Guild Wars 2

Well Scarlet having a base in the mists would certainly explain how she can build such amounts of large warmachinery without us being able to find her base.

And I see they did eventually add the bit about Scarlet to Beigarth’s dialogue. I hope they would have done that immediately when they released the short story.

In my experience the events fail because people have trouble 5-manning a champion.

And part of the failure falls to ANet for allowing lvl 35s in greens and blues to take part in the event.

Ah now I get it. ANet will solve the other cities being graveyards by blowing up LA. Nice job

So what will be the next center of the world? My money is on DR.

I like your outfit, Lilius

This is more like an awkward apology to me jumping the gun with the Origins of Madness. I was initially disappointed that the content was gated behind two timed boss events, but once I got into the first Marionette fight and the story opened up, I was positively surprised. Not just by the story but the fact that the Marionette fight was actually quite fun (although frustrating to see a group fail to kill a lousy champ with 5 players…)

Ironically, now that there is a big marionette to fight, we don’t have to stand for the awful marionette shows with the story dialogue. Dialogues within the in-game engine feel so much more natural. Keep this up, ANet! You’ve got one of the prettiest MMOs out there (although I wouldn’t mind a DX11 update), don’t hide it behind cutscenes and lame marionette shows

Now I need to find time to participate in two or three more marionette fights (which, as a father and a husband can sometimes be difficult) to unlock all the chests and assemble Scarlet’s journal. And I’m actually looking forward to it.

Here’s to hoping the next update will be as good as this one!

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If she actually had a good motive, and if we’d end up fighting side by side at some point. I still hope that’s where they are going with this.

We don’t want another salad dude stealing the credit for our work, thanks.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Your expectations are way too high. Nothing at all will change aside from the scenery and some npc dialogue.

The latter is debatable. Nothing in the NPC dialogue changed when we learned about Scarlet and her past.

While it would be cool to have a jumping puzzle to climb her up and cut the chains, there’s no evidence that GW2’s engine can handle players on moving platforms. In fact, because there are no moving platforms at all that you can stand on, I’m pretty sure GW2’s engine cannot handle them.

When you think about it, WoW’s ships and airships with 20+ people onboard and everyone moving smoothly with the ship gives pretty big credit to Blizzard coders.

DarcShriek.5829:

Tom Gore.4035:

If Anet throws in time travel to this Scarlet fiasco I’m quitting this game for good.

Why would you quit? Time Travel has been part of GW2 since day 1. The Infinity Ball sequence of the personal story is all about time travel.

I know, but

a) it’s the cheapest possible writing tool to bail out after painting yourself into a corner, and
b) it would cause more inconsistencies and paradoxes, which we already have in abundance when Scarlet is concerned.

To me, this would be the final confirmation that Anet’s writers suck and that next year’s living story is going to be just as bad as this year.

If Anet throws in time travel to this Scarlet fiasco I’m quitting this game for good.

Well so much for delivering game features and patches with the living story updates. We’re back to having bigger patches every 3 months or so. In the meantime, we’ll get small “content” patches with 1-2 hours worth of fun stuff to do and a bunch of grindy achievements, coupled with new gem store items.

I’m starting to feel we’re now getting the worst of two worlds. Bi-weekly temporary content that forces us to play and grind, while having to wait longer for the meaningful features.

Ahwell.

The best mystery stories will make you go “ooh, how could I have missed that” when everything is revealed in the end. I’m afraid this one won’t.

However, I also realize it’s practically impossible to write such a mystery story in an MMO, because with so many players, one or more of them would crack the mystery before the revelation.

Here’s hoping anet will surprise us, but I’m not holding my breath. They might surprise us with a completely illogical solution, which could not be foretold by anyone, but I will be really impressed if they can come up with a surprise solution that will at the same time seem perfectly logical in the end.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Tom Gore.4035:

Blade Syphon.4325:

Because to be frank, I do not want to do this ridiculous ascended grind ever again. It’s not challenging, it’s not fun, and it sure as hell isn’t all that rewarding either for the time investment required, and the idea of having to do the exact same thing at a higher level (because we all know that’s what Anet would do) is a prospect that would likely make me, and many others, quit the game.

But let’s play a pretend game that they increased the level cap, but forget about ascended gear forever after that. Exotics would be the highest tier again and a full set would be acquirable in a week or two of intensive playing (or a month with a more relaxed pace).

Would you be opposed to that?

Obviously they’re never going to go back to the “peak power is fast and easy to get” system, because they don’t have anything else to fill the void left by the grind with.

Yes, I’ve geared several characters with Ascended gear, and losing it all would make me, and many others I presume, quit the game.

So you expect that the current Ascended gear will be top tier forever from now on, until the very end of time?

That’s wishful thinking, you know

“Origins of Madness” strongly hints towards the fact that Scarlet is, indeed, bat <beep> crazy.

If that’s the “explanation” to all she’s been doing then lol. Even more Harley Quinn stuff.

Blade Syphon.4325:

Because to be frank, I do not want to do this ridiculous ascended grind ever again. It’s not challenging, it’s not fun, and it sure as hell isn’t all that rewarding either for the time investment required, and the idea of having to do the exact same thing at a higher level (because we all know that’s what Anet would do) is a prospect that would likely make me, and many others, quit the game.

But let’s play a pretend game that they increased the level cap, but forget about ascended gear forever after that. Exotics would be the highest tier again and a full set would be acquirable in a week or two of intensive playing (or a month with a more relaxed pace).

Would you be opposed to that?

Obviously they’re never going to go back to the “peak power is fast and easy to get” system, because they don’t have anything else to fill the void left by the grind with.

BobbyStein.2315:

Or would you like future LW releases to cover other topics? Share your thoughts, but please keep it constructive. Thanks.

That’s a tough question and I will answer it once this year’s LW is complete and I see what the topic of this year’s LW is/was

So if you read the critique from between the lines there, I’d like to see shorter story spans than 12 months, especially if you plan to save the meat and bones of the story to the last few releases.

In addition, I would love to see LW story arcs that culminate in major features being released, such as whole new areas, big gameplay features like guild halls, etc. Someone could argue that the revamped dungeon paths and new dungeons are big gameplay features, but if they offer at best a couple hours of entertainment, I don’t consider them big (and running a dungeon 10+ times does not constitute entertainment for me).

Southsun was very nice, but the continent was way too bare, compared to the feature-packed areas we had been used to before.

Finnway.2183:

Because exploring new areas while leveling was one of the best experiences I have had while playing Guild Wars 2.

This.

I also had a ton of fun while playing through my 100% world completion. Best time in the game, by far.

Now if only they’d add a Dynamic Event checklist and achievement tracker. Would make me go through the whole kitten world once again, with pleasure

Level cap increase would be a nice slap in the face for all those who have grinded their eyeballs out for ascended gear.

Which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

So six weeks to the next update and then we will get to suffer Scarlet for another 8 weeks.

kthxbye, check back next spring I guess…

This thread reminds me. We need boats and ships we can sail and steer. We also need guild halls and player housing.

We need something that isn’t a boring race to get some achies.

We need more toys to play with. Best open world in the MMO industry, with absolutely nothing to do out there once you’ve seen it once.

Lazy writers, I say. They didn’t want to take the time to actually write her a good motivation that they would then follow up. Writing such a motivation, while not giving that motivation away immediately, would require throrough thinking and planning.

So instead they give her some vague motivation and just make up stuff as they work forward.

That, or they actually did carefully craft a motivation, and it’s so brilliant we just haven’t figured it out yet.

Not holding my breath for the latter one, though.

If this is turning into “Scarlet stole christmas” update I’ll seriously uninstall GW2.

Said it before, saying it again.

Triple the size of the maps, remove all waypoints, move all personal rewards into PPT (or delete them altogether).

Zergs vanishing overnight.

Kudos to OP for summarizing most what is wrong with the development of GW2. I agree with almost all of it and find myself playing less and less every day.

I still ain’t bitter. My /age shows I’ve spent a formidable number of hours playing GW2 and most of that time has been fun indeed. It’s been a great ride and the best part? The game has no sub, so I will be coming back every now and then to see what they’ve added/changed to the game.

I took a few months pause earlier this year and now it seems it’s time for me to take another pause. Incidentally, BF4 is just around the corner, so…

Yes. And with the recent changes, also Karma, Gold and most other tokens are now also account-wide.

ANet seems to be moving away from the marionette shows anyhow, which is a good move. You can see that the last few living story updates have all dialogue in-engine and with as few cutscenes as possible.

It has a side effect of making your character a mute sidekick, but I’d still rather have that than the marionette shows.

For some reason I cannot link a thread I made about this feature, a few months back. I suggested combining it with Guild Halls that the guilds can rent/purchase in the open world.

But it looks like if we will get any Guild love, it will be in 2014 the earliest.

While I think we need more serious competition to DirectX, the real performance problems with GW2 are not related to DirectX, but instead the fact it does way too much work on the CPU and way too little on the GPU. Changing the graphics API does not change that.

I’m running an Intel Core i7-3770k @ 4.4GHz and my CPU is still capped at 100% most of the time, while my GTX780 is casually idling at about 50%. This is with most setting maxed.

Mourningcry.9428:

Draco.2806:

The Law of Large Numbers is not subject to personal opinion. It exists.

Likewise for the rest.

The LLN doesn’t delcare ANet’s implementation wrong, bad or a mistake. You did.

ANet’s implementation will, no doubt, confrom to the LLN. How could it not? Your issue is you don’t like what the expected return is, or how how long it would take to realize it.

Draco.2806:

So what happens when you want your loot to drop after killing lots and lots and lots of things? Or if you want your on-crit effect to only trigger for 0,1 of its effectiveness? Well, what happens is that it now takes few centuries for the numbers to average out. You’ve successfully introduced gambling where there should be none. Well-done!

Opinion. It may very well be intended. And again, some of us may feel ok with this and that it should be there.

Draco.2806:

You know what I’m talking about. The Mystic Toilet. T6 mats. Exotic drops. Ascended drops. Even Rare drops. Chest drops. Black Lion chests. Dyes. Precursors. Mystic Clovers. Those silly on-crit effects that only trigger once every blue moon. The list goes on… It shouldn’t happen. It’s a mistake in design.

Opinion. You think it shouldn’t happen, you think it’s a mistake in design. Some do think it should happen, some don’t think it’s a mistake.

Draco.2806:

But you know what the punchline is? No, really? Remember WoW? Its developers know about this. They’ve seen no end to unlucky players being unable to collect 6 Wolf Pelts in the beginning zone for a month straight. And they fixed it. In WoW, the longer you go without collecting a random reward, the higher your chance that you’ll get it next time. So while an extremely lucky player can still get 10 Epic Loots from a Big Boss, there’s no situation where someone will slay it ten times over and walk away without a single Epic Sword of Rat-Slaying.

You think this is a solution. Some may consider it a weak implementation to cater to an entitled audience.

Words of a true grinder. I can appreciate that you don’t want those countless of hours of “work” you’ve put into this game suddenly become worthless.

I hope you catch the irony here.

Factions, not fractions.

Just give us GvG PvP with alliance options and there’s your factions, better than what the devs could ever conjure.

Or, as said, just farm the gold and buy them. It’s the fastest way, at least at the current price.

No fee, but the deposit for your purchase amount is made when you make the purchase order. If you cancel the order, the deposit is returned in full.

darkace.8925:

While we’re on the subject of dragonite ore, I want to voice a marginally related complaint. Why does the dragonite ingot look like a sliced pitted fruit and not a bar of metal?

I thought it looked like a banana.

I don’t have a problem with dragonite. One night doing boss events / temples nets you 200 ore or more. The Empyreal Fragments are more painful for me, since I’m not a very avid dungeon/fractal runner.

Nova.8021:

I just hope that this is in some way related to releasing the jungle dragon, otherwise I see this story going right off the train tracks into the ravine. I also will be disappointed if there isn’t some sort of conversation about the end of the personal story-line because IMO this is probably the best shot at a smooth transition to the next dragon and we all know it won’t be the most powerful one if it is.

We can always hope, but given that no one has discovered even a sliver of hint going that way, it’s quite unlikely.

Moving the start of the match is not a solution either. Many people are already kitten ed off by the 2 minute timer at the start. I can only imagine that moving the clock forward if all players are not in the game would only cause more leavers and would make the queue even more deserted it is now.

Yes I agree solo arena should not exist or it should be unranked.

I repeat, there is no way to make a “serious” solo queue. It just does not work, because people are people, period.

The recipes, as all crafting, is character bound.

The reason for this is that the hardest parts of the Ascended weapons to get are the Empyreal Fragments and Dragonite Ore and incidentally we cannot trade those or any product of theirs.

Thus the time gating is just a gimmick. Your average player will not be time-gated when crafting an ascended, but instead gated by the grind required for those abovementioned mats.

ilr.9675:

Shiren.9532:

I really hope this doesn’t mean ranger pets will be insta downed by all the dodge or die mechanics that were in Aetherblade Retreat…

Yeah this is another big one they seem to keep ignoring.

Giving the pet more HP’s doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an unavoidable death inflicted on a poor A.I.

They should make the pet dodge roll with the owner. That should at least solve some of those deaths.

After Scarlet’s reveal I went to talk to the blacksmith he was mentored by in Hoelbrak. Guess what? Not a single word about her. As if the blacksmith never heard about her.

In the end, it all boils to the fact that this MMO world has build to be static and no amount of words of “world changing stuff” from the developers will change that.

They COULD change the world, existing areas and add new ones, but the workload put into that would be immense, plus they would at the same time remove content that some players don’t want to have removed, and that new players would then never be able to experience.

Static world, static story. The “Living Story” needs to be as detached from the world as it can be, because otherwise ANet would need to make massive changes to existing zones, which they are clearly unwilling to do.

Which brings us to the next question of why they don’t make new zones then and take the living story there? That would also require a lot of resources but by their own talks they should have the dough. It would also solve the problem of not having to remove existing content from the game.

King Amadaeus.8619:

gennyt.3428:

It was quite freeing to stop caring about PPT and upgrading stuff for kind of some vague team. Now I run around with guildmates picking fights and having a great time. I ’m not loving the wxp/karma trains, whether they be friend or foe.

Defending is an uphill struggle to nowhere. Once I realized how the game worked, it sucked all the fun out of that. And they keep making seige stronger while leaving structures the same lol. But hey, E-sports!

Pretty much this…I am over “WvW” in almost every phase, mainly interested in the Deathmatch now.

Thankfully, there is now the Bloodlust area which is all about PvP and none about reward train.

Eurhetemec.9052:

They still exist, if you like that sort of thing – EVE is all about that.

I love EVE’s concept and player interaction. Unfortunately the game itself is immensely bland and doesn’t feel “game” enough for me. I’ve spend many months in EVE but I just cannot stay immersed for long.

I’d still play UO if it had any meaningful population and they would erase the stupid gear grind out of it (basically many changes from Age of Shadows and after that).

yorick.1305:

Not quire so, if you’re on vent whilst doing it talkin’ about last night’s football or the day’s events, consciously you’re doing two things at the same time.

One of them takes the boredom out of the other, if you see my point.

Now take this concept and instead of riding the champ train, you’re sitting in a pub with a pint and discussing the same stuff.

Which would be more fun?

marnick.4305:

Tom Gore.4035:

marnick.4305:

Tom Gore.4035:

Or that ANet is desperately trying to wrap completely random ideas together with a poorly written supervillain.

The fact is, if they just read what they’ve done themselves carefully, they can do the “this was our plan all along” thing as long as they want to, without us ever knowing about it.

But rest assured, if they slip, someone will see it and they will be caught red-handed.

Because Arena.net is flawless, and one tiny slip means they’re doomed. Doomed I tell ya.

Or maybe we should presume they’re humans with the same flaws and drives as you and me. You have flaws too, no? Imagine 300 people like you working together … a slip is inevitable.

Dunno. At this point, fitting the story to the mechanics is more important than fitting the mechanics to the story. Building a nice world is the primary objective, good storytelling will come with the second dragon.

You missed my point. You’re assuming ANet has pre-written all this stuff way back when Flame & Frost started. I’m saying they are making it up bit by bit as they go forward and just making it look like it was all tied together from the beginning.

Does it matter one way or another?

The “slip” here means they will introduce a tie, which someone will then prove it was conjured up later on because it contradicts something so clearly.

So a slip could reveal the thing everyone knows already. Boohoo. You’re making this slip into something that has any influence whatsoever. It is unimportant.

EDIT: And to clarify, I’m basing my assumption that they’re just making it up to the fact that no one, anywhere, had any clues in-game about Scarlet’s identity before she was introduced. Nothing. Yes, it could be a case of just lazy writing, but ANY good suspense story needs to have those hooks and hints in there BEFORE they make the big reveal. The hooks and hints can (and should) be so obscure that their meaning will only be apparent once the reveal has been made, making the reader go “OMG it was right there under my nose all along and I didn’t figure it out!”

We have got NOTHING like that regarding Scarlet. So, either they are indeed making this stuff up as they go ahead, OR they are lazy and/or incompetent in creating a good suspense story. Either way, they should fire their writers and hire better ones.

The story isn’t that bad either. It just lacks some overall depth and is obviously made up on the spot. But there’s plenty of top serialized novels like that. Anna Karenina and Moby kitten come to mind immediately. The writers will need experience with that, and remembering F&F, we should agree they’ve come a long way. Doesn’t mean they’re there yet. Firing people won’t solve anything, especially since no one has done this before. Hiring better people is impossible, you have to make them as a company. Experience will do the trick.

I like Scarlet, you don’t. That’s another discussion enitrely.

The story is bad, because it breaks the suspension of disbelief. I hope you are aware of that term. That’s why I don’t like it. Yes, Scarlet is also a horrible Villain Sue, but I could have forgiven it if we would have had a chance to learn about her before her reveal in-game.

Alas, we couldn’t, because she appeared from thin air. There is absolutely no record of her in-game before the reveal. Nothing, zip. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Scarlet wasn’t special enough for people to talk about her. But she is.

I know there are a lot of stories made up on the spot in popular culture. That doesn’t mean it’s a good way to tell a story. The best stories are always written beforehand and hints of future events are then sprinkled all over the story. I take Babylon 5 as a good example of a story that was written from beginning to end before the story started (not including the messups with the 5th season canceling and un-canceling). Many of the hints you don’t even spot on the first watchthrough, but they make you go “holy sh**” when you realize them.

This is what I would like ANet to do. Make me go “holy sh**” when the Big Plot is revealed and we realize they’ve played us all along.

gennyt.3428:

Tom Gore.4035:

It’ll never change as long as ANet keeps putting PvE rewards in WvW.

Normalizing WvW like sPvP would be a good start to get rid of all the PvE scrubs. Tripling the size of the WvW areas and removing all waypoints would be a good start to eliminate zergs.

However, seeing how most WvW players today are actually nothing but karma train runners who suck at PvP, these changes would empty WvW in a heartbeat.

To fix that, we could forget server wars and just fill each area as people show up, randomly (obviously favoring your guild/friends).

You mean like GvG and alliances and such? There was a game like that where players did that for years…I can’t think of the name…Someone help me out here. :P

There was also a game with brilliant “WvW”, only you fought people within your server instead of changing matchups. I hear it’s still running, too.

Kasama.8941:

Everyone simply does it because the higher number you have, the more awesome you obviously are.

I just love trashing all these “generals”, “legends” and “bronze whatevers” in the bloodlust area. Many times I can go 1v2 and come on top without much trouble.

That’s how awesome running the train makes you in PvP.

Players today are used to being spoon-fed with content. They are taught and in many cases, forced to wait for the developers to come up with new content for them to consume.

Back in the days of Ultima Online we had to make our own content and boy, did we make it. Best days of computerised role playing I’ve ever experienced. I’m afraid those will never come back.

I’d like a level cap increase now, with no ascended items at the new maximum cap, ever.

No.

15 characters.