Guild Wars 2

I’m expecting the new area to be the little corner of new land in Brisban. Any more than that (a new zone) I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Buy it now, if you wait, it’ll only be more expensive. ANet resetting the price would be an economical and PR nightmare so it won’t happen so the price will just keep on rising, forcing people eventually to bite down and buy gems directly from ANet or succumb to the temptations of gold sellers.

Doing the world boss events there’s usually two kinds of people – those who will work and do the pre-events and those who AFK at the last boss spawn spot and get the same end chest as the first group of people. You have events like the Behemoth where a handful of people close the portals while the others stand still auto-attacking yet get the exact same rewards. They scale up the event, though, so that those few that try to do the event properly have to deal with champion and elite adds guarding the portals.

Kitten, I’ve even ran into people who are completely unaware that there are even pre-events and they need to be completed. People are just asking “Where next” and someone links the end location. So they never learn.

With the game that prides itself on rewarding active play, it’s not really working as it should. And since we know that community spirit alone isn’t enough to entice people into helping others, give extra chests for completing pre-events.

Or am I just being Don Quixote here?

Well, for all intents and purposes, instead of a trinity with three options we have one option: zerker.

I was doing Gauntlet last night and people were desperately asking for a commander to tag up so everyone can form one big group. Old habits die hard, but we only have ANet to blame for endorsing zerging (for so long).

Or just add all kinds of events, some for zergers, some that reward more organized play, variety.

Well this is a pretty big hint towards a new zone. But like others have said, that portal does not look like the one that’s currently in Brisban Wildlands, albeit inaccessible. It looks more like a portal leading to a jungle zone.

Maybe we’re not going north of Brisban, but south? There’s an open space south of Brisban and west of Metrica Province that leads closer to Magus Falls…

I much rather like the dragon hanging around my shoulders on my female charr. Please keep it as it is.

I’m resurrecting this topic because I was just about to open a similar one in the Living world section. I’d love for ANet to expand the lore on these kinds of events. We are fighting, but we have no idea why or who.

The crew of “Ravenous” is an exception, but I sure would like to know who Liadri is or why she’s so powerful. I’d love the level of pre-planning that we would meet a character like Liadri in some story instance or in open world and then later would meet her again in this kind of tournament. It would make the world truly seem more … living, instead of just random things thrown together.

Maybe the announcer could give some lore and background on the fighters?

It does seem like ANet is out to make in-game gold farming harder in hopes for players to buy more gems. Maybe their gem sales are spiraling downwards? In any case, it’s not a good direction for the game – there needs to be lucrative and viable ways to farm in-game currencies.

Good luck co-ordinating PUGs to split equally to 6 directions. Maybe, if you have a guild team with 6 commanders organizing the whole thing. But then the whole megaserver thing will ruin it.

Yeah, I agree that it’s a highly underwhelming event compared to last year’s. An event you have to pay money to enter, spend a lot of time mowing through mobs and bosses and get maybe a few champ boxes in the end. What’s amazing that even on patch night it seemed already pretty empty. I wonder if I’m even gonna bother with my “kill 50 mobs” achievements.

Or that’s what Captain Kiel says, when she introduces Braham & the rest of the numbskulls to Master of Peace. As my first order of business, I order them to sit in a corner during Season 2 and have Malyck, Canach and zombie Tybalt as main characters of S2.

But yeah, even though no one mentions you by name or looks at you during the introduction, you’re the leader now.

It’s highly ironic how people claiming to be striving for a troll/abuse-free community have their comments so full of vitriol and gloating.

Looks like they added two new options for dailies in the daily achievement with the new patch. At least today it was 8 PvE, 2 WvW and 2 PvP. It’s not as good as before, but if it keeps like this, I’m happy that they listened to the feedback.

There was the candidate fight things (don’t remember the actual name) which was small group instance stuff, but it mainly consisted of mowing down waves of aetherblades which got boring very fast.

I think I was misunderstood a bit. I don’t mind portals as zone transition. I just don’t like zones that are drawn with a ruler. Now look at the world map – all zones are shaped like rectangular boxes. Some of them (like Orr) have a water border, so it’s not as bad, but most have some kind of mountain border, making them look like a box, not natural at all. Maybe when we get new zones, we could see a transition in a wide, open area instead of a clunky mountain pass? And have different shapes of zones as well.

… can they please not have the usual rectangular shape? Using mountain ranges to mark the borders of zones is so incredibly clunky. I’d like to see a smooth transition from a zone to another without the need to border the map with hills on every side.

Dusty Moon.4382:

It took how long for people to get used the way the game is? 6 – 9 months minimum. Now, you want it to change every 2 weeks? That is ludicrous.

Hard mode would be impossible with the mega servers.

People are basically lazy and just do enough to get things done – period. That is why we have: the Champ Trains, the complaints about the reduction to 10 in the number of dailys, the big zergs, and people complaining about how hard Tequatl and the 3 headed wurm are. They want to do the minimum needed to get by – people want a kitten game.

The large masses often choose the path of least resistance, this is true. But does it mean that the devs have to raise up their hands, give up and start catering solely to this mass?

There is room for challenging content and mechanics, the devs just have to make a statement that if you don’t improve, you won’t succeed, even if it would start a riot of “we paid for this game, we want to see it all by pressing 1!!” well tough.

Seera.5916:

I don’t think whine was the word to use personally. But you can’t argue that if you can get the Daily without realizing it, then it probably is too easy for you. But I don’t think it was too easy for most players and I doubt that was the reason for the change.

I think the reason for the change was all of the people who felt compelled to do every single Daily available complaining of too many options. I don’t think it was done to cater to their natures but more to curtail the amount of AP they could earn.

And I think they went a step too far. Limiting total earned over the lifetime would be fine on its own. Let players decide how quickly they want to hit that cap.

Your reasoning is something I can pretty much sign myself. But again I have to wonder why the rest of the players have to suffer because some obsessive-compulsive players want to grind their life away. (let them, if they want to.) Surely the caps on daily and monthly achievements take care of that problem .

Maybe some of them were (are?) too easy. Like Daily laurel vendor visit. (which is still on the rotation, isn’t it?) But again, is it meant to be very hard? I totally can get behind the thought that you can get the daily just by playing normally. This is the representation of ANet supposed “no grind, play how you want” philosophy.

I believe that releasing the meta rewards again reduces the uniqueness of those rewards. People who have been playing from the start deserve some acknowledgement, since there’s very little prestige items in the game as it is.

Dusty Moon.4382:

People were whining the achievements were to easy and it wasn’t a judgment of how good a player was. People would get the achievements without even realizing they did. I like the achievement system this way.

I’m still looking for an answer on who exactly was whining achievements were to(o) easy. I certainly remember people saying the first system was too hard, and thus they added more options in the update before the april 15th one.

Well, considering the game is nearing it’s 2 year birthday, we’ve had no real PvE content in terms of exploration or lasting value. One new zone, which doesn’t have anything of lasting value or anything to do ’cept for one world boss.

Yes, Lion’s Arch got blown up. Yes, Kessex Hills looks a bit different. All this was tied in a certain time. They do not provide game content for this time, unlike, let’s say they released a god realm – type update from GW1. A new set of armor, weapons, unique jewellery drops, lore, exploration, NPC interaction, minipets. THAT would be content.

I dunno, I guess some people are happy that we have get/got less content than with a traditional expansion (like in GW1). I have no issues against temporary content as long as it’s not the ONLY type of content that is offered. Fractals is fun for a while. For me it was about 10 runs to get level 10. That’s way less than I did GW1 elite PvE content.

It’s such a shame, really. The game is beautiful, has awesome lore to expand on, the potential is there, but it’s not realizing as it could be. I’m willing to update my views if there will be new news, but for now I’m not satisfied with the type of content updates we’re getting.

Donutdude.9582:

Re-posted here as per a Moderator’s suggestion:

Evening all.

I just attended my first Shadow Behemoth after the implementation of the new megaservers & I have to say I’m absolutely disgusted with player attitude nowadays.

Almost 95% of the raid just sat there spamming skill 1 during the portals phase instead of helping kill the portals. The worst part: it’s considered “normal” now. I’m sorry, since when did Guild Wars 2 turn into easy-mode World of Warcraft?

I so wish ArenaNet would punish the leechers somehow. Not contributing to a major part of an event should not be tolerated. It’s as bad as the leechers that used to suck the life out of Competitive Missions & Alliance Battles in Guild Wars.

I was literally coming out here to post about the same thing. It’s standard Behemoth fight nowadays – a handful of people run around clearing the portals while a 100 people stand there leeching off others. Now, since there are so many people, the mobs around the portals scale up to champs and elites regularly, making a few man portal clearing operation pretty dangerous.

Is this how the updated Behe event is meant to be played? “play how you want”? I seriously hope that the devs take another look of the fight, since nowadays it just sucks because of the player attitudes.

Traveller.7496:

Here’s my soon-to-be level 80 ranger Alexandra Thibault

And here’s the level 80 look with a new hairstyle and TA shoulders. I really love the metallic glint of the Strider armor in right lighting.

If they want to stop gold sellers, they need to start selling official gold (or gems in this case) at a comparable price.

I can totally understand the temptation to spend just a few dollars for a big chunk of gold, especially since they have actively tried to hinder any in-game gold gains outside of TP flipping (which not many have the knowhow or resources to do) in hopes that people buy their “official” gold instead. The quote above pretty much admits it.

Dusty Moon.4382:

Traveller.7496:

Dusty Moon.4382:

I have had no issues – I can get it done every day. No big deal to me.

Hey, that’s great. But it’s not really the issue here. Of course you can get it done, but why make it harder than it used to be? Why make a change that makes the game worse? This is what puzzles me.

Why should it be kitteny, either? It is not hard at all now and before you could do it blindfolded.

People are always complaining this game is too easy and then they change something to make one work a little, people complain also.

Show me where I have complained about the dailies being too easy.

Or anyone else, for that matter.

Broad generalizations that someone somewhere complained about something that’s somehow related to this particular issue is not a very good argument.

Draknar.5748:

What category do you fall into? How many dailies do you do on average? Personally I still only do 7 or so per day depending on what they are. The change they made did not affect most players since they never were hitting all dailies anyway.

I remember how the dailies used to be. That’s why I was so happy with the change that gave more options. Less grind, dailies were done naturally. It was often when I had finished the 5 and got a few of them without even paying attention. It felt natural and fun.

My category was “get daily done with normal gameplay”. Nowadays I pretty much have to go and do the specific ones, since I don’t PvP. Of course you can get them done with normal playing now too, sure, but it’s not happening as much. Now, I do the PvE ones I need to do and nothing else.

Dusty Moon.4382:

I have had no issues – I can get it done every day. No big deal to me.

Hey, that’s great. But it’s not really the issue here. Of course you can get it done, but why make it harder than it used to be? Why make a change that makes the game worse? This is what puzzles me.

I would still like an explanation or some kind of reasoning exactly WHY this change was done. I really hate when they change such a core mechanic without even mentioning it in any update notes.

Underwater exploring is one of the best things in the game. It’s such a sharp contrast that underwater combat is one of the worst.

Garrisyl.7402:

Now every time I see them online training in QD and I have nothing better to do, I invite some guildies to start killing champs in random order. They usually log out after 15 minutes or move to another area. .

I’d say this is much worse, since you’re going out of your way to troll/harass other people. It’s no longer a case of playing how you want, if your main intent is malicious and to cause harm to others.

Here’s my soon-to-be level 80 ranger Alexandra Thibault sporting a mix of Strider and Magitech armor. I still haven’t found good shoulders that are subtle enough and not sticking to doorframes.

Dyes are celestial and gold.

Like I said in the other feedback topic, it’s become harder to do the dailies along with your normal gameplay. With the old system there were many times I was surprised that I had finished the daily without even specifically doing all the categories. Now, it won’t happen – at least not as often. I feel like with the new system you have to go out of your way to do the daily, thus making it less of an enjoyable experience.

Still puzzled as to why exactly they changed the system. Less options for players = better? More grind = better? Eh?

Us Europeans are cool with either, except for Germany, who’ll replace evildoers with robots.

lordkrall.7241:

Traveller.7496:

But yeah, I’d wish they’d release some kind of statement concerning the concerns of the community regarding the latest update too.

You mean something like this:

Although we’re excited that you have more players than ever to explore the open world of Guild Wars 2 with, our work is not yet complete. Our megaserver team will continue to monitor the performance of the technology on live and evaluate your feedback. We will continue to tweak and update the way the system works until it is providing even better megaservice!

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-rollout-is-complete-2/

Something like that, yes, just not as vague. I’m still an optimist that eventually we’ll get a good response.

I still get a laugh from “even better megaservice” though, but not because of why they want me to.

Regarding daily reviver: I find it very ironic that we’ve discovered a common MMO problem – stealing someone else’s “property” … not kills, or nodes … but rezzes! Nodes are shared, but there are so many people with the Megaserver in the reactor that you simply can’t rez the NPC’s in time. It’s very frustrating and funny at the same time. People are competing for dead Asura bodies.

When I rez, I always look around if someone wants it too and wait until they get to the same NPC. Try doing the same (or leave the kitten reactor altogether).

The problem is that many people seem to have a mindset that “sure, it’s broken, but I believe ANet will fix it”. I wish I had such faith! But we have to critique the system as it is now, not based on what you think it will be after you believe it will be fixed. And in its current form the negative outweighs the positive, at least for me.

The point Vorch raised about a “larger, wider net for community” is a rather beautiful thought but unfortunately the reality isn’t quite as peachy. Most of the people you see you will rarely see again, which again raises a point of the lost server identity. Sure, every now and then I see familiar guild tags and names, but way less than I used to. Although, I am willing to check my opinion again if the system is tweaked, but I cannot depend on it, you know? I have to voice my concern on how it is now. And the lack of familiarity and my own server community is what’s bugging me a lot.

Becka Williams.4978:

I just saw the front page. I give up. Clearly, we don’t matter.

Yeah, I would prefer some dev response in these feedback topics instead of just a happy, cheerful “everything’s super” – post.

(The germans know how to do it. Not blaming you guys.)

I wish the system would work the same way as previous one and transmuting pre-level 80 characters would be cheaper. Nowadays, I would love to transmute my alts but it just feels like such a waste. Back with the old system the <79 stones were so abundant you had no troubles making alts look fabulous.

Maybe half a charge to transmute a pre-80 character?

Events are where the leveling is. Hearts are basically there to guide you to events. Try to follow event chains, many of them might not be obvious but give great exp.

I would not pay 2000 gems for convenience. It’ll be ages before the cost of buying gathering tools comes higher than the cost of infinite tools and I have no problems buying a pick or an axe when I visit a merchant. Were they cheaper, I might, but at these prices? People surely have too much money on them (if you do, give me some).

Again, I understand that ANet would like for players to try out different stuff. But this is the wrong way to do it. You give incentives to do PvP and WvW, you don’t take away PvE options to “encourage” it.

It feels like I’m going in circles here, but I would just like to hear the justification for the change from ANet’s mouth, especially making it grindier was the exact opposite they told us they wanted last time they changed the dailies!

I would suggest making the 13 portal phase a sub-event in the Shadow Behemoth fight. That way those that bother to run around shutting the portals would get a bit of an extra reward compared to those who just stand there doing nothing in the meantime.

I haven’t been able to do Teq since the update. Before there was a dedicated Teq guild running the event around midnight my time on various low-populated servers almost every night. It was fun and usually followed up by Karka queen. But now it’s ruined.

Of course you can always make the argument that community is behaving like the sky is falling in their heads, and since it is a pretty large community it’s to be expected that people have their individual ways of communicating. But even still I would claim that most of the feedback has been very astute, accurate and genuinely concerned about the direction the game is going.

Personally I would be very disappointed to lose the sense of server and community identity if we’re all just going to be lumped in one big pile of players, where you might not see any familiar faces besides your guild.

timmyf.1490:

Have you considered that’s because, overall, the Megaserver is popular? And maybe the forums are over-representing a very vocally angry minority?

But you can make the same case for Reddit. Have you considered that it represents a vocal happy minority that likes it a lot? I would still claim that the absolute majority of the players doesn’t even know or care that there is a Megaserver.

As I said previously, ANet is aware that there are issues, and I feel like a lot of people are frustrated with the lack of communication. I don’t want to see the MS as a black-or-white solution where you either have to love it or denounce it. (or any other controversial update.) It’s important to me that ANet is aware of the issues, wants to improve it and acknowledges that their systems are not working perfectly as intended.

I’m always a bit vary on forum attitudes where even legitimate concerns are filed under “angry mob minority”. Personally, I sure wouldn’t be here writing this message after midnight if I didn’t care about the game or the recent changes.

If you want to read a more positive outlook on the Megaserver, check out the subreddit for GW2. People are rigorously downvoting all posts which dare to imply even the slightest that MS could use a tune-up.

The german devs posted a status report about Megaservers, so if you’re an optimist, you can hope the english department will have a post ready in the near future?

Seems like the german ANet devs actually communicate with the players. Google translate tells in a nutshell that they are aware of problems and are working on fixing them. (I’m optimistic about the line where he says they are looking to change big boss times.) Now, is it so very hard to get an english community dev to give us this same message?

About people hating/loving megaservers: I would imagine most people in-game don’t really care or even know what’s going on. They might not even read update notes or know what the kitten is a megaserver! But if anyone is trying to spin a truth that people are simply loving it and criticism is simply on the forums where a few people are shouting, you aren’t being honest. The fact that the german dev posted that ANet has acknowledged the critique and are working on solutions should tell you that it’s not the great success and universally loved as you claim it to be.

Algreg.3629:

I think they reduced the overall AP per day to take off stress for the players. Many see AP farming as a necessary daily chore which will burn them out fast. I think I read some interview with WoW devs they regretted a comparable mechanic that cost them a lot of players apparently.

Again, solution to this is to stop giving AP for dailies after you’ve reached five. Lots of categories to choose from, no AP for our obsessive-compulsive friends, everyone is happy.