Guild Wars 2

All the Borderlands maps are the same except for the names of the camps/towers/etc. So it doesn’t matter if you’re red/green/blue you still get the same map. Only Eternal Battlegrounds is different.

They removed the quaggan section a long time ago.

Wow Bubi, a lot of really good ideas here. I wish I had time to go through all of them. Obviously I’m sure there’s room for tweaking with most of them but this would provide a solid foundation for changing WvW in a lot of minor ways that would add up to a huge change (for the better probably).

I like the idea of more Mastery categories to spend points on. As long as they’re balanced having options is always good.

As for rewards for WvW and thoughts on EotM? I think the way EotM actually plays is very harmful to WvW. Sure, a good portion of EotMers are PvE players leveling, but it’s also provided WvW players with a new map for ZvZ fighting. It would be way better if you could ONLY enter EotM if ALL 4 of the WvW maps were queued. In addition to this they need to nerf the rewards for EotM and increase the rewards for WvW, including giving me other things to spend my BoH and Karma on.

I think it’s much more likely that Anet allows classes to use more pre-existing weapons before they introduce a couple brand new ones, but honestly they should do both.

This is a list of the existing weapons I think professions should already be able to use, plus new weapons

Elementalist: Axe (MH/OH), Torch
Engineer: Mace, Crossbow (new)
Guardian: Warhorn, Battleaxe (new), Javelin (new)
Mesmer: Warhorn, Javelin (new)
Necromancer: Axe (OH), Torch
Ranger: Rifle, Javelin (new), Crossbow (new)
Thief: Axe (MH/OH), Crossbow (new)
Warrior: Battleaxe (new), Javelin (new)

And, just for fun, here’s some weapons that I think SHOULD NOT be available on certain classes because I don’t think they fit with the image of the class:

Mesmer: Pistol
Ranger: Greatsword
Warrior: Rifle

Well, technically I think it was implemented because it was deemed too powerful in combination with the Ranger’s other longbow skills. In that respect the “tell” is perfectly fine and fits in with lots of other skills in this game that have a tell.

From the aspect of verbally abusing Rangers for using the longbow knockback…. No, I don’t think ArenaNet considered that when implementing this.

BUT, why are we worried about the Ranger players being verbally abused in chat for using knockback? The perfectly honest answer is they only get “in trouble” for it when it’s detrimental to what the group is doing so they SHOULD be called out for it. LB knockback is great for 1v1s, pushing players off cliffs, keeping the Abominations off the east battery at Tequatl, and a variety of other circumstances, but honestly, players need to learn when to use it and when not to. Don’t just spam all your skills because you don’t know what else to do and you can’t help yourself.

If you’re a longbow Ranger and you’re with a group that wants to fight the enemy where they already are, or they’re trying to melee this enemy, don’t knock it back. It screws with the whole group and you deserve to be called out for doing it, but probably not in quite the mean way that everybody seems to do.

That being said, it’s bound to happen eventually because you forget. Own up to it in the chat and people are usually less likely to attack you.

But it’s not just longbow Ranger knockback that causes problems. Sometimes you don’t want people to use CCs either and of course they do, which is just as annoying.

If you see people using skills that are detrimental to the fight, politely mention in chat why the skills are not helpful and people will usually comply.

Just my $0.02

I’m going to put on my Optimistic Hat for a second:

In 1 year I will be:
– Speaking with my guildies in our beautiful Guild Hall about the upcoming Raid system to be implemented next month. And since I have some time before the GvG starts I’m going to take my Tengu Alchemist to the Dominion of Winds to do some leveling.

….takes Optimist Hat off….

In one year I will be:
– Complaining that the Skeletal Lich is annoying to kill and wondering what to do in-game now that I’ve already finished the meta for Blood & Madness. Sigh.

I’m going to try to be civil and constructive but it’s not going to be easy. My instinct is to yell and swear, but since Anet probably just skips reading posts like that, I hope I can contain it.

This change is completely ridiculous. Forcing players to buy X amount of a currency is a good way to discourage them completely from buying anything at all. You said that only a small percentage of the player base buys odd amounts of gems or converts odd amounts of gold to gems, but I honestly don’t understand why that is a reason to completely eliminate the option to do so. Every player in this game should have the option to buy as many or as little gems as they want at any given time.

I’m all for having “buy X gems for X gold” buttons. They’re very convenient. But it also makes perfect sense to have either a slider or a spot for us to input a custom amount. If I want to buy 37 gems I should be able to. I’ve done this plenty of times in the past and the fact that I can’t now is very discouraging. I was going to buy the Phantom Hood. It’s 200 gems. I would now have to buy 400, which makes no sense, so I guess I won’t be buying it.

But these aren’t the only things bothering me.

- Gaile’s “reasons” for the changes are completely absurd. They make no sense and we’re not buying any of them. I don’t blame Gaile, she’s just the one designated to communicate with us, but Anet couldn’t possibly have thought that we’d accept those reasons and move on.
– The huge price fluctuation in the gems→gold or gold→gems that others have brought up in this thread, combined with the removal of the tracker from the API, is a massive red flag that Anet is covering up their deliberate manipulation of the in-game economy. I will never believe that it’s simply because the prices always change when there’s a new update. They don’t change like this. We’re not stupid.
– Why does the community always have to “suggest” fixes? Why can’t Anet just make logical decisions when creating this game? I feel like EVERY SINGLE DECISION made by Anet in the last year at least has been wildly off-base from what would make logical sense to the average person. What kind of personnel are making these decisions? I’ve never heard of a game coming out that is widely reviewed as being very good, and then the game gets completely destroyed one decision at a time over the course of the next couple years. It’s mind-boggling.

Until this gets fixed I’m no longer a paying customer. And when it gets fixed I expect an apology from Anet.

Is there a guide out there somewhere that details how to get the GW2 achievements from the Hall of Monuments from playing GW1?

I’m very interested to know which achievements come from playing the original game, from the expansions, if there’s an “easiest” way to get a significant number of AP, how hard the titles are to achieve, etc.

Anything like this exist? Anybody with enough knowledge to provide some incite?

I don’t own GW1 or any of the expansions, but I’m interested in the idea of buying them mostly for the potential AP in GW2.

Thanks.

In the past couple weeks I’ve seen threads saying that Engis, Eles, Thieves, Rangers, Warriors, and Necros are ALL OP. And these are just the threads I’ve noticed.

This is a good sign. If everybody is OP, then nobody is OP.

Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a good game of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock :P

Finally a thread on RNG and methods of obtaining items. Been looking forward to this one.

Specific thoughts on RNG
It works perfectly for insignificant drops/rewards, but completely falls apart when you take the high-end “important” items in the game, such as precursors, into account. Assigning a purely RNG-based system to acquiring end-game items was a huge mistake. Allowing those end-game items to be sold on the open market knowing that the only other way to get them was RNG, was an extension of that mistake.

In a loot drop based game RNG is inevitable. It’s essential. It’s not going away. We’re all ok with that. If you search all the threads on this forum you’ll notice that complaints about RNG only occur with high-end items: precursors, ascended drops from fractals, Tequatl weapons, etc. Nobody complains that RNG gave them that masterwork staff they can’t use instead of the dagger they wanted. Because they can easily solve that problem with a very small amount of gold.

Solution to ending the complaints about RNG
Either completely remove RNG for important items in the game, or go with a system that says “if you haven’t got a precursor drop after X hours of play, we’ll give you one”

Option 1: RNG, but with ever-increasing odds
This would an acceptable way to do it, but you’d still have complaints that it’s taking too long, or whatever. People are impatient and get irritable when they can’t see the end clearly. Not knowing is frustrating. But this system would still be preferable to what we have now because at least I could say: “If I keep opening champ bags I’ll get the precursor eventually”

Option 2: Reward Tracks
The Reward Tracks from PvP are actually an exceptional way to allow someone to progress toward a specific goal. Something that they can choose themselves and see their exact progress toward that goal.

How amazing would it be to load into Fractals and be able to select a Fractal Reward Track in order to get one of the Fractal weapons?

How awesome would it be to go to a world event like Tequatl and select a Sunless weapon as your eventual reward for beating Teq X number of times? (this would involve implementing factors showing that you actually participated in the event, maybe saying “you progess x% for each dragon chest you get”)

And lastly, how fantastic would it be to be able to set a general account Reward Track for that specific precursor you want? The reward track could easily tell you what you needed to do to progress further in the track.

It’s a great system and fits perfectly with what we’re trying to accomplish.

I’d love to see a dev’s opinion on this

1. The guild hall needs to be grand and beautiful. If anybody looks at it and says “that’s it? Really?” you’ve failed. They should be spectacles.

2. They should be jam-packed with features. Crafting, merchants, room related to guild missions, GvG, in-guild PvP arena (You enter the room, select a side to be on, and you can fight guildies ), guild leaderboard (for AP pts, fractal rank, wvw rank, etc), portals to other areas, maybe even tutorials.

3. Expandable. Basic features should be available right away, but guilds should be able to purchase things in order to expand the hall. People love progression.

I’m putting a #4, to heck with your Top 3 system :P

4. Instanced. If we want these anytime in the next calendar year, they have to be instanced. Some may not like it, but I imagine adapting the game to squeeze guild halls into the open world would be incredibly difficult and would upwards of 2 years or more to implement.

I remember last year I was looking up the recipe for Immobulus, came across the 250 Giant Eyes, thought “hmm, seems like a lot, maybe I’ll just buy em from the TP”, checked trading post….. only 58 of them available…… “well, kitten”

Anet read through the population imbalance thread, thought to themselves “you know what? there’s just not enough players on Tier 1 servers!” and BAM, here we are. Sure does fix the blobbing problem on low-population servers! sigh

I’d love a base range increase on axe skills.

The way I look at it, if you fix the way WvW is scored, you probably won’t have to fix the population imbalance.

If ArenaNet makes it so a small group defending an objective against a large group gets a significant amount of points, and servers stop getting huge points for passively owning something, then I honestly think a lot of the population imbalance issues will fix themselves.

For one, a server will a smaller population will be able to be much more competitive when playing a higher population server. And two, server transfers from higher-to-lower-tier servers will most likely become more common.

I’m not suggesting that all server populations will equalize, but there would probably be some movement there.

Three things I would absolutely LOVE to know:

1. What is the player cap per server?
2. What exactly does “very high” even mean?
3. How many unique WvW account logins does each server have in a week and how many hours does each of those accounts log?

Artemis Thuras.8795:

so what your suggesting is warrior should beat every class?

Resulting balance would be everyone playing warrior.

Do I need to explain this further?

But then you’d see the best threads ever:

“Warrior OP: Warrior can’t beat Warrior in PvP. Nerf Warrior”
“Warrior needs buff. Can’t beat Warriors in PvP”

- Siege Disabler
– Supply Removal Trap
– Cow-Launching Treb Skills

I’m not sure how anybody else feels about these things in the game, but personally I feel that they all ruin the gameplay considerably. There’s no denying that from an offensive perspective they come in really handy, but that doesn’t change the fact that the actual gameplay suffers when they’re used.

Supply Removal Trap is by far the least intrusive. You don’t see too many of them, so if that was left as-is I’m sure nobody (including myself) would really complain, even though it seems a little silly to me.

The other 2 are a different story altogether.

Being hit by the cows drains tons of supply from a zerg/group and completely changes the plans of whatever that group was about to do, and all it took was one person and a few seconds to do it, which just seems ridiculous. It’s becoming an ever-more-popular “tactic” as well, which is just frustrating. I’m a strict proponent of 1 person not being able to disrupt an entire group incredibly easily.

The siege disabler has been talked about at length, but since it fits with my rant ( ) I have no choice but to mention it again. It’s too powerful. Similar to my previous gripe about the cows, the siege disabler allows a single person to disrupt the intentions of a large group incredibly easily. Now, the disable has a timer, so it’s not like the supply trap. You will get to use your siege again. Unfortunately, another disabler could be used again right after and the process could continue forever. As long as the person disabling the siege has access to supply and have bought enough disablers they could theoretically hold an objective completely by themselves for a long time. This seems crazy to me. I’m perfectly ok with the disabler being used once, as a tactic to allow time for your server to get a group to the objective in order to defend it properly. But you should not be able to disable the rams on a gate (for example) over and over again. There needs to be a timer of sorts where the rams cannot be disabled during that time. I’d also argue that siege should not be able to be disabled during a “fair fight” (for lack of a better term). If there’s 30 people outside a tower, and 30 people inside, you should not even be able to use disablers.

Use of these tactics is becoming more frequent and because they can just be spammed over and over it ruins the natural fluidity of the gameplay.

I’m sure some people reading this will assume I’m just complaining because of something that happened in-game, or suggest that if my enemy is using them, that I should to, but that’s not it at all. I think it’s a fundamental issue that, if fixed, would really benefit WvW.

Balfour.9046:

If it wasn’t for night capping NSP would suck eggs and that is a fact, face it, embrace it, and live with it.

And what do you call SBI’s SEA group that comes on during the morning hours in NA when very few people are on? It’s an imbalance nobody can fix right now. Servers are going to have groups playing at different times and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Using NA times, NSP has more on overnight, SBI has more on in the morning, and as far as I can DR doesn’t have 1 time where they vastly outnumber anybody, but they always have the right number online to compete at any given time.

Why doesn’t SBI show on Fridays? And why isn’t SBI’s SEA crew on today?

- The keep/tower would grants points when you take it, when you upgrade it, and when you defend it. The only time it wouldn’t grant points is if the other servers left it alone, which I’m not sure would ever happen.
– Close matches are a good thing
– Small server being able to hold their own against a large server would be good for WvW, wouldn’kitten It may help redistribute the population over time and do away with all the lop sided matchups we tend to see.
– It’s hard to predict if there will be blowouts because of this. I think Anet would need to track all captures/defends/upgrades for a few matchups and see what point system would make sense.
– I’m on the fence about whether actual player kills should count, but I think it definitely warrants looking at.

I would love the ability to change the stats on my ascended armor, but I don’t think it should be cheap.

What I’d like to see is for Anet to create a slot for the Insignia, which provides the armor with it’s stats, similar to how Runes/Sigils work. If you craft/buy a new insignia you can replace the old one and change the stats. I think this should be possible for all armor though, not just ascended. I’d love to be able to swap insignias on my exotic armor too. For a price of course. As long as I have the option.

This has probably been the most exciting week in WvW in a long time. Every point counts and it’s going to be a stressful last 11 hours. Can’t wait to get out there in 3 hours (stupid work).

Whatever happens I just want to say thank you to everyone on DR, SBI and my fellow NSPers for sticking it out until the very end. It’s rare to see a matchup like this, and I’m so happy nobody has settled for 2nd.

I’m so glad that this discussion is finally taking place, however I am a little concerned about the idea of splitting the day into chunks with a server being able to “win” a chunk of the day. You can never really predict when certain servers will be active and it just seems like there could be plenty of problems with such a system.

I’m wondering what the result would be if we simply went with this:

1. You get points for taking an objective (more points if it’s upgraded)
2. You get points for defending an objective (less points if it’s upgraded)
3. You DO NOT get points for holding an objective
4. You get points for upgrading an objective

This would result in a servers points only going up when they have people playing and nobody can earn a massive amount of points for passively owning something.

This system would only require a rebalance of the point system. I’m sure Anet could monitor a few server matchups and come up with something.

Thoughts?

Way too many ideas in here to comment on all of them, but here’s my thoughts on a few.

Instanced versus Open World
Instanced makes perfect sense because it will take way less effort to implement, avoids a lot of the player cap issues and completely avoids the problem of the open world becoming cluttered. Open world guild halls could be amazing in certain scenarios, but realistically I think it would be too much work to implement them.
note: I will admit that walking through Lornar’s Pass, for example, and seeing this huge towering structure built into the mountains would be a very impressive sight

Alliance Guild Halls
I think that having an actual hall for guild alliances would be a mistake, for all the same reasons as everybody else has already mentioned. It would make for a messy divorce. However, I think that building a “bridge” between guild halls that would allow guilds that have an alliance to visit each others Halls, or a large area that specifically exists so the 2 guilds can mingle, would be an excellent compromise and would present no issues whatsoever. If the alliance ever fell apart the “bridge” or auditorium-style room would simply disappear.

Minimum Size of guilds
People are suggesting that a 1 or 2 person guild should have access to a guild hall as well, but my question is “why would they need a guild hall?” They won’t have anybody to talk to, it wouldn’t increase a sense of community, they can’t really GvG (1v1 I guess, but they can do that in PvP or WvW), and the other “stuff” (ie crafting stations, etc) can be found in the open world.

Suggestion to Devs
I think it would be extremely helpful if the devs could constrain our brainstorming a little bit by making a decision on a few key areas, such as instanced -vs- open world and minimum size. That would help streamline the conversation a little. I would also suggest starting an entirely new thread once a couple concrete decisions are made.

Lots of amazing ideas so far and there’s a lot of potential here.

I think the bottom line is that BiS gear should NOT be RNG. We complain a lot about Anet time-gating things, but I think this is one time where a time-gate would be infinitely more acceptable than what we have currently.

If someone told me that there are legendary weapons in this game but I’ll have to put in 500-1,000 hours of gameplay to get one, I’d say that makes sense since it’s BiS gear. Plus it would be really cool to see somebody with a legendary because you’d know they put a lot of time into GW2 and deserve their reward. It would be impressive.

But, that’s not what happens. Instead you have players that put thousands of hours into the game and get nothing, thousands of gold into the forge and get nothing … and then players who throw 4 random rares into the forge and get a pre, then have one drop from a JP box, and then 1 from temple zerg, and 1 from WvW, etc.

The system makes no sense. Didn’t from the beginning. Anet’s worst mistake with this game was failing to include an epic way to obtain your legendary weapon that rewarded hard work and dedication to the game they created.

Oh, and to the person that suggested the simple solution is to just have all of us buy them off the TP…. That’s not viable either. If everybody stopped throwing their money into the forge and saved up to buy pre’s off the TP, there would be less pre’s on the TP in general because of the one’s lost from people not using the forge, and since more players would be buying pre’s from the TP, the supply would dwindle faster.

Honest question:

If you’re trying to do an event, but for whatever reason you can’t, can’t you just go to a different overflow and try there? I’m not trying to take sides, or continue the pointless arguing that’s been going on for 6 pages. I just honestly want to know. This is the beauty of the megaserver. You can leave the map and come back in order to find one that lets you accomplish whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

Trying to visit a karma merchant in one of the temples in Orr? Keep zoning out and back in til you find one with the waypoint uncontested and the merchant up. I do it all the time.

Trying to complete a specific event but for some reason it’s not up? (ie Coil) Keep zoning out and back in til you find one where the zerg isn’t ruining it.

Trying to zerg farm an event (ie Coil) but you found an overflow where they’re completing the event? Keep zoning out and back in til you find an overflow where the zerg is failing the event.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is the easiest and most adult solution? Isn’t this an excellent use of the megaserver? Isn’t this easier than immediately turning to: “These players aren’t doing exactly what I want so I’m going to get upset until they stop” …?

For background:
– I wanted to complete the Coiled Watch event chain for achievements, so I found a map without a zerg
– I wanted to farm the event to see what it was like, so I found an overflow with a zerg on it

So simple.

I’m on NSP and even though it’s completely lop-sided and technically unfair of Anet to allow this type of matchup, I gotta say everybody on NSP seems to be having a blast with the individual fights themselves during primetime. Sure we’re being blown out of the water points-wise, but we’ve wiped our fair share of zergs and had some really great fights that just went on forever! Anybody from YB at the fight in NSP’s Bay 2 days ago about 8pm EST? Fight lasted like an hour with constant streams of players just WPing and coming back. Was crazy.

I suppose next week will be even more interesting and NSP looks forward to the challenge

I think that any idea that proposes an alliance system, like Green-vs-Blue-vs-Red, would be a huge mistake. The megaserver has already caused me to feel almost completely disconnected from my server in PvE, an alliance system would do almost the same thing in WvW.

I think Anet needs to promote servers and the sense of community. But at the same time there’s servers who just simply don’t have the population to compete. Merging servers is simply the best option.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that we’re trying to come up with ideas in order to balance the populations, but we don’t actually know what the active WvW / total populations are for each server?

Would ArenaNet divulge that sort of information? Is there somewhere that already publicly lists it that I don’t know about?

The simplest solution seems to be to let the lowest population servers be absorbed into the ones just above them. You wouldn’t have to say something like “All ET are being moved to HoD”. You could just offer free transfers to certain servers from certain servers, but put an internal transfer limit that will eventually say “no further transfers to this server allowed at this time” and then see where we end up.

At least in NA, 18 servers would work quite nicely I think.

I don’t understand why I can’t unlock trait points as I level. Especially now that they have went through so much work trying to make the leveling system rewarding. I would absolutely thrilled if every time I leveled I gained a trait point and a skill point.

One fundamental problem with this that I have is that according to Anet they surveyed people that stopped playing the game and based their changes on the leveling system based on their answers. But did they survey the players that are actually still playing the game? Don’t our opinions count for something?

If I made a movie, showed it to 500 people, and 20 of them walked out angry, I wouldn’t change the movie to suit them, because 480 people seemed to enjoy it. It’s not a perfect comparison but you get the point.

Why didn’t they do a CDI on the leveling experience?
Why isn’t there an in-game survey system that periodically asks me questions about in-game features? Wouldn’t that be super helpful if you’re interested in what your player-base thinks? (which, admittedly, Anet definitely seems to).

These forums are full of amazing ideas, but it’s no secret that we’re only a small part of the GW2 population. An in-game survey system would reach 100% of your current player-base and would provide an amazingly accurate idea of what your players want. And I know that personally I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions here and there in order to make the game better. There would also be a great opportunity to link directly to the CDI’s on these forums from inside the game. Collaboration is a great thing, but I feel like 80% of the player-base is upset with the new changes and that is not good.

I have leveled 5 characters from 2-80 strictly in WvW. It’s the best place to level. So much fun and if you’re capping towers/keeps it’s so fast too. Sure EotM is technically quicker if your zerg is quite large, but it’s also pretty boring after awhile.

Leveling in WvW is fine. I’ve never had anybody tell me to “get lost”. But, my personal view is it’s all about not being a liability to the group. Play smart and you won’t die. That’s the key. I played for 4 hours last night on my lvl 26 Ranger and didn’t die once in that span because I know how close to the fight I can get.

Upleveled characters might not be a big help in WvW, but if you’re not a hindrance nobody bothers you from my experience.

Further to my last post, I don’t think that putting restrictions on siege placement using an “exhaustion” system would work in the long run. It would most likely constantly be a hindrance, and only 1% of the time be legitimately useful.

There’s also something to be said for making this new system as simple as possible so it can be implemented quicker. I believe that what I mentioned in my above post is fairly simple and wouldn’t take too long to actually put into the game.

I absolutely love the idea of having the player name appear on the siege. Combine that with an addition to the reporting system to include siege griefing and you really have something. Most people will not act foolishly if there name is plastered all over the place.

I also like the idea of the game allowing me to interact with commander-thrown siege simply by hitting “build”, but if siege is thrown by a non-commander I think there should be a prompt asking me if I really want to build this piece of siege. And I know anybody could pop their tag, throw siege, and de-tag, so they would have to implement something into the game that only designated something as “commander siege” if they had their commander tag up for x number of seconds.

Level gating content is not helpful. If you find your new players are confused by some of your systems, you know what you do? Add tool tips and tutorials.

This is how I imagine a proper revamp of the NPE if you honestly deem it necessary:

You create your character, get the first cut scene, and enter the first instance. You’re greeted with a Welcome to GW2 window, given a brief message about being in a personal story instance, and then given the option to activate the New Player Tutorial right away.

The New Player Tutorial starts off by explain the HUD. Then explains that new skills will open up by using them (as it should be) and goes on to explain the unlocking of utility skills and elite skills later on.

You will then be told about the quest markers and such, and be directed to continue through the instance.

• as a side note I think you should enter into the instance in a safe zone that is easily 3000 range away from the nearest mobs.

Once you start moving forward you will undoubtedly notice the red-named mobs up ahead. When you are 1,500 range away the game with automatically pause and ask you if you would like information on combat in GW2 including weapon skill unlocks, cooldowns, dodging, etc. Each of these can be explained easily.

You then continue through the instance as we normally do.

At some point in the first instance your character should meet up with a “boss” that WILL down you. There’s no avoiding it. Once downed, you will be provided information on the downed state, and be directed to look at each of your skills while downed. Then you are given the opportunity to skill-4-rez yourself and continue with the instance.

Once you have completed the instance and are in the open world you are greeted with a “Welcome to Tyria” message and directed to a Scout to learn about the world. The scouts can be so useful if Anet lets them be. I suggest that when you interact with a scout it starts an unskippable dialog that goes through ALL of the things available to do in the open world. Honestly it won’t take long to explore. Briefly touch on everything from POIs, to Vistas, to Hearts, to Events, etc… and then explain that when you interact with your first POI/Vista/SP/WP you will be given further information on how the system works. The Scout will end by reminding you of your quest/story marker.

Then you’re ready to explore. When you interact with a POI for the first time, a dialog box will open asking you if you would like to know more about it. Simply choose yes or no.

This covers 90% of the simple stuff.

From the moment you enter the open world the game should have a small blinking icon near the top left of the screen that, when hovered over, says “Click to learn more about these in-game features”, and it will then ask you if you would like to learn about each of the options at the top of the screen, LFG, Guild tab, BLTC, etc. And, if you so choose, you have the option to learn about each individually.

I’m sure I missed something, but the point is you can cover most of this with simple tool tips and tutorials. If you think your player-base still wouldn’t get it you could have NPCs throughout the world that provide additional information and tutorials on any subject you may need.

Players are not stupid. They don’t need their hand held for a long period of time. They just need a small amount of information and they’ll be fine. And the option to get further information if necessary never hurts.

But please don’t level-gate everything. It makes the leveling experience way worse, it’s completely insulting to the average player, and it’s horrible frustrating for experienced players that want to level a new character. Level-gating makes zero sense and I can’t believe that this idea passed the initial brainstorming phase at Anet.

I know that it probably took a ton of time to create the new system, but the fact is it just doesn’t make sense and actually makes your game worse instead of better.

I am certain that nothing will be done because reverting a change of this magnitude back to its original format (or my new proposed format ) takes way too much effort, but I guess that didn’t stop me from posting it :P

I play on Northern Shiverpeaks and a couple week ago we were wondering if we’d squeak into Silver League. Now it appears that we’ll be ranked 13th going into the tournament.

Most likely to be in Silver League:

1: Crystal Desert/Maguuma (up to RNG gods)
2. Yak’s Bend
3. Dragonbrand
4. Stormbluff Isle
5. Devona’s Rest
6. Isle of Janthir
7. Northern Shiverpeaks
8. Henge of Denravi
9. Borlis Pass

Should we be expecting to have to face DR/SBI/DB/YB/CD? Or is it highly likely that we get grouped with IOJ/HoD/BP over and over again?

And, if we do somehow match up against DR or SBI, what will we be getting ourselves into? :P

I sure hope not. That’s where I level most of my characters now. That and EotM, which would probably receive the same XP nerf if it’s actually true.

They have level-gated the BLTC merchants because, you know, players are too stupid to figure out how to use it at such low levels. o.O

Made an Asura Ranger like 5 hours before the update. Went to BLTC merchant in starting area of Metrica. Bought gear and weapons. Straight out of the first instance. This is what I always do. Logged out, came back on after update, went back to same merchant to buy some 8-slot bags for leveling. Merchant was missing. I was very confused.

It’s official now, they have level-gated WAAAAY too many things with this new update. C’mon Anet, you can’t possibly think these changes are a good idea.

I sell most of my items instantly because I want the immediately gold return without having to worry about whether the item I listed actually sold. Also, it’s way faster when trying to clear some space while in the middle of something. (I know I could salvage, that’s beside the point).

I used to open BLTC, then click Sell tab, then item, then sell, then click Ok. It would sell the entire stack and it was really nice.

Now…. I open BLTC, click Sell tab, drag slider to max, ensure to check box for selling immediately instead of listing, then Sell button, then Ok. If I forget to move the slider it wastes my time. If I forget to check the sell now box instead of listing the item, then I have to deal with the fact that my item may not sell because of shifting prices.

I “sold” like 50 items yesterday before I realized that I was actually listing them instead of instantly selling them. I checked my “items I’m selling” tab and 4 hours later most of my items were still there. That’s just silly for someone who wanted to sell the items right away.

Please fix this. Give us an option to choose certain default settings.

The way it is right now the siege disabler is way overpowered.

Ideally it would be removed from the game entirely (along with the supply stealing cloud) but since that won’t happen, I suggest making it so while a piece of siege is disabled it cannot be destroyed and for 45 seconds after the disable has been removed the siege cannot be disabled again.

Personally I see the siege disabler as a way of buying your server some time to get reinforcements into the keep/tower/castle. But allowing someone to disable your siege, destroy them, and then force you to start over, is just silly.

Might as well just treb everything now from the safety of your keep/tower. Might cost less.

Level-gating the downed skills is completely ridiculous.

I understand that a lot of players don’t understand what each skill does, but that’s easily fixed by simply changing the opening instance straight out of the character creation to include a “forced downed” situation that brings up a Tool Tip explaining how to use your downed skills.

Like with any patch there’s good and bad, so I’ll just go through it point by point.

1. Trading Post
– For the most part I love the new UI, was easy to use, looks great. However…..
– It should definitely NOT default to “list this item” all the time, you should have a choice. I generally don’t list. I want my money now and don’t want to deal with something not selling. I don’t care if it’s slightly less profitable. Give me the choice.
– It should default to “sell max” not “sell min”, but again, give us a choice. I had a stack of 7 shredded garments and I was selling them one at a time until I finally realized what was going on.
– Options to change defaults will make the TP way more user friendly.

2. Wardrobe, Minis, Collections
– Looks good

3. Collection Achievements
– People will always welcome more achievements

4. New Runes, Sigils, and Combat Log
– Again, good change

5. WvW Changes
– Golem mastery, awesome
– Siege disabler…. WAAAY overpowered
– Commander tags, good change
– Auto respawn, fantastic

6. Leveling
– Oh boy, where to begin
– Hiding anything on the minimap is a terrible idea. Show everything on the map, and whenever a new player comes across a node/vista/SP/heart/etc have a dialog box pop up that explains what it is, ie: “Tyria is full of resources that can be gathered, including wood from trees, ore from mining nodes, and various ingredients from vegetation. If you lack the appropriate gathering tools simply visit your nearest Merchant”
– Unlocking skill points, vistas, asura gates etc is a terrible idea. As a rule, I would get all the WPs, SPs, and vistas on a starting zone map, head to Lion’s Arch and repeat the process for the other starting zones and cities. Now a player is basically forced to grind it out on a starting zone map until they’re “rewarded” with being able to obtain things that should be available from the beginning.
– Level-gating downed skills? Are you friggin’ serious?
– Level-gating weapons skills? Not too bad I guess, unless you’re an Ele, then it’s completely ridiculous. Please go back to letting me unlock them as I use the weapon. That system was perfect.
– Pushing back the levels of the utility skills and elite skill is a mistake. It might take a bit for new players to get used to everything in the game, but people are not complete i.d.i.o.t.s. Just have a Tool Tip pop up for utility skills and elite skills….oh wait… you did that already! You should want your players to acquire skills quickly so they can learn them earlier. Doesn’t that make sense? I think it does.
– I am all for some type of tutorial for new players. Makes sense. But don’t change the game in an extremely negative way for veteran players. You can appease both. It’s not hard.

7. Profession Changes/Balances/Fixes
– Everything seems fine. It’ll take awhile to figure out what works and what doesn’t
– I’ve never seen so many Mesmers and Rangers in my life! Haha.

I think the core of the issue is this:

The amount of points for taking a camp/tower/keep/SM should vary depending on the number of allies/enemies on the map, as well as the amount of resistance you received while trying to take it.
Examples:

- SM gives you 35 points assuming all factors are equal
- If you take it with less numbers you get 50
- If you take it with more numbers you get 20
- If you take with no resistance at all you get 10

All of this would scale depending on the number of players in proximity to SM in combat.

This would ensure that taking advantage of a server without a wvw population during certain times of the day would not result in your server’s PPT being like 500+ for hours on end.

Now, you’re probably saying that if you hold SM for 12 hours straight and eventually both servers have tons of players on EB, you’d be furious if the PPT on SM was still only like 10 points. And you’d be right. So at the start of each 15 minute PPT period the game would have to re-evaluate the worth of each objective you hold. If you’re fending off attacks at SM during primetime, but you capped it hours ago when nobody was online, you definitely deserve to get that higher PPT for it.

I think the issue is, that for once, Anet made the system too simple. PPT in WvW should be a complicated system based on a number of factors.

Thoughts?

To be perfectly honest they made the system too complicated.

It was way better when I would unlock a trait point every time I leveled. The only downside to that, which Anet brought up, was that sometimes people would have 6 or 11 or 17 points spent on a particular trait line, which wasn’t really efficient. This mainly effected new players only.

Now, I would have thought that the simplest solution would be to make it so trait points could only be spent 5 at a time, thus eliminating all the odd numbers. But instead Anet created this incredibly complicated trait unlock system that involves doing all sorts of events throughout the world and it’s just a pain. I honestly end up buying most of the traits because I can’t be bothered. But a new player can’t do that.

Simple is usually better.

This has probably been brought up 30 times but I didn’t see it.

It’s simple. Green side almost always wins in EotM. And it’s not even close.

Why is this? Has Anet ever acknowledged the problem? And is there a fix in the works?

When you mouse over the BLTC icon it should say:

Selling 2 items
Buying 6 items
1g 34s 23c available for pickup

I think that would clear a lot of things up and people would be able to check without having that large, somewhat obnoxious window filling their whole screen.

So, is this right?

If I buy a commander tag today it’ll cost 100g and be for 1 character, but automatically be made account wide with the update, but if I wait til after the update to buy one, it’ll be 300g…..?

Brother Grimm.5176:

Just to add, getting hung up on the semantics of the term “Legendary” as a reason it is broken is not actually legit. If they had named the weapons “AWESOME WEAPONS”, would your complaint (that they are BROKEN because there is nothing LEGENDARY about obtaining them) hold up? No. Are they potentially named incorrectly? Very possibly….but some smart guy once asked, “what’s in a name”.

Sure, everyone that does the required work to get one should get one (and they CAN). However, that required work should not be the equivalent of showing up to work on time for 25 years….you shouldn’t get a top tier, BiS weapon for doing the Dailies for 3 years without missing one (maybe you get a title for that….shrug).
….

First, you and many other complaining does not mandate a change. If there weren’t any players with these items, it might, but those items are around every corner….they must be obtainable.

Second, Anet NOT doing anything about it should tell you something (like they see all the Legendaries being made and don’t feel the system is “broken”).

Finally, they have said they are looking into introducing a new system for obtaining Precursors via crafting (and NOTHING more). Asking for status on this is reasonable but stating they are “dragging their feet” and you “deserve” an answer not reasonable.

BTW, you are going to be less than satisfied when the method to craft the Precursors is similar (but much longer than) getting the new LS Bback Items AND those Precursors are NOT the currently existing Precursors (in some way, they MUST be different).

- This is not a debate over the semantics of the word legendary. Anet chose that name purposely for their BiS weapons, purposely chooses their slogans, etc, one of which has been “become a legend” or something like that. Becoming a legend is all over the dialogue in the game. And finally, Anet loves to talk about legendaries in their livestreams. They’re supposed to be endgame. You’re supposed to want one. But the system for achieving them makes no sense.
- I’m sure this won’t be a perfect example of why the system is broken, but maybe you’ll understand, so here goes: IF RNG just didn’t pan out for every player in the game, there would be no legendaries to make. Think about that. I know that it has, but the system technically allowed for a precursor never to drop ever. Broken.
- Nobody is suggesting that by doing dailies for 3 years you can a free one in the mail or something. I just want to be able to know what percentage of the way I am to achieving the precursor, which is impossible to know through RNG.
- Players mandate change all the time through complaining. Anet has made dozens of changes already because players demanded it. They announced a long time ago that they were going to implement precursor crafting, so it’s not that they’re against the idea. If they were they wouldn’t have said it would be implemented, or at least they would have retracted the statement and said why it wouldn’t work or they weren’t interested.
- Anet not thinking a system is broken does not mean said system isn’t broken. Their vision of the Ranger being a sustained damage over time class is a perfect example.
- As for “dragging their feet”, that’s exactly what they’re doing. Based on when the idea was first presented, to now, for us to have almost no info on what they’re planning, or even if they’re still planning it, is just silly. Especially when they posting in these kinds of threads saying “no, this next update will not include the precursor crafting”.
- I won’t be less than satisfied. Any type of crafting system is better than RNG. Even if it will take a ton of work and take forever. I’m fine with that. Just let me track my progress.

The way I see it, a legendary weapon is an important part of the endgame for a lot of people, and the game puts a lot of emphasis on “becoming a legend”, so how could they even consider allowing the precursor to be a random drop? The whole idea of it just doesn’t make any sense.

Whether they institute precursor crafting, or a precursor vendor, it would be a much better option than crossing your fingers and waiting to be randomly given something.

RNG works just fine for the small stuff (white, greens, and blues from mobs for example) but relying on it for something that is supposed to be fundamentally important to the endgame is ridiculous.

I, and many others, have been complaining about the RNG-system for precursors for a long time now, and Anet still hasn’t done anything about it. They say they’re “working on it” but it honestly shouldn’t take this long to work on it. They’re dragging their feet and I think we, as a community, deserve to know why.

As everybody has surely noticed, if you try to sell too many items too quickly through the trading post you receive an error message. As far as it’s been explained to me, this is so that the servers aren’t taxed with too many transactions at once, causing a slow-down.

What I propose is that a column is added to the Sell tab of the trading post, which would allow the user to check a box, marking an item for sale, which places it in a global “sale queue”. At this point the server(s) will approve the sales in the order it receives them, at a set interval, thus eliminating slow down.

This would allow you to mark as many items in your inventory for sale as you’d like, without receiving an error message, and players would spend much less time trying to sell items on the trading post.

Now, obviously this would mean that you wouldn’t know the exact price your item sold for until it happened, and certain players definitely want the option to sell at a specific price. This should be easily solved with a Sell Now, Sell Later sort of option.

Any fundamental reason this wouldn’t work?
Anybody else find themselves wanting the same thing?