Guild Wars 2

Commander should cost 100g and COLORS shouldn’t ever cost more than 1 or 2 gold. It’s FOR WvW… it should cost badges which is the real drop there. Stupid to think they expect pvp players to go farm dungeons for a pvp feature?

Or maybe they just want everyone to buy features by trading gems for gold.

It makes no sense at all.

What are you going to do in your PVE armor? Farm? It’s pointless. At least in PVP it would mean something for people to see you have achievement armor. In PVE it means nothing to anyone.

It’s a vanity feature now. Those farmlords with 10 legendary weapons just had the vapors about nothing else to buy. Finally something new for them.

/sarcasm

Horrible idea.

They completely ruined the feature.

The ENTIRE point of color swaps on commander tags is so people can see what the heck is going on on the map at a glance.

You know how well having two blue guys works? Like crap. Sometimes people will go nuts until everyone but one guy tags off because it’s too confusing.

Simple solution was always: give colors.

Which they are finally doing but for THREE HUNDRED GOLD PER EACH COLOR to be unlocked?

It ceases to even be a feature for WvW. It’s a toy for rich farmlords.

Probably 5-20 minutes (3 est about)

We shall see.

It was an awful update.

I actually had the worst problems with instances.

SEVERAL second lag happening every 15 seconds does not make for good boss fights. Literally all I could do was blind queue up moves and weapon switching and hope things went sorta right. Which they didn’t really, because that’s not responsive gameplay.

If there’s more updates like this I’m done with the game. It’s nice of them to update it but if it works like crap there’s really no point to actually playing it.

Considering how last season ended I’m going to say that there’s no way this is the only new area. Also notice that they’re selling the LS for gems, so how can they do that if it’s just a tiny bit of content? It’s definitely going to have big stuff in it.

I thought it was pretty good overall.

Some serious issues though:

- For me, NPCs in the story were 80% of the time having multiple characters speak their lines at the same time. Kind of ruins the narrative experience. I guess that might be a lag thing so please find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

- A lot of lag on the servers that impacted my sessions going through the story while in combat. And this will probably happen every release, so that’s concerning.

- When fighting the boss on the platforms my heroic crew all stayed at the bottom attacking stupid worthless roots. I wanted to fire them all. Please put a “go home” command in the future for these forced player companions.

Other than those QA issues, I think they’re on track for a better season.

I don’t see the big deal about new skins one way or the other.

I think reward paths should turn towards ways to modify your character’s skills and build more. Being level 80 is incredibly dull.

It needs to be day 1. “Coming soon” updates for a future update are BS. Nobody enjoys it because the wait is too long.

KOPPER.1458:

I think it’s a bit rude to assume people don’t have jobs…

I can confirm people that complain about the most about trivial stuff like demanding an outline of how the devs are spending their next 5 minutes… they don’t have jobs. I know because I was that way years ago, and it’s embarrassing to think back on how stupid and self-centered I could be online then.

I imagine they’ll have way more people playing more.

A few are going to get their stink on about some change but it is absolutely impossible to not have that happen.

It was a solid patch. Obviously there wasn’t content… it wasn’t a content patch.

But what they did do is start to make multiple characters FUN, with account dye, and account warddrobe. Now I don’t feel like I have one main, but that the whole roster is worth experimenting with.

Seems fair tbh. You can reach this goal casually (although the time frame is a bit of a crunch if you’re employed) but dungeons are a pain to organize and do right.

Or the score.

I’d like to know one or the other to be able to find servers to that are playable and I don’t have to watch a huge chunk of someone else’s match. Would be easy if I had that info.

The patch doesn’t really seem to change how limited each profession is.

I honestly think they don’t want us to make anything resembling “builds” of GW1, because they can’t balance that. So instead we got the phony idea of traits and runes that … well what are you going to do with those besides DPS?

And nobody’s going to play support even if they make changes because YOU DON’T GET ANY DROPS.

’Tis a bummer. I was hoping for the mythical “use more weps or all weps with all classes” to give the game a new lease on combat.

I get that they want everything locked down and to remove that flexibility instead, but it’s still sad. I just don’t really like the combat.

Ultimately all they’ve really made is the shallow version of Guild Wars 1.

It’s weird because Guild Wars 1 wasn’t a super complex game to begin with. It was entertaining though, which Guild Wars 2 sort of misses the mark on by pushing garbage like “let’s zerg together.”

It’s sort of like GW2 is aimed at people who want to play the game without even looking at the screen so they don’t have to keep track of position, activation usage, teammate status, enemy phases, etc… It’s all stand and spam and occasionally dodge which is pretty repetitive and unimpressive.

Also what I really miss about GW1 is you could make a build that YOU LIKED. Not just some popular crap, but one you found FUN or UNIQUE.

GW2 is like playing through GW1 locked into bland build someone else made, that you can’t really customize. It’s a slog. And I bet the amount of accounts that even have an 80 isn’t all that vast a number, because people get bored with a slog.

I’m not getting my hopes up for anything else exciting in the feature patch. A lot of it just revolves around making the game fun for a new player, which is nice now that everyone on the forum has a bunch of 80s.

Can you still dye costumes? My Mad King was alarmingly pink.

We don’t even know what else they’re adding in features yet. How do you know this is the only rebalance leveling?

Sound like good changes but I dunno I’m hoping for something bigger from the feature patch vis a vis fun.

To be fair you hardly do anything in any of this content but show up.

Just watch it on youtube. It’s worth seeing it in-game though but there are indeed TONS of bugged servers, overflow issues, and so forth.

I though the ending scenes were fantastic. The kind of kick in the pants this game needed in cinematics.

Gameplay… meh. I actually crashed on Scarlet’s ship and that’s why I won it because it logged me back in able to do the finale instance. Gameplay still has a ways to go and felt pretty messy here.

But that elder dragon ending… awesome.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

So, I guess ArenaNet listened to the playerbase. =)

No, the playerbase is hungry for great content. Like expansions. Dungeons. Parts of the map that have been locked since release. Anything but this living story/cash shop dribble of pointlessness.

Atrophied.8725:

Hmm, GW1 I farmed UW and bought tormented weapons for ecto.

But you did it wrong. The whole point of having any at all was to complete the DoA experience.

People don’t want “virtual store: the game” we want these adventures under our belt.

And lots of us course have tormented weps in the Hall of Monuments and of course we don’t get anything out of these new skins. It is very silly.

spoj.9672:

Why are you surprised. They did the exact same thing with the zodiac weapons.

Zodiacs are just another skin set. A really nice one but not important lore-wise. Tormented you could earn in GW1, through many gameplay runs of a hard difficulty endgame area called DoA.

Selling tormented weps RNG… what the deuce?

Why don’t you sell access to Domain of Anguish where people can PLAY to get a tormented weapon? I know what I’m suggesting is much harder to develop, but the truth is content is king, cash shops are sad.

Danikat.8537:

As other people have said it’s a nice idea but it’s not practical to implement.

So in order to give us choices they either need to make it a choice that won’t have any impact until 4 months later, or they need to develop 2 (or more) versions of each release, and then only release one of them. Which means at least 1/2 their time would be going into making content that will never be released. That adds up to a lot of wasted effort.

Well it’s practical if you just have an A or B ending to each storyline. Not everything needs constant repercussions.

Also they can cheat and use the same basic framework of progress anyway no matter what you do, same as all choice games do like Mass Effect, The Walking Dead, etc… They just have to acknowledge what the majority of players thought should be the choice, they don’t have to build an entirely different universe.

The point of choice is just to make it feel its “our” world as the playerbase, not to do the impossible as far as development process.

It’s honestly the most fun when you can avoid the stuff they WANT you to do. The updates/cheevos/legendary is an appalling grind to me. If you get off the beaten track and explore and have fun making your own build, the game is a great one. It’s just unfortunate the continuing updates are kind of F2P cheesy too often.

How do you guys feel about LS with choice versus without choice?

For instance our current fight with Scarlet Briar you have no impact.

- You can’t choose a side to fight on.

- You aren’t contributing by logging on other than to your bank account. This event is moving forward no matter what so the choice to play or not to play doesn’t matter.

How do you feel about this versus the election for Kiel and Evon? Personally, I want all LS to do some form of requiring player participation like that. That would be amazing.

What I want included in WvW from EotM:

scaling creatures – Yes, absolutely. Although they’re underpowered still to the zerg so keep tweaking that ratio.

new and more difficult NPCs – Yes, absolutely. NPCs are a big part of what people are going after so they should have variety and crazy powers.

unique bosses at each objective – Yes. It makes things more interesting.

increased emphasis on verticality – YES. Seriously, I laugh every time I die getting knocked off something. It’s the first genuine “well that was unexpected” addition to pvp. It’s great.

destructible terrain – I haven’t seen it used much but it’s a bit forgiving in EoTM. I would love to see some more of it.

the NPC reward power ups – original post forgot to mention the special forms/powers in EotM. I love stuff like this. I would be 100% glad seeing it in WvW too.

And one proposal:

Proposal Overview

I propose there be transport vehicles in large scale PVP modes like EotM and WvW.

Goal of Proposal

Typically people are on the zerg train. If you die and aren’t on it? Walking across the map is boring, prone to being very outnumbered in ambush, and did I mention boring? I probably quit the game 95% more often when I’m in this situation than others in WvW. And even if you’re not just looking for the zerg, even finding a party of friends across the map is just as relevant for needing some transport, if not more so.

Proposal Functionality

You get in the vehicle or mount. You move 50% faster. You have none of your combat skills while onboard. You could do random damage to an enemy or gate running them over, but this damages your vehicle. If your vehicle is destroyed with you in it you’re killed, no down state, just dead on the field. Your vehicle returns to a stable or garage at the home keep.

Exiting a vehicle takes say a second or so, so you would have to use some planning as to when you’re going to exit, where to park, and so on.

Once you’re dismounted, your skill bar returns and if you want you can dismiss your vehicle back to your keep, if you worry it will be attacked. Of course then you have to go back to the keep to use it again.

Vehicles would be permanent for your account once you’ve bought them from a vendor, but they may need repairing like armor.

Associated Risks

The biggest problem I see might be with established people that see themselves as the pros at WvW. They might find such a speed boost too dramatic and lobby against it to not have to rebuild their strategies. I’m not sure what would soothe them about this.

Problem is it’s a goalless farm level. You only get cheevos and bags which are only a niche reward for a certain group.

It would have been cool if players had to make a choice to save one part of LA by doing that area the most or something.

Or we had to make a choice to support one “hero” faction of LA.

But as it is we’re not blind and realize after doing it twice that it’s a looping event with no player influence, and features no gameplay because it’s zergable.

So great ambiance for an update, but pretty limited draw really.

As far as gameplay, well yes.

They really could do to stop with the conga line style of running around the map, zerging. That might be nice maybe once or twice a year but they’re reusing it very frequently at this point.

It’s sad too coming off stuff that required coordination like the Marionette. Here we are in a much more serious stakes and yet the gameplay requires nothing of anyone. Part of the reason people game, Anet has to remember, is they WANT some requirement of them, some challenge. Yet they seem to either go extremely hardcore (wurm) or extremely softcore and we’re missing a balance besides say a jumping puzzle or something.

I think that’s the main issue is they need to find a way to get all difficulty levels in EVERY patch. That doesn’t sound fun logistically for them to handle, but it’s true if they want people to not get mad every other patch that there’s nothing for them.

They really need to stop supporting old story items. Let people clear their inventory in peace!

Let’s not rush them. You don’t want to play it now just to have it be bugged.

At first it can seem overwhelming.

If you play it with some commanders that know what they’re doing though it’s tons of fun. You quickly get used to the fact that there aren’t road signs all over, and it’s actually kind of nice that if you run on autopilot you might fall to your death. Imagine actually keeping awake while you play. Imagine having to learn the landmarks, terrain, and not just walking in straight lines, finally. I like the change.

I love that the 3 areas are completely different. After WvW predictable fights it’s great to see a map that isn’t simplistic.

I’d say the biggest downside is when there’s no commander it’s very hard for a side to get together. It’s something they need to figure out for another update someday is how to give defenders that don’t have any leadership something to do on a map.

The dev comments in this thread are heartening.

This is why I’ve loved ArenaNet ever since GW1 alpha.

They always care about improving and not just settling on something if it’s not working out.

Nice that we’re finally getting a megaton change to the world.

Remember to visit LA before it happens ladies and gents because it will never be exactly as it is now again.

Josh Foreman.8250:

As far as I can tell there are a couple challenges we are trying to overcome. First, we are trying to teach the community a new skill: self organization.

The only trouble is it’s not really self-organizing. It’s Commanders leading and that puts HUGE pressure on the Commanders that most people aren’t really comfortable with.

So at least give Commanders more power and rewards.

Having a power like a local public chat channel that is broadcasted in by the Commanders only would be a start.

Trying to use /local on the wurms when it’s full of people spamming is annoying.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Thematically keeping everyone feeling like they are contributing to a common cause from multiple locations, and still feel heroic is an interesting challenge to balance.

I don’t think people need to feel heroic nearly as much as they need to feel like they’re doing something. You could give someone the simplest task possible of pushing a big red button every 5 seconds without fail, and if they’re doing it right and other people are bringing down the boss they’ll be happy.

The trouble with a lot of GW2 boss encounters so far to me, is you don’t really feel much of what’s going on. You mosh around a bit and there’s a lot of confusion with all the adds, but you don’t have that moment of feeling like “yep, I’m the guy doing something.” It would almost be better if you guys thought SIMPLER in terms of mechanics, simple but people need to be dedicated and do it right. And also, Commanders can throw someone doing it WRONG out of there. That’s important too and not really addressed.

I agree. They’re making stuff that maybe one guild on a whole server support the completion of for others. Then you have to worry about being ferried to get to the main server to not be in the overflow and ridiculous things like that.

I just don’t get it. I commanded for a bit today just in the simplest sense of giving people a blue icon to follow, and what instructions I knew about to help us, but it’s not very fulfilling to keep going at it.

Hate to say it but PUGing a mission in GW1 was actually fun and fairly deep, and the trinity was successful in that people KNEW a role.

Where GW2 is floundering badly is there’s no cohesiveness to the game at all. Suddenly we have barricades and hammers? Wurm attractant from a plague carrier? Ok, new things are nice but it’s better to implement them in a way people really understand and get intuitively, then have to spend hours of failure kind of puzzling out through the mess of 50 people dropping AOE next to each other.

I don’t know I guess I just miss GW1 where the devs had patience with making their own game. When you got to weird stuff like getting infusions, you understood it because there were several story cutscenes about it. Now we’ve got a game where you’re just supposed to Dulfy it, and it’s weird.

Paul Belz.7351:

Hey guys,

You must participate in the marionette encounter in order to progress to the step where you go to LA. You do not have to WIN the fight, only participate. Once you participated that step should go away.

This has got to be one of the most confusing games ever, and I’m not exaggerating.

I really don’t understand why I’m finding out about this instance on an internet forum and not in the game. It really needs to be someone’s job to make sure content is accessible.

I agree. HATE timers.

At least make it if the boss fight fails then each time the respawn timer takes LESS TIME. (Yes, instead of punishing people give them a chance to learn your completely random mechanics, please.)

The way they’re going with this kind of content just isn’t wise. It’s like typical MMO stuff and people are sick to death of that. I hear some of us might even have bought GW2 on the premise that it wasn’t going to be this cliche.

Vol.7601:

Thump, Thump. Time to jump.

It… it can only mean one thing.

Fozzy the grawl’s ultimate dance party.

I appreciate the “living” story and all (though it really means scripted updates…) but what happened to ever having AI in the game?

Once upon a time the point of the living world was that it was supposed to be somewhat autonomous. Monsters could take something over because they won an attack on it. Therefore the living world would have a meta strategy game going on between hostiles and good guys, that went back and forth with or without the player.

But the truth is there’s nothing going on. Players either have to do it all or there’s just a “event failed” chain in very specific places that gives monsters progress. That’s not a dynamic AI warfare system. It’s just a quest motif.

The problem for me is that motif is transparent. I don’t care to defend anything in the world because I’m not actually involved in anything interesting. I’m setting the state of something to A or B, which no one cares about. If the computer can’t use guile against me, it’s not even that satisfying to defeat it.

So, WHAT makes an engaging AI to the player, and WHAT makes us defend? Those are two big questions I hope are looked at in the game. I would hope someday for the monsters to have some “brain” options. Do they want to raid for supplies, terrify and hurt morale, launch a massive war? There should be some randomness, and also friendly systems that are effected. As it is it just feels like part of the game that should exist, but doesn’t.

Lord Kuru.3685:

So Marjory is now an expert in poisons. You think Anet’s slowling going to make her into a Mary Sue to counter Scarlet’s Villain Sue?

Hmm really makes you think. It’s not like the game isn’t based on Destiny’s Edge or anything, a group of super skilled people, or that your character isn’t the same way.

Don’t get why people keep dragging this up.

I do wish we’d get better content then “stand in the event circle and fire off your AOE stuff for 5 minutes.”

I think the devs just need to face that too many people in one place is actually lame. There’s nothing you can do to make it better. It’s just too much. A blob of crap going on onscreen and key mashing. What’s exciting about this? It’s a dumb-fire event.

Smaller instanced content can show off amazing stuff like the Fractals did so well, but we hardly get any.

It’s just a different system. Change your dyes to something you like.