@AliamRationem…….. It seems to me that the community is split pretty evenly on vertical maps vs flat maps. While I don’t like vertical maps(because of its incompatibility with the minimap), I understand that a lot of people enjoy them.
I just don’t want future maps to be all vertical maps. I think at this point Anet would be well served mixing it up to keep both sides happy.
Anet……. PLEASE work on your minimap
This.
I am not fond of the vertical maps but I know others are.
I love the vertical maps, but I agree, that there should be both types. The difference is flat maps don’t particularly bother me, I just find vertical maps more interesting.
But people who hate vertical maps are bothered by them, so the balance should probably lean more toward flat maps.
I don’t think everyone has the same memory or same set of directions. While I had little problem learning this map, I can understand why the OP is frustrated by it.
But as others have said, it’s not every map. There needs to be maps for all types of players.
I’m not 100% sure, but if someone who hasn’t already unlocked it wants to try, there’s an item called unbound magic gatherer.
It’s sold by the unbound magic npc at the beginning of each LS zone for 5 gold. There’s a chance it unlocks the mastery track since it allows you to collect unbound magic which is the first mastery you get.
I can’t try it myself, because I’ve already unlocked the mastery. I might be able to try it on a second account when time permits, and I’ll post the results again, but I don’t have time at the moment to play the story to get to those zones on alt accounts.
To add to all of this some people simply don’t like HoT and I mean they’ve never set foot back into the HoT maps after beating the story.
I know people who have core Tyria Mastery and the ancient magics mastery but regarding HoT they only have the basic points needed to complete the campaign. I have 181 but 181 isn’t something I usually see outside of HoT maps.
In fact I agree with the 99 average as that would indeed be the number you’d be seeing with someone who beat HoT then never returned. Typically vets who already have enough core Tyria points unlocked through achievements gotten prior to launch and only need the exp.
In addition a person who quit because of HoT but returned for Season 3 wouldn’t necessarily go back into HoT and grind it out but rather grind out the new maps and the old ones they enjoyed before. So midway will probably remain the average even going into the next expac as I know there are some HoT masteries namely the adventure gold ones that I’m never going to actual bother to get around too.
I’d go as far to say that there are nearly as many people who only play HoT stuff and maybe Fractals, but aren’t interested in a Legendary Weapon and those people don’t necessary bother with Legendary Mastery.
In fact, I recurrent theme I’m hearing in my guild is that returning players have no trouble leveling their HoT masteries, but tend to find it hard to get enough core tyria mastery points to finish leveling core Tyria mastery.
Anyone who doesn’t do fractals, has no reason to level Fractal mastery.
The only thing everyone seems to want from core Tyria masteries is true autolooting.
She discovered Ommadd’s machine in the leyline hub during Season 2. It’s pretty clear that no one else knew quite what it was. She had time to work with it, and presumably, brought it back to the hidden lab.
Again, not possible. That was resolved in S2 when Phlunt and the Arcane Council took control of the machine.
Even if we presume she had time to somehow work on it, she stated that the machine used in the most recent episode was ommadds… The only one of its kind in existence. Which begs the question how she got the machine out of the Arcane Council’s hands, let alone past the supervision of Phlunt who literally has 0 respect for her.
I don’t know why you think the Council had any knowledge of Ommad’s machine. What they took was the device she built, from parts you got for her, that allowed them to do something. While the machine was near there, there was no indication that the council was there looking at anything but her machine.
Sure in the real world they would have looked around and tried to figure out what everything there was, except that there’s Asuran crap everywhere there are Asurans and they probably don’t have time to stop and analyze every single thing, particularly with the waypoint dilemma going on.
In short, there’s no indication Phlunt had any knowledge of Omadd’s Machine.
10 minute cinematics are too long to be of value.
and suddenly dropping a deus ex machina on you had what value ?
When we are talking about writing the value is in the build up. Something the story has greatly been lacking.
it doesnt also need to be of 10 minutes it just needs a proper build up. Imo it doesnt matter that balthazar didnt make amazing sense from the getgo so long as they make it work in the furture.
It’s not just about Balth. There’s quite a few stretches in the story that leave a lot to be desired. From a machine that’s used to view the eternal alchemy being turned into a polarizing energy matrix, that was already heavily under guard from the arcane council who would have blocked any attempts to move it just as an example. None of that was remotely explained outside of “Oh look Taimi and Genius”. Genius only gets you so far, especially when dealing with your Elder who doesn’t respect you as a person, let alone trust you. Then there’s Batman whose somehow innately aware of an arrow used to slay dragons that had been lost to time yet he suddenly knows it’s exact location ?
I could go on for quite a while about these large scale plotholes that could have been fixed with more time put into the story and explaining the world state and allowing the characters to grow naturally as opposed to poorly using tropes and other literary devices.
Iirc taimi only used the basis of what the machine did and create something entirely new that had the ability to manipulate the magic so she didnt quite took the thing. Dont forget taimi worked with that machine for quite sometime back in se 2. But there was a basic train of though first with specer and the realisation of how dragon magic works the hypothesis of since omads machine can view these diff types of magic maybe theres a way to make a machine based on omad creation that manipulates that. Now the way she made it is missing but its not like with braham she woke up 1 morning and she made the machine out of thin air or came up with the theory about elder dragon magic.
I am not aware if that scroll was idd lost in time but supposedly his source gave him the leads to where this scroll was, if that is left untouched then yes that will be bad but theres always the window to turn the events in a way where his source plays a bigger parts and its revealed to have tried to manipulate events. At least he didnt wake up and know of its existance and location thank god for that.
Taimi literally say’s that’s Omads machine in the story, the only one of its kind. So sorry to burst that bubble it’s not a replica which really begs the question as to how the heck she was even able to come into possession of it. Again onto Batman, it goes to further showcase the problem. Which source, where, why, and the bigger question he somehow had all this knowledge and no one else could (Say for instance The Order of Whispers, the organization built on knowing most ancient secrets) ? I know what you’re implying, however for a narrative you cannot feasibly be that intentionally ambiguous when the item in question has such value to the story.
She discovered Ommadd’s machine in the leyline hub during Season 2. It’s pretty clear that no one else knew quite what it was. She had time to work with it, and presumably, brought it back to the hidden lab.
Labjax, it may be because you took a break from the game but I can assure you that people that play higher end content can survive the jungle in zerker gear. The people who follow the meta tend to get zerker gear, but I have plenty of people in my guild who use other options, because it’s a casual guild. They didn’t have to change their armor at all.
A lot of it really is just knowing the enemy to survive.
Actually, that’s a really good idea Zealex. But the thing is, if people think WvW is abandoned, why do they think adding another form of WvW would be better somehow?
Right now the game has to be balanced for three different sets of criteria. I can’t see how adding a forth would be good for the game.
I expect that’s not true. We’ve had a couple of people who have complained about guild wars not being in the game, but it’s a rare complaint to here. I suspect only a small percent of people who bought the game actually expect guild vs guild. Anet even said guild vs guild wouldn’t be in the game before launch.
WvW was supposed to fill that role. It’s a large scale PvP area where guilds can compete. Not one on one with other guilds, but often, in WvW the big guilds really do compete with each other more generally.
It’ would be a niche format that won’t get the support it needs and it will fail. Anet already had trouble keeping WvW and PvP players happy. Not sure what makes anyone think that adding a new type of PvP will be somehow beneficial.
I don’t know who says no rangers and no necros but that’s not my experience at all. Both of those professions, at least druids and repears, are very very welcome in most fractals.
I would think that misleading map indicators causing more confusion than help is very different than achieving a vista that you have already located.
The problem with HoT is the minimap which I assume is to help you navigate often ends up misleading you as to the location of a particular area.
You used the example of the breached wall blitz vista. This is a platforming activity. The problem I have with HoT is one of navigation. The minimaps just don’t perform well with the multitiered maps.
I don’t enjoy my time being wasted. I wish the minimap instead of giving you up and down arrows would simply have a 1, 2 or 3 so you knew which tier of the map the area was in.
Map indicators are a lot less misleading since up and down had been added to targets, which was a huge upgrade to the map system.
And there are plenty of instances where you need to get to a vista but where it starts from is a completely different place.
I won’t buy it at all until after players get a look and comment. And even then:
- It can’t as hard to play as HoT was.
- Gating cannot exist beyond a small amount. LS S3 has gating about where it needs to be. HoT was and still is gross as regards gating.
- The maps need to be not as disgustingly hard to navigate. Some kind of clear method of showing up and down needs to exist. Similar to how nodes are now, except for passages (once they’ve been discovered, of course).
Those are deal-breakers for me. It needs to be much more casual-friendly (than HoT was) for me. If it’s clear they listened only to the tiny minority of players who want things harder, I won’t buy it.
I agree Daddicus, in fact I have no faith that anet can produce a game as exciting as the core game. For me, it will depend upon whether there is a good mix of differing game styles or just more of the same of poor mastery and hero point collections and platforming of HoT.
Where as I have the opposite problem. I’m not sure that Anet can produce an expansion as good as HoT which I like considerably more than the core game.
If you’re only counting instances as the story, you’re missing huge parts of the story, because half the story is in zones. For example the mordremonth fight in the instance is only half the battle with modremonth. The other is in Dragonstand. It’s done on a much larger scale.
While you’re engaging his mind in the story, what’s left of the pact is facing mordy in the real world. It’s quite clever really.
The problem is people think the story is only in instances and they miss a good deal of it.
In response to the point about learning maps:
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As a contrary example, some will keep going as a matter of pride, or because they want the challenge. But many won’t and I guarantee you the many that won’t make up the majority of the gaming population. The gaming population isn’t a small, devoted crowd anymore. It’s a monstrous behemoth of a spectrum, with wildly varying skill levels.
But more important than that is the fact that… good design makes the player feel smart for doing virtually nothing; good design teaches the player how to be smart and instills confidence in them; good design is like an invisible mentor that stays with you, no matter how good you get. The point being, if you’re going to get defensive about how something is designed, you better have an argument that’s stronger than “people will get over it.” Because if your hope is that people will get over it, you’re about saying, “Yes, the car is on fire, but it will burn itself out eventually and then I can drive home.”
By the time the problem has resolved itself, it’s too late to fix the issue.
That being said, arguments over design choices I welcome and I’m not right about everything when it comes to games. But this stuff about “you eventually learn” is not a good argument. If I’m a filmmaker and release a movie, I don’t want it to “eventually” become a box office hit; it needs to be one now and it’s got a small window in which it can pull that off.
MMOs do have a learning curve a lot of the time. I get that kind of defense. But it isn’t a carte blanche excuse for complexity or confusing design. It’s possible to make something too complicated or too confusing.
Actually there are plenty of decisions Anet makes that are exactly they same and they said so. They expect people to have to learn certain fights and not master them right away. They said it about the marionette fight. They talked about, at that time, raising the bar higher and setting a situation where the community would have to come together and teach each other to get through the content. So yeah, they have had design meetings, and that’s exactly what they came up with at that time. Therefore, it’s probably not accurate to say that no design meeting ever went this way.
There have always been players that want everything spelled out for them, and players who are annoyed when everything is spelled out for them. However, getting around and learning a zone IS the game very often, as learning to get to a hard vista or get through a hard jumping puzzle was the game originally.
I know a lot of people couldn’t easily get to the vista at the end of the breached wall blitz jumping puzzle in the core game. It’s a vista and a hero point if I’m not mistaken. Want to complete the zone, do the JP, the entrance of which is no where near where those things are.
You either figure it out, or you look it up in the wiki or on Dulfy, or ask a guildie. There’s no tutorial for it. That’s how it was designed.
Anet figured, now that many people have been playing the game and have the basics down, they can do more for the people who play a bit better, or the people who don’t want to have their hand held through every single section.
I personally get annoyed when I’m doing a story and a giant red arrow on the minimap tells me where I need to go…sometimes even when there’s only one way TO go.
Saying that no company designs content you have to work your way through is simply untrue.
In gw2, after exploring a map…. the map stays revealed and it is easy to see where you need to go….. However in HoT the minimap doesn’t support the multitiered maps… the minimap gives confusing directions on multitiered maps. Since the minimaps don’t work you have to memorize the maps
This is only true for a while. Then you learn the specifics of the map and the events and it’s no longer confusing.
I disagree with your generalized statement. Perhaps you should replace “you” with “I” because it certainly isn’t true for everyone.
Actually I think it’s true for everyone. Once you learn the maps and events it wouldn’t be confusing because you’ve learned them. It’s like saying once you’ve learned to read, you can read. It’s just simple logic.
Some people may well be incapable of learning the events and maps, but I suspect that’s quite rare. What’s more likely isn’t that people can’t learn, it’s that they believe they can’t.
I mean sure, some people have a really bad sense of direction…but those people can still ask directions.
But I think most people probably don’t have that much trouble learning how to get around at least to the basic areas they need to get to.
Many of us came to this game so we wouldn’t feel compelled to grind for stuff like legendaries. It should always be a choice. Add something like that to it, and suddenly it’s less of a choice. And that, in my opinion, would be very bad for the game.
Dungeons runners quit because their rewards were nerfed
Well I disagree with your assessment of HoT, but at least your position is clear.
About dungeon nerfs: I wasn’t around to see how dungeons used to be rewarded, but I hear that they simply redirected some of the direct gold rewards into the frequenter reward. Regardless, between raw salvage, mob kills, mystic forge gambling, and salvaging dungeon exotics for inscriptions, dungeon running seems plenty rewarding to me. It might not be the fastest way up, but it’s definitely steady and can help an exclusive pve/dungeon runner pile up a respectable amount for some important purchases.
Because you weren’t here you missed part of the picture. The rewards you’re talking about were added after HOT launched due to the reaction Anet had from removing the gold reward completely.
You at one point got a gold for doing most dungeons, plus tokens and drops. Then you got just tokens and drops. No gold at all.
That’s changed now, but at the time the decision was made, some people who loved dungeons and ran them daily did walk from the game.
Anet believed they could replace dungeons with fractals but even the fractal rewards weren’t that good at the time. If you were interested in five man instanced content when HoT launched you had to choose between unrewarding dungeons and unrewarding fractals.
Both rewards have since been improved.
Okay you don’t need five people to get the vampire. You can do it with two as long you both people have the ability to break the bar frequently. I know because I’ve done it. The bat guano hero point is all about breaking the bar.
The frustrating thing about the Guano hero point is the bar resets when it does its “BREAK THE BAR NOW! attack” – even if you had JUST broke it, and all your CC is on cooldown.
That’s why it’s better with two to three people. Again, I do this with other people quite frequently, since people do have problems with it. But it’s not a problem. And you certainly don’t need five people to do it.
In fact, if people don’t know how to do it, it’s often harder with five people. The more people that know how to do it, the easier it is.
Okay you don’t need five people to get the vampire. You can do it with two as long you both people have the ability to break the bar frequently. I know because I’ve done it. The bat guano hero point is all about breaking the bar.
I’ve soloed the golem in Auric Basin.
There are definitely harder hero points, but they’re few and far between.
And you definitely don’t need to look at sites to find out how to get to waypoints. Source, I didn’t look at sites and I found all the waypoints.
A big problem with housing is what happens when a player with a house leaves the game.
I played Lotro which had housing, and there were complete communities full of empty houses with not a player in sight, simply because the players had left the game.
Unlike characters which can be kept forever if they dont play, because non logged in characters dont appear in the game , the houses of non logged in players do and they stay there forever.
To make housing viable from the perspective of the dev time required, houses MUST cost the player gold on a continuing basis, and most players will hate this.the houses were in the open world?
Houses in Lotro were in instanced, but housing couldn’t be in the open world in Guild Wars 2, because of the way the servers are set up.
The idea is servers are created and removed based on need. That’s the megaserver. There’s too many people playing to have houses on just say one server, and that’s all you could have, because only one server may exist.
Housing here would have to be more like Guild Halls.
Hello.
I’m casual and I have 3 full sets of ascended equipment. It’s not that hard if you are dedicated enough to get it. Average 4h per day playtime / 5 years.
So, 4 hours per day, every day, and less than one set per year. From what OP mentioned it seems that it would equate to a lot of effort for him. Also, he seems to not be geared yet, so the best approach (t4 fractals) is not available to him, and won’t be for a long time.
If that’s all he was doing every second of the day was work on legendary armor sets. The thing is, I’m sure that’s not the case, since for the first year of the game, legendary armor didn’t even exist in the game.
actually guild wars always required skills, just not in the open world. And your analysis that twitch and thinking are opposites is incorrect. You can negate some attacks, but they dont give you enough evasion to negate all attacks.
The instances in GW2 are not so much easier than HOT maps. Hot maps are actually more clear with their mechanics really. People just got carried, or someone simplifying their part in the plan. like tequatl, they came up with a system where a few people do all the work, and most people auto attack till they die. Fractals past a certain level also needed plans/skills on the level of HoT.
Also your theory about people not liking learning from punishing games is completely wrong. Have you hung out with any kids these days? have you looked at what they play on their phones/tablets? you know one of the most popular games is undertale? Teaching people by letting them fail is still going strong. its a game, a test of skill or ability or challenge, its not real life. dying in a game isnt the end of the world for most people who play games, 20 years ago, or today.
I’m not saying hot has no problems, but i think its hardness is over estimated. I think its mostly confirmation bias. People are told HoT is hard, you are going to fail because of HoT, not because of yourself, and when they fail they blame hot.
Id say a bigger problem with hot, than enemy difficulty, is how unapproachable the level design is when you have no masteries, combined with how difficult that makes it to get masteries by doing events, when you cant even figure out how to get to the events. Also hero points with enemies are designed for 2+ people so if you are soloing its a lot harder to do.
I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength regarding punishment. What you’re describing sounds like “failing until you succeed.” I don’t have anything against that.
When I talk about punitive, or punishing, design, I’m talking about games that make it harder to get back up and try again when you fail; the message being, to put it in that quirky militaristic way, “Failure is not an option.” That’s the message punishing design sends.
Design that is not punishing, or at least much less so, sends a message more along the lines of, “If you failed, here, have another go at it. You made progress, now continue where you left off. Your effort was worth something.” Or at the very least, “You lost some of your progress, but you can start over simply by clicking this button, in exactly the state that you were in on your last attempt.”
To put it in a rough analogy to real life, punishing game design is sort of like if, in real life, you were trying to learn how to skateboard and every time you lose your balance and fall, you break an arm and have to wait for it to heal. It’s discouraging because you have to stop and let your arm heal before you can try again.
So the issue with punishing design, though in my mind it’s partly an ideological issue, it’s also just impractical design for a lot of people because every step you make in being punishing is another chance that the player will just say “kitten this” and give up. Because punishment structures only work on a large scale when there’s a power hierarchy and the threat of consequences. If the player has no obligation to keep playing because, after all, it’s just a game, punishing mechanics are, more often than not, going to drive them away.
Except that if you get hits on an event, and you can’t get back to it, most of the time you still get credit anyway. It’s just not as punishing as you say.
In fact, I often get credit for events I’ve barely touched in HOT, just as I’m passing by.
Depends on why you stopped playing in the first place. I"m an open world/living story type guy and for the most part, I’m still having fun playing. I don’t love raids, but some people seem to.
Without knowing more why you stopped playing, how can anyone know if it’s worth coming back?
Why not just ask someone to come and join you. The fight is far more fun with more people and goes much faster. If you’re on a US server I’ll do it with you.
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Then you go to the revive system and with large groups, we’re back into twitch land and simple mechanics. Timing again (timing when to try to rez yourself) or timing of other players rezzing you in time. There’s a little thinking in it, in deciding whether to keep attacking to go for the rez-kill, or try to rez yourself, but it’s still very simple. While you’re downed, most of the thinking man’s complexity is nonexistent. And because, with large groups, it’s easy to get rezzed, even when dead, there’s little motivation to care much about dying.
So in a nutshell, GW2 is a thinking man’s game sandwiched in-between twitch mechanics that partially trivialize and undermine the thinking part of it. That’s why so many people know so little about their classes, their abilities, their gear, etc… because in most aspects of the game, there’s nothing even nudging them to bother. One might think that the obvious conclusion is that GW2 should have been harder and thus would have taught people better, but it may not have gotten the population it did if it was.
The fact is, the situation we ended up with is that there were a bunch of players who were happy with the style of the game (that style mostly being “you don’t need to bother”) and then HoT came in and said, “No, you definitely do need to bother. And if you don’t, your play experience will be miserable.”
Naturally, this miffed a lot of people.
To sum it all up, basically the game sends mixed messages: Think about everything, don’t think about anything. Maximize your output, no stat meters allowed (I’ve been away a while, I wonder if that’s still a thing?). Learn your class and gear, in large groups it doesn’t matter because of sheer volume of player pressure.
The game has never said no stat meters allowed. I don’t know where people came up with that. Damage meters have been around for this game for a long long time. They’re neither supported by Anet nor against the TOS. At least many of them aren’t.
The game doesn’t send mixed messages at all. There’s a ton of content that people avoid. Back in the day you could get to 80 by doing nothing but the Queensdale champ train. You’d have never left a 1-15 zone. But you’d still be level 80.
If at that point you tried to run Arah, you’d be dead, pretty much all the time, because you didn’t play the game.
The game has always punished people for bad play, but to different degrees. If you died in Orr, with most of the waypoints contested, which is much of the time, then you have to run back. That’s punishing.
And there were plenty of ways too die in Orr. So many that Anet had to nerf both mob density and mob difficulty in Orr. Which means the game launched with harder content.
People who avoided dungeons and fractals simply didn’t learn the game. Then they expect an expansion to be launched with beginner content.
It’s like Eye of the North in Guild Wars 1. It didn’t pull any punches, because it was expansion content. It was made for people who beat the other games.
And you know, in Guild Wars 1, you could look up a couple of party builds, load up your heroes a certain way and play too. But that didn’t make you good at the game, and if you tried more challenging content, you’d often be flattened.
Living Story Season 1 upped the difficulty of the game considerably. Even stuff in Dry Top and Silverwastes was harder than the core game and the Living World Season 2 story, that was harder too.
Not everyone has done that content, but it was also considered punishing by some people.
HoT is continuing a trend. It’s not that hard, because I know so many mediocre plays who run it wthout problems.
That people think it’s that hard because they keep dying over and over? I don’t believe most of the player base is in that category. More people than are in Orr, perhaps, but I don’t think 60% of the playerbase can’t deal with the mobs in HoT, or find it particularly punishing.
I also don’t think everyone who dislikes HoT, dislikes it because of mob density. There’s a woman in my guild who loves running tier 4 Fractals but HOT is too hard for her. Not the mob density or difficulty. That’s not a problem for her.
Figuring out where to go, that is a problem for her.
I think there are a lot of people out there who never learned the game, and I feel like that’s Anet’s fault.
The base game makes a terrible job scaling the difficulty of the open world up until hot and since ppl wanted more challenge the hot maps ended up being harder. You said it your self “last night i gave zhaitan a beat down” thats not supposed to be the case its a god kitten elder dragon and it you litterally glitter it to death. I say hot does a nice job showing how dangerous should a jungle be and how devastating an elder dragon as well as his minions are.
I understand your frustration but its not the hot maps and story thats garbage its the core tyria that poorly balanced and overall facerol easy.
I don’t remember Zhaitan being easy when I did the final mission on my Mesmer. It just was more forgiving of mistakes than HoT is. That’s the main difference. HoT content punishes mistakes with swift, harsh retribution. The reason grouping makes it more bearable is because of how the revive system works; with enough players around, you can alleviate the punishment of mistakes with quick group revives. But it still doesn’t make the content any less punishing of mistakes.
Take HoT content and give it a revive system more like a classic MMO, where you can only battle rez every 5-10 minutes on a timer, or worse, you have to do a corpse run. No one other than niche die-hards would play it. The only saving grace for HoT content is the ease of rezzing downed or dead players and that only comes with being in a group.
People can argue about how objectively difficult HoT content is, but what can’t be refuted is that it’s inherently punishing of mistakes.
I agree with this. HoT is more punishing of mistakes. The problem is the game prior to this has not be punishing enough and people don’t know how to play the game. They don’t know their professions. If the game had been more punishing people would have learned. They haven’t.
So they think HoT is too hard. It’s not. It’s punishing of mistakes that shouldn’t necessarily be made, at least not often.
I don’t find myself dying or running back a lot in HoT on any profession, and I’m not exactly a pro player, or a min maxer. I make my own builds. I don’t have ascended on most of my characters, except jewelry which is relatively easy to get. Even then some people only have exotics.
But I learned to play the game, so I don’t make that many mistakes, and so I enjoy HoT.
What people are really saying is that the game has failed to teach them how to play.
I’ve never understood the attraction of player housing in MMO’s. To me, it’s something to put time into but in which I cannot actually do anything. Thus, it has no attraction. What I’d like to understand is the motivations of those who do like such a feature.
We have a guy in my guild who decorates our guild hall and that’s one of the main things he does in the game. He goes out and farms what he needs to get stuff to put in the guild hall. Our guild hall often changes but usually looks great because of him.
Housing is a chance to do something non-combat. It’s downtime in a game with increasingly little down time.
You go there to chill when you don’t feel like farming.
Of course,. it has to be something that’s more than just a home instance. There has to be a lot of different ways to decorate it and move those decorations around.
But just as some people love combat and dungeons and hard core stuff, housing and decorating is something a lot of people do like. My wife plays MMOs, but I guarantee you, if a house was in the game, she’s spend hours decorating it, farming for stuff to put in it, or spending money in the cash shop.
That’s unfortunately a fact. lol
Its not reasonable to expect people who are paying to have fun to spend their “play” time not having fun. Customers telling you that they do not like aspects of your product is kind of important if you want to continue to sell to them in the future.
You seem to assume all the players have the same tastes and want the same things. This obviously isn’t the case. And frankly, you don’t even need to read threads like this to know this is an unreasonable assumption. You just need to have had contacts with people.
I’m just curious: how did you read the post you quoted and get “you seem to assume all the players have the same tastes and want the same things”?
Read my next comment, it has it explained.
I guess you must be responding to me, though you don’t quote my post. But no, I’m not going to read a different post to understand this post. I want to know how you go to your conclusion from the post you actually quoted.
Sort of the problems with conversations everywhere. People trying to win arguments pick on specific quotes to say this quote didn’t say this.
Someone in this very thread said people didn’t say HOT was too hard, when the actual OP (and several posts since) have said or implied HOT was too hard.
Conversations don’t always work where a person is replying to only the last thing said. I’m often guilty of the same thing, quoting the most recent quote and responding to something that’s said long term. It’s easy enough to do.
We know the conversation is about HOT being too hard, because the OP is about HoT being too hard. And we know many people in this thread believe that somehow this a major reason HOT didn’t go over as well as Anet might have liked.
We also know, from this thread, that not everyone agrees that it’s a major reason.
HoT, according to some, had many things going against it, including the dungeon nerf, the character slot fiasco, the perceived grind, and the issue of the free to play coming out, kittening off a percentage of veterans (source: posts about it almost every day).
You can argue about what was said in one post or another post, but the truth is, many here really believe that they’re part of some sort of majority that think HoT was too difficult, or HoT was too grindy or HoT just wasn’t enjoyable.
But I’m absolutely certain not everyone who claims HOT was so bad every really gave it a fair go (as we say down under), even if specific individuals did.
Source, people who have avoided playing it, or people who said they did who later found it fun, when they actually figured stuff out.
How is gliding not a mount. I can move faster while gliding. I can get from one place to another faster. In addition I can also stealth over certain things. And people have complained about certain gliders being too big and blocking views. Gliders aren’t any different than mounts, and they’re in the game for a year and a half.
They sell glider skins in the gem store. Many of us have bought more than one.
I’m sorry I don’t see the difference. I’d love to see mounts in an upcoming expansion.
Of course, my interest in mounts is more from the collecting/immersion aspect.
Use a site like gw2timer.com to tell you when meta events are about to happen. Get to maps about 10-15 minutes before teh meta event, or 20-30 minutes in the case of TD. The zones are still pretty busy.
Just make sure to use the LFG tool to get to a zone doing the meta.
Most people are either farming T4 fractals or the Silverwastes for money, though there are other options as well. Since I don’t farm money I’ll let others with more knowledge answer that one.
Yes, and pleasing every customer is impossible.
Exactly. Which is why I said, “if,” regarding Anet’s desire to sell to customers who do not like aspects of the product. The customer expressing disatisfaction with an aspect of the product gives ANet the opportunity to make an informed decision about those aspects.
The problem is, if they do that they won’t be selling their product to other customers. And while the ones unhappy with HoT have an alternative – stick with core Tyria – these other customers don’t. I’m not a marketing specialist, but making HoT different seems a smart move to me.
Making HoT different may very well turn out to have been a smart move. This will depend on that difference having attracted more customers than it alienated.
See, I love HoT, but I don’t think it’s attracted more customers than it’s alienated. That’s why it had to be changed in the first place. If it had attracted more people than it alienate that big April patch last year would have never happened.
HoT attracted some people, but I’m pretty sure Anet didn’t expect the number of people who felt strongly against it.
For a very long time, long before HOT launched, I warned of the dangers of making the game feel more hard core. It attracts a certain type of player, who by their very nature puts off players like me.
Nothing I dislike more than to see the map explode on the rare times we fail an AB meta. The cursing, the yelling, the finger pointing, the name calling. Of course I didn’t like that at the marionette too and stopped doing it once I got my achievements.
This game, for me, was better when there were more helpful, happier people playing it.
It may suck when people rage, but they rage all the time regardless. I seen people raging at champion farming and there was nothing difficult about that.
not everyone is happy and helpful, thats just reality.
trying to create a magical land with no rage isnt really possible.
Oh I know that. But the more competitive things get, the more time you spend, the more time you have to lose the more people will rage. Everyone has a threshold.
I’ve seen some very reasonable people lose it in raids because they were banging their heads against it for an hour and a half and someone screwed up. That’s the issue I have.
Harder content attracts more competitive people, who tend to sledge more (as well say in Australia). In general the more competitive formats of the game have always had a higher level of verbal abuse.
You can’t get rid of it. You can attract people in to the game less likely to engage in that or accept it.
Yes, and pleasing every customer is impossible.
Exactly. Which is why I said, “if,” regarding Anet’s desire to sell to customers who do not like aspects of the product. The customer expressing disatisfaction with an aspect of the product gives ANet the opportunity to make an informed decision about those aspects.
The problem is, if they do that they won’t be selling their product to other customers. And while the ones unhappy with HoT have an alternative – stick with core Tyria – these other customers don’t. I’m not a marketing specialist, but making HoT different seems a smart move to me.
Making HoT different may very well turn out to have been a smart move. This will depend on that difference having attracted more customers than it alienated.
See, I love HoT, but I don’t think it’s attracted more customers than it’s alienated. That’s why it had to be changed in the first place. If it had attracted more people than it alienate that big April patch last year would have never happened.
HoT attracted some people, but I’m pretty sure Anet didn’t expect the number of people who felt strongly against it.
For a very long time, long before HOT launched, I warned of the dangers of making the game feel more hard core. It attracts a certain type of player, who by their very nature puts off players like me.
Nothing I dislike more than to see the map explode on the rare times we fail an AB meta. The cursing, the yelling, the finger pointing, the name calling. Of course I didn’t like that at the marionette too and stopped doing it once I got my achievements.
This game, for me, was better when there were more helpful, happier people playing it.
For those talking about the “unrelenting desire” or “crowds demanding” mounts. Go through the thread, and start counting the “yay” vs “nay” set.
It’s the same handful desperately asking for mounts.
It’s a plethora of others saying “We don’t want them.”
Rather like the dueling threads. There was one thread about dueling, made it to 14 pages before the one, single pro-dueling advocate realized it was literally him against hundreds of others saying no.
His response was still “The majority is wrong.”
There are many games where mounts are a thing. There are many, many fanbases where mounts are the be-all and end-all.
In short, there are other games for those who “need” something that isn’t going to happen.
This is pure confirmation bias, since most likely 80% of the people who play the game will never post on the official forums even once.
I have a guild of about 250 people now, and there are some people strongly against mounts. About 5 of them. I don’t know anyone who is pro mount at all, except for me.
However, the other 225 of the people are not anti or pro mount. If they’re introduced they’ll play with them.
Most people don’t think deeply about their gaming experience. I’m absolutely positive that the antimount crowd is much smaller than most people who are antimount think. It’s a very loud voice. But it’s like raids.
Most people that know MMOs don’t believe that raiders are any kind of majority in an MMO, but they have a very very loud voice.
I don’t have a source, but i’m very certain that at earlier game stage, there was 470-550 ppl working on Arenanet. This is bad business if they cut 100 people loose over time.
Nope, they never had that many people working there.
I can understand the build templates being a top priority, but not buying because nodes don’t reset on a specific schedule? That seems a very strange reason not to buy an entire expansion.
Shrugs. Oh well to each his own.
I’ve soloed most of heart of thorns on most character professions. It’s simply a learning curve. Knowing your profession and your enemy is half the battle.
I’ve soloed most of the events in HOT and done many others when groups were doing them.
It’s definitely something that can be soloed. You may have to change how you approach things. For example, if you always played melee and you’re unwilling to swap to ranged options sometimes, that is one thing.
If you never had condition removal on your bar, you’re almost certainly going to have trouble in the jungle.
But mostly it’s just learning the creatures in the jungle and how to counter them that makes HoT playable.
Mario gameplay, maps that aren’t supported by the minimaps, and increased farming requirements doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that the game has evolved.
It has certainly changed but I wouldn’t say evolved.
I don’t agree with the mario gameplay comment at all. Source. I’ve played mario. It’s nothing like it. Jumping on a mushroom that takes you to a specific place without any skill on your end, is not mario-like in the slightest. The closest thing to mario gameplay in HoT is the adventures. But the rest of HoT, not even close.
As for the evolution part, sure it’s evolved because the AI has evolved. The AI is smarter. I’d sure call that evolution.
The whiteknights on this forum are unbeliveable. I swear if Anet had 1k employees people’d still say “it’s a small company” and would claim at least 980 are artists/management/janitors which means we should be glad that this poor small company has enough resources to at least keep the gem store going.
400 is probably more than WoW has. At the time of GW1 Anet had ~60-80 employees total yet were capable of dishing out 3 campaigns and 1 expansion in 3.5 years with regular balance patches inbetween. Granted it was a somewhat smaller in scope (no gliding, masteries, achievements, etc although there more content to play), but still. Stop making excuses for them.
You don’t have to be a white knight to know something about programming.
A pathed lobby game takes a lot less work/time to produce than a fully fledged MMO.
For one thing, Propehcies, Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North combined had less quests than Guild Wars 2 had dynamic events at launch. You need far more dynamic events than quests to create the kind of game Guild Wars 2 is. Those events have to scale quite broadly, and different events scale differently.
Without pathing, and with stuff like gliding and jumping and swimming, this game is much harder to control.
Everything takes longer to create and, in case you didn’t realize this, sometimes having and organizing more people makes things take longer, because communication is not as easy and hiring more people means less control of individual people.
Not everyone who says something you disagree with is definitely a white knight.
Finally, 400 employees is not 400 developers.
I think Lazarus is Mike O’Brien. Maybe we should be nice to him. lol
The biggest difference between Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 has to do with the addition of a persistent world. It’s much easier to tell stories in a cooperative lobby game like Guild Wars 1, than it is to tell stories in an MMO.
I remember having similar reactions to the end of Nightfall. I loved the story.
The thing is in that type of game, what you’re doing in the “open world” backs up completely what you’re doing in the story. That’s a lot harder to do in an MMO.
I thought the story part was maybe a little short. But, the boss fight was so long it was boring. You were constantly grinding through hit points using impossible-to-learn mechanics. I had to read the wiki before I made it through.
But, they DID fix some stuff. You can actually see the updrafts now, at least from the ground. 3D still sucks royally when the bombs are hitting you during that last flying phase; it’s just impossible to make it through without a significant amount of pure dumb luck.
Why not just land on the branch?
They had well over 300 at launch, they’ve barely expanded their staff at all. And with how successful launch was, they should have nearly doubled staff right then, and immediately began working on improving gameplay systems for whatever the next major release would be. Instead they shoveled out content that their gameplay systems couldn’t sustain except through extreme repetition of a very few of the games mechanics. If they had worked on the system instead of pushing content out maybe we would be looking at the top MMO in the world instead of a hasbeen.
But instead they doddled around for almost three years, refused to expand on existing systems for a lack of manpower and out-and-out blind pride from company leadership, and now improvement is a far off dream, just basic survival hinges on not screwing up a second expansion in a row.
First all all, I wouldn’t say a 25% increase in staff is barely expanding their staff at all, when you consider that most MMOs don’t increase their staff, and quite a few reduce their staff after launch. I’m not so sure you could find many MMOs, if any, that have increased their staff 25% over the first four years.
More than that, they didn’t twiddle their thumbs, they tried stuff that didn’t necessarily work, By the same token, many people loved Living World Season 1, which lasted a year and a half and added no permanent content to the game.
I was here for that and I wouldn’t trade that experience for different permanent content. Tower of Nightmares, Escape from Lion’s Arch, the Marionette fight were all flashes of brilliance and looking back, it added depth to the story of the game, because the world changed and because I was there. I feel like my characters were there.
Nope can’t say I agree with you at all.
Book titles aren’t copyrighted anyway. There are multiple books and even some movies with the same title. It would be different if the name was a trademark of the game itself, but it’s not.
Again, I’m just saying the game did get bad publicity, and of a type rarely seen. I’m not saying all that publicity was well deserved. Usually, before an expansion comes out, there’s an air of excitement. People looking forward. But due to decisions made by Anet, the approach to HOT didn’t feel like that at all.
I mean veterans are almost always looking forward to new content in any MMO. And while there were people excited by the expansion, there were just so many issues that we knew about even before launch.
Anet’s decision not to include a character slot was a mistake in my opinion. That they later came back and added one in the prepurchase, well that was too little too late for a fanbase that was already on the warpath.
And again, it wasn’t just the official forums, but it was reddit which self-moderates to some degree. You say something stupid about the game on reddit, it almost always gets downvoted. This wasn’t the case.
On top of that, there was the decision to make it so that you needed 400 points to unlock your elite spec, which many people, rightly so in my opinion, felt was unnecessary.
Finally the nerf to dungeons, fixed to some degree by the changes, was also unnecessary and was too little too late.
So you had disparate groups complaining about legitimate stuff, coupled with the usual trolls and malcontents and people who like other games better.
I mean most people know me as a white knight, but even I was pretty surprised by some of the decisions Anet made.
That and the fact that there were “only” four zones, which is light for an expansion…Anet needed to market this as an expansion/season pass for it to make a bit more sense. Of course, if they did that, they couldn’t really charge for season 3 if you didn’t log in.
I think the way the living world is handled now is going to come back to bite Anet later.
what bad publicity exactly? apart from the usual nay-saying in gaming forums by the usual negative types the game was received very well across the board, for example:
pc gamer 85
ign 76
metacritic 85
mmorpg 82If you were following meta critic at first, the game was down around 50. It LATER came up to 85. There was a concert effort by people who were outraged to downvote it on metacritic and that number was very low. I remember posting about it at the time.
Game review sites are meaningless anyway. Most games are sold by word of mouth or advertising. Anyone who wanted to do a search on Guild Wars 2 at that time would have encountered articles in places about fans being dissatisfied, and even reddit, which is usually quite positive about the game, was on the warpath.
In general terms, if you post a stupid negative post on reddit, it gets downvoted to hell. The negative posts on reddit are few and far between. Back then, reddit was on the warpath and the first page was filled with negative posts that remained top rated posts for days on end.
I agree there are often a few loud complaints that take front and center, but this was something completely different.
I said publicity, and those sites along with advertising is the publicity/word of mouth and on average HOT was well received, and is well regarded then and now. The fact is on average the typical punter who has not played GW looking for an opinion on HOT are going to see this and videos, and not disgruntled self-centered highly vocal posts on forums and reddit.
There were articles on MMO sites that told of how the community was unhappy with the company and the game. That’s publicity most new games never get. Those articles are rare and they did exist for HOT. That IS bad publicity.
There are always articles about complaining about this and that which is perfectly normal in this day and age online especially in gaming forums and the like. These articles do not however represent the whole community where many have applauded the complexity of the new zones and the design. This also does not counteract the position that on balance there was and is far more positive feedback than negative, and in channels far more likely to be evaluated by the man on the street looking for a new game. The real evidence is Anets behavior, if HOT was disastrous they would not be investing in a new expansion. That’s not to say there are not problems with the initial HOT zones (i personally think raids are too exclusive at present) but good games change and adapt and learn, and i see that within later zones.
This isn’t true. There are very very very rarely articles about a new expansion that talk about the revolting of the fan masses over decisions made by the company. In fact, over the years, I can remember three times that approached the bad publicity Guild Wars 2 got. When Eve online released the $90 cash shop monocle, that was probably as big. The fans revolted. It was crazy.
And there was something about WoW and not being able to use your flying mounts in the new area, or something like that.
PC Gamer, which is a pretty big site, reported on the reactions of fans, and it almost never does. So did several other sites.
I’m not sure what sites you follow, but I never remember seeing that sort of bad publicity about a product prior to it’s launch. And I follow the MMO market.
HoT mobs are designed to be more difficult, but are also designed to reward paying attention to your surroundings and to the mobs themselves.
I would LOVE to see HoT mob style encounters in core Tyria maps.
How do HoT mobs “reward” paying attention to your surroundings?
Obviously HoT maps are more difficult to move around and the mobs are more difficult to deal with. For those seeking difficulty, I guess HoT is more rewarding. However, this thread is about how GW2 was a more laid-back MMO for 3 years and how many of us who actually played it for those 3 years are disappointed in the expansion.
I can understand new players who enjoy a challenge joining GW2 because of HoT. What I can’t understand is why anyone who preferred a higher difficulty would play GW2 for the first 3 years as it was.
Of course there’s another side to this coin. A bunch of people who only ran fractals and dungeons for which that was not enough, who ask for more difficult content, constantly throughout the entire three years the game has been available.
The problem is, there doesn’t seem to be a clear majority anyway. I’ve seen posts complaining that the open world before HoT was too hard. But I’ve seen many more posts complaining about leveling being boring because the open world is too easy.
Anet made the assumption that people were leaving the game early on because they didn’t underststand it, and they gave us the NPE. The problem then is that we don’t really know how many people just leave because they find open world and map completion dull. I’m not so sure that the people who find it dull aren’t in some sort of majority even though I like it myself.
But Guild Wars 2 also has really fun combat that most other games can’t match and I can easily see someone returning again and again, seeing the potential of the combat system, but hoping for something more challenging.
In fact, I’ve seen it happen in my guild, with people who left because they were bored and they’ve come back and stayed, because the game now has that harder content.
Not everyone who played before was happy. Not everyone who was happy then, like me, doesn’t necessarily want more challenging zones as well as the original content.
It’s just not that simple.
I don’t have 4-stat gear and it takes time to get Elite specializations. You can either go back to core Tyria and get your Elite specs the long way, or suffer through HoT to get them.
Neither do I, I use good ol’ Berserker stats. As for getting the Elite specs, that could only have been a problem very early after the release. After that, there are plenty of well-known easy HPs, there are HP trains that don’t even require you to have waypoints, and there’s map chat and players who always come to help with HPs. I spend ~90% of my play time on my main yet I have 9 alts, one of each class, and elite specs unlocked on every one of them. It’s not even hard. Calling it “suffering” is just exaggerating.
When I am in HoT, I frequently see people in chat asking for help with HP who get no response. I know that they get no response, even private, because a few minutes later they ask again, and again. I also haven’t seen any HP trains advertised in a long time.
So I should “learn to like it” like its brocolli or something? This is a game – you know, entertainment? If I don’t like it why should I play it? And of course it is Anet’s fault, they made HoT. If a book is not good, it is the author’s fault, not the reader’s.
Sure, if you genuinely don’t like it you shouldn’t play it. Note that you can still play in core Tyria. However, there are other (again, myself included) who genuinely do like HoT. So your assessment that it’s “not good” cannot be objectively true. Meaning ANet didn’t to something objectively wrong. At best It’s a problem of perception. Maybe it’s simply not for you. But hey, it’s a game! Playing all aspects of it isn’t mandatory. I don’t like PvP and I don’t play it. But I don’t complain about ANet putting it in the game.
I never said that HoT was “not good”, I said I didn’t like it. I made the “not good” reference in my statement about a book not being good. But why are you telling me not to complain? People have complained about a lot of things in this game that Anet have changed as a result. So complaining is a perfectly valid form of showing your opinion.
Seems to me you must be in those maps at different times than I am, because I find people doing hero points in groups quite frequently.
At the moment of this posting there is an advertised HP train in both VB and AB.
And it’s pretty early in the morning by US standards.
I think the next expansion will decide the future of this game. It’s very critical to make up for the shortcomings of HoT. The content was good but there just wasn’t enough of it and a LOT of missed opportunities in the story. We only got 3 real maps and people were expecting a lot more than that. If the next expansion doesn’t go above and beyond then I expect a lot of people will be leaving.
I worries me that these forums seem way less active than they used to be. The front page used to cycle through topics in less than an hour. Now I can post a new topic and get no replies and it will still be on the front page two days later. There are threads on the front page of class forums that are more than a week old and you can’t reply to them without checking the bypass bump box.
A lot of people say the game is great, and maybe it is. But the audience is definitely shrinking…
This.
Reddit seems pretty busy. Maybe it’s a forum thing more than an audience thing.
Free to play players can’t post on the forums. I keep bringing this up, and a lot of people ignore it, but it’s a fact.
Unless people don’t think that people play this game as free to play, which I can’t imagine, the forums can’t really be an accurate gauge of the in game population.
Aside from that, I know a number of people who used to post here all the time who stopped due to various infractions they didn’t feel they deserved.
Yeah, the forums became a very hostile place to many that were critical of of certain things. I only recently started back in both the game and the forums. That being said, there has been a big amount of bleeding of veteran players in the game and maps are constantly closing a forcing players to new ones just to feel “full” and people have to use lfg if they want to get any serious content done as just being on a map with people won’t assure that the thing will be successful anymore.
Maps are “constantly closing” because big groups leave them after doing what they’re there to do. You can get a long time without a map closing, and then you hit Sparkfly fen after Tequatl is over when five, six maps are filled with people and then they all leave at once. That’s what causes map closings.
In HoT it’s more pronounced because the metas rotate frequently through four maps. So yes, there are often more maps than are needed for the off times of each map and they close.
That’s zero evidence of people leaving the game, or the number of people playing it. In fact, it’s arguably the opposite. For that many maps to close that means there had to be enough people on the maps to fill that many maps.
As an aside, another time you’ll find maps closing a lot is when there’s dailies in those maps, or at guild mission times, when there are guild missions in maps. A few big guilds doing missions can spawn multiple maps that are no longer needed when those missions finish.