Guild Wars 2

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Vayne.8563:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Morsus.5106:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Morsus.5106:

tigirius.9014:

you’re basically advocating for what happened to Teq to happen a second time elsewhere.

I love the new Tequatl encounter

Tequatl is the only real dragon at the moment.

As detrimental as it would be to the playerbase, I wish every dragon was that hard without prior planning.

That’s selfish though. not everyone has 45 minutes to devote to extensive boss planning “for glory” or “valiance” or some other knight kitten.

Casuals have all the other world bosses (‘cept for Wurm) so I don’t think it’s unfair to ask for one or two more Tequatl like encounters. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer in particular would be awesome.

And again with assuming casuals want easy content, ugh.

Hello, Casual here. I like Teq. I like Wurm. I don’t think any true world boss should be brainless stand and spam 1. They all need some adjustments. They don’t all need to be super kitten hard, some varying level of coordination and challenge would add some spice imo.

You’re right of course. I think even the Shatterer should be made harder. What I don’t think though is that it should require the level of coordination of Tequatl and certainly not the wurm.

Which is what I said. Varying levels of coordination requirements, number of players, actual challenge, etc. But as a “world boss” you should never be able to just hit 1 and then walk away for coffee. Its just….wrong.

Well yeah, world bosses are just silly. But they’re popular. It proves that a lot of players really only want rewards and it doesn’t matter how easy it is to get them.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Morsus.5106:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Morsus.5106:

tigirius.9014:

you’re basically advocating for what happened to Teq to happen a second time elsewhere.

I love the new Tequatl encounter

Tequatl is the only real dragon at the moment.

As detrimental as it would be to the playerbase, I wish every dragon was that hard without prior planning.

That’s selfish though. not everyone has 45 minutes to devote to extensive boss planning “for glory” or “valiance” or some other knight kitten.

Casuals have all the other world bosses (‘cept for Wurm) so I don’t think it’s unfair to ask for one or two more Tequatl like encounters. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer in particular would be awesome.

And again with assuming casuals want easy content, ugh.

Hello, Casual here. I like Teq. I like Wurm. I don’t think any true world boss should be brainless stand and spam 1. They all need some adjustments. They don’t all need to be super kitten hard, some varying level of coordination and challenge would add some spice imo.

You’re right of course. I think even the Shatterer should be made harder. What I don’t think though is that it should require the level of coordination of Tequatl and certainly not the wurm.

Engineers are the last played profession in the game. I’m sure that it’s on a list somewhere for someone to work on when they get time, but it’s definitely not a priority of any kind. Anet knows about the problem and Colin has acknowledged the problem.

But it can’t be a priority because it’s for only one profession and the least played profession at that.

Morsus.5106:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Morsus.5106:

tigirius.9014:

you’re basically advocating for what happened to Teq to happen a second time elsewhere.

I love the new Tequatl encounter

Tequatl is the only real dragon at the moment.

As detrimental as it would be to the playerbase, I wish every dragon was that hard without prior planning.

That’s selfish though. not everyone has 45 minutes to devote to extensive boss planning “for glory” or “valiance” or some other knight kitten.

Casuals have all the other world bosses (‘cept for Wurm) so I don’t think it’s unfair to ask for one or two more Tequatl like encounters. Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer in particular would be awesome.

I agree that we need harder fights. Jormag would work. I’d leave the Shatterer for the casuals though and maybe choose another one for harder content. After all, the casuals will want at least one dragon.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Vayne.8563:

-snip-

In this instance (pun intended), I don’t think enough of the playerbase by percentage runs dungeons to justify an investment in them. I can’t think of many more reasons why they don’t do more dungeons as a priority.

The above could be easily explained by players completing the dungeon and obtaining the desired token rewards, then never doing it again.

It doesn’t mean they don’t -want- dungeons, just that they’ve grown tired of the old ones.

Your point makes sense, though. Just wanted to point that out.

Well it’s more than that. Let’s pretend that at launch everyone did dungeons to get their tokens and then everyone stopped. Anet would know that too. They really are smart enough to know that if people did them regularly and stopped, that the reason for that is that they want more dungeons.

I’m actually convinced that the majority of the playerbase has barely ever set food in a dungeon. I have a relatively casual guild of over 150 people.

We have 10 people in our guild who run dungeons ALL THE TIME. I mean like every day. They love it. They live for it. There’s another probably 10 guys that are like me. I’ll do anything as long as people need help, so I’ll fill out parties, but I don’t focus on or partiularly love dungeons. I run dungeons because people need a fifth.

So if 20 people in my guild as an estimate are running dungeons, and almost no one in my guild really PvPs or WvWs in any real sense of the word (in other words only very ocassionally) then what are the other 130 people actually doing?

The real answer. Not much. Whatever they’re doing. They do open world stuff. World complete (many don’t even do that cause it means they have to go into WvW). We have a handful of people with legendaries, because many don’t want to do dungeons and WvW to get them.

They’re banging around the world, doing events, jumping puzzles, world completion, making alts, exploring the world, achievement hunting, crafting, just banging around for the most part. They get their own personal goals and go after them, whether it’s mawdry or an insect weapon or getting tier 3 armor.

That’s what I suspect most players do. They bang around the game having fun and killing stuff.

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

Most companies won’t come right out and say, you guys are a minority and we’re not going to cater to you. Why would they? Would you? They’ll do the best they can, but they’ll not usually say it.

But we’ve had comments over the years from devs from different companies, including Anet devs talking about Guild War 1, where they said the bulk of the people never do the challenging content. This isn’t something new, or something I just decided, or something I figured out recently. It’s been talked about in MMO forums for years. The most recent quote that I can find came form a lotro dev. Less than 10% of the game PvPed and did raids, not just at this point, but pretty much all along. 10% isn’t a big number to include both PvP and raids. He was talking about why they’re no longer making the raid instances they used to.

Again, if enough people were playing dungeons in general, Anet would have a dungeon team working full time on dungeons. Can you tell me why you think they wouldn’t?

Because a huge playerbase played SAB, asked them to death about it to rerelease, open old worlds etc. and nothing that even comes close to SAB in mechanics, reward system etc. has come out since what, like 1 year?

That’s why I think they wouldn’t.

A very passionate playerbase certainly but how do you know huge? Where are the stats? Anet knows how many people played it, and they know how many people didn’t. We can only guess at this.

A passionate playerbase isn’t necessarily a large one. In that same lotro dev quote, the dev said that though less than 10% of people ever raided, more than 50% of forum posts were made by raiders.

Kind of makes you think, no?

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

What I’m trying to say is that if you make hard content you have to up the rewards and if you make that hard content rewarding, you run the risk of disenfranchising the casual player base, which I’m assuming is larger than the people who want hard content.
If you don’t make the rewards higher, then you have less people doing it and it becomes what TA Aetherblade Path is. A dungeon that took a long time to make but received only a little bit of use.

Making rewards higher can mean different things. I know what you mean, we don’t want higher rewards in the sense of BETTER stats etc. But look at SAB. If you did the tribulation mode, you were guaranteed an other skin. TA only has the TA weapon set, which drop like almost never. So it’s challenging, but you would have to be extremely lucky to get the skin. The skin was behind RNG, and that’s were its ruined. Tribulation mode skins weren’t behind RNG. You had to complete hard content, but once you completed it you knew something was rewarding you for completing harder content. And that’s the difference between SAB skins and TA skins.

So hard core guys would run it…until they had the guaranteed skin. Then they’d never run it again because it’s not efficient, they’d be out of content and we’d be exactly where we are now.

They would run out of content skin-wise. SAB on itself has alot more replayability than TA. But other than that, if we would get more content that folowed these SAB principles then we wouldn’t run out of content. Only because SAB was the ONLY one with that kind of reward principle, we run out of content, yes.

But you’re asking for Anet to design content and a set of skins for a relatively small group of players. If it’s really challenging most people won’t end up doing it. Most people will not get the skins. Which is what you want.

How is that actually good for the game as a whole. It takes man hours to design the dungeon. After you guys find a million exploits it takes man hours to fix the dungeon. It takes man hours to create an entire weapon set that would be cool enough for you guys to play for. And after all that, most people won’t use it.

If you want to know why this isn’t happening, it’s like this. There are less vegetarian restaurants than there are restaurants, because most people aren’t vegetarians. If most people were, there’s be more vegetarian restaurants. Anet knows how many people by percent run hard content and have ever run hard content.

Apparently they don’t deem the group big enough to spend “a lot” of development time on. That’s a rational business decision that most businesses would make.

It’s not because Anet doesn’t like you guys. It’s because there aren’t enough of you. Because I’m pretty sure if there were, the game would be a lot more hard core.

I don’t think their numbers of people who run hard content are representable. Like you said before, TA, IMO, that is a big fail. It’s one of the only hard content in the game and it just fails. I already explained why I think it fails, and in my group of players(guild, friends etc), they think it fails for the same reason I do. So I think their numbers are not representable.
And still, if they had numbers, how can you automaticly assume they don’t make the content because we are with too few. I have never heard a dev or anyone related in the making of GW2 content say something like: We have REPRESENTABLE numbers of people that run hard content, and well, you are such a big minority, we won’t invest time in you.

Like in another discussion within this topic, the China release COULD be a big business fail. Couldn’t it be possible that they fail to deliver the right content?

Most companies won’t come right out and say, you guys are a minority and we’re not going to cater to you. Why would they? Would you? They’ll do the best they can, but they’ll not usually say it.

But we’ve had comments over the years from devs from different companies, including Anet devs talking about Guild War 1, where they said the bulk of the people never do the challenging content. This isn’t something new, or something I just decided, or something I figured out recently. It’s been talked about in MMO forums for years. The most recent quote that I can find came form a lotro dev. Less than 10% of the game PvPed and did raids, not just at this point, but pretty much all along. 10% isn’t a big number to include both PvP and raids. He was talking about why they’re no longer making the raid instances they used to.

Again, if enough people were playing dungeons in general, Anet would have a dungeon team working full time on dungeons. Can you tell me why you think they wouldn’t?

tigirius.9014:

Vayne.8563:

This game isn’t designed for people who want the “old style” end game content. I thought that was clear way before launch. This game is designed for people who don’t.

So the people who don’t like this game leave, but not all of them do. Many in my guild are playing 2 years and still enjoying the game.

And they’re not looking for more end game content, at least not the kind you seem to be talking about.

Keeping people in the game that want this game is what Anet is doing. Losing people from this game who want a completely different game is inevitable.

Yet another post I agree with Vayne that’s two for two! GASP! jk

What got this game in trouble in the first place is listening to the WoW types. I personally didn’t buy this game because it was going to be like WoW and I hated every minute of their 2 year long catering to the WoW types with Fractals and Ascended. What Anet is doing now is taking this game back to it’s roots, and if they lose dungeoneers that’s fine because they’ll keep the people who typically stay with games longer to begin with, Casuals.

Dude, you need to stop agreeing with me…I’m getting scared. lol

As I said in another thread, it has to do with resources/how many people are going to use those resources.

Anet has a pretty good idea of who uses what. They may not know exactly, but they have a pretty good idea. If you don’t think Anet knows how many people run dungeons, I don’t know what to tell you. Anet knows. They track all that stuff.

To make a dungeon takes a lot of work…not just making it, but changing it after the ever resourceful exploiters find ways to break it. Great for you guys, not so great for Anet.

So to make content like that, they pretty much have to devote crew to it. If everyone was running dungeons all the time, that’s exactly what they’d do.

You don’t have a restaurant where everyone is eating only vegetarian dishes and focus on meat dishes, because you personally like meat. It makes no sense. Anet is a business. They have to cater to the larger group of customers as a main concern and the smaller groups when they have extra time.

In this instance (pun intended), I don’t think enough of the playerbase by percentage runs dungeons to justify an investment in them. I can’t think of many more reasons why they don’t do more dungeons as a priority.

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

What I’m trying to say is that if you make hard content you have to up the rewards and if you make that hard content rewarding, you run the risk of disenfranchising the casual player base, which I’m assuming is larger than the people who want hard content.
If you don’t make the rewards higher, then you have less people doing it and it becomes what TA Aetherblade Path is. A dungeon that took a long time to make but received only a little bit of use.

Making rewards higher can mean different things. I know what you mean, we don’t want higher rewards in the sense of BETTER stats etc. But look at SAB. If you did the tribulation mode, you were guaranteed an other skin. TA only has the TA weapon set, which drop like almost never. So it’s challenging, but you would have to be extremely lucky to get the skin. The skin was behind RNG, and that’s were its ruined. Tribulation mode skins weren’t behind RNG. You had to complete hard content, but once you completed it you knew something was rewarding you for completing harder content. And that’s the difference between SAB skins and TA skins.

So hard core guys would run it…until they had the guaranteed skin. Then they’d never run it again because it’s not efficient, they’d be out of content and we’d be exactly where we are now.

They would run out of content skin-wise. SAB on itself has alot more replayability than TA. But other than that, if we would get more content that folowed these SAB principles then we wouldn’t run out of content. Only because SAB was the ONLY one with that kind of reward principle, we run out of content, yes.

But you’re asking for Anet to design content and a set of skins for a relatively small group of players. If it’s really challenging most people won’t end up doing it. Most people will not get the skins. Which is what you want.

How is that actually good for the game as a whole. It takes man hours to design the dungeon. After you guys find a million exploits it takes man hours to fix the dungeon. It takes man hours to create an entire weapon set that would be cool enough for you guys to play for. And after all that, most people won’t use it.

If you want to know why this isn’t happening, it’s like this. There are less vegetarian restaurants than there are restaurants, because most people aren’t vegetarians. If most people were, there’s be more vegetarian restaurants. Anet knows how many people by percent run hard content and have ever run hard content.

Apparently they don’t deem the group big enough to spend “a lot” of development time on. That’s a rational business decision that most businesses would make.

It’s not because Anet doesn’t like you guys. It’s because there aren’t enough of you. Because I’m pretty sure if there were, the game would be a lot more hard core.

Illuminati.2431:

Vayne.8563:

What I’m trying to say is that if you make hard content you have to up the rewards and if you make that hard content rewarding, you run the risk of disenfranchising the casual player base, which I’m assuming is larger than the people who want hard content.
If you don’t make the rewards higher, then you have less people doing it and it becomes what TA Aetherblade Path is. A dungeon that took a long time to make but received only a little bit of use.

Making rewards higher can mean different things. I know what you mean, we don’t want higher rewards in the sense of BETTER stats etc. But look at SAB. If you did the tribulation mode, you were guaranteed an other skin. TA only has the TA weapon set, which drop like almost never. So it’s challenging, but you would have to be extremely lucky to get the skin. The skin was behind RNG, and that’s were its ruined. Tribulation mode skins weren’t behind RNG. You had to complete hard content, but once you completed it you knew something was rewarding you for completing harder content. And that’s the difference between SAB skins and TA skins.

So hard core guys would run it…until they had the guaranteed skin. Then they’d never run it again because it’s not efficient, they’d be out of content and we’d be exactly where we are now.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

Vayne.8563:

What you have here is a good start, OP and I agree with your conclusions to a point. In fact, I’ve known all along that some people just want challenging content…like Liadri.

The issue becomes how many people are going to play that challenging content. This is where the rewards factor comes in.

Anet made a challenging dungeon, and it is challenging compared to other dungeons. I mean TA Aetherblade path is probably the hardest dungeon in the game. It’s not often run, because it’s not “rewarding”. And this is where the real problem starts.

In most MMOs, the harder content gives better rewards, which encourages people to do that content. Without the better rewards a lot of people simply won’t.

Which means those people aren’t doing hard content for fun, they’re doing hard content for rewards.

Rewarding hard content provides kitten and them situation. You get an upper class and an underclass in game.

The more you have of it, the more the new people and people who don’t really want to kill themselves to get a reward will feel disenfranchised…whether they’re wrong to feel that way or not.

This game works on a trickle theory. Everything you do trickles in. You get a trickle of rares and exotics, a trickle of tier six mats, a trickle of lodestones. Karma comes a bit faster and you can farm it, but at the end of the day, you’re not really going to be getting the “big” drops, because you can get drops anywhere.

What I’m trying to say is that if you make hard content you have to up the rewards and if you make that hard content rewarding, you run the risk of disenfranchising the casual player base, which I’m assuming is larger than the people who want hard content.

If you don’t make the rewards higher, then you have less people doing it and it becomes what TA Aetherblade Path is. A dungeon that took a long time to make but received only a little bit of use.

Put yourself in Anet’s place. If you make hard content and only a small percentage of the playerbase attempts it, or gets through it, would you keep making more hard content?

Casual playebase already has tones of casual content it is called gw2 pve . This should be normal that people who spend few hours mastering some really hard content should get better rewards instead of 2 blue 1 green

According to those players yes. And maybe even, logically according to the other players. Has nothing to do with how it would make them feel though.

What you have here is a good start, OP and I agree with your conclusions to a point. In fact, I’ve known all along that some people just want challenging content…like Liadri.

The issue becomes how many people are going to play that challenging content. This is where the rewards factor comes in.

Anet made a challenging dungeon, and it is challenging compared to other dungeons. I mean TA Aetherblade path is probably the hardest dungeon in the game. It’s not often run, because it’s not “rewarding”. And this is where the real problem starts.

In most MMOs, the harder content gives better rewards, which encourages people to do that content. Without the better rewards a lot of people simply won’t.

Which means those people aren’t doing hard content for fun, they’re doing hard content for rewards.

Rewarding hard content provides kitten and them situation. You get an upper class and an underclass in game.

The more you have of it, the more the new people and people who don’t really want to kill themselves to get a reward will feel disenfranchised…whether they’re wrong to feel that way or not.

This game works on a trickle theory. Everything you do trickles in. You get a trickle of rares and exotics, a trickle of tier six mats, a trickle of lodestones. Karma comes a bit faster and you can farm it, but at the end of the day, you’re not really going to be getting the “big” drops, because you can get drops anywhere.

What I’m trying to say is that if you make hard content you have to up the rewards and if you make that hard content rewarding, you run the risk of disenfranchising the casual player base, which I’m assuming is larger than the people who want hard content.

If you don’t make the rewards higher, then you have less people doing it and it becomes what TA Aetherblade Path is. A dungeon that took a long time to make but received only a little bit of use.

Put yourself in Anet’s place. If you make hard content and only a small percentage of the playerbase attempts it, or gets through it, would you keep making more hard content?

Ridley.3691:

I’d have to agree, I mean it’s good that they’ve opened more up to do as you’re levelling, way more than most games, but the problem is you don’t really seem to unlock anything new once you hit 80. This causes you to then kind of hit a brick wall, since you’ve probably tried out most of the different gamemodes before hitting 80, like WvW, sPvP, dungeons etc, and if you’re not really into pvp of any kind, and you don’t enjoy the way ANet has handled dungeons (including Fractals), then you’re really not left with an awful lot to do after spending two hours every couple of weeks doing the latest Living Story.

What you’re really saying here, if you think about it, is that you don’t like the game. If you don’t like PvP and you don’t like WvW, and you don’t like the dungeons and fractals and obviously the living story is just 2 hours to you…there’s nothing really left but world bosses, achievement hunting, roleplaying or world completion and making alts.

The thing is, there are people who find lots to do who have played since launch on level 80 characters, because they do like the game. It’s a matter of what you like. Simplest example, it takes quite a bit of work to make Mawdry and a few insect weapons. The living story may only be a couple of hours, but the new zone is considerably more than that, if you like those things.

If you don’t like them, you don’t like the game, because that is what the game is. Not just the living story, but the “projects” that accompany the living story. The mini games. The jumping puzzles. Those are the game.

Does it matter if you’re level 80 and do a jumping puzzle or level 50? No, not really. It’s the same puzzle. You either like them or you don’t.

Same with mini games.

Same with crafting or farming the zones.

You simply don’t like what’s on offer, and that’s okay. No game is going to be for everyone.

I guess what I’m saying is, if they made every update for me, most people would leave the game. lol

It’s true there was quite a bit of scamming in Guild Wars 1.

Edit: Trying to trade a dedicated minipet instead of an undedicated one was another. Same icon because it’s the same pet. Very often new people who don’t know better are the targets of scams.

Nerelith.7360:

Vayne.8563:

Nokaru.7831:

Vayne.8563:

Talking for everyone also doesn’t help your case.

Might I offer a suggestion? Maybe you should practice what you preach.

Just because you dislike how people are unsatisfied with the state of the game, it doesn’t make their criticisms invalid.

Also, “bigger picture”? You don’t even know what ArenaNet’s plans are; no one does. You only know what it is you want and are satisfied with, so if you would be so kind, please keep your grandiose explanations more grounded in reality. Your replies are a painfully typical knee-jerk ANet apologist response; nothing more, nothing less.

Show me we’re I’m talking for everyone? Can’t? Didn’t think so. That’s because I don’t.

I don’t say all we really want is end game, because some of us don’t really want end game, not in the traditional sense.

I usually say me and players like me, or I believe more players like X and not Y. I don’t say players want this…because that’s talking for everyone.

If you use that language, even if you’re completely reasonable in what you’re asking for, you’re going to meet resistance and your message will be diminished.

If you want the OP’s message to reach less people and be less focused, feel free to continue this conversation. My comments are helping him (whether he knows it or not) more than yours are.

I mean this in all honesty " With enemies like you, one barely needs friends"

Okay that made me laugh. From now on I will not take a swallow of coffee before reading your posts. lol

Ohoni.6057:

Whelp. Week three’s over. Nothing major. The TP changes sound interesting, but nothing game changing. There’s no built in average or over time trackers or anything so third party sites will still be important. So three weeks, a handful of decent tweaks, a handful of horrible nerfs, absolutely nothing that was super exciting, and most of the positive changes stuff that really should have been in game a year ago.

Whee, year 3, here we come.

Naturally you have a right to your opinion, but I think the improved performance in big battles, overdue or not, could very well be game changing for some people.

And of course crafters and collectors will be happy.

Actually I think there’s plenty in this patch. It’s nothing major in and of itself, but it fills in a lot of gaps. Strengthening the core is probably more important at this point and than single big feature…in my opinion of course.

Kohlteth.3715:

How about a compromise, able to trade with our friends ?

But you can already mail things to friends. I do it all the time.

nearlight.3064:

Blegh. All y’alls are haters! If every other MMO allows this and a trading post system why can’t we?

Every other MMO has static quests and you cant’ deposit mats remotely too. This game was a rethink of may traditional MMO tropes. The fact is, the only reason that person to person trade needs to be in game is to circumvent the gold sink in the auction.

Because mail is more convenient if you’re just sending someone something. And since it is a good gold synch it really working as intended.

Nick.6972:

Trading Post, Mini Pets.
How is this supposed to bring bored players back?

Feature patches weren’t meant to bring bored players back. Content packs are supposed to bring bored players back. Feature packs are supposed to make the game better, so when they do come back, stuff that annoyed them in the first place is less annoying.

I don’t know, like lag in big battles, which everyone seems to ignore, and maybe, just maybe, some people even like collecting things.

It’s a popular feature in other MMOs.

VergilDeZaniah.3295:

Vol.7601:

VergilDeZaniah.3295:

AT LAST. But still, it’s what should have been expected in the first place, not 2 years later :-/

Should that matter? Anet is in a lose lose situation with comments like that

They don’t fix something, people will complain that it’s not here

They fix something, people will complain that it should’ve been fixed long ago

“We’ll release exciting things for veteran players”… I’ve been defending ANet for months now, so playing the “you’ll swoon before our new features” and releasing something quite basic kinda hurts my feelings.

This isn’t a minor feature it’s a major rework. And you know, a lot of people have asked for this. No one said you’d swoon before our new features anyway, but this is not something quite basic. It’s integral to the game, to crafters, to farmers, and to people just needing to buy stuff.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Vayne.8563:

Bleu.5079:

All these new stuff is fancy and all but the point for us vets is, it’s not retroactive! So the super rare and expensive items that I acquired through hard work, sweat and blood all those years/months ago do not apply now?
ANet apparently do not care about vets and long term players. They just want to cater to the new blood and milk their cash.
I wasn’t so concerned when ANet content updates is not as fabulous as the other MMOs out there, but now with the feature updates lacking as well, I’m starting to lose faith in ANet.
It doesn’t help at all that the moment I decided to buy gems from ANet and spend it on an item, it goes on sale the very next day. It doesn’t help at all.
converts to the dark side

What makes you think the game even remember everything a character once owned? Do you know how much wasted space that would take up on servers?

The fact that if you have the achievement already unlocked for say owning cultural armor pieces. i know a few people that bought and owned all of the tiers of human cultural armor, but don’t have it anymore, and when the wardrobe came out they weren’t given the skins for it even though their account clearly shows they bought and wore all three sets. That’s a lot of gold for Anet to ignore.

Didn’t answer my question though.

Okay cultural armor had an achievement, but even that doesnt’ tell you what you owned. Because you can get that achievement without buying every cultural armor. I know because I did.

So the achievement doesn’t specific which stuff you bought. Only that you bought 6 pieces from each tier from each race.

Kurrilino.2706:

Olvendred.3027:

Kurrilino.2706:

Vayne.8563:

Kurrilino.2706:

IrishPotato.6327:

I hope you realize that Eye of the North was supposed to be the prequel to GW2. Primordus was introduced to show what you would be doing in GW2 = hunting the Elder Dragons. That was not stealing, it was paving the way as an introduction to GW2. Get your facts straight.

---

I guess you missed the point of repeating the same story over and over again.
They can have 2567 Dragons in GW2 announced by GW1.
I really don’t care.
The sad thing is the story repeating.

Obviously not a fan of fantasy or science fiction or you’d know this. There are only so many plots. That’s it.

So we knew there were six elder dragons. We knew they were awakening. Logic would then dictate that we have to kill six elder dragons.

It’s not much different from most fantasy and science fiction. The difference is we also had some some plots here that are interesting, including the much maligned Scarlet. The Zephyrites and their connection to Glint. There’s been a lot of side stuff that’s pretty interesting, down to the ley lines.

Way to trivialize a plot and try to say that it’s copied from Guild Wars 1. In fact, the only dragons I remember facing in Guild Wars 1 were Glint, who was an allie, and the Kunnevang who was an ally.

Almost every plot can be boiled down to one of seven things (some people claim 14). There are more than 14 games, hence plots have to get reused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

---

Well GW1 had tons of Dragons around and still had descent plots without them.
-Rurik was entertaining because it led to an epic journey.
-Shiro wasn’t really the bad guys he was just influenced by the crystal ball lady. Also connected to a journey.
-Abadon was my least favorite but mostly because i didn’t like the nightmare lands.
The story itself was enjoyable.
In all these story i couldn’t find a single “let’s get a group”, “they don’t want to”,
“we make them”, “group defeats” cliche stuff

Shiro Tagachi is pretty mean and evil.
We need help. What about them Kurzicks and Luxons? They’re pretty powerful.
But they hate each other :o
Oh, let’s help them and get them to work together.
Now we’re all friendly, let’s go kill Shiro.

Oh noes! Varesh beat the Sunspears and is awaking Abaddon!
We need help. What about them Vabbians? They might be useful.
But they’re lazy and complacent.
Let’s show them the error of their ways and get them to help us.
Oh look! That enemy general and those centaurs. They want to help us too? Sweet.
Now we’re all friendly, let’s go re-imprison Abaddon.

Yeah… none of that ever happened…

Well all of that is by miles better than:

-Text Box Queen Jennah:
What about my people ???
Text Box you:
But Dragons are bad
Text Box Jennah:
Thats true, lets fight them

-Text Box Norn Guy
“We have to much to do with Svanir’s guys
Text Box You:
“But Dragons are bad”
Text Box Norn Guy:
Right, let’s fight them
ect.etc. ….

wow…………….. epic gaming experience

Do you really compare that to Rurik, Shiro and Abadon ????
And i guess we ignore that Luxon and Kurzick was a story about their sacred items…

Yep, I can compare them. Easily.

See Guild Wars 2 has a much better thing going on, because it grows suddenly and involves people.

The Nightmare Tower didn’t just appear. First we tried swimming in the lake in Kessex Hills and there was a force field there. We couldn’t figure out what was going on. Then trees started disappearing. Then Kasmeer broke the illusion and revealed the Nightmare Tower, after days, perhaps weeks of speculation. No matter what you say, nothing in the Guild Wars 1 story involved me as much as that, or the way they waypoints were getting attacked by vines.

I think you’re picking out the most general plotline and saying that the most general plotline is cliche. But it’s just an overview. The leylines, and Scarlet you’re not talking about. The way that Zhaitan turned the rules of Orr into his eyes you’re not talking about. You’re only talking about the stuff you want to talk about to prove your point.

It’s all opinion anyway.

SkiTz.4590:

Vayne.8563:

Romek.4201:

Vayne.8563:

kta.6502:

Karizee.8076:

I remember 2 years ago when Blizzard was all over this forum predicting they were going to kill GW2 with MoP but that plan kinda backfired in their face and they lost 3.5 million players. Looks like they are setting up to lose another 3.5 million with their next expac fail.

Blizzard has 7.8 million subscribers
Anet has 460,000 active players (as of Aug 2013)

Just saying…

(NOTE: Anet hasn’t announced how many players have been playing GW2 in 2014. I only have last year’s numbers. )

That’s not true. Anet had 460,000 players on line currently at that time (which was a long time ago anyway…they’ll not likely hit that mark again any time soon).

At the time that figure was taken, the game was relatively new and I’m pretty sure they had over 3 million players. That was how many were online concurrently.

not 3 million players – it was 3 million sold copies
and from this 3 million only 460.000 ACTIVE players (online)

I can’t even imagine how you come to this conclusion. 3 million sales that early doesn’t mean 3 million active players. The numbers you’re quoting are concurrency figures. It means like the people in Australia who are sleeping might not be playing at the moment of peak concurrency. They log on later.

In the states, not everyone plays at the same time.

The point is you can’t compare concurrency to subscribers, because they’re different numbers.

Here’s the article you’re actually looking for:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-concurrent-players-in-china/

MoP had 1 millon concurrent players at peak and Guild Wars 2 had almost half of that. That’s the comparison.

And that’s not unexpected. WoW is the more popular of the two games. It’s had a longer time to build an audience, it’s had more money to advertise and it was in the right time at the right place.

For Guild Wars 2 to get even close to half of MoP’s concurrency numbers likely makes it the MMO with the second highest concurrency of all time.

Thanks for pointing it out.

Edit: After that it would probably be Final Fantasy:

http://www.craveonline.com.au/gaming/articles/564709-ffxiv-a-realm-reborn-hits-325k-concurrent-players-will-implement-afk-kick-feature#/slide/1

GW2 is not even close to high concurrent users of all time for an MMORPG, let alone MMOs like you stated…

Runescape in its prime beats gw2 by a mile – (400-500k+ concurrent users for multiple years)… GW2 couldn’t keep up those concurrent numbers for a few months…
Aion, WoW, RIFT, EQ in its prime, Blade and Soul, all have had high numbers for a decent amount of time

GW2 concurrent playerbase has dwindled, that much Is easy to speculate…its not even half of that 460k number now (for EU+NA at least) ….its probably stabilized at barely 100k concurrent users in NA+EU right now.

The good thing is a ton of ppl can come back really easily since GW2 is f2p…it’s just a matter of playing the waiting game, hoping anet will finally release some kind of content that draws back the players that have taken a break…

You’re absolutely correct. I was talking about western MMOs and didn’t say so. So Blade and Soul is by far the highest ranking one on the chart. WoW is of course 1 million at its max. Of course Blade and Soul had a high number in China, which has a huge number of people and I wasn’t even thinking about China. I was thinking, as I said about Western MMOs.

According to wikipedia, EQ never had more than 450,000 subs, so it undoubtedly didn’t have anywhere near 420,000 concurrent users.

I can’t take about Runescape, the only article I can find says 250,000 concurrent users which is here: http://lsvp.com/2008/07/15/runescape-stats-250k-peak-concurrent-users/

Rift made only 1 million sales at launch. It might have had higher concurrency when it went free to play. No one knows because Rift never released those numbers.

That the concurrent player base in Guild Wars 2 has dwindled is a no brainer. Anyone who knows anything about MMOs knows that at launch or around launch you’ll usually get the highest peak concurrency. Which means that MoP has also diminished, and I’m pretty sure Blade and Soul has too.

This Final Fantasy record puts it at 187,000. http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/08/28/final-fantasy-xiv-a-realm-reborn-shatters-more-records-187000-concurrent-connections-200000-expected-soon/

I don’t know where you’re getting your info, but it seems to me that of Western MMOs anyway, Guild Wars 2 is just below WoW on the list. If you have links to prove otherwise, I’d love to see them.

Star Wars ToR hit 350,000 btw.

And yes, they’ve all gone down. That’s 100% true. But since everyone goes down after launch I’m not sure what’s to comment on.

Kurrilino.2706:

Vayne.8563:

Kurrilino.2706:

IrishPotato.6327:

I hope you realize that Eye of the North was supposed to be the prequel to GW2. Primordus was introduced to show what you would be doing in GW2 = hunting the Elder Dragons. That was not stealing, it was paving the way as an introduction to GW2. Get your facts straight.

---

I guess you missed the point of repeating the same story over and over again.
They can have 2567 Dragons in GW2 announced by GW1.
I really don’t care.
The sad thing is the story repeating.

Obviously not a fan of fantasy or science fiction or you’d know this. There are only so many plots. That’s it.

So we knew there were six elder dragons. We knew they were awakening. Logic would then dictate that we have to kill six elder dragons.

It’s not much different from most fantasy and science fiction. The difference is we also had some some plots here that are interesting, including the much maligned Scarlet. The Zephyrites and their connection to Glint. There’s been a lot of side stuff that’s pretty interesting, down to the ley lines.

Way to trivialize a plot and try to say that it’s copied from Guild Wars 1. In fact, the only dragons I remember facing in Guild Wars 1 were Glint, who was an allie, and the Kunnevang who was an ally.

Almost every plot can be boiled down to one of seven things (some people claim 14). There are more than 14 games, hence plots have to get reused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

---

Well GW1 had tons of Dragons around and still had descent plots without them.
-Rurik was entertaining because it led to an epic journey.
-Shiro wasn’t really the bad guys he was just influenced by the crystal ball lady. Also connected to a journey.
-Abadon was my least favorite but mostly because i didn’t like the nightmare lands.
The story itself was enjoyable.
In all these story i couldn’t find a single “let’s get a group”, “they don’t want to”,
“we make them”, “group defeats” cliche stuff

And all these storys are written by A-Net

So why do we suddenly have a story problem here in GW2 ???

There were no cliches in Guild Wars 1? Really? We must have been playing very different games.

How about the bad guys (White Mantle) all talking with stupid foreign accents? You didn’t know they were bad guys when you met them? You didn’t know that the Vizier was a bad guy when you met him and that giving him the staff was a mistake?

Guild Wars 1 is filled with cliches.

munkiman.3068:

Corpus Christi.2057:

Prophet.6257:

So many people I talk to are convinced the 350+ people over at Anet are just screwing around and lazy. Others tell me it takes that many people to do the Living Story (which seems a unbelievable considering how little content is actually produced) However, I’ve only ever heard the idea that they are actually working on an expansion online. The arguments I’ve seen for it all sound too familiar and until Anet specifically says they are working on an expansion I will not believe it, give them hype, or get too passionate about this game.

It’s a good game. It is a solid B to C player in my “what to play” list but I only spend money on games I’m real passionate about. GW2 has just fallen out of that bracket for me.

If the world doesn’t grow neither does my passion for the game.

Exactly my hopes. I don’t see how all those 350 would be working through those 2 years and produce just what we got so far. That would be unthinkable, to say the least ( and stay polite ). Expansion is a must in the near future.

While they might not be able to give details or a timeline, you would think, after all this hubbabaloo and negative feedback, they’d simply come out and say, “don’t fret, we’ve been working on an expansion, more details in the near future”.

With people breaking out of the map, we do see that drytop is much larger than it is currently. I just wish it wasn’t released in small chunks every couple weeks, or in some cases, over a month.

I don’t think Anet gets to decide when to say that. The thing is, the timing if an expansion is actually, believe it or not, a business decision. The annoucement has to be timed right. I’m pretty sure NCsoft is calling those shots.

Tachenon.5270:

Vayne.8563:

I still see complaints about temporary content, even though none of the new content has been temporary. The last temporary content we got was months ago. In a year’s time, if this keeps up there’ll be a lot more content.

Well, it’s because what happened all those months ago is bearing fruit right now. And it’s pretty sour fruit. Because if they’d not been so hell bent on pursuing an idea so bad even my cats were laughing at it, we’d have a lot more content RIGHT NOW instead of having to wait a year’s time for the new permanent content to show any significant accumulation.

A lot of us here tried to tell them. Guys, we said, this isn’t going to work, this is a bad idea, this is flat out stupid. PLZ STAHP. What did we get?

“Leave Britney alone!”

But but but, some of you may be saying, they did listen and now LS is permanent content!

Oh, yeah. They did indeed listen. At this rate, we naysayers are going to have to step up our game and start QQing and whining and complaining non-constructively about things they haven’t even thought of screwing up yet at least a year in advance!

Some things just take more time than people are willing to allow for.

I used to have a boss that insisted a 12 hour job could be done in 3 hours. Therefore, no one was able to satisfy him, pretty much ever.

He was consistently unhappy. It didn’t matter that what he was asking for was not reasonable or was beyond the realm of possibility. Sometimes it didn’t even matter of what he asked was bad for business. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it.

When he eventually left the company (shortly before he was going to get fired), he was replaced by a more reasonable boss, who lets things more or less take their course. The store prospered…but not right away. Righting that ship took a good year before anyone saw any differences.

The temporary content thing had strengths as well as weaknesses, but because people were so up in arms about it, Anet was forced back to the drawing board. We’re seeing only the beginnings of those changes now. Actually we’re seeing a lot of changes now, that people have been asking for for a long time.

But it’s not fast enough for some people. And that’s okay. The people it’s not fast enough for will complain bitterly, even if what they’re saying is no longer the case.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Vayne.8563:

You can append that sentence to the cause or not and it doesn’t change the cause. It’s simply superfluous and some people will find it dismissive of their own likes and dislikes and those people will comment, making it harder for the poster to prove their point. The line does not make the following statement truer or falser.

I find it more superflous to argue whether an opinion is true or false.

I’d agree with that. If that was what I was arguing you’d be right, but it’s not. And I’m not saying any more on this because I don’t want to get another infraction for derailing a thread, so that’s it for me. Say what you like.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Vayne.8563:

@Labjax….

You mistook what I said.

When I said saying that content wasn’t significant is useless it’s literally true. What’s the difference between these two complaints.

“This game has no significant content updates.”
“I play this game to do dungeons and there aren’t enough of them.”

The significant content comment, in and out itself does nothing. If you clarify it, it STILL does nothing. It doesn’t help in and out itself.

Oh but it does, as long as it is followed by a ‘because [insert more/less plausible reasons and arguments]…’
E.g.
“This game has no significant content updates, because a lot of them were of temporary nature and as such cannot be played by players who were absent at the time (LS1).”
or
“This game has no significant content updates, because everything still plays in very much the same way (for me) it had played since release (the PoV of one who wants to see new proffs, classes, weapons, dungeons etc. – in short, one who wants a far amount of permanent new content).”
“This game has no significant content updates, if new additions are examined in parallel to the content of the whole game.”
“This game has no significant content updates, because the pvp still feels like it’s in beta, and WvW is still a zergfest and a whack-a-door competition.”

Just to list a few.
It appears you’re back to the usual arguing of semantics there, vaine….

You’re the one arguing semantics.

You can append that sentence to the cause or not and it doesn’t change the cause. It’s simply superfluous and some people will find it dismissive of their own likes and dislikes and those people will comment, making it harder for the poster to prove their point. The line does not make the following statement truer or falser.

Romek.4201:

your spam start to be annoying

every thread you take something out of context and spam it as much as you can with answering every single post so thread makes no sense any more or will not be discussed bout the problem from the op

you talk alot but you say nothing

seriously

What you’re saying is you tried to compare 7.1 million players subscribed to WoW with Guild Wars 2 concurrency figures, which are two different things, and I was able to show it.

I think my response was completely relevant to what you were saying. If you don’t want to have a conversation why are you posting on a forum?

Romek.4201:

Vayne.8563:

kta.6502:

Karizee.8076:

I remember 2 years ago when Blizzard was all over this forum predicting they were going to kill GW2 with MoP but that plan kinda backfired in their face and they lost 3.5 million players. Looks like they are setting up to lose another 3.5 million with their next expac fail.

Blizzard has 7.8 million subscribers
Anet has 460,000 active players (as of Aug 2013)

Just saying…

(NOTE: Anet hasn’t announced how many players have been playing GW2 in 2014. I only have last year’s numbers. )

That’s not true. Anet had 460,000 players on line currently at that time (which was a long time ago anyway…they’ll not likely hit that mark again any time soon).

At the time that figure was taken, the game was relatively new and I’m pretty sure they had over 3 million players. That was how many were online concurrently.

not 3 million players – it was 3 million sold copies
and from this 3 million only 460.000 ACTIVE players (online)

I can’t even imagine how you come to this conclusion. 3 million sales that early doesn’t mean 3 million active players. The numbers you’re quoting are concurrency figures. It means like the people in Australia who are sleeping might not be playing at the moment of peak concurrency. They log on later.

In the states, not everyone plays at the same time.

The point is you can’t compare concurrency to subscribers, because they’re different numbers.

Here’s the article you’re actually looking for:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/wow-pandaria-1-million-concurrent-players-in-china/

MoP had 1 millon concurrent players at peak and Guild Wars 2 had almost half of that. That’s the comparison.

And that’s not unexpected. WoW is the more popular of the two games. It’s had a longer time to build an audience, it’s had more money to advertise and it was in the right time at the right place.

For Guild Wars 2 to get even close to half of MoP’s concurrency numbers likely makes it the MMO with the second highest concurrency of all time.

Thanks for pointing it out.

Edit: After that it would probably be Final Fantasy:

http://www.craveonline.com.au/gaming/articles/564709-ffxiv-a-realm-reborn-hits-325k-concurrent-players-will-implement-afk-kick-feature#/slide/1

kta.6502:

Karizee.8076:

I remember 2 years ago when Blizzard was all over this forum predicting they were going to kill GW2 with MoP but that plan kinda backfired in their face and they lost 3.5 million players. Looks like they are setting up to lose another 3.5 million with their next expac fail.

Blizzard has 7.8 million subscribers
Anet has 460,000 active players (as of Aug 2013)

Just saying…

(NOTE: Anet hasn’t announced how many players have been playing GW2 in 2014. I only have last year’s numbers. )

That’s not true. Anet had 460,000 players on line currently at that time (which was a long time ago anyway…they’ll not likely hit that mark again any time soon).

At the time that figure was taken, the game was relatively new and I’m pretty sure they had over 3 million players. That was how many were online concurrently.

Lazuli.2098:

If there are so many people excited about mini pets why don’t they use them in game. I can go days without seeing a single one (not that I’m complaining).

People have been complaining for a long time about how annoying it is to keep taking out a minipet every single time you port or change zones or die. It takes up an inventory slot as well.

If mini pets aren’t popular, why do minipets from the BL chests sell for 2-3 gold immediately? After all it’s not like you get any achievements for having them.

Xillllix.3485:

Flytrap.8075:

Man, that mini-pet change is so exciting and relevant.

Specially in WvW where pets will clearly dominates lower tiers.

You must have missed the excited comments about it, because obviously some people did find them exciting and relevant. Admittedly it doesn’t mean much to me personally but nothing Anet can provide is going to satisfy everyone.

I think the reaction of the community is a vast over-reaction to this, because most updates, almost all of them, are for veteran players. Of the annoucements for this patch, disappointing or no, only one day of them is for new players.

And I think I’ll benefit too when leveling alts, because some of us veterans are altoholics too.

@Labjax….

You mistook what I said.

When I said saying that content wasn’t significant is useless it’s literally true. What’s the difference between these two complaints.

“This game has no significant content updates.”
“I play this game to do dungeons and there aren’t enough of them.”

The significant content comment, in and out itself does nothing. If you clarify it, it STILL does nothing. It doesn’t help in and out itself.

There’s literally no advantage to using those terms at all, and some people will be offended. If they get offended there will be backlash.. Then the person is defending something they said, and their point gets lost.

So yes, it can be said, but in and of itself, it’s unnecessary and only helps to muddy the issue.

Labjax.2465:

Vayne.8563:

I don’t think the issue of “right” to complain is what the OP is getting at. What the OP is probably trying to say, and what I often try to say is is it reasonable to complain?

There are very reasonable complaints, and there are not so reasonable complaints. There are reasonable ways to phrase complaints and unreasonable ways to phrase them.

We haven’t had a new zone since launch is demonstrably untrue. We got a new zone since July and people are still saying there are no new zones. That’s not reasonable, particularly if we keep getting more with the new living story.

I still see complaints about temporary content, even though none of the new content has been temporary. The last temporary content we got was months ago. In a year’s time, if this keeps up there’ll be a lot more content.

It’s reasonable to want stuff. It’s not reasonable to exaagerate your argument to get what you want, and it doesn’t help your cause.

Reasonable complaints expressed reasonably I almost never go after.

It’s when people are, in my opinion, unreasonable that I take issue.

Well what is unreasonable to one person is reasonable to another. Dishonesty and hyperbole are one thing, but sometimes people just outright disagree and it gets misconstrued as exaggeration, when it is just a difference of opinion.

For example, if I were to say that the game “hasn’t added any significant content since launch,” I am making a subjective claim that is open to personal interpretation.

Sure, and phrasing it that was is actually combative, without you realizing it. By say that, what you’re really doing is saying to everyone who liked the content that their content isn’t significant. You may not feel that way, but others do and that’s what they respond to.

Significant only really means worthy of note. So if you dimiss a bunch of stuff because you don’t like it, you’re actually maligning people’s hard work and trivializing what other people like. You can say it, but expect feedback because people don’t actually like to see themselves marginalized.

Now if you said, I like dungeons and that’s the main reason I play and I’d like to see more dungeons, because no dungeons have been released since the TA aetherblade path and existing dungeons are still filled with flaws", no one could argue that.

The whole significant content statement is actually not helpful to anyone including devs. Everyone has a different idea of what is significant.

Flytrap.8075:

Grind Wars 2 definitely needed some more grind.

I’m sure there’s a ton of people out there who are excited for this “feature”, but it’s definitely under-whelming for a Week 3 announcement to say the least.

Under-whelming to you, maybe. Lots of people seem to think this is a good annoucement. My wife is thrilled. Something like this was a feature in Rift, one of the few things she misses from that game.

tigirius.9014:

Nope because those of us who stopped playing a while back because of the constant lack of features and imbalance, requested in the suggestions forum multiple times, for non-violent activities that would sit well with the casual and RP crowd. And while players like the OP often forget that we are here and are a large part of the community, the developers haven’t forgotten that and I for one am thankful they added this activity and new skins two things this game has needed for some time now.

By your own admission you’re a large part of the audience that has essentially left. Since you’ve left, you pretty much cease to be part of the audience.

It’s much better to hold the customers you have than to maybe get back customers you’ve lost. Particularly if getting those people back might lose you the customers you have.

I don’t think the issue of “right” to complain is what the OP is getting at. What the OP is probably trying to say, and what I often try to say is is it reasonable to complain?

There are very reasonable complaints, and there are not so reasonable complaints. There are reasonable ways to phrase complaints and unreasonable ways to phrase them.

We haven’t had a new zone since launch is demonstrably untrue. We got a new zone since July and people are still saying there are no new zones. That’s not reasonable, particularly if we keep getting more with the new living story.

I still see complaints about temporary content, even though none of the new content has been temporary. The last temporary content we got was months ago. In a year’s time, if this keeps up there’ll be a lot more content.

It’s reasonable to want stuff. It’s not reasonable to exaagerate your argument to get what you want, and it doesn’t help your cause.

Reasonable complaints expressed reasonably I almost never go after.

It’s when people are, in my opinion, unreasonable that I take issue.

laokoko.7403:

Vayne.8563:

kta.6502:

Vayne.8563:

I’m sure part of the problem is that the China launch took a huge amount of work and everyone is playing catch up. Pushing the devs to work harder and harder isn’t actually going to get us new content faster. It just means more burnout, which affects the speed at which stuff is released.

Even without the extra pressure, game development and specifically MMO development is just brutal at times. Like it’s almost always crunch time.

People want what they want now, without really understanding why they can’t have it on their schedule.

I disagree. I would be very surprised if the devs from NA & EU are working on content for the China server. The government there is suspicious of all foreign media workers. Foreign companies have to link up with a Chinese company to sell their wares on China’s mainland. Ryan Budish, a member of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told the Washington Post in today’s article on business in China, “You can’t exactly just move in there and do business.” (Quote comkes from here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/03/linkedin-thinking-twice-about-its-adoption-of-chinas-aggressive-censorship/)

There is a long process that foreign game companies have to go because of the the government’s “famous” censorship policies. All companies from the West have a separate team that communicates with their Chinese counterpart. I would be very surprised if Anet’s devs are doing the work that a specialized “China business team” would do.

I don’t think the devs are training their Chinese counterparts either. China is has alot of already trained software developers and game artists. The Chinese have also been making their own games for at least a decade. Perfect World, the infamous pay-to-win MMO, comes from the People’s Republic of China.

Links that give an overview of the Chinese game industry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gaming_in_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China#Video_games

There’s a very high chance that the Sept update was most likely created by game devs from mainland China, not by the NA / EU devs. It’s illegal to show images of death in China, and that’s why the Downed State was censored until level 5. For sure, the company is testing to see if the censored down state would be accepted here. I’ve seen this political / social move before (FYI: It’s helps to be part of a family that has been doing international business for 500 years!). It’s also why we don’t also have a tutorial for the Downed State, most of the changes in the feature pack are cosmetic, and why we’re not seeing any much needed content updates.

So that leaves the question: What have the NA / EU devs really been up to? Just something to think about.

So when they said they’ve all been busy with the China release they were lying?

Right but I’m not sure the NA / EU players care what they are doing in China.

That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. Logically speaking, they take six months of hard work to get the china game going and it’s a source of income that affects the entire future of the game. It’s an investment in the future.

If all you care about is getting what you want when you want it, that’s okay. But it’s not really fair and it will only lead to your own disappointment.

There are business realities. If you try to remove those realities from your expectations, you’re only going to diminish your enjoyment of the game. It’s not going to change reality. In reality business have to make profit and they will move to make profit. If you can’t except that, that’s okay.

But it won’t improve your gaming experience.

Kurrilino.2706:

IrishPotato.6327:

I hope you realize that Eye of the North was supposed to be the prequel to GW2. Primordus was introduced to show what you would be doing in GW2 = hunting the Elder Dragons. That was not stealing, it was paving the way as an introduction to GW2. Get your facts straight.

---

I guess you missed the point of repeating the same story over and over again.
They can have 2567 Dragons in GW2 announced by GW1.
I really don’t care.
The sad thing is the story repeating.

Obviously not a fan of fantasy or science fiction or you’d know this. There are only so many plots. That’s it.

So we knew there were six elder dragons. We knew they were awakening. Logic would then dictate that we have to kill six elder dragons.

It’s not much different from most fantasy and science fiction. The difference is we also had some some plots here that are interesting, including the much maligned Scarlet. The Zephyrites and their connection to Glint. There’s been a lot of side stuff that’s pretty interesting, down to the ley lines.

Way to trivialize a plot and try to say that it’s copied from Guild Wars 1. In fact, the only dragons I remember facing in Guild Wars 1 were Glint, who was an allie, and the Kunnevang who was an ally.

Almost every plot can be boiled down to one of seven things (some people claim 14). There are more than 14 games, hence plots have to get reused.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots

Bleu.5079:

All these new stuff is fancy and all but the point for us vets is, it’s not retroactive! So the super rare and expensive items that I acquired through hard work, sweat and blood all those years/months ago do not apply now?
ANet apparently do not care about vets and long term players. They just want to cater to the new blood and milk their cash.
I wasn’t so concerned when ANet content updates is not as fabulous as the other MMOs out there, but now with the feature updates lacking as well, I’m starting to lose faith in ANet.
It doesn’t help at all that the moment I decided to buy gems from ANet and spend it on an item, it goes on sale the very next day. It doesn’t help at all.
converts to the dark side

What makes you think the game even remember everything a character once owned? Do you know how much wasted space that would take up on servers?

kta.6502:

Vayne.8563:

I’m sure part of the problem is that the China launch took a huge amount of work and everyone is playing catch up. Pushing the devs to work harder and harder isn’t actually going to get us new content faster. It just means more burnout, which affects the speed at which stuff is released.

Even without the extra pressure, game development and specifically MMO development is just brutal at times. Like it’s almost always crunch time.

People want what they want now, without really understanding why they can’t have it on their schedule.

I disagree. I would be very surprised if the devs from NA & EU are working on content for the China server. The government there is suspicious of all foreign media workers. Foreign companies have to link up with a Chinese company to sell their wares on China’s mainland. Ryan Budish, a member of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told the Washington Post in today’s article on business in China, “You can’t exactly just move in there and do business.” (Quote comkes from here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/03/linkedin-thinking-twice-about-its-adoption-of-chinas-aggressive-censorship/)

There is a long process that foreign game companies have to go because of the the government’s “famous” censorship policies. All companies from the West have a separate team that communicates with their Chinese counterpart. I would be very surprised if Anet’s devs are doing the work that a specialized “China business team” would do.

I don’t think the devs are training their Chinese counterparts either. China is has alot of already trained software developers and game artists. The Chinese have also been making their own games for at least a decade. Perfect World, the infamous pay-to-win MMO, comes from the People’s Republic of China.

Links that give an overview of the Chinese game industry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gaming_in_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China#Video_games

There’s a very high chance that the Sept update was most likely created by game devs from mainland China, not by the NA / EU devs. It’s illegal to show images of death in China, and that’s why the Downed State was censored until level 5. For sure, the company is testing to see if the censored down state would be accepted here. I’ve seen this political / social move before (FYI: It’s helps to be part of a family that has been doing international business for 500 years!). It’s also why we don’t also have a tutorial for the Downed State, most of the changes in the feature pack are cosmetic, and why we’re not seeing any much needed content updates.

So that leaves the question: What have the NA / EU devs really been up to? Just something to think about.

So when they said they’ve all been busy with the China release they were lying?

Xillllix.3485:

Yes it’s a small patch; maybe it is that way because of the drop in sales.
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/guild-wars-2-sees-massive-drop-in-sales-this-year-but-that-s-no-cause-for-alarm/1100-6417784/

An expansion model would have been a better model than a free LS model business wise, specially since the game is desperate for new content (which would attract new players more than levelling changes).

But it’s still hard to believe they have 300 people just pumping out the Living Story and packaging it for China. I mean how can it not be disappointing when after a year waiting all that WvW gets are 3 tags colors and a siege disabler?

Meanwhile another big name MMO is getting 2 new huge competitive maps released soon. Is it because they have monthly fees or because they just decided to do it?

Nothing to do with this. This is a complete red herring.

Games like Guild Wars 2 aren’t designed to make money off more and more sales. They’re designed to make money off the cash shop. After release, almost every game sells less and less over the years.

The cash shop, however, according to the same quarterly report is still profitable.

Iason Evan.3806:

Vayne.8563:

Iason Evan.3806:

Vayne.8563:

I’m definitely excited about the better frame rate at large events.

That’s not a feature though. Just a hotfix. Some of the things that have gotten blog posts are like going to a movie theater for a sneak peak at a trailer. No thanks. Do I appreciate the changes? Yeah! Do they need blog posts? I think a lot of them would have been in the patch notes 1 and a half years ago. When they finally fix the myriad Mesmer issues that have been around forever it should just be in the patch notes because that’s where fixes go.

Actually I wouldn’t call making changes to client and server side a “hot fix”. It’s far more than that. It’s optimization.

Edit: I believe that it’s probably a lot more work than most people think it is.

I won’t argue “optimization” as the word for it. Fact still remains it isn’t a feature. It’s game polish. The way they are changing how drops work is a feature. Fixing framerate issues is not. If we are talking semantics and marketing/PR speak in this thread(which we are) let’s be honest. It’s not a feature.

I’m not sure whether it matters if its a feature or not. That’s really the problem here. Feature packs weren’t meant to contain just features. They were meant to contain all sorts of stuff that wasn’t going to be released while the living story was going on. Keep feature/fixes/updates separated from living story so they didn’t impinge on each other.

They called this a feature patch. Saying X is a feature by Y isn’t a feature isn’t relevent. It a game improvement that possibly took a lot of time and work to program. I know if they gave me a choice between better performance in zergs and any feature in the pack. that would be my choice.

Saying it’s not a feature in no way diminishes it to me.

I have a feeling you’re about to get a rush of negative reaction.

Guild Wars 1 was one of the best PvP games of its time…and it had a similar structure. There’s no way the PvP community here would sit still for this. No way at all.

Balsa.3951:

Expansion come and I can see many people leaveing in fact. Even Blizard says that expansions making it hard for old player to come back.

I think LS is a good idea for making the wold vivid but what is lacking is perma content like new dunguons new pvp modes

u know things u can repeat

plus what is also really lacking in this game is things u want archive by playing certain content every award is centerd around the gemstore. I can see why anet need this but it also makes no reason to do Aetherpath for example to get the skin if u can buy it in the gem store.

Fractal skins are the only weapon skins u cant buy ? i think

and they are rng so no prestige object at all ingame

You can’t buy dungeon skins either.

Edit: Well you can PvP for them. Is that the same as buying thought?

Gibson.4036:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

Personally, I believe a lot of the groaning and moaning going on in these forums at the moment is a case of fear of the unknown.

Players become worried because feature patches promise change, and they’re not sure if they’re going to like it, so they prepare by assuming the worst. Then they read the pessimistic ramblings of others, and these posts amplify each other.

You’ve left out the other half, which is past experience. Fear of the unknown, plus a history of seeing some things in patches which seemed really backwards (to the person who feels that way and not necessarily to anyone else in the entire player base, Lishtenbird).

Players who are still bewildered by things like ascended gear, fractal level reset, WvW bloodlust, or the new trait system are not only randomly afraid of the unknown, they are operating from “once bitten, twice shy” state (but just the ones who feel that way, and in no way the entire playerbase, Lishtenbird).

This I agree with. Anet has the habit of shooting themselves in the foot far too often.

I believe their heart is in the right place, they just need better communication.

You’re best off joining a casual guild and making some friends. Let me tell you, dungeons are a lot more fun for me with friends than with pugs. It’s even nice to chat sometimes while I’m soloing.