Guild Wars 2

morrolan.9608:

Soon.5240:

Vayne.8563:

They believed they could deliver it through the Living Story and perhaps they could have but a rather loud portion of the community kept screaming for an expansion. So Anet took the stuff they were planning to release for LS, bolstered it or changed what they needed to and made it into an expansion.

To me, this has been obvious from day one. And like most things, it was probably driven by money – which is fine. They probably felt that it did not pay to continue to develop and release free Living Story Seasons.

HoT is Living Story Season 3.

The community driving anet to release an xpac is just as apocryphal as ascended being introduced because the masses were baying for more to do. In both cases the noise was hardly overwhelming. No the reason HOT was done was because their revenues were declining.

No one I know said that people were asking for a new tier of gear. All I ever said, and I continue to say, is that people were leaving the game because they had nothing to do. Anet made ascended gear to keep people playing.

On the other hand, the outcry for an expansion was huge, it was all day every day on both this forum and on reddit. People complained they didn’t like the personal story, it wasn’t enough content, they wanted something that they could play through over a longer time.

You can call it apocryphal, but that doesn’t make it so. I’m on these forums a lot, and I remember how it was. It wasn’t a couple of people posting occasionally. There a huge wave of people saying the wanted an expansion. I’m not sure how anyone can say otherwise.

Edit: btw, +1 for using apocryphal. lol

gungcho.7382:

Yes it was crazy with the grinding, i did not enjoy map completion myself ( got about 80% of tyria ), neither drunkard or sweet tooth titles , but non the less the game as a whole was fun- good story, unique combat system. Now it is better, yet fun again! And that is the point.

I enjoy the content in Guild Wars 2 as much as I enjoyed the content in Guild Wars 1, but I enjoyed them differently.

Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. It become more of a strategy game. I enjoyed making builds for heroes and trying to solo as much as I could, or two man stuff with my wife. The hero builds were the key to success. With good heroes, it almost didn’t matter what I did.

Guild Wars 2 is more based around an arcade sentiment than a strategy sentiment. Jumping puzzles are awesome for me. Nothing like that in Guild Wars 1. Underwater combat I enjoy too. I hated being pathed and not being able to jump around and explore things. And now gliding takes that even further.

This game is more action oriented and in many ways less strategic. I find in fun but a different kind of fun than Guild Wars 1.

And sometimes I think they go over board with the difficulty as far as the video game stuff goes. But I’m not even really sure how you can compare to games that are so different. Because they are.

Baseball and Football are both sports, but not everyone who likes one likes the other. I happen to like both though I like baseball more.

Harper.4173:

Vayne.8563:

vesica tempestas.1563:

GW1 had raids. Being able to access all content without gating is casual friendly. Having a power cap is casual friendly. Having a gem store is casual friendly. 10k drinks is casual friendly if you must pull out that nonsense (GW1 had many many achievements like this).

Raids represents a fraction of the game content, and a fraction of the expansion released. Stop worrying about content that’s not targeted at yourself and enjoy the vast majority that is, and you will be happier. And incidentally, Casuals can enjoy raids too, a casual player may decide that he fancies joining in a guild raid one week. hardcore means having to commit to that same raid x nights a week for x hours or risk falling behind. – this is hardcore.

I don’t consider the elite content in Guild Wars 1 raids, and I don’t really think anyone else did either. Well, that’s not completely true. The Deep and Urgoz were probably raids. But nothing else was.

And I wouldn’t say other of those were casual in any way.

The Deep, Urgoz, FoW and UW could all easily be considered raids. In some ways they were even less casual friendly than today’s Raids.

Why?
They were designed to take a long time – even if you were really good – so aside for speed clears -you were looking at a 1.5 to 2 hour stay even with a good party.
They were also very very unforgiving – much more than the current Raids are. How so?

If your entire party wiped – you were done – all progress lost and you were thrown outside the instance – you had to do it all over again – that’s not casual friendly – they were very much aimed at the hardcore.

Imagine how much unforgiving and hardcore the raid would be if you had to redo everything if you wiped at one boss.
Imagine dying at Sabetha and having to clear the ENTIRE raid – VG and Gors included only to get to attempt her again.

The only real definition of PvE raids in any game I’ve played is content that requires a larger group of people than core content. Raids are named after raid groups, where you have more people in your party than you normally wood. For example, most parties in most games are 5 or 6 main and raids are 10 or 20 man.

Urgoz and The Deep are 12 man content. Everything else is just a long dungeon.

I’ve never played an MMO I could keep playing indefinitely before Guild Wars 2. If you’re not competitive, that is interested in hard core PvP or hard core raiding/dungeon running, you can’t keep playing most MMOs.

This MMO gives me more to do than other MMOs at end game for my play style. Yes, even more than subscription MMOs. Because I don’t really care about dungeons and I don’t want to have to raid.

I’m going to be raiding soon in this game and I’m not happy about it. We’ll see how it goes.

I still have plenty to do without raiding though, and there’s no other MMO I can say that about.

gungcho.7382:

Vayne.8563:

I don’t consider the elite content in Guild Wars 1 raids, and I don’t really think anyone else did either. Well, that’s not completely true. The Deep and Urgoz were probably raids. But nothing else was.

And I wouldn’t say other of those were casual in any way.

Yes it was a way more hardcore friendly than casual friendly, a lot of stuff took way too much time, yet we all ( who played GW1) enjoyed the game. And here it is not like that. 10k drinks is too much, but it is for people with free time and lots of gold to invest in them, which in a way shifts the gold towards the poorer players, which is good. But noone has to do this type of achievements if they do not want to.

10k drinks was ridiculous, but only because of the limited time. If you were doing the drunken title in Guild Wars 1, it was a crazy grind, and on top of that, you couldn’t just drink them straight down, you had to time it, so you took a drink just as the other one was wearing off. It was an insane process.

Not to mention map completion in Guild Wars 1, which wasn’t fun for a lot of people including me. Sitting there, pushing against the edge of areas try to unfog a tiny drop that I didn’t know I was missing…nope, not fun at all.

Both games had ridiculous grind for certain things. No one needs the shoulders to compete. It’s meant to be an end game item. Regardless, I still think 10k drinks was too much.

On the other hand the meta for the event was easy to get.

And you know, I didn’t prefer the elite content in Guild Wars 1 to what we have here. I didn’t love the underworld, or Urgoz, or DOA or Slavers. I did them all once. I did Sorrow’s Furnace and FOW a few times, but you know, they weren’t that much fun for me.

I find the new expansion experience more fun that those.

It’s just a matter of taste. I don’t think you could even say more people preferred those to these. We simply don’t know.

vesica tempestas.1563:

GW1 had raids. Being able to access all content without gating is casual friendly. Having a power cap is casual friendly. Having a gem store is casual friendly. 10k drinks is casual friendly if you must pull out that nonsense (GW1 had many many achievements like this).

Raids represents a fraction of the game content, and a fraction of the expansion released. Stop worrying about content that’s not targeted at yourself and enjoy the vast majority that is, and you will be happier. And incidentally, Casuals can enjoy raids too, a casual player may decide that he fancies joining in a guild raid one week. hardcore means having to commit to that same raid x nights a week for x hours or risk falling behind. – this is hardcore.

I don’t consider the elite content in Guild Wars 1 raids, and I don’t really think anyone else did either. Well, that’s not completely true. The Deep and Urgoz were probably raids. But nothing else was.

And I wouldn’t say other of those were casual in any way.

MeGaZlo.9516:

Petrol.9086:

Dark Savior.7589:

+1 the OP.

This game was fun and so I thought the expansion would be too, but instead its just become a tedious grind. Anet took the easy out for difficulty, instead of challenging AI, everything just had its damage output jacked way the hell up, so you get one shot by everything on the maps. I can only beat my head against the wall for so long before its just not any fun at all, and that is my overall impression of this expansion. The story isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly good either. I can only honestly say I wish I hadn’t bought heart of thorns.

I’ll probably keep at for a few more days, because I don’t have money to burn so I will make every effort to redeem this game for myself and the value of my dollar, but its been a week or so and I am just hating it, its a slog, not fun. Someone called it Dark Souls MMO, but honestly Dark Souls was tough but fair for the most part, this crap is just cheap with mobs that hit like trucks, and require no special skill to defeat, just have to get the jump on them & hit them harder first, otherwise they destroy you in a single hit, or if you are really lucky 2 hits.

This is just not true. Everything’s damage isn’t just jacked, they have special abilities that you need to dodge, block,interrupt or otherwise mitigate with protection or whatever. Besides that their damage is normal. The only mobs that don’t have an obvious tell what attack they are going to do are the frogs with bows but they are also very vulnurable to brute force and knock downs since they only have something like 10k hp.
If you’re getting one shot it means you weren’t paying attention, and if you keep getting one shot maby wear defensive gear and use a defensive build until you learn how to deal with them? Other gear than berserker is actually very handy when learning the new maps and mobs, and a full set of exotics is still very cheap. Hell you can get a full exotic soldiers set in Orr for just karma.

Things that are completely useless in regular open world Tyria is extremely useful in HoT like stuns, blinds, knock downs, chill,dodging, actually being present at the computer…

Sounds good and well. But you forgot to mention the fact that half of HoT mobs are vet-s. And they are like a HP sponge. Many of them make the tone of damage. And most of them also have a strip of defiance. Most classes haven’t such count of the control to overcome it. You can’t deny that most of HoT mobs are literally super-annoying.
Smokescales, for example. One is rather easy. But try to kill 2 veterans. I have necro. Necro have pets on some skills. One one of them attacking me with his teleport skill, another puts the smoke and continues to kick my pets within it. Right after this the second does the same thing. I can not control pets – I just have to wait until they die. So at the time they dies I have almost no HP but smokescales, on the contrary, are completely healthy.
Is it assumed that I have to completely change the build for each mob? Or what?
Two vet-s frogs with bows kill my pets and me for a few seconds. I can hardly take half of their HP. And I could kill many champions solo. kitten , I tank raids, m8! But some frogs with bows easily killing me.
Mushroom(!) humiliates killer of elder dragons. Mushroom defender, for example. Uncontrolable. Ton of hp. Ton of damage. Ton of cc. I’m jumping like a clown, a last effort trying to finish some mushroom… The thickest class in the game. Full ascended. Doing 15k crits. Killed by mushroom. Awesome…

And what about these hero challanges shoved somewhere, where no sunlight reaches? Half an hour of searching, to die in a couple of seconds. Cool!

Sharpshooters with 15k execution when you fly past on glider or fight with 2-3 of them. Pew! You’r dead. Great!

Chaks with unavoidable rays. Pew-pew-pew form all directions you didn’t see. You’r dead. Super!

Ok… In a few words: the game has become incredibly irritating when playing solo. Impossible in some places. On the one hand increasing difficulty – it’s good. On the other – you can relax just in boring mindless zergs now. Want to try content solo – lose a lot of nerves. Not good thing, I believe.

(sorry for bad eng, btw)

Well it’s certainly not soloable if you insist on bringing minions. Bad bad choice for most end game PvE content. Necros have other options.

I can solo a whole bunch of stuff on my necro in HoT. But I don’t bring minions. In fact, necro is probably one of the easier professions to solo hot on, because it not only has a lot of health, but it has soul reaping. And once you unlock the reaper, forget it.

Also a lot of mobs in hot die very quickly.

That doesn’t mean you’re never going to die. But if you’re relatively careful and you don’t insist on using a build that probably won’t work, you’ll do much better.

Aedelric.1287:

Vayne.8563:

Actually I think what you’re seeing is compensation for how it’s been. It really has been too easy. Being casual doesn’t mean you want no challenge at all, at least for a lot of us.

Thing is I never once mentioned about the difficulty of content, but rather it not being casual friendly and how things have moved away from what Guild Wars 2 was sold as. I do believe that being casual does not always go hand in hand with wanting easy content and for some perspective I myself am not entirely a casual player.

Event timers, boss timers, a daily that require you to complete specific objectives, unrealistic achievement requirements (10k drinks) that require you to give up a social life to obtain. These are only a handful of issues but there are more, the problem is more on the accessibility side of being casual friendly not really how difficult the content is. Not even the new guild hall system is friendly to casual guilds.

I do not believe it is a form of overcompensation by Arena Net but rather them trying to attract a different crowd than the game originally appealed to, as in the current focus with hardcore content, massive guilds and e-sports.

I’m just not buying this. I’m not saying they’re not trying to attract harder core players to the game as well, but that doesn’t have to mean they’ve abandoned casuals. In six months we’ll have a better idea, when we see what changes are implemented and what new stuff comes along. Until then we’re both just guessing.

I’ve done it. I usually only have 8 slot invisble bags and sometimes I have more than 8 items in my inventory I want to hold on to.

Slightly annoying but not a huge deal.

Eldbrand Charging.8902:

Seera.5916:

Vayne.8563:

If the expansion failed, it would be on sale. Obviously someone must be buying it, because it makes no sense to keep a failed game at full price for any company.

Yea, games that don’t sell too well at launch do tend to go on sale pretty quickly.

For example:

Sims 4 released September 2, 2014. Black Friday 2014, almost 2 months later it was on sale 50%. It did not sell well at launch due to horrible PR disasters that had happened for MONTHS leading up to the launch. EA, greedy EA, put a game on sale 2 months after it launched.

Black Friady was not EA putting the game on sale, Black Friday is when RETAILERS discount their inventory, not the manufacturers. Retailers use Black Friday to make room for new items and empty valuable warehouse space taken up by “old” merchandise.

This is from EA’s store.

http://www.ea.com/uk/news/origin-black-friday-sale

Pretty sure they personally discounted the Sims, not just retail outlets.

If the expansion failed, it would be on sale. Obviously someone must be buying it, because it makes no sense to keep a failed game at full price for any company.

Aedelric.1287:

Arena Net have not been playing to their strengths with Guild Wars 2, focusing on the elite crowd and e-sports has been a mistake. They should be nurturing the casual player and PvE side of the game as much as they can as that is where their bread and butter is.

Lets see what this year holds, hopefully they start making smart decisions when it comes to the direction of content development.

Actually I think what you’re seeing is compensation for how it’s been. It really has been too easy. Being casual doesn’t mean you want no challenge at all, at least for a lot of us.

But, I think that they heard complaints about how easy the game was for a long long time and they compensated and now that they’re hearing the other complaints they’ll compensate again. Originally they said they couldn’t bring gliding to core tyria, it would be too much work and suddenly it’s here.

There’s a new Shatterer fight with new achievements. I think the development cycle is very long, so it looks like the game has taken a new direction. I expect that the direction will shift back again, soon enough.

Soon.5240:

Vayne.8563:

Nah, they won’t advertise it.

A lot of games don’t post when they’re doing well for a very good reason.

Accepting for the sake of argument that Anet will not admit to either an increased player base or a decreased player base, then what evidence would sway you that the population is decreasing to levels that are harmful to the game’s continuation?

I’ll add that I’m a WvW’er and I’ve seem many in my Guild no longer log in to play — many players that I’ve played with for years. It’s a large, well run, well networked guild, so my observations are not being made in a vacuum.

I think everyone knows the WvW population is down. But the PvP and PvE population is up, if nothing else due to free to play.

You don’t have to convince me that the WvW population is down. But I’d wager there are as many players now as there have been any time since launch. The proof will be down the road in about six months when we see how things stabilize after the expansion sales are factored out.

However, I’m generally going by things I see, like reddit traffic, number of times searched on google, stuff like Raptr, which puts GW 2 much higher in the rankings than it was before free to play, and the quarterly reports NcSoft gives to its stockholders.

On a more annecdotal note, my guild hasn’t really slacked off at all. We had over 100 people log in last week. About the same number we had last year at this time.

Electro.4173:

Like you said, masteries are account-wide, not character-bound. And I’ve seen some particularly adventurous souls who have gotten sub-80 characters into HoT maps and can glide just fine. So yes, low-level characters can benefit from gliding in core Tyria unless they add a specific restriction for it, but I don’t see why they’d do that considering it would be more work and make the change less exciting and impactful.

You don’t need to be adventurous at all, really. Just take a low level character to your Lost Precipe Guild Hall. By exiting the hall through the gate, you unlock the Shipwreck Peak waypoint.

The run from there to the Jaka Itzel Waypoint has very few enemies, for the most part easily avoided. I had a level 15 character I parked on the flax farm. lol

Electro.4173:

I think I know which achievement you’re talking about in regards to the “NPC you need to locate”. And yah, I wasted about an hour myself combing that entire mission for said NPC beyond the point when he’s apparently available (because I checked the spot where he is and found nothing) before I said “Screw it” and looked it up on Dulfy. At which point I was like “Oh? He definitely isn’t there, did it bug? Does it despawn if you progress to a certain point(I assume it was this one)? The heck?!”

I agree with the Friend of Frogs thing too. Most of the events in that chain take FOREVER to complete, especially the metamorphosis one, but then a couple of them (I’m guessing you’re talking about the “calm the stampede with mushroom spores” step) can finish extremely fast if people actually know that they’re doing. Thankfully I was in a less populated instance and with people who seemingly didn’t when I did my run for FoF, so I had time to figure out what to do.

Yep, I hate wasting my time. Had to go to Dulfy. Got there and said, great, If that golden icon had vanished when it was no longer available, Id’ have noticed and said, okay got to do this part first.

Alicornus.7095:

Yargesh.4965:

How is what I wrote any different then what you quoted?

Alright then…

Yargesh.4965:

They did not say they were not working on an expansion. Not even close to that.

They did. Quotations to back that up see above.

Yargesh.4965:

The debate was whether to do so entirely through living story or through a traditional paid expansion or through a combination.

No. Quotations see above and read further in the articles. Until they came around the corner with the HoT announcement, the official statement was: No expansions. We’re not working on it, we’re releasing the content via the Living World funded by the gem shop earnings.

They also said that they were working on several big projects in the background and hadn’t decided how to deliver them yet.

An expansion is a group of features and content that is bundled together and sold. Anet’s argument has always been that expansion features could be delivered through the Living Story. That has never changed.

They believed they could deliver it through the Living Story and perhaps they could have but a rather loud portion of the community kept screaming for an expansion. So Anet took the stuff they were planning to release for LS, bolstered it or changed what they needed to and made it into an expansion.

Saying that they didn’t start the expansion earlier, would mean knowing that they didn’t use any of the assets they had made for the living world in an expansion.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Vayne.8563:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Vayne.8563:

Collections are pretty much my end game now. It’s end game for the rest of us. It’s supposed to be difficult.

If collections are end game, then there is something really wrong with them.

How so?

RNG. The fact I can spend hours killing mobs for a junk item to drop and it never drops.

Yes I did check the wiki to make sure I was killing the right mobs.

What are your killing that you’re not getting loot from. I’ve completed a bunch of collections with RNG, doesn’t mean one isn’t bugged.

I waited, because I just knew the prices would drop. They were nuts. MMOs evolve and change all the time. Even something like dungeon master was easier once ascended came out and Fractal stuff is easier now. That’s the way of MMOs. You do stuff first, you spend the premium. You wait around and most of the time, stuff gets easier.

Ayrilana.1396:

Vayne.8563:

The OP isn’t complaining about megaservers though. As far as I can tell he’s complaining about an event being nerfed. The mega server argument is an old one.

They weren’t but the destruction that they were talking about started with megaservers. One could argue that the majority of the destruction of the PvE communities came from the megaservers and all the nerfing of the gerent event did was remove the temporary community of players who would consistently work together attempt after attempt to beat that meta event.

So again it has more to do with where you get your community from. Since my community is my guild, opening the servers up via the megaserver gave me more blood for my community. For my community the mega server had positive impact, not negative.

The OP isn’t complaining about megaservers though. As far as I can tell he’s complaining about an event being nerfed. The mega server argument is an old one.

For me, the megaserver is probably the best update this game has had. It revitalized the game for me. It made zones that used to be quiet feel full again.

Every MMO I’ve played has trouble keeping mid level zones populated even games like WoW. This is a huge problem. It has nothing to do with Anet monitoring or not monitoring population.

It has to do with some people playing off the beaten path, and not seeing other people around when they do so. To me the game felt more alive after the megaserver patch.

Harper.4173:

Actually, it does make sense for Anet to make sure everyone can play the game, for them. Losing your international audience, even if indivdually we’re not as many players as the US, collectively we’re probably a lot more than you think.

Sure – but they can’t balance the entire game around outliers. Not every encounter can and should be balanced around someone having 200 ping.

It’s in Anet’s best interest to encourage more people from more countries to play. Saying that we should be second class citizens because we don’t live in the US is probably not going to endear you to a lot of people.

I play from Europe and get good ping – I do believe most GW2 players are in areas of the game that get decent performance. I don’t believe they can make the game run perfect for everybody.

And it’s not on them to do that. It would be good – but they’re not obliged to do it – because you yourself have to decide whether or not you should buy a game based on whether or not you can play it.

I mean – I play BF4 – and can connect to US servers but usually with a very high latency (ping). Does that mean it’s EA’s fault that I can’t play on US servers properly? No.
Is EA obliged to change the game’s netcode to ensure I get better gunplay at 300+ ping ?No.
So what happens then? I play on EU servers – and if I couldn’t play on EU servers – say they didn’t exist I simply wouldn’t play. That simple.

What I wouldn’t do however is buy a game I know I can’t play properly then complain the game isn’t designed around my specific issues that I know I have.

My argument is if making those rewards available to people who can’t get them by playing is such a burden for the raiding community, then I’d rather not see raids at all, because my enjoyment of the game gets curtailed.

How can you hold such an absurd position? Anet should make unique rewards that are associated with playing at a very high skill and performance level available to people who can drums – not play at a high skill and performance level?
That’s just contradicting yourself.

I get that you’d rather not see Raids – but some of us would rather still see them.
Like I said – a system with a long log-in type of progression might be a thing – if it’s very long it should compensate for the lack of difficulty.

And since there are a lot of people in the US with bad internet connections too, older computers, you’re not just looking at foreigners. You could be looking at a significant percentage of the playerbase.

There’s a balance between graphics detail and performance. How many players would you lose if your game looked bad but ran on more computers and how many would you gain?

How profitable is it to invest in more data centers for servers versus using that money to create content or do something else.

These are questions Anet knows the answers to – and those answers reflect the current state of the game.

WoW is one of the most popular MMOs of all time and one of it’s appeals is that you can play it on a potato. Anything will run it. That’s good for business.

Yes – true – and one of the reasons I never played WoW is because it looks incredibly bad to me. It looks like a game that can run on a potato. That doesn’t cut it for me.

Look at the gaming industry right now – it’s a permanent race to improve your game’s visuals. Sometimes even at the cost of performance. People are looking for that – and deveopers are trying to strike a balance between accessibility and crisp visuals.

Making it so people are left out or left behind because of where they live…pretty sure that’s bad for business.

It depends on how many of these people there are, how many of them actually quit and other factors.
I’m sure that if this was more of a factor it would have been addressed. There’s always latency with this sort of thing – time will tell.

So how is asking for another path to rewards “balancing the whole game” around that?

Harper.4173:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

Because people like getting them.

The questio of why developers add rewards to their content was a follow up to the previous phrase. If, as it is claimed, content alone can keep people interested for years, and it doesn’t matter where the reward will come from (so content doesn’t have exclusive reward) why even add the reward in the first place? After all, content alone should drive the game and those who want a challenge should be happy with playing their challenging content and not need some rewards to go with it.

Where do you draw the line on how hard something is to obtain? Or the alternative is to give everything to everyone, then why not adding Twilight as a loot drop from moas? Or give it as a level 10 reward. I mean according to posters, where someone gets a reward shouldn’t matter, that’s what is being said to me.

First of all, I never said content alone is enough to keep people playing. It’s enough to keep SOME people playing.

But probably not enough by percentage to run an MMO. This is particularly true due to the number of people who run content they don’t enjoy just to get rewards. I didn’t try for Liadri too hard because I found unenjoyable. I don’t play MMOs to solo.

But there are people who hated the content but tried it over and over again until they got that mini. I’m thinking that you get enough of that and some people will stop playing.

See, I enjoy the new zones and I can play them for ages. I don’t even think about the rewards. But I’m not a typical player.

The more rewards in the game beyond the realm of most people to get, the higher the threshold, the more people will start to question if this game is the game for them. That’s just simple human nature.

You didn’t say it, others did.

People are asking for alternative ways to get the rewards, I get that. But one “alternative” might still be hard for some people, just see precursors, the alternative (crafting) is still hard to do for most people, maybe harder than mystic forging it or getting it as drop. So the next question is, how many alternatives do you wish to be added in order to be happy? And where do you draw the line on how easy obtaining the reward is?

I mean, why not add all the rewards as level up things or add them as drops from moas. Something everyone can do, then nobody will complain because they have bad ping, bad computer or cannot perform 100% for reasons beyond their power to fix. Would that make players happy?

I don’t mind hard rewards. I do mind rewards gated behind content that is problematical for people that live in my area of the world. It’s not like six of us alone in a room. There are tens of thousands of people, perhaps even more, who play from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Phillipines, all over the place, really. There are tons of people who live in rural areas around the world who have lousy connections. I’m sure we have enough numbers to gain a bit of consideration. More than 10% of guys are colorbind. It makes red circles a problem.

I’d like to see a way for me to be on even footing. It’s not Anet’s fault I live in Australia. But Anet is selling the game Internationally. They are certainly willing to take money from Australians. So if there’s a reward that’s significantly harder for me to get, I’d like an alternate way to access it.

Dungeon rewards were given to people in PvP, even though dungeons are quite easy to do. Raids aren’t as easy as dungeons but the only way to get raid rewards is raid.

I broke down and I’m going to start raiding with my guild a week from this Tuesday. I’m not happy that I’m doing this. It’s a form of capitulation. It’s also an issue for a casual guild like mine, because it’s going to create haves and have nots. Not everyone in my guild is good enough, well enough, or has a good enough connection to raid. It makes me sad that some people will be denied this.

My hope is that a group of us get good enough to cycle some people in who have less than ideal conditions. But the bottom line is, I don’t think this is good for my guild. I don’t particularly think it’s great for the game.

I don’t know what percentage of people raid, but if 10% of the population are raiders because they enjoy raiding and 20% of the population feel disenfranchised and left out, then I don’t think it’s a good decision on Anet’s part.

That said, I don’t have those numbers. I don’t know what percentage raid and what percentage have stopped logging in or play less do to a perception that the game is moving in a direction and not taking people with it.

This thread should be evidence that a least some people feel disenfrachised.

And I’m not even one of them, because I really like the new zones. I really like the metas, particularly VB and DS. And I really like the elite specializations I’ve played with so far.

What I don’t like is feeling pressured to do content to get something specific because I want it, even though I feel I won’t enjoy the content.

I get what you’re saying Vayne – it makes sense – however I do feel that just because Anet sells the game worldwide doesn’t mean they’re automatically bound to make sure that regardless how good your internet connection or PC specs are you can play the game.

I mean – let’s face it – there’s a point where each individual has to figure out for himself if he can or cannot properly play a game. The developer isn’t really obliged to give you a helping hand if you happen to be unable to play the game properly due to local factors.
Your ability to play and enjoy a game should be something you think about before you buy said game.

Dungeon rewards were given to people in PvP, even though dungeons are quite easy to do. Raids aren’t as easy as dungeons but the only way to get raid rewards is raid.

Because dungeons were designed in such a way that every party can participate and still complete provided they stick to it – they are fail-proof in most regards.

I still don’t believe that Raid rewards should be obtainable in PvP – since one is one thing and one is another but if Raid rewards should be obtained in PvP then they should only be available to those players who are Legendary rank in the new league system.

Is it alternative? yes – is it easy? no.

If alternatives are to be found care must be taken that the alternate paths are not easier – but different and still difficult.

I broke down and I’m going to start raiding with my guild a week from this Tuesday. I’m not happy that I’m doing this. It’s a form of capitulation.

This is exactly what Anet wanted you to do – and now you’re doing it – their strategy works. You’re unhappy now but you’ll get over it.

Same thing happened to me when the first WvW season thing started – they announced “super secret rewards” for doing the WvW meta so I had to begrudgingly haul my rear end out of PvE and grind WvW for said rewards – and it turned out the rewards weren’t that great – but their strategy worked.

In the end I didn’t like it much at fist but It was the first time I seriously did some WvW and overall it opened me up to the idea of WvW – which I did more of until Anet left it to rot in the state it’s currently in.

The point here being – by gating rewards behind a specific form of content Anet will get players to play it and maybe even stick to it in the long run.

. It’s also an issue for a casual guild like mine, because it’s going to create haves and have nots. Not everyone in my guild is good enough, well enough, or has a good enough connection to raid. It makes me sad that some people will be denied this.

That’s alright though – I don’t know how you see things but not everyone should have everything. I’m a pretty good player and have quite a bit of stuff but compared to some guys you could consider me a have not. I’m fine with that. So should your guildmates – and if they’re not there’s always something you can do if you really care about it enough.

My hope is that a group of us get good enough to cycle some people in who have less than ideal conditions. But the bottom line is, I don’t think this is good for my guild. I don’t particularly think it’s great for the game.

There are other areas that I consider good/bad for the game but ultimately it’s Anet who calls these shots.

I don’t know what percentage of people raid, but if 10% of the population are raiders because they enjoy raiding and 20% of the population feel disenfranchised and left out, then I don’t think it’s a good decision on Anet’s part

Apart from those numbers being purely fictive you should also factor in the number of people that GW2 has “lost” or better said never gained during its previous 3 years because everyone knew that GW2 had “no endgame”.
Or factor in the people who left because of “no endgame” during those 3 years.

The problem with speculation on what percentage of the player base wants what is that you have no numbers.
On top of that what people want and are willing to accept changes with time – so while many might be upset with Raids now – in time a good portion of them might simply accept it and move on.

This thread should be evidence that a least some people feel disenfrachised.

Yes – true – and that’s true for almost every thread – since most threads on these forms are complaints and or people being upset.

What I don’t like is feeling pressured to do content to get something specific because I want it, even though I feel I won’t enjoy the content.

With Anet being so far behind with developing content they can’t really afford to leave the decision of what content you play up to you – they’re going to want you to do every bit of content they put out there to keep you “working on something” and to keep the content populated.

With so little content being added ( look at HoT’s size) they’ve been pushing a lot to get players to do all of it.

Actually, it does make sense for Anet to make sure everyone can play the game, for them. Losing your international audience, even if indivdually we’re not as many players as the US, collectively we’re probably a lot more than you think.

It’s in Anet’s best interest to encourage more people from more countries to play. Saying that we should be second class citizens because we don’t live in the US is probably not going to endear you to a lot of people.

And I’m not asking them not to have raids. I’m asking them to not lock rewards behind stuff that’s literally harder for us to do. As I said there are gold rewards I’m sure that are impossible for me to get, and behind each one, there’s a mastery point.

That means I pretty much have to do everything else whether I want to or not. In that case, Anet did give me options. Other ways to earn those points.

My argument is if making those rewards available to people who can’t get them by playing is such a burden for the raiding community, then I’d rather not see raids at all, because my enjoyment of the game gets curtailed.

And since there are a lot of people in the US with bad internet connections too, older computers, you’re not just looking at foreigners. You could be looking at a significant percentage of the playerbase.

WoW is one of the most popular MMOs of all time and one of it’s appeals is that you can play it on a potato. Anything will run it. That’s good for business.

Making it so people are left out or left behind because of where they live…pretty sure that’s bad for business.

Sird.4536:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

My answer is an alternate path for content that, by Anet’s own admission, most people aren’t going to finish. And if that’s the case, they’re taking developer resources, which are spread thin already, to add something to the game of no value whatsoever, to people who play like me.

Where do you draw the line with this “alternative” path(s) of yours? And I’m more interested in the why you’d exclude anyone below that line. Or you want everyone to get all the rewards regardless of their personal skill level, time commitment or any other attribute they might have.

So which is it? Should everyone have access to all the rewards or not? And if yes, we go back to the moa of Queensdale, if no, then why not?

If you don’t want to do the raid, you should have a path to get the rewards, even if it’s expensive, or long, or contains some RNG.

My real solution was to make the gear sellable, just like most of the gear was sellable in GW 1. You could sell tormented weapons. Rare minis. Destroyer Weapons. Voltaic SPears, Celestial compasses.

Raiders could get extra cash, and everyone else could save their pennies. That’s a better solution to me.

So what is the point of raids if people can just do a collection outside of one? Are you seriously annoyed you can’t get a skin?

The point of raids is challenging content., People asked for it and got it. But they don’t JUST want challenging content. They want unique rewards.

If you’re only doing the raid for the reward…that’s your answer right there.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Harper.4173:

Vayne.8563:

Harper.4173:

Daddicus.6128:

Harper.4173:

If casuals want hardcore rewards they should become hardcore – it’s that simple.

For once you and I agree on something.

The problem is that HoT doesn’t allow me to play through, effectively, without being hardcore.

HoT doesn’t require you to be hardcore to play it – it does require you to sink time into it.
Like Vayne – you can be casual but sink a lot of time – HoT doesn’t really need you to improve that much but it gates things to artificially increase the length of the expansion.

Okay there’s a definite learning curve in HoT and a lot depends also on things like whether you’re used to meleeing or ranging.

For example, I can melee all over the world, but I have a lot more trouble meleeing in HoT. I can do it, but I don’t always survive the experience.

On my ranger it hasn’t changed that much. On my warrior, I tend to use my bow a lot more in HoT.

I know a guy who likes to melee. It’s what he enjoys. He’s in my guild. He doesn’t like HoT because he feels it forces him to range. It doesn’t really but it’s certainly easier for some of the encounters.

But as a casual player open world HoT is still very accessible if you’re slightly interested in figuring out how to make things work for you.
Yes – like you said – melee vs range – there are very few ( possibly none) mobs in HoT that you can’t kite to death by running in a circle and ranged dpsing them.
You can do that solo.

And a lot of the difficulty added wasn’t added to appeal to “hardcore” but also to make you more dependent on other players. That’s why we have events that require more people – why we have huge metas on every map.
Because one of the core complaints with core GW2 maps was that everyone was doing their own thing and there was no sense of togetherness or aiding others in a huge fight – HoT sought to address this by “forcing” the community to band together.

Regarding your friend – we were all “forced” to range at some point – I was forced in core GW2 at release. It’s just how it is. At some point people will have to simply improve at the game.

the biggest problem with HoT is that some of the content/areas are locked away behind a map timer. Or events. this also makes a lot of HoT inaccessible to casual gamers. Not to mention frustrating, why do I need to wait 30 mins for a challenge to open up? why these are locked behind meta events I’ll never know. I know some will say to make sure the maps are always done, but they wont always be done. not to the same level, and you could end up having very little time to do said challenges, or mapping places like DS.

I agree with this. You have to be a special kind of patient to be a casual player trying to zone completion or get a mastery point you need and continually have to wait for something else to happen.

I’m fortunate that I have as much free time as I have, but not everyone does.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Vayne.8563:

Collections are pretty much my end game now. It’s end game for the rest of us. It’s supposed to be difficult.

If collections are end game, then there is something really wrong with them.

How so?

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

My answer is an alternate path for content that, by Anet’s own admission, most people aren’t going to finish. And if that’s the case, they’re taking developer resources, which are spread thin already, to add something to the game of no value whatsoever, to people who play like me.

Where do you draw the line with this “alternative” path(s) of yours? And I’m more interested in the why you’d exclude anyone below that line. Or you want everyone to get all the rewards regardless of their personal skill level, time commitment or any other attribute they might have.

So which is it? Should everyone have access to all the rewards or not? And if yes, we go back to the moa of Queensdale, if no, then why not?

If you don’t want to do the raid, you should have a path to get the rewards, even if it’s expensive, or long, or contains some RNG.

My real solution was to make the gear sellable, just like most of the gear was sellable in GW 1. You could sell tormented weapons. Rare minis. Destroyer Weapons. Voltaic SPears, Celestial compasses.

Raiders could get extra cash, and everyone else could save their pennies. That’s a better solution to me.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Vayne.8563:

I wouldn’t mind titles given to people who achieve hard content. But unique skins or the only way to get a specific class of armor…that I do mind. Raids are too hard to lock stuff like that behind.

Dungeons were hard too. This wing is already pugable. By the time legendary armor will be out pugs will speedclear wing 1 and will be comfortable in wing 2.

Dungeons were too hard? lol Okay then.

Edit: Dungeons don’t have an enrage timer. You can go in there with a group of people who dont’ really know and still beat stuff. You don’t have to have specific builds for most dungeon paths, or specific armor sets.

There were still people who insisted on zerker gear, but I run dungeons with anyone. And we succeeded. There were a couple of harder paths. But you could run one of the easier paths every day for tokens.

Until my guild takes down the Vale Guardian, I can’t agree with this.

Once we do, I’ll stop complaining. lol

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

I’d like to see a way for me to be on even footing. It’s not Anet’s fault I live in Australia. But Anet is selling the game Internationally. They are certainly willing to take money from Australians. So if there’s a reward that’s significantly harder for me to get, I’d like an alternate way to access it.

That’s your answer? Just because some people have crappy ping or a bad computer or whatever else, they need to make all the rewards available to those? So they should put everything as a possible drop from moa in Queensdale? I mean that’s something absolutely everyone can do. Nice logic.

No we should all leave the game. That’s what we should. Leave 5% of you raiders left in the game, so that you can be happy. Until there is no more game because I don’t believe there are enough of you to support an entire development team.

My answer is an alternate path for content that, by Anet’s own admission, most people aren’t going to finish. And if that’s the case, they’re taking developer resources, which are spread thin already, to add something to the game of no value whatsoever, to people who play like me.

Just as you can lobby for your hard core content that a small percentage of the player base will ever finish, I can lobby for rewards from that content to be available to me, if I really won’t enjoy that content. The precedent is there, making dungeon rewards available to SPvP players, so why not?

I’d rather do a PvP reward track than raid. Or even play WvW to get it. I don’t love the idea of raids, and if I feel like I can’t get what I want in the game without doing something time consuming that I can’t stand, I will in fact, feel disenfranchised.

Maybe you personally don’t care that players feel this way but Anet should.

So everyone knows me as White Knight #1, I figured I’d throw in a bit of constructive criticism. The kind of stuff that annoys me.

One of my issues right now is the way achievements are handled in story instances. Sometimes you see that golden icon over your bar and sometimes you don’t, with no rhyme or reason. Sometimes you get certain achievements and sometimes you don’t with no rhyme or reason. It makes running achievements more stressful because I’m repeating stories or looking for an achievement that I can’t get, and it doesn’t indicate I can’t get it.

I won’t give out spoilers specifically but there are several specific instances where I still had the golden icon for an achievement I could no longer achieve and had no way of knowing that I couldn’t achieve it. I wasted about an hour looking around for an NPC that wasn’t there, because the clue was misleading. This really annoys me.

Another issue that came up tonight is for a specific achievement…Friend of Frogs in Tangled Depths. In order to get this achievement, you need to complete every event necessary to prepare the beetles for the upcoming fight against the chak garent. In fact the idea behind the whole thing is sort of cool, helping the beetles hatch, escorting them, feeding them, herding them, this is a great chain. I needed one single event for the achievement.

The earlier events in the chain are long and drawn out. So I’m suffering through them (particularly one of them where you have to kill Zintl for ages and none of them drop loot or give XP). I thought the event would never end.

I get to the event I need and it ended in about 30 seconds, so fast I didn’t get credit for it, even though I was there for the whole event. By the time I figured out what to do, the event was over.

Why such a disparity in event duration, to the point where one was long and worthless, and took tons of effort and one finished so fast, I didn’t even have enough time to interpret it. I lost the achievement, and now I have to either wait around until it spawns again, or come back another time. It was the last achievement I needed.

These are the kind of thing that affects my game.

I love the old fashioned type of adventure game, where I’m searching for stuff. I really liked the Karka hunt in Lion’s Arch. But there are those types of achievements in this game that are completely wasted on me, because there really is no good way to figure out how to do them without going to Dulfy and I don’t want to go to Dulfy.

And that might be part of the problem. If Anet is making these achievements with the idea everyone is going to look them up, in my case they’re wrong. I don’t want to look it up, which means I want the clues to be able to put me on the path to figuring out the achievement.

It’s sort of like the old Trolls End JP. The entrance is the well really wasn’t something you could figure out. You had to be told about it, or you had to stumble into it (perhaps literally).

I’d like to see the more puzzle oriented achievements be actual puzzles that there’s a chance to figure out. There are some in the game, but it could do with more. And every time there’s some ridiculously unfair achievement that is so misleading as to have a negative clue,. it makes me reluctant to try the next achievement that comes out…because I hate wasting my in game time.

Collections are pretty much my end game now. It’s end game for the rest of us. It’s supposed to be difficult.

Harper.4173:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Astralporing.1957:

Harper.4173:

If however that reward is bought – or obtained in through an easier process – then yes – it is devalued because your statement is put under doubt – did he earn it the hard way or just bought it?
Is he good or not?

Maybe you don’t see it, but you are again reinforcing what i said before. That statement is only important where there are people that did not do that content (because in a game where there are no casuals and everyone is a succesful raider, everyone has that mini, so having it is no statement at all). It is also important only when other people care. It’s not for you – it is for others. So, in the end, you need people that can’t do that content, and you need them to care that you can. Without it, your reward is meaningless.

I on the other hand do not need such statements to show to others. The stuff i wear is for myself, and the only judgment i might make about others based on how they are dressed is about their style and aestethics. And the meaning of the reward lies purely in how useful it is to me (statwise, or aestethically).

(also, as someone mentioned your argument is weakened by the fact that you can get carried at those encounters)

Actually, I can see Harper’s point.

In GW, there were a lot of titles. Legendary Guardian and Legendary Vanquisher meant you’d completed all the hard more story missions and cleared all the hard mode zones, respectively. I enjoyed displaying those titles, because it meant something to me. I did not care how many people had them, I only cared that I did.

Is it possible there are players who want to lord it over other players? Sure, there are all kinds in game just as in life. However, I don’t think one can accurately generalize that desire to the entire hardcore demographic. You can say that all players who want exclusive rewards in hard content are looking to feel superior to those who don’t have those rewards. However, there are many cases where you’d be wrong.

Thank you – finally – someone gets it.

I don’t hate casual players – I don’t want them to be “second rate citizens” or not to have cool items.
At the same time I want the rewards associated with hard content that I beat to remain hard to obtain – because otherwise the statement they make on my behalf becomes null and void.

I don’t mind if others have said rewards provided they work as hard as I did to obtain them.
I do mind them being handed out through other easier or more comfortable ways – because it means my display of said unique rewards no longer holds its intended message.

I wouldn’t mind titles given to people who achieve hard content. But unique skins or the only way to get a specific class of armor…that I do mind. Raids are too hard to lock stuff like that behind.

I mean a WvW guy with a lot of characters would find legendary armor very appealing maybe. But he might hate raiding. Seems to me like a bad deal for that player.

Soon.5240:

thewaterguy.4796:

….the game is in a great space as it is….

Lol.

How may full servers in NA are there? How many new servers did Anet have to add to handle the swarm of new players attracted the the wonderful HoT expansion?

They don’t have to add servers, because of the mega server. If you’re going to attack the game whenver you can, you should at least be aware of how the game works.

The servers being full or not full now are predicated only and completely on WvW numbers. Since less people play that format and server numbers are baseed SOLELY on that, that isn’t going to indicate anything. I don’t know anyone, including Anet, who thinks WvW is doing great.

Other servers are spawned as needed. There’s no way to tell how many servers are going at one time and if people claim they can, I’d sure like to know how.

But I know for a fact there are many servers in each zone, because often my guild is taxi-ing each other to other zones and we’re all on different servers.

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

Because people like getting them.

The questio of why developers add rewards to their content was a follow up to the previous phrase. If, as it is claimed, content alone can keep people interested for years, and it doesn’t matter where the reward will come from (so content doesn’t have exclusive reward) why even add the reward in the first place? After all, content alone should drive the game and those who want a challenge should be happy with playing their challenging content and not need some rewards to go with it.

Where do you draw the line on how hard something is to obtain? Or the alternative is to give everything to everyone, then why not adding Twilight as a loot drop from moas? Or give it as a level 10 reward. I mean according to posters, where someone gets a reward shouldn’t matter, that’s what is being said to me.

First of all, I never said content alone is enough to keep people playing. It’s enough to keep SOME people playing.

But probably not enough by percentage to run an MMO. This is particularly true due to the number of people who run content they don’t enjoy just to get rewards. I didn’t try for Liadri too hard because I found unenjoyable. I don’t play MMOs to solo.

But there are people who hated the content but tried it over and over again until they got that mini. I’m thinking that you get enough of that and some people will stop playing.

See, I enjoy the new zones and I can play them for ages. I don’t even think about the rewards. But I’m not a typical player.

The more rewards in the game beyond the realm of most people to get, the higher the threshold, the more people will start to question if this game is the game for them. That’s just simple human nature.

You didn’t say it, others did.

People are asking for alternative ways to get the rewards, I get that. But one “alternative” might still be hard for some people, just see precursors, the alternative (crafting) is still hard to do for most people, maybe harder than mystic forging it or getting it as drop. So the next question is, how many alternatives do you wish to be added in order to be happy? And where do you draw the line on how easy obtaining the reward is?

I mean, why not add all the rewards as level up things or add them as drops from moas. Something everyone can do, then nobody will complain because they have bad ping, bad computer or cannot perform 100% for reasons beyond their power to fix. Would that make players happy?

I don’t mind hard rewards. I do mind rewards gated behind content that is problematical for people that live in my area of the world. It’s not like six of us alone in a room. There are tens of thousands of people, perhaps even more, who play from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Phillipines, all over the place, really. There are tons of people who live in rural areas around the world who have lousy connections. I’m sure we have enough numbers to gain a bit of consideration. More than 10% of guys are colorbind. It makes red circles a problem.

I’d like to see a way for me to be on even footing. It’s not Anet’s fault I live in Australia. But Anet is selling the game Internationally. They are certainly willing to take money from Australians. So if there’s a reward that’s significantly harder for me to get, I’d like an alternate way to access it.

Dungeon rewards were given to people in PvP, even though dungeons are quite easy to do. Raids aren’t as easy as dungeons but the only way to get raid rewards is raid.

I broke down and I’m going to start raiding with my guild a week from this Tuesday. I’m not happy that I’m doing this. It’s a form of capitulation. It’s also an issue for a casual guild like mine, because it’s going to create haves and have nots. Not everyone in my guild is good enough, well enough, or has a good enough connection to raid. It makes me sad that some people will be denied this.

My hope is that a group of us get good enough to cycle some people in who have less than ideal conditions. But the bottom line is, I don’t think this is good for my guild. I don’t particularly think it’s great for the game.

I don’t know what percentage of people raid, but if 10% of the population are raiders because they enjoy raiding and 20% of the population feel disenfranchised and left out, then I don’t think it’s a good decision on Anet’s part.

That said, I don’t have those numbers. I don’t know what percentage raid and what percentage have stopped logging in or play less do to a perception that the game is moving in a direction and not taking people with it.

This thread should be evidence that a least some people feel disenfrachised.

And I’m not even one of them, because I really like the new zones. I really like the metas, particularly VB and DS. And I really like the elite specializations I’ve played with so far.

What I don’t like is feeling pressured to do content to get something specific because I want it, even though I feel I won’t enjoy the content.

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

Because people like getting them.

The questio of why developers add rewards to their content was a follow up to the previous phrase. If, as it is claimed, content alone can keep people interested for years, and it doesn’t matter where the reward will come from (so content doesn’t have exclusive reward) why even add the reward in the first place? After all, content alone should drive the game and those who want a challenge should be happy with playing their challenging content and not need some rewards to go with it.

Where do you draw the line on how hard something is to obtain? Or the alternative is to give everything to everyone, then why not adding Twilight as a loot drop from moas? Or give it as a level 10 reward. I mean according to posters, where someone gets a reward shouldn’t matter, that’s what is being said to me.

First of all, I never said content alone is enough to keep people playing. It’s enough to keep SOME people playing.

But probably not enough by percentage to run an MMO. This is particularly true due to the number of people who run content they don’t enjoy just to get rewards. I didn’t try for Liadri too hard because I found unenjoyable. I don’t play MMOs to solo.

But there are people who hated the content but tried it over and over again until they got that mini. I’m thinking that you get enough of that and some people will stop playing.

See, I enjoy the new zones and I can play them for ages. I don’t even think about the rewards. But I’m not a typical player.

The more rewards in the game beyond the realm of most people to get, the higher the threshold, the more people will start to question if this game is the game for them. That’s just simple human nature.

maddoctor.2738:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

because they give meaning to what you do.

Tell me please should they allow Moa in Queensdale drop Twilight? Harvesting Potato nodes giving Juggernaut? Killing Embers dropping a full Incinerator? I hope your answer is no so you do understand why certain items need to be more rare, harder to acquire than others.

Each item is given a “value” by the devs, how hard it will be to obtain, meaning how rare it will be. If they didn’t do that we would have any of the above things I mentioned, after all since nobody should care how the other player got their reward, why not by killing rabbits in Metrica?

No, but a moa is Queensdale can drop a precursor, and has always been able to.

So? Let’s add everything on the moa loot table? After all, why should we care how someone got their reward right? And content alone, by being “fun” enough can keep players busy for 1-2 years regardless of the rewards, since they are meaningless. Why do game developers add rewards in their content I wonder.

Because people like getting them.

Some people have a built in advantage in certain content. I don’t have the Liadri mini. I might have been able to get it, but it would have taken me a lot longer than most, because I’m in Australia. The ping is a lot higher. By the time I got around to it, you couldn’t cheese it with lifesteal anymore.

But the fact is, for the longest time you could cheese it with lifesteal. Take the Dungeon Master title. I beat every dungeon by playing them. I didn’t cheese them. But there are people who have the same titles paying for runs.

There’s very little content in this game where everyone who has the rewards for it does it themselves in the first place. Does a guy who pays for dungeon runs deserve the same dungeon title that I got?

What about parents who have their kids do some of the hard stuff for them? Do they deserve the same rewards.

Rewards in an MMO are different than rewards in say sport, because we’re not all on an even playing field to begin with. I’m colorblind AND in Australia. Last I checked, there’s no colorblind mode in this game. Is that fair? Should I be denied any reward because I’m colorblind? It’s not like other games don’t have a color blind mode.

If I lived in the US, and had a good connection and I wasn’t colorblind, I could do a lot more than I do now, and I can do a lot now.

But I don’t live in the US. So every single Australian, in fact everyone in the Oceanic terroritory is at a disadvantage. I’m never going to get gold rewards on many of the adventures. In fact, I’m pretty sure from where I live it would be impossible to get gold reward on some of the adventures, no matter how well you play.

Yes, it’s an MMO. We’re already playing at different levels with different computers, in different parts of the world. Why should anyone not close to the servers be penalized for being in a different location?

The Olympics need to be fair. MMOs really don’t and seldom are. The only area where I can see rewards being unique are SPvP because it’s a competitive environment, assuming you’re talking about esports. But even there, a percentage of the world is starting out at a disadvantage and has to work harder to receive the same result.

I guess my point of view is different, because my community is and always has been my guild. From my point of view, server communties are too variable for them to be my community.

I wouldn’t walk into my local pub and start talking with everyone there, because most people in my local would have no interest in me at all. On the other hand, I can go to a local pub on trivia night and have fun with people I know are a bit more nerdy. We have a great time.

My guild is good because I get to choose who the people are around me. And yes, I have friends not in the guild, just like I have friends that don’t come to trivia night, but I prefer to be in control to some degree of the people that are around me. I want to know these people are going to enjoying hanging out with me and I’m going to enjoy hanging out with them.

Maybe it’s because I’m older but I don’t want to randomly interface with say a bunch of teenagers in map chat, because the odds are we’ll have completely different interests. I’ll think they’re rude and they’ll think I’m an old.

Soon.5240:

Raziel.4216:

Soon.5240:

thewaterguy.4796:

….the game is in a great space as it is….

Lol.

How may full servers in NA are there? How many new servers did Anet have to add to handle the swarm of new players attracted the the wonderful HoT expansion?

Do you have any inside info related to server capacity? Can you confirm without a shadow of a doubt that Anet did not increase overall server capacity?
Megaflow system neglects the need for more servers anyway.
Try again.

You’re rich.

Lets suppose that the game is wildly popular and has attracted so many new players that Anet had to revise the server capacity! The servers a overflowing with new players! There are queue times just to get into the PvE maps! All is wonderful!

Don’t you think they would advertise it???

I mean seriously, if your servers are being flooded by a huge influx of new players, because the expansion is so fun, this is exactly the type of news that you shout from the roof tops!

Two rules of logic in the absence of available information.

1) Occam’s Razor
2) Law of the Excluded Middle

Look’em up.

Nah, they won’t advertise it. They said not long ago that there were more people currently in SPvP in Guild Wars 2 than there ever was in Guild Wars 1. People simply tore the statement apart, misconstrued it, and said a bunch of things that ended up being negative.

A lot of games don’t post when they’re doing well for a very good reason. Because if they expect a dropoff, they’ll look bad for only reporting it when it’s good. Not saying anything for population is the safest way for a company to go.

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

because they give meaning to what you do.

Tell me please should they allow Moa in Queensdale drop Twilight? Harvesting Potato nodes giving Juggernaut? Killing Embers dropping a full Incinerator? I hope your answer is no so you do understand why certain items need to be more rare, harder to acquire than others.

Each item is given a “value” by the devs, how hard it will be to obtain, meaning how rare it will be. If they didn’t do that we would have any of the above things I mentioned, after all since nobody should care how the other player got their reward, why not by killing rabbits in Metrica?

No, but a moa is Queensdale can drop a precursor, and has always been able to.

Hearts aren’t actually the quests in the game. Dynamic events are. Hearts were created to keep people in the areas where dynamic events spawn. Always prioritize dynamic events over hearts. In end game zones hearts don’t exist at all and it’s all dynamic events.

On the rabbit quest, to use one example, there are other ways to get that heart without carrying food. For example you can scare the rabbits.

In fact, even if you’re carrying food, you can hit F to scare the rabbits. Plus the foot itself gives you a speed buff if you hit one. Also dodging works and will move you to your destination a bit faster.

In answer to your question, no there aren’t a lot of annoying hearts like that anyway, but usually, if something seems really annoyingly difficult, there’s another way to do it.

This is probably my least favorite mechanic in the game. It’s unnecessarily punishing.

Brimstar.9036:

Wow, its a pretty far off in its figures they wanted. This tells me this game isn’t living up to expectation for many people. Its sad but the numbers don’t lie, regardless of building new systems and what not, this was their 1 chance to bring back customers..its extremely hard to come back in this industry if you don’t succeed 2nd try.

Who’s numbers don’t lie? The actual numbers haven’t been announced yet. This is like a sports guy saying a specific team is going to win before the game starts. The numbers don’t lie.

But these aren’t the numbers.

Dinks.2478:

Morfedel.4165:

rgraze.5169:

Ok I Did It.2854:

Because the hype train got massively derailed, no matter what anyone says the lack of WvW and the push for Esports hurt players who play these formats, PvE was 4 maps.

I personally enjoy HoT, but it was not an expansion, it was paid for DLC, but from reading the blog posts from Anet, it seems they are working on a new expansion, so maybe we will see a full expansion this time.

Also what is hurting is really replay ability on the new maps, I made Nevermore at the weekend and honestly I have no incentive to go back to the HoT maps anymore, ive completed them all 100times over, newer players reading these forums or reading in game, who haven’t bought HoT are really seeing no reason too.

If the last expansion was not full then what will this full expansion cost?

You need to remember a lot of this expansion was setting up new systems: elite specializations, masteries, etc.

Now the backbone of those systems are set up, they will have more time to develop more content. I think we can expect a higher content count next expansion due to this.

While I understand what you are saying I feel like anet may have lost the trust of a lot of people with the way they marketed and priced HoT as a full expansion. Most people wouldn’t consider all of that infrastructure as expansion content, including myself, and this leads to HoT being pretty empty. Couple that in with all the things that HoT was supposed to come with that turned into “It’s coming after launch!” some of which we are still waiting for and there is a pretty nasty taste in your mouth.

I don’t know that most people think that deeply about it. They buy something they play it, they either play it enough for they don’t. That’s it for most people. Then again most people will never post on the forums.

Anet was very clear, crystal clear, before launch about the expansion content being lighter but that entire systems have been redefined so they could move forward. They said it directly.

They never said this is a huge expansion. But the amount of work that goes into redeveloping core systems is still work that needs to be paid for. Anyone paying attention should have gone into the xpac with open eyes.

Yes I think some people do think/feel like you said they do, but I’d wager it’s a much smaller percentage of the player base than you think it is.

Easily and Quickly.2187:

I just did map completion in Dragon Stand on my level 18 elementalist.

You’re my hero. lol

Aidan Savage.2078:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Danikat.8537:

Gaile Gray.6029:

PopeUrban.2578:

I just like to say “sticks”

But “I bopped him with a stick” sounds so much less epic than “I smited him with my staff!”

Don’t you mean smote?

I do! But when people give me funny looks for “staves” I don’t want to even think about entering Smote Country.

Well, you could always Dhuum them to a life of misery.

Vayne.8563:

dace.8019:

Vayne.8563:

Sorry, but both are acceptable.

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/staff

I prefer staves myself and on rare occassions when the word pops up in something I’m editing, I recommend changing it to staves, but staffs is not incorrect according to the dictionary. Staves is simply preferred.

As an editor you should know how to interpret a dictionary definition.

The use of “staffs” is applicable only to the first definition but not to the second, which defines the type of staff in question.

I do know, and I’ve researched it before. I just used the first link I found without paying too much attention. Both are considered correct.

Both arent considered correct vayne as far as the BLTC listing. Simple reading would point that out. Both being correct in their own respective contexts does not mean they’re interchangeable.

The FIRST definition applies to “staff” as far as it means the human resource. THAT context means the plural form is only correct when you’re talking about people.
IE:
-Staff is a single group of people
-By extensive, “staffs” is a group of groups

The second definition is the one the game should be using, one that refers to an item. As a result, the correct plural word is staves, not staffs.

For a guy trying hard to correct me, you should read more carefully what I wrote.

I didn’t even read the link carefully having researched this before for other reasons., So I picked the first google thing I came to and I linked it, making the assumption it said what was said in other sites. This isn’t my job. I don’t get paid to check here. I post quickly and if I make a mistake, I’m happy to admit it. Not reading that site was a mistake.

However, in this very thread, other people have backed me up with other sites that have said staffs is acceptable. I don’t really have to research stuff twice, once I learn it. I had to research it after having an argument with an author using it, years ago. I was editing a story for them. I preferred Staves, they wanted Staffs and she was perfectly in her right to use it, as a bit of research determined.

I didn’t even try to read the site I linked.

It’s very hard to recruit people to a small guild because there are a lot of small guilds all playing catch up. Everyone comes into the game and their first thought is, I can run a guild. It would be cool.

Running a guild is work and dedication and not for the faint of heart. I do it and I wouldn’t wish it on most people. I break my back keeping that guild going some months. But I do it because the reward is great.

That said, my guild has 250 members. How do I recruit? At this point, mostly word of mouth, but occasionally I’ll say something in map chat.

Running this guild is a full time job. But it’s part of my game. There are times when it feels pretty thankless. But then it gets better again.

The other problem is joining a bigger guild gets you guild mission success more often, more buffs more guild advantages.

The stuff you usually get from a small guild, you can get from adding people to your friend’s list. All it really gives you is a chat channel.

zeonozero.5860:

HoT is by no means casual friendly

You may join a map at whatever time you want to, but don’t be surprised if you go into a finished or not started Dragon’s Stand, a Verdant Brink in the nighttime boss phases and see nobody on the map, an Auric Basin with saving Tarir meta only to find that none of the doors are even broken down, or a Tangled Depths that has all of it’s events finished in 20-30 minutes.

Want to unlock your elite specialization? There are some channel HP’s for an easy 10 in a few cases on each map (except for Dragon’s Stand, which is all channeling. Advice is to use teleport to friend to the map or just run there). The rest? Better be prepared to fight a champion and possibly some adds.

I heard you wanted to make one of the new legendaries. Congratulations! These are awesome new weapons. Too bad you’ll have to open (assuming a 1/3 chance, and excluding Dragon’s Stand random crystalline ore amounts [1,3,10]) about 750 of the corresponding “chests” in each zone! Exciting I know! Oh but don’t worry, you can get 15 of each currency by doing the personal story missions in those zones…

You excited for raids! I was too! Took our guild a less than a week to figure out all the mechanics, comps, and finally execution to beat it. That was hard. Now on a good casual run (no wipes, minimal afk time) we finish in 35-40 minutes.

I’m pretty sure I could come up with more instances, but those are some right off the top of my head

Legendary weapons were never meant to be casual content, so I don’t really think bringing them up in the context of casual is fair play. I mean when they first came out, at launch you had to do WvW as part of your world complete. Not casual at all.

As for the elite specializations, you’re really pushing the truth there. So you can get about 220 points from core tyria, and you need 4 hero points then to completely it in HoT. If you con’t insist on using all HoT hero points, and you do world completion in core Tyria, I can point you to four easy to get hero points in Verdant Brink and boom, you’re done with your elite specialization without ever having to fight a champ.

The hero point on the floor, right out side where you enter is only vets. There is an easy to reach commune off Mallagen’s Waypoint and two more that you can just fall down to theyr’e in little niches in the wall. If you have Nuhoch Wallow’s trained you can just port down to them.

No champions. 1 vet and two communes. There’s another commune up with the Wyverns, so you’d have to kill a couple of adolescent wyverns to get that one. Easily doable if you’re careful.

dace.8019:

Vayne.8563:

Sorry, but both are acceptable.

http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/staff

I prefer staves myself and on rare occassions when the word pops up in something I’m editing, I recommend changing it to staves, but staffs is not incorrect according to the dictionary. Staves is simply preferred.

As an editor you should know how to interpret a dictionary definition.

The use of “staffs” is applicable only to the first definition but not to the second, which defines the type of staff in question.

I do know, and I’ve researched it before. I just used the first link I found without paying too much attention. Both are considered correct.

Blackmoon.6837:

I fear you guys are simply reading the title rather than expanding on the points being made.

This isn’t about hardcore versus casual play. Nor is it about catering to solo over group play.

It’s about introducing a system that balances solo & group play equally. You can still have difficulty with such a system, for example; splitting a quest line into three directions on the map – each direction being a different difficulty. So even if people aren’t around to scale the quests up, you’d still have your easy/med/hard etc.

Again, these are broad ideas and require more depth to hash out a proper mechanic. Yet given today’s industry, it really doesn’t seem like a far fetched notion.

HoT, currently, is broken. You could lfg, yet the emphasis is on swapping to meta events only and losing your map exp as a result. Trying to get a chain going for the smaller events is a joke. You either have to lucky by being on at the right time or you’re screwed. That’s not a ‘play it my own way’ kind of deal.

Or you could make some friends or join a guild, and play with people. No, I don’t think I’m misreading what you’re saying. I think MMOs should focus on the single player experience and I think they have to be very careful on how they balance the single player experience.

There are a whole lot of people who walked out of Guild Wars 2 after heroes were introduced. They simply couldn’t find people to party with, and they didn’t want to play alone. For a lot of people heroes was a mistake. I’m not one of those people, but then, Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Vayne.8563:

You just have to train yourself to stop just before your endurance runs out. It’s not really that big a deal…or shouldn’t be.

Big deal? No. Confusing to people who earned it earlier? Yes.

But that’s mostly because people call it “infinite gliding” when the mastery is actually “advanced gliding”.

Description:

Learn to glide with such efficiency that you no longer use endurance to stay up in the air, only to perform lean techniques.

Patch Notes

Fixed a bug that could allow players to glide indefinitely without having trained Advanced Gliding Mastery. Deploying your glider now requires a small amount of gliding endurance.

Most people don’t read bug notes and the current description is ambiguous about whether you need endurance to start gliding or not. They probably should update the in-game text.

tl;dr think of it as “Uninterrupted Gliding” not “Infinite” and it will be easier to get used to.

I understood it just fine. lol

rchu.8945:

perfectly fine to totally ignored WvW updates and reveal to the community it was left out prior to HOT release… After people bought the game partially that had a interest in receiving those updates. Months after HOT release, only PvE and sPvP received major updates, WvW got nothing.

No thanks from me to these biased developers.

Do you really not believe the WvW updates don’t need a lot more work to get done than the PvE or PvP ones. WvW doesn’t need a bandaid it needs a transplant. So it takes longer.

Sure that sucks. Doesn’t change the reality of the situation though.