Guild Wars 2

Khisanth.2948:

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

Gliding as the last mastery would have been idiotic. That doesn’t justify having completely useless masteries. The issue isn’t a matter of where they are in the mastery line but the fact that those exist at all. They are useless fillers.

Well they’re not useless, but they are gates.

Fillers are useless things are are only useful to their creators. They provide nothing useful to the consumer.

The design issue was to not make them must have, so that people who didn’t want to grind wouldn’t complain. They’re a success because you think they’re not essentially.

Are we even playing the same game? How are they not must haves? How am I going to get poison mastery without Itzel language or blazing mushroom(mushroom isn’t useless but it isn’t useful either)? If they had allowed people to pick whatever mastery they wanted rather than this forced ordering I wouldn’t care what sort of crappy and useless masteries they add in there as fillers.

Yes we’re playing the same game. You know, this isn’t a shy community and there’s very very little complaining about useless masteries. I may have seen three threads. That’s not exactly a landslide. When people are bothered by something here they let you know.

Even in those three threads, there wasn’t much traction for it. It seems like a non-issue to most of us. I’m really sorry this is something you don’t like but that doesn’t actually make it a problem for the game.

By the same token the 400 point elite unlock was a huge problem for the game, and the fans let Anet know about it and Anet changed it.

So maybe we’re not playing the same game. You seem to be bothered by stuff that really isn’t a hot button issue to most.

Manasa Devi.7958:

Yeah, I was looking at that page when I made that post. It’s what inspired it.

So all the hullabaloo is about loot I don’t want or need without what I play games for to begin with: interesting gameplay? Because I haven’t found any in that area. Everywhere I go people do stuff with lots of sound and fury, and I’m tagging along doing pretty much nothing at all because why bother, the game plays itself for me on a full map with driven people. It’s embarrassing to think that’s a GW2 area.

Funny I think the game play is quite interesting. If you’re doing nothing at all you’re leeching. Someone has to do the work. It’s funny you think that something a bunch of people are enjoying is embarrassing.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Vayne.8563:

- snip -

All MMOs suck today because too many people who play these games don’t want to think. That’s the real issue.

I won’t get into the many similarities between GW and an MMO other than to say that there are a lot. In fact, if you want to use pro wrestling as part of an analogy, you should have used amateur wrestling as the counterpoint. That’s a lot closer to the similarities/differences between GW/GW2 than comparing it to football (either sort). Or maybe pro wrestling and reality TV. That would work, too.

As to your analysis of what’s happened to MMO’s, I wish I could disagree.

Well amateur wrestling and pro wrestling couldn’t be more different, in spite of their similarties. Pro wrestling is story driven, and not actually a sport at all. Amateur wrestling is a sport.

But the problem with compared stuff across long periods of time is that kitten changes. The whole industry has changed, even if Guild Wars 1 was an MMO.

But the reason for citing that it’s not an MMO isn’t because they’re similar or different. It’s a fact that running an MMO is much harder and more intensive than running a lobby game. So resources have to be adjusted for that.

And if making these maps takes five times as long as making the old style 2d pathed maps, then it’s unrealistic to expect as many of them.

Also by having heroes in those games, Anet doesn’t have to worry if there are players in maps. Everyone can solo most things with heroes. But adding a bunch more maps in an MMO means the population is far more spread out. You can’t always depend on heroes.

If I were the only guy in the Cursed Shore I’d hate it. I never had that problem in Guild Wars 1. The point is it’s a whole different way of thinking, in the way that professional wrestling and amateur wrestling are completely different ways of thinking.

Hang out until the next patch on Tuesday some of this stuff is changing.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Vayne.8563:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Raziel.4216:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Raziel.4216:

LOL, more valid than one’s a full game and one’s an add-on.
Let’s compare D2: LoD with D3 next, or D3: RoS with D2 next.

Factions was both an add-on and a stand-alone game. It used the same engine, many of the same skills, the same classes and the same mechanics. So what if it had a leveling area. That invalidates comparison? Maybe in the minds of those looking for reasons to be dismissive.

Such as the devs who made the game? the very definition of expansion? or the comparisson with any other expansion out there?
Ah let’s ignore the ones who made’em, we know better right?

I’m not stating that Factions was an expansion, even though it has some things in common with expansions. If you choose to respond again, consider that fact first. You’ve yet to provide a single reason why a comparison between GW2: HoT and GW: Factions is invalid. Clue: “Because one is an expansion and the other isn’t” is not a valid reason. That’s the issue I’m talking about, not some kittening contest over the word expansion.

@ Vayne: We’re not discussing the merits of Factions v. HoT at all, just whether there can even be a comparison. Of course there can, but it looks like this poster is determined to hold onto the fallacy that because playing Factions did not require one to own GW and had a leveling area, that no comparison is possible.

Well here’s the problem with the comparison, having nothing to do with it being an expansion. Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO and Guild Wars 2 is. That means a whole lot more time being spent on stuff you didn’t really have to worry about in Guild Wars 1.

In many ways, Guild Wars 1 was just a lobby game. You met in an outpost, you got your party together, and you went out into the world. A lot of the strengths of that game are built around the fact that you knew exactly how big parties were likely to be. You had heroes. You could have heroes and henchmen, as an example, because that still meant 8 people in an instance. Could you imagine the lag if everyone had seven heroes here?

So comparing a lobby game expansion to an MMO expansion isn’t really something that’s all that fair.

Then you have to take into account the fact that there was no Z axis and a lot of stuff was pathed. That makes creating the game much easier as well. It was faster to create the maps used in Guild Wars 1. You can compare them all you like but I firmly believe that making maps for GW 1 was far simpler than making maps for Guild Wars 2. That these maps take far longer.

And dynamic events are harder to write and you need more of them than traditional quests.

There are so many differences between the games, from being an MMO to having a Z axis, to not pathing everything to not having traditional quests, to having things scale, to having a trading post, that Guild Wars 1 really didn’t have to worry about.

Sure you can compare the games. But you’re comparing games from different times, of different complexities, and even different types of games.

The only thing these games really have in common is the world they’re set in and the company that makes them. Beyond that, I’m 100% sure that Guild Wars 2 requires far more work to create content for.

Yes, those are things the two offerings had that made them different. They also had a large number of things that were similar or analogous, like characters, gear skins, mobs and elite content (just to name a few). Is it fair to compare them? The ultimate point of such comparisons is in determining value-for-money. In the end, though, that is going to come down, as Ill said, largely to what an individual likes — so such comparisons are best if made on an individual basis — X has a version of feature X which I liked, Y has a version of feature X that I dislike, etc. It may not be fair to ANet, but that is not my primary concern. I’m far more concerned about whether it’s fair to consumers to make such comparisons. I agree with you. I don’t think so, either. However, I’m not going to tell someone else he can’t, or say nothing when someone uses term lawyering to try to shut down discussion.

I don’t really buy this argument at all. If I go to a broadway show, I expect certain realities. If I go to an off broadway show, I expect different realities. If I go to a high school play, I expect different things as well.

If I watch a football match, I expect different things from watching pro wrestling even though they have similarities.

Having similarities isn’t really a good enough reason to compare stuff. My wife and I both have lungs and teeth but we’ve very different people.

The point is, you can obviously compare anything but if your expectations aren’t reasonable to start with, you set yourself up for failure. You don’t have to be fair to Anet, but you should be fair to yourself. Part of that starts with having reasonable expectations because if you don’t, you’re going to end up disappointed a lot of the time.

If you go into an MMO and expect expansions to be the same as the lobby game you bought eight years ago, you’re likely going to be disappointed. In fact, games have evolved and changed along those lines and the more people hold onto the past, the more disappointed they’re going to be.

Guild Wars 1 was a niche game, made at a time when you had to have a certain level of intelligence to play these games. Games in general are more mainstream now and the number and intelligence of the average player has gone down.

The same thing happened with pen and paper RPGs. When Dungeons and Dragons first came out, it was played only on college campuses. Princeton University had a D&D store in it. It filtered down to some specialized high schools, where some really smart kids played them.

But the more and more people played it, the dumber and dumber it got. The rules changed to take less power away from the players and give it to the system. If you were an original player, in those original games, you had a very different experience to later players. If you tried to get into later games, they were very different than the earlier games. And I could compare that original basic D&D to what came later, but there’s no real point, because they were very different games.

The same is true here. Guild Wars 1 was populated by a very narrow segment of the gaming population. As soon as Anet wanted to make the game more main stream, they ran into problems. Hearts were added because people couldn’t figure out the dynamic event system, even though I loved it without the hearts. The NPE was introduced because people couldn’t figure out what to do. I came from a generation of gamers where figuring out what to do was the game. But I can’t really expect those games to exist on the same level, because only a very few people would play them.

For one thing, there are far more games now and a lot of people won’t stay around long enough to have to figure something out.

Another difference back then is that we didn’t really have so many sites like Dulfy out there, to get through content the day it comes out. There are people in my guild who run to Dulfy before they even attempt content. That didn’t happen back then either.

Sure you can compare anything you want. But it won’t change the reality of the genre or the industry. The gaming world has evolved. If you want to be frustrated, that’s your decision. It’s not going to change the genre.

All MMOs suck today because too many people who play these games don’t want to think. That’s the real issue.

echo.2053:

Vayne.8563:

no trading post or auction house. I’ll never go back to a game where I have to stand around hawking my wares in Spamadan.
.

whatt??!!! Must be crazy. Gw1 had a far more stable economy because people had to stop to sell. You also didn’t have deal with constant global undercutting to the point where you just merch everything. gw2 recipes had to be revamped just to have value.

I am not talking about the economy. I’m not worried about global undercutting. I’m worried about having fun while I play. Standing around Spamadan wasn’t fun for me.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Actually, Caithe has a wild hunt and the egg is her wylde hunt. Now, what we know from Wylde hunts is that before she has awakened she’s dreamt of something. We also know it’s not like a book or novel. Anyone who’s started a Sylvari knows what the dream of dreams is. It doesn’t give you complete pictures. It gives you tiny snippets.

So, we have a character who gets tiny snippets of dream. There’s nothing unlikely about her knowing that there’s a place the egg has to get to which is the jungle. At the same time, there’s nothing unlikely knowing that she’s missing information either, because that’s how the dream has worked. That part isn’t unreasonable, since we haven’t spoken to her about it. She knew the egg had to get to the jungle. She knew she had to see it there somehow. She didn’t know how it would work out. And if the egg is her wylde hunt we’re not even sure it’s done yet, since the egg itself is still there. There might be more coming with this.

The Rata Novus part about the dragon weakness was absolutely the weakest part of the story. That long side trip to Rata Novus only to find out every dragon have a weakness was very weak in and of itself. It was a terrible excuse for a big side trip that really yielded us nothing. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess we haven’t seen the last of Rata Novus and there are things there Taimi will discover that will become useful in the future, but that was badly done in my opinion.

However, the figuring out we have to attack it’s mind isn’t really that hard to figure out. If the entire body of the jungle is the dragon and we can’t burn every try we have to attack it at its source. And we can’t get it’s body so we have to attack it’s mind. I’d have come to the same conclusion so I’m not sure why you think that’s some amazing leap of faith. We have to attack it at it’s core, because hacking off the body that can always regrow will do nothing.

Now I’m also not saying certain things couldn’t have been done better, but in my experience, that’s always the case with writing. I find stories I’ve loved that make perfect sense to me, and years later realize the opportunities I’ve missed.

One thing about writing that writers are told is to put something down, don’t think about it for months, leave it in a draw and come back to it. You can’t really do that with a game. That’s the problem.

For what it is supposed to be, driving the story forward, this is perfect acceptable with the single weak leak of the Rata Novus conclusion. And I still think that’s setting up something in the future.

Your efforts to justify those loopholes are really cute.

S-P-O-I-L-E-R-S

Yes, we don’t know why Caithe took egg deep into the jungle, yes, we didn’t ask her. Now, that the Mordy is defeated, there’s no reason not to know this. And yet, expansion doesn’t explain anything. We have characters near us, but they do not explain anything (“later, cub”).

I could agree that dragon’s weakness is not that hard to figure out. But that was just a guess. At the end of the story. Basically we went into the fire without a plan, guessed the solution at end and the tools to carry out this solution was just right here. How convenient. And that tool was just another loophole. Trahearne’s power to get us into dragon’s mind? How does that work? Don’t answer, we don’t know yet, but there must be some reasons, right? Which developers didn’t bother to give us. Again.

In conclusion, a lot of the things we do doesn’t have a reason, but somehow those actions conveniently helps us defeat the dragon.

Good writing.

The expansion doesn’t explain it, because everything doesn’t need to be explained. Maybe you haven’t read a lot of books recently but there are many things in books that happen today that aren’t explained. Hell, short fiction today doesn’t have ending half the time anymore, at least in the traditional sense of the word.

People have always complained about this game because not everything was given to them on a silver platter. But this I have to know it now, as if the story is over and Caithe is dead is just impatience. Caithe can come back into the story and explain herself or she may not. But everything really doesn’t have to be explained. That’s just not how it works.

Also patronizing me by calling my comments cute really doesn’t make your arguments any stronger.

As for the Trahearne thing, well, no we went in trying to rescue Trahearne and talking to him came upon the solution of how we might attack something you can’t attack phyiscally.

It’s really only an issue if you’re looking for issues and let me tell you, if you want to find issues you can find them with any story or book. The problem isn’t the things you’re mentioning.

You liked the length and depth of the original story. The new story is different because it’s faster and doesn’t go into the same level of moment to moment detail and you don’t like the change.

Neither the point about Caithe or the point about figuring out how to beat the dragon is bad writing.

A lot of people complained the personal story was too long or the personal story was too boring so Anet stream-lined it, mostly like as a reaction to complaints.

The same thing happened in Guild Wars 1. People complained Prophecies was too long and too slow, so Anet made Factions. The story was fast, the game was half the size, it could be finished much faster and you leveled far too fast. Why? Because they were reacting to people’s complaints. Anet has a tendency to over-react, and that’s why the story is the length it is. Within a shorter story, particularly one that’s continuing, you don’t to explain everything at the moment.

Would it be interesting to hear Caithe’s story. Sure it would. Is it required to hear Caithe’s story. No. Because she’s a character that drives the action forward and she served her purpose in the story.

Again, in a novel where you have hundreds of pages, you put everything. In shorter stories, you often leave people to figure stuff out. It’s not bad writing and it’s not uncommon.

As for the later cub comment, there’s nothing really to explain. We know what the revenant is, and the story of Rytlock and what happened to him is not the story of HoT. These side passages don’t get explored in shorter stories for a reason. Then they become longer stories, which some people complain about.

A lot of people who love story complained that the expansion was too fast and didn’t give enough detail. A lot of people who don’t like story complained the original story was too long.

And because a game isn’t a book, Anet has to balance it out between people who don’t want a longer story and people who do. There will always be a percentage of people dissatisfied with the balance.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Raziel.4216:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Raziel.4216:

LOL, more valid than one’s a full game and one’s an add-on.
Let’s compare D2: LoD with D3 next, or D3: RoS with D2 next.

Factions was both an add-on and a stand-alone game. It used the same engine, many of the same skills, the same classes and the same mechanics. So what if it had a leveling area. That invalidates comparison? Maybe in the minds of those looking for reasons to be dismissive.

Such as the devs who made the game? the very definition of expansion? or the comparisson with any other expansion out there?
Ah let’s ignore the ones who made’em, we know better right?

I’m not stating that Factions was an expansion, even though it has some things in common with expansions. If you choose to respond again, consider that fact first. You’ve yet to provide a single reason why a comparison between GW2: HoT and GW: Factions is invalid. Clue: “Because one is an expansion and the other isn’t” is not a valid reason. That’s the issue I’m talking about, not some kittening contest over the word expansion.

@ Vayne: We’re not discussing the merits of Factions v. HoT at all, just whether there can even be a comparison. Of course there can, but it looks like this poster is determined to hold onto the fallacy that because playing Factions did not require one to own GW and had a leveling area, that no comparison is possible.

Well here’s the problem with the comparison, having nothing to do with it being an expansion. Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO and Guild Wars 2 is. That means a whole lot more time being spent on stuff you didn’t really have to worry about in Guild Wars 1.

In many ways, Guild Wars 1 was just a lobby game. You met in an outpost, you got your party together, and you went out into the world. A lot of the strengths of that game are built around the fact that you knew exactly how big parties were likely to be. You had heroes. You could have heroes and henchmen, as an example, because that still meant 8 people in an instance. Could you imagine the lag if everyone had seven heroes here?

So comparing a lobby game expansion to an MMO expansion isn’t really something that’s all that fair.

Then you have to take into account the fact that there was no Z axis and a lot of stuff was pathed. That makes creating the game much easier as well. It was faster to create the maps used in Guild Wars 1. You can compare them all you like but I firmly believe that making maps for GW 1 was far simpler than making maps for Guild Wars 2. That these maps take far longer.

And dynamic events are harder to write and you need more of them than traditional quests.

There are so many differences between the games, from being an MMO to having a Z axis, to not pathing everything to not having traditional quests, to having things scale, to having a trading post, that Guild Wars 1 really didn’t have to worry about.

Sure you can compare the games. But you’re comparing games from different times, of different complexities, and even different types of games.

The only thing these games really have in common is the world they’re set in and the company that makes them. Beyond that, I’m 100% sure that Guild Wars 2 requires far more work to create content for.

Almighty Dervisher.6720:

vesica tempestas.1563:

the problem with some people today is they obsess over the details in isolation ‘omg feature x doesn’t suit my personal needs i need to complain online’’ they don’t look at the game as a complete product because they don’t get it about large cohesive gameworlds. The roots of this issue comes from a generation used to playing single player or selfish mmo style shooters etc here instant gratification is > all. In reality they are playing a mmorpg when that game genre has always been niche and they are probably not a natural customer of that niche. Tied with a self entitled mentality we all know well and you get poison.

Guild Wars account is about 8 1/4 years old. This kind of invalidates your entire paragraph. I’ve had over double the experience in Guild Wars 1 compared to Guild Wars 2, and i’d personally prefer to continue in GW1. Unfortunately, after the tragedy of the nerf hammer to my favorite profession, the character is no longer enjoyable to play.

I also have about double the amount of time in Guild Wars 1 than I do in Guild Wars 2, and in some ways Guild Wars 1 was a better game for me…but over all Guild Wars 2 is a better game for me.

The biggest problem I have with Guild Wars 1 was pathing, followed by no trading post or auction house. I’ll never go back to a game where I have to stand around hawking my wares in Spamadan.

So you know, that paragraph aside, both games have their advantages. Not everyone is going to like one or the other better.

Collections are part of the new end game. Pick something you like and go for it. Some of the elite specialization weapons are pretty cool.

They never said there would be no more LS. If you can find a quote where they said that, I’d be very interested.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Whether its boring or the most exciting thing since nude skydiving, no person with a quarter life can log on and routinely do 2 hour events. Not realistic.

It’s definitely harder for more casual players to access, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t access it. It’s simply less convenient. One person who works full time and has a family finally beat it today for the first time. Everything doesn’t have to be done today.

Soon.5240:

Vayne.8563:

Well they’re not useless, but they are gates. The design issue was to not make them must have, so that people who didn’t want to grind wouldn’t complain. They’re a success because you think they’re not essentially.

Wow. So this is the new measure of success in GW2.

I’ve been playing since the head start. I can remember approaching level 80 on my first toon and thinking, “Man, I’m not sure I want to reach level 80.”

Meaning, I was having so much fun playing the game, that I didn’t want it to “end”.

Obviously, I did reach level 80 and went on to spend several thousand hours in WvW. But the point is, I was enjoying the content of the game so much that I didn’t want to finish it.

Now, however, success in GW2 is apparently measured by how well Anet implemented non must-have achievements that you may or may not want to finish depending on the level of grind which you can or cannot tolerate.

head > desk

Would’t it have just been easier to design content that people love to play? So much so that they might, perhaps, even start another toon just for the purpose of playing the content over again?

Or am I being too naive?

Actually your experiences are perfectly valid, but they’re yours. Of course, different people have different experiences.

I never once found the HoT masteries grindy (where as I did find some of the old world masteries a bit grindy), but the HoT ones I haven’t. But there are people who do find them grindy. So yes, the game is designed for lots of people, and has to take lots of people into account.

There are plenty of people who have said right here on this forum that they find leveling boring. There are other people who love the leveling and level characters over and over. And there are people who find WvW boring.

The success of Guild Wars 2 is measured by how many people are enjoying it and how much money it generates.

I’m guessing it’s still relatively successful. I surely haven’t seen evidence to the contrary yet.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Raziel.4216:

DresdenAllblack.1249:

Thge whole problem with this comparison is EotN was poor as well. Compared to what came before it, Eye was lackluster at best, and we would find out months later that the devs heart was already set on GW2.

So I do not care if HoT stacks up, they both still lack. HoT should be compared to Factions or BC or any other ‘first’ expansion. When compared to any of those its hard to argue in its defense.

Those two are stand-alone campaigns that do not require the base game, Anet already told us the only expansion for GW1 is EoTN.

You want to quibble over a word, let’s quibble over why that word should matter. Factions expanded what one could do in the game for those who already owned GW. It was the first pay-for offering by Anet which did so, just as HoT is the first pay-for offering that does so for GW2. Whether it was billed as campaign or expansion does not matter in the slightest.

That said, there are other reasons not to compare the two, but those would include EotN as well. Factions and EotN were produced with different technology, in a different market, in what was arguably a different age as far as games go. That should be ample reason to look at such comparisons with a jaundiced eye. No need to play word games with no substance.

And yet a whole lot of people hated Factions. Factions was too fast. Too little story. They compared it to the base game and said it sucked. Half the story missions. Leveling too fast.

The Nightfall came out and people complained endlessly about heroes being introduced.

There really is no gold bullet. People complained about all those expansions too.

Khisanth.2948:

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

Gliding as the last mastery would have been idiotic. That doesn’t justify having completely useless masteries. The issue isn’t a matter of where they are in the mastery line but the fact that those exist at all. They are useless fillers.

Well they’re not useless, but they are gates. The design issue was to not make them must have, so that people who didn’t want to grind wouldn’t complain. They’re a success because you think they’re not essentially.

Ephemiel.5694:

And every single jumping puzzle in the game just became trivialized and you can bet countless players will find ways to skip most of the hard parts.

GJ.

Mesmer portals would like a word with you.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

Give me some examples and I can talk about it. Saying what you’re saying now has about as much value as me saying it’s good.

From my personal perspective the writing in the Personal story was weaker than say most of the open world writing. The writing in Living Story Season 2 is a bit better, but the writing/delivery in HoT is probably the best it’s been. What I’ve seen is improvement in story telling.

Let’s not forget, for a whole lot of people the PS is unbearably slow.

SPOILER ALERT

A few examples of loopholes:
Caithe takes egg for no reason. Then we are told, that it was some sort of a new vyld hunt to protect the egg. And while protecting it she moves towards Mordremoth? Yeah, it lets plot advance, but other than that it doesn’t makes any sense.
Dragon’s weakness. At the last moment, PC somehow figures out what its weakness is. For some reason.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Actually, Caithe has a wild hunt and the egg is her wylde hunt. Now, what we know from Wylde hunts is that before she has awakened she’s dreamt of something. We also know it’s not like a book or novel. Anyone who’s started a Sylvari knows what the dream of dreams is. It doesn’t give you complete pictures. It gives you tiny snippets.

So, we have a character who gets tiny snippets of dream. There’s nothing unlikely about her knowing that there’s a place the egg has to get to which is the jungle. At the same time, there’s nothing unlikely knowing that she’s missing information either, because that’s how the dream has worked. That part isn’t unreasonable, since we haven’t spoken to her about it. She knew the egg had to get to the jungle. She knew she had to see it there somehow. She didn’t know how it would work out. And if the egg is her wylde hunt we’re not even sure it’s done yet, since the egg itself is still there. There might be more coming with this.

The Rata Novus part about the dragon weakness was absolutely the weakest part of the story. That long side trip to Rata Novus only to find out every dragon have a weakness was very weak in and of itself. It was a terrible excuse for a big side trip that really yielded us nothing. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess we haven’t seen the last of Rata Novus and there are things there Taimi will discover that will become useful in the future, but that was badly done in my opinion.

However, the figuring out we have to attack it’s mind isn’t really that hard to figure out. If the entire body of the jungle is the dragon and we can’t burn every try we have to attack it at its source. And we can’t get it’s body so we have to attack it’s mind. I’d have come to the same conclusion so I’m not sure why you think that’s some amazing leap of faith. We have to attack it at it’s core, because hacking off the body that can always regrow will do nothing.

Now I’m also not saying certain things couldn’t have been done better, but in my experience, that’s always the case with writing. I find stories I’ve loved that make perfect sense to me, and years later realize the opportunities I’ve missed.

One thing about writing that writers are told is to put something down, don’t think about it for months, leave it in a draw and come back to it. You can’t really do that with a game. That’s the problem.

For what it is supposed to be, driving the story forward, this is perfect acceptable with the single weak leak of the Rata Novus conclusion. And I still think that’s setting up something in the future.

WILDCARD.7360:

Still trying to beat this guy. The boss itself isn’t particularly hard but the LEVEL DESIGN IS ABSOLUTELY kittenING BULLkitten! The attacks arent’ that hard to evade using the dodge skill, but there is NO kittenING ROOM TO DODGE without falling off the level. Bullkitten level design.

You may not realize this but it doesn’t really matter where you dodge. Dodge gives you invulnerability. Dodging against a wall or into the boss is the same as dodging away. It might seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes you have to dodge into or through an attack to save yourself.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

It’s not bad writing if you’re doing what you’re supposed to. There is one instance in the HOT story that I do think is bad writing. Really bad. Beyond that, people overuse the word bad.

It’s like watching the movie Tombraider. It’s an action movie based on a game. It wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even really a good movie. That said, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more no less.

In order to judge anything… a movie, a book, a piece of writing, you have to take into account what it’s supposed to do/be. Let’s take the Ibli scenario from early on. Spoilers ahead for those of you who don’t want to know what happens.

The writing team is told we have this outpost to defend. So you have to characters, Ibli and Tizlak the two characters you meet in the story. They’re being chased by modrem, and you save them. This gives them some reason to trust you. We know the rest of their party has been killed and taken, making them sympathetic.

They’re a great contrast the two of them. Ibli is small and thin. His friend Tizlak is huge and carries a big hammer. There’s an entertaining bit of dialogue when your friends are talking about him and Tizlak overhears your suspicious of him, and says something. It’s cute and funny. This is on the escort back to their village.

The chapter is called the Jungle Provides and Ibli’s mother is the head of the hylek village. She believes that you’ve been provided to help them at a time of need, a time when the mordrem are about to attack their village. You’re given a choice. Defend the village as Ibli suggests, or go on the offensive as Tizlak suggests. Both of them have clear logical reasons for choosing their course of action.

Tizlak more the warrior, is more aggressive and believes a good offense is better than being on the back foot defending all the time. Ibli, on the other hand, wants to protect his home, because it is his home. Neither of them are wrong.

The game requires a choice to be made by the player. Why the player? Because they’ve been sent by the jungle to help. like an omen. The leader of the hylek is reading something into that, which isn’t that unlikely really. After all, you just saved her son.

The whole thing is well done. You have a sympathetic character, who happens to be adorable and voiced well,. giving you one motivation. Tizlak is another character I like btw. He’s big and strong, but he’s not overtly violent. I think he’s voiced well as well.

If you look at what is required from the story and what needs to be done and said, the writing for that particular story is spot on. Not Shakespeare. Not brilliant. It simply does exactly what’s required of it for the game.

You can complain all you want about the writing, but I don’t believe it’s as bad as you think it is.

As for the character situation, I’m pretty sure there are too many characters now, without throwing more main characters into the mix. You’ve got Destiny’s Edge characters, Pact Characters, and the Braham/Rox, Marjorie, Kasmeer, Canach, Taimi… its’ a lot of characters for anyone to keep track of.

Also keep in mind how little most MMO players actually follow story. It’s not like everyone is story driven. So you have to hit people over the head with some stuff to get them to understand it, which is another problem for writers in stuff like MMOs. All subtlety gets lost.

The same is true of professional wrestling. Everything has to be exaagerated, because live people in the top row need to understand what’s going on. Wrestling has some pretty good writing too, but you’d never know if if you didn’t understand the industry and how it works.

And here I give another example based on movies: Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Anhilation. Both are supposed to do the same thing, yet one is mediocre and other is terrible.

So what is GW2 story supposed to be? To me, it takes dark and mature themes like overpowering someones mind or losing a family member, uses them once or twice and throws them out. It wants me to take it seriously, but it doesn’t take itself seriously. It gives choices with absolutely no results, and even suffers from loopholes. Yes, loopholes. What kind of writing is supposed to have loopholes?

Give me some examples and I can talk about it. Saying what you’re saying now has about as much value as me saying it’s good.

From my personal perspective the writing in the Personal story was weaker than say most of the open world writing. The writing in Living Story Season 2 is a bit better, but the writing/delivery in HoT is probably the best it’s been. What I’ve seen is improvement in story telling.

Let’s not forget, for a whole lot of people the PS is unbearably slow.

Thaddeus.4891:

Vayne.8563:

Funny I run fractals all the time, and I have very rarely seen people not bother with singularities. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like a get out of jail free card.

It’s not a fun mechanics. That doesn’t bring anything to the fractal experience. It fill like a filler because they didn’t have any good idea.

It brings something to my fractal experience. Instead of being downed, healing the next time you’re downed brings nothing? It’s filler? Okay then.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Most people I talk to seem to like it.

Thaddeus.4891:

Vayne.8563:

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I disagree. First nobody talk about putting gliding at the end, this is just nonsense. The whole Glinding line was just rightly done and my guess is that this is what started their idea of mastery line. This was the first one done, and it’s by far the best. It doesn’t take long before you get your Glider which allow you to do most of the new stuff, but over time you upgrade it, allowing you to access some more advanced place and the last few line are basically quality of life with I think just 3-4 PoI and HP blocked by line-ley glinding. That’s just perfect, over time you gain tool to advance and you use them as a mechanics and that’s the big difference. The mushroom are also something nice. You get boucing shroom early and it open big door for the expansion, but then you gain quality of life with speed and adrenal, which are nice. They are mechanics.

Same with auto loot, mentor tag, Forsaken Thickets, Nuhoch Wallows. They add something to your experience. They add mechanics.

But other masteries?

Some are just plane gating. You unlock them, remove a gate and you forget about it. They are not just, they don’t add anything to the game and can be weird.

The language things just doesn’t work since we talk to them from the beginning in the story. It just feel deconnected. They could had at least change a bit the story if you do it with or without the language. You could have a branching quest if you don’t have Itzel and Nohuch langague for exemple to go find an Hylek from core tyria which could half translate since those language are similar, but not exactly the same. Then if you do the story again but with the languge, you don’t need the translater.

Some other like Itzel poison and stealth detection could be nice, but they just don’t have any mechanics to it. You just forget about them as more and more people have them. It was nice for maybe the first few weeks, but after that, not really. They should add a mechanics. Why not use the special action key from raids. You need to press the key to send a wave that detect the stealthed foes, a bit like with guild rush do with trap. They could add a cooldown longer than the detect timer, so you need more than one people to keep the foe detected. Same with Itzel poison. No mechanics. It’s xp farm and forget. It could allow you to get some plants that protect you from the poison when you eat it, so you need to keep some in your inventory or maybe you get a new special action ability that allow you to survive the poison. Something.

Other are good, but just not worth using. Like the exalted assistance, the ability to fight champions, the mistlock singularity. The champion are usually not worth doing, the only do on a regular basis is because the zerg pass by him after Tarir Meta end so why not. Most people just don’t bother with the singularity even when they pass next to it and the who ask for exalted assistance?

There is just too much filler mastery just to gate, useless or boring in between the good mastery that work well in the world, bring new mechanics and that you don’t forget you have over time.

Funny I run fractals all the time, and I have very rarely seen people not bother with singularities. Why wouldn’t you? It’s like a get out of jail free card.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

My opinion is based on industry experience, not just this is good or this is bad. It’s based on the target for the writing, not just the writing outside of it.

I could go into a very long discussion on writing, but talking with people who haven’t written professionally to spec for specific markets doesn’t really help issues. Everyone is going to think they’re right.

Take the personal story. It’s at best uneven writing. But the unevenness most likely comes less from the writing itself and more from the demands of the game.

Once the developers decided that everything had to finish in exactly 5 episodes and start over, that took something away from what the writers could do.

You can look and see that the writers didn’t write a story that the game wrapped around. The game had mechanics and story that the writing wrapped around. It’s a design choice.

Saying the personal story writing could have been better is absolutely true. Of course it would have also required a different game.

You don’t get to, as a game writer, write what you want. The writing serves the needs of the game. This game is clearly not centered on that. There’s too much else going on.

The game designers design mechanics and the writing has to wrap around it. And often, there are deadlines and other projects in the way.

This is why most single player games have it easier than MMOs. It’s also why most MMOs dont’ have great stories. There are obviously exceptions.

But most of the MMOs that have great stories suffer in other ways. TSW is just a clunky game with a good story that saved money by not voicing the protagonist, which I found far more annoying than anything in this story. That’s why it’s a matter of taste.

The story was fine, except everything in every mission was a monologue and you never said anything. Not really very good from my point of view. You liked it. It’s your opinion.

Why should I argue with your opinion?

I never mentioned TSW, I’m that other guy

I’m not a fiction writer I admit it, but I know when I see bad writing. You give a lot of reasons why writing for video games is more challenging. I agree with every single one of them.
And yet, I don’t really care about them. I don’t blame the writers. It’s a teams job to produce a good video game. And that team FAILED to deliver. I don’t care if they have internal problems or something, if you get into industry, you better be good or you WILL get negative feedback.

It’s not bad writing if you’re doing what you’re supposed to. There is one instance in the HOT story that I do think is bad writing. Really bad. Beyond that, people overuse the word bad.

It’s like watching the movie Tombraider. It’s an action movie based on a game. It wasn’t a great movie. It wasn’t even really a good movie. That said, it was exactly what it was supposed to be, no more no less.

In order to judge anything… a movie, a book, a piece of writing, you have to take into account what it’s supposed to do/be. Let’s take the Ibli scenario from early on. Spoilers ahead for those of you who don’t want to know what happens.

The writing team is told we have this outpost to defend. So you have to characters, Ibli and Tizlak the two characters you meet in the story. They’re being chased by modrem, and you save them. This gives them some reason to trust you. We know the rest of their party has been killed and taken, making them sympathetic.

They’re a great contrast the two of them. Ibli is small and thin. His friend Tizlak is huge and carries a big hammer. There’s an entertaining bit of dialogue when your friends are talking about him and Tizlak overhears your suspicious of him, and says something. It’s cute and funny. This is on the escort back to their village.

The chapter is called the Jungle Provides and Ibli’s mother is the head of the hylek village. She believes that you’ve been provided to help them at a time of need, a time when the mordrem are about to attack their village. You’re given a choice. Defend the village as Ibli suggests, or go on the offensive as Tizlak suggests. Both of them have clear logical reasons for choosing their course of action.

Tizlak more the warrior, is more aggressive and believes a good offense is better than being on the back foot defending all the time. Ibli, on the other hand, wants to protect his home, because it is his home. Neither of them are wrong.

The game requires a choice to be made by the player. Why the player? Because they’ve been sent by the jungle to help. like an omen. The leader of the hylek is reading something into that, which isn’t that unlikely really. After all, you just saved her son.

The whole thing is well done. You have a sympathetic character, who happens to be adorable and voiced well,. giving you one motivation. Tizlak is another character I like btw. He’s big and strong, but he’s not overtly violent. I think he’s voiced well as well.

If you look at what is required from the story and what needs to be done and said, the writing for that particular story is spot on. Not Shakespeare. Not brilliant. It simply does exactly what’s required of it for the game.

You can complain all you want about the writing, but I don’t believe it’s as bad as you think it is.

As for the character situation, I’m pretty sure there are too many characters now, without throwing more main characters into the mix. You’ve got Destiny’s Edge characters, Pact Characters, and the Braham/Rox, Marjorie, Kasmeer, Canach, Taimi… its’ a lot of characters for anyone to keep track of.

Also keep in mind how little most MMO players actually follow story. It’s not like everyone is story driven. So you have to hit people over the head with some stuff to get them to understand it, which is another problem for writers in stuff like MMOs. All subtlety gets lost.

The same is true of professional wrestling. Everything has to be exaagerated, because live people in the top row need to understand what’s going on. Wrestling has some pretty good writing too, but you’d never know if if you didn’t understand the industry and how it works.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

You have an opinion. Other people have other opinions. I don’t judge stories in games the way I judge stories in books. I don’t judge stories in MMOs the way I judge stories in single player games.

It’s really nice that you have an opinion. Me having a different one changes nothing about that. But it doesn’t make you right. I wish people would stop trying to express opinions as objective truth.

When people argue, they present their opinions and bring arguments on which their opinions are based. Some opinions are much more based when the others.

Hearing different opinions actually changes your own. You hear all sorts of points of view, which broadens your own view. This way, you can see the points you didn’t even thought about or see why some of your arguments are wrong.

On the other hand, discussion let’s you verify your own arguments and if your points can’t be broken, you trust your opinion on that topic even more.

Take the best out of every discussion you are in.

My opinion is based on industry experience, not just this is good or this is bad. It’s based on the target for the writing, not just the writing outside of it.

I could go into a very long discussion on writing, but talking with people who haven’t written professionally to spec for specific markets doesn’t really help issues. Everyone is going to think they’re right.

Take the personal story. It’s at best uneven writing. But the unevenness most likely comes less from the writing itself and more from the demands of the game.

Once the developers decided that everything had to finish in exactly 5 episodes and start over, that took something away from what the writers could do.

You can look and see that the writers didn’t write a story that the game wrapped around. The game had mechanics and story that the writing wrapped around. It’s a design choice.

Saying the personal story writing could have been better is absolutely true. Of course it would have also required a different game.

You don’t get to, as a game writer, write what you want. The writing serves the needs of the game. This game is clearly not centered on that. There’s too much else going on.

The game designers design mechanics and the writing has to wrap around it. And often, there are deadlines and other projects in the way.

This is why most single player games have it easier than MMOs. It’s also why most MMOs dont’ have great stories. There are obviously exceptions.

But most of the MMOs that have great stories suffer in other ways. TSW is just a clunky game with a good story that saved money by not voicing the protagonist, which I found far more annoying than anything in this story. That’s why it’s a matter of taste.

The story was fine, except everything in every mission was a monologue and you never said anything. Not really very good from my point of view. You liked it. It’s your opinion.

Why should I argue with your opinion?

Not to mention the words you attributed to me, that I love HoT more than anything on this Earth is just plain wrong. I never even implied that. I’ve said, many times now, that the expansion isn’t without it’s problems. That doesn’t mean I’m not having fun.

I’ve talked about some of those problems in other threads. Me not agreeing with you, isn’t down to some fan boy response. It’s down to me thinking that you are wrong in what you are saying.

Writing can always be better. I’ve been in enough critique groups to know that. But writing on spec or writing on a deadline is very different than looking at writing after it’s done. It’s all very easy when you don’t have to be on that schedule, or no one is telling you what to write.

In most games, writing isn’t the center of the game, it servers a purpose in game. You want a story read a book. But writing in games is made to supplement game play for most types of games, and certainly most MMOs.

Alicornus.7095:

I’ll give up on the story discussion. I gave enough examples on how to do it right – from Guild Wars: Eye of the North, by the way – I gave enough input on how to do it, but all I get is some Texas Sharpshooting, because accepting anything beyond that would result in seeing a flaw in GW2 and that is obviously not allowed to happen.

As you’ve stated yourself, the postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced and this is still relevant because there are no memorable characters which have been introduced in HoT, although they introduce new characters which are important for the plot and the setting they tried to build up with the Maguuma Jungle.

I got the message. You love HoT, probably more than anything on this earth since you roam the forums for months now each and every day to defend it. There is no point in discussing love. I somewhat envy you because I will never be able to appreciate this expansion the way you did, but on the other hand… after decades of experiencing, playing and – quite of lot of – writing interactive stories, I cannot overlook such basic flaws and I’ll never allow professionals to get away with such shlock, because I know firsthand how lazy it is, even though I give the author of HoT that he was at least partially a victim of the circumstances.

You have an opinion. Other people have other opinions. I don’t judge stories in games the way I judge stories in books. I don’t judge stories in MMOs the way I judge stories in single player games.

It’s really nice that you have an opinion. Me having a different one changes nothing about that. But it doesn’t make you right. I wish people would stop trying to express opinions as objective truth.

Cedric Ambidexter.9174:

J envy.5270:

Cedric Ambidexter.9174:

Okay,

So I think i’m officially ‘tired’ of the pvE game structure now. I noticed it about 3 days ago when I logged in and just found myself running between towns feeling extremely bored with the constant missions and aimless mob attacks to get points.

I have a level 62 mesmer. I’m no longer interested in levelling her up. I also have three low-level characters, a human revenant a norn warrior and norn ranger, but I won’t even bother with those either… I was interested in exploring the different lores of the races. It seemed like fun at first. But it’s just the same endless crap. And after buying a whole set of new armour for my mesmer I realized I don’t have the interest or patience to spend that much time in the store doing it again.

Also, one thing that got to me: I wanted to test out the crafting element of the game, so I bought enough ingredients and made half a greatsword. then I returned with more ingredients to make the rest as I ran out – only to find out that the crafting station was closed because of some stupid ‘failed experiment’ which had green creatures running around. If that’s an excuse to add diversity to the game, then my face is blank. REALLY?? So I finished the sword the following day when the ridiculous mission was over and crafted my sword!

It just seems pointless. I remember feeling this way with gw1 – the only difference was that that didn’t happen until about a year later. And from that point forward I only logged in to have fun in Random Arenas.

I think the core of the pve is still the same as the original game and that’s probably why I’m completely bored of the game now, and have no feel to play it, which is a shame.

My verdict:

They need to make this game more interesting and take away the demoralising mission/mob grinding as a pve mainstay. They suck.

Just my opinion. It’s what killed the fun for me, after what is just a few weeks.

I might log in occasionally to run around in WvW.

Any thoughts?

I feel sad for you, you have only played the game for 3 months, your highest character is only lvl 62 and your bored of the game. I feel sad for you because you barely have reached the cusp of what this game has to offer,

From what i see your mostly a pve guy, well in pve you get dungeons(old but you can still do them), fractals, raids, open world bosses, new HoT maps, theres so much to do in that alone, which i am almost sure you have not tried all.

May it be your lack of motivation to find a guild that will not spoon feed you everything, but rather help you to help yourself get better in the game, or rather your choice of playing alone. I myself am a member of a few guilds, but a lot of time i like playing alone, being in coms with 50+ ppl isnt always fun, but its there if i ever need it.

I have played this game since it launched, i also played gw1 from 2005-2011. I’ve never quit gw2 at any point sometimes i play 10-12 hrs a day when new things come, like expansion, new living story, pvp changes, and so forth; other times i login do my daily and log off. I do what i feel like doing, but i still have yet to say that i am bored of this game.

I read what other people said in this post, and honestly i agree that you should go find another game, we cannot force you to like a game, play what you want to play, maybe someday you’ll look back into this game and think of playing it again, but until you change your perspective about this game, it won’t work for you, it really is sad that you barely seen what this game is made off. The reason i never got bored of this game is because i always find new things to keep me enjoying this game, like when i tired of 1 class, i play another class until i have all 9 classes max leveled, after that i went wvw for months, then i went pvp for months, tried out the raids, fractals, finished collections and so forth.

I constantly look for new things to do, and until i have reached a point where i have done everything this game has to offer, only then will i say i am done and i am bored, which is not anytime soon, as long as the game keeps giving me new things to do with updates like new living story and so forth.

Hi,

Thanks for your post. I don’t understand why guild wars 2 expects us to be part of 5 guilds.

In guild wars 1 you could only be in one guild at a time. Seem normal?

I’m sorry I just don’t see how I can split my attention between more than a single guild. That’s just a preposterous idea.

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t expect you to be in more than one guild. Guild Wars 2 allows you to be in more than one guild. There is a fairly big difference.

In almost every MMO, your character is in a guild, not an account. Therefore on almost every MMO you can be in different guilds on different characters. This is an upgrade from that idea.

You don’t have to split your time being in multiple guilds. One of my guilds is a bank guild which gives me extra personal storage. Harder to do now, but fortunately I set it up a long time ago.

So now I have two guilds, a main guild and a guild I can just into to store extra stuff. What’s the problem?

ShelBlackblood.7826:

Siobhan.5273:

They admitted it after trying to make Anet look like they were the bad guys banning innocent people, posting a ridiculous YouTube video, and then hours of silence (and video removal) after Anet came out and stated they had indeed cheated with information to back up those claims.

It is one thing to say you’re sorry, a mistake was made, it won’t happen again…another to deflect, lie, etc.

The brother did apologize in his reddit post. And he explained why he lied – “we outsiders” simply can’t know if he really didn’t remember his so-called “one-time” cheating before he and his sister made the rage video, or not. And the video removal is perfectly fine, ever heard of damage control? Not everyone reads the forums, many ppl who might watch the video could really believe Anet are the bad guys here. Taking the video down doesn’t hurt anyone, right?

The brother apologized for everything on reddit, as for the sister I dunno, so is there really MORE need for the hate? Can’t the “friendliest MMO community” just stop behaving like a mob of vultures?

The community isn’t behaving like a bunch of vultures. I’m certainly not. You’re not. We’re both part of the community.

Communities are made of people and people aren’t uniformly good or bad. There’s a top 5% and a bottom 5%. They’re bad and really really good. Most of us fall between.

Unfortunately the bottom five percent is often visible. Why paint the whole community with one brush?

There are no personal drop rates. People who get precursors every two months are people who play the forge heavily every day. It’s not a mystery. They invest time and money into playing the forge and they get rewarded, eventually. I don’t and I don’t get rewarded that way.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Vayne.8563:

I’m not disagreeing, But I don’t see this buff as the same buff. Because I have this all the time and I never did before. It really is a different animal. I’m not saying it’s not a problem that we lost the first animal however.

It was a buff before and it’s still a buff now to most people. Other than that I think that removing the previous iteration of the buff just prevents needless stacking of said values.

But you do hit on the origin of this problem.

The important things are that these were advertised to be a replacement:

From: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/rethinking-guilds/

The broad category of guild boosts—upgrades that give a benefit to guild members for a limited period of time—felt invisible and unengaging to the average guild member. We’re replacing these with permanent unlocks. Some, like the waypoint cost reduction, will apply permanently for all guild members without any need for interaction. Others, like the World vs. World fort enhancements, will apply permanently in the appropriate situation—the fort enhancements will always apply to the region of any WvW objective your guild claims as long as you hold the objective. Those attached to specific modes of play, such as the WXP or magic find boosters, are being replaced by a new guild-effects slot that functions like food and utility effects. Once your guild unlocks them, these effects will be available from a vendor in your tavern. Each guild member can only have one effect active at a time, but they’re free to swap and effectively never expire.

And that new functionalities are not available to non-HoT owners. Which entirely conflicts with the whole “replacing” phrasing.
From: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Guilds-and-Guild-Halls/5195339

By virtue of the guild hall maps being out in the jungle, you’ll need access to those expansion maps in order to initially liberate your hall from the dragon. Once you’ve cleared out your guild hall, though, guild members who don’t own the expansion will be able to travel to the hall via a fast travel button in their guild panel. Benefiting from new content in the hall will require owning the expansion, but you’ll be able to benefit from existing functionality without it (e.g., using the guild bank, running missions, etc).

In the end, it is just a buff, but also a thing that made guilds attractive. The scope of these guilds buffs are beyond just a slight change in time and bound to the guild or guild member.

The fact it is placed in the “community centric part” of the guild hall, I would say it definitely would benefit from not splitting communities over this minor replacement/new functionality halfbreed.

Plus what most people said. It’s a douchbag move to update something to merely place that update behind the expansion. I don’t think anyone thinks it’s not an updated buff which indeed functions quite differently.

If it’s just a buff with 100% uptime it’s substantially different from the buff I had before. This is a buff under player control not guild control once it’s unlocked.

You may thing that’s splitting hairs, but I don’t. Food is a buff too but food is not a banner or a guild hall buff. This is a different type of buff.

It’s just a matter of perception. And I still think paying players from the first game should all get it.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

Vayne.8563:

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

I’m still confused why you can talk to the frog tribes during the story but you can’t understand their vendors until you master the language. Are the frogs speaking some common Tyrian language (Tenglish?) in the story that the vendors aren’t familiar with?

It’s a cultural thing. Playability always comes before logic in games. Why do you heal 10 times faster when something gets six feet away? Why do deer carry swords? Gameplay is always going to be greater than logic. That’s how it is.

In this case, it’s fairly easy to under that it’s more like rep. You get to know the customs and the merchants will start to trust you and share their wares with you.

Aidenwolf.5964:

Roxanne.6140:

Aidenwolf.5964:

Alin.2468:

Aidenwolf.5964:

From the company’s point of view I can certainly see why you wouldn’t perma ban a gold buyer as they’re likely to buy gems legally and sellers perma ban is obvious. I haven’t had to try 6 times to get into a JP since your ban wave so I guess you nabbed a truck load, GG.

I would want to see your face 6 months from now, when you will see that truckload of players coming back and wearing the skin of Wintersday you did not manage to obtain, because of them.

@Chris Cleary: Thank you.

I’m almost done with my 10k drinks I earned from doing the JP. Get on my level.

There is no level to get on, drink prices might fall later on or the very next day and suddenly, it becomes a cheap cheap skin.

I don’t care what it costs I earned mine. I smell envy.

My hat is off to you. I’ve only managed to get about 5500 drinks so far. But I really really hate farming.

Khisanth.2948:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure it is a failure at all. HoT added a lot of things that are pretty decent.

#1: Harder enemies. I’ve been wanting that for awhile.
#2: Elaborate maps and more involved maps. Always a good thing.
#3: A metroid style of progression where you gain the ability to explore new areas.
#4: The elite specializations are awesome (if a bit power-creepy), and I like playing as most of them.
#5: A large series of collections and achievements for completionists.
#6: Some pretty cool looking skins.
#7: Events that are actually fun to do.

So, I like the xpac, and from what I’ve heard it has sold really well, so I wonder what your standard of failure is.

I would consider at least half of the HoT masteries to be failures.

It starts well enough in the gliding line but then we get low effort fillers like <whatever> language/proving/assistance. Look! You can now click on this other vendor tab. So exciting. You can also fight these champions once a day. The fights aren’t really different from anything else and the loot is mostly junk but it is there …

Fun events … I can think of two, the patriarch in VB and Mouth of Modremoth in DS.

Actually I consider this mastery point a success, not a failure. The idea was the give people masteries they needed, so they could gradually aquire the other ones without having to worry about grinding. Imagine the outcry if the last mastery in the line was gliding instead of the first.

There are reasons for certain design decisions. In my mind, this was well done.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I only have two metrics that I use to compare games:

• Is it fun?
• Does the fun last?

EotN was fun. It was not as much fun for the second or fourth character, except for learning to master the dungeons (and later the bounties/dailies) with only heroes, but that was definitely grinding for a random (tiny) chance of a nice reward.0

HoT is fun. So far (for me) it’s more fun having more characters and so far, I find, I’m not doing the exact same set of things each night.

So by my metrics, HoT is the better expansion.

The thing is: I never went anywhere in EotN unless it was to repeat a dungeon/mission; there wasn’t any sort of depth to the new zones. And while GW1 had a gazillion more skills than GW2, most of them were never worth slotting. So comparing the number of zones or the number of skills is, to me, just a bookkeeping task; it doesn’t convey any of the joy (or tedium) of the game.

tl;dr if you don’t like HoT, you can just say you don’t like it; it’s not necessary to shoehorn a convoluted comparison to justify disappointment.

On the other hand, Eye of the North had Livia, so there is there. lol

Seera.5916:

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

Anet removed something that players paid for from the game, tweaked/reskinned it, and put it back, locked behind the expansion. It is not new. Its charging players again for something they already paid for.

How would those defending this like a situation where, for example, Anet removed Warrior and Elementalist from the game, renamed them Fighter and Mage, recolored the skill icons, and locked them behind a new real money purchase?

I’m not quite buying this argument. Warriors and elementalists are character classes. In the past Anet removed magic find from armor, which was a buff that everyone had and changed the way it worked too. They also removed fractal progress and reset everyone, which annoyed a few people.

But this buff isn’t just a reskin of the old buff, because very few guilds, very very few, had 100% buff uptime and people couldn’t really choose what the guild triggered or didn’t trigger. You’re equating say a 24 hour magic buff when the guild triggered it, to a 24 hour personal buff that the guild unlocked but I can keep whenever I want. They really are different things.

That said, people did lose access to the old buffs. That’s the issue here, more than saying this is reskinned. For my guild, these buffs are a major improvement because we didn’t keep buffs going 24/7.

Magic find armor wearers were compensated, however. They got to freely choose what stat to change to. There has been no compensation for the guild buff.

It just seems like a very odd choice of thing to lock behind a paywall.

Unless someone was on the fence already, I highly doubt the little buffs would be enough to get someone to buy HoT.

I’m not disagreeing, But I don’t see this buff as the same buff. Because I have this all the time and I never did before. It really is a different animal. I’m not saying it’s not a problem that we lost the first animal however.

Alicornus.7095:

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

Not entirely wrong, but not right on the mark, either.
First of all you can introduce well fleshed out characters pretty much whenever you want for the first two thirds of your plot. It becomes increasingly difficult to do so, but you can make it work if you’re good at writing stories.
Second: If you don’t want to waste screen time on new and not that important NPC, then don’t. Let one of the other characters handle it, let’s say Roxx somehow knows how to get along with the Itzel and deals with them in your name. You cannot communicate with them yourself and therefore cannot really relate to them and leave the development of the Itzel entirely to the open world.
Third: If you don’t use the method mentioned before, you have to develop characters because you want the player to relate to them. They’re allies, they’re important, therefore you cannot afford them to be boring or the players won’t care and that aspect of the plot fails to connect with them.
An NPC like this doesn’t need the depth of the protagonists as the story is not really about her, but zero personality doesn’t count as getting the job done.

Vayne.8563:

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

No, it isn’t, because the story introduces new characters and goes pretty much nowhere with them, but even that’s only part of the problem, because the one single character with at least some kind of development in the HoT story is Canach. They even failed at developing Braham or doing anything interesting with Rytlock.
That poor meanie kittencat is hanging around since the start and has gotten no development at all, he is only used to be a gruffy charr, because being gruff is what charr are all about… oh, wait, no.

Vayne.8563:

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Sort of, but not really. In the end, you cannot describe him because there is nothing to describe and that was the point. There were times when ArenaNet had better writers even for characters like Ibli.
When you were first introduced to the culture of the Norn, you had Jora and the struggle with her brother Svanir and when you first learned more about the charr, you had Pyre Fierceshot who’s rubble with Gwen taught you way more about the charr and their worldview than any expository dialogue option in Guild Wars 2. Heck, even Nightfall’s Zhed Shadowhoof had a lot more going on than any HoT NPC.

Okay let’s review what I said.

The original postulate was the storytelling was bad because no memorable characters have been introduced.

I didn’t say, and have NEVER said, memorable characters can’t be introduced. I’ve never even implied it. My statement is that there are some pretty good works out there that never introduce a character.

Ever see the Alfred Hitchock film Lifeboat? All the characters are introduced right away. There’s one environment, which is the lifeboat. The writing is good. Therefore you don’t need to introduce new characters in a story for the writing to be good. It’s not necessary. Of course it can be done. Nothing to do with my point at all.

I can’t describe him because he’s a relatively minor character that I happen to like. He’s a tree frog. That’s what he is. You want me to describe a tree frog? Even if he were visually different from the other tree frogs, the description would look basically the same. Big eyes, green, thin limbs. He looks like a tree frog hylek.

But he’s friendly and he’s got a cool voice. He wants to protect his village. He mother is the leader of that village. And while the jungle provides is pretty much a cliche it’s also based on the reality of cultures that live in jungles.

Hell I’m not even sure what this discussion is about. I bought into the whole tree frog jungle thing and that’s ALL the writing was supposed to make me do.

Writing in games drives your character forward. So we have slight spoilers ahead….a village of hylek with a common enemy who can perhaps help us. That’s all that chapter of the living story needs to do. Doing more, making that character more important than he’s meant to be would be bad writing, not good writing.

The whole conversation is ridiculous. It’s a terrible criteria to try to base writing on. Most professional writing has a purpose. The writing in that chapter is adequate to the purpose and I found it to be fine. Again it’s not Shakespeare, but it wasn’t supposed to be.

Vova.2640:

Vayne.8563:

You’re confusing local data with server data. Here’s how it works.

The server keeps track of where you are. Your computer allows you to move around locally. Without lag, your position on your screen and on the server should be relatively close, but your real position is on the server. It’s not exactly what you’re seeing. The less lag, the closer you are.

That’s what rubberbanding is. You run forward, it’s not updated on the server, so you really haven’t run forward in Tyria, you just see yourself running forward. Eventually the server pings back your real position and you go backwards. The game doesn’t really know your position only the server position.

Lag would not make it appear like you were jumping all over the place on the server, only on your side of the equation. You’d see yourself as jumping. The server would not.

Still though, because of my lag I got thrown into a locked enemy tower lol.

I’m still sure the server can see that happening. There a difference between correction and instructing the server to port you somewhere, which is what hackers do.

One way the server is correcting, in a hack your local client is doing the correcting so to speak. When you use a waypoint or a mesmer portal, the server knows your’e doing it and updates your data. It’s a command.

When a hacker moves to another position intentionally it has to tell the server it’s doing so and the server has that record.

Vova.2640:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Customer Support has carefully reviewed the data that resulted in the termination of the game account in question. They verified that this account accessed 29 map points in under 60 seconds. It is not possible to accomplish this without the use of a third-party program, the kind of program that is expressly forbidden by our User Agreement and our Rules of Conduct.

Because of these facts, the account termination will not be reversed.

I don’t know who that “suck as love” person is or what he did, but I can tell you weird things can happen in this game.

Like, a few months ago I was in WvW, and I had terrible internet issues. Basically for some reason I had moments where my upload speed was basically 0. Anyway, we were in a zerg vs zerg fight and I started lagging terribly. I could walk around the battlefield like a ghost, see everything as it happens (I knew it because I was in TS and saw the actions being made as the commander called them). However, I could not use skills at all, and was not taking any dmg. Literally like a ghost.

Anyway, to the weird part:
At one point after about 2 min of spamming my skills but nothing happening, my lag went away… and every skill used (among which were skills like lightning flash and burning retreat) got casted at the same time… This made my char pretty much fly half way across the map into an enemy tower (well I landed on the wall)…

So yea. Weird things can happen here especially when lag is involved lol.

You’re confusing local data with server data. Here’s how it works.

The server keeps track of where you are. Your computer allows you to move around locally. Without lag, your position on your screen and on the server should be relatively close, but your real position is on the server. It’s not exactly what you’re seeing. The less lag, the closer you are.

That’s what rubberbanding is. You run forward, it’s not updated on the server, so you really haven’t run forward in Tyria, you just see yourself running forward. Eventually the server pings back your real position and you go backwards. The game doesn’t really know your position only the server position.

Lag would not make it appear like you were jumping all over the place on the server, only on your side of the equation. You’d see yourself as jumping. The server would not.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Comparing indeed doesn’t help very much.

People feel different about games today. Is HoT a great expansion? Nope. It is very lackluster in matters of content and story. That is what many people complain about.

HoT is a step back from the game design of the original GW2, with events being on rails instead of being dynamic. That is one reason why the new maps all feel boring after a short amount of time (maybe not to all people, but hey, don’t tell me the maps are not repetative).
This is getting worse from map to map. VB has at least a great amount of events, then you get to AB, where events are limited to three hubs. Then you get to TD and suddenly, events are a rare things here and there. Last and least you get to DS, where you have three lanes which all play the same, but if you have finished these lanes, you have seen everything on the map.

The maps get less interesting while you progress in HoT. Which is an abysmal design choice. The more you progress the more boring the game gets.

So what matters is what you get. HoT did not give us enough.

My opinion is quite different from this. I think HoT is some of the best content in the game, because it’s not braindead easy.

Sure there was a great variety of quests in early zones, but they are, for the most part, mindless. They’re fine if I want to relax and chill.

I’ve done temple events many times, and I don’t find them boring, nor do I find the HoT events boring, even if there aren’t a million of them. In fact, there are a whole lot of people that enjoy the Dragon Stand meta event, for all you claim that you’ve seen it all.

Doing an escort quest in Kessex and kill centaurs, isn’t significantly different from doing an escort quest elsewhere and killing bandits.

But stuff like gliding really opens up the new maps and I find them, over all, more enjoyable than the original maps.

The AI is better, which is good. The creatures are harder, which I like. And learning how to get around is fun.

As for the story being lackluster, I’ll agree it’s short, but I didn’t find it particularly lackluster. And certainly the delivery of the story is better than what we’ve seen so far…in my opinion.

ryandeniszorro.6735:

While i agree on this, i still think community , at least part of it was , at least, mean. there are actual ppl behind there, with feelings, and i dont see how putting them down helps.
One more thing, i personally have two super clear hack reports from wvw over 3 months old now , with several vids with names, and screenshots, and those two are still logging in and play every day !

Again i am not on S@L side, they did wrong. But i do find quite convenient for Anet to have means to say "look , see, no one is safe from ban ".

Of course there are mean people in this community. There are mean people in every community. And those mean people are often the most visible people. You can’t draw any conclusions out of how the community is by what, a handful of gleeful posts?

The community is fine. It has it’s bad apples all communities do, but this sort of thing does bring those people out of the woodwork.

And many people are just happy that cheaters are being banned because it’s good for the game.

One of my guildies crafted Nevermore and showed it off at the last guild mission. I’m sort of sad I didn’t start working on it sooner but I was in the middle of two other legendaries, one of which I’ve now made.

Nevermore is simply gorgeous.

Ashen.2907:

Anet removed something that players paid for from the game, tweaked/reskinned it, and put it back, locked behind the expansion. It is not new. Its charging players again for something they already paid for.

How would those defending this like a situation where, for example, Anet removed Warrior and Elementalist from the game, renamed them Fighter and Mage, recolored the skill icons, and locked them behind a new real money purchase?

I’m not quite buying this argument. Warriors and elementalists are character classes. In the past Anet removed magic find from armor, which was a buff that everyone had and changed the way it worked too. They also removed fractal progress and reset everyone, which annoyed a few people.

But this buff isn’t just a reskin of the old buff, because very few guilds, very very few, had 100% buff uptime and people couldn’t really choose what the guild triggered or didn’t trigger. You’re equating say a 24 hour magic buff when the guild triggered it, to a 24 hour personal buff that the guild unlocked but I can keep whenever I want. They really are different things.

That said, people did lose access to the old buffs. That’s the issue here, more than saying this is reskinned. For my guild, these buffs are a major improvement because we didn’t keep buffs going 24/7.

You lost me the moment you compared the price of an eight year old game with the price of today’s game. Heart of Thorns if you count for inflation and production costs is probably cheaper than Eye of the North to start with.

Eye of the North didn’t really add anything like gliding to the mix either, which is a big game changer for a lot of us. It didn’t really add a different way to play each of the existing professions. And while I really did like Eye of the North, I like HoT quite a bit more.

Also quests in Guild Wars 1 compare to dynamic events in Guild Wars 2. So how many dynamic events are there?

Of course Eye didn’t add a new profession either.

The expansions actually accomplish completely different things. But there’s another difference. The difference in the market and the cost of making games.

Trying to compare a game made 8 years ago with a game made today in a completely different climate is pretty much a waste of time. You can do it, but it won’t really get you anywhere.

Older games were different than games today. I could compare something like Ultima 4 with most of today’s games and they’d be completely different too. In some ways, Ultima 4 was a better game if you liked to think and work things out.

On the other hand, if I had something like Dulfy for Ultima 4 it would have taken me a few days instead of a few months.

Harper.4173:

Vayne – he has a point – everything that people like/dislike can be broken down to quantifiable bits of why they have a positive or negative view regarding said thing.

Have a look here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny
That right there explains why humans have certain responses towards certain features – which are quantifiable.

What I’m trying to get at is this – you liked the character – that’s fine – your opinion is your own.
Manthas asked you to identify those features that you find yourself attracted to – he asked you to objectively break down your idea of “I like X” and point out what features X has that make you like it or not.

You mentioned in a post something along the lines of “you either like the cheese or you don’t” – and while that is true – there are always real, objective quantifiable reasons for you reacting positively or negatively to said cheese (or any stimuli).

Now you may not realize what the reasons for your “liking” of said character might be or you might be unable to quantify and verbalize them- and that’s fine – but simply refusing the question because “it has no basis” is wrong.

All biological organisms react based on input – you can’t just like something without there being an objective reason or reasons for that.

I also don’t feel he is “raising the bar” – it’s a next question in a logical flow.
What do you like – why do you like it?

But his entire premise is based on a logical fallacy anyway, which he himself never answered.

His premise is in the middle of a story, there are no memorable characters being introduced. That happens in a lot of fiction. The main characters are the people we’re supposed to know anyway, not walk ins that further the plot.

This isn’t War and Peace. It’s a video game. You meet people early. they become the main characters, and then you move onto the end of the story with those characters. The idea that the writing is good or bad, really has nothing to do with whether characters introduced later are memorable or whether you can describe them.

I can think of a dozen famous books off hand where the important characters are all introduced up front and no new characters were introduced at all. So the whole conversation is a moot point anyway.

Not to mention the character we’re talking about isn’t a main character that’s around for seventeen chapters of a story. He said none of them were memorable and I thought one was…because I remembered him. Sort of the definition.

Since the entire premise is flawed, I’m not even sure why we’re having this conversation. Red herring is a red herring.

Uriel.6310:

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 2 didn’t raise the expansion. You can, in fact, still compete without having the expansion. Therefore, Guild Wars 2 is less pay to win than any of the competition.

Again, false. You did not reply to me so maybe ill make it shorter this time. WoW releases expansions that will not punish you directly for not buying it. GW2 does.

You’re directly unable to compete in WoW or even reach level cap unless you buy the expansion. You can’t get the top tier of gear in WoW without buying the expansion. In what way is this not punishing?

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

Whether a single character is liikeable or memory is nothing more than an opinion. It’s like eating cheddar cheese. Either you like the cheese, or you don’t like the cheese. It really is that simple.

Not everyone is going to painstakingly analyze everything they like, nor is it reasonable to expect people to. There are reasons to like all sorts of things. Trying to demand an explanation of why someone likes something really isn’t at all reasonable, whether you intend to let it pass or not.

I…like…the… character. That’s it. I’m not sure why this is an issue for you.

Because opinion without arguments holds no value. It gives nothing to the developer. It’s the same thing like “HoT failed”. Why? How? Whom? How should I fix it?

Now, imagine developer reading your comment. Fine, he likes it. Now how should I please him even more?

Nope, opinion without arguments hold plenty of value. You may believe otherwise and that’s okay. Most people don’t know why they like specific things, but they still do. However, you asked someone to name a character that they liked and I did. That’s ALL that was required. Now you’re raising the bar by demanding I tell you why I liked the character.

This simply isn’t reasonable.

You make it sound like a hundred views is a lot of views. Yes it’s a known bug. However, it’s never happened to me or my wife.

One of the problems with testing is you get a certain amount of time to test everything. So if that doesn’t happen to you, you just play through the scenario.

I mean if a couple of hundred people are testing there’s a chance it doesn’t happen to anyone. Maybe it only happens to 1 in 1000 people or one in 10,000 or one in 100,000. We don’t really know.

Saying that testing should catch something like this is all well and nice, but very often, things that are intermittent or don’t happen often won’t be caught in testing.

This the precisely the type of bug that will often get by testers.

Not to mention when testing software, there are bugs that occur in the live server that never occur on the test server.

ryandeniszorro.6735:

I wanted to say just few things not about ban but about how we as community went into this. First reddit post with stupid , shameful redditors, who laughed and mocked this two people.
Then GW2 official forums, thriving on this ban.
Is this what GW2 community is now ? Is it best joy for you to see someone sad and upset ?
Sure they made mistake, but is community best response to laugh at that and mock ?

While you are all so happy someone got ban ill leave you this example , how many of you did and do now EXPLOIT fractals mossman to get easy pass ? How many of you were asked in pug group to do mossman exploiting this , and agreed , or got kicked from party if you said “lets do it normal” ? Skipping events Arah for months, remember ? Map breaking for easy JP ? And so on…. Is it really that different ?

And again, as much as it was wrong what they did, i feel that community response on that was far worse.

my 2c

I don’t think people are happy they got banned. I think people are angry that these people tried to deceive them.

If they came out with a video saying we did the wrong thing and we were banned, this level of attention wouldn’t exist. They didn’t. They lied about it in a video, blaming Anet for what happened to them, then pulled the video when Anet responded.

That’s worthy of ridicule if you ask me. And yes, I’m happy people who break the rules get banned, because I don’t break the rules. This is a game. People who don’t follow the rules, should be banned to keep the game fair. I’m happy when that happens.

Hacking isn’t a mistake. Spilling your drink is a mistake. They didn’t accidentally hack. They deliberately violated the rules, for which they were rightfully punished, then tried to use their “fame” to make themselves look better than they were.

This is simply bad behaviour.

Manthas.6234:

Vayne.8563:

What you’re saying is not relevant to the conversation. Try not to bring the fan boy into the conversation because that IS the end of the conversation. It’s disrespectful. It’s wrong because I DID like that character.

You’ve never watched a movie and liked a character? Without playing the story again I can’t analyze it to tell you what made me like it. But yes, it is the end of the conversation from that point of view. I like something you don’t. I don’t like it because I’m a fan boy. I’m not lying about liking it. I like it because I found the character entertaining. I liked he was the son of the village elder. I liked the way the voice actor played him. Yes, I liked the character.

Your attempt to dismiss me as a fan boy because I like it really does end this conversation. I’ve never talked to some about a movie or book where they said they liked a charcter and I said they didn’t and thought they were a fan boy.

In any event, there are enough characters in the main story without adding more characters anyway. The success of a piece of fiction doesn’t automatically mean adding new characters you remember. Star Trek when a long time with crew members and a lot of unmemorable characters in each episode.

This is a different situation from Factions where the story started all over. So judging the story based on new characters you remember is a complete red herring anyway. Pretty sure most people remember Braham and Kasmeer.

Anyway, I’m tired of people trying to denigrade my opinion because they think I’m a fan boy, or a white knight. You guys don’t really know anything about me.

Denigrating any opinion based on the persons character is wrong and faulty, I would never do that, at least intentionally.
However, I can not let “I like it” pass as an argument. It’s an opinion, conclusion in other words, but not an argument. As an argument it will be refuted.
When I present my opinion, I let people know why I think that way or another. Well, in your case, you may really be in love (at its true form) with the game. And yes, sometimes it can not be explained why people love one thing or another. And while I respect your absolute right to love things, some people may not share that feeling and you should understand them as well.

On other points about no need for new characters, I agree. Even more, I felt that they should have just stick to improving existing races. Was Exalted really needed? That’s probably my original problem which led to the question: did they add anything meaningful to the lore with HoT?

Whether a single character is liikeable or memory is nothing more than an opinion. It’s like eating cheddar cheese. Either you like the cheese, or you don’t like the cheese. It really is that simple.

Not everyone is going to painstakingly analyze everything they like, nor is it reasonable to expect people to. There are reasons to like all sorts of things. Trying to demand an explanation of why someone likes something really isn’t at all reasonable, whether you intend to let it pass or not.

I…like…the… character. That’s it. I’m not sure why this is an issue for you.

nickoboy.2063:

Vayne.8563:

nickoboy.2063:

Stop relating to WoW’s level cap, gw2 doesnt have this and you look like an idiot. The elite specs are new so people want to use them, you’re right. but when someone that has never played engi before runs a scrapper and beats experienced players just because the class is overpowered. a normal engi vs a scrapper the scrapper is bound to win. And this i believe is what Anet tried to do by getting as much pocket money out of all of you that have purchased HoT because you PAYED MONEY FOR IT the classes ( or Elite Specs) are going to be stronger than the normal class itself, and if eventually Anet realises this, they still won’t make Elite Specs balanced to normal classes? why would they? you have payed money to get the elite specs so why would they give people who have payed money an equal chance to play the game towards people who only have the orginal GW2. it’s simple. why would you?

I’m sorry when someone brings up the term pay to win, in relationship to the expansion, then it’s absolutely fair to bring up other games, to see if they are pay to win. WoW does raise the level cap. You can’t compete if you don’t buy the expansion. Therefore, according to this odd definition. WoW is pay to win. So is every other game that raises the level cap. You can’t compete unless you buy the expansion.

Guild Wars 2 didn’t raise the expansion. You can, in fact, still compete without having the expansion. Therefore, Guild Wars 2 is less pay to win than any of the competition.

As for claiming I look like an idiot for bringing up a valid point, I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from name-calling in the future. It doesn’t make your argument any stronger.

you’re right about being able to still compete, although people have an unfair advantage because they bought the expansion, which relates to the term pay to win? comprende

Sure I comprende. You’re saying this game is pay to win, because buying the expansion gives you an advantage. I’m challenging you then to name an MMORPG that’s not pay to win. I bet you’ll have trouble finding one based on your interpretation of pay to win.

This issue is you’re using the term pay to win as literal English language. Many expressions aren’t literal however, and have other meanings. Pay to win has always meant games that sell power in their cash shop, not games that come out with an expansion.

By your definition every single MMORPG I’ve ever played is Pay to Win. Since no one calls those other games pay to win, I can only assume the definition you’re using is faulty.

You can’t just literally look at words and assume that’s what they mean. Sometimes you have to look at how words are used historically to understand their meaning.

nickoboy.2063:

Stop relating to WoW’s level cap, gw2 doesnt have this and you look like an idiot. The elite specs are new so people want to use them, you’re right. but when someone that has never played engi before runs a scrapper and beats experienced players just because the class is overpowered. a normal engi vs a scrapper the scrapper is bound to win. And this i believe is what Anet tried to do by getting as much pocket money out of all of you that have purchased HoT because you PAYED MONEY FOR IT the classes ( or Elite Specs) are going to be stronger than the normal class itself, and if eventually Anet realises this, they still won’t make Elite Specs balanced to normal classes? why would they? you have payed money to get the elite specs so why would they give people who have payed money an equal chance to play the game towards people who only have the orginal GW2. it’s simple. why would you?

I’m sorry when someone brings up the term pay to win, in relationship to the expansion, then it’s absolutely fair to bring up other games, to see if they are pay to win. WoW does raise the level cap. You can’t compete if you don’t buy the expansion. Therefore, according to this odd definition. WoW is pay to win. So is every other game that raises the level cap. You can’t compete unless you buy the expansion.

Guild Wars 2 didn’t raise the expansion. You can, in fact, still compete without having the expansion. Therefore, Guild Wars 2 is less pay to win than any of the competition.

As for claiming I look like an idiot for bringing up a valid point, I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from name-calling in the future. It doesn’t make your argument any stronger.