…There’s already a large guild bias in the game from launch….
Absolutely untrue. The status quo has no advantage to gaining influence in larger than groups of two. (Two players, representing a guild and completing events simultaneously, earn 10x the influence of a single player, but there is no further rate change after that.) Influence is currently earned in events which have no bias in favor of large guilds. The large guilds only potential advantage over a smaller guild is more influence farmers.
In other words, 20 people in 10 guilds completing an event earn the same amount of influence as 20 people in 1 guild.
The event system itself and the prevention of power leveling are other examples that there is no design bias in favor of large guilds. The only change that favored large guilds that I can think of was the guild mission and “merit” award system.
The expansion changes all that through the guild group requirements for earning favor. The elimination of events as a source of the “new influence” also acts as a barrier to small guild participation in “new influence” gaining events.
With the expansion there is a bias against small guilds (say about 10 or fewer active members) unless they all happen to live in the same time zone.
I wouldn’t be so upset (we have guild vaults already) but they have tied expansion content to guild halls. It really upsets me to buy the expansion and then afterwards it is announced that I won’t have access to the scribe.
So your group of two can do all the guild puzzles? You can do bounties without help in time? You can do all the guild challenges. The bias is there. You can deny it all you want, but it’s fact.
Ranger, Guardian and Mesmer to start, then I’ll spread out. I’ll level a revenant slowly in my spare time.
Then, making it ten times more difficult isn’t enough? They have to make it nigh impossible? I don’t think players are asking for it to be ‘balanced’ around few players, just that the status quo is kept.
To me, that isn’t asking too much.
Balance stuff takes time. The more a range you have to balance it for the more time it takes. Anet has already decided to balance it for 5 and up and I’m sure they discussed that number quite a bit. I don’t think balancing guild stuff for 2 makes sense in any way shape or form, but that’s just my belief.
It’s certain that prior to this though, they didn’t consider 2 people and guild and didn’t balance missions for 2 people.
Do the forums count? Just curious? lol
SPvP has to be the worst.
I’ve said this before in another thread (or maybe even this one) but it bears repeating since people defending small guilds haven’t answered it.
There’s already a large guild bias in the game from launch. The Guild Hall situation in hot isn’t changing that at all. Some people are arguing that Anet allows me to make a one person guild therefore Anet supports one person guilds.
But Anet also set it up so that a single person doing a DE gets only 2 influence for that guild, where as two people doing an event together are getting 20 influence, ten times the amount that a single person can generate. This isn’t a decision made by accident. Anet is actively discouraging single player guilds. You CAN get a guild that way, but Anet isn’t support you for doing so. You’re simply exploiting what is essentially a system oversight. (not exploiting in the game exploit sense of the word but taking advantage of).
As it is right now, there are guild puzzles 2 people couldn’t finish. This isn’t new. It has been this way since puzzled launched.
It’s great to say Anet lets me have 2 people in a guild so they have to support that structure, but that was never true, any more than they have to make all dungeons solo dungeons, or make it so you can solo WvW.
The fact is Anet decides what a guild is balanced around and they’ve decided the minimum number of people is five. That’s pretty generous all things considered.
Saying I have a guild so Anet has to support it is a logical fallacy. It’s more like Anet doesn’t support it so they should not allow you to have it, and allowing you to have it is a benefit that you’re taking for granted.
It’s unlikely to ever happen, and I don’t think it makes the game much weaker because of it. In Guild Wars 1. the entire game was about builds. You’d have to choose your skills before you left an outpost and you had to make sure you made the right choices. If you went into Shards of Orr with bleeds, poison and disease it was going to be a rough ride, because none of those things affected skeletons. In this way, Guild Wars 1 was more of a puzzle you had to solve.
Guild Wars 2 is more about active combat than solving a puzzle. It’s a definite adjustment in thought process. In a game where you can change your build out of combat at any point, this sort of thing doesn’t really have the same impact. There are a couple of things in the game that are sort of like that (dredge can’t be blinded, destroyers can’t be burned), but it really doesn’t make that much of a difference. Even with a burning spec I can still kill destroyers. And if it didn’t work I could get out of combat and change on the fly.
This isn’t as much of a strategy game as Guild Wars 1 was, which is probably why it’s reaching a wider audience.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
You are not guaranteed Living Story Updates!!!!!!
If the Living Story was included in the price, then why the kitten are previous seasons being sold in the gem store?!
Living Story episodes are only free if you log in during the week they are available.
And most likely for the next season of Living Story you will need to buy HoT in order to travel in the new maps.If you buy HoT and forget or cannot log in during one of the weeks an episode is on, you will then have to buy it in the gem store!
So please stop listing Living Story as included in the price for HoT, it is not!
The Living Story is included in HoT, since it continues the Living Story even if there are later chapters you don’t get. You can just call it the story I guess, but it’s not because it’s a continuation of the Living Story.
Also there’s a very fine line between getting something for free and having the ability to get it for free, if you are paying attention at all.
This conversation has gotten me to thinking about another problem.
Right now, when something like Ascalon Forager or Krytan Miner pops up on dailies, you can often go to the corresponding starting city and find a gathering boost banner set up by someone right outside the home instance. Or when a world boss is a daily, again you can often find banners and a tray of food there, placed by some kind player. It’s nice, a way for a player to do something good for their fellow players. And banners are easy, even my personal bank guild is able to make them and I’ve often dropped a few for people to use.
That’s about to change, though. Creating banners, even for guilds that currently have it unlocked, is going to require Favor now. And you don’t just casually earn Favor, it’s something you have to do guild missions for, and there’s a cap to how fast you can earn it. Once micro guilds are out of stored banners, they simply won’t be worth the effort to make any more. The same goes for any other shared items, they’ll take a lot more work than they do right now, for no greater benefit.
And it’s not just the micro guilds, look at larger guilds too. They’ll have other uses for that Favor for… months? However long it takes to unlock everything they want in the guild hall system, which may be over a year for a lot of them. It also looks like they’ll have to have a Scribe make any new ones, which will also cost resources and require someone training up that skill. A skill that, excluding the backpacks, seems to be of use ONLY to make things for the guild as a whole. So, again, they’ll use what they have already until it runs out. After that, they have better things to do than to make banners.
Maybe it’s a small loss to most people, but it’s still a loss. It’s something nice people can do for others, and we’re about to lose it. It may take a couple months to burn through the stuff in storage, but it will happen. That’s a bit depressing.
Always dangerous to judge a system before we see it in action. We really don’t know what will be in HoT until HoT comes out. You’re making the assumptions there won’t be ways to make this stuff or people won’t put it out and maybe for a short that that’ll be true. But that was true in this game too.
There are far more banners around today than there were 2.5 years ago when everyone was building influence. It’s become this because people have extra now.
And when people have extra again, it’ll be become this again. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this.
There are always going to be trade offs, but before I make judgements, I’ll wait to see the system in action.
So join a casual guild with no requirements, and profit? You seem to think that joining a guild means having to do something. That’s not always the case.
Casual guilds are social organizations. There are even guilds made of people who solo. I don’t know what guilds you’ve been in, but you’re probably picked the wrong ones.
How does joining a casual guild solve one issue that I have is to earn Favor for my guild so I can to contribute on my own with +5 banners, buffs and other bonuses I have access to? If I join a said guild as to your suggestion I would just get player rewards and the favor goes to said guild thus my problem.
We really don’t know how the credit systems will work yet if two or more guilds can team up and do a missions together, without members need to rep a guild other than their main one. If it is then no issue here! If its not just wait till the 23rd and after there will be more threads and post on this issue!
Anet recognizes there are some issues they trying to fix as they see it from their side. “Missions for All” is something we want to achieve in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-halls-missions-for-all/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/
Because some guilds have no rep requirement. You can rep for guild missions say to get your own personal laurels even if you don’t personally have that unlocked yet, the go back to repping your guild.
It gives you access to your own personal guild and a bigger guild with features, without sacrificing anything. But then if you need help with something, at least there are people to talk to other than yourself.
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New players have a lot of restrictions we didn’t have. They have less character slots. They can’t buy whatever they want on the trading post. They can’t send money or items in the mail.
The game, the whole game, was on sale for $10 three times anyway. I played this game for 3 years and got 3 years worth of entertainment out of it. I experienced things new players never got to see. By logging in during the Living Story Season 2 I got that for free.
You’re not out money by getting in 3 years early. You’re far far ahead of new people just starting out.
I honestly don’t get these posts.
I finally decided to buy the game about a week before it went free to play. The logical options I had were to either buy the base game or pre-purchase the expansion for $30 more… ended up buying the expansion for $50 to try the game for the first time and it goes F2P a week later.. bad luck or I got screwed. Either way I feel like I was ripped off.
People buy stuff all the time that goes down in price a month later, and for a lot more than a hundred bucks. Cars, computers, even house prices. It’s part of life. You weren’t ripped off.
Aside from that you don’t have the limitations a free account has on them and there are many.
Getting the expansion means you’ve gotten rid of the sub AND you get the new game. How exactly were you ripped off?
There’s absolutely no version of the expansion other than the one that comes with the base game.
I used birthday boosters, celebration boosters and the new XP boosters. Most of us have at least some of those. Between that and food and a utility, you level pretty fast.
On topic, I agree with the OP, event reward shouldn’t wait for people to have a conversation.
See I didn’t use anything like that because I distinctly remember them saying exp boosts wouldn’t work for masteries. Hopefully that wasn’t a beta only thing.
I remember that too and I hope that it’s not just a beta thing or else getting the millions (literally) of “experience” needed without being able to use boosters is going to be that much harder.
My guess is that in spite of what they said, the boosters will still work. Otherwise this will severely cut the value of the exp boosters they sell in the gem store and reduce demand (and their profits from these items) for them considerably.
I don’t remember hearing that at all. If you can find a quote, I’d appreciate it, because it’s just experience. So I’m not sure how scrolls won’t work.
“outliers, and social misfits” is a bit harsh here in context of OP post as the Op clearly laid out his issues.
Like the OP says and I agree with “is it so wrong to want to play the game content silently and in my own way that I enjoy?”
It’s not hurting anyone
You are hurting people if you’re a small group that feels that way and you’re asking for changes to be made that will affect the much larger group of people.
HoT is soloable, but not every event is. However, the OP doesn’t have the full experience, because he’s had neither adventures which are solo or the stories, which are very very likely to be solo.
He ran a beta that tested the event chains in a zone and from that he drew erroneous conclusions. Which is fair since that’s all he’s seen.
But saying the game needs to change for someone like you, when even more people are saying the open world is too easy does affect other people.
People are like us are the only getting hurt because the Dev’s are no longer being accommodating with H.O.T along with certain changes to core game since they are heavily focusing on guilds based on 10 or players. Since that’s what the Guild Hall is balanced around to max them out in 6 to 9 months.
Open world content isn’t the issue here as everyone just pretty much goes from event to event and so on their own without having to form a group to do said events. The issue comes when being forced to go big guild or go home is what putting players like us off for various reasons as the OP posted above.
If the “GW2 community is the friendliest community out there” as Anet touts then most likely OP, myself and others wouldn’t have an certain issue/s. Since its clearly isn’t the friendliest community out there hence we have some issue/s.
Forced to get a big guild? 10 people is not a big guild. This is the core of your argument. Forced to have what most people, including Anet, considers a reasonable number of people is not an issue.
You can say anything you want, but Anet has always tuned away from single person guilds. For example, if you’re alone in a guild and you do an event you get 2 influence. If you are with just one single guildie in an event, you get 20. Anet never encouraged single player guilds and those who make them are using a gap in the system to their advantage.
Anet never said they would support 1-2 people guilds, they didn’t design guild missions so that 2 people guilds can even do most of them, and now you’re saying something has changed. Nothing has changed. If anything, by letting 5 people get a guild Hall, Anet is making it easier for small guilds, because there are guild puzzles and challenges that would be very very hard for a five person guild to do.
“outliers, and social misfits” is a bit harsh here in context of OP post as the Op clearly laid out his issues.
Like the OP says and I agree with “is it so wrong to want to play the game content silently and in my own way that I enjoy?”
It’s not hurting anyone
You are hurting people if you’re a small group that feels that way and you’re asking for changes to be made that will affect the much larger group of people.
HoT is soloable, but not every event is. However, the OP doesn’t have the full experience, because he’s had neither adventures which are solo or the stories, which are very very likely to be solo.
He ran a beta that tested the event chains in a zone and from that he drew erroneous conclusions. Which is fair since that’s all he’s seen.
But saying the game needs to change for someone like you, when even more people are saying the open world is too easy does affect other people.
Nate.3927
Well I’m done talking about semantics on what determines a guild or not same for bank guild/s since we all have different opinion’s on the subject while no one is going to convince the other side any different. So lets all to agree to disagree on those 2 points and leave it that.
As the rest of your post is all moot point since you don’t know anything about my guild or its history so nothing else for me to comment on.
In general speaking not directed to anyone one person here on the forums
It would nice if people would stop and think for few moments and realize that players are all different and coming from all kinds of different back grounds. That we all have different interest in things we want to do in game and how we want go about doing those things. Also with what we are or not willing to put up with since some things are not for everyone as some people just want to relax after a long day work/school and not wanting to deal with more crap in game or be one someone’s else time table serving them etc.
So join a casual guild with no requirements, and profit? You seem to think that joining a guild means having to do something. That’s not always the case.
Casual guilds are social organizations. There are even guilds made of people who solo. I don’t know what guilds you’ve been in, but you’re probably picked the wrong ones.
The Masteries progress only in their areas. Tyrian Masteries only in vanilla maps. Maguuma Masteries only on the new maps. It’s going to be crowded on the new maps for awhile. If you dislike crowds you could always work on the Tyrian Masteries first till people move on to the next maps.
I know that’s what I plan to do. Most of my characters that are going for elite specs will need to gather more Hero Points, and I’m saving that for when I can earn Tyrian masteries at the same time.
Just run through the hot story on every alt, instead of doing crowded events. I ran four alts through the single story instance in the beta and almost had my gliding unlocked by the time I was done. Do a couple of events on top of that, or a raid when they come out, or adventures, or just kill stuff, and you’ll have it.
They should, of course, OP.
But really, does anyone even doubt that HoT is a rushed product?
All signs are there, really:
- ArenaNet had said that, if they did the Living World right, they wouldn’t do expansions. Yet here we are, showing that something went wrong.
- Reiterating that, the GW2 earnings kept falling through both Living World seasons. They failed to increase earnings the way an expansion do.
- GW2 went free to play. Is there any MMORPG that changed its business mode to free to play because the previous model was successful?
- At the same time, NCSoft began distancing itself from GW2, despite how it own 100% of ArenaNet; they will not publish the game anymore, which is a way to soften their losses if the game tanks.
- Meanwhile, the former Lead Designer, Eric Flannum, has just left ArenaNet. The signs are all there that there’s something wrong in Denmark.
- And let’s take a look at HoT? Four maps. Just four. All this time, and they can’t make more than that.
- “Two new armor sets”. They release more content into the Gem Store than this and yet the expansion will have only two armor sets.
- A few legendary weapons with more to come “later”. The last time ArenaNet said we would get more legendary weapons “later”, it took them 2 years to talk about the subject again.
- No raid at release. A very vague promise of releasing one wing of one raid some unspecified moment after release.
- A massive amount of bugs on HoT, despite how we’re at one month before release.
- Very poor balance between specializations. ArenaNet made a lot of changes to the previous specializations after the previous betas, showing how little they had been tested, but there has been nowhere similar time to test the last two.
And so on, and so on and so on.
It’s clear that HoT is ArenaNet’s last chance and they are in a hurry to release it soon. I wonder if said hurry won’t be their downfall, when the expansion arrives filled with bugs and lacking content.
I love how you twist facts to try to make a point. Guild Wars 2 didn’t go free to play. They offered the base game for free, but HoT is still buy to play. Which is quite a bit different from most free to play games. They did it to compete with other triple A games going free to play.
Most of the time, almost always, when a company goes free to play it’s because they had a subscription and no one was subscribing. This is a completely different instance. What happened here was that HoT was coming out and by going free to play Anet can keep the old world areas populated while also keeping paying players moving into new areas. It’s called good strategy.
The profits are still strong and according to NCsoft, Guild Wars 2 is still performing to expectation. There have been no lay offs. Anet is hiring. I know you have something against the game, but that doesn’t really justify these types of posts.
A don’t believe a dev said raids would be the new living story. All that was said was that raids would be a part of the Living Story release schedule. If you recall we got new Fractals, Edge of the Mists, Tequatl revamp and the new dungeon path all as part of Living Story update patches.
Raids will now be included in the mix of content that comes out under the label Living Story.
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The game doesnt need new players to bring it to life… its already alive and kicking, just need to keep the content comming..
not hating here, just stating it already does well is all.
The problem is, doing “well” isn’t necessarily enough for a business that wants to expand. There’s always competition. Always new games coming out. And without shaking things up, by resting on your laurels (no pun intended), you end up slipping back a little at a time.
As an example (and it means very little), Anet used to be in the top 20 Raptr games. Now I’m not saying that Raptr is the be all end all. It’s just an indication of popularity. It’s slipped out of the top 20, and this next time I expect it to go back in.
It’s not just about doing well. It’s competing against games that are in the same marketplace. Going free to play was probably well done.
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New players have a lot of restrictions we didn’t have. They have less character slots. They can’t buy whatever they want on the trading post. They can’t send money or items in the mail.
The game, the whole game, was on sale for $10 three times anyway. I played this game for 3 years and got 3 years worth of entertainment out of it. I experienced things new players never got to see. By logging in during the Living Story Season 2 I got that for free.
You’re not out money by getting in 3 years early. You’re far far ahead of new people just starting out.
I honestly don’t get these posts.
It’s worth keeping in mind that a lot of the pre-launch betas were months before release, April, June, and July for a late August launch. These were a bit more compressed, this weekend is loser to launch than the last GW2 beta was to launch, so it’s a bit more concerning, but sure, they could turn a lot of it around.
Sure but the original game was a much bigger project to polish 2. 4 zones isn’t 25 zones. One raid isn’t 32 dungeon paths. It’ll be fine.
You can get points from doing story. I made four characters with my four beta slots, did the first story and pretty much had my gliding. There’ll also be adventures in the mix as swell, which aren’t events either. Everything that gives you experience, including raiding, will be in the mix for leveling masteries. And all buffs work on it.
This isn’t the problem you think it’ll be..
I don’t see any real reason for locking up essential and needed abilities behind grinding. If there is a need for a progression and earning abilities through grinding it should be for things in the game that is optional.
I hope that the starting area will have enough content to unlock gliding, mushroom jumping and the other things that is needed to continuing to play the game without being forced into grinding events.
People love to use the word grinding, but in reality I could have had 3 of the key abilities unlocked in a couple of hours of play, which really isn’t that onorous. Nor is it really grind because I can do different tasks to level those. For example, story missions, adventures, grinding mobs, or dynamic events…even gathering.
Playing the game isn’t really grinding. It’s playing the game. Stuff has always been gated, in every MMO including this one. Weapon swap didn’t unlock at level one when this game launched. You had to level to unlock it.
It’s just a progression system, and it’s not that onerous. However, the higher level things probably are. If you need those to raid, that would be a much larger problem.
The events themselves tend to be mostly quite fun,
I honestly haven’t seen any ‘fun’ events so far. The most common ones are the ones where you have to go back and forth collecting parts, and ‘defend this spot’ events. The boss battle that I saw (with the flying wyvern) was cool, but overall I haven’t really seen anything interesting happen, especially at night.
The entire noble ledges storyline was quite fun. It was hysterical if you bothered listening to what the NPCs were saying. There are immersion players and there are mechanics players.
As an immersion player, the events are fantastic. If you’re just looking at pure mechanics, questing on almost any game is going to fall short because there are only a handful of types of quests and all that ends up mattering are how they’re dressed up.
Each profession was given something that helped it at it’s weakest point, particularly the professions that really needed help. The druid will help rangers get into parties. The reaper will help the necro. That’s all this really is. A way to add functionality to the profession.
I played the druid most of the weekend and really enjoyed it.
The ranger community isn’t going to be asked to do anything massively huge, because I don’t believe most people will raid. In fact, the group of people you refer to as the ranger community probably represents only a tiny percentage of rangers in the game.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, there will be organized guilds and groups that do raids, that are on voice. You’re not depending on a random pug like in the marionette, so I don’t see the problem here.
Are you really saying the ranger community, as in the guys that play rangers and know the profession and post on the forums aren’t good enough to take on this burden?
Nice, really nice.
After playing a bit more, I think that the day/night cycle definitely needs to be sped up. Nights especially. They just drag on foreeeeeeeeeever. Sooooooo boring, Soooooooo repetitive. And this is something they think we’ll want to repeat for any length of time? No thank you.
Currently the schedule is 70 minutes of day, 40 of night, five minutes of dusk, so really it’s more like 75/45. This needs some massive compression. I would say make it 30 minutes of day, 20 minutes of night, then the 5 minutes of dusk after either.
Speed up the daytime mission chains by reducing the number of waves in them, and streamlining some of the time wasters like the above mentioned airship parts collecting. Cut a few of the less interesting events entirely, or just make them irrelevant to advancing the meta. For example the need to set up and defend towers to begin Shashoo’s chain, just make those entirely optional and irrelevant to the meta, and Shashoo’s chain starts with the boss attacking their base at dawn.
Maybe to make sure the chains don’t time out, make them so that on certain phases they will advance the meta whether you complete them or not, like the airship parts one could have a hard time limit of five minutes, and the meta will roll on even if you fail it, but if you don’t complete it in time then you have some sort of tactical disadvantage moving forward.
Then during the night phase, just less of that. Have about 5-10 minutes to build supplies up, then 5 minutes of assault, then another 5 minutes to rebuild/retake, then another 5 minute assault, and then done.
In their current state, I would never want to participate in the meta of the zone. I might do it anyways, if there is some reward I really want that forces me into it, but I would not be happy about it. I enjoy the map itself, and I enjoy the events themselves, I just wouldn’t want to have to do the entire chain more than once in its current form. I definitely wouldn’t want this to become some sort of Drytop/Silverwaste situation, where you’re expected to farm it continuously for weeks in order to unlock various cool rewards.
30 minutes of day might not give people enough time to complete the event chains. Oh sure, when it’s new and such that would work, but you need time for those chains to be completed as people spread out.
I disagree OP. In fact, I strongly disagree.
Raids aren’t coming out on launch day anyway. They were going to give us time to get masteries and such leveled up. At any rate, I’m pretty sure the biggest part of the population isn’t raiding. Delaying a launch for a small percentage of the population is silly.
Guild Wars 2 launched with flaws. Eso launched with flaws. SWToR launched with flaws FFXIV originally launched with so many bugs that they had to close the whole thing down and start over. There were bugs in all these games. In some cases there were bugs that stopped progress. They didn’t stop the release.
The testing we’re doing on BWE are not the main testing and the version of the game we’re playing in the BWE isn’t even the most recent. I wish I could find a dev quote to say that, but it’s definitely been said.
Class balance is an ongoing thing that will never be perfect. Maybe they should delay the game forever.
Your opinion on Stronghold is just that. Your opinion. They may not change it, because it may not be in the best interest of the game. Time will tell.
WvW will be tested live. It’s the best way to test it.
The release of any MMO today is going to be buggy to some degree. When Guild Wars 2 launched the auction house didn’t work, guesting wasn’t available, a good chunk of the events in Orr weren’t working right, plenty of personal story bugs…but it launched. And most of the worst stuff got fixed.
This isn’t 25 zones, it’s 4. That means that most of the bugs should get fixed faster.
There’s no reason to have another BWE. It would only delay the launch.
HoT isn’t only the content on release date, HoT is all the content we get the next few years (well, without the holiday content). ArenaNet may have made a expansion, I see no signs that they abandoned the road of regular content updates (Living World).
Ah, ok. So you think people should overlook the bugged mess that HoT is right now because of a vague promise of undefined content to be release in an unspecificied amount of time?
Sure, sure. Perfectly reasonable.
Hot isn’t a bugged mess right now. I played through the events. The raid was certainly buggy, but the game itself isn’t a bugged mess. You just want people to think that for some personal agenda. It’s about what I’d expect for an MMO these days just before release.
Of course it’ll have issues. But that doesn’t make it unplayable. Certainly not for me. Me and my guild had quite a bit of fun in the area we’ve been given for this BWE. That you can’t, for some reason, have fun in it, I would suggest that’s your own issue.
Considering how often you hammer this game, I’m not surprised you didn’t like HoT either. I like the game and I thought HoT was a nice addition to it.
Because the expansion is basically an overpriced DLC with poor Quality Control.
Really. The few pieces of content we have seen were massively bugged; not only that, but the bugs are actually increasing as we get closer to release. Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Yet here we are, with something so small as mob difficulty being bugged in the entire beta map.
keep in mind you are paying for future updates too that could be for 3 next years, not just things that have been announced and available on day 1.
Funny. When ArenaNet says they will do something and then don’t do it, people scream “it wasn’t a promise, just something they said they would do but didn’t! It wasn’t their fault!”.
And then people turn around and say, “Buy the very overpriced DLC because ArenaNet promised it will come with a vague amount of new content over a vague period of time! It’s definitely worth it!”.
Right. Completely logical.
Bugs haven’t been increasing. In the first beta the major quest chains were bugged. I played through all the quest chains more than once in the current beta and none of them were bugged.
The fact that we’re seeing a different area and getting different bugs has nothing to do with more bugs.
I’d be interested in seeing where you get this “more bug” thing. For all you know, most of the original reported bugs have been fixed. We can’t really know that because we’re in a different area.
Yeah sorry I’m totally going to waste my time to get their exact statement after 3 years and not playing for a year. How was the system not working out exactly? There was no one complaining about not having stronger gear to grind but tons complaining when this crap was released. Why aren’t people complaining for higher tier, come on ANet let’s see raids give higher stat gear than ascended. Also are you ignoring fractals? You need to grind ascended to do fractals so they completely ignored their promises.
There was no one complaining about not getting stronger gear? You weren’t paying attention.
A couple of months after launch, people were leaving this game in droves. Now not all of them said that Anet needed to put vertical progression in, but some of them sure did. What was being said, however, and said often, was that people had nothing to do at 80.
Since a game company can only design new content so fast, and since everyone got exotic items quicker than Anet thought they would, Anet made the only decision it could make. Introduce something that would take longer while new content/a new direction was explored.
I’m sure Anet wasn’t at at happy that people found nothing to do and left. I’m pretty sure they really believed at launch that people would just accept that farming for skins was end game, and some of us did…but many people did not.
I’m sure when you’ve invested millions in the creation of a program, you wouldn’t ever change anything if your initial expectations weren’t working. Fortunately, Anet is a professional game developer and did what they thought they had to.
I don’t like the ascended gear on a personal level, but I know people personally who came back to the game to craft it.
" One deals with integration of content into live servers.(something no other mmo does before launch, resulting in terrible launches) "
Yes, but this is also apparently their reason for not having a public test server, like just about every other non-NCSoft MMO does. Which results in…
Which results in people not learning how to exploit everything before it launches and everyone being on an even footing. Oh and story spoilers not getting out prematurely.
Lets be real here, ascended gear was introduced within 3 months of launch. And it was to remedy the problem of exotics being acquired at an unforeseen easy and fast pace, and to create a system for fractal progression.
You talk about “betrayal”, when the reality is that the addition was a quickly deployed post-beta adjustment. One that they have stayed true to for the 3 years since, and for the foreseeable future.
That’s not a betrayal, that’s run of the mil game development.Of course they are going to balance raids, which are supposed to be demanding and difficult content, around the highest stat tier. To balance it around a lower tier would be to set the system up for failure from the get-go. People with the higher stat gear would encounter lesser difficulty as a result. And given the nature of these raids, most people interested in them likely already have mostly ascended gear already.
Heck, most people who play regularly should have full ascended jewelry (which accounts for 5 gear slots, roughly 40% of your total stats), given how easy it is to come by.
And, as others have mentioned, it being balanced around ascended stats doesn’t actually require you to have ascended to complete it. A 12%ish(for full exotics, less if you have that ascended jewelry I mentioned) stat difference can be overcome, especially in a game like GW2.And do you realize how ridiculous some of what you said you did is? So you made exotics for all your alts, even spent money to do so, but then ascended came out and you didn’t feel like making it, so you deleted all your alts?
How is that even a sensible thing to do? Exotics were more then good enough for all the content that was in the game at the time, and remained good enough for all the content that has been added in the 3 years since. Ascended weren’t even that big of an upgrade, and at the time they were first introduce were only out for literally 3 gear slots.
Imagine buying 5 cars, and then a new model comes out. So you have a hissy and destroy 4 of your cars. Yea that’s reasonable.
Not to mention how easy the ascended jewelry slots are to fill. Heck, if you actually played those alts over the past several years, you probably would have gotten full ascended jewelry by happenstance, just by playing.Also, your car analogy is bad. It doesn’t encompass the situation at all.
You’re salty because you don’t feel like grinding ascended armor. I’m pretty sure that’s all this comes down to. And you know what? I don’t feel like grinding it either. You can just say so, it’s not a big deal.My two mains have full exotic armor, exotic weapons, and ascended jewelry. That’s what they’ve been wearing for a year or two now. And I have enough resources stockpiled to gear another 5+ fresh characters that way easily.
I likely have enough stuff stored to churn out a couple sets of ascended armor too. Yet I probably won’t. The ~5% stat increase (from a full armor set specifically, not a full gear set) doesn’t seem worth the effort/resources. So I’ll try out raids with what I’m wearing now, maybe grab some ascended weapons at most.
If I’m into it, maybe I’ll gear my main raiding character in full ascended. He’s the only one who’ll need it after all.
Whatever weird OCD you have about gearing alts is your prerogative. It’s not ArenaNet’s problem or fault.They said no gear grinding or whatever before launch and then proceed to ignore that and make better gear that was only obtained by grinding stuff you may not have wanted to grind, then around a year and half~2 year later they released the armor parts that was only obtained by grinding crafting for obscene amounts of gold, don’t know how it is now since I haven’t played in a year but it’s still entirely ANets fault and probably still extremely expensive/annoying to grind, especially on more than one character.
An MMO company makes literally thousands of statements before launch and some things will change. Anyone playing any MMO should know that. Things change.
The system they started with wasn’t working out, so they changed it. That’s what they had to do. You can feel betrayed by it if you want, but no one did this TO YOU. They did what they thought they had to do for the good of the game.
It would have been more of a betrayal not introducing something like that, if it were going to affect the over all game even more negatively.
The disadvantage of using old currencies in new content is that guilds already have some built up and new guilds would be completely unable to compete. By making new currency everyone is on even footing. That’s the theory anyway.
I think the ability to ‘Open All and/or Purchase All’ would be popular with the playerbase.
Good luck.
What do you mean open all and purchase all? o.O
Open all bags in a stack or purchase more than one thing at a time. Plenty of people complaining about the amount of clicking.
What part of Beta is everyone missing? That is why you have Betas, so that you can find and fix bugs. We had a Beta, we found bugs, and now they know that they need fixed.
How would you feel if they didn’t have Betas and that had been the live release instead? Then we would have the live release, of the expansion, bugs included.
And then you realize that what we have tested is but a fraction of the content available at release, and that even the content that has been tested is becoming more broken, not less (see the “bug” with the difficulty right now).
What do you think is the state of the untested, unseen until now content?
Because you either think that the beta was really about testing the game for bugs, and so the fact we have found a massive amount of bugs on the content we have tested means the rest of the content – the part we won’t see until release – is massively bugged as well…
…Or you think that the beta wasn’t really about testing the game for bugs, since the majority of HoT won’t be tested, and thus that all the bugs we are seeing at the beta are stuff ArenaNet didn’t think we would still find. Which, again, shows how bugged the rest of the content must be.
Really, it’s a lose/lose situation here.
It’s also 3 weeks till launch, and a lot is broken. Combine that with the rush job on druids, and it’s looking sketchy. Maybe it’ll be amazing and everything will be fine. /sarcasm
Strange, me and my guild had a great time in the beta. To each his own I guess.
I used birthday boosters, celebration boosters and the new XP boosters. Most of us have at least some of those. Between that and food and a utility, you level pretty fast.
On topic, I agree with the OP, event reward shouldn’t wait for people to have a conversation.
Masteries are absolutely my favorite thing about the expansion so far. The story might replace it, but I haven’t seen enough of it to know yet.
We’ve never ever had a personal story for a profession, only for races. As revenant is not a race, there will be no personal story for it.
I’m having fun in the beta too. I’m thinking people who are immersion players will like it a lot. They get immersed in the world, the jungle, what’s going on. I can’t talk about mechanics players, because I don’t focus on that aspect of the game.For me to enjoy an area, all I need is mechanics not to get in the way.
This guild hall isn’t like a tiny one room thing. It’s a guild map. It’s quite complex. It’ll take 6-8 months to fully deck it out.
What it’s not is personal housing.
How does anyone (excluding wvw/pvp only players) not have ascended armor yet?
time? life? is it so preposterous to you that people may not fully put their time into GW2 and in fact spend their time elsewhere?
There’s an elsewhere? Who knew?
Give me concrete numbers for your examples. Links, statements, official responses. How do you know the hardcore community is 1%? Stop the parallels with WoW, even if they would copy paste the raids from there it would still be totally different since this game does not have a hard, forced trinity.
It was originally posted by a developer during wow 2.0. During the panda expansion, I believe it is stated again on an interview. You can also check wowwiki.
Before Wrath of the Lich King came out, less than one percent of the playerbase actually experienced Sunwell.
I was actually the 1 percent that done Sunwell but wasn’t able to finish. When the guild leader says they want to extend raiding time to do Sunwell I told them I wasn’t able to commit and was kick out of the guild. This left a trauma for me that I quit mmorpg for a while.
http://wow.gamepedia.com/Sunwell_Plateau
LOTRO pulling the plug of raiding. Because the raiding group is too small.
Wildstar fail to deliver the game to a wider audience. They thought hardcore raiding is the answer. But it is totally wrong
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2qnhuj/only_03_of_wildstars_players_have_cleared_the/
I’m not certain about the other games, but LotRO I do know a little about. They stopped adding raids, and their numbers have dropped immensely. There are constant complaints by the community that there is nothing to do, no end game, etc. The entire player-base seems to be composed of people who spend all of their time twirling around at festivals (which are almost a constant occurrence there), instead of playing the actual game.
There is a significant enough PvP player-base there, but nobody acknowledged that either until they all moved to one server and basically crowded out the server.
This 1% thing that you’re trying to push, is utter nonsense.There is nothing wrong with having content for people who like a challenge. It brings people to the game. It keeps people playing the game. Stop trying to exclude people who like to play differently than you do. That “1%” matters just as much as you do. Their money spends just as well.
And yet it was a Lotro dev who told us straight out that 10% of the population only ever raided. The same dev told us raiders account for 50% of forum posts.
Source: http://www.mmobomb.com/news/ex-lotro-dev-dishes-turbines-missteps/
Do you work for Anet?
95% of the game population is unhappy with the balance.
82.6% of people who quote statistics make them up on the spot.
Yes, you can glide in the base version of Heart of Thorns. What you get with deluxe is a skin to make your glider look different. It gives you no other advantage.
Well in every map ive been in so far, people are asking..what else is there to do? :|
And there in lies the issues with many of todays gamers: They are playing beta tests in order to play stuff, not in order to test.
The fact that there is “little” stuff to do is on purpose, on order to focus testing on a smaller amount of stuff rather than just having people running around doing everything once.
We all know “beta tests” have never been about testing for a long time. Rather they’re a marketing ploy.
In other games yes. Not here. The evidence for this is particularly clear.
Yeah, I can understand wanting to be completely OP at everything too. Solo farming the Underworld was sorta fun.
Guild missions will no longer need building to unlock, so those, at least the ones we have, we still have access too. The guild buffs will be replaced by a different type of buff and those we won’t be able to use as easily. We’ll still have access to the banners, at least until we run out of influence. In addition, a small amount of influence can be transferred each day to the new currency.
In the live game we’ll have adventures and our story as well as events. Those aren’t active in the beta. The story will be what binds the experience, while the events are there to help level masteries and give you context.
No real idea about adventures yet, because I’ve seen too few to comment.
My Sylvari would like a word with you.
Fractals has an easy entry level and a harder 50th level. I’d be a lot more okay with raiding if there was a difficulty that didn’t require you to be awesome. Even for lesser rewards that aren’t unique.
Rift had to end up doing this, because they were leaking casual players at one point, since the entire game funneled you into raiding.
And you know, now, with a single raid, it’s not that big a deal. When there are half a dozen it might be.