Guild Wars 2

angelpaladin.7921:

I think its pretty much obvious Anet being silent on this for the past 3 days shows they really don’t care about us or the community. Take from that what you will but I will personally take it as a massive slap in the face and a sign of things to come.

It is worrying. By this point I would have expected at least a corporate-diplomacy style “we appreciate your concern and will discuss internally,” or “while it’s too late to do anything about this release, we will take these comments into consideration for the future,” or anything, really, regardless of whether they plan to make any changes or not. The lack of a simple “we are here and we are listening” after something like 1000+ posts on all the threads about this topic and 10000+ views suggests that either 1) nobody cares, or 2) the people who care are being prohibited from speaking. Either way, it doesn’t make them look good.

mtpelion.4562:

Queuing up for WvW is proof that you have interest in player to player combat. If you truly have no interest, you wouldn’t have clicked on the button that takes you there.

If there is story content available only in the WvW environment, you will see plenty of people who are there not because they have any interest in player vs player combat, but because they want to see how the story continues. I must say, it’s a bit absurd to spend a year delivering story in a PvE environment, and then say “if you want to see how it ends, get ready to be preyed upon by people who are literally salivating at the thought of inflicting suffering on others who just want to be left alone.” Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy WvW as a game mode, but this seems like an extremely ill-advised crossover. I’m excited to fight other players on the new map, but dreading the kittenstorm of ill-will and acrimony that happens when PvE players are bribed with rewards/achievements to enter a PvP environment without any real desire to be there.

mtpelion.4562:

Logic says that content added to WvW is NOT PvE. That means that this Living Story Update is not PvE.

I can’t tell you how many times in WvW I heard people say, “get this PvE kitten out of my WvW” in regards to the toxic spore events. Just because something exists in a location where PvP COULD take place does not mean that it itself is PvP content. There is plenty of content in WvW that is primarily (and often completely) PvE content, because the only opponent you face is the computer-generated environment. Capturing a mercenary camp, in my experience, virtually never involves fighting an actual player. Likewise, upwards of 90% of the time the only enemy I see in a jumping puzzle is the jumps themselves. True PvP content means fighting other PLAYERS.

Coopziana.1802:

I personally Don’t see it as a problem if they roll it out to ALL Players using in-game NPC methods, such as new Harvesting tier from Merchants that also provide the boosts.

I think this is a good idea and a nice way to handle it that doesn’t involve refunds/taking away things from anyone. However, that only addresses the balance-based concerns (i.e., a best-in-slot cash shop only item is a bad thing), but not the future expectation concerns that this item has raised (should I not buy things from the gem store, because I don’t want to feel like a sucker when an even better version comes out soon for the same price?). The second concern would need to be addressed as well to restore confidence that purchasing from the gem store is a GOOD idea, and not something soon likely to trigger buyer’s remorse.

I can only pray that I am wrong about this, but I fear that we are on the cusp of seeing the worst griefing that this game has seen since launch. The recipe for this is simple: limited-time objective + ability to kill other players who have no interest in fighting and just want to complete that objective = griefing on an unprecedented scale.

We’ve already seen this sort of thing happen with WvW jumping puzzles. The reason griefing-style play is not a more serious issue there is because there is no inherent time limit to completing that content – if griefers are camping the puzzle, simply come back later after they get bored and leave because there is nobody for them to kill. But what if the content/achievements are only available for a short time, as is the case with the living story? This funnels a constant stream of victims to the griefers, and removes the option to wait for them to go away.

Again, I really hope that some thought has gone into anti-griefing mechanisms for this release, but from what information is available so far I am very, very concerned.

Rengaru.4730:

Comparisons with any real world items are inherently flawed. Any infinite tool you have is de facto worthless (i.e. it has no monetary value) from the moment you pressed the purchase button.

Very important point. In the real world, there is no such concept as “account bound” for a durable good. If you buy an item, and then want to upgrade to a better version later, you are able to sell the original to recoup part of your investment, meaning the amount you pay to upgrade is the difference in value between between the old and the new. I think no one would have any problem if this game system worked like the real world, and let you sell your old item before buying a new one – people are upset because it ISN’T working like the real world, and instead of being able to sell their old car to partially fund a new one, their only choice is to buy the new car at full price while the old one gathers dust in the garage.

hellsmachine.4085:

Zypher.7609:

All this talk over a pay to win item.. there is no pay at all to it. If you want the item spend the gold and get the item. Just because the item is not found on a monster in the game does not make it a P2W. This item is not locked behind spending real world money. If people want to classify any item that requires spending gold on being P2W there are many items in the game that require gold and yet there have been no discussion over those.

My thoughts exactly! If this is what people consider pay to win, then the game became pay to win from the very start.

Buy gems + convert to gold = buy exotic/legendary gear from TP.

It doesn’t really matter if the item counts as being “pay to win” or not. What matters is the incentives putting out an item like this creates. After this, people who want an infinite gathering tool would probably be smart to NOT spend their money right now, because in two more months there could be an even better one for the same price. Even if there ultimately isn’t a better one later, this release is certainly creating the perception that there might be, and perception is really all you have to go on when making your buying decisions, since Anet does not disclose what it will do in the future. Discouraging people who want to spend money from spending it is not going to help anyone, in my opinion.

This has been a problem since the launch of the game, and to my knowledge has never been responded to officially in any way. Due to this, I can only assume that they purposefully intend to make using stacks of items as painful as possible to discourage people from doing it. Maybe it’s to discourage farming, who knows (“gee, opening all those bags I farmed would be so annoying, maybe I just won’t”)?

There are, however, ways to deal with the problem without breaking the “one button, one action” rule. One option was already mentioned: bind the “click” action to the “click” of your mouse’s scroll wheel as it turns. It is physically much easier to activate that button many times than it is the left or right click buttons, and it still performs just one action per each unit of physical input (rotating the wheel a certain number of degrees). You could also bind “click” to multiple different buttons at once, such as every single key on your keyboard, and then go to town on it with both hands and your face.

The reason I am against this new pick is because I fear that in an attempt to improve revenue for themselves, Anet is actually going to end up accomplishing the opposite (thus hurting development of a game I enjoy) due to the implications that people are seeing in this item.

As a prospective buyer of an item, I would want to get the most for my money. The last new pick, the Bone Pick, was available on Nov. 20th, 2013. This better Watchwork pick became available Jan. 28th, 2014, approximately two months later, for the same price. If I want to end up with the best possible pick that I can get, my best course of action is to wait another two months hoping for an even better pick to come out instead of spending my money now. It’s certainly not guaranteed that there will be a new one by then, but it sure seems a lot more likely now than it did, say, a week ago. Now, in order to get these delayed purchasers to actually spend, Anet has to give them the thing they are waiting for, or promise there never will be such (so that they know to stop waiting). But if they DO come out with an even better item to entice those who are waiting, that just encourages even more waiting for the next, even better one than that.

If there is an expectation that purchasing later will be better than purchasing now, purchasing will be delayed. If there is an expectation that purchasing later will ALWAYS be better than purchasing now, purchasing will be delayed indefinitely.

Since the previous massive thread on this topic was locked for being “inflammatory” in tone, let’s all make an effort to be non-inflammatory as we discuss this topic. To kick things off, I’ll reiterate the facts:

1) The watchwork mining pick is a best in slot item, as it produces more material when it mines than any other pick.
2) The watchwork mining pick is available only in the gem store.

Is this an appropriate addition to the gem store? My personal opinion is no; best in slot items do not belong in the gem store under any circumstances. As you reply, to add your opinions, please make an effort to keep the discussion calm and non-inflammatory.

Tolmos.8395:

Korossive.7085:

Company replies: 0

If they say nothing, eventually the thread dies and everyone just accepts it and moves on.

Ignoring it is no solution. Ultimately, only Anet controls what happens in their game, and in that sense they can force the players to “accept” it. On the other hand, players control public perception of the game, and by extension its financial success. Is it worth it for the company to ignore the problem if the result is that they anger customers who then badmouth the game to their friends (aka potential future customers)? Customer allegiance is a powerful thing – happy customers are your best salespeople. Customer dissatisfaction is equally powerful – customers who feel they’ve been wronged are your worst enemy.

I don’t think attempting to label this as “Pay to Win” or not is a helpful exercise, because that term is not very specific, and people can disagree on what it means to “win.” Instead, let’s stick to the facts:

1) This is a best-in-slot item. Its functionality is superior to all other items, gem store or otherwise, that can be equipped in that slot.
2) It is available exclusively through the gem store.

As I’ve said before, I do not believe it is appropriate for ANY best-in-slot item to be gem store exclusive. Feel free to disagree, but let’s at least be on the same page about what we’re discussing – a best-in-slot gem store exclusive item.

A dangerous precedent indeed. This item is not merely more convenient, but functionally better than any other of its type. The amount that it is better is variable based on the value of a sprocket, but so long as a sprocket has a non-zero value, it IS better. Is it appropriate for a “best in slot” item to be available only through the gem store? There is no “right” answer to this question. Some people have no problem with that, and others do. Personally, I have a problem with it.

I’ve experienced a lot of positive interactions around this event, and also some negative ones. Most of the positive ones have been on my native server, and most of the negative ones on overflows. What it boils down to, I think, is that people are more willing to forgive/be pleasant to those on their own server, but feel little connection to the random people they end up in overflows with, leading to shorter tempers and raging.

This has much more to do with the overflow system than the event itself. To address this, overflows need to somehow do a better job of promoting community. My suggestion is a kind of hierarchy system for creating new overflows. When a native server map fills up and an overflow is needed, first create an overflow for a pre-defined group of three or four servers, and direct all additional players from those servers to that overflow. Next to the word “overflow” on the minimap, list which servers that overflow is serving so that people can see who they are playing with.

Only once these smaller community overflows get filled up should players be sent to one with a totally random group of strangers. The idea is to increase the chances that you’ll play with some of the same people repeatedly, reducing the feeling of “I’ll never see you people again so there are no consequences to being rude.”

I think there’s probably a happy medium to be found between avoiding that helpless feeling while you watch others fail, and trivializing individual contribution. I can imagine a couple options – create a scaling difficulty by allowing players on other platforms to help more during the early chain phases, but less or not at all during the later ones. Or make it so that the players on each platform get a scaling buff depending on whether the champions on the adjacent platforms have already been defeated. I don’t see these mechanics being added to this encounter in particular because it is so temporary, but it is something to consider for future ones.

Currently, I can only think of four types of names that events are given within the game (let me know if there are more I’m forgetting):

“Event” – go ahead and do it, nothing special required.
“Group Event” – you might want at least another player or two to help, unless you are super awesome. You have been warned.
“Guild Mission” – designed specifically for a guild to do together, and will require more than just a single group of five people.
“World Event” – requires a sizable number of people, and has a correspondingly larger reward

However, there are now events in the game that don’t fit any of these categories well, such as Tequatl and the new Wurm. These are events specifically designed to be challenging even for massive, well-coordinated, and well-geared groups of players. World Events come the closest, but considering most world events rarely if ever fail even with an unorganized/unoptimized group, they aren’t even of the same order of magnitude in terms of difficulty. To better convey the intent behind this content, I propose giving it a specific name of its own. My personal suggestion would be,

“Group Challenge Event” – the most intense challenges in the game. You’d better bring your wits, a whole army, and some repair canisters.

Please chime in with your own suggested names. My guess would be that “raid” is off the table due to its connection with other games and the implication of being instanced, but I’m sure there are plenty of other good choices.

Edit: updated to include “World Event” which I had originally forgotten to mention.

Ohoni.6057:

In fact, I really hope that the development team considers this for future encounters. Create situations that let players voluntarily take on extra risks and responsibilities commensurate with their skill level, without forcing new/less confident players into situations where they fear they will let down the team.

The problem here is that if they do allow players to do this, then the risk needs to be entirely on the part of the player who does this, not on the part of the group. By which I highlight the Teq cannons, in which six players hold a role that can be make-or-break for the entire event. If ANet provides opportunity for “skilled” players to take on a tougher role, then if “unskilled” players choose to take up this role instead, it shouldn’t negatively impact all the other players. Also, taking on a tougher role should not be necessary for gaining achievements, or for gaining the best rewards, those should all be available to the hoi poloi.

I agree, these are all valid concerns. Careful thought would be necessary to make sure everyone’s incentives were aligned. A very basic example of the extra risks I’m imagining would be giving players two ways to attack a target – a “normal” way, such as using your weapons, and a high-risk, high-reward way, like carrying a bomb. If you get hit even once while carrying the bomb, you (and only you) blow up and die, but if you make it to the objective untouched, you make significant progress for the group. Any player could choose either option, or alternate if they felt like it, and unlike with the Tequatl cannons, nobody gets locked out of any role. A setup like this would provide an opportunity to show off your skills for the greater good, while still giving those with a smaller appetite for risk the opportunity to pitch in in a meaningful way.

After playing even more of this event and continuing to enjoy it, I’d add another point to my original observations:

7) Player performance affects the tasks other players need to do. The mental calculation of, “If lane x fails, we need to prepare for (this), but if lane y succeeds, we need to prepare for (that)” adds a level of interest and investment that is not present in events that always progress in a linear fashion. Tequatl, for example, always progresses through the same phases in the same order, and you either deal enough damage to kill it or you don’t. The Marionette gives the opportunity for adjustment and redistribution of resources during the event based on what has happened so far – if lane x is in a win-or-die situation, send your most experienced players with that particular encounter there. If lane y is leaking champions, send a floating squad of defenders there. It creates some very refreshing variety.

Charak.9761:

I try to do in the 2nd gate because it seems to be the common one to fail, but I should also aim for the 3rd cause it seems to be equally daunting for some players.

I’m happy to hear that you do this, and this is exactly what everyone should aspire to do in a group setting – play to your strengths for the benefit of the group. Not everyone can pull off that clutch dodge every time, and those who can should lead by example and tackle the challenges that others struggle with.

In fact, I really hope that the development team considers this for future encounters. Create situations that let players voluntarily take on extra risks and responsibilities commensurate with their skill level, without forcing new/less confident players into situations where they fear they will let down the team.

Blade Syphon.4325:

I do not believe a fight where a single under geared group or player can fail the event for everyone as “Well designed and balanced”.

I would agree with you if the reward scheme were different, and if ending with 4/5 chains severed resulted in no rewards for anyone. As it stands, the event really has “degrees of success” rather than absolute success or failure in most cases. No one player can deprive you of the majority of the event’s rewards because they are continuously accumulating, not all locked away at the very end.

I would much rather see players trying, failing, and getting better through practice and having fun than see an event where individual actions mean little to nothing and everyone afk autoattacks for a guaranteed win. I guess I am willing to forgo a modest amount of loot for a more interactive experience.

Barsimoprimo.2759:

Only one problem I see with the Marrionate, DPS is essential. They made claims about trying to shift the zerker meta but this update only reinforces it. Without high dps some platforms’ success rates plummet.

Yes, you have a point. I think this could have been easily addressed by having two or three different types of tasks for the small platforms under the Marionette instead of them all being the same, and let players pick which they are best suited for as they enter the portal. Other tasks might be as simple as having at least one party member alive on the platform at the end of the timer (good for tanky characters) or keeping enemies off an npc for the duration (good for control characters).

I posted separately about what design mechanics make this fight work so well, but I wanted to add my voice here as well on a more personal level. I’m having a lot of fun with this event, even though I’ve only had one success out of 5+ tries. There’s a sense of working together that other world bosses lack that makes the experience rewarding above and beyond the material gains. It’s clear a lot of thought went into this one. Keep it up!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I agree:

‘As convenient as I find the waypoints all over the place, I feel like it trivializes much of the exploration we would be having without them.’

Chris

Agreed. Many of my best gaming memories are not about achieving expected goals at the end of a journey, but about the unexpected things that happen on the way. With so many waypoints, there is very little room for unexpected encounters with other players/events because after going there just once, you can teleport to almost any destination with near pinpoint accuracy.

Despite having plenty of people playing the game, I would guess this is at least part of the reason I keep hearing people say that so many zones feel “empty.” Even if there are a hundred other players in there with you, chances are you won’t see any of them because they teleport to their exact destination, do their business, and then teleport out again, leaving 95% of the map untouched by human feet except for the slow trickle of people attempting map completion.

I love the wilderness zone suggestion. I would also suggest the following as a method of horizontal progression to reward additional exploratory visits to zones (forgive me if it has been suggested before): event discovery/completion tracking. Just because you’ve visited a place once doesn’t mean you’ve seen everything there is to see there, especially since so many events are timed or trigger conditionally. Show players how many of the different events that occur in each zone they’ve participated in, and reward them for discovering and completing them all.

Ensign.2189:

Criticisms about the reward structure of the game being poorly designed are well taken. . . .

Calling the trading post soulless is very true – it is a very efficient way of trading, but as a game maker you aren’t necessarily looking for the most efficient system, but the most fun.

This. I think a lot of people are losing sight of the end goal – to create a fun game. Maximal efficiency and fun are not always synonymous. It is entirely possible to create a highly functional and efficient economy that is absolutely no fun to participate in.

Of course, fun is subjective, which is why games such as this one provide a wide variety of activities. Even if you don’t find X activity fun, you can still enjoy Y activity. The problem arises when the game mechanics strongly incentivize one activity to the detriment of others, leading to feelings that if you want any of the rewards that the game designers clearly intend for you to want (better equipment, new cosmetics, etc), you feel “forced” to participate in an activity that doesn’t meet your definition of fun.

In its quest for economic efficiency, I would argue the trading post has done damage to other areas of the game, because the reward mechanics in every other area must take the trading post into account. Drop rates must be so low that as an individual player, attempting to find particular items out in the world is nearly (though not technically) impossible so as not to flood the global TP with supply. And most every reward must be tradeable, or simply come in the form of gold to begin with, because being able to trade things you don’t want for things you do want is efficient. This turns the TP into the reward center of the game, where everyone goes to get the reward they want because it’s so hard to do so through other activities.

At times, it seems as if the rest of the game is designed to meet the needs of the trading post, rather than the trading post being designed to meet the needs of the game and all the many other activities that it encompasses. I think that is something worth discussing.

I don’t post a lot, which I guess typically makes me part of the “non-posting majority,” but this patch has made me feel like adding my voice to make it that much harder to brush off negative feedback as the work of a “vocal minority.” This was a bad decision. I don’t own any human T3 cultural armor myself, but I feel for those who do. If people feel like their effort in the endgame of cosmetic progression is at risk of being undermined, they won’t bother putting in that effort in the first place. Needless to say, that will not do good things for player numbers.

Big, big mistake. In one blow, they’ve managed to:
1) Make the human players who bought the normal version of the armor feel cheated that they paid more for what is by comparison an inferior product,
2) Decrease racial appearance diversity, further making human players feel cheated that they now have fewer ways to appear different from other races,
3) Totally undermine their own arguments about clipping concerns as a reason for not allowing cross-racial cultural armor wearing, inviting anger at perceived unfairness in the fact that now Human cultural armor is available to light armor professions, but, for example, Norn cultural armor isn’t available to heavy armor professions.

I feel a bit foolish for thinking, “maybe this time it will be something OTHER than Scarlet.” Or even, “maybe this is where the Scarlet plot line finally gets ‘good’ like they keep promising.” I actually enjoyed the mechanics of the new reactor fractal (aside from the no waypoint bug), only to log out in disgust after finishing it because of the story. It seems stupid to keep hoping, “maybe this time it will be different.” As long as the individual(s) responsible for story direction remain the same, it’s pretty clear by now that it won’t.

Honestly, I feel like we’ve reached the point of a South Park episode where the recurring refrain is, “Scarlet did it!”

Just want to publicly appreciate this truly unique weapon. I love both the concept and execution, and the bat effect plus the chittering sound every time it’s drawn make it really fun to use, especially around this time of year. You can also get a nice bat swarm going if you use mesmer clones, since the cloned swords generate them too. Good work weapon designers, and keep the creativity coming!

Could I have an invite please? I mistakenly had too many guilds the last time I asked for one and didn’t realize it.

I would like an invite as well

Divinity’s Reach, Plaza of Lyssa
Facing north from where the light the beacons game starts, looking down at the beacons below. Moving slightly backwards and forwards causes the ground below to either appear normal, or disappear into a blue void.
My wife got pictures of both the normal and blue appearance from the same vantage point.

Personally, the Frog King boss with his big amulet instantly made me think of the Frog King who had the hero medal in Chrono Trigger. The visual resemblance is pretty strong. http://chrono.wikia.com/wiki/Frog_King

Legendary weapons are certainly symbols, but as time passes I think their meaning is changing. Prior to being purchasable on the TP, having one meant at the very least that you had “achieved” some things related to game content – you had completely explored the world, played the dungeons, spent some time in WvW, etc. Even if you purchased every component that could be purchased off the TP, there was still a lot that you had to get by DOING rather than buying.

Yet now, as the final product sells on the TP for thousands of gold, and the cost of components continues to rise faster than many players can make money, my reaction when seeing a legendary weapon has changed. Whereas before it was, “that person clearly has a lot of experience with this game,” now it’s “I wonder what the odds are that they did something distasteful to get that? Did they buy money from gold sellers? Did they monopolize a part of the TP to generate profits for themselves while raising prices for everyone else? Or are they so desperate for attention that they paid obscene amounts of cash to legitimately buy gems to turn into gold?”

In a nutshell, the knowledge and experience a legendary used to symbolize was a positive thing. Now, seeing a legendary just says to me, “Warning: this might not be the sort of person you want to be around.”

A report back for those of you who have been following the thread for a while and know my situation (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/error-code-7-11-3-189-101/1089813 for those of you who don’t).

My wife and I were able to conduct our first seat-swap test of this error this weekend. As usual, I was playing completely lag free when she suffered lag and a 7:11 disconnect. We immediately traded places, and I logged into my account from her machine and she logged into hers from mine, and we continued playing. On her machine, I experienced absolutely no lag. On my machine, she experienced some minor lag, but was not disconnected again.

Results: Inconclusive, but hinting at the validity of the idea that this lag is server-side and account-linked, seeing as how all lag disappeared on her machine simply by switching to using my account. I will post again when another opportunity for a test presents itself.

Poulsbo and Fort Aspenwood here.

For those of you waiting for more details on what I’ve been able to find out via experimentation, sorry I don’t have more to tell you – the situation for carrying out a good “seat switch” test hasn’t arisen yet. While my wife has experienced the lag/disconnect problem once since the last time I posted, it cleared up on its own after a single disconnect, so we didn’t get a chance to do any testing with it. Clearly we aren’t having this problem with anything like the regularity some of the other posters here are having it.

My wife and I have experienced this issue in an interesting way, so I figured I might post here to add to the knowledge base about it. First, our situations for running the game are virtually identical:

We have physically identical machines and hardware (and mostly software, too)
We sit in the same room, connected wirelessly to the same router
We (obviously) connect through the same IP
We play together, logged into the same zones at the same time, and our characters are nearby each other

Our lag and disconnection experiences, however, are quite different. While I almost never have any visible lag and can’t remember the last time I was disconnected, my wife gets both on a semi-regular basis. When it happens, it looks something like this: first, activity on her screen seems to pause – damage numbers, enemy movement, and skills all stop, though she can move about as normal. I see no difference in my gameplay. Within 30 seconds, she experiences a quick “catch up,” where all the things that happened while she was lagged suddenly occur for her all at once. This will happen several times, until finally, usually within a few minutes from the first lag spike, she will be booted to the character select screen. If she logs in again, the same problem occurs within a minute or two. The same thing happens if she logs back in with a different character, or in a different game zone, or both. Throughout all of this, I get not one hint of lag.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is what I notice when I compare our two screens while she’s “lagged.” On hers, she can move about, but the world seems otherwise frozen. On mine, not only is the world moving normally, but I can also see HER actions in real time. If she tries to use a skill while lagged, she sees no response, yet I see it happen correctly! The conclusion I draw from this is that the server is successfully receiving inputs that she sends, but not sending her anything back in return. It seems unlikely to be a problem between us and the server, because those reply messages are getting back to me just fine.

Wondering if it was some kind of bandwidth cap issue somewhere, I tried logging out so that only she was connected to the game. It made no difference. My suspicion is that somehow her account is being served at a consistently lower priority than mine, since this problem never occurs in reverse – I’m never the one lagged while she’s doing fine. The next time this happens, I’m going to have us switch seats and each log in from the other’s machine to see if the problem tracks the machine or the account.

After all that has happened, you say that there is no longer a way to be fair to all players, but I can think of one thing that would make all players happy: a (very) public acknowledgement that this has been a long chain of mistakes, and a promise that it will not happen again. As in, no more one-time loot opportunities where being disconnected can permanently deprive people of the reward, and no more attempted fixes that accidentally make the reward disparity worse.

There is another thread on this topic that is actually getting quite a bit of official attention over in the “Account Issues” forum. There have been some responses, just not in this thread.

I feel bad for the position that the support reps have been put in – what should have been a clear PR win by restoring rewards to those who were initially denied them, a thoughtful effort to do right by the customer, has instead become yet another source of criticism. Just as with the initial event, it seems the devs’ hearts were in the right place (let’s create something fun and memorable/let’s fix a problem that our system caused), yet the technical execution was once again lacking. I think it’s worth a moment to say thanks to the support people for your hard work, and that we recognize that you were not the cause of these problems even if you have to deal with the brunt of the anger over them.

It seems like most people agree that the current situation, where we have both culling and portals, is not working as intended and not really acceptable long-term. Obviously, the best solution would be to fix the acknowledged problem of culling, and only THEN have the discussion about the mechanics of portal once we are able to see them truly functioning as intended.

However, we don’t know for certain if culling can truly be fixed in the large scale of the WvW environment. Or, suppose it can be fixed, but it requires so much time and effort to do it that the fix won’t be completed within a year, or maybe even two or three years, due to a choice to spend that time and effort on other parts of the game instead. Should the portal ability be left in its current state, resulting in broken overall gameplay (even though that’s not strictly portal’s fault), for as long as it takes to fix culling, potentially forever?

The way I see it, we can have unrestricted portaling, or we can have culling, but we can’t have both. Until culling can be addressed, putting some kind of quantity/speed limit on portals’ transporting of players is a less than ideal, but still necessary workaround to combat the bug of invisible armies. Once culling is fixed, restore portal to its original unrestricted state if that better serves the balance of the game.

After getting two characters to 80, I love a lot of the big things about the game, although there are a number of small things that I do not love.

Love:
1) The visuals and sound – both very pleasant
2) Being encouraged to explore
3) Being encouraged to help others rather than view them as annoyances (no kill stealing, no resource node stealing, exp for reviving, etc)
4) The variety of classes that play in unique ways
5) The little bits of lore and humor sprinkled about everywhere
6) Many, many other things

Do not love:
1) Persistent bugs with particular situations/skills. Most frustrating in my own experience have been the necromancer minion AI bug and the teleport randomly failing bug.
2) Server-side culling. Usually most problematic in WvW, but was very annoying during the Karka event as well.
3) Active management of the game. Constantly fluctuating item drop rates, whether in the positive or negative direction, do bad things to the market.

As you can see, the things I love are broad, overarching mechanics and content that I encounter every time I play. The things I don’t love are comparatively small pieces of the bigger picture.

I play a level 80 Mesmer.

I deal with the portal skill in just one way: I don’t use it in WvW. Why? I just don’t find it fun. I don’t want to be reduced to a taxi service, and I don’t get any thrill out of exploiting server-side culling. The most fun and exciting battles that I’ve been a part of have not involved any portal usage by any side. I suppose, in a nutshell, I’m not so desperate to win that I’d make the game unfun for myself to do it.

I noticed this problem too during the weekend event, but also something even more odd. The sigil I had equipped on my weapon, which heals every time you kill an enemy, was registering kills by activating and healing me, but my exp and kill count for the karka achievement were not, even when I got the first hit on an enemy and took out a chunk of health before anyone else joined in.

I very much hope everyone takes just a couple minutes to complete the survey. It’s only through this kind of polling, not just reading the forums, that the developers can get an accurate sense of what the players are thinking, and how many of them are thinking it.

The way I see it, the problem people are having is that the possibility of a precursor reward was utterly disproportionate to the content of the event. No other event in the game has ever rewarded approximately 3 hours of gameplay, doable by a character of any level and experience, with hundreds of gold worth of value. Nothing has even come close.

I doubt many people would be defending a system that, 3 hours after you log into the game for the first time, sends you a mail that has a 10% chance to contain 200 gold, yet that is hardly different from what happened. The lottery-by-mail system might actually be more rational, since it would be unaffected by time zone issues and server disconnections.

There is nothing wrong with a range of random rewards, but the range should be sane. The minimum possible reward, the 20 slot bag and the unique accessory, could safely be valued at 15 gold. The maximum possible reward (considering the potential for 2 precursors to drop per chest, and up to 5+ chests for those who were lucky/crafty in bouncing between the right overflows) is well over 1000 gold. To me, a 15 to 1000 gold range is not reasonable for any single event.

Perhaps they are using the wrong strategy to time these events. If they were targeted to the times with the LOWEST concurrency, a greater number of people might actually be able to experience them as they were intended, since I assume participants are supposed to be able to 1) see the enemies, and 2) use skills. Then again, maybe I’m making too many assumptions.

If I were one of those free trial players and this event were my first experience with the game, I would walk away without a second thought, which is a real shame, since I know things can be much better. The network lag was so bad that skills only activated intermittently, if at all. The culling was so bad it felt like playing with a clump of ghosts who were constantly fading in and out in a 20 foot perimeter around my character. Then, after finally finishing the event, I discover that the scavenger-hunt style quest chain has broken and become undoable within a matter of minutes. This is not exactly putting your best foot forward.

The sad thing is, I really like the game on the whole. I enjoy it and want other people to enjoy it too, but I doubt today’s performance convinced anyone to become a paying customer. It may even have sent a few customers packing.