Guild Wars 2

What is this, world war 3? Why does Anet have to retaliate? People are going to go play those games. There’s no stopping them. Anet should focus on what would make GW2 better in an of itself, not what they can do to sabotage the competition.

I see this game as closer to an ARPG in terms of character builds and combat mechanics. We don’t need a trinity, we just need content that plays to what we have. Right now everything just plays to berserker. If they reworked defiant, boon sharing, and healing power I think they could alter the meta enough without having a trinity.

Let me tell you something OP. Racing to 80 as fast as possible is possibly one of the most self-defeating things you can do in this game. You might feel satisfied for an hour or two, but once you get a full set of exotics and settle on a build, you will be staring down the barrel of ascended crafting and the pursuit of legendaries and wonder if it’s even worth the effort.

It’s sort of like trying to get through childhood quickly so that you can get a jump on paying your mortgage.

Plok.5873:

• let us move the target frame somewhere else.

I love this idea. I was under the impression that Anet planned to implement a similar modular UI like they had in GW1. They released a patch that allowed you to resize and move everything in the UI. GW2 needs this.

technonewt.2907:

One more that shows off Dwayna’s divine glow

What really gets me about this type of issue (in the image) is that it would take just as much work by the programmers to amend the script that displays particles on character models. It wouldn’t really take any more or less effort to turn off particles on boss models, than it would to set up this entire orange circle business.

Dark Catalyst.1028:

I just want instanced content period, and maybe an “inspect” command. I just want to keep the bads and the special snowflakes out because they tend to muck up stuff like world events while refusing to listen because they’re “playing how they want”.

I know exactly where you are coming from, but I fear most people will take your statement as proof of “elitism.” I want to strike a balance where people like you can have the control you need to play with more hardcore types of people, while still allowing the content to be accessible.

That is why raids in GW2 shouldn’t require more than exotics, and new players should be made more aware of the multitude of ways they can get exotic gear. I also think it would put people in a more cooperative mindset if these raids were guild-related. People are conditioned to cooperate with their guild more easily, and they are more inclined to go ahead and respec their build if asked to by a guildie. It is generally seen as one family member helping another, rather than a stranger trying to boss you around.

I just throw my bloodstone dust away now every time I get it. Turning it in to bricks is actually costing me money I don’t need to spend because I have more than enough bricks to make a full set of gear. Even though I’ll probably never make a full set because the cost of all the other stuff is insane. Bloodstone dust is the least valuable item in the game, yet it is required to make some of the most expensive items. Very strange.

Olba.5376:

Considering that the reward chests in large dynamic events like Tequatl resulted in people complaining about how crappy they were, I don’t think it would work that well.

And I don’t really see how you could balance it out. On one hand, you would need the rewards to be good (because nowadays people don’t do anything unless they get kittening rewards for it), on the other you cannot make them be too good or you’ll end up with guilds being just about a requirement to play, which is bad.

From what I’ve heard, and this is pretty anecdotal but still, the rewards for Tequatl and Wurms is something like 2% of the participants getting an ascended item or some such great reward, which seems fine considering that those fights involve CAPPED maps of ~150 people and can be repeated every couple hours.

What I’m suggesting is a weekly chest, in line with the weekly guild commendation rewards of existing guild activities. This would allow for better drop rates and certain loot being guaranteed, such as a rare item, some gold, commendations, etc. The ascended gear drop chance would be something akin to Fractals daily chests which have a chance to give you rings and Fractal skins.

Guilds requiring weekly raid participation would undoubtedly come into existence, but no one is forcing you to be in one of those epic hardcore raid guilds. There’s a whole spectrum of guilds out there. Find the one that suits you.

Dude I’m gonna have to disagree with you on the Asuran armor… I like my toes to poke out. I get feet cramps when my toes are squished inside tiny shoes all day.

Let’s see if we can come up with something fun and engaging for end-gamers to do besides these massive, mindless, zergy LS events. If you love PvE, dungeons, guild missions, and/or the idea of raiding, this thread is for you. This is to discuss the future of such content.

First off, let me make one thing perfectly clear. Raiding in GW2 does not have to be like raiding in WoW or other games. Please cast aside all preconceptions of “elitism” and keep an open mind.

After hearing from Allie Murdock in the Ready-Up on the process devs use to gather our feedback, I shall try to condense my own ideas into bullet points. If you have ideas, please do the same.

Commander system: Overhaul
- Allow commanders to have more control over squad organization.
- Allow them to invite people and kick AFKers from the squad, and thus the raid instance (if applicable).
- Allow them to make a “raid call” or announcement pop up message to all squad members. Useful for ready-checking.
- Allow commanders to place physical markers on the ground to indicate places where people should stand, or run to, or stay away from during a fight.
- Create a “Squad Finder” system in the LFG tool (idea by Thereon)

Dungeons: Hard Mode
- A new mode for all dungeon paths where everything is set to level 80.
- All enemies are much harder, possibly some having new mechanics to contend with.
- Rare chance of better loot, and rare chance of ascended crafting mats as random drops.
- Daily Hard Mode chest with rare items and a chance of ascended gear.
- Overall difficulty of Hard Mode should be on par with high level Fractals.
- Bring back the sense of challenge that existed in dungeons during Beta.

Guild Mission: Small Raid
- New type of instance allowing up to 10 people to enter.
- Similar to a dungeon, but with enemies designed to account for 10 players.
- Special bosses with unique mechanics (not tank and spank).
- Rare chance at ascended crafting mats as random drops.
- Weekly chest reward with guild commendations and a chance of ascended gear.
- Weekly chance at rare unique skins.
- Boss drops have chance of very rare miniature
- Small guild Merit reward.
- Special achievements and titles.
- Give something for guilds larger than 3 members to do something together besides dungeons, spvp, or mindless zerg-following.
- Add a little more “end game” to GW2 PvE.

Guild Mission: Large Raid
- Similar to small raid, but designed for 30 players.
- Has it’s own weekly reward chest, but the chest contains the same types of loot as small raid (rare items, commendations, chance for ascended gear, etc). So you can do a small raid, get the reward, then do a large raid and get that reward as well, each week.
- Large guild Merit rewards.
- Special achievements and titles.
- Give something for guilds larger than 20 members to do something together besides bounties, treks, or mindless zerg-following.
- Add a little more “end game” to GW2 PvE.

Guild Mission: Epic Raid
- Same as above, but this time designed for 60 players.
- Very Large guild Merit rewards.
- Special achievements and titles.
- Give something for guilds larger than 50 members to do something together besides puzzles, bounties, treks, or mindless zerg-following.
- Add a little more “end game” to GW2 PvE.

Ad hoc Raids
- A type of raid that is effectively the same as a dungeon, but designed for 10-20 players
- Must be opened by a commander with a squad
- Same weekly reward chest as above, minus the guild commendations (perhaps a different reward instead)
- Meant for people who want to raid but can’t or don’t want to do a guild raid.
- Unique achievements and titles

Raids: Requirements
- SAME AS EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE GAME
- If you didn’t know, you can get a full set of exotics for nothing but KARMA at the Orr Temples. Assuming you haven’t spent all of your karma on Lemons from level 1 to 80, you should have more than enough.
- You don’t need ascended gear or agony resist.
- You don’t need 4,058,714,368,173,456 achievement points, unless your guild asks you to; in which case you might consider finding a different guild.
- Raids should be accessible to anyone who is experienced with the game and playing their class well.

Please post your ideas if you have any, or feel free to discuss ones that are already posted. Keep it constructive and concise so that the devs may have an easier time absorbing it.

GW2 looks amazing… until the eye-bleeding neon orange geometric shapes get slathered everywhere by a jungle wurm or watchwork knight…

I feel your pain OP. The world is full of jerks, and you are bound to run in to some of them, especially in a video game. Best you can do is shake it off and move on.

perilisk.1874:

Funny you should mention the Knights. The telegraphs there seem to work a little differently than normal. For most of the game, you’re trained that if you see the red ring, you dodge ASAP. With the Extraction attack, leaving the area of the attack is infeasible, and if you dodge when you see the ring, the dodge will be over before the attack. To actually avoid the attack, you have to watch the animation. The orange ring there seems to function more as a nudge saying “hey, look at the boss, and get ready to dodge!”

That’s an interesting take on it, however I sense it’s more of a timing bug. The orange circle is itself part of an animation. In video games the animation can often be technically separate from the damage application. I’m a game design student (trying to get in to my university’s character animation track) and I’ve recently been working with Unity and learning how animations are created and applied in a game engine.

The way it works, as I understand it so far, is whatever code package that handles the character behavior (enemy AI) tells it something like:

if player enters aggro range {
engage attack behavior and play “run” animation
}

if player in melee range {
call function attackMelee and play “attackMelee” animation
}

Hurray psuedocode! The point is there is code that handles the damage and technical aspects, and there’s code that tells the character to find and access an animation file that plays effectively like clicking play on a youtube video. You animate the character in another program like Maya, export/import it in to your game engine, and then use a tool to say which frames on the timeline correspond to the animation in question. The tool defines those frames as “idle” or “run” or “walk” or whatever, and the code references those names.

Soooo… What likely happened with the Knights is the animator set up the physical body to be animated with a certain timing, but the game designer set the orange circle to show up at a different time for whatever reason. It boils down to an oversight when polishing. They wanted the orange circle to appear well before the attack happened and have it disappear after, but botched the timing.

Corpse Flakes.5369:

Lupicus in the Arah dungeon (every explorable path) is a heavily visual fight. I recommend it if you’ve never done it.

I’ve done Lupicus. He’s a great example and in retrospect I should have probably used him instead of Kholer in my example. Kholer came to mind first because I was thinking of the beta and how the design of the game has progressed since then.

NewTrain.7549:

If the Living Story had been at all good, people wouldn’t want an expansion this badly.

Yes, this. I see people repeat the mantra “The LS can do anything an expansion can.” It can but it hasn’t, and people are losing faith that it ever will.

1. This thread probably belongs in the Class Balance forum.
2. You should probably update your OP to emphasize and point out that the issue is lack of consistency between game modes, not the debuff in general.

Does this make the mods Forum Commandos and the devs Forum Minstrels?

The revealed debuff is important for balancing reasons. The question should probably be why is the duration different between game modes? Some skills are split between PvE and PvP, but this particular debuff being different really screws up the consistency of the entire class. Personally, I think they should just raise the duration in PvE to match.

You know they have a whole playable race that comes with free cat tails?

I think I would be interested in this. It seems ridiculous that sentinels and celestials are locked behind crazy time/money gates. Anet would have to really take a long time to overhaul the gear rewards throughout the game. I think what you want is sort of what the WvW armor vendor offers in the borderlands. The more I think about that, the more I like it. Maybe have a vendor like that for PvE, and turn the dungeon armors into skins.

By the way, I heard from Woodenpotatoes that the new backpiece allows you to swap stats apparently like a legendary, it just costs about 10g each time. I think something like that for all ascended gear could be a good compromise.

Where was it actually confirmed that the reason the Canthan district got removed was NCSoft/China/Korea were offended by it? That’s been the commonly held belief, but I don’t think I’ve actually seen an official source cited. I’ve also heard that the reason it was scrapped was that it was simply “poorly implemented” which could mean any number of things.

So why did Anet do this? Almost certainly because of the massive amount of particle effects. Look at my screenshot again. Dungeons used to be a huge part of the game, but now we’ve moved in to the open world with massive zergs. Massive zergs = massive particles, particularly the burning condition. Guardians inflict blue burning; possibly the most egregious piece of visual clutter in the game. It fully masks the target’s avatar and makes it neigh impossible to read telegraphs, and renders the concept of anticipation useless. Zergs exacerbate this issue because with multiple guardians proccing the blue burn effect, you get a permanent blue fuzz-ball that can’t be read. Add multiple elementalist AoE and dozens of warriors in bulky armor, and you get a clusterfrakk that forces Anet to change the philosophy of their combat game design.

Solutions? I must confess I am low on suggestions here. One thought would be to remove the burning visual effect from all boss avatars. The burning condition icon on their health bar is enough.

Anet opted to start making bosses arbitrarily bigger. Scarlet appears over 3 times larger than the largest Norn during open world fights, because maybe if the boss avatar is bigger, the particle effects won’t wash it out so much. In my screen shot you might not realize that the holographic boss is standing there in the middle. You only see her legs because you are prompted to angle your camera down to see the orange markers, and she stands something like 40 feet high. There’s simply no way you would be able to anticipate any of her attacks without the orange circles. So why does she even have animations? Why aren’t we just fighting a big, stationary machine; some kind of monolithic computerized obelisk? Why pay animators to animate this model?

What am I really getting at? Compare what Kholer used to be. Compare what games like Dark Souls do with anticipation, and look at what GW2 has become. Do we really want this game to devolve into a colorful rendition of hopscotch? Do we want Avoid-the-orange-Wars-2? I really don’t think it would be that hard to implement world bosses that have attacks with anticipation just like the Asylum Demon. In fact the 3 new watchwork knight bosses have almost the same attack pattern as Kholer. They pull everyone in and follow up with a melee attack. Only, instead of having the watchwork knight pull her arm back, they bathe the ground for miles in Las Vegas Neon Glowing Orange. This simply isn’t the right direction, in my opinion. It makes the game look like crap. It clutters up the screen just as badly as having a multitude of addons like some other games. I fear the day when someone invents the GW2 equivalent of DBM.

Does anyone else feel just a little bit turned off by the orange markers, the huge bosses, and the focus on massive zerging? Am I the only one that remembers Anet talking about designing the gameplay primarily around 5 man content?

Dehvi.1435:

Thing is Xenon, you don’t need to use the overlay for this site. It shows the same info on the website. The overlay is just an extra and in fact I don’t use it as I don’t like making my game windowed mode in order to use it. I don’t think GW will become anything like that because of overlays..

I know you don’t need it, and I’m not necessarily against little addons and stuff as long as they aren’t some form of hack or exploit. I’m just a passionate advocate for minimal UI in video games. The image I linked is a joke about WoW. I think if a game requires the player to be aware of that much information via the UI, something is desperately wrong with that game design.

I almost wrote a massive wall of text on this but it pertained more to dodging and boss mechanics, so I think I’ll make my own thread on that.

For now you just have an overlay for events. What’s next though? A DBM for GW2? Will Anet start relying on the fact that players can literally see the cooldown timer of a boss skill to shape future boss encounters? That’s what I’m worried about

I really hope GW2 doesn’t turn in to this…

I think if you compare what has been permanently added to GW2 through the LS to what was added to GW1 through EotN you would find that the “traditional expansion” delivered far more substance. I think that is what people are looking for. If Anet could step it up and deliver more with the LS, then that would be fine, but after a year+ it doesn’t stand up to traditional expansions.

One thing that would have helped is if all of the temporary stuff had been permanent. Add a new playable race or some new profession skills on top of that and you would actually have something close to an “expansion-worth” of content.

Jski.6180:

Hylek
Praise the sun.

May you one day find you very own sun!

SkylightMoon.1980:

…so random that it almost doesn’t belong in game, because of how much it diverges from the lore…

How exactly does SAB diverge from the lore?

Asura = technomagically superior race
SAB = technomagical device invented by Asura

Seems lore-friendly to me. I agree with the rest of your post, I’m just a stickler for minutiae.

Nightarch.2943:

Not denying anything, I’m just kind of baffled by how some of you are overreacting to my opinion.

Overreaction? On a forum??? What is this I don’t even!

+1 for naked male armor. I want my guardian to be Brock Sampson.

Warning: partial blood and nudity. Nothing an armorless gw2 character wouldn’t show though.
http://www.cgfeedback.com/cgfeedback/attachment.php?attachmentid=2518&stc=1&d=1280655792

I’ll be a really sad quaggan if SAB doesn’t come back on April 1st. The release of the first SAB was last year April 1st.

zenleto.6179:

Lydell.8713:

Joke, yeah, the game’s still going strong. Just don’t do what I’m doing now and don’t dwell in the forums too much, or you’ll end up on hiatus again in no time. Basically, the forums consist in a tiny number of valid points getting lost in an ocean of bullkitten.

And this.

A thousand times this.

bhagwad.4281:

My female engineer Hagrida Blane is a battle hardened kitten. She’d laugh at the female norn upper tier armor with its pansy bras and stockings and what not.

I want to buy her some cultural armor, but all of them look so….eeewww….sexy! I mean, what of the rugged, battered, beer drinking, scarred, one-eyed veterans that many women warriors will obviously be?

I can’t bring myself to clothe Hagrida in such flimsy pathetic outfits. I’ve managed to find her a solid coat as shown in the attached picture, but I badly want some more “non sexy” female norn/human armor.

Come on Anet. Not all of us want to play sexed up huge bosomed female toons with flawless skin, pouty looks and thick wavy hair. Here’s Hagrida in her starter armor: https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/93924/Engineer_2.png

I’d hit that…

Wait… OP you’re saying your character is trying NOT to look sexy?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Xenon.4537:

Kaiyanwan.8521:

I fear, people highly underestimate the potential effect of ESO on GW2.

The reason there will be no big content updates in April is probably, that everyone at ANet is going to play ESO to learn at least from AvA.

You have literally no idea what goes on in a studio do you?

I do not care what is going on at ANet. I do not care if it is hard to program the code, or write a story.

I did not buy GW2 to know what’s going on internally at ANet. If I want to become a coder or a novelist, I go to a place to learn it.

I bought GW2 to be entertained. I like the games core. Do I have to be a novelist or a coder to be able to criticize it? Or a specialist on HR, so I know what’s going on?

No.

I do not even think I am overreacting, I was thinking about making this descision for a fairly long time. I am no longer convinced that the product receives the quality it deserves. I care for it, but there is nothing I can do but to give feedback. I surely gave my feedback on this boards, in positive and negative ways.

So the choice is:

Eat whatever they serve, or just find some other place for lunch. If you get crap every time at your standard place and nothing changes even if you tell them, accepting that this is what you will get in the future too is probably a reasonable conclusion.

No overreaction involved.

P.S.: The quote about being mad is fairly famous, I though everyone would get it.

The simple notion that all 300+ of the devs are going to stop what they are doing for a month and play another MMO together, presumably for the purpose of spying/scouting the competition, is what prompted my question. Your lengthy response more than confirmed my suspicions. My problem wasn’t with your opinion on the game itself, it’s with the misconception you have about how it’s developed.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter that ESO is coming out. If people want to play it, there’s really nothing Anet can do to stop them. I doubt even a full blown expansion would stop people. It might even be a better strategy to take their time and release an expansion later when the hype for ESO has died down.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

sorudo.9054:

Xenon.4537:

I say we start some kind of petition to make NCSoft aware of the demand for Cantha and an expansion, so that they give Anet the funding to develop it.

sill doesn’t change the view of Korea and China…if they don’t approve then a petition really isn’t gonna do any good.

Cantha still exists in GW1…………….. If Korea and China were so distraught with Cantha then wouldn’t Anet delete cantha from GW1??? Thats the kind of logic I am getting out of you.

It is not like Anet would start WWIII if they mixed Asian cultures together. If that happens then I would laugh my kitten off. I would laugh even harder if countries involved tried to sue Anet.

People get easily offended these days even when the subject matter has nothing to do with them. Seriously what does Cantha have to do with Korea of China???? Absolutely nothing at all.

This^

There’s no sane reason to bend over to the will of some upset group of people that have a personal problem with the aesthetics of a video game.

Think of all the games PETA would have shut down for depicting bad things happening to animals. What would our selection be like if devs had to listen to religious groups? Not a single game involving magic would exist.

SkylightMoon.1980:

If Anet has promised to do expansion like content through the Living Story, and they still havent, why do you think the content in an expansion would be any different? I mean pretty much youd just be waiting much longer for a lot more of the same content.

Maybe by the end of LS season 2 we will have like 75% of an expansion’s worth of content, but I fear that is being a bit too hopeful. The problem with such a long development cycle and the nature of the LS system is that half of the patches won’t really be connected to each other. Take Halloween, Wintersday, Bazaar of the Four Winds, and SAB. None of those have anything to do with the whole Scarlet arc. I’m not even sure either of the southsun events had anything to do with her. An expansion contains content that is overall related to each other. Half of what we got since launch have been disjointed singular things that come and go just as quickly.

Not to mention in order to develop the staples of a true expansion such as new playable Races and classes, they would need to take off 8+ months just to focus on it. Those things are waaaaaaay larger orders than anything Anet has put out since launch.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

I fear, people highly underestimate the potential effect of ESO on GW2.

The reason there will be no big content updates in April is probably, that everyone at ANet is going to play ESO to learn at least from AvA.

You have literally no idea what goes on in a studio do you?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Xenon.4537:

People who actually care about GW2 will stay.

Nope. I actually care.

Uninstalled the game yesterday. Why? The game is in a sad state and the DEV’s seem not to listen.
So I’m making a point, a statement so to say:

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

I guess all of those CDI topics and threads with dev responses mean nothing to you. Not sure what more you are expecting.

Also, welcome to the “I uninstalled the game so that I could talk about how much I uninstalled the game” bandwagon.

Embrace The Bold.7619:

Xenon.4537:

Lankybird.8149:

Not Factions I can tell you that. WOrst part of GW1…..

The copy and paste of the ‘flood’ from Halo sucked too.

I beg to differ. Factions was my favorite campaign with some of my favorite environments. Sure, Kaineng City was visually repetitive, but I’m confidant that the outstanding artists who crafted GW2’s environments can do it better this time around. They already have assets going for the Jade Sea via the Maw fractal. I personally would love to revisit Echovald Forest.

By the way, Halo didn’t invent the Flood.

Also.

I agree with this as well. Factions was great Kieng was a bit boring and tbh the afflicted thing cant be in GW2. Its more likely they’ll be a and uneasy alliance from tengu/tryians/cathans to fight a dragon with renegade groups on all sides. also I want my ridiculously bad insults back (we all know what luxons were really called :P).

Haha yes, Kurzick Master Race!

I could see them bring back the afflicted. It would be an easy way for them to rehash old lore; not always a bad idea if done right. But maybe it would be better if they did something with Kuunavang. I think the deep sea dragon would be the perfect candidate for the villain of the Cantha expansion. It currently blocks the ocean routes that lead out that way. I could also see them having karka in the Jade Sea. And of course with the Cantha expansion we have to have the Tengu ally with the rest of Tyria and be added as a playable race.

I’m only expecting the runes and sigils as well as some class balance, since that’s all I’ve ever heard them so much as mention. The rest of the stuff on your list I would love to see, but are 99% likely just pipe dreams.

sorudo.9054:

Xenon.4537:

I say we start some kind of petition to make NCSoft aware of the demand for Cantha and an expansion, so that they give Anet the funding to develop it.

sill doesn’t change the view of Korea and China…if they don’t approve then a petition really isn’t gonna do any good.

I’m still unclear why exactly they have an issue with Cantha. “They don’t like the mixed culture” is just not a strong argument on it’s own. If artists had to consider whether or not to do something based on whether someone dislikes it, there would be no art. Anet shouldn’t let potential dislike stop them from creating new things.

I say we start some kind of petition to make NCSoft aware of the demand for Cantha and an expansion, so that they give Anet the funding to develop it.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

What do You people think?
i think the living story concept is working well and is profitable for them, so it better that they keep on using the living story platform to distribute new expansion content.

Do You also hate LS as I do?
no. i love the living story concept.

Do you also think it is detrminetal for this game?
no. i think it makes the game better.

How many of You would like to see expansion instead?
not me.

i want to see expansion content delivered via living story updates.
this is what they promised earlier.

98% of LS introductions is TEMPORARY content, I can say with a likely 99% certainty that the community would prefer PERMANENT content retail expansions.

My depressing theory is that Anet can’t afford to make a full-blown expansion. The only economically feasible thing for them may be to squeeze these LS updates out and try to entice gem store sales on the side. Keep in mind Anet is the developer. NCSoft is the publisher. NCSoft has the money. NCSoft is supporting the release of Wowstar and other projects. I think Anet is simply not getting any funding from NCSoft for an expansion. By the way, another dirty little secret is that NCSoft probably takes a hefty chunk of those gem store sales as a return on their initial investment in the development of GW2.

I vote we put together some kind of petition to make NCSoft aware of the demand for a GW2 expansion. For whatever reason, the Cantha Thread is just not enough.

Lankybird.8149:

Not Factions I can tell you that. WOrst part of GW1…..

The copy and paste of the ‘flood’ from Halo sucked too.

I beg to differ. Factions was my favorite campaign with some of my favorite environments. Sure, Kaineng City was visually repetitive, but I’m confidant that the outstanding artists who crafted GW2’s environments can do it better this time around. They already have assets going for the Jade Sea via the Maw fractal. I personally would love to revisit Echovald Forest.

By the way, Halo didn’t invent the Flood.

Also.

Lévis.5489:

TESO and Wildstar are coming out soon. Anet better have something up the sleeve instead of some bug fixes and quality of life updates.

Wowstar is just World of Warcraft in space, much like SWTOR. I watched several of my friends get hyped to all hell for Wowstar, and basked in their massive disappointment when they played the beta. If people are in to that sort of thing, I say let them leave.

ESO is in a similar boat. Same friends played it and said after 30 minutes they just wanted to go back to Skyrim. If people would rather play a watered-down multiplayer Skyrim instead of GW2, then let them.

People who actually care about GW2 will stay.

I suspect Anet would give us more than a month of tease and/or warning of a patch that is truly “expansion-sized.” When I think “expansion” I think of GW1 Factions or EotN. Those had 10x more more content than any GW2 patch. In fact I’d say they had 10x more content than all the GW2 patches combined.

I usually defend elitism, because I don’t see it as elitism, but as a will to learn content and beat the game. However I find myself sympathizing with OP’s described situation and agreeing with the 3 proposed ideas.

1. AP doesn’t need to be displayed to people. AFAIK it only serves to stroke egos.
2. Fix scaling. People have obvious advantages through gear and traits that break scaling in low level areas.
3. Respect is a sociological issue. We have crafted a society where people show disrespect all the time. Narcissism runs rampant. Parents, please teach your kids respect.

Practical short-term solution to OP:

Find a guild with nicer people to hang out with. Not everyone checks achievement points. Keep using the LFG tool and if you run in to jerks, don’t sweat it. The world is full of jerks, you are going to run in to them from time to time. Don’t let them rule your life. Getting upset about it only lets them “win.” Shrug it off, grow a thicker skin, and move forward, or you will just always be “here.” What I mean by “here” is this situation of you clashing with jerks. Every game you play you will undoubtedly encounter a similar situation and be doomed to repeat this process. Rise above it, you won’t have low AP forever.

Anet could probably do a better job teaching game mechanics to new players, but there is another side to this issue.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

People have to want to learn to play the game better. If they don’t want to learn, they are going to feel like you are shoving overly difficult content down their throat. It’s narcissism. Their ego simply won’t allow them to consider “learning” as a solution. In their mind, its not their fault, its the game or another player that is at fault.

So any ideas about teaching these types of people have to come in the form of subtle, natural game design. You can’t just give a pop-up that says “Hey you should drink a potion for this dungeon!” The player will ignore it. And you can’t shove a mandatory boss in their path that 1-shots them. They will scream and cry and quit the game, leaving a wake of bad publicity that stains the reputation of the game as a whole.

iFruit.6190:

I cannot visualize a single player posting that many.

A couple months after launch, someone posted a buy order for a single Lemon for approximately 3800 gold iirc, as a joke. Lemons were account bound and it was before Anet fixed the TP to prohibit such buy orders. Gold was worth double or triple what is is now due to inflation. If someone were to place that buy order today, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were over 20,000 gold.

That was just one guy playing a joke. Think of how much more money he might have had then, and how much he has now.