After 2 years of scientific calculations in a hi-tech laboratory we came to the conclusion that a scoring system of 25-16-14 would make WvW great again.
Why develop a simple server merging system so that people can play with their friends on different servers when you can just change 3 numbers and fix everything?
Because these game modes are just minimally supported by Anet
PvP lacks build variety, can’t play competitively with a team of friends, small rewards, all the maps are the same and it’s not as good as GW1 GvG.
WvW has server issues, all your friends are scattered on different servers so you can’t play with them. Gameplay is not as fun as it used to be – blob size now defeat skill, no incentive to play – long matchups with predictable outcome, EotM still has no objective or reward.
They need to first bring celestal back, because the elementlist is a celestial class and the might has been nerfed across the board already. It made no sence to nerf the might because of celestial, then remove celestial and not undo the nerfs.
Then they need to make berserker amulet viable on elementalist again, like it was in the good old days. For that they need to scrap the new trait system and replace it with something more like what we had in the beginning, when we could take more than 3 trait lines and got stat points from them.
I really don’t have strong and supported arguments, so this is pretty much my bias and intuition. Still, I feel there is enough “bias evidence” to have this concern.
I can’t but not notice how many people which were the ones who created GW2 (and even Guild Wars) have left it for other company and other game. That is a big alarm for me. For me it says those people lost the passion for Guild Wars 2, they lost vision for it, or maybe they don’t even enjoy the way GW2 changed and is changing.
So … how does that mean that ANet is abandoning the game? I don’t get it. Employees that leave Anet are not Anet employees. They get new people, new ideas … people that see from outside to understand things that do and don’t work.
I don’t think they’ve abandoned the game, but some parts of it which have left some of the core players that got the game back in 2013 pretty bored.
Something has changed, even the new living story doesn’t speaks to me at all in comparison to the older stuff. Too much dialogue and not enough gameplay.
Maybe it’s actually better for Anet to not spend anything on WvW and to keep going that way, only them know whats best financially. For PvE I prefer to have dungeons scattered across the map with difficulty settings over one Fractal hub where all themes are mixed. Just generally I find PvE content is either too easy or at the opposite frustratingly hard. I’m never going to bother with content that doesn’t leave space for build variety, WvW or Raids, it’s all the same: the gameplay is stale because there is little room to experiment.
For myself however I won’t pre-order the next expansion like I did with HoT; I’ll wait to see what WvW improvements have been made, if the elementalist elite spec is actually fun to play this time around, if they added a GvG mode and if my friends are coming back.
The history of Tempest in 2 sentences:
Concept artists make a epic image of an elementalist summoning a huge storm.
Developer takes that concept and turns it into a heal-bot profession, ruining the class gameplay variety and betraying the no-trinity element of the launch manifesto in the process.
If WvW had been developing properly this game would be thriving. WvW was the real endgame and used to be fun and addictive.
As it is right now most of my friends either went to play another MMO or other competitive games because of how frustrating WvW has become. It seems that Anet rather focus on converting F2P players to HoT and the gem store, for better or worse.
All the new PvE areas are basically just landscapes for groups to farm. No dungeons = nothing challenging. Silverwaste was way better because of the event chain.
Would like to point out that this meta in my honest opinion has been one of the greatest we’ve had so far.
Unless you’re an elementalist and can only heal others with the 1 viable build while dodging like a monkey.
You know there’s other viable builds for elementalist? No one forces you to run meta. Meta just means the most popular and flavor of the month, and the elementalist meta is mainly run because IT IS THE BEST support as of right now. But no one absolutely forces you to run it.
Why would you do this? You can just roll another class (like DH) and roll your face on the keyboard with more success.
Lol major overhaul, who of you guys actually believed they worked 1.5year on it and suddenly scrapped it. Good joke.
Of course not, it was just a well timed lie to go push HoT’s release. Therefore the quotes, there is no way a development studio can be that unproductive.
When you tell your community that the copy/pasted PvP rewards and server linking is the “Huge WvW Overhaul” they’ve been working on for 2 years what else can you expect from them other than pessimist comments?
Everyone I know has either left the game or barely plays because of the massive letdown the “WvW Overhaul” was.
I just can’t imagine how taking years to make an armor skin is possible in the current gaming industry.
Let’s say 3 months top to make a skin (before you actually launch the expansion). Then you just add it to the game.
When your raid/collection system is slowing you down by years maybe it’s because it’s a bad idea.
It would have been much better in the first place to figure out a way for people to obtain the armor playing PvP, WvW and normal PvE content using the same system of precursor drops and mystic forging as the other legendaries pre-HoT.
Would like to point out that this meta in my honest opinion has been one of the greatest we’ve had so far.
Unless you’re an elementalist and can only heal others with the 1 viable build while dodging like a monkey.
What about the WvW Overhaul? I thought it was supposed to be the priority after HoT’s release.
Looking forward to the reddit thread when Anet announces that the legendaries we paid for with HoT will be released in the next expansion, which will also be the same ridiculous price.
So Anet are you… Going to do anything anytime soon?
We’ve been asking that question for the last 2 years as if eventually they’ll say something else than “no, want more deployable kitten?”. Just let it be, they don’t care or don’t have the competences required to fix things.
2 things ruin GW2 and WvW and are completely the fault of the balance team:
1- Over-cheesiness : Skill matters less than the cheesy build you are running. Having an unique build is a disadvantage instead of an advantage, even if you are an amazing player that can master your own build.
Causes: Power creeps, Condi creep, Boon creep, CC creep, terrible skill balance in regards to recharge time, casting time and armor type. Even heavy classes now do more damage than light classes. Why have a light class cast a meteor shower that barely does anything anymore unless enemies stand still when a heavy class can do 20k+ damage on a 3 second cooldown without such an horrendous casting time?
Abandoning the idea of having no trinity system was also a disaster.
2- Blob wins over skill: It doesn’t matter if you are the best player in the world, a group of 20 elites can no longer beat a group of 40 pugs pressing 1 repeatedly.
Causes: Balance changes and everything included in point number one.
The worst season was the one where teams were stacked so the outcome was predetermined. This season has its flaws but I still think it’s better than last ones.
If you’re playing in platinum and gold, unlikely that you’d be running into many of the PVE players as they are mostly in bronze.
Placement matches tended to over rank people so you may be dropping down to a more appropriate level.
Matchmaking just as likely to have other team comp crappy as yours.
Playing competitive games without voice chat is like figure skating on a pool table. Not going to happen.
This game is just for casuals now.
Can we please get a working Mac Client [Merged]
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: Xillllix.3485
I got fed up of the crashes on my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) that I decided to try out Wine. The graphics are not as good as the one you get with the Mac client and frame rates are low, but the game is stable. The annoying issue is with the graphic objects nearby not rendering quickly and I am yet to figure that out. I used wine-2.0-rc5 (staging) and got the 64bit support installed. Then I installed the beta of the 64 bit Windows client and after it started patching, I copied the gw2.dat file from my Mac installation directory over. A point to note is that I didn’t set the “UseGLSL” to ‘disabled’. Just dont create that key or the game doesn’t launch. Hope this helps someone.
Have you tried Crossover? Sometimes it works pretty well, at least it did with GW1.
I don’t want to heal my team to 100% honestly, they can dodge and heal themselves as the game isn’t supposed to have a trinity system. I just want a cool class to play and Warhorn isn’t cool.
If they ever want to see me play pvp again they need celestial back.
Yeah but apparently this season is better than the previous one because you can’t play with your friends… So everyone can pretend they’re good playing in disorganized teams.
Why is it unrealistic to expect for 50$ more than 10% of what you get for 60$? HoT was barely 10% of the full game, and I’m being generous here.
Seriously, if they could sell the game for 60$ at launch with 25+ maps including WvW then they should be able to sell an expansion with 3 gvg maps and 15 PvE maps for 50$.
This is a really crucial point for me. Even though I’d expect less content in general for the same price for an expansion, I’d expect SLIGHTLY less, not dramatically less. The cost of supporting a game for time after launch is that it must be done with a smaller team, so that means slower output. That’s fine and I get that. But HoT on release was not even remotely comparable to its price tag.
It’s unfortunate for consumers that MMO content patches or XPac’s are light in content when compared to the original game. That seems to be a reasonable expectation. ~17% less cost should yield ~17% less game. However, that’s not what we see in the MMO industry across the board.
With the exception of WoW, other MMO’s mostly see their market share peak (at a number very much lower than WoW’s peak) shortly after initial release, then decline over time. Even WoW loses market share between XPac’s and that game is unlikely to reach its high-water mark in terms of subs ever again. Still, WoW generates far more revenue than its competition.
Blizzard charges the industry standard of $10 less than the going rate for a new game (currently $59.99 US). That’s the industry standard. That’s what ANet charged for HoT. Blizzard rents access to the game. ANet does not.
The industry standard is that XPac’s only offer a fraction of the base game’s content with an XPac. BC and WotLK offered far fewer zones and 10 levels of content v. 60. They get away with it because they offer raid/gear progression which forces players to raid to progress, renting the game all the while. ESO’s first two post-B2P content DLC’s combined price was similar to HoT’s, and offered a fraction of the content the vanilla game did.
WoW gets away with “far less than vanilla” while charging slightly less than a new game and renting access. How are developers whose games generate (much) less revenue going to produce “slightly less” content than their vanilla game at that slightly lower price point when their production costs are likely similar to WoW’s? That’s the business reality.
Times have changed quickly, today with download services gamers are offered great deals, up to 85% off sometimes, on the best games ever made.
I don’t think Anet can afford to overprice the next expansion if they want to rebuild their player base.
I expect about 15 pve zones at the bare minimum, new dungeons, and a GvG gamemode with at least 3 maps and elite professions that aren’t rushed out… That is if I’m ever going to pay the price of HoT again.
I don’t want a story, those are pretty badly written anyway. If I want a good story I’ll read a book instead. I just want good gameplay.
I don’t think your expectations will be met. Doubtful there will be new dungeons or a GvG game mode, nor 18 total new maps.
But when unrealistic expectations are not met an entire genre of forum posts crops up.
Why is it unrealistic to expect for 50$ more than 10% of what you get for 60$? HoT was barely 10% of the full game, and I’m being generous here.
Seriously, if they could sell the game for 60$ at launch with 25+ maps including WvW then they should be able to sell an expansion with 3 gvg maps and 15 PvE maps for 50$.
Anyway, this time if its a no-buy unless they deliver.
I expect about 15 pve zones at the bare minimum, new dungeons, and a GvG gamemode with at least 3 maps and elite professions that aren’t rushed out… That is if I’m ever going to pay the price of HoT again.
I don’t want a story, those are pretty badly written anyway. If I want a good story I’ll read a book instead. I just want good gameplay.
Most healing this season? Hmm… 1.1 million? Something over a million.
Heals are extremely important in teamfights as they increase the longetivity of your allies of course, and coupled with damage dealing, warhorn is a viable tool to helping maintain your team.
Well it’s not the Warhorn doing the healing, it’s the auras and you can have those on any weapons. The elementalist used to be a class that could win fights, not just stay around and dance like a monkey to buff other classes.
It’s a shame what they’ve done to this class, a game that wasn’t even supposed to have a trinity system to start with.
It used to be possible to play an elementalist with a berserker amulet.
Now if you use anything else than a bunker amulet any heavy class can melts you, but it doesn’t seem like the dev team cares at all so kitten it.
Been improved quite a lot. HoT was a low point, with WvW being hit especially hard where people were leaving left and right but that seems to have recovered a little.
I thought the Living Story was pretty good. Not really a fan of Ember Bay, but thought Bloodstone Fen was great, and Bitterfrost Frontier to be alright.
HoT needed a full extra year of development before being released. It was way too small of an expansion for 50$. Just looking at the new collectables was depressing because there were so few of them.
Silverwaste release was the strongest release for GW2 in my opinion; but knowing that their expansion would lack so much in content they should have kept this map along with Dry top for the expansion.
The elite professions were rushed out, they also needed 1 more year of polishing, balancing and in certain cases (Tempest) a complete redesign.
We only got a few of the legendaries and they’ve made them too hard to obtain. Precursors should have dropped. I had saved 3k gold for nothing, that infuriated me.
Legendary armors? Who knows when, it been over a year since HoT’s release.
Stronghold: Well that didn’t turn out to be GvG as they announced it to sell it to us, but it was somewhat enjoyable. Where are the other maps?
New Cities? Hot Has no new cities.
New Dungeons? Hot has no new dungeons.
World maps: only 4 maps for the price of the full game that contains like 25+?
Only one of them had 2 levels of exploration.
Raids: Timers ruin it for 95% of the player base. It needed difficulty settings, or a more casual mode that didn’t wasted half your day to prepare for.
WvW: They lied about a overhaul being developed to hype HoT.
Anyway, I don’t see how they can do worse with the next one unless they rush it out faster.
Server pride only works if everyone shows up on a strict schedule. Like having a job. It was bound to fail, like all server systems do in all MMOs.
Putting a price on moving to active servers was never going to solve anything. Moving away from the server structure twords alliances/factions would help but this is anet were talking about…err ncsoft…err just a small commodity that is owned by some sort of investors.
Anet is desperately working on a second expansion to save their game (and reputation after HoT) and meanwhile are letting WvW go afloat because they don’t have any devs available. Anyway it sure looks like this.
The only hope will be the expansion announcement and what they announce for WvW (or new competitive modes like GvG).
lol Warhorn. We all knew it would be kitten even before trying it.
They could buff all the skill damage by 50% and it would still suck because the animations are slow, the synergy is bad (with traits and between skills) and the design is just all around terrible for the class.
It will work like kitten even at the lowest settings because they haven’t done any Mac optimization in over 2 years.
And if it doesn’t crash every 5 minutes in large battles you’re lucky. I recommend that you do not buy on Mac, even if it’s a great game. Just get the Free to Play version to try it out first.
Can we please get a working Mac Client [Merged]
in Account & Technical Support
Posted by: Xillllix.3485
I have installed the mac client on an iMac running El Capitan and it last week stopped working (starting the client causes the iMac to hang and reboot itself). Interestingly, I have also installed the mac client on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Early 2013) which has been upgraded to Sierra (10.12.2); the client still works on the MBP.
Very very frustrating. I also play EVE Online – which in the last six months has moved their Mac version from Cider to the real Wine, maybe Anet could reach out to CCP for some help?
The Mac client causes the computer to overheat, the Mac shutting down is a safety mechanism in os X when the temperature is too high.
It’s been a long-time problem that was improved at a certain point and came back with UI updates preceding HoT’s release and then happened less to me since the game just crashed before it made the computer overheat anyway.
That’s misleading. T1’s empty maps are a result of a playstyle that doesn’t allow for a variety atm. I have accounts in both T1 and T4. When I have to run around for 30m in EBG on my T1 account farming nodes and seeing nothing while I could hop on my T4 account and get action, that’s very telling to me.
Maybe someday the general playerbase will realize that WvW is designed like an RTS, not a 40v40 battle arena, and requires a variety of units to be fun. I’ve written here for a long time now that WvW is most healthy when there is a mix of styles. That still seems to hold true.
kitten has tried to dominate and push with a single blob “fights” style with nothing in-between. That’s why T1 is “dead” right now and why T2 isn’t much better. When I get roamer friends who mainly play on Mag whispering me how much fun they are having in the T4 match on their alts, that affirms my opinions.
Player created problems….
Mostly people have left or are leaving because the gameplay on some classes is simply more frustrating than fun. The synergy between classes feels broken and skill-less cheese builds have taken over. Those who mastered their classes feel that all their effort has now gone to waste, they feel betrayed as they get owned by inexperienced new players running the cheesiest broken build.
Summary: Broken gameplay is the core reason why most of my friends left and the GvG guilds left. Terrible balance can’t keep people playing but good gameplay will keep people playing even if there are other issues like a lack of rewards.
I think 2016 pretty much proved that there never was any WvW overhaul being worked on for over a year. I mean it’s supposed to be 2 years of work as of now and the “priority after HoT’s release”, yet everything is still broken and they are testing random kitten like deployable canons when skill balance and build variety is the worse it has ever been.
Heck of a priority: copy-paste pvp rewards tracks and attach a few empty servers to the largest ones without regards to the consequences or various problem that have been raised that make the gameplay not enjoyable and the matchup pointless as the victory is meaningless.
What a sad story, I wonder if there will ever be a silver lining to it.
They need to do like FF14 and release something like “GW2, WvW reborn” in order to save their game.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
As far as I can tell, it’s doing lots better. Other opinions may vary.
Barely anything got done and the LS stuff that has been released probably was ready before Colin left…
I think we’ll only know with the next expansion.
It was fine the first 2 years of the game, when only glass ele and thief could do that sort of stuff. When heavy classes started to hit for 17k (more if you add the aoe targets) on a 3 sec cooldown is when the balance team seriously failed at doing their job.
Hey Tempest is boring to play anyway, much better damage and fun running Arcane/Water/Air with staff or cele arcane d/d (even if it sucks compared to 2 years ago).
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
The new release made ESO feel like a completely new game to me. It has nothing to do with the rough launch, literally everything has been improved and it has joined GW2 up there on the list. That said GW2 and ESO are both great games with their own merits. Since there is no monthly fee for either of them it’s really the players who benefits from trying them both.
I would add that the main reason I mostly play ESO right now is because the Mac client of GW2 crashes constantly and they do not have a console version.
I do hope that GW2 can redefine itself with the next expansion the way ESO did.
(edited by Xillllix.3485)
The fact that the game mode isn’t doing well has a little to do with the braindead additions they have made to it, but that’s not really the biggest issue. People keep talking about new maps, new rewards, new this, new that.
None of that matters if the fights are not fun.
The leader of my havoc guild used to make really cool videos from WvW footage, showcasing guilds on our server and so on. She recently came back and wanted to record fights and make new videos. What she found, however, is that the footage was boring as hell because the fights were boring as hell.
There is no balance, no diversity. It’s all particle showers and skill spam. Use whatever is off cooldown and let your passives take care of the rest. There is no push and pull, none of that “he used X so I’ll use Y”. There are no turtle guards who sacrifice damage for survival, instead there’s DH that has both. Or Daredevil. Or Scrapper. Or Berserker. Block block block evade evade evade invuln invuln invuln. 8k, 9k, 12k crits per skill.
WvW is all about the fights. The objectives, the map design, it’s all there to encourage encounters with the enemy. So when the experience of those encounters is nothing but the same condi-passive-block bullcrap over and over and over, is it no wonder that people leave?
The solution lies not with the WvW team, but with the apparently non-existent balance one.
Very well said.
I used to spend a lot of time in WvW because the gameplay in coordinated guild groups was fun and engaging. Now it mostly isn’t. There are plenty of reasons for that, but the biggest turning point for me was the stab change. I understand why it was considered necessary and it worked fairly well in other game modes, but it wrecked the ‘fun and engaging’ part of WvW large group play.
The stab changes, the new trait system an the rushed/unbalanced elite specs are the 3 worse things that have happened to this game. These things together just destroyed WvW gameplay.
Make a huge endless-pit crater out of it.
The map is too big already and I’m convinced a donut shaped map would work well from a gameplay perspective.
If they remove class stacking then Guardians will have to wait in queue for hours as they completely outnumber other classes…
DC/Crashes should NEVER take away your reward
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Xillllix.3485
This has been an ongoing problem for years.
It’s even worse on Mac, it crashes every 5 minutes unless every graphic details are at the bare minimum (even with a beast computer) then it only crash once ever 15 minutes.
They should have 1 tier and add extra EBG maps as the population requires.
No one is complaining about Tempest stacking.
Not sure stacking 5 of the most unrewarding class to play would work well.
“Watch-out they’re all gonna cast that Warhorn skill that barely does 400 damage.”
Don’t worry, as an elementalist you have Dragon Tooth, a very powerful skill that almost does 50% as much damage and only takes 3-4 seconds to land.
When we mention “WvW skill balance” for the 500,000th time they may actually do a survey…
“Do you think we should balance WvW skills or make more content?
Please note that a majority of 80% is required for us to do anything at all, otherwise we will just add more deployable siege and add superior siege disablers.
You may support further WvW development by buying gems to unlock PvE content that came free with the expansion. See you next year. "
Please leave in Desert Borderlands so players can continue to produce epic gameplay content such as this video.
lol This is the first thing I’ve seen in a loooooong time that makes me want to reinstall the game… just wow. However, I do get what you’re saying; it should be fun also to used your skills the way they are meant to be used.
It’s been like this for about 2 years btw…
It’s been crashing since an UI update done a few months before HoT was released.
They had fixed it once so it’s not just memory, it’s an actual bug.
WvW priorities for 2017:
0- Mac client that doesn’t crash every 5 minutes
1- Class and skill balance for a new fight meta as fun as GW2 was on release
2- Total merging of all servers in 3 alliance
3- Guild ranking and a sophisticated stats system
4- a Dynamic scoring system that makes it possible for losing servers to catch up until the very end of the matchup
5- Maps: EotM becomes part of WvW as a 5th map – A new 3rd Borderland map is added: a smaller king of the hill map built around fights
It just one of these skills that was “ok” and became “crap” when HoT was released and heavy classes could now do 5-10k spikes in less 1 sec with almost instant skills.