Guild Wars 2

It’s getting quite clear that this isn’t the same Anet that released the game 2 years ago. Somewhere down the line the management changed and they decided to relaunch a “mainsteam” (dumbed down) version of the game, for “new players”.

Time-gating everything totally goes against open world immersion. It’s a really really really bad idea for a MMO. Nobody want’s to be spoon feed in an open world environment.

FarmingPanda.4359:

SIEGE TRAP TOO LONG. <——— really? especially when you’re trying to ninja a tower with a small group, one person just keeps throwing siege traps until the big zerg comes….

Ya this is a good example of how it breaks the gameplay.

An elite that recharged all your attunements and perhaps blast a field at the same time would have been at the very least useful.

They should remove ingame musikittenil level 55, it gets me all dizzy and I end up hitting the wrong keys. Also I say lock the chat window until level 70 and blasting fields at level 79.

Oh and lock the Gem store until level… hey wait a minute.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I just want to quickly add, there are some errors on this chart of how stuff is unlocking, as well as 1st character vs. account unlocks when some of these systems were carried between regions. We’re trying to identify what happened and repair those things assigned the wrong account/character fields, as well as levels.

What is your objective here if it isn’t to make the game fun to play? Add new skills and features perhaps, but don’t remove and time-gate what we were used to.

Levelling felt slow enough already for people that had already a level 80 character. Now everything is locked to them even through they can play the game eyes closed (a game that is quite frankly already too easy).

Truth is however that it’s probably not more fun for new players as well, and that’s where it hurts the most; you underestimate the average gamer ability to discover a new game.
When I play a MMO I don’t want to be spoon fed, I want to discover; unlock everything besides a few special skills and let me figure out the rest, it’s a question of having a choice. You had done it right the first time (besides the text tutorials which were omitting important things like blasting fields). Why break something what was working fine?

Seriously, the decisions you take at Anet sometimes:
Why did you make this awesome WvW map (EotM) and then took it out of the PPT rotation and merged all the servers by a random color system?
Why can’t we do a straight 5vs5 and 8 vs 8 PvP GvG style without trebs and canons in the way?
Why do you add a siege disabler that breaks all the mechanic of what was already functioning well?
Why is there a million backpack to choose from but no guild capes?
Why has SAB, an addon worth an “expansion of the year” award, abandoned and not available in the game anymore?
…

At some point tonight we had 3 yellow tags on the map… was pretty epic.

More karma train indeed. Instead of adding good mechanics they just remove one of the only mechanic that exist preventing the long and intense battles at Stonemist from turning into karma train flipping.

Yeah it’s worth it. Ele is very hard to play but it’s also very rewarding when you get better.
The skills are fun to use, I tried all the class and it’s the class I have the most fun with along with the guardian and the engi.

Halloween doesn’t have more to do with the LS than SAB did.

I disagree with the thread topic; go ahead and burn everything down in lava until all that is left is super hard endgame content!

They should just remove it and apologize for the bad idea. From what I’ve seen it’s game breaking when a group start spamming them: all the siege just become unusable.

Straegen.2938:

…one player effectively turning off attacking siege indefinitely is pretty stupid.

You would think so, because then when you have 2 thieves throwing these around it’s a near rage-quit moment.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Do you have any specific issues to report? It’s difficult to escalate bug reports, without details on the bug(s) you are experiencing and how it’s affecting your gameplay.

Well yesterday we tried to take a keep and every piece of siege we placed down was disabled 99% of the time during which it was destroyed by dps range. There is just nothing we could do beside dps the gate down. Was that the intent of your anti-siege grenade? To have people PvD?

The new siege disabler grenade is seriously overpowered, it shouldn’t be aoe, it should last maximum 5-10 seconds, not 45. But even then, it’s just not interesting for the gameplay.

chris.6583:

LOL ikr, you can also use tornado for swiftness stacking since it’s a lighting field

Most useless field ever… Seriously who would blast a tornado for swiftness? They should have made it a new field that give shock aura instead. It would at least have been interesting.

Welcome on board! Are you doing the dialogues for the expansion?

Can someone at Anet test the new elementals in an actual competitive context and acknowledge that the skill is now literally useless? The elementals are just standing still even when you tell them to do something and the animations take forever to land.

Seriously they do not work at all for anything else than killing rabbits.

Sorry for the complaint, the rest of the trait update is great, only the new elites are mostly useless.

That probably means no new GvG or WvW map until 2015.
Well I’m going to take a break too since there is nothing new to look forward to.

Force.2841:

RIP ele elites.

Once again: we saw it coming a mile away, we told them, they didn’t listen.

Leger.3724:

Balance is not the culprit here – it’s lack of balance.

We were basically lied to when they made this game. There’s no thought going into the balance – specifically in pvp modes at all, it’s garbage compared to GW1 and now it’s worse because their buffs show they have no idea what they’re doing.

I don’t see it that way:
In some aspect of the game GW2 is totally unbalanced, for example elementalists elite skills in comparison to other classes, warrior hammer cc are too frequent and thieves damage spikes still need a tweak (not necessarily a nerf).

BUT, in most aspect of the game there is too much balance, the skills and traits have been equalized/normalized so much that they all give the same damage and same effect duration, therefore there is a definitive lack of diversity.

Do you want Fresh air, that gives you a lightning bolt more often as you attune to air, or Lightning rod, that gives you more lightning bolt when you interrupt people? End result is the same.

For this game to feel balance you would need more skill imbalance, through a larger variety of builds you would also find your opponent weakness. If that makes sense.

Lightning rod is the best trait the ele has now. It’s pretty amazing.

That new version of the skill do not work properly. Half the time it just sits there and doesn’t do anything, the damage is worse than before, the animations are so slow it has time to die 5 times before finishing them. Was it even tested? How does this qualify as an “elite” skill?

Yeah it doesn’t work half as good as it used too.

Seriously to be worth using it would need to be 300% faster, do 1000% more damage, have 400% more hp and have a recharge twice shorter.

Nice balancing fail again.

Resubian.5823:

Maybe instead of stripping features for new players and using them as rewards, you could maybe ADD ACTUAL NEW REWARDS. You know, maybe you guys should get some players to be advisors, that way maybe you’ll realize when something is a terrible idea.

It’s called repackaging. That’s what happens when the managers that do not know what to do turn themselves to people that just finish their degree in marketing. Repackaging is a big thing today: remove a bit of content, reduce the quality, add more colors, increase the box size, raise the price.

lol yeah but the skill is still useless. it even seems to work less than before. Most of the time it just stands there even when I activate it, and one time the stun refused to work.

368 fire damage every 15 sec in for the fire elemental, that’s quite an elite skill! Its completely ridiculous how low the damage is.

The anti-siege grenades are game breaking and annoying.
Shouldn’t be there in the first place but on top of that it’s AoE. It’s a terrible, terrible idea.

Tried to get a keep, literally the rams for a few hits and were disabled 95% of the time until destroyed. is that supposed to make the game more balanced?

It’s not going to help smaller servers if 1 guy can stay there and disable your siege while his blob of 60 comes to wipe your 15 people group.

Commander tags are ok I guess.

wwwes.1398:

Xillllix.3485:

You can still use those level-up scrolls or craft your way up.

Last character I made I used 1 scroll, levelled up from 20 to 40, then crafted 6 professions.
Took 2 days for the levelling, 3 hours for the crafting.

I agree however that is seems like they are dumbing the game down.

I don’t exactly have a ton of scrolls. And here’s the thing, you NEED to level through those zones, that’s how you get most of your low level mats! Low characters are the only ones that get equipment drops that salvage as iron ore.

I wouldn’t know I’ve only played WvW and PvP since I finished world completion (like 18 months ago). I was just mentioning the alternative to this levelling. Even before these new restrictions I found the task too boring.

A smaller map (castle ruins) with only 1 capture point in the middle (like king of the hill), a straight team death match zone, where each kills is worth 5 PPT and rounds are 1 hour.

You can still use those level-up scrolls or craft your way up.

Last character I made I used 1 scroll, levelled up from 20 to 40, then crafted 6 professions.
Took 2 days for the levelling, 3 hours for the crafting.

I agree however that is seems like they are dumbing the game down.

If only they had 1 feature I wanted, like Guild Halls…

I would call this pack something else than feature pack.
It’s more of a “UI improvements” patch

Meteornado! Oh wait…

Anet could have a least replied and explained or deny the end of SAB anymore.
“It doesn’t fit with the LS” is a lame reason, that’s actually what we liked about it.

It’s their creation and then they talk about it like it’s an inconvenience.

King Amadaeus.8619:

GW2’s combat system has and will continue to keep the attention of all those players who try to leave it for all those games you mentioned. The moment another open world pvp game with a even remotely decent combat mechanic comes along: Gw2 will be a wasteland.

Isn’t that happening like next week? Just wished GW2 would have anticipated this and provided new WvW and endgame content.

They won’t fix it. We’ve been stuck in he same matchups for months now and FA/SoS have been reduced to farming each others at choke points while ignoring the completely absent Mag server.

Nice little video!

Guild Halls:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_hall

Nothing would add life to Guilds QoL more than having an actual home to practice and meet in before a raid or mission.

joshc.3129:

Well the current Living Story releases are slowly pushing us towards a fight with Mordremoth and there is that rumor back up with some proof of an actual expansion pack for GW2 sometime in 2015.

But with the term “expansion pack” being so blurred nowadays it will be probably at best the size of Eye of the North instead of a stand alone game like Factions and Nightfall was.

If it was for winter/spring 2015 they would already have a trailer out by now. So if they ever release an expansion it will be fall 2015 early 2016. By that time I will be long gone, but I’ll come back if it adds GvG.

…and 25 months later and we are still here: “Guild capes!”, “Guild Halls!”, “GvG!”, “more Guild missions”, “Guild based WvW!”, “We want guild wars in Guild Wars 2”, “Guild trading”, “Guild raids”, etc.

Anyone at Anet listening? This game is the successor to Guild Wars 1, best PvP MMO ever, and we want more guild-related content.

nirvana.8245:

So I just returned from a 6 month break. There are a fair few things Ive needed to adjust to. But one thing that seems increasingly on the rise is the amount of 1v1s I come across where neither player can kill the other and ends in “a draw” where one or both players get tired of fighting and leave. I came across this on a very rare occasion prior to my break. But these days its every day. I’m not sure how its come to this. It seems as though even if one person makes a mistake, the other person cannot punish them enough for it and before you know it their cooldowns are off again and the fight has restarted again. Im guessing possibly from the ferocity rework? Have other solo roamers had similar experiences?

It’s because there is like only 1 truly viable build per class (with small variants) most of the best players are using and YES, that is because of the epic fail that was the ferocity / critical damage nerf and other nerfs on top of that that equalized all the skills of classes.

Answered it, not that it will change anything I fear, we all know what the game needs: content.

uberkingkong.8041:

Courtyard is a 2v2 map, its has been released for a long time now. Not very popular map so most servers dont run it.

WoW ok, my bad. It’s just so badly implemented that I never noticed it was there.

Anet should do 2 vs 2 team queues for it.

It feels like this fall season will be a huge blow to the GW franchise which may have failed to deliver on it’s great potential. Someone noted yesterday that from the few new skills that were released actually half of them (anti-toxin skills) are completely useless today, this is terrible management.

Too much good competition is coming out now to justify repeating the same thing over and over in WvW for another year. That Anet take over 1 year to make a single WvW map I can respect that, but we’ve had only one map since the release 2 years ago, and it doesn’t even count for the PPT, which is the main official goal of WvW . Should we come to the conclusion that they are just not making new WvW content? They get all upset when we say they have no WvW team, yet in a year all we get are 3 tags colors and a trick that disable stuff (it doesn’t even do something, it just break other siege).

When reality will catch up with them that the other MMOs are being released with 5 times as much PvP content they’ll probably reevaluate their business model.

All that considered GW1 was “THE” competitive MMO.

There is a new PvP map that has been played again at Gamecon, it also had been presented in a Twitch tv stream many months ago.

Will that map ever come out? We’ve been looking at it for months waiting patiently and since Anet used it for the last 2vs2 tournament it must surely be in a playable state.

Why is it taking so long?

One thing is certain, the numbers aren’t going up.
They would have to release an expansion for that.

Vayne.8563:

EotM is not really serving the function it was made to serve.

That is obvious, EotM is a disaster in comparison of what it was meant to be; but what is worrying is: why doesn’t Anet fix it? All the content is there, they just have to make defending and battles meaningful.

Quells.2498:

“If you really think so, why don’t you enlighten us “clueless” people why EotM map design is so great.
Note: I have worked as game designer and programmer and teaching the topic for over 10 years at university.
In my analysis EotM has:
- way too much verticality
- way too many chokepoints
- way too many edges where you can fall into void
- way too many distracting visual effects (flying sand)
- unbalanced overpowered NPCs and buffs for the different colors
- completely lacks the element of water (some players enjoy underwater)”

Most of those reasons are exactly why it’s a good pvp map. I am having a hard time believing your assertion that you’re a designer based on these comments as you should be the one person that I don’t have to explain why they create interesting decisions.

“- way too much verticality”
I do not perceive this as something negative nor did most the community.

“- way too many chokepoints”
We all agreed in the discussion thread that it is the best way to prevent server blobbing, people have been asking for more choke points on the original WvW maps.

“- way too many edges where you can fall into void”
Your not being serious. It actually make some skills like Fear interesting to use.

“- way too many distracting visual effects (flying sand)”
You can disable them, turn post processing or shaders off.

“- unbalanced overpowered NPCs and buffs for the different colors”
Just alternate server colors every time it resets or every day.

“- completely lacks the element of water (some players enjoy underwater)”
Water was also removed from the original WvW map because it’s simply not interesting and not balanced.

Glad you got a good job however.

Windsagio.1340:

people don’t want what they think they want…

Most of the features people want are things that existed in GW1, like Guild Halls, GvG mode, expansions, more skills and build flexibility, less Gem store armors and more armors as reward for new content.

It’s kinda obvious when your most dedicated WvW guildmates are testing the beta of another game. Sadly, nothing worthwhile is coming to WvW at the moment and people are looking elsewhere for something new.

Only 2 maps and 1 that has turned into a disaster of a karma train. That isn’t enough, and a few tag colors won’t change the stale matchups or break the repetition.

EotM is an amazing map that is underestimated by people who have no clue how to play it strategically. It would balance itself quite well if players bothered to defend it for PPT. With a team rotation between the 3 sides every day I don’t see what the balance problem would be.

The only reason it is used as a karma train is because it rewards you more for PvE events than for PPT. It has nothing to do with the map design.

This last feature on together with the other “lesser” features announced make up for a better Guild Wars 2 experience starting next week, that is unquestionable. Thank you Anet for that.
You can clearly notice the hard work that has been put on in reprogramming the TP interface. In contrast to this the new tags colors seems to have been rushed in without an afterthought on how they should have been earned: through the ranking/badges system. We would have needed more colors however.

Question:
In light of those interviews where potential new content for SAB and WvW was dismissed from the near horizon in place for the living story, can expect other large content releases now that the fundamental mechanics have been fixed?

Tagus Eleuthera.7305:

From reading the post, you reeeeeally get the feeling that they worked hard making those changes.

Yeah they did, it’s a big change and it’s easy to see tons of work went into this.
It may also slow down people playing the TP and those kittening gold sellers.

Peow peow.2189:

your quiting the class because you dont like the elite.

He’s quitting the class because our elites are worthless. It’s not a question of liking or not, all the elementalist elite skills are worse than the normal skills.

MightyMicah.7451:

Hmm can anyone elaborate on the whole “on command” thing for the elementals? Or is it just unclear in general?

If you press the elite button again it will do it’s skill.

So instead of dying before it is doing anything (as it has been for 2 years in WvW, useless) you might be able to cast a stun with your air elite if you spam that key while dodging all over the place, blasting fields, casting waters, holding the teamspeak key and avoiding a 30 people blob melee train with the cantrips you won’t replace with the new signets or glymph no matter what they say.

Thankfully we have magnetic shield… that’s always useful… (as a sort of museum artifact display of how a MMO skill shouldn’t be balanced)