(edited by Zenith.6403)
You have the wrong idea. There are many such things you describe that would be absolutely great additions to the game, but which would have nothing to do with Anet’s plan to make money with this game.
Anet is not here to make you a great game. Anet is here to use and manipulate their playerbase in order to make money. It’s only when there’s severe downfall in sales or major population leaving the game that they start to listen player suggestions, such as the one that makes wxp ranks account-bound. The reason we had wxp ranks in the first place is for players to get hooked to playing WvW for the grind. It is very dull experience to be part of zergtrain claiming undefended objectives but hey at least the progress bar is moving.
Oh heavens no. That would be convenient.
But it is one of the few things you as a player can influence. And as such, many try to give themselves the best possible cards. There are so many other elements outside of player control that skill and positioning will always matter more than gear.
- It gives a great sense of futility. The way the game is designed has way more impact than anything you can personally do. For example have you ever stayed defending a tower against a blob of 40 enemies below you? First of all you’d have to stay right at the edge of a wall or the wall itself is going to block your shot, since there’s no archs in bows. If using arrow cart, there’s no 2-dimensional top-down view to aim it, so you have to find some weird camera angle to shoot through door. Speaking of doors, you can’t repair it during siege because enemy AoE goes through it.
Having the mastery to pick up more than 10 supplies, when running as a team to supply camp basically means that someone’s going to have less than full supplies since you took some extra. Placing siege on towers in order to fend off potential zergs has practical dis-incentive that nobody wants to be left behind to guard a tower where nothing happens for long periods of time. Towers don’t also block anything, enemies can just run past them.
Developers decided that there just has to be ascended gear tier for +5% more damage. Multitude of custom skins were made obsolete by one skin that everyone’s going to be wearing eventually. For the sake of progression that has no purpose.
Where do you find meaning in all this? It’s like the whole thing was designed with no critical thinking or playtesting.
I purposely didn’t log in to Guild Wars 2 for a week for 2 reasons:
- 1 to prevent burn out.
- 2 to see how I would view the game after a week of playing other mmo’s.
- When I opened this thread I thought I’d see story like person giving up a drug habit. Discovering the joys of life and looking at the past life with sadness and regret. You gave up a MMO game in order to go play another MMO game, then came back deciding that, gee, the other MMO games are kinda bad in a soul-sucking obsessive-compulsive kind of way.
I was looking at ascended longbow for my ranger. It looks like the damage range is such that having ascended longbow gives my skills +5% damage boost. Now this 5% is in majority of cases meaningless increase. Let me explain:
The function of damage is to increase the killing speed of character. Damage is reduced by armor and the result substracts health of target. In very simplistic terms your killing speed is number of hits it takes to kill target multiplied by attack speed. Any excess damage is wasted. Another way to think about +5% damage increase is this: for every 20 hits your make, you deal an extra hit. In other words if it would take you less than 20 hits to kill the target you’re attacking, you see no benefit from +5% damage increase. Also those attacks that are blocked, evaded, obstructed by terrain or out of range: they don’t count.
I think this whole ascended discussion has been a storm in a teacup. Having or not having ascended gear makes very little difference in the grand scheme of things. Number of players (in WvW), positioning, skill cooldowns, attack intervals, coordination and effective communication are the true problems if one were to min-max their potential in game.
No, that is a WvW parking area for those waiting to do WvW.
- I wonder what kind of thought process went in developers heads there. Let’s create this new and exciting map and use it as a mere placeholder for people who are actually queueing for the old WvW.
Queueing for old content? Surely they must be preparing for server merge.
The previous pick was advertised as “The last pick you’ll ever buy”, so best in slot for all eternity. And it was priced accordingly, as for a full set of them you’d almost pay the price of a full game.
- I’d hate myself for wasting my money like that. No benefit whatsoever. Anet just decided that you can’t use picks forever. Then they gladly sell you the solution to problem that they themselves caused: fork some money for gathering tool without arbitrary restrictions. Oh wait, three gathering tools. Now they’re just messing with you: a better gathering tool is out and no refunds from your previous purchase. Some great con artistry right there. The question is will you give them money again?
What you think it is:
Cool new WvW map! Great chokepoints, fantastic scenery, interesting objectives, asymmetrical design, something you’d like to play with your guild and server. The much-needed salvation to break the monotony that is 3 identical WvW maps and 1 unique one.
What it’s really like:
No cooperation, no warscore, random servers, “something to do while waiting for that WvW experience”. Almost like playing PvE living story events.
Then 6 months later:
Oh sorry guys we kinda goof’d up that EotM thing. Here’s a reconstruction that makes it how it should have been in the first place.
Defending has no metagame purpose and that’s the problem. Towers aren’t protecting anything. They’re like piñatas waiting for zerg to arrive and cash in the reward, which then turns the tower into piñata for the original owner.
Secondly defenders and attackers are equal, which should never be the case. Just think about real life war: purpose of fortification is to grant defenders advantage over attacker. Manning a cannon or oil pot makes you a stationary target for enemy to kill. Usability of arrow carts is horrible with no bird-eye view of the map. Finally there’s the silly problem that AoE attacks go through the doors, making repairs unnecessarily difficult.
And yes, they are not mandatory to most people, but for the minority that is trying to compete with their server’s top achievement point ranking they are. If you are not able to commit 4 hours on any given weekday then you WILL drop down in ranks. This commitment is a little much to ask I think.
You may say it is not an issue, but it clearly is. Two of my friends QUIT the game because of this.
- Yeah there’s a thing calling gaming addiction. You might want to see a doctor about that.
I don’t know how to explain this any more than I have. You guys don’t seem to get that 3x something is still 3x the number. So if there are 100 precursors on the TP, there will be roughly 300 if everyone has 300% magic find, taking nothing else into consideration and simplifying. It doesn’t matter if it’s 0.000000000001 percent, because the multiplication is relative. Do you guys get it yet?
- Yes we get it, but do you see that it’s Anet who controls the base value? They have their own metrics how often a player should get rewarded in order for him to keep playing and adjust the base chance according to how much magic find the community has. The product is the sweet spot. There’s nothing interesting in magic find from player’s perspective.
magic find is a hoax
25 stacks magic find didnt change anything….
- If your base chance is 0.001 and you have +50% magic find, then the odds of dropping are 0.0015. We don’t know what the base chance is, so magic find percentage is meaningless. When was the last time you got a rare item from random drop?
This is a korean MMO and korean MMOs are all about big numbers and grind, you know that. If you want to play a game that respects the player and offer challenging and interesting content, there’s plenty to go around.
That’s true but how often is your target at max range? Hardly ever? 20% of the time and I am being generous, at the other ranges Warriors win.
- You’re at maximum range by default in WvW. Just don’t get close to your enemies.
Ranged is very interesting, the Ranger is NOT the best with ranged weapons. Just compare Warrior with a Rifle/Longbow vs a Ranger with a Longbow/shortbow. I would always choose the Warrior, its a no brainer under the current meta.
Ranger longbow has 1500 range and autoattack deals 317 damage at max range.
Warrior longbow has 1200 range and autoattack deals 212 damage.
My theory is that ANet wants to keep as many as possible playing, and that their decision-making process is reactive rather than proactive. Virtually every change they make, even balance changes, have been a reaction to player complaints of one kind or another. Thing is, you cannot please everyone, and every decision made to please one group angers a different group.
- I think there are changes that benefit everyone playing the game as a whole. Performance improvements, bug fixes and adding useful quality-of-life features are some of them. Then there are changes that are obviously controversial. Adding power creep and vertical progression to please the addicts is going to leave players with multiple characters unhappy. Carrot-in-a-stick type gameplay is highly disrespectful to the player. Like we’re some rats in Skinner’s box who have nothing better to do than go through the hoops to keep up with the shallow content.
This lecture by Jonathan Blow changed how I view the game industry these days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU
Guild Wars 2 has encountered an error
The server has unable to authenticate your gameplay privileges.
Please contact Customer Support to provide them with your registered e-mail address. For additional support, please visit http://support.guildwars2.com.
Server Error
502 – Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server.
There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed. When the Web server (while acting as a gateway or proxy) contacted the upstream content server, it received an invalid response from the content server.
This is what happen when I try to refresh forum page.
If there’s one thing that really grinds my gears it’s the internal cooldown and no documentation how it works.
I was watching this stream:
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2804301
5:08 onwards the developer tells how they didn’t want the recovering supply skill to grant repeated swiftness. This is a reasonable question to consider, but the way they solve the problem is to give arbitrary internal cooldown to swiftness granted by dropping to 0 supply. This is not a way to design good game! How do you think the player knows what internal cooldown whatever mechanic of the game has? We players are completely reliant to hastily made tooltips that describe how skills work, or used to work, or is supposed to work. Also the fact that the skill grants 1 to 6 supply is documented nowhere. Not even wiki has entry for this fact. It doesn’t help that you release a video that has popularity of 3,6k views. Comprehensive description what a skill does has to be in tooltip.
Speaking of multiple guilds, how’s this intended to work? You’re completely disconnected from the guild you’re not representing, not being able to even have separate chatrooms for the guilds you belong to.
There is, change your character to female. 350 Gems.
- Name change 800 gems.
Ca-Ching.
Why isn’t every sigil tied to the weapon it’s attached to? Using a sword that gets more powerful the more souls it claims on the battlefield… but the bonus transfers for no reason to that longbow you pull out. I guess the programmers were just that incompetent. Same thing why sigils have some strange global cooldown. And why two stacking sigils can’t function at once. “Balance” is quite weak reason here, how about first making sure there’s some logic to this stuff?
This achievement is bugged. I finished Scarlet’s Playhouse without dying (got downed twice), but I didn’t get rewarded with achievement.
“We’re introducing new recipes and new materials to be found around the world”
has different meaning than
“We’re introducing new recipes and materials to be found around the world”
I would say in the former case new recipes are not found around the world, but in the latter they are.
In this post I am referring to “downscaled” content which I have experienced as a level 80 character. Simply put, I find it trivial. While fighting in an area with level 14 – 16 creatures I timed how long it took me to kill things and I found that it was consistently <2 seconds. To me that meets the description of trivial.
- Don’t worry. They’re just about to release Ascended weapons which will trivialize even more content. Content trivialization will continue after that in the form of Ascended armor.
“We’re now updating Guild Wars 2 about five times as often as the typical MMO.”
Too bad the updates feature one-fifth the meaningful content as the updates in the typical MMO.
- That’s basically how you advertise anything. If it’s not high quality, then you can say it’s cheap or cheaper than something else. If your sales aren’t high, you can advertise that at least the growth of sales is going upwards. Pick any small detail that’s into your advantage and publish.
If the 23,470,844 Dolyak caravan kills were divided so that maximum number of players would have the Yakslapper title, then 23 people out of 3,500,000 would have the title. Something to think about.
Another post on how someone wants the best of the best right now without putting forth effort? How surprising…
- You might want to practice some reading comprehension if that’s how you read it.
I wish the legendaries didn’t spoil the theme of characters. Would a battle-hardened, iron-clad Charr Warrior use longbow that leaves patches of grass on his footsteps? Bow that looks like something faeries would use?
Supply spending with wall repairs behaves erratically. Currently I have the WvW ability that says “spend 6 supply when repairing”.
Bug #1
If I have 0 supplies and pick up 5 supplies to repair wall with, the wall repair happens in 2 ticks (4 and 1) instead of one tick that the ability would suggest.
Bug #2
If I have 15 supplies and start repairing wall, the repair stops altogether after spending 10 supplies.
Why do you care about abusive time restrictions? Do you let the game dictate how you spend your only life on this earth? That’s how it sounds like. You log in because you have daily to do. You log out because you’ve done your daily. Does it make your life better in any way that you go out and slay 30 critters to get 1 more achievement point for your game account?
I found the unlimited gathering tools to be a worthwhile purchase. I spend a significant portion of my play time in non-level 80 zones so I would previously keep tools of multiple tiers on hand. In some cases multiple tools of multiple tiers. This would tie up more of my inventory space than I liked.
- Just use orichalhum pick for everything. If the materials you collect are worth more than 4 copper on trading post, you’re good.
This error occurs when selling items from inventory to trading post. Putting up multiple different items on same session seems to be connected to its occurence. Whenever there’s message “error attempting to sell”, it remains until closing inventory. Re-opening inventory and attempting to put the item up to sale again may solve the problem.
A certain type of player plays games for challenge. But then, what’s more popular, slot machines or chess? Chess is more challenging but more people play slot machines. Why? Because people require different things out of games.
- I think ‘challenge’ here has positive connotation. What the OP is saying that just showing up on an event doesn’t feel rewarding for him personally, yet the events give outlandish rewards to just about everybody. It’s like the developers are saying: “Oh we’re so happy that you’re still playing with us even after these months, here have a cookie”. At the absence of gameplay value they bring about more and more rewards with content updates. The WvW section is something that I think game improvement is about: adding depth and meaning. You may not agree with the specifics, but surely you recognize the thought process OP has?
There are no mods. Modding is forbidden by EULA. They even monitor your RAM and processes to make sure you’re not using any.
Imagine you’re playing a game where every player has exotic weapons, exotic armor and exotic trinkets.
Now imagine another game where every player has ascended weapons, ascended armor and ascended trinkets.
It is exactly the same game. There is no difference in power. Ascended gear brings no benefit whatsoever to the game. There are downsides, however, since ascended gear takes more time to acquire than exotic gear:
- Changing your build is more difficult
- Bringing your alts to same competitive level as your main character is more difficult
Ascended gear also un-does the work that was put into making tiers below it:
- Content that was balanced for exotic gear characters becomes too easy for ascended gear characters
- Content that is balanced for ascended gear characters becomes too hard / time consuming for exotic gear characters
- Content that rewards exotic gear is now obsolete
They’re testing how giving free gift like WvW exp booster affects player population participating in WvW and the sales of WvW exp boosters.
This game need hard non zergable raid content which would give good loot (like pieces of full armor and gear sets). Guild challenge would be good if there would be some kind of challenge (anybody have ever fail one of these?), some kind of boss mechanics and good reward.
- Why do you people always complain that this game is not hard? Why are you so invested in this? Why not go play some hard game that actually challenges you intellectually, like chess?
Hi,
I am curious how people feel about instrinsic rewards vs extrinsic rewards with regards to MMO, specifically Guild Wars 2. We are bathed in rewards for everything we do right down to achievement points. Do you feel that this type of behavior detracts from people playing the game to simply have fun or not?
- Well, there’s the presentation issue. Quarter of your screen is filled with advertisement of the current event. Every mob drops the event-related item, replacing normal rare drops. Everyone in your guild is talking about how they’re farming the event. Your mailbox is filling with solicitations WOULD YOU COME CHECK THE EVENT? There’s achievement pop-ups and sparkling loots and all that **** you can’t turn off. It’s kinda hard to play the game just to admire the original works.
The centaurs are an example of what could be used to strengthen the DEs. Imagine if when the centaurs took ascalon settlement, then the centaur events everywhere because a little tougher. Imagine a large hoard of centaurs knocking on the gates of DR, if they weren’t cleared out. That would be epic. I can see how this would be hard for new players, but there may be a way to mitigate the difficulties for new players.
- This is a great idea for single player / instanced game. The developers can’t really predict how the large masses of players will behave. What you think is meaningful (e.g. how much detail and attention you put into creating dynamic event) may not be meaningful to the player who just sees hundreds of similar events all over the map.
Interpretation of your centaur event in single player game:
“Hm… I haven’t contained the centaur threat effectively, they are getting stronger.”
“Now I cleared this event and centaurs are no longer threatening.”
“My actions are making meaninful difference to the world I’m in.”
Interpretation of your centaur event in MMO:
“This server is so dead. Strong centaurs are everywhere because of no players.”
“I just cleared the centaur event 15 minutes ago, how come they’re back already?”
“What I experience in game doesn’t depend on my actions. I’m not going to bother with this uphill battle.”
If you travel around the map to get 100% world completion you’ve seen all the content.
I still wonder why they are doing more socializing on other sites than their own. I don’t frequent Facebook or Reddit and even though I’m on these forums at least 5 days out of the week, I have yet to hear of any news here first.
- Because they have your money already. They want to see you ‘like’ Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet on your Facebook page so that there’s a chance your non-GW2 playing friends will get inspired to purchase Guild Wars 2. That’s how the business model of social media works.
PERSONAL means just that, it is yours and yours only, very evident.
- Why is somebody’s PERSONAL stuff being shown to me? Huge icon on the map that looks exactly like merchant. Nope, PERSONAL merchant.
To summarize, the piling up ‘daily’ and time-gated content is just a shallow attempt to keep people coming back, and to restrict those that play many hours a day, causing GW2 to feel like a chore.
- Hah! You may be right it’s shallow, but does it work? Would you play the game if there was no achievements, rewards or gear grind? You would be just given your weapon and you could go whack endlessly respawning monsters with it. How long would you play?
I think it’s rather impressive how these companies manage to hold on to millions of players with cost-effective methods.
(edited by Zenith.6403)
The rings says Unique.
- And so what? Other players have same rings so it’s not unique like is said. How can you even have two UNIQUE rings on your inventory? There should definitely be red text telling that two of same rings can’t be equipped at the same time.
We will not be changing WvW ranks or WxP to be account bound. However, we are going to be implementing a host of changes that should make this seem less like some sort of punishment(a categorization I disagree with entirely) and more of a character progression system. The first step is the liquid WXP that is being added to the rank up chests which is account-bound. We are planning additional systems as well. Hopefully, as we continue to announce some of those changes, you will be happier with the system.
- Could you explain how this is supposed to work as character progression system? If you have playing time worth 10 WXP ranks and you divide that playing time between your two characters, each getting 5 WXP ranks worth of playing time. For one character you get the first rank of Cannon Mastery and the second gets the first rank of Arrow Cart mastery.
Why would someone enjoy this, rather than getting both Cannon Mastery and Arrow Cart Mastery if the ranks were bound to account? It’s just another example of the ridiculous grind you keep adding to this game.
(edited by Zenith.6403)
What’s up with this skill? The passive effect heals for 62 health per second while my Ranger has 17,047 maximum health. It would take 4 minutes 34 seconds to heal to full health with this passive while in combat. Outside combat you’re healed to full automatically and don’t need the passive. If I eat some food and gain 100 healing power then it heals for 68 health per second. Afterwards it would take 4 minutes 10 seconds to heal to full. What a worthless passive.
League of Legends also has a Meta. Based on what champions are picked in tournaments/most frequently. But also based on how it’s ‘normal’ to go ap mid, ad bot with support, and a bruiser top. That’s meta. A while ago it used to be ad in mid to get more cs.
Yes, their champs are balanced. But the game finds it’s niche of what works and ends up there.
- In order to have a metagame the game needs to have depth. League of Legends has that with character roles that work well together. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, is not a deep game by design. There are no roles and every class is a damage dealer. Some skills don’t have damage numbers (like the Thief’s steal and a number of traits) and things like attack speed or even damage reduction mechanics are not explained to the player. Itemization is very rigid with equipment pieces having pre-determined stats. In the absence of challenging AI monster quantities are increased and bosses are loaded with millions of hit points, all waiting to be brought down in very straight-forward fashion.
You can’t have ‘metagame’ on game like this.