Guild Wars 2

Definitely. I would love to have this feature. Just having the city songs is a bit boring. I would love to have Rata Novus, Mouth of Modremoth, or any of the other fantastic music from other parts of the game or GW1 playing in my guild hall.

You need to do the mission “Torn from the Sky” first. Go to the Star icon in your hero menu and click to begin the Heart of Thorns storyline. You need to beat the first mission before the mastery system unlocks.

Speaking from personal experience as I am pretty much the driving force behind my small guild’s upgrades. The biggest issue I run into for upgrades is silverwastes shovels. It takes 50 of them to build the mine and that is required.

Favor becomes problematic if you don’t have at least two other people. It helps if you set the guild missions to PvE missions instead of mixed, as some of the easy PvE missions can be soloed. I soloed both the easy trek and the easy race this past week. Medium treks need at the very least one other person, but preferably two from my tests. It is only possible to run to seven or eight of the locations alone.

If you have old upgrades, it really helps accelerate the upgrade process. Otherwise, you’ll be spending a lot of gold and time grinding the materials for it.

If you are in the same party, right click on his name. There should be an option to “join in the <map instance>.”

I’m not sure how many people watch twitch streams, but using them as a statistical correlation for the number of new accounts is silly. Many people play the game and don’t watch twitch streams. There probably are twitch watchers who DON’T play the game, but enjoy seeing it played. For instance, I don’t play League of Legends, but I enjoy watching others play it. I may just be in the minority though.

Only Anet really knows how many people are playing and we can only speculate. From my personal experience, it feels like there are many more people in game and some are asking pretty basic questions, even on higher level maps.

As far as restrictions go, I made a free account to see how they are, so I could recommend this to friends, as we had some bad experiences before. The only major restriction that I have an issue with is map chat being disabled and restrictions on whispering, as it limits player communication. Two character slots is not terrible and they can always just make a new account.

I’m pretty sure everything I am going to say has been said but this is my two cents (Disclaimer: Everything below is my personal experience and feedback, others may disagree):

1. No karma or experience: for new players this is bad as they can’t level from the event at all. This puzzles me as this entire event was supposed to be a welcome mat for them. I personally don’t see the harm in helping new players level up quicker.

2. No reaction from normal events: A rather hilarious issue, as centaurs will continue to attack outposts completely ignoring the mordrem on the field and vice versa in Kessex Hills map. At the very least they should be hostile to each other. This leads to…

3. No story given, just toss a bunch of mordrem on the map. Yes, the mordrem are “invading”. No, they aren’t. They’re just standing there on three rotating maps. Why? No reason, just kill them all. I’m confused and I’ve played through all of Season 1 and 2. A new player would just be puzzled as to why there are so many plant monsters on the map.

4. Ridiculous pricing on rewards locks out new players from getting much of anything. This plus waypoint costs are a double whammy. What new player is going to have 3 to 10 gold? Scarlet’s Memories is nice if you have the luck to get one of the black lion skins. If you’re going for the spinal blades, you will need a ton of them and that wraps back to the gold problem.

5. Guild recruiting tool: This is non-existent, even though it was promoted as such. I’m by myself and I can do just as well as a guild group.

6. Tagging rather than helping finish events: I get literally nothing for staying around and helping finish an event, to be fair, I get very little from finishing the entire round. Instead, the mechanics of the invasion and the intended rewards, make me run around tagging the mobs rather than help finish events. This seems counter to everything that GW2 has been for. We should WANT to stick around and help out. Of course, event rewards have been problematic since GW2 started.

7. No drops from anything. This makes magic find useless as MF does not affect any boxes, chests, etc. Why am I pushing my magic find % up when it has zero effect on anything?

It’s nice to have something new to do, but I’m not going to participate that much longer in this as the grind is ridiculous for an event that Silverwastes outshines in every way possible. I can see the appeal for the season 1 items, but there so very little heart and soul in this weekend event, just a bunch of monsters literally thrown on a map. Please add some background story information in-game (and not on your site/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit) as to why the invasion is happening and draw new and old players alike into the beautifully crafted world of GW2.

I don’t see why I am suddenly the leader of this group.

How am I the leader? I don’t remember ever being elected or pushed into a leadership position of this group of misfits. When were we a guild or a group that requires a leader figure? As far as I know, Rox and Braham were simply buddies that first met and fought together during the Molten Alliance and they met Majory and Kasmeer during the Tower of Nightmares, who were the investigating on their own. Taimi kinda popped up out of nowhere during the Marionette and immediately attached herself to Braham. There’s been no mention of any sort of organized group ever forming unlike Destiny’s Edge. If anything it’s been an informal gathering of friends that happen to work really well together.

I barely know these characters and I’ve pretty much been playing every step of the living story. Like achensherd said, I’m more like the guy who pops in every now and then than their fearless leader as Captain Kiel claims.

As Commander of the Pact, assuming that the Personal Story is still being treated as canon, don’t we have better things to do than lead a small adventuring company? From my understanding, the Personal Story takes place before the Living Story, so the Pact (and by extension us) should be doing more than standing around Lion’s Arch with a single airship, or fighting the Claw of Jormag for the 1,091,153rd time.

BAWW.8104:

I have 33 characters. I’m glad they all got grandfathered so I don’t have to unlock all the older traits. I’ve wanted to reroll some of them to experience this new way of levelling, but now I don’t feel motivated to do that at all. It’s bad enough an experience that I have to grind out the 5*33 new traits.

The change in cost to trait acquisition is absurd, and I don’t envy new players. Before, it was “play how you want” to get to 80, and you get all traits with 3g10s. Now, it’s “play exactly what we tell you to” to get your traits, else “play how you want” and level a few hundred times to earn those 360 skill points and 43g to buy your traits (and then you still need to grind more skill points because you also need them to buy utility skills).

The trait-hunting concept is fine, but the implementation can surely be improved.

- the tasks should be tied to content of appropriate level, as many have suggested.
- the tasks are entirely irrelevant to their associated traits. What has killing this boss or capping that tower anything to do with the trait I just learned? Nothing at all.
- the tasks should be tailored and different for every profession, such that a player levelling different professions get directed to experience different content, instead of the exact same content everytime.
- the tasks should teach or demonstrate some things about their associated traits. For example, a dredge boss converts conditions on him and his allies into boons every time he hits his gong and pep-talks his comrades, and upon his defeat my Guardian learns Pure of Voice. I just want some relevance.
- and along with profession-specific tasks, the trait unlocks should then be account bound. People who play only one of each profession (or less) would still need to unlock every trait on every character since they would all require different tasks across different professions, but for people who roll extras of the same profession afterwards, it would be a major QOL improvement. It’s ok to demand effort from the players’ end, but please be realistic and reasonable with how much of it is required.

IMO, the current implementation isn’t really fun, especially since all the associated tasks are old content that I have always had access to and have already done many times.

Man, I don’t know how you’re going to do it with 33 characters. I have 9 and it was already a chore the first time around. Best of luck buddy. I totally agree with you that the traits should tie into appropriate tasks and also be account bound per class.

Your post actually gave me an idea. What if we got specific missions or short stories that tie into our traits? How cool would it be if we got mini-missions that not only tied into our personal storylines but also tie into what our traits are and what they do?

Say you’re a Charr Guardian and you want the trait “Strength in Numbers” and mini-mission has you directing your warband (remember them?) in an assault against a Flame Legion stronghold. Or an Asura Engineer conducting a test run of their “Experimental Turrets” with Zojja or their starting krewe? The possibilities are endless.

New players won’t have the gold or the absurd amount of skill points needed to get their traits. Unless they’re selling skill points in the gem store now, I doubt throwing real money at the game will allow players to buy their new shiny traits. It costs 15 gold to unlock all the grandmaster level traits AND 100 skill points if you don’t do the events and that is not a small fee. Half my characters barely have 15 skill points. And if you don’t want to spend the time unlocking the traits it costs you a whopping 43 gold and 360 skill points. I can put up with the gold cost for maybe one character before I’m broke, but the skill point cost is absurd. My main doesn’t even have 200 skill points, but this is more because I like to create alts.

I just wish they added more options to earn these traits than “Go here and do this event”. I feel like I’m a broken record now, but diversity is always good. Without different options to earn the same trait, it just turns the game into an eternal waiting game for the events to trigger, especially in Orr, where I have no idea when the temples or the Risen Wizard is going to be up. In addition, you’re stuck praying for an event to FAIL and for nobody to grief you (Risen Wizard and Lyssa – and no, the defense event at Lyssa does NOT give the trait, this only works for Grenth and Melandru). I only managed to unlock the Risen Wizard trait twice by being lucky and logging in just as the event started. I am literally parking my characters in Orr waiting for the Gates of Arah event to fail so we can take it again. It’s not like I can go anywhere else as the events are completed in such a short period of time that in the time it takes me to waypoint in and run to the location, it might already be finished.

Karka Queen was completed in FOUR minutes the last time I did it with the gigantic zerg that was parking in her driveway. If you missed it, it is a nine hour wait for the next time she will spawn. This is totally NOT acceptable.

In a game where we have so many different options and playstyles, why are we restricted in our trait acquisition to doing just one thing? Yes, playing the game is the point and getting people to experience different parts of the game is great, but this is forcing the players to play the game a certain way in order to unlock their traits. A re-calibration of how the traits are awarded (Finish A Light in the Darkness a level 55 story quest for an Adept trait?!?) is definitely needed, especially if they keep it this way.

The funny thing is before this update I was actually contemplating getting another character slot, now I don’t think I will.

It’s not so much that people dislike playing the game. If we did, none of us would be here. Different people play the game different ways and so there should be different methods of acquiring the traits instead of railroading people into WvW or stuck waiting around for the next time an event happens.

Shriektalon, you are awesome! You’ve summed up the problems with the living story with a great deal of creativity and passion. I’ve read your previous story post and thought they hit exactly what I had expected, but did not get from the living story.

Number 13 in opening post really hits the spot for me. I really should not have to scour the web to find a blog from a developer with a short story explaining what happened in game or prior to the scenario presented… when the medium is the GAME. The old adage that everyone learned in school of “show don’t tell” comes to mind here. If it takes more time to create cinematics, characters, etc, we understand. Every one of your players is here because we are passionate about the game in one way or another. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be playing this game. Please utilize the medium as that is what every one of us experiences. The short stories are nice, but they should not be utilized as an explanation of what is going on. Show us why Scarlet became who she was using cutscenes, or even a flashback mission like the Bonus Missions in GW1.

In addition to everything that has been said, it would be really interesting if we had concurrent events that didn’t tie directly into each other. The dynamic events system is the perfect vehicle for this, so introduce some new dynamic events into the system to make the living world come more alive. There is a ton of story potential just with the random NPCs that are sitting at the renown hearts and current dynamic events that just endlessly repeat themselves. Give us a reason to care about them other than gather five apples or kill twenty centaurs to finish the event. Bring them to life and tell us a good story. If you don’t want these stories to interfere with the rest of the map, then we can utilize the instancing system even.

Good stories don’t have to be earth shattering, change-the-world stories. One of my favorite series of sidequests in GW1 dealt with Lazarus the Dire and the former White Mantle Justiciar Naveed. In five short connected sidequests, you told Naveed’s tragic tale and his ultimate sacrifice. This is the level of storytelling that I want to see again. It was laser focused on Naveed and while the outcome had an effect on the future (hint, hint) ultimately it was not about changing-the-world. This was the story of one man’s fate and his acceptance of it. You guys made me care about Naveed. Let us care about the NPCs in GW2 as well, because right now I barely care about Jennah, Logan, Rytlock, Marjory, Braham, Taimi, etc and these are the “main” characters of the game.

All in all, I like the trait update. Trait acquisition is neat; however, there should be more ways to acquire the same traits. GW1 had several bosses that had the same skill (in most cases – there were a few skills that were unique) and you could defeat any of them to skill capture. As I have nine level 80 characters, I cringe at the thought of waiting around for hours to fight all of these bosses nine times. I have neither the gold nor the skill points to purchase those grandmaster traits.

I wasted an hour last night at Lyssa trying to convince people that the defense event didn’t award the trait. They did it anyway and walked away mad that it didn’t give the trait. If the defense event is supposed to award the trait, then I’ll just consider this a bug. Otherwise this needs to be addressed, as this trait unlock requires the players to intentionally fail the defense event before they fight the Priestess of Lyssa.

Boss timers are a bad idea. This is a discussion for the other thread, but let me say that the Karka Queen, which spawns only three times a day, should not have been selected as one of the trait unlocks. It forces your players to log in at those specific times. Worse, if the player can’t log in at that time, they will never unlock that trait unless they shell out 3G + 20 skill points for every character. Not everyone is made of gold and skill points.

This doesn’t affect me in particular at the moment, but I see from the trait guide on the wiki that there are trait unlocks that require you to go into Obsidian Sanctum and Edge of the Mists, as well as get 100% completion of maps. While I like WvW, I’m pretty sure that there are people who don’t like it and don’t like being forced into doing it for a trait. I’m pretty sure there was a really similar discussion way back when GW2 had that achievement for Queen’s Jubilee in Obsidian Sanctum. Sure you don’t have to do it, but for completionists (like me), and for those who like to experiment with their builds, it’s a big turn off.

While the overall system has its faults (I don’t think anyone likes the fact that trait points start at level 30 now), I think there is definitely potential here. All my above points could be rectified if there were additional ways to unlock some of these traits. They don’t have to be easy; heck, you could put a trait unlock at the end of the Aetherblade Jumping Puzzle! I appreciate the diverse ways that you can unlock them, even if I don’t agree with it.

The main issue I have with the megaserver is that it simply exacerbates the unresolved issue with too many particle effects. I could barely tell what was going on when ten people were hitting a champion. Now I’m fighting alongside with 50+ people with particle effects flying all over the place that my screen literally looks like a mess of purple, red, and orange. I can’t see where I am, where the boss is, and what just killed me.

I am also stuck at 23/24 of the locations and I have been to all 24 twice. Each one of them says that I have already been there already.