Guild Wars 2

Behellagh.1468:

The personal stories merge because in the end it’s about you Vs the big bad dragon. It’s the natural convergence since it’s what everyone is working against. Now if they introduce another of the elder dragons I can see the paths diverging again with each order approaching it’s defeat again through their own means but coming together and the end again.

I’m also trying to remember when the GW1 story ever really “branched.” Even in Nightfall, you were back on line with the other “branch” in the story within two missions.

Prophecies didn’t branch at all. Factions branching was solely within a small segment of the story where you picked a faction. Eye of the North was “branching” in the sense that you could choose what order to do the missions, but all the missions were the same.

Man, the rose-colored glasses over the eyes of some fans are THICK.

The idea that there is a consumer base willing to drop $80-100 on a product because they think the previous product sucked…

… kitten it. Brain broke.

The way I see it, 4 or 5 months is not NEARLY enough time to be seeing too many fruits of that score. I know that Factions came out in a year after the initial release of GW1, but that is content of a significantly smaller scale than what a GW2 version of Cantha and Elona would have to be (again, remember that GW2 had more “content” in terms of pure size than Prophecies and Factions combined; the demand that a “Factions” version of GW2 would carry equal scale and scope is nigh guaranteed).

I mean, it took WoW 3 YEARS to bring Burning Crusade to the table. Even with the reasonable assumption that the process of expanding MMOs has been streamlined over the progress of the genre, a half year or even one year is still an awfully small turnaround to expect anything of huge significance.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t have my reservations about expansion via Living World. If they dump it on us all at once, it might as well be an expansion that I can’t imagine NCSoft would accept being handed out for free. Episode gradual releases of Crystal Desert every month with a new zone… I dunno. I can see players getting very frustrated very quickly with it.

But ya know what… I’m not going to actively discourage the attempt. It irritates me to think that Arena.net would give up before even giving it a shot because their player base decided that it was going to be a failure before the concept even launched.

But that’s what I suspect will happen.

They HAVE told us this though.

The very reason that the LS is a side story is because they DON’T want it connected to the bigger stuff they have planned. They have four Living Story teams, and OTHER teams working on other content. THEY HAVE SAID THIS.

It’s RIGHT HERE: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/GW2-unlikely-to-get-expansions-Interview/page/2#post2343665

I mean… nevermind. I give up. If you don’t want to get it, I can’t make you.

Skan.5301:

If the different part is done right, there won’t be any whining or fits being thrown. Just saying.

They haven’t done ANYTHING yet, though. That’s what irks me about the pushback.

This is busy-work. This is just relatively mindless stuff to keep people occupied while larger stuff is prepared in the background. That’s the impression I’ve always had, at least from the statements I have heard.

But there are these masses who have just slapped their hands over their ears, and decided the ONLY way to properly unveil such large scale content is with an expansion… citing the previously described busy work as evidence that it can’t be done. Nope. Not possible. We NEEDS our expansion!

I don’t get the pushback. Why the hell are we complaining that a company is entertaining giving us an expansion’s worth of content for FREE, in the hopes that it’ll entice us to buy from their in-game store? Why the hell aren’t we saying, “Okay! We’ll take free stuff! Give it your best shot!”

It’d be one thing if they tried to release an expansion through the living story, and it turned out to be too large to be reliably sent via download for enough players… or had a ton of mechanical errors… or any other roadblocks that get in the way. I mean then I could understand a cry of, “Ya know… this isn’t working. Just package it up, let us give you $50, and we can go from there.”

But it hasn’t even been TRIED yet, and we’ve got gamers here already declaring it a a failure.

I’d rather get all those things WITHOUT having to spend $80-100. They wanna try and give it to me for free… why the hell would I complain?

Gamers… yet again the force of stagnation.

Can’t do ANYTHING different, or we’ll whine and pitch a fit. Just give us more of the same.

rizzo.1079:

He said it wrong, but most of the post F&F LS updates have encouraged farming.

I’ve said it in other threads: Farming, for me at least, is both fun and profitable. Please stop being angry that I’m having fun and making a bit of coin while doing it. If you make your coin running dungeons, you’re not more skillful than me, you just have a different way of having fun. If you’re running dungeons or doing the train or doing ANYTHING in game to make money that isn’t fun for, then stop doing that post haste because this is a game not a job.

They “encourage” farming in the same way the champion loot upgrades “encourage” farming.

Players, as a general rule, will find the path of least resistance and walk that path endlessly if they are allowed to do so. Challenge and fun have ALWAYS been terrible motivators for the MMO market.

If players got 1 silver every ten minutes looking at their toon’s idle animations at a waypoint in Gendarren Fields, it would be on multiple overflows across all servers 24/7.

I can guarantee you within one month of “raid” content:

“The rewards aren’t worth it! Why have us do this increased difficulty content for exotics and ascended that I can craft or find in the open world? Kitten rewards. Anet SUXXX!!!”

I got Tybalt in one chamber… in another Scarlet mocked me for blacking out and how that went so well last time with that charr warband.

Those sort of shout-outs to the choices in the personal story were a nice touch.

I also think Arena.net is going to eventually see the writing on the wall. They’re going to TRY to expand the world via Living Story; but the MMO gamer base will push back against it. They’ve become conditioned that expansions=good, and it’s going to be another thing A.net will have to yield to.

Gamers have been a force of stagnation for 20+ years. I don’t see it changing now.

And here is why Arena.net has gotten into the practice of lumping everything they say with a million qualifiers rather than “straight talk.”

bluestocking.6148:

An unfair mobility advantage … in costume brawl?

You’d be amazed the number of people who consider the lack of balance in Costume Brawl to be a gamebreaking flaw.

Well, all I can tell you is that “doing something over and over” is hardly unique to Korean “grinder” MMOs. It’s consistent among ALL MMOs.

In your “robust” single player game, a single playthrough is around 50 hours (and that’s being fairly generous). MMO players will frequently have hours played totals in the THOUSANDS. Repetitive content is the norm.

digiowl.9620:

Must have happened on a different sub-section, or before i took a active interest in the forum, as i don’t recall seeing them.

I don’t recall it much after release, but I do recall the cry that melee’s risk/reward wasn’t good enough during the beta events.

The simplest solution would be longer and more random respawn rates for “open world” champions.

Lopez.7369:

At this point I have to assume they’re purposely avoiding this thread.

Probably.

I mean, what do you want them to say? Lie and say, “We’ve got a solution in the pipeline?” Tell you “we’re still looking into it?” What really CAN be said?

Condition damage needs a complete and total overhaul, both in how they are calcuated and how they are applied. Traits pertaining to conditions and skills that have them as effects would have to be altered and rebalanced, cleanses would need to be looked at for the same reason.

There’s no quick fix here. I’m not even sure there’s an effective band-aid.

Trixie.7614:

I find it funny that there is “reflect projectile”, but there is no “reflect hit” (not counting Retaliation, because it works for ranged too).

There’s plenty of counter abilities that only work in melee (Ranger Greatsword #4 for example, though the block portion of the skill works at range).

The Ranger is not a ranged class in GW2.

Full stop.

Players insistence that it is or should be is the major reason why groups go “LOLRangerNo.” The bulk of their damage is designed to be melee, with a robust ranged option as secondary. The Off-Hands are meant to supplement builds, and can be used in melee OR ranged (just like every other class).

As such, you have Sword/Greatsword for Melee damage, Axe/Longbow/Shortbow for ranged damage. Hardly a huge discrepancy.

Melee builds have done more damage than ranged since Day 1. That is working entirely as intended.

Don’t know what else to tell ya, buddy.

One half the fanbase gripes that armor sets are too revealing and that they should cover up more.

The other half would rather run around half naked.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The Queen’s Pavilion REDUX
Players are allowed to choose between two strategies, and the combined choices of all players on that server, decide the most popular strategy (much like Evon vs Ellen). The events then play out accordingly on that server. Perhaps Scarlet is blown out of the air by siege equipment. Perhaps Scarlet attacks another part of the city instead, and steals a valuable item. Or maybe she attacks Lion’s Arch instead, and springs Mai Trin from jail in a clever twist. Either way, the outcome can be different on each server, and none of the npc’s act like idiots.

The problem I have with servers each having their own independent story is this:

Even if you only give two options, the permutations after only three or four events become too much for even a handful of teams to handle.

A and B turns into A1, A2, B1, B2… which turns into A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2, B3, B4… which turns into A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, A8, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B7, B8…

It’s simply not feasible. Sorry. The story HAS to be railroaded to a considerable degree.

Ya know, for a fanbase that decries farming, vertical progression, and the like… there sure seems to be an awful lot of complaints that the carrot isn’t big enough for their appetites.

But my personal feeling on the Living Story is this; if the goal is to have temporary content that really isn’t more than busy work to keep people logging in while you’re building larger scale permanent content in the background… then I think by and large it’s mission accomplished, and you really DON’T need your fans to tell you that.

But if the goal is that what we’re getting should be the meat and potatoes going forward… then Arena.net is going to be disappointed when the game flops tragically by the end of its second year. There’s been plenty of time to develop the next chapter of the main thrust of the game. We’d like to get to it sooner rather than later.

Galen Grey.4709:

Talissa Chan.7208:

Not an argument thread – please listen when the devs state that.

Its a discussion thread, arguments are kinda a subset of discussions. Personally I think its healthy to have arguments (as long as they’re respectful) as they serve to dwell deeper into different point of views.

That being said if developers or moderators feel that discussions between players on disagreements arent something productive for this thread please say so I would personally be happy to leave that for other threads no problem.

On top of this… part of the reason that we get legions stomping onto the forums complaining about changes “ruining” the game for them is that they were happily playing while someone else was on this forums complaining about the very thing they liked, and what they liked wasn’t being represented or defended.

It’s important to get both sides of a discussion.

Well, here’s the problem. You’ve told the “developers” (let’s assume a dev is reading this right now) that you’re bored and you’re going to quit.

So I guess the question is; what is it you’re looking for? What would keep it interesting for you? The cry of “new PERMANENT content” is all well and good, but it’s a battle cry that is so vague that it really doesn’t say anything.

minbariguy.7504:

So is anyone from Anet going to respond to the pages and pages of feedback that the pace of Living Story releases is too fast? I feel like we’ve been saying it for months and being completely brushed off. Here’s my take on what’s been happening:

---

ANET: Hey guys, we’re going to give you Living Story updates every two weeks! Cool, huh?

Players: Um…that’s kind of…fast…don’t you think?

ANET: Nah, you’re going to love it! No one else is doing it! We’re unique!

Players: No, really, we’ve tried it, and it’s too fast. It’s kind of stressful actually. Can you slow it down a bit?

ANET: We’re committed to bringing you Living Story updates every two weeks! We’ll continue to work hard to make this happen, even though it limits the things we can do because of such a tight release schedule. But we’re doing this for you because we know how much you enjoy it

Players: No! Just stop it, okay? Please! We don’t like it. It’s burning us out. Are you even hearing us?

ANET: Hey, look at our new web advertisements! They say “Free DLC every two weeks!” Pretty slick, huh?

Players: <…sob!>

One, it’s not “Players”, it’s “You.” You do not speak for anyone other than yourself.

And the problem is… Arena.net TRIED the every month bit initially. Players ground through it in three days and cried for the next three weeks they were bored. They are giving us what the majority supposedly wants.

I question the wisdom of trying to appeal to the content locusts… but at this point, the play time requirements to keep up have not been obscene for me.

Players burning out is entirely a player-side problem. You don’t HAVE to complete EVERY meta event, ya know? You CAN get the thrust of the living story in a handful of hours.

Rings and trinkets started as only a fractal reward. It eventually expanded to dailies and guild missions. I’m not sure if it was always possible as drops in higher level fractals.

There’s no reason to believe there won’t be other ways to gain weapons and armor… eventually.

Also, it’s probably a little bit easier to justify weapons as “free” drops (as the only thing that changes is the size depending on the race), than it is to design armor (which would require several modifications depending on the race) in terms of man-hours spent.

kodama spirit.2380:

They will if the rewards are there. Right now this game is (in my opinion) rewarding a kind of play that isn’t in line with the spirit of having a living world. Change that, you have a chance to change how people approach maps, content and actually seeing reason to doing events and making the world dynamic (hopefully) in the end.

Well, that poses the next question. What IS proper rewards? Let’s face it, even in other MMOs, your usual quest rewards are garbage. The enticement of “better loot” is even LESS effective in a game like GW2 that has such a narrow power creep. Would you REALLY be enticed to go free an entire zone for one rare? One exotic? One Ascended? TWO Ascended? 1 gold? 5 gold? What?

There’s a length that Arena.net won’t be willing to go in terms of rewards so that it doesn’t throw the economy even more out of whack than it already is. You start adding another huge influx of gold and gear… yeah. People whine about the price of precursors now… wonder how they’ll react when inflation drives them over 1500g.

So, the rewards really aren’t (and some would argue SHOULDN’T) going to be increased too much further than they already are. And that’s apparently not nearly enough for most players as it is.

I mean, I really like the concept. I personally would love it. But it would most likely kill the game.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Don’t assume. I, as well as most PvE players I know, would love this. Obviously, this wouldn’t be implemented in starter zones, at least not on a large scale, but it would be a welcome addition to the world (and already exists in a mild form, but not quite to the extent Tommyknocker was talking about)

You honestly think your average player will zone in Gendarren Fields, see every waypoint contested and every settlement hostile and think, “I must fight back?”

I don’t. I see them saying, “Kitten this” walking away and leaving entire zones even more abandoned than they already are. It’s a wonderful idea in theory, but I think in a real world setting having zones that could be completely overrun would be a disaster.

Tommyknocker.6089:

Copy/Pasted from another thread.

After playing this game for over a year I would like to give an example of what I believe a true living world should be.

First and foremost it NEEDS REAL consequences for failure. If you have centaurs taking over a town when you fail, why must they end there? If given long enough the centaurs can and should take the whole kitten map, enslaving and forcing the npc’s within the areas to be hostile to the PC’s (similar to a flipped keep in WvW). Waypoints, once the map is taken, should all be contested, making the trip to that map impossible save for entering through a nearby map. And why stop there, if the centaurs form an alliance with the dredge they could start controlling even more of the maps. If however they are at odds with the dredge we could form a temporary alliance with one side to defeat the other or at very least see then openly at war with one another.

(rest of post snipped for brevity)

As much as I personally would like this, I suspect the majority of actual PvE players would not. PvE players tend to prefer “static” locations; they like to go into a place and know [x] is a safe place that will always have certain things.

I can only see that idea leading to frustration and players quitting.

If there is a queue with say 10 people guesting in line… if a native player shows up, they get bumped to the front of the queue as a general rule.

A native player will NOT bump a guesting player who is already in the home map, however.

Astralporing.1957:

Suppose you are making a legendary. You managed to gather almost everything. The last component you need is the precursor. You might have decided to buy it, or MF gamble, but you heard that precursor crafting will be soon, and you actually believed that.
Then a way to make precursors is introduced. You are happy… until you notice, that those are precursors for different legendaries, and those different legendaries not only require a different set of gifts, but (following the general Anet principle lately) cost 10x more than the previous one.
(and of course the prices for original precursors would not crash if it was found out that they’d be uncraftable. Quite the opposite, they’d likely even increase in value).

TL/DR: community asked for precursor crafting to solve a problem of current precursors being available only through ridiculous RNG. Introducing it, but only for new precursors and new Legendaries does not solve the original problem at all. It would still remain unadressed.

Welcome to the practice of market speculating; you make your best educated guess on what the future will bring based on what you know and what you have seen. Sometimes it works… sometimes it doesn’t.

Yep. I concur with the complaints here.

Rangers are infinitely more effective in melee, but when I’m in open world situations with any more than 10 people, you’ll NEVER see me in there.

Why? Because I can’t see what the hell is going on in that morass of spell effects and particle displays.

In seriousness, though… this is NOT a game that you want to rush to 80 and look for the “endgame.” There isn’t one to find. The content is everywhere, in every zone. The level recommendations are largely for show by the time you reach max level… so there’s no need to hurry.

This is NOT a game where you should chase shinies or the biggest numbers. At the very best, it’s a slow power curve that has an inordinate amount of effort to reach. At the very worst, Ascended is the highest you’re gonna get.

My advice is that it’s a game best enjoyed in 1-2 hour sessions, not something you should expend as a second job or a second life. If you try, you WILL be disappointed by the result.

Don’t visit the forums too often or dwell for too long.

Exactly this.

World of Warcraft’s “expansions” don’t offer any more particular content, and the stuff they do offer is just as time-gated as anything in GW2… because it is impossible to generate enough content to keep up with the content locusts.

In WoW as late as Cataclysm, you had people at max level within 48 hours of release. They had slammed through the initial raids within the first two weeks. Without time-gating that endgame content, it would be ripped through in a month and those players would be whining about having nothing to do and that they’re bored.

Subscription models don’t promise more or better content, nor does it offer less time-gating or content management. If anything, it’s MORE time-gated in order to keep you paying that subscription every month.

The only thing on Arena.net’s end that can be done about it is adding more supply. It’s player demand that is driving the cost up.

If the supply is to Arena.net’s liking… what can they do to curb player demand?

VidGhost.3215:

Luck = BAD
Skill/Dedication = Good… why cant this be the norm.

Because it would be more work and wouldn’t be any better?

For the percentage that Arena.net wants legendaries to be, the “skill” requirement to gain the precursor would be so high that instead of the “RNG=bad” crowd complaining, you’d have just as large of a group complaining, “I’m plenty skilled! The requirements are too hard!!! NERF NERF NERF!!!”

Hell, it’s very likely many of the people here would be in that other group too.

Conncept.7638:

Xae Isareth.1364:

I think Anet has a lot of really good ideas, but are just implementing them very badly.

And then after one bad implementation they swear off everything even remotely connected with the idea no matter how good it was.

Just look at the events system improvements (or complete lack thereof) after the failure that was the Modus Sceleris. Once ANet tries something, if it doesn’t go perfectly, they abandon it no matter how much the players want it.

More people were excited for expansions on the event system than have ever been for the LS, yet we keep getting living story simply because the first one didn’t completely bomb while much better ideas were screwed up on their first implementation.

It’s not just Arena.net. Game developers as a general rule don’t “tweak” things. If fan feedback says “we hate this”, it’s pretty much discarded whole hog. Gamers generally aren’t ones to give something they don’t like a second chance. As a rule, they’ll dismiss it as “the same crap as before” and all that time and effort to fix it is wasted.

Better to just toss it all out and try something else.

Promises made and promises pretty much kept in my mind. Then again, I didn’t expect them to keep every statement of intent to begin with. I knew the larger MMO market would resist the changes Arena.net wanted to bring to the table.

What makes your opinion the right one?

That IS an issue I have with the new Tequatl. Something that difficult and epic should at least be on a meta-event chain that allows players to trigger it themselves when THEY are ready.

Ortumbra.7490:

A lot of people think that the rng in guild wars is similar to the wi-flag that happened in Asheron’s Call in the early 2000s, where some people just have better odds than others in the rng system based on their character data. The only problem being that if this is the case, then A-net either doesn’t know how to fix it, doesn’t care enough to fix it, or doesn’t know if their rng is even affected or not by wi-flag. For those that don’t know what wi-flag is, here is an article explaining it: http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag.

While there may very well be some sort of bug in the RNG algorithm that Arena.net uses, there are two issues that make it difficult for me (or anyone) to empirically say “yes, there is.”

1) The % that a precursor is generated is so low that the sample size needed to prove that it truly is more than dumb luck is likely never going to be reached within a feasible amount of time.

2) People have a natural tendency to exaggerate just what they put in to do something. Perception muddies the numbers, if you will. Claims of “I got 5 precursors in like… 10 tries” and someone who says, “I’ve put 10000g worth of rares into the Forge and got nothing!” probably aren’t being exactly accurate. Without actual measurement of who has put in what and for how long, the testamonials that have been cited in these forums would not pass statistical muster.

The Wi-Flag demonstrated in the link is a case where there was something that was supposed to behave one way, but was demonstrably behaving in a completely different way. Someone could quite clearly point at it and say, “Yeah, that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

In THIS case… the Mystic Forge and precursor hunt by the very percentages we know, is SUPPOSED to leave the majority of players frustrated by it. The numbers suggest you AREN’T going to get one very quickly or easily. That there are outlying data points is not particularly unusual, nor is there any evidence to believe there are more outlying points than there really should be.

I personally had no issues with GW2 or any other program upon the update. /shrug

Sounds like happenstance, really.

But anyway, with my Shaders set to “High”, I get a look that’s pretty darn close to those renders…

The issue I have with “High” shader settings is my God can it cause some brain damaging reflections.

My Guardian’s Aegis triggering on High shaders made me think my retina had been scaled out of my eyeballs.

MrRuin.9740:

To be honest, if you don’t like it, don’t do it. Scaling won’t fix what you’re after or make it enjoyable for you. I don’t come to the content you enjoy and petition to have it changed to suit me. Because I understand some people may enjoy that which I don’t.
Like has been pointed out, there are 15-20+ other world bosses that can be done by people who share this want for that type of content. I don’t understand why when there are people doing the one thats like this and enjoy it, that it would be rallied against. If 0.25% of the population d this event, thats fine because the content that is Tequatl represents less than that as a percentage of the content, events and game as a whole. This minuscule percentage of the content does not need to be changed.

Because Tequatl used to be a fairly easy walk the park that guaranteed at least one rare item. That’s one less piece of loot that they aren’t getting that they need for… reasons.

On top of that, The Shatter and Claw of Jormag will be getting similar treatment, and that’s THREE pieces of loot they won’t be able to get, and that makes them ANGRY.

Mathias.9657:

LFR has good gear, and that wasn’t my point anyway. I don’t want an easier version of teq I just want it to be instanced and a challenge without silly restrictions like time limits and 80 person party. Any challenge of this magnitude should be instanced imo.

Open world is not the place for difficult content, as made obvious by the tons of servers that never even attempt tequatl.

And my point is that the driving force that makes LFR work is the (fairly) significant difference in the level of shiny that the harder options give you. That’s the carrot that entices people to try the harder option.

GW2 doesn’t really have that carrot. They can’t just “instance” a harder version of Tequatl for the same reason this current one isn’t popular by swaths of the fanbase. The challenge alone isn’t enough of a motivator. Players pretty much have to be forced (either by the addiction to higher stats or to the fact that it’s the only way to play that content) out of their comfort zone.

Without the carrot of phat lootz, the only option Arena.net really has to push people to give the content a serious shot is to make it the only way.

Mathias.9657:

WoW raid experience is much more casual with the looking for raid feature which allows you to queue for raids in a lesser difficulty setting.

Pretty ironic…

Yes, with drastically lower loot tables. The carrot is that if you want the good stuff, you need the harder difficulties to get those l33t shinies.

That really isn’t an option for GW2. There’s no real “lower” rewards they could give that would encourage people to play the harder variant (even if it gave one of its Ascended weapons to every person per kill, how long would that REALLY hold interest?).

So, the only real driving factor that would be present if an easier and harder version of those dragon lieutenants existed would be the challenge itself; which by my experience, has traditionally been a TERRIBLE motivator for the MMO crowd.