Guild Wars 2

Quick Mouse.7635:

Let’s be honest guys, it’s really NOT hard to get ascended gear. I geared out 2 characters with rings and backpacks in just two weeks of doing nothing but the daily.

Seeing as how it takes 35 laurels to get just one Ascended ring, gonna call you on that bluff.

Unless you mean “daily Fractals”, in which case I’d point out that by your own assertions, you ran Fractals only twice a day for 14 days (28 runs), and it takes ten runs at Lvl 10+ to get enough Pristine Relics to get a guaranteed ring….meaning you’d need to run the dungeon 40 times (20 days in a row) to get the two rings you wanted on each of your two characters.

So, yeah, sorry but your math doesn’t add up. Either you got random ring drops from your dailies that just so happened to match your build (in other words, you were lucky), or you got rings that don’t match your build but you’re “settling” for them just so you can say you have ascended gear. Or, more likely, you just made a false claim.

I leave it to you to tell us which, but please, spare us the assertions that “it’s not hard to get Ascended gear”, because it was never about how difficult they are to get in the first place. No one is complaining about how hard they are to get, we’re complaining that they exist in the first place.

Rieselle.5079:

Your points are almost all correct except for this one.
Refurbishing something and then selling it is not the RL equivalent of “flipping.”

Yes it is. In fact, the most common definition of the term “flipping” is in application to real estate: buy a house cheap, refurbish it, and then sell it for a much higher price tag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipping

The problem with “flipping” in a video game is that the middle step of refurbishing is completely unnecessary because the item has no wear-and-tear or any such equivalent, it’s a digital item whose durability is permanently at peak efficiency. So that vital money sink that makes flipping in the real world a much more risky venture is not present in video game economies, leading to higher profits for the “flippers” and higher prices for everyone else.

eisberg.2379:

The problem with skill based, is that all it takes is some practice and everyone can do it, and it would be fun to do. Really, the only way to make sure that not everyone can get a legendary, is to make it a really boring to get for most people. Lets be honest, the only true barrier to getting a legendary is whether one deems it fun to do a major rng grind, or don’t mind doing that kind of grind despite it might be boring to them.

TLDR: Make it fun to get, everyone will get it.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight:

Your counterargument to the idea of making “legendaries” a skill-based challenge….is that it will make them “too fun” to obtain, and thus, everybody will have one, even though there’s a clear skill barrier that most players won’t be able to break through?

I’m not sure you thought that argument through.

icen.6309:

“Doesn’t take skill it only takes time” time still = hard to obtain, hense how you are whining about it, it’s can’t be easy

Er, yes it can.

Suppose you’re trying to cook two identical meals, one of which takes twice as long to cook. Is the second meal twice as hard? Not really, it just takes longer to complete. The amount of time spent doing a task does not directly translate into the task’s difficulty. Time can be a factor in difficulty, certainly, but that depends on the task in question and how time is factored into it. For example, running an obstacle course becomes a harder task if you set a time limit on completing it. But a task is not automatically harder simply because it takes longer to do.

I find it hilarious that someone who doesn’t understand something this basic would try to claim that everybody else in the thread doesn’t understand “basic logic comprehension” (which, btw, isn’t actually a “thing”).

This game needs massive fixes on existing content, rather than always focusing on throwing us new shiny things to play with for a month or two. It can’t continue to rely on new content forever, not when so much of the existing content still doesn’t work properly.

Or, summarized: We still have broken skills and traits almost a half year into the game, and you want more of them?

There are still people out there who think that GW’2s game economy runs anything like the real economy? I’ll bet if the GW2 economist was on here posting, he/she could tell you just how different these things are and how much they’ve learned about the way that games operate. But you don’t even need an economist….anyone who has put any thought into the idea could tell you how different a game economy is from a real one.

1) There is no hard limit on the supply of any item. In the real world, all things have a finite limit, and once bought up, that’s it. In game worlds, items are only bound in terms of quantity by the number that have dropped, but the supply is potentially infinite. The only limiting factor in a game world is the demand, and since demand is virtually always high, prices can continue to increase without any concern on the part of the seller because there will always be a demand for their items.

2) Nothing is bought from a manufacturer but rather through a secondhand buyer, leading to generally much higher and less consistent prices. This is rather self-explanatory. Manufacturers generally come to some manner of agreement as to what the appropriate price of their product is, and everyone competes within a certain margin of that price (ergo why most of the top cell phone providers charge similar amounts, and the ones that offer less service have to resort to demanding less than the big guys in order to stay afloat). If you buy tickets to a football game from a stadium, they will be the same price consistently until the stadium decides that it’s time to raise it….whereas if you buy them from the scalper in the parking lot, it’ll cost you however much he feels like charging, which means it’ll cost you more (more about that further down this post) and you’ll generally not be charged the same amount twice.

3) “Flipping” is far more profitable in games than in real life. That’s not to say flipping doesn’t exist in real life, it does. But in order to flip an item in real life, you have to buy it low, fix it up (which also costs money) and then continue to invest money into maintaining it until you find someone willing to buy for your desired price. Because of this, flipping doesn’t always work out and people are forced to sell at a net loss. In a game, however, there is zero maintenance costs, and no paying to “fix it up”, so you can flip an item almost immediately or wait for a few months, and the result is pure profits.

4) There is no such thing as a “used” sale in the game world. And because of this, prices are always high. The existence of “used” sales in the real world are a form of balance against rising costs by allowing people to buy a product of slightly lesser quality in exchange for paying much less. GW2 doesn’t allow you to sell anything you’ve used before unless it’s a low equipment tier, meaning that used items don’t exist. If they did, there’d be more of them in the shops, thus a greater supply and lower prices.

5) Inflation kills game economies, whereas it’s a normal function in real ones. Inflation is built into the real world: you earn higher paychecks now than people did a decade ago, and items cost more. This is a natural thing. But in a game world, where drop rates are always the same (except in the many cases where they’ve actually nerfed drop rates), rising prices are something that can kill the game economy because the richer players will always have enough gold to afford the items, whereas the poor players will see an increasing gap in the amount they must pay for an item and their actual wallet size.

I do find myself missing the dodge function when I log into other games, yeah. GW2’s combat feels so much more “alive” than other games that it’s spoiled me to the point where I can’t quite appreciate their combat as much. It’s why I didn’t like TERA’s combat incidentally: because yeah, it has some dodging, but still never felt as loose and fluid as GW2’s to me. If I had played TERA first, maybe it would’ve made a difference, but….I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it after having played in the betas for GW2.

Vavume.8065:

Yeah I dont disagree with that at all, thing is Arenanet just didnt go the skill route, I also expected it to me more like how vanilla wow legendarys were, now that was legendary. So as far as I’m concerned the only way to keep them from being a dime a dozen right now is the high price pre cursor, for most people 500g is still hard to obtain so legendarys are at least somewhat rare, but not legendary status.
I can’t see much changing from the way it is right now, but maybe in the future if there is a new tier of legendarys they might actually have learned something from this and do it the right way and add a skill barrier to them.

Agreed.

I just think it’s a shame they didn’t implement them right the first time. Much as I enjoy the game as is, I miss the days of “when it’s ready”. This is something that should never have been done if they couldn’t take the time to do it right.

Vavume.8065:

I think pre cursors being in the 500g range is fine, the fact that they were ever cheaper is more of a problem in my view. Legendarys should be hard to make, everything is pretty easy to obtain so there needs to be something that is difficult about it, and thats where the high priced pre cursor comes in. I hope they remain high and Arenanet never start handing out welfare precursors, because the day every causal has a legendary will be sad day.
I’m sorry if this sounds elitist, I do not mean it to, although I know many will take it that way, I just have a firm view that legendarys should actually be hard to obtain.

But they’re not hard to obtain. There is absolutely no skill barrier between you and a “legendary”, only a time barrier, because you need only gather a large number of resources. I’m by no means a great player, as WvW often reminds me, but I’m already almost a quarter of the way there myself. Does it really show off how amazingly talented I am? Well, no, not one bit. My prediction, in fact, is that a few years from now, most of the people still playing likely will have at least one so-called “legendary”, and they’ll be so common that people will be starting to use other skins just to feel different.

If you want them to be less common, you shouldn’t be looking at the price tags, because price isn’t a permanent barrier. You should be looking to implement a skill-based challenge system to restrict the flow of precursors, thereby making sure that only people who are truly talented at the game can even get one.

I legit cried when Sieran sacrificed herself there. That heroic sacrifice bit, while common and cliche, was probably the best written piece in the entire storyline. I actually liked her bubbly personality and I had a lot of fun adventuring with her. So I was angry when she was torn from me like that.

And then the story made me even more angry when, near the end of the storyline….the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan mentions her by name.

Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan: I see in your heart that you have lost someone to Zhaitan. Someone named…Sieran. She is waiting for you now, beneath the dragon’s wings…

When I heard him say that, I just lost it. I went into a complete blind rage at that moment because I seriously thought, based on that dialogue, that the dev team was about to force me to fight a Risen Sieran.

Thankfully they spared me that torment, but it goes to illustrate how amazingly well executed that sequence, and and indeed the entire Order Arc of the storyline is. You actually CARE about the order’s helpers, because they have personalities and feelings and they feel REAL.

The person who wrote Trehearne into the storyline for the Pact Arc needs to take notes from the people who wrote the Order Arc. It is far superior in every conceivable way.

People are buying up the low price precursors to resell them at higher prices.

So yes, it’s blatant price manipulation. But don’t expect anything to be done about it, even though the problem (and indeed the precursor problem in general) is solved rather simply by creating a shop in LA that sells precursors for obscene prices. Then all the prices would hover close to that mark, because too much higher and they’d never be able to sell the darn things.

You guys got two rares amongst the lot of you?

Man, you’re lucky. I’ve seen groups go without a single rare.

Kelly.5293:

Has there been any updates on precursors?

A Dev mentioned in the forums they didn’t intend for the prices to be so high on precursors and were looking into a scavenger hunt type something for them. They said they were watching the prices closely, had the Lost Shore event and since then the prices have more then double from 200g to around 500g. . . . They still are climbing even after they said they increased the drop rates slightly just recently. Sadface.

Any news or rumors? I cant find any . . . .

The precursor scavenger hunt is not currently in active development. This was confirmed by Colin back in Jan. So unless something’s changed, don’t expect it until April or later at the earliest.

Apparently it’s not considered a priority at this time.

It was recently stated by the developers that the progress they have made towards getting rid of culling make them optimistic that they could possibly get rid of it by the end of the year.

Am I the only person who doesn’t see this happening?

In fact, in my experience, the recent update that was supposed to reduce culling by using pre-rendered models has only worsened the culling in my experience. I’ve gone from being able to see every single person in a battlefield of more than 50 players….to suddenly not being able to spot a group of less than ten guys who pop out of stealth right behind me.

I’m not trying to bash the game or its developers here, but just basing it on my own personal experience, I’ve seen culling get worse, not better, as time goes on. So I’m not largely optimistic when the devs claim they’ll be getting rid of it by year’s end. But maybe it’s just me, which is why I pose the question to you: in your experience, has culling improved or worsened?

In the words of the generic thief NPCs in-game: “Ha! You’re kidding, right?”

This game is a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong. But when you set up a Pay-To-Play model, you are saying that you believe your game, your customer service, and your facilities are of the highest quality they could be, of such a high quality that you believe your game is worth paying regularly to continue playing.

However, GW2 as a game continues to suffer from massive balance and programming issues (culling continues to get worse, and the DR system punishes legitimate players more than botters). Its customer service can best be described as exceedingly poor, having banned players for sending gold to their friends using the Mail System, with an appeals system that doesn’t work nearly fast enough. And its forums are not consistent in how they dote out punishments, leading to some very nasty posts surviving whereas mild-mannered constructive posts are deleted because they are not constructive enough for that particular mod on that particular day.

If GW2 were running on a sub model, they would be giving SWTOR’s rapid descent a run for its money. Most people are only putting up with the disrespect and maltreatment because the game is a one-time buy. If GW2 intends to fix its image to the point that people would honestly say “yeah, I’d pay monthly for this”, it needs to fix its glaring problems first.

Er, so what are you trying to argue?

That a player who is Lvl 80 and scaled down to a Lvl 15 region shouldn’t still have some advantage over a normal Lvl 15 player? Because I’d seriously disagree with that argument if so.

Even with the advantage you’ve demonstrated here, the scaling has still reduced said player to a level at which he can’t OHKO everything in sight, making it rather hard for high levels to grief low levels in that fashion (which does, in fact, happen in other games).

Josh Foreman.8250:

Cantha was my favorite GW1 region to work on. And I worked on every GW release. I know a lot of the dev team loved it and would love to revisit it. I kinda agree with critickitten about the negative aspect of tight corridors. Most of that came from hitting technological limits while trying to keep the epic quality of the concept art. I think we could do some really amazing things with those themes in our new engine. Certainly nothing is ruled out. I certainly encourage anyone to express your desire for a Cantha region in GW2 in a positive and friendly way. It could be years away, but it’s worth asking for.

I can certainly understand, given your background, why you’d love the Cantha region.

But unless you can find a way to either improve the “slums” of Kaineng City such that they’re no longer a system of narrow corridors (i.e. blowing up the entire city and rebuilding it from scratch), I have to be honest: Cantha is not the right place for GW2 to go.

GW2 is such a massive, open, beautiful world that a city like Kaineng (which admittedly is meant to be slummy and ugly, representing the horrid conditions its people must live in) would be such a downstep from the sweeping, beautiful sights of the cities in Tyria. One of the first things that struck me with amazement was the cities, how large and absolutely beautiful they were. Kaineng, sorry to say, is probably one of the ugliest cities aesthetically that I’ve seen in any game I’ve played, not only in terms of appearances, but also in design and structure. Its narrow walkways, unclear world map that made navigation even more difficult, and very “same-y” wall textures made every part of the city look the same. It would need a total redesign to even compare with the sheer beauty, scale, and grandeur of Divinity’s Reach or The Grove.

There’s also the camera issue. The camera in GW2 is so frustrating that it gets hung up on objects and stuck in walls even within the large, open world that you’ve created. Even now after previous fixes, it’s still pretty poor even compared to GW1’s camera. So it would be an absolute nightmare trying to navigate in the narrow corridors of Kaineng with GW2’s camera. Which, again, makes me emphasize that the city would have to be totally redesigned to make it work for this game.

So basically I’m saying this: if you want to go back to Cantha as a designer, don’t let my distaste for Factions stop you. However, if you’re going to do it, you will need to completely rebuild it from the ground up, because it had major technical and design flaws that would make it a severe step down from what you’ve built in GW2.

kokiman.2364:

Never played at release, huh? Well I was actually referring to the game at the state of release until factions.

So you’re referring to a game state which hasn’t been true for over 6 years in reaching for your examples of how GW1 is more grindy than GW2? And you expect anyone to take this argument seriously?

Skills that get stronger by grinding more factionpoints isn’t mandatory?

Not any more “mandatory” than grinding out skill points to buy an elite skill in GW2 that you never intend to use, no. I almost never used faction skills at all, so I stopped “grinding” those points the very moment I had enough to put a statue into my HoM and earn points for it in GW2.

It was just flat out worse. Getting “perfect” gear is so simple in GW2 right now. Salvage some rares, craft your exotic stuff. Do every day Level 10 fractals to get the daily reward and do the dailies to get laurels.

Which takes no less than a month to do. I can “grind” 5 platinum in GW1 in less than a day and be at max armor.

And that’s not even getting into the comparison of runes in that game versus runes in this game. 22 platinum in GW1 is far easier to acquire than the nearly 46 gold in GW2 to obtain a full set of Superior Runes of Divinity (for an example of “extreme” rune pricing in one game vs the other).

Your argument is completely and provably false. The grind of GW1 is nothing compared to GW2, and the grinds in GW2 are all far more mandatory (in that you must do them to achieve maximum stats, whereas in GW1 they were all about looks) than those in GW1.

No you just didn’t play the game at release.

Why are we comparing GW2 with a game that hasn’t existed since 2006?

No one cares how GW1 was “at release”, we’re comparing it to the grind of GW1 now because we live now. And right now, the grind in GW2 is far, far, far larger than any mandatory GW1 grind, which (I’ll note) you still haven’t actually found an example of.

Unless “faction skills” was meant to be your example, in which case you and I have a fundamental disagreement on the meaning of the word “mandatory”.

lothefallen.7081:

I have responded, but it’s too long to put as a post so i am adding an attachment.

Okay, read it. Uh, this is gonna take a while to properly dissect because I have so many problems with it.

1) A lot of what you said about GW1 also applies to GW2.

The Mesmer is in charge of hex pressure, making foes take more risks when activating their skills.

Also applies to GW2, where stacking Confusion is a viable strategy.

The Rangers’ roles are to spread condition pressure and interrupt key skills.

Still an option in GW2, as well, although I tend to prefer straight-up damage from the longbow.

The monk is in charge of healing, mitigating, and preventing damage. This may seem black and white, but with a variety of skill options, it becomes very diverse.

If you wish to argue that GW1 heals and protection were “very diverse”, then I challenge you to prove that GW2’s heals and protection are somehow not “diverse”. There is far more selection in how you heal and in what you’re healing in GW2 than in GW1. There are also various options for protection of other group members as well.

2) You’re over-glorifying everything.

The Warriors’ are in charge of applying direct, consistent pressure to single targets in an attempt to extend the opposing healers into depleting energy.

So their job is to deal lots of damage over an extended period? Just say “their job is is to deal damage”, then. That’s how you treat GW2’s combat, as nothing but damage regardless of the variety of forms and ways it is implemented, so why not GW1’s? You’re oversimplifying GW2’s combat as “deal damage and nothing else”, but then also hyping up GW1’s combat to the point where “deal damage” is meant to sound like something unique and glorious. Be consistent or no one will take your argument seriously.

3) You claim that it’s inaccurate to say that the game relies on the Monk, yet in your own reply, you continue to focus on the importance of keeping the Monk alive.

This is why saying that the fate of the team rests on the healer, in most cases, is very false, at least in GW1. If you let a hammer Warrior knock your own monk on his duff because you were unaware, the monk may die. If a Ranger didn’t interrupt the Mesmer’s Backfire on the Monk, the Monk may die.

If the monk is not a “relied upon” role, then you should be able to survive without him. That is the definition of dependence: you can’t do without it. You cannot play GW1 without that healer role filled, and you can’t survive if the monk is down. You admit this yourself by your own declarations. So you cannot possibly argue that this is not placing the entire party’s fate in the hands of that healer, because whether he is alive or dead determines whether your party succeeds or fails.

It sounds to me like you don’t actually have good reasons for hating GW2’s combat, you simply don’t like it because it’s not GW1. And that being the case, GW1 is still running and you’re welcome to go play it if that’s what you really want. But GW2 has a very different system of combat by intent, and it was known from the beginning that they were going to do this. If you bought GW2 expecting trinity game play, you weren’t paying attention to any of the press releases, and the blame is on you. There’s nothing wrong with telling players “there is no healer in this game, which means you’re responsible for your own safety and well-being”, and if you want that safety blanket back, GW1 is still open for business. But don’t insist that GW2’s combat is bad simply because it’s not a trinity model, there are lots of games that don’t have trinity game play and are still fun to play.

lothefallen.7081:

Well for one, it creates more group depth and teamwork than what we have currently. When the roles depend on each other rather than just work along side each other with rather homogeneous effects, many players find that to be more satisfying. After all, i bought this game thinking it was an MMORPG, not an online cooperative action / adventure game with platforming elements.

Firstly, no, it doesn’t. It places the fate of an entire group in the hands of 1-2 players who, if untalented, can ruin the experience for EVERYONE else. Failing because someone else failed at their one job? That is unacceptable to me. And it happened so often in GW1 that when GW2 promised “no trinity”, I was 100% on board with it before I’d even played so much as one second of the game. Losing because another player lacks skill isn’t my idea of fun. Me rescuing my entire party from certain failure in a dungeon by using my own dodging skills and clever tactics? THAT is good game play.

Secondly, let’s pretend for a moment that it does “create more group depth”. In what ways exactly? I see you say this all the time, but when asked for specifics, you can never actually provide examples of how this game’s combat is so vastly inferior to GW1’s. You just keep repeating the same thing. So now I’m putting you on the spot: how does GW1’s trinity gameplay “create more group depth”? I want specific examples.

I think people don’t understand why healing is so weak, but it’s not too hard to understand their rationale: They made healing weaker so that a player cannot build themselves 100% around healing, as that basically circumvents the “no trinity” dynamic they were going for.

Think about it, it makes sense. If you’re trying to get rid of dedicated healers but allow players to construct a build for themselves which produces incredibly reliable healing, how exactly did you get rid of dedicated healers? You didn’t, not really. It doesn’t and would not enhance GW2’s combat in any significant manner whatsoever and I have never understood why people think it’s “more fun” to put your fate into some other person’s hands and hope they can do a good job healing you. I find that extremely frustrating myself.

And I can’t honestly say that I think that it’s bad for the game to lack healers. I can’t possibly enjoy combat without having someone else heal me? Is that really what’s missing for you? Because I’ll tell you what, I enjoy combat in GW2 more than I ever liked GW1’s combat. So maybe the problem isn’t the lack of healers, maybe the problem is that you don’t like having to self-manage your own character. To which I say “oh well, that’s how this game’s meant to work”.

Maybe people just need to accept that this game’s combat is a “different strokes for different folks” sort of thing, rather than trying to radically reinvent it.

FTF usually opens it up on Sundays some time after 8 PM Eastern. You could always run it with them.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Some of you need to lighten up a bit

This room has been there since launch, Tirzah, one of our designers made it in her spare time over the weekend because she wanted to. The kid in that room is also hidden in 2 other spots in the world, try to find him.

That kid is in three places at once?

….must be a master mesmer.

Aoshi.4785:

Bugs are still around. But in all seriousness, you don’t really need some stranger holding your hand telling you their opinions to sway you are deter you…log in and check it out for yourself, yeah?

While I’d normally agree with you that it’s unwise to base your opinions on someone else’s….my GW2 folder is 16.9 GB of space. That’s kind of a large space commitment to be just downloading casually, just to check and see if you want to rejoin a game you left for very specific reasons.

emikochan.8504:

10x is not more of a gamble, they use the same percentages. It might feel worse on a miss but statistically it is not different.

This is a gross misunderstanding of statistics, one that often throws off people who don’t understand the difference between a theoretical probability and a practical one.

Statistics are arranged such that everything assumes an infinite sample size and a perfect “throw”. That is, if you flip a coin infinite times, you will get heads on 50% of those infinite throws, and the coin is perfectly and fairly weighted. But in the real world (and also game world), your time, samples, and resources are finite, and the “throws” are not always balanced. No coin in the real world, for example, is perfectly crafted with an equal distribution of weight such that they always produce 50% heads, they’re always slightly weighted. And it’s even worse with computer, as they are not even capable of producing truly random numbers (a computer is designed to give an output based on a given input, it cannot create an output from nothing). Instead, it produces “pseudo-random” numbers using a variety of inputs, such as the system clock. It is close but not exact, and is more prone to a variety of problems, such as a failure to produce a proper distribution of all values across a set. Considering that we’re talking about a video game’s ability to produce random numbers, it’s only fair to point out that it’s only pseudo-random to begin with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator#Problems_with_deterministic_generators

Secondly, your math doesn’t take into account the fact that, in random systems, the tendency of a number to match the intended probability grows stronger. I’ll use this calculator to verify my results, you are welcome to check them if you doubt my figures below: http://stattrek.com/online-calculator/binomial.aspx

Scenario: A player has 250 of the necessary resources to go clover gambling. So they have the option to spend it all in 25 bursts of 10 each, or in 250 bursts of 1 each. Let’s say we want to get at least 80 clovers from these resources. That’s just a bit less than a 0.33 success rate per item, so surely by your logic, there’s no question that both sets of data should get those 80 clovers because the probability is 33%. However, the true probability of getting what you want will vary based on the number of trials, and an item’s tendency to adhere to its probability isn’t as great when the sample size is smaller. Ergo….

Probability that, in 25 trials (of 10 resources each), we get 8 or more successes: 0.6543
Probability that, in 250 trials (of 1 resource each), we get 80 or more successes: 0.6163

Notice that the probability of obtaining those 80 clovers is higher if you spend those resources one at a time, rather than ten at once. This is because with a smaller sample size (in the form of a lower number of trials), each “miss” has more weight and value behind it than it does when the number of trials is much larger.

So let’s increase our odds and try for 50 clovers instead. This is well below the probability of 33%, so surely both should produce a 99% or higher probability, right?

Probability that, in 25 trials (of 10 resources each), we get 5 or more successes: 0.9504
Probability that, in 250 trials (of 1 resource each), we get 50 or more successes: 0.9999

Nope. Because, again, a single “miss” in a sample of 25 is harder to recover from than a single “miss” in a sample of 250. It’s easy to bounce back when you have more opportunities for success…it’s not as easy when there are fewer of them.

So it’s completely legitimate to say that investing one resource is more likely to produce the desired results than dumping ten of a resource. Greater sample size means a better adherence to the true probability of 33%. I know some people swear by it, and that’s their business. But as a mathematician, I would never recommend to anyone that they waste their resources going for 10 at a time when the odds are actually more against them by doing so.

kokiman.2364:

Maybe we played different versions of this game but when I played the max armor was at 1,5k each piece (5pieces = 7,5k) and a rune of superior health was at around 100k, same for the sup rune of absorb. . Getting a req 9 weapon with 15^50 was relatively easy to achieve due to collectors but putting upgrades like + 30 +sundering vamp or zealous on it was a pain in the kitten because those upgrades were so expensive ( back in the days you couldn’t choose which part of the weapon you salvage it was luck based wether you get the +30 Health or 4 Woodplanks).

Clearly we did play different games, because the game I played had armors of max power on sale for 1 platinum per piece. A few examples:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ranger_Sunspear_armor
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Paragon_Elonian_armor
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Assassin_Imperial_armor

Also: I logged in this morning to check, a Rune of Superior Vigor is currently at 22 platinum.

So it sounds like you got ripped off and played some other game that wasn’t Guild Wars 1. ANet should probably sue that other company out there using their franchise name, I guess.

Or maybe you shouldn’t exaggerate because it severely weakens your argument when someone calls you out on your wrong information.

But hey there was not only a gear grind but also an achievement grind because some achievements improved your stats too, for example Luxon, Kurzick/Lightbringer or Treasurehunter. People seem to forget all of this horrendous grind we had in GW1 and I don’t know why.

Because there wasn’t a horrendous mandatory grind in GW1. There was grind, absolutely, but the grind was actually optional.

You could get max armor easily, platinum was not that hard to come by unless you weren’t managing your money well (I had 253 plat banked last I checked, and that was after spending quite a lot of it to obtain stuff for my 30 HoM points), and you practically trip over max gear in that game because it’s everywhere.

GW2’s drop rates are not nearly as considerate, its best gear is stuck behind mandatory month-long grinds (otherwise you get to “settle” for the next tier down on the list), and money is not as easy to come by unless you play the TP.

It’s very difficult to argue that GW1’s grind is worse than GW2’s, or even comparable.

Sure, you could play without perfect equipment but the same goes for GW2, right?!

You could play GW1 without perfect equipment, yes. But you’re living in a fantasy if you think that GW1’s perfect equipment was in any way nearly as much of a grind to obtain as GW2’s is.

kokiman.2364:

Could you please stop praising the gear system from GW1 to heaven? Because it was a much more worse grind than we have now at the beginning.
Gear was relatively cheap in GW1 but the superiour Runes were next to impossible to get for “casual” players, same thing goes for the weapons with the best upgrades. Without the griffon, minotaur, uw farmruns no one would have been able to get that stuff in a short matter of time.

lol wat.

The best gear in the entire game was purchasable for 5 platinum, which was a relatively cheap sum to obtain. I could do that overnight in my prime as a GW1 player. All elite armors and weapon skins were truly optional in that they didn’t provide a lick of better stats, only made you look cooler.

If we compare to this game, the best gear in the entire game takes an absolute minimum of 20 Fractals runs to get one ring (assuming you’re not lucky and one drops during dailies), or 30 days worth of dailies to get one from the laurel shop. 35 if you want to count amulets. And let’s not even look at legendaries, which will soon become more powerful than any Exotic in the game and will continue to get stronger as new content is released.

Yeah, no, GW1’s grind was much smaller and was actually truly optional. You could get the best stats in no time flat and sit on them if you wanted (and I did for quite a while). But GW2’s grind is neither of those things, you must grind in order to have the best stats. I don’t like people “worshiping” GW1 either but let’s be honest about what is really going on, here.

Red Falcon.8257:

I believe that if you don’t dodge at least a couple dozen hits a day then you’re playing this game very very wrong.

I believe you should read the original post instead of skimming it and trying to summarize (incorrectly) what it’s about.

Again, it’s not a matter of difficulty, it’s a matter of proper education. If you’re trying to teach players how to dodge using this daily (which is fair enough), then the game needs to properly recognize all forms of dodging and avoidance. Not just evasion.

kiba.2768:

then perhaps if anet changed the wording to ’ daily evader.’ would that satisfy you? I do see a tangible difference between avoidance and evasion

It fixes at least one complaint, yeah.

However, even renamed, it still encourages bad game play by telling players to wait until the last second to dodge rather than focusing on proper movement, kiting, and regular avoidance tactics. So it doesn’t fix that problem.

Actually, I think it should stay, and just be extended to the entire party.

So a player running 100% MF would boost the entire party’s MF by 100%. That means everybody gets benefits from their gear (just as they would if they’d put those points into damage or healing instead) and they’re not leeching, they’re actually contributing in a significant way.

Quick and easy fix to an otherwise messy issue.

Several posters do not understand what the OP is saying.

It’s not about the requirement being too hard.

It’s the fact that this requirement, which was clearly meant to help teach players how to play better, is actually teaching them to play worse because not all forms of “dodging” are considered a “dodge” by the game. Only evasion counts as “dodging” in this requirement, so if you are like me (with decent reflexes), you will dart out of the way of an incoming attack the moment you see it, rather than waiting until the final second to invoke your dodge….and you’re being punished for that. That isn’t a good model for encouraging players to learn the game’s mechanics.

A similar problem exists with Daily Healer. When it is more efficient to let players go down than to heal them, or to let NPCs die rather than aid them, because you’re seeking your daily requirements? That’s not encouraging better game play, that’s encouraging poor game play.

10x is more of a gamble, statistically speaking, because you’re dumping more resources into a single roll of the dice instead of spreading them out across several dice rolls.

Sort of like trying to gamble $10 on a single dice roll vs gambling on ten dice rolls with $1 per roll. You’re gambling on a 1-in-6 chance, better to make sure you walk away with something than to throw it all into the pot in one go and possibly end up bust.

People misunderstand this notion of “being forced to obtain” something.

You are correct, no content is “gated” from a player because they don’t have a particular tier of items. The game does not perform gear checks (though the players often do, see Fractals for proof of that).

However, for optimal performance (which is what all players strive for, in one form or another: getting the very most out of their own setup), they are required to own a particular type of item to maximize their efficiency and potential….that is the idea of “forcing” them to own it. It’s not compulsory under penalty of death, more like compulsory under penalty of stagnation.

It is technically correct that you can run the game with blues and greens, and you’ll survive if you’re skilled. Just like you can run high level Fractals without any AR if you’re exceptionally skilled at evading Agony-based attacks. But you’re not the very best you can be, are ya? No, you’re not, and everyone here knows this. Even though you are skilled and strong, you know that you can take your character to new heights above the ones that you already are at. That is the sensation that people are describing: not being “forced”, but feeling obligated to do so, in order to push their character forward and continue the sense of progression that was laid out throughout the game.

So let’s look at the so-called “legendary”: an item which the devs have promised will always remain Best-In-Slot. Who in their right mind would try to argue that having an item in the game which will scale infinitely in power for the entire life of the game (through both new tiers of equipment and level cap raises) doesn’t create an incredibly enticing target that players will obviously want to strive for at one point or another? Yeah, they’re a massive grind, but it’s also the very last grind those players ever have to do, so far as weapons go. Years from now, after multiple patches and expansions, when you’re seeking out your tenth new weapon and it’s still more work to get than the last one was, they’ll still be using their Twilight. And in that scenario, it looks to me like they got the better deal.

Just something to think about.

3) You’re missing my point. I’m saying it isn’t a grind depending on your perspective. I can absolutely play through that without feeling grind because I know well enough to avoid grinding it out. Whether you like it or not, this entire game is a grind, and same with GW1, if you were to put it in the perspective of grind = repeatitive actions. However, pulling away from the textbook definition of grind, GW2 gives you a variety of things to do usually, and depending on your play style, you’re not going to feel grind.

Not feeling the grind isn’t the same thing as not having grind.

4) I did not say gear treadmill existed in Mario and Pokemon. I said gear treadmill has roots from those games. Those games offer you a progression based system. You level up, get more power ups and etc. In pokemon, you capture stronger monsters, and train them and level them. It’s similar base concepts, except in MMOs it is applied to gear. It’s basically to give you a goal to shoot towards and give meaning for the “work” done.

That’s reducing the mechanics of a game to such a base level as to strip all meaning from them at all. Yes, all games have some manner of progression, but that doesn’t make it related to a grind or gear treadmill.

5) Again, you forget to consider the developer’s view of their own model. http://www.shacknews.com/article/76799/guild-wars-2-team-addresses-gear-grind-complaints

Which only goes to prove my point. They don’t believe that it’s grinding to keep introducing new tiers and levels of gear, and continue to advertise the game as “zero grind” even though it’s not. It’s a matter of honesty with your players. Your game clearly has grind in it, whether it’s minimal or not is irrelevant. I think it could stand to be less than it is right now, you’re obviously fine with it. That’s fine, we can agree to disagree.

I can play through this game without grind because I choose to. Why can’t you? Maybe you don’t want to or you haven’t figured out a way yet. You can surely learn from other players though instead of demanding Anet to change their game around your perspective.

I guarantee you that you’re wrong. You’ve repeated some aspect of this game at some point to reach the stage you’re at now. You may not have felt like you were grinding, but you were. The fact that you didn’t feel the grind is precisely the desired goal I’m trying to push for, except to a degree where a vast majority of the game’s players do not feel the grind, rather than just a few people who will defend the game regardless of its quality level.

I am not demanding anything. I am suggesting to the developers to fix their game so that the grind is reduced from its current levels so that their advertised stance of “zero grind” is at least plausibly more accurate than it is right now.

You forget that games are always evolving and changing. As developers, they know that your game has to evolve with the times. GW1 was great, but that doesn’t mean it is the ONLY thing that works. Ask yourself, are humans static? They’re not. They change over time, and so do the developers of games. Is GW2 bad? No, it’s still going strong, and the same “manefesto” they had at the start is still in progress. When the game first came out, it wasn’t true horizontal progression. It had elements of both horizontal and vertical, and it was unique BECAUSE of that. GW2 didn’t become great because of GW1. It is its own unique game.

GW2 hasn’t become “great” yet. It’s still a fledgling game whose fate will be decided within its first full year of release. You don’t become “great” overnight, you have to work at it.

What I am proposing is very simple: a series of changes that significantly reduce the game’s existing forms of grind to levels that are generally far more acceptable to the average player. If that is problematic and introduces concerns that the game will become too easy all too quickly, then that issue is solved simply by increasing the difficulty of the game’s content at large so that players will feel more optimally challenged. Right now the game is incredibly easy once you get the hang of it, to the point where you can still kill quite a lot of enemies with just blue or green gear at max level. They have plenty of room to increase difficulty and decrease grind in such a way as to strike a much more optimal balance of game play and content.

No one is asking for them to go back to GW1, here. What we’re suggesting is that they make some small yet significant changes in how they view their game and introduce their content while they are still a young game that can experience large growth. If they choose to rest on what they’ve created, that would be the truly stagnant option here, and eventually their player count will reflect that choice.

kenshinakh.3672:

1) It is quite small in dungeons and WvW, and also remember that this 10% you’re talking about are stats, not overall damage increase like skills that give 10% more damage.

No, it is a 10% increase in damage overall, not just stats.

Power is multiplicative. A 10% increase in Power ~= 10% more damage.

2) I’d be mildly interested because these are the calculations I found:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/23183
Berserker’s Amulet
90 Power
64 Precision
5% Critical Damage

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24498
Exquisite Ruby Jewel
25 power
3% critical damage
15 precision

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mark_of_the_Tethyos_Houses
Mark of the Tethyos Houses
94 Power
67 Precision
5% Critical damage
-
32 Power
4% Critical damage
18 Precision

You should have done your math before posting that. The stats you just posted indicate that the Ascended amulet has 126 Power and 85 Precision vs the Exotic amulet’s 115 Power and 79 Precision. That’s an increase of 9.56% in Power and 7.59% in Precision, not to mention the extra 1% of Critical Damage. That fits precisely within the 5-10% window I pointed out….the same one that the devs themselves gave us. So you actually proved my point.

And that’s just for one item, not for an entire set of Ascended gear (including armor, weapon, and trinkets).

But let’s be conservative for a moment and assume that all of the stats for Ascended gear produce only a 5% boost (even though as established above, this is clearly not true). How much damage will that produce? Let’s set up a scenario and find out. Using similar math to my last proof, and using knowledge gleaned from various sources, I’ll provide a rough estimate on expectations for Ascended Berserker assuming all future equipment to be released comes out at exactly 5% stronger. In the case of Crit Damage, we’ll assume it increases by 1% per item.

Exotic Player’s Stats
Base Stats: 916 Power, 916 Precision, 916 Toughness, 916 Vitality
Weapon: 995-1100 Base Damage, 179 Power, 128 Precision, 9% Critical Damage
Traits: 300 Power, 300 Precision
Armor (sans upgrades): 968 Base Defense, 315 Power, 224 Precision, 16% Critical Damage
Accessories: 162 Power, 110 Precision, 12% Critical Damage
Amulet: 115 Power, 79 Precision, 8% Critical Damage
Rings: 184 Power, 126 Precision, 12% Critical Damage
Back: 47 Power, 31 Precision, 4% Critical Damage
Final Stats: 2218 Power, 1914 Precision (including 61% Critical Damage), 916 Toughness, 916 Vitality, 995-1100 Base Damage, 968 Base Defense

1047.5 * (2218) / (916+968) = 1233 damage per strike on any skill with a modifier of 1, and will have a [4+(1914-916)/21] = 52% chance to deal (150+61) = 211% damage. The average damage is 1233*(1-0.52) + 1233*0.52*2.11 = 1944.7 average damage.

Ascended Player’s Stats
Base Stats: 916 Power, 916 Precision, 916 Toughness, 916 Vitality
Weapon: 1045-1155 Base Damage, 188 Power, 134 Precision, 10% Critical Damage (approximation based on http://i.imgur.com/lZz53.png )
Traits: 300 Power, 300 Precision
Armor (sans upgrades): 1016 Base Defense, 331 Power, 235 Precision, 17% Critical Damage
Accessories: 170 Power, 116 Precision, 14% Critical Damage
Amulet: 126 Power, 85 Precision, 9% Critical Damage (based on Mark of the Tethyos Houses)
Rings: 206 Power, 136 Precision, 16% Critical Damage (based on Red Ring of Death/Crystalline Band)
Back: 56 Power, 35 Precision, 5% Critical Damage (based on Quiver of Swift Flight)
Final Stats: 2293 Power, 1957 Precision (including 71% Critical Damage), 916 Toughness, 916 Vitality, 1045-1155 Base Damage, 1016 Base Defense

1100 * (2293) / (916+968) = 1339 damage per strike on any skill with a modifier of 1, and will have a [4+(1957-916)/21] = 54% chance to deal (150+71) = 221% damage. The average damage is 1339*(1-0.54) + 1339*0.54*2.21 = 2213.9 average damage.

These results show that the Ascended player is dealing 13.8% more damage than the player with only Exotic equipment. And keep in mind that the Exotic player, when in combat with the Ascended player, will actually deal less than the damage listed above because the Ascended player has a higher armor rating (due to the 5% more defense), so the Ascended player’s advantage only grows even larger once that is considered.

(continued in next post)

The thing is: people will always grind, and designing mechanics whose intention is to keep people from “grinding” end up backfiring more often than not.

Ask FF14 how popular their “fatigue system” was with the MMO crowd.

I think they’re way too easy to get, and there’s zero backstory behind most of them. They’re basically just expensive skins that grant you unlimited power for the life of the game….that sort of power shouldn’t be as cheap as it is right now, and shouldn’t be sold to the highest bidder, either.

They need to make a radical shift in the way they handle these items. Right now, there are lots of MMOs out there that do a better job with epic gear like this. It’s just disappointing.

maddoctor.2738:

-snip-

Firstly: Don’t know what threads you’ve observed, but in my history on these forums, MF discussions almost always conclude with the majority of people saying that MF is dysfunctional in its present form and needs to be changed.

This notion that more damage on someone else doesn’t hurt you personally is nice in theory but patently false in reality, as monsters need to be “tagged” in order to acquire loot from them, and your overall contribution to an event is calculated based on the number of tags you’ve earned and how highly you tagged those targets (in the case of vet/champ mobs). This is why people often use AoE in battles, in order to tag a larger number of monsters to receive full completion, while players who pick off single targets don’t get much at all.

This becomes a problem in guild raids or zergs, where the zerg might kill the monsters much faster than you can. And that doesn’t boil down to “skill”, it’s a simple matter of statistics. And if you can properly “tag” a monster with just one hit, you’ve got an advantage over the guy who needs 2 or 3 hits’ worth of damage to earn that tag. I’ve often run guild raids through the Cursed Shore with thirty other guild members, and people have complained they didn’t get proper credit because they didn’t have an abundance of AoE or high-damage builds at their disposal.

Secondly: No, it would still be a grind by definition because repetition is the only requirement for something to be technically “grinding”. The number of “goals” you are going after is completely irrelevant, what matters is the repetition. I’m really not sure why people continue to misunderstand this.

Also, actually, a lot of people have said they’re completely in favor of raids. Again, I don’t know which forum you read but it isn’t this one.

The problem here is that you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what I’ve said, or otherwise are trying to twist it into something I clearly do not mean. I have never once said that I thought RNG was “better” (I don’t believe that).

What I stated was that we’re talking about a game which claims to have “zero grind” even though this is clearly untrue. However, I also understand that it is impossible to remove all grind by definition. Ergo my goal is to reduce that grind to more reasonable levels than are present right now.

kenshinakh.3672:

-snip-

Just a few….

1) How do you consider a 10% advantage to be a “small” one?

2) How would you feel if I told you that in fact, a Berserker Ascended set actually provides a 23% boost in damage over an Exotic Berserker set, not a 10% boost?

3) In all current locations where Ascended gear can be obtained, you must run those locations an absolute minimum of 20 times (10 to reach Lvl 10 Fractals + 10 dailies, or 30-35 laurels) for a single piece of gear. Explain how this is not a textbook example of ‘grinding’, when grinding is simply defined as the repetition of actions for the sake of loot?

4) Explain what “gear treadmills” existed in Mario and Pokemon? I ask because I don’t think you actually understand what a gear treadmill is.

5) In a game advertised as “zero-grind” and coming from the same franchise as a game that ran for years on a model of horizontal progression, is it really enough for both the grind and vertical progression to be “less than WoW”, rather than minimized to a much more significant degree?

Aristio.2784:

critickitten.1498:

Holyblesserx.7618:

I guess my post went over your head like a kufee.

No, your post just didn’t make any sense.

Unless you’re going to try and pretend it was “sarcastic”, in which case I’d remind you that sarcasm doesn’t exactly translate well through text.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XI

I’ve already addressed this point.

Read all of the posts in a conversation before you interject into a conversation you have nothing to do with.

DreamOfACure.4382:

LOL, self-entitlement much?

That’s not how it works. Didn’t you read the ToS?

You paid for Guild Wars 2, and you got Guild Wars 2. It does not have to work the way you think it should. It works however ANet designed it to.

They care about their customers, so it’s great that they’re working to fix the issues, but under no circumstances do you possess any actual right to demand things.

You merely make suggestions and they decide if it’s a good suggestion.
If you don’t trust ANet to do their job, then it’s your own fault for not fully vetting the game before purchasing it.

There is not, and never will be, any clause that says a game is guaranteed to work the way you want it to.

You get what you pay for. And THIS is what you paid for.

I love it when people make statements like this, it shows a lack of understanding about how the MMO industry works.

Yes, a company is welcome to do whatever it pleases with its own property. Just as the customer is welcome to reject any future products from that , and to withhold their money rather than spend it on the company’s game. But an MMO doesn’t work like a normal video game that you buy in a store. It has constant server costs to maintain and a game world to keep up. It has to keep adding content via patches and expansions to keep itself from being eventually tossed aside like other games. And if you make your players mad and they leave you, you’re not going to sell expansions or micro-transactions, you’re going to die.

The fact that ANet is backpedaling and making such a big deal out of these new patches that will “strengthen the core game”, and is actively working to changing its communication with its players, indicates that they’ve taken a larger financial hit than they expected. They went from 2 million sales of the game within weeks of its release….to breaking 3 million sales at the start of January. That’s a big dropoff in sales, and it’s likely their gem sales took a similar hit.

And there’s more evidence of their financial woes in the form of stock trends: NCSoft stocks were climbing in August (release of GW2), slowly trended downwards through Sep and Oct (right after the cancellation of CoH), then took a nosedive in November (two days after the announcement of Lost Shores and the resulting community backlash). It hasn’t recovered to anywhere near its August levels since August 31st.

Yes, a company can run its game however it wants. However, this isn’t a “finished product” game, it’s an ongoing title. And if they want to keep it running, they are at the mercy of their parent company (and by extension its stockholders), and so may want to consider giving their players a bit more say-so in how the game is run moving forward….which, incidentally enough, is what we’re already seeing starting to take place. Suddenly things that weren’t a big deal are becoming priority projects, bug fixes are much more common instead of just rushing out more PvE content, and they’re trying to shuffle their interactivity levels by posting in the forums more often and having more AMAs and video chats with us. This isn’t all coincidence, it’s because they can see things aren’t going the way they had planned and they’re smart enough to scramble and fix things, rather than following the trend of other games that make radical changes and then stick to them (resulting in many of them dying off).

ANet knows this. That’s why they’re working to change people’s negative opinions of the game right now, because they’re not in the dominant spot they expected to be, and they know they need to reverse course to some degree and fix things or they’re not going to live long enough to see their own “panda” expansion.

Rhysati.4932:

Sorry, but I have a really hard time accepting that the amulets are a ‘grind’. You get laurels simply by playing the game. The daily doesn’t even require anything special outside of just doing what you’d do every day(outside of maybe daily crafter. But it’s pretty kitten easy to go craft 10 of the lowest refinements).

Grinding isn’t about how many days it takes you to get it.

You’re right, grinding is not defined as “how many days” it takes to obtain.

Grinding is defined as repetition of a task for the sake of loot (rather than the often-used-but-completely-subjective definition of “how you feel as you repeat tasks”). Oh hey, look….that still fits the description of laurels.

Yes, I know what defense you’re going to use here, it’s the same one everyone else uses. Please don’t bother. The question is never about “does a game have grinding?”, it’s about “how much grinding can I take before I get tired of it?”. And that’s entirely subjective. Personally I find that laurels aren’t as bad of a grind as other aspects of the game, myself, but I’m not thrilled that it costs a month’s worth of laurels for one amulet either.

Ehra.5240:

I don’t know about you, but when I go back to low level zones I DO tear through everything like butter. I’m not 1 shotting them for absurd overkill, but I’m almost never in danger of dieing and everything drops dead with just a few hits.

I remember when I was first leveling my Guardian, taking on the veteran Oakhearts was a drawn out fight with lots of dodging and healing, and a little bit of hoping the Oakheart would aggro one of the nearby mobs onto it. Now I just stand at their feet and pound on them for about 15 seconds until they’re dead, the thought of dodging doesn’t even cross my mind.

Pretty much this.

Even after the patch, my Lvl 80 ranger cuts through standard mobs in low level zones like a hot knife through butter. I’d have to basically let the enemies win if I really wanted to die.

It’s interesting to hear people say this, because I always thought it was more like “you don’t really need to talk to people that much in most situations because everyone knows what to do”.

Larger events like dungeons or temple runs or WvW require more fine-tuned coordination and communication to be successful. An untrained zerg rabble will often lose to a well-coordinated one.

Horrorscope.7632:

And they said Henchies in GW1 was the devil.

Because they were. They were so stupid that it had to be intentional. They were working for Abaddon all along, I swear. ._.

Holyblesserx.7618:

no. the purpose was final fantasy puts heavy emphasis in multiplayer gameplay….guild wars is more casual therefore allows you to progress without a party. which is convenient and optional

You mean to say that GW2 is “more casual”.

Because GW1 put a heavy emphasis on party mechanics, designing all of its content to be run with 4-8 players. You could run it with AI (henchmen at first, and eventually heroes), but the AI wasn’t always very good, so that was an option best left to skilled players.

That’s not to say that GW1 did it better, in fact I hated having to count on other people to save me on a regular basis and prefer having some control over my own destiny….but to claim that the franchise has always been about “casual” solo play is false.

Level: Your argument is self-defeating. Leveling provides a sense of progression, one that is lacking if you just remove it.

Level Restricted Items: Again, self-defeating argument. If items are not restricted by level, there is no sense of progression, you are able to equip the best items from the very start and you can never get stronger at any point in the game. This renders 99% of the game’s content entirely meaningless at all times. Oh, and actually Arthur wielded the Sword in the Stone originally, not Excalibur (though some tellings of the tale mess this part up). He received Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake after the Sword in the Stone was broken in a fierce battle, and after his death, it was returned to her.

Swimming: Time limits underwater would utterly ruin underwater combat. You’re attempting to pin “believability” onto a fantasy game. Besides, who is to say that they’re not using enchantments to lighten the load on their armor?

Race: The Asurans are using magi-science, not “Star Trek technology”. The charr are relying on steam-based technology. And it’s not a matter of technology, technology doesn’t always win battles. Besides, you’re arguing about the practicality of how Ebonhawke could survive the Charr’s tanks and choosing to ignore the fact that the Charr warriors are still charging into the enemy ranks with daggers, swords, and staves, just like their opponents wield.

Respawn: In some areas, yes, the rates for spawns and for event spawning are both just too fast. But most of the time (at least in low level zones) the way in which they spawn is perfectly fine. What you are talking about is a world in which the result of each event is permanent or nearly-permanent, to which I say that we’d already have run out of events to participate in if the world worked like that.

Waypoints: No argument here.

Trading Post: Ditto. A Peer-to-Peer direct trade is something that this game sorely needs.

First-Person View: No argument here.

Integrated Voice Chat: Don’t really care so long as it’s not required.

More WvW Siege Items: I’d personally like to see ladders, siege towers, and some place-able defensive walls to slow enemy advances (they have a name but it escapes me atm).

Personal Story: You were arguing for more permanence earlier, but now you want less?

Last Transaction: This wouldn’t make a difference since the market fluctuates so often that such a system wouldn’t help you in any way.

Holyblesserx.7618:

I guess my post went over your head like a kufee.

No, your post just didn’t make any sense.

Unless you’re going to try and pretend it was “sarcastic”, in which case I’d remind you that sarcasm doesn’t exactly translate well through text.

Seera.5916:

Now does WvW related things below in with that kind of PvP for the Daily and Monthly? No, they are different enough in what you do and enough people don’t like playing one vs the other.

But does WvW really belong in with the PvE Daily and Monthly? No. Because it’s not really PvE. I personally think there is enough that can be done in WvW to warrant it having its own Daily and Monthly. But that’s just me.

I’d actually agree with that, provided the requirements were reasonable. The WvW titles are a tad unreasonable at the moment which would be my main cause for hesitation.

Holyblesserx.7618:

cool post. you want a multiplayer mmo go play final fantasy.

….okay, as silly as the OP’s post is, you realize your response is even more ridiculous, right?

What do you think “MMO” stands for? Because last I checked it stood for Massive Multiplayer Online.

kaltastic.3146:

Gotcha, it doesn’t matter how the people who wrote and maintain the game structure it.

Even though this is a blatant straw-man that ignores the crux of the argument, I’m going to take the bait anyways because it needs to be said:

No, it doesn’t matter what the developers of a single game say in regards to what PvP is. PvP is a well-defined term used across not only every MMO, but virtually every game in the gaming industry in some form or another. And they’re not going to change its meaning just because they don’t want to call their obviously-PvP-centric mode of gameplay a “PvP” game format. Many, many games out there have modes of PvP which use the exact same structure and functionality as their PvE setting, that doesn’t make them PvE settings. It just makes them PvP settings with PvE design constraints.

Does EA get to title their next Medal of Honor game as a “gun-based fighting game” instead of a “first-person shooter” simply because they don’t like the existing meaning of the term “first-person shooter”? No, because the terms that are used to classify a game’s genre and modes of play are already defined, have been defined for years, and will continue to be defined in a similar fashion for years to come.

You don’t get to redefine a term as whatever you want simply because you don’t like the established meaning of that term. And if you think you can redefine things simply because you’re some sort of special snowflake dev team in the industry, then you’re being pretentious.

kaltastic.3146:

Click the PvP tab at the top of the screen. This is what PvP in GW2 is defined as. The fact that the term PvP is some generic game term that means something larger doesn’t matter in this game. In GW2 PvP is separate domain. When they post changes and they say “This change affects PvP only” they don’t mean it affects sPvP/tPvP and WvW.

Again: it doesn’t really matter how the devs define PvP, because PvP is a broad spectrum term that every multiplayer game uses. This is another problem with GW2 and its more rabid fans: it likes to try and redefine things that already have established meanings, or it tries to pin a new name onto an old concept to claim that it’s new.

They’re not classes, they’re professions (even though both terms fit just fine). They’re not quests, they’re events (ditto). It may look like a form of PvP, and it pits players against each other, but it’s not PvP because I say it isn’t (that’s not how definitions work).

PvP is defined as “player vs player”. That is what WvW is, by definition. You are fighting other players….in other words, you’re pitting player versus player. And part of the problems this game is having, especially in WvW, can be directly traced to the fact that they refuse to treat something that is obviously PvP as a PvP setting. And if this philosophy continues, it will be to the game’s detriment, because players want this PvP setting to be balanced properly but it’s never going to be if they don’t start treating it like one. TESO is ripping off GW2’s WvW system wholesale (except doing it worse IMO), but is at least smart enough to acknowledge that it’s a PvP system, as they are proudly boasting about it in all of their announcements.

People keep saying that they don’t think many people left the game.

Well, to add to the growing mound of anecdotes and hypothetical setups here, out of my guild of ten friends (including me), most of whom have been following this game as closely as me since it was announced years ago….only me and one other friend still play the game on a regular basis. The others went back to other MMOs, or only log in once in a while out of curiosity to see if the game’s gotten its act together. The other much larger guild I’m part of? Just kicked another twenty people from its roster of nearly 500 because they hadn’t been playing for a long time, and they’ve had to do this regularly because of how many people keep leaving.

So I’d hope that people aren’t seriously gonna try and tell me that the game hasn’t lost any players. There’s no way you can argue that case, since the only data that exists about player count is these hypothetical scenarios, and nearly all of them suggest that we’ve lost a significant number of players.

Elidath.5679:

You will be outdamaged by what ? A tenth of a percent ? A whole percent ?

By about 23% actually. That’s the statistical difference between a full set of Berserker Ascended gear (trinkets + armor + weapon) and a full set of Berserker Exotic gear, assuming that the Ascended gear is roughly 10% more powerful than the Exotic gear. Which is a fair assumption since the devs themselves said they were aiming for between 5-10% more power on this new tier.

I do like how there’s still people out there who pretend that the difference is going to be small, though. That’s precisely why the devs’ deception here works: because they release the gear slowly over the course of months, and claim that it’s “only 5-10%”, so people naturally take them at face value and don’t want to engage their mathematical skills in verifying those claims. I did, and I found that the power jump is actually rather significant.

And just wait until they raise the level cap. It’ll start all over again. But I’m sure by then, we’ll be hearing a new excuse about how it’s really not that bad, since you had so long to get to Lvl 80 that you have no right to whine about the game’s cap going up.