Guild Wars 2

Reddit is already on a warpath. This was a very bad change, and ANet REALLY should have known better from the start. I don’t know how they couldn’t have seen this going over terribly. Are they really that blind?

Tanith.5264:

Maybe it’s to do with all these extra Carved Bone Spoons Tequatl has been giving me?

I hope not, I’ve already sold a couple dozen.

As for people speaking about damage thresholds, you might be able to do enough damage to account for a kill yourself, yes, but in events where enemies die in one or two hits and you aren’t able to even get one hit off to tag them (think the Harathi Highlands events), it’s better to have a full party, because then you have 5x the chance of your party tagging an enemy before it dies.

Doctor Strange.5420:

Bonus:

Sorry, Timmy, but there won’t be a Wintersday this year. Tixx can’t fly his sleigh without Rudolph…

This reminds me of those ads that the country singers do for animal shelters. “Only you can help an animal in need.”

PookieDaWombat.6209:

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

No it doesn’t.

I literally had about 200 more magic find than about 5 other people (between boosters, etc) when running around with them, and I saw maybe 2 rares while 2 of them got precursors that night in WvW. Magic find makes no difference.

It makes a significant difference, but your example of using precursors is flawed, because they have an insanely low drop rate to begin with. Theirs was an instance of incredibly good luck, not of being boosted into good drops with Magic Find.

Illuminerdi.9153:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Thiefz.3695:

Just a small follow-up on my post from last page. We have a TON of currencies. Just look at the wallet and you will see just how much we have. If you are going to do something token based please use existing currencies. Half the currencies I don’t even use.

Well, the only problem with that is that so many of those currencies are for dungeons. I mean, almost exclusively all of them are.

There might not really be a good way to adopt dungeon currencies to other areas. You could open them up and make them a “global currency” for a zone (Ascalonain Tears being the Ascalon/Charr currency, for example), but then you’ll have an issue with people NOT running dungeons for the currencies anymore (since they can buy dungeon gear from doing “regular content”), so dungeons will become almost empty and obsolete.

Though, I suppose a way around that would be to make dungeons drop significantly more tokens, but you’d also have to jack up the token prices on dungeon gear to accommodate that, which some players might not be happy about…

I think dungeons need to do 2 things: convert to a universal token shared across all of the dungeons and rework the way tokens are distributed from dungeons so that they aren’t given out in big chunks that encourage speedrunning the bosses. Tokens should be cumulative so that every enemy killed in a dungeon adds to an exponential token curve. If you kill a boss without killing any other enemies in the dungeon you should get 5 tokens. If you kill a boss after clearing all the previous enemies and trash mobs, you should get 20 tokens. If you kill a single trash mob you should get 0-1 token. If you kill every trash mob you see in the dungeon you should get 2-5 tokens per mob with token drop drop chance (on regular mobs) between 10% and up to 75%, again depending on how many mobs you’ve killed.

This would eliminate dungeon speedrunning and zerging and thus balance out the dungeon experience that is currently so hostile to new (or sub-80) players and focused on L80 Zerk Exp ONLY!™

This frustrates me to listen to. There is no problem with that mentality — the problem is with people not understanding how to use the LFG tool properly, as well as people wanting to run content like this without thinking of joining a dungeon guild. 99% of the problems with “speed runners” could be solved by people adding USEFUL DESCRIPTIONS to their LFG queue, but a lot of people don’t.

If you’re new to dungeons, start up your own queue with something like “new to dungeon” or something like that. If the speedrunners see that, they aren’t going to join your queue, so no need to worry about the “hostile environment”. Similarly, if you want to start to run dungeons, there’s no harm in joining a guild and running with them. Even if you quit the guild eventually, guilds are a great way to experience new content in a nonhostile environment.

Dungeon speedruns themselves are not the problem. Lack of proper communication is the problem.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Why? Because I think there needs to be more relevant loot for long-time lv.80 players who are working on their ascended gear/legendary. Almost everything I get as drop equals a bit of more silver for me…

Ascended gear already is your “relevant loot for long-time lvl 80s”. Adding an additional step between Exotic and Ascended would be asinine. What good would it really do? The step up from Exotic to Ascended is already small enough as it is (in terms of stats).

@Astralporing – The MF stat hard caps at 300%, correct? But you can still pump it higher with food buffs?

That 300% means you have 3x the normal chance for any given item to drop. However, for something like a precursor with an estimated drop rate of only 0.0001, that only increases the drop rate to 0.0003, which is still infinitesimally small.

As you said, magic find overall has an incredibly small change on a per-drop basis. 3x higher is still a HUGE increase though, so I highly recommend people up that as much as possible if they’re going to be doing drop farming of any kind.

Thiefz.3695:

Just a small follow-up on my post from last page. We have a TON of currencies. Just look at the wallet and you will see just how much we have. If you are going to do something token based please use existing currencies. Half the currencies I don’t even use.

Well, the only problem with that is that so many of those currencies are for dungeons. I mean, almost exclusively all of them are.

There might not really be a good way to adopt dungeon currencies to other areas. You could open them up and make them a “global currency” for a zone (Ascalonain Tears being the Ascalon/Charr currency, for example), but then you’ll have an issue with people NOT running dungeons for the currencies anymore (since they can buy dungeon gear from doing “regular content”), so dungeons will become almost empty and obsolete.

Though, I suppose a way around that would be to make dungeons drop significantly more tokens, but you’d also have to jack up the token prices on dungeon gear to accommodate that, which some players might not be happy about…

phys, hate to tell you bro, but you’re falling into Gambler’s Fallacy (or a variant thereof).

Silmar Alech.4305:

I imagine a modified random number generator that runs with increasing hit probability for every miss. You start with a probability, and every miss increases the probability for a certain event. A hit resets the probability to the start value.

I believe this is referred to as “weighted RNG”, and it’s a system that I know a lot of games use for loot drops, particularly for ones related to quest goals (WoW started implementing it for all of their “get 25 pristine pelt” quests, for example). I could see a system like this for lower tiers of loot, but I still would want the rarer stuff to remain un-weighted.

In regards to 2.5, we already have that system. It’s the gold economy. Money is our “secondary reward” for not getting an interesting drop, and it is the resource we use to buy items we DO want.

However, that is crippled a bit in the current state of the game, mostly because money as a reward no longer has the range of uses it should. Other “secondary currencies” (and even tertiary currencies) have been implemented in newer areas, making money only really useful when 1) buying small goods, or 2) saving for an item that’s on the trade post.

I see the main problem here is that there are so many items that just can’t be bought with money, for various reasons, and the sheer shortage of “rewarding” items that can be bought with money. Yes, there are rewarding items to be bought on the trade post, but the items that many consider truly rewarding are at extremely high prices, due to supply and demand. If there were ways to infinitely generate these “rewarding items” (i.e., a vendor shop), then we wouldn’t have that issue.

However, we’ve been moving away from gold as a usable currency since the game started. First we had karma and dungeon tokens, then we got the commendation badges for PvP, then fractal relics, then SKILL POINTS as a currency, and now we’re up to geodes with Dry Top.

Why do we NEED these tertiary currencies? Why couldn’t the Dry Top goods be sold for gold? What’s the purpose of adding a tertiary system besides time-gating you into spending “x” amount of time in an area before you’re ALLOWED to by the thing you’re there for (and then slapping RNG on top of that with drop ratios on the currency itself)?

I can understand putting some of the rarer items behind a gate (high end recipes and the like), but I don’t see any reason for every item to be gated in such a way…

Korossive.7085:

The reason is bad implementation of colors in rendering engine.

The lighting in the preview panel makes white look white, and color X look like color X.
In-game lighting makes all colors grey bland. I spent hours on hours on all sets with all colors, they all get washed out faded-grey in-game. Only black remains black in-game.

Don’t complain over this – wont be fixed this decade.

I don’t think there’s anything to “fix” here. The system works exactly as it should. Also, they don’t “all get washed out/faded”. If that’s the case, I think your saturation settings on your monitor may be off. Yes, the colors change, but a lot of times I’ve seen them get more vibrant as well. It depends entirely on the setting you’re in. If you’re in a dark area, yes, the colors won’t be as bright, but there are plenty of highly-lit areas in the game, where the color will just change slightly based on the hue of the lighting. You know, kind of like how real life works.

fellyn.5083:

Different areas of the game cause armors dyes to look differently. Not sure why and I’m not sure if it’s on purpose, either.

It is. Environmental lighting and all. It’s meant to make the zone you’re in have a stronger visual presence, by having an affect on your character directly. That’s why usually the more foreboding areas have stronger affects on coloration. (Like Arah.)

Out of curiosity, what dye did you actually use? Was it actually Celestial?

EDIT: I suggest trying “Silver”, myself. I’ve been using it in game, and it always looks appropriate to me. It’s not quite as bright as Celestial, however, not by far.

Falx.8427:

But let’s face it, a lot of players already left GW2 for AA and other games because of the heavy stagnation in both WvW and GvG where they felt developers worked against those two game modes.

To be fair, there’s no documentation for “number of players that left since AA started”, or anything like that. There’s nothing to base that statement on, and honestly, I’ve seen plenty of threads around from people saying, “I left GW2 to play AA, but came back because [feature] was terrible.”

For as many players as “left” for another game, there has also been a growing population, as there always is. There are very few games that give the type of combat we have in GW2, and almost everyone I’ve seen try a “new” MMO ends up coming back because they just can’t go back to the old style MMO combat.

Gobble D Goop.4081:

maybe the reward could be a happy frolicking quaggan for your GH, at least for doing that in a BL. Especially after they were exterminated by having large amounts of landmass dropped on their homes.

Hm, since the door has been opened, can we talk about guild pets now?

jheryn.8390:

-snip-

Most of your post is utterly innacurate. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go back and correct you on “what was said” and what wasn’t. And even more, you’re not letting it drop, and are derailing the thread over some petty discussion.

Just let it go, and get back to the actual subject of the thread. I don’t want to deal with this crap, and this is neither the time nor the place for it anyway.

Listen, being the proponent of airships I am, I would just like to note that I understand some people don’t like the concept, and some people don’t want that as the only concept.

I have pointed out someone who I thought disliked the airship idea for all the wrong reasons (fearing lack of customization and variability, of which there doesn’t have to be), however I’m fine if airships end up not being a guild hall style. I would prefer it, but I can live without it.

The most important thing I think we need is variety and choice. I love how many ideas people have thrown around for different themed guild halls. We can do them on the ground, we can do them in the air, we can do them in the water… it doesn’t matter to me, as long as we get that wide selection so people can have what they want out of a guild hall.

(That being said, I would not be opposed to a guild hall on the back of a giant flying sea turtle. Just throwing that out there.)

jheryn.8390:

daft inquisitor.1605:

jheryn.8390:

- snip -

Jesus, someone’s being defensive. Holy hell man.

Not defensive, just reactionary to condescending and inappropriate comments such as the quote above.

I wasn’t being condescending, and there was nothing inappropriate about my post. You, sir, have let something get under your skin that inappropriately influenced your reading of my post. And I don’t appreciate being replied to in such a manner as what your previous post displayed.

timmyf.1490:

Sure, airships are neat, but we had airships at launch with the Pact. Been there, done that. Guild Halls give us the opportunity to go somewhere new or strange or perplexing. We should be embracing that opportunity!

Let’s try this with your earlier example.

“We’ve had volcanos since launch. Let’s go somewhere new!” “We had jumping puzzles since launch. Let’s go somewhere new!” “We’ve had buildings since launch. Let’s go somewhere new!”

Your argument can be used against every single thing you’ve stated. So, I’ll reiterate it this way. Your idea was jumping puzzles as a guild hall, so why not have midair jumping puzzles on an airship? Having rigged scaffolding and plunges and drops, like how Zephyr Sanctum was, but in an airship? That incorporates things you said would be interesting, plus my idea of an airship.

Yes, we’ve SEEN airships since launch, we’ve been in them, we’ve fought on them. But they’ve never belonged to us. And that’s where the difference is.

Guild halls are just buildings. Jumping puzzles and volcanos are just part of the environment. But having any of that in a guild hall form? Something we can customize and edit to suit or needs or wants? THAT is what makes it interesting.

I’m truly sorry that you can only be so short-sighted with regards to airships, because I think there are some amazing ideas that can be put into them. But, imaginations only go so far with some people. Literally anything that can be done in this game can also be implemented “in the air”, so any time you think up a new guild hall idea, just do me a favor? At least try to picture it in airship form at least for a minute before scoffing away the idea of airships completely.

(Also, floating ruins of a castle/dungeon/mausoleum? Think about that. That sounds cool to me. Just because we’re using the term “airship” here, it doesn’t specifically have to be a “ship”. Like how “guild beacon” isn’t just a huge beam of light cast skyward.)

timmyf.1490:

I think the point is that airships are not a particularly creative guild hall option.

I think the true issue is that people are downsizing what they think of when they think “airship”. There’s a very wide range of things that can be done with just an “airship” tag, but people are purposely using lowest common denominator for it, because they’re afraid of “making the airship too big” for gods-only-knows what reason.

You can do as much with an airship guild hall as you could do with a ground guild hall. The only thing limiting it is your imagination.

Personally, I would love a floatilla, a whole fleet of airships tethered together, acting as a guild hall. Each airship would have something different. One could be your crafting stations, one could be a meeting hall, one could be private quarters…

See? I’ve just taken the “boring airship idea”, and did something different with it.

I would imagine they have a hidden server that banned accounts are linked to. If they ever restore a banned account, they can just re-associate it to the proper server.

timmyf.1490:

Zietlogik.6208:

I vote that Super Adventure Box is an upgrade available for guild halls as well!

Maybe even a super adventure themed Guild Halls as well

>.>

Would pay 2000 gems for SAB guild hall.

Can we have Finn’s Tree House instead?

Best guild hall ever.

jheryn.8390:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Yep a Beacon mechanic is a way to show of your guild and its progress.

Chris

Woo Hoo a BACON mechanic!!! Who doesn’t love bacon? I’m in!

Oh… Beacon mechanic. Nope. I’m out.

I’m just not into the whole airship as a guild hall. Especially if guild halls are open world instead of instanced. How would an airship fit into an open world concept with other ground halls. I just don’t see it happening. Or happening well.

The airship guild halls were only one suggested way of implementing the halls system, and only one suggestion of how the beacon system would be implemented.

Please, don’t abandon the discussion just because you don’t like the idea of airships. For starters, it’s already been essentially taken off the table (for now) in the discussion. So, feel free to just speak your mind about what you think would work well, or what you would like to see.

Really, there are hundreds of ways the “beacon” system could be implemented. It’s just a name that was taken to mean, “Way of expressing your guild’s presence and achievement in the world”. It could literally be anything, not necessarily a physical beacon, or an airship, or anything else already discussed.

(Chris already said to kind of step away from the “open world” system for the time being, and it was pretty much assumed that the airship guild halls would be an open world thing, especially how they would show their presence.)

I just want to chime in that I do like that idea for the “central hall” joining 5 guilds together, as an alliance feature. I think it looks interesting, but I’m just wondering how that would impact the building of separate guild halls. Would that possibly stunt the growth or how you’d be able to design your hall, with needing to have one “entryway” no matter what?

Hmm… how damaging would it be for this, hypothetically…

Let’s say we have Guild A and Guild B in an alliance. Guild B drops out of the alliance. Guild A and Guild B then each get an exact copy of the Alliance Hall they had. Guild B then decides to ally with Group C, and they use the same Alliance Hall that A&B had together.

Instead of having to start from scratch and lose progress from splitting alliances, it now goes the other way that progress can be gained incredibly easily by adding new people to alliances and splitting. That’s the major issue I see out of it. Would it be possible to limit it that you have to be part of an alliance for, say, a month, to get your own copy of the hall should things go sour?

Or maybe (I think I saw someone else suggest this, but maybe not), is there a way to track what upgrades Group A did/participated in, which Group B did/participated in, and then just have them keep a copy of the alliance hall with only their upgrades?

EDIT: For as to how two guilds who were in previous alliances would “combine” their upgrades, that I’m not sure about. I’ll let it go for now though.

timmyf.1490:

I don’t consider Guild Halls which exist within an instance except for a common entrance in the open world to be “open world guild halls,” but those would be acceptable to me so long as their locations are fixed with logical entrance points.

Floating airship guild halls which may be placed throughout the world are not acceptable to me. Floating airship guild halls docked at Fort Trinity or Claw Island would be okay.

(On that note, there really should be a Claw Island guild hall.)

The assumption here is that, if you do have a floating guild hall out in the world some where, there will be a way to instantly teleport to it. You wouldn’t have to physically go out and “find” it, it would be automatic with an item, or a UI button, or something.

Torsailr.8456:

Simon.3106:

Hmm.. CDI for GUILD HALLS…. when is the expected release date? How long does Anet usually take for this?

At least 6 months out. If they come anywhere close to implementing some of the larger ideas here then more likely 12-18 months. But that is my personal estimate. I have no inside knowledge of Anet’s development schedule or manpower.

That’s even assuming they implement guild halls at all.

As stated many, many times before, absolutely nothing in the CDI’s should be taken as a promise of any feature to come. These are simply here for us to talk with the developers over ideas we have for the game, nothing more.

So, don’t expect guild halls just because we’re having the discussion. Of course, it will be a nice surprise when/if they show up, but just having the discussion does not automatically mean they will be implemented.

Gulesave.5073:

GvG as airship battles? Well, then. Color me intrigued.

Some of us like a little bit of Skies Of Arcadia in our MMO’s.

Devata.6589:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Devata.6589:

At the bottom (so looking from the ground) there is the guild-emblem.
So this is what you would always see from the ground and for the most basic guild-hall it would be everything you would see from the ground. When building (basically around this basic part) you can make any shape you want. From the ground you would see that shape (and the colors). You would not see the full model.

From the distance that you’re talking about, a guild ship would have to be absolutely MASSIVE to distinguish a guild emblem from the ground, without it appearing as just a dot in the sky. I think your mental sense of scale here is a bit off.

As I said, I’d rather just have the guild airship docked in the zone itself, close enough that you can actually see the the details and all of the customizations you’ve made, and where you can actually show off your guild hall/ship to anybody — as this would be an open-world area, anyone could enter the zone and see your airship without having to be in a guild and specifically floating around in the sky zone just to see other guild airships.

Well guild-halls are pretty big yeah. Here an image just to get the idea of the size you might see from the ground and how the emblem would be distinguishable.

[img]http://oi62.tinypic.com/24l27hh.jpg[/img]
(just for the record, this image is just to show the size, It would all look a litter better in the game itself)

Well the sky-map is an open world map and maybe the two could mix together. Docking in a normal map.

Well, the pic you have from “what it would look like from the ground” doesn’t mean much without comparable scale. Do you have an image of how big you would expect the guild hall airship itself to be?

As for what’s limiting the network, you can’t use “network bubble” as a way around things — you have to construct the servers with the assumption that everyone in the instance could potentially be in the exact same spot at the exact same time. Because it will happen at some point, and if your server isn’t capable of supporting that even under limited load, you’re going to have issues.

My assumption is that reason right there is why there is a cap of players allowed in any particular instance at a time. I don’t think it’s possible to have more than a few guilds worth of people on a map at any given time. Heck, maybe even not that many if the guilds in question have a full 250 roster.

Devata.6589:

Oow no I would not think you would have the different modes in the same map. You see there will be multiple instances of the sky-maps anyway. (and what you see from the ground would only be one of them.. what ever sky-map that ground map get’s linked to).

But that also means you could decide if you would want to go to a PvP or WvW, or GvG or PvE sky-map and the stuff to do there would be depending on that.

So now, that’s a bare minimum of at least four different sky map zones, all the size of the entirety of Tyria, with possibly dozens or hundreds of guilds and their custom airships all mingling around together? I’m sorry, but that just sounds like an incredible strain on resources to me. Considering how small the zones have to be now before being split, and the limited player population allowed in them, I just don’t see this being feasible at all. :-/ I understand Jon/Chris saying go for the stars, but even in an ideal situation this seems impossible to me, unless I’m missing something huge here.

Devata.6589:

At the bottom (so looking from the ground) there is the guild-emblem.
So this is what you would always see from the ground and for the most basic guild-hall it would be everything you would see from the ground. When building (basically around this basic part) you can make any shape you want. From the ground you would see that shape (and the colors). You would not see the full model.

From the distance that you’re talking about, a guild ship would have to be absolutely MASSIVE to distinguish a guild emblem from the ground, without it appearing as just a dot in the sky. I think your mental sense of scale here is a bit off.

As I said, I’d rather just have the guild airship docked in the zone itself, close enough that you can actually see the the details and all of the customizations you’ve made, and where you can actually show off your guild hall/ship to anybody — as this would be an open-world area, anyone could enter the zone and see your airship without having to be in a guild and specifically floating around in the sky zone just to see other guild airships.

Devata.6589:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Torsailr.8456:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Well, it looks like there’s a relatively large split here about what we envision for how airships will be linked to ground areas.

Devata just wants a large air zone with tons of guilds in it that essentially has a map of Tyria below it. Whereas I want airships physically in the zone, seeable from the ground, providing its own instance for players to do events and map exploration “with their guild”, so to speak. (Forgot to mention, I’m Shadow, just switched accounts. :p)

The airship combat is a different discussion itself, which is why I haven’t gone into it too deeply here. That’s related far more closely to the GvG discussion than the Guild Hall discussion. As stated earlier, let’s get the current topic discussed and settled before moving on to the next.

Whatever happens with the guild halls, there will be a way to make it work with GvG. People will make it work somehow if it needs to.

I don’t really see it as an either or scenario.

Why can’t you have Airship docks in a zone and a Sky map for free roaming/travel between maps? Then let guilds sort themselves out.

I was thinking about that myself. I just personally don’t see the merit of the “sky map” for travel. I mean, what purpose would it have?

I could see it being a warzone for GvG battles, yeah, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine that would span the breadth of all of Tyria like was suggested. This is just my personal opinion of course. I’m not saying there’s no merit to it whatsoever, I just don’t see it myself.

From my perspective on this — where is there to travel? It’s just a bunch of open air and clouds, and some other guild ships. That’s not exciting to me. The only noticable feature would be the terrain below us, but even then, it would pretty much just be the world map, which is precisely as interesting to me as opening the “M” menu on a character. There just isn’t anything worth seeing there.

So, what’s the purpose of it? What can you do on this air map that you can’t do elsewhere, and why? That’s what a lot of the Guild Hall discussion has boiled down to, so I think it’s a good question.

It can have many purposes. But one of the nice things is that you see other ships fly by even if you fly without direct goal.

Also you could make dynamic events in that sky-map. Dragons that come up would come to mind. (those events might then reward you a place on the real map if they would do a mix of both systems) Or maybe you like PvP and like to fight each other on the ship.

With you alliance guilds you could fly in (or form) a formation. It would give more possibilities as a guild-hall stuck in one place on the ground don’t you think? And where else would you expect those air-ships to be? I would think, in the air. Just flying around.

While those are some interesting ideas, I don’t think it would be possible for one single map zone to be able to do “all of that”. I mean, the reason we have segregated PvP and WvW maps is because, I’d imagine, the “zone type” itself has to be set up to be that way. You have to assign players to colors so that they’re distinguishable from one another, and then set it up so that all colors see other colors as enemies.

Now, you could very well make it so that it automatically is set up that way, with each guild being assigned a color. However, then how do you stop larger guilds from continuously preying upon smaller guilds? Not only would you “wreck” the guild-hall experience for players, but you’d also force them into a PvP scenario any time they visited their guild hall.

For “aimlessly flying around”, I don’t see why there is a reason for that in this game. Yes, you can “Mindlessly wander around” in zones already, but that’s simply you avoiding (or not aimfully going towards) other goals that are already present. In a “sky map” like this, it would either have to have content which could be difficult to manage (as you said, random dragon attack events, but again that would take people away from their “guild hall as a refuge”, and turn it into “guild hall as a battleground”, and there would be no way for you, the player, to control that), or it would be a completely wide open space with literally nothing going on ever.

Neither situation sounds like a good solution to me.

Torsailr.8456:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Well, it looks like there’s a relatively large split here about what we envision for how airships will be linked to ground areas.

Devata just wants a large air zone with tons of guilds in it that essentially has a map of Tyria below it. Whereas I want airships physically in the zone, seeable from the ground, providing its own instance for players to do events and map exploration “with their guild”, so to speak. (Forgot to mention, I’m Shadow, just switched accounts. :p)

The airship combat is a different discussion itself, which is why I haven’t gone into it too deeply here. That’s related far more closely to the GvG discussion than the Guild Hall discussion. As stated earlier, let’s get the current topic discussed and settled before moving on to the next.

Whatever happens with the guild halls, there will be a way to make it work with GvG. People will make it work somehow if it needs to.

I don’t really see it as an either or scenario.

Why can’t you have Airship docks in a zone and a Sky map for free roaming/travel between maps? Then let guilds sort themselves out.

I was thinking about that myself. I just personally don’t see the merit of the “sky map” for travel. I mean, what purpose would it have?

I could see it being a warzone for GvG battles, yeah, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine that would span the breadth of all of Tyria like was suggested. This is just my personal opinion of course. I’m not saying there’s no merit to it whatsoever, I just don’t see it myself.

From my perspective on this — where is there to travel? It’s just a bunch of open air and clouds, and some other guild ships. That’s not exciting to me. The only noticable feature would be the terrain below us, but even then, it would pretty much just be the world map, which is precisely as interesting to me as opening the “M” menu on a character. There just isn’t anything worth seeing there.

So, what’s the purpose of it? What can you do on this air map that you can’t do elsewhere, and why? That’s what a lot of the Guild Hall discussion has boiled down to, so I think it’s a good question.

As you said, it’s an issue of height. I would rather see the Airships themselves be distinguishable from the ground. I mean, Guilds want their presence to be seen in the world, right? If your airship is miles up, how are you going to be able to even tell its your guild’s airship?

I see the ships being much lower to the ground — maybe on par or just a tad higher than some of the climable mountains in zones. I would want to be able to see details — heck, I would want to be able to wave to other players (from the ground/nearby cliff) if they’re standing on the deck of the ship.

Well, it looks like there’s a relatively large split here about what we envision for how airships will be linked to ground areas.

Devata just wants a large air zone with tons of guilds in it that essentially has a map of Tyria below it. Whereas I want airships physically in the zone, seeable from the ground, providing its own instance for players to do events and map exploration “with their guild”, so to speak. (Forgot to mention, I’m Shadow, just switched accounts. :p)

The airship combat is a different discussion itself, which is why I haven’t gone into it too deeply here. That’s related far more closely to the GvG discussion than the Guild Hall discussion. As stated earlier, let’s get the current topic discussed and settled before moving on to the next.

Whatever happens with the guild halls, there will be a way to make it work with GvG. People will make it work somehow if it needs to.

Devata.6589:

It should not be so hard really. It’s similar to having a party-member. If you look at the map you see where he is on the map even while he is in another instance. Now add the model information to it and you got all the information you would need here.

Except, if you actually want to have details show up, you’re going to have to poll everything that’s happening in that map. All the players, all the enemies/events that are going on, etc. Because I think that would be a big thing, people would want to look down from the airship and actually see what’s happening in real-time.

Which, again, is why it would make more sense to just have it in the same instance as the map itself. I personally don’t see a reason to make this magical “high atmosphere” zone just for airships — It would be a big resource burden all on its own, especially if it’s supposed to bridge the entirety of the continent all at the same time. That would be insanity.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

daft inquisitor.1605:

Devata.6589:

Why not. If I’m correct the PS ends with a events where you attack a dragon from a zeppelin (that is an air-ship) and if we would have PvP / WvW air-maps guilds might fight each other. It would require new type of open world events (in the air) but it would be possible.

For clarification, the dragon fight takes place in a dungeon, and it is a heavily scripted encounter. It would be a far cry from an air battle between two guild ships.

I can see the jokes now. “Press 2 to GvG”.

Though, I could see ship battles taking an interesting turn. Have a navigator piloting, turret operators, add in a repair minigame… It could be kind of like Puzzle Pirates where everyone contributes to the fight, and the success or failure of one person can mean the success or failure of the whole fight.

Puzzle Pirates is an interesting case. I don’t think it could translate well to this game, due to the underlying design.

Puzzle Pirates specifically, no. However, if we take that type of gameplay and retrofit it to be styled like GW2, I can definitely see it working. It just has to be a minigame of some kind, like how operating and aiming a turret (like in the Zhaitan fight) was sort of like a minigame.

It wouldn’t be point-and-press, it would be dynamic aiming. I think that would only be fair, and be more realistic too.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Sort of like this. One of my big oppositions to mounts any time it comes up (and if anyone decides to start talking about mounts off this, I will find you) is how it could negatively affect performance. I think a couple hundred guild ships parked over Cursed Shore would be just the sort of negative impact on performance I’d be scared of.

From my personal suggestion (and others that have fallen in line), it wouldn’t be “hundreds of ships”. It would be one ship per map instance. Maybe expand it to be two or three. But definitely not free-open, anyone-can-go-there. That would DEFINITELY be a performance bottleneck. It would be heavily regulated by instances, specifically to prevent this type of issue.

But I don’t think a few statically docked (yes, they would not be player-controlled) airships per map would be absolutely fine without causing any extra stress.

Devata.6589:

Why not. If I’m correct the PS ends with a events where you attack a dragon from a zeppelin (that is an air-ship) and if we would have PvP / WvW air-maps guilds might fight each other. It would require new type of open world events (in the air) but it would be possible.

For clarification, the dragon fight takes place in a dungeon, and it is a heavily scripted encounter. It would be a far cry from an air battle between two guild ships.

Though, I could see ship battles taking an interesting turn. Have a navigator piloting, turret operators, add in a repair minigame… It could be kind of like Puzzle Pirates where everyone contributes to the fight, and the success or failure of one person can mean the success or failure of the whole fight.

Devata.6589:

You would see Tyria below you (representation of the map) and the information (model and location air-ship_ from a sky-map are being send to normal maps so on the ground so you would see guild-ships high high really high in the sky.

(not that you could jump of and land on the map or anything like that)

In that case it would make sense your air-ship would be able to fly in that sky-map.

I see this as being much less feasible than having a guild airship “parked” in the sky on a map. It’s much easier to have an airship be a part of a map than to constantly pull an update an “image” of the map — especially going two ways (both having the guild hall pull the image of the zone, and then having the zone pull the image of the guild hall).