Guild Wars 2

Punch.3507:

Anyone else tired of getting new back items in EVERY content release?

Yep.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Please, no more Destiny’s Edge.

I don’t mind them individually (as they’re presented in the early stages of the Personal Story), but collectively I hate them. I hope they never reunite and I hope they’re never presented as a focal point of the story (side or otherwise) again.

IndigoSundown.5419:

So, who’s going to win the Premiere League and the World Series?

Who cares? The NFL regular season is in full swing. :P

DeathPanel.8362:

That single block for you and nearby players easily means the difference between success and a wipe.

Oxxy.7068:

It is a group-wide block.

I thought it was pretty clear I was discussing the passive effect, but I’ll reiterate that point in case it wasn’t. The passive effect of Virtue of Courage provides a single self-block once every 40 seconds. That seems to me to be a long cooldown for a single block; especially considering the timing of the block is uncontrollable (meaning it might very well be wasted on an auto-attack or other similarly weak attack).

ricky.4870:

This game supposed to be a cosmetic game and is the less they have is cosmetic armor just weapons and more weapons , but no new armor to make new looks or combine im getting tired to look the same and other people look the same too just with new weapons ….

Weapons are easier and less time-consuming to make than armor (5 races x 3 armor classes is 15 different armor skins). And given the rate at which they’re churning out Living Story updates, it’s pretty obvious why most new skins are weapons or backpieces. I’m not real crazy about it, but that’s why it is what it is.

and I still don’t understand why the Virtue of Courage’s Aegis is on a 40 second cooldown. It’s a block….a single, solitary block…and it’s on a 40 second cooldown. A warrior with a shield has a 3 second block on a 30 second cooldown and a guardian with a focus has a 3-block skill on a 45 second cooldown. Yet Virtue of Courage grants a single block once ever 40 seconds. And you can’t even choose when it procs. I don’t get it.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Well one path of TA is completely broken and never run. And the devs said ALL dungeon paths would be getting a revamp like AC to introduce better mechanics and less autoattack spam. Now it seems like they are just adding a single path instead.

Overhauling the dungeons is going to be a long process. I’d rather them take their time and get them right before release than rush something out just to meet a deadline. The Living Story has taught me less of a good thing is better than more of a bad thing.

Jakzor.4160:

so i am not the only one who thinks this is a very poor update.

I think you (all of us) should withhold final judgment until the patch actually goes live. Praising or criticizing this or that gleaned from the patch preview is one thing, glorifying or condemning it entirely before even experiencing it is another.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I see they are transitioning dungeons to the same RNG crap shoot the rest of the game is moving towards…

So much for their innovative and fun design of letting you work towards your rewards with a token system….

Evidently locusts consume tokens too quickly…gotta use the good ol’ Skinner Box to keep them around.

I can’t imagine we’re going to get new Legendary weapons anytime soon. Just look how long it took them to fix the existing ones, then extrapolate that to making an entirely new weapon for each weapon type. It’s probably going to be a while before we get anything new on this front (the weapons), though I could be wrong.

knives.6345:

Again, ANet is not a charity to cheer people up – they need to meet a certain profit.

Does anyone really believe they wouldn’t have been profitable with the game they set out to make? The game they wanted to make, in my opinion, was ten times what Guild Wars was. And if Guild Wars was profitable enough to get the go-ahead on a sequel, then I can’t imagine the difference between sticking with their vision and changing it being so great that it meant the difference between profitable enough and not.

And a question I don’t imagine too many people asked themselves is “are the people for whom they changed the game in it for the long-haul either way?” I won’t pretend to know that answer, but I’ll be watching to see what server activity looks like when some of the upcoming AAA MMOs hit the market next year.

If there’s not going to be a bunch of “press F 150 times” achievements and if Scarlet doesn’t plot-armor her way into an escape just so we can do it all again in two weeks then I’ll be happy. I somehow doubt I’ll be happy…

knives.6345:

Sure they do. But if that will make profit go beyond the margin, they will change strategy – as with all other business out there.

Not everyone is so willing to throw artistic integrity aside in the quest for money. There’s a story I once heard (no clue if it’s actually true) about Guillermo del Toro pitching the idea of making a movie based on The Wind in the Willow, a childhood favorite of his. As the story goes, he met with studio executives and tells them his vision for what what he’d like the movie to be.

The executives – being experts in marketing and commercializing everything they touch – liked the idea, but thought the story was a bit antiquated. They asked if he’d be willing to “modernize” the story so that it would be better received – and thus more profitable – by today’s youth. They suggested things like making the Frog saying “hip” things, possibly rapping, and riding a skateboard. As the story goes, del Toro stood up, thanked them for their time, and walked out of the room. He’d rather not make the movie at all than something it was never supposed to be for the sake of “commercialization”.

Whether the story is actually true or not doesn’t matter. The point is too many people are too willing to give up what they dreamed of making in the name of money. Now I know it’s idealistic to say “artistic integrity matters more than commercialization” when it comes to the cooperate world, but just once I’d like to see someone actually fight that battle.

Now I’ll leave you all with a few lines from the great Tom Petty’s The Last DJ…

Well, you can’t turn him into a company man
You can’t turn him into a kitten
And the boys upstairs
Just don’t understand anymore

Well, the top brass don’t like him
Talking so much
And he won’t play what they say to play
And he don’t want to change
What don’t need to change

There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say
Hey, hey, hey

I’ve been rocking the greatsword on my warrior since day one. I always told myself it was just a placeholder for two-handed axes, but who knows when (if) those will ever be added to the game? Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of switching to the hammer (again, just until two-handed axes are added to the game), but I have a couple of concerns.

I’m a PvE player. I spend very little time in WvW, and I don’t PvP at all. Within PvE, most of my time is dedicated to open-world PvE and world bosses. We all know that it doesn’t really matter what weapon or build we use in open-world PvE. But the problems I foresee arising with a hammer have to do with dungeons and fractals.

The greatsword is the PvE king of damage, so in switching to a hammer I’m already losing quite a bit of optimization. This is compounded by the fact that the hammer’s biggest strengths lie in crowd control, which is wasted on trash mobs and ineffective against bosses. So that’s a bit of a double-whammy.

So I come to you guys asking if I should bother. I always envisioned playing the warrior as a slow-but-hard-hitting melee fighter (hence my desire for two-handed axes), but the hammer’s skill set never really suit my chosen area of play (PvE). On the other hand, while the greatsword is fantastic at what it does, it’s neither aesthetically nor functionally what I was looking for. And there’s just something that bugs me about never using my class mechanic (Burst), as is the case with the greatsword.

So I’m open to suggestions or feedback. Thanks.

Vayne.8563:

Sure they wanted to be a unique snowflake. I want to run the three minute mile. Reality has other plans.

You can’t change the genre more than players will allow you to change it. Anet didn’t count on that.

You keep implying they had no choice but to change course; that they were faced with the choice of selling out or shutting down. You keep implying that they wanted to blaze a new path for the genre, but the world refused to let them do so. You don’t know that they weren’t making plenty of money and just wanted that extra bit more anymore that we don’t know that they weren’t making enough money to stay the course. So can we please drop the “it’s our fault, not theirs” routine?

I don’t know if it’s related, but I’m not getting the faint jingle sound played when crafting an item about 80% of the time.

I’d pay money to never have Destiny’s Edge injected into my Personal Story, the Living Story, Dungeon Story Modes, side-quests, or any other part of this game.

Vayne.8563:

Three years later, a statement of intent. I think if you’re going to be 100% accurate, you’d also have to include the clarification that was posted 3 days after this though….because word for word without the clarification seems a bit misleading to me…particularly since they corrected at least one potential misintepretation publicly and right away.

Manifesto, statement of intent, propaganda…I don’t care what you call it. The fact is the ideals expressed in that “statement of intent” were sold down the river within a year of release. Just because the reversal of design philosophy doesn’t bother you doesn’t mean we should all accept it with a “meh” and a shrug of our shoulders.

Xalugami.2096:

How is time gating fun?

It isn’t. And you know what? The developers don’t care. Gone are the days when “is it fun” was used as a measure of success. Now it’s all about the daily log ins. And unfortunately for us, the kinds of “content” that garners the most daily log ins is often the least fun.

WTB: MF recipe to convert Bloodstone Dust to Dragonite Ore or Empyreal Fragment.

isn’t that they were literally created from nothing (i.e. they had no lore connection to the existing world) or that they’re seemingly more numerous and threatening than the all of the Elder Dragons’ minions combined, it’s that they could have been the White Mantle (i.e. a faction with actual ties to Tyrian lore).

Invictus.1503:

Not to mention the money is minimal for animations and design since most of the groundwork has already been done.

There’s a lot more that goes into adding a new race than character models and animations; the story requires writing and tons of voice acting, the home city and level 1-15 zone requires environmental artists, Dynamic Event designers, voice actors for the idle NPC banter, there are racial skills that have to be designed and balanced, every existing weapon and piece of armor has to be designed to fit the character models, every skill animation has to be tested to ensure it works with the character models, and all of this requires a great deal of bug testing and quality assurance polish.

I’m not saying all of those barriers guarantee we’ll never get a new race…but if they’re making money hand over fist with the current Living Story model then I just don’t see the financial incentive for them to bother.

Anchoku.8142:

I’d really like to see more gossamer. I keep making clothes.

Gossamer (all cloth, really) is likely to get really expensive when ascended armor is introduced.

/puts on Hat of Cynicism +5

They’re not going to add the tengu as a playable race for the same reason they’re not adding new zones or expanding the Personal Story…money. Doing any of those things costs money and takes time, and cranking out filler content via the Living Story makes them lots of money for minimal effort. They’ve already said they aren’t going to have our characters speak because the cost involved isn’t worthwhile, and I can’t help but feel new races aren’t going to be added for the same reason. Too many players play the game for loot and rewards, not enough play for the Personal Story a new race would offer.

mercury ranique.2170:

leather and cloth can drop from sacks.

Sacks aren’t nodes. Sacks are drops, meaning they’re beholden to rng. And even if you get a sack, the contents themselves are also determined by rng. If I want some orichalcum ore, I know exactly where to go to get some. If I want some gossamer, I’m at the mercy of rng. There’s no equivocation.

At least there are nodes for lumber, leather and cloth can’t be found anywhere save salvaging.

And here I thought the ratio of bad players to good was the real problem.

Vayne.8563:

What’s selling out?

Come on now…we’re all adults here, let’s not play these games.

Vayne.8563:

What if they kept to their original idea and everyone stopped playing. What if there were four guys left and you couldn’t find a group for your dungeon.

What if they’d stuck to their original ideas and had a few less players but still more than enough to turn a very healthy profit? What if they stuck with their original ideas long enough for those addicted to grinds and treadmills to get through their withdrawals and realize how great the “play for fun” model could have been?

I’m still waiting for them to give us some information this alleged “bigger project” they’ve claimed to be working on for half a year now.

I was doing a personal story mission in Blazerridge Steppes. The Shatterer has been changed (I believe) to randomly fly by or land near players in that zone, but during the personal story it kept appearing, flying off, then reappearing the same spot (near me) since I was the only one in the “zone”. It wasn’t game breaking or anything, but it did look odd. Not sure if it’s worth looking into, but thought I’d let you know all the same.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Time Gating = Players logging in daily = Players getting bored/frustrated/annoyed/burnt out = Players logging in less = Game noticeably stalling = Shareholders become upset = More extreme measures are taken to retain players = Game become unplayable = Small set of core gamers remain = ANet pulls plug.

Time-gating is a short term solution that doesn’t have sustainability. Whenever you “force” players to play the game your way, it will serve only to drive them away.

Players want to log in because they like to, not because they feel they have to.

If ANet truly wants to retain their player base, and expand, they need to stop thinking with their bank accounts, and start thinking with their gamer hats. When they start releasing well done, well tested, and well written content, players will show up. When they start creating a reason beyond gear/achievement chasing, people will become emotionally attached to the game.

When they stop trying to sucker us all into buying gems, and just offer well done, well tested, and awesome things for sale, players will support the game.

RNG, Living World (bugs, release speed, shallowness, focus on achievements, etc), bugs, insta-kill mechanics, PvP neglect, grind, time-gating, focus on gear over fun, reliance on farming, etc….these will kill the game.

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, the reality is probably the exact opposite. Too many players have been conditioned to fall for the psychological addictions employed by game developers these days. The reason ArenaNet is using things like dailies, achievements, loot, etc, is because they work.

Zynga isn’t a successful company because it makes good games, it’s successful because it knows how to keep players logging in. Unfortunately for those of us who bought in expecting something different, ArenaNet is just borrowing pages from Zynga’s playbook. That these kinds of tactics are “industry norms” doesn’t make it any less palpable to see in this game.

Vayne.8563:

The funny bit is, people ARE playing the game. Concurrency numbers are going up.

Glad to hear ArenaNet’s selling out wasn’t for nothing.

Elementalist
I wouldn’t mind seeing a Water Trait that adds a mild damage over time effect to Chill.

Warrior
I think these are okay for PvP (but I don’t PvP, so I could be wrong), but they could use a bit of love for PvE. I don’t have any suggestions over than making Stomp function more along the lines of Seismic Leap.

Hekka.8730:

The “guesting” issue is an over-exaggeration of a problem.

No, it’s not. It’s not at all overstated. I’m a Blackgate resident, and I haven’t been able to get into Sparkfly Fen on my own server since Tuesday. And in that time I’ve spent hours and hours in overflows where the bad players and those who are afk start to finish far outweigh those willing or able to work together. Knowing my server is good enough to get the event done, but not being able to join them because of guesting, is high frustrating.

Lyana Evrilow.8102:

Not the ban. Definitely the kick. Maybe 10 minutes, though. Some people have to deal with kiddos, or worse.

I get it, but when you afk during a popular event you’re making everyone else deal with your kiddos too. Not just the people who are relying on you to be there, pulling your weight…but those waiting in the queue as well. I’m not saying you should jump out of the map every time you have to get up to deal with something (kiddos or otherwise), but there comes a point where one’s personal distractions become a detriment to everyone else.

That said, I’m more than willing to bet that most of the AFKers at Tequatl are AFK because of short attention spans. A few people AFK because they’ve got to deal with important issues, we all get. A mass of people (as I’ve seen time and time again) AFK because they can’t be bothered to pay attention…that’s not cool.

champ.7021:

So this is about how engineers cant really use legendarys because they rely on kits right?
DW most people with legendarys cant use them either :p

Yep. I wonder if I should make a complaint thread about how my elementalist can’t use Bifrost when he’s wielding conjured weapons. Or how my guardian can’t use Flameseeker Prophecies when I’ve weapon swapped to my staff.

Mordar.4286:

yay, 4 bank tabs you have to pay real money for….it’s sad the bank it’s smaller than your actual loot bag, ridiculous, can’t believe World of Warcraft, a much inferior game already has stuff like free bank tabs with your bags and a transmogrification bank so you can store your gear skins

Free bank tabs!? And they don’t even charge you a subscription fee!? How charitable of them!

Congratulations on the victory, ET.

Now that that’s out of the way, I wanna sulk a bit. As a native BG resident who just suffered through the single most pathetic attempt at anything in this game I’ve ever seen I feel cheated on knowing that my fellow BGers were off succeeding somewhere else.

Edit: “cheated on”, not “cheated”…funny how the omission of a tiny, two letter word can completely change the context of an entire post.

Manoa.5897:

Talic.9608:

Guesting to SF next was never decided on so if it’s unwanted I will make sure it doesn’t happen.

Much appreciated guys. Give us some time. If we do find that we end up needing your assistance after all, we’ll be in touch.

I sure hope you’re speaking for the majority, lol. I’d hate to see you tarred and feathered by your own server.

Shelledfade.6435:

This needs to change. It should not take a gigantic guild all in a VOIP chat with coordination in order to do something that is supposed to be designed as a PUBLIC event.

This needs to remain unchanged, and I’ll tell you why. If it’s supposed to be the one of the hardest encounter in the game – one that requires massive coordination and a degree of tactical analysis – then it sould take a gigtantic guild in VOIP to figure out how to do it. After it’s been figured out and people learn the best strategy for victory the fight will become easier and easier.

mallas.9836:

suppose to defend all the batteries.. like you have to go to them. I did that on the first kill and this most recent kill and not getting it. Its sad i want my title!

“Batteries” as in the things charging the mega-laser? Or “batteries” as in the turret batteries?

Link.6157:

Am i the only person wondering why the mods/developers only react the posts like ‘how is tequatl announced’? While there are now like 10000 posts about the difficulty with no decent answer …

Those servers who have succeeded have already given you your answer…the answer is, “it’s doable”. What more do you want?

rjnemer.7816:

Open world players dont want this kind of challenge.

As an open world PvE’er, I can tell you you’re wrong. I DO want this kind of challenge, and I don’t want to be forced into instances to find it. Now if in a week or two people stop bothering and Tequatl becomes the next Karka Queen I’ll shift my opinion from “keep it as it” to “dial back the difficulty or up the rewards to make it worthwhile”, but so long as people are showing up in sufficient numbers to get it done I’d rather it stay at or near where it’s at.

Pifil.5193:

Asyaru.9280:

digiowl.9620:

And once more the solution is “stack and DPS”.

yeah, good luck with that.

You didn’t watch the video did you? That’s exactly what Blackgate did.

Sure, there was a stack. There were also coordinated turret gunners, skirmishers protecting said turret gunners, people clearing tendrils, commanders coordinating the effort, plenty of people willing to change their skill bar to better meet the challenge before them, lots of people using consumables, and a willingness by many to way point and run back to the action rather than laying around sponging up resources.

Evans.6347:

I respectfully disagree. I had a blast watching the lazy farmers getting blasted yesterday. The encounter went something like this:

Boss: Flame Elemental
The clean-up is almost complete and I observe the regular posse of warriors migrate to the centre of the room. So, helpful as I am, I tell them in chat that the new boss will burn anyone too close to it.

Obviously I get ignored. With a couple of seconds left before the abomination appears I repeat my warning, only to be mocked.

And so the Fire Elemental appears, swiftly burns the whole group to a crisp in a couple of seconds and the rest of the fight gets accompanied by comments like:
“What is this crap!”
“This is too much!”
“OMG, another part of the game ruined, thanks Anet!”

“This sucks!”
No gentlemen, you suck!

I got much more enjoyment out of that than I should have really.

lol, your anecdote is almost as sweet as being there myself. It’s a beautiful thing when crap players rage after being trashed for playing stupidly. It’s more beautiful still when it could have easily been avoided had they simply listened to those trying to offer sage advice.

Vincent Von Demetri.1450:

First off let me congratulate you guys on a world first! However, I’m somewhat concerned watching the video in the methods used to complete it. It seems that there were several boss mechanics that just turned out to not be all that important, IE – there was no effort to jump over his wave attacks. I think the bigger concern (hint hint ANET hint hint) is that watching this video, the only successful way to complete this content is to apply zerg tactics to a maximum. How are smaller servers going to stand a chance in completing this?

Every second spent reviving an ally downed by a tidal wave is a second at least two players aren’t doing damage. In a 15 minute fight, every second counts.

falrin.4206:

Reaper.1695:

Why nerf it? BG has shown it can be done. It has not been 12 hours yet.

They killed it because they have more people, more organized than others. Does this call for a nerf? No. But, the fact that it takes this long and being more organized, does call for a nerf. Not a huge one either, but, the rewards do seem slim for how hard the event is.

“They killed it because they have more people than us.”
“They killed it because they’re better organized than us.”
“They killed it because they have better gear than us.”
“They killed it because they’re better at the game than us.”

There’s always going to be something that separated “them” from “us”. If the developers remove those checks then we’re left with everyone getting a participation ribbon for doing menial content…we’re left with what Tequatl was before today.

Zero.5034:

I have to admit I’m disappointed in you BG. You used TS to coordinate the teq fight. All the other servers are pugging it like how it was ment to be played. BG may have been the first to beat him, but having the coordination over TS is an unfair advantage over other servers who can’t get so many people in a voice chat. Beat the event with pugs like how all the other servers are playing it and how it was designed to be played and then I’d consider it the actual world first.

That coordination over TS is what makes us good at WvW, and now it’s what makes us good at PvE. TS is something that’s as readily available to the people on your server as it is to the people on my server. And let’s be clear, the TS helped coordinate our community, but it was the community’s willingness to work together that won the day.

edit: type

SynfulChaot.3169:

I predict that few others will as people flock to just a few servers to be able to complete this hard-nosed teamwork check fight. Most servers will never complete this fight as it is. People who are interested will almost definitely guest to a server that has a chance instead of continued futile attempts.

That’s just my prediction, though. I could be wrong. I doubt it, though.

ftfy