Guild Wars 2

Yeah summation of what the others said. It is a plant, the origin of the plant according to Greek mythology was Apollo falling for the Nymph Daphne and chasing her all around the earth. In order to escape being “taken” by Apollo she prays to her father (a river god) and he transforms her into a Laurel tree. Apollo is still in love with her and takes the Laurel leaves (the symbol) to be his sacred tree and from there people start to use Laurel’s in all sorts of Greek rituals.

A lot of Western culture comes down to us from the Greeks, so the prevalence of the Laurel is still alive and well. You will see it often on country/patriotic/religious symbols.

Source: Ancient Greek minor (included Greek culture/mythology classes). If you want to see the original source you can read the Ovid’s Metomorpheses which has the myth in it from the Latin tradition.

A non league system is going to have the exact same problem, just with fewer servers being stacked. Sure that sounds great for you guys that play at the top, but those of us who have clung to the lower ranked servers would get screwed in the rewards no matter what. A bronze tier server can’t take on a gold server, not because gold is more skilled, but because of the massive amount of players top tier servers have. If you were to only have one league then people would stack JQ/BG etc more and more, and the servers down at the bottom really have nothing to fight for since they won’t get the top rewards no matter how hard they try.

While this system isn’t great, it is far better than your proposed idea. Right now servers at least have a chance to fight for a 1st place spot even if they aren’t a top tier server.

I think they have to lock transferring down the day that they announce a new season so that people don’t try to manipulate their server rank (tanking) in order to get more transfers. Personally I think Anet is trying. You can tell by the fact that they gave out free transfers to the lowest ranked servers in each league. I think that was a great move, they just shouldn’t have announced it before actually implementing it.

I can’t speak for your servers, but for GoM server identity really is a thing. Most of us have been on GoM through the good times and the bad, but we don’t leave and we stay here out of pride. We know most of the people on our server and we like it that way.

A lot of recruiting to get people to come into WvW is done through PvE areas. How do we recruit people for a “Stomp the Map” event now? I can’t say in LA map chat, if you are on GoM come to SF BL to take all their stuff! Oh wait SF you are in this map too?

Guhracie.3419:

eleshazar.6902:

ceol.9175:

eleshazar.6902:

Although I see this approach as not helping. I’m not worried as much about this system in low pop maps. I’m worried about it in high pop maps, like cities, or when a guild event happens. If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

I’m not sure how so many people still think this will be a problem. They’ve addressed it multiple times.

In short, your guild (as well as people in your friend list and home server) will all be put in the same instance, and you can still “taxi” people into the instance you’re in.

I don’t think you are understanding the problem of this algorithm happening over time. You can’t “kick” people out of a map who are already there. So if my guild starts zoning into fireheart rise over the course of 3 minutes we will each get prioritized at different times, not all at once. So the first person into the zone will get placed into a map that fits his needs, and that could be a zone with mainly SBI people because the rest of the guild isn’t there yet. The next person might get placed with him because they are in the same guild, but eventually that map fills up and the rest of the guild has to be in another map, that may also have random people in it.

Basically the flaw it doesn’t all happen at once. Each evaluation is separate. So since you can’t be shuffling people out of maps constatnyl you just keep filling them up. You are going to end up with random people because that is the nature of this. And quite often they will replace spots that your guildies could have taken to be with you.
It is complicated and may take some time to think about, but if you write the progression down on paper you will see that the fundamental flaw in this is that you can only add to a map (and the system is also going to be adding to a map constantly), and can’t forcible subtract.

You never could forcibly subtract anyone from a map instance, though. And you will still have access to a /join command, according to something I read somewhere. (If anyone has the source for this, I’d appreciate the assist)

This doesn’t address the issue with the scheduling of world events, though.

Yes but the problem is in the current method the system isn’t going to try to add people to a map copy all the time which in the new it will. So in essence you could never subtract, but now you have made it harder by forcibly adding people which takes up spots that wouldn’t have been taken up in the old one.

For example if I wanted to go to orr with my guild in the current system, there might have been 10 in the map on our server. Great there are ~140 spots left on the map for my guild! In the new system there may be 10 people from GoM, but it has added in 40 from Darkhaven, 30 from Devona’s Rest, 20 from Sorrow’s Furnace, and 30 from ET. Well great, now 10 people from my guild go in there, and the other 30 that want in are in another instance which may also have filled up before we do /join by it’s continuous adding.

See the problem?

Sardonia.8196:

eleshazar.6902:

ceol.9175:

eleshazar.6902:

Although I see this approach as not helping. I’m not worried as much about this system in low pop maps. I’m worried about it in high pop maps, like cities, or when a guild event happens. If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

I’m not sure how so many people still think this will be a problem. They’ve addressed it multiple times.

In short, your guild (as well as people in your friend list and home server) will all be put in the same instance, and you can still “taxi” people into the instance you’re in.

I don’t think you are understanding the problem of this algorithm happening over time. You can’t “kick” people out of a map who are already there. So if my guild starts zoning into fireheart rise over the course of 3 minutes we will each get prioritized at different times, not all at once. So the first person into the zone will get placed into a map that fits his needs, and that could be a zone with mainly SBI people because the rest of the guild isn’t there yet. The next person might get placed with him because they are in the same guild, but eventually that map fills up and the rest of the guild has to be in another map, that may also have random people in it.

Basically the flaw it doesn’t all happen at once. Each evaluation is separate. So since you can’t be shuffling people out of maps constatnyl you just keep filling them up. You are going to end up with random people because that is the nature of this. And quite often they will replace spots that your guildies could have taken to be with you.
It is complicated and may take some time to think about, but if you write the progression down on paper you will see that the fundamental flaw in this is that you can only add to a map (and the system is also going to be adding to a map constantly), and can’t forcible subtract.

I wish people would quite thinking that these maps are their personal instances. That is the way it is sounding to me. These are open world events where anyone can join in. The issue is with the events and not the maps. They should have never been made for an entire map to beat it. Half map sure, whole map no.

I’m not talking about a world boss event. I’m talking about if my guild wants to do a run through orr without any weapons or armor on just for the heck of it (we have definitely done this one in the past)! We can no longer do this together. They can’t fix the fact that this new system will be splitting us up. Half will end up in a map with some other people that were already there, and then when that queues the other half will be somewhere else. If the system wasn’t constantly adding people in (like a homeworld) then this wouldn’t happen except in very rare cases.

ceol.9175:

eleshazar.6902:

Although I see this approach as not helping. I’m not worried as much about this system in low pop maps. I’m worried about it in high pop maps, like cities, or when a guild event happens. If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

I’m not sure how so many people still think this will be a problem. They’ve addressed it multiple times.

In short, your guild (as well as people in your friend list and home server) will all be put in the same instance, and you can still “taxi” people into the instance you’re in.

I don’t think you are understanding the problem of this algorithm happening over time. You can’t “kick” people out of a map who are already there. So if my guild starts zoning into fireheart rise over the course of 3 minutes we will each get prioritized at different times, not all at once. So the first person into the zone will get placed into a map that fits his needs, and that could be a zone with mainly SBI people because the rest of the guild isn’t there yet. The next person might get placed with him because they are in the same guild, but eventually that map fills up and the rest of the guild has to be in another map, that may also have random people in it.

Basically the flaw it doesn’t all happen at once. Each evaluation is separate. So since you can’t be shuffling people out of maps constatnyl you just keep filling them up. You are going to end up with random people because that is the nature of this. And quite often they will replace spots that your guildies could have taken to be with you.
It is complicated and may take some time to think about, but if you write the progression down on paper you will see that the fundamental flaw in this is that you can only add to a map (and the system is also going to be adding to a map constantly), and can’t forcible subtract.

I guess we have to give them points for at least slowing down the implementation. Gives us more time to convince them this isn’t what we want.

Although I see this approach as not helping. I’m not worried as much about this system in low pop maps. I’m worried about it in high pop maps, like cities, or when a guild event happens. If my whole guild can’t get into a map and keeps getting split because you can’t shove out randoms… gg.

EDIT: At least as the path of some slight compromise can you leave cities alone so that we still have one place where I server community isn’t destroyed? I mean sure taking away the wp/dungeon contestion and the schedule for bosses would be nice, but above all I want some place that I can still gather with my server people that I know and love that isn’t just in WvW since we will constantly queue maps this way. (Honestly I’m guessing this is where people will hang out now to avoid this new disaster system).

Astral Projections.7320:

DISTRICTS!

(Remove guesting and its limits to how many a day)

Instead of the suggested boss timers, maybe collapse all the non-city maps down to a few, for example, 10 permanent maps. Each map has it’s own set of timers going for the bosses and the regular non boss events, just like the current system. The bosses can be started with events just like they are now.

So, I want to do the golem event. I check the app and see its on the containers stage in map versions 3 and 8 and I chose map version 8 from a drop down menu on the UI, like choosing a district in Guild Wars 1. I travel to an open wp on that map and do the event. Rinse and repeat for other bosses.

This allows people to start bosses and events as they come up as they want To chose the bosses they want to do. To find high or low population maps and for people to easily get into the particular map they want.

There still is a problem with large guilds who want to do the hard events. What if they have some way to open up their own district on command with that boss with it’s triggering starting event? Maybe it would require a guild vote and once enough votes have been reached within a certain amount of time they can open the district. Only people in that guild or people they taxi in can access that district and it collapses a set period of time after the boss event is over.

The district method also allows role players to chose maps they want to congregate in. If they all know that map 7 is the favored role playing map then they can find each other easily.

They kind of already have this in the form of 1 map per server. You can basically treat the servers as “districts” like from GW1 just takes a few more seconds to switch. If they removed guesting restrictions we would have the district option that we had in GW1. I don’t understand why that is so difficult for them to see.

Remove guesting limit = problem solved.

#NoToTheMegaServer

Paradox.1380:

I am excited to see this. I am excited for what’s to come next. Can’t wait to see how it all pans out.

EDIT: I just want to know what is so wrong with giving Lower population servers a chance to be part of the community. There is nothing wrong, we’re the Guild Wars 2 Community, not the Blackgate, Dragonbrand, Tarnished Coast, Henge, ETC Communities. I love my server just as much as anyone else, but kitten why does everyone wanna keep everyone else out? o.o; If you are friends with someone add them to your list, in a guild with someone then there’s no problem there’s already lines of communication open. Just right click their name and Join Their Map. If theirs is full, have them join yours. Tada.

1) I live on a server that isn’t super high in population like a BG. I prefer it this way. If I really want to do some massive event I can guest to BG to get it done. I don’t want that massive zerg feeling everyday I’m in game.

2) You are assuming that their algorithm is going to be perfect, and you will always be placed with your friends/people from your server, and then the nooks and crannies are filled by randoms. I highly doubt this will happen. Instead you will end up stuffed in a map with a few people on your friends list while the people that you actually wanted to meet up with are in some other map, then you have to go through the pain of taxing to get to them, and if the map is full because anet is stuffing it with other people…. too bad. Guess you aren’t going to be hanging out with your friends today.

It just seems so utterly awful and terrible that I can’t honestly believe they ever thought this was the solution to the problem. Unlimited guesting seems like a far better solution, or server merges, or even underflows, etc. Any of those would have worked far better than this.

I love how after hundreds of posts saying that the players hate this proposed change (let’s be real at this point after the money they have spent on it, it is pretty much a done deal) the devs aren’t responding anymore.

I sincerly hope that is because they are having an emergency meeting to discuss the overwhelming negative feedback they are getting on this proposed change.

I just have to say that the main thing that has kept me clinging to Guild Wars 2 through the ups and downs was my community. Now you are tearing that apart, no more guarantee that I will see the people on my server, no more guarantee my whole guild can get into a map together, no more time to just enjoy the world without being crowded by others. Destroying the community that people have clung to throughout all of the bad changes made is pretty much the worst move you could have made.

I would love to see

Major: Precision
Minor : Ferocity/Crit dmg
Minor Vitality

You could also flip that to be

Major: Ferocity/Crit dmg
Minor: Precision
Minor: Vitality

This would help classes like guardian that scale horribly with power and have to deal all of their damage through critical hits. Although this wouldn’t help much in PvP since you can’t use jewls anymore, so the only way you could get the small amount of power that you would need for this would be in traits, but everyone knows not to trait into zeal as a guard. :P cough Another way removing jewls hurts sPvP cough

I tend to agree with most people here that this system seems to have more cons than pros. Plus it completely ignores those people that prefer small guilds/interactions over the massive zerg based ones. I thought you guys had learned that we want less zergs not more! Making every map a zerg fest sounds just awesome….

Personally I like having more empty maps where I occasionally run across someone. Sometimes I zone into a zone I know will be more devoid of people because I just want to play semi alone. Also from a RP aspect in the open world you don’t see people all over the place all the time. Why are you forcing this crowding when the current system seems to satisfy players more? No one is asking for this system (since we have found work arounds for the problems with the current system), so why are you implementing it? Change simply for the sake of change is not a good idea. Especially when it introduces more problems than it addresses.

Plus I want to echo the doubling of wp costs and load screens. That is horrible. And now we are going to get more lag anyway because you are shoving more people into maps which means more lag.

Overall this really does sound like an awful change. I’d love to just trust you blindly when you say your algorithm is showing great simulation metrics, but past experience has shown us that you guys aren’t good at testing on the scale that the actual playerbase is. Test among small groups just don’t cut it when you are going to be dealing with a large actuality.

I sincerely hope that you guys listen to your customers who are begging you not to do this. I know that you probably spent a TON of dev hours on this, but the more I think about this, the more flaws the concept has with regards to the way I play the game. Why implement a system no one is asking for, and the majority seems to be against?

Please stop the mega madness :-(

So I have two comments:

1) I don’t like how this looks like it is going to impact running of dungeons such as Cathedral of Fire (I know GW1 die hard), and Crucible of Eternity. Basically it looks like now you have to unlock the dungeon each time you want to run it since guesting to a certain world appears to be a thing of the past.

2) So my longer comment. To me it looks like (at first appearance) you are treating it like map population is something static. You algorithm appears to look at a snapshot in time (event trigger when someone decides to zone into a certian zone) to decide where to put them. While this is fine in theory, what happens as time progresses from zero to n? Won’t maps get to a state in which, without forcing movement of players while they are in the map will become completely disorganized?

This really reminds me of OS memory management schemes. (Sorry thinking back to my Operating Systems class which was quite some time ago….).

To illustrate what I mean let’s assume each map has a capacity of six, we have three maps [alpha, beta, gamma], we have 5 home worlds [a, b, c, d, e], and 6 guilds [1,2,3,4,5,6].

So at t = 0 the maps for x zone looks like this:

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T= 1 Ash[d,6] joins zone placed in map Alpha

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T=2 Tyler[b,3] joins zone, placed in map Beta

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3], Tyler[b,3]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

T=3 Brenda[a,2] joins zone. At this point Alpha (where she should reasonably be placed is full since this system wants more full maps and placed Ash[d,6] in the spot she should be in. Brenda[a,2] placed in Beta where her guild and home world people aren’t.

Alpha: Suzie[a,2], Bettie[a,2], Colin[a,2], James [a,2], Todd[a,2], Ash[d,6]
Beta: Josh[b,1], Sam[b,1], Alex[b,3], Tyler[b,3], Brenda[a,2]
Gamma: Sally[c,4], John[c,4], Albert[c,5]

Now while this is an exaggerated example that doesn’t show people leaving, and limits the map cap drastically, over time this is still a problem that could occur. Especially in high population areas such as LA.

What have you guys done to prevent this “decay” or “fragmentation” from happening?

Ok this guild wins the internet!

I’m really scared of the impact this is going to have on WvW and server pride. I play on a lower tier server for a reason. I hate mindless zerging, and WvW is mainly what keeps me in this game since I view it as good end game content. I like the EotM maps, but I hate the mega server zerg mode of it.

Best solution in my mind is to leave the major cities/non combat zones out of this addition, and only have it take place in the open world.

I’m not sure if this belongs here…..

I’ve had a person who, over the past couple of days, will not stop messaging me in game or on the forums. They are from another server, and at this point I’ve told them repeatedly to leave me alone. I blocked them in game last night, but then after that I got a pm on the forums from them, and in the message they included that they would contact me again later today.

I really don’t want to hear from this person, and I consider what they are doing harassment at this point. I was able to block them in game, but from what I see there is no way to stop them from sending me messages on the forums. How do I deal with this issue with the path of least resistance?

This system would be fine if they were to leave the home cities/gathering places for each server alone. On GoM I love being able to go into LA (or used to) and hang out with people I know. Also our server is a very tight knit community, and if we are placed into home cities with people from other servers we will lose our sense of server pride.

How will we rally people into WvW now? We can’t go into LA (Vigil Keep) and talk in Map chat…. I feel that this will really help in open explorable areas, but really hurts serer community if implemented in major cities.

As requested by OP via whisper in game.

Just cause… Asura!

Lucente.5071:

Ele, lets not go there. Dont sully the GoM name by stepping to that level. We’ve proved our point lets move on. Well continue to prove our point on the battle field

You and Zets are right…. Sorry another terrible day at work, shouldn’t be taking it out on others. My rant is done. Moving on.

MakubeC.3026:

Please, let’s stop the name calling and picture posting because that is not allowed in this forum.
We are giving suggestions and switching ideas here, not stating why one server is better than the other.

Hahahaha this guy. Now when you realize your thread is going to go into the “Trash” bin you act like you weren’t the first one who slung the “GoM has no tactics, lots of zerging, blah blah”.

Sororita.3465:

Full map cap…tier 6…6 am in the morning…on a weekday…

Where is the achievement again?

The achievement is that those were NA based people that stayed up all night to cap things since we can’t compete against the massive amount of people SF brings to the field. I personally know most of the people that were doing that. Quite a few adjusted their work schedules so that they could keep us in this fight.

So their dedication to helping their server is the achievement.

Quicker Muscle.4372:

GoMs dedication and coordination pays off BIG! I was just wondering if any other server has been able to pull this off before. Not only did we pull it off, but we pulled it off during a WvW season! We managed to capture and hold EVERY camp, tower and keep!

Would not have been possible without a number of key people. Great job guys!

This picture just made my day Quicker! Wish I didn’t have to work and could have stayed up all night with you guys. :-/ GoM’s comeback is rather amazing!

Berk.8561:

Lucente.5071:

Smaller servers have trouble winning against your massive blob zergs and outnumbering us 3 to 1. Therefore we use small man/gorilla tactics during the day and some of use adjusted our schedule/work 2nd shift to stay up and flip everything back.

While I suppose your dedication is admirable, you are basically fixing one imbalance problem with another one. You shouldn’t have to rearrange you life around fixing one large population disparity problem with another population disparity problem. It’s kinda like saying you stay up late to burglarize houses while the owners are sleeping to get back the money the owners steal from you during the day because they are bigger and stronger than you instead of correcting the theft problem, itself.

I completely agree with your logic. No one on either side would disagree that there is a population (more accurately wvw population) imbalance issue. What we disagree with is trying to solve the problem by forcing one set time to be the “most important” wvw time. I would love it if all of the servers were more balanced with regards to wvw. I think that Anet tried to fix it this time by fixing price around wvw ranking as opposed to mere population numbers. Unfortunately they announced this before locking the ranks into place, so some servers tanked and didn’t try in order to get transfers. Plus I think the disparity in prices was large enough to encourage people to stack the free servers and ignore the mid ranked servers.

Overall there is a problem, but weighting points around time zones is not the solution.

Another SF complainer…. Seriously. You pull more numbers during prime time than GoM does. So we have NA based people who stay up all night to do with small numbers what we can’t against you during the day-time. Your own commander admitted that you guys queue every map during your peak time. On GoM we only ever queue EB and it is only a 5 person queue if that. So why should we be forced to lose simply because you have superior numbers during prime time? We don’t have OCX coverage… we have people who stay up all night when they can (either because they work odd hours, or have the day off the next day) so that we can beat your much higher numbers. Please stop making thread after thread crying because you don’t have the dedication some people have, and for once your larger numbers aren’t winning this for you.

Can a dev please pm me? We have screenshots of repeated cheating by certain guilds and servers. I have sent in ticket after ticket, with screenshots of people cheating over and over again. These bugs have existed forever, and servers that don’t cheat get penalized because they are never fixed. I have screenshots of the guilds and servers, but support says over and over again that they can’t help because there is no name.

This is getting so old. We can’t report them, when we submit tickets we are ignored, never get responses from exploits@arena.net, and if we post specifics in the forums we get in trouble. How are we supposed to stop the cheating?

It is very toxic to this community to allow this to continue with no action.

Dahkeus.8243:

Abe Kleine.3568:

Dahkeus.8243:

Guardians are in a better spot than any other profession in the game in pretty much every aspect of the game:

PvE
Guards give DPS nearly on par with warriors while bringing reflects rivaled only by mesmers. They have 2 high end, meta builds (look up Obal’s guides for these). Most professions have 1 meta build and some have none (necros).

WvW
Guardians probably are the most popular profession in organized WvW guilds since they are hands down some of the best front-liners available.

sPvP
Guards are still considered a must-have for most teams since they are such strong bunker/team support. They also work well as meditation DPS.

There will always be people who reroll after getting a case of seeing greener on the other side, but the bottom line is that almost no other class in the game is viable in as many areas as guardians are while having as many viable builds as guardians do.

There is one MAJOR flaw with your entire thing…. Playing Guardian isn’t fun.. it’s a CHORE. You MUST use these specific meta builds in order to survive, or you must sacrifice all your survivability (next to none, low hp) to do damage. Meaning you DIE before you can do any of that actual damage, especially when zerging

Lol, speak for yourself.
1) Every class has meta builds. If anything, Guardian has more meta builds and hence more diversity than most other classes in just about every aspect of the game.

2) All classes sacrifice survivability for DPS. However, Guards are one of the sturdiest berserkers in the game since you still have so much access to blocks, blinds, and protection, even in the many of the glassiest of builds.

3) Why would you zerg in a glass build? If you’re talking WvW, then the meta is a high defense, tanky build.

I’m really baffled at your post…either you’re new to the class or you’re really out of touch of the Guardian meta or you haven’t ever played another class. Play a thief for a day if you want to know what it’s like to be squishy, lol.

Your post makes it so obvious you don’t play guard. I play all classes, and my thief on a dps build can out survive my guard for days. You said we have one of the highest amount of meta builds?! Hahahaha that’s a good one. (And you quote the guy who has links to burn guardians as a viable build…. again shows you have never touched a guard in your life if you think a condi guard is viable).

Please go back to the warrior forums. You are still going to be the most desired and OP heavy no need to worry and trash this thread.

The problem with guardians is that there is no viable dps build.

True the zerker meditation guardian exists, but the dps from that is medicore (8k crits on burst which my warrior/thief/ele all outdo by a lot) becuase you have to trait 30 into a defensive trait line and yet they are utter glass. If you were to trait full dps you would be glass with no survivability gimmicks. That is the big problem.

If you look at the other two classes that have the lowest health pool (thief/ele) you will notice that both have ways to survive. Thief has stealth which makes it hard for someone to kill them, and eles have good mobility and cc. What do guards have? A few blocks (one on a 90 second cd and weapon based ones that are also 40 sec + cd), no mobility, protection access on VERY low uptime high cd, and a few blinds scattered about. That is not enough to effectively fight someone glassy in close range. If you trait at 30/30/0/0/10 you will die in every fight. There is no sustain, and no way to gimmick yourself to live through a fight.

So there is your problem. You HAVE to trait into valor and honor in order to have a dps build. No other class has to do that. We have one viable build, which is arguably good, but I wouldn’t call it balance if every guardian takes the same build because it is the only balanced build we have.

Justin ODell.9517:

I think the big reason we need to streamline things and make it easy to pickup is NOT because newbies are dumb or incapable of figuring it out, but rather because PvP is very, very intimidating. Reduction in apparent complexity helps PvP be more approachable and less intimidating.

Also, I can’t undersell the benefits of reducing conceptual complexity for assisting designers achieve balance. We are finite creatures, us humans, and can only hold so many things in our mind at one time. We can create tools to help work around this, but anything that helps make balance easier gets my vote.

I think he is giving the real answer here about the change. It is because the balance team is obviously struggling to balance this game, and they are looking for any way they can to make it easier on themselves.

Although this does beg the question: You said it isn’t a big deal that they are getting rid of jewls because they have little influence on your overall stats and build. But now you are saying that they are screwing up balance because of all of the possiblities they introduce….. So which is it? Do they add nothing therefore need to be removed, or are they adding too much variety and you guys can’t keep it straight?

In my personal opinion, the new players argument is a straw man. A new player will get an amulet and not even realize they can change the jewl until later. Which means that the only players that are actually changing things around are those that can handle the increased complexity. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said the balance team can’t handle the variables and still balance this game. We all know they are struggling (we see it in game every day) but is the solution to simplify the game as opposed to examining what on the balance team is going wrong? Seems like the easy way out to me. I’ve developed very complex applications with many complex functions and variables in it before. The answer when it gets above a few people’s head isn’t to reduce the application’s functionality, the answer is to get more people and a new perspective on it to solve the problems without cutting the functionality of the program.

butch.8136:

^ I agree. But, in my opinion, the impact on Tpvp would be much much bigger if hotjoin didn’t get the same treatment (ye there’s a difference, but it’s extremely small).

If I had faith in Anet’s matchmaking system then I would say that the competitive players would be safe, but the fact that my premade semi-comptetive team made up of all 35+ got matched up with a team that had a r1 and a r6 on their side in TeamQ doesn’t exactly make me feel that the competitive players won’t be affected by this new farm pvp mentality.

I just found it amusing that he didn’t know the warrior skills (arching arrow on bow which he uses on his hambow -.-, and impale) as well as Grouch. Haha I don’t play my warrior as often anymore, and I could have told you the answers to both of those questions.

Hambow skill right there…. #buttonmash

You can bring in more people, but they will be people that simply don’t care about winning or losing. In their minds, there is no cost to dying, and if their team happens to zerg win in hotjoin, or even if they lose, they get credit towards better rewards/time than pve. PvP will become the same mindless thing as champ train farming. You aren’t getting them into TeamQ or YoloQ, so your queue times don’t get better, and you are still frustrated…. What you want is people who come in for the competitive skill aspect, not for the rewards.

zaced.7948:

Magische Boek.2530:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Player’s don’t need to do anything with their items. Everything in your equip slots, inventory, locker, and bank will all be stripped upon logging in and unlocked in the wardrobe.

what if i happen to have a greatsaw greatsword skin on my bank, will that be stripped and put into my locker so i cant sell it anymore?

i also would be very interested in an answer to this question. i seriously hope that sellable skins will not be put into the wardrobe. if so i might have to park everything in the tp for unreasonable prices.

They’ve already said about PvE skins that it only goes into the wardrobe if it has been account or soulbound. So if the GS skin is still able to be sold then it won’t be put into the locker (otherwise everyone would just buy one and then resell it and still get the benefit of the skin).

So I’m not a huge PvPer (only rank 36), I play more WvW and some PvE; but I can predict exactly what will happen here.

I’m glad PvPers are getting better rewards. They deserve them no doubt about it. But what you have done with creating a new rewards track that is far more appealing than dungeon runs/farming in PvE is created the new place for PvE people to farm.

I saw this happen when you did Season 1 of WvW. All of the sudden those of us who are dedicated wvw players saw a mass influx of players that came in only interested in rewards. That led to them letting keeps get taken so that they could recap for achieve points. They would spend supply in bad ways or let a gate get damaged solely so they could get achieve points. They would build siege and waste keep and tower supply just to use a treb to hit some keep. It was awful for those of us who actually cared about winning.

Now my personal opinion is that hot join will explode from this, and it will be worse than now. All the players will care about is what is the best way to get rewarded. I have no trouble seeing people farm this and “swap wins” so to speak.

I’m not mad about this change, just wanted to throw out something that I think will happen from my experience with making nice rewards in a new game area. I personally can say I might farm for rewards in pvp hotjoin when I get bored as opposed to tournies simply because the rewards are now arguably the best in the game (with respect to time and reward).

Hahaha this post makes me laugh….. You are talking about WvW which isn’t considered PvP by Anet. There is no longer a specific reward related to PvP (used to be glory). So think before you post. WvW players still have to run dungeons (or now do PvP) for tokens, etc. WvW definitely has the worst rewards in this game now.

Yeah I feel that the amulet jewl combination being forced kind of sucks. Now we are forced to use a certain stat allotment that they force…. And it limits our traits to having to balance out what the jewl used to do….

Also the rune being all in one slot now stinks too. Sometimes mixing and matching is better. Basically they are asking us to just “trust them” that the new rune balance is going to make us want to use all of one set.

John Smith.4610:

Nothing about that statement is false.

It’s ok, you didn’t have to edit out the “brilliant part” :P. I have noticed your demeanor on the forums has improved lately. Perhaps someone threatened to take away your stapler if you didn’t play nice with the kids? ;-)

Meglobob.8620:

Elrey.5472:

Meglobob.8620:

I virtually never died

John Smith.4610:

You’ve died 895 times.

Meglobob.8620:

But I die a lot less now…

Don’t try to fix it, that was a burn on the face hahaha.

I was not expecting my deaths to be quoted back to me, correct.

That’s why John Smith is Legendary

Even when he makes me poor and takes gold from my poor 8×80th lvl characters mouths…

Legendary wasn’t the choice word I would have used….

It’s easy to look smart and all powerful when you can pull metrics on just about anything and the other person can’t….

EDIT: As a side note I do think this change was a good one, and all of the people complaining about the economic impacts are based on complete guesswork and lack of data.

I think Anet is looking at this from the flip side. It will encourage people to experiment more. Say someone has never tried a zerk build before, but is afraid to do it because they know that at first they will die all of the time. As you mentioned, that can get expensive. So now someone who didn’t want to spend the money to see if they could run x or y build, can now try it out without any real harm.

But ultimately I don’t think this was done because of level 80 players. This was done for people who are brand new to the game. They would pay high costs because they are still learning, and are poor. Honestly this change doesn’t affect me much because even if I failed miserably on an Arah run, the 11s I pay is nothing compared to the reward I received. I don’t even pay attention to the cost.

Plus if you look at this from a WvW perspective, it will encourage people to roam around and split up more, because it isn’t going to start costing you quite a bit from accidentally getting rolled by a passing zerg as you wander.

Levetty.1279:

eleshazar.6902:

I’m glad for the nerf on the champ train. a) You can make far better gold doing other things. b) I personally think this hurts the game because players tell new players this is how you earn money in the game, and they quit after seeing how grindy and boring it is.

I earn 12g+ in under 2 hours in Arah every night. Trust me, the champ train is not a great way to earn money. It is just easy and boring.

Sounds like that is the thing that needs its reward nerfed.

No, the reward is equal to the skill level. When you can kill lupi with a group of five in under a minute then you can earn 12g+ as well. Hitting 1 repeatedly with a group of 40 against some easy champ does not deserve a good reward.

I’m glad for the nerf on the champ train. a) You can make far better gold doing other things. b) I personally think this hurts the game because players tell new players this is how you earn money in the game, and they quit after seeing how grindy and boring it is.

I earn 12g+ in under 2 hours in Arah every night. Trust me, the champ train is not a great way to earn money. It is just easy and boring.

I personally don’t get all of the complaining. Nothing here hurts anyone besides the minor nerf to the raw gold in champ bags (which hurting the champ farming is good imho) and the minor nerf to even money earned. The trait reset (even though we already knew this) is huge, and definitely a good thing for advanced players that want to change their builds in the field and do so quite frequently.

Why do people feel the need to complain when the changes are good, but not as good as you thought they might be? Seriously quit complaining. If you complain all the time they will never take us seriously on the big issues because they will just think “Well the complained when we removed costs, so their complaints on increasing costs of waypoints is probably as equally invalid”.

Stop the negativity…. for real.

I love it…. people complain when the changes are bad. People complain when the changes are good because they aren’t as good as you had hoped. Really people. If you are just looking for a way to complain go do it somewhere else.

Anet makes a lot of mistakes, I won’t be one to deny that. But when they do something nice (even if it is more geared towards newer players who die more) how about you just say thanks and move on. By complaining about everything you devalue the importance that they place on forum goers advice. If we complain about everything, then they won’t listen when we are complaining about something that actually is a big deal.

Allie Murdock.8152:

>.>

<.<

That Allie is so…. shifty eyed….

Arisal.9740:

The Revenant.4970:

Arisal.9740:

The Revenant.4970:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation_Crystal

I’m assuming they will be acquired through the same methods.

With out spending gems the only way is daily reward which you have a 0.26% chance… Sorry that doesn’t cut it. Only other way looks like map completion and you get 3 of the stones which will convert to 1 charge. Still should be other ways.

What about people that only pvp or wvw. This doesn’t help them out at all.

I have little sympathy because people who only play 1/4 of the game to begin with, shouldn’t be up-in-arms over cosmetics. If anything, this gives them incentives to step foot in some other regions once in a while. They got by up until now with the acquisition methods of stones and crystals….they can continue to get by.

I don’t know about you but I consider spvp 1/3 wvw 1/3 and pve 1/3 of the game so excluding 2/3 of the people from the game you have no sympathy for?

Also since to me it sounds like you don’t pvp did you know that they have had a pvp skin locker which is very similar to the one were are getting that is going to unify them? The pvp skin locker it was free to check in/out skins so we never had to rely on these so called transmutation stones/crystals and now charges.

Are you that ignorant that you would blatantly say screw you pvp crowd? Wow man please understand where some of us come from. I have 1000+ hours in the game and play all the 3 parts but some people like my brother only do say 2 of the 3 so you would kick him to curb???

You are obviously misunderstanding the whole system….. Ugh. I play pvp too, and quite a bit. In the old system it was storage of items. 1 item could be stored that you can “check out”. This system doesn’t turn all items into skins that you have to pay for. If you have the item you still have the item in the same way you do now. You have just been given the ability to “duplicate” the look of that item onto something else. You have lost nothing in this new system. They aren’t destroying your current items, or only dropping skins in the future.

Please read and understand the blog post before you freak out.

The Revenant.4970:

TooBz.3065:

I’m fairly sure it will be gem store only. I bet having people customize their appearance is one of the few regular money makers they have.

I 100% doubt it will be gem store ‘only’.

It very well might be. The current system for transmutation crystal is 100% gem store (unless you include BLTC key farming). I personally don’t see a problem with this. I don’t understand why people think that the employees who do this don’t deserve to get paid. If the gemstore stops turning a profit they shut down Guild Wars 2. NCsoft/ArenaNet is a business plain and simple. You can’t have anything in this world at no cost. Someone has to be using the gemstore in order to keep this game alive, if you choose not to that is your choice (this game is nice enough to let you choose not to pay to play), but don’t get upset that they don’t offer things to you for free that others are willing to pay for.

I think that the armor still exists separately as items. It just gives you the flexibility to change the looks without changing the stats. You will still have two armor sets, you just won’t need to have two with the same stats just to change appearances.

I just really don’t get the complaints here… Do you not realize that NOTHING has changed that is going to cost you a copper more? When you get an item, you still get to use it once like you have always been able to. The skin just so happens to also now be stored in your locker after you equip the item. As such you can use a charge “exact same as a trans crystal” to put that skin on another item. YOU STILL HAVE THE FIRST ITEM AND DON’T HAVE TO PAY TO USE IT! This new system is the same as the old with the added benefit of skins not being destroyed in the transmutation process. All they did was improve the current situation (excluding the whole town clothes thing). You’ve been using gems in the past to do this, they just go farther now than they did before…..

Black Box.9312:

Simon.3794:

Black Box.9312:

Simon.3794:

Black Box.9312:

Simon.3794:

Kadin.2356:

Simon.3794:

Maybe you should explain to me why the guardian is the best bunker with lowest base hp

Block skill chaining and easy access to protection. To do so however they have to give up on really doing any significant damage.

you are saying that guardian can have block chain and protection(and blind chain) but can do no damage?

i wonder what is a meditation guardian.

Implying that a meditation guardian can bunker.

Implying that a mediation guardian can Block skill chaining and easy access to protection. Please read what its written.

I’ve played a meditation guard. It doesn’t rely on protection at all, it’s mostly blocks, blinds, and dodges that keep it alive. It’s not a build that is meant for defensive purposes and is very reliant on skillful activation of a limited number of active defenses with high cooldowns to make up for its inherent squishiness. And it’s certainly not able to bunker.

So please, don’t make assumptions about a class or build that you have no knowledge or experience with.

So, A medatation guard doesnt have protection, let’s ignore hammer meditation build 1st, a meditation guard still has access to block chaining and blind spamming. does it render my argument any pointless? let’s make it clear that i did not say meditation guard can bunk before you start.

Ever used a hammer in PvP? Good luck landing that symbol.

That aside though, here’s how to beat a medi guardian: Wait for the focus block to wear off (or break it, your call) then kite it to death. It really isn’t very defensible and relies very heavily on burst damage to subdue the opponent before they can unleash their own offense.

You’re trying to argue that a medi guardian can be defensible and deal good damage, and I’m telling you that you’re wrong. Guardians can be built for good damage, and they can be built for good survivability, but they cannot be built for both.

This is so true. I wish people would actually play guardian before they spout out “guards in good spot they have protection, block, vigor!” Guards actually have limited access to those, and they will deal NO damage if they go for them. So sure we can make great bunkers, but our burst will be lucky to hit 1K. And when we spec for damage, we are more glassy than thieves and eles because we have terrible movement. Our teleports require targets (so can’t be used to run) we have one leap on our GS, and we also have no passive movement speed like other classes. Guards are very easy to kill if you just kite them, because they can’t run, and they can’t catch you. Honestly if a guard goes full dps it is dangerous and not as viable as it should be since our health tier is low and our movement is crap. I think they should move us back to mid tier health.