Guild Wars 2

New bug?

Shattered Strength is not gaining benefits from Illusionary Persona, while traits such as Rending Shatter do. Can anyone confirm whether SS was gaining the fourth charge before or not? It currently does not count Illusionary Persona as an Illusion Shatter, thus the overall nerf to Might gain is larger than the patch note states.

The issue was a bug causing illusions to gain multiple shatter effects. They haven’t fixed the bug but just made it harder to trigger. Hopefully they fix the bug and shatters can be off of GCD. I don’t really like being locked out of daze or distortion because I just Mind Wracked. That .25 seconds is enough for a Thief to daze you and finish you off.

So I have no problem with them dealing with the bug. I just wish the multiple problems with Mesmer traits not working were fixed this quickly. The Torch Phantasm and Phantasmal Haste is still broken even though they claimed otherwise. >|

The bug was a problem. The GCD on shatters is not a long term solution and kind of hurts survival and playstyle, so hopefully they find a way so that illusions don’t gain multiple shatter effects.

They could probably find a better solution to SS. Maybe keep the old might stack for allies but not the Mesmer themselves.

Burst is high because the spvp gamemode of Conquest exists in an eternal sturggle between Burst and Bunker. They probably know that people getting one shotted is not good balance, but they have to have it or yo will have bunker builds that never die. It’s a fustercluck created by their pvp game mode choice.

If true then shame on ArenaNet. This is your mistake. It is in the nature of playing a game to take any advantage you have that is within the game setting. This was within the game setting. You can’t expect your players to read the minds of the devs to figure out if something is intended or not, and if you fall behind taking advantage and it turns out its intended then you’re possibly screwed in the economics game.

Do rollbacks now that you have the means.

Just because you aren’t forced to party with people doesn’t mean you aren’t grouped and playing with others in a DE, nor does it mean you can’t party with people if you want to. You’re only limiting yourself. All that’s been removed is the mechanical aspect of grouping.

Forcing people to group doesn’t encourage social interaction. I don’t know why anyone who has been playing MMOs for awhile would think otherwise. Most of your social interaction will come from talking with people that are your friends or in your guild.

I get this feeling its a different generation from myself that has no concept of how to play a game without being forced and lead around.

-Move loot/badges to a vendor that keeps track of your kills. When you visit the vendor, your kills equate to # of badges and a chest with gold and random loot.
Keep the current loot system for PVE mobs though.
-Add more skins and gear combinations to the badge vendor
-Have the first week of every month be a random match-up so that servers don’t get stuck facing the same servers over and over again.

I can see Mesmer burst coming at me. I can see the clones running towards me. I can know a thief burst is coming, but I can’t see it. Even if I manage to ditch the first burst, the thief goes back to invisible and repeats. I still can’t see the opening hits. It’s just cheese. I can do F3—> Mirror Images —> F1 Mes shatter in the small amount of time it needs to get full burst potential. I have the APM for it, but I still can’t always avoid being bursted by what I can’t see.

Professions should be a playstyle thing, not a role thing. ANet is confusing roles for playstyle. People don’t want classes defined by roles. That’s sort of the thing with GW2, classes being defined by playstyle that have many viable roles.

A Necro is very tanky, but its more the Necro playstyle that people are looking for. The death shroud, pets and ground targeted abilities. Messing around with life force and such.

I play Mesmer most often. I don’t seek for it to have a limited role. I seek for its playstyle of movement, teleports, illusions, and trickery to do many roles while maintaining that particular feel.

The same problems that made me dislike the Halloween Jumping Puzzle remain in the Wintersday Jumping puzzle, just to a reduced degree.

1. Character model size is still an issue, along with being clumped with others. I tend to do better with Norn and Charr characters. I can get far with my Asuran main if there’s only a few other players with me.
2. Camera collision issues remain. Certain routes cause the camera to freak out and screw me up. I can survive two or three cases of the camera suddenly shifting and essentially blinding me from the action, but by the third time I’ve fallen behind too far to cope.
3. The push concept is never well liked in platforming games. Push being a level that pushes you constantly forward, but in a multiplayer atmosphere its far worsened.

For example, if I screw up a boss level in Super Meat Boy that uses the push method, I can immediately restart and nothing gets in my way. In the case of the GW2 jumping puzzles, I have to sit and wait for others to finish and then hope they don’t blind me when I do attempt the level again.

It just stops being fun at a certain point and without other players it might still be fun, but with their presence what should be a fun social event quickly becomes frustrating.

Not trying to pick on you PowerBottom but:

“Btw. don’t misinterpret my passion for GW2 build versatility as being PO’d or not taking other opinions seriously, I just love trying out new stuff in GW2 and feel that ppl that think GW2 is stagnant and only has a few good builds, are just afraid to try out new builds.”

I have tried out different builds as a Mesmer, but all builds must either be burst or bunker, and of those types there’s only the slightest difference between them.

And that’s pretty much the situation all classes find themselves in. You could figure out builds that do different things, but Cap Point makes all those other builds pointless for there is no advantage to having them on your team.

Until a new game type is introduced and traits are overhauled, the GW2 PVP is stagnant. Slight differences in bunker v burst is not interesting. Many of us GW1 pvpers bored of it back in gw2 beta. Sigils and stat variations don’t change up the meta but just recolor the same limited meta. I feel walled in by the lack of viability for variety.

And due to the limited amount of roles or purposes, all variations on a similar theme get thinned out by priority of strength. If one bunker Guardian is stronger than another bunker Guardian, the weaker bunker build fades away.

There needs to be a new game mode and they need to overhaul traits. Traits were supposed to offer the creativity and variety that GW1’s skill system did. No, stat redistributions and sigils do not offer the same livelihood. Instead of offering new ways to play, the traits and stats are offering better ways to play the same thing. Too much vertical increase and things that should be basic functionality. My pistol shoots from a further distance? My Phantasms do more damage? These aren’t game changing. More damage vs lower health foes? Betters what you are already doing, but doesn’t change what you are doing.

Traits should be offering new functionality and playstyle to existing skills. Engineer bombs healing are an example of this. This chages a bomb engy from just aoe damage and area control to also support healing. This adds functionality. Combined with other traits, this functionality’s worth is increased. (Larger bomb radius, bomb on dodge.)

The problem is that the good traits that add functionality and new role options make up a third of traits at most, while most of the traits in games are just buffs to already obvious and pre-existing class/skill functionality. If I plan to use grenades for much of my damage then adding an extra grenade to each kit skill via a trait isn’t much of a choice. It’s an obvious increase to what I’m already doing.

Things like sigils and runes don’t add functionality or new roles. The entire game isn’t doing that and the game type (Cap Point) has no room for it. The game isn’t being called stagnant for lack of trying on the populace’s part. It’s current state is objectively walled in and restricted by their design choices.

Also, a correction on what someone said earlier. GW1 did not launch with Observer mode. That took a year or two (I want to say). I also want to say that the game did not launch with all of HA, GvG, TA and RA, but I’m not sure on that.

There is no actual reason for them to list the current population of a server at the time of checking due to the overflow system. People are used to server populations being listed as a clue to whether or not they will have to wait to get in.

So, the purpose of GW2’s server populations could just be for account creations, but that wouldn’t seem to properly reflect fluctuations in listings though. I guess it could be server transfers, but the fluctuations do seem to follow a peak and off-peak flow. I did notice that when they did Lost Shores and the Friend Trial Weekend, the previously Full Servers became High pop. I doubt a bunch of people suddenly left at that time, but rather that ANet increased the server populations around the board.

On SBI, nearly everytime I log in I get put into Lion’s Arch overflow. During events, there’s tons of overflows.

As for game health, three months is when the MMO vagabonds tend to travel around. It’s a behavior pattern at this point. Play an MMO for a couple of months, suddenly get an urge to move on and get into a new thing. Repeat again in three months.

It’s certainly not at launch levels, but Johannson was pretty positive about the game’s sales and health in that recent interview.

Suun.2856:

As WvW is not as casual as was first thought, and more competitive than envisioned…

{Pause for reflection and viewing of comments elsewhere in various forums}

After 3 weeks of zerging here and zerging there, and seeing some of the more recent comments here, there, and everywhere, and the idea of the individual having an impact outside of the zerg is not a well received idea, it is time to see if PvE can hold my interest for another map completion (unlikely).

Best of luck.

I cut your quote to this point because the line about WvWvW not being as casual as thought highlights perhaps the heart of the issue with PVP in the game right now.

ArenaNet has treated Guild Wars 2 with many compromises. By this, I mean compromises between differing focuses in design based on different types of players or audiences. You can see this with Fractals and Ascended gear, and their following responses to the outrage over their reveal. It’s an attempt to appeal vertical progression types without alienating those that don’t want to grind or those that prefer horizontal progression. Their failure or success on this attempt on this is not the point, but rather the company’s insistence that there can be a happy compromise between opposed types.

sPVP is very heavily influenced by this. Conquest mode was a mode chosen due to its familiarity, the ease of reading a scoreboard, the small skirmishes it creates that are easier to broadcast for e-sports, and the ability to scale the design to different amounts of players. They could introduce the maps via Hot Join and 8v8 matches and then separate competitive games to 5v5 with no change in rules or maps. Conquest mode tries to appease a great many different people, but compromises quite a lot. I could go over what its cost the game, but you could probably read the sPVP forum for that sort of info. The point again is the idea that they can appease opposite types with the same thing. The e-sports and the casual, the hardcore and the casual, the hardcore and the esport guy, and the esport business and the regular customer are all divergent couplings. that Conquest Mode tries to appease at the same time.

WvWvW then has the issue as stated by the quoted user. Is it casual PVP or is it serious PVP? On some level, its being treated as both. Its not intended to be balanced on the level sPVP is, but if it was just casual fun then it lacks the bumpers versus lopsided matches that a casual mode normally has. As in, you don’t see servers autobalanced or rematched against others if a fight gets out of hand. You also have various reminders that this is a serious mode with the point score system and ANet revealing server rankings. If WvWvW was casual warfare then you’d probably see the scoreboard removed and maps reset more often. Yet if it was serious then there would be a more balanced way of keeping score that accounted for the realities of a 24/7 online battle rather than the somewhat basic, mundane rules of victory the game currently has.

So, WvWvW began housing the hardcore in addition to the more casual audience that saw it was a PVE/PVP compromise. It gained perhaps most of the talk in PVP communities post-launch, but its state was never fully intended for hardcore so it couldn’t keep up with that attention.

It may be time to stop compromising for ANet.

I have wanted to be able to control the second part of Prestige since its inception. It’s not just the damage, or the lack of being ‘locked out’, but to actually have a blast finisher on Mesmer that you can quickly trigger.

JonPeters.5630:

So studying it here empirically we think berserker is just missing and not less damage, but that duelist was actually impacted by the “bladetrail” bug fix. I will try and up the duelist damage and I will try and track down why berserker is not always hitting.

Just as an addition to this, the “missing attacks” issue happens with Warlock as well. It doesn’t show an “evade” or “miss”, but the projectile travels over the top of the target and does no damage.

Actually, I have always found the problem with only listening to top players is that they will start to take advantage of that situation and influence the game to be balanced around their playstyles and favored builds. They also get stuck inside a bubble of thought that causes the game to get stale. GW1 ended up suffering from this problem down the road.

You need disruptive thought in regards to balance as well as “top players” feedback.

Reposting from Mesmer subform thread:

“The way Phantasms are behaving now is the way Phantasms behaved before the patch if you didn’t take any of the traits that applied boons to your Phantasms. Since many Mesmers took either Phantasmal Fury or Vengeful Images, there was not a lot of awareness of this issue. If you took either of those or both of those traits, your Phantasms would attack immediately upon summons. Without the traits, there would be a delay between summoning the Phantasm and the Phantasm attacking.
I assume that when they fixed all the boon giving traits to work they ended up removing the instant-attacking Phantasm behavior. Intentional or not, this is a bad change. Phantasms become far less reliable. This is a playability issue. If you cast a spell and the spell doesn’t “go off”, then the class you’re playing becomes far less reliable. People are noticing this change mostly with Zerker because the quick cripple is vital to the playstyle. Now that reliable cripple is no longer reliable and the playability of the class drops off.”

So this was a bug that previously existed, but the broken boon traits somehow changed the Phantasm attack behavior. It is hard to say whether the old broken boon trait behavior or the untraited behavior was the intended behavior for Phantasms.

The Warlock bug is old as well, dating back to the November patch. I haven’t tested to see if its worsened with this patch.

The way Phantasms are behaving now is the way Phantasms behaved before the patch if you didn’t take any of the traits that applied boons to your Phantasms. Since many Mesmers took either Phantasmal Fury or Vengeful Images, there was not a lot of awareness of this issue. If you took either of those or both of those traits, your Phantasms would attack immediately upon summons. Without the traits, there would be a delay between summoning the Phantasm and the Phantasm attacking.

I assume that when they fixed all the boon giving traits to work they ended up removing the instant-attacking Phantasm behavior. Intentional or not, this is a bad change. Phantasms become far less reliable. This is a playability issue. If you cast a spell and the spell doesn’t “go off”, then the class you’re playing becomes far less reliable. People are noticing this change mostly with Zerker because the quick cripple is vital to the playstyle. Now that reliable cripple is no longer reliable and the playability of the class drops off.

Sounds like Doestev made you feel the idiot.

DO NOT INFRACT ME FOR LITERARY PUNS PLS

This is a pretty interesting read for his thoughts on the industry and MMOs. He’ll probably draw some ire for implying that indie development is less risky., but it’s interesting to hear him say that he thinks there will be less MMO development in the near future.

I don’t understand why people worry so much about a buff or point scoring change being made and it leading to servers strategizing around it. That will always happen. That happens already. Servers are pushing when another server’s crew logs off. The current scoring system is already creating questionable playstyles.

So what does it matter to fix the current problem? Because of the extended problems with nightcapping or whatever you want ot call it. Why invest in defending or upgrading a keep, tower or whathaveyou if its going to be zerged down when your guild logs off? Players get to a point where they feel WvWvW is just throwing their gold away and stop playing.

If there’s no new map type or game mode in the next couple of months then I think sPVP is done for.

It was a mistake to go with Conquest only. All this talk about high end meta is meaningless if the mode is not a draw itself. You need to have something many people care about first. Even the people playing everyday will have no audience to play for and no new blood to care about.

The top two issues are the lackluster traits and the lack of variety in game modes.

I do like Power with staff. iWarlock + haste + Power might do more damage than stacking condition damage with Winds of Chaos. My general problem with condition damage and staff is how slow the winds of chaos attacks are.

I feel Winds of Chaos and Chaos Storm plus boon duration is a much better idea. If there was a + boon duration stat on items, that’s how I would go if I was playing Staff. In general, I find condition damage stacking on a Mesmer to be less useful than in other classes.

Power + Crit is best way to go even with Staff. Warlock hits that hard in groups.

The problem with your thinking is that it assumes sub based games have better PVP support and that’s obviously not the case. The best PVP support I’ve experienced existed in the first Guild Wars up until they decided to just blanderize* the skills.

WoW doesn’t have good PVP support. WoW and Blizz have far worse balance issues than either Guild Wars game. Rift has bigger issues as well. You get a new map with a major patch in those games. You got a new map with a major patch here.

So a sub does nothing to help with PVP. Only a greater focus on PVP does and right now ANet has sPVP on the backburner. You must realize that though people view GW as a PVP game, the vast majority of time spent playing by the overall populace is in PVE.

*Blanderize is a word invented and trademarked by etiolate LLC and all future uses of the word must show due rights and respect by being suave.

In WvWvW, Mesmer portal bombs are freezing my game up. I’ve never had this problem until this week and I’ve run into the tactic many times before. The culling of course still exists, but this is a new problem. I have not changed my hardware in the past week.

Gilosean.3805:

Conner.4702:

Sky.9347:

http://www.reddit.com/user/Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

-Snip-

“Because ArenaNet (sort of) held a hard line against all VP with GW1 — no VP ever, year after year — and it wasn’t that fun. It was stagnant.”
- Mike O’Brien, November 2012

I am very interested in how you can combine horizontal and vertical progression (progressing in two different directions?) for the same content… I believe it can not be done, and instead you can only create a very slow, very bloated vertical progression.

I’m out. I haven’t requested refunds, and so I will keep an eye on GW2 over the years just to see what happens. I can’t see me ever coming back to “catch up” with the treadmill.

Mister Mike O’Brien does not speak for me. I never felt GW1 was stagnant or not fun due to no vertical progression. On the contrary it was liberating to be able to do anything without the pressure of wondering if my gear was good enough.

I doubt I’m the only one that feels that way.

Exactly.

I think O’Brian here is making this mistake because he’s too close to games. Of course it’s boring for him – he spends how much time thinking about, talking about and playing the game? If 1) Everyone else is as invested as he is, and 2) Every / most players share his tastes, then his conclusion is logical.

But we’re not as invested as he is, and we don’t all share his tastes. This is a fun diversion, not something where we want to worry about regular scheduling. ANet knew they were going for the casual market, and that market doesn’t want to worry about keeping up in a game. Life is busy enough as it is, there are other priorities. A game is something to play when I want, not something I must log into regularly so I can still play.

I think it ties into the flap over one-time events too. The Other-Priorities market is a different market than the Reliably-Online market, and ANet keeps getting them mixed up.

That said, the AMA provided answers and made it clear that ANet is at least listening to community concerns. They know they goofed, they’ll fix it, and knowing that makes me more confidant in the game long-term.

The difference is not hardcore v casual. It’s healthy MMO players v unhealthy MMO players.

I don’t think its the casual market as talked about that we’re speaking of here. I have 700 hours into this game and have thousands of hours in the first Guild Wars. I played WoW competitively. I don’t consider that time investment casual, but I don’t want “shallow vertical progression” because I see that VP actually offers no new experiences and changes nothing.

So it’s not just a casual audience, but an older, wiser audience that still plays heavily.

This is the simple formula for game livelihood: New content + New ways of tackling content.

Not bigger numbers or minor rewards. Even the reward system, which Ascended targets, has more problems with too much RNG rather than lack of rewards. to obtain.

I don’t agree that the game lacks content. I’m 68% on map completion and have hundreds and hundreds of hours put into the game. What the game lacks is on par rewards for seeing most of that open world content. The world design and the open world content is the strength of the game’s PVE, but map completion and downleveling are not incentive enough to do them for enough of the population base.

People will go where the best stats are and the best money is to be made. That is the behavior of people. You can only design your game to account for that behavior and make sure it doesn’t hurt your game.

Conner.4702:

Sky.9347:

http://www.reddit.com/user/Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

-Snip-

“Because ArenaNet (sort of) held a hard line against all VP with GW1 — no VP ever, year after year — and it wasn’t that fun. It was stagnant.”
- Mike O’Brien, November 2012

I am very interested in how you can combine horizontal and vertical progression (progressing in two different directions?) for the same content… I believe it can not be done, and instead you can only create a very slow, very bloated vertical progression.

I’m out. I haven’t requested refunds, and so I will keep an eye on GW2 over the years just to see what happens. I can’t see me ever coming back to “catch up” with the treadmill.

Mister Mike O’Brien does not speak for me. I never felt GW1 was stagnant or not fun due to no vertical progression. On the contrary it was liberating to be able to do anything without the pressure of wondering if my gear was good enough.

I doubt I’m the only one that feels that way.

You are not. This is either a poorly worded or dumb statement by Mike. I took a year away from the game, maybe more than that, and came back to find the game changed and the way people approach encounters different. Skill system gave the game more life than increased stats can. Actually, increased stats don’t work against the getting stagnant problem. I can only imagine Mike spoke incorrectly.

Amon.5042:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

And the moral of this story is that i need to pay more attention to the feedback we are receiving. There is a great deal going on so a method of more open communication between the teams/design and the community would be great and I intend to work on how we can accomplish this.

Chris

Public Test Server

Indeed. I was hoping there would be a question about creating a Public Test Server. It would help bug testing and communication so much.

But I don’t have a reddit account and reddit has a bad rep, so I don’t bother with it. I also hate their formatting as well. (Not too fond of the buggy quote features here either. =P)

So could someone ask a question for me? A clarification on what improving existing rarity tiers means? I assumed that this meant things like infusions, but some have already argued this will be higher item levels within the same tier. The worry is that there will be Ascended backs for 80s that are more powerful than the current ascended backs for 80s.

That blog post is silly and without any solid basis. The writer doesn’t even check to see how long it actually takes ANet’s teams to design something like Lost Shores. They just assume an amount of time to fit their purpose.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

etiolate.9185:

It’s not just mistrust, but confusion as well. As has been noted, they’ve come out with responses but the “we needed to bridge a gap” explanation doesn’t hold up.

It’s a lot harder to communicate and be believed when the mistrust is there. The confusion and mistrust work together to prevent any answer which doesn’t “make sense” to the listener from being accepted.

This is one of the problems with the talk going on now, and the issue with people taking a hard line with “they lied, end of story” . . . no matter what the company would try to say, there’s that nagging doubt now planted: “are they lying again?”

It’s a terrible way to box in the issue, it turns this into “you lied, yes or no?” questions not being answered, “so the assumption has to reasonably be they lied, right? Right?”

Putting the issue into closed terms, and then adding mistrust into the mix . . . no, there’s not a way out of that without leaving that doubt in there. It’s why I think the people who are being the loudest aren’t going to be satisfied with any addressing of the topic at all until they get the answer they want.

You seem to be approaching this from the angle that all doubt leads to histrionics. People are capable of hearing an explanation that makes sense and accepting it. In other words, you don’t keep silent due to a handful of fools. The silence only worsens the situation.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

etiolate.9185:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

etiolate.9185:

I think that question isn’t adequate enough. It still allows wiggle room to answer it in a way that leaves all options open. I’d prefer a straight, “Yes or no. Will there be gear added with greater stats than Ascended gear from now until the next expansion?
And if Yes, do you feel you have compromised the vision of your game.
And if No, to what purpose does the increase stats on Ascended gear help the game?”

You know, two things.

There’s still wiggle room with those questions, because “until the next expansion” could mean that they just market the next content update as an expansion and now they kept their word. Or they can say “no, no we won’t do that” and then do it right after the expansion . . . and keep their word.

And secondly, if we’re going to start off assuming they’re dishonest and compromised their vision, it’s not rational to expect them not to be dishonest or compromise it again.

Like I said elsewhere, no matter what they say, no matter how they say it, it’s not going to help defuse this whole thing anymore.

I should probably change expansion to level cap increase. Basically, is Ascended the new and final plateau for 80s? If they answered that straight with a yes or no then people could at least know whats really going on. Some may be unhappy if they are adding more gear tiers, but then they could at least know to not waste their time with the game.

As a company, they’ve lost trust. They need to rebuild the trust. That’s why things are asked with a sense of doubt. That doubt was not there before this change.

Mm, yeah. Better phrase of the question. Still won’t stop them from wriggling out of it if you expect them to. That’s more what the point of my post was – once you don’t trust them and doubt their word, how can you take what they say at face value anymore?

It’s not just mistrust, but confusion as well. As has been noted, they’ve come out with responses but the “we needed to bridge a gap” explanation doesn’t hold up.

Beyond the angle of some idea of betrayal, the change to a gear treadmill doesn’t even make sense for their pricing model. Gear treadmills were popular because they worked towards keeping people subscribed. As Guild Wars 2 is a different business model, the treadmill really serves no purpose and is rather out of place. The advantage of Buy 2 Play is that you can take a break and come back later without being disadvantaged. Due to that, you can focus on non-power based hooks. That’s why I had the follow up questions asking to what purpose do the stat increases serve.

Due to there being no real need of a treadmill, people like myself are wiling to listen if they can rationalize the stat increase, and if not that, adjust things so that its isolated within one segment of the game (fractals).

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

etiolate.9185:

I think that question isn’t adequate enough. It still allows wiggle room to answer it in a way that leaves all options open. I’d prefer a straight, “Yes or no. Will there be gear added with greater stats than Ascended gear from now until the next expansion?
And if Yes, do you feel you have compromised the vision of your game.
And if No, to what purpose does the increase stats on Ascended gear help the game?”

You know, two things.

There’s still wiggle room with those questions, because “until the next expansion” could mean that they just market the next content update as an expansion and now they kept their word. Or they can say “no, no we won’t do that” and then do it right after the expansion . . . and keep their word.

And secondly, if we’re going to start off assuming they’re dishonest and compromised their vision, it’s not rational to expect them not to be dishonest or compromise it again.

Like I said elsewhere, no matter what they say, no matter how they say it, it’s not going to help defuse this whole thing anymore.

I should probably change expansion to level cap increase. Basically, is Ascended the new and final plateau for 80s? If they answered that straight with a yes or no then people could at least know whats really going on. Some may be unhappy if they are adding more gear tiers, but then they could at least know to not waste their time with the game.

As a company, they’ve lost trust. They need to rebuild the trust. That’s why things are asked with a sense of doubt. That doubt was not there before this change.

I think that question isn’t adequate enough. It still allows wiggle room to answer it in a way that leaves all options open. I’d prefer a straight, “Yes or no. Will there be gear added with greater stats than Ascended gear from now until the next expansion?
And if Yes, do you feel you have compromised the vision of your game.
And if No, to what purpose does the increase stats on Ascended gear help the game?”

Leaderboards will help, but I am not sure they will help make people care about Cap Point mode.

Other game modes should be higher up on the list of priorities. Forget the e-sports stuff until you have a mode that people care enough about. I would be playing more spvp if there were more game options. I played thousands of hours of Guild Wars spvp and I just can’t get into the current maps. The community is not for Cap Point.

In regards to scaling, copied over from the redundant thread:

I think they just mean the calculations for their scaling are not tweaked properly and that encounters need to scale in more interesting ways. That’s just my take on it though.

For example, there exist many complaints about the Reinforcement segment of the final Lost Shore event, and I had heard that the scaling was crazy for this part. It was indeed the slowest and most boring part of the event. When I redid the finale Event on an alt, there were less players and the whole process was cut in half. This leads me to believe that when things get to critical zerg levels, the scaling is still totally out of sorts.

I think they just mean the calculations for their scaling are not tweaked properly and that encounters need to scale in more interesting ways. That’s just my take on it though.

For example, there exist many complaints about the Reinforcement segment of the final Lost Shore event, and I had heard that the scaling was crazy for this part. It was indeed the slowest and most boring part of the event. When I redid the finale Event on an alt, there were less players and the whole process was cut in half. This leads me to believe that when things get to critical zerg levels, the balance is still totally out of sorts.

There’s a new blog post about post-Lost Shores but it completely avoids talking about the Ascended gear controversy.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/chris-whiteside-on-the-lost-shores-and-beyond/

Ned Stark.9356:

Aethena.7609:

+1.

I think ArenaNet, no matter what their stated intentions, has to acknowledge that a large part of their player base has taken this (the introduction of Ascended gear etc) as a less-than-positive change and a move away from the philosophy expressed in the Manifesto.

CCP listened to EVE Online players when they were unhappy with the direction the game was taking with the Incarna expansion, and went back to focusing on what mattered to the players. I hope that ArenaNet can do the same.

I +1 your quote and response but you already stated the difference between these two companies. CCP which listens to its players also has them get involved which is why the CSM was formed. Anet on the other hand hardly listens at all and refuses to let the players get involved. Although I don’t think they could form anything as groundbreaking as CCP’s CSM which was pure genius

Having a Player Test Realm/Server/Shard would help a lot.

“A large amount of posts by moderators being locked, merged, deleted / logging infractions against – due to posts not being ‘constructive criticism’ or ‘overly negative’.#”

To add to this issue, you can submit e-mail complaints and challenges to these infractions and moderation actions, but I have yet to get a response. I had a post deleted and infracted for “personal attack and insults” that was merely agreeing with another post and adding another issue I had with the game to the other’s post as an addendum. Neither post had name calling or personal attacks. They were benign posts. I submitted a complaint response to the listed email and have not even received a confirmation that they even processed the email. I don’t find waiting weeks on a response to be adequate.

Stormleaf.1769:

etiolate.9185:

Stormleaf.1769:

Why should ArenaNet even say anything if everyone is going to call every single thing they ever post a lie or PR spin or whatever, regardless of what they say? This is exactly what everyone is doing to them. Get over yourselves, people. Show a little respect and rationality.

They need a straight yes or no to the question of whether or not there will be new stat-increased tiers of gear beyond between now and the next expansion. If it’s a yes then people will leave. If it’s a no then the whole outrage will die down.

They aren’t answering that question and its only making people more worried.

Pretty sure “we’re not making a gear treadmill” completely answers that question.

Not really. The statement is “Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill.” That’s different, as you can always adjust your goal and get shifty with the definition of gear treadmill. The more assuring part is that they don’t plan to introduce new tiers of gear every three months. Yet even that has wiggle room in it’s statement:

“We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.”

They can just claim that people don’t need to get ascended gear to enjoy all parts of the game and pretend that the behavior of the populace has no relevance to their intentions. Essentially, they can create a tiering problem that spreads to other parts of the game and just claim ignorance to its existence as their defense.

In addition, the problem is that other answers have been less assuring and have created a mix message.

That’s why a straight yes or no answer to a straight up question needs to be had. ArenaNet needs to regain trust with the public that they have lost due to their announcement and then carefully coded response.

Stormleaf.1769:

Why should ArenaNet even say anything if everyone is going to call every single thing they ever post a lie or PR spin or whatever, regardless of what they say? This is exactly what everyone is doing to them. Get over yourselves, people. Show a little respect and rationality.

They need a straight yes or no to the question of whether or not there will be new stat-increased tiers of gear beyond between now and the next expansion. If it’s a yes then people will leave. If it’s a no then the whole outrage will die down.

They aren’t answering that question and its only making people more worried.

Merthax.5172:

“Not acceptable?”

Unfortunately, you are going to eventually have to accept it and move on.

Not at all. Keep pushing the issue.

A reoccurring topic on the Mesmer forum is the lacking aoe options for the class and how it hurts Mesmers in wall sieges and in tagging mobs in large scale DEs.

Do people feel a 3 second pulse (with a pulse every second) being added to Mind Stab would help? It’s still not a spammable AOE, but maybe in conjunction with another abilities, it would help with the issue.

It’s a great dungeon and mode. I agree that I don’t need the lure of extra stats to run it. I just wanted better loot and the new loot tables and drop rates are much improved. So not only do I enjoy the dungeons, the rewards I get are productive or profitable for the development of my character and my time. If I was earning my way towards armor with prestige rather than stats, I’d be happy as well. It’s not so much the numbers that people care about but the rarity.

It would be better if it was attacking at 6 second rate with improvement from Phantasmal Haste, but Mage is attacking at 7.5 second rate with no benefit from Phantasmal Haste.

Fiontar: If ArenaNet would come outright and say something like..

-this is the new and final plateau of stats
-infusion only work in the Fractals dungeon
-Ascended will be the same as exotic outside of dungeons

or anything like that which is a definite, final statement so as to calm concerns over power creep and gear treadmills, then people would give them that benefit of the doubt.

But they have been purposefully vague and overly quiet in response to this. A lot of PR speak in response and avoiding the tough question. That’s not a good sign.

mulch.2586:

Crater.1625:

Blacksarevok.8104:

They gap between Exotic and legendary was an effort gap.

Ascended gear was intended to fill that gap.

However, by adding better stats to ascended gear they successfully created ANOTHER gap to take the original gaps place.

GG Arenanet on becoming EA; fix one problem, create another even worse problem.

There wasn’t even an effort gap! They put Ascended items in for no reason except to cater to people who can’t live without higher numbers.

Fact is if you’ve been watching feedback here and on other gaming sites, there were a lot of people who felt like there’s not much to do in GW2, no endgame, boring after you hit 80, “i don’t want legendary and got full exotics right after I got 80, so I quit logging in” and over and over, the flames about no endgame.

So… here’s some endgame. With fractal, so no matter how you do it, it never ends. Smoke em if you got em, we’ll be here a while.

Using troll feedback isn’t exactly a smart way to refine your game. I am perfectly aware of people who bought the game and then quit because of a lack of a treadmill, but that’s like buying Mario Bros and being mad at a lack of hookers.

I approve of this idea but would exclude the current five man dungeons and explorable modes as well. Basically, keep Ascended stats and infusions stats to the only place that currently needs infusion stats: Fractal of the Mysts and all future Fractal-like dungeons.

Otherwise, you run into the need to continually rebalance the rest of the game and the rest of the dungeons so that the new stats don’t begin to trivialize the difficulty of their content. Currently, dungeons already possess much needed work on bugs and difficulty tuning. Allowing vertical progression into them will only increase the work needed to properly tune the dungeons.

It would be best to keep vertical progression almost as separate as sPVP currently is. If it must exist, let it exists in the Fractal of the Mists, but keep it from the rest of the game.

Great post DootMasterX.

I too have done the grind and I don’t want to do it anymore. You realize the progress you are getting is only an illusion of progress and the challenge you face is more a statistical one than a skill based one. Once you realize that, all the pride and reward from the vertical gear treadmill vanishes. And the most disheatening part is that you never feel fulfilled. You just have to get that next extra bit of stats, but then you’re off looking for the next carrot.

It’s unhealthy.