Guild Wars 2

Last night three of us were in a party and killed that Champion shark in South Shore. Nobody got anything from it.

Other world drops really feels like what Zapan.7460 said – a cap on rares/exotics/T6 mats. I haven’t found an onix loadstone in two days after farming approx 4 hrs each day: earth elementals in malchors leap and cursed shore – cathedral of verdance — so ya, cross-zone, split over two days, doing WvW and dungeons inbetween farming, farming about an hour each session — that’s supposed to “reset” DR isn’t it?

Could be rng, but, could also be low enough rng to suck the life out of the game.

Vortex.5146:

Rainfall.4017:

The entire of GW2 should not be designed around a minority of players who have trouble. Pretty silly thing to say.

Wow. Way to support someone with a disability. A solution is easy-make 2 or 3 levels of difficulty. Easy=slow melting snowflakes. Hard=fast melting. You get the same achievement but better rewards for the harder one. Simple.

They should totally do this.
I also don’t like the timed nature of these jumping puzzles. But I’d like to see the content.

papryk.6273:

even in Diablo3 you can have decent drops now after patch 1.05….but here Anet is doing the opposite…

Dang this is exactly what I’ve been saying since all this began.

Please please please look at D3 for a model of how to do it wrong – the D3 team finally figured it out and started to loosen their purse strings. But it’s far too late.

D3 has fun gameplay (as does GW2 imo) but even with the most fun gameplay, it’s ultimately time spent in a state of constant frustration. GW2 has gone down that exact same path – and it’s sad to see them doing it so shortly after the D3 fiasco.

I love GW2 and hope they fix this before everyone leaves.

yurtshone.7325:

A problem I see is that the rewards for doing these “dynamic” events is appalling. So people have learnt this now and simply do not want to waste time on it. A group of five only the other day were with me in The Iron Marches and did the Fire Shaman boss. We took around 15 mins to down him. A really fun fight in fact, I would say one of the best I have come across in open world. But after the fight, we got nothing at all for a reward. And I mean nothing. Not even some grey junk to sell. I am all for having fun and epic battles but please, reward me for time spent.

This totally! The overzealous nature of “making the economy realistic” is KILLING the game. If the game is not fun and/or frustrating, a “perfect” economy is pointless since no one will be there to use it.

Henchmen, imo, is not a fix. It’s a cudgel and easy patch to slap on that will end up with the same result – soloing content meant for multiple players, and eventually even with henchmen, with crap rewards, no one will bother even then.

rhodoc.2381:

Important note: Most of players got this error for the first time in last 1 day. This may help for the error fixing…

Maybe most, but I’ve had this since beta.

This and crazy loud pet noises.

Easy to replicate and happens all the time.

I’ve seen a few of his videos and he always struck me as fairly down to earth and high quality. This video is no exception.

Re: PVE, I agree with his sentiments, but even if servers were merged, it wouldn’t get me or many 80’s back into other zones. Granted, if there are enough new players and alts, it might not be an issue — to them. But it’s still an issue to me as an 80 who would really like to revisit all the zones. One of the huge things promised for GW2 before release was that all zones would be viable at 80 — and now that’s just not the case at all. I want to farm for my legendary all across all zones but now, I’m stuck in Orr. That’s a complete waste of all the other zones and the devs time. And frustrating for me since I was expecting to be able to play all zones at 80.

-It’s been in since beta.
-It’s all pets.
-It’s been reported in a previous patch as “fixed”.
-Not sure it’s status.
-I suggest reporting it in-game whenever it happens (I do). They might just have an Excel spreadsheet with “number of reports of this bug” and do the most reported ones first (speculation).

I’ve been following GW2 on xfire (http://beta.xfire.com/games) every day since launch and comparing against WoW/Rift/SWTOR/TSW. (You have to watch xfire over time manually since they only reveal the last 30 days.)

It’s “dying” in parallel with WoW and is almost lock-step with WoW’s up and down ticks, save for GW2 events (big up ticks).

It’s almost always exactly half the number of hours as WoW.

EXCEPT, since the Ascended patch, it has been lower than half of WoW most of the time.

-Rift was flat at about 150 hours until their Storm Legion which bumped it up to about 800 hours.
-SWTOR has been flat at about 3500 hours with an uptick to about 5500 when they went FTP.
-TSW was pretty much DOA at about 350 hours.
-GW2 started at about 180000 hours (above LoL at #1 spot).
-WoW (MoP) started at about 160000 hours (ya, less than GW2 launch, and always less than LoL).
-LoL was about 170000 back when GW2 and MoP released.

Anyhow, watching the numbers is fun for me – so take them as you will. I know people love xfire if it gives readings that fit their world view, and hate/discount it otherwise.

I still love the game even with the crap I post and have logged over 500 hours.

edit: their bbcode/textile is broken.

I know quite a few people who haven’t run dungeons enough to give any [useful] feedback. I’m in that same boat.

For this reason, imo, ANet should roll out a quality “LFG” product, give that some time to stew, and then ask for this sort of feedback.

Right now, imo, dungeons are just not accessible enough to get feedback from a very broad spectrum of players.

It will be disappointing to see time devoted to changing dungeons based on this feedback instead of being allocated to creating the LFG.

Guild leaders are able to demote other players of the same rank.
Yey! So happy

ChairGraveyard.2967:

Dromar.1027:

1)Play the game.
2)Get Rares.
3)Salvage Rares.
4)Save for gear or sell.
5)Progress or profit.

In 5 easy steps your problem can be solved. If your looking for exotic gear then do Dungeons. I’ve had good exotic drops in FotM.

Rare drop rate is bugged since the last patch that was supposed to increase it. You’re lucky to get 1 rare a day from farming Cursed Shore now. So yeah, this doesn’t work like it used to at all.

In 3 days of farming Cursed Shore, I got one rare. That’s with a full magic find set. Something is screwed up.

I’ve read this sort of thing a lot lately.

Is this bug possibly account dependent? (Not asking ‘ChairGraveyard’ specifically, just throwing it out there.)

I farm those areas every day and depending on the variables (how good the group I’m in is, how lucky I am to hit good events, etc), I end up with between 1-5 rares. My MF is limited to Omnomberry bars, the 24-hours guild buffs (not the little 1hr banners), 25-luck stacks, and pirate runes.

ot. I use Mythic or BL salvage kits and haven’t seen a drop in Ecto recovery. I agree with the people talking about market condition changes causing the price increase.

HOWEVER, I do believe ANet nurfed the hell out of getting BL salvage kits from BL chests. Which sucks big time. But I understand why they did it – forces you to buy the kits outright instead of getting them, and other stuff, from the BL chests.

No because in six months you’d be saying: “1.60-2.60 gold in 30min would you be happy”.

I’d just like that every mob drop something (not just trash bones either). Just for the “ohh shinies!” effect.

If every mob dropped something, ya, you’ll end up at a new, higher, baseline — as a side effect (a temporary uptick in inflation). But the psychological effect would be priceless.

Q1. When did you begin playing? (post bw’s)
A1. BWE2

Q2. how many hours total do you have? (/age)
A2. 541 hours

Q3. What’s your most gold banked so far?
A3. 157 gold

Q4. Do you have a max level character (s)? (number if more than one)
A4. just 1

Q5. List 1-3 areas / zones / events / tp; where you spend most of your time for income.
A5. Orr, Frostgorge, Fractals

Q6. Do you mainly use MF or not?
A6. Yes (just runes and Omnomberry Bars)

Q7. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a mob? If so, how many and total?
A7. No

Q8. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a chest? If so, how many and total?
A8. Only the Karka event.

Q9. What’s the most number of rare weapons you have looted in one day or 8hrs time?
A9. ~10

Q10. How many rare or exotic weapons do you “expect” to loot in one hour of time?
A10. 2-3

Q11. How many lodestones have you looted total so far? (all types)
A11. 10

Q12. Do you craft? If so, do you have a 400 crafter? if so, how many?
A12. 400 on: weaponsmith, armorsmith, cooking, jewelcrafting

Q13. Do you sell your looted crafting mats? (specify optional)
A13. no

Q14. Do you feel your return, (in terms of items, completion, income, etc) for your time, has been worth it?
A14. yes

Q15. In ONE word, what needs improved most; from your perspective?
A15. “Quality-of-Life”, meaning the little things:

—bugs
—binding “f” to separate loot/npc interaction/rez
—TP funcationality
—Guesting
—LFG
—etc…

Uncontested Temple of Balthazar on Jade Quarry 1:45pm (PST)

I second this as a quick fix.

But would like a cross-zone, cross-server, LFG as a true solution.

Yesterday I was even suppressed in my own party chat after saying “hi” and then “oops”. That’s messed up.

edit: I should clarify. I said those two things in party chat and a few others in map chat (can’t remember – but it was just “normal” LFMore stuff). But it suppressed all my messaging in both party and map chat. So I couldn’t message in party chat anymore.

Hermes.7014:

garraeth.3267:

This reminds me of D3. Their dev team was so concerned with market “balance” that their drop system was so neutered that their game was not fun*.
They’re getting better so I’ve heard, but it’s way too late and pretty much everyone has stopped D3.

If the markets are perfectly balanced but the game is not fun*, it doesn’t matter one bit. Why repeat the same mistake D3 just did a few months ago (and are now learning from)?

kitten the market. Bring back the fun*.

*fun: in this context – meaning the thrill of seeing STUFF fall all the time, and rare-ish items on a frequent enough basis to keep things exciting. Think Vegas — 90% return on slot machines.

They’d be taking wrong assumptions. Who on GW2 has ever complained for getting drops too easily? No one I believe.
This isn’t D3. They said the game would have been fun and different from other MMOs, without grindfests and such. They can’t change that all of a sudden, because it is that way they could lose players.

Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. I agree with you that no one was complaining about too many drops.

I’m just saying that this “bug” may not be a bug at all, but rather a design decision made to “tighten” the TP (make prices rise via scarcity), and because a lot of devs I know have the philosophy that “everyone can’t have lots of stuff”. And I was using D3 as a recent example to illustrate.

There’s a philosophy among devs that I know, where they believe that there is a bell curve of who has what amount of stuff. There’s the bottom percent, the middle percent (this represents the largest number of players), and the top percent.

I’m saying that D3 shifted the bell curve to the left (verrry few people had any [good] stuff dropping) – to the extreme! People weren’t getting good drops for MONTHS (literally). And I’m seeing that start to happen in GW2 now. Not just with this “bug” (which, I’m wondering if it’s really a bug after all – since a bug in our favor would be fixed overnight), but with ANet’s general philosophy of wanting everything to be a grind (Ascended, Legendaries, etc. – vs/ an exciting quest, hunt, gameplay, whatever).

I’m just suggesting that the GW2 dev’s learn from D3’s mistakes. Now, finally, the D3 dev’s are starting to realize that they are making is a GAME and not the real world, so if everyone has TONS of stuff it’s not a bad thing (like it would be in the real world).

tldr: grind is bad. more drops are good. overabundance of items is good. this is not real life so dev’s shouldn’t try to orchestrate it as such.

This reminds me of D3. Their dev team was so concerned with market “balance” that their drop system was so neutered that their game was not fun*.
They’re getting better so I’ve heard, but it’s way too late and pretty much everyone has stopped D3.

If the markets are perfectly balanced but the game is not fun*, it doesn’t matter one bit. Why repeat the same mistake D3 just did a few months ago (and are now learning from)?

kitten the market. Bring back the fun*.

*fun: in this context – meaning the thrill of seeing STUFF fall all the time, and rare-ish items on a frequent enough basis to keep things exciting. Think Vegas — 90% return on slot machines.

Karizee.8076:

Azjenco.9425:

arabeth.2361:

Serious question: why do mainstream companies like Anet use Reddit to answer questions like this, when Reddit is most famous for being a site that people use to post creepy pictures of underage girls? Also: it’s a horrible site for organizing any kind of information. It seems like the sketchy nature and poor structure of the site would be a terrible match.

My thoughts exactly. Using reddit is a seriously stupid move on ANet’s part.

They have always used reddit for their AMA’s. Since before the game launched.

And it is a horrible decision that excludes the majority of players. And only gives them incite from the 1%-ers who have GW2 and Reddit accounts, and even know what Reddit is. If they truly wanted to know what their players were doing, they would ask people who were not in the internet echo chamber.

I don’t have a reddit account (don’t want one). You should take questions from your forums.

Your house is buring around you and you stop to smell the roses. Why are you ignoring the list of questions ‘Samuraikitten86’ compiled from the community and instead spending the short AMA time answering: “What games do you like to play besides Guild Wars 2?”

Any planned improvements to the chat UI (changing colors, etc)?

Anything planned to allow for players to rebind the current 3-action “f” key to three separate keys?

Any plans to allow the person who created a guild to demote or kick a “leader”?

Background
Pong on the TV, Atari 2600, Nintendo, Apple IIC, PC (IBM), UO beta, Doom, Halflife, Diablo 2….then stopped about 10 years until…Vanguard, WoW, Rift, SWTOR, GW2. Messed with some others (Vindictus, LotR, D&D, AOC, Secret Wars…etc).

Opinion on GW2
I was mostly excited about no vertical progression. None of the “person with the most TIME wins” garbage. And downscaling so that all zones are always relevant (didn’t happen – I’m still hopeful they’ll “figure it out”). I’m fairly cynical about dev’s “figuring it out” however. Don’t get me wrong, I only gripe because I see so much potential in GW2 and love so much of it. There are a ton of quality of life things that are pretty easy to program (I’m a dev by trade) that, for the life of me, can’t understand why dev’s don’t include. And I’m in Irvine and talk to game devs all the time.

Just simple things like allowing us to rebind “interact w/ npc”, “rez” and “loot” to 3 different keys. Or realizing the massive fragmentation such granular leveling in FotM would cause. No LFG, Bank space for a subset of crafting mats. Not understanding the concept that every mob should feel like a pinata (a HUGE downfall, imo, of D3 — no mob should EVER not drop loot). More loot may “destroy” the economy, but a fun game, imo, trumps an economy where items have higher cost due to scarcity (again, D3 should let drops rain from heaven and kitten their AH – they still make $ if the item is cheap – but people would still be playing it if they got “mad lootz” – GW2 is starting to get the D3 vibe imo)). And the more recent direction down the path to vertical progression (I quit Rift after they went totally nutz in this area, and is part of the reason I quit WoW).

Dead.7385:

Two X Knives Style.4592:

Did it make finding a dungeon group faster and easier? Yes for sure it did. Were these groups successful?

Thats a positive

Two X Knives Style.4592:

Not really. The majority of the time it would be 1-2 people that carry the rest of the group or the group would just fall apart.

Do you know why that is? Let me tell you a little secret – the more players doing dungeons – the more likely you will end up in a bad group. Shocking I know….

Two X Knives Style.4592:

The LFG system gave people the instant satisfaction that they wanted (Unless you were a dps where you had to wait 30mins for a spot anyway).

Ohh please. Come back when you played Everquest classic and had to do corpse recoveries in the deepest parts of dungeons with see invis mobs then you can talk about “instant satisfaction”. WoW vanilla was 10X more instant satisfaction than the games before it. Wanna know why Quests were so revolutionary in WoW? Because they took about 5-10 mins and you always were rewarded.

That stuff didn’t happen before. Quests took DAYS and DAYS to complete of camping multiple dungeon across the world. All at level 10 too.

Two X Knives Style.4592:

But what was not expected was the negative impact LFG had on the communities in the realms. People stopped talking with each other, there was no need to communicate with others.

Wrong wrong wrong.

1. GW2 is a CROSS SERVER game. Aside from fractals which you can trick using overflow join in it is a purely cross server experience. WOW is not, it is NOT built in this way. The comparison is null. I grouped with people from all manner of servers because of its infrastructure – WoW that doesn’t happen.

Two X Knives Style.4592:

People could now log on, queue up, tab out, accept the queue pop and collect their loots without ever speaking to anyone or moving out of town.

Really? Really? K, let me tell you my day:
Log on / Join my brother / Go to http://gw2lfg.com/lfgs and post LF3M fractal “X” / /map in lions arch LF3M fractal “X” / do fractals / sell in lions arch / exit.

Notice something? I never left lions arch. Big deal huh?

Two X Knives Style.4592:

This is so bad for a community. World pvp became extinct b/c of this.

We don’t have World PvP so point is moot.

Btw flying mounts killed world PvP pre dungeon finder. But I guess that doesn’t help your point eh?

Two X Knives Style.4592:

Eventually LFG led to LFR which did the same thing but made matter even worse. Yes I know I am talking about WoW and GW2 is very different from WoW.

Then stop comparing the two

Two X Knives Style.4592:

But if the system had those negatives effects on the community in one game where the player base is practically the same in another I can not understand the reasoning for wanting that system in GW2.

The community is very different. Guilds server almost no purpose here for PvE while in WoW they are the cornerstone of its endgame.

So in essence your comparing two different games, then saying they are different. Then going right back to comparing them. Well done.

You summed it up perfectly. Unfortunate I’m afraid a lot of “todays devs” are more like ‘Two X Knives Style’ with myopic (religious?) views when it comes to specific issues.

They end up killing their own games.

Stupid question: but why are the stats listed twice?

Thx!

Halcyon.7352:

Not a bug, that part of Phase 1 wasn’t extended.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/Investigation-by-Miyani-bugged/first#post776212

Oh how lame.

Thx for the replies you two.

I did Subdirector Noll and Canach like 2 minutes before.

…unless that is, I understood incorrectly and their extension ended at midnight server time.

Pastkeeper Saballa is nowhere to be found on Jade Quarry.

Plz fix.

Thx.

gianco.8409:

This blog post, dating back to june, 19th 2012, titled “Is it fun?” was the one that made me dream about a long term fun with no grind or “I play more time than you” gear, I actually bought the game after reading it.

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Now, 5 months later, reality brings me back on planet earth and the answer is “No, it is not fun”.

Obviously, I’ll wait and see what these armours are and how they impact the game (especially WWW), but I’m too experienced to not see what is going to happen here (Daoc=> TOA expansion, War => Tomb King, etc., etc.).

This was one of the biggest sellers of this game for me too. I’m so sick of every MMO being about “who has the most time wins” rather than having fun or “who has the most skill wins”.

I was also totally excited about their promise of downlevling and that has completely flopped. Fix that first ANet. I want to go to ALL the zones and play with my friends without 1-shotting everything and getting crap loot. I’m guessing you’re not working on that since it’s actually GOOD that everyone is clumped in two zones – if everyone was spread evenly throughout, all the zones would be too sparsely populated.

Fix the bugged DEs, crappy downlevling, lost mouse cursor issues, “f” for everything problem, et-al. Things we’ve been at you about for months (since beta) and that are extremely easy to fix (yes, I’m a programmer) — allowing users to bind “loot”, “rez”, or “interact with npc” to something other than “f” is trivial.

All I see with this change is a way to suck money and time from me. So does this mean eventually I’ll have to have multiple sets of gear? More bag space? Bank space? Mats for the Mystic Forge? What?

And all those who WANT gear treadmills have already left and are not going to come back. Never happens.

This is a slippery slope that you originally said you’d never start down. This is step #1.

Why no kitten kittens?

Change everyone to the same height in instanced jumping puzzles. I know that won’t work in non-instanced ones.

It’ll break immersion but might fix all the camera issues. And fix all the issues with puzzles like the clock tower and asura seeing the backsides of norn/charr.

Thanks!

I definitely agree with the OP.

And wish that the tracker sites would include ALL the zone bosses that have chests.

Even if the higher lvl ones give more karma/gold/whatever, why limit yourself to those three? There is usually a huge time gap between them so why not hit up the others throughout the world – there is no opportunity loss by doing so.

The Flame Elemental is hard at low levels, and if you’re still getting used to it. But at lvl 80 and after a bit of practice, it gets easier – I promise. Last time I did it, it was me an two other random people, and it was down within five minutes.

Instanced? No way.

This is one of the things I love about the ANet team — they’ve got the guts to try something different, and imo this is a total win.

Seriously you didn’t think to feel out the market before plunking down $30+ to gamble? And now you QQ? You knew what you were getting into. And, if you DIDN’T then, that’s even worse and you were foolish for going into a gamble ignorant of the odds.

Entitlement indeed. Move to Greece.

/rant

Naoko.7096:

It’s sad to see people keep bringing up “skills” when it’s unrelated to the points some people brought up here. Let’s keep “skills” talks aside for pvp topics. They can balance/scale players in pvp all the system wants.

The topic on hand is that a mmo need a solid end-game grind that’s not just for cosmetic gears. Something to keep dedicated-type players feel constantly evolves and attached to this game. With no gear progression, they should have a backup alternative solid end-game. I gave my personal suggestion earlier in this topic that certain elements of end-game grinding can be included in future house content. There should be many ways. I hope the devs can produce something good and not just expansions only for extending the story and maps.

You’re idea may be great. But OP wants a “carrot” but does not specify.

GW2 has a TON of carrots. So because the OP saying he wants a carrot (his carrot? what carrot? more carrots? whose carrot?), forum posters have to assume what kind of carrot he meant…and the only carrot most people know about, that’s left out of GW2, is the gear progression “carrot”.

And the topic of skill (PvP or PvE – I hate PvP in MMOs) relates to the gear progression carrot.

—
I for one, am glad there is no progression “carrot”. And I see housing carrots the same as cosmetic carrots. Sure you don’t carry your house on your back (as with armor), but it’s purely cosmetic and nonfunctional. Cool with me tho, I’d dig it, but people are probably lumping housing in with “cosmetics”.

—
Another point is that the OP insists on is that no one likes “grind”. I like grind – sometimes. Depending on the gameplay. If I can listen to audio books and grind at the same time and enjoy the atmosphere, I love grinding. I run around in Frostgorge grinding just for fun. I skip Orr because those zones are not fun.

Most of my gamer friends feel the same — it all depends on the gameplay during the grind period.

It’s funny when people say GW2 is for carebears when GW2 is more about skill than a WoW (or clone).

Any ijit with no life can spend 20+ hours/day in WoW (or clone) to “beat” an extremely skilled — in any other game — player.

Time != skill.

TheDaiBish.9735:

The content designers (The Living World Team) aren’t the same people who do bug fixes with the programming (The Live Response Team), so they’ll be able to create new content alongside the optimisation and bug fixes

I get this, and you’re probably right. But why?

I know you “can’t take 9 women to make a baby in 1 month” in dev, but you can often times allocate knowledgeable devs (such as those working on new content) to areas that are in critical state (broken DE’s, broken skill points, bots, broken spawn timers, no custom binding of loot/rez/NPC interaction, FOV…just to name a few…even content creators can go through and, say, fix all the issues with Norn (see: Troll Garden jumping puzzle) and the like).

Then, put them back onto new content. Sure the new content will be a month behind or they’ll have to skip a planned event (no October event), but it will stave off some of the bleeding — these critical things are happening NOW. First impressions matter. Current players getting frustrated with months old issues matter.

Board won’t let me quote…I’m not going to wipe my cookies/history for one [broken for months RoR] site.

Re: defektive.3540
I’d add #4 to your list: too high a price (resource-wise) to implement a robust algorithm to determine spawns.

Granted they might be able to implement a “spawn server” dedicated box to do the hard number crunching to offload from the main game servers. But it’s extra complexity and hardware costs.

The cost of transmitting character positions to/from this extra box would probably be worth it since instead of the game box doing a basic calculation (as it may [is probably] be doing now), it would be spending that time on transmitting character positions every X seconds (not a critical time, could be 3-5 seconds or variable depending on game server load). It’d be something like max of 500 people per zone per server (overflows are different boxes), each users data would be [x,y,z] for the spawn box to know density…so that’s like 6k per update (~12 bytes per user) across the internal network, and quick lookup for game server (assuming all users are in RAM and doesn’t require a DB query). The response would be larger since it would include which mob to spawn (it’s ID#), at which position (x,y,z), and possibly more than 500 (just saying: more than the max # of players it could be sent) mobs spawning. It’d be a non-blocking asynch request/response system of course.

That way, the team would be able to increase the complexity (brains) of whatever system they build to manage spawns. AND, probably also be able to create truly scaling dynamic events…some sort of k-means clustering mix-up (I’m no math expert).

But ya know…us being arm-chair devs and all…don’t know all the in’s and out’s…fun with meta I guess tho ;p

Ditton.3149:

if they separate the bindings to the interaction key, that would be enough, people could just put the loot button on auto if they wanted and walk around…the whole interaction being the same key is a little draconic anyway

This, please a thousand times.

Please make it so users can bind reviving/rezzing, interacting with NPCs, and looting on three different keys.

I’m surprised this didn’t come up in the AMA, and am doubly surprised that there isn’t a 100 page thread about this on the board – is it a non issue for people? Seems like it would be an issue for tons of people.

Like you said, it’s very draconian. And I’m sorry, but it’s odd how the ANet team doesn’t think it’s an issue as they play the game themselves (my assumption, yes — based on me never seeing it brought up in an ama/blog/interview). I know a lot of game developers and it always boggles my mind when they play their own games and don’t see issues that the general playerbase sees (happens a lot). I always use applications I create as much as possible and with as many people as I can in order to “see” these issues from the perspective of a “normal Joe” user.

I just came to the forums to write the exact thing the OP is saying.

Talking with NPC’s can be (play-ability-wise, imo) bound to pretty much any key since you’re generally not talking with them “in the heat of the moment” as you do when you’re looting a lot of the time. So if you have to move your hand away from your “home” position, it’s not a big deal.

Same with reviving/rezzing. ESPECIALLY, imo, the reviving/rezzing people should be able to rebind (actually, I’d suggest for new players it defaults to something other than “F” automatically) since that’s so hard to get out of when you’re getting stomped by 10 mobs and get stuck for that fraction of a second unable to hit your “stability” before you have to hit a movement key to break from rezzing, and * wham *, you’re stunned and then downed next to the NPC who died at the start of the encounter.

And last night I reported a bug — I was trying to loot, hit “F” with a downed NPC nearby so got that instead. But I was “stuck” — no matter what I did (facerolled my keyboard in a panic, clicked every mouse button, alt-tab, etc..) it would not break me out of the rezzing of that NPC…and you know how loooong it takes to rez an NPC. So, of course, I died too.

Thanks for listening!

addendum: your parsing also need a bit of work.
“(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/)...so probably ~20% "
should be
“( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ ) …so probably ~20% "
without the spaces

regular expressions are neat and all, but hard to get right, sometimes over engineering causes these issues.

For me, at least, it’s FF. I can load the site up in FF and Chrome side by side and FF won’t have any buttons but Chrome will.

I get the same thing as teistiz (the “ReferenceError”). The div#_fg_votes is not there, so the JS trying to deal with it is failing. It’s a symptom to the problem of the missing id…so why is the id missing? It’s only there for logged in users…so why does part of the system think I’m logged in (the top nav) and part not think I’m logged in (the post line items)?

It’s really easy to replicate. So a google for ror session apache firefox might turn up something where FF has intermittent issues w/ RoR/Apache writing session cookies…? since it always works on chrome.

FF is still at ~20% market share (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/)...so probably ~20% of your site users are having this issue. Even if its not “critical”, it’s “in your face”.

…just sayin’

To me it’s not a big deal but I understand if it’s lagging (FPS “lag”) your system it’s huge.

But relating to this issue is that I’m constantly losing my mouse in that noise. Losing my mouse is waaaay more important to me than the actual noise. Please, please make the mouse bigger, more obvious, or something.

my hat…thrown in…

Zenyatoo.4059:

Money making – A brief guide from someone with 60g and whose friend has 120g with neither of us having ever played the TP at all

1. dungeons. The best dungeons to run are AC, CoF and HoTW.
AC – There are a few champion scavengers/howlers during the runs. 2/3 of them drop 5 silver. Eating an omnomberry bar raises this to over 7silver. Pure profit. The bosses also drop quite a bit of money (which is also raised by an omnomberry bar) most runs are 7s + 7s +22s +26s -2s (the bar) in 30 minutes. You can do all 3 paths 30 minutes each. with lucky drops thats almost a gold in 30 minutes for a first completion. (pop the omnomberry after you kill, or just before kohler, the drops before that arent really worth it at all)

CoF – path 1 and 2 only.
Finish them as you would normally. Path 1 takes ~15 minutes with a good group.
Take the 60 tokens. Buy 2 rare level 70 helmets with them. Salvage, and hope you get ecto. Profitiability varies. You could end up with only 26s+drops or you could get 26s+drops+3ecto. (45s on TP right now) per path.

HoTW – path 1. Other paths can be done, but are pretty long.
Same deal as CoF. Clear the run, get the helmet, salvage it.

The other potential ecto dungeons are CoE and Arah. Neither is really worth doing for that chance at ecto. Also as far as I am aware, no other dungeon has money drops like AC does.

Other money making -
Events, cursed shore, Frostgorge, ETC. While it seems counter productive, you usually want to find the events with a few people, but not too many. Tagging monsters can be hard in certain events, especially with bots. I can fill a 110 slot inventory in 1 grenth completion, but if I were to do pentinent 10+ times i’d probably still have slots left over because the mobs are dead before I can even hit them. The end chests also have a chance (albeit slight) for legendary precursors. Which, if you are doing them to reach that 1million karma, does mean you’ll be opening them quite a few times.

Other farm spots -
Anywhere lodestones drop. Lodestones can come from dungeon chests. But at the end of the day you could always saddle up the MF gear and go grind NW corner of frostgorge hoping for corrupted lodestones.

Anywhere specific crafting mats drop – blood, poison sacks, and scales are always in high demand. I know that the krait and ooze in WvWvW have a fairly high chance of armored scales. I do not know about other zones. But if you think youve found a good spot for it you could try these.

Good post. I’ve got about 95 gold and haven’t played the TP or run many dungeons (about 4 total).

Everything under your "Other money making – " section is how I play and I can attest to it’s correctness. People sitting at Pentinent wondering why they can’t tag anything — wrong thing to wonder about…better yet, go find events that spawn 10+ mobs per wave…but just you and another fellow are doing it. Then, you’ll be drowning in the drops.

Same with what you say about mobs for high-end mats. I’m pretty sure but any lvl 80 (maybe 78+?) elemental mob drops those high end loadstone style mats. So sparks, frost elementals, oozes, earth elementals, the doods up in NW and NE corner of frostgorge, etc.

Basically, play the game like it was designed to play. Don’t sit in one spot all day like you did in WoW/Rift/SWTOR. It won’t work and then you’ll come to the forums with frustrations about DR and grind.

Though I’d share…

This evening I was running around Cursed Shore and a downed player icon popped up on my minimap in the middle of a nearby event. So I ran over and the player was fighting off a clump of risen. I fought them off and healed the other player up and we finished the event. A couple seconds later I got a message from the player saying: “Thanks, you saved my bacon!”

I wanted to thank ANet for making a game where I can feel a little like a hero every time I play. I can spontaneously run over and help a fellow, and feel good about it. I can’t think of another game (MMO or otherwise) like this.

Thanks team!!
:)

I do this because it’s fun. Don’t care about the “lootz”. Don’t care about the people who “farm” it.
And no, I don’t just grab a bazooka and hit “1” the whole time.

Great post OP. I think what you said sums it up for a lot of us.

Claudius.5381:

They should downscale better. That means:

a) Make us weaker in low-level areas. As of now I am too strong when I play in a level 20 area as level 80 character, allegedly downscaled to level 22.

b) Give us karma, gold, xp like in level 80 areas.

c) Give us level adequate loot like in Orr.

Then it would be the same (loot-/xp-/karma-/goldwise) if I play in Kessex Hills or Cursed Shore. And that would be a very good thing because the high level player would spread all over the world.

I second this. Yes please.

Vircomore.4586:

Edenknight.9284:

Fozzik.1742:

Margoth

When I hit the DR for the first time I was in no way farming dynamic events. In fact I was exploring the map of Blazeridge Steppes, getting all the POI, Vistas and such. All I did was do each event once when I was nearby.

What I don’t understand with the system is how are players supposed to use DE’s to level to 80? This feels a bit like a penalty to level, let alone gain karma etc.

I’ve leveled to 80, played more than 200 hours, gotten 100% on more than half the zones in the game, along with discovering every nook and cranny, doing every event more than once, and doing all the puzzles. I even talk to most of the NPCs. I have around 10 gold, several exotics including a level 80 exotic weapon, about 60k karma, and I’ve horded a massive amount of crafting materials (overflowed my collections tab with multiple items).

Never, at any point in all of that, have I been affected at all by the DR system. Including my time in the Orr zones over the last week…repeating events and exploring. How do you explain that? What I see happening on these boards…people getting worked up like crazy over hyperbole and a few unsubstantiated anecdotes and screenshots with no context, and nobody making any attempt to provide real proof, makes me very skeptical about the whole thing.

Also, like I mentioned above, I see the DR system as being a very positive and necessary thing for the game. I don’t think it is the evil beast that people are trying to make it out to be, and I don’t think it affects players unless 1) there’s a bug, or 2) they are playing clearly outside what the developers intended.

I have 50 mystic clovers, 100% world map complete, a majority of my 250 stacks of T6 mats, my gift of energy, gift of color (minus arah tokens), my fully decked out exotic gears, and a nice set of TA dungeon gear. I haven’t hit the Karma DR whilst gathering any of that prior to the patch a few days ago. Loot DR? Sure, because you hit it in Orr if you can do anything effectively or decide to participate in chain events. The system is punishing to legitimate play, there’s nothing weird about these scenarios. Unless they seriously expect us to play with major breaks in between of a given hour.

The burden of proof lays on the person who makes the claim (Anti-DR folks) – I provided some proof with some shoddy screenshots as I just took them as a wow, look at this. However, with some approach to detail here, we can probably gather more reliable details on what causes it, why it happens, etc. Once we have that solid data, it can become a discussion of if it appropriate or not. I’m leaning towards not though, just because it is currently affecting legitimate players.

The fact that this game has only been live for five weeks, and you are already more than 50% to a legendary item proves that ArenaNet’s anti-farming system is not strict enough. Legendary weapons should be the accomplishment of a GAMETIME, not something you crank out in two months.

So once you get your legendary weapon, what do you plan on doing? Your only focus in the game has been farming, so what will you do when the farming is complete? Are you just not going to have any more fun, and quit playing?

This right here is the mindset that ANET is trying to defeat. Fun comes before farming, and if the only fun you get in MMOs is earning that new item with that different-color name – then you’re playing the wrong game.

You realize that all you are getting for all this effort and all this crying is a few more stat-points, and an item-model that will tell everyone in WvWvW to kill you first.

Meanwhile there are people like me:

• Still haven’t run every wing of each dungeon.
• 0% towards any legendary weapon.
• Only have one piece of karma exotic.

BUT…

• having a blast.

Please stop trying to make a job out of our video game, just because you don’t know anything but work.

OMG Vircomore.4586’s post a thousand times!

This was one of the biggest selling points of GW 2. No more “fastest players set the pace”. No more “work in my game”.