Guild Wars 2

Sounds like ‘someone’ added quite a few movies to their OneDrive Folder.

Ok based on one encounter, didn’t find this fun at all.

Gameplay consisted of running around, getting to the battle point, then trying to do damage to mobs that died before you could even move towards them, or doing damage to something you had no idea you where attacking. Overall I despite trying very kittenly ended up merely tagging mobs before moving on to the next splash of colour.

Did highlight that Anet need to fix their target system, in the mass of ‘colour’ it is almost impossible to know what you are hitting (or that you are within range of something to do any damage) – for example instead of a red arrow above a red name tag, how about a blue arrow and maybe a bit larger, at least give customers the choice. This is a common game problem that turns up elsewhere, and really what is the harm in fixing it.

The previous LA Invasions etc I found to be a lot better and more enjoyable, because you could SEE what you were doing. This was close to pointless – despite doing very little damage I ended up with 25 blooms, some maybe some folks are smarter than others.

That said I suspect the events were bugged, as I am sure some of the mobs basically depop with little damage done to them.

The lack of battle rewards seemed fair to me, as this is always a baggage pain and never feels right during the fighting or as you run to the next colour splash.

Might also add that as I have pre-ordered I started a Azure character with my ‘free slot’ and the contrast between ‘this’ and the delightful Azure low levels is shocking.

Sylent.3165:

I’m getting headaches. To much orange and green. Only colors really on the screen

I pity anyone who is colour-blind playing this zone.

I also wonder if the designer has ever seen pictures of a real jungle. Using the ‘Cursed Shore’ technique of making the mobs blend into the BROWN background in no way corresponds to a real jungle where animals can be fairly brightly coloured because they are nasty to eat. The designer has missed a trick here, for example you could of made the Frogs very brightly coloured which would mean, say, that they explode on death. you could have had a whole colour code for what mobs do in death? Now that would be novel!!!

The map system needs to be 3D if these are the types of zones to be expected in the expansion.

I find there is no point in looking at the map as it takes so long to figure out that mobs repop around you and serves little purpose.

Better would be a persistent transparent globe system that some other games use. As is, the map system is dire and of no use other than swift transport.

Yes but the point is that in order to TEST this beta – in terms of PvE – you have to spend hours mindlessly Zerg Grinding FIRST.

Now I am sure there are ultra keen players who are happy to spend hours of their weekend time – to no longer term effect – so they can provide feedback, but GW2 is mostly a casual friendly game.

The Beta Weekends are making mugs of casual players, and where I am concerned turning me off the whole expansion as I can’t even attempt to enjoy the experience without committing myself to hours of Zerg Grinding on MY weekends!

I mean what is it with Anet and Zone Zerg Grinding as a means of providing PvE entertainment?

My thoughts:-

(a) I did a lot of Zerg Grinding in WvW before they rebalanced things, and that is exactly what high-level PvE is going to be. This is disappointing.

(b) The experience gained from the beta zone appeared nerfed – 2 to 3mins to kill a mob and it drops 358xp on a exp bar that tops at 600K. Really? There was little difference when in Zerg-Mode. As master skills require point + exp this meant I had points but apparently had to spend 8 to 12 hours grinding to use each of them. Really?

© I find the Jungle zones poor. Sure there are plenty of pixels, but is there any wow factor – for me no. To me they are dull and ugly, especially when I compare it to the beautiful GW1 expansions. I think Anet have made a very big mistake to base the expansion or the initial zones on the Jungle.

(d) Most of the time I haven’t a clue what is going on, the fighting is a mess.

(e) I find the complete inability to harvest things extremely annoying.

(f) I doubt people are going to grind out these PvE zones and remain there – I suspect most will be sick of the zones by the time they get all there master abilities which will be completely useless outside these zones. Are people really going to buy into that if they find the graphics dull and ugly?

Beta so far has just been irritating – there has been no pull into the expansion for me. In fact I feel I have been rather foolish in pre-purchasing the expansion when I could have bought a complete new – and unfamiliar – game. I am hard pressed on what the novelty of HoT is for PvE. The Living World had novelty, essentially this expansion is a more irritating – if more complex – Silverwastes.

Early days I know, but it’s looking like PvP + WvW == GW2, PvE == GW1.

I think there is a shift towards game controllers – the Xbox/PS generation – and games that don’t use them don’t get considered by ‘youngsters’.

Essentially the proportion of game players who have never used a keyboard as a game controller is increasing, and I suspect such people are unlikely to consider using a keyboard in the future.

Zaklex.6308:

lilypop.7819:

~Snip~

I actually think there was a bug as you got a mastery point at the end of the shorten personal story but couldn’t use it – or at least I couldn’t figure out how to use it. The impression I am getting – having read a few other posts – is that they took the closed beta VB version and hacked it about a bit then dumped it into this beta weekend without any additional testing. Hence why THIS weekend’s VB doesn’t feel like a beta at all to those new to the beta events.

That’s not a bug, you’ll get the Mastery point before you can use it…as you need to fill up the experience bar in order to use each Mastery Point. In this case you get the Mastery Point first, then you can fill the bar up and use it.

You may well be right, but the icon display indicates you have two points whilst only one is effective. Don’t recall anything else that works this way, perhaps Anet might want to rethink this.

Point taken regards Bug Entropy resulting in VB lock-outs, would explain things a bit. Bad news though as this would indicate the expansion is well short of a release date – for PvEers anyway. Quite a contrast with the LW releases which generally had nothing like this degree of PvE bugs as experienced in VB. I don’t recall a single LW release that resulted in immediate lock-out or abandonment.

Personally I don’t think it’s a good idea to make PvE zones dependent on exp grind to be playable/enjoyable. All you’ll end up with is PvE Zergs. Also if you have to grind to get gilders or harvesting what is going to happen once you get those abilities – i.e. are you going to stick around in that zone to get the benefits of your efforts? – I doubt it, more likely you’ll be so sick of the zone you’ll want something different.

The ultimate in this game is ‘dress’, fine, exp-bar that. I am very happy that is how GW1/2 were designed – it means I don’t have to endlessly grind to keep up, which I really don’t have time for anymore. But surely it is a backward step to exp-bar content – like I can’t pick a mushroom (despite being able to do so for 80 levels) till I gain exp-bars. Really? What next, trees that can’t be chopped down till you fashion a ‘special’ axe.

Difficulty should be assigned to Dungeons rather than general PvE – do they really need to exp-bar gliding, harvesting and much else in the FIRST zone of a new expansion? This is what annoyed me about Dry Top and SW. I have played a number of MMOs down the years – ones where if you glance away from the screen you run the risk of instant death – and frankly all that happens is the zone becomes time-barred to peak population times as little else is possible outside those times. People (well PvEers) then get bored and await a new expansion when the game becomes playable again.

Anet need to add overall utility to an expansion as a given, like easy use of Xbox/PS controllers. As I said I have played lots of MMOs and the thing that gets you in the end is Keyboard RSI. Anet might want to think ahead a bit. They certainly need to think about 3D maps given the direction they are taking. People want the game polished with an expansion, so far we are getting ‘more content’.

It is also going to appear a kitteneap to have LW content gem-blocked if you have owned the game since release and have subsequently purchased the expansion. It’s no lost to Anet to release this content – or whatever they can.

Yes, but these are Alpha bugs.

Now if you took part in a zergfest, say in closed beta (which DIDN’T have these bugs) or possibly in the first few hours on Friday night, you might not appreciate how poor this zone is for PvEers as an expansion introduction.

VB is a pretty poor experience when the population is low and you have no mastery points.

I actually think there was a bug as you got a mastery point at the end of the shorten personal story but couldn’t use it – or at least I couldn’t figure out how to use it. The impression I am getting – having read a few other posts – is that they took the closed beta VB version and hacked it about a bit then dumped it into this beta weekend without any additional testing. Hence why THIS weekend’s VB doesn’t feel like a beta at all to those new to the beta events.

Does seems to be more marketing demo than beta, imo.

It should be a relatively small area of the expansion yet so many initial events bugged?

Also people seem to have voted with their feet, every time I went to VB it was more or less empty. And given the event bugs – and corresponding lack of ‘easy’ group exp – meant you had to grind exp to get your Aion Wings – fours hours in my case.

PvE was no fun (anything new was exp blocked). Very disappointing. Didn’t try anything else (I was late going – Saturday Night – and I think most people bailed out after a few hours on Friday).

Also remember people have JUST paid £35 to £80 to experience this! My advice atm, would be to go play Aion a FTP game! Seriously there was little on offer for PvE. I played Aion for a year about 5 years ago, and that is exactly how VB has INITIALLY felt.

The expansion has to offer far more utility, imo. Instant auto-loot, for example. Or how about 3-D maps if your going the Aion route. A Dungeon Hall for those who are only interested in Dungeon so groups and discussions can be made outside the area – i.e. similar to PvP but for dungeons. More utility is required. I can see what’s coming here, and it is wrong to ask people to grind for so many ‘game improvements’ after forking out a significant amount of money – comes over as a rip-off to be frank.

Oh and another 2 cents, for an expansion the initial area came over as dull, i.e. brown, and more brown. I mention this as if there was one thing Aion was/is it’s a beautifully graphical game. Really all that BROWN was a turn off. Like I bought a R9 to get all these shades of BROWN! The background as BROWN and every mob was BROWN – except the tigers ( or kittens as you could auto hit kill three vet tigers at once). No doubt this expansion will be sold in a BROWN paper bag so peeps can get the full experience. Graphically VB is very poor as an introduction to a new expansion – for PvEers anyway. What happened to the beautiful and generally significantly graphically different GW1 expansions? This was the same old BROWN muck of Drytop/Silverpeaks. I mean are youse serious about this? Why not go the whole hog and try Black and White?

BTW: If this was a marketing demo it’s not going to sell much of the product!

I would have liked to have tried out the new expansion before purchasing; Vets could then decide on the worth if doubtful. I suspect the last two new zones are intended for this purpose, however as I didn’t like those zones and therefore am a little bit worried with regards to this expansion.

As to cost, well I played WoW for 7 years which probably cost $500 to $700!

As for giving the core free to new players, fair enough imo. They are not going to be rushing into the Jungle all that soon and frankly I would rather new players where encouraged to play as this makes for a better game experience for everyone.

I can’t see HoT being ‘rip-off’ content unless you consider the previous three years to have been.; in which case you wouldn’t be interested in the expansion anyway.

Right hand Index finger pain comes to all who use mice for 10 to 20 years.

Try using a trackball. More costly but once you get used to them you never go back to the pain.

Fully accept that removing Qs is the priority, even though I play on Vabbi where Qs are never a consideration. However there may be a problem with this solution.

On Vabbi – bottom server in WvW – the score is never much of a consideration. Most people now accept that they are never going to win overall, or indeed come second overall in any match-up. Those that want to win-win transferred out at the beginning of the Season.

Therefore there is a possibly that the Vabbi WvW player will abandon the current WvW maps and play on this one instead. This would leave any match-ups to 1v1. I can’t see any Vabbi WvW player wanting to play on the standard WvW maps when this goes live.

Indeed in any match-up where a server considers they have no chance of winning, the gameplay is poor (merely fodder to PL the top server), and consequently have no Qs, that server will tend to prefer to play on this new map.

And ofc once Vabbi abandons WvW standard maps the next weakest server will follow, and so on. You see the potential problem.

Change the scoring to:

(a) Supplies consumed via fort upgrades.
(b) Supplies -not yet spent – stolen when the fort is taken.

Each supply scores 1. Supplies not yet spent shown on the map.

This would counter zerging (although it would remain an option – raid like) and flipping (would be worthless) and reduce the effect of time coverage (no points would be scored if the fort could not be further upgraded).

This would still bias WvW towards larger numbers, but I believe would lead to more interesting tactics and smaller scale more defensive fighting.

Would also reduce the life-span of dollies…

Would agree that small-scale fighting is the most enjoyable. And I must say that one benefits of Season 1 has been the increased amount of small-scall fighting – although the reason for this maybe that zerg commanders are logging off becuase they can’t form Zergs anymore.

Perhaps all that is required is for the player kill bonuses to be increased for next season along with the server bonuses. They have also introduced 1 point per player kill on the server scoring, which as far as I can tell, on Vabbi has had no effect. Some the player kill Wxp has been pretty high, I saw my first 100+ one this weekend. Not exactly rolling in however!

However I still think defence – the only counter to zerg gameplay – needs a boost, as it is far too boring and unrewarding to play.

Overall there is no real difference between long-Qs and unplayable ( or unenjoyable) gameplay.

Response to Pavel

One the the reasons people – used to – level their character in WvW was because the low population makes the PvE side of things poor. Only the very low level zones, and highest zone ever have more that 3 to 5 people in them. You can’t blame people for wanting to party with people.

Also the WvW game is really about Forts and Sups, and not pow-pow as per, say WoW. As such the level (gear) of a character is not all that important. If they are happy to fetch sups and use them, then really for the most part they are as good as any legendary equiped level 80 – most of the time.

Vabbi WvW may well be madness, but frankly the people are no different from those on mighter servers.

Fact is that Zerg + Flipping only feeds the larger server. No matter how good a smaller crew is, adopting T1 tactics when you’re a T9 server only feeds wxp to the larger server. If 25 take a fort and 50 retake it, double the wxp goes to the larger server, in time this will count, no matter what. The gameplay is effectively broken in terms of server v server. As far as I can see, WvW is designed to reward numbers, not skill or tactics. For balance WvW should reward more defensive tactics for weaker servers, this has never been in the WvW gameplay. Defending a position is boring, and results is much less wxp for the individual. This has always been a problem with these types of sandbox games.

Frankly I can’t see how WvW can be competitive at all.

Response to Ulion

I fully agree that gaining wxp from players kills is not he most productive method. Zerg + Flipping is the most productive, however this ALWAYS benefits the larger servers in the long run – not matter how much flipping you do, the server with the larger population gains the most wxp (often by a large factor).

An alternative is the one you suggest, BUT with the coming of Season 1 this is no longer possible. Here is why.

I spend about 8 hours in WvW today, Sunday. Most of the time the only thing held by the home team was the Citadel. Small groups which sometimes formed into mini zergs would take a camp then a fort, then immediately a minimum of 20+ zerg ( normal 40 to 80) would retake everything. The reason for this is that the only thing available to the other server was the thing Vabbi had just taken. The timescale was something like 10 to 15mins. The situation is so bad that not once did Vabbi have a chance to try and retake their Garrison. The best was LV + Cliff and a few camps. That was the high point of the whole Sunday, which is pretty much the peak play day. Peak population was 20 to 25, most of the time 5 to maybe 10.

As for roaming there were foreign soloists with Legend tags roaming around killing any roamer or an small group, they also soloed the camps as well. As soon as a single fort was taken you knew there would be a large zerg arriving to retake it back within 10 to 15mins. There was nothing else for that server to do.

I tried a different tactic aimed to set LV up as a defensive fort (when you are in this situation there are no sups for fort upgrades, the dollies just get killed even if you have a supporting camp – which are often being farmed by foreign soloists). Any time we had LV, I dumped ACs in the fort, running from LV to WP to Godsword and back, 10 sups at a time. Most of the time this didn’t work. but for a two hours spell it did. With LV ACed-uped plus two Trebs, the first foreign zerg (maybe 40+) came along took a look and ran away (WP out I think). Second larger foreign zerg (maybe 60+) decided to fight it out, and wiped against 20+ inside the fort. Third even larger foreign zerg came along (maybe 100+) and wiped the fort (the lag was so great the ACs didn’t really work once a wall was down).

Frankly this is boring, and I don’t blame people for not doing something similar. It’s great when their the battle is on, but there is a lot of waiting and inaction. Being able to port to the fort for the home peeps only would offer strong resistance to zerg under these circumstances, and cut down a bit on the boring bits.

Zerg + Flipping has not been happening on Vabbi for the last two days, because so few are playing WvW. Now it maybe they have got their achievements and moved on. It maybe that the home zerg can’t get going before an even bigger zerg wipes them. Frankly I think most are bailing till the next reset. But I suspect things will be no different after a few hours.

It’s a strange game where in T1 you have massive Qs, and in T9 you have empty zones.

I can’t see anyone or any guild moving to Vabbi for the WvW gameplay! Indeed I think it is a bit dishonest for recommend this server to new starts.

The key problem however has no necessary been server population. The fact is that WvW is bias towards higher server population, and always has been, and the older the server the greater the gain.

The standard gameplay is Zerg + Flip. Unfortunately giving the WXP rules flipping always benefits the bigger server, i.e. it’s pool of WXP increases faster with flipping. In time the older server will always trump the younger, as far as WvW goes.

Strictly speaking if you’re the smaller server – or the weaker – you should aim to gain your WXP via player kills and defend forts against zergs. That way there is a risk the zerg walks away with nothing and the smaller server picks up the player kill WXP. However as the game stands, this approach doesn’t get employed, perhaps because of the sheer boredom of it, I have tried I know how boring this is.

In this respect perhaps on the homeland area only the home side could gain a bonus, to address the WXP distribution bias. No sure what. WP in every held fort in the homeland would be nasty for zergs. The risk would certainly be greater and the distribution of WXP would be more balanced. One reason for suggesting this is that you do start to get bored of endlessly jumping to your Citadel WP, goodness knows how often I have done this, but the routes gets boring fast – you start feeling like a hamster after half an hour (even when there is some ‘action’).

It is certainly fair to say that player kill WXP is not a big factor in WvW.

Ok I am a Vabbi player, and there is a problem.

As we are so easily beat, people take a sniff of the match-up, and bailout of WvW totally and GW2 with it. As things stand, Season 1 will kill WvW on this server. People are already asking, ‘When Season 1 is going to end’.

The result will be an even more under populated server, as many seem to only play for WvW.

Personally I think the real problem is that the four areas have more or less the same gameplay. If you can’t zerg in one area, you zerg in another till the Big Zerg catches up with you, and everyone bails out. That is essentially the gameplay.

Better would be to leave EB as is, for zergs as big as you like, but treat the three home areas differently.

For example you could make it such that the home server is never outnumbered. Or that the position of any foreign players is displayed on the map. Or that entrance into a foreign homeland is only possible from within EB (i.e. you have to capture their home EB castle or whatever). Something different.

If balanced servers want to slug it out in EB fine, but when there is ‘no chance’ at least give the weak servers some gameplay in their own little homeland. As it stands, it’s just logout. Over the last two days, there have been hours where Vabbi has not held a single thing at peak times. The moment you attack something you just get a 60+ zerg appearing either just before you capture, or just after – the gameplay is very poor, the dynamics are just not right.

There is a very real danger Season 1 will completely kill the Vabbi server.

I think ‘Living World’ is a very good concept, and fits in well with ‘Dynamic Events’. There may be some rough edges and two weeks is kinda short, but it does give you a feeling that nothing is static in the game. All-in-all, zones are never finished with, as in more traditional MMOs.

The main game problem seems to be that there is no way to knowing which zones are busy, so everyone is spread out. On low-pop servers this gives a GW1 instanced feel to the game as ‘Dynamic Events’ are inhibited. I sometimes wonder if all the improvements over GW1 have been worth it, as you are effectively playing the old game with a bigger processor and RAM, far too often.

It’s the krait, as people has said.

I think the idea is to increase the excitement by getting you into a downed state. Unfortunately the moment you are stationary, you usually always die.

I consider this to be ‘grief design’, as really there is little the player can do to avoid such random killings, except stay well away from dying vets – which is not really a possibly in that area. I also consider this cheating, as such vets do not normally do this in PvE (or at least never noticed if they do).

I didn’t say it was garbage, disappointing is more accurate.

The content is impressive, but it is not hard to see it becoming a very large tombstone within weeks. Is the game so impressive it can afford this?

GW2 does have a particular problem with low-pop servers and it’s novel content spamming mechanism – which I must admit rises it above other similar games. Maybe the new LFG tool will help, but frankly I would like a ‘Hot Zone’ list added as well giving the nature of the PvE design.

I don’t see why having the top three most popular PvE zones being on display, would ‘break’ the game. It’s a minor thing which would jack up the enjoyment for some people, and would cost a lot less than the Teq-Boss-Design.

Fact is there is a lot of content people will never ever see in this game, purely because of lack of casual numbers. This was understandable in GW1 giving it’s design, but why drag it over to GW2?

Fours ideas:-

(1) Vary the speed of character, depending on the number of characters around them. Example, 30+ and they move as per golems.

(2) Automatic Scout: Map icons of varying size based on size of group, i.e. 10, 20, 30, 40+ Zergs would be a lot easier to counter if you knew where they were.

(3) Zerg Mines: Mobile deployable item which triggered on 10, 20, 30, 40+ concentrations. These would only be available to the defending BG. Not useable inside a structure, would not show up on the map, and last 12 hours. Then would gain destruction the closer they were to a friendly structure.

(4) Robo-Mines: Similar to above, but sought out large concentrations of enemies, minimum 10. Picture lots of little golems, steadily homing in on a zerg.

Would leave EB BG as a zerg fest.

A) Agree that ‘overflow’ in Europe is a waste of effort – will not be fooled again – ‘Overflow’ —> ‘Bail-Out’.

B) You should not need a livesteam from ARN to explain the encounter!!!! If need be, provide an in book summary after the first few days. One of the things I hated about WoW was that the key to raids was ‘reading-up’, and almost nothing else. Where exactly is the fun in that?

C) There did seem to be a good bit of unnecessary ‘grief design’, giving that the rewards were not exactly ‘epic’.

D) AFKers. You reward them but didn’t reward at all those that tried repeatedly and failed – not even with EXP!. Way to go. No surprise what will happen on the next new boss encounter you design.

E) There were technical issues with porting to the area when the encounter had just started up, the overflow often didn’t work, and the server disconnected the character. (Maybe the AFKers were disconnected characters? – no idea).

F) If you provide characters with ways of removing DoTSs- don’t effectively disable them via a ‘turret-only’ mechanism. It’s cheating.

G) IF there is no scaling – there didn’t seem to be any – don’t allow the encounter to start till a sufficient number is present. Otherwise you’re just wasted people’s time and effort.

So yes the encounter can be Wowed, but that is not why people play the game – or at least I hope it never comes to that.

The OP is pointing out a very real problem, at least on low pop servers, to my experience.

There would be no harm in factoring in the number of defenders/attackers when a fort/castle is taken or successfully defended.

Certainly on low pop servers there is absolutely no point in utilising upgrades; the gameplay is zerg+golems, and SFA else. It gets boring very fast the moment you hit level 80.

PS: The ‘Outnumbered’ buff is pretty worthless.