Guild Wars 2

Ulion.5476:

phys.7689:

The issue is, tp flipping can make much higher money than any other playstyle, not only that, but the gains are heavily related to how much capital you generate, which means the more money you get, the more money you can get. (i understand there are limits, but these are so far out of the range of other gold earning abilities as not to be relevant in comparing the two)

The tp lets you make as much money as you can make, nothing else in the game does this.

The amount of money you can make it more related to the demand for an item. Just because you have the money to put up 2k of a item does not mean they will all sell within a reasonable time limit. If only 1k sells within a day the reset of the item will not sell tomorrow. This is because of the surplus the item would cause the other sellers decrease the price of the item.

You can make and lose the most money off of TP. Can not think of a way that would not hurt everyone if you limit profit. The people who play the market put in alot of time on the market. At least TP is a global so it is difficult to control any market for a long period of time before equilibrium is reached.

the share volume of trade that occurs means that if you are conservative, you will get your money. There will be someone who will sell low eventually, and there will be some one who will buy it for higher than 15% difference. The game essentially ensures that people MUST sell 90% of the things they get. There is easily, and always going to be a fluctuation of more than 15% value on some item, at some point in time.

i have had 250 mithril for awhile, anytime i salavge in hope of ecto, i often get mithril. I cant store this mithril or use it, i have limited inventory, i must sell this mithril. In a real situation, its rare that i would be trying to get water, and somehow only end up with an excess amount of iron, and no water. People in the game are forced to market, whats worse is mithril gatherers have to compete with my price, who just want to get rid of something i never wanted to begin with.

the whole whether you can lose money or not aside, its sort of irrelevant, The fact that you can lose money isnt as relevant as the fact that a skilled player, using this playstyle is unbeatable by any other playstyle in the market.

the same reasoning applies to class balance. Even if a class requires incredible skill to play, if mastery of that class makes it totally destroy all other classes, they have to try to balance that. You cant build a diverse game where one class/playstyle when done properly totally annihilates other options for the same thing.

Tp flipping is the APEX PREDATOR of wealth gain in the game. Thats a problem that they need to solve.

mtpelion.4562:

I think it is important to note that actions in game can do one of three things to the economy:

1. Create Currency
2. Move Currency
3. Destroy Currency

If you look at the things that have been limited, you will recognize that they are all related to creating currency. They all have a fundamentally different impact on the game than the TP does.

the solution is to give these other activities the ability to move money, or create methods for more wealth creation along with worthwhile sinks.

one of the major issues with the economy imo, is that item creation is too random, most items that are brought to market, should be done so with intention. Its pretty hard for regular players to move value, because
a) most items cannot be obtained by specific means
b) even items obtained by specific means have to compete with items obtained by pure chance, where the obtainer has no interest in the product except to get rid of it for space.

truth is, the main reward for standard play should be gold.
Other things should be hunted, created, whatever the case may be, but it should be intentional.
this way crafters could bring value one way, hunters could bring value another way, Gold grinders could bring currency to the world, people good at jumping puzzles bring puzzle rewards.

If this was the case the TP would be a real exchange of people doing the things they love most, to get the things they want, but dont want to do. Right now, TP is a flippers dream, everyone has to transact constantly even if they dont particularly want to, and the only way to get most things you want is buying it, no matter the price, because you cant get it on your own directly.

John Smith.4610:

This is a great thread.

A few minor thoughts:
The TP is part of the world of Tyria and spending your time interacting with it is just as legitimate a play session as dungeons or jumping puzzles or any of our other fantastic content.

That being said, I see no evidence academically, theoretically or in practice that flipping items on the TP doesn’t push prices closer to equilibrium, eliminate dead weight loss and increase utility/surplus for the market on both the consumer and producer side.

I currently have no plans to limit players interaction with the world of Tyria in anyway. I believe it would be damaging to the economy, to the game experience and to the players overall.

That being said, if you have a dissenting opinion please discuss it here and voice your beliefs and concerns, we’re always watching and reading and learning and your input has been both intelligent and extremely valuable in the past.

I think you missed the point here, the whole flipper thing isnt about whether they offer anything to the game or are a legitimate playstyle. The issue is, tp flipping can make much higher money than any other playstyle, not only that, but the gains are heavily related to how much capital you generate, which means the more money you get, the more money you can get. (i understand there are limits, but these are so far out of the range of other gold earning abilities as not to be relevant in comparing the two)

The tp lets you make as much money as you can make, nothing else in the game does this.

So the problem becomes one of poor distribution of wealth favoring one playstyle. Im sure many say, then people should just adopt that playstyle, but this is not a game that was sold as great economic simulator, its supposed to be an adventure.

Either find a way to limit the growth of wealth through tp play, or come up with a way to give other playstyles the ability to earn wealth.
I would prefer the latter, but i figure it might be hard because gold obtained in other ways is usually created, while tp wealth is redistributed.

I could brainstorm of possible ways, but it would dilute the post.

essentially, its bad for the game to reward one playstyle more than others, especially a playstyle that is niche to the genre.

this conversation indeed predates any COF nerfs, Its a bit sad they moved this to the black lion forum, because no offfense lionites, but this sub forum is biased. It is basically the land of the people who want to make as much money as possible off of the trading post.

As to Nevets Crimsonwing, you are playing with me right? your response to the fact that one form of players obtaining money far outweighs the other and leads to disproportionate spreads of wealth concentrating wealth in the hands of one specific type of player type which is a minority of the game, and a minority of the appeal of the game, is that you meant to say obtaining money instead of making money?

you realize its totally irrelevant to the point i was making in this case whether the money is created or transfered? this specific issue is about how much money a user can obtain, not whether they are creating it or transfering it.

As to some other posts, i wont quote, because quoting is fubar right now. One poster says that the natural result of a free market is these disparities. And its not a question of fair. You are quite correct. free market is far from fair.

but this is a game, id think the developers dont want to create the type of problems real world free markets create.
I dont think they want GW2 to be an experience where 85% of people have comparitively nothing, and can never hope to compete with the top 5%

mostly because it leads to overall player dissatisfaction. The only solutions they as developers can come up with, is make the spread of wealth less drastic, which to be honest is a multi tiered issue, and i doubt they will achieve it.

OR
diminish the value of the trading post on quality of life for the average player. This is what they kind of did with ascended (mostly)

Galen Grey.4709:

Craptrain.7203:

I agree. The daily mechanic is actually counter-productive for longevity. Instead of people playing for fun, they log in for 30 mins to do their daily, then log out again, having all the satisfaction of a completed chore.

so if there was no daily what would have happened? they’d log for 5 hrs and have the time of their life? doing what? whats in the game exactly for anyone to do that doesnt involve:
killing mobs,
doing dynamic events,
doing group events
killing veterans,
killing champions,
doing dungeons,
doing fractals,
killing enemy players in wvw,
killing aquatic creatures,
gathering,
using conditions,
dodging,
repairing wvw structures
capturing wvw stuff
craft

what possibly could players do for hours that doesnt involve any of this?

if they’re loging in to just do their daily they dont want to play to have fun, they just want their shiny and they’re going to farm whatever stuff that shiny requires. If instead of 20 laurels, ascended gear required ectos people would spend 20 days farming CoF or Fractals or whatever is most profitable per piece they wanted to buy.

The problem isnt the daily, the daily doesnt need you do anything special, just to play for a bit the content you enjoy, the problem is people dont care about content they care about rewards. Nothing the game can do there.

back when i used to log on for dailies, it was kind of annoying, id get most done through normal play but there was usually at least one annoying thing i had to do. But it wasnt that bad, i suppose, still id rather not go kill 25 things underwater, or didnt feel like hunting things in WvW. but i did it anyway because hey, i wanted laurels, and i was already 4/5.

now i barely play, and when i do play i almost never do a daily unless its structured pvp. Thats because in structured you will almost always complete your daily just by doing what you came to do, play structured.

I know what the system is trying to deal with, but it sucks at it. Its so transparent and boring. i mean fractals is a time gate, but its mitigated by personal achievement and actual content.
takes at least 10 runs to get to 10, then you can gamble once per day with a luck breaker of 10 days, people who work hard and achieve harder things can get things much faster.

anyhow log on everday time gates are absolute trash, theres no depth, no challenge, or achievement, or story tied to it. Its way to mechanical.
If it was actually tied to something interesting, it might be more palatable

Yid.3024:

I will try not to argue about if flipping is ‘evil’ or ‘helpful’, since people here will clearly not agree on one or the other. Not to mention finding it out will not really solve anything, it’s like that sick old argument of ‘is homosexuality ’natural’ or not?‘. It has been here, will be here, will simply not go away, and we will have to deal with it, no point in arguing over it.
Also, before anyone calls ’stop justifying yourself you filthy capitalist monster!’, I do not flip

The problem OP has is that ‘playing the TP is more effective than farming’, if I understand correctly.

The way I see it, the reason why flipping is more profitable than farming is simple. There are a lot of farmers and ‘regular’ players, but not as many power flippers.

Lot of people who don’t play the TP tend to want to just sell quick, buy quick, and forget about the whole mathematics mess, so they can get back to killing. They can sell to buy orders, or buy from sell listings, knowing that you are gonna lose a bit of coins. But they don’t care, they are willing to pay a little extra for the convenience. All these little bit of coins willingly spent adds up to a huge huge profit for the flippers, just because fewer people go through the trouble of collecting those piles of coins.

So, it just happens. Nothing you can do about it. Yeah, I know that feeling like you are forced to flip sucks, but it’s like how waking up early sucks, it will happen and you cannot blame a specific person for it. Okay that analogy was bad, but anyway. If there were more people interested in power flipping than playing other areas of the game, flipping would not have been as profitable i guess. (So the way to make flipping less effective is to actually….. encourage more people to flip? XD)

And I honestly do not see the big damage it does to the economy in any meaningful scale. Flippers can’t either accelerate inflation, nor arbitrarily set a price point where they please. They can only pull buy price and sell price closer to each other, only at a speed the community allows them to, which is going to eventually happen anyway.

Let’s just leave it be, it is reasonably easy to make enough money to get anything other than precursors anyway.

the problem lies in the fact that flippers are substantially richer than everyone else, and than everyone else can hope to be. This means they are the ones who highly desired items are marketed to. The price point of desirable items are incredibly effected by the amount of money only 10% of the population has.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Fungalfoot.7213:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Profit does not come at the expense of anyone else, unless it is taken by force. By the way, it may be unfun for you, but don’t place your subjective interpretations of that word above everyone else’s.

I am not objecting your right to flip. What I am objecting is the fact that flipping is the only way to get ahead currently. It generates way too much gold compared to other activities and it needs to be addressed.

It doesn’t generate any gold, and actually removes gold from the game.

However, if you’re arguing that flipping is the fastest way to make money, you’re probably right.

We disagree as to whether or not this is an actual problem. For me, I know that when more people attempt to flip, profit margins will dwindle and it won’t really be as fast as a method anymore. The entry barrier which discourages more people from doing it is knowledge. That entry barrier is what keeps it so profitable for those that do it.

But I have nothing against profit, and I don’t want to spend the time overcoming that entry barrier.

So you essentially admit that flipping is best way to make money. You dont need to understand the mathematics and science of equation behavior then.

Simply, if 1 method of gaining rewards far outweighs other methods, and this method primarily involves only one small facet of the game, do you not think this would put people not participating in said facet at a disadvantage.
Do you think the majority of people who dont really want to participate in this facet would be dissatisfied if they have to compete with the people who get greater rewards at a better rate?

Once again here is the problem.
Earnings outside TP are substantially lower than earnings in TP. earnings in TP have limits many order of magnitude higher than earnings outside tp.

This means TP earning players will always have a strong economic advantage over non TP earners.

Since tp earners are actually the minority of players, this leads to much disatifsaction with the economy

Ursan.7846:

Several misconceptions in this thread

1. Flipping does not “generate” gold. It destroys it through transaction fees. There’s no gold introduced to the economy through flipping, hence there’s no danger of inflation.
2. Flippers earn their money by doing people a service by a. giving players who want to sell instantly, a higher buy order and b. giving players who want to buy instantly a lower sell order. The buyers/sellers who deal with flippers are knowingly losing gold for convenience.
3. Flippers do not increase or decrease prices. It simply drives prices to the middle point between buy/sell orders.

these points are accurate, the problem is.

flipping profit is limited by 3 things, skill of the flipper, capital, and volume of sales
every other activity is limited by time, supply and demand.

I think the problem is the liquidity flippers offer is not worth the effects of having such a large disparity in earning potentials per time invested in a game.

Fenrir.3609:

EgonVenkman.1907:

While my own feelings are split, something should be done to pull the TP profit mongering down to match other areas of the game.

Anet has pretty much an anti-farm stance. While they can be slow to update things, they have continuously been making changes to locations where players are farming. Dungeon update, recent Arah farm spot change, etc..

To leave an area of the game completely uncapped, unregulated, etc. would not be good for the overall game. In short, it tells players, that in order to make gold, play the TP.

You and many others simply seem to be caught up in the suggestions for a fix, rather than acknowledging that a fix is needed. Whether it comes in the form of additional/increased fees, limits, or even a time limit on postings is irrelevant.

So you expect a zero risk venture which has little to zero player competition and which every player can do in a short frame of time, to have the same returns ceiling as a high risk venture which takes a large capital base to achieve and puts you in direct competition with other players?

As I mentioned before, general loot rewards could certainly do with being updated (and ANET seems to be in the process of that given the upcoming patch). But trying to “nerf” flipping seems utterly unwarranted.

you essentially said you think that rich people should make more money because they have more money “which takes a large capital base to achieve”

flipping is only as “high risk” as the user chooses to make it. you can make money of hourly price fluctuations that are fairly well documented and dont vary well day to day. the more money you have, the less risk you have to take, and the more likely you can ride out any aberrant spikes in prices.

you are not really arguing the OPs point though, you acknowledge the TP is more profitable than any other activity in the game when done well. Which means you accept that those that play the TP will over time acrue at best geometrically more money than others, and at worst exponentially more money than others.

the end result is, any item that costs money and is highly valued, will have its price determined by the TP rich. This limits the game because it means anet has to limit the amount of tradeable highly desired items or else they people will feel disatisfied with the game. There is a reason why ascended wasnt craftable, and why the ones in the future will be time gated and linked to account bound items. And thats because gold aquisition is not very balanced, and the vast majority of players have no where near enough gold to compete in the market with richer people in the game

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

stuff

flipping exists on all items, not just precursors, any item being sold at less than 15% of its sale value is worth flipping. The whole idea of stablizing the price would happen without the flippers, the only thing one can argue is that the flippers make it happen faster. However in a system where anyone can enter the market at any time, via hitting a tab, the real value of flippers is debatable. Also almost everything in the game is a material, exotics, are materials for precursors, or runes, minor sigils are materials for runes. green items are materials for rare items.

You keep referring to manipulation, i am not talking about manipulation here, that is a seperate issue. most flippers do not seek to corner the market, merely to seize opportunity created by a difference in percieved values of items. Flippers make more money of common transactions than high price items. Buying copper ores for 8 copper and selling them for 10 copper 100 yeilds 6.5% profit per transaction. its has an extremely high velocity, its better for a conservative flipper than trying to caching off precursors. only problem is profit is low per 250 stacks so you have to do a lot more management.

lets be honest here, for the average user, the fact that the flipper gave him 1 copper more per copper buy order is useless, the flipper takes it right back from him when he raises the buy order on the wood item he actually needs, or places the axe he needs on the TP.

The issue is that the system itself makes it much more likely for this to happen. If you want a glass sword, the only reliable way to obtain one is to buy it from the TP, if you want rare swords for trying to get a precursor, trying to obtain it by hunting will get you a ton of other items you probably have no use for. You have limited inventory, you MUST sell these items. The game forces people into business they have no idea about, and thus flippers are likely to find undervalued items

The flipper only makes money by buying low, or by selling high. thats it. Any time he profits, its either because he found a deal on an item, or he found some one willing to pay more.

IRL you can say the flipper does serve a purpose, he knows who has greater desire for an item, and who has less need for materials, but in the TP he isnt doing anything but putting himself in the middle of transactions and essentially taking a tax on sales in general.

and yes the graph is accurate in the shapes of the equations, it is only not accurate in the magnitudes of equations. Much like when you look at getting paid at a flat rate, it can look competitive with interest, but if the cycle goes on long enough, flat rate will always lose due to the nature of the relationship.

As far risk competition, etc. That is up to the skill of the flipper, they can make mistakes, but overall the equation is an exponential one, while they may have rises and falls, its more of a difference in rate of exponential growth. if lose 1% of my investment then make 3% of my investment, my total growth is still exponential, its just not going at the rate i would like it to. I am not saying its impossible to lose money flipping, but we arent talking about the bad flippers, we are talking about the people who are good at it. Prices are fairly stable on many of the items on the TP, a conservative flipper is almost guaranteed to make money if only due to price fluctuations throughout the day.

Also it is fairly accurate to say, those who have continued to flip have a vast deal more wealth than those who solely farm. because how much you can farm is always limited, it is a function of time/efficiency. How much you can make via tp flipping only has to do with the volume of goods being traded. IE the more capital you have the more you can make, even being super conservative.

Even when flipping is sucking, and your money is only making you 1% profit a day, if you have enough money to start with, you can make more money than a farmer does in 10 hours.
crazy farmer man gets 10 gold an hour for 10 hours he makes 100 gold a day.
flipper with 10000 gold can siphon 100 gold from the system even at the incredibly crappy profit of 1% in 24 hours.
now lets say the flipper can make 1% per 2 hours. in 10 hours he makes 400 gold. 1% is nothing in a system where many people are guaranteed to enter the market with no vested value in anything they are selling.

by the way, the flipper will never be able to buy everything on the TP, he is essentially a tax on TP. This means how much money he siphons will always be a portion of the transactions made via TP. you may say that itself is a limit, and that may be true, but it is a limit which is different on orders of magnitude than what a farmer can make.

Galen Grey.4709:

phys.7689:

Galen Grey.4709:

galens stuff edited for space.

snip

I respectfully disagree. Its actually Identical, The reason your values are different is because you have a miscalculation I am afraid.

Your units are 30 mins for a daily and 10 hours for a monthly. I agree. But you miscalculated the time required for the daily player. You claim it takes him/her 14 hrs to finish both the dailies and the monthlies. Thats incorrect. It takes 12hrs to finish the dailies and 10 hrs to finish the monthly for a total of 22hrs per 4 weeks. 40 laurels in 22 hrs = 1.8 laurels exactly the same how you calculated the weekend player would get.

Thats the whole point of the system to get 20 laurels any player needs to put in either 10 dailies and a monthly or 20 dailies.

Irrespective of how much you play at 30mins per daily and 10 hrs per monthly it will take you either 15 hrs if you go the daily + monthly route or 10 hrs if you go the daily only route.

I agree with you that the achievement system isnt exactly a reliable method of getting extra laurels, its just a minor help here and there. Thats important though. I strongly believe in the importance that ascended gear takes a long time to get. I am sure you agree with me that for some players cosmetic rewards are just not a valid incentive. They always want BiS which means that once these players fully gear their characters Arenanet will be in a nasty position. Do they ignore these players or do they introduce a new gear tier to give them more rewards to work towards? Time gating is the only way to balance that without negatively affecting casuals. Like you say correctly going forward ascended gear acquisition will speed up because people can use dailies, crafting and fractals in parallel to gear up opening that further be removing time gating from each of these would be very bad imho because hardcore players will gear up in no time and that dreaded time when anet would need to decide if its time to introduce a new tier or not would come too quickly. At least like this they have more time to work on horizontal progression, perhaps that will be engaging enough to make non cosmetic reward players happy. Dont know.. we’ll see.

I do agree with you that as method of acquiring ascended gear dailies is a pretty boring method. There is no feeling of having truly earned it and thats a down side I agree. There is a positive side to it though that at least it just takes less then 30 mins per day you play to sort that part out. Playing the content you enjoy will get most of the daily sorted and you’ll be left with a few minutes more to sort the rest out if at all.
Whats the alternative though? I cant think of one. Unless Arenanet decide not to care about how long it takes to get a single ascended item (which like I explained would in my opinion be a bad idea) all other methods I can think of would involve unpleasant amounts of grinding for casual players and they’ll still will be less likely to keep up then they are now in my opinion.

most times, doing the daily everyday will complete the monthly without trying.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

EDIT: MY POST STARTS HERE

You wrote: "Every single copper that a flipper makes comes directly from another player, they create no actual value, they merely siphon it.

let me restate it.
A flipper makes money by buying an item from a supplier for less than its worth
and selling it to a consumer for as much as a consumer is willing to pay."

How can a flipper buy something for less than it’s worth? The supplier is selling the item at a given price, to that seller, the item is worth what the flipper is paying for it. Flippers are creating value, because there is value in price setting.

You wrote: “by the nature of this process, on the whole, they can not be helping people get more value for their items gathered, and they cannot be getting the item to the consumer cheaper than they could. It goes against the mathematical nature of how exactly a flipper makes profit.”

Yes they can. As we’ve already discussed, a flipper will push buy orders higher, giving more money to those that sell to buy orders. The flipper will push sell orders lower, giving more money to those that buy to sell orders.

You wrote: “anyhow, regardless, there is a problem in fact that money earnable via playing the game, even to a hardcore level, doesnt really compare with the amount of money one can earn through the tp”

I addressed this above. I don’t see it as a problem.

let me put it to you this way. take the flipper out of the equation, either one of two things happen.
either the seller gets more for the item,
or the buyer gets it for less.
the seller makes his money off of playing with these two issues by being a middleman.
OVERALL, he cannot add value to anything, he either has to take advantage of people who sell items too low, (dont know the worth of an item) or he has to push the price a buying is willing to pay up. that is the only way he makes money.

so is the flipper really pushing buy orders up? not really, the flipper can only make money if something is priced less than 15% lower than what it sells for. The flipper snaps up deals that are lower than 15% of what an item sells for. The illusion of pushing a buy order up is a lie, buy orders mean nothing. i can offer 1 copper for a precursor, a buy order is just an offer, it has nothing to do with the real worth of an item. Until they altered it, you could put buy orders for less than npc price, some of these orders remain.

There is a few things that you can say a flipper offers, and that is greater liquidity of items, and a better sense of what the value of an item is. However, in a system that forces people to transact constantly to obtain anything, the flipper is too powerful not to be limited.

The game design inundates people with items they have no need for and gives them few means other than buying at the TP to get items they actually want.

and its really simple math.
the earning through non tp activity is a linear equation (roughly) say for example you can earn 10 gold through hour played.
the earning through tp activity is an exponential equation(roughly) the more money you have, the more money you can earn.
look at the difference in the graphs

http://image.wistatutor.com/content/feed/tvcs/11111.GIF

look at how much further on the X axis the linear line has to go to reach the same height as the exponential line, the worst part is that it gets worse the farther you go.

the prices for desired goods will be determined by who has the most money at any instant. Over time, the difference will be so large as to be insurmountable.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

You ignored my post completely. Can you please argue against my points where I stated that flipping actually serves a price setting purpose and is good for buyers and sellers in the general populous?

[/quote]

theres a basic principle of things, you dont get something for nothing.

Every single copper that a flipper makes comes directly from another player, they create no actual value, they merely siphon it.

let me restate it.
A flipper makes money by buying an item from a supplier for less than its worth
and selling it to a consumer for as much as a consumer is willing to pay.

by the nature of this process, on the whole, they can not be helping people get more value for their items gathered, and they cannot be getting the item to the consumer cheaper than they could. It goes against the mathematical nature of how exactly a flipper makes profit.

Now, best case scenario you can say a flipper increases the velocity of transactions, but really, ehhh probably of limited use. Aside from the inter flipper gambling that happens, every transaction they make thats not just a flipping competition is to someone who would have bought an item anyhow.

lets say every item that was bought on the TP was account bound, how would that really effect the market?
is the whatever lost by doing that worth the problems that flipping can bring?

this is a serious question people should ask themselves. If you are not a flipper, you essentially almost never by an item you dont need, or cant make into something else. it would actually have no effect on you at all.

People who play the TP would now have to actually buy things of less value and turn them into things of higher value to get money(its actually rare that you can do this, which is another problem)

anyhow, regardless, there is a problem in fact that money earnable via playing the game, even to a hardcore level, doesnt really compare with the amount of money one can earn through the tp

the flipping issue aside the real point of the OP, is that gathering of money directly via killing and gathering is monitored and limited, however, the gathering of gold via TP is not.
Essentially this means while gold growth through even hardcore non tp play will flatten out per time spent, money earned through tp has no such limit.

This means TP playing is the best way to earn gold. this also means, the rate of growth of money through tp play will outshine all other game play. The rarest or best items prices will be determined by the richest, and the gap will only grow.

this is a problem.

This problem is compounded by the random nature of item aquisition, (by random i dont just mean the fact you dont know whether it will drop, but mostly that you dont have many ways to actively seek any one item) this means you almost always have to go to market to get an item you want instead of hunting it.

Essentially yes no matter what john smith says, the growing disparity in earnings between tp players and people who play the game directly is a real problem, and it will get worse as the game continues.

Galen Grey.4709:

galens stuff edited for space.

you are obscuring the real data by acting as if 20 laurels is the end of the laurel process. sure a daily player can get 20 laurels in 10 days and a weeked player can get 20 laurels in 5 weekends
BUT
it doesnt stop at 20 laurels.
lets compare playtimes.
30 min a day, or 3.5 hours a week daily player gets 40 laurels per 4 weeks or, 40 laurels per 14 hours of play or, 2.87 laurels per hour played.
weekend player probably has to play at least 10 hours a month to get the monthly achievement and will pick up 1 daily each day they play, at 18 laurels a month
essentially 1.8 laurels per hour played.

So the factual math is the daily player is a getting a full laurel more per hour, and is 155% as efficient as the weekend player for the same time investment.

Its obvious that they are incentizing daily play, its not just casual play.

bringing up achievements is also a very bad point, because achievements are highly inefficient forms of laurel aquisition, 5000 points is like 8 months of play and you get what, 23 or so laurels? (keep in mind many dont have 5k and they played for like almost 12 months now)
not only that, but many of the achievements are one time only deals, which puts the focus on the daily and monthly achievements as the main means of earning achievement points as the game goes on, which we established gives more advantage to the daily player.

This doesnt even consider other psychological issues, like the inability to ever catch up no matter how hard or fast you are when things are time gated. It would be one thing if this was just cosmetics but its tied most closely to the best gear in the game.
so when you hit 80, no matter how hard you work, you will have to spend X amount of real world time being sub geared.

Then when one starts to talk about the gold wars aspect, the OP are essentially correct. The end game as it was quickly becomes a hunt for the most efficient gold farming. If you dont enjoy this style of play, in general you will have less shinies, less build options, etc.

One good thing about ascended is that it reduces this reliance on gold for part of the elder game progression, the problem is instead of replacing it with interesting activities, or at least whatever activities you prefer, it tends to replace it with daily and monthly playstyle, which is honestly, for me pretty boring.

I think the ascended system works best when implemted like the fractal method.
you had one way to get it via dailies and monthlies, one means to get it that was skill based, where after achieving a certain level of play you could get it much more rapidly than otherwise.
It still has a time gate, due to daily chests, but even that is mitigated by being able to go to higher teirs, and thus get more daily chest rolls based on your achievements.

Guild bounty also has this effect, however, its a pretty hard climb unless you join a guild that pre earned these abilities.

i really hope they severely limit the hard time gating in future content, however it looks like the will take it even farther sadly.

Unholy Pillager.3791:

I know this is GW2. My point was that many people who played GW1 are feeling betrayed by Anet because their favored play style was thoughtfully and deliberately removed from GW2, for no readily apparent reason. Many people like the archer archetype but dislike pets (and many people who like pets in other games dislike them in this one due to their numerous flaws). These people are left with no place to go, because Anet took that option out of the game completely. And, on top of that, the closest thing we get to the GW1 ranger still requires enormous micromanagement to get even close the the effectiveness that other professions have automatically.

I vaguely remember them saying that all playstyles from GW1 would be available in GW2. I call bullkitten.

i doubt they said that within months of release, i mean it would obviously be false when you see there is no monk class at all.

Far as the liking bows thing, Anet said that these classes were made to do different things, not really made with aesthetics in mind. Ranger is the Pet/nature mechanic, not so much the bow class.

Now i think its theoretically possible for them to make a new class, lets call it marksman.
It specializes in prepartion type gameplay. With its special mechanic being tied to preparing your abilities, and reloading them through various gameplay mechanics.
it could have access to some strong ranged options, and a couple close quarter tactics,

But regardless, you arent going to get the full nature ranger aesthetic without pets in GW2

Vanthian.9267:

I would say this is mainly because the balance for this game has been absolutely horrible since head start. The vast majority of the pro players left at or around 3 months in when they realized Anet was never going to truly balance the game or add in multiple game mode functions for sPvP.

Now, sPvP is littered with “leet peeps” trying to make a name for themselves through twitch even though this game is long since dead in the sPvP market. While some of them actually get a few followers in the sPvP area the majority of them are only decent at best and really only do well because they are the very few left that have a 5 man team.

How many teams are actually left in Guild Wars 2 tPvP? I can only think of around 3 currently (that play regularly and claim to be “pros”). {Edit: This is aimed towards the NA side of the game, I don’t keep up with EU.}

There is hardly any skillful play when you can stealth the entire team and one shot the “bunker” of the other team. sPvP is, and will continue to be, a hot mess until Anet steps up and over hauls a lot of their core mechanics for this game.

Just to give some examples of what needs to be dealt with:
1) Stealth— way to easy of access in this game
2) AI reliance for some classes—-Spawn AI then run around in circles (lot of skill there)
3) Passive Play—Way to much passive effects for most classes (aka condition removal, etc).
4) No risk vs reward—- No reason to go melee when you can deal 10% less damage than someone in melee while still applying 5 conditions at 1200 range constantly.
5) Condition Spamming—- So much for powerful short term conditions
6) Boon Spamming— So much for those powerful short term boons
7) etc, etc, etc…

Any who, just my 2 cents.

while i feel that some issues definately need to be balanced, this thread talks about pvp not being popular. The things you have beef with have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with popularity. The truth is popularness and appeal dont come from having a fine tuned game thats super balanced. The top 2 % of players dont make a game popular.
Lol is extremely popular, it is also regularly unbalanced. Even looking at fighting games, Marvel vs Capcom is hardly an example of great fighting game balance and design, but it is pretty popular in tournament watching, mostly because its fun to watch, has great charachters, thrilling moments and very good shout casting.

long story short, popularity of spvp being low is probably due to: being too seperated from the pve progression. (IE nothing you get in pve translates, and little you do in SPVP progresses your account)
and spvp not being something low level people feel they can get into easily. AKA newbs get pwned, PVE doesnt prepare you even an inkling for sPVP.

Im glad they made this shift for rangers, its something i reccomended some time ago, whether they actually heard me, or came to it on thier own, i think its a pretty good change.

Things to keep in mind going forward, i think that they will start to make some stealth counters going foward as they add more skills. I suggest that these counters not be able to take people out of stealth, merely give them an ability that allows them to mark or notice stealthed players.

I say this because completely disabling stealth(forcing the user out) will destroy in stealth benefits.

Also, add a utility that gives some form of stealth, even if its short, more towards regaining opening strikes, and quick use confusing tactics, when not using a bow.

this change along with some of the nerfs in the past, may make the Power line too hard to pass up.

Improve the beastmaster line in terms of actively used skill benefits. Possibly the critical line, though i havent studied that line in awhile

The OP here is short sighted. You are not good at working within the bounds of the game, you want to totally change the nature of the game to be a specific thing you prefer.

heres the truth

Some players prefer a fast paced battle.

Some players use AI minions to control the battlefield and plan tactically and strategically. Its not a lesser skill set to properly make use of AI. Just because believe that the other player didnt beat you, the AI did, and dont like having to pay attention to multiple things on the battlefield doesnt mean the mechanic shouldnt exist.
you can argue the balance, and power of Pets, but you are not really looking at the situation if you claim mesmer pets are bad.

Mesmer pets act more like skill/hexes than AI.

Ibeserker: Target creates a line AOE dmg every 5 seconds starting from last position and is crippled
iwarden. damage over time ground targeted AOE that absorbs projectiles.

iduelist. Take 8 ticks of dmg every 8 seconds, each tick has a 20% chance to proc projectile finishers.

Mesmer is actually the perfect example of AI that isnt really AI, its actually a Hex come to life. The method of removal is down the mesmer or use DPS on the hex itself. If you are getting beaten by a mesmer, its because they used their skills, not because an AI played for them.

If your solution for pvp IN THIS GAME is to erase one class, change everything about combat/hp/classes in this game, then you probably should be talking about a different game.

This whole thing about should be fun to play against is being taken too far. Everybody likes and hates different things.
Should dribbling be taken out of basketball because the center hates how some little guy can run around and confuse people, and make them go the wrong way instead of heading directly for the basket?

3 point shooting be removed because its hard to defend against reggie miller? Its not fun when a guy hits 4 three pointers in 30 seconds and ties a game that should be over.

Really guys, play the actual game, not your fantasy of what guild wars 1 could have been. Stop hating on perfectly acceptable and balanced builds because you dont like the way it makes you feel, or you dont like that fighting them takes you out of the style of fight you think every fight should come down too.

Im not saying somethings dont need to be balanced, but some of these “solutions” are just wanting to play a different game, or, i hate that not every player likes to play the way i play.

Really think about it people, the issue here isnt just a level cakitten ue, by looking at the thread, you can see its an issue of stay the same, or change with time.

I personally think no game can continue without changing with time. Level cap going up is one sign of this, its not the only way, but the game needs new goals, and it needs these goals be something you work towards, and probably gain some benefit from , that allow you to play the game in new and interesting ways, evolving your charachter.

Ok this whole idea of level cap has a lot of detractors, but the reality is, there are many more people who want some type of progression, rather than not. The fact is GW1 didnt increase levels, directly, however the game was as gated in other ways, there were places you could not go and things you could not see, skills you could not get. By adding new skills, they changed many builds, and you were often replacing or destroying gear sets anyhow.

The truth is the game needs progression, it needs goals, and it needs experience as another reward. Now this doesnt mean they HAVE to add more levels, but levels are the standard understandable measurement that many people are familiar with.

Now here, i think they can break out of the box. Many people are afraid of their gear becoming useless, they dont have to make gearing up in the future be a process that requires you to destroy or sacrifice your old gear.

They could have improving gear post 80, be more about upgrading older gear through use of adventure, and skill points, adding rarer means for obtaining case gears.

They could make the gear stop at level 80, and only your charachter level and access to skills/abilities increase with levels post 80

But the fact is, the game really does need to extend the goals, and it probably needs ways to progress you charachters, i already have 7/8 classes to 80, barring new classes, there really isnt that much to do or see with the cap at 80.

In the future, to get me really hyped, they will NEED some type of goals, and some type of new interesting abilities/skills that i can work towards. They dont have to label it as levels, but it essentially needs to have a similar structure;

while i go on these adventures, i want to become more skilled, and experience new events, as well new abilities/skills/synergies with the classes i enjoy the most. GW2 had this, with all of the PVE only skills, with ranks, they skill capture system that sometimes required you to go to places you had never been(as well as getting the skill points to buy the skills, and later with the hall of monuments that clearly tracked your achievements and gave you special trophies you could view for your achievements.

dimgl.4786:

I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re saying.

Firstly, content became irrelevant in Guild Wars because more and more skills were introduced into the skill pool as expansions came out. This meant that more efficient builds were found and eventually, many areas became faceroll easy. It also did not help that players can select two classes. From a balancing perspective, this is a nightmare, and that’s why invincitanks and other forms of super players existed.

Instancing has absolutely nothing to do with game design and combat mechanics. With the correct implementation, the old Guild Wars skill system could have been used in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately, they opted for a simpler system for the sake of having scalability in the open world.

Your argument is that content is too hard, and therefore people will stop playing it. This has nothing to do with combat mechanics. Many mobs in Guild Wars had trivial skill sets and could be solo’d by a single character.

The real problem is that with the current system, we have mobs that mostly function the same, are incredibly boring to fight, and are generally avoidable. The fact that ArenaNet decided to those with this slapdash mechanic of creating mobs that have modifiers and not actual player skills is hurting the PvE metagame.

just want to make this clear again, they at one time gave enemies in GW2 more skills, better control, dazes, knockdowns etc. Players didnt like this because it kicked their kitten Said npcs got nerfed.
all enemies got skill nerf from first beta to the next, they used less skills, less often, and they reduced some of their CC potentials.
Gravelings lost their knockdown/+damage combo.
Story mode COE was greatly nerfed npc skill and dmg wise.
Orr mobs lost many of their CCs, and got lower group densities.

See the problem with this whole discussion, is the truth is GW2 can have difficult varied skill NPCs, in fact they have had this type of thing, and people generally dont like it.
Its not AI designers holding GW2 back, its the fact that people dont want to fight mobs that evade backwards and run away, use knockbacks, and dazes heavy condition damages, and fight a lot of monsters at once (Orr nerf)

The only way to satisfy both sides is for them to create hardmode in some way shape or form. Because the truth is, a LOT of people dont really actually enjoy fighting mobs with difficult mechanics. Sure they say they do, but the minute such content exists, they call it cheesy, and say who designed this or why is this made for certain builds etc.

the vast majority of players are playing gw2 at a very low skill cap.

you know why it seems like many big bosses in dungeons have too much hp? because most parties dont know how to coordinate their offensive buffs for the good of the whole team. IE most parties suck at offensive support

you know why it seems like many monsters do too much dmg? because most parties cant coordinate their defensive buffs, and defensive conditions

You know why it seems like fights are chaotic? because most players dont know when to use their CCs/movement skills (and anet screwed up control a lot with thier implementation of indignant, but thats another story.)

Aigleborgne.2981:

Hey,

What you do think of GW2 monsters compare to GW1 ?
Personally, I miss GW1 monsters, they were a lot more interesting because they had all player skills (including elite!!):
Hydra with meteor (shower)
Moss scarab with vampiric touch
Wind Rider wih degen and interrupt (killed me so many times)
And mixed group of monsters with deadly combination of interrupt, damage, hexes, …

There were many areas where I was cautious to walk because I feared those monsters (crystal desert with mercenaries, not heroes). I could be stressed when 2 more hydras joined an already very difficult fights.

Now, what’s about GW2 monsters? Seriously, most of them are a joke. Some might have some skills, they are still doing pathetic damage or effect compared to what player can do to them. I think it is one of the main reason open world is so easy and not so interesting. Monsters are not impressive.
Except champions, but they are boring because all they do is massive damage with massive health. It was more fun and challenging to fight huge mixed groups in GW1
(like the ones in DoA).

Plus, it is so easy to disengage from combat in GW2. I can run accross most areas, aggroing all monsters in the way, and still survive. Try doing that in GW1 ! (even a run like droknar requires lot of pratice).
Why was it difficult? Because monsters had skills: they slow you down, stun, knockback, and some of them do high damage.

Here, you just dodge from time to time and run like if nobody coukd kill you, and most of the time, nobody will.

Well, this is one of the reason I got bored with GW2. “you want challenge? play dungeon or fractal !”. But it doesn’t change anything, monsters do more damage, have more health, they still don’t do anything special.
Numbers is a compensation, you will usually fight multiple opponents but as most professions have area of effect damage and survival skills, you are far from gw1 difficulty.
And if you play in group (after all, it is a mmo), it becomes a race at who will land a hit before that monster falls. Because yes, things die so fast it isn’t even funny.

Gw1 enemies were not any deeper than gw2 enemies, they just had more of them at once. Also the amount of skills they used and what not changed with how far in you were, and hard mode; to be honest, they set the difficulty on gw2 pretty low, in fact they nerfed the difficulty, and when they do make enemies more difficult, people dont tend to like it. look at krait, repeated Orr nerfs, and gravelings.
The real truth is people dont want diffuclty, and lets be honest GW1 with many party builds was not difficult at all, i could literally let the party fight for me most times, even in the hench times.

Now im not saying they couldnt make gw2 more difficult, or shouldnt, im just saying it really isnt that much easier than gw1 and even if they did make monsters have more dangerous skills, people would complain, as has already happened numerous times, and the enemies would get nerfed.

Essentially the game needs some iteration of hard mode, though they probably are afraid of separating the playerbase.

Wetpaw.3487:

screwing the ignorant playerbase w/a gambling problem

Im beginning to think this is not about people with gambling problems, Its about people who are mad that they cant get the cosmetic items they want for the money investment they want because other people are willing to buy black lion chests and make anet a bunch of money.

Would you be happier if they removed rng, but just charged 100$ per item? or how about if they made the cost increase the more people who buy it for a certain time frame? (aka first come first serve get it cheaper) What sort of economic model can you present which can actually pay for the development of all the free content the game offers, and profit so that its worth it to keep investing money in the game/development?

lets be honest, if anet needs to have a chest item be worth 1/50 chests in order to make the profit they need, how do you plan on making up that money? Its not really people with gambling problems buying these chests, its people who dont care if they blow 100-200 dollars on a game because they got money to burn. People with gambling problems are going to casinos and playing underground card games, not trying to get a skin in GW video game.

ScottBroChill.3254:

People bringing up things like “you don’t have to buy it if you don’t want”, that’s just ignorant. Psychology plays a large effect in gaming and business models. The problem stems from those who don’t have a lot of money see GW2 and buy it because it’s a one time purchase. These people also want a cheap way to boost they’re self esteem in a way by making their in game character impressive compared to their real life persona. So now that this demographic has been wrapped into the game they make it so a lot of the more impressive skins are in the cash shop in RNG chests, so it’s similar to how poor people tend to be addicted to lottery tickets. It’s not that this is a wrong thing to do or if it was even planned this way, but there are most likely correlations and it’s a dirty move by Anet if I do say so myself.

Its a dirty move to create things of value and then try to sell them? Maybe i just believe in people too much. I dont believe that people are incapable of making decsions for themselves.
It might be different if they were selling these items as magical water that makes your problems go away.
But take limited edition sneakers for example.
The company is showing you the shoe
limiting the printing time, and telling you hey if you want the shoe you have to do X
no one is lying to you, no one is tricking you. the deal is clear.

And people stop putting out this poor people are stupid or defenseless logic. Lets be honest most of the people effected by this are not poor. They have money to burn, and they are burning it. Poor people by and large arent going to spend 100 dollars on something whose max payoff is nothing. Even the prestige on these items is pretty low.

If you dont like rng and think it sucks, and wish the items were obtained more directly thats fine, say that, that can be measured or decided, but this whole exploiting poor people thing is complete bull.

Fox.3469:

To be clear, i’m a GW2 and A-Net supporter, the reason i made this post is because I believe that this is a problem.
I also realise that these marketing techniques affect everyone. Altough not everyone is as vulnerable.

Most of all i ask myself why this is needed?
Why can the molten mining pick and others be in for a few weeks only, why do these weapons require real money RNG.
What’s wrong with a store where things come in, go on sale after a while and then find a lower price to stagnate then the new stuff?

because controlling supply and demand is one of the main means of deciding value. If i sell an original its worth more than a copy, even if they look virtually the same, because the original is rarer.

If i say im going to be drawing only 100 guild wars pieces for the next 2 years, it makes my guild wars drawings more valuable than if i say i will draw as many guild wars pieces as people want for the rest of my life.

This is economics, and marketing, and appeals to all people who are interested in your product. I also feel that this thread is stereotyping poor people into being people have no self control and ability to rule themselves, which honestly from what i have seen is not accurate.
I think most people surviving on less than 16 thousand a year tend to have a fair amount of self control and ability to balance their income, or else they dont eat, and cant use electricity.

as far as the whole poor people gambling hoping for a big win dunno if that applies since the payoff is not money

Fox.3469:

Facepunch.5710:

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read your post and the message I’m getting from you is that individuals who are low income earners have no self control and ANet is exploiting their lack of control to make money. And you are against it. Is that right?

I’m saying that these tactics are targetting vunerable people, getting out of poverty is hard enough without having these tactics around in the general market, and a game that applies these strategies is imo just wrong.

I dont think you have the right to tell anyone else how to live their lives, or declare that they shouldnt spend their money the way they want. What you are proposing is that poor peoples purchases should be limited to what you think is worth their money. You dont get to decide how other people should live their own lives when it isnt effecting you.

Also the overall strategy allows people with less money to get more game for less money if they so choose, and the people who want to spend money to make the company profitable enough to continue.

Long story short, every body buying gems has a credit card, and is an adult, and can make their own decsions, and should. You may call it exploitation to sell and market things to people who want them, but really thats just what both parties actually want.

Also, the selling of legendaries is irrelevant to the poor exploitation, i doubt poor people are spending 1000 dollars on a legendary

Folk.2093:

no offense but at level 33 you know two things about your class: jack and squat. There’s more; a lot more.

in his defense, necro traits for conditions dont seem to give you any really big game changers playstyle wise.

IronPlushy.4256:

This isn’t one of those asinine “I quit” threads, but a genuine concern I have.
So my necromancer has reached 33 and I realize that not even halfway through leveling I have every single skill I will ever use and this has left me quite concerned.
After getting a set of gear that isn’t ugly (think every classes 1-20 gear) and finally seeing how powerful a condition necromancer can be, I realize there isn’t a tremendous amount of development in store.
I just don’t see myself playing the next 40+ levels with the same exact skills, it seems kinda dull.
When I started GW2 I was averaging 10+ hours a day losing a lot of sleep, now I haven’t played in almost a week. Just don’t see the point If there is no more meaningful character development why play? Like I get there are trait points but acquiring new and more powerful skills is so vital to core RPG mechanics I’m sitting here thinking wtf.
Is this just exclusive to necromancers or is this just the game?

trait combinations and certain traits can alter your playstyle as much as skills. For a condition Necro it may not be as obvious or entertaining as some other classes, generally speaking the things a level 80 can do via traits and runes/sigils far outclasses what they can do at level 30 when they dont have access to master or grandmaster traits.

I will say that a cursory glance at condition necro traits, while usefull, doesnt seem that exciting although they do increase power and ability to stack conditions.

But for example on ranger a grandmaster in power gives signets effects that were on pets to the ranger, allowing things like 1.5x damage on next hit, invulnerability, stability
Mesmers can count themselves towards shatters, allowing them to use any shatter at any time and increase the power of other shatters or, getting addition skill use per cast in mantras
Engineers get auto might with a certain kit equiped or explosions AOE heal, or 50% faster endurance.

many of the traits or combinations of certain traits are more powerful than a new skill, and actually make more sense for refining your chosen builds, because hey, more skills dont really effect 1 chosen playstyle.

That said, i think you should consider the possibility of other interesting playstyles. I really think ANet needs to look into making either some sort of gear locker, or storing armor/stats/runes so people actually can try other builds. The large inventory and inventory management issues prevent many people from trying new builds, even with max inventory multiple gear sets is still a pretty big hassle.

cantha is the most likely place for hand to hand weapon sets or martial artist proffessions, so it must happen, make it so no1

AlietteFaye.7316:

Hoyvin.3241:

AlietteFaye.7316:

So by your own idea, they should remove just about every zone from Guild Wars 2. Because there is just about nobody in them. There’s people at the boss events for their daily chests, and that’s just about it. Nobody uses these zones anymore, so we should take them out, too, right? Oh, and get those dumb repeating “dynamic events” out of the game. How is it dynamic when I’ve seen and done the same thing six times in the past two hours? Oh, and while we’re at it, remove those dungeons in the game. All of them. It doesn’t make sense that I’ve killed Ghost Eater eighty times, or that I destroyed the Nightmare tree again and again.

Nonsense. Of course not. There obviously has to be some permanent content otherwise new players and alts have nowhere to level. Everything can’t be 100% dynamic, that’s impossible. At least at this point. There are eight permanent dungeons, and I’m sure there will be more. There are dynamic events that give the illusion of permanent changes.

AlietteFaye.7316:

It wasn’t supposed to blow me away? Don’t market it out as an expansion’s worth of content. And you still have yet to explain what the concept is behind the living story. It’s no different than their one-time events exception of the fact that it stayed in for more time, which is what people suggested for their one-time events in the first place.

Show me where Flame & Frost itself was touted as an expansions worth of content.

What’s to explain behind the concept of living story? Isn’t it obvious? It’s what were discussing in this thread. Whether these sort of world changing events with temporary content can work. I think they can, and obviously Arenanet thinks so, as well. They’re obviously trying to break the mold with GW2. Whether it works or not remains to be seen. Obviously, you don’t like it. Some of us do.

“These two months combined are basically an expansion’s worth of content for free.”
Source: http://gamingbolt.com/guild-wars-2-interview-we-talk-to-areanet-about-how-the-mmorpg-has-been-doing-post-launch#1JvUBwFFkaZE8FgG.99
They later came on the forums to clarify that they had to push some things back so it would be combined with March and if I remember correctly April.

Trying to break the mold is fine, I don’t care about that. But they’ve literally added in content that tons of people spend a couple of hours doing and then they have to wait a month (now getting down to two weeks) to come back and see something new. Rather than adding in something that players can play for a lot more time, work towards a goal and actually feel like they’re getting a reward for their effort. Every single update has been about adding in something to bandage the lack of content that there is to do, rather than adding in a good permanent fix.

I don’t mind that they have temporary content. I mind that all they have is temporary content. Yes, Colin said that some of the stuff will be permanent. But that could literally be any aspect. Southsun Cove was permanent, and it failed miserably to be anything worthwhile. Especially after they killed off the guaranteed rich Ori node. They have to add permanent things that people will want to do. Fractals was great, but it’s time for the next “Fractals” to be added. (Not literally, just something as lasting and fun.)

yeah their content got delayed, but in truth it was a fair amount of content. the guild stuff is a lot of content, its basically a whole new guild progression. WvW had culling removed new progression skills/titles added. spvp got custom arenas and spectator mode, temporary wise we had sab and flame and frost. all these things lumped together does rival many other games claims of an expansion, thought not every games claims of an expansion.

That said something’S can be temporary, somethings should come back, some things should change. I think overall though, they should use the temporary stuff to transition into new things more often than not, preferably new good things. For example if southsun cove temporary content transitions into a new dungeon, and a mini game resort, as well as new lore uncovering, that would be an ideal use of temporary content leading to a changing world.

Honestly i dont think flame and frost will be the best execution of living story, it was new, and the teams were learning things/figuring out what they need. Hopefully flame and frost will be the worst execution of living story (no offense to the people who worked hard on it, just saying i hope you guys get better and better at delivering this content and making it feel good)

that said, you guys may need something akin to reruns/back issues/highlights, because even with temp content, a decent amount of people usually want to experience it again in some way/shape/form

Guns and Giblets.9308:

xephire.8324:

Can we please do some more work on the boring skills system?

That would be most welcome.

However, there’s no monetary incentive to revamp the skill system. Right now the game is making bank from the cash shop, especially RNG boxes. The living story helps keep the target demographic of casuals and whales engaged long enough to consider making a purchase (or several). Working on the skill system does little to help the bottom line, since the kinds of people who care about a finely balanced, fluid and interesting meta either already left the game or are now in the minority.

you sound a bit bitter, but maybe i am reading into things. That said, i think skills actually interest most people, except the finely balanced people you mention who generally hate new skills/professions/skill systems etc. I Fully expect new skills/etc to be a great selling point for any new expansions, or ways to garner attention and get people playing again. Keep in mind though, its kind of a big deal, and you generally only see it in relatively large updates/expansions. Not like GW1 added any skills except once an expansion which is like, what once every 1.5 years? And as far as new skill systems? the closest i think GW has to that is the PVE only skills in campaigns, once again something that will be a lot rarer.

The precursor driven economy they created creates too much glut items that have no value, even less than npc prices for many items. It also drives excess production of that same glut, and reduces the game to best money farming is main way to succeed post 80.
Id suggest
get rid of weapon/armor drops from normal mobs
instead, give salvageables with runes/sigils on them that npc for roughly the same as what we have now

Veterans/champions can drop completed items
chests can drop completed items

npcs sell up to blues and greens depending on level

putting 4 salvageables in mystic forge can reward random completed items

mystic forge overall has better rates to compensate for a lot less items in the world
chests

crafting exotics(and even low level rare skins) or higher uses crafter energy or skill points(crystals and philosopher stones) crafter energy is built by doing a simple crafting quest for the crafters guild (like a crafting daily) more can be awarded by doing various dynamic crafting type quests which pop up in towns, hamlets, in the open world, as well as another method something grindy but helpful to the economy where like every day some points are given for bringing overproduced items to the crafters guild.

crafting rare and named exotics now becomes possible, but requires a finite resource, theres more to do in the world and more reasons to go to foreign towns. This will give crafting better value, and better progression,

it reduces the glut of items and increases the value for trash as well as gives value to every drop in the world.
it gives crafting the same low barrier to entry, but gives it a value and limits over production.
Destroying items, but not having so much of that item destruction being top heavy, and negatively impacting top end play to becoming a massive gold grind.

Its probably a lot of work, but lets be honest, the game as a whole will need a lot of work to have a fulfilling reward system with its current structure. Almost every drop you get is fairly worthless and most of the items you create are as well.

SadieDeAtreia.8912:

Lets just think about something for a second:
The game needs RNG and the mystic forge to survive in it’s current state.

I know, harsh words and I almost cannot believe that I’ve typed it…
While I was working on my legendary I was blinded by rage at the nonsense of the mystic forge and how stupid the whole idea was. I slowly realized, however, that without this ‘idiocy in design’ as I once called it, the in game economy will look a whole lot different to what we have now. Rares will be basically worth just more than vendor prices. The same can be said about exotics. Why is that, you may ask? Well, it’s a simple matter of supply and demand. There are hundreds, even thousands, of rares being farmed and crafted each day. The market will simply be flooded. This will cause a spiral effect where things like ecto (amongst others) will drastically loose value. Even harvested materials will become literally worthless. The game needs a mechanic where we, as players, can dispose of all these excess items: the mystic forge. Currently, the primary reason for using the forge is the chance you have at a precursor. Take that away and you disrupt the entire system.

In the long term, with ascended gear requiring a gold sink in the form of ecto, this may change to the point where the gamble for precursors are no longer required in the game in order to keep item quantities in check. For now, though, we have to accept this situation as reality and think of ways how Arenanet can improve the current system. Something that will keep players content and feeling like they are progressing, even with bad luck, while not destroying the economy.

i agree that the current economy is based around the mystic forge, but i disagree that the current economy is good for the game.

I mean your suggestion is one that occured to me, looking at the situation, essentially, a hard cap on precursor obtaining, setting a worst case scenario for players.

I would however make it more interesting by making an event where you challenge zommoros every time you reach a certain amount of failure tokens. lets use some numbers here just to illustrate

say the projected worst case scenario now is 250 failed attempts with exotics, putting worst case scenario precursor at worth 1000 exotics. (current prices this would be like 2-4k gold)
every 50 attempts you get kitten off and try to rob/kill zommoros(think a randomized event in Zommoros home dimension say there is like 10 possible events). Succesfully completing this awards you with some pretty fat loot, and say a 1/20 chance at a unsellable precursor, (but also various treasures, lodestones, or gold, possible rare skins)
cost here is 50 attempts, or on current market 400-800 gold, so giving people some lodestones or even 3-4 gold, or a random highly rare skin is not really a drop in the bucket, but it makes the event feel better

if you reach 5 attempts, you get an event whereby you try to beat zommoros to death its repeatable until you succeed, on success you get precursor(unsellable) of your choice.

Its essentially the same idea, but it sets smaller goals, and at least a feeling of progress, it gives some interesting events, and people can be proud of goin this way for precursors, i would even suggest that each precursor gets an alternate color option so that there is even a feeling of achievement for taking the long road.

but as i said, while these type of solutions might somewhat allieve the perception and feel of current precursor issues, the economy would still be mostly a failure.

clay.7849:

ThiBash.5634:

clay.7849:

Textbook example of a straw man argument. Nice one!

If you are going to use logical fallacies to argue, there is no point in trying to have a meaningful discussion with you, is there?

Your original statement dismissed all reasons WHY support would be worthless, you just claimed it based on your own opinion. You then responded to my arguments with the above statement which was again void of arguments to support your case.

If you like damage more than support, fine. But claiming it is worthless without backing up that claim isn’t gonna win you any support.

Again, you are putting words in my mouth and arguing against those words. Where did I say support was worthless?

See, you are arguing against something I never said. I said that support, as a whole, is less effective than straight DPS provided that DPS can dodge effectively.

That, my friend, is a true statement – as it relates to being the most effective in a PvE encounter.

I never said that support is useless, it just isn’t as useful as constant direct damage and good dodging.

your oversimplifying here, truth is support isnt just healing, its also blinding enemies, using control at the right time, enemy placement, as well as offensive buffs.
dodge means you must stop doing damage for 3 seconds, Blind can mean you can continue to DPS, reflect/absorb projectiles can do the same. Mesmer reflecting might and fury is support.
The honest truth is support is powerful, its just a playstyle most teams have not developed, While people have picked one group composition and figured out how to maximize its effectiveness, most people have not done the same with more complex team set ups.

I see DiogoSilva’s points, but i think combat wise, what it really boils down to, is that PVE wise, encounters are too simple to bring out the deeper combat systems. The problem though is, they probably cant make the game any harder, people already complain that some things are too hard.
Simply put they need to have a hard mode, that is essentially actively harder, mostly due to better enemy
Also I agree that the CC Buff for bosses is stupid. I understand they dont want people chain stunning things, but the solution they came up with essentially negates part of the trinity they wanted to design for.

CC buff for bosses is stupid

had to say it again, it really doesnt work well with the systems they have in place.

As far as the exploration, you are mostly correct. And its kind of wierd, because on one side you have some pretty unique environments in the world, but on the other side they do make it actually feel pretty mechanical, and only have a few dynamic events/chains that actually reveal something about the area. This wouldnt be as much of an issue if they had something that guided you to, or through, or kept track of the actual dynamic events that are tied to the story/zone better.

They have the basic systems down, but their event planning and linking leaves a lot to be desired.

Rising Dusk.2408:

phys.7689:

essentially my research shows it really isnt that much more effective, and as far as inter player synergy, toughness is more effective
(since multiple people can heal, but people generally cant increase others dmg in any stat based way.

Be mindful that there are traits that specifically do this, and there are also boosters such as banners, spirits, and so forth. Furthermore, aoe might stacks boost dps stats appreciably. My anchor Guardian runs a very defensive setup, and yet does quite respectable damage with a perma 16 stacks of might up at a minimum that she can maintain on the entire group.

right but these dmg buffs are not more effective when used by berserkers, 25 stacks of might is giving everyone 875 power regardless of your stacks.
Aoe precision as well.
however healing is more effective the more dmg reduction there is

Im not implying or saying that offensive buffs are worthless, im just saying they effect everyone pretty linearly, whereas the effectiveness of healing at mitigation when toughness is high is not linear. therefore, i dont think toughness really needs to be more effective at all.

carabidus.6214:

Distaste.4801:

The problem with berserker is stat synergy that is not available through any other stats. I mean Power x Crit % x Crit damage x % damage increases provides for some insane damage scaling and it should not be there unless the defensive stats scale equally. There needs to be defensive stat multipliers as well. Healing power should be a viable stat, but since ArenaNet is so hellbent on not having healers it’s pretty much a wasted stat since 9/10 it scales absolutely horribly.

Very well stated… Damage mitigation with respect to armor and healing does not scale in a linear fashion, but yet damage scales in a multiplicative fashion (and does it ever!). Throw in high crit chance and high +% crit damage, and you have yourself a real problem with combat balance. As you alluded to, the damage formula prevents having pure tanks and healers. But, we are left with an end game centered around one parameter: DPS (in PvE especially).

I really respect and applaud the developers for having the courage to depart from the trinity as I do believe the system is dated and needs to go. Nonetheless, I think there are better ways to approach the problem mathematically. Right now, there exists virtually no practical difference in damage mitigation between armor values of 2700 and 3200 (see some of my previous posts on this topic for the analysis). That’s a whopping difference of 500 in toughness, but yet affording only about a 10% difference in damage mitigation. This is due to the non-linear nature of the damage formula. It is a very clever design if you want to limit the effectiveness of armor without a hard cap. But, just like there are stat multipliers for damage, there needs to be stat multipliers for damage mitigation as well. For instance, we can keep the original damage formula, but attach a coefficient to the denominator [1.xx] to boost the effectiveness of armor and counteract the insanely high damage output from the one-shot wonders. With a very simple fix such as this, maybe our end-game characters can finally start to “feel” epic, instead of succumbing to common dungeon trash, which often hits harder than the boss himself.

But that’s another discussion…

essentially my research shows it really isnt that much more effective, and as far as inter player synergy, toughness is more effective
(since multiple people can heal, but people generally cant increase others dmg in any stat based way.

the real dif is, if your skilled you can avoid a lot of dmg, but really that is for the best.

digiowl.9620:

phys.7689:

yes people are exagerating, however, from my research, a berseker full warrior gets 13.68 dmg reduction, whereas a full max toughness build gets 49.6 dmg reduction. this means, say a monster hits for 10 000 dmg
berserker warrior gets hit for
8.632k
knights warrior gets hit for
5.04k
but now we look at protection, which essentially allows you to take 66% dmg
so the defensive dude is taking 3.3k dmg
the berserker is taking 5.6k
so the berserker is taking 70% more dmg roughly, now not only that but when you start looking at heals
the most effiecient healing skill is giving 281 heals per sec with no healing from what i have seen
this means the toughness warrior needs 11.7 seconds to fully recover from a hit

the berserker warrior needs 19.9 seconds. this is basically an extra dodge in terms of damage mitigation, and this is only including your basic heals, its not including heals on shouts, team healing regeneration etc.

So while its only 70% more damage taken, in overall survivability its a pretty big deal, with the nature of heals, i think it could be the difference between being nigh unkillable and not having to stop attacking very often, and having to back off constantly.

Of course, how much one actually needs all that defensive stats is questionable, this isnt a game where you are guaranteed to get hit as much. But its not that these stats arent effective, they are a huge difference in how much dmg your team can sustain and mitigate through heals.

The devil in the details here are that protection is a straight percentage decrease. In other words, the more armor you already have on the more armor it in effect adds.

its more about how heals work, since the lower the number of dmg, the more effective healing is. People think heals dont matter, but if you got people doing the right things, heals are a noticeable amount of mitiagtion, and the less dmg the players take the more effective it is.

It really comes down to the skill set of the players involved.

Assuming the perfect berserker, how often does he have to actually hold back in attacking in order to survive, what is the increase in risk of failure?
Assuming the perfect knight, how often can he continue to hit because his toughness and the teams heals mitigate his dmg, what is the increase in risk of success.

These questions are not easily answered in this game, and thats for the best. However, toughness is going to continue to be boring for many people.

the other problem with toughness, is its best paired with healing/healers if you dont have that going on in your group, its effectiveness is drastically lowered. This is probably why classes that have good healing potential/boons gel better with toughness

also fact is, the game difficulty isnt too high, im pretty sure any highly organized group will probably have little to no difficulties.

Long story short, the game needs some iteration of hard mode in order for various builds to shine, and the playerbase skill level to evolve.

The reason why berserker is the cookie cutter of choice is probably because although the skill cieling is supposed to be high, it really isnt that high in some content.

Wethospu.6437:

Khal Drogo.9631:

Yes well nothing against Wethospu, but he doesnt show you the videos where he had failed practiced. Imagine if he was in a party and had to cope with more random attack patterns. Not sure if scaling occurs from solo to party of five – never tried before.

It doesn’t. Not only fights last 5 times longer, but you also get full focus and no one gets you up if you get downed.
Random attack pattern also means you won’t get hit all the time.

Lafiel.9372:

Lafiel.9372:

—
Berserker gear pve is only strong if the person who wears it is skilled. Others who wear it just end up dying 2-3 seconds into a boss fight – constantly.

How much stronger do you think PVT-gear makes you? About 2 times stronger? So you last 4-6 seconds instead?

A LOT stronger (try 10-20x). I can face tank most mobs for a long time wearing “knights” not pvt. with berserkers, no way.
—

Maybe missing your main point again but scroll up , check my calculations and see how many stats you need in order to get 10 times stronger (not to mention 20…), it’s monstrous.
[/quote]

yes people are exagerating, however, from my research, a berseker full warrior gets 13.68 dmg reduction, whereas a full max toughness build gets 49.6 dmg reduction. this means, say a monster hits for 10 000 dmg
berserker warrior gets hit for
8.632k
knights warrior gets hit for
5.04k
but now we look at protection, which essentially allows you to take 66% dmg
so the defensive dude is taking 3.3k dmg
the berserker is taking 5.6k
so the berserker is taking 70% more dmg roughly, now not only that but when you start looking at heals
the most effiecient healing skill is giving 281 heals per sec with no healing from what i have seen
this means the toughness warrior needs 11.7 seconds to fully recover from a hit

the berserker warrior needs 19.9 seconds. this is basically an extra dodge in terms of damage mitigation, and this is only including your basic heals, its not including heals on shouts, team healing regeneration etc.

So while its only 70% more damage taken, in overall survivability its a pretty big deal, with the nature of heals, i think it could be the difference between being nigh unkillable and not having to stop attacking very often, and having to back off constantly.

Of course, how much one actually needs all that defensive stats is questionable, this isnt a game where you are guaranteed to get hit as much. But its not that these stats arent effective, they are a huge difference in how much dmg your team can sustain and mitigate through heals.

ice ice baby.6083:

Hi There,

I am the leader of a guild called [BOOM] on SFR server we have 450 members and usually average anywhere between 80-130 online at any 1 time.

We had been eagerly awaiting guild challenges since the guild missions came out. Finally this week on Saturday we had unlocked it. However i was very disapointed as to how easy it was to complete as i don’t believe it scaled to the amount of players we had at the event.

Im sure this “Challenge” would have been challenging for maybe 0-10 players, but we had 70 completing the guild missions this sunday and the champions we being killed faster than we should be able to kill a veteran.

Im struggling to find things in PVE i can considering challenging and fun at the same time, which is why i was especially looking forward to this guild mission.

I think there is a slight imbalance for the “Big” guilds and the “small” guilds. Things are too easy for us and too hard for the smaller guilds.

I would like to know what everybody elses thoughts on the guild challenges were?

Thanks

Pure

nothing is going to be challenging for 70 + players unless its specifically designed for 70+ players.
AND i think, lets be honest people will be very mad if these things required 100 + players and are extremely hard.

Maybe they can make hard versions of these guild challenges, but even then, it still can be designed around the 70-400 people some guilds have. They probably dont even have a way to test 100 people + content.

I have an idea for trying to build that type of large scale content, and it basically involves taking an altered instance of WvW, and populating it with a massive amount of NPCs, siege, and multiple bosses at the same time. However it would be no small feat, and only be accessible by an extremely small portion of the player base, so its probably not worth the time.

Wethospu.6437:

SneakyErvin.3056:

Kichwas.7152:

Wethospu.6437:

If you survive easily you have too much defense and could have more offense and do things faster.

Anyways I’m bit curious, how do you people know everyone melting in seconds is running Berserkers or if pvt-gear would even make any difference? Do you ask them to link their gear? Play with them again when they use pvt-gear?

Standard veteran mob standing next to boss drops an AOE on half the group.
2 players who were at full health are suddenly in the downed state, and me standing right next to them – I’ve barely suffered 10%.

- That happens way to often.

Guess who’s group now has to 3-man the boss and adds? Or I can leave the other two still up to 2-man it while I rez the zerkers, only to see them faceplant on the very next AOE…

Oh and, if you survive – it means you had just the right amount of defensive stats.

That happens way too often. It’s been a regular thing then I play my warrior. I stand there up close and personal with 2 other warriors or other squishy geared people, kaboom AoE, I keep standing there, wondering where the other 2 guys went. Then I take a look at the floor and there they are. Then I just back up, dump some arrows and combo fields. Or I avoid the AoE with a dodge, F4 LB, then evisc back into the fight, since I’m not caught up by looking at “huge” numbers from my 100B.

I dont think I’ll ever go back to full zerk gear on any of my toons after trying more defensive combinations. I just got tired of some situations that would down me if I screwed up. Now I can take the semi heavy hits and dodge the planet killers, earlier the semi heavy hits would be planet killers aswell, so dodge had to be more stressed.

Well, at least I know I don’t have to take both of you seriously anymore.
I have 2127 armor and 18372 health. When I get one-shot and you take only 10% of your maximum health you would need:
21270 armor
OR
183720 health
OR (optimal)
6251 armor and 62510 health

Math: Effective was used (Armor * VItality). To take 10% damage you need to have 10 times as much effective health. You get biggest effective health when Armor * 10 = Health (because Vitality gives 10 Health). So best Armor is X when X * X * 10 = 39077244 * 10 -> X = 6251. Then Vitality is just 10X.

it was at best an estimate, say he meant he took 20% of his health, and they took 100, then factor in protection 33% dmg reduction, it becomes a lot more probable.

and yeah i have seen full zerkers go down incredibly fast repeatedly. I have also seen them survive without going down very often. Fact remains though toughness and vitality are not ineffective stats, its just boring, and mostly about getting hit. i say make some of these stats more tied to skills, then people may have more reasons to make interesting choices.

Or they could just increase enemy reg attack speed.

Lokheit.7943:

The real story about thief mechanics.

This is the truth, many people dont really understand theif at all. Theif has a totally different mechanic than any one else.

shortbow on thief is a really good weapon, however, it is not even close to what ranger shortbow is about. I really dont think ranger would want a thief shortbow, Especially as many people find shortbow to be one of rangers best weapons.

Now i am far from thinking ranger is perfect, but what Robert said is basically accurate.
Theif is not nearly as broad as ranger, and you guys concentrate on the big burst potential they have, and yet ignore that in a game with active skill use to deal with enemies, having all your burst on 2 or 3 skills, in an obvious combination is a huge weakness.
Here is what it means that ranger have sustained. a high dmg ranger has all of his damage spread out amongst many different attacks, this means you dont defeat the ranger by waiting for his big skill.

ranger is constanly outputing a lot dmg from difference sources, you really cant mitigate too well. you got a pet hounding you, you got the ranger hounding you, even his decent dmg skills are putting conditions on you.
My main problem with this though, is ranger survivability it too directly tied to stats. Rangers survive with toughness, healing and trait selection. So when you actually do go glass cannon, you have very few actual tools to survive.

I think the real deal is that berserker gear has a direct effect on your skills, through dmg, however Vit, toughness, dont actually directly effect many skills. Even if toughness is useful, if it doesnt effect any actual skills, its going to be way more boring than berserker.

say for example, how long you could block was effected by toughness, or how much damage you could negate.

or if vitality effected condition duration, or how many conditions certain skills could remove.
essentially its a game that is played through ability use more than pure stats, so the stats that effect the effectiveness of ability use will always be the most attractive.

On the flip side, i will say that toughness and vit are probably very usefull. A person who can take a hit can do many usefull things, and tends to help a normal party a lot. Its just pretty boring

clay.7849:

ophidic.1279:

clay.7849:

ophidic.1279:

lordkrall.7241:

clay.7849:

Don’t hate the player, hate the game. LOL!

Seriously, just because you don’t like the OP or disagree with him doesn’t mean it’s a troll post. There are plenty of people that have beef with the game.

The OP is however doing more or less the definition of trolling with that post.

It basically is. There’s been a million of these.

If it was the same person, I would agree. However, it is different people and they have all realized that something about this game isn’t fun for them – and they have the right to post about that feeling for the the devs to see without the need of being called a troll.

Honestly I think they’re playing the wrong game. I don’t mean that in a mean way, I mean that in “this game isn’t suited to their long term needs” kind of way.

I just wish more people shared this attitude about the non-fun jumping puzzles.

I agree. I know I’m playing the wrong game. There is, however, very little competition it seems out there in the MMO genre at the moment.

I keep telling myself I want to play The Secret World, but I have unreasonable problems with playing non-fantasy MMO type games.

Actually, I don’t even like MMOs. GW1 was the closest thing to an MMO I played, but I LOVED IT.

I will probably go back to Skyrim and turn up the difficulty meter another notch while waiting for the next good single player fantasy RPG.

I think a lot of people, like me, are in limbo and are bumming around GW2 because it is F2P.

Ok, now we are getting somewhere. Essentially GW1 was a cooperative RPG, that didnt need to be cooperative. This game is an MMO. This means the overall game mechanics are substantially different. So the question here, is what can be done to appeal to the co op RPG guys to make GW2 more appealing without killing the MMO side of things…

One of the big things about GW1 was that you could do everything solo, or with a group, or partial groups etc. This cant happen completely in GW2. However, I think if they add more plotlines, actual story, and development to each area, so its more similar to Missions in GW1. not only that, but change the concept of personal story towards a personal adventure, make it so every one gets experience and karma balanced around how long the mission takes to complete. The personal adventure would be a bit expanded to include some side stories of a more personal nature for the area, and not be all directly linked to the story line. Think of these as side stories you find in the world, that better flesh out your personal adventures. They arent required for story completion, but they involve your charachter, and their choices, and you can invite people on the missions. Give some rewards for doing these missions the first time similar to trade contracts in GW1, which you could use to get some fairly high demand items like rubies.

This i think would add a lot of depth to exploration, and give co rpg people more content, they can solo it, or they can bring a small group of friends. It would be pretty cool if delve deep into some underwater cave, and instead of finding just a chest worth 1 blue, your Asura gets some race specific story line for a lost Asuran city, You can then invite your friends or some random people on the map and go have fun doing a co op type mission. Keep in mind this content might also be part of a dynamic event, and tied into the goings on in the open world.

Or maybe, as the human who wanted to join the circus, you find and have adventures related to the circus people who were forgotten.

This builds a more personal rpg, and will make the world seem even more cool to explore, while only adding to the overall world itself. Pass on VAs for players in this content, costs too much time and resources, Make use of dialougue as accents. IMO the best VA stuff is usually little tid bits that give you flavor.

mekkanic.4759:

phys.7689:

mekkanic.4759:

Wish they bring back build templates and get rid of the cost of retraiting.

cost of retraiting is honestly not an issue. It costs 3 silver for a level 80 to retrait, i wouldnt really notice nor care of the difference. Build templates though would be good, and im guessing they may return, especially if they split PVE an WvW skills, in fact they would probably get rid of cost of retraiting too.

Still i think the problem is the cost of re gearing, and not just with money, but with convenience, inventory, and manageability.

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary. Its not needed. I would love to retrait while im in wvw without having to go visit someone just so I could retrait. It could cost 0 silver. Its just the fact that I have to go to an npc to do it. It wasnt in gw1…why is it in gw2?

it does need to be at an npc imo. Teleporting is free in WvW, but do you really think it would be a good idea to change traiting completely on the fly in a PVP enviroment? how good you are would have a lot to do with how many trait changes you could do while moving to objectives. Change to running traits while running change to long range dps and tank on wall, change to skirmisher outside wall. At some point you shouldnt be able to specialize for every situation, and have to choose an overall focus with advantages and disadvantages.

Sometimes I ve wanted to change traits on the fly, but i think it would be bad for the game overall.

Null Unit.4375:

It would seem that some of you are trying to prove your opinions to each other. There is no need, as that is as fruitless as these forum discussions are. The developers aren’t going to be convinced of anything by our discussions. Every time a new interview is released, they prove again and again that they live in their own little bubble.

As for the question this thread poses:
This game is so good. It is so close to being great. I had great fun for these months since beta weekends; leveling 5 80’s and gearing them… working on leveling more. Over 1100 hours of fun has been had. Real money has been spent in the gem store. I regret nothing.

Now? Not so much fun have I. I log in to do my daily, for fear of falling behind on some intangible advantage. Then, I go play other games that I actually enjoy. If there was another MMO that seemed worth the time, I would switch in a heartbeat.

RNG boxes, Arenanet tossing their own manifesto out the window, small dribbles of bland content called a “living story”, ridiculously out of touch developer comments, and the knowledge that there is no expansion in the works have drained me of almost all of the passion I have for this game.

The Super Adventure Box is the only actual fun I have had in months.

i agree that laurels as they currently are, are a bit of a pain, and make you feel like you have to log on, rather than you want to log on. I think the execution would be better if they had some other means of obtaining them, like from achievement points, or certain other tasks gave you some.

And SAB i think is probably the most fun addition they have done recently. This is not just due to nostalgia, it has a better overall design than a lot of other content;
the level is designed with hidden secrets and multiple ways to handle the same areas, you get rewarded for exploration as much as beating the level. (if you know where the spots are you can get as many or more baubles just doing hittng teh secrets) If they added a couple unpredictable elements, from a level design standpoint it would be up there.

Reality is though, there will always be moments between content in all forms. Its easier to consome it, than create. When i draw a sequential art page, it takes like 4-12 hours a page. people read it in 30 seconds to 2 minutes. What can you do? 2 hour movies take a year+ to create.
there will always be times when things arent as exciting or you did it all, unless they artificially inflate doing it all with various filler, that many people say they dont want.

gkrit.9416:

Countless others have said that it IS a a grind game lol. So what is it I wonder?

Now this is where discussion goes nowhere. This topic discussion however has gone as long as it has because obviously there is two sides to this story and somewhere along the lines, something is not right. This is where the middle man (Anet in this case) needs to be included to take both sides into account and move forward from there. I just really hope they read these threads.

heres the thing, they said that people misunderstood, they clarified it before the game came out.
You dont have to grind to have fun was or be able to do things.
the second part of the whole grind talk was, yeah you may have to kill 1000s of monsters for a certain item, but it will be cosmetic, which honestly is pretty accurate, (ascended is a bit different, but ascended is generally time gated, not straight grinded)

and taking people use GW as an example, GW was just as grindy as GW2. Most of the reason it didnt seem grindy was because they didnt plan out the economy that well. Over time there got to be so many runes in circulation the prices dropped, but they were not cheap or easy to get in prophecies. GW1 titles were pretty insane. I spent a great deal of time and resources getting vabbian armor, and i never had close to the amount of mats that obsidian armor would have required.

I would get 0-3 ectos an underworld run, and chaos gloves cost 75, and 10k plat.

GW2 is grind for cosmetics, its pretty different from other games with gear checks. That said, while a long term game needs long term goals, I think anets current reward guys plug some pretty off putting numbers into things, and put too much repetitive into tasks.

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

And when the argument goes against you,

What arguments? You trade in opinions, not arguments.

You say this all the time. It’s only true if you refuse to read the stuff I actually write.

You talk about things like balance or depth of game play and how much better it is was in Guild Wars 1.

I’ve replied to this sort of thing several times in several different threads. Talking about how in Guild Wars 1 there were plenty of balance issues as well. I’ve brought up stuff like the perma-sin nerf, the ursan nerf, etc. I’ve brought up in various threads how ritualists were so OP, it completely killed PVe for just about anything but a couple of high end instances. I’ve talked about how necromancers may have had a ton of elite skills, but you pretty much used three of them. I’d say just about every necro in the game was either using discord, aura of the lich, or blood is power if they were farming with a team in UW.

Yes, I’ve given data to back up my opinions. Guild Wars 1, balance wise, isn’t exactly a bastion of virtue. It had it’s flaws, some of them serious. And a lot of people left Guild Wars 1 because of balance issues.

The game was too hard to balance, because of the depth. And it got worse as the game went on, because more skills were added.

So Anet goes with a system that’s easier to balance and has less skills. We don’t know if more skills will be added over time or not, but if they are, it still should be easier to balance, particularly with skills being tied to weapons.

The problem is, when you guys attack me personally because you don’t like my opinion. I’m not ENCOURAGED to have a conversation with you.

I’ll let others decide whether or not I’m just a man of opinions or if I have facts to back them up. I know I have a few detractors on these forums, but as many detractors as I have, I’ve gotten personal messages from far more people who like what I have to say.

I think the point hes making here is not that you shouldnt have an opinion. I think he is saying that simply dismissing everything as opinion is worthless in terms of actual problem solving. Hes saying dont just say nothing matters because everyone has an opinion.

Say i have this opinion based on these factors, heres where i think something is strong, and heres where i think something is lacking. The point is to have a discussion that may give deeper understanding or bear fruit. The topic is do you find the game fun. Of course its going to be an opinion, but theoretically by discussing why yes, and why no, someone seeking solutions maybe able to glean useful information on why people are happy, or not happy, and better allot their resources towards making the game over all, better.

Of course nothing may come of it, but eh point of a forum is discussion, why not try.

mekkanic.4759:

Wish they bring back build templates and get rid of the cost of retraiting.

cost of retraiting is honestly not an issue. It costs 3 silver for a level 80 to retrait, i wouldnt really notice nor care of the difference. Build templates though would be good, and im guessing they may return, especially if they split PVE an WvW skills, in fact they would probably get rid of cost of retraiting too.

Still i think the problem is the cost of re gearing, and not just with money, but with convenience, inventory, and manageability.