Money is pointless in this game as it is, I have 200 gold sitting in my wallet I have no use for atm :P
Of course you have no use for 200 gold.
99.99% of the game requires 50 gold or less.
0.01%, which is a Legendary, requires at least 800 gold.
Your gold is sitting in the middle.
At least with events their timers can be controlled. Yes, they intend on doing only the easiest events but then when they’re done they have nothing else. They’re forced to make a choice: they can either wait a really long time for these easy events to start up again or they can move onto other events. If you understand the farmer mentality you will know that they would prefer the latter. After all, time spent doing nothing could be better spent doing something even if it’s harder.
Oh I can understand farmer mentality very well. And yup, you’re right, they will opt to choose something better to do: not play the game.
Actually, this “ideal” has happened before – it’s the time between they dramatically nerfed CS farming and the new champ loots.
Personally, I cannot account to whether it made the game better or not because it was the time I left the game for a while to spend my time on doing other things I considered more rewarding.
What makes you think this lamentation will end there?
The lamentation will never end. But unless ArenaNet did what they should really do – create an area specifically for farming, in which it was obvious drops would be better, so farmers would move there and leave the other players in peace in the open world – all we can do is make the game less bad.
We have already had multiple examples of farmers clashing with players who want to complete events. This is not going to end any time soon. Meanwhile, just like people complained that champions gave little to no rewards, dynamic events give little to no rewards.
What is better for the game as a whole, considering ArenaNet’s original vision for the game? The vision that, again, made killing random mobs give little experience, so doing dynamic events would be better? It’s obvious – events should give better rewards than killing random mobs or killing champions.
In order to fix the issue with champions giving small rewards, it’s only a matter (as mentioned in my OP and in other posts in this topic) of making every champion in the open world to be an event, even if it’s just “Kill enemy X” events like the ones we have in the invasions. This would allow people to get rewards for champions, due to receiving the reward for the dynamic event about killing champions.
If any, this proposal will simply have an insignificant amount of effect. Of course, on the surface you will see more people, farmers included, completing events because as you suggest, the champions are the events. What difference does that make? It is still farming champions.
Although I see that one of the main concern raised is that farmers prefer killing champs in an event instead of completing that event. The fix to that is quite simple: just stop an event or an event chain from continuously spawning champs until that event is completed. In other words, each event will only spawn a fixed number of champs.
So ok, that will pacify the dispute between the champ-farmers and the event-doers, but doesn’t really do anything significant aside. Farmers will still farm – they will farm events now.
No.
Not only will removing Commander Tags remove their intended utility, it is not a solution to the zerging problem at all (if it is even a problem). Zerg can happen regardless of whether there is a Commander Tag there or not. All people need to do in FS is shout “Where is the zerg?” and then follow the zerg train.
Not really.
Right now, the main reason why you don’t see people roaming around in other zones is that the Invasion events happen on a 45-min hourly cycle. Considering that these events have the most number crowds, they are also simultaneously the best farming option currently. In between clearing loot and selling stuffs, there isn’t much time to do anything else until the next Invasion event starts.
In other times, the main reason why most zones are empty is that there is nothing significantly rewarding to do there. What am I gonna do in Gendarran Fields at level 80? Farm T2 mats which I can buy by the hundreds with the gold I can earn doing higher level farm-able content?
Actually, the main issue that leads to this situation is that characters level up too fast. Areas are distinguishable by their level, and while your character down-levels in lower-level areas, the loot do not scale to your actual level. In other words, there is a disconnect between the area level system and the character level system, which according to basic design of the game, is not so significant that almost everyone equalizes easily at level 80.
In other games, other-level areas are populated because not everybody is max level. And it is actually hard to get to max level. In GW2, level-scaling cannot compensate for the different loot drops.
(edited by projectcedric.6951)
Giving champions better loot was a response to people complaining that champions drop crap relative to their level compared to normal mobs, which is a legit sentiment and the response was just as legitimate.
If you remove chests from champs, it goes back to the issue: what makes them different from normal mobs in terms of drops?
If you make chests attainable at event completion instead of champs, it doesn’t necessarily fix the farming “problem”. So what? People will just farm events instead. And they will find the most efficient events that give the best rewards, and they will harass anyone who don’t do the events as efficiently as the best way does. That means, new issues will arise: disputes over people not having the best gears for farming events, complaints about only certain events are done repetitively in certain maps because their the easiest relative to their rewards, etc.
What makes you think this lamentation will end there?
I like zerg farming the way it is right now.
Thing is, there is always some kind of balance to be struck between farming and doing non-farm content, regardless of which one any player finds fun doing. Farming does have its pros, one of them being able to get some kind of comfort level of attaining something without much of a challenge. Always doing content which do not give rewards efficiently (non-farm content) can just be as detrimental as farming all the time.
That being said, compared to the previous versions of farming, i.e. CS shelter-penitent, COF p1, and even the new champ trains, at least the Invasion farming forces farmers to move around the world map, and is relatively better.
Baseline is you can’t really stop farming. People will find the best, most efficient way possible to farm no matter how much effort you put in trying to cut down farming. It’s just human nature. The better move is to design better farming system, so that the efficient way of farming will trick players to simultaneously do the rest of content. That will be the challenge for Anet.
Agree to all except one guild per account and seeing enemies names in WvW.
The current guild representation system is great. Not only it is convenient, it is realistic. Nothing in the real world suggests that a person can only be a member of one organization, even if sometimes rules do so. And admit it, despite the name, this game is not really about guild wars.
With regards to not seeing enemy names in WvW, it is also preferable. Firstly, I personally don’t really need to know their names because I won’t be playing with them outside of WvW anyway. It is more consistent with real life wars – your enemy, regardless of his name, is just another member of the opposing army after all. Secondly, knowing the names of the opposite team will just provide an avenue for toxic game play. People will probably start targeting specific individuals if they are easily identifiable with names.
In addition to this list though, I wish there is a system to be able to:
-see a player’s stats and equipment, if the players allows others to see it
Half of the problem is time. One month is simply too short and cramped for some Living World contents that it actually feels rather messy at times.
For example, the only relatively detailed explanations we have about the Scarlet Invasion events which started yesterday is either from the patch notes or dulfy, and not everybody read these things.
So there is just a lot of confusion until word-of-mouth allows information to be spread in-game. This is fine, since it creates some sort of unique oral culture, but by the time everyone is familiar with the new LS mechanics it will be a few days out of the 30 days gone.
Between stress and boredom, stress is actually a good thing considering this is a game you paid for.
“Special” isn’t as nearly as meaningful in a game where at some point everybody evens out in terms of max stats and what they can do combat-wise. So what if you have a shiny new sword? It does pretty much exactly what my sword does.
Not to mention that the one fallacy that most mmorpgs -GW2 included, sadly- do with their graphic content, is to put in so many bright lights, that another Legendary sword trail so easily gets lost amid all that effects.
The answer lies in the type of random number generator they use but ANET will never give a definitive on it. Pseudo random number generators using a FIXED seed will return the same set of repeating results over a given period of time. Since that seed number is fixed and more then likely fixed to the account and not per character you may very well have one person getting one set of results while another gets a different set and since both sets REPEAT themselves after so many rolls the first person could be luckier then the second but it has noting at all to do with luck and everything to do with that fixed seed.
There is a very clear explanation on the above problems with fixed seed rng’s here if you scroll down to the heading “Setting Seeds”.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28548/Pitfalls-in-Random-Number-Generation
I don’t think they are using PRNG here. First of all, PRNG isn’t exactly as significant and as necessary in mmorpgs such as GW2 as it is in games like DOTA or LoL, where a single Bash not-procuring may be the difference between a match win or lose.
Secondly, given that, at least in my experience, it is too often that I can get too many rares+an exotic in a row, and then other times none at all for a stretch- this all pretty much shows an RNG behavior.
Ideal 1: Horizontal Progression. A game where the reward for overcoming higher difficulties challenges is simply the nobility of being able to do so, i.e. fashion, title, miniature. That is to say, all players of all skills must all equally have the same capability of attaining the best items in terms of power, gold and prestige.
Ideal 2: Reward is proportionate to difficulty.
Ideal 1 + Ideal 2 = disaster.
I take it you are not a gw1 player.
So?
Nop. You just need to farm somewhere else for a while.
Ideal 1: Horizontal Progression. A game where the reward for overcoming higher difficulties challenges is simply the nobility of being able to do so, i.e. fashion, title, miniature. That is to say, all players of all skills must all equally have the same capability of attaining the best items in terms of power, gold and prestige.
Ideal 2: Reward is proportionate to difficulty.
Ideal 1 + Ideal 2 = disaster.
Anet can nerf every single thing in-game, farmers will find a way to farm. They want to dictate how players want to enjoy/play their game. They can’t. Simple as that.
The minimum damage dealt required to get loot is actually pretty low. I can’t imagine how you can not receive loot even if you bring a support build character.
You know you can just forget the world exploration and just farm like crazy and buy one of the tp. yeah more work but if u dont like world exploration u still have that option to get a legendary. Also world exploration isnt so bad if u use it to level up alts not just for the legendary. and its really easy too especially wvw. I found that to be the easiest because i did it slowly.
Or you can just farm like crazy from 0-1700g because considering everything, it is really the most time-efficient option for a Legendary. I think the point of this question though is achieving World Completion by itself, regardless of Legendary. Truth be told, this achievement is not really natural to exploration. And since there are only two kinds of people who will go through the trouble: those who collect achievements and those who are working for legendaries, it is really more of a chore than an achievement in this regard.
This is more so when you compare it to other achievements like Slayers, which comes more naturally.
I don’t know about that, even just having the maps open (which you can do easily enough from clearing maps, at a stretch just leave hearts alone) helps with a lot of other things. Such as fast teleports to places you need to be for guild missions etc, and with any future content they bring it’s always good to have all these maps open.
The problem is that the achievement World Completion itself requires you to find every nook and corner of the required maps: the exact numbers of POI, vistas, skill points and hearts you have to visit and do. You leave even a single one out and you wont be able to get it.
Just roaming around, opening all the waypoints is the natural, casual and more comfortable mode of exploration. But this alone will be far from sufficient to get 100%. There is a point beyond which you really have to go out of your way to get to certain vistas and POIs.
Furthermore, depending on which server you are in, completing the WvW maps can be a breeze or an impossibility. My server is not the strongest server in WvW, but we are also not the weakest. Every rotation, there will be another server whose population just don’t seem to care about WvW completely. Aside from the fact thakittens gonna be much harder for people there to complete WvW maps, the main issue about that is that why should something like a personal achievement be affected by something that cannot be controlled by the person?
Considering the relative pointlessness of everything else in this game, except if you fall back to the argument that doing a specific something is “fun” for you and that’s the value of that, I would say in fact that AP means a lot, since it means you’ve played the whole content of the game. There is nothing else in this game that is more meaningful than that. In fact I believe that is why acquiring a Legendary is a legitimate goal, since it is part of completing the content.
There is no endgame, no vertical progression, nothing beyond the casual shallowness of combat(even in WvW) to warrant a significant meaning in having combat skills. There is only the lush, beautiful world with lots of things to do -and more things they give you to do every month. What else, therefore, can be more meaningful than AP, which measures how much of these you’ve covered?
You know you can just forget the world exploration and just farm like crazy and buy one of the tp. yeah more work but if u dont like world exploration u still have that option to get a legendary. Also world exploration isnt so bad if u use it to level up alts not just for the legendary. and its really easy too especially wvw. I found that to be the easiest because i did it slowly.
Or you can just farm like crazy from 0-1700g because considering everything, it is really the most time-efficient option for a Legendary. I think the point of this question though is achieving World Completion by itself, regardless of Legendary. Truth be told, this achievement is not really natural to exploration. And since there are only two kinds of people who will go through the trouble: those who collect achievements and those who are working for legendaries, it is really more of a chore than an achievement in this regard.
This is more so when you compare it to other achievements like Slayers, which comes more naturally.
Since neither game was out when the mechanic was probably being designed by both companies what the heck does this have to do with price of tea in China?
You’re probably right, but this question is a trick question since we all know that the Chinese economy is still pretty much closed to a certain extent, so nothing really has got anything to do with the price of tea in China.
cough cough cough Why are we coughing?
*cough*somebodydoesntknowwhatthismeans*cough*
*cough*Diablo3LeprechaunNoOriginality*cough*
cough this game was in the making LOOOOONG before Diablo cough you can go back to your silly little Diablo now. :P
*cough*wheredidyougetthisinformationfromespeciallywhenD3cameout1/2yearbeforeGW2did*cough*
*cough*Diablo3LeprechaunNoOriginality*cough*
5 warriors. One for each race.
I’ll have whatever you and your friends are smoking.
And whats up with every single character and player in the game being youthful, good-looking and having perfectly-shaped bodies? Is this a world where nobody gets old or fat or frail? It’s one of them things that makes it so… juvenile. Even Fable has more maturity.
Please don’t step on people’s dreams too much. I think some of the designers of this game secretly want to be fiction writers, but alas, they have been fated to work on mmorpgs instead. Oh, tragedy! But never mind, gamers don’t really care for better mechanics, right? So there still an opportunity for writing (bad) literature instead. Hence, they proudly present to you, the Living Story.
Bored and kittenz. Farm fest for a legendary because there is nothing better to aim for. Done all PvE. Dungeon is repetitive meh. Living Story is even more meh, next month its forgotten, so much for all the hard work. PvP, whats the point? win or lose over and over just for AP? WvW whats the point? You take some fort, 5 mins later its flipped over, rinse and repeat one million times. Zerg fest galore. Never mind skills, equipment and traits, if enemy server is 100000000+ people more than your zerg, no amount of pro-ness can save you from that.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, farm fest for a legendary because theres nothing better to aim for. Everything is RNG. If you’re lucky, you just might get a precursor from some random boss early on. If not, have fun farming 300 hours. So Legendary indeed!
Wacom Graphire 4 CTE-640 tablet.
Logitech K120 10-dollar keyboard.
Maybe Anet need something in the middle of the two extremes. Major expansions take too much time to develop and to wait for, but right now Living World content, which only last for a month each, are too frequent and too shallow.
So all they need maybe is release something in the middle of the two extremes, like a Living Content episode every 3 months that lasts for 3 months, but has more content than the current monthly release but less content than a major expansion.
So it will be like, Frost and Flame + Cutthroat Politics + Queen’s Jubilee released all at once but they are all happening at the same time for 3 months. That will give more time for people to play each content, or whichever part of the content they want, but not wait for a year for new content.
Not really. Even if its easy to defeat, you still have to farm tickets first to farm deadeye consecutively. 20 tix is about 1-2 hours to accumulate + 20-30 mins killing deadeye to get about 10 gold. That would be just slightly better than farming downstairs.
There will be an option to reduce your graphics settings so that you can only view the entire game through a two-dimensional top view. Furthermore, all environmental elements will be removed and all players will be reduced to single-dot representations floating in free space. That should do the trick.
I still don’t understand what was wrong with CoF p1 and Pent/Shelter. Take into consideration that the struggle to control a society’s gameplay in an mmorpg so as to prevent them from farming is like the Red Queen phenomenon -the eternal arms race- where farmers will simply shift to the next most efficient way of farming. Cof p1 and Pent/Shelter already gave the best premises to give the farmers what they want.
I’d play LoL instead.
Most fun – warrior
Least fun – ranger
I agree with the general point.
I also think that as the development progresses, either Anet hasn’t really fixed their old habits in terms of enemy difficulty or that the new enemies are actually getting more and more..well..cheap (for lack of a better word)
My own example would be the Aetherblade Thug. I understand its a minor enemy and can easily be kited with ranged and spells, but aside from that – what the hell, man!- its only and every attack is a 2-second knockdown attack.
Like, can’t you think of something else? Like maybe buff its allies or at the very least, daze me once in a while instead of knocking me down every attack?
Another thing: Summoned Greatsword in CP. Not only is it directly unkillable (which is fine), but it literally cannot seem to be removed from the map. I don’t even know who the kitten summoned that thing. It has to be summoned by somebody, right? Since its name is SUMMONED Greatsword. And at one point we’ve roamed a few times around and killed everything in that zone, and the GS was still there and was endlessly annoying people at the waypoint. Shouldn’t it be removed once its summoner is dead?
Design a lingerie that would look sexy on a fearsome lion, I dare you.
In response to number 4.):
Anything that players opt to do repetitively for long stretches of time will turn out to be boring, even if it was something truthfully exciting the first time around. Such is the nature and definition of “farming”. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable in any mmorpgs simply because at least one person(if not most people) somewhere out there will opt for efficiency rather than variety. So there really won’t be any fix for that matter.
That being said, the CS events were, in my opinion, already the best platform to provide a farming opportunity for players who want to farm.
Firstly, they were located in what was meant to be end game zones.
Secondly, the never-ending tug-of-war battle against the undead provides an appropriate backdrop for the endless and repetitive meta gameplay which farmers opt to do: grind.
Thirdly, the seemingly annoying difficulty of the zone gives some sense of balance to what farming in the zone entails: “you can farm here, but its not as comfortable to walk around as in the other zones”
Fourthly, its far from Lions Arch or any of the cities. Even though the waypoint system allows a convenient way to go there, it still costs more money. Compound that with the fact that most waypoints in CS are usually contested. In comparison, the new farming area is within Divinity Reach itself (wtf!). What Anet could have just done was to remove the Blacklion Traders in CS -or remove even all the waypoints- and that would have sufficed as a balance to the farming nature of the zone.
All in all, I believe that instead of reducing the CS farm events, they should have increased them instead, but provided more penalties for farming in the area like suggested above. Farmers can farm there all they want. In return, that gives Anet the liberty to design new content without catering to the “farming” needs of the farmers.
This is not really a problem as it is more like the general nature of society as a whole, and hence the general nature of mmorpgs, which usually have thousands if not millions of people playing. Your description fits perfectly well any real life setting with a number of different kinds of people – including but not limited to entitled ones and skillful ones.
As far as I can tell, the only (debatable) problem with the current game design is that the rewards for difficult content is not necessarily appropriate in value considering the difference in difficulty in obtaining them, because of the focus in horizontal progression instead. Which can be both a good and bad thing.
At the very least, the game provides options for both kind of people, and the only real reward for overcoming difficult content is the self-satisfaction that you were able to do so.
Its definitely unfair but I don’t think Anet can be faulted too much.
There were many occasions since the game started when the economy spiked in inflation, and every new content added gives another opportunity for players to find a way to farm gold. While its difficult to a$$e$$ whether its exactly similarly hard to obtain 40g back then compared to obtaining 700g right now, due to the large number of factors, it would be unfair for Anet to rectify inflation by providing cheaper ways to obtain precursors (in this sense, the planned development regarding other ways to obtain them will actually be tricky) – unfair to players who might have paid real money or worked hard to obtain their legendaries before.
Therefore, one way to think about it is that the current system of obtaining precursors (based on RNG) was just too poorly designed, but because it has been left unchanged for a year, its very difficult to rectify properly without being unfair to one party. (This is not really the case though, since current legendary owners can still benefit from new systems if they craft another legendary after all)
Another way is that you can simply consider it as a reward for the players who played the game early, or at least worked for their legendaries early.
(note to editors: why is the word “a$$e$$” being censored?)
Lol, this is so daft. 1600??? I would have given up after 50. Most people would have given up after a hundred or so. The persistent but logical ones would have given after 500. You would have probably thought that fate was trying to tell you something: you ain’t gonna get your precursor this way. Not that it’s the only way to get it anyway.
There’s a limit to what a game designer can impose, especially in mmorpgs. And that is the beautiful thing about mmorpgs, compared to single player or team games – there is always some kind of uncontrollable emergent quality that is brought about by the gaming population as a whole, that no one man or one body can dictate, even the developers. Simply, you can’t completely force the gameplay according to the design intent, however noble they are.
That is why the best approach in terms of design is always to just give players options. And then let the players decide. It doesn’t mean that they should take away or disregard completely those things that most players don’t play, they are still options to some players after all. Like PvP, even if the majority doesn’t play PvP, there are still players who mainly play PvP.
In this sense, saying things like “ANet wanted….” doesn’t really work. It’s not their role to dictate the gameplay beyond a certain extent.
It says: “Cull the Destroyers.” So that’s what it’s doing.
“1-80 in 4-6 hours takes around ~60g depending on what you have accumulated mat-wise. http://gw2crafts.net/ for the details. This is the fastest way to level in the game, but also the most expensive. I would only recommend it after you’ve leveled several characters the traditional way, which, by the way, shouldn’t be focused on leveling speed.”
I suppose that with this and a level 80 character, the fastest you can do right now would be around 24-26 hours if you are literally flat out broke.
Currently, Crown Pavillion allows you to earn about 3-4 gold per hour. So 60 gold will take you around 20 hours to collect.
Depends on what you’re playing for. Suffice to say, most of the game content relies heavily on dealing damage, and unfortunately condition damage is not as efficient as attack damage in this regard. So there really isn’t any point in making a necro or an elementalist unless you really just wanna try the classes, which the game doesn’t penalize you for doing – you have 5 free char slots after all.
Utilities are also ridiculously useless currently. CC, heals, buffs and what-nots have such a negligible effect on combat for them to be able to be focused in a viable build.
That leaves you with only 4 efficient professions for different specific purposes:
1.) Thief and Mesmer for WvW – aside from warriors, these two classes thrive in WvW. Mesmers portal exploits have been fixed last time I check, but Thieves are still slippery kittens with low cds on cloak and can take down small groups who have gone astray.
2.) Ranger on MF Gear (for as long as it still remains) – say what you want, but this is my favorite PvE farming build. Given the fact that you only farm group events, the range and aoe capabilities of the ranger make sure that you can deal enough damage to as much targets as possible in the field.
Being range, this means that you don’t need to walk to hit your next target if it is in the opposite direction – walking this distance sometimes results to melee classes to reach the target too late to get a loot especially in big farming zergs *cough*QueensJubilee*cough*.
Furthermore, the MF build makes sure that you get your rares as often as possible. Of course, you’re shooting is really just for show. You’re not really doing any damage. But nobody knows that. This is the kitten build.
3.) Warrior – for everything else. Zerk, Valkyrie, Knight, Soldier whatever. They all still come down to dealing damage on a warrior.
How fast is fast? Without crafting, its hard to say. Hearts is inefficient without crafting. That leaves you with WvW, which efficiency may depend with your server and whether you can log in during the times in which people play WvW in your server.
If you’re willing to not discount crafting simply on behalf of having no gold right now, the strategic use of hearts/crafting combination is still the fastest way for me. I was able to max level a character in 3 days (about 36 hours) with an initial 7 gold from my first few characters and not too many mats collected.
QJ first. QUICK! Farm as much as you can. Don’t sleep unless you really can’t take it anymore. The nerf police is coming soon.
Just don’t run dungeons. Every other part of the game doesn’t require you to “optimize” your gear according to other people’s expectations. You can run a full mf gear (while its still available) in PvE, WvW, PvP and nobody will know or give a kitten and you’re not required to play with a “team” mentality. This whole “zerk = optimal gear” discourse is really only relevant in dungeons.