Guild Wars 2

Hughs.6549:

Waypoints to main cities should be free too. (it would save a LOT of useless loading screens, if you know what i mean …)

Bet they do something like this soon (imagine the outcry if you had to pay to…). I reckon the ability to hearthstone to your home instance is more likely though, since that might fit well with other ideas for making those a more important part of the game.

Xenite.7418:

And it should NEVER cost money to TP after a death, repair costs are enough.

That’s a different issue that had already been done to death pre-launch. Personally, I think the death penalties in GW2 are just about right, but other people’s mileages vary.

Timbersword.9014:

I think part of the problem isn’t that they’re spending their money willy nilly, so much as they’re abusing the WP system too much, even over the shortest of distances. It’s meant as a means of conveniently getting around quickly, not the primary means of getting around, period. There are world events going off at ALL times and they require people to complete them. I firmly believe Anet’s idea was to deter WP usage with the costs (more so than making them a money sink) so that people would be traveling on foot from place to place and getting involved with the dynamic events they come across.

The only sensible reason for trying to stop people moving from waypoint to waypoint is to prevent waypoint farming runs – Arenanet would hardly be trying to stop you from moving to the particular content that you wish to play, if you aren’t trying some exploit. Noone is going to go on a waypoint hopping expedition that doesn’t end up with them doing some content in the game. Also the waypoints within areas are quite well placed so that you naturally move between them on foot.

Also (most) people aren’t complaining about the necessity to have waypoint costs, more that in the current way they are set up, they scale a bit too steeply as you level and also if you want to play or explore in low level areas you are still paying the full whack, but your income is much lower. So, waypoint costs tend to effect those people who are more interested in exploring and playing the content than those who are more interested in the filthy lucre and happy once they find their farming spot.

“Farming for 1 hour != gold farmer. So basically you want everything to be given to you for free?”

On the contrary it’s you farmers who feel entitled to get everything with little effort, hence all the whining about diminishing returns from farming. And standing in one place for an hour farming blood off skelks is not everyone’s cup of tea and hardly represents an admirable investment of “effort”.

My point is simply that it feels easier to move around when you are low level and that’s more fun, since for instance, you can just log on to do a bit of content and maybe visit a jumping puzzle or two, whereas at level cap you definitely feel the travel cost when doing that kind of thing.

Rosen Myst.7641:

Housing would be nice but there are many other things that need fixing first. I’d rather see pvp, wvw, class balance etc. addressed first.

I hear you – and the idea of non instanced housing in Guild Wars 2 is laughable unless they stick a skyscraper in the middle of Lion’s Arch or something. Does anyone really imagine that Queensdale will be turned into an urban sprawl or that they are going to redesign the whole of Divinity’s Reach?

Strifey.7215:

If you had an 80, you would realize it’s quite normal to make 1-2g an hour if you farm.

Not everyone is a gold farmer, nor should they be, since for many it’s a thoroughly dull way of playing games that turns the world into a spreadsheet.

Think the game would be more fun if the scaling of waypoint costs wasn’t so extreme. People use waypoints more on low level characters than higher level ones and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why that should be the case.

I expect Arenanet have noticed this, but probably if they are going to fix it it would be as a part of some widespread improvements to the economy. In MMOs what you give with one hand you have to take away with the other.

Perhaps they could add a karma vendor for the cultural armor sets. I reckon karma, which you get from doing events represents a better sense of in game achievement than gold, which in that quantity needs to be obtained by farming, playing the market or RMT – more commercial than cultural one might think.

Fritz.5026:

i am not sure why people keep posting this type of thing. do you honestly expect them to go rework the entire game at this point?

Yes, they need to rework the entire loot system (and its relationship with crafting and karma) and if they are going to keep this kind of levelling system, which is really the root cause of the problem, long term, they need to find some way of making lower level content relevant to level capped players. Otherwise, they’ve just wasted 5 years creating a whole raft of (excellent, probably the best in any game yet) content most of which few people will ever actually play, because they are too busy zerg farming in cursed shore – followed by burn out and leaving the game.

Another gun thread. Yawn.

Loot in MMOs is strongly related to progression and if GW2 wasn’t about progression, then why would it have levels?

The central problem with GW2 PvE is that loot and karma are scaled to the level of zones, so that you get much less in earlier zones (why?). That means that high level players can never progress by going back. When you couple that with GW2s frenetic levelling system that gives XP for everything and catapults you up to level 80 in a few weeks it’s a recipe for having large amounts of content that noone ever does.

Sure we play the game for fun. But, it would be a lot more fun if you could progress towards long term goals in all areas of the content, not just by grinding/farming in Cursed Shore.

Levels in GW2 just appear to be a throwback. The promise of GW2s design was to be something new and revolutionary. There is some of that, but in the end they caved into the temptation to follow the illusory crock of gold at the end of WoW’s rainbow rather than developing their own better ideas from Guild Wars 1.

Agemnon.4608:

roqoco.4053:

Artificial Barrier?? I would say it’s a lot more artificial to be able to go into an area filled with dangerous creatures and be able to wipe them all out without raising a sweat.

The problem with that logic is those creatures aren’t dangerous to those who are powerful enough. A fighter jet may be dangerous to you, but to Superman it’s no credible threat. If you have the strength/adept enough in magic/whatever then you could handle what you couldn’t before.

Like a level 80 wolf is actually so much more powerful than a level 1 wolf? Why? Really, the whole premise of that is totally ridiculous. The fact is that it is levels themselves that are an artificial construct and the idea that you should be able to go back a few levels and fell giants with one blow is something that completely trivialises the effort you made doing the content at level.

Artificial Barrier?? I would say it’s a lot more artificial to be able to go into an area filled with dangerous creatures and be able to wipe them all out without raising a sweat.

ChairGraveyard.2967:

Agreed, loot is not exciting at all, regardless of where you’re at. I actually think GW2 has some of the worst loot rewards of any RPG I’ve played.

On a more positive note the fact that we are still playing a game that has the worst itemisation and levelling design of any game I’ve played is a testament to how absorbing other parts of the game are.

I’m reasonably confident that Arenanet will know what’s wrong by now, but it’s probably not that easy to fix since so many different systems are involved (crafting, market, drops, resources etc.) and will need to be iterated together. Pity they didn’t catch this before launch – seems pretty obvious, at least in hindsight, that if you throw around too much kit it’s going to be worth zilch.

Plus:

- Whirl AOE attack on greatsword. Give some reason to melee rather than just pew pew with two bows or bow and axe.
- Better on demand condition removal esp for immobs.
- in/out of combat speed buff to allow builds without warhorn (esp for WvW), but also for PvE running.
- Improve rampage as one, maybe needs cd reduced & swiftness length increased. Rangers need some bar compression.
- Axe (yawns)

bojangles.6912:

But from hearing from a lot of GW1 players, it sounds like they feel GW1 is way better than GW2. I never played it so I don’t know but just seeing how it is now on my server versus launch, it has been decreasing in population.

Guild Wars 1 was a good game, so is GW2 largely. Where I think it goes wrong though, certainly for GW1 players, is in the compromises that have been made to attract WoW fans (leveling, gear grind, easy mode). GW2 goes too far away for fans of Guild Wars 1, but not far enough for fans of WoW style MMOs. It’s trying to be all things to all men, but just succeeds in striking an uneasy balance that falls between the two stools.

marnick.4305:

Press H. Go to achievements. Check how many you haven’t done yet. Good luck have fun.

That’s what kept me going in GW1 for over 7 years. After the first 2 weeks of playing I never got a power increase anymore yet chasing the carrot was never that much fun in other games. Yes it’s all optional. It means you are not forced to do stuff you don’t like. Maybe you just don’t like the game? Nothing wrong with that, but the whole point of optional carrots is to only do them if you actually like playing the game (which I actually didn’t in other MMO games with forced carrots)

Guild Wars 1 didn’t have levels (after tutorial sections) – that’s the big difference and why you can keep playing it. With a level 80 in Guild Wars 2, there is very little to do, unless you want to do earlier content in easy mode.

It’s the poorly implemented levelling system and the coupling of rewards to zone levels that makes everyone ignore most of the content; and that is the big problem in GW2 PvE after level cap.

The reason that loot isn’t interesting up to level cap is that there is too much of it, not too little. Green items drop like confetti, you can get them for karma and they can also be crafted – hence too much supply = no demand. The item system needs to be reworked so that white’s are the new blues, blues are the new greens etc. That means reducing item drops (drop more gold or grey items instead).

After level 80 Arenanet need to make more content, not just cursed shore, relevant places to play and work towards achievements, cosmetic rewards etc.

Another thing – different builds can require different armor stats and weapons – that was a big reason for having multiple armors and wepons in Guild Wars 1. This aspect of the game, i.e. horizontal progession needs a lot more work.

“Endgame in GW2 is PvP. (just like in GW1.)”

No that’s not true. GW1 has extensive things to do in PvE after you reach level cap and many many players never touched PvP in GW1.

Most of the profession fixes today are small tweaks that seem sensible on first glance. I guess that ranger is a bit more difficult, since one of the main problems, particularly in PvP is the pet. So it wouldn’t make much sense to rebalance the ranger based on a non working pet and then to have to do it again when they get the AI working better.

I’m sure that Arenanet have noticed the issues with rangers, but they do like to keep things under their hat until they have a fully worked solution. And the community has to take some blame for lack of communication, as moderate two way discussions that don’t degenerate into incoherence aren’t really possible here.

“I think the point of having massive amounts of level scaling (scaling all PvP up to 80 and scaling all PvE down to its intended level) was to avoid needing to design “endgame”. The endgame is the whole game.”

That’s not what Arenanet said when they were explaining the downscaling system a few months before launch. It was in fact designed so that you don’t 1 shot mobs in low level areas and spoil the events for other players, but you are still much stronger than the content. That’s a worthy idea, but it’s no kind of challenge, unless you like playing whilst AFK. Low level content simply isn’t relevant to high level players.

MMOs have PvE content. When you have finished doing the PvE content and don’t wish to do it again then you have finished the game. GW2 launched with a very large amount of content compared to other MMOs, but unfortunately the levelling system pushes everyone into farming/grinding in one area leaving most of the content unplayed, since when you get to level cap there is no challenge (and no incentive for those who need that) in going back.

So that’s why people are complaining about lack of endgame – if you could wander all over the world and experience relevant gameplay as you can in Guild Wars 1, then “end game” would not be an issue and the whole game would indeed be end game.

What’s excellent about Guild Wars 2 PvE is the content and the events up to level cap and they work best at the level for which they are designed. Not sure why one would want to try and avoid the content by outlevelling it, unless you just want to level up a character for WvW. As someone mentioned previously, levelling is really too quick, since you get to level 80 having missed doing most of the content.

Pretty weird to work for 5 years on a huge amount of content and then allow everyone to miss it out and get to level cap in a few weeks. Not sure how that happened!?

Dracones.9105:

So you can outfit yourself in full masterwork gear for about the cost to use a single waypoint.

Yeah the only thing that costs anything is decent runes, but you can buy greens with useless ones (minor rune of grawl slaying etc) for 1c above vendor trash price and just replace the rune with shards you get from mining. Then when you want to upgrade – sell your current stuff and buy new gear for just a few coppers more than you sold the last lot for.

“I liked the gryphons because it did always give you a sense of the world size. And gryphons would really only be intra-zone anyway because GW2 is zone-based game rather than seamless”

Loved the gryphon, boat & airship systems in Warcraft (& the tram!). Not only makes the world stay larger, but a bit of downtime is a good thing in games and allows some time & space for people to communicate. But it’s a big feature in terms of development resources.

Sounds good – think I’ll give it try; and of course it’s not the kind of thing you get banned for, according to Gaile’s post (pointed to by the mod), since it’s just a graphic improvement, not a way of trying to get some in game advantage over other players (usually by automating gameplay in some way).

They know – there are lots of threads on the subject already. Probably won’t be fixed until the guesting feature is in, I guess. Otherwise PvEers with friends on other servers wouldn’t be too happy.

There’s another way to progress in MMOs – that is horizontal progression. In Guild Wars 1 it was a lot of fun capping elite skills and trying out new builds with them, since you could then mix up your play styles. Also the named bosses would sometimes drop special max level items, the equivalent of exotics, but with unique skins related to each boss, which was a lot of fun too. If you are going to lose the vertical gear grind, then it makes sense to have some horizontal progression instead. Not sure why that’s largely been lost in Guild Wars 2.

Note that Eve Online is based entirely around horizontal progression. You can be effective in PvP in a frigate (as a tackler) from pretty much day 1 and then later you can progress to larger ships that have different and more versatile roles.

Pandemoniac.4739:

• Alt-click to set a personal way point so when I get distracted, I can remember which way I meant to go

Great stuff! I’d missed that one – also works for party members when grouped, which is pretty cool.

Bluestone.7106:

Ianervan.3415:

Bluestone.7106:

Do you WvW? you could try leveling in WvW.

He asked for alternative, possibly faster way of leveling. Leveling in WvW is at the very least 5x slower than in PvE.

His OP said nothing about being faster, only alternative TYVM.

Yeah – Levelling up slower is an advantage, because you get to play the game enjoyably for longer. It astonishes me that all these posters with nothing to do haven’t appreciated that. You have to laugh when someone says they’ve levelled up their characters by crafting and now have nothing to do. errrm….. wonder why that is.

Imagine that Arenanet add content at level cap i.e. level 80 and they don’t increase the level cap. What kind of rewards and achievements could they add that would satisfy the people who need to have rewards to play the game?

For me the legendaries don’t add a lot, because, as things stand, to get them you have to play the game with a grinding mentality and for me that ruins the sense of immersion in a virtual world and turns it into a numbers game. I don’t want to play just for the sake of ticking off things on a list. But, no loot at all is a big detraction from the gameplay – it’s great to have that feeling that round the next corner might be a treasure chest…, that’s been an essential feature of RPGs since they were first invented and is pretty much the whole rationale behind having a levelling system (since you can get increasingly better rewards as you level).

@Faction GJ, well spotted! I wonder if Ruby Djinn is Ruby Bayer who I remember from massively and she was a huge fan of Guild Wars 1 (like 2xGWAMM). I seem to remember hearing that she joined Arenanet, in a press release a while ago.

Guild Wars 2 has many neat little features. Some of them that I particularly like:

- The pathing arrows that show where to go in the personal story. They’re really accurate too.
- Little arrows appear on resource nodes telling you if the resource is above or below your current level. That’s a really cool solution to finding where stuff is and you can often work out there’s a hidden cave when you see a resource with a down arrow.
- Your characters voice in combat telling you when you are low on health or have a condition. Means you don’t constantly need to be looking at your bars.
- You can drag the minimap, often making it unnecessary to open the full map.

What other things have you spotted?

deltasniper.1659:

I am trying to enjoy this game, i have 3 80s thief, warrior, and mesmer, i bought the game for WvW but i find myself day after day forcing myself to enjoy the game – i dont play it to much “howd i get 3 80s then if you dont play much! – i crafted 2 of them up..”

Any suggestions? I am not looking for a quickfix such as Halloween, starting to think this game is not for me : /

I would delete the two characters you crafted to level 80 and then recreate and level them through the content you missed on your main.

I’m intending to level my alts through the areas my main didn’t do, before exploring the whole map on my main, so that the new areas remain fresh – i.e. the most fun way to do the content is at the level for which it is designed (actually play a few levels below content level to get more challenge).

The other thing – never use boosters, magic find or any consumable that is intended to speed things up.

In general, I think GW2 is best played a bit like a single player game – if you forget the crazy idea that PvE is some kind kind of competition with other players to obtain gear then you will see the gameplay in a whole new light.

Calae.1738:

I don’t understand why developers spend 5 years making these large beautiful worlds to explore when people go through them in less than a month. On top of all this; no one wants or needs to go back to them. Ever.

It appears to be a waste of manpower and resources for a game of this genre.

Yes – that’s what I think too. All the players zerg grinding events in Cursed Shore have probably seen only a fraction of the content. That seems like an incredible waste of the resources needed to create all the content – particularly since dynamic events must require a lot more work than old style static quests. And it’s no fun to go back when you are level 80, since the rewards are no longer relevant and the earlier gameplay is no longer challenging.

I wonder if the design originally started out with way less than 80 levels? – That’s the only explanation that seems to make sense of this and for why the reward systems are so weirdly imbalanced. Also, adding levelling at a late stage to a flat design is exactly what happened with Warhammer Online and caused the early content to empty as the levelling wave passed…

I think this whole idea that cooperative PvE is just about getting your gear (and prestige items) before the next guy is the most negative hangover from the culture that World Of Warcraft has developed into in the last few years (during which I fortunately haven’t been playing it).

What’s clear is that Arenanet greatly underestimated the extent to which players would go to avoid doing the content and instead crowd into limited areas to get gold as quickly as possible.

Yeah, the search function is not fully functional and has some glitches. I’ll bet its on their to fix list, but there’s probably quite a lot of other stuff on that too. Also implementing more complex searches uses more resources on the server and we wouldn’t want to go back to having the market overloaded again.

Kopipoki.3542:

Katsky.4795:

Oddly the forums don’t censor the word ‘Kessex’.
So I now need to find another place name that starts with a ‘K’ in order for the guild tag ‘KAT’ to actually be meaningful

Just change Kessex to Krytan, problem solved.

Yes and you get a larger area for your trust to adventure in as well!

carson yuen.6739:

Even think of typing only afflicted?

There are more important things to do than solving a problem because you refuse to use keywords in your search.

The op is right, apart from the rather patronising tone. "" searches would be very handy.

@Thunderstorm – this thread is about magic find. If you want to moan about the cash shop, please do it somewhere else; and if you’ve played 12 hours a day since pre-launch, I reckon you can hardly complain about value for money and maybe you owe Arenanet a few gem purchases….

@GabrielD: “at least some looks and consideration from Anet.”

Maybe the deafening silence from Arenanet surrounding itemisation (drops, rewards, magic find, crafted items, karma items…) is because they are working on it and don’t want to make promises, before they have a complete understanding of the problems and how to fix them. That’s what I hope anyway. Probably, it wasn’t easy to predict how all these things would interact in a live environment (not well as it turns out ATM).

Would also be handy is searching defaulted to items usable by your profession. That’s the major thing missing from the search filter – unless I’m missing something.

I reckon that legendaries should be awarded for legendary feats, rather than farming/grinding. Here are some examples of things that would give achievement credits for legendaries:

- Killing Champions/veterans
- Doing group events
- Doing the harder parts of maps – such as mini dungeons and hopefully some new challenging content in all maps
- Doing a dungeon where some someone in the party is doing that dungeon for the first time
- Doing jumping puzzles for the first time or in a group where someone is doing it for the first time
- Following event chains from beginning to end (bonus for each consecutive event in a chain)
- rezzing players in the middle of fights – but not afterwards and not until the bot problem is sorted.
- participating in events that haven’t reached some maximum player number (i.e. anti zerging measure)
- Participating in events in lots of different areas (encourage diversity).
…
and generally anything that is helpful to others and things where you don’t get other loot.

Galen Grey.4709:

If you find PvE to be no challenge at all (and you’re right most events are easy) then whats the problem of having a MF set? worst it will do is make it a little more challenging for you which is what you want right?

I agree with you that a way of adding a hard mode to the game would be good. But putting magic find on armor is not the solution, because it has too many unpleasant side effects and doesn’t buff the right things. If they want to do a hard mode, it needs to be a fully thought out feature. Perhaps, something along the lines of this suggestion:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Carrying-The-Burden-Of-Grenth-Hard-Mode/first#post314777

Currently there is a massive oversupply problem in the market and you don’t want to exacerbate that by finding other ways of increasing the supply of armor & weapons – precisely the opposite is needed.

Galen Grey.4709:

I totally dont agree with your statement saying you have to have MF gear to compete in the market! how is that the case? from day 1 and I do mean day one that trade post has been available everything masterworks level and below has been flooded with 1000s of items selling at 1c more then vendor price. meaning that anything below Rare has ALWAYS been unviable in the trade post.

The market flooding problem is not going to be solved by allowing one group of players to get even more drops. In fact it has and does make it worse, as more and more players realise that they need magic find to get a reasonable amount of loot, the total amount of supply in the economy will grow.

Was it really Arenanet’s intention to make all Green/Blue/White items into vendor trash? I doubt it.

Galen Grey.4709:

Magic find didnt create that problem magic find fixed in a sense as with it you get stuff you can actually sell on TP for a profit. without MF people will not start magically selling masterworks and uncommon gear for more they’ll still be undercut by the 1000s of people who dont even read before submitting their sell order.

This is putting the cart before the horse. The way to make things more valuable is to reduce the supply of them, not to increase it.

If you want to give people more gold, the way to do that is to drop more gold, not to drop large amounts of weapons and armour that are useless except for putting on the trading post in order to be converted into gold. That just devalues weapons and armor in the game.

Why does it matter? – because if all items are vendor trash then they can’t be used as reward items for content. Apart from the fact that rewards are fun, with no content rewards people are not doing some of the more fun content – such as champion events and mini-dungeons. That’s a big reason why people are not playing together in Guild Wars 2 – they don’t need to, to get their lootz.

That there is something going wrong here should be obvious immediately you open a chest in the game and find that it is in fact full of vendor trash…. MF is a big contributing factor in that, although not the only reason by any means.

@AndyPandy

Yes MF isn’t such a problem if it doesn’t compete with armor stats, although I can’t see that separate MF items really add much to gameplay either and would need balancing for.

I like the dog/pet idea (suggested something like that on Guru a few months ago in beta – as in pigs finding truffles etc), but that’s a very different sort of idea that would require quite a lot of development.

I quite like the idea mentioned by Threat Level Zero of a temporary buff that you get from say killing a champion mob. OTOH, why not just have champion mobs drop some decent stuff in the first place?

@AndyPandy

Not sure what you are getting, but probably we are starting to split hairs rather than adding anything much. Do you yourself think that a magic find mechanism is a good idea in MMOs, such as Guild Wars 2? Would other MMOs be better if they implemented this feature?

AndyPandy.3471

Since some of us don’t even agree on the base statement that MF actually impacts drops “significantly”, he has a point. If we don’t first agree that MF works by formula XY, any conclusion or discussion based on it, is meaningless and hypothetically.

As example, there could be a cap for MF effectiveness? Maybe 50%?
MF store booster could work differently than ingame %.
As shown by some tests MF could also not work at all or it could be extremely effective.

U have no conclusive basis for this discussion anyway. The best we can do is to discuss the concept of MF in a general way and observe/study its effects in other games.

Well we don’t all agree on the existence of the devil. But I think we can agree that if he/she does exist then the world would be a better place if he/she didn’t.

In the unlikely circumstance that MF has no effect and has never had any effect, then what is it doing in the game in the first place? It surely should be removed. And if it does actually do what it says on the tin, then the arguments made in this thread apply and it should be removed. That sounds like a pretty open and shut case to me.

None of the arguments against MF depend on how effective it is, sure, like poison, the more MF you have the worse the results, but that doesn’t mean that a little poison is somehow a good thing, does it?

Pennry.9215:

Another economic point you clearly missed: More people with Magic Find, the more the market gets flooded, the cheaper things get, the less people without Magic Find have to spend. I see no problem with not having to spend money on Magic Find to spend less, and save more over time.

I’ve actually answered that (very naive) argument twice already in this thread as have others. Hence, I can only repeat – read the previous posts in a thread or you are doomed to repeat them.

Pennry.9215:

Again, I’ve made more than enough (currently about 1/4 way to a Legendary at that) without Magic Find. And by how cheap one can get to over 200% Magic Find, I don’t think it’s as big a “problem” as you are making it out to be.

I would urge posters to read the economic arguments in the thread before posting, along with Strill & Threat Level Zero’s posts, otherwise we will just continue to go round in circles. All the arguments made here have been answered previously in the thread and miss the important points, which are to do with the effectiveness of the reward system and the health of the economy – not one person’s anecdotes about obtaining legendary weapons.

@Andypandy – It’s probably best to avoid posting links to suspect external sites, you may wish to edit your post to make the point without that link.

If it was true that MF has little to no effect (reports that I’ve seen are contradictory, mostly anecdotal and not rigorous) then that would seem to be a pretty cast iron argument for removing the mechanism entirely. But, it would be surprising if a system that had no effects was included in the game, unless it has been altered recently.

TBH I can’t really tell. When I use magic find food I do perceive some increase in drop quality, but without rigorous testing that may not be statistically significant. Who knows might just have been luckier those times. However, the guy I play with a lot most certainly does get better drops than I do over a large sample size and he attributes that to his use of magic find.

Can anyone clarify what the situation actually is?