Guild Wars 2

natsos.3692:

If only they could implement a hard mode – normal mode like GW1..

Would love to see a hard mode, not really difficult, just something that level capped players could enter to do the content they missed whilst levelling up and have a little challenge.

Jamais vu.5284:

Gold is the account wide currency. Karma is in contrast purely a currency intended to reflect the progress of your character. You really think ANet didn’t think this through?

If you look at the reward system and the kind of behaviour that it motivates, is motivating in the game right now, I think you could say that if they did think it through then one of the assumptions they made was faulty.

Besides Arenanet, sensibly, adopt an iterative approach (somewhat similar to the way evolution works) to development, whereby they make successive incremental improvements and so it isn’t necessary (in fact its not really possible) to think through the consequences of every design decision from the start. That’s what people often fail to appreciate and why feedback on how things are working out can be useful.

Not sure what point you are trying to make here, if any, other than to clutter up the forums with nonsense; and haven’t you already posted similarly incoherent stuff about botting elsewhere on the site?

Mostly bots are pretty easy to identify, since they follow a set routine and I’m sure that the majority of players try to spend a bit of time checking before making a report – inevitably though there will be some mistaken or malicious reporting.

Ran through straits of devastation and did about 10-15 events in around 1-1/2 hours. Quicker if you are in a group tho. Surely any of the starting areas are good enough if you just want to complete your daily.

The dailies are quite fun as a thing to do, but anytime you start feeling you have to do them every time you play, you make the game into a job – and that’s not going to be fun in the long run. Besides, the rewards are hardly necessary – 5s and and an item worth another couple.

I agree – this is the flaw with any levelling system that makes previous content redundant, you never can really go back. Arenanet have somewhat exacerbated the problem by handing out XP in shovelfuls making it quick to get to level 80 without seeing much of the early content or exploring, which is a pity as it’s excellent and the off track content is the best.

If you just downscale bit more though that would rightly cause complaints from those very casual players who find the content too hard already (yes there are some!) and need to overlevel to compensate.

A much better solution, I think, is to have optional downscaling, which is what my op here is about: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Carrying-The-Burden-Of-Grenth-Hard-Mode. if that’s TL;DR, then the basic idea is that you should have a choice to accept more radical downscaling in return for better rewards.

Zingery.2073:

you got a point.
But please enlighten me what you think defines challenging in your oppinion then, because I am not seeing it in GW2. The amount of ppl wanting to nerf the already easy dungeons is crazy and reminds me of how WoW players started before blizzard nerfed everything to suit a 6 year old.

Well, Arenanet have said they don’t intend to nerf the dungeons as they think people will get better at them with a bit of practice. As to the open world events & mobs it probably needs a bit of tweaking, if only because that would encourage people to play together a bit more.

You can’t really define “challenging” since it’s relative. And also claims of leetness tend to be exaggerated, so it’s often hard to tell what people are finding hard and what they are not. But, I expect the devs will have the stats to check up.

Voltar.8574:

i dunno. i don’t need a carrot. the game’s fun to play so i play it. getting lvl80 stuff dropping is a nice bonus but not the goal.

Well – if you read the op carefully, it isn’t about getting more carrots, rather it’s about making different ways of playing the game viable after you get to level cap.

Currently the amount of PvE content for level 80s is quite limited, so that players rub around a restricted area and that leads to just farming for gold, materials, karma etc.

Perhaps a more fun option than farming after you reach level 80 and have had your fill of Orr and Frostgorge, might be to complete the areas you missed on the way up to cap and fully explore the map. However, your level 80 toon is really much too strong for those early areas (even when down scaled) so that rather detracts from the fun – what many people really want after level 80 is a little more challenge rather than less. Since by that time they should know their skills a bit better.

What’s a little ironic about people complaining that there’s nothing to do for endgame – is that there is actually a lot of content that they mostly haven’t done, they are just too high level to do it now. So what I’m saying is that Arenanet should leverage the large amount of content they put in the game a bit better.

Also, I know its very worthy and all that to say that one should seek and not ask for any reward (save that of knowing you’re not a greedy farmer), but OTH rewards are fun as well and why should they be restricted (or so much easier to obtain) to players who play the game in a particular way, especially considering that intensive farming is a restricted and somewhat myopic way of playing the game that can interfere with other player’s enjoyment of the content.

Lets not muddle this up with other completely unrelated issues; that’s a sure way to shoot it in the foot. It’s generally better not to put all your begs in one ask it!

Andele.1306:

1) You are already downscaled to 2 levels below the highest level DE mob in the area (sometimes even more)
2) DE rewards do get scaled to a pretty nice point (you get 240~ karma pre champion of “badazar”, 360~ pre orr event, not that big of a difference for a 70 level gap).
3) Been there. Done that.
4) More stupid money sinks!

Not really sure what you are trying to say here – possibly you didn’t understand the op. When you play in a low level area as a higher level character you are downscaled in level to the maximum level for that area +1 that’s usually 2 levels above (not below) the mobs you are fighting in that area. Further, of course, when you are a higher level you have better gear, traits etc. so you are effectively quite a bit stronger than that.

I think the event notification is rather good, if not outright excellent. World events are notified over a wide area, whereas local events are notified only when you are closer to them: The idea for these is not that you race all over the map to get to them, I think, they are just things that are going on in the area you are in at the time. One thing they might do though is to remove event notifications when the event is >50% done so one isn’t attracted to events that will soon be done.

It may be that in some areas events are a bit sparse, but they have said they will be adding new ones throughout the lifetime of the game to fill in the gaps a bit.

Well isn’t this essentially how event scaling does work? i.e. events are mostly scaled by increasing the number of mobs. As we know that doesn’t necessarily work if the mobs pass through a bottleneck where they get showered with AOE immediately they spawn. If the idea is to multiply spawn points and generate new bunches of mobs from them, then that does seem like one way of scaling some events and one that’s been mentioned before. I doubt that these types of ideas have escaped the notice of Arenanet’s devs, since they are really pretty much the essence of what scaling is.

@Zii – glad someone thinks its a good idea.

Another little wrinkle occurs to me: If whilst doing an area whilst under the burden some other nice player should help you to kill a mob of veteran level of above or participate in the same event as you, then that person would get a small buff (for helping you shoulder the burden!) such as +5% magic find for ten minutes or whatever. The idea being to encourage people to play together a bit more – something that isn’t happening too much in my world right now (was better in beta I think).

Oh! Armchair game design is so easy…

There are several different areas of difficulty in the game so lets break some of them down so we are all singing off the same hymn sheet:

- Random Mobs. A bit too easy in most of the game, I think, so that they don’t really require any thought. I’m sure that that Brick’s 95% would have no problems if these were beefed up a bit.

- Veterans. Mostly you can solo these quite easily. That means that there is no necessity or incentive for players to get together to take them down – and so they don’t. They could easily be farmed solo for loot – except that as things stand they never have any loot to speak of. If they were a bit harder it would make sense to give them a bit of useful loot. You should have to be reasonably competent to solo a veteran, I think.

- Events. These often have a sweet spot where they can be fun and somewhat challenging. Unfortunately scaling often isn’t effective so that when you are in a zerg everyone is competing to tag the mobs before they die and there’s no real question of any challenge, except as Turgon said the challenge of getting your damage in before the next guy.

- Dungeons. I don’t think many people are suggesting making these harder. In fact perhaps the devs should ease off a bit in story mode instances, whilst players get familiar with them. Not really sure as I’ve only done a couple of runs, which went OK without any particular theory crafting etc.

I was sorry when they toned down the difficulty in the GW2 open world following a few vociferous complaints after BWE1. It seems to me that such complaints tend to come from people who aren’t prepared to adapt their playstyles to new games – in the case of GW2 that means a few simple adjustments, more movement, use of the dodge key, mouse turn not keyboard, know where your strafe keys are etc.

I’m not looking for super hard gameplay in the open world, but a certain level of difficulty is required in order that players get to learn the way their skills work and interact together. If you can play the game simply by standing still and spamming your auto attack, you aren’t going to learn the deep interactions that are built into the combat system in GW2 and the combinations you can do both on your character and across professions.

The current balance probably also contributes to the fact that events rarely fail. The gameplay would be so much more better if those centaurs at least put up some semblance of a fight.

One of the things that maybe can be done in the future is to have differential levels of difficulty. With the cosmetic reward system they could give benefits that lead to certain rewards, for say playing the game with a more radical downscaling to the norm.

pyronix.4081:

@roqoco: i think you’re missing the point here. i read that article which was specifically why i posted this thread. The article goes on to say that specific action is being done to stop botters. That’s well and good and kudos to ANet for that. What it fails to address is the fact that the design of the content itself is what is encouraging botting and afk-playing.

That was a short article, just intended to correct the very strange impression that some people had got that Arenanet don’t care about bots and are not doing anything about it. Similarly Arenanet also know and will certainly care about specific places in the game that make botting easier: Your op is nothing new – those of us who play the game a lot all know about these areas and why they favor bots. No doubt Arenanet will address this, when they have the time and resources to make that a priority. But, it makes no sense for them to reveal exactly what they intend to do about it, since that would just tip the botter’s hand.

In fact, one should appreciate that all these threads about botting are really quite anti-productive. Anyone reading your thread who didn’t know about those places, surely does now. Much better to just report botting over the in game channels than to publicize it here and elsewhere.

Psychrome.9281:

not really a zerg per se about 8 of us and half the time we all were ADD and running around different directions but yeah it doesnt feel that over powered mean it still takes a bit to kill some of these big baddies and the regular trash stuff doesnt drop in miliseconds but id does die fast but that is probably because it was a decent size group not because we have some overpowered gear. hehe and yeah gotta eat your veggies:)

When you get to level 80 it’s likely that there will be many areas of the game that you haven’t yet completed. So the question you have to ask yourself, if you want to complete the content with that toon (rather than say farm mats & items in Orr) is: Is it going to be fun and challenging to explore the rest of the map on this level 80 character? Well, since the content you missed was really designed for low level characters with less skills doing the content for the first time, I think you will have to agree that it’s going to be quite a bit easier with your level 80 toon (and the balance is such ATM that open world PvE isn’t exactly hard the first time around). But what many of us are really looking for from “endgame” (i.e. anything we do after level 80) is experiences that are more challenging not less challenging – particularly since by now we should have L2Ped our class at least to some extent.

Psychrome.9281:

i was talking about karma per time spent…or effort put forth its alot easier to get small amount of karma very fast then a larger amount for a longer and more difficult time. either way this seems like a cheesy way to gear out alts

What you seem to have forgotten is that you can bring your main character back to the starting area and earn Karma on it in exactly the same way as you could do with an alt. In fact it would be much more efficient since level 80s can kill stuff in Queensdale much quicker than your low level alts would be able to – if you think, by some stretch of the imagination that that is an efficient way to earn karma. And that would be a lot more cheesy.

You obviously don’t want zergs of level 80s rushing around Queensdale trying to farm karma. However, noone is going to do that because as pointed out by Above Mars, it would take you forever to earn enough karma that way. Farmers aren’t necessarily the brightest sparks, but they are smarter than that.

The point of making karma account wide, in case it still escapes you, is so that you can earn things in the game by playing the game naturally for it’s content rather than specifically choosing the most efficient way of farming even though that is boring and can be disruptive to other players doing the content. Alting and being able to use karma across your account is never going to be an “efficient” way of getting rewards in the game (its always going to be more effieicent to use your main character) – but many of us are not trying to be efficient we are trying to have fun playing the game as it has been designed.

I might add to what is becoming a bit of a WOT that giving alts access to your main characters karma is hardly going to be a good way of kitting them out. They already have access to your main characters gold reserves and if you want you can kit your alts out in whatever manner you please using that. You can also buy gold for gems and kit them out that way if that’s what floats your boat – but Guild Wars 2 is isn’t really about gear especially at low levels, where the advantage it gives you is minimal.

@Psychrome: So, if I understand you correctly, you ran a zerg of high level players through a low level area and at no time did you feel over powered? That’s very interesting. And thanks for the advice on how to have fun in the game, I’m sure that will be extremely useful and it’s always nice to know about a person’s eating habits.

This particular event has already been mentioned in other threads WRT botting. Also the devs have addressed the issues here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/On-Botting-and-What-We-re-Doing-About-It/first

Hate magic find too. It’s an awful idea and I wish they would remove it from the game or at the very least remove it from armor to some separately managed item. Essentially the presence of magic find means that loots drops have to be balanced around the average magic find strength of players, so that drops get nerfed for those without it.

PuffballPink.6035:

roqoco.4053:

The downscaling has limited effectiveness since you are downscaled to 2 levels over the content.

Only 2 levels?

Here’s a fun exercise: go to local vendors and purchase level-appropriate weapons for the area. Compare your damage before and after.

Downscaling is a poorly implemented mechanic, likely due to adding 80 levels to cater to the fans of older MMOs.

Well I don’t think we are disagreeing about anything here – although nominally 2 levels over the content your gear and traits as a level 80 put you way over level to get the slightest challenge from the content.

There seems to be some schizophrenia about what downscaling is actually for. Originally, in that long video on dynamic events Eric Flannum said that the purpose of downscaling was so that high level players could not return to low level areas and spoil the fun by one shotting low level enemies, but they’d still be much stronger than the content. It’s arguable with a level 80 in say Queensdale whether even that goal has been achieved.

Anyway see my op: Carrying The Burden Of Grenth (Hard Mode) for a possible way these issues might be addressed.

I think we have to accept that getting to level cap is pretty much equivalent to game over for a toon in Guild Wars 2 right now unless one wants to farm high level areas in order to obtain prestige items, return to previous areas for which one is too strong or start an alt – which is fine, but I’m attached to my main character and would like to complete the exploration of the map and generally have a good time with the content without the pressure of levelling and i will play alts as well anyway … after all the game is only a month old and I expect to be playing for some time.

So my idea is that once one gets to level 80 one can obtain an item, which I have called “The Burden Of Grenth” that has several effects on your character:

1) and most importantly. Your character is downscaled to 3 levels below the content level of any area that you choose to play in. And probably some downscaling of armor mods and maybe trait bonuses would happen too.

2) You get additional Karma & rewards (from events) for carrying the Burden of Grenth, equivalent to those that you would get for farming events in Orr.

3) You get some kind of title, aura or mark that shows that you earned the right to carry the burden.

4) You have to pay a small fee (equivalent to that for changing your traits) at a vendor (temple of Grenth?!?) to pickup or drop the burden.

So this is a sort of Guild Wars 2 hard mode equivalent that allows you to go back and do the content you missed, whilst at the same time increasing the challenge and allowing you to work towards those in game rewards without being confined to a limited space.

This idea could also be extended to dungeons, for a hard mode, such that for instance when parties run a dungeon whilst carrying the burden of grenth they get increased rewards for completing it. That also might let the Arenanet designers ease up a little on those who are currently finding the dungeons a little hard.

Account wide achievements in Guild Wars 2 are a big improvement over the many character specific achievements in Guild Wars 1. But I think that the game needs to go one step further and make karma account bound too. One of the main reasons this would be good is that then players who like to have alts can use their alts to work for prestige Karma rewards for their main toon. This has the obvious advantage that they will be playing through all the content to achieve this, rather than just farming karma in high level events on their main toon. In addition this keeps every area of the game relevant and populated rather than sucking everyone into the high level areas to earn their rewards.

Also see my OP “Donkeys Carrots and Guild Wars 2” for more on this theme!

@DNickB. @RashanDale.

Yes, scaling karma & gold rewards to player level as well as items (currently only these are scaled up as mentioned previously) would seem to be an improvement and would help to alleviate the bottlenecks at level cap. And as Dnick said would surely be a reasonably straightforward thing to do.

However, I wonder if there might be a more complete solution, than just scaling everything to level, if one asks exactly what exotic and prestige rewards should be for. Surely the answer is that players should be rewarded for participating in the gameplay over a long period: Prestige/exotic rewards should act as a motivation for visiting every nook and cranny of the game and doing all the content, whether that be with a single toon or with multiple alts. Whether players do some particular event (or whatever) whilst levelling up or whether they do it at level cap should really make no difference to the reward contribution… And prestige/exotic rewards absolutely shouldn’t be there to encourage players to rush to level cap in the shortest possible time and then farm a very limited area of the game for a very long time.

If you agree with the above, then you have to question why things like the karma rewards for dynamic events increase as you move to higher level areas. You don’t do anything more at higher levels to contribute to an event than you did at lower levels and higher level events aren’t essentially any more challenging, given your increased level, than events were at lower levels.

So, if karma is to be used as a prestige/exotic reward currency (lets ignore it’s other less important functions for the sake of argument) then there’s no reason why the quantity you earn should be scaled down at early levels in the first place! Giving full karma for events in early areas would be of major benefit in attracting players back into those areas and also you could start earning karma on alts immediately just by playing the game in the way that altaholics enjoy.

Kaz.5430:

rocoqo, when you go back to do lower level content, the rewards are not always low level. If that were the case there wouldn’t be so many people complaining that when they go to low level areas they keep getting high level drops and don’t get the low level drops they want for crafting.

Where do you draw the line between high end drops as an incentive the high level player looking for loot, and low drops as an incentive the high level player looking for mats?

As the post above proves, whatever ANet do is going to be ‘wrong’.

It actually works like this:

Since drops are individualized, the weapon/armor/items drops are somewhat appropriate for your level, at least to some extent. I do tend to get item drops a couple of levels below my actual level, so those drops seem to be a bit lower than they would be when I’m playing in an area where I’m not down scaled.

All crafting nodes yield the same results as they would if you were at the correct level for the area (1-15 areas yield copper etc), these don’t differ at all for higher level players … and all drops of rare materials from mobs are the also the same as if you were levelling through the area. So I’ve no idea why people should complain that they can’t farm the materials they want in low level areas.

Further the karma/gold rewards from dynamic events, hearts etc. are also not scaled up if you are higher level, they remain the same as they would have been if you had been levelling through this area. On the other hand travel costs for higher level players are just as high as they are in higher level areas…

So you can see that as things stand there is no reason for high level players to do lower level areas, when they are trying to get their exotic items. And that’s the reason that level 80 players all crowd into a single area even though their toons have probably not seen more than 1/2 the content in the game.

The “endgame” has one major flaw for me – which is that you can’t avoid reaching level cap without leaving out half or more of the content. Then if you go back and complete early content in order to explore the map, it is essentially trivial given your lvl 80 stats & in the rewards for doing so are low. This is where Guild Wars 1 really wins out: when you got to level 20 (very quickly after Factions) nearly all the content is ahead of you – even the starting areas (after they added hard mode). Guild Wars 2 badly needs a way of leveraging the large amount of cool content they have already put into the game so that “endgame” isn’t a head banging grind for gold in a small area of the game.

If you put a donkey at location A and a big juicy exotic carrot at location B, within sight of the donkey, what do you expect to happen? …Right, the donkey heads for the carrot along the path that gets him to the destination in the shortest time or along the path of least resistance.

This donkey/carrot design was fine in early RPG games such as Bard’s Tale, Wizardry etc. because those games were almost completely linear: In order to reach the carrot, you had to go through and experience every location in the game. But, it is not so good in a game such as Guild Wars 2 that (sort of) wants you to explore and experience the game as a virtual world. I say “sort of”, because there are all manner of things in the game to speed the donkey on it’s direct route to the carrot (XP from everything, XP on all food, boosts, kill streaks…), so that you can more easily ignore even more of the distractions (content) along the route.

There was a lot of talk during GW2 development that levels don’t really matter – endgame begins at level 1 and you can always come back to experience the content that you missed later (after you have got your exotic carrots presumably). Of course you can do that, but what do you get out of it? The downscaling has limited effectiveness since you are downscaled to 2 levels over the content and have traits, armor etc. that make you invulnerable. My ranger pet is capable of winning most downscaled encounters on it’s own (which probably explains to some extent the high incidence of ranger bots). And, of course, the major reason people won’t go back to do low level content is that the rewards are much less, which essentially is what pushes everyone into grinding for their exotic carrots in the same limited places.

How about alts, then? Well that’s what I’m doing and I think it is the only way of keeping the game vibrant. But, if you are going to play alts and adopt an exploring style, whilst not grinding the high level events you can essentially say good bye to getting any of the high level rewards in the game at least any time this decade.

Arenanet have innovated extensively in Guild Wars 2 and it’s a wonderful game in so many ways. But, I do feel that to add all that content and then to incentivise players into ignoring most of it in favour of grinding a few high level events is the major flaw of the PvE design and needs to be addressed.

Please note if u don’t read anything else in the post: This is intended to be constructive criticism and certainly not some blanket condemnation of the game – which is great and we are all hoping will get even better – otherwise why are you still here?…

Events tend to have a sweet spot in terms of numbers where they can be quite be quite challenging to do and are a lot of fun. It’s just that currently many of them don’t scale too well when a lot of players are around. I’m sure that Arenanet are aware of the issues, but it must be apparent, if you think about it, that the issues surrounding event scaling are complex and hard to test, so it’s likely to take some time to sort out.

D W.5179:

roqoco.4053:

D W.5179:

Unfortunately there are bots all over, and even once reported they remain playing 24/7 for more than a week. The bots by this time get the gold they need and sell it, after more than a week of 24/7 farming they have more hacked accounts if/when a ban ever occurs. The message ANet is sending is, botting is worth it.

How do they have more hacked accounts? That makes no sense. In the case of hacked accounts Arenanet are addressing the issue by tightening security and other measures: see Mike O’Brien’s latest blog post on the subject.

Through brute-force methods and obtaining lists of passwords from other sites. The same way these groups always do… this is nothing new.

In fact, 2 more bots were added just between taking these 2 videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oTd95skcyM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyeTkJyhgiw

The point is that botting of itself doesn’t result in more hacked accounts – that’s a seperate issue that has to be dealt with by putting security measures in place.

Oh and be careful about posting videos of botters here, as that could be taken as showing how an exploit can been done. Just intended as a friendly warning as that can lead to an infraction.

@Avan – I don’t know where this monthly ban wave idea surfaced and it is probably just a myth. All we really know is that they don’t appear to be banning bots the instant they are reported, since the same bots seem to be in the same areas for some time – or at least so people have reported.

As regards gem prices – one might expect gems to go up in terms of gold as the game progresses and more people reach the higher levels where gold is somewhat easier to come by – so that may be a factor in what you have observed too.

@ “Certainly leveling is heavily dependent on completing DEs. Try leveling by exploring and grinding, not only is it VERY boring, but it is slow.”

Quite often one can find DEs by following the “story” of the NPCs involved in them. But I do agree that in some areas they are a bit sparse.

As to levelling: My personal feeling&playstyle is that the game progression is best done somewhat under level, since the open world difficulty is geared to very casual players (not looking for a dungeon level stuff, but a little challenge is fun for L2Ping, testing out one’s build ideas and stuff). For that reason I’m always looking for ways to avoid XP gain, which is quite hard since you get XP for almost everything in GW2 – one session of WvW or a bit of crafting, for instance, puts you over level for an area immediately.

@Temper, @Ninja

OK interesting posts. I don’t know how Arenanet intend to deal with the botting problem either and I’ve seen them and reported them too. However, Arenanet have said that they will be banning people for botting and it’s obvious for the reasons you (Temper) outline in your post why they aren’t good for the game. It should be equally obvious then that Arenanet are not going to spend half a decade making this very complex game and then let it be destroyed by bots and other exploits, if there is anything they can do about it; so they will be and are no doubt already addressing the problem to the best of their ability.

I’m not sure why people are assuming that Arenanet don’t have GMs on each server: I’m sure they do. One thing to remember though is that Arenanet is quite a small company and they didn’t quite anticipate the volumes they would be getting so soon after launch – this is surely the root cause of many of the problems that the game has had. They have said that they are employing more staff on the support side to handle the volume, but of course it does take time to recruit and train staff.

Edit: One thing I might add is that Arenanet haven’t always been as good as other companies at pro-active support in game (i.e. in GW1). Eve Online does this well and their in game support was often almost instant. I hope that Arenanet will take a leaf out of CCP’s book in this respect (and for it be feasible with the cash shop model in GW2).

Zii The Mad.2563:

Many many people moaned duing the BWE’s: “The game is too hard, the game is too hard. We will never develop any personal skill, so please make it easier”. Now it is easy, very easy, and we are all left with an empty feeling inside.

Yes – But, I think that mostly applies to general PvE content (and solo play) and they should roll that back to the kind of level they had in BWE1.

OTOH I don’t see how they can make those large zerged boss fights interesting for variable numbers of players . If I’m playing ranged the boss really has to one shot me to take me out of the fight (as some do), otherwise I’m just going to run out of range and heal. Even if it does one shot me I can revive at the nearest way point and run back in half a minute or less.

So how exactly do you make an open world boss fight more interesting/challenging with a zerg of 40 on balance average players attacking it? Individual skill hardly makes a difference at that scale so you can either balance it so that an average collection of players win or they lose.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I like it that the foes are smart enough to go after low health and downed targets; that’s exactly what players do to reduce threats in PvE and PvP.

Agree – I think the AI is better the closer it is to how human players would play. That’s not only good for the challenge, but also because you can more easily imagine that the opposition represents a real threat and in the long run that’s a lot more fun than feeling the mobs are just there to be punching bags or coconuts at a coconut shie. Whilst Mob AI is hardly perfect in GW2 (those centaurs&bandits have an unnatural death wish most of the time they should try to flee & group together more often) they do seem to have made some progress over past games.

The idea of dynamic events (at least the smaller ones that are the majority of the content) is that they are things that just happen in the world around you where you happen to be at the time, not unlike how things unfold around you in reality. Currently, as we know, this doesn’t always work out as well in practice as it does in theory, but as more events are added and the existing ones get tweaked the game should get closer to that ideal. Since that’s the design aim it would hardly be sensible for Arenanet to introduce tools that would essentially turn events into sequential farming runs for players too impatient to play the content in a more leisurely way: GW2 is a game where it’s very easy to find alternative things to do, since it has a lot of content and four major alternative gameplay elements.

NinjaKnight.1340:

Reason – bots that are farming to Gold sell are on hacked accounts. I’m pretty sure that their profits then get sent to another hacked account to sell to a Gold buyer. By the time it is tracked down, the Gold seller has his money and the hacked account is banned but way too late.

As already pointed out hacked accounts are a different issue from casual botting: The most important thing with hacked accounts is to prevent accounts being stolen in the first place and to get back the ones that did get stolen. Arenanet have explained the steps they are taking to do this in their latest blog post.

Whilst hacked accounts are clearly a priority they obviously don’t want casual botters (i.e. mainly those who paid for their a/c and cheat on their own behalf) either and have said they will be banned. Exactly what procedures they are adopting to catch and ban such players is of course something that is best kept to themselves.

@ “it is quite clear that anything negative against ANet, justified or not, you are going to take issue with.”

On the contrary, there are many things that aren’t working well in the game right now. But saying that Arenanet don’t care about botting and account stealing because they already have your money is plain silly. For a start, if you want a purely commercial argument, in the long run they will likely get more from cash shop than from box sales, as other games do. Besides, wheeling out the old “fanboy” thing is Ad Hominem, which is the last resort of the desperate when they don’t have any sensible argument to make – as you don’t.

& If you don’t want to argue with me and just pop out of your shell occasionally and throw a few ad hominem insults around, then that’s fine with me too.

Temper.7265:

So detectible or not,if they can enjoy a lengthy unhindered farming period or make enough cash or maybe even steal enough accounts,then it’s well worth it to bot.

You are confuting two different things again here. The point is that botters who use stolen accounts (the worst offenders), who are probably mostly commercial gold farmers, can be prevented most easily by making it very difficult to steal accounts and that is the angle that Arenanet are working on most thoroughly at the moment as M O’B stated in his blog post. And, I very much doubt that the majority of casual botters want to pay $60 every time they get an account banned.

D W.5179:

Unfortunately there are bots all over, and even once reported they remain playing 24/7 for more than a week. The bots by this time get the gold they need and sell it, after more than a week of 24/7 farming they have more hacked accounts if/when a ban ever occurs. The message ANet is sending is, botting is worth it.

How do they have more hacked accounts? That makes no sense. In the case of hacked accounts Arenanet are addressing the issue by tightening security and other measures: see Mike O’Brien’s latest blog post on the subject.

@ “Mass bans once a month or similar do absolutely nothing to curb botting and actually encourage it through a lengthy period of inaction against them.”

I’m no expert on botting, but I’ve heard that Arenanet tend to ban bots in waves, so that they don’t alert botters early as to what is currently detectable and allow other botters to circumvent that.

If a botter has an account on Guild Wars 2 it is either paid for or has been hacked. If it was paid for then botters would be losing money by being banned, so mass bans should be effective as people will not want to lose money. If the account was hacked then that’s another problem that is being addressed by tightening up security.

@ “I would gladly start paying a monthly fee if it meant Anet would care about the quality of this game.”

Of course they care. You only have to explore the game for a few minutes to appreciate the care and detail that they have put into it. What you need to appreciate though is that software development isn’t instant and problems don’t just fix themselves overnight. Also remember that about 2million people have bought the game and there may be 500,000 playing at any one time: No development team can easily keep track of that quantity of people all at once.

Biscuithammer.8615:

Have they commented on if they’re going to fix the silver rewards or just karma?

They just said that currently things aren’t working as intended. But, exactly what is intended we don’t yet know. No doubt the situation is still somewhat fluid – Arenanet don’t tend to release information until they have a clear direction that they can communicate.

I’m not sure whether many of the people complaining will be happy with whatever changes are made, since I suspect that Arenanet will not want to encourage particular limited parts of the game to become farming sites that people use to quickly get achievements/items intended to be more long term rewards. But, that’s just my guess.

forrae.6708:

i actually do agree with this. if not giving each class more a defined support damage or control role, at least do it with the trait lines. to me, it does seem that there are some traits that are more designed to do one thing or another. it just doesnt feel as if they are as well defined as they could be. what they were trying to do was make things so all classes could perform and contribute to each role, but i wouldnt see the harm in putting more emphasis on role in a class

You can already create synergies between different builds and different classes, if say you are doing a dungeon or something in a group. If you look at the full range of utility skills along with the combinations that are possible across classes, you can come up with team builds that work well together.

Just because you don’t need to adopt a strict trinity doesn’t mean that different classes can’t perform different roles in GW2 groups. Like GW1, GW2 is a team game and the builds you come up with are team builds – it’s just that in GW2 there’s less concentration of particular types of skill in particular classes so responsibility for roles can be shared more across the team. In GW1 you healing & condition removal skills would be concentrated in a single class, whereas now it can be spread across all classes.

Morgoth.4573:

I am beginning to wonder if Arenanet even reads the Dynamic Events sub-folder of this forum. Not one comment on DE’s and their diminished returns. It really does make you wonder why they haven’t said one thing on the subject.

Arenanet have already commented and said it isn’t working as intended, what more could they add? There’s certainly nothing new here, just more whining. Give them time and they will sort it out. Meanwhile there are plenty of other things to do in the game and this only effects a small (but vocal) minority anyway who aren’t really playing the game for it’s content.

I think they are banning bots, but it seems to takes a considerable period of time between bots being reported and then disappearing, in some cases. Don’t lose hope and keep reporting them when you see them is the best approach, I reckon.

Revolution.6301:

AGREED AGREED AGREED!
Going off what the OP said; I’ve noticed people who range or use magic are usually quite safe so if your fighting a giant the giant should summon smaller giant that go after those rangers and magic users so they have to think stratgically too.
Also lets say (like in many cases 50+ people join in) have an ‘elite’ skill set unlocked for the boss that really requires those 50+ pleople to actually be there and that its actually possible for them to lose.

Actually both these types of scaling already do occur – but clearly not that obviously. In some cases the spawned minions (or coughed up drake food to give an example of minion scaling) simply aren’t damaging enough to cause much trouble. I expect that Arenanet are already well familiar with most of the ideas outlined here – I’m hoping that we will soon see a blog post (hint hint) on what they are doing WRT DE scaling and what the issues are.

I think it’s a good idea to have such events that occur rarely. If it went off frequently the area would be full of players waiting to farm it for drops. And it means that some mysteries can remain even in areas that one is familiar with. In the long run perhaps, when Arenanet add more content, maybe they will increase the number of events that only trigger in certain circumstances, so that each time you are in an area it is a unique experience.

Having just played a warrior up to level cap and started a ranger, I tend to agree to a large extent. Love the pet capping and stuff in PvE and anything works there really, but will definitely stick to warrior in WvW. Think you are right about speed buffs – something that’s essential for a skirmishing class. Also condition removal & eliminating control effects is better for warrior – and those are essential for any PvP.

B.F. Skinner got a lot of hate for his “behaviourism” ideas and particularly for comparing people to rats running mazes and pigeons pecking bars to get food. However, anyone observing how a lot of people play MMOs will know that he wasn’t far off the mark.

The game already flags upcoming events by people running up to you, orange markers etc. and not sure what more they can do without it getting ridiculous; and perhaps selfishly I’m not too disappointed that those out of the way places on the maps aren’t infested by farmers.

Himei.5379:

roqoco.4053:

Find the short bow is a lot of fun to play if you like a skirmishing/kiting gameplay style. Just can’t find a good 2nd weapon set that is worth switching to – except to fire off those two offhand warhorn skills and quickly switch back to the shortbow.

Found axe/warhorn best combo with shortbow. Axe will help bleed and slow down and perfect with kiting as it bounces off mobs. And if given trait of Fury when switching weapons, killer for mobs.

I’ve used Longbow for about 25 levels, then decided to see if i liked shortbow and have never looked back. Damage was higher, dps on auto attack was better than Rapid Fire. It was harder to tag with longbow also since all skills were single target besides Barrage (too long of cd) even if you had Piecing Arrow trait since the shots took forever to fire off.

Yes that’s what I have equipped at the moment – would really love to make sword/warhorn work, but can’t. The thing is that one really wants to use the warhorn skills as an opener, but then what would you do afterwards with a sword that doesn’t have a gap closer? With axe on the other hand you can fire of the warhorn skills plus the axe cooldowns, as they are ranged and then switch to shortbow having gained fury might and swiftness and set some conditions on your foes.

Also think the ranger is lacking a bit in AOE – I don’t mind having restricted AOE at range (just the poison cone on shortbow), but if we have a melee option it should be possible to deal with multiple mobs that way – otherwhise why would anyone ever bother switching to a melee weapon?

Well I don’t want to be the thread police, but is it really necessary to have another thread on this topic, when there have already been so many? The op should learn to check other threads in the forum before posting. I’m sure Arenanet are aware of whatever issues there actually are, but they have of plenty of things on their plate right now, many of which are likely to be more important than a few disgruntled farmers.