Guild Wars 2

Maxwell.7843:

I don’t understand, is there a “berserker problem”?

If the problem is “high DPS parties are more efficient in dungeons”, then I must say it does not seem like a problem to me, it’s seems logical: you do more damage, the bosses die faster.

Everyone is free to run whatever build they like, lfg gives everyone the option to join a group of like minded individuals.

I really don’t see the issue here…

There’s a problem because Zerker seems to be the only type of DPS that the devs are allowing to function properly in PVE. That’s the problem.

DPS dwindles on power and condition damage builds because of obvious design flaws that multiple people including those who review and study games everyday have mentioned yet here it is going on 3 years now and nothings been done save for a refocus on the e-sports fantasy. This game is not a DOTA we need results for PVE builds starting with stopping the everpresent flow of unnecessary PVE nerfs to alternative builds we keep seeing.

Croc.5129:

Tree.3916:

IllegalChocolate.6938:

maddoctor.2738:

IllegalChocolate.6938:

Croc.5129:

Thaddeus.4891:

IllegalChocolate.6938:

nearly invincible eh?

care to put that to the test with a solo of the entirety of the volcanic fractal on lvl50?

I don’t think that anyone that would want to debunk that will pay for a full cleric ascended gear to have enough AR to go througth a level 50 Fractals. But here what I found.

Solo lupi with cleric Warrior
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKO11Y55DTM

Arah path 2 – Group of 5 with dodge disabled
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2VhmwLwvrM

These are all part of the problem. I can tank the spider boss in AC just fine with a mace and focus, but I’m not celebrating that kind of bland gameplay.

I will second this.

Active play should be a part of every archetype regardless if you are bunker or not. The difference is the active play methods that come into play.

The only things that really comes close is playing a bunker on point is sPvP, that is what bunker should be doing in PvE, not just some training wheels, but an actual tactical choice of engagement.

Bunkers in PVP have one role, to stay alive and stall the enemy team until help arrives to help them. That’s their main purpose and they spec for defense because they need to hold points. Holding an objective can be used in certain pve encounters, but can’t be used everywhere and for all boss encounters.

I would like to see it used in a method akin to shooters like Gears of War or Army of Two where the bunker is used as an advancing bulwark to provide a better combat position outside of point defense.

Guild Wars 2 even though an MMORPG borrows heavily from these types of games, the fact that you can swing wildly at nothing, the type of acrobatics you can achieve on legacy of foefire, the fact that DOWNSTATE is straight out of these games like borderlands, gears of war, etc. GW2 needs another push into the action direction and bunker setups can fit very nicely in the picture as the “heavy” of a squad setup.

You still aren’t understanding that boss encounters define how you play. PvP encounters require a bunker to absorb tons of dmg. There are no PvE encounters that require a player to absorb tons of dmg since large wind up attacks are telegraphed and dodgeable. What you really want is an encounter that requires a tanky player to absorb damage. Unfortunately for you, that will never happen in this game as “defined roles” are non existent.

So replace that instead with having the tanky player being able to take that hit and in exchange making the enemy vulnerable to more damaging assault, facilitated through ability use. Mistiming of said ability means the player takes bonus damage beyond normal as a consequence for not properly using their skill.

The point of all this is to find alternative replacements for roles, not just leave them in the same state as they were in the now obsolete environment GW2 left behind.

Actually what some of us want is for PVE balance to be as important to the developers as SPVP seems to be. They told us early on that they would be separating the PVP PVE balance patches so as to prevent things like nerfing classes in PVE from happening. That’s not what’s happened here.

Secondly, there has been an ongoing problem where they’ve added CC and reflects and other such abilities to the game but made them completely useless or have you (Tree) forgotten how right after they gave use reflects in many a build in PVE they made certain attacks from bosses immune to reflects so they too became as useless as CC is today?

You don’t have to have the trinity to have cerebral gameplay you just have to give players choices multiple choices and allow them to work, that’s not what’s happening here, they’ve given us alot of choices but made most of them completely useless in the field when fighting champs and bosses and that’s where the phrase dumbing down applies.

Tree.3916:

Seriously? How do you know he was fired for that? How do you know he was fired at all?
Even if what you said is true, how does that invalidate what he said?

Edit: My second question got answered http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Robert_Hrouda

Oh now that is just hilarious. LOL

Anything else they’d like to share that was designed by someone no longer with the company?

Or perhaps they’d like to talk about how the same thing was done in another NCsoft game with another team that’s not doing so well over there either with similar design flaws. (Wildstar) because that would be just as inherently bad. Wildstar however was setup to be for the nostalgic (you know those people like that person who just made the argument of get off if you don’t like the game, yeah those people) and they realized also just what not to do after launch whereas GW2 was originally trying to attract all kinds of players and then went through a change mid way after launch to become something completely different then what they were talking about at launch or in beta.

So explain to us again how you feel it’s okay for a game company to attract one audience and then completely break what that audience is seeking half way through because that’s what happened here with Zerker, Zerker wasn’t the meta when the game launched you could actually do what the devs claimed you could do with ease and ability in fact you could actually use CC on bosses and it was amazing the difference in fights. Now though it’s been dumbed down to the point that all you need to do is rush everything with no strat. Tell us again how that’s an improvement.

An no profit isn’t the only reason games are made. Blizz recently made several changes to their progression model because they too understand the need for players to play the way they want to play. In fact a huge balance patch is about to come out that’s supposed to enhance and rebalance all classes because of the problems in these classes that GhostCrawler caused while working there in previous expansions that they didn’t have time to fix in this one.

Some of us are just waiting patiently for Arenanet to get rid of their own GhostCrawler problems here in this game that have caused years of PVE imbalance, how is that wrong?

Zypher.7609:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Noobix.3958:

The precursor crafting/scavenger hunt was never a promise. It was on the table, they were working on it, then at some point it went off the table. But it was never promised.

Oh, yes it was promised, and that’s exactly why they don’t promise anything anymore. They even said we’d see it in 2013.

Hopefully they fulfill that promise with HoT.

Did you even read the article, i know it might have taken 5 minutes of your time.

“And So Much More to Come…
From the upcoming release of our brand spanking new Looking for Group (LFG) tool, to investigating ways to limit culling in PvE, to the two-week content schedule our Living World teams have in store, the second half of 2013 has countless more exciting new things in store for our players than I can possibly cover here.As always, the content above is subject to change as we test and iterate on these systems.”

But because of people not reading and jumping to conclusions like you just did with saying they promised these things. This is why they do not let us know anymore.

Actually the problem isn’t people jumping to conclusions because you can’t when it’s a live announcement, the problem is they make live announcements when they treat the whole live game as a PTR. They need a PTR and then need to make PTR only announcements to get customer feedback. They know this, everyone knows this, it’s a time honored tradition to keep updates that are important for the growth of the title alive and to test problems before they go live.

But they keep thinking that they don’t need it so they’ll continue to stumble along in their live patches causing outrage over outrage because they don’t test anything ahead of time.

I doubt very much that we’ll see precursor hunting and even if we do OP we definitely won’t see an actual system of finding a real one directly, most likely it will be locked behind some box or ticket feature or it will require that you have a special account where RNG is never negative.

Jerus.4350:

Rauderi.8706:

Jerus.4350:

And please no with the defiance thing… I can just see people now.
“dude, why did you throw that CC I had a Deep Freeze on the way”
“I needed agro, I’m playing the tank”
“ugh….”

So it’s not the best idea. I can accept that. =P

I never claimed aggro control was consistent. I’m sure there’s plenty of Elementalist stories about “that kitten boss wouldn’t leave me alone even with 4 other party members beating on it.”

The point is, I can, if I do it right. And if that makes it easier (not necessarily faster) for my team/guild, I’m okay with that option. The perceived lack of options is what some of the arguing is about. (The other is the group exclusion, but that’s a use-LFG matter.)

I hear ya, I used to run that Pillar Guard type build. It was nice when it worked, but the inconsistency is what made me give it up.

I still think there is plenty of power in support. And there are many more supportive trait/utility/weapon setups than what is used in the meta. I simply don’t feel that way about gear because for the most part it’s about personal ease of play not group ease of play, and the bit of help toughness gives to agro for a tank type role just isn’t consistent enough to depend on.

Actually several classes don’t really have much in the way of support for their party and it doesn’t help support much that regen doesn’t scale properly in PVE on many classes that are regen heavy. That’s another issue entirely however.

Kite.2510:

tigirius.9014:

Make bosses have a building crit damage resistance buff. Think about it why should CC suffer CC doesn’t kill bosses and Condi damage already has a limitation because it’s built poorly (max stacking), so fix the crit Zerker mentality by making bosses require coordination by giving them a significant buff against crit burst damage skills then parties would be required to have multiple build types and the Zerker build parties would be dead.

I’m with you, (in the Zerker hating Wagon at least) but the content of the game must be built around non-dps builds, and simple solutions like this will take the fun out of it.

I’ve made multiple suggestions for this in the past, going from scaling skills with less popular attributes, to introducing new attributes, to designing dungeons with specific builds in mind.
In the end I’ve understood 3 things.

1. The community here is very toxic. Most players who hate the current “holly Zerker” system have already left the game.
2. There is no easy or fast solution to something so game-changing. The upcoming expansion will be the best opportunity, and I’m prepared to quit my self if it’s not addressed then.
3. Keep beating that Horse until there is nothing left! The fact that so many people keep beating “the crater where the dead horse used to be” means that there’s truly some thing wrong with this game, and then perhaps they’ll take note!

Thanks for your sensible post it was nice to see someone else who’s experienced this. Got almost 20 years of mmo experience under my belt in which I’ve spent hours looking at the spreadsheets for the numbers under the hood, got lots of hours before that back when dice table tops were the thing, it’s terrible when a game isn’t designed properly. Apparently it’s the new thing now to put out something that’s imbalanced, or balanced only for PVP, with as little cerebral content as you can muster and then expect no one to notice.

cillard.3986:

I am confused at to why balance changes are going live in the next patch that will affect the game as a whole when the issues that generated to problems are mainly isolated to sPvP. We all get that certain classes are problematic in sPvP when celestial amulet stats are combined with might stacking, but this simply isn’t the case in the rest of the game.

My worry is that many of these changes will impact things negatively in every other aspect of the game. Why not just make some of these balance changes to sPvP only as that is the only place they are applicable?

Disclaimer: If you are actually implementing these changes in sPvP only, I did not see where that was communicated, so I apologize.

Thanks

That train has come and gone actually. It’s impacted the rest of the game negatively now for over 2 years. Five minutes playing the Engineer will let you see that. There’s so much nerfed on that class not only do people do the Zerker thing in PVE but there’s like only 2 viable specs right now. It’s really sad honestly.

Spoj The Second.7680:

tigirius.9014:

It actually doesn’t when balanced properly. You see, other games that use the triple talent system for developing DPS characters don’t require that someone be that 1 single spec to play above all others because there are other things that are needed that help with strategic gameplay that allow for the other specs to play.

Thats completely incorrect. Other games do have single top dps specs. The difference between other games and gw2 is that the casual community is heavily exposed to the meta crowd in gw2. Whereas in other games its not considered as important in pug groups. But the guild groups and the people running for maximum efficiency are being just as restrictive as we are in GW2 (if not more).

And talking about things that are needed. Introducing needed roles creates even more elitism and exclusion. But the overall most efficient composition is just as restrictive as it is in GW2. Its impossible to have two different approaches with equal efficiency. Especially if one of your approaches is sacrifising damage for defence. Simple logic.

They do they have suggested top DPS specs however you CAN play other specs and do almost the same amount of dps when you play in these other games so it’s not as required as it is here. When you balance a game properly, it doesn’t really matter which spec you are in boss fights which is my point.

For example, if you have a pet heavy class and the boss fight will kill all pets you can switch to a non pet spec and do considerable damage in the fight which in this example deals DoT damage rather than burst crit.

In another title that has a pet heavy class you can switch to an all debuffer style attack spec which has barely any DPS at all but debuffs the boss and elites and makes them miss or do hardly any damage and many instances require that.

That’s my point, it should be balanced to include all dps specs right now they only have 1 and 1 only for every situation, that’s not balance.

Join the club, the hidden pistol doesn’t pickup a single bonus to damage that engineers or thieves use for example.

I’m still seeing people trying to get help for the final personal story. In what way does it improve the game to have people eternally not be able to complete a PS because they designed the final PS to be so difficult you need a group because they have a serious problem with BALANCE in game design? Please enlighten us with your “nothing’s wrong everything is perfect you’re doing it wrong” philosophy because I’m sure people who play other games that are actually balanced when doing things like this to see the lore would like to know how there game is terrible because it’s actually balanced properly and how they must be simply tired of having a great time in a game that’s got 0 design flaws in PVE combat because their game devs actually care about PVE combat balance issues….We’re waiting…

Harper.4173:

nexxe.7081:

Dedlaw.9130:

nexxe.7081:

I find it funny how some of you think that it’s not a problem. Yes, OP can play how he wants, but that’s just avoiding the problem altogether. The zerker playstyle was never intended. It just became the preferred de-facto meta, because it’s more efficient, and it’s borderline exploiting the A.I. mechanics. Anet just gives it a pass because they refuse to update the A.I. in old dungeons.

Stacking on a boss isn’t tactical at all, and it’s outright laughable. Any other MMO, even action-combat ones, don’t even have this. They have A.I. that responds accordingly to mindless gameplay like this.

Living story bosses are even more challenging. Anet has proved this, but they just don’t want to update the old dungeons with better A.I., as was said during that video interview during feature pack 2.

So you’re saying playing as a glass cannon was not intended? In a game where damage takes priority over defence or healing? Where damage avoidance is encouraged over damage reduction?

I should’ve clarified more. It was never intended to be a meta playstyle. All playstyles were intended, but the zerker meta became the de-facto meta by the community. It was never intended by the developers, and it was also never encouraged or restricted by the devs (from what i’ve read anyway).

Damage was never supposed to take priority over anything else. The self-reliance of the individual was/is the intended playstyle. This is why all classes got a healing and dodge skill. This is why the traditional trinity playstyle doesn’t work in GW2.

Damage avoidance is only preferred because of dodge, but that doesn’t mean it was ever intended to replace damage reduction.

This just proves that gw2 needs balancing for all different playstyles, otherwise you have one role, which ironically, gives less choice than a trinity mmorpg.

You do realize a play style will eventually become the “de facto playstyle” because of the community.

That play style is usually the one that gets the job done fastest and even if zerker wasn’t the meta ( because of changes) the next-in-line fastest solution would be.

Damage avoidance replaces damage reduction for those who are skilled enough. I would say for the majority of GW2’s players damage avoidance does not replace damage reduction because the majority of players aren’t full zerker specs.

The majority needs that damage reduction because the majority can’t really play that well.

The fact that pure glass is viable for good and very good players is a side-effect of the fact that the game is aimed at the average and below average in terms of skill level.

Since it’s designed to be manageable for someone of low or average skill it becomes easier the more skilled you are.

A game can’t simultaneously be easy for the less skilled and hard for the very skilled.

Also you don’t seem to differentiate between role and gear choice which are two entirely different things.

Example :

A warrior in full zerk with a GS or AXE could be considered DPS.
A warrior in full zerk with a hammer or mace is Control.
A warrior in full zerk traited for banners is Support.

They have the same gear – they have different roles in the fight and different things they bring to their party.

It actually doesn’t when balanced properly. You see, other games that use the triple talent system for developing DPS characters don’t require that someone be that 1 single spec to play above all others because there are other things that are needed that help with strategic gameplay that allow for the other specs to play. For example, when bosses aren’t the 1 killshot enormous amount of health meta we see players coming together in order to coordinate. That doesn’t happen in this game, everyone simply must be zerker and rush through it as quickly as possible. It’s not coordination it’s finding exploits so use while you’re enormously squishy (unless you play Warrior of course) and you simply must follow the crowd or you can do nothing because you’re kicked from every group.

I have news for you, that’s not balanced.

I can see that alot of people are still asleep when it comes to what’s best for the game here considering the number of “don’t do it” posts that have exactly 0 to say as an alternative or that are posting nonsense about it.

~ It is broken.
~ This meta shouldn’t exist as the sole means to play the game.
~ Balance doesn’t exist.

Until these things are fixed the game will remain as bad as it is for the rest of the community it’s affecting the game in the same terrible ways that Gearscore and DPS Meters have on other titles. If you don’t care about that then you don’t care about the game and you don’t care about your community so some of you are showing your true colors in your replies here today.

If there is an expansion to come, could we please get backpacks that can be turned off, dyed, or made racial, or all of the above.

And if you make them look racial, please design the entire system in such a way that Turrets and the weapons we hold in our hands become racial in design as well so we can match them all.

Two days, let’s see if they even address this issue at all or mention it. sigh

Make bosses have a building crit damage resistance buff. Think about it why should CC suffer CC doesn’t kill bosses and Condi damage already has a limitation because it’s built poorly (max stacking), so fix the crit Zerker mentality by making bosses require coordination by giving them a significant buff against crit burst damage skills then parties would be required to have multiple build types and the Zerker build parties would be dead.

Fuji.6284:

Unfortunately, RNG has always been a part of mmorpgs. It’s even more so in most mmorpgs out there than GW2. I hate RNG too but it has its place and function in the game and you realize that once you’ve played through a variety of similar games.

True but there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing it and it’s well established now that they are doing it the wrong way. When you remove the reward system from the game almost entirely for most players to keep your failing economy afloat there’s a problem. When you design the game to be TPcentric there’s a problem. The element that gives players the fun factor they crave psychologically is gone and it becomes a chore and boring.

Diablo III is the best recent example of this. Their title became all about the real money auction house until 60% of the players left almost overnight. It sent a message to the devs and they not only removed the RMAH but they also increased the chance for drops by 100% and added new drop systems to find treasures while doing other things in the game. They made a second round of record sales almost exclusively off of that simple change they made before selling the game on consoles.

It seems clear what Arenanet and John Smith have to do to correct the problem.

About the PVE balance thing. Apparently someone there thinks that nerfing conditions in PVE is actually a necessity. Obviously no one there is paying attention to the numbers because if they did they’d notice the design flaws that have plagued condis for years now in this game two of which are the stacking problem and the lack of crit damage problem two things that all other titles have had to fix by allowing stacks to either change or become deeper debuffs/DoTs or by giving them actual crits where they do 4-8x the damage per DoT when a crit occurs on a DoT.

Their most recent patch shows that they still don’t get it.

So what I’d like to ask for is a team that cares about actual balance including these problems.

I’d also like to ask for a complete rebalance of explosives and we’re talking about all of them I’m not even worried about grenades (save for the #1 to be changes to a mob target instead of ground target on that kit) but toolbelt mines, the standard mine, the bombs have all suffered terrible drops in trigger zones and explosion sizes and to me it just doesn’t make sense to put weapons of WWII in the game if you’re not going to treat them properly.

One of the things this game lacks now after all the changes to try to make it more “challenging” is a system that’s reasonable for obtaining top tier gear for the purposes of open world.

For example, several other titles out there allowed the collection of currency within a reasonable amount of time per piece to gear characters. It’s been a necessity since mmo’s had end game anything… So my proposal is to not only allow for the players to have fewer RNG elements ie buying materials directly from vendors for making gear in the crafting system that already exists OR repurposing Karma so that you can actually either buy the materials directly (no more bags remove the bags and allow people to buy the items like ectos and stones etc) or buy the gear directly. Reasonable would be 1-2 weeks of doing in game events that give you these currencies (whatever is chosen to be used) per piece. So you could virtually gear your toon out completely in a 3.5 months. That way it remains alt friendly and it allows players the ability to ignore the need to farm entirely (which Anet has stated that they basically wanted to eliminate) and everyone’s happy.

You can do whatever you want with the dungeons/raids that you develop but for the casuals it should be a reasonable system instead of the mess it is now.

“Might: The power and condition damage provided by this boon have been reduced from 35 per stack to 30.”

Because nothing says “balance” like nerfing a system that’s already nerfed because it’s not designed properly.

Conditions don’t need nerfing in PVE on the contrary they need boosting severely because of the problems that stacking causes and the sheer lack of crit damage per DoT.

It was probably put into a folder labeled “archive” along with the Rewards CDI, the PVE combat CDI, and the CDI for precursors. It was a round filing cabinet usually with a bag in it to catch the files.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

darkace.8925:

“…we’re setting up a new framework for how an MMO can grow its universe.”

ArenaNet: perpetually planning to prepare to iterate big things that may or may not make it into the game.

This, two plus years of this, is anyone really surprised that so many people are jaded, apathetic or flat out cynical? I wish I could attend Pax just to see how this will all go down.

I wish I could too I wish we could have someone who is well known on the internet setup an interview with them and then hit them hard with the questions we’re all wondering. What happened? Why did you stop developing this game? Why do you consistantly update things that no one cares about or has ever had an issue with? When can we expect that you’ll fix the inherent problems thousands have posted about in the forums? When will these problems be fixed finally or will they continue to sit on the backburner? I’d love to see their reaction to that because the media we have right now is a joke, for example, if one of these gaming sites actually asked some of these hard hitting questions early on we would have had more action for sure!

when you’re fighting one of the new bosses and you’re well outside of the red circle but somehow get hit by it’s stun anyway…

Iason Evan.3806:

The more I think about it the more I think a solution is untenable. ArenaNet’s real life economy is tied intrinsically to the game economy. If it doesn’t have to cross the player’s mind to hit the, “GET MORE GOLD” button at the top left of the BLTC page then how much real life money does ArenaNet stand to lose.

Actually it is…. Several titles have completely revamped their system and have found other ways of making money without killing their games and Anet can too. If they really wanted to this game would have multiple ways of getting the resources needed for example to build Ascended gear, or multiple ways of getting full sets of said gear. It would have multiple ways of getting rewards while out in Tyria, meaningful rewards like gold, items to sell for gold, items to buy from karma vendors that actually help with progression, items to collect to build other items that aren’t restricted behind yet another RNG (I’m speaking of course of the collections they DID finally add that were like that, you get almost all of the items for something as simple as a new bag and boom you have to contend with yet another RNG by going to look for chests to see if the last item drops.) smh I did that for 3 weeks without success until finally I just uninstalled the game. It’s not fun to have to deal with an account that’s consistantly not obtaining anything.

Astralporing.1957:

tigirius.9014:

So you have to ask yourself, which would you rather have?

Not sure why you are addressing the question to me. I don’t really care about the item rarity (the value of a skin to me is in how well they fit the planned look of my character, not in how hard they are to obtain). I was simply pointing out to Carighan, that a system that reduces negative RNG factors in the form of outlier/“bad luck” accounts doesn’t need to result in everything becoming common, and eliminating rarity.

I actually wasn’t addressing it to you I was addressing it to John.

We’ve sat here for 2 years now watching everything in the economy rise in price, watching the game become a TP centric mess and we’re still not seeing any significant changes to how rewards are handled. It’s sad really especially since so many people have given ample examples on exactly what TO do it should be obvious really.

Astralporing.1957:

Carighan.6758:

Buttercup.5871:

Dear John, I’m sick and tired of being the outlier. So please, if you truly understand: get your act together and bring about some actual change. There’s plenty of pointers in this thread for you to act.

Well, easy enough to fix, so long as you accept that nothing in the game would be remotely rare any more.

That actually doesn’t necessarily follow.

The only two sets of people who are really worried about rarity are the greedy (those who actually had accounts who didn’t suffer from the low drop rates who then have made enormous amounts of gold in the TP and continue to do so starting on the first day when the island event was first launched and no one did anything about people logging in with multiple characters to loot the exact same chest), and the 1% neither of which are large groups, neither of which should be the deciding factor in the future of the game, and neither of which will end up being particularly effective in increasing the number of players in this title. So you have to ask yourself, which would you rather have? A game based on old outdated novelties that cater to the nostalgia or the terrible side in humanity, or an extremely fun and popular game in which people login not because they have some ongoing endless chore to do but because they all actually enjoy being rewarded for their time spent?

I spent all night tonight on WoW guess what I did. I had the most fun collecting items from chests, from fun hidden places throughout the world. I found pets, mounts, gold, resources that actually mattered in my progression instead of cheap items that made no difference. When I found greys, special greys that were hidden I could actually get a significant amount of gold for vendoring them. I found gear I could actually use, some of which were skins. I also found resources for a fun collection system called Archeology where I could build items that had skins or special meanings, or even had some that were items that were useful.

And to think I did all that without ever stopping at the Auction House. That’s what I mean when I say fun and that’s exactly what I expected this game to have, it’s own versions of course. I can recall the talks in interviews about how they carved out special nooks and crannies all throughout Tyria to have special hidden places so that the players would feel rewarded when they went to those places. That never happened for me. I found many of them while exploring but every time there was a chest or hidden item it wasn’t rewarding, it dropped nothing of use and it was a waste of time save for those special stories that were short like the Giant who’s friend had died.

Collections, chests filled with items people can actually use (skins, armor sets, runes, sigils, items so rare they might as well be recolored as legendary for as hard is it is to get them and I do mean the items for crafting.) Is it really that difficult? I’ve seen multiple titles do it now and they didn’t suddenly close down.

Well that explains the appearance of the RNG thread I just read and posted to. I think this article is spot on particularly when it’s talking about how the TP has become the central focus of the game which as we’ve seen in many titles becomes a serious problem for the game itself when you can’t go and get the materials you need within a reasonable amount of time (whoever thought of not being able to get a stone from a rock elemental or leather from animals smh this is the Crossroads Zevra quest amplified across an entire game).

Diablo III just went through a major change and virtually restored it’s population overnight and had a huge successful resell to consoles because of it. When they eliminated much of their RNG and reliance on the AH they restored the fun factor to the game which made people want to play again.

It’s really not hard to see, you can’t argue with evidence right before you.

Destiny had some recent growing pains as well. Certain items were so rare they started to lose subscriptions because it so they modified their RNG to allow more players to obtain what they needed for progression. Bam their subs were virtually restored overnight.

The trend is clear here really. Give people the ability to be rewarded for their time spent in your game and they’ll spend more time in your game but make the AH (TP) the central focus of the game and make it virtually impossible for everyone to go and obtain what they need to progress and they’ll stop playing.

Simple right?

One thing is not a slur and I use it often because it adequately describes why this game is in the state it’s in today (and why so many games have problems)…

Apologist.

When you have enough of these trying to play devils advocate you ruin the ability of customers to try to improve the game because apologists are able to send false messages to the development team that everything is perfectly fine. And I’m not talking of course of sensible arguments to thwart those who would constantly and consistantly try to break the game by making false claims, I’m talking about a genuine misuse of the excitement for a title to disuade any honest claims about where the game is heading when it’s indeed heading to a terrible place. Apologists have been responsible for breaking multiple games of late, ever since 2011 I’ve seen them allow tragedy to strike multiple MMO’s by sending the wrong message to developers, all because they took too much pride in something they didn’t make.

So while I agree that these words on your list are indeed slurs, let’s leave apologist off the list shall we so that we can be clear that there is a problem here when people become too prideful and allow bad things to happen to mmo’s by sending the wrong message to the developers and publishers about problems in the game that affect everyone negatively.

1: You know people are going to defend this but really it’s not anyone’s fault but their own. If they had more integrity and had not built a legacy of not fulfilling their promises since launch there wouldn’t be a need for silence would there.

5: I would add this really because it’s not just that they added a gear treadmill 2 months after launch it’s that they also made the game heavily reliant on the TP to do anything meaningful in progression. Are there any karma vendors with Ascended? Nope. They nerfed everything, karma, material farming, the basics for any kind of sensible time table are gone really in this game and as we’ve seen in countless titles when the TP becomes the focus of the game the game loses it’s fun factor entirely because you spend all your time trying to gather enough gold to get anything done.

“We do need to be very careful about ideas that flatten the experience entirely as that quickly becomes not fun at all.”

Oh I don’t know. I’ve had years of fun in every other title that’s not used RNG for something as basic as crafting materials no matter the tier. Farming is a necessary part of the life in an MMO because it allows players to reach their goals when crafting is part of the progression as it is here.

Economies that rely solely on extremely rare and hard to find crafting mats are not very stable as we’ve seen here, and crafting for progression then becomes a chore when you have an entire account that almost never on any character is able to get the crafting materials to reach top tier gear.

Let’s stop letting the greedy dictate where progression is headed in this game shall we and stabilize the ability of players to progress. If you remove the RNG element from many of the materials in the game that are required to both level crafting and then create crafted items you’ll make it a more fun system because people will be able to progress without breaking the bank.

Much can be said about the ability to get necessary enchants as well. Until those are available from vendors even with a bit more difficult to build up currencies like Laurels for example, you’ll remove the RNG element that makes it extremely difficult for players especially new ones (since everyone seems so concerned with the new players) and you’ll restore the fun element to the game.

As other developers have already tried what you’re doing with this economy and discovered they are losing players left and right because of the heavy RNG and heavy reliance on the Auction House for everything, I would have thought that by now, someone there (since there have been claims of people being gamers on the team) would have noticed that there was a huge problem with a heavy RNG and heavy TP reliant system in the game prior to this. It’s not fun to have to farm gold for months just to build something for progression sorry. It’s a lesson I thought would have been obvious by now.

I’d like to hold up Diablo III as a great example of what TO do in this situation. Eliminate the RNG of many of the items necessary to craft, remove the elements that restrict progression, update the system so that most new players won’t have to spend tons just to get something from the TP that they need (which could easily have been a reward while leveling) and update the rewards system so that players can get what they need at least for one build choice by the end of reaching level 80.

I’d also like to add that even though destiny has had a huge launch, they are now suffering because of their heavy RNG elements and it’s starting to show in their numbers so they are scrambling to try to fix it by making drops more readily available.

Two games who’ve had heavy RNG elements in their systems who’ve had to change drastically because they overestimated the 1%’s desires in their design. Nostalgia can only go so far in a game until it breaks the fun factor.

They’ll be announcing the much anticipated changes to the TP system where you won’t be able to choose what you buy because that would be too confusing for new players, you just walk up to the TP auctioneer and throw gold at them until they give you something. Of course it’ll be part of the much needed RNG system because we’ll never have enough RNG.

I think we should have this ability. When in game, if we’re using a bomb kit or grenade kit or any other kit that looks terrible and we encounter an Anet employee in the game on their avatar, modify our grenades so that we can throw our hobosacks at the anet employees avatar which will permanently equip a hobosack on their avatar until they log out no matter the class. That way, we’ll at least get some attention in this matter :P

It’s true it’s always used lately by the apologists for anything and everything that’s of concern to the community at large. These apologists simply have no concern for their fellow players and instead of helping the situation they deny it exists at all, so the behavior continues and often becomes worse for the community because the developers are given the false notion that what they are doing is correct and welcome.

When this builds as it has in these forums it eventually becomes a community trend and it does indeed reach out from one game to another to another until it reaches a terrible height.

Take the billing model for example. It started off as a simple currency exchange in which players could purchase currency with real money, as time has gone by and more and more of the farming locations for valuables have been nerfed left and right it’s become near impossible to farm for the items needed. We’ve seen apologist after apologist make it seem like this is okay behavior and that it’s somehow fun to rely solely on the TP for everything to the extent of making the game all about farming gold and nothing but at the end game. So the fun is gone, it’s been proven time and time again that a lack of rewards for time spent in game and a total reliance on the AH in any game no matter the label it’s given can and does destroy populations over time. It becomes no longer a matter of enjoyment but more like a chore to login everyday to try to reach your goal of gold to be able to do the things you find meaningful in the way of progression.

When this occurs in one popular game other popular games eventually have the same things happen to them as developers believe this is what the community as a whole wants. Apologists roaming from title to title will indeed continue the trend until there’s an APEX of ugliness in the mmo community as a whole. I saw this ugliness in Archeage while playing the beta. It was terrible. People who were perfectly willing to buy the prelaunch packages but who were hesitant because of very real and later validated concerns about how the game was being handled were basically thrown to the wolves by apologists. Called all kinds of names, slurs that were usually saved for the poor or homeless were all over the forums simply because people didn’t see the need for everything to be so focused on the store and how much money you spent on the game causing an unfair advantage.

When you let apologists run the show on real and valid concerns and your mods are NOT taking the time to moderate those apologists it eventually becomes a problem that affects all titles in the same genre and the community as a whole suffers for it.

It started here and one of the cries of the apologist is that phrase.

Serophous.9085:

Everyone will get everything they complained about!

So start making a new list of complaints

I’ll believe it when i see it. There’s a track record here you see, it’s been repeated several times so you’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

I’ve not seen anything myself either, no speculation or rumor websites cropping up.

timmyf.1490:

Register for an account on Reddit. Post there. Problem solved.

Also my thinking considering that these forums have all but been ignored for years now and the suggestions folder was thrown in the trash. Making things more public like posting to reddit, facebook, youtube, twitch would certainly get more attention and go viral much more quickly in mediums that can’t easily be snuffed out.

Here’s a question, wonder if they’ll be announcing that they’ll have the entire team working on removing hobosacks on their interview LOL

Djinn.9245:

Ashen.2907:

Djinn.9245:

If the entire game is more and more restrictive

It is a good thing that the exact opposite is true then.

Here are my examples of systems in the game where choice has been reduced:

-Costumes reduced from individual pieces to entire outfits.

-NPE: low levels are shown less choice of things to do (gathering, Skill points, etc.)

-Traits

-Dailies: less open PvE choices per day

-Dailies: less choice of where you can go to complete your open PvE Dailies. PvP: less choice of what class you can use to complete certain dailies. Etc.

-Dailies: removed choice of using Dailies in Festival Completion

Now, you claim that there are actually more choices in the game. Please illustrate.

They can’t and that’s the thing. They keep telling us that this game is casual that it’s got lots of choices in it, it’s been the same old nonsense since the beginning of the game. Garrisons in WoW have more options than this title does, better rewards, and have more fun events happening than what this game does to defend or to go out and kill rares to get resources for the garrison or my favorite part, WoW actually has chests that have contents that MATTER when you find them! You can actually use what you find in these chests, not here nope.

And even with the restrictions placed on classes in WoW I’d argue that due to the costs of buying the enchants on this game with the currency exchange being the only go to place to get gold to get these items with an ever more expensive rise in cost over time, that WoW has more choices on their classes than this game does. Even the event system on the Islands were done better in MoP than this title.

Rose colored glasses though man, you know how it goes when they put those things on.

notebene.3190:

New outfits to compliment running and idle animations?

Exactly what I was thinking LOL

Kurrilino.2706:

Ahhh the regular A-Net pattern………..

The 1st time the forum was boiling with disappointment and anger an interview popped out of nowhere talking about precursor crafting…..

The 2nd time isn’t that long ago a statement was made that A-Net looks into expansions…..

This time they talk about expanding the universe and LS was just the beginning….
The frequency between these calm down games is getting shorter and shorter
and the announcements bigger and bigger.

Can’t wait for summer when they announce something like A-Net plans to pay people to play or something huge like that.
It is really sad that A-Net has to use “lures” to keep players interested.

Maybe it’s just me but the signs looking bad…
- canceling mosst teams inclusive dungeon team
- merging serves because of shrinking playerbase
- throwing precursor lure
- fleeing to china to desperately grab some players
- merging servers in china because to few players
- dumb the game down to reach more players
- throwing expansions talks in
- reward player for just locking in to encourage players to lock in
- throwing universe expansion lure into the crowd
- every financial report reports less income than the one before since the peak in 2013

I am a GW1 and GW2 veteran and it makes my heart break to see how incompetence and ignorance is ruining everything that has been grown for almost 10 years.

Any company head with a little bit of dignity should at least admit that they handled it completely wrong and that a new start is needed.
But i guess everything will stay like it is and the pure hope for these magical appearing “new players” will continue to ruin the game

The next big announcement will be this: Asurans can make giant battle mechs, Charr will finally be able to drive around in big war machines but it will only go 33%, and Norn will be able to tame and ride those giant Ice Worms or something, oh and a version of Gandalf will be in the game LOL

lordkrall.7241:

Do people really think that they would take 1,5 hours on the MAIN STAGE for not telling us anything?

Oh I’m sure they’ll tell us all kinds of things we’d like to hear about what’s coming, and then when launch day comes along, only half of them will be present with tons of excuses and laments as to why they were cancelled.

“be among the first to hear how we’re setting up a new framework for how an MMO can grow its universe. The Living World was just the beginning.”

Seven words. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Considering how the game launched, what didn’t happen 9 months ago and most recently, there’s a track record here.

Nope and while I think expansion might help them in this regard, I think there’s far more they need to fix in order to actually get this game out of the trenches it’s remained in for the past year now rather than make an expansion for expansions sake. Perhaps and infusion of expansion money will put them back on track on fixing all of the problems that have plagued this title since launch, that they simply can’t take the time to fix while they try to promote it as a serious E-sport contender or try to add raiding so that the 1% can remain happy.

I agree so much potential to enjoy it while enjoying other types of tasks outside of the kill all the time trap that many an MMO has fallen into these days. I used to login stop what I was doing and stand there to look at the way the world was put together, but there’s only so much of that you can do before moving on because of several missing pieces in the game play.

Andred.1087:

“I propose I’m right and you’re wrong so there, deal with it.”

You’re gonna have to do a little better than that. People have also stated they love the changes, and want to see more like it, so where is your argument exactly?

Some of us left because of the issues with NPE still affecting veteran alts as well as the fact that once again we receive a promise for a goal that’s not being touched or handled at that to the pile of promised made 9 months ago as well as those never implemented in the first place and well you can see where this is going. Call us when integrity becomes a priority will you? Because until then, making it seem like people are crazy because we value integrity and ethics in all business practices just makes your replies look silly.

You’re absolutely right about the nitpicking.

Many mmo’s out there have taken away the cost of having the ability t ochange your characters look for example. You can in those mmo’s (and yes many of them are F2P with no subscription) change the look at anytime and not pay a single dime in in game or out of game currencies.

Crafting ui has been a mess for a long time now, they tried to clean it up but really it doesn’t always help the way they did it. The list is crazy long still, it includes everything even when you try to truncate it it pops back to default the next day. there is no saving.

The grind is also a huge huge problem. Despite the apologists here that is NOT typical of the genre. There are only a few games out there that have massive grind to do anything meaningful in game, and while that number is growing, they are nothing like great examples like Rift in which normal gameplay gets you there quickly so that you can continue after you’ve quickly geared yourself, to enjoy the rest of the world by doing non-combat activities. This doesn’t happen here in GW2 it might as well have been made in Korea.

Agree with you totally on Achievements. I tried to do those achievements they added for “fun” during the last feature patch. I’m still waiting on certain drops to come down. RNG is from 2004 and for some reason Anet has decided everything would taste so much better with a huge helping of RNG it doesn’t matter what it is, RNG has to be part of it which imo is killing this title. It’s almost like a chef adding raspberry vinaigrette to everything, it doesn’t go with every dish and should permeate the game like a plague.

Yep even though there is a purchase warning, that warning doesn’t tell you about unique equips at all so they might as well be asking you do you want fries with that for all the good that tooltip does you about the unique equip Ascended items.

This game is decidedly made for people who have nothing to do and hours to do it in. It’s not designed for the casual (though you may hear lies to the contrary) you can’t just simply jump in and do something meaningful and actually get rewarded in any sense of the word. They say changes are coming to the dailies and monthlies but I say why stop there, there are plenty of places where rewards are severely lacking have been for years now, and adding a couple of trinkets to the dailies probably won’t fix the drought this game suffers from on many an account. Mine for example, almost never gets exotics and rares, they are like gold pressed latinum, almost impossible to drop.

It’s bothersome it is. I’ve never seen a game designed so foolishly and I’m waiting to see what they do next to correct these problems (don’t even get me started on combat) but I’ve resigned myself to play other things until they actually address these concerns because right now as it stands their game is a boring korean grind fest and we already have plenty of those (sandboxes) out right now.

pdavis.8031:

tigirius.9014:

Labjax.2465:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that changes in the overall supply of currency doesn’t mean inflation.

Here’s a snippet from an awesome game economist team:
“Changes in the money supply dwarf the changes to prices. While the money supply grew more than thirteenfold, the CPI fell by almost a quarter. It‘s clear that these series aren‘t strongly correlated. The existence of money alone doesn‘t contribute much to inflation. Money that isn‘t being spent won‘t affect prices. This brings us to the concept of the velocity of money, i.e. frequency with which a given quantity of money changes hands in transactions. It can be stated as the total value of all transactions in a period, divided by the money supply. In our case, we shall be using monthly measurements, i.e. market transactions per month divided the average money supply that month. Only transactions on the general market are included.”

edit: In case it’s not clear, this is not from me or speaking of our game.

Would it be fair to say that the problem here is more one of “supply of goods”? Or, to put it more precisely, “generation/production of goods,” i.e. farming/looting/etc.

I think it would be fair to point out that nowhere does he mention the problem inherent to allowing outside money into the economy. Much of what he talks about is loot balance but that’s not the only issue, and avoidance of the issue, which is Anet being their own gold farmers, is a very big factor in turning a games economy upside down like we’re seeing. Outside money (in the real world it’s called counterfeit) can completely collapse an economy. Without doing anything about it and avoiding the subject entirely, I think the problem is clear and I think we have our answer as to why Blizzard closed down the Real Money Auction House experiment in Diablo III before releasing the console versions of the game. It destroys economies.

Loot has very little to do with it and I would add, that if loot were the sole issue here, we’d see fewer nerfs of farming areas than we’ve seen over the years. The problem is that they haven’t found another way to make money so they’ve locked themselves into a single method of obtaining profits and now they can’t get out of it, so they defend it.

Although that does make sense, what is this outside money? Gem to gold conversion? Its already part of the game. From what i understand its the same pool that houwes gold to gem conversion and operates on the same principle. The only outside money wpuld be from gold sellers, and we know anets stance on them.

You have only their word to go on for that and this my friend has been pointed out multiple times, where did the gold come from in the launch of the game? no one had any yet. And where did it come from several times throughout the life of the game especially at hard hitting times, you cannot honestly believe that at no time in the life of this title that they didn’t infuse that market with stacks of gold from nowhere in order to “maintain the balance”. They’ve basically admitted that they’ve done that even though they’ve completely left out the parts of when and where.

It’s as mysterious a number as the number of players that steadily login.

Obtena.7952:

I’m sure glad GW2 isn’t one of those ‘pay to progress’ themepark MMOs then. You don’t need to pay a dime aside from the original box to get the any level of gear, including BiS. In fact, you can’t even get the BiS gear by only paying. Smart team we get with Anet.

yeah, let’s see how many hours do you play a day? how long did it take you to get a full set, and how many precursors dropped for you? were you there during the island event? be honest now.

my point is either you won the virtual lottery or you’re one of those people with endless hours on your hand who can spend whole days in game. The rest of us have responsibilities. And you have to understand where this is coming from, I’m a legit farmer type player, I go out and get the goods and then sell them.

Labjax.2465:

John Smith.4610:

Remember that changes in the overall supply of currency doesn’t mean inflation.

Here’s a snippet from an awesome game economist team:
“Changes in the money supply dwarf the changes to prices. While the money supply grew more than thirteenfold, the CPI fell by almost a quarter. It‘s clear that these series aren‘t strongly correlated. The existence of money alone doesn‘t contribute much to inflation. Money that isn‘t being spent won‘t affect prices. This brings us to the concept of the velocity of money, i.e. frequency with which a given quantity of money changes hands in transactions. It can be stated as the total value of all transactions in a period, divided by the money supply. In our case, we shall be using monthly measurements, i.e. market transactions per month divided the average money supply that month. Only transactions on the general market are included.”

edit: In case it’s not clear, this is not from me or speaking of our game.

Would it be fair to say that the problem here is more one of “supply of goods”? Or, to put it more precisely, “generation/production of goods,” i.e. farming/looting/etc.

I think it would be fair to point out that nowhere does he mention the problem inherent to allowing outside money into the economy. Much of what he talks about is loot balance but that’s not the only issue, and avoidance of the issue, which is Anet being their own gold farmers, is a very big factor in turning a games economy upside down like we’re seeing. Outside money (in the real world it’s called counterfeit) can completely collapse an economy. Without doing anything about it and avoiding the subject entirely, I think the problem is clear and I think we have our answer as to why Blizzard closed down the Real Money Auction House experiment in Diablo III before releasing the console versions of the game. It destroys economies.

Loot has very little to do with it and I would add, that if loot were the sole issue here, we’d see fewer nerfs of farming areas than we’ve seen over the years. The problem is that they haven’t found another way to make money so they’ve locked themselves into a single method of obtaining profits and now they can’t get out of it, so they defend it.

BlueBoy.1236:

Wanze.8410:

BlueBoy.1236:

Imma just make TLDR of all complains here: I can’t afford some things that i want, so therefore there’s an inflation happening.

Cant Anet just ban this inflation dude?

Do you need a hug? (>^.^)> I’m sry if i fail to make it sarcastic enough

Before anyone makes stupid assumption abt this inflation thingy, please read this thread first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/I-have-a-question-about-the-economy

It covers a lot parts of the in-game economy. From gems, to prec price, to silk price, to almost anything that has to do with in-game economy.

There’s also another phrase that pretty much describes what’s happening when apologists keep allowing these things to happen (and explains in a round about way, how our recent US politics has ended up releasing yet another bank designed bill in our government that’s been copy/pasted verbatum.) It’s why Vegas is so popular as well. “There’s a sucker born every minute.” ~ David Hannum? Which is why I think these things are allowed to continue, why people keep accepting them as unchangeable facts of life, and why people continue to support them with their wallets.

Unfortunately, however, this trend has started to affect the entire rest of the themepark MMO’s out there which isn’t a good thing at all. No one should pay to progress even if it is for items people might think others actually don’t HAVE to have in order to play. I think South Park actually pointed out exactly what’s happening to the MMO world with one of their recent episodes (even though they were pointing at the mobile game market specifically I think it definitely applies here.)

Obtena.7952:

I don’t think this definition is actually correct and that does matter in this discussion.

You’re free to look it up in any dictionary.

Having some trouble with the forums. Let me just post this here for a second until it clears up so that people can stop trying to change the subject with misinformation on the true definition of things here.

Inflation: a general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money. It’s exactly what we’re seeing here in this economy. Increase of prices and the fall of value of money brought on by the purchasing and conversion of currency from an outside source, gold, which then prompts the developers to squeeze even more out of the drop rates causing the prices to go higher causing more people to have to buy more gold etc etc etc. It’s happened before, Diablo III, Blizzard had to shut that entire economy down because the prices became so astronomical that it was simply out of reach for most of the playerbase.

And no you don’t have to be an expert in the field to know a bad deal when you see one.