Guild Wars 2

It’s been a problem for a long time now actually because they simply have not taking the time to make the downed state a universal experience.

There are no trait options to help some classes get back up, some class’ abilities do not do enough damage to get them back on their feet, and some classes grab aggro like crazy instead of those that do more damage or are lower hitpoints who are nearby. I’ve played an Engineer since beta and I can tell you that not only do we aggro while in a downed state worse than anyone else, there is also a 95% guarantee even with all of the downed traits that we are going to die before someone can rez us even with all of our chemicals and gadgets you’d think someone would have found a way to help keep us alive beyond a single potion for a single build. smh

It becomes a problem when buying things from the store becomes the higher activity than actually playing the game and being rewarded. I don’t know about you but buying things has always been less fun to me. I’d much rather reach a goal through currency like marks than buy an item from another player who just happened to be lucky enough to get the lottery ticket. Arenanet needs to take a page from what Blizzard discovered in Diablo III and follow suit.

I was just hoping for a chance at getting that anti toxin backpack.

I would certainly love for my gathering tools to be account bound so that I can choose which toon to be on before logging into the game and picking up the tools for use. I spent real money for them I should be able to use them on any character I want not fixed on the main character only because sometimes I enjoy just running around gathering and picking up mobs along the way in various characters depends on my mood.

So the naysayers are saying that we shouldn’t have the ability to move items like endless gathering tools even though we paid good money for those tools? yeah because that makes sense right? ….smh

Korossive.7085:

It could show a good insight;

90 employees working on code in Chinese
10 employees creating new minis and KasJori dialogs
1 employee fixing bugs
And an empty chair by a desk with “New Profession” document half slipping to the trash.

Don’t forget the 2 interns fixing pvp only balance issues and the entirely empty office with the label, pve balance.

There are sooo many places that they could add weapons to the main hand in this game that don’t exist already with some pretty useful skills if they took the time out to do it in a balance patch that it’s not even funny anymore. I like simplification as much as the next guy but let’s face it when you simplify too much you end up with a lack of diversity especially in PVE.

Waiting on the day that they recognize this and fixit.

Funny funny stuff

Oh fun so those two seconds some buffs last don’t really affect the bombs, that explains alot.

Can’t believe we still don’t have a reply about this even though I and others have mentioned this thread to Gaile multiple times now. smh If ever she wants to know why they have such a terrible reputation for lack of communication she can look over here.

I would like mounts myself as a charr main this would make sense considering the sheer number of vehicles my race has available. A Hog would be awesome!

Exeon.4358:

People are farming 100 champ bags/hour in the silverwastes it’s rather boring and less rewarding then people believe though

This is a symptom of a larger problem in the game. Farming like anything in any game like this and even those that have affected gameplay like trying to keep events from finishing, is directly due to nothing more than there being such a stranglehold on loot and rewards for so long in the game that players couldn’t possible make a dime outside of PVP trains or Dungeons.

When you have a loot nerf to such a large degree and you finally at long last put loot in an area for people to gather in a game in which it’s ridiculously difficult to get loot for the majority of players, you’re going to see farmers. Sorry that’s just how that works. It’s a real life situation in a virtual space.

So it might be boring but it’s necessary because the economy does actually suffer if there isn’t anyone there to buy the things that are listed in the TP, when that happens the prices are doing what we’re seeing right now, bloating to the extent of stupidity in some cases.

Same goes for the number of useful sigils and runes. Somebody over there needs to go through these sets finally and add things like 25% run speed, and more escape options, and more useful crit bonses to these sigils because as you all know only certain ones seem to be useful in PVE which drives up their price, if there were more options with these useful bonuses on them there wouldn’t be such a focus on only having 1 (like traveler runes for example) and the prices of these other rune sets and sigils would drop (like a sigil that has the crit change to explode into a poison field for example would be useful for those of us who are condition builds).

SaintSnow.6593:

1500 range shouldn’t exist in the game regardless of class.

Considering the 1200 range of rifles on warriors and their snipe ability yeah, we deserve a 1500 range on at least one of our skills. I’ve been having a blast in PVE using grenades on enemies from the top of bases with condi abilities. It’s very fun to have that range in PVE. Enemies can still throw things at me so I’m not immune to damage up there so there’s no exploitation going on, it’s just fun keeping those little guys off me while I help all of the Greatsword users down below. :P

Like I was saying in another thread, decisions like these shouldn’t be pure PVP because their have been too many pvp decisions that have drastically nerfed this class in PVE causing all kinds of holes in it’s design over the past 2 years that they’ve never fixed, like the replacement of the condition removal outside of being full elixir, every build I’ve had to use since has always had to have 3 points into elixir because if you don’t use 3 points into elixir your weak vs condition removal to the point of stupidity whereas before with kit refinement even with the 10 second cooldown you at least had 3 heals to keep condis off you relatively well, 2 on EG and the turret. Now you have 1 on EG with a CD and one on the HT and that’s it without those 3 points in Elixir to keep condis off you or you absolutely have to buy one of the new sigils which often interfere with dps builds in PVE just to have a change to remove condis on crit which actually doesn’t help the power/condi builds at all in PVE.

So you see how that works, every time they nerf something because of their e-sport nonsense they never fix it for PVE and it ends up harming either diversity in builds in PVE which they never fix or it makes a hole there in which you absolutely have to spend gold to try to fix it and even then there’s no guarantee it will work well.

oxtred.7658:

5 sec of superspeed or some longer lasting water fields have absolutely no impact on pve, though.

Actually they do, they would have a tremendous impact on the ability to heal oneself in a support role, they’d also allow for a more tanky role which seems to be a thing with these people I’m not sure why but apparently you’re not supposed to tank in this game which makes absolutely no sense, there are healer tanks in every other title without a clear trinity that I’ve ever played save for this one, not to mention that other than the title this class actually acts just like a soldier class in every way it’s high time they allowed that function in PVE at long last considering the number of traits one could use for defense, it’s just the healing aspect of this class is nerfed in PVE because of their decisions in PVP. Balance in all things, but they seriously don’t have balance in this class in PVE. Heck they still haven’t replaced the missing Free Heal/Condition removal they removed from Kit Refinement with something even if it had a longer cooldown it’s necessary because that hole has been there ever since they nerfed that in PVP, it’s drastically affected PVE healing ever since for this class.

coglin.1867:

With possibly the exception of regenerating mist, the list of suggestions seems completely unreasonable. Well maybe cleansing burst wouldn’t be OP. Your last 3 though are very unreasonably OP.

See that’s the thing, decisions like these shouldn’t be based solely on what might happen in PVP it does nothing to help the PVE side of things at all. They need to give up this Esport nonsense and make PVE what it should be, fun and diverse.

Definitely don’t touch them, we’ve suffered enough nerfs in the 2 years this game’s been out. It’s time for some buffs.

Couldn’t resist adding this. Let’s have Johnny describe what should happen next for this type of reward system in the game.

So here’s a question, Noxious Gas damage? I’m wearing a gas mask. smh

Well you know they said they’d be making a different sort of game but all I’m seeing is more of the 2004 wowness of any mmo title in which you stop fighting the forces of evil and start fighting the games artificially bloated RNG loot system.

They’ve made minor adjustments to the dry top and the new area but really this needs to be global from now on.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Labjax.2465:

JohnnySupernova.9182:

Arena net has some of the worst communication out of any game company I can think of. When they’re not giving crappy non-answers and ignoring problems, they’re outright lying to the playerbase.

you really wont see a change in communication. Josh foreman got yelled at for communicating TOO MUCH. Even if anyone at anet WANTED to communicate, they wont be able to because the higher ups deemed it bad for business.

I’ve only been around for a few months, but in that time, I’ve seen them not only make an effort to communicate more, but Gaile now has the title “ArenaNet Forum Communications Team Lead” and has been posting in several threads.

If that’s non-answers and outright lying, then consider me fully duped.

Duping!!?! ~gasp!~ Oh, sorry, different type, gotcha.

Things aren’t going to change overnight, but we are making a concerted effort to improve communications. Not every thread gets — or realistically can get — a reply. That is driven not so much by a particular topic but more critically by sheer volume. And yes, not every question can be answered, but maybe it just can’t be answered in the short term, or maybe it’s taken under consideration for a more focused means of communication, such as a CDI, or maybe you’ll see an answer in the Update Notes. And sure, I guess some questions will go unanswered, too, but not for lack of effort or interest.

The truth is, you’re noticing, or I hope you’re noticing: We’re actively taking steps to be more communicative and involved, and we’ll continue to do so as time passes.

The problem is Gaile that we’ve been patient as hades on some of these topics but we’ve gotten 0 communication. The hobosack post for example has hundreds of replies 25 pages worth at my last count and it’s age is going on 2 years now. It’s that bad. So when some of are saying that Arenanet has the most terrible policy when it comes to communication, we point to those threads that ARE important to the players but pretty much get left in limbo eternally by the team. It’s 2 years on a post in the forums, on something that should have been simple to code (and yes I know game coders so I know it’s not that difficult to do) so imagine our disappointment on this scale. We supported the game, we got a reply early on and then bam nothing for 2 years on a single topic. It’s ridiculous. Any other industry and there would be some heads rolling if customers were made to wait this long for an answer I guarantee.

CMM.6712:

Jaher Dal.9503:

Where is all this havoc people keep talking about? Does it happen while I’m not playing?

Starting to think these posters are paid shills hired by Blizzard come to this forum to create imaginary havoc.

Nope some of us choose not to post but I haven’t logged in since the fiasco with the gem store conversion. It’s pretty much gone way way past the last straw at this point and if I had a dollar for every time they’ve used the “it’s too confusing” excuse for making really really bad decisions I’d be a millionaire by now.

I can think of about 5 major problems with the game and several in PVE class forums that deserve a CDI waaaaaaaaaay before we get to the Raiding portion of the discussion easily.

I cannot believe that this hasn’t been looked at yet seriously is it going on two years now? I demand a fix and a flying pig pet!

Yet another item suggested years ago by many of us in the suggestions folder that is now an Archive.

Absolutely. This is what I’ve been looking for in open world however I’ve got to add one thing. Replace all of the chests they have scattered in the open world with these types of chests that one must have a key to open which will improve the rewards. When I find treasure in any game setting, especially if it’s a real chest of some kind it needs to be useful.

I think the OP and others will miss the point because this actually will backfire on them. All those whiners from the 1% who wanted constant dungeon and raiding focus in a game that was never about that, who’ve made multiple posts about them rage-quitting while saying it’s not a quitting thread will be gone with this too so we’d see even fewer of the 1% posting than are here now. I posted about the NPE as a veteran when it affected my alt playing, but was told by many an idiot that somehow my opinion didn’t matter because I wasn’t in the IN crowd or something stupid.

I don’t think it will remove the trolls.

I’m happy it’s being fixed but once again I have to point out that this thread wouldn’t have happened had there been a PTR for feature changes.

Gibson.4036:

wwwes.1398:

Well, the negativity surrounding changes doesn’t help, neither does the negativity about things they just haven’t had the time or ability to change.

Yes. The problem is we can’t tell if “We’ll look into it” means “We’re actively working on it but it will take some time”, “We know it’s a problem but it’s a low priority and may never get addressed,” or “We’re going to change it but in ways that you can’t even imagine and will most likely make the players bewildered and wish it had just been left alone.”

Some of these things are so very much not new. Sorry to burst your bubble there but some of these problems have been here since launch so saying that they haven’t had the time is like saying that the person who keeps procrastinating about his health for 30 years shouldn’t have died suddenly because he really didn’t have the time to take care of himself. It’s been years since launch you realize and the problems they themselves created with combat for example should have been priority.

It’s the other side of the same logical fallacy argument that we should be patient, well how long is too long. Should we wait 2 more years?

Yep it’s now not only popular but fun apparently with these new players to have RNG to the extreme in this manner. It’s reached it’s apex I agree OP. And they’ll defend it too. You’ll read statements like “it’s not all that bad” or “it’s a natural extension of the games design” or my personal favorite “why worry about go play something else”. I saw the worst of it in other titles recently. Their forums (just like this one) were filled with new players who’ve never played an mmo before or who were just too stupid to do the math who basically think it’s perfectly fine to play a game that is basically a lottery. Everything should have a drop rate. DR is awesome. People should pay for every tiny aspect of progression or advancement in every title.

Apparently no one has ethics anymore there is no limit to what these mmo developers are allowed to do over here and it’s getting worse. It’s almost to the point of paying per second really that’s what I see coming, a truly Chinese method of paying for game time.

dekou.6012:

Mercypsy.9602:

Paradoxically, I suspect the low activity in this thread (given the importance of the issue) is a good indication of how badly this needs to change. People simply don’t care about conditions in PvE. Either they don’t think it will ever change, or they’ve settled into their power builds, bought their power gear and just don’t care anymore. Only chumps still run conditions in PvE I guess.

People already discussed this a year ago.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/tequatl/Please-stop-neglecting-conditions-in-PvE/first

It’s an obvious issue. Plenty of suggestions have been made. Nothing has happened. Discussion isn’t worth the effort.

Go look at the suggestions folder archive, you’ll see just how wrong you are.

Behellagh.1468:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

juno.1840:

Behellagh.1468:

ipan.4356:

Look CIG (Star Citizen) if you want an example of a company ought to communicate with it’s players.

Well that’s because it’s also a continuing sales pitch. I don’t think a week goes by without another “Star Citizen has now raised +1 million more” announcement. More hype equals more donors.

And GW2 doesn’t need money?

CIG communicates regularly because they are crowd funded. In a sense all games are crowd funded — the difference is when.

ANet really isn’t running the show imho — NCSoft is. That’s why I think we’re in this boat. If ANet was the ANet of the GW1 era, you’d see a different product at this point.

I’m not sure I understand this line of thought. NCSoft owned ArenaNet during Guild Wars (One) as well. No changes as far as ownership goes. Why are they ‘running the show’ now, and were not then?

That’s because back during GW, NCSOFT wasn’t controlled by F2P giant Nexon who are secretly controlled by The Gnomes of Zurich.

Why is it when perfectly valid ownership rights for shareholders are brought up as a problem for any and all AAA titles that it somehow becomes a conspiracy theory that shareholders don’t take over the creative process by putting pressure on developers? I don’t work in the field and even I know this happens, seriously you can stop with idiotic statements about how it’s a theory, it’s called business.

I bet people like him are advocates for the Archeage travesty where Trion changed their direction entirely not just in AA mind you but also in Defiance.

The evidence that business rather than fun is being persued in the design of a game should convince anyone that something is wrong with the development of a game and it’s definitely not coincidence that this occurs when a new set of shareholders come into the picture by owning the largest shares. Duh.

I’ve got a suggestion for them. How about fixing things that are REALLY broken in the game and have been for years now. Seriously, condition damage stacking, hobosacks, rewards revamp, precursor scavenger hunt, the tendency for the game to be absolutely and inexplicably unplayable behind a windows 8 firewall all these things should have been on the list for changes. This however should not. So my second suggestion would be, revert it back and then actually spend some time on the real problems this game has had for years now. Thanks.

Tulki.1458:

Karizee.8076:

There’s always a spike in the gems/gold conversion when they add new items to the gem store. Always. Players cash in their excess gold to get the new items. This isn’t the biggest one, not by a long shot:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Biggest spike was over the 10 day 2014 anniversary sale when they offered these items:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem_...niversary_Sale

Things they added today that would have spiked the conversion are the Noble Count outfit (the vampire/mesmer attire which was looked forward to by many), Phantom’s Hood, Devil Horns and most likely the Foil Wrapped Candy.

That gw2spidy link is invalid. The API call for gem prices was mysteriously disabled as soon as the patch hit, so that graph shows gem prices up until immediately before the patch, when they suddenly became very expensive.

Yes and what’s more disturbing is we no longer see the Anet graph showing what the actual activity is to decide when we do our own trades. It’s like bidding on things in the stock market blindly.

Let’s talk about yet another way that the exclusive gear/skin raider types are a thing of the past and are being overshadowed by the much larger much more profitable casuals because that’s what’s really happening here. This isn’t a developer problem, in fact it’s not a problem at all, it’s a well known phenomenon where the demands of the consumers change with the type of consumer.

/thread

chemiclord.3978:

tomroark.3756:

This is a huge indication of the mindset that Anet currently has towards its playerbase, the fact that this change even happened at all is a big red flag. There was nothing wrong with the previous system, and it was one that had respect towards the players- a simple thing that said “we don’t view you as a means to take advantage of to gain revenue.” That’s changed.

The only reason tiered currency systems like the one they implemented exist is to rip people off. This change, along with some of the more recent changes and admittance that things like dungeons are not something they care about, means I won’t be playing much anymore, and that means me not spending any more money in their gem store either- gold or actual cash.

Oh come on… there were certainly things wrong with the old system. Gem exchange rates fluctuated so fast that often the number the interface said you were getting wound up very different than what you actually got (and boy did that kitten some players off), for example.

I understand you’re disappointed. I get that you (and others) are angry (like usual). But come on, let’s not pretend there was “nothing” wrong with how it was before.

Uhm you do realize that’s happening now right? I just had it happen when I used the new system. You can put cheeze wiz on top of poop that still doesn’t remove the poop flavor underneath. So how is this an improvement at all again? Right now you can’t trade per gold piece you’re stuck doing it in stacks which helps exactly no one.

The real question is this, why in the long long list of actual fixes this game needs would they attempt to “fix” something that was never broken to begin with?

Once again we’re seeing the ADHD side of development in this game.

Conditions don’t stack properly? Oh look a shiny! Hobosacks are still a thing? Is that a moving piece of paper over there? There isn’t a trinity anymore in PVE Oh wait! Somebody got Pizza! Where was I again?

Absolutely terrible! I went to go use it tonight to get just enough gems from my gold to buy the new hood in there for my necro and it took all the gold I had for gems I didn’t need, now in order to trade it back I have to do it 75 at a time.

This Chris or Gaile This is what people are complaining about when we say that you don’t communicate major changes and then just put them into the game, not as a test but as a major change and then after we complain about it it’s likely never to change. If ever you needed an example of why people get angry this would be it! Yet another example of something that was working just fine, that never needed to be changed, that should never have been touched but was instead of actual problems in the game, like hobosacks!

I know it’s not your fault Gaile but the people in charge of these things really aren’t thinking about what works best are they?

Palador.2170:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Yes, that’s definitely true. As Mike O’Brien said in a recent post, “We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”

The problem is, you don’t talk about current development either. You only talk about it when it’s complete, bad ideas and all, and ready to be thrown out to the public.

I think we’ve all seen how well that works out, haven’t we? And it’s not just the bad ideas, it’s also the good ideas that could have been great ideas if we’d been able to give feedback on them.

The CDI threads are great for finding a starting place and giving some general ideas and guidelines, but that’s all they can do. As you’ve said yourself, sometimes the plans get scrapped and it’s back to the drawing board. Sometimes, it’s just scrapped and that’s it, we’re not even told. At that point, all the feedback on the CDI is pretty much rendered worthless.

Just as the vet players of GW2 don’t see the problems the game has for brand new players (and thus the NPE), so too are the devs too deep into the game to see things from the players’ point of view.

This. So much. No discussion about anything, even bad design choices, and it’s not just now, that aspect of communication with Anet has been the same throughout the two year time period it’s been out. When Kit Refinement was put out with it’s “new useful replacement abilities like spitting drops of glue” smh no one talked about that either. There was no replacement heal that still removed conditions but only added regen and now as such, there’s a gap in PVE.

This has been a problem since they patched that in PVE but no one’s talking about it. There have been CDI threads in the class forums but much of what we’ve talked about hasn’t been mentioned as even being considered for next patch. Nothings being said about DR and how to this day it’s not stopped a single bot from grinding gold. See my point? Discussion after the fact is necessary as well.

Plexxing.2978:

How about a CDI for this? I’d love to try being a terrormancer in pve if it was useful. Maybe whenever the stack is hit it resets and gives the npc a severely damaging and stacking debuff? Like 25 stacks of bleed= 1 stack of gushing?

Would absolutely love a CDI because apparently a year of posting solutions in the suggestions folder and then posting it in other balance threads in which devs have replied didn’t help.

There were several simple solutions like the changing of a certain stack into another kind of stack “Bleed into deep wounds” and the removal of all conditions from abilities unless the player is using a condition build (ie grande master in condition damage line) so there are no longer any extra condition stackers outside of those who actually use conditions. There’s also no scaling to be heard of (much like healing) and there are no crits really (a great example of crits being done right are shadow priest and Curse Warlock in WoW where crits are big and rightly so)

Kuldebar.1897:

How does one “un-sub” or formally “quit” playing GW2 in such a way that ANet could survey such a demographic?

I mean, I “quit” for over 6 months after the Ascended Tier announcement…yet here I am. I even gave my opinion, freely, no survey required, right here on the forums…got infracted for it, but there it was for the world to see, well til it was deleted.

I suppose it wasn’t as pretty a metric as a survey result of yes or no questions…

It’s true they don’t have that system of reporting. When I dropped the game during the series of blunders that were put forth with kit refinement, DR and the 9 month drop drought we had, I posted to their support team page so that they could forward it to the devs as to why I was leaving. I did so because there was no formal “why are you leaving” unsub request for information on their game or their website. I came back for feature patch to see what had changed but I gotta say as an Engineer in PVE they have a long long way to go baby and before I spend a permanent amount of time they’ve gotta lot to fix. So I come here waiting watching the patch notes and announcements to see if things will get better. If no I’ve already moved on to a more permanent status in other titles so that I can at least have fun with developers that care that I login and play.

Despite how negative that sounded I’m hopeful that they are on the right track and will first before anything else rebalance PVE back to where it was for Engineers because just like Hunters in WoW, These devs have nerfed Engineers into the ground in PVE and it’s time for a fix. Combat balance in PVE is first step imo, the second is fixing their trinity so that condition damage builds, CC and support actually matter, and the third fix in the series imo would be the rewards revamp I’ve been waiting for for 8 months now particularly in the open world.

There are some minor things I’d love to see but those three are priority to get this game back on track imo.

TheFool.4589:

If there’s nothing to do, nothing new, I got everything I want, pvp/WvW is unbalanced, my story is complete, fractles/dungeons are stale, world completion is “been there done that” collecting spoons? No thanks. Crafting is done, legendaries are for the birds, there’s literally nothing else to do that intrest me.

So why do I keep coming back? Why are so many players who have done literally everything, keep playing? Why are you still playing? What is this Guild Wars attraction that won’t let go even when there’s nothing left?

Point of this post is, I can’t figure out why I’m still spending hours playing this game.
I don’t do anything.

Because you haven’t discovered the wonder of Star Trek Online Delta Rising LOL which has my attention at the moment while I’m waiting for them to fix a few things.

oh trust me, they have progression. Ascended was the single worst decision they made. They literally became like all of the other MMOs out there the day they announced it. And no they don’t need more progression they need it to remain where it is now.

Skins are good so long as everyone can get to them. No one should be forced into doing parts of the game that aren’t part of the play style we should have actual “play as you like” mechanics in this game by now. Karma is going to waste big time in this game.

Astral Projections.7320:

You forgot to add that when you are completely done with all maps you’ll get
2 gifts of exploration (which you’ll never use unless you make a Legendary)
A gold star (which is invisible to you so you have to ask someone else if it’s there)
A title (also invisible to you)

Who can ask for more? ^^

Yep, cannot wait for the rewards revamp we’ve all heard about.

Rentapest.6503:

I’ve noticed that since April, there has been a steady decline of loot in dungeons. After the April feature patch, the content inside “bonus” chests is ALWAYS without fail 3xBlues. If you’re lucky enough to get a rare, it’ll be a useless tonic.

I’ve just ran through a Fracal, with 257% Magic Find and walked away with Blues/Greens and 1 single rare! That rare was salvaged using the Silver-fed o-matic and got me 2xSilk, not even an Ecto.

What is the point in doing dungeons if there is no loot reward? I enjoy dungeons and like to “grind” my money/materials that way, but it’s been taken away to the point that unless you run 20 dungeons a day, it’s no longer worth it.

The game is all about grinding gold to BUY materials from the over-priced TP instead of being able to obtain the materials yourself.

Bring back dungeon and fractal loot! I remember getting rares every run, even an exotic ocasionally that I could salvage or sell for materials. But now, I get rares like I get exotics … never or once in a blue moon, and get exotics as if they were precursor drops … once in a lifetime.

Honestly, the drop rates are completely rediculous and need to be revised accross the board.

Welcome to what every open world player has been experiencing for 2 years straight. I doubt very much that anything will happen, as most of the time the defenders come on here and tell us all it’s all in our heads that nothing is dropping. I personally believe that it’s an ongoing effort to try to keep their economy in check by changing the values when they seen too many items listed. I have never trusted or liked their economist and think they could do so much better.

DR has yet to stop a single bot but it’s been negatively affecting players for years now.

Even Blizzard learned from their mistakes and removed DR and added a 100% increased drop rate for these items to make it easier for players to get the materials they needed in Diablo III.

I’ve written and repeated my story multiple times in the forums but I’ll do it again.

When GW2 was in beta I watched every video, every interview (some in other languages because the devs still only spoke english and I could guess the questions by the answers) to find out all I can. I’ll admit I was taken in by the manifesto but I was really interested in the diversity of builds in PVE the number of roles with their own trinity and the promise of never having to step into a dungeon, do PVP or any raiding ever again. That’s what brought me here.

When I saw that they had a class that basically had WWII weaponry I was hooked. After playing a hunter on WoW for a long time and playing several other F2P mmo’s for years I had had enough of dungeons and raids being forced down the throats of every casual player out there. Most games that were themeparks really didn’t have casual activities but I felt surely Arenanet would make this game all they claimed it would be so I fully expected several non-combat activities outside of jumping puzzles or the occasional minigame. I really thought they’d be serious about adding things like fishing, farming, or housing. And surely surely they’d add plenty more cosmetic items to make up the missing pieces they had on the leather side of things where almost everything is a trenchcoat variation. I was happy to see the additions to the stockpile of backpack skins but I had seriously thought that would come much earlier in the game because typically game developers don’t hold onto their skin department very long after launch so the first year I seriously thought would have plenty of skins come out of the woodwork.

I came here also because of the innovations to the same old tired 2004 nonsense we’ve all seen. Leveling both classes and crafting, gathering, the styles of combat, all seemed progressive, that is until the nerfs came the catering to the PVPers and bad bad decisions in balance for PVE. There’s alot broken because of these choices and the choices to keep loot out of the hands of the players.

So I guess I have a love hate relationship with the game. I love the beauty some aspects of combat the simplicity of mmo life here in many aspects, but I hate what they did to break the PVE experience, the lack of non-combat activities, and the lack of rewards.

Robert.4197:

Togashi Jack.9531:

That’s honestly something that I consider to be the biggest issue – There’s no consolidation of information. If you have to go and dig through all the drek, you’re never going to find what information exists, and players are going to end up frustrated and believe that there’s nothing..

I see where you’re coming from but other than copying and pasting past posts, what could they do better? Obviously a working search engine would help but that’s already been commented on.

I mentioned STO above and STO actually literally used the same system for a number of years in fact they still do when it comes to things they mentioned but specifically made it known that these items weren’t for any time frame and might never come to pass, however, everything else is well documented now. There’s no longer a need to go look up wikis in STO because they have not only kept a system of news updates and dev blogs, but they’ve used modern systems of communication like live feeds for every aspect of the game especially when new patches are on the horizon to answer questions they missed on AMA dev threads in forums and interviews. So really, there’s no excuse these things should be consolidated into a single news style system of updates with links to live feeds on the patches, there should be live feeds with questions answered on PVE (I’ve not seen many mostly PVP stuff), and I’ve only seen news feeds on things that are very very close to being released and while they did release more this last feature patch we need to know more about what’s coming over the bend especially in feature patches that change whole dynamics of the game play like it did for alts for veterans.

NewTrain.7549:

tigirius.9014:

NewTrain.7549:

IndigoSundown.5419:

NewTrain.7549:

The fact is, if you’re afraid to develop new content because you may anger a small group that possibly doesn’t even exist in significant numbers (players who want hard content but only if it’s tied to exclusive rewards), then you have no business making video games.

It’s your assumption that it’s a small group. However, you have no data to support that assumption. It’s my contention that the small group could well be those who are willing to settle for somewhat better drops. The thing is, you want to use your lack of data to restrict the discussion and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

And it’s your assumption that it’s a significant group. However, you have no data to support that assumption. It’s my contention that the small/nonexistent group could well be those who will only run challenging content for exclusive rewards. The thing is, you want to use fear of a complete unknown quantity to restrict design choices and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Actually every demographic study so far by multiple mmo developers have shown that the number of people who want harder raid like content with exclusive rewards is really just 1% of the population of their games in each and every study.

Thank you. You just completely supported my argument, which was that people who want exclusive rewards from raid-like content are a vast minority.

But, even though you inadvertently supported my argument while trying to disprove it, I’m still going to ask for a link to these myriad so-called “studies”.

It’s been in MMO news for some time now. WoW was one of the first ones but there have been several. WoW, AoC, Rift, SWTOR, LOTRO would be the five I’m speaking about specifically but they aren’t the only ones. These things are mentioned in every forum of every game and at conventions every year when people ask about raiding. The data just doesn’t like and the developers are reacting to that data. Once they’ve done the studies they’ve announced on forums and in convensions that Raiding isn’t what it used to be and that they may indeed change the direction of their development. The most recent announcement came from the developers of LOTRO in which they stated that because this demographic was so low, they couldn’t justify the time it would take to make new raids when the rest of the game needed so much help. In fact, they stopped making expansions altogether for the next year due to this data so they could flesh out and update the rest of the world, something I hope is happening here with GW2.

Frankly I’m surprised you missed the controversy, the 1% were very vocal about being considered a niche community.

DonQuack.9025:

tigirius.9014:

Gaile I understand as a veteran player of many an MMO over the years how it can degenerate into something unwanted however, in all of the MMOs I’ve ever played, transparency is absolutely a must, and in all of the MMOs I’ve ever played, GW2 has had the least amount of transparency.

I’m about to start STO’s Delta Rising for example. The expansion is free but they are selling ship upgrade packs. The reason I bought the pack isn’t because I needed it, it wasn’t because it was such a short time period for purchase and it wasn’t because I was forced into purchasing it by the design team, it was because of their transparency.

They did live streams for how these ships behaved in PVE. They posted weekly posts on what they were working on showing images, movies etc. They have a dev news blog that keeps people up to date, and their live streams give us answers to commonly asked questions and concerns.

That’s what should be happening here in GW2. This has literally been the only MMO in which transparency and a time table have been abscent. Every time any other title has come out with updates or new expansion level work, not only are they transparent about it, but they also have a clear time table. Part of the frustration is we’re still not hearing about things that were promised 8 months ago like the Engineer hobosacks or the Rewards Revamp, even now we’re not hearing about how those should be the next items to focus on especially since they have gone by the wayside and there isn’t a clear deadline. So people will start asking questions like, “is this game going somewhere? Why haven’t they done anything about things they already said were coming? What are they doing?”

Clearly wasnt around at the launch of STO. or season 1, 2, 3,

Actually I’m a real veteran, I’ve been there since early beta and haven’t left since. I’m very vocal there about their mistreatment of science something that’s central to the trek universe even existing in the first place and I’ve been a critic of their practices early on of only catering to the Tactical Career (much like Arenanet has been about the Warrior class here). So really, the next time you’d like to criticize someone you might want to learn a bit about them first then you won’t look so Vaadwaur in your comments.

Part of the reason STO has been so successful over the past few years has been directly due to their transparency. They too tried to be silent as you pointed out but they almost lost everything because of that silence.

It’s time for Arenanet to learn from the other game developers around them, transparency is always preferable to silence and always restores the confidence of the players even those that disagree with the direction of the game.

maddoctor.2738:

tigirius.9014:

We hear all the time how these games are being dumbed down, but they aren’t being dumbed down because of the PVE players they are being dumbed down because of the PVP players who don’t want to think about strategy they just wanna spam faceroll their enemies in PVP.

Enemies that are just a massive hit point barrier exist only in PVE, mobs that attack only every 3 seconds are also something only in PVE, as are mobs that cannot attack while moving so can be kited around without effort. Also, mobs not running out of AoEs and stacking in corners to be killed quickly is also a PVE thing. Defiant is also a PVE thing and doesn’t exist in PVP.

So everything that’s wrong with PVE in this game only exists in PVE and has nothing to do with PVP, saying that games are being dumbed down because of PVP is false. They are being dumbed down so even players that don’t want to put the effort can do almost all content in PVE, those guys can hardly compete in PVP.

The mobs aren’t the problem either. We have plenty of mobs with regen and huge hp pools and even one shot kill abilities, that’s not the issue, the issue is they nerfed Conditions, they made CC non-existant, and they made support completely useless. Also they made traps pointless for anything other than extra AOE zones.

Conditions are way more powerful than direct damage in PVP, CC is dominant in PVP too, so is Support, actually Support and Control are more important than Damage in PVP, I don’t understand what this has to do with PVP, the only dumbed down thing in GW2 are the mobs nothing else.

Lots of stat combinations are important, lots of skills are important, most weapon sets have their use, conditions are absolute king, control and support are both superb and far more important than damage. All these in PVP, so if everything else is the SAME then why is PVE only about Damage, while the SAME stats/skills/traits/weapons are far better in PVP? Because PVE mechanics/ bosses and mob design is what is flawed. Nothing else.

Then really it’s simple what they need to do, fulfill what they said they’d be doing with the updates anyway which is have separate scores, stats etc between PVE and PVP. If they did that in their updates classes like Engineer wouldn’t have suffered the large number of PVE build destroying nerfs it’s suffered over the years.

NewTrain.7549:

IndigoSundown.5419:

NewTrain.7549:

The fact is, if you’re afraid to develop new content because you may anger a small group that possibly doesn’t even exist in significant numbers (players who want hard content but only if it’s tied to exclusive rewards), then you have no business making video games.

It’s your assumption that it’s a small group. However, you have no data to support that assumption. It’s my contention that the small group could well be those who are willing to settle for somewhat better drops. The thing is, you want to use your lack of data to restrict the discussion and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

And it’s your assumption that it’s a significant group. However, you have no data to support that assumption. It’s my contention that the small/nonexistent group could well be those who will only run challenging content for exclusive rewards. The thing is, you want to use fear of a complete unknown quantity to restrict design choices and I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Actually every demographic study so far by multiple mmo developers have shown that the number of people who want harder raid like content with exclusive rewards is really just 1% of the population of their games in each and every study. It’s been done now 5 times by 5 game developers. I’d say that’s pretty good odds that these raiders are literally 1% of the overall gaming population in any title. When they come to these forums the few that do, they become even smaller of a percentage, so yes, I’d say listening to that tiny demographic for large overall game design choices would be suicide as we’ve seen by Wildstar, a game developed exclusively for this demographic. It’s been proven time and time again.

The problem isn’t the mobs as your title suggests it’s the combat. And this game isn’t alone. Gone are the days of cerebral combat in which you could actually use deadly traps to trick your foe. Explosives are like fireworks even mines aren’t deadly nor do they cripple and they are about the size of tiny bathroom tiles.

This game had such potential in combat early on, but then pvp balance came along and ruined PVE entirely.

God forbid you actually think while fighting anymore on these titles.

We hear all the time how these games are being dumbed down, but they aren’t being dumbed down because of the PVE players they are being dumbed down because of the PVP players who don’t want to think about strategy they just wanna spam faceroll their enemies in PVP.

The mobs aren’t the problem either. We have plenty of mobs with regen and huge hp pools and even one shot kill abilities, that’s not the issue, the issue is they nerfed Conditions, they made CC non-existant, and they made support completely useless. Also they made traps pointless for anything other than extra AOE zones.

Gaile I understand as a veteran player of many an MMO over the years how it can degenerate into something unwanted however, in all of the MMOs I’ve ever played, transparency is absolutely a must, and in all of the MMOs I’ve ever played, GW2 has had the least amount of transparency.

I’m about to start STO’s Delta Rising for example. The expansion is free but they are selling ship upgrade packs. The reason I bought the pack isn’t because I needed it, it wasn’t because it was such a short time period for purchase and it wasn’t because I was forced into purchasing it by the design team, it was because of their transparency.

They did live streams for how these ships behaved in PVE. They posted weekly posts on what they were working on showing images, movies etc. They have a dev news blog that keeps people up to date, and their live streams give us answers to commonly asked questions and concerns.

That’s what should be happening here in GW2. This has literally been the only MMO in which transparency and a time table have been abscent. Every time any other title has come out with updates or new expansion level work, not only are they transparent about it, but they also have a clear time table. Part of the frustration is we’re still not hearing about things that were promised 8 months ago like the Engineer hobosacks or the Rewards Revamp, even now we’re not hearing about how those should be the next items to focus on especially since they have gone by the wayside and there isn’t a clear deadline. So people will start asking questions like, “is this game going somewhere? Why haven’t they done anything about things they already said were coming? What are they doing?”