Guild Wars 2

Azure.8670:

played every day since beta and now I cant get myself to even log in. I havent played since about 4 months after HoT came out.

I never thought id say this but the lack of upgrades is annoying. My characters have been wearing the same gear so long I cannot get myself to log in and find any goals to accomplish. I look at the lil desktop icon and think of my guildmates and friends but I have no drive to play this game and havent touched the living story yet either

horses for courses, GW2 is for those that cannot be bothered with the constant gear race (and all the problems that go along with that) You have had thousands of hours out of this game – that’s amazing value so don’t be bitter, enjoy your other games and pop back later when the new content has built up enough to attract you.

Theres a ton of build you can play that are effective , simply experiment until it works for you – synergies is the key. Tempest is only needed if you are in a competitive arena (ranked spvp, raids) Most are effective but only a couple will be ‘meta’ for a given role.

option 1 they underestimated the cost of building of raids and legendary armor. Raids are expensive to build – we know this from every mmo that produce raids.

option 2 the majority of customers wanted more investment in other areas of the game.

What would you want them to do?

kdaddy.5431:

fishball.7204:

I don’t use these rooms every day, maybe once a week or twice but they’re good if I need a quick daily.

The guys in there mostly don’t even PvP anyway, they just want a fast daily done and go back to PvE or whatever else they’re doing irl.

The only thing that will happen from banning daily/hotjoin rooms is that more people get frustrated and quit the game.

The new titles from PvP (Legend, Sea Dog, Eternal Gladiator) can’t be farmed in daily/hotjoin rooms already so you already have those exclusive things, just leave the hotjoin rooms to the non PvP players, their game play (or lack thereof) hardly affects you personally.

Also the rewards from hotjoin are CAPPED per day, you cannot farm hotjoin for 24 hours and progress faster than rated matches due to this.

TL;DR: killing hotjoin rooms won’t suddenly increase your real PvP population but rather just frustrate players who don’t care much for PvP in the first place.

agreed but why are they in there then?

If Anet wants to to be casual for everyone make it casual for everyone. Make it so raid rewards can be a reward track for PvP and WvW.

There is plenty of frustration going around for everything.

I simply want for PvP players to get PvP rewards. PvP can have its own unique items.

WvW to get there unique rewards for Leveling to say 2k, 3k, 4k+ rank

Fractal players got a back pc.

Raid players are getting legendary armor.

I simply dont see why PvP is the ugly step child Anet doesnt take care of. You yourself said “rather just frustrate players who don’t care much for PvP in the first place”. If they dont care for PvP why are they in there? If Anet whats to give incentives to people for PvPing. Make it legit with good Match Making, good build diversity and a real system in place such as leader boards and que areas. They are hurting the other areas of the game by doing this. If someone needs tokens from dungeons. Instead of doing dungeons they just use the PvP potions they got from standing in a map for 15 minutes.

If Anet wants it easy for everyone why not just give people a majority of the rewards for simply logging in?

you personally want unranked for 1v1 so people can ‘practice’ but you don’t like people practicing 5v5? (which is what spvp is all about) Personally i would avoid developing a chip on the shoulder about ‘casual’ players and create your own guild/arena to suit your own needs.

If you want to see how to cultivate a great PVP game look at games like Eve, the culture there is to support and promote casual pvp in every form because they understand that todays pve/casual player can be tomorrow great pvp player.

nothing wrong at looking outside the box the potential problem is that many like to play mage/elementalist – its a class that has been around since the 70’s and is enjoyed because of a style of gameplay. A mage using guns could work – but then why impact a design philosophy when you could create another class that allows you to specialize in guns, say a technomancer (for example) best of both worlds.

The real danger is that if you have a class that does too many things then you start to homogenize and generalize, you lose flavor.

Dmg we have a lot of options (scepter an staff needs a tweak or 2) its not damage we need, its mitigation of damage or fluidity of movement, or something to help conditions and another off hand would give a more choice. Main hand we already have short medium and long range attack.

If it was main hand I think sword would be more in keeping with elementalist than a pistol, i remember playing wildstar with pistol and the flavour really feels like a thief/ranged melee rather than a castor.

I would prefer a more classic magical background for a new spec. Personally i think duel sceptre would be pretty good, with invisible on a shortish cooldown as a new defensive skill.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Okay, I get it that it’s not a goal for everyone to reach max level as fast as possible. For me, I really put all my dedication into HoT during release. I came back from work, played 4-6 hours. It was an arduous, stressful time… Anyway, I also loved HoT. But after that I just lost all my interest, didn’t even do all the raid parts…

your goal appears to be to give yourself an ‘arduous, stressful time’ that ultimately sickens you off the very same content – lessons to be learned there. I remember when I was a kid and drank a full quarter of vodka, took me a decade before i could go near the stuff again, Ican also remember min maxing the levelling xp in a rush to get to 100 in WOW – hated the levelling experience after that too.

Rather than resigning, don’t screw over those that want to fight, gather at one point and have fun defending it. You have joined a group pvp arena, enjoy that pvp content and make it what you want it, having great fights in a battle you lose badly is just as much fun than winning if you have the right mindset. as for the ‘resign button’ The weak and frustrated will press it far too often, aborting potentially great fights.

in PVE and WVW you can literally go for any build that you enjoy only pvp and raiding has restrictions due to the impact on other team players.

As people have already mentioned, there is no need for ‘inspection’ in a mmorpg, if you want to know what someone is wearing just ask, this benefits the community and encourages social interaction.

There are also major negatives too with inspection, you can see that all too well in games like WOW where people make judgments about other people based on the numbers they have on their items, or worse, tell people what to do uninvited based on a subjective inspection.

if you want a concrete example of this, look at the ‘only join if you have x thousand AP’ groups. Player 1 is not a very nice person, has poor skill but has farmed 12k ap, mostly through dailies. Player 2 is rejected even though he is very skilled a friendly team player but has only 2K AP. Its not hard to see where it would lead if inspection came into the mix too.

‘There’s a central dogma in the gw2 community that sees the staff elementalist’

its not really a GW2 dogma, you can see it in every single MMO, a build cannot be aoe centric and at the same time be powerful 1v1. GW2 is no different, powerful AOE but equally skilled players they will avoid your aoe, then you are in trouble and costing your team time and resource.

8v8 would be good, but would need more points to spread the fight – give us a fort aspenwood

The point was the abuse of the mechanic is producing an unwanted side-effect that impacts people who choose not to do it. Example – i get a couple rares when i do fractals, the value of my loot has dropped making it less rewarding – all because of the abuse of a single event in the entire GW2 world.

I would suspect Anet have not fixed it because maintaining state across multiple instances is an expensive problem to solve. Clearly Anet had no intention of creating this behaviour.

‘An exploit is the misuse of a software feature or bug in a way that allows a player to generate in-game benefits without the risk or time expected by the game’s designers.’ That’s exactly whats going on here.

lol interesting and there we have it. Ask yourself this, the vast majority of Eve players and developers think it is a hardcore PVP game with a pve element, are they all wrong too?

So to take my example, if i pve exclusively in Eve does it make Eve a PVE game?

rofl it wasn’t a criticism of the grammar. A game is a sum of its parts, each part != the game. Since Platforming represents a tiny faction of the game it is incorrect to call it a platformer, its not rocket science here. It is a mmorpg.

Hers another example, I play Eve exclusively as a pve roleplayer, that does not make eve a pve roleplaying game, it is a hardcore pvp game.

If i spent 100% of my time doing puzzles in GW2 i may call it a puzzler in my head, but it is not – it is a mmorpg.

Ashen.2907:

vesica tempestas.1563:

maybe this helps to understand my point of view:

disliking the verticality of HOT is fine.

disliking jumping puzzles and adventures (which is platforming) is fine.

confusing the 2 above and classifying an entire zone as ‘platforming’ is incorrect.

No confusion.

HoT is intended as a platforming game just as it is intended as a combat game, a crafting game, an exploration game, and so on. Of course not the entirety of each zone is dedicated to each individual component of the design, after all crafting stations in GW2 take up an extremely small amount of space, and crafting is not required for participation, advancement of avatar, or game completion. Even so GW2 is a crafting game (in addition to being many other types of game as well).

If I gave the impression that I consider non platforming gameplay elements to be platforming, my apologies. I fully recognize that walking along a path from point A to point B, killing a mob along the way, completing an event, gathering some mithril, and so on are not themselves platforming. But the expansion, and the core game for that matter, is a platforming game among other things because it was designed for those to be parts of the gameplay experience.

well it is not intended as a platforming game, you are incorrect. and your interpretation of synergy is flawed. If you read the specifications from the official anet wiki pages it is clear, If you look at gaming theory it is clear, if you look at intent it is clear, if you look at how players play HOT it is clear. Hot is not a platforming game.

a simpler approach is to stamp the player with an eventID – you get to loot the rewards from the event that matches the eventID.

maybe this helps to understand my point of view:

disliking the verticality of HOT is fine.

disliking jumping puzzles and adventures (which is platforming) is fine.

confusing the 2 above and classifying an entire zone as ‘platforming’ is incorrect.

mmorpg are not multiple games in one, a mmorpg it is a sum of its parts. all these elements are parts. with the core thread being avatar development.

a classic programming OO analogy is a car which is a sum of its parts, it has a wheel it has an engine etc. you call a car a car when all these parts work together. you never however point at a car and say that is a wheel, and that is an engine. and that is a car.

Likewise HOT has a small platforming element (jumping puzzles and adventures) this does not make it a platformer – it is a mmorpg zone, that in itself is part of an mmorpg game. you quest, you do meta, you kill, you gather, you explore etc etc. You can entirely avoid jumping puzzles and adventures if you wish as per typical GW2 design approach.

ah well we can agree on this at least

to clarify, GW2 is not a platforming game, it is a mmorpg that has platforming sub games.

um now your arguing my point. your list is correct , jumping is a tiny segment of GW2, you can say GW2 has a platforming element, but it is not a platformer, it is a mmorpg. as with your list, you can see the same on the official HOT wiki, 4500 words describing its content, the word ‘jump’ is used once. They did not sacrifice a thing, it is a tiny element of a huge game added to give diversity.

I should add your list is worded incorrectly

GW2 has small group PvP .
GW2 has large scale realm-like PvP .
GW2 is a small group instanced PvE .
GW2 has a large scale even open world .
GW2 has mindless hack-n-slash combat .
GW2 has tactical combat .
GW2 supports role playing (I don’t rRP in GW2 but have in other MMOs).
GW2 has mini-games .
GW2 is an exploration game.
GW2 is a crafting game.

that’s true i could log into Diablo 3 and run about avoiding everything and call it an exploration game – but that does not make it an exploration game. again, it is all about deign intent and genre. And i call bs on people who specifically logon to play HOT because its a platformer. And yes jumping puzzles is a platforming sub game, no-one said it wasn’t.

indeed i do not want the reward from what i consider is an abuse of a design flaw. Completing 1 event and try to farm the loot from 5 or so other events with no effort for free – really? And as a said other players are being NEGATIVELY impacted by this abuse, genuine rewards from other activities have lost a lot of value because of this one skewed abuse.

jumping is not ‘platforming’ Platforming games is a genre with a very particular goalset (as per jumping puzzles) it is not a mechanic.

One of the adventure games involves racing a bike – that does not make HOT a racing game. The core gameplay of HOT is meta events.

Ipso facto – you do not need a poll to tell you that mmorpg players playing a mmorpg play HOT zones because it was designed as a platformer. Wrong genre, wrong design intent, wrong goals.

there is an impact on people who do not like the idea of multi looting and do not do it.

do you have much experience of mmorpg? it is all progress, you are progressing on a journey of your own choosing. The goal is not to ‘progress the game’. Gaining xp, masteries, gold towards other goals or simply enjoying playing your character – all classic well understood well know mmorpg ‘progress’

For Platformers you do progress the game, but that is not the core game play or goal of mmorpg’s at all. Maybe this is what you are failing to comprehend – perhaps your are younger or do not understand mmorpgs, i have no idea.

if you have a fear of jumping, you could even choose goals that avoid jumping if that’s your fancy – GW1 is a great choice here, you cannot jump at all!

if you are incapable of abstraction then yes you wont understand logic. You cherry picked (again) scenario is not the point, HOT maps are a sum of its parts. play meta quests for 1 hour or wander and gather, or farm mobs, (and even avoid jumping if you hate it) get your xp, get your precious mushroom etc that is so important to you – job done. In otherwords classic mmorpg gameplay, not classic platforming play.

There is a reason why mmorpgs take a long time to develop, Guild wars 2 is however one of the fastest. To answer your question OP, maps, WVW, PVP are all still lively and content is still being put out regularly. Style wise it will be similar to when you left, there have been new living season releases and quite a few QOL changes around looting/salvaging etc.

you spend less that a fraction of a percent of your life in GW2 getting the skill to jump on a mushroom, it is not core to the game, its is a minor element cherry picked out. Furthemore you don’t platform to get the fraction of a percent to get the skill to jump on a mushroom.

indecently one of the core facets of a mmorpg is that you advance your avatar in the overall virtual world, you do not advance in a linear fashion to a single winning line.

Galtrix.7369:

vesica tempestas.1563:

Ashen.2907:

vesica tempestas.1563:

as i said, objective and subjective e.g ‘convoluted’ I was talking about an objective evaluation of wether GW2 HOT zones were designed to be aimed at people who enjoy platformer games – and it is clearly not..if you are objective. Anyone can give their opinion, but that doesn’t make a thing factual. Simply put because someone thinks a thing is a ‘platformer’ when it was clearly designed not to be a platformer then that does not make it true.

also, the new zone is less complicated than HOT. There is no ‘direction’ there is simply a game that is expanding, and it would be a dull game if every zone that was introduced was simply the same as came before with a new skin.

And the HoT zones clearly were designed for people who enjoy platformers if you are being objective.

See I can call an opinion an objective fact too. Fun stuff.

that fact that players do not go to HOT to play a platformer is fact, not opinion. Its interesting that the only people who think its a platformer is those people who dislike it isnt it. Nothing wrong with not liking the design of the HOT zones, but you should ask yourself why you have the need to justify your dislike with an attempt to label it as something that it is not.

I enjoy HoT and I label it as a platformer. Because that’s what it is.

From the Wikipedia: “Platform game (or platformer) is a video game which involves guiding an avatar to jump between suspended platforms and/or over obstacles to advance the game. These challenges are known as jumping puzzles or freerunning.”

In order to advance the game and to acquire hero points, one must jump using mushrooms and or gliding to reach the intended hero point which is, most of the time, behind a series of jumping platforms (trees that you can step on).

Whether or not players go to HoT for platforming, they are indeed platforming whether they like it or not.

Guild wars 2 is a lot more than the elements you have picked out, context matters, overal design goals and genre matter. You can cherry pick out any element from any game and look at it in isolation – what matters is design intent. Il say it again, the mmorpg genre and players dont go to hot maps because it is a platformer, being deliberately obtuse does not make this so either.

look at it another way, The core gameplay in HOT is meta events, this is what people play in the main. The main intent for the developers was the meta events and making the map more vertical to give value to gliding (or did you expect everyone to use stair lifts?) just because you jump onto platforms does not make it a platformer style game, just as killing mobs for loot over and over does not make it a Diablo 3 copy.

Abelisk.4527:

aerodynamique.5267:

Abelisk.4527:

It’s very difficult to play ele, with the only really viable build right now being Fresh Air S/F. Demo ammy or Mara ammy

Uh.

No?

This applies for PvP only, sorry if I was unclear.

Scepter for lightning strike / dragon tooth and phoenix / water trident / hurl, focus for protection / condi cleanse.

For PvE it’s a whole different story. Staff rules with a Tempest build.

only if you are trying to min max.

Ashen.2907:

vesica tempestas.1563:

as i said, objective and subjective e.g ‘convoluted’ I was talking about an objective evaluation of wether GW2 HOT zones were designed to be aimed at people who enjoy platformer games – and it is clearly not..if you are objective. Anyone can give their opinion, but that doesn’t make a thing factual. Simply put because someone thinks a thing is a ‘platformer’ when it was clearly designed not to be a platformer then that does not make it true.

also, the new zone is less complicated than HOT. There is no ‘direction’ there is simply a game that is expanding, and it would be a dull game if every zone that was introduced was simply the same as came before with a new skin.

And the HoT zones clearly were designed for people who enjoy platformers if you are being objective.

See I can call an opinion an objective fact too. Fun stuff.

that fact that players do not go to HOT to play a platformer is fact, not opinion. Its interesting that the only people who think its a platformer is those people who dislike it isnt it. Nothing wrong with not liking the design of the HOT zones, but you should ask yourself why you have the need to justify your dislike with an attempt to label it as something that it is not.

as i said, objective and subjective e.g ‘convoluted’ I was talking about an objective evaluation of wether GW2 HOT zones were designed to be aimed at people who enjoy platformer games – and it is clearly not..if you are objective. Anyone can give their opinion, but that doesn’t make a thing factual. Simply put because someone thinks a thing is a ‘platformer’ when it was clearly designed not to be a platformer then that does not make it true.

also, the new zone is less complicated than HOT. There is no ‘direction’ there is simply a game that is expanding, and it would be a dull game if every zone that was introduced was simply the same as came before with a new skin.

‘platforming’ isn’t a thing, and there’s a difference between an objective view and a subjective view.

still play full zerk everywhere for myself appart from spvp. I use Focus when I feel i need a bit more defensive options. In hot i destroy most stuff, with a fair amount of dodging and healing as i go.

Raids and Meta obsession, same problems year after year, game after game.

if GW2 was to have housing it should be something along the likes of Wildstars model to make it interesting and engaging long term.

Consider that hot has 30 odd maps including HOT, now award each map a score of 1-10 with 10 representing the most difficult map you can imagine. Add em up, work out the average score. Hot maps are balanced within the context of the full GW2 map.

The problem is people looking at HOT in isolation and wanting every map to be equal to their perfect difficulty score. Hot are amazing maps when you fancy something a bit more difficult.

There are a couple tests that you should apply when evaluating whether a game is a ‘platformer’ or not, and that’s the intent of the designer and the intent of the player. Now lets look at the maps.

The intent of players is not to platform, it is to quest, gather, kill, explore, play meta.. No player says to themselves, i want to platform, i wil go to HOT. The intent of the designer was to create a more complicated map where vertical travel was an important element to provide value and fun for gliding. Consider how dull gliding would be if the maps was a dull set of vertical slabs.

Now jumping puzzles and Adventures are very different, these are designed very explicitly to be a platforming sub game – the reason for the puzzles existence is to offer a challenging platforming route where the goal is to beat the difficult jumps. The same challenge we get in jumping puzzles in every other zone in GW2.

What we have here are players who don’t like a map trying to user the term ‘platformer’ as a derogatory term to justify their dislike.

pacman has mazes, does this mean guild wars has a pacman asthetic too?

A mmorpg game with a more complicated zone structure is not a maze game or a platform game – its a mmorpg with a more complicate zone. calling it a ‘maze’ or a ‘platforming’ game is simply trying to ignore context and part of this modern breed of player who thinks its a game fault because it isn’t exactly how they want it at all times.

Guizao.4167:

FlOwMaKeRs.8623:

I have 4 months playing guild wars 2 and I think I can make an opinion of it.

I’ll be honest, I never had an experience in MMO like Guild Wars 2 (PVE Content – Living World), is just beautiful.

But there are other things that upset me a lot, including WvW & PVP. I will not talk about it, everyone knows whats poppin.

All I want to talk here is about the Specializations. In this game you’re forced to use 1 meta build in different modes, YOU don’t have the freedom to create your own BUILD, They’re gonna scold you if you don’t have that " Bored Meta Build " unlike the Guild Wars (Original & others MMO’s) you could run soooo many crazy build’s and be successful but in Guild Wars 2 you have (1 class = 1 build) and then a massive amount of useless traits and skills.

You can have 3 specializations available in your build and then only 5 skills on your bar, really? is that enough for you?.. is just boring to use the same 3 traitlines on a class and the same weapon for 4+ MONTHS. You can’t customize your primary weapon skills with your secondary, or vice versa. You can’t edit your traits and skills as you want. Everything is like in “automatic” just click here & click there, there you got, done.

I’m sorry, but I think this game is very simple to me.

I feel ya! I’ve been here for 4 years and people keep telling me to quit because I create and play builds with staff elementalist at the PvP scenario, and yet ArenaNet didn’t get the point of their flawed balancing strategies. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? According to some white knights here it is all the players’ fault!

the reason staff is bad in pvp is not because its not ‘meta’ its because aoe and small group pvp does not work apart from giving a false sense of power to the less knowledgeable who think lots of aoe damage numbers means great play (while the rest of the team have to play 4v5).

That aside there are clearly issues with the lack of defined role that elementalist – fight in close range but weakest mitigation etc, at range, slow attacks etc.

indeed, i once bought a staff for 800 gold, it didn’t feel satisfying at all. More recently i spent a year gathering and crafting nevermore, it was a lot of work, a lot of gold but i really really enjoyed the journey and reward. people talking about ‘spending gold’, its just a number held in a column in a database somewhere ultimately.

Again the point is that xp progression is blocked when it doesnt need to be. Its a fundamental design flaw (im guessing oversight) when every time you kill a mob an xp reward flashes up on the screen, but then you are not actually awarded that xp, wheras someone standing next to you killing the exact same mode does.

yup we get it in hot and ember you can go up and down, tricky. So you want maps that have just the perfect amount of up and down to suit you personally..as well as the other 28 odd zones that are flat?

also to use your order of precedence, ember has less vertical and is much simpler than HOT – direction reverse is it?

Djinn.9245:

We all understand that many players enjoy the challenge of HoT. We also can read that many players have the game time to wander around and figure out the maps. Or maybe some players are just really good at taking a path once and then remembering it. I knew someone who could drive somewhere only once and remember how to get to that place for the rest of his life.

Not all of us fit these criteria. When I started playing GW2 in Beta, it was a game that appealed to more of the common denominator. That was exactly why I chose to play it. They said no grinding and other things that appealed to me. GW2 seems to be going away from that initial vision of the game: more and more twitch / platforming, more difficulty in multiple ways, etc. Some people applaud the change while others wish for the GW2 they originally purchased.

No amount of “practice more” or “L2play” is going to change my opinion that I don’t like the direction the game is going.

the HOT maps arent ‘going in a direction’ they are simply a different style of map to compliment the other 30 or so maps we have – Diversity is good, having every zone as flat easy to navigate zones is dull.

As for your comments about grinding and direction, this is in your head i’m afraid, ‘Grind’ actually means ‘Im doing something i don’t like’ and more fool te man that does that in a game. As for collecting, there is probably more collecting in GW1 than there is in GW2, the direction has not changed, it always has been and probably always will be collecting rather than power gain.

you will never be excited about any game you have played for years, however great games keep you coming back, and what mmorpg offer in particular is that feeling of continuity and being part of a virtual world. this is why expansions are so important imo as they do offer a big enough change that things become exciting, new zones, fundamental changes in game play without starting again, more choice, new things to learn.