I just ran into this same issue, was trying to do collection for MInstrel, but Tootsie is absolutely impossible to kill right now. During the phase where you’re supposed to be able to stop her from running away, we had like 10 people there applying CC and the breakbar went down by maybe 10%.
Yeah, the number of blossoms you get needs to be bumped WAY WAY up. It’s impossible for just about anybody to get the top rewards at the rate we’ve seen. I mean, a nice thing about Guild Wars 2 has been that big goals have been attainable by people who can’t play for 8-10 hours a day. You should at least be able to get ONE of the potions if you can only play for 4 hours a day if you grind enough mordrem events.
Not to mention that low rewards will drive a ton of people away, which makes it almost impossible to complete 10 events, let alone more.
Items have a way of returning to the Gem Store on an occasional basis. The store doesn’t have a set rotation of items, although in some cases it would be sensible to predict the return of, say, Halloween-related items sometime in the fall.
In the case of Rox’s items, these are non-seasonal items so I’d simply keep my eyes on the store because it does seem likely that these two items will be featured again in the future.
…..bunny. ears.
Somehow I feel that didn’t come across with quite as much gravitas as I intended it to.
Not to tell y’all how to test, but… I watched Golem Mark II. That’s where you see how this stuff works against a brick wall. 90 stacks of bleed? Slightly faster melt than usual. 40 stacks of burning? Dead in less than a minute.
Nerf burning (heck, just the stacks of guardian burn) and leave everything else. Watch as it all evens out. In PvE anyway, because that’s the only place condis needed a buff in the first place.
Am I the only one that thinks this mean we’ll get festival content of some sort as well? They said they’d be discussing associated player events, that sounds like festival activities.
I’m not going to argue economics on an MMO message board, even if it’s about game economics. But to believe that it is possible for mankind to exist in a world where people who own the most land and money don’t ensure they have the means to control who owns land and money is extraordinarily naive and not backed up by any period in history ever.
Hi Economists! Would you say that the proliferation of account bound stuff is a sign that the free market cannot exist and that it must always be regulated to some degree?
In conversations with my friends, they tell me we live in a “perverted” or “warped” version of capitalism and that total deregulation would be better.
First, history proves them incorrect and also demonstrates that in the absence of regulation to protect everyone, there will remain regulation to protect those who own the most. How anyone can understand pure socialism can’t exist because people are corrupt but thinks pure capitalism can exist is beyond me.
Second, it’s impossible to have complete deregulation in a game because the game provides all items and, both directly and indirectly, provides all currency to players. They always decide what drops and what doesn’t, and have the ability to change that at any time.
And even given that, account-bound items have nothing to do with a regulated economy, it’s about game mechanics. For example, let’s take a look at the precursor masteries. Those don’t exist because it’s impossible to grind the amount of gold for a precursor, they exist because people want a way to earn their precursor and avoid RNG. They are account bound because they are intended as special rewards that players can work towards, and I believe it’s been said that while the precursors you get are not tradeable, the legendaries you receive will be.
I think the biggest issue with Mesmers is that you have to have to put twice as much effort into it to get the same dps as other classes with a lower skill threshold. Higher skill requirement isn’t actually rewarded, but you need it keep up with the other classes. Anet have created a class that is difficult to balance and therefore the class tends to get the short end of the stick.
Most skills are too conditional to get the full potential from the class. Look at the new specializations, you get great interrupt traits, but interrupts are are actually hard to pull off in any reliable way. You can die in PvP without pulling off a single interrupt.
The thing is that they say they want a class with a high skill cap, but they really don’t design that. What they design is a class with a high skill FLOOR and make sure the cap isn’t any higher than any other class. If they were serious about this class, they would make mesmer skills theoretically possible to just wreck EVERYTHING and then buff base mechanics to be in line with other classes in terms of DPS.
Of course, that’s just in PvP, in PvE/WvW, they just need to buff the health of clones/phantasm to be much much higher. Which, I thought they could adjust things like numbers independently through different modes, don’t know why they don’t do that.
The bottom line is that they spent the whole mesmer presentation explaining how they would nerfed anything cool, then presented a guardian specialization that looked like it was designed by a 12 year old that cheats at hide and seek. IE overpowered without subtlety or apology.
I’ve already started trying to learn other classes. When we see Thief specialization, mark my words, we will all know that mesmer is dead as anything except a gimmicks.
Am I the only one that has just never ever run out of transmutation charges? I have 8 toons, change various stuff every week or so, and still have a bank of well over 100. It’s never been something I’ve even had to think about.
The fact that the rift can be targeted seems like it makes the skill incredibly difficult to use without being destroyed, as it basically creates the only cc in the game that cannot be avoided.
Even having the spot visible for a few seconds means a team of 2 could stack three aoes in that spot and pretty much instakill you. You don’t even need good reflexes for that, it’s basically like the mesmer is using a channel at that point.
I feel like there should at least be a delay in when it appears, like it flickers into view only a second before it triggers.
To the ppl that are still posting, note that you are in ranked. Currently I lose every ranked match I have, but still have a decent time of it in unranked. No idea what the real difference is but I know the formula is different.
The entire reason they made this matchmaking system was to enable 3-1-1 or 2-2-1 matches against solo queuers. Because they said people complained it was too hard to join pvp with just a buddy. And they apparently don’t have the population to actually sustain a system where buddy teams get matched in 5v5, so… yeah.
Seriously, I would like a dev to play solo queue on Twitch, just to prove to us that matchmaking for solo queues are balanced and fair. Not just 1 game but at least 30 games in a row. I wouldn’t be surprised if they won 1 game and then lost 4 in a row and then roflstomped and another game and lost another 4 and then rolfstomped another and so on.
This. And not one of the devs that is great at the game with high mmr, one that is a casual player. Doesn’t have to be 30 games in a row, just 30 games over a period of a week or so. If he/she has a fair experience, I will promise to stop badmouthing the matchmaking in and out of game forever.
Because it has been made so that you can rejoin the match if you switch characters at the last second and load in just after the match starts. I don’t know why that’s necessary, but that’s where we are.
You’re wrong, and here is why. Everyone has to hit that “accept match” button when they get queued. If there are only 9 checkboxes there, the match doesn’t start and you are thrown back into queue. So at some point, someone is leaving and that’s why you are on a 4v5.
4v5 results from a player disconnection or desertion. You don’t get put into 4v5 matches unless you’re in hotjoin, in which case my advice would be to stop doing that.
It’s more than just that, look at the wiki. They have that algorithm posted, yes, but if you check the history, they change it without actually explaining or announcing.
Another idea, they should apply the dodging, smart AI they are using for enemies in HoT to mesmer clones. If they did that, it might make things much more interesting.
It’s more than just that, ranked matchmaking is really terrible right now for low/mid MMR players, something ANet did (imho, they haven’t said jack) has made many people note that their win ratio dropped heavily after an update a couple of weeks ago. Go to unranked and hope they change things for the better once the “ladder” is over.
OMG. The game was on sale for $10 and probably will be again. That’s the price of a movie. That’s the price of two drinks at Starbucks. That’s not enough?
Yeah, but I’ve had a lot of trollish posts recently and feel bad about it. They’re doing their best and trying to make a better experience overall, so they’re not exactly against us. And in the past, I’ve been helped personally by Justin. At least we aren’t in a game where you can buy your way to leaderboard position.
I think there are serious problems with matchmaking and maintain their system is especially bad for average/slightly-below-average players. But it’s too easy to just be a jerk.
I would name a player and ask if it was them, but I think we aren’t supposed to do that.
Suffice to say, you are correct, best you can do is block their chat. In fact, you could consider blocking map/say chat altogether if you just can’t take it anymore.
But what is the alternative, banning people for being salty? I’d not be in favor of that.
So that page was updated about a week ago “to match live”. It looks like there are a number of changes, some of which are different between ranked and unranked.
Was this a change that had been made a long time ago, or, say… just to throw an arbitrary date out there… Friday, March 27th.
Edit: Sorry if this sounds snarky, and I genuinely have respect for the work that you do, it’s just that one mode constantly throws me into losses and the other one doesn’t, and that didn’t happen until that date.
I’ve said many times, there needs to be a button that says “match me now” on the queue screen. If you press that button, then it shoehorns you into a match that might not be a perfect fit. If you do not press that button, then the game will wait until it finds something better.
I have complained about the favour to win algorithm myself but I don’t think it is as kittenome people are making it out to be. I have no problem facing off against premades or partly premades as a solo as long as I don’t end up losing points when my team is highly outmatched.
I think the 25% mentioned by Justin above should maybe be increased to something more like 35 or 40. The biggest advantage a premade has is being able to bring a decent team comp. I realise most of the premades you face do not use voice comms but even having a triple queue on your team that have builds that synergise is a huge advantage over solo queuers who get 5 random classes with random builds teamed up.
I would also remove the pvp rank completely as it is probably the worst judge of how good someone is at pvp. In fact if you removed the pvp rank and added the weight to premade you would probably have a decent estimate.
I’ll second this. If I could lose my rank and go back down to Rabbit to get outmatched less, I’d do it in a heartbeat. When you go 5-20 in a single weekend, getting a rank up chest mostly just feels like sarcasm.
Just because their algorithm predicts that you would be favored does not mean you would actually be favored – it has very, very clear flaws when handling premades vs pugs, for instance.
At least in aggregate, we have a very strong, linear prediction gradient for accuracy. Which means our match prediction is pretty kitten good, but we could always make improvements.
Roster size (i.e. premade count) accounts for 25% of a match’s prediction. I do wonder if it should be more.
I think I’m done with PVP for awhile, actually. It’ll be hard to ween myself off, but it’s just not fun anymore. If losing is not fun, and that’s what is going to happen 80% of the time in a game mode now… What’s the point of it?
Leaderboard issues were that it favored players that just did tons of matches for too long and didn’t reward skills. So on Friday, the update they made simultaneously changed leaderboard rank methods AND created a secret, less forgiving MMR algorithm designed to keep average/below average players from winning for awhile.
In their defense, it mostly seems to be working, the leaderboards are pretty much fixing themselves.
I love when people defend this system. Oh yeah, it works like a charm. Why don’t you invite over some people who haven’t done much pvp and see how they like their soloq experience.
Actually, nm, I got this. If you can’t beat em, join em. No rule says I have to try to gain rank points, just that I can’t afk or actively try to lose. It’s ranked build experimentation time!!!!
That the system for predicting outcomes and assigning players to sides is completely broken for low/mid MMR players. :-)
Also, while you’re placing me in match after match after match after match with losses, can you stop giving me rank points? Getting a rank up chest feels like you’re just mocking me.
