Guild Wars 2

This current one is not challenging, but I felt bw2 was not especially challenging either. The mobs were about the same as drytop with a few bonus skills.

bw1, on the other hand, was killer, literally. I believe it was a good direction (and suspect you all did not set it up that was randomly.) The zones leading to the jungle are a good warning that you are approaching a dragon, and just like the leap upon entering (pre nerfed) Orr, you really do gain an increased sense of danger and need for cooperation.

I think the first beta weekend difficulty was appropriate. perhaps a lower HP pool for many mobs (is that simply to collect more data?) But the lethality of it was great. It made the environment threatening, and encourage creativity (problem solving) People would learn to master their characters in new ways (as promised,) and to cooperate more.

Can we get something close to that? I am a casual player with a lot (since day 1) of exp, and not great by any means, but I felt that even bw2 was too easy to be a new challenge. Make it dangerous to just run through the jungle alone, keep the snipers, make night deadly, keep the mobs working together. ?add downed state and executions for the corrupted sylvari?

For the longest, I only played my main, an asuran, and the home instance was rarely visited.

Then resource nodes and a teleport stone were added, so now I am there almost every day.

Last week I rolled a human and saw a human home instance… and was blown away by the difference.

The human home instance is a little village! shops, npcs with fuller dialog and activities. hustle and bustle and the crafting nodes are more sensically placed. Overal, divinity’s reach is clearly the superior and more invested in locale of the starting cities, but….

Being an asuran at heart, I have a few asthetic suggestions:

1 move the asuran crafting nodes into the labs and have them be part of experaments. One of the lab buildings could be doing agriculture research, and there be little plots in it with the nodes. Another one doing matterials or mineralogical research, and house the mining nodes. the labs asthetics and, ideally character dialogs should be changed to match the themes of each lab

2 living lab: the asuran home is supposed to be a krewe and its lab. The player is suppose to be head of the crew. make some research! more specifically, have the labs have matterials available, perhaps for karma instead of coin? simple things like certain low level asuran themed items buyable elsewhere (petre dish delight?)

3 things to make home instances really great, have them function like a mini game that outputs various things… in the case of the asuran, it would be lab management. spending matterials and dedicating ends with chances of success in having the crew produce things, but a chance of failure. player could choose dangerous/high risk experaments that could have catastrophic failures (opening portals that summon dangerous monsters) The krew can be trained up and the lab focused for certain things, that make certain kinds of work more likely to succesd but not improve other kinds. experaments could have various timers, including quite long ones like guild construction. it looked like my krew and guests got bigger as I played through the personal story.. taht could be tied into expanding options of the lab. new members can be told (and purchased) to focus on certain things and the lab become more developed/advanced and more experaments (and rewards/events) become available.

Account security is not a matter of finding a winning password, it is a matter of never letting anything you put out in the wild be uesfull for very long. if you want to keep an account secure, you MUST change the password. Depending on the level of security you should (assuming no significant data breaches) assume ANY PASSWORD YOU ARE USING HAS BEEN REVEALED IN 30-90 days. If you use a password for 2 years, it is almost certainly in plain text on someone’s (many someone’s) hard drive. It is a whole nother matter if it is ever actually uesd (there are huge databses of decrypted passwords.) And (much more importantly) a great feat of incompetence on the accessors, or a great feat of competence on your or your server’s behalf for the use of such a password to be known to you. If you use a password in BNET, and then use that username/password for your bank, you should assume that someone is watching your bank account, NOT that everything is fine. If you use a password across several online games, you should assume no one got around to trying it yet. You should NOT assume that your password is somehow so good that it is not going to be used by someone else, there is no such password. Password decryption is just a matter of time. (for real security you need keys, time tables, and, most ideally, single use timed decryption keys) A password is a lot like a lock on a door. Shallow, as career thieves use crowbars and windows.