Guild Wars 2

Obtena.7952:

Well, if you understood that Anet is trying to run a business and not a charity, you would. … That’s much more work to split the expansion and they have finite resources … are you going to pay more for an expansion that satisfies the desires of more players? Wait longer?

I’d appreciate if you didn’t insinuate that I cannot distinguish between charities and businesses.

As to more work: if Anet made five maps in the expansion, and made, say, two more relaxed and three tough, that would equate to roughly the same amount of work as five tough maps. By ‘split the expansion,’ that’s what I meant: there should have been a variety, and it was being discussed hypothetically. I’m not now calling for multiple maps to be rebuilt.

As to paying more money for a more thorough and larger expansion generally, in theory, yes. In practice, I’m not convinced that would happen. Heart of Thorns was fairly light on content for $50, and it seems like the devs have specific ideas about the future of the game at this point.

Vayne.8563:

If they had to split the expansion, it wouldn’t have been as good for players like me.

No offence, but I honestly don’t see this as a problem. It would have been better for players who wanted more stuff to do in line with the core game. I would rather larger portions of the audience get a bit to do than a more specific group get a lot. To target one group’s predilections is to ignore another’s, which is unhealthy for a title that ultimately derives some playability from a broad, healthy community.

Ultimately, I hold that expansions should attempt to give a game’s total audience more of what they like and also take games in new directions. I think HoT was too specific and too slight to make the claim that it did this satisfactorily – especially considering the asking price.

trunks.1659:

It’s not a matter of satisfying him/her or me or anyone, it’s a matter of the remedy being commensurate with the grievance. I don’t like WvW but I do like Legendary Weapons. Your solution is “remove WvW from the game” because some people don’t like it. The sane solution was “let the WvW currency for Legendaries be sold”. That way, the people who enjoy WvW still get to play and my path to epic shinies is still open…

Personally, I still get satisfaction from slaughtering those stupid frogs… But you want to remove that from the game for me … because you can’t be bothered to find a way around them … or spec’ing a cleanse so you don’t get Crippled…

I didn’t say anything about WvW, nor did I advocate removing, or even altering, anything. I didn’t weigh in on toning down mob density. I didn’t mention frogs or my alleged inability to cleanse conditions. I said that I think HoT should have contained a better variety of maps and activities. If I was unclear about that, I apologise and have hopefully clarified my position.

Obtena.7952:

I’ve not seen anyone give a good reason why HoT should be dumbed down…

Not everyone likes it; that’s the reason people are offering. If that’s not a ‘good reason,’ then what reason could possibly satisfy you? The reason you’re offering for it not being ‘dumbed down’ is that you do like it.

Also, I only watched a couple of ads/previews of HoT before buying, but from what I saw, it wasn’t specifically marketed as being all about tough content. It was marketed as being a wide-ranging expansion everyone would appreciate. I ultimately don’t think that’s accurate, and that strikes me as a pretty good reason to be frustrated with new maps.

Obtena.7952:

For me, the only compromise here is that people avoid zones they don’t like to play in.

That’s the expansion. That’s been a consistent complaint of many posters, including the original comment – it’s the whole point of this thread. The maps are all about density, tough mobs, verticality and content best done in groups. The core game has tough maps, and that’s great. It also has maps that aren’t, or maps that offer a mixture. That’s great, too. And that’s what HoT should have had. (For the record, unlike many, I don’t find Bloodstone Fen that much better, probably in part because I haven’t invested heavily in Maguuma masteries yet, so getting around remains a pain.)

I’m not asking that Tangled Depths be remade. Sometimes I want a challenge. But I do care that I bought an expansion marketed as something for everyone that leans very heavily towards tough group content instead of providing a variety of things to do.

At this point, my strongest feeling about HoT is that it does little of what made the original game great, and I’ve wasted my money on it. My hope here is that Anet is listening to this sort of thing, and cares about it enough to consider making more diverse content from here on out. If not, it was fun while it lasted and I hope the remaining players have a good time.

Hi.

Just ran into a vexing bug in Iron Marches at the ‘Rescue the captured workers’ event. While trying to bring down vines to free the workers, my character would get momentarily trapped in vines, from which you can bust out – except that upon busting out, I was still stuck, with my character model missing. Enemies would still target and kill. This happened twice during the event and once more a few seconds after it had finished. It wasn’t fun.

Screenshot attached, if that helps.

I agree with the general opinion here that Bloodstone Fen is a bit better than other HoT maps so far, but it’s still vastly different from the tone and feel of most open world maps.

As for ‘explorability,’ it is still somewhat frustrating in that you do need some unlocks to make the most of it, and it seems to be designed around spending a few hours becoming familiar with it before it becomes simple to traverse, as if the end goal is for players to spend gobs of time on a single map rather than some time on many. There’s also an unaddressed tension between the vertical design of the maps and the game’s map/mini-map functions, which don’t handle these things well.

I don’t know. I’m really disappointed by Heart of Thorns as a whole and I worry this is the beginning of the end for Anet producing a variety of enjoyable content, including casual, relaxing stuff.

I’m probably late to this, but I recently got the expansion and have been thinking about it for a few days.

So one of the things I really enjoyed about Guild Wars 2 were the variety of play and sheer number of things to do. You can explore, gather resources and take part in occasional events. You can head to Silverwastes or Orr and spend an hour in a big group meta-event with tougher mobs. There were dungeons, fractals, larger PvP in WvW, and smaller competitive challenges in PvP. I was excited to see what HoT would add.

Heart of Thorns isn’t really about addition, though. It excises almost all of that variety in favor of a few tough meta-event maps that favor group play, hitting that same note throughout all of the expansion I’ve seen thus far. Gliding is nice, and new masteries are welcome, but the part that was most exciting was simply having new stuff to do. It’s hard not to come away from this addition with the firm notion that Anet’s new vision of this game going forward is very different from what attracted many different people to it in the first place. Now, it’s meta-events or the raid. The smorgasbord of options has been pared down to make room for a somewhat narrower multiplayer action title. At this point, I’ve pretty much stopped even going to the new maps entirely.

Is this what we can expect from now on?

Same here.

UI elements don’t seem to align correctly, so using fields is difficult. The Trading Post UI as a whole is also sluggish to respond.

Normally, I don’t post here. However, I’ve been doing some JPs lately for achievement points (no interest in PvP/WvW, so points need to come from somewhere). I suspect ANet collects metrics on this sort of thing, and might mistakenly assume I’m doing that because they’re enjoyable. I want to correct that, because I do think this is generally a pretty good game.

JPs aren’t pleasant at all. They’re arguably the worst thing in PvE. It’s less a puzzle than it is a constant fight against a camera which is clearly not designed for the needlessly cramped spaces in which it’s trying to operate (much less with larger characters), obfuscating any helpful references and sapping the fun out of the experience. What should in theory be a fun diversion ends up being incredibly frustrating and painful. I’m genuinely baffled that people claim to like them.

Rant over.

Ugh. Same problem as many here. IP uses dynamic ISPs; have to constantly ‘authenticate;’ don’t get authentication emails. I used to get these in a timely manner (and still get them quickly from Steam, other games). Now I’m lucky to get them within an hour and they frequently do not arrive at all. (At the moment, I’m waiting more than 40 minutes after a log-in attempt with no luck.)

At this point, the game is broken for me. Signing in takes the better part of an evening, and by the time I can get in, I no longer have time to play. I know you guys are claiming that the email problems aren’t on your end, but many people are getting them, and ultimately it falls on your company to find a feasible solution to an issue that stems from the way you’ve configured security protocols, considering how widespread it has become. Something like an option that checks physical addresses of equipment or something else needs to be implemented.