Showing Posts For tnarrant.9714:
I’ve pretty much given up on it. Too annoying for the payoff now. The whole game is moving that direction with each successive update, so I’m filling more of my time with other games, games that understand that fun should trump frustration. I seek out games to entertain myself, not to add more stress to my life.
1. Graveling Scavenger
2. Graveling Scavenger
3. Graveling Scavenger
4. (yes, I hate them that much)
5. Risen with pull or underwater sink
Some specific contrasting examples would help, and perhaps other words would be better than stretching “endogenous” into this context.
“Emergent” is a word already used in gaming contexts to indicate behavior resulting from AI rules as opposed to being scripted. Emergence can also result when a greater portion of the gameplay is due to player action rather than environment interaction. Emergent behavior has the characteristic of rarely repeating, as opposed to scripted encounters which are of course the same every time. In GW2 the PvE arena is primarily scripted while the PvP arena is primarily emergent. The big downside of emergent gameplay is that it precludes storytelling, since you have to wait for it to happen naturally.
Another word, “immersive”, has already been mentioned. That has more to do with the consistency of the game-world logic, and I think is close to what you are meaning. Environmental details contribute to immersion, as does NPC voicing. If a ghost doesn’t behave like other ghosts in the game, that can break immersion, as can mobs dropping arbitrary items or building decor that is wildly off (here the Asura have lore-based leeway, otherwise they would fall under this).
But to just say that gameplay should come from the natural game system does not speak to much; that is essentially what most single-player games do, since they have only one player around which to build non-scripted gameplay. Games that break that mold, like Minecraft or Simcity, do not try to tell a story but instead present a world that is all about inviting interaction.
So “lazy” and “terrible” are the words elitists are throwing now. I would outright reject “terrible” since I’ve played MMOs for over a decade and know my way around them. “Lazy” isn’t quite as bad a fit, in the sense that I don’t want to put as much work into a game as I used to, given a certain amount of reward. My tolerance for tediousness and grinding is lower now than when I played EQ or CoH or even WoW.
Gaming is still pretty much a hobby for me, but I’m no longer inclined to put second-job effort into games. I’d like to be able to play more casually and still get significant rewards. Not just handed to me, but after some moderate challenges or time-investment.
The prior incarnation of AC was just inside my window of tolerance. The reward was okay and required some effort, and it seemed somewhat balanced. Now the effort is increased but not the reward, so it seems out of balance now. And that direction of change makes me less inclined to play the game because it signals that those in control of the game lack any similarity to my perspective, even though I originally thought this game was considerably up my alley.
Since the game came out, almost every change seems to mean I need more time and trouble to do the things I was doing and wanted to continue doing. Alts I was leveling saw major skill nerfs. Dungeons I was running get harder with WP nerfs and other changes. I dislike the sense of moving backward in games; I play MMOs (and RPGs in general) largely to feel progress. It feels like this game is catering too much to the most hardcore players who feel like they’re not being challenged enough (who always have the option of hampering themselves with gear and skill changes if they want more challenge).
I agree fully with the OP. Almost all changes made to this game increase my frustration and increase the time to do things in the game, with no increased enjoyment. I do not play games to have a second job that adds stress and forces me to spend countless hours perfecting skill use. I don’t mind challenges, but I do mind that most hurdles seem to be targeted toward the most hardcore players, leaving everyone else to fall behind badly and have less things to be able to do in the game.
For me and most groups I was in, AC before was a nice challenge, with sufficient (but certainly not extravagant) reward. Now it is significantly more difficult with no increase in the reward. The hurdle bar has been raised for no apparent reason beyond appeasing the most skilled and elite, ignoring the masses that play the game.
AC used to be a nice relaxing dungeon to run with a casual group. Now it’s a F’ing grind like everything else except CoF p1.
Thanks ArenaNet for making this game that much more tedious.
Bravo
Most changes they make to this game seem to have this effect. It’s like they can’t stand people not being frustrated when playing. If an ability is powerful, nerf it until people switch to more boring skills. If a dungeon can be run by 80s in half an hour, tone it up so they have to take longer, never mind what that does to group composition. And never mind that what it really comes down to is having to waste more time to do just about everything.
They seem to keep ratcheting things up to make them challenging for top-level players with exotic gear, but that is unfair to lower levels who want to do things at their stated levels, as well as to more casual players who simply want to gear up without being stressed out in a game.
I’ve run AC many, many times before, and now it’s considerably more difficult. I thought after they nerfed WP rezzing they were going to tone it down a bit, but it looks like they went the opposite direction. To be disappointed by that is not the same as weeping. I’m not against a pleasant challenge in a game, but for me gaming should not be a source of significant added frustration and stress.
This patch, like almost every one in the last few months, makes this game more frustrating for me. They seem to want to make this game more grinding and annoying instead of more fun.
Like some others, I’m now waiting for ESO.
No more nerfs of any class! Nerfs are the lazy way out, and they’ve already been used way too much, instead of buffing other classes. Look at it this way: if you keep hammering slightly higher nails, eventually all the nails will be level with the wood. That is, all classes would be equally mediocre and unsatisfactory to players. People do not play games to RP weak characters, they play to experience power and progress they rarely see in real life.
Graveling Scavengers are the most annoying and overpowered trash mob in the game. What other mob can jump you and defeat in seconds with no recourse if you have no stun-breaker out of cooldown? It’s like they put them in out of perverse motive to frustrate players and make them mad.
Engineers start off as a more difficult, less straight-forward class with some awkward mechanics, reducing the number of players that try them. Then they get hit with severe nerfs, further reducing their population. This means fewer people understand what they can really do and just go by the rumors and by the complaints (which are not all unjustified). It is essentially an unfinished class still very much in development, making it hard for players to get comfortable with them. No finished class should ever see a 30% hit to an ability; that’s just wrong for something post-beta.
This dead horse has been mercilessly beaten into the ground. It’s dead, stop beating it.
There’s simply no reason not to skip mobs. They have too much health and give terrible drops.
That’s it. Killing them eats up a lot of time with little reward.
This.
And it’s worse now with no WP rezzing because every time you attempt unnecessary fights you take a chance someone will cause a delay by being defeated and you either have to all back out of combat and let them rez or carry on the fight more slowly with fewer people. All while getting insufficient reward for that effort.
The reason for an increase in 80s-only groups seems pretty obvious to me – the removal of waypoint rezzing while group members are still in combat. That change makes dungeon runs take longer if members are not more robust and experienced, so taking only 80s reduces the risk of wipes and partial wipes that extend the time taken for the dungeon while not at all increasing rewards.
It’s a simple matter of the game makers altering the risk/reward ratio of dungeons and players doing what they can to adjust it back somewhat.
In my last MMO, SWtOR, I played mostly for the class story lines, but after hitting level cap in one and then working on alts, I reached a point where the effort of playing the same content to get the reward of the story content didn’t seem worth it anymore, so I left.
Now in this game, I’ve gotten two to 80, with both fully PvE explored and one nearly 100% explored, so exploration is pretty much out as a motivation. The draws are leveling other classes for the gameplay novelty and collecting some good gear so alts are not dying every other minute in dungeons later. But the hours needed to do that while engaging in repetitive content are starting to wear on me. The rewards are tending to be below the threshold that would prompt me to keep up my time investment.
The current system (low-odds RNG + tradeable precursors/legendaries) encourages people to purchase gems and convert them to gold. ArenaNet knows exactly what they are doing with this, and it has nothing to do with what players want. It’s a cash shop strategy, pure and simple.
I’m not saying it’s either right or wrong, but I am saying that I don’t like it one bit, and I find it rather distastefully done.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly how I see it.
It makes sense that they would subtlety motivate players to buy gems, since they are a business, so I can’t completely hold that against them. But it’s seeming more blatant as time advances, so it’s turning me off and I’m not giving them a single dime. Too many changes seem to increase my frustration and reduce my enjoyment, so I’m tending to spend more time in other games now.
People are more focused on daily achievements now because of Laurels, which can purchase Ascended gear. That’s the same reason people focus on Fractals.
It’s all because of gear tiers. Ascended items are pretty much best-in-slot, even though they supposedly only benefit people going up in Fractal levels.
They are making such changes because they want to keep people who need end-level treadmill grinds, never mind people who preferred the character of GW1. This is a sequel in name only, as most people playing obviously have known for a long time.
Everything is becoming more difficult and grindy to do. I barely have time to log on during the week and now I come on today and see these ridiculous dailies. Oh, and dungeons are going to be a lot harder now so I won’t be able to gear up my characters as easily as the people who played the game for 5 months prior to this month (I’m new to the game). Let see what else, another currency that I have to keep track of, great.
From my point of view, it would seem like the bulk of these changes were put in to halt/limit progression.
I bought the game because the original Guild Wars wasn’t so grindy and GW2 was advertised as the non-MMO MMO. Well I can see now that GW2 is about as much of a sequel to GW1 as Diablo III was to Diablo II, as in a sequel in name only that completely misses what made the previous game good.
I have to say that I agree almost completely with this. I’m still able to have fun in this game, but I’m finding that as time goes by and the the game changes my ratio of frustration to fun keeps increasing. Given that I can see no good player-perspective rationale for this trend, I can only assume that the higher frustration is intentional and is related to the gem store. My original impression was that the store would be cosmetic and novelty items, not a resort for those hampered by game annoyances.
Had the game been moving in a better (IMHO) direction, I would have by now spent money on additional character slots and possibly other things. But instead as class after class gets nerfed and rewards get trimmed and difficulty ramped up, I’m more inclined to delete characters and boycott the store.
I was purposefully melodramatic in the overstatement of PuGs being soon extinct.
However, I just had quite a bad night with PuGs, with three runs ruined by rage quitters (where the rest of us were booted from the dungeon when they left and had to start all over) and one salvaged by kind joiners after two people quit while we were nearly finished. This does not bode well.
I’m wondering whether this difficulty tuning is more for the purpose of increasing frustration to the point where people break down and buy gems to gear up, as opposed to a sincere effort to enhance enjoyment. I get that sense with far too many changes they make.
This is going to kill PuGs. Just wait and see. Nobody is going to want to take someone new into a dungeon, or even someone they suspect doesn’t know it well, because to do so is to condemn your group to taking 5 or 10 times longer to complete it because so many battles will have to be done over.
All for the sake of a tactic that was a choice and didn’t hurt anyone.
The dungeon waypoint change is going to wreak havoc on pugging, I predict. If you don’t go in with an experienced, coordinated group, dungeons are going to take much, much longer.
When someone gets downed next to a boss, attempting to rez them is often suicidal, meaning once that first down happens, everyone else might as well hang it up and run away instead of being able to continue fighting knowing their buddy will soon be back in the fight.
Who was so-called waypoint-rushing hurting? Nobody, that’s who. This is a change tyrannically forced on us because it doesn’t mesh with some peoples’ vision of proper gameplay, but will only add frustration to many players’ game experience without being of real benefit to anyone, because the now-forbidden tactic could always be freely rejected.
This will especially discourage groups from including players without much experience in that particular dungeon, for fear of a drastic increase in the time needed to complete the dungeon. What mechanism will work against this bad result?
How is this a worthy use of development time when the game still includes so many bugs that actually impede players?
As soon as I saw the “25 underwater kills” as part of the daily, I immediately knew I probably won’t bother with dailies. Underwater killing is one of the most unfun things in the game, because you lose 80% of your skills, making kills take longer for no good reason. And having to craft too, when I specifically only focused one character on crafting. So unless the daily is account-wide, no thanks.
People play MMOs to have fun and experience progress and victory for their characters. When they get their characters to a place that feels powerful and fun, they do not like to get hammered by reductions that suddenly remove some of the progress they worked hard to achieve, reductions that for some players remove enough of the fun for that character that they abandon it for another class or even in some cases abandon the game altogether.
What makes swallowing such changes even harder is when those reductions seem to be based on only one arena of a game with many arenas. Usually this means a skill complained about in PvP is reduced without much regard for the effect that has in PvE. It doesn’t seem to matter much that over time we have to spend more and more time to achieve similar results or rewards in PvE. Constantly over time drops and skills are lowered, making money harder to come by and taking more time too because it takes longer to kill things with reduced skills.
The secondary problem is build tunneling, where nerfed skills lead players to the same builds in order to compensate and attempt to maximize power in the face of unrelenting reductions. Left in the dust is player choice and a wide variety of viable styles of play. Sure, you have a choice to play a weak character, but who wants that choice?
Our group got through AC path 2 and was fighting the final boss when we were suddenly all kicked out of the dungeon to the Plains. Not cool to have our time wasted like that.
Why do horrid bugs like this persist when meanwhile chatter abounds about unneeded nerfs to AoE and restrictive changes to dungeon waypoints? Your priorities are completely out of whack.
Just to clarify, you’ll no longer be able to use waypoints when a party member is in combat inside a dungeon. This is prevent people from using waypoints to rush and kill bosses or clear areas, which is not intended game play.
All other forms of res remain unchanged.
I wish you would quit squashing “unintended game play” and focus on fixing the multitude of bugs. Who cares if a tactic or process is unintended? Why not leave that option instead of limiting player choice, unless it is an out-and-out exploit?
You seem intent on herding everyone in particular directions, instead of giving players the freedom to find their fun how they choose. Unrestricted waypoint use in dungeons does nothing to prevent coordinated groups from marching through. It does however allow less capable groups to muddle through without having to completely abandon their efforts, thereby giving them experience toward not needing that crutch on later attempts, as well as tokens toward better equipment that make defeat less frequent. So now you want to force every group to wipe and start all over, so you’re essentially forcing some players to waste more time to accomplish their goals, in the name of shoving your vision down our throats.
Just wanted to let you guys know that we’re reading this thread.
Your logic, reasons, anecdotes and ideas are being listened to. Also keep in mind, that as I said yesterday, a skill can be a balance problem in one area of the game, but underpowered in another. That’s the nature of using one set of #‘s to balance across all areas of the game. So we’re keeping that in mind as we look at this. We may need to do different tweaks in different areas of the game.
We’re also not going to make a knee jerk reaction to this. We’re still gathering data, watching player trends, and having meetings on all possible ramifications from possible changes.
I’d be more reassured by this if it resembled actual actions, but your previous changes don’t match those words. Those words are very reasonable, but past changes show very little concern for painful reductions on players in different arenas. To the point now where I have delayed or almost abandoned alts I was starting to enjoy, and to the point where I’m wondering how much longer I’ll be playing because the game’s direction seems so wrong.
Most changes seem to reduce our choices because they make previously good options now lackluster, instead of elevating lackluster options to be better. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that the changes seem intended to give the illusion of enhanced choice by making them all similarly lackluster, which has the effect of increasing frustration and tedium while playing. Perhaps for a small minority the forced (as opposed to the much more preferred voluntary) increase in difficulty is enjoyable, but the vast majority simply have to spend more time getting the same rewards in the game.
The optimist in me would like to see those words as a sign of a sea change in your approach, but the pessimist in me wonders if they’re just hollow verbiage to temporarily placate a volatile crowd, or, perhaps even worse, a symptom of such staggering self-deception that hope for future improvement should be forsaken.
More specifically on-topic, AoE is in some cases the only redeeming virtue of some classes and builds. Engineer DPS has been neutered in the name of flexibilty, as have many DPS options for Elementalists. To now have their AoE options further limited while effectively elevating others who focus on single-target skills (typically classes and builds already seen by players as superior) seems like an extremely wrong-headed move. Others here are providing ample detailed arguments to that effect.
As much as I’d like to hope otherwise, I think MMOs inevitably devolve into grinds. A subscription-based MMO has an incentive to extend your playtime over months and years, so they tend so slow down progress because the alternative is to continually pump out enormous amounts of new content to stave off grinding (or leaving) for the leading edge players. A non-subscription MMO with a cash shop has an incentive to make some elements of the game tedious or less satisfying in order to prompt people to buy items that help speed or spruce things up.
Having cut my MMO teeth in the original Everquest, I have a higher tolerance for grind than some might, but after so many years and so many MMOs, I am tiring of the same pattern over and over and wondering if anyone will break the mold. The higher you get in a game, the more things slow down and the more chance your progress will be reversed by a lazy reduction in supposedly overpowered skills or traits (usually deemed a problem in one particular arena like PvP but the reduction unfairly having a strong impact also in PvE).
One good thing about GW2 is the multitude of things to do. If one or two of those things seem especially grindy to you, you can shift your focus to the others. Granted, this doesn’t always satisfy if you still have a desire to improve your gear, because too often the avenues of real progress get shoehorned into highly controlled venues that tend to be very repetitive.
When they close down threads they deem for the purpose of complaining, that seems too heavy-handed to me. Where else could we gripe where we have a chance, however minimal, of being heard by those who manage the game?
With no regular subscription, which would provide a monetary voice at least, how do we express our displeasure? Does a boycott of the gem store do anything? Do they note who does and does not spend real money, or just look at aggregate numbers?
That said, I still glean considerable useful information from some of the official forums, but the rare official posts are often more confusing than informative.
Yes, still bugged. I endured two defeats and killed the Eye, and now have to pay repairs for a complete waste of time. This game is too often a source of frustration rather than fun.
The only anomaly was that Trahearne was down at the time I killed the Eye, but I got the checkmark for the kill. However, the story is stuck no matter what I do inside the instance.
Those stupid purple machine-gun laser bursts are almost more than I can stand to face in another try; I dodge most of them, but it makes the whole event a huge pain.
It seems to me that in an effort to enhance difficulty so that experienced players face a challenge and most players might feel a need to spend money on gems, they have overdone it a bit. That is coupled with PvP-motivated skill reductions that make PvE harder for many professions and ruin previously good build options.
Given the many hours of enjoyment I have received, I’d say I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth from this game and do not feel the purchase was at all wasted. But I do feel somewhat betrayed by what I see as the direction of the game. I naively thought this game might break the pattern of constant nerfing that seems to be the only tactic used in balancing MMO games. I can’t help feeling that such reliance is lazy and uncreative and punishes the many to reward the few.
So while I can still enjoy the game, I am not going to reward them with more money when I see my characters get weaker with many patches and make a mockery of the weeks I spent building them up. And the lowering of loot has made too much of my time feel like a grind instead of a pleasurable past-time.
You must be imagining grenades catching on your feet or ledges. Surely they wouldn’t smash down grenades 30% if they had issues like that. Surely such heavy-handed nerfing is reserved for perfect skills that are unabashedly beyond their place. And of course the non-impressive DPS of other skills is just a matter of bad perception too, since they would not lower the only impressive DPS so much; in such a case they would surely strengthen the less-used skills and not put on players the burden of losing a significant amount of power they spent so much time and effort accumulating.
They won’t get a single cent from me until they stop focusing on nerfing and focus instead on fixing bugs. They nerf profession after profession while months-old nerfs continue to frustrate players. It seems like most skills that make players feel their characters are good and powerful get hammered down until they are lackluster like other skills that might have been unused, instead of buffing up the already weak skills. That makes progress feel worthless over time because you get a character up to a good place only to see a backslide that makes you weaker like you were levels or days/weeks before that. Coupled with extremely poor loot, that makes the game feel like a hamster wheel that we need to grind hour over hour unless we break down and bend to the almost-blackmail forces and buy gems. That direction is one I will not reward with my money.
The original intent seemed to that purchases in the store would be for your character’s look or gimmicky novelties, instead of substitutions for dozens of hours of playing time. Some time-saving items wouldn’t be too bad, but coupled with a continual lowering of loot it makes it seem like we’re being squeezed.
This is still broken on Jade Quarry. Just bugged it. I’m having to camp a spot where two shadow fiends periodically spawn because nothing else seems to work for the Hellion Forest heart quest.
If they spent half as much time fixing bugs as nerfing class after class, this would be a great game, but as it is I’m losing pretty much all confidence in the devs. Whatever direction they seem to want to move in is not one I’m interested in following.
When I tried to login from a second location, it sent an email to authorize that location but when I tried that (clicking on the link in the email, etc.) I got an error that it had failed. This happened even when pasting that link in different browsers. So I submitted a ticket but their response was just instructions on how to turn off account security, which implies that their authorization system does not work so they just provide a workaround, but they didn’t say anything about the system being broken.
Why even send those emails if they don’t work? Or if they are supposed to work, why did my ticket only get a workaround response instead of assuring me they are looking into and trying to fix the problem?
I think I need to see that ticket to get context and consider if we’re sending the wrong message in your case. Could you please provide the 12-digit incident/ticket number?
Here is the data, direct from the support page:
Subject Reference # Status Date Created
Authorizing Second Login IP Fails 121218-002856 Waiting 12/18/2012
There are a few traits I look forward to building up to and that I think provide a significant boost, but most are lackluster at best. At least they don’t take up a skill slot on my bar.
When I tried to login from a second location, it sent an email to authorize that location but when I tried that (clicking on the link in the email, etc.) I got an error that it had failed. This happened even when pasting that link in different browsers. So I submitted a ticket but their response was just instructions on how to turn off account security, which implies that their authorization system does not work so they just provide a workaround, but they didn’t say anything about the system being broken.
Why even send those emails if they don’t work? Or if they are supposed to work, why did my ticket only get a workaround response instead of assuring me they are looking into and trying to fix the problem?
So in short.
If we gear a certain way, use pistol/pistol, trait for a certain way and use specific sigils then the nerf isnt so bad?
Thats great to know, all i need to do is stop playing the way i was and the way i enjoyed. Dump a bunch of gold on new runes, sigils, weapons, not ever get downed and drop my legendary rifle.Yah, that sounds completely reasonable.
This was the point I was trying to make, too. All the numbers in the world when you have dozens of gold to spend don’t counter this point. The nerf hits many, many Engineers hard. Sure, a minority can overcome it, but even they have lost an option to use rifles with grenades (unless they want to gimp themselves).
On my 30 Engineer alt, I was enjoying using a rifle and sometimes grenades and was planning to go up to Grenadier, but now my plans are in disarray and meanwhile my contribution to groups is cut by over 30%.
People swarmed to grenades because they were the best DPS. No surprise that when one path is good and others are lackluster most choose the good one. But this stupid patch made the good one also lackluster instead of making the others good to make multiple viable choices. That is the method that I decry, knocking everything down to the same impotent level instead of making more things good and fun.
Even if it isn’t a nerf for a wealthy level 80, it certainly is for everyone else. Those leveling an Engineer now have to suffer a huge penalty when they want to AoE with grenades. Where once they shone brightly in groups against clustered mobs now they are lackluster at best. It also forces anyone who wants to heavily use grenades to use pistols instead of a rifle, which limits options.
Why is it every MMO seems to fall into a pattern of constant nerfing? Is that the only balance mechanism they can think of? They expect us to commit to their games but they show little commitment to our characters when they suddenly chop them off at the knees in the name of so-called balance. I’ve had it happen many times in other games and I’ve had it happen several times already in this game, with multiple professions. Just when I’m getting comfortable with a profession and starting to really enjoy it, boom, down comes a hammer that seems to take perverse pleasure in making me feel less capable and powerful after I put in much thought and effort to reach that.
It’s like any ability that makes a character actually feel strong has to be smashed down, instead of allowing such abilities for every profession so that enjoyment is actually enhanced instead of continually dampened. In the end instead of a bountiful forest of choices we are left with a plot of equally blunted stumps.
Most of us play these games to feel a sense of adventure or accomplishment or discovery or usefulness that often eludes us in our normal lives. How discouraging it is, then, when even here we have a group of out-of-touch overseers that care more about crushing the slightest whiff of power than about ensuring their customers actually enjoy themselves. At the very least, they seem to be motivated by concerns that lack much relevance to many if not most players.
Why continue to build up characters knowing that with any given patch they could be chopped down to effectively what they were many levels and hours and days previous, thus making a mockery of my time and effort? And yes, that question sounds a bit silly even to me, since I’ve played enough MMOs to recognize that such is part of the bargain. I had hopes that this game might be different, and it seemed like it started out that way, but it has now begun following a well-worn path instead of blazing a new trail.