Guild Wars 2

I think rewards should become permanent if I don’t have it. I think rewards should be limited time only if I do have it. I’m a hypocrite.

On a more serious note, rarity creates desirability. Players enjoy having something that makes their character stand out and feel unique. There will always be content in a game like this that isn’t readily available to everyone (legendaries, anyone?), and I’m okay with that. Try not to get hung up on the idea of someone having something you don’t (welcome to life!), instead just wait for the next special event and get your own limited item then. ArenaNet seems to introduce new limited time items with most special events, so there will be plenty of other opportunities to find something cool and unique.

Six solo runs a day (though I usually only do worlds 1 and 2), nearly every day, zero drops. Take a buddy with me for his first run, and he gets a drop from the first chest. Two conclusions:
1) Some people have all the luck.
2) I should never gamble in Vegas.

Rhaps.8540:

The day I top an MMO leaderboard is the day I seriously have to reevaluate what I’m doing with my life.

Ha! Agreed!

Deadly Spirit Guy.4769:

I hope they release a tool that will let you search up your own rank in categories. Then players would get a sense of where they are compared to other players and the leader boards would actually be useful to me.

Also agreed, and I give it decent odds this is coming as this seems like a pretty obvious feature.

hamsteak.1368:

the leaderboards (at least for pvp) take into account people who have been doing tournaments since last month, not since the beginning of the game; most of the people at the top aren’t “cheaters” they just run with a premade

Then I will concede that point. As I mentioned in my initial post, I don’t do much sPvP, so I don’t pay as much attention to how that one works.

I’m mostly interested in a discussion to think of ways that the leaderboards can become of interest to a wider player base, and can become more dynamic as apposed to having the same names for all eternity.

Tolunart: as for me personally, I do most of my time in PvE, and couldn’t really care less about the competitive aspect (though I do enjoy the large scale chaos possible in WvW). My question is more one of intellectual curiosity about the purpose of something that appears to serve, well, no purpose. In fact, you reinforce the point by illustrating how the system only rewards the tiny percentage of obsessive players. One other point, you mention top 1000, but they are actually only tracking the top 24 in WvW, which is such a tiny number of players it left me scratching my head.

Snow White.9680:

I can’t think of any other reason.. the whole thing seems silly to me.

Yeah, that’s kinda where I stand. And, I suspect, 99.99% of the rest of the player base (seeing as they are not, and never will be, on the leaderboard, thus making it pointless for the 99.99%).

Just to make this a constructive conversation, as apposed to a kitten-fest, we should try to come up with some tweaks or algorithms that would correct the problem of leaderboards only being for people that never miss a day.

Here are some thoughts:
Achievements – daily and monthly achievements make up such a large part of the achievements leaderboards that you have no chance of ranking if you have not completed the daily nearly every day since launch. Perhaps using a weighted score where repeatable achievements (such as dailies and monthies) have diminishing value in ranking calculations? (hypothetical example with made-up numbers: first 100 dailies are worth 1 point for achievement rankings, next 100 dailies are worth .5 pts for rankings, next 100 are worth .25 pts, etc). That would still give people some credit for having never missed a daily, but not so much that they can make it onto the leaderboard and never fall off by simply having done the daily every day since launch.

WvW – perhaps use play time in WvW to weight the score slightly so that players who play less but are highly productive (and thus have a high effectiveness/efficiency) have a shot at the leaderboard, and/or doing a diminishing returns on a player’s score based on hours played in a timeframe so that the longer someone plays past a certain number of hours, the fewer points they get for performing the same actions.

PvP – they are already on the right track for PvP rankings I think by basing the top 100 on win/loss ratio. Too many competitive games base their leaderboards solely on number of kills or victorys so that players who simply play more rate higher than highly skilled players. I also don’t ever do the structured PvP, so my thoughts here may be ill-informed. Most I think some systems to detect or avoid people gaming the system, such as diminishing returns for killing the same opponent.

Hoyvin.3241:

Sorry. There is no room for rational thought on these forums. I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to leave.

Darnit!

First, I want to say I appreciate the regular additions to the game, and I accept that not every new feature or content will be relevant to every player.

That said, I’m honestly wondering what the point of leader boards truly is. Invariably, leader boards in any game always ended up being dominated by players who fall into one of two categories: cheaters or players who have played since day one and continue to play 16 hours a day every day. Your normal player, no matter how skilled or how much effort they put into it, will never ever see themselves on a leaderboard. The names in the top 1% of any leaderboard I have seen almost never change, either. Individual names may shift a few places up and down (when John Doe #9 takes a break to go take a dump, in those few minutes he will fall a place, but he will make it back up when the guy who passed him breaks to microwave a hot-pocket), but that list of top 100 names is nearly always the same names for all time. I have no idea about the current number of Guild Wars 2 players, but considering 2 million copies were sold in the first two weeks, a system that only tracks the top 100 seems like a lot of effort to implement a system that will ultimately be a pretty static list of players only relevant to 0.005% of the population.

I do realize ArenaNet said that in the coming weeks, they will add more tools to sort the leaderboards, but I’m just lost as to the point of a system that only 100 people out of thousands will be able to use (because if you haven’t been playing since day one, and you are not currently on the leaderboards, then you will never, ever be on there).

If I am completely missing something here, please feel free to set me straight!

Thanks for the feedback, Agadar! Healing Spring looks like a great swap. I’m curious why you recommend 30 in Wilderness Survival, however. The top tier of traits in Wilderness Survival don’t relate to regeneration in any way I see, and to spend that last 10 pts in Wilderness Survival, I would have to lose a trait that does affect regen.

I’ve been messing around with alternative builds, and I’m curious if anyone has any feedback on a Ranger regen-focused build. Here is what I’m looking at doing:

Traits:
Wilderness Survival:
20 (VIII) – Oakheart Salve, regen for 5 secs upon condition dmg

Nature Magic:
5 – Rejuventation (regen when health at 75%)
10 (III) – Nature’s Bond (regen lasts 33% longer)
15 – Fortifying Bond (boons shared with pet)

Beastmastery:
10 (IV) – Compassion Training (pets heal for more)
30 (XII) – Natural Healing (passive regen)

Skills:
Signet of the Wild (passive regen)
Troll Ungent (healing-over-time, but not counted as a regen effect as I understand it)

Gear:
Cleric’s (healing power, power, toughness)

Thoughts? Anyone tried this (I’m sure someone has)?

Hello! I’m looking into trying out a different build, and I have a conundrum I’m interested in some opinions on. This is primarily for PvE. Essentially, I’m putting together a pet/bow build with favored stats being healing pwr, vit, condition dmg. I have three possibilities I am undecided between:

Option 1:
20 Marksmanship – primarily to get Eagle Eye. Yes, I know the longbow does no condition dmg, but I really like the ridiculously long range this gives you.
20 Skirmishing – to get Agility Training to improve pet speed, and Quick Draw which would benefit both long bow and the more condition-oriented short bow
30 Beastmastery – Natural Healing + Signet of the Wild + high healing stat for lots of passive regen

Option 2:

20 Marksmanship w/Eagle Eye
20 Wilderness Survival – I am one crazy dodge-rolling mofo, and this gives me a 50% increase in endurance regen, so that’s a big deal to me, plus 2 secs of protection after dodging. That’s potentially a lot of dmg avoidance/mitigation for someone who is quick on the dodge. Also, this gives access to Soften the Fall, which is incredibly useful for exploration.
30 Beastmastery

Option 3:
20 Skirmishing w/Agility Training and Quick Draw
20 Wilderness Survival
30 Beastmastery

Long Bow is probably my favorite weapon, and option 1 gets the most out of the long bow, however, I’m leaning more towards option 3 since it would provide better survival and the Quick Draw trait can be applied to either bow.

Thoughts?

I have the same issue/question. When I rename a pet, it in effect names that slot, so if I change out the pet in that slot, the new pet inherits the name, and if I slot the original pet back in, it goes back to being “juvenile blah”.

Hopefully this will get fixed soon, as I quite like having unique names for each pet, but since I change around pets frequently, it gets tiresome having to rename them again and again.

Unless someone has a work-around for this?