Rain King

Lordkrall, on 06 February 2013 - 04:52 PM, said:

Very glad this is the first reply here.  We need to be optimistic.  R* held back their big baby for polishing, Arenanet is holding their patch back for polishing, it's all good.  Grant them time, and it will be better.

The rage in that thread is extremely entertaining.

Sure, it is a bit disappointing, but I am sure people would whine just as much, if not more, if they did force the release in February and it was not fully tested and completely broken.

Almost always better to push back release if stuff turns up than to force half-tested stuff.

I would say Warrior's is better all around, Guardian is very slow, the ward can be jumped over, only has one massive CD knockback(though powerful) where as the warrior has a small knockback, a stun, a faster attack chain, and most importantly: earthshaker - AoE stun for 1-2 seconds(based on adrenaline) every 10 seconds. Amazing disruption in PvP.

The Guardian i would say is best for PvE for its constant melee range protection, its knockback is immense on bosses that allow it, immobolize is always useful, and #2 is a blast finisher on 5 second CD, which is awesome for all those group combo fields.

I've recently noticed that the drastic difference between how much I talk online and how much I talk in real life. I'm aware that I probably spend too much time on the computer every day but I've never really been an antisocial person....at least online. In real life social situations, I either have nothing to say, or I just simply don't find the conversation interesting and I'm trying to understand why.

Anyone else share these experiences? I can't tell if I'm socially anxious or just completely uninterested in the topics other people are talking about.

If these changes ever go through, every open field battle will be who has the bigger zerg and stack together like some glue again. No need to dodge anymore, no need for any skills in pvp, just turtle up.

The future of wvw suddenly seems bright!

Upcoming AoE skill balancing (nerf)

• One of the issues brought up a lot in WvW./sPvP is AoE (Area of Effect). We feel like they are too strong at the moment and a lot of people in WvW are gaming the system using AoEs.
  
• For people that don’t know – max targets for siege weapons is 50 while max targets for AoE is 5.
  
• Reducing AoE effectiveness to bring them in line with the single target damage skills.
  
• Major update coming to all the AoE skills – make classes that are good at single target damage stand out a bit more.
  
• Same thing with dungeons – right now if you have a lot of AoE you can past encounters by just spamming AoE which is not what we want.

"We are encourage people to defend, to get involved, to break away from large mass mentality of zerging"

Sounds like a pretty stupid idea. They don't like zerging, but they want to nerf AOE? Not sure if I follow you on this one Anet. If anything this makes zerging more viable. Funneling a zerg through a choke point and aoeing them was somehow unfair? Funny, I thought that was strategy.

Seriously, do you even WvW Anet?

Thoughts?

IsThisNameTaken, on 18 January 2013 - 09:57 AM, said:

I agree.  After having an elementalist as my main character in GW1 and suffering through all the problems there (continual skill nerfs, AI updates to nerf AoE effectiveness, HM elemental dmg scale nerfing, no real effort to address ele skill rebalancing until it was too late - GW2 launch), I was hopeful that ANet would have learned their lesson and made an effort to have the GW2 elementalist not suffer a similar fate.  Alas, it seems that ANet is up to their old tricks, and their attempts to balance the game will continue to drive the elementalist into uselessness.  By the time they make a real effort to fix eles for PvE, GW3 will be launching.

Tran$mutation stones

Gilles VI, on 03 January 2013 - 10:36 AM, said:

I'm not sure if you understand how people monopolize market. There is no anticipations of any sorts... First they pick an item that is hot for sale. Second they buy all of them from tp. Third they manipulate price from now on.... They dont anticipate anything they just change price and its working.

I'll give you example of one that person saw with their own eyes happen. He or she was looking at price of abyss dye it was around 5g. Wanted to buy it, next moment when he checked all abyss dyes were gone. After some time persons who bought them off put 15g+ price. As you can see there is no anticipations here. They simply rule price of things.

Also there is fix for this, anet just have to make normal price for abyss dyes fixed price. For exmaple if they feel abyss dye should be 5g then make them 5g from shop. This way monoplizers will lose huge chunk of money.
Next thing make precursors fixed price. For example 300g. Now they will lose even more money because they bought dusks for 400g+. I don't think you will have people brave enough to monopolize things after this.

But back on the topic, these people should be banned. Every time some exploit come around u see several individuals think its ok to use it. Actually its not, and anet said if you do come across something like this, you should report it fast and not abuse it. This is not first time it happens, and now I hope these people stay banned for good.

Gilles VI, on 03 January 2013 - 10:36 AM, said:

"smart people"?Where is the smart in what they do?I buy all the existing items,then i put out bogus offers to buy,then i dump the crap and people buy it,no brain surgery skill required,to me people that mess with the tp and people that use exploits are on par,they are all cheating.

they should focus on the trading post exploiters,who make thousands of gold just because they have thousands of gold.A person can buy 100 $ worth of gold from gold farmers and double that money in an hour,arenanet doesn't do anything about these people who are creating artificial prices,they ban some poor sucker who tried to get 50 ectos to craft some backpiece.

Before fixing anything, let's quickly identify the core problems with GW2's PvE today. And by "PvE", I mean only the open-world PvE here, not personal story or dungeons.

So, the problems:
- The world is dead. Other than cursed shore, the dragons, and lion's arch, it's largely empty.
- "Dynamic" events are hardly dynamic, as we were led to believe.
- The reward structure is really, really bad. This is actually the main reason for the first problem.

...aaand now how to fix all this, starting with the pre-requisites and moving on to more complex changes:

1. Better event scaling. Currently events don't scale well for large number of players (10+). You just get more mobs in pre-set spawn points that get aoed down just as easily. Anyone who's spent 30 minutes in Cursed Shore knows this. Some improvements were made in this regard compared to a few months ago, but it's very little. Events with more players around need to spawn veterans and champions and add additional spawn points, not just additional mobs. Basically, things that are not negated by AoE.

2. Iterative difficulty scaling for events. Most events never fail. Why not? Because they're too easy. Anet needs to add difficulty scaling that's not dependent on number of players, but based on the number of times the event was successfully completed previously (on top of number-of-players scaling in #1, not instead). Every event stats at difficulty 0 after a server reset. Each time it's completed successfully, the difficulty goes up by 1 point. 1 point of difficulty translates into 1 additional mob per wave, +3% mob health and damage, etc.

So instead of facerolling Shelter's Gate Camp for loot every 10 minutes, one day you might come there and get zerged by veteran spiders. Woah, what happened? Well, see, the last defense barely succeeded and turned the difficulty from 7 to 8. And they had more people than you did, so tough luck. But now that the event failed, the difficulty scale goes down by -3, so next time the event will be at difficulty 5. This system will calibrate itself to the average number of players in an area and add a huge amount of variety to the same events, while the +1/-3 system still ensures it succeeds most of the time. (The scale is hidden, so people don't intentionally avoid scaled-up events.)

3. More events. More, more, more. There are a handful of basic event "templates" in the game and 95% of all events fit in these: defend a point, assault a point, escort an npc, kill a boss, kill mobs until the bar gets to 0 (or 100%). I honestly don't see why anet isn't minting these like crazy. I highly doubt they take a lot of time to make, given that you already have all the components... just need to put the pieces together in a slightly different configuration in a different area. BAM, new event. Reduce the frequency of each individual event to keep the number of concurrent events the same, but increase the variety. I'm not asking here for a brand-new zone with brand-new armored crabs and a ton of scripting to be used one time and then abandoned. This would probably take far less work.

4. Balancing rewards. The base reward for completing an event is pitiful. 1.5 silver, some experience that you don't need at 80, and a bit of karma that's grossly outweighed by the daily jug. (The daily jug was a good idea, but it's just... difficult to outperform it. That's a different subject.) The bulk of the reward comes from the drops and drops from a single champion are much worse than from aoeing waves of mobs for 4 minutes. Most of the time the champion takes more effort too!

The second problem is the disparity between zones. Events in Orr are well-known (so everyone does the easy ones), highly populated and give max rewards for level 80. Events in every other zone are the complete opposite. To balance this:

- Normalize the silver/exp/karma rewards for lvl 80s throughout the world. Seriously, it's a tiny amount of money anyway and getting 1.5s or 0.9s won't really impact anything. All it does is make lower-level events look bad.
- Improve drops from champions. Duh. To avoid causing inflation, do not flat-out make them drop 15 silver, but simply add a chance for each champion to drop zone-specific items. Each zones or a group of zones could have things like unique armor sets and unique weapon skins. There are zone-unique weapon skins in the game currently, such as "Steam" weapons in Charr areas, but they're easily obtainable and thus can't serve as an incentive to go there.
- Also add tokens to champions. For X tokens from champions in Charr lands, you can buy a rare armor skin (that also drops only in this areas), but weapons can only be gotten as a drop. Something like that.

5. Worldwide and zone-wide event notifications. Another very simple addition, but once you've really made events dynamic (points #1 and #2), added more of them (#3), and gave the players a reason to go there (#4), tell people about them! Display all events happening in the zone on the map, with an option to toggle it off, and display MAJOR events happening in other zones on the world map, like Orr temple assaults, dragons, swamp monster in Queensdale, etc. People will see events and flock to them instead of wandering about empty zones alone or farming events in Cursed Shore as a zerg.

Also, display this next point in the corner of the screen (under your personal story) at all times:

6. Daily zones. Now we're getting into more ambitious things. It's time to really create a dynamic world. Each day 1 or 2 zones could become event hubs. Balefire means business today and made a pact with the ogres to attack Ebonhawke! The entire area turns into a warzone. You know, the Charr are really attacking. Basically, turn the area into Cursed Shore + difficulty scaling (#2).

Hearts are disabled (Farmer Joe doesn't really care about shooing away the gryphons from this cabbage when THE CHARR ARE ATTACKING). All regular events that fit the war theme are enabled with a majorly increased frequency (remember, we reduced it in #3 and increased the total number of events). There are additional events active: every outpost gets assaulted on a regular basis and after a successful defense, there are events to march out and take down a champ or recapture a lost outpost. Again, this is all just copy/paste stuff (#3). Optimize the templates and then make more events!

As a bonus, drops of zone-specific rewards are doubled for the day when that area is a warzone.

As a second bonus, if a critical number of events is failed during the day (this could be a rather high threshold), the zone is under Flame Legion's control for next 1-3 days, every waypoint is disabled, you still can't do hearts in it (Farmer Joe is dead, his head is on a spike, and so are the cabbage-loving gryphons), and after these 3 days, the map becomes a warzone for the day again. Same events are running with the aim of recapturing it. This time it can't fail.

7. Live GMs. All of the above would do a good job of making the world appear dynamic, as it was advertised in the beginning, but dedicated game-masters controlling the world would make it REALLY dynamic. Provided there's a good framework for creating events (#3), anet could expand it to create events out of pre-set pieces on the fly. Starcraft's map editor did it in 1999 by allowing you to create custom missions using building blocks already provided with the game, why can't we do it on a live server in 2013? This outpost is getting attacked by X waves, each one consisting of Y mobs for Z minutes. Oh and there's a dragon at the end, which I'm going to personally control and target people with it. Go!

A GM per server or even 1 GM per few servers could further spice up the "daily areas" and add an occasional special event to other places in the world. And once again, I don't mean "occasional" and "special" a la brand-new invisible precursor-dropping crabs that take months of development for one night of lag. No, "special", as in, there will be a unique event somewhere a few times per day that's not part of the game's default package. You know, something new.

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Well, that's pretty much it. A game like this would almost certainly keep me playing for years, paying a sub fee, and buying all the expansions. (Provided those expansions also expanded the above model).

Hey Everyone! I went ahead and made a Wintersday Calendar-Wallpaper, that way it's easy to look up the Times, Dates & Locations for the event. Enjoy! Link: http://i.imgur.com/5Ilty.gif?1  (I also posted this on Reddit: http://redd.it/14nk73)

I, on 09 December 2012 - 04:49 AM, said:

If [b], why [a]?

As of Yesterday

https://www.guildwar...-ascended-gear/

"This is just the beginning. In November, we’re only adding the first level of Infusions and Ascended Rings and Back slots, so that leaves us a lot of room to build upon these levels of Item progression in future content.  As we release more new end game content in the future, you’ll see more Infusions and Ascended item types being added to the game.  Eventually, you’ll be able to kit yourself out with a full set of Ascended gear and high end Infusions to help give you the edge in end game content."      

- Lindsey Murdock, Game Designer   

3 Months Earlier

http://venturebeat.c...s:guildwars2-16

"Here's what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can't realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game.  Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear.  We don't make grindy games -- we leave the grind to other MMOs."

  -Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

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While it is pretty clear of what Arenanet has in mind going forward, many of us want to know "What happened?"  One does not simply decide to simply build a MMO claiming to "defy all existing conventions" & 2 months down the road completely change ones business practices & betray its playerbase without reason.

Some speculate "No endgame, not enough micro-transactions, player activity declining" & well I have a opinion on those matters which I will share, but none of these issues should have been addressed with a gear treadmill/power creep.  This is one of the milestones Arenanet promised its playerbase which made it unique in the MMO industry & now threatens to go back on.


No Endgame:

While I am sure to get opposition on this, I happen to agree on this matter.  GW2 is very limited on endgame.  Here is #1 reason.  Players are limited to 2 Zones.  We have a MASSIVE world out there & only 2 zones are populated.  Why has this issue gone overlooked.  Currently the majority of the 80 population is found in 1 of 3 areas.  Lions Arch, Orr, Frostgorge.  Why?  There is no incentive/reward for players to be active in the other zones.  T6 crafting materials, exotic/rare drops, higher exp/karma/silver for participating in dynamic events.

Suggestion:

Zaishen Daily Dynamic Events - Each day 1 zone is selected (Outside of Orr/Frostgorge).  For the first completion of every dynamic event in that zone the player would be rewarded a large % increase to Dynamic event rewards.  Significantly higher than that of Orr/Frostgorge.  For example:  Orr/Frostgorge reward something like 378 karma for completion.  ZDDE would reward 500.  Once every dynamic event in the zone was completed the player would be rewarded with a 20-30 T6 mats of their choice & a fair sum of silver.  ZDDE applies to 80's only.  (Yes, I'm aware it would have to be affiliated with some other organization, just using Zaishen as a GW1 reference)

Not Enough Microtransactions:

This is 100% on Arenanet.  Currently there is nothing in the gemstore that appeals to me as a player.  I do not speak for everyone but I think many would agree that items such as Black Lion Keys are not a viable purchase.  I conducted a study on these very forums & the numbers speak for themselves.

http://www.guildwars...een-r-d-thread/

The probability of a player getting a desirable item such as the permanent bank/trader is likely less than 1%.  When Black Lion Keys are going for roughly 1G which equates to $2.00 US Dollars, its hard to justify such a gamble.  

Suggestion:

New additions need to be added to the gem store more frequently & not just during holiday events.  Additions such as unique emotes, musical instruments etc.  Black Lion Chests need to have a much much more appealing drop % for desirable items.  5-6% would be more realistic for items such as permanent bank/trader etc.

Player Activity Declining:

I don't necessary agree with this.  I will say that of my 6 friends who started playing GW2, I am the only one continuing to do so but my inner circle is not indicative of the games population as a whole.  GW2 is unique in that there are no monthly fees.  So one has the freedom of coming on & playing when he/she chooses.  I think we will always see a increase in activity during event weekends & lulls when there is not.  I feel GW2 is fine, but when one fundamentally changes the games core philosophy with additions such as the one that is coming it is very possible that players will move on/leave.  After all, "No grind/No treadmill" was one of if not the main selling point of this franchise.