Glider

You've wasted your time. The main complaints about Ascended gear wasn't because people thought that it would be a huge advantage but that it would be a start of a gear treadmill and power creep. Your post here does nothing to contradict what a power creep is by definition. Anyway, tired old dead horse, blah blah blah.

Trei, on 16 December 2012 - 09:36 AM, said:

Make them not destroy your skillbar and we have a deal.

Seriously this is why no-one uses town clothes.

If they wanted different game, they should've just created another IP.

GW1---->Awesome
GW2---->just another MMO

101 of human psychollogy. If I mention Warhammer 40k what is the first thing that pops in your head? Space Marines of course(I am weird Like that and I would say Eldar{<3 Eldar <3}). You mention Guild Wars and what pops? Bots/instances and equal playfield.

GW2 really shouldn't have been GUILD WARS 2. It should've been idk... "Dragonsbane{?}". That sounds ok?

This jumping puzzle was an improvement, and a step back from the clocktower. Hopefully they can get it right the next time they make one of these.

Having the puzzle split up the starting locations was a great idea. It solved the issue with the clocktower being so cluttered at the start. The tower itself wasn't really hard, you just couldn't see where you were going in the beginning.

The puzzle itself was a bit of a let down though. The design was nice visually, but the puzzle didn't have any particularly interesting challenge. The jumps were very strait forward with nothing that really seemed like you might not make it or that it would be hard to aim. There was no "hidden" jump as the puzzle never doubles back, drops below itself, or "evolve" (think the explosions for clocktower). The puzzle was mostly "Hold W and hit space repeatedly."

Splitting up the start was great. Removing the tricky jumps... not so great.


Edit: Oh and I so thought there was going to be another hidden chest at the top of the second jumping puzzle at the top.

Sheepski, on 11 December 2012 - 02:24 AM, said:

I'd rather compare it to buying a Ferrari mark II after haven driven a mark I for 6 years - and it appears to be able to fit 4 kids, goes no faster than 80 mph, it has no airco and it's being painted white.

Perhaps it's stil a nice car but definitely not what you expected or what the manufacturer made you believe it would be.

BrettM, on 07 December 2012 - 08:56 PM, said:

I find your example rather unfair since a car is a physical object that can be physically dismantled like that. Also, in doing so, you did not use the car for its constructed purpose. i find a better analogy to be buying a car and then only be able to drive 5 miles with it before the bottom falls out and it turns out that they didn't screw it on properly. And that the exhaust pipe is made of plastic and has melted down. And then when you call up the car company and wonder why they sold you such a thing, they tell you that the car wasn't made to be driven, it was supposed to just stand there and look good. And then they ask you if you would like to buy some gems.

A straw-man topic?

That's got to be some kind of first.

OP: If you're talking about people like me, we never wanted endgame in particular. We wanted a power plateau. The power plateau has absolutely nothing at all to do with an end game. Saying that a power plateau is like endgame is like saying all of a Grand Theft Auto game from the moment you turn it on is endgame, when it clearly isn't.

We don't want a game where the outcome is constantly decided by stats, and where you win or lose because of your numbers, rather than because of your skill. That leads to a game where you grind for gear in order to win, because bigger numbers equal victory. What that means is that you're grinding for victory; Which is more commonly known as time > skill.

GrandmaFunk, on 11 December 2012 - 09:44 PM, said:

Apparently people associate greater skill with the ability to herd cats.

With the Sylvari, I expected silly nature faeries, but after playing them was pleasantly surprised by Arthurian and Sidhe Court strains in their culture.  That courtly style may seem a bit naive to our contemporary, cynical worldview, but it's hardly shallow.  Hundreds of years staying power in the Arthurian mythology argues otherwise.

I really couldn't stand the Norn at first.  Thought they seemed like a cartoon version of jock culture.  Lots of bragging about prowess and drinking to excess.  After getting a Norn a ways into the story, however, I found that some of that ridiculousness tapers off.  It's still there for occasional comedy, but the main Norn characters don't feel like the caricatures you find when you first encounter the race.

I've had the least exposure to the Charr.  The chest-thumping, drill sergeant caricature made me wary of them as well.  But then there's Tybalt.  What a great character.  Just recently, I spent a little time running around Ascalon, and encountered Charr who were more mellow, determined soldiers rather than growly chest-thumpers.

Gotta say, I feel some of the in-game characters I've run across are more three-dimensional than those in the two novels, which was a surpise.  This definitely isn't award winning fiction here, but it's not all two dimensional, let alone one.

Sword Hammer Axe, on 11 December 2012 - 06:47 PM, said:

Elves were not even close to perfect. They shed more of their own blood than any other race over some silly stones one of them made. They routinely slaughtered dwarves and even humans in conquest during the 1st and 2nd age. They were incredibly cruel and completely indifferent to the sufferings of men at the end of the 3rd age. They sent some small force as a show, but most were creeping out the back door on boats, hell with Middle Earth, off to paradise!!!!

Why am I being a lore monger about Tolkien on a GW2 board? I have no clue. Knee jerk reflex. Sorry...

The charr paradigm shift was the only thing that kept me playing GW2 for a month, despite my mind going on and on about how much I was grinding and how unfun it was. There was this other part of my mind that was revelling in an honest to goodness intelligent paradigm shift. It's one of the few things I still praise about the game. Showing a once foe as being simply the 'other side' of a war, handling the perceptions in regards to that, and helping people understand how much was government war propaganda on both sides versus the actual people...

If only the writing of the rest of the game had been as good as that of the charr, if only the design of their city had lived up to the writing, I might have actually put up with GW2 for another month.

As it stands, the geth continue to be my favourite 'paradigm shift' race. A race that everyone was convinced was completely evil and couldn't be any other way just because we only ever saw one side of them. It's amusing, you still have the Bioware fans who want to run around killing the geth, and despise that we ever saw any other side of them. See, I think of the people who say things like this as being right-wing nutters, the sorts of people who have truly black & white views of the world. Like: Westerners GUD, Easterners BAD, and it's never granular enough to support the people, or to realise that Western governments have done some fairly atrocious things.

For me, as an enlightened person, seeing the other side of a conflict and understanding the perspectives involved is pretty great as far as brain food goes. See, GW2 paints the charr and humans being one as bad as the other due to bad leadership. Mad King Adelbern and his royal loyalists where unyielding psycopaths. Anyone remember how, when presented with Krytan aid in GW1, he was convinced that everything was poisoned, even the toys. I kept raising an eyebrow at him in GW1 and wondering just how much of the war was his fault, for being such a crazy old git.

Then there was the propaganda about charr eating people. Yet at one point in the Prophecies storyline you encounter a bunch of human prisoners who've been kept in a very healthy state for years. Who hadn't been sent to the arena or anything. It was always like, gasp, there were charr who were trying to protect their prisoners and didn't agree with the actions of the Flame Legion. Imagine that. And this was in Prophecies. You'd have to have been completely unobservant to miss that one, I'm sorry. That was the game hitting you over the head with the obvious hammer and telling you that there was more going on here than meets the eye.

But the sad part is is that real world attitudes creep into gamer attitudes. So if a person thinks Westerners GUD, Easterners BAD in a black & white way, then by the same merit they're likely going to think Tyrian Humans GUD, Charr BAD.

What a shame.

Oh so you don't like it means it's directly bad?

I for one find the GW2 stance on Charr much better than in GW1.
In GW1 they were just the bad guys, while in GW2 there are differences.
Charr are a society, where different people have different opinions.

What feels better?
1) A pure good/bad portrait like we had in GW1. Charr were evil that killed the good humans.

or

2) A more variable society, where some Charr are hostile to almost everything (flame legion), some only accept the peace treaty with the humans, and where some charr just live among other races.
This feels much more realistic/mature to me..

Corvindi, on 08 December 2012 - 08:03 AM, said:

Yeah this game is too grindy for me too.  Having experienced GW1, I thought GW2 would be similar.  In GW1, most of the things to buy in the store are only cosmetic and you can't convert real money into gold in GW1.  You can also get max stat gear easily for all your characters in GW1 and I thought GW2 would be similar, except that it allows you to convert real money into gold.

I should have foreseen that in order to encourage more people to spend real money, gold would have to be harder to come by.  That, in turn, would mean more grind for gold for those who don't spend real money for them.  This would explain a lot of things in GW2.

Some people justify the gold sinks by saying that they are to curb inflation.  But how much is enough?  Is there such a thing as too much gold sink?  For example, one of my pet peeve is the 15% tax (listing fee+transaction fee) every time you sell something on the TP.  To me that is a huge percentage of our cut, can you imagine how much gold they tax everyday just from that alone?  For those who says gold sinks are good, how about they increase it to a 99% tax every time you trade.  Wouldn't that be better then?  How much of a gold sink is too much?  There has to be a limit but nobody, including those who favor gold sinks, can answer what the limit should be.  I don't know what the limit is myself, but I deem that currently we have too much gold sink gauging from the prices of max stat gear and incoming gold for a casual player like me.

It's been broadly accepted by the community at large that they are manipulating the drop rates behind the scenes.  The fact that they can control value/demand and scarcity is a powerful tool in leveraging the value of gold and therefore driving people to the cash shop to convert gems->gold.  In fact, there should be no reason that they cannot change the drop rates on the fly.  The official forums are heavy proof that they believe in controlling the perception of things, so many do not believe them when they say otherwise.

The jump change was to fix a wall-hacking issue.  While I applaud the effort, it clearly wasn't QA'd properly.  The entire QA process is balls and a sham for a game that's been in development so long with modern development systems in process, like Agile.

If the jump change had been seamless beyond fixing wall-hacking, there would never have been a need to bring it up.  Players who were wall-hacking would comment it on it, but no one playing the game legitimately would have batted an eye.  But instead, it broke the game.  A core part of the game.  And so now people are upset.

That's the value of a proper QA process.  When fixes do not actually work, when patch notes are worded incorrectly and changes that should appear seamless actually break your game for the playerbase to see.. That is shitty QA.  Either from QA, or the people who are managing the QA.

I absolutely love these fanboys who actually want to defend the waypoint travel costs.

Odd how in GW1 waypoint travel was free, and yet  the game ran fine? Magic perhaps?