AMA summary

Dear Arenanet and Gaile Gray,

It would be great if you would post AMA summary from reddit in this forum, seeing as this is the official forum. The reason is that there are actually countries who blocked reddit (it's true, Indonesia is example).https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Reddit-blocked-by-the-Indonesian-governmentWould be great to know what has been discussed.

Thank you!

EDIT: @Healix.5819 kindly posted the summary below, which I believe came from Dulfy. Scroll below or click one of the links.https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/74re46/pof_developer_ama_summary/http://dulfy.net/2017/10/06/gw2-path-of-fire-reddit-developer-ama-summary/

Within a day or two, Dulfy will have the summary. Hopefully, that site is not blocked for you.

Good luck.

Wait when did they even announce an AMA? There's a new AMA?!?!

I find it still ridiculous that they don't use stil ltheir own official forums for thigns like this, AMAS and so on ... before they started working on the new version of the forum, they knew exactly, what kind of FUNCTIONS this new forum version needs to be able, to do this stuff also here.They know, what reddit offers, what the old version of our forum didn't, so why in hell didn't they just use their chance while they looked for competent forum providers/technology also for one, that is able to give the official forum also the same functions and features, that Reddit has and that our official forum so far not, which is the only reason, why the devs are there doing all the stuff they should do here..

As long as this fasct doesn't change could anet practially call Reddit their official forum, as long their do always the most important information stuff like these AMAS or other important discussions only there, whikle treating those which care for this forum like 2nd class members which always get first only the summaries of everythign, once the AMAS, discussions ect. are over

This reddit stuff splits the community!! The first thing I#d care for as a forum owner, if I see, that there is something that splits my community, when I'm gong about to rework my forum is, to improve the forum with the features, that are the reason for why my community is splitted between various platforms, os that they don't have a reason anymore to go somewhere elsewhere to get their official infos about the game.Thats the reason why you have official forums, because they are the place, where players should always get the most important and latest official infos about the game FIRST, it should be their number one go to place, and not firts Reddit, then here, just to see, if heres a short summary about everythign that has been discussed first at Reddit.

I won't support ever this Reddit Site. I go here, because I want to read what is important to know and to discuss officially, because I know, I will receive here always first the infos I need to know... not first like some days after everything has been talked about somewhere else, only because the Devs aren't able to make an own official forum, which provides the features they need, which they find on an other side...

@Fenom.9457 said:Wait when did they even announce an AMA? There's a new AMA?!?!

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/8039/dev-celebration-october-6-2017#latest

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/74re46/pof_developer_ama_summary/

General

• Crystal Oasis night sky texture is low res and doesn’t scale with resolution. Any plan to fix? – We are already using very large textures for the sky and making them larger could reduce perf or cause other issues
• Amnoon was a lot larger initially but had to be downsized due to performance and to add more content to the other parts of the map. The noble quarter for example hadn’t been devastated by a sandstorm!
• We did many weeks worth of performance tuning. A lot of it was just changing scripts to be more performant, but the engineers also did a lot of small improvements on the code side to things such as AI in order to make these massive maps playable when filled with players.
• We’re closely looking at the outputs of the expansion, paying particular attention to the metas. We don’t have anything to announce at this time, but will make changes as necessary to make the investment in conquering the metas be rewarding.
• The focus of the maps for Path of Fire was around deep and meaningful exploration, and reconnecting with the pure sense of discovery. Map wide metas didn’t have a place in this expansion but I wouldn’t say they are gone from future releases.
• Palawa Joko had a big musical number that got cut.
• Weather effects – It was something we’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have time before. We wanted to add them into this expansion to give areas more moods from just day/night. You’ll notice the rainstorm from the south of Riverlands will be on at the same time as the one in the north of Desolation too! You may also notice some content changes that accompany the weather
• It’s likely that we won’t be adding new weapons to core professions (baseline). Elite specializations allow us to implement weapons with more direct themes and flavor, and ensure a more modular (within the elite spec) way to balance weapons.
• What determines how many Elegy Mosaics you get from a specific boss? It’s pretty random, you’re right. There are the once-a-day cooldowns for some, but drops overall are “the luck of the draw… drop.”
• You can expect recipes and updates for ascended crafting for the desert coming in a future update.
• Bounties in future/old maps – That’s going to be up to those content teams. I can say that my intention was for it to be easy to plug into future content, I’ll have to leave you in suspense if things worked out as planned!
• Any updates on the progress of high DPI support for the UI – Soon
• Skins not previewable in collections until they are unlocked – This was a bug left over from the Demo build. Should be fixed in a future update
• What happened to the health bar feature becoming yellow for a brief moment when u deal damage? – This is a feature that we’ve been working on in our dev environment but hasn’t gone through all of our gates yet, thus not released.
• They had an open world PvP event in Vabbi but had to cut it due to performance reasons.
• For our environments we took a lot of inspiration from real life! From Turkey, Egypt, Africa to even closer locations like Bryce Canyon and high desert type landscapes.
• Bounties difficulty – We’ve been making minor changes to some that we saw were outside the difficulty we had planned
• Guild Content – We don’t have a guild content team, so as to the “will we ever…” questions, we have no official plans there. We do have passionate devs who sometimes work in their spare time. But again, nothing currently in development.
• Town Clothes – Town clothes provided non-combat appearance, and tonics provide non-combat appearance, so that’s why they got translated that way back in the day. I agree it’s weird. It’s one of those things that I’d love to improve, but probably won’t, because it’s not worth derailing a team that could otherwise be making great new content.

Class Balance

• Scourge being unable to maintain 3 shades at once was a design choice. Keeping 3 shades up at once is intended to be a temporary boost to coverage before returning to 1 or 2 shades for a time. Shorter periods of increased coverage allows us to put a little more power into the skills themselves.
• Sorry – it is NOT intended that stacking multiple shades compounds their effects. We’re going to make changes while keeping a close eye on the power of the Scourge across game modes and adjust it over time accordingly. Frankly, the Sand Shades were one of the most controversial (and dangerous!) mechanics we added with the Path of Fire Elite Specs.
• There are a few changes being looked into for the Weaver, to improve some damage numbers with Sword. Barrier numbers overall have been balanced So that it’s a boost of survivability, but not the primary source of it. We’ve experienced periods of godlike weaver survivability (internally) due to barriers being too strong, so we’ll be careful with any increases. We’ll continue to monitor the numbers, analytics and feedback, but for right now we’re holding them where they are until the sword damage numbers shake out.
• We’re planning some changes for weapons we feel are undertuned, definitely
• Sand shark pet – It was something a lot of us wanted to do, internally, but there were technical issues that arose from it. One of the biggest factors was how it gets treated when you’re not on a ground that really supports it. Picture something like a thin wooden platform. You’d literally see a floating shark embedded in the wood. Or stone. Or steel. It’d be pretty awkward and is not the kind of visual we’re okay with putting into the game.
• What is the long-term goal for power vs. condi balance in PvE – Power is intended to be more spike damage-centric. Condi more ramping sustained damage. Currently there are some issues with how quickly condition damage can be spiked up, negating the benefits of power damage. If I presented you with a power skill that dealt 1,000 damage instantaneously and a condition one that dealt 1,000 damage over 4 seconds there wouldn’t be a question about what build to choose; you’d go with the instant option every time. Not counting other effects, condition skills must inflict more damage over their duration in order to make power vs. condi into a real choice. Moving forward we’ll be aiming changes to bring a bit more parity between the options through the ramp time and using that to emphasize some of the differences. That said, a fundamental issue is that foes whose health pools allow them to survive a significant amount of time (beyond the point of condition stack ramping) are going to favor condition builds unless they specifically have mechanics which deal with conditions.
• Kalla being chosed as the new Rev legend – We chose Kalla because she’s a huge figure in charr history and partly responsible for a major cultural shift that made the charr nation more unified and more powerful. And we also wanted to achieve a better gender and racial parity among the Revenant legends, so a charr female fit the bill perfectly
• Will the DPS be pushed up from the older classes to be more in-line with the newer ones or will the newer ones be pushed downwards to be in-line with HoT classes – We’re going to try to bring them together bit more, but we don’t want them to be the same. That’ll require some combination of up and down changes based on what each spec is aimed at – for some it is more damage, for others more utility, movement, support, etc. We tend to be more critical of the things we work on – at the moment Scourge is an outlier with high value both defensively and offensively. I’d like to separate those options a bit more.

Mounts

• Mastery point in tomb of primeval kings is intended for griffon mount.
• There are no plans right now for a legendary mount. We don’t have different quality tiers of mounts, just different ways to acquire them like griffon vs the other mounts.
• Instant cross-mounting while already on a mount – This was considered during development but there were significant concerns from animation. However, we’re looking into ways to streamline this process a bit
• In terms of technical challenges: huge amounts of the tech that went into mounts are wrapped around the effort to make them feel responsive on the client. We had to build an entirely new scripting-style system to handle all the things they could do, and then those functions are all mirrored between client and server; keeping the two properly in sync, though, has been a ferocious (and ongoing) challenge.
• Currently you can’t use mounts while being transformed – This will likely stay. We currently don’t really really have different classifications of transforms(they are used in all sorts of ways across the game) and a lot of them that would be cause issues or balance concerns if we let you mount and remove the transform.
• Originally, you could interact with many things while mounted. However, there were a lot of cases where things would completely break if you interacted while mounted, especially in core Tyria. With the number of different kinds of things that can happen on interact, with some of them being quite complicated, it’s a lot safer to dismount the player before taking those actions. We removed this to prevent those things from breaking while still maintaining consistency with behavior for the mount interactions in general.
• Radial Mount menu – we actually did look into a radial menu. Early in expansion development we explored several options for quick mount-selection, including a radial menu, and we went with the skill-select style menu because it would be the most familiar/friendly way to introduce mount selection. That said, a radial may not be available in the game now, but if there were enough player requests for it…

Story

• Ree Soesbee no longer works for Anet.
• The Narrative team for PoF had specific assignments, but there was a ton of overlap and virtually every Narrative person contributed to both open world and story steps.
• Regarding the humor in Season 3 – Season 3 went for a lighter tone, but Path of Fire is a bit darker, more serious. That stated, there are moments of levity to balance out the grim subject matter. Rytlock and Canach have a chemistry, so it’s in character for them to banter back and forth. We hear the comments, though, and have been adjusting future content to be more serious when warranted. It’s all in striking a balance.
• Vlast – Vlast was always intended to be something of a tragic character, and from the beginning we wanted our Commander to have to pick up the pieces of his life. In large part one of the things we consistently strive to champion is player agency, and having a dragon lead us through the desert is much less impactful than leading the way ourselves.
• Storytelling in PoF – We tried to tell a simpler story with fewer characters so that we could devote more time to presenting it more effectively. We also looked at how we were using Cinematics and decided that the more we could keep the player in control (via in game action instead of a cutscene), the stronger the player’s narrative experience would be. Every time we had the player make a difficult decision or encounter a major event, we tried to give space for all the allies to chime in. I think this helped a lot in tying Kasmeer, Rytlock, & Canach to the various conflicts, and giving moments to show how they were evolving. This was definitely easier with less characters.
• At what point did you want one of the human gods to go bad? – We talked about it during very early planning for Season 3 of Living World
• As for Joko, he wasn’t the focus of this expansion, and with a character as rich as he is, giving him an expanded role in Path of Fire would only have served to randomize our story. Have no fear though, you’ve not seen the last of Palawa Joko!
• One way story development changed from HoT to PoF was that in HoT, we started with a stable list of locations we wanted to visit, in the order we wanted to visit them. For PoF, we gave ourselves a lot more leeway to pick and choose the places we would go to support the story as it unfolded. And it’s not like there was a shortage of awesome places to consider in the desert region..
• Also, we looked at our story plan, considered it carefully, and then added a whole lot of Canach to it.

Raids/Fractals/Dungeons

• Regarding raid difficulty – we’re not working on different difficulty tiers. We’re focused on making great content and don’t want to slow that down by multiplying the amount of work. We’re hard at work on the next raid and development is going well; no announcements today
• The raids released during Season 4 may use both Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns masteries
• Any plans to better-reward boon stripping as mechanic in any/all PvE – I can speak for fractals team in that we are trying to lean less on instabilities to provide boonplay in encounters. Building them directly into the content is preferrable.
• There was no dungeon team associated with Path of Fire

WvW

• Max number of players in a wvw map is fixed and same for all worlds on a map ( can’t give out numbers). Players have already figured its in the ballpark of 100 per team. This isn’t far off.
• Wall Health in WvW – We recently did a pass on all the walls and they should all be the same health. If you have found a specific wall that is different then report it using “/bug” in game please ????
• Regarding closed WvW servers – We weekly monitor world populations and adjust them as WvW players move around
• We’re looking at the condition damage issues that are inherent to the scaling number of players in WvW. Major mode-centric changes are a major part of balance patches and we’ll be iterating through several potential changes specifically for WvW. I wouldn’t expect huge mode-specific balance changes before the first post-PoF balance patch.
• We calculate a Worlds “fullness” based on the amount of WvW playhours over a period of time. Specific details about world populations is something we don’t discuss externally. Both JQ and FA are within 10% of BGs playtime stat. Many of the hosts with links have a larger total population play time then BG.
• Distinguishable Winds of Disenchantment, ie different colors for friendly and enemy bubbles – Looking into it.

PvP

• Could you explain the thought process in allowing the new elite specializations from Path of Fire to be used mid-season in Ranked PvP? – we gave it quite a lot of thought. In the end, we felt it was better than either having a shortened season or having a really long off-season.

@Healix.5819 said:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/74re46/pof_developer_ama_summary/

General

• Crystal Oasis night sky texture is low res and doesn’t scale with resolution. Any plan to fix? – We are already using very large textures for the sky and making them larger could reduce perf or cause other issues
• Amnoon was a lot larger initially but had to be downsized due to performance and to add more content to the other parts of the map. The noble quarter for example hadn’t been devastated by a sandstorm!
• We did many weeks worth of performance tuning. A lot of it was just changing scripts to be more performant, but the engineers also did a lot of small improvements on the code side to things such as AI in order to make these massive maps playable when filled with players.
• We’re closely looking at the outputs of the expansion, paying particular attention to the metas. We don’t have anything to announce at this time, but will make changes as necessary to make the investment in conquering the metas be rewarding.
• The focus of the maps for Path of Fire was around deep and meaningful exploration, and reconnecting with the pure sense of discovery. Map wide metas didn’t have a place in this expansion but I wouldn’t say they are gone from future releases.
• Palawa Joko had a big musical number that got cut.
• Weather effects – It was something we’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have time before. We wanted to add them into this expansion to give areas more moods from just day/night. You’ll notice the rainstorm from the south of Riverlands will be on at the same time as the one in the north of Desolation too! You may also notice some content changes that accompany the weather
• It’s likely that we won’t be adding new weapons to core professions (baseline). Elite specializations allow us to implement weapons with more direct themes and flavor, and ensure a more modular (within the elite spec) way to balance weapons.
• What determines how many Elegy Mosaics you get from a specific boss? It’s pretty random, you’re right. There are the once-a-day cooldowns for some, but drops overall are “the luck of the draw… drop.”
• You can expect recipes and updates for ascended crafting for the desert coming in a future update.
• Bounties in future/old maps – That’s going to be up to those content teams. I can say that my intention was for it to be easy to plug into future content, I’ll have to leave you in suspense if things worked out as planned!
• Any updates on the progress of high DPI support for the UI – Soon
• Skins not previewable in collections until they are unlocked – This was a bug left over from the Demo build. Should be fixed in a future update
• What happened to the health bar feature becoming yellow for a brief moment when u deal damage? – This is a feature that we’ve been working on in our dev environment but hasn’t gone through all of our gates yet, thus not released.
• They had an open world PvP event in Vabbi but had to cut it due to performance reasons.
• For our environments we took a lot of inspiration from real life! From Turkey, Egypt, Africa to even closer locations like Bryce Canyon and high desert type landscapes.
• Bounties difficulty – We’ve been making minor changes to some that we saw were outside the difficulty we had planned
• Guild Content – We don’t have a guild content team, so as to the “will we ever…” questions, we have no official plans there. We do have passionate devs who sometimes work in their spare time. But again, nothing currently in development.
• Town Clothes – Town clothes provided non-combat appearance, and tonics provide non-combat appearance, so that’s why they got translated that way back in the day. I agree it’s weird. It’s one of those things that I’d love to improve, but probably won’t, because it’s not worth derailing a team that could otherwise be making great new content.

Class Balance

• Scourge being unable to maintain 3 shades at once was a design choice. Keeping 3 shades up at once is intended to be a temporary boost to coverage before returning to 1 or 2 shades for a time. Shorter periods of increased coverage allows us to put a little more power into the skills themselves.
• Sorry – it is NOT intended that stacking multiple shades compounds their effects. We’re going to make changes while keeping a close eye on the power of the Scourge across game modes and adjust it over time accordingly. Frankly, the Sand Shades were one of the most controversial (and dangerous!) mechanics we added with the Path of Fire Elite Specs.
• There are a few changes being looked into for the Weaver, to improve some damage numbers with Sword. Barrier numbers overall have been balanced So that it’s a boost of survivability, but not the primary source of it. We’ve experienced periods of godlike weaver survivability (internally) due to barriers being too strong, so we’ll be careful with any increases. We’ll continue to monitor the numbers, analytics and feedback, but for right now we’re holding them where they are until the sword damage numbers shake out.
• We’re planning some changes for weapons we feel are undertuned, definitely
• Sand shark pet – It was something a lot of us wanted to do, internally, but there were technical issues that arose from it. One of the biggest factors was how it gets treated when you’re not on a ground that really supports it. Picture something like a thin wooden platform. You’d literally see a floating shark embedded in the wood. Or stone. Or steel. It’d be pretty awkward and is not the kind of visual we’re okay with putting into the game.
• What is the long-term goal for power vs. condi balance in PvE – Power is intended to be more spike damage-centric. Condi more ramping sustained damage. Currently there are some issues with how quickly condition damage can be spiked up, negating the benefits of power damage. If I presented you with a power skill that dealt 1,000 damage instantaneously and a condition one that dealt 1,000 damage over 4 seconds there wouldn’t be a question about what build to choose; you’d go with the instant option every time. Not counting other effects, condition skills must inflict more damage over their duration in order to make power vs. condi into a real choice. Moving forward we’ll be aiming changes to bring a bit more parity between the options through the ramp time and using that to emphasize some of the differences. That said, a fundamental issue is that foes whose health pools allow them to survive a significant amount of time (beyond the point of condition stack ramping) are going to favor condition builds unless they specifically have mechanics which deal with conditions.
• Kalla being chosed as the new Rev legend – We chose Kalla because she’s a huge figure in charr history and partly responsible for a major cultural shift that made the charr nation more unified and more powerful. And we also wanted to achieve a better gender and racial parity among the Revenant legends, so a charr female fit the bill perfectly
• Will the DPS be pushed up from the older classes to be more in-line with the newer ones or will the newer ones be pushed downwards to be in-line with HoT classes – We’re going to try to bring them together bit more, but we don’t want them to be the same. That’ll require some combination of up and down changes based on what each spec is aimed at – for some it is more damage, for others more utility, movement, support, etc. We tend to be more critical of the things we work on – at the moment Scourge is an outlier with high value both defensively and offensively. I’d like to separate those options a bit more.

Mounts

• Mastery point in tomb of primeval kings is intended for griffon mount.
• There are no plans right now for a legendary mount. We don’t have different quality tiers of mounts, just different ways to acquire them like griffon vs the other mounts.
• Instant cross-mounting while already on a mount – This was considered during development but there were significant concerns from animation. However, we’re looking into ways to streamline this process a bit
• In terms of technical challenges: huge amounts of the tech that went into mounts are wrapped around the effort to make them feel responsive on the client. We had to build an entirely new scripting-style system to handle all the things they could do, and then those functions are all mirrored between client and server; keeping the two properly in sync, though, has been a ferocious (and ongoing) challenge.
• Currently you can’t use mounts while being transformed – This will likely stay. We currently don’t really really have different classifications of transforms(they are used in all sorts of ways across the game) and a lot of them that would be cause issues or balance concerns if we let you mount and remove the transform.
• Originally, you could interact with many things while mounted. However, there were a lot of cases where things would completely break if you interacted while mounted, especially in core Tyria. With the number of different kinds of things that can happen on interact, with some of them being quite complicated, it’s a lot safer to dismount the player before taking those actions. We removed this to prevent those things from breaking while still maintaining consistency with behavior for the mount interactions in general.
• Radial Mount menu – we actually did look into a radial menu. Early in expansion development we explored several options for quick mount-selection, including a radial menu, and we went with the skill-select style menu because it would be the most familiar/friendly way to introduce mount selection. That said, a radial may not be available in the game now, but if there were enough player requests for it…

Story

• Ree Soesbee no longer works for Anet.
• The Narrative team for PoF had specific assignments, but there was a ton of overlap and virtually every Narrative person contributed to both open world and story steps.
• Regarding the humor in Season 3 – Season 3 went for a lighter tone, but Path of Fire is a bit darker, more serious. That stated, there are moments of levity to balance out the grim subject matter. Rytlock and Canach have a chemistry, so it’s in character for them to banter back and forth. We hear the comments, though, and have been adjusting future content to be more serious when warranted. It’s all in striking a balance.
• Vlast – Vlast was always intended to be something of a tragic character, and from the beginning we wanted our Commander to have to pick up the pieces of his life. In large part one of the things we consistently strive to champion is player agency, and having a dragon lead us through the desert is much less impactful than leading the way ourselves.
• Storytelling in PoF – We tried to tell a simpler story with fewer characters so that we could devote more time to presenting it more effectively. We also looked at how we were using Cinematics and decided that the more we could keep the player in control (via in game action instead of a cutscene), the stronger the player’s narrative experience would be. Every time we had the player make a difficult decision or encounter a major event, we tried to give space for all the allies to chime in. I think this helped a lot in tying Kasmeer, Rytlock, & Canach to the various conflicts, and giving moments to show how they were evolving. This was definitely easier with less characters.
• At what point did you want one of the human gods to go bad? – We talked about it during very early planning for Season 3 of Living World
• As for Joko, he wasn’t the focus of this expansion, and with a character as rich as he is, giving him an expanded role in Path of Fire would only have served to randomize our story. Have no fear though, you’ve not seen the last of Palawa Joko!
• One way story development changed from HoT to PoF was that in HoT, we started with a stable list of locations we wanted to visit, in the order we wanted to visit them. For PoF, we gave ourselves a lot more leeway to pick and choose the places we would go to support the story as it unfolded. And it’s not like there was a shortage of awesome places to consider in the desert region..
• Also, we looked at our story plan, considered it carefully, and then added a whole lot of Canach to it.

Raids/Fractals/Dungeons

• Regarding raid difficulty – we’re not working on different difficulty tiers. We’re focused on making great content and don’t want to slow that down by multiplying the amount of work. We’re hard at work on the next raid and development is going well; no announcements today
• The raids released during Season 4 may use both Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns masteries
• Any plans to better-reward boon stripping as mechanic in any/all PvE – I can speak for fractals team in that we are trying to lean less on instabilities to provide boonplay in encounters. Building them directly into the content is preferrable.
• There was no dungeon team associated with Path of Fire

WvW

• Max number of players in a wvw map is fixed and same for all worlds on a map ( can’t give out numbers). Players have already figured its in the ballpark of 100 per team. This isn’t far off.
• Wall Health in WvW – We recently did a pass on all the walls and they should all be the same health. If you have found a specific wall that is different then report it using “/bug” in game please ????
• Regarding closed WvW servers – We weekly monitor world populations and adjust them as WvW players move around
• We’re looking at the condition damage issues that are inherent to the scaling number of players in WvW. Major mode-centric changes are a major part of balance patches and we’ll be iterating through several potential changes specifically for WvW. I wouldn’t expect huge mode-specific balance changes before the first post-PoF balance patch.
• We calculate a Worlds “fullness” based on the amount of WvW playhours over a period of time. Specific details about world populations is something we don’t discuss externally. Both JQ and FA are within 10% of BGs playtime stat. Many of the hosts with links have a larger total population play time then BG.
• Distinguishable Winds of Disenchantment, ie different colors for friendly and enemy bubbles – Looking into it.

PvP

• Could you explain the thought process in allowing the new elite specializations from Path of Fire to be used mid-season in Ranked PvP? – we gave it quite a lot of thought. In the end, we felt it was better than either having a shortened season or having a really long off-season.

Thank you, you are doing Kormir's work.

Mount skins?

Why wasn't this asked?

@Healix.5819 said:

• Sand shark pet – It was something a lot of us wanted to do, internally, but there were technical issues that arose from it. One of the biggest factors was how it gets treated when you’re not on a ground that really supports it. Picture something like a thin wooden platform. You’d literally see a floating shark embedded in the wood. Or stone. Or steel. It’d be pretty awkward and is not the kind of visual we’re okay with putting into the game.

Sand shark pet is already in the game implemented in the exact same way it is described here. Don't they know their own game? Also, it clearly isn't a "technical issue" with the sand shark pet it clearly is a "design problem".

Overall uninteresting questions and some questionable answers in this...

Nothing about more visible/ customize-able health bars :anguished:

@Healix.5819 said:

• Vlast – Vlast was always intended to be something of a tragic character, and from the beginning we wanted our Commander to have to pick up the pieces of his life. In large part one of the things we consistently strive to champion is player agency, and having a dragon lead us through the desert is much less impactful than leading the way ourselves.

Please remember that for future content, especially with Taimi. The entirety of LS3 was one unpleasant slog of being ordered around and condescended to by Taimi -- and if not her, then some other so-much-smarter-and-better-and-more-important-than-thou NPC (Jennah, Anise, Livia). Allowing the PC to draw their own conclusions, come up with their own solutions, contact people and organize things by themselves, in short: show intelligence, initiative and leadership instead of being some third-rate errand runner, is something I sorely missed.

Also, if you try to remember player agency more in the future, please also remember to let NPCs show some positive emotion towards the PC while you're at it? Concern, support, curiosity, friendly banter, what have you. For example, it was seriously unpleasant to go through HoT as a sylvari not only without my so-called "friends" bothering to show me that they had my back, but also having to put up with their hostility and suspicion. In PoF, the complete lack of emotional reaction to my character's actual death and resurrection was similarly frustrating and immersion-breaking. It feels like the NPCs only care about each other, which makes me dislike them in turn, and dislike how much my character is made to care about and support them with no reciprocity.

Finally, player agency should take PC background into consideration much more often. A human isn't a sylvari isn't a charr isn't a norn. The times I enjoy storytelling in this game the most is when it decides to remember that I'm playing a sylvari, a Vigil member, a certain class, whatever, instead of a generic faceless blob.

• Storytelling in PoF – We tried to tell a simpler story with fewer characters so that we could devote more time to presenting it more effectively. We also looked at how we were using Cinematics and decided that the more we could keep the player in control (via in game action instead of a cutscene), the stronger the player’s narrative experience would be. Every time we had the player make a difficult decision or encounter a major event, we tried to give space for all the allies to chime in. I think this helped a lot in tying Kasmeer, Rytlock, & Canach to the various conflicts, and giving moments to show how they were evolving. This was definitely easier with less characters.

I did notice and appreciate this, both the reduced cast of characters and the "storytelling through action". It's always highly frustrating when devs take the cheap and easy way to force something (usually a death) by taking away player control and making the PC stand around drooling uselessly while NPCs act out whatever it is the writers want to happen.

• Regarding raid difficulty – we’re not working on different difficulty tiers. We’re focused on making great content and don’t want to slow that down by multiplying the amount of work.

Why not make that content more accessible then, instead of essentially promoting all the ugly attitudes and behaviors that come with "exclusive" content for a minority?

@Adenin.5973 said:Mount skins?

Why wasn't this asked?

@Healix.5819 said:

• Sand shark pet – It was something a lot of us wanted to do, internally, but there were technical issues that arose from it. One of the biggest factors was how it gets treated when you’re not on a ground that really supports it. Picture something like a thin wooden platform. You’d literally see a floating shark embedded in the wood. Or stone. Or steel. It’d be pretty awkward and is not the kind of visual we’re okay with putting into the game.

There is a mini sand shark, yes. They're talking about Sand Shark as a Ranger pet. Meaning much bigger, much more noticable.

@Adenin.5973 said:Mount skins?

Why wasn't this asked?

@Healix.5819 said:

• Sand shark pet – It was something a lot of us wanted to do, internally, but there were technical issues that arose from it. One of the biggest factors was how it gets treated when you’re not on a ground that really supports it. Picture something like a thin wooden platform. You’d literally see a floating shark embedded in the wood. Or stone. Or steel. It’d be pretty awkward and is not the kind of visual we’re okay with putting into the game.

Dont think that the question was about the minipet.