Smoky.5348

Enjoy your future, I guess, 'cause ANET sure doesn't seem interested in doing anything with past content. Just keep making new stuff and leave the rest of the game behind. How many core Tyria bugs were fixed this patch? Two? And another two for EoD? That sure doesn't instill me with confidence for the future, but for some reason we can't both get what we want for this open-ended MMO.

I'm about to floor all of you. I've been playing primarily Core Tyria. Interesting to hear it's been going on everywhere else, but I can't say I'm surprised; I've heard hints of this sort of thing before, and there are so many more cheevos asking for events these days. I don't believe that applies to Core Tyria, only expansion maps. And even then, it takes a minute for it to register who's left. I've played a lot of open world PoF and I don't think I've seen an event scale down (but I don't see many leavers in PoF, either). Funnily enough, I was afraid the turtle was gonna cause all sorts of problems, but even now I don't see it very often in my neck of the woods. Instead, it's the skyscale that's fulfilling everything I was worried about, which seems odd to me; the skyscale's attack pattern looks significantly more boring than the turtle's. Though, maybe that's the leechers making it look bad.

For the past few months, I've been getting a high frequency of players joining an event just to quickly abandon me alone with the now upscaled difficulty. Did everyone forget the courtesy of sticking with an event unless there are multiple people there to handle it? And if that's not happening, sometimes there's skyscalers sniping all the enemies from a mile away, stopping me from getting sure credit despite being in the thick of it. There aren't as many of them as the leavers, but I still encounter them at least once per week. Eventing now somehow feels worse than the days when I had to put a PSA about hogging kills in map chat.

Please separate rim lighting from the High shader option. I shouldn't have to abstain from having better visual quality to avoid a graphic effect that I don't like.

Whaaaaaat? That's really weird. ANET, why you do this?

Did...the default backstraps not already count as an invisible backpack skin? Or, are they only invisible on charr or something?

Ahhh, the classic "incomplete transformation cancel" buffer. l never really understood why some bundles hide the backpack when they don't transform you in any way. Some bundles show 'em fine, so what's the deal? Reads to me like, "I didn't pay attention to which transformation I used as a parent".

Buffing core Tyria HP will not help. More health means you need to do more damage to get your minimum credit. Dealt 10k damage? Nope, no credit if that didn't pass the percentage threshold. This literally wouldn't be an issue if the game would just give you pity credit if you at least scratch the enemy. Easy band-aid fix. AFK leachers are gonna AFK leech no matter what, especially now that there's skyscale ""combat"", so no one's getting hurt from such a change. If anything, we need it to compete with the skyscales and DPS freaks. Of course, it'd be nice if events scaled more intelligently. When an event scales well, all it's doing is spamming more mobs or buffing their levels. It'd be better if they spread those spawns across multiple areas so players have to split up and, you know, take actual advantage of their numbers.

You mean the weird zooms that go too far and too close, then suddenly snap back to where it should've gone? It'd be nice if they even made it functional.

I love dumping on ANET, but that's not true. When EoD added a crate-carrying event that slowed you to walking speed, they realized charr had no walking animations for two-handed bundles and finally made new ones. They even took the opportunity to polish up other missing charr movements! It was one of the few times ANET did something right! And, it was for something as miniscule as walking anims. You take what you can get.

Didn't ANET say last year they were gonna work on better communication? Devs, fix it.

Want me to get into the nitty gritty of it? Okay, most of the mechanics suck. Red/Green Light encourages you to stand still in a movement-based game. Ley-Line Buildup doesn't spawn places to discharge your stacks half the time, so you just die after awhile if you get unlucky. The one where all attacks are blocked until you get close will randomly block your melee attacks anyway. And, all the other ones have vague or no audio to signal when the bad thing is gonna come out (love getting knocked down with no warning), or they're complete non-issues that you never notice (do Healing Tendrils do anything?). That's all to say nothing about certain mechanics gelling horribly with certain champs because it randomly assigns them. It's one thing that ANET reuses them so much, but it's another when they do that and the things just suck on their own. But, why improve 'em when they're too busy with SotO, right?

They really do just slap these abilities on whenever they can't come up with anything else. It was cool enough as a Path of Fire bounty standard, but then they just keep showing up. Have they even added new ones?

At the risk of an unwanted interjection, I think you're missing the point. The complaint isn't that they're free, it's that the stream trickles in slowly and they have to be managed like a resource. They are not given out like candy, and the more characters you have, the thinner your reserve of them gets. And, just because it's possible to amass a large amount when you play the game for a long time doesn't mean they're quick to come across when you don't play a lot. Yep, and look at our current alternative: characters standing around, animated with emotes, barely moving their mouth, maybe they walk somewhere. Those complainers might have had a point back then, but we have retrospect now. And, no, the general audiences may never be media literate. Just look at me.

Shield surfing sounds the closest to what OP wants in practice. There's plenty of mountains and hills to facilitate it, but not a lot end in ramps or similar for launching back up. There's also a potential issue of how easy it is to take fall damage normally. The concept is something I thought of before and would love to have, but it definitely would be mostly a fun novelty. Instead, l get my movement tech kicks from jumping up slopes with a raptor. FPS sliding seems to me like it'd clash with dodge rolling, which maybe it could be a replacement for it like how some classes do. If it absolutely had to function like FPS sliding.

ANET continues to communicate poorly. Forumgoers continue to shoot down every bit of criticism. I'd love to engage more fluently if it were worth a kitten.

Remember core Tyria personal story where we had skippable cutscenes and animated characters when they talk? Best of both worlds back then.

Welp, guess we still can't have something as simple as bump mapping without having to deal with that illogical fresnel light. Guess we're never getting that unless they decide to change graphics things again next year.

I hope when ANET splits the Shader option that they also include normal maps and fresnel rim lighting as individual options. Those two are only available on High setting, but I do not care for the way fresnel lighting makes everyone look like shiny ghosts, so Medium I stick with. The news post only mentioned, "bloom, color grading, color tint, distortion, light rays, and selection outline," so I post this for the sake of assuring all shader options become available. If I may be a bit anecdotal, I am also rather confused why those two effects are locked behind High. They have not been historically expensive effects, except maybe when they were first introduced in the gaming space. It's distortion and light rays and outlines that I've seen tank performance in other games. Very peculiar.

Has ANET said anything specific on the matter or are they still ignoring their community?

I believe this system is in use for weapon master cheevos. For those, it's easier to check what weapon dealt the killing blow than to check what you hit them with last and whether you actually used that weapon for most of your damage. But for nourishment dailies, I'm guessing the new team just coincidentally chose that on-death event and didn't think it'd make a difference to use a more broad one. The fact the new team used a more forgiving event for other kill dailies tells me they didn't think everything through, either for being rushed or not knowing the game engine perfectly. Unfortunately, it's still a pretty edge case thing unless you're around a lot of players all the time, so who knows how long it could take for ANET to take notice.

Outside of the GW2 definition, Activities are all 100% PvP. You directly interact with other players in a competitive context. That is not a PvE experience, and l would not file it under a PvE category. Honestly, they should be full-fledged PvP modes and be expanded upon, but that's a different topic. I do think combining the Activities daily with Adventures does sound like a good compromise, so I wouldn't be opposed to that.

I'm very baffled how often EoD shows up in my dailies when PoF, HoT, and the entirety of core Tyria can be pooled from. What happened to the variety?

Wow. A whole one. When we used to have a choice from twelve total.

This ain't even my thread, so I don't know the answer. If y'all don't see the issue because how small the issue looks to you, then I can't change your minds. My stance is that having a currency cap just hampers the consumer's freedom of choice, but I'll just pick gold and Ascended stuff 'cause l don't need anything else at the moment. I was just filling in the blanks for the OP since I commiserate with their problem.