Sunchaser.9854

I mean honestly i use a fair bit of steam, and outside of steam playtime tracking, and a built in steam community fourms and artwork / review zone for the steam hub, it has quite a fair slight bit of resource bloat. It's usually faster to play games without the bloat and it'll save you like 0.5-1gb ram, not much but nice. I think most of the people looking at the steam release were explicit in looking for regional pricing. Which can be hit or miss since it lets people play or at least expecting a path of fire launch sale on the anniversary. I think there is some command line -portal method or something, that allows you to play your main account on steam, but dlcs purchased from steam will apply to the special steam's account, not the normal gw2 account. There's not a lot of reasons to play on steam if you were playing already other than the free advertising or trickle. But keep in mind 60 gb is still a big download. Maybe people are just still downloading it(?)

I mean hey it might actually be free advertising for player growth. Artificial or not. players could be silently just seeing the advertising and going to gw2's official launcher. In terms of near free advertising sources. Twitch is near one of the easiest and muted tabbed or not, people were still massively engaging with Muk to the point that at one point of time he was singlehandedly 33k viewers and got gw2 to peak over wow for a few moments. Talking with other mmorpg players, it seems like gw2 has always been a lower active pop by mmorpg population. Even with login bots it may be 1/20th the registered accounts of some game so expecting 200% the steam downloads as a 20-139k new mmorpg might have been. Plus gw2 is known for not being a 24/7 grind mmorpg and after ascended you could just log in 5 minutes a day and be fine. Ff14 and WoW just dropped a major content expac ff14 players waited for and WoW a suspiciously timed free xpac+level boost usually sold for 60$ hours before the steam launch. It could be possible people are binging sub mmorpgs to get the most time out of them and coming to gw2 later(?) . But there were many people from the twitch chat saying it was their first time seeing a gw2/raid/fractal/strike. It's almost the freeist advertising you can get. I think it could easily be a economically wise free player growth/advertising strategy.

I hope so. LS anniversary sales only happen once a year. But at least select regions can pay 130$ for it on steam i guess. I hope there's some competition going on though. I remember this evening where like 16 minutes after hearing the news that there would be twitch drops and coming back from a game, i got a announcement WoW was directly competing with the gw2 launch by suddenly giving the last 4 months of shadowlands and a lvl 50 boost free. Gw2 can be a good value over a long time, but people arguing that the lack of development but buy for life model of 50-100$ vs 60+15$ a month wow was usually easier. But a 100$ to start, 15$ to sub? WoW even if it doesn't have the most stellar content still produces like 10-20 dungeons per 2-3 years and some people on steam were like talking about how - Steam users/mmorpg player pov on 100$ All living season Gw2 to "Enjoy the full story" and 15$ linear playthrough of wow to "enjoy the story" And i shrug. We have strikes, i guess? And open world. And Soo won metas? And flying turtles? Idk. At least if there's a anniversary sale we could have more players enjoy the stories and stuff to buy i guess. They're still calling gw2 more of a freemium game i guess that could use stronger selling points for a 100$ story buy in when WoW decides to give it's 60$ away for free for a 15$ sub buy in. Of course it can be more expensive over time but 7 months to break even for a mmorpg that's been 9 years between dungeons seems like it can be a big deal to the dungeon runners. Gw2 is mostly known for open world and the gem shop. At least having some sales would help.. Make the gem shop better(??)

All that hype, the big decade. Well. We got something at least. Right?

I remember starting EoD and seeing 10 S to tele back and forth. Thank the god for mists until i realized i wouldn't be able to teleport back until halfway into the story for the arborstone teleport scroll lol. XD

Honestly, yeah. As much as i liked the ease of casual, hop on 10-20 minutes before work, run a casual dungeon with pugs just to have fun, i don't think there's much want for a looking for raid system here or other games as much ever. WoW lfr(Raid lfg) was a experiment and they found that mechanics like "Boss does +700% for next attack unless you tank swap!, and then having a looking for raid where the other tank is a dps who qued tank for a faster que and left you with +4900% hillariously damage or having a wow druid healer need to shift to bear form to taunt and facetank in squishy leather was hillarious haha. Gw2 baseline difficulty, if i had to pick a default level, would probably be somewhere around Wow heroic/ half mythic without a starting difficulty. But the 3-4 tiered raiding difficulty of content (LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic). Seemed like a good way to make one slice of content have 4 tiers people could access. LFR was a "Tourist mode: que me into the game, i just want to see the cutscenes / Get my 800 Wow G helping bag", with 0% fail rate except for the parts with mechanics that spawnkilled raids 20x over. (Emboldened stacking per death is remarkably almost identical to WoW's Lfg Determination, stacking each death up to +50% more dps, healing and health. vs gw's +50% dps, healing, and +100% health), etc. Still i think the thing was, WoW actually had both a automated system, and a selective system. You could go for a automated matcher for lazy casual matchers, or curate a group for heroic/mythic raids where you were offered their class, role, and experience level (raider.io points for mythic+, clear history for heroic/mythic, or ilvl etc). And since often wow gear ilvl was usually a bit linked to the content a person did or was able to clear. You could know they had got to at least usually beaten some previous raid or mythic+ content. Or if you were casual farming, you could either go for 5 warm bodies as fast as possible just to have a social time with some casual content, or easier gear for mechanics. It wasn't a guarantee, but 80% of the time it was at least a loose litmus. I think for gw2 content, the content you could do with a random lfg currently would probably max out at maybe, current dungeons where respawns are free, the current no preventions from joining lfg kinda soft functions like one. You usually have votekicks to kick trolls and the default option being join is good for quick play but kinda already functions like a lfg. If someone requests "alac healer/dps plz" and 5 pure dps form. You just might not have a healer but go meh, and do the casual easy 3-5 iceblood strikes anyways. (Boneskinner can one shot easily, but that's mostly it anyways. ) A lfg tool for gw2 would probably have options you'd want to select like: Dps, Healer, Full or partial Quickness, Alac roles. But if you wanted, you could literally just brute force lfg to have like a lfg boon bot like jade bot offensives if you really wanted, but most of the stuff is just for optimum dps, you wouldn't really need it for low casual content like punishmentless iceblood strikes/dungeons where even if you died, you'd just respawn or do 2 minute long content 25% slower. It'd be slower but not the end of the world sure. Actual raid content and the eod strikes at base difficulty (and not a special, casual/accessible content mode) might be a mistake for a automated raid finder/group finder at base difficulty though.

Yeah, i never got why scaling was never based off players in a encounter and instead like players in a map. Just one of those quirks other games had, but you could like see obviously new players adding hp to boss fights. While gw2 doesn't display boss hp numbers past %, so you could probably do players in a fight scaling pretty easily with it. Or rework fishing party stacks a bit to make losing those stacks less punishing i hear, so pve fishers and meta events would reward both instead of slightly inconviencing each other perhaps, maybe. etc?

I guess we can only wait and see when the time arrives. I've heard some core players coming for steam say they wanted to to find out their dps with the training zone golem functionality but were blocked due to needing (?) Hot or a expansion to access it(?) Not sure but a api key is pretty handy for wiki features like mastery point unlocks and collection guides. I guess it depends on of there's some way to get one from in-game or use a steam account to register one. Like accounts might not be linked but some sites have steam integrations to see accounts or like add humble bundle keys directly into accounts. Maybe they could add a official steam integration to get api keys directly with a steam linked account? Or they might not, who knows. Can only wait and see, I guess.

As far as things go, I've joined a couple of metadata and beat it the first few tries nut noticed 1/5 fail by a mere 5% dps. I think a big thing people cherish or lament is the fact that in gw2, people can easily complete open world content story with a build that they like or assembled from random drops anywhere from 0.5k-4k random affix builds to 25-35k potentials. I think Soo won's metas requires like 50 people to all contribute and boon maybe to like 7-10k dps avg over 50 people. It isn't 20-35k raider high but still a group effort that some can carry, others can fail. Many people I've seen are happy doing open world with 0.5-5k dps and happy with it. But when it comes to personal player experiences, its not uncommon to hear one person wonder what the fuss was about, they did good damage and boons and had no problem clearing it 18 times. Another person had lost 18 times, and struggled with turtle. There's no right or wrong playstyle in gw2. All playstyles are viable for gw2 open world and many builds fun. 1k dps or 35k dps, doesn't matter. Mobs all eventually die. But yeah, the ability for players to replay a scuffed run might be good for new players. It's significantly less demanding than gw2 raid content imo but in a place where it's likely to be many open world players first speed bump in the game. And I agree on the idea that maybe toning down frustration points while giving players improvement to aim for could be good for the game. And letting maybe soo won be reAttemptable for 30 minutes sounds like a fair compromise. Keeps the challenge. But adds a second try to a 1-2 hr meta.

Osrs said it didn't want a ge and then had it's population half after about a month of falador park and double with the ge. Most content has waypoints but still likely 1-2/5 characters in a group won't have it which is workable with. Just anticlimactically boring as some 1 paths end before the player arrives or gets completed on 3/5. To say that strong and replayable dungeons with fun and frequent loot drops are usually one of the good parts, not bad parts of a mmorpg seems like a understatement. Gw2 exists. Have they been updated in 9 years? I've been told Anet actually updated them to be less rewarding on steam to intentionally kill the content? And while the fractal system is good, it feels like the fractal level only upgrading on say 25 and 50 75, etc could have minor problems with approach as you could theoretically join like groups. But since they only seem to promote higher, getting stuck at a 74/75 or 49/50 or 24/25 probably wouldn't be uncommon. It'd be neat if they made it so just as long as it was within 5-10 fractal levels you could still get the +1 attunement perhaps. They're only minutes long but some levels needed to rise are barely ran. To say dungeons are usually a mmorpg staple and gw2 were sadly a bit underwhelming to many new players and vets with 9 years of no updates and intentionally reduced rewards. Feels iffy. But I'm sure gw2 players will say it's always been this way and happy with it that way past the currency changes.

The raptor long jump is required to get the bunny since they want you to lurk a while and use the raptor for a bit before you get bunny. Just wait, even though people love the skyscale grind, the raptor lvl 3 is a hinderance, you can wiki for the mastery points if you run out (there's a underwater mastery point like west of one of the big ammoon cities or something), but leveling the raptor to level 3 is one of the shortest things in the game for the mount journey. Just kill random things for 1-3 hours and hunt for mastery points and you'll have it.

Yeah i think mine took about between 1-2 days, but as soon as i had em, it was nice to have. Though yeah, a early noob trap is rushing to buy stuff asap, and then missing eligibility on a sale which could be like the 23rd. I'd also avoid spending gems in case they do like a gems off or pof /eod on sale, but it'd probably only be 5$ i think and only if you don't value the cosmetics which i don't think i mostly use. I mean, 20$ for a boat skin and meh raptor skin is like, 3-5$ of value for 20$ at best for me. I guess the makeover kit could be seen as 5$ but monetizing haircuts is just bleh. The eod deluxe edition specials really aren't worth it to me unless you're really into the boat skin or ugly raptor skin imo.

You guys want to pay g for a bank in the middle of nowhereville? *laughter in pvp zone instant bank and tp and take back and eod Arborstone noises*

Might as well give up at this point. I can't wait for anet to make a fps shooter with a sniper rifle that auto locks onto heads with aim bot and wall hacks so it can be accessible for everyone!

The closest idea we have to a planned patch is the august 23rd, there also some supporting info from other sources that it's at least a earliest planned date, but if it gets delayed to the 28th or a later date on anet's whims. not much you can do about it. the 23rd does seem like a likely spot to watch for though even if the other sales have been august 7-12 which would have been a week ago by now. Expect radio silence on their own anniversary for anet as usual. There's a reason it has 1/10th to 1/4th the population of other mmorpgs despite having good game quality. A known good advertising team and radio silence on anniversaries could be one of the reasons it never really hit mainstream status to 15$ to sub to sit in a house mmorpgs with 2.5 sec gcds.

Low intensity builds often are say, less intense, but honestly i think going glass dps gear to kill things quicker can save off the dps with the jade core saving or even providing like +200 vitality, or using celestial gear. From what i can remember, Celestial gear offers a all rounder grab bag mix of stats. I remember for rev it was about 70% dps stats, but came with like 20% more hp and healing at cost of -30% dps. For some Champion soloing, It's not a bad tradeoff to hit a equilbrum where you heal as much damage as you take, even if you do a little dps. For most open world content though, it's kinda like the osrs Bandos vs Barrows tradeoff. Where although you trade off 10-20% of your armor, if you kill things 10% faster, you can end up breaking even better than the tanky armor since the kill speed can mitigate damage. Thus trading like a glass build with 20% less hp for 30% more damage can often work and gear designed for raiding, although squishier at first, only amounts to like a 23k ->19.3k change in my hp or something. I think celestial gear is a all rounder set, it heals, it give both dmg and condi dmg, it only does 60-70% the dps if proper runes are slotted, but it is fairly tanky and is sometimes used for condi dps alac builds as a inbetween the boon focused Ritualist gear and the condi dps focused viper. Honestly i think for most classes, i think most dps are fine with berserkers for raids, whatever the hp of marauders is for open world, or a celestial set for a grab bag. But i think you'd probably want to plan your ascended armor set around what classes wear it. Heavy: Guardian, Warrior, Revenant. I think Firebrand and Renegade can use viper (Condi dps). Or celestial (great on guardian, alac hybrid ren with + boon duration runes), etc. Medium: Engi, Ranger, Thief. I think engi can use berserkers for power dps to 35k-36k or vipers for 37k extended golem dps. I think the top snowcrow build is condi untamed using vipers. Haven't heard of thief being used much tbh so idk them. Light: Ele mesmer Necro. Ele and mesmer i don't think seem loved by devs, Necro is pretty solid for open world and sometimes used to solo champion and leg bounties. I think you can get away with celestial on most classes and especially for open world, it's slow but tanky, but specialized gear and even runes can tend to get specialized as well. Just remember berserker gear is usually dirt cheap to buy, viper/celestial expensive asf. And guardian or hybrid builds like boon support condi dpses kinda get some mileage out of all of it.

From what i can see, skimming through the steam threads. Most of the threads so far are about people curious about the game on steam. People hate the idea of living world being paywalled, people are asking for how much of a experience they can enjoy f2p. People mentioned that pof can let you enjoy a lot of the game for 15$, but the expansions and story focused LS might set you back like 85$ are understandably put off. The story seems like a horrible thing to monetize and people are getting sticker shock making even some people warn against EVEN trying it for free for lvl 1-30 or 1-80. People are complaining that certain branches of content was tried and neglected, such as dungeons, WvW, and pvp. People are asking if the game is P2w, with people saying "oh, you can only just exchange real life currency into legendary armor that can become any stat in the game, it's not pay to win!" Players are discussing new world, Elder scrolls online, as well as Black desert online next to Gw2, so it'll probably be compared next to it's other mmorpg peers, etc.

I think just one of the basic storytelling elements is, A good story could use both emotional highs and lows. But one of the worst feelings you can get from a story isn't a even a interaction, but confusion or apathy. Many of the living seasons are designed to take you out of the current lore to go back in time, but many of the lowest reward content is also paradoxially at the start with the more rewarding content (mounts, 30-35g a week arborstone, +25% xp, flying mounts /skyscale/beetle, ascended trinkets / items, wider playerbase), etc. But the story is so segmented and designed to make you wait for a sale or waste money that by the time you arrive at the content you can feel kinda apathetic. I think the more weighty moments of story are when it can get you to emotionally invest in a character. Either for being A: Likeable, Like a Mumen rider who's a everyman who tries his best, but is outmatched by the odds and still makes you root for him. Or B: A emotional punch, a tragic loss of a character you loved or making you feel the character's loss and pain with good writing. A bit of a repost, but Ace's death can be one of those for me as you can see the character's entire family weeping for him. Garp is torn in pain, letting himself be punched and dragged into the ground as the weeping caretaker who raised his family screams in pain, pelting him as they both just cry and take it. Everyone is sobbing, feeling remorseful and the emotional pangs hit through the floor. When a character dies and the characters are written like they don't care and are reading lines off a piece of paper, it can often fall flat. But when it's written well, it can be a very sad and emotional moment for the characters and narrative of a story. When it's done wrong, you just might have no emotion. And for many gw2 moments. it seems like they skip on capitalizing or weighing the impact for longer than even minutes after the personal story ends.

Gw2 Dragon magic has some pretty bizzare and weird uses honestly. It can raise the dead and brand them. It can power electronics, and batteries like a charger, apparently. It can be stored in mcGuffin devices to end the world or create anti dragon weapons. If aurene ate a battery charger, i don't know if i'd even put my money safe as being unable to charge phones if the commander's phone ran out of battery unprompted. Like, it's probably a 50 50 fair chance aurene could go like. "Commander, i see a sacrifice is needed! It has been difficult, but i have consumed the essences of Zhaitan to provide Zi-Fi and Blacktooth mobile device charging!" if the plot demanded like, Taimi's device needed a recharge or not. But yeah, it seems like after the Soo won fight, Aurene is exhausted and needs time to process all the energy. She's able to purify it for magic elder dragon / plot handwave reasons. But it seems like it taxes her and needs time to process. Considering she grew up from like horse sized to mountain sized after POF's events though, i wouldn't be surprised if she'd become like 3x her current mountain size by the next expac or living story if she keeps growing though.

Hey now, how on earth will players miss out on the wonderful story that is Find aurene, Hatch Aurene, Raise aurene, Feed Aurene, Use Aurene to eat all the other dragons if we don't sell the story for 50$ + 50$? Sure, players could just play with most of the meta mounts for like 15$ in path of fire, but if they aren't story loving purists, they should love paying 50-85$ just to see the wonderful story of a plotline that makes no sense until you purchase it, only to find out after purchasing it, it was all to introduce a character you already know for the sound of Ka-CHING noises! 😛 But yeah. Having a bundle that at least saves you a bit of money for all the seasons would be nice. Ls4 was pretty good, and ls3:3 has good ascended trinkets/ring/etc. But yeah i hope they do some kinda bundle or launch. There's supposed to be a steam sale but it'll be mighty sad that as long as they paywall the content, most people are going to likely experience the story out of order as the monetization fights linear plot coherence for the NOT 10 consecutive year players for a middling story at best that can be kinda summed up as. "Finding a magical dragon to solve all magical problems."

Reshade is usually just free presets, i have no idea if the person actually did like any custom shader work or just sells his personal preset, but the software is still free to use and one standard thing some people do is just enable like the first 7 zones, and it makes a pretty game. but reshade tends to increase computer heat. So since im in a hot summer zone, i got beautiful visuals but tone it down with the 110F weather. I don't actually know but the basic idea is you can get the stuff for free and customize your reshade stuff, it's a free software that edits renderers, but just a fair heads up. since it DOES mess with renderer files, it will trigger a alert saying it will modify files. a very good thing to be cautious about. However i think this is just changing the game shaders and just has the antivirus label it a false alarm and disable it sometimes, but it's still good to be properly wary and only install it from the right source.

I swear i've seen a exact duplicate of this post before(?), but anyways guessing from the radio silence and 20% sales, there'll be a ton of hype, and then instead of a 40% sale they'll do a 10th anniversary 40% 10% off sale with our luck.

Ironically Gw2 can actually have some quite beautiful reshader visuals, especially next to older mmorpgs like WoW. And the reshader can be free, but it does seem to maybe add on a bit of heat to the cpu especially in this summer weather. This person sells a crappy preset for a free software tool but it does make the game look nice. But to match BDO in graphics would require like a unreal engine rework and remaking from the ground up, while there are also cpu shortages and chip tensions over Taiwan and China where like 90% of the world's computer chips for all electronics are made that could shut down factories if a war happened. It can be quite a pretty game, but even on 16 gb ram i find that gw2 DRASTICALLY overuses the CPU to 100% and only 3 gb of my 16 gb ram while getting quite hot on summer heat even with a stand for ventilation and heat. Sure it might not be as pretty as bdo or 5 "races" of just Humans with animal ears FF14. But it still looks nice. I think one of the running jokes with WoW was because it could always run on a potato, anyone could join it and that might have led to it's success especially in raiding where lag for rendering all 40 players doesn't really get noticed unless you have all visuals on. Meanwhile GW2 starts to lag on just 20-50+ people metas if you have character models on. But playing the game with generic blobs on lowest speeds up a lot of the stutters for better ability use (especially on specs where every second of reaction speed is important over autoing for 10% dps), but it's pretty anticlimatic to play a mmorpg where the game slows down unless you TURN other players off. If they did a rework, i'd like to see the game become more optimized to use less cpu and more ram honestly and optimized for both low end and high end. As well as seperate bloom from on or off. etc.

Don't the norn have tattoos? just make a small one and pass it off as a tall human and wish granted.

While most people tend to stick to most games, advertising or just public awareness a game exists is a big part. Most people know of gw2 at launch where it's launch trailer had like 1000k Views. Eod's trailer got 100k views. Asmongold (a considerably toxic wow streamer who went ff14), gets like 400k, (4x the VIEWS of EoD's release trailer), looking at gw2 beetles races in wow or lamenting them nerfing the copied features from 2x speed to half speed as they went one step further and also gave the Dracthyr evokers (dragon people), the dive ability like griffon, Then took it away. (The default wow mount was pretty much a 200% speed skyscale without physics or endurance bars or rolls. ), so the speed was probably just mostly the fun of swooping. You can't really buy a product you've never heard of before and there are some speculations Gw2 might be estimated to have like a third or a tenth of the playerbase of games like ff14 though it's really honestly anyone's guess. I remember at the time, happening in real week to week moments there were just some posts on "Tired of wow, what are some other good mmorpgs to try?" The mmorpgs that appeared were Eso, Archeage, New World, Black Desert online, Tera, FF14, "skyrim", "Dark souls", etc. And within a week the next headline was. "FF14 gets so many new players, they're forced to throttle sales of their games to keep the servers stable." -> "FF14 surges and quadtruples playerbase" -> "FF14 completely takes over mmorpg market and competes with wow", with comments like. "Honestly i don't know why i'm paying a 15$ month a sub for this, but it's not wow and i can rp in a house i guess but i kinda miss the raiding and fluid combat of wow over the 2.5 sec gcds between abilities." Steam could be very well a pretty big influx just from free advertising like Lotro and DND online are the competitors for a free no sub mmorpg or lvl 1-20 in wow. which is pretty much doing the starter dungeons and being unable to chat. And lotro has like 20 years of age on it and had pretty bad in your face monetization. But i mean i wouldn't be surprised if it could lead to a modest +20-50% higher playerbase from the free advertising being listed. Even osrs Runescape, a game who almost everyone focusing on it uses runelite's addon for xp/hr trackers, hitboxes, better ui and qol features, still got like a 50k active player to like 70-80k player actively playing spike after the steam launch. Even though the osrs endgame for 90% of players has been like "Kill vorkath for 3m a hr for 7 years in a row" now.