Mistwraithe.3106

It's a bit surprising but I'm thinking you might be on the right track. Telemetry data will be telling Anet that there are a lot of very long drawn out fights in tiered keeps because a significant portion (around 50% I think) of the big attacking zergs I've seen in recent months are primarily there to get kills rather than to cap the keep (another 25% are there for both and only maybe 25% will try to cap as fast as they can). This makes sense - most good organised zergs are around fight guilds and by definition they primarily want to fight with capping objectives usually being secondary. I must admit I've been on both sides, I play in organised zergs when they are available and I've been in plenty of keep attacks which were solely to get a response so the zerg had people to fight and kill with no real intention to capture the keep. The best way to get others to fight you is to attack a tier 3 keep. So they will regularly roll all around the keep for 30+ minutes killing the clouding defenders (who as mentioned in my original post have minimal chance of organising a strong enough zerg to fight back unless one happens to already be online) without even bothering to kill the lord. I've been in zergs before where the commander got really annoyed because someone killed the lord and the keep got capped thereby spoiling the fun. Prior to this latest patch sometimes those zergs would eventually leave or die after 30 minutes of farming defenders because walls were repaired and they slowly got whittled down. This latest patch will make this much harder and make it easier for the zerg to keep farming defenders indefinitely by making it harder to repair walls and making it harder to down the attackers (by slashing the guild objective buffs). So if Anet made this change to reduce the length of these long drawn out keep fights (many of which are just zergs farming pugs) then they've gone completely the wrong way by making it easier for the zerg to farm forever...

I'm not a fan. I decided to post a new thread as there are a few existing threads but they either are not particularly serious discussions or aren't addressing this particular issue. The recent changes seem to be trying to make it so your only realistic chance of defending your tiered up keep against an organised zerg is to have your own organised zerg. This comes partly from the reduction in defender bonuses but I think a slightly bigger factor is the change to wall repairing. Often the only viable way for an unorganised defending group to defeat an attacking zerg (even if they outnumber it significantly) is to pick off the tail when they can, usually at a bad K/D exchange rate (ie the zerg is killing far more of you than you are getting of them). But this only works if you can destroy their siege and then tap the walls shut so those you kill can't just easily rejoin their zerg. It was hard work but pre the latest changes it was possible for a sizeable group of unorganised defenders to pull off an unlikely, you could say heroic, defence against an organised zerg. Now it's much less likely. So, it seems Anet only want you to be able to defend against an organised zerg with another organised zerg. But most links won't have organised zergs on 24/7 - in fact I suspect no links ever achieve this? And if you don't have an organised zerg then you can't just create one out of nothing. We have people who will try to tag up but without the numbers, party composition, teamwork and ideally discord communication (not essential but useful) it's a doomed attempt. A quickly assembled ragtag zerg loses to to a pre-organised zerg virtually every time and quickly - maybe they could wear them down but the new reduction in defence bonuses and difficulty in sealing the walls makes this much more unlikely. People know that (from experience) so they generally don't join the squad or don't stack tight with the commander - and those that do die to the enemy zerg for the aforementioned reasons. Which is a vicious circle. People without an organised zerg don't cloud for no reason, they do it because it's the best way of surviving and maybe winning if you don't have the luxury of an organised zerg. This means Anet are making it essentially random whether you can defend your keeps. If you have are lucky enough to have an organised zerg ready to defend at the same time as an enemy guild is doing their run then yeah you could have a good fight (but I argue you could before these changes too). But if you don't then chances are that your attempts to defend will be futile. It's a small step from there to deciding not to try to defending (if you don't have an organised zerg) which I think is pretty clearly bad for the game and for player motivation (players not in organised zergs that is). This seems like a serious step backwards. And I'm not sure what Anet think the upside is? Those situations where both sides have organised zergs already happened before the latest patch. I don't see this change increasing the frequency. Likely the opposite, by making it much less worthwhile trying to defend any defending team will likely struggle to get the numbers to form even an unorganised zerg to fight back, so it's reducing one of the stepping stones towards getting more organised (since I think getting experience working together on defence is one impetus towards trying to join or band together into more organised groups). I don't think Anet act without reasons, so my only conclusion is that they are basing these changes on incomplete or flawed data. Perhaps the developers or decision makers only play WvW during peak times when all sides have organised zergs? Maybe they only play WvW with strong guild zergs and hence haven't experienced it from the other side? Maybe they are playing with Anet tags and always get a bunch of people joining them because of who they are? I dunno. But they seem to only have one very limited view of how the gameplay works and it's based on maybe 15-30 hours out of a 168 hour week...

I think OPs suggestion, or some variation of it, is a pretty good idea.

It's Rubi, not Rudy. I had it wrong. I think GW2 is already a great looking game to explore and that's one (of many) reasons I play the game. It's great to hear Anet are working on further improvements such as the texture compression.

I would be on board with that, along with buffing the HP slightly - not to Svanir Shaman levels, but a moderate amount more when there are high player counts on the map.

Agreed. I think Anet have done a pretty good job of making things morally interesting in the past. Joko is a great example of it, in PoF there were a lot of Elonian people who were loyal to Joko or even adored him because he had (prior to Balthazar's arrival) provided safety and stability for them and their families. And that sort of made good sense for their world view but at the same time Joko was a tyrannical ruler who literally killed his opponents and subjects so he could resurrect them back again as his awakened slaves and gloated while doing so. I found it quite fascinating and was pleasantly surprised that Anet had put in that level of twisting normal tropes about good and evil.

It would make more sense for them to have one slot which allows you to pick only between different loot bonuses and another slot which allows you to pick only between different utility bonuses. That should improve the variety in what players pick.

Agreed. While individually the differences are only 5% per weapon damage/armour defence/character stat (less percentage wise if it's a character stat with a 1000 base) the bonuses compound upon each other. Even just a 2.5% bonus multiplied three times is 7.7%, to the power of 4 it is 10.4%, etc, plus of course there are the infusions. Full ascended with stat infusions is more like 10-15% better than exotic when you factor in everything including increased survivability (possibly better for Celestial if your build can make good use of all the stats).

Can’t tell if OP is joking or not. Seems like quite good rewards, particularly for just 3 events per day per MC instead of 5 with the LWS2 return (tho events are very easy in Silverwastes).

My guess is that there is also a timer for each map and Anet want each map to be closed down once it has been up quite a while, probably because event bugs build upon over time and slowly cycling thru new map copies gives the best experience. Agreed tho, there have been multiple times that I have clicked to leave the supposedly unpopulated map and then found the new map had similar or fewer players and the meta was further behind or non existent. It would be great if the logic was improved, ideally if there is a timer it would align itself with the end of the map meta.

I think getting the game to remember the most recent setup version of each weapon type for each character (or ideally each character's equipment template) would be a very good QoL improvement. Even if it only remembered within the same gaming session it would still be nice. That way when you swap back to your legendary staff it would automatically apply the same stats, sigils and infusions (assuming they were available still) as when that character last had a legendary staff equiped.

There is a middle ground between the Hp scaling on the silverwaste bosses and what they did with the starter zone boss revamps. In fact it’s a yawning gulf. I would be happy with somewhere in the middle, a 50% buff maybe, particularly with the scaling for lots of people.

And great, love and well done.

OK, but you're just proving my point. Your complaint isn't really about the hooks (legendary relic in this case), it's that you don't like SOTO. You think it's a bike instead of a Lamborghini and you aren't interested in bikes.

I think you were completely correct in your first sentence, Anet pretty much said as much that they needed a more stable economic model. The rest of the paragraph is your interpretation though. Anet have essentially said the new model is so they have the regular revenue to keep up development of the game and their team has actually grown. So you are saying the opposite . Maybe you are right but your comments seem to come from your disinterest in the SOTO content (which some others have said they like) rather than from any objective evidence to back them.

Ok, but that’s what I have been saying too. Astralporing’s complaint is really about not liking / appreciating the SOTO content. But it’s been put across by them and others as though Anet have recently become greedy and exploitative with hooks to force people to buy expansions when demonstrably it’s no worse than 9 years ago. Lets stick to what the real complaint is.

I understand what you are saying but I don't agree with your conclusions. In this post and others you are essentially saying Anet have got greedy and have put too many hooks into SOTO to force people to buy the expansion to compete in combat/gameplay. But I think it's pretty indisputable that the combat/gameplay "hooks" in SOTO are weaker than they were in HoT, PoF and EoD. Each of those expansions had elite specialisations which added significant combat options (and also a bit of power creep as demonstrated by the fact that Snowcrows doesn't list any core professions on its DPS charts, only elite specs). You need those HoT, PoF, EoD elite specs much more than you need SOTO's weapon specs and SOTO specific relics. So why are you losing it so much over SOTO? If anything it demonstrates less greed and less hooks than previous expansions.

Not quite. That's just the price to replace it if you accidentally lost it. Either way you need to have done the achievements which gives you the original copy (and allows you to buy a replacement). Some of the achievements are quite tricky, specifically Sentient Aberration where you need to do the Chalice of Tears jumping puzzle yet. I have the other three but not that one so I don't have the Gleam of Sentience yet (planning to try it when I get the rewind position device in LWS4).

You seem to be working on the assumption that making SOTO relics only available to people who bought SOTO somehow took a lot of development hours and consequently reduced the amount of other content. That seems extremely unlikely. No content was killed in making SOTO relics require owning SOTO. So really your complaint boils down to not liking the "content" or amount of "content" in SOTO rather than being about how legendary relics work?

I know what you are saying. But the reality is that Anet need both good content which makes the game (all modes interesting) AND combat/gameplay reasons for people to want to buy the expansion. I absolutely guarantee that all of the expansions sold more copies than they would have if there hadn't been elite specs, weapon specs, and now relics, that you needed to buy the expansions to use. It's just common sense and economics.

New strikes or a raid wing is indeed good expansion content for instance players. But pretty much everything else you mention, while a good idea, doesn't offer a hook to encourage these players to buy expansions. Unless Anet start making new fractals only available to people who own the next expansion? Or somehow improve class/PvP/WvW balance only for people who buy an expansion? I think there would be a far greater outcry if they did either of these. Seems to me that the weapon specs, soto relics, easier skyscale, strikes were pretty good ways of adding nice benefits to people who bought SOTO while still keeping the impacts pretty mild for people who don't buy SOTO. It seems inline with the benefits from elite specs, gliding, mounts, strikes/raids introduced in earlier expansions. If anything SOTO seems rather milder in terms of penalising people who don't buy the expansions than previous expansions were.

What's good content? I presume you mean a good story? I agree a good story is important. But a significant number of players have openly said in this thread and elsewhere that they don't care about the story, they only play for WvW or PvP or instanced content (there's a thread right now about someone who says they only play instanced content and don't care about the story). What's the hook for people who play these modes and essentially care mainly about the gameplay / combat system and? Elite specialisations were the hook but Anet rightly concluded it would be a mistake to add new elite specs every mini-expansion. Surely it has to be things like the expansion relics and new weapon specialisations? So exactly what Anet are doing and you are complaining about? I feel like many of the people posting in this thread haven't even tried to understand why Anet might be acting the way they are.

That's fair and I agree that straight up is what I would have liked to see (not that I think they were particularly trying to hide it but they also didn't clearly communicate this). Unfortunately Anet get a huge amount of criticism whatever they do. I feel that Anet have become fairly minimalist at what they say because every word they say gets over analysed and debated at great length, often with miss-quoting or interpreting. No joke that people are quoting things they said 8 years ago and trying to hold them to it, as though business doesn't change. Maybe you wouldn't have complained if they have been more upfront as you say - or maybe alternative universe you would have complained even more loudly. Maybe Anet would have had a massive firestorm and people jumping on a boycott bandwagon if they had been more upfront. I dunno. I look at threads like this and see how heated up people have got about what I view as minor things that have quite a small impact and I wonder...

Exactly. Because they need to make money to continue to develop the game and many of the obvious hooks that could be put into new expansions are already well served (gliding, mounts, elite specs, legendaries). Your choices are really to either have game support and development reduce or accept that they need to make a few (relatively minor tbh) changes like this to add extra benefits to buying the expansions. Note that it's just one lever, they also have more things (eg last expansion had OW legendary armour, extra weapon proficiencies, strikes, accessible Skyscale and story) they add in each expansion but Anet clearly feel they need the relic lever as well. I'm fully in the latter camp as I want GW2 to continue to be developed as much as possible. This is a non-issue to me and tbh I'm surprised that legendaries weren't made this way from the start (ie it's surprising Anet didn't make it that you had to buy expansions to unlock stat bonuses in your legendaries from the start).

Sorry, but anyone who was expecting a one year mini expansion to have as much content as a full expansion plus living world is plain delusional (plus has reading difficulties as Anet explicitly said what was going to be in the one year cycle).