Mistwraithe.3106

I think it would be worth them playing with. I vote Anet give us more WvW related skins (eg on siege etc, to help fund WvW dev) and then they put some effort into trying different things out.

I'm not really a fan either. Why should Scepter be different from other Revenant weapons? Another core legend would be the way to go if they want to add to the class I think.

I can see it isn't great but I'm curious about what sort of solutions you would be looking for? From what you have said it might be more player behavior and expectations that's the problem rather than what the devs have done?

Wow. The negativity is strong here. Personally I'm really looking forward to SOTO. I've enjoyed reading the information we have been provided and a couple of interviews on SOTO which I found in the gaming press. I think Relics are going to open up quite a few more options and I'm looking forward to the new legendary armor set. Furthermore the story sounds interesting (not that we've been told too much, which I'm fine with, I want to experience the story in game rather than in advance). I like that they have dropped the normal main cast and are going to be mixing things up more. From what I've read I definitely got the sense that the Arena Net design and development team are quite excited about having a cleaner slate to design future content now that the cycle of dragons is complete.

True, but having to fill equipment slots with duplicate sets of gear depending on how much you want to ramp up difficulty (eg I don't want to ramp it up at all when I'm doing a fractal or dungeon in a party of two) is pretty awkward compared to having 3 or 4 difficulty levels to choose between. And it also feels pretty poor when leveling and equipping a new character (which is when I most wanted to be able to increase difficulty), it means ignoring all the loot that drops and the level up gear. Can be done but it guts that joy of seeing whether any loot you got is better than what you are currently wearing, or of crafting yourself new equipment. All white gear might be fine for an experienced player who has done it all before, and finds loot drops boring, has heaps of character and equipment slots, etc, but that's not really my target. I am thinking a lot of new players here. Introducing friends to GW2 (pretty experienced at gaming but not MMOs) I had this complaint that it was too easy and hence a bit boring, particularly as we liked playing as a group (which made open world even more trivial). A difficulty setting would have been great in that situation.

As mentioned I'm a proponent of having difficulty modes (which adjust your own power, nothing else, so not splitting map populations etc) but I also don't think there should be any change in rewards for playing in a more difficult mode. My reason for wanting difficulty settings is purely to make the game more of a challenge. It isn't to receive more rewards and I wouldn't want people to feel like they need to play on a harder difficulty level than they are comfortable to maximize their rewards.

Please buff the Karka Queen and some of the other open world bosses along similar lines to how you buffed the low level zone world bosses a while back Perhaps not quite as many hitpoints as the Svanir Shaman (that feels slightly over the top), but more damage output and threat level would be great. We've done the Karka Queen for the first time a few times over the last few days and were startled at how quickly it died. It's listed as a Legendary and one of the hardest bosses (along with triple trouble and Tequatl) but it has melted in less than 2 minutes every time. Having expected a challenge out of this boss we hadn't done before we were all very disappointed players...

I think it would be great. I enjoyed playing through the core maps but was disappointed at how easy the content was and once you reach level 80 (but are still exploring core maps) you don't have the option of going to higher level maps were you are underleveled. But I wouldn't change difficulty by changing the mob strength, by far the better way to do it is to scale the players strength. Different difficulty levels could reduce all your stats by 10%, 20%, etc. That way you could have a player who is set to easy mod right beside a player set to hard mode and it's fine, you don't need different maps or splitting the player base, etc.

So you must be very pleased by Anet's current annual expansion plans then? Seems like a decent attempt to put in place a regular schedule while also arranging the funding (through annual expansion sales) to pay for the development to keep with the schedule.

To OP, fair enough. But personally I'm really looking forward to SOTO, the business plan around it (annual expansions) and what I've heard about both the story (various third party interviews etc) and the mechanics (ie relics, new weapon options) all sounds great to me.

I tend to agree with OP. I would do it as a default, so for new players who haven't done LWS1 (or anything later really?) the default would be the old version, for other players the default would be the new version BUT any player could override the default and say I always want the new / old version. Obviously I don't know the numbers but I think Lion's Arch is fairly heavily visited and could probably support having both old and new instances running. I mean the lowest it can go is 1 instance of each version, so how many players would each instance have off peak? I guess you may end up with a very uneven split, eg only 5% of players are on the old version. This wouldn't be good for newer players who default to the old version as it would mean they are visiting a deserved Lion's Arch. It would however make the core story missions (which show the old Lion's Arch) and LWS1 make a lot more sense and the battle for lion's arch chapter be a lot more meaningful.

Thanks for posting that, I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Unlike all the anti RBL/Desert map people out there, I don't mind RBL and would be keen to see a new WvW map (tho I think they would want to avoid making it as complex and vertical as the desert map is). It definitely couldn't require SOTO tho, it would have to available to everyone. You couldn't have some people being unable to visit one of the WvW maps.

I don’t see this either, I got heaps of the heroic tokens very quickly when I started.

Agreed. I would rather Arena Net got to keep as much money as possible, not giving 30% (or whatever it is) to Amazon.

Several years ago there was a thread where someone official from Arena Net said that ArcDPS was OK. Definitely at own risk, not supported, etc, but the principle of what it was doing was allowed. Of course Arena Net might change their mind but given how widely used ArcDPS is I think they would publish that they were changing their mind before going after people. Unfortunately I don't know where the thread/page is - Google might find it or someone else might link it.

Is GW2 really a buggy game though? I've had a few bugs but compared to other games I've played I would put it as above average in quality TBH. Maybe I've just been lucky, and certainly I'm a relatively new PvE player, I've done core and am just finishing LWS1 so I haven't hit the expansion maps (I've also played quite a lot of WvW). But, I'm not seeing it as a particularly buggy game. Keep in mind that, as I mentioned in my post above, developer time is very precious. Visit any long running software dev team and you will find a long list of bugs which are marked "Will Not Fix" because they are too minor to be worth the time required to fix them. It's a fact of life for a software project. So, yeah, all software has bugs and GW2 doesn't seem particularly blighted in that department. It's worth pointing out that while OP mentioned bugs a few times he also talked about a bunch of other things where he felt Anet should have spent their dev time differently, talked to the community more, or monetized less/differently which is why the thread has the replies it has.

I agree. Map chat works very well so long as people use it. My point was essentially that some people lack confidence to use map chat (pretty much confirmed by OP) and a "I need help" button is likely to require less courage to use (I think it would often lead to using chat to talk to those who come to help, possibly just in local Say chat, which is good thing as it would help improve confidence in using chat with other players in general). Actually, one other point. A "I need help" tag would provide location information which is a significant advantage over map chat. It can be hard to know where someone is and how to meet up via just chat, particularly if the person who needs help is new and doesn't know the zone well.

OK, I guess that is fair. But, it's very mild. A player without a relic isn't going to automatically lose to someone who does have one. And you get given relics as part of the upgrade so you are immediately back to the same level of power for at least one build per character. We don't know exact costs but it's hard to imagine that acquiring a few more core relics is going to be a significant expenditure for most players. Acquiring the new expansion relics could be a lot more work but then that is the essence of an expansion - to provide more content and things to do. Similarly Legendary Relics could be a lot of work but they are going to alleviate that somewhat by give a boost for anyone who already had Legendary Runes. Compared with what is meant by vertical progression in other games like WoW (where new expansions raise the power bar to the point that characters who haven't reached the new level cap have no chance at all) and the difference is night and day. So it's worthy of comment, but I still don't see it as being worthy of the vitriol that has been produced from some forum posters.

I see three problems. One is that when Arena Net do communicate (eg I'm talking over the last 6 months when I've been most active on the forums) I see an awful lot people picking apart what they said, including a lot of over-analysis and speculation on what they didn't say, why did they word things that way, and often taking the absolute worse case interpretation. This includes a lot of re-hashing what was said in previous communications and any deviation from previous communication is treated like a crime (as tho things don't change and forward facing statements should be forever future binding...). Not from everyone by any means, in fact I suspect it's a small minority of the forum readers (and a bigger minority of the forum posters) but it must be incredibly draining and frustrating for those at Arena Net tasked with communicating with the community. The second problem is that many people have no idea of the development challenges. I presume most haven't tried to run a big project or develop software before, and sometimes even those who are don't seem to be applying what they've learnt from that to GW2 or maybe they have only worked on short term one off projects (which have different challenges). The reality is that development time is incredibly precious and in short supply once you have a software project with a large number of disparate users. What the players (users) will be requesting will be hundred or thousands of times more work than there is actually available dev time to do. It isn't wrong or bad, it is just the nature of having a large number of users who all have their own likes/dislikes and hence request different things. People don't seem to realise how much work it would take to do even 10% of the wide ranging requests Arena Net get. The last problem is that many people (again, not all), are looking at it from their own short term interests. This is understandable but Arena Net are running a business and they need to make a profit. (BTW, it hopefully goes without saying that if people like playing GW2 (which I do!) then it's actually in our medium term interests for Arena Net to be profitable). This means they need a good game that people like playing firstly, but then secondly they need ways of making money from it. Many suggestions will be decent ideas but will run counter to those goals, eg they might be too niche and not improve the game for enough other players, or they might impact Arena Net's ability to make money, etc. Given my point above where requests far outstrip available dev time the end result is obviously that the vast majority of player requests are realistically going to have to be ignored and that is the correct decision for Arena Net to be making.

OP's suggestions seem good to me. I suspect the main issue Arena Net are dealing with right now is that they didn't plan to have Legendary Relic's available in SotO. The easiest solutions to the problem involve giving Legendary Rune owners partial or complete funding towards a Legendary Relic, but if they don't exist then that solution isn't feasible. So they are stuck and it might already be too late to put Legendary Relic's into SotO since release date is very soon. As an aside, I personally feel that the gnashing of teeth over Legendary Runes is a bit overplayed from some quarters, I get it's a problem but the world isn't ending. Meanwhile, the wailing that Relics are vertical progression or pay to win seems ludicrous to me (relics are on par with any other stat/skill affecting system in the game, including the fact that a full set of matching superior runes, which costs resources to arrange, is far better than minor/major runes or having mismatched runes).

I was reading this thread and thinking what's really needed is a way for new players to say they would like some help (yes they can type in map chat, but that does require a bit more confidence than turning a tag on). Then I saw your message, so we think alike. I would be very much behind a "I Need Help" tag. I think that would be much better than trying to improve usage of the mentor tag. When I'm playing GW I'm not usually sitting there thinking "I want to help someone". It's far more reactive, if I see someone who seems to need help then I'm happy to help. However, you often can't tell if someone needs help unless they are in down state. So a better way of knowing when other players need help would go a long way to increasing how much mentoring happened. (Of course, this could end up in a situation where 20 people in each zone have the "I Need Help" tag up all the time at which point everyone just ignores the tag. So it might not work out, but it's worth considering further and perhaps trialing).

But I am a new player. And I am doing it. And very much enjoying it. Perhaps what you mean is that as an experienced player, perhaps someone who did LWS1 in it's original form, you have no interest in it? That's fair. But you can't speak for new players, and your attempts to do so have wildly missed the mark. As I said before, I'm very pleased they put LWS1 back into the game and it most definitely wasn't a waste of resources from my point of view.

The fight guild I play with has a visible tag at least 95% of the time, it's the norm. The few times we don't it's usually because we want to have some decent fights and the opposition is a bit light on the ground (fairly common in AU timezone). In these situations we will already have enough players (mostly guild members) in discord to make a sizeable stack or 20-25. If we run visible then we get another 20+ pub players which makes our zerg far too big for groups to try to oppose us and we end up with everyone just running from us rather than fighting. Which is ultimately more boring - challenge makes most things more interesting and there is no challenge if no one will oppose you.

I think the idea has merit, depending entirely on implementation effort required. The ideal way to try it out would probably be something akin to a new festival so the battle royale only lasted a week or two. Base rules/skills should be WvW IMO so people could bring their own equipment, but I can see a strong argument for PvP too to balance people (I wouldn't use the PvE skills as they lack any balancing for being against other players). That leaves map and mechanics as requiring development. Map could potentially be fairly simple, I would use a OW maps personally. Mechanics (a closing circle as time goes on, etc) and adding ways of gaining advantage in game (eg like finding weapons and equipment in PUBG) would require the most time, I'm not sure how much. Whether it's viable depends on whether testing it with a one off festival is easy enough that it can be done by a few devs/artists in a few weeks or whether it would be a major project.