Mistwraithe.3106

So OP quite likes GW2 then? 🙂 I think it's an amazing game too. Still loving it after a couple of years slowly working my way through content and enjoying WvW.

You can buy stat selectable weapons and armour from TEID-07 in the WvW maps so long as you have a few badges from doing a bit of WvW (should be easy since you want to do WvW). For buying any runes, sigils or getting ascended trinkets with laurels, I strongly suggest using the Wizard's Vault to buy gold and laurels. You can get 90 gold for 540 AA which you can gain very easily in less than a week of dailies and weeklies.

Very topical for me as I bought 8 WV skins last night… After buying and auto unlock the skins have less value than a single transmutation charge which you can delete with a single yes/no confirmation. So it is very silly to have to type each one out or do the multi-click copy paste work around. Would love Anet to update the properties of these skins so they can be deleted normally.

I think they do need more variety in their WV lists to reduce the frequency that the same JPs and mini-dungeons keep popping up.

I maintain that a bad boon ball of 30 will generally lose trying to attack a keep being defended by a very good group of 30 pugs. If the boon ball is very good and at the same game play level as the pugs then the boon ball has a very good chance of winning, but that's as it should be. There has to be a benefit to being organised into complementary parties and on discord. The boon ball players put more effort into being organised, they should win!

OP has no suggestions of what should be improved and I actually struggle to work out exactly what they are complaining about. Anet seem to be working quite hard with the Wizard's Vault (easier gold, ascended, etc) and other recent trends (including remaking LWS1, cheap exotics in WvW, easier skyscale, improving build variety for each profession by making quickness/alacrity/support available to all, etc) to make GW2 more accessible to newer players. I'm pretty sure they regard this as a top priority. There are certainly things they could improve further (top of my list would be fixing the WV penalizing new players with multiple expansions by giving them dailies/weeklies in zones they have never visited) but for this thread to have any potential benefit OP (or others) really need to articulate what they would like improved. Otherwise it comes across as too vague to be actionable or even really understandable.

Much of this thread hinges on the definition of Pay to Win (P2W) but really I think the issue is freemium type gameplay in general. The freemium model essentially boils down to making game progression difficult enough, or usually, time consuming enough (your time is usually what freemium games abuse, rather than skill) that the player is constantly fighting the urge to pay money to progress to avoid wasting too much time. For this to work well progression needs to slow to an absolute crawl and that's what most effective (aka evil) freemium games will do once they have got players sufficiently hooked. GW2 generally doesn't have this problem. And as many people have said, Hero Points are not an example of this problem. Yes, some of them can be hard, but it's hard in a way that makes for a good challenge and fun gameplay, rather than a freemium "you will grind for 20 hours straight to unlock the next 10 hero points" way. Furthermore, if they are still too hard (and hence not fun gameplay) for some people then the Hero Point Trains mean that anyone who can logon during vaguely peak times can bypass this challenge and unlock HPs in easy mode. So yeah. I can see the concern and the concept of selling hero points for real world money could be the start of a slippery slope depending on what else Anet sell in future, but I don't see this step as embodying any of what makes freemium/P2W games abusive.

LOL. Yeah, once you know how to do it perfectly it's easy. Like so many things in life...

I like desert borderlands too. I am firmly in the camp that Anet should add more WvW maps and rotate them once they have more than three.

The fact that one of the posters has 3.3k of them just highlights the problem with making them worth much. The fact that this poster did enough raids to accumulate that many also suggests people who like raids will do lots (and lots 🙂 ) without being able to sell LI.

It’s a fair point that Anet have shown little inclination to work more on underwater content. However it also makes sense that those who would like more of it keep asking in the forums for it. So good luck with your request!

Sure, if you like WvW and PvP and are happy playing a moderate amount of it every week to get the weeklies that's a great plan. I like WvW so that's what I do and it makes getting the daily and weekly chests easy (if I hadn't then I would be irate as I own all expansions but am only half way through LWS3 in the story so I would be unable to get the daily and weekly chest a lot of the time). If you do NOT like WvW and PvP then it's a terrible plan. My wife, sister and friends who I've introduced to GW2 all have no interest in WvW or PvP. My two kids play a bit of WvW with me (both have just got their warclaw) but not enough that they would realistically be able to get the weekly chest. So for all of them it wouldn't work. We have a small friends and family guild (9 of us) and when my sister asked yesterday about whether she (or others in the guild) should buy EoD in this sale my answer was no, not yet. The rest of them (after 6 months playing) are even further behind in the story than me (half way through Verdant Brink in HoT) so we're not going to reach the EoD story for ages yet - I suggested that perhaps next year's Black Friday sale would be the time to buy it. It surprises me that Anet won't fix the issue so people like us can't just buy the expansions now but I presume they have their reasons.

With the current Black Friday sales, now is a topical time to remind all new players and anyone who is going through the GW2 story in order for the first time: ONLY buy expansions when you are ready to start the expansion content. This is because the Wizard's Vault, which is a major source of gameplay rewards for new players, gives out daily and weekly missions based on the expansions you own rather than the ones you have reached in your playing. So, if you are playing through HoT or PoF and buy EoD you will suddenly start getting missions which are in the EoD maps. Similarly for SOTO. If you don't want to spoil the story by skipping ahead to those maps (and getting major story reveals) then you will find it much harder to get the daily or weekly chest, and sometimes it will be impossible. This matters because the Wizard's Vault rewards are heavily skewed towards getting that big daily or weekly chest. A player who does 5 weekly missions (and hence misses on the chest) gets 250AA to spend, while a player who does 6 weekly missions (and hence gets the chest) gets 750AA to spend. That one extra mission triples the amount of AA you get so if you don't achieve it you only get 1/3rd the rewards. (Cue for vets who play 30 hours a week to reply saying they have so much money that the WV rewards are worthless, or they do every single daily and weekly and hence have so much AA that they can't spend it all, but that's not who this post is targeted at, I am talking to newer and/or more casual players who are enjoying working their way through the story). So if you are doing the story in order then don't buy the expansions until you reach them. You will regret it if you do! Note that I live in hope Anet will fix this and change how the Wizard's Vault works so that it only gives you missions in expansions you have actually started (easy to do - just have an achievement which is triggered when you visit a map in the expansion then look at that). It seems silly that players get penalized for buying expansions before they are ready to play the content but it is what it is currently.

Agreed

It would be reasonable if downing someone gave a small amount of participation.

It's a fair point. OTOH, Anet might think that with the Legendary Starter Kit now people need slightly less Clovers than before? Who knows, as WRay said I think the Wizard's Vault gives Anet quite a lot of potential to balance the economy however they see fit over the coming years.

Note that in the long run it's likely Geforce Now will cost more money than buying a second hand or cheap computer. But for a year or two it's potentially cheaper.

I totally agree that there should be a larger pool of jumping puzzles and mini dungeons available. Some of the JPs would also work for Dailies (just not the harder/longer ones, they should remain weeklies).

Quoting myself for relevance. Having now played LWS2 and gone into HoT with 3 family members I think LWS2 is really an excellent lead in to HoT. You could improve some things but it was my favorite LW episodes (surpassed by HoT but possibly better than the first half of LWS3 which has seemed a bit disjointed). I have 4 other friends and family who have NOT purchased LWS2 and hence are now in HoT without that lead in. It's far inferior experience and they are less hooked than us on the story as a result. I strongly encourage Anet to make LWS2 included for free for anyone who has HoT.

Re content, it is worth keeping in mind that lack of content is only a veteran player problem. For new GW2 players there is a massive amount of content which is all relevant and generally has a good number of players playing it. I think GW2 stacks up well in this regard for new players. Games like WoW might have more total content but their vertical progression model means most of that content is completely abandoned as only the very latest content is worth playing for veteran players. (Because the rewards from the slightly older content are to underpowered to be relevant in the latest WoW expansion)

Can't say I read the whole thread but I believe I got the gist of it. I agree with everyone who says Anet needed a more regular revenue model. I really enjoy GW2 and want it to continue to have new content, for that Anet need money and from everything I have heard (plus running a business myself) I think one of their main requirements to produce that content is a more reliable revenue stream. Personally I think Anet made the right choice with the SOTO model. It's not that dissimilar to what we are used to with LWS and expansions. LWS should never have been free IMO, it seems Anet have finally come to the same conclusion. I think moving to more heavily Freemium would be a complete disaster for GW2 and I think a battle pass system could also be a disaster (tho less certain). That's because of the type of people who already play GW2. We are used to being treated pretty well by Anet on the monetization front. Both Freemium and Battle Pass are generally more exploitative approaches (particularly Freemium, I've sat in conference lectures from Freemium app developers talking about the psychological and design steps they go through to open people's wallets and it's very immoral). If Anet tried it then it's likely they would lose a significant portion of their player base as a knee jerk reaction and then a larger proportion in the following months depending on how exploitative the model actually was. As an 11 year old game I think they would have next to no chance of recouping that lost player base with players who are happy with Freemium type models. My only question is whether the price and sales from SOTO were enough to provide that regular income for Anet. I really hope they were. I know I would be happy to pay more for more content in their annual expansions, but I know they would also get stronger complaints if they charged more.

Totally agreed with OP. Most of the WV UI is fine but there needs to be better ways of selecting how many of a reward you want to get.

Serious response. If either you or your friend aren’t fussed about the ping then one of you should just do a one time move of your account.

Hmmm. Essentially you are complaining that you don't like how slow the speed of light is and you want Anet to be able to host a single server for the entire world. Unfortunately, the speed of light won't increase just because you would like it to. As a result Anet run separate North American and European servers. Bad luck. Physics doesn't care that you are unhappy about it.

OP has a point. Not being able to see a squad because someone you blocked X months ago has joined the squad is probably stronger than most people want. LFG needs some improvements anyway (main one for me is that it needs to keep it's state and remember which category you previously had selected), adding a filter on this would seem reasonable. That would allow people to toggle whether they see squads containing people they blocked.