Mistwraithe.3106

Multi threaded programming is hard. It’s easier today than it has ever been because of improved libraries and language features but it is still about the hardest development challenge, particularly if working within an engine which wasn’t built for it. They need to keep working on it but it’s going to take time.

OP has a point. I think players should have the option of linking their WV missions based on guild, a bit like WvW is planning to allow users to pick which guild they want to represent in WvW. Let us choose which guild we want to get our WV missions from and then everyone in that guild gets the same list of missions. Players who are missing expansions will get any missions they can't do replaced with the next mission on the list, but the rest of the missions will stay in common allowing guild members to work together on dailies and weeklies. Oh, and they should also fix the issue where it looks at expansion ownership rather than whether you have been there. None of our little guild (about 10) have played any of EoD or SOTO yet (still working through HoT mostly) but those poor sods who were foolish enough to buy those expansions keep getting WV missions they can't do.

Like most replies I don't think GW2 has the pop to be able to survive a server split AND I also don't think it is necessary as the game design makes the old content still relevant. Players who want to experience gameplay closer to GW2 launch can somewhat already by choosing not to use their mount, making up their own builds and ignoring all of the wiki/fast farming/etc info. My main caveat with what I wrote above is that leveling is way faster than original. I think it would be nice to be able to at a minimum turn off the character adventure guide but potentially go even further and choose to reduce your own experience gain pre level 80. I do also somewhat agree with OP that I'm not convinced flying mounts are good for a game like GW2. I've played Ark quite a bit before and the group I play with have pretty much agreed that going straight to taming flying mounts on a new map is the best move but ALSO that it's the most boring thing to do as it trivialises much of the gameplay and exploration. GW2 is a different game but I still think it's bad for gameplay experience in new zones. Of course it is self inflicted though so players can choose not to use them in most cases (baring a few metas where apparently you need them to keep up).

My family have GW2 running on a variety of hardware and it runs fine except when there are dozens of players in a small space (eg 50 people jumping down into the Auric basin loot fest). OP is presumably playing at 4K+ with max everything and then complaining it isn’t buttery smooth. While that would be nice for the few percent which have Uber hardware, there is no way I would throw away GW2 for that.

Interesting. I appreciated the injection of humour. Just goes to show how hard it is for the writers to please everyone.

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)