Mistwraithe.3106

That’s nonsense. You might as well say that GW2 shouldn’t bother having a story at all. Some people don’t care about the story but many (myself included) flat out would not be playing the game if there wasn’t a story. I am 100% sure GW2 would make massively less sales without the story (which is actually quite good once you get past the rather weak core story). if story does matter to a moderate number of buyers, which I assert it does, then it is plain stupid that Anet made the wizards vault give dailies/weeklies based on purchased expansions rather than account story progress. Consider a book or movie analogy. You are excited by a newly discovered book or movie series so you buy all of them in advance. But then when you start reading/watching them you keep having your experience interrupted by diversions into later books, showing what happens to key characters and how major future events will play out, despite being only half way thru the first book. Does this make any sense from a story standpoint? No. Does it make any sense from a money standpoint? No - the customer has already paid for all the content - spoiling it for them is just going to make them want them to return the later expansions for a refund! (Which I have successfully done). Does it make sense from any standpoint? Not by any reason I have ever seen articulated in these forums (and I read threads like this avidly). I also really don’t understand why anyone has given the OP confused emoticons. How petty or thoughtless do you need to be that you actually WANT new players who like story and invested in buying expansions to be penalised by not being able to achieve their dailies or weeklies? (Which is a massive penalty btw: achieving only 3 instead of 4 dailies is 25 vs 65 AA while achieving only 5 instead of 6 weeklies is 200 vs 690!!! AA). The system as it stands is a big middle finger to anyone who likes the GW2 story and buys expansions before they absolutely need them (or just doesn’t realise how badly they will get penalised for buying expansions).

As a player who is going through the story in order and has yet to reach the PoF maps I was grateful of the turtle recently when I joined a W5 training run and didn't have a Springer or flying mount to get to one of the bosses. Someone pulled out their turtle, I jumped in the second person seat and problem solved! (yes I realise I'm not strictly doing the game in order if I'm trying W5 before getting to PoF, but whatever).

It occurs to me that despite writing a longish more complex post earlier, basically I follow the same rule as various others here. I have never exchanged gold for gems or gems for gold. I use gold for in game goals which require gold and I buy gems with RL money if I want something from the gem store. I can see that if someone reaches end game and has all the legendaries etc that they want or if they play enough that they are swimming in gold then converting gold to gems is the obvious move. I don't see myself ever reaching that point tho :-).

I have a question for those people who have weapon skills 1 and 2 (or any skill really) bound to their mouse buttons, are these just extra mouse buttons (eg on the side, mouse button 3+ etc) or are you using the main mouse buttons for this? And if the latter have you changed your look mode? I use the standard look and move mode where holding down mouse button 1 or 2 changes where you look and the direction the forward key will move you. I'm mostly happy with this but I would prefer to rebind the hold-down-to-look button to instead be holding down the mouse wheel which would free up that button to be skill 1. However, it doesn't seem like you can change bindings for the hold-down-to-look and hold-down-to-change-forward-direction buttons...

At least some of the time I think the problem is ISP routing rather than specifically Anet's GW2 servers. I've had a couple of instances which were bad enough that I could see dropped packets to various Amazon websites (including amazon.com) indicating that it was routing to AWS in general rather than specifically GW2's AWS servers, and friends of mine who live in the same city but on different ISPs (I am on One/Vodafone) were fine. One thing to try is using a VPN and then running GW2. If connecting via VPN solves the lag problems (which it almost always does for me as an NZ player) then it's entirely down to routing rather than the GW2 servers running slowly.

It depends on many factors of course, particularly whether you can spare a bit of money to buy some gems and how willing you are to give Arena Net some real money. Anyway, I can totally relate to much of what you've said, including that obviously the easiest way to make gold is to not play the game, spend more time on paid RL work and then buy gems, but that's completely contrary to the fact that GW2 is meant to be a game played for fun! I've had similar thoughts. Since you asked, my rules are essentially that I'll happily spend RL money to buy gems for things that improve my overall gameplay experience and avoid me wasting time on busy work, but I do NOT spend RL money to buy gems and exchange for gold so I can buy resources to craft legendaries. The reasoning being that the former makes my gameplay more fun and saves me time microing things but the latter would actually replace gameplay with paying RL money instead - I want to earn Ascended/Legendaries etc in game rather than through my credit card as that makes the game pointless to me (sounds like you feel a bit the same). So, I have purchased infinite gathering tools (two sets actually, I bought a second for another character as the first was so nice being able to always be gathering with top level equipment and not messing around with replacing them), the coppermatic and silvermatic salvagers (again, nice to stop messing with buying salvage kits), and a couple of lots of the 5 shared slots packs (I think I have about 15 shared slots now, some from expansions or giveaways but most purchased). I have a few extra bag slots and inventory/build slots I have purchased too, plus other miscellaneous things, tho I've got as many of these from things like Prime Gaming giveaways, Twitch drops, etc. Note that some of these things do save/make money over time (eg avoiding buying salvage/gathering kits, plus my gathering tools are unbound and volatile so make a bit of money slowly) but I'm fine with that. Using RL money to buy skins would be a grey area for me, something I don't intend to do. Generally I'm happy with the skins I can unlock in game so I haven't felt a need to spend RL money on skins but that's just me. (I guess I have in a way for the gathering tools but really that was about utility and the cosmetics was just a bonus). I should add that I'm also happy sending some of my RL money Anets way. I can afford it and I really enjoy GW2 so it's a way of showing my appreciation and obviously the more people who do that the more resources they have to keep working on the game.

I am an active member of 4 guilds each of which I have a good reason for being a member of and gain significant benefits from. There's the small friends and family guild, the WvW fight guild, the big does everything guild based in Australia, and then a slightly smaller more raid and fractal focused guild in NZ (my timezone). I run with each of them at different times and would miss it if I had to drop one (there's a temporary hiccup with the WvW fight guild but I still want to be a member of a fight guild so the slot is necessary even if I end up in a different one). So I have to disagree with OP.

Assuming this wasn't a tongue in cheek post, brilliant timing because as Stx said above just a few days ago cheap exotic armor with the ability to select any stat was added to WvW. You do need some WvW badges to buy it but not that many. A very cunning plan by Anet to get more people to try out WvW! 🙂

Sure, my suggestion isn't really trying to change what determines the winner of a matchup. Are there any alternate solutions which did address this tho? My understanding is that the main problem people complain about is world stacking which happens after every relink. My suggestion was mainly to address that.

Fair enough. I disagree but I know quite a few agree with you and wanted faster leveling. I also saw quite a few similar complaints to mine when they introduced CAG. You know what would make everyone happy? If there was a toggle to turn it off. Like I said in my first post...

I main Herald but I think Anet did a reasonable job with Herald at least (I don't know enough about Renegade and Vindi). I get the argument that if they nerfed Herald boon duration to force Herald to run more Concentration from equipment then that would naturally drop Herald DPS without needing to nerf GS, but as others have said in this thread that would have lead to a cycle where the top builds optimise to the max to just keep quickness up while getting max DPS, then Anet would balance on that and Herald ends up being much harder to play for the 95% (probably really 99%) of players who can't play at a Snowcrows level (me included). My feeling is that Anet want Herald to be a relatively easy build to play well enough to get into instanced content. If Anet want newer players to try and get into the instanced content then there needs to be some builds which are good enough that people will accept them into Raid, Strike, high level Fractal squads but are also not too hard to learn to run. Pretty sure Anet mean Herald to be one of those builds. That being the case they need to make sure its DPS is competitive, but they also need to make sure it isn't too high otherwise other harder to master quickness builds get completely squeezed out. Also, it's quite funny (or sad?) how often I see threads from people complaining about DPS creep (which I personally agree is a major problem, a lot of content is too easy now) and then as soon as Anet do a little balance patch like this where virtually every change is a nerf to bring down top builds, you get a bunch of people really complaining and saying that's the last straw, game is unplayable now, etc, etc.

If people want WvW to thrive then it needs new players to try it out fairly regularly. Most will likely go back to PvE but every time a bunch of new players try WvW some of them decide they like it and add it into their gameplay routine. That's what happened to me earlier this year. So while it might be frustrating if there are queues (are they happening on all 4 maps?), the WvW Rush event itself is good for the longer term health of WvW.

I think the best solution would be to keep the current worlds but relink every week. That would make it very expensive for people to keep swapping to stack servers which is one of the biggest problems currently. It also means if you get a bad link (for whatever definition that means, some people regard it as a bad link when there isn't enough competition, for others it is when there is too much competition) then it's only for a week. The main flow on effect from that is the current tiers don't work, you can't really have a reward of your team going up a tier if the teams change due to relinks every week. But most people don't seem to be all that motivated by winning to go up tiers anyway, it seems to be more about trying to end up against your preferred competition next week. So I would drop the tier system and instead have small weekly rewards which are higher for the winning team (I would still give some rewards to the middle and losing team, but less as you go down) and potentially scale slightly based on play time / contribution (not too huge, mainly so that someone who only logged into WvW for 20 minutes during the week gets significantly less than players who played WvW for > 5 hours). That's what I would do. Thoughts?

It's mostly down to the Character Achievement Guide. It boosts your leveling massively. We (friends and family) were around level 50 when it was introduced and it spoiled our enjoyment of the remainder of leveling up to level 80 because it happened so fast. We were having fun exploring zones (usually zones a bit over our level to make it a challenge) and slowly leveling up while doing the story, then wham, bam, we're level 80 and are now over-leveled for all the zones we were exploring instead of under-leveled. It was quite a kick in the guts at the time and a couple of us stopped playing for a few months as a result (one still hasn't come back really). I have no idea why Anet didn't make the CAG a toggle that you could turn off. WoW has toggles for turning off event experience boosts even when they are only 50% boosts, the CAG boosted things by way more than 50% and there was no way around it.

Agreed. I'm firmly in the camp that making legendaries salable is bad for the long term health of the game. Many people have said how doing the collections for their legendaries make achieving and the using the legendary much more meaningful, as opposed to essentially just opening your checkbook and buying it. The Gen 1 Legendaries are a classic point about how being able to buy something can get in the way of playing and enjoying the game. My wife is rather more casual at GW2 than me but she's enjoying it. She's into the crafting, particularly Chef with all the different ingredients to gather. She plays a long bow Ranger currently and I think she would absolutely love going through the Kudzu collections gathering flowers etc to work up towards getting the Kudzu legendary weapon. It's perfect for her. But because the Gen 1s are saleable, including their precursors, she would be a complete mug to go through the collections and craft her own Leaf of Kudzu. It's 325 gold cheaper to buy Leaf of Kudzu on the TP! So what would have been an engaging longish term (for her) goal is instead rendered pointless by being able to buy it on the TP for far cheaper. The same would happen to most Legendaries if they were saleable. Gen 1 precursors are the worst because they are also random drops. But imagine if PvP, WvW and Raid legendary armours were saleable. People who play PvP, WvW and Raids lots because it's their favourite game modes accumulate heaps of the special resources necessary for building them. Since they already have these resources lying around they are happy to sell them for any decent gold, they don't need to get a good return on the time put in, it's already a sunk cost for them. So inevitably it would become less effort just to buy them from from those people than to do the actual PvP, WvW or Raids yourself. And thus the game dies, the smart move becomes to buy the ultimate gear with gold by going to the most efficient farming metas or paying real money, while playing various different game modes and doing collections/achievements etc to achieve long term goals becomes the least optimal way of doing it.

Wow. So what you are saying is that Anet have been lying about expanding the dev team and all their future plans? You have secret sources which know what is actually going on and we should believe you over them (and over what we have seen with our own eyes over the last couple of years) because you said so? This whole thread is pretty pointless. Fortunately those of us that disagree with OP can move on from this thread and enjoy playing the game...

The Weekly chest is actually 450AA which is massive. So yeah, if you do the dailies and weeklies then you get very good rewards.

Not personally a fan of the idea.

If you are talking about the Hidden Arcana instance then you can talk to the challenge motes to ask for the boss to be reset if you have failed the achievement, you don't have to restart the whole instance. I think you have to kill the boss first tho which is a bit painful with the last boss (and the wiki page mentions some bug too I think). They are all easier with a second person if you have a friend who can help out.

I think personal difficulty levels which just scale your own character's stats to make things harder would be great. No extra rewards for playing on harder difficulty, it would just be something that players could set higher if they want more of a challenge while doing OW rather than everything dying with one shot...

I haven't created a Thief myself but from what I've gathered Thieves might be a bit the way you are talking with the ability to burst damage and then stealth away to rebuild their resources?

The core story is pretty meh but LWS1 is significantly better, then LWS2 and how it flows into the Heart of Thorns maps was awesome for me (I did everything in order so hadn't visited HoT maps until I got there and hence I enjoyed the couple of plot twists which came out in LWS2). I'm currently in LWS3 and the story is slightly more disjointed than LWS2+HoT was but still fun. So yeah, if you are interested in story I thoroughly recommend this approach...

I agree with many that I don't think GW3 will happen for the same reasons I don't think WoW2 will happen. The closest you could get to that is ongoing developments and improvements to the engine which continue to improve how good it looks, plus perhaps new systems like weather etc. Anet have already been doing this with the push to DX11, replacing other old parts of the code base such as the browser, etc so its possible so long as the game keeps making money.

Yeah, by design. It's pretty clear that one of the drivers for the Wizards Vault was to link the rewards more closely to actually playing the game rather than just logging in. If you do play the game enough to get most dailies weeklies (which will often just happen as a byproduct of your playing if you are playing regularly) then the rewards are both higher and obviously more flexible. My only gripe with the system at this point is when dailies/weeklies want you to go onto maps/expansions you haven't reached yet in your story progression, which is pretty dumb, I don't read a book out of order and I'm not playing the GW2 story out of order either. If you just login daily instead then you get less, as Anet obviously intended.

Personally I think they should tell us they are shelving Alliances and instead focus WvW resources on a third borderlands map and WvW related skins (eg siege etc). Maybe some more WvW achievements or events, etc.