Tiny Doom.4380

I did part one solo last night and part two solo this morning. Until I came here and read this thread I had no idea either was intended to be group content. I thought there was a problem with the in-game description. Since I couldn't see a "solo" option in game I tried both. The public one was non-functional with about ten people in map chat discussing what they were meant to do and why it wasn't working so I tried the "Squad" version. I played through the first part solo and assumed it was meant to be that way. It was very easy all the way to the final boss, which was annoying but only in exactly the same way many bosses in the last two seasons were. That was last night. This morning I logged in and did part two, which was even easier, including a much easier final boss fight. It didn't occur to me at any point that the content was meant for a group - it seemed to be tuned very well for solo play. I was on my full heal druid, who I always use for Living Story stuff and this episode played exactly like any other so i would suggest that whatever your solo experience in other chapters on a given character, this won't be much different. There was, however, some discussion in map chat suggesting that, if you don't own a Commander tag on the account you're playinng, you won't even see the "private squad" option so you will have no solo option. If that's true (I can't test it) then it ought to be changed. Other than that, I'd say that if you want to do it solo you should just choose the Private Squad option and go in alone. It's perfectly doable.

And ppl like that are not the majority of this game. Should we set difficulty of every game in a lvl that my friend can play every part of every game? He is missing one hand btw.Yes, we should. It's that simple.

The Tournament Era was my favorite. I've never seen the point of fighting for the sake of fighting. The original conception was a "take and hold territory" game and that mindset was at its peak during and for a year or so after Tournaments. What really killed the game mode (although it's been a slow, lingering death) was the introduction of the Megaserver to PvE. That began the slide away from real Server loyalty, without which WvW becomes the equivalent of an eternal warm-up for a competetive match that never starts. Links accelerated the decline as did the introduction of skirmishes and reward tracks. Anything that drew attention away from the only thing that should matter - winning the match. Now we're in the era of "someone tell me why we're here again". Everyone running around to no purpose, day after day, week after week. It's like a particularly dull version of Valhalla.

It's undeniably a very short episode but I don't believe that's a problem in itself. The pacing is actually good and the content is a huge improvement over most of the tedious, longwinded and painful filler that padded out many episodes of the last two seasons. I vastly prefer the new approach, especially the absence of the "learn new skill A, learn new skill B, Learn new skill C, now put them all together while dodging lava pits during an artillery barrage" trope that served to make every episode both a boring and a miserable experience. The problem is the length of time between episodes. Whisper in the Dark has about as much content (less, in fact) than we routinely got in every bi-weekly episode of Season One. Granted, those episodes didn't come with new maps, the lack of which did become a problem in itself, eventually, but we've had plenty of new maps now. If we could have the current amount of content on at least a monthly schedule, happening in existing maps, that might work better. I would certainly take these shorter episodes with better content and gameplay every time over what we suffered for the preceding several years, though. That said, this episode has its problems other than length. The voiceover/dialog is very flaky. I could hear Rytlock and Cre talking all the time I was with Marjory, even though they were on another part of the map doing something entirely different. That was by no means the only time I heard the dialog from one scene while I was engaged in another, either. Also, while the atmosphere was excellent and the plot solid enough, the charater interaction was off. Several characters really didn't sound like themselves. Rytlock was virtualy incoherent at times and Marjory was almost unrecognizeable. She was less emotional back when Belinda was actually killed and I don't recall any character development since then that would explain her almost terrified reactiion to yet another hallucination. It's not like she hasn't seen mind tricks before, either. She is going out with Kasmeer, after all...

What's more, Guesting was only ever relevant before the change to Multiservers. I'm surprised it still even exists. Since you can't - and never could - use it for WvW, which is now the only part of the game that uses named servers, surely Guesting could and should have been removed long ago.

I'm curious as to who you think your audience is if you imagine they're finding the description of falling damage reduction over-complicated. It's about as straightforward and basic a concept as you could imagine. If that's too complicated then most of the game must be completely incomprehensible. I'll also +1 the request to split this between game modes, if you insist on going ahead with the pointless and unecessary change. I've survived so many lemming rushes over cliffs in WvW thanks to having fall reduction traited. Bear in mind that gliding is frequently not an option in that game mode and there are no flying or hovering mounts there. The original functionality of the trait in WvW is largely unchanged after seven years.

I'd use that. It's a great idea. Even better would be a filter you could add words of your choice to, which would then be replaced with "kitten". Other MMOs have this function (although not with the kitten part).

it was more popular when it mattered - by having tournaments. Tournaments will never be held again because of match manipulation, burnout from overplay, and poor rewards. Even now, the lack of reward makes the game mode stale. I understand why they won't make great rewards, but they ought to, since PvE and PVP offer much greater incentives to play.ANet's given reason for not doing Tournaments is player burnout. That could easily be avoided by having smaller, more intelligently organized Tournaments. For example, A Tournament could consist of seven one-day matches held across seven weeks, Round One on Saturday, Round Two on Sunday etc etc. Or every Saturday or whatever. Or there could be a single week tournament, 7 days. Hard to burn out in a week. Endless possible combinations could be tried. They could vary each time so as to spread any possible burnout. One person's Match Manipulation is another person's strategic planning. I thought the alliances and team-ups in the Tournaments were one of it's strengths, not one of its problems. This kind of strategic planning, co-operation and potential treachery is inherant in a tripartite competitive format. It should be the norm, not the exception. As for rewards, harldy anything in GW2 ever gives any rewards worth having so I find that a moot point.

Simple answer to that is people who do it aren't bored. Some of them say they are for effect but the ones who really are bored stop.

Didn't vote in the poll because I don't consider myself a "WvW Main". These days, I play some WvW every day I log in, which is pretty much every day. How much depends on what's going on. Could just be some dailies, could be several hours. When GW2 started I barely looked at WvW for the first year. I started to get into it before the first tournament and became heavily invested from then on until Path of Fire came out. During that period, which was maybe 3-4 years, I played more WvW than any other game mode and I played it on two (sometimes three) accounts. What drove me was server pride. As that declined, so did my interest. I'm not interested in fighting other players per se, only in that they need to be killed to maintain the supremacy of my homeworld. Now no-one, not even me, cares much about home worlds, I can't really see much point in the game mode. Couldn't care less what guild does what. Been in a guild of maximum four people, mostly two, for seven years, which suits me fine. I am in a much larger guild that does WvW as well but even that hasn't done much organized play for a long time. Future of the mode is bleak even if ANet does ever get around to the alliance restructuring. As someone who also plays GW2 PvE I would say that has sufered almost exactly the same decline. It was good once. Now it's not and hasn't been for ages. Just waiting for something else to come along, really.

WvW is partly what many MMOs used to call PvPvE - PvE objectives in a PvP setting.

these are interesting ideas. There are no "off hours" in a global game. For whatever reason, we have two server clusters - EU and NA. Clearly that doesn't represent the audience the game has acquired. Unless ANet is going to open specific data centers for the other major time-zones, each of which have substantial populations relative to WvW, there are going to be plenty of people whose prime playing time is NA's or EU's "off hours". There are businesses that trade on exclusivity, by limiting access to their products and services to make them seem more attractive than their intrinsic value suports, but massively multiple online games, particularly ones that emphasize collaboration, co-operation and accessibility, aren't among them. Putting limitations in place that prevent customers who've purchased the game from playing any part of it based on the time of day they choose to play - which could and, correctly, would be associated with the part of the world in which they live, would be a PR disaster. What they might have done to ameliorate this predictable problem from the start would have been to come up with a scoring system that took time-zones into account. Not a penalty but a split, so that each match scores in phases, for example. Or separate matches during a week - or a couple of weeks - with staggered reset times and an aggregate score across all matches to decide who won the set. There are plenty of ways it could have been arranged that would have resulted in a more balanced outcome than the very basic system we've been using.

Where did you see that? If thats true i'm much more hopeful and it might even be a power staff buff https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/977739/#Comment_977739 I've been playing staff ele in WvW for five years. It comes and goes. I just ride it out.

GW2 certainly does have "lootboxes" in the widely-understood vernacular, and has had since launch. They are known as "Black Lion Chests" and have been relatively uncontroversial and somewhat popular for almost seven years. Their ever-increasing price on the Trading Post suggests they are getting more popular rather than less. As far as the transfer of the OP's account from their brother is concerned, it would seem to be in violation of Sections 2(f)(iv), 4(a), 5(e)(i), and quite specifically 9(b) of the [EULA](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/[EULA](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/ "EULA").

Whether people enjoy a story or not has precious little to do with whether it's "good". We could argue forever about what "good" even means, as indeed academics do for decades over stories that are vastly better-known and cuturally longer-lived than anything in GW2 will ever be. We can, and should, talk about how much or how little we enjoyed it, though. That's useful feedback. Personally, I thought it was poor-to-middling fare, with the opening resurrection being one of the weakest segments. I didn't think it was especially bad by the established, standards of Living World but it was significantly less enjoyable than some chapters have been, mostly because it felt very rushed indeed and because so much of the action seemed to happen off-screen. It's true that the idea of Aurene resurrecting via having eaten Joko was a very well-known possibility. More to the point, I never thought she was permanently dead for a very simple reason: no-one is EVER dead in GW2. The entire game runs on the concept of death being little more than a change of career. Entire populataions return as Awakened or ghosts , frequently retaining the memories and personalities they had when they were alive. Individuals return as visitations from their new existences in other realms (Eir, for example) and again talk and behave just like they did when they were living. The Player Character themselves died and got better! The most surprising thing about Aurene's death isn't the way she was brought back but that anyone, including the Commander and all his allies, ever doubted for a second that she would return. Their entire life-experience tells them that death is transient. Rather than moping about in forced-walk slomo the lot of them should have been having a high-level, intensive seminar on how Aurene would return and how long it would take so they could get their plan for what to do when she did. GW2 really isn't a setting where the death of a major character can have anythign like the impact it might in a movie or a book. Speaking of which, can we have Scarlet back now, please?

The tiny additional reward of the event box is completely insignificant. Unless you happen to be one of the handful of players that get the ultra-rare this week, this is basically normal World Boss Train with a ton of extra people. Why are people doing it? Except for the infinitesimal chance of the infusion or the slightly better chance of the (completely pointless) shoes, anyone could do this "event" any day of the year for exactly the same rewards. And plenty do. World Bosses are well-attended and have been, consistently, since the game began. Looking at the crazy numbers turning out, it seems most people either didn't know, or had forgotten, there was already a World Boss Train running all day, every day. What it suggests is that the rewards have little to do with what people do in the short term - hype is much more powerful. Rewards are what keep people grinding or farming week in, week out but for short events all that matters is publicity. I would suggest that a good system for these kinds of events would be to allocate unique rewards to each. Nothing spectacular: titles are always good, as are minis. Set the bar at a very reasonable level, like killing five or ten Bosses over the course of the event to prevent people feeling they have to grind all week. Make it something you can do at will, for fun, for something readily achievable that you can't get elsewhere. If you try to balance the rewards to be valuable in terms of time spent on other farms the whole thing will degenerate into just another spreadsheet excercise rather than the amusing diversion it was presumably intended to be. If you add a currency and offer valuable rewards for accruing it, some people will end up resenting "having" to grind it out to get what they want. Better to tailor specific rewards to specific events and keep the whole thing on the level of casual fun that can be enjoyed by those who like that sort of thing and ignored by those who don't.

The Marionette was one of the most enjoyable events ever seen in GW2. It would be wonderful to see it return. I'd also like to see (a lot) more map invasion events such as we used to get routinely in Season 1 and occasionally afterwards. They used to be a signature feature of GW2 and we see far too few of them of late.

Best of all were the Seasons. After that, the early days in general, before Megaservers. Losing Lion's Arch for rallying the troops did more damage than DBL in the long term. I particularly liked the era when class skills mattered more and players had agency: Guardians protecting siege weapons, Warriors bannering the lord, upgrading structures by fetching and dumping supply and so on. All the automation from tactics and watchtowers and auto-upgrades and EWPs and so on isn't terrible but none of it is an improvement. I know people complained about having to do the grunt work but I always felt much more involved that way and there never seemed to be a shortage of people willing to do the work.

I like it. But I think it's a little bit too short and doesn't show enough to capture the interest of someone not familiar with GW2. Black Citadel is an amazing city but that trailer really doesn't begin to do it justice. The voiceover is off, too. "Smelteuuuurrrrhhh" What? I find it hard to see who that trailer is designed to appeal to. Edit: Posted that before I'd watched the rest of the Tourism videos. Black Citadel is the weakest by far, mainly because the voiceover is very hard to understand and the Great Smelter is quite possibly the least interesting sight in the entire city. The general idea of the series is good and I understand why they need to be so very short but even as short as they are they could all be tighter. The voiceovers certainly could do with being punched up. The Grove one is probably the best, which is ironic since The Grove is my least favorite starting city. The really interesting part, though, is that you're doing the ad campaign in the first place. I've been playing MMORPGs for twenty years and it's pretty unusual in my experience for any MMO as old as GW2 now is to get this kind of push when nothing is actually going on to support it in terms of, for example, a new expansion or a change in payment model.

Well, you've certainly put a lot of thought into it. As usual with any of these blue sky proposals, there are bits some people are going to like and bits they aren't. If it ever got as far as any kind of official ANet-directed discussion thread the sheer detail involved would bog the whole thing down in endless nit-picking debate, exactly as has happened every other time this has been tried in the last six years. One person's dream scenario is another's nightmare as we've seen over and over on these forums. The plain fact, though, is that there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that anyone with the ability to make any of this happen has the slightest interest, let alone intention, of doing so. There's already a plan in play for the wholescale re-imagining of WvW and that has taken, what, a year and more to get nowhere close as yet even to pre-alpha testing. It's all very well to say that this new proposal uses systems and mechanics that are already in the game but as anyone who's played these last half-dozen years must have noticed, these are not the kind of developers who simply think of an idea and slot the pieces together. Every new development takes many months. One this size would take years at the rate these teams work - even assuming there actually was a WvW "team", which a lot of people no longer believe to be the case. As someone said above, this is a decent proposal for GW3, if there is one. As far as GW2 is concerned, we have what we have and maybe one day we'll have the Alliance system as currently imagined. If that doesn't work then it's probably game over for WvW.

Very nice map.Very short story but since the shortness is probably because the set-piece fights are not drawn out to make everything last forever that's probably a good thing. I'd certainly rather have a short story that isn't a miserable slog.Bleak ending. And I mean seriously bleak. I was expecting bad news but not that bad. All the rest, Fractals, Epic Weapon etc, not interested in and will never use so no comment. We go to an anouncement of Expansion #3 next, right? Or is there one more episode?

I think you make some solid points, especially in highlighting how far GW2 has drifted from its original conception. One problem is, the entire game has drifted, some parts much farther than WvW. What's worse is that much of the descriptive text on the game's official website hasn't been revised for years. It's full of things that aren't merely arguable, they're factually incorrect, as for example "on five massive maps in week-long matches and seasonal tournaments" and "While in WvW, your character is boosted to max level, and you will continue to gain experience and loot as you normally would while exploring Tyria", neither of which has been true almost in living memory! Another is that, even with the best of intentions, agreement on what constitutes "fun fantasy combat" is going to be hard to find. You say, for example, that "Skills that root a player are not fun in a game designed for high mobility and positioning in combat" whereas I would say that one of the best parts of playing a staff ele is the thrill of having to stand, motionless and vulnerable in the midst of battle, for long enough to get a Meteor Shower off . Being able to cast that on the run wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun, especially if the trade-off was lower damage. Stil, you're right that there's a heck of a lot more that could be done to improve the whole experience. Unfortunately, after six and a half years, I see very little sign that anything other than endless fiddling about with edge cases and fixing what that breaks is going to happen.

That may be true for you, but based on the comments and results of polls, most players don't care about a "server" or "server identity". For them, it's closer to home - the guild they fight with/for and the friends they fight with/for. The "server" they're on doesn't matter at all. This is true, for the simple reason that most people who played for their server left WvW long ago. For several years the mode was all about server pride but successive design changes put an end to that. Now most of what's left is people who just want to fight for the sake of fighting which, as is frequently mentioned, represents a small fraction of the population the game mode once had. Whether ANet now decide to cater for the players they still have or try to attract new ones is a different question...

It's probably too late to contribute to this thread, which I have only just noticed since mostly I only read the WvW and Lore forums but here's my 2c anyway. I have three accounts and all the classes in multiple but my most-played class on all three accounts is Elementalist. I have all three expansions on one account, two on the second and just Core on the third. I've been playing since Launch without any breaks. All of them are basic Berserker builds, largely unchanged for years. Two are Tempests, one is Core Ele. I could play Weaver on one account but I tried it and disliked (too fiddly) it so I don't. I am very happy with my Eles, all three of them. My main game mode these days is WvW, where I play Tempest and find it enjoyable and effective. I mostly play support in zergs, where I have no major issues or complaints. It would always be nice to have more DPS to finish off downed players faster and the nerf to Meteor Shower has slowed down my ability to destroy siege, which is annoying, but those are minor things. Regular open world PvE is so easy I doubt it makes any substantive difference what class or build you use. I don't do Fractals, Raids or Dungeons so I have no opinion on what's good or bad about the Ele there. I haven't done PvP in years so I have no idea about that either. About the only place I do feel some squishiness as a Berserker Staff Ele is in Living Story instances so I do those on my Necro instead. That's why we have multiple character slots. Obviously I'm not going to complain if my Eles get made more powerful or effective but I'm not feeling the need in the game modes I play.

Ok, don't know if this helps at all... I have three accounts. Two of them I can log in with no problems at all. The third I can't log in - I get the Network Error message. The account that can't log in is the only account that was logged in yesterday. It was logged in before the update and i was playing. I logged out immediately the update became available, patched and logged in. I accepted the Living World prompt but declined to begin, sending it to my journal. I then did the Krait daily in Caledon Forest, got the key and moved to a couple of maps to try and open chests but the chests still seemed bugged for me. If I recall correctly the maps were Kessex and Gendarran Fields b ut I may well be misremembering that. I disconnected soon afterwards, before I had decided what to do next. I then logged back in a couple of times but got dc'd quickly so I gave up. I didn't try to play GW2 again until 3pm London time today, Wednesday. I logged in one of the other accounts (that didn;t play at all yesterday), did my dailies, did the Krait daily, finished the Sunken Treasure Achievement (thanks for fixing the chests) for which I had six chests to open, then I did a second full round of chests. That took me an hour. No DCs, no problems. I then tried to log in the account I was playing yesterday but it cannot log in. It gets the Network Error repeatedly. Twice I got it before I could reach character select, once at character select. When I did get to character select I chose a character who hadn't lgged on yesterday (I think - he certainly wasn't played yesterday - conceivably I logged him in and didn;t get to play him but I don't think so). The game dc'd on a Network Error as soon as I hit Play. I logged in my third account, again not played yesterday, and I'm in game on that account now as I type - have been in with no issues for about 15 minutes. I conclude that whatever the problem is it's something that got changed specifically on the account that was on during the first build of the update. I haven't done anything at all with any of the new content on the account that can't log in (or indeed on the others that can). Also possibly relevant, the account that can't log in is the only one flagged for Path of Fire and therefore the only one that has done any of the previous LW content from this season. Edit: After completing my dailies (and helping to save Hills) on the third account, I tried logging the one that was getting the Network Error in again. This time I got to character create and picked a character I haven't played for several weeks. She was able to log in. A second not-recently -played character also got in so I tried the character I was doing the Krait stuff with yesterday. He was able to log in but his loading screen, which showed Frostgorge Sound, flipped to Iron Marches, where he arrived in game at the waypoint next to the zone portal. I then logged him out and logged in the character I normally do LW stuff with. Currently he's in game and I'm about to try the new Chapter. We'll see how that goes... Edit 2: It went fine. Played without any issues (or bugs) for about two hours. Whatever the issue was it seems to have gone.