Zephire.8049

Chalice is pretty terrible and needed another pass or two over it to make it better. With other JPs, there are people who do them for fun even after completing them. AFAIK, very, very few people do Chalice for anything other than achievements or the loot at the end, or helping someone else do it for achievements. The design simply isn't user friendly (multiple leaps of faith, insta-down mechanics, ledges that don't match the visual, ranged mobs, stacks of burning, etc.) and requiring players to do it multiple times is bad. Yes there was a meme about doing it again the moment the Returning events were announced but that doesn't mean it had to happen. If you miss out on the initial rush and you don't have the time or ability to do it yourself, you have to wait for something to appear in LFG and be prepared to drop what you're doing to go do it because you don't know when the next chance will appear. Even Not So Secret is better than Chalice and that's saying something.

Honestly the new design looks better so it may have been less "politically motivated" and more that there was regret about the v1.0 design and they finally had a chance to fix it. Unless they're part of her attack, they're superfluous and tacked on—literally.

If you love exploring, definitely. The maps—especially core maps—are beautiful and have hidden areas where the purpose is to be pretty, not have a secret for something else. And instead of traditional quests, there are renown hearts where doing things in designated areas gives progress. So think of instead of talking to an NPC to get a quest telling you to slay 12 creatures, you walk into a spot where you can slay creatures or fix broken machines or retrieve items or help train soldiers. Or a combination of them all. It's much more free-form compared to WoW's quests while having familiar mechanics. Crafting is in the game. It's not forced on you in that it's required for leveling, but you can level your character from it. There's also a discovery mechanic where the game gives you hints at what's needed but you have to figure out the exact combination of items for a recipe that's a mystery to you. Dungeons are sadly no longer being developed, instead Guild Wars 2 has Fractals which are more condensed dungeons that have unique mechanics known as instabilities as you progress to higher tiers that rotate daily and change up how they play. There's also Strikes and Dragon Response Missions, with the former's intention being a step between Fractals and Raids, the latter is... not great. They're fine but there's a lot of grind tied to them. End game is what you make of it, though. If you just want to explore and take screenshots, you can absolutely do that. Gear never goes out of date so there's no pressure to grind dungeons or raids every few months and you can do what you want. Even if you get bored, the journey to 80 and throughout the expansions is worth it alone. Right now they're even giving out free episodes (think mini content patches of story) each week as a way to hype the third expansion, and all you need to get them is to log in. But since Guild Wars 2 is free up to the first expansion (and with both expansions (they're bundled together) going on sale for $15USD regularly), it's definitely worth checking out as there's no financial risk and very few limits even on free accounts—you can do the whole base story and get to max level without spending anything on the game unless you choose to do so.

There's several reasons: It makes an engine overhaul easier as they don't need to redo previous models or deal with broken coding; It lets them restart the story where they want; It lets devs have a fresh start after learning what not to do without having to work around/correct past mistakes; Arenanet has already gone from GW1 to GW2 because they couldn't do what they wanted in GW1 due to limitations of the engine. There's downsides too, of course, but GW3 isn't out of the question. What WoW does is irrelevant due to the last point on that list. Other MMOs have also revamped themselves: Final Fantasy XIV years ago, Phantasy Star Online 2 just released New Genesis, MapleStory 2. There's also Planetside 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch 2. And that's just off the top of my head. Some developers stick to an MMO/online-only game and refuse to even consider doing a sequel using modern tech and coding due to the risks involved. Others choose to do a sequel despite the risks because there's also potential of a higher payout and a longer-lived game. Arenanet is the latter so a GW3 isn't out of the question. Maybe not in the immediate future given how they're working on GW2's engine now, but at some point.

The thing is that transition points such as portals have to exist as it shows where a point is. Without that, new players won't know where to go and it's harder to tell if a transition point is bugged if you can't tell where it is exactly. Some breaking of immersion for some players is preferable to new players getting frustrated and quitting because they don't know where to go. Plus it allows people to start playing as soon as the core files are installed as you don't need to download the full game as maps are separated. Fun fact: the reason why the spawn point after the human tutorial was changed to be outside rather than inside the inn was because players would use inanimate object tonics to block the doorway and a lot of new players thought it was actually blocked and had no idea where to go. While they could alter the map to make it clearer, they would have to do that multiple times for every single map and that's a lot of work. 9 years in and a lot of stuff is set, especially on an ancient engine and servers that have lag on current-sized maps. (Yes sometimes it's player hardware but the servers themselves can't handle large areas that have active players without impacting everyone on that map) Instanced maps like in GW2 also helps concentrate players so the world feels alive because you actually see people outside hubs.

It's priced that way to discourage people changing characters' names frequently. High enough that people won't make joke names all the time, low enough that it's accessible to players who don't buy gems with money, and it being the same price as a character slot means someone opting for it over a new character is more likely to pick a serious name rather than one that's reportable. It sucks if you want/need multiples of them but part of the reason for the price is so that support doesn't get inundated by people changing their names all the time.

If they wanted player feedback on features before release, they'd have a PTR. And depending on the coding involved, it would take longer than a week to change things a minority of players complain about with no hand's on experience. A lot of it is probably set in stone anyway barring a huge backlash to a part of it since Anet doesn't do previews except when something is ready to ship next patch.

So true. The first time I tried the Halloween JP, I had to get someone else to do it because I was getting so frustrated. Now I get it in one go usually. Practice goes a long way, especially in GW2 where the barrier to entry is low but it takes a while to build up the muscle memory as its gameplay is so different from other MMOs. And if you play on a norn or charr, you can change the camera setting to be at a default height rather than scaled to your character. Not sure how much it would help since I don't use it, but it's there.

Yeah, no. While I would love a new engine, companies using crowdfunding as a way to fund new projects without dipping into executive bonuses needs to stop. There's been no indication that Anet lacks money, only that management fails to manage money, projects, and personnel. NCSoft also has billions and could bankroll a new engine without blinking so the idea of them asking people who are already paying them for more money for something that should already be included is beyond tacky.

The engine is actually about 20 years old, not 9, so it definitely doesn't work well on today's tech. The bottleneck is on the CPU as it only uses one core or thread (can't remember which) so past a certain point your GPU and RAM don't matter unless you have other programs running on your computer. A new engine would be fantastic, to say the least. Whether we'll get one or not is a different matter. All the new particle effects each store update certainly doesn't help. But in the meantime, turning on character culling in cities or during populated meta events is a workaround and will dramatically increase your FPS if you don't have it on already.

Welcome to Tyria! Some things: While ranged is definitely easier in terms of avoiding some mechanics, they also miss out on boons as those typically have a 300-600 range. For any group that's serious about group content, stacking in melee range is required as someone standing away from the group will be lacking a lot of DPS and them surviving mechanics doesn't mean much if the encounter hits the enrage timer or everyone else is dead. Granted the visual noise is an issue in melee range, so you're right just not for the reason you think you are. They've tried different difficulties for world bosses and the result was that the harder ones weren't done as much or as successfully as they wanted. Since it's open world, zerg mentality can't be helped and there's a fine balance when it comes to scaling. That's common to a lot of MMOs as it serves as a visual indicator that a player got something. It would be easier if you just got copper and materials were automatically deposited, but there's be a lot more people complaining about how they didn't get anything because they weren't paying attention to what was looted. It was actually far worse before Unidentified Gear with some metas requiring you to deal with your bags mid-loot phase. Not sure what you mean by bad jumping as I've never had an issue and the issues I've heard from others amounts not liking platforming in anything or connection issues to the GW2 server. The camera can be wonky with larger character models, but that's a camera issue, not a jumping issue. Getting over feeling like you need to do more than tap to jump is hard and accidentally deploying a glider can happen. If it happens a lot, I believe there's an option to turn it off. There's a mastery to dismount mounts mid-air under the Crystal Champion line. One of the likely reasons why it's not baked in is because Anet wanted the mounts to feel more than just visuals for movement speed and forcing people to commit to being mounted was part of that. There's also a mastery under both the Griffon and Skyscale to mount them mid-air. Depending on where you are and what you're doing, it can be helpful to keep in mind what that area was designed with. For example, core Tyria was made before gliding or mounts were even in the planning phase so everything in them can be done on foot. HOT was made with gliding but not mounts so you can get weird interactions with the map, especially on flying mounts. POF was made with everything in mind but not all the more recent masteries. Also the engine is nearly 20 years old (GW2 uses a highly modifed version of the GW1 engine, which did not include jumping so that may have something to do with jumping feeling off to you) and uses AWS so there can be... issues and lag at times. But even then the game being down for more than 10-15 minutes is a rarity and you've probably noticed that patch days are simply downloading it and getting back on to play, not the game being down for hours at a time. It's not perfect and doesn't click with everybody, but like you said, it's unique and has a good community in-game. Hope you continue to enjoy it!

The word pyre has origins in both Latin and Greek (pyra and pyr respectively) and essentially mean fire (pyra actually means bonfire rather than generic fire, but for this it's the fire part that's important). "Pyre gloves" sounds a lot more fancy fantasy than "Fire gloves". Also you're being way too literal about charr names, especially ones that originated during a time where one legion was oppressing and enslaving the others as a good way to get in with your oppressors is to name a cub after an individual or something your oppressors value to "prove" your loyalty. Plus charr are sometimes inspired by a cub's coat colour and it's easy to see why Pyre's dam thought of fire when she saw his coat. Most likely someone was just flipping through a name book or dictionary and landed on Pyre (other Fierce warband members include Swift, Roan, Cowl, and Seer so not exactly "inspired") but there is lore reason behind the name as well if you prefer that.

In addition to Southsun Survival, there were also the Repel the invading dragon forces and Hunger Royale events that concluded a couple of the pre-release beta weekends. While these don't help people who missed them, they were fun because of the novelty, not because they were good. An MMO is not the best place for a battle royale mode, especially one with an engine approaching 2 decades old. A BR mode if done well may be fun, but part of the risk of it is player retention. If the people doing it drops after a week or two when the novelty wears off (because the engine makes it janky to play), that's a lot of development for new content that is now sitting there with minimal players. With WvW and PvP languishing, it wouldn't make sense to spend that much time on a yet another new PvE mode when there's already several other PvE modes already (including Southsun Survival) and GW2 is not designed to do BR well to begin with.

Honestly I find that effect less disruptive than the ghostly, chak, pinata, and bee infusions, among others. Much closer to the body with no annoying sounds or trails. Not to mention gemstore items. But there really does need to be an option to turn off (or at least reduce) the number of particles from other players. Old engine + tons of modern particle effects = bad time even without taking into account the visual noise. I've lost count of how many times there's been a skin that crashes/lags nearby players since the original star griffon skin.

This. It gives a fraction of the rewards as WvW and WvW already is pretty low rewards so it's in the situation where people who want WvW rewards will go to a borderland or EBG, people who want to fight in WvW will go to a borderland/EBG, and people who don't mind WvW but prioritize making gold will stick with PvE. If it were on par with WvW, pip farmers and people grinding out an GoB may be more inclined to go to EotM rather than taking up a slot in WvW. It's a pretty place but unless you're specifically going for EotM achievements, there's zero reason to go there.

Like others have said, Metabattle is perfectly alright. If you're doing competitive game modes, cross-referencing with a build site dedicated to that mode wouldn't hurt but often MB's builds are good. In the past I actually preferred them over Snowcrows as, at the time, one of the people responsible for putting builds on the SC website had a hate on for a spec and refused to put a build up for it for months, until enough people were asking for it they relented. There was also a Soulbeast build that was on MB and after a month or two, SC copied the build and put it on their site as a variant. And both times people who hated on MB for being "meme" builds and denying anyone who didn't run a SC build in their groups instantly changed tunes when all that happened was SC put the build on their site a month later. As long as you go in with a grain of salt, are familiar with how a class plays, and what you're comfortable playing, it's perfectly fine. But really that applies to any build you get off a website.

What Ayrilana said. It's far cheaper to craft celestial exotic gear than it is to buy it. Even with the Hardened Leather, that's 15-20 gold difference between crafting it yourself or buying from the trading post so most players will opt to craft it. There's also more and more stat-selectable pieces of gear that players get from achievements and even the trading post (e.g. the charr masks, ice golem's helm, etc.) and celestial is a niche stat so generally once a player has a full set on one character, they don't need any more unless they run celestial builds on multiple characters.

Odds are it's either natural market trends or some TP barons decided to change the market. The main way Anet affects the TP is by adding other sources of item(s) and/or adding a recipe that requires item(s) that are deemed too cheap, not generating a bunch of new items. The closest they got to directly affecting the TP is when they banned the baron who put up a price wall of Mystic Coins and that wall was removed as a result of the ban. Also keep in mind that players are coming back after being away for years so are going through their inventories and selling things for immediate gold as they start playing again, which can look like a concerted effort to affect the market but those items were already in-game to begin with. Without knowing which items you're referring to it's hard to say, but it's much more likely that it's another player doing it instead of Anet.

New Engine. Improved character customization and textures. Better mount scaling for larger characters. Though mainly the first one and the other two I picked from the first things that popped into my head. A new engine because the current one is at its limits and ~20 years old, and much of what people want literally cannot be done with it. Improved character customization because the game's coming up on 9 years and there's been minimal updates for every race except humans. Better mount scaling because outside a handful of skins, norn and charr look like they're crushing their mounts. And in relation to GW2 but not directly in-game, free articles and stories that expand on the lore that the game doesn't (and can't always) do. They used to do this (plus put out the three novels) but have since stopped and it's a shame because there's a lot of unwritten lore and lore that was written for the devs' use but not made public and I think putting out side stories and whatnot would help keep players engaged and interested between content patches and maybe connect more with various characters and races.

Another issue with dueling in PvE is if it's allowed out of the city, people will absolutely find out ways to exploit it to either kill world bosses, bug the entire event for everyone, or trick other players into entering PvP so they can then be ganked. Even if those three things are somehow avoided, PvPing at and on world bosses would absolutely become a common trolling mechanic to further obscure the visuals because the trolls would still get all the loot if they tag the boss. You also end up with people sitting in starter zones dueling each other with all the flashy visuals while discouraging/preventing new players from simple PvE. Currently if someone's going around kill stealing mobs and it's clear they're only doing so to harass other players, that is reportable. With PvP, players could do that but now there's plausible deniability because they and their friend just so happened to wind up dueling in a spot that makes it difficult-to-impossible to finish that heart in a remotely timely manner. The only way dueling should be added is if it's in a dedicated place, not in the open world where it gives people another tool to harass others.

The AI that has NPCs stall or run in the opposite direction? That has them completely ignore combat randomly? IBS and LW4 improved it some, but it's still far too unreliable to make it a core component of a game mode. And if its current state is fine, that just means players will ignore anything to do with them as player characters would be vastly superior and it would be easy to get by them or line-of-sight them. Even if you compensate by making NPCs tankier, people would avoid engaging them as it wouldn't be fun, especially if another player is there attacking you at the same time. Same if you increase their damage to compensate—it's not fun to engage with enemies if you know you're going to die if you do. Particularly if the mode is marked as PvP but the meta has shifted to using bunker builds to protect/heal NPCs and let them do the fighting. The AI in such a mode would need to be extremely responsive and reliable for it to be engaging. What we have now for story NPCs is less intelligent than the AI for necromancer minions, and that's saying something. One of the reasons why I'm emphasizing AI is because there are two large-scale PvP modes and sPvP which has a MOBA-esque mode in addition to its conquest mode. Practically no one plays Stronghold (the MOBA-esque sPvP map) in part because the AI is lacking and fighting NPCs is boring when you want to fight players. If the AI isn't interesting to face in what you're suggesting, most people will move back to WvW or sPvP and cut out the annoying gimmick after they test it out or get what they want. That or the NPCs will be completely ignored by everyone because it's easier to play if you aren't micromanaging NPCs while also fighting other players 1v1. And by events I mean things like "Defend X", "Attack Y", "Destroy Z" plus anti-spawn camp events like there is in WvW. And that's assuming there are no special event chains that can trigger, or more PvE-esque ones, just the stock PvP/WvW events that exist to guide players in what to do and where to go. It wouldn't be the hardest thing in the world to adapt those events but it would still require a lot of testing as a broken event chain in PvE is one (granted annoying) thing while a broken chain in PvP where one side can't progress no matter what is another and would absolutely kill the mode until a fix is implemented. That's if Anet doesn't disable it completely until fixed.

So a Hack and Slash/RTS mode? If done well I could see that possibly working but given how GW2's combat is all about movement, telling troops to stand in one area would make them really easy to take down. They actually used a similar system with a couple hearts in POF but the result was rather janky and they haven't used it since, which tells me they were trying it out to see if it would work but it didn't work well enough to continue using given how other pieces of new tech from that time got over used when they got it to work (e.g. the infamous spin cycle attack). Also model/art assets are the smaller part of the cost. The sheer amount of coding the map, events, and the AI need would take up a lot of resources, meaning both money and developer time. Plus all the development time planning such a feature out. Sure you could theoretically pop in various generic soldier models, but you need to have things like pathing, attacks, response time, and how the player character issues orders coded in first otherwise you'll just have soldiers t-posing or wandering around. Or both. Given how GW1 Factions had an emphasis on PvP and EOD is going back to Cantha, something like this may fit in, but I'd rather they adapt it to GW2 instead of directly copy it from other games much like how mounts in GW2 are both similar to but very different from mounts in other MMOs.

I vastly prefer alternating between large threats and smaller ones as it's easy to overlook what's going on at the micro level when everything is focusing on the macro and, with it being a video game, it's impossible to actually look at the micro level unless it's in-game or there's tie-in material, something GW2 doesn't do anymore. Plus if everything is the Biggest Threat Ever™, that's how you end up with something that goes from people saving their village to saving the world to saving the universe to saving the multiverse in just as many seasons. The forever escalating threat is something people have been complaining about in media for decades because it's rarely done well and often becomes unrealistic (and the audience ends up exhausted or otherwise disconnected from it over time). My only complaint with the micro level threats in GW2 is that so many of them ended up focusing on humans at first (likely due to a lot of it being tied to GW1's story). It's gotten more balanced over time, thankfully, but I'd rather see what happens with the charr civil war, for example, than Big Bad Threat #7 showing up only to be forgotten about when Big Bad Threat #8 appears.

Barring an engine change, I doubt they'd add it even if there was a lot of demand for it. On open world PvE maps, it's coded in such a way were all players are friendly or all players are hostile (with a handful of gimmicky exceptions that are prone to bug out)—there is no way to pick and choose who's friendly or hostile. This has origins in how GW2 was founded on the idea that other players should never be seen as the enemy and player griefing should not be encouraged by putting systems in unless it's explicitly for PvP/WvW. If the code is old enough and baked in enough, it would be a massive undertaking for something that has multiple workarounds already. If you want duels, there's guild halls, WvW (5 maps, including Obsidian Sanctum), PvP, the WvW lounge, Edge of the Mists, and I know I'm missing some. Yes it's a bit more effort than just right-clicking a player and selecting duel, but it means that if you care so much about it and the other person does to, you're perfectly happy to select what skill balance to use (PvE, WvW, or PvP) and where to go. At the same time, people who have no interest in dueling aren't harassed over it. Also mounts could be monetized and Anet had previously stated they would only do mounts at all if they could be done in a way where it wasn't just a graphical speed boost. I don't see how dueling could be monetized unless it's to buy spots in tournaments and/or obnoxious graphics and/or a predatory battlepass. And given the PvP population in the game is so small, it's very unlikely that they'd start the massive undertaking of adding duels to the open world when it wouldn't even break even. A specific map or arena I could understand testing out, but not the open world.

Honestly those things very well could break a character, if not the account itself given how badly the personal story code has aged. One of the reasons they don't fix personal story bugs that have been around for years is because even if they fix it, they could very well break something else in the process. At least the current bugs they know the extent and frequency of them, and the community can chime in far quicker than support to confirm it's a known bug and what to do about it. Looking at the code, it's hilariously bad in hindsight but it is what it is and 2 expansions (soon to be 3 barring an engine overhaul) and 5 story arcs have been built on it—plus nearly 9 years of various updates and changes. If they say that the code is too spaghetti and hanging on with duct tape and gumption, I'm inclined to believe them. The code is ancient, future-proofing seems to have only been a priority the past two or three years, and a lot of people who worked with the original GW1 code and early GW2 code are no longer with the company. It's far safer and easier to spend time on other things (especially when there's a workaround for race changes) rather than something that would be a massive undertaking for something only a small amount of players would use. If regular updates with more recent code still result in a HoT-era novelty crashing the map, random tool tips crashing the map, and mount skins crashing players (among other things), it's almost expected that touching the personal story code would result in far more extensive issues up to the possibility of entire accounts being corrupted.