Zephire.8049

It would be nice if you could at least buy an account-bound select box (like the achievement's) with DRM currency or if after X metas you would get a second account-bound box, just so you can finish a set if you want.

I'd prefer it if monthly numbers were published about infractions (e.g. action taken about X name infractions, Y botting, and Z hacking) rather than it being personal since unless you report a dozen people daily, it wouldn't be hard to tell who was investigated and what punishment they had given you could just add them to your friend list and see if they're online or not. You can actually do that now so a notification of any sort would just make it easier. And honestly? I'm just not that invested in the minutia. Granted I don't PvP but if I'm reporting something in-game, I'm not going to be invested in the outcome and lose sleep over it. When I report something via the support website, that's when I care about something and that does tell you when it's submitted and you sometimes get follow-up emails from GMs. They won't tell you what action has been taken, if any, but it's a human interaction that implies it's been looked into.

Considering that it's been a week since the episode came out and the ending has been foreshadowed for a year and made explicit two months ago, I'm not sure if what you're asking for is reasonable. If you're two months or more behind on content, it's unreasonable to expect no one to talk about it or for a company to show nothing from the newest release when they already waited a week to do so. It sucks and I'm sorry you got spoiled on the end of IBS but there's only so much that can reasonably be done and anything past that point is on the individual to do, be it skip emails, stay off social media, turn off map chat, etc. Unless your email provider opens everything in full, "Join the Final Battle, [character name]" indicates it's about the finale thus may contain spoilers and you shouldn't open it until you finish the episode. Also you talk about one of the images in the email being a spoiler while you also were looking for visuals from EoD which would count as a visual spoiler as well and there are some who want to go into the expansion completely blind. Where should the line be for what's a spoiler and what's advertising, and how can a company take into account everyone's varying ability to understand foreshadowing?

In-dept achievements are something I also enjoy but there seems to be a reason they moved away from them. Roughly the first have of Gen 2 legendaries had good collection quests and custom dialogue (Chuka and Champawat is amazing) but then they switched to crafting-only for the remaining ones because it took so long to do custom quests, and this is with a 3-4 month gap between each release. Granted we don't know how big the legendary team was and this was during the time period where GW2 was being understaffed for an unannounced project that was cancelled, but one of the cited issues was that it took time to find the right dynamic events to tie to the quest. Messing with that particular code could break an entire chain of events and core Tyria events in general break easily and waiting until the next patch in 1.5 weeks before you can continue on your quest is not fun. Plus for some reason achievements kept being tied to event failures even after Anet said that they would no longer do that. The reason I recapped that isn't because I think in-depth achievements are bad (they aren't) but because it's a surprisingly complicated matter. If they utilize older content and events, they risk breaking an event/event chain for everyone. If they create whole new content, odds of that breaking are smaller but it also takes resources to make all the custom dialogue, coding, and animations for a small part of the game. Achievements that just count how many times you do X require the least effort on their end. And don't forget they need to have something to do between content releases for players to do, so they can't just not add simple achievements. If they were to just not put out achievements, a lot of people would complain and there's already a huge dearth of PvE achievements and (especially AP if you missed LW1) and cutting that back further will alienate dedicated players. If you're a new player you have a ton of options in what you want to do but if you've been playing regularly since release or HoT, there's not a whole lot of variety by this point. This has been far more rambly than I intended but TLDR is it's a complicated matter in terms of balancing both resources and what group of players to focus on. Plus anything involving core content has a not-small potential in breaking that needs to be considered. (But IBS: Champions did drop the ball in terms of achievements with seemingly little-to-no QA testing or consideration for players' time with them.)

The solution to an annoying bug is to fix the bug, not remove what it's tied to for everyone. That's just cutting off everyone's nose to spite your face.

Making pre-events harder would just make it more annoying, not harder, since it means more player coordination and you'd need more players who know what to do playing to succeed. Since so many world bosses are in <80 areas (with 4 being in starter zones), they should be balanced around new(er) players and players who don't have gear and/or don't know their class, not people who have been playing for years, exotic or higher gear, and/or do raids or fractals regularly. Making a boss harder should involve adding an attack or something that punishes not dodging it, for example, not making it more difficult for people not on boss train maps to start or adding a point of failure that would not allow for recovery.

No way would I play GW2 if it had a subscription and I outright refuse to pay a subscription for any game that also charges money for the box. A subscription also doesn't guarantee that there wouldn't be a cash shop as both WoW and FF14 show. I'd be paying $32+ for a mount skin in WoW in addition to the $60 for each expansion and $20 every month for the subscription. At most I'd pay ~$30 for a premium skin in GW2 but more realistically half that for a mount select license, or free if I get lucky with a key. Sure WoW has mount skins in-game but if it has a 1% drop rate and you spend 20 hours trying to get it (with there being a chance someone else will ninja it unless you solo), it's not free—it cost you $20 for the month + 20 hours of your time. FF14 is a bit more reasonable with single-player mount skins being as low as $12USD, though those are per character rather than account. Account-wide skins are $24USD. This is on top of a subscription. Could there be more mount skins available through in-game methods? Absolutely! But a subscription would be no guarantee as the two largest subscription-based MMOs also have cash shops (which charge far more for skins) while it would alienate players.

Exactly. You can pretty accurately track the EoD announcement with how it affected IBS and one of the narrative leads talked in a stream about how he and his team had to scrap their plan for the IBS story halfway through and both write EoD quickly and rewrite the second half of IBS to lead into it. It's also been mentioned that most of the teams were pulled off of IBS to focus solely on EoD so odds are less than a dozen people were left working on IBS full-time with a fraction of the resources they expected to have. I have no love for the grind, DRMs, and general lack of foresight with Champions but the people who should be blamed for what happened is upper management, not devs who had no say about scrapping half of a release or whether or not to make a whole new expansion. From what I've heard and conferred, a good number of devs were also frustrated and upset at the sudden change and having to toss what they spent months on in the garbage. Pretty much the only people who weren't negatively impacted would be upper management and investors who, coincidentally, also call the shots so any ire should go towards them. Devs may have more influence and power than players but they have no control over something like this if they're told to do it or lose their job so the least we, as players, can do is recognize that. It doesn't mean you can't be upset about what happened but it would be like demanding an apology from a retail worker for a store no longer stocking an item rather than being mad at corporate for deciding not to continue stocking said item—ineffectual and putting the blame on the wrong person.

Theoretically I'd go with the Priory (and they're my #2) but I've become fond of the Vigil, probably because of Almorra Soulkeeper and her portrayal in Ghosts of Ascalon. The idea of altruistic individuals coming together regardless of race to protect everyone regardless of race certainly appeals to me—especially as the Vigil was founded before the human-charr truce. Though in-game it tends to gloss over that and the Pact has taken over with the Vigil being the pure strength branch. Plus their missions can be simpler and I always forget which Whispers mission takes forever because of stealth >.>

If they were going to tease or reveal anything before the end of IBS, it would have happened by now. It's frustrating (and to be clear I don't agree with this level of secrecy) but if they didn't budge in over 6 months, they're not going to budge in 9 days and 9 days isn't going to make or break a hype train when it hasn't even left the station. I do expect we'll see something within 2-4 weeks of IBS' finale, though, be it a teaser or full reveal.

Adding markers for parties would be nice, but as others have said, the party leader was something that used to exist but was removed because people abused it to the point people were turned off of using LFG or being the PUG of a group as there was no small chance you'd be kicked just before getting credit or loot.

This doesn't really make any sense. Yes there were no crafting timegates but if you wanted to play multiple characters, you would have to go around and hunt down bosses that had a skill you wanted/needed for a build. If it was a boss that's RNG, you could spend a couple hours before getting it. GW2 doesn't timegate your very build and you can get by perfectly fine with level 80 exotics. The closest thing to a timegate post-80 is hero points if you're going for an elite spec, but a HoT HP train will take care of that in the time it takes you to get 1-2 skills in GW1. Also neither jumping puzzles nor scavenger hunts are timegated with a few exceptions for certain scavenger hunt steps (most notably with the skyscale). Something taking time =/= timegate. There was an issue of condi in PvP (and still is, though to a lesser extent) but condi spent years being underpowered and a meme/niche build, it didn't start off as OP at launch. They were also toning down the condi damage in PvP until the balance team got pulled off of it to work on EoD balancing and elite specs. However if you have an idea for a specific sub-mode to be added, by all means suggest it. Just saying "add more modes" isn't helpful. Also that notification means the map is popular enough that it requires at least one more instance. So it's not that players are spread out across the game, it's that 100+ players are on the same map. If you don't see other players, either there's a meta or world boss and you aren't in the area or you ended up on one of the overflow maps. "Make the game feel like I'm not playing a game" also implies you want something addictive, which is... not good. MMOs (even GW2) utilize psychological methods to keep people playing beyond what they'd do otherwise and that is not something people should be advocating for. A game can absolutely be fun and engaging but "making it feel like it's not a game" is a slippery and dangerous slope.

The skyscale's bread and butter is if you're starting off high as height stamina is less of an issue there, but you still have the ability to get higher than the springer allows if you put a bit of work into it and use the mount bonds. You can also go higher vertically than the springer can jump, albeit slightly slower yet with more precision and the option to add 50% more height to that even in open air. The skyscale is for uneven terrain, not open areas, and in uneven terrain it's fantastic and stamina is rarely an issue given how many ways there are to replenish it fully or temporarily. How quickly it grabs things sometimes could be adjusted, sure, but stamina use is in the sweet spot.

Considering the skyscale already trivializes most terrain, doubt it's going to happen. At most I can see them making the cling more fluid or toggleable. If you're in core, HoT, or LW3 maps, these were pre-mounts so either you're trying to get somewhere you were never intended to go, are taking an even shorter cut, or not utilizing random outcroppings to reset your stamina bar. PoF, LW4, and IBS were built with mounts in mind with LW4 and IBS specifically having balls of VM or karma in the air in places that were expected to be a shortcut so you can refill your stamina on the go. So either it's a learn to play issue (make sure to use Bond of Vigor for extra stamina, wall cling for flight juice, and Bond of Faith to get over the lips of places) or you're trying to go to places you weren't supposed to and/or going ways you weren't supposed to. Because at over a dozen map comps of every map (minus PoF because those hearts are scaled badly) since the skyscale came out, the only time I've ever had an issue was when I knowingly pushed the limit to see if I could do it. It took a while to get used to it, but once you know the limits and to watch for places to refill your stamina, it becomes the easiest mount in the game. Simply put, if you use it expecting a free-flying mount, you're going to have a hard time. If you use it thinking it's a way to bypass cliffs and gorges, it gets far more intuitive.

With how IBS has been going, I'm tempering my expectations. A lot. Theoretically 5 months with no new maps or other assets (and something like <6 hours of gameplay) should mean that there was plenty of time for the IBS team to work on a final map with people working on EoD doing a few hours here or there as needed (which wouldn't noticeably impact EoD), but I'm kind of expecting it to be an instance because that would be the cherry on the disappointing sundae that was the second half of IBS. By all accounts it would be a smart move to make the finale big and repeatable to hype up EoD while providing non-DRM content, but that's why I'm not sure it will happen.

There's been similar problems with various materials which have always been tradable though. There was a time when you couldn't give away thick leather (literally, I tried and no one wanted it) and many other T5 mats have at various times been hovering just above vendor value. It's the same with a lot of the food. Making it account bound might hide the problem because everyone only sees what they've got, but it doesn't mean there's genuinely more demand for it or that it's more valuable. Oh for sure. There's also the same issue with most of the PoF mats. But if they switch from account-bound to tradable without retroactively changing everything, they do preserve a demand that can now be fulfilled without the TP being flooded with tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of sell orders. It's hard to find a balance for items that have been tradable for years without drastic changes that may affect far more than just the specific material demand, but at least if they introduce a material that can now be traded, they can more easily monitor the supply and demand of it and adjust it as needed to where they want the balance to be. (Of course it being Anet you never know what will happen, but an iterative approach on the surface is a safer approach than allowing every player to dump their surplus at once unless the goal is for a previously "desirable" material that people had to work on to get to be at vendor value on the TP.)

Given the January 19th patch where they made a lot of previously account-bound materials and other items tradable but only those items that were generated after the patch, such a change probably won't help like you think it would if you horde account-bound mats with the idea that you can sell them on the TP if/when they become tradable. If something's still new in the game, they can change all currently existing items without it negatively affecting the market (e.g. Prismatium Ingot). If something's been around for years, that's years worth of items that could flood the TP thus to preserve the market and intended value, a new version that can be traded is added (e.g. Serpentine Jewel). It's just not a good look for a material that's supposed to be mid-high tier to sell on the TP for 1c above the vendor price, which is what would happen with a lot of account-bound mats if the existing ones were made tradable in one fell swoop, which also means it won't benefit people holding onto those materials, either.

and yet you have people (not all) with the proper hardware that can play gw2 almost as if it's running natively in linux using wine + dxvk and in some cases and hardware configurations (amd cpu+ amd gpu), on par or a faster than playing it on windows (that's a lot of overhead too, compared to say, just running d912pxy on windows) "upgrading the engine" doesn't just mean changing the graphics renderer to a different one and calling it a day, it also means making your game much more multi-threading friendly to make better utilization of modern CPUs. WoW did it, Path of Exile did it, and a korean mmorpg that's barely alive with it's population: Tree of Savior also did it. just to name a few examples, all of them use custom made engines not something ready-to-use like UE3/UE4 -- and for the record, WoW's engine is ancient too. it's just that it seems GW2/Arenanet doesn't even want to try. d912pxy and (linux)wine+dxvk has shown that with the right hardware, there's a lot of performance to be gained over the vanilla client we have now. performance gains also don't pertain to just huge increases in FPS, it can also be less FPS drops (higher floor) and more stable average FPS, less stuttering and no before someone else says it, even with an upgraded engine there's no reason to immediately cut-off people with older OS/hardware setups that can't utilize new tech. many games offer old/legacy api and client builds for people who can't use the new tech. (ex. WoW offering dx11 while also having dx12 in it's options) Not sure why you think I don't want an engine upgrade—that's actually something I've been talking about the game needing for years. The OP was specifically talking about upgrading the graphics only, though, which would be about the same amount of work for a fraction of the benefit. If you upgrade the whole engine, you can pull out a bunch of the spaghetti and make it more modular, dev-friendly, and future-proof it. If you just upgrade the graphics side of things, you're still beholden to an engine that's older than some people playing it and having to work within those confines. dx12py tells us otherwise. Yes, implementing something like dx12py wouldn't solve ALL the issues, maybe not even help at the most serious of situations, but it does indeed help with a lot others. So not implementing a solution that can help in a wide range of situations, because "it won't do much" for the situations where the main thread is the issue, is a bit odd.No doubt that the engine has issues, but see above: Instead of just doing one thing that not everyone will benefit from, overhaul the entire engine itself if it will be about the same amount of work. Everyone will benefit from streamlined processing that actually works on current tech but not everyone can even run DX12. And who's to say they couldn't update the DirectX at the same time (or make space for that update to be added easily in the future)? And I was just summing up what the dev said with "it won't do much", so if you think it's odd to say you're better off talking to them since they have hands-on experience with the engine.

According to Wikipedia, "Guild Wars 2 uses a heavily modified version of the proprietary game engine developed for Guild Wars by ArenaNet"....I honestly can't imagine them implementing native DX12 support in GW2 but one can always hope I guess. That it does and they already had to sacrifice some things from it to get other things in GW2 and often run into issue because the engine is close to 20 years old and there's not many still at the company who are familiar with the original GW1 code. GW2 actually came about because the engine wouldn't let them do what they wanted in GW1. (Also it was the company's first engine so you just know there was tons of mistakes in it to begin with simply due to the lack of experience) A dev has even said that upgrading to DX12 would be a massive undertaking and the positive impact would be minimal because the main issue is where GW2 processes things and that is the bottleneck and changing the DirectX won't do much because DirectX largely utilizes a different thread for its processing. Excerpt: TLDR: The engine is ancient and designed to work with tech that tops out at potato computer nowadays and it literally cannot make use of current tech.

Can't remember if the EU got their promised promotion either and the wiki lists nothing. I don't know what's worse: lying (or reneging) about compensation or treating the roller beetle car sweepstakes as the make-up promotion. Which is why I really want to know if the Dorito's sweepstakes going on right now is the promotion that's supposed to be for international players. One (1) person getting 52 bags of chips =/= unlimited (of you're in the US and have money) discounted gems and account keys.

I'm curious if the Dorito's sweepstakes is the international promotion hinted at because if so... yikes. Just yikes.

I'm pretty rich. I can throw money at what I want. But, ya know, that's not an accident, and it's not luck, and it's not cos I'm super clever or cos I play the TP or anything like that. I'll tell you exactly how I made all my gold. I crafted legendaries and sold them. That's it. Simples. It's not magic, and it's not particularly difficult. It's not something you can do overnight, and it does, absolutely, require some effort and a lot of patience. But it is, absolutely, something every player can achieve. If they want to, and are prepared to make the effort. Why play victim, when you have all the means at your disposal to improve your situation? What's your point? 'cause mine was the OP's suggestion to punish people for knowing how to make legendaries would harm average players far more. Take away the recipe and the average player has to stick to time-gated methods that would take them months to get 77 clovers if their time was limited, and that's assuming they start getting mystic clovers in their loyalty chests right away. People with gold would just find other ways to make gold and legendary flipping would be streamlined since it would still be profitable, if not more so because it would be harder for people make them casually thus reducing supply while demand won't change. No one's playing a victim but you.

Even if American Amazon was going to offer the discount no matter what and Anet simply promoted it to get more sales thus more income even with Amazon's cut, it's still a move that upset international players because it's not the first time it's happened and nothing was done in-game or internationally to make it clear all players all appreciated regardless of their location. There's also the added issue of Anet not planning ahead of time to have an international promotion going on at the same time. An ambiguous time in the future doesn't help with the here and now and at the end of the day, a lot of people find more value in discounted gems even if they still paid for them than a free hair kit/mini/bonfire/1 hour booster which is often what international promotions end up being. Heck, outside a handful of minis, you can buy all of those and still have enough gems for skins, outfits, and/or account upgrades. Yeah you technically paid for it but you can actually get what you want and not get something you may have a stack of in you in-game bank or can sell for 5s on the TP. The whole thing could have been handled so much better than it was and a business isn't anything without customers yet once again Anet implied it thinks less of its non-American customers.

The issue isn't the Mystic Clover recipe, the issue is that so many recipes that use Mystic Coins were made when they were easier (and cheaper) to get and haven't been adjusted since then. I would bet just these recipes alone use as many, if not more, Coins than legendaries do as they are far more accessible to the average player. Unless you love a legendary's skin or want one for the "prestige", it's far cheaper to make a skin you want for a fraction of the price given that legendaries don't have higher stats than ascended. Also, some of those such as the mystic skins, are required for specialization collections which will net you an ascended weapon that has the same stats as a legendary. There will always be extremely wealthy people who can just throw money at what they want but it makes zero sense to punish everyone else because of a handful of people, which is what you want to do.

Those were some nice concepts but like you said not telling much. Just perhaps that echovald buildings could look really good.. Yeah. Pretty concept art only goes so far. I get Anet not wanting to spoil the main story, but periodic location and creature concept art would go a long way in easing some of the frustration at the lack of information for EoD. Plus we already know it will be in Cantha which means we know the locations and creatures from GW1 so neither is really a spoiler unless it's brand new. new elite specs dont mess with the story either as no one can spoil the new story from elite specs alone.It depends on the elite spec and with elite specs there can be an issue of people hearing a concept and hyping it up way too much and then getting angry when the reality of a spec is different than what they expected, even if literally nothing was said about a spec but the name. That said, if they were to put out various concept art (possibly even models and renders) of places, creatures, and even characters, they could tease elite specs without saying anything about them and that would avoid the above situation. Or find another way to tease or reveal elite specs that wouldn't cause issues down the line because players built up their expectations far too high. But the bottom line is that they could have been way better about showing what's going on with EoD while still keeping hard information close to their chest during IBS and hopefully come the finale of that, they'll start showing players what they've been working on while utilizing some of the worst grind I've come across in an MMO to keep players playing. 'cause they really did drop the ball there.