Zephire.8049

Exactly. AFK farming doesn't even bring in nearly the same amount of gold that, say, doing RIBA or Drizzlewood does so the impact to the economy is minimal and I could see Anet actually accounting for AFK farmers to bring in T3 and T4 mats to keep the price of those low. AFK farmers aren't a pretty sight but unless you're doing a heart or event where they are, they don't affect nearly as much as people think they do. And I'd rather contend with them than people who get a kick out of killing mobs before anyone else can tag them. (And before anyone accuses me of being an AFK farmer, I actually report them when I see them. I just don't work myself up about it because at that point it's in Anet's hands and either they'll do something or won't and I'm not going to try to moderate their game for them.)

That hasn't been an issue for about a year or so now. At some point Anet changed it so when you rent a mount you get a buff that lasts an hour and if you talk to a mount rental NPC at any time in that hour, you can rent a mount again without paying. It doesn't work between different mount type vendors (not sure if that's intentional or not) but if you rent a raptor and end up dropping the bundle, you can talk to a raptor vendor and say "I still have time left on my rental" and you get a raptor again at no cost. It would still be a hassle to go back to a vendor, but it's 10s per hour (just don't leave the map) instead of 10s per time.

It's definitely something I think should be in the game. Maybe (probably) not all mounts, but the basic raptor and a few mount rental NPCs on maps would go a long way in offering a QoL feature (for a price) to new players and show them through hands on experience that mounts do make a difference and GW2 mounts feel way different than mounts in other MMOs. Some people won't be tempted to buy PoF, sure, but if mounts, gliding, unlocked chat, the full Trading post, and elite skills aren't enough for someone to upgrade from a free account, nothing will and features should not be added or designed around them.

Yes, you have to wait a week between drops. This is a marketing scheme to induce pressure to buy early for the best deal. Artificial scarcity is also why skins and outfits rotate in and out of the shop, as that tends to increase sales in video games. As this Supply Drop has an outfit voucher, a weapons voucher, and a Backpack/Glider voucher, these will allow you to get a skin that's not currently in rotation, though. The Bizarre Beast License isn't in the shop because it's a brand new item, but it will be added on Tuesday. Included in this Supply Drop is 1 Bizarre Beast Select License and either 1 Select License of a different set of skins or 1 random Bizarre Beast License. These are just skins though, not the mounts themselves. If you do not have the mount, you cannot use the skin until you acquire that mount. LW1 is sadly not likely to be available to play in full again. It was coded very differently compared to what we have now so between that and part of it taking place in the Open World, it would be a lot of work at the expense of current updates to add it to the game. 4 parts of LW1 instanced content was added in the Visions of the Past update, though to unlock them you need to play through that episode and there is no connecting story—they are just snapshots from LW1. The only way to experience the whole of LW1 would be to watch one of the videos on Youtube that is the whole thing edited together. Italics do work on the forum, you just can't have a space between the underscore and the letters. So this will not italicize but this will.

Nope. Swim speed infusions were added early May 2018, that means you had up to over two years of enjoying a static swim speed increase. You will still be able to enjoy faster swimming in areas that don't allow mounts, fractals, and in combat but mounts should be equal no matter the gear/gold someone has, provided the people have the same masteries unlocked.

I get it. You have a bunch of money IRL and have your own idea of how Anet should operate. Except Anet has always designed GW2 as being accessible to everyone regardless of their IRL income. That was one of their main design philosophies since the game was in development and it was a promise to players that the game would not become pay-to-win or lock things behind a paywall. Now, there is debate about whether or not some elite specs count as being pay-to-win but those at least are tied to expansions instead of just being in the gem shop and requiring you to pay $30 to unlock them. Nothing is "too consumer-friendly" and that should never be a bad thing, especially when it comes to the video game industry which is infamously and insidiously exploitative of players. GW2 isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than so many other games and MMOs out there.

Because people who have unlocked every single dye are the minority and the birthday dyes not being account-bound would destroy the dye economy and also all but guarantee people wouldn't buy most dye kits in the gem store—why spend 125-2500 gems at a shot at something when you could buy it for 1-50 gold and get exactly what you want? Dyes being in birthday kits does lower their price overtime (e.g. Permafrost, Shadow Abyss, Blacklight, etc.) due to them becoming slowly more available and reducing the demand for them while not crashing the market. Not everyone can make use of birthday items and instead of wanting to crash the dye market it would be more feasible to ask for/suggest an alternative for people who have all dyes unlocked, especially as with more and more time going on, more and more people will have unlocked most/all dyes of earlier years, such as getting an option of your birthday dye kit to the gem store RNG one of the same name so you can gamble on what dye you get and being able to sell that on the TP.

Yes and no. We do get more than from GW1, but GW1 had more variety in what we did get (even if it was RNG), they counted towards the HoM and thus exclusive GW2 skins, and undedicated minis could be sold to others for platinum. And from the 8th birthday on, you could select which birthday year you wanted to gamble on. It's also nice being able to boost people's HoMs by 8 points just by having a GW1 account that's old enough to have a good chunk of or all the minis needed to max the HoM devotion track and get someone upwards of 8 points. 8 points unlocks the entire heritage armour skin sets, a staff skin, and a shortbow skin, and is 50AP and a title. Even if I personally don't get much out of something anymore (such as GW1 birthday minis), being able to help others with what I do get more than makes up for it and that ability to help friends and strangers alike is missing from GW2 even though it was always possible in GW1.

I prefer the 8th birthday over the 7th, but just barely. Aside from the infusion being tied to a karma boost, as someone who mostly plays charr I'd rarely see the effect unless they adjust the positioning so it's not mainly inside the neck. The dye kit and other skin unlocks are to be expected, but I wish they'd have done something in addition to or replacing the 5k karma with something else. An amulet can be used on an alt, 5k karma is nothing and not useful by the time an account hits 8 years old—even if someone didn't play since launch, they'd still have gotten 5k x number of characters x number of birthdays. I don't expect anything expensive—the dye unlocks you can use to unlock dyes worth hundreds of gold are good enough there—but getting something that's useful would be preferable. We don't even get level-up scrolls anymore and those were nice for alts and key running. An RNG mount skin voucher would be fine, as would any voucher, really. 5 keys, 200-400 gems, a chair, a boosted version of the tyrian exchange voucher, laurels, gold, the list goes on of things that would be better than 5k karma. The amulet I can at least stick on an alt, that karma is just going to sit there because it's been years and years since I was ever approaching that low on karma. Heck, you can get about that much karma just by doing some events and/or hearts. It's like someone giving you a stale piece of bread to celebrate your birthday 8 years in a row—it's old now, in more ways than one.

It's so subtle you can't even see it on asura and barely see it on charr... It looks good on human, norn, and sylvari, but it seems like they didn't do much or any testing on asura or charr given the bad anchor point on both of them—asura are in the body and charr are in the neck. As a result you get hints of it on charr (assuming you don't have a large mane) and every few seconds you see a flicker on asura (assuming you don't have hair and don't have any particle effects or auras).

Along with what others have mentioned, the instanced maps seem to act as a way to contain bugs, too. Just recently we had a patch where people interacting with a certain object in LA crashed the game for everyone in LA in that instance. If maps weren't instanced, there's a chance that it would have instead crashed the entire game for everyone. There's been a number of bugs that made it to live/appeared when introduced to live code like that, where a certain object or skin or whatever would result in everyone on the map DC'ing or fully crashing. Depending on how the code or the servers are set up, removing the ability for the game to partition areas via map instance could easily result in such DCs and crashes affecting everyone in the game. With the engine being so old and code being as spaghetti as devs say it is, changing something as key as map instances (something GW1 also had so it's likely hard-baked into the code), it's a lose-lose situation for something most people are fine with (if they even notice) and which benefits devs. That's if it's even possible to do. This. Down time is not, "immersive."Heh, I remember when I played Black Desert. Gorgeous open world sure but then... all NPcs just stopped. Stood there in the fields. Permanently died until the world was empty. Time for downtime! ... For like 6 hours. And then when its up its broken within a couple of hours again and time for another downtime lasting a day.And then there's WoW where there would be a regular "minor" patch that was scheduled to be an hour or two... only for something to break and the entire game being down for 12-24 hours with little to no communication from the devs. That happened multiple times when I played. EU going down earlier this year was bad, but that was a semi-regular occurrence with WoW and you never knew if it was going to be a regular patch day or one of those patch days. I'd rather deal with a loading screen that takes 1-10 seconds (SSD) and have the game always be available than have a completely open world but the game being down multiple hours a month.

Old maps are plenty populated. Maybe not as much when the game came out and people were roughly the same level, but they aren't dead unless you play at off-hours for your region. And level 80 players with power classes could always stomp mobs in <70 levels. Ascended makes this more pronounced, but it's not a new phenomenon. 'zerker gear + build/spec for power = dead mob even if someone's "only" in exotics. And I'm not sure why you're even bringing up HoT when HoT is level 80 content and downscaling only happens in all but two vanilla zones.

Celestial stats are fine. Celestial scourge still looks to be a viable build and celestial guardian or firebrand was an option for a time, both being in WvW (I'm not familiar enough with other specs to comment on them). Celestial has always been a jack of all trades, master of none stat. This usually means running with a group of people who will sponge damage away from you so you can be an aggressive support player. If you're roaming in celestial, you're in for a rough time because like you've discovered, it does not offer the same survivability due to the stat distribution. In exchange your damage and support abilities aren't as low as they would be otherwise, but you really need other players with you for it to shine. And not all stats need to be viable in all gamemodes. I don't PvP so can't speak for that, but in PvE no one would ever touch celestial even with a rework because 'zerker/marauder/viper/carrion stats are fine in OWPvE, and due to the toughness it wouldn't be used in raids outside possibly some meme builds. There's a finite number gear stats can have, distributed among X stats. 'zerker is about as ideal distribution you can get for power DPS, so unless celestial no longer resembled anything approaching celestial, it would not be useful or used in PvE so reworking it would be pointless. Even if you gave it non-stat buffs in something, it would have to at least be a sidegrade to what we have now for it to be used outside the occasional piece of gear or two when not min-maxing. You can re-stat your ascended celestial armour (not trickets, though) with a mystic forge recipe, but honestly I'd look into reworking stats like nomad's, rampager's, and settler's before celestial. At least from a PvE perspective.

1) Kourna. The colour palette is muddy no matter where you go, it's annoying to navigate, and one POI is locked behind the meta and another behind an event chain that bugs out far too often. There's also a good amount of dead space where there's no mobs, no reason to explore, no events, and it's yet more brown. 2) Lake Doric. I want to like it but with the mobs being sponges and the hearts taking forever to fill, it's too frustrating so I don't bother outside of map completion. The leather farm is also a joke so the result is that entire corner of the map is impossible to survive solo and before the skyscale came out, you stood a good chance of being sniped and falling to your death before you could get that POI and/or escape with your life. 3) Brisban. The hearts are nothing special (and screw the math heart) but there's 16 of them. Not a huge fan of the PoF maps, either, since many of the hearts are on par with or worse than Lake Doric's but they escape my top three disliked maps. Thunderhead gets an honourable mention not because of the map itself but because it is infamously laggy and that one POI was badly designed.

Sure you could swap inscriptions around but you could do nothing about the level or skin so having a max level weapon in a skin you want is already relying on RNG two times: Once for the weapon to drop at all and once for it to be max level. How would you even introduce different weapon stats this late in the game, anyway? There's 8 years of weapons sitting on the TP and in people's banks/on characters, so either you'd have to randomize what already exists, introduce weapons that are worse than what currently exists that no one would touch, or introduce weapons that are more powerful than exotics but less powerful than ascended and piss off the playerbase. Horizontal progression is fine as it is and a lot of people play GW2 to get away from vertical progression/RNG gear stats. It's fine if you care more about stats than skins, but a lot of us lean more to the RPG part of MMO when it comes to GW2. There's also enough RNG carrots in the game, so why would you lock basic character progression behind RNG? All that does is benefit those with the most time they're willing to spend on a game, or those who have enough money to buy their way through it.

Excuse me? :o Where did you get those numbers from? Out of thin air. GW2efficiency shows 43,212 accounts have finished two story missions of the new episode that came out less than a week ago, and GW2efficiency only tracks 264,476 accounts for a game that sold millions. No way to tell what the consecutive players online number is, but it's bound to be way more than 10k when at least 8642 players a day on average were playing the new story alone, and that doesn't even account for PvP or WvW, which would push it to over 10k alone, or the hundreds/thousands of players in lower level zones, or even people playing on multiple RIBA maps.

Is to minimize botting of the TP and to prevent drastic swings in a matter of minutes by throttling usage past a certain point. It's annoying but it serves a very real purpose. The listing fee has always existed and serves to discourage people from using the TP as a way to store items. It's an upfront fee that you have to pay no matter what. Whisper limitation is due to one or both of you having a free account. This is to prevent gold farmers from making unlimited free accounts and then spamming anyone and everyone with whispers. Mutual friends can whisper each other though. The mail suppression is definitely annoying and overly sensitive. People have been asking Anet to up the limit for years to no response, though.

Since you've done all the hearts and HPs, you are missing one of the cities. Lion's ArchBlack CitadelHoelbrakDivinity's ReachThe GroveRata SumI'd guess either Hoelbrak because it's surrounded by other maps so if you've been there once to unfog it, it's easy to assume you've done it, or Lion's Arch because you can easily forget you haven't actually finished it if you spend a lot of time in it. But it's definitely one of those 6 places so you only need to check 6 maps.

First, story is subjective. What you claim is unforgettable from GW1, I don't care about or had forgotten. You say only 3 characters in GW2 have maybe had an impact people and I say you're wrong and that only one of your three has done enough that I somewhat care about him (Canach). Market: The TP is a godsend and standing around Spammadan trying to sell whatever was annoying and took forever. It was worse when trying to buy because you had to hope you were in the same district as someone who had what you wanted, hope that they were reading chat, hope that they were willing to sell, and hope that they wouldn't rip you off. All that is time that could have been better spent playing the game instead of alt-tabbing or reading a book because you couldn't keep an eye on chat if you left the hub. (The TP also minimizes inflation and combats gold-selling, btw.) Legendaries: Legendaries are cosmetic and have some QoL fuctions. That's it. And if you remember from GW2's early days, precursors were RNG drops only so the only way to get a legendary was to be lucky with a pre drop or buy one off the TP. They only added crafting in when players complained about how unfair and inaccessible that system was. Also I don't know what them to do about legendaries since either the original weapons are the only legendaries the game will ever get or they occasionally add a new one. They chose the latter and it shouldn't be a surprise that some people after nearly 8 years have multiple legendaries. Classes: I don't know what you're trying to say here because all I see is complaining that armour classes don't dictate what a player can and can't do. In a game that was designed and advertised to not follow the Holy Trinity and force people into end-game roles that were determined by the class they picked. Is it weird that a cloth-wearer is one of the best tanks and that the heavy armour classes are some of the best support classes? A bit, but also breaking MMO conventions was what GW2 was supposed to do. NPCs: Again, personal preference. Also representation matters so while you may not care about Marjory and Kasmeer, I do and I know many people who do care about the fact that there's a prominent non-straight couple in a AAA MMO (even if they've been put on the backburner for a few years). I'm not really into Kas but it is possible to not personally be into something while still acknowledging that it's important to others. LA: You do have a bit of a point here, but LA of SoS is different than the LA of EoD which is different than the LA that is in GW2. The game also largely doesn't show slums and citys are shrunk down (as are maps in general) because that makes the game more approachable to players and means the game takes up less room. The themepark look of new LA is bad, though, and clashes with the rest of the game. WvW: WvW is in a massive need of an update, yes, but complaints about it are like the tides and it largely depends on what class you play and what you do in WvW. If not for the invuln tactic, zergs would be able to take whatever they wanted because that minute gives the defending server time to respond. Without it, towers could be taken in a minute or two. Siege being repairable would also benefit the defenders, especially in the case of fully stocked keeps. And the warclaw has been repeatedly nerfed to the point where it's mostly just useful for mobility for classes that can't teleport or stack swiftness and can no longer finish downed enemies. And why is it bad some people are able to escape fights now? If they're able to mount up, you haven't touched them in a while so it can't have been much of a fight. Also stability is good because losing control of your character often and repeatedly was obnoxious. Conditions (and boons) need a rework but stability was introduced to fix a problem. Mists: Agreed here. It's no longer needed as an overflow so should be used or converted to something. Also have rewards increased as it gives little WXP and no pips. TL;DR: Veterans aren't a monolith, you don't speak for all of us, and a lot of what you suggest as "fixes" or "improvements" is purely subjective and/or goes against the game design.

I'm a Charr player myself, I was just trying to make the Norn look less like Neanderthals and fix the deformed gear of my cats.If your issue with charr is the clipping and weird armour, that's a QA/artist issue. Turning them into your standard Fantasy Cat Human may cover up some of the issues, but it wouldn't fix everything (since humans and sylvari have their own clipping issues, as do female norn) and charr would no longer be charr. Every single piece of armour would also have to be remade to work with the new skeleton so it's more than just changing the charr model and skeleton. Same with male norn—change the model and skeleton and all the armour has to be remade to work with it. Ideally armour issues wouldn't exist, but since that's not the case (and this is an issue that Arenanet should resolve instead of leaving it alone—not just for charr but for all the issues that exist) I'd prefer the occasional weird armour or losing horns/ears/mane to turning the charr humanoid if it comes down to it.

Anet is in the Seattle metropolitan area (Bellevue specifically), not Los Angeles.Yes but they apparently do some/all of their recording in LA, most likely because voice actors tend to live near where there's work for them and neither Seattle nor Bellevue are known for a plethora of voice acting gigs. It's cheaper to fly some employees down to get what is needed than get VAs to fly to Washington on Arenanet's dime. So they would have to fly people down to LA, hope the VAs are able and willing to record during a short period of time, and fly people back to Washington. That's a heck of a lot of risk for everyone involved for something as small as voice acting. And yes some people can't enjoy or follow the story without voice acting but the need for safety of dozens of people outweighs the wants of voice acting in a video game.

Because if I'm talking that means I can't play, so why would I try to strike up conversation with strangers in a video game when there's social media for that? I'm perfectly happy to help someone out but I rarely find map chat to be worth engaging in, especially if it's a random "Hi!" or something else that could easily have been meant for a whisper. I'm also usually following guild chats and/or watching shows on a second monitor, so if I want to engage in map chat I have to stop doing those things on top of no longer playing the game. It comes down to the fact that there are other ways for me to socialize and map chat is not conducive to that, especially as an MMO such as GW2 requires active movement. I still see map chat being active a lot of the time, though, it's just not my thing.

And then people will complain about Anet not communicating large changes with players before the change goes live. Again. The heads up lets people prepare for changes, theorycraft, or hold off on gearing up a character for a week. Usually (all the time?) the preview has a disclaimer about how the changes could change and not all the changes are mentioned. It's not the devs' fault players take a preview and treat it as concrete after being told it's not concrete.

When an item that people can buy for ~$25USD (honestly a bit more since you can't buy just 2k gems) is bugged, you fix it before people start demanding refunds since refunds cost you money on top of the money you're already refunding. Depending on the type of bug and frequency of bugs in cash shop items, not fixing what's broken ASAP can affect customer purchases in the future, too. Not to mention add more work to support who by all accounts have been running at max capacity since the pandemic hit. GW2 is also a global game (minus China which has its own version) so it has to err on the side of caution because consumer laws vary so much around the globe. Would there be a lawsuit over one skin? Doubtful, but better to inconvenience some players than to risk it. That's partly why you see cash shop items be hotfixed quickly most of the time while in-game items languishing, if they're touched at all. If it was a skin that was only available from an in-game source, the fix would probably have gone out on the next patch/larger hotfix, but because people could and did buy it directly, that changes things. It sucks that it affected WvW but it is what it is. Sometimes PvP/WvW-only hotfixes go out and inconvenience PvE players, other times PvE-only hotfixes go out and inconvenience PvP/WvW players. They can't just take down part of the game to hotfix something and reducing/preventing customer refunds takes priority over whatever is going on in WvW at the moment.

Obsidian Sanctum in WvW is better than the PvP lobby now that it has NPCs, but again there's no crafting station, mystic forge, fractal vendors, and more. Mistlock is popular because everything is in a small area, you get a special action to move faster, and there are crafting stations, NPCs, and the fractal entrance that none of the other lounges have. It's essentially all of LA put in an area no bigger than the domed area southeast of the LA bank. LA and EotN are fine, as are the other lounges, Mistlock just has the most QoL features than the others. And once you know to change map layers to waypoint, the biggest inconvenience of it is gone. You still can't click waypoints from chat, but that still beats having to run between everywhere. Also keep in mind a lot of players bought the Mistlock pass before PoF so that's not just a couple raptor jumps between places, that's a good several seconds of running that Mistlock cut out, albeit for a premium price.