Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Vayne.8563

Members
  • Posts

    5,102
  • Joined

  • Last visited

1 Follower

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Vayne.8563's Achievements

  1. But if you're half focused, it's not unintended game play. Unattended means you're not there. You're not hitting buttons. Half the time I'm playing I'm talking in guild chat, talking to my wife, and posting on reddit, but I'm still there in the game, controlling my character. Sometimes, I die because I lose focus, but that's not unattended game play. I'm attending it, but I'm not focused well on it. I have ADHD and my mind is sometimes all over the place. Does that mean I'm breaking rules by playing all the time. Unattending game play means using a ranger with a pet to do stuff while you do nothing, or using a minion master, or an engie with a turret on autocast or something similar. If you're at your computer, watching another screen, as I often do, it's not unattended game play.
  2. That cool feature is a direct buff. Saying it's not a buff, when it is in fact one of the two things that turtle offers is like saying, let's just take the turtle out of the game. The skyscale is already a swiss army mount. Let's not compound that.
  3. If you're on a US server, I'll do it. I'll have to get a character up to that step though, but let me know if you want me to. Happy to help.
  4. I don't think of it as begging. It's more like asking if anyone can help with a quest that you can't do on your own. After all, when you donate to a beggar you lose something. When you farm someone's home instance, no one loses anything. It's more of a community thing. You're going in anyway, so taking in 2 or 3 or even 4 other people costs you nothing. At worst, you can chat with someone while you farm, and at best someone tips you, though I don't expect it, and sometimes return it. It's not much different from a mesmer offering a portal at a JP.
  5. I share my home instance with people every day. No reason not to, as it costs me something. But there's a difference between the treasure chest and the other nodes. The vast majority of other nodes are just bought with gold or in game currency. The treasure chest is an achievement that requires people to either farm a lot or spend a lot of gold on specific items that come from specific events. That's one of the reason some of those events are populated at all. If people decide they can get that for free, you're actually changing the economy for some items. For some people, doing the Eye of Zhaitan in Straits of Devestation is part of their play, because they have a rare chance of getting a pendent of Arah. This isn't really true for any of the other items in the home instance. And in truth, the stuff you get from the chest is pretty lousy to begin with. But if people could get the reward without getting the chest, some of those items might go down in price, due to lack of demand. There's enough free stuff in the home instance that not getting that chest means very little. Not sure it matters one way or another, which is why changing it doesn't really make sense. This is a long complicated achievement, and the reward for it should be yours.
  6. Yeah, admittedly, I like to argue. Not one of my best qualities. But you know, I need something to do on load screens. lol
  7. While that's true, the devs did talk about having hearts to teach people how the game worked and then taking them away. That was the plan. They could always invest locals. In some locations the locals are people at forts who are fighting against an enemy after all. What zone have we been in that didn't have locals we could help out. There were allied Hylek in Verdant brink. Southsun had locals. But neither have hearts. In fact, there's en entire event chain in Verdant Brink where we help out the locals. Pretty much all four pylons in AB are us helping out the locals, but there are no hearts. This is a very silly argument. What are you trying to say? That the devs are putting hearts in based on a lore formula instead of it just being another piece of content that we play? I'm finding that a bit difficult to believe. I don't think there's a rulebook for it, because there doesn't seem to be a rulebook for much of anything. Anet originally set expectations with the original game and when those expectatoins are later no met, people complain and sometimes Anet fixes is, like competing for resources at a heart instead of having everyone have their own. It's happened a couple of times and Anet has fixed it. Which is why I don't think there's a rule book. Multiple teams working on different chapters of the story in rotation couldn't even agree on how to put out a fire. You think they had this hearts idea in mind, rather than a loose idea that we're doing hearts again? Cause I don't.
  8. There's a lot of hair-splitting going on here. The Lake Doric attack happened, Queen Jennah shielded DR but couldn't shield it forever. Logan was in charge of the strategy, but you were the one going around doing the content, while Logan basically sat in a command tent. In Orr, which has no hearts, Trahearne was in charge of the strategy while you were out fighting an elder dragon. He wasn't even there, but you were NOT in charge of the pact. At the end of the day, the party that took down Caudecaus was you, even if you weren't in charge, you were absolutely in charge of the final assault. Whe we took down Zhaitan, you sat on a ship, and you were not in charge of the army or fleet of ships. You were on one of many ships and you were just fighting. Nor were we under direct threat from Zhaitan in Orr, because Zhaitan was Orr's territory. Divinty's Reach wasn't under attack. The first major city under threat in the game was Lion's Arch and that was during the karka invasion. So, Trahearne in charge, no immediate threat story, no hearts. Logan in charge, an immediate threat to Divinty's reach, hearts. What you're doing is mental gymnastics to prove a personal theory for which the evidence. Maybe there is a formula, but what you have isn't it. Think about what you're saying. You're saying we were in charge in Orr? I don't remember making a lot of decisions. I remember Trahearne saying "Commander a word." A lot. Trahearne gave a speech in a Light in the Darkness, not us. We were the heroes, because we fought Zhaitan. We were the heroes in Lake Doric because we fought Caudecaus. We were in charge of our little guild, but not the zone or the strategy to defend us. Logan sends up out to scout. We keep returning to Logan for orders. How is Trahearne different?
  9. Lake Doric has hearts, you're the commander and there's an eminent crisis happening. Is that better? The whole point is you can keep making arbitrary rules up and move the bar until a point is proven. A theory is just that, a theory. There's no proof of it. In Lake Doric, DR is attacked. There's battles going on. It's a major situation, and we still have hearts. It's not that hard to imagine. Anet probably doesn't have this list of rules like this zone is a war zone, and the story is moving fast enough so we don't need hearts. Them having plans which change is more likely. For example, none of Orr, that's three zones, had hearts. Southsun where we just fought animals had no hearts. Dry Top where we weren't fighting a war didn't have hearts. Silverwastes didn't have hearts. The four zones of hot didn't, and Bloodstone Fen didn't. It's just as easy to believe Hearts had been removed and never were supposed to make a return, and then people started asking for them. Bloodstone Fen was probably already completed, so they decided not to add them, and just add them going forward. I think that's far more likely than this complex list of things that says we'll add hearts here. There's no need for a convoluted justification for hearts, particularly when we know that they weren't meant to be included in the first place. A lot of people can't stand hearts and they complained and so they came out again. Anet actually balanced them in EOD by making less hearts and not including them in a the last zone, because it was a meta zone, built around that one huge meta. It was a showpiece zone. But then there were no hearts in Gyala either, or in any of Soto. Probably, because we've had so many changes to the creative team in leadership positions, some of them liked hearts and some of them didn't. At the end of the day, a theory is a theory and will remain so without proof. Shrugs.
  10. Hirathi Hinterlands is an active war zone that remsembles straits of devestation more than any other zone. The war is with the centaurs. There are hearts.
  11. You have a citation to back this up, or is this just an opinion? I say this because the devs said the original game wasn't designed around hearts, and they only added them to keep people in places were dynamic events spawned. That's what the devs said. Most of the Season 3 maps are busy maps and don't need hearts. I think your explanation can be explained by humans wanting to find patterns in everything.
  12. I did note the OP's title. I just feel like there's less filler than he's saying there is in the new zones. This trend actually started with IBS, which in my opinion was the worst of all the expansions for filler content (and yes, I know it's not an expansion). But the footsteps quests were the blueprint for many of the quests we got in EOD, where lore and story didn't come from hearts so much as from longer quests that involved doing specific events, talking to different people and unraveling a story. I've said this before and I'll say this again. Hearts are stand alone content. They don't interact with each other. They don't connect directly to each other. Whatever info they can give you or story you can tell is less story and more background. And that's okay. But these longer event chains do tell a story. Think of the Pale Reaver chain from HoT. Or the Noble's Ledges chain where we follow the story of a group of survivors, after they were shot down by Mordremoth. In EoD we have longer, involved story and achievement chains that talk about The End of the Celestial Ministry, Marjory's past or the Fate of House Zu Heltzer. The stories in Skywatch Archipelago remind me of that. That longer quest chain type of story, instead of a stand-alone heart. Anyway to each their own. Most hearts, the vast majority, add nothing to the game for me. The one in Lake Doric where you sneak is good. That adds directly to the story, but the ones where you just kill stuff in the area that's part of the story. There are plenty of those. I could pick out a handful of hearts that really add to the lore or story of a zone over events and event chains, but they'd be just that. A handful of hearts.
  13. The vast majority I saw about hearts was from casual players who wanted stuff they could easily solo, because some people have trouble with even relatively easy events. Many who commented saw hearts as solo content, where other content was just too hard. It was a backlash from HoT being too hard for the casual crowd. I don't believe for a second Anet brought them back to create more cohesive story. I believe Anet brought them back because people asked for them, and they were easy/fast/cheap content to provide. Obviously though I can't know that for sure. Not sure why Nayos is a map that doesn't know what it wants to be. Seems pretty straightforward to me story and themewise at least.
  14. The filler content isn't for people like me and you, as we'd explore the game anyway. Even hearts weren't supposed to be in this game. They weren't in the first two betas. They appeared in the third. At the time a dev said that they were added because people were running past events, and not participating. And devs asked why they weren't participating in events and they said, I didn't have a quest to do it. People didn't get it. They had to add hearts to teach people to stay in areas where events spawns. For some people, it became content and people asked for more hearts. If you look at the original game, we had hearts in the core game right up to the 3 Orr zones, which have none and were end game content. Then zones were added. Southsun, Dry Top and Silverwastes had no hearts. None of the four HoT zones had hearts. Bloodstone Fen has no hearts. And then hearts were back, because players asked for hearts. But Hearts were only added because people didn't play if they didn't have marks on the map. That never really changed. Give a guy a star and most people will ignore everything but the star. Since I plan on doing all the content in a zone anyway, those bars barely affect my game at all, because I'll always do enough to fill them just exploring. We never really went from star to star, because we almost always had to get a level or two to get to the next one. Then they changed the story to every 10 levels. It wasn't an accident. They want people to understand the open world is the story. But people are dense, and they need marks on the map. Something to tell them what to do. Filling bars isn't for me, since I play that content normally. It's for the people who do run star to star, which is, in my opinion, most players.
  15. So the devs design a game where they want you to explore and not go from star to star. You say you don't know where to go, and I say that's the point. Some people come to this game from MMOs, but I game to this game from RPGs. Old school RPGs didn't tell you quite so much. Everyone didn't need to be spoon fed or led around by the nose. Anet hasn't done what they've done because they've been lazy. They designed the game this way to get people to actually play the part of the game they want focused on. There have been more updates to the open world than any other area of the game. They don't want people making the few instances the game. They want people doing dynamic events, meta events, and yeah, unfortunately hearts. But that's the game. You may not like the game as it was designed, and that's okay. Not everyone game is for everyone. But I feel we have quite enough games where you go quest hub to quest hub, getting just enough experience to get you to the next hub. I'm over that kind of game. And I get that some people want that linear path, but if you do, there's plenty of games for you out there, including most of them. I feel it's perfectly okay for a game to be designed around setting your own goals and figuring things out. Of course, plenty of people just look up what to do in the wiki, or use walk throughs and that's okay too. But in a game based on exploration, following an arrow to a star is pretty much the opposite of what the game was going for. And they'll never get the balance perfectly right. There's plenty of stuff in this game that could be messaged better than it is. But to say that the game design is lazy because people need reminding of the fact that you're not supposed to go from star to star, because every other game is like that? That seems like a pretty big stretch to me.
×
×
  • Create New...