Rasimir.6239

The way this game handles loot is on purpose, and in fact directly at odds with some of the things you are hoping for. One of the main pillars of this game's loot design is "comparable rewards". No matter what kind of content you like to play, you will get rewards that enable you to aquire the things you are looking for. The game strives to allow you to freely choose the kind of content you like to spend your time with, and get rewarded comparably to other content. Some loot (mostly cosmetics) is tied to specific content (e.g. the carapax armor somebody mentioned can only be gained on the Silverwastes map or through related pvp and wvw reward tracks), but the majority of loot can be aquired through trading, and the steady supply of generic equipment and crafting material enables everybody to gain resources to trade for whatever shiny they actually want to get. This system is great for players like me that prefer to choose the content they want to spend their time on depending on what they enjoy playing, rather than depending on what the rewards are, since you are able to trade most of the rewards for whatever you are looking for. On the other hand the system is lacking for players that prefer to choose the content they play based on what (exclusive) rewards they get out of that content. If you tie more specific, non-tradeable rewards to specific events, then you skew the comparability of rewards between different kinds of content. It's great if you like the kind of content that the rewards are tied to, but much less so if you don't enjoy the content that gates the specific shiny you would like to get, or get tired of playing it, or the events in question just don't happen at a time when you are free to play the game (not everyone of us has the luxury of playing undisturbed for hours). The last point also ties into the question of map-changing consequences of group event chains. It's fun if you have the time and amount of players to play around on the map (see maps like Dragon's Stand or Drizzlewood for that kind of event-driven map), but it's a nuisance if you find yourself gated from certain things (e.g. adventures in Verdant Brink) because there aren't enough people around to advance an event-driven map to the point you need to access whatever you're after. As such I very much appreciate the mix of maps we have, some with map-changing meta event chains, and others with mainly smaller, localized events and event chains.

The problem is that there is no guarantee the whole group is on one map. I'm not sure how much data overhead it would be if each group advertised in the lfg you check is queried as to whether they're all on a full map or not, especially if you want to update the indicator in real time (or close to). As an example let's look back to the recent festival of the four winds, more specifically the crown pavillion boss blitz. I've frequently joined squads that were spread across different map instances. When the main group finished one boss blitz, squad members on the other maps would call out the status of their map, and many players would jump around different map instances to minimize the downtime between whatever activity they were after (mostly boss blitz, but some were actually using that to e.g. farm centaurs on preparation maps). Whenever a player changed map instance, the game would query the map they wanted to join in, then give back feedback to the client if that map was full or not. Imagine instead of having to choose to join, the game would indicate whether the other maps were full or not, possibly re-checking every second. The network traffic would explode exponentially, especially if you'd "monitor" the status of several maps at the same time (no matter if you show indicators on an lfg tab or in party/squad view). I've played a few games in my time that weren't careful about the amount of information they send to the clients, and something like that can quickly get out of hand to the point where it has an actual (negative) impact on game performance. Anyway, all that technical stuff aside, leading labyrinth groups really isn't hard, and most people are fine with "commanders" that do nothing more than run in a circle. If you want to try it out, open a 10-person-squad (you can do that without a commander tag) and advertise on lfg with something like "new to commanding, help welcome". If you have a mentor tag you might also consider popping that, just so other potential commanders coming to the map know that there's somebody busy on there already.

ANet reduced the number of players per labyrinth instance on purpose a couple of years ago. They didn't explain why, but if I had to guess I would think that it's either because it makes scaling the events easier (since there will never be a huge zerg trivializing any of the events), or to make sure there are plenty of instances actively played, to allow each player to find an active map with people that have similar goals (farm bosses, farm bags without bosses, whatever). Likely it's even a combination of both. Unlike meta events and world bosses, the labyrinth has proven to work fine with the low map count over the last couple of years. If you don't find a matching group with an open instance, simply put one up yourself. You'll find that it's easy to lead a group around the labyrinth, and that there are always plenty of people ready to join. If you want to play a certain way (bosses/no bosses, low damage only, casual pace, whatever), then putting up your own group with a matching description will even make it easier to get players to your instance that like to play the same way, too.

If I remember this correctly, the original idea was that people were only able to harvest guild hall nodes once per day, no matter how many guilds with guild halls they had access to. This apparently led to conflicts with the way the game normally checks/stores special nodes harvested that day (like sometimes you stumble upon a rich ore node that does not give you extra ores because once you start mining the game realizes that you already harvested a rich node on a different map instance the same day that is tied to the same daily bonus "slot"). In the beginning harvesting across different guilds/guild halls behaved pretty erratic. Sometimes it worked as advertised (meaning you could only harvest each synthesizer in one guild), other times it allowed multi harvesting where it wasn't supposed to. Eventually they settled upon "once per day per guild hall output tier" as that seemed to fit into the existing technical framework. Tying the flag for daily harvesting to a specific guild rather than just "guild hall node x output level y" seems to be outside of the frame of the current data structure, and depending on the exact setup of the data structure might not be easy to implement. I suspect that back when the original tech was created that flagged resource nodes as available or used, nobody was thinking about nodes that were tied to something other than map, so they probably had to get creative to even fit the guild hall synthesizer system in. Aside from possible technical problems with allowing harvesting in each guild daily, there's a couple of other points that make it unlikely that ANet will eventually change this. For one it would potentially multiply the database space necessary to store the information (right now it's four flags for each synthesizer, depending on output level, change this to guilds and it would multiply since you can harvest in any guild, not just those you are a member of), and as we know from former communications (back when material storage was expanded), database space is something ANet does not take lightly. It could also lead to people farming guild halls, for example building a chain of people with access to different Vabbi guild halls to let people farm obsidian shards from mining each guild's hall one after another: It's a stupidly boring activity, but I've seen people do worse "farms" before, and somehow I don't think ANet would be comfortable enabling this kind of farm.

No, there certainly isn't. In fact, reading your op, there is one thing I would tell you that certainly is missing in there: Go find people that actually like to play with other people, instead of playing with those that don't really care and just want a "perfect at <insertgamemmode> bot" to fill out their teams. There are plenty of people around that actually enjoy playing with people that haven't yet hit the peak of in-game experience, that like to share what they know or figure things out together. People that expect you to study to be worthy to play with them generally aren't worth playing with. You can, to a point. GW2 does give you a lot of hints in tooltips, combat log, npc chat, and more. It does however take time and willingness to experiment, and if you want to learn about group content, then you need to play with people that are ok with you trying to figure things out and make mistakes, see above. Singleplayer tutorials that give you the experience you need to be perfect at multiplayer content is technically impossible.

Maybe it's an age thing, but I really can't agree with this. I "grew up" in a time when video games were brand new and the only outside information you could get was from printed magazines that shipped weeks after the games were released. Still games didn't have better explanations or tutorials back then. Instead we were just used to figuring out things ourselves. GW2 does give you a lot of room to discover stuff for yourself, and I have found plenty of hints to figure things out. It takes time and (sometimes a lot of) trial&error, but that's what makes it fun for me, much more than games that tell me what to do all the way and just act as a shiny front for a loot simulator. I do however get the impression that a lot of players these days are so used to getting every bit of information served on a silver platter that they have neither the patience nor the skill to figure things out on their own. One prominent example that comes to my mind is the Skyscale. I had a blast going through the collections, finding all the bits and pieces, and it still took me only a week, without any outside information. Same with story instances, I go in a try to figure out the mechanics, and it usually only takes a few tries to see what I have to do. Still there are plenty of threads again and again complaining that it is "impossible without wiki/youtube". Is it really the game that fails at explaining, or is it the players expecting handholding where the game offers exploration instead?

I suspect that a third (and major) part is giving people something to do. When designing the game, they have to take a good look at all the game systems and decide which ones to make baseline (convenience) and which ones to require participation to progress. On the later they then have to decide whether to make this account-bound (one-time) progression or character bound (potentially open-ended). GW2 decided on the current crafting disciplines to be character-bound progression systems, while gathering for example is baseline for convenience. Other games draw the line at different activities. There's really no right or wrong on this front, as long as the mix of convenience and progression works for the majority of players.

Have you even tried putting up your offer? You've waited how many months to save that much gold, do a couple more weeks really make a difference?

Coordination between players IS the major part of the challenge those instances pose. Take that out and you have easy-mode. That is really unfortunate 😞 . It is however totally different on EU, the game is very much alive and kicking here, with multiple instances of the more recent maps, as well as those with world bosses or meta events happening. We run into the "problem" of party members ending up on different map instances regularly, even for such mundane things as guild missions.

There is a slight difference between five players simultaneously each beating one part of a challenge and one player just doing one part of the challenge without coordinating with four others. Swampland fractal for example would be indefinitely easier if I could just carry one wisp to its place and didn't have to coordinate with the rest of the team who takes which wisp and how to make sure all four of them get back in time.

I'm trying to picture an ai plus command setup to make them any useful in the more complex living story fights ... Caudecus maybe? Or the golem from Sandswept Isles? The final instance of the Siren's Landing story?

But if your mercs only work in instanced content to begin with, but don't work (well) in any of the more complex instances, isn't it a waste of development resources to even implement it? It's not like we're talking about a 5-minute dev project here.

It can be any character, as long as your elementalist has unlocked the collection. I remember mine took a while, but I eventually got it from a random smokescale in VB while on one of my rangers.

Aside from making you log in, it also helps keep the economy going. You can bypass the daily ascended crafting by buying the intermediate materials (e.g. deldrimor steel ingots, spiritwood planks) on the trading post. This way people that like to craft/do daily tasks can sell their extra daily crafting results, which again creates a market for ores, logs etc. that are used to promote the timegated materials to the tradeable ones. It entices people to participate in the trading economy and keeps up the demand for mid-level basic resources while making it hard for individuals or small groups to control the market.

Apples and oranges. GW1 is an instanced game. You have to actively team up with somebody to end up in the same instance with them, which in turn means you know about the number of ai heroes/henchman joining the map, too. GW2 is an open world MMO with dozends of players in the same map instance, with potentially many strangers impacted by individual player actions and their (potential) pets/heroes/companions/mercenaries/whatever. If you want to experience an MMO with a "mercenary" system, try ESO. They implemented a companion system in their latest expansion that is pretty similar to the heroes from GW1. Personally I find it primarily annoying that "my" world is now polluted by all these companions tagging along with most players.

No. I brought up the question of using one fixed resource on either one set of armor skins or multiple one-piece outfits. You are moving the discussion from what to use specific development resources on to how significant these specific resources are in the context of developing the whole game. Only the reasoning they gave was offering more variety, which you could argue (and many that advocated for increased output did argue this) improves player experience, as it increases the variety available and thus the chance for each player to find something to their liking. The whole problem with the "we want individual skin pieces instead of outfits" line of argument that regularly comes up on these forums is that people fail to acknowledge the difference in resources needed to produce either. The underlying discussion really is "we want ANet to spend more resources on armor skin design without higher prices", but people rarely say this outright. Instead they argue that ANet is just "lazy" or "greedy" by offering a variety of outfits instead of individual armor skins, and thus try to (knowingly or unknowingly) mask the fact that armor skin and outfit are far from equal in development/design resource required.

It's not inherently wrong. It's just a question of whether changing existing systems (including considering all implications, implementing the change, quality assurance, release, ...) is worth the time/resource investment compared to utilizing the existing system (seeking out the multitude of solo-able events on the map and/or joining events with others where possible). If your problem is that you feel unable to get enough crowbars, then there might be plenty of helpful tips to fix that without changing the game. If on the other hand you don't like any of the current aquisition methods available, you are better off giving a convincing argument why investing into changing the game is worth it (since it always comes at the detriment of unspecified other content areas the resources required could be spent on instead).

Do chests even give coat boxes? I remember when the Vinewrath was new, the only way to get chest boxes was doing the Vinewrath event, as the lost bandit chests didn't drop them. If you're on the lower end of rng luck that's unfortunate. I remember it took me 20+ Vinewraths to get the two coat boxes for the collection, plus the guaranteed one for the first event, while a friend had all three after the 2nd Vinewrath event (one guaranteed plus one random drop for each event). Seeing how this is permanent content and even people like me that don't play world bosses or meta events unless they accidentally stumble upon them have done this event dozends of times, I'm positive that everyone that actively plays will eventually get their three coat boxes for the collection. It's mostly just an issue if you try to brute-force the collection in a short period of time, and if you are that desparate there even is a quaranteed way to get it from the wvw and pvp reward tracks.

Sorry, but I don't get what you're trying to say here. We were talking about whether ANet should spend time designing and implementing several one-piece outfits or instead spend that same time designing and implementing one set of armor skins. ANet themselves have said that producing armor skins instead of outfits will significantly slow the output of armor skins in general (which will likely increase the cost to buy them in case of gemstore wares, too, as can be seen by the armor skin pieces we got lately). What exactly are you trying to argue for by comparing this to the price of totally unrelated games? The reason ANet gave us for outfits vs. individual armor skins (which as others mentioned was asked for by a lot of players back then) was the ability to produce more cosmetics with the same manpower, which increased the variety on offer as well as lowered the price per outfit. People are used to having a new outfit offered every couple of weeks. Many would not appreciate only having new skins offered two or three times a year instead (on the assumption of manpower available to design and implement armor/outfit cosmetics staying constant).

The problem with this line of thinking is that people don't factor in the amount of work required. One of the main reasons for outfits that ANet gave back then was that they are considerably quicker to make, since the designer doesn't have to worry about matching the seams of the different armor pieces on all armor types. Creating an outfit, especially one that can be worn by characters of any armor class, is considerably faster than creating a set of armor skins. I seriously doubt the majority of the people complaining would be satisfied to get just one set of mix-and-match armor skins instead of 10 or so different-looking outfits to choose from.

I honestly can't follow your logic here. If ANet thought they could make more money by lowering the price, then why do you think they aren't doing it?

SAB!!! 🙂

No one is arguing that it is. It's simply a question of numbers. If ANet says they change it because of too many people quitting, then keeps the changes, that makes me assume that the numbers of players quitting because of the new way are more acceptable to ANet than before.

Your point being? There is no way anyone can know the "optimal" price point, since there is no way to collect all data necessary to calculate it. Any pricing for anything in this world relies on finding a spot the seller is comfortable with, since there is no way to know how many people will actually buy at that price point compared to a different one. Are you saying to expect ANet to change the price because "people on the internet say so"? Why should ANet take that risk if they have found a price point they are comfortable with?

That you are playing on a beta character (if I understood you correctly). Beta characters don't progress achievements.