Rasimir.6239

A player starting this game today will have hundreds of days and thousands of hours of playtime to go before they can even gather all the achievement points available to them. Your theoretical problem fails to acknowledge this fact. By the time they have all the points they can get, to gather all the rewards they can, things will have changed drastically from the way it is now, and there really is no way predicting how (as that not only includes the continuous introduction of new achievement points and achievement rewards, but also things like the game drastically changing in a way that majorly effects the introduction and gaining of ap). Current high-ap rewards are aimed at players that have invested years into playing this game. If you start today, work with what you have (which, as others mentioned, is varied enough to actually make it easier today). You will get to those rewards one day, provided you play this game long enough (and the game stays alive long enough). The system is set up so retired ap (or even just ap given for tasks you don't want to and can't complete) will not block you from gaining the rewards. It will simply delay you, and the amount of delay is in your hands by choosing what content to play and for how long. The ap reward system is not built on the premise of being "won". It's a dynamic system, built to last years and years of new and updated content. It is set up to always have another unique reward available for you in the future if you keep playing. And the way you progress along the (theoretically neverending) rewards path is just as dynamic as the whole system, and set up to include the introduction of new ap sources as well as the retirment of old ones. There is no problem here, it's how the system was designed, and it works very well this way.

... Enter ESOI started playing this game toward the end of 2012, so a bit over 7 years now. I've played ESO on and off since beta. While I do enjoy ESO occasionally, it is exactly the fact that for most of the unique stuff you have to grind the same stuff day in day out that always turns me off quickly, and if you miss a couple of days for seasonal rewards for example you're out of luck.In GW2 most things (nowadays) can be gotten at your own pace, whenever and however you feel like it. While you are missing the carrot, I play this game exactly for the same reason I gave in the post you quoted: I get to choose what to do (and in what timeframe). There's no need to for example repeat specific dailies each and every day since most rewards can be gotten through a variety of ways. If ESO were a bit more like GW2 in this way I'd be all over it, since I actually like a lot about that game, but their more conservative way to rewarding players for grinding very specific content turns me off every time. If guild wars doesn't adapt you'll be going to those games too, because the severs will go down and it won't exist (Until a private server comes around, if it does.)Do you have some insider knowledge about the actual motivations of this game's player base, or is this really just the usual doom and gloom because you and your peers don't get out of this game what other games have conditioned you to expect?

That seems unlikely when I get an e-mail to a character that was deleted at least thee weeks ago.As mentioned above, the delay between ANet pulling the list of character names from their database and sending out the actual mail is likely for technical reasons. Pulling each name separately from the database before sending out the corresponding marketing mail to thousands upon thousands of accounts generates a performance overhead that's way out of proportion to what is being done. More likely they pull one big list of names and mail adresses, then send out the mails in batches (can't send too many mails at once). It's simply a marketing gimmick and will work in enough cases to make it worthwhile the way it is.

There really is no way for ANet to know that I still consider this one char® my main and dearest character, despite not playing him all that often these days. Another character of similar age and not much less playtime on the other hand rarely gets played because he simply never "clicked" with me and mostly just exists for his crafting skills and birthday presents. None of the information the servers have indicate to them the level of personal attachment to the characters I have built. I was "lucky" this time in that the mail was in fact adressed to one of my personal favourite characters, while at other times I'd had it adressed to characters I wouldn't rate highly among the ones I have, but had been playing a lot at that time because they were suitable to help a friend with some lengthy project, or were used for a personal experiment (like the one that was created to answer the question "how many hours does it take to unlock all core Tyria waypoints on a new character"). If you spend most of your time in this game every week on your key farming characters, there's really no good metric to tell ANet that this is not some character you feel attached to. Depending on when the names were selected (it might be a good idea to run a database scan once to collect a list of character names for all accounts, then send out the actual mails in batches over the next couple of days for purely technical reasons - gathering such data in real time for each mail sent might cost a lot more database performance for example) it could even be close to impossible to know if the character still exists once the actual mail is sent (as the database performance cost for that action would be exorbitantly high for virtually no benefit).

If you need the game to lure you with carrots of the most powerful rewards that you can only reach by doing very specific content, there are lots of MMOs out there to give you that kind of gameplay. Not doing that kind of thing is one of the strengths of GW2 that makes it pretty unique compared to similar games, and a strength many players appreciate. Alienating the players that choose to play this game precisely because there is no "one and only" path to endgame rewards (speaking from a purely mechanical/power point of view) just to lure in more players with a feature that competes with lots of other games out there doesn't seem like a smart business move to me. This gamer wants to chase fun, a world to explore on my own terms, characters to build and improve the way I enjoy it, to find the content that best suits me on any given day. I'm sure there's enough of us that appreciate the kind of endgame GW2 has precisely because of its open, variable nature compared to other games to keep this one game afloat. The moment the game has to try and compete with other games by mimicing features those games have because it's core audience is too small to keep it afloat with its current setup is the moment this game has a much bigger problem than just "enough" people wanting to play it but missing their carrot-on-a-stick to give them the illusion of having things to do.

Make the latest zone more attractive (fun, profitable, whatever attracts you to play a certain zone over others) is counter-productive to trying to spread people across the world. While it will make that zone more densely populated (which might not be everyone's cup of tea either), it will also make all the zones that came before more empty. We'll end up with the same system of people only doing the latest zone, everybody coming in later going through a series of ghost maps, and people at the top burning out more quickly because of only one zone full of things to do (a real problem in my view that has driven many of us away from other games). People already claim that you can't do a lot of events, achievements etc. unless you manage to cram it into the first days (or max couple of weeks) after release. Personally I think this is untrue, since I rarely do achievements the moment they are released, and sometimes not until many months (and releases) later and have never encountered a true road block, but the more you shift people from playing all over the world to concentrating on the latest release, the harder it will be to play through older releases and their achievements.

Bruh I get it but fuuuu... it's just the extremely punishing design that you need to get to know first and can't use your jump skills to get through first time. Like you need to know that you get across the weird blue spin platforms at the top by walking onto them when they start spinning instead of standing on them already in order to not overshoot. How the hack are you supposed to know that? and how is the skillful? it only eats up time and make me frustrated. Plus the leap of faith is just... Its completely optional, ignore it if it frustrates you that much. Those who really really want to finish it will do it with guides and succeed. As the most challenging JP its fine. Had to get it for a mastery. I need masteries so I don't get xp blocked and can farm spirit shards on SW.You don't get xp blocked from lack of mastery points. If all of your active mastery tracks are filled with experience but you don't have the points to train said masteries, you will gain spirit shards just like you would once you had finished all masteries.That said, I don't consider this particular mastery point either quick or easy, but then it's the only diving goggle I've had missing for many many years 8) .

Source: I was on 34/35 when I got to the story step with a second charcter. All the idols reappeared (and crumpled again once that step was done), but none counted towards the achievement (I later found the missing one in a totally different corner of the map). As long as you have the achievement open (after getting to the corresponding story step with your first character, but before finishing the achievement) you can see and smash the missing idols with any character, regardless of where in the story they currently are (or if they've played any story at all). Idols you've smashed once (for the achievement) will be shown as destroyed to all characters except one currently on the mission to smash them within the story.

PvE has the advantage of having stats distributed across a total of 13-14 different pieces of equipment, where pvp only offers one slot that holds all stats. If you do want the pvp combinations, simply combine equipment pieces with different combinations until you reach the desired stats, e.g. a combination of Berserker, Assassin, Cavalier and Knight instead of Demolisher.

If you are on EU, I'll gladly do it with you. I know where you're coming from, I'm 50 myself with fibromyalgia among several other health problems, but I've met a lot of people and whole guilds in this game that like to socialize and help each other out and don't care if you take a day or a year to do content. Voice chat does in fact make things easier (we're still using Teamspeak in my main guild, but we're mostly dinosaurs ;) ), but is in no way required.

Or just leave it as is. The price would still be so small as to not exist in the first place, so theres still no point for doing it even that way, especially given the dev time involved to make such a thing that accomplishes nothing function. Still glad they got rid of repairs costs, and retrait costs. The game has one big annoyance as is for death and thats the travel back and i think thats enough, even with mounts its terribly annoying. You call it annoyance i call ot risk and consequences, it makes the game mroe meaningful and engaging for some.And a lot more annoying for others.Let's face it, those of us who have played a long time and learned the ins and outs of this game will hardly notice it, as we have plenty of resources, fully leveled crafters, and rarely if ever die anyway. The people who will notice it are the ones new to the game, without much gold or the experience to avoid dying. Veterans crying for "consequences" that will hardly affect them but make life for those still learning a lot more annoying, are either looking for a cheap way to feel superior to all those "noobs" or not thinking about the consequences at all.

Honestly this sounds like it'll force way too many guilds to micro-manage their permissions, making it unnecessarily complicated for them, while only benefitting a few. Personally I think what you're proposing isn't really quality of life for most, but just a band-aid to help you because you don't trust your guild members.

Whenever I log in, first thing I do is say hi in all of my guilds. Ironically, the one with the most active guild chat and most people partying up and helping out constantly is the one where pretty much nobody ever represents that guild. We're all parts of other (vastly different) guilds, too, but the comunity spirit in that non-rep guild is still among the best I've ever been in. That's not to say my other guilds are dead or anything. In fact I just had close to a dozend guildies from my main guild (the one where I'm one of the guild leaders and that I rep most of the time) at my house last weekend to celebrate my real life birthday :) . That guild just is more casual and laid-back than the other one and guild chat isn't always as active. Personally I could do with more guild slots, as I had to turn down a few guild invites from interesting guilds/communities a few times already, but I'd hate to see the complaining if ANet should choose to sell them in the store. It's just not a good marketing move at this point in time.

What's wrong about trying to tackle something difficult on your own to see how you hold up? For a lot of people that's the best way to learn, but they won't learn anything if they never even try, for fear of being punished for not having mastered the fight mechanics from the get go.

Repair costs (and any other form of permanent or temporary punishment for in-game deaths) aren't a logical consequence of death and make dying "mean something". They simply are an annoyance. There are way too many ways to die in this game that are outside of your control, from technical issues (ever had any lag/disconnect) to human issues (great, yet another thief pulling too many mobs, then going invis to drop the aggro on the innocent player that happens to pass by at the wrong moment). Punishing players for dying will make a lot of people think twice before coming to the help of a stranger that seems to be overwhelmed by mobs. Punishing players for dying will make a lot of people rage at others for getting them killed, often because the player that made the mistake didn't know any better. Punishing players for dying will make learning new fights and mechanics a lot more annoying, but in no way any more effective. This game does a good job at providing mechanics that encourage people to learn and cooperate. Punishment isn't a way that encourages people to learn and improve. It's an outdated method that's been proven to teach nothing but how to get through at the expense of everyone else. Armor repair is fine as it is. Making it more annoying will be of no consequence to those that don't die anyway, while making the game a lot less fun for those who are still trying to learn.

What I absolutely did NOT enjoy were some of the people I encountered in strike missions. I'm 50, with poor eyesight and reflexes, and while I thoroughly enjoy this kind of instanced content, it takes me a LOT of tries to get the mechanics down to a point where I can react to all of them with a reasonable margin of error, even if I know them by heart long before. Many people I encountered are nice and relaxed, but the percentage of the ones that were too impatient and started flaming people for not following mechanics flawlessly was just too high for my tastes. I'm in this game to relax and enjoy myself, but I don't have 9 other like-minded people online regularly to do strikes with (if I had, I'd be raiding more than once every blue moon, too), and I really don't want to ruin my entertainment time by having to deal with the kind of people I've encountered in some of the strike missions I was in. Fortunate for me, I really couldn't care less about achievements, so I don't worry about not finishing the meta achievement of this episode, but looking around my guilds and ingame friends, many of whom are even older than me, there are a lot of players put off by seeing the meta out of their reach unless they do instanced content with people they don't care to associate with.

Living Story Season 1 was an experiment. ArenaNet tried to set up an MMO with a constant stream of time-limited, event-like content. Content that always was created on the premise of being available only for a couple of weeks, before a new chunk of content took its place. None of it was ever created within the constraints of being available indefinitely and being able to function alongside other content released at a different point in time. Some of the content still works as persistent content, but a lot of it simply doesn't work. Looking back today we can say that the experiment failed. The personal playtime needed to keep up with the time-limited releases is just too much for most people. Unfortunately there's such a thing as real life that often takes precendence over a mere game ;) . Still, the content back then was never created to live indefinitely, then "taken away" for no good reason. It was created to work for a very specific, very limited reallife time period, often no more than two weeks. There was no story journal, no story instances that you can string one after another. A large part of it were events in open world pve (and sometimes even wvw) that just don't work mixed up with other events from earlier or later releases happening on the same maps. Imagine Wayfarer Foothills, with refugees dropping in from the north, nobody knows where they come from or what drove them away. At the same time (really weeks later, when the extend of the refugee situation has started to become clearer) hidden entrances to the molten facility dungeon pop up all across the map. Suddenly (really a year or so after the first refugees came) an aetherblade invasion hits the map, wreaking havoc all over the place. All of those are totally different points in the timeline of season 1. All of these transported parts of the story via open world, time-limited events (in the case of the molten facility even including open world access to a time-limited dungeon that has since been converted to a couple of fractals). All of these are totally unintelligible if you just drop them into today's maps alongside each other. You seem to expect ongoing storytelling the way we have known it from season 2 onward via the story journal. That is not what season 1 was. There were a couple of (mostly tiny) story instances, but most of season 1 really was storytelling via timelimited open world events. There's just no way outside of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch to make season 1 available today. You can claim that taking it away is not fair, but there never was a story to take away to begin with. There was an experiment of storytelling via non-persistent, time-limited content. It failed, but that doesn't change the fact that if was non-persistent, and no matter how often you or I or the devs or anybody else wishes the story were available to be played today, there is no content that was ever built in a way that would've made this possible. That is very well described, thank you. Now, given that we all agree that the experiment failed, and that repairing the failure is cost-prohibitive, why would you not want to mitigate the damage of the failure . . ?I would if I had a good idea how to do so, but I don't agree with your idea of how to do it. That's got too many drawbacks in my view, most if not all already mentioned several times by other posters in this thread.

ANet is already reusing as many assest from season 1 as they can (skins, dungeons), but most of what transportet the story back then simply DOES NOT EXIST. There is no story journal, there is no cohesive story. There simply is a collection of events and npc dialogue that MAKE NO SENSE alongside content sitting in the same map space but belonging to a different point in the season timeline. In season 1 Tyria really was a living, breathing, and everchanging world, but the price for that was not working in the constraints of persistant storytelling that allows players to experience different parts of the story alongside each other. Those assets you claim they didn't get rid of never existed in the first place. Most of the persistant assets already have been reintroduced into the game, but the storytelling back then was live in a way that is simply impossible to preserve.

Living Story Season 1 was an experiment. ArenaNet tried to set up an MMO with a constant stream of time-limited, event-like content. Content that always was created on the premise of being available only for a couple of weeks, before a new chunk of content took its place. None of it was ever created within the constraints of being available indefinitely and being able to function alongside other content released at a different point in time. Some of the content still works as persistent content, but a lot of it simply doesn't work. Looking back today we can say that the experiment failed. The personal playtime needed to keep up with the time-limited releases is just too much for most people. Unfortunately there's such a thing as real life that often takes precendence over a mere game ;) . Still, the content back then was never created to live indefinitely, then "taken away" for no good reason. It was created to work for a very specific, very limited reallife time period, often no more than two weeks. There was no story journal, no story instances that you can string one after another. A large part of it were events in open world pve (and sometimes even wvw) that just don't work mixed up with other events from earlier or later releases happening on the same maps. Imagine Wayfarer Foothills, with refugees dropping in from the north, nobody knows where they come from or what drove them away. At the same time (really weeks later, when the extend of the refugee situation has started to become clearer) hidden entrances to the molten facility dungeon pop up all across the map. Suddenly (really a year or so after the first refugees came) an aetherblade invasion hits the map, wreaking havoc all over the place. All of those are totally different points in the timeline of season 1. All of these transported parts of the story via open world, time-limited events (in the case of the molten facility even including open world access to a time-limited dungeon that has since been converted to a couple of fractals). All of these are totally unintelligible if you just drop them into today's maps alongside each other. You seem to expect ongoing storytelling the way we have known it from season 2 onward via the story journal. That is not what season 1 was. There were a couple of (mostly tiny) story instances, but most of season 1 really was storytelling via timelimited open world events. There's just no way outside of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch to make season 1 available today. You can claim that taking it away is not fair, but there never was a story to take away to begin with. There was an experiment of storytelling via non-persistent, time-limited content. It failed, but that doesn't change the fact that if was non-persistent, and no matter how often you or I or the devs or anybody else wishes the story were available to be played today, there is no content that was ever built in a way that would've made this possible. It doesn't matter that LWS1 was "an experiment". After the experiment concluded, they should have been thinking of ways to include itOh, I'm sure they did think about it, and more than once (or twice or a dozend times). What I'm saying is not that they shouldn't care about bringing back season 1. I'm sure they'd love to do that.What I'm saying is that there isn't anything to bring back. It no longer exists. I'm sure the developers are just as unhappy about how that turned out as you and I. They are doing their best to salvage as much as they can (see most if not all of the unique season 1 rewards returned to the game by now and available through new ways, or the season 1 dungeons converted to fractals). They just can't conjure up content that doesn't exist (and never existed in any persistant form). There may be many people that missed season 1 and would love to play through the story (I missed part of it myself due to busy phases in real life, and would love to go back and replay others), but realistically story, especially old story you've been through (or at least through parts of it) before, is not what keeps most players playing a game like this. Personally I love to replay this game's stories time and time again, but I acknowledge that most people I know are bored after a run or two and just want to get it over with. Digging up resources to recreate such an extensive project as season 1 (and pretty much recreate it from scratch) just isn't feasible from a business point of view.

Living Story Season 1 was an experiment. ArenaNet tried to set up an MMO with a constant stream of time-limited, event-like content. Content that always was created on the premise of being available only for a couple of weeks, before a new chunk of content took its place. None of it was ever created within the constraints of being available indefinitely and being able to function alongside other content released at a different point in time. Some of the content still works as persistent content, but a lot of it simply doesn't work. Looking back today we can say that the experiment failed. The personal playtime needed to keep up with the time-limited releases is just too much for most people. Unfortunately there's such a thing as real life that often takes precendence over a mere game ;) . Still, the content back then was never created to live indefinitely, then "taken away" for no good reason. It was created to work for a very specific, very limited reallife time period, often no more than two weeks. There was no story journal, no story instances that you can string one after another. A large part of it were events in open world pve (and sometimes even wvw) that just don't work mixed up with other events from earlier or later releases happening on the same maps. Imagine Wayfarer Foothills, with refugees dropping in from the north, nobody knows where they come from or what drove them away. At the same time (really weeks later, when the extend of the refugee situation has started to become clearer) hidden entrances to the molten facility dungeon pop up all across the map. Suddenly (really a year or so after the first refugees came) an aetherblade invasion hits the map, wreaking havoc all over the place. All of those are totally different points in the timeline of season 1. All of these transported parts of the story via open world, time-limited events (in the case of the molten facility even including open world access to a time-limited dungeon that has since been converted to a couple of fractals). All of these are totally unintelligible if you just drop them into today's maps alongside each other. You seem to expect ongoing storytelling the way we have known it from season 2 onward via the story journal. That is not what season 1 was. There were a couple of (mostly tiny) story instances, but most of season 1 really was storytelling via timelimited open world events. There's just no way outside of rebuilding the whole thing from scratch to make season 1 available today. You can claim that taking it away is not fair, but there never was a story to take away to begin with. There was an experiment of storytelling via non-persistent, time-limited content. It failed, but that doesn't change the fact that if was non-persistent, and no matter how often you or I or the devs or anybody else wishes the story were available to be played today, there is no content that was ever built in a way that would've made this possible.