voltaicbore.8012

ANet created Home instances nodes. They give meaning to go back to the home instances everyday. Because nodes can be shared, you can invite other players to farm your home and admire your decorations. They will be a big main draw for me and ANet would benefit from having players buy home instance nodes to have more reason to go admire their own home decorations. I don't think that's related to his statement. Home instance nodes have nothing to do with housing as a primary selling point for an expansion. Let's acknowledge that admiring a chair in a house is definitely a different level of interaction than being able to farm nodes in a private instance. Exactly that, home instance nodes is not cosmetic like a guild hall that have no influence on the game with how you decorate it.Your logic about decorated homes having no influence on the game is sound, and I also thought the same until I played games that had proper player housing. I still can't figure out exactly why such mechanisms are so popular and generally successful (many others have offered very reasonable theories on this subject), but I also can't deny that many players (myself included) greatly enjoy them. Of course not every player is into them, and there's nothing wrong with that. All i'm saying is that housing for some reason has much broader appeal than you might expect, even when it doesn't really impact gameplay. As for a new mount, eh. I don't see the need for any more than we have, and among those who are looking forward to a completely separate mobility option (or just something different altogether that isn't even about mobility) with EoD.

How... how is that possible? How could anything be worse than Chalice of Tears? I force myself to forget that exists in this game, so I can continue to convince myself to give ANet money. Difficulty is not universal. Some people find some things to be easier (or harder) than others. Although, yes, i can fully understand your feelings toward Chalice, and i share them. I still find the gauntlet to be even more frustrating.Now that you mention it, I remember doing the timed challenge for Khan Ur when the Prologue was still kinda new, and feeling quite frustrated by a number of the jumps. To make matters worse, familiarity hasn't made those parts any easier for me, while Chalice got marginally better for me the second time I went in there. But yeah - as terrible as Chalice is, I can definitely see Khan Ur having its own special place in JP hell along with it.

Just chiming into say that I, too, could care less about this emote inequality. This is not at all diminishing your larger points about inequalities between the races in other areas (which exist in painfully large scale at times), but I'd be surprised if anything approaching a majority of players care at all about this.

How... how is that possible? How could anything be worse than Chalice of Tears? I force myself to forget that exists in this game, so I can continue to convince myself to give ANet money.

I appreciate your opinion. But my thread wasnt about constructing a matchmaker for guildwas 2 - it just adresses one core problem at its current stage from my point of view and was just a suggestion that the matchmaker should provide role-decision. How to implement this, is a topic for its own. I know that this idea is easier said than done, (apart from the fact that the current matchmaking is bad in general). Fair point. Arguably those two questions are actually inseparable, given how the game works, but I won't get into that. I still think associating any role-sensitive function to the matchmaker is a terrible idea, for many of the reasons you and others have already mentioned. We'd require some form of build, gear, and class locking when joining the queue. I'm not sure I'd want to play spvp if I could only choose between a couple preset builds if I wanted to run a damage ranger or support necro. It would turn into a slightly more advanced form of some junk like the Dragon Ball event (which is fun in its own right, but would make for a very sad version of spvp). You yourself noted that we are all aware that roles in spvp are important, given the need to swap builds and classes before the match starts. You think that task should be given to the matchmaker, and I think that (1) doing so is impractical, and (2) is best left to players. That said, I agree that without enforced role-based matchmaking, it will be quite hard to have fair matches. I think that's the price we pay for playing a game that allows for player choice, and it's a steep price. Unfortunately it's a price we cannot avoid paying unless we fundamentally reduce player freedom just for spvp, and I think we can't do that without destroying one of the things this game does best.

You haven't touched the single most important idea of role-based matchmaking, which is how the algorithm would even consistently identify what role a player is playing. Should ANet look at the godsofpvp or metabattle meta builds and tell the matchmaker "if X percentage of traits/runes/sigils/amulet loadout matches Y build, assign this player to Z role" ? It would be extremely easy for players to game such a system, or on the other hand it would punish players for trying variation. So yeah, I think this is an awful idea.

You will be excluded from achievements and even Masterypoints. From the very simple Tyria-Mastery thank God not, because a skipp-button was long part of the game and had never represented a problem. "I don't want to do story, but want all the rewards associated with doing story." To be fair to the OP, I don't think this is what @Kyrios.8736 was going for at all - they simply asked for a skip feature, and I agree it would be nice. There was no request for being able to get the story-locked achievements without actually doing story, as it should be.

I get what you said later on about the illusion of complexity, but don't follow you here. What exactly is hidden from the player? Are you referring to the "this looks complex, but really isn't" phenomenon?

I applaud you for continuing to attempt explaining this lol. I argue for a living, so I no longer feel like continuing with @"Cleopatra.4068". The basic pattern here is: (1) Cleo says "something is hard to understand."(2) We say, "well, the game tells you what it is."(3) Cleo shifts goalposts to "well maybe the player can't even read it!"(4) We say, "how is that even relevant, ANet can't solve dyslexia or illiteracy"(5) Cleo shifts goalposts again, "well words like 'critical' are super mysterious for people new to GW2."(6).... I think that about covers the whole rotation. I don't see this going anywhere, because there can always be something for Cleo to bring up in terms of player deficiency. Can't read, won't read, or reads but somehow doesn't understand relatively simple concept without someone onYouTube digesting it for them... it's a pretty irreconcilable difference it seems. We're just working with different standards, and like 2 skew lines I don't think we'll ever really meet anywhere.... so I'm done.

I agree "CC" and "breakbar" are not self-evident to the new player, but guess what? Those are player-instituted terms, not something ANet ever put into the game. ANet isn't responsible for explaining something they never said in the first place. We should stick to terms the game itself pushes onto players. As for each of the stats, they are... you guessed it... explained by their tooltips. If you don't know what Precision does, that means you don't even know how to mouse over your stats on the hero panel where it tells you exactly what the stat does generally, and right next to it the game even tells you exactly how much crit chance your current precision is giving you. The one exception to this would be condition damage, for which the tooltip very unhelpfully says "increases condition damage." I think that tooltip could be vastly improved by listing all the damaging conditions in the game with their icons, similarly to how conditions affected by expertise are listed in the condition duration tooltip. Of the things you mentioned, boons are perhaps the only things not made explicitly clear in a table of some kind on their own, which also might explain why so many new players are so bad/unaware when it comes to boons. I personally learned about most boons via... you guessed it again... in-game tooltips that are on traits and abilities that grant boons. But I agree it would help to have some resource in-game that tabulates each boon, their icons, and their effects. Eh. With the exception of the condition damage tooltip and the boons I mentioned above, the bar for getting that information as a first-timer to games is extremely low. If you know that tooltips exist in the game, and you can figure out where to look up stats and your gear, it really isn't hard to figure out what's going on. That's not to say that just looking at tooltips without being able to intelligently test performance is enough to make a player a buildcraft master - but it's certainly a solid start, and I question the general capacity of anyone truly mystified by GW2's terminology on such a basic level. For the most part, the answers to your questions are self-evident (if you get X proc on applying bleed, it generally works on all the procs of bleed within the constraints of an ICDs). And besides, if you're at the point where you're starting to worry about that level of synergy, you're the type of player making good use of the information the game provides, and probably understand that you can either read the (spammy and admittedly unhelpful combat log) and watch conditions/buffs on your bar/your target's bar to figure out if effects are proc-ing or not. Generally the game is pretty clear about when a normal dodge procs something, or when an actual evasion due to an evasive ability does the trick, but I admit that there are places where it's not entirely clear. For instance, the ranger trait Light on your Feet says it gives you an effect upon dodging, but it also procs when you use shortbow 3 (which is a backwards evade) and I believe it also works on Lightning Reflexes (another backward evade-granting move). Here's the thing - how did those people figure it out so they could tell you? Hm? Magic? Nope, they tested it in-game, and likely even showed you (if it's a video) how they did it. I agree it is poor design to need to have to test some basic things that could be made clearer in the tooltip, as in my ranger trait example above. I didn't know those other evades proc-ed the effect for sure until I tried it, and it wouldn't have taken too much extra text to explain how that proc actually triggers. But at the same time, it's disingenuous to pretend like this is at all difficult to figure out, and that players need to turn to some expert outside source to get this information. I believe reasonable people can disagree on this issue, so we'll just agree to disagree here. Using the English language client as my baseline, I believe the in-game information (primarily through tooltips) is more than sufficiently accessible to anyone of reasonable reading comprehension around age 12-13 and up. I guess you don't see it the same way. You do mention scattering information, and in the case of listing conditions and boons, I would agree the game misses a few easy opportunities to present them all at once to the player. But aside from that, even the external sources mirror the game's interface when it comes to player data. The one improvement I can think of is how the GW2 build editor site has your stats listed off to the side, always visible no matter what screen you're on. That would help players directly observe the effect of their choices on their stats, and something other games do as well. Like, how is this ANet's problem to solve? Are you saying that if someone downloads a game that isn't in their language, ANet should offer... what? Roll up their sleeves and localize the game in that language? Have some sort of in-game wiki page just in that language? Also, do external sources magically make themselves readable to dyslexic visitors? What could the game possibly do for these people? Have someone narrate every single tooltip? I guess ANet could make a special in-game cutscene where some NPC goes over some pertinent information (like boons and conditions), or have tooltips accessible to screen reading technology, but... we're really reaching here. Now this is something I fully agree with you on. Not really sure there's any way to tell how important of an issue this is. Even stuff like annoying exit surveys on uninstallation are unreliable, if someone just decides to delete the game folder wholesale or chooses not to respond to a game they're no longer interested in playing. Overall though, I'd say the places of un-clarity are very much the exception, and not the rule.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1429219/#Comment_1429219 Yup. If you want to rush content, then it's not game's fault despite of what some people on this forum seem to think. Except new players and those returning from longer stretches of inactivity typically do not have access to the living story episodes. I don't mean to say Arenanet doesn't deserve the money for said episodes. Frankly, they're well worth it even if you don't get them for free. However, new players or those out of the loop have no way of knowing that. They are directed towards the latest content as that's where most players are. When they struggle with the combat and can't make sense of the story they either quit or start asking questions at which point they are told to play through the living story because it puts everything in context and also teaches you about the more difficult enemies and environmental dangers you have to face in both expansions. Not to mention giving you access to additional masteries that make traversing Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire much easier. So they go to the story tab and notice how many episodes they are missing and see the price for getting them all then rightfully ask why the story and what is essentially a combat tutorial for the expansion are both hidden behind a paywall. One which they were not told about when buying the game. Since they're new or returnees from a long hiatus they won't know that said episodes are more than worth the asking price. They also will not have the gold to convert for gems. All they see is a somewhat steep up-front cost for what can be considered an integral part of the game. That turns off quite a few players There should be some sort of stop-gap solution for this.I fully agree. I'm not sure what the stop-gap should be myself, haven't put enough thought to it yet. But I think you describe the bulk of the issue quite well for returning folks. It's natural for them to be pushed/gravitate toward the most recent content, which will often be very different from what they remember. To make matters worse, it's likely that abilities and traits they depended on prior to taking a break have been radically changed (or even removed altogether) as a result, breaking any synergies they might have leaned heavily on. The thing is, IMO the vast majority of these issues can be solved if the returning player just reads the tooltips and gains a sense of what still works and what doesn't via combat testing. It's not that hard to refine your build, although not everyone coming back to the game might have the resources on hand to re-gear several characters fully. I think the best solution would be for ANet to somehow incentivize the act of staying in a sort of tutorial or testing instance for returning players, where they can hit/get hit by dummies to get their feel for the game back.

But it is. In fact, how do you think all those external guides get that information? Wow! From the game itself! Who would have known? TLDR; you don't have to be super hardcore or a theorycrafter to figure out a successful build that works for you, the game provides plenty of tooltip information to get there. I see this attitude (the game isn't providing enough information/practice/etc.) as deeply problematic. Like you @ewenness.6482 , I'm not a hardcore elitist either, and I never judge players by a singular metric. In fact, the best use I get out of arcdps is to see how my very off-meta builds perform on non-dps metrics, and many of my most favorite and most successful oddball builds struggle to get anywhere near 10K dps and honestly average around 5-6K if I'm playing the build to its true purpose (instead of trying to just push dps on the meter). However, I have zero sympathy for someone who can't read several tooltips and them form coherent thoughts based on that information. GW2 is not a particularly complex game for the non-elite/non-tryhard player. Sure, there's never an exhaustive explanation of each stat given to you by some stupid exposition NPC, because there doesn't need to be. There's an accurate tooltip over each one in the hero panel. The game even helpfully breaks it down between the stat itself (such as precision) and lists the outcome produced by the stat (crit chance) side-by-side. Aside from buggy abilities and the occasional inaccurate tooltip, by and large GW2 tooltips are succinct and helpful. There's a difference between (1) demanding that players reach certain performance benchmarks within a specific meta, and (2) not seeing any need to literally form thoughts for people too lazy to do it themselves. The game is very generous with information, and tooltips are absolutely everywhere from the very beginning. If that's not a huge tip to someone to think "hey, maybe I should read these, these things tell me how the game works", I don't... I don't have anything appropriate to say on the matter beyond that, frankly. The thing is, every bad player I've met knows the answers are in the tooltips. They just pester people with dumb questions because they can't be bothered to figure anything out for themselves.

Well THAT'S just completely inaccurate. You don't mention what part of my comment is inaccurate.Assumption 1: You don't agree that overabundance of materials causes ANet to increase material requirements.In this case it must have been my imagination that refining materials like mithryl or elder wood costs more raw material than at launch. It also must've been my imagination that gen2 and gen3 legendaries require dozens of stacks of these materials. Assumption 2: You don't agree that grinding these materials is tedious. How long do you need to gather 80+ stacks of Mithril? Assumption 3: You don't agree that you have to buy the material from the bots. So I guess you have some secret method of avoiding the trading post listings made by bot accounts? Please teach me. Assumption 4: You don't agree that farm bots causes an overabundance of materials on the trading post. In that case please elaborate where all these farmed materials end up and why they have no impact on the ingame economy.Your accusation in assumption #1 is problematic. How do you know the overabundance of mats due to botting is what caused these recipes to call for so many of those mats? Do you have any evidence of this, or are you - gasp - just assuming? EDIT: missed @Parasite.5389's post above lol. At any rate, you have to establish that your claim in assumption #1 isn't total BS for any of the other points to apply. Which is not to say the other points aren't valid - in fact, quite the opposite. The things in assumptions 2-4 are all true. It does take quite some time (especially if you don't dedicate yourself to farming them efficiently) to gather up the amounts of mithril and elder wood these recipes call for. The market is anonymous, so as you say, it is impossible to completely prevent your gold from flowing to bots. It also makes sense that the bots wouldn't hoard the mats, but instead would be putting them up for sale on the market, which undoubtedly depresses prices. But again, none of that means anything for your argument if you can't show us any evidence that the recipes are the way they are because of bots. Otherwise, you're assuming as well, which I think is hilarious and fitting.

Not a bug, it's part of the ability design. The ability was always meant to revive your pet first if it's dead, then have it come rez you.

10 LFGs? Must be EU. All I ever see in LFG for NA are guilds selling clears. Also, plenty of metas are being done all the time, even for old content like Orr. Maybe you need to get out of the aerodrome a bit more.

It might work with the proper reward structure, but if the reward is merely "the fun of having a challenge," I'm certain it will fizzle out quickly and prove to be a total waste of dev time. It's a lot like "player-driven content" - forums, reddit, and mouthy content creators all love it, but very few players actually seem to. Which is not surprising, because such schemes always devolve into the same handful of highly skilled/organized/have-the-most-time players and guilds dominating things. The "fun" of working with limitations like always watching your back, living under the rule of some tryhards, or just plain old harder combat for the sake of harder combat... yeah that fun wears off quickly, or never even exists in the first place for a ton of players. However, with the right rewards, this idea could certainly work. BDO recently did this, where they released a new type of server where previously one-shottable trash enemies in mid-level zones got super dangerous (basically now you are the one-shottable trash). They also massively increased the rewards for running around in those zones, including very specific weapons to work for. I can only judge how well it works from observing my guild and those up-scaled zones during peak hours, but by those measures it seems to be very successful.

You're treating the "Jormag doesn't lie" statement as if it covers a wider range of cases than it needs to. It comes down to what we consider "lying", which Tom Abernathy (probably intentionally) failed to discuss. I think it's pretty clear from the rest of that tweet that when he says "Jormag doesn't lie" it's the equivalent of "Jormag does not intentionally tell us things that Jormag personally does not believe to be true as well." As the tweet says. Jormag is always sincere. That dosen't mean Jormag is always correct. You, @Raknar.4735, are consistently speaking as though Jormag's honesty always guarantees Jormag's correctness, and frankly it's getting hard to watch at this point.

You can do dungeons, and making your own listing on LFG for it often fills quickly. In fact, I make a point of joining dungeon LFGs that are listed as "new" or "first time" just to help out, even if I can solo it faster. As old and officially abandoned content, dungeons occupy a weird and somewhat biploar spot in terms of combat training. In the explorable paths, the elite mobs do hit quite hard and often show up in large groups to overwhelm the unprepared, so it's a good way to learn what your build is good at, what it's terrible at, and how to maximize your ability to handle hard-hitting mobs without dying first. On the other hand, it's quite easy to figure out how to handle most of these groups, as dungeons generally offer a ton of ways to line-of-sight enemies, places to cleave them through walls, and all sort of handy tricks. So yeah - they hit hard and will kill you if you're not ready, but it's also quite easy to figure them out after just a few runs.

You really think Arenanet would invent a completely new system, if they already have a decorating system in place that they simply can make a variant of? I doubt they even have the resources for that on top of making the expansion. They don't have to make a completely new system- instead of having scribing be the source of a lot of baseline props, they could just make those same assets vendor-purchasable for personal housing. The assets themselves would even have the same clunky placement mechanic and interface. But yeah, not holding my breath that this will be part of EoD or any other content drop in the future. It's why I went and captured a fresh guild hall of my own, since that seems to be the only way to play house for the foreseeable future.

Other variants of that, including individual personal housing, are unlikely to be received differently. Eh. The guild hall decorating system should be nothing like a personal housing system. Sure, there are many weird little raid or festival-themed decorations that you straight up buy from vendors, but a lot of the cooler theme-making pieces (library bookshelf, various furniture, props, etc.) is very clunky to make through the scribing system. I am 100% sure that if personal housing were implemented, it would not require scribing (which requires a guild hall with at least that minimal level of workshop upgrade), and furniture/props would just be drops or purchaseable items. Either way, I don't care, as I went through the trouble of capturing a guild hall for my solo guild, and am treating it as a personal housing instance. I never played WoW, but the archaeology system @miraude.2107 mentioned sounds like it would fit perfectly with GW2. So many of the maps (particularly many of the core ones) are quite meticulously designed with a lot of totally optional corners here and there, so it would be incredible to have reasons to snoop around those areas. It would be a very easy way to enrich the local lore (so smaller scale stories about the people/events of that specific area) that don't have to tie into the grand scale of the main story.

I agree with your post but the throws at that point are more common than many people would think, I think. Not so much on account of having a team that is amazingly good at comebacks, but because the enemy team starts to make mistakes and the losing team still plays alright. Especially when both teams don't have the best communication, many teams get overconfident and over extend at that point, and sometimes the lagging team winning a team fight or two against them at point throws the leading team completely off. Granted often when you have that kind of a gap usually the winning team will win, but last season I'd say a good third the games I was in (gold ranking) where there was a 300-350 pt lead got flipped. 400 or more was almost always a write off, I don't know anymore if we won any of those, I don't think we did. You know what, you have a very good point here - I was mostly focused on actively making a comeback, but having a shaky team passively lose their winning margin is all too common. And you're right, it doesn't take super skilled winners to flip things sometimes, it's often just that one team keeps trying to do the right things moderately well, and the other team slowly fritters away their lead by overextending, taking unnecessary risks and getting killed more, going for full caps instead of decaps when necessary, etc.

LOL where have you been, man. There are plenty of people who would fly into an unreasonable rage over much smaller things these days. I agree with you and @"Randulf.7614" that accents in the game aren't bad, and if done well can add a certain level of charm. But the prevailing culture of hypersensitivity, at least here in the US, could easily see the accents as a target for outrage. ANet has always been pretty strongly attuned to the "let's be inclusive/let's not offend people" side of things, so it doesn't surprise me at all the the game would take these more politically correct directions in various ways.

The lopsided games are winnable, I've seen very high ranked players in some of my matches meme around for off-point kills while their team falls behind 300-100. Then they stop memeing and play a very tight point denial game while still managing to make kills, and end up winning 500-400. Very few teams have what it takes to turn around that kind of deficit though. At minimum, it takes (1) players who can actually win fights, (2) a team that knows how to rotate to deny node points while still keeping theirs active and ticking, and (3) an enemy team that doesn't know how to counter that. A 100 point deficit is easy to turn around, 200 is harder but doable, but beyond that it takes uncommon skill or a throw to turn things around in my experience.

@Joote.4081, I think the best advice I could possibly offer at this point is to install arcdps and see what it tells you. You just seem to struggle with combat in general, so I think you need to figure out a better balance between survival and killing. Arcdps is a third-party addon, but it's about as close to an officially-sanctioned addon as you're going to get. At any rate, arcdps can be your first step in figuring out what works best for you, which is the most important thing right now. Perhaps the most helpful part is, if you're partied up with a more experienced player, arcdps can show you what they're doing as well, which should be an eye-opener. Data always helps.

This, exactly. I think it's pretty clear that people aren't concerned about the AP or the actual skins themselves - the numbers we have make it quite clear that people are making the exact calculation @Trevor Boyer.6524 laid out a few posts up: "just not worth it." The concern, at least for me, runs much deeper. These weapon sets in particular, and IBS in general, feel as though ANet's steadily asking for much greater levels of investment (time and gold) for decreasing returns. While I have faith that EoD will not continue the trend, it's not unreasonable to fear that the devs have in fact decided that this is the direction they want to take the game. I think that's what has people concerned. It's easy enough to pass on these obviously overpriced achievements, but the prospect of seeing more and more of this (at the expense of the kind of stuff that does feel worth the effort) isn't comforting. Now to me ... THAT is a legit complaint. If the ONLY thing to look forward to earning in this episode is to craft expensive weapons, THAT'S a big problem if Anet wants to continue to appeal to GW2 playerbase through new content releases. I missed this when I first posted, but I think this is a great expression of the type of concern I was getting at. It's not just this skin or these few AP. It's about what ANet considers acceptable content moving forward.