voltaicbore.8012

This. OP got a tag, made a group asking for experienced players. Some internet stranger joined group not experienced, didn't get the hint to leave, so OP kicked them. Then other internet strangers apparently tried to make OP feel bad for it. So now OP is here, asking yet another group of internet strangers for validation. This entire thread, imo, has been a colossal waste, and I gladly add to it because I'm bored and in between other recreational tasks at the moment.

I just want to second the idea of fishing as a decent (if imo boring) gold farm. I was shocked to find that even bad and unmotivated fishers like me could do 20g/hr with food buff. Of course, that all depends on how ambergris prices move, so I'm not sure if it's currently better, worse, or the same as the old 20ish g/hr rate I was getting. Lately I've stopped actively farming gold because my play hours have gone down quite a bit. After knocking out spvp dailies, I just do 2 runs of dungeon frequenter, salvage gear for mats, and let the mats pile up. I then do a gigantic liquidation every once in a while, and setting a price instead of insta-selling. That nets me a few hundred gold at a time, but I'm certain the g/hr rate is horrendous.

I'm pleasantly surprised - feel better about the direction of the game than I have for some time. Looking forward to visual noise reduction and whatever the new not-elite-spec gameplay updates are going to be!

Short answer: yes, but none of the things you described sound at all like it. Longer answer: arguably there are two fundamental forms of cheating, as I see it. The first is straight up hacks that allow characters to perform actions in the game that simply are not allowed. I recently saw a a core ranger in several (unranked, mercifully) matches that was teleporting across the entire map, and became untargetable when downed. And yeah, this guy was terrible, so even with the cheats he went down A LOT. In my experience these sorts of hack cheaters are not at all subtle, it will be obvious even to a relatively new player when someone is using such a cheat. If you've been up and down the ladder as much as you claim, I think you'd be able to recognize it too. The second form of cheating is match manipulation. And oh man, do we have problems in ranked with this. I consider @Trevor Boyer.6524 to be our resident forums expert on the matter, and I'll defer to a lot of his comments on the subject. The long and short of it is, there's a pretty small clique of players at the top of the ladder, and via the use of queue dodging, queue timing, alt accounts, and all sorts of other shenanigans, they effectively control the top of the ladder. Their control was so complete that they could (and did!) reliably sell, for real money, ranked titles and gizmos (the other big reward for finishing at the top of a ranked season). Back when spvp population levels weren't quite as low as they are now, the typical player in silver and gold rating tiers didn't really get touched by the nonsense going on at the top. Now, with population being as small as it is, new players who are low gold/high silver are seeing top players in their matches much more frequently. As for the "just good enough" players like me who can reach plat1/maybe touch low plat2 in a season if you try hard, the problem is even worse.

Nobody who plays spvp regularly wonders that. We all know there's a pretty steep learning curve on most classes. It is stat-normalized. Stats aren't the whole story - there are a ton of passives (what the game calls 'traits') that some classes have that stack up a lot of damage if you pull off certain combos. Take, for instance, a condition like cripple. It's not just a movement debuff - some classes can get extra damage against crippled/immobilized targets, and if you slot the right sigil that can add even more. There is a huge difference between facing a player that knows and uses such things to stack things in their favor, versus facing someone who doesn't.

It's a gross mischaracterization of what I discussed to reduce it to "admission," as if I were only grudgingly acknowledging that objectively Anet has gotten it right so many other times. The fact that it didn't happen much at all was literally the first thing I mentioned. What I was saying merely attempted to answer questions that seemed to indicate genuine confusion about what anyone could possibly be bothered by (on a political level) in EoD. As for "we just had to wait for Gyala to get Yao de-tokenized," I consider that extremely weak. Good on Anet for developing Yao a bit more (I do believe his character had/has the potential to be the best narrative connection Team Commander could have with the Brotherhood faction), but I still maintain it's completely fair and objective to say that up to that point Yao was primarily token. To put it more clearly, my point is less "Yao was purely token" and more "these are the objectively defensible reasons why someone might have formed the impression that Yao is token."

Perhaps. But from another perspective, the already-good offhands were... already good. And noted changes don't seem to affect counterplay all that much, just further punishes people who already had trouble dealing with those abilities. As @phokus.8934 said, there really are more pressing issues when it comes to improving mesmer, and those didn't happen. So the net result is that mesmer didn't get fixes it probably needed to actually improve, and instead got a (not gamebreaking) boost to things that were already okay. I believe my hate has been properly fed here.

It wouldn't be an issue because the only people bothered by its current form, probably wouldn't have even noticed it in the "wife and child" form. That's all there is to it. The "one-off" ness of that line is what annoys me. As I mentioned, it felt like just a bolted-on "hey look at how aligned we are with current issues of the day." It's the same reason people get annoyed with any other form of pandering. Frankly this kind of stuff already has far more attention than it deserves. I'm only answering because you're asking pretty basic logical questions about it.

It was just a couple times here and there (could probably count them on one hand) where the game kind of hamfistedly promotes Yao as the token agender character. At the end of the Kaineng meta, Yao even pointlessly identifies themselves as such. It's like... it's like Anet made that character so flimsy that their gender identification constitutes almost the entirety of their pre-Gyala character. Theo Ashford got a husband posthumously, just because. It's not like it was developed (if I'm remembering correctly) for a long time, or part of the fabric of the story. It was just bolted on. I honestly think both sides of the aisle should be annoyed by these clearly low-effort inserts. Left leaning folks, of all people, should resent tokenization, but it seems in the current environment any mention in one's favored media gets a pass as "representation." I presume folks on the right side of course see flimsy characters fitting some buzzwords as preachy and virtue-signal-y; such people don't often articulate what it is they actually want, and end up either saying nothing at all (a tried and true conservative tradition lol) or just sounding like hatemongers who are just totally implacable at any mention of gender issues. Disclosure: I'm an Korean-American male, and I'd call myself politically conservative, born in the mid-1980s. I have been tokenized, to my kittening face, my entire youth from "liberals" and "conservatives" alike. From ages 0-17 I was always one of the 2-3 (if not the ONLY) Asian at school/church/wherever. Liberals at that time loved to call anything/anyone vaguely Asian "exotic," and my fellow conservatives often still used the term "Oriental." For most of that period, I just got used to the "where are you REALLY from" question, well-meaning adults speaking English veeeery slowly until I assured them my English was fine, and fielding the "so if you're not Chinese or Japanese, what are you?" I really think I missed the opportunity to say "Martian" back in those days lol. Therefore I feel at least minimally capable of identifying low-effort "lets do some virtue signaling" levels of "representation," and I feel it's fair to say that at least pre-Gyala Yao and Ashford's identity reveal qualify. Though both were extremely short in duration, they were nonetheless memorable, and that's what people are probably unhappy about. Counterpoint: there is an example of higher-effort, and (at least to me) more authentic-feeling gender identity in Lion's Arch. I always hear it around the fractal gate area, but there is apparently an NPC who survived the destruction of Old Lion's Arch who got a gender change. These two NPCs have an entire voiced conversation about it, and it isn't just to promote "hey so I was a dude, now I'm a lady," but rather seemed to make a comment about resilience and change in the face of adversity. Again, not a huge thing, but memorable - and in my opinion, done right. Also I think Kas and Jory represent another instance the more right-leaning/conservative players don't really have complaints about. It's just been a thing for so long, and there's a lot more to those characters that have nothing to do with their orientation. They're a pair, it's just how it is, and the game never really preaches about it. Even the whole marriage thing at the Dead End was just a celebration of their relationship and characters, not so much their identities. At least that's how I saw it, and it didn't really bother me. Not sure current Anet really does anything with that level of care anymore.

New Kaineng City remains the embodiment of why I don't like EoD. I'll just mention in passing that I'm merely okay with all the other features already discussed in the thread. It all boils down to "sure, XYZ thing is far from perfect (many of them are outright poorly designed), but I can either ignore them or fall back on much better alternatives." But NKC... just ugh. Nothing, in my opinion, demonstrates that Anet has lost touch with what I used to cherish most about this game, which was the attention designers paid to capturing the feeling of a map feeling alive. I truly believe that whoever did NKC should study Divinity's Reach and the Gladium Canton in the Black Citadel. In NKC, you can't really enter any of the off-the-beaten-path buildings. Yes, it's something of a ridiculous trope in RPGs that the player character can often just barge into people's homes, smash containers, and loot objects, but Divinity's Reach put a wonderful twist on that. There's a number of homes in each district that you can just go into - no PoI, no container smashings, no lootings. These places are fully furnished and were obviously designed with thematic care, and they're convincing artifacts of NPCs living their own lives completely independent from whatever nonsense the Commander is up to. The city also has just the right balance of chatter, random unvoiced NPCs that have text box conversations with you, NPC movement, and NPC density to again make it feel like the NPCs all have actual lives outside of being a backdrop for the Commander's adventures. NKC fails quite hard in this regard. So that's what Divinity's Reach outclasses NKC in... what about Gladium Canton? I was hoping for NKC to have a sector (didn't have to be particularly large) that really lived up to all the "jadepunk" hype that was going on before release. Basically Tyria's version of cyberpunk - a dense clash of technology, claustrophobia, poverty, and residents' ingenious struggle to make it within such a challenging environment. A place where the law doesn't fully reach, and enforcement really just aims to contain the slum's problems rather than actually go in and solve them. Visually, Gladium Canton really comes close to capturing what I was hoping jadepunk might be. Everything is kind of patched together, there's a good amount of visual diversity. You can catch a glimpse of the sky if you approach the edge of the central pit area, with clotheslines, sheet metal protrusions, and other objects intruding into the view. Speaking of the central pit, there's constantly vapor rising up from it, much like we've seen steam/smoke rising from cyberpunk (and real life!) alleyways in dense cities. It's not really a happy place, but it does have a vibrance and culture to itself. NKC? Large, empty plazas. Noodle stands everywhere, and you can't even buy any noodles from them. One apartment complex that you can enter for just one short story step. It's just way too sanitized to be considered anything-punk. A complete waste of -punk opportunity, if you ask me. The supposedly hard-times Grub Ward doesn't even look bad; the worst thing going on is the residents complaining about it. I admit this is a pretty specific set of non-gameplay nitpicks, but I think it's still objectively important. Good environmental design, in my opinion, is what separates a true MMO from all the other copypasta garbage "MMOs" you'll find at the bottom of the Steam charts. NKC reminds me so much of the "cities" you'll see in such garbageware games.

I'm a mesmer hater. I sincerely believe (purely in the competitive modes) that it is the epitome of unhealthy game design (dependence on broken mechanics to perform, thanks to otherwise poorly handled balance). Every time a mesmer player looks at patch notes and cries in pain, GW2 gets to live one day longer. Long live the game! Less hatefully, my pve mesmers would like more buffs, and the long overdue fixes to the less effective phantasms as already mentioned in the thread.

Thanks for the blurb on the turtle pet - I gave up trying to make use of any EoD pets almost instantly after taming them, and if I'm remembering correctly, they were all bugged in terms of movement and even worse at landing hits of any kind. The slow projectile velocities are still going to be quite unfun to work with, but perhaps melee + non-attack stance + active management will help. I guess I'll give turtle another go on a few different specs, see how it is. Back on topic: that's exactly what I thought Anet was doing with the EoD pets, intentional sabotage so there wasn't another iboga/gazelle outcry.

This is really exactly it. It's certainly minor, in terms of the overall structure of the even just the Sylvari personal story, but its nonetheless an extremely compelling idea. Everywhere else it's just The Tree, and all the Sylvari we encounter come from that tree. To think that there's another Tree out there is so outside the parameters of what we thought we knew about the Sylvari, it's arguably almost as compelling as the idea that the leafy people were meant to be Mordremoth minions. As for E, I've made my peace with never finding out - IF E's never really brought up again. It's entirely believable that someone working from the shadows either dies (peacefully or less so) without us ever finding out about it, or retires from the presumably dangerous work of intelligence gathering. E could also be a collective identity of a handful of people, or maybe it's just how a specific program within the Order of Whispers chose to anonymously feed tips to selected individuals at those particular points in time. Either way, since it seems well beyond our characters' knowledge, I'm narratively okay with having E just fade out without us ever getting a definitive answer. I will be annoyed if Anet sees fit to keep bringing us correspondence from E as a cheap anonymous narrative device, with no real plan for making E fit interestingly into the world. Kinda like the new letters your character mysteriously keeps finding in their pockets in older Elder Scrolls titles.

Agree: such behavior is dumb, and deserves to be called out as such. Disagree: that this is new behavior. Has been going on for at least 6+ years (as long as I've been playing), but more likely has been happening for the entire lifespan of the game. Especially with thieves - a decap thief's ability to truly swing the outcome depends extremely heavily on the rest of the team doing their jobs as normal. Given that thieves often inherently feel less empowered than their teammates, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they're often the first to see things as hopeless. If the choice is "work hard, and probably lose anyways" vs "do nothing, and lose for sure," many will opt not to waste their effort given the high probability of the same losing outcome. I agree that this is not a really advisable mindset to have in a competitive mode, but it is what it is.

I think is really the crux of the matter. As a couple other people noted, the fight isn't actually that hard. And no, it's not just because those of us posting in this thread already have prior knowledge of it - just a number of things from previous experience in the rest of the game (how to manage camera wonkiness in small rooms, having a build that pumps out a lot of dps while also including recovery options, managing many orange circles without panic dodging, etc.) make the fight objectively manageable (even more so post-nerf). Therein lies the problem though - the game's "global approach" to story content, up to that point, rarely demands that players put that entire package together. Yes, it's true that knowing/doing all the things I noted makes story fights faster, more efficient, and often just trivial, but weaving together such a package of combat skills into one coherent piece is never a hard requirement to succeed through story. You can easily make it to LWS3 missing one (or several) of the GW2 combat principles that make the Caudecus fight easy. Even though HoT combat is a noticeable step up from core Tyria, most players can just solve their initial growing pains in the jungle with proper damage output combined with a minimal increase in situational awareness.

Being an on-and-off Black Desert player made me think about this concept as well. The devs for that game can make changes to classes that are universal to every single player of that class, which has its advantages. Theoretically, if Anet knows every single class always has access to its entire kit, it can tweak, buff, or nerf things as needed knowing that every single "build" for that class will be impacted. On the other hand, balance in BDO is something of a joke (like in many other games, tbh), and meaningful choice + build diversity is (for me at least) a big reason why I still have fun playing GW2. If I had to choose, I'd elect to keep the status quo. This isn't to say I don't think OP's idea is cool. As a ranger, I'd LOVE to just be able to take Wilderness Survival without losing an offensive traitline. Imagining having one's cake and eating it too is always nice.

I think having a "Precocious Aurene"- esque instance where those who actually want to see more of her can do so is a fine idea. As OP notes, such an instance could also prove to be a very lightweight way to provide small updates to Aurene that don't really impact the rest of the game, but throw the Aurene lovers a bone from time to time. If it were up to me, I'd prefer to see Aurene lose her physical individuality. Kind of melt into Tyria/The Mists, so she could embed her super magic filtering abilities directly into the fabric of reality.

Storytelling via the map designs themselves has been severely reduced over the years, and like you, I really miss those things from the core maps. "Story" doesn't have to be some super grand, fully voice acted thing. Sometimes it doesn't even have to have interactable objects - just some cool places tucked away here and there is more than enough.

Then why are you even asking for more information from the studio? I would (and do) expect more of what Anet has historically done - some mixture of complete silence, and corporate-speak. In other words, not really that different from any other business that has to communicate directly with its customers. I have my doubts about the quality of the 'new direction' they've recently announced, but I'm going to withhold judgment until we actually get to see what results.

Yes. Also yes. It was fairly clear, but I'll clarify it further. I was saying that Anet, at least superficially, isn't trying to solve its immediate problems by increasing expenditures. This point in no way excludes "lack of money/resources" itself from being a problem. Some of you might be thinking "of course! If lacking money is a problem, nobody would try to solve that by spending more money that they don't even have in the first place!" If you think so, you'd be surprised - people and corporations who should know better often use debt to do precisely that. People throw good money after bad all the time.

Here's the thing - even if money is put back into the game, that's no guarantee the game will actually improve. What I've seen IRL in non-manufacturing businesses is that if the main attempt to solve a problem is first and foremost throwing more money at it, the end result is the exact same product just with more waste and expense. On that note, Anet's most recent statement (on its surface) does not seem to be making that mistake. I don't see any mention of "expanding the team" or any other telltale signs of "we're throwing money at the problem." Instead, it appears to be all about trying something different with the resources they have on hand. Of course, we've heard this sort of story before: Anet tries new thing! And.... it just kinda fizzles out over time. But overall I think my point stands: more money =/= better game. For all the things I might not consider optimal about Anet, mischaracterizing GW2's problems as money problems isn't one of them. It seems quite stupid to blindly believe that more money is what Anet needs to solve problems, when Anet themselves don't seem to make a big stink about it.

For anyone still in here, just check out OP's posting history. Not all of it is like this, but there's a lot of "transplant X thing from Y game because I think it's cool" suggestions. This just seems to be his MO. Not sure this is the best place to ask (probably should have started your own thread with that question), but I'll bite. No. It sounds like your engagement with the game is fairly narrow (solo, one class, not into achievements, pretty much just mainline story). EoD has some story, sure, but compared to your HoT/PoF bundle, it's a pretty steep price for mostly stuff you're not interested in. I unironically suggest that if the only thing you like is elementalist, try Genshin Impact. They basically made an entire game out of a simplified (and in many ways, improved) version of ele.

Duels do matter. It's extremely difficult for a team that simply can't win any fights (teamfights or duels) to control nodes long enough to win. I've seen that happen maybe two or three times over 6-7 years of playing, and those wins were more the fault of the other team really dropping the ball on recapping nodes. If every single time you get caught in a 1v1 you die, that most certainly matters.

Honestly GW2 is sorely lacking YT presence outside the usual suspects (Teapot, WP [who himself didn't make vids for a big long stretch recently], and Mukluk [who is also, as someone noted, now doing GW2 less]). There are people outside the GW2 bubble who do make GW2 content, and some even get repeat sponsorships from Anet (Josh Strife Hayes comes to mind). The issue with creators like Josh (who are pretty talented, regularly insightful, and reliably entertaining) is that the best ones tend not to focus enough on GW2 to really be worth more than the occasional sponsorship from Anet. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, in my mind. It's hard to get someone to dedicate a lot of their channel to GW2 for the long run, if the YT metrics don't scream for it. But in order to get those metrics to look better for potential creators, Anet needs to convince more creators to more regularly make more stuff about it. I believe Anet can break that stalemate by sponsoring (or making in-house) a high production value short film or series about something in GW2 that is compelling. For instance, I am only vaguely and tangentially plugged into the universe of Warhammer 40K. I've never played the tabletop or videogame installments of it, and I don't really consume books or comics about it either. However, one very talented person recently made a short series of animations (compiled into one video in the link) about some Space Marines doing something that I still don't quite understand fully... but man is the series just COOL. If Anet could somehow generate that kind of work (and promote it to some level of popularity/virality) about Tyria, I think that might be a way to reach outside the bubble. NOTE: the Astartes series I linked, the creator pretty much got bought out by GW (Games Workshop, the people who own/run Warhammer) and the original videos are now behind GW's rather hostile "everything fan made is infringement" paywall. The link is hosted on a channel that is not the original creator. You can actually follow along the saga of GW's increasingly baring its fangs against its own community in the video description and pinned comment. I guess that's one thing Anet doesn't do, which is stifle outside creativity relevant to Tyria. They just might need to cultivate more of it, is all.

I think more than money, they need an actual not-silly marketing strategy. ArenaNet has put out some of what I believe is the most ill-considered marketing in the past. I think the few semi-visible things they have tried in recent years made much more sense, but I'm thinking they need to start talking to some of the bigger MMO content creators (the type who don't just play, but also dedicate a significant portion of their airtime to critical discussion) who've recently lavished praise on GW2... rather than sponsoring a random one-off video from streamers who don't seem to cultivate the kind of audience GW2 might appeal to.