Zephire.8049

I'd like to be excited since I was excited about other episodes (I _love_ we're finally getting more charr lore) but the last episode felt like it was 1/3-1/4 an episode in terms of content and whatever rush they had going on internally was evident in how there was no conclusion to the story and the story progress notification stayed on people's HUDs even though there was no way to progress. Maybe the new episode will make up for it, but I can't get excited about it until it's out and players can see what's really in it instead of getting hyped by a trailer. Speaking of trailers, the one for the new episode didn't mention anything new so that's another reason why I'm not excited. New skins, a new ally faction, a new emote, and some more DRMs? That's what the trailer for the previous episode had and what players knew would be in this episode as well.

> @"Sylvyn.4750" said: > Anyone have a take on why Ascended is account bound, but they'll let you sell Gen 1 Legendaries on the TP? You can sell all the way up to Exotic, can't sell Ascended, but then can sell some Legendaries...just seems odd. If they really want a person to explore Tyria to get a Legendary, why allow it to even be purchased for gold? Seems like once they've introduced a contradiction in the game, it opens the door for more kittens... The Gen 1 precursors originally only came from RNG drops so you had to either be extremely lucky or buy the pre off the TP and this was kept for Gen 1 legendaries both then and moving forward. Anet decided against making Gen 1 legendaries BoA, likely to avoid pissing players off and because they had already established that (Gen 1) legendaries could be bought and sold. That Gen 2 _is_ BoA shows that they also thought legendaries going forward should be tied to account, not who has enough gold, but for Gen 1 their hands were effectively tied.

Hard no. You can already buy Gen 1 legendaries with money if you really want by converting gems to gold, albeit over twice the 3k you mention. Throwing the GoE up in the store spits on the face of everyone who made a legendary over the past 8+ years and makes Gen 2 legendaries that much closer to being something you buy with a credit card. There is no stat bonus to legendaries so there's zero reason to use them unless you want either the QoL aspects or the skin, and if you want those you can work on it just like everybody else. You're buying the GoE with time (much like the GoB unless you have 80 potions to get it instantly) and that should not be changed, especially as every legendary means that someone spent several hours to over 25 hours doing map completion and you want to bypass that with money. Put in your time like everybody else.

> @"Veprovina.4876" said: > > @"Zephire.8049" said: > > (Also at least in Mistlock, less repetitive NPC chatter. It's been years but an asura talking about how ideas are like cream still drives me into a rage because of the one NPC that was stationed too close to the bank in old LA so was constantly saying her line as people used the bank.) > > *"I know your face from my dream!"* > *"Seek and you shall find!"* > *"Sieze the moment!"* > *"More violets i say, less violence!"* > > I started using the WvW banker just to stop hearing that hahhahahah! > > But, @"JesterX.6730" , if you want a "lounge" like experience but without the crafting stuff and the like, just go to WvW, any map. Every spawn has merchants, bank and trading post access. Plus, when you exit, you get back to exactly where you were. You don't have to teleport anywhere like you would if you're in a town. Just make sure you exit through the interface, not through the Lion's Arch portal in game. Fair! The sylvari NPC VA is easier ignore than the asura one in my opinion so those bug me far less, but it definitely comes down to what you can deal with. But all the NPCs (minus crafting stations) being added to Obsidian Sanctum was such a good move and I definitely use OS only a bit less often than Mistlock, though OS > Mistlock for toons that are in farm spots.

The only combo I do nowadays is fire ones (either putting the field down or using one) or combos I can do myself. There's just way too many effects to see what all is there now and people drop multiple fields in the same spot so you don't know if you'll end up giving everyone might, cleansing people, or blinding the mob when it comes to doing things in groups. It doesn't make a huge difference with or without them (minus AoE might from fire fields) so I'm not going to reduce my own DPS or healing for a chance at one (1) good combo. (This being non-raid PvE—combos can be very useful in other content and coordinated groups.)

To add on to what Danikat said, lounges (usually) load faster than LA does, either because the map is smaller or because the lounge is in a less populated part of the game. I think the only exception to this is the Lily of Elon which falls victim to PoF load times. (Though it also lets you bypass the story to get characters into PoF maps if you're not in a guild that has the PoF guild hall) Really, lounges are just QoL and flavour items at their core and you can survive just fine by using LA and Obsidian Sanctum. But once you're used to every crafting station being <1 second away from each other and 1 second away from the TP, it's really hard to go back. So I guess you could say that lounge passes end up letting you spend more time playing the game because you don't have to wait for loading screens or deal with running back and forth in LA at the bare minimum. (Also at least in Mistlock, less repetitive NPC chatter. It's been years but an asura talking about how ideas are like cream still drives me into a rage because of the one NPC that was stationed too close to the bank in old LA so was constantly saying her line as people used the bank.)

> @"Tuna Bandit.3786" said: > Just stay away from the "mandatory 100% rep" power freaks that love to stalk you. problem solved! > > What I really want: > Option IF I want to show my current location to my Guild Mates.,, That this is default behavior is one of the reasons I usually rep my private guild. > > Other than that: Choose your guilds wisely, asking Rep during guild missions or event is more than reasonable. > Demanding 100% rep all the time... Not happening. Ever. The only time _any_ amount of rep requirement makes sense is for WvW guilds, in my opinion. Though at least then there's a benefit to rep'ing them as well. Plus guild missions like you said. If a guild advertises it requires members to rep it, that's a hard no from me even if I'm otherwise interested in it. I'd rather not have people police what box I have checked in the game and provide them my current location at all times. Especially if they're monitoring it so frequently that even making a new character leads to angry messages.

The issue isn't money—they make enough to make content and fund an expansion—it's the engine and management. Crowdfunding won't fix the engine (which is why weapons aren't dyable, not lack of staff) and it won't improve management. Anet even employs more people than would be expected for a studio that has one game in maintenance mode and one that is bringing in more money than it costs to make content for so it's not even due to the lack of staff. _Maybe_ they have a third unannounced game in the works that requires so many people to work on it, but the money isn't the issue and has never been the issue. Even GW1 brought in more than enough money that they could start making GW2 and not update GW1 for years (outside some minor patches and short quests). And honestly a lot of issues there are today could have been fixed if there were different people in charge. Instead of spending years and diverting the vast majority of money GW2 made into a project that ended up cancelled because NCsoft considered it a money pit that needed to stop, we could have gotten a new engine by now, better performance, more updates, larger updates, WvW updates, and/or PvP updates. That was years in terms of time, tens of millions of dollars in terms of money, and a hundred or more people that could have been working on the game that was already out with an established playerbase instead of something that we still know nothing about other than it existed and is the reason why so much of PoF and LW4 is lackluster and didn't get support after release. I love GW2 but more money won't help when it's not money that's the problem and it's not up to players to fund a AAA game studio that's a subsidy of a different larger game developer that brought in 1.5 **b**illion dollars in 2018.

> @"Donari.5237" said: > > @"Crackers.9628" said: > > > Shouldn't dyes and berserker gear always be a hot market? > > Dyes coming in birthday presents have helped rein in prices. Also at some point dyes became salvageable for pigments used in guild hall decorations -- brown pigment seems the most valuable -- so if someone could sell a dye for under a silver, or get pigments to store for later use or sale, they might find it easier to salvage and deposit mats than to go through the TP interface for such a small listing. > > So many better stats have become available that while berserker is still decent for the right power build (and condi builds became quite viable after a rework, lessening the demand for only berserker), it is extremely easy to do better. And again, with more room to store mats and more uses for those mats, players are probably salvaging rather than listing. > > Like I said, flipping means knowing the ins and outs of the market. Paying heed to game changes that may affect fotm builds. Predicting what common material might become hot thanks to a new achieve or special item to make. It's way more work than I've ever cared to put in :) Dyes also became account-wide instead of having to unlock them on each character, so that combined with the birthday dye packs means it's mostly new players buying the non-exclusive dyes and that's a slow market with very little, if any, profit. Even with exclusive dyes, between the birthday gifts and the BLC rotation of the kits, the demand for the most expensive ones has dropped and there's a certain volatility there. I ended up dropping dyes as something to flip just because there's a lot more research to turn a profit on those than I was willing to put into it. Though to tack something on, pay attention to festivals for flipping things. Buy when they're cheapest in the year and sell when they're most in demand. For example, ToT bags and Wintersday presents spike right at the start of Halloween and Wintersday respectively but demand drops off after the first ~24 hours, and raw mats spike during the same timeframe of Four Winds. But it really does require more research and effort now to make a quick profit than it used to. There's been years of not just the market maturing and stabilizing but years of people learning how the GW2 economy works, how to make money off it, and how to manipulate it to make money. Between TP flippers being secretive about what's profitable at the moment and flippers/TP barons periodically trying to create for a demand for something they bought up, it's actual work instead of buying unidentified dye and having a good chance to break even or make a profit on it.

> @"Strider Pj.2193" said: > > @"Obfuscate.6430" said: > > I am kind of confused why people are mocking the OP in the responses here. Arenanet has clearly defined rules when it comes to names. > > Guild names and pet names must also be subjected to the same rules character names are. > > I have seen a handful of blatantly hateful guild names in 8 years; guild names that included hate speech and slurs. Some of these were obviously troll guilds designed specifically to provoke people. Troll or not, they are against the Terms of Service and it would be nice to have a more convenient way to report them. > > > > I guess I would ask which posters above are mocking the OP? There were some last night that were deleted in the time between your post and Obfuscate's post, and they definitely weren't said out of curiosity.

1 - Adding AI such as that would be extremely complicated given the age of the engine and aggro mechanics are generally hostile/neutral, toughness, and range + level (with some exceptions, most of which are in raids). There's no tracking method in-game so one would have to be written from scratch and somehow integrated into the game _and_ UI added for players. Also it adds an easy way for players to troll each other via intentionally failing events, which is not going to happen period. It's an MMO so you should not dread seeing another player. Also the Great Hall meta in Istan was changed because players were farming champions instead of doing the event and one of the reasons Anet stated for the change was because players should try to beat events, not tell others to not do them and harassing those who continue to do the events anyway. 2 - Personal housing and personal scribing is an oft requested feature so I don't know why you'd lock it behind gems. But personal scribing needs to happen as it's the only crafting profession that doesn't serve much of a personal use and guild content has kinda been abandoned so it makes sense to repurpose it. (Updating jewelcrafting would also be nice) 3 - Racials probably won't be touched, ever. They're flavour and intentionally tied to the race, not character choices. Asura get golems, sylvari plants, humans gods, norn transformations, and charr legion support. Giving other races legion support would make racial elites unbalanced and charr would have to get something from another race and at that point you may as well give similar racials to everyone. Which I'm not against but that's a lot of work for skills that are intentionally underpowered to prevent one race from being better than the others. There's also some dialogue in IBS regarding your profession. But it's extra work writing and recording lines the minority of players will hear so that's why they're just nice easter eggs instead of detailed. More cultural armour would be interesting (though they need to deal with the clipping issues charr have with what is already there) but tying appearance to character creation options means a lot of work for the artists and means people with few characters would need to go through the list of every option/combination to unlock the skins. There's also already skins locked behind professions so it's getting up there with what would generally be tolerated if race options were also thrown in. Making an elementalist 4 times is annoying. Making 15-45 characters to unlock skins would be extremely frustrating, especially if you had to buy the armour on that character instead the skin automatically unlocking on character creation. 4 - More general achievements and minigames would definitely be fun, but it probably won't happen to old content given resource and management issues. 5 - There's also the mentor tag, auto-loot, and faster reviving, among other things. Which are nice QoL things and you can't make Central Tyria masteries more than that as core Tyria is the place where people who cannot access masteries play. As soon as you make Central Tyria masteries required for lore or loot or whatever, F2P and heroic players are being directly punished for not having an expansion. (And you could already argue that locking auto-loot behind a mastery instead of achievement or gold is punishing enough given the massive QoL that mastery brings). HoT-IBS can get away with masteries that affect your character on the map/in-game because they have access to the mastery system by having HoT and/or PoF. That's not the case with core Tyria so another system would have to be made that non-expansion players could use if there were direct upgrades available. Your ideas aren't bad, but they definitely treat GW2 as if it were a single-player game. Morality stuff and more in-depth NPC interaction is pretty simple in a single-player RPG, but an MMO is another beast and things like how it would affect other players, how would it affect balance, is it worth it to put resources into X content instead of Y content, and whether or not not only can the game engine handle it but if adding things would affect the performance of players on lower-end rigs. There could be more racial differences in the game, but skins/animations for existing abilities would be the easiest and safest route to go.

> @"Nephalem.8921" said: > > @"phokus.8934" said: > > > @"Dawdler.8521" said: > > > > @"Kanok.3027" said: > > > > Not only would it require GW2 to have it's graphics engine/api to be rewritten to DX12 (which won't happen), but then they'd have to somehow jerry-rig the engine to support DLSS, which would be a monumental task to add to a very old MMORPG. > > > I'm not an engine coder but I am pretty sure the engine doesnt have to be "rewritten to DX12" in order to *technically* be DX12 since DX12 is backwards compatible with DX9 afaik and you could add DX12 features specifically (just look at the fan made DX12 wrapper running on top of the DX9 engine) but Anet hasnt said a peep about any engine upgrades so we'll probably never see it. > > > > > > Considering the time its taken them to fix the missing tier 3 3x3x5 meter wall on DBL - 5 years and counting now I think - if that is any indication it would take them maybe 300-350 years to implement DX12. Or less than 24h if some PvEr had figured out how to abuse a raid boss with the wall. > > You’d have to rewrite quite a bit especially the rendering state really changes from 9-11/12. > > > > The only way I can see them doing anything with dx12 is with a brand new game but I’m not holding my breath. > > > > WoW updated their engine from dx9 to 11 to 12. FF from 9 to 11. Poe updated from dx9 to dx11 to vulkan. Of course its possible if you dont fire or bully every engine dev out of the company. > Dx9 doesnt even support low level optimisation afaik. That api is 18years old and outdated. They dont have to rewrite the entire engine to support technology from this century. It probably wont happen and it will just die soon. 15-20fps in zergs is just not fun. Upgrading hardware into the 1-2k range doesnt even add much. It should be noted that WoW had more than enough money and multiple other popular games that brought in money so they could afford the resources needed to update the graphics, Final Fantasy XIV uses an engine that Square Enix also uses on other Final Fantasy games so they have a vested interest in keep it up to date plus the finances to do so (also the time between 1.0 and 2.0 to change things without impacting players), and Path of Exile had its engine built from scratch specifically for PoE and Path of Exile 2 is happening in part because it lets the developer better change and update the engine on multiple fronts. Both FFXIV's and PoE's engines are about 8-10 years younger than GW2's, which gives them that many years in coding and tech improvements to make upgrading them easier and learning from mistakes of the previous generation of MMOs. WoW uses (or used?) a modified Warcraft 3 engine putting it at a bit older than GW2's engine but not by as much as the other two are younger. This isn't to say that GW2 doesn't need an engine overhaul (it does, badly) just that the circumstances are different both in the studio and what the engine was designed to do. The GW2 engine is already doing things it wasn't ever meant to do (and the indications are that the GW1 engine was not designed to be future-proof/make updates easy) and there's been enough turnover now that the people who know what the original engine was like are few and far between so touching that code risky and we already know there are parts of the code that developers aren't allowed to touch—at all—because of the chaos it would cause both for players and devs. So it really comes down to whether a new engine will come out in an expansion, a game revival patch, or GW3 to wipe the code clean. It would honestly be surprising if a graphic update came out without a new engine given how messy the code is and how devs have said both would mean about the same amount of work for them.

I don't see how this is needed as XX:55 works across timezones with the exception for the handful that are on the half hour. You can also turn timestamps on for chat so if someone says "HP train moving in 20 minutes" you know what time they said it and when the HP train would move out. Also not everyone can math out timezones on the fly, especially when so many places still use Daylight Savings Time so their UTC number changes twice a year. Perhaps it was easy for you but your personal experience =/= universal. And I get it. I've been using 24-hour time since I was a kid so it's really easy to convert the times on the fly, but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people struggle with it if they aren't familiar with it and it can take months for people to get comfortable with it. Forcing people to be confused and not know what times things are at in a video game doesn't help anyone and guilds who are serious about having round the clock coverage are predisposed to having players who are familiar with UTC. Someone wanting to know when a world boss is doesn't benefit by being told the UTC when they have no idea how that system works—they just wanted to know when to set an alarm (which is in local time) or know if they can do that boss between dinner and putting the kids to bed. The game already lets you change between local time, server time, and Tyrian time and I don't see how removing 2/3 of those fosters community rather than confusion. It's not about knowing what time it is for you locally without having to look anywhere else, it's being able to tell at a glance whether you'll have time to do in-game things without having to do a conversion from UTC to local time or having to use a website to do that for you.

Yeah, no. A Lunar node of some sort would be nice but lucky envelopes would add too much liquid gold into the economy, even the little ones. _If_ it was a unique envelope that did not have any junk items worth up to 8g88s88c and the back items were taken out then maybe, but if you give everyone access to a node that has an item that's affected by magic find and can give people just under 9g a day, inflation is going to go up. A lot. Even if only 5% of players got that drop per day, that's still a ton of gold entering the economy for zero work and without a sink for it. But since there's no unique currency for LNY (aside from the tokens, but those are in addition to gold and don't offer unique rewards), there's not really a huge need for a node to keep the festival currency down outside of the 3 weeks it's active. A vendor that gives you 1-2 random food items would keep the flavour of a LNY node without the tidal wave of gold.

New/improved guild missions would be welcome but a guild raid isn't likely and definitely not fair as it only benefits large guilds with 10+ people who are geared and experienced raiders, something that's not very common. Throw in the need for those 10+ people to have the same schedule so they can get together for 2+ hours a week every week (and never, ever have to drop for IRL reasons/their power going out since they can't be replaced with a PUG) and that's content the vast majority of players will never see or be part of. Guild puzzles using raid maps could be interesting and incorporate aspects of the raid/boss(es), but raids that are locked to guild members is taking content the vast _minority_ of players play and restricting it further while also putting no small amount of development resources into it. > Edit: Guild Raids doesn't have to be "a walk in the park". I'm talking about hard and challenging raids with multiple difficulties. Something that only true raiders can appreciate. Anet has stated repeatedly that they do not want raids to have multiple difficulties and that they have no intention of doing so, and if they aren't willing to do that with raiding in general, they're not going to do that for niche content that even fewer people will be able to access. Also "true raiders" is making some huge assumptions about players, and not in a good way. I'd also say a guild raid should be easier than regular raids as it would have to account for players who gear-wise and/or skill-wise aren't up to snuff for even VG, and outside of raiding guilds or mega-guilds, odds of a guild having 10+ active members who are able to raid at any given time is slim. And if it's impossible to bring in a PUG, the difficulty floor would need to accommodate that and scale things down. Which Anet won't do as they've dug in their heels about raid difficulty despite years of players asking for an easier mode that would be more accessible to all players.

I find it strange that you say GW2 "doesn't have any uniqueness or edge" over other MMOs but then talk about ways that GW2 could adopt systems, mimic, or outright copy game designs from other MMOs. Not every game appeals to everyone and GW2 was never intended to appeal to the traditional MMO player who wants to grind for gear and forever have a carrot they need to chase, it was designed to appeal to players who _don't_ like that. In doing so, it was appealing to adults who have other commitments in their lives so they don't have time to grind dungeons/raids for hours a week every week and who don't want to be punished if they're not able to play regularly. That combined with it being buy-to-play and letting players buy premium currency with gold (both being a big deal when GW2 came out) is why GW2 stood out for _me_ in the first place and still does. I quit WoW and FFXIV couldn't hold my interest. I pre-ordered RIFT but ended up forgetting about it after a month or two. I've lost track of all the other MMOs I've played over the years but there's one that's been a constant: GW2. I have taken hiatuses before but the nice thing about GW2 is that it was designed for that in mind (iirc in one of the development videos before release, it was stated that they only want players to keep playing if they find it fun, not because they have to keep up on a grind or something) so not having to worry about gear scaling alone is a reason why I've picked up GW2 again rather than dropping it completely. No hate at you or how you've presented this, but so much of it is subjective and treats gamers as a monolith instead of a very diverse group who have different interests and varying amounts of time they can allocate to gaming. It's an easy trap to fall into and one of the reasons why so many games from the MMO boom post-WoW have had to change to free-to-play, have low populations (or both), or have shut down the servers entirely. Yet GW2 is over 8 years old now and still going steady without completely changing up their financial model. This despite the hiccups and failures of leadership that negatively affected players, the lack of QoL features players have been asking for for years, and the utter lack of communication. If GW2 offered nothing special or different compared to other MMOs, why would so many people have stuck around through all that? But to break down your list, I'll go point by point. Not to prove you wrong—you are welcome to your opinion and aren't wrong for not being into these game designs—but to give you an idea of why myself and others like what you consider mediocre. > PvE is vastly outperformed by FF14 and WoW Subjective. When I played WoW, I didn't have any desire to do things in the open world unless there was a specific reason to. I don't find the combat or graphics particularly special and anything but the current content wasn't useful so there was no point doing things outside of the latest expansion area. Dungeons got repetitive but were required to gear up or try for an RNG drop and raids were once a week and even then got boring after half a dozen runs. FFXIV kept me for a month, maybe two, before I couldn't stand it. I don't care if the end-game is great when a game requires you to spend so many hours grinding levels before you get a hint of what people rave about. Especially when you have to pay for that "privilege". I vastly prefer the PvE in GW2 which is why I've 100%'d core Tyria, HoT, LW3-4, and IBS 30+ times. PoF sucks though but thankfully it's not forced on you outside a handful of things. There are issues in how the LFG needs an overhaul, dungeons a revamp of some sort, and raids... raids and its community are something and that's a whole other topic but to keep it short, I did wings 1-4, some of 5 and 6, and that's it not because I don't like the raids themselves but other things about them. > Progression The lack of numbers progression is great. Some people want/need the vertical progression but the visual progression is far more appealing to me and something I do take seriously. Countless hours and thousands of gold have gone into it, something I can't say about other MMOs that have vertical progression. For Anet to "catch up" they would have to completely change a fundamental design of GW2 and something that was central to GW1 as well. > I think good PvE is pretty much non-existent in GW2 > ... but Anet doesn't particularly focus on delivering content to sustain a PvE community. There's a content patch every 2-4 months for PvE. You may not like it either for the writing or how it's bite-sized, but it happens far more often with GW2 than a lot of other MMOs that go 6+ months between content patches. Would I like it if every 2 months there was enough content to drop that would take weeks to go through? Absolutely, but that's not realistic and would be unhealthy for the devs to do so. There has been (and currently is) and issue about the lack of content and especially the lack of communication, but PvE content has been dropping every 2-4 months since LW3 and nearly each time with a brand new map and new metas. > GW2 is nowhere near the quality and quantity other mmos Purely subjective and you have to look at how _active_ other MMOs are on non-current content/maps. I map complete a lot and at off-hours for NA yet there's almost always others around, especially post-Covid. New players for sure, but also older players since <80 maps aren't invalidated and there are reasons for people to be on HoT, PoF, and LW3-4 maps even though they're technically old content at this point. To me that's both quality and quantity and the size of your game doesn't matter if non-new players only hang out in 5% of it. > Competitive stuff Not my forte so won't speak on that. > The only thing GW2 can bring to the table is Living Story and the story itself, however I think it's super boring You're applying what you like to everyone again. The story is definitely polarizing but I personally enjoy it. It's not perfect or anything like that (I could write a massive post on the technical flaws alone), but I don't expect a single-player RPG story in an MMO. I also prefer the bite-sized additions in the form of LW episodes over having to wait 6-12 months for a patch before the story continues, especially when the story is locked behind dungeons or raids. Waiting for an expansion is even worse. > I would bet quite a bit of money that if Anet made LS episodes b2p from the moment they released only a few percent of the playerbase would consider buying them for the story. But that's not the case and it was likely a deliberate choice not to put a financial barrier up between episodes unless you don't log in for 5 seconds every 2-4 months or weren't even playing the game at the time. There should definitely be a review of the sale of LW seasons for new players, but saying people wouldn't buy something when the company knew people weren't likely to buy something thus made it free (for a time) is kind of redundant. If someone offers me free pie, even if it's not amazing, it's still free. Maybe I would buy it because it sounded interesting or because I liked the person, maybe I wouldn't, but at the end of the day it was still free and unless the person asks for my feedback, it's just idle speculation about if/how much I'd pay for something I got for free. > But is this really what GW2 should be? A kinda enjoyable gap filler for releases in other mmos/games? Considering that was one of the main ideas behind GW2, yes. It wasn't designed to take up your entire time gaming, it was designed so you could play however much you wanted, play or do something else for weeks/months/years, then come back without having to worry about being behind on gear or levels. > I'd love to see Anet make up their mind and settle on something they want their game to identify. GW2 is an accessible MMO aimed more at people with limited amounts of time than people who can spend hours a day every day on a game. That has always been its identity and is one of the reasons why when they went back on that (raids) it created a ton of issues that they were reluctant to talk about and still refuse to talk about in some cases. Even fractals can be done in short bursts even though they're end-game content. > I'm a PvP player That definitely explains some of all this. I'm not saying that in a mean way, just that people who prefer/stick with one gamemode tend to not be the best judge on why others prefer other modes. As for things I think they should change/focus on: * Communication I honestly wouldn't care nearly as much about things or get frustrated if Anet simply communicated what they were doing or why they made various choices. Lack of communication is the most likely reason I'll drop GW2 if/when I do. Not issues with the story, not scrapped content, not the spaghetti engine, but the simple lack of letting players know what to expect and that they are listening to player feedback. - If they're no longer going to work on raids, tell players that. - If DRMs are going to be the new thing, tell players that. - If strikes are going to going to be scrapped, tell players that. - Tell players how WvW alliances is going. - Inform players that there's not going to be a Q4 balance patch because of EoD. - If players need to hang onto items for months before they can use them, make it clear that's the case. Honestly the list goes on and on and you probably get the picture. I don't PvP and only casually WvW so I'm coming at it from a primarily PvE point of view, but I'd be fine with how things are going if there was clear and constant communication about what was going on (an off-hand comment in a dev chat is not meaningful communication) and it would be far easier to offer feedback if it was known what was going on and what the plan is. The latest IBS episode really made it clear how bad they're at communicating and everyone I talked to about it stated that they would have been fine with the episode being cut in half and stopping suddenly if they had been told that would be the case. And I imagine PvP would also improve if they talked about what was in the works, trends they've noticed, and acknowledging hackers are an issue and that they're working on something in regard to that. I just can't get concerned about a game's perceived identity or niche when the studio operates in radio silence despite its one current game being an MMO (AKA a "live service game") and it's hard to offer feedback when a studio doesn't even tell players what it's doing outside a vague quarterly roadmap and player feedback is rarely ever acknowledged so players are flying blind with what happens each content patch. (Some PvE mount skins would also be nice, just throwing that out there since mounts are a big thing now but the base skins are so limited. It seems strange to not have some PvE-exclusive skins for rewards and to entice people to buy more from the store.)

Having a sound cue when you're in a boosted dive would be useful, but that specific sound is likely copyrighted given how huge the HTTYD franchise is for Dreamworks and how iconic that sound is to HTTYD.

While it may not seem like it in the moment (especially when you list more expensive items), a 15% tax benefits everyone in that it keeps the inflation down so while you don't make as much personally, what you make is worth more than it would be otherwise and it's cheaper for yourself when you buy things. (Cheaper in that even if the prices are on par, you don't have to spend as much time grinding content for enough gold to buy it.) It may feel nice to have thousands of gold and to be able to list things for hundreds of gold, but look at what happened to the likes of GaiaOnline with too much gold coming in with not enough of it going out. It's an extreme example, yes, but it illustrates why gold sinks are incredibly important for the health of virtual economies. Also there's intentionally no player-to-player trading so that there's no getting around paying the listing fee and selling fee, the economy is shared between everyone, and so that people aren't scammed out of items or end up trading for items acquired through scams or RMT. The last one also meaning support isn't swamped with tickets about being scammed or scammers trying to issue a "charge back" to get the gold and item(s). While you can send items to others in the mail, there's a reason why you're told support will not help you if you mess up or get scammed that way.

About the walking underwater thing, the game's engine works in such a way where swimming only activates under z-axis 0. If you have water above that point, any water you see is purely visual and not actual water. While it's technically possible for them to code "bubbles" of water above the z-axis, that apparently isn't as easy as it sounds so it's less about them forgetting to hit the "players swim here" button and more the environmental artists accidentally made a river too deep and neither the project manager nor QA tester(s) caught it before it made it to live servers. That or it was a low priority to fix before pushing the content.

I'm not against an achievement chest rework given how the system was designed when AP was a lot easier to come by, but rewards should absolutely not be removed from it because that punishes new players and players who haven't spent time focusing on gaining AP. RNG skins in AP milestone chests is also bad design because they could have been put in as a choice (what we have now lets you choose the skin you want) and taking away that choice means a lot of people are going to end up with skins they don't want despite putting in hours—possibly dozens of hours—to get the AP needed for that chest. If you want to go the RNG route, it would be better to include RNG armour or weapon unlock items every X chests on top of what is available now and make it retroactive so no one is punished for playing the game or for starting the game.

Even if there was such an app, I don't think it would be useful for one reason: Anet doesn't really communicate. If it takes hours for them to respond to chronic crashing or server issues (if they respond at all) then a notification app isn't going to be much use since you'd still have to look at the forums/reddit/twitter to see if there's been a hotfix yet. You're better off finding a GW2 discord that does patch announcements and using the mobile app because if they can't spare someone to write a post on the forum or hire a community manager, they're unlikely to make use of a notification app even if they had one already made and ready to go.

Whenever there's a sale on a popular item, the price goes up. This week we had sales on: * Character slots * Storage expanders * Bank tabs * Shared inventory slots * LW2, 3, and 4 which are popular items so with a large discount and only available for 24 hours, a lot of people are buying them via gold-gem conversion in a short amount of time. The conversion rate will drop back down in a week or two (provided nothing of note comes out in the gem store on Tuesday) when people aren't in a rush to buy things.

> @"Linken.6345" said: > > @"fluffdragon.1523" said: > > Can we also restore the indicator of what Order we joined, maybe? Gets annoying having to sift through my characters to figure out who can talk to which merchant when I finally feel like unlocking something. > > Dont that show in my story text? In the text of the hero panel it does, but not on the character selection screen. If it's been a while since you've done the story and/or have a lot of characters, it can be a royal PITA to log into each character individually to see if they've joined an order and if so, which one. A symbol or other indicator on the character select screen would be a huge QoL improvement and save players a lot of time, especially as there are HoT achievements tied to each order that are available only to characters in that order.

Visually the game is fine, imo. Performance, however, is a different matter. From what devs have said and implied in the past, doing a visual overhaul would be not much different than an engine overhaul when it comes to the about of work needed, so it would be better to to an engine overhaul rather than focus just on graphics. With a new engine, a graphics update is likely to happen since they're already in the guts of the game meaning everyone would benefit from it. This includes devs who are limited in what they can and can't do due to the age and jerry rigging of the current engine. A graphics update that's only a graphics update would be a bandaid that wouldn't actually fix server issues, broken events, lag, etc. It may or may not be a prettier mess, but it would still be a mess.

That would definitely be nice. Being able to select what information gets shown would be a huge QoL feature, imo, and because you'd be able to select the information (for this purpose, think a list with tick boxes) you could have as much or as little as you'd want so you can control what your character select screen looks like. Because I'm an altoholic, I have to rely on a spreadsheet and gw2efficiency to keep track of who's in what order, map completion, story stage, birthdays, etc. and it would be nice to have some or all of that information right there in-game rather than using outside resources. Because when you break 15-20 characters, it gets exponentially harder to remember all the details of each one and it's time consuming to log into each of them individually even if the game is on an SSD.