Zephire.8049

Can't say I'm enthused to repeat content where the doing it the first time was the most interesting simply because I didn't know what would happen. The rewards are mediocre right now and I'm not going to grind content I'm indifferent about on the off-chance the gated rewards are something I'm interested in. With the masteries being locked as well, it feels like there's no point to doing DRMs repeatedly because it's wasted XP.

But what puts me off the most and has put off most people I've talked to is the utter lack in communication. The story suddenly stopping would have been fine if Anet had simply said that they're going back to how LW1 unfolded and that the community needs to build up supplies/allies between the parts of the story. Instead nothing was said about it, there was no clear indication that there was no way to proceed, and the community event wasn't mentioned anywhere and the in-game notification was collapsed by default.

If a game can't respect its players' time by clearly communicating that they're changing up how things have been done for years, it's kind of demoralizing even when the content that you're expected to run isn't boring as heck.

I've also been kicked twice in the past 30 minutes. First time it took 25 minutes to get back in, and was kicked after 5 of that.

I've also been talking to someone else on Discord and they've experienced the same thing at the same time. I was in Drizzlewood and I think they were in a city, so it's definitely not IBS5 instances only.

They removed elementalist auras because they were "too distracting" but those auras were nothing compared to what we have now. With the exception of combo fields, there's no reason why any player needs to actually see the weapon/skill effects of another player if they don't want to. It's actually hard to impossible to see combo fields now because there's so many effects going on over them which results in them being far less engaging.

Boss tells are also impossible to see when you literally cannot see their model. Also model culling does not prioritize bosses so even if you turn model culling on to the highest setting for performance reasons, there's no small chance that the boss' model will be invisible anyway. (And then there's the Madusa's gaze ability where the eye is literally too high to see on some models so you have no idea when you should look away to avoid being frozen...)

"We don't want you to play the interface" falls rather flat when, if you're melee, the only way to see that you're in melee range and hitting a boss is to look at your auto-attack skill and see if the boss is in range or not because there are so many weapon and skill effects going off on top of the large, particle effect laden skins that you cannot see what your character is doing. Honestly, at this point I tend to just range auto-attack on bosses because I can't see anything going on in melee range and there's too many mechanics that insta-down you where it's impossible to see when to dodge. My DPS is less than it would be otherwise but my QoL skyrockets when I can actually see the occasional tell or avoid a poison/fire field instead of dying to it and having to run back from a waypoint all because there was no way to see it through all the frivolous effects.

Instead of waypoints, they may utilize shrines (Siren's Landing being an example of a map with one WP but there being 4 other shrines to teleport to).

That said, Asura weren't present in Elona either but we still got Waypoints and Dragonfall showed us that waypoints are mobile, so while Cantha may not have the tech currently, as soon as we show up they gain access to it because it's ready to go and can be placed where needed. Tie it to story progression and you have lore reasons for why there are WPs.

Why would they add a prompt during world transfer to get people to buy gems? Unless you're transferring to a free world, you'd have had to buy gems for the transfer thus already aware of the ability to buy gems. The notification when there's a new store item also serves as a reminder to buy gems. The news website posts are reminders to buy gems. The occasional free item is a reminder to buy gems. The sales throughout the year are reminders to buy gems. There is zero need to add new pop-ups/notifications to buy gems because there's already various was to remind/encourage people to buy gems that at least makes some degree of sense and I have outright quit games that add "Hey, buy our premium currency!" notifications anywhere and everywhere they think they can get away with it.

You also don't need to buy gems during world transfer. You do that before or after, not during, especially as there's nothing time-sensitive that can't wait a few minutes unless you're trying to nab a sale item seconds before the sale ends and instead of taking care of that before transferring worlds, you decided to transfer first. Even if that's just an example you threw out there, there is no time in GW2 I can think of where you would need to buy gems right that moment instead of waiting a few minutes.

Also a flat rate is infinitely more fair to people who cannot afford to buy large sums of gems. Just because someone can drop $50 a month on virtual items doesn't mean that they should get even more than someone who can only afford/justify $10 every few months. It's just another case where those with excess means get bonuses just for having money while those with a tight budget are punished for it. A flat rate also makes it easier for people to say no and control their spending since they aren't being pressured to "just spend a little more" to get "bonus" gems, which is exactly why so many developers _don't_ do flat rates, since it's easier to draw in whales and prey on people with poor impulse control or addictions and upsell them on something it costs you literally nothing to make or store.

It may feel good to get a perceived bonus, but you have to look into the implications and reasons behind it. One real world example is if you buy an item that says "Now X% more!" there's no small chance that the product's size was recently changed so the "bigger" one is still the same size as the old size as they work through the old packaging and prime buyers into accepting the smaller size, or as a way to trick people into buying their product instead of a competitor's, or both.

Gems have no storage or production costs thus should have a flat rate across the board because to do otherwise is to put money ahead of people and put well-off people ahead of poorer people. The gem store was always designed to be (roughly) equal footing for all players so it makes zero sense to change it to be unfair, especially 8 years in.

The chance for keys is still the same at 25% per map (with the exception of Southsun and cities) so you just hit a streak of bad RNG. I've found keeping a spreadsheet of whether I get a key or charge has helped lessen the disappointment of not getting a key for several maps since with the exception of a handful of characters, most of my (recorded) map comps sit at 4-6 keys total which puts them in the 25% zone. Streaks of bad luck are just more memorable than streaks of good luck.

> @"crepuscular.9047" said:

> if you do the gen 2 legendary shortbow collection, you will get the item https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tiger_Training_Guide

>

> double click on the item, you can pick a tiger cub, and it will cling to your back

> https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Nola

What's fun with that is that it doesn't count as a back item so persists when your model is removed. Tonics all have the cub there, story transformations have the cub, and I was told that the cub is there even in the Clocktower JP.

It's no mini but it's the best gizmo/unlock during a legendary in my opinion.

As someone with a tiger-themed toon, agreed! The regular tiger minis are fine, but the cub has such a good model. They also added a tiger cub tonic within the past year (I think) so the model is definitely current with its model, texture, and rigging.

> @"lare.5129" said:

> > @"Laila Lightness.8742" said:

> > new engine

> for what ?? I don't see any benefit to do this.

> 1)dx12 already exist whit side patch if someone need it

> 2)people, who feel some actual some unknown shaders and shadows already long time ago start play another games

> 3)possible huge amount if bugs can come if new engine come

> 4)any action is coast. Benefit from new engine can not be have positive money balance.

> 5)this is mmo game, most players can compare that we have at 486x or Pentium I 166mmmxwiht S3 0.5MB video card and what we have now. Now it better and enough. No any reason to update more.

There's no doubt that a new engine would be a huge undertaking, but GW2's engine is a _heavily_ modified GW1 engine making it 16+ years old now. It's doing things that the original engine was not designed to support and is 16+ years of code on code on code. Not only that but there's been massive leaps in tech—both in coding and hardware—since then and the gap between generations is smaller now than they were in the 00s.

And to illustrate just how old the engine is with another engine more people are familiar with, Unreal Engine 2 was the latest and greatest at the time with Unreal 3 still being 2+ years away at the time of GW1's engine. Unreal 5 is due out in approximately a year. Frankly it's amazing that Arenanet has managed to do so much with such an old engine, but its age is definitely showing and has been showing for a number of years now.

The engine will have to be updated sooner rather than later to better future-proof the game and make development easier so while the upfront resources may be higher for a new engine compared to "just" adding DX12, it will be cheaper in the long run. Also, the engine was written when single-core CPUs were the norm which is why GW2 cannot utilize multiple cores even though the majority of CPUs on the market for the past 10 years have been multi-core. It's much more likely that letting the game utilize multiple cores will provide a greater impact to more player than going from DX9 to DX12, especially as the CPU is generally the location where game performance bottlenecks.

> @"mes.4607" said:

> > @"Zephire.8049" said:

> > > @"mes.4607" said:

> > > Anyone saying no is crazy. Use invis bags people

> >

> > You mean the bags that do not let you deposit materials or sell things to both vendors or on the TP? That require a player to manually move items out of to do anything with them? That's just switching from one bad experience to another

> >

> > And again, no one is requesting that the compact option be removed from the game. Literally all we want is for there to be an _**option**_ that lets us move its location as roughly 2/3rds of players (using this poll as an example) do not use the option and its location causes a drop in the QoL of such players due to its current location. Something, btw, that Arenanet realized was a problem when they gave players an option to change where it was on the cog list as so many people were accidentally clicking on it because it was right next to the deposit materials button.

>

> Invis bags are for storing gear and other items you dont want mixed in with the rest... I feel like people dont use them correctly

Which for most people would be 1/5 bags, though with the armoury gear is less of an issue as you can store two sets without it taking up bag space.

That still leaves 4/5 bags that can have their stuff moved around by accidentally clicking a few pixels to the right.

> @"mes.4607" said:

> Anyone saying no is crazy. Use invis bags people

You mean the bags that do not let you deposit materials or sell things to both vendors or on the TP? That require a player to manually move items out of to do anything with them? That's just switching from one bad experience to another

And again, no one is requesting that the compact option be removed from the game. Literally all we want is for there to be an _**option**_ that lets us move its location as roughly 2/3rds of players (using this poll as an example) do not use the option and its location causes a drop in the QoL of such players due to its current location. Something, btw, that Arenanet realized was a problem when they gave players an option to change where it was on the cog list as so many people were accidentally clicking on it because it was right next to the deposit materials button.

Nope, never. My bottom bag is generally an invisible bag where I keep unidentified gear and anything else I don't want to accidentally salvage, but I'm someone who fills their inventory from the bottom up. I will periodically move anything I'm keeping to the bottom so that I can see new loot as I get it because I cannot stand a "top heavy" inventory and it's easier to judge when I need to pop by a bank when I don't need to scroll to the bottom of my inventory.

I'm also not a fan of specialty bags because they affect where loot can go. I have the Reinforced Olmakhan Bandolier on one character and I can't even list the number of times it's caused me to salvage unid gear by accident or how drops get lost because suddenly instead of loot filling from the top down, it fills both from the top and middle. And that's just one bag—I'm not going to use a mix of invisible, craftsmen, equipment, oiled, and Olmakhan bags on one character because that would be utterly obnoxious for me to deal with. Maybe some people are fine with that and I'm not knocking them, but I refuse to do something that makes looting a frustration for me in an MMO where loot is a large part of gameplay.

I'm also not going to go out and replace every bag of my 37 characters with various other bags to the tune of hundreds to over a thousand gold just because of a bad design choice that ignores the history of the compact button and some people don't want for there to be an _option_ to move the compact button's placement despite that being the case when it was an option in the cog menu.

That won't happen since the Shimmerwing is a premium skin and they don't reuse premium skin models. They occasionally tweak/reuse RNG models outside of the base ones, but it can be assumed that premium skins are a one-off and the only time they _may_ get reused is in another premium skin. Otherwise it lessens the "exclusiveness" of premium skins if people know that "free" players will have access to the same model in the future even if the dye channels and/or textures differ.

Oldest one is from April 27th, 2012 (beta)


I don't remember the context but probably something about how charr don't need bras as that was a huge thing at the time.

Oldest one that's a full screenshot is April 28th, 2012.


Moving it or giving players an option to return it back to the co menu would be great. I never use it because I absolutely loathe how it compacts to the top only and I keep things I want in lower bags. Other bags may exist (and I do use invisible bags) but they are too specific about what they do and can affect where loot goes, and invisible bags require manually depositing things and require you to move an item to a different bag to sell it on the TP. It adds one QoL improvement(not having to worry about accidental compaction) at the cost of another (no longer being able to deposit materials with a single click).

Accidentally hitting compact kills the momentum and can require multiple minutes to sort out, which isn't great if you're in the middle of a meta, as well.

There's a reason why it was given the option to be put at the bottom of the menu so it stands to reason there should be a way to move it now.

It probably does have something to do with an engine limitation as GW1 also had issues with bank space and GW2 is a modified GW1 engine. There's also a seemingly odd limitation on the number of characters you can have (69) and guild levels (also 69) which makes me think there's technical limitations of some sort. That or devs don't mind random numbers. But anyway, for storage it's more cost-effective to buy a new character slot and give them 18-slot bags and use them as mules. A bank tab will net you 30 slots for 600 gems, a character slot will net you 92 slots for 800 gems plus the cost of 4 18-slot bags (<10g). You still can't move soulbound stuff between characters, but you can move account-bound stuff around.

Plus you'll get character birthdays and story keys, which more than make up for the bag cost over time, as well as the option to park them on farms for some passive gold gain.

And if your memory is bad/you're not sure what item a character is on, gw2efficiency has a search function that will look at all your characters' inventory.

I am a major, major packrat in MMOs but I only moved up to 9 bank tabs this summer and "only" have my material storage at 1k because I buy a new character slot when I'm feeling tight on room. Anything that isn't going to be useful any time soon is sent to one of my 37 characters.

Nope. I do not like having to install anti-cheat programs, especially if it's not clearly disclosed before purchasing a game (fine print doesn't count).

There's also been too many instances of anti-cheat software harming or outright destroying hardware (SecuROM, Valorant) and there's a privacy issue as well as a security issue, depending on what type of software it is.

GW2 does have cheaters but not close to enough to warrant an entirely separate program to deal with, especially as GW2 doesn't do e-sports.

I don't know how many alts you have but have you looked into the more profitable farms/alt locations? It won't get you as much gold as fast as the active farms, but it could get you several gold per day with minimal to no fighting. There's also farming volatile magic on LW4 maps and buying material shipments with the VM and then selling the mats on the TP (you can also convert Eternal Ice into LW4 currency and turn that into VM to do the same thing).

> @"Avatar.3568" said:

> > @"jokke.6239" said:

> > You can already do this, just buy gems. If you would rather have nothing, just don't spent the gems?

>

> i would only do it if they invest into the game not into something else

You have no idea what they'll do with the money once they have it, subscription or no subscription. Since developers are paid salary, it's not uncommon for the video game industry to funnel any and all profits up to the CEO, board members, and shareholders rather than investing it back into the game or hiring more people.

You can already give Arenanet money, no need to implement a subscription under the assumption that that will somehow guarantee the money will be used exclusively on GW2, especially as not one but two unannounced projects have been cancelled mid-production and we don't know what, if any, other projects are in development.

It very much needs an overhaul, or at the very least changed so blocking someone removes them from your followers and they can't see where you are.

But it really should be possible to remove people from your followers list and there's no reason not to allow that since if adding people doesn't require consent of both parties, then it should be possible for one person to say "no". That would have zero impact on people who don't care but would be a huge improvement for people who deal with stalking/harassment, have former friends/partners they can't fully remove, and in general allow for the list to be curated.

1) Throw me in to the group that prefers the personal story cutscenes. I find it way easier to follow the conversation when there's no combat involved or having to follow NPCs assuming combat might happen, especially as I tend to play with the sound low. If people are talking in a guild or whispering me directly, that's yet more distractions and I can't follow anything going on. The "talking heads" also allow you to skip dialogue if you have no interest and get on with the instance, something that I sorely miss with the current state of things, especially when I want to grab an achievement but have to wait 5 minutes for the NPC to walk up to the area and give a speech every time I want to attempt it.

2) I'm fine with the 10 level chunks of story, too. While it was nice when you could push as far ahead as you could with the personal story, far too many people were complaining how they couldn't just keep going and had to spend time leveling up because it got to the point where the personal story instances were far too high for them to be able to solo. Even in single-player RPGs you have to level up to move on sometimes, so it doesn't strike me as strange that an MMO would also require this. Plus it's relatively easy to level up in GW2 and you get experience no matter what you do and what map you're on. So if you're trying to rush the story the gating of it every 10 levels can be annoying, but encouraging people to explore the MMO world is good.

3) Keep in mind you don't sign up for the order, you are personally recommended by a former Destiny's Edge member because they see that much potential in you. At that point starting at the bottom is more of a formality and as others said, you end up with a mid-high rank instead of the highest rank before you move on to The Pact. And even in The Pact you aren't the leader. This is also where gating the personal story every 10 levels helps as even though you only do a handful of missions before getting promoted, you have to wait for it and in this wait it's easy to think about your character doing other missions for them as MMOs require you to fill in the gaps sometimes because it is physically impossible for them to show everything—running dozens of missions for an Order would get boring, fast, and the game is about dealing with Elder Dragons, not reading books/eavesdropping/being deployed to a town. Sometimes you've got to suspend your disbelief in an MMO and that's fine.

4) It would be nice if they did something with dungeons. Scaling down the story mode mobs and/or scaling up the power of NPCs would help a lot there, especially if they updated the combat AI for the NPCs. Technically you can solo story modes but that really depends on your build and skill and having the time to keep throwing yourself at certain things until you get past it.

5) Can't really comment on that because the first time was so miserable to do that I have only ever done it the one time.

Definitely agree that 6 gold is too much. It would also create the same issue legendary weapons have where people resent having to spend time in a gamemode they don't like. Some people would be fine with playing three gamemodes ot maximize their daily rewards but a lot of people wouldn't be happy that they're "forced" into modes they don't like because they miss out on rewards if they don't. 2g-4g on their own aren't much both over the span of a month that would be ~60g-120g. Over a year: ~720g-1440g. Just from doing all the dailies.

What we have now puts all players on equal footing and lets them choose which dailies they want. Sure you miss out on the chest rewards of the ones you don't do, but if you have limited time or zero interest in a gamemode, that's not a big deal and you'll still get the maximum amount of gold and AP anyway.

Worthless? I actually look forward to getting them so I can use them on my alts and keyrunner. They're way faster and less annoying than tomes. Just because you don't find them useful doesn't mean they're worthless.

If you don't use them feel free to delete them or hang onto them but people who use them shouldn't be punished for doing so by barring them from unique cosmetic items for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. When there's a timegate up upwards of 6 years (and 800 gems), you can't retroactively add a vendor for items people have already used or deleted.

I've found that after getting the minis and other unique items from the heart vendors, there's zero reason to do the hearts past getting 100% completion to unlock the elite specs. It wouldn't be so bad if the hearts filled at a reasonable pace but it can take 5-10 minutes per heart because it fills so slowly.

If there are hearts in EoD, I really hope they're more balanced than the ones in PoF. Or, should they keep PoF's (lack of) speed, give better rewards beyond the first time like you said. When Lake Doric's hearts are faster in comparison, you know the balance is way off.

Sometimes there's not a piece that fits what I'm going for but other than that I'm very happy with the sheer number of skins in GW2. There are valid complaints about it and some issues, but lack of choice isn't one of them given there are thousands of armour skins thus infinite combinations. Throw dyes into the mix and you very rarely see a character that's close to identical to yours.

According to gw2efficiency, there's 6,394 back, armour, weapon, and gathering item skins. If you can't find a combo you like with that amount (or even just half that), there's not much Arenanet can do for you and a few new skins won't change that.