Zephire.8049

> @"Ashantara.8731" said:

> > @"senki.1046" said:

> > He will have over 10k viewers, thats more than gw2 has player online.

>

> Excuse me? :o Where did you get those numbers from?

Out of thin air. GW2efficiency shows 43,212 accounts have finished two story missions of the new episode that came out less than a week ago, and GW2efficiency only tracks 264,476 accounts for a game that sold millions.

No way to tell what the consecutive players online number is, but it's bound to be way more than 10k when at least 8642 players a day on average were playing the new story alone, and that doesn't even account for PvP or WvW, which would push it to over 10k alone, or the hundreds/thousands of players in lower level zones, or even people playing on multiple RIBA maps.

1. Is to minimize botting of the TP and to prevent drastic swings in a matter of minutes by throttling usage past a certain point. It's annoying but it serves a very real purpose.

2. The listing fee has always existed and serves to discourage people from using the TP as a way to store items. It's an upfront fee that you have to pay no matter what.

3. Whisper limitation is due to one or both of you having a free account. This is to prevent gold farmers from making unlimited free accounts and then spamming anyone and everyone with whispers. Mutual friends can whisper each other though.

4. The mail suppression is definitely annoying and overly sensitive. People have been asking Anet to up the limit for years to no response, though.

Since you've done all the hearts and HPs, you are missing one of the cities.

* Lion's Arch

* Black Citadel

* Hoelbrak

* Divinity's Reach

* The Grove

* Rata Sum

I'd guess either Hoelbrak because it's surrounded by other maps so if you've been there once to unfog it, it's easy to assume you've done it, or Lion's Arch because you can easily forget you haven't actually finished it if you spend a lot of time in it. But it's definitely one of those 6 places so you only need to check 6 maps.

> @"Storm.1629" said:

> I get it it's Norn not Norm, now get over it. The message here is not how it is written, don't be all riled up about what's really unimportant.

> Also what I did was express my opinion, you don't have to agree with it, or be rude about it, and I did say I love the game right? I was writting as someone who had the fortune of playing this game since GW1 (I even have the books, do you know there are books too?), what I'm saying is basically if you played it since the start like I did, now there's like a sense of lacking from what it was in the beginning...

>

You don't speak for everyone. I've also played since early Prophecies, was on the beta forum for GW2 and played in the closed beta weekends/stress tests, and read all the books (also own Charrlie and an official charr t-shirt, since you want to pull nerd rank, and the only reason I didn't get the collector's edition back in 2012 was because only one was allocated to my city and an EB Games employee snagged it before it was available to the public) and don't agree with you on multiple points.

First, story is subjective. What you claim is unforgettable from GW1, I don't care about or had forgotten. You say only 3 characters in GW2 have _maybe_ had an impact people and I say you're wrong and that only one of your three has done enough that I somewhat care about him (Canach).

Market: The TP is a godsend and standing around Spammadan trying to sell whatever was annoying and took forever. It was worse when trying to buy because you had to hope you were in the same district as someone who had what you wanted, hope that they were reading chat, hope that they were willing to sell, and hope that they wouldn't rip you off. All that is time that could have been better spent playing the game instead of alt-tabbing or reading a book because you couldn't keep an eye on chat if you left the hub.

(The TP also minimizes inflation and combats gold-selling, btw.)

Legendaries: Legendaries are cosmetic and have some QoL fuctions. That's it. And if you remember from GW2's early days, precursors were RNG drops only so the only way to get a legendary was to be lucky with a pre drop or buy one off the TP. They only added crafting in when players complained about how unfair and inaccessible that system was. Also I don't know what them to do about legendaries since either the original weapons are the only legendaries the game will ever get or they occasionally add a new one. They chose the latter and it shouldn't be a surprise that some people after nearly 8 years have multiple legendaries.

Classes: I don't know what you're trying to say here because all I see is complaining that armour classes don't dictate what a player can and can't do. In a game that was designed and advertised to not follow the Holy Trinity and force people into end-game roles that were determined by the class they picked. Is it weird that a cloth-wearer is one of the best tanks and that the heavy armour classes are some of the best support classes? A bit, but also breaking MMO conventions was what GW2 was supposed to do.

NPCs: Again, personal preference. Also representation matters so while you may not care about Marjory and Kasmeer, I do and I know many people who do care about the fact that there's a prominent non-straight couple in a AAA MMO (even if they've been put on the backburner for a few years). I'm not really into Kas but it is possible to not personally be into something while still acknowledging that it's important to others.

LA: You do have a bit of a point here, but LA of SoS is different than the LA of EoD which is different than the LA that is in GW2. The game also largely doesn't show slums and citys are shrunk down (as are maps in general) because that makes the game more approachable to players and means the game takes up less room. The themepark look of new LA is bad, though, and clashes with the rest of the game.

WvW: WvW is in a massive need of an update, yes, but complaints about it are like the tides and it largely depends on what class you play and what you do in WvW. If not for the invuln tactic, zergs would be able to take whatever they wanted because that minute gives the defending server time to respond. Without it, towers could be taken in a minute or two. Siege being repairable would also benefit the defenders, especially in the case of fully stocked keeps. And the warclaw has been repeatedly nerfed to the point where it's mostly just useful for mobility for classes that can't teleport or stack swiftness and can no longer finish downed enemies. And why is it bad some people are able to escape fights now? If they're able to mount up, you haven't touched them in a while so it can't have been much of a fight.

Also stability is good because losing control of your character often and repeatedly was obnoxious. Conditions (and boons) need a rework but stability was introduced to fix a problem.

Mists: Agreed here. It's no longer needed as an overflow so should be used or converted to something. Also have rewards increased as it gives little WXP and no pips.

TL;DR: Veterans aren't a monolith, you don't speak for all of us, and a lot of what you suggest as "fixes" or "improvements" is purely subjective and/or goes against the game design.

> @"Kosmo.3468" said:

> > @"firedragon.8953" said:

> > Sincerely,

> > Apa the Steroidal Orangutan

>

> I'm a Charr player myself, I was just trying to make the Norn look less like Neanderthals and fix the deformed gear of my cats.

If your issue with charr is the clipping and weird armour, that's a QA/artist issue. Turning them into your standard Fantasy Cat Human may cover up some of the issues, but it wouldn't fix everything (since humans and sylvari have their own clipping issues, as do female norn) and charr would no longer be charr. Every single piece of armour would also have to be remade to work with the new skeleton so it's more than just changing the charr model and skeleton.

Same with male norn—change the model and skeleton and all the armour has to be remade to work with it.

Ideally armour issues wouldn't exist, but since that's not the case (and this is an issue that Arenanet should resolve instead of leaving it alone—not just for charr but for all the issues that exist) I'd prefer the occasional weird armour or losing horns/ears/mane to turning the charr humanoid if it comes down to it.

> @"Bristingr.5034" said:

> > @"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:

> > Even with one voice actor in the studio at a time, there are still studio audio techs and directors there as well, etc. Also, Los Angeles is a hot spot, and much of it under lockdown.

>

> Anet is in the Seattle metropolitan area (Bellevue specifically), not Los Angeles.

Yes but they apparently do some/all of their recording in LA, most likely because voice actors tend to live near where there's work for them and neither Seattle nor Bellevue are known for a plethora of voice acting gigs. It's cheaper to fly some employees down to get what is needed than get VAs to fly to Washington on Arenanet's dime.

So they would have to fly people down to LA, hope the VAs are able and willing to record during a short period of time, and fly people back to Washington. That's a heck of a lot of risk for everyone involved for something as small as voice acting. And yes some people can't enjoy or follow the story without voice acting but the need for safety of dozens of people outweighs the wants of voice acting in a video game.

Because if I'm talking that means I can't play, so why would I try to strike up conversation with strangers in a video game when there's social media for that? I'm perfectly happy to help someone out but I rarely find map chat to be worth engaging in, especially if it's a random "Hi!" or something else that could easily have been meant for a whisper.

I'm also usually following guild chats and/or watching shows on a second monitor, so if I want to engage in map chat I have to stop doing those things on top of no longer playing the game.

It comes down to the fact that there are other ways for me to socialize and map chat is not conducive to that, especially as an MMO such as GW2 requires active movement. I still see map chat being active a lot of the time, though, it's just not my thing.

And then people will complain about Anet not communicating large changes with players before the change goes live. Again.

The heads up lets people prepare for changes, theorycraft, or hold off on gearing up a character for a week. Usually (all the time?) the preview has a disclaimer about how the changes could change and not all the changes are mentioned. It's not the devs' fault players take a preview and treat it as concrete after being told it's not concrete.

When an item that people can buy for ~$25USD (honestly a bit more since you can't buy just 2k gems) is bugged, you fix it before people start demanding refunds since refunds cost you money on top of the money you're already refunding. Depending on the type of bug and frequency of bugs in cash shop items, not fixing what's broken ASAP can affect customer purchases in the future, too. Not to mention add more work to support who by all accounts have been running at max capacity since the pandemic hit.

GW2 is also a global game (minus China which has its own version) so it has to err on the side of caution because consumer laws vary so much around the globe. Would there be a lawsuit over one skin? Doubtful, but better to inconvenience some players than to risk it. That's partly why you see cash shop items be hotfixed quickly most of the time while in-game items languishing, if they're touched at all.

If it was a skin that was only available from an in-game source, the fix would probably have gone out on the next patch/larger hotfix, but because people could and did buy it directly, that changes things. It sucks that it affected WvW but it is what it is. Sometimes PvP/WvW-only hotfixes go out and inconvenience PvE players, other times PvE-only hotfixes go out and inconvenience PvP/WvW players. They can't just take down part of the game to hotfix something and reducing/preventing customer refunds takes priority over whatever is going on in WvW at the moment.

Obsidian Sanctum in WvW is better than the PvP lobby now that it has NPCs, but again there's no crafting station, mystic forge, fractal vendors, and more. Mistlock is popular because everything is in a small area, you get a special action to move faster, and there are crafting stations, NPCs, and the fractal entrance that none of the other lounges have. It's essentially all of LA put in an area no bigger than the domed area southeast of the LA bank.

LA and EotN are fine, as are the other lounges, Mistlock just has the most QoL features than the others. And once you know to change map layers to waypoint, the biggest inconvenience of it is gone. You still can't click waypoints from chat, but that still beats having to run between everywhere.

Also keep in mind a lot of players bought the Mistlock pass before PoF so that's not just a couple raptor jumps between places, that's a good several seconds of running that Mistlock cut out, albeit for a premium price.

What scrolls are you talking about? Aside from the Living World tomes that take up 3 spaces there are.

* 8 lounges.

* 7 city scrolls

* 3 LW3 items with one being for a story, another that can be bought daily, and the final one is just a spot on the map that can be accessed via mounts

* Home Portal Stone

* HoM stone

* Spearmarshal's Plea

* The starter maps one from the tutorial.

That's all of 21. 24 if you add the three LW tomes, which is not 30 unless you're also counting the 2 week lounge passes which by their nature are temporary.

In addition to that, very, very few people would have more than 1-3 lounge passes, even fewer still have/use the city scrolls, and the HoM stone can be purchased as many times as you need so you can delete it.

The festival ones add up... until you get all of them and combine them into a single item.

That's all of a single bag's worth of items unless you're someone who collects everything, but realistically more like half a bag at most for most people and that can easily fit on a character or in a bank tab. Letting people combine the city scrolls into a tome would be nice, but other than that I don't see the value in combining everything else.

Safety of people > rushing to add voice work into a video game.

In the meantime, use LFG to find active maps. From my experience, there's one (usually multiple) maps going on, you just don't spawn into them. It's the same as the Silverwastes in that regard—you'd think the map is dead because you always spawn onto an overflow map but LFG tells you otherwise.

Agreed that the marketing for GW2 is pretty terrible but cinematic trailers would be a bandaid trying to fix a broken limb. Creating a cinematic trailer several times a year for updates won't attract that many new people—far fewer than active marketing would—and be hugely expensive and require a dedicated team to work on.

All the trailers and cinematics for GW2 are either purely in-game (the cutscenes that you mentioned are in-game, just with custom animations, camerawork, and post-editing) or their signature painterly style. And I can tell you that as a gamer, I prefer that over cinematics like WoW, LoL, and even Proph and Factions use. I'd rather know what's possible than be fed a lie, especially when it's so common for studios to pour money into a high quality cinematic only for the game itself to look a decade or two old at max settings. And while GW2 looks good for its age (especially given the engine), a cinematic would end up making it look bad in comparison. Especially for new players who spawn into a starting zone and interact with textures and animations from 2012 after seeing a cinematic from 2020.

Also Anet does not have a good history of trailers that don't use the in-game engine. There's some that are good (I'm a particular fan of the Rytlock one for the first SAB), but then there's also the one that shall not be named and those that have seen it likely know the exact one I'm talking about :p

I'd just prefer Anet focus on the game itself instead of putting resources into cinematic trailers that aren't needed and have no small chance at being a money pit given their history with marketing and trailers.

Retal in the open world definitely needs a rework, especially given how common it is now. In raids, PvP, and WvW it provides strategy and rewards people who track their opponent's buff bar. In the open world it punishes players for not running boon-strip, having a cleave attack, and/or not running with a healer. "Just wait for it to drop off" doesn't help if enemies move in groups of 3-5+ and you have no single-target attack—the UI doesn't allow for tracking multiple enemy buff bars at the same time and with retal being staggered means your window to not be hit by it is rare.

There's also the issue of boon-strip and how it's not equal among all professions and some professions have it on a longer cooldown than others. When you can only strip retal once every 45-120 seconds but the mob reapplies it every 5-15, it ceases to be useful.

When doing group content it's easier to plan around boon-strip and healing and have dedicated people in those roles. In the open world you should be able to reasonably assume that you can manage on your own as long as you're fighting regular mobs and have decent gear. Getting insta-downed because 5 mobs popped retal during your cast time is not fun or good game design as there's zero counter-play for situations like that.

> @"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:

> > @"Khisanth.2948" said:

> > > @"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:

> > > > @"Fueki.4753" said:

> > > > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > > > @"Fueki.4753" said:

> > > > > > > @"Strider Pj.2193" said:

> > > > > > > It is an exclusive WvW reward, but **it CAN be gotten without ever entering WvW.**

> > > > > > And how would you do that?

> > > > > >

> > > > >

> > > > > Big spender daily. Planning. All that needs to be done is purchase siege. For badges of course.

> > > >

> > > > Outside of the big achievement boxes, Badges of Honour are only available by participating in WvW.

> > > > I doubt those chests award enough badges to fill up that Reward track.

> > > > I don't remember ever seeing a vendor that takes badges of Honour outside of WvW. Where is it?

> > > >

> > > >

> > >

> > > In your local Guild Hall. (Providing it has the necessary upgrade.)

> > > 2400 Badges needed for 1 Reward Track utilizing Badges of Tribute (30 Badges of Honor each). 6500 AP to acquire the 2400 Badges.

> > > It takes awhile, but the Legendary Journeys are supposed to take time.

> >

> > 1600 not 2400. You need to spend 25(30) but the daily gives back 10.

> >

> > You could also just go into wvw and buy the skins and spend only 25 instead of 30 which reduces it to 1200 but you can't sell the skins unlike the badge of tribute.

>

> The question was where one could spend Badges of Honor without setting foot in WvW.

> Also, one must spend 30 Badges of Honor (instead of 25) outside WvW on the Badge of Tribute for one of the 80 Potion of WvW Rewards needed.

> I did forget about the 10 Badges of Honor one receives from each Daily, so only 5000 AP required?

Another thing is you can get Boxes of WvW Supplies from both the Karmic and Ley-Energy converters. They're random but when you get one, it gives you a small-to-massive amount of WXP. When you rank up, you get badges of honour (10? Not sure if they're set or random but that's what I got when I tested it just now) so while it's not reliable due to the RNG in both the converters and WXP you get, that's another (small) source of badges of honour that don't require stepping foot in WvW.

Depending on your definition of WvW, the daily jumping puzzle in Obsidian Sanctum also gives upwards of 20 badges. OS is also usually dead and practically everyone doesn't bother with attacking others even though it's a PvP area. You could also ask a guild that's on your server/paired with your server if you can tag along if they have the OS JP as a weekly mission. Then you just wait around and take a mesmer portal to the chest.

> @"Jimbru.6014" said:

> > @"Zephire.8049" said:

> > Upgrading from Unreal 3 to Unreal 4 also isn't too hard as NCSoft did not have to make the engine and, presumably, Epic Games streamlined some or all of the upgrade process from 3 to 4. Guild Wars 1 and 2 run on a proprietary engine so Anet themselves would have to write an entirely new engine in addition to upgrading GW2 to it. If they were change to a different game engine, that would also require a lot of work and break a lot of the current coding.

>

> GW2's engine is basically GW1's engine with a giant bowl of spaghetti code on top. Which means the engine was already seven years old and borderline obsolete at GW2's release, and is certainly obsolete now. It's not just behind the curve; it's down a lap and losing ground. Updates MUST happen.

>

Yep. Given that GW1 came out in 2005, it's not unreasonable to assume the engine itself was built in 2002 or 2003 (or was largely completed if not polished), so GW2 is running on an ~18 year old game engine. The dev video about how they had to jerry-rig mounts was interesting and also helps to illustrate how what may seem simple is difficult or outright impossible with the current engine. It wasn't until LW4 that they actually figured out a way to make moving platforms that acted like elevators.

I definitely agree that the engine needs to be upgraded, but DX12 is far from the main or only reason to do so like the OP (and others who think it's so easy to do and the only reason the engine should be upgraded) says it should be. More like it's a bonus to better tools, better models and animations, and better server stability. Not to mention being able to future-proof an engine in the way the current one wasn't.

Patching something client-side is far easier and less risky than changing it server-side. If someone uses d912pxy, at most they're risking their account but realistically they may just have to deal with crashes or glitches that won't affect the account itself. Changing something like that server-side means risking the entire database and everyone's accounts in a worst-case scenario and requires a lot of testing to make sure the game doesn't break for everyone. And given how coding works, it's not unlikely that in trying to upgrade to DX12, several other things will break and require fixing, and of those several some will further break unrelated parts of the engine that no one could have predicted.

Upgrading from Unreal 3 to Unreal 4 also isn't too hard as NCSoft did not have to make the engine and, presumably, Epic Games streamlined some or all of the upgrade process from 3 to 4. Guild Wars 1 and 2 run on a proprietary engine so Anet themselves would have to write an entirely new engine in addition to upgrading GW2 to it. If they were change to a different game engine, that would also require a lot of work and break a lot of the current coding.

Blizzard was able to upgrade WoW's engine because they are a massive company with multiple games that bring in income. Blizzard also merged with Activision in 2008 so they had additional resources to upgrade the engine on top of what Blizzard had just by itself.

And the EU rollback, while large, was one of something like 2 or 3 rollbacks in GW2's nearly 8 year history. Server lag is an issue but you can't use an extremely rare occurrence as proof that the engine needs to be changed, not when so many MMOs and other online games have had rollbacks regardless of what engine they use.

> @"Fueki.4753" said:

> > @"Zephire.8049" said:

> > And don't forget the different physiques for each race and gender combo, too. Each piece has to be tested so that it stretches or shrinks in a way where it doesn't clip or look bad (which they sometimes miss the mark with). And sure some race/gender combos don't have too much variety between them, but they'd still require testing and fixing for 5+ physiques for each race/gender combo, and charr especially have some drastically different physiques on top of an already different posture.

> >

> > Asura have the fewest customization options but that's still 10 physiques the devs have to test for each piece of armour. Norn have 11, charr have 13, humans have 17, and sylvari have 22. So for one piece of armour, it has to be tested and tweaked if needed to work 73 different ways. Sure some of them could (and likely do) use the same armour model and no one would be able to tell the difference, but Anet still has to spend the time testing it instead of assuming everything is fine. Throw in possible clipping issues with other pieces of armour it's no wonder they went from 438 pieces for a single armour set to outfits where they could fudge things and not worry about clipping issues with armour from a different set.

> >

> > (And that's going by physique alone—ears, hair, and horns are less of an issue but they can still influence armour design.)

>

> I doubt they went thriugh all that.

> It's more likely that they just made one male and one female version for one standard human body and then stretched it to fit the other physiques and races, except for Rytlock's Revenant armour.

> Said armour's tail cover looks like it has been stretched/flattened into a butt-shape for non-Charr.

They still need to check it for each physique, which I said. They may not do anything more than stretch or shrink a model but they still need to spend time checking it regardless and checking 438 options adds up even if you don't do anything to them since, as a business, Anet can't just assume something is fine without even a cursory check over. Even assuming each piece only takes 2 minutes, that's still 14.6 hours spent on one armour set.

And no, they don't make human armour the default for everything. Some of them they do (with some tweaks here and there), but much of the time there's multiple changes for each race when it comes to armour ranging from adding some extra details to completely changing the look. Humans, asura, and charr also have different enough proportions where they can't just stretch or shrink the model without it looking bad—they need to come up with a model that works with, say, long arms, a short torso, digitigrade legs, thin/thick limbs, or a hunched back. Even male norn need special consideration given how dang wide they are and no matter how HD the texture is, it's obvious when something is stretched across such a barrel chest like some of the norn physiques have.

The concept art may start with humans as the default, but what we see and get as players isn't unless the artist assigned to it thinks it's general enough that they can get away with starting from a base model for everything.

> @"Swagger.1459" said:

> > @"Ahnlok.3897" said:

> > So we all gave up on Anet then, just like how they handle wvw.

>

> No, it’s already been explained to us for years and years...

>

> “ Armor sets are one of (if not actually) the most time expensive things we make for GW2. Each set has an incredible amount of detail and customization, and then has to be fit to very disparate rigs.”

>

> Each individual piece of armor needs to be created to fit 5 races X 2 genders... Now to go back over just 1 outfit means the devs would have have to make 6 new pieces of armor X 5 races X 2 genders. That ends up being 60 models needing to be made... And it’s not that Anet can’t do it, it’s just not worth the massive amount of time and money to do so.

And don't forget the different physiques for each race and gender combo, too. Each piece has to be tested so that it stretches or shrinks in a way where it doesn't clip or look bad (which they sometimes miss the mark with). And sure some race/gender combos don't have too much variety between them, but they'd still require testing and fixing for 5+ physiques for each race/gender combo, and charr especially have some drastically different physiques on top of an already different posture.

Asura have the fewest customization options but that's still 10 physiques the devs have to test for each piece of armour. Norn have 11, charr have 13, humans have 17, and sylvari have 22. So for one piece of armour, it has to be tested and tweaked if needed to work 73 different ways. Sure some of them could (and likely do) use the same armour model and no one would be able to tell the difference, but Anet still has to spend the time testing it instead of assuming everything is fine. Throw in possible clipping issues with other pieces of armour it's no wonder they went from 438 pieces for a single armour set to outfits where they could fudge things and not worry about clipping issues with armour from a different set.

(And that's going by physique alone—ears, hair, and horns are less of an issue but they can still influence armour design.)

And then the raid wipes because someone was in your way so you couldn't dodge, or you can't access the bank because there's already 5 people surrounding each NPC, or WvW finally gets a major meta shift because all it takes is people body-blocking the entrance with a squad of people to buff and heal them to stall pushes until one side gets bored. Or how about how people will simply form a ring around where new players spawn and then AFK like that so new players can't actually play. The human spawn point after the intro mission had to be changed because it used to be in the building but people would use tonics to make it look like the door was blocked and people assumed it was.

And that was without collision.

Collision doesn't work in an MMO because it's difficult to code efficiently with so many players and variables, increases the stress on hardware (you think a WvW blob causes lag now?), and people will use it to harass and troll others. And as previously mentioned, collision would effectively make melee too risky to use more than one or _maybe_ two of and most groups wouldn't take any melee. And stacking would happen anyway because the issue isn't with player collision or the lack thereof, the problem is that buff ranges tend to be small so everyone needs to stay withing 300 units otherwise they'll miss out on buffs and/or healing.

Collision wouldn't make things interesting, it would just make it annoying and frustrating.

> @"Fenella.2634" said:

> Why 18, specifically? We don't know how fast Charr grow up and at what age they are considered adults. Could be 5 years or 30. Or any other random guess.

> It's really hard to tell, especially with the non-human NPCs.

>

> Edit: But since Crecia is the mother of at least Ryland and they kind of broke up when Rytlock got Sohothin, that may give a little bit of a time frame?

We know a bit about them such as

> Charr children are called cubs, though female cubs are occasionally called "kits" out of affection. Infants are born fully furred, with open eyes and functional limbs. Within a few days, cubs can follow their mothers over even the harshest terrain. They eat meat within a month of birth, and are fully independent several months later.

([Ecology of the Charr](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ecology_of_the_Charr))

I think they live about as long as humans, though, but of course it's rare for charr to die of old age (I wish I could find the source). Rytlock I'd say is in his 40s given that Ryland seems to be in his early 20s which would put Rytlock in his mid-late 20s or early 30s during Edge of Destiny which makes sense. He was a lot more hot-headed then than he is now and we know Bangar exploited him before EoD formed, and that type of exploitation is easiest done when someone still isn't sure of themselves so assuming charr don't fully mature mentally until their mid-twenties like humans, that's around the age he'd have been when he broke away from Bangar by my best guess. He also wasn't a father when he was sent to spy on the Flame Legion and you don't send a brand new cub out of the fahrar to integrate with your enemy because they wouldn't have any real world experience to do so and not risk blowing their cover within the first week. Especially as he's Blood and not Ash (which may have better spy training in their fahrar).

Their quick early development makes it hard to nail down specific ages but I wouldn't be surprised if real world felines served as the inspiration for that as humans having a long infant/baby/toddler period is not the norm. It probably takes charr a number of years to put on that much muscle, too, so while they may be technically sexually mature in their teens, they're still not adults and would rarely produce offspring that young.

> @"Galmac.4680" said:

> By the way, as software developer (completely other things) Iknow that this is NOT just a job of five minutes. Regeneration and life is coming from several sources, you have to add at all of them this new option, without impact on other code parts (and you won't believe what crazy connections could exist in old code!), have this well tested (by us players, I know).

>

Whenever I hear about strange connections in MMO code, I think of how the starter backpack in WoW can't be removed or upgraded because somewhere at some time, someone accidentally made it a key part of the entire game, so if the starter backpack gets changed, the game no longer works.

I think the most efficient and safest way to do what the OP is asking is to actually have a debuff that prevents health gain (I want to say there's a story mission with such a debuff?) and have an option to turn that on, but that still requires UI work and would require coming up for rules for when it can be turned on and off. There's also the very real chance that it would bug encounters or make it easy to exploit bosses.

And again the question is why would Anet spend time and resources on an option few would use (fewer than the action cam or making keys go into the wallet, and both of those were worked on by one person) and could create issues in the current game or down the line? There are already ways to have a harder experience in GW2 and while you can't control it if someone shows up and starts giving you regen, you can control what profession you play, what traits you have, what runes you have, and what skills you use.

Maybe a dev will take on such a thing as a labour of love, but outside of that I don't see it taking priority over literally everything else.

I can't see what the appeal would be of such a mode for a lot of players and definitely not for Anet. You can already do this by having self-imposed rules for yourself and as Randulf already said, Anet is not going to put resources and majorly change the spaghetti code for a niche option that prevents people from spending money. The only way such a mode would make money is if they charge for the character slot, and very few people will spend $10 USD on an MMO character that is prevented from benefiting from the time and money they spent on their account.

I haven't played PoE but am familiar with that type of game and there's a fundamental incompatibility with what you're asking for and an MMO. GW2 was designed to be alt-friendly respect the time someone put into their account—there were even changes in the past to the dye and wardrobe system to further improve things.

Speaking of the wardrobe system, there is absolutely no way to hide or remove unlocks on account. None. If you accidentally unlock Eternity's skin, you better like Eternity and want a legendary greatsword because support cannot unbind Eternity because they can't remove the skin from your account.

The easiest way to do what you want is to set up a completely different server and more or less link accounts, but even that would require a lot of resources for something that would never make back close to what was spent on it (at the expense of making something that would benefit the majority while also increasing revenue, I might add).

> @"Donari.5237" said:

> You may wish to search the years of threads on this issue. Some of them contain quotes of dev responses explaining the incredibly vast amount of work this would entail along with the good chance of breaking the game software into little bits, even if it's just an all-or-nothing weight choice.

>

> I fully agree with the desirability of expanding what characters can wear. I've been wrong before about what they can't do for technical reasons (see: Gliding in Central Tyria). So I'd *love* for this to be one of their QoL surprises one day. However, I'm certainly not holding my breath. With gliding, they never said they couldn't, as best as I can recall. They've very strongly said the weight distinctions are baked in. I'd rather continue with the current limitations in a solidly functional game than have everything wrecked in the attempt to rework the game's core.

I think the most likely way for this to happen is that after a certain release, going forward each skin will be available in all weights but they don't plan on going back to make previous skins available in all weights, similar to how backpacks are now dyable if they're new but there's no plan on changing the old ones. There's still potential slipping issues with that but that's still a heck of a lot less work than tripling the number of skins by hand since there's no flip they can switch that will do it for them.

Given that people complained (and still complain) about PoF enemies being difficult to solo, I doubt Anet is going to increase their difficulty, especially since enemy difficulty is affected in part by what gear you have, what class you play, and whether you're condi or power. A minion power reaper is going to have a much easier time killing things than a ranger in soldier's gear who will have an easier time of anyone in magi's gear.

It sucks that your immersion was broken but I'm familiar with those giants you spoke of and they _can_ be hard if you're solo, lack stun breaks, or are squishy (or a combo of all three). There's a reason why the difficult enemies tend to be event champions or bounties, and that reason is because Anet has to design the open world with the assumption most people won't be min-maxing and that there's going to be a huge range of skill. Double-teaming a vet that's balanced around the idea most people who choose to fight them would be doing so alone is going to result in a very dead giant in the same way that a level 80 in raid gear fighting a vet/elite/champion in a starting zone will easily kill the supposedly hard enemy fairly quickly.

An MMO needs to cater to everyone in a way that single-player games don't have to. There is no difficulty slider or difficulty mods and what you find easy, others will find hard and the open world isn't designed to be hard outside of metas and some events. Make you think, sure, but there is no minimum DPS requirement. Raids, fractals, certain hero points, and metas all have enemies that are harder to kill—regular open world enemies exist for everyone and thus have to account for all players.