Vayne.8563

> @"Randulf.7614" said: > > @"Vayne.8563" said: > > Just for the record, those legendaries you attribute to season 3 and season 4 didn't exist while season 3 and season 4 were coming out. They were added later to get people back into those zones. So your base information is off. > > I believe they refer to the 2nd gen weapons which released usually alongside an episode > If they were, my bad, but the OP specifically said I miss Season3/4. They were probably referring to some of the harder to get skins that came out of the zone meta like the ascended backpiece from Draconis Mons or the 32 slot bag from Sandswept.

Just for the record, those legendaries you attribute to season 3 and season 4 didn't exist while season 3 and season 4 were coming out. They were added later to get people back into those zones. So your base information is off. And many zones included weapon sets such as thunderhead peaks (Dragonsblood) or the two in Domain of Istan (Stellar and Astral). The difference is that Anet has made getting zone metas more challenging (in the case of strike missions) or grindy. Anet needs to return to its original formula for zone metas and it needs not to lock mastery points behind hard collections, like the volcanic collection which is RNG or massively expensive and has a mastery point locked behind it. Yeah I know you don't need it, but it's still ludicrous. I've done every zone meta now (though it took ages) and I've done the Otter collection and I've made all the weapon sets except the two new ones and I agree these weapon sets are excessive and a turn off to most players. It's not a substitution for content.

> @"Eloc Freidon.5692" said: > The game is very unfriendly when you try to get into HoT without knowing how masteries work. Especially when you try to play without doing the story. For new players, it is especially bad with what they give you with the lvl 80 booster. That has nothing to do with friendly. That's end game content. It was introduced 3.5 years after launch. It's expected people play the core game before proceeding to HOT in the same way people go to 6th grade before they go to 12th. A lot of people, not just a few, asked for most challenging open world content. Anet obliged them. Let's not pretend HoT isn't one of the most highly populated open world areas of the game to this day. Some people love it. People who say it's unfriendly are people who want to master end game content quickly. And HOT really isn't that hard. It just requires a bit of learning to master.

Guild Wars 2 is still sub friendly and still casual friendly so I'm not sure what the OP is actually talking about. As with most MMOs, the people who are harder core will have different goals than people who are more casual. That's sort of how it works. A casual person might get a couple of characters to 80 and gear them out in exotic/ascended and not go for legendary. Some people will be harder core and go for legendary gear. Working as intended if you ask me.

My guild has plenty of new players and plenty of returning players and plenty of people playing a long time, but don't play that much or that often. It's not like everyone lives in the game. As for people reading chat while playing an area they barely know, that's not possible for everyone.

There's a huge difference between servers and guilds. The reason given for aliances working is that guilds are more granular. Servers are all roughly the same size but some guilds are smaller, some are bigger, some people play solo, some people play with bigger guilds. There are obvious differences between servers and guilds. There are far more guilds in far more varying sizes allowing more pieces to fill in gaps. It all depends on how good the algorthym is that figures out not just how many people are playing but when they play. And it won't be perfect obviously but I don't see how it can not be better than it is now.

I haven't played that many MMOs with a more complex story than Guild Wars 2, tbh. MMO stories aren't single player game stories, after all. The exception's I can think of off hand are TSW and SWTOR, which was designed specifically with a Bioware storyline. I don't find most other MMO stories to be complex. I've lost count of how many times I've heard the phrase if you want a story play a single player game.

Your guild doesn't have to be in Darkhaven. Servers are only for WvW and nothing else. There are two server parks, EU and US. Whichever server you're on that's the guild you'll need to join, unless you plan on getting heavily into WvW. Otherwise my guild sounds like it would fit you quite nicely. We're a US server based pre launch guild that's both casual and helpful and we're very good about helping people catch up. Particularly if they don't mind jumping into discord.

I tag, call it out in my chat, usually get enough people to do a bounty on any map at any time. I'm not sure why you think LFG is better to use than just a tag and map chat...because it's probably not.

I like the account wide bonuses among other things. A lot of people don't talk about them, but that experience per kills, gold find and magic find all add up. I'm killing stuff all the time. I'm getting loot all the time. In a game of trickles where you're a long way between huge drops that adds up. You can't see it, but it doesn't make it less true.

> @"TheThief.8475" said: > > @"Vayne.8563" said: > > > @"TheThief.8475" said: > > > > @"Danikat.8537" said: > > > > Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked. > > > > > > > > I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other. > > > > > > No I don't remember this part, may be one of my pause periods, anyway if you compare what we have now with something worse, it may feel good, but just compare what we have now, to the initial release, this is what I'am comparing in this post, imo was much better. > > > Whats your opinion? > > > > Both the current iteration and the original had their problems. > > > > In the original version of the game, you could run from green star to green star and do your story as soon as you got to it, as long as you were high enough level. You didn't have to wait 10 levels. This had two effects. The first was you sometimes had to stop doing story in the middle of an arc TO level. The other is that people were trained to follow stars on the map, which is how other games work and not this one. > > > > This game has always been about setting your own goals. And doing it the old way didn't teach that at all. The leveling experience before was good for me, but not good for everyone. The leveling experience now is better for some people and not better for others. Anything that Anet does is pretty much going to annoy a segment of the playerbase. > > > > That said, changes were made to keep people playing. They didn't like the retention rate, which is why they changed it. They tested the oritignal system on 1000 people and used the results to create the new system. Wrong or right, the old system wasn't working for the game. Of course, we have no real clue if player retention went up or not. > > I'm curious, indeed, to know if it improved XD It didn't improve for me, but I don't think the changes were aimed at me. That's sort of my point. The original new player experience worked for players like me, but I don't think of myself as mainstream.

> @"TheThief.8475" said: > > @"Danikat.8537" said: > > Do you remember the part where you had to unlock each weapon skill individually by using that weapon? Not just each slot but each skill? So on a profession without many weapons/skills to choose from it could be quick, but unlocking everything on an elementalist took ages because you had to do each weapon 4 times over (once for each element). It wasn't directly tied to levels, but it's not like you started the game with all weapon skills unlocked. > > > > I think this system is simpler because you don't have to go out of your way to make sure you unlock skills. As soon as you level up enough to unlock a slot you have access to that skill on all weapons, and you get XP from everything so you'll unlock them all just by playing. But you still have to find or buy that weapon before you can use it's skills, and new players will still need to experiment with each weapon to find out which one they like best, so overall I think it's one of the more trivial changes and I'd be hesitant to say one way is better than the other. > > No I don't remember this part, may be one of my pause periods, anyway if you compare what we have now with something worse, it may feel good, but just compare what we have now, to the initial release, this is what I'am comparing in this post, imo was much better. > Whats your opinion? Both the current iteration and the original had their problems. In the original version of the game, you could run from green star to green star and do your story as soon as you got to it, as long as you were high enough level. You didn't have to wait 10 levels. This had two effects. The first was you sometimes had to stop doing story in the middle of an arc TO level. The other is that people were trained to follow stars on the map, which is how other games work and not this one. This game has always been about setting your own goals. And doing it the old way didn't teach that at all. The leveling experience before was good for me, but not good for everyone. The leveling experience now is better for some people and not better for others. Anything that Anet does is pretty much going to annoy a segment of the playerbase. That said, changes were made to keep people playing. They didn't like the retention rate, which is why they changed it. They tested the oritignal system on 1000 people and used the results to create the new system. Wrong or right, the old system wasn't working for the game. Of course, we have no real clue if player retention went up or not.

> @"Manasa Devi.7958" said: > > @"Vayne.8563" said: > > New maps are good for you, maybe, but that doesn't make them good for the game. People keep saying, and I've seen it a number of times, that the population is less than it was say 2 years ago. How would anyone know? We have so many more maps. So many more metas. So many more places people can be. > > > > If the population stays stable, new maps eventually become unsustainable. And Anet said straight out that we won't get new maps for every episode for the Icebrood Saga a long time ago. This isn't new information. It's been around a while. > > > > For every person who asks for new maps, another person is complaining that people spend 2 hours on the new maps and never go back there. > I guess it's preferable that people don't even show up for their bimonthly "2 hours" at all then? Yep, everyone just shows up for 2 hours when the stuff comes out. The 150 people in my guild who log in pretty much every day for hours don't matter at all. The idea that most people don't play the LS for more than that is at best an opinion. My opinion is that if that was actually the case, Anet would focus on something else. My guess is there are people playing playing LS maps than there are people PvPing or raiding, probably both combined. I don't have the numbers obviously, but neither does anyone else...except Anet. I think their actions lend some credence to the idea that the LS is popular with at least a percentage of the population.

> @"Yrch.5491" said: > I recently returned as well and while I do like and even love parts of GW2, there are a lot of things that keep it from becoming my main MMO. Why they cannot fix tab targeting I have no clue, but it is easily the worst tab targeting I have ever played in a game. The story fights are waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long and some of them are stupid hard, but if you just keep dying and then mashing your buttons, eventually you will win, it's stupid. Also the number of bugs and glitches that I keep running into, mastery or hero points not working, but then if you switch maps then all of a sudden they work is too much. Some areas the mobs respawn too fast and it makes some places very hard to solo. At first I was amazed by the trait system, there really seems like a lot of variety when it comes to builds, but so far of the dozen or so I have tried, they all boil down to one or two button mash fests or their rotations are stupidly long, still looking for that one in the middle. Not a fan of the gear system either. There are many other little things that are annoying about the game. > > But like I said, I do like the game, I'm mostly enjoying it, It's the MMO that could compete with WoW if the devs seemed like they gave a kitten, but we all know they mostly don't so yeah. > > fanbois/gurls, save your breath I dont care. > > The story missions are too hard for you? You keep dying and mashing buttons. This is a learn to play problem, not an issue with the game. I've played every story mission on every class and they're all not only doable but most of them are relatively easy. If you're just mashing buttons to beat them, there's a problem but it's not the game's problem. One issue could be that you're not using a decent build, or a decent keybind, or decent gear. It could be your overall strategy or hand eye coodination. This game depends more on twitch reflexed than a lot of other games...but story instances? They're fine. There's a learning curve to be sure, but making story instances easier won't make this game better.

As others have said, there are always extra mastery points more than you need. It's okay if some of them are grindy,, particularly if they're encouraging someone to actually do the meta and get used to it. Otherwise a lot of people might do the meta once and never go b;ack. Take a meta like Drakkar. The first time you do it it's all over the place. You don't necessarily know what's going on. Same with Drizzlewood. Unless you do them multiple times you probabliy won't learn them. And a lot of people won't give something like that a chance. Then they learn it and think, this is okay or even this is fun. But they won't if that mastery doesn't encourage them to do it. Right now, after getting every core tyria mastery trained I have 30 extra points. I have 26 extra HoT points (and I don't have them all), and I have 17 extra path of fire points. I'm sitting on 13 extra Icebrood Saga points. Mastery points are an opportunity to encourage people to voluntarily give new content a chance. I think they're fine the way they are.