Tiny Doom.4380

> @"Krzysztof.5973" said:

> This pretty much closes the discussion. You can go and solo this side-story. Play the way you want. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Let others enjoy it they way it was designed.

I did part one solo last night and part two solo this morning. Until I came here and read this thread I had no idea either was intended to be group content. I thought there was a problem with the in-game description. Since I couldn't see a "solo" option in game I tried both. The public one was non-functional with about ten people in map chat discussing what they were meant to do and why it wasn't working so I tried the "Squad" version. I played through the first part solo and assumed it was meant to be that way. It was very easy all the way to the final boss, which was annoying but only in exactly the same way many bosses in the last two seasons were.

That was last night. This morning I logged in and did part two, which was even easier, including a much easier final boss fight. It didn't occur to me at any point that the content was meant for a group - it seemed to be tuned very well for solo play.

I was on my full heal druid, who I always use for Living Story stuff and this episode played exactly like any other so i would suggest that whatever your solo experience in other chapters on a given character, this won't be much different. There was, however, some discussion in map chat suggesting that, if you don't own a Commander tag on the account you're playinng, you won't even see the "private squad" option so you will have no solo option. If that's true (I can't test it) then it ought to be changed.

Other than that, I'd say that if you want to do it solo you should just choose the Private Squad option and go in alone. It's perfectly doable.

> @"sokeenoppa.5384" said:

> > @"Fueki.4753" said:

> > > @"zealex.9410" said:

> > > Usually you make up for the lack of talent with practice.

> > And then you have people with natural physiological and neural disadvantages, like slower reaction times, in which cases practices won't help at all.

> > Practise never is a 100% solution to anything.

> >

>

> And ppl like that are not the majority of this game. Should we set difficulty of every game in a lvl that my friend can play every part of every game? He is missing one hand btw.

Yes, we should. It's that simple.

The Tournament Era was my favorite. I've never seen the point of fighting for the sake of fighting. The original conception was a "take and hold territory" game and that mindset was at its peak during and for a year or so after Tournaments.

What really killed the game mode (although it's been a slow, lingering death) was the introduction of the Megaserver to PvE. That began the slide away from real Server loyalty, without which WvW becomes the equivalent of an eternal warm-up for a competetive match that never starts. Links accelerated the decline as did the introduction of skirmishes and reward tracks. Anything that drew attention away from the only thing that should matter - winning the match.

Now we're in the era of "someone tell me why we're here again". Everyone running around to no purpose, day after day, week after week. It's like a particularly dull version of Valhalla.

It's undeniably a very short episode but I don't believe that's a problem in itself. The pacing is actually good and the content is a huge improvement over most of the tedious, longwinded and painful filler that padded out many episodes of the last two seasons. I vastly prefer the new approach, especially the absence of the "learn new skill A, learn new skill B, Learn new skill C, now put them all together while dodging lava pits during an artillery barrage" trope that served to make every episode both a boring and a miserable experience.

The problem is the length of time between episodes. Whisper in the Dark has about as much content (less, in fact) than we routinely got in every bi-weekly episode of Season One. Granted, those episodes didn't come with new maps, the lack of which did become a problem in itself, eventually, but we've had plenty of new maps now. If we could have the current amount of content on at least a monthly schedule, happening in existing maps, that might work better.

I would certainly take these shorter episodes with better content and gameplay every time over what we suffered for the preceding several years, though.

That said, this episode has its problems other than length. The voiceover/dialog is very flaky. I could hear Rytlock and Cre talking all the time I was with Marjory, even though they were on another part of the map doing something entirely different. That was by no means the only time I heard the dialog from one scene while I was engaged in another, either.

Also, while the atmosphere was excellent and the plot solid enough, the charater interaction was off. Several characters really didn't sound like themselves. Rytlock was virtualy incoherent at times and Marjory was almost unrecognizeable. She was less emotional back when Belinda was actually killed and I don't recall any character development since then that would explain her almost terrified reactiion to yet another hallucination. It's not like she hasn't seen mind tricks before, either. She is going out with Kasmeer, after all...

> @"Vayne.8563" said:

> Guesting has NEVER worked with WvW. It was not its intended purpose.

What's more, Guesting was only ever relevant before the change to Multiservers. I'm surprised it still even exists. Since you can't - and never could - use it for WvW, which is now the only part of the game that uses named servers, surely Guesting could and should have been removed long ago.

I'm curious as to who you think your audience is if you imagine they're finding the description of falling damage reduction over-complicated. It's about as straightforward and basic a concept as you could imagine. If that's too complicated then most of the game must be completely incomprehensible.

I'll also +1 the request to split this between game modes, if you insist on going ahead with the pointless and unecessary change. I've survived so many lemming rushes over cliffs in WvW thanks to having fall reduction traited. Bear in mind that gliding is frequently not an option in that game mode and there are no flying or hovering mounts there. The original functionality of the trait in WvW is largely unchanged after seven years.

> @"Jayden Reese.9542" said:

> Maybe they should add a setting to replace these bad words with "kitten" like here on the forums so nobody gets offended

I'd use that. It's a great idea. Even better would be a filter you could add words of your choice to, which would then be replaced with "kitten". Other MMOs have this function (although not with the kitten part).

> @"Oogabooga.3812" said:

> > @"Sovereign.1093" said:

> > > @"Dinas Dragonbane.2978" said:

> > > > @"Arctisavange.7261" said:

> > > > Been playing and commanding since launch of the game. Do you think anyone in their right mind give any kitten about PPT and overall, flipping towers/keeps?

> > > >

> > > > WvW is massive PVP aka large scale player vs player. People who care about the game mode are here to fight enemies, not slap gates all day long and call it a GG if they climb a tier.

> > > So then.... was the game more popular when the majority of the wvw community's focus was on ppt, or nowadays when people say it's all about fights?

> > >

> >

> > it was more popular when it mattered - by having tournaments.

>

> Tournaments will never be held again because of match manipulation, burnout from overplay, and poor rewards.

>

> Even now, the lack of reward makes the game mode stale. I understand why they won't make great rewards, but they ought to, since PvE and PVP offer much greater incentives to play.

ANet's given reason for not doing Tournaments is player burnout. That could easily be avoided by having smaller, more intelligently organized Tournaments. For example, A Tournament could consist of seven one-day matches held across seven weeks, Round One on Saturday, Round Two on Sunday etc etc. Or every Saturday or whatever. Or there could be a single week tournament, 7 days. Hard to burn out in a week. Endless possible combinations could be tried. They could vary each time so as to spread any possible burnout.

One person's Match Manipulation is another person's strategic planning. I thought the alliances and team-ups in the Tournaments were one of it's strengths, not one of its problems. This kind of strategic planning, co-operation and potential treachery is inherant in a tripartite competitive format. It should be the norm, not the exception.

As for rewards, harldy anything in GW2 ever gives any rewards worth having so I find that a moot point.

> @"LetoII.3782" said:

> Loot train follows the path of least resistance and abandons all others.

>

> Never understood the desire to be bored in a game.. I mean, you can get paid for mindless remedial tasks.

Simple answer to that is people who do it aren't bored. Some of them say they are for effect but the ones who really are bored stop.

Didn't vote in the poll because I don't consider myself a "WvW Main". These days, I play some WvW every day I log in, which is pretty much every day. How much depends on what's going on. Could just be some dailies, could be several hours.

When GW2 started I barely looked at WvW for the first year. I started to get into it before the first tournament and became heavily invested from then on until Path of Fire came out. During that period, which was maybe 3-4 years, I played more WvW than any other game mode and I played it on two (sometimes three) accounts.

What drove me was server pride. As that declined, so did my interest. I'm not interested in fighting other players per se, only in that they need to be killed to maintain the supremacy of my homeworld. Now no-one, not even me, cares much about home worlds, I can't really see much point in the game mode. Couldn't care less what guild does what. Been in a guild of maximum four people, mostly two, for seven years, which suits me fine. I am in a much larger guild that does WvW as well but even that hasn't done much organized play for a long time.

Future of the mode is bleak even if ANet does ever get around to the alliance restructuring. As someone who also plays GW2 PvE I would say that has sufered almost exactly the same decline. It was good once. Now it's not and hasn't been for ages.

Just waiting for something else to come along, really.

WvW is partly what many MMOs used to call PvPvE - PvE objectives in a PvP setting.

> @"Stand The Wall.6987" said:

> > @"EremiteAngel.9765" said:

> > Lower the cap on the number of players allowed in each map during off hours.

>

> > @"subversiontwo.7501" said:

> > _They should devalue the map_ for server score when it appears. Make it a grade. High vs. low, 100% more players, 0% map value. 50% = 50% etc.

>

> these are interesting ideas.

There are no "off hours" in a global game. For whatever reason, we have two server clusters - EU and NA. Clearly that doesn't represent the audience the game has acquired. Unless ANet is going to open specific data centers for the other major time-zones, each of which have substantial populations relative to WvW, there are going to be plenty of people whose prime playing time is NA's or EU's "off hours".

There are businesses that trade on exclusivity, by limiting access to their products and services to make them seem more attractive than their intrinsic value suports, but massively multiple online games, particularly ones that emphasize collaboration, co-operation and accessibility, aren't among them. Putting limitations in place that prevent customers who've purchased the game from playing any part of it based on the time of day they choose to play - which could and, correctly, would be associated with the part of the world in which they live, would be a PR disaster.

What they might have done to ameliorate this predictable problem from the start would have been to come up with a scoring system that took time-zones into account. Not a penalty but a split, so that each match scores in phases, for example. Or separate matches during a week - or a couple of weeks - with staggered reset times and an aggregate score across all matches to decide who won the set. There are plenty of ways it could have been arranged that would have resulted in a more balanced outcome than the very basic system we've been using.

> @"leunamsil.6742" said:

> > @"Auburner.6945" said:

> >

> > They missed out mentioning Power Overwhelming's change.

> >

>

> Where did you see that? If thats true i'm much more hopeful and it might even be a power staff buff

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/977739/#Comment_977739

I've been playing staff ele in WvW for five years. It comes and goes. I just ride it out.

GW2 certainly does have "lootboxes" in the widely-understood vernacular, and has had since launch. They are known as "Black Lion Chests" and have been relatively uncontroversial and somewhat popular for almost seven years. Their ever-increasing price on the Trading Post suggests they are getting more popular rather than less.

As far as the transfer of the OP's account from their brother is concerned, it would seem to be in violation of Sections 2(f)(iv), 4(a), 5(e)(i), and quite specifically 9(b) of the [EULA](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/[EULA](https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/ "EULA").

Whether people enjoy a story or not has precious little to do with whether it's "good". We could argue forever about what "good" even means, as indeed academics do for decades over stories that are vastly better-known and cuturally longer-lived than anything in GW2 will ever be. We can, and should, talk about how much or how little we enjoyed it, though. That's useful feedback.

Personally, I thought it was poor-to-middling fare, with the opening resurrection being one of the weakest segments. I didn't think it was especially bad by the established, standards of Living World but it was significantly less enjoyable than some chapters have been, mostly because it felt very rushed indeed and because so much of the action seemed to happen off-screen.

It's true that the idea of Aurene resurrecting via having eaten Joko was a very well-known possibility. More to the point, I never thought she was permanently dead for a very simple reason: no-one is EVER dead in GW2. The entire game runs on the concept of death being little more than a change of career. Entire populataions return as Awakened or ghosts , frequently retaining the memories and personalities they had when they were alive. Individuals return as visitations from their new existences in other realms (Eir, for example) and again talk and behave just like they did when they were living. The Player Character themselves died and got better!

The most surprising thing about Aurene's death isn't the way she was brought back but that anyone, including the Commander and all his allies, ever doubted for a second that she would return. Their entire life-experience tells them that death is transient. Rather than moping about in forced-walk slomo the lot of them should have been having a high-level, intensive seminar on *how* Aurene would return and *how long* it would take so they could get their plan for what to do when she did.

GW2 really isn't a setting where the death of a major character can have anythign like the impact it might in a movie or a book. Speaking of which, can we have Scarlet back now, please?

The tiny additional reward of the event box is completely insignificant. Unless you happen to be one of the handful of players that get the ultra-rare this week, this is basically normal World Boss Train with a ton of extra people. Why are people doing it?

Except for the infinitesimal chance of the infusion or the slightly better chance of the (completely pointless) shoes, anyone could do this "event" any day of the year for exactly the same rewards. And plenty do. World Bosses are well-attended and have been, consistently, since the game began. Looking at the crazy numbers turning out, it seems most people either didn't know, or had forgotten, there was already a World Boss Train running all day, every day.

What it suggests is that the rewards have little to do with what people do in the short term - hype is much more powerful. Rewards are what keep people grinding or farming week in, week out but for short events all that matters is publicity.

I would suggest that a good system for these kinds of events would be to allocate unique rewards to each. Nothing spectacular: titles are always good, as are minis. Set the bar at a very reasonable level, like killing five or ten Bosses over the course of the event to prevent people feeling they have to grind all week. Make it something you can do at will, for fun, for something readily achievable that you can't get elsewhere.

If you try to balance the rewards to be valuable in terms of time spent on other farms the whole thing will degenerate into just another spreadsheet excercise rather than the amusing diversion it was presumably intended to be. If you add a currency and offer valuable rewards for accruing it, some people will end up resenting "having" to grind it out to get what they want. Better to tailor specific rewards to specific events and keep the whole thing on the level of casual fun that can be enjoyed by those who like that sort of thing and ignored by those who don't.

> @"WhatLiesBeneath.9018" said:

> * If its possible, the return of the Marionette fight from Season 1 would be awesome to have as a event now and then, if its not too much work.

>

The Marionette was one of the most enjoyable events ever seen in GW2. It would be wonderful to see it return.

I'd also like to see (a lot) more map invasion events such as we used to get routinely in Season 1 and occasionally afterwards. They used to be a signature feature of GW2 and we see far too few of them of late.

Best of all were the Seasons. After that, the early days in general, before Megaservers. Losing Lion's Arch for rallying the troops did more damage than DBL in the long term.

I particularly liked the era when class skills mattered more and players had agency: Guardians protecting siege weapons, Warriors bannering the lord, upgrading structures by fetching and dumping supply and so on. All the automation from tactics and watchtowers and auto-upgrades and EWPs and so on isn't terrible but none of it is an improvement. I know people complained about having to do the grunt work but I always felt much more involved that way and there never seemed to be a shortage of people willing to do the work.

> @"sarkysek.1085" said:

> > @"Mike Silbowitz.1827" said:

> > Ok. Lets' play it safe first. I'm showing you a tourism ad.

> >

> > [https://youtube.com/watch?v=1YC0-ZGcLTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YC0-ZGcLTg "https://youtube.com/watch?v=1YC0-ZGcLTg")

> >

> > What do you think?

>

> I like it. But I think it's a little bit too short and doesn't show enough to capture the interest of someone not familiar with GW2.

Black Citadel is an amazing city but that trailer really doesn't begin to do it justice. The voiceover is off, too. "Smelteuuuurrrrhhh" What?

I find it hard to see who that trailer is designed to appeal to.

Edit: Posted that before I'd watched the rest of the Tourism videos. Black Citadel is the weakest by far, mainly because the voiceover is very hard to understand and the Great Smelter is quite possibly the least interesting sight in the entire city. The general idea of the series is good and I understand why they need to be so very short but even as short as they are they could all be tighter. The voiceovers certainly could do with being punched up. The Grove one is probably the best, which is ironic since The Grove is my least favorite starting city.

The really interesting part, though, is that you're doing the ad campaign in the first place. I've been playing MMORPGs for twenty years and it's pretty unusual in my experience for any MMO as old as GW2 now is to get this kind of push when nothing is actually going on to support it in terms of, for example, a new expansion or a change in payment model.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> Strange thing is... I havent seen real noticable skill lag for ages. I cant even remember the last time. Mounts certainly didnt change anything for me. Zerging or solo roaming, 1-2+ hours every day in EU T1/T2 primetime. Almost exlusivly borderhopping, rarely EB.

I play EU hours on US servers so I never see the game at its busiest. Still, going back to before HoT, I used to get huge skill lag fairly often and always, without fail, in three-way in SMC. Since then it's become less and less frequent, which may be down to the ever-decreasing numbers of people playing the mode.

It might be quieter in general, but at weekends and in matches where we play someone with a strong EU presence there are still some large-scale three-ways in SMC and occasionally elsewhere. I haven't experienced any skill lockdowns in one of those for as far back as I can remember. Definitely never in the last six months, quite probably not in over a year. The addition of mounts (which I deplore for other reasons) has made absolutely no difference to skill lag or performance for me.

In fact, for me WvW is more playable, in a technical sense, than ever before. Being able to move and cast freely (as a staff Ele) inside SMC Lord room with two zergs fighting and a third stacking in a corridor has increased my survivability tenfold, not to mention my usefulness. This would literally never have happened in the same situation between 2012 and 2016.

I have no idea why that should be. I'm playing on the same PC with the same settings on the same ISP. If anything's changed I assume it's at ANet's end. Maybe it's the Amazon hosting. Perhaps that simply has bettter connectivity with my ISP than the old servers did. Clearly there are winners and losers in the new set up but how many people are worse off and how many better?

I have always found defending hugely more exciting and enjoyable than attacking. The glory days of epic Garrison defences lasting all Sunday afternoon! Last ditch fights that somehow turn into improbable saves. I really miss bannering the Lord or combat rezzing him after banners were nerfed.

The only time attacking structures is really fun is when they are very heavily defended and it takes mutiple attempts and several hours to wear the defences down. That used to be fairly common back before HoT, when I would often get home from work and spend 2-3 hours doing nothing but trying to take Bay (we had some very determined commanders back then). Even if we failed I went to bed happy after a great evening trying.

Anything that shortens any aspect of structure siege, offense or defense, is a retrograde move in my book. That said, it's also pointless to have structures sitting at T3/Full supply for days at a stretch. I'd be all for removing the automation of upgraders so we had to go back to players running supply to raise the tiers. A lot of the current issues come from that automation.

After nearly seven years I'm afraid this just isn't sufficiently interesting to hold my attention any more. It's been a good run and the nature of GW2's easy drop-in design means no big decisions about staying or going, but the fact is I only really log in to do dailies these days and some days I forget to do that. Instead, I've returned to a couple of older MMOs that I played extensively before GW2 released. They don't get anything like the publicity GW2 does but they've had far more content added in the lifetime of GW2 than GW2 has and a good deal more regularly and consistently. Also, to my taste, of considerably higher quality.

I was hanging on for an expansion, which is pretty much the only time we get anything remotely close to the amount of content I've been used to in other MMOs over the last two decades (including in GW1). I loved HoT but I didn't enjoy PoF so even that was a bit of a gamble, but it would at least have been something solid to look forward to. I haven't really enjoyed the Living Story since the end of Season One (which I loved). Instanced content doesn't do it for me. The new maps were nice at first but they've become formulaic.

With no expansion in prospect I'm likely to drop in and out only when there's something new. I do like the stuff the Side Stories team puts out - it's far superior to anything we see in the main Living Story - so I'll be around for that. Also, if the Alliance system ever arrives I'll be there for some revamped WvW - assuming we're not all playing Camelot Unchained by then...

All that said, it does look like a better approach and a sounder base for maintaining the game. It's just too late. This is what should have happened after Heart of Thorns. Still, better late than never I guess. And maybe we'll get an expansion eventually. They do make more money than anything else an aging MMO can expect, after all.

> @"zinkz.7045" said:

> > @"Absurd.2947" said:

> > Ranger is overpowered as kitten, people don't realize that because most ranger players are absolute baddies.

>

> Everyone still playing WvW is a baddie. In case you missed it a borderline dead game mode in a 6 year old MMORPG, that is competitvely a joke with a relatively low skilled combat system and where the most common gameplay is known as 'blobbing', is not the place leet gamers are hanging out.

>

>

"Elite gamers" never even came to GW2 in the first place. The "elite" RVR guilds that did mostly left in the first six months. WvW has been casual PvPvE for at least five years, which is just as well since that's what it was designed to be.

> @"Ruufio.1496" said:

Anyone who knows what they're talking about knows that fights that are actually fun are 15 players or less.

>

Tell that to CCP as they work on getting 10,000 players into simultaneous combat, never mind the 4000 plus they already managed in EVE. Or CSE as they work towards 4000 player battles in Camelot Unchained. Or Intrepid, ditto, for Ashes of Creation. Fifteen players a side, wave of the future. Right.

> @"Widmo.3186" said:

> Its just a handicap for PvE-lads to not get engaged in fights and instead do some _soft loli breathing_ PvE stuff like capping not defended camps.

> On the other hand i really have fun times when I see "big bois" with PvP backpack or even PvP titles that just keep running on their little kitty mount, avoid any fights (and by fights I mean 1v1s, not some 3v1s ganking) and focus on PvE stuff like ^capping camps. When they see enemy approaching they simply use mount, leave camp and dodge away (PvE mission failed, abandon the ship).

> Great update ANet, instead of Open World PvP we have now Open World Comedy. Well, its still in better place than WoW PvP atm tho, lol.

The game mode is, was and always has been PvPvE not PvP. PvPvE has existed in MMOs for as long as there have been MMOs. That some players confuse the mode with PvP (or indeed with PvE) is not a failure of design, it's a failure of comprehension.