I would remove the top sentence as this is pure speculation. Also, this security firm has a track record for being wrong every time they talk about GW2. Take it with a pile of salt.
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Guild Wars 2 |OT3| Two Week Updates, One Box, Zero Subscriptions
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I would remove the top sentence as this is pure speculation. Also, this security firm has a track record for being wrong every time they talk about GW2. Take it with a pile of salt.
A Korean investment company reporting on NCSoft's financial future commented that Guild Wars 2 will have an expansion next year. They reported an expansion for 2013 as well, and that obviously didn't happen. The problem is that NCSoft is very hands-off with ArenaNet so they may not have much info at all.
Considering how anti-expansion they've been in the past, I would be very surprised if we see one at all, though that hasn't stopped the usual slew of clickbait articles about how desperately the game supposedly needs one. I'll wait until there's even a murmur of something official before I worry about an expansion at all.
In other, expansion-related news, the next WoW expansion will cost the same as Guild Wars 2 when it launchs and cap off an exciting year of... nothing, since the last Panda content patch was in September. Anybody who doesn't cancel their subs (which, considering the most efficient way to pay is for large chunks in advance) is going to be pissing away ~$180 for nothing.
Jest Chillin
Member
This could change depending on how they overhaul SPvP. If bags are still able to be acquired through it, and the ranking becomes easier...
But I feel that way because I'm just not one for dungeons.
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
I can't wait for Evon Gnashblade's tweets
Noisy Ninj4
Member
Pissing away money? Sounds awesome. I think I'll unsub from GW2 for the new WoW expansion when it comes out.
Noisy Ninj4
Member
Do fractals 1-10. No agony resist required. At 10, you have some agony, but you won't automagically fail without it.
shysaursoft
Member
Because they probably took pity on the whiny, incompetent players.
Never forget:
I keed.
(The real comic is here: http://i.imgur.com/JXHk9rA.jpg)
Fractals are the best thing about the game, hands down. You will not need any ascended gear to start out, but after a certain level you'll need it. However, they make it simple enough to get it.
Dunno about that. I like to think I'm leetsauce in a can. I've done things that I believe put me in the upper end of the playerbase in terms of skill and all that. But I can't exactly control or account for 49 other people. Yet those other people, in this case, do impact whether I can see or do something. If they aren't seeing or doing something right, why penalize everyone in order to hold up some imaginary bar of difficulty?
But I don't see the Knights are any sort of indication of skill or any of that jazz so much as one's ability to guest over to JQ or Blackgate, or hook up with a guild designed for it like the Teq guild. With MMOs especially, the more people you add, the less individual skill matters.
In this case, I'd say the nerfs were justified all things considered.
Because they probably took pity on the whiny, incompetent players.
Never forget:
I keed.
(The real comic is here: http://i.imgur.com/JXHk9rA.jpg)
Or they realised it was a bad design that didnt work.
nah, thats just crazy, anet make a mistake? haha, that doesnt happen.
Hmm that land mass south of the Tengu Wall. Interesting.
Isn't that Claw Island?
shysaursoft
Member
My sarcasm wasn't strong enough, apparently. I thought the comic (and the "I keed" in spoiler) would be a dead giveaway. I think the 25% nerf is good.
Edvardelis
Member
I tried the first attempt at the Knights after the daily reset today. It took close to 20 minutes to get Blue down, we went over to Green... and no one was there, Green was at full health.
I think most people who've done it have basically given up. It reminds me of the Marionette... after the first few days you were lucky to get one or two chains severed, let alone win the thing.
shysaursoft
Member
To be fair, the patch hit right at reset, so a great many people were either patching, or had yet to log out to patch, which splits the community in two. We failed the Knights right on reset as well - the effects of the patch didn't exist until the next hour anyway (there were Menders at 8 EST, when the patch notes said there weren't supposed to be). At 9 EST, even FA - which is universally terrible at PvE - managed to take down all three Knights with only about 20 at each, with time to spare.
Right now, Knights and Holo are being farmed something fierce for the Cores, since the expectation is their price will skyrocket after they stop dropping. I've seen entire guilds dedicated to just farming the Cores.
nope, it's the island south of that.
shysaursoft
Member
In hindsight: I should know better.
So I'm going to do better.
So I'm going to do better.
They're not the same people, that's the problem. One group of players wants one thing, another wants something completely different, and still more groups want their own things. No matter what you do, one group or another feels like they're not getting enough attention and the other groups are getting too much. You can see this in sPVP vs. WvW vs. PVE, Dungeons vs. Open world content, Profession vs. Profession... there are even groups that bitch about content that doesn't even exist (GvG, for example).
The key to finding pleasure in GW2 is not to focus on some tiny little aspect and bitch when other parts of the game are developed. It's finding fun in everything, or (gasp) not playing for a spell.
I think the bitching is good feedback. Obviously the delivery matters a lot but if you're unsatisfied and/or want more, best thing you could do is make sure the content creators get the message.
Can't hold it against people who are fans of a certain fraction of the game that hasn't been getting any love.
Can't hold it against people who are fans of a certain fraction of the game that hasn't been getting any love.
I think there's a very clear difference between useful feedback ("I don't like this, here's why...") and bitching ("ArenaNet is lazy / inept / biased / etc."). For one, useful feedback is a rare beast, though the CDI threads are proving to be pretty good (though there's still a fuckload of bitching in them). Bitching happens constantly, and in an echo chamber where the severity of what may at heart be a legitimate complaint is blown out of proportion (i.e. the vocal minority) and drowns out reasonable feedback.
The bitching is what happens at the level of discourse shown in Map Chat when people whine that they can't Zerg the Knights anymore, or there's no new zones, or Guardians are OP, and so on.... Useful feedback is... well... an endangered species. Especially when the people who provide it often feel ignored (at best) or are subject to abuse at the hands of the whiners.
shysaursoft
Member
There is something I don't quite understand.
We all know the 'tiny icons under a boss' is super-confusing to newcomers and Anet has a habit of hiding important information in there in a tiny icon few people notice. The Knight fight for example.
When the fight starts, there are very few icons, one that clearly says 'condition reflect' and no conditions stick to the Knight. That works, for the most part: the only way that could be improved, visually, is by having the UI more responsive, like having the actual condition icons you apply to the boss boilerplate physically bounce off and drop down to your own boilerplate, or something like that.
Boss hits 75% (why there are no quarter-marks on HP bars I do not know), phase change. Suddenly, all those condition icons stack, but I'm not clear on two things:
Condition Crash. "Power level lowers the more conditions are applied to it". By power level, I'm assuming they mean how much damage the boss is doing? Is it the boss's speed? How much it's AoE stop does? This is really vague.
Condition Counter. This little red shield counts up as people apply conditions (?), and... what? It says "tracks the power level of each mode", but again we're not told what "power level" is, or what the value range even represents. Is higher better, is lower, what's the cap, what does it mean if it sits at 50?
There's so much going on in the GW2 UI, that it kind of undoes the nice and minimalist thing they have going over most of it. I *adore* the GW2 UI, warts and all, because it's clean, functional, and shows me everything I need to know - though sometimes I feel it shows too much. Those condition markers could surely be simplified into just three, the three representing three "groups" of condition types, and they fill in, or number up, or something, as players apply the required amount.
I've been wondering what steps could be taken to clean up the information overload, which bits could be simplified into a single icon, or arrow system like GW1 had for buff/debuff, which I always thought was rather good: if your up arrows are more than the down arrows, you're good. The 'tug of war' thing. Also, would it be useful to have a tiny window that opens when you start applying conditions, that shows only your own conditions? I'm undecided on the value of that.
On a side note: I've also been working half-heartedly on a "guide" to playing GW2 like a traditional MMO, basically forcing using certain weapons until X level so you don't have access to new weapon skills until a higher level, which utilities you can buy when based on level, all with the goal of "stretching" the game out so it matches the pace of conventional MMOs that dole out skills at a ludicrously and artificially slowed rate.It might account for my sour mood: because it feels so dirty. Like taking the nicest thing you can find, and making it ugly on purpose.
We all know the 'tiny icons under a boss' is super-confusing to newcomers and Anet has a habit of hiding important information in there in a tiny icon few people notice. The Knight fight for example.
When the fight starts, there are very few icons, one that clearly says 'condition reflect' and no conditions stick to the Knight. That works, for the most part: the only way that could be improved, visually, is by having the UI more responsive, like having the actual condition icons you apply to the boss boilerplate physically bounce off and drop down to your own boilerplate, or something like that.
Boss hits 75% (why there are no quarter-marks on HP bars I do not know), phase change. Suddenly, all those condition icons stack, but I'm not clear on two things:
Condition Crash. "Power level lowers the more conditions are applied to it". By power level, I'm assuming they mean how much damage the boss is doing? Is it the boss's speed? How much it's AoE stop does? This is really vague.
Condition Counter. This little red shield counts up as people apply conditions (?), and... what? It says "tracks the power level of each mode", but again we're not told what "power level" is, or what the value range even represents. Is higher better, is lower, what's the cap, what does it mean if it sits at 50?
There's so much going on in the GW2 UI, that it kind of undoes the nice and minimalist thing they have going over most of it. I *adore* the GW2 UI, warts and all, because it's clean, functional, and shows me everything I need to know - though sometimes I feel it shows too much. Those condition markers could surely be simplified into just three, the three representing three "groups" of condition types, and they fill in, or number up, or something, as players apply the required amount.
I've been wondering what steps could be taken to clean up the information overload, which bits could be simplified into a single icon, or arrow system like GW1 had for buff/debuff, which I always thought was rather good: if your up arrows are more than the down arrows, you're good. The 'tug of war' thing. Also, would it be useful to have a tiny window that opens when you start applying conditions, that shows only your own conditions? I'm undecided on the value of that.
On a side note: I've also been working half-heartedly on a "guide" to playing GW2 like a traditional MMO, basically forcing using certain weapons until X level so you don't have access to new weapon skills until a higher level, which utilities you can buy when based on level, all with the goal of "stretching" the game out so it matches the pace of conventional MMOs that dole out skills at a ludicrously and artificially slowed rate.It might account for my sour mood: because it feels so dirty. Like taking the nicest thing you can find, and making it ugly on purpose.
Ugh, yeah. Don't do that to yourself. It's like trying to force a baby panda into a blender.
Why would you write a guide about making the game a negative. Guides on cool things to do at lower level ranges would probably be more enjoyable. Brain tease had a long stretch of suck between whenever low levels ended and level 60 because of trait requirements for a shatter heavy style.
I'm sure good feedback is seen by the correct eyes. Its likely another reason why arguing serves no real purpose. State your opinion, and move on. Trying to debate other people mostly just ends in headache. Wish I'd remember that myself, but tally-ho.
Roaming thieves can bite all my butts.
Roaming thieves can bite all my butts.
The nerf to the Assault Knights is definitely the right thing to do. They tuned these fights for large groups of players. They then cap the players to 50 but make no change to the Knights HP. That made no sense to me. It was obviously an oversight and Anet agrees. Its just a shame its taken a week to finally get the fight in order. Looking forward to doing the holo fight again tonight though!
They did if they wanted to design the game well and not create a false sense of elitism that some mmo gamers seem to crave more than air by confusing lots of people with difficult.you know... they didnt had to nerf the knights...
Bl4ckSunsh1n3
Member
With the knight nerf I'll probably go and kill Scarlet again. After failing every time post-zerg update and pre-nerf I had given up on it.
Kos Luftar
Member
Yesterday I went on around 10:10pm estern. Zoned into LA, knights has been killed. Got the buff, went into teleportal. There was 25 minutes to kill holo. There wasn't any communication really but everyone knew what to do. We killed the holo with 5 minutes left.
I do not run la often but Everytime it's been successful and easy.
I must be lucky.
I do not run la often but Everytime it's been successful and easy.
I must be lucky.
why is it poor design? i dont get it, i dont see any part of that as bad design. the health scale was nice, the mechanics were fine, just kinda tricky but, really i dont see the point of calling that fight poor design.
so am i.
Bl4ckSunsh1n3
Member
I haven't gotten into main to do one yet so yes, you are. Granted I haven't tried since the weekend either so maybe it would be different now.
FWIW, the holo fight is pretty easy. Every time I've gotten to it, sans the first one, we've put it down with plenty of time to spare.
I wouldn't call the fight badly designed. If you're in main it's probably pretty easy every time. You have enough people that if people run off like assholes and fire at a knight when they are doing no damage it doesn't hurt your chances at taking the knights down because you still have your 30-50 on each doing it correctly. The problem is in the overflows. You usually only have enough people to do it right one specific way and that almost never happens. When 10 of them go to the wrong place you're screwed. The only really frustrating part of the design is how it renders stupid people completely useless.
EDIT: I lied, I did get into main once. It was at 8AM and we had like 40 people total trying the fight. Got two knights down still.
shysaursoft
Member
Double Post, derp. Have a gif in pennance:
shysaursoft
Member
Well, it was mostly as a joke - I've seen so many people complain about "getting all skills at level 15 and now there's nothing to do", I wondered if stretching out skill acquisition along a conventional timeframe would actually change things (it didn't). It wasn't a guide meant for public consumption.
"Challenge" is not just the domain of the elite. Every hobby has different skill levels. Oddly, this seems to have become unacceptable to some, who insist that everything in videogames far and wide should be accessible to even the lowest denominator. It's like saying chess is "exclusionary" and somehow bad for checkers because it's harder to figure out than noughts and crosses.
However, I'll concede that Anet is trying to ride two ponies at once, and it's not always working out. They want everyone to at least *try* the new content, to not have it be gated out behind an instance, gear check or not being at the right point on your quest lines. While simultaneously expecting everyone involved to at least *try* to understand the fight.
I really do think it boils down less to "poor mechanics" and has more to do with poor communication, that the game lacks the necessary tools to quickly get across the ghist of what a fight entails, and perhaps to guide the player a bit more into utilizing the mechanics. The health nerf is more of a band-aid to solve the problem of there being more players who aren't interested in (or aren't able to) learn the fight mechanics, than there are who do, at any given random time (which is in itself a problem - that every 150 player LA map is such a hodge-podge of different skill levels, some ignoring the Knights alltogether to just champ train (ug) and others not even walking over to get the buff to damage the nights).
To quote someone else: "But then, I've seen people hate on "challenging" books, because they think that those who read them are arrogant and feel they're better than everyone else."
This highlights the kind of attitude that that really gets my goat, because not only does it attempt to tear down people who try, the person who thinks that way also thinks so little of himself that they'd rather be jealous of other people accomplishing things than putting in the effort themselves.
----- /rant
In other news, I guess nobody else knows what Condition Crash and Condition Counter does, huh?
Bl4ckSunsh1n3
Member
Every bad design choice I've made in building software has come because I assumed that the user-base was intelligent (seriously). I think ArenaNet sometimes makes the same mistake. You have those who are capable but, you also have a lowest common denominator that you have to hit, if you want to cater to the most people possible; which it also appears they want to do. It's a tough line to walk. They do a pretty good job of it overall. You can't ever please 100% of the people 100% of the time. If you could the Internet would lose half of it's traffic.
This is kinda adorable, I mean, I approve of them making it a little easier just like you, because this is a real "lowest common denominator" event... but I still beat it twice before the nerf, so... it did work. It just wasn't easy enough for everybody.
Constantly. They did it all over GW1 as well, but GW2 is even more of a "make-your-own-fun" sort of affair, and there's very little to assist the players who are unwilling or incapable of figuring out everything the game has to offer on their own (or by asking friendly fellow gamers). Essentially, ArenaNet has had to readjust the baseline several times- sometimes for the better (I really like the orange solid AOE indicators for group content) and sometimes for the worse (achievements being seen as required to motivate people to try/find things and keep them populated).Bl4ckSunsh1n3 said:
They'll never get it exactly right, by the way. As you say, pleasing 100% is legitimately impossible; reaching the actual lowest common denominator- the go-to example in my head was the guy on the forums asking why he couldn't get world completion if he doesn't want to do vistas- would render the game a mere iteration on Progress Quest.
It's all about just finding things that you personally enjoy, whatever's fun for you, to do when you log on. If the answer comes back with a bunch of stuff, sometimes a bigger issue is just deciding how to spend your time in-game! If the answer comes back with just one thing, do that until you get bored of it. If the answer comes back with nothing, play other stuff until it changes, or forever.
The above paragraph is the obvious way to play games in any genre. It only seems to become confusing to people in MMOs in my experience.
I, too, am a masochistMiktar said:
Jest Chillin
Member
I feel like this is because most current MMO players have experienced MMO's in the Themepark fashion. Where they've been trained that unless there is an obvious directive given to them to complete X activity for Y reward, they view it as, at worst a waste of time or at best a failure on the developers part in providing a path.
This is also why Sandbox style MMO's tend not to be as successful anymore. I'd liken it to Single Player RPGS back when JRPG's were all the rage. Many solid WRPG's were overlooked and/or didn't see the success they should have because the presentation just wasn't what people were expecting/used to.
A part of the reason why that changed with JRPG/WRPG's was actually the decline of big name JRPGs on consoles (and their lack of presence on PCs) that sort of forced the players to give WRPGs a shot. MMO's though are way more cost intensive so most publishers don't give their Sandbox games a chance to grow before changing them in hopes of better monetary returns either by harmful cash shop policies, gameplay changes to more of a themepark experience or both.
Bl4ckSunsh1n3
Member
Wow. I'm glad I don't go to the GW2 forums.
Kos Luftar
Member
You guys all sound so smart when you talk about GW2. I feel dumb for just liking the game and not being able to write mega posts about it.
Wonder if anyone else besides Kristen B will be at GDC from ANET. Would be cool if they were there And maybe teased what was coming with LS season 2.
Ps. Oh hai, Korten!
Wonder if anyone else besides Kristen B will be at GDC from ANET. Would be cool if they were there And maybe teased what was coming with LS season 2.
Ps. Oh hai, Korten!
shysaursoft
Member
To be honest, I feel too stupid to play it half the time. I don't "get" numbers. People talk about balancing their gear for Precision and Power and all that jazz, but I have trouble understanding the difference between Toughness at Vitality, even 2k hours in. That's why I just went full Celestial on my Engineer, all armour, all weapons, all trinkets - so that I don't have to think about numbers. I do wish sometimes I had more of a head for this kind of thing, so I could push a bit more out of what I run (nades and toolkit mostly, sometimes bombs for might stacking). I'm the kind of guy that uses 'Optimize' in jRPG equipment screens, and if the game doesn't have the option I rarely play far.
My ideal version of gear for GW2, would be based off Monster Hunter (less emphasis on stats, more emphasis on building gear out of killed foes, the gear having effects based on how many pieces of the same gear you have - not unlike Runes, but more built-in), but with a bit of Diablo III's legendaries thrown in. How cool would it be to find a helm for an engineer that has a proc like, if you throw flame turret, there's a 10% chance the flame turret will have a fire field on it, or a Warrior sword that when you do 100 blades, will have an automatic stomp trigger on the end. I'd love to see more "if then" systems influencing the skills.
Not sure about any other Anet folks presenting at GDC, but I imagine more than a few will be there. I also wouldn't count on much teasing coming out of it; even though lots of companies try to use GDC as another trade show, the spirit of the affair is more about the act of game development rather than the result.
Yeah, I've been wishing for a level-less, class-less, stat-less MMO for years. It's not going to happen, the cost of development outweighs the profit because there simply wouldn't be any carrots in the game beyond perfecting an individual playstyle. Guild Wars 2 is at the closest, if only because the stats that do exist don't matter that much compared to skill / strategy, and all of the annoying things other MMOs do are cut out.
*shrug* exactly the same side of the same coin to me. Yes it's one of the easiest encounters, yes the nerf made it easier.
Yeah that's the game I've always wanted, basically. Maybe not class-less, but something where picking your class (or whatever you pick at the beginning) is a lot more like choosing a character in a fighting game than anything else, and you basically have every ability you'd need to beat the hardest content in the game from minute one, the only bottleneck being your own skill. The progression would exist only in the sense of customization (changing your character horizontally to suit your playstyle) and "get better" (just improve your skill level over time, as in a fighting or action game). Hard-to-find gear could have cool amplification or skill-tweaking effects like Miktar suggested rather than increasing your power, and would never be necessary.Retro said:
I think epic quests, open-world bosses, dungeons, puzzles, and even "raids" or whatever the equivalent would be under this setup could be incredibly fun to partake in with this sort of open system. But Retro is correct that a game of the scope I'm imagining is essentially impossible to develop as a profit center. There are people out there who like carrots even if they don't need them to enjoy a game, and there are people out there who do need carrots, and both of those groups have dollars.
The funny thing is, in reading over this I sort of got the urge to play some version of Monster Hunter again, but the more I thought about it I realized how much I was romanticizing it. There are some seriously tedious quests in those games outside of the good stuff (you know... Monster Hunting), and the RNG when farming a creature for pieces for a new armor set (which you need to upgrade) makes everything in GW2 look tame.
I don't even know of any game that has come close- which of course brings me back here. A lot of things I mentioned definitely make GW2 the closest game to what I want that's ever been attempted on this scale. A lot of things in my first paragraph are almost true of this game.
A sidenote: sometimes I think my opinion is colored pretty dramatically by having played with a gamepad for so long. The game honestly has great, sensible core controls, and I think that shines through easily in how well it works with a controller.
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