Category: Guild Wars 2

A ranger watches as the bulk of the army runs back towards the keep. He pats the yak’s head trying to keep the animal’s focus on the road ahead instead of all the bodies of the enemy at the southwest supply camp. The ranger plods along with the yak. He sees and hears sounds of war coming from the western keep. Siege engines are tearing down walls, and the supply is critical to bolstering their thinning defenses. For now the yak will move at its own pace, and the ranger’s thoughts slow down to echo the patient ease of the animal.

The ranger notices now the way the grass sways in the wind. He looks out across the lake to see blue skies. There is no storm portending the doom of a keep today.  A small hill blocks the lake from view, and the ranger watches the local fauna holding court on that pinnacle of their kingdom. A few allies run by headed for war. They wave happily, and the ranger and the yak tramp along in a meditative rhythm.

An enemy appears from the hill. The asura thief drives with sole purpose to end the yak’s life. She succeeds amidst dozens of blows from the ranger and his allies and falls to the ground dead a few yards away from the yak’s body. The ranger and his allies stand above the asura’s corpse for a second in silent pause. Her death being little compensation.

The ranger falls to his knees, the certainty of the yak now gone.

–Ravious

 

You can tell it’s not a grind or a treadmill because they say it’s not. Also this “add a new tier of gear” thing is totally not something they plan to do every three months. Only every time they add an expansion pack worth of content.

: Zubon

You’ll be facing WvW opponents who will get the top gear, so let’s add DAoC problems, too. Trifecta! If the horizontal endgame isn’t working as planned, why not pivot to a vertical endgame?

The horizontal endgame of Guild Wars 2 does not seem to be working as well as intended. Players are using all eight dungeons, but this is not working at all in the open world. The high-level loot is too concentrated in Orr to encourage level 80s to hang out in lower level zones, so non-bot 80s visit the dragons, the dungeons, and Orr. Lost Shores will add an option to that list but not encourage using the 0-70 content. You can find action in the newbie zones, and channeling players together still works pretty well, but most of the world seems very sparsely populated even in prime time (outside the holiday event). The dynamic event model has fewer problems with low density than Warhammer Online, but you group events can sit there for hours, and the same for events not labeled as group content but effectively unsoloable. I am amongst the many people who talked about how you could play in any zone at level 80, so all these good things will come of that, but the reward structure is not supporting that. There are some people who play the content they enjoy without thought of the rewards; they are mostly not MMO players.

You still run into dynamic events that are bugged from launch, and with the less frequent server resets, those can also sit there for a very long time. This lets a lot of players see them, which furthers negativity. If an event can reach a bugged state from which it cannot advance, it will eventually get there, so over time more areas reach bugged states that cannot be cleared. Logging on Sunday morning for my 5 daily events, 2 of the first 4 I found were bugged, along with a waypoint stuck in a bugged contested state from a previous event. This is an uncommon run of luck, but I was not exactly surprised. I am still judging games based on how long you can play until you see a bug, and GW2 is not doing enormously well there.

: Zubon

If they fix the problem from my first paragraph, come back here a month later to hear me complain about how level 80s are swarming newbie events because the problems with scaling let you kill much faster at lower levels.

MMO news sites have been popping up this morning (post embargo) with sneak peeks at the content patch for Guild Wars 2 set to drop this weekend. The content patch is titled Lost Shores. MMORPG.com and GW2 Hub seem to have the most depth and commentary, respectively. Be sure to check them out. Thoughts follow.

Southsun Cove 

The new open world PvE map is Southsun Cove. It is a playground for level 80 characters fighting a new enemy, the karka. However, during the lead-in event everybody can be upleveled to play on the map. Afterwards it is losing that upleveling ability.

Besides all the usual goodies, there isn’t much to comment on yet. More content is good. Less emphasis on Orr is good. New enemy type is good. What I am most interested in is to see how ArenaNet responds to the current playstyle of level 80 content. It seems they’ve emphasized the karka’s armor to the point where there is a new shader in the game to show armor falling off. Will this armor mechanic shift the current “area of effect” spam meta?

Regardless, I think it will be a nice change of pace from Orr – bright sandy beaches with heavily-armored, four-legged Half Life 2 creatures. Continue reading [GW2] The Next Content

All joking aside, I think ArenaNet is making Guild Wars 2 work for its business model. Lost Shores is going to introduce permanent content, but ArenaNet wants fanfare. They want a crush of concurrency to surround the unveiling of that content. This is not a mistake either. ArenaNet is one of the few MMOs that can sustain itself on waveform player concurrency.

Conventional MMOs do have waveform player concurrency too, but it operates usually on huge expansions. It takes months to build up the excitement, and then it takes a month or so to go back down as players eat the expansions content up. Filled, they wander away. Most seem to rely on a plateau concurrency, especially subscription MMOs. Some players call it “grind”; some call it “end game treadmill”. Either way, conventional MMOs want consistency. They want a plateau of player activity even if it is always going to be slanting downhill. Continue reading [GW2] Player Concurrency – Water Level Vs. Waveform

Before working on my WvW exploration, I tried to work on my personal goal of working through every story mode in the Guild Wars 2 dungeons before hitting Zhaitan. I joined a party of two that had been sitting in Lion’s Arch for half an hour trying to get people to join them for Sorrow’s Embrace. We exchanged pleasantries and the group leader starting saying that I had been the only bite for the mid-level dungeon’s story mode in quite a while. She was clearly depressed at the thought of working for another hour to pick up another two party members at that rate. I decided I might not have time for the party wait plus the dungeon and excused myself.

ArenaNet has been adamant against creating a “LFG” system that would bring people looking for the same activity together. There is a lot of confusion both for ArenaNet’s decision and their definition of a “LFG” system. Continue reading [GW2] The Underflow – Bringing People Together

There are a few ways to run around in Guild Wars 2 World vs. World (WvW) mode. Everybody’s favorite to love and hate is the zerg, which is just a critical mass of players rolling over objectives and against other zergs. It’s disorganized and powerful at the same time. The skilled players not in zerg siege mode tend to join smaller strike squads which requires significant communication and directives to disrupt and slow the enemy as much as possible. Last night I realized that a solo player could be particularly useful as well.

Selfishly I was running around Isle of Janthir’s borderlands with little intention of helping the cause. I had a goal to complete the map. Right now in our matchup the Isle is the whipping boy while my server, Sanctum of Rall, is trying its best to stop Sea of Sorrows from winning too much. It seems like next week us three will be at it again too. Since I had completed Sanctum of Rall’s borderlands, I decided hitting up the losing server’s borderlands would provide easier exploration than elsewhere. Continue reading [GW2] Solo in a World War

I tried writing a post to mirror Zubon’s great post on elementalists, but I seem incapable of writing “guides”. I write more how I feel since I usually ignore things like builds, micromanaging stats, etc. in the actual game anyway. Here’s how I feel about a class I have spent 95% of my Guild Wars 2 time playing.

Open World

In the open world, I am a cockroach tank spreading diseases at my whim. I laugh as the crippled enemy finally gets up to my face weakened from the burden of my conditions to get a single hit off me before bleeding out their life. I snatch that orb of life away never having moved from my spot. With my health and extra Death Shroud lifebar, I feel impervious in all but the most perilous situations. I see allies drop against the Claw of Jormag, and I still stand.

Then a greatsword warrior runs up to a nearby enemy and appears to drop it in a quarter of the time it takes me. Snicker-snack. I can’t help but feel jealous. Continue reading [GW2] Necromancer Thoughts