Feature Pack 2: The Re-Featuring

August 13, 2014 at 5:17 pm | Posted in Guild Wars 2, mmorpg, PvE, PvP, WvW | Comments Off on Feature Pack 2: The Re-Featuring
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Back in March Arenanet released a feature pack and they led up to that release with a series of blog posts. I commented on and tried to predict what those blog posts would be about based on the previewed titles. I got a lot right in that post, but plenty wrong as well. In any case they’ve gone and done it again, a list of future misleading blog post titles and topics that they’ll probably reschedule, rename, and reorganize a day after I’ve written this. On to the new predictions.

13 Aug
Announcing the Guild Wars 2 World Tournament Series
We’re bringing competitive play in Guild Wars 2 to a whole new level.

Week 1: Competitive Week
From new tools for coordinating your tactics to new rewards for your valor, Competitive Week is all about our support for and improvements to competitive play in Guild Wars 2!

14 Aug
Do You Feel Glorious?

18 Aug
Balancing Act

19 Aug
Tricks and Explosive Finales

20 Aug
Command the Rainbow

21 Aug
Prepare to Fight

Week 2: A Fresh Start
Our second week of September 2014 Feature Pack reveals is focused on improving the Guild Wars 2 experience for new and veteran players alike!

Week 3: Collecting and Trading
In the September 2014 Feature Pack, we’re rethinking the way you collect and trade items

Okay so today’s blog post is already up. It’s a new tournament culminating in a 50k cash prize in December. Nothing to sneeze at yet yadda yadda yadda I’m not going to pretend to care.

Since week 1 is all about PvP, “Do you feel glorious?” should be pretty easy to guess at. The new tournie is named the Tournament of Glory, so either further details on the new tournament will be uncovered or maybe they’ll talk more about the new PvP reward tracks they’ve hinted at on Zam and Massively.

Balancing Act has to be pretty obvious. They’ve been previewing balance changes on their streaming PvP orientated Twitch show on a bi-weekly basis. Here’s their youtube channel as well. There’s still plenty to see I’m sure.

I don’t know what Tricks and Explosive Finales would be. Tricks and traps are rarely used in WvW as far as I know, but it’s not impossible that they’d implement some new ones that are specifically designed to deter some of the more cheap and lazy ways to play the game. A trap that specifically targets zergs would be amazing but I’m not hopeful. Personally I’ve often wanted a more concussive finale to breaking down a door in WvW but it could be more likely a new finisher of some type. Or a more intensive way to end the week long match? Could be anything.

I would predict that Command the Rainbow is going to be changes to the commander pin except that’s exactly what I predicted for the last feature pack and was completely wrong. I guess I can’t come up with anything else, so yeah, more options and features for the commander pin including new coloured pin options as data-mined by that_shaman.

Edit: Apparently Zam is all over this.

As hinted at in a recent dev post on the oficial forums, I think Prepare to Fight is probably the unveiling of a new PvP format. I couldn’t hazard a guess at what type of PvP format, there are a lot of options to choose from. Some form of Guild versus Guild is called for a lot, and a lot of different types of PvP are popular in other types of games, but it’s hard to say what is right for an MMO of this type.

Week 2: A Fresh Start likely has to do with the new player experience in China, if I had to guess, and further refining the western version of Guild Wars 2 to be more like the Eastern. Although again, I did predict this exact change last time and failed miserably. Beyond further hand holding and babysitting new players who can’t figure out these complicated and new fangled games called MMOs I’m not sure what they’ll change exactly. Likely a bunch of stuff that will annoy the crap out of people and send them into a rage.

Week 3: Collecting and Trading probably has to do with the trading post. I envision filters for searching different armour classes for one. Perhaps some UI changes? I remember Guild Wars changed our User Interface a few times but I’ve yet to see any major UI changes in Guild Wars 2. Beyond that I don’t have any real guesses. I enjoy the way collections work right now so I’m slightly apprehensive about it.

And I’ll think I’ll end there as I don’t have any further predictions beyond wild speculation based on zero evidence.

Finish Him!

March 10, 2014 at 6:06 pm | Posted in Gem Store, Guild Wars 2, mmorpg, PvE, PvP, WvW | 2 Comments
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I’ve had a lot of complaints about Guild Wars 2’s gem store over the past year and a half. There’s the weird pricing structures, expensive temporary items, and the potential power creep of some items becoming more useful than comparable older items. One thing I’m becoming more and more tempted by however are the finishers.

Finishers are mostly for PvP. It’s basically a little animation when you stomp someone in WvW, Structured PvP, and increasingly in PvE as well. There are 12 available in the gem store ranging in price from about 500 gems to 800. And I really want to buy one.

I have some temporary finishers ready to go, 10 or 20 collected from festivals and other rewards from playing the game. Not to mention the default finisher which is basically just a spear driven into the ground, and my PvP rank finisher which is just the cutest wittle bunny wabbit family hopping around a banner. None of the temporary ones would really last long, certainly not in WvW, so I’m definitely looking at something more permanent.

With the Toxic Alliance living story arc however a lot of PvE mobs suddenly had a downed phase. I don’t know if that was specifically put in to drive up the sale of finishers but it has certainly worked on me. I’ve been looking through youtube trying to figure out which finisher is best finisher.

For instance, while I find the Permanent Quaggan Finisher (see video below) amusing, I don’t think I want a permanent one. A lot of the finishers are pretty cool, and there a number of them that aren’t currently on sale like the Permanent Super Explosive Finisher, and numerous festival-related finishers.

Anyway I just thought I’d give credit where it’s due, finishers are a great cosmetic item in the gem shop. Now I just have to figure out which way I want to send players and mobs into the mists. Whumped by a giant maybe? Straddled by a spectre of death?

Let’s see more PvE downed state guys.

Why Guesting is Important

September 6, 2012 at 5:50 pm | Posted in Guild Wars 2, mmorpg, PvP, WvW | 16 Comments
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I was pretty disappointed that guesting wasn’t going to be in at launch. It’s a big feature to me, but having free transfers has certainly been an acceptable compromise. Also I’ve actually managed to play with others on overflow servers and do a dungeon run with people on other servers since it doesn’t seem to matter what server you’re on in a dungeon.

Guesting will become more important again once overflow servers begin to disappear as is already happening.

Anyway guesting was never really for primarily PvE players like me anyway. The need for it comes from World vs World. Being able to naturally transfer around servers would upset the player balance in that part of the game. People would naturally tend towards winning servers instead of sticking it out with the server they settled on.

Which brings me to the problems my own server has been having.

I guess I’ll have to start from the beginning. My guild is friendly with some guilds who are friendly with some guilds who wanted to create a successful World vs World community. They bought the server’s domain name, set up a forum, formed an alliance, invited everyone to particpate and a lot of people ended up on our server.

Initially our server had essentially been doing very well. We’d won every match up by quite a bit. The problem was we were doing too well, the queues for World vs World were hours long. You’d be damn lucky to be able to form a guild group let alone play with someone you know.

At this point people started to grumble but the heads of the alliance advised everyone to stick it out since it was still the first week and queues were bound to die down. Maybe it was random, or maybe because the matchup system is working, we were then matched up against other successful WvW servers.

We did not do so well.

This seemed to be the catalyst to make these WvW guilds start to panic. Several large and well known guilds have left, including the guild that went so far as to buy the domain name.

Ask them and they’ll start complaining that escorting dolyak groups were out of control. Ask them and they’ll say that if you were just in WvW to explore or screw around you should leave so that they could play WvW. Ask them and they’ll say the queues were just too long.

But if you ask me, suddenly dolyak farming has disappeared (Edit: yeah because they took out the rewards apparently) from WvW on my server. If you ask me, everyone has a right to join in WvW, it isn’t your server, its ours. And if you ask me WvW went from me not even being able to get in to me playing whenever I want.

We’re getting crushed though. We’re being matched up against top servers who have guilds like Goon Squad when we really don’t warrant it.

I’m not saying people can’t play where they want, or that long queues weren’t frustrating or painful. I’m just saying if you want to build a stable community, leave a legacy, try giving it more than a week.

And that is why guesting will be important in the future. To stop nonsense like this. Entire alliances shifting where they play on a whim.

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