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Guild Wars 2 Official Forums and Dev Activity
Finit
Member Posts: 145
in Guild Wars 2
One thing I feel that hasn't been talked about enough on these forums is the amount of developer activity on the Guild Wars 2 official forums. Since the forums have opened up to the public, which is less than one week old, there have been over 36 pages of developer comments.
f you were in last weekend's beta then you should already have access to the official forums for Guild Wars 2. The forum offers an easy, sleek design that allows you to communicate anything and everything about GW2. It is a great resource, and if you access you should really take a look. Many of ArenaNet's developers have responded to lots of critical and constructive feedback. The site even offers a Dev tracker that allows anyone to see what they are saying. If you are at all interested in Guild Wars, you need to look below:
Here's some examples of What's Been Said (just in case you don't follow/aren't in the forums)
-A sell all junk feature has been added to the game. This was developed in response to the beta test.
-AOE's and the number of targets
This is a general rule of our skill system. AoE attacks hit up to 5 targets. AoE buffs or heals can heal up to 5. We cap it at 5 because its the party size and lets us reign in the balance on AoE without impacting most normal situations. WvW is the one place where this shows up, but we believe the alternative is worse. Hope this helps…
And Jon later continues with the smart-aoe targeting the game has. This was actually pretty interesting.
It prioritizes targets.For enemies:1) Your selected target assuming they are in range.2) enemies based on proximity to you.For allies:1) party members based on proximity to you2) non party members based on proximity to you.Hope that helps.
-Crowd control and the shorter duration in Guild Wars 2:
Our CC tends to be shorter in duration because long durations are simply not fun for people who get hit with them and end up stunlocked till dead. On the other hand, almost every profession has access to at least some form of CC between stuns, knockdowns, knockbacks, chills, etc.Everyone will need to learn that one of the keys to GW2 combat is WHEN to use your CC, and not just hit it as soon as you engage so you can roflstomp the target. Trust me, knockbacks used on people ressing can turn entire fights.
-Adressing concerns over the Norn Personal Story:
We can certainly examine the norn content and learn from our mistakes, whether or not we have the time and resources to make radical changes before ship. Changing the flow of a story involves almost every department in the studio, from design and writing to programming, art and animation. Simple dialogue edits and re-recording VO impacts cinematic conversations, so we can sometimes justify going back into the booth to change story elements but it’s more difficult to overhaul plot, and it also means more work for the animators.
-PvE balance is being readjusted. In the beta, there were some mob types that were significantly more difficult than others in very close proximity. There were also some very hard phases to personal story while there were other parts that were very easy to complete.
Since there’s a lot of topics and discussions on this, I figured I’d make a post to let you guys know that we’re listening to your feedback on the matter, and there are valid points on both sides of the issue. In general, we’ve been fairly happy with the difficulty of the game in most places. However, we’re still in the process of working on PvE balance, so a lot of things will probably be adjusted and changed in the upcoming weeks. Here’s some of the areas we’re looking into updating:
New-player experience
: It often takes people a while to get used to GW2 combat and learn to avoid attacks and learn what their skills do and how they work. We’re looking at slowing down the rate in which we introduce different enemy mechanics so that new players have more of a chance to get accustomed to the game.
Event scaling
: We’re looking at ways to make the scaling on a lot of events work better for large amounts of players.
Monster balance
: Some enemies are significantly more difficult than others while others aren’t very threatening- we’re working on updating the balance for both of these categories so that there’s a more consistent difficulty level between various enemy types.
Individual quest and event balance
: Some events and personal story quests can be overly difficult, and we’re looking at identifying these places.
-Melee vs. Ranged Combat is being greatly looked into. The quote is below:
Hey all. I wanted to talk about this a bit since it is a hot topic here and also on the internets. The intention is that both styles are viable. Certainly right now Melee is more difficult than ranged. There are some things we will try to do to address this, but I think the more you play you would find they are closer than you think.
First what’s already there:
1) Melee does more damage. Melee damage is simply higher than ranged damage across the board.
2) Melee has more control. With a few intentional exception Melee has a lot more control than ranged.
What Melee needs:
1) defensive tools on more weapons, particularly on lower armor professions.
2) ai needs to favor Melee a bit less than it currently does.
What else:
Finally because of the more action based nature of combat Melee needs to be taught better. Effective Melee requires skills that translate over from FPS games which are notoriously harder on casual players. You have to wasd to move, constantly aim with your mouse camera, and hit skills on 1-5.
Some tips:
If you have learned any good Melee tips that you think we should pass on to newer players feel free to post them here. I’ll start with a few tips of my own.
- If you don’t have mouse look on when using a skill you will turn to face. I sometimes let go of mouse look as I activate to help me aim through the chaos and then click it back down in between attacks.
- Melee has a lot of hard hitting skills and good setup. Utility skills Can really help set up big Melee attacks. Bulls charge on warrior, scorpion wire on thief, judges intervention on guardian.
- know when to run. No matter what you are not a tank. You have to move in and out avoiding damage. If you have to soak damage try and bring boons like Protection and Regeneration or conditions like Blindness and the very undervalued Weakness.
Thanks for reading this all. Rest assured we will keep working on this and just keep in mind the subtle differences in GW2 combat that take a while to sink in.
Jon
My Guild Wars 2 Blog can be found here: Divinity's Reach
Comments
My Guild Wars 2 Blog can be found here: Divinity's Reach
Nah, many of them just ignore the stuff they don't want to hear, like the long thread begging FunCom to wait a few more months with releasing AoC.
But ANET have been good with their dev to player relations, otherwise the game wouldn´t have been that hyped up here.
Not that Strange, Jeff Strain, founder of ANET lead designer of GW1 and GW2 (for the first 3 years) were very active on forums as well.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
My Guild Wars 2 Blog can be found here: Divinity's Reach
Ah the junk seller is awesome. I was hoping they might get a name filter of some type like LORTO has so the names aren't all unrelated to role playing. Toaster Cord comes to mind is one I saw. All though if you were a Fire Mage in WoW that might work. Also, a check name feature on character creation. Sometimes I will think of a character in my head, give him a name, and build the character. Problem is if I spend 20 min building him and the name is taken I have wasted my time!
edit: I need to learn to spell check before posting
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
That's one thing I really like about ArenaNet, they aren't afraid to interact with their customers. I've been browsing the official forums since they were opened and it is very common to see the devs answering questions and replying to suggestions.
It's good PR. Makes you feel like your opinion actually matters.
Wait, did you have to go back and re-build your character after the name was taken? I think that might have been a glitch, because that certainly did not happen to me.
My Guild Wars 2 Blog can be found here: Divinity's Reach
No, I build the character around the name. I'm backwards I guess. I take a name like Allanon for example from the Terrey Brooks Shannara series. He was tall, dark, and bearded. If I take the time to build him and the name is already taken, I have to start over again with a new name and character. I don't always build characters this way, but it is something I do.
Edit: for shannara spelling :O
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
If your ideas are good they will stand up to criticism. In fact they will be enhanced by it.
If you are just guessing your ideas often fall apart like a house of cards instead.
Many developers are just guessing and deep down they know it and are too scared to lay it on the line.
This is not a game.
I agree, there was so much synergy in some of the builds you could make. However, there were some professions which I don't think work quite as well as others yet, but again beta is beta.
My Guild Wars 2 Blog can be found here: Divinity's Reach
nice to see arena net showing they actually care what we think which is more than i can say for most of the MMO's i have played where the dev's have little to no interaction with the community. Thanks for putting those quotes together from the devtracker OP
I also liked dev activity.
They already answered about some concerns players were having and said they were working on it. Some aspects i was concerned with already were mentioned by developers as something they are aware of.
I didnt play melee this last weekend and saw some players complaining about melee combat. But at same time i watched some well played, with good builds, warriors and i was impressed with it, some videos at this forum. Not sure if they are underpowered or if we just arent used to it.
I also saw that Jon Peters post at offical forums and was nice to see they are aware of players issues.
My name is Mike, and I approve of this message.
nothing to add sorry 
.
Apart from the forums, I've never see a tweeter as busy as GW2's official twitter on Friday night, he was replying to almost all the ppl that were reporting things via tweets.
I'm usually pretty diligent about always reading everything a Dev Tracker links to, and not just in Guildwars. But god....damn.... There was no freaking way I was going to keep up with that one. And there really wasn't that much feedback for them to even read DURING the weekend when it was going on. The only people spamming it with messages were the ones who couldn't get in b/c A> They didn't buy the right thing. B> They were trying to play GW2 on a Toaster
It really does. But it's important to remember they're all different from eachother too. People posting in Crafting should try to be as Polite as they can b/c the lady heading that one isn't the hardened Flame-Warrior Jon Peters and are few others are. ...And Colin, I imagine that guy can just laugh off anything b/c he's so happy all the time. But a number of other ones can be thin skinned at times. So you really have to take a different tact if you expect them to keep listening. And then there's 1 or 2 others who will never listen b/c they have their "private bubble" like Guilds and circles of cronies to tell them all the right things they want to hear.
I think my Favorite dev now though is Kristen. ...it's hard not to be inspired by her amazing commitment to Art as a real living substance with scientific reasoning behind it, rather than just eye candy
...it really makes me want to be a "compelling Artist" too instead of just a Popular one.
It'll be interesting to see what they do with all of the feedback that was given.
The sword of shannara was my first ever fantasy novel that I read for enjoyment (not school). It's what got me interested in fantasy, which of course led me to the king of all fantasy, the Silmarillion. Allanon is still one of my most favorite characters of all time.
Ok......How on earth do i get to the official gw2 forums?.....I have literally been trying to figure this out for almost an hour.
I went https://forum.guildwars2.com but it says you have to sign in, but there's no way to sign up.....
What. The hell. Is going on here.
If that's not the official forum, then what is? Where are you getting this info from? So confused.
You have to be a beta tester to view the beta forums. While it's in read only mode, they could probably make those viewable by anyone. The tone of the forums is good and there is nothing there that people shouldn't be allowed to see, since the BWEs are not under NDA. If you pre-purchase the game, you'll be able to set up an account and read them. Otherwise, you'll just have to wait and see if Arenanet opens them for public viewing at some point.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Ok thank you! Finally i know what's going on!
Is there anywhere i can go to see what the devs are saying on the boards?
Isn't it more blasphemous that you spelled the writers name wrong rather than the serie's name. It's Terry. Also Landover > Shannara