Solvar.7953

I don't know the history, but I expect the case was true that when the prices were first set up, the costs were all about the same. Every once in a while, the re-adjust the prices for materials to buy boxes in festival of the four winds due to changing prices - that might make sense for Anet to do for provisioner tokens. OTOH, basing prices for something (runes/sigils) whose value can greatly change on some future balance update might just not be a good idea in general. Making those exchanges based on something a bit less volatile may make sense.

The provisioner tokens are somewhat annoying, regardless what you need them for. The vendors are spread across all sorts of different maps (hopping from one to the other is hardly what I would call interesting play), and the cost of what you can buy (via materials) can have greatly different prices - one of the various weapons will cost ~30s, where as 20 superior sigils of icebrood slaying will run you closer to 25 gold. And there are some items with even lower values - I have more obsidian shards than I need, so I exchange those in 1/day. But the fastest way, if you play much WvW, is to exchange the WvW currencies - you can do 25/week, so only need to do 1/week (vs daily) and you get a nice stash quickly. https://fast.farming-community.eu/conversions/provisioner-token is a handy list of the relative costs of how to get the different tokens.

Most dailies now are very quick - gather resources, view a vista, do some combat mechanic. There are a few that can take a bit longer (hearts come to mind). While dungeons can be quick (still not as quick as many of the current dailies), you then have to add in the time to form a group. I suspect if dungeons were added back in as dailies, few people would do it, instead choosing the other quicker options.

Given there is currently a weekly for doing 1 fractal, a weekly for 1 dungeon would be comparable in terms of time/effort (depending on what fractal or dungeon, time to complete would vary). For that matter, they could just change that to 'do 1 dungeon or 1 fractal', though maybe in that case, everyone would just choose the fractal.

I would say as a general rule, timers are a bad design for any content. I sort of get it may be so that players don't have a super defensive/healing build but only do 1k dps to wear down a monster (eg, champion hero point) for 30 minutes. But if a player chooses to do that, why not let them? It is just very frustrating playing any content (meta, strike, whatever) and end up spending x minutes at it to end up being 20 seconds short of doing it successfully. To a great degree, the reward for doing them faster is that you can do something else. And some content provides better rewards for doing it faster. And there may be cases where things are on fixed timings (like most of HoT metas) where things sort of have to time out and reset so the next meta cycle can begin. But timers are applied to a lot more than just that.

I also imagine that even if you take Anet for their word that this change was to to give them more time to work on the core game, the priority would be for content that is active year round, and not something active 3 weeks/year. There are enough bugs/issues with core content that it could likely keep a couple devs constantly busy, and I'd personally rather they be fixing that than adding to festivals. I think this is better for the game also - I doubt festivals have much impact on sales for the game. But I could imagine new players (perhaps on the free account) running into issues and thinking 'if I'm getting bugs/problems here, no way am I going to spend money on this'. And it does seem that changes over the past few years have been to try and make the new user experience better, but I also think there is a lot more that could be done.

Using temporary events like this to provide mystic coins is probably a smart way to increase supply without making changes that may have unforeseen consequences down the road, which is often the case if drop rate is increased slightly or crafting recipes are changed. In those cases, it can take quite a while for the market to stabilize based on those new supplies/demand. But with a temporary event, Anet can probably get a pretty good idea of the total number of coins that will get added to the game over this event. Not every player is going to do all 3 dailies every day (I know I'm not). They can look at the TP and see number of outstanding orders and what price. So if Anet thinks mystic coins are overpriced, this is a good way to bring that price down in a controlled fashion - if the price drops too much, then next bonus event likely won't give out mystic coins and something else instead, to let the mystic coin price rebound.

I suspect that rewarding players for reporting botters will result in that getting abused pretty quickly - people reporting anyone that remotely looks like they are AFK, even if that person is not, just for the rewards. So then you need to add a system to punish players who report for now good reason. And the thing is, Anet will not ban someone based only on reports - they need to send a GM there to verify that in fact the person is AFK (by sending them a GM message asking if they are AFK). So even if 20 people report someone as AFK in some area, that GM still needs to show up and verify it. And that is likely the real reason not a lot is done - sending a GM requires actual human time investment, and Anet just doesn't consider the problem with the cost policing it.

Anet also abandoned the living world idea after season 1 when they realized it wasn't sustainable (eg, content that is released only once, and what players do will dictate some future design decisions). While that was an interesting idea, I can see how it doesn't work out. So at this point, anything promised at the release of the game (or even 2+ years ago) may have no relation to current design philiosophy.

While I agree in principal that #1 should be fixed (AFK runners), I suspect the reason Anet has not spent much time on this is they know those who want to AFK will just find some other method to do so. I believe AFK running is already against TOS, so if that was cracked down, instead players would find macros/programs that automatically (and randomly) press other keys now and again - using skills, changing direction, etc. This is of course also against TOS, but if they players don't currently care about TOS (and Anet doesn't enforce it), this is the end result. For #2 to work, I would presume that you wouldn't enter with whatever character you were playing when you are allowed to join, but instead when you switch to another character, could join with that one. But with #4 (1 minute to enter), that timing could be tight - I could imagine a situation where I'm in the middle of doing something that takes 30 seconds to finish up, and then logging out and switching characters and waiting for that character to load is now getting close to that one minute. But I do like the idea of #2 - even something light weight like crafting could be done while waiting, and then switch to the other character when you can join. I suspect there may be technical limitations on why this might no be able to happen (if at the character selection screen but not playing a character, the state of the character/account may be in some odd state that is hard to track progress), but I do overall like the ideas.

The problem with a WvW expansion (other than mentioned with likely low amount of people buying it), is what happens to the WvW players who do not buy it? Not allowed to go on the new maps? Not allowed to play WvW at all? This works easily enough for PvE - players can not go to the new maps or do other content related to it, but for WvW, really unclear how that works in any fashion. I play occasional WvW, but I wouldn't buy an expansion of only WvW. But it would be a very unpopular thing if there are new objections, but in general those players who bought the expansion is unable to find anyone to help them capture it because those who do not own it get nothing for doing so. And if those not owning do get something, then why buy the expansion? I suppose they could add new reward tracks that only those who own this expansion can access. A lot of people would likely say that isn't an expansion worth of content, others would just look and see if there is anything in those new reward tracks they care about it, etc.

GW2 is known to be CPU limited, and the 4790 is at this point a very old cpu (8 generations behind as Intel has released 12xx series). The 4790 was released 10 years ago, so while it may not be the sole cause of it being slow, it is almost certainly a contributing factor. The speed of other things (PCIE bus speeds, SSD (now nvme), memory, etc, other speeds are also much faster). 2 minutes sounds really slow, so makes me think something else is wrong, but hard to say what.

There are probably many reasons why Anet doesn't take player feedback. Forum users are a tiny minority of the player base. Forum users by and large are not typical players (if you are an active forum user, you are probably more invested in the game than typical players). So taking too much input from forum skews the game which the overall player base may not want. Now I would think for build issues, this can be easily examined (eg, one can figure the DPS of a given build) compared to content that is less quantifiable (type of maps/quests/encounters to add), where they follow what forum input suggest people want, and the forum users might be happy what Anet came up with, but the overall playerbase was not.

I also felt these unstable abilities were a cop out for a thought out design. Instead of getting abilities that make sense for a given boss, we are instead given these abilities that make no actual sense but get brushed under a 'unstable magic', which is why they have them. While I know it is a game, and a lot of stuff is put in to challenge players, I also like that content that follows within the lore of the game world. It would be a simple thing to make a game where monsters just have random abilities (or even random maps/dungeons) - I'd be unlikely to pay for such a game. I'm willing to pay for GW2 (or other games) that have actually thought out the content they provide. In some cases, less can be more - if the reason for doing this was so they could quickly put out a lot of bounties because they didn't have to think about them much, I might have instead preferred having half as many bounties but each creature having some thought out abilities.

I totally get that power creep has resulted in higher DPS, and a group with optimized builds and high DPS will breeze through some bosses quickly. The problem is that groups that have less than ideal DPS now find these fights long and boring. And I have a feeling that there are more people/groups in this category than in the optimized DPS category. The danger I see is that if Anet continues to design fractals for the high DPS parties, this may alienate the more typical DPS groups who will find those fractals long and boring, and choose not to play them. Them Anet sees that not many people are not playing those new fractals and thinks there is a lack of interest in new fractals, and decides to stop making any new ones. Which is not the actual problem - it is just the new ones with high HP or annoying mechanics are not popular.