Guild Wars 2

I’ve been pretty vocal in my dislike of time-gated content in general, and time-gated crafting specifically. I’ve been trying to think up alternative solutions that would work out for everyone. Here’s the best I’ve come up with so far:

Ablative Timegates

The purpose of an Ablative Timegate is to restrict the availability of an item, but to do so in a way that gradually relaxes the restrictions over time. This allows new content to be introduced at a measured pace, but without lingering onerous timegates that outlive their usefulness.

Example 1:

Recipe X is the hot new item that all the characters want to get. In addition to the usual assortment of farmed materials, harvested materials, crafted materials, and currency materials, the recipe calls for 1 Item X.

Item X can only be bought from a vendor (Miyani, perhaps). On release day, the item costs 50 Laurels to buy. Each day thereafter, the price drops by 1 Laurel until it stabilizes at 5 Laurels.

(These are just random numbers I made up for demo purposes)
(It doesn’t have to be Laurels. It could be any currency, really, but it shouldn’t be gold or anything that can be bought with cash or gems.)

This is an “Ablative Timegate”. Hardcore players who HAVE to have it on day one can do so as long as they’re willing to pay the very high cost for Item X.

But over time, the price drops to something more reasonable, and players can jump in at their own comfort level. Once the price hits 5 Laurels, it stays there. The content at that point has been in the game for over a month, so a time-gate is really unnecessary, and it’s pointless to keep punishing players who are pursuing this content.

Another version of the Ablative Timegate:

“The Gardening Method”

Item X is a rare fruit. You can’t just buy it from a vendor, but you CAN give Item X Seeds to a vendor who will grow them for you. One Item X Seed will produce one Item X on a predictable timer (say, 1/day). When it’s ready, you can retrieve it for crafting. OR you can leave the Item X with the NPC and they will continue to produce Item X at a rate of 1/day until you collect them. This way you still have your “daily craft timer” but it isn’t a chore that players have to do every day, and it doesn’t favor those who can log in every day over those who can’t.

Item X doesn’t have to be a fruit, and it doesn’t need to require a seed. It can be anything that produces something else:

Seed X produces Fruit X
Seed X produces Flower X
Spider X produces Silk X
Chemical X produces Power Puff Girls (sorry, I could resist)
Solution X produces Crystal X
Snake X produces Venom X

And so on.

You can further expand/restrict the availability of these items be changing how many of them can be “ongoing” at a time. Maybe the vendor can only handle 1 Snake X at a time, and 1 Venom X per day is the best you can get. Or maybe he can handle 5 Snake X and you can retrieve up to 5 Venom X per day. Or maybe it’s the same vendor for all of these items, and you have to decide if you want 1 Flower X per day, or 1 Silk X per day, but you can change it whenever you need to and start producing something else instead.

You can further restrict availability by adding more types of items to be produced. Maybe there are Seed X, Seed Y, and Seed Z. You can produce whichever you like, but only one kind at a time.

I think I’d be a lot better with it all if I could queue up a number of something, and they all happen for me in the background, and at the end of “x days”, I get them all then.
What I’ve found the most frustrating thing about the current time gating is that I have to load the character with the right pre-req (be it appropriate crafting skill or “is holding crystals to transmute” or whatever), and then take them to the right spot…. each day.
If I could queue up “build 10 mithrillium”, and then come back 10 days later, and it’s done… that’d be SOOOO much better.

Maybe have a “layaway” system where you provide the materials now, and queue them all up, and then, at the end of however many days, you get the benefit in the mail. The balance is you get less annoyance, but have to wait until the end to get any of the items.

How about they just lose the time gates completely and we can all get back to playing the game the way we want to play it?

Yup. No timegates is the “Play how you want” default setting. But I’m assuming the devs have compelling reasons for using them at all, so I’m trying to offer some alternatives. I’m mostly just trying to avoid another timegate fail like we had with Ascended Weapons.

The problem with what you want from anet’s perspective is it defeats the purpose of why they are adding time gated materials. They want you to log in everyday. That is how they feel they maximize their potential profit.

They should have never allowed those time gated mats on to the TP if they wanted to keep a true time gate. Still, they basically are time gating the casual crowd, which is really who the time gated items are geared toward.