Guild Wars 2

Hello Anet,

I’d like to express my worries about the trend you’ve been going on for a while. I’m a dedicated player which has all the professions (8 of them) at level 80. Ever since ascended gear was introduced I had some issues… getting all the gear for my characters takes 8 times longer.

Now sure, some would say I dug my own grave, but my arguments are simple and I don’t consider them to be to greedy or over the top.

I played other mmos, most notably WoW… I’m not asking you to turn into WoW. But wow would allow me to play 8 times as much in order to obtain my gear.

So a brief history of my leveling and adventuring:

1) My first character, a shy little Mesmer discovers the world and gets to 80
2) Experiance as much of the game as possible pve, spvp, tpvp, wvw.
3) Level up all the other professions, learn their play styles (this was surprisingly easy and fast)
4) Ascended gear introduced, run fractals every second of the day get random drops nothing ever fits my builds/gear.
5) Get a total of 5 ascended rings ever.
6) Ascended ring tokens introduced (10 = 1 ring), farm 20 tokens (no drops mind you) finally get rings for main, never do fractals again! my alts can throw themselves of a bridge. Infuse etc. (I got to F30 with 0 agony res)
7) Get back piece with relics, upgrade etc. Same story, I’m not gonna grind so many hours for my alts. (I know I can craft them, but your basically saying more alts = more gold)
8) Amulets introduced, these can only be purchased through Laurels a new currency. Obtained at 1 per day and 20 per monthly. This means you can get 1.6 amulets per month.
9) Accessories introduced, 5 gold and 12 guild tokens. Ignoring that guilds had to level up to get access to all 6 guild tokens a week, that limits you to a month to get 2 accessories for 1 character. Or you can pay 40 Laurels and 50 Ectos, which means 2 months and 20 days + gold for 2 accessories.
10) Celestial gear and the new shards 1/day resource. If I’d wanted to gear a character not only would I need the recipie before hand (which completely over rides the crafting system, as most good looking gear overrides the crafting with the forge), I would only get 1 resource per day considering I got 25 shards.

Conclusion:

I would currently need to run 160 fractals. – Rings
Complete daily and monthly for 5 Months. – Amulets
Complete Guild missions each week for 8 months or complete daily and monthly for 7.1 months + gold – Accessories
And an additional 14800 relics – Back slot

Now you’re saying you want to add new 1/day materials in order to craft ascended armor and weapons. How many months do you want me to play for 48 armor slots that I have to replace +/- weapons I’d like to use.

Problems with this:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this. Which seems awfully counter intuitive seeing as you are selling character slots in the gem shop. (sure people can buy them for pvp, but then again they can just delete a character and make a new profession at lvl 1)
- This makes the idea of having more sets of armor or off-specs even more difficult, the way I’m seeing it now its you either have one character with a lot of armor sets or many characters who fit different roles.
- I mentioned above that the bag piece is the only exception which can also be crafted with gold, but this for me seems very obtrusive towards the idea that a character can be a self contained person and achieve everything on his own. So the choice becomes either waste time and grind gold or waste time and farm fractals with my main who is higher level and can get the relics needed faster. (this is really not a strong point, since it actually lets you grind, but non-the-less…really slow)
- 1/day resources, this will probably be the bane of my existence in gathering the necessary resources to craft 8 sets of armor and 14 sets of weapons. This again will make the chances of a profession having an off-spec almost null.
- Most of the ascended gear works around the crafting system, like most the desired good looking gear in the game, legendary weapons who only slightly dip in there with the gifts.
- Celestial gear completely skips the discovery process of the crafting system, with the requirement of actually needing the recipes as well as some previous event gear.
- Always being scared of that one big nerf that will make all your gear useless and the need of repeating this long and painful process.

Things Anet has done to make this easier:

- First of all adding the ring tokens .Having a RNG on gear, especially on account bound gear is a horrible idea.
- Adding more methods to obtain gear, Laurels and guild commendations can be used for more than 1 type of ascended gear, but this is still impractical seeing as guild commendations need to be exclusively be used on accessories in order to gain the maximum efficiency. And gratz on adding ascended gear to WvW… its not my slice of the pie but at least you get a discount of 10 laurels if I’m not mistaking and also helping the players who almost exclusively play wvw.

Things other MMOs have done to help this:

- No RNG, Currency for completing dungeons, quests etc.
- RNG, Items are not character/account bound on pickup or if they are bound then a party loot system is usually present in order to get the gear to who needs it.
- Drop and token hybrid, the player performs the necessary task and either gets Good loot on RNG and token, or gets Bad loot on RNG and badges. Badges always serve as a sense of progress towards the players goal in acquiring his end game gear.
- Bound resources not being soul bound, a simple rule of the thumb is if I can’t do anything with an item to affect the game, market or someone else they will not be 1/day. The player should not feel crippled for the effort in maintenance of more than one character, this also applies to having on character with more than one spec.

Final thoughts:

I cannot possibly give a suggestion that would not brake the current system or cause fury to people. So I will just say I’ve been born in a country which 24 years ago was a communist country, and I still hear stories about going to the local supply center and waiting for hours in queue to get your 1/day liter of milk per person and such, I’m not calling ANet communists mind you, I’m only implying the same thing over and over again which is, do not:

- Put player in a queue (wait for daily/weekly/monthly)
- Ask them to put effort in the game (cause the daily/weekly/monthly is not going to solve itself)
- Make the process even slower for more characters and flexible players with more off-specs (Even the commies didn’t ask all of us to present ourselves to the queue , and under the ridiculous constraint of one at a time in the hole queue)

FAQ.

- Didn’t wow also make you grind once a week on raids ?

Yes. But the sense of progress was always there, I could always get off-spec items and by the end of the cycle new content would be available always keeping me in motion, this also caused stronger gear to now become obsolete and easier to acquire (not asking for more gear in gw2). + alt runs were fun!

- Didn’t more characters also require you to farm even more raids ?

Yes. But being a top guild player (not Ensidia/Paragon or anything but top 100), we would clear content pretty fast, raids quickly degraded into farm or alt runs and they were always good for training on the main raid. And lets be serious current content does not require TOP players.

- Ascended gear is end game gear you have to work for it! shouldn’t you?

Yes. But not by forcing players to be in a queue, most MMOs don’t scale the reward of your progress by time spent in the game and even more so by enforcing a set minimum time, and gw2 extends this even more for multi-spec/profession players. This discourages players from playing together since there will be a “time-gap” and the nature of GW2 pve is cooperation. MMOs tend to scale in difficulty instead, requesting the player to present with a lower tier of gear in order to acquire the next one. An easy method for this would be to only allow players with full exotic either by arbitrary decision or adding a stat on all exotic gear which allows the ability to damage Fractal Mobs and lowering the time spent in needing to acquire ascended gear. This creates a slick progression ladder which encourages players to go from whites to blues to greens to oranges and finally purples.

I will gladly ask any questions and would like to encourage discussion on this and civilization on expressing your opinion. Sorry for the long post, I posted this pretty late and expect grammatical errors and bad math.

TL;DR.

A poorly written post late at night about the difficulty in amassing gear for multi-spec/profession players and the current GW2 system which punishes these players + worries for the next tier of ascended gear and time based progression instead of the pinnacles of GW2 which “are”/“should be” skill, effort and dedication.

Not going to lie…didn’t bother reading most of the post…but if your issue is with not being able to gear all your alts with ascended armor/weapons…you will be able to but them from the TP.

Amun Ra.6435:

Not going to lie…didn’t bother reading most of the post…but if your issue is with not being able to gear all your alts with ascended armor/weapons…you will be able to but them from the TP.

Rings, Accessories, Amulets are unobtainable from from the TP and probably so will the armor and weapons considering the celestial armor patch. Back items as stated in my post can be obtained but are extremely expensive and result in the same process, either farm relics or farm gold, which in both cases seems acceptable but redundant seeing as they are two long grinding routes to the same destination.

Also edited topic to better reflect the post content.

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

Hastur.6231:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this

That’s a great thing. Considering how “dedicated players” is usually how people talk about grinders, limiting the grinders’ ability of receiving more rewards than other players by doing mindless, easy content for 18+ hours per day is a very good idea.

Regarding your point about alts being somewhat punished due to the “1 per day per account” limit, I agree. While I’m sure people would abuse the system if it could be used by level 1 characters, it wouldn’t hurt if the Quartz node in the personal instance was availble daily for each level 80 character in a given account. I doubt this would happen, though.

I approve of everything OP said. People with alts are screwed. I’ve always hated that I had to spend laurels to get amulets.
Of course alts require more gold+work but that’s the fun about them. Limiting to 1/day is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard Anet say.
And I don’t get what’s so bad about grinding. No one is forcing you to. Here, again, we see how Anet fails with work vs. reward. Which is probably their main issue in the game.
If I want to grind to gear up my alts, why don’t let me?

kahzee.6042:

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

I think the 3rd question in my FAQ answers this quite nicely or at least partially. I do agree you should not be instantly geared, but I currently need 8 moths of game time to gear my characters. I mean I literally only need to log in one hour per day, for 8 months, face book mechanics are not a really good approach when trying to play an MMO, since MMOs thrive on player activity and not encouraging user to go off-line because they cannot progress any more that day.

Erasculio.2914:

Hastur.6231:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this

That’s a great thing. Considering how “dedicated players” is usually how people talk about grinders, limiting the grinders’ ability of receiving more rewards than other players by doing mindless, easy content for 18+ hours per day is a very good idea.

Regarding your point about alts being somewhat punished due to the “1 per day per account” limit, I agree. While I’m sure people would abuse the system if it could be used by level 1 characters, it wouldn’t hurt if the Quartz node in the personal instance was availble daily for each level 80 character in a given account. I doubt this would happen, though.

I agree whit almost all you said, but with the limiting factor. I don’t see why you would limit gear progression on ascended items seeing as they cannot be sold, salvaged or affect the economy of the game in any way, this is also pve gear so my progression on account bound, non-marketable items does not affect other players in any way, and as stated above 8 moths is slightly over doing it in terms of limitations.

On WvW side of things, It can be a bother some to some people but arguments against that are:

- Dungeon running gear is not really the most efficient way of gearing for WvW, palyers who want to WvW and need off-spec armor are also affected by the issues above
- Having some extra stats would help me survive or deal more damage in a 1v1, 5v5 maybe even a 10v10. But current tactics of WvW still make ascended gear a negligible advantage when the enemy still has superior numbers in his blob.
- Allowing me to gear all my characters will not disadvantage servers, seeing as I cannot simultaneously play all my 8 characters (which would be silly), but if I attempt to swap to another character to adapt to a situation, I would be stuck in a queue for 1 hour, until I’ll be back in wvw…I’ll just probably need to swap back to my main.

Thank you for all your replies and participation in this discussion. I would also like to point out SSalp’s post. Legendaries, exotic gear, dungeon tokens and even gold are grindable resources. Making an account bound, non marketable resource limited on account (not character mind you) is just silly.

kahzee.6042:

You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

The problem is the balance between instantly and requiring an amount of effort that is fun which is obviously subjective.

For me even running dungeons often enough for the armor is a huge effort. Besides doing the same content so many times, the real problem here is I don’t see any need to get these items. In PvE you are fine without Ascended or Exotic gear. So where is the fun doing things you don’t need?

It should be character bound for characters lv 80

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

Also, I’m fairly certain you do not play all your professions equally. I’m sure the others can manage with exotics while you earn your way through them. Keeps you busy!

My problem with one a day limits is real life. Some days I have hours to blow on GW2… some days I don’t get to log on. I’d love to spend a lazy Saturday grinding for mats, and nor feel panicky about missing the next six chances.

Evans.6347:

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

Also, I’m fairly certain you do not play all your professions equally. I’m sure the others can manage with exotics while you earn your way through them. Keeps you busy!

I see your point evans, but even so. I already currently “don’t have anything to do” since I have to wait for my daily to reset, my weekly guild missions to reset and the monthly to reset… see where I’m going with this ?

If I ever get my ascended in 8th months (doubtful since soon I will need to also get weapons and armor, how many months will that take?) I won’t have anything to do, but I also currently don’t have anything to do already, I want to play more guild wars, but its not letting me do it because my progress is currently blocked by their system.

Not to mention my other two points:

- it is impossible to have offspecs in my case. since that will steal progress from another character!
- Being afraid of that one big nerf or one of those new traits/skills that will force me out of my build/gear and require the process of waiting to be allowed to progress all over again.

Although I don’t agree with a lot of what you said, there a few things I do agree with you on:
1. The 1/day thing is extremely annoying! If I want to farm it right away, then that should be my choice. If I want to take my time, then that should be my choice.
2. Account bound equipment (can’t remember if you touched on this [wall of text dude!]). I did not like this with the current ascended gear and I the coming armor will equally be just as bad. Related to my #1, if I want to buy my gear with gold, then I should be able to buy it.

One other thing I noticed you said that had me puzzled:
“…Anet…do not:
Ask them to put effort in the game….”
^ did you just ask Anet to make players NOT put EFFORT in the game?!

If that’s what you’re getting at then that’s just silly. There should be a least some effort put into getting you’re gear.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Although I don’t agree with a lot of what you said, there a few things I do agree with you on:
1. The 1/day thing is extremely annoying! If I want to farm it right away, then that should be my choice. If I want to take my time, then that should be my choice.
2. Account bound equipment (can’t remember if you touched on this [wall of text dude!]). I did not like this with the current ascended gear and I the coming armor will equally be just as bad. Related to my #1, if I want to buy my gear with gold, then I should be able to buy it.

One other thing I noticed you said that had me puzzled:
“…Anet…do not:
Ask them to put effort in the game….”
^ did you just ask Anet to make players NOT put EFFORT in the game?!

If that’s what you’re getting at then that’s just silly. There should be a least some effort put into getting you’re gear.

Thanks for contributing!

I know, I know… the great wall of Chine is scared of my post. But to clarify I did say it was poorly written most likely in some areas. Those three lines of arguments that you pointed out were intended to be taken as a group of elements and mashed togather, and not be treated independently.

The fast explanation for those lines is the following:

- Don’t put me in a queue (A queue does not progress faster, depending on your actions, it only progresses as fast as the system allows it to by definition)
- AND THEN ask me to put in an effort (this is in contradiction to what I said above in parenthesis, I’m in a queue/a system that arbitrarily will not allow access to something but at the same time obligates me to work for my goal in order to get to the top of the queue)
- And finally making the progress (laurels, guild commendations in particular) be an account bound income basically punishing ALTs or multi-speced characters.

This basically forces me to stand in a queue, check on my position in the queue daily, the work to advance in the queue and then when I get to the top go back for every character/spec I want. Basically what you were saying… If I want to put 10 times the effort, I should be able, but Anet currently denies me this and treats me like a 5-year old with parental controls so I don’t injure my clicking finger, and then politely one hour later asks me to return tomorrow cause I cannot get any progress anymore today.

Hope this clears it up.

Anet is running out of ideas pretty quickly here. I’ve been playing WoW and it’s been amazing not to have to wait a week just to craft armor that I want. Let’s see, Anet has time gated the achievement chests, the Quartz ore, the armor crafting, and I’m positive there’s more to come. Seriously though, play Guild Wars 2 for a week, then come to WoW and you’ll realize you never should’ve left WoW in the first place, because Blizzard does everything better than Anet.

Galtrix.7369:

Anet is running out of ideas pretty quickly here. I’ve been playing WoW and it’s been amazing not to have to wait a week just to craft armor that I want. Let’s see, Anet has time gated the achievement chests, the Quartz ore, the armor crafting, and I’m positive there’s more to come. Seriously though, play Guild Wars 2 for a week, then come to WoW and you’ll realize you never should’ve left WoW in the first place, because Blizzard does everything better than Anet.

…..O.o …… Errmm, not sure if serious ^

@OP, yes, that makes more sense. Thanks for clarifying your statement.

I’d go halfway. Give a one-a-day recipe and give a X-a-day recipe that requires more materials than 1:1. I actually think that fits their “anti-grinding” motto much better.

Still don’t see anything wrong with the way we get gear. It should take a while.

Agree with OP.
Effort shouldn’t be reduced to having to do time gated activities.
If I play 1hr a day for a month, or the same 30hrs in a week, the effort is not treated the same.
What seems weird is more and more content rewards are shifted towards time limitations. I understand it for holidays, events – but for it to become the new game motto is terrible. Time limited grinds are the worst – let me play at my own pace.

The dungeon token system is a nice hybrid of both. Max tokens once per char per day but can be circumvented with alts or a penalty of DR for tokens if someone wishes to get their gear faster than a daily allotment.

kahzee.6042:

Still don’t see anything wrong with the way we get gear. It should take a while.

Kahzee this is your 2nd post, saying nothing is wrong with the system. While people are continuing to add arguments to their statements, being fair to the opinions of everyone. I really do want to understand your logic and train of thoughts but you’re not helping me. Maybe we are in the wrong, explain it to us. Thank you for your dedication and continued presence in this thread.

falchion.3652:

Agree with OP.
Effort shouldn’t be reduced to having to do time gated activities.
If I play 1hr a day for a month, or the same 30hrs in a week, the effort is not treated the same.
What seems weird is more and more content rewards are shifted towards time limitations. I understand it for holidays, events – but for it to become the new game motto is terrible. Time limited grinds are the worst – let me play at my own pace.

The dungeon token system is a nice hybrid of both. Max tokens once per char per day but can be circumvented with alts or a penalty of DR for tokens if someone wishes to get their gear faster than a daily allotment.

I can agree and relate to this. I didn’t think about covering this, but while I have 8 characters I can get 8 times the tokens by running 8 times the more dungeons! The ratio of time spent, effort put into the game and reward is perfect across the board.

But currency such as laurels and guild tokens can only be obtained by 1 character per insert arbitrary time limit. Which cripples the behavior I stated above, players with more than 1 character or people who just experience the game through more than one class or method of play.

I have more then 1 character too, I don’t see a problem in gearing them all, of course gearing more then 1 character takes more time, but I also have the advantage of having more then 1 character…
Let’s be serious, the best gear in GW2 (exotic) is the worst joke in RPG history. As soon as you hit 80, you go shopping whit 8 golds (you probably got 30+ at least while leveling) and you have the best gear the game can offer… you have nothing to work for, sure there are skins, but you can only use one.
This game really needs a tier of gear that actually takes time and dedication to achieve.
I want to say that I hate vertical progression, I don’t want to see any higher tier after ascended, I laso hate level cap increase in mmo.
More trait points, skill upgrade, more infusion slot ecc are a much better way to progress your character. This way you actually add more to what you already have, whitout make everything you achieve so far pointless.
Ascended are not making exotic worthless, exotics were already worthless at day one.
The game needs a new type of gear, something better than exotic, a gear that you cannot buy or find whit luck, something that takes time, skill and dedication to obtain.
Sorry for my english

Matty.7395:

I have more then 1 character too, I don’t see a problem in gearing them all, of course gearing more then 1 character takes more time, but I also have the advantage of having more then 1 character…
Let’s be serious, the best gear in GW2 (exotic) is the worst joke in RPG history. As soon as you hit 80, you go shopping whit 8 golds (you probably got 30+ at least while leveling) and you have the best gear the game can offer… you have nothing to work for, sure there are skins, but you can only use one.
This game really needs a tier of gear that actually takes time and dedication to achieve.
I want to say that I hate vertical progression, I don’t want to see any higher tier after ascended, I laso hate level cap increase in mmo.
More trait points, skill upgrade, more infusion slot ecc are a much better way to progress your character. This way you actually add more to what you already have, whitout make everything you achieve so far pointless.
Ascended are not making exotic worthless, exotics were already worthless at day one.
The game needs a new type of gear, something better than exotic, a gear that you cannot buy or find whit luck, something that takes time, skill and dedication to obtain.
Sorry for my english

Hello and thank you for your reply.

While I do agree exotic gear isn’t hard to obtain, the talk here is regarding ascended gear, the new ascended armor and weapons and time constraints when gear is involved.

So let me share my concerns with your post:

- More than 1 character = more time needed to gear. yes, that should always be true
- Gear should be hard to obtain. yes, there should be a challenge involved, effort and dedication required

Which leads to

- The advantage of having more characters. what exactly is the advantage? you can swap in dungeon runs, but that’s about it. It does not help you to get gear faster because laurels and guild tokens and future resources are account bound, meaning every time I invest one of the above mentioned resources in a character, that’s one less resource going towards another character. Increasing the time needed to gear 1 character by 100% for each additional character. This goes against the “dedication” stated in your post that the player provides, because you cannot dedicate more effort in acquiring these resources because of the limitation in place.
- “a gear that you cannot buy or find whit luck, something that takes time, skill and dedication to obtain.” – As previously stated, I agree with all but time enforcements. But I also agree I shouldn’t just be able to buy my end game gear of the TP or just craft it. But, I would like that each individual character to be able to progress in a timely manor toward its final complete build without taking away form the progress of other characters created by the same player.

Thank you for reading, and your English was okay (either that or I’m as bad as you are).

Time gating sucks and kills new player interest in the game. It is a way to lock in your existing players and suffer a slow death from attrition.

New players hate time gated gear because it means there is no way they can catch up. They hit max level, they give the old “college try” at grinding Laurels, Crafting, whatever for a couple of weeks then stop logging in.

It’s just like wvw you can certainly still do it under 80, you won’t be as effective but you can still do it. You can compete just fine in pve and wvw with exotikittenil you get ascended. I’m really all for a system taking time to get. I don’t need my hand held and everything given to me. As was said above it was your choice to have multiple alts. Why should you he given everything because you don’t wanna spend the time gearing them. It’s quite silly.

The whole time lock mechanic seems to be Anet’s way of reinforcing the “no gear grind/no gear treadmill” philosophy (the validity of that entire philosophy, or rather, whether or not its ever been executed or upheld in the first place, is entirely suspect and debatable to begin with, but lets set that aside for a moment).

By putting new gear behind time locks, the goal seems to be to encourage people to play and experience everything the game has to offer, instead of obsessing over grinding new gear as fast as possible. Allowing only so much progress per day means you need to find other things to do in-game. Ascended gear is also only marginally better than exotic, and its not actually needed to progress through content in the game (the obvious exception being FotM, but even that isn’t really a valid exception since people made it to FotM lvl 80 back when we had far less than 45 AR available).

That’s my take on why Anet is doing this. However, I completely disagree with it because it flies in the face of the “play the way you want” philosophy that they so vigorously promote. Some people want to embrace the grind, get it over with, get their new shiny, and go back to whatever it was they were doing before (i.e concentrating on the parts of the game that they enjoy the most and “playing the way they want”). Some people actually want the grind. They look forward to it, and that’s what they want to do. Some people don’t give a kitten and will take their time, going about getting ascended gear whenever they kitten well please. If they want to slow down gear progression, then make it a slow grind, but don’t time lock it. There is a HUGE difference between a time lock and content difficulty. A time lock doesn’t make something harder. Not having a time lock doesn’t necessarily make things easier. People who don’t want the grind can still go about getting it at their own pace, and the people who want to get it over with can do just that. I don’t want anything given to me, but I want to be able to acquire it as quickly or as slowly as I want.

Hastur.6231:

Hello Anet,

I’d like to express my worries about the trend you’ve been going on for a while. I’m a dedicated player which has all the professions (8 of them) at level 80. Ever since ascended gear was introduced I had some issues… getting all the gear for my characters takes 8 times longer.

Now sure, some would say I dug my own grave, but my arguments are simple and I don’t consider them to be to greedy or over the top.

I played other mmos, most notably WoW… I’m not asking you to turn into WoW. But wow would allow me to play 8 times as much in order to obtain my gear.

So a brief history of my leveling and adventuring:

1) My first character, a shy little Mesmer discovers the world and gets to 80
2) Experiance as much of the game as possible pve, spvp, tpvp, wvw.
3) Level up all the other professions, learn their play styles (this was surprisingly easy and fast)
4) Ascended gear introduced, run fractals every second of the day get random drops nothing ever fits my builds/gear.
5) Get a total of 5 ascended rings ever.
6) Ascended ring tokens introduced (10 = 1 ring), farm 20 tokens (no drops mind you) finally get rings for main, never do fractals again! my alts can throw themselves of a bridge. Infuse etc. (I got to F30 with 0 agony res)
7) Get back piece with relics, upgrade etc. Same story, I’m not gonna grind so many hours for my alts. (I know I can craft them, but your basically saying more alts = more gold)
8) Amulets introduced, these can only be purchased through Laurels a new currency. Obtained at 1 per day and 20 per monthly. This means you can get 1.6 amulets per month.
9) Accessories introduced, 5 gold and 12 guild tokens. Ignoring that guilds had to level up to get access to all 6 guild tokens a week, that limits you to a month to get 2 accessories for 1 character. Or you can pay 40 Laurels and 50 Ectos, which means 2 months and 20 days + gold for 2 accessories.
10) Celestial gear and the new shards 1/day resource. If I’d wanted to gear a character not only would I need the recipie before hand (which completely over rides the crafting system, as most good looking gear overrides the crafting with the forge), I would only get 1 resource per day considering I got 25 shards.

Conclusion:

I would currently need to run 160 fractals. – Rings
Complete daily and monthly for 5 Months. – Amulets
Complete Guild missions each week for 8 months or complete daily and monthly for 7.1 months + gold – Accessories
And an additional 14800 relics – Back slot

Now you’re saying you want to add new 1/day materials in order to craft ascended armor and weapons. How many months do you want me to play for 48 armor slots that I have to replace +/- weapons I’d like to use.

Fyi the way Colin has made it sound is that the crafting of actual ascended gear is once per day which is absolutely reasonable. The crafting mats require 1 day as well, but from what it sounds like this is based on a ‘per craft’ basis. So for example, if you were to combine 2 t6 cooking mats up to t7 you can do that once on a character, and then again on another character who has cooking.

If anything, none of this “account wide” stuff has been confirmed yet and I am inclined to believe that based on what we have gained so far as far as information goes we have no reason to not believe it could be “per craft” daily.

kahzee.6042:

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

I don’t know, open-world pve? Dungeons? Fractals? WvW? Jumping Puzzles? You know, the same sort of stuff we’ve had fun doing before a new tier of gear was added to the game.

diamondgirl.6315:

My problem with one a day limits is real life. Some days I have hours to blow on GW2… some days I don’t get to log on. I’d love to spend a lazy Saturday grinding for mats, and nor feel panicky about missing the next six chances.

I suspect that’s the whole intent. It’s a very Zynga-esque method of making people feel they’re missing out if they’re not logging in on a daily basis.

Evans.6347:

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

There are people who actually enjoy games in spite of carrots. Their enjoyment of a game stems from the game play and doesn’t cease the moment they’ve got the best gear in the game. Some of these people will be able to continue to enjoying the game play whether they’re in ascended gear or not. But some of these people also want to run dungeons, Fractals, WvW, etc. optimally. And they’re going to prevented from doing so for a long time because of time-gating…the laziest design philosophy a developer can implement.

kahzee.6042:

Still don’t see anything wrong with the way we get gear. It should take a while.

8 months is more then a while.

Xae.7204:

Time gating sucks and kills new player interest in the game. It is a way to lock in your existing players and suffer a slow death from attrition.

New players hate time gated gear because it means there is no way they can catch up. They hit max level, they give the old “college try” at grinding Laurels, Crafting, whatever for a couple of weeks then stop logging in.

The mistake as I see it was to do this with ascended gear. Max stat gear should not be time gated what so ever. It would be different if this were a cosmetic set like a legendary armor but for max stat it’s a mistake.

darkace.8925:

kahzee.6042:

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

I don’t know, open-world pve? Dungeons? Fractals? WvW? Jumping Puzzles? You know, the same sort of stuff we’ve had fun doing before a new tier of gear was added to the game.

diamondgirl.6315:

My problem with one a day limits is real life. Some days I have hours to blow on GW2… some days I don’t get to log on. I’d love to spend a lazy Saturday grinding for mats, and nor feel panicky about missing the next six chances.

I suspect that’s the whole intent. It’s a very Zynga-esque method of making people feel they’re missing out if they’re not logging in on a daily basis.

Evans.6347:

One thing to keep in mind is that once all your characters at lv80 are fully equiped with ascended stuff, there’s pretty much nothing left to do with them. Unless you want to go legendary on all them.

There are people who actually enjoy games in spite of carrots. Their enjoyment of a game stems from the game play and doesn’t cease the moment they’ve got the best gear in the game. Some of these people will be able to continue to enjoying the game play whether they’re in ascended gear or not. But some of these people also want to run dungeons, Fractals, WvW, etc. optimally. And they’re going to prevented from doing so for a long time because of time-gating…the laziest design philosophy a developer can implement.

+1 to you kind sir/lady for understanding.

I enjoy my guardian in PvE mostly because i have choices. I can swap weapons, traits and gear on the fly while doing a certain dungeon, fractal etc… Even for one character, i am LOCKED by the once per day system. I am forced to pick one item at a time, while in fact i use every single weapon and about 3 different armor sets. Should i be punished for playing at my best every time? Should i have to wait days in a row for something?

The design is lazy. While indeed, dedicated players will log in daily, it also feels more and more like a job than a game. I must do the daily, i must do the fractals, i must do the 1/day material, i must do…. and the list goes on.

Now you’ll say “no one is forcing you”. The design itself does if i want to be up to par with everyone else, have the best gear available, offer the best dps/support etc possible. There are people that want to do this, unlike others who only have one character and are happy to play it as is, without bothering about maximizing or thinking how to improve their character even further.

Now you’ll say i can do it even with exotics. True, i can play it even with exotics, i can even go in greens/rares. But i don’t enjoy being lazy about my gear or not investing in the best available.

Now…this is just 1 character. Multiply it by 7. Sure, some require less gearing, but overall, they all require it.

And as a final thought, what happens when your build is changed or they add new traits as they promised? What happens when something new appears and you must change your entire gear? What then? Go back to waiting x days because of the 1/day rule?

I would really love the input of a Dev in this thread, telling us exactly how they plan the 1/day system to function and if it will be account bound – as the quartz.

Kahzee I suggest reading Tentonhammr and Sleel’s posts. You say your fine with “not having your hand held and having gear handed to you”, yet that is what we are saying as well. Limiting access to content on a time base mechanic screams “hand holding” at me more than anything.

And Anet does give you 5 character slots and sells you additional character slots, are you actually saying Anet is not encouraging multiple playthroughs of their game ? And its the fault of people who actually use or buy those extra slots, that the gear progression is so long and tedious ?

Even if I had only used the standard 5 character slots, it would still take me 5 months to progress. With a 2-week new content release schedule…. Imagine how much the game can change until I find out that Rabid gear is no longer the optimal choice for my “insert profession here” happens?

I don’t even mind the time-based progression, Like I stated. WoW and other MMOs I played did this as well, but they allowed me to complete dailies on all my characters, only lock down raids/dungeons for characters that played in said raid/dungeon (very similar to what gw is doing in its dungeons).

I know gw2 had a bot-ing problem so a lot of content is on DR, but these currencies are non-marketable, cannot be salvaged or sold to vendors.

Fact of the matter is that player should progress in a manner in which “they chose to play the game” as ANet’s policy stated. I would have liked to be able to complete dailies with all my characters during this past weekend. Go to guild missions tomorrow and complete 2 dailies and then go to guild missions with my 2nd guild the next day and skip dailies cause I don’t feel like it and not feel bad about it because I know I worked extra hard this past weekend.

I’m not asking to allow me to grind everything in 1 day or less, I don’t mind getting my ascended gear (as currently present in the game) in 1 month, that is a reasonable time limit to me. But let me simultaneously progress on all of my characters and stop holding my hand!

kahzee.6042:

Game is fine stop crying.

If you don’t want to contribute to the discussion, you don’t have to. But posts like this are a waste of all our time.

Wouldn’t be a discussion if people didn’t want their hand held and feel entitled to everything.

Hastur.6231:

Kahzee I suggest reading Tentonhammr and Sleel’s posts. You say your fine with “not having your hand held and having gear handed to you”, yet that is what we are saying as well. Limiting access to content on a time base mechanic screams “hand holding” at me more than anything.

And Anet does give you 5 character slots and sells you additional character slots, are you actually saying Anet is not encouraging multiple playthroughs of their game ? And its the fault of people who actually use or buy those extra slots, that the gear progression is so long and tedious ?

Even if I had only used the standard 5 character slots, it would still take me 5 months to progress. With a 2-week new content release schedule…. Imagine how much the game can change until I find out that Rabid gear is no longer the optimal choice for my “insert profession here” happens?

I don’t even mind the time-based progression, Like I stated. WoW and other MMOs I played did this as well, but they allowed me to complete dailies on all my characters, only lock down raids/dungeons for characters that played in said raid/dungeon (very similar to what gw is doing in its dungeons).

I know gw2 had a bot-ing problem so a lot of content is on DR, but these currencies are non-marketable, cannot be salvaged or sold to vendors.

Fact of the matter is that player should progress in a manner in which “they chose to play the game” as ANet’s policy stated. I would have liked to be able to complete dailies with all my characters during this past weekend. Go to guild missions tomorrow and complete 2 dailies and then go to guild missions with my 2nd guild the next day and skip dailies cause I don’t feel like it and not feel bad about it because I know I worked extra hard this past weekend.

I’m not asking to allow me to grind everything in 1 day or less, I don’t mind getting my ascended gear (as currently present in the game) in 1 month, that is a reasonable time limit to me. But let me simultaneously progress on all of my characters and stop holding my hand!

You make no sense at all. You should not be able to progress all your characters at the same time. THAT is hand holding.

kahzee.6042:

Wouldn’t be a discussion if people didn’t want their hand held and feel entitled to everything.

Care to explain how hand-holding or entitlement are relevant to time gating?

Lol guys. Just use exotics. Even if your alts have zero asc equipment you are losing 5% of stats – its ok. Top level gear should always be hard to obtain.

PS for all of wow gear system fans out there: It is very hard to have all slots top level equiped main in wow. And I think that there are less than 100 people in the world with top geared alt in wow.

The reason for the time gating seems pretty obvious. It is to keep people logging in everyday. As strange as it might sound the time gating is just a replacement for the subscription(must play every day or I am wasting money!).

Scaramuccia.1258:

Lol guys. Just use exotics. Even if your alts have zero asc equipment you are losing 5% of stats – its ok. Top level gear should always be hard to obtain.

PS for all of wow gear system fans out there: It is very hard to have all slots top level equiped main in wow. And I think that there are less than 100 people in the world with top geared alt in wow.

If you would have read the above posts, then this message would not exist. No, it is not ok – not everyone is happy to be mediocre/sub-par/average. Some players want to have the best available armor.

We all agree it should take time – but not IMPOSED time. It should be hard to obtain, make you work for it etc. But, should i desire to spend 1000g on having it in one day, this option should be available. With the 1/day system, this cannot happen and is locked out.

The time gating limits the player to only one character and one set of gear only. This means i cannot even have my main geared up properly and limit myself to one set of gear. I have 3 sets and play both PvE and WvW. I use different sets there. Do i have to choose? I mean really, when fractals came out, it split the players into two. The time gating also does that in a way.

As for wow method – you never saw alts fully geared? What else do you do when your main is fully geared? Or when your raid requires a healer? I’ve had two speccs with BIS and an alt with BIS because the system allowed me to. I had to go to raids on both and work for it, but i could do it.

Even the current GW2 dungeon system proves that character based stuff can be made. 60 badges per path, per character. Multiple runs can be made on the same path either with the same character (but with diminishing returns) or on other characters. This allows someone to get their set fast or slow – however they desire.

What is wrong with that system? It gives us options. In the end, this thread is about how players with multiple specs or characters are getting told off by the system and ANET for playing the game, having bought character slots and being dedicated.

And for the love of god, stop posting unless you have something constructive to add. We get it – we can use exotics, the difference in stats do not matter etc etc… we get you and we already stated our view on that matter. Repeating the same thing over and over again will lead nowhere.

I’m definitely an ALTaholic (have one of each except Necro….will likely start that soon).

I see that what the OP is stating is that he can’t “gear up” all 8 of his characters as fast as someone that has only 1 main or a few ALTs.

This is not about TOTAL playing time, but how much time you spend on EACH character. You are NOT being punished for playing more characters……it’s going to take 8 times longer for you to progress ALL your characters to the same extent as someone playing only 1 character.

I fail to see how THAT situation is singling out any type of player differently than any other. Now is time gating content unfair to everyone? That can certainly be debated (and IS on plenty of threads all over this forum).

I get that you and plenty of others here don’t LIKE the time gated content, but how many characters you have chosen to “gear up” is NOT something that should be considered as an overall factor in the discussion (you chose to lie in 8 beds…deal with it).

Again, read the above posts. I know it’s hard to read through it, but please, just do it.

It’s simple. Right now, i can either spend 1000g to gear all my characters, run the same dungeon on all 8 characters in 1 day (yes, it is extreme) or have multiple runs on several characters. This can result in me obtaining my gear how i see fit. Aka.. i can be the “no lifer”. Or, i can do 3 paths a day, take my time, get gear. Aka…i’m the “casual / normal person”.

Now… a very poorly, but easy to understand time gating definition: when I do not have an option and must do what the game tells me or else i have no gear. In other words, when i cannot get something the way i want it and must wait x months for it.

It doesn’t take 8 times as longer for me to progress. It takes more because every class can have multiple builds, designed for certain activities like dungeons, fractals, wvwvw etc etc. Each character takes ages in the fashion of “you can only do this once per day, because this way it’s fair for everyone”.

First of all, it ruins it for new players. They cannot catch up with other players even if they want to invest the effort.
Second of all, creates unbalance even in WvW (when not in a huge ZvZ).
Third, it ruins it for those who want to invest the time and effort – we must do this once per day like everyone else – basically we cannot be better than anyone else as the game won’t allow it.
Fourth – did you make your legendary? It can take 8 months or it can take 2 weeks. YOU HAVE THE CHOICE.

Time gating forces players to log in or be behind. Time gating does not allow players to think, make choices, play the game as they want to play it.

Brother Grimm, Thank you for taking your time and contributing.

“This is not about TOTAL playing time, but how much time you spend on EACH character” – Brother Grimm – July/22/2013

You say that, yet the rest of your arguments seems contradictory to that statement. If I complete a daily on my main in 1 hour and then play 7 more hours on my alts. I’m not going to acquire additional laurels, which means I have spent and equal amount on all characters yet received progress only for one.

To clarify this even further, again. If I log in right now and complete the following:

- 1 Laurel from daily

I can play the rest of my 23 hours on any character. Yet I cannot gain any more progress regardless of what character I choose to spend my time on.

So in trend with your argument: “This is not about TOTAL playing time, neither about how much time you spend on EACH character, but on how much ANet ALLOWS you to progress.” – Hastur – July/22/2013

Which currently is 1 month per character, which totals to 8 moths for all classes with no off-specs and the chance that in one of the bi-weekly patches Anet will just introduce a better stat comkittenfs/buffs a class or/and adds new skills/traits which break the meta your original gear was intended for.

sorry the laurs gives you the chance for rings, amulets and earings but lets say you get one from guild missions, a amulet from laurs, and the othere earing from laurs and 2 rings from fractals(given the achiemnts point chest and peaks you will have enough laurs for that when you have done fractals for the 2 rings if not before) as there is so many laurs in play now

Agreed, Erika (and others) – they want me to log in every day, and artificially structure my gwar acquisition process to ‘encourage’ me to. Well, I’m not going to. Not because I am taking some sort of Stand, but because… Life. So… since I am not shelling out a monthly fee, I am more likely to just go try out a new game. No drama, just their choices informing my choices. And that bums me out, because this is such a pretty game.

Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character?

Korsbaek.9803:

sorry the laurs gives you the chance for rings, amulets and earings but lets say you get one from guild missions, a amulet from laurs, and the othere earing from laurs and 2 rings from fractals(given the achiemnts point chest and peaks you will have enough laurs for that when you have done fractals for the 2 rings if not before) as there is so many laurs in play now

Indeed there are many Laurels in play, but its still 40 a month, and achi chest granted I personally do have 8500 points will get me a boost. But we are trying to help new and old players alike, and new players are more restricted in that manner, which is okay for a “first character”. The toughest part right now are the accessories (takes up to 8 moths only using guild commendations) which cost a lot more laurels and gold to boot, if your only going to spend laurels your going to run out of them fast.

diamondgirl.6315:

Agreed, Erika (and others) – they want me to log in every day, and artificially structure my gwar acquisition process to ‘encourage’ me to. Well, I’m not going to. Not because I am taking some sort of Stand, but because… Life. So… since I am not shelling out a monthly fee, I am more likely to just go try out a new game. No drama, just their choices informing my choices. And that bums me out, because this is such a pretty game.

The only disappointment here is the first interviews before the game came out. With thousands of quotes such as “The game is free, you can come back at any time and play and you are never left behind, since our intention is not to make the game a gear grind” – that sounds vaguely familiar to me from a lot of the pre-release announcements and media.

anzenketh.3759:

Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character?

For me personally that would be perfect, as I said 1 month for gear seems more than decent. I already run dungeons repeatedly on all alts and I did that before bosses dropped additional tokens, and even before that when tokens could only be taken from chests. Less account bound activities more character bound ones.

you should not be rewarded more just because you have more alts end of discussion

Even if ascended gear were not time-gated, it could still require significant effort to gear your characters. I consider the gear and key materials being account bound being enough of a limitation itself.

You said it yourself. You dug your own grave.