Guild Wars 2

Frankly I was wondering how long it would take the ‘hardcore’ crowd who seem to find fault with every tiny aspect of an MMO to find it here, sadly it seems they have arrived.

Having a quick glance over the threads in this forum, revealed the same but none the less shocking and disturbing suggestions you can find in any other popular MMO, things such as “Orr should be group only content! Its too easy!” And “Mobs should have AoE avoidance! Farming is too easy”.

What’s more shocking is, I honestly dont think there is anyone here who can honestly say “Oh all explore mode dungeons are too easy”, and yet content outside of that apparently must be brought up to the same difficulty?

I sincerely hope developers looking over the forums do not take this group of people as the voice of the player-base, there is more than staggering enough content for ‘Hardcores’ to throw hours upon hours for, raising the difficulty for those of us who do not want to get a group just to see Orr for example (Which by the way I think is fantastically designed even with the bugs and I absolutely loved exploring it) or giving mobs AoE avoidance (Seriously I cannot believe these suggestions) would be utterly unfair to those of us without the possibility of being able to commit to the game 6 hours or day, or do not find the game becoming an un-enjoyable difficult chore ‘fun’.

I doubt I will ever get a full set of exploration mode gear, why? I find they are too hard and take too long to complete, and I dont expect to get that armor either, I’m glad though that its there as some form of prestige for people who play harder than I do, still does not make it right to warp the whole game around them however.

Think you need to understand that games of the past 12 or so years have been getting easier and easier. Play a game from the late 80’s to late 90’s and they are much harder >for what they are< compared to todays games.

The problem is that now we have a generation of gamers that have been brought up on said easy mode games and think those games are the ‘standard’ and that anything even remotly harder is ‘wrong’ and for the hardcore. When in actual fact the ‘hardcore’ parts of games or the few ‘hardcore’ games that currently exist, are the ‘real’ standard, and everything is is ‘easy’.

The next problem you come across is that no matter how many times people try to explain this like i am now, or how much proof to present.. these people we are talking about NEVER accept that they are used to ‘easy mode’ games.

And lets face it MMORPG’s will never be ‘hard’ anyway, atleats with the current control style (tab targeting). When the average mmorpg becomes a proper action combat mmorpg, THEN, the real difficulty can start to be added. As it stand atm the ‘difficulty’ is just down to ‘tactics’ and ‘time’. You got enough time and know the tactics you can breeze through the game.

^ Agree with Solar Nova. Games are way too easy, we definitely need them harder.

I was laughing so hard last night. My guildies always go forward up, or up up TA explorable. So I suggested we should go forward forward. After like 15 minutes of arguing with them I managed to convince them, despite their warnings it’s “INSANELY HARD MAN, THAT PATH IS HELL!!1”.

So we did it in 1 hour 5 minutes, NO WIPES. Now, I know I’m just THAT GOOD, but still…

The problem is that the definition of difficult, in ANet’s eyes, is wrong. I know I mentioned dungeons in the DE sub-forum, but it was about difficulty, so…

We really need hard stuff, and we aren’t getting it nearly enough from GW2 at this moment.

Have games been getting progressively easier throughout the years? No doubt. Is this a bad thing? Not at all. Is it ok to have hard games when most others are easy? It’s perfectly fine. In fact a lot of these older games, a level-headed video game player from that era would look back on them and be surprised they played a game that had by today’s standards terribly laid out and unituitive game design. That doesn’t they suddenly decide it wasn’t fun anymore, and nor does it mean that today’s easy mode games are nothing short of crap made digital. Whatever games trend towards are meant to appeal to as broad of a gamer audience as they can, and if that trends is easier games, then so be it. It could’ve been fancier art styles or deep narrative stories, but it just so happened to be that people decided they’d like the difficulty in their games toned down.

It’s a shift in how society is deciding to accept something, whether you like it or not, and you’ll just have to roll with it until it swings the other way.

Painking.4703:

Have games been getting progressively easier throughout the years? No doubt. Is this a bad thing? Not at all.

It’s bad. It’s very, VERY bad.

I was sorry when they toned down the difficulty in the GW2 open world following a few vociferous complaints after BWE1. It seems to me that such complaints tend to come from people who aren’t prepared to adapt their playstyles to new games – in the case of GW2 that means a few simple adjustments, more movement, use of the dodge key, mouse turn not keyboard, know where your strafe keys are etc.

I’m not looking for super hard gameplay in the open world, but a certain level of difficulty is required in order that players get to learn the way their skills work and interact together. If you can play the game simply by standing still and spamming your auto attack, you aren’t going to learn the deep interactions that are built into the combat system in GW2 and the combinations you can do both on your character and across professions.

The current balance probably also contributes to the fact that events rarely fail. The gameplay would be so much more better if those centaurs at least put up some semblance of a fight.

One of the things that maybe can be done in the future is to have differential levels of difficulty. With the cosmetic reward system they could give benefits that lead to certain rewards, for say playing the game with a more radical downscaling to the norm.

Leo.6817:

snip

Hey Leo, it’s good to see someone bringing up the other side of the argument. Forums can easily snowball on one side of a discussion if people aren’t careful.

I am firmly on the side of Orr needs to be tuned harder right now though. However, I would not class myself as a hardcore gamer anymore. I have not done any explorable modes yet and I just get an hour or so in the evenings to play.

I don’t think the call from the forums so far has been to make Orr as unforgiving and difficult as dungeons. I think what most people are trying to address are the tendencies for large groups of players to sit outside outposts and AoE waves of enemies so quickittenhat they are dead before they are even rendered.

This is not even ‘easy’ gameplay it’s a new type of challenge that is actually quite difficult. Get your AoE in quicker than everyone else’s in order to tag as many mobs as possible. It’s quite a challenge really.

This is not a call for hardcore mode in Orr. This is a call for working dynamic events that are balanced to the amount of players present.

This is very true. What happens to games is that there is a 5% crowd which is ridiculously good at games, then there’s the 60% of us which are the usual gamers and the rest are casuals. What you want to do with the game is to balance around the 95% of us which are the normal gamers and the casuals because we are the majority. What happens is the dev’s program it so it’s centred around the top 5% which causes the other 95% to give up on the game.

There are several different areas of difficulty in the game so lets break some of them down so we are all singing off the same hymn sheet:

- Random Mobs. A bit too easy in most of the game, I think, so that they don’t really require any thought. I’m sure that that Brick’s 95% would have no problems if these were beefed up a bit.

- Veterans. Mostly you can solo these quite easily. That means that there is no necessity or incentive for players to get together to take them down – and so they don’t. They could easily be farmed solo for loot – except that as things stand they never have any loot to speak of. If they were a bit harder it would make sense to give them a bit of useful loot. You should have to be reasonably competent to solo a veteran, I think.

- Events. These often have a sweet spot where they can be fun and somewhat challenging. Unfortunately scaling often isn’t effective so that when you are in a zerg everyone is competing to tag the mobs before they die and there’s no real question of any challenge, except as Turgon said the challenge of getting your damage in before the next guy.

- Dungeons. I don’t think many people are suggesting making these harder. In fact perhaps the devs should ease off a bit in story mode instances, whilst players get familiar with them. Not really sure as I’ve only done a couple of runs, which went OK without any particular theory crafting etc.

It all boils down to compromise, really. The ‘hardcore’ crowd wouldn’t be so vocal if it wasn’t for the ‘casual’ crowd demanding that they have access to everything the game has to offer. What’s wrong with the odd dungeon or zone out of many that offers an extreme challenge and offers a sense of accomplishment for those who manage to complete it? It’s an age old argument.

I doubt Arenanet are going to go down the root of excluding people access to Orr through difficulty.

The really challenging stuff has been clearly segmented into instances.

Orr, as I understand it, is the place for level 80s to hang out and do stuff, no skill requirements needed. This does not mean that dynamic events should not be able to fail and that mobs should fall over as soon as they get near a group of players.

Its hard to tweek real ‘difficulty’ in a game with controls such as GW2 and many other mmo’s. Without full control of your characters movements you are left to the stats/gear/and rng to decide whether your fail or succeed even after utilizing what control you have in GW2’s case, skills that proc a block, or a heal, the limited dodging etc.

By that i mean, you cant time when you attack to get a better hit in, you cant aim for a more vulnerable spot, you cant dodge when you want (limited to 2 dodges atm), you cant parry or block when you want (limited again). To get real difficulty put into a game you need the game mechanics to allow it, and dispite GW2’s attempt to move away from the general mmorpg controls, its still very limited compared to action games with ‘twitch combat’.

If GW2 is hard and geared toward the top 5% of players, I’m a heck of a lot better gamer than I thought! Thanks for the compliment. Oh, also, it’s way too easy. It should have taken a month for the first people to be hitting 80. Orr wouldn’t be an issue. They could still be developing all the post-65 game that basically never got tested. There’d be less sprawl, more density, more socializing and less wealth. Oh well, too late. It’s a single-player campaign that takes about 60 hours, which is a good deal for the money… but an MMO 5 years in development and launched in 2012?

I’ve played some Asian mmos in which it would take you a month to get one level…. Getting lvl80 in merely days in GW2 made me loose all hope in future mmos.. They need to be way way harder than this.. Dungeons are ez-mode atm and spend 1 week to get max level and max gear is ludacris to say the least.
This is exactly what happens when you listen too much to the casuals and dumb down the game (hint: WoW)

I really don’t think the amount of time it takes to do something is really any indicator of difficulty Zingery?

I mean, it is a test of patience I suppose. In that sense it is quite challenging.

I think the sooner mmo’s get away from the reputation of being incredibly time consuming due to having to repeat the same tasks over and over again the better. Those kind of games can still exist for gamers like Zingery but should not define the genre.

Turgon.8625:

I really don’t think the amount of time it takes to do something is really any indicator of difficulty Zingery?

I mean, it is a test of patience I suppose. In that sense it is quite challenging.

I think the sooner mmo’s get away from the reputation of being incredibly time consuming due to having to repeat the same tasks over and over again the better. Those kind of games can still exist for gamers like Zingery but should not define the genre.

you got a point.
But please enlighten me what you think defines challenging in your oppinion then, because I am not seeing it in GW2. The amount of ppl wanting to nerf the already easy dungeons is crazy and reminds me of how WoW players started before blizzard nerfed everything to suit a 6 year old.

Zingery.2073:

you got a point.
But please enlighten me what you think defines challenging in your oppinion then, because I am not seeing it in GW2. The amount of ppl wanting to nerf the already easy dungeons is crazy and reminds me of how WoW players started before blizzard nerfed everything to suit a 6 year old.

Well, Arenanet have said they don’t intend to nerf the dungeons as they think people will get better at them with a bit of practice. As to the open world events & mobs it probably needs a bit of tweaking, if only because that would encourage people to play together a bit more.

You can’t really define “challenging” since it’s relative. And also claims of leetness tend to be exaggerated, so it’s often hard to tell what people are finding hard and what they are not. But, I expect the devs will have the stats to check up.

WoW became a game for the extremely super-casual who wanted things handed to them with little to no effort. Many people in GW2 are refugees from this crime that Activision committed, and no one wants this game to be too easy. Those who do want games to be super easy should play WoW, as they cater to that idea now.

you got a point.
But please enlighten me what you think defines challenging in your oppinion then, because I am not seeing it in GW2. The amount of ppl wanting to nerf the already easy dungeons is crazy and reminds me of how WoW players started before blizzard nerfed everything to suit a 6 year old.

I am not seeing it in the world yet either. I can’t speak for explorable dungeons as I have not tried them yet (some people say they are hard, some people not so much). Certainty the intent of the developers is for the really hard stuff to be contained safely away in instances.

I still think Orr events need to be changed from what they are now to a tougher less zerg friendly form. After all, you still get rewarded even if an event fails and it often opens up new events through that. I really can’t see any strength in the arguments to keep them in their current form.

Veltoss.9135:

no one wants this game to be too easy

This might be going a bit far. I am sure there are many people attracted to this game for the story and creating a beautiful character in a rich world and are not even thinking about how they are going to be challenged at level 80.

There should be a broad range of difficulties. Getting to polarized in either direction will exclude people for no good reason.

Turgon.8625:

Veltoss.9135:

no one wants this game to be too easy

This might be going a bit far. I am sure there are many people attracted to this game for the story and creating a beautiful character in a rich world and are not even thinking about how they are going to be challenged at level 80.

There should be a broad range of difficulties. Getting to polarized in either direction will exclude people for no good reason.

The explorable dungeons were supposed to be the “hard” stuff for ppl that wanted a challange, with storymode as a casual alternative.

But what we are seeing is the casual crowd going “why do they get special content when I cant?, nerf explorable dungeons to suit everyone please”
This is exactly what ruined WoW and will eventually ruin GW2 aswell.. Anet will bow down to the demands of the many and nerf everything to suit “everyone”

That’s a shame if people are already asking for EM nerfs. To be fair, so far ANet have been steadfast in not submitting to the cries as of yet. Early days though.

Also, despite being a lot easier the story mode dungeons are definitely not trivial. You really can’t just run in and aoe everything down like in WoW. If you are not paying attention, you will die and wipe. I think that is refreshing.

brickforlife.1364:

This is very true. What happens to games is that there is a 5% crowd which is ridiculously good at games, then there’s the 60% of us which are the usual gamers and the rest are casuals. What you want to do with the game is to balance around the 95% of us which are the normal gamers and the casuals because we are the majority. What happens is the dev’s program it so it’s centred around the top 5% which causes the other 95% to give up on the game.

Over 99.9% of all statistics are made up on the spot, including the statistic that I just made up right now.

Zingery.2073:

Turgon.8625:

Veltoss.9135:

no one wants this game to be too easy

This might be going a bit far. I am sure there are many people attracted to this game for the story and creating a beautiful character in a rich world and are not even thinking about how they are going to be challenged at level 80.

There should be a broad range of difficulties. Getting to polarized in either direction will exclude people for no good reason.

The explorable dungeons were supposed to be the “hard” stuff for ppl that wanted a challange, with storymode as a casual alternative.

But what we are seeing is the casual crowd going “why do they get special content when I cant?, nerf explorable dungeons to suit everyone please”
This is exactly what ruined WoW and will eventually ruin GW2 aswell.. Anet will bow down to the demands of the many and nerf everything to suit “everyone”

+1
“OH MY GOD I PAID FOR THIS GAME BUT I CAN’T DO IT WHY DO YOU RESTRICT CONTENT FROM ME???!?”
if you find it too hard, don’t do it kitten it isn’t required. you want that shiny armor yes? well tough luck. go farm some karma.

or giving mobs AoE avoidance (Seriously I cannot believe these suggestions)

So mob crowds melting in 2-3 seconds (this isn’t an exaggeration) is nowadays fun?

Everything, everything in GW2 is too easy.

I’m pugging TA explorable, all 3 paths, with no wipes. With RARE downed players too. It’s not just a matter of how often people get killed inside dungeons or DEs – the fact is that all encounters feature shallow mechanics, are too simplistic and boring.

Just add easy on top of that and voila, you get the picture of what state GW2 is in.

These threads make me chuckle. The players that claim they are ‘hardcore’. “Oh this game is too easy, make it harder” “oh this game is for the casuals, we want a challenge”

Until a difficult game is released, then you want nothing to do with it. Why fail at something thats a challenge, when you can play an ‘easy’ game and act like its too simple for you. Lets take some examples shall we?

Aion. Oh sure it was a grind, but the mobs were hard. You had to dodge those spells or you were freaking dead. And to dodge / block you needed to time the end of a 3-4 link chain, all the while hoping more mobs wouldn’t come and end you. Nope, nobody plays that. Too hard. Takes too long.

Demon Souls. People were returning it because it was too hard. Nobody could handle having to die a bunch of times to learn the curves and get to the end. The difficulty scaling in that game was perfect. A dungeon run through the first time could take hours. After you had completed it a few times you could run through it in 5 min. Dodge the assassin there, move away from the rolling boulder there, don’t open said spiky coffin, etc. Nope, too difficult. Not enough checkpoints.

Im sorry but the only ‘hardcore’ gamers are the ones who make it their profession, get sponsors and compete in leagues. Everyone else is just a casual. Its something you do on your spare time for enjoyment, so stop pretending like you’re better than everyone else and things are “too easy” because quite frankly you’re the same people asking things to get nerfed the second they become difficult.

Sky, people asking for more difficult content aren’t pretending anything. They are asking and genuinely hoping to get challenged more by GW2. Why would they ask for something they in reality don’t want? Does that make sense to you?

I never complained and asked for nerfs. Ever. I complained that ANet’s definition of “difficult” is flawed, as it means simplistic, shallow mechanics, huge HP pools and extremely hard hitting abilities.

Nothing needs to be impossible. Developers need to find a sweet spot – difficult content, but not impossible. Slow progress, but not tedious or overly frustrating.

That’s what developing is all about, finding that balance. If it was just slap-infinite-HP-on-this-mob and make-it-one-shoot-me, everyone would be successful game developers.

It doesn’t make sense to me, but from experience it happens. This notion of ‘balance’ is IMO non existant. People will always complain things are too easy, or too hard. If you take WoW as an example, they would make things easier when the playerbase complained it was too hard, and vice versa. They could never win.

If you are asking for more complicated mechanics, I suggest playing another game. I don’t mean this in a “oh well if you don’t like it get out!” way, (trust me I hate that bandwagon)". I just mean that the game was released with certain mechanics, if you don’t like them why not play a game with the mechanics you are looking for. If you want a game where you can dodge almost every skillshot, and have to aim shots directly – there are games for that; Tera, Divine Souls, etc. If you want a tank focusing the boss while dps have to avoid fire, there are plenty of raiding games for that.

What Im trying to get at here, is to make the game ‘more difficult’ in that sense, the developers would have to change the mechanics. This double dodge / Cooldown / Tab system limits the things they can do. Really I think people should just enjoy games the way they are (personally I complain over nerfs and buffs, can’t always help myself) or switch to a different game if they’re looking for something else.

Basically – why not find a game that has the mechanics you’re looking for rather than asking ones that don’t have it to change.

Some people(not including myself) play very ,VERY casually.(2-3 hours a day).
That means they don’t intend to do HARD stuff that takes a lot of time,and the casual players are a lot.
Of course a game should have a scale, with easier and harder things to do,there should be the hardcore and the softcore parts of a game.
Imho, game is fine right now, I play a game to relax and not to frustrate because I have wiped X times in a hardcore part of the game(even if I am a hardcore player.)

TL:DR
The game should give you options for everything, you can do this easy mode – you get less reward, if you do it hard mode – grats you get more reward.
If only they could implement a hard mode – normal mode like GW1..

natsos.3692:

If only they could implement a hard mode – normal mode like GW1..

Would love to see a hard mode, not really difficult, just something that level capped players could enter to do the content they missed whilst levelling up and have a little challenge.

@Sky: I am not sure what side of the discussion you are on. Do you think the Dynamic Events AoE Zerg should be changed or not?

I see your point about it being difficult for the Devs to add challenge into a game built around it’s current mechanics. I think it’s an interesting point as I think GW2 has raised the skill ceiling a bit when compared to other hotkey MMO’s like WoW and SWToR. It isn’t at the twitch reaction level of RTS and FPS games but it is moving in the right direction.

With that in mind I think they have a lot of options that could be pulled in to make DE’s more challenging. The system is in early days yet, let’s hope they try and push the boundaries a bit now the game is out.

I would argue to not change them (nor put time into trying). With the current game mechanics they are as difficult as realistically possible. If you think about it, these events can have 50-100 people in them. Sort of hard to expect the detail of a 10 man raid. As for the mechanics I love them. Perfect blend between the mindless 1234 mashing and having to dodge everything / aim everything (Tera). You can play the game half asleep, while you can also be quick and dodge proper spells when actually trying.

I suppose if the developers could find a way to make an interactive 100 man bossfight, I would take my hat off and accept the changes with open arms. But Im not expecting miracles here, things are good enough as is.

Hard-mode games are starting to make a resurgence … look at Diablo 3 and DayZ! We need more perma-death games!

Hard is good.

Its artificial difficulty that I am offended by.

By overloading a boss with HP, with one shots and so on.
Its not interesting mechanics and skill that overcomes him, its cheese and abuse.

Its not a mistake or a lack of understanding that kills you, its artificial difficulty.

A boss with 50,000 HP is not in all cases more difficult than the same one which has 25,000 HP

Caelib.2497:

Hard-mode games are starting to make a resurgence … look at Diablo 3 and DayZ! We need more perma-death games!

Atleast ppl would focus on dodging and healing themselves in dungeons if their characters were wiped the moment they died. It sounds pretty interesting and I am all for a mode like that.

Lyuben.2613:

Hard is good.

Its artificial difficulty that I am offended by.

By overloading a boss with HP, with one shots and so on.
Its not interesting mechanics and skill that overcomes him, its cheese and abuse.

Its not a mistake or a lack of understanding that kills you, its artificial difficulty.

A boss with 50,000 HP is not in all cases more difficult than the same one which has 25,000 HP

Yep. As someoe who played in the top guild on my EQ server for years, there wasn’t much HARD about it. It just took a lot of time. Back in those days raid bosses didn’t even really have strategy. They were all basically the same: zerg with a bunch of people and hope things work out.

MMOs have never been hard. GW2 is substantially harder than most other MMOs, especially for dungeon content. It does do away with a lot of the pointless time sinks, though, and people flatter themselves that those make things more difficult.

Yukishiro.8792:

Lyuben.2613:

Hard is good.

Its artificial difficulty that I am offended by.

By overloading a boss with HP, with one shots and so on.
Its not interesting mechanics and skill that overcomes him, its cheese and abuse.

Its not a mistake or a lack of understanding that kills you, its artificial difficulty.

A boss with 50,000 HP is not in all cases more difficult than the same one which has 25,000 HP

Yep. As someoe who played in the top guild on my EQ server for years, there wasn’t much HARD about it. It just took a lot of time. Back in those days raid bosses didn’t even really have strategy. They were all basically the same: zerg with a bunch of people and hope things work out.

MMOs have never been hard. GW2 is substantially harder than most other MMOs, especially for dungeon content. It does do away with a lot of the pointless time sinks, though, and people flatter themselves that those make things more difficult.

GW2’s dungeons are harder than most mmos, and thats what we like and we want to keep it that way. What we dont like is the majority of players wanting to nerf those same hard dungeons to suit everyone.

But it seems Anet has made a stand and wont change the difficulty of dungeons, and I admire them for doing so.

Agreed! If you want a true challenge go play explorable mode and get nice gear while you’re at it….