Guild Wars 2

KjarlSeaspite.9573:

Feel free to stop playing MMOs…

Find me something with the scope of a Massive MP Online game that’s not Elder Scrolls, and I might consider it. Or better, split the difference and do a clone of .hack or .hack//GU with a setting more focused on the game-world rather than the meta-story, and with different settings other than Magitech JRPG. I play MMOs because in general they have very large and expansive worlds, which has only been matched by Bethesda (granted, some MMOs aren’t that large—DCUO being one that violently springs to mind. :-/ )
Being able to casually chat with other people while I play, I like. Having the option to group if I want to, I like. Having drop-in/drop-out events where I don’t have to group to participate, I like. Being forced to group whether I want to or not, especially when the company has rather quite well demonstrated that they can provide alternatives to that, either through scaling or providing NPC substitutes? That’s a no-go.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

I’m one of the people who were against story content to be done in a dungeon. I did the dungeon with my friends a few hours ago and we loved it. I thought that players could be substituted by decent npcs but the boss-battles need you to do complex evasive maneuvers… I don’t think the AI in the game is even close to resembling a human player. It’s quite different to the gameplay which was used in GW1, healers targetted npcs and players and this made up for the bad movement-AI.

Someone said, that the previous Braham/Rox-missions were difficult when done alone, but that’s not true imho. It was just defeating strong waves on your own, that’s it. No need for any strategy.

The boss encounters were fun, I can’t imagine that any npc-AI can handle this. It would probably be awesome if there were an AI that could do this… then we would have a similar feeling to GW1 where solo-players could enjoy the content too, without the need to group with random people who hate cutscenes and rush forward leaving you and your full backbag behind.

Thanks to the team responsible for this nice dungeon, I can’t wait to see what’s next. I’d love to see Anet taking the risk and trying more new things with dungeons. IS there a solution to make dungeons more solofriendly but without exclusion of human players… (Imho in the open world there is already a solution to this, you don’t have to group, don’t have to rush along etc.)

(offtopic: I think the reason why people tend to rush through dungeons is because these are farmspots. Is it really a good design to reward rushing players? Why not reward players who like to explore dungeons? Give them a better reward than those rushing players and perhaps people would slow down a bit)

I was ready to let this all go until I read the anet dev comments that they just couldn’t manage to do it without making it a required dungeon event. This is utter nonsense. I’ve lost what little respect I still had for this outfit. There is so much to like in this game if they had just maintained the philosophy of letting people play the way they want too. Guess they aren’t smart enuf to do that. The thing that upsets me the most is that they didn’t tell us from the outset that it would end with a required dungeon. I never would have wasted my time completing the early stages if they had.

CalvinHobbes.3541:

KjarlSeaspite.9573:

CalvinHobbes.3541:

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

Translation:

We haven’t figured out how to cap story content in any manner other than forced dungeon play. Expect all future content to be handled the same and shame on you for expecting otherwise. We recognize that like the personal story finale, there will be players who object philosophically to this inconsistency but balancing is hard. Besides, nothing helps build an online world that encourages people to play together more than forcing them to.

Feel free to stop playing MMOs…

Oh boy you got me with that one. How ever will I go on?

It’s funny because that’s how most MMOs handle their content…enjoy doing a dungeon/raid to see the end.

KjarlSeaspite.9573:

Feel free to stop playing MMOs…

MMOG: Massively Multiplayer Online Game. As far as I know, Massively Multiplayer =/= 5 players. This is supposed to be a Massively Multiplayer Online Game, not just a Multiplayer Online Game.
Open world content is what brings out the ‘Massively Multiplayer’ part, not 5-man instances.

As for my experience with the dungeon, I haven’t been able to complete it yet. I went in with two friends, and one had to leave for bed about 75% through the Weapon Testing part. The two of us that were left managed to get through all the Veterans and Elites decently, but at a certain point we just couldn’t handle being outnumbered by Veterans and Elites and had to call it quits.

Before you tell us to LFG for PUGs, we (referring to me and my friend who were left in the end) don’t like PUGs. They’re often either too impatient to wait for us to finish the cutscenes or they like to kick you out at the end so their friends can have loot instead, as has been my experience sadly. We’d much rather play with friends we know we can trust.

I am determined to finish the Living Story though, so I hope I can try again tomorrow with more people – likely three or four again. I must say I did like the dungeon though, especially the weapon testing part. The Embers were less fun in my opinion.

Alphonse.4356:

I was ready to let this all go until I read the anet dev comments that they just couldn’t manage to do it without making it a required dungeon event. This is utter nonsense. I’ve lost what little respect I still had for this outfit. There is so much to like in this game if they had just maintained the philosophy of letting people play the way they want too. Guess they aren’t smart enuf to do that. The thing that upsets me the most is that they didn’t tell us from the outset that it would end with a required dungeon. I never would have wasted my time completing the early stages if they had.

A lesson going forward, I suppose. This was my first sample of the Living Story content, and I quite enjoyed the previous months. But if they’re going end it with a forced-group dungeon every time…then as you say, might as well just ignore it entirely, because in the end it’ll be a complete waste of time due to the only way to finish being that dungeon. And I had been looking forward to seeing how the story resolved, too—talk about a major sour taste in your mouth. YouTube’s a poor substitute to seeing it first-hand.

Why don’t we make up groups for the dongeons here? I personally intend to run it several times to get the story, and then the shinies But if you tell me you haven’t seen the story yet, I won’t mind waiting at all. I’m on Emhry Bay. You can PM me if you want to meet up.

MatthewMedina.5419:

…our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

If that was really true then the game should have either been released with an in-game party dungeon finder, or better yet dungeons wouldn’t be limited to 5 man instances. Won’t comment on dungeon yet till I give it a try, but is this going to be the “standard” fare in the future? Ending stuff with a 5 man instance, so that we can play together but separately?

“Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter…”

The only memory from this will be that I didn’t do it. Just like the Personal Story. In fact every time I see the PS quest on the top left of the screen I am reminded not to even bother with any story content again. It also reminds me not to spend any more money on this game.

KjarlSeaspite.9573:

CalvinHobbes.3541:

KjarlSeaspite.9573:

CalvinHobbes.3541:

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

Translation:

We haven’t figured out how to cap story content in any manner other than forced dungeon play. Expect all future content to be handled the same and shame on you for expecting otherwise. We recognize that like the personal story finale, there will be players who object philosophically to this inconsistency but balancing is hard. Besides, nothing helps build an online world that encourages people to play together more than forcing them to.

Feel free to stop playing MMOs…

Oh boy you got me with that one. How ever will I go on?

It’s funny because that’s how most MMOs handle their content…enjoy doing a dungeon/raid to see the end.

I’m not talking about other MMO’s and I’m not talking about any other content in Guild Wars 2. I’m talking about specific content in Guild Wars 2. Specific content that like the personal story line was 100% solo-friendly only to deviate from that course to a forced dungeon. I am not advocating the removal of co-op play in any MMO. I recognize what an MMO is but thought this was the game that wanted to break away from the status quo of how most MMO’s handle their content.

This is very disapointing. My (very small) guild only plays together for 2 hours every week, and there’s absolutely no way we’ll ever get this done, especially after tonight’s wipe-fest. The champion ooze and his friends at the end of the very first tunnel must have wiped us about 10 times before we managed to get them down, and the rest of the dungeon that we managed to see was even more ridiculous in terms of how powerfull the mobs were compared to anything found in the open world. This is disapointing for us as we had managed to do all the living story content leading up to this in the short play times we have, only to find out it was for nothing. It’s doubly disapointing for me personnally as I’m the one who convinced them that we should be doing this content instead of our usual hearts/events/exploration nights.

I really hope that the devs don’t think this is “casual friendly” content, and if the end of our personnal stories is on the same level there’s a good chance we’ll just drop them before we waste any more of our precious time, same for all the other dungeons, we’ll just skip them.

That being said, we’re not going anywhere for now, there’s enough open-world content to keep a small guild like us going for a while, the down-side being that we’ll be playing in a static world, knowing now that all future “living stories” will probably end in an impossible (for us) dungeon, we won’t bother with them. But at some point in the future we’ll run out of hearts and that’ll be it. Maybe by then we’ll have unlocked guild missions, who knows…

I’d like to finish with a suggestion, so that this isn’t just selfish criticism, and since I still love this game: add a “casual mode” or some sort of difficulty selector to Story-mode dungeons, easier versions that give lesser (or no) rewards, but would allow smaller guilds, or even groups of less than 5, to be a part of the story of this world, wether our personnal stories or the evolving living story. You could have the achievements needed for the living story unlocks be attainable from regular or casual versions, while the regular permanent dungeons would continue to operate as before, with the added casual version not giving any achievements, aside from the last one in regards to the personnal story. You probably have a million other things to work on, but there it is…

P.S.: my ranger thanks you for the quiver skin (or he will soon when I buy it for him).

I was initially disappointed that Flame and Frost ended wtih a dungeon… until I ran the dungeon.

It makes perfect sense now story-wise why a Dungeon had to be the ending for this story. Anything less would not have been able to feel as exciting and epic.

And Drift, if you need a hand, I am happy to help you and your mates through the dungeon. It really is a fun ride

ForAce.1943:

This is MMO, not Single Player game! Come on ppl!

MMO only means it’s an online game played by many people on the same server at the same time. You share a world with other players. It does NOT mean it’s a game you need to join a group to be able to play. That’s a misconception.

Mathew and Paul. If you would have told me up front that the whole living story was going to end in a big 5 man I would have skipped the whole thing. But I also suspect that’s why you didn’t tell anyone too. Because a lot of players would have skipped it. I would like a refund please. I’d like to see the content but you will never get me to try it. I’ve seen too many bad experiences on GW1 and WoW to even bother with them.

Frankly, I think you need some new tools in your kit. I want a spontaneous world like you promised. The one time fight on Southsun Cove is what I expected the end of F & F to be like. You can put us in an instance, that’s fine but work it more like The Madd King area of PvE. And just to really frost my bucket you say things like and we put in new things you can only get here. That’s why I left WoW.

I’m not against playing with other players just rigid groups of small players. No matter how careful you are there is always one player in a group of five willing to play dictator. If you insist on 5 man instances you might as well put in the random group generator at least that way you don’t have to stand around waiting for a group. It’s like grade school and who’s going to be picked for what team. God, that’s not entertainment that’s torture.

MatthewMedina.5419:

I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

With all due respect Sir; Encouraging and forcing are not the same.
I don’t “object philosophically” to doing dungeons. I can’t and won’t do them for two reasons:
1. I have fibromyalgia. My arms/fingers/back/neck hurts and I’m also very stiff. This means I’m slower than the average player and not as flexible with my fingers, meaning I can be slow to react/have problems dodging etc. The fast pace of dungeons are a terror for me, for both body and mind because I get stressed trying to keep up, meaning I stiffen and hurt even more.
2. I won’t do them because I don’t want to ruin the game for others. If I have problem keeping up, I shouldn’t join groups.

I’m doing just fine in the open world though, and I have soloed all my personal stories up to the last dungeon part on 3 characters. I love MMOs, -to play in open living worlds, I just can’t be forced to playing in groups.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect

That’s always a bad way to start a sentence… Just saying

Could you elaborate on the balancing (and scaling) issue? Why is it more difficult to scale dungeons (instead of the SAB or Events for example)? What has to be taken into account? Why do you think a solo friendly play would discourage players from grouping? There are many players doing content in teams of 2 or 3.

I would really appreciate it if you could shed some more light on this.

Was a fun ending, ridiculous OP final boss(es). Not saying it was too hard, but… well, yeah, I am, but mostly it’s way outside of the general flow of Living Story. That was pretty crazy difficult for everyone to be able to complete.

Here’s a little newsflash: not everyone does dungeons— this instance is why!

I felt the exact same way op. I’m not really a fan of dungeon content and even less when pugs are involved. That said, after seeing everyone rave about how good it was I couldn’t resist and took the plunge anyway. It was my first dungeon in GW2 and it ended up being pretty darn fun, wiped a couple times(once on trash then again at the final boss) but we got through it well enough. Completely agree with the dev that it was the best way to end F&F.

Just give it a go, whats the worst that could happen?

OK, I managed to find a group (much easier than for any other dungeon I’ve tried) and finish the dungeon (my first group dungeon).

Gauntlets are nice. Hard to pick between which character to put them on.

Dungeon was hard, but I was with a good group that made it easier the time I finished.

Also, my Ranger was easier to use than my Warrior in it. Same thing was true of the first Toymaker dungeon (which I soloed).

I don’t see what would be hard about scaling this. But I’m not a developer, so what do I know… I’d still be interested in hearing what makes it difficult to scale just out of curiosity.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

With all due respect, surely you have had enough experience scaling difficulty by now? Wasn’t feasible? World events scale, don’t they? Don’t personal story steps scale? Didn’t the previous missions scale for groups?

If you scaled the mobs down so the vets become normal, the elites become vets and the champs and bosses become elite, it would probably be enough to allow people to get through the dungeon and see the story.

The purpose of an “easy” mode isn’t to provide a challenge after all, it’s to allow people to see the end of the content. I think most people would be happy with the achievement and the same rewards they got from the previous missions (so a couple of silver and a karma reward). Leave the chests in the group, “hard” version.

MatthewMedina.5419:

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

It doesn’t encourage players to play the game together it forces it. WvW encourages players to play together. sPvP encourages players to play together. Dungeons require players to play together. There is a major difference between the two. I and many others object philosophically to your idea of ending what is a personal, solo-able story line with a dungeon. It’s the change at the end that’s our problem. The change from play it your way to play it our way. I hope you understand this?

Personally, I would have preferred if you’d focused your time and energy into more missions that would tell a story rather than a dungeon. As it is Rox and Brahams stories barely got going before the end, everything happens off-screen, hidden from the player.

MatthewMedina.5419:

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

I have tried it and unfortunately had to bail on the final bosses due to issues in real life (I could have parked my character out of the way and come back if it was soloable). It was good fun and well done, congratulations on that, I hope to get another chance at it tonight or over the weekend.

However, it doesn’t change my view that these instances should be solo-able too.

some people need to man up and stop being such anti social introverts. It took me all of 2 seconds to join a group of random strangers and we all stepped in there and had a blast.

its not like you have to manage a friggin 20 man raid and organise healers, tanks etc.

Drift.9614:

This is very disapointing. My (very small) guild only plays together for 2 hours every week, and there’s absolutely no way we’ll ever get this done, especially after tonight’s wipe-fest. The champion ooze and his friends at the end of the very first tunnel must have wiped us about 10 times before we managed to get them down, and the rest of the dungeon that we managed to see was even more ridiculous in terms of how powerfull the mobs were compared to anything found in the open world. This is disapointing for us as we had managed to do all the living story content leading up to this in the short play times we have, only to find out it was for nothing. It’s doubly disapointing for me personnally as I’m the one who convinced them that we should be doing this content instead of our usual hearts/events/exploration nights.

I really hope that the devs don’t think this is “casual friendly” content, and if the end of our personnal stories is on the same level there’s a good chance we’ll just drop them before we waste any more of our precious time, same for all the other dungeons, we’ll just skip them.

That being said, we’re not going anywhere for now, there’s enough open-world content to keep a small guild like us going for a while, the down-side being that we’ll be playing in a static world, knowing now that all future “living stories” will probably end in an impossible (for us) dungeon, we won’t bother with them. But at some point in the future we’ll run out of hearts and that’ll be it. Maybe by then we’ll have unlocked guild missions, who knows…

I’d like to finish with a suggestion, so that this isn’t just selfish criticism, and since I still love this game: add a “casual mode” or some sort of difficulty selector to Story-mode dungeons, easier versions that give lesser (or no) rewards, but would allow smaller guilds, or even groups of less than 5, to be a part of the story of this world, wether our personnal stories or the evolving living story. You could have the achievements needed for the living story unlocks be attainable from regular or casual versions, while the regular permanent dungeons would continue to operate as before, with the added casual version not giving any achievements, aside from the last one in regards to the personnal story. You probably have a million other things to work on, but there it is…

P.S.: my ranger thanks you for the quiver skin (or he will soon when I buy it for him).

I think there is a big misconception: Casual player (which I am too) doesn’t equal a bad player. I feel offended when you say: do something for the casual and make content easier. I love that the dungeon is harder than open world stuff (which imho is much too easy because doing autoattack isn’t really that fun to me) and wished that there are more challenges in the non-instanced areas of the game too, to prepare everyone for dungeon-difficulty.

Your suggestion is good, the team did it in SAB already: the easy-mode cloud. It could be done very easily: give Rox and Braham unlimited health and let them hit very very hard. It’s that easy, don’t care for balance, just make the npcs gods and lock away the rewards for the group running this. The reward for them is experiencing the story. Even if players die constantly, the heroes clear out the area and revive the players afterwards. Meanwhile the downed players can watch the epic battle. In this mode it doesn’t matter how many players are in the group, you can go in with 1 friend and experience the story. Or even alone.

I don’t agree that you should get the story-achievement for that though, since achievements shouldn’t work like that. I hate that you get an achievement for everything nowadays: log in —> achievement; get lv.10 --> achievement. Achievements should show off accomplishment of managing difficult barriers in the game imho. Something to work for, not something that falls from the sky.

The fact that the dungeon is only available for a short time is also devestating for bad players. They can’t take the time they need to become better in this dungeon. Drift here can try it two times (he plays together with his group 2h / Week) and then it’s gone. Meh.

I too am extremely disappointed that at the very last minute the rug was pulled from underneath me. So much so that I just had to sign up to the forum and say something. This is my first post.

I was very much looking forward to the conclusion after all the time I spent leading up to it. I logged in and went straight to the area indicated on the map, entered the instance…and got destroyed. I died something like 25 times in the first room before I gave up.

I was expecting to be able to solo it like every other part. The other parts of the story were hard but I managed to get through it…this just makes me want to quit and never come back.

Like others here I wonder why I bothered with the Living Story.

Next time I wont bother, it is like watching a movie and then for the last 10 minutes they require the theater to be 100% full before they continue…

Thobek.1730:

some people need to man up and stop being such anti social introverts.

That was both ignorant and rude.
First off: Introvert does not equal anti social. Stop putting labels on people if you don’t understand what they mean.
Secondly: Many loath dungeons, (for different reasons) so why should they be forced to play them to see the end of a story they’ve been happily soloing through up to then? Many play MMOs to experience and quest/do events in a living open world, (with other players I might add, so it’s not about being a-social) NOT to raid or do dungeons. We are all different and often don’t enjoy the same parts of the game. Heck, I’ve known some that would rather harvest and craft than anything else.
Points here are: 1. A soloable storyline should not end in a group requirement.
2. It’s never a good thing to force a certain type of gameplay on people.

I honestly can’t see why people are so bent out of shape about this. It’s a multiplayer game so the content is going to arguably require multiple players at some points. If you want to play an RPG and talk to your friends without grouping then why not play Skyrim and run Skype in the background.

So what if the proceeding story was solo-able content? Where was the cast iron promise anything else would be?

No one is forcing you to do the content. If you don’t want to do it then don’t. You’ll be able to watch someone’s run on youtube within a day of release anyway so you can’t miss out on anything.

I hate dungeons with a passion. Got my quota filled up from another game which forced you to run them “for progression”. Gives me a rash. Well, not really but I like to think so anyway. I’m also a bit disappointed with this whole deal of a dungeon at the end but there isn’t much my complaining will do to help, so I’m going to ask something else from the dungeon hating community instead.

Why don’t we, who for different reasons don’t like doing them, like medical reasons (Rubina for an example) or anything else, just set up a group here on the forums, agree on a time and stuff, then go do them at our own pace? Guesting is here, so we can gather up, no problems. When the group is formed up, just inform the group of anything that might be important, like medical reasons, small children, keyboard loving cats, ya know, whatever it is, and then we are good to go.

Any interest in this? I’m located in EU, evenings during week and almost all weekend is clear for me.

So I did the dungeon with a pug. Bo-o-o-o-o-ring. The final boss looked kinda cool but well, so did Zhaitan. Didn’t mean it wasn’t boring. If I wanted to play aoe-dodge-a-thon I could just do Grenth, which is actual living world content. The dynamic event system was the only thing keeping pve from being a sleepwalk, using instances just makes it feel like I’ve stepped out of GW2 into a much worse game coughWoWcough. It was the same with the instances for The Razing really, but at least I didn’t have to wait for a party to find out how disappointing those were. =D

Rubina.9482:

Thobek.1730:

some people need to man up and stop being such anti social introverts.

That was both ignorant and rude.
First off: Introvert does not equal anti social. Stop putting labels on people if you don’t understand what they mean.
Secondly: Many loath dungeons, (for different reasons) so why should they be forced to play them to see the end of a story they’ve been happily soloing through up to then? Many play MMOs to experience and quest/do events in a living open world, (with other players I might add, so it’s not about being a-social) NOT to raid or do dungeons. We are all different and often don’t enjoy the same parts of the game. Heck, I’ve known some that would rather harvest and craft than anything else.
Points here are: 1. A soloable storyline should not end in a group requirement.
2. It’s never a good thing to force a certain type of gameplay on people.

see you’re exactly the sensitive type I’m talking about. Actually forcing people to work well with others can be good for people. It breaks them out of their shell.

I’m just glad there are people out there that enjoy meeting and playing these dungeons with others otherwise this game would be one depressing MMO where everyone just runs around doing everything solo.

MatthewMedina.5419:

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

So basically “Put up and shut up” then?

Let me add my voice to those expressing deep disappointment that your highly inventive and engaging Living Story has ended in a roadblock that means I’ll never experience the conclusion. It seems my “philosophy” of not wanting to waste my time with fools, be it in Guilds or PUGs, is incompatible with ArenaNet’s “philosophy” of encouraging (or, in this case, forcing) players to play together.

You’ll have to forgive me for feeling utterly blindsided by this revelation, considering that the vast, vast majority of GW2 so far has been soloable.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

The entire point of GW2 was that it removed barriers to playing with others, rather than forcing players to play with others. You guys are getting further and further off track and it’s becoming very worrisome.

I thought one of the lessons all of us took from past special events was that people didn’t want to be forced to do five man content to complete such events. The two instances from last month scaled almost perfectly for groups of various sizes, which makes the decision to return to the tired old set party paradigm even more perplexing.

I’m sorry, but if you can make story instances scale, you can make longer story instances that approximate a dungeon run scale as well. (Let’s be honest, even regular dungeons should scale and it’s an absurd shame that even though Arenanet had all the tools needed to make it happen, it’s going to take WildStar to actually bring the obvious evolution of dungeons that can scale from one player to raid size a reality).

If the choice had been a string of four or five story instances that take an hour or so (all together) and scale just like any other story instance, VS. a five man dungeon that takes an hour, how was it not obvious which was the right choice to finish up a four month Living STORY event that hadn’t forced five man parties at any other step along the way?

Is this resume building coming before what’s actually good for the game? Or is it just “brain drain” and “thought rot” that have left Arenanet unable to progress the paradigm shifting game they created?

IMO, the entire living story has been a very mediocre affair that really needed a fulfilling conclusion that everyone could enjoy to tie things together and make the four months worth the player effort and design time. You guys chose a path that you knew would end up excluding and disillusioning a fairly large portion of the player base. You had many other far better options, but still chose the one that you knew would ruin the entire thing for a lot of people.

Why? I mean seriously, why? My brain hurts trying to comprehend the reasoning!

Thobek.1730:

Rubina.9482:

Thobek.1730:

some people need to man up and stop being such anti social introverts.

That was both ignorant and rude.
First off: Introvert does not equal anti social. Stop putting labels on people if you don’t understand what they mean.
Secondly: Many loath dungeons, (for different reasons) so why should they be forced to play them to see the end of a story they’ve been happily soloing through up to then? Many play MMOs to experience and quest/do events in a living open world, (with other players I might add, so it’s not about being a-social) NOT to raid or do dungeons. We are all different and often don’t enjoy the same parts of the game. Heck, I’ve known some that would rather harvest and craft than anything else.
Points here are: 1. A soloable storyline should not end in a group requirement.
2. It’s never a good thing to force a certain type of gameplay on people.

see you’re exactly the sensitive type I’m talking about. Actually forcing people to work well with others can be good for people. It breaks them out of their shell.

<snip>

This is a game we pay to play, not a military style boot camp designed to change our behavior. You are exactly the type of person the causes me to dislike forced groups.

but how do you create a dungeon which is soloable + needs the participants to do complex maneuvers as a group?

The only thing I could think of: include easy-mode where Braham and Rox are gods and ignore each enemy attack while destroying the enemies. I don’t think this is an option for normal mode though, a lot of time went into designing those encounters to be challenging.

Thobek.1730:

see you’re exactly the sensitive type I’m talking about. Actually forcing people to work well with others can be good for people. It breaks them out of their shell.

Ah yes, the good old standard-issue, extrovert misconception that introverts are just sensitive people that need someone to come along and “fix” them, to break them out of their shell. Force people to “work” with others! It’s good for them! It’ll build character!

Extroverts tend to be confident. That’s good. That confidence leads to an inclination to think that they’re right. That can be good, to a degree, but like everyone else they’re quite often wrong. It just tends to be more difficult to convince them of that.

my 2 cents

Guild Wars 2 has this [Scale according to crowd size “thing”] (i don’t know whats its called) so why not use it for dungeons as well?

Don’t have to limit dungeon to 5 persons make it 1 – X numbers.

Feh. As I said elsewhere, I’d say taking the mini-dungeon approach (a la Font of Rhand) would be better for stuff like this.
‘Grouping’ on-the-fly is fine.
Having to actually pre-form a group is not.

SweetPotato.7456:

my 2 cents

Guild Wars 2 has this [Scale according to crowd size “thing”] (i don’t know whats its called) so why not use it for dungeons as well?

Don’t have to limit dungeon to 5 persons make it 1 – X numbers.

It’s not that easy, it isn’t just a numbers game. It gets quite complex when you think of all the rezzing of downed players is part of the battle-design.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

It’s not that easy, it isn’t just a numbers game. It gets quite complex when you think of all the rezzing of downed players is part of the battle-design.

Rox and Braham can and do rez too so that’s not much of a difficulty.

I have confidence in ArenaNet

Fiontar.4695:

HiddenNick.7206:

Turgon.8625:

Just read over at massively that the living story ends with a 5 man instance. What a disappointment for all those out there who won’t go near that sort of content.

This feels exactly like the pain of the personal story.

You could do the entire 1-80 personal story solo except for the final mission where you suddenly had to go into a dungeon. I still don’t know how my story ends….

All the living story content has been doable solo so far, and I have very much enjoyed it – please don’t make this ending a 5 man! I am all for 5 mans being used for content just not for the culmination of a plot line that has been open to everyone so far.

I love GW2 but I would rather just logout then be forced into dungeon play.

What you really ask for is the removal of all cooperative play from the game and that’s the kind of thing that would be a deal breaker for huge majority of people! There needs to be content that REQUIRES cooperative play or only few people will continue to play it! That’s because people need to have reasons to play together. That’s a huge thing for every MMO.

Umm…no. The arbitrary requirement of having five people just turns a lot of people off of “group content” in this game. To assume that players will only group for instances if they are forced to is ludicrous. If dungeons scaled for 1 to 5 people, a lot more people would do them and a lot more people would participate in group activities in this game.

A lot of people who would rather stay away from all the large guild BS play in small guilds, which may often just be made up of a few RL friends. My guild is like this and we would all love to do group content together, but by requiring five players, rather than two, three or four, we have extremely limited opportunities to do group content together.

Forced grouping in a game that so successfully supports scaling every where else is just plain silly and evidence of backwards thinking in an otherwise forward thinking game.

There’s just not enough +1s to do this justice. Hear, hear.

I don’t understand why you guys are so opposed to dungeons. You don’t have to speak to anyone, and in this case you don’t really have to wait for a party either—someone will post LFG every couple minutes, you type their name in the invite box, and done. If four other people were doing the same dynamic event as you, you wouldn’t mind, and might actually welcome the help. So why not just think of this as a dynamic event with four other players in the vicinity? It’s just about that easy

Adding them as a party does the samething a guild does and that forces us to share our exp and loot with who we are partied or in a guild with so creating a group with people you do not know is kinda a bad thing with me. If I had a group of friends I would not mind sharing my stuff with them cause then I know I am helping people that are not just doing it to take from me like other MMO’s.

I already give up my loot to people that help me around the game that just do it out of the blue.

@RuneCrimson: you don’t share your loot at all, everyone in GW2 has his own lootdrop from every mob. In dungeons they live easily long enough for each groupmember to tag them.

RuneCrimson.7380:

Adding them as a party does the samething a guild does and that forces us to share our exp and loot with who we are partied or in a guild with so creating a group with people you do not know is kinda a bad thing with me. If I had a group of friends I would not mind sharing my stuff with them cause then I know I am helping people that are not just doing it to take from me like other MMO’s.

I already give up my loot to people that help me around the game that just do it out of the blue.

Yep, it makes no difference whether 1 or 5 people kill a mob, as long as you do some damage you will get the same loot. In fact your better killing a mob with 5 people as it takes less time and you get the same loot as if you had spent 5 times as long killing it solo.

Not really going to get into it again but I have seen it happen in this game and others…Its a normal MMO thing. I have been told all this before but I have also been suckered in at least 5 different MMO’s that said these samethings. Its better I just be careful and not get used again. The help I do get I appreciate but I will not throw myself into a guild or party like I have before when I am told these same things and get suckered. Soon I will be high enough in level to not care to much I am already a level 36 and never partied or joined a guild but thinking about it after I find out how much a guild takes from our loot and exp if I feel I cannot get a straight answer I guess its game play like I have been doing til it matters little if I get exp or not meaning level 80 lol

RuneCrimson.7380:

Not really going to get into it again but I have seen it happen in this game and others…Its a normal MMO thing. I have been told all this before but I have also been suckered in at least 5 different MMO’s that said these samethings. Its better I just be careful and not get used again. The help I do get I appreciate but I will not throw myself into a guild or party like I have before when I am told these same things and get suckered. Soon I will be high enough in level to not care to much I am already a level 36 and never partied or joined a guild but thinking about it after I find out how much a guild takes from our loot and exp if I feel I cannot get a straight answer I guess its game play like I have been doing til it matters little if I get exp or not meaning level 80 lol

Guilds take nothing out of your loot mechanically. Teaming does not lower your loot. In fact teaming in this game is the best way to get more loot, as I’ve said you get the same loot wether you solo or have 2 or 3 people killing it. The only time you will get less loot is if you can’t do enough damage to count as having killed said mob, This will practically never happen in a dungeon (it is set very low, the only time it will really kick in is in huge Orr Events where there are 20+ people all killing the same mobs, or in Zergs if you’re Support.)

and btw I know it’s normal for MMORPG to split loot, Guild Wars 2 does not do this, it’s almost part of their mission statement, they don’t want to you to get annoyed when someone helps you. It’s bad for community. Which is why this game does it differently.

sighs If you say so….Not going to take a chance seems to many people are trying to take from noobs that have been used before. Thanks for the info. Do not think I will take the chance on it and level up doing alot on my own. Keeping up how I been doing…all MMO’s are the same parties and guilds take and make it hard for lower levels to level up. And the people like to tell them what everyone has told me just to make it hard for them. Anyway I am done have a good day/night.

RuneCrimson.7380:

sighs If you say so….Not going to take a chance seems to many people are trying to take from noobs that have been used before. Thanks for the info. Do not think I will take the chance on it and level up doing alot on my own. Keeping up how I been doing…all MMO’s are the same parties and guilds take and make it hard for lower levels to level up. And the people like to tell them what everyone has told me just to make it hard for them. Anyway I am done have a good day/night.

You are actually very wrong here. Party-members (and every person outside of your party) can’t see the loot you are getting from killing mobs, it’s phased out for them. It’s yours and party-members just help you to get if faster by killing the mob faster. It works that way inside of dungeons and outside in the world. From time to time you even meet people who link their loot in the chat and give you the opportunity to trade with them, not everyone can wear everything.

There is no way to take loot away from anyone in this game. Sorry for your bad experiences in other games.

Alphonse.4356:

This is a game we pay to play, not a military style boot camp designed to change our behavior. You are exactly the type of person the causes me to dislike forced groups.

That’s ok, nobody is forcing you to do anything. Go get a party together amongst your friends and do the content.

I on the other hand don’t mind grouping with the guild, my mates or even a bunch of randoms. In fact I find everyone that I’ve grouped with to be a great bunch of people, we seem to have a good laugh even when mistakes are made. Nobody has this elitist attitude.

If you miss out because your too shy to play with others its your loss, not mine.

btw the dungeon is very very good.

I wished I could have taken a pic of the person that took my loot that time and the exp that was halfed but it would not do it. So I have no proof that it happens here too. I have watched a creature I killed glowing where I should be able to get something and someone walk up and take it and it stop glowing…like you say I should only see what is mine on my side so that means that guy took my loot. But since the capture picture does not cap that kinda thing I will never be able to prove that a MMO is a MMO no matter where we go.

RuneCrimson.7380:

I wished I could have taken a pic of the person that took my loot that time and the exp that was halfed but it would not do it. So I have no proof that it happens here too. I have watched a creature I killed glowing where I should be able to get something and someone walk up and take it and it stop glowing…like you say I should only see what is mine on my side so that means that guy took my loot. But since the capture picture does not cap that kinda thing I will never be able to prove that a MMO is a MMO no matter where we go.

nobody took your loot, loot disappears after 3 minutes when not picked up + you don’t get loot every time you kill a creature… it’s random luck.

(+ creatures don’t “glow”, not sure what you’re talking about here. They leave loot behind which glows)