Guild Wars 2

…that I’m going on vacation and will most almost all of this “update.” Then I saw this worthless waste of time that is the wurm fight, and I know I won’t miss it one bit. It makes me wonder what the dev meetings are like when they come up with this stuff.

Dev #1: “You know, we really need more content that only a small fraction of players will like.”
Dev #2: “I agree. We were successful with Tequatl. Now that zone’s as barren as a Catholic Church during Happy Hour.”
D1: “Wait, I got it! Let’s Teq it!”
D2: “huh?”
D1: “We’ll make some ridiculous mechanic that will absolutely require a third party VOIP program to coordinate, like, oh, I dunno…”
D2: “10 bombs at the same instant?”
D1: “kitten it! Why not 20?!?”
D2: “Oh man! What else?”
D1: “Uhh, champs. Like 30 of em! With one-hit magical kittening laserbeam eyes!”
D2: “Brilliant!”
D1: “WAIT! I have it!”
D2: quizzical look
D1: “No. Loot. For anything! Let’s take up 35 minutes on a guaranteed fail, and then we’ll just mushroom-stamp everyone RIGHT ON THE FOREHEAD!”
D2: “you’re a monster…”

1. let’s make it really hard and non-instanced. That will show them casuals!

2. Oh you’re trying to quest to a server that has the population and organization to complete it? Sorry, overflow!

3. Let’s make everyone wait and complete pre-events that don’t have any rewards in them.

4. Let’s randomly teleport people to deal with different champions, just so that some poor newbie who wasn’t geared or lvled enough will fail the event for everyone.

But yeah other than that it’s nice.

This patch reminds me of something….

If you were disappointed about missing out on the game to go on holiday I think I can safely assume you enjoy something about it. Let us say, for the sake of argument, it is killing skritt.

It just so happens I am starting a company (Skrittbox). Our sole product will be a game in which you play a character standing in an empty box hitting skritt with a stick until fall down. It is the game for a hardcore skritt killer like yourself.

This game will certainly be a success I know there is an audience (you) and it is so simple it must be cheap to make. All I need to hire is someone to manage the finances, someone to negotiate the rights to skritt, sticks and boxes, an artist to draw the skritt the boxes, the stick and most importantly the dude who hits the skritt with the stick and developer to program the thing. Then I need a little bit from each sale for myself, otherwise why would I be doing this?

I can get all of this for $430. $430! GW2 must have cost at least 300,000 times that ammount. And I have a guaranteed audience! All you have to do is pay me $430…………

Wait. That is a lot for a game. You probably won’t buy it. We need more players. But who other that you is insane enough to buy a game where you stand in a box and hit skritt with sticks till they fall over? Well some people are nearly that obsessed with skritt hitting. I know four guys who will buy if we add character customisation, another five who will certainly play if the game plays the Jackson classic “Beat It” on a continuous loop and 10 who will play if we add an on-line leader board. And the best thing is since I’ve already paid for my team to put on shoes etc it is pretty easy for them to do a little bit extra and make these things happen. In fact I think I can bring in all these additional features, on top of the basic game, for a new total of $500.

That’s 20 guaranteed purchases for only $500 invested. I only need to charge $25 a copy. A perfectly reasonable amount to pay to fulfil your ( now slightly diluted and cluttered) dream of being a dude who hits skritt with a stick. In a box.

Thus games with production values over a certain threshold may contain content you find unappealing. I hope this great mystery has been solved for you.

JonG going to admirable lengths to defend badly designed content.

Glad you find my length admirable.

I actually agree that the content is badly designed. But as your first post highlights nicely it is more to do with the delivery of the content (making it hard/impossible for casuals to ignore, not giving organised groups adequate tools to err…. organise themselves, not effectively communicating how the encounters work) than the content itself.

The OP just seemed unaware of how the devs might have to consider players other than herself or those like her.