So I ended up replying in the large Ascenended gear feedback thread and writing a large post with constructive criticism/suggestions and thought it was worth a post here. So here it goes:
http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success
“Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”
Now I would understand if the system simply wasn’t working, or if they had no idea how to make an mmo without vertical progression, but they are the ones behind Guild Wars 1, which was amazingly successful and had absolutely no gear grind or power creep! Check out the list of best selling video games of all time on wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#PC – guess which game is on there? Guild Wars – with over 6.5 million copies sold!
I’m still pretty confident that they will change the system back and remove the grind – after all, they are all humans, they make mistakes and I’m 100% sure they want what’s best for their game. After all, a lot of the developers are gamers too and I simply think they just misjudged their player base needs.
As for suggestions/constructive criticism, all they have to do is look back to Guild Wars 1!
- Titles (GWAMM, Hero/Gladiator, Survivor etc.) – make them more visible and try to spice it up a bit – in GW1 the hardcore players were grinding thousands of hours for these to feel prestigious, and they really were an “oh wow” factor when you saw someone with a cool title.
- Skins – make different tiers of skins, not stats! You say exotics are too easy to get and legendaries too hard – make some skins that fit inbetween to fill the time-gap you want to close! Some of these skins already exist in game as exotics, how about you add a new tier like legendaries (no stat difference, just prestiege) and make them cooler than exotics but less cool than legendaries!
- Cool emotes – rank/zrank and these come to mind. Make them availabe outside of the pvp lobby and people will go kittening mental about them – everyone who played GW1 knows that. Make an emote for sPvP (we already have that kinda), make one for WvW and have it require multiple things (kills/captures/100% WvW map etc.), make one for PvE and have it require every dungeon every run completed/100% world map and similar things.
- More content – you are doing this incredibly well! And that does count as progression a lot! If you keep pumping new content updates like these every 1/2/3 months, people will keep playing the game like no other! Doing new content is worth endlessly more than repeating old one so this is the thing that will keep people playing the most! And of course, couple it with unique skins and other cool items in the gem store (town clothes, cool consumables, new dances?) and you will have enough money to keep Colin smiling for ever (and we all know that is the whole point anyway)!
Ok so this turned out to be much longer than I though it will be and I seriously hope someone reads this at some point (please if someone does, just reply and you will make me very very happy). And if nothing else, perhaps if you listen to these suggestions and make us happy, perhaps, you will get some more… cupcakes?