Guild Wars 2

Some of which simply must be done otherwise MMOs get boring.

1. Expansions

For the love of god, please stop thinking the Living Story is a good substitute for an expansion. We want a new race. We want new classes. We want a new area to explore and quest in.

Every-2-weeks LS content cannot give us that.

Every successful MMO in the history of gaming has adhered to this model. Every year it gets a massive, paid expansion with tons of new stuff to do. That’s the way it works, and if a game doesn’t get this, it withers and dies.

Why? Because players want a bunch of brand new content all at once. It feels fresh, exciting, and fun.

2. Dungeons

Make more dungeons.

Make them level 80.

Make them harder.

Make them permanent.

This game is in desperate need of new 5 man content. The dungeons that exist have been done to DEATH. Please, PLEASE give us more dungeons. Just take some time, develop 5 new, challenging in the right ways dungeons and it’ll go a long, long way towards helping the stagnation in this game.

3. Raids

The interest and dedication to Tequatl proves it: Players desperately want hard, large-group content. Because that kitten is FUN and AWESOME. People (who aren’t entitled babies) love the Tequatl event’s difficulty, and only want more. But the open world is not a place for this kind of content. It’s too hard to scale. You make it good for 20 players, it’s too easy for the 200 that want to do it. You make it good for 200, then it’s impossible to gather 200 people after a week.

The solution is to do what other MMOs do: Instance the content and balance it for 20 players.

ArenaNet, you did some really fantastic stuff in terms of making combat better in MMOs. You also did wonders with Dynamic Events and World Bosses. These are all really great features that have made MMOs enjoyable again.

But please, for the love of god, stop being so obtuse. Stop going against the grain so hard that you give your hand splinters. Stop refusing to do anything other MMOs are doing simply because you want to be different.

Expansions are the lifeblood of MMOs.
Dungeons are excellent filler in between Expansions.
Raids are godkitten near essential for your game to have an end-game.

Please stop trying so hard. Right now you’re in a good spot. Players are still playing and still waiting for things to change. The game isn’t dying yet. Take the best parts of what other MMOs are doing and make that happen for your players.

Otherwise? This game will die.

The game will die if what you say isn’t added? Hyperbole much?

The thing is, if they do exactly what other mmo’s do, they have to do it better, otherwise they’ll lose players to the games that do do it better.

There’s nothing wrong with taking concepts from other games, but completely copying their model could actually do more harm than good.

On topic:

1) You’re right. 2 week production time can’t produce expansion level content. There’s nothing to say though that the LS can’t produce these things if given enough production time, and given there’s 4 LS teams, what’s to say 1 team isn’t working on these things. As well as this, while expansions give a bunch of brand new content to play with, so does a 2 week turnaround of content.

That’s not to say I’m against an expansion. Expansions develop interest as well as revenue and would be beneficial for the game. I just thing your reasoning that it has to be expansions flawed.

2) A new dungeon path is being added Tuesday for level 80’s, as well as the 3 new fractals at some point. Not sure how they’re ‘going against the grain’ with this one.

3) I personally haven’t got anything against raids. However, your ‘too easy for 200 people’ comment has a solution; scale the mechanics of the fight, and not simply the health. That way, players have to take note of the fight’s mechanics, and not simply brute-force them while a small number pay attention.

For points 2 and 3, and can’t necessarily agree that more instanced content would be good for the game. Essentially, they fracture the community into smaller groups of 5 – 20 people.

What I would like to see is more world boss revamps for open-world raids (as well as engine optimization and a slider for spell effects), and dungeons that aren’t the same every-time. Have mobs patrol, and their group makeup change every new dungeon.

For example, maybe you’ll have a D/D Ele, SB Ranger and GS Warrior composition, and the next time you do it it’ll be a S/F Mesmer, S/D Necro and S/S Guardian.

Maybe the boss will also roam around, instead of waiting in one spot to be slaughtered.

Maybe the objective will change; one run might have you wipe all of the mobs out, while another will require you to steal some plans.

Maybe the dungeon won’t have much in the way of mobs, but traps and such.

Maybe there’ll be secret areas in the ‘main’ dungeon that opens up new objectives (i.e. explore the new wing).

I personally thing dungeons that have random elements like this would go a lot further towards combating stagnation than simply putting new dungeons out.

TheDaiBish.9735:

The game will die if what you say isn’t added? Hyperbole much?

The thing is, if they do exactly what other mmo’s do, they have to do it better, otherwise they’ll lose players to the games that do do it better.

There’s nothing wrong with taking concepts from other games, but completely copying their model could actually do more harm than good.

On topic:

1) You’re right. 2 week production time can’t produce expansion level content. There’s nothing to say though that the LS can’t produce these things if given enough production time, and given there’s 4 LS teams, what’s to say 1 team isn’t working on these things. As well as this, while expansions give a bunch of brand new content to play with, so does a 2 week turnaround of content.

That’s not to say I’m against an expansion. Expansions develop interest as well as revenue and would be beneficial for the game. I just thing your reasoning that it has to be expansions flawed.

2) A new dungeon path is being added Tuesday for level 80’s, as well as the 3 new fractals at some point. Not sure how they’re ‘going against the grain’ with this one.

3) I personally haven’t got anything against raids. However, your ‘too easy for 200 people’ comment has a solution; scale the mechanics of the fight, and not simply the health. That way, players have to take note of the fight’s mechanics, and not simply brute-force them while a small number pay attention.

For points 2 and 3, and can’t necessarily agree that more instanced content would be good for the game. Essentially, they fracture the community into smaller groups of 5 – 20 people.

What I would like to see is more world boss revamps for open-world raids (as well as engine optimization and a slider for spell effects), and dungeons that aren’t the same every-time. Have mobs patrol, and their group makeup change every new dungeon.

For example, maybe you’ll have a D/D Ele, SB Ranger and GS Warrior composition, and the next time you do it it’ll be a S/F Mesmer, S/D Necro and S/S Guardian.

Maybe the boss will also roam around, instead of waiting in one spot to be slaughtered.

Maybe the objective will change; one run might have you wipe all of the mobs out, while another will require you to steal some plans.

Maybe the dungeon won’t have much in the way of mobs, but traps and such.

Maybe there’ll be secret areas in the ‘main’ dungeon that opens up new objectives (i.e. explore the new wing).

I personally thing dungeons that have random elements like this would go a lot further towards combating stagnation than simply putting new dungeons out.

I like your thoughts. These are some good thoughts.

Balancing stuff in the open world is really tricky though. Right now we have a few problems: If you make it scale down, people will just complete it there where it’s easier. And people will get mad if others join in. If you make it not scale at all, you have the problem we have right now where nobody but highly-coordinated groups can complete it.

That’s not even getting into the matter of it being on an invisible timer, so people have to wait around to see if the gigantic, difficult-to-kill, requires-200-people boss shows up.

All of those problems are solved by instancing. Have your awesome world-bosses, but the game really needs its HARD large-group content to be instanced and balanced accordingly.

Hyperbole though?

No.

The game WILL die if they neglect the PvE part of their fanbase. That’s a fact. No new dungeons, no large-scale raids, and no proper expansion WILL lead to a dead game. It’s happened in countless other failed MMOs over the years and Guild Wars 2 is no exception.

Time Glitch.2460:

I like your thoughts. These are some good thoughts.

Balancing stuff in the open world is really tricky though. Right now we have a few problems: If you make it scale down, people will just complete it there where it’s easier. And people will get mad if others join in. If you make it not scale at all, you have the problem we have right now where nobody but highly-coordinated groups can complete it.

That’s not even getting into the matter of it being on an invisible timer, so people have to wait around to see if the gigantic, difficult-to-kill, requires-200-people boss shows up.

All of those problems are solved by instancing. Have your awesome world-bosses, but the game really needs its HARD large-group content to be instanced and balanced accordingly.

Hyperbole though?

No.

The game WILL die if they neglect the PvE part of their fanbase. That’s a fact. No new dungeons, no large-scale raids, and no proper expansion WILL lead to a dead game. It’s happened in countless other failed MMOs over the years and Guild Wars 2 is no exception.

Well, I’m pretty sure ANet wouldn’t keep going with this approach if all the numbers were doing were going down :P

Like I said, I have no issues with raids in themselves, but I can see how large-scale open-world content (that isn’t a spam fest) and large instanced content can live side by side. If you take people out of the world, then the open-world content can’t be completed.

The issue with scaling can be sorted with mechanic scaling. I also don’t see why these large boss fights shouldn’t require a well organised group. You can easily assign roles and positions to players to have an organised group even with randoms.

And yeah, the timer issue is a problem (especially for overflows who don’t seem to want to co-ordinate). Short of having player-initiated pre-events, there isn’t much that can be done.

Another advantage to open-world content is that if you’re in a guild, you don’t have to say ‘no’ to 10 people if you have 30 that want to do the 20-man raid tonight.

I disagree with the OP. The current system is great, keep going, but do polish and fix existing stuff, and as with tequatl, don’t be afraid to remix current content.

Although i do agree of your visions for this game, i dont think the game will die if they are not implemented, well, maybe a small load of 5 man content needs to be added permanently and not the temporal (but AWESOME as hell) dungeons we get. when talking about expansions, i think your knowledge about the expansion development times is rather limited, as far as i know the FIRST expansions of most of mmos dont get themselves done on a year, in fact the first (and im gonna get flamed for this) WoW expansion released on 2006,2 YEARS after the release on 2004. But besides that, gw2 isn’t the case like WoW because it doesn’t release PERMANENT content for patches but temporal ones, with this being said then the gw2 expansion could in fact be by the end of this year. Now when talking about raids Gw2 doesn’t really need some, Why? well tequatl can explain it for ya, you could just give him a 30% chance of exotic drop and a rare drop and you got yourself a raid boss, buff all the Dragons this way and create more giant/difficult world bosses with this and then gw2 hardcore endgame content would be almost fulfilled. but that is just my opinion

Time Glitch.2460:

Every successful MMO in the history of gaming has adhered to this model. Every year it gets a massive, paid expansion with tons of new stuff to do. That’s the way it works, and if a game doesn’t get this, it withers and dies.

Name me a few “successful” MMOs that have had annual, paid expansions.

Make more dungeons.

Make them level 80.

Make them harder.

Make them permanent.

You’re gonna get a handful of new Fractals this years.
Higher level Fractals pretty much require Agony Resistance, which is only found on level 80 gear.
Fractals are pretty tough, I have been told.
Fractals are permanent.

You were saying?

The interest and dedication to Tequatl proves it: Players desperately want hard, large-group content. Because that kitten is FUN and AWESOME. People (who aren’t entitled babies) love the Tequatl event’s difficulty, and only want more. But the open world is not a place for this kind of content. It’s too hard to scale. You make it good for 20 players, it’s too easy for the 200 that want to do it. You make it good for 200, then it’s impossible to gather 200 people after a week.

The solution is to do what other MMOs do: Instance the content and balance it for 20 players.

The problem with that is that you end up shafting everyone who’s not a part of a big guild.

But please, for the love of god, stop being so obtuse. Stop going against the grain so hard that you give your hand splinters. Stop refusing to do anything other MMOs are doing simply because you want to be different.

And if you stop being different, you just end up being compared to the best of the bunch and all of your flaws, however insignificant they may be, get amplified to unnecessary proportions. Which is not a good plan.

I find it rather hilarious that there are tons of people enjoying WvW and PvP and you seem to act like none of those people exist/matter.

Olba.5376:

Name me a few “successful” MMOs that have had annual, paid expansions.

WoW

Guild Wars 1

Everquest

Granted these might not have been annual on the dot but they did exist. Right now ANet says they aren’t even working on an expansion. Big mistake.

You’re gonna get a handful of new Fractals this years.
Higher level Fractals pretty much require Agony Resistance, which is only found on level 80 gear.
Fractals are pretty tough, I have been told.
Fractals are permanent.

You were saying?

Fractals are rehashed old content with kitten tons of artificial difficulty (1 shot kills, extremely high-health). New dungeons brings with it new enemies, new mechanics that can actually be challenging (not just damage spongey 1-hitters), and an overall feeling of freshness. Can’t get that with recycled or re-balanced old dungeons and fractals.

The problem with that is that you end up shafting everyone who’s not a part of a big guild.

It’s not that hard to find a casual raiding guild in any MMO. If you don’t want to be part of a large group, you probably aren’t interested in doing big group content.

I never said I wanted to get rid of open-world bosses that were challenging. Just, not as challenging as Tequatl. Especially the time limit part. That doesn’t WORK in an open world where if you fail in 15 minutes, you have to wait 3 hours. Not to mention it makes zero sense lore wise (living story/world here). “Oh I didn’t die? Guess I’ll be back later. Kthxbai.”

And if you stop being different, you just end up being compared to the best of the bunch and all of your flaws, however insignificant they may be, get amplified to unnecessary proportions. Which is not a good plan.

I find it rather hilarious that there are tons of people enjoying WvW and PvP and you seem to act like none of those people exist/matter.

ANet already has tons of stuff that makes them different. But deliberately NOT doing stuff that MMOs do REALLY WELL (instanced hard content and expansions) is simply not giving your customers a good experience.

MMOs have a lot of flaws, but Raids, Dungeons, and huge paid expansions are NOT one of them. They’re the best part of any MMO hands down.

Also, I don’t really know if anybody is enjoying WvW or PvP. All I ever see is kittening about them. Maybe ANet should take a really hard look at both of them, but that’s not what this thread is about.

No. I neither want need races nor new classes.

Guild Wars 1 having so many expansions was the few negatives I had about it. (Huge paid expansions are a bad thing because it forces anyone who wants to be competitive to buy them. If they can work continuous release into expansion and still thrive as a business, they should.)

I can agree with a timelimit being bad, but I’m not sure about Tequatl being instanced.
I like the concept of him being accessed in the open world. I’d just like to see him start moving inland and destroying stuff with a small army after times up.

Raids can be a good idea, personally never been interested but that’s not something I’d hold against others and take their fun.

Dungeons are a lot of fun content but for Guild Wars, the concept of the rp they try to work in (and should work on some more) was the best part for me. I’d like more RPG in my MMO.

As always personal opinion in the above.