Hello!
I haven’t been cruising around the forums and this sub-topic for a while now and might have missed previous similar debates, so excuse me if I make a ‘’re-post’’ worthy of negative influence points or a post deletion.
Quite a big chunk of players clearing raids on weekly basis, and those who haven’t had the chance to clear it yet, are showing interest for a DPS meter on a daily basis. Because there isn’t any progress on that specific field some people go out of their comfort zone and make programs (which Anet should provide anyway) which measure personal and group DPS. They are doing Anet’s job.
Why has there been no progress on that field? Does Anet feel it would cause rupture between the casual population and those playing with a certain goal, organization, discipline, leading to the ’’casual’’ being left out of the ’’content’’ they release?
Sure it might be their ideology not to become yet another ‘’copy/paste’’ MMO and to be casual friendly but in all fairness to the tested and worn-out models, they at least keep players around and busy. While on the other hand Guild Wars 2 has an awesome foundation to push to the top but seems to be limited by narrow vision of power horses in the Anet’s engine room. The lack of love for the end-game content and willingness to move away from the ‘’casual friendly game’’ idea is making anyone who has spent a certain amount of hours in-game leave because everything they do has been:
-done so many times before,
-doesn’t leave much option on what ’’content’’ to do,
-is too easy,
-pushes for only 1 gameplay style, which is DPS (might have forgotten some).
Because of that people in the past took it upon themselves to create content and competition among each other (record clears, limiting number of players, solo’s,…). Again those same people doing Anet’s work.
Back to topic. Another step lately has been introduction of Raids yet no release of DPS tool. Firstly Raids were cleared in hours by many half-abled guilds, which don’t even call themselves hardcore/semi-hardcore but were rather made from people that experienced raids in other games. Only thing time limit in raids did was to push groups into going pure damage/condi damage and a tiny tiny tiny bit of healing. Sure mechanics were okay, you have to glide/move/jump/get in the area etc. But similar stuff has already been seen in fractals where area on the ground dictates how you move (aether, coe,…). Secondly no official release of DPS meter made things a bit confusing. People had to again spend their time and work on calculating the DPS, checking if results were correct, checking with other people, re-checking DPS, then you had to find somebody else to do other professions and repeat the process. At that point ’’meta’’ builds were released and team composition building came in (repeat the process x4). But hey some of us like to do that, no biggie, the problem was not having any help from Anet in the form of DPS meter.
In the spirit of Raids being a high level, challenging end-game content where a lot of coordination, communication, organization is required, we were left in stone age relying on SEEING/speculating what professions do the most damage, who performs well, what else can be improved and we were generally left in the dark (which is avoidable if you go out of your skin to create your own programs and invest a ‘’full-time job’’ into it). If you want to have high level end-game content such as 10 man raids, make a bloody DPS meter or something similar to show progress and effectiveness of group members.
These failed attempts to create challenging end-game content, at the same time banning all 3rd party measuring programs have lead up to a lot of once dedicated, skilled, loyal players leave the game for good. It might be time to re-think the ideology to support gliders, wings, BL skins in order to satisfy the casual players because at some point they will want more than meaningless PvE event farm or 2 modes of PvP and will want to dedicate to something. At that point their needs wont be satisfied and will do like many before them and leave.
I wont give out any ideas because there has been plenty on the forums, plenty of ideas in other games but nothing happens. This is just my humble opinion on a tiny aspect which is significant to dedicated raiders/fotm-ers/dungeoneers and atm is the cause of a lot of players changing to games like Bewbs&Babes, etc.
By all means offer constructive criticism, points to debate on and your personal ideas.
Thanks,
a player who is slowly giving up.