Turned out when players started working together they could get stuff done once thought impossible, get their rewards, and those who craved a bigger challenge got something to sate them, those who might have disliked it at first now enjoy it, and those who still hate the new maps get their rewards and barely go back there unless needed.
Source? I have plenty of people in my guild that barely got into the new zones and left in disgust. I’m n ot one of these, but that doesn’t mean that I have no empathy for them.
As long as the content is rewarding you, regardless of your feelings, and getting you to play it, it is doing its job.
That is a HORRIBLE view for a game company to take. That is Candy Crush values right there. No. If the player is not HAPPY while playing then you have FAILED as a gaming company, end of story.
Wrong. Increasing the difficulty is a natural side-effect of newer inventive mechanics.
No, it’s not. You can add new mechanics that are no more difficult than previous ones, but just require you to do different things.
If Vale Guardian’s Green Circle does ignorable damage yet still carries that same unique mechanic of standing inside of it to completely wipe out the damage, does that make it an equally interesting mechanic than it’s current iteration of doing a massive nuke, potentially downing you?
It does if you choose to pay attention to it. It gives you something to TRY to do, it REWARDS you for doing it successfully by you not taking damage, without REQUIRING that you get it right every time. SAB is a good example of this on normal mode, there are a ton of different things you can do, and many of them you don’t have to do just to get through the stage or even to hit the bauble cap for a given run, but you can do them, which gives you options to try fun things.
Because their happiness will come at a cost of another. Not a single suggestion you have made has accounted for the damage to other players’ happiness when you trivialize their rewards by offering them elsewhere in an activity that very likely will be an easier alternative.
Because their happiness only exists at another’s expense. A player cannot be happy about having an item that only one player in a hundred has, without ninety-nine other players NOT having that item. Meanwhile, a player that can be happy because HE has the item can be happy about that whether he’s the only one out of a hundred to have it, or whether all one hundred had it. That latter player’s happiness is more important than the former’s, because it does not depend on the unhappiness of others. If you can’t make all people happy, then OF COURSE you prioritize the people who’s happiness does not depend on the unhappiness of others, and you can do so with a perfectly clear conscience. It’s like you’re arguing that laws against theft are unfair, because they make thieves sad to not be able to pursue their art.
Their reward for their efforts in content they might have liked, will be impossible to prove to their friends and others that they received it doing something harder than other content.
If their friends do not believe they did it just because they say they did, then they are not their friends, or the person is known to be a liar. In either case, some alternative can fill this role, like a title, or a nametag flair.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Yes, you might absolutely abhor say…the Chak skins by doing that content you enjoy (if you somehow like Tangled Depths). That is still a reward someone else might envy or want.
And that’s exactly my point, that you cannot say “it’s ok that you can’t have this reward, because you can have this other reward,” when that other reward might not be something you want. The only way to make rewards “balanced” is to allow the player to determine which reward he wants from a given content. You should have to work for it, it should act as a carrot, but you should be able to work for it within a gameplay type that you enjoy, and the easier that content is, the longer the path would be, but it would still be a path.
if you decide that the reward is not worth the content, then that’s your choice, you made the call and you clearly did not want the reward enough.
But choosing the least bad option out of two bad options is STILL choosing a bad option. It is still ultimately an unhappy ending. The game should not force that choice, it should present a true win-win option in as many situations as possible, “get the reward you want AND have fun earning it.”
after all the Original Legendary Weapons they regret being made available on the Trading Post.
That was a completely different situation. The only problem there was not one of freedom of choice, it was that the only other way to gain precursors was preposterous RNG (to the point that after 3.5 years and thousands of hours in game I’ve still never had a single Precursor drop for me), and that they allowed their gold economy to run amok for too long under “free hand of the market” principles, which completely devalued gold as a gameplay currency. Just because they horribly mismanaged Legendary Weapons does not mean that a flexible reward system is a bad idea, and at the end of the day, having Legendaries on the TP is still better than the alternative of having the exact same system we have today without allowing them on the TP. The new Maguuma ones are considerably worse, because you have no alternate paths to gaining them.
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
