But, I will say we kinda agree, I mean, really, if players joined GW2 at any time prior to HoT, they stayed because of the friendly, casual, enjoyable content, where they did not need to be in the right guilds to gain access to the whole game, and I guess if the direction that GW2 is going in, is to make it so that players need to be in the right guilds, know the right people, Then I am sure many people will realize, you’re right, and that this is not the game for them anymore.
Yes, I suppose it would be best for the game overall if they would cull the weak and leave the game onto for the fit few to rule over. I mean, for the few months it would last beyond that point.
I’m personally very flexible on the generic loot for easy mode raids. I don’t really have a solid grasp on what the community would demand. I’m just saying, based on what people have said of the hard modes once you’ve got them on farm, I’m assuming an average easy mode run of Spirit Vale, start to finish, would be about 30-45 minutes or so? And of comparable difficulty to a mid-tier dungeon or low end Fractal.
So given that, if you want people to do it just long enough to get their Legendary, and then bounce, then you could have relatively minimal generic rewards. If you want it to be something people add to their rotations even after getting their Legendary, then it would need to be roughly equivalent to a dungeon/fractal of comparable length and difficulty. Just slightly more, perhaps, to account for taking just slightly longer to form a party (once the LFG has been fixed).
Saying “I don’t know about the community” is a copout. Tell us what you want. It’s your easy mode, it’s your baby, you tell us.
Yeah like I said, CoF1 pre-nerf. 1g. People ran that in that time and got that reward and were happy with it. A bit more in reality, but I can’t be bothered doing the rounding.
Hard mode raids could offer way more than that, I don’t think many would have too much of a problem with that.
And keep in mind, any arguments made on “well if the generic rewards for easy aren’t good enough then nobody will run it after getting their Legendary,” well that’s true, so you do want the rewards to be “enough,” and the same applies equally to hard mode raiders, who will be getting their Legendaries earlier than easy mode. So if legendary rewards are the only draw for hard mode, then hard mode would be a ghost town way before easy mode would be.
That’s beside the point. If the raids need their rewards buffed beyond the legendary items, raids will get their rewards buffed. But it’s irrelevant for the sake of the comparative reward rates.
I think it’s important that the higher the “total reward” gets, the more of it is shifted from liquid gold to fungible assets. I mean, if it’s ever determined that 16g is a reasonable drop from a given boss (and I’m not sure where you’re getting that), it should not come in coin, that should cap out in the 4-5 range, but rather most of it should be given out in stable materials, resellable exotic gear, things like that. The total amount of wealth gained would be appropriately high, but the liquid currency added would be relatively low. Since relatively few players would be earning these amounts, it shouldn’t even have a huge impact on the resale markets, so long as they choose the right markets to use for this purpose.
That’s true, it could be moved into fungible assets, but that does not change that this group of people would be given a pretty huge economic benefit for the sake of enabling an easy mode. Turning 8g into 20 ecto is ezpz and limits the inflation factor, but they’d still be gaining pretty massive economic power as a direct result of easy mode being added.
I think your high-end here is getting a little preposterous. If you have to bribe players that heavily into doing hard mode raids, then the indication would be that hard mode raids are just not a thing anyone actually wants to do and they should be scrapped. The rewards should be fair, such that someone inclined to hard mode raid will feel that his time was well spent, not a bribe to convince people that hard mode raiding is the only reasonable activity to pursue.
No, I don’t necessarily think that people need to be bribed that heavily into doing hard mode raids. YOU think that people need to be bribed that heavily into hard mode raids. You have made these projections yourself; you thought 25s was a reasonable reward for an easy mode raid while 2g is the current reward. 1g is an actual reward that people will run for; you carry the numbers forward, 2g per kill becomes 8g per kill. It gets doubled during CE. Full clears with more wings increase the total amount of money earnt.
And I agree. It shouldn’t be a bribe that convinces people to think that hard mode raiding is the only avenue worth pursuing. This is the problem. To actually create rewarding, distinct easy modes and hard modes that will not die out on their own, you need to create this kind of incentive structure that distorts the players’, and more importantly the devs’, efforts.
I believe it would take considerably less work to make an easy mode raid than it would take to make a vanilla dungeon relevant again, but assuming that it would take an equivalent effort, DEFINITELY easy mode raid. I mean, there’s not even a question there. The vanilla dungeons have been out for years now, people have run them to death, whereas the raids are new content with more interesting mechanics to them. I mean this one’s a no-brainer, obviously easy mode raids. Who do you think would choose otherwise?
…Anybody who likes dungeons?
I’d choose otherwise. I think a lot of people would choose otherwise. I’ve already explained the damages that irrelevant dungeons cause.
Again these projections of how much work it takes are completely off base. Gaile’s already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you aren’t an ANet dev. That you previously said “well just ignore the QA work” is exhibit A-Z.
Saying “I don’t know about the community” is a copout. Tell us what you want. It’s your easy mode, it’s your baby, you tell us.
Yeah like I said, CoF1 pre-nerf. 1g. People ran that in that time and got that reward and were happy with it. A bit more in reality, but I can’t be bothered doing the rounding.
Well I said that, I would play it with relatively minimal loot to progress towards my legendary armor, and once I had no need for that anymore, I’m not exactly sure how much generic loot would be necessary to keep me running it regularly, it would really depend on what else is going on at the time. I can say what I would want, but I’m not the only factor to consider, and as someone who doesn’t regularly Fractal or Dungeon, I’m not the best audience to target those factors towards.
That’s beside the point. If the raids need their rewards buffed beyond the legendary items, raids will get their rewards buffed. But it’s irrelevant for the sake of the comparative reward rates.
Well, it’s relevant when we’re comparing easy to hard rewards. If the argument is that raid rewards have to be X amount better than easy or nobody will run hard, and also factor in that the rewards to each would need to be strong enough to justify running them even after achieving all the unique loot, then the system must be viewed as a whole, not each segment in isolation from the rest.
That’s true, it could be moved into fungible assets, but that does not change that this group of people would be given a pretty huge economic benefit for the sake of enabling an easy mode.
No. They do not need to be given any benefit for the sake of enabling easy mode. They are not “owed” anything for “allowing” easy mode to happen, that is not their choice. Now I think it is reasonable that they can have a certain higher level of reward, but if a reasonable amount of reward is not sufficient, if they are given enough that they make significantly more than in any other activity and they’re still like “I’m going to need more than that if you want me running hard mode raids,” then clearly there’s no actual audience for hard mode raids in the first place and they’re just chasing the best possible loot. If that’s the case, then why bother bribing them to do content they don’t want to do?
No, have the reward payout for hard mode be FAIR, have it so that if there were no loot in the game at all, if every activity were purely “what do you want to do today,” then players who chose “raid” under those conditions would also choose “raid” with the loot being offered here, but there’s no need for more than that, no need to convince people to raid who would at all prefer to be doing something else.
No, I don’t necessarily think that people need to be bribed that heavily into doing hard mode raids. YOU think that people need to be bribed that heavily into hard mode raids. You have made these projections yourself; you thought 25s was a reasonable reward for an easy mode raid while 2g is the current reward. 1g is an actual reward that people will run for; you carry the numbers forward, 2g per kill becomes 8g per kill. It gets doubled during CE. Full clears with more wings increase the total amount of money earnt.
What is this CE you speak of? In any case, I staked out “three times the loot” as the target, so even if easy mode offered 1g per kill, that would make hard mode 3g per kill, not 8g. Still, I think even less could keep easy mode rolling for quite a while, as player chase the legendary components for the better part of a year or more (like dungeon tokens), and the novelty of the new content. The generic rewards aren’t encouragement to do it like in dungeons, they are just a token payment to keep the work/time balance.
People talk about the demise of dungeons as if it’s some great shock or tragedy, which it was neither. This is three year old content we’re talking about, the shock is that they remained active for so long, not that they’re dead lately. I don’t expect raids of any difficulty to remain high demand content indefinitely, I just expect it to remain in high demand over a reasonable period of time to properly return on the investment.
Again, any problems easy mode would have retaining players would only be WORSE if only hard mode existed. The players capable of it would earn all the unique rewards much faster than in easy mode, and the players who were not capable of it would never engage the content at all.
…Anybody who likes dungeons?
I’d choose otherwise. I think a lot of people would choose otherwise. I’ve already explained the damages that irrelevant dungeons cause.
I’d take that bet. I bet if you asked people who ran dungeons regularly before the nerfs: Which would you prefer, that they take the time to make an easymode version of the raids that is comparable in difficulty to dungeons, or that they spend that same amount of time updating the existing dungeons in some way (which would amount to basically tweaking some damage numbers on the bosses of 1-2 existing dungeons, tops)?
I bet they would choose the new raid experience over tweaking some numbers on the old dungeons.
Now, if you offered them meaningful upgrades to the old dungeons, like entirely new paths, with entirely new combat mechanics, that they might want, but that would be magnitudes more work than anything I’ve suggested involving raids, even for one dungeon, much less all of them.
Again these projections of how much work it takes are completely off base. Gaile’s already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you aren’t an ANet dev. That you previously said “well just ignore the QA work” is exhibit A-Z.
And Gaile still hasn’t gotten back to us with QA different figure on how much time it would take. All she said was that on a completely different game that she was following, a completely different process than what I was talking about might take more time than I was assuming. And why not ignore the QA work? I mean, that’s work, it needs to take place, but it’s a separate team, it doesn’t slow down the efforts of the people actually building and tweaking gameplay systems.
And Gaile still hasn’t gotten back to us with QA different figure on how much time it would take.
It’s not like she ever said she would actually “get back to us?”…
Well I said that, I would play it with relatively minimal loot to progress towards my legendary armor, and once I had no need for that anymore, I’m not exactly sure how much generic loot would be necessary to keep me running it regularly, it would really depend on what else is going on at the time. I can say what I would want, but I’m not the only factor to consider, and as someone who doesn’t regularly Fractal or Dungeon, I’m not the best audience to target those factors towards.
Not answering the question.
Well, it’s relevant when we’re comparing easy to hard rewards. If the argument is that raid rewards have to be X amount better than easy or nobody will run hard, and also factor in that the rewards to each would need to be strong enough to justify running them even after achieving all the unique loot, then the system must be viewed as a whole, not each segment in isolation from the rest.
It’s not relevant. The relation between the two is the only item of import. Viewing the entire system is just a waste of time when we only need to look at specific pieces.
No. They do not need to be given any benefit for the sake of enabling easy mode. They are not “owed” anything for “allowing” easy mode to happen, that is not their choice. Now I think it is reasonable that they can have a certain higher level of reward, but if a reasonable amount of reward is not sufficient, if they are given enough that they make significantly more than in any other activity and they’re still like “I’m going to need more than that if you want me running hard mode raids,” then clearly there’s no actual audience for hard mode raids in the first place and they’re just chasing the best possible loot. If that’s the case, then why bother bribing them to do content they don’t want to do?
Yes they do, you said so yourself. Hard mode raids would need to be provide significantly better rewards to be justifiable over scrubcore raids.
No, have the reward payout for hard mode be FAIR, have it so that if there were no loot in the game at all, if every activity were purely “what do you want to do today,” then players who chose “raid” under those conditions would also choose “raid” with the loot being offered here, but there’s no need for more than that, no need to convince people to raid who would at all prefer to be doing something else.
The reward payout for hard mode already is fair.
The patterns of behavior that we’ve seen in the game and are currently seeing heavily imply that going drastically beneath this point will just leave a dead mode.
What is this CE you speak of? In any case, I staked out “three times the loot” as the target, so even if easy mode offered 1g per kill, that would make hard mode 3g per kill, not 8g. Still, I think even less could keep easy mode rolling for quite a while, as player chase the legendary components for the better part of a year or more (like dungeon tokens), and the novelty of the new content. The generic rewards aren’t encouragement to do it like in dungeons, they are just a token payment to keep the work/time balance.
CE is cutting edge. The double your gold thing. Idk what it’s called in GW2.
It doesn’t need to keep rolling ‘for a while’. It needs to keep rolling FOREVER. Temporary content and temporary fixes is what got GW2 in the mess it’s in.
People talk about the demise of dungeons as if it’s some great shock or tragedy, which it was neither. This is three year old content we’re talking about, the shock is that they remained active for so long, not that they’re dead lately. I don’t expect raids of any difficulty to remain high demand content indefinitely, I just expect it to remain in high demand over a reasonable period of time to properly return on the investment.
I’m not people. I’m me. Look at what I’ve said. Don’t care what other people say. Talk to me.
You’re completely missing the point by dismissing it that way. If you’re shocked that it lasted so long then you’ve got your priorities out of whack. Content should not die.
Again, any problems easy mode would have retaining players would only be WORSE if only hard mode existed. The players capable of it would earn all the unique rewards much faster than in easy mode, and the players who were not capable of it would never engage the content at all.
Simply put, no. If they provide good material rewards, which they do, and players can clear the content, which they can, people will run them for quite a while. There’s not much of a reason not to do raids over other content if you’re capable of it, even if you’ve got all the shiny skins.
And you’re conflating ‘capable’ with ‘willing’. You’re perfectly capable of doing the raids as they are currently. You’re just not willing. Try learning how the game works and how to gear and spec your character. That’s all this comes down to; “I don’t want to do this content at this level”. And you’re not even the target audience anyway by your own admission so why should they bother satiating you beyond trying to give you a sugar rush
I’d take that bet. I bet if you asked people who ran dungeons regularly before the nerfs: Which would you prefer, that they take the time to make an easymode version of the raids that is comparable in difficulty to dungeons, or that they spend that same amount of time updating the existing dungeons in some way (which would amount to basically tweaking some damage numbers on the bosses of 1-2 existing dungeons, tops)?
This entire assessment underlines the issue here. You don’t understand what’s going on. You’re making assumptions about the resources required. You’ve got specific demands that don’t fit any kind of good change. I don’t know if you’ve even realized that implementing multiple modes on its own takes resources.
I bet they would choose the new raid experience over tweaking some numbers on the old dungeons.
1. The ones who still play are probably already enjoying the new raid experience. A scrubcore mode wouldn’t do anything for them.
2. Scrubcore raids are nowhere near the same experience as real raids.
Now, if you offered them meaningful upgrades to the old dungeons, like entirely new paths, with entirely new combat mechanics, that they might want, but that would be magnitudes more work than anything I’ve suggested involving raids, even for one dungeon, much less all of them.
Yes, making good changes takes a longer time. I’m aware. That’s kind of the point. If you’re going to make a change, make it a good one and make it a longer one. Scrubcore raids are an easy, quick fix that cause damage in the long run. If you did your research, you’d know this.
And Gaile still hasn’t gotten back to us with QA different figure on how much time it would take. All she said was that on a completely different game that she was following, a completely different process than what I was talking about might take more time than I was assuming. And why not ignore the QA work? I mean, that’s work, it needs to take place, but it’s a separate team, it doesn’t slow down the efforts of the people actually building and tweaking gameplay systems.
Gaile never said she’d get back to you. She just told you to direct your feedback to something that’s actually relevant. Telling the devs specifically what you want is kinda pointless considering they’re far more aware of what resources they have available than you and what direction they want to go in than you.
QA resources are limited. Saying “QA is a separate team!” is irrelevant because you’re still spending resources that could otherwise go into better places. There are at least two better places to put them that are currently in the pipeline.
Let’s go for 2000 replies Ohoni!
Go Ohoni!
Not answering the question.
Ok, if that’s how you choose to interpret my words, but I can’t do any better than that.
It’s not relevant. The relation between the two is the only item of import. Viewing the entire system is just a waste of time when we only need to look at specific pieces.
And that’s how the most catastrophic failures occur.
Yes they do, you said so yourself. Hard mode raids would need to be provide significantly better rewards to be justifiable over scrubcore raids.
Yes, but not significantly better than they currently offer, just significantly better than easy mode, which they always would. If hard modes raids do deserve a bump, and there seems to be evidence that they do, that is a separate matter entirely from easy mode, and would be equally true with or without easy mode.
The reward payout for hard mode already is fair.
Then it should remain unchanged, end of story.
The patterns of behavior that we’ve seen in the game and are currently seeing heavily imply that going drastically beneath this point will just leave a dead mode.
If the rewards for it are fair and that isn’t enough to fuel active participation then it would deserve to be a dead mode. How could you argue otherwise?
The goal should not be to artificially inflate participation, it should be to ensure that “natural” participation levels are not reduced by unbalancedly low rewards.
CE is cutting edge. The double your gold thing. Idk what it’s called in GW2.
It doesn’t need to keep rolling ‘for a while’. It needs to keep rolling FOREVER. Temporary content and temporary fixes is what got GW2 in the mess it’s in.
I don’t think there’s any hope whatsoever of individual GW2 raids “going forever.” That is just not a thing that will exist in reality. When Raid Wing 3 drops, Wings 1 and 2 will reduce. When Raid 2.1 drops, there will be a drop in all Raid 1 wings. By the time Raid 2.3 drops, Raid 1.1 might still see activity, but 1.2 and probably 1.3 will be limping along. If they ever get around to a third or forth raid, then the second would be a ghost town.
That’s just the nature of the beast. They are dealing with a relatively small population of players that will ever participate in hard mode raiding, and will shrink over time. That population will be spread thinner and thinner across available raids, so unless they take measures to concentrate players at a single task, it will become harder and harder to find groups.
Could easy mode raids make this worse? Perhaps a little, but only by offering freedom to players who didn’t particularly want to be part of the hardcore scene in the first place. That’s a good thing, overall, if perhaps not a good thing for natural hardcore raiders who wanted to use those players as grist in their machinery. For the most part though, the people playing easy mode raids will be people who never would have been a part of the hardcore raid lifecycle, and now have something more to do.
Their participation in the overall raid process gives MORE justification for spending resources developing the raids, not less.
I’m not people. I’m me. Look at what I’ve said. Don’t care what other people say. Talk to me.
No. I don’t care about you. I care about the topic, I speak to the topic, I do not speak only to you.
If you’re shocked that it lasted so long then you’ve got your priorities out of whack. Content should not die.
Content inevitably dies. Most single player games don’t last more than a few months, many no more than a few days. In MMOs content tends to last a year or more, but at some point people inevitably get tired of running the same content over and over and want some variety, so they shift from one thing to the next. The idea that a single piece of content could keep audiences entertained for several years is nonsense. If there is content that people run continuously that long, I guarantee you that most of the players involved do not enjoy the experience, they just enjoy something else about the game enough that they put up with that content because it offers them something they need elsewhere, like better loot. That is not a positive for the game company, because the ideal state for both the company and the player is for the player to be doing what he actually wants to be doing instead.
And you’re conflating ‘capable’ with ‘willing’. You’re perfectly capable of doing the raids as they are currently. You’re just not willing. Try learning how the game works and how to gear and spec your character.
Again, anyone who believes that some variation on “learn to play” will resolve anything here has completely missed the point. You can say it all you like, it’s just never going to change anything.
This entire assessment underlines the issue here. You don’t understand what’s going on. You’re making assumptions about the resources required. You’ve got specific demands that don’t fit any kind of good change. I don’t know if you’ve even realized that implementing multiple modes on its own takes resources.
Again, I’ve been very clear about the specifics of my proposal because I believe that it is both the best outcome AND the easiest to implement if they intend to implement anything at all. I’m flexible in the details so that it would fit their goals, but I’m tired o people insisting that I have “no idea how it works” when I’m making very grounded proposals.
Could they make dungeons popular again? Sure, but it would involve basically creating NEW content there, involving environmental artists, mob artists, new animations and AI patterns for the bosses, major changes to the visuals and gameplay of the dungeons, which no matter how you try to frame it is WELL beyond the scope of anything I’ve been recommending for easy mode raids (and in fact I’ve fought against such changes).
You can argue that easy mode raids would take more work than I believe, you can do that all you like, but there is no way that easy mode raids, as I’ve proposed them, would take more work than overhauling even one dungeon to a state that people would actually care about.
Yes, making good changes takes a longer time. I’m aware. That’s kind of the point. If you’re going to make a change, make it a good one and make it a longer one. Scrubcore raids are an easy, quick fix that cause damage in the long run. If you did your research, you’d know this.
We haven’t had them in GW2 before, so there’s nothing to research. They’ve existed in other games, perhaps, but other games behave VERY differently than GW2, and the communities rarely see eye to eye.
Telling the devs specifically what you want is kinda pointless considering they’re far more aware of what resources they have available than you and what direction they want to go in than you.
I’m presenting them with a scenario that would satisfy me, and I believe satisfy most players currently unsatisfied with the current options, in what I believe to be the most efficient manner. If they have better ideas then that’s great, I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be this whole huge thing that would take away a ton of resources.
QA resources are limited. Saying “QA is a separate team!” is irrelevant because you’re still spending resources that could otherwise go into better places.
We don’t know how their QA teams are currently being used, but since they’ve brought in player guilds in the past to test raids, and since as “easy mode” raids these would be much less sensitive, they could similarly employ player teams to test out the content. All they’d need to do is make sure they basically worked, since unlike the hard modes, the core elements of the content would already have passed testing, and the tuning would not need to be nearly so fine. And again, if it releases and bugs happen that cause various issues, it’s far less of a big deal than if it happens to the hard mode versions, since nobody really cares about “firsts” or anything like that.
Saying “I don’t know about the community” is a copout. Tell us what you want. It’s your easy mode, it’s your baby, you tell us.
Yeah like I said, CoF1 pre-nerf. 1g. People ran that in that time and got that reward and were happy with it. A bit more in reality, but I can’t be bothered doing the rounding.Well I said that, I would play it with relatively minimal loot to progress towards my legendary armor, and once I had no need for that anymore, I’m not exactly sure how much generic loot would be necessary to keep me running it regularly, it would really depend on what else is going on at the time. I can say what I would want, but I’m not the only factor to consider, and as someone who doesn’t regularly Fractal or Dungeon, I’m not the best audience to target those factors towards.
That’s beside the point. If the raids need their rewards buffed beyond the legendary items, raids will get their rewards buffed. But it’s irrelevant for the sake of the comparative reward rates.
Well, it’s relevant when we’re comparing easy to hard rewards. If the argument is that raid rewards have to be X amount better than easy or nobody will run hard, and also factor in that the rewards to each would need to be strong enough to justify running them even after achieving all the unique loot, then the system must be viewed as a whole, not each segment in isolation from the rest.
That’s true, it could be moved into fungible assets, but that does not change that this group of people would be given a pretty huge economic benefit for the sake of enabling an easy mode.
No. They do not need to be given any benefit for the sake of enabling easy mode. They are not “owed” anything for “allowing” easy mode to happen, that is not their choice. Now I think it is reasonable that they can have a certain higher level of reward, but if a reasonable amount of reward is not sufficient, if they are given enough that they make significantly more than in any other activity and they’re still like “I’m going to need more than that if you want me running hard mode raids,” then clearly there’s no actual audience for hard mode raids in the first place and they’re just chasing the best possible loot. If that’s the case, then why bother bribing them to do content they don’t want to do?
No, have the reward payout for hard mode be FAIR, have it so that if there were no loot in the game at all, if every activity were purely “what do you want to do today,” then players who chose “raid” under those conditions would also choose “raid” with the loot being offered here, but there’s no need for more than that, no need to convince people to raid who would at all prefer to be doing something else.
No, I don’t necessarily think that people need to be bribed that heavily into doing hard mode raids. YOU think that people need to be bribed that heavily into hard mode raids. You have made these projections yourself; you thought 25s was a reasonable reward for an easy mode raid while 2g is the current reward. 1g is an actual reward that people will run for; you carry the numbers forward, 2g per kill becomes 8g per kill. It gets doubled during CE. Full clears with more wings increase the total amount of money earnt.
What is this CE you speak of? In any case, I staked out “three times the loot” as the target, so even if easy mode offered 1g per kill, that would make hard mode 3g per kill, not 8g. Still, I think even less could keep easy mode rolling for quite a while, as player chase the legendary components for the better part of a year or more (like dungeon tokens), and the novelty of the new content. The generic rewards aren’t encouragement to do it like in dungeons, they are just a token payment to keep the work/time balance.
People talk about the demise of dungeons as if it’s some great shock or tragedy, which it was neither. This is three year old content we’re talking about, the shock is that they remained active for so long, not that they’re dead lately. I don’t expect raids of any difficulty to remain high demand content indefinitely, I just expect it to remain in high demand over a reasonable period of time to properly return on the investment.
Again, any problems easy mode would have retaining players would only be WORSE if only hard mode existed. The players capable of it would earn all the unique rewards much faster than in easy mode, and the players who were not capable of it would never engage the content at all.
…Anybody who likes dungeons?
I’d choose otherwise. I think a lot of people would choose otherwise. I’ve already explained the damages that irrelevant dungeons cause.I’d take that bet. I bet if you asked people who ran dungeons regularly before the nerfs: Which would you prefer, that they take the time to make an easymode version of the raids that is comparable in difficulty to dungeons, or that they spend that same amount of time updating the existing dungeons in some way (which would amount to basically tweaking some damage numbers on the bosses of 1-2 existing dungeons, tops)?
I bet they would choose the new raid experience over tweaking some numbers on the old dungeons.
Now, if you offered them meaningful upgrades to the old dungeons, like entirely new paths, with entirely new combat mechanics, that they might want, but that would be magnitudes more work than anything I’ve suggested involving raids, even for one dungeon, much less all of them.
Again these projections of how much work it takes are completely off base. Gaile’s already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you aren’t an ANet dev. That you previously said “well just ignore the QA work” is exhibit A-Z.
And Gaile still hasn’t gotten back to us with QA different figure on how much time it would take. All she said was that on a completely different game that she was following, a completely different process than what I was talking about might take more time than I was assuming. And why not ignore the QA work? I mean, that’s work, it needs to take place, but it’s a separate team, it doesn’t slow down the efforts of the people actually building and tweaking gameplay systems.
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
same, rather than useless easy mode raid…
And that’s how the most catastrophic failures occur.
What, by understanding scopes?
Yes, but not significantly better than they currently offer, just significantly better than easy mode, which they always would. If hard modes raids do deserve a bump, and there seems to be evidence that they do, that is a separate matter entirely from easy mode, and would be equally true with or without easy mode.
Please refer me to this evidence
Then it should remain unchanged, end of story.
Not the point.
If the rewards for it are fair and that isn’t enough to fuel active participation then it would deserve to be a dead mode. How could you argue otherwise?
Because making dead modes is a waste of time?
The goal should not be to artificially inflate participation, it should be to ensure that “natural” participation levels are not reduced by unbalancedly low rewards.
GL finding a ‘balanced’ ‘low’ reward for scrubcore raids that gets people to actually keep running the content.
I don’t think there’s any hope whatsoever of individual GW2 raids “going forever.” That is just not a thing that will exist in reality.
Then raid development should be discontinued completely.
That’s just the nature of the beast. They are dealing with a relatively small population of players that will ever participate in hard mode raiding, and will shrink over time.
On what basis, man who has no interest in raiding or researching raiding?
Perhaps a little, but only by offering freedom to players who didn’t particularly want to be part of the hardcore scene in the first place.
Hardcore is an imaginary arbitration that you’ve made. There’s no reason to conclude that you’ve accurately pegged what constitutes a ‘hardcore’ raid, especially considering that you don’t seem to have ever done it.
Oh, and people can opt out of the hardcore scene already. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to raid.
Their participation in the overall raid process gives MORE justification for spending resources developing the raids, not less.
Which is bad. I don’t want all of ANet’s resources to be funneled into raids. I want them to have other content on the table as well.
I don’t raid in this game; I doubt I’d be interested in raiding an easy mode. If they were to spend even more of their limited resources on raids, the game would be significantly worse for me.
No. I don’t care about you. I care about the topic, I speak to the topic, I do not speak only to you.
I thought we had something Ohoni. A real bond. But if that’s how you feel… I suppose the problem’s me, then. I’m sorry. I thought our relationship was deeper than that.
But nah look if you’re making rebuttals making generalized rebuttals is just boring. Directly refute what I’m saying.
Content inevitably dies.
Why people still running Orr then? Didn’t get the memo that content should die at some point?
Why Foefire and Niflhel still most popular maps? Out with the old and in with the new, I say. Stronghold and Skyhammer ho!
And I must say, I pity the fools who want Alpine Borderlands back.
Again, anyone who believes that some variation on “learn to play” will resolve anything here has completely missed the point. You can say it all you like, it’s just never going to change anything.
Rubber glue. Who has missed the point? You.
The point is the distinction between the words you are saying. “Capable” and “willing” are different words. You have made it amply clear that you are not willing to engage the raids as they are regardless of whether you are capable of doing so. Which you are.
Again, I’ve been very clear about the specifics of my proposal because I believe that it is both the best outcome AND the easiest to implement if they intend to implement anything at all. I’m flexible in the details so that it would fit their goals, but I’m tired o people insisting that I have “no idea how it works” when I’m making very grounded proposals.
“making grounded proposals”
You have a total of 7 hours of raiding under your belt with no kills
How could you possibly have an estimation of what constitutes a grounded proposal
Could they make dungeons popular again? Sure, but it would involve basically creating NEW content there, involving environmental artists, mob artists, new animations and AI patterns for the bosses, major changes to the visuals and gameplay of the dungeons, which no matter how you try to frame it is WELL beyond the scope of anything I’ve been recommending for easy mode raids (and in fact I’ve fought against such changes).
Someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.
You can argue that easy mode raids would take more work than I believe, you can do that all you like, but there is no way that easy mode raids, as I’ve proposed them, would take more work than overhauling even one dungeon to a state that people would actually care about.
There’s a pretty easy way that scrubcore raids would take more time than overhauling dungeons; they have to implement the system. What takes more work, retuning or retuning and adding a system?
And again; someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.
We haven’t had them in GW2 before, so there’s nothing to research. They’ve existed in other games, perhaps, but other games behave VERY differently than GW2, and the communities rarely see eye to eye.
How can you possibly have any contextual understanding of what makes raids different in GW2 from other games when you have neither played raids in GW2 or other games for any reasonable amount of time, have scored no kills, and refuse to research them?
You said you made grounded proposals. Grounded in what?… Your stunning in-depth analysis of GW2 raiding, which you’ve done 7 hours on and have made no headway with? Your examination of other games which doesn’t exist? I’d wager that just about everything you know about other games’ raid models was told to you by me.
I’m presenting them with a scenario that would satisfy me, and I believe satisfy most players currently unsatisfied with the current options, in what I believe to be the most efficient manner.
Why? LINK YOUR DATA
If they have better ideas then that’s great, I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be this whole huge thing that would take away a ton of resources.
Yes, I’m certain your assessment of the resources required to implement something for a company you don’t work at in a field that you probably don’t work in is bang on.
We don’t know how their QA teams are currently being used, but since they’ve brought in player guilds in the past to test raids, and since as “easy mode” raids these would be much less sensitive, they could similarly employ player teams to test out the content. All they’d need to do is make sure they basically worked, since unlike the hard modes, the core elements of the content would already have passed testing, and the tuning would not need to be nearly so fine. And again, if it releases and bugs happen that cause various issues, it’s far less of a big deal than if it happens to the hard mode versions, since nobody really cares about “firsts” or anything like that.
Again, if you don’t work at ANet, how would you possibly know what kind of work needs to go into their QA? Are you a QA guy at ANet? Are you a QA guy at another games company? Are you a QA guy in any professional capacity?
Nevermind that it doesn’t actually address the point that there are better places to spend those resources.
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
same, rather than useless easy mode raid…
PAY UP OHONI
momma just bought her 5 acc-wide slots and she needs some cash in the kitty
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
same, rather than useless easy mode raid…
But you can understand why I would doubt your sincerity, given that you don’t want easy mode to happen. Seriously guys, what do you expect them to be able to do to dungeons in the time it would take to make an easy mode version of Salvation Pass? What is your expectation there?
What, by understanding scopes?
By focusing only on the trees and missing that they’re in a forest.
Please refer me to this evidence
Anecdotal, of course, but I’m willing to trust raiders when they say they do not believe that the existing generic loot for hard mode is sufficient to keep them playing.
Because making dead modes is a waste of time?
And yet they’ve decided to make raids anyways, so if they’re going to, shouldn’t we give them as much of a fighting chance as possible?
GL finding a ‘balanced’ ‘low’ reward for scrubcore raids that gets people to actually keep running the content.
As you say, why bother with dead modes? Running current through a corpse might get it to kick a little, but you’re not doing anyone any favors.
Then raid development should be discontinued completely.
Perhaps so, not my call to make.
On what basis, man who has no interest in raiding or researching raiding?
Dwindling capability to find groups of raiders, anecdotal reports. Obviously ANet has better numbers of how many people are actually raiding right now, but I think it’s unreasonable to assume that the raiding population will actually be rising any time soon, right? So even if the population remains stable, it will get spread thinner and thinner as more raiding options become available.
Hardcore is an imaginary arbitration that you’ve made. There’s no reason to conclude that you’ve accurately pegged what constitutes a ‘hardcore’ raid, especially considering that you don’t seem to have ever done it.
Everything’s relative, of course. I’m pegging the existing raid content, among a few other experiences, as being “hardcore content” relative to the GW2 average for the purposes of this discussion. You can disagree with me on that, but when I use the term, that’s what I’m going to be meaning, translate that as you will for your own purposes.
Oh, and people can opt out of the hardcore scene already. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to raid.
Again, we’re 23 pages in, you should understand by now that this is not a constructive response.
I don’t raid in this game; I doubt I’d be interested in raiding an easy mode. If they were to spend even more of their limited resources on raids, the game would be significantly worse for me.
If they were going to be spending a significant amount of resources on it, then that would not be justified, but I still contend that this would be a very efficient use of resources, to make the most of what they have at hand, like kitchen leftovers. They’re going to be spending time working on resources that neither of us wants to see, that’s a given. This is an element that I feel, even if you don’t care to use it, would provide enjoyment for a lot of people with relatively little effort on their part compared to other potential targets (like overhauling dungeons to be fun again). I feel that whatever we’d be missing out for them to do this, we’d never even notice it was gone, or more likely delayed by a week or two.
But nah look if you’re making rebuttals making generalized rebuttals is just boring. Directly refute what I’m saying.
No. I mean you do whatever, but I’m discussing the overall argument here, if I feel like refuting something you’re specifically saying, rest assured that I will, but if I don’t, if I think that the larger discussion around what you said is more informative than the specific words you used, then I’ll address that instead.
Why people still running Orr then? Didn’t get the memo that content should die at some point?
Why Foefire and Niflhel still most popular maps? Out with the old and in with the new, I say. Stronghold and Skyhammer ho!
And I must say, I pity the fools who want Alpine Borderlands back.
Far fewer people wander Orr these days than once did. I remember back when there’d be massive zergs, now if I’m down there and people are around it’s maybe 20, often less. And the thing with PvP content is that it’s the other players who are the content more than the settings, and they change every round. People loved the new WvW maps, until they played with them a bit and found that they did not work well with the limited and disinterested players WvW contains these days. Alpine will not be much better, people just know what they can do with those maps when no one is around.
When I said “content dies,” I don’t mean that nobody will ever do it, I just mean that the numbers that do it will fall way below the “healthy” numbers that wouldbe ideal. There is always a new hot content, and most people gravitate towards that if it’s at all up their alley, and if not, they move to something they can do. I find myself too often having to explain things that should be commonly understood.
The point is the distinction between the words you are saying. “Capable” and “willing” are different words. You have made it amply clear that you are not willing to engage the raids as they are regardless of whether you are capable of doing so. Which you are.
And the point is that arguments like that miss the larger point, in that nobody cares. There is no practical difference in this context between “capable” and “willing,” because whichever word you choose, it amounts to the same thing, these people WON’T be playing raids in their current form, but many of them would if they were a bit more casual in nature.
“making grounded proposals”
You have a total of 7 hours of raiding under your belt with no kills
How could you possibly have an estimation of what constitutes a grounded proposal
Because the elements I’m talking about could be discussed with 0 hours of raiding, they are issues of basic game design, adjusting numbers in a spreadsheet. It has absolutely nothing to do with on the ground experience of raiding.
Someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.
I don’t run dungeons anymore, but I did at one point. Oh, sure, they can get back some dungeon runners just by throwing more loot their way, but you can do that with anything. You could make Crab Toss the most popular element of GW2 if you threw enough loot at it. To make people actually enjoy dungeons they would have to make a substantive overhaul, giving it combat mechanics more like the raid has, completely new experiences.
There’s a pretty easy way that scrubcore raids would take more time than overhauling dungeons; they have to implement the system. What takes more work, retuning or retuning and adding a system?
What are you even talking about? “Implementing the system,” do you mean like the mechanism to choose the difficulty level? They have that already. Go up to the raid entrance in Verdant Brink. A little screen pops up that asks if you want to head to Spirit Vale or Salvation Pass, and clicking one loads that map. Just add two more to the UI, “Spirit Vale (easy)” and “Salvation Pass (easy),” and each of those would send you to the altered copy of the map instead. No drama. If they don’t want to do that, they have a half dozen other UI options already available to them from other areas of the game in which players can select alternate variations on a map, they just pick one and assign variables to it.
Beyond that, there’s no new “system,” it’s just the existing raid, copied and pasted, and then some of the values in the spreadsheets are tweaked.
How can you possibly have any contextual understanding of what makes raids different in GW2 from other games when you have neither played raids in GW2 or other games for any reasonable amount of time, have scored no kills, and refuse to research them?
You said you made grounded proposals. Grounded in what?… Your stunning in-depth analysis of GW2 raiding, which you’ve done 7 hours on and have made no headway with? Your examination of other games which doesn’t exist? I’d wager that just about everything you know about other games’ raid models was told to you by me.
I feel like this is more personal task than substance, so I’ll do you the favor of staying away from it. Try to get your thoughts in order next time.
PAY UP OHONI
momma just bought her 5 acc-wide slots and she needs some cash in the kitty
Lol, I never said that the people on this board would agree with me, that’d be a fool’s bet for certain, on any topic. I was saying that the actual players in the game would be more likely to support easy mode raid than an undetectable change to dungeons.
I think it is time to get this thread back to the basics: Are raids good for GW2?
Answer: Yes
Explanation: Pre-raids there were 2-3 threads a month talking about the game lacked end game content and that there was no repeatable content to do that kept players interested in the game in between content droughts. You’ll notice that in the last 6 months not a single one of those threads has popped up because we now have raids to fill that gap. This is a huge boon to Anet since it takes a lot of the negative pressure off of them in terms of endgame content and allows them to focus on appeasing the casual players.
Reducing the difficulty of raids or putting in an easy mode would defeat the whole premise of raids and bring back the multiple complaint threads about how there is nothing to do since everyone will just farm the easy mode and be done with it in minutes. In conclusion:
Raids = Good
Easy mode Raids = Bad
I feel like this is more personal task than substance, so I’ll do you the favor of staying away from it. Try to get your thoughts in order next time.
No, I’d like you to get stuck in. I’d love for you to explain on what basis you can make a reasonable, grounded proposal on how to structure a raid well, considering you have demonstrated next to no experience raiding in GW2, no experience raiding in other games, and refuse to research other games.
I really would love to understand what makes you so capable considering all evidence points to the contrary- and what exactly makes you so confident that you are constantly, directly going against the directions of a community manager.
Lol, I never said that the people on this board would agree with me, that’d be a fool’s bet for certain, on any topic. I was saying that the actual players in the game would be more likely to support easy mode raid than an undetectable change to dungeons.
TIL Hypairion and Ashen are not actual ‘players in the game’. And you think I’m making personal shots.
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
same, rather than useless easy mode raid…
But you can understand why I would doubt your sincerity, given that you don’t want easy mode to happen. Seriously guys, what do you expect them to be able to do to dungeons in the time it would take to make an easy mode version of Salvation Pass? What is your expectation there?
What, by understanding scopes?
By focusing only on the trees and missing that they’re in a forest.
Please refer me to this evidence
Anecdotal, of course, but I’m willing to trust raiders when they say they do not believe that the existing generic loot for hard mode is sufficient to keep them playing.
Because making dead modes is a waste of time?
And yet they’ve decided to make raids anyways, so if they’re going to, shouldn’t we give them as much of a fighting chance as possible?
GL finding a ‘balanced’ ‘low’ reward for scrubcore raids that gets people to actually keep running the content.
As you say, why bother with dead modes? Running current through a corpse might get it to kick a little, but you’re not doing anyone any favors.
Then raid development should be discontinued completely.
Perhaps so, not my call to make.
On what basis, man who has no interest in raiding or researching raiding?
Dwindling capability to find groups of raiders, anecdotal reports. Obviously ANet has better numbers of how many people are actually raiding right now, but I think it’s unreasonable to assume that the raiding population will actually be rising any time soon, right? So even if the population remains stable, it will get spread thinner and thinner as more raiding options become available.
Hardcore is an imaginary arbitration that you’ve made. There’s no reason to conclude that you’ve accurately pegged what constitutes a ‘hardcore’ raid, especially considering that you don’t seem to have ever done it.
Everything’s relative, of course. I’m pegging the existing raid content, among a few other experiences, as being “hardcore content” relative to the GW2 average for the purposes of this discussion. You can disagree with me on that, but when I use the term, that’s what I’m going to be meaning, translate that as you will for your own purposes.
Oh, and people can opt out of the hardcore scene already. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to raid.
Again, we’re 23 pages in, you should understand by now that this is not a constructive response.
I don’t raid in this game; I doubt I’d be interested in raiding an easy mode. If they were to spend even more of their limited resources on raids, the game would be significantly worse for me.
If they were going to be spending a significant amount of resources on it, then that would not be justified, but I still contend that this would be a very efficient use of resources, to make the most of what they have at hand, like kitchen leftovers. They’re going to be spending time working on resources that neither of us wants to see, that’s a given. This is an element that I feel, even if you don’t care to use it, would provide enjoyment for a lot of people with relatively little effort on their part compared to other potential targets (like overhauling dungeons to be fun again). I feel that whatever we’d be missing out for them to do this, we’d never even notice it was gone, or more likely delayed by a week or two.
But nah look if you’re making rebuttals making generalized rebuttals is just boring. Directly refute what I’m saying.
No. I mean you do whatever, but I’m discussing the overall argument here, if I feel like refuting something you’re specifically saying, rest assured that I will, but if I don’t, if I think that the larger discussion around what you said is more informative than the specific words you used, then I’ll address that instead.
Why people still running Orr then? Didn’t get the memo that content should die at some point?
Why Foefire and Niflhel still most popular maps? Out with the old and in with the new, I say. Stronghold and Skyhammer ho!
And I must say, I pity the fools who want Alpine Borderlands back.
Far fewer people wander Orr these days than once did. I remember back when there’d be massive zergs, now if I’m down there and people are around it’s maybe 20, often less. And the thing with PvP content is that it’s the other players who are the content more than the settings, and they change every round. People loved the new WvW maps, until they played with them a bit and found that they did not work well with the limited and disinterested players WvW contains these days. Alpine will not be much better, people just know what they can do with those maps when no one is around.
When I said “content dies,” I don’t mean that nobody will ever do it, I just mean that the numbers that do it will fall way below the “healthy” numbers that wouldbe ideal. There is always a new hot content, and most people gravitate towards that if it’s at all up their alley, and if not, they move to something they can do. I find myself too often having to explain things that should be commonly understood.
The point is the distinction between the words you are saying. “Capable” and “willing” are different words. You have made it amply clear that you are not willing to engage the raids as they are regardless of whether you are capable of doing so. Which you are.
And the point is that arguments like that miss the larger point, in that nobody cares. There is no practical difference in this context between “capable” and “willing,” because whichever word you choose, it amounts to the same thing, these people WON’T be playing raids in their current form, but many of them would if they were a bit more casual in nature.
“making grounded proposals”
You have a total of 7 hours of raiding under your belt with no kills
How could you possibly have an estimation of what constitutes a grounded proposalBecause the elements I’m talking about could be discussed with 0 hours of raiding, they are issues of basic game design, adjusting numbers in a spreadsheet. It has absolutely nothing to do with on the ground experience of raiding.
Someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.
I don’t run dungeons anymore, but I did at one point. Oh, sure, they can get back some dungeon runners just by throwing more loot their way, but you can do that with anything. You could make Crab Toss the most popular element of GW2 if you threw enough loot at it. To make people actually enjoy dungeons they would have to make a substantive overhaul, giving it combat mechanics more like the raid has, completely new experiences.
There’s a pretty easy way that scrubcore raids would take more time than overhauling dungeons; they have to implement the system. What takes more work, retuning or retuning and adding a system?
What are you even talking about? “Implementing the system,” do you mean like the mechanism to choose the difficulty level? They have that already. Go up to the raid entrance in Verdant Brink. A little screen pops up that asks if you want to head to Spirit Vale or Salvation Pass, and clicking one loads that map. Just add two more to the UI, “Spirit Vale (easy)” and “Salvation Pass (easy),” and each of those would send you to the altered copy of the map instead. No drama. If they don’t want to do that, they have a half dozen other UI options already available to them from other areas of the game in which players can select alternate variations on a map, they just pick one and assign variables to it.
Beyond that, there’s no new “system,” it’s just the existing raid, copied and pasted, and then some of the values in the spreadsheets are tweaked.
How can you possibly have any contextual understanding of what makes raids different in GW2 from other games when you have neither played raids in GW2 or other games for any reasonable amount of time, have scored no kills, and refuse to research them?
You said you made grounded proposals. Grounded in what?… Your stunning in-depth analysis of GW2 raiding, which you’ve done 7 hours on and have made no headway with? Your examination of other games which doesn’t exist? I’d wager that just about everything you know about other games’ raid models was told to you by me.
I feel like this is more personal task than substance, so I’ll do you the favor of staying away from it. Try to get your thoughts in order next time.
PAY UP OHONI
momma just bought her 5 acc-wide slots and she needs some cash in the kittyLol, I never said that the people on this board would agree with me, that’d be a fool’s bet for certain, on any topic. I was saying that the actual players in the game would be more likely to support easy mode raid than an undetectable change to dungeons.
So you “bet” what others would prefer and then question sincerity if expressed preferences arent what you want them to be?
Sounds like the sincerity that should be questioned is yours.
An easy mode version of raids adds nothing for me, and it is personal preference of people who enjoyed dungeons that you bet on, while work on dungeons potentially would.
I think it is time to get this thread back to the basics: Are raids good for GW2?
Answer: Yes
Explanation: Pre-raids there were 2-3 threads a month talking about the game lacked end game content and that there was no repeatable content to do that kept players interested in the game in between content droughts. You’ll notice that in the last 6 months not a single one of those threads has popped up because we now have raids to fill that gap. This is a huge boon to Anet since it takes a lot of the negative pressure off of them in terms of endgame content and allows them to focus on appeasing the casual players.
Reducing the difficulty of raids or putting in an easy mode would defeat the whole premise of raids and bring back the multiple complaint threads about how there is nothing to do since everyone will just farm the easy mode and be done with it in minutes. In conclusion:
Raids = Good
Easy mode Raids = Bad
If that was only the full truth.
Yes, raids should stay hard mode. If not, people looking for harder content indeed will indeed never shut up. The problem with this is, they won´t shut up anyway when Anet refocuses on casuals.
“The first raid ended 3 months ago. Where is raid wing Nr. 1 of raid 2? Casuals get all your attention!”
Sounds familiar? This is what has happened the last 6 months in GW2, but with reversed groups. Raids are the first content that has really divided people in a big way.
Now as Anet has opened that can of worms for whatever reason, they have to deal with it. If they do not deal with it, MO will have to come to the forums again someday, drop his pants and bend over like he did with legendary weapons and admit that Anet has not the organization, manpower, money or a combination of the 3 to cater to casuals and raiders at the same time. The to be expected backlash of this has surely made people very nervous at Anet, and if you look at the legendary weapons thread with a significantly less important topic, people are already livid there. I don´t think they want to have another piece of this cake, but they have painted themselves in a corner now in my opinion.
Of course they have the 3 needed components you may say now, but lets be honest here for a moment: Has Anet ever shown that they can satisfy two groups at once? I can´t remember something like that happening.
Of course they have the 3 needed components you may say now, but lets be honest here for a moment: Has Anet ever shown that they can satisfy two groups at once? I can´t remember something like that happening.
PvPers are somewhat satisfied at the moment; does that count?
Of course they have the 3 needed components you may say now, but lets be honest here for a moment: Has Anet ever shown that they can satisfy two groups at once? I can´t remember something like that happening.
PvPers are somewhat satisfied at the moment; does that count?
Oh yes, I see people lying in the arms of each other while they celebrate being stuck in tiers or having to deal with scrubs like me who are in for the AP and brutally suck at PvP when they have to fight people that are really dedicated to it. There is of course always crying in PvP over balance, but crying over matchmaking balance is a rather new concept there.^^
I would not say that raids are the first content to divide people in a big way.
Oh yes, I see people lying in the arms of each other while they celebrate being stuck in tiers or having to deal with scrubs like me who are in for the AP and brutally suck at PvP when they have to fight people that are really dedicated to it. There is of course always crying in PvP over balance, but crying over matchmaking balance is a rather new concept there.^^
shhh, i said somewhat :p
the balance itself is actually okayish, sans warriors being toilet tier
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.
same, rather than useless easy mode raid…
Same, and I actually think this is a win-win for everyone.
When you ask people to describe what they want in easy mode raids, the answers you get, in the abstract, sound awfully like dungeons.
So: non raiders get more content at their skill level. Raiders get more (daily) content. Who loses here?
So: non raiders get more content at their skill level. Raiders get more (daily) content. Who loses here?
People who want to ezmode their way to legendary armor. :V
So: non raiders get more content at their skill level. Raiders get more (daily) content. Who loses here?
People who want to ezmode their way to legendary armor. :V
^ this (4 or 5 in this thread then ^^)
. Everything you listed for fotm are not needed either. Outside of some fotm you can dodge the AR attacks, you don’t need food or oil and if you do dodge the AR attacks you don’t need ascended gear. Plus in fotm you can also get rewards of up to 100g (btw you can’t salvage ascended items to get the based materials back so who cares how much they are worth).
While you may not need those things, I use them, and even with using food, oils, and potions, AR, Ascended Items, I still manage to turn a profit running Fractals.
Now, If you can’t turn a profit doing a Raid (or any content for that matter) then you need to revisit how good you really are at that content, and accept that perhaps that content is not really the right content for you, if you can’t turn a profit doing it.
I turn a profit because I am in a good guild, this isn’t about me. Though everyone is not in a good guild that can speed clear a raid and for those what do you say? ‘This content is not for you’. Well if you can’t get a guild or friends to get the legendary armour then we’ll ‘this content is not for you’.
I’ll just coincide that you would understand that situation better then I would, I mean after whatever MMO you used to play, I am sure had raids, and you gave that up to come play an ultra-casual game like GW2, where, a 3 hour a week investment can net you some pretty good progress and guilds only serve as a social hub, because honestly, you realized that the demands to do raids in that other MMO were simply beyond you.
Wish I could share in that sentiment, as the last MMO I quit playing was Black Gold Online, and honestly I stopped playing because I really hated their
money grubbingpayment model.But, I will say we kinda agree, I mean, really, if players joined GW2 at any time prior to HoT, they stayed because of the friendly, casual, enjoyable content, where they did not need to be in the right guilds to gain access to the whole game, and I guess if the direction that GW2 is going in, is to make it so that players need to be in the right guilds, know the right people, Then I am sure many people will realize, you’re right, and that this is not the game for them anymore.
I will tell you what games I have played what i did.
GW1 Pvp 4yrs
Wow pvp 1 yr
Aion Pvp 2yrs
SWTOR pvp 1yr
GW2 WvW 3yrs
As you can see I have no raid background. Sure I did PvE in these game to supplement my pvp expenses but my main focus was always pvp at a high competitive level. First raid was in HoT because wvw failed. I joined GW2 because I love GW1, still my favourite MMO. Gw2 was never advertised as a casual game and even if it had I still would have come over because of my GW1 history.
Sure I raided a little in Wow but that wasn’t hard either.
I am sorry that I have to quote this from another thread, but it was just too good to pass by. I am not necessarily of the same opinion as Farzo but I let it in for the sake of understanding where it is coming from, so just read it to the last sentence please:
Because usually these players that raid are being so tryhard to make it into an “elitist” thing, so I can’t bother with it anymore.
Full ascended gear on 3 different professions is apparently required to enter a raid group.
Yeah, no… not going to bother with that. I can dedicate time and skill, gold, food and whatnot, but I’m not going to bother filling 2 more professions with ascended equipment because these raiding players thinks it’s necessary.
It makes me cringe when elitist players try to make a game that is casual into something hardcore.
In certain guilds they ask for that because certain class stacking is pointless. It has nothing to do with elitism. You can’t expect to bring a bunch of mesmers and not hit enrage. There are plenty of guilds out there that accommodate all sorts of players and there is no reason why you can’t start your own group in LFG or from friends.
It makes me cringe the amount of casuals that want to turn this casual game even more casual.
I think whoever stated that only 4 or 5 people want raids gone, changed significantly or marginalized at least here on the boards stands corrected when it is even stated by a pro-raid enthusiast.^^
No, I’d like you to get stuck in. I’d love for you to explain on what basis you can make a reasonable, grounded proposal on how to structure a raid well, considering you have demonstrated next to no experience raiding in GW2, no experience raiding in other games, and refuse to research other games.
I really would love to understand what makes you so capable considering all evidence points to the contrary- and what exactly makes you so confident that you are constantly, directly going against the directions of a community manager.
Because I’ve played dozens of MMOs over the years dating back to Asheron’s Call, including this one for three years, I’ve researched how raids work in this game, including kill strategy videos for all the available bosses, and I’ve developed for smaller scale indy games and read a lot of articles over the years by larger scale developers, so while I don’t know the specific tools they use to design content, I am aware of the tools that they should have available on a project like this to edit the existing content in a timely manner.
TIL Hypairion and Ashen are not actual ‘players in the game’. And you think I’m making personal shots.
I didn’t say that they weren’t actually players, I was making the point that they were not representative of the target audience of my proposal. They can speak for themselves, they cannot speak for the larger audience because they are outliers, people who are fine with the raids the way they are.
So you “bet” what others would prefer and then question sincerity if expressed preferences arent what you want them to be?
So if someone bet that most Americans loved dogs while in a cat convention, and then two cat ladies with “I [heart] kitties” T-shirts on ran up and said “no, dogs are terrible!,” that is an indication that Americans in general do, in fact, hate dogs? This is not how statistics work.
An easy mode version of raids adds nothing for me, and it is personal preference of people who enjoyed dungeons that you bet on, while work on dungeons potentially would.
But again, we’re only talking EQUIVALENT work. I guarantee you that if they only spent as much time working on dungeons as they would need to spend to make easy mode raids, then you would never even notice anything had been touched. It’s like if someone has a messy house, and you tell them “if you spent as much time cleaning up this place as you spend talking on the phone each day. . .” and he only spends like five minutes on the phone, so he spends five minutes cleaning instead, and the place is still a mess.
Yes, raids should stay hard mode. If not, people looking for harder content indeed will indeed never shut up. The problem with this is, they won´t shut up anyway when Anet refocuses on casuals.
“The first raid ended 3 months ago. Where is raid wing Nr. 1 of raid 2? Casuals get all your attention!”
Sounds familiar? This is what has happened the last 6 months in GW2, but with reversed groups. Raids are the first content that has really divided people in a big way.
Yeah, if anything, GW2 shot themselves in the foot with raids, because prior to raids, if people whined about “GW2 has no endgame!” the honest answer was “No, it doesn’t, and we like that. You don’t understand this game and it’s not for you, but plenty of other people enjoy it.” Now that they’ve added raids though, it only encourages those players to keep trying to change the game in their image. The anti-raid people are not some new force out to destroy your fun, we’re the game’s indigenous population trying to maintain the game that we knew and loved.
When you ask people to describe what they want in easy mode raids, the answers you get, in the abstract, sound awfully like dungeons.
Sure, in terms of challenge level, no doubt about that, but the difference is that raids are NEW CONTENT, whereas the existing dungeons are OLD CONTENT, and no matter how pessimistic you might be about the difficulty of implementing easy mode raiding, it is IMPOSSIBLE for easy mode raiding to take more work to implement than it would take to make the old dungeons feel like new content again. You could do it, it would just take a ton of art, animation, conceptual design, and other assets that easy mode raiding would not need, on top of anything that you would need for easy mode raiding. It’s like saying “Driving to the airport just to get on a plane from New York to LA? That sounds like a huge hassle, why don’t you just drive cross country instead?”
I didn’t say that they weren’t actually players, I was making the point that they were not representative of the target audience of my proposal. They can speak for themselves, they cannot speak for the larger audience because they are outliers, people who are fine with the raids the way they are.
You said people who played dungeons. I fit that. You spoke of an entire class of players based on their enjoyment of a form of content not part of the subject of this thread.
I never claimed to speak for a larger audience.
I am also not fond of, “raids the way they are.”
You might want to stop speaking for others. First you claim to know how people who played and enjoyed dungeons would prefer resources be allocated and now you claim to know what people think about raids.
Here is some advice. If you are going to post a sentence about how someone thinks about something, use, “I,” instead of, “they,” or, “we.”
“I think X,” is perfectly fine and reasonable, “they think X,” is much less so.
You said people who played dungeons. I fit that.
You do, and again, can speak for yourself, but you are not exemplar of the whole of that body. And perhaps you were not intending to speak to that whole body, but Sarrs was definitely making that implication, which is what I was responding to.
You said people who played dungeons. I fit that.
You do, and again, can speak for yourself, but you are not exemplar of the whole of that body. And perhaps you were not intending to speak to that whole body, but Sarrs was definitely making that implication, which is what I was responding to.
“I bet if you asked people who ran dungeons regularly before the nerfs: Which would you prefer, that they take the time to make an easymode version of the raids that is comparable in difficulty to dungeons, or that they spend that same amount of time updating the existing dungeons in some way?”
You did not say, “ask everyone.” So people did respond and Sarrs pointed out that people responding as if asked that question preferred the idea of spending the resources on the dungeons.
You then essentially called the respondents liars for claiming to prefer spending resources on dungeons over raids. When that met with resistance you moved the goalposts from people to specific people that agree with you. When that met with resistence you moved the goalposts again to some imaginary people, specifically other than those of us who did respond, who would somehow represent the entirety of those who ran dungeons before the arrival of raids.
Some pretty impressive verbal contortionism going on there sir.
You did not say, “ask everyone.” So people did respond and Sarrs pointed out that people responding as if asked that question preferred the idea of spending the resources on the dungeons.
I think I was clear enough in that statement that I was referencing “the sum total of people,” rather than trying to say that if you asked around, there would be no people that would disagree with this statement." There will always be conflicting viewpoints, that’s a given. My point was, the community as a whole would prefer easy mode raids to insignificant dungeon tweaks. I’m sorry if that read as unclear, but it was not my intent.
But now that we’re discussing the topic, let me ask you directly, say there was a choice between easy mode raids and dungeon improvements, what would you personally classify as a “dungeon improvement” that would be significant enough that you would actually care, that it would make you more likely to run dungeons over a reasonable period of time?
My assumption is that any answer to that question would take significantly longer to implement, and involve a higher number of developers than the easy mode raid concept I laid out, but prove me wrong on that one.
My assumption is that any answer to that question would take significantly longer to implement, and involve a higher number of developers than the easy mode raid concept I laid out, but prove me wrong on that one.
And it would still take less developers for you to play raids than an easy mode, if you want to use that logic.
And it would still take less developers for you to play raids than an easy mode, if you want to use that logic.
True, but irrelevant. To catch you up, we’re discussing ways to satisfy players who are not satisfied by raids in their current form. My recommendation is to add easy mode raids, which would make them more accessible to people who, for various reasons, do not find the current raids to be accessible enough.
Now some would argue that these people are wrong, but that doesn’t matter in the least, because that’s how they feel about it and telling them they’re wrong won’t actually change how they feel about it and is a huge waste of everyone’s time.
So then we’re back to “some people feel that the current raids are inaccessible,” and while an easy mode would resolve this in a very simple and relatively low effort manner, this is not the ideal solution for some people on this thread. So the alternative proposed would be to overhaul dungeons in a way that would cause dungeons to satisfy those who feel left out of the raiding process.
My counter argument to this is that I do not believe that dungeons could be significantly improved with even double the effort it would take to implement easy mode raids, likely much more than that, so if the argument is that the devs shouldn’t be “wasting their time” on easy mode raids, then the same would apply several times over to a dungeon overhaul.
And then of course there are the “don’t do anything” crowd, but ultimately this also is a waste of everyone’s time. If ANet does not recognize this as an issue that needs correcting, then they will do nothing, and don’t need any players to tell them to. If, on the other hand, they do recognize this as an issue, then they could take any number of possible courses in correcting it, and as they have a solid track record of heading off miles in the wrong direction before we ever hear they’re in motion, it’s to everyone’s benefit to discuss the best possible solutions before they get too deep into resolving it.
And now we’re here, what do you have to add to the conversation?
Because I’ve played dozens of MMOs over the years dating back to Asheron’s Call, including this one for three years,
So no raiding experience.
I’ve researched how raids work in this game, including kill strategy videos for all the available bosses
Which doesn’t address the question. No kill experience in this game, not much general raiding experience here, no willingness to research other games.
and I’ve developed for smaller scale indy games
Interesting. Show me.
and read a lot of articles over the years by larger scale developers,
That’s great. Perhaps if you could read other peoples’ posts maybe you’d learn something.
so while I don’t know the specific tools they use to design content, I am aware of the tools that they should have available on a project like this to edit the existing content in a timely manner.
Which doesn’t really seem to change the fact that you don’t know the tools they have, you don’t know what kind of expertise they have and you don’t know their production cycle. kitten man you said that QA was irrelevant.
I didn’t say that they weren’t actually players, I was making the point that they were not representative of the target audience of my proposal. They can speak for themselves, they cannot speak for the larger audience because they are outliers, people who are fine with the raids the way they are.
Implying people who are fine with the raids the way they are are outliers.
If you have proof that they are outliers, SHOW US YOUR GRAPHS.
So if someone bet that most Americans loved dogs while in a cat convention, and then two cat ladies with “I [heart] kitties” T-shirts on ran up and said “no, dogs are terrible!,” that is an indication that Americans in general do, in fact, hate dogs? This is not how statistics work.
And if someone ran for president on the basis of “everyone agrees me, honest, they just don’t vote or speak about politics” that’s not how elections or statistics work either bro.
At least we’ve got some data, even if it’s 3 guys. You have no data. SHOW US YOUR DATA.
But again, we’re only talking EQUIVALENT work. I guarantee you that if they only spent as much time working on dungeons as they would need to spend to make easy mode raids, then you would never even notice anything had been touched. It’s like if someone has a messy house, and you tell them “if you spent as much time cleaning up this place as you spend talking on the phone each day. . .” and he only spends like five minutes on the phone, so he spends five minutes cleaning instead, and the place is still a mess.
That analogy makes no sense at all.
Then again, if you spent the time you spend on the forums on getting your gear and skill up, maybe you’d be able to do raids. :^)
Yeah, if anything, GW2 shot themselves in the foot with raids, because prior to raids, if people whined about “GW2 has no endgame!” the honest answer was “No, it doesn’t, and we like that. You don’t understand this game and it’s not for you, but plenty of other people enjoy it.” Now that they’ve added raids though, it only encourages those players to keep trying to change the game in their image. The anti-raid people are not some new force out to destroy your fun, we’re the game’s indigenous population trying to maintain the game that we knew and loved.]
There you go again. Insulting people by insinuating that they aren’t part of the GW2 playerbase when they disagree with you.
Sure, in terms of challenge level, no doubt about that, but the difference is that raids are NEW CONTENT, whereas the existing dungeons are OLD CONTENT, and no matter how pessimistic you might be about the difficulty of implementing easy mode raiding, it is IMPOSSIBLE for easy mode raiding to take more work to implement than it would take to make the old dungeons feel like new content again. You could do it, it would just take a ton of art, animation, conceptual design, and other assets that easy mode raiding would not need, on top of anything that you would need for easy mode raiding. It’s like saying “Driving to the airport just to get on a plane from New York to LA? That sounds like a huge hassle, why don’t you just drive cross country instead?”
Man who admits he is not the target audience of dungeons claims he understands what would fix dungeons.
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
I didn’t say that they weren’t actually players, I was making the point that they were not representative of the target audience of my proposal. They can speak for themselves, they cannot speak for the larger audience because they are outliers, people who are fine with the raids the way they are.
Implying people who are fine with the raids the way they are are outliers.
If you have proof that they are outliers, SHOW US YOUR GRAPHS.
I’d like to see those graphs, too. I’d also like to see the him demonstrate that the audience for easy-mode raids in GW2 is not an outlier. I’m sure that — assuming raiders are above average on the hardcore-casual continuum — there are more non-raiders than raiders. What I’d like to see, though, is proof that there is enough interest among casuals in easy raids to warrant the effort.
Given all the talk on various forums about raids over the years, I have little doubt that ANet believed raids were aimed at a minority of players. I also have little doubt that, given the statement that the percentage of players who’ve raided here is larger than that reported elsewhere, ANet believes that raids in GW2 were a good idea. If they do, that implies that demographic was big “enough.” Whether there is enough of a market for easy mode raids also, that I do not think anyone in this thread has demonstrated.
And it would still take less developers for you to play raids than an easy mode, if you want to use that logic.
True, but irrelevant. To catch you up, we’re discussing ways to satisfy players who are not satisfied by raids in their current form. My recommendation is to add easy mode raids, which would make them more accessible to people who, for various reasons, do not find the current raids to be accessible enough.
Now some would argue that these people are wrong, but that doesn’t matter in the least, because that’s how they feel about it and telling them they’re wrong won’t actually change how they feel about it and is a huge waste of everyone’s time.
So then we’re back to “some people feel that the current raids are inaccessible,” and while an easy mode would resolve this in a very simple and relatively low effort manner, this is not the ideal solution for some people on this thread. So the alternative proposed would be to overhaul dungeons in a way that would cause dungeons to satisfy those who feel left out of the raiding process.
My counter argument to this is that I do not believe that dungeons could be significantly improved with even double the effort it would take to implement easy mode raids, likely much more than that, so if the argument is that the devs shouldn’t be “wasting their time” on easy mode raids, then the same would apply several times over to a dungeon overhaul.
And then of course there are the “don’t do anything” crowd, but ultimately this also is a waste of everyone’s time. If ANet does not recognize this as an issue that needs correcting, then they will do nothing, and don’t need any players to tell them to. If, on the other hand, they do recognize this as an issue, then they could take any number of possible courses in correcting it, and as they have a solid track record of heading off miles in the wrong direction before we ever hear they’re in motion, it’s to everyone’s benefit to discuss the best possible solutions before they get too deep into resolving it.
And now we’re here, what do you have to add to the conversation?
That you can’t satisfy people who don’t want to raid, by adding an easy mode. Sorry if they don’t want to raid, they wont raid.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cant make them drink.
You seem to think there’s this magic bullet that solves the problem in an easy mode. Sorry you’re just flat out wrong here. If they want the items, they need to go do raids as they are.
If they want easier content, the rest of tyria exist and living world 3 is coming Soon™.
Therefore all anet needs to do is keep doing them, and ignoring the irrational complaints made by the minority in this thread.
So no raiding experience.
Aside from the time I’ve spent in GW2 and a little in DCUO, no. But I don’t need any to express the positions I’ve expressed here.
Which doesn’t address the question. No kill experience in this game, not much general raiding experience here, no willingness to research other games.
That’s not a question.
Interesting. Show me.
No.
That’s great. Perhaps if you could read other peoples’ posts maybe you’d learn something.
I have, and have, and what I post is the result of that. Just because I read and understand what you say does not mean that I believe you’re correct.
Which doesn’t really seem to change the fact that you don’t know the tools they have, you don’t know what kind of expertise they have and you don’t know their production cycle. kitten man you said that QA was irrelevant.
You keep bringing that up, even though I explained what I meant by that. This leads me to believe that you aren’t trying to enlighten the discussion, you’re just trying to attack my credibility so that you can more easily dismiss my arguments. You can be better.
At least we’ve got some data, even if it’s 3 guys.
That’s not how data works.
[quote][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote][quote]
You seem to think there’s this magic bullet that solves the problem in an easy mode. Sorry you’re just flat out wrong here. If they want the items, they need to go do raids as they are.
If they want easier content, the rest of tyria exist and living world 3 is coming Soon™.
Yes, but what about the ones that don’t want to do the raids in their current form, but do want the rewards? Your solution is “those players don’t get to be happy,” but what if ANet wants those players to be happy?
You seem to think there’s this magic bullet that solves the problem in an easy mode. Sorry you’re just flat out wrong here. If they want the items, they need to go do raids as they are.
If they want easier content, the rest of tyria exist and living world 3 is coming Soon™.
Yes, but what about the ones that don’t want to do the raids in their current form, but do want the rewards? Your solution is “those players don’t get to be happy,” but what if ANet wants those players to be happy?
Those players, need to grow up. Realize that they actually have to work for something and go do it. Anet doesn’t need to and should never cater to that playerbase or they’ll do irreparable damage to their own game again.
You want rewards, go earn them like everyone else.
Those players, need to grow up. Realize that they actually have to work for something and go do it. Anet doesn’t need to and should never cater to that playerbase or they’ll do irreparable damage to their own game again.
Again, “those players don’t get to be happy,” but what if ANet wants then to be happy?
Those players, need to grow up. Realize that they actually have to work for something and go do it. Anet doesn’t need to and should never cater to that playerbase or they’ll do irreparable damage to their own game again.
Again, “those players don’t get to be happy,” but what if ANet wants then to be happy?
I don’t think there is a solution to your problem Ohoni. If your easy mode is implemented, with the raid rewards because be honest, without rewards you’re not interested, then probably à lot of actual raiders would be unhappy (raid rewards for free, after all..). And if no easy mode, you and some others will stay unhappy because there will be à shiny you think impossible to have (although you could raid to have it…)
So, whatever happens, someone will be unhappy. Best is, then, to not spend dev times to change the situation (I’m sûre their time is precious, and they have better things to do)
I don’t think there is a solution to your problem Ohoni. If your easy mode is implemented, with the raid rewards because be honest, without rewards you’re not interested, then probably à lot of actual raiders would be unhappy (raid rewards for free, after all..).
But again, you’re exaggerating the terms, “raid rewards for free,” when in fact they would take a lot of work either way. Yes, I’m sure there would be raiders that would still be upset by it, but far fewer of them than people who would be made happy, and those that would be upset would be for impure reasons, so all in all, it balances out to a huge net positive.
And if no easy mode, you and some others will stay unhappy because there will be à shiny you think impossible to have (although you could raid to have it…)
Yes, exactly, so what is your solution to that, assuming ANet determines a solution is warranted?
So, whatever happens, someone will be unhappy. Best is, then, to not spend dev times to change the situation (I’m sûre their time is precious, and they have better things to do)
That argument would apply to ANY change to the game though. There will always be some that disagree with it and some that agree, so saying “some would disagree, might as well do nothing” is a useless position to take. What matters is how many people would be affected positively verses how many negatively, and by how much each would be effected.
We can agree that from the outside we are in a poor position to judge how many players are running raids, verses how many people could be running them if easy mode were established. I’ve come to my conclusions on that and you’ve come to yours, but ultimately ANet would have better data and more stake in the outcomes, and they would be the ones to determine whether action is necessary.
We can also agree that if very few people would benefit from this change, and if a larger population would be measurably harmed by it, then it’s not something they should do.
But if we assume that some action is warranted, if there is a larger population of people willing by unable to run easy mode raids than there are that would begrudge those players having access to raid rewards, and therefore some effort to please them would be worth the time it would take, then again, how would you make those players happy?
Aside from the time I’ve spent in GW2 and a little in DCUO, no. But I don’t need any to express the positions I’ve expressed here.
There’s a difference between expressing a position and saying you’ve made a grounded proposal. Having an opinion is okay. Having a proposal with the specificity you’ve put forth without exploring the rationale behind the decision appropriately, when you don’t understand the consequences of the specifics that you put forward, is not okay.
Well, I guess it’s okay, it’s not like you’ll go to prison, but hopefully you get my meaning.
That’s not a question.
Okay. What gives you the experience to make measured, rational, grounded proposals for easy modes?
No.
So I have no way to evaluate your experience? Joy.
I’m very willing to link my armory and my logs for your benefit so that you can know where I’m coming from, by the way.
I have, and have, and what I post is the result of that. Just because I read and understand what you say does not mean that I believe you’re correct.
You don’t understand what I say lol. Time and time again you’ve misinterpreted people taking your logic to its logical conclusions and you’ve taken it as an actual suggestion.
You keep bringing that up, even though I explained what I meant by that. This leads me to believe that you aren’t trying to enlighten the discussion, you’re just trying to attack my credibility so that you can more easily dismiss my arguments. You can be better.
And I told you why your ‘explanation’ is junk. QA teams aren’t infinite. They have resource limitations. If ANet wants to run a ‘guild test’, that still takes dev time to intake and interpret the information- it can even take more time than simply running internal tests- it’s not done because it’s cheap, it’s done because it’s a different kind of test. If you think it’s free, you’re plainly delusional.
That’s not how data works.
I know, but I think it works a little better than “The silent majority is behind me! Nevermind that they never actually say they’re behind me!”
Ok, you know that’s straight trolling at this point in the conversation. Be better.
I’m not trolling, I’m having fun. That’s why I put a fun face on the end!
A part of it, just a minute portion of that playerbase, arguing against the interests of the majority.
PROVE IT
I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked Ashen then, what do YOU think they could do to meaningfully make players enjoy dungeons again? Ideally, what could they do in what you believe would take less manhours than implementing the sort of easy mode raiding I proposed. You’ve spent plenty of time shooting down any attempt at positive change, let’s see your alternative.
Firstly, telling you what I think would revive dungeons is pretty fruitless. You’ve already said that you’re not the target audience of dungeons, so me going into detail on what would fix that is about as useful as me telling you why your suggestions won’t work. You’ll just blither on anyway.
Secondly, I haven’t spent all my time shooting down any alternatives. I’ve already made my suggestions. If ANet wants easy mode raids, they should create a completely separate raid at that difficulty. If people not seeing the story is a problem, creating a single-player alternative is a strong one. If you want something to do in the game, there are open-world versions of raids already- Vinewrath, Dragon’s Stand.
Thirdly… I’m pretty sure I’ve already said what’ll do dungeons well. Switch them to weekly lockouts, tune up the rewards, tune up the enemies and encounters to be suitable for the current power level of players in Exotic gear.
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
Those players, need to grow up. Realize that they actually have to work for something and go do it. Anet doesn’t need to and should never cater to that playerbase or they’ll do irreparable damage to their own game again.
Again, “those players don’t get to be happy,” but what if ANet wants then to be happy?
If Anet want’s anything it’s for you to play the content they make. Thought this was obvious. The content has hit its success mark, ergo the minority who want to get the loot without the work are not the target audience and need not be considered when we are talking about raids and improvements.
In other words, you want to be happy ? Go Raid.
The content has hit its success mark, ergo the minority who want to get the loot without the work are not the target audience and need not be considered when we are talking about raids and improvements.
Yep. Raids have already exceeded their expected participation rates.
There’s a difference between expressing a position and saying you’ve made a grounded proposal. Having an opinion is okay. Having a proposal with the specificity you’ve put forth without exploring the rationale behind the decision appropriately, when you don’t understand the consequences of the specifics that you put forward, is not okay.
It is a grounded proposal, you just don’t agree with the premise of it.
Okay. What gives you the experience to make measured, rational, grounded proposals for easy modes?
Roughly 27+ years of general gaming, 17+ years of MMO gaming, over three years of GW2 experience with at least a little in all available content areas and clearing the vast majority of it, paying attention to developer commentary from this and previous MMOs about how MMOs work behind the scenes, what tools developers typically have access to in a general sense, and how MMO communities tend to function. I’ve also been paying attention to what content adjustments ANet have made within hours, days, or weeks of a patch, which gives some indication of what they are capable of doing once they decide to do it, as well as developer interviews in which they’ve discussed these processes.
Now true, someone who is actually working on these systems within ANet would have a better understanding of them than you or I, but I think I have enough to go on to make general estimations on what they are capable of doing.
I’m very willing to link my armory and my logs for your benefit so that you can know where I’m coming from, by the way.
That’s great. Don’t need it. I try to avoid ad hominem diversions as best I can, and focus on the argument itself. You don’t need to know anything about me, just evaluate the points I make on their own merits. Pretend I don’t exist, just address the things that I am saying as if they come to you from the void.
You don’t understand what I say lol. Time and time again you’ve misinterpreted people taking your logic to its logical conclusions and you’ve taken it as an actual suggestion.
If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea, if it’s a bad idea, it’s a bad idea. There’s no such thing as a slippery slope, you just get off at the point it stops being a good idea. Sometimes people suggest things that they believe to be ridiculous, when in fact they’ve accidentally hit on a great idea, and in other cases they say “well if you do X, then you’d have to do 10X, and that would be awful,” to which I might agree, 10X would be awful, which is why you stop with 1X, where the most people are happy.
Typically when people say “taken to its logical conclusion,” they actually mean “taken well past its logical conclusion.” I mean any train, if you take it far enough, flies off the end of the tracks and derails. Most would not consider that a logical conclusion to the ride, but neither is that any reason not to take the train and park it in the station like a rational person.
And I told you why your ‘explanation’ is junk. QA teams aren’t infinite. They have resource limitations. If ANet wants to run a ‘guild test’, that still takes dev time to propose and interpret the information- it can even take more time than simply running internal tests- it’s not done because it’s cheap, it’s done because it’s a different kind of test. If you think it’s free, you’re plainly delusional.
So maybe there would be factors of QA time, ANet can be the judge of that, but I think it’s important to keep the following factors in mind.
1. This is still QA time, in the meantime the content developers can continue advancing new projects. Not every new project requires significant testing, so there are likely periods in which there are no high profile items that require testing and the testers. These projects could fill those gaps.
2. Since the mechanics and basic functions of the raid would be identical to the existing, highly tuned raids, the testing would not to be so comprehensive. I mean, there’d be no reason why it wouldn’t just work the first time, since nothing actually changed from hard mode, so testing would be more about balance than basic function. It would take a fraction of the time of the hard mode testing where any given mechanic could fail entirely.
3. Since the rewards would be considerably lower, and on a weekly lockout, the launch balance is far less of a concern than with the hard mode raid. I mean, let’s say it turns out way easier than intended, and there’s some massive exploit to trivialize it. That would be massively demoralizing for an “ultimate challenge” hard mode raid, but for easy mode, it’s really no big deal. No real harm done. They can shut it down if they deem it to catastrophic, but it really wouldn’t hurt to leave it up, and they can patch in a fix to whatever the issue is. Maybe leave out the things that would unlock Legendary rewards for a few weeks after it launches to work the kinks out, test it with the open public. Again, since it’s not as high pressure as hard mode raids are, they can be a lot more casual about slip-ups.
I’m not trolling, I’m having fun. That’s why I put a fun face on the end!
You do understand that trolls can use emoticons, right?
Firstly, telling you what I think would revive dungeons is pretty fruitless.
I had a reply for this, but then you went and gave your explanation in point three, no never mind.
Secondly, I haven’t spent all my time shooting down any alternatives. I’ve already made my suggestions. If ANet wants easy mode raids, they should create a completely separate raid at that difficulty. If people not seeing the story is a problem, creating a single-player alternative is a strong one. If you want something to do in the game, there are open-world versions of raids already- Vinewrath, Dragon’s Stand.
So make an easier completely new raid, which would take about as much work as adding an entirely new hard mode raid, which people might enjoy on its own merits, but fails to fulfill the interests of anyone who wants to play out the mechanics of the original fights.
Then make a story mode version of the raid, which would take about as much work as easy mode, more if they include the actual fights and it isn’t just basically a cleared raid instance.
And still nothing to address the issue of Legendary Armor.
I just don’t see them being able to implement any of this within a near future timeframe, much less all of it. It’s basically pipe dreams, and ultimately would be a lesser version of the easy mode system, for no apparent reason. It’s lose-lose-lose.
And which would you genuinely prefer here, let’s say they are going to get to work on something tomorrow, would you prefer they do it your way or my way?
I mean I know where you’d prefer they end up, fine, but considering the work involved, which would you prefer? Would you prefer they make an easy mode my way, which would involve only a couple of content developers to spend a few hours tweaking spreadsheets to update the enemy effects a bit, or would you prefer that they pull the entire raid squad off of wing 3, or raid 2.1, or whatever it is they’re doing right now, and put them on your “brand new easy raid” project for a period of weeks, more likely months to build this thing, and only after that getting back to work on raid 2.
I mean, you say it as your preferred solution on the assumption that they would never actually do it, but if they actually were going to do it, is that really what you’d want?
Thirdly… I’m pretty sure I’ve already said what’ll do dungeons well. Switch them to weekly lockouts, tune up the rewards, tune up the enemies and encounters to be suitable for the current power level of players in Exotic gear.
Ok, but effectively tuning up the encounters of a single dungeon would take more work, and more testing since you’re so big on that, than tuning down the bosses of the raid. So it’d basically take at least eight times the work of adding an easy mode. And then you’ve made the bosses harder, which is great for people that like that sort of thing, but now you’ve got all the players who like the current difficulty level annoyed, and I’d wager there are more of them than that want the dungeons harder.
Weekly lockouts might be fine, but then you’re ending up with it being much harder to find a team to do a dungeon with you towards the end of the week, because more people have done that dungeon earlier in the week. I mean there’d be the same number of players with at least 1-2 dungeons they hadn’t run yet, but it would be different dungeons for each person, and finding the ones that haven’t completed the dungeons you want to do would become harder.
(edited by Ohoni.6057)
If Anet want’s anything it’s for you to play the content they make.
I would hope not. That would be a bad goal. It’s like a good chef doesn’t go in wanting you to eat his food. A good chef wants you to ENJOY his food. And a good chef, if he knows you’re not enjoying the food he made because it doesn’t suit your palate, would want to make something you would enjoy. It’s only a poor chef who puts his own cuisine above the eater’s experience.
So sure, their raid developers might want me to enjoy their raid as it currently stands, but if they know that I don’t, then they wouldn’t want me to play it anyway, any more than I want to play it anyway. That would be awful.
In other words, you want to be happy ? Go Raid.
But that’s not a possibility, so again, you’re saying “I don’t care if you’re happy,” so again I ask, what if ANet does?
Yep. Raids have already exceeded their expected participation rates.
Again, no evidence of that. The evidence frequently cited on that point does not actually say what you want it to say.
It is a grounded proposal, you just don’t agree with the premise of it.
Which premise?
“There should be an easier alternative for people who enjoy the content presented in raids but not the difficulty”? Yeah there should be. Dungeons.
“There should be a way for people to get legendary armor outside of raids”? Sure, I can agree with that.
“There should be a way to get Viper’s trinkets”? Yeah.
“There should be a way to get these specific skins without tackling the content its attached to”? Broadly, no, not for specialized, difficult content like raids. They’re just skins, dunno why you’re stuck on em.
“ANet should implement an easy mode version of the currently implemented raid wings which retains all of the mechanics while significantly dropping them all, filling a ‘training’ role in the content, while also providing rewards beneath that of the raid but above a level which is generally rewarding, which may or may not require increasing the reward level of the current raid to provide room for both raids to co-exist and remain healthy with the playerbase, still providing legendary armor and skins”. That’s not really a premise, but the entire argument.
Roughly 27+ years of general gaming, 17+ years of MMO gaming, over three years of GW2 experience with at least a little in all available content areas and clearing the vast majority of it, paying attention to developer commentary from this and previous MMOs about how MMOs work behind the scenes, what tools developers typically have access to in a general sense, and how MMO communities tend to function. I’ve also been paying attention to what content adjustments ANet have made within hours, days, or weeks of a patch, which gives some indication of what they are capable of doing once they decide to do it, as well as developer interviews in which they’ve discussed these processes.
Close the scope a little. Raids. Talkin’ about raids here friendo. What raid experience you got.
Now true, someone who is actually working on these systems within ANet would have a better understanding of them than you or I, but I think I have enough to go on to make general estimations on what they are capable of doing.
I do believe Gaile told you otherwise.
That’s great. Don’t need it. I try to avoid ad hominem diversions as best I can, and focus on the argument itself. You don’t need to know anything about me, just evaluate the points I make on their own merits. Pretend I don’t exist, just address the things that I am saying as if they come to you from the void.
I’ve done that and you don’t take the advice lol.
If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea, if it’s a bad idea, it’s a bad idea. There’s no such thing as a slippery slope, you just get off at the point it stops being a good idea. Sometimes people suggest things that they believe to be ridiculous, when in fact they’ve accidentally hit on a great idea, and in other cases they say “well if you do X, then you’d have to do 10X, and that would be awful,” to which I might agree, 10X would be awful, which is why you stop with 1X, where the most people are happy.
Typically when people say “taken to its logical conclusion,” they actually mean “taken well past its logical conclusion.” I mean any train, if you take it far enough, flies off the end of the tracks and derails. Most would not consider that a logical conclusion to the ride, but neither is that any reason not to take the train and park it in the station like a rational person.
Yes, the slippery slope is a fallacy. Taking things to their logical conclusion does not imply a slippery slope. It’s analyzing the universal constants that you put forward.
So maybe there would be factors of QA time, ANet can be the judge of that, but I think it’s important to keep the following factors in mind.
1. This is still QA time, in the meantime the content developers can continue advancing new projects.
Doesn’t actually address the point that QA resources are still limited.
2. Since the mechanics and basic functions of the raid would be identical to the existing, highly tuned raids, the testing would not to be so comprehensive. I mean, there’d be no reason why it wouldn’t just work the first time, since nothing actually changed from hard mode, so testing would be more about balance than basic function. It would take a fraction of the time of the hard mode testing where any given mechanic could fail entirely.
Sure, but that doesn’t make the QA time negligible. Less time != no time.
3. Since the rewards would be considerably lower, and on a weekly lockout, the launch balance is far less of a concern than with the hard mode raid. I mean, let’s say it turns out way easier than intended, and there’s some massive exploit to trivialize it. That would be massively demoralizing for an “ultimate challenge” hard mode raid, but for easy mode, it’s really no big deal. No real harm done. They can shut it down if they deem it to catastrophic, but it really wouldn’t hurt to leave it up, and they can patch in a fix to whatever the issue is. Maybe leave out the things that would unlock Legendary rewards for a few weeks after it launches to work the kinks out, test it with the open public. Again, since it’s not as high pressure as hard mode raids are, they can be a lot more casual about slip-ups.
You’ve created one outcome here and you’ve based the rest of the premise on it; that it’s easier than intended. And if it’s harder than intended, what then? Then it’s simply not doing the job?
Also, I quite like the idea of keeping the legendary rewards out of any hypothetical easy mode indefinitely. :^)
You do understand that trolls can use emoticons, right?
You do understand that trolls can make suggestions and make arguments right? OMG OHONI STOP TROLLING
I had a reply for this, but then you went and gave your explanation in point three, no never mind.
I will always be minding. I am the batman of minding. These forums are my Gotham City.
So make an easier completely new raid, which would take about as much work as adding an entirely new hard mode raid, which people might enjoy on its own merits, but fails to fulfill the interests of anyone who wants to play out the mechanics of the original fights.
Then make a story mode version of the raid, which would take about as much work as easy mode, more if they include the actual fights and it isn’t just basically a cleared raid instance.
Yes. Making good solutions which take longer is a better idea than making bad solutions which can be implemented quickly.
And still nothing to address the issue of Legendary Armor.
Because it’s an issue in your mind.
Like seriously, it isn’t an issue. The stat boost is irrelevant. The armor itself is probably going to end up costing far more than just making an ascended set of all the relevant armor sets (zerk’s/viper’s/zealot’s). The armor will need to be constantly re-runed, costing you even more money.
And I’ve already suggested legendary armor for wvw.
I just don’t see them being able to implement any of this within a near future timeframe, much less all of it. It’s basically pipe dreams, and ultimately would be a lesser version of the easy mode system, for no apparent reason. It’s lose-lose-lose.
MMO is a marathon, not a sprint. Implementations which work in the next year but are negative for the five years after that are bad. Your argument is predicated around the immediate reality of the raids when that isn’t fair.
And which would you genuinely prefer here, let’s say they are going to get to work on something tomorrow, would you prefer they do it your way or my way?
I mean I know where you’d prefer they end up, fine, but considering the work involved, which would you prefer? Would you prefer they make an easy mode my way, which would involve only a couple of content developers to spend a few hours tweaking spreadsheets to update the enemy effects a bit, or would you prefer that they pull the entire raid squad off of wing 3, or raid 2.1, or whatever it is they’re doing right now, and put them on your “brand new easy raid” project for a period of weeks, more likely months to build this thing, and only after that getting back to work on raid 2.
I mean, you say it as your preferred solution on the assumption that they would never actually do it, but if they actually were going to do it, is that really what you’d want?
Something something… Dungeons. Y’know. The answer to all the problems presented here. Challenging fixed group content, check. Consistent, check. Unique rewards, check. Satiates a playerbase that is annoyed, check. And addressing the dungeons addresses raid entry difficulties, too! It’s almost like it solves everything except your legendary armor problem- which in itself is a good thing!
Ok, but effectively tuning up the encounters of a single dungeon would take more work, and more testing since you’re so big on that, than tuning down the bosses of the raid.
Sing it with me!
“I don’t care if it takes a bit longer
So long as it’s a better solution!”
So it’d basically take at least eight times the work of adding an easy mode.
I don’t think you’ve done the legwork to support that number, and it’s not a lot of legwork.
And then you’ve made the bosses harder, which is great for people that like that sort of thing, but now you’ve got all the players who like the current difficulty level annoyed, and I’d wager there are more of them than that want the dungeons harder.
Implying you can’t create a difficulty curve in the dungeons.
Weekly lockouts might be fine, but then you’re ending up with it being much harder to find a team to do a dungeon with you towards the end of the week, because more people have done that dungeon earlier in the week.
Fair cop. But it sure sounds like a problem you’ll experience with your ezmode raids, no? That it takes less players is itself a protection against this problem.
I mean there’d be the same number of players with at least 1-2 dungeons they hadn’t run yet, but it would be different dungeons for each person, and finding the ones that haven’t completed the dungeons you want to do would become harder.
And finding the ones who haven’t completed the raids you want to do would become harder. Twice as hard, in fact, since you need to check against twice as many lockouts.
I would hope not. That would be a bad goal. It’s like a good chef doesn’t go in wanting you to eat his food. A good chef wants you to ENJOY his food. And a good chef, if he knows you’re not enjoying the food he made because it doesn’t suit your palate, would want to make something you would enjoy. It’s only a poor chef who puts his own cuisine above the eater’s experience.
So sure, their raid developers might want me to enjoy their raid as it currently stands, but if they know that I don’t, then they wouldn’t want me to play it anyway, any more than I want to play it anyway. That would be awful.
Don’t go to a Chinese takeout if you want pizza.
Don’t go to raids if you don’t like raids.
Don’t ask a pizza place to put rice on the pizza (I actually don’t know if this is a good idea I’m not a foodologist????)
But that’s not a possibility, so again, you’re saying “I don’t care if you’re happy,” so again I ask, what if ANet does?
You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time.
Raids have already exceeded their target participation rates.
Again, no evidence of that. The evidence frequently cited on that point does not actually say what you want it to say.
There’s more evidence to state the positive then there is to state the negative.
Supporting the statement: “Raids are seeing participation rates higher than what you see in other games. This might be because of GW2’s unique structures”. I’m paraphrasing, don’t get too picky.
Against the statement:
…
crickets
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
I too like to ignore the facts, it makes for the most healthy conversations and discussions when we blatantly ignore or dismiss what the developers have stated just to further our own personal agenda’s.
Lets continue this another time when you can actually hold an objective discussion that isn’t biased and around you getting rewarded for things you’re not willing to do.
“There should be an easier alternative for people who enjoy the content presented in raids but not the difficulty”? Yeah there should be. Dungeons.
But that’s not an alternative, not like I meant, at least. That’s like telling WvWers “not happy with WvW lately? Go play League Ranked.” I mean, yes, League Ranked PvP is technically something that is an alternative to WvW, but do yuo really intend for your comment to lead them to happiness, or are you just trying to shut them up so you don’t have to consider that they aren’t happy?
“There should be a way for people to get legendary armor outside of raids”? Sure, I can agree with that.
Ok, but any time any suggestion is made that is likely to be implemented within the next year or so you shoot it down.
“There should be a way to get Viper’s trinkets”? Yeah.
Didn’t really bring that up, but whatever.
“There should be a way to get these specific skins without tackling the content its attached to”? Broadly, no, not for specialized, difficult content like raids. They’re just skins, dunno why you’re stuck on em.
You don’t have to understand, just accept it as a fact and move forward. I mean, some of the raiders are actually bothered by the idea that “lesser” players might share the same skin they do, I can’t for the life of me understand that, but I accept it as fact and move on.
“ANet should implement an easy mode version of the currently implemented raid wings which retains all of the mechanics while significantly dropping them all, filling a ‘training’ role in the content, while also providing rewards beneath that of the raid but above a level which is generally rewarding, which may or may not require increasing the reward level of the current raid to provide room for both raids to co-exist and remain healthy with the playerbase, still providing legendary armor and skins”. That’s not really a premise, but the entire argument.
True, but let’s just stick with “There should be an easy mode raid which, aside from being easier, does not significant differ from the existing raids.” I mean it’s not that complex to wrap your head around, when you think about it.
Close the scope a little. Raids. Talkin’ about raids here friendo. What raid experience you got.
Around six hours in this game, and who knows, maybe about that much in DCUO a few years back? Plus I’ve watched strategy videos for all the GW2 raids, so I’m aware of the general tactics involved, and have had running battles with raiding communities in this and other games for years now. The Wildstar community was particularly obnoxious about it, but I guess they turned out to be right in the end about how vital raids are to a successful MMO.
But raiding experience alone is not all that matters, because we’re discussing how raids can and should fit in with the entirety of the game GW2 and its community. This isn’t about “making raids better” as the primary goal, it’s "making GW2 as a whole better, and how raids are a part of that.
I do believe Gaile told you otherwise.
Which she prefaced by saying that she was actually not directly aware of those systems either, and would need to talk to those people to know for sure. She then implied that she’d discussed difficulty levels in some other game, in a way that seemed more complex than what I was talking about. Again, more data would be appreciated, but so far it’s nothing to dispute what I was saying.
Yes, the slippery slope is a fallacy. Taking things to their logical conclusion does not imply a slippery slope. It’s analyzing the universal constants that you put forward.
Yes, but again, if your “logical conclusion” would be a bad idea, why go that far? Why not stop well before that point, while it’s still on the tracks?
Doesn’t actually address the point that QA resources are still limited.
Yes, I addressed that in the subsequent points.
Sure, but that doesn’t make the QA time negligible. Less time != no time.
True, but it does still mean less time, which makes it easier to fit into the schedule without significant disruption.
You’ve created one outcome here and you’ve based the rest of the premise on it; that it’s easier than intended. And if it’s harder than intended, what then? Then it’s simply not doing the job?
If it’s harder than intended then people will struggle with it those first few weeks, ANet will gather metrics, and if necessary go back in and tweak the sticking points down a bit further. Again, not the end of the world, they’ve done this with plenty of content in the past. They don’t want to tweak down the hard mode raids because those are intended to be high challenge, so if they released raid wing 3 then even if nobody cleared it for weeks I imagine they’d be ok with that and hold for at least a month or two before nerfing it. With easy mode the intent is for it to be reasonably easy, so if their metrics show that it still has a higher than intended wipe rate then they can notch it down a bit more.
Yes. Making good solutions which take longer is a better idea than making bad solutions which can be implemented quickly.
True, but my solution is both the fastest AND best one, so two birds, one stone. Yours is both slowest and disappointing at best.
Because it’s an issue in your mind.
Like seriously, it isn’t an issue. The stat boost is irrelevant. The armor itself is probably going to end up costing far more than just making an ascended set of all the relevant armor sets (zerk’s/viper’s/zealot’s). The armor will need to be constantly re-runed, costing you even more money.
Look, you can continue to argue that, and it will continue to change exactly zero minds. The people who are bothered will continue to be bothered. If there are enough of those people to care about, which I believe is the case, then ANet will care about them too, and will want to make those players happy. How would you like ANet to make those players happy, whether or not you can personally empathize with them?
And I’ve already suggested legendary armor for wvw.
And that’ll be nice, when and if it every happens, for people who play WvW. But assuming that it’s not entirely trivial (like “you buy a recipe that costs 1000 badges”), how would that be helpful to players that enjoy the PvE gameplay, but will not raid? That is the largest potential audience currently left out of the process.
MMO is a marathon, not a sprint. Implementations which work in the next year but are negative for the five years after that are bad. Your argument is predicated around the immediate reality of the raids when that isn’t fair.
My proposal will work out in the long term at least as well as raids will work in any form. I just don’t think there’s any good solution that begins a year or more from now. I mean, we assume that it won’t be that they just hand out completed armor to everyone, it’ll likely take time, likely longer than it’ll take hard mode raiders to earn. So if hard mode raiders can start earning theirs now, and it takes perhaps nine months to earn a complete say, and it takes 2-3 times that long for an “alternative method” player to earn his, then even if they got started in January it would be almost three years between now and when they finish their armor.
Basically, the longer they wait to allow players to start on that journey, the shorter the journey would have to be for it to be reasonable.
Something something… Dungeons. Y’know. The answer to all the problems presented here. Challenging fixed group content, check.
No, no, we aren’t doing dungeons right now, we’re talking raid. Dungeons will be later. Right now we’re assuming the hypothetical that ANet does decide to do something about those players that want to raid but can’t do hard mode raiding for various reasons. Dungeons are completely unrelated, they can do whatever to dungeons and it doesn’t apply here.
So what would you have them do about an easy mode raid if they decided to do something immediately? Would you prefer they do the copy-paste-tweak approach I suggest, or would you prefer they pull out the devs needed to build something entirely new from scratch as you suggested earlier? Not as a “but they won’t do it so I don’t have to care,” but rather as a “this would remove resources from parts of the game I care about to make this happen” situation. Be honest, if one were definitely going to happen, which would you prefer to happen?
Sing it with me!
“I don’t care if it takes a bit longer
So long as it’s a better solution!”
But again. 1. not a better solution, a worse solution, 2. while it’s in production, the players impacted remain disgruntled and may leave before the eventual solution takes place, and 3. while it’s in production, it is pulling resources from other parts of the game, delaying those as well, most likely the hard mode raids since that’s the closest content.
I don’t think you’ve done the legwork to support that number, and it’s not a lot of legwork.
There are eight dungeons, so buffing them up would take at least eight times as much work as tweaking down one raid wing. The math is fairly easy.
Implying you can’t create a difficulty curve in the dungeons.
You mean tweak some of them up and leave some alone? Of course you can do that, but there will still be people who preferred the original difficulty level of that particular dungeon. Remember the AC buffs and how the community reacted to those? There are already dungeons that are relatively harder than others, so if people do want harder dungeons, they can already stick to the harder ones.
Fair cop. But it sure sounds like a problem you’ll experience with your ezmode raids, no? That it takes less players is itself a protection against this problem.
True, but there are less raids to lock out, at least at first. It’ll be a while before there are as many raids as there are dungeon paths, so players will be more concentrated. Now years down the line players might spread out a bit, but that’s something that’s going to occur to raids with or without easy modes.
Don’t go to a Chinese takeout if you want pizza.
And don’t go to GW2 if you want hardcore raiding. This is not a situation of me going to a Chinese takeout and ordering pizza, this is a situation of you going into a pizzeria that happens to serve a kung-pow pizza, and because you happen to like that flavor, you demand premium seating and service beyond what us cheese and pepperoni players are given.
Raids have already exceeded their target participation rates.
Again, no evidence of that. The evidence frequently cited on that point does not actually say what you want it to say.
Supporting the statement: “Raids are seeing participation rates higher than what you see in other games. This might be because of GW2’s unique structures”. I’m paraphrasing, don’t get too picky.
You’ve never heard of a company use language which puts a positive spin on negative or neutral news? “Rates higher than other games,” when other games historically offer abysmal rates, is not necessarily what they were hoping for, but until they have a practical solution it sounds better than “this was a huge mistake.”
I too like to ignore the facts, it makes for the most healthy conversations and discussions when we blatantly ignore or dismiss what the developers have stated just to further our own personal agenda’s.
Lets continue this another time when you can actually hold an objective discussion that isn’t biased and around you getting rewarded for things you’re not willing to do.
So again, you’re saying “I don’t care if you’re happy,” so again I ask, what if ANet does?
But that’s not an alternative, not like I meant, at least. That’s like telling WvWers “not happy with WvW lately? Go play League Ranked.” I mean, yes, League Ranked PvP is technically something that is an alternative to WvW, but do yuo really intend for your comment to lead them to happiness, or are you just trying to shut them up so you don’t have to consider that they aren’t happy?
WvW and sPvP are game modes that ANet have explicitly stated should not be considered to be similar.
Oh, and WvWers are already going to play something else. It’s called BDO. This raid ‘issue’ is first world problems.
Ok, but any time any suggestion is made that is likely to be implemented within the next year or so you shoot it down.
For a reason. Argue against that reason if you can.
Didn’t really bring that up, but whatever.
That’s a shame, because it’s actually a good thing to implement alternatives for.
You don’t have to understand, just accept it as a fact and move forward. I mean, some of the raiders are actually bothered by the idea that “lesser” players might share the same skin they do, I can’t for the life of me understand that, but I accept it as fact and move on.
I completely understand that some people want skins and are unwilling to put forward the effort required to obtain them. If skins are so irrelevant, why do you want them?
True, but let’s just stick with “There should be an easy mode raid which, aside from being easier, does not significant differ from the existing raids.” I mean it’s not that complex to wrap your head around, when you think about it.
Those are the specifics that you put forward.
I know exactly what an easy mode raid is, and I know exactly what you want. And frankly, I know that if ANet just mailed you the legendary armor tomorrow, you wouldn’t care one lick whether they implemented an easy mode or not.
Around six hours in this game, and who knows, maybe about that much in DCUO a few years back? Plus I’ve watched strategy videos for all the GW2 raids, so I’m aware of the general tactics involved, and have had running battles with raiding communities in this and other games for years now. The Wildstar community was particularly obnoxious about it, but I guess they turned out to be right in the end about how vital raids are to a successful MMO.
So twelve hours experience. Well, we’re up a bit!
Wildstar’s an example in how important momentum is for an MMO. The raids are a footnote.
But raiding experience alone is not all that matters, because we’re discussing how raids can and should fit in with the entirety of the game GW2 and its community. This isn’t about “making raids better” as the primary goal, it’s "making GW2 as a whole better, and how raids are a part of that.
No, it’s not all that matters, but it’s the only difference between you and I. In algebra, you remove elements that are identical from both sides of the equation.
Which she prefaced by saying that she was actually not directly aware of those systems either, and would need to talk to those people to know for sure. She then implied that she’d discussed difficulty levels in some other game, in a way that seemed more complex than what I was talking about. Again, more data would be appreciated, but so far it’s nothing to dispute what I was saying.
Ir- say it with me- relevant.
And frankly I’d be really interested in reading the article she wrote.
Yes, but again, if your “logical conclusion” would be a bad idea, why go that far? Why not stop well before that point, while it’s still on the tracks?
Because you don’t know what a universal constant is?
Yes, I addressed that in the subsequent points.
No not really.
True, but it does still mean less time, which makes it easier to fit into the schedule without significant disruption.
It still detracts resources from other areas c’mon.
If it’s harder than intended then people will struggle with it those first few weeks, ANet will gather metrics, and if necessary go back in and tweak the sticking points down a bit further. Again, not the end of the world, they’ve done this with plenty of content in the past. They don’t want to tweak down the hard mode raids because those are intended to be high challenge, so if they released raid wing 3 then even if nobody cleared it for weeks I imagine they’d be ok with that and hold for at least a month or two before nerfing it. With easy mode the intent is for it to be reasonably easy, so if their metrics show that it still has a higher than intended wipe rate then they can notch it down a bit more.
So you’ve already created the need for them to rebalance the content twice because you didn’t reasonably factor in the QA required to vet the change. Hooraaaay!
True, but my solution is both the fastest AND best one, so two birds, one stone. Yours is both slowest and disappointing at best.
…Except you’ve got half the thread or more in opposition to you. And frankly, the problem you’re addressing is “how do I get legendary armor”.
Look, you can continue to argue that, and it will continue to change exactly zero minds. The people who are bothered will continue to be bothered. If there are enough of those people to care about, which I believe is the case, then ANet will care about them too, and will want to make those players happy. How would you like ANet to make those players happy, whether or not you can personally empathize with them?
Sure, it’s for everyone else.
How would I like ANet to make you happy? I dunno. Add a legendary armor set to cooking, entirely made out of potatoes. Alternatively, they could not listen to your GIMME tantrum.
And that’ll be nice, when and if it every happens, for people who play WvW. But assuming that it’s not entirely trivial (like “you buy a recipe that costs 1000 badges”), how would that be helpful to players that enjoy the PvE gameplay, but will not raid? That is the largest potential audience currently left out of the process.
It’s the largest audience which already receives the lion’s share of the content. Why do you think they’re diverting from legendary weapons so they can focus on living story content? Because nobody cares about legendaries, they care about getting content.
My proposal will work out in the long term at least as well as raids will work in any form.
I’ll take that at your word, mister 12 hours of experience raiding and refuses to research the impact of easy mode in other games, doesn’t seem to listen to anybody at all and doesn’t have any interest in how the changes would affect other people.
I just don’t think there’s any good solution that begins a year or more from now. I mean, we assume that it won’t be that they just hand out completed armor to everyone, it’ll likely take time, likely longer than it’ll take hard mode raiders to earn. So if hard mode raiders can start earning theirs now, and it takes perhaps nine months to earn a complete say, and it takes 2-3 times that long for an “alternative method” player to earn his, then even if they got started in January it would be almost three years between now and when they finish their armor.
So basically you’ve spent a total of 40% time waiting. And by waiting, I mean building money and resources so you can smash out your gifts and the other components required as quickly as possible.
No, no, we aren’t doing dungeons right now, we’re talking raid.
Well I’m very sorry captain easymode but dungeons are extremely important in the broader scheme of creating a reasonable difficulty curve, building communities and expectations of content.
Right now we’re assuming the hypothetical that ANet does decide to do something about those players that want to raid but can’t do hard mode raiding for various reasons. Dungeons are completely unrelated, they can do whatever to dungeons and it doesn’t apply here.
No. Players who want to raid but can’t do hard mode raiding have one of three problems:
1. They don’t actually want to raid. (This is you!)
2. They don’t have the gear for raiding. Fractals are supposed to provide this, and dungeons to a lesser extent.
3. They don’t have the friends for raiding. Tools like LFG improvements and guild finding systems are great for this. Alternatively, they can queue up for lower levels of content, make friends, eventually form a guild, and then… Oh hey they have the friends for raiding now.
So what would you have them do about an easy mode raid
Conclusion doesn’t follow the premise, moving on.
But again. 1. not a better solution, a worse solution
How is making dungeons relevant a worse solution than making a mode that will inevitably die
2. while it’s in production, the players impacted remain disgruntled and may leave before the eventual solution takes place
Players are always disgruntled. This is not because of raids. This is because of the 8/8, coming on 8/9, content drought either side of hot.
3. while it’s in production, it is pulling resources from other parts of the game, delaying those as well, most likely the hard mode raids since that’s the closest content.
As though easy mode raids won’t draw resources from other parts of the game.
There are eight dungeons, so buffing them up would take at least eight times as much work as tweaking down one raid wing. The math is fairly easy.
It’s almost like there’s more than one dungeon path per dungeon. It’s almost like the number of raid wings currently in the game is not one. It’s almost like they’re going to add more raid wings in the future.
Do a little research.
You mean tweak some of them up and leave some alone? Of course you can do that, but there will still be people who preferred the original difficulty level of that particular dungeon. Remember the AC buffs and how the community reacted to those? There are already dungeons that are relatively harder than others, so if people do want harder dungeons, they can already stick to the harder ones.
No, I mean create a difficulty curve.
True, but there are less raids to lock out, at least at first. It’ll be a while before there are as many raids as there are dungeon paths, so players will be more concentrated. Now years down the line players might spread out a bit, but that’s something that’s going to occur to raids with or without easy modes.
No, less raids to lock out means there’s more of a problem.
Steve’s done path 1 and John’s done path 2. That means the party goes to path 3!
Steve’s done Salvation Pass and John’s done Spirit Vale. That means the party goes to… Uh?…
And don’t go to GW2 if you want hardcore raiding.
gw2 raiding is not hardcore lol
This is not a situation of me going to a Chinese takeout and ordering pizza, this is a situation of you going into a pizzeria that happens to serve a kung-pow pizza, and because you happen to like that flavor, you demand premium seating and service beyond what us cheese and pepperoni players are given.
no lol, it’s a situation of you not willing to do content and expecting to get the rewards of it
Again, no evidence of that. The evidence frequently cited on that point does not actually say what you want it to say.
You’ve never heard of a company use language which puts a positive spin on negative or neutral news? “Rates higher than other games,” when other games historically offer abysmal rates, is not necessarily what they were hoping for, but until they have a practical solution it sounds better than “this was a huge mistake.”
Yes, I’ve heard companies use language which puts a positive spin on negative or neutral news. A good example is ANet saying that they’re diverting resources from Legendary weapons to focus on producing Living World content.
They haven’t announced that they’re diverting resources from raids to produce Living World content. It’s almost like… Hmmm. It’s like spending resources to create raids for the current raiding audience is a perfectly serviceable arrangement. Who would have thought? It’s… It’s almost like…
Maybe, if they’re continuing to make raids… Then raids have met and exceeded their target expectations.
(edited by Sarrs.4831)
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