Guild Wars 2

WvW and sPvP are game modes that ANet have explicitly stated should not be considered to be similar.

That does not mean that they are not more similar to each other than most PvE content is to other PvE content.

That’s a shame, because it’s actually a good thing to implement alternatives for.

. . .

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?

Again, you don’t have to understand, you just have to accept it as true, but just try to comprehend that as much as you view that it is reasonable for people to care about certain trinkets being locked behind raids, and only accessible to those who raid, and you believe this is a situation that might deserve correction, understand that I feel that EXACT same way about skins. Literally the same way. Again, you don’t need to agree with that, understand it, or empathize with it, just understand that that’s where I am.

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.

I would care less, but I would still care, because for me, I still DO want to play out the existing raid content in a lower stress environment, seriously, it’s true, and also because I do actually care about my fellow players, so a solution that solves what impacts me directly would still be a problem for other players, and that would continue to bother me. You do understand that I’ve argued in favor of changes in the past which would in no way impact me personally, right?

Wildstar’s an example in how important momentum is for an MMO. The raids are a footnote.

And yet right up to launch, their community has a cult-like “build it and they will come” mentality about the raids." They built it, they came, turns out there were that many “they.”

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.

I think there are some rather significant differences between us, even setting aside raiding experience.

It still detracts resources from other areas c’mon.

Yes, but what I believe to be a negligible amount of time, and again, I am spotting you that if it is not an amount of time worthy of the potential payoffs then they should not do it. Neither of us is in a position to definitively judge that though.

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!

Sure, but again we’re talking negligible development time. “OMG, they’d have to spend TIME” on it is not, in and of itself, the end of the world. I’ve had to patch up bugs after a release, they do it with every patch they put out. It happens. You go in, make the necessary changes, push it back out. We can assume that the initial version will at least be on the right track. From even a few hours of live play they should be able to determine where players are getting stuck, and can just notch that element down a little. Minutes of work. It will take some unit of time, it is unlikely to take a unit of time that could be better spent on anything else in the game.

…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”.

I think you’re a bit confused. It’s fair to say that about half the posts in this thread are in opposition to me, since I post, then someone opposes, then I post again. But in actuality, there are, what, 4-6 of your that have posted about 90% of the oppositional posts? Most if it is just a handful of you. And there are also 2-3 other relatively frequent posters that are mostly in favor of at least some of what I’m talking about.

And then there are the one-hit-wonders who pop in and say their piece and leave, and yes, I believe more of those are on your side in this than mine, but not by a huge amount, and remember that we’re currently on the raid/dungeon/fractal board, which will skew more heavily toward that sort of content than people more focused on the general game. Let’s remember that there’s a similar thread on raiding on the HoT forum, and in that one, the overwhelming opinion is that raids are just awful and never should have existed, with only a handful of dissenting views, mostly the same lot as this thread.

And also keep in mind that even within the entirety of the forums, online forums tend to skew heavily towards less casual, more hardcore players, so each voice is less representative of them than the voice of a casual is of other casuals. One famous example was a LotRO dev that said that while the majority of their forum traffic revolved around raiding, less then 10% of their population actually engaged in them.

So don’t try to make my view out as being a minority view within the population of the game. It’s possibly true, but you have absolutely nothing to back that claim with.

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.

So again, you’re saying “I don’t care if you’re happy,” so again I ask, what if ANet does?

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.

They care about legendaries too, just so long as the methods of obtaining them are within reason, which the previous Legendary paths were not.

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.

I’m assuming I could smash those out already if necessary, but there will almost certainly be time gated factors that would make that irrelevant to earning the armor any faster. It would still mean that we’ll be almost fully through the next president’s first term before I’d have a set of Legendary Armor, and I’m not satisfied with that.

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.

Maybe, but they have nothing to do with the desire for easy mode raids. The people who want easy mode raid know what a dungeon is, and whatever you do to dungeons, it doesn’t help the problem they are expressing to you. I feel like you just keep asking if I’ve tried turning it on and off. https://xkcd.com/806/

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.

1. Again, I definitely DO NOT want to do the type of raid you want to do, we all understood that like 20+ pages ago, but I DO want to do the type of raid that I have explained to you I want. Again, you don’t have to agree that you would like to play that sort of raid, but that does not mean that I wouldn’t. I don’t know why I have to keep explaining this. It really undermines any point you try to make when you establish that you’re incapable of processing this data.

2. If they don’t have the gear, then they don’t want to have to have the gear. Again, you can have to have the gear for hard mode raiding, fine, but not everyone wants to have to care. Easy mode allows them to play in the way that makes THEM happy, even if it’s different from the way that would make you happy.

3. Being able to find people to do things with is great, I’m a co-leader in my guild and we had two teams attempting raids before both gave up because of reasons 1 and 2. But the point is, better LFG is fine, it definitely helps some people, but not an actual solution to this issue. And also, GW2 was built upon “casual cooperation,” the beauty of the pug, or even less than pug coorperation where people join you just long enough to accomplish a task and then are gone. Again, hard mode can require a well oiled and coordinated group, but there is a desire for an alternative that doesn’t, where any pack of randos can do just fine.

How is making dungeons relevant a worse solution than making a mode that will inevitably die

Dungeons had their three years, I think easy mode raids would last at least that long. Everything inevitably dies eventually.

As though easy mode raids won’t draw resources from other parts of the game.

But again, easy mode raids would draw LESS resources over a SHORTER period of time than anything you’ve advocated, so whatever impact it has on the rest of the development cycle would be the least possible impact to achieve any significant results, which is better than if it takes more resources.

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.

Yes, there are 24 dungeon wings, and within the near future three raid wings, so eight times, and yes, they will add new raid wings over time, and those will need hard modes added, but they would likely have to periodically update the dungeons over time as well if they want to keep those corpses dancing on the autopsy table like you want them to.

No, I mean create a difficulty curve.

Like. . . a protractor? I have no idea where you’re going with that one.

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?…

That means Steve does Spirit Vale and John does Salvation Pass, each in different parties. If they care enough to insist on playing together then they should care enough to get their schedules in order. If they don’t care enough to get their schedules in order then what matters is finding nine other warm bodies to run the raid with you, and that’s easier when there’s only two of them.

gw2 raiding is not hardcore lol

It is relative to GW2, which is the problem.

no lol, it’s a situation of you not willing to do content and expecting to get the rewards of it

Because the expectations of the content are higher than what should be expected in that establishment.

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 raids 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.

OR Raid wing 3 is right around the corner and it would sort of put a crimp in the hype factor of that if they told us that the raid team had been moved off of raid 2.0 weeks ago and are already working on something else. It’s ANet, who the kitten knows what is going on behind the curtain. Have you even seen the half-finished maps WP was touring a year or so ago? They built things that were basically like WvW raid wings or something and then just threw them out!

Sarrs.4831:

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.

This is not necesarily true or the full truth. We know for sure the legendary weapons team was axed, and we also know that the raid team has delivered what was asked from them until now.
A higher number of people raid in GW2 than in WOW. Point for you, true enough. I would still like to remind you that statistcs can be spun around various expectations, questions and goals.
We indeed do not know if the raid team is not finishing what they are doing right now(raid wing 3) and MO will come out again and say the same he did with the legendary weapons team. Of course he could have said that right from the front when he bend over for the leg. weapons to get it over with, but he had a trump card he later played with SAB to appease the players and he also would have lost the raiders right now instead of loosing them in some months where they still buy gems now.
I am not saying that this is going to happen, but it is a scenario as likey as yours.

I think this thread can be boiled down to: if you told me everything easy mode raiders wanted in the abstract, the answer would be fractals and dungeons.

Don’t need class roles? Check.
Don’t need optimal gear? Check.
Can be completed with other random people? Check.
Low stress? Check.
Boss encounters with unique mechanics? Check.
Unique(ish) rewards? Check.

So the only two main points of contention: the content itself is not the same, and legendary armor.

As for matching the exact content, I think we can fairly quickly dismiss this argument, as no other content, other than fractals and infantile mode, is like this. There’s no watered down lupi, aether path, triple trouble, or teq. A single difficultly – but given the variety of guild wars 2, there’s always something at your skill level.

As for legendary armor, well, most raiders are not opposed to (eventually) alternate methods to achieve them. But they have the same stats as ascended. So really just a skin. And the other legendaries with HOT only have a single method to achieve them too.

Ohoni.6057:

That does not mean that they are not more similar to each other than most PvE content is to other PvE content.

Go check how many people think that dungeons are similar to raids. I’ll wait for you.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, you don’t have to understand, you just have to accept it as true

Sorry, only Jesus gets that position for me.

Ohoni.6057:

I would care less,

So yeah, the call of ’you’re only in it for the gear’ has a non-zero truth rating.

Ohoni.6057:

but I would still care, because for me, I still DO want to play out the existing raid content in a lower stress environment,

Then I really recommend that you go and try a game which presents these raiding alternatives at a lower scale. If you believe that people are so willing to leave GW2 over this issue, why don’t you?

Ohoni.6057:

and also because I do actually care about my fellow players, so a solution that solves what impacts me directly would still be a problem for other players, and that would continue to bother me.

Well, look, if you cared about your fellow players, then you would probably ask them what they want. You’d have some grounding in what you propose. You’d listen to the people who argue against you, because they are also fellow players. Perhaps you’d review the people who, back before raids were implemented, were asking ANet to implement something that was above the standard for content.

Ohoni.6057:

You do understand that I’ve argued in favor of changes in the past which would in no way impact me personally, right?

I’m sure that statistically speaking, it’s more likely than not. You understand that I’m arguing against you when I would personally benefit from your changes, right?

Ohoni.6057:

And yet right up to launch, their community has a cult-like “build it and they will come” mentality about the raids." They built it, they came, turns out there were that many “they.”

The reason Wildstar failed was because they put up a full box price with a full subscription fee for a completely new IP, without noticing that diamond solid IPs like Star Wars and Elder Scrolls went F2P on a timescale that you can use as an accurate benchmark for how long it takes a game to drop its sub model. The content was a drop in the water- you can’t succeed on that model regardless of how good your game is.

The game is now shutting down- or has shut down, idk- because of this immense failure to read the market and apply its momentum properly.

Ohoni.6057:

I think you’re a bit confused. It’s fair to say that about half the posts in this thread are in opposition to me, since I post, then someone opposes, then I post again. But in actuality, there are, what, 4-6 of your that have posted about 90% of the oppositional posts? Most if it is just a handful of you. And there are also 2-3 other relatively frequent posters that are mostly in favor of at least some of what I’m talking about.

So statistically speaking, we’ve got a 66% split in favor of me, because I am amazing, as you know.

Ohoni.6057:

And then there are the one-hit-wonders who pop in and say their piece and leave, and yes, I believe more of those are on your side in this than mine, but not by a huge amount, and remember that we’re currently on the raid/dungeon/fractal board, which will skew more heavily toward that sort of content than people more focused on the general game. Let’s remember that there’s a similar thread on raiding on the HoT forum, and in that one, the overwhelming opinion is that raids are just awful and never should have existed, with only a handful of dissenting views, mostly the same lot as this thread.

So now we’re even further in the “Sarrs is awesome” camp. Like favorite and subscribe!

But nah go post it in General if you’d like. Go ask them if they’d like to see dungeons done up or ez raids. Even if it gets moved here, or you post it here, you’ll probably still get some good feedback. Maybe it’d be a fun thread, god knows this one’s tired.

I’m considering doing this myself actually. It could be an interesting discussion.

Ohoni.6057:

And also keep in mind that even within the entirety of the forums, online forums tend to skew heavily towards less casual, more hardcore players, so each voice is less representative of them than the voice of a casual is of other casuals. One famous example was a LotRO dev that said that while the majority of their forum traffic revolved around raiding, less then 10% of their population actually engaged in them.

So don’t try to make my view out as being a minority view within the population of the game. It’s possibly true, but you have absolutely nothing to back that claim with.

I’m aware that forum populations tend to skew towards more invested players but that’s still beside your point; do you have any evidence to indicate that people want an easy mode raid?

And keep in mind that this point is arguing reality. If people on the forums’ opinions cannot be considered, then yours cannot be considered, because you are on the forums, therefore your opinion that forum opinions cannot be considered cannot be considered.

Ohoni.6057:

So again, you’re saying “I don’t care if you’re happy,” so again I ask, what if ANet does?

Let’s be clear; ANet does care about whether you’re happy. The problem is that they’re trying to keep every single one of their active players happy while also trying to engage people from outside the game to try to entice them into coming and play GW2.

If the internal answer is that some content needs to be revamped in order to retain and add players to the game, you can bet your britches that focus is going to be put on dungeons and Fractals. In fact we know this focus is being put on fractals, and that they’ve been surprised by the response to the dungeon change, such that they’re looking into it again.

If the internal answer is that legendary armor is a major sticking point not just for your but for a lot of the casual audience, I don’t really think that they’ll be making changes along the lines of what you want. I am extremely skeptical that legendary armor is a sticking point for the casual audience, considering they’ve already put the legendary weapons on hold in favor of pushing out LW quicker.

Ohoni.6057:

They care about legendaries too, just so long as the methods of obtaining them are within reason, which the previous Legendary paths were not.

What, the “get precursor from random drops” path? Or the current legendary precursor paths? Cos the paths are good, leave them alone. Except for the part 2 steps, they’re boring, fix em.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m assuming I could smash those out already if necessary, but there will almost certainly be time gated factors that would make that irrelevant to earning the armor any faster. It would still mean that we’ll be almost fully through the next president’s first term before I’d have a set of Legendary Armor, and I’m not satisfied with that.

…Why would you assume that? Because the current raid has legendary armor and that’s timegated, therefore this legendary armor would need to be?

If the appeal of the raid legendary armor is the skin and the prestige associated with that skin, then there’s no need for potato armor to have that kind of timegate. They can just put it behind the ascended materials and the obs shards and all that stuff that weapons are currently, and it’ll still hold the same weight as a legendary weapon and have all the utility.

I don’t think this would necessarily need to be the case for much of a reason other than arbitrarily drawing out the time which the legendary armor lives.

Ohoni.6057:

Maybe, but they have nothing to do with the desire for easy mode raids. The people who want easy mode raid know what a dungeon is, and whatever you do to dungeons, it doesn’t help the problem they are expressing to you. I feel like you just keep asking if I’ve tried turning it on and off. https://xkcd.com/806/

Well, have you tried?

Look, you have a desire for a very specific form of content: these raids tuned down in a new mode. The average player does not necessarily have this desire; you are conflating your “generalized people want easier group content” which is a reasonable position and it’s one I’m amenable to, to your suggestion of “people want exactly this this and this with these rewards and this and that and this” which there’s no evidence to support.

Ohoni.6057:

1. Again, I definitely DO NOT want to do the type of raid you want to do, we all understood that like 20+ pages ago, but I DO want to do the type of raid that I have explained to you I want. Again, you don’t have to agree that you would like to play that sort of raid, but that does not mean that I wouldn’t. I don’t know why I have to keep explaining this. It really undermines any point you try to make when you establish that you’re incapable of processing this data.

You want content that’s tuned for you. a-okay

Ohoni.6057:

2. If they don’t have the gear, then they don’t want to have to have the gear.

Foul! Asserting if/then argument which doesn’t have any basis. Two more and you’re off the court!

Ohoni.6057:

Again, you can have to have the gear for hard mode raiding, fine, but not everyone wants to have to care. Easy mode allows them to play in the way that makes THEM happy, even if it’s different from the way that would make you happy.

Not the point.

Ohoni.6057:

3. Being able to find people to do things with is great, I’m a co-leader in my guild and we had two teams attempting raids before both gave up because of reasons 1 and 2. But the point is, better LFG is fine, it definitely helps some people, but not an actual solution to this issue. And also, GW2 was built upon “casual cooperation,” the beauty of the pug, or even less than pug coorperation where people join you just long enough to accomplish a task and then are gone. Again, hard mode can require a well oiled and coordinated group, but there is a desire for an alternative that doesn’t, where any pack of randos can do just fine.

There is alternative content where any pack of randos can do just fine.

It’s called
OPEN WORLD CONTENT

Ohoni.6057:

Dungeons had their three years, I think easy mode raids would last at least that long. Everything inevitably dies eventually.

Dungeons had their three years and would still be ran if ANet didn’t tune down the rewards

Ohoni.6057:

But again, easy mode raids would draw LESS resources over a SHORTER period of time than anything you’ve advocated, so whatever impact it has on the rest of the development cycle would be the least possible impact to achieve any significant results, which is better than if it takes more resources.

Sing it with me
“I don’t care if it takes longer
So long as it’s better!”

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, there are 24 dungeon wings,

33.
34 if you count the path that was deleted for no apparent reason.

Ohoni.6057:

and within the near future three raid wings, so eight times, and yes, they will add new raid wings over time, and those will need hard modes added

Oh good, you do know that they’ll need to put in extra work for these raids. Well, we’re getting somewhere.

Ohoni.6057:

but they would likely have to periodically update the dungeons over time as well if they want to keep those corpses dancing on the autopsy table like you want them to.

Which they would also need to do for the raids?… Especially now that they have two modes?…

Look, okay, if your issue is “they are too hard” but you’re also making the argument “content inevitably becomes irrelevant due to power creep” then the problem solves itself. Just wait a year and you’ll see your easy mode from power creep. You’ll probably even see it just from better published strategies.

Ohoni.6057:

Like. . . a protractor? I have no idea where you’re going with that one.

Captain 27+ years of gaming who has assisted in the development of small indie games does not know what a difficulty curve is.

Ohoni.6057:

That means Steve does Spirit Vale and John does Salvation Pass, each in different parties. If they care enough to insist on playing together then they should care enough to get their schedules in order. If they don’t care enough to get their schedules in order then what matters is finding nine other warm bodies to run the raid with you, and that’s easier when there’s only two of them.

If they care enough to get their play schedules in order for ezmode raids, why don’t they care enough to get their play schedules in order for their dungeons? Come on.

Ohoni.6057:

It is relative to GW2, which is the problem.

providing higher difficulty forms of content is only a problem in this elaborate mind prison you’ve constructed

Ohoni.6057:

Because the expectations of the content are higher than what should be expected in that establishment.

if you expect easy mode raids why don’t you go to an establishment which offers easy mode raids? :v

like you can make as many food analogies if you want
but if your ultimate argument is “anet should make me happy” and you never actually take your business elsewhere, as far as their metrics are concerned, they’re still making you happy

Ohoni.6057:

OR Raid wing 3 is right around the corner and it would sort of put a crimp in the hype factor of that if they told us that the raid team had been moved off of raid 2.0 weeks ago and are already working on something else. It’s ANet, who the kitten knows what is going on behind the curtain.

Is this a god of the gaps argument? I’m not sure what the fallacy is. It’s one of those religious argument ones. Why did life evolve/because GOD did it. You have no evidence and you’re just trying to cast doubt on something that does have evidence.

Ohoni.6057:

Have you even seen the half-finished maps WP was touring a year or so ago? They built things that were basically like WvW raid wings or something and then just threw them out!

Because making the floor terrain, adding doodads and texturing is like 99% of the work. Totally. That’s definitely how making maps works.

Torolan.5816:

This is not necesarily true or the full truth. We know for sure the legendary weapons team was axed, and we also know that the raid team has delivered what was asked from them until now.
A higher number of people raid in GW2 than in WOW. Point for you, true enough. I would still like to remind you that statistcs can be spun around various expectations, questions and goals.

Sure, statistics can be manipulated- but what motive do they have for manipulating the statistics when they’re taking hits elsewhere? What motive do they have for pumping up an audience that is, if assumptions are correct, so small relative to the rest of the game? Is there a reasonable alternative explanation? I don’t see in what world ANet wins by saying “yeah raids are doing pretty well!” when they’re actually doing terribly.

Torolan.5816:

We indeed do not know if the raid team is not finishing what they are doing right now(raid wing 3) and MO will come out again and say the same he did with the legendary weapons team. Of course he could have said that right from the front when he bend over for the leg. weapons to get it over with, but he had a trump card he later played with SAB to appease the players and he also would have lost the raiders right now instead of loosing them in some months where they still buy gems now.

Sure, that’s possible, but that’s speculation- and it’s speculation that goes directly contrary against what they’ve publicly released. I don’t see what’s in it for them to openly lie like that.

Torolan.5816:

I am not saying that this is going to happen, but it is a scenario as likey as yours.

Hey, what will happen, will happen. And I don’t have a horse in this race; I’m not raiding anyway. More content development pushed towards me from raids dying off should probably be to my benefit.

Sarrs.4831:

Yep. Raids have already exceeded their expected participation rates.

They never said that.

Sarrs.4831:

Ohoni.6057:

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.

So are Raids and the rest of PvE.

Sarrs.4831:

Oh, and WvWers are already going to play something else. It’s called BDO. This raid ‘issue’ is first world problems.

So, you think that pushing players to other games is something good?

Sarrs.4831:

It still detracts resources from other areas c’mon.

Developing Raids detracts resources from other areas. So, by your reasoning should we stop developing them too?

Sarrs.4831:

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.

Seeing the reaction to that announcement was much more one-sided than this thread, i’d say it looks that far more people care about legendaries than about raids.

Sarrs.4831:

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.

Not to Anet apparently. Besides there’s no reason to think that creating such “reasonable difficulty curve” (reasonable by whose standards, by the way?) is something good for the game at all. It’s only important if the whole game is meant to lead to raids (which themselves are not proved to have a positive impact, by the way).

Sarrs.4831:

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.

You seem to have a completely different definition of friendship than i do. Friends should come before the content, not the other way around.

Sarrs.4831:

No, I mean create a difficulty curve.

For what reason? So people will have even less reasons to run them than they have now?

Sarrs.4831:

Ohoni.6057:

And don’t go to GW2 if you want hardcore raiding.

gw2 raiding is not hardcore lol

maybe it isn’t, but it’s in the game only because hardcore raiding is what some people asked for.

Sarrs.4831:

They haven’t announced that they’re diverting resources from raids to produce Living World content.

Yet. But if the raids are so succesful, why MO tried to downplay the effort put into them and marginalize that content as much as he did during AMA? That’s not how Anet usually operates.

Sarrs.4831:

Look, you have a desire for a very specific form of content: these raids tuned down in a new mode. The average player does not necessarily have this desire; you are conflating your “generalized people want easier group content” which is a reasonable position and it’s one I’m amenable to, to your suggestion of “people want exactly this this and this with these rewards and this and that and this” which there’s no evidence to support.

That i have to actually agree on. Ohoni’s desires are way too specific to be supported by the broader community. Or at least supported for the same reason.

The main reason why i support easy mode raids, for example, is not because i want them, but because i want
1. new content that a casual could play, on the level of dungeons or fractals.
2. a way to get legendary armor.
And it just happens that Ohoni’s idea seems to supply both of those at the least resource/effort expenditure on Anet’s part.

Sarrs.4831:

Dungeons had their three years and would still be ran if ANet didn’t tune down the rewards

Indeed. And, based on what Anet said lately, they may get a little bit of revival when they tune the rewards back up again.

Sarrs.4831:

Sing it with me
“I don’t care if it takes longer
So long as it’s better!”

Yeah, right. I, on the other hand would rather not wait long enough to see the people leave before it arrives. Especially if the person leaving would be me.

Sarrs.4831:

Ohoni.6057:

but they would likely have to periodically update the dungeons over time as well if they want to keep those corpses dancing on the autopsy table like you want them to.

Which they would also need to do for the raids?… Especially now that they have two modes?…

They have a Raid team. They don’t have a dungeon team, and they said at least the latter is not going to change anytime soon. So, dungeons will get reward tune up, but they won’t get anything above that for years. If ever.

Sarrs.4831:

If they care enough to get their play schedules in order for ezmode raids, why don’t they care enough to get their play schedules in order for their dungeons?

Because, obviously, ezmode raids will not require such a tight schedule as current difficulty ones.

Where was the last time you had to plan a schedule for fractals or dungeons?

Sarrs.4831:

Torolan.5816:

This is not necesarily true or the full truth. We know for sure the legendary weapons team was axed, and we also know that the raid team has delivered what was asked from them until now.
A higher number of people raid in GW2 than in WOW. Point for you, true enough. I would still like to remind you that statistcs can be spun around various expectations, questions and goals.

Sure, statistics can be manipulated- but what motive do they have for manipulating the statistics when they’re taking hits elsewhere? What motive do they have for pumping up an audience that is, if assumptions are correct, so small relative to the rest of the game? Is there a reasonable alternative explanation? I don’t see in what world ANet wins by saying “yeah raids are doing pretty well!” when they’re actually doing terribly.

Torolan.5816:

We indeed do not know if the raid team is not finishing what they are doing right now(raid wing 3) and MO will come out again and say the same he did with the legendary weapons team. Of course he could have said that right from the front when he bend over for the leg. weapons to get it over with, but he had a trump card he later played with SAB to appease the players and he also would have lost the raiders right now instead of loosing them in some months where they still buy gems now.

Sure, that’s possible, but that’s speculation- and it’s speculation that goes directly contrary against what they’ve publicly released. I don’t see what’s in it for them to openly lie like that.

Torolan.5816:

I am not saying that this is going to happen, but it is a scenario as likey as yours.

Hey, what will happen, will happen. And I don’t have a horse in this race; I’m not raiding anyway. More content development pushed towards me from raids dying off should probably be to my benefit.

Again a speculation for why a statistic is bloomy(not wrong, bloomy):
Damage control. Let´s say someone, maybe MO himself or Colin Johansson, pushed for raids to raise numbers. He did probably think that this move would be bold and drive people away, but thought that the number going would be smaller than raids attracting people. The bomb fell, raids did well, but the number of casuals dropped rapidly. Anet actually admitted that F2P to HoT does not go well, so of course there has to be a success to present in the next spring numbers for shareholders and investors.

MO stated something akin to the idea that he would look at the manifesto again and promote open world when he axed the legendary weapon team. The manifesto is written for casual gamers, I hope nobody is going to deny that.

I have no doubt that raids fared better than I personally had hoped they would, but I still hope the number is not good enough to continue them. I am sorry for the people that like to raid, but I think that raiding should have no prominent place in GW2 for a lot of reasons. Some of them are business related in a way I see my favirite game going down the drain, other are gameplay related as I see my style of playing getting the short stick, and some are utterly selfish like simply not wanting to be a second class citizen without bending over to the raid community.

Ohoni.6057:

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?

I’ve already told you what Anet would like you to do to be happy.
You want the rewards, play the content that has it. I don’t see how this is a problem and neither does Anet as proven by unique rewards for different game modes being a thing since this games launch.

You want this thing called “happiness” to matter to a group that has no desire to make you happy as you are not the target audience. Sorry, it’s not their job to placate to you. However, you can voice your concerns to the living world team. They’re more than capable of delivering easy content for everyone to do.

TexZero.7910:

I’ve already told you what Anet would like you to do to be happy.

And i am sure that you are fully qualified to do that, with you being their official spokeperson.
…oh wait.

Astralporing.1957:

TexZero.7910:

I’ve already told you what Anet would like you to do to be happy.

And i am sure that you are fully qualified to do that, with you being their official spokeperson.
…oh wait.

Don’t have to be a spokesperson to realize a pattern at work.

You want The Ascension → PvP, You want Ad Infinitum → Fractal, You want Envoy Armor → Raid.

If the Legendary acquisition is the only thing that is going to make you happy go to the source.

Oh wait, that’s like logical or something.

But hey since you want to bring up the legitimacy of sources, i’d like to point out that your partner and yourself are really good at ignoring the Dev’s and out-right calling them liars. Seems pretty silly to do so and then label others dontcha think ?

Well, it’s not like I have started pointing out that someone should not speak for the devs. A little consequence here.

I’d like also to point out, that all the examples you brought up can be obtained in what in raids would be the easy mode. If it existed, that is. And there are two different legendary backpacks, so if you want one, you have options.

Astralporing.1957:

Well, it’s not like I have started pointing out that someone should not speak for the devs. A little consequence here.

I’d like also to point out, that all the examples you brought up can be obtained in what in raids would be the easy mode. If it existed, that is. And there are two different legendary backpacks, so if you want one, you have options.

Or here’s the alternative, they don’t as raids are fine. Those players who want another source of Legendary Armor (now) can raid, and those that don’t can hold out for another source later (not from the same content). Shocking right ?

Though lets be real here, they’re not dumb enough to devalue raids by adding Legendary Armor sources anywhere else to the world for a very long time. So if you want the Armor go to the source.

It’s no different than if i want specific runes or gearsets going to said map where they are rewards.

Some thoughts:

• It’s fine if there are other sources of legendary armor. What matters is that the particular legendary armor available in the Forsaken Thicket is only available in the Forsaken Thicket. This is just the first place that it has been introduced; I expect it to show up elsewhere and in raids in future expansions.
• The raid team operates almost entirely independently from other groups barring involvement from the lore / narrative team and the sound team. They are very efficient at their work, and have a proven track record thus far of both listening to the community and making very high quality content.
• Raids are very active and are contributing to player retention.
• The current plan is to have a raid in the next expansion. This may change, though given the success of the team I seriously doubt it.

Note: I do not speak for ArenaNet, but I do speak with them, sometimes in-game. I am not bound by an NDA, but I also don’t want to throw any devs under the bus if they talk to me. Suffice it to say that as far as I understand, ANet considers raids a resounding success both in their impact on player retention and in keeping raiders raiding, and at this point they expect the next expansion will have a raid.

TexZero.7910:

Astralporing.1957:

Well, it’s not like I have started pointing out that someone should not speak for the devs. A little consequence here.

I’d like also to point out, that all the examples you brought up can be obtained in what in raids would be the easy mode. If it existed, that is. And there are two different legendary backpacks, so if you want one, you have options.

Or here’s the alternative, they don’t as raids are fine.

Alternative to what? To me pointing to you that your analogy is flawed?
Also, Who don’t? (and don’t what?)

TexZero.7910:

Those players who want another source of Legendary Armor (now) can raid, and those that don’t can hold out for another source later (not from the same content). Shocking right ?

Nah, heard it before. Didn’t solve anything then, doesn’t solve anything now.

TexZero.7910:

Though lets be real here, they’re not dumb enough to devalue raids by adding Legendary Armor sources anywhere else to the world for a very long time.

They may however be wise enough to do exactly that.

TexZero.7910:

It’s no different than if i want specific runes or gearsets going to said map where they are rewards.

Locking rune/statsets to specific content is generally considered to not be a good idea, so i agree with you here. It’s no different, and both should be fixed.

Rising Dusk.2408:

• It’s fine if there are other sources of legendary armor. What matters is that the particular legendary armor available in the Forsaken Thicket is only available in the Forsaken Thicket. This is just the first place that it has been introduced; I expect it to show up elsewhere and in raids in future expansions.

If we’ll need to wait years for those alternate options, then they might as well not exist for the purposes of discussing them.

Astralporing.1957:

TexZero.7910:

It’s no different than if i want specific runes or gearsets going to said map where they are rewards.

Locking rune/statsets to specific content is generally considered to not be a good idea, so i agree with you here. It’s no different, and both should be fixed.

You and i disagree. I think having stats gated to specific content pieces isn’t an issue. Play the content. Play the game.

You’re basis for concern is silly, and if you really feel having map specific rewards is irrational need we point you to pretty much the entirety of the game where in specific maps have unique rewards tied to them ? This isn’t a new concept, its part of keeping the game healthy, putting all rewards everywhere dilutes the gaming experience making queensdale no different from that of southsun for anything other than an aesthetic purpose.

Astralporing.1957:

If we’ll need to wait years for those alternate options, then they might as well not exist for the purposes of discussing them.

No matter what, new legendary armor will not exist before the second expansion. Even if they decided to add it to alternate game modes today, it still wouldn’t arrive before the second expansion.

I think this thread can be boiled down to: if you told me everything easy mode raiders wanted in the abstract, the answer would be fractals and dungeons.

The answer for you, perhaps, but not for them, and since you’re content with what we already have, the answer for you is of less importance.

So the only two main points of contention: the content itself is not the same, and legendary armor.

Yes, which like saying that the main contention in a food item is whether it tastes any good. True, obvious, and more important than other factors in the discussion.

As for matching the exact content, I think we can fairly quickly dismiss this argument, as no other content, other than fractals and infantile mode, is like this. There’s no watered down lupi, aether path, triple trouble, or teq.

Except for SAB and Fractals, yes. And also story mode chapters with Challenge motes. And Queen’s Gauntlet bosses with gambits. But aside from those, there’s no difficulty setting on any activities in the game, so if only 3-4 parts of the game have difficulty scaling, why should a 5th?

Sorry, only Jesus gets that position for me.

and yet it moves.

So yeah, the call of ’you’re only in it for the gear’ has a non-zero truth rating.

Exactly. I’ve always been up front that personal interest in the gear is definitely ONE of the pillars of this argument for me, never denied it, and yet people keep pointing it out as some great “aha!” But I’ve also been clear from the start that it is just one of the pillars to me, and that the other factors are also of significant importance, and that just solving the “Legendary armor for Ohoni” issue would not resolve the entire raiding situation in my eyes.

Then I really recommend that you go and try a game which presents these raiding alternatives at a lower scale. If you believe that people are so willing to leave GW2 over this issue, why don’t you?

Because I’m not there yet. I might be eventually, but honestly, you wouldn’t want that because the game could not sustain itself on players who like the current raids, it’d be like Wildstar 2.0. As I’ve said, I don’t predict many people rage-quitting over the lack of easy mode raids, but I do see it as a negative influence on the game and its community, that would cause people to drift away from the game, more likely to play other things, play GW2 less, and eventually stop logging in at all.

Well, look, if you cared about your fellow players, then you would probably ask them what they want. You’d have some grounding in what you propose. You’d listen to the people who argue against you, because they are also fellow players.

I do all of those things, but listening to you guys does not mean that I have to agree that what works for you would work for the good of the game overall.

Perhaps you’d review the people who, back before raids were implemented, were asking ANet to implement something that was above the standard for content.

I did at the time, and like today they were relatively few in number. GW2 just wasn’t the game for them.

I’m aware that forum populations tend to skew towards more invested players but that’s still beside your point; do you have any evidence to indicate that people want an easy mode raid?

You were the one that was claiming that the majority in this thread somehow translated to any majority worth caring about. All I was pointing out was why that was nonsense.

And keep in mind that this point is arguing reality. If people on the forums’ opinions cannot be considered, then yours cannot be considered, because you are on the forums, therefore your opinion that forum opinions cannot be considered cannot be considered.

It’s not that people on the forums cannot be considered, it’s that people on the forums are statistically irrelevant. You cannot make decisions based on how many people on the forums are for or against a thing, it is not a voting mechanism, it is a place for discussion. So the point is not to tally up how many are for or against, that is entirely irrelevant, the point is to actually discuss the merits of various ideas and work out the best possible way to do things. The statistics have to come from a more neutral source, like metrics and scientific polling.

Let’s be clear; ANet does care about whether you’re happy. The problem is that they’re trying to keep every single one of their active players happy while also trying to engage people from outside the game to try to entice them into coming and play GW2.

And I believe that, loosely speaking, what makes me happy in this regard would make more additional players happy than sad, and by a larger amount. Would some people be less happy? Sure, that’s true of any change, it was certainly true of them adding Raids in their current state, but again, I believe that more people would be happy to see easy mode raids than would be upset by it, and I think that it would involve less work than anything that could produce similar happiness, so the cost/benefit of it would be sound. You have not proposed any alternative that would offer an equivalent or superior cost/benefit outcome.

If the internal answer is that legendary armor is a major sticking point not just for your but for a lot of the casual audience, I don’t really think that they’ll be making changes along the lines of what you want. I am extremely skeptical that legendary armor is a sticking point for the casual audience, considering they’ve already put the legendary weapons on hold in favor of pushing out LW quicker.

I think that even if you’re right for the time being, you’d be wrong in the long term. I think it’s possible that Legendary armor is low on the radar of most players at the moment, but only because ti doesn’t technically exist yet. We haven’t even seen what it looks like. Once we do see it, and assuming it’s suitably awesome, I imagine interest among casuals will spike considerably, and they won’t like “well you’ll have to bite down and soldier through Raids for several months to get it” as an answer, and they won’t like “well we might add some alternative method, starting in a year or so, that will take a further year or more to earn after that. . .” as an answer any better. They will want a near-term path to at least getting started, with a reasonably in-sight finish line.

What, the “get precursor from random drops” path? Or the current legendary precursor paths? Cos the paths are good, leave them alone. Except for the part 2 steps, they’re boring, fix em.

The achievement paths. They involved WAY too much gold-fungible material for a process that also involved so much questing. Most players just dabbled into it and then decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.

…Why would you assume that? Because the current raid has legendary armor and that’s timegated, therefore this legendary armor would need to be?

So you would assume otherwise? You would be fine if the alternative to running raids for Legendary armor is they just decide “well, spend 2000g in materials, dump them into the forge, and you can have the armor day one?” Honestly I would feel pretty gypped about that.

Well, have you tried?

Yes, we’ve already established that I tried raids, and raids in their current form are not the sort of content I could ever enjoy. Hence this entire topic.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, you can have to have the gear for hard mode raiding, fine, but not everyone wants to have to care. Easy mode allows them to play in the way that makes THEM happy, even if it’s different from the way that would make you happy.

Not the point.

Entirely the point.

There is alternative content where any pack of randos can do just fine.

It’s called
OPEN WORLD CONTENT

Yes, but we’re talking about raids here.

Dungeons had their three years and would still be ran if ANet didn’t tune down the rewards

Ran? Perhaps. Enjoyed though? That’s far more debatable. I would argue that the dungeon rewards are currently perfectly fair, they are just not excessive, and people required excessive rewards in order to do that content because the content itself was stale. They didn’t particularly want to do it, they just did because they wanted the rewards, and of course those who did want to do them are now upset because they’re making less than they were, whether or not that original amount was fair. You can bribe players to run any sort of content, that is not the same thing as getting them to enjoy it.

Sing it with me
“I don’t care if it takes longer
So long as it’s better!”

And yet you do, because that “takes longer” has to come out of somewhere, which means that other parts of the game will be “worse” for this one part “taking longer.”

Oh good, you do know that they’ll need to put in extra work for these raids. Well, we’re getting somewhere.

Yes, but again, only tiny amount. And if they are developing easy mode alongside hard mode then it would be even less work to develop, as any time their testing notices something is too easy for hard mode, they can note that for possible inclusion into the easy mode version.

Look, okay, if your issue is “they are too hard” but you’re also making the argument “content inevitably becomes irrelevant due to power creep” then the problem solves itself.

I said nothing about power creep. Content doesn’t become irrelevant due to powercreep, it becomes irrelevant due to boredom. The dungeons aren’t currently irrelevant because players have gotten stronger, it’s because players have already run them dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, and that’s dozens of times more than you can run anything and still enjoy it. Players need variety, so there’s nothing that can be done that would make vanilla dungeons actually fun again, beyond completely changing how each operates so that it is an entirely new experience.

Captain 27+ years of gaming who has assisted in the development of small indie games does not know what a difficulty curve is.

I know what it is in the abstract, but you just keep saying the words without explaining how you think they would interact with a dungeon overhaul in any way.

Ohoni.6057:

That means Steve does Spirit Vale and John does Salvation Pass, each in different parties. If they care enough to insist on playing together then they should care enough to get their schedules in order. If they don’t care enough to get their schedules in order then what matters is finding nine other warm bodies to run the raid with you, and that’s easier when there’s only two of them.

If they care enough to get their play schedules in order for ezmode raids, why don’t they care enough to get their play schedules in order for their dungeons? Come on.

Agreed, they would have the same difficulty with easy mode, I never suggested otherwise. The point I was making though, is that while they would have to coordinate their schedules to play with each other, they would still each be able to find “a team” to run the content with, because there are relatively few possible variations. With dungeons on a weekly lockout, by the end of the week there would be so many possible variations of who’s already done what that it would become difficult to even find a pug of five people who hadn’t already done the specific path you wanted to run.

but if your ultimate argument is “anet should make me happy” and you never actually take your business elsewhere, as far as their metrics are concerned, they’re still making you happy

That’s actually a poor way to think about it, and a bit of an outdated holdover from previous MMO generations. See, that would almost be true if you were talking about WoW, with their subscription model, because so long as a player doesn’t un-sub, they are still supporting the game. But with a game like GW2, just “not quitting” isn’t good enough. That’s not a terribly useful player. What they want is players so engaged in the game that they will buy useless kitten for cash money. A player who is mopily still logging in for his dailies is all well and good, but that’s no great victory to them. What they want is a player that loves the game he’s playing so much that he needs five shared inventory slots and a fancy bubble glider.

Because making the floor terrain, adding doodads and texturing is like 99% of the work. Totally. That’s definitely how making maps works.

It also had a bunch of voice acting, apparently, and we don’t know how much else. My point though is that ANet does an awful lot of behind the scenes stuff without ever telling us, so you saying “they pulled people off Legendaries but not off raids” is meaningless, we don’t know what the raid team is currently up to, we don’t know what other teams are currently up to. They could be halfway through the easy mode raid testing right now for all we know.

I’ve already told you what Anet would like you to do to be happy.

That’s not how happiness works. People are not happy because they do what they’re told, that’s something out of an Orwell book. If ANet cares about making players happy, and I assume they are, it does not involve convincing the players to enjoy what ANet thinks they should enjoy, step one is figuring out what the PLAYERS enjoy, and step 2 is delivering that.

No matter what, new legendary armor will not exist before the second expansion. Even if they decided to add it to alternate game modes today, it still wouldn’t arrive before the second expansion.

Well, I hope they don’t plan on having players buy that second expansion with money then.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Astralporing.1957:

If we’ll need to wait years for those alternate options, then they might as well not exist for the purposes of discussing them.

No matter what, new legendary armor will not exist before the second expansion. Even if they decided to add it to alternate game modes today, it still wouldn’t arrive before the second expansion.

Oh, i agree. We won’t get it anytime soon. Definitely not enough to have any impact on the current situation. Which is exactly why i am lobbying for making the raid one to be more accessible.

Ohoni.6057:

No matter what, new legendary armor will not exist before the second expansion. Even if they decided to add it to alternate game modes today, it still wouldn’t arrive before the second expansion.

Well, I hope they don’t plan on having players buy that second expansion with money then.

You won’t maybe. But other will. Again, stop thinking about your personnal situation as the whole GW2 population…

Rising Dusk.2408:

Some thoughts:

• It’s fine if there are other sources of legendary armor. What matters is that the particular legendary armor available in the Forsaken Thicket is only available in the Forsaken Thicket. This is just the first place that it has been introduced; I expect it to show up elsewhere and in raids in future expansions.
• The raid team operates almost entirely independently from other groups barring involvement from the lore / narrative team and the sound team. They are very efficient at their work, and have a proven track record thus far of both listening to the community and making very high quality content.
• Raids are very active and are contributing to player retention.
• The current plan is to have a raid in the next expansion. This may change, though given the success of the team I seriously doubt it.

Note: I do not speak for ArenaNet, but I do speak with them, sometimes in-game. I am not bound by an NDA, but I also don’t want to throw any devs under the bus if they talk to me. Suffice it to say that as far as I understand, ANet considers raids a resounding success both in their impact on player retention and in keeping raiders raiding, and at this point they expect the next expansion will have a raid.

“The current plan is to have a raid in the next expansion.”

Wait are you saying they’re going to stop making raids after the third wing all the way until the next expansion? This is NOT what we were told and I’m very disappointed to hear this, but with the whole legendary weapons thing I guess I can’t say I’m completely surprised.

Is that actually what the plan is?

Ohoni.6057:

That’s not how happiness works. People are not happy because they do what they’re told, that’s something out of an Orwell book. If ANet cares about making players happy, and I assume they are, it does not involve convincing the players to enjoy what ANet thinks they should enjoy, step one is figuring out what the PLAYERS enjoy, and step 2 is delivering that.

People are happy, you the individual are not. Congrats, welcome to being the minority.
As we’ve already gone over you cannot please everyone. You wont be pleased until a “easy mode” comes out, but as seen by your SAB post about dailies, you should never expect to be happy if you as a player think dailies are getting hard. No gameplay designer on earth is going to make a raid that easier than dailies.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Some thoughts:

• It’s fine if there are other sources of legendary armor. What matters is that the particular legendary armor available in the Forsaken Thicket is only available in the Forsaken Thicket. This is just the first place that it has been introduced; I expect it to show up elsewhere and in raids in future expansions.
• The raid team operates almost entirely independently from other groups barring involvement from the lore / narrative team and the sound team. They are very efficient at their work, and have a proven track record thus far of both listening to the community and making very high quality content.
• Raids are very active and are contributing to player retention.
• The current plan is to have a raid in the next expansion. This may change, though given the success of the team I seriously doubt it.

Note: I do not speak for ArenaNet, but I do speak with them, sometimes in-game. I am not bound by an NDA, but I also don’t want to throw any devs under the bus if they talk to me. Suffice it to say that as far as I understand, ANet considers raids a resounding success both in their impact on player retention and in keeping raiders raiding, and at this point they expect the next expansion will have a raid.

If this turns out to be true and Anet continues to devote so much time to raids as they do right now(in output, not in dev time), I´ll probably finally be able to give up on GW2 despite clinging to it for the last year or so and its change of direction. If there were only a viable alternative right now that comes with a boxed set, maybe Star Citizen will do the trick for me when it comes out.

You won’t maybe. But other will. Again, stop thinking about your personnal situation as the whole GW2 population…

Even Wooden Potatoes is questioning whether he’d buy a second expansion right now. The entire community IS very wary of paying more money to ANet when they seem to have delivered so little to so few for the last expansion. If all they have to promise is “you’ll get more with the next expansion,” I think a ton of the people left holding on will jump ship. The next paid expansion shouldn’t even be on their radar of priorities at this point, because if it is, then it won’t be selling.

People are happy, you the individual are not.

I guarantee you, if it were just me, as you seem to insist, then issue over, I would need nothing more to make me happy about this, but you personally know for a fact that it is not just me, as plenty of others have expressed similar issues in this and other threads. How many? Hard to say, but I see good reason to believe it’s a significantly large number. Again, if I’m wrong on that, then there’s no point you trying to “prove” me wrong, that won’t accomplish anything because you can’t actually do that. If I’m wrong then ANet knows that and they won’t do anything to address the concerns I’ve raised. But if I’m right then they are likely to do something, and the discussion here is not about WHETHER they should do something, since that decision is entirely outside our influence. The discssion here is that IF they decided to do something, with the goal of making players happy who are not happy with the current situation, then what should they do to best make the most players happy with the minimal interruption in other elements of the game. How can the do the most net good possible?

You wont be pleased until a “easy mode” comes out, but as seen by your SAB post about dailies, you should never expect to be happy if you as a player think dailies are getting hard.

Did you actually read the thread? I wasn’t saying they were ever too hard for me, and I haven’t yet missed a daily set, I was just noting that they had been, to that point, getting harder and harder each day, relying on more World 2 objectives relative to World 1, and relying on more complex objectives in World 1, making it more and more difficult to get at least three of them. Which was true. I was concerned at the time that they might keep getting harder until relatively low skill players would be unable to accomplish three in any given day.

And then it turned out a few days later it went back into a cycle, but for example yesterdays objectives were some of the more complex possible, requiring you to really dive into World 2 or some of the more difficult World 1 objectives if you wanted to clear the daily meta. I mean, you might think all SAB is easy, and that’s fine, but you should at least understand the point I was making there.

No gameplay designer on earth is going to make a raid that easier than dailies.

When did I ever say anything of the sort?

Astralporing.1957:

That i have to actually agree on. Ohoni’s desires are way too specific to be supported by the broader community. Or at least supported for the same reason.

The main reason why i support easy mode raids, for example, is not because i want them, but because i want
1. new content that a casual could play, on the level of dungeons or fractals.
2. a way to get legendary armor.
And it just happens that Ohoni’s idea seems to supply both of those at the least resource/effort expenditure on Anet’s part.

I really appreciate the honesty here and I do think that you’re being very pessimistic. If they do plan to never introduce new sets of legendary armor, I can empathize with wanting to have this legendary armor out in the world.

Astralporing.1957:

Yeah, right. I, on the other hand would rather not wait long enough to see the people leave before it arrives. Especially if the person leaving would be me.

The game’s explicitly designed to be able to be dropped out of and returned to with minimal discomfort. If you drop out of the game, play another one for a while, and come back when another mode gets legendary armor, you’re not really punished.

Ohoni.6057:

and yet it moves.

you talkin smack about the big j-man?

Ohoni.6057:

Exactly. I’ve always been up front that personal interest in the gear is definitely ONE of the pillars of this argument for me, never denied it, and yet people keep pointing it out as some great “aha!” But I’ve also been clear from the start that it is just one of the pillars to me, and that the other factors are also of significant importance, and that just solving the “Legendary armor for Ohoni” issue would not resolve the entire raiding situation in my eyes.

It just kinda means that you completely don’t understand the gearing systems in GW2 or the reward systems in GW2 so why would anyone assume you understand anything at all.

Ohoni.6057:

Because I’m not there yet.

Get there. Easy modes ain’t comin’. Get angery

Ohoni.6057:

I do all of those things, but listening to you guys does not mean that I have to agree that what works for you would work for the good of the game overall.

haha no you don’t listen

Ohoni.6057:

I did at the time, and like today they were relatively few in number. GW2 just wasn’t the game for them.

[citation needed]

Ohoni.6057:

You were the one that was claiming that the majority in this thread somehow translated to any majority worth caring about. All I was pointing out was why that was nonsense.

and you’re the one claiming you have a majority and you have no evidence to suggest it???
at least i have a forum majority, you have no majority? this is what i mean by you don’t listen ohoni, rub them sticks together up in your noggin, start a fire
some evidence is better than no evidence

Ohoni.6057:

You cannot make decisions based on how many people on the forums are for or against a thing, it is not a voting mechanism, it is a place for discussion.

then why do you keep making dumb bets and saying that the majority of the players would benefit from your ideas when you have nothing to back it up

Ohoni.6057:

And I believe that, loosely speaking, what makes me happy in this regard would make more additional players happy than sad, and by a larger amount. Would some people be less happy? Sure, that’s true of any change, it was certainly true of them adding Raids in their current state, but again, I believe that more people would be happy to see easy mode raids than would be upset by it, and I think that it would involve less work than anything that could produce similar happiness, so the cost/benefit of it would be sound. You have not proposed any alternative that would offer an equivalent or superior cost/benefit outcome.

i’ve proposed or agreed with three, you monkey
they only wouldn’t be better solutions in the elaborate mind prison you’ve constructed

Ohoni.6057:

I think that even if you’re right for the time being, you’d be wrong in the long term.

…considering my entire position is a long term strategy which sacrifices the immediate, i am very curious how you make this conclusion

Ohoni.6057:

The achievement paths. They involved WAY too much gold-fungible material for a process that also involved so much questing. Most players just dabbled into it and then decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.

maybe most players didn’t get beyond dabbling in it because it was expensive and they didn’t have that kind of asset

like, if the average player has, say, 1000 gold/ascended crafting mats, they’re only going to be able to push through one/two legendary weapons before they run out of materials, underwater weapons notwithstanding

of course players have only dabbled in it so far, they’ve not had the materials to push further

and frankly it’s not the money that’s the biggest blocker in p2, it’s the crests, geodes and obby shards

Ohoni.6057:

So you would assume otherwise?

no, you’ve got your negatives mixed up, you’re not that good at wordplay man

i am not assuming that they would need a timegate, that just means ‘nothing’, wipe your brain of expectations.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, we’ve already established that I tried raids, and raids in their current form are not the sort of content I could ever enjoy. Hence this entire topic.

no, have you tried turning it off and on again

Ohoni.6057:

Entirely the point.

nop

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but we’re talking about raids here.

look lol you wanted content that fit the criteria of ‘scrub puggable’
open world content is, broadly, scrub puggable

Ohoni.6057:

Ran? Perhaps. Enjoyed though? That’s far more debatable.

man who admits he is not the target audience of dungeons thinks he understands what would make dungeons enjoyable

Ohoni.6057:

And yet you do, because that “takes longer” has to come out of somewhere, which means that other parts of the game will be “worse” for this one part “taking longer.”

and now we see the most basic of fallacious arguments, the ‘asspull’. it’s a bold move. let’s see if it pays off

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but again, only tiny amount.

thankyou for conceding

Ohoni.6057:

I said nothing about power creep. Content doesn’t become irrelevant due to powercreep

no, content becomes irrelevant due to powercreep. that’s like, half the issue with dungeons. they were tuned around greens/yellows and everyone running them was in full exotic, or full ascended.

Ohoni.6057:

I know what it is in the abstract, but you just keep saying the words without explaining how you think they would interact with a dungeon overhaul in any way.

okay imagine this line is actually curvy

and it represents difficulty okay

you put the dungeons on it

i’ve already said i’m not gonna hold your hand because you don’t listen

Ohoni.6057:

Agreed, they would have the same difficulty with easy mode, I never suggested otherwise. The point I was making though, is that while they would have to coordinate their schedules to play with each other, they would still each be able to find “a team” to run the content with, because there are relatively few possible variations. With dungeons on a weekly lockout, by the end of the week there would be so many possible variations of who’s already done what that it would become difficult to even find a pug of five people who hadn’t already done the specific path you wanted to run.

man who has no raid experience and admits he is not the target audience of either raids or dungeons thinks he knows how raid and dungeon teams work

psst: this isn’t how they work

Ohoni.6057:

That’s actually a poor way to think about it, and a bit of an outdated holdover from previous MMO generations.

no it’s like
business 101
if you’re in a saturated market and your customers complain but they still come to your shop, their complaints aren’t serious enough to take their business elsewhere
and the MMO market is very, very saturated
i’m legit curious how many mmos you’re playing atm now

Ohoni.6057:

It also had a bunch of voice acting, apparently, and we don’t know how much else. My point though is that ANet does an awful lot of behind the scenes stuff without ever telling us, so you saying “they pulled people off Legendaries but not off raids” is meaningless, we don’t know what the raid team is currently up to, we don’t know what other teams are currently up to. They could be halfway through the easy mode raid testing right now for all we know.

which doesn’t have any bearing on anything
for all we know they could be sipping martinis on the bluffs of scotland
it doesn’t affect whether scrubcore mode raids are bad or less bad

Torolan.5816:

If this turns out to be true and Anet continues to devote so much time to raids as they do right now(in output, not in dev time)

The only reason we’re seeing ‘so much’ of the raids (we aren’t, 6 bosses in 5 months is pretty average) is because they were one of the only teams which was continuing to develop content after the launch of the expansion. The entire issue is the development pipeline around HoT was a complete full tilt from LS content to expansion content; that tilt caused the first 8 month content drought, and the tilt back from expansion content to LS content has caused the last 8 months. Blaming the raid dev team like this is a lazy scapegoat.

The game’s explicitly designed to be able to be dropped out of and returned to with minimal discomfort. If you drop out of the game, play another one for a while, and come back when another mode gets legendary armor, you’re not really punished.

True, but realistically, most people never come back. Some do, I’m sure you have a pocket full of anecdotal people who left and MMO and came back, but historically more who leave don’t come back. GW2 is more supportive of returning than most games, sure, but ANet still doesn’t want players to leave for months or years at a time if they can do something to stop it. And if players do end up leaving over Legendary armor, then they won’t be lured back with the promise of a complicated process that would take months or a year to play out to get what raiders would already have by that point. If they wanted to lure players back it would have to be a fairly quick and simple process, and that would subvert any attempt at making it at all “something to work towards.” You can have one or the other, not both.

It just kinda means that you completely don’t understand the gearing systems in GW2 or the reward systems in GW2 so why would anyone assume you understand anything at all.

That’s what I’ve been saying to you this entire thread, and why I’ve been trying to educate you on how it does work very differently than other MMOs you might be used to.

haha no you don’t listen

Again, I listen to every word, but listening doesn’t mean agreeing. I listen to you, but you’re still wrong.

[citation needed]

Citation wanted, citation not owed.

at least i have a forum majority, you have no majority?

That’s not how statistics work. You can’t claim to have a majority of a small subset as a basis to claim that you have any relevance to a larger set, unless the subset is representative of the whole, which this thread is not. You could have a hundred people backing your side in this thread and I could have none, and it would still not mean anything whatsoever in the grander scheme of things, because for all we know those are the only hundred people out of the hundreds of thousands playing the game that agree with you. You should know that already, but at least you do now. Go forth and sin against math no more.

i’ve proposed or agreed with three, you monkey
they only wouldn’t be better solutions in the elaborate mind prison you’ve constructed

You’ve proposed alternatives that would be worse. They would either have a worse overall outcome, or would take more time and effort to implement than they would be worth, or both.

maybe most players didn’t get beyond dabbling in it because it was expensive and they didn’t have that kind of asset

like, if the average player has, say, 1000 gold/ascended crafting mats, they’re only going to be able to push through one/two legendary weapons before they run out of materials, underwater weapons notwithstanding

of course players have only dabbled in it so far, they’ve not had the materials to push further

and frankly it’s not the money that’s the biggest blocker in p2, it’s the crests, geodes and obby shards

Exactly. Playes looked at the stage one and though “oh, that looks fun, I’ll pursue bits of that as I play!” And then they looked up on wikis and reddit what the final costs involved would be and said “I would never want to spend that much on this, no point bothering with the other stuff.”

If you could just DO the parts of Legendary Crafting that involve DOING, and the gold costs involved were completely negligible, you’d have a lot more players happily pursuing various legendaries, but they ruined it.

look lol you wanted content that fit the criteria of ‘scrub puggable’
open world content is, broadly, scrub puggable

Yes, but I never said “I want whatever content you’ve got that is scrub puggable,” that is the role you guys keep insisting I accept. I’ve been aware from the start what content is available, I’ve been playing this game since beta. When I say “I want scrub puggable raids,” the last word in that is not redundant, it’s the object of the sentence. I want scrub puggable RAIDS, as in “not open world, not dungeons, not fractals, not whatever not raids you want to suggest I be doing instead.” If you want to help me achieve that, then climb on board the train. If you don’t, that’s fine too, but stop suggesting alternative activities while knowing full well that alternative activities are not what is being requested in this thread.

no, content becomes irrelevant due to powercreep. that’s like, half the issue with dungeons. they were tuned around greens/yellows and everyone running them was in full exotic, or full ascended.

Lol, no. That’s a raider issue, “it’s not challenging enough for me!” No, GW2 players do not care about that even a little. GW2 players aren’t looking for that. If they went through and tuned up all the dungeons to be balanced against Exotic or Ascended armor, to your satisfaction, then while some people would play it more, more people would play it less, and all told there would be far fewer people participating than we have today.

okay imagine this line is actually curvy

and it represents difficulty okay

you put the dungeons on it

i’ve already said i’m not gonna hold your hand because you don’t listen

So you got nothing. Ok. You had my curiosity on that one, but now you have my contempt.

man who has no raid experience and admits he is not the target audience of either raids or dungeons thinks he knows how raid and dungeon teams work

psst: this isn’t how they work

Again, if a raid team is so interested in sticking together that it becomes an issue when they can’t stick together later in the week, then that team would coordinate their schedules so that they could stick together. They’d probably be in all the same raid/dungeon runs anyways. If a player is not involved in such a team, however, and is just pugging, then his issue is being able to find random people who are willing to do the same content he wants to do, and that would be easier for raids with a weekly lockout, since there are less potential things to be locked out, than for dungeons with a weekly lockout, since there are more combinations of possible content that could have been locked out earlier in the week.

if you’re in a saturated market and your customers complain but they still come to your shop, their complaints aren’t serious enough to take their business elsewhere

Yeah, but again, “but they still come to your shop” is meaningless if they don’t have to actually buy anything. That’s the difference. If it’s a sub-based game, “so long as they keep playing” is a real thing, you do that, you’re fine. With a gem store game, “so long as they keep playing” is next to meaningless. They provide some small benefit, but not any direct profits. what actually matters is “so long as they keep feeling incentive to PAY.”

Think of it like you’re running a coffee shop that offers free wifi. even if you can keep every table packed all day, that’s still a failing business unless those people are also buying food. If you can’t engender enough positive engagement to get them to want to buy your actual products, then it doesn’t matter whether they’re in the store or out of it.

i’m legit curious how many mmos you’re playing atm now

This one, Marvel Heroes, and Marvel Future Fight, and Kingdom Hearts Unchained X on the phone. The last MMO before this was Wildstar beta and the first month of ESO, before that was a few months of SWTOR. And that’s not counting single player games. I mean, there are plenty of other ways I could be spending my time, I spend time in GW2 because I’ve really enjoyed it and would like to continue enjoying it. I’m just not enjoying it as much as I once did, or could.

which doesn’t have any bearing on anything
for all we know they could be sipping martinis on the bluffs of scotland
it doesn’t affect whether scrubcore mode raids are bad or less bad

True, but you were the one raising announced developmental shifts as evidence that “raiding is totally doing great!,” when in fact all it is is a lack of evidence that it’s not, and “lack of evidence” is the status quo when it comes to what ANet has in development so that shouldn’t be surprising.

Ohoni.6057:

True, but realistically, most people never come back. Some do, I’m sure you have a pocket full of anecdotal people who left and MMO and came back

Speaking of anecdotes, I’m sure you have a bunch of anecdotal people who left and never came back.

But, y’know. It’s been proven that MMOs can pull back players to hit high participation levels after the launch of the expansion purely on the back of advertising. I’ve already told you where this happened.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s what I’ve been saying to you this entire thread, and why I’ve been trying to educate you on how it does work very differently than other MMOs you might be used to.

I know perfectly well how itemization works in GW2, man who does not have any experience with raids.

Stat cap is easy to get. This is what matters. This is what creates the level playing field.
Skins are rewards for doing specific content.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, I listen to every word, but listening doesn’t mean agreeing. I listen to you, but you’re still wrong.

yes, repeat the mantras. repeat them i say! if you were wrong, you wouldn’t keep saying you’re right, would you?!

Ohoni.6057:

Citation wanted, citation not owed.

lol no, if you want to prove something, you have to
y’know
prove it

Ohoni.6057:

That’s not how statistics work. You can’t claim to have a majority of a small subset as a basis to claim that you have any relevance to a larger set, unless the subset is representative of the whole, which this thread is not. You could have a hundred people backing your side in this thread and I could have none, and it would still not mean anything whatsoever in the grander scheme of things, because for all we know those are the only hundred people out of the hundreds of thousands playing the game that agree with you. You should know that already, but at least you do now. Go forth and sin against math no more.

it’s pretty basic math
i have one thing that is of dubious value
you have nothing
it doesn’t matter if my evidence is 1% truthful
you still have nothing

Ohoni.6057:

You’ve proposed alternatives that would be worse. They would either have a worse overall outcome, or would take more time and effort to implement than they would be worth, or both.

i’m bored
you can keep saying its better that doesnt make it better

Ohoni.6057:

Exactly. Playes looked at the stage one and though “oh, that looks fun, I’ll pursue bits of that as I play!” And then they looked up on wikis and reddit what the final costs involved would be and said “I would never want to spend that much on this, no point bothering with the other stuff.”

or maybe they just DO IT

JUST DO IT
DONT LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS

YOURE GONNA WORK HARD AT IT AND YOURE GONNA WIN COS YOURE NOT GONNA GIVE UP

but nah srs this is nothing beyond anecdotal evidence. i could just as easily say that they do p1 and then chill on p2 like i do

Ohoni.6057:

If you could just DO the parts of Legendary Crafting that involve DOING, and the gold costs involved were completely negligible, you’d have a lot more players happily pursuing various legendaries, but they ruined it.

you CAN just DO half the parts THAT NEED DOING
JUST DO IT

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but I never said “I want whatever content you’ve got that is scrub puggable,” that is the role you guys keep insisting I accept. I’ve been aware from the start what content is available, I’ve been playing this game since beta. When I say “I want scrub puggable raids,” the last word in that is not redundant, it’s the object of the sentence. I want scrub puggable RAIDS, as in “not open world, not dungeons, not fractals, not whatever not raids you want to suggest I be doing instead.” If you want to help me achieve that, then climb on board the train. If you don’t, that’s fine too, but stop suggesting alternative activities while knowing full well that alternative activities are not what is being requested in this thread.

you don’t want scrub puggable raids though
you want scrub puggable this raids
if you wanted scrub puggable raids i’ve already said i’d be happy with that, just not these raids

Ohoni.6057:

Lol, no. That’s a raider issue, “it’s not challenging enough for me!” No, GW2 players do not care about that even a little. GW2 players aren’t looking for that.

More othering, Ohoni? More deciding that people who want a certain thing aren’t GW2 players? I’m completely serious, it’s incredibly insulting that you constantly do this. Calling people fools, trolls, telling people that their opinions don’t matter, telling people that they aren’t real GW2 players (twice on this page even!).

I know I post in a more jocular manner than you but that you are constantly going out of your way to declare that people who want things that you don’t want are “NOT REAL GW2 PLAYERS” is just disgusting.

Ohoni.6057:

So you got nothing. Ok. You had my curiosity on that one, but now you have my contempt.

Now I have your contempt. You’ve already called me a troll, a fool, someone who doesn’t actually play GW2- go on.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, if a raid team is so interested in sticking together that it becomes an issue when they can’t stick together later in the week, then that team would coordinate their schedules so that they could stick together.

They do. They organize their runs to happen at the start of the lockout so that people don’t get bored and go pug.

Ohoni.6057:

They’d probably be in all the same raid/dungeon runs anyways. If a player is not involved in such a team, however, and is just pugging, then his issue is being able to find random people who are willing to do the same content he wants to do, and that would be easier for raids with a weekly lockout, since there are less potential things to be locked out, than for dungeons with a weekly lockout, since there are more combinations of possible content that could have been locked out earlier in the week.

Simply, no. You haven’t thought this through and you don’t understand the points being made.

You are taking an abundance of content and trying to turn it into a scarcity of content by talking about ‘combinations of possible locked content’ when that doesn’t make any sense. The ‘combinations of locked content’ is based around the group size, not the dungeons. There are 5 combinations of locked content in a dungeon group. There are 10 combinations of locked content in a raid group.

There’s more wrong here but I cbf.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, but again, “but they still come to your shop” is meaningless if they don’t have to actually buy anything. That’s the difference. If it’s a sub-based game, “so long as they keep playing” is a real thing, you do that, you’re fine. With a gem store game, “so long as they keep playing” is next to meaningless. They provide some small benefit, but not any direct profits. what actually matters is “so long as they keep feeling incentive to PAY.”

Think of it like you’re running a coffee shop that offers free wifi. even if you can keep every table packed all day, that’s still a failing business unless those people are also buying food. If you can’t engender enough positive engagement to get them to want to buy your actual products, then it doesn’t matter whether they’re in the store or out of it.

The problems with getting customers to buy HOT is not based around the raids. Raids are probably a reason why people buy HOT.

People don’t want to buy HOT because it’s producing negative reviews because of other places. Legendary weapon development being dropped, not many maps.

Ohoni.6057:

This one, Marvel Heroes, and Marvel Future Fight, and Kingdom Hearts Unchained X on the phone. The last MMO before this was Wildstar beta and the first month of ESO, before that was a few months of SWTOR.

Go play SWTOR. They have raids you’d like.
Not even kidding, did EV the other day in a pug.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m just not enjoying it as much as I once did, or could.

I want you to do some soulsearching here.

Is it because the expansion launched with little content?
Or is it because other people are getting things that you want for yourself?

If it’s the first, then, well, you know the dance.
If it’s the second… Well, then, you know the dance. Better pull your pants up and get that stuff.

Ohoni.6057:

True, but you were the one raising announced developmental shifts as evidence that “raiding is totally doing great!,” when in fact all it is is a lack of evidence that it’s not, and “lack of evidence” is the status quo when it comes to what ANet has in development so that shouldn’t be surprising.

nah dusk just sed it’s doin gr8, all gud

Speaking of anecdotes, I’m sure you have a bunch of anecdotal people who left and never came back.

Yes, but again we’re talking about statistics, and statistically, more people leave and never come back, which overrides any anecdotal evidence we may have, because that’s how evidence works. There are just too many shinies in the world, and if you break the cycle of habit, getting back into the habit becomes less likely than maintaining it. It’s possible to bring some of them back, some of the time, but it’s far cheaper to just keep them there the entire time. Besides, even if they do return, that’s an entire period in which they are not buying gems.

I know perfectly well how itemization works in GW2, man who does not have any experience with raids.

You know, I would take you more seriously if you didn’t constantly ignore facts already in evidence.

Stat cap is easy to get. This is what matters. This is what creates the level playing field.
Skins are rewards for doing specific content.

Stat cap was easy to get, then they added Ascended gear and new stats, and now stat cap is rather complicated to get. It’s certainly easy by progression raiding standards, you don’t have to spend months at one raid, then months at another, and repeat several times to hit the cap, but it’s certainly non-trivial.

it’s pretty basic math
i have one thing that is of dubious value
you have nothing
it doesn’t matter if my evidence is 1% truthful
you still have nothing

Again, not how statistics works. Stop trying to use statistics, statistics has done nothing to deserve that sort of abuse.

you don’t want scrub puggable raids though

No, I do.

you want scrub puggable this raids
if you wanted scrub puggable raids i’ve already said i’d be happy with that, just not these raids

And I do want scrub puggable this raid, because this is the raid that’s out there, and if you’re going to make a scrub puggable raid, there’s no reason whatsoever to not use the existing assets to do it.

I know I post in a more jocular manner than you but that you are constantly going out of your way to declare that people who want things that you don’t want are “NOT REAL GW2 PLAYERS” is just disgusting.

I don’t try to belittle you or what you want from the game, but I am pointing out that what you want is the minority position of GW2 players. If what you want from the game was the majority position then the game never would have lasted the three years between launch and HoT, because it never had any of those things. If you want to insist that what you want is what most GW2 players would want, and you were right, then GW2 would have gone the way of Wildstar, ergo, you are not right.

Now I have your contempt. You’ve already called me a troll, a fool, someone who doesn’t actually play GW2- go on.

If you don’t want it, don’t earn it.

The problems with getting customers to buy HOT is not based around the raids. Raids are probably a reason why people buy HOT.

Not talking about the expansion, I’m talking about buying things in the gem store. If people are playing, but are not engaged enough to buy gem store items, then they aren’t benefiting ANet’s bottom line. But let’s do talk about expansions for a sec, because while a player might be playing now, if he really feels like HoT was a waste of his money, because it hasn’t provided the sort of content he was expecting, then yeah. he’ll be much more wary about purchasing the next expansion that comes along. I’m sure some people did buy HoT because of raiding and raid-geared content, but plenty of other people bought HoT because they wanted to continue their vanilla GW2 experience into the next generation of the game, and found that the content provided was distinctly NOT what they enjoyed about GW2.

Go play SWTOR. They have raids you’d like.
Not even kidding, did EV the other day in a pug.

Again, stop suggesting alternatives. It is not helping. Whenever you feel the urge to offer an alternative, don’t do that.

Is it because the expansion launched with little content?
Or is it because other people are getting things that you want for yourself?

Both, and I’ve given the solutions to both of those that would resolve them for me. You’ve offered suggestions of how you might handle those situations, but the methods that would work for you would not work for me, so they are useless to me. Understand that and move forward, or refuse to understand it and continue in circles, that’s all the help I can offer you.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but again we’re talking about statistics, and statistically, more people leave and never come back

Prove it. Post the statistics that indicate that more people leave and never come back.

Ohoni.6057:

You know, I would take you more seriously if you didn’t constantly ignore facts already in evidence.

Something something… Rubber. Glue. Pots and kettles remarking about one another’s dark shade. Glass houses improperly penetrated by stones.

Ohoni.6057:

Stat cap was easy to get, then they added Ascended gear and new stats, and now stat cap is rather complicated to get.

No, it’s not really very complicated to get. It’s both easy and simple to get. You push your crafting up to 500, you get the insignias and patterns you want, you craft the gear. “Buy materials and craft things” is not complex.

If you were to assert that it was expensive then you might be onto something, as it does cost a bit of money. But if expense is your issue, then you’re kinda looking at the mild incline of ascended armor and then the mt kilimanjaro of what legendary armor will most likely expect and saying “go big or go home”.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, not how statistics works. Stop trying to use statistics, statistics has done nothing to deserve that sort of abuse.

sorry i have evidence and you don’t

Ohoni.6057:

No, I do.

then why aren’t you amenable to completely separate raids that fill that role

Ohoni.6057:

And I do want scrub puggable this raid, because this is the raid that’s out there, and if you’re going to make a scrub puggable raid, there’s no reason whatsoever to not use the existing assets to do it.

posted plenty of them feel free to review

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t try to belittle you

THEN STOP SAYING THAT PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE WITH YOU ARE NOT REAL PLAYERS OF THE GAME

Ohoni.6057:

If you want to insist that what you want is what most GW2 players would want, and you were right, then GW2 would have gone the way of Wildstar, ergo, you are not right.

already told you why wildstar died m8, and it’s not because of raids

Ohoni.6057:

If you don’t want it, don’t earn it.

Go ahead, show me some contempt. I can at least respect STIHL’s contempt, he goes straight for the throat.

Ohoni.6057:

Not talking about the expansion, I’m talking about buying things in the gem store.If people are playing, but are not engaged enough to buy gem store items, then they aren’t benefiting ANet’s bottom line. But let’s do talk about expansions for a sec, because while a player might be playing now, if he really feels like HoT was a waste of his money, because it hasn’t provided the sort of content he was expecting, then yeah. he’ll be much more wary about purchasing the next expansion that comes along. I’m sure some people did buy HoT because of raiding and raid-geared content, but plenty of other people bought HoT because they wanted to continue their vanilla GW2 experience into the next generation of the game, and found that the content provided was distinctly NOT what they enjoyed about GW2.

Yeah there was a lot of whinging, some fair, about the content this expac. But without internal data on what their sales are, both on HOT and the gemstore, you’re making an kitten out of you and me when you make these claims.

Like, if you had empirical evidence that what you were saying was true- that gemstore sales are down and HOT sales aren’t enough to bridge the difference- sure. If you can create a definitive link between the half a dozen people dedicated to building these raids- less than 5% of their live development team- and that revenue gap, sure. But that doesn’t translate into the incredibly specific thing that you want.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, stop suggesting alternatives. It is not helping. Whenever you feel the urge to offer an alternative, don’t do that.

I would hardly be so rude as to expect you to stop playing GW2 and instead play another game. I would like for you to culturally enrich yourself and experience the content you enjoy, and think about how it would adapt into GW2 and what form would be best for it to take in GW2.

I’m completely serious. I really don’t see how you would have any perception of the qualifications you’ve made or the ramifications of the things you suggest unless you’ve actually participated in that style of content.

Ohoni.6057:

Both, and I’ve given the solutions to both of those that would resolve them for me. You’ve offered suggestions of how you might handle those situations, but the methods that would work for you would not work for me, so they are useless to me. Understand that and move forward, or refuse to understand it and continue in circles, that’s all the help I can offer you.

No, I understand completely. You’re in a box where you think your solution is the best and you don’t think other solutions have any merit. You automatically discard anything as inferior because you aren’t thinking in a problem oriented way. You’ve got a solution that’s trying to find a problem. And you’re doing it not because you have respect for the content or you think your solution is good; you’re doing it out of base jealousy. You know you are, otherwise you wouldn’t keep throwing out these fallacious arguments, ad hominems, and ignoring the people you’re talking to, and you’re hoping people don’t catch onto you, and you’re plainly not very good at it because nobody’s falling for it.

Sarrs.4831:

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but again we’re talking about statistics, and statistically, more people leave and never come back

Prove it. Post the statistics that indicate that more people leave and never come back.

…seriously.

The game has less than a million active players now (half of whose are f2p). Out of 4-5 millions of sold b2p accounts in NA/EU and some number of f2p ones.

Yes, most players leave to never return. I’m pretty sure you already know that, so wonder why are you even arguing it.

Roooouuuuundddd 2408, with the same points being made over and over again.

Fight!!

Astralporing.1957:

…seriously.

The game has less than a million active players now (half of whose are f2p). Out of 4-5 millions of sold b2p accounts in NA/EU and some number of f2p ones.

Yes, most players leave to never return. I’m pretty sure you already know that, so wonder why are you even arguing it.

You’re right, I was thinking of concurrent users.

Astralporing.1957:

Sarrs.4831:

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but again we’re talking about statistics, and statistically, more people leave and never come back

Prove it. Post the statistics that indicate that more people leave and never come back.

…seriously.

The game has less than a million active players now (half of whose are f2p). Out of 4-5 millions of sold b2p accounts in NA/EU and some number of f2p ones.

Yes, most players leave to never return. I’m pretty sure you already know that, so wonder why are you even arguing it.

And where did you get those numbers? Post a source or they are just fantasy numbers to prove your point…

Miellyn.6847:

And where did you get those numbers? Post a source or they are just fantasy numbers to prove your point…

I am curious, but they’re not strictly relevant. The broad trend is believable that there are more people who own the game than who are currently playing the game. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the conversation either way, though.

Miellyn.6847:

And where did you get those numbers? Post a source or they are just fantasy numbers to prove your point…

The number of HoT boxes sold can be calculated from NCsoft’s quarterly income info. From what i remember people estimated somewhere around 300-400k boxes sold (depending on how you count). From the press releases after HoT launch (somewhere in november, and later) we do know that most of the active players have bought HoT, and that going f2p doubled the number of active accounts. The numbers of b2p accounts sold is from past Anet’s blogposts.

Notice, that the numbers are likely lower than that, as an “active account” from what we know is an account that has logged at least once within a month, and that many of f2p ones are second accounts of b2p players.

You’re free to dispute those numbers. I don’t really care. They may not be 100% accurate, but the case remains, that most people that have bought this game at some point are no longer playing. I don’t think anyone’s going to dispute that.

Astralporing.1957:

Miellyn.6847:

And where did you get those numbers? Post a source or they are just fantasy numbers to prove your point…

The number of HoT boxes sold can be calculated from NCsoft’s quarterly income info. From what i remember people estimated somewhere around 300-400k boxes sold (depending on how you count). From the press releases after HoT launch (somewhere in november, and later) we do know that most of the active players have bought HoT, and that going f2p doubled the number of active accounts. The numbers of b2p accounts sold is from past Anet’s blogposts.

Notice, that the numbers are likely lower than that, as an “active account” from what we know is an account that has logged at least once within a month, and that many of f2p ones are second accounts of b2p players.

You’re free to dispute those numbers. I don’t really care. They may not be 100% accurate, but the case remains, that most people that have bought this game at some point are no longer playing. I don’t think anyone’s going to dispute that.

Of course the number of active players is lower than the amount of sold boxes…

But we don’t know if most active players with a base game own HoT and we don’t know how many bought it after december, there aren’t any numbers about it yet
Also there is no indication about f2p players

Your Numbers are pure speculation without any base

And it is relevant to the discussion, it just proves again the easy mode raid group just make the numbers up to prove their points

Miellyn.6847:

And it is relevant to the discussion, it just proves again the easy mode raid group just make the numbers up to prove their points

Everyone knows that with Ohoni the points are made up and the score doesn’t matter. If you talk to him because you want to search his claims for validity you should join the world tour in Missing The Point.

There’s a reason this sort of post is on point;

Bast Bow.2958:

Roooouuuuundddd 2408, with the same points being made over and over again.

Fight!!

Prove it. Post the statistics that indicate that more people leave and never come back.

It’s from articles and interviews with MMO developers from years ago, I don’t footnote my life, do your own research and stop asking me to do it for you.

No, it’s not really very complicated to get. It’s both easy and simple to get. You push your crafting up to 500, you get the insignias and patterns you want, you craft the gear. “Buy materials and craft things” is not complex.

It’s not cheap or particularly easy. You can get full 80 exotic within minutes of hitting level 80, but full ascended meta gear takes a bit more than that. Again, I think it’s a perfectly fair basis for hard mode raid, but I also think that people would appreciate a raid mode where it isn’t necessary.

But if expense is your issue, then you’re kinda looking at the mild incline of ascended armor and then the mt kilimanjaro of what legendary armor will most likely expect and saying “go big or go home”.

Yes, but the thing is, say you invest in a full set of Ascended armor. Why? So you have the stats needed to raid. I mean, if you don’t have it already then clearly you haven’t needed to do anything else. So why raid? To get Legendary armor. And what happens once you get Legendary armor? You don’t need that Ascended armor anymore. Why not just skip the middleman? I know that’s heresy to someone used to progression gear treadmills, but it’s a perfectly reasonable statement in GW2, where we’re used to hitting level 80 in blues and greens, and then upgrading to “the only armor you’ll ever need.” Until now.

sorry i have evidence and you don’t

Again, no, what you have would never constitute “evidence” of anything, no matter how often you assert it. You know this, and yet you keep saying it anyway, which is not the behavior of someone acting in good faith.

then why aren’t you amenable to completely separate raids that fill that role

Because they would provide a different experience. If someone tells you that they want to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and you tell them that they can’t because they live in North Carolina, but they can go to a Justin Bieber concert instead, and it’s just as good because a concert is a concert, right? There is a reasonable chance that they will not see Bieber as an acceptable substitute.

An alternate raid is something different than what I’m asking for. It’s possible it would turn out even better, and that’d be nice, but I’d still want to do the easy mode raid I described as well. And in either case it would take longer to implement, meaning that not only would it be playable at a later date than what I proposed, meaning more time not playing it in between now and then, but it would also hold up other developer resources during that added time, preventing those resources from being applied to other areas of the game.

The the end result, even if it’s good within itself, would still not provide the functionality that was asked for and still desired, would arrive later than otherwise achievable, and would slow down the progress of the rest of the game. Lose-lose-lose.

I think I have plenty of perfectly good reasons to not be satisfied with your proposal, whether any of them apply to you or not.

THEN STOP SAYING THAT PEOPLE WHO DISAGREE WITH YOU ARE NOT REAL PLAYERS OF THE GAME

I never have. I’ve only pointed out that the vast majority of the game is focused on aspects that are completely contradictory to the hardcore raider mindset. It’s only a noisy fringe that keeps pushing for more challenging content, and unfortunately the devs enjoy indulging them, to the detriment of everyone else.

already told you why wildstar died m8, and it’s not because of raids

Keep telling yourself that if you think it helps.

The only data we do have about the expansion is that sales fell well short of expectations. Now the numbers on how many people enjoyed their purchase, and for what reasons, is more in the air, but what we do know for a fact is that they’re refocusing priorities away from the Legendary Weapons, which would fall into the “not casual” category, and into some more casual content, although we don’t yet know the shape of things because they don’t tell us stuff.

Like, if you had empirical evidence that what you were saying was true- that gemstore sales are down and HOT sales aren’t enough to bridge the difference- sure. If you can create a definitive link between the half a dozen people dedicated to building these raids- less than 5% of their live development team- and that revenue gap, sure. But that doesn’t translate into the incredibly specific thing that you want.

Again, it’s not about the raid team specifically. It’s also about the rest of the core content team that was designing HoT open world content to be more like raids, with more challenging enemies and more coordinated group strategies. The Chak Garrant, as originally launched, was very much like a 150 player raid encounter, requiring a lot of precision to pull off and taking longer to bring down than any raid boss so far.

But yes, the effort spent on the raids was a waste if it can’t be shared with the rest of the players. Even if it’s only six people, as those defending raids constantly bring up, the fact that they achieved content of the scale and complexity of the raids makes one wonder what more they could have done if not tasked with building raids.

I would hardly be so rude as to expect you to stop playing GW2 and instead play another game. I would like for you to culturally enrich yourself and experience the content you enjoy, and think about how it would adapt into GW2 and what form would be best for it to take in GW2.

And I would rather not reinstall it. As I said, the next time a suggestion for me comes into your mind, don’t type it out. I will not like it so unless you’re intending to get a rise out of me, you’re wasting your time.

I’m completely serious. I really don’t see how you would have any perception of the qualifications you’ve made or the ramifications of the things you suggest unless you’ve actually participated in that style of content.

I think I have plenty of knowledge to discuss what I’d like to see in GW2 without having played SWTOR raids, thank you.

You’re in a box where you think your solution is the best and you don’t think other solutions have any merit.

It’s not a box. It’s just reality, the sum total of all that is, was, or will be. Within that space, I believe that your solution is worse for the game and its players than my solution. My solution might not be the best, but it’s better than yours, at least, or any of the other ones proposed here, for various reasons that I’ve discussed at length up thread. Until such time as a better idea does come along, it remains the best on the table.

And you’re doing it not because you have respect for the content or you think your solution is good; you’re doing it out of base jealousy. You know you are, otherwise you wouldn’t keep throwing out these fallacious arguments, ad hominems, and ignoring the people you’re talking to, and you’re hoping people don’t catch onto you, and you’re plainly not very good at it because nobody’s falling for it.

I don’t think I actually need to respond to that one.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s from articles and interviews with MMO developers from years ago, I don’t footnote my life, do your own research and stop asking me to do it for you.

man makes claim
man refuses to back up claim
???
profit

Ohoni.6057:

It’s not cheap or particularly easy. You can get full 80 exotic within minutes of hitting level 80, but full ascended meta gear takes a bit more than that. Again, I think it’s a perfectly fair basis for hard mode raid, but I also think that people would appreciate a raid mode where it isn’t necessary.

No, it’s pretty easy. You can get to crafting 500 and get all materials other than Bloodstone Dust, Emp Shards and Dragonite Ore using a credit card (and by extension, doing any content you like, provided you’re generating money), and you can get those three mats using the Silverwastes chest train that you said was so trivially easy.

You didn’t say it wasn’t cheap. You said it was easy and complicated, which it isn’t.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but the thing is, say you invest in a full set of Ascended armor. Why? So you have the stats needed to raid. I mean, if you don’t have it already then clearly you haven’t needed to do anything else. So why raid? To get Legendary armor.

Maybe raid because you enjoy raids. Like, y’know, any sane person who doesn’t subject himself to raids despite hating them for legendary armor, or league pvp for wings, which you’re doing after realizing your tanty on the pvp forums wouldn’t work.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, no, what you have would never constitute “evidence” of anything, no matter how often you assert it. You know this, and yet you keep saying it anyway, which is not the behavior of someone acting in good faith.

That’s because the validity of the evidence is not relevant, so long as it is >0% true. This immediately beats the nothing that you have.

I have a pair of 2 of clubs. It’s a pretty rubbish hand, but it’s better than nothing.

Ohoni.6057:

Because they would provide a different experience. If someone tells you that they want to go to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and you tell them that they can’t because they live in North Carolina, but they can go to a Justin Bieber concert instead, and it’s just as good because a concert is a concert, right? There is a reasonable chance that they will not see Bieber as an acceptable substitute.

But your issue with the current raids is that they don’t provide the experience you want. You said it yourself, it’s too punishing, you can’t wear the gear you like, blah blah blah. You don’t want a raid. You don’t want the experience anyway- and trust me, I’ve raided multiple difficulty levels before, this changes the experience.

Ohoni.6057:

An alternate raid is something different than what I’m asking for. It’s possible it would turn out even better, and that’d be nice, but I’d still want to do the easy mode raid I described as well. And in either case it would take longer to implement, meaning that not only would it be playable at a later date than what I proposed, meaning more time not playing it in between now and then, but it would also hold up other developer resources during that added time, preventing those resources from being applied to other areas of the game.

Sing it with me
I don’t care if it takes longer
So long as it’s a better solution!

Ohoni.6057:

The the end result, even if it’s good within itself, would still not provide the functionality that was asked for and still desired, would arrive later than otherwise achievable, and would slow down the progress of the rest of the game. Lose-lose-lose.

How is producing good content a lose?
Because it doesn't get Ohoni his legendaries quickly or easily!

Ohoni.6057:

I never have.

you’ve done it several times in this thread, lol

Ohoni.6057:

Keep telling yourself that if you think it helps.

not my fault if you don’t understand how markets work, lol

Ohoni.6057:

The only data we do have about the expansion is that sales fell well short of expectations. Now the numbers on how many people enjoyed their purchase, and for what reasons, is more in the air, but what we do know for a fact is that they’re refocusing priorities away from the Legendary Weapons, which would fall into the “not casual” category, and into some more casual content, although we don’t yet know the shape of things because they don’t tell us stuff.

uh yeh i kno

Ohoni.6057:

Again, it’s not about the raid team specifically. It’s also about the rest of the core content team that was designing HoT open world content to be more like raids, with more challenging enemies and more coordinated group strategies. The Chak Garrant, as originally launched, was very much like a 150 player raid encounter, requiring a lot of precision to pull off and taking longer to bring down than any raid boss so far.

dude, hard mobs were not invented by raids
coordination was not invented by raids

Ohoni.6057:

But yes, the effort spent on the raids was a waste if it can’t be shared with the rest of the players. Even if it’s only six people, as those defending raids constantly bring up, the fact that they achieved content of the scale and complexity of the raids makes one wonder what more they could have done if not tasked with building raids.

raids have had a participation rate higher than that which they see in other mmos
raid team has a proven track record of making high quality content
raids are very active and contributing to player retention
ANet considers raiding a resounding success

do you really think that ANet’s raid team is virtuosos and the rest of their developers are just mastering glue and crayons, or do you think it’s because the form of content is appealing precisely because it is an entirely different form of content than GW2 audience is used to

hmmmm

Ohoni.6057:

And I would rather not reinstall it. As I said, the next time a suggestion for me comes into your mind, don’t type it out. I will not like it so unless you’re intending to get a rise out of me, you’re wasting your time.

Like look.

Try Path of Exile, it’s a great game. Lots of fun. Really can’t recommend it highly enough.
Or XCOM 2 that’s a great game.
Or… I don’t know. DW8?

Ohoni.6057:

I think I have plenty of knowledge to discuss what I’d like to see in GW2 without having played SWTOR raids, thank you.

i think you’ve probably spent longer arguing on the forums about it than you have spent actually raided lol

Ohoni.6057:

It’s not a box. It’s just reality

the ‘reality’ in which you… don’t try any other games’ raids and aren’t willing to put forward the effort to do these raids because “HRRNGGH ITS TOO HAAAAARD” (that’s what she said)

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t think I actually need to respond to that one.

Oh, very much so. In fact, you don’t need to respond to anything at all. You don’t need to post on these forums. You don’t even need to turn on your computer in the morning.

Similarly, you don’t need purple words and fancy pixels in the make believe fantasy world of GW2. Try working on the pink ones first. Maybe once you’re actually equipped to tackle raids you’ll give it a go and find out why other people enjoy it. C:

Sarrs, I really think you’ve moved beyond any sort of constructive discussion, and I don’t think it’s healthy for me to continue enabling you. Either start over and come at this from a place of honest, respectful, and well intentioned discourse, or do yourself a favor and take some time out.

Miellyn.6847:

Of course the number of active players is lower than the amount of sold boxes…

Good. Now, if you also agree, that it is lower than half of the existing accounts, then the original point stands. More people leave the game permanently than leave and return.

Miellyn.6847:

But we don’t know if most active players with a base game own HoT

According to Anet yes, they do.

Miellyn.6847:

and we don’t know how many bought it after december, there aren’t any numbers about it yet

Sure. I wasn’t about precise numbers however, just a general indication. Also, I’d be surprised if it increased the number of sold boxes significally. If anything, everything seems to point out to less people playing now than at HoT launch.

Miellyn.6847:

Also there is no indication about f2p players

We have a statement from anet, from around december, that f2p accounts are around half of the all active accounts.

Miellyn.6847:

Your Numbers are pure speculation without any base

I’m basing it on informations from Anet. Unless you claim that those informations are themselves baseless?

Miellyn.6847:

And it is relevant to the discussion, it just proves again the easy mode raid group just make the numbers up to prove their points

Yeah, right. If it proves anything is that some people will argue even against things that are obviously true.

Ohoni.6057:

Sarrs, I really think you’ve moved beyond any sort of constructive discussion, and I don’t think it’s healthy for me to continue enabling you. Either start over and come at this from a place of honest, respectful, and well intentioned discourse, or do yourself a favor and take some time out.

Here’s something that I honestly, respectfully think will help you, with all good intentions:
Go and see what the systems you advocate result in.

I am completely serious, it’s impossible for you to have any clue what you are advocating unless you do that. “GW2 is a different game, it doesn’t work like that!” sure but any reference point is better than no reference point.

You have, by your own words, stated that you aren’t the target of this content or of dungeon content in general. You’ve said that you have barely a dozen hours of experience to your name and you haven’t had any success in the game mode in any game.

Despite this, you are confident enough to believe that your incredibly specific suggestions are the absolute best solution to the poorly defined problems that you’ve put forward- confident enough that you’re willing to go against the direct wishes of a community manager by speculating on the resource expenditures involved. How you can pretend to understand what the word ‘respect’ means when you don’t respect the moderator’s wishes is beyond me.

You’ve said before that you ‘battle’ raiders in other forums. If you’re calling for honest, respectful, well-intentioned discussions, maybe try not approaching these discussions as though they’re battles. I have taken things in from you, from Astral, from STIHL, you have some good points, but not once have I seen you actually consider the opinions of anyone else in this thread or in the other threads you’ve spawned.

You have, by your own words, stated that you aren’t the target of this content or of dungeon content in general. You’ve said that you have barely a dozen hours of experience to your name and you haven’t had any success in the game mode in any game.

If you’d been listening, you would know that I had successfully completed Raids in DCUO, for whatever that might be worth, but the thing is, raids in other MMOs have never interested me, in the same way that GW2’s raids will never interest me in their current form, because content in which it is considered “part of the process” to fail many many times before eventually clawing your way to victory is just never something I will ever enjoy, under any circumstances. I understand that some people do enjoy that. and that’s great, for them, but it does not extend to everyone, does not extend to me, certainly.

So however well-meaning you might think your suggestion that I experience raids in whatever other game may be, it would involve a great deal of time and effort for me to even get “raid ready” in one of those games, only to experience content that I know from prior experience I would not particularly enjoy, at best, so this would be a whole lot of hassle for no benefit whatsoever. It is not a scenario that would in any way make my life better, or anyone’s life better, except for those that would enjoy feeding off of my suffering.

The experience I’m asking for is one which deliberately circumvents the many aspects of the existing raid that will never gel with what I enjoy about gaming in general and GW2 specifically, and I understand those differences well. I fully understand all sides of what I’m asking for, even if what I’m asking for is not what you would want.

Despite this, you are confident enough to believe that your incredibly specific suggestions are the absolute best solution to the poorly defined problems that you’ve put forward

Again, if you’d been paying attention, you would note that I conceded that there might exist better solutions, just that none had been forwarded so far.

You’ve said before that you ‘battle’ raiders in other forums. If you’re calling for honest, respectful, well-intentioned discussions, maybe try not approaching these discussions as though they’re battles. I have taken things in from you, from Astral, from STIHL, you have some good points, but not once have I seen you actually consider the opinions of anyone else in this thread or in the other threads you’ve spawned.

You’re no closer to my position than when you went into this, why would you expect me to be any closer to yours? I do actually consider EVERY point raised in these threads. That I consider and then disagree with the point does not mean that I’ve not given it fair consideration, it just means that I’ve considered it and found it lacking. I’ve considered every idea you’ve put forth, and some do have merit to them, but the downsides always far outweigh the positives. Again, you’re free to continue to disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I’m compelled to agree with you.

Ohoni.6057:

The experience I’m asking for is one which deliberately circumvents the many aspects of the existing raid that will never gel with what I enjoy about gaming in general and GW2 specifically, and I understand those differences well. I fully understand all sides of what I’m asking for, even if what I’m asking for is not what you would want.

But you can understand the problem in asking for an alternate mode raid because you don’t like raids, right? You’re asking for a square circle. You say “I don’t enjoy needing to get gear, I don’t enjoy the difficulty or challenge level” but those are 90% of what build the raid.

And there are square circles in the game, even!… They’re the open world raids and encounters! And dungeons! And fractals!

Ohoni.6057:

Again, if you’d been paying attention, you would note that I conceded that there might exist better solutions, just that none had been forwarded so far.

And you don’t seem to have actually responded to why these are bad alternatives with anything but “but it takes longer!”

And when I was specifically giving you advice on how to construct an easy mode, minor changes that actually create a meaningful easy mode, you responded with “nonono that’s no good”. I could give you a shirt that gives you the exact experience you want, but you’d complain about the shirt. And again, I give you this advice because I know how these systems play out, in the circumstances in which they have worked.

Ohoni.6057:

You’re no closer to my position than when you went into this, why would you expect me to be any closer to yours?

Because I am closer to your position.

I would be perfectly okay with an easy raid.
I would be perfectly okay with an alternative solo mode that lets you experience the story.
I would love for ANet to tune up dungeons and fractals to provide fixed group experiences that cater to a lower level of difficulty than the current raids. Granted, this was already my position, but y’know I’m more amenable than you think if you were to take the points I’m stuck on to heart.

These address the problems that you’ve put forward; that there’s no ‘easy’ raid or similar content to tackle, and that there’s no way to see the story without doing the hard mode. But again, you rebuff it with “oh it takes too long”. I say it for a reason: I don’t care if it takes longer if it’s a better solution. Gaile specifically said what she said because time isn’t a concern for the dev team.

Ohoni.6057:

I do actually consider EVERY point raised in these threads. That I consider and then disagree with the point does not mean that I’ve not given it fair consideration, it just means that I’ve considered it and found it lacking.

You find many things to be lacking, if that’s the case. What’s a thing that you’ve considered and have subsequently changed your opinion on? If the answer is “no they’re all wrong” then you haven’t fairly considered a thing.

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve considered every idea you’ve put forth, and some do have merit to them, but the downsides always far outweigh the positives. Again, you’re free to continue to disagree, but that doesn’t mean that I’m compelled to agree with you.

Go ahead. Which have merits? What are their downsides?
And I swear to God if you say “it doesn’t have muh legendaries” or “it takes too long” you’re taking the kitten.

Sarrs.4831:

Here’s something that I honestly, respectfully think will help you, with all good intentions:
Go and see what the systems you advocate result in.

I am completely serious, it’s impossible for you to have any clue what you are advocating unless you do that.

We agree, and I have done it. For quite a few years, thanks.

I played games that had Tiered Difficulty Settings for all their Instance Based Dungeons, with 4 settings (Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite) per normal dungeon and 3 settings for their Raids (Normal, Hard, Elite) They had well over 200 Custom Dungeons, and Two Separate Tiers of Difficulty for their Dungeons (Heroic&Epic)

Each Difficulty Tier offered better base Rewards, like Exp, Coin, Favor and Harder Content had Better Chances to Drop better loot, both in Quantity and Quality.

I left because I did not like their gear overhaul, It invalidated my previous years of work, but that did not change the fact that their tiered difficulty system worked perfectly for it’s intend purpose, to make the game accessible to anyone that wanted to play it.

As such, I really have no idea where any of your objections come from in regards to having various difficulty scales.

So my sincere advice to you, is follow your own suggestion, broaden your experience pool and go play a few of those other games, you will be amazed at what is out there and how well some of it works. Just because one game you used play maybe did it poorly, does not mean the idea or the method has not been used by others game makers with amazing success.

STIHL.2489:

I played games that had Tiered Difficulty Settings for all their Instance Based Dungeons, with 4 settings (Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite) per normal dungeon and 3 settings for their Raids (Normal, Hard, Elite) They had well over 200 Custom Dungeons, and Two Separate Tiers of Difficulty for their Dungeons (Heroic&Epic)

Each Difficulty Tier offered better base Rewards, like Exp, Coin, Favor and Harder Content had Better Chances to Drop better loot, both in Quantity and Quality.

What game was this again? I remember you said something about it earlier but I can’t recall the name, refresh my memory please?

Sarrs.4831:

STIHL.2489:

I played games that had Tiered Difficulty Settings for all their Instance Based Dungeons, with 4 settings (Casual, Normal, Hard, Elite) per normal dungeon and 3 settings for their Raids (Normal, Hard, Elite) They had well over 200 Custom Dungeons, and Two Separate Tiers of Difficulty for their Dungeons (Heroic&Epic)

Each Difficulty Tier offered better base Rewards, like Exp, Coin, Favor and Harder Content had Better Chances to Drop better loot, both in Quantity and Quality.

What game was this again? I remember you said something about it earlier but I can’t recall the name, refresh my memory please?

Sure thing. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons Online and while it’s been a few years since I played it, it should still be mainly the same game, I hope, in either case, it was a very innovative game, and one of the first games to make the move from Subscription to Free to Play Model, it’s amazing success in the transition setting the stage for all the current Free 2 Play games out there today.

Enjoy!

STIHL.2489:

Sure thing. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons Online and while it’s been a few years since I played it, it should still be mainly the same game, I hope, in either case, it was a very innovative game, and one of the first games to make the move from Subscription to Free to Play Model, it’s amazing success in the transition setting the stage for all the current Free 2 Play games out there today.

Enjoy!

Perhaps I had you mistaken with someone else, I was thinking it was a more obscure one. But yeah, I heard quite a few good things about DDO, though mostly on the transition front- I’ll see if I can have a bit of a review.

Also, can you link to any articles or somesuch which describe the gear overhaul for me?

Sarrs.4831:

Also, can you link to any articles or somesuch which describe the gear overhaul for me?

Not to be rude, but, No. On a Positive note tho, the changes only affected veteran players, so, as a new player it will not affect you at all.