Guild Wars 2

I understand that I’ll be swarmed by a lot of people here, but please bear with me for a few more lines.

Explorable Mode

As stated in another thread the current difficulty of dungeons is a very shifty thing. Can you please elaborate on how specific dungeons were and are going to be balanced ?
Currently many dungeons feel easy while others feel hard but there isn’t a consistent curve. AC feels much harder than CM and some routes (say route 2) in CoF was viewed as easy farm.

I’m not whining here. I just wanna make a point that even after recent patches, dungeon difficulty needs to be adjusted to be roughly the same or at least taken a look at.
Adding more beef to CM, CoF and dungeon’s overall is a great start !
Regretably the rewards seem too low now.

Another problem in dungeons is the lack of variety in the challenges that you face. As stated in the post bellow, dungeon battles suffer from lack of variety and ridiculous health pools on some enemies. Rather than being a real issue here, this might be viewed as a questionable polish when it comes to dungeons.

If possible, please give us some info on your reasoning behind the latest and future changes.
Something to chew on.

Story Mode

As the name implies, this is supposed to be something that has to do with the story of the game, it’s characters and your own. The genre of the game has kittenised this completely. People want to speed run dungeons and that is to be expected, but bringing casual and hardcore players in the same instance and assuming they will have the same goals is for me an extremely bad design even if not forced.

It’s already hard for me to make a party for my casual guildmates or for myself when I feel like it. Casual players want to be able to stay behind talk to the NPC and get some immersion into the Lore of the game you ArenaNET have created.

As it is, because of the game being a MMO and dungeons in Story Mode not scaling with party size, it doesn’t feel like Story Mode at all. Can you please provide some minor insight on how you are going to address this, if you think it is an issue at all.

I might get trashed here, I hope I don’t. For me explore mode dungeons are rather easy and not rewarding at the moment, but for my casual guildies they feel extremely hard and that is perfectly normal. That’s the way the game is supposed to be. On the other hand Story Mode feels like a demo version of Explorable Mode. Please, give more options for both casual and hardcore players. I and I hope we the players understand that this game is all about bringing MMO and RPG back together, however as it is dungeons need a lot of polish in both Explorable and Story Mode.

Thanks for reading !
Thanks for the awesome game !
Thank you all for playing this game with me !

My current gripe with explorable modes is that the difficulty is just all over the place and that most of the actual “difficulty” comes not from well designed interesting mechanics that can be learned, but artificial inflation because of high health pools and needlessly punishing mechanics. I know about myself that I’m not an uber player in most games I play, but I am also not a scrub. I’m not the kind of guy that will understand a mechanic the very first time I see it, but if that’s the kind of player the explorable modes are meant to cater to then this game will lose a lot of players VERY fast.

I know people like to hate on WoW but although the difficulty there is too low, the base design is well done. The trash before a boss will begin teaching you the mechanics that the boss will use and the bosses have more than just a single mechanic. The mechanics are also varied rather than being the same 2-3 mechanics rehashed over and over again. Rather then using ridiculous health-pools to prolong the fights, give us “soft enrages” like the worm fight in TA explore mode seems to be attempting, where if you take too long to complete it you just get swarmed by worms.
This will also curb what we’re seeing now in terms of GY spawning and just running back.

I’ll add the core of your post to the first post. It’s not likely that there will be a replay, but just for the sake of it.

If you read Colin Johanson’s post, you will know exactly what to expect.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read it. It helped me understand that GW2 is a PvP game. Not a PvE game. There is some PvE content. But it has been designed by people (maybe just one guy ?) who does not understand how PvE works.

He thinks that putting in Tetris-HardMode in his dungeons will make them harder. He does not understand what makes games fun. He does not understand the concept “teach your players while they play the game”. He does not understand the concept of “gradual learning curve”. He does not understand the phrase “easy to learn, hard to master”. He doesn’t understand what the average player will think when he reads the words “Story Mode”.

The new form of “heart quests” for quests is a step back for MMO players, imho. It limits the variety of quests. It limits the story-telling of quests. Public Dynamic Events are usually a zerg. Fun sometimes, but a bit simplistic. The whole design and architecture behind the dungeons is just “kittied in the head”. This all makes me believe that the PvE-designers are trying, but just don’t get it.

And then Colin makes a post that it is all “working as intended”. And then they make changes in the opposite direction of what was needed.

It is clear. This game is not for me. It’s not a PvE game (too bad for the art-designers who made a beautiful world). It’s not for bad players, it’s not for average players, it’s not even for players who are slightly above average (as I consider myself). The PvE-content is only for the creme-de-la-creme (the very best).

Let’s make a game that costs $100m. Let’s make it so beautiful that it sells 4m boxes, so we can barely make back our initial money. Then make the PvE-content so hard, and so limited, that the masses will stop play soon. And we’ll never make any profit.
Brilliant business plan !

Have to agree with Gryz….

A game is about having fun. People tend to flock towards easy or at least, less difficult path, however as I keep mentioning, it’s not about easy for me personally, it’s about time spent. People don’t want to labour inside dungeon’s getting frustrated. A majority of people like quick 20 – 30 dungeon’s, so they can get out and move onto other things, like pvp…. instead of having to grind out a cosmetic piece of gear that looks better. Limit people to three times per day, but don’t take away from dungeon’s experiance by making it a negative experiance of frustration that just causes resentment towards you the developer.

Gryz.8376:

If you read Colin Johanson’s post, you will know exactly what to expect.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read it. It helped me understand that GW2 is a PvP game. Not a PvE game. There is some PvE content. But it has been designed by people (maybe just one guy ?) who does not understand how PvE works.

He thinks that putting in Tetris-HardMode in his dungeons will make them harder. He does not understand what makes games fun. He does not understand the concept “teach your players while they play the game”. He does not understand the concept of “gradual learning curve”. He does not understand the phrase “easy to learn, hard to master”. He doesn’t understand what the average player will think when he reads the words “Story Mode”.

The new form of “heart quests” for quests is a step back for MMO players, imho. It limits the variety of quests. It limits the story-telling of quests. Public Dynamic Events are usually a zerg. Fun sometimes, but a bit simplistic. The whole design and architecture behind the dungeons is just “kittied in the head”. This all makes me believe that the PvE-designers are trying, but just don’t get it.

And then Colin makes a post that it is all “working as intended”. And then they make changes in the opposite direction of what was needed.

It is clear. This game is not for me. It’s not a PvE game (too bad for the art-designers who made a beautiful world). It’s not for bad players, it’s not for average players, it’s not even for players who are slightly above average (as I consider myself). The PvE-content is only for the creme-de-la-creme (the very best).

Let’s make a game that costs $100m. Let’s make it so beautiful that it sells 4m boxes, so we can barely make back our initial money. Then make the PvE-content so hard, and so limited, that the masses will stop play soon. And we’ll never make any profit.
Brilliant business plan !

Gryz, while I agree with you I thin you are too extreme here, after all this is a MMO and those things (read It’s not a PvE game) are to be expected. The real thing here is as you nailed it :

What the average player will think when he reads the words “Story Mode”.

I’ll keep my hopes high. I beleive ArenaNET will address these issues and some design changed will come in the near future. If they take a page out of Riot Games’ (hey, they even designed a whole cave based on Riot’s lead designer Morello, former college of theirs I hear, thumbs up for that) book and start making more frequent and detailed post on the forums, people like me and you won’t be posting such extremes.

I don’t think this is a case of “Kitten that loser”.

To OP, you might want to change the topic title on this, addressing ANet or a specific employee in topic title is not allowed as per their code of conduct (they refer to it as employee call outs as I recall).

Charged it now, the forums are rather buggy at the moment.

Thank you Crise for the info.