Guild Wars 2

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and views. I am not even surprised to see someone complain about the exclusivity of a tiny part of the game.
What I am actually surprised about is the cheer amount of players complaining about this.

People used to take the exclusitivity of certain things (like being high level, legendary gear, PvP, etc…) as an incentive to grind /try /or work harder than they ever would if those were attainable by everyone. Achievements used to be actual achievements.

Makes me feel like I am really getting old (as an MMO players).

I find raids being in this game kinda funny, tho. Besides the supposed “challenging content” raids are suppose to be, in general they’re there to grant players a way to gaining even greater gear than what you certainly possess. From what I’m hearing, you need ascended gear to grind content that’s going to ONE DAY amount to you getting legendary armor that isn’t going to be any stronger than the ascended gear you needed to do the said content in… now I’m just left wondering why all the other MMOs didn’t implement this first.

mbhalo.1547:

Raids are “adventures” on steroids. Same gimmicky mini games with added bullet hell for extra twitch gameplay. They are the result of the no gear progression philosophy. If you dont like arcade games i suggest you to forget that raids exist in GW2.

Pretty much sums up Raids….. For good or bad…..

+1

Sarrs.4831:

You’re mistaking “begin participating” with “winning”. Raids are very challenging and it’s very important to provide that tone to the game. To say that it’s unfair to put exclusive rewards behind difficult content is absurd on its face.

I’ve amended my original position to make it clear that I am not arguing against exclusive rewards for challenge, but more exclusion from the lore, story and aesthetics of the content. That was a mistake in my original post, but I don’t want to edit it.

As mentioned by other posters, there is an intention for it to be core content. I don’t want the game to end up in a position like WoW was in WotLK where the pinnacle of the Warcraft universe and story, the conclusion of the story of Arthas, a story many people had become enthralled with since the first time they played Warcraft III as a kid, was locked behind a skill and gear barrier that people with busy lives who could not commit the time to practice and progress with a raiding guild were unable to see and experience.

This is completely incongruous with what you’re saying. WoW has four difficulty levels for every current dungeon and four difficulty levels for every raid. Surely, it should therefore be far, far less toxic than GW2, but that’s nowhere near the case. Some of the people I’ve met in LFR and LFD systems are vile people who I’d never play with.

That is a very interesting point, but one that I feel does not detract from the merits of my arguments. Four difficulty levels in WoW is a relatively new concept, only appearing within the last two expansions. That’s roughly 10 years since it’s conception. The game’s culture of trolling and elitism had already been firmly established from a decade of core content that could only be completed by a percentage of the community. This is what people have come to associate and expect from WoW and 10 years of it’s existence has firmly established that as a social norm and what is acceptable. Just simply throwing in a casual mode difficulty is not going to railroad something like that; it’s just too little too late.

In fact, it really supports the importance of addressing this issue before the game we both passionately enjoy gets set on releasing all it’s future content via “raids”.

Difficult content and exclusive content does not breed toxicity. Inconsequentiality of social interactions are what breed toxicity.

I don’t think that’s applicable, because there is simply very little realistic social consequences in social interactions by the the Internet and even huge games like WoW have the inability to police every single grievance.

Instead, I think it’s more of a result of what the game mechanics allow and what they promote. The general positivity and healthiness of the GW2 community isn’t the result of heavier consequences, but rather game design that includes things like personal instances of resource nodes so players aren’t fighting over them or the ability to tag a mob at any point in a fight and receive credit instead of making it a race to see who gets the first hit and receive the credit. Receiving experience for reviving a random player provides incentive for players to help each other out rather just keep on walking. The combo mechanics provide ways for two strangers to randomly meet in a fight and provide each other with combat bonuses that neither would otherwise receive.

Up until this point, there has been very little challenging content for anyone to feel elitist about, outside of primarily dungeon speed run groups. How that content is designed and implemented is important as it will determine how players will interact with each other out of neccessity to ensure succes.

I think fractals was the correct model for challenging content in GW2; I think the current implementation of raiding is not. A singular level of difficulty that forces players of varying play styles and skill levels to interact if they want to be able to see the content to it’s completion is just a powder keg waiting to go off.

MadRabbit.3179:

Sarrs.4831:

You’re mistaking “begin participating” with “winning”. Raids are very challenging and it’s very important to provide that tone to the game. To say that it’s unfair to put exclusive rewards behind difficult content is absurd on its face.

I’ve amended my original position to make it clear that I am not arguing against exclusive rewards for challenge, but more exclusion from the lore, story and aesthetics of the content. As mentioned by other posters, there is an intention for it to be core content. I don’t want the game to end up in a position like WoW was in WotLK where the pinnacle of the Warcraft universe and story, the conclusion of the story of Arthas, a story many people had become enthralled with since the first time they played Warcraft III as a kid, was locked behind a skill and gear barrier that people with busy lives who could not commit the time to practice and progress with a raiding guild were unable to see and experience.

This is completely incongruous with what you’re saying. WoW has four difficulty levels for every current dungeon and four difficulty levels for every raid. Surely, it should therefore be far, far less toxic than GW2, but that’s nowhere near the case. Some of the people I’ve met in LFR and LFD systems are vile people who I’d never play with.

That is a very interesting point, but one that I feel does not detract from the merits of my arguments. Four difficulty levels in WoW is a relatively new concept, only appearing within the last two expansions. That’s roughly 10 years since it’s conception. The game’s culture of trolling and elitism had already been firmly established from a decade of core content that could only be completed by a percentage of the community. This is what people have come to associate and expect from WoW and 10 years of it’s existence has firmly established that as a social norm and what is acceptable. Just simply throwing in a casual mode difficulty is not going to railroad something like that; it’s just too little too late.

In fact, it really supports the importance of addressing this issue before the game we both passionately enjoy gets set on releasing all it’s future content via “raids”.

If you must know, there isn’t such a grand story behind raids, just some people got captured, some soul eating monster and we go in to free them. There’s not much dialogue and no cutscenes at all. At most the npcs will shout 1 or 2 sentences which don’t really mean anything like ‘we must hurry’ or ‘die’ or something like that. Your cof p1 has more in depth story than raids. You’re not missing much if you are worried about story.

Zach.2618:

If you must know, there isn’t such a grand story behind raids, just some people got captured, some soul eating monster and we go in to free them. There’s not much dialogue and no cutscenes at all. At most the npcs will shout 1 or 2 sentences which don’t really mean anything like ‘we must hurry’ or ‘die’ or something like that. Your cof p1 has more in depth story than raids. You’re not missing much if you are worried about story.

Perhaps maybe you and I would not find either of that to be valuable, but the point of me writing this is to provide community feedback on the merits of the model itself before it becomes precedent as a way to deliver new content.

MadRabbit.3179:

Zach.2618:

If you must know, there isn’t such a grand story behind raids, just some people got captured, some soul eating monster and we go in to free them. There’s not much dialogue and no cutscenes at all. At most the npcs will shout 1 or 2 sentences which don’t really mean anything like ‘we must hurry’ or ‘die’ or something like that. Your cof p1 has more in depth story than raids. You’re not missing much if you are worried about story.

Perhaps maybe you and I would not find either of that to be valuable, but the point of me writing this is to provide community feedback on the merits of the model itself before it becomes precedent as a way to deliver new content.

Yes but from your original post you seemed to portray a different opinion than what you have now, maybe you prematurely judged raids and in a haste created a post without much understanding. That is understandable, you are worried Anet will gate an important part of the story or core elements behind raids, but that is not the case. Besides the nice reward of legendary armor (which isn’t required in any game mode) raids currently are not blocking people out of any core content. Maybe your post was directed towards future raid wings which would make more sense, but might have carried a little too much prejudgment. As of now you don’t have to worry about losing anything by not doing raids, the only exclusive thing you are losing will be the legendary armor.

Zach.2618:

Yes but from your original post you seemed to portray a different opinion than what you have now, maybe you prematurely judged raids and in a haste created a post without much understanding. That is understandable, you are worried Anet will gate an important part of the story or core elements behind raids, but that is not the case. Besides the nice reward of legendary armor (which isn’t required in any game mode) raids currently are not blocking people out of any core content. Maybe your post was directed towards future raid wings which would make more sense, but might have carried a little too much prejudgment. As of now you don’t have to worry about losing anything by not doing raids, the only exclusive thing you are losing will be the legendary armor.

Not exactly. No. The only point I’ve really changed on is the importance of exclusive rewards for challenging content. That was just something I overlooked and didn’t fully consider and it was flawed. That is what happens in discussion; things evolve.

But, beyond that, I think all the points I have made are solid and valid and not just the result of pre-judgment. This is, because the counter arguments in this thread and in other threads that my thread has inspired are primarily subjective.

Case in point, you are making a value judgement. The content isn’t really that good, so it’s not that big of deal. Okay, so let’s say I agree with you. Just because the two of us agree on it, does that make it true for everyone? Since we have decided that the lore and raid of the story is not that great, is that going to be the same conclusion everyone is going to draw? Do our opinions make a model that excludes a percentage of the population from seeing the content we think they won’t find much value in okay?

Other arguments have been that the raid isn’t really all that difficult. Okay, great, let’s say I agree with that and I think it’s easy. Does that value judgement apply to everyone, therefore negating the need to have alternative difficulties that would suit the play style of other people?

Another would be the argument that if we implemented an easy mode, people would do it and not get better at the game. Why do we get to decide that people’s current skill level is inadequate and therefore, need to limit options to force them to improve?

These kind of arguments are basically just sweeping the issues under the rug. It’s saying, essentially, yes, this could be a problem, but it’s not a problem right now because X is bad/good where what is bad and good varies from user to user.

MadRabbit.3179:

The first introduction of challenging content was fractals and it implemented a system that kept to this philosophy by having scaling difficulty levels. The first 20 levels did not require any type of ascended gear and even the most casual player could participate and experience the content due to the lack of difficulty. The only downside was smaller rewards compared to the higher fractal levels, but you were not blocked from participating in the content itself.

On top, you get upleveled to lvl 80 in the fractals….

I´ll second your arguments as well. Very well said…
Thx.

Can the hardcore players not have ONE thing in the game that we enjoy? Nothing is preventing casual players from completing raids, if one person can do them, anyone can.

MadRabbit.3179:

RoRo.8270:

Idk why you think every piece of content anet creates should be accessible to you. I kid you not you can still pop into open world and participate in zerg trains

Like seriously? Are you being serious right now? This is the question you are legitimately asking me?

Because the money I spent on the expansion and the money I have spent in the gem store over the years has gone to pay to create that content.

Like, holy dancing kittens, batman. Have you beaten any of the raid content? If so, I change my stance. Raids are too easy. Anyone can do it.

That’s a very reasonable question he’s posing, though I think it needs to be reworded; accessible is not the correct word to use because the raid is very accessible. What I believe this poster wants to say is Why should all content Anet creates be something anyone can complete successfully?

maxwelgm.4315:

This is alienating not only to players who are too casual to attempt doing the hard content (which I think is no argument too, I played with my dad back in the day and we managed the hard content eventually so he could experience the lore by himself, with him playing for 1, 2 hours a day at most), but also alienates players who can go down the “hardcore” road but can’t be bothered to do it by looking at some metabuild wiki. Anet has done this right before, so I have no idea how did they manage to insert a DPS race into the game and call it elite content (Mallyx and Dhuum are ashamed of you). Yes I can play the raids, yes I can spit the thousands of damage you want me to, yes I can git gud, but I’m not having fun with it and will complain until you give me the juicy challenging stuff you used to give before.

Preach on brother! +1, +2, +3, +4, etc. I’m not sure how so many people don’t get this. Can I min/max to cater to the meta? Of course. Is that how I want to play in a game that’s main philosophy is role diversity? No.

Obtena.7952:

MadRabbit.3179:

RoRo.8270:

Idk why you think every piece of content anet creates should be accessible to you. I kid you not you can still pop into open world and participate in zerg trains

Like seriously? Are you being serious right now? This is the question you are legitimately asking me?

Because the money I spent on the expansion and the money I have spent in the gem store over the years has gone to pay to create that content.

Like, holy dancing kittens, batman. Have you beaten any of the raid content? If so, I change my stance. Raids are too easy. Anyone can do it.

Why should all content Anet creates be something anyone can complete successfully?

This.

MadRabbit.3179:

Raids could have followed this same philosophy, but they didn’t. There is only one difficulty level, a cap on the number of people who can participate and the sheer difficulty of it marks the first time ascended gear is almost required to experience the content itself.
Just curious to see what other people thought.

I would argue that Ascended gear is less “required” because of the actual stats bonus and more because it tells you something about a player.
I have significantly more faith in a full ascended player than I would in a full exotic one.
The reasons should be pretty evident.
However full ascended is not guaranteed – and would gladly take a top-tier player in full exotic in Raids – it’s just that I don’t tend to trust people in full exotic enough to run with unless I know them personally.

To put it simply – I would be happy to have DnT’s Nike on a full exotic condi warrior dps spec in any Raid fight but would probably not take any “random” full exotic condi warrior dps spec because I wouldn’t trust them.

This toxicity comes in the form of a degree of elitism, feelings of exclusion due to the limit of players, exclusion of certain classes due to imbalance issues, abuse of new or casual players who want to participate but are still learning the content and barrier to entry in the form of ascended gear which has historically been optional in all content.

Call it elitism – call it what you want.
I don’t have infinite time to raid forever – I can get a few hours here, a few hours there.
I raid to kill – I’m not there to be part of some tutorial for whomever wants to give the raid a go – so I’m respecting my own time when filtering out and only accepting competent and efficient players.

Also Ascended gear has been required for high level fractals because of the agony mechanic – there’s precedent there.

Ultimately I have nothing against new and inexperienced players.
Do I want them to Raid? Yes.
Do I want them to learn and improve? Yes.
Do I want them to do all that in my groups costing me my kill and time? No.
They’ll have to do it by themselves – like most of the game’s “top-tier” players did when they first came to GW2.

When the game launched nobody knew the game – nobody gave us handouts, nobody carried us through dungeons, nobody told us “here’s the meta take it and win”. People had to earn it and do it by themselves.

Nobody taught me to dodge, I had to learn myself. Nobody taught me how to find out what the meta was, I had to look it up.
I ask no more of new players or casuals than to put in the same amount of effort and dedication into the game that I did if they want us to play together.
And if they don’t want to – that’s perfectly fine – we’ll simply not play together.

MadRabbit.3179:

Malchior.5732:

smiling.9028:

Kam.4092:

Git Gud

EXACTLY the toxicity the OP was talking about, thank you for proving his point.

@OP Well said, 100% agree.

The toxicity you guys all talk about is that certain skills are actually expected of you now instead of letting you be carried by all the good players.
I see that as good game design, when you expect players to learn, adapt, and grow in skill. Certain players are too mean, but that is just a generalization and depends entirely on the individuals.

So what do you feel would be lost if raid content used scaling difficulties that allowed players lacking in skill and mechanical mastery to still participate without hindering the progression of people who want to play at a higher level of difficulty?

We could even make a middle ground between inclusivity and exclusivity where the legendary armor was acquired in tiers, each tier requiring completing the content at a different difficulty level and each tier with an unique visual style that expressed your accomplishments.

Among other issues a “casual” or “low difficulty” raid setting would invariably make raids easier – even at “higher difficulty level”.

Why? Well because mechanics could be practiced under less pressure and people would have an easier time familiarizing themselves with said mechanics.

Look at Gorseval – he’s a hard DPS check – if you can’t bring the DPS do push his HP down fast enough you’re not going to experience the later mechanics that he’s got because you won’t pass the initial one.

This is an element that brings difficulty – because you only get to practice those mechanics of his later “stages” with good teams. Bad teams don’t get that chance – because they’re not able to get to it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So in short, I can never have the “skill”, I don’t have the time, the people, or the money, and I have ethical problems with how raids are made. To be frank, if the raiding community is anything like the dungeon community of old, then they’re an insufferable bunch who will make the whole thing unwelcoming to everybody but themselves; exactly how they like it.

It will most likely be worse than the dungeon community of old.

And the whole “unwelcoming” thing – while it might not be your idea of “great” it does have its advantages – one of them being people that aren’t experienced steering clear of groups and not ruining runs.

Eirdyne.9843:

Firstly, if you don’t address the impression raids have formed in the minds of most people right now looking at Heart of Thorns (that Guild Wars 2 is now just another WoW clone) you can say good-bye to this game.

Why?
Because there’s absolutely nothing else to do if you’ve already reached End-Game. I mean end-game. If you already have more legendaries than you can use. If you’re just going to snap out a set or two legendary armor no matter how things turn out. If you were basically ready for this expansion…

If that’s you, and by reading this, I’m kind of thinking most of us are… then ya… Heart of Thorns has been a pretty disastrous situation. We’re sitting at basically the position of having universal hall pass. We could kitten away the rest of this year twirling our thumbs and still get through with little more than the usual frustration of any other MMO.

But to say that and feel no trepidation is a monumental failure to understand what Guild Wars 2 wasn’t.

I played a Priest for years in WoW, a Bard and Healer in DAoC, and a Cleric in EQ. These are classes basically guaranteed that, if you could play them well, the guild would ensure you came out on top. Why? You were needed.
Druid’s are in that position right now. Am I concerned for myself? Not in the least. I have everything in the bank to flip over to an Ascended or Legendary Druid if need be. But from a player climbing up the ladder, or any number of people loyal to the idea Guild Wars 2 wasn’t going to be about kittening your life away for a video to have you chasing carrots on a stick… Anet is well deserving of some strong and fundamental changes of heart by its consumer base. Personally I’m of the stance right now companies that do this deserve to fail. They’re just in it for themselves and anyone that can’t grasp that is just a cow getting milked. What follows is the butchers yard. Everyone that didn’t already have Ascended armor got butchered.

Pretty much true – the part in bold.

My question is however : When Anet added a new gear tier to the game – how was it not immediately apparent to people that regardless of what Anet says you will most likely require that gear in the future?

How do you trust a developer that promises and markets a game with a core selling point of “no gear treadmill” then releases a new gear tier a few months after the game’s release with the motivation of “oh sorry guys we meant to put this in the game at release but forgot. Whoops our bad we’re putting it in now”.

I seriously do not understand how people got “blindsided” by the fact that Ascended gear would be a relevant thing in the future.

And no – saying that “we took Anet’s word for it” doesn’t really constitute a good reason in my book.
Look at their track record of making statements and then how things actually happened and you’ll understand. There are players here like Blood Red Arachnid that are informed, intelligent and aware of the developer’s track record ever since launch.

This question goes out to you in particular – how did you get so blindsided?

Obtena.7952:

MadRabbit.3179:

RoRo.8270:

Idk why you think every piece of content anet creates should be accessible to you. I kid you not you can still pop into open world and participate in zerg trains

Like seriously? Are you being serious right now? This is the question you are legitimately asking me?

Because the money I spent on the expansion and the money I have spent in the gem store over the years has gone to pay to create that content.

Like, holy dancing kittens, batman. Have you beaten any of the raid content? If so, I change my stance. Raids are too easy. Anyone can do it.

That’s a very reasonable question he’s posing, though I think it needs to be reworded; accessible is not the correct word to use because the raid is very accessible. What I believe this poster wants to say is Why should all content Anet creates be something anyone can complete successfully?

There are a couple of things to address here – it’s a push-pull situation.

On the one hand you would want all content to be accessible to all players because that way you would maximize your “gains” as a developer when investing time and resources into creating content.

On the other hand there are also potential threats:

-having all content be accessible to all players no longer provides certain players with that “elite” feeling for doing something special.

-having all content accessible to all players could bring about a very bad PR situation for your game where this accessibility gives your game a bad reputation for being “easy”.

I’m guessing these two points are the main reason Anet want to keep raids inaccessible to most players at least for now.
They want to be able to attract new players with the PR bonus of “we now have exclusive hardcore content too” and also cater to the “hardcore” crowd that’s been very vocal and very upset since the 3 years following release have mostly catered to casual players and given nearly nothing to hardcore players.

In the future I predict that as more raids/raid wings are added initial ones will slowly be nerfed – by then the hardcore will have moved on to the newer encounters and might care less about the initial ones.
PR-wise the hit would also be negligible since you would have those new encounters serving as you “ultimate hard content”.

It’s the eternal wheel of developer favor turning I guess – for 3 years the casuals were catered to and the hardcore felt disenfranchised and abandoned – so they complained, quit, gave the game bad reviews and whatnot while the casuals filled the forums with “this is how it is and if you don’t like it leave” or “this is our game”.

Now Anet has decided it’s finally time to address this – and as a result the situation has reversed itself with the forums being filled to the brim with posts about casual players being “excluded” from content which are promptly answered by friendly “get good or go home” counters.

Ultimately this will all blow over – it will take some time however.

I get the compromise but the fact remains that 99% of the game benefits the lowest common denominator but when 1% of the game is intro’ed to appeal to a specific type of player, all the sudden 99% isn’t good enough for the LCD’s. That’s when the discussion gets immature and unreasonable.

Obtena.7952:

I get the compromise but the fact remains that 99% of the game benefits the lowest common denominator but when 1% of the game is intro’ed to appeal to a specific type of player, all the sudden 99% isn’t good enough for the LCD’s. That’s when the discussion gets immature and unreasonable.

Yeah, this has been my point for a long time. People are obviously aware that players with different preferences play the game, but cannot seem to accept that ANet might introduce content that caters to a different demographic. All that said, I have some sympathy for those who believe that HoT offers little to nothing for them, but raids are not the exclusive cause of that feeling — it owes a lot more to ANet’s decisions regarding the persistent world.

I mean, then don’t raid? Not sure what exactly you want to happen here. If you want to raid, go for it. You might not succeed at first but no one can really give you that guarantee.

I have only done VG and I went with some friends of mine and their guild mates. I had a blast. For reference, I am generally very busy and raiding appeals to me but I dont intend to ever really get too serious about it. I don’t really have the time to be consistent with it. No big deal.

Tried at Gorseval for a bit before having to break the group and I didn’t kill him. Still really enjoyed it. No one really owes me that win. I would of course love to beat all the content but if it’s not gonna happen right now, it’s not gonna happen.

Either raid, or don’t. Making a post to whine about it doesn’t really seem like a great use of your time.

Obtena.7952:

I get the compromise but the fact remains that 99% of the game benefits the lowest common denominator but when 1% of the game is intro’ed to appeal to a specific type of player, all the sudden 99% isn’t good enough for the LCD’s. That’s when the discussion gets immature and unreasonable.

I agree with you – so much of GW2 caters to casual players that I feel the addition of hardcore content is not only a breath of fresh air but also a move in the right direction. Having something for everybody is definitely good – and they’ve done a smart move in my book.

They should start to make new content soon because people are bored. Nothing to do in game if you don’t have viper gear.