Guild Wars 2

Fix this bug already…

Vayne.8563:

Just curious about this, since it came up in another thread. How many people here ran dungeons to get the achievements for those dungeons, even though they don’t like running dungeons or don’t care about dungeons all that much.

I know I run dungeons sometimes, because other people need help with them or to fill in when the guild can’t find a fifth. Anyone else?

I run dungeons for gold. I don’t run the paths that aren’t profitable.

@ Vayne

Its a vicious cycle. NO ONE, not even Anet can tell us that the players who enjoy dungeons are the ones who spend the less in gems.
Why? Because frankly, the big majority of dungeoneers are unhappy customers. They havent been catered to at all, why should they support the game by purchasing Gems and give Anet the sign that everything is going well?

Vicious cycle: dungeoneers dont buy gems because Anet doesnt give them dungeons/fractals; Anet doesnt make more dungeons/fractals because they dont buy Gems.

Well, no kitten! And I can tell you from my experience that about half of my friend list are dungeoneers and they havent touched the game for MONTHES. Maybe if there was actually content being developed for them every once in a while (not every 2-3 years), they would actually still be playing the game.

This just goes to show that both the activity and profitability of total chunk of people who play dungeons is extremely unreliable and thats why I hate that Anet keeps using metrics to justify their planning.

serenke.4806:

There is something that developers and people advocating no instances should consider. While it is probably true that more people fall into the casual category and they probably spend more real money in the gemstore than veterans who can afford gold > gem conversions… veterans are a very important part of the community, the core actually.

In my opinion it is a terrible idea to focus exclusively on either group, since if you neglect content that casuals can complete, you lose a paying customer base. But if you neglect veterans, you will lose those players who would keep your game alive when the casuals have logged off. They provide really important promotional work by building communities (guilds, ts communities), creating content (youtube videos, drawings, paintings, fan fictions). They draw people in by spreading the word how great the game is. They provide feedback that the developers can rely on because let’s be honest, sometimes they understand the game better than the devs.

Veteran players in my book are not only dungeon runners, they can be anything from open world boss event farmers (the ones carrying the press 1 and i win crowd) through dungeon speedrunners, pvpers all the way to RP-ers (yes even they are important while anet seems to think otherwise).

In a game like this where you have so many different ways to play and be a veteran, we should respect the other veterans instead of trying to make them “wisen up” and play our kind of content.

This. Exactly this. Look at the wiki. It has suffered a lot from vets quitting the game. Superficial information still goes up, sure. But in-depth information is more and more lacking.

And I don’t think Anet realizes it at all.

But, what’s the point of in depth information if the majority of players don’t care about how well they play the game? Just throw a bunch of superficial stuff out (shinies and content with very little thought put into it other than looking “pretty”) and rake in that cash.

I said it before and ill say it again, the low interest in dungeon from the player base is solely because of the lack of support from Anet. Dungeons are a big part of MMO, but with no incentive and no support, player move to something else.

I remember when the game was new and getting exotic from dungeon felt rewarding. Now you can get the skin from pvp, or better looking skins elsewhere faster, or go for better gear (ascended)

Other games have indeed shown that you can’t ignore the casual playerbase.

GW2 will be the one to show that you can’t ignore the non-casual playerbase.

I’m not even sure there’s time left to fix it after the kittenshow that was post-launch GW2 development.

I just hope another game rips off the GW2 combat system and develops content that is in line with the standards of the MMO genre, both in variety and quantity. All I know is that I don’t trust the current ArenaNet to do it, nor do they even seem interested in doing so.

dlonie.6547:

Other games have indeed shown that you can’t ignore the casual playerbase.

GW2 will be the one to show that you can’t ignore the non-casual playerbase.

I’m not even sure there’s time left to fix it after the kittenshow that was post-launch GW2 development.

I just hope another game rips off the GW2 combat system and develops content that is in line with the standards of the MMO genre, both in variety and quantity. All I know is that I don’t trust the current ArenaNet to do it, nor do they even seem interested in doing so.

Thing is… you can and games have.

It’s just your game becomes not much more than a “Second Life” type game with less customization but some combat to make people feel like they’re playing something, or at least have the potential to.

It’s more a mark of pride within the developing company on whether they want to put out something great or just something that will create some cash. Do they want to create a game that pushes players to excel, or do they just want players that will drop some cash?

I have no doubt that ANet’s current plan will still net them a profit, maybe even more if they cut their costs. It’s just a shame that it won’t be what it could have been. A lot of wasted work creating a progressive play style with all it’s intricacies that won’t be utilized by it’s playerbase.

Jerus.4350:

dlonie.6547:

Other games have indeed shown that you can’t ignore the casual playerbase.

GW2 will be the one to show that you can’t ignore the non-casual playerbase.

I’m not even sure there’s time left to fix it after the kittenshow that was post-launch GW2 development.

I just hope another game rips off the GW2 combat system and develops content that is in line with the standards of the MMO genre, both in variety and quantity. All I know is that I don’t trust the current ArenaNet to do it, nor do they even seem interested in doing so.

Thing is… you can and games have.

It’s just your game becomes not much more than a “Second Life” type game with less customization but some combat to make people feel like they’re playing something, or at least have the potential to.

It’s more a mark of pride within the developing company on whether they want to put out something great or just something that will create some cash. Do they want to create a game that pushes players to excel, or do they just want players that will drop some cash?

I have no doubt that ANet’s current plan will still net them a profit, maybe even more if they cut their costs. It’s just a shame that it won’t be what it could have been. A lot of wasted work creating a progressive play style with all it’s intricacies that won’t be utilized by it’s playerbase.

Oh, I didn’t mean to say it won’t be profitable. All the kittenty MMO ads I see served up everywhere I go prove that you don’t need to really try to make some money off of an MMO.

But on one hand you have cash-rake MMOs, and on the other you have games that create a community around their games while attracting and managing the different types of players that enjoy MMOs, both casual and non-casual.

GW2 at launch appeared to be the latter, but it has transformed itself into the former. The content they’ve released since launch (as well as the neglect of launch content) shows they aren’t interested in attracting or keeping non-casual players. On top of that, there’s their insistence on ignoring the different player types and naively creating content that forces different player styles to butt heads and create conflicts in their community (e.g. non-instanced content). This conflict is unavoidable to a degree, but there are easy ways to mitigate it that ArenaNet refuses to implement because they’re ignoring the problem.

GW2 is still running off of its launch hype. Not many players are happy with what they’ve put out since launch. I’m sure someone will call this anecdotal, but seriously — they’ve focused pretty much everything they have on producing one type of content while ignoring the wonderful variety of game modes that existed at launch. That’s going to make a lot of players who bought the game for X type of gameplay unhappy and leave (PvP, WvW, instances, etc). The reason a lot of us who are disenfranchised by this extremely narrow focus are still around is because the launch content held so much promise, so much potential. But that potential will never be realized and people have woken up to that, and continue to do so. Expect further decline.

It won’t kill it, but if the game maintains its current direction I don’t see it having very much staying power as one of the ‘big boys’ in the MMO genre. It’ll be another cashshop-and-grind-for-shinies-while-staring-at-a-virtual-badonkadonk MMO. It will continue lose its appeal to players who aren’t just looking for a sexy cash shop where they kittening get rewarded for just logging in, and will fade into the background.

It could have been revolutionary. It could have been a game changer. It could have been an MMO that delivered quality casual content along with challenging content that attracted more than one type of player. But yeah. Instead we get zerg maps and a slow moving, linear storyline for new content. Woohoo.

Aye, fully agree. I’m just done deluding myself into believing that ANet will ever change. They have a chance to prove me wrong with the “challenging group content” but I simply have no faith left in the game.

That said, I think they’ll still have the potential to be one of the ‘big boys,’ well when you consider that WoW has the lions share and the scraps are divided up between Rift, Wildstar, EQ/EQ2, DCUO, GW2, Archage, FFXIV, SWTOR, AION, and whatever else is out there. I don’t even consider any of those above another, they’re just fighting for WoW’s scraps. GW2 will still hold many players based on it’s graphics and casual gameplay, and by casual I don’t mean easy bullkitten, I mean stuff you can jump in and play for 30 mins and feel like you’ve done something. It just happens to be that GW2 took casual to mean that it should be stupidly easy.

First they were fun, but after a couple of weeks we’ve seen all paths. It is fun from time to time to run dungeons with friends/guildies and on top you get rather good gold.

The problem I see is that since the beginning there is nothing new there. They revamped AC once but that’s it, aside from Aetherpath. The dungeon scene is stale and it’s really a shame that my favorite MMO has the most stale instanced group content I know.

dlonie.6547:

I just hope another game rips off the GW2 combat system and develops content that is in line with the standards of the MMO genre, both in variety and quantity.

This. Please, people at Wizards of the Coast: make an MMO based on Magic’s mana system (with no set classes)!

A skills-based game with new skills every 4 months managed by people who understand how to create/balance skills + combat system of GW2. I’d be outta here in a second.

Jerus.4350:

They have a chance to prove me wrong with the “challenging group content” but I simply have no faith left in the game.

I’m pretty sure that by “challenging group content” they meant content like Vinewrath.

I did them for the achieves way back in the day. I found them fun at the time just at an exploration level, because it was like everybody’s first time inside them, but I don’t really like the gameplay for its own sake.

I ran dungeons for the rewards, the opportunity to really give my character a “performance test” of sorts, the teamwork involved with small groups, the time involved versus other content types, and general lack of interest with open world grind/zerg fests.

I have had both the best and worst experiences in small group content. A great group, with like minded players, is an amazing experience…like a well-oiled machine. I tend to view my characters almost like sports cars. I like them to be high performance output and to turn on a dime. I like the challenge of squeezing as much performance out of them as possible. I find it exciting to play glass, always on the edge of getting downed, but timing dodges/active defenses perfectly. I find the combo field system pretty fun too…at least on professions that have decent combo finisher options. These are things you can only get in small group content to any significant degree. You can’t even notice the effects of things like this in a huge zerg. The flip side of this comes with being in a really bad group…those are the worst experiences I have had in this game.