Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t think any of this is accurate information. The raid contains more information than the dungeons, And there really aren’t any barriers to entry, you can throw out an LFG, need half as many people to join you, they can be any class they want, not know the content at all, and you’ll still do just fine.

I hadn’t done much dungeoning lately because I’d burned out on them years ago, but when they added daily raids I’ve started doing a few of those. When CM was the dungeon of the day a month or so back, I queued up for path 1 with four other people who’d never done it before, and I totally forgot how to do it, and we still managed it in less than a half hour with only one wipe and a few downs. If you can manage the same with Vale Guardian then I’ll concede the point. To sum up, the challenge is:

• Clear Vale Guardian
• Using a completely random LFG party
• NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
• with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
• half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

Let’s see how you do. This is open to anyone, btw.

So you are doing something you don’t like for rewards by running CM. Weird comming from you, but even if you do like CM, I think its reasonable that often times rewards make up for playing content you do not like? So an alternative way to get you happily into raiding is actually increasing the rewards, which is something that IMO should happen. Or do you think majority of the people run tarrir/SW/Champ trains for fun?

One wipe allowed? Because otherwise people suddenly get experienced? So you are in fact acknowledging that total strangers can get relevant encounter experience, enough to clear one of the more difficult bosses might I add, in the short time span of half an hour? Now they might not feel very rewarded if they in it for the wealth cause raids do not offer a whole lot compared to some of the ridiculous farms we have.

Gw2 is about horizontal progression, getting different and more unique looking skins as you progress and clear more and also at times difficult content. As such raids are within the gw2 spirit.

Just look at all high end skins, they are all exclusive and include bragging rights. The difference is for once skilled people get actually rewarded. Why should it always be the the rich, the farmers, the grinders (relatively small part of the community as well) and not for once be the effective and skilled players ?

Why should we compromise to this small part of the community, that actually gets sad by not having the skins. Which is a very small part mind you, given that forums are a place for negative people voicing complains, yet I see so little individuals voicing their concerns regarding envoy being raid specific. It is not inherently bad that people want exclusive skins they can wear for the content they have cleared. There is nothing weird with that ( the game has been like this for a long time), the weird thing is players getting worked up over not having them.

Infact, some players get so worked up over it they want to change the best received content for the intended playerbase to be changed into something bad. Making false claims nothing will change for the current raiders.

Mind you, I casually raid with friends but also pugs at times, some periods I don’t raid for a month, other periods I clear all 9 bosses with PUGs, I have gotten 52 LI’s and the first collection I completed ( nothing ridiculous). I won’t have the resources for the armor and I prolly wont meet the 150 LI requirement in a long time, however I’m perfectly fine with not being able to get envoy armor. Given that I’m a casual raider and do not experience accesibility issues, I feel no need for compromise.

Ohoni.6057:

How do the people that are ‘missing out on the story’ feel about dungeons? While dungeons are easier to complete, they provide barriers that are similar to those encountered when raiding. A single dungeon provides more story than all of the raid wings combined do. I suppose this isn’t a problem because you can get all the dungeon rewards by playing pvp.

I don’t think any of this is accurate information. The raid contains more information than the dungeons, And there really aren’t any barriers to entry, you can throw out an LFG, need half as many people to join you, they can be any class they want, not know the content at all, and you’ll still do just fine.

I hadn’t done much dungeoning lately because I’d burned out on them years ago, but when they added daily raids I’ve started doing a few of those. When CM was the dungeon of the day a month or so back, I queued up for path 1 with four other people who’d never done it before, and I totally forgot how to do it, and we still managed it in less than a half hour with only one wipe and a few downs. If you can manage the same with Vale Guardian then I’ll concede the point. To sum up, the challenge is:

• Clear Vale Guardian
• Using a completely random LFG party
• NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
• with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
• half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

Let’s see how you do. This is open to anyone, btw.

The raid contains more information than the dungeons? Really? That’s false.
If you look at just dialogue lines -there is FAR more information and lore in the dungeons than the raid.

The problem with your challenge is that raids were designed to NOT be that sort of content. The developers themselves stated at one point that they had prepared “a bucket for our tears” and that raids were never meant to be puggable.

You can do this challenge if you basically make a dungeon with a “raid theme” – and you should – but given the core concept of what raids are and represent your “raid theme” dungeon should give you no rewards.

well since we dont have only zerker or gtfo partys anymore in dungeons there are all welcome (any class combination can complete them), I would think anyone would be able to see those stories.

The reason you don’t have those anymore is because there are now FAR better farms out there. Back in the day it was dungeons or bust.

Ohoni.6057:

If they go through many wipes then they are no longer inexperienced. The challenge is to complete it in under 30 minutes and with only one wipe using an inexperienced and randomly coordinated group, not to take that group and spend hours and a hours refining strategies and training skills.

I’ve “realized” that too, it’s no grand revelation, that’s just not something I’d rather do. You’d rather do those things, and that’s great, I’d rather ask ANet to make some changes to the game so that I (and many others) would enjoy it more. You do you, I’ll do me, and we’ll each be happy.

Maybe you’ll realize that Legendary armor is something you’d rather want more than not wanting to form a group.
Or maybe you’ll realize that Legendary armor too is something you’d rather not have.

cephiroth.6182:

Fixed that for you.
Maybe not the 99% is the source of irritation, maybe it’s the 1%.

What are you even talking about? GW2 is 99% casual, everything is accessible to everybody, even raids. The only people who can’t raid are those with disabilities or just refuse to get good enough to raid.

Don’t change what I said and put words into my mouth that I didn’t say. Just because you’re bad and I’m calling you bad doesn’t mean I’m elitist. You’re objectively bad when you refuse to do what many people have done and instead blame the system.

- Clear Vale Guardian
- Using a completely random LFG party
- NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
- with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
- half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

- Clear Arah Explorable (any path)
- Using a completely random LFG party
- NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
- with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
- half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

500g all yours Ohoni if you can do it with video proof

Ohoni.6057:

In my opinion the players that claim they want a story mode/easier raid in order to ‘experience the story’ are not being genuine.

Your opinion is wrong, simple as that.

And this is where the discussion ends – when people flat out state things like this you realize there can be no middle ground.

You can’t call his opinion wrong – it’s an opinion.
In MY opinion everything you say, write, claim or suggest on these forums is either wrong, misleading, sad or a combination of the above. That doesn’t mean I’m going to counter your “arguments” with “your opinion is wrong”. I’ve tried explaining, discussing and arguing.

With an attitude like that you should just be ignored.

fishball.7204:

cephiroth.6182:

Fixed that for you.
Maybe not the 99% is the source of irritation, maybe it’s the 1%.

What are you even talking about? GW2 is 99% casual, everything is accessible to everybody, even raids. The only people who can’t raid are those with disabilities or just refuse to get good enough to raid.

Don’t change what I said and put words into my mouth that I didn’t say. Just because you’re bad and I’m calling you bad doesn’t mean I’m elitist. You’re objectively bad when you refuse to do what many people have done and instead blame the system.

- Clear Vale Guardian
- Using a completely random LFG party
- NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
- with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
- half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

- Clear Arah Explorable (any path)
- Using a completely random LFG party
- NONE of whom have any experience with the encounter
- with absolutely no gearchecks or class-checks, come as you are
- half hour total time limit, one wipe allowed.

500g all yours Ohoni if you can do it with video proof

The fun thing is, if we replace VG with for example the escort or bandit trio, and put in one experienced leader, the raid challenge is probably more doable.

It’s true, trio and escort are really easy. I’ve seen RP guilds finish the escort with random mashups of builds and classes and just swapping utilities once they realized what they needed.

Just sad people are more willing to cry on the forums than to actually work towards something.

fishball.7204:

I’d like to see some of these guys try Arah p4 in 30 mins with just 1 wipe in a random LFG pug ayyy lmao

Actually any arah path. I’ll give u 500g if you make a video of you randomly pugging Ohoni, arah dungeon 30 minutes just 1 wipe in LFG.

Well, yeah, Arah would take a bit longer than 30 minutes. And likely a few wipes on the way. Still, if you’d just stick to it, you’d be sure to complete it on the first try (well, almost sure – there are still some nasty bugs left that might pose a problem). With no ts and overt organization.
And Arah is the very high end of the dungeon experience.

Actually, i have a good example. One of my guildies pugged Aetherpath yesterday. She’s a casual, new to gw2 (started a month ago), and to MMO’s in general, and was doing that path for the second time. As far as TA experience, she was the only one in group with any (due to our guild run the day before. Where we weren’t explaining things that much, and were generally ignoring most of the encounter mechanics). They still cleared the path with no sweat (again, ignoring lot of the encounter mechanics).

When players will be able to do that consistently with raids, you might start to compare them with dungeons. Until then, you really shouldn’t.

DutchRiders.2871:

So an alternative way to get you happily into raiding is actually increasing the rewards, which is something that IMO should happen.

Nope. One can accept some less enjoyment, or even participate in some tedious/unfun content, in exchange for satisfying rewards, but that works only to a certain level. Unless you’re a masochist, you won’t go beyond that level no matter the rewards, or, if you do, it will cause some permanent damage to your enjoyment with the game.
No game should ever try to push you beyond such a point.

Astralporing.1957:

fishball.7204:

I’d like to see some of these guys try Arah p4 in 30 mins with just 1 wipe in a random LFG pug ayyy lmao

Actually any arah path. I’ll give u 500g if you make a video of you randomly pugging Ohoni, arah dungeon 30 minutes just 1 wipe in LFG.

Well, yeah, Arah would take a bit longer than 30 minutes. And likely a few wipes on the way. Still, if you’d just stick to it, you’d be sure to complete it on the first try (well, almost sure – there are still some nasty bugs left that might pose a problem). With no ts and overt organization.
And Arah is the very high end of the dungeon experience.

Actually, i have a good example. One of my guildies pugged Aetherpath yesterday. She’s a casual, new to gw2 (started a month ago), and to MMO’s in general, and was doing that path for the second time. As far as TA experience, she was the only one in group with any (due to our guild run the day before. Where we weren’t explaining things that much, and were generally ignoring most of the encounter mechanics). They still cleared the path with no sweat (again, ignoring lot of the encounter mechanics).

When players will be able to do that consistently with raids, you might start to compare them with dungeons. Until then, you really shouldn’t.

DutchRiders.2871:

So an alternative way to get you happily into raiding is actually increasing the rewards, which is something that IMO should happen.

Nope. One can accept some less enjoyment, or even participate in some tedious/unfun content, in exchange for satisfying rewards, but that works only to a certain level. Unless you’re a masochist, you won’t go beyond that level no matter the rewards, or, if you do, it will cause some permanent damage to your enjoyment with the game.
No game should ever try to push you beyond such a point.

You can’t clear aetherpath while ignoring the encounter mechanics. If you don’t clear the oil fields on slick and sparky or you don’t kill holograms on clockheart, your party will die. Before the HoT release, you weren’t guaranteed to finish aetherpath or arah with completely inexperienced players at all. Heck, before the lupi wall reflect trick became widely known, you pretty much had to be able to solo lupi if you wanted to clear with randoms.

All of you that claim clearing arah for the first time was ‘easy’ are either lying, got carried by their party or are good enough at the game to be able to clear raids with a bit of effort.
Just like how it’s possible to get carried in dungeons, it’s also possible to get carried in raids. I recommend playing revenant and just sword 1111111 with facet of nature and fury on. Swap to staff and use 5 for the breakbar. Nobody will notice that you’re dogkitten. You will be needed in every encounter. You won’t have to worry about any of the ‘special’ mechanics, since those are generally covered by other classes. All you have to do is stay alive and press 1.

Legendary envoy armor is a prestige item for dedicated raiders. Making it accessible to players that aren’t interested in the raiding experience (which includes the difficulty) is pretty absurd and diminishes the achievements of those that got it the ‘hard’ way.

No.

I’m not a fan of the ‘everybody is a winner’ ideology. People that put in time, effort and skill deserve to be rewarded for it. If you’re unwilling/unable to do all 3, you’re not entitled to the reward and raids are not the content for you.

I don’t care. I’m not a fan of the “You can’t have this armor skin because I want to feel like I’m better than other players” ideology. If you need some special indication that you’re better than other players, then it’s ok that ANet enable you, but it should do so using something like a title or nametag flair or other non-skin method. Your desire to show off should not trump other players desire to have the armor skins they want.

Dungeons have a larger story line than raids, this is not a matter of opinion but a fact.

Wrong.

Anyhow the point I’m trying to make is: ‘why weren’t all these super casual, story obsessed people complaining about dungeons?’

Because dungeons are at a lower threshold of difficulty and inconvenience, obviously. Players who want to do dungeons can do dungeons, and likely already have. These same players may be incapable of doing raids within the same time and energy.

Imo some people are using the story as an excuse in order to get easier, although more time consuming, access to the legendary envoy armor.

And again, you opinion is wrong. You’re conflating two distinct issues.

Nobody (aside from envious players that don’t want anybody else to accomplish what they can’t) will benefit from making legendary armor into another brainless farm achievement.

Nobody (aside from envious players that don’t want anybody else to have what they have) will benefit from keeping legendary armor as an item exclusive to raid-ready players.

Also, telling me my opinion is just my opinion and doesn’t matter is NOT an argument.

Neither is trying to present a fact (ie whether someone else does or does not actually care about the story) as if it is “just your opinion.” You cannot have a valid opinion on whether someone else actually believes something, you can just either right or wrong about it.

I already mentioned the similar barriers in a previous post: need to form a group, 1 person that can take initiative, people must be willing to communicate and listen. And although there are no ‘hard’ requirements for dungeons, you can make the run a lot easier by adjusting your comp and bringing the right build.

But again, it is much easier to clear the dungeons, even the higher difficulty paths, than to clear most of the raid bosses. That you would even question this is a bit suspect, but I won’t go so far as you have to claim that you’re being deliberately disingenuous.

If you can’t clear arah, why didn’t you complain about not being able to ‘experience the story’ before?

I’m not saying that this would apply to every player, but it is perfectly possible for a given player to care about the story being told in the Forsaken Thicket and not care about the story being told in Arah. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Actually any arah path. I’ll give u 500g if you make a video of you randomly pugging Ohoni, arah dungeon 30 minutes just 1 wipe in LFG.

I don’t have video capture software and don’t want it, but I essentially did just that on my first try. It was the one with the reflect crystals, whichever that was.

Yes – and they are enjoying the majority of GW2 content – what they should not expect to do is enjoy ALL the content.
Nor should the developers bend over backwards to make this game more enjoyable to a category of individuals that clearly chose the wrong game if they have severe difficulty in interacting with others.

but it’s not your job to police who this is the “wrong game” for. If they enjoy it then it is the “right game” for them, and if there are enough of them, then while they can’t “expect” the game to shape to their needs, it could be in ANet’s best interests to keep them happy.

How exactly do you gauge “general participation in the game and social media” ? Do you stand in LA and count people?

Active participation in meta events, full maps, LFG queues, active friends lists and guild lists, the same sorts of metrics we’ve been using since launch. It’s difficult to judge absolute population using those, but it’s fairly effective at judging relative populations to other periods in the game’s history.

Does that mean it went down because of raids like you initially suggested?

I didn’t say that it went down because of raids, correlation is not causation, I was only pointing out that it seems to have gone down in spite of raids, so if raids did increase the game’s population in any way, then it hasn’t been enough to offset losses elsewhere.

You seem to have a difficult time understanding. I’ll try to be clearer.
Raids are that ultra-hardcore high-end PvE content that should not have alternative means of reward acquisition.

Just because you say so does not make it so. Even ANet saying so would not make it so, because they can always say something different tomorrow. We can both agree that it’s intended to be challenging content, but that in no way means that they can’t make a less challenging optional version of it, nor that its rewards MUST be exclusive to it. You would like this to be the case, others would like the opposite. There is nothing that it must be.

Are HoT maps weapons and armor harder to acquire than my previous example? No. You might think they are – but they really aren’t.

Some of them definitely were when HoT launched. They are currently a bit easier since they nerfed several areas.

Ok sure – but if we’re going to give everyone a chance in spite of how unfit they are for the initial challenge those stairs and that ramp better be 10 kms long.

Why? Just because of spite? I think you greatly overestimate the value of being able to climb the rope.

I don’t enjoy “farming moas in queensdale” – but if the drops were good and I needed the farm – I would kitten well farm them.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s virtuous content that must be defended at all costs. If the moa drops were good then of course you could choose to farm them, but I also wouldn’t begrudge you appealing to ANet to balance out those rewards with other, more engaging content, so that you would not feel compelled to do content you are not enjoying just in search of the rewards. That’s what customer feedback is for.

It sits well with me and many others.
Why do you get to draw the line? Why is a title fine but a skin isn’t? Why are not both a title and skin unfair? Who exactly gives you the right to tell me what I should and should not get in this game?

If more people are fine with the current system than would prefer something different, then you would be right, but I don’t believe that to be the case. If more people would be bothered by not having access to a title than by not having access to a desired armor skin then you would be right, but I don’t believe that to be the case either. “if ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts. . .”

The change WOULD harm the experience for existing WvW players just like your proposed change to raids – so I don’t consider it. You can’t please everyone all the time.

No, so the goal is to please the most players possible, and I don’t believe that the current system achieves that.

But is your enjoyment worth the chance that you might be wrong? and all the developer resources to make that mode?

Yes, particularly since the devs can continue to tweak it if they miss the mark, as they have already tweaked the raids a few times. Of course I’m not saying that if I don’t like the new easy mode they create, but others do, that they would have to continue tweaking it just to satisfy me, I’m just positing that if I’m not satisfied by it then likely not many others would be either, so continued tweaks would be warranted to make something that works for most players inclined to enjoy such a thing.

I’m not the one that is ruining others enjoyment – it is their own self-imposed incapacity that locks them out of the content and the rewards they seek.

It’s not self-imposed, it’s innate. Your argument is a bit ridiculous, it’s like saying “it’s your fault that you don’t enjoy chocolate, I love chocolate, you’re just choosing to not like it.”

Nobody said that once you hit 80 “it’s all equivalent” – simply that once you hit 80 you don’t have to go VERTICAL anymore. Horizontal however is a whole new story.

Which is exactly my point. You don’t have to keep getting better and better and better. If you’d like to, you can, but the content does not require it of you to advance. If you can do some of the things at level 80, the you can do all of the things at 80, for the most part.

Raids require coordination and concentration at a certain “threshold” level. If you can’t pass it you don’t progress – regardless of time and effort spent. When you wipe your progress is null and you try again.

Your easy mode takes that away because it makes wipes not a concern – so the effort in concentration and focus put in is much lower since the pressure of a wipe isn’t there.

They’re not only taking longer – they’re also having an easier time.

The easier time is the goal, but it’s offset by forcing more repetitions. The number of repetitions required would be intended to be higher than the likely number of times a hard mode player would have to repeat it to “git gud,” and then some. It should take more time and active gameplay within the easy mode raid to clear the reward conditions than it would take, from start to finish, to both learn AND farm the hard mode version. And that’s after the hard mode version gets the head start of hard mode releasing first.

So you are doing something you don’t like for rewards by running CM. Weird comming from you, but even if you do like CM, I think its reasonable that often times rewards make up for playing content you do not like?

Again, going slightly out of one’s way for a reward can be fine and expected, it was a half hour of one day, and if I’d chosen not to do it, I wouldn’t be missing out on a ton anyway. I did it because I felt like doing it. I spent about 1/10th the time in CM that I’ve spent in the raids so far, and accomplished infinitely more for the time. If CM was as frustrating as raiding then I would not have bothered, for any reward.

So an alternative way to get you happily into raiding is actually increasing the rewards, which is something that IMO should happen.

No, increasing the rewards would only make things worse. I could be in favor of increasing the reward quantity, but only if it came alongside an easy mode that allowed other players to receive the same rewards in a lower quantity. I have no problem with raids providing “enough rewards for the time and effort spent,” my only problem is with those rewards ONLY being earned by clearing the existing difficulty of raids.

One wipe allowed? Because otherwise people suddenly get experienced? So you are in fact acknowledging that total strangers can get relevant encounter experience, enough to clear one of the more difficult bosses might I add, in the short time span of half an hour?

In case you missed the analogy, I was comparing the raid to that specific instance of CM, where I ran it with a group that had zero experience with the content and yet managed it with, among other things, only one wipe. I was saying that if people could say the same about VG then maybe I was blowing things out of proportion, but if VG genuinely is much more likely to fail, then there definitely is a gap between dungeons and raids. I don’t think it would make a practical difference if that challenge would allow 5-10 wipes within the 30 minute timeframe, but it kept the analogy clean.

The raid contains more information than the dungeons? Really? That’s false.
If you look at just dialogue lines -there is FAR more information and lore in the dungeons than the raid.

It’s not about the lines of dialog, it’s about the story conveyed. There are silent movies that convey more information than an Aaron Sorkin film.

The problem with your challenge is that raids were designed to NOT be that sort of content. The developers themselves stated at one point that they had prepared “a bucket for our tears” and that raids were never meant to be puggable.

Yes, so now that we’ve defined the problem, that raids ARE much harder and less convenient than dungeons, let’s work towards a solution.

Maybe you’ll realize that Legendary armor is something you’d rather want more than not wanting to form a group.
Or maybe you’ll realize that Legendary armor too is something you’d rather not have.

No, I do want it. I just don’t want to do the current steps to earning it. Not wanting to do the current steps to earning it has absolutely zero impact on whether I want the armor itself, it just means that I’m looking for alternative methods for earning it.

You can’t call his opinion wrong – it’s an opinion.

It’s really not. Tagging “in my opinion” to something doesn’t actually make it an opinion, if the statement is a statement of fact. “In my opinion, horses are all green” is not a valid opinion, it is just being wrong.

“In my opinion, raids are fine as they are” would be a valid opinion, I’d disagree but you’re entitled to it.

“In my opinion the players that claim they want a story mode/easier raid in order to ‘experience the story’ are not being genuine,” is not an opinion, it’s a supposition, and it can be factually incorrect, as this one is.

The fun thing is, if we replace VG with for example the escort or bandit trio, and put in one experienced leader, the raid challenge is probably more doable.

Possibly, but Vale Guardian is the first one, you can’t even get to the Bandit Trio without beating Slothazor, or joining someone who has. The challenge is not to beat any random raid encounter, it’s to beat the first one.

Just sad people are more willing to cry on the forums than to actually work towards something.

I am working towards something, it’s just a different thing than what you’d like.

petyr baelish.9675:

You can’t clear aetherpath while ignoring the encounter mechanics. If you don’t clear the oil fields on slick and sparky or you don’t kill holograms on clockheart, your party will die. Before the HoT release, you weren’t guaranteed to finish aetherpath or arah with completely inexperienced players at all. Heck, before the lupi wall reflect trick became widely known, you pretty much had to be able to solo lupi if you wanted to clear with randoms.

All of you that claim clearing arah for the first time was ‘easy’ are either lying, got carried by their party or are good enough at the game to be able to clear raids with a bit of effort.
Just like how it’s possible to get carried in dungeons, it’s also possible to get carried in raids. I recommend playing revenant and just sword 1111111 with facet of nature and fury on. Swap to staff and use 5 for the breakbar. Nobody will notice that you’re dogkitten. You will be needed in every encounter. You won’t have to worry about any of the ‘special’ mechanics, since those are generally covered by other classes. All you have to do is stay alive and press 1.

You are wrong, You can skip tons of mechanics due to the power creep, When I do aetherpath (yes we are raiders) We don’t do ooze, in fact we normally have the ooze killed by the time we killed sparki. The next boss’s, whoever that guy who does the spin to win attack is called. Normally people probably pull mobs off to kill them, Nope we go in, kill mobs + boss no problem. Again skipping that ‘mechanic’ (it still technically is one), As for the final boss you can skip the holograms with enough dps. You only need to time the CC break to right before he starts gaining stacks, pretty simple.

Ohoni,

on your last sentiment what you believe is not necessarily the truth, I have only ever seen you and about 3 other people complain on the forums about this issue, if that is any indication of how you are trying the skew this vs the bigger number of people against such a change. Its really easy to talk about unnamed players that don’t speak up to validate your point, it’s like me saying I have so many people in all 5 of my guild slots that love the challenge it has been to work towards the Envoy Armor, and that if others haven’t put forth effort to the already released prerequisites to acquire then they don’t deserve to acquire it.

Again just because you want something to be so doesn’t mean it is, most people I know are fine with the current system the only piece that some of them don’t agree upon is the number of Provisooner tokens and number of LI needed. Just wait for your preferred game mode to get a legendary armor variant, more players have waited longer for rewards for their preferred gamemode or waited years for their gamemode to exist.

I don’t care. I’m not a fan of the “You can’t have this armor skin because I want to feel like I’m better than other players” ideology. If you need some special indication that you’re better than other players, then it’s ok that ANet enable you, but it should do so using something like a title or nametag flair or other non-skin method. Your desire to show off should not trump other players desire to have the armor skins they want.

everyone can have the armor, the “quest & difficulty” is for everyone the same.
if you can’t beat the raid, you can’t get the armor.

did you ever complain about the glorious hero armor?
(http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glorious_Hero's_armor)
if not i give you a quest. go on write 1000 texts in the pvp forum how unfair it is that this armorskin is only unlockable through high class pvp playing / tournaments.

you will probably get the same answer from them.

as blaquefyre said, out of all the ppl i spoke with ingame, all of them are fine with the system.
no need to go full whiteknight for people who don’t even share their opinion with you.
you can only speak for yourself, yet you constantly speak for all the casuals.

most of them don’t even care about that. if they want the armor, they are already into raiding and doing their stuff, without any easy way, and they do it.

protipp for you: get a rev, get him asc trinkets + weapons. go into raid, press f2 and facet with fury up. press 111111.
if breakbar comes up, switch to staff, press 5, switch back to sword.

nobody will even see that your dmg will suck as hell, yet you do your job as revenant.
99% of the mechanics will be carried out by others.

is as easy as it gets.

Guys, stop getting into Ohoni’s pace. Seriously.
He has his own point of view and he won’t change, no matter what you say.

Yes, it could be pretty tempting, but it’s pointless. He’s the kind of guy who always want to have the last words. Just… save your energy and hope ArenaNet understands that they don’t need to cater to his specific needs.

@Ohoni:

Dungeons DO have more story to them than raids do. For example, you can see all the dialogue for the arah exp mode here https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ruined_City_of_Arah_. Compare it to that of spirit vale https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spirit_Vale And you’ll see that there is about as much story and lore to experience in a single dungeon path as there is in an entire raid wing.

Imo i’m not making that big of a stretch by comparing the difficulty of arah or aetherpath with that of a raid. These paths even have some crude mechanics that require some coordination or awareness of your environment, similar (but simpler, I’m not saying they’re the same) to those of raids. Sure, raids are harder, but I remain convinced a player that managed to complete said dungeons will be able to complete raids if he’s willing to try.

You can only be envious when somebody has something that you don’t have.

You’re just saying whatever you want without providing any proper arguments and you dismiss other people’s arguments by stating they’re wrong or their opinion doesn’t matter. I cannot believe you’re this arrogant with seemingly nothing to back it up, aside from your ‘elaborate vocabulary’ and talent of typing walls of text with 0 substance.

Also, don’t try to prostrate yourself as the champion of the casuals or claim that the majority of the playerbase actually shares your opinion. I doubt the majority is as narrow minded as you or gives a kitten about anything tied to raids.

Now you’ll claim I resort to kittentalking because I can’t come up with anything else. The fact of the matter is that I tried to have a reasonable discussion, but you don’t want to have a discussion at all. Inb4 ‘no’, ’you’re wrong’ and ’that’s just your opinion’.

edit: There is nothing wrong with being proud of your accomplishments and wishing to display them, even if it’s ‘just’ a videogame. You almost make it seem like a crime. Envious indeed.

@Leezy:

What did you do in all these years before HoT powercreep made dungeons irrelevant? If you couldn’t complete the dungeons back then were you ok with not being able to ‘experience’ their story?

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Ohoni,

on your last sentiment what you believe is not necessarily the truth, I have only ever seen you and about 3 other people complain on the forums about this issue, if that is any indication of how you are trying the skew this vs the bigger number of people against such a change. Its really easy to talk about unnamed players that don’t speak up to validate your point, it’s like me saying I have so many people in all 5 of my guild slots that love the challenge it has been to work towards the Envoy Armor, and that if others haven’t put forth effort to the already released prerequisites to acquire then they don’t deserve to acquire it.

Again just because you want something to be so doesn’t mean it is, most people I know are fine with the current system the only piece that some of them don’t agree upon is the number of Provisooner tokens and number of LI needed. Just wait for your preferred game mode to get a legendary armor variant, more players have waited longer for rewards for their preferred gamemode or waited years for their gamemode to exist.

Even though I disagree with most of Ohoni’s points, raids do have accessibility issues and I think it’s safe to say what we see here on both sides of the argument are just the vocal minority.

I’m saying this based on this poll: http://www.strawpoll.me/10553512/r

Now, I don’t know what is stopping the majority of people to get into raids, but in it’s current form it looks like it’s inaccessible for most people for whatever reason. (which is a shame because raids are an awesome piece of content)

On a level, I have to agree with them. Getting into raiding after months it was out was pain in the kitten, I can only imagine how hard it is now. If there was an easy mode that allows people to master each boss’s mechanic from the first phase to the last a lot more people could get into raiding than now (imo)

I like Option 3: Continue with the status quo.

If you want easy content, you have the entire game.

I’ll ask this question on every one of these threads I see. Give me your 30 second answer — no one likes reading walls of text.

Why does this content, in particular, need an easy mode?

Ohoni.6057:

but it’s not your job to police who this is the “wrong game” for. If they enjoy it then it is the “right game” for them, and if there are enough of them, then while they can’t “expect” the game to shape to their needs, it could be in ANet’s best interests to keep them happy.

Your whole argument is based on the fact that people are NOT enjoying grouping up with others. If they don’t it isn’t the right game for them. If they do it is and there’s no problem.

Ohoni.6057:

Active participation in meta events, full maps, LFG queues, active friends lists and guild lists, the same sorts of metrics we’ve been using since launch. It’s difficult to judge absolute population using those, but it’s fairly effective at judging relative populations to other periods in the game’s history.

This is skewed – because populations shift. You might have emptier maps because of the PvP season and not because people aren’t playing. Or longer queues because people have finished their backpiece and stopped playing PvP. You really can’t tell with your methods.

Ohoni.6057:

I didn’t say that it went down because of raids, correlation is not causation, I was only pointing out that it seems to have gone down in spite of raids, so if raids did increase the game’s population in any way, then it hasn’t been enough to offset losses elsewhere.

It would have gone down in spite of anything – if it indeed went down – because all MMO expansions follow this pattern. The quality of HoT contributed to this greatly.

Ohoni.6057:

Just because you say so does not make it so. Even ANet saying so would not make it so, because they can always say something different tomorrow. We can both agree that it’s intended to be challenging content, but that in no way means that they can’t make a less challenging optional version of it, nor that its rewards MUST be exclusive to it. You would like this to be the case, others would like the opposite. There is nothing that it must be.

I agree we can make a less challenging optional version (Anet can) but I can’t agree that we should make it. In fact I believe this should not be made because it would be a waste of resources.
I believe there are too few people like you – who under no circumstance would consider raiding now but would jump on it when Ez mode drops.

Ohoni.6057:

Some of them definitely were when HoT launched. They are currently a bit easier since they nerfed several areas.

I honestly think you’re joking. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get fractal weapons pre-HoT?

Ohoni.6057:

Why? Just because of spite? I think you greatly overestimate the value of being able to climb the rope.

Not spite mate – because things have to be earned. In the real world you have to be worth something if you’re going to get things.
There might be no value in climbing the rope – but if climbing the rope is the only way to get up – the value is there – at the end of the climb. If you can’t make the climb – tough luck.

Ohoni.6057:

But that doesn’t mean that it’s virtuous content that must be defended at all costs. If the moa drops were good then of course you could choose to farm them, but I also wouldn’t begrudge you appealing to ANet to balance out those rewards with other, more engaging content, so that you would not feel compelled to do content you are not enjoying just in search of the rewards. That’s what customer feedback is for.

You say this now – but we all know how well received “give us raids” threads were back when the CDIs were up.

Ohoni.6057:

If more people are fine with the current system than would prefer something different, then you would be right, but I don’t believe that to be the case. If more people would be bothered by not having access to a title than by not having access to a desired armor skin then you would be right, but I don’t believe that to be the case either. “if ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts. . .”

So why does it matter what you believe? I believe that is the case. We both believe whatever we want. Your opinion doesn’t matter and neither does mine.

Earlier you shut down somebody for stating an opinion and said “your opinion is wrong” – yet somehow we’re supposed to accept yours – when you believe this or that about the player base and argue and speculate what might be instead of just telling you off with “you’re wrong now stop posting”.

Ohoni.6057:

No, so the goal is to please the most players possible, and I don’t believe that the current system achieves that.

Again – bringing forward lots of arguments to support your claims. A few threads here and there aren’t actually evidence. There are tons of “I like raids threads”. And even if there weren’t all that you can prove is that the vocal minority that spams the forums with raid QQ isn’t happy with the current system – but you can’t really say anything about the real majority of in-game players because you have no access to metrics.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, particularly since the devs can continue to tweak it if they miss the mark, as they have already tweaked the raids a few times. Of course I’m not saying that if I don’t like the new easy mode they create, but others do, that they would have to continue tweaking it just to satisfy me, I’m just positing that if I’m not satisfied by it then likely not many others would be either, so continued tweaks would be warranted to make something that works for most players inclined to enjoy such a thing.

And I’m going to say no – because wasting developer resources was something that Anet did and it bit them back hard. LS1 and the whole LS at the beginning put them in a very bad spot. It was a gambit and it didn’t pay off – and they’ve been playing catch-up ever since. The last thing we need in this content drought is more gambles taken in order to try and please you.

To put it simply: I don’t think you and others would be enough to warrant this allocation of resources. When they could simply make MORE content for everyone else.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s not self-imposed, it’s innate. Your argument is a bit ridiculous, it’s like saying “it’s your fault that you don’t enjoy chocolate, I love chocolate, you’re just choosing to not like it.”

It is self-imposed. Because you’re a human being and a human being has willpower. You can choose to do something for a reason even if you don’t like it. If you want the reward badly enough anyway.

You might hate chocolate but for 1 million USD you’d eat as much as you could. It just proves that the raid rewards either don’t matter enough to you.

Ohoni.6057:

Which is exactly my point. You don’t have to keep getting better and better and better. If you’d like to, you can, but the content does not require it of you to advance. If you can do some of the things at level 80, the you can do all of the things at 80, for the most part.

Wow. You take what I write and understand what you want from it.
Vertical progression means progression that is tied to gear – it means getting a sword that has a +3 instead of a +2. That progression is capped in GW2.
However improving as a player doesn’t qualify as gear grind or vertical progression – it is a skill you the player develop.

GW2 was never designed to have a cap on how good you need to be and then you could just not bother getting better.
It was designed to have a level cap and a vertical gear cap so that you wouldn’t have to farm all day every day to get better gear.
Getting better as a player is an entirely different thing – and I doubt any game wants to cap its player base’s skill level.

Ohoni.6057:

The easier time is the goal, but it’s offset by forcing more repetitions. The number of repetitions required would be intended to be higher than the likely number of times a hard mode player would have to repeat it to “git gud,” and then some. It should take more time and active gameplay within the easy mode raid to clear the reward conditions than it would take, from start to finish, to both learn AND farm the hard mode version. And that’s after the hard mode version gets the head start of hard mode releasing first.

Yeah – sure – as long as it takes the easy mode players 300 pulls of easy mode VG to get 1 hard mode VG pull’s worth of rewards – I totally see where you’re going.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s not about the lines of dialog, it’s about the story conveyed. There are silent movies that convey more information than an Aaron Sorkin film.

And how exactly do raids convey more story than dungeons? Please enlighten me.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, so now that we’ve defined the problem, that raids ARE much harder and less convenient than dungeons, let’s work towards a solution.

Except it’s NOT a problem and there’s no need for a solution. If it’s a problem for you then go ahead and find yourself a solution but don’t demand the game be changed because you’re too lazy to find it.

Ohoni.6057:

No, I do want it. I just don’t want to do the current steps to earning it. Not wanting to do the current steps to earning it has absolutely zero impact on whether I want the armor itself, it just means that I’m looking for alternative methods for earning it.

Then you just don’t want it enough. If your life or the life of a loved one depended on raiding you’d be raiding with the best of them. Not wanting to do the current content means you don’t consider the armor sufficiently worth it for you to be bothered to get out of your comfort zone.
Instead you’re looking for handouts on the forum.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s really not. Tagging “in my opinion” to something doesn’t actually make it an opinion, if the statement is a statement of fact. “In my opinion, horses are all green” is not a valid opinion, it is just being wrong.
“In my opinion, raids are fine as they are” would be a valid opinion, I’d disagree but you’re entitled to it.

This might get philosophical but opinions are subjective. One might perceive all horses are green and thus from his perspective his opinion would be valid.
To dismiss an opinion you have to have access to objective unquestionable truth – but as a human being yourself you don’t have that. So – while his opinion might be “wrong” – you have no right to dismiss it – because it’s HIS perception of the situation vs YOURS. 1 on 1.

You need a bit more to be able to swing the pendulum one way or another.

Ohoni.6057:

“In my opinion the players that claim they want a story mode/easier raid in order to ‘experience the story’ are not being genuine,” is not an opinion, it’s a supposition, and it can be factually incorrect, as this one is.

Is it now? and how can you prove that it is factually incorrect? – Are you somehow inside the head of every player that claim they want a story mode and know for a fact they are all genuine in their plight and don’t just want easy rewards?

Ohoni.6057:

I am working towards something, it’s just a different thing than what you’d like.

Good luck with that. I’ll be here working against you every step of the way.

on your last sentiment what you believe is not necessarily the truth, I have only ever seen you and about 3 other people complain on the forums about this issue, if that is any indication of how you are trying the skew this vs the bigger number of people against such a change. Its really easy to talk about unnamed players that don’t speak up to validate your point, it’s like me saying I have so many people in all 5 of my guild slots that love the challenge it has been to work towards the Envoy Armor, and that if others haven’t put forth effort to the already released prerequisites to acquire then they don’t deserve to acquire it.

Blaquefyre, we are not debating relative numbers. That is something neither of us can prove with any degree of certainty, but ANet should be aware of without us telling them. If you’re right and more people love raiding than don’t, then they should do nothing. If I’m right and more people are dissatisfied with the current state of raiding than love it, then something should be done, and the discussion is around what should be done about that.

everyone can have the armor, the “quest & difficulty” is for everyone the same.
if you can’t beat the raid, you can’t get the armor.

I don’t know how you could think I didn’t already know that. Of course I know that, which is why I’m working so hard to change it.

did you ever complain about the glorious hero armor?
(http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glorious_Hero's_armor)
if not i give you a quest. go on write 1000 texts in the pvp forum how unfair it is that this armorskin is only unlockable through high class pvp playing / tournaments.

I did, but it was years ago, and since Glorious Hero’s armor is not a significant improvement on Glorious armor, and I already have all that I want of that, it’s not a priority for me. If it’s someone else’s priority though then I would not try to shut them down.

Dungeons DO have more story to them than raids do. For example, you can see all the dialogue for the arah exp mode here https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ruined_City_of_Arah. Compare it to that of spirit vale https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/SpiritVale And you’ll see that there is about as much story and lore to experience in a single dungeon path as there is in an entire raid wing.

Again, “lines of dialog” != “story.”

Imo i’m not making that big of a stretch by comparing the difficulty of arah or aetherpath with that of a raid.

But you’re wrong, because it is. It’s possible that on a single player level, the skill expected of you is not that much higher on Raids than on certain dungeon encounters, but given the tuning and the bump to ten players, there’s a lot more than can go wrong and cause a wipe. The practical difficulty of the raid bosses is clearly higher, at least for most of them.

Sure, raids are harder, but I remain convinced a player that managed to complete said dungeons will be able to complete raids if he’s willing to try.

Again, that “willing to try” is a pretty broad category. I’ve “tried” VG and Gorseval. I have not beat either. What you mean to say is “willing to spend many hours running them over and over and over and eventually, if the rest of the group is decent, you might clear it.” Well I’m sorry, that sort of “train to git gud” mentality is just not something that will ever interest me. I am a better player than I was when HoT came out, and was then a better player than a year before, and the year before that, I do keep improving, but I do so at my own pace, by succeeding at content I enjoy over and over, not by failing at content that I hate over and over. I will never become capable of embracing the sort of mindset necessary for enjoying the “raiding experience” that so many of you seem to enjoy, it is just not a taste that is compatible with me.

So I’m not trying to take your raiding experience away from you, if that’s what you enjoy, then great, keep enjoying it, but I want something different, and will continue to push for that. I will NEVER want what you want from it, and no amount of convincing will ever move me closer to wanting that.

Why does this content, in particular, need an easy mode?

Because the currently available mode is too hard.

Your whole argument is based on the fact that people are NOT enjoying grouping up with others. If they don’t it isn’t the right game for them. If they do it is and there’s no problem.

but this isn’t a game where you HAVE to group with others effectively to do most of the content. That’s the issue with raids, if this game were ALL raids, then of course you should be expected to have a raider mentality if you want to play the game at all, but if most of the game does not require a raider mentality at even the most basic level, and then this particular activity does require that, and in so doing gates off story elements and desirable rewards, then why shouldn’t players be upset, if they enjoy 90% of the game but are blocked off from elements of it that they would like to have by content that is out of step with everything else?

You might have emptier maps because of the PvP season and not because people aren’t playing.

Unlikely, considering that PvP queues are hella long. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say that the active PvP League participation this season is at half or less what it was in season 1, when the PvE maps were also more active. If the same number of players are just distributed differently then they are doing an excellent job of hiding themselves.

It would have gone down in spite of anything – if it indeed went down – because all MMO expansions follow this pattern. The quality of HoT contributed to this greatly.

But some were making the case that the raids were drawing in tons of people, and yet the population declines seemed to increase as more and more raid content came out. Again, not saying the raids are the cause of that, just that they don’t appear to have had any positive impact either.

I believe there are too few people like you – who under no circumstance would consider raiding now but would jump on it when Ez mode drops.

Well, again, that’s something rather pointless to argue about, since our only options are to repeat “I disagree” using various wording. ANet has the numbers, or at least the means to gather them, they are in the best position to determine relative numbers. Scorpio’s poll is interesting though, given that within the sample group (however representative it may be), roughly twice as many people have tried raiding and decided it was not for them, or plan to raid but haven’t yet, than are currently enjoying the raids.

Well what would be stopping those people from currently enjoying raids? They are clearly interested in the raid to some degree, and if they enjoyed it then they would likely be doing it already, so it stands to reason that what would be holding them back is a gameplay experience that they don’t feel prepared for. An easier version, well executed, would be likely to engage these players. They might even then move on from that to “proper” raids, but if not they would at least be entertained.

I honestly think you’re joking. Do you have any idea how hard it was to get fractal weapons pre-HoT?

Pretty easy, they were random drops form running Fractals. The odds were not in your favor though.

Not spite mate – because things have to be earned. In the real world you have to be worth something if you’re going to get things.

Yeah, which is why people play games, because the real world kinda sucks.

There might be no value in climbing the rope – but if climbing the rope is the only way to get up – the value is there – at the end of the climb. If you can’t make the climb – tough luck.

Which is why you add the ramp, to provide alternatives.

You say this now – but we all know how well received “give us raids” threads were back when the CDIs were up.

Mostly because in those threads raiders fully expected to get things like Legendary armor from raiding, and we knew how that would turn out. I didn’t have an issue with raids themselves, but I did have an issue with raider mentality getting its claws into the game, and it turned out I was right.

And I’m going to say no – because wasting developer resources was something that Anet did and it bit them back hard.

Well sure, the raids were a waste of resources and it did bite them hard, but they can work to correct that by expanding to easy mode versions, so that more of the players can participate in them.

To put it simply: I don’t think you and others would be enough to warrant this allocation of resources. When they could simply make MORE content for everyone else.

However many resources it would take to implement easy mode raids, it cannot possibly be as much as it takes to implement original content of equivalent scale. More content is better, but making easy mode raids is a very efficient way to deliver more content. It’s the same reason they added 50 new Fractal scales rather than adding a dozen completely new Fractals.

It is self-imposed. Because you’re a human being and a human being has willpower. You can choose to do something for a reason even if you don’t like it. If you want the reward badly enough anyway.

You might hate chocolate but for 1 million USD you’d eat as much as you could. It just proves that the raid rewards either don’t matter enough to you.

Yes, but again, this is a game, not a punishment, and players should never feel the need to do things that they do not enjoy for significant periods of time just to get rewards that they want. You can argue that there are already places in the game where this happens, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and it is those elements that should be changed, rather than the other way around.

GW2 was never designed to have a cap on how good you need to be and then you could just not bother getting better.

No, it pretty much was. Once you get to 80 you can farm moas in Queensdale or tackle world bosses or whatever you like, it’s a variety of different offerings, not a progression of higher and higher difficulties.

Yeah – sure – as long as it takes the easy mode players 300 pulls of easy mode VG to get 1 hard mode VG pull’s worth of rewards – I totally see where you’re going.

Again, you vastly overestimate the value of climbing the rope. You’re like a minimum wage Walmart clerk that is demanding a $100K salary because you feel that the job you do is just that important. Beating the VG on hard is not worth 300 clears on easy. It’s worth maybe ten, and even that is being exceptionally generous. Your efforts are not worth anythign remotely near what you insist that they are.

And how exactly do raids convey more story than dungeons? Please enlighten me.

Through the progression of the events, the lore achievements, the layouts of the maps, it’s kind of sad that you’re so into raids and yet you’re missing all that’s around you.

If it’s a problem for you then go ahead and find yourself a solution but don’t demand the game be changed because you’re too lazy to find it.

My solution IS to demand the game be changed. There’s no solution to be found within the existing code.

Then you just don’t want it enough. If your life or the life of a loved one depended on raiding you’d be raiding with the best of them.

Sure, but I still certainly wouldn’t enjoy raiding. The goal is to make it an enjoyable gaming experience, something I’d prefer to playing something else. Content that someone would be willing to do if they had a gun to their head should certainly not be the developer’s target.

This might get philosophical but opinions are subjective. One might perceive all horses are green and thus from his perspective his opinion would be valid.

Nope, even if someone does honestly perceive all horses as being green, their perceptions are objectively incorrect, because “green” has a commonly understood meaning, and horses, most of them at least, do not meet that standard. If one holds your standard of subjectivity then objectivity would not exist in any form, because people could just invent their own definitions for anything and hold conversations that have no relevance to anyone else. There are many things that can be opinion, and people are entitled to those, but there are also many things that have an objective truth, and on those, there are right and wrong answers.

So – while his opinion might be “wrong” – you have no right to dismiss it – because it’s HIS perception of the situation vs YOURS. 1 on 1.

But if his perception is that he believes that I believe a certain thing, and I do not in fact believe that certain thing, then it is a fact that his perception is wrong.

Is it now? and how can you prove that it is factually incorrect?

Because I’m one of those players, and I do not believe it. Now if he’d said , " some of the players that claim. . ." the he might be right, or even " most of the players that claim. . ." I would disagree with, but is still somewhat possible, but what he actually did say was “the players that claim. . .” which is factually incorrect.

Irrelevant – we must counter him every step of the way until he decides to call it quits and retreats back to wherever he came from.

That’s really not a constructive response to consumer feedback.

Harper.4173:

LegACy.1296:

Guys, stop getting into Ohoni’s pace. Seriously.
He has his own point of view and he won’t change, no matter what you say.

Yes, it could be pretty tempting, but it’s pointless. He’s the kind of guy who always want to have the last words. Just… save your energy and hope ArenaNet understands that they don’t need to cater to his specific needs.

Irrelevant – we must counter him every step of the way until he decides to call it quits and retreats back to wherever he came from.
He’s human and thus will at one point cease. We have to keep going until that point is reached.

hmm, what will happen is most probably the thread is closed (it’s what happen with him usually…)

Ohoni.6057:

on your last sentiment what you believe is not necessarily the truth, I have only ever seen you and about 3 other people complain on the forums about this issue, if that is any indication of how you are trying the skew this vs the bigger number of people against such a change. Its really easy to talk about unnamed players that don’t speak up to validate your point, it’s like me saying I have so many people in all 5 of my guild slots that love the challenge it has been to work towards the Envoy Armor, and that if others haven’t put forth effort to the already released prerequisites to acquire then they don’t deserve to acquire it.

Blaquefyre, we are not debating relative numbers. That is something neither of us can prove with any degree of certainty, but ANet should be aware of without us telling them. If you’re right and more people love raiding than don’t, then they should do nothing. If I’m right and more people are dissatisfied with the current state of raiding than love it, then something should be done, and the discussion is around what should be done about that.

everyone can have the armor, the “quest & difficulty” is for everyone the same.
if you can’t beat the raid, you can’t get the armor.

I don’t know how you could think I didn’t already know that. Of course I know that, which is why I’m working so hard to change it.

did you ever complain about the glorious hero armor?
(http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Glorious_Hero's_armor)
if not i give you a quest. go on write 1000 texts in the pvp forum how unfair it is that this armorskin is only unlockable through high class pvp playing / tournaments.

I did, but it was years ago, and since Glorious Hero’s armor is not a significant improvement on Glorious armor, and I already have all that I want of that, it’s not a priority for me. If it’s someone else’s priority though then I would not try to shut them down.

Dungeons DO have more story to them than raids do. For example, you can see all the dialogue for the arah exp mode here https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Ruined_City_of_Arah. Compare it to that of spirit vale https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/SpiritVale And you’ll see that there is about as much story and lore to experience in a single dungeon path as there is in an entire raid wing.

Again, “lines of dialog” != “story.”

Imo i’m not making that big of a stretch by comparing the difficulty of arah or aetherpath with that of a raid.

But you’re wrong, because it is. It’s possible that on a single player level, the skill expected of you is not that much higher on Raids than on certain dungeon encounters, but given the tuning and the bump to ten players, there’s a lot more than can go wrong and cause a wipe. The practical difficulty of the raid bosses is clearly higher, at least for most of them.

Sure, raids are harder, but I remain convinced a player that managed to complete said dungeons will be able to complete raids if he’s willing to try.

Again, that “willing to try” is a pretty broad category. I’ve “tried” VG and Gorseval. I have not beat either. What you mean to say is “willing to spend many hours running them over and over and over and eventually, if the rest of the group is decent, you might clear it.” Well I’m sorry, that sort of “train to git gud” mentality is just not something that will ever interest me. I am a better player than I was when HoT came out, and was then a better player than a year before, and the year before that, I do keep improving, but I do so at my own pace, by succeeding at content I enjoy over and over, not by failing at content that I hate over and over. I will never become capable of embracing the sort of mindset necessary for enjoying the “raiding experience” that so many of you seem to enjoy, it is just not a taste that is compatible with me.

So I’m not trying to take your raiding experience away from you, if that’s what you enjoy, then great, keep enjoying it, but I want something different, and will continue to push for that. I will NEVER want what you want from it, and no amount of convincing will ever move me closer to wanting that.

I’m not claiming more lines of dialog means more story either. What I’m saying is that the story for those paths is both deeper and more fleshed out than the story for raids. If you had actually clicked the links and read the story you may have understood that.

If you make legendary envoy armor accessible to everybody, you actually would be taking something away from raiders. Raids are enjoyable by themselves but if you take away the prestige of the legendary armor, you’d take away that warm fuzzy feeling people will get when they finally complete the armor.

I can see 1 reason for why somebody that clearly dislikes everything about raids is so interested in them: you want the rewards. If story was your main motivator you wouldn’t throw such a fuss and just read about it on the wiki or in a cleared instance. At the very least you would be satisfied with a story mode that has a low reward, like 50 silver.

Raids ARE quite accessible, there are already plenty of posts that cover this so I won’t elaborate. The perceived barrier of entry is much lower than the actual barrier for entering raids. If you’re patient enough, you can participate in training runs and low requirement kill runs for every boss, without ever having to speak a word or starting your own group. You can significantly speed up the process by taking some initiative and starting your own groups or joining a guild.

Edit: I love how you separate 2 sentences that immediately follow and complement each other and then address each of them out of context, just so you can make it seem like I’m saying something I’m not and you can make a point about it. Crafty.

Lets get this back on track for a second because CLEARLY the point has been missed here:

This is not about gear, this is not about taking away the difficulty or the challenge raiders enjoy, this is not about giving more access to legendary armor…

This is about letting people who “want” to raid, for the enjoyment of the STORY enjoy actually doing it at a relaxed and leisurely pace so that they can enjoy the content rather than having to find 9 people capable of being as dedicated to the game as they want to be

Can we focus on the actual topic instead of deviating the topic to derail things?

@CaptainVanguard

If that is truly what you want, you can have it. But I doubt enough people will play it in order for it to be worth the effort. And that is the problem. Even the people that want to have a raid story mode, aren’t convinced enough players will play it for it to be worth the development time. That’s why they want a reward for completing the story raid. And not just 50s, the same reward you get for completing a story dungeon. No, they want to be rewarded with one of the most prestigious items in the game, the legendary armor. That way your ‘raid story mode’ will become the ‘mindlessly farm for legendary armor mode’. This is why I’m convinced that many of the people that advocate for the raid story mode because they ‘want to experience the story’, aren’t being genuine and just want an easy way to get legendary armor.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Lets get this back on track for a second because CLEARLY the point has been missed here:

This is not about gear, this is not about taking away the difficulty or the challenge raiders enjoy, this is not about giving more access to legendary armor…

This is about letting people who “want” to raid, for the enjoyment of the STORY enjoy actually doing it at a relaxed and leisurely pace so that they can enjoy the content rather than having to find 9 people capable of being as dedicated to the game as they want to be

Can we focus on the actual topic instead of deviating the topic to derail things?

You have personal story to enjoy story.

You have living world to enjoy story.

There’s easier group content if that’s your thing.

You have all you want already. And it’s fine to want more of that. But don’t destroy raids in the process.

CaptainVanguard.4925:

Lets get this back on track for a second because CLEARLY the point has been missed here:

This is not about gear, this is not about taking away the difficulty or the challenge raiders enjoy, this is not about giving more access to legendary armor…

This is about letting people who “want” to raid, for the enjoyment of the STORY enjoy actually doing it at a relaxed and leisurely pace so that they can enjoy the content rather than having to find 9 people capable of being as dedicated to the game as they want to be

Can we focus on the actual topic instead of deviating the topic to derail things?

Raid, Relaxed, Leisurely pace….something here doesn’t quite belong.

Besides there’s this handy tool called youtube. The Raid story is there. The fights themselves contain 0 story.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, “lines of dialog” != “story.”

How do you define story?
If not by actual in-game dialogue, text or custcenes – what?

Ohoni.6057:

But you’re wrong, because it is. It’s possible that on a single player level, the skill expected of you is not that much higher on Raids than on certain dungeon encounters, but given the tuning and the bump to ten players, there’s a lot more than can go wrong and cause a wipe. The practical difficulty of the raid bosses is clearly higher, at least for most of them.

Have you actually raided? Because I’m going to tell you this is not the case. On a single player level the skill required of you is much lower in dungeons than in raids.
Do you raid now?

Ohoni.6057:

Well I’m sorry, that sort of “train to git gud” mentality is just not something that will ever interest me.

Just like Legendary armor right mate?

Ohoni.6057:

, but I do so at my own pace, by succeeding at content I enjoy over and over, not by failing at content that I hate over and over.

Then there’s no problem – a few years form now I’m sure you’ll have VG on farm.

Ohoni.6057:

So I’m not trying to take your raiding experience away from you, if that’s what you enjoy, then great, keep enjoying it, but I want something different, and will continue to push for that. I will NEVER want what you want from it, and no amount of convincing will ever move me closer to wanting that.

Cool story. You might be here for quite a wait.

Ohoni.6057:

Because the currently available mode is too hard.

Do you get to define too hard? Why is it “too hard” and not “too easy”?

Ohoni.6057:

but this isn’t a game where you HAVE to group with others effectively to do most of the content. That’s the issue with raids, if this game were ALL raids, then of course you should be expected to have a raider mentality if you want to play the game at all, but if most of the game does not require a raider mentality at even the most basic level, and then this particular activity does require that, and in so doing gates off story elements and desirable rewards, then why shouldn’t players be upset, if they enjoy 90% of the game but are blocked off from elements of it that they would like to have by content that is out of step with everything else?

Because they already have 90% of the game to do whatever they want in – this last 10% is also for them BUT only if they improve adapt and get better. That’s why they shouldn’t be upset. Because we were expected to suck it up with no real “hardcore” content for 3 years – and nobody really cared that wasn’t fun for us.

Ohoni.6057:

Unlikely, considering that PvP queues are hella long. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say that the active PvP League participation this season is at half or less what it was in season 1, when the PvE maps were also more active. If the same number of players are just distributed differently then they are doing an excellent job of hiding themselves.

That’s mostly because people are done with the backpiece now – season 3 is where most of the people finished it. Also – you’re just giving opinions and can’t give any numbers – so let’s not imagine things into existence here shall we?

Ohoni.6057:

But some were making the case that the raids were drawing in tons of people, and yet the population declines seemed to increase as more and more raid content came out. Again, not saying the raids are the cause of that, just that they don’t appear to have had any positive impact either.

And they were – but not necessarily new players. A lot of people have tried raids – and many have stuck with them. There are new players coming in just for raids – but I don’t expect a HUGe influx.

You still fail to realize you have yet to provide any hard factual evidence that supports your “population decline” hypothesis.
On top of that more raid content comes out as time goes on. If there was a population decline because of other reasons ( like the content drought – discontinuation of legendary weapons, etc) that would also get worse over time – but this doesn’t mean that the two are related or that one caused the other.

You’re trying to be deliberately misleading. Stop.

Ohoni.6057:

Well, again, that’s something rather pointless to argue about, since our only options are to repeat “I disagree” using various wording. ANet has the numbers, or at least the means to gather them, they are in the best position to determine relative numbers. Scorpio’s poll is interesting though, given that within the sample group (however representative it may be), roughly twice as many people have tried raiding and decided it was not for them, or plan to raid but haven’t yet, than are currently enjoying the raids.

And here you go and ignore the fact that one huge category said haven’t but are planning to – which means you can easily look at it my way and lob them into the “raid friendly” camp.
That way roughly 2x as many players raid or plan on raiding than those that tried it and didn’t like it.

Ohoni.6057:

Well what would be stopping those people from currently enjoying raids? They are clearly interested in the raid to some degree, and if they enjoyed it then they would likely be doing it already, so it stands to reason that what would be holding them back is a gameplay experience that they don’t feel prepared for. An easier version, well executed, would be likely to engage these players. They might even then move on from that to “proper” raids, but if not they would at least be entertained.

Perhaps they are interested in raids only because they are as hard as they are now and would not be interested if the experience was changed and made “easier” as you suggest. You have no way of knowing. Perhaps your “easier version” will have the opposite effect and make them abandon raids entirely because “every baddie can do them now”.
Maybe they want to raid for the exclusive rewards and “bragging rights”.
Perhaps what’s holding them back are time constraints, lack of gear, or other real-life factors.
Stop trying to spin your narrative on these numbers.

Ohoni.6057:

Pretty easy, they were random drops form running Fractals. The odds were not in your favor though.

“Pretty easy” – except it wasn’t easy. Ask people how much work went into a full set.

Ohoni.6057:

Yeah, which is why people play games, because the real world kinda sucks.

And in comparison don’t you think GW2 sucks a whole lot less? Still – the same general principles apply.

Ohoni.6057:

Which is why you add the ramp, to provide alternatives.

Or you don’t – and people bother to actually get decent at rope climbing. Or if they can’t because of some physical reason just accept that rope climbing and associated benefits are not for them.

Ohoni.6057:

Mostly because in those threads raiders fully expected to get things like Legendary armor from raiding, and we knew how that would turn out. I didn’t have an issue with raids themselves, but I did have an issue with raider mentality getting its claws into the game, and it turned out I was right.

Ohoni.6057:

You’re saying you’re right. Sure. The “Raided mentality” is fine. If YOU have a problem with it it is YOUR problem.

Ohoni.6057:

Well sure, the raids were a waste of resources and it did bite them hard, but they can work to correct that by expanding to easy mode versions, so that more of the players can participate in them.

I was talking about LS season 1 – that was a waste of resources. That and the NPE+China release.

Ohoni.6057:

However many resources it would take to implement easy mode raids, it cannot possibly be as much as it takes to implement original content of equivalent scale. More content is better, but making easy mode raids is a very efficient way to deliver more content. It’s the same reason they added 50 new Fractal scales rather than adding a dozen completely new Fractals.

Yeah – and look how well that worked out for fractals.
It might be easier to scale existing content but the question is :are there enough people that care about this “rescaled version” or are you spending time catering to too few people?

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but again, this is a game, not a punishment, and players should never feel the need to do things that they do not enjoy for significant periods of time just to get rewards that they want. You can argue that there are already places in the game where this happens, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and it is those elements that should be changed, rather than the other way around.

But this is exactly what an MMO is – you do stuff you’ve already done 1000 times in order to get the next reward. That’s why you’ve got people with THOUSANDS of hours in a game that only provides a few hundred of hours of genuinely new gameplay.
The way to get players to repeat content is through rewards.
Sometimes you dislike the content – but like the rewards. Find out which one you want more and decide.

If this game relied entirely on “fun” gameplay and not “reward-driven repeat grind” it would have been dead already.
You just can’t produce enough “fun” gameplay and content fast enough to keep people on board – at one point you’ll have to make them repeat the content. And you’ll do that by offering rewards.

Ohoni.6057:

No, it pretty much was. Once you get to 80 you can farm moas in Queensdale or tackle world bosses or whatever you like, it’s a variety of different offerings, not a progression of higher and higher difficulties.

Yeah – you can do whatever. But that doesn’t mean that you SHOULD be able to beat everything if you stopped improving.
You’re not hardcapped in trying anything – but if you’re bad you’ll die and fail.

Again, you vastly overestimate the value of climbing the rope. You’re like a minimum wage Walmart clerk that is demanding a $100K salary because you feel that the job you do is just that important. Beating the VG on hard is not worth 300 clears on easy. It’s worth maybe ten, and even that is being exceptionally generous. Your efforts are not worth anythign remotely near what you insist that they are.

Why isn’t it worth 300 pulls on easy? Because you say so? Well I’m a person too and I say IT is worth exactly 300 pulls on easy. Go ahead – it’s your opinion versus mine.

Ohoni.6057:

Through the progression of the events, the lore achievements, the layouts of the maps, it’s kind of sad that you’re so into raids and yet you’re missing all that’s around you.

Not missing all the loot I can tell you that much.
Also the reasons you give are not really explained. You can say the exact things when asked “Why do dungeons have more story than raids?” and you wouldn’t be wrong.

My solution IS to demand the game be changed. There’s no solution to be found within the existing code.

Sad.

Sure, but I still certainly wouldn’t enjoy raiding. The goal is to make it an enjoyable gaming experience, something I’d prefer to playing something else. Content that someone would be willing to do if they had a gun to their head should certainly not be the developer’s target.

I was pointing out that if you wanted the rewards bad enough you would raid.
Just accept that you don’t want legendary armor enough. It’s alright.

Nope, even if someone does honestly perceive all horses as being green, their perceptions are objectively incorrect, because “green” has a commonly understood meaning, and horses, most of them at least, do not meet that standard. If one holds your standard of subjectivity then objectivity would not exist in any form, because people could just invent their own definitions for anything and hold conversations that have no relevance to anyone else. There are many things that can be opinion, and people are entitled to those, but there are also many things that have an objective truth, and on those, there are right and wrong answers.

Yes – a “commonly understood meaning” – but you didn’t counter with a commonly understood thing – you countered with “you’re wrong” – which is just your opinion.
Where are the others that hold your opinions? YOUR opinion is not the commonly understood objective reality everyone has agreed is the norm.

But if his perception is that he believes that I believe a certain thing, and I do not in fact believe that certain thing, then it is a fact that his perception is wrong.

Except he referred to ALL players who want easy mode – not just you. You can dismiss his claims regarding yourself – but only yourself. His claim might be true for the rest of the “easy mode supporters”.

Because I’m one of those players, and I do not believe it. Now if he’d said , " some of the players that claim. . ." the he might be right, or even " most of the players that claim. . ." I would disagree with, but is still somewhat possible, but what he actually did say was “the players that claim. . .” which is factually incorrect.

You can prove that not ALL of them follow this agenda – but just that. It might very well be that the majority of them are in fact disingenuous.
Or – it could be that he is entirely right – and that you are lying about your intentions. What if that’s the case?

That’s really not a constructive response to consumer feedback.

But it is a constructive response to you.

Hypairion.9210:

Harper.4173:

LegACy.1296:

Guys, stop getting into Ohoni’s pace. Seriously.
He has his own point of view and he won’t change, no matter what you say.

Yes, it could be pretty tempting, but it’s pointless. He’s the kind of guy who always want to have the last words. Just… save your energy and hope ArenaNet understands that they don’t need to cater to his specific needs.

Irrelevant – we must counter him every step of the way until he decides to call it quits and retreats back to wherever he came from.
He’s human and thus will at one point cease. We have to keep going until that point is reached.

hmm, what will happen is most probably the thread is closed (it’s what happen with him usually…)

And if it is – Ohoni’s precious opinions will be lost like tears in rain – which wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.

If you make legendary envoy armor accessible to everybody, you actually would be taking something away from raiders. Raids are enjoyable by themselves but if you take away the prestige of the legendary armor, you’d take away that warm fuzzy feeling people will get when they finally complete the armor.

Having a goal is good. Working towards that goal is good. But if that goal is an armor skin, then it should be open to anyone who likes that skin, not just to people who like to raid. If raiders want to work towards something that only raiders can have, it should come in the form of a title or a name-tag flair, or something like that, something they can show off to the people they imagine are impressed by such things, but without keeping armor out of the hands of players that would enjoy the armor for its OWN value, rather than just for the imagined “prestige” the item carries.

If that “takes away” anything from raiders then it’s only something they were never owed in the first place, and the loss to them is for the greater good.

I can see 1 reason for why somebody that clearly dislikes everything about raids is so interested in them: you want the rewards. If story was your main motivator you wouldn’t throw such a fuss and just read about it on the wiki or in a cleared instance.

But you’re wrong. The reason we play games is to EXPERIENCE them. To have the story happen around you, and to participate in that story. Otherwise why play games at all? You can just watch a let’s play of anything and get the story, but in most cases it’s a better experience to be a PART of that story.

And I haven’t gone into it a lot in this thread, but I genuinely do want to fight the bosses with their mechanics. I just don’t want the odds of failure to be so high. I want the bosses to make the same attacks, I just want the penalties for failing to deal with the attacks to be low enough that failure does not equal wipes.

I want to be able to have my team perform badly enough in a raid boss encounter that they would wipe 2-3 times over if in the current version, and yet they succeed anyway and move on to the next thing, hoping to come back the next time and do it slightly better, rather than to slam our heads against the wall for three hours because someone keeps dropping the ball at some point. But I want to experience those mechanics, I want to know that if I do my job 100%, that I’ll know that, even if other players on my team mess things up and it would have led to wipes and resets in the current version. I want to know that if I’m the one who screws up, it won’t lead to a fail state for the other players.

I want to play the raids, I would enjoy playing them, I just don’t want to play them with the current fail-state conditions.

At the very least you would be satisfied with a story mode that has a low reward, like 50 silver.

As I said, I would be at least partially satisfied with that.

It would be better than nothing, and I would play it exactly once. But I would see no reason to repeat it if the rewards were not at least adequate. And as ANet, I don’t think there would be a ton of value in making a story mode that each player would only complete once, when they could instead make an easy mode that players would complete once or more per week (depending on lock-outs).

And again, I do still want the rewards, I’ve made that abundantly clear, I only dispute your insistence that it is the only thing I care about. So if they made a story mode that didn’t include the rewards, then of course I would continue to press for the rewards to be made available through some alternative means.

This is why I’m convinced that many of the people that advocate for the raid story mode because they ‘want to experience the story’, aren’t being genuine and just want an easy way to get legendary armor.

Instead of assuming, why don’t you just ask?

You have personal story to enjoy story.

You have living world to enjoy story.

Those are different stories.

Ohoni, “Having a goal is good. Working towards that goal is good. But if that goal is an armor skin, then it should be open to anyone who likes that skin, not just to people who like to raid. If raiders want to work towards something that only raiders can have, it should come in the form of a title or a name-tag flair, or something like that, something they can show off to the people they imagine are impressed by such things, but without keeping armor out of the hands of players that would enjoy the armor for its OWN value, rather than just for the imagined “prestige” the item carries.”

Then they should remove every single gated skin by this logic which invalidates why they have separate skins for different content, they put these different rewarded to attract players to experience different game modes, it’s no different than me saying they should give me everything for Chuka and Chumpatawa or however it’s spelled when all I do is pvp, there is no reason for me to have to do any PvE to acquire this item by your reasoning…… Just admit it you don’t even care about the content you just want the shinies with minimal to no effort. You even stated you never wanted to do raids and won’t do raids, so why should Anet change something that doesn’t interest you to make you get your shiny easier?

Ohoni.6057:

If you make legendary envoy armor accessible to everybody, you actually would be taking something away from raiders. Raids are enjoyable by themselves but if you take away the prestige of the legendary armor, you’d take away that warm fuzzy feeling people will get when they finally complete the armor.

Having a goal is good. Working towards that goal is good. But if that goal is an armor skin, then it should be open to anyone who likes that skin, not just to people who like to raid. If raiders want to work towards something that only raiders can have, it should come in the form of a title or a name-tag flair, or something like that, something they can show off to the people they imagine are impressed by such things, but without keeping armor out of the hands of players that would enjoy the armor for its OWN value, rather than just for the imagined “prestige” the item carries.

If that “takes away” anything from raiders then it’s only something they were never owed in the first place, and the loss to them is for the greater good.

I can see 1 reason for why somebody that clearly dislikes everything about raids is so interested in them: you want the rewards. If story was your main motivator you wouldn’t throw such a fuss and just read about it on the wiki or in a cleared instance.

But you’re wrong. The reason we play games is to EXPERIENCE them. To have the story happen around you, and to participate in that story. Otherwise why play games at all? You can just watch a let’s play of anything and get the story, but in most cases it’s a better experience to be a PART of that story.

And I haven’t gone into it a lot in this thread, but I genuinely do want to fight the bosses with their mechanics. I just don’t want the odds of failure to be so high. I want the bosses to make the same attacks, I just want the penalties for failing to deal with the attacks to be low enough that failure does not equal wipes.

I want to be able to have my team perform badly enough in a raid boss encounter that they would wipe 2-3 times over if in the current version, and yet they succeed anyway and move on to the next thing, hoping to come back the next time and do it slightly better, rather than to slam our heads against the wall for three hours because someone keeps dropping the ball at some point. But I want to experience those mechanics, I want to know that if I do my job 100%, that I’ll know that, even if other players on my team mess things up and it would have led to wipes and resets in the current version. I want to know that if I’m the one who screws up, it won’t lead to a fail state for the other players.

I want to play the raids, I would enjoy playing them, I just don’t want to play them with the current fail-state conditions.

At the very least you would be satisfied with a story mode that has a low reward, like 50 silver.

As I said, I would be at least partially satisfied with that.

It would be better than nothing, and I would play it exactly once. But I would see no reason to repeat it if the rewards were not at least adequate. And as ANet, I don’t think there would be a ton of value in making a story mode that each player would only complete once, when they could instead make an easy mode that players would complete once or more per week (depending on lock-outs).

And again, I do still want the rewards, I’ve made that abundantly clear, I only dispute your insistence that it is the only thing I care about. So if they made a story mode that didn’t include the rewards, then of course I would continue to press for the rewards to be made available through some alternative means.

This is why I’m convinced that many of the people that advocate for the raid story mode because they ‘want to experience the story’, aren’t being genuine and just want an easy way to get legendary armor.

Instead of assuming, why don’t you just ask?

You have personal story to enjoy story.

You have living world to enjoy story.

Those are different stories.

Gosh you’re so full of yourself. The greater good, really? I don’t see what’s wrong with some skins being exclusive. Gw2 already has some skins that are exlusive to some gamemodes or content. This one is exclusive to ‘skilled’ pve players. Just like how there are exclusive skins for ‘skilled’ pvp players. Boo Hoo.

Wanting to have an easy raid for story purposes is an opinion I can actually respect, wanting legendary armor as a reward for completing this story raid, is not. From what you’re saying, it seems to me like you care more about the rewards part than the ‘experiencing the story’ part. So much so that I suspect that while there may be some truth to wanting to experiencing the story, you mainly use it as an excuse for your true purpose: easy legendary armor. You’re going to say I’m just assuming and that I’m wrong again. I think you’re full of kitten and you’re lying.

Have you actually raided? Because I’m going to tell you this is not the case. On a single player level the skill required of you is much lower in dungeons than in raids.
Do you raid now?

Look, you aren’t arguing with me, you’re arguing with someone on your side, who was claiming that the raids are not much harder than dungeons. I was just conceding the point that this may be true on an individual level, but that the added complexity increased the chance of overall failure. In my personal experience with VG and Goreseval, yeah, they are harder fights than any dungeon I’ve done.

Ohoni.6057:

Well I’m sorry, that sort of “train to git gud” mentality is just not something that will ever interest me.

Just like Legendary armor right mate?

No, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Wanting Legendary armor and wanting to do raiding are two completely separate things. You can want either very much without wanting the other at all.

Ohoni.6057:

Because the currently available mode is too hard.

Do you get to define too hard? Why is it “too hard” and not “too easy”?

You asked why “this content in particular” needed an easy mode. The answer to that is obvious, because the existing version is too hard. Obviously that’s a subjective judgement, but it’s considered by most, including yourself, to be harder content than the nearest equivalents elsewhere in the game, so “why this content,” because it’s hard enough that people who are comfortable with the challenge in other content might find this unenjoyably difficult. Reducing the difficulty level would make it more enjoyable for them.

Because they already have 90% of the game to do whatever they want in – this last 10% is also for them BUT only if they improve adapt and get better. That’s why they shouldn’t be upset. Because we were expected to suck it up with no real “hardcore” content for 3 years – and nobody really cared that wasn’t fun for us.

Yes, because clearly the game wasn’t for you and if you left nobody would notice. But if most of the game is one way, and then a little bit of content, which gates valued story and rewards, is made a completely different way, then people who prefer how the entire rest of the game is structured have every right to ask that either a. the content be brought more in line with the rest of the game, or b. that it not gate story or rewards from the players who choose not to participate in it.

That’s mostly because people are done with the backpiece now – season 3 is where most of the people finished it. Also – you’re just giving opinions and can’t give any numbers – so let’s not imagine things into existence here shall we?

The queue times were still considerably longer early in the season than during previous seasons.

And here you go and ignore the fact that one huge category said haven’t but are planning to – which means you can easily look at it my way and lob them into the “raid friendly” camp.

But again, if they haven’t already, then why haven’t they? I have, and we all know my stance on raids. Clearly something is holding them back, and if not the difficulty of it, then what? “Haven’t but planning to” presumably means “when things change for the better in some way, because clearly I’m not doing it right now.” If they made an easy mode, I imagine all of those people would show up on day one.

“Pretty easy” – except it wasn’t easy. Ask people how much work went into a full set.

How much luck, you mean. It’s pretty much impossible to discuss the balance of RNG rewards, some players can spend ten times as much effort on it as others.

Or you don’t – and people bother to actually get decent at rope climbing. Or if they can’t because of some physical reason just accept that rope climbing and associated benefits are not for them.

Yeah, but you shouldn’t do that, because if people would be happier at the top, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t provide them access to it.

It might be easier to scale existing content but the question is :are there enough people that care about this “rescaled version” or are you spending time catering to too few people?

And that’s a judgement neither of us is in any position to make. You have your opinion, I have mine, ANet has actual numbers to go by and they will make the call. I’m only trying to shape their choices IF they decide it’s worth doing something, neither of us can really convince them about whether they should or should not.

The way to get players to repeat content is through rewards.
Sometimes you dislike the content – but like the rewards. Find out which one you want more and decide.

But ideally you provide multiple paths, so that when players get bored with doing one thing, they can move to something else for a bit, while continuing to progress. Forcing them to stick with one activity, especially one that they already hate going in, does not benefit anyone, it just leads to player burnout.

Why isn’t it worth 300 pulls on easy? Because you say so? Well I’m a person too and I say IT is worth exactly 300 pulls on easy. Go ahead – it’s your opinion versus mine.

No, it’s ANet’s opinion that will actually matter in the end, and I can’t imagine them siding with you on it. You’re being ridiculous.

I was pointing out that if you wanted the rewards bad enough you would raid.
Just accept that you don’t want legendary armor enough. It’s alright.

Which is all obvious and completely uncontested. If I wanted the armor enough then I would be raiding, and clearly I don’t. But I still do want the armor, and I still do want to play through the content, just never enough to put up with the constant wipe and reset cycles. But I do want those things enough to go after them if the path seems reasonable to me. What I’m asking for is a path that I find reasonable.

Or – it could be that he is entirely right – and that you are lying about your intentions. What if that’s the case?

If that were the case then he would be right, but he’s not, so he’s wrong. Of course, calling other players liars would be against the board rules.

Then they should remove every single gated skin by this logic

Yes. Or rather, remove the gates to them, like they’ve done with Dungeon armor.

it’s no different than me saying they should give me everything for Chuka and Chumpatawa or however it’s spelled when all I do is pvp, there is no reason for me to have to do any PvE to acquire this item by your reasoning

Agreed.

ou even stated you never wanted to do raids and won’t do raids, so why should Anet change something that doesn’t interest you to make you get your shiny easier?

I never want to do raids if they remain as they are, but I do want to do them if they change to be more fun to play. Those are two separate situations.

Gosh you’re so full of yourself. The greater good, really? I don’t see what’s wrong with some skins being exclusive. Gw2 already has some skins that are exlusive to some gamemodes or content. This one is exclusive to ‘skilled’ pve players. Just like how there are exclusive skins for ‘skilled’ pvp players. Boo Hoo.

And I’m opposed to all of that. You may disagree with me, but I’m at least consistent.

From what you’re saying, it seems to me like you care more about the rewards part than the ‘experiencing the story’ part.

More? That’s probably fair to say, I do care more about the armor than the story elements, but the challenge on the table was that I only cared about the rewards, which is untrue.

So much so that I suspect that while there may be some truth to wanting to experiencing the story, you mainly use it as an excuse for your true purpose: easy legendary armor.

No, I still want both. If they came out and said “we’ll give you the armor some other way, but NEVER on the easy mode!!!!!” then I would still want the easy mode. And if they said “we’ll give you easy mode, but it definitely won’t have the armor!!!” then I would still want the armor, either to be added to easy mode or added via some other method. They are two completely distinct points, but since both are currently related to raiding, I see solving both at once as the easiest way to get both solved, rather than doing it piecemeal.

I think it’s important to identify first principles like these to avoid long walls of text. Honestly not many people read those.

I think it’s clear that Ohoni’s are:

1. All content must be available at an easy skill level
2. All skins must be available at an easy skill level

It’s fine to hold these views. And Ohoni’s been consistent in their application. You’re unlikely to change his mind in these regards.

But guild wars 2 is not the game Ohoni imagines. There’s always been hard content. And there’s always been exclusive skins.

Again, it’s fine to hold these views. And it seems pointless to argue over them. But other games, like single player games, are more consistent in applying these two principles.

petyr baelish.9675:

@Leezy:

What did you do in all these years before HoT powercreep made dungeons irrelevant? If you couldn’t complete the dungeons back then were you ok with not being able to ‘experience’ their story?

Reality was, Out of the 150-200 person guild I was part of (This is nearly a year and a half ago so I can’t remember the number) It was a pretty close guild at the time, and every single member I group’d up with for dungeons, Not a single one had EVER watched one of the cut scenes, or read any of the dialogue.

Since everyone wants to classify themselves as “casual” I will follow suit. Reality is the other side, Dungeon tour / speed runners / raiders / fractlers. People who main the higher end of PVE content, don’t give two kittens about story

Of course this is only in my experience, and we only did a dungeon tour daily for the gold, it was the only thing we could do (and fractals) where we could go, what comp can we do, change builds up for an encounter, etc etc. Actually feel a difference in skill play compared to everything else that you want to play for…111111111111, so much fun.

But ya to answer the question, I only completed the Gw2 vanilla story like 6 months ago (started playing shortly after launch) So ya, if i couldn’t access the story i wouldn’t care. (I also got a few friends still who have never completed the story still)

I think the difference between the “casual I don’t want raids”, and raiders (not all), is that I play right now because of the people I play with, it’s the interaction, friendship you would call it. Like guys this is NOT A SINGLE PLAYER GAME THIS IS A MMORPG……. MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER ONLINE, <———— i feel this is a lost message to these people

P.S I feel this will be required to add, Yes i understand you want to play a different style, Yes we get it, However raids is a small part of the game, you don’t need to access everything.

RoRo.8270:

Raids were advertised as challenging content. Not sure why players feel they need to be catered and have access to everything

Maybe they feel they deserve access because they spent $50 on it? I dunno, just a theory.

Well all I can say to that is that I strongly disagree with your opinion regarding the accessibility of the legendary armor. I find it quite ironic that you claim to be fighting for the greater good while your opinion is morally flawed. You’re basically saying: ‘He put in time and effort to get a shiny, I want this shiny too but I don’t want to put in all that effort so they need to change the way I can get the shiny.’ All while diminishing the other person’s achievement in the process. And let’s remember that the both of you start on an even playing ground from the moment you start playing the game, so don’t you dare claim it’s about equality. Seems pretty immoral to me. Envy and laziness, that’s what this is and nothing else.

sephiroth.4217:

RoRo.8270:

Raids were advertised as challenging content. Not sure why players feel they need to be catered and have access to everything

Maybe they feel they deserve access because they spent $50 on it? I dunno, just a theory.

Legendary armor has always been advertised as an exclusive reward to raids. You’re not really claiming people paid 50$ for the skin, now are you? They did, in part, pay $50 for raids, and they got them. And nobody is being excluded for participating in raids, if you want to do raids there is nobody stopping you, aside from you yourself.

I think it’s clear that Ohoni’s are:

1. All content must be available at an easy skill level
2. All skins must be available at an easy skill level

It’s fine to hold these views. And Ohoni’s been consistent in their application. You’re unlikely to change his mind in these regards.

But guild wars 2 is not the game Ohoni imagines. There’s always been hard content. And there’s always been exclusive skins.

Eh, sort of. I mean you’re close, and I appreciate that you are least tried. It’s a bit more like:

1. All content must be available at a moderate skill level
2. All skins must be available to players of all skill levels

I mean, for 1, many of you seem to consider most content in the game “easy,” and by that measure, yeah, I want easy, but by a more realistic measure, the content average of GW2 would be moderate, some of it much easier than that, a very few things slightly harder. I think it’s ok to have some content that is only available if it’s harder, but the harder it is, the less you should miss out by not performing it. Ideally, all you’d miss out by not doing something very challenging is the experience of doing something very challenging.

2. makes an important distinction, because I’m often accused of wanting to be “handed” things, and that’s not my point at all. I value having to work towards goals, and have no problem with rewards that involve a long and complex process to unlock them, I just don’t agree that long and complex processes should lock you into a single specific game type, one which you might not enjoy or be talented at, for long periods of time. They also should not require that you be an above average player. I think that high level skill should provide a reasonable shortcut to the goal, and that specific activities can be more efficient than others if they want to encourage those options, but ultimately it should never become a hard barrier of “do this one specific thing OR never get the item.”

I think that since GW2 offers such a broad range of gameplay experiences, it’s cruel to block progress towards goals players might have behind content that they clearly might not enjoy.

You’re basically saying: ‘He put in time and effort to get a shiny, I want this shiny too but I don’t want to put in all that effort so they need to change the way I can get the shiny.’

No, that’s flawed reasoning. I’m willing to put in equivalent time and effort, I just don’t necessarily want to do it the same way. It’s like if someone puts in the time to go to law school, become a lawyer, works as a lawyer for a bit, and can afford to buy a $75K car, that’s fine. But then if someone else wants that same car, and works as a plumber for more years, not doing ANY lawyering at all, then he can buy that car too, and that’s also ok. Nobody is having anything taken from them just because that plumber is allowed to earn that car through means other than lawyering.

And let’s remember that the both of you start on an even playing ground from the moment you start playing the game, so don’t you dare claim it’s about equality.

That’s not true at all. Both player’s avatars may start at level 1, but there’s no reason to believe that both players start at a level ground. One might work a full time job while the other only works part time or not at all, so has more time to play. One might have family that needs attention while the other does not. One might have a physical or social disability that limits how well they can play, or maybe one just has better than average coordination and can play better. There are all sorts of factors that would lead one player to have an easier time doing certain activities than others.

I haven’t read the whole thread yet, but where in the world are people getting the idea that LS3 will even deal with these events? Who’s to say they won’t catch up non raiders at the start too? I’m a casual raider. Yes, I do believe it’s a thing. Having a story mode that’s easier would, unfortunately, be a kick in the teeth. I didn’t want the gear (the white mantle stuff looks a tad silly). I wanted that moment of “YES, EAT THAT” after many a good attempt at killing a boss. That feeling of satisfaction when you triumph. It’s not the gear that’s the problem, it’s that. If there was an easier option, I wouldn’t feel compelled to try the hard one, and my work killing the 2 bosses I’ve killed would feel tainted. Besides, do we even know if they can feasibly add a story mode? Tuning difficulty is still a lot of work, and the raid team is probably exhausted after working on raid 1.
Edit: And yes, skins that are in raids should stay in them. The whole idea of having skins available to everyone is silly, and it’s not even the only example of content exclusive skins. Fractal backpacks, skins, pvp backpack, triumphant armor just to name a few. I’m okay not having triumphant armor despite how cool it is. Why? I don’t WvW and I accept that.

Ohoni.6057:

I think it’s clear that Ohoni’s are:

1. All content must be available at an easy skill level
2. All skins must be available at an easy skill level

It’s fine to hold these views. And Ohoni’s been consistent in their application. You’re unlikely to change his mind in these regards.

But guild wars 2 is not the game Ohoni imagines. There’s always been hard content. And there’s always been exclusive skins.

Eh, sort of. I mean you’re close, and I appreciate that you are least tried. It’s a bit more like:

1. All content must be available at a moderate skill level
2. All skins must be available to players of all skill levels

I mean, for 1, many of you seem to consider most content in the game “easy,” and by that measure, yeah, I want easy, but by a more realistic measure, the content average of GW2 would be moderate, some of it much easier than that, a very few things slightly harder. I think it’s ok to have some content that is only available if it’s harder, but the harder it is, the less you should miss out by not performing it. Ideally, all you’d miss out by not doing something very challenging is the experience of doing something very challenging.

2. makes an important distinction, because I’m often accused of wanting to be “handed” things, and that’s not my point at all. I value having to work towards goals, and have no problem with rewards that involve a long and complex process to unlock them, I just don’t agree that long and complex processes should lock you into a single specific game type, one which you might not enjoy or be talented at, for long periods of time. They also should not require that you be an above average player. I think that high level skill should provide a reasonable shortcut to the goal, and that specific activities can be more efficient than others if they want to encourage those options, but ultimately it should never become a hard barrier of “do this one specific thing OR never get the item.”

I think that since GW2 offers such a broad range of gameplay experiences, it’s cruel to block progress towards goals players might have behind content that they clearly might not enjoy.

You’re basically saying: ‘He put in time and effort to get a shiny, I want this shiny too but I don’t want to put in all that effort so they need to change the way I can get the shiny.’

No, that’s flawed reasoning. I’m willing to put in equivalent time and effort, I just don’t necessarily want to do it the same way. It’s like if someone puts in the time to go to law school, become a lawyer, works as a lawyer for a bit, and can afford to buy a $75K car, that’s fine. But then if someone else wants that same car, and works as a plumber for more years, not doing ANY lawyering at all, then he can buy that car too, and that’s also ok. Nobody is having anything taken from them just because that plumber is allowed to earn that car through means other than lawyering.

And let’s remember that the both of you start on an even playing ground from the moment you start playing the game, so don’t you dare claim it’s about equality.

That’s not true at all. Both player’s avatars may start at level 1, but there’s no reason to believe that both players start at a level ground. One might work a full time job while the other only works part time or not at all, so has more time to play. One might have family that needs attention while the other does not. One might have a physical or social disability that limits how well they can play, or maybe one just has better than average coordination and can play better. There are all sorts of factors that would lead one player to have an easier time doing certain activities than others.

I commend you for stating your principles.

We disagree on #1, and I don’t think I’ll change your mind. Fair enough.

I respect #2, and to some extent sympathize. I think the ideal system is to have the armor sellable on the trading post, like the original legendary weapons. It’s worked pretty well for the gorseval infusion. But I honestly don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. And I think I’m in the minority here — many like having skins tied to particular achievements.

And this is a weak preference for me — I would not prefer lesser solutions, like easy mode, because it diminishes raids.

But, again, good on you for stating your principles.

Having a story mode that’s easier would, unfortunately, be a kick in the teeth. I didn’t want the gear (the white mantle stuff looks a tad silly). I wanted that moment of “YES, EAT THAT” after many a good attempt at killing a boss. That feeling of satisfaction when you triumph. It’s not the gear that’s the problem, it’s that. If there was an easier option, I wouldn’t feel compelled to try the hard one, and my work killing the 2 bosses I’ve killed would feel tainted.

Look, if there is ONLY a harder mode, and a player knows that he would not enjoy it, but would enjoy an easier mode, then I think it’s fair to provide him the choice. But if there are two modes, an easier mode and a harder mode, and you believe that you would enjoy the harder mode more, but even with that harder mode available you would choose to play the easy mode anyway?

Well I’m sorry, that is you being offered a fair choice and choosing the option that would make you less happy, and that choice IS on you. The game should not have the responsibility of preventing you from making poor choices, and nor should other players have their options limited by your inability to choose the best option for yourself.

Besides, do we even know if they can feasibly add a story mode? Tuning difficulty is still a lot of work, and the raid team is probably exhausted after working on raid 1.

Based on other content in the game, we know that they definitely can make an easy mode. Now how much work that would entail and whether it would be worth doing, that’s another story entirely. Personally I believe it would take relatively little work, depending on how much effort they want to put into making it unique from hard mode, others believe it would take a lot, but only ANet knows for sure and ultimately they will judge whether it’s worth pursuing.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the existing raid team would not necessarily be the ones involved in making easy mode, as it would basically just be tuning existing elements. Several members of the team would be entirely unnecessary, as no new assets would need to be created, and for the other roles, there are likely other ANet employees that could do that job if they decided that the raid team’s focus should be on Raid 2.1.

I respect #2, and to some extent sympathize. I think the ideal system is to have the armor sellable on the trading post, like the original legendary weapons.

I think this is better than nothing, by at least some small measure, and if it came down to it I’d rather buy armor off the TP than pay for “ridealong” status in a raid, especially since I only really want a few pieces of it, but I still don’t particularly like this solution, first because I do not like for the raiders to profit at the expense of the non-raiders, and the second because I want to be able to actually earn the armor through gameplay activities, not just accumulating gold.

I think that ultimately “raid ready” players should be able to earn the Legendary Armor their way, start to finish, and that’s all well and good. “non-raid-ready” players should have a different path they can pursue, and it is not as fast but it’ll get them there, start to finish on their own merits, just with time and dedication substituted in for specific skill at raid-style content. The two types of players should never have to interact for each to get what they want out of the system, and non-raiding players should not act as a second class players to raiders.

So here are a few questions:

• When you are not even willing to put forth the money to have proper gear for raids, and the time to learn how to play, what makes you think you would be putting forth money or time towards legendary armour?
• What do you gain from having gear that can change stats in a game mode where you can faceroll content with the trash you get from mobs anyhow?
• Have you even bothered to sit down and think about why you need the gear or where you would use it?
• Did you even consider spending time in game or reddit looking for training groups instead of pouting to anet that you are left out because you do not “have time” to get into it?

Besides:
The only mode where it is actually useful to be able to swap your stats on armour on the fly is in raids anyhow, and even then only for a few characters. Additionally, until you can select runes as well, it is not even beneficial to move between characters.

Maybe…. /maybe/ it would be useful for WvW but they just run nomads or soldiers anyhow. And my WvW guild got together, geared up properly, and beat the raid. So not even those players have an excuse. If you can beat players regularly, you can beat raid bosses.

For everyone else? Craft your exotics, buy them, or get from drops. That is more than enough to do all the content from HoT and core Tyria. All the dungeons. And all the living stories. Even all your personal story.

And if you fractal, you have the gear (or can cheaply change it to be correct) and the skill to do raids.

Lastly:
If all you want is the story, which they have made clear has no relevance on the rest of the game, Glenna, at the start of wing three, gives you a summary of the first two wings. Then you can catch vids for the rest. And I bet you can ask in Aerodrome for an empty wing at any time to see what is left.

When you are not even willing to put forth the money to have proper gear for raids, and the time to learn how to play, what makes you think you would be putting forth money or time towards legendary armour?

Because if I put forth the money to buy proper gear for the raids, and then I got stat-shifting Legendary armor, then the money spent on the raid armor would be a bit of a waste. You shouldn’t have to buy armor to be able to buy more armor. That’s the whole problem with a gear treadmill, working hard to make Armor F just so that you can earn Armor G, which makes Armor F obsolete.

What do you gain from having gear that can change stats in a game mode where you can faceroll content with the trash you get from mobs anyhow?

The stat shifting is more for convenience than necessity, but honestly the skins are more important to me. If you could just unlock the skins without getting the stat-shifting part, I’d be totally fine with that.

Have you even bothered to sit down and think about why you need the gear or where you would use it?

Yes.

Did you even consider spending time in game or reddit looking for training groups instead of pouting to anet that you are left out because you do not “have time” to get into it?

Yes.

The only mode where it is actually useful to be able to swap your stats on armour on the fly is in raids anyhow, and even then only for a few characters. Additionally, until you can select runes as well, it is not even beneficial to move between characters.

The necessity to have not only prime stats but also prime runes does make stat-shifting LESS valueable in raids than in other content. With other content, being able to shift from a tanky to a zerky build, or zerky to condi, even if the runes aren’t ideal, can be quite useful. In raiding content, you’d be much better off just having two complete sets of gear.

If all you want is the story, which they have made clear has no relevance on the rest of the game, Glenna, at the start of wing three, gives you a summary of the first two wings.

Again, those who want the story do not want to watch lets plays, do not want to have an NPC give them a recap, that is all completely irrelevant. They want to actually participate in the story itself. It’s a game, not a movie, not a book. The story is in the experience.

Ohoni.6057:

Having a story mode that’s easier would, unfortunately, be a kick in the teeth. I didn’t want the gear (the white mantle stuff looks a tad silly). I wanted that moment of “YES, EAT THAT” after many a good attempt at killing a boss. That feeling of satisfaction when you triumph. It’s not the gear that’s the problem, it’s that. If there was an easier option, I wouldn’t feel compelled to try the hard one, and my work killing the 2 bosses I’ve killed would feel tainted.

Look, if there is ONLY a harder mode, and a player knows that he would not enjoy it, but would enjoy an easier mode, then I think it’s fair to provide him the choice. But if there are two modes, an easier mode and a harder mode, and you believe that you would enjoy the harder mode more, but even with that harder mode available you would choose to play the easy mode anyway?

Well I’m sorry, that is you being offered a fair choice and choosing the option that would make you less happy, and that choice IS on you. The game should not have the responsibility of preventing you from making poor choices, and nor should other players have their options limited by your inability to choose the best option for yourself.

I don’t think you quite understood what I said. I said that I wouldn’t feel compelled to choose the hard option. The same drive I have now wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t feel like my time was worth spending in a hard mode. Having the choice would make me not play raids periods. Plus is adding the choice of easy or hard to content that was advertised as “hardcore” in the first place really be fair to everyone? I can’t do higher level fractals because I don’t have the AR. I don’t have the choice to play the highest difficulty in there, but do I want the ascended rewards and all the juicy stuff down where I can get it? No, cause I’m the one who didn’t get the AR necessary.
Oh, and you don’t work at Anet. As far as I’ve seen, none of us do. So assuming ANYTHING they do would be easy/ be relegated to someone of the raid team or anything like that is not something we should do. I estimated, but I didn’t say that it would be hard to add definitively. Heck, I probably shouldn’t of even said it might be hard. I don’t know, so we shouldn’t assume things about how Anet works.

I don’t think you quite understood what I said. I said that I wouldn’t feel compelled to choose the hard option. The same drive I have now wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t feel like my time was worth spending in a hard mode. Having the choice would make me not play raids periods.

Ok, that’s fine. There’s no reason you should feel compelled to do hard mode if you aren’t compelled to do hard mode. Play how you want to play.

Plus is adding the choice of easy or hard to content that was advertised as “hardcore” in the first place really be fair to everyone?

Yes. The people who enjoy hardcore content would still have the hardcore content available, and the people who don’t enjoy hardcore content would have an option that they could enjoy, so everyone wins.

I can’t do higher level fractals because I don’t have the AR. I don’t have the choice to play the highest difficulty in there, but do I want the ascended rewards and all the juicy stuff down where I can get it? No, cause I’m the one who didn’t get the AR necessary.

That’s up to you, but if someone else wanted access to those things, they wouldn’t be wrong for wanting that, and if enough people wanted that, then it might be in ANet’s interests to provide it. They certainly have made similar moves in the past.

Oh, and you don’t work at Anet. As far as I’ve seen, none of us do. So assuming ANYTHING they do would be easy/ be relegated to someone of the raid team or anything like that is not something we should do.

I’m not making any unreasonable assumptions, I just laid out the options. Obviously ANet would determine their own course of action.

Ohoni.6057:

I think it’s clear that Ohoni’s are:

1. All content must be available at an easy skill level
2. All skins must be available at an easy skill level

It’s fine to hold these views. And Ohoni’s been consistent in their application. You’re unlikely to change his mind in these regards.

But guild wars 2 is not the game Ohoni imagines. There’s always been hard content. And there’s always been exclusive skins.

Eh, sort of. I mean you’re close, and I appreciate that you are least tried. It’s a bit more like:

1. All content must be available at a moderate skill level
2. All skins must be available to players of all skill levels

I mean, for 1, many of you seem to consider most content in the game “easy,” and by that measure, yeah, I want easy, but by a more realistic measure, the content average of GW2 would be moderate, some of it much easier than that, a very few things slightly harder. I think it’s ok to have some content that is only available if it’s harder, but the harder it is, the less you should miss out by not performing it. Ideally, all you’d miss out by not doing something very challenging is the experience of doing something very challenging.

2. makes an important distinction, because I’m often accused of wanting to be “handed” things, and that’s not my point at all. I value having to work towards goals, and have no problem with rewards that involve a long and complex process to unlock them, I just don’t agree that long and complex processes should lock you into a single specific game type, one which you might not enjoy or be talented at, for long periods of time. They also should not require that you be an above average player. I think that high level skill should provide a reasonable shortcut to the goal, and that specific activities can be more efficient than others if they want to encourage those options, but ultimately it should never become a hard barrier of “do this one specific thing OR never get the item.”

I think that since GW2 offers such a broad range of gameplay experiences, it’s cruel to block progress towards goals players might have behind content that they clearly might not enjoy.

You’re basically saying: ‘He put in time and effort to get a shiny, I want this shiny too but I don’t want to put in all that effort so they need to change the way I can get the shiny.’

No, that’s flawed reasoning. I’m willing to put in equivalent time and effort, I just don’t necessarily want to do it the same way. It’s like if someone puts in the time to go to law school, become a lawyer, works as a lawyer for a bit, and can afford to buy a $75K car, that’s fine. But then if someone else wants that same car, and works as a plumber for more years, not doing ANY lawyering at all, then he can buy that car too, and that’s also ok. Nobody is having anything taken from them just because that plumber is allowed to earn that car through means other than lawyering.

And let’s remember that the both of you start on an even playing ground from the moment you start playing the game, so don’t you dare claim it’s about equality.

That’s not true at all. Both player’s avatars may start at level 1, but there’s no reason to believe that both players start at a level ground. One might work a full time job while the other only works part time or not at all, so has more time to play. One might have family that needs attention while the other does not. One might have a physical or social disability that limits how well they can play, or maybe one just has better than average coordination and can play better. There are all sorts of factors that would lead one player to have an easier time doing certain activities than others.

I can understand how this analogy works from your point of view. Here is how i see it: a person wants a masters degree in chemistry, however he doesn’t want to study for it at the university. He’d rather do the professional chemistry option (which is much easier) but he still wants to get a master’s degree in the end. He doesn’t care if he has to spend double the amount of time in school compared to the uni student, as long as he gets the master’s degree. It’s pretty clear why it doesn’t work that way. You need more than just time to obtain a uni degree, not everybody can get it and that’s why it’s valuable.
Same thing for legendary armor, just putting in a buttload of time smashing your face on your keyboard is not enough to be qualified to get it imo.

I can understand how this analogy works from your point of view. Here is how i see it: a person wants a masters degree in chemistry, however he doesn’t want to study for it at the university. He’d rather do the professional chemistry option (which is much easier) but he still wants to get a master’s degree in the end. He doesn’t care if he has to spend double the amount of time in school compared to the uni student, as long as he gets the master’s degree. It’s pretty clear why it doesn’t work that way. You need more than just time to obtain a uni degree, not everybody can get it and that’s why it’s valuable.
Same thing for legendary armor, just putting in a buttload of time smashing your face on your keyboard is not enough to be qualified to get it imo.

But again, this is where the analogy breaks down, because “qualified” is a bit of a loaded term. It’s important to know that someone who has a masters degree is qualified for it, not because a master’s degree is prestigious, but because it denotes a certain level of capability, and you may need that level of capability to do do a given job moving forward. I think it’s fine for raiders to be able to get some tangible representation of their accomplishment, as I said a title or a tag flair or something like that to show other players “hey, I did this one specific, difficult task.”

I do not believe that armor can fall into this category though, because armor has its own inherent value. A chemistry masters degree has zero value, it’s just a scrap of paper, except that it says “I accomplished the masters program.” If you removed that meaning, if you knew that you could get the degree without the work, then it would just become a scrap of paper again, worth nothing.

Armor skins are NEVER that. Armor skins have their own worth based on their appearance, and that worth remains whether the skin is earned by clearing the very hardest content, or whether it’s a log-in reward. It is unfair to players who have zero interest in the prestige value, but have full interest in the inherent worth of the armor, to ONLY be able to acquire that armor by achieving that prestigious act.

So I have no issue whatsoever with raiders having some signifier that they achieved something difficult, so long as that signifier is something that nobody would ever want except to show off to others that they achieved that difficult task. If the item in question does have inherent worth, if it’s something that players could conceivably want to use even if every other player also had easy access to it, then there should be reasonable alternatives to a single, difficult or complex process.

It can still absolutely require time and effort of varying degrees to earn it, but players should have options into the exact nature of that time and effort.

i want an armor / weapons to show off, weapons only raiders have so i can identify myself with them and also show other people, look, i raided successfully, you can ask me anything regarding that.

just a silly title? some people don’t even have turned that option on so they see players running arround with their titles.

some people like to pose arround a bit, its fashion wars anyway.

so yeah, its pretty nice and good thinking of anet to place that legendary armor exactly into raids.
like this there will be even more players who get also interested in raids, good thing for the game and also for the raiders.
they create interest with that.

easy mode / story mode? yeah sure, no problem, but without any progress towards any normal mode realated rewards. u gotta play the normal mode for that.

i want an armor / weapons to show off, weapons only raiders have so i can identify myself with them and also show other people, look, i raided successfully, you can ask me anything regarding that.

Again, I think it’s fine for you to have something to show off that says “I am a raider and have done things only a raider can do.”

You don’t need armor or weapon skins to do that.

You can have a title, or a nametag flair, or a handheld trophy/gizmo/bundle (ie the Flames of Kryta), anything along those lines, something that conveys to other players that you have accomplished something, but that nobody would ever want except to show off that they accomplished that thing.

like this there will be even more players who get also interested in raids, good thing for the game.

I think that getting people to TRY new content is a positive thing. I think that forcing players to spend tens of hours in that content, even if that player KNOWS that they are not enjoying themselves, is not a positive thing.

I alluded to this earlier, but I believe that there are two good ways to use loot in a game:

1. To attract players to certain content. If a certain cool item can only be found in one type of content, it encourages people to check it out.

2. To get people to keep playing the game at all. The general loot chase is positive for the game as a whole. Put in interesting loot, make it take time and effort to collect, it keeps players motivated to keep playing your game.

The problem is, you shouldn’t ever combine the two things.

Anything that fills condition 1 should be something that can be earned in a couple hours or less of earnestly attempting the content. You shouldn’t have to be particularly good at the content, you shouldn’t have to continue playing the content for long stretches of time, these rewards should just be there to get players through the door, get them to attempt the content, and then if the player enjoys the content, then they will keep playing it, while if they hate the content, they are allowed to stop without losing out on anything.

For condition 2 rewards, they should be available via multiple paths. Some paths can be quicker and easier than others, but alternatives should be available.

To get specific to raids, it’s a good thing that they have a reward that attracts players to ATTEMPT raiding. That’s all well and good. But once a player has attempted raiding, spent a good couple hours on the attempt, if they then decide that raiding is not their thing, the they should be allowed to quit, without forever giving up on rewards like Legendary armor.

The best way to accomplish this would be to have an item that can only be earned through raids, purchased using Magnetite shards (without requiring the mastery). This would require you to at least attempt Vale Guardian for a while, but even if you never beat him you’d acquire enough shards to be able to purchase this one item. This item could then be necessary for Legendary armor, but all other components could be found elsewhere.

If you were really enjoying raiding, then continuing to raid would be the fastest and most efficient way of acquiring the remaining components. If you were not enjoying yourself, then other methods would be available, and at least you gave it a shot.

ANet does not benefit from players continuing to play content that they are not enjoying, when they could instead be spending that time playing content that they do enjoy.