(edited by TheBlackLeech.9360)
Raid Rewards to be gated (Weekly)
It’s funny people seem to think current dungeons and fractals will no longer be run now that we have raids, but they have completely overlooked the fact that the team that balances loot rewards is very stingy and they have timegated every single pve reward since release.
If they can’t balance the rewards without limiting player access then it is bad game design, all mmos do this and not one of them try to combat the issue they just go with the flow, players might make too much money affecting gemsales/rmting? gate the rewards, clearly there has to be a better way. I know for a fact that mmo developers have entire teams who’s sole purpose is to determine what can and can not be a pve rewards, how often it is rewarded etc, now that gw2 is f2p I guess we’ll be seeing even more of this and yet I see no one until now mentioning it.
OP sorry to break your bubble, but you are going to be rather disappointed
In a live stream they already stated there will be a raid currency, and you can save up this currency to buy particular items. Also there will be drops. They said even if you are not lucky on RNG you can save up currency and outright buy items from a raid vendor I assume
Also I do not expect anything to come out of raids to not be account bound. People who cannot complete the end game should not have a buy option. It devalues the entire experience of raids and the difficulty. Since nothing from raids is a higher tier in stats it will be purely for cosmetic and bragging rights.
Raids are not THE end game – only a very small piece of it.
The primary developer emphasis needs to stay on the activities large groups of people can participate in – including upping the challenge/offering new things there. Raids, fractals and anything else that limits the number of players that can enter are still important – they just cannot be what GW2 focuses on – or the game just becomes another clone (and brings all the hate, elitism, etc that those games are notorious for).
Few thoughts.
Weekly raid lockout timers are not new. This is an artificial way to extend the lifetime of the content. Simply put if you can farm-run raids 20 times per day, you’ll get all the shinies from them and never step your foot in it again, whining about lack of content all along.
RNG in rewards plays the similar role. If you only get things you want, you’ll stop playing faster as you won’t be forced to acquire (via RNG) all the stuff you don’t really care for in the process. This is slightly mitigated by having raid currency for people who have reeeealy bad luck and still would like to feel some sort of progress towards the desired goal.
All of these mechanics are present in practically every game with raids. Even GW2 has precursor for this mechanic in one-per-day-per-path dungeon rewards and daily fractal rewards. In raids loot is in higher demand (and with higher chance of dropping), so the lockouts are longer.
EDIT: Difficulty gating is almost impossible in GW2. Most mechanics heavy encounters will be learned, spoiled and put on the farm status relatively quickly. A guild that can reliably kill a boss can certainly farm it.
With regards to account bound rewards – GW2 is moving away from non-account bound rewards for ‘prestige’ items (legendaries), so I wouldn’t expect them to add unbound items into raids. It’s unlikely that they intend raid rewards to be a source of additional income for raiding guilds.
(edited by Zania.8461)
Nobody said people should be able to spam raids all day to grind everything first week.
Some time-gate is fine. Like the current dungeons/fractals are.
Once per day. Not once per week.
It’s funny people seem to think current dungeons and fractals will no longer be run now that we have raids, but they have completely overlooked the fact that the team that balances loot rewards is very stingy and they have timegated every single pve reward since release.
.
I never said people wouldn’t still run dungeons or fotm…. but they are so painfully boring that you either
A) Don’t do them because you have already done them 82342342734 times.
or
B) You finish all the dungeon paths and fotm tiers in 2 hours and are forced to turn the game off and wait to play till tomorrow (where you are faced with thew same exact A or B scenario)
Also…. don’t think for one second anyone has ever “forgotten about timegating” Why do you think I’m even addressing this issue? Time gating anything is a lame way for Anet to keep players poorer for longer so they are tempted (even if they never do so) to trade real currency for game currency.
OP sorry to break your bubble, but you are going to be rather disappointed
In a live stream they already stated there will be a raid currency, and you can save up this currency to buy particular items. Also there will be drops. They said even if you are not lucky on RNG you can save up currency and outright buy items from a raid vendor I assume
Also I do not expect anything to come out of raids to not be account bound. People who cannot complete the end game should not have a buy option. It devalues the entire experience of raids and the difficulty. Since nothing from raids is a higher tier in stats it will be purely for cosmetic and bragging rights.
I never said there was not going to be a currency system. It is a good system… but in GW1….. in DoA for example…. There was a HUGE market for the currency AND the rewards bought with the currency (tormented weapons, coffers, consumables, cosmetic items, etc) from the elite endgame area called the Domain of Anguish… and there would still be bragging rights because the items would be extremely expensive.
Difficulty gating is almost impossible in GW2. Most mechanics heavy encounters will be learned, spoiled and put on the farm status relatively quickly. A guild that can reliably kill a boss can certainly farm it.
With regards to account bound rewards – GW2 is moving away from non-account bound rewards for ‘prestige’ items (legendaries), so I wouldn’t expect them to add unbound items into raids. It’s unlikely that they intend raid rewards to be a source of additional income for raiding guilds.
So if what you are saying is true…. and difficulty gating is impossible…. then essentially the prestige associated with the rewards amounts to absolutely nothing.
(except, you got a lucky dice roll)
There are already other rewards in the game like this.
Fractal Weapons for example.
There is no prestige… but also no way for players to trade skins…. so you are left with a system where everyone loses.
(edited by TheBlackLeech.9360)
So if what you are saying is true…. and difficulty gating is impossible…. then essentially the prestige associated with the rewards amounts to absolutely nothing.
(except, you got a lucky dice roll)
There are already other rewards in the game like this.
Fractal Weapons for example.
There is no prestige… but also no way for players to trade skins…. so you are left with a system where everyone loses.
What I mean is this: you CAN tune a raid to be only doable by 1% of the population. Initially only 0.01% will succeed but then after strategies are spoiled another 0.99% will be able to do it.
What you cannot really do is prevent that 1% from being able to farm it. If they could do it once, they can do it again. The only way to prevent massive influx of rewards from these players is time gating. Time gating can take a very large number of forms. Respawn timers (EQ before instanced content, WoW world bosses), lockout timers (can’t enter instances, instanced respawn timers bound to raid leader/character/whatever) or finally the ‘you can do it as many times as you want but only get reward once per week’ lockout of GW2.
I am sure that top tier guilds can still profit from raids. I suspect it won’t be long before raids can be 9 manned. That last spot will then be sold for obscene amounts of money. Due to enrage timers one’s ability to sell more than 1 or 2 spots will likely not happen for a very long time, so prices will stay up. You won’t be selling specific item but a random roll for one. That, and/or completion achievement, similar to how some people get their dungeon master without actually doing Arah.
However I currently think that raids will not be tuned to 1% of the population – not if they want all classes to be viable. I’d make a guess of 5-10% being able to (eventually) participate.
Think to TT – it is almost impossible to completely PuG, but very possible to do if you have an organized core with random PuGs in vent. I suspect that instanced raids will run in the same vein – difficult to PuG but reasonable if you have some organization present.
Daily reset is a terrible idea. The reason why they can put actual rewards on these guys is because their lockout timer is so long. They’d have to drastically cut back on the rewards if you could kill these every day.
Plus it cheapens the experience. There’s nothing that will burn people out on raids faster if they feel like they have to do raids every day to optimize their rewards.
The only part of that I really hate is RNG deciding which piece of account bound loot you get. I absolutely hate it when RNG drops a rare item that is absolutely useless for me even through I know that there are plenty of people who really want it for themselves. Something that happens regularly with the ring drops in fractals.
But something that never happens when the item is tradeable. Because if the item is rare and people want it then it will sell for a lot. Making it a drop that everyone likes to receive.
So if what you are saying is true…. and difficulty gating is impossible…. then essentially the prestige associated with the rewards amounts to absolutely nothing.
(except, you got a lucky dice roll)
There are already other rewards in the game like this.
Fractal Weapons for example.
There is no prestige… but also no way for players to trade skins…. so you are left with a system where everyone loses.
What I mean is this: you CAN tune a raid to be only doable by 1% of the population. Initially only 0.01% will succeed but then after strategies are spoiled another 0.99% will be able to do it.
What you cannot really do is prevent that 1% from being able to farm it. If they could do it once, they can do it again. The only way to prevent massive influx of rewards from these players is time gating. Time gating can take a very large number of forms. Respawn timers (EQ before instanced content, WoW world bosses), lockout timers (can’t enter instances, instanced respawn timers bound to raid leader/character/whatever) or finally the ‘you can do it as many times as you want but only get reward once per week’ lockout of GW2.
I am sure that top tier guilds can still profit from raids. I suspect it won’t be long before raids can be 9 manned. That last spot will then be sold for obscene amounts of money. Due to enrage timers one’s ability to sell more than 1 or 2 spots will likely not happen for a very long time, so prices will stay up. You won’t be selling specific item but a random roll for one. That, and/or completion achievement, similar to how some people get their dungeon master without actually doing Arah.
However I currently think that raids will not be tuned to 1% of the population – not if they want all classes to be viable. I’d make a guess of 5-10% being able to (eventually) participate.
Think to TT – it is almost impossible to completely PuG, but very possible to do if you have an organized core with random PuGs in vent. I suspect that instanced raids will run in the same vein – difficult to PuG but reasonable if you have some organization present.
Why would you ever want to prevent players from earning rewards they are entitled to?
The 1% of the community that can accomplish a successful raid should be rewarded, and not gated in any way shape or form.
In guild wars 2, the wealthiest people are never the most skilled players… which has been a huge problem associated with a lack of endgame content.
Now that we are finally getting some real endgame, if the rewards are just going to be gated it undermines the entire purpose of having endgame.
The Guild Wars 1 community thrived on endgame content farming, and supported the game and its economy for years to come after new content had stopped being released. Players would login every day and experiene endgame content as long as they wanted until they had to log off.
Guild Wars 2 has no incentive to keep veteran players logging in and playing without endgame content farming… there is just not enough to do.
Instead, anet perpetuates a churn and burn playerbase where new players love the game for a while but then end up being bored to tears. …but that doesn’t matter to anet because a new batch of players will come along and spend their money and replace the old players.
Why do you think the silverwastes is so popular?
There is no time gating associated with the rewards there.
It is truly the only area in the game where players can farm wealth endlessly…. and it is always packed.
The bottom line is… anet is forcing its playerbase, even at its most hardcore, to be casual….
Once a week for endgame?
come on.
What are the veteran players supposed to do???
What are the veteran players supposed to do???
Currently veteran players have had way too much time to gather everything they would ever want or need. When HoT hits that should change, there should be a lot more “end game” content to do with Masteries and increasing Fractals. This should be less of an issue.
There’s also another issue with removing the time gating: If they are to be pumping out raids at a steady pace (They mentioned 6 wings a year which is about 18 raid bosses). These raids will never become irrelevant content because they don’t plan on having another tier of gear. So in only a year you have veteran players feeling like they need to clear 18 raid bosses every day. That’s just ridiculous, that’s probably 4-5 hours of raiding every day, IF you have everything on farm status. That’s not sustainable…
While it feels underwhelming now, it won’t be if they get even close to their predictions.
What are the veteran players supposed to do???
Currently veteran players have had way too much time to gather everything they would ever want or need. When HoT hits that should change, there should be a lot more “end game” content to do with Masteries and increasing Fractals. This should be less of an issue.
There’s also another issue with removing the time gating: If they are to be pumping out raids at a steady pace (They mentioned 6 wings a year which is about 18 raid bosses). These raids will never become irrelevant content because they don’t plan on having another tier of gear. So in only a year you have veteran players feeling like they need to clear 18 raid bosses every day. That’s just ridiculous, that’s probably 4-5 hours of raiding every day, IF you have everything on farm status. That’s not sustainable…
While it feels underwhelming now, it won’t be if they get even close to their predictions.
I would rather have so many options that I couldn’t possibly do them all…. then do some things and be bored for an entire week. Just the option to say…. hey I have 5 hours to kill today…. and even though I did the raid yesterday… I can do it again today.
Without the option there….you are just facilitating stagnancy.
Gating raid rewards is just a ploy to stretch out the life of the content.
The content is what should keep the players playing…. not the gating.