Guild Wars 2

A Proposal for Catering to the Weekend Warrior

The issue:

Time gating has been a part of the game for some time, at least since the introduction of dailies and daily fractal chests. Recent updates, the upcoming one included, have seen this trend intensified. Crafting materials required to craft ascended gear will be available once daily. Perhaps more crucially, the recent dungeon change turned off the old CoF 1 gold spigot, runnable more or less infinitely whenever one had the time, and changed to a system in which gold is more portioned out over time – daily runs of the quick paths of CoE, AC, SE, and so forth.

Guild Wars has players of many kinds, many older ones with professional and family commitments. Such players want to make a time commitment to the game, but not necessarily on a daily schedule. Some, owing to work and family schedules, can play a lot on weekends – not incidentally the times of highest player concurrency – but not necessarily at all during the week.

This issue was more easily dismissed when the only daily things of any importance were the dailies themselves, which offer relatively modest rewards and took mere minutes to complete. Dungeon runs – now a major source of income for many players – cannot be completed so quickly. There are other ways to make gold of course – the whack-a-mole of Cursed Shore and Frostgorge farming, for example, which we all know will be nerfed before long – but I think most people if given the choice would prefer to do a variety of activities to earn rewards.

The proposal:

Acknowledging the some people would do away with time gating, dungeon DR, and the like altogether, I propose something less radical. Guild Wars should change from daily dungeon resets to weekly ones, changing on Wednesdays. In other words, everyone gets seven runs of a path per week before no longer getting the reward chest. If people want to do one a day, that’s fine. If people want to run CoF1 seven times in a row on Saturday, because that’s when they have the time, that’s fine too.

Same for crafting. Instead of being able to craft one crystal thingy per day, players should be able to craft seven per week.

The payoff:

The game can only benefit from accommodating many types of players. Older players can bring maturity and poise to the community, which benefits everyone. For Anet, it allows the game to cater to a crowd that the WoW’s of the world, with their hardcore players and raid schedules, scare away as one grows older and family and work commitments increase. In more mercenary terms, that means more people willing to spend money on various content and more sustainability down the line. Guild Wars was sold as that kind of game – don’t make the mistake of turning it into something where people feel they need to log in every day or they’re missing out on opportunities to earn rewards and progress.

Please give this some consideration.

tldr: A lot of people only have time to play on the weekends, so there should be weekly resets of dungeons and the like rather than daily ones.

Time-gating isn’t done out of ignorance.

It’s done to get as many people as possible playing the game as frequently as they can, such that Arenanet can claim “We have X people logging in every day!”, and so that they can get as many view hits and purchases on the gem store as possible.

It’s the same reason the Living Story is time-gated. Arenanet have never managed to explain why, because they don’t want you to be aware of why they’re making it time-gated.

Dailies and Monthlies are tolerable, they don’t unlock exclusive content or offer some special advantage, but this latest change of making content borderline-exclusive to frequent players is just getting stupid.

Oh, I totally agree that there are monetary reasons for some of the gating, especially the living story. I think the idea there is to introduce new rewards and create a crazy grind to get them – so they can say they’re not forcing anyone to buy anything to get the content – in the hopes that people with more money than time will just buy gems or whatever to get the new stuff. For that reason, I don’t expect the temp content train to stop. (Or the absurd practice of making the things 1 ticket for two weeks and then an astonishing 5 tickets – which is dozens of keys – after that.)

And I also get what you’re saying about wanting to get high login numbers. Totally makes sense. I just think especially something like the new crafting is gonna turn off a lot of players who might potentially spend money on the game if allowed to play in a way that suits them. If you can only log in two days a week, ascended crafting will take an obscenely long time. (Indeed it will for all players, if they’re gearing more than one toon.) Between that and the way dungeon rewards work now, there aren’t a lot of ways to progress much playing only on weekends, even if you play a lot of hours on those weekends.

x7 Weeklies is definately more flexible than x1 Dailies.

Rift had this, I enjoyed it more.

A surprisngly not bad idea. It doesnt change the overall payout, just lets people do it more at their pace. Im ok with this.

Too practical, work harder not smarter.

Actually, this is a great idea. I cringed when I saw the youtube vid and cringed some more when read the blogpost and checked dulfy. Time-gating thus far hasn’t been that bad, but this…now my OCD is going to make it so that I have to do this or it’s going to linger in my mind as unfinished business. At least until I leave this game, which is becoming more and more likely everyday.

Not to mention that I know there are many out there that hate crafting. Doesn’t actually matter what difference there is between exotics and ascended, BiS compels me to fight for it.

I am going to go ahead and say that I’m not against ascended, but I don’t really understand the need for it. The game is pretty simple as is. Why exactly do we need a boost? This game has been turning into a mess. It’s all over the place.

“timegating”

Haha… I’ve heard it all now.

Anet has repeatedly said that they will ALWAYS reward players for increased time investment.

Simply put… Your rewards for logging on once a week for 3 hours can’t equal the rewards of someone who plays for 3 hours every day. They just can’t. Even if you want those two “play styles” to be equal, they’re not. They never will be.

Anet wants people to play their game. Crazy notion. Nobody says you have to grind, you know. There is nothing that says you HAVE to do anything in this game.

The irony is that if GW2 catered to every ultra casual player that can’t play the game for more than a few hours a week, they’d get flak from everyone. Now people are giving them flak for rewarding people who invest more time in-game… Where does it stop??

Let’s just send everyone the best items in the game for nothing then. No work, no time investment…. Everyone gets everything right off the bat. Doesn’t matter if you play for 2 hours or 200 hours… Absolutely ridiculous. I am at a loss for words.

darkdomino.9578:

“timegating”

Haha… I’ve heard it all now.

Anet has repeatedly said that they will ALWAYS reward players for increased time investment.

Simply put… Your rewards for logging on once a week for 3 hours can’t equal the rewards of someone who plays for 3 hours every day. They just can’t. Even if you want those two “play styles” to be equal, they’re not. They never will be.

Anet wants people to play their game. Crazy notion. Nobody says you have to grind, you know. There is nothing that says you HAVE to do anything in this game.

The irony is that if GW2 catered to every ultra casual player that can’t play the game for more than a few hours a week, they’d get flak from everyone. Now people are giving them flak for rewarding people who invest more time in-game… Where does it stop??

Let’s just send everyone the best items in the game for nothing then. No work, no time investment…. Everyone gets everything right off the bat. Doesn’t matter if you play for 2 hours or 200 hours… Absolutely ridiculous. I am at a loss for words.

Did you even read the OP? I didn’t say equal rewards for three hours once per week vs. three hours per day. I said that if one person played seven hours on Saturday, they should have equal chance at rewards vs. someone playing one hour per day for seven days. Seven hours should equal seven hours, that’s all.

People should be rewarded equally for equal hours of play. Some people have more time to play at certain times of the week. Currently, if someone logs in every day for a week and runs AC 1 every day, he gets the 1.5 gold chest seven times. A person logging in only on Saturday, were he to run AC 1 seven times also, would only get one chest even though he ran the path just as many times. All I’m saying is there is no reason to insist people log in every day if they play just as much.

Geez, actually read the OP before firing off hyperbolic statements like “Let’s just send everyone the best items in the game.”