Guild Wars 2

Well it’s no secret that the last few days has seen the GW2 community divided on many issues. Topic words include ‘Manifesto’, ‘Philosophy’, ‘Grind’, ‘Gear Treadmill’, ‘Vertical/Horizontal Progression’ and so and so forth.

Well the AMA on Reddit has finished and for those that have read it, it is again likely to divide opinion.

For me, however, it comes down to this:

Are you going to give Anet a second chance?

Again, it’s no secret that for many of us, gaming is very important to our lives. Whilst I cannot say I fall into this category these days, I certainly used to, and because of this I understand that for those of you playing for 8+ hours a day, Anet’s recent ‘betrayal of the manifesto’, has been taken very personally.

For those of you under that category, you are understandably asking questions such as ‘Why should I trust anything Anet says again? The answers on the AMA say ’we are working on this’, ‘we are aware of that’ but they have completely ignored everything they have said in the past, they could do it again.’

Are the answers in the AMA enough for you? Can you bring yourself to believe what they say again?

I can.

My own personal stance is that I have not heavily invested in the hate train. I cannot say that I have enjoyed the game as much as pre-patch. I think the population is heavily fractured, between those stuck at low level fractals, and those too scared to jump off the fractal treadmill for fear of being left behind. I immediately disliked how difficult it is to get Ascended items but am also pleased to find out that they are going to add more ways in which to obtain them. I disliked the patch but didn’t get caught up in the uproar. I personally think a lot of your reactions over the past few days have been embarassing and undignified. A lot of your responses, though, have been thoughtful, philosophical, well-organised.

Personally, I acknowledged that Chris both too responsibility for this fallout, and apologised for it.

I am also ready to give them a second chance, and so is my wife and so here we will stay.

So yeah, I am not saying those of you leaving are wrong or right, just showing my own personal stance on the matter.

I am going to stay and give them a second chance.

I’d like to hear your own stances and plans now.

Thanks.

I’ve been very critical of the recent changes, but yes, I’m giving them a second chance. One of my questions was answered on the AMA, and I’m confident that in the near future ascended armor will become a non-issue

Romeo.4378:

Are you going to give Anet a second chance?

No. I’ll keep an eye on the forums and IF and when they fix it I’ll weigh what they’ve actually changed against what I’m currently doing in my current MMO and how much grinding it will take to catch up.

But I don’t believe a word of what they have said so they only way I’ll consider anything is after people have posted that they have seen it in game. Not going to waste my recreation time on we’re working on it.

If by second chance you mean me spending money on them, then no. Having said that, I will still play. Like I said in the other forums, I’ll stick to wait and see.

I haven’t gone out of my way to do Fractals over and over. I’ll do them for fun, or if I’m needed. If I get stuff, then I get stuff. If not oh well. I’ll wait to work on Ascended Gear once they’re mostly implemented and available thru most of the game (WvW, Karma, Crafting, other Dungeons). As of now, I’m fine with just Exotics. If I find that I’m gonna end up needing to get Ascended, then I’ll probably just move on to something else if I don’t already have a decent way to get them.

My plan still holds. This being my “alternate” game to my main “gear progression” game – LoTRO: Riders of Rohan.

Currently i’m not playing, the grind for me is just too epic as I personally like to be able to sustain several lvl 80’s (they allow me to mix it up and it helps keep the game fresh for me).

I’m willing to wait and see whether and how the ‘moving forwards’ are implemented and whether they support me being able to play alts or not.

As to ‘trust’ i’ve learned to expect the unexpected unless something is stated categorically. Will I make gem purchases? Depends on whether I feel included or excluded in terms of access to gear/content.

I’m still in the wait and see camp. I won’t spend anymore money on the game and I’ll play a lot less. I’ll dig back into my Steam backlog in the meantime. The AMA didn’t really restore my faith in the brand. I feel like I just need to see what they implement – I don’t trust that I understand where they’re really headed. I thought I understood their philosophy before, but clearly I didn’t. I did appreciate Chris’ willingness to spend so much time answering questions though, including some of the tough ones. That gives me some hope.

Enikuo.9205:

I’m still in the wait and see camp. I won’t spend anymore money on the game and I’ll play a lot less. I’ll dig back into my Steam backlog in the meantime. The AMA didn’t really restore my faith in the brand. I feel like I just need to see what they implement – I don’t trust that I understand where they’re really headed. I thought I understood their philosophy before, but clearly I didn’t. I did appreciate Chris’ willingness to spend so much time answering questions though, including some of the tough ones. That gives me some hope.

I agree on Chris and I respect that he took his time to answer.

Romeo.4378:

Are you going to give Anet a second chance?

Yes I am.

The AMA was rather successful in my view. Chris hammered some large concerns out, and I find it hard to believe that even the most ardent ascended skeptics wouldn’t even be a bit hopeful after that.

It makes sense now that ascended will be distributed all over the game and is meant to be a horizontal progression item with a minor vertical element. Horizontal as in, attainable in my different flavors across the game with infusions fulfilling the hardcore player’s needs of improvement.
Exotics couldn’t fulfill that niche, so I’m prepared to observe how they implement this into the game in the coming months.

What also left me hopeful is the fact that he saw the issue in communication. There’s a large gap in what ANet is working on and what we know is happening behind the scenes. We need to be a part of the process and if they establish effective lines of communication with us, then the whole Lost Shores fiasco can be averted.

ANet was burned, and pain is the best teacher. So I doubt they’ll be making the same mistake again.

I was not a fan of the AMA answers. It seemed like Chris was willing to admit to the shortsightedness of the most recent patch but wouldn’t directly admit it. It was a lot of corporate double speak when players wanted direct answers, it was really just a cop out.

That being said, I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. The whole gear treadmill, dungeons, and gated content means nothing to me because I don’t care for and don’t play that part of the game.

If someone wants to bring their ascended gear into WvW let them, the difference between exotics and ascended is very small in comparison to the difference between a player and no player.

Not a dime from me from here on. I’ll play until I hit the pay wall. But their sale this weekend was horrible, the content on the store nil. Looks like they want cash for gold to bypass grind to be their market now.

LOL. For me is simple. Anet needs to deliver whatever they said before asap. Talking is easy. Doing is another. I can promised gamers we will be dealing with bugs, events, so and so, but i will be fixing up months or even years later.

Before giving out such AMA session, they guy will have to be good in PR and study lots of questions and preparing which is the best answer to give, followed by some backup answers.

AMA success or not…. i give a neutral. Let’s hope this game will improve the next 3 months.

Romeo.4378:

Again, it’s no secret that for many of us, gaming is very important to our lives. Whilst I cannot say I fall into this category these days, I certainly used to, and because of this I understand that for those of you playing for 8+ hours a day, Anet’s recent ‘betrayal of the manifesto’, has been taken very personally.

Well actually I think the players under the category of “can only play 1-2 hours a day” would suffer more from the new direction: gear treadmill and gated content.

With less time to play, we fall behind even more easily. I tried FOTM during the Karka weekend but failed to proceed to lvl 2. Now I never see anyone calling for lvl1 already.

Well I’ll still play but it would be harder for me to experience all the content if they are going to this direction.

nope. seeing their philosophy that got me buying this game broken after just few months, unlikely ANET will get my money again.

i’m just not prepared for epic grinding…..

I will wait and see, but yes they get a 2nd chance from me.

If I’m going to be forced into a gear grind to compete, I’d rather do it in a game that does gear grinds/dungeons/pvp better.

This game had one solid pro to outweigh what needed to be worked on, and they decided to toss that pro and ignore the broken content.

Feels too much like Nexon now.

Sadly the AMA was far from relieving concerns for me. Saying they never intended ascended items to be such a grind yet implemented such a steep cost increase over exotics say otherwise. You do not increase the cost by a magnitude of at least 10 if you don’t want it to be a grind. No one can convince me they didn’t realize this when they put it in, because if true they will need to look for people with more forsight to start calling some of the shots.
Also it seems they think progression only comes from gears, levels and other stat related things.
To me they are just trying to rewrite history. Sure they never said it wouldn’t have vertical progression, but on the flip side they never said it would. If they truly had planned this they would have been upfront about it and all of this could have been avoided. He was severely downplaying the effect ascended gear had on the community in my opinion.

Yes, but sort of. This would be my last shot at the game, giving them a clean slate to do what they need to do for the next patch. Although if in doubt they really were just cooperate double talking this whole time, then definitely before Christmas I would probably have uninstall this game and moved on to something else by then.

Gonna give them one last shot to just: say it – and do it.

Most of us are just waiting on the next patch to see just how serious they are about their playerbase by seeing what exactly they fix, what they improve, and what they remove.

That’s the reason I havent been posting daily. I’m patiently waiting.

After reading the AMA im quite happy that they realised this and they will not make the same mistakes along the way , they said they will add ascendant gear to be aquired through other means which is awesome bring it on.

It is just a game. Not a religion. Not a political movement or country.

The term “manifesto” was overblown. What seemed like vision was hype. A piece of software, especially entertainment software, doesn’t merit a term like manifesto. Save that kind of verbage for Apple.

The AMA answers tell me there wasn’t so much to get excited about. They just wanna make a piece of software that people will have fun playing. I wish they had the programming talent of Trion, but hopefully they’ll start working on the quality issues, and hope they keep developing a fun game.

Bottom line, ascended gear so far is sooo much talk about negligible stat difference. The AMA makes me think they heard the message and will keep stat creep to these negligible levels.

As of this moment, for me there is simply nothing in this game worth doing at max level (I don’t like pvp, and I’m not interested in gear grinds). So right now I just don’t consider the game “fun”. Although a couple of the things Chris said in the AMA sound good (“At the end of the day we want to make fun content for all of our different player types to enjoy, in which they can earn the same rewards as other types of players, through activities they enjoy playing the most”), I will first have to see what kinds of incentives they come up with to make people want to return to all the lower level zones in the games to keep them relevant, and what kinds of motivation (other than gear) they can come up with to make people interested in doing stories and dynamic events in all the zones again.
If they do manage to make the game ‘fun’ again for players like me, then yes, I may very well return.

The game is not even a year old yet so all this screaming like it is dying and nothing will change is starting to drive my head in so yeah… I am still part of the wait a year crowd

Not for now, im deluded by the direction taken, and the fact that this ascended tier will be released piece by piece, so a player cant program his equipment.
I really hate this kind of tricks.
Ill take a look on the forum, to see the situation time to time.

Conner.4702:

Sadly the AMA was far from relieving concerns for me. Saying they never intended ascended items to be such a grind yet implemented such a steep cost increase over exotics say otherwise. You do not increase the cost by a magnitude of at least 10 if you don’t want it to be a grind. No one can convince me they didn’t realize this when they put it in, because if true they will need to look for people with more forsight to start calling some of the shots.
Also it seems they think progression only comes from gears, levels and other stat related things.
To me they are just trying to rewrite history. Sure they never said it wouldn’t have vertical progression, but on the flip side they never said it would. If they truly had planned this they would have been upfront about it and all of this could have been avoided. He was severely downplaying the effect ascended gear had on the community in my opinion.

Actually yeah no..read the whole thing. he said they wanted to add all kinds of progression, vertical and horizontal.

They´ve made it very easy for us to wait and see. Microtransactions make it easy to vote with your wallet.

Personaly that´s what i will do. I´m not throwing a copper in their direction before this thing is out and i´ve seen how it ends.

second chance? they already have my money.

if they fix it, I will keep playing, that’s the second chance
if they dont, I won’t and will think twice before buying more Anet products

Second chance? Anet still has to waste their first chance for me.
I’m satisfied with the game but I hope at some point they will start developing characters rather than the world.
I like the emphasis on new world content and all, but we need more character content: new skills, elites, weapons, traits and other forms of customization.

I would like to see this: fractal-styled system for other dungeons / new paths = vanilla PvE ok for a long time → WvW/sPvP content = PvP done for a lot of time → new weps / new elites / new traits / customizable gear stats.

I think there has been some sort of misunderstanding or maybe I interpret it as that. Must say I played many MMOs and I still like GW2 more than any other. Somehow, GW2 gives a lot of freedom to the play style and I think it is awesome. I realy realy like that. Also, while leveling only one quest (personal story) and ton of events that are there and do not force player to visit every NPC to handle the issue. PvP thing is done very well in my opinion – it is very fair and not gear oriented but player skill oriented (actual humans – us). SPvP has some MOBA elements and really like it. I think WvW is a bit of a miss. To me looks like a playground for those that want to gank other players and that too is made to be as fair as possible (so probably gankers don’t like it as such).

However, I haven’t played GW1 so I look on the You Tube for GW1 videos and I noticed it has incredible lore. Many players I play with (my guildies included) have played GW1 so for me is mystery but I realize how strong impact has left on them and they like it a lot. Just by watching simple quest chain having no voice over made me thinking “This thing has really deep story in it”. GW2 is exploration oriented and that is really good yet most of player need to be dragged by their nose to do things what traditional quests actually do. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want ANet return traditional quests but would like to have more lore and story as GW1 had. This lore based things could be an addition, a long quest chains in Personal Story fashion.
I am inspired by this simple video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3wqIz-ltak
It is not much but can make playing more enjoyable and can stick players to many different zones across Tyria not just LA. Don’t get me wrong, GW2 is still good for me but it seems as GW2 is on foundations of GW1 where things are just piled up nothing solid. Most characters from personal story are not memorable. Once we complete Arah, seems like there is no more lore in it. As a paradox, there is achievement to explore whole map – it is a bit boring to explore it like that. I finished only 60% of map on my main and completed personal story. 40% remain for “later” (who knows when). But if there is some lore based story, some mystery to solve in huge quest chain (in personal story manner) at the same time exploring the map, that would be great. Would make me feel “What will be next? Who are these guys? Will gods ever return? Are unseen ones still there? Is that whole hidden city?”.

Also, I really like how you designed the capital cities in GW2. My favorite is Devinity’s Reach, but as soon I entered Lion’s Arch, I really had no need to return to Divinity’s Reach. This whole huge city remains there unused, unexploited by the players. This is also case with other cities. It would be good to make some content there and make players enjoy doing things there.

SPvP is very good in my opinion. Still it needs a boost to attract more players and make them want to make teams for tournaments. It would be good to have some sort of scoreboard or announcer(s) in PvE part of the game. Let’s say best team, best players etc. Make some sort of virtual sport and virtual gladiators of players. NPCs could have their chat and debates on top 5 players that others can be encouraged to play SPvP themselves.

Hope some people from Arena Net read our plea here on the forums – it is because we like the game and want it to be good to make game to suck in as much of players as possible. We experienced so many innovations here and there are things that are not good enough. We want to play this for years and if players fall off it will be over much sooner than we anticipated (I don’t have any proof but feel a lot of negativity lately). I repeat: GW2 is the best MMO experience I had and I had many, I just want to have more of it for long time. If Arena Net doesn’t read this… well we, the community, we have tried what we could.

Romeo.4378:

Are you going to give Anet a second chance?

I’ve played Guild Wars for over seven years now. I’ve seen some blunders by ANet in that time. I gave them plenty of second chances to make right. Guild Wars 2 itself was like the ultimate second chance to have given them, an opportunity for them to set everything that they wronged me on in their first game to be righted in their sequel.

It’s not even three months past release, and they’ve already put themselves in position to take a direction that couldn’t be farther off from where I had hoped they would take me.

No, it’s going to be very hard for me to forgive them this time around.

Ditton.3149:

Conner.4702:

Sadly the AMA was far from relieving concerns for me. Saying they never intended ascended items to be such a grind yet implemented such a steep cost increase over exotics say otherwise. You do not increase the cost by a magnitude of at least 10 if you don’t want it to be a grind. No one can convince me they didn’t realize this when they put it in, because if true they will need to look for people with more forsight to start calling some of the shots.
Also it seems they think progression only comes from gears, levels and other stat related things.
To me they are just trying to rewrite history. Sure they never said it wouldn’t have vertical progression, but on the flip side they never said it would. If they truly had planned this they would have been upfront about it and all of this could have been avoided. He was severely downplaying the effect ascended gear had on the community in my opinion.

Actually yeah no..read the whole thing. he said they wanted to add all kinds of progression, vertical and horizontal.

I did, I saw no progression mentioned that wasn’t level, gear or stat based. Note: gear means both vertical and horizontal.

I think the AMA made it quite clear, the way they release the new gear was a mistake in hindsight, and they intend to rectufy it in future patches including new gear dropping around the world so that you can still work on legendary while getting infused gear.

Now saying that, the idea of no grind was one that drew me towards GW2, and you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered certain paths within the game required grinding, such as crafting, whether it be for materials, or for gold to buy materials.

As for the vertical/horizontal progression, I am confused by these terms. All I know is for my character to go from point A to point B, I need to do certain things, and sometimes that involves repeating steps between points A and B.

wildcode.5403:

As for the vertical/horizontal progression, I am confused by these terms. All I know is for my character to go from point A to point B, I need to do certain things, and sometimes that involves repeating steps between points A and B.

Vertical, your character goes from+1 to +2.

Horizontal, your characters wardrobe goes from 1 dress to 2 dresses… Or a shinier dress.

So we have vertical progression until lvl80, at which point we have horizontal progression? So why all the complaints about vertical progression in reguards to the new content?

Yes, I’m giving them a second chance. AMA actually calmed me down, TBH. I’m going to get back into the game and just play like I used to.
However, I won’t be buying gems in the foreseeable future, because as someone said Talking is easy, working on it is hard. I’ll wait and see.

wildcode.5403:

So we have vertical progression until lvl80, at which point we have horizontal progression? So why all the complaints about vertical progression in reguards to the new content?

People like to complain about ridiculous things on forums, for nothing more than the sake of complaining. That’s one of the “rules of the forum”

wildcode.5403:

So we have vertical progression until lvl80, at which point we have horizontal progression? So why all the complaints about vertical progression in reguards to the new content?

Because all of the pre-launch pr very appointedly spoke about there not being any more after having reached the power cap. Because we thought we´d have a level playing field after arriving at the said cap. Because people thought we´d have progression model more similiar to gw1 one than standard cookiecutter mmorpg. Because exotics themselves were borderline uncomfortably grindy for big part of the player base and ascended is that times about nine thousand.

…well to mention few, just look at the frontpage of this forum and you´ll find plenty mroe.

I think I’ll go finish off some more chapters of GW1 on my alt account while waiting for GW2 updates.

Well, I would if they’d fix the lag problems. At present I’ll have to stick to Saturday and Sunday mornings.

GW2 is looking alright, and I think with some additions to the story I’d enjoy it more. Not really liking the gear system – GW1’s setup where I could outfit a character in max-level equipment as soon as my character was ready for it, change builds without having to buy expensive new gear every time, etc. was far superior from the perspective of someone who wanted to play the game, not the gear treadmill.

I still play when I can (which is not as often as I’d like, hence I miss out on all the FoTM stuff). I am still somewhat worried about the asended gear and whether or not I can keep up.

But I did appreciate it that Chris admitted that they handled the patch poorly and that the communication was horrible. I hope he’s learned from that and won’t make that mistake again in the future. And yes, that gives me hope for this company.

Ok correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the addition of “better than exotic” lvl80 gear, below legendary, just add a between step with horizontal progression?

Can someone link what you guys are talking about please.

wildcode.5403:

Ok correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the addition of “better than exotic” lvl80 gear, below legendary, just add a between step with horizontal progression?

No.
Legendaries were originaly purely cosmetic and didn´t have any better stats than exotics, and never were supposed to have either if one believes the prelaunch advertisement.

Ascended added better stats, which put peoples panties (including mine) in a twist. And also since legendaries wouldn´t really be legendaries anymore they had to raise their stats too…well will have to as soon as ascended weapons release.

Jordan.6157:

Can someone link what you guys are talking about please.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/

You will have to scroll down a bit.

wildcode.5403:

Jordan.6157:

Can someone link what you guys are talking about please.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/

You will have to scroll down a bit.

http://pastehtml.com/view/cjqpwkikn.html

That are all questions and answers, so you don’t have to search for them

Strang.8170:

No.
Legendaries were originaly purely cosmetic and didn´t have any better stats than exotics, and never were supposed to have either if one believes the prelaunch advertisement.

Ascended added better stats, which put peoples panties (including mine) in to twist. And also since legendaries wouldn´t really be legendaries anymore they had to raise their stats too…well will have to as soon as ascended weapons release.

Ok so the complaints are coming from those who already have legendary weapons and transmuted them to the stats they wanted, and will not benifit from the boost to legendary weapons when it happens? I’m sorry its just confusing seeing alot of complaints about vertical progression when to me it looks like horizontal progression. I suppose you could see it as weapons getting a linear progression, but from the players standpoint its still a horizontal progression to get it.

I for one appreciate the effort Chris put in yesterday to set the record straight, but the game is still broke IMHO and we got a lot of words so at the moment I’ll be taking a pass until the game starts to look like something I want to invest my time in again.

I hope they pull it out of the fire, I really do I love the game, the combat , the look and the respect the game had to allow players to advance in the game regardless of how you want to play it. GW2 didn’t cater to just those that wanted to spend countless hours rerunning the same content and until it looks like that game again I’m out.

wildcode.5403:

Strang.8170:

No.
Legendaries were originaly purely cosmetic and didn´t have any better stats than exotics, and never were supposed to have either if one believes the prelaunch advertisement.

Ascended added better stats, which put peoples panties (including mine) in to twist. And also since legendaries wouldn´t really be legendaries anymore they had to raise their stats too…well will have to as soon as ascended weapons release.

Ok so the complaints are coming from those who already have legendary weapons and transmuted them to the stats they wanted, and will not benifit from the boost to legendary weapons when it happens? I’m sorry its just confusing seeing alot of complaints about vertical progression when to me it looks like horizontal progression. I suppose you could see it as weapons getting a linear progression, but from the players standpoint its still a horizontal progression to get it.

Complaints are coming from sources pointed earlier, and if you necessarily want to delve more into that, this forum is still full of them.

It´s not horizontal.
You have a weapon with a set of stats, when another weapon is basicly the same but with +1 added to each stat, that´s vertical. You climb a hill of rising stats.
Horizontal progression is having 2 weapons of exactly same powerlevel, but different. For example having healing set and power set. You´ve reached the plateu, but can wander around to different directions.

crude example and expands to lot of other content to, but should make it easier to grasp, maybe.

The AMA seemed to me to just muddy the waters. I couldn’t find anything reassuring in it.

Claiming to be for the community as a whole when you’ve just brought out a patch for and in response to one very specific section of the community sounds a bit hollow to me.

All that’s really changed is we have official confirmation that the vertical gear progression is here to stay. There was still a lot of evasion in the answers and they failed to take any questions about their vision of the game pre patch and now.

So no I’m not reassured and my desire to spend any time or money has not been rekindled. So I guess I’ll sit in the wait and see camp.

I’m in the “wait and see” camp. They’ve acknowledge fault, seemed fairly honest, and have given some insight on their plans to solve it.

Now they’ll have to do just that. My advice to ANet: as soon as possible, give us the info on when you plan to release those ascended pieces to the rest of the game, and what costs you’re thinking of. That way you can get feedback before you act (because it’s far harder to say decrease costs after players have bought it at twice the price already). In addition, having a projected date gives us some certainty – I want to know whether I should expect this in a week, a month, or half a year.

It seems to me the AMA confirmed that they wish to have no grind for stats, though stat raises will occur. This seems a reasonable compromise, if it is implemented correctly.

We’ll see. I’m not a big fan of saying “second chance”, I’d rather say I give them the chance to remedy the situation and then…“move forward”

No I wont until I see implantation. There was a lot of crap in the ama and it was a joke.
Had that been one of my guys I would have terminated the contract.
They said some things tried damage control ect but the fact is they rolled everything out with precision. The grind and tiers ect were meant to be like that and to say otherwise is disingenuous.

It proves to me that they dont have a clue of what they are doing and what direction they want to go in. We will focus on all aspects of the game – well duh.
We will do vertical and horizontal progression – Lol Pleasing everyone is pleasing no one.

I have no objection to more free content.

I play this game as a casual and really enjoying it.. hell my highest char is lvl 57.. but i do have 6 other low levels..