Hi,
A long time ago, 2001, there was this game made called Dark Age of Camelot.
In this game there were 50 levels for all time. Players were the primary source of ones armor, which was crafted by way of Legendary Crafters (a status made by crafting for very long periods of time at huge expenses). A feat not for the faint of heart, but rewarding and sometimes quite a relaxing affair There were many kinds of crafters from Dye Crafters, to Armor Crafters, to Spell Crafting. This last, Spell Crafting, could be quite comical as it involved a particularly unique risk… death. Trying to get that extra 5% bonus into your stats wasn’t just achieved… you could fail. The armor might explode, the crafter did explode, and the only way to do this was to be that Legendary Crafter.
Armor in this game had fixed stats, just like Guild Wars 2. There was a hard cap on just how much you were ever going to be epic and it could degrade. It was around 5 to 15 gold to repair a high level piece of armor or weapon. No matter how much you liked it, one day a level 12 water beetle would sneeze, your tailor would smile, and the epicly awesome shiny would break. At that point you would need to craft new armor.
This assured that at least once a year Sir Epicness Most Awesome Have-it-All was reduced to Sir Have It Not of Fables.
I don’t think Guild Wars 2 is about that nor needs it. However, in the course of this other game there came a day when the devs made an Expansion known as Trials of Atlantis.
Curious things emerged in Trials of Atlantis no crafter could ever produce. These things were called Artifacts. They were many and often came with great boons to assist the would-be heroes and Sirs. Many were glad and then they were sad for something great had been broken. A game that had been fair had been shifted ever so slightly askew.
It was this access to a soft push into the stat-cap. Though 5% was hardly a lot it was enough to wave goodbye the crafter’s chore and the community threw quite a fit. Enough so that there came a day when the Developers were forced to make a server where never would this Trial in Atlantis be part of the game again. One expansion removed and a story to learn from in all future games to follow.
I’m telling you this story because while I have no issue with Ascended Armor being the new end-all-be-all for raiding, you’ve effectively changed the meta of the game irreversibly.
Players must now face the choice to push themselves to get ascended, a chore really as trying as a Legendary Weapon in most cases, or set themselves away forever from a piece of content least their fortunes run across a friendly group of players who could care less about Ascended Stats.
And there’s no assurance this friendly group of players, however good they be, will be able to do a darned thing in the face of needing that little bitty stat difference. So, there it, staring so many a player in the face. It’s a bit like the story of the Mantis in True Facts… and we all know how it turned out for the mantis…
Some nay-sayer to all this is certainly going to post after I do to tell how this is all wrong. I merely have to point at LFG to site otherwise. I quote" [Read] full run 5k+ap lvl 80 zerker." Here’s another. “p1/p2 Zerker EXP 80.” That’s an Ascalonian Catacombs group. A level 35 instance. So much for the new player’s experiencing dungeons in a nice inviting way. Replace “zerker” with “ascended + stat type + trait” and you’ve got the road map you’ve set out for us with this already developed.
This is what I’ve been talking about in my posts about LFG. It’s really not LFG. It’s LFG Meta. Yes, it’s entirely right that – as some have pointed out – this will always be the case. There’s going to be a meta. However, there really ought to be two LFG tabs if you’re going to persist with this: LFG Meta and LFG Relaxed.
This goes on to say that many people’s desire are possibly right to want see a difficulty mode selection come into the game for those seeking it; whether it be purely dungeons or going right on into open world content as well.
If you’re going to cater to a niche of the community who just want to run the meta and the “win” be the thing they need to enjoy a game that’s fine. However, you’re going to have another niche who wants to coordinate with other players or defend a location and chat about it during some tense lulls in the fighting just as much. You’re mistaking “Relaxed” as “Don’t care to win”.
Relaxed people get a great deal more joy out of doing something unconventionally than following the cookie-cutter corporate formula because sometimes the only real goal is to hit the boss in the face with a hammer – be darned if it did no more than send it bounded around like a rag doll. Tim cooked it with a fire field all just the same.
Just think carefully where you’re taking this game if you’re going to up the meta to the wall. Is this Guild Wars 2 to be a “trial” or a “game”?