Guild Wars 2

cesmode.4257:

timmyf.1490:

Izzy-

I think that’s some great info on time-gating and helps us to understand why you use it. I would add that, in addition to casual-vs-hardcore, you should consider single-vs-multiple character players.

Time gates that might be reasonable for players with a single character could be entirely ridiculous for those of us who have eight.

You might not like this answer but the person who has 8 characters can craft more things quickly, like spiritwood for example, than the guy with just one character.

The guy with just one character might not even be a casual that plays 1 hour a day. He might have 1500 hours in and just really love his class.

So how is this fair to him?

and how is it fair to me ?
I leveled all my toons to 80 why do I need to be punished for the sole benefit of those that have a single character ?

if I have 8 max level characters and i have the time to play say 2 in a day, I should be able to progress them both towards whatever it is I want and NOT be shoe horned and restricted by a time gate that punishes anyone that plays more than 1 single character.

I understand the reasoning behind it and all but…..
they should’ve also thought about those like me that have several toons that are actually played on a regular basis and are not just there to abuse the systems in place or just to make money.

with the current time gate style of one toon rewards, I will never ever go for ascended items on any of my alts even though i play them on a regular basis, the fact i cannot progress them on the same day is just to much.

and let’s not even talk about why ascended armor piece recipes have specific stats on them ? and even though they have stats on them i still need an insignia as well\

if i buy a recipe for boots and an insignia for beserker stats that should be it !
if i want different stats buy a different insignia, the way it was implemented would requires more laurels than what you get in a whole year to actually get all the stat types and that is only for 1 crafting profession.

I’m gonna stop hear I’m getting to worked up already and don’t need any more potential infractions !

Khisanth.2948:

Septemptus.7164:

We really need flat rewards in WvW so it won’t be even more damaged (and I personally think it’s damaged beyond repair for months now thanks to WvW S1).

On the other hand the S1 rewards have shown that none of it really mattered. It was still just the same old thing about the scores.

For me that was the best thing that happened.
I also loved whole that reward rage on forums. I really enjoyed it.

I hope this will teach people to play and have fun instead of betraying servers and grind for some imagined rewards. The rewards can’t be the reason you play or you will burn out sooner or later.
That is why I enjoy more and more skins that we get. I almost never use them, but the variety of options is the best thing for me. That is why I love it and it’s not rewarding in terms of gold and legendaries and all that people equal to wealth.
It’s rewarding because I have more options to play with and some people asked me – what is that cool looking green book on my necro’s back and I could tell them: “I have this because I played 1st Halloween event”.
If something in this game feels exclusive – it’s that feeling – I was there when it happened.

As more systems are introduced, so are artificial inconveniences. Ones that are a direct consequence of several distinct decisions that together end up negating the reason for a restriction in the first place. Ascended gear is fine by me as a mode of progression, but it is also overly daunting since I have one of each profession at 80 and I really enjoy experimenting with builds and stats.

In that sense I think more progression should be account bound as many things in the game already are, e.g. the wallet. The distinction between characters would then come from decisions in builds, appearance, and other such devices. In this sense I feel the suggestions about unlocking stat combinations or similar features are really good. It would also make it easier to introduce new stats to the game as rewards for various game modes. I once suggested that stats should be separate from armor, but some of the solutions in this thread appeal to me just as much.

Another example of artificial inconvenience is in crafting. You can enable two crafts at a time on a character. I have all the crafts spread across all my characters, so now it is merely an unneeded inconvenience when I have to swap characters to craft something. The materials are already account bound. Crafting could in essence just be another account unlock in a progression system of unlocks (dyes, armors, stats, and so on). That way you also don’t have to juggle recipes between characters or wonder if you have a certain recipe on that one character. This way of thinking could be applied in many places.

Collections give a strong sense of purpose. Something to complete. Something to own. Something to use. Directly tied into a progression system that does this on purpose would be good. It’s overall a really great incentive, especially if there is a visual distinction that lets me know what I’m still missing. Right now, some of the collections are merely passive and incidental. How do I know I have all the colors? How do I know which ones are missing? How many armor skins am I missing?

In this way, vertical and horizontal progression could also have something in common.

Sorry Izzy, but I just don’t agree with time-gating full-stop, and your lists of pros and cons are all very well from a developer’s point of view, but from a player’s point of view?
Yeah, that’s a different story.

Firstly, why don’t I agree with time-gating at all?

On release, it wasn’t even in the game.
Nothing at all was time-gated.
That’s the game I bought and enjoyed playing.

Now why your pros and cons are messed up:

- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)

Less time might mean less days per week or per month. If you miss one day with the current time-gating systems, you’re falling behind.
If you miss a month or more, you stand no chance of catching up with those people who are able to log in every day.
For me, this has created the very real scenario that no matter how much interesting content is released, I am unlikely to ever play the game again as long as time-gating is in effect.
The longer I stay logged off, the wider the gap grows between my characters and those of others still logging in. This actively decreases the appeal of Guild Wars 2 to me as time goes on.
There is no quick way to catch up thanks to all the time-gates in place.
Actually, from what I’ve read, you can buy a lot of the materials for Ascended gear from the trading post which will help you catch up. I don’t know, I stopped playing just before SAB2. So if I want to start playing again I suppose I could dump a whole truckload of real-world cash into gems.
Yeah, a huge pay-gate’s probably even worse than a time-gate.

Thanks to the above, it puts this con of yours into an entirely new light:

- Time gates hurt players with more time (by this I mean players with more time run up against time gates more and their time becomes less rewarded over time.)

I would argue that people with more time on their hands, those able to log in every day of every month? These are the ONLY people time-gating benefits.

Let’s look at time-gating from a philosophical point of view.

When it comes down to it, MMO developers need to keep people interested in their games so that they keep playing and hopefully, paying. This is the way you earn your living and the way shareholder’s earn a profit.
I get that; you need to earn a buck as much as I do.
When it comes down to it, there are two ways you can try to retain the interest of your audience.

1. Regularly release more content that relies on creation of artistic assets, such as new armour & weapon models, new areas, new dungeons, new jumping puzzles and new story elements.

2. Artificially increase the amount of time a player stays logged in through adding activities that have to be completed on a regular basis.

Point 1 is more expensive for developers, and if it’s to be in any way meaningful and satisfying to the players, it has to be substantial.

Point 2 is all round cheaper and easier for developers, yet runs the risk of alienating players, especially more casual ones.

To ArenaNet’s credit, they’re actually trying to do both.
But I think they’d be better off ignoring point 2 completely.

Look, let’s face it, when it comes down to it, you’re hoping that by increasing the amount of time people play, you’re also maximising their exposure to your monetisation systems.
The thing is, I would argue that your current system alienates your most valuable customers; those with less time to play because they’re more financially stable, most likely because they have commitments outside of the game.

The people logging in every day and playing 5 or more hours?
They can buy gems with gold. They have found all the best ways to make money in game.
Anything desirable that becomes available through the gem store, they can buy with gold. They’re not generating any revenue for you.
They’re hitting their time-gates and staying ahead of those unable to log as much time as them.

The people with less time available want something more meaningful than a shopping list of activities they need to repeat on a daily basis. They want to log in and experience something new and fun. In all likelihood, they’ve just finished work. The last thing they want at the end of the working day is to be presented with more tasks they have to complete.
That’s the kind of pressure they play games to get away from.

If you shift focus to pure content creation, you end up making things that everyone can enjoy. And if it’s permanent, they can enjoy it at their leisure, with no pressure to complete it in a mad 2 week rush.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

videoboy.4162

Isaiah,
I see where you’re coming from with the time gates. My question is, do you think that allowing players to craft two or three items per day would be too detrimental?

Well the crafting gating we added was actually for a different reason then gating the speed in which someone can craft ascended gear. We wanted to make people who level up crafting able to do something to gain gold each day. The time gate here goal is much more focused around making gold then limiting crafting as you can bypass it with gold.

Are you sure about this one? Deldrimor Steel Ingots sells at a lost of 10 silvers each. Every time you craft and sell one you become a little bit poorer.

I think there was a fatal flaw in that design by forcing anyone who would want to buy those items to have to level their crafting to a point where they are able to make it themselves. Your only buyers will be rich and impatient people.

This does break down when someone has a lot of characters and has an endless demand for these mats. This problem I put under alt problem and we just need to brainstorm more ideas on how to make life easier for people with lots of characters.

At the very least each of the professions should have had separate timers(if you have 10 lv500 weaponsmith they would still share one timer) so you don’t have armor crafting contending with weapon crafting for resources. It wouldn’t be a vast improvement but it would be less contentious.

In order to progress characters they need to make ascended items tradeable before first use.

Remove laurels as the worst time gating alt destroying idea ever brought into a game.

Remove laurels as a requirement for buying ascended recipes. It will take almost 4 months (or longer?) of logging in every single day just to unlock the ascended weapons and armor recipes- not to mention the further 5 days per infusion….and 4 armor sets for ONE toon…

If they do the first then the laurels problem becomes moot. Given that people have warehouses full of ascended items that they have no use for currently, the first suggestion would release all these items and mean that people who play casually, play alts or just plain hate wasting time and getting frustrated in fractals can be on a level playing field with the fully ascended decked out fractal runners.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Cliff.8679:

Izzy, you gave an example a little earlier about how it’s a problem that there’s a big gap between players who play a lot versus players who don’t play as much, and you mentioned an example of the hardcore players being level 4000 while the casual players are 100.

I don’t think this example really works, because this game doesn’t have any kind of vertical progression like that. In fact, before ascended gear, the hardcore and the casual players were on a level playing field, time-gating or not. Exotics were all anyone had to worry about, and they weren’t too difficult or time consuming to attain. Now with the ascended crafting, it actually makes things worse. Players who don’t play as much have less laurels, they miss days to do their ectoplasm refinements, have less materials to use, less money to buy materials they might need, etc. So I’m failing to see how the time-gating helps keep a minimal gap between hardcore players and casual players on a power level, especially when one didn’t really exist before.

At this point, the only purpose this time-gating is serving is what you just said: it keeps a stranglehold on the ascended material market so that some players can make money selling instead of crafting. Is that really worth it? I agree that crafting is largely useless when it comes to actually being profitable for players, but there has to be a better answer than crippling our ability to advance at a reasonable speed. Especially when we want to have multiple builds, outfit multiple characters, and outfit those multiple characters with multiple builds of their own.

I was using the example to explain how time gates help equalize players goals and focus them together. Another example would be guild timers without them a super hard core guild would have finished all guild levels in 1 night where other guilds of equal size might take months. Then if you design new content around the guild that can do that much content in 1 night then the other guilds just get left behind in the dust. Vertical or horizontal progression doesn’t matter a player who is going to take 3 years to do something everyone else and in a few weeks makes it hard to balance. Now gates don’t make them equal at all, the players with more time will still complete things faster take my guild example the super good guild still finishes something in 5 weeks that took the other 3 months, but it does help close that gap. You really don’t want them to be that close you just don’t want them to be crazy far apart.

This also is super important for wealth disparity as far as economy goes but I’m keeping the examples as much around progression as economy is a totally different discussion.

What time gating really does is make people log in on a regular interval so that it becomes habitual.

Instead of stats progression, skills progression. Able to learn skills maybe from different weapons, in order to custom the skills. Using skills points to learn for it.

That give you two different objetive:

- Search all weapons to “extract” their skills
- Find the skills where you are more confortable for.

I want to develop further on my order i choose. Titles can be rewarding, also skins. Maybe a special haircut. Or a dance style! Maybe my order can give to me some bonus if i do an special quest that week. Or maybe i need to reunite with other people (not necesary from the same Guild) to do a special quest for the order.

But why we want to develop our character? To overcome better challenges:

+More choices for dungeons. Some kind of one-man route where you can test your character. Or a not limiting player number route. Or a competitive route where you “race” against other guild or group. There you can see the other group and decide to run as fast as possible, or give them troubles.

+A random dungeon (for example a tower, with random rooms with random enemies and events) You (and your group) go up (or down, two choices) when every time you clear a dungeon, you can choose to:

- Leave. Ok, thats it. Another people might fill that slot.
- Stay. Then you get a random boom like +%magic find, +%gold, etc but that character get a condition, +1% for example to damage.

So, every player have a different “bonus” depending how long they played.

I do like the stats progression (i know a lot of people doesnt), in somehow like Diablo, were you find the stats with a random number on it. So you are always trying to find the “perfect” item. But instead a huge different, maybe its just a little. Maybe something like Power: From 955-1005. So every drop counts, maybe can give you a little improvement. Not really neccesary, but is nice.

Armour:
I am Charr, and I wear mediun armour. I dont find too much of a problem with the rate or difficultness of crafting/getting things. One thing I DO have a problem with though is finding something that actually looks good on my charr. Most medium armour are coats, coats and more coats…. The ascended armour looks ok so I’ll Craft that ome what I have the mats. But till now I’va had the same armour for sO long without finding anything else that looks good. Not in BLTC not anywhere…. There’s clipping, stretching, removal of horns (DON’T cut my horns… make a hole for them simply…) etc.

I know the charr population is small (seem to have been even smaller). But still, u can get a lot of money from us since I guess i’m far from the only charr out there stil waiting….. for that other good looking armour.

Weapons:
I’m a ranger. When there os weapons that are likely to be used together (SB/LB, Shield/swod/mace, Scepter/mace/focus,… I Think u get what I mean). Plz make legendaries etc that matches each other despite being different weapons. For example a LB and a SB sthat looks almost the same/has the same style. Ppl go for a general style and all of the sudden ther is this cool weapon – that NOTHING else matches of the other weapons that u can get.

A minor ability to dye weapns would be nice too. As it is now y’ll have to match u’r armour with the weapon (if u’d like a color sceme that is in harmony)…. The colors could be limited bepending on materials etc (would look wiered with some mats having some colors on weapons).

About getting Money/mats:
I Think that the Farm traing going on in Frostgorge is a sighn of something gone wrong. Ppl can run there for hours just so that they can afford anything (I have no clue what they buy or if its for luck). When the rest of the content in the game i is less motivating/rewarding (well I find fractals far more rewarding – and challenging – if u ask me) than running between 5 Champs a couple of hundret times a day, there is something wrong. Either it’s boring, or not rewarding enough or both. The lack of big released pathches might be one of the problems. When there have been an LS patch released its overwhelmed for a couple of hours to Days and then, when its done, ppl go back to have nothing to do…

Event rewards:
Instead of just getting XP, Karma and a very small amount of Money upon a sucessful event, there could be some other reward as well like for example “As a thankful gesture for u protecting my crops I have saved some for u; a small reward of some food mats” I Think this could actually drive ppl out to do events to get materials.

Personal story rewards:
The Personal story have happened nothing with for over a year… It’s fun doing it but I Think most players have done it by now, maybe even several times. And, speaking of personals tory. Often u end up having higher lvl than for the instance, lets say u’re lvl 55 and the instance is 34 (usually happens due to mapexploring in between). U still get a lvl 34 reward – that is compleatly useless! Plz make the reward match u’r character’s CURRENT lvl in personal story.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Gnat.9405:

Is it possible for us to get an idea from you, Chris, of the concepts you think stand out and may have an impact on the future of progression? Right now it’s a lot of you repeating our ideas optimistically, but not a lot of context (with all due respect).

I have been building a proposal on behalf of everyone. I am still seeing how the discussion plays out on other ideas. I will continue to update the proposal. This is how I am approaching the ideation discussion. I think I have called out the idea that are interesting however I don’t understadn what you mean by ‘Not a lot of context’.

If you are looking for definitive promises on work actions then I am afraid that is something I won’t be doing. If you are looking for thoughts on direction moving forward then you can find this all over the thread and there will be a summary in this regard upon conclusion of the Vertical discussion before centering of the Horizintal discussion.

Hope this helps?

Chris

Chris I believe what Gnat might have been trying to say was ‘more back and forth interaction’ instead of just affirming some good ideas here and there.

We want to hear your take on it. You’ve heard most of our ideas already, what do you think about character progression, if it were your characters you were aiming to progress, and you were able to do something about it, then I’m pretty sure most of the contributors of this thread would like to know how you’d do it. This IS a discussion after all, and instead of just moderating and summarising, what’s your input?

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Con’s
- Time gates hurt players with more time (by this I mean players with more time run up against time gates more and their time becomes less rewarded over time.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to complete the content before the gate resets, this can add fatigue to players play experience (If I have 15 things I need to do every time I log in, I never feel like I get to do what I want to do.)
- Time gates are very calculable (You know how many dailies you need to get x reward.) It’s hard to say how many days it takes to hit level 80 as it’s very dependent on too many factors. Knowing the time can sometimes make it feel more daunting or tedious.

Pro’s
- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)
- Time gates equalize players by bringing the hardcore and the causal players closer together. (Players play at an variety of different times and intensities. This makes balancing wealth disparity and play times/progression much harder without actual gates.)
- Time gates help group players up (guilds 1 week timer helps group a large amount of play times into the same time frame.)

Reasons for time gating
- Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)
- Overflow issues (the way our tech works without a time gate, you can use overflows to reset your timer)
- Reward Equalization (keep the time to do something more even between hardcore and causal)
- Character vs Account (some things we want to reward the account and thus an account time gated reward allows us to do that cleanly, which stops people from deleting characters and renaming in order to acquire a large number of things)

Overall I feel like time gating is important for an MMO because it’s important to close the gap between the causal and hardcore group so you can make sure your future rewards and content are useful for a wider variety of players. For example if there was no level cap and everyone could level as much as they want, hardcore players would be at level 4561 and a causal player would be at like 100. Once that happens, it would be very hard to make anything that both of those players would be happy about getting. MMO’s also have what I like to call “mass” to them, the more people playing and logging on, the more fun they are and systems which encourage people to log in often help create that mass. People see their friends regularly even just to say “hey there is an event this Sunday with the guild” or “hey lets set aside some time Friday so we can do fractals”. Now this doesn’t mean I feel like we can just add time gates everywhere. In fact I think you need either a very large amount of time gated stuff so a player can play for ever and never run out of things to do (which is a bit unrealistic) or you need non-time gated rewards and game play. This is why we create places for people to farm for all types of things. We like people who farm a lot, we are just always trying to make sure farming doesn’t blow out an item so much it’s no longer worth farming as it sort of defeats the whole reason to farm. A nice mix of time gates and non-gates is important. I think there are some valid complaints that we have over time gated some areas of the game and we should do some reviews of our time gates to see if adjustments should be made, but the game needs time gates for many reasons and if they were not there the game would be way less fun for any type of player.

Isaiah, I’m sure you’ve heard of an old phrase “… and never the twain shall meet”. I quote this in reference to your example of casuals and hardcore players being effectively bound in parity by a timegate on certain materials. Believe me, casuals won’t always be casuals, but hardcores will always be hardcores, and you can rest assured that putting in one timegate on an aspect of the game won’t stop hardcores from continually skipping further and further away from casuals in other aspects. If you think this very small but important factor of timegating is going to keep casuals in line with hardcores or vice versa then – and I don’t want to sound impolite – it is an admirable sentiment, but you’re out of touch with who plays this game and exactly who it’s dominated by.

There’s a lot to be said about farming your own materials (and I know not everyone is in this camp) but not farming to only have your own progress stifled by further timegates.

What I would like to see in terms of progression is earned character progression in the form of further, deeper character customization. This could be done in many forms.

-Trophies, or little tidbits added onto armor and weapons.
-Give us another skill bar. a special one, 3 slots, invent new skills – really awesome, creative ones. have a variety, 12 to choose from.

to make this skill bar unique instead of just adding more buttons to mash on cooldown, make them require somekind of effect or combat occurance to take place before use. stuff like: requires dodge before use, requires block of a skill before use, requires player to be at less than 10% hp)

4 based on weapon combo equiped -
4 based on class
4 based on race

choose 1 for each of the 3 slots.

B00M – more customization. more depth, more fun. make the aquisition of this extra skill bar apart of an epic quest chain. further personal story, or make each skill thats available be hidden somewhere in the world in a certain special event / encounter / small (5 man able boss) or hidden puzzle reward.

Thats one thing Id love to see. just MORE SKILLS. Doesnt matter how we get there, just more skills, more depth to combat.

right now on many occasions i feel like i just mash all the cooldowns as soon as they come up because thats whats most effective. there is little to no thought put in actually using skills intelligently or needing to wait for openings to use them. some kind of added interaction in combat would be a GODSEND.

maybe thats just me tho.

Here’s something I want: Legendary Traits. A single trait line that uses its own resource and provides a minimal boost to all stats. At the end, it lets you select a cosmetic perk, (such as replacing a mesmer’s butterflies with bats, or adding sparkles to a ranger’s pets).

It progresses using [Objects] of Prestige, which are earned by completing difficult profession-specific challenges throughout the world. For example, a guardian would need Beacons of Prestige, gained in public instances that only guardians can enter. The challenges would be exceptionally difficult, but you only need to succeed at each one once.

The idea of synergy skills was brought up, and I kind of want to expand on that further. One of my pet peeves about the game, is the lack of combat depth. I don’t feel that my class (necromancer) is contributing anything, and I don’t feel like the combat is moving forward. In fact, it feels like it is going backwards.

Look at the picture I’ve included below. This is what an average dungeon run looks like. As you can see, there’s no strategy involved. All the support that you need is a bunch of guardians spamming every boon on their bar, and then everyone stacking somewhere in a corner. All those boons on us, that’s all the guardians are doing, and that’s all we need.

Now, during this run I had Plague with me to blind enemies… was it really needed? I don’t think anyone even noticed those enemies were blind. The combat is really lacking depth. I want to see combat move on from that, and move towards more elaborate roles and tactics. I don’t think one class should be able to spam so many boons that it trivializes pretty much every dungeon encounter in the game. And I don’t think every player stacking on top of each other should be the pinnacle of tactics in the game.

This is why one of the other users laughed at your support warrior before. All you basically need in the game is one guardian, along with everyone stacking in a corner and clobbering things to death. Defense is barely needed, especially since all you really ever have to dodge is insta-kills (a mechanic which trivializes defensive equipment).

If we are going to have some form of equipment progression, I think the game needs to progress with it, and give defense a purpose. I also want to see more synergy between the different classes, so they have to work together to get this much defense, instead of just spamming their whole skill bar.

Progression limits options:

In my opinion there is a problem with the current progression system. While I progress through the game I will gain skills, traits and new weapons. But beyond level 80 instead of expanding my options the progression system locks me into a specific build and play style. The more I progress with a character the more expensive it becomes to expand my options. Crafting ascended gear locks you into one set of stats, which in turn will lock you into a type of build (and it locks you into a specific look as well unless you spend even more money).

The beauty of the Guild Wars 1 progression system was that I got more options the more I progressed. New skills gave you new ways to play the game, to make contend you already experienced new and fresh again. It may have given us too many options, but the problem with the current progression system is not that its not expending our options, it is actually reducing them. It is making me stay with a playstlye even if I got bored with it weeks ago, because I put hours into acquiring armor, stats and runes which I am reluctant to give up. I think this is also a big contributor to the negative reactions to class changes, since you can not change with them.

Until now I used all stats rings and amulets to keep my options divers (which kind of works on a guardian), but this wont work with weapons and armor. I have no desire to keep progressing in the current system. I rather get more exotic gear to make build switching possible. But the need for inventory space and the lack of build/gear templates make this difficult as well. I loved the 1H sword and mace on my guardian while leveling, but now I am just using hammer, greatsword, staff. There are so many options, but they feel out of grasp and progressing will make them even more undesirable.

Stats and Skin collection:

My solution to this problem would be a gear collection system. I would like to unlock gear for my characters similar to the current solution to stat locked legendarys. Instead of a choice between every possible stat combination, I would like there to be a way to unlock berserker, cleric, knight stats for a helm or gloves. This way I have small goals and finding or crafting gear would mean more than it does now, even if I do not need those stats right now.

Can we go back for time-gatting issue?
I think that I understand both cons/pros but may I have the suggestion? The main goal is to equalize hardcore/casuals – in order to that the daily limits are not the best solution. I’d rather see monthly/weekly time constraints for some part of them – for example crafting like:
you can craft only 20 items / month, 5 items / week or you can craft one item every day. You can decide – going for more but on daily basis or less but on the longer period. This way I will not feel missing if I need to leave gw2 for some period.

Zplus.4217:

No to power creep vertical grind.

Big yes to horizontal skin, skill and build progression.

K.I.S.S

+1

I apoligize in advance if this post sounds a bit hostile, but some things I red in your post made me slightly angry.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)

Not sure where you’re getting this idea from. I’m one of those players and when I come home late during weekdays, I don’t want to spend my limited time on some kind of shopping list every single day. I’d rather do something fun like events, WvW or PvP, than waste my time on boring timegates.
However, the days I do have a lot more hours to play, I can’t catch up. Why? Because these timegates that are supposed to “help” me, are actually stopping me from progressing .

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)

What about making actual fun stuff that makes me log in? Instead of shopping lists and other psychological tricks to “make” me. Wouldn’t it be better to have players log in to do content because it’s actually fun, instead of just because it’s time-gated?
Don’t get me wrong, I like most of your content. Just not the heavily time-gated content.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Overall I feel like time gating is important for an MMO because it’s important to close the gap between the causal and hardcore group so you can make sure your future rewards and content are useful for a wider variety of players. For example if there was no level cap and everyone could level as much as they want, hardcore players would be at level 4561 and a causal player would be at like 100. Once that happens, it would be very hard to make anything that both of those players would be happy about getting.

I’m sorry, but caps and timegates are hardly the same. Caps eventually bring everyone to the same level. Timegates do the opposite; they segregate more and more people unless everyone keeps up with the timegate.
An improvement to the current system IMO, would be to change daily timegates into weekly timegates. That way, players that have less time on some days and more on others, can still catch up. Meanwhile (hardcore) players with a lot of time, are still weekly capped and (casual) players playing a bit every single day can still continue doing just that.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The idea of synergy skills was brought up, and I kind of want to expand on that further. One of my pet peeves about the game, is the lack of combat depth. I don’t feel that my class (necromancer) is contributing anything, and I don’t feel like the combat is moving forward. In fact, it feels like it is going backwards.

Look at the picture I’ve included below. This is what an average dungeon run looks like. As you can see, there’s no strategy involved. All the support that you need is a bunch of guardians spamming every boon on their bar, and then everyone stacking somewhere in a corner. All those boons on us, that’s all the guardians are doing, and that’s all we need.

Now, during this run I had Plague with me to blind enemies… was it really needed? I don’t think anyone even noticed those enemies were blind. The combat is really lacking depth. I want to see combat move on from that, and move towards more elaborate roles and tactics. I don’t think one class should be able to spam so many boons that it trivializes pretty much every dungeon encounter in the game. And I don’t think every player stacking on top of each other should be the pinnacle of tactics in the game.

This is why one of the other users laughed at your support warrior before. All you basically need in the game is one guardian, along with everyone stacking in a corner and clobbering things to death. Defense is barely needed, especially since all you really ever have to dodge is insta-kills (a mechanic which trivializes defensive equipment).

If we are going to have some form of equipment progression, I think the game needs to progress with it, and give defense a purpose. I also want to see more synergy between the different classes, so they have to work together to get this much defense, instead of just spamming their whole skill bar.

I do dungeons EVERY day, and a LOT of them, I teach guildies how to runthem very fast and efficiently, I can clearly tell a good player that times there boons, reflects, blocks, dodges, heals BLINDS, Weakness, Chills (both weakness and blind will save you alot of trouble in some places) Knockbacks/Pulls and Immob/cripples (those are very important to be good at using).

The times when we have amazing level 49 fractals and the best dungeons runs are the times that players are using theirs skills correctly and wisely.

Ive had some of the easiest (what I feel are) dungeons runs be a Nightmare b.c players just “spam skills” with no rotation, not knowing the Enemy attacks or timings.

So I feel this game does have alot of depth and strategy, just b.c you can “push” your way threw a dungeon with force doesnt mean thats the best way and fun.

Coldtart.4785:

My earlier proposal which I will give the short version of here was for exotic gear to be able to be upgraded with customisation slots that allow for selecting a different skin, stat type and/or rune/sigil and the item becoming ‘ascended’ once it reaches a certain quantity of customisations, allowing it to then be used as a legendary precursor.

This setup would remove post-game vertical progression in favour of horizontal build variety without invalidating the effort people have put into obtaining existing ascended items, while also making ascended into a true bridge between exotic and legendary rather than competition for mats as it currently is.

I love this idea! It would make the gear upgrade process much less destructive and much more growth-oriented.

Faux.1937:

So I feel this game does have alot of depth and strategy, just b.c you can “push” your way threw a dungeon with force doesnt mean thats the best way and fun.

The fact that you can simply push through with the most braindead of tactics, kind of illustrates that the game’s combat does lack depth. None of the content demands better strategy on the part of the players.

And there’s also a clear imbalance between how effective the classes are in dungeons. It’s no surprise you see warriors and guardians + 1 mesmer combos everywhere. That screenshot of mine where you see all those dozens of boons, that is the reason people bring a guardian and not a necromancer/ranger/engineer.

Please add not only more synergy in the skills, but make the content also require multiple classes to work together. And also, bring the other classes more in line in that regard. The less popular classes need a role in dungeons.

Its not said nearly enough, but one of the driving forces against vertical progression is WvW. You can’t have vertical progression in WvW because there is no way to properly reward a player in it.

How do you reward a player for selflessly walking dolyaks and capping ruins? If the rewards were good you would have frikkin dolyak trains and ruin trains.

And that’s just it.

The main body of any zerg in all of wvw is a bunch of reward-minded pve’ers grinding karma and achieves.

That’s why when a server starts losing even a little, the pve kids disapear and suddenly a slightly imbalanced match becomes a blowout.

That’s why WvW matchmaking is impossible.

…

WvW needs to become like the mists of GW1

It needs to use the existing pve gear structure so that you can load into wvw with your pve character. However, this ‘copy’ actually has its own gear, similar to spvp. Such that if you earn a piece of ascended in WvW and equip it, when you leave WvW that ascended item stays with the WvW copy.

That way you can have varying levels of ‘grind’ for acquiring gear. In WvW it can be very easy, since that gear will stay there. In PvE it can be hard, and even have more vertical progression, so that they are happy.

Most importantly, none of the rewards in wvw will be relevant for pve. Rewards in PvE can be used in wvw, but it would be silly to pve for gear for wvw when you could wvw for your wvw gear much faster.

At the same time if casual pvers want to drop in and do some wvw they can bring their hard earned lewts with them to show off and let others bask in the shining light of their massive ego.

Think about it. No more karma trains. No more zergs.

The only people playing WvW will be people who actually want to be there.
The only people PvEing will be the people that actually want to be there.

Crazy, I know, right?

Truthbearer.9708:

I apoligize in advance if this post sounds a bit hostile, but some things I red in your post made me slightly angry.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)

Not sure where you’re getting this idea from. I’m one of those players and when I come home late during weekdays, I don’t want to spend my limited time on some kind of shopping list every single day. I’d rather do something fun like events, WvW or PvP, than waste my time on boring timegates.
However, the days I do have a lot more hours to play, I can’t catch up. Why? Because these timegates that are supposed to “help” me, are actually stopping me from progressing .

Yeah, this is my perspective on this ‘pro’. Time-gating for somebody who can only log in a couple of times a week = they can only craft whatever-material a couple of times a week, and that’s if they choose to spend their limited time on the time-gated content. Of course, they don’t “have to”, but as Izzy says, not doing so slows them down, puts them behind the curve, and is the opposite of equalising the progression of casual and hardcore players who continue to log in most days and play enough hours per session that doing a little time-gated content does not prevent them from progressing in other areas.

What would help make the time gating less painful is that for each day you don’t log in within a certain time frame (let’s say a week), you accrue credit for a particular time-gated component. Let’s say you didn’t log in from Mon-Fri, and the first day you log in that week is Saturday. Based on the time-gating, you can now craft 6 of those components to account for your missed time. I’d accept credit not accruing forever – perhaps it resets each week.

But part of accepting that casual players have limited time is accepting that they generally have less flexible time, too. It may be that they play 5-10 hours a week, and they play it all in one day. Time-gating thus harms them a lot, compared to people who can play an hour or 2 a day. If time-gating is genuinely about equalising instead of artificially slowing people down, this needs to be a consideration for game basics like BiS gear.

The time gating thing, ugh, I’m not a fan of the way it is implemented for ascended crafting. Currenty I’m at Artificer level 477, and there is nothing for me to do but to wait till I can craft the next material the very next day. Experience crawls up extremely slowly, and it feels like the time gating is only there to make the process take longer. If I could, I would pop a crafting booster, and just craft a ton of ascended materials in one go. My crafting xp would shoot up, and that level 500 would be in reach a lot faster. But until that time, it is a grind with gating slapped on top.

Wow, this thread exploded quickly (in length, that is!). Probably not surprising, given how much of a controversial issue progression types have proven to be in the past, especially in the context of the Guild Wars franchise (since GW1 was one of the few games out there that focused on the horizontal side). Trying to read everything just isn’t practical, so I’ve just scanned through the red posts and a few others that caught my eye, and here are my own thoughts:

Personally, I’m a horizontal progressor at heart. Vertical progression, to me, always struck me as a bit of a pointless Red Queen’s Race – you get bigger numbers on your character so you can fight monsters which have bigger numbers. It works for pencil and paper roleplaying and for more abstract, generally turn-based games, but in realtime computer games where you’re micromanaging every aspect of your character anyway, I’d really prefer to be developing my own skill and progressing by trying out new skill combinations, playstyles, and professions. This is something that GW1 catered for really well, but GW2, unfortunately, falls short – the increased investment required for gear makes it prohibitive to experiment with builds based on a different gear set, and GW2 imposing a price on trait resets, however small, makes it harder to justify switching builds on a regular basis – which is something that helped keep GW1 fresh for me for years, while GW2, between not having had a lot of significant change in skills and traits since release and the psychological barrier imposed by the price on respeccing, is already starting to feel a little stale.

For people who like to respec, I think removing the respeccing fee would be a massive quality-of-life change – I know some people champion it as a gold sink, but not everything that subtracts gold from the economy is really an effective gold sink. After all, most gold is being generated by farmers who probably stick to the most optimal build for their farming until that most optimal build changes – the respect fee is probably doing little to curb their income, and the nature of the GW2 economy is such that inflation is mostly being driven by the super-rich. (Just look at how the price of everything that isn’t a legendary, precursor, or other toy for the players who have made it big keeps trending back to the merch value over time. Inflation largely only happens at the top of the market – gold sinks need to target the people up there, not nickel and diming everyone else.) But I digress.

Philosophically, there is no real right answer to that balance, since every potential player has their own subjective viewpoint. From my observation, vertical progressers seem to have more of an expectation that games will be made for them – historically most games in the genre have been, after all. I’ve seen a few claim that vertical progression is just more popular and thus any MMO that wants to be popular should cater for it. They may be right, but I’d question whether it is actually what the majority of potential players prefer, or whether it’s a chicken and egg thing – early MMOs focused on vertical progression, which attracted players who liked it, which lead to later games being targeted at those players, and so the cycle goes.

Horizontal progressors, by contrast, have a tendency to take “grin and bear it” attitudes when it comes to vertical progression in the MMO genre – it’s a staple, so they generally just have to put up with it. However, this does mean they tend to be much more invested when a game comes along that does cater to them. Guild Wars 1 is an example of this. One advantage of horizontal-focused progression is, I think, that it’s a lot friendlier to having an experienced player and a less experienced player (or character!) play together. In GW1, it was quite possible and reasonable for someone to start from scratch and be running the FoW within a week, with coaching and guidance from the more experienced players. The more vertical progression you have, the more of a barrier you’re effectively raising between new players and endgame content.

What balance you take between these two is, of course, up to you – but with what I’ve said above, I would say that Chris Whiteside’s brainstorm comment on page 14 is something that definitely resonates strongly with me. I also would comment, though, that catering for horizontal progression-oriented players, who are looking for new skills, new artwork, and generally new experiences, probably does require more work than catering for pure vertical progression-oriented players who just need to see bigger numbers to be happy. (Perhaps this is why vertical progression has been so popular in the past?) However, it’s something that I at least would greatly appreciate.

Having said that, though, I think there are a few mistakes that you’ve made in your vertical progression systems, which are things that could be addressed:

First, and this is something I think you’ve largely learned from but I’m mentioning it for completeness, is that vertical progression should be something that allows the player to choose what they do to progress. XP is great – it’s something that in GW2 and most of GW1 you earned (albeit nor necessarily at the same rate) wherever you went. However, while it’s okay to have some form of progression that’s only possible in a particular game mode or area, it should be something that’s only applicable to that game mode or area. WvW ranks are an example of doing this well – while they can only be gained in WvW, they’re meaningless outside of WvW, so for the non-WvW player they just don’t matter. Title grinds in GW1, though, were an example of doing it wrong – if you used PvE skills (and most of the best builds did) then you needed to grind those titles, often by repeating the same tasks, or you were at a mechanical disadvantage.

Second, and this is something I have noticed being mentioned a few times: The greatest tragedy of Ascended armour is, I think, that it resets all of the effort a player has made in customising the look of their character. Currently, for instance, without the use of transmutation crystals or skin overlays, every character of a given race, gender, and armour class would look the same apart from their dyes!

Yes, it’s possible to transfer looks via transmutation crystals – but many players regard that as a bandaid solution at best (which still involves losing the salvage value of the old item, unless you also buy a splitter…) and profiteering at worst. This goes doubly so when one considers that no guarantee has been given that anything short of legendary gear is immune to being made obsolete through a level cap increase or the addition of another tier. Certainly, from a personal perspective – I’ve looked at a few of the armour skins in the shop, and apart from what I’m about to say I’d definitely have primeval at least on my shopping list – but I’m certainly not going to spend real money on upgrading the look of armour that might, at any time, become obsolete, requiring me to either discard my investment or spend more currency in keeping it.

What I would propose is:

1) Make gem store armour an unlock (similar to the HoM skins), along with account-bound skins awarded as part of an achievement (anything that requires spending a non-gem resource and which can be acquired in multiples, sure, but statless skins that you get one example of per account maximum as a reward for… well, I’d love to start using those, but I just can’t bring myself to do so until I’ve got a reasonably futureproofed BiS item to apply them to.) It worked for GW1 costumes, after all – in fact, while I obviously don’t have the numbers, I think I saw a lot more people comparatively speaking in GW1 wearing costumes than in GW2 wearing gemstore armour or town clothes.

2) Make it so that, when crafting an item, you can choose to give the item the look of any item lower than it on the crafting tree (possibly with additional ingredients if the base look required them, such as cores to get the Destroyer weapon look). That way, if someone wanted to, say, make an Ascended heavy set with the Draconic look, they could (without having to make a separate exotic set and salvaging it) – however, they wouldn’t be able to make an exotic set with an Ascended look, so the high-end art still retains its prestige.

3) For item looks that are purchased rather than crafted, make it possible to purchase the item as a skin rather than the full item. Alternatively, have them sell crafting recipes that allow the buyer to craft Ascended armour of that type.

Finally, some individual things seen in this thread I’d comment on:

Hall of Monuments-style displays, in the home instance or some special location, would be awesome. Guild halls would be awesome. Guild halls which have sections that allow you to view your guild members’ display cabinets… beyond awesome!

More synergies sound like a great idea (the warrior/necromancer one, for instance, sounds like it could harken back to the old synergy between necromancers and adrenaline users in GW1…)

With respect to the Lorelei’s point above: As a PvEer that occasionally dips into WvW, I can certainly confirm his observation there. It is quite hard to maintain enthusiasm in WvW when you drop in at a bad time (Australian timezone here!) and what you experience is constant gangbashing by the ascendant server’s zerg while your repair costs climb higher and higher with no compensation. Paradoxically, I would probably play WvW more if from a PvE perspective it was totally no-risk-no-reward – then it would simply be an avenue to take a break from the norm and have a bit of no-risk-no-reward fun rather than raising than being a gamble every second you’re there.

Finally, Mr Whiteside, while I don’t always fully agree with you, my respect for you goes up every time we have one of these threads. Full kudos to you, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results in 2014. I might try to participate more once this thread goes fully over to horizontal progression ideas – in the meantime, I think I can confidently say that Shan and Malafide are doing a good job of expressing much the same sentiments I would.

draxynnic.3719:

1) Make gem store armour an unlock (similar to the HoM skins), along with account-bound skins awarded as part of an achievement (anything that requires spending a non-gem resource and which can be acquired in multiples, sure, but statless skins that you get one example of per account maximum as a reward for… well, I’d love to start using those, but I just can’t bring myself to do so until I’ve got a reasonably futureproofed BiS item to apply them to.) It worked for GW1 costumes, after all – in fact, while I obviously don’t have the numbers, I think I saw a lot more people comparatively speaking in GW1 wearing costumes than in GW2 wearing gemstore armour or town clothes.

No one wears town clothes, because unlike GW1, we can’t wear them over our own armor in combat, and we can’t mix them with our armor.

But I like the idea of unlocking armors as skin in your HOM. But then I would also suggest making ALL armors unlockable. If I buy a full set of Ascalon Catacombs Armor, I want that entire skin unlocked, so I can easily apply it to any ascended armor I craft.

draxynnic.3719:

in the meantime, I think I can confidently say that Shan and Malafide are doing a good job of expressing much the same sentiments I would.

Thank you darling, and you have also made valuable contributions to the discussion yourself.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Pro’s
- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)
- Time gates equalize players by bringing the hardcore and the causal players closer together. (Players play at an variety of different times and intensities. This makes balancing wealth disparity and play times/progression much harder without actual gates.)
- Time gates help group players up (guilds 1 week timer helps group a large amount of play times into the same time frame.)

Reasons for time gating
- Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)
- Overflow issues (the way our tech works without a time gate, you can use overflows to reset your timer)
- Reward Equalization (keep the time to do something more even between hardcore and causal)
- Character vs Account (some things we want to reward the account and thus an account time gated reward allows us to do that cleanly, which stops people from deleting characters and renaming in order to acquire a large number of things)

I would doubt all of these.
If I’m really busy at the university, do I log in to guild wars for an hour just to finish my daily, or do I take out L.A Noire where I could solve one case? I would choose the latter. Why? Because it’s content that gets me to go places. I have exhausted GW2 content so badly that I would only log in every time an update would hit.
Exploits bit – ascended gear is account bound and can not be traded. How could a person be exploiting there? If they amassed a lot of laurels, skill points, karma and gold, why not to just let them get it?

draxynnic.3719:

Hall of Monuments-style displays, in the home instance or some special location, would be awesome. Guild halls would be awesome. Guild halls which have sections that allow you to view your guild members’ display cabinets… beyond awesome!

My thoughts on this: Do this in the actual Hall of Monuments that is already in the game. The HOM is better than the home instance, because:

• It is smaller, and thus easier and quicker to navigate.
• You can go there at the click of an item, from any place in the world, and then return back where you were afterwards.

That is my biggest gripe with the home instance, it is very out of the way, and requires a lot of zoning to get to. But if I want to go to my Hall of Monuments however, I need only double click the HOM-stone and I’m there, and then I walk out and I’m back where I used it. It’s like a scroll of town portal. So please, move all those mining nodes to the HOM, and expand the HOM instead of the home instance.

That’s essentially what I was aiming for with the second half of part 3 – have the dungeon vendors sell recipes that allow you to craft ascended versions of the armours in question.

Mind you, now that you mention it, HoM-style would also work, and also resolve the grandfathering issue – show a piece of dungeon armour to Kimmes, and he can use the power of the Hall to duplicate it and make skins that can then be applied to other pieces of the same weight class.

Thinking on it, in fact, that’s probably the simplest option that could cover all of the possibilities – unless there’s a specific reason not to allow a skin to be duplicated, make it so that you can always take a skin to Kimmes and give him the ability to duplicate it. Kind of like the festival hat maker in GW1. :P

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

The Lost Witch.7601

These two have their own con’s:
- If I can only play an hour a day, I don’t want to spend any of that time loading into Lions Arch to do my crafting and do my daily. Yet that is what I often find myself doing, and it freaks me out.
- I don’t want to log in every day, I need to spend some time on something else. I want to put GW2 away for a few weeks and invest in other parts of life. (Be it other forms of play/studying/traveling/social calls/an intense working period or who knows what.) But I will be ‘behind’ on progress if I don’t log in. And it is so ‘easy’ to just log in and get those time gated things done… but they make it really hard to take a break!
You make a fair point, but these should really be a part of the con’s in your list!

Well this comes down to your play style it’s not like there is anything forcing you to log in every day just slows you down if you don’t and as for being behind I think when the new thing comes out there is a stronger pressure around “being behind” but as time goes on that pressure goes away. Sense we are normally planning on how something will work in the long term we are ok with there being a bit more pressure when something first goes out but someone who starts one month from now will have a very different feeling.

While it does come down to my playstyle (which I don’t think is limited to just me) it is the game that encourages this. (Partly by tagging timegating on to stat-progression, which feels much less optional than other forms of progression.) A playstyle is not just made by choice, also by the design of the game.

There is nothing ‘forcing’ me to log on every day. But there are systems in place that make not logging on feel like a wasted opportunity, that make reaching ‘completion’ a matter of logging on every day. Without these systems I would have a different playstyle. So while I am not ‘forced’ to do timegated content every day, I feel bad about missing out on the opportunities when I don’t. (Moreso because not doing it today means I will have to do it some time in the future. We can’t just get it out of the way.)

Games can use tricks to keep players attached. (Skinner box among others) They do not force us to play, but they are misleading us into doing things that we don’t actually want to do (or they make us want to do things that we wouldn’t want to do if we had clear vision, not deeply influenced by encouraging game mechanics). It can take a long time and some serious help from other people to get players to snap out of that mindset.

Now I understand that the devs can’t keep in mind every player. And that ‘feel’ arguments are especially hard to place. But it is the sort of stuff that fuels a gaming-burnout. I get the feeling that you are brushing it off. Like a minor issue. While to those affected, it is a very big deal. It may not affect the majority of the playerbase, but please acknowledge it and use it in evaluating wether or not a time-gate is worth it.

As I said, you make a fair point. And I am not suggesting that the con’s outweigh the pro’s, because even though I do not like it, I can see the value of timegates. But I somehow get the feeling that this side of timegating does not get the attention it deserves.

Khisanth.2948:

How much time was this supposed to buy? It has taken over a year for ascended gear to roll out and and there are still problems aplenty. How much time would this better expansion system need? Before or after this decade?

Before, certainly.

GW2 had a lot of things that needed to get going in it’s first year. From seasonal events to building up the living story, to tweaking systems like magic find and guild progress + so much more. I’d say they are already making use of the time they bought with it. But yeah, more good horizontal progression systems do need to be invented so that they can get rid of this temporary solution. And I really think that this thread can inspire them to come up with a great horizontal replacements.

draxynnic.3719:

Thinking on it, in fact, that’s probably the simplest option that could cover all of the possibilities – unless there’s a specific reason not to allow a skin to be duplicated, make it so that you can always take a skin to Kimmes and give him the ability to duplicate it. Kind of like the festival hat maker in GW1. :P

I love that suggestion! Now if this system was also combined with the ability to swap out statistics on armors on the fly (also by unlocking runes and such), then I think we finally get our equipment where we want it. A quick and inexpensive way to gather, store, and change equipment. This would solve the issue with a lot of players now being stuck with a cool looking armor that is not ascended, and ascended armor just not looking that good.

Because whether you like the look of the ascended armor or not, you know most players will want to turn their current look to ascended quality. That’s just how it works. Which means a lot of transmuting, which means they have to buy from the gemstore. I would rather unlock the skins, and apply them onto ascended armor that I craft, so I can keep the same look but with better stats. I want to improve what I already have, and not constantly have to transmute or buy new runes.

I haven’t read the whole thread, but I thought I’d weigh in with my opinion.

I truly hope ascended gear is the last tier of gear we see. I don’t think the ascended gear, in and of itself, is too hard to get. But I do think that leveling a crafting profession from 400-500 is punishing, particularly to more casual players. That said, it punishes longer term players too.

I was very very close to getting my third legendary. I already had the precusor. I had the dungeon and WvW components. In fact, I essentially had everything but the T6 mats.

Now the T6 mats I needed after the few I’d saved ran me about 400 gold. That’s an awful lot of gold for most people and it nearly made me broke. Sure I can make the gold back. What I can’t do, however, is work on ascended armor and leveling my crafting professions because I was forced to make a choice.

In a game where ectos are used for EVERYTHING, and T6 mats are needed too, there’s simply too much to spend them on. People are being forced to choose.

And this is from a player who was here day one of head start. What do you think someone who’s here two or three months is going to do. Unless they’re massively hard core (and most players aren’t), they’re going to feel that they are so far behind the curve, there’s absolutely no point in playing. New players in this game right now are going to have a really hard time “catching up”. Legendary weapons weren’t much of a problem when they had the same stats. They’re a problem now.

I don’t prefer vertical progression, I prefer horizontal progression. I even prefer story progression. I will play a game just to see what happens next (though I acknowledge most people won’t).

I’d rather see more skills and not only ways to make builds, but ways to have a couple of builds I can swap out on the fly, so I can easily go from WvW to open world PvE to a dungeon. It’s not the cost that’s really the problem for me, it’s the lack of the ability to save the old build. It’s just too annoying to do it often.

If you add more build diversity you need to add the subsystems to back it up. Give people the ability to have multiple builds and they’ll feel their characters are progressing.

Vayne.8563:

If you add more build diversity you need to add the subsystems to back it up. Give people the ability to have multiple builds and they’ll feel their characters are progressing.

This. And people are going to feel even more trapped in their builds once they have Ascended gear. So adding new skills is actually going to make people feel worse because it almost ensures they will eventually have to change builds, and thus go through the unholy Ascended grind again.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Felbryn.5462:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The two main areas for discussion will be Horizontal and Vertical progression, however please understand that the commentary and ideation we are really looking for regarding vertical is around its accessibility in game.

I’m not sure I understand this bit; could you clarify?

Hi,

To clarify I am looking forward to hearing the communities thoughts on speed of acquisition such as how long crafting time takes? or drop rates in fractals and other areas of the game etc.

I hope this adds some clarity.

Chris

For those that were prepared, they had multiple pieces the day of the patch, I know a lot of people that made thousands of gold off of their Glory, pretty stupid idea there anet, I mean what do you really have to spend gold on in spvp? and now you’re about to start letting them make gold? Okay.

As far as fractals goes I have yet to go past lvl 9 since the patch has hit, I used to run 2-3 lvl 48 a day but that was months ago, I used to make topics about how anet should do more with fractals but they just got ignored like so many others. I really don’t want to run fractals anymore, I like WvW now, or I did, but after seasons it seems to have been killed by anet because we will not be getting random matchups, just stuck in the same matchup for the foreseeable future, and that is just boring, I mean why not just stick the PvE community with 1 dynamic event for the rest of the year and see how they deal with it, or 1 dungeon.

This is regression, not progression.

cesmode.4257:

Im still waiting on some response about future progression in terms of

1. Ascended runes and sigils — Will they ever be in the game?
2. Will Ascended runes and sigils be only allowed on ascended weapons and armor? <-- thus forcing the player to craft the ascended armor first before being able to utilzie the ascended rune or sigil.

Dyin’ to know this one.

Edit: I know you all are busy and/or could be formulating a proper response to it Just waiting!

We should include infusions as well. I have read the blog post from Linsey Murdock dealing with ascended items and infusions several times since release. There was drawn the picture about the progression of infusions from “first level” to “high end infusions”.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/

I see there a sword of Damocles above our heads. What are high end infusions? I would consider the now producible +10 and higher AR infusions as “high end”. But I do not know what Arenanet considers to be “high end”.

I have the feeling it would irritate many players to face infusions like + 30 AR/+ 30 power or WvW infusions like + 30 power/+ 20 precision/+ 2% damage against guards. I hope Arenanet can remove this sword of Damocles in the minds of the players..

I think we’re putting too much thought into “vertical” progression. It should be clear that hardly anyone (a vast minority) wants a continual power creep to be added to the game. So, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that ascended gear is it. That is max “power”. If that can be agreed upon then the whole topic of vertical itself comes screeching to a halt and we automatically shift to the horizontal line of thinking… now that we know and have resolved ourselves to the idea that ascended is it, how accessible do we make ascended?

So we’ve seen a few things already mentioned in the thread… adding more viable means to acquire ascended gear and making the ascended gear more flexible such that someone with many alts or many build selections for their character doesn’t need to spend vast amounts of time getting the gear they want, however there still needs to be a notable investment in time to get the gear in the first place (otherwise everyone will be geared too quickly and start looking for “what’s next?”).

Ideas that I’ve personally liked so far –

Allowing more than just crafting to create ascended weapons and armor. This would include dungeon tokens to get dungeon specific ascended skins, pristine fractal relics to get Fractal based ascended gear, Badges of Honor for WvW, etc. Add more options, but still have a worthy time investment for each path.

Allow the flexibility to change the stats on the ascended gear (as you can on Legendary) so that the time it takes for one character to get geared won’t have to be duplicated multiple times for that same character. Personally the idea I like best in this regards is being able to use t-stones (already in game) to change the inscriptions (weapons) or insignias (armor) on the gear (as opposed to combining two pieces of gear). For example, for a sword simply craft a new insignia and use a t-stone to put those stats on the sword, destroying the old insignia in the process.

Now with regards to gearing alts the question that comes up is this… should each of your characters require a comparable amount of time to gear up with ascended gear? Logically it makes sense that they should… they’re each individual, separate characters after all. It’s quite different than changing stats on gear one character already has. But the concept of gearing alts at a different pace than mains I think could be a topic of its own.

But I think this is where we’re at, no? Cap vertical at ascended (at least for the distant future), open more paths to acquire ascended, add flexibility to ascended to ease the time-burden once you have a set but don’t speed up the acquisition process such that ascended becomes “cheapened” by being too easily acquired.

Thoughts?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The time gating thing, ugh, I’m not a fan of the way it is implemented for ascended crafting. Currenty I’m at Artificer level 477, and there is nothing for me to do but to wait till I can craft the next material the very next day. Experience crawls up extremely slowly, and it feels like the time gating is only there to make the process take longer. If I could, I would pop a crafting booster, and just craft a ton of ascended materials in one go. My crafting xp would shoot up, and that level 500 would be in reach a lot faster. But until that time, it is a grind with gating slapped on top.

Just FYI if you’re leveling your crafting profession via ecto refinement, you’re doing it wrong. Doing all your discoveries will get you there in less than 5 minutes, if you have the mats on hand.

While i agree the time-gate on crafting is a bad move, it still is a soft gate, meaning you can work around it by just buying the stuff off the TP. It seems to be meant to provide crafters with a way to earn extra gold. They really need to come up with better solutions to make crafting more profitable than just sticking a time-gate on it, however.

VOLKON.1290:

Allow the flexibility to change the stats on the ascended gear (as you can on Legendary) so that the time it takes for one character to get geared won’t have to be duplicated multiple times for that same character. Personally the idea I like best in this regards is being able to use t-stones (already in game) to change the inscriptions (weapons) or insignias (armor) on the gear (as opposed to combining two pieces of gear). For example, for a sword simply craft a new insignia and use a t-stone to put those stats on the sword, destroying the old insignia in the process.

Maybe t-stones become too expensive at the long run. May proposal was to add new stat combinations you can choose for via drop-down menu by using the Mystic Forge including mystic forge stones the ascended item, one insignia/inscription an one small vision crystal.

Time Gate topic:

- “Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)”
I agree

- " Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)"
I’m not sure this is the “Pros”. Because it’s punish the hardcore players that their playtime is the same reward as casual. Hardcore players should get more rewards for their playtime because they play more to be honest. It’s like in real life, if u work overtime u’ll get pay more

munkiman.3068:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

The time gating thing, ugh, I’m not a fan of the way it is implemented for ascended crafting. Currenty I’m at Artificer level 477, and there is nothing for me to do but to wait till I can craft the next material the very next day. Experience crawls up extremely slowly, and it feels like the time gating is only there to make the process take longer. If I could, I would pop a crafting booster, and just craft a ton of ascended materials in one go. My crafting xp would shoot up, and that level 500 would be in reach a lot faster. But until that time, it is a grind with gating slapped on top.

Just FYI if you’re leveling your crafting profession via ecto refinement, you’re doing it wrong. Doing all your discoveries will get you there in less than 5 minutes, if you have the mats on hand.

While i agree the time-gate on crafting is a bad move, it still is a soft gate, meaning you can work around it by just buying the stuff off the TP. It seems to be meant to provide crafters with a way to earn extra gold. They really need to come up with better solutions to make crafting more profitable than just sticking a time-gate on it, however.

Well… that can be done fairly easily, but it’ll take considerable effort. By that I mean we need more things to craft, and not just armors and weapons, and it can tie into horizontal progression quite nicely. Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re battling Jormag himself in an epic fight and possibly, if you survive (mwa ha ha haaa…), you find when looting a scale or tooth of the dragon. It turns out that with that scale or tooth you could possibly make a wall hanging, a table, a set of chairs, an ornate carving, something cosmetic of this nature to be placed in a personal instance (or guild hall if you wished). Now, if you were able to sell these cosmetic items on the TP you’d have access to a new market that someone who, for example, spends most or all of their time in WvW would likely not have access to (yet would now have access to the finished products). Conversely there could be things only acquired through considerable investment in WvW that could be created that the base PvE crowd would otherwise not have access to. That gives a nice, cosmetic and possibly profitable means of horizontal progression… although it would tax the ArenaNet artists, developers and testers quite a bit coming up with so many new things.

So basically we can combine crafting (and profit) with world activities and create a cosmetic form of horizontal progression… if we had somewhere to put our stuff.

You know… I could see having a nice sized home instance type area to decorate up be given free and expansions on the size of it being available through the gem shop… (a little love for the accountants there…).

So, I’m entering the discussion kinda late, but I still want to drop my 2 cents here.

I’ve been playing GW2 since January the 1st, got 2,8k hours on it atm. 5 classes to lvl 80, played 7 of them in pvp (I haven’t tried rangers – ew).

I’m all in for horizontal character progression and no vertical one. I do apprieciate the Ascended weapons/crafting not offering a lot in terms of pure stats and only being essential for fractals. However, as people mentioned, just being able to refine exotic gear you already got into Ascended one, would be the best solution to everyone’s complains. You’d still need to get Ascended crafting to 500 though, which is not a bad thing. You can both get any ascended skins you want that way, plus have many builds on ascended stats, plus keep being time gated on several aspects of the concept.

Now, when it comes to skills – I want to stress how many more we need. I know you have announced that we got new utilities, elites and weapon sklls in coming, but I want to say; do it fast and do it right. We need a new meta, especially in pvp, that says “go die in a fire” to passive playstyles and reward high skill cap builds/playstyles. I’m usually not one to whine in the forums about it, since I like assassination playstyles and builds that have the luxury of big plays and outsmarting the opponent – especially if they’re just auto-attacking rangers – but this doesn’t go for everyone. The fact that several of the new heal skills were passive disappointed me a lot, but I’m glad many of them are useless. Think about it like this – warrior doesn’t need more stances, warrior needs skills that will allow big plays between ANIMATIONS, while keeping the high sustain/high damage or CC playstyle. Fresh Air elementalists don’t need to move away from the arcana tree (because they never will as long as we have Evasive Arcana and 10 seconds attunement swap) all they need is an elite skill that spells “I win when I cast this right” – much like thief’s Basilisk Venom, engineer’s Supply Crate, mesmer’s Moa Form, etc. What guardian needs is actively tanking the enemy, instead of spamming shouts no matter the build – although opening up offensive guardian builds is something alright in my book.

I can go on forever about what kinds of skills the classes need but the reason I’m staying on this, is because it’s probably the 2nd most desired thing right now (possibly the first being new legendaries and new pvp modes but those are a different story). I like the idea of unlocking more skills, more builds because that’s the actual character progression – learning to use more aspects of your character. Stat-wise, no progression after ascended is perfect imo, we can just grind for looks in all aspects of the game – pve/pvp/wvw – and so far it works out.

Belenwyn.8674:

VOLKON.1290:

Allow the flexibility to change the stats on the ascended gear (as you can on Legendary) so that the time it takes for one character to get geared won’t have to be duplicated multiple times for that same character. Personally the idea I like best in this regards is being able to use t-stones (already in game) to change the inscriptions (weapons) or insignias (armor) on the gear (as opposed to combining two pieces of gear). For example, for a sword simply craft a new insignia and use a t-stone to put those stats on the sword, destroying the old insignia in the process.

Maybe t-stones become too expensive at the long run. May proposal was to add new stat combinations you can choose for via drop-down menu by using the Mystic Forge including mystic forge stones the ascended item, one insignia/inscription an one small vision crystal.

Well, let’s look at it from a business perspective as well. It’s not fair to ask ANet to completely toss away a bit of their revenue. I could see t-stones coming down in price through the gem store and possibly more means to get them (for example, added to the list of possible items in WvW rank chests) however if there is an issue with demand vs. cost.

Belenwyn.8674:

I have the feeling it would irritate many players to face infusions like + 30 AR/+ 30 power or WvW infusions like + 30 power/+ 20 precision/+ 2% damage against guards. I hope Arenanet can remove this sword of Damocles in the minds of the players..

Given the time needed to craft a single +30 AR infusion (see here), unless they alter it considerably, you won’t ever see a +30 infusion in your lifetime. Well, unless you live in the Highlander world, of course…

But I agree with you that it would be bad.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Con’s
- Time gates hurt players with more time (by this I mean players with more time run up against time gates more and their time becomes less rewarded over time.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to complete the content before the gate resets, this can add fatigue to players play experience (If I have 15 things I need to do every time I log in, I never feel like I get to do what I want to do.)
- Time gates are very calculable (You know how many dailies you need to get x reward.) It’s hard to say how many days it takes to hit level 80 as it’s very dependent on too many factors. Knowing the time can sometimes make it feel more daunting or tedious.

Chris you missed one important “Con” in regards to time gates. Yes it would balance nicely between players with lots of time versus those with little time, IF everyone only played one character but the way the gates are currently set up it hurts those with multiple toons. (9 level 80’s in my case) The more characters you have the more detrimental time gates are to keep those with multiple characters interested in the game.

If for example (and this is only an example) I wanted to equip all my characters in Ascended it would take an inordinate amount of time to do so. Now I am retired and have time but I do not think I have that much time left! Not only do I have to level each one of my crafters to 500 and pass through time gates on the way but Laurels are time gated, refinements are time gated, and so on. With multiple characters it is an exponential increase in time required and that is assuming I want only one set (power,condition, mixed) of Ascended gear for each toon.

That is why I suggested earlier that once a payer crafts an Ascended piece of equipment in a given discipline the requirements in time/materials/effort to craft the next piece in that same discipline should be lowered.

As I may have mentioned before, I don’t really care whether I get Ascended gear. I still enjoy the game.

Having said that, there are time-gates in the game that kind of defeat the “play how you want” credo.

Hypothetical Situation:

When I and my friends log in, we do the dailies for the laurels in order to buy (whatever.) It may not be Ascended items, but many like those dye packs and some want the mini snuffles.

By the time we’ve spent an hour or so on them, many of us are done. The real world calls and we log out. But, if we don’t do our dailies, we don’t get our laurels, and we don’t get the dye pack, or T6 bag or anything else.

These are not things that we absolutely have to have to enjoy the game, but it is still time-gated, and it still needs to be done if we want our shineys, so how is it helping us to play the game when we’re directed into specific content for the duration of our time online?

As others have said, if we don’t want to do it, then don’t do it, but still, we know it’s there, and with the mentality of some of the players, not doing it isn’t an option.

I am not trying to do away with dailies. I don’t mind them, actually, and I do them when I feel like it. I am more trying to draw the attention to the time-gate of dailies forcing us into specific content therefore predetermining what we do when we log in.

This kind of time-gate isn’t too bad, but in a sense, that’s what is happening on a larger scale with crafting.

Rotation goes:
1. Log in
2. Check the Achievement tab for the list of dailies
3. craft a component
4. do dailies
5. look at the clock (late again)
6. log out

How does that encourage going out and seeing the world, or doing events, or dungeons, fractals, PvP or anything else?

TL;DR:

In your post, you said that time-gating is good for “casual” players, but in my opinion, it does the exact opposite. When you magnify the issue to the level of those who spend a LOT of time in the game, it’s even more obvious that some time gates are truly wrong.

Tallis.5607:

Wauw… just… wauw.

With all due respect… but I don’t think that it is a good idea to post that you won’t listen to a Customer, just because he didn’t read 100s of posts.

I’m actually laughing here, because really: What Chris said, read the thread first.
(Especially the parts between what you quoted and where your reply is!)

Theftwind.8976:

If for example (and this is only an example) I wanted to equip all my characters in Ascended it would take an inordinate amount of time to do so. Now I am retired and have time but I do not think I have that much time left! Not only do I have to level each one of my crafters to 500 and pass through time gates on the way but Laurels are time gated, refinements are time gated, and so on. With multiple characters it is an exponential increase in time required and that is assuming I want only one set (power,condition, mixed) of Ascended gear for each toon.

Honestly I see that as quite balanced, though. You have multiple toons fully decked out at the end, which gives you a very very high amount of flexibility in regards to gameplay. You can always relog to a character with specialized gear and trait setup and just the fitting utility skills.

That flexibility has a cost, in that you needed to spend the time for each character.

Seems fine to me?

Septemptus.7164:

EDIT: Make that every 2nd post of Nike at times.

I discussed player strategies for framing your input to elicit a Dev response in the last CDI Evolution thread. I’ll be happy to go over some new insights I’ve had since then in the next evolution thread. Maybe a tutorial IS worth scripting up. In any case, I’m trying to save meta-analysis of ‘how these threads work’ for that venue. There’s meat on those bones, but this thread is not the place to gnaw them.

((Incidentally I’ve posted in this thread 36 times, so I think the ratio is a bit lower than you’re suggesting . And one of the ‘direct responses’ I’ve received was simply because I was first on the scene to point out a typo… Does that really count?))