Guild Wars 2

Death is easy. In Guild Wars 2 death means waypointing/waiting for a rez, and at worst a silver or two in repair costs. If you want to charge into the unknown with reckless disregard for safety, it works, but sadly it takes away from your run-of-the-mill adventuring.

Anyone who played the original Guild Wars probably remembers the Survivor title: 1,337,500 xp without dying. One slip-up, one moment of distraction, and your shot at the title was gone(later it merely reset). Diablo 3 took it one step further with its Hardcore mode: no restarts, no decking your new character out in the best gear from the start, and death means game over. Period. It’s harsh, yes, but it adds a delicious edge to everything you do, no matter how mundane. The idea here is to have a group of people sharing this same agenda to play together. The basic ground rules are: No importing equipment from other characters(i.e. no bank access) apart from bags, no crafting, and only partying with other hardcore toons. And dead is dead. You die before level 80, you delete the character(or you could, of course, choose to keep it, but remove it from HC activities.) Ideally, we’d like to take these characters throughout even the most challenging portions of the game, including dungeons.

We want to create a persistently challenging experience, as well as investment in these avatars. Normally if someone dies it’s simply “lol, oops!” and a rez/WP. But picture this: You and a couple HC players are engaged in a tough battle. You’re on the edge of your seat as you dodge, maneuver, and use every skill at your disposal to survive. The battle is prolonged and one of your buddies gets trapped and downed in a mob. You face a choice. You know he’s put 10, 20, 30+ hours into his character. You can play it safe and retreat, or put your own avatar at risk to revive/rally him. You make a split-second decision and leap into the fray, disrupting your foes enough to buy the downed player some time. It’s enough for your party to kill an enemy and rally him. Everyone scrambles for safety, the rallied player breathes a deep sigh of relief, and you reassemble yourselves to finish off your weakened enemies. Which sounds more fun to you?

Come on, you know you are up to the challenge….

It would be kinda cool, proper HC mode with the relevant title, but WvW/sPvP would need to be excluded I think.

I like this idea, but I think lag and disconnections would prevent this from being as awesome as it probably could be. There have been one too many times when I’ve gotten killed as a result of the game being unresponsive or misinterpreting my actions.

For instance, I was on a dungeon run about a month ago that had us taking turns to sneak by a mob. When it got to my turn, I did what everyone else did, only to find myself dead in a matter of seconds for no apparent reason. Upon asking “WTF?!?”, a party member remarked that from his perspective, I had run smack-dab into the middle of the mob, versus safely along the side like I did and saw from my perspective.

Getting killed as a result of gameplay is one thing, but getting killed by what can be categorized as a game malfunction is another entirely, one that would probably result in a lot of support tickets. That said, the idea itself is sound, and without any connection issues it’d be great for the experience.

achensherd.2735:

I like this idea, but I think lag and disconnections would prevent this from being as awesome as it probably could be. There have been one too many times when I’ve gotten killed as a result of the game being unresponsive or misinterpreting my actions.

For instance, I was on a dungeon run about a month ago that had us taking turns to sneak by a mob. When it got to my turn, I did what everyone else did, only to find myself dead in a matter of seconds for no apparent reason. Upon asking “WTF?!?”, a party member remarked that from his perspective, I had run smack-dab into the middle of the mob, versus safely along the side like I did and saw from my perspective.

Getting killed as a result of gameplay is one thing, but getting killed by what can be categorized as a game malfunction is another entirely, one that would probably result in a lot of support tickets. That said, the idea itself is sound, and without any connection issues it’d be great for the experience.

I think because GW2 IS a MMO having a hardcore mode could only work if instead of a death meaning death they instead had it give you a massive debuff. Like maybe no switching weapons, half health, no dodging, no healing, 2 utilities, no elite skill. It won’t ever happen though I would think.

one problem with a hard core mode here is aggro switching.

How many times have you been fighting etc when some other player comes trucking by with a few mobs in tow? Now his mobs are yours as well as the batch you were currently fighting.

Most times this is quite unintentional and someone is just traveling but this could be done with malice quite easily.

Not sure if you are asking for this to be implemented by the devs or simply just something players should strive to shoot for themselves. If the dev’s side this wont happen, this is not that kind of game. Besides with the way this aggro system works it would probably be impossible or very unfair for those players like myself who are ALWAYS public enemy no.1 in events (especially champs) and dungeon boss fights because of my Toughness/Damage output/Other variables that this system uses for aggro that always works against me.

HC was fun in Diablo. There was a problem with death by d/c which would also be a problem in this game. The main problem I would have with it here is that death can be one or two shot out of the blue. In D3 once they toned down the affixes elites could assume fight outcomes generally depended on player skill. GW2 has combat mechanics that introduce random death much too often for a harcore mode to be successful imo.

And, the reference by Oldsarge above about aggro switching is actually a sport in HC—it’s called PKing (Player Killing) and it occasionally rises to an art form. It’s a form of non-consensual PvP and only really finds full expression in HC.

Raine.1394:

HC was fun in Diablo. There was a problem with death by d/c which would also be a problem in this game. The main problem I would have with it here is that death can be one or two shot out of the blue. In D3 once they toned down the affixes elites could assume fight outcomes generally depended on player skill. GW2 has combat mechanics that introduce random death much too often for a harcore mode to be successful imo.

And, the reference by Oldsarge above about aggro switching is actually a sport in HC—it’s called PKing (Player Killing) and it occasionally rises to an art form. It’s a form of non-consensual PvP and only really finds full expression in HC.

I could also imagine people griefing others by simply not resing downed players when they could/should just for the hell of it. No sir this sounds too much like something that griefers would get a huge kick out of.

Paulytnz.7619:

Raine.1394:

HC was fun in Diablo. There was a problem with death by d/c which would also be a problem in this game. The main problem I would have with it here is that death can be one or two shot out of the blue. In D3 once they toned down the affixes elites could assume fight outcomes generally depended on player skill. GW2 has combat mechanics that introduce random death much too often for a harcore mode to be successful imo.

And, the reference by Oldsarge above about aggro switching is actually a sport in HC—it’s called PKing (Player Killing) and it occasionally rises to an art form. It’s a form of non-consensual PvP and only really finds full expression in HC.

I could also imagine people griefing others by simply not resing downed players when they could/should just for the hell of it. No sir this sounds too much like something that griefers would get a huge kick out of.

griefing is fun though. if only we could hostile in the world to promote real world pvp

imagine trying to level in queensdale at primetime

would be so fun

Not in Anet’s view it is. Sorry if that’s the kind of game you are looking for you couldn’t have found the worst game for it. :P

I’ve tried for 4 months straight to play hardcore in this game (at least 40 restarts) and I can tell you it isn’t easy. Usually at level 20-30 a random lower level NPC will somehow king-hit you and you die instantly without any chance of survival.

I was a 10 vet of hardcore in D2 and never did I think ‘wtf’ when I died (single player local play, not online). That’s because the enemies were consistent and there was no lag or culling. You knew what you were getting into before you took on the enemy plus you could out level them if they were getting too tough. In GW2 there is an element of the unknown which you cannot always account for plus you’re character level means squat as it is always manipulated by the system. To have hardcore in GW2 you need to have a separate hardcore server with different mechanics to normal PvE IMO.

I was into hardcore characters in Diablo 2, that is, until my hardcore level 89 barbarian was killed by a physical immune, teleport spamming boss. It’s just too easy to be killed by bad luck or even hardware failure for it to be fun, and in games like this were death is a slap on the rest, dying can happen from even mundane activities like jumping puzzles.

Well you technically cannot “die” in this game so yeah :p

Not hardcore enough. If you die you forfeit your actual life.

GGWP.

Getting close to the end and then dying would make me rage. Not to mention that even though I’m not great at jumping puzzles, I still love doing them. I wouldn’t last long with that in mind. :p

I used to play in HM in GW2 (if I die I just re-roll and I did it like 50 o more times) but unfortunately the lag and some failures in the game design make this very frustrating (being able to survive group event bosses, vets and champs to die because you fall like 30cm or just by running over a ramp is not funny).

Those are all valid points. I’m not so much asking for the devs to implement this as I am looking for some players to do it with.

Griefing shouldn’t be a problem as we would all have each others backs and the random Joes out there would have no idea what we were up to, so they won’t be TRYING to give us aggro.

The two of you who said you have true it before, seem to have tried it solo. Would it not be better with help? People who care enough to help you live because they themselves know what you have invested. I already have 1 friend ready to do this with me and we think it could be truly epic with a team.

I do understand everyone’s reservations about not wanting to do it, but the extra edge you get while playing this way is very worth it to me. Every en
counter must be considered BEFORE you wade into battle.

Come on and join us in our fool hardy, but ultimately very intrinsically satisfying quests. You know you want to…

Hey guys, I thought I would try and give this old post a bump. I would like to try this again. Something about it keeps me coming back for more. Could be the rush, could be that for once I feel emotionally invested in one of my characters, no idea what the reason actually is, but I am sure that someone out there would like to join up.

/Hardcore Relots

Oldsarge.5609:

one problem with a hard core mode here is aggro switching.

How many times have you been fighting etc when some other player comes trucking by with a few mobs in tow? Now his mobs are yours as well as the batch you were currently fighting.

Most times this is quite unintentional and someone is just traveling but this could be done with malice quite easily.

I don’t think it should be applied to the open world because it’ll cause an absolute kittenstorm, but having hardmode dungeons/instances/etc as an option would be nice (so there’d be 3 types of modes, story, explorable, then hardcore)

I’d try but I’d be done quick.

/walks on ledge and falls dead

Happens to me all the time.

lmaonade.9207:

Oldsarge.5609:

one problem with a hard core mode here is aggro switching.

How many times have you been fighting etc when some other player comes trucking by with a few mobs in tow? Now his mobs are yours as well as the batch you were currently fighting.

Most times this is quite unintentional and someone is just traveling but this could be done with malice quite easily.

I don’t think it should be applied to the open world because it’ll cause an absolute kittenstorm, but having hardmode dungeons/instances/etc as an option would be nice (so there’d be 3 types of modes, story, explorable, then hardcore)

The whole point is to apply to the open world. I’m not asking for ANet to implement this in game, I am already doing….well, trying it. I’ve never once died from others dragging aggro onto me, but I have follishly killed myself other ways. Twice I fell to my own death (how tempting the exp and gear rewards of a Jump Puzzle can be when you arent allowed to use the BLTP), a few others were careless mistakes.

I’m enjoying trying to weigh the risk/reward of every battle before I go into it. The farthest I have made it so far is with a Mesmer, I made it to level 31. Pretty proud of that one. Too bad he also fell to his death (longest fall ever).

I really think that if we got a group of people together that we could get to 80, it’s nice to have someone watching your back.

Relots.6439:

But picture this: You and a couple HC players are engaged in a tough battle. You’re on the edge of your seat as you dodge, maneuver, and use every skill at your disposal to survive. The battle is prolonged and one of your buddies gets trapped and downed in a mob. You face a choice. You know he’s put 10, 20, 30+ hours into his character. You can play it safe and retreat, or put your own avatar at risk to revive/rally him. You make a split-second decision and leap into the fray, disrupting your foes enough to buy the downed player some time. It’s enough for your party to kill an enemy and rally him. Everyone scrambles for safety, the rallied player breathes a deep sigh of relief, and you reassemble yourselves to finish off your weakened enemies. Which sounds more fun to you?

Or, you leap into the fray, pulling more mobs, realizing that you bit off more than you can chew, and both of you have to delete your char which you spent 30+ hours making. I think this one sounds more fun.

Relots.6439:

Hey guys, I thought I would try and give this old post a bump. I would like to try this again. Something about it keeps me coming back for more. Could be the rush, could be that for once I feel emotionally invested in one of my characters, no idea what the reason actually is, but I am sure that someone out there would like to join up.

/Hardcore Relots

I just re-roll a few weeks ago, I know this is impossible but still I try to avoid death as… well, death.
However, I already die a few times and I don’t even remember how (I know it wasn’t in a fight) but still, without the fear to die, the game isn’t the same and something force me to try again but unfortunately, that’s not cheap (already deleted 5 or 6 chars with around 50-110g invested on them).

But well, to anyone with a survivor complex like me trying this, I wish you all the best of luck, you will need it

From my experience and for countless others, the mere act of failure is discouraging enough without punishing players for it. Punishment mechanics for death are just tedium that discourages players and distances them from the fun parts of the game, and akittens worst they open the door toward abuse by other players.

I prefer a different approach: one of the advantages to having little to no negative feedback on death is that it lets the devs make much harder content. When death isn’t so bad, it means that the game has the opportunity to make death more common. Currently the developers are making it so areas of the game slowly become more difficult, but the developers also need to know that with such a light punishment for death they are allowed to crank the difficulty up to extreme in different circumstances, as long as they do “difficulty” properly. There are so many mechanics in PVP and WvW that don’t get used in PVE that would make for great PVE content. Giganticus Lupicus should be the standard model for boss fights, and not the exception.

Relots.6439:

Death is easy. In Guild Wars 2 death means waypointing/waiting for a rez, and at worst a silver or two in repair costs. If you want to charge into the unknown with reckless disregard for safety, it works, but sadly it takes away from your run-of-the-mill adventuring.

Anyone who played the original Guild Wars probably remembers the Survivor title: 1,337,500 xp without dying. One slip-up, one moment of distraction, and your shot at the title was gone(later it merely reset). Diablo 3 took it one step further with its Hardcore mode: no restarts, no decking your new character out in the best gear from the start, and death means game over. Period. It’s harsh, yes, but it adds a delicious edge to everything you do, no matter how mundane. The idea here is to have a group of people sharing this same agenda to play together. The basic ground rules are: No importing equipment from other characters(i.e. no bank access) apart from bags, no crafting, and only partying with other hardcore toons. And dead is dead. You die before level 80, you delete the character(or you could, of course, choose to keep it, but remove it from HC activities.) Ideally, we’d like to take these characters throughout even the most challenging portions of the game, including dungeons.

We want to create a persistently challenging experience, as well as investment in these avatars. Normally if someone dies it’s simply “lol, oops!” and a rez/WP. But picture this: You and a couple HC players are engaged in a tough battle. You’re on the edge of your seat as you dodge, maneuver, and use every skill at your disposal to survive. The battle is prolonged and one of your buddies gets trapped and downed in a mob. You face a choice. You know he’s put 10, 20, 30+ hours into his character. You can play it safe and retreat, or put your own avatar at risk to revive/rally him. You make a split-second decision and leap into the fray, disrupting your foes enough to buy the downed player some time. It’s enough for your party to kill an enemy and rally him. Everyone scrambles for safety, the rallied player breathes a deep sigh of relief, and you reassemble yourselves to finish off your weakened enemies. Which sounds more fun to you?

Come on, you know you are up to the challenge….

Nope, don’t sound fun at all. Which is why I don’t play game with perma death. I play games for fun not to be stressed.

Relots.6439:

lmaonade.9207:

Oldsarge.5609:

one problem with a hard core mode here is aggro switching.

How many times have you been fighting etc when some other player comes trucking by with a few mobs in tow? Now his mobs are yours as well as the batch you were currently fighting.

Most times this is quite unintentional and someone is just traveling but this could be done with malice quite easily.

I don’t think it should be applied to the open world because it’ll cause an absolute kittenstorm, but having hardmode dungeons/instances/etc as an option would be nice (so there’d be 3 types of modes, story, explorable, then hardcore)

The whole point is to apply to the open world. I’m not asking for ANet to implement this in game, I am already doing….well, trying it. I’ve never once died from others dragging aggro onto me, but I have follishly killed myself other ways. Twice I fell to my own death (how tempting the exp and gear rewards of a Jump Puzzle can be when you arent allowed to use the BLTP), a few others were careless mistakes.

I’m enjoying trying to weigh the risk/reward of every battle before I go into it. The farthest I have made it so far is with a Mesmer, I made it to level 31. Pretty proud of that one. Too bad he also fell to his death (longest fall ever).

I really think that if we got a group of people together that we could get to 80, it’s nice to have someone watching your back.

Well, let’s just see how long it takes you to get tired of starting over all the time.

It should be noted that public games in D2 and D3 pretty much became unplayable due to amount of griefing (and later cheaters and exploiters— D3 had those infamous townkiters which it was possible to instagib people as you join a game!). There were many people that played in private groups though. It’s going to be a huge amount of qq if people die to some new exploit from griefing.

Eladriel.7295:

Nope, don’t sound fun at all. Which is why I don’t play game with perma death. I play games for fun not to be stressed.

Oh yes, is very stressful.

I only do it because I get obsessed with the survivor title in GW1 but it shouldn’t be forced on other persons.

Also, I don’t think a HM in GW2 can work. In GW1 we could lure, mobs didn’t re-spawn, we had henchmen/heroes and all that allow a lot of tactics.
In GW2 we have endless mobs re-spawning in seconds, OP Champions/Bosses with ridiculously HP and 1 or 2 attacks and our only tactic is dodging or let other person take all the dmg and then brag about how good we are for not dying.

Hardcore mode in GW2 would mean mobs with higher dmg, a kittenload of HP and tons of them re-spawning without end so no, I like to play trying to avoid death but increasing the difficulty in this game will make thing tedious, boring and really stressful.

For an mmo where you can put thousands of hours into a character, permadeath isn’t really an option. I’m all for hardcore mode in campaign games with an end, but in a never-ending persistent world it’s out of place. Plus this game was designed with rezzing and waypointing in mind… it’s not really fair to have hardcore mode in a game where you can get one-shotted by a gang of crazed karka through no fault of your own.

Could you not have just reserected one of the several similar threads? The general flow of discussion is
-I want it!
-Delete your character if you die!
-I don’t want to do that by myself someone else do it for me!
-no!

I’m not sure everyone quite gets the motivation behind this. It’s not about changing the game, or making people do things they don’t want to. It’s a personal challenge with a personal reward. Like saying “Today, I’m going to run X miles in X time.” Maybe you succeed, maybe you don’t. Even if you fail, today’s run was not wasted, you’re better prepared for tomorrow. When you strive for a goal, it gives meaning to it. Playing without the fear of death has its place for sure. It can be alot of fun to just kick back and play!

But let’s say you go out and spend your time making a ton of money doing dungeons, and FotM and dying. And with this money you can buy all manner of shiny goodies. It all looks nice, but the truth is, noone around you really cares. So it’s meaningless to have that Legendary GS strapped to your back, unless having it makes YOU happy. Getting to 80 without dying doesn’t get you a title, nor fame, or any other kind of external reward. But when the last of the XP stars zoom into your avatar, and 80 rolls over, you can say “Yes. I set myself a course, a difficult one, and I ran it. And I succeeded!”

That’s the ethereal side of things. In practice it means a different style of play that some people are going to enjoy and some aren’t, depending on what they’re looking for in a game, and their own nature. If you have a problem running awa…I mean “staging a tactical withdrawal”, you gain satisfaction from getting all the most expensive gear, or just don’t want a modicum of stress in your gaming then you’re not going to want to do this. Nothing wrong with that; go, have fun, enjoy! If you’re bored of vanilla GW2 gameplay, want to spice up your leveling, think outside the box, then you might enjoy something like this.

Relots and I enjoy the challenge this brings, and it is a fact that there is strength and flexibility in numbers. We’re going to work on it whether anyone joins us or not, but I think it would be an even more fun, successful, and rewarding enterprise if undertaken with some new friends. And anyway, we’re nice people. Well, Relots is..

Whatever your opinion, thanks for your interest and taking the time to contribute your thoughts.

Relots.6439:

Anyone who played the original Guild Wars probably remembers the Survivor title

Yeah I remember that it was totally Meaningless: Punch Out Extravaganza

Play HC on your own and delete your character once you die, because implementing this would cause problems.
Implement it into the regular servers without other people knowing that you HC and dungeons will be an instant death. “Skip here” “stack” you die and it’s “oops! We’re one person short for the dungeon now!”. Even worse if you were the one that opened and just kicked everyone out.
Implement it with the rest of the servers, but put a sign above the heads of those doing HC mode – griefing starts.
Open extra servers and rally the HCers there – once again someone will grief, Anet will be using extra bandwich and it will just not pay.
Not to mention the constant support tickets “my character died because I lagged, I demand you to restore him!”.

This thread has confirmed on of my thoughts about this forum. Some people don’t actually take the time to read what others wrote, they just assume they know what was said.

I have maybe 3 or 4 posts on this one and I think every single one of them state that I’m not asking for ANet to add this to the game. I actually agree with most of you, that people would grief the crap out of you if they knew what you were up to. As it stands now though, if my character is standing next to yours, you have no clue that I’ve not died yet and so you have no reason to try to change that. I’m thankful that this is not implemented in game!

Having said all that, Apple and I are still going to keep working on it. It’s a terrific challenge for anyone who still likes to challenge themselves. We would love for others to join us, but we completely understand that this isn’t for everyone.

After much thought and previously supporting the idea for an HC mode I’m not a big supporter… BUT I do really like the idea of expanding the survivor title or making a title that begins at character creation and doesn’t reset after death and have various tiers for titles for it.. just my 2 cents.

ilr.9675:

Relots.6439:

Anyone who played the original Guild Wars probably remembers the Survivor title

Yeah I remember that it was totally Meaningless: Punch Out Extravaganza

Of course, you can make anything meaningless if you try. You could grind Punchout, be extremely bored for a certain number of hours and flaunt a title you hadn’t really “earned”. Or you could just play the game with a different mindset. I did it the latter way. Noone cared about the title under my name, but it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside to know I truly earned it.

And to repeat, noone’s asking for Anet to code a HM. Most everyone agrees it would be a poor idea, and you don’t need one if you make your own…

I started working on that a few weeks ago, determined to get map completion without dying once. I was a big fan of HC mode in D2 and D3 and so far it works just fine as it is. The hardest part so far is to resist the urge to aggro everything and fight as I usually do with my other characters. The casualties so far:

lvl 8 necro – one-shotted by a Veteran Risen Abomination in Caledon Forest
lvl 8 thief – died at the Benjamin Quickblade skill point in Queensdale trying to help two downed players.
lvl 23 mesmer – I swear that cliff wasn’t that high!
lvl 21 warrior – Got too kitteny against krait in Kessex.

It’s been fun so far, but I’m taking a small break from that as the starter zones are starting to get repetitive. I know I’ll manage to do it one day, we’ll just see how long it takes!