Guild Wars 2

“1.) We changed the formula for how attributes are calculated when the dynamic leveling adjustment system scales you down. This makes returning to lower level zones more fun and better balanced.”

It amazes me when people try to say what makes something more fun. How does this person know that they made it more fun? Maybe I think that change makes it less fun perhaps I like to be op maybe that’s what i find fun.

There is a reason that some games come with a casual level and " Insane level" (fyi i normally play casual)

I also brought up the issue of “fun” in this thread here

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Solo-Dungeon-option-end-forced-grouping"

My point is making things harder does not by default make things more fun. In fact it can have the opposite effect.

Well, it certainly makes it a lot more fun for the people at level in that zone who couldn’t get credit for the events they needed because high level characters were killing stuff way too fast. lol

Vayne.8563:

Well, it certainly makes it a lot more fun for the people at level in that zone who couldn’t get credit for the events they needed because high level characters were killing stuff way too fast. lol

I was referring to the statement This makes returning to lower level zones more fun key word returning

I hardly even noticed any difference when I went back to Wayfarer’s Foothills to look at the Flame and Frost thing. Maybe Vets take a tiny bit longer to kill. I’m still slaughtering everything I run into far, far quicker and easier than I ever did at that level. There are people out there who experience any difficulty at all going back to low level zones as a high level?

Fun is entirely subjective. For me fun is going back to low level areas once you’re completely kitted out with top-tier gear and 1-hitting any mob you see. Gives that sense of power, of achievement — like you didn’t just waste 200 hours scratching your kitten and spamming 1-5 consistently.

Because most people find auto attacking a mob and having it die one hit boring. Most MMOs you “outlevel” an area and don’t go back because of it.

But you are right the term “Fun” is relative, but for most people face rolling mobs in low level zones gets boring fast hence them now being more with the adjustments. I for one agree with the changes and find them more fun.

VakarisJ.5619:

Fun is entirely subjective. For me fun is going back to low level areas once you’re completely kitted out with top-tier gear and 1-hitting any mob you see. Gives that sense of power, of achievement — like you didn’t just waste 200 hours scratching your kitten and spamming 1-5 consistently.

If you get your sense of power and achievement by seeing big numbers on your screen then there are still plenty of defenseless critters you can slap around

Ehra.5240:

If you get your sense of power and achievement by seeing big numbers on your screen then there are still plenty of defenseless critters you can slap around

Yeah, but the thing is those critters were never a problem to begin with, you didn’t achieve anything because you didn’t have to overcome them as an obstacle.
If at lvl10 I’m struggling with some champion fire elemental and I come back at lvl80, I want to be able to strike that thing down as if it were butter. Then I can remember how much difficulty I had before and that is what gives the sense of power and achievement.

PR marketing jargon is always filled with improperly used terms to create hype, just don’t mind the semantics and check the contents.

The question around scaling is balance and I think they had it right before they fixed what wasn’t wrong. What’s truly odd is that there are so many issues obviously and glaringly wrong. One could talk about class balance. Have you played all the professions. Did you happen to notice there are three that really, really fall short of the others? One could talk about the persistent and gamebreaking problem of culling that has an impact daily on gameplay. These are things they should be focusing development resources on. Scaling was not even low-hanging fruit. It may have needed tweaking and rewards of course needed to be added, but they didn’t need to fundamentally realign players with the environment.

I give them a thumbs up on the work they did in Orr. It’s not “fun” to be in constant major CC in a densely packed, insta-respawn environment. I mean anyone playing the game while it was in development should have noticed that one.

I give them thumbs down on scaling and difficulty in the 1/28 patch. A hero should benefit somewhat from the fruit of his or her heroism. He or she certainly shouldn’t be running for their life from 20-something mobs.

There are factors in game design that we play games for, fantasy, abnegation, etc. But, the bottom line is these are fun factors. All potential elements need to be evaluated in terms of the fun factor. MMO’s are not about crushing challenge and fun does not equal more difficult. Challenge is desirable in all games and there’s the razor’s edge. You must walk it without falling to the left or right. It was perfect before the patch. Like my Norn warrior who often prefers falling to his death to completing even a tough vista, they have fallen off the razor’s edge.

VakarisJ.5619:

Ehra.5240:

If you get your sense of power and achievement by seeing big numbers on your screen then there are still plenty of defenseless critters you can slap around

Yeah, but the thing is those critters were never a problem to begin with, you didn’t achieve anything because you didn’t have to overcome them as an obstacle.
If at lvl10 I’m struggling with some champion fire elemental and I come back at lvl80, I want to be able to strike that thing down as if it were butter. Then I can remember how much difficulty I had before and that is what gives the sense of power and achievement.

I don’t know about you, but when I go back to low level zones I DO tear through everything like butter. I’m not 1 shotting them for absurd overkill, but I’m almost never in danger of dieing and everything drops dead with just a few hits.

I remember when I was first leveling my Guardian, taking on the veteran Oakhearts was a drawn out fight with lots of dodging and healing, and a little bit of hoping the Oakheart would aggro one of the nearby mobs onto it. Now I just stand at their feet and pound on them for about 15 seconds until they’re dead, the thought of dodging doesn’t even cross my mind.

Not to mention all of the trait effects, rune effects, sigil procs, and so on that I now benefit from that I never had access to at that level. The power of a scaled down character and an actual low level isn’t even comparable, even after this patch.

Ehra.5240:

I don’t know about you, but when I go back to low level zones I DO tear through everything like butter. I’m not 1 shotting them for absurd overkill, but I’m almost never in danger of dieing and everything drops dead with just a few hits.

I remember when I was first leveling my Guardian, taking on the veteran Oakhearts was a drawn out fight with lots of dodging and healing, and a little bit of hoping the Oakheart would aggro one of the nearby mobs onto it. Now I just stand at their feet and pound on them for about 15 seconds until they’re dead, the thought of dodging doesn’t even cross my mind.

Pretty much this.

Even after the patch, my Lvl 80 ranger cuts through standard mobs in low level zones like a hot knife through butter. I’d have to basically let the enemies win if I really wanted to die.

Ehra.5240:

I don’t know about you, but when I go back to low level zones I DO tear through everything like butter. I’m not 1 shotting them for absurd overkill, but I’m almost never in danger of dieing and everything drops dead with just a few hits.

I remember when I was first leveling my Guardian, taking on the veteran Oakhearts was a drawn out fight with lots of dodging and healing, and a little bit of hoping the Oakheart would aggro one of the nearby mobs onto it. Now I just stand at their feet and pound on them for about 15 seconds until they’re dead, the thought of dodging doesn’t even cross my mind.

Not to mention all of the trait effects, rune effects, sigil procs, and so on that I now benefit from that I never had access to at that level. The power of a scaled down character and an actual low level isn’t even comparable, even after this patch.

While sigils, runes and traits do add a distinct advantage, but unless you’re running a glass cannon build you won’t be scaled such as you’d kill mobs in a few hits.

In starting areas you do seem more powerful then when you first were there, but in mid-level areas are where the flaws of scaling really show. I’ve had more difficulty going through some zones downscaled then I had when I was of adequate level and that’s what annoys me the most.

An example of which would be a skillpoint guardian in Snowden Drifts (which isn’t even what you’d normally consider a mid-level area), the mesmer one east of Scholar’s Cleft waypoint. It’s even worse when there’s that sylvari there too.

I’ve been slowly working on my exploration title. I’ve been going through Fireheart Rise since the patch and haven’t had any trouble despite being in full MF gear (Explorer’s). Group events are rough, but that’s to be expected.

I always felt that a game was fun to me if I only came to the forums to add a suggestion on a way to enhance gameplay in a positive way.

If I came to the forums for anything else, the game was losing it’s fun appeal at that very moment and forum pvp overtook ingame fun for at least a little while. (Usually until my sub ran out lol)

MacLeod.5386:

I always felt that a game was fun to me if I only came to the forums to add a suggestion on a way to enhance gameplay in a positive way.

If I came to the forums for anything else, the game was losing it’s fun appeal at that very moment and forum pvp overtook ingame fun for at least a little while. (Usually until my sub ran out lol)

LOL…the hunnymoon is over I guess for me. Now its just a time sink.

While “fun” is an entirely subjective concept, I’m guessing the developers are referring to some sense of what they believe the “majority” of gamers will find fun. Or perhaps, they are simply using themselves as a point of reference and assuming that whatever THEY think is fun is, in fact, fun. I dunno.

Personally, I like the various world zones as a whole and I don’t really need additional motivation to have fun in them. The recent increase in difficulty when one is sidekicked down didn’t improve my “fun.” Honestly, I’ve barely noticed a change at all. But, I’m not really one of these people that has more fun when the difficulty goes up. Not my playstyle.

The nicest thing they’ve done that has increased my fun in lower level zones is that now I seem to be getting more on-level rewards there than I did before. That’s pretty much it, though.

I have a way at looking at it. In the real world things don’t change difficulty very much over an area, lets say your home state is your beginner zone and going to other state should raise the difficulty. No that is just stupid. I really like what they did here. It makes where ever you are about the same difficulty (matter of speaking, not totaly true). This makes any zone playable and still fun to be in. In other mmo’s I played going back to the beginner zones wasn’t fun, it was boring no challenge at all. So for some of the player base ( people like me) this is a lot of fun.

Are people really finding that much of a difference in difficulty? I mean, really? I play in lower zones all the time while I go for map completion or farm mats, and I wouldn’t even have known the difficulty had been increased if I hadn’t read this thread. I play multiple alts with multiple professions, ranging from levels 32 to 80 and not one of them has experienced the slightest amount of excess difficulty, going back to lower zones.

I say the emperor has no clothes and you are all seeing something that isn’t even there.

Deer are overpowered – fear the deer!

Karizee.8076:

Deer are overpowered – fear the deer!

IRL, that is true….. at least where I live/drive.

Fun for me is being rewarded with a chest full of rares or above for dragon events, or rares or above for doing dungeon bosses, or actually getting something other then my overflowing porous bones from every Orr event. I like the carrot on the stick so long as the string that holds the carrot isn’t cut and the carrot lost when i pull it up.

So youve made a thread basically saying that fun is subjective. I dont know whats worse- you posting or me reading and then replying.

Of course fun is subjective but in this case its like saying “We’ve removed the ‘licking a sponge’ part of your daily life and replaced it with ‘licking some cake’”. The majority of people love cake so its a good thing….but you’ll always get the odd few ‘sponge lickers’ making a fuss about the changes. In summary, the change is for the better. Dont read too much into a dev calling something ‘fun’.

I’m a casual player and I think difficult is more fun, to a certain point. In fact I wish the 1-15 areas were (still) a little harder at 80 than they are now.

Well i dont know about you but in low and mid level zone’s I may not one shot but i am still Way more powerfull than i was (also just better at the game)

And were im not some crased loot grinding nut i did get an exotic drop the other day and sold it for a gold. So that was awesome.