Explain "horizontal progression"
Have you read the forums? Because all this and more has been answered in other threads from various perspectives.
waah waah I love playing the game but the moment Anet attaches a reward to something it becomes work.
Reward should not exist for you i take it then.
These forums are a joke its not for opinions or debate its just a safe place for people to cry at.
The primary reason is both simple and obvious – power creep needlessly gates content. Not just advanced content, but also older content. Effectively, focusing on vertical progression means that at any given time 10% of the game is worthwhile while the other 90% is obsolete, which is obviously a bad paradigm.
Additionally, casual players who only play intermittently end up being “locked out” of all new content because they lack the time or dedication to grind for whatever is needed to get there.
There’s a huge (rather stupid, frankly) misconception that people who are opposed to vertical progression just “want things to be easy”, when in reality it’s the opposite. Most horizonatally-inclined folks value the idea that “winning” is based around the cultivation of player skill and strategy, and not around who has the best numbers and can therefore faceroll everything around them.
Quite simply, players who don’t like vertical progression don’t dislike it because it makes them feel inadequate, they dislike it because they like the game to be oriented toward full content utilization and a level playing field. Those that like vertical progression like it because they like to feel elite. The inadequacy complex is squarely planted on the latter camp.
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
If you get a satisfactory answer, the next question I’d like to see answered is “what is the net gain in progression when both you and your opponent have your power increased by 10%?”
People shouldn’t have to explain why they value the core principals of a game they decided to purchase based on its core principals. It’s common sense; agree to disagree.
The question I have is this: why do people care whether someone else in WvW has the same gear they do when that means the outcome will be decided by ability? Are they jealous of people who are better at PvP than they are? Are they just “haters”? Do these people really want dungeon running PVE players to have a stat advantage on gear so they don’t feel inadequate in WvW?
“…we don’t expect you to be forced into dungeons at endgame.”
~ArenaNet
~ArenaNet
It has nothing to do with other players.
It’s fun for me to play a game when I have a maxed out character, because then every single thing that I do or don’t accomplish within the game is purely a matter of my own ability to play the game. When I win, I know that the only thing keeping me from winning faster and more easily is if I still have room to improve as a player. When I lose, I know that it’s because I wasn’t good enough, and not because my stats weren’t good enough.
There is also no such thing as ‘progression’ with ‘vertical progression’. The hardest content in the game is always, always designed with the strongest characters in mind. The difficulty will never change, relative to to the max stats; if the player’s damage goes up by 15%, the only thing that means is that the next boss is going to have 15% more HP.
The only two things that vertical progression actually accomplishes are:
1) enforcing a functional downgrade on my character. I was at 100% of the maximum power, and now I’m at less than 100% of maximum – the only way to prevent backwards progression is to grind out the new equipment, which will bring me back to 100% – exactly where I started.
2) Gradually trivializing old content. Everything existing prior to a power update, that used to offer some level of fun and challenge, now offers significantly less, until it’s too boring to bother with. The only relevant content in the game is whichever area is the newest one, designed for the new power level.
There’s also nothing interesting or fun about higher numbers. The math is the same; the numbers are just bigger. With horizontal progression, all advancement increases your flexibility, rather than your power. It increases player freedom, and allows personal skill and adaptability to shine through.
Vertical progression is simply bad design. It offers no benefit, except to players who can be duped into thinking that “256 ÷ 16” gives a different result than “32 ÷ 2”.
There is a sense of closure with horizontal progression. Horizontal progression usually doesn’t get devalued by the addition of new content. If I farmed long and hard, saved every silver so that I could finally get the skin I wanted to titles maxed out, there’s usually not going to be an update that introduces a higher title tier of what I had already achieved. There’s not going to be an update that changes the texture quality of a skin I worked hard for to a much higher one without updating my item, because I got it before the update.
I want max gear not because I enjoy getting it. I want it to not have to think about it even more. It’s a chore, even in GW2, but as long as I know there’s an ultimate goal that will never move further away, I’m willing to soldier through the process of getting it, so I can have that final moment of relief after I put on the gear. I’m at the maximum – done, forever.
With skins and titles, it’s the same. You’ve seen a few people here worry about being deprived of their world completion title every time new content is released. Those people have the same underlying desire to keep what they worked for, which isn’t to explore the areas of Tyria that were available when they finished world completion, but to not have to start working on it again.
I don’t want to be Zeno.
The question I have is this: why do people care whether someone else in the game has better gear than they do when the game scales levels automatically? Are they jealous? Are they just “haters”? Do these people really want everyone to have exactly the same stats on gear so they don’t feel inadequate in some way?
- It’s not often a question whether somebody has better gear than others, but the implications of not having better gear:
1) Being excluded from groups because you have inadequate gear.
2) Having worse performance in PvP because you have inadequate gear.
3) In general taking more time and effort to finish tasks that were designed to be completed with better gear.
4a) Long and arduous content repetition (grind) to get into point where you’re sufficiently equipped.
4b) This grind is restricted to a certain dungeon instance in form of tokens and soulbound items.
If you look into this from point of view of game design, this kind of vertical progression is not very “fun”. The dungeon in itself could be fun, but being forced to do it in order to be competitive is not. Vertical progression is often used in games that are short on content. It saves a great deal of development resources to make players repeat content. I for one would like to see a well-developed system that players would want to play regardless of any external rewards.
While horizontal progression may require less time commitment from players, it certainly doesn’t imply less skill. If anything, it requires more skill since you can’t simply get stronger gear (either grind for it now, or grind for it when expansion comes out) and faceroll a dungeon.
Also, horizontal progression does not mean all gear is the same. It means selecting the proper gear for your build and the area you are going to. It means that you have to make tradeoffs. In Guild Wars 1, you could choose major runes to get stronger attributes at the price of a big chunk of health.
Ever since I decided to not grind fractals I have been liking the game a lot more without the need for the grind.
I will grind for cosmetics not for small upgrades, I am wearing over 2k arah shards in item skins and wanting to do more.
The game is fun only if you approach it with a positive attitude, in my case, not fractal farming for months on end with bad people in groups, (no idea, not 80, not geared, noty)
It’s simply that I’m opposed to the concept of gathering gear to acces new stuff.
If you can read this then it is proof that ArenaNet’s moderators just, kind and fair.
waah waah I love playing the game but the moment Anet attaches a reward to something it becomes work.
The problem is that it funnels you into playing content in a certain order. The problem is that it funnels you into playing the same content over and over again ad nauseum.
Instead of choosing the content that you enjoy most, you are pushed to playing that which gives you the reward.
Hi,
I’ve played MMOs since the days of Ultima Online and have seen many games rise and fade. What has stood out so far about GW2 is the hostility towards the “gear treadmill” and the “elitist” players that exists in virtually every other MMO out there.
The question I have is this: why do people care whether someone else in the game has better gear than they do when the game scales levels automatically? Are they jealous? Are they just “haters”? Do these people really want everyone to have exactly the same stats on gear so they don’t feel inadequate in some way?
From what I’ve seen in the original dungeons and now in the fractals is that it does not take an incredible amount of skill to finish them, especially if you are on voice chat to coordinate. The hardest thing to deal with is someone getting disconnected then being banned from rejoining the instance by the game. Maybe this is anet’s unintentional “hard mode”.
Is this game really designed for the lowest common denominator of players skill wise, time wise and patience wise? If so, who is that player? Are they people that sit in LA all day trolling/gossiping? Are they people who farm Orr to grind for a legendary? Are they people what never leave WvW?
Some clarification would be much appreciated!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0Zn81sY7pqI
Just to add that vertical progression lock player into one character. Fun of playing different professions and races are out of the question when forced to pick up main and only advance main if spending only limited time playing the game.
Otherwise stat difference seems to be really hard concept to grasp in PvP environment for some people. Like previously mentioned, when winning or losing, I rather have it because of my skill, not arbitrary time spend on grinding stats. Wouldn’t good players prevail anyway, when they have more time to practice. Why would they still need added advantage of improved stats.
[Hex]
waah waah I love playing the game but the moment Anet attaches a reward to something it becomes work.
The problem is that it funnels you into playing content in a certain order.
I wouldn’t call forcing people to play content in a specific order a bad thing. In fact, I’d call it a good thing because when you go looking for a PUG you know that if they are allowed to attempt one thing, then they are at least good enough to have completed previous things.
Lets take GW1 Prophesies as an example. The hardest mission to PUG was Thunderhead Keep. Not because it was harder than later missions, but because it was impossible to skip. A lot of people skipped the early missions, didn’t learn the player skill those missions would have taught. Then they reach THK and can’t complete it because they lack skill (a lot of them also lacked levels, but they were easy enough to avoid). But there are a lot of them, so they bring down the skilled players in PUGs.
But once you passed THK, PUGs became much easier because the only people who got there were the people who had enough skill to complete THK.
Then Factions came out, with a lot more points that could never be skipped, and it never had the THK problem because each unskippble point only needed a bit more skill than the previous one.
The problem is that it funnels you into playing the same content over and over again ad nauseum.
Instead of choosing the content that you enjoy most, you are pushed to playing that which gives you the reward.
This however is a problem. Forcing players to repeat content they did well is not acceptable.
It’s precisely because of level scaling that gear has become the most important thing in this game.
Stat boosts from gear are not scaled by the game. So if you have better gear than someone else you do have an advantage over them in your stats.
User will be infracted for this post.
This guy had some great points. I particularly liked the idea of publishing guild and individual achievements and then giving high achievers some kind of cosmetic reward or recognition. It would somewhat fill the void that lack of progression that many people feel once they reach 80 do now.
Everyone arguing in favor of a gear treadmill as a matter of course should really watch this.
Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games.
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
For a start being forced to grind for gear and vertical progression does not make anything harder, it just makes thing more tedious, time consuming and forces you to repeat the same thing over and over again to move on. So no its not about players not wanting a challenge at all. If an enemies’ stats increase by X amount and your stats also increase by X amount nothing has changed, the numbers have just gotten bigger. This is the lazy way of extending content and creating the illusion of progression.
If you want to actually make things more difficult and interesting you increase the enemies stats without also increasing the players stats, give them different skill combination, better AI or some unique thing you have to do to beat them (obviously the first is the easiest option).
Gear grind gates content so instead being able to do what you want to do you have to spend X amount of hours repeating a task you have already done or don’t actually want to do. Especially if future content is balance around the gear you get from grind (as it with WoW and other MMO’s).
It makes old content invalid because you end up over-geared for them so it becomes trivial and rewards are no longer worthwhile. It makes it difficult for new player or old players with new characters to get into the game because you will never catch up to those who have been playing longer and old content ends up deserted.
It unbalances PvP (this won’t affect sPvP but it will effect WvW), it stops becoming about skill and more about who spent the most amount of time grinding. Sure a great player might still beat a kitten player with better gear but you’ll be losing against someone who is equal or bit (or a lot depending on how big a stat difference we are talking) lesser to you and the better the gear gets the worse this becomes.
It forces you to stick with one character and one build if you want to be decent because the time investment to get the corresponding gear for that build is just too great and you fall behind if you don’t keep playing them. One of the great things about Guild Wars 1 was that you didn’t have this problem; it was very easy to experiment with builds and skill combinations. If you got bored playing one thing or a different build would be better for a different situation you were free to change it. When new content was introduced you got new skills allowing you to further tweak your builds or take them in a new direction. This is horizontal progression, you get more options and more ways of dealing with challenges rather than just continuing the same thing upwards. Problem is it much harder to develop than simply increasing numbers.
(edited by Demented Sheep.1642)
If you want to actually make things more difficult and interesting you increase the enemies stats without also increasing the players stats, give them different skill combination, better AI or some unique thing you have to do to beat them (obviously the first is the easiest option).
Every one of those things, with the possible exception of AI improvements, is something that ANET did do in GW1. I only make an exception for AI because I’m not sure.
Everyone arguing in favor of a gear treadmill as a matter of course should really watch this.
Good video, I’m going to make it a post.
(edited by Onshidesigns.1069)
exotic gear + upgrade = ascended gear – agony resist. qqmore.
Ascended gear without an Infusion is about 8% stronger than Exotic gear with an upgrade.
yeah sure. give me an example.
Seafarer’s Rest. Time Keepers [TK].
Sure. Here’s an Ascended ring.
It gives 72 + 32 to its primary stat, and 51 + 18 to each of its secondary stats – a total of 242 stat points.
Now let’s look at an Exotic Ring.
It gives 67 to its primary stat, and 48 to each of its secondary stats. The Upgrade in it gives a further 25 to the primary stat, and 15 to each secondary stat. The total sum is 218 stat points.
242 / 218 = ~1.11
So I actually lowballed it – it’s actually an 11% increase over an Exotic Ring with an upgrade.
There are a lot of games that have open hub world mechanics, where you start a new game, and you can then choose from many different levels. One does not lead to the other, and you can complete them in any order. Mega Man is a good example, although that one obviously leads to a final showdown. This is horizontal progression. You aren’t necessarily getting more and more powerful. You’re simply becoming more well-rounded.
Coincidentally this is also how it worked in GW1. If you had enough skills for one good build, that’s all you needed. But the more you played, the more skills you obtained, meaning you could respond to more situations, play in more varied ways, and have new experiences, as you played. Gear never factored into any of it.
If you think about it, the idea of getting a higher number actually competing with such a satisfying thing as horizontal progression is incredibly stupid. There’s no possible way it can compare. Horizontal progression absolutely CRUSHES vertical progression. The problem is, horizontal progression is very difficult to achieve. Vertical progression is lazy and easy, and can be addicting if you intentionally make the levels too difficult, since humans are goal-oriented creatures. This is why MMOs use them, and why stupid people don’t know any better.
GW2 made the mistake of discarding every single one of the components that gave GW1 its progression elements, but still thought they could achieve the same things. I imagine most of this was due to Isiah Cartwright becoming the lead designer, as he was just the skill balancer in GW1. His experiences there, I imagine, made him resent such a complex system. As he isn’t really that great of a designer to begin with (certainly his work on GW1 left much to be desired), he unintentionally sabotaged a very complex system by reducing its complexity to the point that there was no longer any depth to the system, at all. As a result, combat, builds, and so on are now centered almost entirely around numbers, rather than utility. It’s probably the worst mistake ANet ever made.
Horizontal progression basically refers to different game elements that can’t be directly compared with each other. Vertical progression refers to game elements that can be directly compared with each other.
So, let’s say that the first tier of gear in a game has +10 power. Then, tier two is introduced, and this has +20 power. Tier two is objectively superior to tier one, as 20 is more than 10. This is vertical progression.
But what if tier one is apples and tier two is oranges? Then it’s, well, apples and oranges. Later content introduced to a game doesn’t have to be numerically superior; Instead it can simply expand on the game design elements already in place.
The vast majority of games do this so I don’t understand why people try to act like vertical progression has to be included in a game in this genre.
Horizontal progression can also mean gaining increased customization, not only in character appearance and such but in gameplay terms (e.g. more abilities to choose from that aren’t necessarily more powerful) which may in practice make you more powerful because you can tailor your character to suit your preferred play style, but doesn’t rely on stat increases and result in a max-level character being able to take on literally any number of low-level characters as is the case in games like WoW. (Guild Wars of course also artificially levels you up when necessary, but you could in theory design a game with progression where even that wasn’t required.)
This can even include passive stuff like some of WoW’s talents: For example, let’s say your character is an archer. When you start off, you have a perfectly equal balance of range, damage, crit chance, attack speed, etc. As you level up you can start to specialize into one or several of these areas to have, for example, long range and good burst damage but poorer sustained damage, or shorter range and good sustained damage but poor burst. You could be the kind of archer that takes careful aim with every shot and makes it count, or that fires off arrows as fast as they can knock and draw them. And this isn’t even taking into account other abilities that you might have that would also play into such a system, like mobility, stealth, toughness, etc. etc.
I keep waiting for a game that really uses this model, where a Level 1 character is not ostensibly any weaker than a Level X, but just has fewer options, is less specialized (maybe, based on player choice), and looks less fancy (maybe, again based on player choice). Guild Wars isn’t quite it, but it’s about the closest thing around right now.
Another advantage of such a system of “true”, “pure” horizontal progression would be that anyone could go anywhere in the world and PvE at any time.
Everyone arguing in favor of a gear treadmill as a matter of course should really watch this.
The tricky thing is implementing “intangibles” just as they said in the video. Your intangible might not have the same value as my intangible. So far it seems that the “intangibles” in the game are purely cosmetic if you can call the skins in the game intangibles.
I get the feeling from playing this game that there is a large population of people (or maybe just a very vocal segment of the people that post on the forums) that are opposed to skill based intangibles and would label them as “elitist” rewards, regardless whether they gated content or not.
Thoughts?
It’s not jealousy, it’s being locked out from content because you don’t do exactly this or that or wear this or that item.
Here is my take on this subject. I enjoy grinding for items i want and that i feel worthry for my time to get them.
When i do pvp i want to have the best stat i possibly can. PVP in this game is a numbers game duh.
No hate,no jealousy nada. Just a desire to be better then the next player.
Bottom line this game should be renamed to skinwars seeing as players aim for best looks (i did for my warrior) along with stats and ive yet to see anything releated to guild pvp lol.
- It’s not often a question whether somebody has better gear than others, but the implications of not having better gear:
1) Being excluded from groups because you have inadequate gear.
2) Having worse performance in PvP because you have inadequate gear.
3) In general taking more time and effort to finish tasks that were designed to be completed with better gear.
4a) Long and arduous content repetition (grind) to get into point where you’re sufficiently equipped.
4b) This grind is restricted to a certain dungeon instance in form of tokens and soulbound items..
4c) It’s incredibly frustrating when a casual player goes through all that grind only for the next expansion to put the ‘end game’ out of reach once again before they’ve had a chance to play what they’ve just worked toward.
Horizontal progression is something you can do at any pace, because unlike vertical progression, it does not prevent you from experience X unless you met requirement Y.
This is excellent for people that:
1) Don’t have as much time to play as the typical gamer.
2) Like the freedom to “goof around” and enjoy themselves, because you aren’t pressured to do the most efficient thing constantly to progress.
3) Like to progress on a variety of tracks, because in a highly demanding grindfest you simply won’t achieve two characters (or even builds) able to do max content.
LF2M Max Ascended Only!
Hi,
I’ve played MMOs since the days of Ultima Online and have seen many games rise and fade. What has stood out so far about GW2 is the hostility towards the “gear treadmill” and the “elitist” players that exists in virtually every other MMO out there.
The question I have is this: why do people care whether someone else in the game has better gear than they do when the game scales levels automatically? Are they jealous? Are they just “haters”? Do these people really want everyone to have exactly the same stats on gear so they don’t feel inadequate in some way?
From what I’ve seen in the original dungeons and now in the fractals is that it does not take an incredible amount of skill to finish them, especially if you are on voice chat to coordinate. The hardest thing to deal with is someone getting disconnected then being banned from rejoining the instance by the game. Maybe this is anet’s unintentional “hard mode”.
Is this game really designed for the lowest common denominator of players skill wise, time wise and patience wise? If so, who is that player? Are they people that sit in LA all day trolling/gossiping? Are they people who farm Orr to grind for a legendary? Are they people what never leave WvW?
Some clarification would be much appreciated!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0Zn81sY7pqI
The most hilarious part is he just described Guild Wars 1! Lmao maybe they should have removed solo instancing from explorable zones in Guild Wars 1 and added player scaling and it would’ve been much more fun than Guild Wars 2.
Why is he not working at Arena Net, sounds like they need him.
I think it’s impossible to have a themepark MMO with horizontal progression. After looking back at almost 3 months of GW2, I really think that it should have been designed as a sandbox MMO. There are sandbox elements all over GW2, but none of them are developed very strongly. I think that several design choices, especially the decision to separate WvW from the main PvE world, and now FoTM & its gear treadmill, have driven the game into a tight corner that will be very hard to get out of: The devs have chosen to build up on GW2’s weak (imho) themepark base instead of working on fun gameplay mechanics that could have made the game a very compelling sandbox. It’s early in development, but IMO Elder Scrolls Online is doing a lot of things right that GW2 got wrong.
Horizontal progression is never having to step foot in a single raid or dungeon to get the materials or gear you need to progress in the game title end game.
In this game it’s getting rare drops you can salvage, getting exotic drops you can use, it’s getting material drops you can collect all without putting a single toe in a dungeon instance or raid. THAT’s what this game started as.
Now disappointedly they have been taken over at Anet by the gear treadmill dungeon only crowd.
Balance Team: Please Fix Mine Toolbelt Positioning!