(edited by Zylonite.5913)
Feature pack: why the change of heart?
Ill bite.
Account bound:
because the ORIGINAL ideas from the devs was to make a lot of things account bound, not character bound. Lots of things changed once a 3rd party group that worked on their market system got in the mix and forced them to change the orignal plans. They are just going back to what they said they first wanted.
Mix of PvE and PvP
This is mostly tied to the account bound stuff. When moving skins to account bound they still had specific skins that PvP players only got and vice versa. As for getting things in WvW… yeah never has been that way. They view WvW as a side activity for PvE players so its lumped into the PVE catagory. They still have seperate game modes for PvP and PvE when you realize this.
Megaserver:
A challenge to ESO and other upcoming MMOs. It is slowly becoming what majority of MMO players want and saves them having to call it “merging servers”
Stat increase = gear grind.
Gear grind = no money from me ever again.
Account Bound: having everything soulbound to a single character made it too grindy to get all your alts into gear that could stand out and also made getting that unique look prohibitively expensive. Not to mention we now have a massive number of miscellaneous skins rewarded from Living Story metas cluttering up our banks. By changing all skins and dyes to being account bound it will be much easier to customize the appearance of your characters and make it easier to find a look that you like.
Same thing for ascended and legendary gear. It takes a huge amount of effort to get those on even one character, so by having them be account bound it removes a lot of grind from the game. Sure, GW2 may be about character progression, but it is also very much against grinding, and that is what this change is meant to address.
Mixing PvP and PvE: They are not forcing anything, they are simply allowing items that are usually exclusively earned in PvE to be awarded in PvP as well. So if a PvP player wants to get dungeon tokens, he can now. This does not impact the PvE player in any way. And if a PvE player wants to PvP, he doesn’t need to deal with having to change gear every time (though this does bring gear stats into question).
Megaserver: This is their solution to small servers. Granted this one has received a very large amount of criticism, both from people who feel that sense of server community is being ripped away from them and from the groups who will be negatively affected by the changes being made to the game to accommodate the new server algorithms. At this point I’m not really sure why they went with this approach other than it being a fairly clever means of not having to worry about servers being merged.
(edited by Thomas Kaira.7863)
Account bound:
They are adding new systems in the future that will provide the character progression.
Mixing PvP and PvE:
PvP did not take off like they hoped it would. They are trying to get more players to play it by getting rid of a big reason why some do not play it. They are not forcing you to play it however. Unless you are going for one of the PvP exclusive skins.
They did not change the core of PvP however. Stats are are still standardized and you still are automatically at level 80.
MegaServer:
People really did not buy server transfers for PvE they bought them for WvW. They need to get rid of the ghosttown feel in a lot of the maps. This was the best way to do it.