//I had to seperate this post into two parts because it’s longer than 5000 words, sorry for that, have a good read!
So the AMA on reddit yesterday revealed some unexpected “news” about the philosophy. I please to not merge this thread into the big AMA thread (which eventually will happen). So let me try to clear out my standing point first.
Don’t understand me wrong, I really like GW2. I realised the quote from O’Brain wasn’t really the case since I started playing the game. The things I really loved about GW1 was the storylines and system, not stat and lvl increase ever, pvp/pve seperation, the lore, the skillsystem, the design of the world, instances and teamplay. From start the only things found into GW2 from that was the lore, amazing world design and pvp/pve seperation. The story wasn’t a story in my opinion, more simple lined up quests with breaks not tieing up together. The skillsystem is nearly not there, I really don’t bother to plan on builds like in GW1 were I spent tons of hours having fun with that. With teamplay it’s the same case. There are cross profession combos but you don’t have to plan that your group is working well together in builds and the way approaching things. However I really liked GW2 for the features that found their way in and a lot of other thing like dynamic combat, jumping puzzles and such. But since they broke one of the last three holding between GW1 and GW2 with stating there will be stat and lvl increase with future expansion the game lost a lot of fun to play forward for me; it’s a fun killer to me. I love games, I love GW1 and I love a lot of things in GW2 but I feel very sad about the way the game scene is moving and that is the reason why I started this thread. Please understand that.
Now I will quote Mike O’Brain first, followed by two quotes of Chris Whiteside and conclusion/discussion start:
“Guild Wars 2 takes everything you love about Guild Wars 1 and puts it into a persistent world […]” – Manifesto
So now Chris Whiteside released the following two informations:
“Ascended gears are making a lot of people worry about an ever-increasing gear treadmill. Many players did not want the exotic/legendary system to change, and they don’t like ascended gears. Was this expected? Can this be something fixed in a painless way? Can it happen?
Yes the response was definitively expected. We did not intent for the information to come out this way. Going back to my previous answer the issue is that we believe in the vertical progression system we had pre launch and that the introduction of an element into the system post launch was going to cause concern but something we believe in. That is why there is no plan for new Rarity Tiers of loot but there are plans to enhance or gain items within the existing rarity design whose properties continue on a shallow power curve. This said we certainly don’t want to create a system where itemization blocks progression in the game globally and we also need to be careful of this in areas such as FotM if the primary reward isn’t available elsewhere in the game. So in short its an exciting problem but one that has been poorly communicated and handled.
And for this i take responsibility and apologies. However the future of this philosophy and the design challenges it throws up are going to lead to a pioneering world and one that we are very excited about."
“More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PvE and PvP. In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.”