Guild Wars 2

For pve of course. Honestly, when I think about it, there are very very few instances where I see someones armor set or weapon and I think “kitten , they are good.” The only times I have had this in recent memory are with SAB tribulation skins, a mode which was incredibly annoying and difficult, and quite time consuming. That, and the liadri mini, which isn’t a skin or armor even though it should be.

A lot of weapon skins in this game, A LOT, are obtained through crafting or gold. Probably most are obtained through gold to be honest, since even the gemstorey bltc skins can be sold for very high amounts. For armor, we’ve mostly gotten armor from the gemstore, and a few pieces from the living story. I wish we had more armor that we could obtain in this game They need to balance it out. I don’t mind gemstore stuff but it really devalues the skin a lot I think. Ive bought a gemstore armor skin before and it was cool to have but I felt rather empty, because I didn’t really work for it at all.

What this game needs is more acknowledgement of the skilled players in PVE. Soloing high level fractals or certain explore paths can be impressive if the person doesn’t glitch the boss, but the only thing is these players are doing this because all the content in game that is offered isn’t challenging. So they have to create difficult content for themself by soloing content thats made for 5 people. The fact that 1 person is soloing what should be considered difficult for 5 should tell you how easy the content is on 5. Anyway I diverged off my thought path, and what I mean to say is there needs to be a way to reward these people based on their skill. They are soloing plenty of content and not receiving any reward whatsoever.

GW2 is a game based on horizontal progression, build your character through obtaining skins. Unfortunately a high amount of the skins in game can be bought through gold, which means they can be bought through real life money and thats just sad. Whats the point?

I agree, PvE isn’t very difficult as it’s designed for groups. Yes you can solo it, and that makes it a bit more difficult, but the point still remains. That being said, how do you evaluate skill? ANYONE can get full ascended equipment and legendaries, and trait for a solo dungeon running build, but that doesn’t necissarily mean they are skilled. Aquiring ALL the skins doesn’t equate skill either, as you pointed out you can buy them, or play long enough to find them all. (And they don’t do anything other than make you look “pretty” anyway, so I never saw the point of them…)

The only real thing in PvE that has anything to do with skill is the Jumping Puzzles and there is a reward for doing those, AP and a chest.

The skill tests are what PvP and WvWvW are for. Unlike PvE mobs who follow a specific attack pattern and movement route, enemies in PvP/WvWvW are unpredictable. It take skill to fight them, rather than set auto attack and dodge every 20 seconds when the boss launches his AoE attack.

I don’t see how you can determine a persons skill level in PvE and be able to reward accordingly. AP as I understood it was supposed to be a measure of someones skill, and there are rewards for that, but so many people did nothing but farm AP so that became usless.

ATM, having Liadri is the only way to gauge player skill.

Difficult content like teq/wurm can be easily carried, while dungeon completion can be bought.

Legendaries/AP are also not a sign of player skill, but wealth/time.

sPvP ranks can be farmed, and WvW is less about individual skill and more about group cohesion and strategy.

I hope that when we return to Queen’s Gauntlet, we end up having rewards gated behind the completion of difficult bosses.

Yes, the casuals and bad players will complain but there is more than enough content for people who want things easy.

Most MMOs don’t have any way to gauge player skill over time investment and wealth. As Vol mentioned, Liadri is really the only indicator. This isn’t anything new. In fact, most games don’t have any indicator of player skill unless you count direct PvP and experiencing their skill first hand. Even in games like Borderlands 2, having Slayer of Terramorphous wasn’t that big of a deal since The Bee and The Conference Call made a 5-man boss a joke with one person.

Indicators like titles and skins are only effective if there’s no other means of obtaining it other than skill, which is just something that doesn’t usually exist in games.

As someone who ragequit Tribulation Mode, I’m gonna have to agree. I really hope ANet releases more skins and such that are almost exclusively accessible to people who ran legitimately challenging content (i.e. didn’t jump in a TTS Teq/Wurm run and spammed “1” the whole fight.) We casuals have plenty of neat stuff to play with, but the hardcores of every game mode (PvE, WvW, PvP) could definitely do with some more bling to showcase those accomplishments.

TAKE MY +1s AND MY LOVE!

Maybe some pants like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Giovanni_Battista_Moroni_009.jpg

OP makes good points.

TL;DR I want an item that not everybody can get so that I can stand around in town with it equipped and wait for whispers to ask me how I got it so that I can feel superior to others.

There is no other reason to ask for what you are asking for.

Vol.7601:

Yes, the casuals and bad players will complain but there is more than enough content for people who want things easy.

Let’s flip this statement around and say “elitists have more than enough other games for those who want to show off beating content.” Does that sound ridiculous? If so, then so does the statement about casuals and “bad” players.

I personally like Guild Wars 2’s general level of difficulty. I have Liadri, I have no problem with Tribulation mode and I have access to groups that beat Tequatl and Wurm, so this isn’t me being bitter. Yes, despite sinking lots of hours in the game, I would consider myself casual, so I’m biased, but that doesn’t mean my opinion is less valid than yours.

Now that said, I think a variety of difficulty is good. I think rewards in this game in general should better reflect what the player has directly done and be less reliant on luck, grind and money. But I don’t agree that we need to devote extra developer resources for more content that’s specifically designed to exclude as many people as possible just so those who were “skilled” enough to practice a PvE rotation until they could do it from muscle memory get to show off.

TL;DR: Better rewards recognizing dedication in every niche of the game (RP, exploring, PvP, WvW, hard PvE) is more important than specifically focusing on challenging content.

PS: The hardest part of Liadri was seeing the red circles on the grating and dealing with the lag from the zerg below. The most time consuming part was farming tickets and waiting in line. If that’s what passes for skilled content, then no thank you.

The reason why is far too exhaustive, but it has to do with no rewards being difficult to obtain and that has to do with no content being difficult and that has to do with the DPS-only limitation that this game has. Rewards in GW2 will always be bad because content is trivially easy. Even if the content is not “easy” (i.e. tequatl requires a large amount of people and some organization), the rewards will be bad because of the sheer number of people participating in the event.

If the chance at an expensive/rare drop was like 1/5 when doing a world boss like teq you soon have a bunch of people getting expensive things which 1) floods the market and reduces the price and 2) affects ANets bottom line of gem sales. The game is fundamentally flawed in that it will never be rewarding as long as no trinity exists. If a trinity exists, content is not trivialized and requires coordination and actual build diversity, not pure DPS spam and berating players who would dare use a support/healing build.

If we are talking about the WvW side of things there simply is no player skill. In this game, people theorycraft and all use min/max builds or cheesy builds that abuse class mechanics and have few to no counters. It takes no skill to abuse stealth and spam backstab, takes no skill to run Prismatic Understanding and spam confusion, takes no skill to play a warrior in general, and so on.

Level 50 fractals are pretty tricky, but that is obviously a contested point. The best armour in the game is Ascended which you cannot just buy off the TP, sure you can get some bolts of damsack or whatever but the shards and the dragonite you have to earn yourself with skill. So really my point is that you don’t make much sense, espesially as there is armour like the fractal backpeice which you can only get from doing high level fractals.

kratan.4619:

TL;DR I want an item that not everybody can get so that I can stand around in town with it equipped and wait for whispers to ask me how I got it so that I can feel superior to others.

There is no other reason to ask for what you are asking for.

Yeah, but if it is just a skin, then I really don’t see any reason to object. People who care about such things can show off their skins or notice them on others and be impressed if they are so inclined, and people who don’t care one whit like myself can play on with the same stats and ignore the peakittens.

Vol.7601:

ATM, having Liadri is the only way to gauge player skill.

I didn’t have time to play that patch, no Liadri for me.

But I do agree it would be great to have permanent forced solo hardcore content with very exclusive rewards to hand out.
Minis would be ideal, armor/weapon skins not so much because lets face it, if I don’t like it I won’t enjoy wearing them.
As soon as I finish my first set of ascended armor I’ll instantly reskin it, it will lose the prestige but oh well.