Guild Wars 2

“doesnt become a grinding treadmill”
-Mike O’Brian

The only thing they didn’t follow up on out of all of that was account bound dyes which I believe they reasoned out in a later blog post.

/thread?

We have had threads like these before, and they have been locked and deleted.

The reason? I believe the reasons was that you are writing the ArenaNet’s staff names in your thread, quoting them, and that is against the rule or something, I think.

But yes, it’s many things ArenaNet have done to sail away from what they said.

Farzo.8410:

We have had threads like these before, and they have been locked and deleted.

The reason? I believe the reasons was that you are writing the ArenaNet’s staff names in your thread, quoting them, and that is against the rule or something, I think.

But yes, it’s many things ArenaNet have done to sail away from what they said.

That’s odd. That means we can have posts/threads deleted by quoting Arenanet responses on this forum.

Shockwave.1230:

Farzo.8410:

We have had threads like these before, and they have been locked and deleted.

The reason? I believe the reasons was that you are writing the ArenaNet’s staff names in your thread, quoting them, and that is against the rule or something, I think.

But yes, it’s many things ArenaNet have done to sail away from what they said.

That’s odd. That means we can have posts/threads deleted by quoting Arenanet responses on this forum.

Well, I have seen threads like these been locked many, many times, and the moderator respond have usually been something in line of ‘’Badmouthing ArenaNet staff or mentioning their names in some way.’’

Shockwave.1230:

Farzo.8410:

We have had threads like these before, and they have been locked and deleted.

The reason? I believe the reasons was that you are writing the ArenaNet’s staff names in your thread, quoting them, and that is against the rule or something, I think.

But yes, it’s many things ArenaNet have done to sail away from what they said.

That’s odd. That means we can have posts/threads deleted by quoting Arenanet responses on this forum.

He misinterpreted the ToS. You aren’t allowed to include ArenaNet or names of employees in topic titles. This thread should be fine.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Shockwave.1230:

Farzo.8410:

We have had threads like these before, and they have been locked and deleted.

The reason? I believe the reasons was that you are writing the ArenaNet’s staff names in your thread, quoting them, and that is against the rule or something, I think.

But yes, it’s many things ArenaNet have done to sail away from what they said.

That’s odd. That means we can have posts/threads deleted by quoting Arenanet responses on this forum.

He misinterpreted the ToS. You aren’t allowed to include ArenaNet or names of employees in topic titles. This thread should be fine.

^ Might be it.

Evolution and even changing things isn’t bait and switch. Do you even know what bait and switch MEANS. In no court of law would ANY of this be considered bait and switch.

It’s like a restaurant opening mostly with seafood and finding out that more people like steak, so they get rid of some seafood dishes and start serving more steak. People who used to like the seafood dishes stop coming. But that isn’t bait and switch that’s the evolution of a business. Those who like steak have no problem with it. Those that like seafood find another seafood restaurant.

People who continually bring up stuff that was said even before the game launched are the same people who bring up old arguments about what you did last year when the argument should be about what’s happening today.

People are still complaining about the dye system? Really?

How come you’re not listing how the original dye system was where you got a seed drop and you had to go to the NPC in your home instance to grow that seed and you could only grow 1 per day, unless you spent money in the cash shop to buy plant food. Oh I know why you didn’t comment on that change. Because it didn’t prove this point you’re trying to make.

The old dye system was MUCH worse than the new dye system, even if those dyes would have been account bound. But you ignore this in your argument. Instead you point out one article, written by one employee before the game was actually released. In the beta, the plant food thing, with the seeds, that was in the game…and Anet changed it. But get this. They changed it FOR THE BETTER.

So the dyes are not account bound anymore, but you don’t have to buy plant food to see what dye you got, if you want to do more than one dye a day.

This is an MMO. MMOs evolve and change all the time. Keeping a list of all the times Anet made a change to the game should be longer.

Are you also advocating that they said there would be energy potions in the game and there are not energy potions in the game. Why isn’t that on your list. I’ll tell you why.

You want to pick on the things Anet changed that you don’t like, without balancing it out by listing the things Anet has said that they’ve changed that people do like. Here’s another example.

Colin said straight out there would be no way to walk in the game only run. He said that it’s a quote. And then, due to people complaining, Anet added walk. It was a lie, right?

How about when Anet said there would be no way to change eye color that they couldn’t do it. And then Anet put changing eye color in the game, again due to the outcry from fans. How come that’s in your list. Anet said one thing but they did something else.

All MMOs evolve and change. Energy potions, eye color, the ability to walk instead of run are some examples and I can find probably dozens more.

If this is all Anet “lied about” in the years since the game’s inception, they have a pretty kitten good track record.

And I don’t see this thread as productive, just something that will start arguments for no reason. I think the mods should close it.

A Manifesto isn’t a promise – It’s a statement of intention.

Obviously intentions can change during the design process. Given the dates of the manifesto and the dye blog post (2010), something obviously changed between then and release in which they had to make changes.

And just as there were changes between 2010 and release, for all you know there may be changes between 2012 and now.

As for the whole grinding for gear thing, they haven’t changed that. Exotics are relatively easy to get. It’s the shiny skins that take the most time to get.

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

Figured I’d get a word in here before Vayne shows up and steals the show.

I’ll just address one though for now. The dye system.

That quote was from before beta. When things were still in a “subject to change” mode. Nothing was written in stone and we knew that. Still it was upsetting of course, but we knew that things change during the process of creation. It is how all games are.

Now in comes Crystin Cox (who we all just know and love):

There was a time when the dye system was very different and at that time dye unlocks were account based, but we have since changed the dyes system and we really feel that character based is the right way to go and the system we have now is the best one for the game.

Customized dye should be something that denotes your characters progress, like better looking, more elaborate gear. As you spend more time on your character, they grow and gain access to more customization options. If we make dyes account based, this progression will only happen on one character. We wanted character customization to remain tied to the character but we felt that one-time-use dyes discouraged players from customizing as often as they would like, that is how we arrived at the current system.

There are 400 dyes in the game, we do not think of dyes as something that a character should unlock all of, it is not meant to be a collection feature. Each character should have a unique palette and we have made enough colors to make this possible. Dyes come from world drops, rewards, crafting, the Mystic Forge, and the Gem Store and we expect that over the life of a character you will collect a lot of them.

We are still developing and the dye system will continue to receive attention and improvements, but changing it to an account based system is not something we are considering right now.

Edit: Well drat. Vayne showed up before I finished. lol

Well I agree with the first one but why the others ? I don’t know any item that is hard to get and out power all the others, you might be thinking of the ascended back piece ? It’s actually quite easy to get one since the price of the ecto dropped that much, if you spared since the beginning you should be around 20-30gold when you hit 80 and have quite enought of karma to buy 3 trinket. 20-30 gold was enought to have : full exotic armor, 2 sets of land exotic weapon and 2 aquatic exotic weapon and 3 trinket. The ascended gear is now quite trivial to get trough daily/monthly/achievement laurels. While playing for fun and discovering all the dungeon and getting slowly but EASILY, you should have enought to buy the back piece component. You don’t need to infuse it, it won’t make you more powerful, just for those who wants to go in HL fractal, and by doing fractal one by one you will get way more than enough tokken to infuse it. (by infuse i mean the base +5 without infusion).
I think the VI for casual is the living story, because it’s quite trivial and yet challenging enough for casual (2h-7h a week casual).
And gw2 is different, I raised my second character to lvl 80 and full exoticed him (back when there was no fractal) in barely 3 days for the cheap price of 60g. Wich is worth a week of sloth-mode farming. (barely 3h a day)

Vayne.8563:

So the dyes are not account bound anymore, but you don’t have to buy plant food to see what dye you got, if you want to do more than one dye a day.

I initially supported the decision on the dye system but now I completely disagree mainly because dye drops are so bad. They are bad enough that they should have remained account bound.

TheDaiBish.9735:

A Manifesto isn’t a promise – It’s a statement of intention.

Obviously intentions can change during the design process.

That’s pretty much the point here.

Other things change, but I don’t think people care that much. ArenaNet promised we would have a shooting range, among other activities, and while we can still see it in Divinity’s Reach, it was never implemented; but that’s ok, that kind of thing happens when developing a game this size. They also promised us that the personality system would give us titles and change how NPCs react to our characters before we even talk to them, and that also was gone. But again, that’s ok, some things just don’t work as intended.

Those things are just features. They are not intentions. When a developer changes something so fundamentally basic such as the intention behind the game, that’s when players should worry – which is what we (me, the OP, and others) have been doing.

IMO, this entry from Colin Johanson’s blog post, Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on How ArenaNet Measures Success, is great:

Colin Johanson

If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content meant to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do—I played it multiple times because it was fun!

Emphasis mine.

Somewhere along the line, ArenaNet went away from a system in which having fun content is the priority, to a system in which keeping people playing the game because the game tells them to (dailies, Legendary grind, Ascended gear grind, and so on).

EDIT: Oh, and there’s this interesting bit from an old PC Gamer interview, too, talking about dungeons:

As far as the mechanics of the drop system is concerned, Flannum says “It’s more of a badge system, so this is something that we did in Guild Wars 1 as well. Our basic philosophy is that you should never complete a piece of content and get something you don’t want. So it’s going to be the case where you go through and are guaranteed to get a piece of gear that you didn’t have before, and that you’re going to want.” So, you’re guaranteed to get a piece of gear every time you do a dungeon? “Yes.” Sweet.

Again, emphasis mine. If that was describing a system in which one run would give one armor piece, by release the game had the system we know today, in which a run gives some tokens, of which players need quite a few before being able to buy a full armor set.

Not to mention the way Legendaries were changed from beta to release, and so on, and so on.

You don’t have to do dailies or grind a lengendary to have the BIS, and they made ascended gear quite easy to get for casual, no need for grinding, just wander through its beautiful landscape and look at the cute little crabs on the beach, and you can get all 6 ascended items. No, you just have to play and, well sometimes you only need 1 more thing to end your daily, just do it, let’s say you do one daily a week, you still will get your ascended gear, nice and slow. Grind if you want to rush things like a 10yo, or just have fun with your friends and do some RPevent with the major RP guild or just watch them. You still will get your ascended, and even your legendary, with no grind of any kind.

@Erasculio

I’d argue against that the game is telling you to go for a Legendary, but I can see your points on the others.

However, fun is subjective.

I don’t log in to do my dailies (I also very rarely check my Achievements tab), or get Ascended (I mean, I bought my first piece the other day). I log in to play, to wander and explore. At the moment I’m having fun searching for them Sky Crystals, and the Sanctum Sprint race. Not for some arbitrary cookie that will supposedly keep me playing.

And if I play like that, then there must be others. I’d say the hardcore WvW players play for the fun, and not because the game tells them to.

You can’t say that they’ve stopped making fun content. Just that it’s not fun for you.

TheDaiBish.9735:

I’d argue against that the game is telling you to go for a Legendary, but I can see your points on the others.

Heh, the empty icon on the character selection screen is a somewhat not very subtle way to nudge people into going for a Legendary.

The issue with saying fun is subjective is that it makes the discussion somewhat moot – you could reply to anything by saying “I think it’s fun!”, even to Alien: Colonial Marines.

I believe, though, that there are some things in which ArenaNet gave up on trying to implement fun content, and went with grind instead. See Legendary weapons: before release, during beta, they required significantly less grind (this did not exist, for example). Then the way to acquire those items was changed, but instead of trying to change it to become more epic or more fun (something including in-game lore, or some kind of epic task, or something about the dragons), ArenaNet made it just a matter of grinding until your fingers bleed.

Then we have the last Southsun event. It was extremely poor – again using Kiel as a way to point players to a problem, with very bad storytelling (I wonder how many people noticed the scene in which Kiel learns that Canach was behind everything), repetitive dynamic events that didn’t really add anything new to the mechanics already in the game… But events that were easy to farm, which gave chest rewards with no daily limit, together with a 200% buff to Magic Find. That, to me, was a sign of ArenaNet not even trying to make fun content, choosing instead to make grindy content knowing that’s what their playerbase wanted.

I wasn’t really surprised by ANet going against their word. Right off the bat they designed the game with their vision pigeonhold by the concept of grind, so instead of making a fun and engaging loot system they focused on the speed and increment at which loot is delivered.

Vayne.8563:

Evolution and even changing things isn’t bait and switch. Do you even know what bait and switch MEANS. In no court of law would ANY of this be considered bait and switch.

It’s like a restaurant opening mostly with seafood and finding out that more people like steak, so they get rid of some seafood dishes and start serving more steak. People who used to like the seafood dishes stop coming. But that isn’t bait and switch that’s the evolution of a business. Those who like steak have no problem with it. Those that like seafood find another seafood restaurant.

People who continually bring up stuff that was said even before the game launched are the same people who bring up old arguments about what you did last year when the argument should be about what’s happening today.

People are still complaining about the dye system? Really?

How come you’re not listing how the original dye system was where you got a seed drop and you had to go to the NPC in your home instance to grow that seed and you could only grow 1 per day, unless you spent money in the cash shop to buy plant food. Oh I know why you didn’t comment on that change. Because it didn’t prove this point you’re trying to make.

The old dye system was MUCH worse than the new dye system, even if those dyes would have been account bound. But you ignore this in your argument. Instead you point out one article, written by one employee before the game was actually released. In the beta, the plant food thing, with the seeds, that was in the game…and Anet changed it. But get this. They changed it FOR THE BETTER.

So the dyes are not account bound anymore, but you don’t have to buy plant food to see what dye you got, if you want to do more than one dye a day.

This is an MMO. MMOs evolve and change all the time. Keeping a list of all the times Anet made a change to the game should be longer.

Are you also advocating that they said there would be energy potions in the game and there are not energy potions in the game. Why isn’t that on your list. I’ll tell you why.

You want to pick on the things Anet changed that you don’t like, without balancing it out by listing the things Anet has said that they’ve changed that people do like. Here’s another example.

Colin said straight out there would be no way to walk in the game only run. He said that it’s a quote. And then, due to people complaining, Anet added walk. It was a lie, right?

How about when Anet said there would be no way to change eye color that they couldn’t do it. And then Anet put changing eye color in the game, again due to the outcry from fans. How come that’s in your list. Anet said one thing but they did something else.

All MMOs evolve and change. Energy potions, eye color, the ability to walk instead of run are some examples and I can find probably dozens more.

If this is all Anet “lied about” in the years since the game’s inception, they have a pretty kitten good track record.

And I don’t see this thread as productive, just something that will start arguments for no reason. I think the mods should close it.

Hmmmm i’m not sure you know what bait and switch really means you cant say “Mostly” and have a valid point. I was reading this post and got so kitten ed off that i had to log in and reply. So, what your saying is that when i get an add in the paper for a Business saying “Sea food! all you can eat” i go to that Business sit down and the waiter tells me “Sorry sir, the sea food is 1 dish only” Then i say, wait in your Paper it said “All you can eat sea food” so i should (according to you) just get up and go to different business that sells sea food????. Your missing the real point to Bait and Switch. The BAIT part is to get you to play and promise you all this ‘Really new and cool stuff that no other MMO does’ and the SWITCH part is them changing the process when you INVEST your time with there product. I’m sorry but your Logic is totally and completely wrong.

“The intention of the bait-and-switch is to encourage purchases of substituted goods, making consumers satisfied with the available stock offered, as an alternative to a disappointment or inconvenience of acquiring no goods (or bait) at all”

The Sixteenth.2561:

You don’t have to do dailies or grind a lengendary to have the BIS, and they made ascended gear quite easy to get for casual, no need for grinding, just wander through its beautiful landscape and look at the cute little crabs on the beach, and you can get all 6 ascended items. No, you just have to play and, well sometimes you only need 1 more thing to end your daily, just do it, let’s say you do one daily a week, you still will get your ascended gear, nice and slow. Grind if you want to rush things like a 10yo, or just have fun with your friends and do some RPevent with the major RP guild or just watch them. You still will get your ascended, and even your legendary, with no grind of any kind.

Define casual, I’d call it playing 11-12 hours a week. Just to get all the dailies it would take most of that time and feel like a chore, dailies already feel like a grind to me.

Challenging puzzles, combat, platforming, and problem solving is how I want to be rewarded. That’s how Guild Wars was, minus the platforming. The only thing I ever was grinding for was titles, I was always on the same playing field as any other player when it came to combat. In this Guild Wars 2, that’s not true, you can’t get cheap max stat 1k armor and because of the trading system there’s no way for market amatuers to pull in wealth. You can’t just go find a handful of rare items that you’ll be able to get a piece of max stat gear in 2 hours or less.

In Guild Wars 2 you grind for vertical progression. People say that Exotics aren’t a grind, but they are. Even rares are a grind for casual players. I miss being able to just play and not have to worry about my stats at all, because I knew everyone else had the same stats as I did. You just play and you know that you’re not g|mped from what you could be at. That’s the biggest problem I have with Guild Wars 2, I couldn’t care less about grind when it comes to aesthetics, but when it comes to power progression and being on the same playing field as everyone else when it comes to the challenging content… that really rubs me the wrong way, because the game is centered around combat and it’s important everyone be on the same playing field when it comes to combat. I play with masterwork gear, because they’re cheap enough for the amount of time I have available to get what I need and be able to change my build and not have buyers remorse. If I spent more on gear I’d feel locked into a build and if it turned out to be a poor choice I’d be s.o.l.

How can dailies possibly feel like a grind? They just happen! All by themselves! As long as your play experience involves leaving Lion’s Arch occasionally, you’ll get your required dailies. I don’t think of achievements very often, but I notice I get my dailies pretty much every day I log in, for just having played the game. And even if doing irritating things like killing any mob or participating in any event were really such a pain that you didn’t like doing them, don’t. It’s just for shinies and negligible boosts anyway.

Well, it’s good for your e- (breakingupthekittensoyoucanseethe"E"atthebeginningandhopefullydeducewhatImtryingtosay)peen too.

Klawlyt.6507:

How can dailies possibly feel like a grind? They just happen! All by themselves! As long as your play experience involves leaving Lion’s Arch occasionally, you’ll get your required dailies.

No you won’t, there’s always at least 1 or 2 that you’ll have to go out of your way to get.

Shockwave.1230:

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

Sorry but the old dye scheme, the one that Anet showed, would have been more likely to increase sales in the gem shop., not less.

See this is something else taken out of context. Anet had one system in place and changed THE WHOLE system. That includes whether a dye is account or player bound.

Now, you might think that you can pull one change out of the system analzye it and say that change is bad, but Anet had something really horrid in the cash shop (The plant food) and took it out. The system that you’re trying to make look more greedy is actually LESS greedy than it was before the change.

You then take one thing that’s changed not all of it, and point it out to make the decision seem to be nothing but greed. If Anet wanted to be greedy they’d have left in the original dye situation where dyes were account bound but you couldn’t sell or trade them and you had to buy plant food to grow more in a day.

Imagine how it would have been. You get a dye seed. You’re already growing one. You can’t grow another until you buy plant food from the cash shop. So you don’t buy it and you wait. 24 hours for a dye seed to mature, then you go and find out it’s the same dye you already have. But you can’t sell it on the marketplace. You can’t use it, because it’s account bound. You just have to delete it, because it’s worthless to you.

Do you really think that’s a better system?

Simplifying information is fine, as long as the full story emerges from that simplification. Taking a single change out of context and making it look like something it’s not (let’s say more greedy instead of less greedy), is misleading.

Anet didn’t just change the dye from account bound to unlocked on an individual character, but they revamped the whole dye system…and it’s much better this way than it was in beta.

And on that topic, it’s infinitely better than the dye system in Guild Wars 1 where you needed a bottle of dye each time you wanted to dye your armor for each piece of armor.

Hrithmus.2583:

Vayne.8563:

Evolution and even changing things isn’t bait and switch. Do you even know what bait and switch MEANS. In no court of law would ANY of this be considered bait and switch.

snip

People are still complaining about the dye system? Really?

How come you’re not listing how the original dye system was where you got a seed drop and you had to go to the NPC in your home instance to grow that seed and you could only grow 1 per day, unless you spent money in the cash shop to buy plant food. Oh I know why you didn’t comment on that change. Because it didn’t prove this point you’re trying to make.

The old dye system was MUCH worse than the new dye system, even if those dyes would have been account bound. But you ignore this in your argument. Instead you point out one article, written by one employee before the game was actually released. In the beta, the plant food thing, with the seeds, that was in the game…and Anet changed it. But get this. They changed it FOR THE BETTER.

So the dyes are not account bound anymore, but you don’t have to buy plant food to see what dye you got, if you want to do more than one dye a day.

This is an MMO. MMOs evolve and change all the time. Keeping a list of all the times Anet made a change to the game should be longer.

Are you also advocating that they said there would be energy potions in the game and there are not energy potions in the game. Why isn’t that on your list. I’ll tell you why.

snip

Colin said straight out there would be no way to walk in the game only run. He said that it’s a quote. And then, due to people complaining, Anet added walk. It was a lie, right?

How about when Anet said there would be no way to change eye color that they couldn’t do it. And then Anet put changing eye color in the game, again due to the outcry from fans. How come that’s in your list. Anet said one thing but they did something else.

All MMOs evolve and change. Energy potions, eye color, the ability to walk instead of run are some examples and I can find probably dozens more.

If this is all Anet “lied about” in the years since the game’s inception, they have a pretty kitten good track record.

And I don’t see this thread as productive, just something that will start arguments for no reason. I think the mods should close it.

Hmmmm i’m not sure you know what bait and switch really means you cant say “Mostly” and have a valid point. I was reading this post and got so kitten ed off that i had to log in and reply. So, what your saying is that when i get an add in the paper for a Business saying “Sea food! all you can eat” i go to that Business sit down and the waiter tells me “Sorry sir, the sea food is 1 dish only” Then i say, wait in your Paper it said “All you can eat sea food” so i should (according to you) just get up and go to different business that sells sea food????. Your missing the real point to Bait and Switch. The BAIT part is to get you to play and promise you all this ‘Really new and cool stuff that no other MMO does’ and the SWITCH part is them changing the process when you INVEST your time with there product. I’m sorry but your Logic is totally and completely wrong.

“The intention of the bait-and-switch is to encourage purchases of substituted goods, making consumers satisfied with the available stock offered, as an alternative to a disappointment or inconvenience of acquiring no goods (or bait) at all”

Sorry but I was in retail for a long long time. Now if Anet made an ad, let’s say the manifesto or an article and TWO YEARS LATER they opened the business, and between the same two points they annouced what the business would have in great detail, it wouldn’t be bait and switch.

The point of bait and switch is immediacy. I advertise something today which I don’t have in stock and when you get into the store, I then at that point try to sell you something else. It’s a point of sale thing.

If I advertised something six months ago, and since changed what I do, no court in the WORLD would call that bait and switch.

A manifesto is not a guarantee of delivery, it’s a statement of intent. You can’t really call someone intending to do something but not guaranteeing it bait and switch, because not every intent can come to pass.

And beyond all that, you can argue all you want, but unless Anet advertises that dyes are account bound and that’s a major selling point of the game, and you end up buying the game JUST BECAUSE dyes are account bound, that wouldn’t be bait and switch either.

Sorry but the whole bait and switch thing is nothing more than hyperbole. You’re exaggerating a claim to try to make a point.

And using the words bait and switch means you lose credibility with those who know what it means.

Stuff said years before a product comes out doesn’t apply to bait and switch.

morrolan.9608:

Klawlyt.6507:

How can dailies possibly feel like a grind? They just happen! All by themselves! As long as your play experience involves leaving Lion’s Arch occasionally, you’ll get your required dailies.

No you won’t, there’s always at least 1 or 2 that you’ll have to go out of your way to get.

If you choose to do every daily every day, then you in fact will have to go out of your way to get some of them.

But you’re not obligated to do every daily every day and I’m pretty sure most people don’t. Not doing it just means you’re delaying your reward chest by a few days or weeks.

If you, for some reason, choose to do every daily every day, and you’re not enjoying it, I suggest you stop.

Because the game doesn’t require it of you.

Vayne.8563:

Sorry but I was in retail for a long long time. Now if Anet made an ad, let’s say the manifesto or an article and TWO YEARS LATER they opened the business, and between the same two points they annouced what the business would have in great detail, it wouldn’t be bait and switch.

The point of bait and switch is immediacy. I advertise something today which I don’t have in stock and when you get into the store, I then at that point try to sell you something else. It’s a point of sale thing.

If I advertised something six months ago, and since changed what I do, no court in the WORLD would call that bait and switch.

A manifesto is not a guarantee of delivery, it’s a statement of intent. You can’t really call someone intending to do something but not guaranteeing it bait and switch, because not every intent can come to pass.

And beyond all that, you can argue all you want, but unless Anet advertises that dyes are account bound and that’s a major selling point of the game, and you end up buying the game JUST BECAUSE dyes are account bound, that wouldn’t be bait and switch either.

Sorry but the whole bait and switch thing is nothing more than hyperbole. You’re exaggerating a claim to try to make a point.

And using the words bait and switch means you lose credibility with those who know what it means.

Stuff said years before a product comes out doesn’t apply to bait and switch.

Are you still pitching the “it was two years old” argument…despite the fact that the main guild wars 2 site had a direct link to it (complete with graphics) on the main page basically right up until release?

http://web.archive.org/web/20120510235808/http://www.guildwars2.com/en/

Having it linked off of the very front page made it every bit at launch as the day it was created.

morrolan.9608:

Klawlyt.6507:

How can dailies possibly feel like a grind? They just happen! All by themselves! As long as your play experience involves leaving Lion’s Arch occasionally, you’ll get your required dailies.

No you won’t, there’s always at least 1 or 2 that you’ll have to go out of your way to get.

That really depends on how you play. Some days I do them by accident, some days I don’t even bother. Adding 3-5 more dailies types per day should help the problem a little.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

Sorry but the old dye scheme, the one that Anet showed, would have been more likely to increase sales in the gem shop., not less.

See this is something else taken out of context. Anet had one system in place and changed THE WHOLE system. That includes whether a dye is account or player bound.

Now, you might think that you can pull one change out of the system analzye it and say that change is bad, but Anet had something really horrid in the cash shop (The plant food) and took it out. The system that you’re trying to make look more greedy is actually LESS greedy than it was before the change.

You then take one thing that’s changed not all of it, and point it out to make the decision seem to be nothing but greed. If Anet wanted to be greedy they’d have left in the original dye situation where dyes were account bound but you couldn’t sell or trade them and you had to buy plant food to grow more in a day.

Imagine how it would have been. You get a dye seed. You’re already growing one. You can’t grow another until you buy plant food from the cash shop. So you don’t buy it and you wait. 24 hours for a dye seed to mature, then you go and find out it’s the same dye you already have. But you can’t sell it on the marketplace. You can’t use it, because it’s account bound. You just have to delete it, because it’s worthless to you.

Do you really think that’s a better system?

Simplifying information is fine, as long as the full story emerges from that simplification. Taking a single change out of context and making it look like something it’s not (let’s say more greedy instead of less greedy), is misleading.

Anet didn’t just change the dye from account bound to unlocked on an individual character, but they revamped the whole dye system…and it’s much better this way than it was in beta.

And on that topic, it’s infinitely better than the dye system in Guild Wars 1 where you needed a bottle of dye each time you wanted to dye your armor for each piece of armor.

What you’re describing seems neither here nor there, it might have been better or worse. like you’ve said systems evolve. Fact of the matter is that Anet was looking at dyes being account bound and changed it to character bound thereby increasing the amount of time and or money players must invest into getting the colors they want. There is no denying they were well aware that account bound dyes are more convenient to a player than character bound dyes. This fact can’t be spun. They did character bound bcs it causes the player population to spend more time/money meaning more revenue for them.

It’s the same reason they did the repair penalty, waypoint penalty, gold/gem exchange penalties, trading post listing penalties, and vertical progression gear. The more time it takes players to accomplish something they want the more willing they are to find a way to do it faster, people become more willing to part with their money, because it saves them time on doing what they don’t want to do. So in order to incentivize people to part with their money they made fundamental shifts counter to what they did in Gw1.

If this was Blizzard doing these things I’d be impressed and singing their praises, bcs they’d be progressing towards something more favorable to the player than what they were. But it’s ANet, they were already ahead of the game with what they were doing in Gw1 and backtracked. That’s what gets to people, they had a game where you paid for new content, actual content once, and you had the option to pay for cosmetics and account supplements like character slots and storage, and low level bonus items, and max level weapon skins, and bonus missions.

They were going to come out with Guild wars utopia, but did Gw2 instead. Though guild wars 2 is a better game technologically, it turns out that conceptually, Guild Wars was the utopia for players.

Rooks Zaer.5846:

Vayne.8563:

Sorry but I was in retail for a long long time. Now if Anet made an ad, let’s say the manifesto or an article and TWO YEARS LATER they opened the business, and between the same two points they annouced what the business would have in great detail, it wouldn’t be bait and switch.

The point of bait and switch is immediacy. I advertise something today which I don’t have in stock and when you get into the store, I then at that point try to sell you something else. It’s a point of sale thing.

If I advertised something six months ago, and since changed what I do, no court in the WORLD would call that bait and switch.

A manifesto is not a guarantee of delivery, it’s a statement of intent. You can’t really call someone intending to do something but not guaranteeing it bait and switch, because not every intent can come to pass.

And beyond all that, you can argue all you want, but unless Anet advertises that dyes are account bound and that’s a major selling point of the game, and you end up buying the game JUST BECAUSE dyes are account bound, that wouldn’t be bait and switch either.

Sorry but the whole bait and switch thing is nothing more than hyperbole. You’re exaggerating a claim to try to make a point.

And using the words bait and switch means you lose credibility with those who know what it means.

Stuff said years before a product comes out doesn’t apply to bait and switch.

Are you still pitching the “it was two years old” argument…despite the fact that the main guild wars 2 site had a direct link to it (complete with graphics) on the main page basically right up until release?

http://web.archive.org/web/20120510235808/http://www.guildwars2.com/en/

Having it linked off of the very front page made it every bit at launch as the day it was created.

And it’s completely 100% irrelevant. First of all, nothing in the manifesto is wrong or a lie. It’s a statement of intent which for the most part Anet has upheld. If you can’t see that, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Secondly, and more importantly, it’s neither an advertisement nor a guarantee and more stuff exists on the site than just that. So it’s not bait and switch. If it were an ad, you MIGHT be able to claim it’s false advertising, except that wouldnt’ stand up in court either.

I love how people try to justify their hyperbole when there isn’t any excuse for using it. Why can’t you just say these are things Anet said that didn’t eventuate, instead of using obviously incorrect hyperbole like bait and switch?

Says the same thing and isn’t completely wrong.

Shockwave.1230:

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

snip

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

Sorry but the old dye scheme, the one that Anet showed, would have been more likely to increase sales in the gem shop., not less.

See this is something else taken out of context. Anet had one system in place and changed THE WHOLE system. That includes whether a dye is account or player bound.

Now, you might think that you can pull one change out of the system analzye it and say that change is bad, but Anet had something really horrid in the cash shop (The plant food) and took it out. The system that you’re trying to make look more greedy is actually LESS greedy than it was before the change.

You then take one thing that’s changed not all of it, and point it out to make the decision seem to be nothing but greed. If Anet wanted to be greedy they’d have left in the original dye situation where dyes were account bound but you couldn’t sell or trade them and you had to buy plant food to grow more in a day.

Imagine how it would have been. You get a dye seed. You’re already growing one. You can’t grow another until you buy plant food from the cash shop. So you don’t buy it and you wait. 24 hours for a dye seed to mature, then you go and find out it’s the same dye you already have. But you can’t sell it on the marketplace. You can’t use it, because it’s account bound. You just have to delete it, because it’s worthless to you.

Do you really think that’s a better system?

Simplifying information is fine, as long as the full story emerges from that simplification. Taking a single change out of context and making it look like something it’s not (let’s say more greedy instead of less greedy), is misleading.

snip

And on that topic, it’s infinitely better than the dye system in Guild Wars 1 where you needed a bottle of dye each time you wanted to dye your armor for each piece of armor.

What you’re describing seems neither here nor there, it might have been better or worse. like you’ve said systems evolve. Fact of the matter is that Anet was looking at dyes being account bound and changed it to character bound thereby increasing the amount of time and or money players must invest into getting the colors they want. There is no denying they were well aware that account bound dyes are more convenient to a player than character bound dyes. This fact can’t be spun. They did character bound bcs it causes the player population to spend more time/money meaning more revenue for them.

It’s the same reason they did the repair penalty, waypoint penalty, gold/gem exchange penalties, trading post listing penalties, and vertical progression gear. The more time it takes players to accomplish something they want the more willing they are to find a way to do it faster, people become more willing to part with their money, because it saves them time on doing what they don’t want to do. So in order to incentivize people to part with their money they made fundamental shifts counter to what they did in Gw1.

If this was Blizzard doing these things I’d be impressed and singing their praises, bcs they’d be progressing towards something more favorable to the player than what they were. But it’s ANet, they were already ahead of the game with what they were doing in Gw1 and backtracked. That’s what gets to people, they had a game where you paid for new content, actual content once, and you had the option to pay for cosmetics and account supplements like character slots and storage, and low level bonus items, and max level weapon skins, and bonus missions.

They were going to come out with Guild wars utopia, but did Gw2 instead. Though guild wars 2 is a better game technologically, it turns out that conceptually, Guild Wars was the utopia for players.

If the dyes were account bound in the old system it would take players longer and cost them more to get the dyes they want not less.

Anet changed the system to make it better for/easier for players to get the dyes they want, and that’s what’s important.

Taking one aspect of the system separately gives the illusion that it was made harder.

Now you can buy the missing dye you want off the trading post. Before you couldn’t. It had to drop, period end of story. And you could only identify one day a day from seeds that dropped all the time, unless you paid money to the cash shop to speed up the process.

So yeah, having it account bound wasn’t better when you take into consideration the entire dye system.

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Uhh…yea. But people have beaten this horse to death, drudging up old comments made by ANet employees from years ago, writing page long posts, and even linking “the manifesto” in their signature.

I like to talk about games too. I’m just saying that people take the complaints to the level of an unhealthy obsession.

The game is what it is.

Stone.6751:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Uhh…yea. But people have beaten this horse to death, drudging up old comments made by ANet employees from years ago, writing page long posts, and even linking “the manifesto” in their signature.

I like to talk about games too. I’m just saying that people take the complaints to the level of an unhealthy obsession.

The game is what it is.

This is what happens when a company backtracks on the philosophies that drew people to it. Guild Wars and Wow seemed pretty much like opposites in the gaming world. Guild Wars 2 conceptually is WoW 2.0, not Guild Wars 2.0. Like I mentioned earlier if this was Blizzard, whole different story. But there’s this whole market of gamers wanting a modern game with the ideologies that drive the original Guild Wars and all that in a persistent world. I doubt it’s going to happen, at least not in the lifespan of Guild Wars 2, but if it did expect most of the GW fanbase to pick it up.

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Uhh…yea. But people have beaten this horse to death, drudging up old comments made by ANet employees from years ago, writing page long posts, and even linking “the manifesto” in their signature.

I like to talk about games too. I’m just saying that people take the complaints to the level of an unhealthy obsession.

The game is what it is.

This is what happens when a company backtracks on the philosophies that drew people to it. Guild Wars and Wow seemed pretty much like opposites in the gaming world. Guild Wars 2 conceptually is WoW 2.0, not Guild Wars 2.0. Like I mentioned earlier if this was Blizzard, whole different story. But there’s this whole market of gamers wanting a modern game with the ideologies that drive the original Guild Wars and all that in a persistent world. I doubt it’s going to happen, at least not in the lifespan of Guild Wars 2, but if it did expect most of the GW fanbase to pick it up.

Only people who haven’t played WoW could say these games are alike. There’s no rep grind, there’s very little grind at all (except those people insist on making for themselves), there’s no trinity, there’s no taunt mechanic at all, there’s no static quests, there’s an active dodge roll. There are no raids. There’s a bar with less skills on it, instead of a zillion bars with a quintillion skills on it…

honestly only a Guild Wars 1 fan could say this game was like WoW. No WoW player thinks this is like WoW.

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

Holy crap, Shockwave, You’re right! ANet is eeeeeeeeeevil! Let us all run! Run from this place! Yes let’s go, go somewhere else full of bunnies and golden coins! Yes let us run… run… is he gone?

Look, the manifesto is an ideal, and it contains the guiding principles behind the development of this game. I think they’ve largely stuck to the broader manifesto itself. I think the fractals were the beginning of a step away from that, but I think ANet also saw the blowback that resulted and learned from it. Is the manifesto still relevant? Absolutely. Is it a contract between anyone and anyone? Nope.

Now let’s be honest. The dye thing isn’t about the manifesto. The dye thing is a matter of you liking the idea of a beta iteration of a system you never tried. You like it better because it adhered to your ideals better, and because you never tried it, and don’t know the drawbacks first hand (which have been discussed at length by now). In your mind the equation is as simple as account bound=good, character bound=bad. There’s a lot more to this, and your oversimplification of the system as evil and money grubbing doesn’t really further any discussion.

The game is changing and to go back 2 or 3 years before the game launched and say that that is the one and only way the game should be now is not sensible. There are millions who bought the game and hundreds of thousands who play on a regular basis. They want similar things and conflicting things. Things that work for a small group fall flat for a huge group and vice-versa.
The game is on an interesting growth path and I am glad of that. As time goes on more things will change, it is a business but also I am sure a passion to those who work there.

Shockwave.1230:

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

But I still disagree here. I do think this has a lot more in common with Guild Wars 1 than WoW. Compare.

WoW..unlimited skills all at once.
Guild Wars… limited skill bar

WoW. Taunt mechanic/true tanking
Guild Wars. No taunt mechanic

WoW..mounts
Guild Wars no mounts (except the broom if you want, but we had siege devourers in game in Guild Wars 1 anyway…not quite the same as the mounts in WoW)

Then you have stuff like story and explorable mode dungeons, already done in Guild Wars 1. As an example, Bloodstone Caves, the easier explorable mode as part of a story followed by the explorable mode when you went back to it.

The fact is, with the exception of “making builds”, this game works a whole lot like Guild Wars 1 did, far more than it works on WoW.

Guild Wars tries to tell “your” story.
WoW- Just as a story of the world, nothing is really your story.

WoW . Thrives on player made mods. The whole game was pretty much a mod fest.
Guild Wars. Very limited use of mods

WoW. Gear score…encouraging players to be competitive.
Guild Wars….each person gets their own drops, you’re not rolling against other people

Guild Wars…doesn’t lock you out of content due to gear
WOW…locks you out of content due to gear

Then you have stuff that WOW and Guild Wars 1 has that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have…like faction rep grinding.

Yeah, I don’t think this can in any way shape or form be considered WoW 2.0. Rift can, but not this. It’s way too different.

I’ve extensively played a lot of WoW style MMOs, and this has a lot less to do with those than you’re admitting.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Uhh…yea. But people have beaten this horse to death, drudging up old comments made by ANet employees from years ago, writing page long posts, and even linking “the manifesto” in their signature.

I like to talk about games too. I’m just saying that people take the complaints to the level of an unhealthy obsession.

The game is what it is.

This is what happens when a company backtracks on the philosophies that drew people to it. Guild Wars and Wow seemed pretty much like opposites in the gaming world. Guild Wars 2 conceptually is WoW 2.0, not Guild Wars 2.0. Like I mentioned earlier if this was Blizzard, whole different story. But there’s this whole market of gamers wanting a modern game with the ideologies that drive the original Guild Wars and all that in a persistent world. I doubt it’s going to happen, at least not in the lifespan of Guild Wars 2, but if it did expect most of the GW fanbase to pick it up.

Only people who haven’t played WoW could say these games are alike. There’s no rep grind, there’s very little grind at all (except those people insist on making for themselves), there’s no trinity, there’s no taunt mechanic at all, there’s no static quests, there’s an active dodge roll. There are no raids. There’s a bar with less skills on it, instead of a zillion bars with a quintillion skills on it…

honestly only a Guild Wars 1 fan could say this game was like WoW. No WoW player thinks this is like WoW.

Rep grind-optional, also shares daily mechanics with GW2
Trinity- Warrior, Mesmer, Guardian (I jest…or do I?) come the closest
Static Quests-Heart System (so close to the same thing)
Raids-They are a coming.

There are some similarities, but not many.
Positives of GW2 from a WoW veteran:
Combat is much better
Graphics
Very shallow vertical progression mechanic
Armor skins are much more detailed
Non grindy spvp
Little to no gating of content behind gear attributes
Bunches of other things

Bad stuff:
Crafting is horrible here
Timed Content progression mechanic
Grind for items that are needed in high tier cosmetics is much worse than grind for top gear in other MMO’s (luckily, you don’t need them)
Instanced content is worse (on par in some cases-Molten Facility was good stuff)
Agro mechanics
The gem shop (necessary for payment model)

Strictly my opinion, but I think the lore and some story here is actually worse than WoW, which I didn’t expect since it came from an rpg instead of an rts. Sorta sad. Hope they add more, I constantly hunt down anything in game that has to do with the lore or world history.

http://www.killtenrats.com/2011/01/14/world-of-warcraft-players-guide-to-guild-wars-2/

Klawlyt.6507:

Holy crap, Shockwave, You’re right! ANet is eeeeeeeeeevil! Let us all run! Run from this place! Yes let’s go, go somewhere else full of bunnies and golden coins! Yes let us run… run… is he gone?

Look, the manifesto is an ideal, and it contains the guiding principles behind the development of this game. I think they’ve largely stuck to the broader manifesto itself. I think the fractals were the beginning of a step away from that, but I think ANet also saw the blowback that resulted and learned from it. Is the manifesto still relevant? Absolutely. Is it a contract between anyone and anyone? Nope.

Now let’s be honest. The dye thing isn’t about the manifesto. The dye thing is a matter of you liking the idea of a beta iteration of a system you never tried. You like it better because it adhered to your ideals better, and because you never tried it, and don’t know the drawbacks first hand (which have been discussed at length by now). In your mind the equation is as simple as account bound=good, character bound=bad. There’s a lot more to this, and your oversimplification of the system as evil and money grubbing doesn’t really further any discussion.

The dye thing is a small concern by itself. The broader implication of multiple concepts that penalize players by taking in game currency unnecessarily is that you force players to spend more time or money to get that currency back. The dye thing isn’t even a penalty, but it in combination with other design choices that are penalties do exactly what I’ve described, which ultimately incentivizes players to lean towards shortcuts of getting game currency, which leads to more gem purchases for gold.

Now I’m sure people think I’m nuts, bcs my views are driven by the original Guild Wars, but I expect not to lose time or money to do the following…

Fast travel
Change my build
Death penalty – removing this was skilled play
Get the best stated items
Trading fees – didn’t exist

I expect only to grind for cosmetics and achievements. I also expect that every player have easy access to the best stated gear so that they can’t feel handicapped.

Shockwave.1230:

Klawlyt.6507:

Holy crap, Shockwave, You’re right! ANet is eeeeeeeeeevil! Let us all run! Run from this place! Yes let’s go, go somewhere else full of bunnies and golden coins! Yes let us run… run… is he gone?

Look, the manifesto is an ideal, and it contains the guiding principles behind the development of this game. I think they’ve largely stuck to the broader manifesto itself. I think the fractals were the beginning of a step away from that, but I think ANet also saw the blowback that resulted and learned from it. Is the manifesto still relevant? Absolutely. Is it a contract between anyone and anyone? Nope.

Now let’s be honest. The dye thing isn’t about the manifesto. The dye thing is a matter of you liking the idea of a beta iteration of a system you never tried. You like it better because it adhered to your ideals better, and because you never tried it, and don’t know the drawbacks first hand (which have been discussed at length by now). In your mind the equation is as simple as account bound=good, character bound=bad. There’s a lot more to this, and your oversimplification of the system as evil and money grubbing doesn’t really further any discussion.

The dye thing is a small concern by itself. The broader implication of multiple concepts that penalize players by taking in game currency unnecessarily is that you force players to spend more time or money to get that currency back. The dye thing isn’t even a penalty, but it in combination with other design choices that are penalties do exactly what I’ve described, which ultimately incentivizes players to lean towards shortcuts of getting game currency, which leads to more gem purchases for gold.

Now I’m sure people think I’m nuts, bcs my views are driven by the original Guild Wars, but I expect not to lose time or money to do the following…

Fast travel
Change my build
Death penalty – removing this was skilled play
Get the best stated items
Trading fees – didn’t exist

I expect only to grind for cosmetics and achievements. I also expect that every player have easy access to the best stated gear so that they can’t feel handicapped.

You’re still missing my point about the dye system. The orginal dye system was more greedy than it is now and Anet toned it down. In the process of toning it down they made a decision about whether it should be account bound or not. Big, fat, hairy deal.

The problem is that people keep bringing that stuff up, not only out of context but trying to link it to everything else. The decision Anet made to revamp the dye system over all was a positive change for players, not a negative change. I guarantee you if they kept the dye system they originally quoted, people would be screaming about it in frustration.

Vayne.8563:

I love how people try to justify their hyperbole when there isn’t any excuse for using it. Why can’t you just say these are things Anet said that didn’t eventuate, instead of using obviously incorrect hyperbole like bait and switch?

Says the same thing and isn’t completely wrong.

Precisely this. That sort of thing makes you lose any credibility you might have had, it makes you look less intelligent than you might really be, and it’s the difference between constructive criticism and flaming.

Shockwave.1230:

The dye thing is a small concern by itself. The broader implication of multiple concepts that penalize players by taking in game currency unnecessarily is that you force players to spend more time or money to get that currency back. The dye thing isn’t even a penalty, but it in combination with other design choices that are penalties do exactly what I’ve described, which ultimately incentivizes players to lean towards shortcuts of getting game currency, which leads to more gem purchases for gold.

Now I’m sure people think I’m nuts, bcs my views are driven by the original Guild Wars, but I expect not to lose time or money to do the following…

Fast travel
Change my build
Death penalty – removing this was skilled play
Get the best stated items
Trading fees – didn’t exist

I expect only to grind for cosmetics and achievements. I also expect that every player have easy access to the best stated gear so that they can’t feel handicapped.

There’s a few things to note here. Sure there were no gold sinks in GW1. Trading fees didn’t exist simply because there was no functional trade system except for spamming in Kamadan.

No gold sinks lead to an extremely inflated economy, to the point where a new player simply couldn’t catch up anymore. Compare this to GW2 where precursor prices have been stable for almost half a year … Inflation is non-existent in this game.

Gold sinks are an economic necessity. The only one I don’t like at all is the waypoint cost. But on average, my gold keeps its value over a long time. As such, buying gems is hardly necessary. Even then, it’s not necessary to buy from the black market like GW1. It all makes for a healthy and stable economy.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

But I still disagree here. I do think this has a lot more in common with Guild Wars 1 than WoW. Compare.

WoW..unlimited skills all at once.
Guild Wars… limited skill bar

WoW. Taunt mechanic/true tanking
Guild Wars. No taunt mechanic

WoW..mounts
Guild Wars no mounts (except the broom if you want, but we had siege devourers in game in Guild Wars 1 anyway…not quite the same as the mounts in WoW)

Then you have stuff like story and explorable mode dungeons, already done in Guild Wars 1. As an example, Bloodstone Caves, the easier explorable mode as part of a story followed by the explorable mode when you went back to it.

The fact is, with the exception of “making builds”, this game works a whole lot like Guild Wars 1 did, far more than it works on WoW.

Guild Wars tries to tell “your” story.
WoW- Just as a story of the world, nothing is really your story.

WoW . Thrives on player made mods. The whole game was pretty much a mod fest.
Guild Wars. Very limited use of mods

WoW. Gear score…encouraging players to be competitive.
Guild Wars….each person gets their own drops, you’re not rolling against other people

Guild Wars…doesn’t lock you out of content due to gear
WOW…locks you out of content due to gear

Then you have stuff that WOW and Guild Wars 1 has that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have…like faction rep grinding.

Yeah, I don’t think this can in any way shape or form be considered WoW 2.0. Rift can, but not this. It’s way too different.

I’ve extensively played a lot of WoW style MMOs, and this has a lot less to do with those than you’re admitting.

Check my last post for some of the design changes I’m referencing.
Also add to that a gated aspect to builds was never in GW. The whole gating concept in the trait lines really bugged me when it also applied to major traits in the betas. That dies not help with build diversity, you limit the number of possibilities, if they were concerned with traits not seeing use, then make better traits.

The grind is what really gets my gears though. How can a company go from 0 power progression to over over 10% disparities on weapons and armor and ridiculous disparities on runes and sigils. That in combination with the trading post being the only viable way of obtaining the items… just look at the prices of the best stat items. How can you expect someone to get a full set of max gear and mods in a day or two like it was so easy to do in Guild Wars? You can’t because the current systems don’t allow it.

One of the best aspects of Guild Wars was taking your character through content in different ways by playing different builds. Which you can’t do in GW2 bcs build are so equipment based. You’re gated from playing lots of different builds, bcs it’s so expensive to get gear and it even takes currency to respec your traits and trait attribute bonuses. Builds are like relationships in this game, you do a good job finding one bcs you’re going to be with it for a while.

I relate it all back to freedom that players feel within the system the developers make. GW2 feels very limiting to me compared to GW, and those limitations remind me of how I felt when I tried to play WoW and never could fully commit to it.

Shockwave.1230:

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

But I still disagree here. I do think this has a lot more in common with Guild Wars 1 than WoW. Compare.

WoW..unlimited skills all at once.
Guild Wars… limited skill bar

WoW. Taunt mechanic/true tanking
Guild Wars. No taunt mechanic

WoW..mounts
Guild Wars no mounts (except the broom if you want, but we had siege devourers in game in Guild Wars 1 anyway…not quite the same as the mounts in WoW)

Then you have stuff like story and explorable mode dungeons, already done in Guild Wars 1. As an example, Bloodstone Caves, the easier explorable mode as part of a story followed by the explorable mode when you went back to it.

The fact is, with the exception of “making builds”, this game works a whole lot like Guild Wars 1 did, far more than it works on WoW.

Guild Wars tries to tell “your” story.
WoW- Just as a story of the world, nothing is really your story.

WoW . Thrives on player made mods. The whole game was pretty much a mod fest.
Guild Wars. Very limited use of mods

WoW. Gear score…encouraging players to be competitive.
Guild Wars….each person gets their own drops, you’re not rolling against other people

Guild Wars…doesn’t lock you out of content due to gear
WOW…locks you out of content due to gear

Then you have stuff that WOW and Guild Wars 1 has that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have…like faction rep grinding.

Yeah, I don’t think this can in any way shape or form be considered WoW 2.0. Rift can, but not this. It’s way too different.

I’ve extensively played a lot of WoW style MMOs, and this has a lot less to do with those than you’re admitting.

Check my last post for some of the design changes I’m referencing.
Also add to that a gated aspect to builds was never in GW. The whole gating concept in the trait lines really bugged me when it also applied to major traits in the betas. That dies not help with build diversity, you limit the number of possibilities, if they were concerned with traits not seeing use, then make better traits.

The grind is what really gets my gears though. How can a company go from 0 power progression to over over 10% disparities on weapons and armor and ridiculous disparities on runes and sigils. That in combination with the trading post being the only viable way of obtaining the items… just look at the prices of the best stat items. How can you expect someone to get a full set of max gear and mods in a day or two like it was so easy to do in Guild Wars? You can’t because the current systems don’t allow it.

One of the best aspects of Guild Wars was taking your character through content in different ways by playing different builds. Which you can’t do in GW2 bcs build are so equipment based. You’re gated from playing lots of different builds, bcs it’s so expensive to get gear and it even takes currency to respec your traits and trait attribute bonuses. Builds are like relationships in this game, you do a good job finding one bcs you’re going to be with it for a while.

I relate it all back to freedom that players feel within the system the developers make. GW2 feels very limiting to me compared to GW, and those limitations remind me of how I felt when I tried to play WoW and never could fully commit to it.

Sure but in WoW, you never have best in stat stuff for any length of time, because it changes every three months.

You’re commenting on some ascended stuff that’s been around since November. Armor and weapons are the same now as they were the day the game got released back in August.

Do you have any idea of what a ten month period in WoW would look like with no armor or weapon stat upgrades? It’s called a treadmill for a reason. This game doesn’t have it.

Erasculio.2914:

TheDaiBish.9735:

I’d argue against that the game is telling you to go for a Legendary, but I can see your points on the others.

Heh, the empty icon on the character selection screen is a somewhat not very subtle way to nudge people into going for a Legendary.

The issue with saying fun is subjective is that it makes the discussion somewhat moot – you could reply to anything by saying “I think it’s fun!”, even to Alien: Colonial Marines.

I believe, though, that there are some things in which ArenaNet gave up on trying to implement fun content, and went with grind instead. See Legendary weapons: before release, during beta, they required significantly less grind (this did not exist, for example). Then the way to acquire those items was changed, but instead of trying to change it to become more epic or more fun (something including in-game lore, or some kind of epic task, or something about the dragons), ArenaNet made it just a matter of grinding until your fingers bleed.

Then we have the last Southsun event. It was extremely poor – again using Kiel as a way to point players to a problem, with very bad storytelling (I wonder how many people noticed the scene in which Kiel learns that Canach was behind everything), repetitive dynamic events that didn’t really add anything new to the mechanics already in the game… But events that were easy to farm, which gave chest rewards with no daily limit, together with a 200% buff to Magic Find. That, to me, was a sign of ArenaNet not even trying to make fun content, choosing instead to make grindy content knowing that’s what their playerbase wanted.

Eh, looking in from the outside, I can see you point with the Legendary.

Oh, I agree that the way Legendary weapons were implemented in the end was disappointing, and that some of the storytelling is a bit off (the Living Story would be much better if certain aspects, such as finding what the bad guys want, the last instance ect, were totally player-driven, as opposed to being on a set schedule. Not only would the player be an actual driving force, but it’d also mean the community has to work together, and that can’t be a bad thing, surely?). I didn’t actually play the last Southsun event (no Internet), so I can’t really comment on that.

I also agree that there are a lot of things that could be improved to increase the level of engagement in content (harder world boss fights, for example).

At the same time though, a lot of the content they have introduced (Flame + Frost, Aetherblade Retreat, this current LS) have been, what I consider, to be fun. So to say that they’ve stopped making fun content altogether, in my eyes, is a falsehood.

In terms of grinding, I personally consider this a state of mind, as opposed to an actual ‘doing’. Doing something you find engaging (this will vary from player to player) will feel less of a grind than something the player finds monotonous. This is probably why I don’t feel that this is a grindy game; I do the things I enjoy and I can personally actively engage in, and don’t do things I don’t enjoy. I don’t play for the rewards, but the game itself, and I’m much happier for it.

Let’s compare, say, Dragon Bash and this LS:

Dragon Bash had quite a few of monotonous tasks that required low levels of engagement (click pinata, click fireworks ect). Couple this with the amount of times you had to repeat it to get an Achievement, and it’d feel like a grind, especially if you’re actively chasing that Achievement (if you’re doing it as you go about your daily stuff, I’d say it wouldn’t be so bad).

This LS, however, has, what I’d consider to be, very few grindy tasks. Most of them require the person to look for these things (Sky Crystals and Large Kites) and, if you don’t use Dulfy, you actually have to engage with the content to find these things.

Engagement reduces the feeling that ‘this is a grind’. Pressing F who knows how many times isn’t engaging, especially compared to content where the player has to find things and think (how do I get there, what skill will I use, this way didn’t work so let’s try this way). Of course, if the player uses a walk-through to do all of the thinking for them, this reduces the level of engagement, which results it being just a ‘click F 40 times’ task.

Vayne.8563:

Stuff said years before a product comes out doesn’t apply to bait and switch.

Agreed.

Of course if that stuff is still being said at, or near, the time the product is released its a different matter.

The reality of the matter is that the dye system the OP is complaining about is an improvement, favoring the player heavily, over the one that existed previously.

The other elements he mentions specifically seem to have been adhered to reasonably well considering the fact that the game was a work in progress at the time they were mentioned.

Top end gear is very easily obtainable in GW2. Prices are very low on the TP, where only skin rarity drives high prices…kind of like in GW1. Overall there is a bit more effort to achieve max stat gear in GW2 than in GW1, but we are still speaking of a very minor investment.

A two pound dumbbell is a 100% increase in weight over one pound, but both are easily lifted.

Shockwave.1230:

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

The dye system was changed in the betas allready and it was a pita- you had to get a seed, give it to an npc in your home instance and come back for the dye later if I recall.
Anyone who says it was changed to make money is reaching imo- really who buys dyes from the gem shop? I bet the money just rolls in from all those dyes lol.

@ OP the dye system is the only thing that has been changed- well and the addition of ascended gear but Anet seems to have realized that it might not have been the greatest idea.

An MMo is a work in progress it will be for as long as it runs- nothing is cast in stone. Things change, games mature etc etc.
What would you say if someone showed you a quote from when you were 1st grade and said you claimed you would become an astronaut, since you became (insert profession here) you were lying and betrayed your teacher and parents? Silly huh?

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

Stuff said years before a product comes out doesn’t apply to bait and switch.

Agreed.

Of course if that stuff is still being said at, or near, the time the product is released its a different matter.

As I’ve said, repeatedly, there was so much accurate information released by Anet leading up to the release, that ANYONE could have done a minimal amount of research and found out about mostly anything in the game.

Another point is that the game launched and had a refund policy for months and months and months. They gave refunds to people who played the game for six months. That’s unheard of. So even if they had said something different before launch, the fact they were willing to return people’s money for the first six months (when people well and truly should have known what they were getting) means that bait and switch doesn’t exist. There are a whole lot of people who played this game for free.