Guild Wars 2

I was hoping that the developers of GW2 had learned valuable lessons from GW1 – based upon the ‘Lost Shores’ event – it appears they did not. Prior to the event, I had been watching the ongoing discussion regarding the difficulty for many to obtain Legendary precursor weapons via the Mystic Forge along with the complaint that they were too dear in price at the Trading Post. My view was that those who were complaining had some points with merit, but not many.
We were advised that these weapons were supposed to be hard to obtain. In addition, they required work in ALL areas of the game, save for sPVP, in order for them to be constructed. These were features that I thought were correctly thought out by the devs.
Then, a vocal contingent of players arose with complaints that the precursor was too random/difficult to obtain, that the grind was too difficult, that they were too expensive. Perhaps some – even all of the above – were true, but this was easily correctable by tweaks of the MF mechanism which generated the precursor weapons.
Rather than make the small correction that may/may not have been needed – the decision was made to make the precursor weapons widely available via the finale boss chest drops in the Lost Shores event. Whoever made this decision – very bad call.
{For the record – I will note that I was one who had success at the Mystic Forge in producing precursor weapons via a ‘pattern’ I used – not cheap, but productive – and I also did receive a precursor via the final event chest}.
Here are a couple of relative questions I would like answered – Volcanus – to produce the weapon requires over 450 Gold in materials + multiple dungeon runs to create. Why? Why are 100 Lodestones required to produce a component for the Legendary weapons – with each one costing 1 Gold – hence 100 Gold for this single component of the weapon production?? Note that in both cases the expense and difficulty were created by the devs. Clearly, these weapons WERE supposed to be expensive and not easy to obtain. AND – I had no problems with either – until this event.
In the Halloween event – I missed one event and was shut out from progression in the achievement chain. In Lost Shore – you could have missed EVERYTHING except the final event – you could even have just joined a group for the last few minute of the event and received a full share of the end-chest reward. Very poor design. INSTEAD – there should have been a measuring of a players overall event participation and/or time spent in the finale and/or work within some type of real scavenger hunt – and then the reward of a small % of players who had met some participation criteria with a precursor; this would have made a lot more sense, been far more palatable, and been far less destructive to the game as a whole.
We had been told – in this very forum – that there would be a scavenger-type hunt event with respect to acquiring the precursors? Well the so-called scavenger hunt was an absolute joke – yielding a 5 commendation reward which was good for?? Linsey – ??
I was disgusted when I heard and then saw the precursors dropping from that end chest. This was a slap in the face to every player who had worked and grinded actively to acquire and produce their Legendary weapons. This demeaned the value of the GW2 Legendary weapon concept- – supposedly the Holy Grail of the GW2 grind. Via a very bad decision, by giving in to a group of players, an end-game piece of GW2 was damaged – perhaps even destroyed.

Now – the fall-out. Instead of the people who were previously complaining – a single group – now there are multiple groups complaining. Some were locked-out, some, crashed-out, some didn’t know the event was occurring, some couldn’t attend, and some just didn’t get a precursor drop. The ‘haves’ were a minority before – as was intended. Now a more serious split between groups has been created. In addition, while prices for the precursors have indeed fallen – the entire trading post/GW2 economy will be affected. Prices of many materials will be in flux towards higher prices as players move towards attemping weapon construction. In the end, it may actually wind up being MORE expensive to constuct a Legendary than it would have been prior to the event (except perhaps for the 5 most expensive precursors). Some tiers of items will see a price crash as it isn’t worth purchasing them any longer because the end-item (precursor) no longer has the needed value. Given that there are in-game weapons that are even more expensive to produce AND where the extraordinary high price is driven more by GW2 than the players – I simply can not understand the decision, and its manner of execution, to make these precursors so widely available.
I can only hope that the dev’s think their actions through more thouroughly and avoid knee-jerk ‘fixes’ in the future.
Finally – Linsey – I was following your blog regularly regarding the precursor discussions. While I appreciate your availability, comments, and willingness to respond to questions from the player base – my opinion is that you were giving far too much away with your answers.

Too late, a game’s suspension only works as long as people live with obvious problems in favor of having a certain goal. Once that goal is taken away or accomplished, the more obvious problems surface and become obvious.

For instance, with me, there are two major factors I like to play games for: 1. enjoying the trading and 2. having some overarching distant goal that I want to work towards. Both of those were in some way shattered with the event. Once that suspension was gone, I looked at the game from the outside and realized that it’s plagued by bugs, boring grind and nothing to trully look forward to. I’d probably still stick to it, were it not for EVE getting a new expansion in a few days, making me realize how much I miss my beloved Internet Spaceships.

I’m fully aware that the reasons I decided to stop with GW2 for a while will look silly to most, I’m also fully aware that it’s not just the question of precursors that led to it. However, it does show how a series of minor issues can combine into a major one. Chaos Theory at it’s best, I guess :p

I’m going to affix my tinfoil hat and suppose that this was a last minute decision to get people to participate in an event that they might have not otherwise either due to the ascended item news or out of shear lag. High participation in an event that takes place during a free trial weekend is a very powerful thing for a game’s image and once they get those people to pay the money for the game, it won’t much matter if they stick around a week later or not since new people will always be coming in as long as the only reviews in the public eye are the raving ones written during the betas.

Or get them to participate, even though the timing of the event was so extremely kittened-up for some of us.
4am Monday morning? There better be a good reward.

Anet, please make the event names more specific in the future. “The Lost Shores” should be named “The Precursor Shores” instead.

Learn from GW1?

Judging by their many inexperience mistakes so far, the devs have not learned from any mmo.

wtf man had i known this i would have done the event.. instead of working on an alt

i have been farming dragons endlessly for ages.. just because someone said they drop from them

wow … just wow

dunno what to think about arena net now doing crap like this with out letting the cat outta the bag

my friend you just been kicked in the kittens… said the man in the orange fro

couldn’t be bothered to read the whole op, but gw2 is hardly being ruind in anyway, shape, or form.

it was nice some ppl pulled precursors from the event, it certainly was long enough.

GW2 is the best MMO out on the market. Bottom line, you got something better to play? Go play it?