Yumiko Emi Ishida 80 Ele, Hikari Kyoko Ishida 80 Guard TC-NA. Active RPer of NA megaserver.
(edited by Yumiko Ishida.3769)
Its not a matter of broken promises...
What? You think I’m choosing sides? I found something you all should be looking into instead of making baseless arguments and complaints.
Yumiko Emi Ishida 80 Ele, Hikari Kyoko Ishida 80 Guard TC-NA. Active RPer of NA megaserver.
Don’t make post like these it feels them.
Ignore them and they will eventually go away.
Sorry, but grammar nazi rising… I’m assuming you mean feeds them.
A dialogue from concerned players and Mike O’Brian himself:
Quoting here,
LandeydaTarnished Coast 135 points136 points137 points 7 days ago
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
That was the quote that sold a lot of people on Guild Wars 2. For years we waited for a game that would give us horizontal progression, not vertical progression. We were told that you were building the game around that.
Then, only a few short months after release, a new higher-stat gear grind was added. Why? Why cater to a sub-section of your playerbase who are cannot stop being, for lack of a better term, WoW-minded when it comes to progression? Why go back on your word to a loyal playerbase that supported you guys for so long?
Also, you stated there was a gap between Legendary and Exotic progression. There was no stat gap, so I can only assume you meant a time gap. But there was a filler — unique Exotics that were harder to get than the normal, base ones. Please clarify what you meant by that gap.
Thank you.
Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet 129 points130 points131 points 7 days ago
Hi! I’ll respond to the top part since it’s a quote from me.
Obviously the key phrase I’m going to point you to in that quote is, “if someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it”. That really is the litmus test we’ve used. That’s why, at ship, we gave better stats to exotic gear and didn’t give better stats to legendary gear.
More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was. That’s why GW2 shipped with a higher level cap, and with a hard separation between PvE and PvP. In GW1 we never advanced the level cap through four campaigns/expansions. The game design didn’t allow for it. But GW2 was designed without those restrictions, and we’ve always expected that we will someday raise the level cap in GW2.
That’s why we’ve always said that GW2 rewards players through both progression and collection, whereas GW1 primarily rewarded through collection. Presumably players aren’t shocked that GW2 rewards through progression, since it has a level 80 cap.
I wonder if the core sentiment is more this: It’s only been two-and-a-half months! We don’t even all have exotics yet, and already you’re introducing another tier. Is this the start of a power progression curve that I’ll never be able to keep up with?
I certainly appreciate that worry. I myself don’t want a constant struggle, as exists in some other games, to keep my equipment viable.
Then we’re left with a balancing act. Some progression is ok, but pushing players onto gear treadmill isn’t ok and isn’t what the game is about.
So I would ask you to judge us by details, and not by making slippery-slope arguments. We introduced a ton of new content in November, and the sum total of new progression rewards we added to go with it provided a 5-10% stat increase in 2 of 12 slots. I hope you’ll agree that that kind of very shallow and gradual progression does not force people onto a gear treadmill.
I think it’s important for GW2 to be able to have this kind of gradual progression. Of course we made some mistakes with the way we introduced ascended gear. (See ChrisW’s answers for details.) But those are addressable issues. I don’t think they invalidate the fundamental concept that GW2 can have gradual stat progression without being a gear treadmill game.
~ MO
Yumiko Emi Ishida 80 Ele, Hikari Kyoko Ishida 80 Guard TC-NA. Active RPer of NA megaserver.
DonMarani 47 points48 points49 points 7 days ago
We introduced a ton of new content in November, and the sum total of new progression rewards we added to go with it provided a 5-10% stat increase in 2 of 12 slots.
Yes, and the cost of upgrading one of those slots is more than obtaining an entire exotic set.
And with the next content update, another 2 slots get added, so we need to grind them out as well – at the cost of a full set, for one slot, for one character. If I don’t play the very latest thing that drops the new gear randomly, I’m left behind.
If this new gear would really be as simple to obtain as you want to make us believe, it wouldn’t be any harder than getting exotics, so there was no point in introducing the new tier in the first place – unless there is a grind attached to it.
This is not how the game was advertised, and had I known about this beforehand, I wouldn’t have bought this game.
Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet 44 points45 points46 points 6 days ago
I mostly agree. That’s why I wrote that last paragraph. Introducing new rewards for playing new content doesn’t have to lead to grind, but for two of the three examples (item types) we introduced in November, it did. The design team is aware of that and fixing it. See ChrisW’s answers for more details.
~ MO
Yumiko Emi Ishida 80 Ele, Hikari Kyoko Ishida 80 Guard TC-NA. Active RPer of NA megaserver.
In the 13th century it was common for the peasants and serfs to blame the king’s advisers for their woes while exonerating the king.
Can we please get past this? The purpose of a company is to make money for those who own it, work for it, and invest in it.
The responsibility of workers/purchasers is to be savvy. Cunning. Smart. Dare I say jaded?
Are you happy with GW2? Great, carry on. If you’re not, stop spending money on the god kitten thing.
“…we don’t expect you to be forced into dungeons at endgame.”
~ArenaNet
~ArenaNet
I could try to dissect this thing further, but its taking too much time and energy. I mainly found the posts that addressed most if not all our concerns in a nutshell. If you want to look into it further and make more quotes for all to see be my guest I supplied the AMA for all to read and dissect at their leisure.
Yumiko Emi Ishida 80 Ele, Hikari Kyoko Ishida 80 Guard TC-NA. Active RPer of NA megaserver.
Thats all well in good hindsight 20/20 an all but data mining says otherwise as do the meet and greets during beta weekend events where they named exotics and legendaries …well we’ve been over this forever nothing is going to change yours or my views on it.
And to say what they introduced in Nov like its a cake they just whipped up is just facetious. The lead time on that type of event is atleast a year from concept to release so it coincides with atleast the publication of the manifesto blog post and other dev posts during the lead up to beta weekend events.
Regardless whats done is done the only thing left to do is go forward.
In the 13th century it was common for the peasants and serfs to blame the king’s advisers for their woes while exonerating the king.
Can we please get past this? The purpose of a company is to make money for those who own it, work for it, and invest in it.
The responsibility of workers/purchasers is to be savvy. Cunning. Smart. Dare I say jaded?
Are you happy with GW2? Great, carry on. If you’re not, stop spending money on the god kitten thing.
Thats the old paradigm and its incompatible for the new world order of globalization of economies. this video illustrates it best
I’ve come to the conclusion GW2’s Manifesto still stands and hasn’t been changed or us being lied to.
Your having come to that conclusion doesn’t make it so. I have come to the opposite conclusion. Maybe I should make a topic announcing it to the forum?
OP, thanks for sharing the quotes. I have read them, and I understand how you came to that conclusion. Yes, technically, they didn’t lie because people misunderstood the promises, and they made a mistake they are trying to fix.
The first quote
Issue: I thought you said a thousand hours = just cooler looking characters. People bought the game based on this assumption.
Answer: Nope, you assumed wrong. You should have seen stat progression coming when we announced a lvl 80 cap. We have PvP if you want horizontal progression. Also, that quote was specifically only in reference to legendaries vs exotic weapons.
Second Quote
Issue: I thought you said no grind
Answer: Yeah… we’re working on it.
From the responses, though, if I was a random third party listening in on the discussion, I’d have to assume the company was very misleading and untrustworthy. You can always weasel your way out of something saying it was a misunderstanding, but in this scenario, there are way too many discrepancies that one can’t help but wonder if this company deliberately mislead people.
Do you remember, early on in the game, when people complained on the forums, “why no progression?”, people pounced on them saying, “why did you buy this game if you wanted progression?” Why wasn’t anything said then? Any redname could have said, “Just wait. It’s coming.”
Bottom line: There’s no need to cry over spilled milk. This is Anet’s clarified stance. Let’s move on.
In the 13th century it was common for the peasants and serfs to blame the king’s advisers for their woes while exonerating the king.
Can we please get past this? The purpose of a company is to make money for those who own it, work for it, and invest in it.
The responsibility of workers/purchasers is to be savvy. Cunning. Smart. Dare I say jaded?
Are you happy with GW2? Great, carry on. If you’re not, stop spending money on the god kitten thing.
Thats the old paradigm and its incompatible for the new world order of globalization of economies. this video illustrates it best
That was awesome, thank you! A well-spent 11 minutes and 11 seconds.
“…we don’t expect you to be forced into dungeons at endgame.”
~ArenaNet
~ArenaNet
To answer your question, let’s take a quote from the manifesto:
“It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.”
Does vertical progression require you to grind for a “future fun reward”? Let me remind you that vertical progression “progresses” by periodically increasing the power level. That’s what vertical progression is. It requires you to, periodically, hop on the treadmill and catch up to the level of “progression”. Again, that’s what vertical progression is.
Let’s take a quote from the AMA from Chris:
" we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve."
Here Chris states that there will be, not the addition of Ascended gear which should have been there at launch, but rather vertical progression. Of course the statement is a contradiction in terms as vertical progression defines a gear grind. Again, an increase in power level requires you to grind to achieve the new power level. That’s what vertical progression is.
I think it’s clear that the Manifesto is not reflected in the game as it currently is conceived by the developers. As to whether that speaks of broken promises, I’ll leave that to you to decide.
In the 13th century it was common for the peasants and serfs to blame the king’s advisers for their woes while exonerating the king.
Can we please get past this? The purpose of a company is to make money for those who own it, work for it, and invest in it.
The responsibility of workers/purchasers is to be savvy. Cunning. Smart. Dare I say jaded?
Are you happy with GW2? Great, carry on. If you’re not, stop spending money on the god kitten thing.
Thats the old paradigm and its incompatible for the new world order of globalization of economies. this video illustrates it best
That was awesome, thank you! A well-spent 11 minutes and 11 seconds.
David Harvey is always fantastic to listen to, he’s really good at pointing out how it’s all one way streets and one system with no alternatives should something inevitably go wrong with the systems, which are in fact too focused on one paradigm as opposed to balanced approaches.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=EYzKsiev43Q&NR=1
Is a bit of a less animated talk about such things but is highly relevant in todays financial climate.
Irony…. xD
The issue really comes down to the fact that we will never know. The manifesto was just vague enough for there to be multiple interpretations. There are other things that point in different directions that, when added together with the manifesto, paint a very different picture.
Regardless of what could be lies or what could not be, there is a very clear issue. They admit that they knew this would be a large issue. They did nothing. They told players nothing. They haven’t done anything to alleviate it. There is a large amount of fallout inside and outside of the game that could have been mitigated to a very large degree.
Many of the things that they did tell players would be in the game are still not anywhere to be found. They instead focused on adding something that was never mentioned in an extremely poor, incomplete and rather snide manner.
To put it bluntly, they earned every bit of this regardless of what the truth is.
The issue really comes down to the fact that we will never know. The manifesto was just vague enough for there to be multiple interpretations. There are other things that point in different directions that, when added together with the manifesto, paint a very different picture.
Regardless of what could be lies or what could not be, there is a very clear issue. They admit that they knew this would be a large issue. They did nothing. They told players nothing. They haven’t done anything to alleviate it. There is a large amount of fallout inside and outside of the game that could have been mitigated to a very large degree.
Many of the things that they did tell players would be in the game are still not anywhere to be found. They instead focused on adding something that was never mentioned in an extremely poor, incomplete and rather snide manner.
To put it bluntly, they earned every bit of this regardless of what the truth is.
The problem is that how much flak anet takes, not matter how much we whine/complain/demand. You’ll always get players who’ll steadfastly defend them or just troll, such is the life of a regular forum poster.
Whilst, I agree with you that they did indeed earn all this negative attention, and bluntly put, this game does not deserve the game of the year at all, except maybe in the graphics department =P But the company as a whole is not listening carefully enough to the players, or not taking enough interest in very valid concerns – the standing joke is that you can’t criticize the game in forums without risking an infraction. Well, I say poop to that ~ I personally think if you like something, and want it to succeed then you fight for it. GW2 still has the potential to be a great game, no it is a great game but it needs some very significant changes to happen, most of all ~ anet needs to win back player confidence first.
protest this travesty of a patch -
Get it taken down -
Do whatever it takes if you care about this game -
Get it taken down -
Do whatever it takes if you care about this game -
When you knowingly allow people to use the manifesto in a way that you know already not to be true = lying to me. They should have educated their intend from the start and they didn’t. Instead we got this debacle and I don’t think it will get any better judging from the AMA.
People like to throw around look they are listening. Well actions speak louder and I’ve yet to see any action on any of the concerns what so ever.
The issue really comes down to the fact that we will never know. The manifesto was just vague enough for there to be multiple interpretations. There are other things that point in different directions that, when added together with the manifesto, paint a very different picture.
Regardless of what could be lies or what could not be, there is a very clear issue. They admit that they knew this would be a large issue. They did nothing. They told players nothing. They haven’t done anything to alleviate it. There is a large amount of fallout inside and outside of the game that could have been mitigated to a very large degree.
Many of the things that they did tell players would be in the game are still not anywhere to be found. They instead focused on adding something that was never mentioned in an extremely poor, incomplete and rather snide manner.
To put it bluntly, they earned every bit of this regardless of what the truth is.
The problem is that how much flak anet takes, not matter how much we whine/complain/demand. You’ll always get players who’ll steadfastly defend them or just troll, such is the life of a regular forum poster.
Whilst, I agree with you that they did indeed earn all this negative attention, and bluntly put, this game does not deserve the game of the year at all, except maybe in the graphics department =P But the company as a whole is not listening carefully enough to the players, or not taking enough interest in very valid concerns – the standing joke is that you can’t criticize the game in forums without risking an infraction. Well, I say poop to that ~ I personally think if you like something, and want it to succeed then you fight for it. GW2 still has the potential to be a great game, no it is a great game but it needs some very significant changes to happen, most of all ~ anet needs to win back player confidence first.
Your comment on the artists (graphics) has occurred to me as well. They have done an outstanding job deserving of nothing but praise. It’s sad that their work is considered within the context of the overall game direction. They deserve more.
When you knowingly allow people to use the manifesto in a way that you know already not to be true = lying to me. They should have educated their intend from the start and they didn’t. Instead we got this debacle and I don’t think it will get any better judging from the AMA.
People like to throw around look they are listening. Well actions speak louder and I’ve yet to see any action on any of the concerns what so ever.
My take is that Ascended Gear was not in the picture pre-launch. It was added in panic mode when people were not logging in due to boredom and whining about nothing to do. I think they anticipated some negative reaction, but not the amount they got, and are now back-pedaling.
An issue that has been completely overlooked in the whole HP vs. VP thing is another clear statement, “When it’s ready.” Face it, it wasn’t. For “the whole game is endgame” to have worked, down-scaling needed to be more severe, and rewards needed to be there for going into lower level areas. Neither was the case. If they had been, perhaps the kitten-storm over nothing to do might have been smaller.
Both issues suggest to me that there was pressure to publish sooner rather than later from NCSoft. Truth to tell, how many games over the last few years have launched when not ready (at least in fans’ minds), and you can look and see financial issues for the parent company?