Guild Wars 2

I’m going to attempt to outline a few major points in systems for rewards that I can think of keeping in mind a few principles:

• The game should be accessible to everyone, ranging from your casual gamer to your hardcore gamer.
• There still needs to be some level of item differentiation for time spent on skinning your character to those just getting level appropriate gear.
• The rarer the item, the more people will want it.

First off, we’ll start with the RNG, this allows easy access to content across the board, all skill levels, casual and hardcore gamers alike. The drop rate can be easily specified by the designers allowing for control of how many of the item enter the world. Unfortunately, people who ‘open x boxes’ and don’t get their item will whine. However providing the item isn’t account bound then it’ll be for sale allowing acquisition in time through the medium of gold.

But then, if we don’t have RNG, what methods are there?

Well, you could have a method like dungeon running for a large number of tokens to acquire super rare items. BUT the only way of ensuring that this item will stay rare, will be to set the token price high, but then the gamers will declare this a ‘grind’ and ‘goes against the manifesto’ so looks like that’s not a decent method.

You could have a long quest chain, or a highly skilled quest chain that would reward players. But if it’s skilled you have the issue of the game not being ‘casual friendly’, a long quest chain will then be a ‘grind’ and if it’s not marked clearly it’ll be ‘too hard’ (look at the Lost Shores event where there was no quest markers, just clues to see the reaction on the forums) and there will be a guide on the internet the following day anyway. So you can’t have a rare item through a quest reward, as it’ll no longer be rare.

Then you can make a highly skilled event, like say the Halloween puzzle, or a turbo boosted Wintersday bells, but even they were surprised at how many people managed to complete the Halloween puzzle. And then you get the reaction from the population that ‘timed’ puzzles discriminate against slow internet connections, people with handicaps etc. So that’s not really a great way to introduce rare items.

Forge recipes has also been suggested, however, the only way to ensure that these are rare is to have a large list of materials required, some of which item bound like legendaries. And then it becomes a ‘grind’ from the RNG on material drops etc. I for one, am beginning to lose my love for the legendaries as I see more and more people with them, I want something not many people have, there’s no longer the ‘wow’ factor when I see someone with Twilight or Sunrise, it’s a shame but I guess the way it’s going to be.

And, just looking at the idea of giving everyone access to all the rare items would offend the people who want to have the rare stuff, want to be different. I spend a lot of time and materials on my equipment, I want to look better than someone who hasn’t spent any time on it. That’s just the way it goes, if I’ve got an endless Wintersday Bell, I don’t want everyone to have it, it loses its value and becomes pointless, thus there would be no carrot in the game to keep the majority of people who want the rare things.

I will admit, I get jealous when I see a player who’s played for less time/not as skilled/isn’t as mindblowingly sexy carrying an item I want but haven’t had the luck to acquire. But I don’t hate the RNG because of it, it can suck but it’s by far the fairest way of maintaining a rare item’s existence as actually rare. What I feel it boils down to is a feeling of entitlement, that people have played it more so should have it and that’s not how it works. You take away the rare, hard to acquire objects and you lose a big motivator for a lot of people.

Sorry for this being so long, but as a final question. If you are against RNG, why are you against it? And what system do you feel should be employed instead?

Alk Trio Fan.6357:

I spend a lot of time and materials on my equipment, I want to look better than someone who hasn’t spent any time on it.

Sorry, you don’t deserve it.

Your argument has two main flaws:

1) You are assuming that time spent is worth anything. It’s not. Other MMOs have indoctrinated people into believing that the recipe for “success” in a MMO is spending a lot of time (usually repeating content that isn’t fun), but that’s not how real life works. Someone who works 12 hours a day doing mindless, repetitive jobs don’t get paid nearly as much as skilled and talented people who work less time (compare Chinese factory workers to Steve Jobs). Believing you deserve anything better than someone else because you simply spent more time is nonsense.

2) You need external gratification, while you should be happy with internal gratification. Insecure people have the need to feel “better” than others. More mature people are happy with feeling good about themselves. Instead of wanting to have a skin because it looks better than what someone else has, the more mature approach is to want a skin because you like how said skin looks, regardless of how rare or not it is. Believing people are going to admire you due to the skin you have in a MMO is simply delusional.

Maybe my use of ‘better’ was incorrect there. It wasn’t meant as in ‘better’ as in than ‘wow, he looks good’, but better as in ‘I think I look better than x’. It is internally reflected, I don’t give a kitten as to what people think of my character from the outside, I want my characters to look better and different, unfortunately a lot of the time this is the much rarer equipment, but not always.

Though, even between the masterwork sets, you can see a large jump in value purely because of the skin. Just so happens the stuff I like is the rarer stuff.

Erasculio.2914:

1) You are assuming that time spent is worth anything. It’s not. Other MMOs have indoctrinated people into believing that the recipe for “success” in a MMO is spending a lot of time (usually repeating content that isn’t fun), but that’s not how real life works. Someone who works 12 hours a day doing mindless, repetitive jobs don’t get paid nearly as much as skilled and talented people who work less time (compare Chinese factory workers to Steve Jobs). Believing you deserve anything better than someone else because you simply spent more time is nonsense.

Now, I agree in principle with this, yes there is a degree of indoctrination, however your analogy in its own right isn’t by any means perfect. Your comparison is of two completely separate tasks. Comparing the two would actually make more sense if we were comparing two different games. But as it’s one game, and the argument is time spent then it boils down to the closer analogy of two workers for the same company, paid by commission, one working hard, the other procrastinating and floating around, by all rights the hard working one would get more, though the procrastinator would still have his chance to obtain large sales etc. through a bit of luck. Most of the time the hard worker would come out on top, but not always.

I feel RNG fits this analogy better.