Guild Wars 2

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Loiterer.4235:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

/Log in
/push ’’O’’
/go ’’Others’’ and the ’’Minis’’
/count 182

/go in ‘’Gem Store ’’ section
/count 10

Bored to look in the Wiki about limited pets from the Achivement-2week stories or the Limited edition Gem store sale .

“Too bored to look. Will just throw out random data.”

That is a great way to win a debate.

Hey !
I tried !
(But still in the Ah version there are 182 … did i calculate wrong ?)
Atleast i dont have to pay 15 euro per months (to access the servers) + the real money in the Store :P
But rather farm some dungeons if i need to , and not drop a single penny to the company (uneployed) :P

I’m not entirely sure but the AH listing might not include items that were/are bind on pick-up because you wouldn’t be able to list them anyway.

Your reasoning of grinding gold is sound but don’t forget that for that to happen, Arenanet has to rope in others to pay your share. Which was always my main issue with games that don’t have a subscription. Paying 15 dollars or 13 euros a month and getting access to 99% of the content comes out far cheaper than paying the same amount for a single cosmetic armour set.

In essence, the F2P and B2P model mainly appeals to those who can’t pay and those who can pay an obscure amount. The average user will either end up grinding too much or overspending to acquire the same amount of content that they get from a subscription game.

The gaming market shows that it’s viable model but to say that WoW depends on its cash shop as an argument for GW2’s own cash shop is such a bizarre statement that I have to question whether Vayne was simply trolling.

naiasonod.9265:

Geneaux.9547:

And today I learned that players don’t want to work towards anything and have everything handed to them on silver platter, grind or no grind.

http://swz.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Aerospace-Engineer-V-Job-Description.aspx

Can’t speak for anyone else, though that’s on the order of what I’m willing to work at.

These games? Pff. Not so much. There’s a certain wisdom in knowing what’s good and useful to work hard at, and to me, these games are so far from making the list as to render such comments as this downright comical.

My commitment to sparkle motion should not merely be doubted, but known far and wide s being non-existent.

And before some smug little part time burger flipper tried to tell me how lazy that must mean I am, I make craft beers, do my own custom cabinetry and woodworking, am a hobbyist electrical engineer when it comes to messing around with my own tweaking of computer hardware, a frequent world traveler for both work and leisure, a once-a-week member of a local church’s choral group and a regular volunteer down at my local food shelter.

More? I’m also a full time husband of a wife that firmly believes that going mountain biking and hiking on everything is the perfect way to spend a weekend. Consequently, we do a lot of those, as well as going to beaches with friends and having regular once or twice weekly barbecue cook outs on our patio.

I’m not willing to sacrifice any of that to ‘work harder’ at a game. Frankly, I feel it to be a giant joke to work at these things at all. Defeat the point much? It certainly would for me, to them this into yet another laborious task in my life.

So hers your sign. I’ll take all the silver platter service. You can try to, I dunno, pretend you’re the Michael Phelps of achievement point hunting or something.

Whatever it is that motivated people to try so hard to work at these games harder than they might well work at anything else at all fails entirely to grab me. I don’t get it and I don’t rightly care to start trying now.

I’ve been saying to posts like this ’ get a real job and accomplish something in your life. Then come back and tell us how lazy we are for not being interested in working super hard in video game land’ for years. Consider it implied here too.

I just wanted to quote you on this since i think it perfectly describes what I feel about “Games” and “Work”, and how the two are entirely different things. Well said man.. I love this post. +1 !

Gehenna.3625:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

It would be better , to give more options to aquire the Rings+Earings+Amuelt and let the 6-piece gear to grind alot – waste a lot of gold .
If they waste their gold in the Crafting , then the Gold vs Gem ratio will be still low , for the rest of the population and not see somthing like :
‘’you need 100 gold for 100 gems’’ in the near future

Edit" Or atleast , Rings+Earings+Amuelt + 2 set pieces , are almost be extremly easy to get like exotics

I also think it would be better to have stat neutrality at level 80. Just wondering if it would upset a lot of people. The thing is they are clearly coming back to GW1 style approaches but only partially. That might not be as successful unless they completely take stat differences out of level 80 gear.

i have thought of that but i suspect it’s not the way you mean, got an idea a while ago to make armor equally flat across all armor tiers, reducing tier amount and simply lower the “max armor” problem.

first we need only 4 armor tiers.

• normal (white)
• masterwork (green)
• exotic (orange)
• ascended (purple)

now we change how armor stats work per tier, note that the armor stat it self is always the same, so normal is as powerful as ascended, the only thing that makes a difference is the armor weight class.

1. normal: 1 stat bonus, can only equip 1 minor and/or major rune.
2. masterwork: 2 stat bonuses, can equip 2 minor and/or major runes.
3. exotic: 3 stat bonuses, can equip 2 minor and/or major rune/ can equip 1 superior rune. (so only one slot accepts a superior rune)
4. ascended: 3 bonuses, can equip any 2 rune tier.

i do not extend this to weapons just yet, still need to work out some problems for legendary weapons

Devata.6589:

IndigoSundown.5419:

- snip -

Well GW2 has them all but mainly has 3 then 2 (or if you would count gold as tokens 2 would be first) and then 1.

To simplify even further, break rewards down to those which are: randomly obtained; obtained incrementally; or both. Gold serves the purpose of a token (because you obtain what you need for item X in increments). Gold has the benefit (or drawback) of being a “token” that one can obtain anywhere in game, though some activities are vastly more profitable than others.

Number 4 is separate as it simply uses the other 3. And the mats you usually need simply drop in to low quantity’s to really being farmed by yourself. If I compare that to other MMO’s I never really had a problem with collecting mats. I checked what mob drops the maps, I went there and farmed them for a few min, an hour max and I got what I needed. The real time went into getting the recipe’s I needed to make what I wanted. Again like all cosmetics they usually where rewarded for a dungeon, or dropped from a mob or where rewarded from a quest-line. That is how you earned them and that’s what kept you busy. It’s also way more interesting sending you all over the world with a much more clear goal, that one recipe. In stead of.. I need 250 charged lodestones then I can not really get anywhere so lets start gold-grinding to buy them.

Leaving aside the subjective nature of what you like v. what someone else may like, I thought number 4 deserved its own mention because the two most desirable reward categories in the game are Ascended and Legendary items. Asc. weapons and armor crafting require a large list of items, as do Legendary Weapons.

What is the problem you have with your number 3 is drops are to low.

Another way to look at that would be to say that the overwhelming majority of items in the drop tables are salvage bait or outright junk. Yes, it’s a given that the more items you add to a table, the lower the percentage chance that a particular item will turn up. That’s if all items are weighted equally. If item drop chances are weighted to produce degrees of rarity, then the chance the most rare items will appear use negative exponents (example: [1e-1]% would be .1 percent).

The token system imho should be something you would in most cases something you earn along the way. The goals you want people to go for would be items directly rewarded from completing something or that are RNG based but also in a doable way. And of course a few exceptions to this to create some really rare items is oke.

While there are some items that are obtained as rare drops from specific content, these items are neither common nor among the most widely desirable in this game.

While i do not have the same negative attitude towards the cash shop you do, I think that the game needs a few more Eureka! drops. However, anytime ANet puts a desirable item behind RNG, they get flamed. They put desirable items behind a collection system, they get flamed. They’re never going to please everyone with the same system.

ANet has chosen to please people who value accessibility more than those who value exclusivity and to please those who prefer slow, sure acquisition over those who prefer the Eureka moment of getting that desired drop. That design direction will be even more apparent when (if) precursors no longer require RNG or outright purchase.

Devata.6589:

It’s basically like the dungeon token systems, and what I have always said about the dungeon token system is that they are great but only as a side thing! Your main goal for items in a dungeon should imho firstly be some special reward you get for completing it (maybe depending on the difficulty levels or on the paths), then there might be some special RNG drops in there you might wanna get, that should be like your second most reason to wanna do the dungeon (based on the way they put the items in there) and then the tokens would be a great thing your would earn along the way. Something you are not even really farming but you earn it while going for those other things. [I think the caparace stuff is an better example of something you earn along the way and the coat as a direct reward for completing something.]
…
“You were saying?” That there is way to much grind (mainly gold grind) in this game.
Have been saying that all the time, you have not been paying attention?

Anyway, this is a good addition to the thread. Maybe Anet also thinks the grind get less if they also make some stuff available in-game, but that is of cource not the case. If I want to collect skins and special items the grind is still just as much there and if I want to hunt down for specific items changes are big those are still behind the gold-grind (or another currency grind).

It sounds like what you are describing is a system where new content (dungeon,puzzle,quest chain, boss, LS chapter, etc.) is released and completing it once or twice more or less automatically gives you the best / majority of the rewards from that content. If you want an item then you complete the associated content or, looked at from the other direction, when you complete fresh content (for you) then you obtain the important associated items and you can move on to something else that is fresh.

While that sounds great in theory, I don’t see how it could work for the players who play 4+ hours a day. The development team would have to be producing one hour of fresh gameplay every two business hours. Obviously that is a bit of an exaggeration, but probably not a huge one. The Living Story development team spends weeks creating new content that people finish in a day. And if somehow the development teams were introducing fresh content that fast, as a couple hour a week player, I would personally end up feeling like there was a content grind that I couldn’t play through fast enough to just keep up.

MMOs are generally built around producing a little fresh gameplay and hiding goodies behind an RNG or currencies that keep you repeating that hour of gameplay hundreds or thousands of times. If there exists a necessity to do that in order to keep the most dedicated players on the hamster wheel, then we just end up discussing exactly how to structure and implement a grind. Should we put the item on a specific character with a 1:1000 RNG drop rate? Or have each kill drop a token and 1000 tokens give the item? Have everything drop a generic currency and price the item at the income expected from 40 hours of play? No matter how we frame it, if we are incentivizing repeating one hour of content for dozens or hundreds of hours, then we are inevitably going to create some form of grind.

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Devata.6589:

“I’ve almost never had a problem with the cash shop in this game.” Well I run into them all the time. You see what I just said about those 80 mounts, I like to hunt down in WoW (or special ranger pets, or toys, or mini’s or other skins). I did try to do the same in GW2.. Oow he has a cool mini oow need to grind gold for it. Oow nice weapon skin.. oow Black lion scrap skin. If I was to make a list of 80 cosmetics I would like in GW2 I would be very lucky if 10 would be available in a viable way ingame without some boring grind. And thats just how it is, that has nothing to do with opinions or seeing problems magnified. That’s just a fact. And when of those 80 things 10 are reasonable to get the whole fun of collecting them is gone (including those 10) at least for me. If it was the other way around I could be fine with it.

RE: my previous post, I just realized that part of my skepticism may be that I personally don’t care much about skins or collections or minis, so I focus primarily on weapons and armor. There are a lot fewer weapons and armor slots to fill, so I tend to think in terms of a need to spread out upgrades to a relatively small number of items over a long period of gameplay.

In your case, that probably doesn’t apply as much. It might be more possible than I previously thought to add large numbers of items to collect spread out over all kinds of tasks that keep players playing for large amounts of cumulative time without requiring as large an investment per item as might be necessary for armor and weapons.

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

But activity X leeds to reward Y, guaranteed. It may take you 200 or 300 times to get one but you will get it. And that’s the only place you can get it.

In our case you are not only grinding for a chance of the item but stuff to trade for gold to acquire that item from the TP.

Is it more heroic, valiant, satisfying, rewarding to receive that item from defeating a particular boss at an event, even if you have to do that event a lot versus buying one from from the corner shop after cashing in all the “worthless” drops you got?

In the first case you know everyone who has one got it the same way, doing the same activity. You are comrades in arms, you can kick back at the tavern with your flagon of mead and talk about that time when such and such happened.

Our way, someone who never ran level 80 content could earn enough to buy it outright. Their heroic activity could just be shrewd use of the TP. While not forcing players into doing things they aren’t comfortable with while giving them the ability to get those same items sounds great, those of the first school of thought despise it. It cheapens the reward in their mind.

Loiterer.4235:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Loiterer.4235:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

/Log in
/push ’’O’’
/go ’’Others’’ and the ’’Minis’’
/count 182

/go in ‘’Gem Store ’’ section
/count 10

Bored to look in the Wiki about limited pets from the Achivement-2week stories or the Limited edition Gem store sale .

“Too bored to look. Will just throw out random data.”

That is a great way to win a debate.

Hey !
I tried !
(But still in the Ah version there are 182 … did i calculate wrong ?)
Atleast i dont have to pay 15 euro per months (to access the servers) + the real money in the Store :P
But rather farm some dungeons if i need to , and not drop a single penny to the company (uneployed) :P

I’m not entirely sure but the AH listing might not include items that were/are bind on pick-up because you wouldn’t be able to list them anyway.

Your reasoning of grinding gold is sound but don’t forget that for that to happen, Arenanet has to rope in others to pay your share. Which was always my main issue with games that don’t have a subscription. Paying 15 dollars or 13 euros a month and getting access to 99% of the content comes out far cheaper than paying the same amount for a single cosmetic armour set.

In essence, the F2P and B2P model mainly appeals to those who can’t pay and those who can pay an obscure amount. The average user will either end up grinding too much or overspending to acquire the same amount of content that they get from a subscription game.

The gaming market shows that it’s viable model but to say that WoW depends on its cash shop as an argument for GW2’s own cash shop is such a bizarre statement that I have to question whether Vayne was simply trolling.

Please don’t mix up the B2P and F2P model. While GW2 says they use a B2P model they are now financing the game with the cash-shop not with game-sales (including expansions). A true B2P model would not need to have this problem. A F2P or better cash-shop model can not really exist any other way.

Behellagh.1468:

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

But activity X leeds to reward Y, guarantee. It may take you 200 times to get one but you get it. And that’s the only place you can get it.

In our case you are not only grinding for a chance of the item but stuff to trade for gold to trade to acquire that item from the TP.

Is it more heroic, valiant, satisfying to receive that reward from defeating a particular boss at an event, even if you have to do that event a lot versus buying one from cashing in all the loot you get from repeating the event, from the corner shop?

In the first case you know everyone who has one got it the same way, doing the same activity. You are comrades in arms, you can kick back at the tavern with your flagon of mead and talk about that time when such and such happened.

Our way, someone who never ran level 80 content could earn enough to buy it outright. They heroic activity could just be shrewd use of the TP. While not forcing players into doing things they aren’t comfortable with while giving them the ability to get those same items sounds great, those of the first school of thought despise it. It cheapened the reward in their mind.

I don’t disagree, but that just makes the grind more acceptable, or worthwhile to do, or less perceived, correct? You aren’t trying to claim that doing things that way results in no grind existing, are you?

Talking about it the way you are makes sense to me… This kind of grind is preferable to that kind of grind. But people do seem to be talking about the concept of no grind of any kind as if that is achievable.

As I understood it, the overall discussion is that when Anet says “no grind”, and by grind we mean having to do only one specific thing over and over, people accuse them of ignoring or being blind to the other kinds of grind they have created in the game. I completely get discussing whether one grind is better than another grind, but I keep trying to wrap my head around how “no grind at all” could work.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Devata.6589:

IndigoSundown.5419:

- snip -

Well GW2 has them all but mainly has 3 then 2 (or if you would count gold as tokens 2 would be first) and then 1.

To simplify even further, break rewards down to those which are: randomly obtained; obtained incrementally; or both. Gold serves the purpose of a token (because you obtain what you need for item X in increments). Gold has the benefit (or drawback) of being a “token” that one can obtain anywhere in game, though some activities are vastly more profitable than others.

Number 4 is separate as it simply uses the other 3. And the mats you usually need simply drop in to low quantity’s to really being farmed by yourself. If I compare that to other MMO’s I never really had a problem with collecting mats. I checked what mob drops the maps, I went there and farmed them for a few min, an hour max and I got what I needed. The real time went into getting the recipe’s I needed to make what I wanted. Again like all cosmetics they usually where rewarded for a dungeon, or dropped from a mob or where rewarded from a quest-line. That is how you earned them and that’s what kept you busy. It’s also way more interesting sending you all over the world with a much more clear goal, that one recipe. In stead of.. I need 250 charged lodestones then I can not really get anywhere so lets start gold-grinding to buy them.

Leaving aside the subjective nature of what you like v. what someone else may like, I thought number 4 deserved its own mention because the two most desirable reward categories in the game are Ascended and Legendary items. Asc. weapons and armor crafting require a large list of items, as do Legendary Weapons.

What is the problem you have with your number 3 is drops are to low.

Another way to look at that would be to say that the overwhelming majority of items in the drop tables are salvage bait or outright junk. Yes, it’s a given that the more items you add to a table, the lower the percentage chance that a particular item will turn up. That’s if all items are weighted equally. If item drop chances are weighted to produce degrees of rarity, then the chance the most rare items will appear use negative exponents (example: [1e-1]% would be .1 percent).

The token system imho should be something you would in most cases something you earn along the way. The goals you want people to go for would be items directly rewarded from completing something or that are RNG based but also in a doable way. And of course a few exceptions to this to create some really rare items is oke.

While there are some items that are obtained as rare drops from specific content, these items are neither common nor among the most widely desirable in this game.

While i do not have the same negative attitude towards the cash shop you do, I think that the game needs a few more Eureka! drops. However, anytime ANet puts a desirable item behind RNG, they get flamed. They put desirable items behind a collection system, they get flamed. They’re never going to please everyone with the same system.

ANet has chosen to please people who value accessibility more than those who value exclusivity and to please those who prefer slow, sure acquisition over those who prefer the Eureka moment of getting that desired drop. That design direction will be even more apparent when (if) precursors no longer require RNG or outright purchase.

For all items that are not account bound the gold grind options is still there for those who prefer the brainless grind. So they would only need to complain about the really rare ones. But then again, has a very rare RNG drop really so much less accessibility then for example infinity or the MF backpack?

And let me say this again.. I don’t so much dislike the cash-shop as a thing. I dislike how the cash-shop focus influence the game like (mainly) the grind we are talking about here.

Obtena.7952:

tigirius.9014:

Obtena.7952:

Test.8734:

Obtena.7952:

Frankly, this topic should be locked:

1. Anet replied to the concern
2. I think everyone has covered both sides of the topic thoroughly

Not much left. The only reason anyone would want to have it left open is because they are campaigning.

To be honest, the amount of posts help. The circular discussions don’t do anything, but it’s different for ArenaNet to see, “Look, there are 4 THOUSAND posts complaining about traits!” than “Look, there are 8 posts talking about how Defiance sucks”.

Just see Vayne’s post a bit above mine – he claims that he knew a lot of people felt they didn’t have anything do to at max level because a lot of people were complaining on the forum about it. If we see a lot of people complaining about grind on the forum (and better to do that in a single topic than have dozen topics about the same thing), maybe ArenaNet will do something about it.

Spamming posts does not help. Just because a thread has an overwhelming number of posts does not indicate it’s more of an issue to players than one that does not. The fact that ANet has replied with their position on this is pretty much a /thread right there.

The thousands of people who posted over the course of 9 months across 4 closed by mods threads about the loot disappearance fiasco that we experienced when they nerfed Dye Drops would like to explain to you how wrong you are about that statement.

They could but it would be stupid. This isn’t a bug or something extraordinary. This is just QQing about how the game is intended to work.

As for the rest of you; if the game is work for you, it’s because you choose goals that make it work. IRL, I need to work, ingame, that doesn’t exist. I do what I want in whatever gear I’m willing to get and can succeed and compete. In the majority of situations, Anet does not make it’s players work for the things that allow you to succeed and compete.

They “intended” for loot to be squished to maintain their economic chinese gold farmer setup designed to be hidden behind a clever gem conversion system that continues to fool people to this day. Doesn’t make what’s happening here, a design flaw, any less different that a bug that they finally admitted to after 9 months of waiting. Both were done for the same reasons.

In fact it’s actually being played out on other MMOs out there right now. There’s one popular one right now that’s using a similar algorithm for personal loot, and this dev team that started to use it is also discovering (without the use of DR mind you) that this algorithm is loaded with problems namely, a lack of drops when performing tasks that are usually very rewarding. So you can imagine how that makes this title look, when not only is it STILL not adjusting this aspect of the game but is making it even worse for players by adding a secondary loot decision making subroutine that cuts players off from even having a chance at receiving loot had they actually had a functioning baseline algorithm to begin with. Keep in mind though that this other title doesn’t have a shop and doesn’t have a currency conversion system yet it’s still showing the exact same problems that we’re seeing here in GW2.

History is repeating itself right now in other titles out there, and they are using the mold that this game is using and it’s showing the exact same problems. Tell us all again how it’s just us complaining because there’s plenty of evidence to support our claims even in other titles!

DavidH.7380:

Behellagh.1468:

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

But activity X leeds to reward Y, guarantee. It may take you 200 times to get one but you get it. And that’s the only place you can get it.

In our case you are not only grinding for a chance of the item but stuff to trade for gold to trade to acquire that item from the TP.

Is it more heroic, valiant, satisfying to receive that reward from defeating a particular boss at an event, even if you have to do that event a lot versus buying one from cashing in all the loot you get from repeating the event, from the corner shop?

In the first case you know everyone who has one got it the same way, doing the same activity. You are comrades in arms, you can kick back at the tavern with your flagon of mead and talk about that time when such and such happened.

Our way, someone who never ran level 80 content could earn enough to buy it outright. They heroic activity could just be shrewd use of the TP. While not forcing players into doing things they aren’t comfortable with while giving them the ability to get those same items sounds great, those of the first school of thought despise it. It cheapened the reward in their mind.

I don’t disagree, but that just makes the grind more acceptable, or worthwhile to do, or less perceived, correct? You aren’t trying to claim that doing things that way results in no grind existing, are you?

Oh no, it’s still grind, it’s just alters the perception of it. I got X because of defeating Y versus I got X because I earned enough gold to buy it. The 2nd case seems more like normal life than high fantasy. It turns it into a job. It’s the Looney Tune’s cartoon with the wolf and sheepdog punch in for work everyday. How is that escapism.

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

It’s basically like the dungeon token systems, and what I have always said about the dungeon token system is that they are great but only as a side thing! Your main goal for items in a dungeon should imho firstly be some special reward you get for completing it (maybe depending on the difficulty levels or on the paths), then there might be some special RNG drops in there you might wanna get, that should be like your second most reason to wanna do the dungeon (based on the way they put the items in there) and then the tokens would be a great thing your would earn along the way. Something you are not even really farming but you earn it while going for those other things. [I think the caparace stuff is an better example of something you earn along the way and the coat as a direct reward for completing something.]
…
“You were saying?” That there is way to much grind (mainly gold grind) in this game.
Have been saying that all the time, you have not been paying attention?

Anyway, this is a good addition to the thread. Maybe Anet also thinks the grind get less if they also make some stuff available in-game, but that is of cource not the case. If I want to collect skins and special items the grind is still just as much there and if I want to hunt down for specific items changes are big those are still behind the gold-grind (or another currency grind).

It sounds like what you are describing is a system where new content (dungeon,puzzle,quest chain, boss, LS chapter, etc.) is released and completing it once or twice more or less automatically gives you the best / majority of the rewards from that content. If you want an item then you complete the associated content or, looked at from the other direction, when you complete fresh content (for you) then you obtain the important associated items and you can move on to something else that is fresh.
~Skip for space

No I said it would work with 3 types of reward at the same time. The one for completing it (and you can be creative with this, like complete it at easy mode and get the skin, complete it at hard mode and you get the skin but one part of it is silver, complete it in epic mode and you get the skin to also glow)

Then there are also some rng drops in there (thats what makes it more interesting to repeat) and at the same time there is a token system that should not be designed like you have to grind it but while playing for the rng drops you get it along the way so even if you are unlucky you are not leaving empty handed.

Having one group of mobs that does drop one mini version of itself with a very rare drop-change at multiple places in the world is by itself indeed also a boring farm but mixed in with other systems it’s not that bad.

And there are so many places you can easily put those sorts of rewards they should be able to keep you going for a long time.

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

“I’ve almost never had a problem with the cash shop in this game.” Well I run into them all the time. You see what I just said about those 80 mounts, I like to hunt down in WoW (or special ranger pets, or toys, or mini’s or other skins). I did try to do the same in GW2.. Oow he has a cool mini oow need to grind gold for it. Oow nice weapon skin.. oow Black lion scrap skin. If I was to make a list of 80 cosmetics I would like in GW2 I would be very lucky if 10 would be available in a viable way ingame without some boring grind. And thats just how it is, that has nothing to do with opinions or seeing problems magnified. That’s just a fact. And when of those 80 things 10 are reasonable to get the whole fun of collecting them is gone (including those 10) at least for me. If it was the other way around I could be fine with it.

RE: my previous post, I just realized that part of my skepticism may be that I personally don’t care much about skins or collections or minis, so I focus primarily on weapons and armor. There are a lot fewer weapons and armor slots to fill, so I tend to think in terms of a need to spread out upgrades to a relatively small number of items over a long period of gameplay.

In your case, that probably doesn’t apply as much. It might be more possible than I previously thought to add large numbers of items to collect spread out over all kinds of tasks that keep players playing for large amounts of cumulative time without requiring as large an investment per item as might be necessary for armor and weapons.

Yeah some RNG is still fine to create that rarity but it’s indeed not needed to have extremely low drop-rates on most of them just to keep people busy.

Devata.6589:

Yeah some RNG is still fine to create that rarity but it’s indeed not needed to have extremely low drop-rates on most of them just to keep people busy.

Unless, of course, people can sell everything for gold on the TP…

Ironically, it seems like Anets “no grind philosophy” is a large part of the problem of gold as the ultimate grind.

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

Again it’s a mix of things that make it more interesting. And 1% isn’t always as bad as it seems while I would suggest usually trying to be around 5%. With some incorrect but guide-lining math 1% means at 25 times you already have a 1/4 drop-chance, 50 times it’s 1/2 and the chance it drops after that becomes bigger then that it does not drop (as you over the 1/2 drop change). It’s not completely correct but a guide-line.

I also never said there would be completely no farming. Sure this is farming a dungeon but if drop-changes are acceptable it’s not that bad, and then you move on the the next item. Does it take to long you can also go for another item for a while (including the ones that you get for completing content, so no RNG). Something you can’t do if almost all items require the same gold-grind.

Not to mention that it adds value to the item.. It’s rewarded for that content or sometimes even has a complete story behind it (usually rewards you get from quest-chains).

Now in GW2 it’s grinding gold for most of the items. And the ‘earn gold while playing’ simply won’t do it. Never gonna make the amounts of gold you need if you are a collector.

Lastly the gold-grind option is still available for the non-account-bound items while not the most optimal way anymore (if the rng is not so high the marked gets exaggerated with them). Not to say I would want none of them account-bound as that also adds value. Just saying that for those that aren’t the gold-grind option is still there.

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

DavidH.7380:

Behellagh.1468:

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

But activity X leeds to reward Y, guarantee. It may take you 200 times to get one but you get it. And that’s the only place you can get it.

In our case you are not only grinding for a chance of the item but stuff to trade for gold to trade to acquire that item from the TP.

Is it more heroic, valiant, satisfying to receive that reward from defeating a particular boss at an event, even if you have to do that event a lot versus buying one from cashing in all the loot you get from repeating the event, from the corner shop?

In the first case you know everyone who has one got it the same way, doing the same activity. You are comrades in arms, you can kick back at the tavern with your flagon of mead and talk about that time when such and such happened.

Our way, someone who never ran level 80 content could earn enough to buy it outright. They heroic activity could just be shrewd use of the TP. While not forcing players into doing things they aren’t comfortable with while giving them the ability to get those same items sounds great, those of the first school of thought despise it. It cheapened the reward in their mind.

I don’t disagree, but that just makes the grind more acceptable, or worthwhile to do, or less perceived, correct? You aren’t trying to claim that doing things that way results in no grind existing, are you?

Talking about it the way you are makes sense to me… This kind of grind is preferable to that kind of grind. But people do seem to be talking about the concept of no grind of any kind as if that is achievable.

As I understood it, the overall discussion is that when Anet says “no grind”, and by grind we mean having to do only one specific thing over and over, people accuse them of ignoring or being blind to the other kinds of grind they have created in the game. I completely get discussing whether one grind is better than another grind, but I keep trying to wrap my head around how “no grind at all” could work.

Well maybe it’s a perception of words but I see the GW2 version as one big grind for most of those items. The other is a mix of direct ways, mixed with smaller farms (with different rewards per content) and the tokens you simply earn along the way.

You grind a currency, being it XP, gold, tokens, stats, reputation and so on. But that is also only a grind if you do it for the sole purpose of getting the currency, doing a quest because you like it and earning XP for it is not a grind.
(This one also feels like real-life work. Something I do not play a game for)

You farm a dungeon / mob for an item you know it drops. Again, completing a dungeon for fun that rewards you an item is not a farm.

The problem is that these are like Internet words so interpreted a little different by different people but I do think this is the general idea of grinding vs farming.

Still if everything was just farming I would also dislike it, the solution would be that mix I talked about. But I do think you could remove the ‘need’ (if you want those items) for the big grind by implementing other systems including the smaller farms.

So the one I do consider a big grind, the other not so much.

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

About the memorized part. I agree totally. That is also Why I did disagree with Chris in the raid CDI where he said knowledge > skill > group composition. I think knowledge should be the lowest as thats eventually is a trick you learn.

My solution for that would be better AI and a lot use of the randomizer. Really, if I was developing a game the randomizer would be my best friend and I would use it for about everything. That and involving other players (PvP) because they are also unpredictable. Think of a dungeon that has two separate rooms with two teams both needing to complete the goal first and having abilities to slow down the enemy team.

Or an easy example of AI would be a JP. Imaging moving blocks, you can learn how they move and so the JP becomes easy. But what if you apply a randomizer to the speed and moment of movement to those blocks you need to jump on. That is stays unpredictable and so skill becomes more important then having learned the thing or having watched a youtube video.

naiasonod.9265:

Gene Archer.8560:

naiasonod.9265:

And before some smug little part time burger flipper tried to tell me how lazy that must mean I am,

I’m a part time burger flipper and I wholly agree with you.

I don’t play games to work. That’s what a job is for.

Though if ANet wants to pay me to play their game, then sure. I’ll get on their gear grind locomotive and do work.

I used to flip burger myself. And sling tacos. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for anybody that has a job these days no matter what it is.

I’m not so glad for those that are typically very young and think ‘I work almost twenty hours a week sometimes and I can make all the raids and I never have any difficulty farming for my loot and leveling and everyone else is just a lazy scrub that isn’t on my level and wants everything on a silver platter’.

Just s lot of snide dismissal for the wee ones that have nothing but free time to do anything they live whenever whim strikes when they treat the rest of us with far fuller lives like we’re lazy because we’re not eager to need to spend 60 hours a week for the next year trying to get the unobtanium with any sort of believable chance at actually succeeding.

Or panning us for not being add invested at doing everything amazingly and buckling down like this is our personal Olympics and the very soul of or pride is on the line.

That’s very well stated. Anyone who has worked a full-time job while helping to raise children will tell you that all time spent playing games is leisure time, not “work.” Time spent grinding for mats in a game could be productively utilized cleaning the house, playing with the kids, cooking a meal, or any of the myriad of chores that are perpetually looming in any healthy household. Time spent in the game is actually time spent being lazy. So when I hear players calling others lazy for complaining about having to spend unreasonable amounts of time being lazy in order to get anywhere in the game I’m left scratching my head.

I still remember my first year of grad school. My typical day:

• Three hours of class
• An hour of research and/or homework
• An hour of teaching
• 15 minutes commute
• Nine hours of spare time
• Ten hours of sleep

Here’s my typical day now:

• Ten hours of work
• One and a half hours commute
• Three hours of family time and/or household chores
• Three and a half hours spare time
• Seven hours of sleep

Bear in mind that my youngest kid is now in middle school and somewhat independent. When my kids were infants my spare time was pretty much non-existent. Also note that the spare time I have on weekdays comes at the cost of sleep. Like you, I have very little tolerance for the young ‘uns who want to call me lazy because I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to spend several months farming for mats before I can participate in the high level fractals that my guild mates run.

Bernie.8674:

naiasonod.9265:

Gene Archer.8560:

naiasonod.9265:

And before some smug little part time burger flipper tried to tell me how lazy that must mean I am,

I’m a part time burger flipper and I wholly agree with you.

I don’t play games to work. That’s what a job is for.

Though if ANet wants to pay me to play their game, then sure. I’ll get on their gear grind locomotive and do work.

I used to flip burger myself. And sling tacos. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for anybody that has a job these days no matter what it is.

I’m not so glad for those that are typically very young and think ‘I work almost twenty hours a week sometimes and I can make all the raids and I never have any difficulty farming for my loot and leveling and everyone else is just a lazy scrub that isn’t on my level and wants everything on a silver platter’.

Just s lot of snide dismissal for the wee ones that have nothing but free time to do anything they live whenever whim strikes when they treat the rest of us with far fuller lives like we’re lazy because we’re not eager to need to spend 60 hours a week for the next year trying to get the unobtanium with any sort of believable chance at actually succeeding.

Or panning us for not being add invested at doing everything amazingly and buckling down like this is our personal Olympics and the very soul of or pride is on the line.

That’s very well stated. Anyone who has worked a full-time job while helping to raise children will tell you that all time spent playing games is leisure time, not “work.” Time spent grinding for mats in a game could be productively utilized cleaning the house, playing with the kids, cooking a meal, or any of the myriad of chores that are perpetually looming in any healthy household. Time spent in the game is actually time spent being lazy. So when I hear players calling others lazy for complaining about having to spend unreasonable amounts of time being lazy in order to get anywhere in the game I’m left scratching my head.

I still remember my first year of grad school. My typical day:

• Three hours of class
• An hour of research and/or homework
• An hour of teaching
• 15 minutes commute
• Nine hours of spare time
• Ten hours of sleep

Here’s my typical day now:

• Ten hours of work
• One and a half hours commute
• Three hours of family time and/or household chores
• Three and a half hours spare time
• Seven hours of sleep

Bear in mind that my youngest kid is now in middle school and somewhat independent. When my kids were infants my spare time was pretty much non-existent. Also note that the spare time I have on weekdays comes at the cost of sleep. Like you, I have very little tolerance for the young ‘uns who want to call me lazy because I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to spend several months farming for mats before I can participate in the high level fractals that my guild mates run.

So because you have more important things in real life to attend to, you should feel you should be handed everything in game. If your guild mates are so high up there, why don’t they help you get mats? Nevermind the fact that the chest of loyalty at the end of the monthly login period gives you free ascended mats.

The way stuff should have been rewarded has come up multiple times, what makes sense. Grind is a rewarding system and so the subjects are linked together. To make better clear what I dislike and to also explain how I would imho solve the grind I will explain how I would design the reward system.

There are two premises that are basically required to start with. That is that we have to take the cash-shop out of the picture here. It’s simple, every item put in there adds another item you can only grind gold for. The other would be addition of traditional quest. It could go without and I might have a little bias here as I think they should be added also outside of this discussion for other reasons but especially quest chains simply are very good ways to reward items and also give more meaning to those items.

I would use the 3 systems I talked about before. Direct reward for completing, rng and tokens you earn along the way.

Content, being it a dungeon, a boss, a JP or whatever could and in some cases should (a simple mob should not) reward a (or more) good item simply for completing it.

You can make this more interesting by adding multiple difficulty levels. Every level could add a different reward or like I said before an upgraded version. First you get a stone hammer skin, second difficulty you get the same hammer but the head is silver and with the hardest level it gets a nice glow over it. Preferably it’s always one item but you unlock an effect that you can also turn of independently if you want to. If somebody does not like the glow you do not want to punish him by giving the glow because he completed the highest level.

Secondly you also put some rng in there. All within limits, and that really depends on the content. Just killing a mob where there are plenty of you can give lower drop-rates then a dungeon you can only do once a day. It can also be multiple items but then usually different things. So not two different hammer skins but a mini or a skin and a dye or a mount (mount in GW2 being a glider skin, that could be a little dragon having you in it’s claws I guess).

This is a farm but again should be within limits. For a dungeon I would say 1 to 5 % but really this is something you need to see using statistics you collect in the game. It should be low enough to make it a rare drop but easy enough to prevent a boring grind.

Some items should be account-bound, else should not be, the once that are not should be rare enough to not flood the TP.

Then there is also a token system linked to that content. The items rewarding should not be among the most desirable. More of the type ‘nice to have’ or maybe just one part of them somebody might want. So people should have no real reason to farm them. I think most dungeon tokens in GW2 are a good example.
The amount of tokens you need to buy everything you can with them (like a full set of armor) is based on the drop-rate of the rng items. You calculate at what number of runs the person has a 50% drop chance in total for it to drop. Just before you reach this you should have earned all the required tokens.

All the items should be in style / connected to the content that rewards them.

Next to that there should be plenty of quest-chains that give nice rewards telling you not only about the NPC’s you meet but also a story about the items you eventually get. Recipe’s for crafts are also earned in these ways while the grind for the mats should be an fairly easy task. It’s getting the recipe’s that sends you all over the world and is the hard part.

Lastly some exceptions to the things above might be made. Like a few items with an extremely low drop rate or that do require an extremely high number of tokens (or other currency) are oke just to create some of those extremely rare items.
Still if tokens or mats are what you need don’t simply make it extremely hard to get them (like you need 250 but after an hour of farming mobs that there are only a few of you still have zero) simply making the farm doable but the number high.
These items should really be a few exceptions but they might be in there simply to create a few of those ‘woow’ items.

Oow and how do you pay this without the cash-shop. By releasing more regular expansions once a year max 1,5 year.
The only items you ‘hand out for free’ would be something like hairstyles at a barber.

Stark.1350:

Bernie.8674:

naiasonod.9265:

Gene Archer.8560:

naiasonod.9265:

And before some smug little part time burger flipper tried to tell me how lazy that must mean I am,

I’m a part time burger flipper and I wholly agree with you.

I don’t play games to work. That’s what a job is for.

Though if ANet wants to pay me to play their game, then sure. I’ll get on their gear grind locomotive and do work.

I used to flip burger myself. And sling tacos. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad for anybody that has a job these days no matter what it is.

I’m not so glad for those that are typically very young and think ‘I work almost twenty hours a week sometimes and I can make all the raids and I never have any difficulty farming for my loot and leveling and everyone else is just a lazy scrub that isn’t on my level and wants everything on a silver platter’.

Just s lot of snide dismissal for the wee ones that have nothing but free time to do anything they live whenever whim strikes when they treat the rest of us with far fuller lives like we’re lazy because we’re not eager to need to spend 60 hours a week for the next year trying to get the unobtanium with any sort of believable chance at actually succeeding.

Or panning us for not being add invested at doing everything amazingly and buckling down like this is our personal Olympics and the very soul of or pride is on the line.

That’s very well stated. Anyone who has worked a full-time job while helping to raise children will tell you that all time spent playing games is leisure time, not “work.” Time spent grinding for mats in a game could be productively utilized cleaning the house, playing with the kids, cooking a meal, or any of the myriad of chores that are perpetually looming in any healthy household. Time spent in the game is actually time spent being lazy. So when I hear players calling others lazy for complaining about having to spend unreasonable amounts of time being lazy in order to get anywhere in the game I’m left scratching my head.

I still remember my first year of grad school. My typical day:

• Three hours of class
• An hour of research and/or homework
• An hour of teaching
• 15 minutes commute
• Nine hours of spare time
• Ten hours of sleep

Here’s my typical day now:

• Ten hours of work
• One and a half hours commute
• Three hours of family time and/or household chores
• Three and a half hours spare time
• Seven hours of sleep

Bear in mind that my youngest kid is now in middle school and somewhat independent. When my kids were infants my spare time was pretty much non-existent. Also note that the spare time I have on weekdays comes at the cost of sleep. Like you, I have very little tolerance for the young ‘uns who want to call me lazy because I don’t think it’s reasonable to have to spend several months farming for mats before I can participate in the high level fractals that my guild mates run.

So because you have more important things in real life to attend to, you should feel you should be handed everything in game. If your guild mates are so high up there, why don’t they help you get mats? Nevermind the fact that the chest of loyalty at the end of the monthly login period gives you free ascended mats.

Nobody wants anything handed to us!!!!! What most of us want are rewards for doing content with real chance to get anything of value like skins or even ascended gear. Why can’t we get a piece of ascended armor once a day for mid tier fractals? There are like 20 combinations of stats on gear which mean our chances to get stats that we are after are already 1 to 20, now add in 10 possible slots (head, chest, hands, shoulders, pants, boots, weapon 1, weapon 2, back item, aquatic 1 and aquatic 2) and chances to get what we want would be even smaller. Where do you see anything “for free” or “handed”? ???

Stark.1350:

So because you have more important things in real life to attend to, you should feel you should be handed everything in game. If your guild mates are so high up there, why don’t they help you get mats? Nevermind the fact that the chest of loyalty at the end of the monthly login period gives you free ascended mats.

There’re a lot of shades of not only grey, but color gradients, between absolute black and absolute white.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Try again. This time, refrain from ignorant conclusions hinging on intellectually absent assumptions if you please.

Devata.6589:

Oow and how do you pay this without the cash-shop. By releasing more regular expansions once a year max 1,5 year.
The only items you ‘hand out for free’ would be something like hairstyles at a barber.

You know , in order to create GW2 , they had some1 lend them some money ?
And by having that ’’contract’’ , they are obligated each month to show up a profit and return it back to payback the debt ?
If profit is within the contract rules , then no1 will forced to be ’’fired’’ .

We dont know the financial/situation of everything in the globe .

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

No I’m not going to argue with you that WoW’s cash shop is similar to Guild Wars 2. Because WoW makes I don’t know, $150,000,000 per month in subscription fees. They don’t update content regularly, they just sell you an expansion every couple of years. So no big content updates. You pay for the expansion. you pay for the monthly fee AND there’s a cash shop. If that doesn’t strike you as greedy, there’s absolutely nothing to talk about. On top of that:

http://www.themarysue.com/celestial-steed-world-of-warcraft/

This game is far less greedy than that game….in my opinion.

I don’t know but it seems to me that the WoW players, of which there are many and I am not one of them, are willing to fork out cash for that game.

So is Blizzard more greedy or are their customers less stingy? Apparently these players enjoy the game to the point of having no issue spending money on it even for something as a shiny horse.

And correct me if I am wrong, there are also content updates in WoW between the major expansions. Blizzard certainly knows how to make money with WoW, but I don’t think they would be successful if it was just them being greedy. Perhaps they are simply able to create an experience where people enjoy the game to the point of spending some extra cash on it. I never liked WoW but I can’t argue with those numbers and it seems to simple to just pin the pricing down to greed.

There are precious few content updates between expansions. That’s why people play for three months and then subs fall off until the next expansion comes out.

But don’t make the mistake that WOW has these numbers because it’s such a great game. It is definitely an addictive game, though, I’ll give it that.

I have two sons that are subscribed to WoW again, and they’re bored already. But this happens every time an expansion comes out. They buy it. They subscribe to it. One of my sons doesn’t even like it that much but he does it anyway. He ends up not playing more than he plays…but he still subscribes.

WoW does advertise heavily and they have tons of people vested in the game for years on end, so sure, they have that advantage. But they don’t have regular content updates, trust me on that.

There’s also plenty of grind. Ask people about faction grind one day.

Those sons that also stopped playing GW2? So maybe the lack of updates you talk about (The ones GW2 does have) is not the reason?

If I read this I would almost conclude the solution would be more regular expansions… Oow wait, thats what I have been suggesting all the time.

No, they essentially play games to grind. As long as grind is present they seem to play. When they complete the current grind they move games.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Devata.6589:

Oow and how do you pay this without the cash-shop. By releasing more regular expansions once a year max 1,5 year.
The only items you ‘hand out for free’ would be something like hairstyles at a barber.

You know , in order to create GW2 , they had some1 lend them some money ?
And by having that ’’contract’’ , they are obligated each month to show up a profit and return it back to payback the debt ?
If profit is within the contract rules , then no1 will forced to be ’’fired’’ .

We dont know the financial/situation of everything in the globe .

So they have to pay that money back on a monthly base. So explain me, how they did pay the money during the multiple years of development-time. Or you know what, explain me how a game serie like GTA gets payed.

They don’t have to get payed on a only base. People invest, earn money on release of the game invest, earn back 1 year / 1,5 year later at the expansion, invest again and so on, and so on. That works perfectly fine. It’s how like all B2P games (also the not mmo’s) get funded or really any big projects that require investments. As long as the total amount is enough. And if I base my numbers on how well GW1’s expansions sold compared to it’s initial release and see how much the cash-shop earned compared to GW2 initial released GW2 would have earned more money by now with the expansion-based model then with the cash-shop model.

Oow and just for the record. I do think those expansions would have sold along a similar percentages (based on initial sale) as GW1’s expansions did. However I think HoT will sell less then that because Anet already did some irreversible damage as in scared people of that won’t come back after such a long time.

The risk is a little higher but still something pretty common on the market of games. A lot of companies don’t earn money on a daily or monthly base. Yearly is very common, or multiple years for B2P games is also very common or some companies (outside of the gaming industry) even invest money into projects they expect to pay of 50 years later.

I have seen this argument multiple times, as if they need a steady flow of income, but thats simply false.

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/151443/1q14_NCSoft.jpg

ColinJohanson.2394:

The best gear/stats: This means to have statistically the best abilities in the game, you shouldn’t need to, by our definition of the word, grind. This goes for leveling and getting top gear (by our definition that’s ascended gear.)

But you do have to craft.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Grind: To us, grind means being required to do the same boring activity over and over again

Crafting is doing the same boring activity over and over again. And we are required to do it in order to get the Ascended gear we want. I’ve been able to level my crafting following online guides, but I’ve never gotten the hang of it. And sitting at that table in town scratching my head frustrates the hell out of me. I am not alone in my hatred of crafting.

I have no issue with attaining the materials. It’s knowing what I need and then putting them all together. The only Ascended stuff I’ve been able to get is Trinkets/Accessories. I would love to be able to get weapons, and to a lesser extent armor.

Please, PLEASE. PLEASE can’t you develop a system for those of us who despise crafting to get Ascended gear? (Clue: RNG is not a “system”).

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

@Devata,

I haven’t come to the same conclusions you have. I think WoW depends more heavily on the cash shop than you think (plenty if their really cool mounts are only available in the cash shop) and I don’t think that this game has the issues you think.

That is to say I agree that the game is funded by the cash shop, but I don’t see the problems you do. I think your dislike of it magnifies a lot of the issues with it. I’ve almost never had a problem with the cash shop in this game.

Of course, I’ve played Turbine games and Perfect World before this, and that might be way.

Compared to most MMOs with a cash shop that have no subscription, this game still feels like a breath of fresh air.

snip

No I’m not going to argue with you that WoW’s cash shop is similar to Guild Wars 2. Because WoW makes I don’t know, $150,000,000 per month in subscription fees. They don’t update content regularly, they just sell you an expansion every couple of years. So no big content updates. You pay for the expansion. you pay for the monthly fee AND there’s a cash shop. If that doesn’t strike you as greedy, there’s absolutely nothing to talk about. On top of that:

http://www.themarysue.com/celestial-steed-world-of-warcraft/

This game is far less greedy than that game….in my opinion.

I see what you did there. Changing the subject to what is more greedy to end with a ‘in the end I am right’ as if that was the subject. Yes WoW is more greedy, thats what I dislike about WoW. But you where talking about there cash-shop before, saying how intrusive that was, what is simply untrue, just as you now say they don’t have bigger patches in-between what is also untrue. The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we where talking about, not what company was more greedy.

This might all be very interesting but in the end the discussion is about the grind in GW2 (or the sub discussion between us, the cash-shop involvement between them… btw a sub-discussion you started, not me). And then GW2 still is very grindy if it comes to those things, the cash-shop is very likely to blame for it. Therefor the solution likely also lays in there payment model.

Well, the thing is, I’ve played lots of MMOs with lots of different systems and there’s grind in all of them. I don’t believe that the grind in WoW is any less (though its’ different) than the grind here. Faction farming in other MMOs like Rift and WoW is obnoxious and I can’t stand it.

You’re still blaming the cash shop for our grind, while ignoring grind in those other games. Just as my kids finish grind there and stop playing, they finish grind here and stop playing. They keep returning there and giving WoW more money because they are conditioned TO grind. They want to level up their characters. They get to max level and they stop playing again. To me, it’s a sad situation. I don’t even think they’re having fun. But they’re willing to pay.

I’m convinced if there were more grind here, they would come back to grind. In fact, one of them came back, got his ascended stuff and left again. He’ll be back again when the new content comes out to grind something else.

I wonder if the mastery point grind will be enough to keep him here. And these kids aren’t alone in this. This is how a lot of people play these games, hence my understanding of why I believe Anet added ascended gear.

Your constant use of the cash shop as an example of why we have to grind just doesn’t really stack up. And I still feel I was grinding as much in Guild Wars 1 as here.

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

No I’m not going to argue with you that WoW’s cash shop is similar to Guild Wars 2. Because WoW makes I don’t know, $150,000,000 per month in subscription fees. They don’t update content regularly, they just sell you an expansion every couple of years. So no big content updates. You pay for the expansion. you pay for the monthly fee AND there’s a cash shop. If that doesn’t strike you as greedy, there’s absolutely nothing to talk about. On top of that:

http://www.themarysue.com/celestial-steed-world-of-warcraft/

This game is far less greedy than that game….in my opinion.

I don’t know but it seems to me that the WoW players, of which there are many and I am not one of them, are willing to fork out cash for that game.

So is Blizzard more greedy or are their customers less stingy? Apparently these players enjoy the game to the point of having no issue spending money on it even for something as a shiny horse.

And correct me if I am wrong, there are also content updates in WoW between the major expansions. Blizzard certainly knows how to make money with WoW, but I don’t think they would be successful if it was just them being greedy. Perhaps they are simply able to create an experience where people enjoy the game to the point of spending some extra cash on it. I never liked WoW but I can’t argue with those numbers and it seems to simple to just pin the pricing down to greed.

There are precious few content updates between expansions. That’s why people play for three months and then subs fall off until the next expansion comes out.

But don’t make the mistake that WOW has these numbers because it’s such a great game. It is definitely an addictive game, though, I’ll give it that.

I have two sons that are subscribed to WoW again, and they’re bored already. But this happens every time an expansion comes out. They buy it. They subscribe to it. One of my sons doesn’t even like it that much but he does it anyway. He ends up not playing more than he plays…but he still subscribes.

WoW does advertise heavily and they have tons of people vested in the game for years on end, so sure, they have that advantage. But they don’t have regular content updates, trust me on that.

There’s also plenty of grind. Ask people about faction grind one day.

Those sons that also stopped playing GW2? So maybe the lack of updates you talk about (The ones GW2 does have) is not the reason?

If I read this I would almost conclude the solution would be more regular expansions… Oow wait, thats what I have been suggesting all the time.

No, they essentially play games to grind. As long as grind is present they seem to play. When they complete the current grind they move games.

So they got all the mini’s, all the armor, the highest stats, all the other cosmetics and items in GW2?

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

No I’m not going to argue with you that WoW’s cash shop is similar to Guild Wars 2. Because WoW makes I don’t know, $150,000,000 per month in subscription fees. They don’t update content regularly, they just sell you an expansion every couple of years. So no big content updates. You pay for the expansion. you pay for the monthly fee AND there’s a cash shop. If that doesn’t strike you as greedy, there’s absolutely nothing to talk about. On top of that:

http://www.themarysue.com/celestial-steed-world-of-warcraft/

This game is far less greedy than that game….in my opinion.

I don’t know but it seems to me that the WoW players, of which there are many and I am not one of them, are willing to fork out cash for that game.

So is Blizzard more greedy or are their customers less stingy? Apparently these players enjoy the game to the point of having no issue spending money on it even for something as a shiny horse.

And correct me if I am wrong, there are also content updates in WoW between the major expansions. Blizzard certainly knows how to make money with WoW, but I don’t think they would be successful if it was just them being greedy. Perhaps they are simply able to create an experience where people enjoy the game to the point of spending some extra cash on it. I never liked WoW but I can’t argue with those numbers and it seems to simple to just pin the pricing down to greed.

There are precious few content updates between expansions. That’s why people play for three months and then subs fall off until the next expansion comes out.

But don’t make the mistake that WOW has these numbers because it’s such a great game. It is definitely an addictive game, though, I’ll give it that.

I have two sons that are subscribed to WoW again, and they’re bored already. But this happens every time an expansion comes out. They buy it. They subscribe to it. One of my sons doesn’t even like it that much but he does it anyway. He ends up not playing more than he plays…but he still subscribes.

WoW does advertise heavily and they have tons of people vested in the game for years on end, so sure, they have that advantage. But they don’t have regular content updates, trust me on that.

There’s also plenty of grind. Ask people about faction grind one day.

Those sons that also stopped playing GW2? So maybe the lack of updates you talk about (The ones GW2 does have) is not the reason?

If I read this I would almost conclude the solution would be more regular expansions… Oow wait, thats what I have been suggesting all the time.

No, they essentially play games to grind. As long as grind is present they seem to play. When they complete the current grind they move games.

So they got all the mini’s, all the armor, the highest stats, all the other cosmetics and items in GW2?

No. they don’t care about minis. They care about stats. That’s why ascended armor drew them back here, but minis and armor don’t.

You love cosmetics, and you think lots of people go through cosmetics. WoW’s popularity is based, at least in part, 1 on making your numbers bigger. In Guild Wars 2 your numbers aren’t going to get bigger and so they just don’t care.

Devata.6589:

So explain me, how they did pay the money during the multiple years of development-time. Or you know what, explain me how a game like series as GTA get payed.

Do you know the cost to make a GTA game ? Or an MMO ?
Because i dont .
Or how many pplare needed to create a single player game vs an MMO ?

Because frankly i dont ….

I guess NOW with the 21 milion dollars per 3 months they gain , the 50% of that is used to payback the ‘’development-time’’ . That why they dont push even more with the gems items , nor get ’’fired’’ from the NCsoft

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

No I’m not going to argue with you that WoW’s cash shop is similar to Guild Wars 2. Because WoW makes I don’t know, $150,000,000 per month in subscription fees. They don’t update content regularly, they just sell you an expansion every couple of years. So no big content updates. You pay for the expansion. you pay for the monthly fee AND there’s a cash shop. If that doesn’t strike you as greedy, there’s absolutely nothing to talk about. On top of that:

http://www.themarysue.com/celestial-steed-world-of-warcraft/

This game is far less greedy than that game….in my opinion.

I don’t know but it seems to me that the WoW players, of which there are many and I am not one of them, are willing to fork out cash for that game.

So is Blizzard more greedy or are their customers less stingy? Apparently these players enjoy the game to the point of having no issue spending money on it even for something as a shiny horse.

And correct me if I am wrong, there are also content updates in WoW between the major expansions. Blizzard certainly knows how to make money with WoW, but I don’t think they would be successful if it was just them being greedy. Perhaps they are simply able to create an experience where people enjoy the game to the point of spending some extra cash on it. I never liked WoW but I can’t argue with those numbers and it seems to simple to just pin the pricing down to greed.

There are precious few content updates between expansions. That’s why people play for three months and then subs fall off until the next expansion comes out.

But don’t make the mistake that WOW has these numbers because it’s such a great game. It is definitely an addictive game, though, I’ll give it that.

I have two sons that are subscribed to WoW again, and they’re bored already. But this happens every time an expansion comes out. They buy it. They subscribe to it. One of my sons doesn’t even like it that much but he does it anyway. He ends up not playing more than he plays…but he still subscribes.

WoW does advertise heavily and they have tons of people vested in the game for years on end, so sure, they have that advantage. But they don’t have regular content updates, trust me on that.

There’s also plenty of grind. Ask people about faction grind one day.

Those sons that also stopped playing GW2? So maybe the lack of updates you talk about (The ones GW2 does have) is not the reason?

If I read this I would almost conclude the solution would be more regular expansions… Oow wait, thats what I have been suggesting all the time.

No, they essentially play games to grind. As long as grind is present they seem to play. When they complete the current grind they move games.

So they got all the mini’s, all the armor, the highest stats, all the other cosmetics and items in GW2?

No. they don’t care about minis. They care about stats. That’s why ascended armor drew them back here, but minis and armor don’t.

You love cosmetics, and you think lots of people go through cosmetics. WoW’s popularity is based, at least in part, 1 on making your numbers bigger. In Guild Wars 2 your numbers aren’t going to get bigger and so they just don’t care.

Oke, lets for a moment, just for the sake of argument and to prevent repeating everything again play on your turn.

I dislike the ‘type of grind’ and the ‘quantity’ of grind, and find that especially the case for the element of the game I personally prefer the most. The same part that happens to also be the focus point of this game. Cosmetics.

I also find this grind or this type of grind, especially for this part of the game to be way worse that the way many other mmo’s reward there stuff.

This is not how I alone feel but how many people feel.

Because of that I would suggest Anet does something about it. (I just have an example of how it could be better) I don’t care how they fix it as long as they fix it. And while it seems completely logically that it’s linked to the cash-shop focus this link is not the important thing for me. What is important for me is that they fix it. The only reason I do point towards that link is because I think to solve a problem you need to find the cause of the problem. But again, in the end it’s the result that I care for the most.

How is this Vaye? Can you live with this formulation of the problem we are talking about here?

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Devata.6589:

So explain me, how they did pay the money during the multiple years of development-time. Or you know what, explain me how a game like series as GTA get payed.

Do you know the cost to make a GTA game ? Or an MMO ?
Because i dont .
Or how many pplare needed to create a single player game vs an MMO ?

Because frankly i dont ….

I guess NOW with the 21 milion dollars per 3 months they gain , the 50% of that is used to payback the ‘’development-time’’ . That why they dont push even more with the gems items , nor get ’’fired’’ from the NCsoft

In fact I do. GTA was at it’s release the most expensive game made so that means also more expensive then any MMO made by that time:

http://www.ibtimes.com/gta-5-costs-265-million-develop-market-making-it-most-expensive-video-game-ever-produced-report

The number of people is irrelevant, it´s about the total cost.

I think at this moment Destiny is the most expensive game on the market. A game that happens to be more in-line with the model I am suggesting here. Not completely as they also push out DLC but it’s more in line with it.

Maybe GW2 should remove the Cash Shop and force ppl to buy DLC instead with real money instead

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Maybe GW2 should remove the Cash Shop and force ppl to buy DLC instead with real money instead

Force? But sure and then they do that once a year / 1,5 year, make the DLC the size of an expansion and also sell it as a boxed version.
Great idea!

And if they dont reach the ’’satisfiing’’ boxxes sold , then what ?
Reduce the 2-week update ?
Sell DLC ?

Their x-pack should not suck balls at any cost :PPP
Edit" going to sleep , cya :P

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

the game doesnt have a good balance of rewards. Other games juggle it a lot better. SAB (the first one)juggled it waaaay better.
A) you get content sensitive rewards/abilities from mastering the area (find this go here, etc)
B) you have a rare chance of sellable drop on success.
C) you can get a non sellable version by either mastering the levels (finding and getting all the hidden marbles as fast as possible) or at a slower pace with low mastery through repetition.

there are even better versions, but the main point is gw2 current system isnt working very well, loot/grind/rewarding feeling wise

Killthehealersffs.8940:

And if they dont reach the ’’satisfiing’’ boxxes sold , then what ?
Reduce the 2-week update ?
Sell DLC ?

Their x-pack should not suck balls at any cost :PPP
Edit" going to sleep , cya :P

Thats the risk I talked about. But then again with any model it’s possible you don’t make enough money.

Good night

phys.7689:

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

the game doesnt have a good balance of rewards. Other games juggle it a lot better. SAB (the first one)juggled it waaaay better.
A) you get content sensitive rewards/abilities from mastering the area (find this go here, etc)
B) you have a rare chance of sellable drop on success.
C) you can get a non sellable version by either mastering the levels (finding and getting all the hidden marbles as fast as possible) or at a slower pace with low mastery through repetition.

there are even better versions, but the main point is gw2 current system isnt working very well, loot/grind/rewarding feeling wise

Agreed about SAB version 1. It was still not optimal but much better then most of what we see in GW2. If only the SAB mini’s would also have been available in SAB (in a not time limited way).

With the first version I also leveled all my alts up to the max in SAB and had fun doing it, with the second version only one as it was not rewarding to do it with the others. And it’s safe to assume that this reward model was also part of the reason for it’s popularity.

Lheimroo.2947:

Face facts; they’re not dumb. Anet is not dumb, and therefore at least most of this stuff was very deliberate, and their PR speech is just a smokescreen or an attempt to make some very cynical design decisions palatable to the playerbase.

Frankly, we should be taking anything Anet says these days with a grain of salt.

And this is why Blizzard gets my money each month and Anet hasn’t in years. I watched their expansion release on youtube and and there was zero excitement about it. Everything they said was hey they talked awesome before and we got garbage so what garbage will be coming in the expansion. I probably will never know because until they actually remove the grind they claim isn’t there and make the game I’ve already paid for fun enough to play over other games they will not get any money from me.

So if this new expansion is required for the Legendary precursor then it falls in line with the rest of their lies that they promised. So until Anet actually does something I don’t believe a word they say because the two do not match. I don’t know of anyone in my EVE or WoW groups that will be purchasing or has any interest in the new expansion. It’ll be interesting to see the sales figures in the earnings reports.

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Devata.6589:

Vayne.8563:

Gehenna.3625:

Vayne.8563:

snip

I don’t know but it seems to me that the WoW players, of which there are many and I am not one of them, are willing to fork out cash for that game.

So is Blizzard more greedy or are their customers less stingy? Apparently these players enjoy the game to the point of having no issue spending money on it even for something as a shiny horse.

snip

There are precious few content updates between expansions. That’s why people play for three months and then subs fall off until the next expansion comes out.

But don’t make the mistake that WOW has these numbers because it’s such a great game. It is definitely an addictive game, though, I’ll give it that.

snip

WoW does advertise heavily and they have tons of people vested in the game for years on end, so sure, they have that advantage. But they don’t have regular content updates, trust me on that.

There’s also plenty of grind. Ask people about faction grind one day.

Those sons that also stopped playing GW2? So maybe the lack of updates you talk about (The ones GW2 does have) is not the reason?

If I read this I would almost conclude the solution would be more regular expansions… Oow wait, thats what I have been suggesting all the time.

No, they essentially play games to grind. As long as grind is present they seem to play. When they complete the current grind they move games.

So they got all the mini’s, all the armor, the highest stats, all the other cosmetics and items in GW2?

No. they don’t care about minis. They care about stats. That’s why ascended armor drew them back here, but minis and armor don’t.

You love cosmetics, and you think lots of people go through cosmetics. WoW’s popularity is based, at least in part, 1 on making your numbers bigger. In Guild Wars 2 your numbers aren’t going to get bigger and so they just don’t care.

Oke, lets for a moment, just for the sake of argument and to prevent repeating everything again play on your turn.

I dislike the ‘type of grind’ and the ‘quantity’ of grind, and find that especially the case for the element of the game I personally prefer the most. The same part that happens to also be the focus point of this game. Cosmetics.

I also find this grind or this type of grind, especially for this part of the game to be way worse that the way many other mmo’s reward there stuff.

This is not how I alone feel but how many people feel.

Because of that I would suggest Anet does something about it. (I just have an example of how it could be better) I don’t care how they fix it as long as they fix it. And while it seems completely logically that it’s linked to the cash-shop focus this link is not the important thing for me. What is important for me is that they fix it. The only reason I do point towards that link is because I think to solve a problem you need to find the cause of the problem. But again, in the end it’s the result that I care for the most.

How is this Vaye? Can you live with this formulation of the problem we are talking about here?

I can live with it. It won’t happen but I can live with it. It won’t happen because there is no way for the company to produce content fast enough for the content locusts. Even in Guild Wars 1’s time, people finished Factions in weeks and claimed there was nothing to do.

The strategy here is that you don’t get these big drops but you can get drops from anywhere, making the world feel bigger, to me anyway, because you can go anywhere. I don’t want to be standing around in zone X waiting for Y to drop. I don’t particularly like it in Drytop and the Silverwastes, which was a change in the direction you liked.

What you want is very specific. You want to go to a specific place and have a chance to get a specific reward, without grinding and without ridiculous RNG and without spending gold. You want what you want. You’ve narrowed down what you want to such a narrow point that you won’t get it, because other people want other things, even if there are other people who want what you want.

I want the freedom to roam in any map and have a chance of getting something cool. That’s what I want. So, yes, your very specific, needlessly restrictive set of desires, is incompatible with my desires.

Because if it getting the carapace armor worked your way, everyone would have it in two days or three days and then they’d be crying there’s nothing to do.

How do you solve that problem and your problem at the same time?

Vayne.8563:

Because if it getting the carapace armor worked your way, everyone would have it in two days or three days and then they’d be crying there’s nothing to do.

How do you solve that problem and your problem at the same time?

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I entirely approve of the bandit crest vendor and using things like that as a deterministic way to get what we want. 1000 bandit crests + 1 gold isn’t at all hard to get, even from the most casual of perspectives I can reasonably think of.

Only wanna spend maybe a half hour a day out in the Silverwastes? Get tired of doing events after maybe ten tops? You’ll still be able to get some of those pieces deterministically in a very reasonable timeframe.

Want every single piece for all three armor types? You’ve got a bit of farming to do.

Want all of those carapace pieces to be transmuted into luminescent pieces? You’ve got even more farming to do.

But if all you want is a carapace heavy chestpiece and legs to spice up your heavy armor options? Pff. You don’t even have to farm for those. Just go do the last chapters of the living story and bam, there you go.

I think the way they’ve handled carapace is excellent, and I dearly hope we see more balances between availability and things to ‘work for’, as much as I personally loath the phrase’s application in this context.

naiasonod.9265:

Vayne.8563:

Because if it getting the carapace armor worked your way, everyone would have it in two days or three days and then they’d be crying there’s nothing to do.

How do you solve that problem and your problem at the same time?

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I entirely approve of the bandit crest vendor and using things like that as a deterministic way to get what we want. 1000 bandit crests + 1 gold isn’t at all hard to get, even from the most casual of perspectives I can reasonably think of.

Only wanna spend maybe a half hour a day out in the Silverwastes? Get tired of doing events after maybe ten tops? You’ll still be able to get some of those pieces deterministically in a very reasonable timeframe.

Want every single piece for all three armor types? You’ve got a bit of farming to do.

Want all of those carapace pieces to be transmuted into luminescent pieces? You’ve got even more farming to do.

But if all you want is a carapace heavy chestpiece and legs to spice up your heavy armor options? Pff. You don’t even have to farm for those. Just go do the last chapters of the living story and bam, there you go.

I think the way they’ve handled carapace is excellent, and I dearly hope we see more balances between availability and things to ‘work for’, as much as I personally loath the phrase’s application in this context.

I agree. I think this sort of thing is the best compromise. The thing, even though it’s a step in the right direction, according to Devata, it’s too grindy for his/her tastes.

Well if you’re going to make new stuff not grindy and not cost gold and not cost cash, I’m not sure what the options are.

Her answer is, repeatedly, new expansions, new content. She claims it’ll work but I don’t see the evidence for this. I don’t think in this day and age that a developer could put out enough new content fast enough to make a game truly buy to play with no cash shop.

Devata brings up another game but the DLC content which they come out with goes against the ideal plan.

This is the limitation of believing only one ways is good. If it was the only good way everyone would be doing it. I believe the way Devata wants the game to be run would result in less players and I believe it would be a tremendous risk.

naiasonod.9265:

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I entirely approve of the bandit crest vendor and using things like that as a deterministic way to get what we want. 1000 bandit crests + 1 gold isn’t at all hard to get, even from the most casual of perspectives I can reasonably think of.

As a skin yes, stat wise though its far from ideal its not even exotic.

aerial.7021:

naiasonod.9265:

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I entirely approve of the bandit crest vendor and using things like that as a deterministic way to get what we want. 1000 bandit crests + 1 gold isn’t at all hard to get, even from the most casual of perspectives I can reasonably think of.

As a skin yes, stat wise though its far from ideal its not even exotic.

The only especially coveted stats that aren’t ridiculously easy to get is the Celestial array courtesy of time gating. I dunno, I think the point is the skins, not the stats.

This game’s pretty definitively built on vanity being the allure far more than power via vertical gear progression…though it wouldn’t hurt a bit if they made things like Carapace exotic and let you pick your own stat prefix for them.

/shrug

naiasonod.9265:

aerial.7021:

naiasonod.9265:

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I entirely approve of the bandit crest vendor and using things like that as a deterministic way to get what we want. 1000 bandit crests + 1 gold isn’t at all hard to get, even from the most casual of perspectives I can reasonably think of.

As a skin yes, stat wise though its far from ideal its not even exotic.

The only especially coveted stats that aren’t ridiculously easy to get is the Celestial array courtesy of time gating. I dunno, I think the point is the skins, not the stats.

This game’s pretty definitively built on vanity being the allure far more than power via vertical gear progression…though it wouldn’t hurt a bit if they made things like Carapace exotic and let you pick your own stat prefix for them.

/shrug

Pretty much my take on it too. Even the highest racial armor is only rare. It’s clearly meant to be about the skins.

Stark.1350:

So because you have more important things in real life to attend to, you should feel you should be handed everything in game. If your guild mates are so high up there, why don’t they help you get mats? Nevermind the fact that the chest of loyalty at the end of the monthly login period gives you free ascended mats.

. . . are you being serious right now? I can’t quite tell.

Because there’s a lot of conversations going on here now, and being handed things on a silver platter? Nobody has asked for that. Not even in jest.

So go take a breather, have a glass of water, and try that again with less of a loaded question at the top and less rhetoric later.

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

I agree, which is why I was asking the questions for clarification. I don’t think the current system is the best possible balance, so I understand discussing ways to make grinds less tedious, but it seemed like perhaps some people were trying to argue for eliminating or severely reducing all forms of grind.

I think the answers have since established that we all pretty much have a broad consensus that the game does need some grinds and we aren’t really trying to advocate for a “no grind game”, but also that the current system clearly has room for significant improvements.