Guild Wars 2

Distaste.4801:

Vayne.8563:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t some big huge thing that huge numbers of people are complaining about. This is a pet peeve of a small percentage of the population who got riled up because Anet used the word grind and said the game wasn’t grindy. If that hadn’t happened, this thread wouldn’t even exist.

Yes, yes it would.

I have utter and complete faith it would still exist in some form. We might not be complaining about the same things as far as grind . . .

This thread is specifically about the no grind philosophy which was brought up at the launch. If the word grind hadn’t been mentioned in the launch people would be talking more about HoT and less about this.

Also there are a lot of things that people post in grind threads that aren’t about the grind itself.

Time gating is not grind, if anything it’s anti grind. It’s an alternate way to slow down progress. If something is time gated, you can’t grind it.

RNG – RNG is not grind. It’s a way of slowing down how fast you get something. You can grind the whole world over and over for a precursor, but what’s being complained about there is the random element…not grind.

Not getting good enough drops – This is not grind either, it’s people complaining they somehow have unlucky accounts and they don’t get the stuff other people do.

There are some grind complaints on these forums but they’re generally few and far between or have been for the last year or so anyway.

Time gating can certainly be a grind. Grinding is any repetitive task you need to do a lot of times to achieve some goal. Just because it is time gated does not mean you aren’t doing a repetitive task. The grind is spread out over a much longer period of time. Did I want to log in and do the daily? Heck no! But I needed that laurel and a lot more in order to get an ascended item. So every day I logged on to grind out the daily to get a single laurel towards my goal.

RNG is certainly a part of grinding. If it makes things harder to get that means doing the repetitive task more, thus more grinding. If an item has a 1/10 chance of dropping it’s not going to take nearly as much grinding as a 1/2500.

Poor drops- this is the same as RNG. If you get poor drops then you’re going to be grinding more in order to get whatever it is that you want. Not to mention that GW2’s reward system is terrible since most of the time you get trash loot. This helps reinforce the feeling of grinding since you never get a feeling of accomplishment. This is diablo 3 at release, at least Blizzard learned from their mistake.

In the last year or so the forums have slowed to a crawl as people have left or simply don’t care anymore since the devs ignore us. Grind has always been a big topic in GW2. Do you not remember the dungeon grind at launch that people complained about? Pentinent grind? The fractal skin grind? The ascended mats grind? The precursor grind? Champ grinding? The T6 grind? The Lodestone grind? Silk grinding? Ecto grinding? I mean there is very few aspects of GW2 that haven’t been associated with grinding and then complained about.

Time gating is NOT a grind. It prevents grind.

In the old days, you could do dungeons over and over again to farm tokens. They time gated those tokens. After that people didn’t talk about grinding tokens. If anything time gating is a measure to PREVENT grind. Anyone who calls time gating a grind isn’t using any definition I’ve ever heard.

Yes there has always been a low undercurrent of people complaining about those things, but it’s dwarfed by the number of threads about mounts.

There will always be people complaining about lots of stuff, but it’s not prevalent and hasn’t been in a long long time.

Bernie.8674:

A MMO is not a source of accomplishment; it’s a source of entertainment. Accomplishments happen in the real world, not in an online one. After I’ve spent my day accomplishing things I like to come home and escape to an online world for a couple of hours. I don’t want to spend those hours engaging in simulated commutes or artificial drudgery. I’ve gotten plenty of that already in real life. Demanding that entertainment be entertaining isn’t “lazy” or “entitled.”

In an ideal world, that would be true. However, in the real world, what’s so is that some players demand that MMO’s provide that entertainment over the course of many thousands of hours of game time. In order to make that happen, developers resort to rewards to make repetition of content (many times, in a lot of cases) take longer than the content itself would warrant if it were in a different game genre like a SPRPG. A new SPRPG costs as much as the GW2 box did at launch, and provides anywhere from 20 to a couple of hundred hours of play. What are the hour counts of many GW2 players? Mine is in excess of 2500 hours and I don’t play that much each day, and I took about 8 months off.

PvP is a different animal. PvP enjoys longevity because the unpredictability of player actions means that each fight may be a new experience. PvE does not enjoy that benefit and will not until and unless we see true AI that can adapt to player actions the way players do.

Sure, MMO’s in general and GW2 in particular can be viewed as only a source of entertainment as long as you are willing to shine on the time-consuming reward pursuits offered to offer those who use MMO’s as a lifestyle something to do.

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

DavidH.7380:

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure? I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

I absolutely agree. I find it stunning and odd that they’ll blow trumpets and create pageantries of attention for hiring real economists, yet I’m not sure if they’re aware that economists are almost as qualified to do a sociologist or cultural anthropologist’s job as might a car mechanic or a part-time rodeo clown be.

We desperately need some social science experts up in these businesses, methinks. I honestly don’t trust the metrics of an economist’s purview when it comes to things like community management.

Managing people isn’t something mmo devs seem to be very good at, anyway. I’ve seen far, farfarfar better implementations of community building and management…heck, anywhere that real attempts by genuinely proficient human resource directors were made.

The company I work for retains the services of a whole image consulting agency that does nothing but provide the execs and department heads with insightful guidance on inter and intra-office culture, how to foster successful business relationships and how to engage clients in terms that are most likely to appeal to them.

And bloody hell if it hasn’t had a dramatic impact. Real experts on how people work and why people do what they do versus some folks with engineering degrees, some MBA’s and a passel of yet others with physics degrees?

There’s no contest. And I suspect there’d be no contest in the outcomes real experts on how people work and why people do what they do could bring about in comparison to the best-guess figurings a bunch of computer science and game development and art majors can come up with respective to such matters either.

I dunno. I don’t see the effects I’d expect to see if game studios actually employed humanities experts upon such endeavors. The human animal isn’t nearly so mysterious as it likes to think, but you can spend billions of dollars trying to come up with magic algorithms and heuristics and tools for refinement of metrics to predict it…and fail. Or succeed so marginally that you might as well have just consulted tea leaves, or a magic 8-ball.

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

Grind is optional. All the things you think you need, you don’t. You don`t even need exotic gear, but if you played a character from 2 all the way to 80 doing PvE content the average player would earn the ammount of gold needed to buy themselves a workable set of armor to continue PvEing in.

If you like WvW, you get plenty of drops from ranking up and killing NPCs and players that can fund you or gear you up to continue WvWing.

You can get what you want by doing almost anything. You could fund and gear a character up entirely from doing jumping puzzles and other daily things you find fun.

If you absolutely insist you have to grind for it, I absolutely insist it is not necessary. No grind needed.

If you want to classify some of the things you do in game as grind, then congratulations, you like grinding and choose to grind. If you don’t like what you’re doing in game. Stop doing it. You’ll be fine doing something else.

Dante.1763:

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

See, I don’t have any. But I only have 1530 hours.

I still have 0 Legendaries. But that’s because I either dislike the look of the current Legendaries, or they just wouldn’t suit my character’s aesthetics. (My grim, gothic Necro wielding a rainbow staff? Err, no.)

However, I’m close to having all the mats needed to craft full sets of Ascended armor and weapons for my 5 mains. If I liquidated all the mats I’m hoarding in my Bank, I could probably afford 1, maybe 2 Legendaries. (However, that’ll never happen. I like my dragon’s hoard of shinies. XD)

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Dante.1763:

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

See, I don’t have any. But I only have 1530 hours.

Assuming you’ve been playing since launch, that is an average of roughly 2 hours a day, every day.

I feel like such a failure…. I’ve only played roughly 30 mins a day for two years. What have I been wasting the rest of my life on???

DavidH.7380:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Dante.1763:

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

See, I don’t have any. But I only have 1530 hours.

Assuming you’ve been playing since launch, that is an average of roughly 2 hours a day, every day.

I feel like such a failure…. I’ve only played roughly 30 mins a day for two years. What have I been wasting the rest of my life on???

Mexican cat juggling.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

Woefully incorrect, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Donkey Kong in fact any old game in the era you are talking about on the whole was NOT about grind at all! it was about who could get the highest score, because those games do not have an end-game at all period they if anything loop and you just keep playing for as long as you can stay alive, more importantly they where developed for Arcades Halls, the 2 cannot be compared at all there in different eras, let alone genres.

aerial.7021:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

Woefully incorrect, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Donkey Kong in fact any old game in the era you are talking about on the whole was NOT about grind at all! it was about who could get the highest score, because those games do not have an end-game at all period they if anything loop and you just keep playing for as long as you can stay alive, more importantly they where developed for Arcades Halls, the 2 cannot be compared at all there in different eras, let alone genres.

You’re right. It was only a grind if you cared about the prestige of seeing your name on the leaderboard.

So . . . self-inflicted grind.

. . . I’m having a sense of deja-vu . . . nah, wait, that’s just my Tetris flashbacks.

DavidH.7380:

Assuming you’ve been playing since launch, that is an average of roughly 2 hours a day, every day.

I feel like such a failure…. I’ve only played roughly 30 mins a day for two years. What have I been wasting the rest of my life on???

Slightly before launch, and there were several periods I wasn’t playing every day. More like once or twice a week, and usually that was WvW. (Dem bags.)

I didn’t actually have an approach to earn a Precursor I wanted, mostly because I view having an approach to beating RNG is like expecting to beat a Vegas casino and not wake up in the alley with a lump on your head and a surly guy telling you not to come back.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

aerial.7021:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

Woefully incorrect, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Donkey Kong in fact any old game in the era you are talking about on the whole was NOT about grind at all! it was about who could get the highest score, because those games do not have an end-game at all period they if anything loop and you just keep playing for as long as you can stay alive, more importantly they where developed for Arcades Halls, the 2 cannot be compared at all there in different eras, let alone genres.

You’re right. It was only a grind if you cared about the prestige of seeing your name on the leaderboard.

So . . . self-inflicted grind.

. . . I’m having a sense of deja-vu . . . nah, wait, that’s just my Tetris flashbacks.

you guys are taking grind out of hand, probably on purpose to debase the point.
Tetris had no grind, first of all high scores werent hard to reach
they generally reset the machines everyday.
The top scorer in say tetris, probably played for what, 10-20 minutes conescutively?
Tetris had increased speed, and different initial block placements, making each level unique.

so a game you have to play well for 20 minutes, to get the top score, or 5 minutes if you are early in the morning, which has different levels the fiurther you get is a grind?

yall are just being ridiculous

Lheimroo.2947:

And he’s also claimed to have kitted out several characters in full ascended. Which was not introduced entirely 2 years ago, you remember, so he hasn’t had 2 years to do that.

I’m not drawing this conclusion from one datum. Vayne plays a lot.

I reserve the right to filter anything he says about the lack of grind in this game and the accessibility of ascended through that conclusion.

Your conclusion would be correct… Vayne recently posted their in game time at approx. 9500 hours logged in which at the time worked out to about 9.5hours/day, everyday since launch…

I think you’ll find many others who argue along similar lines and who are vocally active on these forums also play a lot, which can lead to an inherent bias in their arguments.

The problem with this is, as the game attempts to cater to this vocal minority and their demands, it tends to shift the bar for everyone else to where the true “casual” is unable to access certain aspects of the game. And while they may just be vanity items or minor gear improvements, attaining these things is a large portion of what the game is based upon and so it can end up isolating a portion of the player base.

In the end it’s the same old argument of time investment vs. reward, and when it’s rewarding it’s not a considered a grind. A large part of the problem here lies in the depth of play, choice (i.e. lack of skills etc.) and replay value which only feeds the grind perception issue. They’ve obviously recognized this as they’re now using it to sell HoT.

Time-gating could also be perceived as grind in slow motion because all it’s doing is slowing down the process over months or even years of grinding something out. Again this only punishes and isolates the casual player who may not log in daily and thus becomes self-defeating to the game itself.

In the end, whether it’s grind or not is a matter of perception, so arguing/debating whether it is or isn’t is somewhat pointless because your essentially saying that another’s perception is wrong. What people should be talking about is something tangible like – Time Investment vs. Reward i.e. what is a reasonable and healthy amount of time required to attain this or that item?

naiasonod.9265:

DavidH.7380:

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure? I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

I absolutely agree. I find it stunning and odd that they’ll blow trumpets and create pageantries of attention for hiring real economists, yet I’m not sure if they’re aware that economists are almost as qualified to do a sociologist or cultural anthropologist’s job as might a car mechanic or a part-time rodeo clown be.

We desperately need some social science experts up in these businesses, methinks. I honestly don’t trust the metrics of an economist’s purview when it comes to things like community management.

Managing people isn’t something mmo devs seem to be very good at, anyway. I’ve seen far, farfarfar better implementations of community building and management…heck, anywhere that real attempts by genuinely proficient human resource directors were made.

The company I work for retains the services of a whole image consulting agency that does nothing but provide the execs and department heads with insightful guidance on inter and intra-office culture, how to foster successful business relationships and how to engage clients in terms that are most likely to appeal to them.

And bloody hell if it hasn’t had a dramatic impact. Real experts on how people work and why people do what they do versus some folks with engineering degrees, some MBA’s and a passel of yet others with physics degrees?

There’s no contest. And I suspect there’d be no contest in the outcomes real experts on how people work and why people do what they do could bring about in comparison to the best-guess figurings a bunch of computer science and game development and art majors can come up with respective to such matters either.

I dunno. I don’t see the effects I’d expect to see if game studios actually employed humanities experts upon such endeavors. The human animal isn’t nearly so mysterious as it likes to think, but you can spend billions of dollars trying to come up with magic algorithms and heuristics and tools for refinement of metrics to predict it…and fail. Or succeed so marginally that you might as well have just consulted tea leaves, or a magic 8-ball.

Fantastic post!

Vayne.8563:

At the time when ascended gear was added to the game, there were a whole lot of posts about people leaving because they had nothing to do. The only way Anet could have added something to do in a timely manner, was to add something time gated that helped people stay in game longer toward that goal. I didn’t like it but I got why they did it. The forums were a zoo. Every day there were posts about people who ran out of stuff to do. Anet made a decision based on forum posts. Yet you dislike their solution.

The solution of providing more and more content wasn’t an option because the content your’e talking about takes too much time to implement if they needed to head off what was quickly becoming a stampede.

But more to the point. we hardly see grind complaints, UNTIL Anet brings up the words no grind. And then we get threads like this.

Before this thread, I think you could count on one hand the number of times a month that anyone said they had a problem with the game being grindy.

This isn’t some big huge thing that huge numbers of people are complaining about. This is a pet peeve of a small percentage of the population who got riled up because Anet used the word grind and said the game wasn’t grindy. If that hadn’t happened, this thread wouldn’t even exist.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/I-personally-feel-like-I-am-going-nowhere-in-PVE
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-do-you-guys-do-after-80
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/getting-kinda-bored-already
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Something-to-Consider
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Are-the-complaints-just-from-a-lack-of-understanding

Yeah, this was just at the beginning of september of some posts I bother to go back and look for, least one a page at times. So before the november patch with the ascended gear.

Its also probably hard to find some things, as other complaints were probably moved to “trash can”, hence why i at least linked the last one.

Eleri Tezhme.3048:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

nGumball.1283:

Please sir, find that game that has no grind and only has content and enjoy it for yourself.

Elder Scrolls
Mass Effect
Fallout
Dragon Age

It’s actually quite easy to make a game with no grind and only content.

Myst Online, but that’s such an utter outlier that it is in a category by itself.

Anyhoo, grind…

I think the distinction between Grind: repetitive/time consuming actions required for game advancement vs Farm: repetitive/time consuming actions for optional game enhanements is a super important one.

There’s not a whole lot of gameplay dependent Grind in GW2. All of my 80s have gotten through their LS without an ounce of Ascended gear, most of them with only one or two pieces of exotic gear, and almost all of that from drops rather than crafting or purchace. (I’d even say there was more of it in GW1- there were areas you could not complete without having to go and get specific elite spells.)

On the other hand, even though crafting technically falls under the “Farming” category, it absolutely 100% is the most grindyest activity in the whole game.

Spending time gathering materials to make repetitive items (90% of which you will delete, because the market is saturated with them, even after you set aside the ones you will use) just to be able to advance to the next level of materials (at which point the previous level of materials becomes completely useless), where you repeat the exact same recipies, to make the exact same series of items, just with fancier mats. No wonder people who decide to craft things feel like their game is grindy, because it really does qualify- even though they’ve chosen to “Farm”

The only crafting dicipline that isn’t a fixed, linear grind is Cooking. At least there the materials you gather throughout the game are useful at all levels, the recipies aren’t blatantly predictable (so you’re actually discovering things) and you don’t (usually) end up with piles and piles of the same relatively useless item just so you can get to the next level.

So, yeah. While ANet is correct in that that there is very little “Grind” required for gameplay, their “Farming” and crafting mechanism is EPICLY grindy.

Edited to Add: SO points out to me that another major facet of “Grind” is the sense of high effort-low reward, very low enjoyment. Most ‘grind’ feels like it is pointless repetition.

Have to agree with this. When I say grind I mean enormous effort for almost no reward. Even Arenanet cannot make a statement that says they don’t have grind when using this definition because the entire game is based around the philosophy economically.

When I say farm, I mean doing repetative activities to gain a specific set of rewards in a reasonable amount of time, like gathering ore. If you want to talk drops I’d say they have the ability to farm items like greens and blues but as these items are largely useless even from a crafting standpoint much less one in which someone can use the materials from these items to make massive amounts of gold (haha) they definitely DON’T have farming in this game. They were very very successful at killing farming at the expense of a rewarding gameplay design.

For example, certain types of leather are near impossible to farm even to the last day I logged in, they were mid level types of leather, so if you were a gold farmer forget it. The same went for certain types of gems in gem cutting. I was amazed that these items stayed relatively rare even though they were common items needed for crafting for the past number of years.

An example of farming would be in other titles, like I can go out right now and do specific things and I’ll know I’ll get garrison resources. I can go out right now and do specific things and I’ll know I’ll get dilithium, both 100% of the time from these other two game titles, but not here. Here not only do we have RNG to deal with we also have RNG within RNG (the chance for bags to drop and then the chance for certain items to drop) AND DR on top of that.

I would agree with Anet that the “No-grind philosophy” holds. I have played the game since launch and I feel I’ve never grinded to get anything. All legendaries, all ascended armor, all fancy cosmetics I own I obtained either through spending whatever I had at the time, or collecting resources obtained from just playing the game. When I get board of doing something, I stop doing it.

Now if I got board with content, and continued to do it, or grinded the content, what would I gain that would give me an advantage over other players? I can’t think of anything. Cosmetics won’t give me an advantage, money doesn’t give me an advantage, a whole load of various crafting materials won’t give me an advantage. So I’m not in a race with other players for the next best set of powerful gear, I’m not racing to level up as fast as possible because I can’t do anything as a lower level character (on the contrary I am on equal ground with other players in pvp the moment I log in). I’m just playing the game how I’d like to, and at the same time have been able to access all the content in the game.

naiasonod.9265:

DavidH.7380:

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure? I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

I absolutely agree. I find it stunning and odd that they’ll blow trumpets and create pageantries of attention for hiring real economists, yet I’m not sure if they’re aware that economists are almost as qualified to do a sociologist or cultural anthropologist’s job as might a car mechanic or a part-time rodeo clown be.

We desperately need some social science experts up in these businesses, methinks. I honestly don’t trust the metrics of an economist’s purview when it comes to things like community management.

Managing people isn’t something mmo devs seem to be very good at, anyway. I’ve seen far, farfarfar better implementations of community building and management…heck, anywhere that real attempts by genuinely proficient human resource directors were made.

The company I work for retains the services of a whole image consulting agency that does nothing but provide the execs and department heads with insightful guidance on inter and intra-office culture, how to foster successful business relationships and how to engage clients in terms that are most likely to appeal to them.

And bloody hell if it hasn’t had a dramatic impact. Real experts on how people work and why people do what they do versus some folks with engineering degrees, some MBA’s and a passel of yet others with physics degrees?

There’s no contest. And I suspect there’d be no contest in the outcomes real experts on how people work and why people do what they do could bring about in comparison to the best-guess figurings a bunch of computer science and game development and art majors can come up with respective to such matters either.

I dunno. I don’t see the effects I’d expect to see if game studios actually employed humanities experts upon such endeavors. The human animal isn’t nearly so mysterious as it likes to think, but you can spend billions of dollars trying to come up with magic algorithms and heuristics and tools for refinement of metrics to predict it…and fail. Or succeed so marginally that you might as well have just consulted tea leaves, or a magic 8-ball.

Time = value. People want to put a value on their time, even if its in a game. They then want something to show inside the game to others their time spent, or at least be towards something that they can show off later.

What makes me smile though, is that people complaining about rewards have NO IDEA how scarce they were when the game launched. Again, when i was going back through the forums, people were whining about having only 5g once they hit 80. Or not enough karma to buy a full exotic set from the temple vendors.

Course then, the november patch came out, and then drop rates were affected by a bug they anet wouldnt respond to until a french forum mod finally replied, then we posted data for months, and finally anet caved and helped rebalance drop rates and give us the boss chests.

Serophous.9085:

naiasonod.9265:

DavidH.7380:

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure? I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

I absolutely agree. I find it stunning and odd that they’ll blow trumpets and create pageantries of attention for hiring real economists, yet I’m not sure if they’re aware that economists are almost as qualified to do a sociologist or cultural anthropologist’s job as might a car mechanic or a part-time rodeo clown be.

We desperately need some social science experts up in these businesses, methinks. I honestly don’t trust the metrics of an economist’s purview when it comes to things like community management.

Managing people isn’t something mmo devs seem to be very good at, anyway. I’ve seen far, farfarfar better implementations of community building and management…heck, anywhere that real attempts by genuinely proficient human resource directors were made.

The company I work for retains the services of a whole image consulting agency that does nothing but provide the execs and department heads with insightful guidance on inter and intra-office culture, how to foster successful business relationships and how to engage clients in terms that are most likely to appeal to them.

And bloody hell if it hasn’t had a dramatic impact. Real experts on how people work and why people do what they do versus some folks with engineering degrees, some MBA’s and a passel of yet others with physics degrees?

There’s no contest. And I suspect there’d be no contest in the outcomes real experts on how people work and why people do what they do could bring about in comparison to the best-guess figurings a bunch of computer science and game development and art majors can come up with respective to such matters either.

I dunno. I don’t see the effects I’d expect to see if game studios actually employed humanities experts upon such endeavors. The human animal isn’t nearly so mysterious as it likes to think, but you can spend billions of dollars trying to come up with magic algorithms and heuristics and tools for refinement of metrics to predict it…and fail. Or succeed so marginally that you might as well have just consulted tea leaves, or a magic 8-ball.

Time = value. People want to put a value on their time, even if its in a game. They then want something to show inside the game to others their time spent, or at least be towards something that they can show off later.

What makes me smile though, is that people complaining about rewards have NO IDEA how scarce they were when the game launched. Again, when i was going back through the forums, people were whining about having only 5g once they hit 80. Or not enough karma to buy a full exotic set from the temple vendors.

Course then, the november patch came out, and then drop rates were affected by a bug they anet wouldnt respond to until a french forum mod finally replied, then we posted data for months, and finally anet caved and helped rebalance drop rates and give us the boss chests.

the feeling of lack of reward isnt just about how much you get, its about the overall item design/loot/drops.

You get a lot more stuff in gw2 than in most mmos, in terms of shear volume, but you get way less that is of value to you. Thats why people say the game feels unrewarding. giving people more grab bags doesnt make the game feel rewarding, if the grab bags have 95% chance of something you didnt really want anyway.

phys.7689:

you guys are taking grind out of hand, probably on purpose to debase the point.
Tetris had no grind, first of all high scores werent hard to reach
they generally reset the machines everyday.
The top scorer in say tetris, probably played for what, 10-20 minutes conescutively?
Tetris had increased speed, and different initial block placements, making each level unique.

so a game you have to play well for 20 minutes, to get the top score, or 5 minutes if you are early in the morning, which has different levels the fiurther you get is a grind?

yall are just being ridiculous

So’s the argument about “requiring” Ascended armor to progress. TTS doesn’t even do that despite posts saying they do. The only thing which requires Ascended is high-tier Fractals. And there’s little point to doing those.

But then, we’re circling back to this point. Again. And I have yet to have someone point out why spending countless time and energy getting the Ascended gear they want is significantly more important than spending countless runs of UW/Fissure for Obsidian Armor.

(Because both Ascended Armor and Obsidian Armor look ridiculous to me.)

There’s no reason to really go for it except . . . to go for it. Which is why I compare, ceaselessly, the Ascended grind to grinding your titles in GW1 – there’s really not much of a point.

As such, if you want to go stuff your hands on to the Ascended Grind third rail, I’m not going to get behind you crying about how you need to do it. Could it be easier? Sure as skritt love shinies. Should it be easier? Not my call; I’d like it to be easier but it’s easing up anymore with the tons of materials salvaging my Silverwastes loot has given me.

Do the drop rates stink like Risen in tropic heat? Sure seems to, but as I got my Wupwup Longbow off the first WvW Season midway? What kind of hypocrite would I be to say it needs to be better after already winning “the lottery” once?

Do Precursors need a review? Apparently they got one. I’m patient to wait to see how HoT handles it.

Does Yakslapper require too much work? I think so, but then I’m not a dedicated WvW player. Ask one of them.

Is gold a grind? I find it hard to say yes when two hours a day will net me roughly 5g without sticking my head into dungeons. If I did dungeons or spent longer, probably could up that to 20g. And I’ll lay out exactly how I do the 5g to anyone who asks – it’s not a secret, it’s not hard, it’s just working with what you have to do.

Certainly affording a Precursor from farming would take forever. Again, HoT may fix that to be easier. Certainly it’s not easy to do Gold-to-Gem; that’s by design and intentional, by my book.

Is it too much grind? That’s for the individual. Blanket statements about how much is too much, or whether it’s “not really all that much” sit on that nice subjective grey area where it’s impossible to qualify universally.

Which is why this topic got so big in the first place.

Serophous.9085:

Time = value. People want to put a value on their time, even if its in a game. They then want something to show inside the game to others their time spent, or at least be towards something that they can show off later.

What makes me smile though, is that people complaining about rewards have NO IDEA how scarce they were when the game launched. Again, when i was going back through the forums, people were whining about having only 5g once they hit 80. Or not enough karma to buy a full exotic set from the temple vendors.

Course then, the november patch came out, and then drop rates were affected by a bug they anet wouldnt respond to until a french forum mod finally replied, then we posted data for months, and finally anet caved and helped rebalance drop rates and give us the boss chests.

I know I absolutely do respective to the bolded sentence, though I personally get very little out of the ‘showing off’ part. As to the rest…I’m inclined to agree. I was here at launch. I’m pretty sure my first 80 got there with roughly 6 gold to his name, and I promptly spent all of it crafting my exotic heavy armor.

naiasonod.9265:

Serophous.9085:

Time = value. People want to put a value on their time, even if its in a game. They then want something to show inside the game to others their time spent, or at least be towards something that they can show off later.

What makes me smile though, is that people complaining about rewards have NO IDEA how scarce they were when the game launched. Again, when i was going back through the forums, people were whining about having only 5g once they hit 80. Or not enough karma to buy a full exotic set from the temple vendors.

Course then, the november patch came out, and then drop rates were affected by a bug they anet wouldnt respond to until a french forum mod finally replied, then we posted data for months, and finally anet caved and helped rebalance drop rates and give us the boss chests.

I know I absolutely do respective to the bolded sentence, though I personally get very little out of the ‘showing off’ part. As to the rest…I’m inclined to agree. I was here at launch. I’m pretty sure my first 80 got there with roughly 6 gold to his name, and I promptly spent all of it crafting my exotic heavy armor.

I saved Karma instead. I already knew you could get them from the Temples, and I was given an Exotic L79 Longbow from Fireheart Rise. Or was it Frostgorge Sound? Dunno, I knocked those out in the same evening. I wound up getting the armor on my first successful Balthazar win, instead of Obsidian Shards.

Blind Goddess it was pretty dreadful before champ bags . . .

So I believe I have caught up on the full context of the whole discussion, I only have one thing to say.

The entirety of all of this has as a whole, been a huge buildup to something we all have known, or should have known since page 1.

The grind is subjective to the individual. That’s all, to nitpick at certain things is fairly pointless as what one person says is a grind, another says it is fair progression. Heck I think I read somewhere that someone thought progression is a grind in of itself, and they wouldn’t technically be wrong.

Personally speaking, I don’t see a grind when I am having fun, that’s it, nothing else can shake me from my position. From my own experiences, I have not seen anything that has impacted me as a ‘negative grind’ in the game. I have played several other MMOs, GW2 is still by far probably the least ‘grindy’ of them all. Any of the things that might constitute grinds in this game, I have noticed that Arenanet has started to steer away from, or allocated other ways to achieve the same reward.

That’s my piece.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

So’s the argument about “requiring” Ascended armor to progress. TTS doesn’t even do that despite posts saying they do. The only thing which requires Ascended is high-tier Fractals. And there’s little point to doing those.

But then, we’re circling back to this point. Again. And I have yet to have someone point out why spending countless time and energy getting the Ascended gear they want is significantly more important than spending countless runs of UW/Fissure for Obsidian Armor.

(Because both Ascended Armor and Obsidian Armor look ridiculous to me.)

There’s no reason to really go for it except . . . to go for it. Which is why I compare, ceaselessly, the Ascended grind to grinding your titles in GW1 – there’s really not much of a point.

As such, if you want to go stuff your hands on to the Ascended Grind third rail, I’m not going to get behind you crying about how you need to do it. Could it be easier? Sure as skritt love shinies. Should it be easier? Not my call; I’d like it to be easier but it’s easing up anymore with the tons of materials salvaging my Silverwastes loot has given me.

Do the drop rates stink like Risen in tropic heat? Sure seems to, but as I got my Wupwup Longbow off the first WvW Season midway? What kind of hypocrite would I be to say it needs to be better after already winning “the lottery” once?

Do Precursors need a review? Apparently they got one. I’m patient to wait to see how HoT handles it.

Does Yakslapper require too much work? I think so, but then I’m not a dedicated WvW player. Ask one of them.

Is gold a grind? I find it hard to say yes when two hours a day will net me roughly 5g without sticking my head into dungeons. If I did dungeons or spent longer, probably could up that to 20g. And I’ll lay out exactly how I do the 5g to anyone who asks – it’s not a secret, it’s not hard, it’s just working with what you have to do.

you realize the game designers have already said ascended isnt the equivalent of a vanity title right? It was introduced supposedly as a good mid range goal for players. They are supposed to feel gratified working towards/getting ascended.

Ascended isnt supposed to be getting a legendary, its supposed to be your goal after you get 80.

I know you choose to see it as a pointless task.

But lets say its supposed to be your goal after you get 80, to keep you doing the things you enjoy, and feeling rewarded as you play post 80.
How does it measure up with those set of specifications?

How do any of the post 80 goals that are supposed to serve those purposes feel?

and as for the whole oh thats subjective, i told you before. There is a great many things in life that are subjective, and yet people are expected to still be able to know/ be responsible for subjective things.
like being rude
personal space
driving too fast
driving too slow
painful

you can be like omg subjective is impossible to speak on as much as you want, but we have to do it every day, we have to communicate and try to understand other peoples perspectives,
If you refuse to speak on subjective matters, you may as well stop talking to any other human ever again, because there is more subjective than there is objective in our worlds.

so yes, you, when talking about grind, have to consider the more universal themes, and common threads to how people use it. And when you use the word grind, you have to consider, and clarify what you mean, and what your intent is.

And even if your meaning doesnt follow their meaning, you should seek to understand what they are really saying, and the point behind it.

The point is many people would consider gw2 to be grindy. Even the people defending it dont disagree that it is grindy, they just say it isnt grindy if you ignore all of the things that are grindy, and only focus on the things that are less so.

btw 5 gold a day isnt a lot of money, just to meet the 100 silk requirement per day for crafting, which would take you about a month, you would need 5.94 gold. Thats just the silk, doesnt include the linen, cotton, etc.

so essentially your whole days gains would be dedicated to just the 100 silk daily portion of obtaining ascended gear. (keep in mind this is a daily limit, which means they would expect people to be doing this once per day)

Its not about “requiring ascended to progress” its about the goals the designers set for the players, and how what/how players would have to do to get it.

keep in mind if most the goals designers set for players are grindy, most players will tend to feel the game is grindy.
whether they put a metaphorical gun to your head or not, its the truth.

phys.7689:

I know you choose to see it as a pointless task.

Because it sort of is a pointless task, since it’s only really useful in areas close to level 80 thanks to downscaling . . . it’s also not something you need until you try Agony.

. . . which is easier to solve by just getting your Accessory slots (five of them) and infusions.

How do any of the post 80 goals that are supposed to serve those purposes feel?

Well, I don’t like PvP that much, WvW is an uneven grab bag depending on the time of day and how the week is going, so I’d say post-80 my goals don’t align at all with what the developers expect me to do.

Of course, they didn’t align in Prophecies either and I didn’t have people trying to browbeat me into feeling ashamed for not going into Heroes’ Ascent.

and as for the whole oh thats subjective, i told you before. There is a great many things in life that are subjective, and yet people are expected to still be able to know/ be responsible for subjective things.

Except for the first two, everything there is pretty much quantifiable – too fast or too slow driving is a legally defined thing. Try arguing to a cop “I wasn’t going too fast, you just don’t have the same definition of fast as I do”. I double-down dare you.

you can be like omg subjective is impossible to speak on as much as you want, but we have to do it every day, we have to communicate and try to understand other peoples perspectives,
If you refuse to speak on subjective matters, you may as well stop talking to any other human ever again, because there is more subjective than there is objective in our worlds.

Not really, no. There is much objectiveness in the world, much in the realm of concrete fact as opposed to opinion. And it’s perfect to speak of subjectiveness but if I say “I really liked reading that book” and the other person says “oh my god that book was garbage” . . . guess what I’m not doing?

I try to see where other people are coming from when I discuss matters with them. That’s been growing thin lately the longer this whole thing goes on, because it’s going in circles and getting nowhere. People want to complain about the grind, and refute the idea it’s unnecessary. People want to compare the grind here to how GW1 didn’t have any. (A concept which makes me laugh, every time. Ditto for how RNG wasn’t an issue there either.)

Just because I can see your point doesn’t mean I have to agree with the conclusion which follows. I may, at my leisure, agree there is a point there. But seeing your side of things, or someone else’s side of things, doesn’t require me to take their side.

1/2

The point is many people would consider gw2 to be grindy. Even the people defending it dont disagree that it is grindy, they just say it isnt grindy if you ignore all of the things that are grindy, and only focus on the things that are less so.

Let’s get something straight – I’m not defending Ascended as not grindy or as an entity at all. I think it was a big unnecessary step . . . which can rightfully just get shoved in a closet and ignored by anyone who finds it too onerous to deal with. As I liken it to chasing Obsidian Armor back in GW1. I think it’s a little pricey to just buy your way through the materials, but if you’re patient and work on them it’s more likely you can make it work in a timeframe which is expected.

btw 5 gold a day isnt a lot of money, just to meet the 100 silk requirement per day for crafting, which would take you about a month, you would need 5.94 gold. Thats just the silk, doesnt include the linen, cotton, etc.

See, there’s your problem! I get my silk off salvage Especially easy with Silverwastes now pouring low-end loot into my inventory faster than I can salvage it.

Its not about “requiring ascended to progress” its about the goals the designers set for the players, and how what/how players would have to do to get it.

keep in mind if most the goals designers set for players are grindy, most players will tend to feel the game is grindy.
whether they put a metaphorical gun to your head or not, its the truth.

Well, if you’re going to agree grind is subjective – which you have – then claim it’s the truth – which you did – . . . you’ve got a problem. You see, truth isn’t subjective. Truth is something which an objective fact which can be proven.

I also say it’s probably the quintessential right of players to refuse to do the grinds which they neither wish to do nor need to do. I’d go so far as to say it’s their duty if they ever wish to try to change it.

Assumedly, it worked with regards to Precursors.

2/2

Dante.1763:

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

You do need a lot of gold. I play a lot of hours. I tend to tick away at things a bit at a time though, rather than hard core farm.

One of the things I do is salvage all yellows for ectos if it’s not profitable to sell them. I use the ectos and skill points I get to mystic forge clovers which gives me a start on my t6 mats as well.

With the first precursor I got lucky during the karka event. Two of my other precusors are cheap ones…the underwater ones. Fortunately I really like those skins. I bought those. One of my guildies got a drop of the shortbow and I got a reasonably good deal on that back quite some time ago. And the last one I get a very lucky drop from a black lion chest that I opened with a story key. I got a permanent hair style kit, which I promptly sold and bought Frostfang.

So the last one and the first one required luck.

aerial.7021:

Hold your horses there buddy, I don’t mean to nit pick or anything but you didn’t have to do underword/fow for ecto & shards, you could go farm some place for gold and buy them off the merchant, that’s how I got my first Obsidian Armor I farmed all over the place, constant farming up and down (solo) beckon’s perch to droknar’s forge in hard mode, it got so bad I had to buy a 2nd account and bring along my other account to haul the goods back to the merchant.

It may have been a grind took many hours to clear the maps but it was a challenge! you left the portals with a feeling of anticipation and excitement can I really make it that far with my 55.

You can do exactly the same in GW2, you can farm gold in any game mode in any area and buy whatever you need.

Vayne.8563:

At the time when ascended gear was added to the game, there were a whole lot of posts about people leaving because they had nothing to do. The only way Anet could have added something to do in a timely manner, was to add something time gated that helped people stay in game longer toward that goal. I didn’t like it but I got why they did it. The forums were a zoo. Every day there were posts about people who ran out of stuff to do. Anet made a decision based on forum posts. Yet you dislike their solution.

The solution of providing more and more content wasn’t an option because the content your’e talking about takes too much time to implement if they needed to head off what was quickly becoming a stampede.

But more to the point. we hardly see grind complaints, UNTIL Anet brings up the words no grind. And then we get threads like this.

Before this thread, I think you could count on one hand the number of times a month that anyone said they had a problem with the game being grindy.

This isn’t some big huge thing that huge numbers of people are complaining about. This is a pet peeve of a small percentage of the population who got riled up because Anet used the word grind and said the game wasn’t grindy. If that hadn’t happened, this thread wouldn’t even exist.

“At the time when ascended gear was added to the game, there were a whole lot of posts about people leaving because they had nothing to do.” Oow now I am getting this part. I see people mention that back before ascended was introduced people where asking for that on the forums. And while I was not very active I did read the forums a little but can’t remember the outcry for vertical progression some are claiming. But indeed there where many people complaining there was nothing to do and even I had some time I was just standing in LA. The solution for me was WvW and guild-missions that got introduced.

Anyway, so that out-cry about no end-game is now being translated as an outcry for vertical progression. But why could that not have been horizontal progression. You know, the cosmetics hunt we are now talking about. Maybe Anet reacted on the forums but with the wrong solution? Or maybe fractals would have been enough without the special gear, just adding agony infusions to exotics?

“Yet you dislike their solution.” I dislike their solution? I am not complaining about ascended gear am I? I don’t care for stats so also don’t care for them adding that. I guess you can conclude it’s not a very good solution if so many people dislike it.

“The solution of providing more and more content wasn’t an option because the content your’e talking about takes too much time to implement” What I am talking about here (or the last two years) was never meant as quick solution for that moment. We could have a discussion how they should have tackled that but that is kind of useless at this point. It is also not what this thread is about. So I am not so sure why you are commenting these things to me. This thread is about grind, not about possible bad decisions in the past, not about how they should have done that in the past and I also didn’t say much about ascended gear myself. What I am talking about is the future.

“But more to the point.”
That would be nice

“we hardly see grind complaints, UNTIL Anet brings up the words no grind. And then we get threads like this.”
Seriously? You never did see people use the term Grind Wars? I have seen that many times in map-chat. I mentioned it multiple times before. I have seen a lot of talk about it on the forum (not that all the thread names are directly about grind but the conversations in it are) like threads where people complain about nothing to do or the game being boring and even the complain about no end-game, for those who dislike grind and like horizontal progression the reason why there is no end-game for them is because that is locked behind the grind. So there have been many complains about it, directly and indirectly.

If people don’t creating new threads about it so much anymore it’s likely because they said about it what they had so say. Bloggers are not going to keep blogging about that subject. and for many people they don’t keep posting about it. You also do not see daily threads about the NPE anymore, or blogs on game-sites about it. That does not mean they are suddenly fine with all the changes but because it’s a known complain and they said about it what they had so say about it. Colin’s statement was just a trigger to awaken this existing subject again but yeah the grind is mentioned plenty in many threads, map-chat and so on.

“If that hadn’t happened, this thread wouldn’t even exist.” Well at least it is true this exact thread is a direct reaction on that claim so would not have been there without it. But why was the thread created? Because somebody, or people did feel the grind is to grindy and then see Colin again talk about no grind.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

The point is many people would consider gw2 to be grindy. Even the people defending it dont disagree that it is grindy, they just say it isnt grindy if you ignore all of the things that are grindy, and only focus on the things that are less so.

Let’s get something straight – I’m not defending Ascended as not grindy or as an entity at all. I think it was a big unnecessary step . . . which can rightfully just get shoved in a closet and ignored by anyone who finds it too onerous to deal with. As I liken it to chasing Obsidian Armor back in GW1. I think it’s a little pricey to just buy your way through the materials, but if you’re patient and work on them it’s more likely you can make it work in a timeframe which is expected.

btw 5 gold a day isnt a lot of money, just to meet the 100 silk requirement per day for crafting, which would take you about a month, you would need 5.94 gold. Thats just the silk, doesnt include the linen, cotton, etc.

See, there’s your problem! I get my silk off salvage Especially easy with Silverwastes now pouring low-end loot into my inventory faster than I can salvage it.

Its not about “requiring ascended to progress” its about the goals the designers set for the players, and how what/how players would have to do to get it.

keep in mind if most the goals designers set for players are grindy, most players will tend to feel the game is grindy.
whether they put a metaphorical gun to your head or not, its the truth.

Well, if you’re going to agree grind is subjective – which you have – then claim it’s the truth – which you did – . . . you’ve got a problem. You see, truth isn’t subjective. Truth is something which an objective fact which can be proven.

I also say it’s probably the quintessential right of players to refuse to do the grinds which they neither wish to do nor need to do. I’d go so far as to say it’s their duty if they ever wish to try to change it.

Assumedly, it worked with regards to Precursors.

2/2

truth is subjective too, but lets not get existential. lets just say, that it is likely that a decent amount of people will describe your game as grindy, if your designers give it grindy goals. Now some people will ignore these goals, and just enjoy whatever facets they enjoy. So you designed a grindy game, and some people ignore those elements, They are playing what amounts to a different game. Or a meta game.

@Devata.6589

There’s a difference between someone saying the level of grind is unacceptable and saying, how can you claim this game has no grind. Those are two completely different things. This thread is saying that Anet’s claims are wrong. It’s an excuse, a target for dissatisfied people to rally together to a banner.

But many of those same people are misrepresenting the grind that was in Guild Wars 1, which was indeed vast. They’re not exactly they same, but they’re enough the same that anyone from there should have expected it. I did.

You say maybe Anet made the wrong choice. I’m saying Anet may not have HAD a choice. By the time they reacted, they needed to do something quickly. We could do X in 90 days, we can do y in 30. That could have been their choice.

And because you like what you like, to you that’s the wrong choice. But it might well have been the right choice for the business. You and I both have a personal stake in things coming out that we like. But Anet has a financial stake in making sure this game succeeds. I’m not sure your likes or my likes get to supercede that.

Sure, maybe Anet got it wrong. Maybe you got it wrong though. Maybe I got it wrong. Anet made a decision based on information they have, and I still maintain, their information is better than ours.

There’s no way I’m going to convince you that ascended gear was their only real option, or something very much like it. Anything else would have taken too long to implement.

It was meant as a stop gap measure and it apparently worked. If you think it didn’t work, that’s fine. I believe it worked and if it hadn’t, Anet would have likely been laying off some people when NcSoft West went through its reorganization.

This game has met expectations and it’s been successful. Maybe Anet got it wrong, but if they did, this game is successful in spite of what Anet has done. I’m not sure why anyone here is so confident, so sure of themselves that they think that it would have done better doing it there way.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe it would have been more sucessful your way, but we’ll never know. And as it stands now, it’s one of the most successful MMOs to come out in the last five years.

Vayne.8563:

It’s not just titles. ~snip for brevity~.

Seems you have skipped the other XY ways of obtaining (un)lucky points (you gain pts when opening chests with locks, when using clovers, when salvaging …). Perhaps you should have done more research. And I suppose I’ve just been ‘lucky’ than that my test sample of 100 tickets didn’t drain all that fast. However I am not interested in maxing out either of those titles, which is why my sample might have been too small to judge…but my overall track record shows I’m considerably more unlucky than lucky, so hmm.

Vayne.8563:

And even then I only maxed unlucky and not lucky. ~snip for brevity~

I’m not buying the talk how hard/expensive it is, especially not with repeatable double point weeks and so many alternative ways of gaining them. I doubt the wiki accounts for those though.

Vayne.8563:

I’m pretty sure the wiki page is more accurate than your memory. It matches my memory pretty well.

And it doesn’t match mine at all. Perhaps it’d be diff if I had chosen the ring afking as the only source of pts, but concluding from the few attempts I did, I usually had a slightly higher ticket gain than loss.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

True, you can earn points doing that. ~snip for brevity~

I didn’t even bother doing the math for ascended, because crafting the cook title alone got my jaded enough to vow I’d never go down that rabbit hole again.
At least AFKing doesn’t fry your brain in the process..unless you wish to observe the scenery. But in that case, you might as well go watch paint dry .

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Yet it was still there, so it counts.

It counts as evidence of how GW2 decreased the quality of game experience on GW, if anything, because you could see a significant shift in the general approach to the game in both pvp and pve. Since the shift involved adding a load of grindy zero-content titles and skill balances which are extremely similar to GW2 style of balancing, I cannot see it as anything but redundant and not added to the original for its own sake.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You’re going to need to explain how 75k per prestige armor set wasn’t something which bogged you down. Or the need for Jadite/Amber.

I think you’ll first have to explain how the farm for kurzick/lux elite armor is comparable to the grind for ascended. For starters, the former isn’t 1) time gated; 2) demanding massive amounts of basic materials (the amounts are reasonable and obtained rather quickly from salvaging alone); 3) requiring significant amounts of rare material (again, jade/amber are obtainable directly from many diff sources which ranges from quest rewards, monster drops, JQ and FA in pve and AB in pvp); 4) does not require you to max out a craft proffession which will be mostly useless outside the particular purpose; and 5) does not raise your stats above the cheapest BiS obtained at droknar’s.

(to be continued in 30min)

Vayne.8563:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Vayne.8563:

This isn’t some big huge thing that huge numbers of people are complaining about. This is a pet peeve of a small percentage of the population who got riled up because Anet used the word grind and said the game wasn’t grindy. If that hadn’t happened, this thread wouldn’t even exist.

Yes, yes it would.

I have utter and complete faith it would still exist in some form. We might not be complaining about the same things as far as grind . . .

This thread is specifically about the no grind philosophy which was brought up at the launch. If the word grind hadn’t been mentioned in the launch people would be talking more about HoT and less about this.

Also there are a lot of things that people post in grind threads that aren’t about the grind itself.

Time gating is not grind, if anything it’s anti grind. It’s an alternate way to slow down progress. If something is time gated, you can’t grind it.

RNG – RNG is not grind. It’s a way of slowing down how fast you get something. You can grind the whole world over and over for a precursor, but what’s being complained about there is the random element…not grind.

Not getting good enough drops – This is not grind either, it’s people complaining they somehow have unlucky accounts and they don’t get the stuff other people do.

There are some grind complaints on these forums but they’re generally few and far between or have been for the last year or so anyway.

“RNG – RNG is not grind. It’s a way of slowing down how fast you get something. You can grind the whole world over and over for a precursor, but what’s being complained about there is the random element…not grind” bad RNG can result in grind so that is completely on topic and about grind. If you make an extreme low drop-rate (RNG) and then put that drop in many places (exactly what Anet does with many items that are ingame) it means the only reasonable way to get them is to grind for gold and buy them. So yes, RNG can be the result of grind so when people talk about RNG they can very well be talking about grind.

Anyway you are saying, in the grind topics people also talk about other things but you forget that in many other topics grind is mentioned as well.

aerial.7021:

Devata.6589:

In stead of trying to end every argument with the ‘you do not have the exact numbers’.

Was attempting to create balance.

Well I think everybody knows we do not have any exact numbers. So that balance already exist. But then I guess you comment was more to inform the people who did think we all had exact factual numbers.

In that case it’s nice of you to inform them while I think everybody well did know that already.

KarlaGrey.5903:

Vayne.8563:

It’s not just titles. ~snip for brevity~.

Seems you have skipped the other XY ways of obtaining (un)lucky points (you gain pts when opening chests with locks, when using clovers, when salvaging …). Perhaps you should have done more research. And I suppose I’ve just been ‘lucky’ than that my test sample of 100 tickets didn’t drain all that fast. However I am not interested in maxing out either of those titles, which is why my sample might have been too small to judge…but my overall track record shows I’m considerably more unlucky than lucky, so hmm.

Vayne.8563:

And even then I only maxed unlucky and not lucky. ~snip for brevity~

I’m not buying the talk how hard/expensive it is, especially not with repeatable double point weeks and so many alternative ways of gaining them. I doubt the wiki accounts for those though.

Vayne.8563:

I’m pretty sure the wiki page is more accurate than your memory. It matches my memory pretty well.

And it doesn’t match mine at all. Perhaps it’d be diff if I had chosen the ring afking as the only source of pts, but concluding from the few attempts I did, I usually had a slightly higher ticket gain than loss.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

True, you can earn points doing that. ~snip for brevity~

I didn’t even bother doing the math for ascended, because crafting the cook title alone got my jaded enough to vow I’d never go down that rabbit hole again.
At least AFKing doesn’t fry your brain in the process..unless you wish to observe the scenery. But in that case, you might as well go watch paint dry .

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Yet it was still there, so it counts.

It counts as evidence of how GW2 decreased the quality of game experience on GW, if anything, because you could see a significant shift in the general approach to the game in both pvp and pve. Since the shift involved adding a load of grindy zero-content titles and skill balances which are extremely similar to GW2 style of balancing, I cannot see it as anything but redundant and not added to the original for its own sake.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You’re going to need to explain how 75k per prestige armor set wasn’t something which bogged you down. Or the need for Jadite/Amber.

I think you’ll first have to explain how the farm for kurzick/lux elite armor is comparable to the grind for ascended. For starters, the former isn’t 1) time gated; 2) demanding massive amounts of basic materials (the amounts are reasonable and obtained rather quickly from salvaging alone); 3) requiring significant amounts of rare material (again, jade/amber are obtainable directly from many diff sources which ranges from quest rewards, monster drops, JQ and FA in pve and AB in pvp); 4) does not require you to max out a craft proffession which will be mostly useless outside the particular purpose; and 5) does not raise your stats above the cheapest BiS obtained at droknar’s.

(to be continued in 30min)

I didn’t skip anything. I have 15,000 hours in Guild Wars 1, actively went after the lucky title and still don’t have it. I did get the unlucky title. I got GWAMM and 50/50 and still don’t have the lucky title.

Everyone that I ever played Guild Wars 1 with spoke about how grindy certain titles were including that. I think you’re deliberately trying to mislead people.

Even people who don’t generally agree with me will tell you the lucky title was grindy as hell. Nor have I met anyone who didn’t think the Luxon/Kurzick titles were grindy as hell.

You can insist, you can quote, you can try anything you want, but those that actually played Guild Wars 1 know the truth.

I won’t answer you any more on this issue, because I’ve already proven it with links to the wiki.

Can’t we fairly easily have enough non-grindy, grindy, and super-grindy stuff to keep everyone engaged and rewarded and entertained whether they play 30 minutes or 13 hours a day? People sometimes talk as if we have to choose between high-grind and low-grind rewards so we need to argue about which are better. How hard can it be to shrink existing game models to make more minis (or make rare minis that are slightly larger), add super rare vanity dye colors, make up new titles, add a glow to an extra rare version of an existing item, etc???

The real trick is balancing it so the more grindy stuff feels worth doing and sufficiently rewarding without making the non-grindy stuff feel 2nd rate.

DavidH.7380:

Can’t we fairly easily have enough non-grindy, grindy, and super-grindy stuff to keep everyone engaged and rewarded and entertained whether they play 30 minutes or 13 hours a day? People sometimes talk as if we have to choose between high-grind and low-grind rewards so we need to argue about which are better. How hard can it be to shrink existing game models to make more minis (or make rare minis that are slightly larger), add super rare vanity dye colors, make up new titles, add a glow to an extra rare version of an existing item, etc???

The real trick is balancing it so the more grindy stuff feels worth doing and sufficiently rewarding without making the non-grindy stuff feel 2nd rate.

I don’t think this is as easy as you think.

Let’s say some stuff is massively easy to get. Then it’s attained very fast. There are a couple of examples like this in the game. The faster something can be attained, the more of that stuff you need in the game. So the slowest, hardest to get stuff there can be less of, because it takes so long to get it. That means the stuff you need to have the most of us the easy to get stuff, because everyone gets that stuff super fast.

It would mean more content, much more content, was needed. By making everything take some time to get, you slow down the rate at which you need to provide content.

The problem is, content takes time to make and gets consumed much faster than it’s made. That’s why these slow down mechanisms exist in the first place.

Well after reading the thread i came to a conclusion. I have winter here in Poland and lots of free time and so i spend lots of it by my PC or console, i have the game for like 2 years have smth like 6300 AP points and a feeling that i did not rly do anything meaningful in GW2 i tried 2 get legendary because i felt that would be it, so i played more than ever before with the mystic toilet and that did not work for me. So i tried different method and did more dungeons to get that gold and buy it from tp so i grinded them for like 1 week straight AC/SE/COE/TA/COF/Arach i did not do every single path in each dungeon only the fastest ones and failed with it because i was borred of the grind. Im the kind of person that rather does stuff that is exciting fun and challenging so Collecting stuff like the collections is not for me i hate that, just like gathering those AP and Crafting i hate it. PvPin GW2 its some of the worst experience in my short 29 years of life. When i buy a game after finishing it or just having it, makes me feel good like: This game was worth the 60$ for example: Tekken games they stay like 80% of the time in my console love them and online pvp ;] totaly worth the money
Counter strike is a cheap shooter but i play it for 14-15 years, i like it. Gw1 is among those games i had fun with it. But Gw2 is a complete 180 turnaround for me i tried too see smth more in this game try to understand ppl like Vayne who are loving it and i just can’t, maybe its a state of mind or whatever so the conclusion is:
This game is simply not for me!!!

As this is probably my last post: Cu guys in another Place different corner of the wast internet ;] and probably some other game ;]

(continued)

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

No, no it is. You’re just not admitting it.

Cannot admit something that isn’t true. Surely some grind was there, but it wasn’t even close to as impactful or mind-boggingly boring as it was on GW2. Perhaps the generic loot table and the associated lack of a good reward system are too blame in that regard.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Hyperbole? No. I literally had an UW run where every drop was a blue or purple Cane. We all had a good laugh about it. No trophies at all, just Canes. Any time I opened an end chest on an EOTN dungeon, I usually called “Diamond or Onyx” before opening and . . . yup.

So you had 1 run that had kittenty rewards. Great, I’ve also had quite a few here and there where I’d die too fast or just got really unlucky, and then I had runs where I’d get up to 5 ecto or shards per run. I’m talking duo fow/uw here though, as I rarely went into UW with a full group to clear the entire place…I did however clear FoW quite a few times with a full group, and it usually netted quite a few shards, including the end chest drops.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Not hyperbole. I lived it.

We all have our unhappy moments. I once had a broad head arrow hit me through a 75% block stance + guardian on top of it; another time I had a ranger dshot my elite through blind, which is 90% miss chance. Tough luck~

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I don’t care about PvP, and every time I try another MMO they wind up boring me to tears with the grind about halfway through. Plus, they generally require more out of my PC specs than I’m willing to spend upgrading to . . .

That’s a pity, because GW pvp is the best and most enjoayble you will ever find in an mmo. But you can only realize that once you get the hang of it, and experience the lack of such a well-designed concept in other games.

DavidH.7380:

They aren’t needed to complete content (other than the same fractals at higher levels), but they are needed to give stat oriented players who aren’t interested in cosmetics something relatively meaningless to sink large amounts of time into obtaining.

As I understand it, if you bumped exotics up to ascended stats it wouldn’t really do much to improve the experience of players in exotics, but it would deeply upset a lot of players who invested a lot of time and effort into obtaining a very small stat increase and then had even that very small benefit taken back.

Like many supporters claim, the game wasn’t aimed at stat-oriented people. Even so, they could have implemented progression in a different manner rather than doing a full turn on their original policy, which was apparently even intended from the get-go.
But why please a demographic the game wasn’t intended for?

How would experience not be improved if exotics and ascended became equal in stats? It’s not a mere 5% change, after all. And like I said, ascended stats should be made exchangeable in the process, so it’s a win-win scenario. Moreover, if the advantage was as insignificant as people like to claim, why getting upset to start with? If the benefit is as small and insignificat as touted (Buran’s post seems to be suggesting the opposite), no one should really be upset at anyone but themselves for going through the trouble of obtaining something that is supposedly of negligable effect.

That aside, it’s a win-win situation because the gear would no longer become scrap material if a skill balance happens to nerf a particular build/gear setup, but would allow the player to adjust the stats accoringly.

Vayne.8563:

DavidH.7380:

Can’t we fairly easily have enough non-grindy, grindy, and super-grindy stuff to keep everyone engaged and rewarded and entertained whether they play 30 minutes or 13 hours a day? People sometimes talk as if we have to choose between high-grind and low-grind rewards so we need to argue about which are better. How hard can it be to shrink existing game models to make more minis (or make rare minis that are slightly larger), add super rare vanity dye colors, make up new titles, add a glow to an extra rare version of an existing item, etc???

The real trick is balancing it so the more grindy stuff feels worth doing and sufficiently rewarding without making the non-grindy stuff feel 2nd rate.

I don’t think this is as easy as you think.

Let’s say some stuff is massively easy to get. Then it’s attained very fast. There are a couple of examples like this in the game. The faster something can be attained, the more of that stuff you need in the game. So the slowest, hardest to get stuff there can be less of, because it takes so long to get it. That means the stuff you need to have the most of us the easy to get stuff, because everyone gets that stuff super fast.

It would mean more content, much more content, was needed. By making everything take some time to get, you slow down the rate at which you need to provide content.

The problem is, content takes time to make and gets consumed much faster than it’s made. That’s why these slow down mechanisms exist in the first place.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed the point, but why would we need more content as opposed to just more “stuff” (not that new content isn’t also needed in general)? I play a half hour a day on average. Just finishing every jumping puzzle in the game once is a fairly significant task for me, but it would be a single day of playing for someone more skilled and with more time. Completing every puzzle 25 times might be a worthy task for them, but I’m not going to even try. One reward means choosing between rewarding me or rewarding them, and between having not enough grind and having too much grind. But if there is a “Puzzle Jumper” title for doing them all once, “Veteran Puzzle Jumper” for doing them all 10 times, “Master Puzzle Jumper” for 25 times, and “Puzzle Jumper God” for doing them all 50 times, then everyone has a target to work toward and periodic rewards that reflect their own level of commitment and investment without adding any new content but just more stuff.

It isn’t a new or particularly insightful thought, but arguments seem to rage back and forth between the “its too much grind for me to get anything” and the “you have to have lots of grind to keep people from running out of things to do” camps. It seems like both should have enough stuff targeted to their level. As always, not everyone would be happy, most likely the “I only play 30 minutes a day but want to get everything anyway” and “I play 12 hours a day but don’t want to repeat content/grind” folks, for whom I don’t have much of an answer because I don’t think their complaints can be fixed by any practical solutions I’ve ever heard.

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

serenke.4806:

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

You’ll probably win the Powerball jackpot before you get one of those. Good luck.

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

You’ll probably win the Powerball jackpot before you get one of those. Good luck.

Thanks, i’ve equipped two characters with those and have additional 2 dozen sitting in my bank.

Devata.6589:

bad RNG can result in grind so that is completely on topic and about grind. If you make an extreme low drop-rate (RNG) and then put that drop in many places (exactly what Anet does with many items that are ingame) it means the only reasonable way to get them is to grind for gold and buy them. So yes, RNG can be the result of grind so when people talk about RNG they can very well be talking about grind.

That’s how I do things, I prefer certainty rather than random chances if I do X expect Y, not random rotations of garbage, I believe I can dive into my wheely bin for that, mainly because my experiences with luck in real life are absolute 0.

serenke.4806:

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

You’ll probably win the Powerball jackpot before you get one of those. Good luck.

Thanks, i’ve equipped two characters with those and have additional 2 dozen sitting in my bank.

Uh huh. Is ‘every area of the game’ fractals by chance? Because if you do anything outside of fractals? Yeah, you’re both wrong and hilarious. In factals, sure.

Running around out in the world? Doing world bosses? Killing mobs? Doing dungeons?

NNNNNNNNOPE, swing and a miss. You’re either mistaken in what you mean by ‘every area of the game’ or you’re lying through your digital teeth.

The point being that you don’t have to grind for anything, just do whichever part of the game you like and you will get to your goal without pressure or feeling bored.

Now if you absolutely have to have something really quickly (not sure for what you would need ascended/legendary immediately), then of course there is an optimal method and you have to do it that way. But that’s your choice and you cannot cry “grindy” if you chose the grind.

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

You’ll probably win the Powerball jackpot before you get one of those. Good luck.

Thanks, i’ve equipped two characters with those and have additional 2 dozen sitting in my bank.

Uh huh. Is ‘every area of the game’ fractals by chance? Because if you do anything outside of fractals? Yeah, you’re both wrong and hilarious. In factals, sure.

Running around out in the world? Doing world bosses? Killing mobs? Doing dungeons?

NNNNNNNNOPE, swing and a miss. You’re either mistaken in what you mean by ‘every area of the game’ or you’re lying through your digital teeth.

By every area of the game i mean the weapon chests i got from pvp, the armor chests i got in wvw and sure also in pve.