I really look forward to early next year when the “death Star” (for want of a better term) is fully operational and we are really going to see what this platform can do. Without a shadow of a doubt is completely related to the support and feedback from the community.
I share the secret with you they reworked the leveling System to be more smooth. For this reason they will reset all your character Levels to 30 and make Levels accountbound and make it able to Level up to 150 within the next 4 months as they did with fractals.
I share the secret with you they reworked the leveling System to be more smooth. For this reason they will reset all your character Levels to 30 and make Levels accountbound and make it able to Level up to 150 within the next 4 months as they did with fractals.
Better rewards include only 1 green and 2blues instead of 2 greens 3 blues,
less karma for world events and more account bound ascended materials.
Exotics now have half the drop chance.
Precursors no longer drop from enemies or mystic forge, new precursor crafting is available with crafting raised to 600 each discipline.
Time gates have been improved! You can now only complete a dungeon for full rewards once per week per account.
Added new armour skins from Guild Wars 1, 3000gem for each piece, first week are helms.
unless they change their plans…that is still what many hopes.
They have promised so much, once again….
let see.
GW2 balance:
A PvE player is supposed to avoid a 1-2 second 1 shotting aoe.
A WWW player is considered uncapable of avoiding a 5,75 second aoe for half his health.
Well they still think the living story is great.. yeah should not be so much temporary content but overall it’s great according to that interview.
Well while the temporary nature was the biggest problem the rest of the living story so far was also just bad. An grind with low quality temporary content, temporary achievements and temporary rewards. Take away the temporary nature of all of them (so far rewards and achievements stay temporary) and it becomes less bad but it does not become good. So if they really think it’s great that is not a good sign especially if thats where the game wants to lean on as it’s core mechanism.
At least the next arc is the beginning of the end for Scarlet…
Nice trailer.
I was rather impressed at how they kind of tied all the LS chapters together in a neat package. We may not have liked what they did every time, but at least the youtube vid reminded us of what came to pass so far.
Which Asura gate is the one they show broken in the trailer? Maybe LA is on her radar, so to speak?
I really look forward to early next year when the “death Star” (for want of a better term) is fully operational and we are really going to see what this platform can do. Without a shadow of a doubt is completely related to the support and feedback from the community.
That isn’t a moon, it’s a space station… :o
Thats really Scarlets plan, to build a Death Star, so she can blow up zhe moon, to get rid of that Asura moon base. As the final dungeon event, we’ll have to infiltrate the Death Star through a 2 meter high tunnel.
I share the secret with you they reworked the leveling System to be more smooth. For this reason they will reset all your character Levels to 30 and make Levels accountbound and make it able to Level up to 150 within the next 4 months as they did with fractals.
Better rewards include only 1 green and 2blues instead of 2 greens 3 blues,
less karma for world events and more account bound ascended materials.
Exotics now have half the drop chance.
Precursors no longer drop from enemies or mystic forge, new precursor crafting is available with crafting raised to 600 each discipline.
Time gates have been improved! You can now only complete a dungeon for full rewards once per week per account.
Added new armour skins from Guild Wars 1, 3000gem for each piece, first week are helms.
Don’t forget half the current time limits for those world events.
I share the secret with you they reworked the leveling System to be more smooth. For this reason they will reset all your character Levels to 30 and make Levels accountbound and make it able to Level up to 150 within the next 4 months as they did with fractals.
Better rewards include only 1 green and 2blues instead of 2 greens 3 blues,
less karma for world events and more account bound ascended materials.
Exotics now have half the drop chance.
Precursors no longer drop from enemies or mystic forge, new precursor crafting is available with crafting raised to 600 each discipline.
Time gates have been improved! You can now only complete a dungeon for full rewards once per week per account.
Added new armour skins from Guild Wars 1, 3000gem for each piece, first week are helms.
Well theres that section in LA where there are broken/unfinished Star, I mean Asura, gates being built. That what I thought of when seeing that part of the trailer.
Just read over the dev interview link. As far as I could tell the entire thing was about CDI stuff. Chris seemed super excited about it so I decided to actually skim the CDI thread. There’s a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones. Unfortunately out of all these ideas it seems people have decided what the game needs most is Player Housing and Guild Halls. And that somehow these things are going to open up new story and exciting gameplay elements. Pretty disappointing. Not to say I don’t want a Guild Hall cuz I do, but I don’t see it leading to the kind of content I thought most people wanted.
We should be blaming these bloggers more than Anet. They played the hype machine as a way to gain more subscribers, followers, and page views. Pretty disappointing.
How in the world is a CDI interview way better than an expansion?!
’Looking into 2014 and back on the plot of the main story of 2013, many questions remain: why did Scarlet brings these groups together? What did she see when she looked into the eternal alchemy, and how did it change her? What is she trying to accomplish? Is she just nuts, or is there something far more sinister going on? How do each of these moments through 2013 tie together?
The answer to all of these questions await in our four upcoming releases in 2014: and lead to one final moment that will change the face of Tyria forever.’
The LS is a temporary storyline that leads to a permenant conclusion, which will change the face of Tyria forever. I suspect that conclusion and change is the ‘something big’.
Why. As the bosses were, it was a quick and fun way to get some good loot in a game where good drops are scarce. Their “fix” afterwards was to give some bosses a billion HP, which didn’t make the fights harder, only lenghtened it (Maw, Shatterer). Only one they got correct was Fire elemental which actually can be quite hard now but still doesn’t take ages to kill.
I’ve lost all interest in Tequatl when I have to log in the zone for an hour before I can fight him and even then it requires a lot of co-ordination which usually just isn’t there. Update world bosses for extra good loot if you want but keep fun and easy options for loot as well. Otherwise they all will end up as ghost towns. Also the segment they’re (re)designing the world bosses to:
Guilds an players who like banging their head on the wall until they win and the reward for them is the completion and not necessarily the loot. It’s very much designed for a certain type of player and guild.
And yet he adds:
We obviously want to make it as accessible as possible.
To me, these are in odds with each other. How can the fight be as accessible as possible if it requires a high level of co-ordination and communication? Is this the “raid type” content that was promised some time ago? I don’t like the development if they make all future content super hard like Tequatl.
And the rest of the interview: It’s nice he acknowledges that the release was rushed. He also has a very high opinion of the Living world/story, which is understandable, but hyperbole always tends to rub me the wrong way (especially when I don’t relaly agree with the premise). I was kinda hoping for at least some teasers.
Just read over the dev interview link. As far as I could tell the entire thing was about CDI stuff. Chris seemed super excited about it so I decided to actually skim the CDI thread. There’s a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones. Unfortunately out of all these ideas it seems people have decided what the game needs most is Player Housing and Guild Halls. And that somehow these things are going to open up new story and exciting gameplay elements. Pretty disappointing. Not to say I don’t want a Guild Hall cuz I do, but I don’t see it leading to the kind of content I thought most people wanted.
You should go back and really read the thread. There are so many ideas being tossed around and Housing was only a small part of it. We just moved from discussing Sub-Classes to discussing new skills and their attainment. It’s a pretty fun thread. =)
Best E-mail of the week – GW2 Conclusion of Scarlett!
Now get to work on some content/expansions Anet looking forward to what you guys can do when you aren’t constrained by the LS!
Well prepare for disappointment, cuz’ LS is still continuing after Scarlett/Season1. Season 2 starts mid/early March (maybe late March if Feature patch is all by itself with no LS part).
Best E-mail of the week – GW2 Conclusion of Scarlett!
Now get to work on some content/expansions Anet looking forward to what you guys can do when you aren’t constrained by the LS!
Well prepare for disappointment, cuz’ LS is still continuing after Scarlett/Season1. Season 2 starts mid/early March (maybe late March if Feature patch is all by itself with no LS part).
I’ll believe that when they are foolish enough to actually not release an expansion. Until March I’m gonna keep my hopes up.
Anarai Aeonblade [GASM] – Guardian – DB
RIP my fair Engi and Ranger, you will be missed.
I remember the part of the living story when scarlet kidnapping queen jennah and the bombs everywhere was supposed to be some huge plot twist that everyone was supposed to look forward to and get super excited over and etc.
I do not have high hopes because of this post.
an expansion to gw2 would include no less than: 15 new areas, 1 new elder dragon, 2 new dungeons, 10 new jumping puzzles, numerous new gear combinations and stats/boons/conditions.
to say it’s better than that… I do not think that means what they think that means. I’m expecting their list will technically be longer than mine but include things like: 30 new town outfits you can buy in the gem store, 18 living story missions you can play once, 3 more sets of infinite mining picks, …
I remember the part of the living story when scarlet kidnapping queen jennah and the bombs everywhere was supposed to be some huge plot twist that everyone was supposed to look forward to and get super excited over and etc.
I do not have high hopes because of this post.
an expansion to gw2 would include no less than: 15 new areas, 1 new elder dragon, 2 new dungeons, 10 new jumping puzzles, numerous new gear combinations and stats/boons/conditions.
to say it’s better than that… I do not think that means what they think that means. I’m expecting their list will technically be longer than mine but include things like: 30 new town outfits you can buy in the gem store, 18 living story missions you can play once, 3 more sets of infinite mining picks, …
And yet, if they implemented all the stuff you said here it would not be much better because they keep focusing on the gem-store so a big part of the quality and fun is just gone. How great are 15 new zones, 1 new elder dragon, 2 new dungeons, 10 new jumping puzzles, numerous new gear combinations and stats/boons/conditions when the main game is still about a boring gold grind and dynamic events that are boring, don’t have a specific reward and keep repeating?
They need to bring the game back into the game. Undo what they did. Throw all those mini’s that were and are available in the game itself (not in the gem-store / TP / temporary living story grind). They need to allow you to farm for your items in stead of needing to grind gold to buy your items. They need to send you all over the world (like traditional quest do) they need to add all those fun elements MMO’s have. 15 new zones are useless if the game itself is boring.
Im guessing it doesn’t matter what we say here, it will be whatever Anet want it to be, given recent changes on the forums, and the binning of the dynamic event / suggestions section of the forums, pretty much sums it up, they don’t care what we have to say, it will be whatever they want, and if we don’t like it, we can move over to 1 of the other MMO’s coming out later this year.
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
Part of me thinks that someone in ANet was thinking “hey, wanna see something funny? Watch this…”
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
I just don’t understand this logic. The money that they get from the gemstore is small in comparison to the amount of money they would get by releasing a $30-60 expansion. Arenanet, and especially NCSOFT, aren’t just concerned with making enough money to keep the game live. They are concerned with making as much profit as possible and giving out a bunch of free updates without people ever having to buy anything again isn’t going to lead them to longterm profit.
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
I just don’t understand this logic. The money that they get from the gemstore is small in comparison to the amount of money they would get by releasing a $30-60 expansion. Arenanet, and especially NCSOFT, aren’t just concerned with making enough money to keep the game live. They are concerned with making as much profit as possible and giving out a bunch of free updates without people ever having to buy anything again isn’t going to lead them to longterm profit.
I think you are wrong there. There are many many people who can’t handle there money and so throw loads of money towards a gem-store. hundreds of dollars. They even like to state that fact like if they help to improve the game (in my opinion they destroy it). If you make sure game decisions are based around gem-sales (And Anet clearly does, making gold very important, putting mini’s mainly behind gold or gems and so on) you can easily get loads of money from those people that might be more then an expansion would do plus it would require less work and cost. Making a good expansion requires money and time.
The big difference is that those decisions you make in the game to get people to buy gems effect the game in a negative way (as you do not make the decisions based on quality) so on the longer run the game will not benefit from that (people will leave) and so in the long run expansions based income might be more profitable, of course thats also a bigger risk because that will only work if you have a good game to begin with. But who says Ncsoft is in it for the long run and willing to take that risk? It looks like they might just want to squeeze out as much money as they can and then move on to the next project / investment to do it there again (Wildstar for example). That might be the problem.
The LS update vs. Expansion is actually a great example of some Human psychology.
People rather get a expansion ( A big amount of content at one time (and get one every year))
than
Get the LS (A bigger amount of content, but spread over a year)
Expansions don’t evaporate after a few weeks. I can still go back and play GW1 Eye of the North till my eyes bleed and can enjoy EvE updates from Castpr to Rubicon, but kitten ed if I am allowed to replay any of the LS content.
South Sun alone is more “expansion” that the LS ever was because I can still go there.
Expansions also tend to inject massive amounts of content that actually change the game play in the form of new maps, races, skills, mechanics ect. The only game play changing things we have gotten are the 1 healing skill no one uses and a couple of resource nodes that people can’t ever get if they happened to miss said LS installment.
Everything else has been story of suspect quality, grind and gem store items. Any other changes have been a result of their rapid balance/bugfix style that happened to coincide with LS updates.
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
I just don’t understand this logic. The money that they get from the gemstore is small in comparison to the amount of money they would get by releasing a $30-60 expansion. Arenanet, and especially NCSOFT, aren’t just concerned with making enough money to keep the game live. They are concerned with making as much profit as possible and giving out a bunch of free updates without people ever having to buy anything again isn’t going to lead them to longterm profit.
Because it’s a simple profit vs effort issue. An expansion could cost $30 but take months of full dev team effort to put out. Why do that when they can sell armor sets for $10 (a third the cost of a whole expansion) and lottery boxes that require a few modelers and riggers. Two, maybe three people can make a functioning armor set in a week or two depending on how long you spend on design. Even if only 5% of the game buys it you are still likely to get more profit this way over the long term, even more so when the gambling addicts notice the RNG boxes.
It’s why they are opting for LS with Gem Store over an actual boxed expansion. They know what they are doing but only time will tell if it was the right decision.
Reading the interview gave me the thought “Anet could really use some ideas/tools from NSA for CDI”.
CDI success essentially depend on tracking intelligence. That’s typically a spy agency’s job. Maybe the CDI team can name themselves “order of whisper” in the future.
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
I just don’t understand this logic. The money that they get from the gemstore is small in comparison to the amount of money they would get by releasing a $30-60 expansion. Arenanet, and especially NCSOFT, aren’t just concerned with making enough money to keep the game live. They are concerned with making as much profit as possible and giving out a bunch of free updates without people ever having to buy anything again isn’t going to lead them to longterm profit.
Because it’s a simple profit vs effort issue. An expansion could cost $30 but take months of full dev team effort to put out. Why do that when they can sell armor sets for $10 (a third the cost of a whole expansion) and lottery boxes that require a few modelers and riggers. Two, maybe three people can make a functioning armor set in a week or two depending on how long you spend on design. Even if only 5% of the game buys it you are still likely to get more profit this way over the long term, even more so when the gambling addicts notice the RNG boxes.
It’s why they are opting for LS with Gem Store over an actual boxed expansion. They know what they are doing but only time will tell if it was the right decision.
Well in the long term they would make less money because the type of content and game designs will destroy the game. You mean they will make more compared to what they would have made in lets say the first 1,5 year if they would else have released an expansion. Thats true. However if they keep going on like this the game will most likely be pretty dead 1,5 year from now and so making them less money then, then if they would have gone for expansions. So when you see 5+ years as long term then expansion based income would be more interesting.
However like I said, it’s a bigger risk (hyping something is easier then setting a good product that will indeed still be played 5 years from now) and Ncsoft might not be interested in that long term they just move from one investment to the next all short term.
Purely from a game viewpoint the micro-transaction bad for the game but from a financial viewpoint is all depends what you want. Get more money over a way longer period or squeeze as much money out now and then move on to the next project. So when we might say it’s a failure because the game is pretty much dead 1,5 year from now Ncsoft might see it as a success. Just remember that and then don’t buy other games from them. Then in the even longer run it might hurt them after-all.
Just read over the dev interview link. As far as I could tell the entire thing was about CDI stuff. Chris seemed super excited about it so I decided to actually skim the CDI thread. There’s a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ones. Unfortunately out of all these ideas it seems people have decided what the game needs most is Player Housing and Guild Halls. And that somehow these things are going to open up new story and exciting gameplay elements. Pretty disappointing. Not to say I don’t want a Guild Hall cuz I do, but I don’t see it leading to the kind of content I thought most people wanted.
+1 for that!!! I agree with your review of the CDI thread, I’d say very very disappointing. As well as becoming so big it virtually useless unless you have been contributor from the beginning (could be better if the forum actually had a decent functioning search engine). I don’t even bother looking at it anymore.
I have my reserves regarding these new so called “epic…stuff” to come, considering how they treated content so far. They just left me with almost no trust left in what they do.
I do hope for weeklies instead of dailies because I can spend less time in the game without “falling behind” on the time-gated currencies. I think it could also send a message to ANet when they see their daily log numbers fall (assuming they fall which I think they will).
This begs the question “Why play at all if I don’t want to log in daily?”. It’s a good question everyone should ask themselves. For me it’s because I have friends that still play the game and I like that social aspect (which is game independent — we could be playing any other game to obtain that satisfaction). I log in every Friday and Tuesday for WvW nights. That’s about it until there’s something else to do which captures my attention.
Part of me thinks that someone in ANet was thinking “hey, wanna see something funny? Watch this…”
2014 is going to be an amazing year for GW2 and the community! Chris
Chris do you how many blogs and videos all the devs used to make before game launch? Do you also remember how much less communicative and more enigmatic in 2013 you guys became. In 2013 I lost complete faith in you guys because of the silence treatment. Yeah I still enjoy the game, and you’ll forgive me if I say that I have no interest in remarks like the one you posted. All I would like to see in forums in 2014 is pre launch communication like we used to have in the form of the following few words, blogs, videos, elder dragons, new explorable regions, new race perhaps, new armors and weapons for in game sales or drops not in the store for once.
So far for 2014 all we know is that there are no blogs or anything new before at least March need I go on. It’s not a big list but seeing these words would go a long way towards restoring my faith in the company that hired you.
It would be nice to hear from the old gang as well, Colin Johanson, Daniel Dociu, Kristen Perry and so on.
Based upon how much Chris pumped up CDI and LS and how it’s all working beautifully, I conclude there will not be an expansion in 2014 — or ever until ANet decides it needs to do something drastic to recover player population.
I just don’t understand this logic. The money that they get from the gemstore is small in comparison to the amount of money they would get by releasing a $30-60 expansion. Arenanet, and especially NCSOFT, aren’t just concerned with making enough money to keep the game live. They are concerned with making as much profit as possible and giving out a bunch of free updates without people ever having to buy anything again isn’t going to lead them to longterm profit.
Because it’s a simple profit vs effort issue. An expansion could cost $30 but take months of full dev team effort to put out. Why do that when they can sell armor sets for $10 (a third the cost of a whole expansion) and lottery boxes that require a few modelers and riggers. Two, maybe three people can make a functioning armor set in a week or two depending on how long you spend on design. Even if only 5% of the game buys it you are still likely to get more profit this way over the long term, even more so when the gambling addicts notice the RNG boxes.
It’s why they are opting for LS with Gem Store over an actual boxed expansion. They know what they are doing but only time will tell if it was the right decision.
Well in the long term they would make less money because the type of content and game designs will destroy the game. You mean they will make more compared to what they would have made in lets say the first 1,5 year if they would else have released an expansion. Thats true. However if they keep going on like this the game will most likely be pretty dead 1,5 year from now and so making them less money then, then if they would have gone for expansions. So when you see 5+ years as long term then expansion based income would be more interesting.
However like I said, it’s a bigger risk (hyping something is easier then setting a good product that will indeed still be played 5 years from now) and Ncsoft might not be interested in that long term they just move from one investment to the next all short term.
Purely from a game viewpoint the micro-transaction bad for the game but from a financial viewpoint is all depends what you want. Get more money over a way longer period or squeeze as much money out now and then move on to the next project. So when we might say it’s a failure because the game is pretty much dead 1,5 year from now Ncsoft might see it as a success. Just remember that and then don’t buy other games from them. Then in the even longer run it might hurt them after-all.
The biggest problem is that Anet doesn’t own the Guildwars IP. They are subsidiary of Ncsoft (who also own other MMO IP’s and soon to own a brand new one) and we only get to play the game as long as they deem it profitable to keep the servers open.
Blizzard and CCP have a vested interest in keeping their games going as long as possible because they charge fees and the games are owned by them so it’s also a matter of branding. Their name means they made it and support it and a well respected brand is one of the most valuable things a company can own.
If NCsoft crunched the numbers and found it’s better for them in the long run to milk GW2 for all it’s worth and then dump it’s dry husk by the road side and focus on another title (say Wildstar?) then that’s what they will do and will get away with it because they can just release said title under another developer name and most people won’t know they are buying a game by a publisher that may have no intention of sticking in for the long run.
People sing the praises of box sale fueled games over sub fee games but at least sub fee games have a reason to keep you playing. Cash shops work to even this out in theory but if 1 guy buys gems enough to cover another 5 people then why bother making content to keep those other 5 playing if you can just keep the one guy? New content means you have to pay someone to make it and server space to host it. Anet has also painted themselves into a corner with this whole “no intention of a paid expansion” biz. We are expecting new stuff for free which means it has to be paid for with the gem store.
I think Penny Arcade hit it on the head when it comes to MMO’s published by third parties even if the strip was about digital CCG’s.
looking forward to what you guys can do when you aren’t constrained by the LS!
