Guild Wars 2

So, GW2 has hit rock botton. The Q3 earnings are the lowest they have ever been for the game. Creatively, the game is stagnant. Now would be a perfect moment for ArenaNet to give up GW2 and begin working on Guild Wars 3… But they can’t. It’s not just money they’re hemorrhaging, but also talent – ArenaNet could afford to pause and build GW2 because the original Guild Wars was very successful, but now they don’t have that kind of luxury anymore.

I don’t think the game can truly be saved, tbh. Between the multiple broken promises and the overpriced DLC ArenaNet calls “Heart of Thorns”, I’m not sure players would be willing to come back no matter what ArenaNet did now. A fundamental trust has been broken.

But, assuming resurrection is still possible for this corpse, ArenaNet would need to make fundamental changes that they won’t do easily. So far, their answer has been more of the same – they’re trying to circunvent the loss of money by focusing on their shady lottery system. That’s (rather obviously) not the answer.

ArenaNet needs to think outside the box. They need to go back to what made them successful once ago, despite losing it later.

They need… To Make Tyria Great Again.

The minimum ArenaNet needs to do is:

• Remove levels from the game.

• Remove all stats from gear. Let players set and rearrange their characters’ attribute points freely. All remaning items would be cosmetic only. Refund everyone who got ascended gear.

• Remove the Black Lion Chests. No more selling of lottery tickets; all skins would become available for a fixed price.

• Refocus the game from being about grinding to being about having fun. Stop wasting resources on fake longevity that only pushes players away. Double the efforts to actually make interesting content that people want to play, as opposed to catering to compulsive behavior only.

This is only the beginning. The question is, will ArenaNet do it? Or will they just lose everything they have?

I think you need to read my signature and rethink all your suggestions.

Perhaps you need to explain your ideas further. For example, what does the game look like without any levels? Making the game “being about having fun” could mean a great many things to a great many people (Mounts, Fishing, Housing are just a few oft-mentioned items). I really have no idea what the game you are envisioning looks like.

Or does it look like PvP?

This has got to be the least logical post I’ve read. The game is far from dying, Q3 is almost identical to Q2 in terms of earnings, which is even surprising considering Q3 happened to be when a lot of other games released or got expansions, so statistically speaking, Q3 has been going well.
Only to be topped off by your recommendations which are not backed up at all and are in complete contradiction with what the game is about.

• many people, myself included, enjoy leveling their character to maximum level and having a feeling of progression.
• what are you doing with people who got legendary weapons for the convenience of stat swapping?
• RNG Black Lion Chests are a healthy way of ensuring income through keys without requiring anyone to buy them. They’re also another way for people to trade their gems to gold (gems>keys>tickets>skins>gold) that may be more advantageous sometimes, and also helps stabilizing Gem to Gold conversion rates.
• The game has never been about grinding, there’s /nothing/ requiring people to grind for BiS

overall I’d give your post a 1/10 for good spelling and structure.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I think you need to read my signature and rethink all your suggestions.

A couple of his suggestions go well beyond what your signature suggests, and right into the land of “corporate suicide”.

Not that they are inherently bad suggestions, but they are the equivalent of building a car out of lead and then having someone say “you should fix it by making it a blimp!”.

Example, no traits on armor at all, and allow the players to enhance the items to their desire? wonderful concept for a game that has not been developed yet, but Mike O. and Arenanet would have to be deliberately trying to go bankrupt and shut down if they were to implement such a thing. There is simply no way in which they would implement something like that.

So no levels. People get out of the starting instance and BAM! Level 80, all traits, all Masteries (Masteries is post level 80 leveling you know). This would remove a huge part of the game. No more hours of leveling alts. Just make a character and that’s it. You’re done.

No gear. No stats. Have you even thought about what that would do to the game economy and to the mats you want to sell? No crafting gear. No point in running dungeons to gear up alts. How about all the merchants selling low level karma gear? They’ll be useless.

Refund ascended? How will they judge the price. Is it the value of when it was made, even if it was made 3 years ago or the current price? If the mats crash in value due to this (and they will) will the refund be based on the value of mats that are now vendor price?

Remove BLC. Can you show us your numbers that will inform ANet that they’ll make more money by removing the BLC? I’m sure they would like to see this.

Refocus the game from being about grinding to being about having fun
Easy to say but oh so hard to do. Please tell us your ideas of fun things that can be put in that don’t involve grinding/repetition yet is lasting, repeatable content.

GW2 hasn’t hit rock bottom, in fact it was the only NCSoft game other than Lineage2 which didn’t take a significant hit between Q2 and Q3 in 2016. That’s pretty impressive. Think about it, its earnings didn’t drop in Q3 by any significant amount, a quarter where a lot of games do bad every year, and not to mention it also competed with Overwatch and WoW putting out a huge new expac which was reported as potentially being its best expac ever. And despite competing against this, and more, GW2 didn’t drop its earnings in Q3.

That’s actually really kittening impressive for it considering how little content has come out since HoT period, much less in Q3 alone (which amounted to a whole LW episode I think. Can’t remember if LWS3 episode 1 came out at the end of Q3 or the beginning of Q4).

So no, I don’t think GW2 is in a bad state at all. So far LWS3 has been kittening awesome, and that is being put out while they are also working on an expansion too. Assuming they keep this quality up for LWS3 (and on Reddit a dev said they hope to release a new map with every release of LWS3), not only will we be having high quality updates, but we will also be seeing the next expac drop not long after LWS3 ends either, which means we will also avoid another huge content drought like the one that came before HoT.

Game’s going strong man. Only thing that isn’t seems to be you

The idea that a four year old game doing this much money is in any kind of trouble is in itself troubling. I think people read too much into quarterly reports without any real idea of what’s expected. Several large games came out and people are playing them. That’s the nature of the business.

It’s like ratings on TV. On Election night, Smackdown Live, usually one of the highest rated shows, had poor ratings, because everyone was watching election results. During the world series, it’s ratings went down. During presidential debates its’ ratings went down.

But the show will do fine when not competing with all that new insistent stuff. The weeks without that stuff the ratings are higher.

Hardly surprising that with big titles that have recently come out, a four year old game isn’t doing better.

Wildstar, that’s doing badly.

OriOri.8724:

That’s actually really kittening impressive for it considering how little content has come out since HoT period, much less in Q3 alone (which amounted to a whole LW episode I think. Can’t remember if LWS3 episode 1 came out at the end of Q3 or the beginning of Q4).

Both episode 1 and 2 were part of Q3. Out of the Shadows has been released on July 26, Rising Flames on September 20. The new Living World season should have brought some people back to the game again, but the earnings in Q3 are even lower than Q2.

OriOri.8724:

So no, I don’t think GW2 is in a bad state at all. So far LWS3 has been kittening awesome, and that is being put out while they are also working on an expansion too.

Already working on the next expansion while parts of HoT are still missing.
Keep in mind that they also changed their release schedule from 2 weeks to 2-3 months between each episode. The amount of story (instances) however didn’t really change, just the release of new maps.

OriOri.8724:

Assuming they keep this quality up for LWS3 (and on Reddit a dev said they hope to release a new map with every release of LWS3), not only will we be having high quality updates

Depending on what you consider to be high quality. While the pacing of the story in episode 1 was ok, it felt overly rushed in the second episode. They just scratched the surface on every event and rushed from one to another. Looking at the introduction of some enemies and allies. Plus, they scrapped the journey to Ember Bay completely which lead to the question why we are exactly there . Other than that, the bosses such as the sloth queen or the Molten Dominator are ridiculous – the giant Lava Wurm is a simple defense event, you don’t even fight against it yourself.

Furthermore, Ember Bay has a huge problem with constantly changing NPC models, even Hungry Hal looked different every time you gave him an apple: Changing Hal . Other NPC’s had multiple doppelgangers within their field of view, and also changed their appearance in every map instance while keeping the same dialogues . Don’t forget the actual achievement of Hungry Hal, carrying 50 apples back and forth.
All things considered, I don’t acknowledge the current season of the Living World to be high quality.

OriOri.8724:

Game’s going strong man.

So, not really.

@Tekey.7946
Furthermore, Ember Bay has a huge problem with constantly changing NPC models,

Huge. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

The thread established that some NPCs throughout the game are randomly generated from a stock set of models. That may be lazy coding but it’s not a huge problem and it’s not a sign that the game is going downhill.

Test.8734:

• Remove levels from the game.

• Remove all stats from gear. Let players set and rearrange their characters’ attribute points freely. All remaning items would be cosmetic only. Refund everyone who got ascended gear.

• Refocus the game from being about grinding to being about having fun. Stop wasting resources on fake longevity that only pushes players away. Double the efforts to actually make interesting content that people want to play, as opposed to catering to compulsive behavior only.

Think I disagreed with everything else in the post, but these where interesting.

So basically you miss GW1 leveling/gearing and how it impacted the game/gameplay. 20 levels (basically tutorial/training), and have horizontal advancement after that by something similar to capturing skills like in GW1. While you could buy a full set of max armor, but stats where set by the “traits” system you had in GW1. And because most of the game took away most of the things people associated with grind (leveling, and grinding gear) people where left to find their own entertainment in the game.

I kind of agree on some of that, I’ve disliked the leveling in this game since the start. Not because it is a big chore or anything, but it just feels so useless. Over every iteration to the leveling system since launch I keep wondering “Why do we have these bunch of levels? They could easily have crammed all the important parts into 20 levels like in GW1”.

The closest thing I can find to a logical reason to change from the 20 to 80 levels is because “All the other MMO’s has level 60-80-100, and the typical MMO player will go: bleeh GW2 only has 20 levels man! That is weak! I’ll play World of Grinding instead and get to level 80 and be POWERFUL!”

On the other hand, while I do want to remove stats (power/precision/fero etc) from Weapons and Armor, I’d like to keep it to the trinkets. So you buy Weapons for the DAMAGE stat and place Sigils on. Armor for the defense rating and to put runes on. And trinkets for the stats. Clear separation, easier to adjust stats for build without having to buy bunch of more items, runes and sigils etc.

Honestly, lots of things they could do to change/simplify the stats system. Atm it’s designed to be just a whole lot of bloat.

But yeah, fun is “In the Eye of the Beholder”, so yeah some people like grinding, others doesn’t. GW1 was pretty unique and will be remembered for that, doesn’t mean that it was all perfect and butterflies. I personally can’t even fire up the game any longer because I just flat out can’t STAND the combat in the game after having played GW2.

Test.8734:

ArenaNet could afford to pause and build GW2 because the original Guild Wars was very successful, but now they don’t have that kind of luxury anymore.

They could afford to pause and build GW2 because they convinced NCSoft, their publisher, to loan them the money on the premise that in the long-run they would earn more money back from the game.

It’s rare that a game is funded entirely by the developers. Even indie companies (the ones that are truly independent, without a publisher) usually get external funding of some sort.

More generally I disagree completely with your assessment that GW2 is dead, or even dying. Partially because I’ve been hearing this from various people since about 2 weeks after the game came out (and I’ve heard it about every other online game or on-going franchise I’ve ever played). But mostly because it doesn’t match my experience of the number of people in-game and on the forum at all.

But in spite of that I actually like a lot of your ideas. I’d love to see an RPG with no levels, because I don’t think they serve any purpose except as an easy short-hand to indicate your progress and which areas you should be playing in.

But I don’t think it’s an easy thing to do. Without that short-hand you need another way to give people a sense of progression, beyond simply completing quests and activities or many of them will get bored and frustrated because they feel like they’re not really achieving anything overall.

I think it could work in a single-player game where you can show your progress in other ways. Dragon Age Inquisition for example has maps which start off as absolute chaos – a civil war raging across the landscape, deadly monsters everywhere, people injured, lost and starving…and you gradually transform it into a safe, and liveable area, so you see the progress you’re making in the game world itself rather than your character sheet. GW2 does that with event chains but the problem there is it’s not specific to you and it can reset as fast as you make progress. Save a town from centaurs and by the time you’ve been thanked by the grateful populous and are ready to move on the same centaurs are attacking again.

Elder Scrolls Online, did something similar recently. They still have levels but the entire game is scaled to max level and if you’re below that you’re scaled up too. You only have the skills you’ve unlocked but your stats are maxed and it means you can play anything in any order.

People are really struggling with it. A lot of people simply cannot grasp the point of playing anything except the previously designated end game areas. You don’t need XP to level to enter those areas so in their eyes there is absolutely no point in ever doing anything else. (I don’t understand this myself, to me the point is to see the maps, play through the storylines…actually play the game instead of seeing it as something that’s in the way of getting to the end.)

Other people want to play everything but feel lost. They don’t know what map they “should” go to next or what order to do quests in. Do they do all the starter zones first? Do they do the main quest in an area before the side quests? Before it was simple: you did quests at or below your level ad. Now there’s no clear direction and it leaves a lot of people confused.

I still think it could work, but I think the game needs to be designed that way right from the very beginning. Trying to modify a game that relies on a levelling system to work without it just makes a mess.

Same with removing stats from gear and just letting people pick whatever. Firstly it removes what many people see as the main reason to play – if they’re not getting new gear or stats they have no incentive to bother with that content. And secondly it leaves you with loads of choices and no restrictions.

It also opens it up to issues with builds being OP. I’d love to be able to put all my rangers points into Condition Damage, Power and Toughness with nothing else but I’m told that combination isn’t available because it would be massively over-powered. I’m sure there’s other examples too.

I’d love to see Black Lion Chests removed. I think gambling real money for virtual items is a horrible system. But remember that the point of your thread was that Anet is not making any money and needs more. Removing one of the ways they make money, apparently the single most successful one too (according to NCSoft’s reports) is not going to do that.

Finally I agree with everyone else that you need to clarify what making it about fun means. Huge maps with lots of hidden things to find? Big meta-events? Open-world PvP? Player-housing? More emotes for role-playing?

How does one measure success? GW1 had less players after 4 years than GW2 does.

GW2 makes them more money.

Danikat.8537:

More generally I disagree completely with your assessment that GW2 is dead, or even dying. Partially because I’ve been hearing this from various people since about 2 weeks after the game came out (and I’ve heard it about every other online game or on-going franchise I’ve ever played). But mostly because it doesn’t match my experience of the number of people in-game and on the forum at all.

The end is nigh! Complete agreement with this, my personal favourite was watching someone claim this in the 2 days head-start.

No real opinions on BLC, I saw them for what they where at launch, and blankly ignored them ever since. If they make money on them, good for them.

Danikat.8537:

Finally I agree with everyone else that you need to clarify what making it about fun means. Huge maps with lots of hidden things to find? Big meta-events? Open-world PvP? Player-housing? More emotes for role-playing?

Yeah, this game has so many different people with so many different opinions and definitions of fun. Kind of the problem with open-world and MMO games. They try to carter to everyone.

For the record, “Huge maps with lots of hidden things to find?” I’m down with that! That, and you made me tempted to try ESO >_< I’m trying to stop testing more MMO games!

In general really liking your post Danikat. Also warning, I’m going to rant my heart out now! Skip the rest of the post if you don’t like walls of text, lots of dreamy stuff about re-designing gw2, and prefer your sanity as it is.

Regarding gearing and stats:

While ideally I would agree with the idea of setting up your own stats and all that, I don’t think it is feasible in this game. But I do have a few ideas for how I think it could be improved (naturally).

poked at it in my previous post, but basically remove the prefix/stats from weapons and armor.

• Weapons = Damage + Sigil
• Armor = Defence + Runes
• Trinkets = Stats

You would still want an exotic weapon for having good damage, exotic armor for having a higher defence rating. And you use trinkets to change stats.

This saves the need to have to change out armors and weapons, and often also sigils/runes for every build. You can use the same runes/sigils with a different build for example. Also less items to carry around if you bring some trinkets to tweak stats instead of multiple armor/weapon sets.

Finally, if combined with the level stuff I mentioned in the next post, you could even standardise the stats for all armors/weapons/trinkets based on quality instead. To clarify this also means that item progression is through quality and not level. A white starting sword will always do the same damage no matter what map/level you’re at.

• White/Blue = single stat
• Green = Dual stat
• Yellow/Orange = Tristat
• No idea where to toss in 4 stats in this, probably just as alternative orange/red options as is.

The negatives of this system:

• You lose some minor fine-tuning of stats.
• You lose the ability to have 2 different stats set on 2 different weapons for swap (think this is the only major loss)
• Would remove the one mechanical benefit the legendary weapons got (replace it with always making all skins free to apply for legendary weapons instead, most of pve only use zerk stats anyways)
• It would make less demand for lower level stuff, that already is flooding the market. (counter weight this by having less craft-able variations of the same thing. Ironically making most crafting less of an RSI chore.)

(More to come… Omnious)

Danikat.8537:

Elder Scrolls Online, did something similar recently. They still have levels but the entire game is scaled to max level and if you’re below that you’re scaled up too. You only have the skills you’ve unlocked but your stats are maxed and it means you can play anything in any order.

People are really struggling with it. A lot of people simply cannot grasp the point of playing anything except the previously designated end game areas. You don’t need XP to level to enter those areas so in their eyes there is absolutely no point in ever doing anything else. (I don’t understand this myself, to me the point is to see the maps, play through the storylines…actually play the game instead of seeing it as something that’s in the way of getting to the end.)

Other people want to play everything but feel lost. They don’t know what map they “should” go to next or what order to do quests in. Do they do all the starter zones first? Do they do the main quest in an area before the side quests? Before it was simple: you did quests at or below your level ad. Now there’s no clear direction and it leaves a lot of people confused.

I’m fascinated by this, people keep wanting to play “open world” games, but also want to be rail-road’ed. But most games tend to solve that by using the “story”, and GW2’s story would work pretty decently for this. And others like me is just going to run around trying to find every nook anyway and doesn’t care about that or other restrictions.

Danikat.8537:

I still think it could work, but I think the game needs to be designed that way right from the very beginning. Trying to modify a game that relies on a levelling system to work without it just makes a mess.

I would agree if not for the massive use of the up/down leveling system GW2 uses. It already largely negates most of the leveling in the game. For good and/or bad. On the whole I like it, but honestly think that it could be replaced with something like this:

Alternative option for leveling:

• Set all base stats to 1000 from level 1
• Remove all stat upgrades from leveling
• Remove up/down scaling
• Stat progression is now gear based (somewhat horizontal, depending on options)
• Advancement is now based on unlocking skills/traits (horizontal)
• This removes the weird artifacts from up/down scaling, like the weird critical hit rates
• Reduce to smaller amount of levels, give significant upgrades (unloks, traits, skills, heropoints. Depends on leveling design)
• Alternatively remove leveling entirely, progress by capturing heropoints, map completion giving hero points, chain events give hero points etc.
• Depending on which level design, lock quality types of gear to levels. 5 for blue, 10 for green, 15 for rare, 20/max for exotic for ex.

Note: the higher level areas would still be harder since they’re balanced (well somewhat…) against you having access to more gear stats and traits/skills etc. This would probably need some tweaking, but shouldn’t be far off as is. But honestly most open world PVE content is way too easy anyway.

Danikat.8537:

I think it could work in a single-player game where you can show your progress in other ways. Dragon Age Inquisition for example has maps which start off as absolute chaos – a civil war raging across the landscape, deadly monsters everywhere, people injured, lost and starving…and you gradually transform it into a safe, and liveable area, so you see the progress you’re making in the game world itself rather than your character sheet. GW2 does that with event chains but the problem there is it’s not specific to you and it can reset as fast as you make progress. Save a town from centaurs and by the time you’ve been thanked by the grateful populous and are ready to move on the same centaurs are attacking again.

Honestly thought this what was they where going to do with the event system when they talked about it before release. Or at least set all events into a sort of chain system. Say for ex Kessex hills, that you had a continual struggle against the centaurs, but as long as people where there and beat the events back, the centaurs would be thrown out of the map. And having periodical Breakout events to try to regain a foothold on the map.

Basically if players camped a map, they would retain control of it. As soon as players went elsewhere (bored, little to do etc), the chain events would regain foothold and start expanding. So if you came to a map that nobody been in for a while it would be overrun, and you’d have to fight defensive battles to beat the centaurs back from sieges around the last towns etc.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen

It still wouldn’t let you make a lasting change in the world, but it would at least let you feel a change depending on what you did. And would be a good way to make players cycle maps.

Neural.1824:

Not that they are inherently bad suggestions, but they are the equivalent of building a car out of lead and then having someone say “you should fix it by making it a blimp!”.

Example, no traits on armor at all, and allow the players to enhance the items to their desire? wonderful concept for a game that has not been developed yet, but Mike O. and Arenanet would have to be deliberately trying to go bankrupt and shut down if they were to implement such a thing. There is simply no way in which they would implement something like that.

See, nothing less than radical change would work.

The issue with the earnings, which ultimately translates to players losing interest, is not ragequiters – let’s be honest, very few people actually ragequit. People who are angry are people who still care.

People who leave the game are those who stop caring. Not people who see a single change – skill X nerfed or feature Y removed -, rather people who pile disappointment over disappointment, over and over again, until there are more reasons to leave the game than to stay.

That kind of thing is not undone through small changes. Adding a new map won’t fix it, even if it were a good map. It’s simply not enough to make people care. Doing what ArenaNet has done – changing how the Black Lion Chests work – definitely won’t bring anyone back.

An expansion could have done it – it would create interest, it would make people pat attention to the game again, it would be a time to add many changes to the game – but HoT failed to do any of those things. If anything, it added more reasons for people to leave or to stay away from the game. The result is that even a new expansion likely wouldn’t be able to do it now, even if it were very different from HoT.

ArenaNet needs to do something big. Something so big that it would make the news, turn heads, and grab a lot of attention; which would be the first step in making everyone who left to actually pay attention to the game. It also needs to be something so big that it addresses a lot of complains about the game , instead of changing only feature Y or skill X, in order to be something impactful enough to make even the disillusioned players to come back. And it needs to be a huge show of goodwill, to make players believe in ArenaNet again.

Could it end up being corporative suicide? Sure, that’s a risk. It’s arguable, though, if corporative suicide is worse than being a slowly rotting corpse.