Guild Wars 2

A player that plays better will more often than not spend more time in game. That means he will be more exposed to gem store offers and has possibly spent more money on the game already.

No, that’s nonsense. There’s no evidence to back up the idea that skill equals longer play time, much less spending in the store.

Sure, someone who spends two hours on a dungeon is spending more time doing that thing than someone who spends twenty minutes on a dungeon, but that latter player might then go off and do 3-4 other things and spend just as much time that play session, or he might play every day of the week while the former player just runs the dungeon once on weekends and doesn’t log in the rest of the week. Or maybe the hard mode player is a poor college kid who couldn’t rationalize spending $10 for a fancy scarf, while the casual dungeon player has an established six figure salary and can afford to drop $10 every week or two without really noticing.

There are a lot of factors that go into whether someone bothers to spend money, and player skill is just not a significant one. You don’t want to invest in “skilled players,” you want to invest in “long term” players, and a player that spends four hours doing a champ train is just as valuable as one that spends four hours running dungeons, or for that matter one who logs in for an hour or so per week but feels like blowing $20 in gems every time she does.

The fact that entire sections of the game die off and wither is not going to be good for it.

That really depends on whether other sections grow as those sections wither. If everyone ends up doing Keg Brawl all night, that’s totally ok so long as everyone loves keg brawl. If a given type of content isn’t getting played at all, then it’s probably because people don’t want to do it, not because players aren’t being bribed enough.

They should try to make the quantity of rewards balanced across all play types, so that you never feel that a given activity is just not worth it even if you really love it, but at the same time that balance works both ways, and they should pay even more careful attention to making sure that rewards for a given activity are never so good that players feel compelled to play stuff that they don’t enjoy, just because the loot is too important to them.

Assuming they can’t get it perfect, it’s better to err on the side of having fun activities that aren’t quite as rewarding as they should be, than it is to have unfun activities that are more rewarding than other stuff in the game. The Triple Wurm and Fractals are a prime example of the latter.

The problem you’re experiencing with the SW gear isn’t really a problem. That’s not even a difficult thing to achieve. And you can grind out your badges easily anyway.

I don’t think you were actually paying attention, my complaint with the SW gear was with the LW achievements in this current arc, like the stealth one. I mean, I love stealth games, but the implementation of it in that mission was just terrible, and I dread trying to get through it perfectly, and on failure having to restart the whole thing. To me, that is gaming torture, and yet it’s the only way to unlock the trinkets that are required to complete the luminescent collections. Ideally there would be alternatives.

Also item rarity does bring value in a MMO market.
Look at the really expensive items on the TP – the fewer they are the more expensive they become and the more money people are willing to pay for them.

Yes, but that doesn’t represent any increase in value, only an increase in cost. Things that are extremely rare, and yet which nobody wants, do not retain high value (like the Legendary Harpoon Pre). The highest priced items are highly priced because the supply is well short of the demand. If they were made to have infinite supply, of course the cost would drop, but the demand generally wouldn’t. All that would change is that more people would have the things that they want to have. I’m not surging that they should be infinite, mind you, but in many cases I do think that supply could be loosened up a bit.

Now you can leave this player to keep playing aspect A for as long as he wants and for as long as he enjoys himself but sooner or later he will become bored.
Now your best bet is to bait him into trying out the rest 60% of the game because there’s a chance he might like or learn to like these other parts.

And to a point, this is fine, but only to a point. You’re right that it’s a good ideas to get players to try all aspects of the game, but you also need to respect his opinion when he does try it and does not like it. “Bribe” elements should always come in the form of one-time-only rewards, saying “you go try this thing, you get a prize.” Then players would have incentive to attempt it, once. If they love it, then they can keep doing it. If they hate it, then they never have to do it again. Bribe mechanisms should not be reoccurring, should not be something that they would consistently miss out on if they stopped doing that thing just because they don’t enjoy it.

So long story short, if they want people to try out a dungeon because maybe they’d like it, then that would justify having an achievement attached which would provide a one time reward pack, but it would not justify the dungeon rewarding bonus rewards every time it’s completed.

This happened to me. Before the first WvW season and the “mysterious unique end-season reward” i would never have touched WvW even with a stick.

Doing that meta ( a clear bait) made me appreciate an aspect of the game which I still play today. For fun. Because doing it for a while made me understand and eventually like it.

And then on the other hand you have me, who played WvW a bit when getting world completion and a little more to get the Season 2 rewards (I skipped season 1), and has not played WvW since. I do not like green eggs and ham, even after trying them, so I resent any further efforts ANet puts into nudging me towards it. Ditto sPvP and Fractals. It’s not that I’m bad at these things, I actually tend to do reasonably well, certainly not poor enough that I’m frustrated by them, I just do not enjoy them for various reasons, and while improving the elements I do not enjoy might encourage me to try them, increasing the rewards to them (like having Daily Fractals make up 1/4 of the PvE daily many days) only makes me cross.

I am all for the hard content.

Discussion seems to be veering away from the case for HM and towards Filthy Casuals Vs NEET Hardcores…

So, OP – excellent post, read it all, found myself longing for it.

My preference would probably be thus – HM dungeons and for an instanced HM Map rather than an open world variant. If it would be open world, then I would reckon it would need a strict population cap.

YES PLEASE OMG YES, I would love hard mode like gw1 had. I dont know how it realistically could be implemented in gw2 considering it is open world. It was possible in gw1 as it had private instances, heroes/henchman to fill parties, but I honestly cant see it working properly in gw2…maybe for dungeons? But not in regular openworld maps. Unless they introduced some kind of Elite areas where it didnt split off the population in the map. Just a map with Elite level difficulty similar to gw1’s FoW and UW but with open world, I think this would be much more technically feasible.

X T D, one possibility that’s gotten mentioned in later posts is having a limited population shard (25 people maximum, instead of the 100+ of normal). Maybe even tying it into Guilds (25 person content would be ideal for medium-to-large guilds).

Well that sounds more like creating a raid instance, in which case I do believe they recently finished a CDI, so who knows we might see something like it someday

I think the issue with this is that it would require a fair devotion of time, resources, etc., to implement, for something that would only be “hard” for a finite amount of time. Someone mentioned earlier in the thread how the explorable paths of dungeons were originally meant to be the HM versions of the story paths, but now there’s folks speedrunning them, sometimes soloing them, with youtube “how to’s” walking you through the process. And it wouldn’t be long before HM zones were little more than cakewalks because the same thing would happen.

I played GW1 for years, but HM wasn’t much more than a faceroll with the proper build and you could pull that off PvX. With 7 heroway, Vanquishing or even HM dungeons (with a few exceptions) took time, not effort or skill.

So to ask the devs to commit to creating split versions of existing zones when the harder versions of them would only be hard for a month or two, rather than spending that same amount of time working on brand new content that could include elements of what was proposed in the OP … i’d be far more in favor of the latter.

I’ve been suggesting hard-mode maps as often as anyone will listen to me. This is really well thought-out. I’d like to see instanced maps just for hard mode, but your solution sounds a bit more feasible, albeit confusing and probably really really difficult to balance.

Thanks for this! I really hope one day arena net will implement hard-mode.