Guild Wars 2

So recently if you frequently keep yourself updated with gw2, the reddit posts, the blog posts, the dev interviews, one thing you may notice lately is the comment from the devs about making everything more rewarding. Champion rewards inc and dungeon rewards inc. It seems a lot, and I MEAN A LOT, of stuff implemented in gw2 has been rewards for content to create an incentive. Weapon skins weapon skins weapon skins. Thats usually what they throw in to create incentive. That or crafting materials. etc.

There is a huge problem here. First I need to acknowledge thakittens great they are adding new rewards to champions and gold to dungeons, but I think philosophically ANET is on a very wrong route. Right now, it seems that anet is simply trying to make everything more rewarding in the game by adding certain items as obtainable as completion for this content. Like I said, a lot of MMO’s have followed this trail, but this is completely wrong!!!

The true reward that comes from content in game should be the fun you experience! If you have to put 1 gold at the end of most explorable paths, or boss fights, that should tell you that the content is not intrinsically fun. It will only temporarily satisfy the players, because once they have that skin, or gold, they have no reason to come back. However if the content is just very fun to do, then that will create an everlasting incentive to come back.

There are a couple pieces of content in the game that are like this. WvW and PvP. Mainly because each time you go back, the battle can be immensely different! Alongside that, fighting massive groups of players and defending towers is just fun. I dont care if I get gold, lose gold, get a skin or what. I just do it because its fun. PVE content in this game is lacking in its fun factor. But recently I did encounter two examples of pve content that I played just for fun! Those were southsun survival and aspect arena. I have played each for more than an hour at a time, and they are mini games!! Like with WvW, I play these because they are fun, and not because I need a reward. The reward I receive is the fun!

Conclusion?? Content, mainly pve, including the living story needs to be more entertaining to the players. Its about making a boss fight mechanics really interesting and challenging. Or developing a really compelling story to keep players coming back. Anet, and I point out Colin Johansson, paralleled the Living Story to the a tv show, to which you come back each week to update yourself on. But guys, creating all these meta achievements, gemstore items, and grind rewards as incentive for the Living Story is like paying people to watch your tv show because its too boring. Thats where the true problem lay. Anyway if you read all of this, I appreciate it.

I understand where you are coming from here, however for many such as myself the content is already really amazing. My brother and I play pretty casually, but we are both constantly looking for a fun jumping puzzle or champion to take down just the two of us. Often, after defeating a boss that was really fun, we are left thinking “that was awesome, too bad it only dropped a blue item that we can’t even use”. I think this is the part that the developers are starting to address, and I for one look forward to what they will do with it.

All of that said, they do need to keep your concerns in mind as they go forward here, and make sure that content does not suffer.
-Cheers

Thanx. Im not saying there isnt fun content in this game. There is! Im just offering a different conceptual approach to making things more rewarding by making them more fun. The criticism will only be valid if they continue to go with this process of adding item rewards to content for incentive.

I agree with both the OP and unseenone… the content can and definitely needs to be continually built to be “fun,” but in the current state of the game (it’s getting better with the updates!) it definitely is a problem when you spend a large amount of time doing something fun to only be rewarded with trash.

This has definitely been the biggest issue for me with the game since launch, and I’m ecstatic that Anet is addressing the issue.

Always could use moar SHINIES! (unique shinies…preferably)

While I do agree with some of the things the OP in some respects that things need to change to make the game more compelling… but the number 1 thing that would make the game more compelling for me is better loot… I could care less if what I get is still only worth 15-20s the fact I got an exotic over a rare or a rare over a masterwork item drives me to play more… and with the lack of actual loot (boss chests being excluded) from foes being usable or at least “desirable” to have had drop.. it just gets boring seeing the same awful blue and green drops…

I think the OP misses it around reward. Yes, a game must be intrinsically rewarding. We play because it’s fun and if it isn’t, well…

But, in games, and especially in the MMO, there must be extrinsic rewards as well. Character development requires gold or some form of currency. Food costs. Waypoints cost. T3 armor is around 120g. Everything of value found in the games costs something. Actually, since we don’t create ex nihilo, this is modeled on real life. The game has an economy and we all participate in it. There is nothing wrong with this.

And, this is why Anet’s focus on extrinsic rewards in game is not misguided, but rather the OP is. Anet is correct in noticing that felt reward in the game has not been happening for a lot of players. They are addressing this and hopefully the extrinsic rewards will rise to meet the intrinsic rewards of the gameplay itself. The game is a lot of fun to play.

I think everyone’s missing the point entirely.

First the Champs are still basically a RNG Box with a mostly TERRIBLE drop table that when you throw enough bodies at it, will get opened. Even a Champ Wraith or Champ Noble/Jester will eventually DIE to even the worst players in the game and not even give a better chance at rewards than the ones I can already solo in 50+ zones on a terribad underpowered ranger … (lol, “group” content)

Second… this is more about COF COIN farming…. they obviously gave up on trying to fix the dungeons after the overhaul to AC just further disenfranchised so many people. So now they’re just going to do what they should have done back in October when it was first pointed out to them that certain paths could be finished in 7 minutes or less <— which made a laughing stock of their Diminishing Returns on tokens… (some actually got precursors from this idiocy by forging the Exotics bought with those tokens anyway!).

.

Someone obviously crunched the numbers. I think we all know who … reading between the lines of his comments in the BLTF could show some tacit admission that inflation “does indeed need to be kept in check”. Well they just nudged that inflation back in the other direction. We’ll see how long it lasts….

It feels worse because the reward system was so unnecessarily dire at the start of the game. Now they are working hard to catch up to where it should have been and it feels like its all rewards, rewards, rewards. Once the work is complete and the meta boss fiasco is sorted, hopefully the emphasis will shift back to story and content and people can enjoy just playing without worrying where the next shiny will come from.

The rewards themselves never were too bad, the prices we see day in day out on the tp are, they make the rewards look small…

Fun content can only get you so far. After playing something fun once, twice, or even five times, people will move on. Devs want to give players a reason to repeat content, it gives them time to create new content.

I think the reason is because in wvw a player can develop a character to have a legitimate role and fill a niche within the wvw content.
In PvE players are going on scripted rides, collecting tickets for novelty prizes, and the content doesn’t really have niches that want/need/care about long-term players (apart from farming).

IMO, GW2 is still better than the other mmorpgs I’ve played. However, is just a better way of doing what every mmorpg seems to do. I can’t wait for EQN reveal tomorrow, just to see what ideas they’ve come up with for a sandbox mmorpg. I am curious.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Thanx. Im not saying there isnt fun content in this game. There is! Im just offering a different conceptual approach to making things more rewarding by making them more fun.

That’s what single player games do.

Unfortunatelly, MMOs don’t need to make fun content. Admittedly, it’s hard to make something fun – the definition itself of “fun” is subjective, it’s the kind of content that players go through somewhat quickly while it takes a lot of time to build, and so on.

But the main lesson MMORPG players have taught developers is that they don’t really care about fun. Grind will do. Being given bigger rewards will make those players go through whatever content, much like a donkey with a carrot in front of its head will walk through whatever trying to eat. Human beins should be smarter than that, but it appears many are not.

That’s why MMORPGs are mediocre games. That’s why “kill ten rats” quests are the norm, not the exception. That’s why MMOs have such bad storylines. Or why levelling consist of 1 on 1 fights against melee enemies that have no interesting ability or any variation other than doing some kind of knock down/stun once in a while.

Because MMORPG players don’t care about any of that. All they want are rewards.

ArenaNet has learned this, some time after release. See the last Southsun event as evidence. It had very mediocre storytelling (do you even remember when was it that Kiel learned it was Canach behind all that mess?). Very mediocre dynamic events (they even recycled the instigator event twice in the same map!). It left behind a very mediocre boss (the Karka Queen is basically a Karka Champion with more health). But, a lot of people played in Southsun during the event. Why? 200% buff to Magic Find, the instigator events gave a guaranteed chest every time they were done. In other words, rewards.

I don’t believe ArenaNet will actually make Orr fun. I also don’t believe ArenaNet will fix champions so they are interesting enemies, instead of big HP sponges with slow hard hitting attacks. ArenaNet has no reason to. Just changing them to give more rewars will have the same effect – more people playing the game, even if they are not having fun – and it’s much easier.

So after reading some of your responses I think Ive been able to agree with some.

First I have to re-evaluate my previous points, because all the instances I mentioned of fun, were pvp content. There is a reason for that. The experience when playing a content against other players can be different everytime, because they arn’t npcs and dont follow a script. So its easier to repeat WvW or Southsun Survival and find diversity.

Its obviously impossible at this point to have a piece of PVE content that is repeatable on that same scale. I certainly do think Anet is taking the right direction though in revamping the dungeons and world bosses. The first reason is that some of the fights are just boring. A lot of the fights in this game are just spank the fight types of bosses. Im sure they could throw in some interesting mechanics to really create diversity. The world boss fights especially. The jungle wurm, the shatterer, shadow behemoth, etc, all have extremely easy fights that require you to stand still and press 1. This is also true with some dungeons.

So they need to revamped for the lack of quality in some instances. But continuing to slightly polish or completely overhaul certain PVE content already in the game may be necessary as a continuation in the future. Simple to keep things fresh. The Living World is obviously a great tool to do this.

The main tool to drive PVE content in the end may be the Story though. They’ve made it pretty clear that we havent yet understood the full magnitude or theme of this current story arc. They have said several times it will become more clear as the year goes on, but the true villains and plot in play are still nebulous. Perhaps once we finally start learning these things, people really will gain interest, a strong interest in the lore, and play the content simply because they want to see whats going to happen next. Its all on them to write a compelling script though. They did with gw1 so we’ll see what happens this time.