Guild Wars 2

Purely based on my observations.

People are having problems with FotM because some players wouldn’t want to group with them. Why? Because these players couldn’t progress further and get BETTER LOOTS.

People are complaining about the Lost Shores finale one time event because of the SHINY LOOTS. The chance to get precursors, the guaranteed 20 slot bag, the accessory, and some decent exotic and rares. A lot of them got disconnected during the final part, and complained because they haven’t got the loots. A lot of them complained because they weren’t around the one-time event due to timezone differences. They didn’t expect that the rewards for it would be these ‘wondrous’ loots.

I thought this game is all about balance and being “fair and equal” in some way, wherein players wouldn’t feel inferior and superior to each other when it comes to gear/stuff, wherein there’s not much competition but cooperative gameplay. That’s why there’s level scaling. That’s why the leveling is easy because levels don’t matter a lot in GW2. That’s why most of the awesome stuff in-game and in the gem store are purely cosmetic.

But this patch: everybody is now fussing all about the loots. This has divided the community in some way. It makes me sad because I haven’t seen it coming. I don’t know if it’s just the players’ mindset or… there’s some sort of a mistake in here.

Try open world hunting…
I could build a Palace out of all the Porus Bones i have collected :-( not good when hunting for Exotic Mats …

Well no offense, but that Lost Shore event took a few hours for some servers… so to DC at the very end is really lame. The loot in question was a good chance for precursors, which are worth a hefty penny in the TP; even in a devalued market, it’s still a nice chunk of change. The 20 slot bag ain’t bad too considering making a 20 slotter is over 10g. So if you were one of the unfortunate people who couldn’t log on or, even worse, got DC’ed at the last minute…. it’s a real downer.

The FotM progression system is set up so much in the same way story and explore mode are in dungeons; no sense in doing the former when you’re at the latter stage. The problem is that this issue is further propagated by the fact that the only way to progress is to do a fractal at your max level; which is further propagated by parties only being able to do the max level available to the player with the lowest level of progression. Even if you try to help someone out, you have to run them through each level until they reach your max level… have fun running someone new to FotM 20+ times just to be at your level.

The fact that this loot exists creates it’s own problems seen through different viewing glasses, whether it’s imbalance issues, devaluing of older content or real money purchases, a gated-community, etc. Yes, there’s fussing about the loot, but it’s a combination of it’s existence (and the problems it creates) as well as the rigors of trying to get it (which create an incredibly inflexible and tedious progression system).