Guild Wars 2

Lately a lot of vocal players have expressed frustrations with things like NPE, saying it doesn’t address the veteran players. Others have expressed frustrations with the direction of the game moving towards more overly-casual and simplistic game play experience. I have to wonder if there is even enough of us active to justify Anet even feeling the need to do something for those wanting something more. What would more difficult content even look like? Would it just be greater enemy hp pools and less player damage or would it require thinking from the players and coordination as a team? Do you even think that there are enough active players who are ready for more difficult content?

I was reading a thread by another player who was lamenting on the lack of coordinated tactics and strategy in WvW. They had hoped that WvW would be comparable to DAoC. I had never played it but apparently there was lots of defense strategies and coordination required. Apparently it was really challenging requiring some thought instead of mindless zerg like combat. Apparently WvW was heading that way with the introduction of Orbs, but then removed due to exploitation – didn’t know that.

So then I began to wonder about direction of the game. It’s no secret that zerg combat seems to be very normal. Just watch world boss train, EotM, and I suppose WvW combat (our server is small, so no large zergs there) Coordination can be brought in, but most of the time the zerg mentality wins out over commanders who are trying to be clever. I don’t know how many times in EotM I’ve seen the zerg train split because the commander wanted to try something different. Most of the players seem to like the zerg mentality and the relative few that didn’t have either left or put up with it. Not surprising, since the game is designed to be casual.

So, what could Anet do? I’m no expert in game design for MMO’s, but I would think more difficult content can take a variety of forms. Currently we have Teq and Triple Threat Jungle Wurm. We have dungeons and fractals for the player wanting more difficult content, but do you think there could be more? Do you think there’s room for a Hard Mode like in GW1, even though it’s probably impossible to implement due to lack of instanced combat. Maybe they could bring in 8 – 10 man dungeons, rework WvW to be more rewarding for defense, or different PvP game modes like they had in GW1?

So here are some final questions:

1. Do you think there is already enough challenging content that requires strategy and coordination in this game?

2. If Anet did design more challenging content, would there even be enough players to play it?

3. Is the zerg mentality too strong to even prevent some development?

4. What would more challenging content in GW2 look like?

Thanks for reading.

I think that better enemy AI in PVE would create harder content and actually make the game play the way it was intended. No more stack and smack would be a good thing.
The game needs high risk high reward content and it needed it a very long time ago.
People want a challenge but also a good reward. GW1 did this very well with HM instanced dungeons like UW and DoA.
I just logged in after a month break and found myself doing Teq then pretty much getting bored again and started playing another game.
Maybe difficult content might be too little too late for many

Stormcrow.7513:

I think that better enemy AI in PVE would create harder content and actually make the game play the way it was intended. No more stack and smack would be a good thing.
The game needs high risk high reward content and it needed it a very long time ago.
People want a challenge but also a good reward. GW1 did this very well with HM instanced dungeons like UW and DoA.
I just logged in after a month break and found myself doing Teq then pretty much getting bored again and started playing another game.
Maybe difficult content might be too little too late for many

I guess that’s my point exactly. Maybe all those who like that sort of challenge have moved on making it not worth their while to develop it. This leaves the majority of the player base liking the zerg style simplified approach so Anet would dare not make things more challenging otherwise they might alienate those players too.

It’s bit like pandoras box (jar), Zergs are they way to win I think we’re far beyond ‘becoming’.

Much more difficult content tends not to be worth it in games like this. You end up with content only a small portion of the overall population can do, which isn’t a good use for your resources. And the people who can do it tend to learn how to go through it quickly and then need more as they burn it out far faster than more can be made. So they’ll leave anyway, till new stuff comes out.

Anet focuses on rolling out content everyone can do, since it keeps as much of the population busy with it as they can.

Mediocrity in gameplay doesn’t sell gems with me but then again I am not their target audience.
I had such high hopes for GW2 and while it is a good game it just really isn’t what I had envisioned it to be.
I loved doing the dungeons in GW1 and while most are “ok” for GW2 the only real one that is truely fun is Aetherblade path, which has terrible rewards for the effort.
GW2 will be on the backburner for me until there is significant content that is not only challenging and rewarding but fun.

Well I must admit this games best thing is its flaw.

I’m coming from ff 14 a realm reborn. Played the game and loved it. But I noticed……every day I logged in, ran the exact same dungeon twice, logged off. Did this daily for the best armor. It wasn’t fun. But getting that new armor was great. I was strong and powerful. Then right after new dungeons came out with better armor, then I had to repeat. I had to keep doing the same boring thing over ABC over and over and realized this is the game forget it I’m going back to gw2.

Gw2 is very fun and exciting and has some challenges. If I don’t want to run a certain dungeon owell don’t need to. But it leaves that issue, never getting stronger,never feeling like I’m progressing. So it’s hard to say which ideas better. Truthfully if they added harder content then it would require a greater reward. People who are pure casual would become upset, and then this game would be like every other mmo out. They need new content though for sure not the living world but an expansion.

These complaints have been voiced for a long time now. Virtually every mob army created — and the ones revised — since launch have been objectively harder than the mob armies in game at launch (after the beta mob nerfs). Karka, Molten Alliance, Toxic, Aether, the Risen and Krait revamps, the Mordremoth mobs — they’re all harder than armies like Ogres, Centaurs, etc.

So what’s happened? Well, several things.

1. Players learned the new mobs’ moves. This is always going to happen. Once the moves are known, the better players are going to use the game’s invulnerability frames to avoid damage. Once they’ve mastered this, they perceive the content as too easy.
2. An awful lot of the game’s players are at max level and in Ascended or Exotic gear. Down-leveling does not put those characters at the same degree of effectiveness as an on-level character in blue or green gear would be.
3. Events that were created using the new or revised mobs were being left undone on an awful lot of servers. Even with mega-servers, toxic events, for example, often seem to sit not attempted. Why? I’m not sure, but the most likely reason seems to be that the effort-to-return ratio on harder events is not favorable. Players would rather cluster into large herds at the guaranteed rare chest events. ANet’s metrics are going to tell them that players seem to prefer events with better rewards to events with greater challenge.

TL:DR? At the end of the day, Anet has been trying to ramp up the challenge by the use of different mob mechanics in new and revised mob armies, but because of the PvE learning curve, down-leveling issues and reward over challenge preferences, this increased challenge is either nonexistent or under-utilized.

I don’t know how many new vs old players there are. But what I do know is that new players aren’t likely to buy gems until they’ve invested a decent amount of time into the game to make the purchase worthwhile.

I’d also like to add that as a player that has been around since the betas I do NOT want difficult content if it means not being in a specific map at a specific time will result in failure.

Tequatl and Tripple Threat are all good and well but it’s unrealistic to make more of those kinds of events until people don’t have to worry about having the proper numbers to even think about finishing them.

Anet needs to adjust the scaling so they can be completed with fewer people and scale up to be difficult for the huge numbers that might show up. Until they can nail that down then I say no thanks to more difficult content.

Anet has done a lot to break up the zerg mentality. I’m not even sure why people haven’t noticed. Take the last events created by Anet:

The Marionette
Triple Threat
Escape from Lion’s Arch
The Battle for Lion’s Arch
The Queen’s Pavillion
Dry Top

Each of these events are “zergable” to a point and then stop being zergable, particularly if you want the maximum reward. Zerging is the least efficient way to go.

The marionette divided people onto platforms of five, but it was still massively popular.

Triple thread divides the zerg into three, but you still won’t beat it zerging. You need organized groups with the 50 further divided into different teams including a condition team and reflect team.

The best reward in Escape from Lion’s Arch involved rescuing as many citizens as we could before the miasma levels reached max. We started off zerging that event like a train, but in the end, we were all working different areas of the city. The corridor I worked usually had about 6-8 people clearing it. Divide and conquer.

The Battle for Lion’s Arch only allowed 50 people to get the buff for each of the three holograms and all three had to be defeated to win. At the end it ended up in a five man instance.

The Queens Pavillion could be zerged and often was…but it was terribly inefficient and the worst way to get rewarded. Having ten guys on each boss, coodorinated, meant that they didn’t scale up and you could control the experience. Kill Boom Boom first and everyone else follows suit…giving you gold or sometimes silver reward much faster than you could ever get a bronze by zerging (which means you could run it more often).

Dry Top rewards are much much cheaper if you can get to tier 6, but zerging isn’t the way to do it. When I do it with my wife, we try to do the least popular events to try to push the tier higher, so the rewards are cheaper. Zerging isn’t the best way to do Drytop, but not everyone knows it.

Anet has provided us lots of ways not to zerg, and it’s up to us, the playerbase, to educated the rest of the playerbase as to why zerging in some places is simply bad.

You’ve got to remember that a lot of people who want difficult content are also the people who pick optimum builds and get tactics from web walkthroughs. The existing explorable dungeons are genuinely hard without those, so just how hard does any new content have to be?

For example, (almost?) nobody soloed Lupicus until many months after the game release and all PUGS fought him at range. He was seen as a tough long fight. Now PUGS expect everyone to melee him, even though it would be very painful for a beginner to learn the animations and dodges in play (rather than watching a walk through).

Stooperdale.3560:

You’ve got to remember that a lot of people who want difficult content are also the people who pick optimum builds and get tactics from web walkthroughs. The existing explorable dungeons are genuinely hard without those, so just how hard does any new content have to be?

For example, (almost?) nobody soloed Lupicus until many months after the game release and all PUGS fought him at range. He was seen as a tough long fight. Now PUGS expect everyone to melee him, even though it would be very painful for a beginner to learn the animations and dodges in play (rather than watching a walk through).

Exactly, that’s the practice effect.

@ Vayne

Agreed, but only Dry Top of the stuff you mentioned is still available. I still see zergs in Dry Top, but they’re smaller than in other zones. The biggest I see are in CS where it’s a struggle to get gold credit on something like the Plinx events (pre-Abom).

There’s an easy way to find out if there are too few players for such content. Up the rewards by a significant margin in the Twilight Arbor Aetherpath and see how many people bite.

Vayne.8563:

Anet has done a lot to break up the zerg mentality. I’m not even sure why people haven’t noticed. Take the last events created by Anet:

The Marionette
Triple Threat
Escape from Lion’s Arch
The Battle for Lion’s Arch
The Queen’s Pavillion
Dry Top

Each of these events are “zergable” to a point and then stop being zergable, particularly if you want the maximum reward. Zerging is the least efficient way to go.

The marionette divided people onto platforms of five, but it was still massively popular.

Triple thread divides the zerg into three, but you still won’t beat it zerging. You need organized groups with the 50 further divided into different teams including a condition team and reflect team.

The best reward in Escape from Lion’s Arch involved rescuing as many citizens as we could before the miasma levels reached max. We started off zerging that event like a train, but in the end, we were all working different areas of the city. The corridor I worked usually had about 6-8 people clearing it. Divide and conquer.

The Battle for Lion’s Arch only allowed 50 people to get the buff for each of the three holograms and all three had to be defeated to win. At the end it ended up in a five man instance.

The Queens Pavillion could be zerged and often was…but it was terribly inefficient and the worst way to get rewarded. Having ten guys on each boss, coodorinated, meant that they didn’t scale up and you could control the experience. Kill Boom Boom first and everyone else follows suit…giving you gold or sometimes silver reward much faster than you could ever get a bronze by zerging (which means you could run it more often).

Dry Top rewards are much much cheaper if you can get to tier 6, but zerging isn’t the way to do it. When I do it with my wife, we try to do the least popular events to try to push the tier higher, so the rewards are cheaper. Zerging isn’t the best way to do Drytop, but not everyone knows it.

Anet has provided us lots of ways not to zerg, and it’s up to us, the playerbase, to educated the rest of the playerbase as to why zerging in some places is simply bad.

only two of the things you mentioned are still in the game though

DragonWhimsy.6489:

There’s an easy way to find out if there are too few players for such content. Up the rewards by a significant margin in the Twilight Arbor Aetherpath and see how many people bite.

See there’s the rub. I know a lot of people who do difficult content just for rewards, and then, they get frustrated because they’re not having fun.

You can’t possibly tell me everyone who raided in WoW likes raiding. There were some, sure, but many people I knew raided for gear and couldn’t wait until they could stop.

So raising the rewards would simply pressure people to play content they don’t enjoy.

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it. Challenge should be enough that you have to pay attention, learn certain patterns, and get things right most of the time, but should not require perfection.

2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious if your succeed and frustrating if you fail. The best content follows the rule of three, do one activity successfully, then have to do it a second time with slightly more complications, and then do it a third time with even more complications. All three rounds should be forgiving of minor stumbles, and you should never have to repeat the same sequence more than three times in an event (I’m talking broad objectives, I’m not saying each boss should die in three hits).

3. DPS checks are not hard. If content can be done easily when everyone is in full Ascended Zerk, but not when everyone is in full tank greens, then that is not hard content, it’s just gear-check, and nobody should be proud at succeeding in it. You didn’t do well, your shorts did well. Content should scale to the stats of the group, with better stats allowing you to win it faster, but not being necessary to overall success.

4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.

5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content. Anything achievable via “hard” content should be equally as achievable using “casual” content, it just might come to you faster, for example if a “hard” event takes more time and has a greater chance of complete failure, it might reward twice as many tokens towards a cool reward, allowing you to acquire it faster, but there should not be rewards that can ONLY be gained through hard content.

6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards. If this is the case, then you just shouldn’t have “hard” content because that’s clearly not what the players want. You should reward players adequately for the time spent, they should never say “I would do that but I’d make half as much as if I did this other thing,” but so long as they are adequately rewarded, if they still don’t want to do it, then they don’t want to do it, make it more FUN, not more rewarding.

7. As for breaking up the zerg, this is not hard to do, so long as you force it to happen. So long as everyone can move in a pack, they will move in a pack, because it’s the path of least resistance. The only way to avoid it is to make events in which you MUST engage multiple spread out targets at once, in which even 150 people on one only is impossible to win with, and you also need to convey this information clearly to the players. If they have to bang their heads against the wall or visit an outside blog to figure this out then you’ve failed, the event trackers need to make clear that some people need to go left and some right, and how many are needed at each, so that a totally new player who doesn’t know the event can figure out at a glance where he will be most useful. You have to balance out rewards and difficulty between events, otherwise people will just overload the easiest/more rewarding path.

Ohoni.6057:

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content….

3) dps checks, depends on the execution, there are levels of dps check, some dps checks are basically seeing if you can skillfully do damage without messing up. Ideally, gear should not be a consideration
4) only needing half the people to know what they are doing to succeed is a fail when it comes to test. If someone knows half the problems on a test, have they demonstrated knowledge? most places wouldnt pass someone with a 50%
5)hard content isnt better, but it should reward more, just like a 3 pointer is worth more than a 2 pointer in basketball.
6) untrue, if you get the same reward for something, but are more likely to fail it/require more effort to get good enough to beat it then it should reward more. If it doesnt then it people may not do it, not because they dont want to, but because it is ineffecient. how many people would aim for a bullseye in darts, if it was worth the same or less than other parts. How fun would darts be if the entire board all gave the same point value. The depth of the game goes down drastically with this concept.

Im not saying everything has to be super hard, but challenge is a primary tenant of game design. Rewarding skilled play is one of the key methods of balancing how the game is played.

I think some items can be exclusive to certain content, but that goes beyond just being hard, i think different activities should reward you more appropriately to begin with. WvW items should primarily be in WvW. Fractal useful items in fractals. Merchanting items primarily from merchanting.
There can be some cross obtaining of items, but the most effecient way should be linked to the type of play that makes sense for that item.

3) dps checks, depends on the execution, there are levels of dps check, some dps checks are basically seeing if you can skillfully do damage without messing up. Ideally, gear should not be a consideration

A DPS check is a DPS check. If you want to see whether people can land the attacks without messing up, then the solution is to require a certain number of players to hit the thing, ala the Wurm Harpoon or Barrel objectives. If you want to do it without giving them bundles, then the solution is buffs, have one objective that gives you a buff, and then another objective that if you hit the mob while the buff is up, it deals fixed damage, then you lose the buff.

If it’s just a burn phase where everyone’s wailing on the thing, then it shouldn’t matter whether the zerg is hitting with super-peak attacks or super-weak attacks. On bosses like the Wurms, there should be three burn phases regardless of the group size or stats, they should be able to DPS the boss down no matter what so long as they can activate the burn phases at all.

Raw DPS should be for dealing with adds, not for burning the main boss, especially not when there is a timer involved (ie if high DPS makes the difference between beating a boss and being able to move on within five minutes rather than seven, then fair enough, if it makes the difference between beating the boss and going home empty handed, then no).

4) only needing half the people to know what they are doing to succeed is a fail when it comes to test. If someone knows half the problems on a test, have they demonstrated knowledge? most places wouldnt pass someone with a 50%

Sure, but no class I’ve ever heard of passes or fails everyone in the class based on the average score of the class. If you have an activity that involves a large mass of players, you have to design it taking into account a disparity of skill and experience, otherwise you lose players before they even have the chance to get good at it. The results need to be based mostly on how well the best players do, with the worst players barely being taken into account.

They can add in repeatable personal achievements with their own rewards, like dodging specific types of attacks, or landing an attack during a particular phase that’s difficult to achieve, but the event should still only require a small portion of the group to get it right for the thing to clear. For example the Wurm fights could have repeatable achievements for dropping barrels, throwing harpoons, passing on color buffs, avoiding certain attacks, etc., and you could only complete one each day, and that might give you a little extra reward to get people to do those things, but so long as some people do those things, the event should progress.

6) untrue, if you get the same reward for something, but are more likely to fail it/require more effort to get good enough to beat it then it should reward more

You weren’t listening. I did say that harder content could offer higher quantities of reward, just that it should not offer higher quality rewards. If there is Content A, which takes on average fifteen minutes to complete and cleared every time, and Content B which takes thirty minutes and tends to fail half the time, then Content B can offer four times as much total reward, or even slightly more, than Content A can, but it should not offer way more than that, or offer anything that you could never get from Content A even if you did it a thousand times.

Rewards should be balanced based on the time and effort that goes into them, so that players don’t feel that they would really like to do Content B but it would be a waste of their time, but neither should anyone feel that they must do Content B because they really want that shiny hat, and Content B is the only place to find it. If people just don’t want to do Content B, then the game should never bribe them into it.

how many people would aim for a bullseye in darts, if it was worth the same or less than other parts. How fun would darts be if the entire board all gave the same point value. The depth of the game goes down drastically with this concept.

And this makes my point, the bullseye in darts is worth 50 points, but the other parts of the board are also worth points, and if your goal is to earn 200 points, you can target the bullseye and hit it 4 times, or you can target the outer numbers and hit them a couple dozen times, which will take longer, but you’ll get to 200 either way. They don’t make it so that the bullseye automatically wins a car or something and the other portions of the board can never get that prize.

Content isn’t hard, but people tend to do stuff easy mode.

For example, CoE and Subject Alpha.
Who said you have to stack in corner and lure him? Why not spread out?
it’s already a whole lot harder to kill him this way than stacking and dpsing with closed eyes.

Content isn’t hard, but people tend to do stuff easy mode.

For example, CoE and Subject Alpha.
Who said you have to stack in corner and lure him? Why not spread out?
it’s already a whole lot harder to kill him this way than stacking and dpsing with closed eyes.

Yeah, this too. I for one really enjoy Claw of Jormag phase 1. A lot of people just stack in the corner and rez/heal/clear each other as his attacks hit them in the face, and you can do that just fine, but I have a lot more fighting him face to face. I stand right in the middle, and try to time my dodges to avoid the avalanches and ice falls, using my Heat Shield with channel-canceling to avoid his screams. If I do very well I can do the entire phase without taking any damage or getting CCed, but usually I’ll get hit by at least 1-2 effects over the course of it. I’m almost never downed though. The challenge is in beating my own expectations, not just in whether the event succeeds or not. I consider the event to be challenging, doing it my own way, even though I haven’t seen it actually fail since before the megaserver patch.

Sorry TL:DR, I am just to tired today… But I skimmed the OP so I am going to see if I am on topic… Sorry if not.

For me there is alot of challanging content but not enough. I am quite the lonely player so I play alone or with one friend or to most of the time and it is only on weekends I can gather a group of 5 to do something challanging like dungeons and Fractals.
After the update to fractals I havent played it more than 5 times becouse my friends who plays on the weekends isn’t good enough so we can never compleate the Story instance for fractals or more like the way the boss mechanic in the Reactor is built to totaly ruin it for them since they are just not good enough. Though I have played with some guild mates (Wich I rarely do) and finnished it simple and clean so it is hard to say if it is easy or hard, it is hard enough to try 3 weekends with lots and lots of deaths on the boss (Like a brick wall for us), so we gave up but it is easy enough playing with my experienced Guildmates.
In short, if you play it a few times you learn how to compleate it and then it is easy all of a sudden… But some players never learn, some can’t possition them selves right, some can’t jump (Robot/Laser barrier room), some can’t dodge, some just don’t bother to find good builds and more.

I would dare to say that I am very good at this game but I am afraid to play with people I don’t know so what I do miss alot is Solo/Duo/Triple content that is challanging and not punishing like achievements in the living story (You don’t know until the part is done if you compleated it or not).

For me getting ready for a whole hour and going online on Team Speak or other Voice chats is not for me so… I have never even seen Wurm or Teq being defeated :-/
After the MegaServers think I thought I would give it a try but nah… Never bothered… It’s not hard the way I want it, I mean there are alot of players who have beaten Teq but more or less just standing afk, sure it’s not thanks to them Teq was downed but it is possible.

And Zerg content… I realy do like Zerg content… I don’t care for the best places to farm or bother to farm at all but before the nerf to Scarlets minion attacks on different maps I had a wonderfull time, I though it was realy entertaining hunting minnions down. But after the nerf and other good farming spots where found Scarlets Minion attacks was not interesting for many players anymore and for me I was unable to do the events anymore becouse no one where doing them. So sad. I also liked the feeling of succeding so for example the first time Queens guantlet was introduced I had a blast but the second time when a Timer was placed, you had to defeat all bosses under this time and lots of players had to listen to eachother to manage Gold or Silver even, the fun ended for me… I liked the idéa but it was so easy to ruin it, just needed some players not reading the chat.

Zergs in WvW though is the worst and it is so booring so I havent touched WvW for a realy long time now. Most of the times it feels like the biggest mobs win and in the end people are just running around searching for roamers, avoiding zergs and attacking empty forts.

I think it is not easy making content to please everyone, I wan’t more easier content and I want more harder content too… So what I have been asking since release of this game is please give us a Easy/Normal/Hard mode option atleast on dungeons.

I don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing approach which many here seem to suggest it is.

I think we can have content that is more challenging that provides greater rewards that aren’t game breaking with this content not being crucial to the overall game play.

Stormcrow.7513:

Mediocrity in gameplay doesn’t sell gems with me but then again I am not their target audience.
I had such high hopes for GW2 and while it is a good game it just really isn’t what I had envisioned it to be.
I loved doing the dungeons in GW1 and while most are “ok” for GW2 the only real one that is truely fun is Aetherblade path, which has terrible rewards for the effort.
GW2 will be on the backburner for me until there is significant content that is not only challenging and rewarding but fun.

Pretty much this. For anyone who played older and more complex MMOs like GW1, Lineage 2 and WoW, some of the ideas here in GW2 are just disappointing. I still, however, have some hopes for an exp pack delivering at least the amount of quality new content that GW1 campaigns delivered.

Kythan Myr.4719:

1. Do you think there is already enough challenging content that requires strategy and coordination in this game?

No.

2. If Anet did design more challenging content, would there even be enough players to play it?

Yes

3. Is the zerg mentality too strong to even prevent some development?

Yes and it is A.Net fault. The majority of players don’t want hard content because they are used to easy content and they are used to getting every new non-gemstore related reward through autoattacking mobs.

Kythan Myr.4719:

4. What would more challenging content in GW2 look like?

Open world stuff would look like the 3headed wurm. Instanced based content (what we will most likely never see again) will look like TA Aetherpath, a little bit more fleshed.

Hey Edgar, you should try Drytop. There are plenty of events there that require real skill, and plenty that don’t, but if you stick to the ones that do you should have a lot of fun. You need a full map to hit T6, but even if you’re the only guy on the map you can solo a lot of the content if you know what you’re doing. The more personally tricky challenges are the toad on top of the rock spire at XX:05+20+35, the Chickenado at xx:40+50, the mine debris clearing at XX:40+50, the Race at XX:00+15+30, and Moa at that same time if you can get at least a few other people with you. The bigger bosses are also often fun, but tend to require at least 10-20 people around.

I don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing approach which many here seem to suggest it is.

I think we can have content that is more challenging that provides greater rewards that aren’t game breaking with this content not being crucial to the overall game play.

Yeah, I don’t mind that there is content in the game that is “harder” than I personally like. I only mind it when that content gets unique rewards (like the Teq/Wurm minis and ascended armors), or when they spend too much time working on that sort of content and not enough working on more “general” content.

It’s not even that this game only needs more difficult content. It needs any sort of mechanic first.
The monsters from Monster Hunter had great mechanics. Most were pretty simple but you never could simply walk up to the monster and start smashing buttons. And by the time I stopped playing MH I knew the mechanics of all monsters. GW2 combat is the complete opposite. Either it’s stacking or it’s AFK ranging. Either way, you don’t really have to care about the mechanics of the monsters, you just have to pull off your perfect damage rotation. Subject Alpha and Lupicus are the only exception. Those two bosses have mechanics you have to know and to play along them. These are the only entertaining fights in GW2 (and Shadow Behemoth… he looks cool).

Kythan Myr.4719:

So here are some final questions:

1. Do you think there is already enough challenging content that requires strategy and coordination in this game?

2. If Anet did design more challenging content, would there even be enough players to play it?

3. Is the zerg mentality too strong to even prevent some development?

4. What would more challenging content in GW2 look like?

Thanks for reading.

1)No – there needs to be more difficult content in the game. Most content is faceroll easy.

2)Yes – I believe that more if not almost all players would at least try it provided it has decent rewards that make it worth the time and effort to learn how to master and complete it. I cannot stress this enough.

3)No – and like this year’s Queen Pavilion showed us zergs can be broken up and people can be made to organize provided the rewards for doing so are worth it.

4)That’s difficult – as many perceive challenge in different ways.

I personally would like content with less margin for error and also content that requires more optimized builds and play in order for the party to succeed. Content that demands a certain amount of time to familiarize yourself before you can do it well.

The problem is that we have hard content in the game now that’s not really played a lot by a lot of the players because of one reason : bad rewards.

Look at the FOTM rewards, look at the rewards for Teq and Wurm.

I don’t even do Wurm – because while the content is fun it’s also a huge time investment – if you want a chance to succeed you have to show up an hour early and usually Wurm runs have a higher failure rate than Teq.

I’ll do Wurm just like Teq – when the failure rate is so low the 1hour in advance organized runs are practically a sure kill.

Of course – if Wurm runs rewarded more gold or decent skins or something unique and worth wile ( maybe ascended drops with an actual decent drop rate) I would do it – but right now there’s no point.

You see – the thing with difficult content is that it’s not necessarily rewarding in itself – you do it a few times – get it down and then there’s no real incentive to go back.
Devs should be aware of this and give you proper rewards in order to motivate you to keep going.

Which is not happening now.

FOTM rewards were butchered post-fractured, with skin drops being murdered. Why?

phys.7689:

Vayne.8563:

Anet has done a lot to break up the zerg mentality. I’m not even sure why people haven’t noticed. Take the last events created by Anet:

The Marionette
Triple Threat
Escape from Lion’s Arch
The Battle for Lion’s Arch
The Queen’s Pavillion
Dry Top

Each of these events are “zergable” to a point and then stop being zergable, particularly if you want the maximum reward. Zerging is the least efficient way to go.

The marionette divided people onto platforms of five, but it was still massively popular.

Triple thread divides the zerg into three, but you still won’t beat it zerging. You need organized groups with the 50 further divided into different teams including a condition team and reflect team.

The best reward in Escape from Lion’s Arch involved rescuing as many citizens as we could before the miasma levels reached max. We started off zerging that event like a train, but in the end, we were all working different areas of the city. The corridor I worked usually had about 6-8 people clearing it. Divide and conquer.

The Battle for Lion’s Arch only allowed 50 people to get the buff for each of the three holograms and all three had to be defeated to win. At the end it ended up in a five man instance.

The Queens Pavillion could be zerged and often was…but it was terribly inefficient and the worst way to get rewarded. Having ten guys on each boss, coodorinated, meant that they didn’t scale up and you could control the experience. Kill Boom Boom first and everyone else follows suit…giving you gold or sometimes silver reward much faster than you could ever get a bronze by zerging (which means you could run it more often).

Dry Top rewards are much much cheaper if you can get to tier 6, but zerging isn’t the way to do it. When I do it with my wife, we try to do the least popular events to try to push the tier higher, so the rewards are cheaper. Zerging isn’t the best way to do Drytop, but not everyone knows it.

Anet has provided us lots of ways not to zerg, and it’s up to us, the playerbase, to educated the rest of the playerbase as to why zerging in some places is simply bad.

only two of the things you mentioned are still in the game though

Don’t point that out.
Vayne actually believes that taking content out of the game might have been a good idea. Or at least that they couldn’t have known it wouldn’t be.

Vayne.8563:

DragonWhimsy.6489:

There’s an easy way to find out if there are too few players for such content. Up the rewards by a significant margin in the Twilight Arbor Aetherpath and see how many people bite.

See there’s the rub. I know a lot of people who do difficult content just for rewards, and then, they get frustrated because they’re not having fun.

You can’t possibly tell me everyone who raided in WoW likes raiding. There were some, sure, but many people I knew raided for gear and couldn’t wait until they could stop.

So raising the rewards would simply pressure people to play content they don’t enjoy.

Actually no – it would give people a choice.

They could step up and do harder content for better rewards or simply mash #1 in a zerg for normal rewards.

The whole point is to at least have a choice which we currently don’t.

With the recent changes to the instance owner mechanics you can’t even solo dungeons and sell the paths for great profit.

Sadly you don’t really understand players who play difficult content for rewards – sure they might not care for the content but they care about those better rewards and those rewards make them happy.

I might hate certain dungeons but if they gave me 5 gold at the end I’d play the heck out of them and do it happily because of that reward.

The difference between wow’s gear raiding and better rewards associated with harder content in GW2 is this :

In WoW you needed to raid in order to be top-notch best in slot and stay viable in the high-end PVE arena. No gear meant no parties and you were left on the side lines.

In GW2 – even if harder content with better rewards ( HCBR) was introduced people wouldn’t find themselves forced to do it. If you don’t associate vertical progression with it people could do it or they could simply leave it alone. Or do it sometimes. It’d be up to them.

In any case – I believe having better rewards for hard content is better than the current state : when you crawl through a level 50 FOTM, get terrible fractals, spend almost 1.30 to 2 hours and then get nothing as a reward.

That’s what frustrates people.

Ohoni.6057:

Hey Edgar, you should try Drytop. There are plenty of events there that require real skill, and plenty that don’t, but if you stick to the ones that do you should have a lot of fun. You need a full map to hit T6, but even if you’re the only guy on the map you can solo a lot of the content if you know what you’re doing. The more personally tricky challenges are the toad on top of the rock spire at XX:05+20+35, the Chickenado at xx:40+50, the mine debris clearing at XX:40+50, the Race at XX:00+15+30, and Moa at that same time if you can get at least a few other people with you. The bigger bosses are also often fun, but tend to require at least 10-20 people around.

I don’t see why it has to be an all or nothing approach which many here seem to suggest it is.

I think we can have content that is more challenging that provides greater rewards that aren’t game breaking with this content not being crucial to the overall game play.

Yeah, I don’t mind that there is content in the game that is “harder” than I personally like. I only mind it when that content gets unique rewards (like the Teq/Wurm minis and ascended armors), or when they spend too much time working on that sort of content and not enough working on more “general” content.

Heya. yea I know about Dry Top and it is awesome, the difficulty though is iether to hard or to easy there :P

Harper.4173:

phys.7689:

Vayne.8563:

Anet has done a lot to break up the zerg mentality. I’m not even sure why people haven’t noticed. Take the last events created by Anet:

The Marionette
Triple Threat
Escape from Lion’s Arch
The Battle for Lion’s Arch
The Queen’s Pavillion
Dry Top

Each of these events are “zergable” to a point and then stop being zergable, particularly if you want the maximum reward. Zerging is the least efficient way to go.

The marionette divided people onto platforms of five, but it was still massively popular.

Triple thread divides the zerg into three, but you still won’t beat it zerging. You need organized groups with the 50 further divided into different teams including a condition team and reflect team.

The best reward in Escape from Lion’s Arch involved rescuing as many citizens as we could before the miasma levels reached max. We started off zerging that event like a train, but in the end, we were all working different areas of the city. The corridor I worked usually had about 6-8 people clearing it. Divide and conquer.

The Battle for Lion’s Arch only allowed 50 people to get the buff for each of the three holograms and all three had to be defeated to win. At the end it ended up in a five man instance.

The Queens Pavillion could be zerged and often was…but it was terribly inefficient and the worst way to get rewarded. Having ten guys on each boss, coodorinated, meant that they didn’t scale up and you could control the experience. Kill Boom Boom first and everyone else follows suit…giving you gold or sometimes silver reward much faster than you could ever get a bronze by zerging (which means you could run it more often).

Dry Top rewards are much much cheaper if you can get to tier 6, but zerging isn’t the way to do it. When I do it with my wife, we try to do the least popular events to try to push the tier higher, so the rewards are cheaper. Zerging isn’t the best way to do Drytop, but not everyone knows it.

Anet has provided us lots of ways not to zerg, and it’s up to us, the playerbase, to educated the rest of the playerbase as to why zerging in some places is simply bad.

only two of the things you mentioned are still in the game though

Don’t point that out.
Vayne actually believes that taking content out of the game might have been a good idea. Or at least that they couldn’t have known it wouldn’t be.

Never said it was a good idea. Did say I understand what Anet was trying to do with it. It was a gamble and it didn’t work out. Feel free to misquote me as much as you like, however. It’s entertaining how many people bring up my name, and then completely try to say something I didn’t say.

The problem is that we have hard content in the game now that’s not really played a lot by a lot of the players because of one reason : bad rewards.

No.

The rewards for all of those things are plenty, they are just not activities that a lot of people want to do, so they don’t. If they want more people to do them, they need to make them more FUN, less inconvenient, and leave the reward structures alone.

Sadly you don’t really understand players who play difficult content for rewards – sure they might not care for the content but they care about those better rewards and those rewards make them happy.

Yeah, but if rewards are what make them happy, then why reward content they don’t want to do? What does ANet get out of making people do content they’d rather avoid? Instead, find the content that players want to do, and reward that content so that people who do it have fun AND feel well rewarded, rather than making it either/or.

In any case – I believe having better rewards for hard content is better than the current state : when you crawl through a level 50 FOTM, get terrible fractals, spend almost 1.30 to 2 hours and then get nothing as a reward.

If you spend two hours running fractals then you should certainly get 2 hours worth of rewards, but not better rewards than players who spend two hours doing other stuff. The problem with fractals is that it’s too much of a locked-in time investment. I enjoy each fractal well enough, and consider myself reasonably good at each, but I will never spend any more time there than I have to until they start valuing my time by allowing us to complete fractals on an individual basis, 10-20 minutes at a time, rather than forcing us to do the entire sequence in one go.

You know, even the phrase difficult content is problematic. Difficult content for who?

There are people out there, many people, for whom dungeons in this game are difficult content. The people who are really asking for difficult content, are asking for content difficult for them. I’m not sure I’d be able to do that content, though I can run any dungeon in the game.

The thing is, it may be that all players want difficult content…for them. Stuff that challenges them that they can accomplish. But there’s such a range of skill sets among the player base, there’s no real way to create difficult content with a capital D.

Vayne.8563:

Never said it was a good idea. Did say I understand what Anet was trying to do with it. It was a gamble and it didn’t work out. Feel free to misquote me as much as you like, however. It’s entertaining how many people bring up my name, and then completely try to say something I didn’t say.

You also deny that it was plainly obvious it would be a bad idea.
It wasn’t even close to a gamble. It was just a mess. That’s the whole point.

is there anything that relates harder content with it being interesting/highly replayable? (it’s an honest question, ‘cause I don’t see a logic link between the two factors)

Ohoni.6057:

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it.

2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious

3. DPS checks are not hard.

4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.

5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content.

6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards.

Great post … totally agree with all that .. especially #5 and #6

Make difficult content and make instances for that,
The marionette event was the best event I have witnessed and something like that again would be great but I really can’t take the hate in mapchat when there is just that many people allowed there and they only have x amount of minutes to complete – why exclude new players?

Ohoni.6057:

stuff

Really? The rewards for FOTM level 50 runs are “plenty” ? Wow – do you even play this content?

Almost all players who do fotm 50 regularly agree the rewards are terrible for the amount of work and skill needed to complete a run.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/KING-Fractals-Droprate-Research-3k-chests/first#post4452088

Go have a look for yourself.

Now imagine if the rewards for FOTM were increased – more people would do it.
I know a lot of people who want to do fractals but don’t because they’re frustrated with the very poor results.

Every time I finish a run, even if it goes smooth, when that final chest gives me another useless ring my heart sinks and it takes me a while before I can go back and do another run.

I absolutely love the content – but each time we get nothing for doing it is like being slapped in the face. There’s only so many slaps I can take.

Rewards make players happy – better rewards make players happier but better rewards also have to come at a cost – higher difficulty.
People want better rewards so they can stand out – so they can be proud and feel like they’ve achieved something.
If all the rewards are the same – then there’s no incentive for players.

If you give better rewards for content that people " want to do " such as zerging bosses you’ve accomplished nothing really.

The issue is you don’t even know what content people “want to do” because most content is done by people for the rewards. I wouldn’t touch one world boss if they didn’t give loot and usually show up there at the last possible moment in order to tag it.
Do the metrics reflect this? No. They clock me in doing world bosses and make Anet think I actually enjoy it.

Do you remember how many people did the “Open World” boss train before the rewards started including that guaranteed rare? Nobody. Nobody even cared the world bosses existed.

Do you think that now people do world bosses because they’ve magically become so taken in by them that they love and long for the experience of doing those events?

No – they do it to get their rare and move on.

On the other hand you have players that do FOTM – even though the rewards are terrible people like me ( and many other FOTM players) love FOTM and do it even if the rewards are terrible.
So what’s wrong with giving us better rewards? You yourself said they should give better rewards for content people enjoy.

If you spend two hours running fractals then you should certainly get 2 hours worth of rewards, but not better rewards than players who spend two hours doing other stuff. The problem with fractals is that it’s too much of a locked-in time investment. I enjoy each fractal well enough, and consider myself reasonably good at each, but I will never spend any more time there than I have to until they start valuing my time by allowing us to complete fractals on an individual basis, 10-20 minutes at a time, rather than forcing us to do the entire sequence in one go.

This is wrong.
Two hours of level 50 FOTM requires a lot of coordination, skill, teamwork and concentration to pull off.
Doing that level of fractals isn’t equivalent to " Mash #1 key on the shatterer and his friends to win".
It even requires a considerable financial investment ( full ascended for infusions) unlike the open world where you can go in a zerg in greens and blues and still tag and bag those rewards.

What i’m saying is rewards should be given out based on difficulty.
Why should some of the most difficult areas in the game be just as rewarding as some of the easiest. And if the rewards are the same – why not farm the easiest forever even though you hate the content?

Beldin.5498:

Ohoni.6057:

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it.

2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious

3. DPS checks are not hard.

4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.

5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content.

6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards.

Great post … totally agree with all that .. especially #5 and #6

People want cool rewards that say something.
Like the Lyadri mini.

Number 5 and 6 points are totally wrong in my opinion.
More work = more and better rewards. Just like anything else in life – the better you are and the harder you work the more you should earn.

People don’t actually enjoy repeating hard content – but enjoy getting rewards that make them stand out.
If everyone has the same rewards – how do you stand out?

MMOs are all about vanity – and there’s no point in being the same as the next guy.
If you’re more skilled, more dedicated, more invested into an MMO you’re going to want to have the means to show it off.
Usually through :

1) Better rewards – more cash means more vanity items faster.
2) Unique rewards – that say " i did this and am proud of it "

If you take that away you’ve taken a lot of motivation from a lot of players.

figured i would just upload an image to express my thoughts on the matter
personally i only care so much about “difficulty” at this point, but if they continually fill the trough with swill content expecting a harvest of gamers to show up. . . .

Harper.4173:

Beldin.5498:

Ohoni.6057:

1. I’m not a fan of “hard” content. I like challenge, but not challenge that assumes that a large number of players will never be able to do it.

2. Having an event in which you need to get something right 12 times in a row, and failing it even once can kill you, is not “hard,” it’s just tedious

3. DPS checks are not hard.

4. If content requires large masses of people to succeed, but having a minority of the players fail can cause the entire thing to fail, that is not hard content, it is just frustrating content. If at least half the people know what they’re doing, an event should succeed, the more people that know what they’re doing, the faster it succeeds. In large group events, difficulty should be measured on a personal level, on whether you can survive the action, not on the average skill level of the entire group.

5. Hard content is not “superior” content, it’s just content some people like more. If you are the type that enjoys “hard” content, that does not make you better than those that prefer casual, and you do not deserve better rewards just because you enjoy “hard” content.

6. If you have to bribe people to do “hard” content with cool rewards, then people don’t want to do “hard” content, they just want cool rewards.

Great post … totally agree with all that .. especially #5 and #6

People want cool rewards that say something.
Like the Lyadri mini.

Number 5 and 6 points are totally wrong in my opinion.
More work = more and better rewards. Just like anything else in life – the better you are and the harder you work the more you should earn.

People don’t actually enjoy repeating hard content – but enjoy getting rewards that make them stand out.
If everyone has the same rewards – how do you stand out?

MMOs are all about vanity – and there’s no point in being the same as the next guy.
If you’re more skilled, more dedicated, more invested into an MMO you’re going to want to have the means to show it off.
Usually through :

1) Better rewards – more cash means more vanity items faster.
2) Unique rewards – that say " i did this and am proud of it "

If you take that away you’ve taken a lot of motivation from a lot of players.

I’m just a person who doesn’t play content anymore if i don’t enjoy it. So i don’t even
do any instanced dungeons anymore since i was never a fan of them, but for long time
i forced myself to do them in other games just for the rewards.

So i picked up GW2 because i read that this game doesn’t force me to do content
i don’t like, and could still get most of the best stuff. And i don’t want that to change.

Also if i already read things like more work .. it is a GAME .. not a job .. my god.

Whoever wants soo much that hard content .. Wildstar was created just for you
and i heared it does soo well because it caters only to the hardcore crowd.

Beldin.5498:

I’m just a person who doesn’t play content anymore if i don’t enjoy it. So i don’t even
do any instanced dungeons anymore since i was never a fan of them, but for long time
i forced myself to do them in other games just for the rewards.

So i picked up GW2 because i read that this game doesn’t force me to do content
i don’t like, and could still get most of the best stuff. And i don’t want that to change.

Also if i already read things like more work .. it is a GAME .. not a job .. my god.

Whoever wants soo much that hard content .. Wildstar was created just for you
and i heared it does soo well because it caters only to the hardcore crowd.

Seriously, what kind of attitude is that? The addition of challenging content wouldn’t affect you at all, yet you still don’t want it added to the game. What about other people’s enjoyment, eh?

NewTrain.7549:

Beldin.5498:

I’m just a person who doesn’t play content anymore if i don’t enjoy it. So i don’t even
do any instanced dungeons anymore since i was never a fan of them, but for long time
i forced myself to do them in other games just for the rewards.

So i picked up GW2 because i read that this game doesn’t force me to do content
i don’t like, and could still get most of the best stuff. And i don’t want that to change.

Also if i already read things like more work .. it is a GAME .. not a job .. my god.

Whoever wants soo much that hard content .. Wildstar was created just for you
and i heared it does soo well because it caters only to the hardcore crowd.

Seriously, what kind of attitude is that? The addition of challenging content wouldn’t affect you at all, yet you still don’t want it added to the game. What about other people’s enjoyment, eh?

What about if i want to get 100 Gold whenever i log in ? it wouldn’t affect you but
i bet you also don’t want it .. right ?

What i don’t want is just that they don’t create content wher those ub0r players can
farm 10 times more money than others .. and of course not that too much developer
ressources are spent for a small minority. If they create content for just 1% of the
playerbase .. then they can use 1% of dev-ressources for that .. but not 20% or more.

Harper.4173:

Vayne.8563:

Never said it was a good idea. Did say I understand what Anet was trying to do with it. It was a gamble and it didn’t work out. Feel free to misquote me as much as you like, however. It’s entertaining how many people bring up my name, and then completely try to say something I didn’t say.

You also deny that it was plainly obvious it would be a bad idea.
It wasn’t even close to a gamble. It was just a mess. That’s the whole point.

I actually liked the way it was…to a degree. I liked the idea that there was always something different and new to do. Once I do some kinds of content I don’t actually care if I ever do it again. So yeah, I loved Escape from Lion’s Arch but it’s done. I was happy to wait for the next thing. I liked the idea of a story moving forward on a constant basis.

I didn’t like some of the achievements and the pressure that put on me however.

There are people playing this game that liked it. Saying it’s obviously a bad idea when some people liked it is sort of interesting.

The fact is, and it is a fact, we don’t really know what percentage of players actually disliked it.

It really depends on the rewards.

You can have the most difficult content out there, but if you’re greeted with RNG after accomplishment, it’s just not worth it.

Take a look at the recent Destiny game that was released. After defeating a “raid boss”, you get a random reward that might be crap, even though you did the most damage or support on the team. (i’m just trying to remember here from a video i saw, so it’s not really accurate)

This happens in GW2, a lot. You can defeat Teq or Wurm, but you won’t get a guarantee drop of what you want.

This happened in WoW’s raids too. There was no guarantee of a drop, but at least your guildmates were guaranteed something, and gave you a sense of accomplishment as a team. This doesn’t happen in GW2 though, because everything is shared with strangers.

Sadly, it’s all about RNG and, reward vs. effort, where effort isn’t worth it.

Beldin.5498:

NewTrain.7549:

Beldin.5498:

I’m just a person who doesn’t play content anymore if i don’t enjoy it. So i don’t even
do any instanced dungeons anymore since i was never a fan of them, but for long time
i forced myself to do them in other games just for the rewards.

So i picked up GW2 because i read that this game doesn’t force me to do content
i don’t like, and could still get most of the best stuff. And i don’t want that to change.

Also if i already read things like more work .. it is a GAME .. not a job .. my god.

Whoever wants soo much that hard content .. Wildstar was created just for you
and i heared it does soo well because it caters only to the hardcore crowd.

Seriously, what kind of attitude is that? The addition of challenging content wouldn’t affect you at all, yet you still don’t want it added to the game. What about other people’s enjoyment, eh?

What about if i want to get 100 Gold whenever i log in ? it wouldn’t affect you but
i bet you also don’t want it .. right ?

What i don’t want is just that they don’t create content wher those ub0r players can
farm 10 times more money than others .. and of course not that too much developer
ressources are spent for a small minority. If they create content for just 1% of the
playerbase .. then they can use 1% of dev-ressources for that .. but not 20% or more.

If you’re trying to compare challenging content to “getting a free 100 gold for logging in” then you’re entire view of this subject is warped. Free gold is not content. Content is content. We’re talking about increasing the enjoyment of the game here.

Also, it’s pretty clear from this thread that people who want more challenging content are not a “small minority”. Hardly 1% of the population, as you claim.

Fact is, more challenging content (that you wouldn’t be forced to do) would greatly increase the fun of the game for a large group of players and yet you’re against it because it’s not something you personally enjoy.

The zerg problem is due to GW2’s nature of a cooperative environment.

Everything is shared in the open-world. Mobs, guild content, world bosses, etc..
The only exceptions are dungeons, personal stories, and living world stories.

Zerg content could be changed. All they would have to do is change the mechanics on boss fights, champions, events, WvW, etc. Just put in some anti-zerging stuff that requires coordination, and up the rewards to make it worth the effort.

Kythan Myr.4719:

Lately a lot of vocal players have expressed frustrations with things like NPE, saying it doesn’t address the veteran players. Others have expressed frustrations with the direction of the game moving towards more overly-casual and simplistic game play experience.

Yes, I have seen a lot expressed frustrations and anger in the NPE threads in this forum. Maybe its because key farming takes longer now (and key farmers are the only veterans that I can think of, that are creating a lot of new characters) maybe people already felt patronized by this even by reading the announcements. Its hard to tell.

But I do not see that the game has the general direction towards more overly-casual and simplistic game play.

Example: Most of the new content of this year (in the LS2) is for 80s only and has some new mob mechanics and harder mobs and is more challenging than for example the personal story.

For some people this already is too difficult, for some others its still too easy.

So, if A-Net raises the difficulity-bar in little steps, step-by-step over time, I think most of the player base would adapt and follow this direction.

Usually difficult content becomes easy with better skilled and equipped characters and with more experienced players. So content that was hard at the beginning feels easy now.

I do want more difficult content.
I do want more easy content.
I just want more content to play.

Greetings.

nexxe.7081:

It really depends on the rewards.

I do not think so.

Good content is fun to play. That is normally the main reward and reason to play.

But after you have played the content and it is not so much fun anymore then the other rewards (loot, achievement system, etc..) take over and motivate players to play the same content over and over repeatedly.

Fun content can be “stretched” by rewards/loot/grinding but not replaced.

Content can only be replaced by more content.

Greetings.

Pve is scripted, if you’re looking for challenge in pve you’re looking in the wrong place.