Guild Wars 2

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

Never gonna happen

Id be thrilled. Even if they removed ascended and put the infusion slot on exotic. Id be thrilled. They would have nearly completely won back my business. Id spend in the gemstore again, on day 1.

They’ve already admitted the mistake of exotic gear — it being far too easy to obtain. If they were to remove ascended gear, they would just increase the level cap sooner rather than later and make exotics the new ascended.

There would be complaints every bit as vehement as those we’ve seen against Ascended. It would mostly be different people doing the complaining, but taking something away that players think they earned is never a good idea. ANet is not likely to do something like that …

Oh, wait…

It would make world bosses into dead content, JPs would have even less of a point in doing them, and crafting would only serve the purpose of being a quick way to get 10 levels again.

So, no.

Its not an answer to progression after 80, but it did give me something to do and a purpose to some of the core content of the game. So unless they take it away and replace it with something else (new, useful skills or traits) the answer from me is a solid no.

If they pulled Ascended Gear out of the game, compensation would be required because they would be resetting actual, meaningful progress (unlike with the Personal Reward Level reset, which is simply a renaming of a meaningless large number to a smaller but meaningful large number. No progress is being lost there because those numbers didn’t actually do anything. It has the exact same impact on the player as if they reset the “time played” stat, i.e. none).

Doon.2364:

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

I’d prefer anet make it easy to get ascended gear (across all activities) and stick with their original promise of having a cosmetic grind only.

They would have to compensate more than just a little bit of gold. I’ve set the goal for myself of eventually outfitting 8 characters in full ascended. So far I’ve gotten 5 ascended weapons and around 19 ascended trinkets. That was a lot of grinding doing world boss events, guild bounties, harvesting and buying from the trading post. I chose to do this so I’m not complaining, but if they abruptly took away the results of all my work then I’d be seriously annoyed. As well as distrustful of what else they might decide to do.

I wouldn’t object to them making it easier. But I would say no to them taking it away.

I’d probably quit because there would be nothing left to shoot for in the game. Not to mention if they just stripped all the effort/time I put into something, I’d be pretty kitten ed.

I don’t mind ascended gear and it wasn’t a mistake so they have nothing to admit.

This thread is going to end up closed soon. It doesn’t encourage constructive feedback.

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

This thread is going to end up closed soon. It doesn’t encourage constructive feedback.

I beg to disagree. The message that taking away items or achievements that players got/reached/completed in game is not a good idea is constructive feedback.

I’d be a happy face. I would buy gems off the gem store (plenty).

But quite frankly I’d be OK if it got removed from PvP (WvW) where it has a disastrous effect on combat which is as dull right now as possibly can be. Right now WvW only revolves around farming as many keeps in as little time as possible since it is the only way to get ascended rewards. Remove the gear progression and give players a choice again. Player driven activities make games strong and last long. Ascended gear completely cancels that out since it dictates a very specidifc approach to the game. And don’t get me started on the power creep…

The bummer is that they first said ascended stuff was for fractals. Then they went back on that and said that ascended was always supposed to be in the game but didn’t make the launch. If it had been in from day 1, and ended up being the absolute ceiling for gear, no one would have cared. It’s just that two different things were said about it, and it got released over time. Apparently carrots in this game need to be more treadmill like in this game than they were in GW1.

It’s also really too bad that Ascended weapons and armor are not obtainable by any means outside of crafting. Why should anyone do dungeons anymore? Furthermore, why aren’t dungeon armors being turned into skins now that Ascended armor and weapons will be the top tier? Why wasn’t there an ascended Fractal Armor set announced? Why are the Fractal Weapons going to be skins and not Ascended weapons? I honestly don’t understand why this stuff was handled this way and we can’t get them for doing content AND crafting.

I can imagine an alternate future in which they down-statted ascended gear to be exotics with infusion slots, turning them into purely fractal bait. I cannot imagine them eliminating them entirely. That would be the Etch-a-Sketch solution.

shake shake And now you’re naked.

As long as they add an Ascended leaderboard afterward, I’d be cool with it.

I would like it gone.

In fact I’d like Exotics (stats, not looks) gone as well.

Less grind. More room to experiment.

Asking this question is almost the equivalent of saying, what would happen if ANet made you waste a couple hundred hours of your gameplay?

I’d look back and feel depress about the time and gold spent on my 2 ascended weapon. Then shrug it off. It’s realyl not an issue for me either way, it would be better for them to make Ascended more readily available than to remove a tier of gear though.

Eventually Ascended will be super easy to get (even more than now) and people will stop complaining. I remember 3 months into the game and people were asking Anet to keep the gear cap in WvW at Rare, because exotics were too hard to acquire…

I actually like a bit of grind, something to work towards…

There’s already very little you can work towards in this game.
And I feel that this is actually performed in a decent way.

They could’ve made much better ways to obtain the last 100 levels in crafting though.
Right now they’re simply a material sink, which is pretty lame.

I want it gone. I would start making cash shop purchases if they made such a decision.

They took MF out of the game the world didn’t end. yes, I paid a lot for runes that I basically lost, but that is ok. It wa a bad mechanic and needed to go.

If they admitted their mistakes and made corrections, It would go a long way to promoting good will. Removing DR and fixing the camera are 2 examples fixes that would promote goodwill.

When I am happy = I spend.

I would be all for the removal of ascended gear. That’s with 4 back pieces (3 infused), 8 accessories, 7 weapons, and a bank tab of rings. AR should have been implemented by adding infusion slots to existing gear.

I also refused to spend cash for gems until either ascended is removed, or full ascended is available from all of the same sources as exotics. And each source needs to be similar in effort (40 laurels+50 ectos is nowhere close to 12 commendations+5g).

They could also implement asinine grind for cosmetics instead of stats.
Specific dungeon titles for 10/20/50k dungeon tokens.
The new TA skins were added with lame RNG. They could have been craftable using 10 Gift of Thorns+collecting corrupted branches from each end boss.
Have world bosses drop special account bound items to combine with other bosses’ special drops and other materials to create some skins.

Many ways to reward doing specific content without resorting to vertical progression, gold giveaways, or horrifically rare RNG.

As much as I hate Ascended gear and want it gone, It’s too late now. Arenanet can’t just take ascended gear from players who worked a lot for it, that’s wrong.

It never should have existed according to their sales pitches. However it would be best if it were gone. However I do think they would have to compensate for the items that were used in their creation for those who built them. Or some number for those that farmed them. If it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have spent tons of gold to level to 500 crafting or grinding out them.

At this point in time they’ve already made the mistake and lost what appears to be a majority of their player base. What’s left are people that like them, or don’t care. If they mess with taking it out they risk loosing another large portion of their player base and it’s not like people are going to bother to run back if they did. People are gone they’re gone.

It’ll be interesting to see how many get ticked and leave over the Fractal level. I’m guessing not as many but who knows. But wouldn’t be surprised if they did they’re really good at deleting criticism threads on their forums. They’d probably just delete the complaint threads when that happens too.

I’ll point to what worked and that is the original Guild Wars. They never improved the armors and weapons, even more when hard mode was released they still didn’t do this. Not once in 7 years.

So here we are in Guild Wars 2 and they’ve released Ascended Trinkets and Weapons, there’s no turning but I DO hope this will be the final tier ever. Getting 500 level of craft is not hard but requires some effort, crafting the weapons themselves requires time and money but it’s doable.

If ascended tier is what ANet originally meant for the exotics, then I think they hit the right spot but it would be totally wrong going any higher.

I say bring it on ANet, bring out your ascended armor sets, the sooner I’ll be done grinding for the best stats the more I’ll have fun in the game, cause I won’t have to mind about the stats any longer.

Why would the people who are against ascended feel bad or angry? After all, ascended doesn’t matter, right? The stat change is so minor that it makes no appreciable difference, right? You can still enjoy all the “content” the game has to offer, right? I keep hearing on these forums ascended is irrelevant, so why the negativity over removing it?

I wasn’t happy with the introduction of Ascended gear, but I can see why it was done. It gives the grinders something to keep them happy with, for a fairly low increase in power from Exotic → Ascended. It’s also something to absorb the large amount of wealth in the game going forward.

As others have said though, I want Ascended to be the last tier. If there ever comes another higher tier, creating a gear treadmill, I’m outta here.

Mystic forge all the ascended gear in existance then salvage the result for 1 piece of elder wood?

Gladly.

ArmoredVehicle.2849:

I say bring it on ANet, bring out your ascended armor sets, the sooner I’ll be done grinding for the best stats the more I’ll have fun in the game, cause I won’t have to mind about the stats any longer.

They talked about continuing vertical progression through higher level infusions back when ascended gear was first introduced, and I seem to remember chatcodes for masterwork infusions being discovered already. Anyone that thinks ascended armor is the end of stat chasing would be incorrect.

I’d be cool with it. Gear progression is boring. I feel bad for people who can’t have fun without goals and bigger being handed to them, but that seems to be a lot of people.

Look at how people reacted to resetting fractal levels higher than 30 down to 30.

In any case, Anet would never do it because they would never admit Ascended gear was a mistake.

Ascended was not a mistake, exotic was. It was too easy to obtain exotic. I just hope they lower the stat difference between exotic and ascended.

I don’t mind ascended gear. I geared up my guardian with 4 weapons so far, and since the rest of my characters don’t feel like heroes anymore, I don’t play them. So I don’t buy boosts, storage or skins off the gem store for them. Not out of spite, I just can’t rationalize spending money on characters I likely won’t play anymore. Hurts them more than me.

Many viable alts is more money for them. Less viable alts, less money. I just found I won’t log into an alt leaving all that ascended work on the select screen. Maybe I’m the only one, but considering the vertical progression is counter to their monetization scheme with the gem store (less characters leveled and played, less stuff will be bought) I suspect this will be more of an issue for them in the future than it will be for the player base.

Yenn.9185:

Ascended was not a mistake, exotic was. It was too easy to obtain exotic. I just hope they lower the stat difference between exotic and ascended.

What’s wrong with easy to attain gear?

Yenn.9185:

Ascended was not a mistake, exotic was. It was too easy to obtain exotic. I just hope they lower the stat difference between exotic and ascended.

There is nothing wrong with Exotic being easy to obtain in fact it was one of the selling points of the game.

The only people who had a problem with this are the ones who came from other MMO’s and jumped on the GW2 bandwagon with out doing research.
Then they demanded that GW2 be the same as whatever game they left.

If Anet removed ascended I would be the happiest person in Tyria- because from where I am sitting it changes the game from a very free and open and experimental experience- to a farmfest where people run around in circles to maximise time/profit.

The progression crowd could easily have had infusions added to exotic and used it to unlock more and more fractal levels with bigger and better infusions

Ascended Gears reversed would be sraeG dednecsA!

Shockwave.1230:

Asking this question is almost the equivalent of saying, what would happen if ANet made you waste a couple hundred hours of your gameplay?

It’d be like resetting people’s fractal levels, ridiculous!

Oh wait..

I would have renewed faith in humanity if they did this.

Also…

F*** PROGRESSION.

That is all.

Doon.2364:

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

I have just finished Yesterday crafting the last ascended weapon according to everything i used pre ascended….(except a pistol but i m not leveling a profession just for it).

If they removed all the work i did for those….I would still be extremely happy…..grind for stats is not acceptable (i accept it for skins instead).

Doon.2364:

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

It would be a first step in the right direction.
Then they should finally come clean and admit the insane amount of screw ups they did since release, and finally begins to give ous some actual new content instead of keep recycling the old ones.
Then GW2 would be almost out from beta.

They would have to pay me the 600g worth of mats it took to level up too 500 but I would be thrilled.

It would be a start to fix the mess they made 1 year ago.

The best way Ascended should be treated

-same stat of exotics (just with infusion slots for fractal)
-can swap stats (you grinded for it, you deserve to retain a “reward” cause stats are taken away, and this would be far better than +stat)

This way you have ascended being exotic-level of power with a trade of some versatility in building (can’t make Ruby ring with emerald jewel, you’re forced to go ruby/ruby as stats) for a infusion slot (and forementioned stat swap), and at same time being a utility/build diversity helper with stat swap (like current legendaries, which are ascended in fact).

Striker.9413:

I would be all for the removal of ascended gear. That’s with 4 back pieces (3 infused), 8 accessories, 7 weapons, and a bank tab of rings. AR should have been implemented by adding infusion slots to existing gear.

I also refused to spend cash for gems until either ascended is removed, or full ascended is available from all of the same sources as exotics. And each source needs to be similar in effort (40 laurels+50 ectos is nowhere close to 12 commendations+5g).

They could also implement asinine grind for cosmetics instead of stats.
Specific dungeon titles for 10/20/50k dungeon tokens.
The new TA skins were added with lame RNG. They could have been craftable using 10 Gift of Thorns+collecting corrupted branches from each end boss.
Have world bosses drop special account bound items to combine with other bosses’ special drops and other materials to create some skins.

Many ways to reward doing specific content without resorting to vertical progression, gold giveaways, or horrifically rare RNG.

It’s supposed to be better to use commendations, that encourages people to join guilds and do guild missions. The laurel alternative is like the laurel alternative for rings, still possible but it’ll take you longer than FotM.

I kind of like a bit of RNG in dungeons. There should both be fixed token rewards so you know you wot waste your time and RNG drops. The problem with current dungeons is that you don’t care what the boss drops you because you know it’s nothing desirable. One of the major things about MMO is the excitement of finding rare loot, which this game severely lacks.

Iason Evan.3806:

The bummer is that they first said ascended stuff was for fractals. Then they went back on that and said that ascended was always supposed to be in the game but didn’t make the launch. If it had been in from day 1, and ended up being the absolute ceiling for gear, no one would have cared. It’s just that two different things were said about it, and it got released over time. Apparently carrots in this game need to be more treadmill like in this game than they were in GW1.

Even if Ascended armor was in the game at launch in it’s current form there would have been a HUGE backlash. Easy to obtain max stats and hard to obtain skins was a big selling point for the game and having the grind-a-thon ascended in at launch would have caused players to pull out their pitchforks and lynch ArenaNet, which happened anyway when Ascended was put in. Perhaps you forgot the outcry about dungeon tokens at launch? If I remember correctly you would get something like 5 tokens per boss and 15 daily dungeon path completion bonus. 60-80 runs of a single dungeon is more than a bit excessive for a full set of gear, of course they made it ever so slightly better and it’s now only 30-40 runs…

Rant
People didn’t leave this game because there was no vertical progression, they left because of the grind. Having an even bigger grind in at launch would have just hastened people leaving. Now I know some people will say that getting exotic isn’t a grind, but it really is. The landscape when you hit 80 at launch was A. Grind karma to get a karma set and hope the temple wasn’t bugged/impossible to complete B. Grind mats to craft the exotics but you’re timegated by their respawn time C. 60-80 dungeon runs assume the stats you wanted were on a dungeon being run a lot D. a ridiculous amount of Badges of Honor. What made everything worse is that there was never a chance at cool loot with every boss kill/event/etc, it was a long slog of small gains. ArenaNet still suffers from this poor reward system, players need a constant chance at good rewards. As bad as my luck is at RNG systems at least there was excitement on a boss kill that something awesome I could use would drop, and almost always something awesome dropped that someone in the group could use.
/rant

Ascended needs either removed or brought down to manageable levels so a wide range of people can enjoy it from casuals to people with 8 alts. Then they need to add unique good drops to events and bosses. Make each temple/dungeon boss able to drop parts of their set and have them drop ascended(if left in) with a decent drop rate(not to be confused with teqs droprate). At least then people would feel like they could login and get some cool loot, instead it’s login and grind out another 2% of the materials towards ascended.

Doon.2364:

So what if Arena finally admit the mistake of Ascended Gears and decides to reverse their decision and remove the gears entirely? Would people be happy or would people be upset at this point?

I personally would be happy if they got rid of them, even though I have all ascended stuff already. Just compensate by giving us gold for each ascended piece.

I have a follow up question. How many people would reward Anet with a cash shop purchase if they did remove it?

How about $50? I’d do it.

IndigoSundown.5419:

taking something away that players think they earned is never a good idea. ANet is not likely to do something like that …

Oh, wait…

L O L

Draco.2806:

I would like it gone.

In fact I’d like Exotics (stats, not looks) gone as well.

Less grind. More room to experiment.

Yep. I would play this game a lot more (and actually do things I like) if there wasn’t something like gear progression in this game. For WvW I have 7 classes. I try tons of builds on them, and I need different stat combos (and runes/sigils) for most. It’s really costly.

AndrewSX.3794:

It would be a start to fix the mess they made 1 year ago.

The best way Ascended should be treated

-same stat of exotics (just with infusion slots for fractal)
-can swap stats (you grinded for it, you deserve to retain a “reward” cause stats are taken away, and this would be far better than +stat)

I would find this satisfactory. Fractals are a time and skill investment. The investment that goes into acquiring ascended equipment is several times that of an ordinary exotic. Being able to morph their stats would offer back the equivalent of multiple pieces of equipment. Even if I didn’t run fractals, I’d feel inclined to invest the time to suit my main in that kind of equipment, purely for the convenience factor. About the only downside I can think of would be the need to commit to a single rune set. That’s not so good if you want to use a certain condition or support set for one of your builds. But if that one set is Travelers, hoo-yeah!

Sirendor.1394:

Draco.2806:

I would like it gone.

In fact I’d like Exotics (stats, not looks) gone as well.

Less grind. More room to experiment.

Yep. I would play this game a lot more (and actually do things I like) if there wasn’t something like gear progression in this game. For WvW I have 7 classes. I try tons of builds on them, and I need different stat combos (and runes/sigils) for most. It’s really costly.

I think exotic is ok as top tier. They could remove rares. I think they should keep it whites, blues, greens, and exotics.

I would only go along with this if they allowed you to gain the infusion slot on your exotics some way. perhaps pay a nominal gold amout for it/ perhaps a mission to infuse.

Just leaving the slot on ascended makes it more desirable that exotic, which defeats the purpose.

Leave the ascended stuff for skin or bragging rights = ok

but truth be known, I just want it gone.