Guild Wars 2

kwolf.4306:

mulch.2586:

So the point of this thread is to debate whether a Cap or variable ceiling in possible stats is important or not.
My claim is, whether you think it is or isn’t important, what truly matters is the effect on your character will be too small to notice.

Then why have it? If it adds nothing, it’s unnecessary.

If they didn’t want to add more grind (which they did), they could have added the gear with the new slot and the same stat pool and put rewards that get you closer to your legendary in the higher frac levels. That would give incentive to go out and get the new gear, but not change the manifesto (which they did regardless of what they say in the AMA).

The devs objected to the slippery slope argument, but if they don’t intend to add further tiers, why have another tier at all?

(By the way, you should be using the flat (purple) weapons in the HotM to do your damage calculations, they take out variable weapon damage making it very easy to see what the addition of power is to your damage).

Why have it? I think the idea was to give something not so hard as a legendary to work on, but like a legendary, it’s not a big performance increase.

I did do a bunch of analyses with steady weapons. The 2 troubles there are 1) the increase in damage is in fractions of damage points, so the model suffers lack of fit due to the discreteness of the scale, and 2) applicability for forums readers. Adding 100 power gets you 2 more damage points with a pvp steady weapon. (so what? no one uses pvp steady) I wish they’d made them with realistic strengths (say 1050-1050 damage).

May I propose a sort-of hybrid solution?

1. Reduce Ascended gear to the same total number of stat points as Exotic gear.
2. Remove all stats (for now) from Infusions.
3. Then, make Ascended gear so that one of the three stats is always the unique stat a class uses. This stat should be automatically adapting, so that if I see an item I see +A% Guile on it, while an Elementalist would see +X Intelligence on the very same item.
4. Finally, reduce Infusions to a single type, which simply gives Agony Resistance.

This way while the Ascended Items offer no additional power by themselves, they do give you access to a stat you otherwise cannot boost with gear. Which is a very big bonus in and of itself!

I totally 100% agree with OP. I think Guild Wars 2 is the MMO that was made to be different, the good kind of different. This is the MMO to be playing for years for all those that can’t stand the old formula that WoW, LotRO, Rift, etc. keep shoveling.

Please ANet, realize that vertical progression isn’t necessary to keep players happy. Be bold enough to be different!

Relentliss.2170:

The game did not have enough horizontal progression, acquiring skill, skins, titles, abilities, perks, conveniences, to keep people interested long term.

Why not? Well part of the problem is the very limited way they are handling classes. The classes are very streamlined and offer the players little flexibiity. This lack of flexibility really limits the options for horizontal progression. I had every worthwhile skill a month after launch.

Therefore, they sat down a month after release and said ‘Oops Wtf now?’ and plopped in this Ascended gear to keep people busy. Why? Because it is easy and cheap, not because it is good gameplay or fits with their Manifesto.

I would agree with this point.

The game at launch really didn’t have enough horizontal progression to offset the near complete lack of vertical.

I was looking forward to a game with no vertical.

To be honest, if I want to play an MMO with vertical, I’ll play an MMO that knows how to do it (IE, not a game from Arena Net). I did that for years in WoW.

Part of the problem with the launch was that much of the horizontal progression was just plain bugged and didn’t work (DE’s, dungeon bosses, etc). And so much of that bugged launch content is still in the exact same state as it was 3 months ago.

How many people still can’t complete their personal story because the event/Arah just doesn’t work? The Balthazar event is always in progress when I’m in Straits, but even now, every single time I see it in progress (double digits), it’s bugged.

Add in that so much of the horizontal at launch was just grind, grind, grind, and then RNG Mystic Forge chucking, and while there are so many zones that people won’t see along their way to 80 – because of the sheer amount of mats/karma/gold needed for some of this horizontal – those zones are, basically, worthless for someone going for something that needs loads of karma, gold or T6 mats. The content is already there, but many people view it as simply not worth doing because of how little it helps for some of the more grindy grinds in this game.

While I haven’t tried sPvP, WvW really needs some love – but the engine itself seems to be the limiter with culling. Since launch, there are 2 noticeable changes made to WvW – elimination of the Orbs and removal of karma from escorts. That’s it. There’s loads of things that could be done to make WvW better, but none of them are happening (and all the dev posts promise things “in the works” and “soon”.

I thought the Halloween event was good (barring not being able to see my character in the Clock Tower – I spent maybe 30 minutes total trying and just didn’t find blindly jumping fun), and there were even 2 PvP mini-games added. But they’re gone. They were there for a limited time, and I would love to play them now, but I can’t.

Throw in Lost Shores (what part of that is/was NOT bugged?), and it seems like the team is incredibly understaffed for what they are trying to do, and there seems to be a real lack of direction as to where things are going.

Like I said above – if I wanted to play a game with vertical, I’d play a game that does it well. The Fractals do NOT do it well. The encounters themselves are interesting, but every system around them is buggy, ill-thought out, tried and abandoned years ago by other MMOs, and just plain grindy.

While I haven’t played any “Korean grindfests”, I’ve played quite a few Western MMOs, and this is, by far, the grindiest MMO I’ve ever played, with a huge does of RNG on top of it. I don’t quite get how Mr. Whiteside can even say they ATTEMPT to avoid grinds, as this game is simply full of them.

I think what the OP has said sums up my opinion.

I would add two points which add a bit to it:
1) Getting exotics nowadays is getting harder. Its getting pretty expensive by crafting and other methods are time consuming/grindy. Getting several sets for multiple purposes will be a task that will take much of my time, and that would be its own reward.
I don’t even want to think what would be the effort to reach a new tier of gear…
2) Alts. I mean, I love most professions in the game and had several characters that provided me with refreshingly different mechanics and gameplay. If a new tier of gear is very time consuming imagine doing that for all alts!! It is just not possible, besides it actually decreases the will to play another character if I have so much work to do because of equipment.

Anyway, I’m curious to see where all this gear/grind thing is going.

Bregah.7365:

Relentliss.2170:

The game did not have enough horizontal progression, acquiring skill, skins, titles, abilities, perks, conveniences, to keep people interested long term.

Why not? Well part of the problem is the very limited way they are handling classes. The classes are very streamlined and offer the players little flexibiity. This lack of flexibility really limits the options for horizontal progression. I had every worthwhile skill a month after launch.

Therefore, they sat down a month after release and said ‘Oops Wtf now?’ and plopped in this Ascended gear to keep people busy. Why? Because it is easy and cheap, not because it is good gameplay or fits with their Manifesto.

I would agree with this point.

The game at launch really didn’t have enough horizontal progression to offset the near complete lack of vertical.

I was looking forward to a game with no vertical.

To be honest, if I want to play an MMO with vertical, I’ll play an MMO that knows how to do it (IE, not a game from Arena Net). I did that for years in WoW.

Part of the problem with the launch was that much of the horizontal progression was just plain bugged and didn’t work (DE’s, dungeon bosses, etc). And so much of that bugged launch content is still in the exact same state as it was 3 months ago.

How many people still can’t complete their personal story because the event/Arah just doesn’t work? The Balthazar event is always in progress when I’m in Straits, but even now, every single time I see it in progress (double digits), it’s bugged.

Add in that so much of the horizontal at launch was just grind, grind, grind, and then RNG Mystic Forge chucking, and while there are so many zones that people won’t see along their way to 80 – because of the sheer amount of mats/karma/gold needed for some of this horizontal – those zones are, basically, worthless for someone going for something that needs loads of karma, gold or T6 mats. The content is already there, but many people view it as simply not worth doing because of how little it helps for some of the more grindy grinds in this game.

While I haven’t tried sPvP, WvW really needs some love – but the engine itself seems to be the limiter with culling. Since launch, there are 2 noticeable changes made to WvW – elimination of the Orbs and removal of karma from escorts. That’s it. There’s loads of things that could be done to make WvW better, but none of them are happening (and all the dev posts promise things “in the works” and “soon”.

I thought the Halloween event was good (barring not being able to see my character in the Clock Tower – I spent maybe 30 minutes total trying and just didn’t find blindly jumping fun), and there were even 2 PvP mini-games added. But they’re gone. They were there for a limited time, and I would love to play them now, but I can’t.

Throw in Lost Shores (what part of that is/was NOT bugged?), and it seems like the team is incredibly understaffed for what they are trying to do, and there seems to be a real lack of direction as to where things are going.

Like I said above – if I wanted to play a game with vertical, I’d play a game that does it well. The Fractals do NOT do it well. The encounters themselves are interesting, but every system around them is buggy, ill-thought out, tried and abandoned years ago by other MMOs, and just plain grindy.

While I haven’t played any “Korean grindfests”, I’ve played quite a few Western MMOs, and this is, by far, the grindiest MMO I’ve ever played, with a huge does of RNG on top of it. I don’t quite get how Mr. Whiteside can even say they ATTEMPT to avoid grinds, as this game is simply full of them.

See that is the beauty/problem of horizontal progression. I do not have all the grind problem you have because I have the choice not to do them. I am an asura engineer and I found that all dungeon medium armors are horrible and the legendary rifle is horrible and I get the perfect armor skins at level 50 already. Don’t get me wrong I love this game and don’t even have a slightest discontent about it but I doubt a lot of people can say the same.

So the OP suddenly pulls out abstract terms like Stat-progression players and Stat-cap players, treats them as obvious distinctions within the playerbase and gets a little following to toot his horn. I am more than sure that the players who agree with the OP have never looked at themselves as Stat-cap players. To put it bluntly, this “article” is just a politely written vent regarding ascended gear with made up excuses to what anet should or should not do in their game. It is completely unhelpful to explaining how the game actually is, that is the good as well as bad parts and instead tells a tale of how a certain mystical order of players, who call themselves “Stat-cap”, were betrayed. Willing to tolerate vertical progression up to 80 plus exotic gear because there was an “end”, and not because you actually liked playing the game? Please do explain what is there for you not to tolerate anymore with the arrival of 2 ascended gear with 5% increase in stats (with more to follow)? Do tell which content are you suddenly locked out of now? Tier 3 of fractals? It’s the same as tier 1. Should I not tolerate the game anymore because I am doing level 16 fractals with green back item, blue amulet and no ascended rings wearing MF gear on a thief?

Please, thinking that you are locked out of any content in the game only because not having maximum stats gear is nothing more than an illusion you created on yourself. The crafting mats requirements for making/upgrading ascended gear is a whole other topic, though.

Wouldn’t the ideal have been to make exotics with infusion slots? That wouldn’t increase the gear level outside of FotM but would still make the gear progression (infusions) mandatory in within it. I think that GW1 was a superior game in many of it’s systems… p.a. gear wise (also runes & inscriptions). I don’t understand how you just throw those things away and replaced them with 250 ecto gear… (just an example) those numbers are totally based on nothing.

While I’m mostly in agreement with the OP, what I feel people need to realize, is that not everything is black and white. Live and let live and things.
I too, I guess because of age and been there, done that, have no more interest in grind games. I just want to play any given char, and once at 80, feel like I want to be able to engage in just about everything. (I say just about, because I realize that an 80 character in greens in WvW is a bit tough)

Now, with all three of my 80’s, I can run every dungeon in full yellows, and with my Guardian and Warrior, I can go as far as running dungeons in 80 blues. In that sense, GW2 is a game where stats really don’t matter. Even in full exotics, the really big hits will keelhaul you regardless. Given, the smaller and more constant damage may be easier to weather with exotics instead of blues, but okay.

I do think that with Agony, Anet made a huge mistake to add a arbitrary gate called agony resistance. But honestly, if Anet is really sticking to their word now about Ascended gear (see the latest AMA on Reddit where Chris is stating that Ascended is the last tier to be added), I personally don’t have any issue with the current design.
While it’s true that Ascended gear is more powerful than Exotic gear, I’m in agreement with Mulch in this thread. It’s just a minor increase.
Those then stating that they apparently have been conditioned into always needing to have the BiS gear at any given time, I can only say to learn how to deal with that mindset. It will give you much more enjoyment of the game.
I personally feel that Anet made the right choice on Ascended gear, it gives a little something to work towards while not having the huge legendary barrier to demotivate you. At the same time, the bonus is so trivial, that you’ll honestly will not need the stat increases to enjoy all content. (As I’ve stated, you don’t even need Exotics to enjoy all content, I can do level 10 FotM fine in yellows) Honestly, I feel this is something that is good for vertical and horizontal minded players alike, there is still something to keep one kind of player ready, and the horizontal minded players can enjoy the entire game the second they hit 80, since 80 yellows are incredibly easy to acquire.
Because in the end, we’re one community after all. What’s wrong with trying to please everyone? Does only you and your kind of players deserve to be happy? Or only the other crowd? GW2 is set up so well in terms of balancing and requirement on just playing well, that the way they are handling Ascended gear is done just right in my opinion. I just can not get myself to get angry at this little bit of vertical progression, as long as it stays limited to the Ascended tier.

Agony, though, is a different story altogether. Now Agony is what actually might make me consider a different game. I can already see the shout messages in chat “LF2M for (new dungeon to be added that also has Agony), 30+ resist required!!!11” Brrrrr

The distinction between those asking for a cap and those asking for creep is not imaginary.
I have stopped playing the game altogether. On principle. Every other MMO out there has “progression” (except for GW1) and laughably they all do it far better.

Looking forward to A/net going around and pleasing each player out there, personally.

This actually brought a tear to my eye.

I wish that all the devs see this.

I only see pve adds here nothing more.

Interesting topic – yet I feel like most here are somewhat late to the party. Anet have recently spoken toward the fact that Ascended items were not rolled out in the fashion they would have liked. It was mentioned numerous times during the recent AMA on Reddit that Anet would have preferred to roll out these items from the launch of the game and to have made them achievable pieces via many styles of game-play, not just through Fractals. Further – this is what they plan to do moving forward.

To me, this is an acceptable compromise. I am willing to have a gradual stat increase as long as it is always obtainable whilst playing the game the way I wish. Of course, some will feel that having gear be so relatively easy to obtain negates the need for a gear creep in the first place, but to my mind, this is all other games do to a greater or lesser extent whereby the major difference is that other MMOs create a split, elitism based culture within their community’s. I don’t believe that anyone is really fooled in any MMO by the “carrot on a stick” analogy. Everyone understands that it is an artificial, never-ending false sense of reward, but this in no way reduces my, and others feeling of satisfaction at gaining these items. What I think has changed is that many players are no longer prepared to jump through any and every hoop the designers tell us to just to get these rewards. Rather, we want to be rewarded for having fun and staying loyal to the game.

I do understand that for some, this creates the issue that if everyone can have everything, then who’s special? To that end, I do agree that legendary items feel somewhat less than legendary to acquire, but are working in the sense that they are rare and obtainable for those that have the jump through hoops mentality.

All in all, for me, it was the lack of communication with the player base over the whole Ascended issue that caused the real problem. If they had but released a statement similar to the recent AMA, much of the consternation could have been vastly reduced.

Nice post, that’s pretty close to how I feel. I’m just fed up with the constant grind to get the next gear everytime there is new content…I just want to play the new content.

I have nothing to add really except as a “me too” comment in regards to the original post. I want the developers to know that there are many of us who appreciate a game that has horizontal progression once one reaches “max level”. I bought this game because they promised, advertised, promoted this game as one which had a stat plateau. It is why this is the only game I have ever pre-purchased, and one of the few that I’ve ever payed release day prices for. I wanted to support them in breaking out of the tired old MMO mold.

I feel like the addition of another tier of stats is a bit of bait and switch, if I had known they were going to create a gear grind treadmill with gated content, I don’t know that I would have been as excited for this game pre-launch.

There are a million mmo games out there for people who enjoy the gear hampster wheel. I bought this game because they promised us something different, an MMO for people like me. I was genuinely excited; really. I don’t really get excited about video game releases but this was the exception. Now I feel like they have gone back on their word, and I am disappointed, but too jaded to be surprised.

I was perfectly happy to spend money on gems before all of this happened, now I’m not so sure. I will give them more money when they add the things that I want to seem, as they don’t seem to be adding additional content to the game for folks like me. They could have at least waited for an expansion and added a gear grind as a feature of that, instead of altering the core game.

Amonde Daneren.2380:

The distinction between those asking for a cap and those asking for creep is not imaginary.
I have stopped playing the game altogether. On principle. Every other MMO out there has “progression” (except for GW1) and laughably they all do it far better.

Looking forward to A/net going around and pleasing each player out there, personally.

This is what Anet needs to realize. GW2 has very good art design and inherits a lot of GW1’s stat capped (up until now), skill, creativity and synergy based gameplay. The story and character progression however, are mediocre. At best they do not detract from the game. I simply don’t see how Anet stands to benefit in the long run by compromising on their original manifesto with cheap, psychologically exploitative mechanics and doing it WORSE than the other MMO’s.

What a wonderful well written article and I agree 200%

Roquen.4523:

It was mentioned numerous times during the recent AMA on Reddit that Anet would have preferred to roll out these items from the launch of the game.

Beware of believing this rhetoric.

It’s very easy for them to say “we wanted to do this all along!”, now that they’ve introduced it 3 months after the game launched.

It may be true, they may have indeed intended to have a gear grind in the game from the very start but lacked the resources and time to get it in. Would the game have attracted the interest of the MMO community and gaming press in general if it had the gear grind from the start? Would so many old GW1 fans have pre-ordered it? I doubt it.

Only one of two things can be the case here:

1: This is a lie, a well-phrased lie intended to deflect some of the fierce criticism the team is getting. They never intended to include a gear treadmill from the start, and in fact the main selling point was horizontal progression. The team may have had a vague idea that they could add more vertical progression in future if enough players demanded it, but it was not part of the original vision of the game.

2: This is the truth. They knew all all along that they would be introducing gear grind at a later stage, and chose to withold this information from us, the people buying their game on pre-order. It is not mentioned anywhere in the manifesto, anywhere in the development blog posts, (which do go into significant detail around Rare and Exotic gear) or any of the interviews that the team gave. If this was indeed the plan all along, they have been extremely good at hiding it.

I don’t believe that 2 is true, I have faith in Anet as a whole, I just can’t see them being so devious as to pull this as a bait-and-switch kind of deal.

I just think they’ve gotten carried away with the whole thing. The game has been far more successful than they had ever dared hope, and now they’re panicking about some of the big numbers.

I imagine that they’ve “lost” over a million players since launch, and that most of those players are citing “no PvE endgame” as the reason they’re quitting. This new gear tier is a measure to stop players who are into “Vertical Progression” from going back to WoW.

A message to Anet:

It won’t work, it can’t work, it has been tried dozens of times before and has always failed. These content locusts will eventually burn themselves out on WoW and find something better to do with their time. That might be GW2, it might not. We don’t care, and nor should you.

The number of people that want to grind for bigger numbers is getting smaller every single day. There are so many more people in the world that just want a decent video game. Pre-November, Guild Wars 2 was exactly that, you just didn’t give them enough time to let them find it.

It doesn’t MATTER if people buy your game, enjoy it, then quit. It DOESN’T. They will be back when you add more content, and they will buy gems. LOTS of gems.

Don’t try to catch the falling knife.

mulch.2586:

So the point of this thread is to debate whether a Cap or variable ceiling in possible stats is important or not.
My claim is, whether you think it is or isn’t important, what truly matters is the effect on your character will be too small to notice.

“What truly matters” is a matter of individual perspective and playstyle (reasons why people play the game). For you (and many others), an ongoing 2-5% (even if true) power curve installed over a period of months or a year (if true) doesn’t matter because it wouldn’t represent a significant functional difference affecting any combat your character is involved in – PvE or WvW.

Do you think most players are familiar with the math (even if true)? No, all they see is a stat increase and reasonably assume that it makes a difference or else there would be no reason for the developer to put it in. Thus the effect on the community and how it interacts with each other and the game becomes the same as if the stat was significant.

People that have it are stat elites, everyone else is a scrub. Psychologically, people that were planning on leveling up alts and trying out different max-stat gears over a long period of time are – psychologically – devastated (as far as MMOG’s go), because now (whether functionally true or not) they feel like they have to constantly grind basically one character just to keep up. WvW players now feel like they have to grind out Ascended to stay competitive.

I suggest that what “truly matters” to players is “how they feel” when they play, not a mathematical analysis of damage output. If they feel like they have become 2nd rate scrubs or falling behind because of gear checks or because they won’t grind (read: do something they don’t want to do over and over to get something they want) for it, or if they feel like they cannot accomplish their goals of leveling up several characters to max stats and playing with builds, or feel that they are becoming non-competitive in WvW, then a lot of them will be unhappy with the game whether there is a significant, mathematical, functional difference between Ascended and Exotic or not.

If they perceive there is a difference, and that perception makes them feel negatively as a result, then it doesn’t matter if that functional difference is 1% or 20% for most players – it generates the same psychological and community effects. For example, I believe that the statistical difference is probably very minor, but it makes no difference to how I feel about the game now. I used to play about 5-6 hrs a day and was excited and enjoyed it immenselly. Now I play about an hour every 2-3 days, and that’s really just to occasionally kill time.

That is why a stat cap matters, and why a “nearly-flat” power curve cannot be a substitute for many players. Humans are not mathematical logic-machines. More things matter to us than just raw numbers. A stat cap means something; a never-ending power curve – no matter how slight – means something else, whether the two are functionally equivalent or not.

Masterpyro.4310:

Asmodeus.8491:

Yoshihito.5928: I am going to keep this civil because I think this is a good thread, and I don’t want to get it locked up. When you sarcastically say that you “love how stat cap people want everyone to bow to them,” I must ask you if you have ever heard the story about the pot and the kettle? If not, ask google about it.

Masterpyro.4310: Before the Ascended Tier chase was introduced to the game, there was a tonne of stuff to do with your toon post full exotic/ perfect cosmetic; however, none of it had any ability to improve your toon (except for trying to max out all crafting skills maybe). In other words, if you already have full power, and perfect looks, how else can you improve your toon?

What you need to see is that better gear is not a real improvement. You and your new mob opponents grow stronger by the same ratio, so your bigger numbers only serve to give you the illusion of improvement.

Unless we are talking about a stat advantage in WvWvW. If one has stronger gear (full Ascended) than one’s opponents (full Exotic), then one will be able to beat them with less effort. My question here is if you start the race early, and win, how can you take pride in your victory? Its like playing Warhammer 40K with a 2000 point army against someone who is only using a 1800 point army. That 200 points (one extra unit) gives an unfair advantage.

Honestly, if they handled WvWvW gear the same way they handle spvp gear, I think this whole issue would go away (at least it would go away for me anyway.)

Partially, honestly the only thing left for me to do was get the legendary and I probably would have stopped playing after kicking some kitten in wvw with my sweet looking weapon. Now with ascended I have stuff to work for. I agree that their implementation is a bit against their manifesto though. Ascended gear should be higher stats imo, otherwise I wouldn’t bother because i already have the skin I want. But what should be different is how its obtained. It should be craftable with items obtained from fractals dungeons (which will be for sale on the TP for those that dont want to bother). Same as exotic, its just new content for everyone to consume in their own way.

Some people are complaining simply because its a new tier, which doesn’t make sense. They should have been complaining from the beginning that there was any tier higher than level 1 gear if that’s all they cared about. God forbid they add 1 more level, they are allowed to and encouraged to add more content. This game cannot just sit here the way it is and still have people playing 8 years down the road like current WoW or GW1 fans do/did.

I m complaining that it is gated to one play style seems to me dungeon runners complained and got what they wanted new higher stat gear. It I think would have been received by the gameing community as a whole better if there had been several ways to get these items and just not in dungeons. There is a flaw in this if it had been set out in the world on a Karma vendor or as a drop of some sort or very long quest chain ect ect these same people that claim they love to run dungeons would have been there not in that dungeon cuz its easier. Now comes the claim I m more skilled I deserve well let me say this I have jumped thru those hoops before have earned the new bestest gear I am now old and tired and dont want that but want the same reward for I deem enjoyable and rewarding and that needs just as much skill and work.

Why so much fuss over a couple stat points? There hasn’t even be any real change in the game’s philosophy! Reaching the absolute top was made difficult from the beginning and this is just expanding on it so it won’t get stale. Remember Anet has to make a system that’s as friendly as possible to the widest possible audience.

Examples for you:

- From release untill the most recent updates the back piece gear slot upgrade to the best possible (rare) costed 5g – the equivalent of 2 exotic items in other slots, and it offered a few stat points advantage that was completely negligible. Most players never got it, ignored it and I’ve never heard complaints about it. Why so much QQ now when the gains are just as little?

- The Triforge Pendant amulet was always super expensive to get (costs like gearing 3 characters in 12 slots lv 80 exotics) and offered a substantial advantage for all builds that made use of multiple stats. There weren’t many complaints about it even though the advantage gain from it can be far bigger than what current Ascended items provide.

I strongly support this unique progression model where the playing field is nearly but not perfecly equal. I don’t like having to chase numbers but I really enjoy being rewarded in a tangible (not just cosmetic) way.

Players who are afraid of being left far behind the progression top shouldn’t really be – it’s almost certain that Ascended gear pieces will be getting easier and easier to get over time, and even if you plan taking a whole year break you will at worst find yourself just ~3% less powerful than someone fully ascended.

Trust me, that difference is almost impossible to notice in actual gameplay, see yourself – degrade one or 2 slots from exotic to rare at the same stat combination and see the difference.

This is the best thread on the internet regarding GW2. I want a piece of the cake OP is baking.

defi.4127:

So the OP suddenly pulls out abstract terms like Stat-progression players and Stat-cap players, treats them as obvious distinctions within the playerbase and gets a little following to toot his horn. I am more than sure that the players who agree with the OP have never looked at themselves as Stat-cap players. To put it bluntly, this “article” is just a politely written vent regarding ascended gear with made up excuses to what anet should or should not do in their game. It is completely unhelpful to explaining how the game actually is, that is the good as well as bad parts and instead tells a tale of how a certain mystical order of players, who call themselves “Stat-cap”, were betrayed. Willing to tolerate vertical progression up to 80 plus exotic gear because there was an “end”, and not because you actually liked playing the game? Please do explain what is there for you not to tolerate anymore with the arrival of 2 ascended gear with 5% increase in stats (with more to follow)? Do tell which content are you suddenly locked out of now? Tier 3 of fractals? It’s the same as tier 1. Should I not tolerate the game anymore because I am doing level 16 fractals with green back item, blue amulet and no ascended rings wearing MF gear on a thief?

Please, thinking that you are locked out of any content in the game only because not having maximum stats gear is nothing more than an illusion you created on yourself. The crafting mats requirements for making/upgrading ascended gear is a whole other topic, though.

My point is not about being “locked out of conent” because of stats. It’s about examining the motivations different groups of people have when playing games, and evolving a lexicon with which to articulate and understand those motivations. I myself didn’t really fully understand “what it was” that made MMOGs enjoyable or not enjoyable when I played them. I used to make “casual vs hardcore” arguments, but through this experience I recognized there was a more objective, quantifiable motivational difference that is best described (IMO) as the difference between what a hard stat cap means to many players, and how it makes them feel about a game, and what an endless power gradient means to many players, and how it makes them feel.

I realized that no matter how much people play, or if they enjoyed PvE, or PvP, or WvW, or were explorers or achievers, etc., there was a large number of people that felt dissatisfied, felt like there was no content, and felt like there was nothing to do unless they could constantly be moving up a power curve. On the other hand, there was a large contingent of players, from a broad base of things they found enjoyable in games (raiding, grouping, dungeons, pve, pvp, WvW, exploration, etc.) that abhor the idea of an endless power gradient, and “nothing is fun or enjoyable” unless there is a hard cap on how powerful you can be in a game.

Does this represent all players? Of course not? Do most players fall into one or the other category? Probably not. But the fact is, there are virtually no hard-capped MMOGS in existence; the fact is a lot of players here (mistakenly or not) felt that GW2 was going to be a hard-capped game, and now there’s a lot of players that are upset that it is not going to be hard-capped – they feel betrayed (justifiably so or not) because of this very issue: they wanted a game with a hard stat-cap.

So what I’m doing here primarily is trying to better articulate a debate that used to be subsumed by the “casual vs hardcore” debate that has raged for years. I realize now that I don’t care how much other people play or how fast they get to that “best” status, as long as I feel like, eventually, I can build and dress up several max-stat characters just like them and have various kinds of game content (pvp, wvw, dungeons, events, quests, etc) to play them in and through horizontally.

As long as there is an eternal power curve, I’ll never be able to do that, and currently there is no modern, world-size MMOG that offers it. I had a taste of it for 10 weeks or so in GW2 (whether I was misinformed or mistaken about their intentions or not), and the difference the perception that it was a game with a hard stat-cap made in my enjoyment of the game was enormous. It was a joy to log in because of how that perception made me feel about playing the game. I never got this joyful feeling from any game since I first logged into EQ vanilla.

I think many others feel the same way, so they are understandably upset when they perceive that it was taken away from them without good reason.

The measure of increase as of this time is irrelevant. Anyone that can do math can see the difference between full ascended and full exotics is going to be 15% AT A MINIMUM without taking into account any infusions.

While that may be tolerable today, tomorrow they could very well add a new tier, which they have explicitly declined to rule it out.
Furthermore, with the cap being raised in future expansions, it opens up the path for progression without ever having to introduce new tiers. Just release an expansion every 6 months with 5 more levels and new gear to grind.

Those of you saying ignore it should understand this: none of us is willing to invest time in any endeavor where that time ultimately ends up being wasted. With vertical progression, you have to keep investing more time, always, or you get left behind and all those hours end up being nothing more than resentment.

You see, here’s the salient point: whether we were mistaken or not, what the manifesto and other info provided by ANET (including years of GW2 game philosophy) meant to many of us was that GW2 was going to be a game with hard-capped stats. That was our perception. We saw nothing in five years of development to change that perception, and much that reinforced it, like Legendaries having only a cosmetic variance from Exotics, and their statements about how “grinds” should only lead to cosmetic variances, and how players shouldn’t “feel” like they have to grind to keep up with a power treadmill.

Perhaps that perception was wrong, but the perception of a hard stat cap brought many of us out of MMOG retirement, dragged many here from GW1, and got many others to leave other games for GW2. For the first time in perhaps a decade of playing MMOGs, many of us loved and enjoyed an MMOG because of how our perception that there as going to be a hard stat cap in GW2 made us feel about investing time and money in the game.

If nothing else, even if GW2 is lost to us, we at least know what we want – a game with a hard stat-cap. Personally, that means the developer must explicitly state that their game has a hard stat cap – that is relatively easy to attain – for me to try/invest in another MMOG. By “we”, I mean nothing more than those of us who have realized that this is really what makes the difference between enjoying and not enjoying an MMOG.

Decided that this would be a good place for a first post, even though i don’t really have anything new to add to the conversation.

I just want to voice my agreement with the OP.

The only reason i decided to play this game was the (maybe wrongly perceived, but then it was a very easy mistake to make) promise of no vertical progression.
Other things about this game are great, but that’s true for many other games.

I felt GW2 was the only game that convincingly ruled out any kind of gear treadmill whatsoever (no monthly subscription, ergo no need to keep people playing as much as possible, …and all that jazz)

It is a long and complex topic, but the simple truth is: I don’t ever want to play an MMO again where i feel i need to play in order to stay equal in power to others.
It doesn’t matter if it’ only 1%, or only in PVE, or only this or only that.

Very well written post! I also agree with your point of view.
Right now, though, I have given up on getting max stats – I refuse to farm Fractals over and over. Fractals is great, I’ve done it a few times now, but I’m not going to go there multiple times a month.

Since there is more ascended gear to come, I suggest that they finish the ascended armor/jewellery and make ascended the new maximum. It is too late to revert it now that a lot of players have some of it.
Also, it would be reasonable if there was another method of obtaining all the pieces (I know you can craft some already), as long as it’s not too ridiculous on crafting requirements.

Thanks for this thread everyone, each post I have read makes me happy that we are all on the same page.

I also agree with the OP. There shouldn’t be a stat based progression; it should be purely skill based. Rewards should be cosmetic like armor skins and titles.

I logged in twice after the event finished. Once to make a weapon for a friend, and once to finish the monthly (Which was almost done already)

I can’t even be bothered logging in any more.

Annoyed about them adding a treadmill? A little.
Annoyed about them breaking their promises? Quite a lot.
Annoyed that once we found out they told us to screw ourselves? Just guess…

I had 3 80s with full exo gear.
I had a relatively large amount of cash.
I had ~3100 achievement points.
I was on my way to my 17th title.

And now I just don’t want to play.

deSade.9437:

I’m a minority, you’re a minority, a vegetarian is a minority, hence I’m a salad and I play sylvari for that.

Thats just the thing. We’re not the minority here and that’s whats gonna kill this game in the end.

Why do I play GW1/2?

1) No monthly fee – Gems and its item are absolutly ok! Spend a lot so far ;-)
2) No chasing the carrot, play because you like it – at least I thought and you self told us so… but now… I /sign the OP…
3) No need to grind – I’m not so sure anymore about this. I mean you need this element, but it is at a very critical point…

jamasont.4653:

deSade.9437:

I’m a minority, you’re a minority, a vegetarian is a minority, hence I’m a salad and I play sylvari for that.

Thats just the thing. We’re not the minority here and that’s whats gonna kill this game in the end.

If you don’t want to play, then stop playing. That’s certainly fine.

What’s cool about GW2, even with ascended gear, is you’ll never be too far behind to come back and play, if you or ANet has a change of heart.

I heard a lecture by one of their developers at GDC. They have extensive data collection of all things players experience in game, even down to average frame rates across the map.

In short – the best, perhaps only, way to communicate to ANet is to vote with your characters’ feet.

What a lot of people are seeing, however, is that a lot of other players are voting with their feet, jumping in to the new content, making the items, essentially voting yes.

minority, majority, only ANet has the data that show

Yes, this. this so much. The ONLY way you will ever give them a clear message is to stop playing altogether.

Best OP in days on here.

Thank you.

Ryan.6951:

Best OP in days on here.

Thank you.

Ha! the thread is about a week old.

Stat cap is important for competitive PvP balance.

sPvP isn’t affected by ascended items, so ascended items make no impact on competitive PvP.

And no, WvW isn’t competitive PvP. It is large scale zerging and ascended items are not powerful enough to change one side being out numbered.

I gotta disagree OP. I love vertical progression and it’s the reason all my friends and I play. Not one of my friends and I played gw1 for over a month because there wasn’t a thing to do after you hit 20 and got a few skills. All the people I know don’t want some barbie dressup simulator that just hands us everything when we login. We want to keep getting better cooler stuff as the game goes on and I don’t mean just some fancy new dress with the same stats. That just doesn’t cut it for most people. GW1 didn’t keep people interested for long except a few diehard fans and bots.

Reaver.9256:

I gotta disagree OP. I love vertical progression and it’s the reason all my friends and I play. Not one of my friends and I played gw1 for over a month because there wasn’t a thing to do after you hit 20 and got a few skills. All the people I know don’t want some barbie dressup simulator that just hands us everything when we login. We want to keep getting better cooler stuff as the game goes on and I don’t mean just some fancy new dress with the same stats. That just doesn’t cut it for most people. GW1 didn’t keep people interested for long except a few diehard fans and bots.

We saw so many comments in the press and gaming forums of people feeling they’d run out of things to do, “GW2 has no endgame.” Myself, 2 lvl 80s, 3 full sets of gear… I was feeling like I was running low of things to do, cept work up spvp.

It’s not failing to understand the concept of “horizontal progression” but simply finding that there wasn’t enough of it to be compelling. Honestly, I don’t want yet another set of armor, cuz my bags are too full as it is. So what do you do? Level another character?

mulch.2586:

Reaver.9256:

I gotta disagree OP. I love vertical progression and it’s the reason all my friends and I play. Not one of my friends and I played gw1 for over a month because there wasn’t a thing to do after you hit 20 and got a few skills. All the people I know don’t want some barbie dressup simulator that just hands us everything when we login. We want to keep getting better cooler stuff as the game goes on and I don’t mean just some fancy new dress with the same stats. That just doesn’t cut it for most people. GW1 didn’t keep people interested for long except a few diehard fans and bots.

We saw so many comments in the press and gaming forums of people feeling they’d run out of things to do, “GW2 has no endgame.” Myself, 2 lvl 80s, 3 full sets of gear… I was feeling like I was running low of things to do, cept work up spvp.

It’s not failing to understand the concept of “horizontal progression” but simply finding that there wasn’t enough of it to be compelling. Honestly, I don’t want yet another set of armor, cuz my bags are too full as it is. So what do you do? Level another character?

Ummm invest in some bag space? My main has 100+ slots on him as it is not counting all the bank space I’ve unlocked through playing. I only have 1 set of armor on each guy and they wear it because I’m not into horizontal progression and dressing up my guys in different looking armor with the same stats……..

Excellent OP!

I would add that a significant subset of the stat-cap community can be characterized by allergy to grind. I, for one, can tolerate only minimal grind. For example if in GW1 it would take me, say, 100 hours (don’t remember the exact number) to level a PvE character and collect the skills relevant for PvP I’d tolerate several hours on top of that in order to get the armor second tier armor I wanted. I spent a total of 4500 hours playing GW1 over the years, probably half of it in PvP.

In GW2 you have built-in, obvious and unashamed grind. Dungeon armors, karma sets, legendaries, FOTM – I will never go through that content more than once or twice for fun. (On top of that you don’t have a viable way to reliably make in-game money in small portions suitable for people with lives; and, on top of that again, albeit without relevance for this discussion – PvP doesn’t work.)

What ANet (or perhaps NCSoft) are missing is that they will NOT succeed in forcing PvE grind on this type of player. I like the gameplay, I’m planning to make one char per profession, but the moment you try force me to repeat the same content more than a couple of time – I’m out. There are half a dozen excellent games waiting to be played in my Steam library.

Perhaps we’re a minority, but players are content. Time will tell.

Yawg.1294:

- From release untill the most recent updates the back piece gear slot upgrade to the best possible (rare) costed 5g – the equivalent of 2 exotic items in other slots, and it offered a few stat points advantage that was completely negligible. Most players never got it, ignored it and I’ve never heard complaints about it. Why so much QQ now when the gains are just as little?

Why pay 5g + a new jewel (the storyline back slot comes with an exotic jewel) to get a rare item for very few stat bonuses when it was expected that exotic back slots would be added one day or another?

shrug
Post-AMA I am actually cool with “casually grinding” Ascendance gear OUTSIDE of Fractal style dungeons. WvW and PvE exploration quests or dailies? hell yeah I can do that.

Take a tip from a real life negotiator folks…are you holding to a position or an interest?

Holding a position: Outright opposition of Anet’s “Betrayal” and deviation from their self proclaimed ideology and what you understood their Manifesto be. (most of you)

Holding an interest: Not wanting to have to grind fractals to have the best gear. (me and a few others)

In the recent AMA, while I had to abandon my position, my interests were satisfied. That is key in any kind of negotiation, knowing that your interests are preserved even if your position is not. That is compromise. No one gets everything. You give and take. Progress is NOT a zero-sum game.

Reaver.9256:

I gotta disagree OP. I love vertical progression and it’s the reason all my friends and I play. Not one of my friends and I played gw1 for over a month because there wasn’t a thing to do after you hit 20 and got a few skills. All the people I know don’t want some barbie dressup simulator that just hands us everything when we login. We want to keep getting better cooler stuff as the game goes on and I don’t mean just some fancy new dress with the same stats. That just doesn’t cut it for most people. GW1 didn’t keep people interested for long except a few diehard fans and bots.

There is no disagreement. I said in the O.P. that there are a lot of people – perhaps a majority – that love endless vertical progression and don’t fee satisfied unless they can vertically progress their character. There’s nothing wrong with that. There is another group that cannot enjoy an MMOG unless it has capped stats, as this thread, the 11,000-post thread, and countless others on various sites attest.

The interesting and somewhat odd fact is that you have literally scores of games that serve your interest; as far as I know, there is one MMOG on the market that serves mine – GW1 – and it’s 7 years old.

If nothing else, this sequence of events has demonstrated that there is a market for a stat-capped MMOG.

So much of what you’ve said is true Wintyre, but it doesn’t go far enough. When game companies introduce vertical progression, level increase, and other types of power creep they are making earlier content less playable. They are destroying their own work and design efforts.

A-Net once said that because of level scaling the entire game is end-game, but in reality that hasn’t held true. It isn’t true because traits, weapons, armor, and skills make it so that I can’t take a level 80 character to Queensdale and enjoy any challenge at all. I can’t go play with a new player (or even an old player with a new alt) and have it so that they have any challenge at all while playing beside me.

Adding better stat armor, better stat weapons, more levels with the accompanying trait points and skills — these things exacerbate the problem. Right now I can still play and enjoy several dungeons, all fractals, and about 6 regular content maps. If A-Net releases a new expansion with new content but no power creep, players keep everything they have and get new places to play, too and that makes me very happy. If there is an expansion that increases the maximum character level, players will get new places to play, but at the same time lose some of those dungeons, and at least a few of the maps (Sparkfly is alredy pretty borderline) to power creep. It won’t be any fun to play in those places anymore.

With power creep A-Net loses because parts of the map that they’ve invested man hours in creating are no longer viable to all of their player base, and players lose options on where to play.

New content with no power creep is better for everyone involved. I honestly believe that players who ask for “progression” could be very easily satisfied with more content instead of bigger numbers. Yes, new things have to be added to the game to keep it fresh, but those things don’t have to consist of bigger numbers. That’s just what we’re used to.

What if Fractals had been introduced in their current form, difficulty increasing with every level, agony being introduced in higher levels, but nothing had been provided to mitigate it — no new armor tier, no new infusions. Players would still have flocked to the dungeon to experience the new content, and leaderboards could have shown the names of team members who kill the highest level Jade Maw. Players/teams would be forced to kill quickly, work on synergy, know when and where to throw support. What a learning experience this would have been! What bragging rights players could earn!

But, we have this thread instead.

“The interesting and somewhat odd fact is that you have literally scores of games that serve your interest; as far as I know, there is one MMOG on the market that serves mine – GW1 – and it’s 7 years old.”

Not trying to start a fight or anything but what are these scores of games that I can pay for once and get a mmo experience without needing real cash for the cash shop. Eve online I guess you could save up the hundreds of millions of isk and pay for your sub, but that’s a totally different type of game.

fled.4691:

Take a tip from a real life negotiator folks…are you holding to a position or an interest?

I don’t know about anybody else, but I am not negotiating for anything. I simply will not play this game as long as there is vertical progression, no matter how they dress it up.

The reason I am posting here is to make it very clear to them exactly why I am not playing anymore (people stop for all kinds of reasons). Since launch, I have played every day, right up until the patch.

They have metrics and will see exactly how many players quit, as well as how often they played and lord know what else. What they can’t see is why we stop, and that is the reason threads like this are important.

So… did anyone from ArenaNet ever actually say there would be a stat cap?

Well, with no subscription fees, Anet had to figure something out to make people buy gems for gold. The obvious answer to that is to lower drop rates to get rare mats. Simple supply and demand. Ascended gear and that agony thing exponentially makes this situation worse. This all happened around the same time they got rid of the rmt botter rangers too.

Reaver.9256:

“The interesting and somewhat odd fact is that you have literally scores of games that serve your interest; as far as I know, there is one MMOG on the market that serves mine – GW1 – and it’s 7 years old.”

Not trying to start a fight or anything but what are these scores of games that I can pay for once and get a mmo experience without needing real cash for the cash shop. Eve online I guess you could save up the hundreds of millions of isk and pay for your sub, but that’s a totally different type of game.

The “interest” I was talking about was “endless progression”. How they gather revenue is a different topic.

The no subscription fees argument for increasing stat caps is very soft. GW1 made them a ton of money, with a minimalism cash shop that was introduced late in the game’s life.

Wanna know the funny part? I spent more money in GW1 cash shop than i did in GW2. And that is for a very simple reason: I knew what I was buying. And it actually had some value. None of this random pack bullkitten. And the costumes, besides looking MUCH better. Could be worn at all times (even in combat).

But hey… TF2 hats generate more money than the whole of GW2, and it has capped stats, no vertical progression and all hats are purely cosmetic. It all comes down to offering something that is actually worthwhile, not an afterthought.