Guild Wars 2

I’m finding it really tedious to run to a place of power everyday just to get this one crystal. Anet, surely you can think of a better solution than this? Actually, sense all the gear made with the charged crystals are account bound, I’d argue you already have done something. Is this really just a case of you guys wanting to time gate us? Are the daily achievements not enough incentive for players to log in once a day? You’re better than this.

There’s also the fact that with the introduction of ascended armor and the removal of the magic find stat eventually there’s very little point to go to the trouble.

So many complicated reasons and explanations… it is really quite simple though.

They were testing the reaction and commitment of the playerbase before announcing that ascended armor mats would all be time gated. If the community had freaked out they would of held off on that announcement.

I have to agree that the once per day thing feels a bit forced, for instance, I’m a bit late on this content because I was on holiday and only started everything a little while ago, so unless this lasts until the end of the month I’ll be an achievement down.

…so someone has to actually work for the Celestial gear, do things themselves over a period of time using their own 400 level crafters, not just buy a full set off the TP five minutes after they ding 80. After all, they can buy the quartz off the TP…

I think this is testing concepts toward the pink-con level 500 craftables. Which had better take a lot of work over a long time, if they are not to cheapen epic gear.

bewhatever.2390:

…so someone has to actually work for the Celestial gear, do things themselves over a period of time using their own 400 level crafters, not just buy a full set off the TP five minutes after they ding 80. After all, they can buy the quartz off the TP…

I think this is testing concepts toward the pink-con level 500 craftables. Which had better take a lot of work over a long time, if they are not to cheapen epic gear.

I think the problem here is people don’t feel the sense of accomplishment waiting for the daily reset to kick in and click on the commune button. In other wise, they got the over a long time part, but not the a lot of work bit

bewhatever.2390:

…so someone has to actually work for the Celestial gear

What work? Running to a Place of Power once a day isn’t work. Well, it’s busy work, but not work work.

bewhatever.2390:

do things themselves over a period of time using their own 400 level crafters

They’ve already done it for themselves since they’ve got their craft to 400. Crafting exotics is supposed to be the fruit of one’s labor, but now we’re being told we can only enjoy that fruit one grape per day.

bewhatever.2390:

not just buy a full set off the TP five minutes after they ding 80.

Celestial is account bound…no one is going to buy a full set off the TP whether the charged crystals are time-gated or not.

bewhatever.2390:

After all, they can buy the quartz off the TP…

Why does the ability to purchase quartz off the TP mean we should be limited to obtaining charged quartz, used to make account bound gear, once per day?

bewhatever.2390:

I think this is testing concepts toward the pink-con level 500 craftables. Which had better take a lot of work over a long time, if they are not to cheapen epic gear.

How does possession of something cheapen it?

bewhatever.2390:

I think this is testing concepts toward the pink-con level 500 craftables. Which had better take a lot of work over a long time, if they are not to cheapen epic gear.

Have a think about this, if they time gate ascended armor like celestial, when we obtain each piece we can’t necessarily use it because it would disrupt the runes in the armor (unless you use orbs but that would be a minority). So we’re sitting there for an extended period of time with unused armor in our inventory, unless ascended will take runes unlike the jewelry.

Ever since people burned through what endgame there was at launch, we’ve seen more and more time-gated stuff. My guess? They’re trying to slow down the people who throw many hours a day, 7 days a week at the game.

Vol.5241:

You know, if this game had a monthly fee you’d have good reason to complain.

But it’s not enough.

Didn’t realize you we’re from my server and grats on more precursors, I just got a Dawn using a bunch of mystic forge stones yesterday :P. While it’s a common arguement the game is free and we should take it as it is, from what I heard they actually make twice as much money off the gemshop compared to having subscription fee due to how peoples minds work with spending money and it’s why many MMO are going to micropayments. It’s really not free, at least not to a good portion of the players so the game deserves to be good and make sense so we’re not looking back on how messy and cluster kittened the game is, especially for those who pay to play this game.

I find this change pointless since they are accound bound and I think it was silly to make it account bound to begin with when you Givers, Apoth, Sentienal gear all ingame. If you want to leave it account bound, then remove the once crystal a day.

It’s to make sure people who play 12 hours a day can’t get a significant advantage over people who work 12 hours a day (and therefor hold the wallet vote).

Four words:

Ascended and Precursor crafting.

Why waste time making celestial if they plan to make ascended with the same amount of time time-gating

time-gating is an insult to gamers/customers.

Charak.9761:

Why waste time making celestial if they plan to make ascended with the same amount of time time-gating

time-gating is an insult to gamers/customers.

I don’t feel that way. I can get meaningful progression in the single hour I have on a lucky day.

I bet Quartz was a “test” for the upcoming time-gated Ascended materials.

Meglobob.8620:

It helps balance no life 24/7 gamers vs people who work for a living and enjoy gaming as a pleasurable hobby…

I work for a living, and enjoy gaming as a hobby. I’m still seriously irritated by the timegating. Especially since (due to work), while i am able to devote lot of time to the game during weekends, Monday-Friday is completely different matter. Especially if i pull an afternoon shift.

This time gating is not casual friendly. Casuals do not play every day, every week, every month all year.

Astralporing.1957:

I work for a living, and enjoy gaming as a hobby. I’m still seriously irritated by the timegating. Especially since (due to work), while i am able to devote lot of time to the game during weekends, Monday-Friday is completely different matter. Especially if i pull an afternoon shift.

This time gating is not casual friendly. Casuals do not play every day, every week, every month all year.

Hear hear, I’m in full agreement.

Also, consider other games. Mario, Zelda, Halo, Resident Evil, etc., these are all a successful franchise and do not require you to log in every day to be successful.

MMORPGs are of a different nature due to the constant server costs and the staff managing the game, but it still does not require you to log in every day for it to be a sustainable business model. Heck, the business model of Guild Wars (no subscription fees) already will get many people to just log back in whenever they feel like, since they don’t have to pay a fee and feel obliged to play for a whole month.

In short, if you need, or even WANT, people to play every day, you’ve failed.

Astralporing.1957:

Meglobob.8620:

It helps balance no life 24/7 gamers vs people who work for a living and enjoy gaming as a pleasurable hobby…

I work for a living, and enjoy gaming as a hobby. I’m still seriously irritated by the timegating. Especially since (due to work), while i am able to devote lot of time to the game during weekends, Monday-Friday is completely different matter. Especially if i pull an afternoon shift.

This time gating is not casual friendly. Casuals do not play every day, every week, every month all year.

But on the other hand, it doesn’t require 3 hours raids 3 times a week either like it was in WoW to get end-game crafting materials. It’s not necessary to dump hours and hours into farming specific items, which would put hardcore 24/7 players in control of the economy.

By putting everything on daily timers, a casual can choose what he needs, and make meaningful progress without being negatively affected by hardcore players. Making a single quartz takes 10 seconds. Farming a single elemental essence in WoW takes half an hour to two hours. Take your pick.

For something that takes less 2 minutes to login in, wp, charge and logout, people sure do complain quite a lot.

marnick.4305:

But on the other hand, it doesn’t require 3 hours raids 3 times a week either like it was in WoW to get end-game crafting materials. It’s not necessary to dump hours and hours into farming specific items, which would put hardcore 24/7 players in control of the economy.

I don’t like either system, both are attempts to keep players logging in regularly on a treadmill.

Solo.9027:

Time gating sucks but not needing T6 balances it out.

Agreed. Would be ok with time gated ascended armor and weapons that DOES NOT require a lot of gold, but the crafted ascended equipment should be treadeable so that people with the money can buy it as fast as they wish.

Astralporing.1957:

This time gating is not casual friendly. Casuals do not play every day, every week, every month all year.

Yes, let our offline days add up, 1/day or 5/week or 15/month, so people who were offline for a while can do more in one day, but it’s still rewarding to be online every day.

like others I too think this is about ascended gear crafting. Ascended gear is currently aimed at taking a month to get per piece. To do that in crafting you either just make it require 30 charged crystals or if you dont use a time gated mechanism you’d have to balanced materials for it. That would mean something like … most hardcore players get 5 – 10 rare drops a day from farming. So to balance it around them an ascended gear recipe would need to require 150 – 300 ectos. That however would be a nightmare for casuals who probably didnt see 150 rare drops since launch.

Like this its a simple and elegant way to put casuals and hardcore players on the same page and have them both take 30 days to craft a piece of kitten gear rather then have a situations where a hardcore player can get it done in 20 – 30 days and a casual need 6 months to craft the same thing.

marnick.4305:

By putting everything on daily timers, a casual can choose what he needs, and make meaningful progress without being negatively affected by hardcore players. Making a single quartz takes 10 seconds. Farming a single elemental essence in WoW takes half an hour to two hours. Take your pick.

Make it weeklies, not dailies? By which I mean you can skip a daily and catch up another day.

Zoldyck.6241:

For something that takes less 2 minutes to login in, wp, charge and logout, people sure do complain quite a lot.

These design decisions reflect a philosophy that underlies the game. As a result, there might be worse things to come.

Besides, there are also the daily achievements that give you laurels, another time-gated currency.

The complaining about complaining is getting a bit old. We’re simply voicing our opinion in the hope they address the issue or convince us that they are doing it for good reasons.

Galen Grey.4709:

Like this its a simple and elegant way to put casuals and hardcore players on the same page and have them both take 30 days to craft a piece of kitten gear rather then have a situations where a hardcore player can get it done in 20 – 30 days and a casual need 6 months to craft the same thing.

Why try to equalize those who play so differently?

The actual elegant solution is to let the willingness to expand effort correlate with the reward you get, but simply don’t let the reward count in a competitive way.

Let hardcore players get the Legendaries and other amazing skins that are insanely difficult to get. This is no way affects your competitive edge, but it gives you the rewarding prestige associated with the items.

You know that Quartz like karma and gold and drops literally is thrown at you in WvW. It spams from lootbags, if it will continue to do so after the Sanctum leaves I don’t know. But I’m betting that WvW players have stacks and stacks of the stuff.

morrolan.9608:

Its a way to keep people logging in just like the 1 a day laurels.

Its lazy design because it doesn’t require much work to design and implement. Its also grindy and anti player.

Ding Ding Ding. We have a winner.

Galen Grey.4709:

Like this its a simple and elegant way to put casuals and hardcore players on the same page and have them both take 30 days to craft a piece of kitten gear rather then have a situations where a hardcore player can get it done in 20 – 30 days and a casual need 6 months to craft the same thing.

Here’s the problem: That should never happen. Why should someone who has a lot of time to dedicate to the game be artificially crippled because someone else doesn’t?

Imagine you’re running a marathon, and you’re really good. Running is one thing you love, and fortunately you can do it all the time, so evidently, you’re really good. But because you’re better, the organization of the event fits you with lead shoes to “even it up” with those who aren’t as good.

It’s the polar opposite, but exactly just as bad, as most MMOs, where someone with more time to play is inherently better, regardless of their skill, because their gear and level will be so insanely overpowering. GW2 makes a very good job of avoiding this, with easy leveling and, at least until ascended gear comes around, basically no vertical progression. Unfortunately it’s falling a bit too much into the opposite trap, creating an inverse, but equally obnoxious problem.

There’s really no winning for Anet when it comes to stuff like this.

A) They time gate it – Everyone has something to do every day, and whines about it every day because they want to be able to do more in one sitting. This also gates the number of maximum rewards a single player can achieve, so everyone is (at max) on even ground

B) They don’t time gate it, and they limit the rewards – A handful of ultra hardcore players achieve the maximum limit on rewards within 1 day and then spend the next 2 weeks whining that the content was too short and they want something that will keep them busy for 2 weeks.

C) They don’t time gate it, and don’t limit the rewards – A handful of ultra hardcore players achieve all the rewards possibly available within 2 or 3 days. Other players whine that they only had time to get 1 or 2 items and it’s not fair

All the time gate was is to prevent a ridiculous rush on quartz to prevent them from having ballooned up to 20s then kitten right back down to 1s the 3rd day after the event release. Just keeping the ripples in that market smaller is all… thats the only logical reason I see…

Shifty.5187:

Galen Grey.4709:

Like this its a simple and elegant way to put casuals and hardcore players on the same page and have them both take 30 days to craft a piece of kitten gear rather then have a situations where a hardcore player can get it done in 20 – 30 days and a casual need 6 months to craft the same thing.

Why try to equalize those who play so differently?

The actual elegant solution is to let the willingness to expand effort correlate with the reward you get, but simply don’t let the reward count in a competitive way.

Let hardcore players get the Legendaries and other amazing skins that are insanely difficult to get. This is no way affects your competitive edge, but it gives you the rewarding prestige associated with the items.

Because the gap is just too big to bridge. You have players that put in a few hours a week (lets say 5hrs though this number is completely invented). You have an average amount of players that play say 12hrs a week and then you have hardcore players that play more then 60 hrs a week. thats not all you have to consider. Different players play the game differently. For some its all about farming for others its about doing what they enjoy.

Lets say for the sake of argument to craft an ascended gear piece you just needed ectos. Lets say if you farm ectos you can earn as many as 1.5 per hour. While if you play without farming ectos you’ll earn .5 ecto per hour.

That means in the categories I specified if we consider casuals to farmers in that order in one week those who play:

5hrs will earn 2 ecto and 7 ecto
12hrs will earn 6 ecto and 18 ecto
60hrs will earn 30 ecto and 90 ecto

So you want your gear to take a month per piece to acquire. How much ectos do you ask for to craft a single piece do you go with an average of people who play 12hrs and thus make it so that a single item needs 48 ecto? if you do that, the slowest players will need 6 months per piece while the most hardcore farmers will need 3 days.
do you go with slowest players and ask for 8 ecto? that means for most players it will take a couple of days at most. Do you go for the count of the most efficient players? if so you’d need to require 360 ectos which means that casual player now might require over 3 years to craft a single one.

Which one would you go with?

Remember as a developer you have to be impartial and deliver a solution that benefits the community as best as you can while still meeting the needs of the game. If you go for an average amount (48 ecto) you’ll be alienating casuals and with good reason, it will take them 6 years (6 months per item) to craft a full set and thats just for 1 character. At the same time hardcore players will done in less then a month to get the whole set where as this reward was supposed to keep players engaged for a whole year. So what now? do you leave hardcore players without a goal for the rest of the remaining 11 months? Do you add a new guild tier so they have more stuff to work towards?

IF they were force to choose a system like the above I bet they’ll aim more towards the hardcore player because at the end of the day ascended gear is optional, giving a goal for players to achieve is not. So it would be better for the game to make it so only the most hardcore farmers can get this then to make it so everyone has a shot to achieve this. That means everyone in the game would complain the grind for this is unbearable and they’d be right.

On the other hand you dont have to make this loose loose choice if you go with a time-gate. Hardcore players are still going to get an advantage over casuals. While both will require 30 days of game time in order to craft a single item, hardcore players will have that done in a month while for casual players it might take 2 – 3 months in some cases to get it done. At least no one would be mindlessly farming for ages which is a good thing imho.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Galen Grey.4709:

Like this its a simple and elegant way to put casuals and hardcore players on the same page and have them both take 30 days to craft a piece of kitten gear rather then have a situations where a hardcore player can get it done in 20 – 30 days and a casual need 6 months to craft the same thing.

Here’s the problem: That should never happen. Why should someone who has a lot of time to dedicate to the game be artificially crippled because someone else doesn’t?

Imagine you’re running a marathon, and you’re really good. Running is one thing you love, and fortunately you can do it all the time, so evidently, you’re really good. But because you’re better, the organization of the event fits you with lead shoes to “even it up” with those who aren’t as good.

It’s the polar opposite, but exactly just as bad, as most MMOs, where someone with more time to play is inherently better, regardless of their skill, because their gear and level will be so insanely overpowering. GW2 makes a very good job of avoiding this, with easy leveling and, at least until ascended gear comes around, basically no vertical progression. Unfortunately it’s falling a bit too much into the opposite trap, creating an inverse, but equally obnoxious problem.

check my reply to Shifty for details but in a nutshell its because this race isnt about who gets there first, this race is about a journey that needs to take X amount of time. If you’re organizing a 1 hour race and you have people who are going to participate in by walking, others by running, others using a bicycle, some using a car and a few using a fighter jet how long to you make the track? 800kms so that the fighter jet takes about an hour to get to the finish line? or 2km so that the people walking it will take an hour to get to the finish line?

What this does is make sure everyone is traveling at the same speed even though some will take a breaks hence the people who are really good at racing will still get to the finish line first. Its just this systems makes sure no one falls too far behind and no one gets trashed because he is made to put in the same effort as people who have farm more time to invest in the game that he ever can.

Galen Grey.4709:

So you want your gear to take a month per piece to acquire.

That’s the crucial bit, just don’t want that.

If your game has hardcore players then that is great of course, but do you really want them to play your game for 60 hours a week? Don’t you want them to spend time on other things besides your game? After all, it’s just a game. This is not to diminish the value of games, but they are just games. Games are meant to be played for entertainment purposes and that’s it. Once players are playing it like it is a job, you’re losing sight of what is really your goal as a game developer.

Collecting gear is not even fun. It’s the actual game-content that is fun. Running through the areas, doing the events with other people (preferably), doing dungeons with PUGs or with your guild, those are the fun things. After a while most of these things become stale and then you might run into a problem. As a developer you probably want to keep giving things to your players so they can entertain themselves, but just adding time-gated crap does not solve any of that. It’s not fun for ANYONE.

If you want your game to remain fun, focus on WvW and PvP, add Fractals levels and continue to develop the Living Story. These are all things that can get people back, and none of it requires time-gated nonsense.

If despite that you do want to offer something to 60 hours per week hardcore players, then just add items that are insanely hard to get but only differ in looks. Guild Wars 1 had plenty of awesome items that would get you some nice in-game prestige, but none of it was necessary. Casual players were not at a disadvantage in PvE and mostly did not care. Here and there would be some pangs of jealousy, but that’s actually what you want. Give the hardcore players awesome but ‘useless’ items, and let casual players leave the game when they want to, and let them come back when they want to.

Galen Grey.4709:

check my reply to Shifty for details but in a nutshell its because this race isnt about who gets there first, this race is about a journey that needs to take X amount of time. If you’re organizing a 1 hour race and you have people who are going to participate in by walking, others by running, others using a bicycle, some using a car and a few using a fighter jet how long to you make the track? 800kms so that the fighter jet takes about an hour to get to the finish line? or 2km so that the people walking it will take an hour to get to the finish line?

What this does is make sure everyone is traveling at the same speed even though some will take a breaks hence the people who are really good at racing will still get to the finish line first. Its just this systems makes sure no one falls too far behind and no one gets trashed because he is made to put in the same effort as people who have farm more time to invest in the game that he ever can.

But that’s the problem, it’s a terribly stupid logic and horrible game design. If someone can finish first, let them. The whole “oh we can’t leave anyone behind!” attitude is bullkitten. Sure we can. If you can’t keep up that’s your problem. It’s not like this gear gives you an advantage, it’s just another stat distribution.

To answer your question: Developers shouldn’t be focusing on how long something lasts in that sense. That would be the first mistake. They should be focusing on making the content enjoyable and sensible. Some people will complete it in a day, others in a month. Doesn’t matter. That’s their problem, not yours. Nobody is forced to step up, so why are some people forced to “step down”?

Once you go down the “this should take one month to complete” road you’re already wrong. You’ve failed. Game over.

@shifty
thats is precisely why time gating is a good idea here. You want people to take 30 days to acquire 1 item but you certainly dont want every single one of your players to spend as much time as the ones who play a lot spend, like say 60hrs per week. with charged crystal mechanic you’re still making sure it takes 30 days to acquire 1 item (well provided this is what the mechanic is intended for lets not forget all this is just speculation) but instead of forcing everyone to play 60hrs per week you’re just asking them to invest 2-5 minutes each day leaving the rest of the game session free for them to play what they enjoy rather then farming a ton of materials .

@ProxyDamage

That will still be there. if a player can only play 5hrs a week they’ll likely log in a few days, say 3 days per week. if someone plays 60hrs a week I am sure they log in every day.
so the person who plays 60hrs per week will get this done in 30 days. the one who plays 3 days per week will get done in 2 months 10 days.

I dont agree there. Some players already find it hard to enjoy working towards cosmetic equipement that provide no advantage imagine if you had to have them play with no reward to work towards. Would you enjoy playing with no long term goal? IE you already had your full ascended set and legendaries for all your alts and have nothing left to get? for most people that would be a big no I bet.

Also I didnt say Developers should focus on how long content takes and this doesnt do that, this does exactly the opposite. If they went with the traditional crafting materials route this would have to be like 30 times the requirements of an exotic armor piece at least. So that means taking a random exotic item as bases 150 ectos, 150 Gossamer, 600 Spools of Gossamer Thread, 150 ancient bones. That would mean a lot of farming. If you farmed for the gold directly you’d need 30g for the ecto, 4g for gossamer, 4g for the spools, 24g for the ancient bones for a total of 62g per piece. Would that really be better ?

As for using time as a base of valuing things, its actually how you should do things in MMO. in real life we value stuff based on the value of raw materials & labour required to build them + a little profit on top. In a game there is no raw material involved in creating items so what you’re left is giving them value based on the time you want players to invest in getting said item.

a Carrion Intricate Gossamer Insignia simply speaking does require 5x ectos, 5 bolts, 5x ancient bones, 20x spools because it really requires as many items to create. It has those requirements simply because who ever worked on the economy estimated that it should take say a day or two of effort to create the item and those ingredients should require that level of effort to acquire.

This is not a failure or game over, this is having mid term goals (more effort then exotic but less effort then legendary) without forcing people to play specific content for a long period of time. The problem is people cant accept it takes 30 days to get a single ascended item. They just want to be able to get it quicker then that. In real life that would be the equivalent of complaining a specific car cost $50,000 when you want to pay for it $10,000 because time is the real currency by which you’re paying for things.

Simply speaking I believe you’re looking at this the wrong way. What this is doing is not slowing down the hardcore player who plays 60 hours a week, its just speeding up a little bit the casual player who playing 5 hrs a week. The hardcore player is still going to win the race because he can play each day.

Galen Grey.4709:

Which one would you go with?

With diminshing return. Let’s say you can craft one t7 mat/charged crystal daily. If you want to craft more, you can, but each additional attempt will cost you double. Third attempt – double again (and so on). Then (in case of ascended gear, you can drop this step for celestial exotic sets) repeat the same with armor pieces, but on a weekly basis.
Now, someone that wants to farm like hell to get their gear set faster, can, but will soon hit ridiculous cost levels. Casuals are mostly unaffected (and if they want to get their gear just a little bit faster, it should also be within their reach.

Wouldn’t something like that be far better than what we have now?

Note: The above example is not too well thought out as far as precise mats calculations go. I am sure it could be designed far better, and finetuned to give reasonable time brackets (whatever “reasonable” would mean).

maddoctor.2738:

I bet Quartz was a “test” for the upcoming time-gated Ascended materials.

Maybe, or maybe the LS team responsible for Quartz did not talk with the team working on Ascended. They certainly didn’t talk with the team working on getting rid of MF on gear.

The charged quartz is not only gated(mostly since you have a rare chance to get one from the mining node in your home instance) but it’s also an account bound material with no discover-able recipes(all the recipes are learned from scrolls) .
When you add the talk of ascended gear needing be a combination of existing materials. To me this places quartz as one of two things, either this will be an extremely sought material for some ascension gear combination. With the acquisition for most players will be a yearly(or when kits roll back in) gated resource for most like snowflakes of the winters day or candy from Halloween.
Or this will be a dead end resource allowing for the odd creation of exotic gear from a few crafters. I hope it’s not the latter because it would be sad for still growing pile of glint bones in my home instances to be a pointless resource.
(also a note for those that don’t want to do the extra waypointing, quartz has no base mining limit so create a lvl 1 alt and park it next to a home instance with copper picks. To avoid the other WP as frequently, have another alt withdraw a few days worth and park them on one of the starter zone focus points(like the dead worm in shiverpeaks) so you can just log these alts in and do the 2 minutes of gathering & charging.)

Galen Grey.4709:

In real life we value stuff based on the value of raw materials & labour required to build them + a little profit on top. In a game there is no raw material involved in creating items so what you’re left is giving them value based on the time you want players to invest in getting said item.

I agree with your point in general, but this isn’t correct.

In real life pricing things is very complex, but can be summarized as a set of boundaries.

The lower bound is how much it costs the most efficient producer to make.

The upper bound is how much the seller thinks the wealthiest potential customer is willing to pay.

Where the actual “price” happens to be at any particular moment depends on how many willing customers with enough money there are and how much of the desired product there is.

Bear in mind, however, that all sellers desire for their prices to be as high as possible all the time. The only things that prevent this are competition and consumer willingness to pay. Costs don’t enter into the conversation until you start talking about efficiency. Also, keep in mind that prices are almost never set by consumers. Sales are determined by consumers, generally as a Yes/No decision, but that doesn’t really reflect on prices much. There are loads of products out there that will never sell (or will sell too quickly) because their prices don’t make any sense.

And, in case someone should think this is completely off-topic, this is the precise reason I don’t mind time-gating. Imagine if we could all make as much Celestial Armor for all of our alts all on 1 day. What do you think would happen to the price of Quartz? And what would happen to the price of Quartz after supply gets reduced when the event ends? I think the time-gated nature of Charged Quartz is an excellent method of ensuring price stability and eliminating waste. Most people aren’t going to make a bunch of Celestial armor “Just because.” They’re going to log in once a day to make each Charged Quartz, so they can get their one piece of Celestial a week. Why? Because they care. And in this instance ANet decided not to make them grind gold for a year because they care about getting a particular stat distribution.

And if this is a model to how Ascended is going to be implemented, then I’m all for it. I hate how half of the process of crafting a Legendary Weapon is grinding gold until you hate logging in. I’d rather it be artificially time gated than gated by market forces.

I think they are doing these kinds to things to make players want to log in everyday…this reeks of desperation. I think they are losing players and trying to keep them playing the laziest way possible…time gated material.

I honestly could care less for the charged quartz…just my opinion on why they are doing things like this.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the other big MMO’s come out.

It’s just a cheap technique to get you to log in everyday. It’s more costly to develop actual content.

Question for everyone just to get a feel for things.
Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character as apposed to once per-day per account?
I personally think a lot of alt aholics would be ok with this. It allows them to progress the character as a character not as a account.

anzenketh.3759:

Question for everyone just to get a feel for things.
Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character as apposed to once per-day per account?
I personally think a lot of alt aholics would be ok with this. It allows them to progress the character as a character not as a account.

No. The point is to gate how long it takes an individual character to get a full set of these items. With 5 characters I could fuse 5 pieces a day and be done with one toon in like a week and a half.

That would completely invalidate the point of time-gating the content in the first place, because then it wouldn’t be time-gated. It’d be character slot gated.

PinCushion.7390:

anzenketh.3759:

Question for everyone just to get a feel for things.
Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character as apposed to once per-day per account?
I personally think a lot of alt aholics would be ok with this. It allows them to progress the character as a character not as a account.

No. The point is to gate how long it takes an individual character to get a full set of these items. With 5 characters I could fuse 5 pieces a day and be done with one toon in like a week and a half.

That would completely invalidate the point of time-gating the content in the first place, because then it wouldn’t be time-gated. It’d be character slot gated.

What if that same time gate required you to complete content in higher level areas to get the item for the timegate? What if you could only fuze quartz in Orr.

Would it be ok then. In the case of quartz.

Then you could not just run up with the 5 new characters. You would have to level each one. Then go complete the content.

The point is to time gate one character. You already did forcing all those characters to level a specific amount takes time. Or coin to bypass the time. Which still take time to get. (Don’t talk about the cash shop here because that is the entire point of the cash shop if for those that want to bypass time requirements.)

It’s time gated for the same reason new currencies are introduced, to prevent rich characters from instantly getting all the best gear.

Everyone starts with a level playing field. You only need to acquire 25 quartz a day to get a charged quartz and that’s reasonably easy to do between the mining points at Labyrinthine Cliffs and your home instance and a few kite baskets.

It’s also time gated to encourage players to play daily. A “happy” MMO is a populated MMO.

ProxyDamage.9826:

To answer your question: Developers shouldn’t be focusing on how long something lasts in that sense. That would be the first mistake. They should be focusing on making the content enjoyable and sensible. Some people will complete it in a day, others in a month. Doesn’t matter. That’s their problem, not yours. Nobody is forced to step up, so why are some people forced to “step down”?

Once you go down the “this should take one month to complete” road you’re already wrong. You’ve failed. Game over.

And it seems to me that by having fortnightly living story content releases that they should have overcome the issue of keeping players in the game busy anyway, with no need for such extreme time gating.

I think it’s just busywork to get people to log in. Another “daily” activity, if you will. It doesn’t really bother me because I don’t use them, anyway.

For a game thats meant to be aimed at casual players why the need to get them to log in every single day?

Like I said the fortnightly content should be enough to keep players coming back for a few days every fortnight.

Behellagh.1468:

It’s time gated for the same reason new currencies are introduced, to prevent rich characters from instantly getting all the best gear.

Everyone starts with a level playing field. You only need to acquire 25 quartz a day to get a charged quartz and that’s reasonably easy to do between the mining points at Labyrinthine Cliffs and your home instance and a few kite baskets.

It’s also time gated to encourage players to play daily. A “happy” MMO is a populated MMO.

If people are just logging in to do these dailies then they are going to leave the second a big name MMO is released…tactics like this might keep a player logging in for daily things…but it wont keep them…

It’s just lazy design.