Guild Wars 2

John, one major concern here:

Are you going to do one of the underhand tactics with 3:1 to 4:1 or 2:1 to 3:1 refinement ratios thingggy again.

Remember that one time where you changed softwood from 3:1 to 4:1? It would be nice to know so I won’t update my client until I find out about those and refine about 100k softwood before I got shafted you know.

If this is any indication, player beware t5 leathers are going from 3:1 to 5:1, better refine now.

Or please John, let us know if you are going to use those underhand tactics again so we know ahead of time. Please

John Smith.4610:

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

So what you are saying is that you are completely fine with the exceedingly high price of Silk and are also nerfing its salvaging so that even if players wanted to they could not generate the silk themselves without resorting to the trade post.

I highly doubt the “innovative” map rewards will reward enough silk to be worth it to craft one spool of silk weaving thread a day. Silk bolts are 100 every day compared to 50 for Thick leather section, mithrillium, and elder spirit wood. Even if you lowered them to 50 they would still maintain their value because they are used for insignias for all armor types and in general are more used than any of the other two comparable ascended materials.

I’ve seen this problem in a game before, gating content behind grinding and having to trade with other players to participate in gameplay. It doesn’t work, in the end you will alienate all of the players who are average at the game while leaving only the elite who really won’t care about what you change because they are already sitting on enough capital to get or make nearly anything they want.

I want to continue playing this game but I don’t want it to turn into Grind Wars 2 since people are not machines who can play the game 24/7 they have jobs and families in lots of cases and working to play is terrible. Games should not be “work” they should be fun.

Zyga.2580:

As a side note, do you guys do this often? have you even seen the yakslapper achievement? is it fun for you guys to put things out of possible reach? This achievement and the one where you DEFEND the yaks, are well out of range for…. anyone, I’m willing to bet that not a single player has this. It seems rather impossible with such low spawn rates and such a high number demanded.

Yakslapper is getting drastically lowered in HoT. It will now be within reach (2500 Yaks).

John Smith.4610:

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

Wait… what?

To a lot of us, Fractals are just another kind of dungeon. For the sake of this discussion (and I realize it may be a bit outside your area), what is the difference that makes Fractals better than the older dungeons for people to earn rewards in?

Question Two
Will the change to the gold rewards from dungeons be the only change to them, or are there other incoming changes to assist in this perception shift of how they’re viewed? (Economic or non-economic, either kind of change.)

John Smith.4610:

I don’t believe we ever discussed changing the tokens from dungeons.

This is EXTREMELY concerning as someone who wants to collect all the skins eventually.

Disincentivizing dungeon play = less players running dungeons.

Less players running dungeons = more time and effort spent finding dungeon groups.

More time and effort spent finding dungeon groups = large increase in time/effort required to earn dungeon skins.

I seriously hope the team considers changing token drop rate or reducing skin prices, because killing the dungeon population means killing our chances at ever finishing dungeon skin collection. And when these skins are meant to be a reward for playing a specific type of PvE content, directing players to PvP is NOT the answer. If I wanted to earn my dungeon skins via PvP, that’s what I would have been doing this whole time since the reward track update – but I don’t enjoy PvP, so I’d rather get the dungeon skins by doing dungeons.

But again, by killing dungeon population, I’m forced to either play PvP (which I don’t enjoy) or give up on dungeon skins entirely.

szthesquid.9576:

John Smith.4610:

I don’t believe we ever discussed changing the tokens from dungeons.

This is EXTREMELY concerning as someone who wants to collect all the skins eventually.

Disincentivizing dungeon play = less players running dungeons.

Less players running dungeons = more time and effort spent finding dungeon groups.

More time and effort spent finding dungeon groups = large increase in time/effort required to earn dungeon skins.

I seriously hope the team considers changing token drop rate or reducing skin prices, because killing the dungeon population means killing our chances at ever finishing dungeon skin collection. And when these skins are meant to be a reward for playing a specific type of PvE content, directing players to PvP is NOT the answer. If I wanted to earn my dungeon skins via PvP, that’s what I would have been doing this whole time since the reward track update – but I don’t enjoy PvP, so I’d rather get the dungeon skins by doing dungeons.

But again, by killing dungeon population, I’m forced to either play PvP (which I don’t enjoy) or give up on dungeon skins entirely.

they want you to pvp if you want dungeon gear, or wait for enough people to group, or beg your friends.

On dungeons I will say this. Players are sell swords. Mercenaries. We do content specifically for loot and money. Fun plays a large part yes. But if you want us to play your content, like dungeon paths, you have to reward us in a manner that is consistent with the effort and time invested. Otherwise they empty out and you are left with an largely abandoned attraction.

It may not be your intention, but nerfing dungeon rewards while keeping things like token armor and weapons at the same price will have the net result of emptying out that content in favor of something that pays out as well but requires less effort.

It is a challenging thing managing where your population clusters, and I know you guys have lots of content you want to attract people to. But I would ask that you not dictate to your player base. Don’t tell them “You do fractals now.” And adjust rewards to enforce it. They will rebel and resent it. Instead watch where we go and why. Produce new content that caters to, rather than trying to adjust away from that behavior. The fractals were not made for the purpose of farming. They were made for hard core gamers (many of which have moved on to other games because of inherently short attention spans) who demanded some content that was face meltingly difficult so they could brag about it’s completion. It was not intended for what is a majority casual player base.

Personally I dislike them a great deal. I hate heights, and I don’t like jumping puzzles, and fractals have both of those things along with several other mechanics I do not enjoy. And I felt the payout did not fit the time and difficulty put in. But I did put a lot of time and effort into dungeon paths which I found acceptably challenging given my time constraints and felt the rewards fit the effort given.

In the end that is what matters. If people will do your content. The greatest roller coaster on earth is no good if you can’t get enough people to ride it because it’s to scary. So when you produce things like fractals that have such a narrow focus you have to accept that those who frequent them are relatively fewer in number than those in the world at large. This turned out a bit more rambly than I intended but it’s just my thoughts and opinions on it.

Cross.6437:

Zyga.2580:

As a side note, do you guys do this often? have you even seen the yakslapper achievement? is it fun for you guys to put things out of possible reach? This achievement and the one where you DEFEND the yaks, are well out of range for…. anyone, I’m willing to bet that not a single player has this. It seems rather impossible with such low spawn rates and such a high number demanded.

Yakslapper is getting drastically lowered in HoT. It will now be within reach (2500 Yaks).

Well one thing addressed at a time I suppose, We’ve got to have the yakslapper title more than we need ascended gear for raids. :/

“Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes”

Well, thank you for the honest response to that. I mean that sincerely. It’s disappointing to see that’s what’s happening, but it’s good to get a frank answer.

munki.6402:

Nebilim.5127

This is the first time i have seen a developer purposely sabotaging its own content to demoralize its costumers of doing it.

And this, unfortunately, is not the first time I’ve seen players use hyperbole to express their opinions. He’s being refreshingly straightforward. If he weren’t being so honest, you would complain for their lack of an explanation. These are good changes and he’s obviously being as transparent as he can be because he knows this will create a tiny schism. The fact is, dungeons are broken, dead end content hurting the game economy. Time to move on.

they arent hurting the game economy, he basically said he wants to put dungeon rewards elsewhere. He said point blank the goal is to move where you earn money, not to change money earning much.

Dungeons are not the most profitable farm. the goal is to get people to stop playing dungeons all the time. They want those people playing fractals. And they redesigned fractals to resemble dungeons, so i dunno what design failures you are talking about creatively with dungeons.

He is being straight foward though, and i applaud that because at least you can converse about things as they stand, rather than around it.

its not about dunegeons ruining the economy, its just that they want dungeons to fade to the back of things players do often.

I noticed several answers involved “I feel” this or that. Were they based on your personal opinions or on what you think is best for the game?

Indeed, I applaud how direct that answer was. It stings a bit because at some point I would have liked to see more dungeons (I’m one of those few weirdos who likes Aetherpath), but this is way better communication.

The problem with de-incentivicing dungeons and expecting people to spend that time in fractals is this – From what we understand, there will be three daily reward tiers for fractals and now each fractal only consists of one shard. unless higher level instabilities does something gimmicky to increase the time of completion by a huge amount, doing your daily fractals will take no time at all. Raids are gated to weekly rewards, so it will function more as an extremely challenging guild mission.

So after a dungeon runner does his 3 daily fractal shards, what should he do? Map rewards? Open world pve should not be a dungeon substitute. Even as old and overdone as they are, old dungeons are still much more engaging then open world zerg farming.

Maybe if Arah and Aetherpath could still have a sizable gold reward, that would be a decent compromise.

De-incentivizing content after waving about comments in some of the streams about how great it is that content is always relevant because of scaling is pretty backwards but given this is Anet I’m not particularly surprised since they apparently don’t want us to grind either, but then have most of the game involve outrageous amounts of “optional” grind.

It’s just sad to see because it also seems to show a certain lack of pride in the work that was put into those dungeons, what about newer players(you know that massive wave you guys were so giddy about)? Getting help to do the dungeons when no one wants to do them for lack of reward is gonna suck for them.

[Edit] Just to add that I’m not saying removal of the gold is a bad idea, but removal without another form of reward with the goal of making people not want to do it is incredibly short sighted. Devs should never have to de-incentivize content, make the new content have more incentive in the first place. To be honest it’s disappointing as this is a terribly ham fisted approach to game design.

What was the reasoning behind staggering the release of the new Legendaries that were supposed to be out in 2013?

munki.6402:

Trice.4598:

munki.6402:

Sublimatio.6981:

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Why?

It’s dead-end content and injects gold from thin air (so to speak) into the economy, causing inflation. Two very good reasons to make adjustments moving forward.

How about 75 people farming 50-100 champion bags an hour handing out 2-10 silver each. That’s without counting all the blue/green being sold to merchant. Pretty sure more gold is injected in the economy by people AFK-farming Silverwaste than dungeon runners.

Wrong. The money flow and wealth generated from SW either goes directly to the gatherer via merchant transactions, or TP transactions with other players in the form of drops/salvage/mats. You might have noticed there is no end, flat gold reward in SW. I will say again, the gold rewards of dungeons come from thin air and are injected into the economy, causing inflation. That is bad.

I must also add that I see little difference between afk’ing portions of the SW events (for the record, I do not afk because I like to, I don’t know, play the game) and skipping dungeon mobs and cheesing dungeon bosses to maximize g/hr returns.

Wrong. I was referring to the raw silver they drop, every bag drops an average of 6 silvers, which is out of thin air as you say, not the items they give. Most loots from bags aren’t sold on the TP hence, not much of those silver is spent on TP taxes. And unlike dungeons which can only give reward once, people can do it all day.

And I much rather have people actually trying to be efficient (aka “cheesing” ) than just leeching of people who actually try to succeed the event (I really like being the only person defending my lane when I see 12 people up the ledge doing nothing).

munki.6402:

Trice.4598:

munki.6402:

Sublimatio.6981:

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Why?

It’s dead-end content and injects gold from thin air (so to speak) into the economy, causing inflation. Two very good reasons to make adjustments moving forward.

How about 75 people farming 50-100 champion bags an hour handing out 2-10 silver each. That’s without counting all the blue/green being sold to merchant. Pretty sure more gold is injected in the economy by people AFK-farming Silverwaste than dungeon runners.

Wrong. The money flow and wealth generated from SW either goes directly to the gatherer via merchant transactions, or TP transactions with other players in the form of drops/salvage/mats. You might have noticed there is no end, flat gold reward in SW. I will say again, the gold rewards of dungeons come from thin air and are injected into the economy, causing inflation. That is bad.

I must also add that I see little difference between afk’ing portions of the SW events (for the record, I do not afk because I like to, I don’t know, play the game) and skipping dungeon mobs and cheesing dungeon bosses to maximize g/hr returns.

Each champ bag contain silver..or coinage. Also every item vendored does create coin “out of thin air”. That coin is coming from the same place dungeon coin comes from.

munki.6402:

[…]
I must also add that I see little difference between afk’ing portions of the SW events (for the record, I do not afk because I like to, I don’t know, play the game) and skipping dungeon mobs and cheesing dungeon bosses to maximize g/hr returns.

instead of taking out these dungeons as a possibility can we just fix things so that stacking is punished and doing cheezy things is also punished? my first experiences with dungeons included things like “Why arent you running zerker gear” “Get in this corner and stack” “run past everything” etc. The game needs to have all options covered, if I want to run a staff condi mesmer I shouldnt be punished for it, because it’s a reasonable build, while clearly not being as good as a GS zerker build, it needs to make things like stacking bad, we need more monsters that do a cleave and maybe even boon removal, we need to have dungeon monsters never give up on following you, etc etc etc, please work to fix what content was there instead of cutting it off so that it slowly dies and then when the day comes that nobody likes playing it remove it, and then blame it on us for not wanting it. When really it’s just Anet making something worthless so that it dies.

Kain Francois.4328:

Are there any plans to make them available other than Champions bags?

Other than drops from literally everything that drop stuff, by extension pvp boxes, or purchasable from fractals?

I’ve got a question, is the mystic forge been brought up in this matter?

To put it simply,
Are there going to be new recipes?
Are some going to get changes?
Is what you guys want it to be going to change?
etc, just a lot of “is X of the MF changing” or “is X of the MF going to be updated”.

Thank you John.

I enjoy dungeons. They are fun. I still haven’t completed every path in every dungeon, and I want to do it for the Achievements. I also would love to come back to dungeons to farm some tokens and buy some cool skins.

The new system doesn’t affect me, because I never did dungeons for the gold. But it will inherently affect me, because there will be a lot less people doing dungeons.

I already find it difficult to find groups for dungeons because I’ve never run some paths and I may not berserker gear on all my characters, and those seem to be requirements for a lot of people that farm dungeons.

But I have to realize that less people is less people and it’ll only make it harder to find a group.

I don’t know why dungeons lost support. I guess as a more casual MMO starts to amp up the competitiveness, it needs to toss aside some of the casual elements.

But I don’t see why Dungeons, Fractals, and Raids can’t get along and occupy a different goal for people.

Okay, here’s an option. Convert all the dungeons into raids. Make them scale 1-9 so you don’t need agony resistance, and make them drop the dungeon tokens. Then just remove dungeons completely.

I feel anything would be better than the proposed system.

John Smith.4610:

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

And really, this is where bad things, just stay bad. I get it though. Silk is a HUGE gold sink for anyone wanting ascended armor. If they changed the frequency, they devalue those that spent the $100 in gems, just to buy 30-some bolts of Damask.

The silk issue should have been fixed along time ago. Keeping it as it was, in the beginning was more a way to churn gem profits, via gem-to-gold transactions.

Seeing this response tells me, that even though things are changing, the one constant will be that we are still depending on gem-to-gold transactions in order to purchase the rarer mats.

So John, here is my question to you: Has Arena Net ever considered offering a monthly sub to those of us who’d like a 60-75% increase in crafting mats drops? If so, why haven’t we been given the option, instead of depending on large gem purchases, that we rarely can afford?

I wonder if dungeon selling will increase or decrease because of this.
I mean, since people won’t find groups anyways, the only people they have left to play with is the guild, friends, and the sellers.

Can we keep this about post HoT economy questions and not debating the impact on dungeons. The die is thrown, it’s been thrown a long time ago when the dungeon team was dismantled and they stated future team content will be fractals. The reduction in gold was the inevitable swift kick in the breaches to break old habits and start new ones, otherwise few would leave and continue to complain that there are no new dungeons while ignoring new fractals that are inevitably coming.

This shouldn’t just be debating the reasons behind the change to dungeon rewards.

Well I guess it will free some of my time up. Less reason to help new people with what skills do, what combo field and finishers are and what they do or what buffs are. Since none of these things are used outside of dungeons/fractals. And since fractals is a bad environment for this, I will prob stop joining the “we need help”-party’s in lfg.

I am just glad I am an old player with people to do fractals/raids with already since it will be so mush harder for new people to get into this from now on.

All that said, I get the decision (from a business perspectiv) since it will be get HoT or dont play instanced content.

once again the playerbase is going to have to suffer through yet ANOTHER Anet experiment that will lead to failure, sad thing is though ANet never kittening learns. i guess you will when players just stop logging on. this is NOT how you fix the economy especially when you go for the low hanging fruit where there are other more lucrative ways to generate gold in this game. you guys are busy trying to be nuanced that you miss the big picture and John, the amount of vitriol coming your way when players see the kitten you pulled will be hilarious to watch. i will have my popcorn ready.

I can definitly accept that you reduce the dungeon gold amount. Not that I like it, but I can kinda see why. But would it be possible to increase the amount of tokens in return? Nothing crazy like doubling it. But adding like 10 more per run or so to kinda make up for the money loss. Ofcourse I can’t really see the bigger picture and if it would derail some other economy, but I really can’t see how 10 more tokens will hurt or make things too easy etc.
Btw. thanks allot for making a Q&A.

John Smith.4610:

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

Omg, this just made me die laughing. thanks for being so good about all the questions John. This is all very interesting. It makes me a little sad, because dungeons and fractals are my thing in this game. I’m really excited for raids, but hope dungeons aren’t nerfed too much.

Is your intention to shift the gold away from dungeons into fractals above 50 that require masteries? This seems like a great way to pressure players into buying the expansion.

Wanna farm gold in an optimal way!? Better grab that wallet and purchase HoT!

Drennon.7190:

Is your intention to shift the gold away from dungeons into fractals above 50 that require masteries? This seems like a great way to pressure players into buying the expansion.

Wanna farm gold in an optimal way!? Better grab that wallet and purchase HoT!

Do we even need Hot for the non-Tyrian masteries?

…Don’t forget to look out for a rebalancing event at launch that’ll be very similar to rebalancing events of the past.

I’m wondering what this part thrown in at the end of the blog post means.

What I’m imagining is Lost Shores end event, where precursors were dropping like candy.

Certainly hoping so.

John Smith.4610:

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

Ty for your clear statements. I’m a fan.

Fractals already exist. Imho Anet should try to increase the amount of attractive content, not to decrease it.
When dungeons become unattractive we need a replacement or fractals will become boring very fast.

There are ~ 25 dungeonpaths. I doubt we will see 25 new fractal maps with daily rewards tied to each map.

slamfunction.7462:

John Smith.4610:

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

And really, this is where bad things, just stay bad. I get it though. Silk is a HUGE gold sink for anyone wanting ascended armor. If they changed the frequency, they devalue those that spent the $100 in gems, just to buy 30-some bolts of Damask.

The silk issue should have been fixed along time ago. Keeping it as it was, in the beginning was more a way to churn gem profits, via gem-to-gold transactions.

Seeing this response tells me, that even though things are changing, the one constant will be that we are still depending on gem-to-gold transactions in order to purchase the rarer mats.

So John, here is my question to you: Has Arena Net ever considered offering a monthly sub to those of us who’d like a 60-75% increase in crafting mats drops? If so, why haven’t we been given the option, instead of depending on large gem purchases, that we rarely can afford?

China has a subscription fee for GW2, If I remember correctly they gave you gems (same amount of gems for the money you paid) and then a few other things that are cosmetic. It isn’t a “bad” deal if you spend money on ingame outfits/items from the shop.

Just to clarify, John, the goal is to make people grind more? Because that’s the net effect here. Take away reliable sources of income and replace them with open world grind.

Here’s the system, simplified:
- remove sources of liquid reward from the game, because there’s no gold sink mechanic (TP sucks up gold)
- drive up demand for materials by “incentivizing” (forcing) acquisition of more expensive equipment in order to complete the newly focused PvE content (ie ascended gear for raids and fractals)
- emphasize content behind paywalls (HoT) by heavily discouraging existing forms of income

The economic side of things definitely fits the new grind philosophy of GW2. From a gameplay perspective, the Mastery system is built to force grind to reduce the rate of content consumption. How does that work?
- only 4 maps, if players can access the content immediately they will blow through the entire expansion in less than a month
- push a lock-out system that requires heavy grind to move to new parts of each map
- level cap remains fixed at 80, but access to the new zones is effectively blocked to people who do not grind out the “new” levels in HoT

Grind is the future for everything in this game.

Improve the possibility to solo dungeons and that change won’t bother me.

Tending towards scarcity and keeping stuff like silk as is does though. Everything is way too TP-centric for me as is.

I really dont understand this. I mean I get you are trying to deincentivize dungeons but why. they are actually a really fun piece of content that honestly Im pretty upset Anet hasnt gone into, but fine i get it they dont want to and maybe the devs dont like dungeons but im still pretty upset about it. I dont understand why you couldnt just leave them alone as a way for people just starting out with instance based pve content or people who didnt buy heart of thorns. or people working to get their ascended gear for fractals and raids who arent long time players. And the worst part about this is that some of the dungeons are still under rewarding despite the change that happened 2 years ago. Aetherpath is a huge example of this. But no instead of trying to make dungeons better they are just discarded as Anet moves on to the next piece of content. And you didnt even need to try and make them better you could just leave them alone despite their problems. In the time between being locked out of raids what are we suppose to do just re run the same few fractals over and over again, but people are only going to do enought to get the highest level daily chest. Then what we have next are world events and dungeons and right now SW is just about as good as dungeons in terms of making money but so incredibly boring, and Verdant brink isnt that fun either, dungeons are incredibly fun but instead of nerfing the boring mindless stuff you nerf the actual well designed fun stuff. you dont need to phase out dungeons just make the new pve stuff worth doing along with dungeons. why would you make the original game worse especially with so many new players that are coming in with free to play. and you dont even need to nerf dungeons with the lock out time on raids, and the amount of fractals that you need to do every day not being that many. This just makes no sense to me and it seems like you are just trying to hurt people trying to make money and materials for economic reasons which is so kittenty. When are we goingot treat this game like a game and not an economy and focus on making the game enjoyable, and rewarding, and not treat it like an economy. As an avid dungeon runner it is going to be so hard to find pugs because everyone is just gong to be in Silverwastes, because its going to be more rewarding which is so lame because the mindless grinding that takes almost no skill to accomplish is now better then the content that actually takes skill. Dont nerf the rewards for parts of your content balance them all so people have incentive to do all of it thats how you make people want to play your game, when developers actually care about all aspects of there game and not just a handful. Come one Anet I was really looking forward to raids with so much in pve being balanced with great rewards all around, but now you just ruined all of that.

Zyga.2580:

I was going to write a big long angry post about the economy but I feel like it would go better if I just say it in fewer words: This is going to suck for the people who don’t have an inflated wallet. I want ascended gear, I don’t have time to make 1000 gold to pay for said gear, the game is also nerfing me from creating it myself by lower material rates. this isn’t fair to the people who can’t afford it.

Please make a material sink intended for massively wealthy characters, and allow normal people to obtain ascended gear because it will be the standard for raids. The way I suggest it would be to keep our material rates the same. Because those who have hoarded the most are going to make a huge profit right now and then you just have a rich get richer kind of deal going on.
I’m also a little bit agitated right now because yesterday I sold all of my crafting materials so I could get some gold to pay for things to make my ascended gear today, and the price has suddenly skyrocketed to well out of my reach. So I’ll just be sitting here with a long goal ahead of me for Grind wars 2 HoT, and right there my game just got a whole lot less fun, ascendeds were within reach of normal players, now they’re way out of it (and when the changes hit it will be further out of it because then I won’t be able to get the materials for myself to make this.)

As a side note, do you guys do this often? have you even seen the yakslapper achievement? is it fun for you guys to put things out of possible reach? This achievement and the one where you DEFEND the yaks, are well out of range for…. anyone, I’m willing to bet that not a single player has this. It seems rather impossible with such low spawn rates and such a high number demanded.

i build my ascended gear without buying anything off the trading post. it takes time, but not impossible.

Quite honestly, I do not know who came up with this, but with this rationale, in my former university this person would not pass one of the monthly tests let alone the final exam. I am an economist by the way.

This is essentially a targeted way to remove dungeon running as an integral part of the game. A well developed part of the game at that. Why would any developer do this? No idea.

We’re going to need a truck load of cheese to go with all this wine.

Wow.

You should have realized that a gold nerf was coming. They can’t hand out +2% gold find per month, every month and not have it become an issue.

What I read was that you will still receive value, but the value will come less from gold and more from other things. This is a good change. I’ve been able to make a LOT of gold this year but it’s been hard work.

Gold will buy you most things, but not everything. It won’t buy you spirit shards – you have to play the game if you want more. If we see more desirable items that are acquired through play and not purely from gold, it will be a very good change.

John, the one thing I would like to see addressed are the fact that there are various reward systems in the game that once achieved, you still acquire, but you have no way to use them or convert them:

BL Chest minis that cannot be traded
Luck essence once you hit maximum account magic find
3rd year birthday gifts for people who own all the dyes (were we not supposed to do that?)
Fractal weapons are being addressed, thank goodness.

There are probably a few other things, but I would like to see more thought given to “what happens when players finish/collect/maximize X and continue to get Y as a reward?”

Thanks

What kind of rewards can we except for doing fractal after completing the 3 dailys in the new system, gold? rings? more greens? I’ll assume if you just going to shift rewards to fractals and raids and not take them out of the game doing fractals after finishing the 3 dailys will reward something like 1-3g per fractal?

Did anyone think this through?

I have almost 4000 hours of playtime (no afk) in about a year and a half. I’ve played this same content A LOT. I have 100% map completion on multiple characters and most of achievements completed.

I do not enjoy PvP or WvW. So after you’re done with all of PvE content for so many times it becomes stale, repetetive and boring (attack, defend, escort. all over again, hundrets of times). I do not see how HoT will be any different. From what we’ve seen, WHOLE MAPS are just a massive attack and defend over and over again.

So in the end I’ve came down to mindlessly farm Cursed Shore, Frostgorge Sound, Silverwastes, daily dungeons and fractals and I have really enjoyed dungeons and to some extent fractals(too easy, too few and too short.) despite their pathetic rewards, because atleast it isn’t just mindless afkspam1 and now you’re taking away even this little reward we got away from us? I really enjoy this game but there isn’t much to do once you’ve completed all of the open world content so many times.

Dungeons have kept me entertained for many hours every day, what will I do now?

So did anyone think this through? What will we do AFTER we’ve “explored” the same repetative HoT content dozens or hundrets of times? Because one raid per week won’t cut it.

Chokolata.1870:

Quite honestly, I do not know who came up with this, but with this rationale, in my former university this person would not pass one of the monthly tests let alone the final exam. I am an economist by the way.

This is essentially a targeted way to remove dungeon running as an integral part of the game. A well developed part of the game at that. Why would any developer do this? No idea.

“Reducing rewards while increasing the cost of things through higher demand = more fun.”

Arenanet 2015

blazerzen.5294:

Did anyone think this through?

I have almost 4000 hours of playtime (no afk) in about a year and a half. I’ve played this same content A LOT. I have 100% map completion on multiple characters and most of achievements completed.

I do not enjoy PvP or WvW. So after you’re done with all of PvE content for so many times it becomes stale, repetetive and boring (attack, defend, escort. all over again, hundrets of times). I do not see how HoT will be any different. From what we’ve seen, WHOLE MAPS are just a massive attack and defend over and over again.

So in the end I’ve came down to mindlessly farm Cursed Shore, Frostgorge Sound, Silverwastes, daily dungeons and fractals and I have really enjoyed dungeons and to some extent fractals(too easy, too few and too short.) despite their pathetic rewards, because atleast it isn’t just mindless afkspam1 and now you’re taking away even this little reward we got away from us? I really enjoy this game but there isn’t much to do once you’ve completed all of the open world content so many times.

Dungeons have kept me entertained for many hours every day, what will I do now?

So did anyone think this through? What will we do AFTER we’ve “explored” the same repetative HoT content dozens or hundrets of times? Because one raid per week won’t cut it.

In this new age of MMOs, when the cash shop has replaced monthly subscriptions, you should assume that matters of the in-game economy, gold sales, etc. should take priority over player content.

Incentivizing HoT-exclusive content and encouraging gem purchases to acquire gold (as a means of circumventing increased grind requirements) are necessary measures to keep this product profitable.

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

Just to clarify, John, the goal is to make people grind more? Because that’s the net effect here. Take away reliable sources of income and replace them with open world grind.

Here’s the system, simplified:
- remove sources of liquid reward from the game, because there’s no gold sink mechanic (TP sucks up gold)
- drive up demand for materials by “incentivizing” (forcing) acquisition of more expensive equipment in order to complete the newly focused PvE content (ie ascended gear for raids and fractals)
- emphasize content behind paywalls (HoT) by heavily discouraging existing forms of income

The economic side of things definitely fits the new grind philosophy of GW2. From a gameplay perspective, the Mastery system is built to force grind to reduce the rate of content consumption. How does that work?
- only 4 maps, if players can access the content immediately they will blow through the entire expansion in less than a month
- push a lock-out system that requires heavy grind to move to new parts of each map
- level cap remains fixed at 80, but access to the new zones is effectively blocked to people who do not grind out the “new” levels in HoT

Grind is the future for everything in this game.

They go F2P and slowly convert to every other NCSoft cash grab. I’ve spent 10 years of my life happily sticking to this franchise, praising them, and spreading word about how awesome this company and their games are. But this past year has been brutal. I don’t know what changed internally, but it’s disappointment after disappointment. I feel tricked, duped, and cheated.

Wow, so your logic is to disuade people from doing stuff they like into stuff they don’t?

I don’t know if you guys ever thought about this, but if Dungeons were so popular, instead of removing content and incentive from the game, why not focus MORE on dungeons if that’s what people want?

Well, all I can say is, it’s your game, your rules. But also my choice which game I put my time and money into. I’ve literally never seen a developer go out of their way to sabotage their own game.

Baffling.

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?
The intention is not entirely to reduce liquid gold earning, we’ll be using up the slack we generate in other locations

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

This is a very sad thing, in my opinion.

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

Allow me to state one thing:

Dungeons are NOT the same as Fractals.

Fractals are NOT the same as dungeons.

They care to two different groups of players, even though they both focus on 5-man groups.

In all honesty, I don’t mind the “no more dungeons, only fractals and raids” but to deincentivize dungeons is no different than removing a gamestyle that a certain group will only like. And that means losing players. Which means no future profits from said players.

What’s worse was that back in 2013 you guys promised to revamp dungeons, with the changes to Ascalon Catacombs being the first set of such, but then you decided to just go do other things. You said the same with world bosses, with Tequatl being the first one, but then you just decided to go do other things. How does that make us feel about these promises of “the first of many” with HoT? How do we know you guys aren’t just going to not only abandon raids after the first one, but then deincentivize them later down the road?

In all honesty, I don’t get the intention behind doing this. And you guys don’t explain.

What the hell is so bad about dungeons that you would rather give them Isaiah’s Balance than to make them proper gamestyles that get discontinued?

I bought HoT two weekends ago because I figured you guys were actually going down the right path again.

Apparently I was wrong.

By the way, I spent 100 bucks on the expansion. Other than that, you will never get one more red cent from me through the Gem Store. No matter HOW flashy the staff or finisher. That’s it.

Just some little economic balancing of my own

So if the goal is to move income generation behind time and gear gated content (a dev did come out to say raids require ascended; another clarified it on reddit by saying it was ‘recommended’) aren’t you excluding the casual audience you’ve marketed to the last 3 years?

Raids need BiS gear and high communication, fractals at a high level (with the goalposts moved to 100) have a high gear requirement for casual players. If you then remove (by all intents and purposes; dungeons will likely be abandoned if there’s no sufficient reward for your efforts) dungeons as an income stream, with the alternative locked away behind a skill/gear/communication wall, you create a two tier system with a minority able to get a solid income, and casual pve players left in the dust, while the economy marches on.

Drennon.7190:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

Just to clarify, John, the goal is to make people grind more? Because that’s the net effect here. Take away reliable sources of income and replace them with open world grind.

Here’s the system, simplified:
- remove sources of liquid reward from the game, because there’s no gold sink mechanic (TP sucks up gold)
- drive up demand for materials by “incentivizing” (forcing) acquisition of more expensive equipment in order to complete the newly focused PvE content (ie ascended gear for raids and fractals)
- emphasize content behind paywalls (HoT) by heavily discouraging existing forms of income

The economic side of things definitely fits the new grind philosophy of GW2. From a gameplay perspective, the Mastery system is built to force grind to reduce the rate of content consumption. How does that work?
- only 4 maps, if players can access the content immediately they will blow through the entire expansion in less than a month
- push a lock-out system that requires heavy grind to move to new parts of each map
- level cap remains fixed at 80, but access to the new zones is effectively blocked to people who do not grind out the “new” levels in HoT

Grind is the future for everything in this game.

They go F2P and slowly convert to every other NCSoft cash grab. I’ve spent 10 years of my life happily sticking to this franchise, praising them, and spreading word about how awesome this company and their games are. But this past year has been brutal. I don’t know what changed internally, but it’s disappointment after disappointment. I feel tricked, duped, and cheated.

Same here more or less. This is the only game I’ve played in which I’ve felt embarrassed and apologetic for recommending to friends.

I sometimes wonder if GW2 is not an online game, but a social behavior experiment when I read news like this.

Not enough that you actually deny stuff to people for various incomprehensible reasons like that newbies can´t catch up if you do not(hard cap foir dailies), you also nerf content that is still played for some reason while not giving this type of the community new stuff they ask for(dungeons). I am not even a supporter of dungeon running, but I scratched my head in an attempt to understand your reasoning for this.

Are you really that desperately trying to accomplish that all people have to do raids and fractals? If this is the case, just turn the dungeons into fractals, let mobs drop the tokens there and get over with it.

@König des Todes
You don´t know Anet won´t drop them. You just don´t. If the next cycle of fotm content is reached, raids may be dropped quickly again under the flag of “This is new, this is groundbreaking, this is exciting!”. Could very well reasonably happen.
Konrad Adenauer probably said it best:
“What do I care for my speech from yesterday?”