Guild Wars 2

2. But you could get FOTM items even without playing FOTM – back in the old format you could buy runs with gold – and in the new format you can buy fractal encryption boxes.

4. Take me for example – I’ve grown tired of the jungle and didn’t particularly like it to start – but I need to do it because I’ll want masteries for Raids – because I want legendary armor.
I want mastery points for new tracks that might be necessary for Raids and legendary armor.
Let’s not forget the new Raid track will allow you to get your reward eventually via non-RNG system.

Play in those specific areas to say get the Mastery Points? I agree.
But if I want to just get XP I should be able to get it anywhere – not just the jungle.

Mastery points would be great because they would prove you went there – did the content – you’re no stranger to it.
But don’t make us grind the jungle over and over and over for XP with little variety.

7. Both are relevant because the ease with which somethings becomes available tells us something about how easily it can be invalidated when something better comes along.

8. Because they made some bad calls down the line – What I dislike is that they never said “ok guys here’s what’s up – we wasted a lot of time before getting to work on HoT – we admit we went in some directions that didn’t work out and have had very little time to develop HoT – so we’ll be rolling it out in steps and so on and so forth”.

They have never been forthcoming with us – never told us why things got pushed back.

You also describe another problem with GW2’s future very well – we don’t know what that future will be.

They’ve tried so many things and iterated so much but there doesn’t seem to be a cohesive story for the future.
2 Years ago it was the living world.
1 Year ago it was this expansion.
In the future it seems to be a mix – there’s just no stability.

At launch their instanced content was Dungeons – then they tried to push Fractals – then they abandoned fractals and pushed for dungeons with the reward revamp – then they completely nerfed said rewards with HoT, revamped FOTM ( nerfing rewards in FOTM too in the process) and are now pushing for Raids.

It just seems they don’t have a proper grasp on what they’re doing really.

9. Yes but one could argue that buying GW2 at launch was supposed to come with these new items.
Let’s not forget GW2 at launch and shortly after promoted the idea of the “Living World” – no expansions – free updates every 2 weeks or so with new content added into the game.

That was content you theoretically paid for when you bought the game and when you used the Gem Store. It was not free – it was stuff you had bought in advance ( Sort of how Raids and New Legendary weapons are now coming with HoT) – they were supposed to be free because you had bought the core game.

The idea behind GW2 then was “buy it now play it forever – no subscription fees, no pay gates” in a sense.

Ultimately I’m also upset because they said it would come out and it didn’t – and while I don’t feel they owed it to me I think they owed the player base an explanation for all of the whacky things that have been going on with the game’s development.

ekarat.1085:

Einlanzer.1627:

Vayne.8563:

I’d take the four maps I got with HoT over all the maps in EotN any day. The complexity of these maps is astounding.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Eye of the North. But then, we haven’t seen raids yet, and Eye of the North didn’t have expansion content coming in reguilarly either. We have to see what the new content delivery cadence is. Also EotN offered nothing at all for PvP.

I think it’s okay to do a little of both. I sort of hope the next expansion/set of maps we get goes in a different direction – specifically – reduced complexity and greater quantity.

It seems to be a common mantra that quality > quantity, and that was a major design goal for GW2, but I’ve long argued that you really need a bit of both and should strive to find a middle ground.

I’d actually argue that too many maps is bad because it stretches out the player base and encourages abandoning old maps. At the very least, it’s better to have 1 large map than 2 maps at half the area each — it’s the exact same amount of content either way.

So, it’s not just complexity, it’s also size, and the new maps are much bigger than GW1 maps.

Wait, which ones are bigger than GW1 maps? I completed a large chunk of hard mode maps back in GW1, and most of them felt at least the same size as large maps in GW2.

I’d like a lot more exploring in GW2 personally. I loved that I had all four parts of GW1 and could run around (nearly) countless maps with different villages and people and monsters and places everywhere. I’d much rather Anet not only provide high-resource maps like the HoT expansion did. They could add event-less maps purely for wanderers/explorers to traverse. Those come cheap, and quench wanderlust. (Maybe include one or two basic events on each?) I’d enjoy the calm emptiness of exploration maps, as well as the the lack of events staring me down every corner I turn. Since such maps come cheap, it couldn’t hurt the devs, either.

And cheap exploration maps could be developed in the future, too.

2. Come on, that’s a technicality. By that logic, you can buy your way into guild runs on TD meta. Technically you CAN get almost anything by spending gold or gaming the system.

4. You can get experience virtually anywhere (except WvW and in some sense PvP) — the issue is what that EXP counts towards, not if you can get it.

They’ve already announced raids won’t be gated behind tons of different things in masteries, only basic things. If you do each meta event, personal story, silver-gold in the adventures you come across, you will have enough to get the masteries for raids. No need to grind same content over and over. Only if you’re going beyond what is necessary for raids will you need to grind—and it needs to be that way otherwise the new content just gets ded instantly. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people already grinded in gw2—people who wanted money grinded silverwastes/dungeons, for example. It’s not like grinding specific types of content is a new concept to gw2, and at least Maguuma offers a plethora of varied content to “grind”.

7. I don’t follow your train of thought. I think the example we were discussing was invisible stuff so your character can go without armor appearing in certain slots while maintaining the stats. What in specific about it being easy to make these items makes it easy to invalidate?

8. I don’t think that a lot of what they did was bad calls though. Some of it certainly was, IE their failed attempts to bring us precursor crafting and legendaries. Instead, I think it was a decision on what the xpac’s philosophy would be. I think they opted for long term benefit over short term benefit. Having lots of good features in the game benefits the game in the long term, but having larger quantities of content only really benefits you in the short term (because no matter how large the sum, you’ll just play through it all anyway). By building a lot of huge features (ie raids/guild halls/map contribution mechanics) they make it much easier on themselves in future xpacs/content updates to add more content BECAUSE they don’t have to worry about the features. Because they don’t have to worry about getting the technology and features built in to host guild halls, maybe next time they could put a larger budget and reorganize personnel into focusing on more content and away from focusing on features.

IoW, HoT gives you more of what you want (sheer amount of content) BY giving you less of it not and focusing on the more core additions first.

They’ve announced their focus will be on FotM and Raids for the future, dungeons are basically getting the axe. I don’t think by adding a dungeon path and revamping rewards they were making dungeons the focus for the overall game, just improving dungeons.

I agree it’d be nice to know what they plan in regards to expansions, but there is no confusion that the living world will certainly always be a part of GW2. Whether they do an expansion again or not is up for debate, but I don’t think not knowing that is a big negative. Of course they can always improve communication, but as an experienced MMO player this is not something new rofl. This accurately describes every MMO company ever.

9. But did they ever explicitly say we’d get them for free before we bought the game? As a consumer, we are only entitled to what we are promised/assured, assuming and inferring without good reasoning/evidence doesn’t entitle to anything more. When you used the gem store you were paying for gem store items, you were not entitled to anything else from that whatsoever. If it wasn’t made clear this was part of the package of the purchase we were making, you can’t feel entitled to it rationally.

Yeah, again I’d agree I’d like more communication from ANet. Doesn’t mean we’re owed it, doesn’t mean it’s necessary, doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong and more fundamentally as the thread is supposed to be about this, doesn’t mean the expansion is bad/not worth it. Lack of communication sucks, sure, but the expansion stands on it’s own regardless of that.