No, they want to be challenged and rewarded properly for it. It’s not one or the other, it’s the combination of the two that people want.
Well everyone likes “moar free stuff,” but that doesn’t mean that their idea of “rewarded properly” actually is rewarding them properly, and they have to learn to accept that and play nice with others.
I have a lot of basis for my claim.
1) The most popular MMO of all time is raid-heavy and rewards skilled play.
2) A lot of people over the course of 3 years have asked Anet for challenging content and better rewards, often a combination of the two.
3) Being challenged and rewarded properly for it is one of the key stones of game-design. It’s what most people find fun. Not just in GW2, but in general.
1. The most popular MMO of all time is not this game, most games that have tried to copy its formula have not done very well, and this game has largely succeeded by bucking a lot of that game’s trends, providing a valid alternative, rather than another clone.
2. “A lot” is highly misleading. The sum total of these players in the grand scheme of the game make up only about 0.5% of the total population, if that. There is no reason to believe that they are representative of a larger body of support.
3. "Rewarded properly " is likewise highly subjective, and what raiders appear to be demanding as “proper” rewards for their services rendered do not seem to match up with what others feel is a “proper” reward for them.
I respect your choices, I just don’t think chatting in Divinty’s Reach should entitle you to the same rewards as an hardcore raider.
If you respected my choices then you wouldn’t have to resort to ridiculous strawmen to try and minimize them.
That’s nice, but that’s WoW, which is a far less active game than GW2, and though he’s physically disabled, he seems to have a good handle on the mental portion of it, which not everyone can master. Again, stop assuming that everyone can get it if they work hard enough, than that therefore everyone who doesn’t get it is being lazy.
They don’t HAVE to do it. And they also don’t NEED legendary armor. They can perfectly decide NOT to do raids and thus NOT get their legendary armor.
And once again, that is not a valid option.
Most people I know hate number 2 and 4. In fact I’ve never met anyone who genuinely likes 2 of 4.
Ask WP about 4, he’s advocated for it numerous times in the past. As for 2, while of course everyone wants things “as soon as possible,” and the ideal solution to them would be to not keep things out of their hands in the first place, if you are going to insist on making things “difficult” to get, then there are plenty of people that would prefer a slow and steady pace to pure RNG, or to a skill challenge that they cannot overcome (if anyone could overcome it then it would fail as a content gate), so a way to work long term to earn their reward would be seen as the “least bad” alternative. The new Precursor Crafting system would seem to fall into this category.
But again, the most favored alternative on the list, by almost everyone, would be
5. Just don’t make the item so hard to get in the first place.
I agree. And there is NOTHING unreasonable about putting legendary armor behind difficult raids.
Neither do I, so long as there are alternative methods for people who don’t want to do difficult raids. See, of 1-4, you don’t need to pick just one, do all of them.
I’m all for SOME rewards being available through different means. I find that perfectly acceptable. But I also think SOME rewards should be highly exclusive and limited behind specific game content.
And I don’t accept the value of that. It’s a system that allows a small number of people to feel special because they have something that most don’t, but it detracts from the experience of most players because it adds something desirable that they are unlikely to ever have. I think players should have to work towards goals, but that process should offer a clear and achievable path for all players to earn them after an appropriate amount of time and effort.
And again you have it backwards. It’s not even about what a player is “worth” (as you said, we’re all worth equally, at least all of us who seriously play this game). That completely doesn’t matter and is 100% irrelevant to the discussion.
What is relevant is what is good game design, what is considered fun by most people, THAT is what matters. Games that reward skilled play are often more fun and fun games sell better. It’s really that simple.
And I think that’s backwards thinking, as plenty of games that focus on “skilled play” have done horribly too, and plenty of games that require little to no skill have been incredibly popular. It’s hard to correlate that “skilled play” leads to success unless you apply confirmation bias. I think it’s fairer to say that games should provide content for all skill levels, and allow players to choose between those contents with as much freedom and as little penalty as possible.
Harder content should offer more reward, to justify the risk involved, but should not offer better rewards that can never be earned through easier play, even after additional effort has been put forth.
If 1 is the fastest options, people will only do 1.
If 2 is the fastest option, people will only do 2.
If 3 is the fastest option, people will rely on 3.
If 4 is the fastest option, people will only do 4.
In each case, the other three options are invalidated.
Not true. Players will always take the best option FOR THEM. 1 is skill. If a player is high skill, or at least capable of high skill, then 1 should be the best option FOR HIM. He should tend to pick 1 as often as possible, and for him that would be the quickest and easiest method.
2. Is grind. It would often be the slowest method, but would still result in the reward. This is the optimal method only if 3 and 4 haven’t worked out for you, and 1 is either impossible for you, or more hassle than it is worth for you because you do not enjoy difficult content. If you fall into that category, then 2 is the best option FOR YOU, and that’s fine.
3. Is RNG. For the most part people might not pursue this one, but if it works out then they’re happy they got what they want. One could be said to “pursue” this one if they want an item, have no interest in the sjkill route, and find the grind route too boring, so they basically just do something that advances neither of those options, but they at least retain hope that maybe the thing they want will just fall into their hands. This is the equivalent of someone who hopes for a precursor eventually, but isn’t going to grind for gold to buy one, do Precursor Crafting, buy and throw weapons into the Forge, etc., but RNG at least gives them hope that killing some random moa will drop a Dawn some day.
4. Is a bit of a wildcard, but limited time “sales” on items do favor “engaged” players that remain consistently in touch with the community, that if methods 1-3 are disagreeable for whatever reasons, but an item pops up in a manner that makes it temporarily easier to get, then great! A recent example of this is some of the more rare dyes, which had both a “limited time” drop of the birthday dyes, and also some quick salves of dyes that have been out of circulation for a long time, which not only made them potentially available through RNG, but also more available via grind, as the gold price dropped considerably.
I bet, that if the precursor collection mastery proves to be a quicker and more reliable way of getting precursors, then no one will grind gold or use the Mystic Forge anymore to get precursors (unless they want more than 1of the same precursor).
No one? I would take that bet, because there would still be value in farming sellable Precursors, because there will always be people with more gold than time. But I would also bet that the number of people using traditional methods of making Precursors would drop considerably, as well it should because the old methods were awful.
I also bet that if the precursor collection mastery proves to be more of a hassle than simply grinding gold to buy a precursor from the TP or using the MF, then people won’t bother with the precursor collection mastery at all.
Again, if we’re playing in absolutes then I would take that bet as well, no matter what the method is there will be some people pursuing it, but sure, if the methods are too annoying then most people would stick with the existing methods. That’s just common sense.
I was kind of thinking about this last night, how could you apply #1 to Legendary Pres? I don’t think there’s any possible task in the game that could be so difficult that you would deserve a guaranteed Precursor for completing it. You could, however, combine #1 and #3, to have specific methods by which you would have a much better RNG chance than the usual methods. There could be a task, more difficult than any solo tasks currently in the game, and the reward for it would be an RNG chance of a Precursor that would be roughly equivalent to a Signet of Rhendak, or a Teq chest, or something like that, so it would require you to be very skilled to even attempt it, but each attempt would not be guaranteed a Precuror. Or alternately combine 1 and 2, each time you do the task you get a token, do it maybe 100 times and you get the Precursor guaranteed. Right now the only options are 2 and 3.
You easily make 20-30g per hour in open-world content if you know how (and many people do know how). So if raids would only give gold as rewards, it should be more than 30g to make it attractive to the average player who just want the rewards.
I was offering an example, I don’t keep track of what the “meta” gold rates are. but sure, if you can earn 30g per hour in open world, then raids should offer more than that. Ideally though, I think 30g per hour in open world sounds a bit too much and they should probably tone down those optimal methods. And of course I’m not talking direct gold, although that should be part of it, but also in the form of crafting mats and other “junk” loot that are essentially “gold.”
The raid should also be easily beatable otherwise those players might as well just grind gold in open-world content. However, making the raids easy defeats the purpose of raids and it’s not what people asked for.
Well, as I said in earlier posts, the raids should be designed with plenty of reward phases to them, so that even if you do fail at some point, you will have been rewarded for most of the time you’ve spent in there, for each of the steps that you did make it through (and the first few should be reasonably easy). Of course the risk of missing out on some of the reward is the entire justification of offering a higher potential reward in the first place, so you can’t argue that you deserve both a higher reward and no risk in earning it.
That’s a big “if”. What if we don’t want the player to choose freely? There is no reason to let the player choose the rewards freely. You don’t let players select how they get the rewards, you let them select what they want to play. Players are selfish creatures, they always go for the path of least resistance
But again, if you force the players to decide what content to do based on the reward they want then they can’t fairly choose what content they want to do based on the difficulty and style of the content. You can’t do both at once unless you offer the choice freely. So when I say “some people don’t like difficult content,” you respond with “well then they don’t have to do it.” When I say “well sometimes the reward they want is locked behind that difficult content,” you respond “well then they have to do that content if they want the reward.” You can’t eat your cake and have it too. Either the system is going to force the player into one of two bad choices, or it won’t. I vote that it shouldn’t.
So any player who plays video games and wants to play the game and better themselves are living in a pipe dream?
No, wanting to better your own skills it perfectly fine. You don’t need recognition for that.
Because they are the ones that are pushing the boundaries of a given game system, without players who are “good” at any game, the game will simply stagnate and die.
Not true. If the game caters to those who are constantly pushing their own skills then it causes the game to be hostile to new players, who have not had years to develop their skills. The healthy game allows for all skill levels, and gives people opportunities to gain and use skills, but does not require it of anyone.
Prize money for big events are set before the event even starts. FIFA for example has written what each team based on their final position will get during a world cup long before the cup even starts and ratings start coming in.
Yes, but again, those are based on the expectation of earned revenue, based on past similar events. Sometimes the prize money is less than they strictly deserved for an event that outperforms expectations, or sometimes the prizes are excessive if the event under performs, but they do spend a lot of effort trying to figure out “fair” payments, and those payments are based on what they expect to bring in. Think of it like Superbowl ad prices, they are set well in advance, before the final teams are even determined, but they are based on the assumption of a certain number of viewers, based on people who watched previous Superbowls. Sometimes they end up with less than expected, sometimes more, and that’s a risk they take, but the pricing of the ads is based on a calculation of cost vs. value, they don’t just pay a lot for a Superbowl ad because any event with the word “Superbowl” in its name is divinely endowed with highly priced tv ads.
That’s how rewards work in video games. The game devs put unique rewards behind content to entice players to do them.
And as I’ve said, this is fine when the reward is easy to earn, when it is to get people to try content, but once players get past the easy phase and into the grind phase, “try things” rewards should fall away and players choice should be respected.
I do NOT want to do 100% map completion THREE more times, nor do I feel like grinding gold for SIX full stacks of all T6 mats.
I don’t know how they’ll do map completion, I doubt it would be a factor for the armors, because the whole idea is that one map completion nets you two Legendary weapons, which is fair. If you needed to do that for each armor piece then it means to fully gear one player with two two-handers and full armor it would take himself and three alts, and it would be impossible to gear all your characters since you’d just keep exponentially adding characters.
So I don’t think traditional map completion would be a requirement, but I wouldn’t put it past them to require something similar, but more repeatable. I would hope that whatever it is though, doing it once would give you enough to make a full set, rather than just 1-2 pieces, and you’d only need to repeat the process to get multiple sets.
People who like raids aren’t the only ones who’d be displeased by there being no items that are in any way connected to specific game modes or challenges.
Pretty much.
Raiders are a better target FOR YOU.
Do you know how selfish you sound? You only care about yourself, once again. You think you are part of the “majority” when in fact, very few ppl have your type of diluted sense of personal grandeur and entitlement.
No, I’m saying they are a better target in general, completely outside of me. They are a better target because they are, to this point, not a part of this game, so the role they play in its future is entirely optional. If they have to disappoint any other group, then they are disappointing a sizable number of current players who enjoy how the game currently works.
Again it would be nice if they can manage to not disappoint anyone, but if you’re going to have to disappoint someone, disappoint the bird in the bush, not the birds in the hand.
And yet he’s not earning above minimum wage without his Patreon, wich i support aswell btw. And he is by far the most popular GW2 focussed channel. That is a problem. He needs to make up crazy challenges to even have an interesting stream. This is not good, and should not ever be considdered as the norm. This has nothing to do with GW2 but with WP’s passion. That man could talk about anything for 3 hours and i would to listen to it. Other them him, there is litterly noone even half as popular. We are talking about an exceptional person here.
Sure, but adding raids would do nothing to alter any of that.
Wp’s highest viewed video containing actual GW2 footage, the one about keyfarming, has just over 1/3 of the views of a world first raid guild’s mythic archimonde kill in wow recently, and that was a video by that guild. And that game is loosing subs constantly.
Yeah, but 1. WoW is WoW, and always makes a horrible example for “things other games should do,” and 2. WP’s individual videos may have less views, but he puts out a lot more of them, so I imagine that over time he makes more off of those than that guild did from their “world first” video, which they can only do once per raid.
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”