Guild Wars 2

Sylent.3165:

Am I fan of raids? Actually yes. I did them a lot in Wow and did them in ff14.

The main reason I came back to gw2 full time now as my only game is because as an adult the game is beyond perfect for an hour at a time play which is the most I can do.

Seeing from any mmo in the past, and how this one is structured I see it taking well over an hour at a time for casual players to complete these raids. I fear it’s going to involve way to many people trying to be hardcore, talking down to players, kicking players who are trying to get this done.

This just isn’t what gw2 was made for I thought…..

gw2 was always supposed to provide challenging content, they just didnt want it to be content with mechanical walls, like joining big guilds, grinding gear, etc.

Navi.9308:

I really don’t understand these complaints.

If they make the raids hard enough such that they require scheduled (can’t play when you want) and organized (can’t play with just anyone, needs to be the same people/guild so you make progress) groups, then they are content that effectively doesn’t exist for anyone who doesn’t want to schedule their life around a game.

Except those people are still paying for them. Developer time/resources are not infinite (this seems to be what you don’t understand). Raids aren’t just a bonus. They were made in place of something else. How much something else we don’t know yet because we haven’t seen how big/significant the raids are. Perhaps 5 or 6 new zones in HoT instead of 4. Perhaps more fractal style (scaling difficulty) instances. What about $35 for base HoT, and anyone who wants raids can pay an extra $15 for them? Who knows. But they aren’t just another skin set, they are whole additional areas with bosses and tuning involved.

Take WoW for example, which spends probably 40-50% of the dev “budget” on making raids (and then is forced to offer the mindnumbing, kittenized LFR version of it in order to justify that expense to the vast majority the player base who will never do organized raiding), leaving an insufficient amount of content outside of raiding. It’s one of the main reasons WoW is declining at the moment.

And organized raiders are a small minority in that game which has been “raid or quit” for years now, let alone GW2 which essentially set itself up as the antithesis of that game model. What percentage of the player base came to GW2 just to escape that? So it’s easy to see why a “GW2 now has Raids!” announcement can get negative reactions.

“Or almost none.” Ohoni above for instance wouldn’t be happy with skins either.

There’d be much less conflict, however. People care a lot about the ‘legendary’ thing… and heaven help us all if there are achievements for the armor set.

Otherwise, yeah you’re right. That last bit came out way more negative than I intended. I’m gonna hold to part of it though:

I think a major motivator for people is the ability to stand out, visibly for things they’ve done that others couldn’t. There already has been hard content in GW2 that ’wasn’t worth the reward’ and essentialy nobody does. This tends to reinforce my point.

Further reinforcing it is my other pet peeve, in that raids really aren’t, and to a large degree CAN’T be about personal second-to-second game skill. The more players you include in an encounter the less viable that becomes, because the difficulty is kind of multiplicative.

phys.7689:

gw2 was always supposed to provide challenging content, they just didnt want it to be content with mechanical walls, like joining big guilds, grinding gear, etc.

That’s the problem with “raids”. As soon as you make them “hard” execution-wise at an individual level with that many people, you pretty much mandate all the organizational/scheduling walls and all the application/trial/performance/drama crap that goes with it. Yet if the raid is doable without such things, it’s usually not satisfactorily difficult on an individual level.

But you aren’t forced to do those, like spvp tournaments and high level fractals….which can get just as “teh elitist”.

Should those be removed for you guys also? What else should we take away.

Chairman Wang.5930:

Seisus.6591:

Sylent.3165:

Seeing from any mmo in the past, and how this one is structured I see it taking well over an hour at a time for casual players to complete these raids. I fear it’s going to involve way to many people trying to be hardcore, talking down to players, kicking players who are trying to get this done.

Here’s the good thing about raids in gw2: The rewards will not be better than rewards from playing other content. They may be shinier, but they will not give your character the advantage gained from raiding in other mmos.

While it does bum me out that some people will probably not be able to experience this content due to time constraints, my experience with raiding in other games tells me this will probably not last forever. As more people learn the fight mechanics clear times on the raids will drop making raids more accessible if you can find the group.

Lastly, and this is pure speculation, anet could implement a lockout system similar to other mmos. Since there won’t be a direct enhancement to your character from raiding, this lockout could exist until the player decided to reset it. This would allow a player to gather a few friends and take a swing at some bosses without having to worry about the instance resetting when they zone out.

All in all, I trust anet to make raids something enjoyable and accessible to as many people they can while still keeping them difficult.

I use to think Urgoz took a long time… Power creep fixed that so it might happen in GW2. The HP sinks are real though.

I think Urgoz was like a 12 hour run for the first few times, after a few weeks we used to do it in like 3-4 hours, then they started doing speed runs in less than an hour.

Amineo.8951:

Are you scared of having an Extreme Titan-like Raid in GW2 TC?

100% yes that’s what I fear. It took hours of kicking people and refining parties for one 8 minute fight for titan extreme. Gw2 was not supposed to be like that.

Substatic.6958:

But you aren’t forced to do those, like spvp tournaments and high level fractals….which can get just as “teh elitist”.

Should those be removed for you guys also? What else should we take away.

No, just don’t have multigroup content :p

Edit: Noting that we’re getting it regardless of what I, or anyone else thinks :P

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, because any step forward becomes irrational if it requires you to make another step. There will always be a cliff or a wall to run into. Rationality is about taking the steps forward that are rational, and then stopping when the next step would be irrational. I proposed a rational position, you proposed “well then what about if we keep going until it becomes irrational,” to which my response is “let’s not.”

And that’s you and the majority of people disagree. Because for most us, we’re already at the cliff.

Anyway, it’s off-topic.

But you aren’t forced to do those, like spvp tournaments and high level fractals….which can get just as “teh elitist”.

Should those be removed for you guys also? What else should we take away.

Again,. stop talking about “should those be removed” as if anyone is asking that. Nobody is asking that anything be removed for anyone. This is purely additive. Anything you can get, or would get, you will still get, nobody is asking to take any of that away from you. Are we absolutely clear on this point so that it will not reoccur?

Good.

So what people are asking for is alternatives, so that on an individual basis, those that do not want to do certain tasks, do not have to, without missing out on rewards that they really want. These alternatives do not have to be “easy,” they expect to involve a lot of time and effort to complete, but they should just be different gameplay experiences for those that do not enjoy the “default” gameplay experience. If you love raiding, great, do raiding and it should always be the fastest and most direct route to whatever rewards it offers. If you don’t enjoy raiding? Also great, there should be other ways to play the game and still eventually earn those rewards. And yes, the same applies to high end Fractals, PvP, everything.

And that’s you and the majority of people disagree. Because for most us, we’re already at the cliff.

If that’s true then you don’t need to be making straw man arguments. If you believe that we’re at the cliff, then argue that we’re at the cliff and cannot take one step forward. Don’t try to argue “well what if we walked fifty feet more?” Clearly I disagree, but employing straw man arguments doesn’t lead to more agreement, it just makes you appear to be irrationally terrified of relatively simple changes.

So, this may not be completely appropriate for this thread’s current discussion, but it has been eating at me, so here it is. I’m not bashing anyone’s preferred style of play here. These are just some observations that I, like many others, have made over the past three years. And I pre-empt the guy who will inevitably say “QQ cry moar”, with a friendly reminder that it takes more effort to discuss things as an adult, so please don’t strain yourself.

If Anet wants to make gaining legendary armor a raid thing, fine. Go for it, and all you raiders enjoy your shiny loot- you earned it, and I say that without sarcasm. But in the meantime, why can Anet not offer some nicer incentives for WvW players too?

Raiders like to say that raid content requires skill- which it does- but remaining in the top tier of WvW certainly requires just as much skill. Hardcore WvW players will tell you that smashing two blobs of peeps together doesn’t cut it in the long run. World vs World is not, contrary to what some believe, a red=dead scenario most of the time. In order to stay competitive, you have to be strategic and learn to play your profession, improvise with that profession at times, coordinate with your commanders and complement your squad, etc… And might I add that, unlike instanced areas of play, one cannot keep running WvW over and over to get the timing and mechanics of the encounters down to a memorized science. You are fighting other players and no single battle is predictable. So, basically, you have to have skill to be successful.

That being said, why are the WvW adherents not getting equally rewarded for the skill they exhibit in their preferred method of play? These guys and girls are in those borderlands because they enjoy it, and the challenge it brings, because they certainly aren’t doing it for the loot.

They get no ascended crafting materials, no cool skins (some may argue that the skins available from tournament tokens are ‘cool’, but I certainly haven’t seen anyone wearing them), no chance at ascended or legendary back pieces or even just materials to make those things. They could at least have the option to spend their WvW currency on ascended mats or something. Seriously, I am sitting on so much WvW currency because the things you are offered are total crap in comparison to what sPVPers get and now, apparently, what raiders will get. Heck, they’re even less rewarding than mindless Silverwaste loot.

I remember a time, shortly after the game launched, that Anet made the comment “play your way” a catchphrase they used to promote the game. And that is a wonderful vision to have and promotes longevity if done properly. But lately, a good portion of players who are “playing their own way” (and not just WvWers, to be fair) are being pushed to the wayside.

It makes me King Arthur sad.

Ohoni.6057:

So what people are asking for is alternatives, so that on an individual basis, those that do not want to do certain tasks, do not have to, without missing out on rewards that they really want. These alternatives do not have to be “easy,” they expect to involve a lot of time and effort to complete, but they should just be different gameplay experiences for those that do not enjoy the “default” gameplay experience. If you love raiding, great, do raiding and it should always be the fastest and most direct route to whatever rewards it offers. If you don’t enjoy raiding? Also great, there should be other ways to play the game and still eventually earn those rewards. And yes, the same applies to high end Fractals, PvP, everything.

Note: All numbers and stats are made up.

It initially starts out as raids only. 75% of players are fine with this (for a variety of reasons, some in this group will be players who don’t like raids). 25% are not.

They decide to add it to another area. They choose dungeons as it’s the most similar type of content. Of the 25% of the players who are not happy with the rewards being in raids only, 75% decide it’s now enough other areas (dungeons are easy enough, they love dungeons, etc). 25% of the 25% of players still think it’s not enough. It’s attached to the tokens so this pleases the PvP crowd as well.

They decide to add it to yet another area. WvW rewards. Kill two birds with one stone, give WvW some decent rewards. Some portion of the previous 25% will be fine with it, and another will still think it’s not in enough areas. And 25% of the group who thought it was just fine in raids alone now say it’s in too many areas.

Where does it stop? There is a saying: give them an inch and they’ll go for the mile.

It can be hard to balance giving meaningful rewards to challenging content while not making players feel forced to do the content given the multiple means of obtaining nearly all other rewards in the game.

They decide to add it to another area. They choose dungeons as it’s the most similar type of content.

For the record, dungeons and raids are the same thing. Dungeons/Fractals/any dungeon by another name is not an alternative to raids. An alternative to raids would be like something in the open world. They can have dungeons and fractals as alternatives IF there are many, many alternatives out there, but if it’s just “you can raid or you can run dungeons” then that would satisfied like one or two people that weren’t already satisfied by raids alone.

Where does it stop? There is a saying: give them an inch and they’ll go for the mile.

It stops when it should stop. You can’t please everyone, but you can keep trying. It stops when they decide that it causes more harm than good to make the effort, when it would either require more work than it’s worth, or when it would completely trivialize the effort. I mean, some things you can’t balance out, some people point out shovel farming in the Silverwastes, and I agree that this is bad content that should be changed a bit to be less about digging up chests and more about actually fighting the content.

If they made it, for example, so that you could only dig up chests around “held” bases, and they more closely tied how many chests you could open to how well you defend them, then it would be more about playing the events and defending the bases, and less just looping the map and ignoring the forts. As an example.

So no I don’t believe they should reward people for digging up the desert, or for “sitting in town and chatting,” but there are plenty of activities in this game that are worthy of reward, and if they are worthy of one type of reward, why not all types? They would reward in differing amounts based on the time and skill involved, but you should be able to do the activities that you enjoy and still be working diligently towards any reward in the game.

The important thing is that “challenging content” should not be balanced by having exclusive rewards, all that does is get people to play it who have no business playing it. Challenging content should be balanced based on a quantity of reward that is worth the effort, that means that those who genuinely enjoy the content can play it and not feel that they could have been making more elsewhere, but you should never feel that you are playing the challenging content because of the loot.

Ohoni.6057:

They decide to add it to another area. They choose dungeons as it’s the most similar type of content.

For the record, dungeons and raids are the same thing. Dungeons/Fractals/any dungeon by another name is not an alternative to raids. An alternative to raids would be like something in the open world. They can have dungeons and fractals as alternatives IF there are many, many alternatives out there, but if it’s just “you can raid or you can run dungeons” then that would satisfied like one or two people that weren’t already satisfied by raids alone.

Where does it stop? There is a saying: give them an inch and they’ll go for the mile.

It stops when it should stop. You can’t please everyone, but you can keep trying. It stops when they decide that it causes more harm than good to make the effort, when it would either require more work than it’s worth, or when it would completely trivialize the effort. I mean, some things you can’t balance out, some people point out shovel farming in the Silverwastes, and I agree that this is bad content that should be changed a bit to be less about digging up chests and more about actually fighting the content.

If they made it, for example, so that you could only dig up chests around “held” bases, and they more closely tied how many chests you could open to how well you defend them, then it would be more about playing the events and defending the bases, and less just looping the map and ignoring the forts. As an example.

So no I don’t believe they should reward people for digging up the desert, or for “sitting in town and chatting,” but there are plenty of activities in this game that are worthy of reward, and if they are worthy of one type of reward, why not all types? They would reward in differing amounts based on the time and skill involved, but you should be able to do the activities that you enjoy and still be working diligently towards any reward in the game.

The important thing is that “challenging content” should not be balanced by having exclusive rewards, all that does is get people to play it who have no business playing it. Challenging content should be balanced based on a quantity of reward that is worth the effort, that means that those who genuinely enjoy the content can play it and not feel that they could have been making more elsewhere, but you should never feel that you are playing the challenging content because of the loot.

I believe that exclusivity is a valid way to reward challenging content. But I know you don’t. Nothing you say will change my mind on it. And nothing I say will change your mind. So let’s agree to disagree on the issue in order to keep the thread on topic (whether it should be doable by PUGs/casuals or not).

Dungeons and raids are not the same thing. Dungeons are 5 man instanced content. Raids are 10 man instanced content. And we don’t know exactly what they will entail inside of the instance. But yes, they are similar.

I believe that exclusivity is a valid way to reward challenging content. But I know you don’t. Nothing you say will change my mind on it. And nothing I say will change your mind.

A fair point, but I do believe that objectively, exclusivity is worse. This is because with quantity, you can always catch up. Even if a raid rewards a thousand times more gold than some other activity, you at least have the option of doing that other thing a thousand times and eventually get there. If it’s an exclusive item though, then you could do your event a million times and still never get the thing you wanted out of it. I just can’t see that as a “to each their own” difference.

Dungeons and raids are not the same thing. Dungeons are 5 man instanced content. Raids are 10 man instanced content.

Tomayto/Tomahto.

Ohoni.6057:

I believe that exclusivity is a valid way to reward challenging content. But I know you don’t. Nothing you say will change my mind on it. And nothing I say will change your mind.

A fair point, but I do believe that objectively, exclusivity is worse. This is because with quantity, you can always catch up. Even if a raid rewards a thousand times more gold than some other activity, you at least have the option of doing that other thing a thousand times and eventually get there. If it’s an exclusive item though, then you could do your event a million times and still never get the thing you wanted out of it. I just can’t see that as a “to each their own” difference.

Dungeons and raids are not the same thing. Dungeons are 5 man instanced content. Raids are 10 man instanced content.

Tomayto/Tomahto.

How the exclusive item is earned is entirely different from the exclusive or not argument. They should definitely have a token system for any of the exclusive items offered in raids, to increase the similarity between it and dungeons. So that it’s not tied to RNG. But again, we’re both at the point where it’s agree to disagree and move on as the rewards of the raids is NOT the topic of the discussion here. And I will make no more comments on it as I respect the OP’s concerns enough to not derail the topic and get it locked.

And we don’t know enough about raids to say the differences between dungeons and raids is the same as the different pronunciations of tomato.

you are in the wrong guild then, you could join a difrante one, that does dungeons and fractals and pvp wvw all together, you will never be left alone like this

Ohoni.6057:

If that’s true then you don’t need to be making straw man arguments. If you believe that we’re at the cliff, then argue that we’re at the cliff and cannot take one step forward. Don’t try to argue “well what if we walked fifty feet more?” Clearly I disagree, but employing straw man arguments doesn’t lead to more agreement, it just makes you appear to be irrationally terrified of relatively simple changes.

It’s definitely challenging to argue reasonably with radicals.

rotten.9753:

Ohoni.6057:

If that’s true then you don’t need to be making straw man arguments. If you believe that we’re at the cliff, then argue that we’re at the cliff and cannot take one step forward. Don’t try to argue “well what if we walked fifty feet more?” Clearly I disagree, but employing straw man arguments doesn’t lead to more agreement, it just makes you appear to be irrationally terrified of relatively simple changes.

It’s definitely challenging to argue reasonably with radicals.

Ohoni isn’t a radical. Ohoni just knows what they want and hasn’t heard anything that would change their opinion.

Undertow.2389:

Except those people are still paying for them. Developer time/resources are not infinite (this seems to be what you don’t understand). Raids aren’t just a bonus. They were made in place of something else.

GW2 ist a “package deal” with a lots of different things and game modes. People that do mostly only PvP or WvW and no open-world PvE have to “pay” also for things they do not want to play (open world maps i.e.). And people that do not do PvP have to pay for stronghold. etc. etc.

GW2 has a lot of “game modes” and a player has the choice to choose to play what he/she likes and to not bother about the others.

Undertow.2389:

If they make the raids hard enough such that they require scheduled (can’t play when you want) and organized (can’t play with just anyone, needs to be the same people/guild so you make progress) groups, then they are content that effectively doesn’t exist for anyone who doesn’t want to schedule their life around a game.

If I want to play with my friends (in game or in real life) of course I have to schedule to make sure that we are playing at the same time. I you do not want this kind of team play and you are a “solo only” person, than maybe other “game modes” are more suited to your taste.

When they said challenging content, what they meant was challenging to your real life >:D (but seriously….)

…I see your problem. You don’t have enough time to play. WEll…sorry but deal with the fact you probably wont be able to do this then.

Having not enough time to play a game isn’t the problem of the game unless they are spitting out 10 hour raids with no save points.

Seriously.

If I want to play with my friends (in game or in real life) of course I have to schedule to make sure that we are playing at the same time. I you do not want this kind of team play and you are a “solo only” person, than maybe other “game modes” are more suited to your taste.

This is why people are asking for those other game modes to be equally viable paths towards advancing through the game. You can either say “only this game mode should have the best rewards," OR you can say “well if you don’t like this game mode, play something else,” but you can’t have it both ways.

My major issue with hard content… Nothing. Let there be different types of content for everyone. Fractals will be quicker now so you have low time commitment instanced content and there are dungeons for something a little longer and now there’s raids for greater challenge. It might not be exactly what I’m expecting… but honestly, not all content needs to be designed for me personally.

If you don’t want to play for more than an hour at a time, don’t raid. It is impossible to cater for all players, and at this point I feel the more serious PvE players need some content aimed specifically at them.

Not to be disrespectful to you OP, but it sounds like you want all content to be aimed specifically at casual players like yourself, without anything for other kinds of players.

I am curious to see whether ANet has made raids that will be really interestingly hard mechanic wise while still be made so that they do not mechanically lock out players for not finding fun in joining a fixed raid guild with all that wanna-be-elite-selection venom, DKP manipulation schemes, player spot rotation extortion and the unruly and unpleasant social drama that other raid design concepts have broought in the past.

Since ANet has a good track record at doing stuff to make things more sociably enjoyable by design I have good faith in the new raids.
So far the only hard fact is they are supposed to be designed with the original intention dungeons were: “Bring whatever friend and player character that you like to play with”
So their fundamental concept of choosing the player you want to play with over choosing any virtual toon for a required stat seems to stand still.
Let’s see what their solutions and success in this matter are when it comes out.
I’m all excited and hope this will bring a new generation of raid content design, that is as challenging as it is sociably pleasant.