Guild Wars 2

“Mal ikke fanden pa vaeggen,” Danish saying meaning:
~ “Don’t paint the devil on the wall just yet.”

In a storm of discussions this last week about just about everything to do with HoT and changes a firm mingling of ideas has been forming between my friends. We’ve made our own raid guild so we can focus on this. We’re experimenting with new builds, modifying old ones, and getting tactics down. Day 1 we failed miserably on the boss. Day 2 we nearly always survived to day phase 3. Day 3 we missed killing it consistently by seconds on the timer.
I’m not aware of anyone who really disagrees with the raid design nor implementation. It’s genuinely been well received by my causal guilds and my hardcore guilds. In short, it’s a ton of fun.

The real problems everyone is grouping around seems to be a single issue:
Presentation.

Per usual there is very little assured means to get at consistent reliable facts about Guild Wars 2’s development. You really have to be on your toes to get the facts as to what’s going on in Development or Update schedules. Even if you are, you may not have time for it all. Bad facts tend to mushroom.
I point this out because it seems the vast majority of the player base is simply not getting the news before something gets implemented. The result is a strong amount of rabid paranoia. The sharp edges get smoothed out if a person has a large enough guild, its members are actively communicating, and the individual players is participating with enough of the game content to understand this or that. Misconceptions die quickly after encountering implementation. But, still, how to access development news is pretty nebulous.

In real life I actually get together with a few of the friends I play with. We sit down, have tea, and meander through different discussions on various things to do with the game.
The same sort of thing happens in game as well. Before a raid we generally take an hour to stand around and chat. Sometimes about the raid, sometimes about the game, usually about whether or not Charr should be Asura mounts. Serious stuff…
Nebulous, but heartfelt discussions generally flips-flop between who we are citing for good information about the game. Dulfy, WoodenPotatoes, Helly, Twitch, Guild Chat, etc all come up.

The age ranges within our discussion are pretty varied. We have some people who are 16, others 63, and everything in between. Since we all played MMOs for years we usually know each other beyond just this single game. We may even be playing several of them together from something as complex as EVE to as ghetto as WoW. A lot of times it is to keep in touch while we’re off to college or because someone got married. It’s become kind of a family thing and extended family thing. It’s also something to talk about besides, “The puppy re-decorated the carpet.”

Sometimes people drop out of it for a time, usually because of a lack of time, or disgust with the current trend in gaming away from community and content. The point is, anyway, that we tend to rely on each other first and the “news” and “rumor mill” second.

This seems to be the case within an MMO community as well. Our primary sources for information are going to be our friends. If the MMO company doesn’t take the time to give us clear consistent information we’re not going to go further out of our way to find it than we need to and can. We’ll also generally assume they don’t want to and a certain amount of animosity forms. Video games are kind of like a religious organization, charity, and etc in that respect: Money is given in hopes of its appropriate use. Mostly I believe the money we give to a game goes to server expenses.

Here we come to the heart of the discussion. At this point, MMOs have a lot of people who ‘get’ what they are about. Most are WoW clones; brainless nonsense with zero content and an infinitely long gear treadmill that is ever being extended. Playing these games is increasingly being regarded as something of an IQ test. The only time the game is good is before you’ve reached the ‘end content’ because after that you can be certain development has halted (if it was ever even implemented).

Guild Wars 2 has tried to be progressive in most things its developers have done. Unfortunately, it took a lot of the structures it designed from what was viewed as “progressive” for a small period of time in which WoW was thriving. These included things like soulbinding, crafting that can only benefit you, and went a step further by making the only reliable source of materials for crafting be from gold. There were systems in place to handle things, but a bunch of things have gotten “pinched” with the release of Heart of Thorns.

This is where presentation really can make or break a game. When Heart of Thorns released we all were made aware Ascended armor would be necessary. So, okay, no problem. There was a working system in place for how to get that. Go to dungeons for Empyreal Shards, World Bosses and Edge of the Mists for Dragonite, and play in any context for Bloodstone Dust. Save up your silk or buy Damask from the gold from dungeons and you’re set. OR, if you are already level 40 + in Fractals do that.

Unfortunately Anet had a brain kitten and decided to remove access to Ascended armor entirely for those that don’t have it. Whether this was done accidently or deliberately is not clear. Nevertheless, it happened.
This was done by removing liquid gold from dungeons, which withdrew players from that piece of content, in turn removing the access to Empyreal Shards. Thus, the crafting process to Ascend Gear has been suspended. Simultaneously, Ascended drop rates in Fractals were nerfed into oblivion. This in turn had the net fallout of convincing most of the community we were just told, “Don’t have Ascended gear? Get out. You aren’t welcome.”
No shouting. No warning. Just an utter annihilation of the new and rising player base from access to Heart of Thorn’s end game any time this year. On top of this it made every old players go, "Wait a minute. I have Ascended gear, sure, but look at this! If I want to raid I’m getting demands I have precisely this build. Now I have to go make new weapons. Except, I can’t reasonably do that since the Empyreal Shards now requires several weeks of collection. And anyway, that doesn’t really solve matters as I’m expected in the raid tonight. Since everyone is busy working on their own things right now, facing the same crunch, the selfishness is high and demand to be ready now impossible meet. So, not only did developers nerf Ascend Gear they effectively gated people with Ascended Gear from the content designed for them!

This is then where the presentation of Heart of Thorns looks like a pretty grim direction for the game to be heading. Since most players utterly were not expected to get perma-gated from Ascended Gear (by design or accident) the only conclusion most I’m talking to have come to is, “Did we just get cut from the game?” Because that’s what it looks like.

At the same time, those players that already have Ascended Gear, and all the right kinds of it are not really feeling any of this at all. For them, this is at worst a nervous situation while we wait to see how the community responds. But it also looks pretty grim because we’re sort of watching the momentum to reach us just falling dead. And for good reason. Everything above paints the picture that there’s no progression now. If you have Ascended Gear you can go on to get more through the Raid eventually. If you don’t you won’t.

Now, that might seem unfair if you’re familiar with the game. There are still world chest farms that will eventually yield 15 or so Empyreal Shards every 3 maps or so. There’s still the option for Dungeons IF you can get people to do them… good luck really. And there is still Silverwastes for some sort of gold gain.

But realistically, we’re a minority of players.

We’ve been playing a long time. Most of us have a lot of MMO experience. We know how to dodge most of the time traps. Even that experience won’t help you a lot with this game as it really is pretty unique. Our speed, efficiency, and success with this game is more to do with our experience with it rather than us having any more common sense with this than the next person.

The rest of the community is really just on edge because, for them, they are just seeing what they’ve seen happen to every other MMO. The development of the GAME stops. Instead there’s just an increase to the levels, a longer grind added to existing crafting or token acquisition for gear, and that’s it. The game goes into a limbo never to return from.
And really, I’m sure anyone reading this has bumped into someone that’s made these comments too. We’re pushing into WoW clone territory. And that’s where games go to die.

Worse still, we’re not the part of the community looking at the this giant barrier. IF you have Ascended you’re going, “Why is there this issue? I mean there is this option, that option, and etc to get it.” But if you don’t have it, suddenly you’re going. "Now wait a kitten minute! Those people playing just before release had XYZ options to Ascended gear. I get? Well #*-&#*%-*#$# …and they’d right. The Fractal nerf that first gave a huge injection of Ascended Gear when Fractals first released created an elite community that really was simply lucky to have been playing at the time. Now a second round of that is going through. This time, really, it close-lined a lot of people. Those that can do the dungeon will see more Ascended. Those that can’t won’t.
That suggests to A LOT of people that the demographic for the game just got changed. If someone doesn’t have Ascended they’re looking at the game going, “This isn’t meant for me.” And why not? The only people that can reasonably get it are getting it from raids. So the game is about raiding. That’s included in the presentation by implementation. It was anyway, just by what little we heard from the devs. So, the question of whether or not a chunk of the community just got handed their hats is very much in debate.

The next big issue is a ‘future’ situation that’s realllllly going to be a test of the community’s tolerances right now: Legendary Armors

This is a concern for SO many because it will be a test of faith with us and the Devs. If it turns out that Legendary armors come from the raids this really may damage the game in a long hard way.
Why? Well, with Ascended acquisition now a non-existent portion of the game realistically, the only people who can really get anything out of Heart of Thorns for their character are those doing raids. People doing the raids really believe Ascended is necessary now more and more. Yet, everything else is so time-gated that it will actually be a year or more just for people to get Ascended. Again, this isn’t about completing a character. It’s about being able to reach the peak of the game. If you are in Exotics you’re a Third World citizen for many who will be using Legendary Armor. They’ll be able to not only trait swap, but completely stat swap. The only money sink they have left is Runes. It so completely segments the player community it’s hard to see how this is going to get a good reception. The only mitigating factor I can imagine is that players discover Legendary Armor does not come from raids.

That is the only way players can be presented with hard coded facts that they haven’t been preselected by the devs as no longer considered part of this product’s demographic. Simultaneously it will be the only way for players less concerned with that to tell whether or not the game is now just another WoW-clone with an infinite gear treadmill excusing the developers AND COMPANY from ever injecting more into the game than a grind.

So, I think the implementation created a presentation that the game has shifted focus from being about content to being about a grind while a rare few on the community can continue on playing.

It’s a presentation issue.

Maybe it’s a result of the implementation schedule.

Armor and weapons are your characters stats.

Since they go with you everywhere, no matter how much you may intend for these things to be the meta only for a raid, it never works out that way. WvW, PvP, PvE, and Dungeons… no matter where your character is and no matter how skilled you are… the armor makes or breaks you. That’s just how the MMO has been designed so far. Stats aren’t bound to your character. So when this kind of thing gets implemented wrong there’s a really narrow time to fix it before the community you had drops, changes, or goes into a rage about it. Just look at the EVE online situation with the Monocle.

Possible fixes? (I’m just brainstorming – brilliant breakdown btw):

• Give ascended armor stat swapping and give legendaries rune swapping (in addition to their stat swapping). Over time, add minor skin variants for ascended pertaining to crafted stats, so that there is a reason for different recipes (not unlike weapon variants).

• Add full set of ascended armor to various currency merchants (e.g. laurels, badges of honor, zone-related tokens, karma) and make it a one-time account purchase for each class (light, medium, heavy). You would be able to choose your stat set for this armor the first time, but once you’d chosen it, you’d have to go the expensive route to swap or craft another set for more stats.

• Make it such that legendary armor is faster to acquire through raids, but can be acquired through other means (and make this readily apparent to players).

(Note that I’m not suggesting all of these ideas be implemented. Some of them would work well together and some would be unnecessary with one or two of the others.)

I got probably over 10k empyreal fragments from SW chest farming. It’s not exactly fun but that’s a way to get empyreal fragments and dragonite ore, bloodstone dust easily if you need them.

I think you’ve made a lot of good points. I also think that we are heading in a very bad direction as you mentioned with communication. Chris Whiteside, one of the driving forces behind the very well-received CDIs, is no longer with the company. I haven’t seen a CDI since almost a year ago, there’s no mention of when we can expect more content to start rolling out, and while I understand the removal of liquid gold from dungeons, alternative rewards really need to be implemented.

I believe ANet has been catering far too much to short-term metrics; when they announce ‘next LS in 4 months!’ you will see a drop in players because they all decide ‘I will wait for more stuff’. But what it does do is prevent permanent burnout on the game. An increasing number of friends end up playing hundreds of hours getting all into the game, and continuing to play now because they don’t know they need to pace themselves. In the end, they get completely burnt out, and only if HoT had been FREE would they consider coming back. In all, I know 2 new players, and 6 burnt-out players, in addition to the 8 who have been here all along and/or taking breaks. The F2P model didn’t bring in any new people I know of, and instead has further alienated those who were burnt out. I can’t look them in the eye and tell them the expac has even 40% the quantity of content that the original game had at launch, even if it is good quality.

I think that ANet is further struggling with too many goals that tie their hands.
-Make a sizable profit (not a bad thing per-se, but they have more demands for green than for black, and that drives some decisions)
-Support a non-treadmill game which does not increase the numerical stats as carrot for play
-Provide for PvE, PvP, and WvW with a unified system
-No trinity (and thus no explicit aggro management, which means a lot more AI investment in dev)
-No monthly fee
-A dynamic, ‘alive’ world

This becomes glaringly obvious as a problem when looking at PvE vs PvP. If it was PvE focused, they could churn out new skills and traits like no-one’s business, providing quantity players crave. But PvP means massive, exhaustive testing to ensure it doesnt break things. Further, no trinity means there’s no formulaic way to calculate potential and impact of skills, additionally hampering this.

ANet is trying to do literally everything, which is just impossible. They have done some truly amazing things, and it’s still the most revolutionary game of the MMO genre since it’s inception, but they can’t keep it up. If they don’t want us to have a treadmill, they need to stop innovating, and make more of what they already have. The Quality of the expansion is phenomenal. The Quantity is lack-luster, and as pointed out, there are glaring issues with player confidence, not just in the market, but in the course of development.

Well, that was a lot more rambling, but about all I can muster with the limited time I have.

+1 for the well thought-out post, Eirdyne.

I also agree with dreadicon in that stronger communication itself would be a massive improvement on Anet’s part. There are certainly some one-way channels for communication (Guild Wars news), but very little information and few responses are given, even when the game receives an update based on forum feedback. I guess mods/devs are probably hesitant to engage with us because there are a lot of flamers who would attack them instead of engage in thoughtful discussion, but there are ways to limit that kind of occurrence. Others here would like to be part of the world that we’re invested in.

This was interesting, perhaps slightly long, to read.

If you believe overexcited posts, you can finish raids pretty much naked, wearing nothing but some dry leaves and level 1 weapon. So I am not sure if ascended gear is required or it is just some weird view random groups have implemented. As I personally believe raids are not suppose to be finished by random groups, this becomes no problem since dedicated group can probably do it using mostly exotics too.

As someone who never has done dungeons or fractals much, I have gained my ascended gear from crafting and WvW chests. Sure, the WvW looks pretty dead by now and for new players is probably not the path to gain ascended gear. Yet, I fail to see why it would be now impossible for new players to craft their ascended gear.