Guild Wars 2

Problem definition – Time gating in Precursor/HoT legendaries crafting:

Complaint: Due to time gating, it can take over 2 months to craft the precursor/HoT legendary! It’s not challenging or difficult. Just plain annoying.

Usual answer: It took me 2 years to craft my legendary! Why are you complaining about 2 months? You’re acting like an entitled noob!

Actual problem: In theory, if you had a copious amount of gold, you could have bought all the mats for a classic legendary, do the necessary dungeon/PvP track to get the tokens for the gift, buy the precursor from the TP, and craft the legendary in roughly 2 weeks.

How’s the time spent here?
1) The dungeon/reward track – actual things you have to do. Time depends (sort of) on your skill and parties.
There’s a slight time-gate here, but it’s size depends on you. If you go for the reward track AND the dungeons, this could take you 2-3 days (180 tokens per day + tokens from pvp).
2) Acquiring mats/gold for the mats – if, like certain players, you play the TP, this could take something like a week (so I’ve heard, not sure, and isn’t relevant here). Another way would be to farm something like dungeons (pre-nerf), or SW until you have the proper amount.
If not, could take months or even years.
Acquiring the precursor – like the mats acquisition, could take a week to get gold from the TP, several weeks/some time to farm cash to buy it off the TP from various sources, or years until you get lucky from regular gameplay, or the mystic toilet.

These last 2 sections are the bulk of your time! They depend ONLY on you!
If you’re lucky and/or play the TP, this’ll be a very quick and would seem unimportant in your “quest” for you weapon.
If you’re farming something, you could get a big chunk of gold each day and feel the progress you’ve made due to YOUR hard investment.
If you’re just “playing the game”, then yes, this’ll take you months and years because that’s how YOU choose to play. The game isn’t forcing you to wait. The only obstacle is YOU.
This is a good implementation by ANet which gives the players complete freedom and places the responsibility and time management on the player. We’re free to skip a day of crafting and it won’t effect our overall progression, and we can sprint a chunk of crafting if we choose to in a single day to compensate for the lost time. The choice rests on us.

Now let’s take a look at the time-gated progress for precursor crafting and HoT legendaries (just came to realize the problem is in the HoT precursors but hell, just go with it):

Let’s ignore the HUGE and disproportionate amount of mats needed to craft the precursors (just my opinion).
Some of these precursors, Astralaria for example, have an 87 days-long time gate in one of it’s phases due to Deldrimor steel, charged crystals, and Zinn’s journal (which for some reason takes 12 days to complete… Why is that?).
Now, I understand the mechanic, time gates are used to increase the value of certain objects and items. But… It’s just an artificial method to inflate their values. They don’t increase difficulty, the goal doesn’t become more challenging, it just forces you to log in for several days, do a fake daily and basically, block your progress to the legendary for the next 24 hours.
The control over the progress is transferred from the player, to the game. Good skill and gameplay are not rewarded by this method, only constant log ins, and patience…

This is the core issue here. Nobody wants things “instantly”, nobody is acting entitled. All the players are willing to wait and invest time in their legendary, but the players who are willing to work HARDER expect their investment to be rewarded properly.
The players feel like they’ve lost certain control over the game since their gameplay won’t be rewarded the same way it was before.
Time gating forces the player to wait and restricts their gameplay

I hope this cleared the issue about this subject, and will help find a path towards a solution.

tl;dr – players feel that if they’re willing to work harder, they should be rewarded properly, and not be forced to wait.

BTW – I’ve been playing since launch and still have no legendary. It sucks, but hey, I never really worked for it, so I would expect no less.

So at first, yes I’am against the timegates! I don’t think they are a good mechanic.

The Timegate for the weapon is 50 Days! If you take your time and inform yourself you see that you need the 12 Books, the (25? not sure)Deldrimor steel and the 50 charged Quartz, but you can get all three things at the same day, so you need only a total of 50 Days (still quiet a lot). If you don’t informe yourself and do it one after another it is your fault :P

Beside, I don’t believe that a lot of players could get the legendary in an instant without the timegate, you still need around 3000gold, so you will have to farm for it wich will take you more than 50 days if you aren’t a hardcore player or a TP player.

BTW: with the exception of the Book thing, you could get all the timegated stuff in advance. The Steel and the quartz where not that expensive pre HoT, so it would have cost you maybe 1 gold per day to craft them.

So yeah, I don’t like the timegate, but there are ways around it.