Guild Wars 2

Coulter.2315:

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

you cannot design a game that will grant the same experience to 12-90 yr olds in all professions in all desired focuses of life.

Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.

Erm.. They announced Challenging Group Content as soon as HoT was spoken about – you were sold CGC and Raids, if you bought HoT you’re getting what they advertised. HoT was sold on the inclusion of raids (dsignated CGC initially but raids have been spoken about for a long time now), you cannot buy it and complain you were mislead somehow…

Challenging group content is not necessarily raids. As many have observed, if raids are implemented in a style similar to fractals, then it’s still challenging, without requiring people to have huge blocks of time for it.

GrapeGatsby.6937:

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

you cannot design a game that will grant the same experience to 12-90 yr olds in all professions in all desired focuses of life.

Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.

Please elaborate on how they “totally changed direction”.

I’d like to know that too but I get the feeling he doesn’t know the meaning of the word “totally”.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

you cannot design a game that will grant the same experience to 12-90 yr olds in all professions in all desired focuses of life.

Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.

Erm.. They announced Challenging Group Content as soon as HoT was spoken about – you were sold CGC and Raids, if you bought HoT you’re getting what they advertised. HoT was sold on the inclusion of raids (dsignated CGC initially but raids have been spoken about for a long time now), you cannot buy it and complain you were mislead somehow…

Challenging group content is not necessarily raids. As many have observed, if raids are implemented in a style similar to fractals, then it’s still challenging, without requiring people to have huge blocks of time for it.

The guy was complaining that he was missold HoT, CGC was on the cards from the start and EVERYONE wanted it to be raids (are you telling me you wanted a new kind of fractal?), it was raids – they employed a raid designer too.

Its just silly for him to say “Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.” when clearly HoT was sold on the platform it was.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

That’s not what is said in the GW2 wiki:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Raid

“Progress within a raid will be saved for players that leave the instance. Restarting an instance will remember progress made if created before the weekly reset.”

Therefore, if you kill the first boss before the weekly reset, you have to kill him again, unless you find someone who killed the first boss after the weekly reset to start the raids.

If Anet changed their mind and use what you said to implement the weekly reset, then it would acceptable, though not ideal.

I encourage you to go watch the raid stream from twitchcon. They were quite clear about this.

That refers to progress within a wing. If you have progressed up to, but not beaten the boss in a wing and come back before the reset all previous encounters will remain completed so you don’t have to repeat them.

I knew this, and I also know that reset is done every week. Therefore, your progress made before the reset is lost when they reset it on a weekly basis.

Yes, but it’s progress within one wing, and each wing is a “single session” chunk of content if done successfully, 1-2 hours worth, which you can spread out over an entire week if you’re failing repeatedly and learning the encounters.

The raid as a whole is split up in to wings, so when you reach that “checkpoint” of killing the first boss, that progress is never reset. You will never have to kill that first boss, or any of the trash that leads up to him, ever again unless you want to do it for more/different loot.

We do have to wait to see if each raid wing can be cleared in 1 hour. If this is the case, then Anet should announce it, because this means that raids in GW2 are very, very different from raids in other MMOs, and proves that Anet is true to their manifesto.

I’m literally just parroting what Crystal said in the raid stream from memory. I encourage you to watch it and clarify any place where I might have mis-remembered stuff. I’m at work so I can’t right now XD

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

But you’re not really being fair trying to compare multiple LS instances which revolve around Story (the S in LS) to a multiplayer Raid revolving around boss mechanics and team fighting.

Coulter.2315:

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

you cannot design a game that will grant the same experience to 12-90 yr olds in all professions in all desired focuses of life.

Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.

Erm.. They announced Challenging Group Content as soon as HoT was spoken about – you were sold CGC and Raids, if you bought HoT you’re getting what they advertised. HoT was sold on the inclusion of raids (dsignated CGC initially but raids have been spoken about for a long time now), you cannot buy it and complain you were mislead somehow…

I mean if compared to what game was like at launch (can call it vanilla now?). I have not bought and I won’t buy HoT.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

There’s nothing wrong with raids having a bit of side lore.

All of the personal story early paths have bits and pieces of lore and story in them, but none of it is crucial to the overall plot. However, some of it is information about the world you wouldn’t have access to any other way.

Like, it’s not important in the battle against mordremoth to know the history of the jotun, but you won’t really get that history if you don’t play the right PS. You’ll have far less information about uzolan or caudecus when you do CM story if you didn’t play the right story path.

It’s completely fine to have lore in raids as long as the knowledge or understanding of that lore isn’t crucial to the plot and can be summed up easily anywhere the story requires it.

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

Kevan.8912:

Coulter.2315:

you cannot design a game that will grant the same experience to 12-90 yr olds in all professions in all desired focuses of life.

Exactly, but the problem about it is that they designed and sold the game to someone…and after a while, totally changed direction.

Erm.. They announced Challenging Group Content as soon as HoT was spoken about – you were sold CGC and Raids, if you bought HoT you’re getting what they advertised. HoT was sold on the inclusion of raids (dsignated CGC initially but raids have been spoken about for a long time now), you cannot buy it and complain you were mislead somehow…

I mean at launch (can call it vanilla now?). I have not bought and I won’t buy HoT.

Awesome then you can still play the game exactly as you bought it, if you want the features in HoT feel free to get that too.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

MyriadStars.5679:

By the way, even after Blizzard implemented LFR in Cataclysm, most of the players who quit WOW when they no longer had the time for raids did not return to WoW, even though they played 30+ hours of WoW per week when they had the time. We can wait to see the same thing happen to GW2, or Anet programmers can learn from this and do it right from the very beginning.

I don’t see how that’s a counterargument to having different raid difficulties in GW2. WoW is a raiding MMO, it’s main focus of progression is a gear treadmill and newer raids which requires better gear. While their world building is fantastic, the focus on raiding has been a detriment on other aspects of the game. What’s more, many would argue that LFR was too small a step too late. And many of the casual players were actually able to experience raiding in a positive light once the LFR system came out, all of them more casual players. They praised the system as it allowed them to view the same content without getting kneed in the face by elitists. But WoW is also plagued by far more issues. it’s age, it’s inherent design, the slow change in focus, the subscription model (my personal opinion) and most unforunately, the migratory nature of MMO players. Which is honestly a shame, given that blizzard has so much to give in their fantastic world, and i’d like to see it continue to grow and i hope that it does. However it’s not my kind of game, and subscription models are a no for me.

GW2 on the other hand is newer, is reaching it’s first expansion this month, and has fixed many of the issues that other MMOs have, creating a more casual friendly experience. Now there is nothing wrong with having more hard core content, but there should also be the ability to play it for those who want an easier time, as this game has most definitely shown that it can provide that with fractals. They have not yet released raids, so ther is still time to implement difficulty modes.

PopeUrban.2578:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

There’s nothing wrong with raids having a bit of side lore.

All of the personal story early paths have bits and pieces of lore and story in them, but none of it is crucial to the overall plot. However, some of it is information about the world you wouldn’t have access to any other way.

Like, it’s not important in the battle against mordremoth to know the history of the jotun, but you won’t really get that history if you don’t play the right PS. You’ll have far less information about uzolan or caudecus when you do CM story if you didn’t play the right story path.

It’s completely fine to have lore in raids as long as the knowledge or understanding of that lore isn’t crucial to the plot and can be summed up easily anywhere the story requires it.

Yer sorry should have been more explicit, I was very wishy washy with my definition of ‘lore’ using 2 at least.

My position is raids shouldn’t have massive influence on the main story arc (deaths of major players etc.) but can certainly include things which deepen the world (finding out interesting bits and pieces about things/people). That strengthens the independence of raids and means they can be focus of solid raid design without ruining the story experience for others who can’t/won’t do them.

castlemanic.3198:

MyriadStars.5679:

By the way, even after Blizzard implemented LFR in Cataclysm, most of the players who quit WOW when they no longer had the time for raids did not return to WoW, even though they played 30+ hours of WoW per week when they had the time. We can wait to see the same thing happen to GW2, or Anet programmers can learn from this and do it right from the very beginning.

I don’t see how that’s a counterargument to having different raid difficulties in GW2.

Actually what I meant is that Anet should learn from this and implement either multiple raid difficulties, or fractals-like raids, from the very beginning, instead of waiting till it is too late. Therefore, we are talking about the same thing.

Pockets.3201:

There are things practice and learning cannot fix.

I mean, yeah. Obviously. If you’re playing the game with only one arm, for example, raids may not be for you.

If your laptop would serve better as a panini press, raids may not be for you.

If you become frustrated after a single death and leave an area, raids may not be for you.

Not every feature Anet puts in the game is for everyone. If you try to please everybody, you end up with a mediocre, genre-confused mess like ESO.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

Have we reached the point in the evening where its time to stop? I think so, you’ve just gone for the “raiding causes health problems” argument. I can asure you I am perfectly healthy and really expect other humans to have the intelligence to see to their own health.

Unless you want to complain to Peter Jackson for those dangerously long LotR directors cuts too – jesus the original Gone With The Wind must have caused a tidal wave of ER admissions.

Feeling things is good – its part of being human. Speaking of which I cannot recommend Inside Out enough – was so good – I would even say watch it alone to let all those emotions work without worrying about bursting into tears infront of people you know.

Well this thread has been successfully derailed.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

Have we reached the point in the evening where its time to stop? I think so, you’ve just gone for the “raiding causes health problems” argument. I can asure you I am perfectly healthy and really expect other humans to have the intelligence to see to their own health.

Unless you want to complain to Peter Jackson for those dangerously long LotR directors cuts too – jesus the original Gone With The Wind must have caused a tidal wave of ER admissions.

Feeling things is good – its part of being human. Speaking of which I cannot recommend Inside Out enough – was so good – I would even say watch it alone to let all those emotions work without worrying about bursting into tears infront of people you know.

You can choose to watch the 3 LOTR movies (extended) in one day to get the epic feeling, but most others would just use three different days or as many days as they want to, and they don’t have to watch them in the same week. What is important is that, having the ability to watch 3 LOTR movies on the same day won’t stop others from using more days.

Keeping raids in long raid wings will make it difficult for others to enjoy each encounter one by one at their own pace. If they use a system like fractals, or have raid wings that can be cleared in 1 hour for skillful players, nothing would stop you from getting a group to move from one instance to another on the same night, in order to raid for 5+ hours a time to get the epic feeling, provided that you do this with a hardcore raid guild. We actually move from one instance to another when we move from one zone to the next, and I don’t think this makes the GW2 world look smaller.

If jumping from instances to instances bothers you, I would say that they actually don’t even have to split a raid wing into multiple instances. It’s enough to give players the ability to jump to the x-th boss directly if they had killed first (x-1) bosses before, no matter how long ago they killed these bosses. It is like using a bookmark when reading a long epic fantasy fiction; you don’t have to read it from the very beginning each time you do some reading. You see, there are multiple ways of giving you the epic feeling without making others have access to less new content.

Others say that it is selfish to ask Anet to nerf raids so that more people can do it. Now, is it selfish to prevent more people from having access to new content, because some want an epic feeling that does not imply more challenges?

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

Have we reached the point in the evening where its time to stop? I think so, you’ve just gone for the “raiding causes health problems” argument. I can asure you I am perfectly healthy and really expect other humans to have the intelligence to see to their own health.

Unless you want to complain to Peter Jackson for those dangerously long LotR directors cuts too – jesus the original Gone With The Wind must have caused a tidal wave of ER admissions.

Feeling things is good – its part of being human. Speaking of which I cannot recommend Inside Out enough – was so good – I would even say watch it alone to let all those emotions work without worrying about bursting into tears infront of people you know.

You can choose to watch the 3 LOTR movies (extended) in one day to get the epic feeling, but most others would just use three different days or as many days as they want to, and they don’t have to watch them in the same week. What is important is that, having the ability to watch 3 LOTR movies on the same day won’t stop others from using more days.

Keeping raids in long raid wings will make it difficult for others to enjoy each encounter one by one at their own pace. If they use a system like fractals, or have raid wings that can be cleared in 1 hour for skillful players, nothing would stop you from getting a group to move from one instance to another on the same night, in order to raid for 5+ hours a time to get the epic feeling, provided that you do this with a hardcore raid guild. We actually move from one instance to another when we move from one zone to the next, and I don’t think this makes the GW2 world look smaller.

If jumping from instances to instances bothers you, I would say that they actually don’t even have to split a raid wing into multiple instances. It’s enough to give players the ability to jump to the x-th boss directly if they had killed first (x-1) bosses before, no matter how long ago they killed these bosses. It is like using a bookmark when reading a long epic fantasy fiction; you don’t have to read it from the very beginning each time you do some reading. You see, there are multiple ways of giving you the epic feeling without making others have access to less new content.

Others say that it is selfish to ask Anet to nerf raids so that more people can do it. Now, is it selfish to prevent more people from having access to new content, because some want an epic feeling that does not imply more challenges?

Nothing is stopping you clearing 1 wing a week and saving your progress but having 1 boss per instance will just destroy the feeling and Guild Wars’ devs put a lot of effort into their environments. Its not unreasonable and its not selfish to ask you to kill 3 bosses in a week if you are raiding.

If you can watch all the LotR movies in a week you can manage that. No one is getting less access – you’re inventing barriers which you do not know exist.

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

Have we reached the point in the evening where its time to stop? I think so, you’ve just gone for the “raiding causes health problems” argument. I can asure you I am perfectly healthy and really expect other humans to have the intelligence to see to their own health.

Unless you want to complain to Peter Jackson for those dangerously long LotR directors cuts too – jesus the original Gone With The Wind must have caused a tidal wave of ER admissions.

Feeling things is good – its part of being human. Speaking of which I cannot recommend Inside Out enough – was so good – I would even say watch it alone to let all those emotions work without worrying about bursting into tears infront of people you know.

You can choose to watch the 3 LOTR movies (extended) in one day to get the epic feeling, but most others would just use three different days or as many days as they want to, and they don’t have to watch them in the same week. What is important is that, having the ability to watch 3 LOTR movies on the same day won’t stop others from using more days.

Keeping raids in long raid wings will make it difficult for others to enjoy each encounter one by one at their own pace. If they use a system like fractals, or have raid wings that can be cleared in 1 hour for skillful players, nothing would stop you from getting a group to move from one instance to another on the same night, in order to raid for 5+ hours a time to get the epic feeling, provided that you do this with a hardcore raid guild. We actually move from one instance to another when we move from one zone to the next, and I don’t think this makes the GW2 world look smaller.

If jumping from instances to instances bothers you, I would say that they actually don’t even have to split a raid wing into multiple instances. It’s enough to give players the ability to jump to the x-th boss directly if they had killed first (x-1) bosses before, no matter how long ago they killed these bosses. It is like using a bookmark when reading a long epic fantasy fiction; you don’t have to read it from the very beginning each time you do some reading. You see, there are multiple ways of giving you the epic feeling without making others have access to less new content.

Others say that it is selfish to ask Anet to nerf raids so that more people can do it. Now, is it selfish to prevent more people from having access to new content, because some want an epic feeling that does not imply more challenges?

Nothing is stopping you clearing 1 wing a week and saving your progress but having 1 boss per instance will just destroy the feeling and Guild Wars’ devs put a lot of effort into their environments. Its not unreasonable and its not selfish to ask you to kill 3 bosses in a week if you are raiding.

If you can watch all the LotR movies in a week you can manage that. No one is getting less access – you’re inventing barriers which you do not know exist.

Having 3 bosses in one raid wing will not make hardcore players happy, because it’s not epic enough. They will call it too casual and too easy, and complain about it. When their guild has a raid wing on farm status, they will clear it in under 2 hours, and complain that the raid night is too short and they have nothing else to do.

Besides, the “bookmark” feature that I proposed does not even require Anet to put a boss in each instance. They can put 10 bosses in each raid wing if they want to, as long as players can “bookmark” their progress indefinitely. You can always find hardcore raid guilds in which players want to do it from the first boss to the last every week, and others can do it at their own pace.

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

MyriadStars.5679:

Coulter.2315:

Notice I’m not saying LFR wasn’t popular with some people but I do contest your assertion that a “retiring raider” would ever consider doing them for fun, they were just depressing. They were designed so everyone could see the whole raid – notice WoW’s main story line conclusions were raids – and they were not there as a substitute for “people who wanted to raid but didn’t have the time” because they weren’t raiding, they were attacking a target dummy dressed up as a raid with nothing that made a raid a raid.

I think it depends on why they retired from raiding. If it’s because they are tired of mindlessly farming raid instances over and over again, to satisfy the attendance required by raid guilds, then sure, it’s possible that they won’t be interested in LFR, either. However, if it’s because they no longer have the time for raids, then it depends on whether they are interested in stories, i.e., the lore. If they are, they may choose to do LFR a few times for lore, instead of for loot, and stay in the game longer between expansions. Even though the story line in WoW is far inferior to Warcraft 3, it’s still better to have the access to the story line instead of not having it entirely.

And there you’ve said it, “they will maybe do it a few times for lore” that is not retention… That is one run to see the cutscenes and dialogue if you’re paying attention, that is not worth adding to the game. Just go watch WP anyway for Lore :P

Also I’m not sure how heavy our GW2 raids will be on “story” all we know atm is a pact squad is missing and there seems to be a Bloodstone piece on the floor. Interesting no doubt but adding LFR (and all the trouble it brings – people feeling forced to grind it for extra loot drops and resentment over the cheapening of raids and extra development time required). Uuurgh it was not a provably good thing for WoW and all my memories of it were awful and please don’t bring it here.

I think it’s retention…People mostly do single-player campaigns in real-time strategy games such as starcraft and warcraft (not wow) for lore (you don’t need so many episodes to learn how to use the units), but these campaigns are created anyway.

You’re having now to reach for RTS to make your point, you know its not retention to do something once every 6 months in an MMO (every 6 months being their pencil’d in time table for raid releases I think I read – if its a different number read that instead).

One evening every 6 months to be rushed through a raid by strangers zooming off ahead to want to grind through it on easy mode would not give you a good lore experience anyway – I would point to Nobbel who does WoW lore and he actually gets guilds to run him through the real raid instances instead of doing LFR.

It won’t retain retiring raiders, if they’re stickin around in the game for 6 months for 1 evening of LFR then they are clearly staying for other things (which is a good thing) and we don;t need this abomination brought to our shores.

Actually I don’t have to reach to RTS. I am pretty sure that the living story season 2 helped Anet to retain many players. Most players just do it once for lore, and only some opt to grind it for things like Bioluminescence.

Oh I agree new content is great, but thats exactly what I would want – single playered instances for Story (ie. LS3) and Raids kept as Raids (I really don’t need the raids to be drowned in Lore infact most were not; most of the bosses in ICC were just made up on the spot to fill a slot). Mordremoth should be killed in the main story line that everyone can do – raids are a side mission for those interested.

I didn’t really propose to dumb down raids. Creating multiple difficulty levels, or use the fractals systems, will not take away the challenging content. In fact, with these options, Anet will never have to nerf any raid boss (which was done sometimes in other MMOs), because alternate ways of experiencing these encounters are provided anyway. Therefore, it’s ultimately good for those who want challenging content as well.

As we discussed earlier doing them fractal style loses their epic feeling, as has been explained by others you will have your raid progress saved at the end of wings. You do not need these extra difficulty levels or fractal style 1 per instance.

I’m not sure how easy it would be for Anet to create different levels of Raid given it took WoW 2 expansions and A LOT of tinkering and trial and error and a very Raid focused player base to settle into what it thought was best and now has gone over board with adding Raid stuff that it has drained all the life from every other part of the game (the raids were the only solid part of their last expansion the rest was given a lot of criticism and thats from resource management I would think – don’t believe “add extra raid levels” comes at zero cost).

Epic feelings come at a cost. By regularly playing games for 5+ hours straight without major breaks, one may get into health issues. Think about neck pains, back pains, eye issues… GW1 used to show the message that “you have been playing for x hours” to remind people that their own health is important.

Epic feelings do not imply more challenges to player skills. Therefore, people are sacrificing their heath for … actually I don’t know what for.

Have we reached the point in the evening where its time to stop? I think so, you’ve just gone for the “raiding causes health problems” argument. I can asure you I am perfectly healthy and really expect other humans to have the intelligence to see to their own health.

Unless you want to complain to Peter Jackson for those dangerously long LotR directors cuts too – jesus the original Gone With The Wind must have caused a tidal wave of ER admissions.

Feeling things is good – its part of being human. Speaking of which I cannot recommend Inside Out enough – was so good – I would even say watch it alone to let all those emotions work without worrying about bursting into tears infront of people you know.

You can choose to watch the 3 LOTR movies (extended) in one day to get the epic feeling, but most others would just use three different days or as many days as they want to, and they don’t have to watch them in the same week. What is important is that, having the ability to watch 3 LOTR movies on the same day won’t stop others from using more days.

Keeping raids in long raid wings will make it difficult for others to enjoy each encounter one by one at their own pace. If they use a system like fractals, or have raid wings that can be cleared in 1 hour for skillful players, nothing would stop you from getting a group to move from one instance to another on the same night, in order to raid for 5+ hours a time to get the epic feeling, provided that you do this with a hardcore raid guild. We actually move from one instance to another when we move from one zone to the next, and I don’t think this makes the GW2 world look smaller.

If jumping from instances to instances bothers you, I would say that they actually don’t even have to split a raid wing into multiple instances. It’s enough to give players the ability to jump to the x-th boss directly if they had killed first (x-1) bosses before, no matter how long ago they killed these bosses. It is like using a bookmark when reading a long epic fantasy fiction; you don’t have to read it from the very beginning each time you do some reading. You see, there are multiple ways of giving you the epic feeling without making others have access to less new content.

Others say that it is selfish to ask Anet to nerf raids so that more people can do it. Now, is it selfish to prevent more people from having access to new content, because some want an epic feeling that does not imply more challenges?

Nothing is stopping you clearing 1 wing a week and saving your progress but having 1 boss per instance will just destroy the feeling and Guild Wars’ devs put a lot of effort into their environments. Its not unreasonable and its not selfish to ask you to kill 3 bosses in a week if you are raiding.

If you can watch all the LotR movies in a week you can manage that. No one is getting less access – you’re inventing barriers which you do not know exist.

Having 3 bosses in one raid wing will not make hardcore players happy, because it’s not epic enough. They will call it too casual and too easy, and complain about it. When their guild has a raid wing on farm status, they will clear it in under 2 hours, and complain that the raid night is too short and they have nothing else to do.

Besides, the “bookmark” feature that I proposed does not even require Anet to put a boss in each instance. They can put 10 bosses in each raid wing if they want to, as long as players can “bookmark” their progress indefinitely. You can always find hardcore raid guilds in which players want to do it from the first boss to the last every week, and others can do it at their own pace.

Well if it doesn’t compromise the design of the instance I see no trouble with a bookmark idea – I’m not sure if its possible to implement though.

Ug, I can’t even read all 6 pages of this thread. See what is going to happen is…people who don’t want to spend 6 months creating ascended gear and legendary weapons will just leave GW2 (Hi, that’s me!) and go play something with an end-game they can actually enjoy. The exodus will leave these threads totally devoid of people except the MMO-Darwinist like the OP, until GW2 becomes an insular boring game full of kitten-hats pretending that min-maxing a dumbed down build and throwing months of time into ascended gear equals “skill.” Bye, Felicias!

lukejoe.1592:

Ug, I can’t even read all 6 pages of this thread. See what is going to happen is…people who don’t want to spend 6 months creating ascended gear and legendary weapons will just leave GW2 (Hi, that’s me!) and go play something with an end-game they can actually enjoy. The exodus will leave these threads totally devoid of people except the MMO-Darwinist like the OP, until GW2 becomes an insular boring game full of kitten-hats pretending that min-maxing a dumbed down build and throwing months of time into ascended gear equals “skill.” Bye, Felicias!

People have been saying that since ascended came out. If they are still playing, then chances are they will not be leaving any time soon because of that. People have been claiming nonstop that if Anet doesn’t add this or doesn’t add that, the game will die. All of which hasn’t come close to happening and the game is still running strong. Your claims and exaggerations are no different.

lukejoe.1592:

Ug, I can’t even read all 6 pages of this thread. See what is going to happen is…people who don’t want to spend 6 months creating ascended gear and legendary weapons will just leave GW2 (Hi, that’s me!) and go play something with an end-game they can actually enjoy. The exodus will leave these threads totally devoid of people except the MMO-Darwinist like the OP, until GW2 becomes an insular boring game full of kitten-hats pretending that min-maxing a dumbed down build and throwing months of time into ascended gear equals “skill.” Bye, Felicias!

I am veteran player of both Gw1 and Gw2. I’d consider myself rather hardcore player, i pretty much quit playing gw2(i was still logging in for few dungeons a week) after ~8 months after i got my third legendary.

Ascended gear was one of the biggest let downs for me. I didn’t expect Anet to break their great rule of “no gear treadmill” which was the rule that hooked me to Gw1. I knew that everyone has an easy access to max level gear(just like gw2 pre ascended gear) and the only thing that matters is skill and teamwork. I knew that we all have same stats and our only advantage is our creativity and knowledge of the game. Just look at builds like 55 Monk, that was a really creative build. You didn’t have to play 12 hours a day to be good and beat hardest content.

Now regarding Gw2. Since ascended gear mattered the most in Fractals i was not bothered that much. I simply don’t like em. Now when raids are part of HoT i am extremely disappointed that players who just spent hours/days on crafting gear(which is not hard, it just reacquires fookin grind) have power advantage over players who just don’t want to spend their time on grinding.

This is it. Adding gear that gives you power advantage and at the same time reacquires significant amounts of time to craft is simply breaking the rule of “no gear treadmill”. Your power should be your mechanical skills and your knowledge which imo are the most important features of a great player. Ascended gear screwed their policy and there is no way to go back now, there will always be losers regardless what they will do.

I just crafted my full set of ascended items yesterday. Till yesterday i was running in full exotic gear. Only thing that pushed me to craft it was recent news on raids.

I feel sorry for players who don’t have cash/items and will have to grind the kitten out of this game, instead of experiencing what Gw1 was like and what Gw2 was promised to be. Skill based game.

Peace

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

Further, you don’t even have to do boss 1 as long as whoever starts the instance has, but each boos has unique loot (the assumption is that each drops a different armor precursor in addition to its unique skins) so you’d want to do them all if you were after a full set of precursors, but if you don’t want the precursors and only want a specific boss skin, you can do just that boss as long as you’re in a group where the instance starter has access to that wing.

Does that mean raid LFG calls will also contain something like “Starting at Boss No4. Will skip others before it”?

Didn’t log into the forums for a day, and I walk into this…

Anyways, let’s go over some of the discussion that’s been going on in this thread. I’ll take the arguments apart one by one to make it easier to digest:

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged? There should not be the opportunity for everyone to beat a Raid. Either your team is good enough to beat it, or they’re not. Simple as that.

Raids with lower difficulty levels won’t reward as good

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

I can’t do Raids. I’ll quit the game.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

Designing Raids means Devs have no time for other content

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Raids are an MMO trap the Colin promised there wouldn’t be any

No, Raids are just one more type of game play. Don’t like Raids? There are still Dungeons and FotM for you and your party to run.

I’m a Casual gamer, so I can’t play Raids

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

Raids require me to have good gear

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Didn’t log into the forums for a day, and I walk into this…

Anyways, let’s go over some of the discussion that’s been going on in this thread. I’ll take the arguments apart one by one to make it easier to digest:

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged? There should not be the opportunity for everyone to beat a Raid. Either your team is good enough to beat it, or they’re not. Simple as that.

Raids with lower difficulty levels won’t reward as good

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

I can’t do Raids. I’ll quit the game.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

Designing Raids means Devs have no time for other content

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Raids are an MMO trap the Colin promised there wouldn’t be any

No, Raids are just one more type of game play. Don’t like Raids? There are still Dungeons and FotM for you and your party to run.

I’m a Casual gamer, so I can’t play Raids

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

Raids require me to have good gear

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

All true. And "You have to be “this” tall to enter." is exactly where the problem is.

Kevan.8912:

All true. And "You have to be “this” tall to enter." is exactly where the problem is.

I contradicted myself there. It should be: You have to be “this” tall to win.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Kevan.8912:

All true. And "You have to be “this” tall to enter." is exactly where the problem is.

I contradicted myself there. It should be: You have to be “this” tall to win.

Traditional endgame trap: get the endgame xxx (change xxx with mastery, stat, exp, gear, attunement, paragon, EGO..) to access exclusive content. of course access to something is meaningless if you can’ t win it in ANY CASE, just because it’s calibrated to be done with that gear, whether you re a good player or not.
Once again, AR and stats are just timesinks. please do not use “gear” and skills in the same post.

Don’t care if 1% content or 10%…just a matter of %, but typical timesink and “make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun”. definitely.
And ascended is a HUGE, unpleasant, time and life consuming gate, even worse than the worst of a f2p game.

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged?

What’s the point of beating any game on hard mode when it can be completed on easy mode, and yet millions of gamers do it every day. this is a silly argument. The reason for hard mode is because you enjoy hard mode, and even if anyone can claim to have beaten it on easy mode, only the best can beat it on hard mode.

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

If it’s just about the loot for you, then play on easy mode and get the loot. To some people it’s about challenge, and for them hard mode will be available. If you’re trying to say that only people who can complete it on hard mode deserve rewards, well no, they don’t deserve anything more than satisfaction at a job well done. Anything they are given for their efforts is a gift, not a salary, and they are not owed it, they are offered it. Anything they are not offered was never owed them.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

No, I’m positive that some will. You know as well as I that some will. I won’t be in that group, but it will make me enjoy the game a bit less if there’s this whole growing section of meaningful content and rewards that I’m entirely alienated from. I tolerated Fractals, but only because A. It did have an “easy mode” and I was able to clear each Fractal in that mode, and B. The harder modes really offered very little reason for anyone to do them other than that they wanted to, which is how it should be. If beating “hard mode” raids is the only way to experience them, and if that is the only way to earn certain rewards, then that will erode my enjoyment of the game as a whole, even if there are other things I can be doing inside it.

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Perhaps, but you can’t say how much more content the world in general could have if those raid teams were working on other projects instead. They built a whole map for the raid, the size of a standard small map, and are adding numerous complex boss encounters. How much cooler could they have made HoT if they’d focused that attention on making a new open world map with a similar attention to encounters that were not so difficult that they exclude a significant number of players?

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

This is just a preposterous argument. “Anyone can participate, you just can’t expect to actually clear it successfully?” That’s just insane. Who is that argument meant to satisfy? Who is meant to hear that and go “oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way, ‘expect to be disappointed,’ that makes me totally fine with it!”

“Open to anyone” means “open for anyone to try and succeed,” not “open for anyone to waste their time and go home empty handed when they could have been doing something better with their life.” As Judge Judy would say, “don’t kitten on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

But the gear gating is arbitrary and unnecessarily costly. There is no reason for a gear gate in the first place, they could design it so that player stats are made irrelevant by mechanics, but even if they do retain the gear-check, they could certainly make it easier to acquire the gear necessary in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Didn’t log into the forums for a day, and I walk into this…

Anyways, let’s go over some of the discussion that’s been going on in this thread. I’ll take the arguments apart one by one to make it easier to digest:

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged? There should not be the opportunity for everyone to beat a Raid. Either your team is good enough to beat it, or they’re not. Simple as that.

Raids with lower difficulty levels won’t reward as good

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

I can’t do Raids. I’ll quit the game.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

Designing Raids means Devs have no time for other content

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Raids are an MMO trap the Colin promised there wouldn’t be any

No, Raids are just one more type of game play. Don’t like Raids? There are still Dungeons and FotM for you and your party to run.

I’m a Casual gamer, so I can’t play Raids

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

Raids require me to have good gear

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

I think many negative views on raids are due to people’s experience from other games. They do have the tendency to bring more elitism to the game and are viewed as “disturbing” to the game’s general feel. Especially in GW2 where, currently, we have more relaxed atmosphere and elitism is more of an exception than the rule. This could change with raids, depending on how much work or emphasis devs give them in comparison to other parts of GW2.
I am not a raider, but I do intend to try them. But, as a non raider, I am still trying to figure out what is the real reason certain part of player base always demands (rightfully so) raids be included in an MMO.

When asking for raids, you can hear “We want more challenging content!”. When presented with raids, you hear “We want raids to bring exclusive rewards!”. So, what is the real reason? My guess is that most of them would definitely say “Both!”. So I have to ask, would you like raids if they were very challenging, but offered no additional (exclusive) rewards? Meaning, the fact that you completed that challenging content is a reward by itself.

My opinion is that such raids would generate very little interest, even among the most hardcore raiders. And this is where you see the birth of such elitism. It’s not about challenge itself, it’s about rewards in terms of gear. Something that GW2 hasn’t been about, until now. And this may be the main reason for players to be worried. Because of getting something simply challenging, we will get a gear wall and gear elitism.

IMO, raids were originally invented to keep players who play all day happy. If someone plays all day (say, 6+ hours per day), he will run out of things to do very quickly. Then raids were created as time sinks for those players, and they could indeed spend 40+ hours per week on raids. They also have to do this every week, as raid guilds have requirements on attendance. If you don’t join, say, >90% of the guild raids, then you will become a bench person and some other guildie will take your regular raider’s place.

Raids are never about the challenge itself. Many people are mindlessly raiding every week in many MMOs to keep their regular raiders’ spots. All you have to do in a raid is to do the right thing at the right time, and it will eventually become trivial because the mechanism never changes for the same boss.

To experience real challenge in games, one should play RTS or FPS games online, as there is always someone better and you can try to beat him/her.

symke.3105:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

Further, you don’t even have to do boss 1 as long as whoever starts the instance has, but each boos has unique loot (the assumption is that each drops a different armor precursor in addition to its unique skins) so you’d want to do them all if you were after a full set of precursors, but if you don’t want the precursors and only want a specific boss skin, you can do just that boss as long as you’re in a group where the instance starter has access to that wing.

Does that mean raid LFG calls will also contain something like “Starting at Boss No4. Will skip others before it”?

You don’t have to skip them. They said when you hit the portal there’s a popup that says “go to wing 1, wing 2, etc.” so lets say you couldn’t make it to raid last week and your group did wing 1 and completed the boss.

This week, they’re moving on to wing 2, and you’re back. The instance starter (not you) gets a popup at the entry portal, like the fractal level or explorable/story selection that says “start at which wing?” and 3 would be greyed out (because the instance starter hasn’t unlocked it)

So he selects 2, and you start at wing 2 as well with your group.

You guys spend a couple hours, finish half the wing, and start having real trouble with a certain encounter, so you decided to hang it up for the day and go do dailies and have a dance party to chill some and chat about ideas to solve it. You all agree you’re free to pick it up tomorrow, so you say goodnight and log.

You are struck down with a massive cold and end up home sick from work, so you decide to try and PUG wing 2 to see if you can learn anything that might help your group.

You get in a PUG, but nobody in the PUG has actually completed wing 1, including you, so you guys don’t have anyone who can start at wing 2. You excuse yourself as you prefer to do W1 with your regular group, wish them well, and log to take advil and chug nyquil.

That evening, your group gets back together. People have a few ideas for some build and strat changes, you all feel good about it, and you head back in to wing 2.

Because the weekly reset hasn’t happenned, the half of the wing you guys have done (becuase you went back today with the same instance starter) is still done. You run through half a wing of empty hallways, right back to where you left off yesterday.

Luckily, your group is really awesome today and the new strategy pays off, you complete the encounter and go on to complete the rest of the wing, you get phat loot from boss 2.

However, because you, personally, still haven’t completed wing 1 you can’t insta-warp to wing 2. You’d still need someone that can do that if you wanted to just replay wing 2. However, since you have beaten wing 2, you’ll see that when you go to star an instance, you can start it at either wing 1, or wing 3.

Pockets.3201:

It also tells some players that they can’t play the endgame, so they should find another game to play.

Then they clearly haven’t played any MMOs in their entire lives. It’s a lesson they were bound to learn at some point. Content typically scales in difficulty. Not everyone will be able to do the really difficult content. The only other option is to make everything easy so everyone can do it without failure. That would lose more people than anything.

The basic assumption is that after leveling 1-80, doing dungeons, maybe some fractals, finishing personal story, living story, jumping puzzles and exploring all of the new zones, that you should have enough experience playing the game to be competent in group content. If you aren’t, then no one can help you. At no point does that mean Anet shouldn’t develop content for people who have gained the skill necessary to complete harder content. We’ve had years to practice with our characters, I don’t even find FoTM50 difficult, I would be pretty upset if the raids were a cake walk.

Lux Dominatoris.3941:

@Tigaseye So the only “toxic” (in the lack of a better word) replies are mine and the one I am replying to is perfectly rational, not selfish and represents the good side? C’mon man, when I make a mistake I admit it. But do you truly believe that the bad guys (from replies) are only the hardcore people? The so called casuals are having the utter most perfected and logical arguments and we are the barbarians? There’s a saying in my country, “You laugh at the straw in that person’s eye while not seeing the crowbar in your own.”

So, Matthew 7:3. I recommend reading the rest of the Bible, particularly the bit about the meek inheriting the earth, or anything that speaks of compassion. Considering how your own proverb applies to yourself seems to be beyond your !337ness.

lukejoe.1592:

Ug, I can’t even read all 6 pages of this thread. See what is going to happen is…people who don’t want to spend 6 months creating ascended gear and legendary weapons will just leave GW2 (Hi, that’s me!) and go play something with an end-game they can actually enjoy. The exodus will leave these threads totally devoid of people except the MMO-Darwinist like the OP, until GW2 becomes an insular boring game full of kitten-hats pretending that min-maxing a dumbed down build and throwing months of time into ascended gear equals “skill.” Bye, Felicias!

I am casual, it did not take me 6 months to obtain ascended, put some effort in, spend some gold, or … enjoy your other game that will have more of a grind for you to participate in raids.

Fotm is more a gearcheck on agony resistance than “skill”.
If challenging content was just a test about skills and knowledge of game mechanics, it would be ok for me.
but there is just a time/gold sink with a passive attribute on a unavoidable damage.

Pockets.3201:

It also tells some players that they can’t play the endgame, so they should find another game to play.

Im just going to assume you are for the whole “everyone wins!” mentality during school competitions (is it even a competition if everyone wins?)

More content for people that like a challenge and people screaming for some form of coordination requirement is amazing.
If players dont want to do that (lets face it, they are not excluded, they just simply dont want to or dont bother taking the time to learn how to raid) thats fine. Just dont argue about needing to get everything for free. Some rewards hidden behind actual skill will be a breath of fresh air.

Todd.6573:

Pockets.3201:

It also tells some players that they can’t play the endgame, so they should find another game to play.

Im just going to assume you are for the whole “everyone wins!” mentality during school competitions (is it even a competition if everyone wins?)

It’s now a competition? It hasn’t been for 3 years, but now that we have raids, the community gets divided. Amazing how that elitist attitude instantly turns things toxic, is it not? (edited, stupid kitten filter)

Todd.6573:

More content for people that like a challenge and people screaming for some form of coordination requirement is amazing.
If players dont want to do that (lets face it, they are not excluded, they just simply dont want to or dont bother taking the time to learn how to raid) thats fine. Just dont argue about needing to get everything for free. Some rewards hidden behind actual skill will be a breath of fresh air.

You want challenging content? Fine. Nobody here is saying “there shouldn’t be raids.” That’s a strawman. What I and a few others are saying is “Raids shouldn’t get exclusive, desirable rewards.” If you enjoy raiding, then by all means, raids are there. If you want to divide the community by saying that people who enjoy raids are special and should get special treatment, then there’s a problem: it creates an unnecessary division in the community. It alienates LOYAL CUSTOMERS who have no interest in raiding when you decide that they don’t matter.
Toxic? Yep. Turning “everyone who plays this game” into “raiders” and “non-raiders” and making it into “a competition” turns a game where everyone wins into a zero-sum game where some have to lose. Since it hasn’t been this way for years, the sudden change in direction is likely going to be disastrous.

Lakanna.2073:

Nobody here is saying “there shouldn’t be raids.” That’s a strawman.

You are mistaken.

Some people here (perhaps not you) are actually saying (paraphrased) that there should not be raids.

Ashen.2907:

Lakanna.2073:

Nobody here is saying “there shouldn’t be raids.” That’s a strawman.

You are mistaken.

Some people here (perhaps not you) are actually saying (paraphrased) that there should not be raids.

A lot of people played GW2 specially because it had no raids.

And were promised no grind ….. lol

And no gear treadmill …… lol

And no trinity…..LOLOLOLOLOLOL

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Didn’t log into the forums for a day, and I walk into this…

Anyways, let’s go over some of the discussion that’s been going on in this thread. I’ll take the arguments apart one by one to make it easier to digest:

Raids should have different levels of difficulty like FotM

No. Raids are hardcore end-game challenges. What’s the point in saying “I beat the first Raid Wing” when someone can say the same thing with an easy button engaged? There should not be the opportunity for everyone to beat a Raid. Either your team is good enough to beat it, or they’re not. Simple as that.

Raids with lower difficulty levels won’t reward as good

It’s not just about the loot. It’s about the accomplishment of actually beating the content. If Anet were to implement easy Raids and hard Raids, you basically kill the content.

I can’t do Raids. I’ll quit the game.

Raids are just one single challenge in an entire game full of Casual friendly content. Just because you can’t complete this 1% of the game, doesn’t mean the other 99% ceases to exist. No one will quit the game just because of Raids.

Designing Raids means Devs have no time for other content

There are multiple teams working on multiple projects at any given time. Once HoT goes live, the team goes right back to designing Cantha making other content. I wouldn’t be surprised if Colin already has people working on the next expansion.

Raids are an MMO trap the Colin promised there wouldn’t be any

No, Raids are just one more type of game play. Don’t like Raids? There are still Dungeons and FotM for you and your party to run.

I’m a Casual gamer, so I can’t play Raids

Not true. Raids are open for anyone to try. It’s not locked away from you. The part that will prove to be difficult is beating the end boss. But failures should encourage you to become a better player, and a better team.

Raids require me to have good gear

Yes. Yes it does. And that’s not a problem at all, since this is end-game Elite level content. If you’re not geared to walk into the hardest content available, then you’re not prepared to win. There’s a Gear Gate, Skill Gate, and a Mastery Gate. Later wings require all three, and then some. Think of it like that sign at the Disneyland rides: You have to be “this” tall to enter.

1. Maybe people like me don´t care about beating that wing easy or hard, but we care about legendary armor. That`s my personal motivation to even touch raids, elese wise I would not even mind them at all.
2. See point 1. Doesn´t matter to people like me, grind is ok as long as we get the shinies in the end. You can still boast about your Red Alert Hardcore raid, especially with people who care about that.
3. Lol, of course some people will quit because of raids. Some because of broken promises, some about being treated as second class citizens if they don´t bend over and do raids. The same would have happened with fractals if there was a substantial reward in them. The question is the incoming vs outdropping players ratio, not that it will happen.
4. You know as good as I that Anet can barely make one thing, how could they devote time to two or more things. SAB and a million little other things say hi with that.
5. Raids are a trap is as good of an opinion as raids are not a trap.
6. “I am a casual gamer that does not have time to beat the raid” is a very good reason to not make a raid. Just because “I am physically and mentally able to try, so all is good and fair” is such a dribble and meek argument that I can barely understand that it is used. I can also try to reach my working place by foot, but I would basically go home as soon as I would have arrived home. Should I go to work now with that idea because my anchestors obviously walked at least 10 miles a day and I theoretically could too?
7. Raids require good gear, the only point I agree upon with you. I especially like the disney land comparison with rides where kids are crying be cause they can´t enter this and that and have to be caressed by their parents then. I am pretty sure that Anet will have to caress too, or the families will not visit Disney Land again…

PopeUrban.2578:

symke.3105:

PopeUrban.2578:

MyriadStars.5679:

Ayrilana.1396:

MyriadStars.5679:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Don’t get scared, non-elite players. We tried the raid as a pug group and had lot’s of fun. It wasn’t like: BOOM, all bads die. We made progress each try.

Even though it’s brutal hard to kill the boss, it’s decently designed to feel rewarding even for pugs, when dealing with certain mechanics. You’ll die a lot, but you’ll also learn a lot.

Don’t get discouraged! Pug up and learn. Then come back with a more organised group.

If each raid wing contains one boss only plus some mini bosses, then sure, there is no need to fear. However, if a raid wing contains 5+ bosses and your progress is reset every week, then raids = time sinks, which are typical MMO traps which GW2 was advertised to avoid when it was released.

Progress is not reset.

Did you mean that if I kill the first two bosses and stop playing the game for 2 months, I can directly attempt the 3rd boss after I return to GW2?

Yes.

It’s based on a permanent gate system, like the living story. Complete boss 1 to unlock boss 2, you can now do boss 2 whenever you want.

Further, you don’t even have to do boss 1 as long as whoever starts the instance has, but each boos has unique loot (the assumption is that each drops a different armor precursor in addition to its unique skins) so you’d want to do them all if you were after a full set of precursors, but if you don’t want the precursors and only want a specific boss skin, you can do just that boss as long as you’re in a group where the instance starter has access to that wing.

Does that mean raid LFG calls will also contain something like “Starting at Boss No4. Will skip others before it”?

You don’t have to skip them. They said when you hit the portal there’s a popup that says “go to wing 1, wing 2, etc.” so lets say you couldn’t make it to raid last week and your group did wing 1 and completed the boss.

This week, they’re moving on to wing 2, and you’re back. The instance starter (not you) gets a popup at the entry portal, like the fractal level or explorable/story selection that says “start at which wing?” and 3 would be greyed out (because the instance starter hasn’t unlocked it)

So he selects 2, and you start at wing 2 as well with your group.

You guys spend a couple hours, finish half the wing, and start having real trouble with a certain encounter, so you decided to hang it up for the day and go do dailies and have a dance party to chill some and chat about ideas to solve it. You all agree you’re free to pick it up tomorrow, so you say goodnight and log.

You are struck down with a massive cold and end up home sick from work, so you decide to try and PUG wing 2 to see if you can learn anything that might help your group.

You get in a PUG, but nobody in the PUG has actually completed wing 1, including you, so you guys don’t have anyone who can start at wing 2. You excuse yourself as you prefer to do W1 with your regular group, wish them well, and log to take advil and chug nyquil.

That evening, your group gets back together. People have a few ideas for some build and strat changes, you all feel good about it, and you head back in to wing 2.

Because the weekly reset hasn’t happenned, the half of the wing you guys have done (becuase you went back today with the same instance starter) is still done. You run through half a wing of empty hallways, right back to where you left off yesterday.

Luckily, your group is really awesome today and the new strategy pays off, you complete the encounter and go on to complete the rest of the wing, you get phat loot from boss 2.

However, because you, personally, still haven’t completed wing 1 you can’t insta-warp to wing 2. You’d still need someone that can do that if you wanted to just replay wing 2. However, since you have beaten wing 2, you’ll see that when you go to star an instance, you can start it at either wing 1, or wing 3.

Thank you. I appreciate the effort you put into this post. This makes it a bit clearer.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Kevan.8912:

All true. And "You have to be “this” tall to enter." is exactly where the problem is.

I contradicted myself there. It should be: You have to be “this” tall to win.

Not to mention you contradicted your original post: “Raids…exclude some people….”

You have completely baffled me as to the point of your thread.

But then I am a casual gamer who has no interest in completing a dungeon run much less a raid. I am just not interested in playing linear games. No one excludes me from raiding except myself. As for serious study of a subject, my interests lie elsewhere.

I don’t criticize hardcore gamers for their choices. Some of my favorite people are hard core gamers. The two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive.

Random.4691:

I am casual, it did not take me 6 months to obtain ascended, put some effort in, spend some gold, or … enjoy your other game that will have more of a grind for you to participate in raids.

looks at the other two raid MMOs he plays, WoW and FFXIV and notes that he can do a weeks worth of dungeons or outdoor content in both and have everything needed for the newest tier of raiding

Not to mention that my shaman is still raid ready for the current heroic raid and I quit playing WoW back in February.

looks at GW2 and hates the crafting system as its inferior to FFXIV’s system and has to grind longer than a couple weeks to make everything or has to buy $20-$40 worth of gems to just buy the mats

Now if they were to make ascended drop of champion mobs and events this wouldn’t be an issue for a lot of people, but Anet are pretty kitten stubborn for whatever reason on a lot of weird things.

:D

Post to fix forum bug.