Guild Wars 2

Silicato.4603:

maddoctor.2738:

I know. I count the difficulty of challenging conten by how fast I can finish it. And you should do it that way too.
From that point when I have succedded, the content and its dicciultywill be DONE, unless it has good rewards that make me repeat it, even when it is not longer a challenge.

And yeah, that time is going to be days in many cases and weeks for the mayotity of us.

Which means the “Grindy” path which is easy for everyone, should take Weeks (like the majority) and not days (like the “best case”)

Ohoni.6057:

Selfishness isn’t about wanting things for yourself, it’s about keeping them from others. I don’t want to keep anything from anyone.

selfish
?s?lf??/
adjective
adjective: selfish
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.

Selfish is literally about wanting things for yourself, keeping things from others is not a selfish act by itself, in a structured environment it makes sense, see the trophies and rewards from sports analogy a few people have made.

I know you don’t agree with it but surely you can recognize that progression and advancement are at the core of the game, and both of those involve less people being present the further along you get.

Ohoni.6057:

What some people now ask is to simply have rewards that not behind an endless grind, or where the endless grind is the most optimal way of getting them, but items that are locked behind a challenge, or in my case I would be happy having rewards simply behind specific content.

I’m fine with a balance of activities, so long as it’s a balance for ALL rewards, and not the “You can get version B doing it your way, but you can only get the cooler version A for doing it the way I like to do.” There also needs to be a balance between the “long and grindy” path and the “short but difficult” path, so that there aren’t ways to just coast through the difficult path, and so that the long and grindy path is not TOO long and grindy. The time difference between people who take the grindy path and the fastest people who blitz through the hard path should not be all that vast.

Like I gave as example before, give JP’s all their own reward (that you can’t get when using a portal, or logging in at the chest).. You can even put a timer on it (adding the challenge) and link 3 rewards to a JP where the first you get for completing the JP and other 2 only if you complete it within x time.

Not a fan of that, and that’s even though I’ve reasonably good at JPs and have completed most of them (a few I never got around to, and I’ve not yet cleared the Mad King one). But still, plenty of people don’t like them, so what if they really want that reward? I think the rewards for things like JPs should be more in the vein of pure achievement rewards, have multiple achievements for them, like ones you can only get if you never use a portal/cheat, ones you can get for clearing it in certain time thresholds, have a dedicated leaderboard that tracks all the best times, etc. That should be the award for the achievement, not a fancy skin that someone might want without caring about the difficult in earning it.

I wouldn’t mind if they did attach themed skins to JPs, so long as you could “cheat” your way to them if that’s your thing, OR there were other ways of earning it, such as reward tracks or some events in the area that might drop it or something. The idea of an item themed to a memorable jumping puzzle is fun, the idea that it might be forever denied to people who aren’t good at JPs, even if it works soooo well with their outfit, is just mean.

And that ‘balance’ is exactly what resulted in everything being behind a grind. Well that and the fact that cash-shop items are automatically always behind a currency-grind.

“There also needs to be a balance between the “long and grindy” path and the “short but difficult” path, so that there aren’t ways to just coast through the difficult path, and so that the long and grindy path is not TOO long and grindy." That will never happen because if the items becomes easy to get, the value will drop and so the grind will become lower..

The other way around however it is something that can, and in fact does happen all the time in the game. Make rewards just be generic but rare drops is only available with a currency (cash-shop items) and doing specific content to get them is nearly impossible.

Even if you say “I just play what content I want an earn the currency that way” (we then just forget, that the reward for content is part of the fun.) the problem is that there is usually some other way that earns the currency faster, so simply for doing your preferred content you already get punished.. but that’s not all.

The people who do the content just to get the currency (all the grind you see) means the prices will go up / inflation for the more rare items. So it becomes even harder to earn it that way. So you are getting behind on the rest… no problem, you just take longer one would say. But that is also false because new items will come you might also be interested in. So in the end the result is that to get many of the items ypu like, only joining the grind is an option.

With other words.. rewards are already very much locked behind something… the grind. Now som people ask to also have it locked behind something else and the grinders / hardcore casuals are afraid they will not be able to get it anymore. Well… welcome to the life of all non-grinders.

Vayne.8563:

There’s a big range of things between handed on a platter and killing yourself to get something. I consider the rewards from the Aetherblade dungeon relatively hard to get, but I got them all. I consider the Liviing Story fights, some of them, difficult, but I got them too.

I respect that, and honestly TA:Aether and high level Fractals are going to be more then likely what they gauge the challenge by so you really shouldn’t have to worry since those are the only two things that are really group conent that is challenging. Past that you may have to look towards Marionette, Tequatl and Triple Trouble for Open World content.

Though where as you may not have an issue with it not being handed on a silver platter, quite a few posters have took that as their stance as to why the rewards should be super easy and grindy to get and as quoted here:

The time difference between people who take the grindy path and the fastest people who blitz through the hard path should not be all that vast

So that is where the handed to them on a silver platter aspect comes from. You are willing to take the time and put the effort in to aquiring it, that is perfectly fine and how the rewards should work.

If others get jealous because they see someone with a skin they want, then they should work towards it minus a select few skins that are currently unobtainable that are from the gem store you have all the options in the world to put the effort in and take the time to get it like the players that did already. If that isn’t fun to you then scrap the idea of getting that skin, it is out of your reach and look for something that is fun for you to achieve. But in no way should there not be something to make harder content feel rewarding and in this game rewards are part of the wardrobe system, so taking away unique rewards for harder content makes the game effectively ignore that content after said and done and makes it a waste of time and resources in the development if all the players really have the motivation to do it once or twice because their is better/easier ways to acquire the same rewards that have nothing to do with the content.

A few good examples is dungeon story mode paths and ARAH p4, you either have to hope you can get a pug group that can do it or you have to pay for it for someone trying to make the content worth doing and feel rewarding. So you end up with content that is largely ignored by most the population becuase it is called too hard when in all reality it is just not efficient or rewarding to do. So do we want to see the game continue to do this, release content with the most grindy feeling possible and give everyone access to every new thing or build a game with diversity and where players can choose where to focus and when they feel like leaving their comfort zone they can be rewarded for doing so?

Ohoni.6057:

Not a fan of that, and that’s even though I’ve reasonably good at JPs and have completed most of them (a few I never got around to, and I’ve not yet cleared the Mad King one). But still, plenty of people don’t like them, so what if they really want that reward?

I don’t like grinding, resulting in me not being able to get 90% of the rewards. It seems as that is fine under the name of “grind the way you want”, so then I don’t see why it would also not be fine to have items locked behind a JP, and other behind a dungeon, and other behind a raid and another behind some other (hard content) and…

But like I said before, it is important to link the reward to the content. For the Molten Backpack you need to kill the boss with the molten backpack, for a portal to a WvW map, you need to hold a keep in that WvW map, for a mini that jumps all the time you need to have completed that JP in x time and so on.

Ohoni.6057:

I think the rewards for things like JPs should be more in the vein of pure achievement rewards

Hmm, then I think it’s better to have rewards for grinding be more in vein of pure achievements rewards.
Sorry, I don’t see how this makes any sense.

Ohoni.6057:

I wouldn’t mind if they did attach themed skins to JPs, so long as you could “cheat” your way to them if that’s your thing, OR there were other ways of earning it, such as reward tracks or some events in the area that might drop it or something.

That completely undermines / devalues the items from a game-play perspective. The skin is, or should be, a reward for completing something.. You said you would prefer only achievements and titles for this but a skin simply is, or can and should be, a visual representation of that.

It’s like a trophy. You can earn a trophy for winning with some sport.. or you can simply go to a shop and buy that exact same trophy. While it’s the same trophy, the first one will be of more value (for you at least) because it was a reward for winning, not just something you did buy with the money you earned working. However it would feel really bad if other people would indeed buy the same trophy because it undermines the meaning of the trophy.

Ohoni.6057:

The idea of an item themed to a memorable jumping puzzle is fun, the idea that it might be forever denied to people who aren’t good at JPs, even if it works soooo well with their outfit, is just mean.

If you think that.. then you should consider how mean the game is right now to people who don’t like to brainlessly grind?

Anyway, looking at it from this perspective, the only way it would not be mean was if you would put a vendor in every city that would freely give you any item you wanted.. I however can assure you, it would become a really boring game. But at least it would not be mean.

Torolan.5816:

Devata.6589:

Yeah, but when the reward you are interested in is in the dungeon, there is always the drive to get the item and the rush of ‘will it drop’ making it an overall more fun experience. When done right the reward is also linked to the content, again something MC got completely right, dropping the backpack and the mini form the boss.

When a currency becomes the means of getting something, people will do whatever gets them the currency the fastest (and then for all the rewards they want). So it becomes a completely different experience. But indeed, after a few runs it will almost always be reward driven.

That is true. But what if it does not drop and you do not get anything halfway good?
I am usually not a Nr.1 is best and 2nd place is the first looser type of person.
But even I am angry when the first price is a trip to lets say Barbados all inclusive(Dungeon only exclusive item), the second place is a cyrstal penguin I can sell to a collector(random collectors item) for a good sum of money, and the third place and down gets the looser stuff like a set of spoons(Spoons, really Anet? How is Tequatl going to eat his soup now?).

Something that particularly agitated me, although it was a long time ago, was when I took part in raids in DAOC, Realm Dragon or whatever and got absolutely nothing for your effort. If I remember well, the game had a kind of feature that collected items with the raidleader or something like that, and I found myself playing in the player driven lottery more than once to distribute loot. If your number did not win, you had wasted hours of game time for the same kind of loot you would have got by slaying random monsters.

That however brings us back to how RNG works. Yes you could end up with nothing. nonetheless, if it’s token base, it’s nice to see you got token 1 of the 100 you need, but as long as you don’t have 100 tokens that 1 token is completely useless. And it will be useless until you get the 100th token. Would the drop-rate be 1/100 then on average you would have the reward in 100 runs.

The RNG way would take away some exact progress, you could get it after 1 run it could also take you 100 (while the average will be 100.. so there still is a form of progress, just invisible and less exact).

But it would add the rush of “will it drop”.

The token way removes the rush but gives the exact progress. Personally I prefer the rush because that has an effect on every run, because it can drop every run, with the token system only becomes interesting when you are nearing the required number of tokens, before that all you see is the wall of missing tokens. (token can be replaced by any type of currency here).

That is not to say that there could not also be an items you simply get for completing it the first time.

Apolo.5942:

To those people comparing Hard Content, to WoW raiding.

There is a very big particular difference betwin content here an in WoW.

When you kill a Raid Boss in WoW, it ALWAYS dropps significant loot and gear.

Here you have Teq which gets killed every day and dropps something significant may be what 1 out of 100 times?.

What incentives is there to actually want those fights to be harder?.

All of this. I want rewarding content first. Then we can talk about making things harder.

This all comes down to preference in what you want to do in the game. I find it highly hypocritical that people are having a problem now, while there have been skins locked away behind specific content for the entire duration of the game.
But now that the hardcore pve community would get their own rewards, it’s a problem.

Dungeons offer unique rewards.
Silverwastes and drytop offer unique rewards.
Events during living story offer unique rewards, and most of the season 1 stuff is impossible to get if you are a new player.
Fractals offer unique rewards.
Certain achievements offer unique rewards.
Hell even achievement points offer unique rewards.
Teq and the wurm offer unique rewards.

Get over it.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Apolo.5942:

To those people comparing Hard Content, to WoW raiding.

There is a very big particular difference betwin content here an in WoW.

When you kill a Raid Boss in WoW, it ALWAYS dropps significant loot and gear.

Here you have Teq which gets killed every day and dropps something significant may be what 1 out of 100 times?.

What incentives is there to actually want those fights to be harder?.

All of this. I want rewarding content first. Then we can talk about making things harder.

Well, Teq does reward well… in currency. So people grind the world-bosses to then buy the items we want.

That is how things go, and bases on this thread, multiple people clearly dislike.

I also simply want specific rewards behind specific content, hard content being a part of that.

Devata.6589:

That however brings us back to how RNG works. Yes you could end up with nothing. nonetheless, if it’s token base, it’s nice to see you got token 1 of the 100 you need, but as long as you don’t have 100 tokens that 1 token is completely useless. And it will be useless until you get the 100th token. Would the drop-rate be 1/100 then on average you would have the reward in 100 runs.

The RNG way would take away some exact progress, you could get it after 1 run it could also take you 100 (while the average will be 100.. so there still is a form of progress, just invisible and less exact).

But it would add the rush of “will it drop”.

The token way removes the rush but gives the exact progress. Personally I prefer the rush because that has an effect on every run, because it can drop every run, with the token system only becomes interesting when you are nearing the required number of tokens, before that all you see is the wall of missing tokens. (token can be replaced by any type of currency here).

That is not to say that there could not also be an items you simply get for completing it the first time.

Couldn´t the issue of getting a boring token solution that is individually worthless instead of junk be avoided with making the token currency tradeable to a merchant who gives out stuff, quality depending on how many tokens you want to invest, like it is done in SW?

Lets make an example:
Say you have collected 46 tokens, then your item drops. You have a reasonably number of tokens then: not enough to be angry because you invested so dearly in them, but proud enogh to maybe tell it in guild once or twice. You give them to the merchant for something that is nice but you wouldn´t really put a thought in else wise.
I see only winners in this scenario:
*The Person who got the item dropped early won because he won the item and has escaped early from the grind.
*The token collector that got lucky won because he got the item and some stuff for his effort.
*The poor soul who had to collect 100 tokens is rewarded with the item and can be proud for his persistance and stubborness, making him a winner of hearts.^^

Devata.6589:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Apolo.5942:

To those people comparing Hard Content, to WoW raiding.

There is a very big particular difference betwin content here an in WoW.

When you kill a Raid Boss in WoW, it ALWAYS dropps significant loot and gear.

Here you have Teq which gets killed every day and dropps something significant may be what 1 out of 100 times?.

What incentives is there to actually want those fights to be harder?.

All of this. I want rewarding content first. Then we can talk about making things harder.

Well, Teq does reward well… in currency. So people grind the world-bosses to then buy the items we want.

That is how things go, and bases on this thread, multiple people clearly dislike.

I also simply want specific rewards behind specific content, hard content being a part of that.

I’ve always viewed buying items as a short cut to getting what you want. The problem GW2 has is that there are no reliable ways to get pre cursers or named exotic weapons. In GW1 there where areas where they would drop. Sure it might take awhile, but you knew where you had to be if you wanted something. If say champs in Kryta had a better chance of dropping The Chosen, then you would know what areas you needed to be. As it stands there are so many drops in the table.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Astralporing.1957:

The way i see it, entertainment should not be about work.

Don’t even start with this argument, you put work into anything you’re involved with, you’re just associating work with not being fun.

Of course i put my work in the game. I just don’t want the game to be about work, which is what you are advocating. For that kind of game RL is good enough for me.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Astralporing.1957:

Perhaps some of us playing virtual worlds do not want them to mirror real life?

They have to mirror aspects of them , otherwise they don’t play to peoples tastes or are seen as aberrant as they don’t follow real world structures.

Ah, but whose tastes do they have to mirror? Yours, or mine?

Conski Deshan.2057:

So thats how far MMO’s have fallen eh…..

Yes, they have fallen from the kind of games where tens of thousands were considered a big population, to the levels where below million is considered to be small.

Conski Deshan.2057:

It’s funny you’d claim that people who what exclusive/unique rewards to exist are selfish, while your whole argument is “All the rewards must be for me , I have to be able to get everything or it’s unfair”.
While our argument is “Everyone’s individual abilities should be uniquely reward proportional to the skill displayed and type of content played.”

Okay, so let’s agree that we’re equally selfish with the only differnce is that i want you to be able to get everything i can too, but you don’t want me to get what you can. Yeah, no meaningful difference here [/sarcasm]

Vayne.8563:

Let me ask all you hard core types this? What is the good of having hard content, if Anet has to stop making content because too many people aren’t playing. You think this can’t happen, but I think it can.

A better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that can be enjoyed by only a handfull of people? When that same amount of workhours could be devoted to something that would benefit everyone in the game instead

BrotherBelial.3094:

All of this. I want rewarding content first. Then we can talk about making things harder.

We can’t have rewarding content in this game. We can’t have game offered progression either. We have to make our own rules about it. It’s the very nature of the game.
Think of it this way, they didn’t add 10 more lvls to the game cause they didn’t want to invalidate anyone’s gear. How much of a progression you’re expecting?

And lets not forget that the only paths of progression offered by the game in this expansion are limited in scope, and super confined to an area of the world map. That should tell us something about the company’s progression plans. I’m affraid you’ll have to make your own progression plan and stick with it.

Astralporing.1957:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Astralporing.1957:

The way i see it, entertainment should not be about work.

Don’t even start with this argument, you put work into anything you’re involved with, you’re just associating work with not being fun.

Of course i put my work in the game. I just don’t want the game to be about work, which is what you are advocating. For that kind of game RL is good enough for me.

You got it backwards. The game is already about working working working, grinding grinding grinding the most profitable path in order to get access the rewards you might want.

What players are asking for is content that doesn’t feel like a job (like the everything else feels like NOW) and instead reward players for completing challenging content, overcoming difficulties instead of working your daily routine to earn your rewards, like a job.

I want content to reward me when I overcome challenges, I want to have fun playing and enjoying the content instead of following a daily routine. RL is good enough for me as far as daily routines are concerned.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Vayne.8563:

Let me ask all you hard core types this? What is the good of having hard content, if Anet has to stop making content because too many people aren’t playing. You think this can’t happen, but I think it can.

A better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that can be enjoyed by only a handfull of people? When that same amount of workhours could be devoted to something that would benefit everyone in the game instead

Right now they are adding content that can be enjoyed by a handful of people too, the heavy grind-lovers. And don’t say that the vast majority of players are enjoying that content, moving around pressing 1 and collecting loot is NOT enjoyable nor fun.

So a better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that is enjoyable by nobody but they feel obligated to do it in order to collect rewards (like a job)?

Torolan.5816:

Devata.6589:

That however brings us back to how RNG works. Yes you could end up with nothing. nonetheless, if it’s token base, it’s nice to see you got token 1 of the 100 you need, but as long as you don’t have 100 tokens that 1 token is completely useless. And it will be useless until you get the 100th token. Would the drop-rate be 1/100 then on average you would have the reward in 100 runs.

The RNG way would take away some exact progress, you could get it after 1 run it could also take you 100 (while the average will be 100.. so there still is a form of progress, just invisible and less exact).

But it would add the rush of “will it drop”.

The token way removes the rush but gives the exact progress. Personally I prefer the rush because that has an effect on every run, because it can drop every run, with the token system only becomes interesting when you are nearing the required number of tokens, before that all you see is the wall of missing tokens. (token can be replaced by any type of currency here).

That is not to say that there could not also be an items you simply get for completing it the first time.

Couldn´t the issue of getting a boring token solution that is individually worthless instead of junk be avoided with making the token currency tradeable to a merchant who gives out stuff, quality depending on how many tokens you want to invest, like it is done in SW?

Lets make an example:
Say you have collected 46 tokens, then your item drops. You have a reasonably number of tokens then: not enough to be angry because you invested so dearly in them, but proud enogh to maybe tell it in guild once or twice. You give them to the merchant for something that is nice but you wouldn´t really put a thought in else wise.
I see only winners in this scenario:
*The Person who got the item dropped early won because he won the item and has escaped early from the grind.
*The token collector that got lucky won because he got the item and some stuff for his effort.
*The poor soul who had to collect 100 tokens is rewarded with the item and can be proud for his persistance and stubborness, making him a winner of hearts.^^

That could possible work. The way I would however design it would be a little different.

I would put in one reward simply for completing it. 1 or more rewards behind RNG, this should be the rewards people are really after, so the ‘best looking ones’. (that is of course somewhat personal)

In addition I would put in tokens to earn something along the way, much like the dungeon armor, however this should really be a nice addition, not something people would really want to go for or would always want to collect (from all dungeons).

But your solution would also work I think. The question just is.. what is the ‘stuff’ you talk about.. and the guy who needs to do 10 runs does then only get the main reward but none of the stuff. Not sure how that would work out.

Astralporing.1957:

Okay, so let’s agree that we’re equally selfish with the only differnce is that i want you to be able to get everything i can too, but you don’t want me to get what you can. Yeah, no meaningful difference here

This isn’t true at all. You don’t like doing hardcore content, i don’t like running around in circles in silverwaste/drytop. We both are locked out of rewards for content that we don’t like doing.

The difference is, i don’t kitten about it.

Devata.6589:

Torolan.5816:

Devata.6589:

That however brings us back to how RNG works. Yes you could end up with nothing. nonetheless, if it’s token base, it’s nice to see you got token 1 of the 100 you need, but as long as you don’t have 100 tokens that 1 token is completely useless. And it will be useless until you get the 100th token. Would the drop-rate be 1/100 then on average you would have the reward in 100 runs.

The RNG way would take away some exact progress, you could get it after 1 run it could also take you 100 (while the average will be 100.. so there still is a form of progress, just invisible and less exact).

But it would add the rush of “will it drop”.

The token way removes the rush but gives the exact progress. Personally I prefer the rush because that has an effect on every run, because it can drop every run, with the token system only becomes interesting when you are nearing the required number of tokens, before that all you see is the wall of missing tokens. (token can be replaced by any type of currency here).

That is not to say that there could not also be an items you simply get for completing it the first time.

Couldn´t the issue of getting a boring token solution that is individually worthless instead of junk be avoided with making the token currency tradeable to a merchant who gives out stuff, quality depending on how many tokens you want to invest, like it is done in SW?

Lets make an example:
Say you have collected 46 tokens, then your item drops. You have a reasonably number of tokens then: not enough to be angry because you invested so dearly in them, but proud enogh to maybe tell it in guild once or twice. You give them to the merchant for something that is nice but you wouldn´t really put a thought in else wise.
I see only winners in this scenario:
*The Person who got the item dropped early won because he won the item and has escaped early from the grind.
*The token collector that got lucky won because he got the item and some stuff for his effort.
*The poor soul who had to collect 100 tokens is rewarded with the item and can be proud for his persistance and stubborness, making him a winner of hearts.^^

That could possible work. The way I would however design it would be a little different.

I would put in one reward simply for completing it. 1 or more rewards behind RNG, this should be the rewards people are really after, so the ‘best looking ones’. (that is of course somewhat personal)

In addition I would put in tokens to earn something along the way, much like the dungeon armor, however this should really be a nice addition, not something people would really want to go for or would always want to collect (from all dungeons).

But your solution would also work I think. The question just is.. what is the ‘stuff’ you talk about.. and the guy who needs to do 10 runs does then only get the main reward but none of the stuff. Not sure how that would work out.

I like the idea for the completion. Staying through with a group of relative newbies for example should be awarded.

I am not sure how the rewards could look. Maybe like this:
5 medium sacks for 1 token(linen anyone?)
1 T6 mat for 1 token
1 lodestone of your choice for 5 tokens
1 tradeable miniature(not always the same to not make it wortless quick) for 50 tokens
1 Quaggan femaledogslap deathblow for 80 tokens
1 Dungeon Exklusive Item for 100 tokens

And for the guy who lucked out early but still wants the stuff, who says that he cant come in again to farm?

Fox.3469:

This all comes down to preference in what you want to do in the game. I find it highly hypocritical that people are having a problem now, while there have been skins locked away behind specific content for the entire duration of the game.

Because it’s the first time this has been brought up…
Yeah, right. Seriously, this is a topic that people has been arguing about since before the game launched.

Fox.3469:

Astralporing.1957:

Okay, so let’s agree that we’re equally selfish with the only differnce is that i want you to be able to get everything i can too, but you don’t want me to get what you can. Yeah, no meaningful difference here

This isn’t true at all. You don’t like doing hardcore content, i don’t like running around in circles in silverwaste/drytop. We both are locked out of rewards for content that we don’t like doing.

And we shouldn’t be. For each of us there should be a satisfactory way to get those rewards. If we’d go with my approach, we’d both get what we want the way we want. If we went with yours, only you would be able to get it through the content you like.
Yeah, it’s exactly the same [/sarcasm]

Torolan.5816:

Devata.6589:

Torolan.5816:

Devata.6589:

That however brings us back to how RNG works. Yes you could end up with nothing. nonetheless, if it’s token base, it’s nice to see you got token 1 of the 100 you need, but as long as you don’t have 100 tokens that 1 token is completely useless. And it will be useless until you get the 100th token. Would the drop-rate be 1/100 then on average you would have the reward in 100 runs.

The RNG way would take away some exact progress, you could get it after 1 run it could also take you 100 (while the average will be 100.. so there still is a form of progress, just invisible and less exact).

But it would add the rush of “will it drop”.

The token way removes the rush but gives the exact progress. Personally I prefer the rush because that has an effect on every run, because it can drop every run, with the token system only becomes interesting when you are nearing the required number of tokens, before that all you see is the wall of missing tokens. (token can be replaced by any type of currency here).

That is not to say that there could not also be an items you simply get for completing it the first time.

Couldn´t the issue of getting a boring token solution that is individually worthless instead of junk be avoided with making the token currency tradeable to a merchant who gives out stuff, quality depending on how many tokens you want to invest, like it is done in SW?

Lets make an example:
Say you have collected 46 tokens, then your item drops. You have a reasonably number of tokens then: not enough to be angry because you invested so dearly in them, but proud enogh to maybe tell it in guild once or twice. You give them to the merchant for something that is nice but you wouldn´t really put a thought in else wise.
I see only winners in this scenario:
*The Person who got the item dropped early won because he won the item and has escaped early from the grind.
*The token collector that got lucky won because he got the item and some stuff for his effort.
*The poor soul who had to collect 100 tokens is rewarded with the item and can be proud for his persistance and stubborness, making him a winner of hearts.^^

That could possible work. The way I would however design it would be a little different.

I would put in one reward simply for completing it. 1 or more rewards behind RNG, this should be the rewards people are really after, so the ‘best looking ones’. (that is of course somewhat personal)

In addition I would put in tokens to earn something along the way, much like the dungeon armor, however this should really be a nice addition, not something people would really want to go for or would always want to collect (from all dungeons).

But your solution would also work I think. The question just is.. what is the ‘stuff’ you talk about.. and the guy who needs to do 10 runs does then only get the main reward but none of the stuff. Not sure how that would work out.

I like the idea for the completion. Staying through with a group of relative newbies for example should be awarded.

I am not sure how the rewards could look. Maybe like this:
5 medium sacks for 1 token(linen anyone?)
1 T6 mat for 1 token
1 lodestone of your choice for 5 tokens
1 tradeable miniature(not always the same to not make it wortless quick) for 50 tokens
1 Quaggan femaledogslap deathblow for 80 tokens
1 Dungeon Exklusive Item for 100 tokens

And for the guy who lucked out early but still wants the stuff, who says that he cant come in again to farm?

And those can RNG drop as well? So basically you want it as SAB?

I think the result would be similar to my solution, so I would be fine with it. While I do think that sometimes (not a lot!) you would want to put in a really rare item that is pure RNG, just to have a few of woow moment.

The only thing I wonder about, is if this does not compromise the feeling of “will it drop”. You see, with SAB I loved the game but did not ever have the feeling of “Will the skin I like drop” because I knew I got them with the tokens anyway. I did have that feeling with the MC dungeon. So that might still be a little concern.

But overall it’s for sure better then what we have I think.

I don´t know how it was in the SAB, that event sucked the life out of me and I had to quit it really early.

Monsters could keep their usual drop table of course. I see the token solution more as a safety net to not get only garbage out of a longer run or when you are new and barely manage to do the dungeon instead of the jaded, bitter farmer dungeoeneers we probably are.

I don´t know about your special feeling regarding this, but why should it not be there? Maybe you will luck out in your third try, maybe you have to go all the way. Why could you not feel giddy when you think “will it drop in this run?” instead of “will it ever drop?”.

Klocknov.8219:

Vayne.8563:

There’s a big range of things between handed on a platter and killing yourself to get something. I consider the rewards from the Aetherblade dungeon relatively hard to get, but I got them all. I consider the Liviing Story fights, some of them, difficult, but I got them too.

I respect that, and honestly TA:Aether and high level Fractals are going to be more then likely what they gauge the challenge by so you really shouldn’t have to worry since those are the only two things that are really group conent that is challenging. Past that you may have to look towards Marionette, Tequatl and Triple Trouble for Open World content.

Though where as you may not have an issue with it not being handed on a silver platter, quite a few posters have took that as their stance as to why the rewards should be super easy and grindy to get and as quoted here:

The time difference between people who take the grindy path and the fastest people who blitz through the hard path should not be all that vast

So that is where the handed to them on a silver platter aspect comes from. You are willing to take the time and put the effort in to aquiring it, that is perfectly fine and how the rewards should work.

If others get jealous because they see someone with a skin they want, then they should work towards it minus a select few skins that are currently unobtainable that are from the gem store you have all the options in the world to put the effort in and take the time to get it like the players that did already. If that isn’t fun to you then scrap the idea of getting that skin, it is out of your reach and look for something that is fun for you to achieve. But in no way should there not be something to make harder content feel rewarding and in this game rewards are part of the wardrobe system, so taking away unique rewards for harder content makes the game effectively ignore that content after said and done and makes it a waste of time and resources in the development if all the players really have the motivation to do it once or twice because their is better/easier ways to acquire the same rewards that have nothing to do with the content.

A few good examples is dungeon story mode paths and ARAH p4, you either have to hope you can get a pug group that can do it or you have to pay for it for someone trying to make the content worth doing and feel rewarding. So you end up with content that is largely ignored by most the population becuase it is called too hard when in all reality it is just not efficient or rewarding to do. So do we want to see the game continue to do this, release content with the most grindy feeling possible and give everyone access to every new thing or build a game with diversity and where players can choose where to focus and when they feel like leaving their comfort zone they can be rewarded for doing so?

My problem is I think the new stuff will be harder than that, and if you need a lot more than five people….I really really hate pugging. I mean yeah I can probably get 10 people to run hard content in my guild,j but more than that? It would be very hard.

I just hope there’s no like 15 man content, or that a dozen people can do it. Or that it scales down to 10. But my suspicion is the group size is going up.

Astralporing.1957:

Fox.3469:

This all comes down to preference in what you want to do in the game. I find it highly hypocritical that people are having a problem now, while there have been skins locked away behind specific content for the entire duration of the game.

Because it’s the first time this has been brought up…
Yeah, right. Seriously, this is a topic that people has been arguing about since before the game launched.

Fox.3469:

Astralporing.1957:

Okay, so let’s agree that we’re equally selfish with the only differnce is that i want you to be able to get everything i can too, but you don’t want me to get what you can. Yeah, no meaningful difference here

This isn’t true at all. You don’t like doing hardcore content, i don’t like running around in circles in silverwaste/drytop. We both are locked out of rewards for content that we don’t like doing.

And we shouldn’t be. For each of us there should be a satisfactory way to get those rewards. If we’d go with my approach, we’d both get what we want the way we want. If we went with yours, only you would be able to get it through the content you like.
Yeah, it’s exactly the same [/sarcasm]

I don’t want the rewards for content i do not do. It’s me waying off the options and taking an informed descission, either i do some content i like less, because i want the reward, or i say it isn’t worth it. I don’t like running around in circles, wich means i also don’t like “optimal gold farm”. If all rewards would become available for gold that still would favor the farming zerg people over anyone else playing this game.

Now i’m not opposed to let’s say having the hardcore content work with tokens, and having 1-2 “warm up” bosses that drop 1 token each, while having the harder ones drop 5 to 10. That way it’s timegated if you really don’t want to do the rest of the content, while still not exactly being locked to you. And this is purely cause i don’t give a kitten about your rewards, while you seem to only be interested in mine.

Other then that you don’t deserve to have every reward in the game accesible to you, just because you buy the game. I don’t want that either. In fact i care more about the content, and that is the whole idea of why i want good rewards in the hardcore content. See unlike you i’m bound to having a group of people. I can’t just go to whatever zone trains are running around in and farm, i actually have to make a group and if the content isn’t rewarding, finding a group will be so much harder. And that directly impacts my gameplay, not the way i look, but the way the game plays for me.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Vayne.8563:

Let me ask all you hard core types this? What is the good of having hard content, if Anet has to stop making content because too many people aren’t playing. You think this can’t happen, but I think it can.

A better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that can be enjoyed by only a handfull of people? When that same amount of workhours could be devoted to something that would benefit everyone in the game instead

BrotherBelial.3094:

All of this. I want rewarding content first. Then we can talk about making things harder.

We can’t have rewarding content in this game. We can’t have game offered progression either. We have to make our own rules about it. It’s the very nature of the game.
Think of it this way, they didn’t add 10 more lvls to the game cause they didn’t want to invalidate anyone’s gear. How much of a progression you’re expecting?

And lets not forget that the only paths of progression offered by the game in this expansion are limited in scope, and super confined to an area of the world map. That should tell us something about the company’s progression plans. I’m affraid you’ll have to make your own progression plan and stick with it.

I think we can. Why can’t we have rewarding content?

Conski Deshan.2057:

selfish
?s?lf??/
adjective
adjective: selfish
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.

Selfish is literally about wanting things for yourself, keeping things from others is not a selfish act by itself, in a structured environment it makes sense, see the trophies and rewards from sports analogy a few people have made.

I know you don’t agree with it but surely you can recognize that progression and advancement are at the core of the game, and both of those involve less people being present the further along you get.

Both sides are being selfish.

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive. The other side, meanwhile, wants to prevent others from getting those rewards at all. Both sides are also trying to preserve what they value — access or exclusivity.

Neither side is being noble, expansive or inclusive. There is no way to give both sides what they want, because their desires are diametrically opposed. The only way to move forward in situations like that is to compromise by having some rewards that can be gained in multiple ways, and some that require completion of certain content.

ANet already knows this. That’s why we have a mix of reward availability in the game and are likely to see the same going forward. However, they also need to keep a couple of other things in mind.

• Vayne’s point about there being a “straw that broke the camel’s back” with regard to reward exclusivity has merit. Locking too many of the most wanted gewgaws behind harder content would have an effect on participation, which affects revenue in the long run. Fortunately, ANet also seems to realize this, and there are not that many such rewards — nor do I expect to see the preponderance of rewards be exclusive going forward, for the same reason. A like point can be made on the part of those who want some exclusivity. If they don’t get their itch scratched, they might also move on, so that has to also be factored in.

• More players wanting to play different aspects of GW2 is good for the longevity of the game. ANet uses rewards to push participation. I see no signs they will stop doing this, so I expect there will continue to be rewards used for that purpose.

PorceleinEve.2973:

A better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that can be enjoyed by only a handfull of people? When that same amount of workhours could be devoted to something that would benefit everyone in the game instead

WvW, SPvP, jumping puzzles, world bosses, crafting, gathering, dungeons/fractals, and everything else in the game fits that bill.
What makes you think hard content will be enjoyed less than any of the other things anet spends their time on?
There are a lot of people that don’t enjoy autoattack difficult content.

https://youtu.be/gxLkfXwxLTs?t=18m20s

I think that settles the issue, the audience was very optimistic to hear about new challenges.

Fernling.1729:

PorceleinEve.2973:

A better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that can be enjoyed by only a handfull of people? When that same amount of workhours could be devoted to something that would benefit everyone in the game instead

WvW, SPvP, jumping puzzles, world bosses, crafting, gathering, dungeons/fractals, and everything else in the game fits that bill.
What makes you think hard content will be enjoyed less than any of the other things anet spends their time on?
There are a lot of people that don’t enjoy autoattack difficult content.

fernling nails it

I’m almost positive only a handful of ppl watch or even care about sPvP.
Yet anet is constantly trying to revamp it, make it better, add a new game mode, map , etc etc…

Stop having this grand illusion of anet should only spend resources on “costumes, PvE open world zerging, easy and casual content that everyone does since everyone likes to play dress up in LA and judge who has the better sparkle in their armor”

News flash, this game is still going strong in the MMORPGsphere because anet spends resources in all areas of the game. Not just satisfying all the casuals ONLY.
PvP deserves attention, WvW deserves it, hardcore PvE content deserves it, just as much as the casual crowd deserves their fill.
So far it’s been pretty lopsided with respect to casual PvE vs PvP,WvW, hardcore PvE…. luckily anets slowing balancing it…

maddoctor.2738:

So a better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that is enjoyable by nobody but they feel obligated to do it in order to collect rewards (like a job)?

That easy, that’s very very bad. That’s what you get when you welcome dry top and silverwastes as a revolution and instead of staying clear of those jokes of maps devoid of theme, context, atmosphere and soul, you reward the company by staying in there and participating in their new vision of zones as boxes in which we run events.

How do you think we will get stuck with four maps (most likely) full of “content” (events)? Players were asking for more boxes with events, players will get more boxes with events. Only now, you’ll probably be forced to press 3 buttons instead of one cause the people want more “challenging” content and “appropriate” rewards for their time.

I keep saying it left and right, we are moving away from mmos being virtual worlds (with soul and atmosphere) and into game boxes. And, sometimes, it feels like i’m the only one protesting about it, or at least talking about it.

bleh … there goes my mood…

BrotherBelial.3094:

I think we can. Why can’t we have rewarding content?

Because that’s how the game was designed? And usually, when devs change the design of the game in the middle of its life, people turn out sour. They went with ascended gear as the best gear you can get, and then you get to set your own goals and progression.

I suspect that’s one of the reasons the new “progression” system feels so grindy, empty and soulless (to me).

Fernling.1729:

WvW, SPvP, jumping puzzles, world bosses, crafting, gathering, dungeons/fractals, and everything else in the game fits that bill.
What makes you think hard content will be enjoyed less than any of the other things anet spends their time on?
There are a lot of people that don’t enjoy autoattack difficult content.

Cause by it’s very nature it will be … um.. hard?
And harder usually means fewer ppl doing it?

Yes I’m sure there are lots and lots of people, I’m just not that sure that they are in this game. But if they are, kudos to them for waiting 2 years for the content to get harder while being bored…

PorceleinEve.2973:

Fernling.1729:

WvW, SPvP, jumping puzzles, world bosses, crafting, gathering, dungeons/fractals, and everything else in the game fits that bill.
What makes you think hard content will be enjoyed less than any of the other things anet spends their time on?
There are a lot of people that don’t enjoy autoattack difficult content.

Cause by it’s very nature it will be … um.. hard?
And harder usually means fewer ppl doing it?

Yes I’m sure there are lots and lots of people, I’m just not that sure that they are in this game. But if they are, kudos to them for waiting 2 years for the content to get harder while being bored…

Where do you get your assumptions from?
harder means less ppl doing it? what The ppl wanting hardcore pve content either quit the game LONG time ago OR moved into spvp/wvw where its usually not a braindead auto attack spam game like you have now…
less ppl do it because they FIND IT BORING.. thats why anet is bringing in endgame progression/content…. because of evident it was that this game was lacking it…

IndigoSundown.5419:

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive. The other side, meanwhile, wants to prevent others from getting those rewards at all.

People wanting content to be harder and rewarding do not want people prevented from attaining the rewards or doing the content, we just want it to require some effort.

Coulter.2315:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive. The other side, meanwhile, wants to prevent others from getting those rewards at all.

People wanting content to be harder and rewarding do not want people prevented from attaining the rewards or doing the content, we just want it to require some effort.

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.
Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

SkiTz.4590:

Where do you get your assumptions from?
harder means less ppl doing it? what The ppl wanting hardcore pve content either quit the game LONG time ago OR moved into spvp/wvw where its usually not a braindead auto attack spam game like you have now…
less ppl do it because they FIND IT BORING.. thats why anet is bringing in endgame progression/content…. because of evident it was that this game was lacking it…

I don’t know, it seems logical to assume that if something is harder to do than what is expected, many will try it, fail and then stop participating in it. Are you saying that because something will be harder, everyone will flock to it like flies on a pile of dung on a hot summer day? Seems doubtful.

I agree most hardcore folk left the game. So what we have here is the extremely small minority that’s left in the game. And those get their fill in pvp and wvw (just not at the EotM). So were does that leaves us?

I seriously doubt anet will be bringing end game progression. They might dip into some raid content (they did hire a raid designer a while back) but I don’t see them doing anything other than that. Or maybe they’ll go the triple worm way and attempt to make more interesting world bosses.

But if they really wanted for progression to be a thing, they’d add more lvls, new tiers of armours, weapons, they would make masteries apply to the whole world etc etc. That’s progression. An area limited progression system, doesn’t sound much like progression at all. Keeping the same weapons and armour doesn’t sound like it’s progression either. What exactly you think they’re gonna do? Add super hard raids that just the top 10% can get and give them super exclusive titles, skins and whatnot? It seems more likely that they’ll add something moderately hard, with some form of semi-exclusive rewards and then after a while nerf it to make it more accessible if the players don’t get it on teq farm lvls after a set amount of time.

Astralporing.1957:

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.
Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

Oh yes, you better believe it it’s all about the exclusion and the perceived feeling of superiority. That’s what’s behind all this talk about loot, loot and more loot. And the correlations of rewards and effort.

Only poor fox (i think, can’t remember names) want’s difficulty for the fun and challenge cause he/she get’s off the “teacher” role (nothing wrong with that, keep doing it ).

PorceleinEve.2973:

Astralporing.1957:

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.

Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

Oh yes, you better believe it it’s all about the exclusion and the perceived feeling of superiority. That’s what’s behind all this talk about loot, loot and more loot. And the correlations of rewards and effort.

Only poor fox (i think, can’t remember names) want’s difficulty for the fun and challenge cause he/she get’s off the “teacher” role (nothing wrong with that, keep doing it ).

The problem with all your posts is the insane amount of exaggeration and thus, everyone ignoring everything you have to say.

“over half the players have below average skills”…. like where do you even come up with stuff like that????

It doesn’t matter what you say dude, endgame challenging content IS COMING whether you like it or not. So just deal with it instead of complaining about things you have no control over.

You said “I seriously doubt anet will be bringing end game progression”… that means you clearly didn’t watch the video at PAX south in january where anet higher ups CLEARLY SAID THOSE EXACT WORDS ARE COMING

SkiTz.4590:

PorceleinEve.2973:

Astralporing.1957:

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.

Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

Oh yes, you better believe it it’s all about the exclusion and the perceived feeling of superiority. That’s what’s behind all this talk about loot, loot and more loot. And the correlations of rewards and effort.

Only poor fox (i think, can’t remember names) want’s difficulty for the fun and challenge cause he/she get’s off the “teacher” role (nothing wrong with that, keep doing it ).

The problem with all your posts is the insane amount of exaggeration and thus, everyone ignoring everything you have to say.

“over half the players have below average skills”…. like where do you even come up with stuff like that????

It doesn’t matter what you say dude, endgame challenging content IS COMING whether you like it or not. So just deal with it instead of complaining about things you have no control over.

You said “I seriously doubt anet will be bringing end game progression”… that means you clearly didn’t watch the video at PAX south in january where anet higher ups CLEARLY SAID THOSE EXACT WORDS ARE COMING

Sigh… first of all I can’t help but notice that you confuse 2 people with one. That’s never good. for you. I don’t get affected much by it.

And yes, that’s how normal distributions work. Cause the average tends to be in the middle of the distribution. Thus, it stands to logic (i know i know logic… lol) that the part that’s bellow the average is in fact about 50%. OMG! terrifying thought. Where does he get those numbers huh?

Deal with it? why thanks for the idea, I am. I’m making my opinion known in the forums. Its part of the dealing with it process. And if per chance colin calls me and asks for it personally i’ll give it to him. Just sayn’.

And yes I saw the pax presentation. And i also happen to understand that devs say things that will never happen. I think end game progression is not gonna happen. We’ll get at best a shadow of it. That’s gonna become accesible to all after a while. Might even get a pvp track for it also (wouldn’t want to kitten off the pvp crowd).

so, yes… just to make sure, astral is not me. Unless i suffer from multiple personalities. Then it could be me. But i wouldn’t know. We don’t talk to each other.

PorceleinEve.2973:

maddoctor.2738:

So a better question would be, how good can it be for the game to add content that is enjoyable by nobody but they feel obligated to do it in order to collect rewards (like a job)?

That easy, that’s very very bad. That’s what you get when you welcome dry top and silverwastes as a revolution and instead of staying clear of those jokes of maps devoid of theme, context, atmosphere and soul, you reward the company by staying in there and participating in their new vision of zones as boxes in which we run events.

How do you think we will get stuck with four maps (most likely) full of “content” (events)? Players were asking for more boxes with events, players will get more boxes with events. Only now, you’ll probably be forced to press 3 buttons instead of one cause the people want more “challenging” content and “appropriate” rewards for their time.

I keep saying it left and right, we are moving away from mmos being virtual worlds (with soul and atmosphere) and into game boxes. And, sometimes, it feels like i’m the only one protesting about it, or at least talking about it.

bleh … there goes my mood…

Challenging content can have a good story too, epic boss battles unlike the ones you can get in the open world and appropriate rewards that make sense to be rewarded by said boss. A well designed instance can have a much better atmosphere similar to what only good single player games can provide.

One of the reasons that the maps are devoid of context is because they have generic rewards. When you play a new zone or content to get more generic materials, random items to salvage and gold, then that’s why the zone has no soul. If on the other hand fighting in those zones resulted in themed rewards. For example, defeat that powerful Undead Lich to get his Staff of Unholy Power. Generic and boring rewards ARE one of the reasons that zones also feel generic.

And the other one is the low difficulty. If the content resolves to moving around looting bandit chests, following “trains” then the entire concept of a WAR is over. If bosses are there as sacks of hit points that drop loot, there is no feeling of an actual WAR going around. When you are going to fight Ulgoth for example, it should feel like an epic battle with the centaur forces that culminates in a high stakes epic fight with their leader. Instead, due to the abysmal difficulty of the game, players form huge loot trains to get their generic rewards (see above) resulting in a game that feels more like a job than actual entertainment.

Instanced Challenging Group Content (I added Instanced) has the potential to solve all of the above issues. Real Epic Battles with bosses you can’t know you can always win, real loot (exclusive) appropriate and themed for the boss you fight. WAR that feels like a war, fight for survival that feels like a fight for survival.

Astralporing.1957:

Coulter.2315:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive. The other side, meanwhile, wants to prevent others from getting those rewards at all.

People wanting content to be harder and rewarding do not want people prevented from attaining the rewards or doing the content, we just want it to require some effort.

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.
Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

And so what? You want the game to be like a job (as it is now?) or to have something more fun and entertaining (read: challenging) like a proper game?

How do you define “average skills”? All we have in the game now is endless/boring repetition and grind. If some part of the playerbase can only form big loot trains and press 1111 to get loot then good riddance to them, not only from this game or MMORPGs but from all gaming in general.

But I seriously doubt the actual majority of the playerbase of this game has only that skill level and following tags in big trains is all they can do.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Astralporing.1957:

Of course you do want it. A content that anyone would be able to do, one that a majority would be able to do, or even one that a large number of people would be able to do will not be considered hard. For obvious reasons.
Half the players are of below average skills. By asking for a hard content (one that requires above average skills) you are asking for content that will be beyond the reach of at least half the game population. Some people – those whose primary concern is indeed to have something that will personally challenge them – may not be thinking about it, but i am certain that majority of people asking for hardcore content are not only perfectly aware of it, but that this exclusion itself is their main goal.

Oh yes, you better believe it it’s all about the exclusion and the perceived feeling of superiority. That’s what’s behind all this talk about loot, loot and more loot. And the correlations of rewards and effort.

Only poor fox (i think, can’t remember names) want’s difficulty for the fun and challenge cause he/she get’s off the “teacher” role (nothing wrong with that, keep doing it ).

I look for personal challenge, yes, and since i’m probally above average (not saying i’m awesome or anything) i guess Astral is meaning me. So do we want challenging content that excludes half the game population. I personally don’t want that. The only thing i want is some content where i can go in and actually fail, the more i fail, the more it’s a learning process for me, and i like that, i like hard things. Right now this is virtually impossible with any content in GW2. The only place i actually die these days is WvW.

Now let’s make one thing clear. There will be hardcore content in GW2 HoT. They announced it and they cannot go back on that. No matter how much you don’t like it.
So there should be no more discussion about this, the decision has been made, you cannot reverse that part.
But, if you want instances to become easier over time, due to people just getting more experience, while actually still doing the content, and farming it, you need exclusive rewards.

If you don’t add this, then yes, you will never get a majority of people in there. However, if you do add this, i really believe that it will allow more people acces to the instance, after a period of time. Once the people running it, let’s say on weekly basis, get experienced enough, it won’t matter that much who they bring allong. If at least half the group knows what to do, they will at least educate the other people, even if they are coming along for the first time. Some people will explain everything (i’m part of this category, wich is larger then you think), sometimes you’ll learn by just watching what others are doing and following their example. In any case, it will let more people do the actual content. Making it way less exclusive. This system basicly takes people’s need to feeling superior and uses it to make them help other people, often without them even realising it.

So now the question is, do you want to make the content more accesable by keeping the rewards exclusive, wich gives reason for players that cleared it to keep doing it.
Or do you want the content to remain exclusive because the rewards aren’t worth it and after the first few weeks noone runs it anymore. Making the achievement for completing the content even more frustrating then dungeon master, something allot of new above average players have difficulty with.

If i was a developper i’d want as many people as possible to be able to see it, while still keeping it challenging content, so i’d go with the exclusive rewards option.
When enough time passes they can even apply several small nerves to it, to make it even more accesable while releasing new content.

The only thing i want, is a holy crap feeling while some boss completely murders me, to investigate why he murdered me, and to try again. I love making progress and tbh the last time i felt like this was when the new tequatl launched. The first try i did we didn’t even get 5% off him but as we learned it we got him down to 50% and then even more and people just got excited because we made progress, to a point where the biggest teamspeak explosion ever errupted when he finally went down. I remember that moment, i remember every single thing that happened in that fight, and i’d like some more moments to remember. I didn’t get any good loot from our first kill, but boy could i care less about that. Funny enough the kill i got an ascended hoard from i remember nothing about but the fact i got the reward.
Now i can guarantee you, if teq offered just 1 chest like all other world bosses, and no exclusive rewards(ascended teq items have a unique skin), he wouldn’t be done anymore, let alone be at a lvl now where almost no organised group fails him. (i know he got nerfed but it’s still a hard boss) And that is the beauty of it. Most people doing teq right now are a core group of people, and then whoever is in the map. They basicly get to experience this awesome fight, because they are in the company of people who know what to do, and learn from them.

Group content is kind of the same, only with less people. Wich also means that people having real experience in it make a far bigger difference.

Coulter.2315:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive. The other side, meanwhile, wants to prevent others from getting those rewards at all.

People wanting content to be harder and rewarding do not want people prevented from attaining the rewards or doing the content, we just want it to require some effort.

Not sure you can make that claim for everyone who wants harder content. Content tuned for the players who are above average in skill presents a barrier to players with average or below average skill. Part of the lure (at least for some) of exclusive rewards behind a skill barrier is that everyone knows that having armor or skin X means you beat content y. Go ahead, deny that bragging rights and getting something in a game that others will be unable to get are motivations for some players — if you dare.

Some people like to pretend that anyone can learn to play with skill equal to the best players in a video game. It’s not going to happen. Things like internet connection, computer limitations, and raw twitch ability that people cannot change — for whatever reason — get in the way. There are players in the game now who find dungeon content to be hard, no matter how much they try. Content tuned for such players is not going to be viewed as hard by the above average.

What I mostly see is requests for equal access to rewards, not requests to not have to put in any effort. Interpret “not having to put in the same type of effort I did” as “I want this with no effort” all you want. you’re just making yourself look condescending.

• Disclaimer 1: This post is not about wanting there to be no exclusive rewards; it’s about believing that both the “want hard content” and the “want equal access” sides are both being selfish. There may be altruists on both sides, but they’re pretty rare.
• Disclaimer 2: There are some posters who truly do request they get stuff with no effort; I’m not in favor of that, either. However, I think that most of the “equal access” posters want equal access for equal effort.

So you want the game to be about completing content once and never looking back since even joe shmoe sitting afk in LA gets the same reward as you just for “participation” good to know.

I never said or implied that, because I never meant that. I want a game where people do the content they enjoy as many times as they enjoy it, and move on to other content if that content becomes boring to them.

What is going to drive players to stay once they complete all the new content? REWARDS! Now if everything only requires you to grind to get it and is easy as kitten to get how long is it going to be till the game starts to die down again?

If your argument is a sound one, then what difference would my proposal make? You claim that once players achieve something, they leave, but if high skilled players already achieve these things, then they leave, and thus become irrelevant. All I’m arguing is that lower skilled players should have the same options.

Still though, the Strawman is strong in this thread.

Hell WoW had challenging content locking people away from rewards that didn’t take the time or effort to get it but did that cause players to quit in droves? NO! It added diversity to the game and a way for the players that wanted to get better to do so with people with experience and skill to do the content in the first place. Every MMO and most games have challenging content with rewards to suit the challenge that you have to go out of your way to get generally and get better at the game or spend time to better your character depending on the system, so your saying that skins that do nothing to stats should not be special rewards becuase you want your vanity closet complete full without doing anything? Well I will point you to the Barbie games I believe that they do that for you!

I hear Wildstar is going free to play soon. . . well, it might last six months more.

Imagine this, if the content is at the first few weeks/months doable (until guides start poping and players get really good at this) by only a 2% of the population, if they set the time for the “grindy” part to how long that 2% took to get the reward, then it means the other 98% will take far less time to get it “the grindy” way than the “challenge” way, so they simply will never even TRY the challenging part.

I don’t like the concept of “cool rewards will get players to try new things,” at least not in this context. I think that rewards designed to get players to try a given activity should actually be based on them trying it, not completing it. These rewards should be based on the outcomes of an average player making a genuine attempt to succeed, perhaps a few attempts, but unless the average player is expected to succeed within a few attempts, the reward should not be predicated on actual success.

A “get them to try new content” reward is a good idea to get people to try stuff, but it should also be designed to respect when they go “nope, I’ve tried it, and I genuinely do not enjoy it, I’d like to go home now.”

Didn’t read the 9 pages of replies but, 99% of the PvE mode IS easy mode, let some of the people who like challenging content have some as well.

You could have at least read the first post. The entire point of it is that people who want hard mode SHOULD get it. They just shouldn’t get super special rewards that other players cannot have in addition to the gameplay they claim to love.

If that’s not “handed to them” then I don’t know what it is.

Well, “handed to them” would be handed to them, as in a login reward or something, and nobody is saying that, except for the army of strawmen infesting the thread.

(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.

Selfish is literally about wanting things for yourself, keeping things from others is not a selfish act by itself, in a structured environment it makes sense, see the trophies and rewards from sports analogy a few people have made.

You’re focusing on one half of the definition and ignoring the remainder. Wanting things for yourself is not a problem, so long as you consider others as well. I want what I want, but I do not want you to not get what you want. You want what you want, and also want me to not get what I want. That is the more selfish position.

Even if you say “I just play what content I want an earn the currency that way” (we then just forget, that the reward for content is part of the fun.) the problem is that there is usually some other way that earns the currency faster, so simply for doing your preferred content you already get punished.. but that’s not all.

They should make more of an effort to balance content, to stamp down on areas that prove excessively rewarding to buff up areas that are minimally rewarding, more than they currently do. But even assuming that they don’t, it’s still a better alternative to the “one source reward” situation. If you can get a reward through multiple means, and some are less efficient than others, then hey, maybe you’ll want to gravitate towards the most efficient form, but if you genuinely hate that most efficient method, you at least have alternatives, you can trade a little efficiency for more fun doing it. If there is only one track towards your goal, however, then you’re stuck with that method, like it or not.

The people who do the content just to get the currency (all the grind you see) means the prices will go up / inflation for the more rare items. So it becomes even harder to earn it that way.

This is part of the reason why gold can’t be the currency used. It needs to be something account bound, turned in to NPCs, so that the price cannot inflate.ANet had proven that they do not have a firm enough grasp on the gold economy to make it viable.

I don’t like grinding, resulting in me not being able to get 90% of the rewards. It seems as that is fine under the name of “grind the way you want”,

If you can propose a fair alternative that would work for you, I wouldn’t automatically shoot it down. I don’t think that you should be able to earn the same rewards in significantly less time and effort than other players, I don’t think it should be “handed to you” just because you can complete more difficult content, but I don’t want to see you going without any rewards that you do want just because you don’t enjoy certain types of content.

But like I said before, it is important to link the reward to the content. For the Molten Backpack you need to kill the boss with the molten backpack, for a portal to a WvW map, you need to hold a keep in that WvW map, for a mini that jumps all the time you need to have completed that JP in x time and so on.

Thematic linking is all well and good, but should not come at the expense of fun. There are numerous items in this game that are thematically linked to a given boss or dungeon or other task, but there are also numerous items that could be thematically linked, but aren’t. The Pact Fleet weapons could be earned in Silverwastes, the human God skins could be linked to Orr, but they aren’t they are bought for gold on the TP.

I think it’s perfectly fine to thematically link an item to a given dungeon or JP or whatever difficult task, and that can certainly be one way of earning it, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be others, like PvE reward tracks, token collection/redemption, drops in the local area, etc. A decent example of this is the game Marvel Heroes. Most bosses in the game have special unique gear associated with them, like say “Doctor Octopus’s Tentacles.” You can, as one would assume, get these off the boss in question, as a rare drop. But also, you can clear an achievement to kill that boss 100 times, and even if you never got it as a rare drop, that guarantees you one. OR, in some cases, these items also have a chance of dropping off any mob in their stage, lower, but still possible. OR, there are special “rare drop” boxes that you can buy using special event currencies, and these boxes have a chance of dropping these special rare items as well. There are currently several ways to get almost any item, while still keeping the item thematically tied, and I think this is a fair balance to aim for.

Hmm, then I think it’s better to have rewards for grinding be more in vein of pure achievements rewards.
Sorry, I don’t see how this makes any sense.

Because achieving hard mode content is about overcoming the obstacle. It’s about hitting a wall, and then scaling it. If you can do that, then you deserve a prize, but if you make it a prize that is only available through that method, then anyone who cannot scale that wall, cannot have that prize, and that is sad if it’s a prize they want. Prizes that people want for their inherent value should be available to ALL players, of ALL skill levels. The only rewards that should be gated behind exclusionary content should be rewards where the only value to the reward is that only high skill players can get it.

You said you would prefer only achievements and titles for this but a skin simply is, or can and should be, a visual representation of that.

And I wholeheartedly reject that premise. A skin has inherent value. You take every skin in the game, make them all unlocked for everyone in the wardrobe, and people would gravitate towards some skins over others, even if “exclusivity” was a non issue. Skins do not function as a “visual representation of achievement,” they are instead a “visual representation of their design,” and as such, they make an unreasonable thing to make exclusive.

It’s like a trophy. You can earn a trophy for winning with some sport.. or you can simply go to a shop and buy that exact same trophy. While it’s the same trophy, the first one will be of more value (for you at least) because it was a reward for winning, not just something you did buy with the money you earned working. However it would feel really bad if other people would indeed buy the same trophy because it undermines the meaning of the trophy.

As I said before, I have no problem with trophies, so long a they ARE trophies, as in an otherwise useless hunk of metal that only serves to highlight an accomplishment. Skins are NOT trophies.

Maybe you aren’t getting that yet, think of it this way, interior design. People like to design their homes, right? Buy furniture that they think looks good? Well what if most furniture could not be bought, it had to be won through various means. Want a leather sofa? You have to complete a 10K. Want a standing reading lamp? You have to complete a bachelors in literature. Want a blue carpet? You have to master bee keeping. The design of your home would be subject to the tasks you were willing and able to complete for them, and the arbitrary rules that society placed in assigning item A to content B.

The skins available to you should not be held hostage to the content you are willing and able to complete.

Anyway, looking at it from this perspective, the only way it would not be mean was if you would put a vendor in every city that would freely give you any item you wanted.. I however can assure you, it would become a really boring game. But at least it would not be mean.

I don’t know, for all your protestations about “grind,” you really do seem to be spending most of your time here:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Collect_armor_scraps_and_bring_them_to_Rani_so_he_can_build_a_snowman_army_to_scare_the_grawl

This all comes down to preference in what you want to do in the game. I find it highly hypocritical that people are having a problem now, while there have been skins locked away behind specific content for the entire duration of the game.
But now that the hardcore pve community would get their own rewards, it’s a problem.

I’ve never been in favor of it before, and have expressed that in the past. If there are items that you feel are unfairly blocked behind certain content, I will be right by your side in arguing for alternatives. I just saw this as a point where the devs might be tempted to double down on that philosophy, and wanted to lodge a formal rebuttal in advance of it.

Couldn´t the issue of getting a boring token solution that is individually worthless instead of junk be avoided with making the token currency tradeable to a merchant who gives out stuff, quality depending on how many tokens you want to invest, like it is done in SW?

Yes.

What players are asking for is content that doesn’t feel like a job (like the everything else feels like NOW) and instead reward players for completing challenging content, overcoming difficulties instead of working your daily routine to earn your rewards, like a job.

You feel that open world content is a chore. Others would feel that running a difficult dungeon is a chore. The solution is to make BOTH of them viable paths to achieving your goal, so that YOU get to choose which you prefer.

The OP does not want to prevent people from obtaining rewards, but he wants to prevent them from being able to obtain the feeling of satisfaction that they get from having something exclusive.

That is not the same thing at all. That’s like saying that a law against murder is bad, because while it does protect potential victims from being murdered, it also takes away the murderer’s fun from murdering people. The right of people to feel superior to others for having exclusive items is NOT a positive thing that should be encouraged.

I basicly strongly disagree with everything you said in this last post Ohoni. No offense to you but i hope A-Net ignores your argument completely. In fact i hope this topic will convince them to push it even more in the way they are going now.

I’m not overly fond of WvWvW, does that mean Anet should stop creating content for it? No.

If you don’t like hard content, you don’t need to do it.

There needs to be content to please everyone, and as it is at the moment, guild wars 2 is seriously lacking in the challenge department.

Ohoni.6057:

All I’m arguing is that lower skilled players should have the same options.

No, they shouldn’t.

Why should someone get the same rewards as someone who put in the effort, just for doing an easier form of said content? You reward those who are willing to put in the effort and time to complete said hard content, you don’t reward the lesser skilled just for attempting. “Oh well, you tried, here, have a participation reward.”

If you want the rewards for hard content, you better yourself until you’re able to complete the hard content, if you don’t want to do that, you acknowledge that you’ll never get those rewards. There needs to be in-game items that cannot be bought yet flaunt someones accomplishments, legendaries don’t even do that, they can be bought so long as your wallet is deep enough, they never should’ve been tradeable to begin with.

You also don’t throw in an “easy mode” for those unwilling to better themselves.
Guild wars 2 has a lot of insanely easy content, and it will most definitely have more easy content in the future, it has next to no hard content at all, fractals are relatively easy, with the exception of some 50 fractals, most of them can literally be stacked with the right group, that’s not challenging, i see challenging as the wyvern fight that was showcased in HoT, you have to be on your toes or you will die.

Edit: haha accidentally uploaded a picture of my kittenatiel by mistake.

maddoctor.2738:

Challenging content can have a good story too, epic boss battles unlike the ones you can get in the open world and appropriate rewards that make sense to be rewarded by said boss. A well designed instance can have a much better atmosphere similar to what only good single player games can provide.

One of the reasons that the maps are devoid of context is because they have generic rewards. When you play a new zone or content to get more generic materials, random items to salvage and gold, then that’s why the zone has no soul. If on the other hand fighting in those zones resulted in themed rewards. For example, defeat that powerful Undead Lich to get his Staff of Unholy Power. Generic and boring rewards ARE one of the reasons that zones also feel generic.

And the other one is the low difficulty. If the content resolves to moving around looting bandit chests, following “trains” then the entire concept of a WAR is over. If bosses are there as sacks of hit points that drop loot, there is no feeling of an actual WAR going around. When you are going to fight Ulgoth for example, it should feel like an epic battle with the centaur forces that culminates in a high stakes epic fight with their leader. Instead, due to the abysmal difficulty of the game, players form huge loot trains to get their generic rewards (see above) resulting in a game that feels more like a job than actual entertainment.

Instanced Challenging Group Content (I added Instanced) has the potential to solve all of the above issues. Real Epic Battles with bosses you can’t know you can always win, real loot (exclusive) appropriate and themed for the boss you fight. WAR that feels like a war, fight for survival that feels like a fight for survival.

Yes challenging content can have good stories, as can non challenging content. The hardness of the content doesn’t really affect the quality of the story. As a person I don’t much like instances (totally personal preference) and I prefer well designed zones to them (which in this game are also instanced, bleh).

Loot, that’s true, is part of the problem. Too generic loot to matter to most. But for me, the real problem is the lack of narrative. The lack of life in the zones. The new zones lack the narrative, lack the lore, lack in story much much more than they lack in loot. Adding a cool staff skin in a zone won’t be adding any of that into it. I didn’t see the luminecent armour adding any soul to silverwastes. Having a story, an actuall one, and lore, and life would be a much better option. Something, i strongly suspect we won’t be getting with our four new maps in HoT.

Higher difficulty, or lower difficulty don’t add or subtract from the story. The story is there. Or it isn’t. There can never be an actual concept of war. Not even the illution of it. This isn’t a mature rated game, it can’t touch on the subtle plot lines of a war. So having harder mobs will only increase the frustration of the ppl who engage in the train option. I would like something different al together.

Instanced challenging group content will come, will not be all that challenging. What’s a real epic battle? One you can’t always win? No matter how hard you try? That cannot possibly happen. And how many would you have complete it? 75% of the population? 50% of the population? How many people you’d exclude for it to feel “epic”. Cause if everyone could complete it the rewards wouldn’t be exclusive, would they? What’s the cut off point for you… let’s be specific.

The more i think about it, the more i see that such a thing can’t happen. Or it’ll end up yet another neglected system of the game just like dungeons.

Fox.3469:

I basicly strongly disagree with everything you said in this last post Ohoni. No offense to you but i hope A-Net ignores your argument completely. In fact i hope this topic will convince them to push it even more in the way they are going now.

Oh they def aren’t listening….end game character progression is what anet announced will be happening… that pretty much means there will be rewards not everyone will be able to achieve unless they can handle whatever the “new challenging content is”…

It will certainly be accessible to everyone in the game, but if you can’t do it, you won’t get the reward, plain and simple.
That is YOUR problem if you can’t complete whatever the new content will be.
Whining about it won’t change a thing.

Fox.3469:

you know … stuff

You sir are a true romantic.

if i had a hat, i’d take it off, i love romantics.

Get ready for the pvp track for those exclusive rewards (because I my god sir, am a cynic, hm.. maybe that’s why i like romantics so much … hm..)

FrizzFreston.5290:

Entertainment (a game in this case) shouldn’t be about work how?

They clearly didn’t understand that when you said “work” you meant “effort”. In their mind playing a game shouldn’t be work. That’s fair. But to say that people shouldn’t ever have to put effort into a game is just stupid. Go play Candy Crush or something if that’s how they feel.

Most people yield entertainment in MMOs through achieving goals, and those goals almost always involve effort. Astralporing just doesn’t seem to understand this concept.

To them, they should be able to frolic through the fields doing whatever they want and still be able to get all of the same rewards as everyone else.

Ohoni.6057:

Hell WoW had challenging content locking people away from rewards that didn’t take the time or effort to get it but did that cause players to quit in droves? NO! It added diversity to the game and a way for the players that wanted to get better to do so with people with experience and skill to do the content in the first place. Every MMO and most games have challenging content with rewards to suit the challenge that you have to go out of your way to get generally and get better at the game or spend time to better your character depending on the system, so your saying that skins that do nothing to stats should not be special rewards becuase you want your vanity closet complete full without doing anything? Well I will point you to the Barbie games I believe that they do that for you!

I hear Wildstar is going free to play soon. . . well, it might last six months more.

And WoW is still the number one MMORPG and won’t be surpassed any time soon. What’s your point? Wildstar didn’t fail because it copied WoW as far as rewards go, it failed because it didn’t.

Imagine this, if the content is at the first few weeks/months doable (until guides start poping and players get really good at this) by only a 2% of the population, if they set the time for the “grindy” part to how long that 2% took to get the reward, then it means the other 98% will take far less time to get it “the grindy” way than the “challenge” way, so they simply will never even TRY the challenging part.

I don’t like the concept of “cool rewards will get players to try new things,” at least not in this context. I think that rewards designed to get players to try a given activity should actually be based on them trying it, not completing it. These rewards should be based on the outcomes of an average player making a genuine attempt to succeed, perhaps a few attempts, but unless the average player is expected to succeed within a few attempts, the reward should not be predicated on actual success.

The point still stands, if they make it so you can get the reward by spamming 1 in SW in the same time frame it takes the “good” players to run the challenging content there is still no point in it (and doesn’t make any sense)

You could have at least read the first post. The entire point of it is that people who want hard mode SHOULD get it. They just shouldn’t get super special rewards that other players cannot have in addition to the gameplay they claim to love.

Sadly some posters in the last pages are against challenging content in general and derail the thread from the original topic.
As a reminder: the topic is to allow as many people as possible to earn the “new” challenging rewards by having multiple ways to acquire them, this isn’t a question about Challenging Content being in the game or not. Aside from a few posters, everyone else got it I think.

If that’s not “handed to them” then I don’t know what it is.

Well, “handed to them” would be handed to them, as in a login reward or something, and nobody is saying that, except for the army of strawmen infesting the thread.

Actually wanting anyone to get the new rewards by playing farm content AND have them in the same time frame as those running the challenging content is the same as getting them with login rewards. So, “handed to them”.

This is part of the reason why gold can’t be the currency used. It needs to be something account bound, turned in to NPCs, so that the price cannot inflate.ANet had proven that they do not have a firm enough grasp on the gold economy to make it viable.

Everyone (I think) should agree with this. If nothing else, someone who is following champion trains, following chest farms, kills world bosses and farms PVP arenas should have 0% chance of obtaining the new rewards. Any other token system is fine.

I don’t like grinding, resulting in me not being able to get 90% of the rewards. It seems as that is fine under the name of “grind the way you want”,

If you can propose a fair alternative that would work for you, I wouldn’t automatically shoot it down. I don’t think that you should be able to earn the same rewards in significantly less time and effort than other players, I don’t think it should be “handed to you” just because you can complete more difficult content, but I don’t want to see you going without any rewards that you do want just because you don’t enjoy certain types of content.

The Challenging group content is an excellent opportunity for them to add something that doesn’t require grind/rng. Want to farm? And you are wrong, if someone is capable of completing that challenging content that 98% of the playerbase cannot then it’s not “handed to them”. Getting the rewards by any kind of brainless grind is “handed to them”. That player who finished the hard content put some effort (unlike the farmers) to learn the game and master the mechanics. Of course he should be able to get the rewards in a very small fraction of the time that it will take a farmer.

I’ve never been in favor of it before, and have expressed that in the past. If there are items that you feel are unfairly blocked behind certain content, I will be right by your side in arguing for alternatives. I just saw this as a point where the devs might be tempted to double down on that philosophy, and wanted to lodge a formal rebuttal in advance of it.

Every single black lion skin in the game is unfairly blocked behind grind because it is bought with gold. I’d rather I get them as rewards from content instead.

What players are asking for is content that doesn’t feel like a job (like the everything else feels like NOW) and instead reward players for completing challenging content, overcoming difficulties instead of working your daily routine to earn your rewards, like a job.

You feel that open world content is a chore. Others would feel that running a difficult dungeon is a chore. The solution is to make BOTH of them viable paths to achieving your goal, so that YOU get to choose which you prefer.

No. The kind of boring Open world like champ farming, sw cf, world bosses and pvp daily farm maps, should never ever provide a viable path to achieving any goal. They are ALREADY the most viable path to getting any Black Lion skin (most gold per hour) and I think that’s enough for them, let other types of content give rewards to players, those things already have exclusivity.