The things is, you can’t have a timeframe with some types of content, I gave an example with Arah exclusive rewards also available in Cursed Shore events. You CANNOT have a timeframe with Arah runs, in 1 hour one group of players will run all 4 Arah paths, in 1 hour another group might only run Arah P4 and nothing else.
You’re excessively generalizing to support your case. Yes, dungeons can take longer or shorter based on the group, but dungeons can also carry players, so it is possible for an individual player to “clear” any Arah path with very little effort and skill on his part. Likewise a player can typically coast through open world content on the backs of his fellow players, but like in dungeons at least some of the players need to actually do a good job, especially on the ones with timers or fail states.
You’re right that you cannot come up with an exact 1:1 time correlation between dungeon and open world time, but wrong that this fact actually matters. You don’t need to come up with an exact correlation, you just need to decide on an average balance. Sometimes people would be more efficient than the balance point, sometimes less, but that’s ok and inevitable in game design.
Fortunately they can’t and they already announced that challenging group content is coming.
I get that, and as I said since the start of this thread, I don’t have a problem with them adding hard mode content for those that want it. My only concern is that when they do so they make sure not to alienate their players that don’t want to participate in it by tying exclusive rewards to that content. If you want to do hard mode content, then great, do it, but if you don’t want to, then you shouldn’t have to, and shouldn’t feel that you’re missing out on cool stuff because of it.
Big open world content that attract casuals can maintain a game for so long until it feels like a job and not a video game anymore.
Nonsense. You’re just describing raid content. and substituting the words “Big open world content” instead.
Only in a game like guild wars 2 where you can change your build on the fly quickly and effortlessly that’s not a problem.
Changing builds is not that effortless. You’d at the very least need a second set of high-end gear, which most casuals would not bother with. You’d also need to know what that second build is, and be comfortable with using it, which is not that simple if it’s significantly different from your usual skills and rotations. Having a character that swaps builds regularly is possible in GW2, but it should not be considered the norm for content balancing.
That’s exactly what balancing rewards is all about and the reason certain activities are so out of balance in this game. It’s the very reason that the game feels so grindy and boring.
If they’re doing the content for the rewards then they’ve already done something wrong. You should be doing the content because you enjoy the content, the rewards should just be a bonus. You should be doing content not because it offers the best reward, but because it offers the most fun. it’s then the job of the rewards system to provide a quantity of loot, sufficient so that you don’t believe your fun time was a waste because it put you “behind” players doing other tasks.
You should never feel compelled to do content that does not interest you, because the reward at the end is something that does. The moment you start doing that, you’re working, not playing, and games should not be about work.
Developing “easier” methods by players is fine, reducing the difficulty by artificial means is not.
So the prices of things should never go on sale weeks or months after they come out? What a revelation, I’ll go tell Steam that.
To you maybe that’s all that matters. Not everyone thinks the same, all that matters to mean is how the majority of rewards is being given.
Ok, and that’s fine. So you design the system so that the people who want specific rewards can get their specific rewards, and those who don’t care about that can continue not caring about it, everyone’s happy.
How are they supposed to get the rewards then? You are saying everyone should get them, why not players who just login?
I really don’t have time for this, so have fun with this instead: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Collect_armor_scraps_and_bring_them_to_Rani_so_he_can_build_a_snowman_army_to_scare_the_grawl
Not to mention that many of the sales (including yours) will be from things like bank slots and character slots so are very much linked to the box-sale and not the other items we talk about here.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that while we could expect a slight uptick from the regular level, character slot/bag/bank/etc. sales based on an expansion box will not likely be nearly as high as for the initial launch, since the majority of players will already have all they need of those. With the free character slots I was given already, I don’t plan on buying any more of that stuff with HoT.
With GW1 on average every campaign earned them the same amount as the initial game. So based on those number, if they would indeed have released an expansion every 1 to 1,5 year they would have a higher income. As far as we know, the team did not increase for HoT so cost would likely be similar.
Well if your numbers and assumptions are correct, then I see no reason that they wouldn’t move to a frequent expansion model, but I think that since they haven’t earlier, it is likely that something about your assumptions is incorrect. I’m sure they’ve spent far more time considering this than we have, and using far more specific data.
But there were not much complains about the GW1 campaigns.. maybe because people have started to see GW2 as a cash-shop game and with that also expect lower expansion prices?
I think it had more to do with GW1 campaigns being priced lower, at a level they were more comfortable with for an MMO expansion, and players did not realize that the cost of games, and MMO expansions, have been creeping upwards since the last GW1 expansion.
When you bash your head on a wall because you can’t do something and try again until you get it, that’s what I do in almost all -good video games- I’ve ever played.
And if you enjoy that, then that’s great, bash away, but just respect that other players don’t, and for those players that don’t enjoy it, they shouldn’t have to do that.
All this thread is is fear in the face of that challenge. If anything it proves that players are too stuck in their farming ways and that the game needs to provide something different to keep things interesting.
Hence I said that the challenges need to be paced well for people to enjoy it. Especially if it’s something completely new like raids.
There’s no such thing as “challenging content that everyone can enjoy.” If content is challenging enough that high-challenge players will find it engaging, then it will be too challenging for low-challenge players to enjoy. You literally cannot please everyone with the same content. So the only way to come remotely close to pleasing everyone is to provide different content for as many players as possible, and then give them as much freedom as possible to choose the content that best fits their playstyle, and not punish them for that choice by locking the things they want behind the other.
It’s like a restaurant, you cannot make a restaurant with one menu item that everyone will love, which is why you try to include a little steak, a little fish, a little chicken, some vegan options, etc., and let the customer decide which type of food he wants to eat.
As for “challenging comfort levels,” I’ve made my stance clear on that, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for ANet to have a short term reward that encourages you to dabble in a new area, give it a try, see if you like it, but this is not a good role for long term rewards, ones that would require you to invest days, weeks, months in that new content whether you enjoy it or not. If you spend weeks running content that you do not enjoy just to get a reward that you want, that is not “challenging your comfort zone,” that is just “being uncomfortable.”
ANet should be using karma for more. If you want to have challenging content for guaranteed drops, fine. But make those same drops also available through karma. Make it so karma is awarded from all content.
Karma was a nice idea, but I think it’s unsalvagable at this point. I have like tens of millions of karma, and I’m probably nowhere near the highest. Any system they made that would reward karma would either be excessively rewarding to long time players or be hopeless for incoming players.
Than nobody is going to play the new challenging content if it doesn’t have “unique progression/reward system”.
Ppl won’t quit the game, but at the same time,
I highly doubt anet wants to see their new challenging content that they worked kitten as dead content…
If people won’t play challenging content unless it has a unique reward, then they just shouldn’t waste their time making challenging content, because clearly people don’t actually want it, they just want that unique reward. The only “unique reward” that should be necessary to get people to run challenging content is the “reward” of having completed it, the feeling of having overcome that challenge. Any other reward given should just be about making sure that they don’t feel that they have taken “time off” the loot train to engage in their challenging content.
I can already taste the frustration from some of the ppl here that already assume they won’t be able get the unique rewards from the new challenging content. It’s delicious.
And this is exactly the sort of toxic attitude that ANet should not be feeding and encouraging in their game.
if this is the case why are 90% of the maps empty when nothing profitable is going on?
regardless of enjoying easy or hard, people are playing the game chasing progress.
Because people are having fun doing the things on the other maps. Your theory would hold up if the empty maps were less fun, but the fact is that most of the maps are roughly as fun as any other, so yeah, players tend to gravitate towards the activities that are also profitable, but players still do plenty of activities in this game that are not the most profitable possible, when they find those activities to be fun.
point is people want challenging content, and they want it to be worthwhile. this is not mutually exclusive.
Of course, but “worthwhile” doesn’t have to mean exclusivity, it just means that the quantity of loot you acquire has to be equivalent to the quantity you can get via other means.
wanting to get rewarded based on how difficult something is is not some new crazy concept.
If you enjoy cooking, does that mean you want to repeatedly cook for 30 people for no benefit?
Some people do, but that’s neither here nor there.
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
