Guild Wars 2

Guys he is just trolling you… He is arguing for “no exclusive rewards for specific content” a completely joke stance which will never be implemented or taken seriously by anyone.

Just ignore him.. You don’t need to beat him in an argument, he lost the moment he started.

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve seen people in this thread saying stuff like farming SW should be a viable way to earn such cgc rewards. That is not proportional effort. Now, maybe you don’t think that, but it’s definitely been said in this thread.

That really depends on how much you have to farm. Is farming SW for one hour proportional effort to running a dungeon for one hour? No. Is farming SW for two hours proportional to running a dungeon for one hour? Yeah, probably. So long as the exchange rate is right, it balances out. Personally though, I think they need to tighten up how SW works, you shouldn’t be able to just chest farm, the rewards should come from actually engaging the content (but ANet are the ones that currently think it should be a profitable way to play, so argue with them about it).

At this point it’s just very clear we are not going to agree. I thought maybe there might be some agreement on this point, but no that’s not the case. Braindead SW should never be a viable path to hard content rewards. Or put it this way, if it did it would have to take a VERY long time. Like months and months. And not through bandit chests at all. Ever. The bandit chests shouldn’t even exist and I pray that Anet never adds anything like that to the game again.

But I suppose we can civilly agree to disagree on all this.

I think you underestimate just how many people do WvW and sPvP. Just a bit. If it was such a huge waste of time, Anet wouldn’t bother supporting it at all. They’d give just give up development of it. Clearly Anet doesn’t view it as a waste of time. Time is money and they wouldn’t waste it on something that had an insignificant playerbase.

I think you underestimate just how many people do WvW and sPvP. Just a bit. If it was such a huge waste of time, Anet wouldn’t bother supporting it at all. They’d give just give up development of it. Clearly Anet doesn’t view it as a waste of time. Time is money and they wouldn’t waste it on something that had an insignificant playerbase.

I don’t know why they do it, I suspect it’s because they really do hope that it takes off and becomes a big success eventually, because that really would be a big deal if it happened. If it doesn’t happen soon after the HoT release though I doubt they’d continue to throw money at it.

And yet here you are, still wishing for this dream scenario where anet disbands the pvp and wvw dev team. Why are you asking for something that will never happen?

It’s not a priority for me, you’re the one making it out to be a big deal. You just asked if I wanted PvP to exist in the game, and I answered you honestly. It’s pretty off topic, really.

You are completely delusional if you believe pve players dont occasional go into wvw or spvp…the truth is there are very few ppl like you who only care about casual pve and dont want anything to do with dungs,fracs,spvp or wvw.

I’m sure many do, even I PvP a few times a week, but only because the PvE dailies are horribly designed such that some days I can’t complete it without doing a round of Unranked to fill in the gaps. Players wouldn’t be doing it without the constant bribes though, as shown by the fact that they had to start bribing players in the first place. From the PvEer perspective, sPvP was in its ideal state at launch, when it was completely distinct form PvE and no PvEer had any reason to even consider it, and nobody played.

Ohoni.6057:

Lol, 2/3 of the gameplay systems, but not 2/3 of the actual players by ANY stretch. The game is broken up into three systems because each represents a very distinct gameplay style that mixes poorly with the other. Don’t let that confuse you into believing that they are each equally as important to the players, or the developers. sPvP is a sideshow at best.

The game’s very design, everything from environments to player movements and capabilities, has catered to both PvE and PvP since its birth from both a developer standpoint and a marketing one. Regardless of how you feel, or how popular certain other modes are, PvE, WvW, and SPvP are the founding roots of GW2, to rip one of them out would be senseless and send the game into a downward spiral for failing at even its most basic promises. To even suggest that resources not be put into other modes than PvE, and I rather not insult, but it shows a distinct lack of understanding of how GW2 should be. You are not taking an informed position.

Ohoni.6057:

They would like to see sPvP and WvW succeed, which is why they waste so much time and good will updating it and trying to figure out new ways to bribe their PvE players into playing it, but the players never bite.

Given the philosophy of the trinity Arenanet has set forth, they can and probably will do so. The PvP only backpiece is a solid first step towards trying to pull new and old players into SPvP to try to get it, it helps make SPvP more appealing to those who want that skin. Of course, given the entirety of this discussion you would rather the skin be available through some other trivial routine content on a different scale of difficulty than SPvP and support the dissolution of it. I’d rather not chop off a pillar for the game thank you very much. I would rather see players go through both envy and awe, perhaps even jealousy that they need to actually try their best for a reward well earned. But that’s too much work right?

Ohoni.6057:

If you believe that then you don’t understand my point at all. My point is, I’m pretty good at the game, and I’m certainly a lot better than when I started, and hope to get better still. But if you put an objective in front of me and tell me “you need to get better if you want to get this thing,” then that does not encourage me, it only frustrates me. I do not want to get better because you tell me to get better, I want to get better at whatever pace I get better, and do not want to wait to get that reward until I have.

So if you ask me how many players have any interest in ever improving, then sure, most of them probably. But if you ask me how many players would be satisfied with the answer “get better at the game” as a reason to why they cannot have something that they want, then that number is much much smaller.

I don’t understand that line. From the very moment you picked up this game you are put on a path to learn and grow. Going into dungeons for the first time, learning the rotations for your profession, all of this requires some amount of work. You even admit to wanting to get the reward when you finally reach the point where you have gotten better enough to earn it. Great! Take that mentality to Heart of Thorns and try out group content until you succeed at it!

Things like frustration are a part of learning something new, it might not even be that satisfying until you accomplish the task, that’s the whole point! And the very last point where you believe players will be dissatisfied with how the content ‘forces you to get better’ really hinges on whatever metrics you pulled from whatever your perception is. I can’t really blame you as I hold a much higher regard for players actually accepting Heart of Thorns for what it might bring to the table.

Sure, and I don’t dispute that, I appreciate their help when offered, and offer my own help any time I can, we have a great community. I’m just saying, jn this case I don’t need them to be my ally, I just need them to understand that I don’t want to do that content, and don’t want to have to do it to get any rewards I might want. I don’t need their help, I just need them to not get in my way.

I just wanted to quote your final paragraph, because I want you to put that into your OP at the very top. That is all.

The game’s very design, everything from environments to player movements and capabilities, has catered to both PvE and PvP since its birth from both a developer standpoint and a marketing one.

I’m aware of this. I’m well aware that they WANt people to want to PvP, I just have zero faith that “the people” agree. And again, I am NOT advocating that they “rip them out.” I don’t know why you guys have gone so crazy on this particular tangent, must have inadvertently touched a nerve somewhere.

The PvP only backpiece is a solid first step towards trying to pull new and old players into SPvP to try to get it, it helps make SPvP more appealing to those who want that skin.

See, but you’re conceding my point, that people don’t actually want to PvP, but may be convinced to do so if you bribe them hard enough. Ideally thoguh, they wouldn’t bother trying to bribe people into things they don’t want to do, and just reward them for doing the content they enjoy doing instead. Then everyone’s happier.

I don’t understand that line. From the very moment you picked up this game you are put on a path to learn and grow. Going into dungeons for the first time, learning the rotations for your profession, all of this requires some amount of work. You even admit to wanting to get the reward when you finally reach the point where you have gotten better enough to earn it. Great! Take that mentality to Heart of Thorns and try out group content until you succeed at it!

I don’t think you understand. You seem to think that this is a situation in which you have some chance of convincing me that my feelings on the matter are wrong. I assure you that is not possible. I know how I feel, you can’t use words to alter that in any way. I know what types of content I enjoy, I know what types I do not. I assume that you know yourself just as well. Do you believe that I could use words to convince you to not enjoy challenging content? If not, then please respect that my feelings are different than your feelings on the matter, and will never become your feelings.

I like challenge, to a point, and then I don’t like it anymore at all. If a try a thing several times, and do not manage to complete it, I do not double down until I succeed, I just stop doing it, and never try again until the situation changes. If I am convinced to try again, it gets another few tries, and if that still results in failure, then that still results in me not bothering with it again. It doesn’t matter what sort of shiny they put behind that wall, I’m not going to bang my head against it more than a few times before it’s not worth the hassle.

I do not like challenges where you can make an earnest effort and fail to get anything in return. I prefer challenges where instead of “pass or fail,” it’s “pass or pass very well,” where getting something is practically guaranteed if you make an effort, but your progress is tracked, and you can do much better than just succeeding, for example beating Teq in five minutes instead of ten. I prefer to set my own challenges, my own goals that the game does not officially recognize, and judge myself by how well I complete those, than to rely on the game engine to choose goals for me.

Also, challenge aside, I don’t like dungeon content, even very easy dungeons that I can effortlessly pass through. I like open world content, where I can just show up, do some events with people nearby, and then leave at my whim without abandoning anything or leaving anyone in the lurch. I also don’t like some of the newer open world content where they have these massive event chains in which you have to complete each step to get any significant reward, because those are essentially dungeons set in the open world. I like for each encounter to only last 10-20 minutes, and you can jump in, do that bit, and get a good reward for your efforts and move on to something else, rather than being stuck in that zone for an hour or more until the “dungeon” completes.

These are facts that I know about myself from over twenty years as a gamer, and I don’t expect them changing any time soon. If you could manage to do that through rhetoric alone, you’d be seriously wasting your talents as a politician, or perhaps televangelist.

I can’t really blame you as I hold a much higher regard for players actually accepting Heart of Thorns for what it might bring to the table.

We’ll see when they start getting metrics on player uptake of the HoT challenging content. If it’s better than it is for Fractals, then you might be right, but given the various iterations this game has gone through, the changes they’ve had to make to try and convince players to do things that the players clearly do not want to do, I doubt it.

phys.7689:

ok im guessing your misunderstanding me.

• 1)When i say the idea that people do easy content for fun is bull, what i should have said, is the idea that everyone is doing certain specific easy content like say champ trains, or event spam in Orr, or silverwastes, because its just so fun is bull.

And the idea that everyone does challenging content because it’s just so fun is bull as well, clearly.

What is your point? That people also do things for rewards? Yes, that’s been established, thus my saying that people should be able to play what they want while also being able to get the things they want.

phys.7689:

This doesnt mean no one enjoys it, or there isnt fun to be had doing it. The point is they are not doing it for fun ALONE. If it was actually just for the pure joy, then people wouldnt abandon them when they nerf the rewards.

Right, thus my belief that people should be able to get the things they want while doing the content they enjoy.

So if you want to do challenging content to get sword A, then do challenging content. If you want to do not challenging content to get sword A, then there should be an alternative.

Why does the reward also being available in some manner outside of challenging content suddenly make the challenging content not worth doing if what you want to do is challenging content? That’s what I don’t understand. If you have more fun in challenging content and the item is available in challenging content, then why are you in the other content to get said item?

If you answer path of least resistance, then I will again respond that clearly, if you are choosing path of least resistance over what you find fun, then you aren’t actually interested in that content, you are interested strictly in the reward.

phys.7689:

• 2)throw a party for fun when you feel like it, but few people throw a party all the time, most people throw a few parties a year, even most hardcore party throwers only do it once a week. MMOs want to avoid creating content average people want to do a few times a year.

I’m going to be honest, could we drop the party thing? Because at this point, I’m confused at what your point is with the example in question. What is it you are trying to say?

phys.7689:

• 3)its not about flaunting your stuff around, (for everyone) its about creating a fulfilling reward system. By creating many means of getting any item, you make its value determined by the easiest most effecient means of getting that item,

How does how someone else got the reward diminish your reward? Why do you care how anyone else got their +1 molerat of slicing? Why is the value suddenly less? Why is that suddenly diminished? Why are you less fulfilled by it?

phys.7689:

• 5)Im saying they tried having non exclusive rewards, and they ended up having to create insane grind to get anything they want players to value.

They didn’t end up having to do that. They chose to make it that way because they didn’t want to put work into revamping their systems. They chose to make it that way because they decided to use gold instead of a closed currency granted by all forms of content, (once again, like karma).

phys.7689:

• halloween 2 for example. Because of the insane amount of people playing halloween content, they had so much currency they had to create ridiculous prices in halloween items to create anything. They basically have to consider not how hard anything should be to obtain, but how much of it flows into and out of the economy.

They didn’t have to create those prices, though, that’s the thing.

The problem here is that your judging an item’s value entirely by it’s rarity. That’s not the only way to find value in the items in this game, and there’s no reason it should be the only way to judge value.

phys.7689:

lets say halloween content had exclusive rewards, then they could design it so that someone who plays 10 hours of halloween content can get one of these items.
or someone who does all this halloween stuff can get one of these items.
instead they had to base it on how much candy corn and nuggets are there in the economy divided by the number of people we expect to want to get these items.

Again, they didn’t have to do it that way. They lowered a lot of the prices the last time, and things worked out better, even with candy corn flooding the market. You’re too hung up on economic worth and rarity.

phys.7689:

• 6) i wasnt saying challenging content is automatcially fun for everyone, i was explaining to you why a person might find challenging content fun, but not find it fun enough to do it a lot if it doesnt give them value for the effort.

And I ask again, why does that value only exist if the item is exclusive? Why is the progress you made suddenly invalidated by how someone else got that item?

phys.7689:

• 7) yes anet should make sure all content provides progression, exclusive items helps you to do this by seperating concerns. You dont have to worry about how the latest farm will effect the value of rewards you get from say doing personal story, or a jump puzzle.

I disagree.

phys.7689:

• 8)it doesnt have to be a competitive sport, every game has an objective/objectives. perhaps its human psychology but most people will not be happy playing a game if they are working cross purpose to the objectives.

You mean like how I have to go into fractals if I ever want to see one of those cool looking weapon skins (merely an example, most of them look horrible to me, actually)?

Yeah, you’re right, I don’t like working cross purpose to my objective, thus my belief that people should be able to play what they like to get what they want.

phys.7689:

When having fun in a game relies on ignoring the objectives,

Which is why people should be able to play what they like to meet their objectives.

phys.7689:

• 9)exclusive rewards is the easiest method available to them to make rewards have value without introducing insane level of grind, or devaluing the item.

But it’s not the only method, and it certainly isn’t the best method. That aside, I ask yet again. How is the item devalued? Cause I can guarantee you that how you are probably valuing items is in no way the same as how I do. It’s probably also why we aren’t in agreement.

phys.7689:

explain how you would make non exclusive items work? universal currency like ohoni says?

I think my solution can work for keeping items exclusive (only drop within certain content) but make it so said content is open enough for a variety of skill levels.
A big, more open zone, rather than closed corridors as current dungeons, with lots of different tasks/quests/events to finish around (in no particular order), some of them challenging, some of them easier, doing only the easier parts will net less “progress” towards the reward, but still offer some progress.

By putting them all within the same content, all players will progress at their own pace. At the moment I can only beat the boss at the north east corner, but since I’m here already, why not try my luck on the other bosses? So all players have an incentive to get better and better, and if they reach a point that they can’t progress anymore because it’s too hard for them, they will stop and just do the content they can until they feel they are better to take on a harder challenge.

And then we have the question of difficulty, if it’s doable by too many players, then the “pros” will find it really easy and complain. There is a solution for that too, if the map is open enough, the “pro” crowd could split and have their members do multiple parts at the same time. Imagine the content being for 5 players, if it gets too easy for a “pro” team they could split and solo 5 parts of the content at the same time, leading to much quicker rewards from the end chests AND providing extra challenge for benefit.

A team that isn’t so coordinated will simply stay together and tackle the content a little at a time. Win win for everyone. Keeps -almost- everyone happy (I think)

Ohoni.6057:

Erm.. You can get the skins you just need to play to the standard they require.

Unless you can’t play to that standard.

and even if you are capable of playing tot hat standard, if you don’t find it fun, you shouldn’t have to.

I knew it would be a matter of time before your mantra came through; this is just another thread about how you think you should get whatever you want even if you don’t want to do what’s necessary to get it. Not happening.

I get your stance; multiple ways to get the same rewards. It sounds cool on the surface but I don’t believe that’s good game design because it encourages grinding specific content and the idea of legendaries is to expose players to many aspects of the game to get them (at least the weapons). A sensible and reasonable requirement to get the BiS gear of this type for the back slot as well.

I think my solution can work for keeping items exclusive (only drop within certain content) but make it so said content is open enough for a variety of skill levels.
A big, more open zone, rather than closed corridors as current dungeons, with lots of different tasks/quests/events to finish around (in no particular order), some of them challenging, some of them easier, doing only the easier parts will net less “progress” towards the reward, but still offer some progress.

I think it’s an interesting idea, and I’d want to dabble in this a bit, but truly pulling it off in a way that is satisfying to both casuals and hardcore would be tricky. It would need to have a really well designed flow to it, and really solid messaging as to the expected level of difficulty. You wouldn’t want to have really hard content right next to really easy, so that people doing the easier stuff would bump into the harder stuff, get annihilated, and leave in terror, never to return. They’d need to do a good job of communicating what to players so that they can make informed decisions.

I knew it would be a matter of time before your mantra came through; this is just another thread about how you should get whatever you want even if do don’t want to do what’s necessary to get it. Not happening.

It was in the OP, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The whole point of the thread, and again I’m not sure how this comes as a shock, is “Some people don’t like hard mode.”

A Challenging Group Content encounter concept using my system:

The Map is like a PVE version of Edge of the Mists, players begin near the center. You can go in solo or in a group of up to 15 players. Players can engage in multiple activities while on the map, ranging from killing sentries (solo or duo), taking generators, objectives, towers, keeps and the a big final boss. All activities give you some progress towards completion and acquisition of the larger rewards, using a token exchange system, the more tokens you have, the better rewards you can buy. So no matter your skill and team size, you can always progress. Easier bosses drop a set amount of tokens which is then split to the amount of players. So if 15 players all attack a sentry, they will get substantially lower (/15) rewards than taking them on their own. This is to ensure sentries are there for solo and duo players and not being exploited for their rewards. Other objectives can use this system too, other than Keeps and the final boss, and offer rewards that SPLIT with the amount of players, so forming big blobs is discouraged, but doable, until you learn the content and the mechanics.

Each objective gives a debuff to the area around the nearest Keep similar to Fractal instabilities. Players need to work through and defeat the bosses there to remove the instability, then take the Keep itself. Or they can always go for the Keep before disabling the instabilities but it will be way harder (but faster)

There is a “hidden” final boss in the middle of the map, but this one spawn only if all keeps are taken within a certain (limited) time frame. So the best groups will split in 3, each one taking the keep of their choice. During the final battle all instabilities will affect it, so it’s important for players to disable them.

This design gives something for everyone to do no matter their skill level AND the size of their team. An expert team of 15 will split in 3 teams of 5 to go for each Keep, while an average team might move all 15 players at the same time. Less than 15 players can also do the content, for example 3 players splitting in 3 to take all keeps solo although that should never be possible (it would be too easy!).

Finally, the big boss. There is a final boss that has very hard conditions to spawn, and is even harder to defeat, for the most dedicated teams to find and beat. That boss doesn’t reward tokens, instead it offers complete items once you beat it (no RNG) In order to spawn the final boss all 3 Keep bosses must be defeated within a certain timeframe. The timer to spawn the final boss needs to be low enough (similar to the Triple Trouble Wurm) so a team of 15 can’t go to each keep in order and spawn it but instead split in 3 teams and tackle all keeps at the same time.

There are no waypoints in the map unless you reach a certain point, for example capturing a Keep. Every time a player is defeated or joins a map after its creation (selling spots?) they are moved to the middle area (Where the final boss is) and can play a couple of mini games while waiting for the team to earn a waypoint. Mini games could be like fighting mobs in an arena 1vs1, or even dueling other defeated / waiting players for fun. This is to ensure a defeated player isn’t bored to death. There might be an option to fight a very difficult mini-boss fight and if you win you will get a second chance and respawn to the middle! Players in the “defeated” zone re-appear immediately if the Final Boss appear and can contribute to the fight so selling spots is much trickier and harder but still doable.

When a waypoint appears, the team can leave the area and “save” it so they can come back at a later time with their progress saved. Maybe they could use a guild hall item created by the Scribe, to offer more time for the “save”. At level one it lasts a week, at level 2 it lasts 10 days, at level 3 it lasts 2 weeks etc

For anyone who read it all, thank you! This is just an idea I had for a full concept of Challenging Group Content using my “system”. Thoughts? Is it good enough for “pros”? Is it good enough for the “exclusive crowd”? Is it good enough for the more casual players? Is it good enough for the majority of players?

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t see how a casual player can’t like challenging content

Challenging content = more fails

More Fails = more time needed to success

More time needed to success = anti casual gameplay

Thats why.

I like hard content too, but not if it sends you home completely emptyhanded like ls2 does. Not a big fan of the Aetherpath either, so much work and commitment for so little reward. If it has to be hard, at least don´t fill it with Garbage only at the end, and some mid level champs don´t hurt either.^^

Silicato.4603:

maddoctor.2738:

I don’t see how a casual player can’t like challenging content

Challenging content = more fails

More Fails = more time needed to success

More time needed to success = anti METAZERK gameplay

Thats why.

Fixed that for you.

Some casuals actually don’t mind their dungeon taking a bit longer. For example I love aetherpath and think it is the most enjoyable dungeon path at the moment. Also I don’t shy away from challenge even though I view myself as a casual.

The Map is like a PVE version of Edge of the Mists, players begin near the center. You can go in solo or in a group of up to 15 players.

This sort of thing is kind of expected, but it’s also kind of a yellow card to me. It sounds like you’re stuck with the group (or lack of group) that you enter with? I kind of like map populations that can be organic, people coming and going as they please. That’s one of my favorite features of GW2, that much of the content does not require pre-planning or pre-organizing, and any content they add that relies on “setting up the map” or “building a party” before the content starts, I see as a failure on their part.

You say it can be soloed, but I wouldn’t want to solo it. I think a common misconception people have is that in GW2, when people say “I like to solo,” they typically don’t mean that they enjoy being alone in an instance, as might be the case in an earlier generation game, they instead mean “I like to do my own thing, outside of a formal group, but alongside many other players who are also doing their own thing,” which is something GW2 does better than any game out there, but largely the industry is moving towards. The better an activity handles people coming and going at will, the better it is overall.

Easier bosses drop a set amount of tokens which is then split to the amount of players. So if 15 players all attack a sentry, they will get substantially lower (/15) rewards than taking them on their own.

This is very worrisome. I get the intent, but the practical effect is, if I’m soloing a Sentry, and someone shows up partway through, I think “that kitten, now I’ll get less rewards,” which was a common feeling to previous MMOs, but something GW2 tried very hard to stamp out, and good riddance. An approaching player should ALWAYS be a positive, their presence should never take away from your experience and make it harder or less rewarding. If I see another player coming up to me, my thought should always be “great! That should make my life easier!”

There were a lot of discussions of “how to convince players to split the zerg” around the time that nuTeq came out, and I think the solution has to involve just having multiple simultaneous tasks, such that the zerg can’t successfully tackle them one at a time as a zerg, they need to split up and each handle a task all at once or “something bad will happen.”

The timer to spawn the final boss needs to be low enough (similar to the Triple Trouble Wurm) so a team of 15 can’t go to each keep in order and spawn it but instead split in 3 teams and tackle all keeps at the same time.

This is one way to do it, although I think it would be better to focus more on “kill time,” in that there is a relatively lax timer for “taking all towers,” but once you conquer one fully, you’d need to conquer the other two within a very short time, a minute or two, so you can’t do them in sequence. If it would be a problem for players to single-zerg them each down to 5% and then split up to finish them off (which could be viewed as a valid tactic, optionally), then maybe make it so that once you get it down to, say, 25%, a forcefield locks you inside, so you can’t then leave to do something else until either you finish the keep, or everyone wipes. That way everyone needs to commit to their tower.

If you try to force people to hit all three keeps at once by using a single “get them all before this one timer hits zero,” then it needs to be a very tight timer, [time to kill one keep with a full zerg]3 + [travel time between keeps]2, otherwise players will just run them in circuit with a full zerg. Having a timer that tight would make it very difficult for anyone to complete it, regardless of their tactics. Even slightly less than optimal parties would stand no chance, unless maybe the travel times between keeps were ridiculously long, and that would be boring to get through.

When it comes to “beat the timer or you fail” situations, I prefer to see “beat the timer, or someone else will” instead, where there isn’t a timer that fails the event, but there is time tracking and leaderboards, and competitive players can record and show off their best times, compare e-kittens with other competitive players, while non-competitive players can just have fun and complete the event.

Every time a player is defeated or joins a map after its creation (selling spots?) they are moved to the middle area (Where the final boss is) and can play a couple of mini games while waiting for the team to earn a waypoint.

Eh, I don’t see the point to this. If you don’t want them to rejoin the fight, then use a system a bit like dodgeball. Just have an “outer region” to the map, a borderlands around each keep, that is entirely walled off from the rest of the map with a gate. Have enemies on both sides and other sub-objectives to complete. If players take the keep, the gate opens and anyone trapped there can come back into the main area. In the meantime though, the players trapped on the outside can fight the mobs guarding the gate from their side, and if they win, they do get to come back into the map early, and they’ve earned that right (and blown at least five minutes or so even if there are a lot of them, so it would still set back the overall effort).

It’s a solid concept though, a bit like a combo of the Mad King’s Labyrinth and Queen’s Jubilee. Seeing it all together, I get why the timer, but timers still bug me, and also the sort of “pre-organized” aspect of it, which should be an option, but there would ideally also be ways to wander in and out of the content.

Challenging content = more fails

More Fails = more time needed to success

More time needed to success = anti casual gameplay

Thats why.

True. Again, “casual” is a bit of a complex word, ask a dozen players what they mean by “casual” and you’ll get a dozen different answers, but wanting to avoid “wasted effort” is a big one for me at least. I HATE wasted effort. I want every step I take to be advancing towards my goal, and any time I get pushed back, that annoys me. The further I get pushed back, the more annoyed I get. Some people like Rogelikes, I can’t even imagine playing one.

This is something that comes up in discussions of Jumping Puzzles, I love JPs, in theory, but whether I love an individual one has a lot to do with it’s design. My favorites are the ones where they require lots of clever and complicated jumps and movements, but that when you fail a jump, they are designed so that you don’t end up too far behind where you were, and can return to where you started that last sequence of jumps. Maybe this is through literal waypoints, like the Skritt one or Spekk’s Lab, maybe it’s through clever architecture that puts the “ground” beneath a difficult jump in a place where you can hop back to where you started the jump, but I like those a lot better than a JP where if you miss a jump it sets you back dozens of previous jumps or more, even if each jump in that sequence is relatively simple.

Ohoni.6057:

Challenging content = more fails

More Fails = more time needed to success

More time needed to success = anti casual gameplay

Thats why.

True. Again, “casual” is a bit of a complex word, ask a dozen players what they mean by “casual” and you’ll get a dozen different answers, but wanting to avoid “wasted effort” is a big one for me at least. I HATE wasted effort. I want every step I take to be advancing towards my goal, and any time I get pushed back, that annoys me. The further I get pushed back, the more annoyed I get. Some people like Rogelikes, I can’t even imagine playing one.

This is something that comes up in discussions of Jumping Puzzles, I love JPs, in theory, but whether I love an individual one has a lot to do with it’s design. My favorites are the ones where they require lots of clever and complicated jumps and movements, but that when you fail a jump, they are designed so that you don’t end up too far behind where you were, and can return to where you started that last sequence of jumps. Maybe this is through literal waypoints, like the Skritt one or Spekk’s Lab, maybe it’s through clever architecture that puts the “ground” beneath a difficult jump in a place where you can hop back to where you started the jump, but I like those a lot better than a JP where if you miss a jump it sets you back dozens of previous jumps or more, even if each jump in that sequence is relatively simple.

Your definition of wasted effort is quite twisted to say the least.

Let us take an example of a warrior that tries to solo arah for the first time. Our warrior can’t get past lupi after bashing it for five hours and goes to sleep thinking only about how he wants to murder that dog. Would you at this point say that was wasted effort?

The next day our warrior comes back thinking about the things he made wrong yesterday and aces than son of a kitten.

Lesson of the story, there is this thing called learning curve, trial and error. When you realize you’re able to do something you weren’t able to do before the reward is much MUCH higher from that content than from a content that holds your hand through every singe step.

Let us take an example of a warrior that tries to solo arah for the first time. Our warrior can’t get past lupi after bashing it for five hours and goes to sleep thinking only about how he wants to murder that dog. Would you at this point say that was wasted effort?

Yes.

Lesson of the story, there is this thing called learning curve, trial and error. When you realize you’re able to do something you weren’t able to do before the reward is much MUCH higher from that content than from a content that holds your hand through every singe step.

Yes, and I don’t like that stuff. I prefer steady forward progress to forward, back, forward, back, eventually more forward than back. I prefer setbacks to be minimal, and gains to be frequent. I prefer to learn from small successes to lead to bigger successes, than to have to learn from total failures.

Maybe now you can understand why some people might play content that you find “fun challenge” and instead feel it’s torture.

This is very worrisome. I get the intent, but the practical effect is, if I’m soloing a Sentry, and someone shows up partway through, I think “that kitten, now I’ll get less rewards,” which was a common feeling to previous MMOs, but something GW2 tried very hard to stamp out, and good riddance.

Of course if it’s in the open world it wouldn’t work, it would punish players for helping others. But in an instanced situation by the point you reach that sentry you’ve already decided who does what.

Having a timer that tight would make it very difficult for anyone to complete it, regardless of their tactics. Even slightly less than optimal parties would stand no chance, unless maybe the travel times between keeps were ridiculously long, and that would be boring to get through.

My idea for the final boss is to be something that won’t be beaten at all by a lot of players, it’s that last 2% thingy, that’s why I’m not saying it should have ANY kind of awesome exclusive rewards. The alternative is to focus on the instabilities instead, so the actual boss isn’t so hard, but it’s nearly impossible with instabilities, so most groups will go and remove the instabilities first (taking the long way) while that final 2% will go straight for the boss without removing those and fail miserably, I mean kill it.

Every time a player is defeated or joins a map after its creation (selling spots?) they are moved to the middle area (Where the final boss is) and can play a couple of mini games while waiting for the team to earn a waypoint.

Eh, I don’t see the point to this. If you don’t want them to rejoin the fight, then use a system a bit like dodgeball.

That’s was my intent. I thought of the little arena because having a complete outer area might be overkill (too much work) for the devs but it can also work. The main idea is to not allow instant rezzes and waypoints, but not making it super boring for those who die. Multiple ways can achieve this we can find the best one

It’s a solid concept though, a bit like a combo of the Mad King’s Labyrinth and Queen’s Jubilee. Seeing it all together, I get why the timer, but timers still bug me, and also the sort of “pre-organized” aspect of it, which should be an option, but there would ideally also be ways to wander in and out of the content.

The timer is to split the party, if they use some other way to do it like those force fields around the keep it’s fine with me. I just want to prevent all of the players going for the same objective and getting the same big reward. I’ve added many such splits, for example the original group might split in 3 groups to take on the keeps at the same time, and then they might want to split further to get the 3 objectives near the keep to remove the debuff instabilities.

And now about the Open World vs Instanced content, although it deserves a complete thread on its own but I will try to be brief:

The thing I don’t like about the open world is the big blobs formed by players that make good content look bad. I remember doing Shatterer (yes that “joke” boss) with a party of 5 in some weird off hour even after the megaservers. It wasn’t as “easy” as some might think. Or how hard the Fire Elemental actually is if you go with 5 people, or solo/duo Golem MKII (without using the box “exploit”). GW2 has fine encounters, it’s the huge number of players that invalidate them.

The other thing is playing with friends. With the current megaservers it’s often annoying to get all guild members on the same map for missions or big world events. Playing with friends should be higher priority than making it so everyone can do content, and that’s why they are making some of the guild missions instanced, so guilds don’t go through all this trouble to play together.

Another problem with the open world is the scaling. Unfortunately the only way to make content more challenging is to increase mob hit points and mob damage when more people are around. That’s just sad, a team of 10 can deal with different mechanics than a team with 30, yet in the open world it’s the exact same thing, just mobs have different HP and damage values. With instanced content they can fine tune the encounters for a particular number of players. If in some way they could make it so the group of 10 fights some interesting mechanics, but a team of 30 gets some different mechanics then it could work, but I doubt it’s worth the effort.

Then it’s the whole idea of earning rewards without doing anything. Joining Vinewrath during the final phase it earns you the same rewards as someone who was fighting to take all the keeps. Joining Dry Top only during Sandstorms is another one, there are many examples of this. Someone who was actively progressing the map fighting the mordrem gets the same final reward as someone who just joined for the end boss. I will never like this, I feel bad for those progressing the content lol

And the final and most annoying part of the Open World, above everything else: the timers. If it was an open world area it would need its own timer. Players couldn’t go in when they want, they will have to watch timers and go when the content is ready. Waiting to do content you like is never fun!

And back to my idea:

When I say the content is for 15 people I don’t mean fine-tuned for 15 people like current dungeons that is very very hard with 12 or 14. The idea is to allow MORE players than the “difficulty” allows and then split them. A player going in solo or with a friend can still do things in the area, a “dungeon” team of 5 can still do things in the area, progress and earn rewards. Groups that aren’t as organized and powerful can just go with a full team of 15 to all content, while more organized groups will split further to do the content quicker.

A way to avoid the pre-organize part is to use a system like the unranked and ranked arenas. People queue and the system puts them in the same team, teams of 5. You can join with a full team or have empty spots to get other people. The “unranked” version is an easier version of the map and the “ranked” version is the hard version of the map.

Although that would need some sort of system to avoid trolls

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Let us take an example of a warrior that tries to solo arah for the first time. Our warrior can’t get past lupi after bashing it for five hours and goes to sleep thinking only about how he wants to murder that dog. Would you at this point say that was wasted effort?

The next day our warrior comes back thinking about the things he made wrong yesterday and aces than son of a kitten.

Lesson of the story, there is this thing called learning curve, trial and error. When you realize you’re able to do something you weren’t able to do before the reward is much MUCH higher from that content than from a content that holds your hand through every singe step.

That is not a very good example for am MMO, no? A guy doing a group content on his own, tolerated but certainly not encouraged by Anet, with the secondary goal to solo it to sell it in the worst case.

And yes, it was a wasted effort, although not completely wasted of course, there surely is some fun in this. But he got nothing monetarily from it and surely, a quantity of the invested time was teleporting, cursing and wondering why the last attempt of 15 minutes did fail so closely because his clicking finger started to became deaf or something like that.

Sykper.6583:

Perhaps we all could have saved the effort and just agreed on the OP’s choice of a thread name and moved on, because yes some people don’t like hard mode, and a crocodile tear will be shed when a skin they want is locked behind the challenge, not gained through other means like gold or karma or gems.

Though, admittedly thanks to this thread next week’s announcement ought to be quite amusing as well as hyped to watch.

Following the discussion I in fact think the thread name should be a little different. More like, “Lock rewards behind specific (hard) content?”. As that seems to be the discussion.

But you are right, some people don’t like hard / challenging content. While it’s a little vague. What is hard and challenging? I see a lot of people in this thread say GW2 does not have hard or challenging content. However, I know multiple people who can’t complete most of the JP’s so for them that already is hard / challenging content. So it’s very personal.

I see a lot of the people that are in favor for specific rewards for specific (challenging) content already cheer victory.

I am completely in favor of this, and consider the current currency / grind driven reward system, the biggest concern for GW2 is (and have been for the last 2,5 years) I also truly believe they have to get this right for HoT. Still I would not yet be so sure we will get this.

Sure, we have seen some improvements over the last 2,5 years and more and more people have come to the conclusion that this indeed is a problem. (When I had a discussion like this 2 years ago half the people where still saying no direct rewards for content / the grind did not matter because cosmetics where optional anyway).

But what might happen? Lets say Anet announces 3 raids (personally I hope guilds will play a bigger road, so it will be more like guild-content then general raid content) and then for every raid there is one special reward we could get. Would we then be happy?

I personally don’t think so. Maybe those rewards are still grindy if it is put in with a new raid-currency. And even if it’s not.. well then we have 3 new challenging things that have their own reward, but that would not solve the reward system overall. (Rewards for all the other content, and while this topic might be about ‘hard’ content, the definition ‘hard’ is personal, some find the current content hard).

To really be rewarded for the content you would have to do that all over the place, and if we will see that, really depends on there model.. If they continue to use the micro-transactions model, we are not likely to see a big difference, because selling the best looking items is how they make there money. So even if they would want to, they might not even be able to ‘fix’ the reward system.

Asking €50,- for the expansion might suggest a move away from that model, but don’t know for sure. So why I truly hope the reward system gets better and we will see content specific rewards, I do not yet dare to cheer victory.

To OP, maybe you might want to edit the title to better fit the subject.

phys.7689:

PorceleinEve.2973:

phys.7689:

no, just because you want challenge doesnt mean you want to be ineffecicient.

lets be honest, no one like working hard and getting a crappy reward. Even if they enjoyed the work.
I enjoy painting, but if someone tells me he will give me 5 dollars per painting, i wont do it.
casual players are also annoyed by this. I remember the first time i beat arah in a pug long ago, and the newish guy, was like thats it? (back then you got very little silver, and most chests were garbage)

acting like anyone likes working hard for less reward than doing something easy is disengenous.

it would be different if there were no rewards in the game at all, but as i said once you add rewards it will come into play.

Since we’re on the jobs analogy. Nobody works for a different kind of money that you get by doing a specific job. Yes? Everyone gets the same currency in different amounts. So going by that, you shouldn’t be asking for unique and exclusive rewards, but for more than what others with easier “jobs” get.

You enjoy painting, but you still expect to be paid in dollars right? and you clearly want more dollars for your work, not a new currency. So why is it that in challenging content you want exclusivity? You should get what everyone else is getting, just more. How much more is open for debate. But nobody gets “special dollars” for working.

And again nobody here is asking for getting less or the same for working hard. In fact most say that you should get more, just not exclusives. People who do hard content should be rewarded by more of what it is people who don’t get. But the same stuff, not different. Just more.

But then again it’s not about that is it? It’s about the bragging rights and the feelings of superiority. You just want to stand out from the plebs. All there is to it. The rest as i said before is just rationalizations. And since someone is going to ask what’s wrong with that. The answer is, that’s not a community I want to be part of. The only thing that remains, is what kind of community anet wants for the game. It hasn’t been such a community untill now, I, personally, want it to stay that way.

The problem with non exclusives, is they have to balance themselves against economics. Which in an MMO = grind. The moment something can be sold on the market, the items design people have to consider how many can be created, how to keep it at the set monetary value they have in mind, how to adjust its rarity, how it will effect the economy.

now, once they correctly find this balance, it means grind. like precursors, which are 1/700 combines of 3 or more items. Or drop rates so low, most people who have played for 3000 hours have not seen a drop.

the main reason i say they should be exclusive is to eliminate grind, and make objective based, instead of repetition based gameplay.

They simply wont design an item that is supposed to have value, without grind, if it has to interact directly with the economy. Once it interacts with the economy, its value is determined by grind. Thats reality.

there are other non economy based ways they could solve this, but they would require extensive systems added to the game, and even those would need various balances. They arent going to do all that, so exclusives is the only way they can reward gameplay appropriately without opening a huge can of grind.

keep in mind this shouldnt just be for challenging content, but for many content types.

I do in fact think Anet does look to much at it from an economic perspective. I believe they even have a person hired specifically for this (not 100% sure. They have somebody that at least talk a lot about it on the forums, I would love to see him come in here and give his opinion about the matter.), and while I guess he does a great job from an economic perspective, this is a game. We might not want the economic part, we just want fun, interesting (challenging) and rewarding content. Not the grind for currency.. the way economies work.

Anyway, I completely agree with you. (While I do think some items can be sold, even more important is that content is not so interesting to grind (general good loot), and items have less of a general drop but a more specific one.

In short, the game should not be so much economy based, but have more of a “life from the land” mentality.

xarallei.4279:

People keep saying it’s to show off or brag and yet I have the distinct feeling that if there was no other reward but a good deal of gold people would still happily do the content….again reward proportional to the effort.

That is false.. Sure, if I have an item rewarded from specific content , it might give some “show off” value.

But it’s also very much something to be pride of yourself. From most items you can only have one visible at the time anyway, so how would the “show off” hold stand for all the items on the bank?

Torolan.5816:

To be fair, in some other mmos you are thankful for reasonable people like SkiTz instead of the moron parade that can be witnessed there.

And speaking of content that gets harder, not softer:
Everyone who was around when Marionette was an issue will quickly see the ties this event has to Vinewrath. 5 lanes of hard monsters (rather full lanes wiped sometimes) an a high number of objectives to achieve. There were hardcore gamers wading through salt seas for weeks then, people camped at the spots they thought would be most vulnerable and blocked by terrible or new players in an attempt to beat the event, accusations, frustration etc etc. Simply a glorious event even when it failed. Thank you, Mr. Designer, I still use salt from that event in the kitchen from then to salute you every day.

Then what happened?
The mechanic resurfaced with Vinewraith, but only had three lanes and the champions and lanes are reasonably easy. So even when it is a big step up from the vanilla opponents of other maps, it is still a downgrade from a harder content, and VW is not even on the level of Tequatl, sitting somewhere between the Karka Queen and Tequatl. Does not exactly speak for the idea that more really hardcore stuff is what Anet is looking for.

This has to do with open-world raid-like systems. The same holds true for world-bosses. All it shows is that Anet did try to implement harder group content in the past, but (as many predicted) that does not work very well for open world group content because you are always with pug groups.

For personal content that will work (some of the JP’s have also gotten harder) but challenging group content means the group will need to work together and that is a problem with open word content.

So it does very much look like they want to implement harder content (that is also why they announced it for HoT), but they simply found out that for the group content it did not fit into their current vision where they wanted to do everything in the open world.

Torolan.5816:

I like hard content too, but not if it sends you home completely emptyhanded like ls2 does. Not a big fan of the Aetherpath either, so much work and commitment for so little reward. If it has to be hard, at least don´t fill it with Garbage only at the end, and some mid level champs don´t hurt either.^^

No you don’t like challenging content. You like loot and rewards. You see challenging content as a means to those. You don’t like the content, just the rewards.

Of course if it’s in the open world it wouldn’t work, it would punish players for helping others. But in an instanced situation by the point you reach that sentry you’ve already decided who does what.

In a very organized raid-group, perhaps, but in the smaller, less organized, pug type situations, it’d probably be more ad-hoc, people would just split off to do what they felt comfortable with and hope for the best, like in unranked PvP. I just don’t think the “split loot” mechanism has any real value to it.

That’s was my intent. I thought of the little arena because having a complete outer area might be overkill (too much work) for the devs but it can also work. The main idea is to not allow instant rezzes and waypoints, but not making it super boring for those who die. Multiple ways can achieve this we can find the best one

Yeah, fair enough,l I thought the arena would be more work, putting special content in it as busywork. The outer region I was envisioning wouldn’t be huge, just a blob of terrain outside the gates, keeping people out unless they can fight their way back in. I think there does need to be a practical goal to it, like being able to earn early release. If it’s just pointless busywork then I think I would just prefer to go AFK until it was time to pop out than to dance around in circles.

The thing I don’t like about the open world is the big blobs formed by players that make good content look bad. I remember doing Shatterer (yes that “joke” boss) with a party of 5 in some weird off hour even after the megaservers. It wasn’t as “easy” as some might think. Or how hard the Fire Elemental actually is if you go with 5 people, or solo/duo Golem MKII (without using the box “exploit”). GW2 has fine encounters, it’s the huge number of players that invalidate them.

Sure, but I think they’ve gotten a lot better at managing that. Drytop and Silverwastes both do a solid job of splitting up the zergs, at least so long as the map is actively attempting the primary objectives. They were both excellent testbeds for ideas that will probably come up again in HoT. The trick to splitting a zerg in other situations is to do a bit like parts of Teq do, make sure that there are multiple places that require people to be for success. Teq is imperfect there, but it got the ball rolling. A more perfect version of Teq, taking into account the same basic layout, might involve having to do the battery defense portions during the “burn phases”, while groups are trying to take down his HP, and to also have three damage points on his body, and if one takes too much damage then it draws “special agro,” resulting in a massive attack on them, so you want to spread the DPS as evenly as possible. This would split the 1-2 zergs into six full groupings at all times, possible more.

There’s a lot of different ways to harness people’s inclinations to zerg, they just have to employ them.

And yes, I’ve fought pretty much all the mega-bosses in small or solo parties back before megaservers, they definitely are a different experience. You can still occasionally find them if you time it just right and catch the “last bus in.”

The other thing is playing with friends. With the current megaservers it’s often annoying to get all guild members on the same map for missions or big world events. Playing with friends should be higher priority than making it so everyone can do content, and that’s why they are making some of the guild missions instanced, so guilds don’t go through all this trouble to play together.

I agree that the current system doesn’t work, but the solution is fairly simple. Just let people manually choose their own maps. Plenty of games do this, I remember Champions Online was one of the first I played that did, I believe DCUO does as well. If you hit /ip, you can tell the ip of the map you’re in, just make it so that either from inside the map, or from the login screen, you have the option to just “auto-join,” OR you would have the option to view the full list of available servers (of the map you’re aiming for), listed by ip and also listing the population of each. If you want to flood it with a hundred guildies, then pick one with only a few people and everyone jump in. They could even have a feature where if most of the maps are mostly full, people could “petition” for a clean map, and once 60+, or whatever a reasonable cutoff is, sign up to that ip, they all get transferred into that map.

They also need to bring back the ability to queue for a map like you used to be able to do when on an overflow map. If I want to jump to a friend’s map, I shouldn’t have to spam join and hope to get in between two other people, I should just be able to hit “join” once, and it puts me in a queue, and when I pop, I can transfer over there.

Another problem with the open world is the scaling. Unfortunately the only way to make content more challenging is to increase mob hit points and mob damage when more people are around. That’s just sad, a team of 10 can deal with different mechanics than a team with 30, yet in the open world it’s the exact same thing, just mobs have different HP and damage values. With instanced content they can fine tune the encounters for a particular number of players. If in some way they could make it so the group of 10 fights some interesting mechanics, but a team of 30 gets some different mechanics then it could work, but I doubt it’s worth the effort.

There’s really nothing stopping them from scaling open world content to deal with larger groups of people. Have special ads that require new tactics, but only spawn when X number of people are around. Have a new shield or mid-battle phase that only occurs when large numbers of players are around. They can have all sorts of changes to the encounter that could occur dynamically in response to the local population, they just don’t do it.

Then it’s the whole idea of earning rewards without doing anything. Joining Vinewrath during the final phase it earns you the same rewards as someone who was fighting to take all the keeps. Joining Dry Top only during Sandstorms is another one, there are many examples of this. Someone who was actively progressing the map fighting the mordrem gets the same final reward as someone who just joined for the end boss. I will never like this, I feel bad for those progressing the content lol

Sure, but I’m of two minds on that. One, I don’t LIKE long event chains, so I don’t want mechanisms, like a DT T6 map, that encourage you to spend the entire hour (or more) there. That gets tiresome, I like being able to move on. On the other hand, I agree that if there are long term goals for the events, players should be rewarded based on how much they contribute.

I was actually thinking about DT while mowing today, I really like DT for the most part, but the overall meta always bugged me. Here’s how I would change it. Split the meta in half. Have one meta goal, called “Dry Top Threat” This meta is progressed exactly like the current one, by doing various events, and goes up to T6. The difference is, it ONLY effects the map-wide events. It controls which sandstorm bosses appear and maybe slightly tweaks some of their loot or something. It is a map-wide meta trait that effects the map. Then there is the “Favor of the Zephyrites,” which is exactly like the current one, and controls how many geodes drop from each event, and how much you have to spend at vendors, except that it ONLY applies to you personally. It is only raised for you by events you complete, and only effects the loot and prices that you receive.

In this way, a map can try for T6 and get all the best bosses to appear (with their best loot), but more importantly, each player would want to earn his full T6 personal status, to get the most out of every event. If someone just dropped in during the sandstorm, they would get a decent amount of geodes and stuff, but not nearly as much as if they’d built up to T6 first. Of course, events that are faster to complete would raise your personal bar a bit less than the long duration ones, so players doing the longer ones wouldn’t fall behind.

And the final and most annoying part of the Open World, above everything else: the timers. If it was an open world area it would need its own timer. Players couldn’t go in when they want, they will have to watch timers and go when the content is ready. Waiting to do content you like is never fun!

Yes and no. If it’s something you need a large group for, then “drop in any time” like a dungeon would mean that you’d still be waiting around for a group to get their act together, still waiting. At least if it’s on a fixed timer, everyone knows that they can just show up on the hour and it’ll be starting. This is why I don’t much case for timed things though, it’s nice if you can just drop in whenever and join the action, already in progress.

A way to avoid the pre-organize part is to use a system like the unranked and ranked arenas. People queue and the system puts them in the same team, teams of 5.

That’s better than nothing, but even PvP queuing involves standing around for about 5-10 minutes each time, and as little as I have faith in the size of the PvP community, I tend to think that the community for this type of content would likely be lower, and the group size is larger, and the map duration is longer, so that all adds up to likely even longer queues. You could at least be doing open world PvE while you wait, but it’s always a pain to be in queue because you can’t really commit to doing anything.

But you are right, some people don’t like hard / challenging content. While it’s a little vague. What is hard and challenging? I see a lot of people in this thread say GW2 does not have hard or challenging content. However, I know multiple people who can’t complete most of the JP’s so for them that already is hard / challenging content. So it’s very personal.

It is, and there is no “right” answer. The topic is in general just making the point that while some players do go after content that they believe is “hard,” and they actively enjoy it, there are plenty of players that do not, and they should be kept in mind as a portion of the audience.

Devata.6589:

That is false.. Sure, if I have an item rewarded from specific content , it might give some “show off” value.

But it’s also very much something to be pride of yourself. From most items you can only have one visible at the time anyway, so how would the “show off” hold stand for all the items on the bank?

As an ex raider, only the latest and greatest matter. Looks are usually unimportant. So what would happen is, you’d equip what you’d consider your “biggest” “achievement” items untill such time you got bored of them. Or the people around you got bored of them (for example when something has become more widespread and you see it all around you now).

As time passes by, and if the flow of raid content is steady, you would use the combination of items that are generally accepted by the community as the ones that have been harder to get, even if said items now come for defunct raids.

The value of the showing off is to separate your self from the lessers, the less skilled or worthy players by displaying your hard to get and unique treasures. It’s like a peakitten, displaying its feathers. You’d only choose the most rare and exclusive feathers you can get your hands on.

xarallei.4279:

I think you underestimate just how many people do WvW and sPvP. Just a bit. If it was such a huge waste of time, Anet wouldn’t bother supporting it at all.

Nah, Anet Devs are just huge pvp fans. In fact, if you can remember, GW1 was supposed to be a PvP game with a PvE sideshow acting as lobby. Only, it didn’t work that way – people were way more interested in the pve aspect.
The devs simply haven’t really accepted that yet.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Torolan.5816:

I like hard content too, but not if it sends you home completely emptyhanded like ls2 does. Not a big fan of the Aetherpath either, so much work and commitment for so little reward. If it has to be hard, at least don´t fill it with Garbage only at the end, and some mid level champs don´t hurt either.^^

No you don’t like challenging content. You like loot and rewards. You see challenging content as a means to those. You don’t like the content, just the rewards.

Yeah, that may be indeed true too, but it´s not that easy. I see no problem with challenging content as long as you don´t leave empty handed, that can be something as simple as an AP for a mid level champion opponent that keeps me coming back.

People keep on telling me how they have easily made and still enjoyed the challenge ls2 for example. But I found it to be challenging, boring, grindy and repetive in the worst kind of way.
The same goes with most JPs, I only had the Wallbreaker JP for years. Or making Arah solo, that is not even in question for me, even if I had the skills or the tenacity to do it.
If this is the new hard content, I will gladly pass it.

If the new hard content is more like Marionette in an open world content, please bring it online quickly. I don´t want to practice with my friends how to do this or that, we´re not a sports team, but a casual group of people hanging out together in a game.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Devata.6589:

That is false.. Sure, if I have an item rewarded from specific content , it might give some “show off” value.

But it’s also very much something to be pride of yourself. From most items you can only have one visible at the time anyway, so how would the “show off” hold stand for all the items on the bank?

As an ex raider, only the latest and greatest matter. Looks are usually unimportant. So what would happen is, you’d equip what you’d consider your “biggest” “achievement” items untill such time you got bored of them. Or the people around you got bored of them (for example when something has become more widespread and you see it all around you now).

As time passes by, and if the flow of raid content is steady, you would use the combination of items that are generally accepted by the community as the ones that have been harder to get, even if said items now come for defunct raids.

The value of the showing off is to separate your self from the lessers, the less skilled or worthy players by displaying your hard to get and unique treasures. It’s like a peakitten, displaying its feathers. You’d only choose the most rare and exclusive feathers you can get your hands on.

Oh you form no attachments to your history, thats sad. I still used transmog or special items which had meaning to me long after they rotated out. You have a dim view of humanity – stop thinking everyone is like you. Hard earned and unique treasures are some of the joys of MMOs, don’t try and ruin it for the rest of us because you’re jaded.

The type of progression systems you guys create will make a boring grindy unfullfilling progression. you actually think its good for the game if you never have to do anything but one thing in one place over and over again to acheive any goal in the game.

heres the point, what type of incentive can you give for doing anything, if all incentives can be obtained by doing task A.
the type of system you guys are suggesting is one that may as well not exist. If you can get anything by doing anything, you may as well just give every one everything.

your basically suggesting a system that essentially is just a straight up time sink progression. why have something like that all?

the thing about incentives, if you incentivize everything, you end up incetiviizing nothing.
if i get a candy no matter what i do, then getting candy is no longer a bonus
if you make it only about quanity, say something worth 1 candy and somethings worth 1/100 candies, you end up deincentivizing certain things. 1/100 candy tasks are seen as tasks no one values

So how do you give rewards for everything, without making all rewards feel worthless, or setting up compartive value of different tasks?
you give different rewards.

Im more concerned with the game as a whole feeling rewarding for doing things, than getting any particular item.

phys.7689:

heres the point, what type of incentive can you give for doing anything, if all incentives can be obtained by doing task A.

The incentive is getting to do the content that you enjoy, whether that is only one thing, or everything the game has to offer. What is so hard to understand? People who like several different types of gameplay can just switch between the stuff they like if they get bored.

But people who only like one or two portions of the game can still move forward with their goals as well.

You keep saying it will be grindy, but that’s only if ANet programs it to be grindy. And if you think it will be grindy no matter what, then you may as well shelve this game, because if ANet can’t get simple content to be non-grindy, why do you think that the challenging/hard content will be any less grindy, exclusive rewards or otherwise?

I mean, the only non-grindy things in the game that I know, whether behind difficult content or otherwise, are the SAB Tribulation Tokens, and the Lidari Mini, as they’re the only things that are 100% guaranteed from their content. Teq, TT, and Fractals, all originally lauded as challenging content, have 0 guaranteed rewards (aside from maybe that stupid spoon that I’ve seen several threads about).

Even in those, you have to do the content over and over again before you get anywhere, short of RNGesus.

So with that in mind, how can you keep believing that challenging/exclusive rewards are somehow going to save the day when almost everything that ANet puts into the game is grindy regardless of difficulty?

Exclusive rewards aren’t going to solve your issues with ANet’s entire reward structure.

phys.7689:

So how do you give rewards for everything, without making all rewards feel worthless,

How do the rewards become worthless?

You keep saying this. What does that actually mean? What is the worth of the rewards? What is their value? How are you gauging these things? How are you determining these things? What set of criteria are you using that renders them worthless/without value?

Summary:

One side values skins at looks and what seems more convenient for them, and want to encourage access to any and all skins through any method of the player’s choosing.

Another side values skins based on their attainment requirements and to some extent exclusivity, looks matter a bit less (typically the skins that have said requirements are often catered to a good theme or look anyways).

And neither side will reach a compromise (solutions seem to compromise the positions on either side). I believe we have reached an impasse since any and all arguments at this point have gone full circle.

As the OP has pointed out they won’t be compromising their position at any single regard, this is no longer a debate or real conversation that can bear any sort of merit going forward. I am eager to see what comes this next saturday, and I wish everyone the best of luck should things not be what they expected or wanted.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Devata.6589:

That is false.. Sure, if I have an item rewarded from specific content , it might give some “show off” value.

But it’s also very much something to be pride of yourself. From most items you can only have one visible at the time anyway, so how would the “show off” hold stand for all the items on the bank?

As an ex raider, only the latest and greatest matter. Looks are usually unimportant. So what would happen is, you’d equip what you’d consider your “biggest” “achievement” items untill such time you got bored of them. Or the people around you got bored of them (for example when something has become more widespread and you see it all around you now).

As time passes by, and if the flow of raid content is steady, you would use the combination of items that are generally accepted by the community as the ones that have been harder to get, even if said items now come for defunct raids.

The value of the showing off is to separate your self from the lessers, the less skilled or worthy players by displaying your hard to get and unique treasures. It’s like a peakitten, displaying its feathers. You’d only choose the most rare and exclusive feathers you can get your hands on.

As a person who wants specific items from specific content I can tell you, your way of thinking is not true for everybody.

I have the Liadri mini, am proud because it’s supposed to be hard content, but I don’t use it because I don’t like the looks of it (don’t like humanoid mini’s). In fact I use some older mini’s.

I however do use the SAB title because I am pride of it but even that has little bragging right because while many people where not able to get it so it might show some sort of skill, most people even know the meaning of the title.

So no, it’s not always the latest and it’s not always to ‘separate yourself from the lessers’.

In fact, often I don’t even like to use a ‘new’ item because at the time everybody is running around with it (that is at least true for new, easy to get items). Waiting a while makes your character look more unique.. something I do indeed like.

That is also why purely for the skin, looks are important.. you don’t want to look unique but also good.
From a game-play perspective the looks are important because you want to be rewarded with the best looking skin for completing the most challenging content. Not like it is now.. where you can simply buy the best looking skin by spending some money or brainlessly grinding. That completely devalues the items.

Gene Archer.8560:

phys.7689:

So how do you give rewards for everything, without making all rewards feel worthless,

How do the rewards become worthless?

You keep saying this. What does that actually mean? What is the worth of the rewards? What is their value? How are you gauging these things? How are you determining these things? What set of criteria are you using that renders them worthless/without value?

The value of an item is based on how you got it. Just like expensive items on the TP are those with abysmal low drop rates, items that aren’t sold for gold are expensive when they are hard (or impossible) to acquire.

If they gave you any skin you asked for in the daily login rewards it would make all skins worthless and give no reason to play the game anymore. That’s exactly how players who want items behind specific content feel if they give items in other (much easier) types of content. Same feeling really

maddoctor.2738:

The value of an item is based on how you got it.

The value of an item is based on its aesthetics and how it looks with your other skins as you design your character.

maddoctor.2738:

If they gave you any skin you asked for in the daily login rewards it would make all skins worthless and give no reason to play the game anymore. That’s exactly how players who want items behind specific content feel if they give items in other (much easier) types of content. Same feeling really

Then those players only care about the reward and content because only they and a select few are able to obtain it.

Which means I was right and it’s about stroking ego.

Gene Archer.8560:

maddoctor.2738:

The value of an item is based on how you got it.

The value of an item is based on its aesthetics and how it looks with your other skins as you design your character.

maddoctor.2738:

If they gave you any skin you asked for in the daily login rewards it would make all skins worthless and give no reason to play the game anymore. That’s exactly how players who want items behind specific content feel if they give items in other (much easier) types of content. Same feeling really

Then those players only care about the reward and content because only they and a select few are able to obtain it.

Which means I was right and it’s about stroking ekitten

an example from my time in WoW. Tyrande’s Doll was a healer trinket you got through Archaeology, it took me MONTHS of farming for hours to get (I was just unlucky it wasn’t super rare). I used that trinket all the way through the expansion right up to Deathwing Heroic because it mattered to me because of the time and effort I put into getting it. My robe was transmogged from an old set I felt I really worked for and loved the look of – PERSONALLY.

People form attachments to things they work for and it feels special to THEM. Yes things have value beyond their looks and while it is impressive to see the first Sunrise run past you you care about YOUR Sunrise more, much like children they are just evidence of unprotected sex from other people but yours are special (though they probably are wholey unspecial when looked at in the population).

(Before anyone says I am describing children and pixels as the same thing I am using this as an example of attachment to personal achievements – though children being achievements is something odd in itself, I suppose programming them with worthy knowledge to make a good human being is an achievement, but I would need to judge each of your attempts on a case by case basis)

Gene Archer.8560:

maddoctor.2738:

The value of an item is based on how you got it.

The value of an item is based on its aesthetics and how it looks with your other skins as you design your character.

maddoctor.2738:

If they gave you any skin you asked for in the daily login rewards it would make all skins worthless and give no reason to play the game anymore. That’s exactly how players who want items behind specific content feel if they give items in other (much easier) types of content. Same feeling really

Then those players only care about the reward and content because only they and a select few are able to obtain it.

Which means I was right and it’s about stroking ego.

That’s not really the case. At least not for everyone. There are definitely people who like having super rare, exclusive items so they can be special snowflakes. Just check out the general forum thread about obtaining unobtainable armors.

However, for many people it’s about rewards proportional to the effort. Braindead SW facerolling should not be the most rewarding content in the game. Period. There is no effort involved there. If it does give rewards it should take a very significant amount of time to obtain such rewards because the effort involved is next to nothing.

phys.7689:

The type of progression systems you guys create will make a boring grindy unfullfilling progression. you actually think its good for the game if you never have to do anything but one thing in one place over and over again to acheive any goal in the game.

Well what they really ask for, is for the game to keep the reward system is does, as thats exactly how it works now. It’s imho the biggest issue holding GW2 back from what it could have been.

The excuse is always “you can do whatever you like” but reality simply does not work that way. In an MMO (PvE) other then doing content, people are almost always chasing rewards, so it is indeed very important to have rewards for content, especially for re-playability. Else you get exactly what we see in GW2. People do some content once, and then see an item they like so look what gets it to them the fastest, same for the next, and next and next item, what then results in grind, grind, grind what in turn results for a lot of people in getting bored or burned out. With exception of the people who in fact like the grind.

At this moment GW2 is likely to have a big player-base whit these people as the system filtered them out, but for HoT it would be nice if Anet also did try to hold other people.

Sykper.6583:

Another side values skins based on their attainment requirements and to some extent exclusivity, looks matter a bit less (typically the skins that have said requirements are often catered to a good theme or look anyways).

Skins matter very much, if the skins coming with the rewards always look not as good / lesser as the skins you buy / can grind for, it feels very unsatisfying.

It’s like if the price for winning is the bronze or silver metal but the consolation prize is the gold or platinum metal.

At same time it both counts, that is true, as “reward value” the gold and platinum metal would in this case get less meaning.. still they are the most valuable, it’s for a reason that they are used to give to the winner, and not as a consolation prize like in my example. So both is important.

Also I don’t think we will get an answer to this, this Saturday, the first half year of HoT will have to make clear if they fix the reward system or leave it pretty much as is. I think they do know it’s flawed (as shown by some tries to improve it already) but as long as they need to sell the skins to make their money they won’t / can’t make big changes to it. (maybe a reward behind some content here and there, but no overall improvement in the complete game) So personally the question for me is more, will they keep this model or move more to an expansion based model and I think that when you have the answer to that, you also have an answer to what will happen with the reward system.

xarallei.4279:

However, for many people it’s about rewards proportional to the effort.

Okay, but what makes a reward proportional to said effort? What is the criteria?

And it definitely is the case, since the post I had responded to basically admitted that it was the case.

xarallei.4279:

Braindead SW facerolling should not be the most rewarding content in the game. Period. There is no effort involved there.

I don’t like the effort argument because how do you decide what constitutes effort? Who is the judge of that?

A lot of “hardcore” WoW players like to claim that LFR takes no effort, that it’s easy mode, etc.

But for me? That content is difficult. I don’t just “spam 1”. I have to use my full rotation, I have to keep on my feet, I have to dodge out of the fire, even though LFR is supposed to be “easy” mode.

I’m doing everything that would be expected of me in a high tier raid. And yet they claim I don’t put in effort.

The effort argument is flawed. End of.

Coulter.2315:

OK an example from my time in WoW. Tyrande’s Doll was a healer trinket you got through Archaeology, it took me MONTHS of farming for hours to get (I was just unlucky it wasn’t super rare). I used that trinket all the way through the expansion right up to Deathwing Heroic because it mattered to me because of the time and effort I put into getting it. My robe was transmogged from an old set I felt I really worked for and loved the look of – PERSONALLY.

And I get that. But then the question becomes, would that doll still hold value to you if somebody had managed to get it in less time/easier than you? (Less RNG)

Best way I can think to explain my thought process and what I’m talking about is this. You’re familiar with Cataclysm, yeah? Remember Tol Barad? Well, in the PVE zone portion of it, there was a fox pet you could originally only get from RNGesus smiling down upon you as you slew countless Tol Barad Foxes.

I lost count of how many foxes I took down, but I got that tiny fox. About 2 months later, Blizzard added that fox to the Tol Barad vendor for 40 tokens. About 5-9 days of dailies (I forgot the number of tokens you got through those dailies).

That fox was now far more common among pet collectors, but it didn’t diminish the value of it for me. In fact, I was happy that others would be able to escape that bloody RNG trap. My rare pet was now more common, but I was perfectly fine with it. Didn’t bother me.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Coulter.2315:

I suppose programming them with worthy knowledge

Sorry, everyone’s SD cards are already out of storage space /ba dum tish

Gene Archer.8560:

maddoctor.2738:

The value of an item is based on how you got it.

The value of an item is based on its aesthetics and how it looks with your other skins as you design your character.

In fact, it’s based on both, and one more.

Value of an item (ingame, and irl) is based on rarity, difficulty to obtain (what is linked with rarity) and popularity (demand supply).

Gene Archer.8560:

Then those players only care about the reward and content because only they and a select few are able to obtain it.

If you do that with nearly all rewards and all content “those players” is “every player”, because everybody does content and everybody is has strong and weak points. What is hard for you might be easy for me and the other way around.

Gene Archer.8560:

xarallei.4279:

However, for many people it’s about rewards proportional to the effort.

Okay, but what makes a reward proportional to said effort? What is the criteria?

And it definitely is the case, since the post I had responded to basically admitted that it was the case.

xarallei.4279:

Braindead SW facerolling should not be the most rewarding content in the game. Period. There is no effort involved there.

I don’t like the effort argument because how do you decide what constitutes effort? Who is the judge of that?

A lot of “hardcore” WoW players like to claim that LFR takes no effort, that it’s easy mode, etc.

But for me? That content is difficult. I don’t just “spam 1”. I have to use my full rotation, I have to keep on my feet, I have to dodge out of the fire, even though LFR is supposed to be “easy” mode.

I’m doing everything that would be expected of me in a high tier raid. And yet they claim I don’t put in effort.

The effort argument is flawed. End of.

Coulter.2315:

OK an example from my time in WoW. Tyrande’s Doll was a healer trinket you got through Archaeology, it took me MONTHS of farming for hours to get (I was just unlucky it wasn’t super rare). I used that trinket all the way through the expansion right up to Deathwing Heroic because it mattered to me because of the time and effort I put into getting it. My robe was transmogged from an old set I felt I really worked for and loved the look of – PERSONALLY.

And I get that. But then the question becomes, would that doll still hold value to you if somebody had managed to get it in less time/easier than you? (Less RNG)

Best way I can think to explain my thought process and what I’m talking about is this. You’re familiar with Cataclysm, yeah? Remember Tol Barad? Well, in the PVE zone portion of it, there was a fox pet you could originally only get from RNGesus smiling down upon you as you slew countless Tol Barad Foxes.

I lost count of how many foxes I took down, but I got that tiny fox. About 2 months later, Blizzard added that fox to the Tol Barad vendor for 40 tokens. About 5-9 days of dailies (I forgot the number of tokens you got through those dailies).

That fox was now far more common among pet collectors, but it didn’t diminish the value of it for me. In fact, I was happy that others would be able to escape that bloody RNG trap. My rare pet was now more common, but I was perfectly fine with it. Didn’t bother me.

That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Coulter.2315:

I suppose programming them with worthy knowledge

Sorry, everyone’s SD cards are already out of storage space /ba dum tish

Tyrande’s Doll required dedication to a certain activity, its personal value would be reduced immeasurably if it was just a world drop or something you got from SW farming. There is 1 way to get it and I spent the time and effort to do it, if you accidently got it doing anything then that dedication portion is removed completely – this seems to be the part you don’t grasp.

This dedication reward is what people want from their unique and effort requiring loot we’ve been discussing in this thread.

Your fox story is EXACTLY my point, the dedication you showed to want and get that fox means YOUR fox is worth so much more than the ones people bought for 40 tokens. See how the journey makes it worth it, giving the foxes away for free lessened their worth to their owners because they didn’’t have the experience you had to get yours.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Torolan.5816:

I like hard content too, but not if it sends you home completely emptyhanded like ls2 does. Not a big fan of the Aetherpath either, so much work and commitment for so little reward. If it has to be hard, at least don´t fill it with Garbage only at the end, and some mid level champs don´t hurt either.^^

No you don’t like challenging content. You like loot and rewards. You see challenging content as a means to those. You don’t like the content, just the rewards.

Thats a false statement, they are not an either or condition.
A person can like challenging content and like unique rewards.
A person can like challenging content and not like unique rewards.
A person can not like challenging content but like unique rewards.
A person can like neither.

As you say you’ve previously been a raider you know the expectations that come with challenge content, that they are seen as a pinnacle of gameplay and completion of which brings benefits. That is independent from the base desire for challenging content.
If you want to change that association you need to look at the structure of MMO’s they’re built upon that hierarchy, They’re designed around getting you to want those items and to compete against the other players indirectly for it.
At its base GW2 the RPG has maybe 100 hours of non-repeating content (grind to get to that content removed), The time spent beyond that is the MMO aspect and what grabs most of the playtime.

As a thought exercise imagine GW2 was a single player game, I know if it was for me I would have played through a single classes story-line on the hardest difficulty, maybe done some side dungeons, the hardest piece of content and then I’d be done. I would never have bothered with getting any of the rare items or cool weapons because it would be pointless, who would know? who would see that achievement? I already know I’d likely be able to do anything the game throws at me so I’ve no need to prove it to myself I can complete the game without the sword so there’d have to be some other benefit for me to bother.

The difference between it being a 40 hour rpg and a 4000 hour MMORPG is that special snowflake race that you appear to hate so much.
That’s as much about self satisfaction for the player as bragging rights, sure you get some bad apples who need to rub it into others faces, the rest just quietly pat themselves on the back on being able to complete it and enjoy their reward.

TL/DR liking challenge content is a gamer thing, requiring unique rewards for that challenge content is an MMO genre thing.

Gene Archer.8560:

maddoctor.2738:

The value of an item is based on how you got it.

The value of an item is based on its aesthetics and how it looks with your other skins as you design your character.

maddoctor.2738:

If they gave you any skin you asked for in the daily login rewards it would make all skins worthless and give no reason to play the game anymore. That’s exactly how players who want items behind specific content feel if they give items in other (much easier) types of content. Same feeling really

Then those players only care about the reward and content because only they and a select few are able to obtain it.

Which means I was right and it’s about stroking ego.

You asked a loaded question, You asked what his definition for item value was, then immediately disregarded it and plonked your own version down as the correct answer.
An items value in a single player game is a combination its looks and stats.
An items value in an MMO is a combination of the looks(1),stats(2),usefulness(3), acquisition method(4), quantity available(5), additional uses(6) and speculative value on future uses.(7).
(1). Crimson lion skins were at a lower price than other black lion skins in the same introductory period due to their less flashy appearance.
(2). An exotic item is valued more than a rare item due to increased statistical values.
(3). A land based weapon is valued more than an aquatic weapon as it will see more use/ make a bigger impact.
(4). Luminescent armour is valued more than Zodiac armor as it coveys a large amount of reasonably content has been completed compared to just spending 10 euro.
(5). The level 80 rare weapons with no prefixes are worth more than most exotics purely due to the fact there is a limited number of them, despite them having no functional use. (5.1) The lucky dragon envelope that drops 1 is worth more than the lucky envelope that drops 10 purely due to their being less in existence.
(6). The value of a precursor is due to its use in making legendaries with its other aspects adding negligible value.
(7). Purely economic ,if people believe something will be useful in the future , the value of it increases, Many tp speculation examples available, the more recent easy one would be the mini kasmeer that people suspected was getting a special mystic forge recipe in the future.

But what about the people that want the item and not the memory associated with getting it? isn´t it a grind for them to make the hard content, despite not wanting to do it, and would have prefered to collect 40 tokens?

We´re players with different measures of things that are fun, not employees that have to make a certain amount of money or get cut. But probably even the most lazy of casuals would want the same items the hardcores have gotten after a long battle and are willing to grind for them with her mouse in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

Would it do the trick if the farmed item is blue and the hardcore one red maybe?

Seriously curious here.

Gene Archer.8560:

phys.7689:

heres the point, what type of incentive can you give for doing anything, if all incentives can be obtained by doing task A.

The incentive is getting to do the content that you enjoy, whether that is only one thing, or everything the game has to offer. What is so hard to understand? People who like several different types of gameplay can just switch between the stuff they like if they get bored.

But people who only like one or two portions of the game can still move forward with their goals as well.

You keep saying it will be grindy, but that’s only if ANet programs it to be grindy. And if you think it will be grindy no matter what, then you may as well shelve this game, because if ANet can’t get simple content to be non-grindy, why do you think that the challenging/hard content will be any less grindy, exclusive rewards or otherwise?

I mean, the only non-grindy things in the game that I know, whether behind difficult content or otherwise, are the SAB Tribulation Tokens, and the Lidari Mini, as they’re the only things that are 100% guaranteed from their content. Teq, TT, and Fractals, all originally lauded as challenging content, have 0 guaranteed rewards (aside from maybe that stupid spoon that I’ve seen several threads about).

Even in those, you have to do the content over and over again before you get anywhere, short of RNGesus.

So with that in mind, how can you keep believing that challenging/exclusive rewards are somehow going to save the day when almost everything that ANet puts into the game is grindy regardless of difficulty?

Exclusive rewards aren’t going to solve your issues with ANet’s entire reward structure.

phys.7689:

So how do you give rewards for everything, without making all rewards feel worthless,

How do the rewards become worthless?

You keep saying this. What does that actually mean? What is the worth of the rewards? What is their value? How are you gauging these things? How are you determining these things? What set of criteria are you using that renders them worthless/without value?

I see the disconnect.
you look at items as charachter customization primarily. A new armor is like a new face, or hairstyle to you. Its purpose is to achieve a certain look.

But that does not create a rewarding game. I look at some items as being a part of the game structure, a means of incentivizing behaviors, increasing satisfaction, and creating goals for playing the game.

I want people to aim to beat X battle and at the end feel like it served a purpose. I want people to explore a hidden area and come away feeling like the charachter has grown in doing so. I want the content to feel full, and purposeful. Some items a representation of how they played the game and what they achieved. to have a personal value.

Now if items only exist for look customization, then perhaps your path is the way. But if that was the case, they shouldnt actually be giving cosmetics for anything, it should basically all be part of a appearance customizer.
That might be ok, but then they would have to come up with some other system to reward/incentivize/create goals, and people would have to believe it was something cool.

and yes anet could create a grindy horrible reward system with uniques, but they generally seem to make them less grindy if they dont involve multiple economies. Suffice to say if they create a legendary or ascended armor like level of grind while also being challenging, i agree that will be a huge failure of design.

Coulter.2315:

Your fox story is EXACTLY my point, the dedication you showed to want and get that fox means YOUR fox is worth so much more than the ones people bought for 40 tokens.

But it’s not. It’s worth exactly the same as all those other foxes intrinsically. The only thing that makes that fox worth more than anyone else’s fox to me is that it is mine. “This is my fox. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” That would have still held true had I gotten it for 40 tokens as well.

Coulter.2315:

See how the journey makes it worth it, giving the foxes away for free lessened their worth to their owners because they didn’’t have the experience you had to get yours.

There is no way to know that their experiences were any less than mine. I would dare argue they had a better experience than myself. Some of the Tol Barad quests were actually pretty interesting, especially as an engineer with a parachute.

Devata.6589:

In fact, it’s based on both, and one more.

Value of an item (ingame, and irl) is based on rarity, difficulty to obtain (what is linked with rarity) and popularity (demand supply).

And yet, if the item doesn’t aesthetically please me, it’s value is in fact zero (to me). Do you see where I’m going with this yet?

Torolan.5816:

But what about the people that want the item and not the memory associated with getting it? isn´t it a grind for them to make the hard content, despite not wanting to do it, and would have prefered to collect 40 tokens?

We´re players with different measures of things that are fun, not employees that have to make a certain amount of money or get cut. But probably even the most lazy of casuals would want the same items the hardcores have gotten after a long battle and are willing to grind for them with her mouse in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

Would it do the trick if the farmed item is blue and the hardcore one red maybe?

Seriously curious here.

It would, that has been A-nets solution so far as a compromise.
The SAB skins, Achievement skins(for weapons), Luminescent armor and Glorious armor all allow an average player to obtain a version of the item, while preserving the prestige by giving a second iconic version that carries the trophy status.

Before you ask that won’t fly though, I suggested this compromise and was told it wasn’t fair by the equalists because what if someone wants the red one and not the blue one.

Gene Archer.8560:

And yet, if the item doesn’t aesthetically please me, it’s value is in fact zero (to me). Do you see where I’m going with this yet?

That’s the thing that is just its value to you, not its value in the context of the game. You may hate white and black dyes but in the context of the game they are more valuable than say yellow.
I played a game where there was a brown wooden sword, everyone got it at the start of the game, no one used it and it was usually dumped instantly, the games value on it was low even if an individuals value of it was high.
There was also a black wooden sword, it was only obtained through a random drop on a rare spawn in a really high level dungeon, the games value on it was high, even if an individuals value of it was low. As a result several players designed their entire outfits around showing off this sword, where it may not have been a look they would usually use they found a way to get value out of the item. Because of the game structures value on the item not the individuals tastes. (I.E they got enjoyment out of the item not exclusively because of its looks).

Torolan.5816:

But what about the people that want the item and not the memory associated with getting it? isn´t it a grind for them to make the hard content, despite not wanting to do it, and would have prefered to collect 40 tokens?

We´re players with different measures of things that are fun, not employees that have to make a certain amount of money or get cut. But probably even the most lazy of casuals would want the same items the hardcores have gotten after a long battle and are willing to grind for them with her mouse in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

Would it do the trick if the farmed item is blue and the hardcore one red maybe?

Seriously curious here.

sometimes that is good enough.
sab uses that type of system,
another game i loved, phantasy star online, gave player named weapons with hard to get skins (that were usually grindy or random) along with a bit of player customization of the stats (stuff that existed but you might not see on the normal version of that weapon)
visually it wasnt different, but on a personal level it was an awesome less grindy way to get special skins, and made the weapons very personal.

the goal was to beat all levels in the game in under a certain time frame.
you could retry each level for a better time. each level took 3-40 minutes depending on skill and luck. So a person who doesnt play a lot could do it, person who is hardcore could do it, and aimed for lower times.

really quite good reward and content imo.