Guild Wars 2

I just don’t see the design philosophy behind time gated materials and time gated content (raids). ideas?

It is so the market doesn’t get flooded. Or for people to RUSH through everything, and then complain there’s nothing to do.

I absolutely loathe time gates with a massive hate for more time gates. Everytime I hit another time gate the more I loathe them. I’m just waiting for my wife say she’s done so we can move on to another game because it’s getting full on ridiculous with the gates.

I think timegates are a good way to slow down the wealth gap between players who play alot and players who play casually.

Still don’t get it. Why do we care about slowing things down? Why do we care about “protecting” the market?

bladezero.9470:

Still don’t get it. Why do we care about slowing things down? Why do we care about “protecting” the market?

“We” don’t, unless “we” is the we that does not include you. Developers care about lowering the gap between play-a-lots and play-lesser-amounts and providing players a reason to play the same things over a longer period. Why is this even an issue? Because some players want everything right away and that’s not how MMO’s work."

Every MMO does a time gate / level gate / equipment gate, etc.

bladezero.9470:

Still don’t get it. Why do we care about slowing things down? Why do we care about “protecting” the market?

Imagine if you could run through everything, be able to craft everything near instantly.
You don’t need to wait to do any bosses, they just auto spawn on repeat. Meta event chains, ascended crafting, etc.

What happens then? There is nothing left to look forward to. Nothing to work towards. No reason to continuously play. No reason to log in everyday.

Also with that, the economy goes haywire. Suddenly tons of gold, mats, items. flood the market. Then nothing is worth anything, or costs the sky.

Then at the very extreme, people stop playing. They have thousands of gold, but nothing to buy. Nothing to work towards. Everything has been done. And the game slowly dies.

Time gates are a great and easy way to keep players playing. It’s become almost an industry standard. Even super popular games like Angry Birds, or Candy Crush are time gated. You only have so many lives per day, but you can spend some money and buy more, or wait. But it keeps players playing. That’s the sole purpose of it. And it seems to work rather well.

pdavis.8031:

bladezero.9470:

Still don’t get it. Why do we care about slowing things down? Why do we care about “protecting” the market?

Imagine if you could run through everything, be able to craft everything near instantly.
You don’t need to wait to do any bosses, they just auto spawn on repeat. Meta event chains, ascended crafting, etc.

What happens then? There is nothing left to look forward to. Nothing to work towards. No reason to continuously play. No reason to log in everyday.

Also with that, the economy goes haywire. Suddenly tons of gold, mats, items. flood the market. Then nothing is worth anything, or costs the sky.

Then at the very extreme, people stop playing. They have thousands of gold, but nothing to buy. Nothing to work towards. Everything has been done. And the game slowly dies.

Time gates are a great and easy way to keep players playing. It’s become almost an industry standard. Even super popular games like Angry Birds, or Candy Crush are time gated. You only have so many lives per day, but you can spend some money and buy more, or wait. But it keeps players playing. That’s the sole purpose of it. And it seems to work rather well.

But with time gates, you aren’t working towards anything. You are just waiting for the clock to reset.

Still seems strange to me. It doesn’t really bother me since it doesn’t affect me. I simply don’t craft in Guild Wars 2. But I was surprised to see so many time gated features in HoT. It’s one of the major reasons why I’ve decided not to purchase yet.

tluv.5821:

It is so the market doesn’t get flooded. Or for people to RUSH through everything, and then complain there’s nothing to do.

Markets still get flooded, and people still complain about having nothing to do. Time gates only achieve the slowing down aspect, barely.

It’s because it takes less time to go through content than it does to create it. MMOs make their money from extending play time (either through subscription or impulse purchases from the cash shop, which you need to expose to the players for a longer period of time to trigger), and the easiest way to achieve that is enforced grinding and time gating.

Until someone comes up with tech that allows the game to dynamically spawn its own content or a tool that lets developers produce content faster than it can be consumed, such arbitrary designs will continue to persist.