Guild Wars 2

Fixing the forum page bug.

Zaxares.5419:

@Shiren: It’s likely that Masteries will be earned in a similar fashion to traits now. They are unlocked via a combination of completing story content, achievements, doing specific events, or maybe even via completing certain Collections.

his point, which i agree with if my posts weren’t telling enough, is that even if you need to do specific things to earn mastery points, if you can spend said points on whatever you want, rather than being rewarded a point in a specific mastery for doing a specific task, then there really isn’t much point to it, is there. you’re not “mastering” a language, you’re doing unrelated tasks that will earn you points to spend on “unlock tyria translate”, or hang gliding, or combat skills.

for the masteries to be meaningful, they have to be tied to relevant content: get hang gliding points for doing hang gliding-related stuff.

a somewhat similar comparison would be GW1’s reputation system: you can’t earn norn rep points by doing asura related tasks, that would be silly.

BrunoBRS.5178:

a somewhat similar comparison would be GW1’s reputation system: you can’t earn norn rep points by doing asura related tasks, that would be silly.

Speaking of grind . . .

I wouldn’t be all that surprised if there was some type of grind involved, but said grind will probably be hidden amongst the other types of achievements.

Take the “Kill X Amount of Mordrem” for example. If it’s anything like the Zhaitan’s Bane achievement, we will be easily getting that as we progress along the story and the different areas. The kill count will steadily rise from story mission to story mission, and it will sky rocket in open world events with us tagging everything. Not to mention, if it was already in-game, we would have probably finished in a week or two into farming SW.

Plus, while those achievements are super generic, they can still be fitted into the Lore progression of the different new races. Those races have no trust towards outsiders. In between the gliders and the wrecked Pact ships, we’re literally just weird people falling out of the sky to them. By proving our worth by helping them defend their town/villages by doing certain events and “Killing X amount of Mordrem”, we’re showing that we can be trusted. That means it will be safe for them to open up trade with us and show us their various secrets.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

BrunoBRS.5178:

a somewhat similar comparison would be GW1’s reputation system: you can’t earn norn rep points by doing asura related tasks, that would be silly.

Speaking of grind . . .

yeah, i don’t expect it to be like that, though we could look at its rewards (thematic armor → collections, new utility skills → combat masteries) and the way each reputation was exclusive to doing X or Y things. and the sunspear rep wasn’t bad :P

Shiren.9532:

Masteries wouldn’t be very meaningful if they became generic grinds.

Agreed, but some of your suggestions don’t gate content for very long. If it was merely making it to a location to get a new hang glider skill, we’d get to that new content within the hour instead of a couple of days.

When Mike O’Brien said vertical progression is the answer MMOs turn to to solve a problem, he did not say what that problem was. This is because the problem is a business problem, not a game play problem. The problem he was talking about was players digesting content rapidly, complaining there is nothing to do, leaving the game, and thus not paying the subscription fee (or making gem purchases) any longer. The Mastery System is Arena Net’s answer to this problem. Thus, I suspect that some of the masteries will involve significant amounts of grind.¹ I just hope that the ones that do are in the paths for things like precursors, and not in the paths required to explore the world and learn about its lore.

To be fair, I think this is a better answer to the problem than their previous attempt, which was to churn out low-quality, mini releases every two weeks (i.e., The Living Story).

¹ – By grind I mean an onerous activity that takes a long time to achieve. I do not mean Arena Net’s stated definition.