"Looking Ahead" : Report Card!

"Looking Ahead" : Report Card!

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Posted by: Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Vincent Von Demetri.1450

I wanted to take a second to do a quick reflection on the content delivered by ANET in regards to Colin Johanson’s post “Looking Ahead : Guild Wars 2 in 2013” on July 18, 2013. Feel free to use this as a place to voice your opinions on the last 6 months of development in Guild Wars 2. I’ve gone ahead and included my ratings of how well the deliverable items have been incorporated so far.

Cited from: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Cited from : https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

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Posted by: Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Living World and the Two-Week Release Schedule (C-)

“Our Living World releases will expand on the promise of what it means to be a continually growing game. In the future, you’ll see a wider array of content and experiences in each release, with a greater focus on permanently expanding content. We’ll go into specifics on the variety of playable content you’ll be receiving as each update approaches, but some of our focuses will include improving our existing world bosses, continuing to update and refine our dungeons and fractals, creating world events with a larger and more permanent impact, and expanding the number of dynamic events across the world.”

New Skills and Traits (D)

“We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds! You will be able to earn these new traits and skills by unlocking them. To go along with this, we’ll expand the content and options to earn skill points to help encourage players to experience different challenges and content throughout the world. These skills and traits will be designed to be balanced with the existing skills/traits we currently have in the game, and will simply compliment and expand the range of abilities and tactics available to each profession. Both WvW and PvE players can acquire skills and traits, and additional means of earning skill points will be addressed for both core content areas.”

Champion Rewards (A-)

Champions in the game will be updated so each will always drop a guaranteed reward box for any player that qualifies for a reward from the boss. This chest will contain things like crafting materials, skill points, unique skins, lodestones, and more. This change will make champions more rewarding, and will make playing in Orr and Southsun Cove (where events can scale up to add champions) more exciting and fruitful for guilds and players joining together in the open world.”

Dungeon Complete Bonus Rewards (B-)

“In order to make playing all of our unique dungeons more rewarding, we’ll give you a bonus gold reward for each dungeon path you complete each day. Coins will be removed from the current bosses (replaced by the champion reward box listed above) to coincide with this bonus payout for completing each path. Completion rewards will be guaranteed, and we’ll vary the amount of gold earned based on difficulty and length of each dungeon path.”

New Crafting Material Rewards (A)

We’ll also add a new set of account-bound crafting materials to the game. You’ll receive these materials as guaranteed rewards once per day per unique location for completing content within a category of gameplay in Guild Wars 2.

Account Magic Find (A+)

You can improve your account magic find through the account achievement reward system and from consumable items found in game. As your magic find increases, it will require more consumables to keep raising it higher. In the near future, we’ll detail the system we’ll use to replace the existing magic find items. Our goal will be to have as little disruption as possible to those who currently own items with a magic find stat on them.”

Salvaging Fine and Masterwork Items (A-)

“Otherwise known as blues and greens, we want to give more reason to care about these item types when they drop. When the account magic find system is implemented, there will be a chance you can acquire account magic find consumables from salvaging both fine and masterwork items.”

Crafting Taken to 500! (A+)

“At 500, crafters will be able to craft ascended weapons and armor. Once you reach 500, a new tier of crafting materials will be available to you; this new tier of materials will be made by combining lower tier materials. This tier is time-constrained, so each item can only be made once per day in order to help give high-level crafters their own economy of items to build and sell that retain their value and rarity.”

Legendary Gear and Precursors (D)

“We aren’t quite ready to go into all the details here, but what I can say is you will see a specific way to build precursor items on your way to a legendary. On top of this, you’ll also see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013. Building your precursor will require a large amount of the new crafting material rewards listed above, 500 in crafting, and likely a combination of other items earned for completing more specific content in the game. In addition, we’ll also improve the functionality of legendaries, allowing you to set their stats when out of combat to any stat combo available, so you don’t need to transmute stat changes for legendaries. Legendary gear will remain with the same tier of stats as ascended gear and will not be made more powerful than other gear, it will simply be slightly more convenient since it will no longer need transmutations to change stats.”

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Posted by: Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Player Roles (C-)

“Something that has developed naturally over time and that we would like to encourage is the definition of roles within WvW. Everyone has likely seen a commander laying out battle plans and then subsequently seen that one thief mucking up those plans. It’s our goal to introduce more systems that encourage play within a wide variety of roles, not just those two. Scouts, siege masters, and defenders are only a sampling of the roles we intend to add to. We think that these are all a vital part of the success of any server in WvW, so we want to reward players who do these tasks so that they feel like their time is properly valued.

Zergs (D)

“Our goal is to continue to encourage organized large groups while giving small, tactical groups the necessary tools to put a dent into larger mobs of less-skilled players. We think that it can be fun to run around in a zerg — but we also think that the game should be about tactical acumen and skill more than sheer numbers. In order to achieve that, we will continue to make tweaks to the scoring system to properly reward smart play and to make it possible for a server to prevail over superior numbers with superior tactics. We will also continue to make changes to siege weapons and introduce new siege weaponry to throw the balance in favor of well-organized groups while retaining the joy of jumping right into things for more casual WvW players.”

Overall : (C-)

I think ANET has done an “okay” job in delivering the content outlined so far. Obviously, there is still time left in the year to make a final and lasting impression on players. As of right now, the PVE content within the game is rather strong, typically seeing what appears to be the most development man-hours. However, the lore of the Living Story is rather lackluster and misses meaningful and purpose in itself. Rewards have been vastly improved as promised, with a greater variety of things to earn and achieve through all areas of the game (Besides sPVP, sorry guys and gals!). It’s awesome to see that players are finding that nearly all the content in the game can reward them in a meaningful and unique way. World vs World and sPVP are probably the weakest points of the game right now. Balancing is far from being kosher, and much of the meta driven in the game is around exploiting of broken mechanics introduced by ANET throughout the development cycle. In addition new skills and traits have not been regularly included, unless you count “1” PVE based healing skill as “skills” (Note the difference in plural).

Recommendation for Improvement :

Draw upon your roots! What Guild Wars 2 needs is a true breath of lore and competitive atmosphere. Guild Wars 1 has a strongly written lore with a vast variety of cohesive content, work with what you have sometimes. In addition, you have writers that develops three fantastic books. Perhaps, develop around the lore built within those books instead of trying to reinvent the wheel? Guild Wars 1 had fantastic PVP content as well, focused around providing a wide array of options to players for their build types and strategies. However, on the opposite end, relentless nerfing and restrictions on classes has shifted Guild Wars 2 from having lots of viable options to continually having less and less. Study what made Guild Wars 1 a success, and Guild Wars 2 will develop from that! Don’t bite off more than you can chew either, this community is harsh because they want quality content. Everyone here would rather see a well finished product months late than something meaningless now. In addition, this means working with your community and being transparent. Your fans will guide you down the path to success, and being stubborn as developers and sure that you know what is best from a “data sheet” might not fully represent the true reality.

These are simply my thoughts, hopefully this sticks somewhere and it gets the proper attention it deserves. I hope that ANET continues to develop what I know can and someday will be an outstanding game.

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Posted by: Shpongle.6025

Shpongle.6025

Need more quaggans.

Are you Shpongled?

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Posted by: Wallace MacBix.2089

Wallace MacBix.2089

To make some shorter comments on your thoughts/posts

I think the LW deserves more than a C-.
We have reoccurring LS’s that can somewhat be considered permanent (dragon bash, holiday festivals, SAB, Zypherite sanctum, and Queen’s Gauntlet). And while I disagree with some of the LS (and by that I mean the whole Teq patch) they still changed (I wouldn’t say improved) the world bosses and have made the past two LS effect the a map in a large way. The invasions also still attack various maps as well.

As for the new skills I say wait for Dec. They’ve stated they don’t want to affect the balance in WvW season 1. So I assume that after it ends we’ll get our new skills/traits. And technically they added the skill point scrolls (and random LS rewards to give skill points).

Personally, I hate the champ rewards (though they did deliver what they said they would). They started the champ trains where many plays can be volatile towards other players who “upset” the rotation. And it was the start of the fast inflation in the game.

I also hate account magic find (but again they did deliver). It’s been a couple of months and I’m still not where I was before the patch in my MF armor, and I still haven’t chosen a new stat combo for those items because I already had my “dungeon/fractal” armor. It was only introduced as a massive gold sink, which was only required because of the previous LS’ massive amount of farming (champ trains, QP, QG, invasions).

Crafting to 500 was another massive sink (any tp interaction is a sink because of the fees). This also made me realize how unbalanced the stat system is (full exotic vs. full ascended can get a +~20% dps increase for zerk stats. Good luck trying to get that improvement out of conditions). I do agree with the time gated mats though (besides, it’s another gold sink for the wealthy/impatient).

I don’t think new Legendaries will happen this year. They may, but devs have stated that if anything is going to be delayed it will be this. So this can most likely be expected early next year. I’m just scared at how much of a gold sink a precursor should be (they could make it very easy and crash the precursor market, because they never intended them to be that expensive or they can make it more of a grind/more expensive than just buying one on the tp).

For player roles, Teq is what drove that home for me. A horrible experience for me, making basically just one set of gear useful (thankfully it wasn’t the standard zerker, though they still did the same amount of damage as soldier’s). As for the WvW component hopefully they rework things for season 2 to make a train not the best way to get things.

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Posted by: Wallace MacBix.2089

Wallace MacBix.2089

I have enjoyed most of the LS updates (I just disagree with account magic find/luck and despise (almost) the entire Teq patch [the x2-x4 increase in hp for the other bosses is not compensated by 2 champ bags, but the new mechanics for the bosses are awesome]). And for the most part they have delivered what they said they would, it’s just a matter if the majority has agreed with how they did it. We’re just waiting on new skills/traits and precursor crafting/new legendaries and ascended armor (joy….) but I think they will be able to keep their words and still provide enjoyable content via the LS. So despite my focusing on the negative here, overall I still feel pretty positive about the past year, I’d upgrade their overall score to a B or so for now and maybe a B+ or A- depending how ascended armor and the new skills/traits are introduced.

I think another QoL improvement (thanks for the account bound infinite tools!) would be to add in the LS reward skins into the hero tab with the other weapon/armor skins. Another nice touch would be to be able to relive our PS and previous LS cut scenes, similar to replay a mission in gw1 or the pool at EotN. I’m also excited to see how else they decide to expand our home instance and any new mini games they think up. I would also love some things from gw1 (heroes and hard mode), but I realize that both of those don’t really fit into the type of game gw2 is.

I do agree that quality is important, and I realize that some people love the things that I hated, that is an opinion after all, but for the most part I enjoy the 2 week cycle because if I don’t like a patch I know another one is right around the corner for me to try. It is a bit annoying that most things leave after 2 weeks, as it doesn’t really give you time to “take a break,” but that is their business model; they can’t make money if we don’t play. Personally, I have enjoyed a lot more the “shorter” LS as of late because I can finish them somewhat quickly and then either move on to something else if I don’t enjoy the LS (and only did it for the meta reward) or continue to play it if I enjoy it.

For some PvP ideas (I never did any gw1 standard PvP) but I loved the asymmetric “defend/assault the fort” (the name escapes me) and the “turtle escort” thing in Jade Quarry was also enjoyable. I do play gw2 PvP, but only when I’m bored/want to mix things up a bit. I think adding new types besides capture/defend points would go a long way to help things feel fresh.

So I guess I would like to see better balance between the stat types. For the classes I’ve played so far I seem to enjoy all of the condi heavy weapons, but I feel sad when I realize that a zerker is going to be doing more damage than me and my contribution is lowered further because of the global condition stack. Or if I want to make a support character my usefulness doesn’t really seem like anything (outside of buffing the zerker). It would be nice if somehow it felt beneficial to not be a pure zerker.

And that was longer than I thought it would be.

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Posted by: lordkrall.7241

lordkrall.7241

I wonder how many of these threads we will see.
We have already had loads of threads about them not adding everything they “promised”.

Can’t people at least wait until the time is up?
They still have 1,5 months which include at least 3 updates left.

Krall Bloodsword – Mesmer
Krall Peterson – Warrior
Piken Square

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Posted by: Wallace MacBix.2089

Wallace MacBix.2089

Oh one last bit I forgot, it would be nice if when designing new content (and looking at older content) that you (the devs) tried to balance the risk/reward/time factors to all try to be in line with each other.

As it stands champ farming is the best way to make money (outside of flipping on the tp) and then dungeon running and then world bosses.

I’d argue that the Teq patch that changed most world bosses, just made champ farming seem even more profitable by comparison. The increased mechanics are awesome! I enjoy that the golem can kill you if you look away for 5 seconds, but I don’t enjoy that it both takes longer to kill him (for marginally better rewards) and there is an arbitrary timer attached to him. I’ve seen kitten fail a bunch of times at off hours, which makes me a bit sad. If I can solo him to ~40% hp in 15min, why can I spend another 10-15 min to kill him myself. I don’t think playing at not peek hours should punish players.

Oh and another thing (more of a gripe/something I hope gets addressed). Was it intended for people to run through and skip most mobs in all dungeons? It’s honestly the main reason I just can’t enjoy running a dungeon.

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Posted by: nekretaal.6485

nekretaal.6485

A more interesting post than simply a grade would be a post translation comparing corporate PR hype to what we actually got.

Examples:

New Skills And Traits: Anet did a balance patch and released a heal skill nobody uses, and you can now get skill points from champion drops

Dungeon Complete Bonus Rewards: Nerf to gold generation

Zergs: They added a sPvP area for roamers to play in the wvw borderlands

Player Roles: This one beats me, I have no idea how they encouraged scouting or defending in WvW

#24 leaderboard rank North America.

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Posted by: Redenaz.8631

Redenaz.8631

I wonder how many of these threads we will see.
We have already had loads of threads about them not adding everything they “promised”.

Can’t people at least wait until the time is up?
They still have 1,5 months which include at least 3 updates left.

This. I mean, sure, there is a lot to say about what we’ve seen so far, and there are some fairly safe bets about what will/will not be seen in the remainder of the year, but if this conversation is going to be framed as a “report card,” with grades given out with a month-and-a-half left in the year…Treating it like a retrospective just feels premature.

So I guess the weirdness is less to do with the discussion itself, than with the way it’s framed in this particular thread. -shrug-

~The Storyteller – Elementalist – Jade Quarry~

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Posted by: Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Vincent Von Demetri.1450

Please recall that a C is average in typical grading systems. I would ask you to reevaluate whether or not the above listed was better than average, average, or below average when framing your discussions. This is big professional grading, not grade school equivalent. Also, keep in mind I am not grading it at all on what the content was like, just how well they have met their quoted phrases so far!

(edited by Vincent Von Demetri.1450)

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Posted by: Theundersigned.4761

Theundersigned.4761

I love your take on the matter. Nice and reasonably unbiased, very clear. Nice, nice, nice. Great idea.

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Posted by: Kimhyuna.1035

Kimhyuna.1035

I would give them a C even if they have 3 months left. The Living Story updates have been terrible lately and most people play the first few days before it becomes dead content. Look at how many people do the new TA path or how many servers actively clear Taco.

Minion

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Posted by: Dragsooth.4071

Dragsooth.4071

I would REALLY like to see some changes to the roles in PvE. You know, like support/damage/control. What happened to that? Suddenly everyone is in zerker gear and running around in a zerg. I want those roles kitten and I want to feel like teamwork and coordination makes a difference.

:3

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Posted by: curlydim.8461

curlydim.8461

“On top of this, you’ll also see new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013.” – https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Ok, I do realise that the 2013 is not yet over. However, the next patch “Fractured” mentions no such implementations. At the same time the patch after that will most likely be a Wintersday one such as last year and in previous GW1 Decembers.

I really hope that they add some new legendary items by the end of the year. Please, please ANet, add them

Much Love,

Dim

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Posted by: lordkrall.7241

lordkrall.7241

Why assume they can’t add stuff with the Wintersday updates?

Krall Bloodsword – Mesmer
Krall Peterson – Warrior
Piken Square

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Posted by: Kaiiku.2917

Kaiiku.2917

Someone data mined precursor hunts, potential recipes, and legendary weapon stories.
Although it may not be in the update coming next week, there’s at least 3 updates before the end of the year (if they keep this up — which they likely will!), so bear in mind that everything can come, but similarly everything may not come, or not fully.

~ Kaiiku Yintro: 80 Human Warrior ~
~ Kira Yintro: 80 Human Mesmer ~
- Yak’s Bend -

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Posted by: curlydim.8461

curlydim.8461

I am not assuming anything

I saw the data mined precursor hunts, however I was referring to their promise of “new legendary weapons and new types of legendary gear in 2013.”.

I do realise they can ninja it in a patch as a surprise. However I was hoping they would add them this upcoming patch. I mean it’s not really a living story one (except the new added fractals, thanks to Kiel), so it made sense for them to add the new legendary stuff now…

Either way I have hopes they will add them by the end of 2013, all I was saying is that it seems unlikely, simply because the next patch will be coming out on November 26th then two weeks later on December 10th and then on December 24th.
I can’t see them not releasing the Wintersday patch on the 10th. Simply because they won’t wait till December 24th.

I just hope they keep their promise and I am being as optimistic as possible (while being a realist).

Please ANet, we’re waiting