Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

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Every single thing you posted above points to “I want the game to be played how I want it to be played”. Anet cannot satisfy every single player. And Anet knows well enough not to make it easy mode so every single player can get their max rewards whenever they decide they want it.

Group content with requirements to meet max rewards is a simple concept. Your map needs to finish X amount of events in order to fill the event bar. If you do your part, that’s great. You contributed to the event bar. But if another group fails to cover an event, and you’re 99% to getting T4 when the timer runs out, your whole map only gets T3. I fully understand that it’s frustrating to fail, but realize that in this content, you are not the only player there. You rise and fall together. THIS is how it works, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

You keep going on about fairness and equal effort. That means nothing when you have events that require efforts from different people, that lead to different tiers of rewards. Again, you’re not Entitled to the best rewards, simply because you put in your best effort in group content. When you think about it, what you want is completely unfair to everyone else. If Anet made Easy Mode T4, where anyone could get the max rewards, what would be the purpose of even offering these rewards in the first place? Why not just give everyone cheap keys? Why not just give everyone a Tequatl weapon? Why not just give everyone a Legendary?

You don’t understand why your thinking is flawed. By asking for such a system where everyone could get max rewards because they wanted it, you take away the incentive of completing a challenge. The challenge in this case, is to complete X amount of events within 45 minutes. And note that GW2 is not the only MMO that offers challenges with requirements.

Edit – note that now there’s T5 levels in game. That means you’ll need to rely on other people even more to complete the challenge at hand.

Tiered rewarding is ultimately a great compromise a way to introduces increasing difficulty content with increasing rewards. This denies no one content while giving something to strive towards. To remove it is to deny one group interesting content every release.

Once again, this proves that the greatest challenge Anet can throw at the community has nothing to do with numbers or content.

The greatest challenge is getting players to work together.

The vast majority do not, cannot or will not organize because we have been trained to play this game thinking of ourselves. Log in, load up, enjoy. A lot of content may “require” teams, but most of it you can fly solo. That’s a problem when you push open-world, instance-wide content that demands cooperation.

Coordinate? I’m not a Commander. We need someone or a large guild, because I can’t. No one will listen, anyway, everyone’s in the organized instance. -Everyone else

OrianZeta.1537:

Once again, this proves that the greatest challenge Anet can throw at the community has nothing to do with numbers or content.

The greatest challenge is getting players to work together.

The vast majority do not, cannot or will not organize because we have been trained to play this game thinking of ourselves. Log in, load up, enjoy. A lot of content may “require” teams, but most of it you can fly solo. That’s a problem when you push open-world, instance-wide content that demands cooperation.

Coordinate? I’m not a Commander. We need someone or a large guild, because I can’t. No one will listen, anyway, everyone’s in the organized instance. -Everyone else

This is very true. Anet wanted a game where you could choose to play by yourself, and just join in with other random people in the Open World at their leisure. Now, there are people who expect to be handed high level rewards because they did their part in an event. There’s now a disconnect between events that you can solo and get max rewards, from events that require multiple group all doing their parts to get max rewards.

Every single thing you posted above points to “I want the game to be played how I want it to be played”. Anet cannot satisfy every single player. And Anet knows well enough not to make it easy mode so every single player can get their max rewards whenever they decide they want it.

Agreed, which is why they shouldn’t make all the new content revolve around these “get on the right map or you’re screwed” meta mechanics.

You keep going on about fairness and equal effort. That means nothing when you have events that require efforts from different people, that lead to different tiers of rewards. Again, you’re not Entitled to the best rewards, simply because you put in your best effort in group content. When you think about it, what you want is completely unfair to everyone else. If Anet made Easy Mode T4, where anyone could get the max rewards, what would be the purpose of even offering these rewards in the first place? Why not just give everyone cheap keys? Why not just give everyone a Tequatl weapon? Why not just give everyone a Legendary?

Well? Why not? So long as everyone puts forth the effort, why shouldn’t they be rewarded fairly for it?

You don’t understand why your thinking is flawed. By asking for such a system where everyone could get max rewards because they wanted it, you take away the incentive of completing a challenge.

You’d be completing the same challenges either way. Nobody’s talking about reducing the challenges you have to complete to receive the reward. All I’ve been talking about is reducing the RNG aspect of it, of making it so that if you put in the effort, if you succeed, you get the reward, and you aren’t screwed over by ending up on a map where the other players aren’t as interested in the meta as you are.

The challenge in this case, is to complete X amount of events within 45 minutes.

If they did that, then I would be fine with it, so long as it was reasonable. They launch seven event chains over the course of 40 minutes. If the meta were "YOU complete 3 events for T2, 5 for T3, and 7 for T4, then that’d be fine by me. That’s something achievable regardless of the map you end up on. The fact that the entire map needs to complete, what is it, 15-20 events over that time frame makes it impossible to do unless you end up on a map where multiple coordinated groups are in action.

Edit – note that now there’s T5 levels in game. That means you’ll need to rely on other people even more to complete the challenge at hand.

EXACTLY!

Tiered rewarding is ultimately a great compromise a way to introduces increasing difficulty content with increasing rewards. This denies no one content while giving something to strive towards. To remove it is to deny one group interesting content every release.

Setting goals if great. Scaling rewards based on meeting those goals is not. If they wanted to allow you to get up to T10 or whatever, that alone I wouldn’t care, so long as the rewards were all identical. If you had some uber tight guild and you wanted to push the bar up to the absolute max, getting a perfect score on every event possible and pushing it up to T6, or T8, or whatever that would end up being, so you could say “We got T8, look how great we are!” then that’s fine, let’s do that, but when they put a higher quality and/or quantity of rewards behind that accomplishment then I do not feel it should be an “exclusive” thing, it should be something any pick-up map should be able to achieve, and if not, then they need better tools for allowing players to effortlessly reach the maps that are capable of achieving those goals.

Coordinate? I’m not a Commander. We need someone or a large guild, because I can’t. No one will listen, anyway, everyone’s in the organized instance. -Everyone else

Another part of the problem here is that these events tend to be timed, and on a fixed schedule. Dry Top starts at XX:00, and the challenge ends at XX:40, always. This means that if you start playing at XX:15, you can’t likely push the event to T4. If you start at XX:00 but it takes you a while to whip everyone into shape, then you aren’t likely to get to T4. It’s possible to recover and get a T4 run with a few early gaffes, but it’s not easy. I haven’t even tried a T5 run, who knows how ridiculous the requirements for that will be (I hope it’s just a matter of factoring in events from the new region that are more rewarding). Anyways, my point is, it’s not a very forgiving system. If you try and still fail, then you waste an hour’s effort. I don’t have all that many hours in my day to be playing GW2, I don’t want ANY of them to be wasted, especially not when I know what I’m doing and am doing all that I’m capable of to make a success of it.

This is very true. Anet wanted a game where you could choose to play by yourself, and just join in with other random people in the Open World at their leisure. Now, there are people who expect to be handed high level rewards because they did their part in an event. There’s now a disconnect between events that you can solo and get max rewards, from events that require multiple group all doing their parts to get max rewards.

Exactly. You can’t take one game and switch it for another mid-stream. This is not the game that people signed up to play.

I could quote the manifesto (“it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun”) and claim that it does make us spend those hours.

But I won’t.

Because in Dry Top, we’re not preparing to have fun, we’re just preparing to do utterly trivial events more efficiently.

Ohoni.6057:

This is very true. Anet wanted a game where you could choose to play by yourself, and just join in with other random people in the Open World at their leisure. Now, there are people who expect to be handed high level rewards because they did their part in an event. There’s now a disconnect between events that you can solo and get max rewards, from events that require multiple group all doing their parts to get max rewards.

Exactly. You can’t take one game and switch it for another mid-stream. This is not the game that people signed up to play.

But it’s still part of the game. You are one of the players wants to solo everything. That’s fine. In fact, you can still solo everything without asking for anyone’s help, save for events like Arah to end your Personal Story.

But there’s another type of player in the same MMO you’re playing. These are the group players, who can coordinate and succeed on difficult challenges. You are most welcome to join these players, as this is an Open World game. Don’t mistake that for being deserving of the max rewards for participating a group event.

Dry Top T4/T5. CoF entrance unlocking. The rewards are given map wide, so any player on that map can benefit. This is intended. And realize that not all content rewards are like this. It’s not mandatory for you to get T4/T5 rewards. This is a bonus for people putting in the efforts to succeed as a group. If your group doesn’t succeed, you’re not more important than the other 10, 20, or 50 people on the same map as you. That means you don’t deserve to access the top rewards of group content, even if your efforts may (or may not) have been better than all the rest of the players.

Bottom line, if you want the max rewards, set up the map’s group yourself, or taxi into a map that other players have coordinated. And by the way, if you do decide to set up a map yourself, and other players won’t listen to you, you can’t be mad at them. They’re not required to help you, because they want to play the game how they want to play.

But it’s still part of the game. You are one of the players wants to solo everything. That’s fine. In fact, you can still solo everything without asking for anyone’s help, save for events like Arah to end your Personal Story.

/sigh. Four pages in and you still don’t actually read anything. I’ve said time and time and time and time again that I have no interest in soloing in this game. I just want to be able to jump in and play with other people, without having to be in a party, or a guild, or pre-organizing, or joining in on a map. If I wanted to do any of those things I would be playing WoW, who by all accounts do those things better. Instead I play GW2, and LOVE GW2, because it is a game that allows me to play with other people without the typical MMO hassles and drama. But the new content just keeps getting further and further away from that.

Dry Top T4/T5. CoF entrance unlocking. The rewards are given map wide, so any player on that map can benefit. This is intended. And realize that not all content rewards are like this. It’s not mandatory for you to get T4/T5 rewards.

Nu-Teq, Marionette, Triple Wurm, LA events, Blitz, Dry Top, it seems like an awful lot of the new content over the past year, particularly the most rewarding stuff, has been the “get the right map or you’re screwed” meta stuff. Tell me, what content have they added over the past year that you can do with whatever random pick-up group that you end up in, and that is as rewarding as that stuff?

Ohoni.6057:

But it’s still part of the game. You are one of the players wants to solo everything. That’s fine. In fact, you can still solo everything without asking for anyone’s help, save for events like Arah to end your Personal Story.

/sigh. Four pages in and you still don’t actually read anything. I’ve said time and time and time and time again that I have no interest in soloing in this game. I just want to be able to jump in and play with other people, without having to be in a party, or a guild, or pre-organizing, or joining in on a map. If I wanted to do any of those things I would be playing WoW, who by all accounts do those things better. Instead I play GW2, and LOVE GW2, because it is a game that allows me to play with other people without the typical MMO hassles and drama. But the new content just keeps getting further and further away from that.

Dry Top T4/T5. CoF entrance unlocking. The rewards are given map wide, so any player on that map can benefit. This is intended. And realize that not all content rewards are like this. It’s not mandatory for you to get T4/T5 rewards.

Nu-Teq, Marionette, Triple Wurm, LA events, Blitz, Dry Top, it seems like an awful lot of the new content over the past year, particularly the most rewarding stuff, has been the “get the right map or you’re screwed” meta stuff. Tell me, what content have they added over the past year that you can do with whatever random pick-up group that you end up in, and that is as rewarding as that stuff?

I think you don’t understand your own arguments. You are, in essence, a solo player. Why? Because you don’t have a group. You, as a solo player, want to join my group so that you can get max rewards. Nothing wrong with this idea. But now, as a solo player, you feel you’re Entitled to the max rewards, simply because you did the content. If my group fails, the map fails. You, on the other hand, want Anet to reward you because you completed 1 out of 5 requirements, thus fulfilling your part. This is where you’re wrong in your thinking. Solo content grants solo rewards. Group content grants group rewards. You don’t get to enjoy the group rewards if the “group” didn’t succeed.

As for your other argument, you want to know what content Anet added for you solo players? Try looking at the Living Story. You get rewarded based on your completion of the story. You want better rewards? Take up the challenge Anet provides to you and succeed at them. And realize that if you take up these challenges, and they require group effort, you better find yourself a group.

I’ll repeat this again. You’re not Entitled to the best rewards, simply because you feel you deserve them. You don’t get the Marionette chest if your map doesn’t complete all phases. You don’t get the Wurm chest if your map doesn’t complete all three heads. And you don’t get T4/T5 Dry Top, if your map doesn’t complete the required amount of events in the 45 min. timer. Challenges are meant to be hard, and rewards a given based on the level of challenge you complete. Anet will never make an Easy Mode button for a lot of valid reasons.

I think you don’t understand your own arguments. You are, in essence, a solo player. Why? Because you don’t have a group. You, as a solo player, want to join my group so that you can get max rewards.

I don’t want to join your group. I want to play with other players. If you happen to be mingled in with those other players, then I’m happy to have you along with MY group, but it’s not your group just because you’re in it. If you aren’t there, I won’t miss you.

This is where you’re wrong in your thinking. Solo content grants solo rewards. Group content grants group rewards. You don’t get to enjoy the group rewards if the “group” didn’t succeed.

Which goes back to my argument that if they keep adding this sort of content, they need to do a better job of getting players into success-capable groups without the current map switching hassles and pre-planning. I really don’t mind situations that require a group to succeed as a whole, so long as these things coordinate themselves. The pre-nu-Teq world bosses are an excellent example of them doing this right.

As for your other argument, you want to know what content Anet added for you solo players? Try looking at the Living Story. You get rewarded based on your completion of the story.

There are two reasons that is not a valid response to anything I’ve said. First, the living story content is SOLO content, and I’ve repeatedly told you that I have no interest in SOLO content. If you can explain to me how I can do the livign story content with a collection of 10-15 other players who happen to be around doing that content when I am, then I’ll conceed that point, but so far every time I’ve gone into a living story chapter I’ve been alone (unless I grouped up beforehand), and if I wanted to play alone then I’d play a single player game, or if I wanted a pre-made group I’d play WoW.

Second, the rewards just aren’t comparable at all. You can only get them ONCE, no matter how many times you run the story, the mobs don’t drop ANY loot, you get more loot by running a single T4 run than you do by doing every chapter of the living story, and you can do T4 runs dozens of times. It’s preposterous that you would actually suggest it as an alternative.

I’ll repeat this again. You’re not Entitled to the best rewards, simply because you feel you deserve them. You don’t get the Marionette chest if your map doesn’t complete all phases. You don’t get the Wurm chest if your map doesn’t complete all three heads. And you don’t get T4/T5 Dry Top, if your map doesn’t complete the required amount of events in the 45 min. timer. Challenges are meant to be hard, and rewards a given based on the level of challenge you complete. Anet will never make an Easy Mode button for a lot of valid reasons.

Again, I’m not looking for “easy” anything. I’m willing to put forth just as much effort and require just as much skill as anyone. You seem to be the one advocating an “easy” button by using a guild or something to auto-place you into a T4 map where you can just coast along and still get way more rewards than anyone trying their heart out on a T2 map. I really wish you’d drop the condescension.

Ohoni.6057:

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You want an Easy Mode by telling Anet to put you on a map that’s destined to succeed. You are a solo player looking to complete group content. Because you don’t have a group of your own, you’re forced to join an existing one. This is one of the requirements when attempting a challenge where you need to coordinate (to some degree) different events happening at the same time. Your Easy Mode idea is that the map coordinates itself. No. Players take existing mechanics and events on on the map, and coordinates it themselves. You are not Entitled to being a part of this group just because you want it. Just as you’re not Entitled to joining a coordinated group that aims to beat the Marionette or the Great Wurm.

As to your idea that rewards aren’t balanced. Why do you think there are different tiers, or levels of reward? They’re not the same, because you’re granted better rewards with more success. At the World Cup, does Brazil get a Gold medal because Germany got one? Or why doesn’t FIFA make it easier for the USA to have a “success-capable” team? No. These are challenges. So if you fail at a challenge, you get rewarded at whatever level you succeeded up to.

You want an Easy Mode by telling Anet to put you on a map that’s destined to succeed.

Yes. I don’t think it’s reasonable for Anet to put me on a map that’s destined to fail. Why would you? Where is the fun in that?

Just as you’re not Entitled to joining a coordinated group that aims to beat the Marionette or the Great Wurm.

Then they need to fix the content until it does. They managed this just fine with the launch world bosses and events. They just need to make more.

As to your idea that rewards aren’t balanced. Why do you think there are different tiers, or levels of reward? They’re not the same, because you’re granted better rewards with more success.

But again, you say “you should not expect to get the top tier just because YOU do everything right, because it’s a group event.” Fine. But then you say “you should not expect the same personal reward for low tiers, because you did not do as well as high tiers.” These concepts are in opposition. You should not be personally rewarded for the achievements of your map as a whole, nor should you be personally punished for the failure of your map. If it’s purely for bragging rights, then fine, let the tiers be a map thing. If it’s about personal TAKE HOME returns, then that should be based on your own participation, like bronze/silver/gold rewards in a standard event.

If cannot possibly be considered fair to offer personal rewards that have almost nothing to do with your personal impact on the event.

At the World Cup, does Brazil get a Gold medal because Germany got one? Or why doesn’t FIFA make it easier for the USA to have a “success-capable” team? No. These are challenges. So if you fail at a challenge, you get rewarded at whatever level you succeeded up to.

And yet, each player’s salary is based on how well he did. You can bet that when it comes time to renegotiate salary, the player on Germany’s team that did nothing useful will be a lot lower than the player on Brazil’s team that. . . well came close to the goal or whatever. I don’t mind if the T5 people get a fancy medal, so long as the loot I pocket is the same as anyone on that map who accomplished as much as I did.