Guild Wars 2

This is mainly a question intended for the devs. (I know this is a very old topic, and has likely been covered before, but I couldn’t find it on a quick search of the forums. But it’s still relevant.)

What was the reasoning behind gating progression of the Legendary Backpack (or honestly, really anything) behind forcing players to play multiple classes?

I can see the value in the desire to get people to try things out of their comfort zones so that they might find a new class and/or playstyle that they like that they want to then pursue as their main. However, I believe that the design of the achievements as they are now has the potential to be far more harmful than good, especially when regarding more “casual”/non-PvP main players. And certainly, if this is the goal, it should not be pushed in a ranked setting; it should be encouraged in either unranked, or the choice of unranked/ranked (completely up to the player).

Let me explain the problem: in order to get the legendary The Ascension, a player has to have at least 3 professions that they play on in order to complete the “League Professional” meta achievements. They have to win on each of those classes a minimum of 27 times per class (with 1 of the 3 classes only have to win a min of 22 times), spread across the progression of the multiple stages of the Year of the Ascension. Some prefacing: if you absolutely hate PvP, then you will likely just choose to completely opt out of this legendary, so that’s not a big deal; however, if you can/enjoy PvP’ing on even just 1 class, you will potentially make progress in the achievements, and may desire to pursue the legendary. The issue is, if you have your foot in the door (and I’m in this situation, only enjoying/reasonably good at playing on Thief), then you will want to get the legendary. Well, what does that mean? I now have to find 2 other classes, which I know I’m not nearly as good at as my main, and either 1) take the time to really learn the class, and even then I may not end up liking the class, or 2) just brute-force BS’ing my way through a bunch of matches until I wrack up enough wins to finish the achievements and move back to playing on my main class. I find myself in the middle of those to options, and I think most people (especially those who don’t play this game as a PvP game) will be the same, if not leaning towards option 2.

The problem with the design of the achievements as it is is that because you have to do multiple professions, you will be playing sub-optimally at least some of the time whilst you are progressing these achievements. And what makes this so bad is you have to do them in ranked matches, you can’t do them in practice. That means, because you aren’t playing builds you may actually care about and be good at, you will be dragging down your team with you, just because you are trying to progress some achievements (again, all of this is for something which gives prestige in PvP, yes, but also gives advantages/mechanics in PvE; if the legendary was purely an Ascended backpack with a unique skin, then I wouldn’t care so much about getting it). Along with this dragging-down, you and you team will likely drop in Skill Rating.

(Didn’t have enough space in OP to include this, so here’s the rest)

My solution to this would be one or multiple of the following:

• Make the league professional achievements be advance-able in unranked matches. This is not ideal because it’s not as competitive, but it’s also going to keep ranked matches purely for people who have the desire to play at the top of their game (to be fair, the daily achievement needed for progression is also not ideal to have, because people may just brute-force that as well, but at least they can do it on the class they are most comfortable with). I would recommend making it so progressing it via unranked matches gives a limit of 1 match per profession (or per account) per day (this would mean you’d have to run 22-27 days of unranked matches on 2 professions to get all of the achievements completed). Likewise, people may still brute-force it, but because these achievements would only take 27 days to complete, and the 3-ranked-matches-a-day achievements takes 60 days to complete, I think most people won’t feel as pressured to speed through the profession achievements.
• Remove the need to complete multiple professions completely. You could up the number of matches to win on the single profession (say, by two-fold), but that isn’t really a good option to change at this point.
• Change the condition to be play, instead of win. This will at least get people out of the matches in a defined amount of matches, as opposed to potentially being dragged on indefinitely (not sure when they’ll get their wins).
• Make it so you can have a unique Skill Rating per profession. I think this option speaks to a much bigger issue in ranked PvP, really. What this would mean is that each one of your professions could have a tailor-made experience for PvP, based on your skill level with that profession. This would mean if you play poorly on the 2 professions that you just have to brute-force through, you will likely get a lower rating, and face people more on-par with your skill, meaning the class to actually win will be higher, and the chance to drop the skill rating of you and your team-mates will then also go down. Likewise, your high skill on a particular class will not bind you to only playing that class out of fear that playing on any other class will lower your skill rating. Personally, I think the best option would be to have per-profession Skill Rating, but then also having an account skill-rating, which is simply the highest of your profession Skill Ratings. If you want to, you can opt-in to using your account’s skill-rating, as opposed to your profession’s skill rating; doing so will increase the difficulty of the matches, but also will put you at risk of losing the skill rating of your highest profession(s) if you do end up losing.
• Maybe some other options?

And don’t respond that “if you aren’t good at more than 1 class, then don’t play more than that 1; don’t ruin it for others” or anything along those lines. This is an incentivization issue on the part of the devs, and it needs to be corrected on their side. You cannot expect players, even in a game-mode where honest playing is vital, to take responsibility when it’s simply easier not to.

I see no problem in the achievement. It’s very logical. When Ascencion was introduced it was meant as a somewhat prestige PVP back item that you should have some trouble getting. Now it’s just time consuming more than anything. To me it seems you only want to have the Ascension without too much trouble and only by playing one profession and that’s not how Ascension was made to be acquired. It was meant as a PVP back item and to get you should (or even must) be able to play more than one profession in PVP (in this case at least 3). And that’s only a good thing.
I kinda struggled with it too at first, because I needed to play another profession (and then another one) and I only played ranger until then. But then I had to play another profession to get the back piece which I wanted to have. So I started to play warrior and then mesmer as a third profession. And I really liked them also and I am glad that I played them, because mesmer turned out to be so much fun to play I played it exclusively for some time. There’s nothing wrong with the achievement as it encourages you to try other professions and maybe find a new favorite. In the end, achievement is category is called “Year of Ascension”, not “Log in and get Ascension”. It almost took me a year to get it (I didn’t play for a season and a half last year, so yeah there’s that).
Also there are off seasons in which you can play different professions than what you would usually play in ranked, or even play them in unranked during season. If you want Ascension you have to invest some time in it, it won’t just be give to you.

per class MMR would solve it …

Wolfric.9380:

per class MMR would solve it …

You get an upvote for that and…

Sorry to late..we that saw the light in this must let it go.

Its not easier for PvPers to get PvE legendary why it should be the other way around?

Its already a participation trophy i dont see a reason why it should be easier to get.
You dont need to play top level to get a win. Look at some of the names in the ladder lol.

chibi.2537:

It was meant as a PVP back item and to get you should (or even must) be able to play more than one profession in PVP (in this case at least 3). And that’s only a good thing.

I just don’t agree that this is a sound enough justification. The result is you have people who feel like they have to play classes which they may not be their best at, and which may not be the best for the situation that they are in, simply to check off an arbitrary achievement. All other achievements dealing with Ascension can be achieved naturally by simply playing your best and trying to win, all of which can be achieved by playing whatever you are best at or you feel would be the most helpful in that situation.

If, for example (completely artificial), you are perfectly equally skilled at all classes, but find that Dragonhunter works best on all maps but Skyhammer and Khylo, in which case you go for Ranger, then why should you have to cripple yourself, and your team, in order to work on a personal reward goal?

I agree that getting players to find more classes and play styles is a powerful and important thing, but I don’t think that 1) it should affect your entire account’s MMR (which will very likely drag it down if you’re playing a new class and aren’t familiar with it), and 2) it shouldn’t be incentivized to be something that you will only want to explore in ranked matches (which it is currently, because if you play in unranked, you dont get progress for many of the Ascension achievements).

Ideally, you’d have people playing whatever class they feel they can do best on, and you wouldn’t need to have artificial incentives to play on other classes. I think that this is more-or-less the exact same issue that the daily class achievements have. If class swapping makes you a better pvper who wins more, I personally think that should be on you, and not be forced on you, to figure out and make use of. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t have to suffer for it. Whatever makes you personally feel like you do better is what you should do, and there’s already the simple incentive of pips which is enforcing that idea.

Also, because Ascension achievements include the need to go through League Rewards, you will definitely want to focus on doing the achievements during an active league so that you’re getting everything all at once. So the idea that you can play/practice new classes in off-seasons is really not ideal unless you’ve already finished all of the Reward achievements.

I know that The Ascension is supposed to take time investment to get. I don’t want it right away. But I don’t want to feel like I’m being forced to play classes that aren’t being as helpful to the situation as another class could be, simply because I’m supposed to. The grind of all of the other achievements, in my opinion, are enough of a grind, and as it is, it’s not like the class achievements are adding any more length to the grind, it’s simply restricting how you can optimally do the grind by adding more conditions. If they took away the League Professional achievements, it would take almost the exact same amount of time as it does now (except people would likely have better MMR and/or may lose less, so maybe a little faster).

There wasn’t any logic.

ANet just tried to gate it behind more stuff so it was harder to get. But most of those achievements don’t make it harder – just more frustrating.

I think the best competitors are going to have first hand experience with their enemies’ builds. I generally take druids extremely lightly in WvW because I know every single detail of their build within about 3 seconds of encountering them (I use WvW as an example because there is a lot more build diversity there.)

For other professions I have general ideas of what they’re running, but I don’t know with 100% certainty if a passive is going to proc or what runes they’re using and why and whatever else is going on.