Guild Wars 2

The idea of passive traits for WvW had me considering spending far more time in the battlegrounds than I currently do. Finding out that they are character bound undoes all of that.

I get that the point of making it character rather than account bound is to make the game more about character progression, since it doesn’t feel much like an RPG, but all it’ll really do is punish the people who like to play a variety of classes.

For those saying that those wishing it to be account bound are just lazy, let me put it this way: If someone puts the same amount of time playing several characters as someone who just plays one character, they get a lot less out of it than the person playing one character. You could say that it’s the same for leveling and gearing up, but those are relatively quick processes (at least before Ascended, but that is another matter) compared to what should be end game, long-term progression. This inequality can be avoided with account bound progression, which makes both playstyles viable.

If the developers want to give more of a sense of character progression in the game, this seems like a really lazy way to go about it. It also appears to me to be quite misplaced to be putting this kind of character-based progression in a game mode where people like to focus on playing different classes and competing against other players, and frankly aren’t all that interested in a story.

There’s legitimate reasons to make the commander icon character bound, but the WvW progression? I guess if the point is to make this game mode more for the PvE player than the WvW player. We thought we were going to get something nice, but I’m guessing we’re just getting thrown under the bus again.

Habib Loew.6239:

WvW ranks & abilities are character based. The best way to think of this system is as alternative/extended character progression.

I have now seen the same reply spammed here many times. Yet, Anet fails to give us any real reason why the WvWvW ranks and abilities should be character based.

1. How would it hurt the game if the the WvWvW progression would be account based?
2. What kind of possible imbalance would occur from having WvWvW progression made account based?

My guess is that most players have just 1-2 main characters and their alts are very low level characters, which are not used in WvWvW anycase.

This shouldn’t be account bound or character bound. It shouldn’t be there at all.

GW gameplay was always about rewarding people for clever play, not for time spent in game. Or at least, so I was told. This is yet another step far away from that mindset, and one that will push me further away from wvw (and probably the game altogether) rather than drag me into it.

On top of that, I play every profession depending on mood of the day and what’s needed at the moment (as of now, 6/8 are lvl 80). Which there will now be a game mechanic to discourage me from doing.

Bleh.

I’ll wait and see how this plays out. I hope it doesn’t encourage me limit myself to one class in wvw.

Slamz.5376:

Usual MMORPG developer thinking:
“Let’s make this character bound so that our players can have fun developing many characters through this system.”

Actual player thinking:
“I’m bored of this class. I think I’ll level up something new. Wait. It’s going to take me 6 months now to get to where my main is and while I’m doing this my main is going to fall behind. That’s not fun and I’m tired of my main. I quit.”

Every.
Game.
Ever.

This, every time. Whatever happened to powerleveling a char to max in 4-8 hours? Ugh.

Everything should be account bound it is just plain stupid that this is character bound. By leaving this character bound they have basically ruined WvW. How so? WvW is a place where Guilds can utilize tactics/groups/professions and versatility is so important for taking over the maps. If the Guild needs Mesmers, Frontliners (Guard/Warr) or Elementalists for swirls they can ask their guildies to swap to the professions they need. People should not be punished for be versatile in a setting where versatility is the most important. Let PvP be character, bound, but in WvW is a completely different beast. The funny part is you can spot the people that don’t run in a guild or who are not team players because if they were team players they too would be asking for account bound. WvW is the ultimate team play, if you don’t like team play gtfo. Even a pug can be team oriented so I’m talking about non-team minded people.

To add insult to injury are we supposed to abandon any profession that isn’t “finished” just so we don’t fall behind. Say goodbye to the Engineer & Ranger. Their populations are nearly going extinct and this would be the end of them.

Either make it account bound or don’t implement it at all.

Every time I read something about the march patch, Im closer and closer to quit the game.

Trikki.5803:

I think this will be a true test to whether Anet listen to the community or not.

This patch will absolutely make or break my decision to stick with this game long term.

Pretty much.

Nuzt.7894:

When did players get so lazy that they expect everything to be account wide, or retroactive.

Lazy huh? I’m sorry most of us that want account bound have real lives outside of the game and have a job, relationships, kids, or etc. So yes lazy indeed. It’s lazy people like you that can’t post a concrete argument for character bound.

Why would WvW progress be characterbound? It’s 1 account, 1 player, it should show the player’s progress and skill/ranking, not the character. I honestly couldn’t care less about which character is what rank, I’m more interested in WHO is what rank.

2 different games obviously, but hopefully a good analogy: It would be like in League of Legends where your level and/or rank is determined by which champion you play….

Remember, this is ranking, not character levels. These are 2 completely different ways of showing someone’s progression and IMO it should be treated this way. Because now it just looks like another leveling system to me. A way to increase the level cap without actually increasing it. It just makes the ranking system less interesting and less valuable. Why would anyone care what rank they are when they will have 8 different ranks if they play on different characters?

Goloith.6349:

Nuzt.7894:

When did players get so lazy that they expect everything to be account wide, or retroactive.

Lazy huh? I’m sorry most of us that want account bound have real lives outside of the game and have a job, relationships, kids, or etc. So yes lazy indeed. It’s lazy people like you that can’t post a concrete argument for character bound.

Nuzt also forgot that ArenaNet’s marketing strategy was “no more grinding” and “no wasting player’s time” on whatever, etc etc etc. The only thing I noticed where they kept their word is the leveling curve. (and the questing system, but we’re not talking about that).

Still the best MMO out there imo, but that’s because I find MMORPG’s in general utter ****.

Based on Habib’s comment in that interview, it seems like the new WvW specializations will be character based by necessity, not artificial game length via addition of grind per character.

What will make the difference to me is how deep the specialization goes. If it is just a buch of minor % resists and there is no consequence to choosing one spec over another, then farming this “world exp” on multiple characters will feel like a real grind because they are all similar anyway. I’m hoping that each character’s spec will feel sufficiently unique so that large groups can begin to assign sub-roles beyond the character’s profession.

Just to give an example of what I’m thinking: strike teams will want to specialize in abilities to combat guards and transport supply, while zerg players will specialize in supply capacity and combat vs. siege on walls. What I’m afraid will happen is that characters will have access to all of these perks/abilities despite the ones you actively slot, creating an identical grind for every single character.

Monsoon.2589:

…

Just because there is no monthly fee doesn’t mean that whatever they do to the game is alright. That’s what the forums are here for, for feedback. Maybe they’ve already talked about this during their meetings, but maybe they haven’t and this is new insight to them. You never know, and that’s why I post my opinion.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, which means that people will never completely agree on something, same goes with this. To me it seems like quite the opposite of what they’ve been advertising for years before the game came out.

I just want to remind people of Colin’s quote from the GW2 manifesto “I swung a sword, I swung a sword again, heeey I swung it again, that’s great”. The same sarcasm/principle applies to this. “I ranked up on this char, I ranked up again on that char, heeey I ranked up again, that’s great”.

Ofcourse we don’t know all the details, but from the little info we have, to me, it just looks like an alternative leveling system to keep people grinding and bored for life. It takes the special out of it. Like I said, I don’t see how people would eventually care about what rank they are if they have 8 different ranks. Maybe I’m wrong, but even so, I think they should think about it, if they haven’t already.

We’ll see how it turns out.

So you all think char bound wvw progression is crap? So people can come in rank up any char and still have the same ability’s at lvl 1 as your lvl 80? that’s wrong! I surely dont want to see a lvl 1 on siege fully buffed doing the same crap and damage as a lvl 80 fully buffed. Char bound ability’s is the way to go for wvw.

This would of been better as account bound. People want to play on all of their characters. Not just one.

Vistal.2906:

So you all think char bound wvw progression is crap? So people can come in rank up any char and still have the same ability’s at lvl 1 as your lvl 80? that’s wrong! I surely dont want to see a lvl 1 on siege fully buffed doing the same crap and damage as a lvl 80 fully buffed. Char bound ability’s is the way to go for wvw.

What?

We’re not talking about characterlevels. That obviously is already in the game and doesn’t need any changing. This is the ranking system we’re talking about. I don’t see how this will or should affect your characterlevels and which abilities you can use….

Example: In sPvP we’re all lvl 80, but let’s pretend that you would have to level up there too. While playing spvp you also have a scoreboard (if you press B key) which shows how many points you have gathered and what place you are on your team (got the most points? then you’re #1). I don’t see how THAT and characterlevels have anything to do with eachother.

I don’t know what exactly this ranking will be about, can’t find a lot (or any) info about it on the gw2 site. But when I hear ranking, I think about some sort of leaderboard showing how “skilled” a player is. There are enough characterbound things in the game, levels, map completion and I can go on. Where is the feature that shows the account progression? You could say these are the “achievements”, but only you can see that, and nobody cares which achievements you have.

Monsoon.2589:

I think people are just knee jerk reacting without thinking this through.

Quite the contrary, the last MMO I played was Rift, they also had a level cap progression system which was character bound, guess what the majority of people did not like that it was character bound, because it put them off playing alts.

And guess what, the devs at Rift changed it to account bound (with a cost for switching the points between characters), people get to play alts, game got a little gold sink.

Unless this progression is relatively quick to achieve (unlikely) then it will have the same effect, it will put many people off playing alts, just another example of how this game fails to live up to what it was sold it on.

Monsoon.2589:

What people do not realize is that those apply to everybody not just your 5 alts.

It´s not okay because it´s the same for everyone. That´s like saying that it´s okay to get enslaved by robots because hey, atleast it´s happening to everyone else too.

Monsoon.2589:

I think people are just knee jerk reacting without thinking this through. You do not pay a monthly subscription so that it is going to take time to level in the ladders and obtain the titles and ranking is irrelevant in the sense that no matter what the slope is some people will always complain it is too hard.

It´s not irrelevant. If something comes in the way of your enjoyment, the thing you bought this game for, it´s far from irrelevant. We shouldn´t need to work to enjoy our game. We want to change character when we get bored of our old one…. but NO, apparently you need to work first for the things you already had.

Habib Loew.6239:

WvW ranks & abilities are character based. The best way to think of this system is as alternative/extended character progression.

Seriously?! Why the kitten would we care about them then? I like to play ALL of my characters. Why do you need to get all that kitten characterbound again?
Lets see what sucks:
- Leveling characters up to 80 every time!! YAYYYY! (T-T)
I have leveled 4 characters to level 80 and let me tell you… it stops getting exciting from level 30. You can’t play dungeons because nobody wants low levels. You can’t play World vs. World cause you are about as powerful as an ant to an elephant.

- Karma soulbound! Great idea!!! Oh wait, I have 100k karma on this character, but I need to gear up my other character. Buys armour, oh it’s SOULBOUND?! Who invented such a stupid thing?

- Skill points. Need to farm them for the legendaries? Soulbound!

- Nice I finally have tier 3 cultural. Now I’m going to wear that whenever I play.
<Plays other character> What?! Can’t use it, unless I buy 6 fine transmutation stones, get them all to a level 1 item and then get that back to my actual low character’s level with another 6 basic transmutation stones?

And so on… Anet this is TERRIBLE

Slamz.5376:

Usual MMORPG developer thinking:
“Let’s make this character bound so that our players can have fun developing many characters through this system.”

Actual player thinking:
“I’m bored of this class. I think I’ll level up something new. Wait. It’s going to take me 6 months now to get to where my main is and while I’m doing this my main is going to fall behind. That’s not fun and I’m tired of my main. I quit.”

Every.
Game.
Ever.

Exactly. I have been feeling about quitting very often, cause of all of Anets stupid ‘playerfriendly’ ideas. Who’s going with me to Elder Scrolls Online?

Doesn’t this system even further segregate the game between WvWers, Spvpers and PvEers? And yea, character bound is unfriendly to alts.

Rewarding WvW activity is a good thing. Doing it in a way that widens the gap between experienced WvW’ers and non-experienced WvW’ers isn’t, because it discourages new players. NB: this doesn’t sound like it’s rewarding better play, only that it’s buffing character’s based on tenure.

We already have this problem with Fractals: the longer Fractal progression was around, the harder it was for new players to even start in Fractals. In the end ANet had to patch that, and even then there’ still a gap.

When you do this ANet, make sure the effect is minor, not discouraging for new characters.

From the preview screenshot, looks less like it’s about specialization and more like rack up the points so that you can spend them. Disappointing, considering that the only defense of character bound world XP in this thread has been ad hominem (“people who want account bound are carebears”) and ad verecundiam (“let Arena Net decide what’s right”) along with a few peculiar arguments that people should be discouraged from playing their alts.

i prefer the character bound XP. anet is 100% right about this one. And i think its particularly great for people that play lots of alts like myself. adds more sense of progression to the play which is important. you loose that by making it account bound. every character has the same abilities, you pick flame ram mastery and you are stuck with it, great when going with your war, sucks when playing as a squishy thief. Or they make the points easily refundable in which case it just becomes a case of – i play X hours i get X% more powerful with every char, just pick at what, based on whatever i need at that moment. Not very rewarding imo. This way you get to pick how to build each character based on how you want to play him or what your group needs (i would still like the ability to refund, but it should have a price).
Char-bound has a better “feel” and is more fun overall. You wouldnt know it reading the forums, but i think the vast majority prefers this mode over account. But as with everything the negative crowd is always louder.

This is what i like more. Some people would prefer it to be account-bound, they can make valid arguments for it and there certainly are advantages to account-wide system. But you cant have it both ways, you have to pick one and character bound is imo better for the majority of the players and for the game overall.

Good call on making it character bound. The whole system is a great addition to www and even better, the culling will be gone. Cant wait for the update to go live. great job

I’m waiting patiently Anet to see if you’re going to keep me for another few months or if I throw my money elsewhere, I hope you don’t let me down.

Works for those of us that play a main. Alt lovers will have their work cut out for them.

Let’s hope they don’t mess up your main toon with a bad patch and ruin all your progress.

I look at this as a bonus. Its nice to get but shouldn’t dictate what you play.

It’s not that it’s unfriendly to alts, I think it’s unfriendly to those of us that play solely in WvW guilds. I have seven 80s myself, five of which are geared and traited for WvW specifically, (the other two are for farming) some have more than one exotic set depending on which build I need to run.

For me I’m worried about how long it takes to get ranks for these abilities, I either roam solo or play in my guild group. We don’t really go for the whole banging our heads against walls thing, preferring the open field fights. Will this system reward solo play? Will this system require me to join the Zerg in my guilds off hours? Arghh.

There is just too many questions until we see it in action! I’m so impatient but scared to get my hopes up at all. I just hope I don’t have to change the way I play in order to keep up with the zerglings.

If the screenshot showing abilities was all you got, which is what it looks like from the bar on the right, there would only be one that is worthwhile. (Supply capacity.) The damage from/against guards is completely useless. Siege bunker and Siege might would have to be on the order of a 25-50% bonus to be equal, although supply capacity would become more powerful as the week went on.

Gee whats better, +10% damage or an extra treb?

The other abilities are good in combination, but everyone needs supply capacity and MAYBE bunker. Only the guy on the siege needs +siege.

It’s not really the end of the world for using alts since there’s probably only one ability you need. (Albeit the one that costs the most points per the screenshot.)

To think i thought the patch would bring players back to wvw. The fact these are NOT retro 7 months after launch is very bad, but a character bound reward system is just an insult this late. Developer neglect and lack of rewards drove many of us away from wvw to pve. In pve we were encouraged to create alts in order to not be attacked by the games harsh DR. Now in order to be on equal ground with opposing players i will be forced to play 1 character or risk falling to far behind in ranks to be effective. I can see it now…
ZZ tell you," can you log on your ele all of ours logged for the night and we need fire fields."
you tell ZZ, “no my ele is only rank 10 she will die to fast not enough points in bunker yet.”

Worse yet large wvw will require players to designate a “main” and they will only recruiting “x-class min rank-x.” The account bound part of this new reward/progress system is just bad and needs rethought A-Net. It punishes alt-aholics and is going to later create another obstacle to discourage new players from entering wvw at all. I am having a very hard time seeing what you are trying to accomplish with this new system.

From the new image on the site, it seems that each borderlands has specific things as well. Now question is will these reset every week or carry on and the server name change?

I agree that thre should be some account bound achievements and some character bound ones. I play WvW 99% of the time and sometimes use other characters. This system will force people to play on just one character. I think this is unfair really because if they or the guild needs more of one profession they have to start all over again, for smaller guilds this will put them at a disadvantage whilst larger guilds will have plenty of each.

1 more quick comment on zerging and guild size.
Do you think it will be easier to bring in an under rewarded/ranked playing into your 5 man team or your zerg ball? When this drops it might not encourage zerging but later zerging will be the only way a new character will be able to rank up while not getting wtfpwned by the higher ranks.

Habib Loew.6239:

WvW ranks & abilities are character based. The best way to think of this system is as alternative/extended character progression.

Please make it account bound. Think of this system as player progression.

Do you seriously want me to play just one character on my Account? Then you should’ve said so from the beginning and only provide me with one Character slot.
Really characterbound? Four full equipped lvl 80s for nothing in WvW? “Progress” of 7 months for nothing?
Got to be kidding me.
It’s just the same as in GW1 when you introduced the HoM rewards.
We have alts, we want to play them, we have made progress on ALL of them, we want to be versatile, we want to relogg on a mesmer when it is needed, we want to defend with a ranger/engineer when we don’t roam with a thief or zerg with a warrior/guardian, we want to provide buffs and the next day we want to kill characters running around solo … why take that from us?

Wow… definitely didn’t read this, or I wouldn’t have been excited about it.

Apparently “alt friendly” to ANet means you get to earn everything again on your alts. Have all 8 classes? Enjoy earning everything 7 extra times.

Let’s say I play 4 times as much WvW as someone else, but I play on 8 characters… why is it that they should have more of these WXP bonuses than I do? I agree with one of the previous posters in that I wish ANet would have just said “very few things are account bound, so just play the one character because we’ll punish you for having more.”

Can’t wait to farm ~1200+ ranks on all my characters for +5 supplies.

This is pretty dumb.

Victory.2879:

snip.

Bless this post.

To put things in perspective. I can do fractals on character A and the Ascended Gear i get i can give to character B. Even if B has never, ever, set foot in a Fractal. My progression into Fractals on character A isnt meaningless can be a use to help my other characters without having to go through the grind.

And then Dungeons. Not only can i simply take my best geared character A and use the tokens i get to buy gear for character B, that again hasnt been anywhere near the trouble.
But if i run the dungeon for the first time today on A i get a daily bonus. If i run it again on B, I GET THE DAILY BONUS AGAIN. Having multiple characters not only doesnt hinder my progression by allowing my most powerful character to do the work, it actively boosts the rate at which i can accumulate this new gear for character B.

The design choices made in WvW are lazy and just dont make any sense. No where is switching a character for another as important asin WvW, and no where but WvW is this action punishing the player.
And when they added the new gear vendor they added a gold cost. Who thought it a good idea to add another goldsink to WvW!? This just leaves me confused and baffled.

The WvW patch was very disapointing with the rather meager added content, and the stuff that was added just doesnt make any sense. And only further cements the idea that ANet holds WvW as a fairly low priority and probably just doesnt know what to do with it.

Post got deleted by a mod….

So to rephrase:

Bad idea. Goes completely against the rest of the game mechanics and is badly thought out. Players reading the reply ‘alternative/character progression’ feel that the devs have little to no understanding of why players like to play different classes at different times.

It appears it’s one rule for pve and another for wvw- which doesn’t make this game any more fun, it just turns it into one big grind to level up ten different lvl80 toons abilities- and for those that say they make very little difference, read the correction on ballista damage increase which is 25%- but which in order to get on whatever class I am playing that day I now to get 10 times over.

There, hope that was nicely phrased (it now fails to get much of the points across that I made originally) and doesn’t get deleted for offending their sensibilities.

I’ll just add my two cents here as well. I play WvW quite a bit, and usually on several characters depending on the situation. If my group needs seige defense and control, I roll on my ele for a bit. If I feel like capping camps and roaming in general, I roll on my ranger. If I feel like picking people off whether zerging, roaming, or defending, I roll of my thief. If I feel like turning on my Commander tag and/or fighting in zergs I get my mesmer.

Or at least, I used to. Now I feel like I’m repeating all of the work that I already accomplished on one of my characters. Honestly, it’s really annoying. Since I’m on my mesmer the most, and she has the commander tag, I haven’t gone into WvW on any of my other characters since the patch, it just feels like I’m wasting experience. Especially with how long it takes to earn WXP unless you are running around with a massive zerg.

I like the WXP idea, a lot. It brought a lot of attention to WvW, and re-invigorated everyone to participate. But it’s going to cause burnout, it already has for me when I feel like I can’t WvW on any of my other characters because there is an excess of progress to make on my mesmer (if the 1hour/1rank WXP stands it will take upwards of 500 hours in WvW per character, and that’s assuming I run with zergs constantly).

This part just wasn’t thought out very well in my opinion.

edit: Also, 75 experience for a structure defense and hundreds of experience for structure capture? That’s just begging for people to not upgrade, let their structures get cap’d and then recap them, this encourages the zerg behavior even more. Shouldn’t you be incentivized for defending your structures? It makes sense to me for the defense, and capture to be the same amount of experience; especially since capturing with a decent group is much faster than the event timers for defending are. And if you’re worried about people triggering defense events unnecessarily, don’t be. It still takes a long time to earn that experience and even longer to earn experience for ranking up.