Guild Wars 2

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Now, if only it wasn’t in a volume which smothered the zones on some servers . . .

Be grateful its active.

Isende.2607:

so. queensdale has an overflow, huh? how’s your content change workin’ out for ya, devs? as planned? i doubt it — everyone’s flocking to the lowbie areas to do this “content” that’s supposed to spread them throughout the world.

why do i point this out in this thread? because, dear wonderful dreamers, it’s yet another case of your plans for how people should do things blowing up, and reality sinking in. people want fast, they want easy, they’re going to take anything you offer and make sure they get it.

Dead lowbie zones were a common complaint, and posed a serious threat to their ability to keep new players. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentional, or if it was unintentional that they’re pleasantly happy with the results.

Heijincks.9267:

If you don’t immediately get everything you need right off the bat to have fun, would that mean Anet broke their promise?

No, but that’s not what happened here. This is preparing to have fun.

Drasleona.5049:

and exactly where is the shortage of SHORT TERM goals?
im still hunting for good looking dagger for my ranger, and a better skin for axe.
honestly i want less short term goals, because there is just soo freaking much, daily’s, pvp daily, FOTM daily. whats next hourly achievments? pleasee no.

im not a impatient little kid who needs to have a carrot hanged infront of my eyes for me to continue going.

im a patient guy who loves having fun with my community and people i meet during my game time. if you want to be part of a large guild, talk to them and ask them if you can join them and get to know them, however when you are being turned down. understand this, people who are content leeches or loot addicted people are not wanted in social hubs because its determental to the whole guild. i dont want to have to play with people whos interests go only as far as their greed. no, thats not who i want to play with or even be associated with! i want to play with friends, people who have integrity and know how to have fun and have thick skin. which is why i found myself enjoying who VexX as a collective are. we love fun, we have thick skin and we aim to do good in what we are playing.

really why is it that small guilds need to be on par with a large guild, whats the point of managing a large guild that is a huge force to reckon with. a collective that can make a difference in PVE and WvW, not to mention dominate SPVP.
so my question is this, why are 5 ppl expecting to do the job of 100 people?

would you really feel safe knowing you are sending 5 people after a criminal that has continuously escaped capture from 50 people, and the criminals target is you? would you really hire the 5 people? NO if you care for the criminal to be caught you would hire the 100.

And this explains why they couldn’t have included any content for small guilds to engage in by the end of the week (without buying into the resource sink)?

You would think Anet would want to get people enthused about the new content by getting them involved in the new content, not leave them feeling shafted because the new content is actually weeks or months of grinding away.

Do these bounties just crap out rewards or something? Was multi-gating access to them necessary because they have no inherent gating factor when taken alone? I would suspect they’re as unrewarding as all the other content is, which is to say it could take weeks or months just to get anything interesting out of the RNG, so there’s really no reason for most of the gating anyway (except perhaps to generate some slight increase in GW2 youtube videos via “world firsts”…..exactly like WoW does).

Drasleona.5049:

im still hunting for good looking dagger for my ranger, and a better skin for axe.

Is this one of those “hardcore v casual” things? It takes all of three days to find and acquire a decent skin from a dungeon, less from the TP, unless you really want a super-unique skin such as a legendary or soft-legendary, but I’m sure we can agree those last two are long-term goals.

Are you really picky about appearance, is the ranger your seventh alt (or similar), or are you just woefully inefficient with your in-game time?

I didn’t say every casual is out of short term goals, just that I’m sure many are (possibly most, at least insofar as their “main”).

Zorainda.3495:

In other games, raids (that are often compared to this new content) weren’t designed for large guilds. Small guilds and individuals could as well do them, with the obvious disadvantages of course (pugging people, slower progression etc) but they were still able to at least try them and earn rewards, without feeling as B-class gamers who only need to pay and pay and then pay some more for the fun of it.

To be fair, this usually result in larger guilds collapsing in much the same way smaller guilds are claiming the new guild bounty system will cause them to collapse.

Leading a raid can be a time-consuming and challenging task, enough so that not every large guild will have multiple teams of officers capable of leading multiple raids. Most large raiding guilds rely on a core group of leaders/players, and they’ll usually form an “A team” to tackle small-guild oriented “raid” content, leaving the rest of the guild to fend for themselves (even transitioning from 40-man to 20-man content, there’s no guarantee the “B team” is capable of handling the 20-man raid).

I’m sure someone could relate dozens or hundreds of such stories from WoW as they started transitioning first from 40-man to 20-man content, and then from 20-man to 10-man content.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

Yep, lets completly ignore the prices of karka shell accessory and triforge pendant

For many players, the karka shell accessory was free.

But the point stands; those all-stat items have exceptionally high itemization points, and make for a poor point of comparison, unless you’re comparing exotic all-stat items to ascended all-stat items.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

I love how people keep spouting this sillyness that the diffrence is small.. the multistat accessory has almost twice the amount of stat points as a exotic item.. How is that a small diffrence ?

You mean the one patterned off the Triforge Pendant? Are you comparing it against the similar Karka Shell exotic accessory? Those items all have bonus itemization points.

Just wait for a fanboy to come around and point out how that accessory, or the triforge pendant, are on par with the tri-stat ascended pieces.

Heijincks.9267:

If you’re expecting to be able to do things just as easily in small guilds compared to big guilds, then that just sounds like entitlement. It’s completely practical, and even if it takes longer, it’s nothing close to what people are moaning about.

I think their complaint is that there’s nothing in the system targeted towards them. It’s entirely tailored for large guilds, to the point that there’s a massive influence dump available to access the content immediately (whereas if there was any small guild oriented content, large guilds would access it immediately without the influence dump).

Maybe in a few weeks, when Anet feels enough large guilds have hastily dumped influence into unlocking the content, they’ll address the issue, but in the meantime it’s just a targeted resource sink.

What were you thinking by not including minor guild bounties for the smaller guilds?

You don’t need to answer. I know your development team wasn’t thinking about it; they were busy designing stuff for the large guilds who have already largely abandoned the game.

TheGentleEnemy.2875:

I think, after having read tons and tons of whining here: Where is the Problem?

Many small guild members believe they’ll be kicked from larger guilds if they don’t actively represent the larger guild, undermining the value of being in multiple guilds. This was an already existing concern within the community, shared by small and large guilds alike, and one which was exacerbated by this change.

Drasleona.5049:

the whole aim of the guild missions are to be hard to even unlock not to mention complete. has the community lost the meaning of long term goal?

Long-term goals are fine when there are also short-term goals alongside it. At this point, even many casuals have run out of short-term goals. This is another system which wouldn’t have received as much flak as it is if it had been included at release.

I don’t understand why the stat difference was needed at all, or, if the reasoning for the increase is sound enough, why the stat difference was made so large. In the game I’m playing now, in terms of time/resources required to upgrade, an analogous increase between tiers would be less than 1% per piece, and maybe a 10% total increase by fully upgrading an entire set.

stobie.2134:

If bots are often operating on hacked accounts, should we really care if our prices lower? I mean, isn’t this just about the height of selfishness?

If they’re using hacked accounts, I agree it’s despicable.

Blame China. Maybe I’ll go fish out the great article I read recently in the WSJ regarding the Chinese government’s direct support of widespread intellectual property theft.

stobie.2134:

eta: ARGH! I can’t believe I have to defend wanting bots gone!

Your choice to do so is even more optional than doing dailies for laurels.

Shikigami.4013:

Whenever people talk about bots some players come with the argument “I don’t mind them, they just keep prices down”.

Anet’s problem with bots is that they undermine Anet’s goal to maintain certain currency/material values.

In a year, new gear will be released, and you can start the grind all over again.

Stop being so naive that this isn’t a treadmill, and worry about how this will impact new players coming to the game (for longer than the 2-3 months it might take them to level to 80).

Astralporing.1957:

(because waiting for the problem to really affect you is like waiting to press the brakes until you are already hitting the concrete wall).

Ha. Great analogy.

I know it doesn’t help to say, “I told you so,” but it feels kitten good.

Join the club. I’ve already seen at least one other play who agreed with me that reliance on the daily system spearheaded the soul-sucking content that convinced me to leave WoW, and that was relatively benign compared to ANet’s vision for dailies.

stobie.2134:

And big surprise, gathering mats are rising in cost at the trading post.

Bots actually bring down material costs by (dramatically) increasing the supply.

There are several reasons for the price to go up, including increased demand associated with a newly released recipe (or material sink), decreased supply as players leave the game (and with regards to mats, on average most players are suppliers of most mats), or decreased supply due to something Anet has done (decreased node availability, increased node cooldowns, banning bots, etc.). In some particular cases, there’s even the potential for market manipulators to artificially set a price floor (for example, back in October I had a pair of guildies who cornered the Charged Lodestone market).

Katreyn.4218:

The only interesting thing I’ve discovered so far is one of the refugee’s stories in LA mention wanting to populate Southsun Cove...which is a plausible change imo.

I’m pretty sure there was an NPC standing around LA during Lost Shores who said the same thing.

Medazolam.3058:

Also for those who haven’t played in two months and still are posting here, log in, check it out.

If they had made any appealing changes to the game since I stopped playing, I just might do that.

More calendar gating just doesn’t cut it.

Arisal.9740:

Since when did 3 million become a bad number!?

If I’m not mistaken, SWTOR sold 3 million in the first six months (with about 2M at release), before going F2P by the end of its first year.

marnick.4305:

- hardcore gamers are a minority by default. It is not possible to be good at videogames with less than 12 hours per day. For 80% of people that’s impossible to reach (given current unemployment figures).

It’s a mindset, not an actual measure of time spent playing the game.

People have pointed out in this thread that a casual could spend all day playing the game and have nothing to show for it.

I’ve known plenty of “hardcore” players who play on notionally “casual” schedules.

TsukasaHiiragi.9730:

Hardcore players are the bain of MMos – and I personally despise most of them. The problem is, isn’t really to do with being a hardcore player, but the attitude of one.

And the attitude you display here isn’t at least equally despicable?

Heijincks.9267:

But what does Anet hope to gain by saying that the “game is growing”? That’s where the assumptions pour in.

An active game is an attractive game.

His options are to say, “the game is growing,” “the game is stagnant,” or “the game is tanking.” He’ll obviously never say the latter, and there’s little reason to say the second one unless there was serious and credible reason to believe the game was tanking, but he’s happy to say “the game is growing,” even if he’s referring to 0.01% growth in the playerbase or in player activity.

Did any of the fanboys stop to think that all these new players are people who bought the game (or received it as a gift) during the holidays? Or that these new players are just as likely to follow the same general population trends that all the release day purchasers exhibited?

Or even that the entire increase in “concurrent hours” is purely a statistical fudge of the increased activity during the holidays?

Is Colin’s full quote offered anywhere in this thread? I mean fully in context, including with the question he was responding to?

Heijincks.9267:

Saying Anet is being deceptive requires a lot of assumptions.

Just one; that they’re as unscrupulous as every other major game developer.

Anyway, in all fairness to Anet, the only thing which changed within the genre are the number of players who buy and try a given game. Most games end up falling to the same population levels that MMOs traditionally drew, generally in the 100-250k range. In this environment, the haters are always right that a given game is “dying.”

Toxophile.6215:

It’s just sad to think about all the real, human interaction and potential friendships they have been missing out on.

What makes you think they’re not finding that?

In general, its the casuals I’ve come across who are anti-social (TOR was the worst in this regard), unless you’re willing to sit and stroke their egos.

Odd, how that works.

Drew.1865:

I don’t understand why anyone wants a legendary. The only thing legendary about them is the grind involved.

There’s literally nothing else to do but work on a legendary. Most everything else is calendar gated, and the best repetitive content (PvP) is really lacking.

Bloodstealer.5978:

GW2 is eseentially a F2P package so any account created has to be considered active, therefore the numbers that they have hinted at might actually be true.
If this was say, SWTOR (prior to F2P launching) we would all be laughing if they said yay we just hit 3mill actives… cos we all know active subs are very different to active F2P accounts, unless you have an official timeframe to measure when a F2P account becomes officially inactive more precisely.

That just goes to show how useless their metrics may be. I haven’t logged into the game in over two months; am I being counted as an “active” player?

Calae.1738:

Colin sold us on the E-Sport idea. E-Sport is not for casual players. Not by a long shot.

Well that was obviously a lark.

Khisanth.2948:

The game’s worst enemies are the people who complain about every little thing without ever considering the reasons for why things are done that way.

The reasons usually aren’t obvious to players, and more often than not the reason is “because we ran out of time,” which while understandable isn’t worth defending.

kRiza krimos.1637:

So thief should be only class who’s unique ability should have counter?

What? What “unique abilities” are in this game which aren’t countered by DPS, except for stealth? Even the Mesmer needs stealth to effect escapes while his decoy clones distract enemies.

Stealth is the only “unique ability” in the game.

Blackmoon.6837:

There’s your problem. Like many others around, you’re stuck in this mindset of “rewards rewards, gimme rewards”.

That’s your fault.

I blame the developers; they’re the ones who put us on a clock before they release an expansion which wipes out everything we had worked for til then.

Based on what I had heard about GW, I thought GW2 might be different from the rest of the genre, but Lost Shores demonstrated that its exactly the same (worse, actually; I would rather have the whole tier sitting in front of me to work on instead of being fed it piecemeal and through calendar gating).

As for returning to lower level zones, I generally make an effort to clear a zone while leveling as thoroughly as is reasonable. One game I can think of in which I did go back to lower level zones to farm was TOR, but the down-scaling in GW2 undermines what was worthwhile about that (easily clearing dozens of lower level elite mobs, with great drop rates, every few minutes).

No.

In terms of the playerbase, it’s the lack of attention paid to role players that is this game’s worst enemy.

Well, that or the swing and a miss that is GW2 PvP.

Urvanis.2985:

Hardcore players are a minority, devs pamper to the masses. Every hardcore player could up and leave all at once, Anet wouldn’t even notice.

But everyone else would, and then many of them would start leaving, and eventually Anet would notice.

Who do you think makes the youtube videos, or the 3rd party sites, or maintains quality guilds?

Cloud.7613:

The casual players I know don’t care about content because they aren’t around long enough to see it all.

And that’s the danger of catering to casuals; they’re generally so not involved in the game that they’re unlikely to stick with it beyond when the next new shiny releases.

Vayne.8563:

So you think Anet is lying?

Creatively twisting the truth; it’s what the marketing department at any game developer gets paid to do, and whenever developers are making official statements, they’re clearing it with marketing first.

I’m not claiming they’re outright lying, but it sounds like the statement was vague, covered only a specific and relatively short timespan, and wasn’t bound by any legal obligation to tell the truth.

And they wouldn’t be the first developers to bury their heads in the sand.

To be honest, I haven’t even played GW2 during the timespan this statement apparently covers, so I can’t even offer anecdotal evidence whether its true or not.

Vayne.8563:

But I do have annecdotal evidence. If nothing else, it’s been posted here in several threads that Tarnished Coast is where everyone is guesting too, and of course, I’ve met people guesting to TC.

My experience in previous MMOs is that that would make TC a future destination server if they ever resort to server mergers.

Even dying MMOs usually have one or two vibrant servers which seem totally contradictory to the overall population trends.

NetherDiver.6079:

But in terms of population metrics, I’d believe a company more than some stranger over the internet any day..

There’s little sense believing some random stranger on the internet, but there’s not much more use in believing the company; they have an active interest in making the game at least appear to be attractive, including overstating player activity when possible (or totally ignoring the issue of player activity when they might possibly be held accountable).

plasmacutter.2709:

Because nothing says “we want to nurture a thriving middle class” more than penalizing the industrious half of our children with crippling student debt that chains them to their parents’ basements.

So your solution is to have the government step in and subsidize the rapaciously greedy university system?

Sokar Rostau.7316:

As for Murdoch… Murdoch did change the news media, with the help of Roger Ailes. Fox News is simply the end result of a decades long move from actual news to newstainment. Murdoch’s background is in tabloids where scandal, gossip and manufactured stories are the bread and butter of the business. He took the tabloid format from print and applied it to the screen.

None of the others are any better. PBS is just as biased; it’s what makes the government subsidies even more of a joke (lets face it, any network with Big Bird could survive on its own).

plasmacutter.2709:

don’t forget the 2% payroll tax increase affects middle class families too, but most of the cuts have been to education.

What cuts? There have been no cuts yet.

Besides, do you mean the education system which has regularly seen above-inflation level budget increases per year for decades yet has at best remained stagnant in its results, and in many cases has steadily dropped year over year relative to world leaders in education?

It could use some cuts before it creates a kitten storm of its own making.

mjharrison.3209:

Scandinavian countries are socialist and consistently rank in the world’s top 10 most livable and most developed countries in the world with the happiest people. Stop watching Faux News.

It works in some (small and wealthy) countries; don’t act like it can be easily transposed anywhere its tried.

Besides, that happiness index garbage is a bunch of nonsense. Stop drinking the kool-aid, because you’re not really in the club.

Heijincks.9267:

I don’t think it’s a matter of trusting Anet. It’s more of a matter of proving your case with statistics. Personal experience doesn’t count by the way as others have stated contradicting experiences.

There are no metrics backing up Anets claim, either. They say there are, there may very well be, but they’re certainly not making them public.

Anyway, increased hours played over the past two months isn’t especially noteworthy; by December, hours played as tracked by Xfire had dropped something like 90% from the release. I know fanboys curse Xfire, but its proven reliable across multiple MMOs I’ve played.

Rekuja.6318:

tldr: another stupid journalist writes another stupid summary of what they believe happened, thousands of ignorant people (older generation) believe everything they see on the news and thus begins the moronic spiral of how video games are apparently “bad”

This. Movies are far more to blame, alongside dwindling economic opportunities, but meanwhile Hollywood gets another tax break on the backs of American small businesses.

SneakyErvin.3056:

Maybe you are just in the wrong timezone or something.

If that’s the case, then he’s forever screwed. Off-peak casuals face an uphill battle trying to play a casual-scheduled MMO; I saw this in TOR, where the game was a ghost town outside of peak hours. Unless you really like playing alone, you might as well move along.

Fanboys feeling they’ve earned extra benefits; nothing to see here.

Astralporing.1957:

Making everyone be equally miserable is definitely not fine.

Ah, the joys of socialism.

thisolderhead.5127:

And to be fair – without exploiting you can buy your way into a chunk of TP domination too, you haven’t missed the window…

I don’t play MMOs to pretend I’m a market analyst; some might get their kicks that way, but I’m beginning to think it’s more trouble than it’s worth to have such a system in a game.

Be smart and start the instance next time.

bluewanders.5297:

You can treat someone respectfully while not regarding them with respect.

The dev trolled; it’s really not a big issue.

The hacker would just salvage it, or throw it into the forge where applicable.

Soulbound does not protect you from hackers, or make something super specially yours; it keeps you from selling it on the trading post.

Amusing to watch people fall for this.

Bloodstealer.5978:

Revolution.6301:

Vayne.8563:

Ellisande.5218:

crawlerxp.1536:

Ellisande.5218:

However at level 80 you are essentially just doing it for the purpose of the activity itself.

Oh no, you mean people playing the game to enjoy the game instead of playing it to improve their characters? Heresy!

You clearly are failing to understand the point I am making. People can enjoy an activity when it accomplishes dual purposes (the activity and the leveling) but not enjoy the activity when it only accomplishes a single purpose (the activity). When a player plays a game the reason why they play it or the thing which leads to their enjoying the game might only be the dual purpose and not the single purpose. There is nothing wrong with that anything more than there is something wrong with enjoying the game only from the single purpose. It is simply the recognition that different people gain enjoyment from different things or in different ways.

Therefore playing the game solely for the joy of seeing your character grow stronger is just as valid a purpose as playing the game to watch the particle effects when doing DEs.

And I agree that a lot of the DEs are very dull (especially the long escort missions, YAWN!) and for the most part the heart quests are extremely repetitive and pointless, and exploration becomes a chore when you are forced to go above and beyond just admiring the scenery (which gets repeated between zones so it ceases to be novel).

That’s like saying I play chess because I like the way the pieces look, rather than why the game is actually designed.

There are games, grindy games, where the entire game is pretty much leveling afterwhich you embark on some kind of end game. And there’s nothing wrong with those games. This isn’t really one of them, though.

Playing this game, you’ve got a couple of options at “end game”, but for a lot of us, we love and enjoy the world. If all you want is advancement and that’s all you care about, this probably isn’t the game for you. That’s the bad news. The good news is there are dozens and dozens of games that you can ride the gear treadmill as high as you like.

This game was designed for people who want the other kind of game…and it’s one of the very few that offer an immersive open world experience as something to viably do at max level.

I mean even the marginally higher stats of ascended gear have sent half the population into a tailspin, so obviously this game isn’t about that kind of progression.

If you don’t like that, nothing anyone can say will make any difference at all.

Your both wrong.

The game has great ideas like the heart quests but once they’re done they’re done. I mean there is no reason to go back to an area once the heart quests/vistas are done. If they created reasons then yay that be awsome.

They could for example add a ‘sword in the stone’ idea after a long and difficult DE. Basically we all get a semi decent looking item for playing the DE for 2+hrs.

And they could fix ascended gear. Honestly people LACK THE TIME to throw 2 hours into fotm. They just do. I know there are people who have time but there are aload that don’t. Why not cut the time in half which means then aload more people could play fotm.

Ascended Gear was implemented so poorly, Idk how Anet deleyed Gw2 3 times (09,10,11) and did not have this ready.

Thats why post 80 is boring. Simply put once I get my gear what then? Grind for a legendary weapon that will take me at least a year to get?

O’ Lord, not this again….

Why do you feel the need to keep posting out the same stuff over and over…. “The game is boring, it’s not as I was promised cos I only have 1 hr of playtime so I can’t run FotM, can’t get Ascended Gear, cant get a legendary… therefoee the game is broke, boring, un rewarding, and everything in PvE is redundant when you hit 80”…..

Surely if your struggling to enjoy this game, struggling to find things to do in game and your 1 hr or so is just boring in game… then why log in, why keep coming on here to spend more time than you do ingame just so you can keep telling us we are all wrong and the game is broke and boring…. cos ANET have lied to us all.

Maybe go walk the dog, or go kick a ball with some mates cos honestly these repetitive posts aren’t getting you anywhere and the game isn’t going to change around just to suit your easywin requirements.

Practice what you preach and just ignore the thread and let it die if you’re in such disagreement.

It’s obvious the game isn’t a shining beacon of entertainment.

Sumii.2845:

So after this long winded and unorganized post, what do you the community think?

I think you should edit the two posts so that it covers just the relevant question.

All the venting you do for the first 80% of it just gets in the way, even if it’s satisfying to you.

tigirius.9014:

won’t have to deal with the name calling the bad attitudes and the lack of concern for the teams fun.

It’s called the ignore feature.

Leamas.5803:

You watch…the next set of legendaries released will be ascended legendaries and be even more difficult to get…if that’s possible.

Legendary weapons get buffed to ascended when ascended weapons release.

What you’re looking for are the legendary weapons released alongside the level cap increase. I’m sure they’ll use a whole slew of new mats, and you can be sure every single one will have awesome particle effects.

lunarminx.3624:

If I could get them back into AOC, I’d be happy.

It certainly had some potential, but stretching out the leveling process for like 40 extra levels didn’t help, and I still remember the blue screen crash which finally convinced me to uninstall inside my first month (only MMO I’ve quit that quickly).

It’s right there, under that rock.

Meowwilson.5106:

800 hours of game play and I just recently beat my story. I haven’t even got into wvw yet either.. which is why i bought the game to begin with… how do people go through the game so fast? and now there are laurels and that new content stuff coming out. guild events and whatnot.. I still dont have the exact armor or dyes that i want or the weapons-this is all endgame stuff right?

Did you just AFK for 700+ of those?

Cazio.2137:

People here expect Anet to give them free content, free bug fixes, free basically everything. That will only last as long as the gem shop is making them enough cash.

You’ve got it backward; the constant free updates are meant to keep the playerbase engaged enough that they can suck a decent amount of revenue out of the fraction of the playerbase which is actually spending the money.

Irontusk.5219:

The only way to be satisfied is find other full time GW2 players and start an All-Star guild leave the other segments of the game alone.

That’s usually what they do, and then people start whining about how all the groups in gw2lfg.com are looking for warriors or mesmers.

I’d suggest you go form your own casual guild, but I know how that turns out; casual guild leader can’t log in for days, and the guild suddenly collapses, or the entire guild is so casual that, except for 1-2 hours each weekend, you might as well be alone in the guild (I saw this community wide in TOR; the game was practically a ghost town during off-peak hours).

One of the Anet developers made a statement about not designing games for people who don’t play them. But that’s exactly what a casual amounts to; they play so sparingly that they’re just barely considered a member of the community (well, either that or they’re lying about how casual they really are).

Let them figure out how to fit an MMO into their life if they’re really so crazy that they’d bother to play one with their casual schedule.

Incidentally, finding a way to ignore both sides while using them for your own personal gain is the best bet. The only upside to casuals in this regard is that at least you don’t see them often enough for any individual one to be problematic.

thisolderhead.5127:

Genre suicide… it is the basic premise of a “Free to play supported by microtransactions” MMORPG at the moment -

But that’s not what I read in your statement which I quote. You seemed to suggest that they could take it further, that full blown P2W could work.

thisolderhead.5127:

basically the only even nearly working business model.

Barely surviving on the revenue generated by a small population used to have a different term – a dead MMO. Developers will come to realize this eventually, that F2P is no different than accepting a 100-200k subscription base, or maybe we’re here because they have and they realize that a populated MMO, even if 80% of the people don’t spend a dime, is more attractive than the alternative.

There always was a certain percentage of players who would never abandon their chosen MMO, no matter how bad it got, or how unlikely it was to ever receive additional developer attention. F2P calls on that same group of players, and has them voluntarily paying 2-3x the cost of their old subscription (incidentally, a $30-45 per month subscription MMO could work).

It’s great for making a traditionally “dead” game more lively by adding all those “filler” players you deride, but that’s about all its good for.

thisolderhead.5127:

frankly all of us who support RMT as it stands today are subsidising the cheap grinders free game play.

With that attitude, it’s no surprise you have to pay people to play with you.

kenshinakh.3672:

The slope is really important when it comes to gear treadmills. I don’t see GW2 being like some games that requires me to game every day or so to keep up. In GW2, I could probably login every 6 months, play a lot for a week, and then stop with decently high end gear, and I wouldn’t be jumping far to catch up either.

Not at all. It’s one month of logging in once a day to get an ascended amulet, for example. It will never be less than that. Taking a six month break, and coming back for a week, will not afford you new gear because all the new gear is calendar-gated, and you’ll be six months behind everyone else who has been running the daily progression mill.

And the reward for logging in once a day to do your calisthenics for six months straight? A level cap increase that invalidates all your gear.

kenshinakh.3672:

That’s the gear treadmill I’m defining, not the one GW2 has, which again… is not a gear treadmill if you go ask people who played MMOs where gear treadmills are used to the extreme.

I wouldn’t use Korean MMOs as a comparison, and as far as I’ve heard, WoW could conceivably accommodate your six month break and one week return. Actually, WoW’s reached a point where six month breaks and one month returns are standard procedure, to the point where I know this because I’ve seen WoW kiddies running around spouting that nonsense on other forums as if it would be acceptable in other games.

kenshinakh.3672:

I write a lot, in hopes of making it clear that I’m not ignoring his questions or thoughts.

The best way to make things clearer is to read what you wrote and edit it to be clearer and more concise; this also has the added benefit of reducing the size of any walls of text.

kenshinakh.3672:

There’s truth in marketing lines. It all depends on your perspective.

I’m sure you’re their target audience. Incidentally, I have a bridge to sell.

thisolderhead.5127:

And there is the crux – you can circumvent the RNG reasonably by PAYING TO PLAY THE GAME, problem solved and all the RNG-Grinding scrooges can fill out the spare slots in paying players’ groups.

That’s genre suicide.

And also, you’re usually asked to pay way more than you would for the subscription game.