There is a lot of hate being thrown around concerning the introduction of ascended gear and time gated crafting, so I feel the need to post here and clear something up for the general community.
Whatever demographic of gamer you may be in, you aren’t the only demographic being catered to.
Before you pull out the pitchforks on me, let me explain myself a little.
Some people like to see the numbers go up. Some people want purely aesthetic rewards. ANet stated at one point that they didn’t even want LEVELS in the game, but that alienated so many players that the game would have been doomed from the start. ANet could have thrown their hands up and said FINE, here’s your kitten levels! Enjoy the WoW clone!
But they didn’t. In the end they made what was probably the most sound design decision they could. They made levels irrelevant overall, but still relevant to the player in terms of progression.
Now here comes the other boogeyman of MMOs: Vertical Progression. I need to make this VERY clear…Vertical Progression is nothing more than the introduction of new gear levels over time. It is NOT inherently a bad thing. “Gear Grind” is a TYPE of VP, the most easily abused and the one most common in MMOs. ANet isn’t infallible (as the ascended gear being dropped on us with fractals shows), but they are showing remarkable levels of awareness in regards to what the players want out of gear, and they are taking responsible steps to make sure the majority of players get what they want.
You wanted more numbers? You got:
Ascended gear.
You wanted to remove gear grind? You got:
Time Gated Crafting, ensuring that the vast majority of players can easily keep up.
Long periods between gear releases, ensuring that even the most casual player can have the gear with minimal effort.
Farming Events Where the casual player can join in the living story to get enough materials to cover just about anything
As an experiment, I have only played 1 Invasion per day, only done my dailies as part of the invasion, and only completed the living story. I made 20gp this week in gold rewards/selling lower tier items, and got enough mats from the higher tier items to craft an entire set of exotic gear. I have no significant magic find. I don’t eat MF food. I just play for one invasion per day. Hell, I afk’d for the last half of an invasion and got 30 greens and over a gold just for being there.
TL;DR: Gamers as a community have condensed legitimate game design concepts into buzzwords that trigger kneejerk reactions.
To the people who will be responding to this, I’d like to ask you in advance to take a moment to think about exactly what is going on here, and exactly what you want to accomplish what your post. The cleaner this thread is, the more likely it is that ANet will join the conversation and actually communicate with us instead of trying to wade through pages of rage and whining.
@ANet: Communication & Transparency go hand in hand, and aren’t limited to player issues. We need to understand EXACTLY why you make a given decision, preferably before you implement it. Feedback is only useful if it’s something you can change afterwards, and the debacle when Ascended gear could was first released could have been avoided entirely if you had had transparent discussions regarding their introduction beforehand. My advice as another member of the industry: Add links on your to-do list to subforums for that feature, in a forum called “upcoming content”. Moderate the hell out of that forum to cull whining and raging, so players can hold real discussions about the features, and you can get valuable feedback.