Showing Posts For Eitri.2608:
Yeah, that’s not an argument that’s worth a kitten because good is an objectively undefinable term. What is good to me, may not be good to you, or at least not good enough. I love most of GW2s content, as is. I enjoy doing it, all over the place. This trait system just gives me directionality for each new character.
The subjectivity of content enjoyment is exactly why tying trait unlocks to all types of content was a bad idea. Each player likes and dislikes different styles of things to different degrees and very few are like you and like everything.
Old system: I can take a character from 1-80 exclusively in WvW, the progression feels natural as I start out pretty weak and gradually get stronger as I level and fill out my chosen build. As I’m doing so I learn more about the class I’m playing and my playstyle so I may tweak my build along the way.
That just can’t happen if I have to go wait for some event to spawn. Not to mention putting trait selection 20 levels behind where it used to be.
Leveling alts used to be quite enjoyable because 95% of the time spent in game felt productive. Everything that would have felt like a grind in other games had an appropriate reward. Even jumping puzzles, which I hate, have a good chest at the end. The addition of a trait grind is totally out of place, especially when it used to be something you got simply for leveling.
If they had tons of traits per profession, like 100 or something, then the system would have worked. You could start with enough to make a few builds, maybe not very interesting ones, and then you could build on that by trait hunting. That way it would have been a grind to improve your character, not a complete lockout of the mechanic that allows players to customize their characters’ abilities.
As for just doing the same old tree shtick that so many other MMOs do. No thank you. You may think that’s good. I do not. Again, not objectively definable.
Oh I don’t like it either, it’s just the direction that other MMOs seem to be going, and GW2 seems to be following instead of leading at this point.
But it’s still a good system, because I might not have sought out the event, or location otherwise. So it’s doing its job and inspiring exploration.
How about inspiring exploration by actually having good content worth exploring to find? Using the trait unlocks to artificially push players shows lack of confidence. I find that especially jarring since Anet is supposed to be the, “we do it differently because we know it’s better this way,” MMO studio.
The next step in the path of following what the other MMO devs are doing is to remove most of the choice from traits entirely: pick two primary lines and one secondary line, all your points go into those three automatically as you level. Maybe allow picking one primary and two secondaries for diversity!
As it is, brushing this huge thread off with hollow platitudes is disprespectful, and ultimately customers who do not feel valued are disinclined to purchase things. To a sub based mmo, it leads to loss of subs, here, it is potentially leading to reduced gem sales. Why should players support a company that willfully ignores them?
It goes deeper than just gem sales for this game, it’s hurting future business as well. Before April I would have welcomed an expansion. Now anything Anet tries to sell me will need to be very good indeed for me to buy it and certainly wouldn’t be something I’d preorder.
This is not about newbies. It’s about veterans. Please keep the arguments about how the trait system affects veterans. There are plenty of valid arguments about how the trait system inconveniences veterans.
First of all, I wasn’t aware you were a forum moderator.
Secondly, the discussions about new players are centered around Anet’s reasoning behind the trait changes, specifically pushing back the trait progression later in the level progression. See https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/traits-unleashed-forty-new-traits-and-more/ and https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Game-Updates-Traits/page/41#post4358626.
Just because you only have an issue with one part of the new trait system doesn’t invalidate the opinions of people who have other problems with it, including Anet’s communication around it. Several things were changed at once so we’re free to discuss any of them and how they affect both veterans and newbies alike.
Even from the, “more meaningful progression from 30 to 80,” standpoint it was a fail. They removed traits from characters within that range (reverse progression) and left a bunch of levels empty in that range. Before a trait point each level wasn’t generally a game changer, but it was at least something. With a bigger something that could be a game changer every five levels.
Back in april no one ever spoke of making this game “easier” for new players. The official explanation was to make leveling between level 30 and 60? more exciting.
From their own announcement: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/traits-unleashed-forty-new-traits-and-more/
“With this system, spending traits will be much easier for new players to understand.”
There’s a bunch of stuff in there about making the system more accessible. Most of the changes actually exacerbate the problems they were trying to solve. One example, “Once you reach the appropriate level, we want you to be able to dive right into the system and start playing around with it, so you’ll unlock each tier for free!” They don’t mention that the actual traits will be locked behind content you have no hope of doing at your level, so you can’t exactly dive right into the system.
On a different, related topic. Would any of the people who are defending this system actually mind if they reverted it back to the old system? To the point where you’d stop playing? It seems like you see criticism of the system as criticism of the game, which for most of the critics is wrong. We want the old system back because we like the game except for this system.
(edited by Eitri.2608)
Hey really I think it could be worse. I don’t particularly like everything about the current trait system but it isn’t a gamebreaker.
Mo Mo, you’re misunderstanding where the frustration with this change is coming from. GW2 is a BTP model, with that model comes the expectation that any changes to the game will improve it. Since players can’t vote with their wallets by unsubscribing, they will do so by simply not buying products from the same company again. The reworked trait system makes the game significantly worse than the game we bought.
The change is a reflection on the lack of foresight of the development team, did they really not realize that they would have to take away some of the traits that players had earned? Did they really not realize they were introducing a tremendous grind to the game? Were they intentionally doing these things? Furthermore the handling of the change from a PR standpoint has been terrible.
As GW2 is a BTP game, a thread like this is the only way for customers to express their dissatisfaction with the current trait system.
I’m putting my bet here that, it’ll eventually get Gaile or a mod coming in saying that this thread has now run its course, and “the feedback was valuable” but that they’ll close the thread as they feel they’ve exhausted all talking points, and still they’ll tell us nothing about the status of trait changes.
I’ll take your bet a step further, they’ve circled the date when they feel they can say that on their calendar.
It’s an interesting case study in community management since it basically demonstrates how long it takes a community to go from hopeful at a public response to disappointed. Maybe they’re waiting for it to get hostile so they can cite that as a reason to close the thread.
IF I was to make an alt now, Edge of the mist till 80, then buy what I need.
To me they even screwed up doing it that way by restructuring the trait progression. At least when you got a point every level from 11 on you could feel like you were contributing more and more as an uplevel. Take, for example, the fall reduction traits. Those are pretty critical if you’re going to run with a zerg in WvW.
Sadly It seems like the metric they’re using is quarterly financials. If you go by those, most of the design decisions have been good ones. Maybe with this last quarter’s numbers our statements about playing less and not recommending the game due to this system will carry more weight.
I agree and didn’t mean to imply that they implemented the whole system in two weeks, just that it shouldn’t take six months to even get acknowledgement of which issues they recognize and are trying to fix. From their silence it seems like they stand behind the system as it stands.
The reason people are wondering why it’s taking so long is because it seemed like the trait overhaul was implemented quite quickly.
The changes were announced officially on March 20: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/traits-unleashed-forty-new-traits-and-more/.
The changes came out April 15th: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-April-15-2014/first#post3957343.
It seems like they could re-overhaul the system quite quickly if they wanted to. “We hear your feedback,” is different from, “we acknowledge that there are these specific problems and we’re working to fix them.”
Anet should understand that the passionate feedback in this thread is valuable. The reason it’s here is because the game was better before this change. Many of us aren’t playing as much as we did before and thus not buying gems. We also aren’t recommending the game, which leads to lower sales.
With subsequent changes to the game, your input shifted to address current concerns. That’s very meaningful to those team members following this thread and we thank you.
This implies that input about previous concerns is less meaningful, is that intentional? Can you give us some examples of this shift? I don’t see it, the input I’m seeing in the thread still seems to be mostly about issues raised on the first few pages of the thread.
I find myself experimenting more with trait unlocks than without it.
If you want to experiment with all the traits, you can go to PvP. They have majority of everything unlocked. You don’t need to fight players, there is a pit where you can fight NPC.
Experimenting in PVP was not introduced with the trait change and is actually worse now than it was when traits were simply level unlocked, since for new players who can’t afford the unlocks will create builds that will either be impossible or discouragingly out of reach.
Since you have the cash on hand to buy the traits for your build it impacts you less. Try rolling a new character, write down how much gold you start with, and only use the gold you earn to unlock. Personally I can’t recommend the game to friends (even at 50% off) and knowingly sign them up for that process. With the old system I could recommend the game to them and tell them that however they choose to play, the only barrier to fine tuning their character was level. They could level entirely in WvW, and come out at 80 with very much the same character as if they leveled entirely doing PVE and dungeons.
Basically, if a suggestion has been made, it’s on record and we wouldn’t want players to believe they need to restate a previously-offered suggestion. If it’s in this thread—previously or in the future—that’s great. Meaning if there’s a new thought, suggestion, or opinion to offer, that’s very welcome.
If you don’t want repeat suggestions, please provide a list of what you and the devs understand to be the current suggestions. That way we can discuss them and know that there aren’t any that were missed in 60 pages of thread.
Here’s one: if trait unlocks need to be behind some sort of unlock, instead of overloading skill points, implement trait points. That way the player would still have to do the unlocks, however flawed, but could still have some build leeway.
The biggest glaring issue with the current trait system is that it ruins the playing of alts. My suggestion is that each dev or designer who is looking into it start and level an alt from scratch, without twinking and without significant help from friends. I assume most of them have at least one level 80 character that they created and leveled under the old system.
While leveling this new character without help from any other characters, they should be evaluating whether it’s more or less fun than the previous system. Is it really better to get the traits later? Is the progression rewarding enough or are there too many empty levels? Does unlocking each trait feel like a worthwhile challenge or an artificial barrier? Does the system meet the initial goal of encouraging learning about and experimenting with a variety of traits?
It seems like the overriding design goal for GW2 at the beginning was to make things fun. It seemed like the team looked at each decision from the standpoint of, “which is the more fun of these two options? Pick that one.” Experimenting with traits is fun, playing uplevel WvW and feeling like you can contribute is fun. Trying out a new class in a reasonable amount of time is fun. All of these things are less fun with the current traits system. Please bring back those funs.
Getting review and community sites involved is a great idea. With the trait change GW2 is essentially a different game from launch and that should be accounted for in review scores. I know for me it turned from a 9/10 game that I played almost daily to a 6/10 that I wouldn’t recommend to my friends and haven’t played in months.
I just logged into my L51 Ele, spent my four trait points, saw that my trait build was much less exciting than it was before the patch, and logged out. For characters < L80 this is essentially reverse progression. It’s hard for me to justify playing a game where anything I’ve worked for is taken away, and even harder for me to recommend it to others.
The justification that getting traits one point at a time makes it easy to ruin a character doesn’t hold a lot of water when you have free out of combat respecs. Who cares if someone puts a point in the wrong place when it’s so easy to fix it?
I’m all for the addition of horizontal content to make the game more interesting at 80, but not at the cost of fun, rewarding progression to 80.
Thanks.
Now my guardian is just 26. Cannot go higher than 10 in any trait until what… level 40, right? I have put 10 in radiance, 5 in virtues, and the remaining for now in the line which increases toughness…I have not taken blind exposure yet because for now I play with a hammer and as alternate weapon a staff… so I have not seen any way to blind enemies. I’m perhaps wrong though. If I remember well I have taken signet mastery to reduce signet cooldown.
I’ll have to read the guide again… there are so much info, it is hard to remember all this.
The synergy comes from the first minor trait in Radiance, which makes Virtue of Justice do an AOE blind. It won’t really shine until you can put 15 points in Radiance for the second minor trait, which refreshes Virtue of Justice on each kill.
I’m taking the same path as you (just hit 32 last night) and I’m really liking it. The only thing that’s giving me trouble so far are mobs that attack quickly with heavy conditions (destroyer crabs), I’m contemplating switching a utility out for Bow of Truth for those fights. Purging Flames could be nice but fire against destroyers is no fun.
Just for kicks I figured out my point distribution as I level in a way that works ingame:
10-40: 5 Virtues, 10 Radiance, 10 Valor, fill in last 4 points with Honor or Zeal
40-60: Start with 5 Virtues, 15 Radiance, 10 Valor, add to Valor to 20, then add to Honor
60-80: Start with 5 Virtues, 15 Radiance, 30 Valor, add to Honor for the rest
(edited by Eitri.2608)
How about this: instead of making the boss immune, give the boss CC resistance that is proportional to the number of players participating. So when the boss rears up for its big attack if all the participating players use their CC, one will have a probable chance of getting through. Instead of coordinating to round-robin the CCs for no other reason than to remove stacks, the players have to be aware and smart enough to know when to CC. This allows large, disorganized PUG players to have fun taking down bosses without figuring out a CC rotation first.