Guild Wars 2

you’ve got the wrong idea mangoman, it’s not ANet that’s not talented, this game was on the road to introducing true horizontal progression, that’s no small feat and would’ve revolutionized the mmo industry.

However, i blame ncsoft

same thing I wrote:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Solving-the-issue-of-vertical-progression/first#post964422

except I gave some actual formulas for it, instead of just mindlessly writing about it like that guy does

people just don’t give the truth-tellers credit sigh, always have to rely on more eloquently written articles

PS: and yes I did come up with the original level scaling idea

when are the people who make the actual contributions going to receive credit instead of all those annoying people out there who just write articles about it and then are worshpiped

blame NCSoft, still if NCsoft gets axed, they might have a chance

why is the biggest mistake of your life?

by the way, NCsoft might have a hand in all this nonsense, I smite thee NCSoft, you dirty dirty kitten.

because I believe in reality, but that doesn’t mean i’m narrow-minded like some people…wo’nt mention any names here Face/zeldain (i didn’t say that)

But in all honesty, pls fix the targeting it is horrendous.

the only thing that’s dying, is there lack of ability to even fix targeting in Pvp, wtf, but besides all that this is a great game and if they’re gearing it in the right direction it can’t fail.

responding to that post about me being a nutjob, seriuosly, totally, not true…
really.

by the way they need to fix targeting i still can’t target anything as melee there’s no target lock (pvp), also when I went in-game wtf happened, the damage is crazy now due to the buffs?

Nah, trust me, this is different…seriously

Khemizt.5104:

It shows a loss of serveral thousand players over a 1 month period rofl… Are we looking at the same information!????

You seem to be forgetting, that it’s also rising again. See that little curve going upwards, that’s called a rise, son learn it.

Unless you’re saying it’s only a temporary fluctuation, then it will drop back down again, which I highly doubt.

I can see trends accurately fool, GW2 IS BACK ON DA RISE BABY.

Those who’ve failed to keep loyal will be smited, those who’ve kept loyal will be rewarded for their investment for they were shrewd.

Get back in da game, babies invest your time get rich, and when this game gets popular again, you’ll have something to sell or show-off with.

PS: can you make real money off the gem store or is that against their ToS?

PowerCat.5738:

FaRectification, you’re so condescending. You speak as if you thought you could make a better game than gw2, you also believe you have the answer to every problem in the game.

THATS BECAUSE I"M ALWAYS RIGHT.

http://beta.xfire.com/games/gw2

:)

good indicator, don’t lose faith devs, xfire may have been right a lot of times, but nothing’s fixed in stone.

wait awhile and you’ll see people coming back

the only thing that would make people not come back, is if you lie to them again by breaking the manifesto.

don’t do it, and you’ll be safe, not only that: you’re guaranteed to make a comeback.

your project has great quality, and it will succeed

for now the player drop is noticeable, but trust me based on the quality of this game, and if you carry it in the right direction without betrayal again, it is guaranteed to do nothing but rise.

I’ve never believed in statistics, no matter how factual they were, because there is always the issue of riding the trends.

Based on my personal observation, and it is pretty acute, I have a feeling this game will rise again but you’ve got to follow the manifesto, otherwise you’re going to get a lot of flak.

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/170650/Is_Guild_Wars_2_the_answer_to_stagnant_MMO_design.php#.UM1bRm-Znnh

people are counting on you to make things work, ANet, shout-out to Ree. cute girl

Joshua Oreskovich
21 May 2012 at 5:17 pm PST

Also of the 3 ( I haven’t played Tera), my money is on GW2 being the best overall entertainment. I don’t trust eastern game companies to “eventually” come around to their senses. The designers of GW2 are obviously going for a fuller experience including largely non-combat more niche market. Tera will make more money maybe, but I’m voting for the dreamers.

the biggest part that is still missing in GW2 (aside from an interesting story), is AoC’s ability to deliver an artistically cut “vision”, GW2 still suffers from cartoon-y “chaotic-stupid” tropes and lacks contrast, culture, history (that isn’t written by a high school novelist) and meaning.

Their story won’t deliver this, it can’t. It’s the bottom of the barrel of social connection. But if they spent the next year or 2 fine tuning their world with meaning beyond .. “kill stuff” and it’s “for the greater good”, and inserted some psychology, history, myth and mystery beyond whats behind door #1 I think they will blossom into something much better.

For now though my money is still on the Arenanet guys to hold the torch after Bioware died.

Now THAT I can agree with.

Raine.1394:

FaRectification.5678:

If everybody looked backwards, there would be no going forwards.
[snip]

Sounds really nice and progressive and all, but I would be more inclined to state it thus: If no one looked backwards, there would be no going forwards. It’s why we study history. It’s built into our very DNA and it’s how we learn. It’s why, as adults, we no longer need to stick our hands in fire to see if it will burn. And, it’s how we deal with “new” phenomena; we associate within an existing framework of meaning. So, an idealistic approach often sounds very progressive, it just doesn’t match up well with how things work in the world of shared human experience, meaning, it’s not how we work.

I’m with OP on this one. The state of the game calls for reflection and reconsideration and not a rush forward at a breakneck pace. Why? (asks the idealist), because we are not getting good results, and we want to know why so that we can produce good results.

I will have to say that this was the first rational post by a skeptic I’ve ever seen.

Thank you for that, and I applaud you for being rational for once.

As for your breakneck pace accusation, I would say that it isn’t a matter of a breakneck pace, more-so that they are trying to make metered changes.

The whack-a-mole balancing style is obsolete, and it’s been proven not to be effective.

Metered changes are the new way to go, so it might seem as if it were going at a breakneck pace, when in fact it’s controlled.

Argue if you think i’m wrong.

Once again, I’m not a fanboy of anything, but just seeing how dedicated this talented dev team is, I want to support them. If they were at all wrong, I would ditch their boat immediately. Get my drift? I’m neutral. I’ve always been neutral, and I’ve never really cared about any particular company.

Don’t believe in it.

Because it’s unrealistic.

By constantly yelling that there’s no solution to anything, all you’re doing is ignoring science completely.

If everybody looked backwards, there would be no going forwards.

Your concept of realistic design, isn’t in fact realistic. What’s realistic is taking everything into account.

Did Everquest try and be realistic? No, it dared to push the boundaries.

If you only consider the boundaries, you’re not considering the third element that can be implemented as well, and the third element is in fact not a delusional concept, it is a realistic one.

The idea, is that there is a solution to everything, this has always been scientific.

Don’t believe the skeptics, if we only viewed skepticism as reality, there would be no desire to push science any further.

The idea behind scientific pursuit, has always been one of solving things.

If you were to believe all these cynical “realists” and skeptics, what would happen is we’d be stuck in the past, with no point of even advancing science any further.

As we can see, this is not the case, because science has always evolved.

Take Microsoft and Google for example, Microsoft focuses on the “traditional” scientific view and an ultra-realistic one. As a result, they’ve never been able to break boundaries.

Google focuses on breaking boundaries with its ultra-metrics. And they’ve succeeded in creating a mythical search engine no one has been able to replicate. They’ve essentially solved the problem of the search engine.

As you can see, if history has taught us one thing, it’s that we don’t believe in skeptics.

It’s not as simple as speed of delivery, you could have armor mitigating spike damage, while the same damage wouldn’t be mitigated with condition. The thing is, condition damage can also be mitigated by armor, and then that would be a different story altogether. Spike damage would do 5 damage per blast for example, but condition would do 2 per tick over time. This might even result in odd #’s rather than even ones.

Then there is the issue of dynamics, so balance is much harder to achieve than you imagine and it isn’t as simple an issue as round #’s.

So it isn’t as simple as you think as move and counter-move, and there’s entire obstacles behind it depth-wise, and it might also be abstract and distal.

It’s supposed to not only be an action game but also a depth-planning game combined with moderate health bars, and I hope they achieve that. Currently, the health bars are a bit too twitchy and it can go from 100-0 in one shot, or some other weird way. They need to stabilize the health bars, so that it’s even all-around. This isn’t to say it has to be like Everquest where at lvl 1 it takes forever to kill a mob and then at lvl 80 it also takes the same amount of time. That’s a poor way to look at stabilization, and that’s a very 2-dimensional way to look at it. You have to factor in dynamics, and in the end it’s an issue of balance.

For example, at lvl 1 you one-shot things. But at max lvl 100, as an ele for example you get hit and your hp drops to 3/4, but you have mistform and then that acts as a barrier for the 2nd hit, before the 3rd hit kills you. Because the ele can quickly teleport out, this isn’t a problem, and this balances out with dynamics well, even if the #’s and hp pools between the Ele and the gigantic soloable raid boss differ widely. This is pretty much an obvious example anyone can figure out. And through horizontal progressive balance and depth-development and upon achieving perfection, the game will entail a whole new state. This state might not necessarily be one of extreme dynamics, but rather the essential quality will have changed.

The term meta-game describes the entrance-way into horizontal progression in reality, and it’s something noone has gone past before.

The idea is to merge all previous inconsistencies and form one wholesome channel, I suppose their idea is to make everything solo-style. However, it is probably not impossible to bring back and incorporate the Holy Trinity as well with the current solo-style. A Holy Duality would imply reliance on one other character in your context or the reliance of having to have to resort to one other factor besides dps which is support.

Solo-style is great and all, but it depends if they want to incorporate variety in the future too such as mixing in the Holy Trinity back, it’s not impossible. But I guess their view is that independence is key.

relax, kittening troll. noone’s getting hostile but you, once again relax. troll

Poe Lyfe, pls be objective.

With game design, they don’t immediately patch everything up. This isn’t 1+1=2, it’s more abstract than that.

What they do is have the initial lay-out correct, then they work on shifting things around in order to see the most major problems, then once they identify those problems they go about with smaller tweaks. The idea is they have to shift things around first, to know exactly what they’re dealing with. If they just make small balance changes, then they’re just giving you false confidence, and they’d be shying away from the problem.They cannot simply go about getting something right the first time. Nothing starts out perfect come on guys. It requires major shifts across all platforms.

Saying it’s not possible at this point to fix things, is ludicrous. It’s always been this way.

It’s called trial and error, relax.

You guys have to look at things objectively, and stop making assumptions.

ANet already stated in one of their youtube interviews with top pros that their approach is to have the correct lay-out down first, and then work on progressing through smaller balance changes in order to perfect the game. As of now, that isn’t happening because it hasn’t reached that point yet.

Come on, you guys need to get with the program. Google didn’t start out perfect, but it already had the perfect core mechanic and code at work, it takes time to work from there and turn it competitive.

If it was competitive from the start, it would mean something horrid, essentially it would mean that it would be shallow and uninteresting which ultimately leads to imbalance. If a company did that, you could call that company a faker for the sake of self-image. ANet is completely transparent, far more transparent than any company I’ve seen before. They have a lot of talent, so pls don’t discredit them anymore.

There are far too many people in these forums who rely on discrete math resulting in extreme brokenness of a game contrary to their belief that it would provide balance. Sure it’d be balanced #’s wise, but think of it this way, there needs to be depth for balance. With only 2-dimensional planar balance the player would have to resort to all sorts of hard counters which is entirely undesirable.

Man, I hate all these arrogant discrete math majors. They don’t know anything about math.

anything can be measured through an engineering approach Account

don’t rely on discrete math.

Take a look at this thread guys:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solving-the-issue-of-vertical-progression/first#post993697

evolverzilla.2359:

@Seithan
1 – the game has only 3 months, how can you really affirm that they will put more things on game every 2-3 months? You can´t, simply. They already told in reddity that ascended was a inicital concept idea withou time to implement in the launch of the game, not mora of the same but better.
2 – Any game has any form of grind, or else just give players everything they want anytime and get bored beacuse you have nothing to work for in the game. If you don´t want to work for something there are a lot of F2P and pirate game servers.
3 – When people stop wasting more time kittening about vertical progression and give more intelligent approachs on how to solve problems already in the game like annoying high life bosses without brains cells, unpopulated areas, dungeons bugs, unattractive dungeons, etc… in some time no one will ever remember this VP…

VP is at the core of a lot of problems, including balance and economy. In fact, metrics can solve a lot of issues including artificial intelligence as well as possibly even making dungeon lay-outs more attractive (but that’s probably more of a design issue).

The thing is, VP is the fundamental problem that needs to be rectified. Don’t worry about the details yet, until you’ve rectified the fundamental issue.

The ANet manifesto believes that nothing is black or white, there is always a solution to everything. Horizontal progression might be harder to discern at first, but if you get the entrance right, everything follows.

VP is not some mystery, and evolverzilla you are thinking a bit too simply. There is a 3rd-dimension to everything, and nothing should ever be considered plainly. If things in the world were as simple as black and white, then there wouldn’t be the issue of Google having killer metrics that noone can solve. Math is far more complicated than that.

It might be true that any game has any form of grind, but there’s also a way to solve this problem at a higher level. That’s the idea.

Your idea of intelligent approach doesn’t really apply here, because you’re suggesting an intelligent approach only involves thinking on a planar level. The world has depth, the planet is 3-dimensional.

The idea is that the sciences are being carried in a new direction that revolves around an initial correct starting point. You can apply heuristics or initial search functions all you want but you’ll never arrive at the answer without correct initial metrics. Only with a correct initial start, can you develop further on an accurate basis. If you’re trying to still apply the old science method of discovery, that’s the thing, you’re only still discovering and you’d never find the answer because your starting basis is one of observation without actually having the core mechanic realized yet. This is the problem with discrete mathematics as the universe is infinite and cannot be solved by mere application of surface observation. This is where theory is more important than application. By having correct initial metrics, you already have the answer, and from there you can work outwards in correcting the errors from a correct starting basis. The errors would be much more far and few in-between, as well as having less of a negative impact, if you try to brute force it, it’s a lot harder. This is why ANet considers depth of game-play to be more of a balance issue than detailed design work.

This is essentially how game design works, and if you were to try to build the game up with no inherent direction, then you would get the situation where your development process would involve nothing but balance issues and the struggle for correcting errors endlessly. With the correct starting point ANet has already developed for itself, its future outlook is more of one of creative development, rather than bug-fixing. They’d still have to correct balance issues, but it’d be in the process of also creatively developing the game. So it’s more of a brighter and positive outlook.

(made a minor edit to one of the above post sections) Edit: correction, a melee weapon that insta hits from a distance isn’t correct, how about just a regular nova. That way 1v1, there wouldn’t be as OP of an imbalance, but in a group it might for instance do very minor splash damage in a large radius. I think this is a better example of freedom of allocation.

The general idea behind depth design is to eventually balance the game, the game starts out flat and 2-dimensional and in the process of adding more depth you’re also balancing the game by growing it. Instead of breaking balance, adding depth seeks to perfect the game while also adding layers upon layers of depth.

Once i’m done posting all this i’m outta here, because this is boring and it’s giving me tedium. I hope they read all this, the reason I posted all this was because I found GW2 devs to be competent, and they had the ability to carry it out directly. If anything they needed an uplifting boost in the right direction, but they have the ability to do what I can’t which is to carry out the details themselves. I know about the general direction in which to take things, but I’m not too clear on the details. So once again, I hope they read this if they don’t want to end up like Blizzard did, and eventually play way too greedy, and not appeal to their conscience.

:) up to you son, you are the customer so you have a right in say.

it wouldn’t really be an advantage, it’d be more of an option.

The illusion problem can be solved, the horizontal leveling as you put it, is just a mindset thing. I wouldn’t call it an illusion, people should find it fun to have to level a new character to max in order to break-off into horizontal content. Therefore they can max all characters, and still have a diagonal slope progression with each character. And in the end once they’ve progressed enough, they won’t feel obligated to progress an individual character even further because the gains in power would be miniscule, they’d be able to work on other characters. It might even be possible to get a character to the end of the diagonal slope directly and skip the in-betweens, but they’d have to figure out a solution for that (which involves a third element, degree, angle, indirect approach whatever you’d like to call it). It might not be possible, but I’m just providing a fundamental design here, and then I’m out. Got better things to do such as play the actual game.

All designs are 3rd-dimensional, it’s not as simple as 2-dimensional functions. Metrics are far more complicated than that and can even solve the 3rd dimension. The 3rd element is also the hardest to discern. And sometimes it can appear quite paradoxical, but in fact can be solved.

Any small drip of vertical progression just means it’s slowing down the tear, doesn’t solve the fundamental issue.

The grind can also be solved therefore by this downwards slope, it would be applied to loot such that the power changes would become smaller and smaller in a sense, there might be a 3rd element that can be applied here also such as the implementation of an off-chance that a low-level mob would instantaneously drop a legendary for example. But I don’t feel like thinking anymore, because this is frankly giving me a headache. They’ll have to think for themselves.

I already answered your question about the rewards for going back to older content not being equivalent to higher-mob drops in my Solving Vertical Progression Post, if you scan or use the find search thing. I’ll repost it here.

From this quote:

By the way, I made a post on the WoW forums a long time ago, concerning level scaling. I’m glad that ANet has incorporated this into their game thus far. But I believe it can be stretched even further than just an enjoyability factor for older content. Older content can give renewed loot and purpose. The higher level you are the more it scales to give you better chances to kill easy mobs to get higher-end loot matching your level. This plays on dynamics very well.

Furthering the abilities of the lvl-scaling innovation:

In order to renew and provide continued interest in older/lower-lvl mob areas permanently:

For instance, the drop rates would be modified so that they would be extremely low, however if a character is able to chain dynamic skills very well he could take advantage of those low lvl areas as a lvl 80 and gain more than the steady rate of drops offered by regular lvl 80 mobs. This is a generic play on dynamics. And it is also quite balanced. Skillful players will be rewarded accordingly, and less-skilled players will suffer a bit more, but this is generally how it is. As with any design work, the devs will balance such skill discrepancies out themselves so as to prevent balance from going through the roof. This is the concept of depth-design. The idea presented with “evening the playing field” as found in some previous game designs such as Starcraft 2 was incorrect because it eventually didn’t allow for skill progression at all. The way you even the playing field for more skilled and less skilled players is essentially just an ordinary balance problem, if highly skilled players are rewarded too much and it generates too large of a gap, that is just a mere balance problem. This is not really an issue.

As for the game not being horizontal to begin with, the moderate flat linear lvling approach is the horizontal starting point. As for their philosophy, I believe they made a post on that in the dev tracker, hopefully they’ll stay true to their word. They said that they planned on not doing the gear treadmill at all. But it seems they couldn’t find a solution, and now they’ve sneakily gone back on their word. That’s what it appears based on certain “character progression” threads they’ve made recently. They already have the underlying components down, if they wanted to change their perception and start working on a proper formula, I believe they can do it.

But as for it never being truly horizontal to begin with, I think you’re wrong on that point. They just need to erase the mistakes they’ve dealt themselves, and keep the cap fixed and then work on a proper formula to horizontally progress.

the idea that the game starts at lvl 80 (but honestly i think it should be capped off at lvl 100, round #’s are always slightly better), is the correct idea, the lvling process is just a means to get out to that branch-off, which ends up in a slope direction. The hardcore players will get more wealth, but it goes down in a linear slope (think diagonally). Eventually after some time, the wealth accumulation will be miniscule.

This makes it take a short amount of time, to get things the hardcore player has gotten within the span of say 1 year, within 2 years it would take linearly longer, but the gains for the hardcore player would also be equivalently shorter (due to this diagonal line). Within 5 years, it would be even more miniscule (but the key word here is moderate), within 10 years the gains by the hardcore player would be miniscule enough so that only small power changes would make him slightly more OP (but the key words here are perfecting the game’s balance). This also ties in very well with player-skill level which as a result of 10 years will have been practiced upon and trained very well (by then).

Also, this means eventually number-crunching will be reduced to next to nothing. It’s a process of solving, the player solves the bigger # issues, then he works down in a slope, and it’s satisfactory that way.

You don’t think they can incorporate this, in the near future? I don’t think it’s unfeasible.

They set out planning to do this anyway, and now I’ve given them the formula, so have at you.

They already have the linear lvling process for regular lvl 1-80 cap, that is to apply moderate lvling. After that it is about applying the necessary metrics for what they are at the current stage of trying to evolve into, which is horizontal progression.

So at this stage, they need this.

This isn’t considered abstraction, it is more like applying correct metrics. Which most people consider to be a genuine practice and starting point nowadays in mathematics.

They have the initial metrics perfected, now they need the new metrics for horizontal progression, and I think this is a good start.

There is no way to progress vertically anymore, that path has been beaten down to the ground, if they were to revisit that path, they would fail.

This isn’t about what’s risky, vertical progression fails period and it aims to destroy all balance.

They have three choices: either just do nothing and keep their game as it is right now, play it safe somehow and just introduce minor vertical progression so that their game decays at a slower rate, or carefully try and progress in the new direction themselves. It’s up to them.

It should not be in the nature of human beings also to simply “settle for less”, they should always give it their all to try their best.

So gwcharr, I understand where you’re coming from, but never should a company strive for less, nor should they even settle for a safe amount (past examples have shown this to be very detrimental as well), they should try their best.

Yes Fred, you can buff power, while also balancing the game at the same time.

Subtraction is key to keep the power buffs able to be done, while still not really doing it at the same time and keeping the #’s always fixed at the cap which is what people want.

Legendary weapons should have a concrete mod called:

TImeless Decay

It will allow you to semi-phase out of combat but not entirely and during that process you will be absorbing some very minor damage (not all the damage which means you can still be hit) and gaining slight buffers. During the phase animation, you will be unable to perform any actions at all. After the phase ends, your 2ndary skillset is made available but your main attacks will still be unavailable for some time.

This allows the character equipping legendary status to be able to move slightly more freely around the battlefield, as a slight escape tool, or for a more minor offensive where for example a warrior could absorb some more damage and close the distance between him and the ranger while still having access to his skillslots in order to close even more distance, while absorbing a little bit more damage. His main attacks during and after the absorb will still be unable to connect though, therefore he would be relying on his skillsets to control until his main attacks become available again.

This is pretty balanced, and is pretty metrical in nature since he would be sacrificing his main attacks and only have access to his 2ndaries. If he were able to still attack after the phase animation ends while absorbing damage that would obviously be a direct conflict of interest since he would pretty much just be absorbing damage. But since he is absorbing damage and then sacrificing his main attack, he is then relying on his control skills to gain more footing. This counterplay of absorbing damage, while not being able to dish out any especially a short while even after the animation has ended (which is important because if it were only during the phase then he could merely use it as a gap-closer which would be OP) is perfectly balanced. Thus this special legendary technique can also be used as an offensive “time-staller.”

As an escape tool, you will still be unable to escape too effectively, because your action bars will be locked out. All you will be doing is running and absorbing a little damage.
Note that this shouldn’t be a separate skill in and of itself, but it should be only for legendaries.

Edit: Also, the more you use this skill, the more it drains your Legendary Weapon’s energy bar, after it is completely drained it will require a small fee to recharge. This acts as the third gold sink source.

This makes elite players have to consider how to manage their funds while still being able to contract Timeless Decay. Since players with Legendaries will usually be rich anyhow but still have to make back the small fee through this final gold sink.

Legendary weapons should have a concrete mod called:

TImeless Decay

It will allow you to semi-phase out of combat but not entirely and during that process you will be absorbing some very minor damage (not all the damage which means you can still be hit) and gaining slight buffers. During the phase animation, you will be unable to perform any actions at all. After the phase ends, your 2ndary skillset is made available but your main attacks will still be unavailable for some time.

This allows the character equipping legendary status to be able to move slightly more freely around the battlefield, as a slight escape tool, or for a more minor offensive where for example a warrior could absorb some more damage and close the distance between him and the ranger while still having access to his skillslots in order to close even more distance, while absorbing a little bit more damage. His main attacks during and after the absorb will still be unable to connect though, therefore he would be relying on his skillsets to control until his main attacks become available again.

This is pretty balanced, and is pretty metrical in nature since he would be sacrificing his main attacks and only have access to his 2ndaries. If he were able to still attack after the phase animation ends while absorbing damage that would obviously be a direct conflict of interest since he would pretty much just be absorbing damage. But since he is absorbing damage and then sacrificing his main attack, he is then relying on his control skills to gain more footing. This counterplay of absorbing damage, while not being able to dish out any especially a short while even after the animation has ended (which is important because if it were only during the phase then he could merely use it as a gap-closer which would be OP) is perfectly balanced. Thus this special legendary technique can also be used as an offensive “time-staller.”

As an escape tool, you will still be unable to escape too effectively, because your action bars will be locked out. All you will be doing is running and absorbing a little damage.
Note that this shouldn’t be a separate skill in and of itself, but it should be only for legendaries.

Edit: Also, the more you use this skill, the more it drains your Legendary Weapon’s energy bar, after it is completely drained it will require a small fee to recharge. This acts as the third gold sink source.

This makes elite players have to consider how to manage their funds while still being able to contract Timeless Decay. Since players with Legendaries will usually be rich anyhow but still have to make back the small fee through this final gold sink.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solving-the-issue-of-vertical-progression/first#post993697

wanted to post this to see what kind of reaction i’d get from newbs in the general forum (but eventually that post got infracted by a mod for double-posting)

haw haw haw

enjoy all ye WoW newb scrubbers, those who’ve moved into this game from WoW.

ANet has built a great game, and now the Gear Treadmill problem has been solved. Forget about your woes of the past from WoW. Move on with this new and improved formula!

Agreed, first person is a must.

Agreed, there is a way to make all things have concrete bonuses, rather than just for cosmetics.

If that’s one thing ANet got wrong, it was to only give Legendary weapons cosmetics.

Everything can be made concrete, and that should be their ideology. Concreteness is what makes people happy.

With horizontal progression, PvE can be limitless as well not just have to resort to PvP. check out my threads.

Thus, the initial balance was there, and the balance will forever be there no matter how much depth and how much expand you put into the game through horizontal progression development 10 years down the line.

This is the metric of true horizontal progression, without vertical progression, while still adding depth, power, character progression and even improving the balance in a slope and eventually perfecting the game.

It is paradoxical, but it is possible, to progress vertically without vertical progression. It is up to the devs to assign the timeframe in which it takes to “catch” up to veterans 10 years down the line. And it’s really up to their freedom of choice what to set it at. The way it works is to once again make it so that the time it takes to loot something the veteran has that the guy who wants to catch up doesn’t eventually goes from taking a long time (lvl 1-80), then eventually less and less in a downwards slope so that he can still catch up and not feel sad (lvl 80 fixed meta-game). So this works for loot tables too. This way the catching up process becomes more moderate.

Once again, there’s no limit as to which the radius can expand to, it can expand all the way to 1,000 radius and hit people half way across the map for all the devs care. That is to give the said player who’s played 10 years longer the wealth advantage to someone who dropped the game 10 years ago.

This is because you can just subtract that radius to balance things out once again.
But there probably would be a limit, because you don’t want the guy being blasted away halfway across the map.

Of course, this would all have to be done in a downwards slope, so that eventually the person who dropped the game 10 years ago, can come back and still play for awhile and eventually catch up significantly with only slight disadvantages remaining.

This linear-diagonal downward slope ( and not a flat linear one) is the correct metric for horizontal planning instead of vertical linear progression.

Subtraction to keep #’s fixed and level (or in other words moderate) is also key instead of adding power to match/balance power.

Of course, the lvling process from 1-80 would still be just like ANet has it now, flat and moderate and linear in order to make people have to complete a character and spend time on it and also feel a sense of achievement (This flat lvling process is the perfection of previous lvling models, wherein for some reason they preferred to make it so that the higher levels took exponentially longer to lvl up to. I could probably figure out why but I’m done.)

the idea that the game starts at lvl 80 (honestly I think it should be capped off at lvl 100 because round #’s are always better), is the correct idea, the lvling process is just a means to get out to that branch-off, which ends up in a slope direction. The hardcore players will get more wealth, but it goes down in a linear slope (think diagonally). Eventually after some time, the wealth accumulation will be miniscule.

This makes it take a short amount of time, to get things the hardcore player has gotten within the span of say 1 year, within 2 years it would take linearly longer, but the gains for the hardcore player would also be equivalently shorter (due to this diagonal line). Within 5 years, it would be even more miniscule (but the key word here is moderate), within 10 years the gains by the hardcore player would be miniscule enough so that only small power changes would make him slightly more OP (but the key words here are perfecting the game’s balance). This also ties in very well with player-skill level which as a result of 10 years will have been practiced upon and trained very well (by then).

Also, this means eventually number-crunching will be reduced to next to nothing. It’s a process of solving, the player solves the bigger # issues, then he works down in a slope, and it’s satisfactory that way.

The general idea behind depth design is to eventually balance the game, the game starts out flat and 2-dimensional and in the process of adding more depth you’re also balancing the game by growing it. Instead of breaking balance, adding depth seeks to perfect the game while also adding layers upon layers of depth.

The idea is that character progression serves to balance and perfect the game. This has to be planned out somehow though I don’t know how it’s going to be done honestly, but I have a feeling this is the way to do it.

You’d have to plan out some sort of initial imbalance, so that in-between this and the final balance point, you’re constantly improving the balance by tweaking it. The balance changes would go from being major to minor over the course of a long period of time. Thus a person who comes back into this game say 10 years later still can play it but only have a moderate disadvantage compared to his opponents because they’ve collected wealth for PvP (not minor or major, but moderate which is bad enough).

This is essentially also the process for character progression and power improvement (sense of power based on small changes rather than OP ones). Of course, in the beginning the changes would be a lot bigger.

For example, a dynamic skill called flamesword, allows you to swing a particular enchanted sword initially at a preset level of 150 radius without actually making melee contact which is different from a projectile or a nova because it would be instantaneous and it would also be different from mere increased range of said weapon which would still require a swing (the radius is already initially balanced), with the first major “meta-depth” balance and power improvement process change it would swing to 155 (i’m saying 155 to show the slight change, but in reality it’d be more like 200) radius. Someone who hasn’t played a long time thus has to catch up.

But here’s the awesome thing: people who have played equally long as the character with the new and improved flamesword 155 would be able to loot a stat called reduction of flame-sword 155 radius to 150. Thus that would be the counter-play and you wouldn’t have to increase the power of the guy trying to counter the flamesword 155 as well which would be vertical progression and throw things out the roof eventually since he’d have to increase his range as well and eventually everything would be blown out of proportion. Instead you simply keep the #’s fixed once again.

But for the person who hasn’t played in a long time and comes back and sees the veteran who’s accumulated the flamesword 155, it is still only a slight shift in OPness for the veteran, and it really wouldn’t be breaking any balance, since the balance could be corrected by playing a bit more and accumulating the “reduce flame-sword 155 radius to 150”. The radius is small enough to provide a small advantage but still not make the person want to drop the game because he can’t catch up. Of course, you could make the radius eventually as large as 300, or shift it to any # down the line, and it wouldn’t matter because eventually you could acquire a stat drop to “minus” or “subtract” that advantage.

Edit: correction, a melee weapon that insta hits from a distance isn’t correct, how about just a regular nova. That way 1v1, there wouldn’t be as OP of an imbalance, but in a group it might for instance do very minor splash damage in a large radius. I think this is a better example of freedom of allocation.

Thus, the initial balance was there, and the balance will forever be there no matter how much depth and how much expand you put into the game through horizontal progression development 10 years down the line.

This is the metric of true horizontal progression, without vertical progression, while still adding depth, power, character progression and even improving the balance in a slope and eventually perfecting the game.

It is paradoxical, but it is possible, to progress vertically without vertical progression. It is up to the devs to assign the timeframe in which it takes to “catch” up to veterans 10 years down the line. And it’s really up to their freedom of choice what to set it at. The way it works is to once again make it so that the time it takes to loot something the veteran has that the guy who wants to catch up doesn’t eventually goes from taking a long time (lvl 1-80), then eventually less and less in a downwards slope so that he can still catch up and not feel sad (lvl 80 fixed meta-game). So this works for loot tables too. This way the catching up process becomes more moderate.

Once again, there’s no limit as to which the radius can expand to, it can expand all the way to 1,000 radius and hit people half way across the map for all the devs care. That is to give the said player who’s played 10 years longer the wealth advantage to someone who dropped the game 10 years ago.

This is because you can just subtract that radius to balance things out once again.

But there probably would be a limit, because you don’t want the guy being blasted away halfway across the map.

Of course, this would all have to be done in a downwards slope, so that eventually the person who dropped the game 10 years ago, can come back and still play for awhile and eventually catch up significantly with only slight disadvantages remaining.

This linear-diagonal downward slope ( and not a flat linear one) is the correct metric for horizontal planning instead of vertical linear progression.

Subtraction to keep #’s fixed and level (or in other words moderate) is also key instead of adding power to match/balance power.

Of course, the lvling process from 1-80 would still be just like ANet has it now, flat and moderate and linear using simple #‘s in order to make people have to complete a character and spend time on it and also feel a sense of achievement (This flat lvling process is the perfection of previous lvling models, wherein for some reason they preferred to make it so that the higher levels took exponentially longer to lvl up to. I could probably figure out why but I’m done.)

The idea is that character progression serves to balance and perfect the game. This has to be planned out somehow though I don’t know how it’s going to be done honestly, but I have a feeling this is the way to do it.

You’d have to plan out some sort of initial imbalance, so that in-between this and the final balance point, you’re constantly improving the balance by tweaking it. The balance changes would go from being major to minor over the course of a long period of time. Thus a person who comes back into this game say 10 years later still can play it but only have a moderate disadvantage compared to his opponents because they’ve collected wealth for PvP (not minor or major, but moderate which is bad enough). This is essentially also the process for character progression and power improvement (sense of power based on small changes rather than OP ones). Of course, in the beginning the changes would be a lot bigger.

For example, a dynamic skill called flamesword, allows you to swing a particular enchanted sword initially at a preset level of 150 radius without actually making melee contact which is different from a projectile or a nova because it would be instantaneous and it would also be different from mere increased range of said weapon which would still require a swing (the radius is already initially balanced), with the first major “meta-depth” balance and power improvement process change it would swing to 155 (i’m saying 155 to show the slight change, but in reality it’d be more like 200) radius. Someone who hasn’t played a long time thus has to catch up. But here’s the awesome thing: people who have played equally long as the character with the new and improved flamesword 155 would be able to loot a stat called reduction of flame-sword 155 radius to 150. Thus that would be the counter-play and you wouldn’t have to increase the power of the guy trying to counter the flamesword 155 as well which would be vertical progression and throw things out the roof eventually since he’d have to increase his range as well and eventually everything would be blown out of proportion. Instead you simply keep the #’s fixed once again.

But for the person who hasn’t played in a long time and comes back and sees the veteran who’s accumulated the flamesword 155, it is still only a slight shift in OPness for the veteran, and it really wouldn’t be breaking any balance, since the balance could be corrected by playing a bit more and accumulating the “reduce flame-sword 155 radius to 150”. The radius is small enough to provide a small advantage but still not make the person want to drop the game because he can’t catch up. Of course, you could make the radius eventually as large as 300, or shift it to any # down the line, and it wouldn’t matter because eventually you could acquire a stat drop to “minus” or “subtract” that advantage.

Edit: correction, a melee weapon that insta hits from a distance isn’t correct, how about just a regular nova. That way 1v1, there wouldn’t be as OP of an imbalance, but in a group it might for instance do very minor splash damage in a large radius. I think this is a better example of freedom of allocation.

Individual character progression should have a stop-point.

When you’ve progressed your character far enough it should be more about the accumulation of wealth in order to bolster skill and power. This way, alts can be made across the board without having to have to progress just one character infinitely and be stuck with it (which is vertical progression).

The one way to go about doing this, would be to introduce a stopping gap wherein after awhile all said items would play on horizontal progression rather than infinitely build bulk or power on only one character, power will therefore transfer over to skill or application of content.

The key thing to make this all work is to have all or at least many items after a certain point be account-bound rather than soul-bound.

You would also have to have solved vertical progression first.
see this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solving-the-issue-of-vertical-progression/first#post977704

The way to make a character still have progression, but have a stopping point would be to stress the issue of power development as a means not to increase power for the sake of power but to balance the game ultimately. This acts like a slope, early on you play more, you get more increases you become more OP than the other guy who plays less, later on it gets more and more slight but you still get power but it serves not to throw the game out of balance but to balance it. Also this slope mixes well with skill because by then you’d have a lot of practice. Adding dynamic skills to balance out the game while intentionally making some things early on imbalanced, serves as a process to not only balance out the game for the future, but to make it so that character progression can serve to enhance the power of said character and also to progress it. But these would be slight changes that favor balance rather than strictly for adding power, the power is fixed, but the idea is to intentionally put in some imbalance early on, to allow for character progression later on which ultimately serves to balance the game through slighter and slighter changes with dynamic loot.

We all know metrics are more important as a function to balance out the game than direct application of discrete mathematics, which are impossible to calculate without the guidance of functions and just add heaps of problems after problems.

However, relating to the endgame and the ultimate goal is the feeling of wealth and power.

So, the best way to accomplish this would be to ultimately create a world where all mobs are doable and offer rewards at any given level. This not only includes the horizontal progressive idea that lower level mobs will be completely doable and not only doable but even viable/rewardable by lvl 80 characters. But on the flipside, even a large guild of lvl 1 newbies will be able to take down a lvl 80 boss given that their #’s are large enough by the use of horizontal metrics rather than linear vertical progression which is superficial and shallow.

It is important to note, that nothing is black or white, and there really are no boundaries.

So beyond the issue of arriving at an endpoint in the ultimate endgame development of GW2, skill is obviously an important factor in given players a sense of power.

The basis of this argument is that the feeling of power is more important than cosmetics in regards to the feeling of wealth, of which accumulating more wealth is just another cosmetic in endgame and can’t be considered true endgame.

This goes back to Everquest. It probably eventually ended prematurely, and didn’t have some sort of final boss, because it probably just continued feeding players content.

The best way to go about with endgame I believe is therefore expanding on PvP as the premise for introducing power to endgame.

One way to accomplish this, would be to introduce a new scenario whereby you compete with other players in actual PvE and not direct PvP or WvW. Somebody suggested a contribution factor that might flash over the players’ heads that determines extra wealth gains (but not wealth losses) and this might not be such a bad idea after all for competition. Sorry for stealing your idea poster, also please introduce glory points for PvE characters which would be a combination of accumulated wealth.

What do you guys think?

charms are cool, but maddoctor things like contributing more on a mob, can be very controversial especially since player’s will feel obligatory to contribute or suffer losses. It might seem like you can measure things out like this superficially, but it doesn’t work because player’s will feel jealous of other people who simply contribute more on one individual mob. It also makes people feel the need to be in a frenzy all the time and contribute constantly to one mob. It should be about overall progress and not just contributing to individual mobs to get more gain.

Contribution factor in and of itself is sort of like communism. You feel you have to contribute, or you’ll be lynched essentially. Not good in an RPG.

tigirius.9014:

Conncept.7638:

tigirius.9014:

I want:

1. loot levels to be restored to what they were at launch and not this garbage heap we get now
2. real balance otherwise they can rename this game Guild Warriors 2
3. horizontal progression for ascended gear to be focused on the real crafting of this game and not the mystic toilet
4. engineer pve class to be completely fixed by the end of the month. (seriously they’ve had three months to fix this class) which includes but isn’t limited to the restoration of cond damage, tab targeting for #1 grenades, and faster cast times for grenades, bombs, and pistols.

You do realize that there still hasn’t been any conclusive proof that loot drop rates have changed right? And ANet has said, if they have dropped they didn’t do it, and they can’t see anything in the code that would have caused them to drop on there own.

You ever think that it might just be your frustrations playing tricks on your mind? Some of this crap is insanely hard to get, but has always been insanely hard to get.

So i guess a 25k viewed 880+ thread isn’t proof enough huh.

Yeah, just because they aren’t talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. People have tried to farm for WEEKS now and haven’t gotten but one rare even from dragon events. That doesn’t sound fishy to you? OR if you want facts how about nexon moving thier financial attache into the offices of Anet in june to help with the overall “design” of the game,. after buying the largest amount of shares.

It stopped being a theory about a month ago.

Haha, Nexon moving in with their crap, now that’s funny.

Nexon sux. My kitten It’s like Activision with Blizzard. Guess which one’s the culprit.

And from the guild hall, comes the opportunity to deploy a mobile guild banner (this time anywhere on the field) and also upgrade it at the same time. This would act not only as a cosmetic, but also grant any stranger near the reputable guild member bonuses based on how far it’s been upgraded. The bonuses would include a mod called reputation, and serves to increase by a minor amount the generated karma (think events) for the stranger himself or influence for the stranger’s guild. This only works for the stranger and only has cosmetic attributes for the guild member deploying the banner. This encourages occasional charity and generosity and what am I doing, this is now a troll post :/.

Yes, you’re correct with the idea that currently, you don’t die much at low levels, and that’s a problem to be fixed overall anyway I think in the current complaint of things. But concerning health pools, I believe they should make them larger and more balanced like in EQ, but not necessarily take as long.

What do you think?

The growth penalty, is actually completely different.
Also, it seriously doesn’t punish you, because you can die all you want, and it would just extend the duration of the debuff. Whereas, if you were punished, and died continuously, you’d lose up to 100% of your current level. This is highly discouraging.

Think about it this way in terms of #‘s: you die continuously from a penalty, you lose a lot of XP. You die continuously from just this growth debuff, you still only extend the duration of the debuff. You at least don’t lose any XP at all in this instance. And you can keep dying to your heart’s content. However, at the actual moment that you actually kill the mob, your XP gains are reduced. This discourages growth, and punishes players positively.

The #‘s can be tweaked in all sorts of directions, it’d be cool.

What does this guy hope to achieve anyway? Honestly…I suggested lvl scaling a long time ago, and now it’s been incorporated, what’s your problem.

The idea behind theorycrafting is that you’re making open-ended suggestions, so they can’t be wrong at all. You have no education do you?

Experience plays very little in the overall scheme of things, you need to have the correct formula. Experience just serves to correct mistakes.

And next time try quoting the relevant section, kitten. Don’t put things out of context.

What do you expect me to do, post a spreadsheet of #’s here? This is called an Idea article, learn it. kitten

Is being a kitten, part of your scheme here?

The way GW2 is designed is to encourage lvling to be important too, I don’t know what you’re trying to imply here, but the whole idea of lvl scaling is to reintroduce interest in old content. I made a post on lvl scaling far far back in a certain WoW forum.

The idea of whether or not XP gains continue at lvl 80, is not really important, the only thing important here is you’re flaming my thread.

Pls don’t flame my thread thx. Provide some actual feedback instead of making empty threats, thx.

Actually, penalties discourage people more than a simple debuff on growth mechanic. The idea is you prevent growth, which like you said is the same thing, but you don’t give a penalty

Hitting lvl 80 should indeed be an accomplishment, this isn’t WoW, you can go back to WoW.

Once again, don’t troll my thread. You have your ideas backwards, especially the part about where limiting growth is actually more annoying than a direct penalty.

In all your meandering around, you seem to have missed a critical point with your screaming, that is you can continue to die, and not lose experience, and only lose growth. Capice?

You essentially think like an idiot, and speak like one too, your attacks make no sense, and they serve no constructive purpose other than to flame. Also, you still haven’t offered any constructive criticism other than to attack my character.

My posts offer incredible insight into game design, and I was the one who made a post on the WoW forums back then concerning lvl scaling.

It’s really really sad people like you ruin other people and also discredit genuine practitioners of Truth, bye bye now.

They need to make death an exacting punishment. Don’t reintroduce experience penalties or scale up the waypoint costs in accordance to character level or something like that. Instead, you introduce the concept where death limits growth. Death should give you a debuff state called Due to Death where your XP gains, magic find gains, and gold drop gains are decreased moderately for example by 5% for around 5 minutes. Of course when you hit lvl 80 the XP part will no longer apply, except for raids that apply what I suggested in another thread where your level is scaled down to meet new encounters and then scaled back up again as a loot drop. Hitting lvl 80 is thus an accomplishment in and of itself. But the growth debuff will be even more devastating. This thus doesn’t penalize players from dying but instead prevents their growth.

There is a critical aspect to note here that Account below has missed, that is that the growth debuff is different from a penalty because no matter how much you die you don’t lose actual experience points, you only extend the duration of the debuff.

The essential quality in this is that it discourages people by giving them the impression that they aren’t going to get as wealthy quick, but doesn’t punish them either. The idea circles around the premises that they can still grow, but just not as quick as a punishment. Nobody wants to be punished, and everybody wants to grow. That is why this works.

Think a little next time before you speak Account. Thanks.

The idea is there’s also a standard to doing everything, there’s an ultimate level where both casuals and hc players can both swim around in. It’s called a middle-ground, and this is common. You don’t have to do things for one or another, although hard mode for epic bosses are a different story, you’re talking about changing things around to make them easier in order to suit you. But if you can’t get past the hard stuff, that just means it’s going to be more of a challenge. Granted, this is not meant to be a competitive game at least in overall PvE (until you get to the endgame content). But you still want a challenge here and there. I don’t know about Orr or the super fast zombies, you might be right about that, but as long as it’s not broken, it’s just a challenge.

The problem with a lot of designs nowadays, is that there isn’t enough challenge even at the intermediary levels during regular character leveling. This is an obscure aspect and a very slight difference here that can be improved on that was over-looked in the past. I believe the intermediate leveling process before you get to max level still can be be fun or able to be accomplished by anyone, however, devs can incorporate challenges even at the intermediate levels and this would act as challenges on content.

Be careful here, because challenges are different from gates or locks on content, which are completely artificial and bad design.

Being able to do everything during the intermediate levels is not a good idea, offering challenges that require a measure of skill to complete is part of the overall power improvement process. This is something that existed during EQ. Nowadays, just anybody can get to lvl 80 and they think it has to be this way because rpgs are “role-playing” based and not skill-based, which is only partly true.

Once again, both minor challenges and major challenges on content are a good idea.

For example, the way to do this would be not to lock people out of content if they don’t have enough skill, but to slow down the lvling process tremendously by having to do all the race areas and still not have enough to level considerably and have to grind ever so slightly (the grind is pretty much non-existent though). If they are able to beat a “mini-boss” as to speak then they would be able to make further strides. This minor obstacle in their path will require a specific, dynamic, concrete, and very obscure action in order to complete, such as equipping certain equipment just to get past it, having to have an extra teammate to overcome it, or it having a special application required to be able to defeat it, such as can only be damaged by critical hits. Everquest I’m certain did really well in the overall combat process, and was a trial and error process for players as well resulting in many tries (and deaths) before success. The only way to do this however would be to merge classic long health bars, the holy trinity, and stat calculation with the current twitch-based style of play. This isn’t impossible to do I think.

Also, they need to make death an exacting punishment. Don’t reintroduce experience penalties or scale up the waypoint costs in accordance to character level or something like that. Instead, you introduce the concept where death limits growth. Death should give you a debuff state called Due to Death where your XP gains, magic find gains, and gold drop gains are decreased moderately for example by 5% for around 5 minutes. Of course when you hit lvl 80 the XP part will no longer apply, except for raids that apply what I suggested in another thread where your level is scaled down to meet new encounters and then scaled back up again as a loot drop. Hitting lvl 80 is thus an accomplishment in and of itself. But the growth debuff will be even more devastating. This thus doesn’t penalize players from dying but instead prevents their growth.