Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

I think the OP underestimates how many hard core players there are compared to casuals. kitten off the hard core players and they leave, and shrugs. So what?

kitten off the casual players and there’ll be no one to fund the game. This is actually true in most games. There are far more casual players than there are hard core players.

Then there are guys like me who play a LOT for a long time and don’t want gear progression in my game. Because I know how to make my own fun. The game gives me the tools to have fun and I go and have it. I don’t have to be ultra competitive or get phat lootz to enjoy playing this game.

Everyone seems to think that their demographic represents the majority of players. We can’t ALL be right. lol

I did not say I underestimated or pretended to know the demographics of the GW2 population at all in my post. It would be idiotic to say that the number of hardcore players rivals the number of casual players, and it would be idiotic to say that the casual players do not “pay the game.” I know many casual people who spend their well-earning money in-game to get more gold, so they can get items easier, as they do not have the time.

In a game like Guild Wars 2, where I see that there are many less people than there were at launch (most likely because of the no subscription key and the ability to pick the game back up without paying.) is worrying, because I want to see more people playing it, therefore I think that ANet needs to consider the entirety of the population that is playing the game—casuals and hardcore players, and everything in between—instead of mostly the people who oppose a gear progression.

To conclude, I want to say that gear progression is not the only answer to try to cater to their entire crowd, but it is the only one I can think of that would somewhat satisfy the some of the hardcore players, but at the same time angering some of the casual players. I would suggest a more content-driven ANet, which they are sort-of, but the monthly content updates are not that big, and with some news that says they are not planning a future expansion worries me. I also know that you cannot satisfy everyone, but discussions such as these help convince, flesh out, and to teach ideas that people might not otherwise be aware of.

Kaiem.8297:

Once upon a time people played mmo’s because they enjoyed the game and had fun doing the content. People played the game for the sake of playing it. Somewhere in between then and now people got tricked into thinking that the reason to play an mmo was gear progression.

New content shouldn’t be about what new more powerful gear it can offer but about being fun and enjoyable. The new content added to this game since November has been blighted by the fact it’s designed around a new level of gear. Guild missions have horrible time sinks built in that reduce incentive for guilds to do them more than once a week and that’s only the guilds that can actually afford them. Would laurels have caused such hand wringing and moaning if ascended gear wasn’t one of the things purchasable with them. People would have looked at fractals as a new and interesting dungeon and not something they had to do if they wanted the new gear tier.

You also don’t seem to understand what makes a player hardcore or casual. It’s nothing to do with wanting gear progression what so ever. In fact according to you no serious wvw player could be casual as gear progression is a pain in the kitten for wvw. For wvw people would prefer to be able to gear characters to the best possible stats in a relatively short space of time and then just have fun playing.

The game was originally designed and marketed to those who wanted a game they could quickly gear a character to top items and just play level 80 content for fun, not meaningless stat progression. Those players, who you sneer at and call casual, and the ones who would damage this game if they left. They are the ones who buy character slots, bag and bank slots, fine transmute stones etc.

Almost every mmo now has gear progression, going that route will remove some of the uniqueness that makes gw2 stand out. Offering exactly the same product as your competitors isn’t really the best business sense.

Sorry that’s a bit rambling. It’s early here and I’m trying to write this on my phone.

I’ll answer the part of response that refers to hardcore and casual. I made no indication and never said that hardcore players are all a certain “give me a better gear set group” and not all casual players are “I want to be able to pick this game back up after months away.” There was no such thing in my initial post, so you are interpreting it wrong.

I’m not going answer the rest of your post because you are twisting my words, and molding me into a person I did not say I was. I do not sneer at casual players. I do not consider myself a hardcore player. I barely have 600 hours clocked in the game, and consider myself semi-casual. For future reference, do not twist people’s words, it makes your argument invalid.

Heijincks.9267:

Unfortunately, I can’t agree with you. If this was another game I would, but GW2’s progression incentive is to work towards aesthetics.

This has been GW2’s direction from the very start. The developers did not want progression that would make a player stronger (other than the amount we have right now).

You know why there was a huge uproar with the release of ascended? Because a major portion of the playerbase does not want progression to be anything but for aesthetics. This is ingrained into an enormous amount of players. In short, GW2 is not the kind of game you’d say it should be. This type of progression worked very well for GW1, so why not have it in GW2?

Yes, perhaps GW2 isn’t catering to the hardcore crowd. I’d rather keep it that way. If “hardcore” is what you’re all about, show off your skills in WvW.

Secondly, you contradicted yourself when you said laurels are a gold sink.

Thirdly, badge of honor for aesthetics. I think 90% of the playerbase would agree to just keep it at that.

If the developers did not want gear progression, then why was it that Ascended was added in the first place? It does not set straight with me to read that developers did not want gear progression, yet they add Ascended, making it a requirement to do Fractals, and another piece of gear to get to have the advantage over somebody in WvW.

I respect your opinion that GW2 should not cater towards the hardcore crowd, but I do not think you’re right. They already tilted towards giving the hardcore crowd a carrot to chase with Ascended, but there really should be something other to pursue than just a prettier look. It’s nice after a while, but even after I geared my main to what I wanted, I really lost the incentive to do so for any future characters.

Lastly, laurels are a “gold sink.” I’m referring to a gold sink as something that you can waste a currency on—not actual gold. You can buy these random items if you would like to, and waste the dailies and monthlies that you have ground out.

Ricky Da Man.5064:

And for the OP to say the player base will radically decline if this isnt added more is pure nonsense, just look at GW1 that did not have vertical gear progression and people still play it now.

Please re-read my post, because you seem to have changed “some” to “radically.”

purpleskies.3274:

Personally I get a bit annoyed at the people asking for gear progression. I miss the trinity, but I would never post multiple threads about changing GW2 into a trinity game. And if they added the trinity here I would support the player base being upset because they were told that wasn’t a part of this game. I wish people who want gear progression showed the same courtesy.

To be honest, it would not surprise me in the future if there actually was a bigger gear progression. There’s already a somewhat time-based gear progression now, which is going against ANet’s initial stance.

I posted this in a thread that turned into a pretty big rage thread at the OP, but I feel it should be seen more. I’m not complaining, I am content with the content of the game. I’m compiling complaints of a few of my friends into this post which need to be discussed and addressed.

I just keep seeing “this game isn’t for you,” “go back to WoW,” and “that’s a grind, though!”

If you have any of these responses with some terrible backup of their initial comment, you have nothing to contribute to this thread.

There’s really no incentive to work towards to in this game other than looking like a fabulous rainbow with your sparkly legendary and multicolored armor set. The only reason to play this game, as of this moment, for those of us with 500, 600, or more hours clocked, is for a prettier item that what we have. This doesn’t appeal to more of the hardcore players.

The hardcore players are more focused on progression, to become better and hit harder, and this does not happen much. With Ascended gear, this was introduced, but there has been a lot of feedback on this from the community because people didn’t want to have a gear requirement. The hardcore players (the ones that will keep playing this game for a long time) need an incentive to stay, or else this player base will dwindle.

The more softcore players, and the casuals, do not want this gear progression. They want to pick up the game after months away and be able to compete again. This is the current state of the game, since I had taken a 2 month break and was able to pick it back up. This is a nice aspect of the game, but it is one that quickly gets boring after picking the game back up. There’s not much to aim towards.

The currencies are part of the issue.

We have laurels, which are pretty bad for a couple reasons :
One, to create a gold sink for players who are not smart enough to realize that there are much easier ways to get items (See the Armor Boxes, Crafting Mat boxes, Crafting starter kits, Obsidian Shards, Unidentified Dyes… nothing else comes to mind at the moment)
Two, to give the more hardcore players more stuff to buy! This grind isn’t fun though. Roughly 40 laurels a month? An ascended amulet costing that much? No thank you, I’d rather spend my laurels on an insanely expensive cat.

Badges of Honor, which are near useless:
I know they’re probably being looked at in the 26 Mar. update, but they’re terrible right now. It’s just another prerequisite for a legendary, to buy siege blueprints (which are so much easier to get if you have gold, which you can also get faster than badges. For example, 100 badges for an alpha siege, or 1 gold. I can get one gold in a few minutes, which 100 badges takes a few hours of WvW, or a few days of casual play) or for you to buy extremely expensive PVT gear (soldier’s) which you can craft, buy with karma, or do dungeons (AC, SE, HoTW).

There’s also the new Guild Merits, and Guild commendations(2 per week, for 6 weeks for another pretty pink ascended piece!), but I won’t even go into those for how much they’re messed up. Seriously, you have to have an amazing amount of guild money, for a small guild, or a massive guild, to receive enough guild influence to unlock the missions. Even then, the most hardcore guilds that I’ve seen have Guild Treks unlocked, which don’t even reward commendations.

Overall, ArenaNet needs to do some serious rethinking on the direction they’re taking the game, because if they sway too far towards a more casual approach, they’ll be losing some of the hardcore player base, and if they sway more towards a hardcore approach, they’ll be losing some of the casual player base.

As probably previously mentioned in the thread, a lot of thieves are pretty terrible at the class. This is partly because thieves rely more on endurance and dodging correctly than most other classes.

Thieves are kicked this often because nobody knows how to dodge on one. It’s sad how easy the timing is to dodge when paying attention to boss fights. There’s really no way to fix this in the future, and if you wanted to lessen how much thieves are kicked, then it would require a major re-do of the class, which it basically impossible and would make a lot of people complain.

Tl;dr: Thieves rely heavier than other classes on dodge. People can’t dodge, their health melts, they die.

Thief stealth doesn’t need changing; you should have a lot of mobility no matter what as a thief. The fact that people can attack you when you use stealth is good for them, and a bad part on you. Use your stealths better.

Thief is far from needing a buff. Anything you really buff will directly make them more powerful, which they already are.

I have about 500 hours on thief and have not recognized any difficulties jumping in and out of stealth, and staying stealthed.

Darius Glazkov.9750:

soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo………………. what happens when you break into lowlands keep?

this lol!!!!!!! http://i.imgur.com/cEKyKGv.jpg

don’t do it again.

Yeah… when SB and lowlands was taken from us, everybody was mad and just zerg rushed the keeps. Terrible idea to try to take our keep.

Was fun though!

The only occurrence I have seen of a total boss reset (which I would count as the boss returning to the original position it started in and healing to maximum) is when the entire party is stealthed and nobody has aggro. This should be the only case where the boss would reset. Therefore, as long as the entire party is not stealthed, dead, or otherwise out of combat, then the boss will not reset.