Guild Wars 2

Seasniffer.1763:

This is a very nice change but what is ArenaNet going to do about the declining bee population?

Well I have 2 bee hives and I post a blog about my bee’s every two weeks on facebook in which a lot of Arenanet follows. Also we have a good 20 bee hives on the roof of our building so while we could be doing more but we are fighting that decline!

Draco Magnus.2473:

I totally understand the Meteorshower nerv.

But why the Air-Overload?
D/W ele was at one level with thief and condi ranger. (and maybe engi if he is really good)
Now there are better classes in the only thing eles can do in raids.

Ok, you can heal. But then we would need an uniqe group buff or something like this. Otherwise Druids are better.

Make Eles great again!

Overall Ele’s are and have been a bit out of bounds power wise, We’ve been trying to bring them in line. The profession has a huge variance in skill level and applications and they bring a lot to the table in any situation which makes them really hard to make changes to. Overload created an insane amount of damage and a 7% reduction isn’t going to stop that from being played but bring it more in line. As for Meteor Shower when it came to big targets the number of times this would hit was insane so this change helps normalize it so other profession with skills that don’t scale as insanely against large monsters can better compete.

Well you all ready have 1 fan : )

<————

Chris Whiteside.6102:

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Mr. Whiteside, sorry to bring it up again, but can you clarify the changes in instance ownership? I believe that there’s a genuine concern for griefing, and I was hoping that you could put our legitimate worries at ease.

Thanks again for replying!

We have been discussing this for a very long time. Can you PM me so i remember to get back to this point when it is appropriate to do so please?

Chris

I could answer this! It is true two people could be invited and then boot out everyone else to “take over” the instance where as before two people could only kick the instance owner out closing the instance destroying it for everyone. While this isn’t ideal and something we need to look more into, the goal of this change was to reduce the more common case of the instance owner leaving. For now Ryan is looking into adding some logging (see post here) so people can report people abusing this.

Thanks everyone for giving us some feedback on this system we’ll meet internally and discuss this system some more as I think there are a lot of valid points being brought up here.

Swagger.1459:

question first…
what is the reasoning behind gear only affecting 3 of 7 stats (besides celestial)?

Really 3 stats just makes for some more interesting choices in how people itemize.

Sarrs.4831:

Quick q, Izzy, are Boon/Condi Duration actually on the table?

I’m just testing the waters so I love to hear ideas.

1&2 stat combos: Probably wouldn’t do this we started off with a lot of items centered around 1 stat and it really created some insane min maxing that made the game play unfun.

Thanks for all the responses!

I would love to get people thoughts on what stat combinations they would like to see added to the game?

Fowidner.6930:

The main thing I still don’t understand; Fractals is all about agony and agony resistance. After compleeting a Fractal you have a chance to get Fractal Weapons, But WHY we still can’t upgrade these weapons into ascended and maybe like the backpack an extra glow or any other effect while infusion the weapon.

A few neat ideas here I wanted to split out.
1.) Upgrading weapons to ascended: We didn’t do this because when we first released these weapons there where no ascended weapons and now that there are we figured like all skins people could transfer them via the transmogrification system. I do how ever really like the idea of making another tier to the weapons and allowing you to upgrade it much like the backpack.
2) Infused weapons: I don’t want us to add infusions to all ascend pieces as it quickly blows out agony and makes the new +1 system more complicated. Keeping it to rings and back items makes the known quantity of agony resistance predictable.

morrolan.9608:

How about some of the more egregious vertical progression imbalances get fixed before implementing purely horizontal progression suggestions such as the fixing ascended armor crafting so that it is more equitable instead of light armor taking 36 days to craft, medium armor 24 days and heavy armor 25 days due to the time gating on bolts of damask.

The goal of the T7 materials is not to be a pure time gate for crafting it’s to allow those materials to have value above their cost. This does mean weapons and armor that only take one material take longer to craft if you craft all the T7 mats yourself but you could also buy those mats thus it isn’t a time gate.

We do recognize that cloth prices are a bit high this is a factor of how hard it is to focus farm for leather and cloth. This is something we are looking into.

ptitminou.6489:

TLDR/Conclusion:
So, I will be able to run level 39 fractals in a month’s time, 2 months if I were a fresh new account, my friend will barely be able to afford 1 ascended ring, or one ascension item and he will still be running level 1-9 in 2 months because you want to “help” casual players. Timegates do NOT work, they will never slow down a hardcore player, all they achieve is to make us math things out to get max efficiency. Fractals really make a lot of the other timegates useless too, just an fyi for your game.

L2P an MMO tips:
Chase the furthest attainable carrot for your gamestyle (ie: not wvw achieves if you are an achiever), chances are you’ll grab a few of the others along the way without even trying. As well as making a ton of gold, because games are generally misbalanced like that to incite players to even bother going after that far away carrot.

The goal isn’t to make hardcore and causal players have equal times that would make for a pretty unfun game, goal is to just bring the ratios between them slightly closer instead of 100 to 1 get it to 20 to 1 and stop it from becoming 1000 to 1 over 10 years.

Some of the debate your leading into is time gating vs skill gating which is pretty tricky skill gating is important for a game but it drives a lot of people away. I actually think we need to add more skill gating but skill gating progression I think leaves some really strong imbalances and leads to really nitch hard core user base. This is why skill gating into horizontal progression rewards is good because this can allow people to do hard things but doesn’t require people to do it. This is why ascended armor is designed to be achievable by anyone just takes time to so.

cesmode.4257:

We’ve talked about ascended runes/sigls as I think there are a number of balance issues with the current runes and sigils and it would allow us to make some tweaks to it that are harder to make without it but I don’t think we feel any need to do it yet and maybe not even at all. We have talked about how we are going to bring Jewel crafting and Cooking up to 500 but overall we really want to see how armor pans out and we would like to spend our time more on horizontal progression.

Hi, Thanks for the response! Get the email or the post-it note?

So this is semi comforting that you have not definitively decided on doing it yet, or if at all. I definately agree that JC and cooking need a boost and judging by this thread I think these are areas where you can lighten up on the requirements to craft in these disciplines. And it is good to hear that now that ascended armor is here, you are turning your focus to horizontal progression.

Question: How would it make your job easier to tweak balance issues if ascended sigils and runes were introduced, vs simply tweaking the existing ones? I don’t understand this.

Also, and one thing to keep in mind: If you ever decided to go ahead with introducing ascended sigils and runes, please allow them to be put into exotic gear. This would not force a player to grind up to 500 in a craft just to get these items.

While I could see how ascended gear feels like our focus as been on vertical progression I don’t feel like that is the case we spend a lot more time adding many things I would consider horizontal progression. I feel like new stat combos, skins, skills, traits, crafting recipes, mini pets, achievements, ect… are all horizontal progression and we have spent a lot more time and resources on expanding those systems by far.

Ascended Runes/Sigils: This is mainly an issue with acquisition of the exotic ones there is just a large number of worthless runes mainly due to the balance between supply and demand, while I think there are a number of balance tweaks needed to bring more in line I don’t think the total supply of all runes/sigils comes anywhere near the total demand for all runes and sigils which means over time runes and sigils value just gets less and less. It’s much harder to change that as it requires changing the value of a lot of current items. There are other systems we could do to fix this problem like we could make there be a less chance to salvage them out or make all runes/sigils crafting and when you salvage them you get some material that is used so we can adjust supply and demand between those.

Our system doesn’t really support limiting upgrades by rarity and I don’t think this is something we would do if we wanted to go that route we would just make infusions better sense they are naturally limited by ascended gear but that’s also a can of worms.

Iason Evan.3806:

Thanks Chris and Izzy for taking the time to have such a fantastic discourse with the community. I appreciate the time gating post by Izzy, but there is an issue with it: Wealthy players can buy the end result materials and negate the time sink. Casual players or even more regular players that don’t have a lot of disposable in game income can not. It makes for an unequal playing field. I think time gates should be universal.

I really love the above post that talks about adding 7 time gated materials per week. You can only make 7 a week, but you can make them all on the same day.That would actually benefit casual and hard core alike. You can do it all at once and forget it till the next week. There is a caveat with this system though: It needs to be universally time gated. The end result materials should not be available for purchase.

I think that vertical progression is better rewarded with in game items and not leaderboards that aren’t in the game. I want my progression to be represented in game. Titles and emotes do a great job of this in game. I think the Fractals needs it’s own set of armor to compliment the weapons and show off to other players that you do them. It is after all the only place in game where AR is needed. What better way to show off that you are at a certain fractal level (vertical progression) than with a set of armor that only drops at a certain tier or above? Fractal titles are a good way too. Leaderboards don’t show it off in Tyria and that is where my vertical progression matters.

Yeah the 7 time gate thing is interesting there is a bit of a challenge to communicate something like that clearly and it has some economic impacts like currently T7 cloth goes for 10g but takes 4 or 5 to make so you can make a good 5 or 6 gold if you could choose you would simply craft all t7 cloth x 7 right now which would drive the price down quickly. The whole goal of the time gated crafting is to allow people to crafting something that is worth more then the mats because of our global trading post most materials are worth so close to the mats that crafting is rarely profitable unless your doing something like pitching for precursors. The demand for the materials is higher at the start but even the ascended weapons ones you can still make a gold or so off them. I’m not 100% sure how something like allowing players to craft any of 7 items would effect things I think some materials which have lower demand like leather would just be crafted a lot less in favor of cloth and ore which would start to normalize the materials which makes the whole system a little less interesting. (So need to an economic CDI at some point lol)

Some other interesting ways we could midigate the pressure on alts is just make all ascended gear account bound it would remove some demand but it’s something we’ve discussed before. Another idea is we could make it easier to craft ascended gear after you’ve made the first set, or we could allow you to duplicate ascended gear with some recipe so once you’ve created one set you can copy it for an alt for less. You could allow people to give up other time gates for the crafting one by letting people craft stuff with laurals or mystic coins. These are all some of the ideas or concepts we toss around for how to solve some of the alt issues. As for crafting your first set of ascended gear we want this to take a bit of time before you get to our horizontal progression systems. These are all some random brainstorm ideas that need a lot more vetting but I wanted to give some examples of other ways to work around some of these issues.

cesmode.4257

Im still waiting on some response about future progression in terms of
1. Ascended runes and sigils — Will they ever be in the game?
2. Will Ascended runes and sigils be only allowed on ascended weapons and armor? <— thus forcing the player to craft the ascended armor first before being able to utilzie the ascended rune or sigil.
Dyin’ to know this one.
Edit: I know you all are busy and/or could be formulating a proper response to it Just waiting!

We’ve talked about ascended runes/sigls as I think there are a number of balance issues with the current runes and sigils and it would allow us to make some tweaks to it that are harder to make without it but I don’t think we feel any need to do it yet and maybe not even at all. We have talked about how we are going to bring Jewel crafting and Cooking up to 500 but overall we really want to see how armor pans out and we would like to spend our time more on horizontal progression.

Shockwave.1230:

Izzy,

It seems that the team would be in a great position to start coming up with a lot of smaller and maybe new fresh ideas for character progression. It’s early on in the game’s overall lifespan (knocks on wood), you’re trying to learn more about what the community likes and wants.

Now seems like a really good opportunity to break down character progression into numerous smaller pieces, there’s already lots of LONG term goals. What and how to do this are pending, but big picture if progression content is scatter throughout the world in smaller chunks (relatively speaking, with perhaps some variations in size) a couple important things may happen.

1) The concentration of players may change, and people might start exploring maps for the character progression content.

2) People may feel better about progressing alts, because they can go after smaller things they want for specific characters.

3) The dev team can collect metrics based upon the content that gets put out to see what people are doing most, and what people are repeating.

The hope for the team would be that releasing fair amounts of smaller character progression and related content is more feasible when it comes to turn around time. Spreading it throughout the existing world would hopefully allow reutilization of some existing content as opposed to having to completely develop from scratch.

I don’t know how the teams at ANet feel about casting a wide net of small content for progression, but RPGs are all about character progression, so you’d be pretty guarenteed all the content would be encountered a lot and can get a good idea of what to expand upon.

Food for thought.

I think this is an interesting way to look at it but one of the important things about progression is you want a common thing to communicate your accomplishments. For example if I say I just hit rank 2000 on my little pony race adventure time, you have no idea if that was a hard thing or not, but if I said I just hit 20k achievement points you have a good idea of how much effort that was.

I think your thoughts are pretty much what horizontal progression tries to do give lots of little options all over for people to do as many as they like, but keep in mind this still creates a lot of work in creating common language for people to communicate as well as requires a lot more work. Not saying it’s not worth it just trying to explain the trade offs.

Cliff.8679:

Izzy, you gave an example a little earlier about how it’s a problem that there’s a big gap between players who play a lot versus players who don’t play as much, and you mentioned an example of the hardcore players being level 4000 while the casual players are 100.

I don’t think this example really works, because this game doesn’t have any kind of vertical progression like that. In fact, before ascended gear, the hardcore and the casual players were on a level playing field, time-gating or not. Exotics were all anyone had to worry about, and they weren’t too difficult or time consuming to attain. Now with the ascended crafting, it actually makes things worse. Players who don’t play as much have less laurels, they miss days to do their ectoplasm refinements, have less materials to use, less money to buy materials they might need, etc. So I’m failing to see how the time-gating helps keep a minimal gap between hardcore players and casual players on a power level, especially when one didn’t really exist before.

At this point, the only purpose this time-gating is serving is what you just said: it keeps a stranglehold on the ascended material market so that some players can make money selling instead of crafting. Is that really worth it? I agree that crafting is largely useless when it comes to actually being profitable for players, but there has to be a better answer than crippling our ability to advance at a reasonable speed. Especially when we want to have multiple builds, outfit multiple characters, and outfit those multiple characters with multiple builds of their own.

I was using the example to explain how time gates help equalize players goals and focus them together. Another example would be guild timers without them a super hard core guild would have finished all guild levels in 1 night where other guilds of equal size might take months. Then if you design new content around the guild that can do that much content in 1 night then the other guilds just get left behind in the dust. Vertical or horizontal progression doesn’t matter a player who is going to take 3 years to do something everyone else and in a few weeks makes it hard to balance. Now gates don’t make them equal at all, the players with more time will still complete things faster take my guild example the super good guild still finishes something in 5 weeks that took the other 3 months, but it does help close that gap. You really don’t want them to be that close you just don’t want them to be crazy far apart.

This also is super important for wealth disparity as far as economy goes but I’m keeping the examples as much around progression as economy is a totally different discussion.

adubb.2453:

Here’s an crazy idea that’s a little out of left field:

What if any profession could use any armor type?
With this one change you would instantly have access to a wider range of aesthetic choice for their character. Not only would your characters get a wider aesthetic choice, but you could have some really crazy builds with it but it would completely squash the idea of the “trinity”.

In order to assist with balance, you could perhaps give certain advantages/disadvantages with each type of armor. Heavy armor would give you increased armor rating, but decreased movement speed. Medium armor would give a healthy dose of both. Light armor would give you the most movement speed, but lowest armor rating. The ability to mix and match would significantly widen the range of builds and survivability.

Bizarre use cases!
Guardians could switch to medium armor to focus more on DPS, then survivability. Ele’s could wear heavy armor to boost their survivability and perhaps encourage more melee Ele’s in PvE. When was the last time you saw a D/D ele in a dungeon? (It’s rare!) And imagine what would no doubt be everyone’s nightmare? A necro in heavy armor! Good lord, it would be glorious!

One thing to keep in mind how our system works is you can’t mix heavy, medium and light armor together the way we lay out the texture means these items can never be mixed. After that while it would open up some options you always have to be careful with making profession all feel the same. This is all ready a big struggle as we want all professions to fill multiple roles but it’s important some professions have weakness that they can overcome if you let your weakest character be a toughest as your toughest then they both lose some some of what makes them different

Essence Snow.3194:

I hope ya’ll realize that most every pro and reason you just listed gets negated by allowing players to bypass time gates via gold.

This is why we really count crafting gating as a soft gate it is not meant to be a hard gate, but we have a lot of other time gates in the game daily, gathering, guild mission cool down, fractal daily timers ect. I know most of the concern about gating is directed at the crafting gate but I’m more trying to give insight to why we use time gates at all.

Nike.2631:

StriderShinryu.6923:

…it’s becoming pretty clear at this point that the CDI is not what I interpreted it as being. I hesitate to call it an outright failure as, at best, we’re not going to be seeing any of the fruits of our labour for at least several months but the reality of what we are seeing now is definitely not what I was anticipating when the CDI stone was started in it’s rolling.

I’m sort of curious what you thought could happen that isn’t or the time you felt was reasonable to see ideas be converted into action?

Because personally, I find the turn around time between the close of the Living Story CDI and the announcement that the 2 week release schedule is being put on hold AND their revealing in advance the end date for the Scarlet Storyline were breathtakingly fast manifestations of that discussion.

Cause and effect, as far as I can tell.

While it is true in how we work it’s hard to get fast turn around to ideas and I think a lot of the discussion and ideas need to be vetting more to make sure we are not missing something I do find these open discussion help drive discussions in the office and can help with priority. The goal of these in my mind isn’t to come away with a set of action items but to help share some insight on how we do things and why. This in turn gives people a greater understanding of how our game is made and can help improve communication between the dev’s and the community which can often lead to higher enjoyment for everyone.

videoboy.4162

Isaiah,
I see where you’re coming from with the time gates. My question is, do you think that allowing players to craft two or three items per day would be too detrimental?

Well the crafting gating we added was actually for a different reason then gating the speed in which someone can craft ascended gear. We wanted to make people who level up crafting able to do something to gain gold each day. The time gate here goal is much more focused around making gold then limiting crafting as you can bypass it with gold. This does break down when someone has a lot of characters and has an endless demand for these mats. This problem I put under alt problem and we just need to brainstorm more ideas on how to make life easier for people with lots of characters.

timmyf.1490

Izzy-
I think that’s some great info on time-gating and helps us to understand why you use it. I would add that, in addition to casual-vs-hardcore, you should consider single-vs-multiple character players.
Time gates that might be reasonable for players with a single character could be entirely ridiculous for those of us who have eight.

I think your totally right and I think we do keep these in mind, it’s why we made sure for each mat people can acquire it in both multiplier and single player ways. We don’t try and balance these to be equal just to make sure they are reasonably doable. We did be a little cautious on ascended mats in WvW as we didn’t want to drive people to farm there in an unnatural way. After playing it I do think we need to make some adjustments in this area.

The Lost Witch.7601

These two have their own con’s:
- If I can only play an hour a day, I don’t want to spend any of that time loading into Lions Arch to do my crafting and do my daily. Yet that is what I often find myself doing, and it freaks me out.
- I don’t want to log in every day, I need to spend some time on something else. I want to put GW2 away for a few weeks and invest in other parts of life. (Be it other forms of play/studying/traveling/social calls/an intense working period or who knows what.) But I will be ‘behind’ on progress if I don’t log in. And it is so ‘easy’ to just log in and get those time gated things done… but they make it really hard to take a break!
You make a fair point, but these should really be a part of the con’s in your list!

Well this comes down to your play style it’s not like there is anything forcing you to log in every day just slows you down if you don’t and as for being behind I think when the new thing comes out there is a stronger pressure around “being behind” but as time goes on that pressure goes away. Sense we are normally planning on how something will work in the long term we are ok with there being a bit more pressure when something first goes out but someone who starts one month from now will have a very different feeling.

Chris Whiteside

<3 you Izzy!

<3 you too Chris but I responded before reading your note/ email victory is mine.

Just so everyone knows Chris loves these threads a lot and we do talk about them a lot even as he was leaving today he was all excited as we talked about the discussions here so thanks everyone for making my boss all happy

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490

Still no Dev comment that I’ve seen on Time Gates, something that many players brought up early in this thread. Sort of disappointed by that.

So I know time gates is a pretty hot topical overall as I’ve had some pretty heated debates in the past over it. So here is my view on them.

Summary
Overall I think time gates are important for an MMO, while they have pro’s and con’s for sure, in my opinion the overall gains come out ahead. That said I think there is diminishing returns to the number of time gates in a game. This brings up a core design philosophy which is “it’s always easier to add to then it is to take away” (while in this example it is a bit inverse, as adding a time gate is “adding” but it’s really taking away the players ability to repeat the action as much as they want). Meaning, we error on the side of time gating as we can always remove a time gate if needed but it’s really hard to add one. One clarification I would like to make is there are two different time gates: One time and repeatable. I think most of the complaints about time gates are all on the repeatable end, so I’ll focus my thoughts on that one.

Con’s
- Time gates hurt players with more time (by this I mean players with more time run up against time gates more and their time becomes less rewarded over time.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to complete the content before the gate resets, this can add fatigue to players play experience (If I have 15 things I need to do every time I log in, I never feel like I get to do what I want to do.)
- Time gates are very calculable (You know how many dailies you need to get x reward.) It’s hard to say how many days it takes to hit level 80 as it’s very dependent on too many factors. Knowing the time can sometimes make it feel more daunting or tedious.

Pro’s
- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)
- Time gates equalize players by bringing the hardcore and the causal players closer together. (Players play at an variety of different times and intensities. This makes balancing wealth disparity and play times/progression much harder without actual gates.)
- Time gates help group players up (guilds 1 week timer helps group a large amount of play times into the same time frame.)

Reasons for time gating
- Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)
- Overflow issues (the way our tech works without a time gate, you can use overflows to reset your timer)
- Reward Equalization (keep the time to do something more even between hardcore and causal)
- Character vs Account (some things we want to reward the account and thus an account time gated reward allows us to do that cleanly, which stops people from deleting characters and renaming in order to acquire a large number of things)

Overall I feel like time gating is important for an MMO because it’s important to close the gap between the causal and hardcore group so you can make sure your future rewards and content are useful for a wider variety of players. For example if there was no level cap and everyone could level as much as they want, hardcore players would be at level 4561 and a causal player would be at like 100. Once that happens, it would be very hard to make anything that both of those players would be happy about getting. MMO’s also have what I like to call “mass” to them, the more people playing and logging on, the more fun they are and systems which encourage people to log in often help create that mass. People see their friends regularly even just to say “hey there is an event this Sunday with the guild” or “hey lets set aside some time Friday so we can do fractals”. Now this doesn’t mean I feel like we can just add time gates everywhere. In fact I think you need either a very large amount of time gated stuff so a player can play for ever and never run out of things to do (which is a bit unrealistic) or you need non-time gated rewards and game play. This is why we create places for people to farm for all types of things. We like people who farm a lot, we are just always trying to make sure farming doesn’t blow out an item so much it’s no longer worth farming as it sort of defeats the whole reason to farm. A nice mix of time gates and non-gates is important. I think there are some valid complaints that we have over time gated some areas of the game and we should do some reviews of our time gates to see if adjustments should be made, but the game needs time gates for many reasons and if they were not there the game would be way less fun for any type of player.

Risky Man.1756:

What about Weapon Skins? Is that just as costly? Considering the lack of weapon dyes in the game, could you not work with that? Maybe even add in Animations for certain weapons on top of the existing skins. Examples like an ecto glow, or a pink mist. Here’s one, change the color of skill animations like arrow/bullet trails. Even simpler maybe unique weapon names like GW1.
Just some thoughts.
And thanks for the discussion.

Weapon skins are not as hard as Armor which is why you see more of them, but there are still 19 weapons and we’ve found partial sets are not everyone fav thing. We do think there is some fatige to a slot. For example if we added a weapon skin every week the number of people who would care about each new weapon would go down quick. Which is why we try and rotate which slots new art comes out.

Gloves, Boots, shoulders and Helms are easier for armor but still take a while, Coats and Leggings are the most expensive.

Back items and weapons are faster to make but you need to make a lot of them

Sytherek.7689:

Excuse me, which “tradable level up books” are you referring to?

I mean account bound level up books, the tomes of knowledge.

Ascended Gear
So then why did we add ascended gear, well the reason is we wanted sometime between the transition and what we shipped with was very little time turns out global trading post has a lot more effect on this then we had original thought which made us need a non-tradable gear step. We still have some progression to smooth out around the rare -> exotic area as mostly you just jump from leveling greens to exotics and rare is really only used for salvaging into ecto. We have been spacing out adding each slot of ascended gear to make sure we don’t make our original mistake again and I’m sure we’ll need to continue to evaluate the time to gain this gear like we do all things.

Art Progression
Art progression! It’s horizontal why not do it more!!! Well we do this a lot all ready and a lot of it’s constraints comes down to costs. Every single piece of art we make is not liked by everyone and so the amount of art you have to make to give everyone a smooth art progression curve is very high. The cost of making some pieces of art is also very high (Armor especially) sense very pair of gloves = 10 pairs of gloves due to race/sex. We think art is a great horizontal progression system but not something that can stand 100% alone due to constraints of creation.

Grind
Alts

I group these together because I think they have some relation. Grind well I think grind is a kittene to fully describe because it really comes down to each person own personal feeling of I can only do x action so many times before its fun faction goes down and thus starts to feel grinding. For some this can be do something twice others 100 times, our goal with how to keep grind out of the game is the relation between time based and skill based gating. I think this is an area we are always trying to get a better sense on as we start to make things harder to add more challenge to the game sometimes we cross the time gate and skill gate too much and things feel more grindy then we intend. As for alts why I lump these up is I think often leveling up alts can feel grindy, our goals here are really about how we make things feel a little less grinding for some actions and we’ve been making a lot of steps with that combing WvW xp, adding tradable level up books, birthday gifts that level you up ect.. I think we are not done with the initiative to progressing alts being a bit more smooth and it’s something we will keep working on as we move forward.

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

Ok so that was a wall of text and clearly needs a cool story bro, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there before I head home for the day. Thanks everyone for posting we are reading it and maybe I’ll jump on after dinner if I get some free time.

As chris said going to be hard to keep to a 3 page summary with this one but I’ll get started

Topics
*Fractal Resets
*Ascended Gear
*Horizontal Progression
*Vertical Progression
*Grind
*Art Progression
*Alts
*Gates
*Map progression
*Ascended creation time

There where a a lot more topics but I figured I’ll get a start before I head home

Fractal Resets
See my above post on this.

Ascended Gear
Horizontal Progression
Vertical Progression

I’m going to lump these three together and talk about all three. The goal of progression is for you to feel like your character is growing as you spend time in the game. It can also serve as a common system that the different playstyles of people can use as a common language to communicate their accomplishment between each other. For example saying I reached level 80 or have full ascended tells someone of your accomplishments but you could do that in many different ways.

Vertical progression
Some games choose vertical progression for this system and I think vertical progression has it’s place it’s a very strait forward system that has natural gating built in and makes you feel better when you get stronger and overcome those gates. The place where I feel it breaks down is when you start adding to a game. This changes the feeling of vertical progression as your accomplishments start to become a bit more of a moving target I think this problem hasn’t really be solved for vertical progression as most games just live with this downside and enjoy vertical progression for it’s easy of use and clear system the biggest solution I’ve liked is soft caps where the cost gets so high you effectively have a cap but it’s a little more grey you lose some of the clarity of vertical progression but you gain some constraints. In Guild Wars 2 we wanted from the start to try and solve this paradigm so we said let’s use vertical progression at the start as the gate can be a great tool to teach people slower and to grant access to different areas and build that sense of growth, but we found in GW1 that a max to that time allows for us to have a common end point for people and from there we grow horizontally.

Horizontal Progression
With horizontal progression, it has some tradeoffs it’s great for adding to as everything you add takes away a lot less from the things you made before. Making it a great system to add to it also keeps things fresh as it can add more choices and options. It’s weakness are mostly with clarity and gating, it always takes a lot more effect to explain what someone needs to do next with horizontal progression which means your often spending a lot of time and UI to tell people what to do to overcome this weakness while this can happen with vertical progression too it’s normally a bit simpler and easier sense it’s often more liner. Vertical progression naturally gets gateing built in and while you can add gating to horizontal progression it once again takes more UI and systems to explain why that gating matters you could easily add content that you can’t do unless you have this skill but how do you that content is there?

This is why for GW2 our goals from the start where using Vertical progression for teaching and clarity and then have a common understandable end point at that point switch to a more horizontal progression system which is easy to add too. We’ll still have to overcome some of the downsides with horizontal progression and it’s something we are contiung to work on.

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

I think that’s fair but there wasn’t much back and forth on the topic sense our commander system is so simple there isn’t much to discuss.

Thanks for the feedback though I’ll make sure and cover some more reasoning/explanation for things next time.

morrolan.9608:

Just some feedback on the current WvW CDI thread whilst there are some good suggestions it seems to be going pretty much nowhere in collaborative terms, much like the first WvW thread.

What where some things that could have been done better in that thread? What are some examples of collaboration you are looking to see ?

I’m going to close this thread as I think this topic has come to and end, I wanted to thank everyone involved it’s been a great thread here is a summary of the discussions, this is a list of the main topics that where discussed and not a list of upcoming features. As with all CDI threads will bring the info gained from these threads into our discussion internally.

Commander Visibility

• More options for the Color/Shape of the tag itself. This could be tied to functionality or rank of commanders but mainly targeted around organization.
• Removal of buff display to enemies. As well as we should avoid doing skills/abilities that highlight the commander to enemies.
• Ability to limit visibility to a sub group, party, guild, ect..
• Tag sizing. (I debate this a bit as when you auto size the tag you can often lose the ability to see how far away something is but it was brought up a lot so listing it here)
• Add squads to LFG system.

Commander Tools

• More detailed supply info that’s always up. (Increased radius)
• Ability to create sub roles within a squad.
• Current squad tools are rarely used.
• Seems to be some debates on buffs to followers, but there is a lot of good examples of ways to do that.
• Squad size needs to be increased.
• Ability to group up parties or other commanders to form different squad organization.
• Improved chat suppression for commanders
• Commander announcements (yellow text across the screen)
• Open/Closing Squad tools

Commander gating

• Current 100g gate isn’t the cleanest gate. (Whole goal behind a gate is to limit the number of commanders out there.
• Gating using WvW abilities seems to have some debate to it, but seems like something we should avoid.
• Account bound commander tags vs character bound.

The next CDI thread will be run by Chris Whiteside starting on Wed 12/11 the topic will be Progression.

Once again Thank you these threads are a joy to read and cause many great conversations and discussion here in the office.

Twinny.9304:

Question
If there will be any change to the Commander Gating, does that mean everybody start from scratch? or current Commanders still get to keep their tags? Because I would hate to lose/get a refund on my tag. I saved hard for that when i had very little cash and would like to keep it.

I was just asking to get a sense of it really. : )

I think this thread is nearing it’s end so I wanted to do a quick high level summary of what I’ve gotten out of it so far and a few questions about each.

Commander Visibility

• More options for the Color/Shape of the tag itself. This could be tied to functionality or rank of commanders but mainly targeted around organization.
• Removal of buff display to enemies. As well as we should avoid doing skills/abilities that highlight the commander to enemies.
• Ability to limit visibility to a sub group, party, guild, ect..
• Tag sizing. (I debate this a bit as when you auto size the tag you can often lose the ability to see how far away something is but it was brought up a lot so listing it here)
• Add squads to LFG system.

Questions:
1.) How important is it to see your squad members as a different color and always visible on your map like party?

Commander Tools

• More detailed supply info that’s always up. (Increased radius)
• Ability to create sub roles within a squad.
• Current squad tools are rarely used.
• Seems to be some debates on buffs to followers, but there is a lot of good examples of ways to do that.
• Squad size needs to be increased.
• Ability to group up parties or other commanders to form different squad organization.
• Improved chat suppression for commanders
• Commander announcements (yellow text across the screen)

Questions:
2) I’ve always felt the best commander organization tool would be the ability to create events. Like drop a siege and the commander can set this is a build event then everyone gets Ui like build this flame ram 0/50 supply needed. Or Destroy this gate <show gate health bar>. Lets assume for this discussion there are no rewards to the events just a communication tool. Thoughts on commander created events?

Commander gating

• Current 100g gate isn’t the cleanest gate. (Whole goal behind a gate is to limit the number of commanders out there.
• Gating using WvW abilities seems to have some debate to it, but seems like something we should avoid.
• Account bound commander tags vs character bound.

Question
3) A guild gating system would be clean but require all commanders to be in a fairly active guild is this a fair gating system?

Question
4) What did I miss on this list

Blackarps.1974:

Out of the suggestions given so far, how many do you think will be put into action? Which ones? When is the earliest we could see a change to the commander system?

I have a ton of other questions and could talk to you about GW2 for hours. I wish you had some time to do so

I think it’s hard to say how many but from the other CDI threads I know they spawn a lot of discussions internally and give a lot of different perspectives on the issue. I think overall this discussions will help shape the feature and backlog list of things to do with commander which could lead to many ideas here spawning improvements. As for time frame thats not really what this thread is for so I’ll dodge roll that question.

Hit me up in game if I’m not doing something I’m always up for discussing/debating. Char name is Izzy or Izzys Rose.

FirstRyder.2091:

Is this something you see as a problem? Or working as intended? Or which could be improved?

I think it’s less of an issue now that you can trade siege and I wouldn’t exactly say it’s working as intended. I think our goal was siege placement was done but lots of different people but in reality it’s much easier and more practical for the commander to do it as they have a better understanding of supply and are paying more attention to these things. I could see features to support easier donations but in the end I think people can do this pretty easily now so I honestly haven’t given a feature like that much thought or discussion but now typing this got some ideas flowing about it and I could see a few neat ways that could be improved. : )

ptitminou.6489:

How are decisions on designs and ideas reached within ANet? That actually could help with some suggestions.

How many devs completed their Season 1 WvW meta?

Has there been any kind of discussion about a /announce and a macro system for GW2 in the past (not necessarily tied to commanders) that may have been dropped for various reasons?

It really depends on the decision, we have a bunch of different teams working on different features and content, our high level direction is picked from our directors and leads (those decisions come from meetings with directors). Then a problem or feature is given to a team to solve. That team then works to come up with solutions to the problems and then get the design of those solutions passed by the leads from all disciplines and then once approved start working on the feature. From minor to major decisions different people make all kinds of decisions based on feedback testing ect.. So I guess it’s really hard to say I think in some way every one makes some decisions on some level. : ) Hope that round about answer helped lol.

No idea I would have to pull numbers, I know I got it by the skin of my teeth completing it last Sunday… repair being my last one to get. I heard a few other people saying they where close.

Going to keep to the commander topic as much as possible (looks at the above to answers and realized they where not commander related so FINE! no really hasn’t been much discussion on those two things in a long while.)

I’ll try and only answer the commander questions to keep on topic!

Thanks for all the answers might be hard for me to answer everyone but I’m up for a bit any questions I could answer?

Seems like people really enjoy answering questions so I’ll throw out a few more.

How big do you expect a squad to be?
What kind of content is a PvE commander most useful?
Is money a good enough gate for commander tags?

ptitminou.6489:

If you want smaller groups, why did you make a fight like Tequatl? Why are smaller groups punished in WvW, its much harder to take down a keep with 20 people than 60 given the supply one can carry…

My point wasn’t that we don’t want large fights we love large fights but we want a mix of large and small fights, different tactics and tools for players to use to approach any battle or situation. I think the commander tool could help solve these problems in all situations.

Thanks for all the responses : )

I’ve always felt the commander system had a lot of room to grow mainly it does a good job of giving people something to follow but that’s about it. I used to do a lot of commanding and I found splitting a group of 20-40 up into smaller groups to be very difficult and we just ended up using parties and voice but I’ve noticed the lack of tools to do this drives a lot of gameplay to follow the commander. I know in PvE and in WvW we’ve been trying to make the content force a little more splitting as the game becomes a lot more fun when there are a bunch of smaller fights then one big one.

I know there are a lot of suggestions about a whole commander system with points, ranks, ect.. and I think that could be neat but one of our big goals is deep systems and as few of them as possible, as having a lot of small shallow systems all over the game can make it hard to maintain and keep up to date. Some examples are we could just roll the whole commander system into the Guild System and make new ranks and abilities part of guild upgrades. Another way to simplify this would be turn commander into WvW abilities and have a few lines that focus on commanding/following. (Granted this approch does make things more messy for PvE commanders). Just a few examples of how to design in a more simplistic way by folding this into another system, and some of the discussions and debates we have internally every time we go to improve/update a system.

One of my fav quotes on simplistic design
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” -Albert Einstein

A lot of awesome ideas here.

Here are some questions I’ve been wondering about.

How often do people actually join squads and use the features that are there? (4 different way point markers, /supplyinfo). What would make you join squads more?

How much is spies a problem with commander system?

Should the commander icon be shown above the commanders head to the commander?

Should we allow a WvW upgrade to see enemy commanders (not on the map just on screen) ?

I would love to help field a discussion on the commander system, I know there are a few other topics everyone brought up but I think a good brainstorm about how to improve large scale communication/origination has very large impact on WvW. This is also becoming more important in PvE as we move forward with large scale encounters. So I think it would be a fun discussion as there is a lot of room to improve the current system.

<—- Also loves Hobo-tron

generalraccoon.3857:

Isn’t it ‘Tyria’, not ‘Tyira’?

Yes I’m a terrible speller thanks. : )

Scar Rufo.7935:

go Evon, more BL Keys and more RNG’s; gotta pay for this guy’s new car

I forgive you for falling to the Influence of Kiel’s trickery and false accusations, she is cunning.

Just try it once vote for Evon and you’ll find your way.

There is a bunch of people on both sides here at Anet, granted I have been pretty pro Evon!

azureai.9764:

Is it a coincidence that Kiel is running for the seat of the Captain Counselor she let be assassinated? Either she’s incompetent or evil.

Gnashblade is a cunning businessman that can realpolitik his way through the Captain’s Counsel. He’s by far the superior candidate.

I can’t agree I more, I mean Gnashblade could buy the vote at any time but he doesn’t because he has integrity unlike that incompetent wannabe caption who lets face it killed the old counselor member for her own gain and covered up her own blunder by finding the nearest pirate and blaming it on her.

draxynnic.3719:

Funny, when I saw Kiel fight, I’m pretty sure she was using guardian greatsword skills, not warrior…

That’s just a diversion to hide the truth, she can’t be trusted….

Vote Evan!

Evon!!!

Clearly the only viable candidate, I hear Kiel is responsible for all nerfs, I mean shes a greatsword wielding warrior… Need I say more?

While Evon is responsible for all buffs in the game, I mean more buffs = more farming = more trading post taxes.

The choice is clear…. Evon

Thanks for all the info everyone, I totally didn’t write down everyone’s names by the questions because I’m bad sorry about that. I’ll make sure to do that next time.

Feedback on the steam is always welcome.