Showing Posts For Jersey.6987:
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As for the event itself, well… It went off to a rough start, and continued with more problems. Oh well, I’ll make it short and just add my suggestions:
- Make events like this repeat, to make them accessible to more people.
- Don’t give out excessive rewards during one-time events (even if they repeat throughout the day). There are still people who can’t attend the event either way and who might be upset at not having a shot at the “grand prize”. (No, I didn’t get a precursor either. I’m not jealous on those who did, and I’m happy with the 20-slot box as it saved me 10 gold.)
- Reduce max allowed number of people in the zone when you run such events, that seems to be the only way to avoid lag and culling issues.
- Better testing of the events with at least the max number of people in the zone. Preferably through external connection if the problem isn’t identified as being server-side only.
- Someone else mentioned a “reset-button” on key npcs. It doesn’t fix the root of the issue with bugged out event npcs, but I think it’s a good idea that will allow you to help scavenger hunts and the like to run more smoothly.
I was a little disappointed that the new map is so small. But that’s a minor concern, after all it’s free content. And it’s actual content, just not higher numbers on your gear.
FotM dungeon is also a good addition in and of itself. I’ve only done two different fractals so far, and I liked them. But I didn’t like them enough to run them 50 times on end… The really sad thing is that the first two concerns I mentioned (power creep and content gating) keeps overshadowing the fun and the content itself.
Now, one of the most important things you, the developers, can do at this point is to make a clear statement about which direction you intend this game to follow in the future. This last patch is a complete U-turn compared to earlier design statements and that is making a poor player like me very confused. Please don’t ask me to just go read the last blog post from Chris Whiteside, because that blog post really doesn’t answer the question that is important to so many players: “Will this game evolve into a game that I would like to play or not?”
No matter what your statement will be, one group of players will answer “yes” and the other group will answer “no” to that question. However, if you don’t give a clear statement you risk that both groups of players just say “forget it” and move along. Then you’re left with just the players who doesn’t really care which way the game goes, and they would’ve probably stayed for a while anyway…
Best regards
Jersey
I’m well aware that the forum is being rather heavily moderated these days, and I’m sure there’s a real risk that this post will be deleted for being written in a rather negative tone. But before you, dear moderator, deletes this post, please take a moment to consider that negative feedback is often very valuable feedback, and in some cases the best feedback. And my intention with this post was to provide just that, valuable and constructive feedback. Please allow the developers to read it :-)
Many players will probably disagree with me as well as many will agree with me, but that’s not the point. You, the developers, are asking for feedback and I’m providing just that: my feedback. Please pardon my wall of text.
To sum it up: In my personal and humble oppinion, this patch is the worst thing that has happened to GW2 as of yet. I believe it’s true as was mentioned in the pre-patch marketing: “Tyria will never be the same!” Sadly, not in the way I hoped it would mean.
Introduction of vertical progression (or power creep if you like) along with massive gear grind in the form of Ascended gear was the last thing this game needed, and in my oppinion was totally uncalled for. Also, this design change goes against a lot, if not most, of what was advertised in the manifesto video as well as lots of other blog posts and marketing stunts before release.
I’m terribly sorry that you closed the infamous 11 000 + replies thread before I got a chance to post in it. I could elaborate a lot more on this particular point but I will leave it at that, at least in this thread.
Content gating is another terrible introduction with this patch. The result of it is now rearing it’s ugly head in Lion’s Arch. It splits up the community and causes more elitism than the old dungeons ever did. Hang out in LA for a few minutes and look at map chat, or look at a few of the many threads out there speaking of it.
Both of the above issues are tightly linked together, and must be solved together. The solution I would urge you to choose is:
- Reduce Ascended gear’s stats to be equal to excotic gear, only with an empty infusion slot to differentiate the two.
- By doing this there’s no need to make ascended gear available outside of FotM.
- Make infusions ONLY apply their bonuses in FotM. Not in WvW, not in the open world, not in any other dungeons and most importantly not in any future content.
- Better yet, remove infusions and (what I think is a very cheap gameplay mechanism) agony all together, this is probably the only way to reduce the elitist attitude to a minimum. But on the other hand this will be very unpopular amongst the treadmill runners.
- Players who already aquired Ascended gear and infusions could be compensated for their now reduced stats. For example give them a “we’re-sorry-chest” (you can probably come up with a better name for it) that contains a random precursor weapon, or perhaps something else that takes a lot of luck or resources to aquire.
- Redesign FotM such that a party will always enter at lvl 1. Each new fractal should increase the difficulty level by 1, and you could have a rest between each fractal as you now have a rest after doing 3 fractals. This would be very much in line with the “how deep can you go” attitude that was used in the blog post describing FotM. It would help to avoid the dividing of the community we now see, but it would not reduce the elitist attitude we’re currently seeing.
- Add intangible rewards for beating different levels of FotM. Titles come to mind as something that worked well as intangible rewards in GW1 (although that may be a new cause for elitism….)
- Leave the daily reward chest in there after beating X levels, as that is probably an important motivation for those who like to run this new treadmill. And this patch seems to have been aimed at that crowd specifically.
A related problem is that earlier zones feel pretty much abandoned after the last patch, even more than they already did before the patch. I love the “whole game is the endgame” philosophy that was announced before launch, but that doesn’t seem very viable with the current state of the game. The fixes I suggested to ascended gear and infusions above would certainly help to fix this issue as well, in addition to:
- Make downscaling a lot harsher, make it affect your equipment too. As it has been since launch you’re pretty much one- and two-shotting everything in the earlier zones with a lvl 80. Heck, even my lvl 30 thief with sub-par gear feels like a ruthless murderer when running around in Queensdale.
- Give players more level-appropriate rewards throughout the entire game. I understand you’ve done this for lvl 55+ zones and that I appreciate. But expand on this to include ALL of Tyria, please.
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