Guild Wars 2

Perhaps a little patience is in order from the community so see how it further developes…. or is that too much to ask?

Too much to ask. They’ve already told us how they’re going to further develop this. They’re going to continue rolling out new ascended pieces for different slots, and add more ways for people to obtain them. They’re going to slowly roll out each slot.

What this means is periodically, I’ll have to grind out each new piece of gear if I want to stay on a level playing field. If I choose not to participate in this, I will be significantly behind everyone else by the time they roll everything out.

When they have rolled out an ascended piece for every slot, they have three options:

A) Create another new tier (aka: neverending gear grind)
B) Raise the level cap so they can recycle the ascended tier 10 levels higher (thus invalidating all the work that went into the first set of ascended gear you put together; aka: neverending gear and level grind)
C) Stop there (why would they decide to create ascended in the first place if this was their plan?)

I’d love to hope they pick C, but the original decision to create the ascended tier tells me they’re not going to.

Once they introduced even minor vertical stat increases, the fear (and justifiably so) is that they will continue to add stat increases.

They said yesterday that they intend to do this.

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

-From Is it Fun?

This is a very clear declaration of their intent to stick with the original philosophy they had in GW1.

I’m sure there’s a method of parsing this which doesn’t contradict what they’re currently doing. They may not have ever shut the door on a gear treadmill entirely. There may not be a smoking gun where a developer explicitly said, “We will never release gear which is statistically superior to Exotic gear for any reason, ever.”

None of that matters. The message they sent was loud and clear. It was repeated. It was reinforced by precedent. It was intentional.

They intentionally gave me the impression that there would not be continuous gear inflation. That impression is incorrect.

And now we’re being reassured with this “We never said we wouldn’t do this!” tripe. Any time someone tells you something like, “it’s not technically lying”, you’re being lied to.