Showing Posts For Kjell.8379:
I think it’s silly to make two entirely different looks depending on what the gender of the player character is. You wanna include a fairy stripper outfit? You wanna include an Ironman suit? A wearable bag? A pair of sandals and some dental floss? Well ok. But keep it the same for everyone. Don’t add boobplate to armour that doesn’t have it for men. Let’s have some equal distribution of butterfly wings.
Divide things up after styles so that whether you get the Muscledragon Armour or Daintyfeather Dress is up to your tastes rather than the gender of your character.
I find this faulty reasoning. This is a game, nothing is required, therefore everything is required. What actually is “required” is anything you really want. You say it isn’t required unless you need it to access content, but accessing content is not required, it is just something people might want.
What is required is the ability to meet the various challenges the game poses, aka “accessing content” aka “playing the game” aka “the reason GW2 exists in the first place”. The stats necessary to do so are widely available.
This is just further proof that your suggestion of putting rewards behind pure use of time is bad. If it’s only a question of wanting then just have every skin available freely from the start. It’s much more sensible than this half-baked, flavourless nonsense.
They don’t HAVE to do it. And they also don’t NEED legendary armor. They can perfectly decide NOT to do raids and thus NOT get their legendary armor.
And once again, that is not a valid option.
That absolutely is a valid option. Attaining specific skins is an intended sub-goal but not required to complete any form of material character advancement. People genuinely don’t have to complete any given dungeon or whatever. Players being unable or unwilling to reach voluntary sub-goals is not necessarily a fault of the game’s design.
And I would assert that they can do a good job of pleasing most of the people most of the time, and that if they have to displease anyone, raiders are a better target than most.
People who like raids aren’t the only ones who’d be displeased by there being no items that are in any way connected to specific game modes or challenges.
But what would you say to players who felt that a raid type encounter is no more “freeing” to them than the oppressive work life you described yourself escaping from? Why not offer them an escape as well?
I would recommend drawing. Or simply accepting that GW2 contains a mix of things for different people to do which means that they can’t please everyone with everything. People who don’t want raids have still got dungeons, events, WvW, PvP and plain goofing around.
All game design choices will alienate some, be irrelevant to some and be welcomed by some. If you want a challenge-based game with skins as clear trophies and marks of achievement then exclusive rewards are a must. If you want a more openly expressive game then it’s better to have things freely available instead of gating them behind totally arbitrary wastes of time. If you want time spent doing what you enjoy to be the main factor then why not reward people as much for finding diving spots as you would for clearing fractals? Everything then becomes a simple matter of spending time and that isn’t very satisfying if you want engaging game play and is boring if you just want the dressup right away. It incentivises doing the easiest, quickest thing repeatedly because everything else would be less efficient ways to reach the intended goals of unlocking gear. This is why I think that what you argue for is half-baked.
If you reward more difficult content more than you do less difficult content, then all that does is provide disproportionate rewards depending on the players’ skill, and since each is an equally valuable customer, there is no actual justification for doing so.
The rewards are fully proportionate to the challenge completed. You seem to think that every game must appeal to the largest group possible when that is only one goal you can choose for the game you’re developing. Having to clobber the troll for the next fancy upgrade instead of murdering bats for an hour is fundamental to a number of genres and a fairly uncontroversial game element. It’s even less of a problem in GW2 because the fanciest rewards are cosmetic rather than functional.
Mastery being rewarded is very popular not the least because people lack that in their daily lives. Very few of us have any real control over our work and have little connection to what we do other than needing to do it to continue living. Games that properly reward people for understanding what it’s about and putting in effort to improve are appealing because of this void. MMOs in general are very much about reaching clear goals and receiving proportional acknowledgement for it. So that’s all part of the justification.
Raiding is more demanding than other content, but what about that makes it more entitled to superior rewards?
It is generally a good idea to have rewards be proportional to the effort/risk involved. It’s a fairly basic game design thing. Developing a sense of mastery and having something achieved through it is one of the most widely successful elements of games I can think of. Highscores, a fancy hat, new levels… and so on.
As a general principle it holds quite well and is reflected in GW2 in for example that dungeon bosses drop better loot than some random moa in Queensdale. Silverwastes farming breaks the rule and is one of the more complained about things in the game because of the material incentives it creates.
They are both the same amount of time spent playing the game, why should they not offer at least close to equivalent rewards?
Because one is specifically intended to be more demanding than the other. A raid is more difficult and more specific in its timing than logging on for fifteen minutes to do some map completion or an event. Since more is necessary to be put into it, more is given in return.
3. Any design element that causes people to have less fun than they otherwise might, is a failure of the game.
This is not necessarily true. “Fun” means many different things to many different people. That open world PvE is quite easy, for example, is fun for some and boring for others. That doesn’t mean that easy PvE is a failure while difficult PvE is a success. It means that you are going to have to decide on an audience for your game. And a large audience isn’t more or less valid than a small audience because if all anyone did was try to please the largest group we would never have anything different.
If you were meaning that a game shouldn’t contain elements that needlessly contradict its core principles, yeah, sure, but what you actually wrote is deeply flawed and not a useful way to understand game design.
People do put a premium on appearance, even if two items are mechanically identical. You cannot argue that just because two items have identical stats, that a player has no right to value one over the other, and be upset for not having the one he prefers.
A player can feel whatever because people don’t really have control over their emotions. That’s what emotions are. But it isn’t a flaw in the game that someone has trouble with or doesn’t at all want to fight the giant wrestler to win his champion belt, when that belt doesn’t confer any advantage compared to one you can get elsewhere, craft or purchase.
Giving the champion belt meaning by having to understand what the game fundamentally is and proving mastery of it through defeating its current holder because it is a champion belt and not some random other belt is good game design. Giving items a reason for existing and looking like they do that ties them into the world and makes it more tangible and alive is good game design.
That’s why not all things are available everywhere. This causes no harm because gear that is just as strong is available somewhere and nobody is actually left out.
All of this is strawman nonsense that has already been addressed and dismissed ad nauseum.
I am not misrepresenting your arguments and then defeating them. I am telling you what would be a better thing to argue for. Why are you fine with having to go to a particular place to get something? Why is requiring thoughtless tedium acceptable but demanding that someone engages with the game is not? You don’t want people to do things they don’t like to get gear so you might as well have everything available from the start. It’s only the logical conclusion. I’ve played and loved games that largely do this. I don’t have a problem with it. I do have a problem with a half-baked system, tho.
One of these has a significantly greater barrier of entry than the other.
So what? Legendary weapons are still not the expected norm and aren’t needed for anything. The belief that striving for a legendary weapon is the best way to improve your character’s power level isn’t really widely held. Legendary armour is highly unlikely to change that.
(edited by Kjell.8379)
I clearly don’t use “equally good” to mean that it’s matching anyone’s particular aesthetic preferences, but that something is of the same quality as another thing. Sunrise is as good as Twilight or any other legendary greatsword they care to introduce. Only reason it’s so expensive is the immense time needed to be put into it. A more popular skin isn’t necessarily found on a superior weapon.
so long as you don’t need to expend any significant time or effort while there.
What even is “significant effort”?
You could just as well have a model viewer and a chat room. That’d save you a lot of time. Why go somewhere at all in this case? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you’re better off wanting every skin freely available to everyone from the start regardless of anything. It’s a much more respectable thing to argue for than these half-measures. I’ve already played a lot of City of Heroes which got a lot of praise for the costume system and would not mind seeing it again.
Perception is everything, that’s a basic concept of loot & rewards in GW2.
It is the only way to get the highest rarity tier, gameplay differences or not. Isn’t there an implied ‘doing this is better’ element as compared to granting unique skin sets (as fractals or other pve content or for that matter Pvp do?)
Legendary weapons already being time-consuming enough to make hasn’t proved to be a problem, despite requiring you to play WvW. Legendary armour having components you need to raid for isn’t going to be a problem either.
(edited by Kjell.8379)
Legendary items are not sufficiently more powerful than exotics to really be a concern. You yourself even call it a “prestige tier”. If someone needs ascended gear then there is already a way to get that without needing to raid, anyway.
“Equally good” is highly subjective, and what doesn’t matter to you might matter a great deal to someone else.
“Equally good” isn’t at all subjective. A weapon of one particular rarity with one set of stats is the same whether it was dropped, crafted or bought with tokens. You are not forced to have any one given weapon. There is no external pressure on you to play a lot of WvW to get the Axe of WvWing A Lot so you can stand on equal terms with everyone else who has the best weapon.
If a player sets a personal goal for themselves it isn’t a failure of the game developers if that player can’t complete that goal and especially not if that player doesn’t actually want to complete that goal.
If we want a game environment that makes an attempt at being a world and not simply a pretty loot dispenser then some things will only be found in certain places. Not like you could go anywhere and do just anything to get your sword in the stone. It’s fine to have rewards with certain themes bound to accomplishing a themed task. Going into the lava factory to get lava machine armour, going into the ghost pit to get ghost bows etc etc. The items are visually bound to the character of the task you undertook to acquire them. A weapon being all melty because you took it from the factories of the stone king who had ordered the construction of a million fire warriors to ravage the surface world but was stopped by the plucky underdog maniac adventurer is a much nicer explanation for why it exists than “it’s cool, I bought it”. It gives a reason for things being the way they are that ties you to the game environment.
Playing it a few dozen hours more isn’t going to make you like it more, it’s just going to make you hate the game more for forcing you to do things you do not enjoy. At that point the reward is not rewarding you for trying new things, it’s punishing you for being too stubborn to quit.
You’re not really forced to do it, though. You can get equally good gear elsewhere. If you want the sword you can only get from pulling it out of the fallen king of giants in the lost city of titans then you best get to pulling. You can purchase or craft an equally good sword and find any number of styles for it elsewhere.
You’re kind of relying on painting a large percentage of the playerbase as immature people who can’t emotionally handle a practically inconsequential item being difficult for them to get.
The dragon head and llama look exactly like something you’d find on a bunch of fighter planes or something. Not seeing any reason to complain there.
If you want to challenge yourself, then the game should provide opportunities for you to do so, but if someone else wants to challenge himself less, then the game should not punish him for that.
Nobody will be punished for not playing raids just as nobody is punished for not playing dungeons or PvP or WvW. Exotics are good enough for anything and are attainable easily enough. Locking specific skins behind specific tasks is the least consequential thing they could have gone with. Legendary weapons, racial gear and dungeon items have been in the game from the start and haven’t been a problem at all.
For instance, 10 seconds difference could mean a parent playing a game, intending to stop after megadestroyer, failed to stop his son/daughter from hurting him/herself when playing.
lol
If the parent doesn’t notice their child hurting themselves to the knowledge of absolutely no one then it isn’t anyone’s fault. You might as well say the same thing about something cracking a line of jokes, causing that parent to read the chat for ten seconds longer than they otherwise would have. Or giving good and interesting advice!
Obviously pranking shouldn’t be a free for all but “a crazy scenario might happen in real life” is a terrible reason compared to “having your gameplay disrupted constantly is unfun”.
Since they CAN allow players to earn these rewards through other, more convenient means, why shouldn’t they?
In order to make the game environment interesting. Various item skin telling you what a given player has done and likes to do is good because it lets you bond with others in a way. It gives the game character. Overcoming difficulty and inconvenience makes the result more precious because it required dedication. You needed to put something of yourself into it.
Dark Souls is a widely praised and critically acclaimed game because it’s based on the principle that challenges are good because they’re satisfying to overcome. And of course because the game does it very well! If you want Quelaag’s Furysword you need to defeat Quelaag. If you want the full set of pyromancy spells you need to find and enter the Painted World (and get out again!). It isn’t a matter of deserving or not deserving, it’s just that some things place demands on you in order to be true to the game world and be meaningful.
Why felines? And not say drakes
Also it doesnt have a 2nd weapon.
One of the cats has an AoE might buff for its F2 and another of the cats straight up turns invisible while attacking for its F2. They bring a lot of damage.
The A/T condition set has the axe in one weapon set and the torch in the other weapon set. This means that you always have both equipped but can still swap weapon sets to trigger various effects. It doesn’t give you a new set of skills with fresh cooldowns but it’s a pretty cute little interaction.
Gasp! A druid with a staff.
Still looks like ranger hate to me.
Yeah because a Ranger/Woodsman DOES NOT and HAS NOT ever wielded a staff.
The Ranger class is evenly divided up in archer/beastmaster/barbarian/druid so this is hardly out of character. They already have nature magic and spirits.
It’s unconventional if you approach the class from a WoW hunter style perspective. While this, admittedly, is what the class most looks like at first druidism has been a thing since GW1.
As PvP awoke one morning from uneasy dreams,
Just give access to the strongest alternative pet skill.
This. This just needs to happen. Pets would be far better if you could control this skill as it is often the one we want the most, at pivotal times, as well as also being the one we don’t want them to cast and ruin their DPS due to cast time or poor placement. +1
It would for sure be so much more convenient if my eagle spammed its F2 skill instead of the speed buff.
Just let people pick which of the pet skills they use with F2.
Hopefully gear inspect and dps meter with HOT
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Kjell.8379
If you can’t get into a guild that is coordinated enough that everyone actually brings good specs and gears appropriately for the challenge then, well, a DPS meter and gear inspection is not going to help you.
Guardian does good damage and has plenty of group support options. Elementalists do have close combat options in the form of daggers and they’re one of the best classes at the moment. Mesmers are an excellent pick as well.
You should try every class at least a little but sticking with thief is going to be fine, too. It’s a matter of learning how it works and getting damage-oriented gear.
If you can easily get multiple crafting disciplines to 500, paying fifty silver every time you need to swap is nothing.
Legendary armour is just a little more convenient than ascendend armour. It isn’t actually more powerful. You don’t have to transmute anything to change stats but you still have to fiddle with replacing runes.
You’re hugely overreacting.
The people who are so dedicated to subverting WvW gameplay as to level characters up to 60 will already have bought multiple accounts in any of the sales that GW2 has had.
Don’t worry, the economy will be ok. We put a lot of effort into keeping it protected.
Can we not let them into wvw atleast, there’s gonna be to many servers lvl toons to 60 just to spy on other servers, this is not something we WvWers should have to deal with especially since we paid for the game.
The people who would go through the effort to level a character to 60 in order to spy on people are most likely already fine with switching servers to do so.
I suspect people just don’t know what dottir means. Not like Nordic names would be the only ones were people kinda just briefly look something up on Wikipedia…
More facial hair of all varieties would very much be appreciated.
shrug Some class has to be the last one to have its elite spec revealed.
So you want to destroy the concept of rarity and antiquity entirely?
Btw you can get an unobtainable armour just fine. Buy an account with it.
Well uh. I mean. These armour sets that are currently unobtainable were just kinda gone one day with no actual warning. People had no way of knowing that they should get one particular armour set while it still was attainable. Guild armour at the very least has no excuse for existing only partially available.
Purchasing a pre-owned account is really not a sensible solution compared to adding these already existing armour skins back into the game.
A dinosaur.
15 chars.
All the jungle raptors running around seem like the perfect candidates for this. They’re even the right pet size.
Green and golden moas would also be nice.
But what about players who really want that armor or weapon skin, but have zero interest in the task related to it?
shrug Too bad for them. I’m not interested in grinding a lot for legendary weapons so I’m unlikely to get any. That can be asked about any activity, anyway, even a system where you do whatever you want and pick whatever item you want. It’s much better to just implement a system where everyone simply has every skin unlocked instead of advocating for half-hearted grinding. City of Heroes did mostly that and the costume creator was one of its strong points. There was still a lot of heroing to be done, though, and the rewards were mostly XP and currency since there was so little actual gear.
IMHO either gear should tell you something about their wearer and have a meaningful existence in the game environment or should be available as baseline. I’m a fan of the game world simply telling you that some things will be done on its terms and not on yours. If it’s going to be a world then let it be a world and let players build community around that.
If all you need is a token of your achievement, something to say “I did this, and the game recognizes that,” then why can’t it just be a literal trophy to keep in your home instance, or a title, or just an achievement unlocked? Why does it need to be a practical weapon or armor skin that other players might want regardless of the “trophy” factor? Why do you even need a physical representation at all, when you know that you completed the task, and that’s the important part?
An armour set is cooler than a title or something you have to go away from everyone else to be reminded of. It allows you to customise your character to reflect what you’ve done, thus increasing the bond you feel for it. You show other people who’ve also done the same thing that you went through the same troubles as they did. You get to tell people who’ve never heard about that challenge what it is and give them tips if they’re interested. If you’re using a less popular weapon and went through the trouble of getting a skin for it that is challenging to acquire, you show other people how much you like that skin or that weapon and they’ll be appropriately impressed/disturbed.
Having many different challenges for many different items allows for players to structure their long-term playtime instead of simply repeating the most efficient currency grind. All of this is why dungeons give out their own unique currency instead of having a single Dungeon Coin that you can buy any gear with. It makes the game environment more flavourful and varied.
If nothing should be any kind of challenge to get we might as well simply have the skins available to everyone from the start. It would be much more sensible than putting it behind an arbitrary grind. Playing for rewards instead of playing for the sake of playing wouldn’t be possible.
It’s perfectly fine to have different things attainable through different means. There isn’t any problem with having something that tells you that this player has done a lot of dungeons or has max crafting level or has played a lot of PvP. Knowing what people have done just by looking at them is a great way of adding flavour to the game environment. If there’s a particular helmet at the end of a jumping puzzle then people who have it can bond over how nerve-wracking the timing on the last section was. If there’s a staff available only through achieving high rank in WvW then people who have it can know they have someone to exchange tips with or reminisce about past bouts.
Someone brought up Dark Souls earlier and that’s kinda funny to me because while that game challenges the player the whole point of doing so is how good it feels once you figure the trick out. The game isn’t even always that hard, it just demands that you keep your eyes open and your head screwed on properly. Even the game mechanics are more tactical than raw twitch. If GW2 had more Dark Souls in it that would be great.
I would without a doubt want a pet overhaul first. Good AI, running animations and all manners of QoL improvements. For example, I simply don’t understand why names are reset when you replace your active pets. Having to actually retype their names every time you change your stable is such a pain and works against them feeling like valued companions rather than temporary pieces of gear.
People should be impressed by the pet system whenever they try a ranger. It should feel great and play great.
Well received by whom, anyway? It could very well be true that “the concepts behind overloading an element” were well received because 1) they just mention the concept, not the implementation and 2) they don’t have to be talking about people who dissect game mechanics or even post much on forums.
Adding more medium armour that isn’t gunslinger coats would be just fine. More practically styled light armour would also be nice. Desert explorer gear, anyone?
I do like that a lot of the armour sets have only relatively subtle differences, though. Giant wings and WoW-y shoulderpads should be outliers. Makes mixing and matching easier, too.
I would also like more different lower-level weapon skins. Giving darksteel, bronze, iron and mithril weapons more substantial differences than colours would be nice. Nothing huge is needed.
Oooh, a necro thread.
Using “metagame” (often “the metagame”) to refer to the strategic landscape of a competitive game is pretty standard. This is established usage across a range of different game communities.
For example, from MTG: http://www.channelfireball.com/tag/metagame/ — these are all articles about what to expect when you go to a tournament and how to tune your own stuff to tackle it well.
(It’s “meta” because it’s driven by communities, analysis, and information cascades.)
This is the understanding of the term that I use because it’s what i find to be the most useful. Though I think it makes the most sense to use in terms of PvP because that’s where what other people play is the most relevant.
The metagame can be shaped by more than strictly what’s most efficient or the most powerful to do, too. Warriors are the most popular class in PvE because they fit the basic heroic archetype in Western fantasy. Rangers are the second most common because they’re Legolas. Some styles simply resonate with people and will exist no matter their place in the power rankings. Minion masters, GW1 Wa/Mos and so on. These can also be something you have to take into account when deciding on what strategy to pursue yourself.
I would just pick something nice and simple, like an elder wood or maybe an aureate bow. If I had to pick something more extravagant I would aim for Kudzu tho who knows how long that would take to get.