Guild Wars 2

Logun.2349:

I haven’t logged in since the announcement except to check a few things out. I highly recommend if you hate this move by Arena Net don’t log-in take a break and consider if this if the game you want to continue supporting.

That´s exactly what I have done. I also deinstalled it.

A Monetization Producer at ArenaNet from March 2012. How much time does a company need to do such a change – produce the content?

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Meleagar/072009/24188_ANET-Is-Lying-To-Us

I just deinstalled the game. I will not support such a behavior.

No, not anymore.

Magiofdeath.2745:

Where was all this outcry of 150 pages when skill points, temple of balthazar, etc was practically continually bugged for over a month after release? I don’t get this community – there was game breaking bugs in the game for over a month after release and there wasn’t a single thread that was 150 pages worth of people complaining about that (I did complain about that because it was a problem) and now they add a new tier of gear and there’s a thread that has amassed 150 pages of outcry. This new tier seems infinitesimal to the game breaking bugs the game had for a month, and which are still present to some small degree with PS, etc. I just don’t get it – can someone please explain that to me?

Because bugs happen. A shift in design is by decision.

tkalamba.2541:

You can do all 9 portions of the dungeon without encountering Agony, so no it does not lock you out of content. If you wish to proceed into the higher difficulty runs, which are still the same 9 sections, then Agony will play a role, but you can still do the 9 sections.

Tell me, from a designer point of view, why do you need better gear to get a higher difficulty? I am lost.

UnderdogSMO.9428:

Shahiel.8342:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjxvj2I_CCA

“And legendary weapons, of course, are not any more powerful than the top level exotic weapons.”

“These legendaries weapons are really cool looking, and like we said, you won’t get a gameplay advantage out of these things, you’re just going to look really cool.”

From July 12th 2012.

now there not more powerful than ascended

Top level exotics? Now Top level ascended? I do see a difference. That was a lie. And as many have mentioned: That is a treadmill.

Creslin.1758:

Read between the lines = Consider my subjective interpretation to be the author’s literal fact.

That’s what I’m saying, people are misinterpreting what he said. He just said that hardcore grinders that are willing to spend days upon days of grinding to get an uber item should not have a statistical advantage over more casual players.

I am sorry your answer feels (no pun intended) as if you still did not read the blog but just refer to the other quote mentioned mostly in this thread before.

Snerf.1650:

You’re missing the point.

The fact is that this is a departure from the Anet design philosophy.

They stated that gear and stats weren’t going to be the focus and 3 months into the game are adding a new tier above the previous max that will require us to completely re-gear every character we play. They flat out just stated that “This is only the beginning” of a new gear progression model.

The design of Guild wars games over the last 7 or so years has been one that openly shuns gear progression. You can log in GW1 today and use the same max stat gear that you got when the game was released years and years ago. That’s the design principle that we are upset that they are departing from.

If they are changing course, that’s their prerogative. I understand that. If that is the case though, I wish they would just say that. And if it isn’t their intention, all they have to do is change this update to reduce ascended gear to exotic stats, while leaving legendary also the same stat-wise as exotic.

Thank you – I could not have explained it any better. I wholeheartly agree with you.

Luigio.3265:

yes , it IS minimal , even if YOU dont consider it minimal

No, it is NOT minimal, even if YOU consider it minimal. See? Can do that, too.
Take a look at the percentages, ask a raider if it is minimal or not, come back…

Creslin.1758:

Kriton.5402:

Creslin.1758:

Finally, for argument’s sake, I would like to ask…would you have a problem with Ascended items if they are only marginally more difficult to acquire than exotics? And if so, then why don’t you have a problem with exotics, or even rares?

I do not mind the difficulty. I do have a problem that they have told us, that there would be a plateau of gear. Adding another tier points to a treadmill (regardless how easy to obtain). I thought I would get a game I could play for fun (mechanics) not gear.

They actually never said this. People are just misinterpreting what Colin said. He said that gear that takes an unreasonable amount of time to achieve should not offer statistical advantage.

Read the blogpost I have quoted. It is much more clear than the quote of Colin.

Creslin.1758:

Can you point me towards a quote where ANet promised to never add a new gear tier to the game?

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Of course you have to have the will to read what was meant (reading a little bit between the lines) and taking care of the many things they have told us in the past years during development.

Creslin.1758:

Finally, for argument’s sake, I would like to ask…would you have a problem with Ascended items if they are only marginally more difficult to acquire than exotics? And if so, then why don’t you have a problem with exotics, or even rares?

I do not mind the difficulty. I do have a problem that they have told us, that there would be a plateau of gear. Adding another tier points to a treadmill (regardless how easy to obtain). I thought I would get a game I could play for fun (mechanics) not gear.

bluejay.6739:

In case someone is using a text parser to total the sentiment in this thread, I want to add that..

I AM COMPLETELY FOR THE ADDED GEAR TIER.

It will give me something else to work for. If the game’s difficulty and rewards don’t increase over time what point is there to continuing to play?

You know… errr… FUN?! Ok, that depends on the game mechanic, but it works. Their are many games using that method. Shocking, I know…

tkalamba.2541:

Creslin.1758:

Principe I.1492:

sireuh.3870:

A guy said this on another forum

A few quotes from 3 months back about gearing:

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

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.”
– Colin Johanson

they just told a mountain of lies.

I will not give a penny to ArenaNet

No…you don’t know if they lied yet. Read what they said:

If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game.

They only promised that items that take an unrealistic amount of time to acquire will not have statistical advantages. Now ask yourself, do you know that Ascended items will take an unrealistic time for most players to acquire? No, you don’t. For all we know, Ascended items may take around the same time to acquire as exotics.

Legendary items are clearly what they are talking about in the quote above. They actually DO take a ridiculous amount of time and dedication to acquire, and as they said, they are only differentiated by appearance.

So long as Ascended items can be acquired in a reasonable amount of time, then no promises have been broken.

This is exactly what people are choosing to not see when they go about saying they were lied to and that others are being illogical for saying otherwise.

Well, you are wrong. That happens if someone is just reading one quote instead some more:

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

(…)When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time. You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc. (…)

If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content meant to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do—I played it multiple times because it was fun! (…)

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.

The idea behind it is crystal clear. Play semantics as long as you will, but they have broken their own design and at least my faith in this studio.

Nerth.3940:

mantrunks.4810:

A question for everyone. How does a company make a dynamic game with a statically requested system?

If a new PVE map/dungeon was released with having no real change to gameplay was released, who would play it? It would be visited for a 1 time run through on most cases, and its the truth. If it has nothing new to offer, why bother? Who would use it?

According to your logic, nobody is playing League of Legends or any other game that is based on player skills.

Change for the sake of change is a bad thing and it usually bites you in the rear. I mean no disrespect but I guess you are a member of younger generation. Let me tell you something, some of us played games on 8 bit machines for years because the gameplay was fun and engaging. Do you really have to have a carrot on a stick to play the game? Wouldn’t it be nice to play a game because it is fun to play?

I know, Utopian concept.

Yes, i remember playing Katakis on C64, trying to do all 12 levels without loosing a life. Well, I do not mind a gear progression in general (or at least I could accept it and indeed have accepted it in the past for example playing hardcore raids in WoW), but I feel betrayed by the devs because of the difference in advertisement. I really wanted to play this game because of the fact it does not have gear-progression and left both SWTOR and Secret World because I thought this game would it be. Well… times are changing.

It is still against the vision they have sold us.

We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.

He does not say their won´t be new tiers. He just tells us that it won´t be every 3 months.
And after that move I will not give them the benefit of the doubt.
Fool me once: your fault. Fool me twice: my fault. I won´t do that to myself.
I am out. It is disheartening that a studio which had a clear communicated vision leaves it behind just 3 months into the game.

I hope their will be a developer who stays true to his vision regardless of some people who try his game and don´t like it. That´s the point to me: I do not care of the actual implementation of the new tier, but the lies I have been told before.

This blog post feels right:

http://divinitysreach.blogspot.de/

I have no voice, and I certainly don’t carry any weight in my words to you ArenaNet. We asked for many changes to your PvE content, but this was almost never asked for by the majority of your fanbase. I have defended you countless times, and trusted you far more than any company rightfully deserves. I hoped this game would be different, that it would set a precedent for other upcoming MMOs. When you challenged the current field of competitors, it was we who rose with you. When you cried for change, it was us who spread the news that it was time for a new type of MMO. When it was you who asked who will play, we answered with a resounding “yes.” You will likely not lose money, many of us will still play, and you will almost certainly not read this. But you have lost our trust, I hope it was worth it.

http://guildwars2hub.com/features/previews/lost-shores-preview

New Item Quality Level – Ascended

While it remains to be seen exactly how many new items are being added in terms of new weapon or armor sets, we do know that a new quality level is being introduced: Ascended. This will be one step higher than exotic quality items, so it will be interesting to see how that impacts gearing up at level 80. As things stand currently, level 80 rares are basically something you only equip while piecing together an exotic set, and from there most people either salvage them for ectos or sell them on the trading post.

Hopefully the ascended gear will be somewhat difficult to obtain, otherwise it might end up greatly devaluing exotics moving forward. New items are also supposed to be hitting the current dungeon vendors, so I’m also curious to see how that will fit into the bigger itemization picture. According to ArenaNet, this new item quality is intended to help give the endgame a more distinct sense of progression, so I’d imagine that there won’t be a massive amount of ascended gear hitting the live game right away either way.

It’s also worth noting that with the update there will be a new resource to harvest, along with 200 new crafting recipes being added. Presumably these will be focused on the ascended quality level as well, so it will be interesting to see how expensive the new recipes will be to create given the current high production costs on exotic gear.

Marrgon.6852:

Should we not reserve judgement until they actually release this new content? If it’s a matter of a couple extra power or vitality it matters not in terns of being able to contribute equally in groups. Lets see what happens, you never know you might actually like it

Never! It does not make any difference if the stats are just slightly more powerfull.
Once you have started to go that route there will never be a feeling like before. It would be indeed a broken “promise” a difference to other games which attracted me because of that (I was a hardcore raider and pvpler in WoW for years).
We would never be save that they would not do it again.
I feel sad about it because I do believe designers should stick to their vision. I never bought biowares “we do what people want most”. Bullkitten!
Anet did the right thing. Promote a vision and stay true to it. That way your customers do know what to expect and those who do know (and do not want you to change the game they want it which is most of the time different to the next one) and play it will stay loyal to your game.

Changing that? Well, I feel sad about it.

synk.6907:

I’m all for more skins and more options for character customization.

However I share the concerns of many in this thread [though there are so many pages now I have not ready every post]. Guild Wars was always appealing for finding ways to entice us players with each new chapter and the expansion and the content updates without any changes in what was “max” armor and weapons.

While I do have two level 80 characters now, I have played pretty casually and have not been in a rush to get one character maxed out. I am still in the very early stages of deciding what armor skins I think I want and how I will go about getting them — dungeons runs, PvP, dynamic event zerging — on these characters. But I guess now I have to make sure I get this other gear as well? This has me worrying that there will always be that “new” level of gear now as content is added to the world (and a continual need for me to get the higher-level transmutation stones if I want to to keep using a skin), and not having that was one thing that always was appealing about the Guild Wars style of play.

I liked that in Guild Wars a player could get a max-level set of armor, even if it wasn’t the skin or one he or she wanted (e.g. getting one of the basic max level sets in Droknar’s or K-City and the docks in Kamadan), and be fully functional in the game. Then you were free to explore the story, complete missions, quest in the instanced zones, run dungeons, etc. as you wanted without fear that you were not bringing to bear as much as the other players. It left me free to play with my friends and guild, helping out when we ran high-end missions and dungeons or just helped get people through a chapter or to a prestige armor vendor. And along the way, I was rewarded with cool drops and mats and money and could similarly customize my character. I knew that through play I would get the prestige armors I wanted, the cool weapon skins I was after. And I did. More than once on some characters when new armor and weapon skins were introduced! But getting them didn’t make the character suddenly better. The gear “treadmill” was in chasing cool looks, not chasing after a maximum that keeps getting pushed further away with new content.

I am not claiming that cannot be entertaining or that going after the new hotness of gear in a game doesn’t keep people involved — I know it does! I’ve played other MMOs. But I liked that in GW it was a visual goal and not an always-updating functional goal. I felt that was one of the set of characteristics that made Guild Wars unique and enjoyable.

And I was keen on GW2 being the same. I was happy to have two characters at 80 now, with another close, knowing that I could get into the “let’s look awesome” phase of the game while also knowing I don’t have to change my gear.

Sure, we don’t know how the gear differs, and arguably for most people the new gear may not be necessary. But everything sounds like it points to a stat increase as well as an upgrade slot uniqueness, and these are indications, to me, that GW2 is not following GW1. And I am worried.

Since I cannot see any info on the stats of the gear yet, I can’t know if I am justified in that worry. Still, making something more desirable than everything else at 80 that is essentially equal suggests that will keep happening. And then I start to worry about level cap increases with new chapters instead of the previous method.

This is exactly the way I feel.

Jacaari.5986:

Am I the only one that gets bothered by character models clipping on themselves. It personally bothers me when I see my character’s hair clipping through the weapon/shield on my back or various other similar feature involving character models. I suggest that it should be fixed. Before I get berated for it, I have no programming/coding/game making experience whatsoever, it seems like it would be an easy thing to fix. Is it?

Big issue to me, too. As an Asura I can´t tell how often my ears are clipping if I am wearing a hat for example (especially when fighting because the way my ears are animated).

And speaking of weapons and armor… maybe an option to hide weapons – just like shoulders and helmets?

Grenades just have to be changed to the way the Necromancer staff works. No 1 is auto-attack, but not GTAOE anymore.

Really, it is such a quality of life issue I have stopped playing my engi (because grenades are the only viable long range opportunity as an engi) after getting him to 80 (and I really had to tell myself to not stop before that).

Would it be a nerf? Probably. But it would be consistent with Necro. And as most naysayers do not seem to use it very often… Remember, we are just speaking of the No 1. And I guess many of us who promote a change think of PvP, especially situations which need movement.