Guild Wars 2

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

If the drop rate is guaranteed for everything, it gets boring. If it’s almost guaranteed, it’s just annoying for all the people who don’t get the drop. If the drop rate is low enough to be meaningful, say “25%”, then most people won’t need more than 5-6 tries. However, given how many people who play, some will need a lot more attempts — and that’s when it becomes horribly frustrating.

For example, in Henge Away from Home, I got three of the elemental drops within 1-2 kills; my friend got all four with 1 kill. My fourth? took over 40 kills.

So I don’t think it’s possible to have an RNG drop and be “balanced” for everyone.

What might be a better solution is to have a guaranteed drop, “Piece of Ley-Line Bezoar” plus the random drop of the full item. Then you can combine 10 (or maybe 20) pieces to get the full one. Get lucky? You can stop early. Unlucky? well, there’s still a clear end in sight.

Why would it boring if it’s guaranteed? Isn’t it just a collection piece? Like one of those “one piece out of 500 needed” situations? (yes, I figure I’m exaggerating saying 500)

I can see the boring argument being used in relation to RNG existing, period, in a game. But not in relation to one piece of a gigantic collection.

I think it’s the kind of thing that looks great on paper, but it either wasn’t thought through well enough, or the development process morphed it into something much different than what was intended. That or I just fundamentally disagree with its goals.

I think the concept of horizontal progression is reasonable and GW2 certainly isn’t the first game to do it.

But here’s a way of doing it off the top of my head that I think might work more effectively at providing a sense of mastery and avoiding the base simplicity of “earn points, click button to unlock thing, earn more points” (granted, it would be more complicated to design):

Take, for instance, Lean Gliding. Rather than you unlocking it with XP and an unrelated adventure point, you unlock it by Lean Gliding. This might sound stupid at first, but bear with me here. You don’t get full Lean Gliding functionality at first. Instead, it costs a high amount of your gliding stamina and is high risk to use. The more you use it, the more progress you get on a bar, the less it costs in stamina with each use until you reach mastery.

Why? The idea is:
- Instead of being outright restricted, you get introduced to the ability by using it.
- You master it through using it, which means you learn as you go along, rather than being exposed to it all at once, and by the time you’ve mastered it in numbers, you’ll probably have a pretty good sense of how to make use of it, practically.

The reason I say it would be way more complicated to do may be obvious to some. For example, the jump mushrooms don’t really lend themselves to such a system. They have a specific distance they leap you to and that’s it. Features like that (and the maps themselves) would have needed to be designed entirely differently from the ground up to support such a system.

So it’s not like it’d automatically work for everything.

But that’s one way I can think of to create a sense of mastery beyond vague, unrelated point acquisition.

I’m not passionately against vague, unrelated point acquisition though… I think I would have preferred it if the masteries we got were just unlocked with XP, or mastery points were acquired generically through, like, world boss battles or something.

What I don’t like is the idea of doing something highly specific that has nothing to do with what it’s for (e.g. doing a gold adventure for a mastery point that lets you do something that has nothing to do with the gold adventure).

Vayne.8563:

You don’t understand my argument at all. I bring two people with me if I want to be serious. If people can’t find two friends in an MMO I’m not sure what to tell them.

That said, no, there’s far far far more than three people in a zone. I can’t ever remember a time when there weren’t enough people in a zone to do content, even without LFG except when a new build is out and I don’t reset.

Even if I get on a new map it’s not long before other people are on that new map with me.

I clearly don’t because what you just said makes even less sense to me than what you said before. “You bring two people if you want to be serious”? What does that even mean? I just explained to you how some people don’t want to try to do HoT meta events with 3 people. Some of them would be downright brutal to try to do with only 3 people (and I’m talking the pres, the main events themselves obviously need way more).

As for your “there’s far far more,” I outlined an experience in another thread (which I know you at least skimmed over because you replied to it) about an experience where I couldn’t find people for meta events for a specific map, even with LFG, even with creating my own squad, etc.

I brought up a point like that and you told me about timers.

So which is it? Do maps always have enough people or do they just always have enough people when the major part of the map cycle is coming up? There’s a gigantic difference between those two statements. And the second one might be a reasonable point if the maps had NO events happening on them during downtime. But the world bosses are not like meta events. The meta events often happen in some form outside of the major cycle coming up. World bosses just are coming up or they aren’t.

Initial release HoT maps were designed to have events ongoing pretty much all the time; events that tie into the overall scheme of the map and require groups of players to do. And you’re going to tell me (not in this post, but you did in that other thread and have said similar things to others here) that I’m supposed to play the game on a timer, defeating the whole point of dynamic event design because that’s where the population is.

Meanwhile, you’re talking as if the population is just always there, when what you must mean is that it’s there when you’re there for the major part of the map cycle.

What that means is, you don’t get to play how you want. You get to play what’s available on a timer. That’s not dynamic at all and frankly, I couldn’t imagine doing that day in and day out. It would be incredibly boring. “Oh, what’s up next for content to play today. Let me check the timer” ??? Why would that be appealing in a game that sells itself on dynamic design?

I said something years ago in relation to Silverwastes that I will repeat because it’s relevant: I loved Silverwastes (when it was the main attraction, i.e. very active) and it was for a number of reasons, but one of the things I liked about it was that there wasn’t much of a “cooldown” period (even at the end, the “chest” looting period was fairly brief if I recall correctly). If people wanted to do Silverwastes over and over they could and that meant if you’ve just logged in, there’d probably be some people doing it, or ready to do it soon.

Initial release HoT maps instead chose to make most everything as super long events and super long cooldowns. Cool, I guess, if you’re someone who plays 16 hours a day, but if you just want to dink around for an hour or two, it’s horrible. You log in at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Have to commit to, like, hour blocks of time just to participate in a full event. You can’t do what you want half the time because things are on a timer and people like you apparently let the timer lead your gameplay like a compass, so it’s no wonder that population might suffer in off-time; everybody is off following the timer.

Vayne.8563:

Healix.5819:

Vayne.8563:

LOOK dead

That’s what matters. The average player is simply going to enter HoT and play through the game. It doesn’t matter if there’s a full map in LFG or even if the map is full with everyone in a corner somewhere. If it’s continuously dead to them, they’re going to be discouraged and eventually stop bothering. Some simple UI changes could improve things, such as showing all nearby events and how many people are nearby / how many it’s scaled for. Simply showing the scale would hopefully stop the whole idea of needing 20+ people for a 3+ event.

LFG is a big part of the problem, as it’s potentially killing off 3 other maps per 1 full one. For those simply playing the game, they’re almost always going to find themselves spread out in those dead maps. The megaserver is the other problem, as it prioritizes popular servers, then eventually locks to invite only. If the maps simply filled, LFG wouldn’t be needed.

Big events would be much more accessible if there was simply a UI that showed when they were and you actually queued into a special event map. That way big events could be designed for exact numbers and they wouldn’t be killing off the rest of the map or persisting for other players to login to. I doubt they could do this, but they could also try phasing instead.

Even the dead maps aren’t dead, that’s one point no one says. I don’t use LFG unless I want a meta. Most of the time I’m just zone completing on different characters, because I find it fun.

I’ve zone completed VB on almost 30 characters, and AB on 25 of them. And I don’t run with hero point trains and I don’t use LFG very often…there are still people even on the so-called dead maps.

This whole HoT is dead is like when people say the game is dead, which people have been saying for years, even when it was at its height.

You’re not going to get 800 people standing on one hero point. But if you’re in a zone and you just watch map chat, you’re almost guaranteed that someone is going to be doing a hero point, sooner rather than later. This happens so frequently that it’s hard to believe I’m the only one seeing this.

Sure it’s hard to see people with multiple levels and all the foliage. Even if you’re on a VB map doing the meta in the last half of night, everyone will be up in the canopy and you, as a new player on the ground, might not know that anyone is there.

There’s a big community of people who play the HOT zones, not just a few people, a LOT of people.

But the zones are not designed to zerg. They’re designed for small groups to get stuff done.

Three people can do 90% of HoT, without grouping with anyone else at all.

It seems to me that if the crux of your argument is that 90% of HoT can be done with three people, that’s missing the point. I would imagine most people who are inclined to call a map dead were hoping to find more than three people.

Strictly speaking, many meta events can be done with a handful of players. But that doesn’t mean that’s what the average player wants to see. HoT maps are big and the term MMO has the word massively in it for a reason. I think it’s safe to say people are generally looking for a sizable group.

I also disagree with your assertion that the zones are made for small groups getting stuff done. “Small group” meaning what size? 10? 20? 3? If you mean something in the range of 3, I would say that’s a ludicrous assertion, when you factor in events like Vinetooth. If by small you mean 10-15, I might be willing to concede the point.

And it’s important because there’s a huge difference between 3 and 10-15. 3 is “we better all be very good at this or we’re screwed.” 10-15 is "most of us can make a lot of mistakes and we’ll get by on the sheer power of reviving each other and making up for individual skill with numbers. (For most events. Some are not that easy.)

Sly.9518:

Labjax.2465:

Djinn.9245:

I think that the biggest problem is people not breaking the defiance bar.

Aye. Basically, if the group doesn’t even break the defiance bar once, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll fail. Sometimes if there’s a big enough group with enough doing decent damage, they can take it down on sheer zerg power.

But breaking the defiance bar even once makes a huge difference.

It’s one of those things that should probably be nerfed when the new expansion comes out. The time you have to break the defiance bar doesn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes. And he tends to do a jump or run right at that part, making it all the harder for people to land their CC.

And I don’t think the defiance bar failure is just a matter of people not knowing what to do. You need to have good reaction time and not have wasted your CC already to hit him with it at the right time. Which for some classes, builds, and players, is just harder than for others.

I think people may be underestimating the general competence of the playerbase on this one. It’s not an easy fight for an uncoordinated pug environment (which is what most of GW2 open world is).

Why would they be using their cc skills when their CC wouldn’t do anything? That would indicate low level of understanding and lack of skill.

Some attacks are hybrids, meaning the application and usefulness of them goes beyond simply “this is CC — use it when you need to CC and never otherwise.” For example, Scrapper Hammer 5 skill is a minor CC, but it’s also a combo field.

Djinn.9245:

I think that the biggest problem is people not breaking the defiance bar.

Aye. Basically, if the group doesn’t even break the defiance bar once, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll fail. Sometimes if there’s a big enough group with enough doing decent damage, they can take it down on sheer zerg power.

But breaking the defiance bar even once makes a huge difference.

It’s one of those things that should probably be nerfed when the new expansion comes out. The time you have to break the defiance bar doesn’t leave a lot of room for mistakes. And he tends to do a jump or run right at that part, making it all the harder for people to land their CC.

And I don’t think the defiance bar failure is just a matter of people not knowing what to do. You need to have good reaction time and not have wasted your CC already to hit him with it at the right time. Which for some classes, builds, and players, is just harder than for others.

I think people may be underestimating the general competence of the playerbase on this one. It’s not an easy fight for an uncoordinated pug environment (which is what most of GW2 open world is).

Most boring: Human.

But most of my characters are human because I’m interested in human fashion, not charr fashion, or asura fashion. Couple of norns, but they’re still a humanoid race.

Most likely never to get past the starter zones: Sylvari

Most likely to get annoyed at the arrogance of: Asura

Most likely to disagree with the brutal mindset of: Charr

Most likely to forget what their story is: Norn

Best Dressed: Queen Jenna

Most Overrated: The Pale Tree

Most Likely to Narrate a Series of Bestselling Sylvari Children’s Books: Trahearne

Most Likely to be Used in Alzheimer’s Research: Skritt

Most Likely to Get to the Bottom of Things: Dredge

Like in SWTOR, kind of?

I don’t know if it’s any worse than it used to be, but I recall making an argument a long time ago that people are going to have a bad attitude, whether their information is accurate or not. The main difference with a meter is that they can be a little more certain about who isn’t pulling their weight.

I would think that people who use it to trash talk were probably going to find a reason to trash talk, meter or no.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Labjax.2465:

I don’t think it’s the voice actor’s fault. Probably a combination of direction and writing.

Indeed. This matters a lot in TV, film, and stage, and even more so in voice acting — the VA has no way of knowing what the part calls for except what’s written in their ‘sides’ and whatever background the director provides.

---

Some VAs are amazing talents and can do all sorts of stuff, which sometimes mean different accents, but often means making a strong and sometimes risky choice and waiting to be told to reign it in (or not).

Listen to the interplay between Mad King Thorn & Bloody Prince Thorn in the Labyrinth and imagine trying to do that without the other actor present. Sometimes the actor will make a strong choice and many people will love it while others will have kittens trying to block it out of their memory — that’s how it is for some of us with Taimi, with Scarlet, and especially with Zojja (Felicia Day has an interesting form of vocal fry, which is off-putting to a lot of people, regardless of what she says or does).

Matthew Brenher isn’t my favorite voice actor in the game — far from it. All the same, I think he did a brave thing to come back and re-record lines and risk making strong-but-different choices the second time around. (I mean, I’m sure he got paid for his efforts, too.)

Yeah. I’ve heard with some VA roles, they don’t even know who they’re reading for. Like not even a character name. I recall there was some guy who did a character in Fallout 4 who talked about this happening to him with Fallout 4.

Danikat.8537:

Zedek.8932:

“Speed watching” (TV series at 2x speed because they ain’t got time), every 5-liner needs a “TL;DR” and such.

I had never heard of that before so I googled it. Now I kind of wish I still hadn’t heard of it.

What ever happened to doing things for the experience, for the sake of doing it instead of getting it over with as quickly as possible? What’s the appeal of spending less time having fun?

I mean I understand not having enough hours in the day for all the things you want to do, but if you’re always rushing through things are you even getting the best use of the time you do have?

That’s so foreign to me. I adopted using faster speed recently, for non-fiction videos like news, as a way to help me digest the material (cause I have ADD and the faster speed helps me stay focused on it without zoning out). But I can’t imagine doing that with a TV show. TV shows are designed so painstakingly carefully with the speed they were crafted in, in mind. It sounds akin to wolfing down a gourmet meal without chewing.

I kinda know what you mean. I grew up on games like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye for the n64, Pokemon Red for the Gameboy Color, KOTOR, and briefly, SWG pre-CU. For me, in the early days, playing games wasn’t “for” anything; it was just this thing that brought joy and doing it with other people brought even more joy because we were experiencing it together.

I think it was around when I started playing Rift that things took a turn for me (it was also the first time I’d played a modern, WoW-like MMO. The people I played with were great – that part of it was awesome – but the mechanics of the game… the thing to understand is, I enjoyed the game in many ways. But it fundamentally changed how I approach games. It was also not many years after I had moved from living in a rural, slow-moving town, to a fast-paced city environment, so that may have affected my approach as well.

I didn’t really know what was happening at the time, but looking back, what changed is that I went from seeing games as something you take your time with, to something you rush through as fast and efficiently as possible because it’s a competition, because time is money, because you need to be the best to qualify, etc.

And games like Rift, or GW2, with their fast travel / waypointing and other forms of speeding the transition time between activities means that for someone like me, with how my mind has been affected… if I were to just log in and wander about Lion’s Arch, for instance, I would think that I’m wasting my time. I would think that I’m not accomplishing anything and that therefore I’m burning valuable time that could be spent achieving goals.

The shift in mindset, to simplify, meant that it’s hard for me not to see games as a kind of work. Particularly when they are built in the way that games like GW2 are.

In theory, nothing is making me play them this way. But I would argue that many of the design elements are nudging me, trying to tell me what I could be doing, what I could be achieving, etc. Some of this may be an unintended consequence of usability design; for instance, looking at a story episode and seeing the icon showing a chest. Theoretically, the icon is just there to let me know whether I’ve earned the base rewards from the episode yet, so that I’m aware (usability). But it’s also enticing me, prodding at me to do the episode to get the rewards.

I don’t know what to do about this, other than that I more often play games like The Sims now because its minimal amount of structure gives me space to relax and slip back more into the mindset that I had when I was a kid. The shift in mindset is still there though. On some level, it’s a part of me now that is hard to shake.

I don’t think it’s the voice actor’s fault. Probably a combination of direction and writing. I mean, like others have said, his character is a scholar and he sounds like one. But due to the writing, they thrust his character into a position that the character wasn’t really built for. Might have worked in a novel, inside of Trahearne’s head, but it worked weirdly for a guy who is an NPC in a video game.

The VA simply stuck with the Trahearne scholar voice, for whatever reason. Could have been direction. Could have been a creative choice on the VA’s part. Could have been he couldn’t stretch his Trahearne voice much, without it sounding like someone else. Anyone’s guess what the reason, really.

Vayne.8563:

Labjax.2465:

Oh and BTW, I did have a time frame a few days ago (I think it was like evening-ish on a weekday) where I was trying to do events in AB and could not find people, like at all. Taxiing was pretty much dead under that section. I tried multiple times telling people I was doing pylons in map chat… got maybe 3-4 people in total in the 20-30 minutes I tried for. Tried tagging up several times, including trying queuing up in LFG to try to get people to join me.

Was mind-boggingly dead. When I finally just gave up after it took a handful of us something like 20 minutes to activate one pylon, I peeked around in LFG and did notice that TD seemed to be at the height of its meta, so maybe that was pulling in most of the active players in HoT maps. I had no idea TD was nearing that stage when I started trying to find people for pylons though, and really no way to know, without tracking the meta somehow or going to TD myself. Plus I didn’t really want to be TD at that moment.

So I mean, dead zones are not bigfoot. They are certainly something that exists in some capacity. Granted, in the times I’ve played since I came back, that is the worst I’ve seen it when I was trying to do events.

Edit: Meant AB, not VB. Wrong initials.

The meta schedule is found on timer sights like gw2timer.com which is the one I use. It’s no different than tracking world boss events. I wouldn’t bother doing fire ele until it was going to be up. That’s just how it is.

Thing is though, in this case, I wasn’t wanting to do “whatever event other people are on now.” I wanted to do AB. And I couldn’t find people for doing AB. Being able to find somewhere in the realm of 5-10 people total, in 30+ minutes, with various attempts to get people (and some of those 5-10 trickling away… I don’t remember how many there were at every point… I just know when I gave up, there were maybe 4 of us tops and most of the time, there was no more than 2-3, including myself).

Point is, during that time-frame, the map was definitely what most people call “dead” for doing events.

If I have to wait for a meta timer on a flagship HoT map to find people to do events that are happening on that map, I’d rank that pretty much as population problems in that moment.

So I’m a bit confused by your response. I’m not sure if you’re trying to respond to what I said, or just talking about the timer as a separate thing.

ArchonWing.9480:

Perhaps it’s because there are the elite, and then there are the people that think they are elite. Guess which one is more common.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmugSnake A good description of it, as well as what happened this thread.

Sounds about right.

SkyShroud.2865:

limit the number of people joining for the sake of joining, I guess is understandable.

What the kitten other reason would you join a guild for? Also, you don’t need to charge a fee to limit recruitment. You just say no if you’re too full up for what you want.

Taking peoples’ money because they want to join is just taking advantage of them, plain and simple, and I’ve known people in elite guilds who I could imagine doing that for kicks, so I’m not exactly jumping to give the benefit of the doubt on this one.

Any guild that wants you to pay them to join is a kittenty guild, scam or no. You should stay far away from them. The whole point of being in a guild is to work with people as a team, make friends, that sort of thing. Kinda hard to do those things if it’s built on the premise of paying for entry. You will forever be kissing kitten wondering if you’ve truly earned your way in yet.

Story time: I used to help run a guild in another game. There was some stuff I think we did poorly, looking back, but one way in which we were very firm and it really paid off, was how we acted about being a true guild, not a series of business relationships. Our mindset, which we passed down to our members, was that if you’re a member of the guild, we help you when you need help and you do the same for your fellow guildies.

Often in raids, we would have people voluntarily helping out with consumable stuff that we needed because they wanted to help.

Some people have a hard time wrapping their head around this mindset. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only effective way to run a guild if you want long-term members. It has to be built on the premise of supporting each other, not something transactional. If it’s transactional, people will ditch the moment your guild hits any hard spots. And every guild hits hard spots. You need people to want to stick around when those hard spots happen because they feel like they’re a part of a family.

On the other hand, if you want a guild of disposable DPS machines, then by all means, treat people like the DPS machines that they are.

But those who are looking for a guild most likely don’t want to be treated that way, so unless you want to be treated that way, be wary about trying to join up with guilds that care more about numbers than working with a human being.

The funny thing about elite guilds is they often fall apart. I don’t have anything against trying to be elite – heck, I’m pretty much a closet elitist player – but it is kind of interesting to me how elite guilds often seem to have problems keeping their players together where other guilds last (I’ve observed some of this firsthand.. the ego friction can be a big problem). It’s not impossible to have an elite guild and build something lasting, but you have to do more than trials.

Oh and BTW, I did have a time frame a few days ago (I think it was like evening-ish on a weekday) where I was trying to do events in AB and could not find people, like at all. Taxiing was pretty much dead under that section. I tried multiple times telling people I was doing pylons in map chat… got maybe 3-4 people in total in the 20-30 minutes I tried for. Tried tagging up several times, including trying queuing up in LFG to try to get people to join me.

Was mind-boggingly dead. When I finally just gave up after it took a handful of us something like 20 minutes to activate one pylon, I peeked around in LFG and did notice that TD seemed to be at the height of its meta, so maybe that was pulling in most of the active players in HoT maps. I had no idea TD was nearing that stage when I started trying to find people for pylons though, and really no way to know, without tracking the meta somehow or going to TD myself. Plus I didn’t really want to be TD at that moment.

So I mean, dead zones are not bigfoot. They are certainly something that exists in some capacity. Granted, in the times I’ve played since I came back, that is the worst I’ve seen it when I was trying to do events.

Edit: Meant AB, not VB. Wrong initials.

I’m probably missing some variables, but it seems like the general takeaway is that “finding your way to a populated map” needs to be a more transparent and obvious process to the player.

For instance, a system where…. say you port to VB and then you hit a checkbox that says you want to do meta events. It does some behind-the-scenes checks and then prompts you to join a map that is built on other players having hit the same checkbox. This could even be set as the “default” checked option for maps like VB, since it’s probably the most common way one would want to play the map.

Then you’d have a couple other options as well, like map completion (for things like exploring or HP trains), story. And maybe a more generic option like “other” that players can use to match for unique circumstances, like special farm areas.

In addition to this, I think it’d be a good idea to tweak how squads are put together and have this queue system automatically put people into the same squad, for options where grouping is an expected part of it (ex: meta events).

In other words, mimick how taxiing works for getting people grouped together, in a way that is more transparent and automated. Taxiing and LFG could be left in still as a manual option, if players want to go that route for edge cases that go outside the automated system (or in cases where the automated system is borked for whatever reason).

Jilhome.6593:

My another “2B”

Name : Yuria Hal

Nice work capturing the likeness!

Psientist.6437:

Labjax.2465:

Psientist.6437:

Labjax.2465:

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

You describe a genuine advantage of using conformist builds for NPCs and there are many conformist NPCs. This advantage shrinks as a player becomes more proficient.

Nonconformist builds offer a similar challenge or opportunity to learn. Nonconformist builds do offer the unexpected.

I don’t think the arguments for either is stronger then the one for both.

The person I was responding to said, “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills.” I gave a design reason why it might be beneficial in some circumstances. That was the point of what I said.

As for the tangent you’re going in, you’re missing the point of the point I was making. My point was, the player can potentially learn about their own class through seeing an NPC use it. Learning from an NPC that is much different from them is not the same kind of learning opportunity, even if it can be a learning opportunity.

Offering a challenge is something different. That requires more ongoing variety, sure. But the octovine isn’t exactly changing his mechanics each time either. So it’s not as though having unique abilities means the player will be presented with a unique challenge each time they fight the same mob. It just means there’ll be more mobs in the game that have unique mechanics.

I took your point to be mostly an opportunity to give yourself unearned applause. I won’t dwell on that point because if you really believe that conformist builds are “beneficial in some circumstances” then you also must believe “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills”, and we are in agreement. Do you need to make a point about the definition of ‘restrict’?

Your argument about the Octavine or any other NPC that doesn’t change its build or mechanics is a straw man. Failure to deliver on every possible way to make NPC encounters challenging is not an argument for the studio to restrict themselves to one way.

What are you talking about? Is there something in the tangle of negatives that is “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills" where we are comprehending it differently?

That statement, to my eyes, is essentially saying that there is no design reason why you would create mobs that only have player skills, abilities, etc. I’m saying that, no, there can be a design reason why you would do that. That it might be a beneficial approach in some circumstances.

As for the Octovine, the point of me saying that is that just because a mob has unique abilities doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an ongoing source of challenge or variety. That it’s the aggregate adding of new types of NPCs over time that helps create an ongoing source of challenge and variety, not the adding of unique abilities itself.

Consider that in the case of the Octovine, the variety lies more in the mechanics for removing its shield than any abilities it might have. So it’s not as if giving NPCs unique abilities is the only way to create new scenarios for the player.

Vayne.8563:

@;Labjax.2465

The point is I’m not personally insulting people who disagree with me, and if people take it what way, I’m sorry.

I do personally have something to say people people saying the new zones are dead, because it’s factually untrue. I disagree with people who say the new zones are dead because you need LFG to get to them, because that’s how they were designed. It doesn’t make them dead, any mote than it makes any other form of content that needs coordination and people dead to use tools to find people to do it.

I’ve also said the core game doesn’t adequately prepare people for the expansion, unless they’ve played LS 2 all the way through, or possibly LS 1.

However, I’ve never said people are professional complainers because they don’t like the zone. I’m simply suggesting they may not exist in the same numbers as people assume they do. People saying there are so many complaints and not so much support are demonstably wrong,, by the 50/50 post count I pointed out before.

One person is saying it’s this way and I’m saying it’s not so cut and dried. I’m not sure those are the same things.

I never claimed to be part of any majority. I just don’t think those that are complaining, often using hyperbole or even actual misinformation, are helping their own position by doing so.

For example, anyone who spends as much time in HoT as I do will tell you for a fact it’s not dead.

A person who goes to DS and doesn’t use LFG and doesn’t know how to get to an active map might well think it is and may well post about it, but that doesn’t mean I have to sit silently and allow it to get by.

My argument is, and has always been, that the expansion was a mixed success. That some people really like it and some people don’t like it and no one group has any kind of majority.

Further, the people who don’t like it are very much divided on why they don’t like it. Some are saying the mobs are too hard, some are saying the maps are too complex, some don’t like the timer, or the mini-games. They’re all different complaints.

Furthermore, I’m saying that there were many other factors that affected sales of HoT including bad pricing, the character slot debacle, the choice to nerf dungeon gold completely, the way fractals were handled at first, and they WvW new map fiasco.

There’s lots wrong besides the new zone being hard or confusing to some people. Trying to use lacklustre sales as evidence of any one point of view is just a guess at best.

I’m not saying people aren’t entitled to dislike the expansion. I’m not saying that they’re professional complainers, and I don’t appreciate being called a professional defender myself.

But that’s no reason for me not to provide the other side of the coin.

Have you missed where I’ve said the core game really doesn’t prepare people adequately for HoT? Have you missed where I’ve said I don’t claim to be part of any majority?

But I will pipe up if people claim those zones are dead, because it’s factually untrue. Two weeks ago, I took a returning guildie through AB, TD and DS completion. Took us several hours. There were only two of us.

I’m pretty sure if it were dead, we couldn’t have managed thatg.

To that end, I’m willing to run zone completes of any HOT zone with any one on a US server to prove my point.

All along I’ve said I’ll show people how to do this. Some people have taken me up on it, but not many. Of those who have taken me up on it, most of them continue to play HOT content.

I will give you that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you insult people over not liking something in the game.

Anyway, I don’t think I have anything pressing to say at the moment in continuing that particular subject. As far as I’m concerned, I said my piece and you said yours. It is what it is.

Vayne.8563:

Danicus.4952:

I apologize for my negative disposition with HOT. I have posted on a few threads over the years about my dissatisfaction with HOT, and I see many familiar defenders of HOT on this thread. I do find resonance with this OP, and many others that have had similar experiences. It feels like the conversation hasn’t really evolved though. Many new players enjoy core Tyria, and run into a wall in HOT. They make their point on the forum, and there’s almost a professional team of posters ready to smack them down with honed arguments of why the OP’s experience isn’t valid. So I will retire for a few months again and see if things have changed. Good luck OP, there are people out there that understand your experience of HOT and support your point of view.

Even early on the support/I hate hot threads had about 50/50 on the posters. One side doesn’t have any kind of clear demograhic.

On top of that, the game did well for many many months, at least 3-4 quarters after HoT launched before it started to slip. HoT wasn’t as detrimental to the game as some people make it sound.

It lost some casual players, it picked up some raiders.

And since it’s been proven that more people will complain than compliment, I believe most people didn’t share the same complaints about HoT as the OP though undoubtedly some did. Also those complaints are split into two major groups, difficulty, of content and how confusing the map is. Not everyone who is confused by the map wants the easy content. Not everyone that wants the easy content necessarily wants simple maps. You don’t like it so strongly you’re assuming most people or a ton of people feel like you do. It’s probably not as high a percentage as you think.

All that said, if you post a negative post on something like Reddit, which is not moderator but fan moderated, you’ll find that they tend to get downvoted. That is to say the reddit audience has more people that like the new map complexity and difficulty than don’t.

Of course, that’s not really indicating anything since those people are in fact, more dedicated to the game and likely represent more skilled players.

Still its’ not as cut and dried as you seem to think.

I don’t know, seems to me like you just did exactly what he described. Not an hour after he posted and you’ve already written this multi-paragraph analysis to try to undermine what he’s saying. “Professional team of posters” might be overstating it, but there are certainly dedicated defenders like yourself around. I’ve had you quote me many times on this very HoT-related topic, often responding in a way that seems more centered on a general defense argument than responding to what I literally say.

So I can see where Danicus would get the “professional poster” vibe. I hope you can see that if you were in our shoes, the rate and mode with which you post could look that way from the other end.

I try really hard to give people the benefit of the doubt and I’ve tried to put myself in your shoes in the past and figure that maybe under different circumstances, I could be the poster like you on other forums, coming out of the woodwork all the time to defend something I like. But from the actual end I’m inhabiting here, it’s hard to see it that way.

I don’t think what Danicus is describing is just about HoT. It’s about a kind of persistent need to make the same defenses over and over, to ensure that the narrative on the forums is not lopsided in a negative direction, even if that means making those saying negative things feel like they aren’t welcome here for saying it, or like there is something wrong with them for disliking some part of the game. You can’t deny you’re a major player in this refutation of the negative campaign and have been for years. Every game forum seems to have this sort of back and forth in some capacity. It’s more a question of how far it goes and what form it takes.

Interestingly, in my observations of this forum in the past and current, it doesn’t seem to have anyone who is dedicated to making a negative campaign against the game (something which some game forums do have). And that may be why it’s more noticeable that people like yourself are so quick to try to undermine negative opinions. Heck, in my case, at the height of my negativity (which was probably in post-HoT release disenfranchisement) I think I was still pretty mild and trying to find some positives.

Psientist.6437:

Labjax.2465:

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

You describe a genuine advantage of using conformist builds for NPCs and there are many conformist NPCs. This advantage shrinks as a player becomes more proficient.

Nonconformist builds offer a similar challenge or opportunity to learn. Nonconformist builds do offer the unexpected.

I don’t think the arguments for either is stronger then the one for both.

The person I was responding to said, “there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills.” I gave a design reason why it might be beneficial in some circumstances. That was the point of what I said.

As for the tangent you’re going in, you’re missing the point of the point I was making. My point was, the player can potentially learn about their own class through seeing an NPC use it. Learning from an NPC that is much different from them is not the same kind of learning opportunity, even if it can be a learning opportunity.

Offering a challenge is something different. That requires more ongoing variety, sure. But the octovine isn’t exactly changing his mechanics each time either. So it’s not as though having unique abilities means the player will be presented with a unique challenge each time they fight the same mob. It just means there’ll be more mobs in the game that have unique mechanics.

Not that this is anything new, but I will say, I had to use google and wiki to understand how combo fields work. And I still don’t have most of them memorized. That should tell you something about the game’s ability to teach people how it works without conscious player-to-player tutoring or studying a wiki.

I mean they put in a dodge tutorial with the NPE, I believe, in starter zones. Which is something. But understanding how to hit dodge and time it to avoid damage is the tip of the iceberg. It’s only one mechanic and in many scenarios, it doesn’t mean a lot, either because there’s something else you need to be doing, like dodging by running out of a bubble, or because you temporarily ran out of energy to do more dodges.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Labjax.2465:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The named mercs make for some interesting encounters; I don’t think they need to change, especially since they are all easily avoided. Think they are too powerful? Don’t fight them.

Snow.2048:

I don’t read the OP as a call for npc nerfs, but more an indirect ask why new skills are being made for npcs and not given to players

ThomasC.1056:

TL;DR : Ro venombite is yet another OP character, bearing skills with no common measure with player’s. Either it’s a bug, or it’s an intended design to have a veteran so tedious to beat, but it’s time to stop the power creep, and the crazy new skills for NPC’s only.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

OP is clearly asking for NPCs not to have “crazy new skills.”

ThomasC.1056:

I was indeed not asking for a nerf.

I apologize then for misunderstanding your intent. I recommend you go back and edit the original post, because the text clearly says you don’t want the NPC skills to be stronger than that of the player’s. That’s a “nerf” by nearly anyone’s definition.

ThomasC.1056:

From a gameplay point of view, that mercenary is nothing to worry too much about : she can be avoided, she’s no real threat. I’m underlining here design issues : players have been asking and asking for new skills for ages, and at each release, we see new skills designed, developped specifically for NPC’s. On top of it, it’s on-steroids version of player’s skills…

I still can’t agree that there’s an “issue” with the design. Players are always going to better than the AI, so it makes sense to make them deadlier and more powerful, otherwise we will always adapt too quickly.

Runiir.6425:

Named or not the named classes NEED to be 100% confined to the EXACT skills the players have access to. If they can’t create a challenging encounter with those skills, it is time to take a hard look at the class as to why this is.

I think this is horrid idea. Players are always going to perform better than the AI; we have an unfair advantage. I think it’s up to us to rise to the challenge of strong NPCs.

Er… I don’t really have a horse in this race, but… come again? “Players are always going to perform better than the AI”? In what world? If you mean players will always have the potential to outsmart AI, sure. But that’s why games make mobs stupidly powerful, to compensate for how dumb they are, strategically. Even so, some of the mobs in this game aren’t exactly dumb or inept. Some of them are downright obnoxious and great at making a mockery of players.

Like Mordrem Snipers, for instance. In what fantasy world are players always going to perform better than them?

It’s actually not really beyond the capability of developers in this day and age to program AI that can give players a really hard time, without being much more powerful than them. And I don’t see why it should be a bad thing if there’s room for the player to figure out how to outsmart the AI’s tricks and take it down a lot more easily than they were doing prior. I mean, what’s the alternative? Being required to have more people along because the mob was given uber powers? Where’s the strategy in that?

It seems the fear is that the mobs will be too easy and therefore people will get bored and disgruntled about it. But I don’t see how uber powers is some sort of carte blanche answer to that.

I doubt it’s even true in practice. I think what keeps people entertained is more complicated than that.

The point is that there is no design reason to restrict mobs from having non-player skills, including skills that are more powerful than ones that players can obtain.

You’re absolutely correct that what makes combat interesting is more complicated than any single design choice. However, the topic of the OP is one particular design choice — they weren’t saying here’s how to holistically make encounters more interesting; they were saying how they didn’t like mobs having special skills.

I spent about five minutes thinking about scenarios where this wouldn’t be true and I already thought of one. Having mobs that are limited to what the player has could be a strong design choice for teaching the player about how their class works and what its limitations are. You make the players face themselves and they will get sparks of ideas from how the NPC plays and what strategies they use.

So that is already one design reason out of the “none” that you say exist.

Queensdale. Probably because it was the first zone for me and the one I saw the most, mostly playing human characters.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The named mercs make for some interesting encounters; I don’t think they need to change, especially since they are all easily avoided. Think they are too powerful? Don’t fight them.

Snow.2048:

I don’t read the OP as a call for npc nerfs, but more an indirect ask why new skills are being made for npcs and not given to players

ThomasC.1056:

TL;DR : Ro venombite is yet another OP character, bearing skills with no common measure with player’s. Either it’s a bug, or it’s an intended design to have a veteran so tedious to beat, but it’s time to stop the power creep, and the crazy new skills for NPC’s only.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

OP is clearly asking for NPCs not to have “crazy new skills.”

ThomasC.1056:

I was indeed not asking for a nerf.

I apologize then for misunderstanding your intent. I recommend you go back and edit the original post, because the text clearly says you don’t want the NPC skills to be stronger than that of the player’s. That’s a “nerf” by nearly anyone’s definition.

ThomasC.1056:

From a gameplay point of view, that mercenary is nothing to worry too much about : she can be avoided, she’s no real threat. I’m underlining here design issues : players have been asking and asking for new skills for ages, and at each release, we see new skills designed, developped specifically for NPC’s. On top of it, it’s on-steroids version of player’s skills…

I still can’t agree that there’s an “issue” with the design. Players are always going to better than the AI, so it makes sense to make them deadlier and more powerful, otherwise we will always adapt too quickly.

Runiir.6425:

Named or not the named classes NEED to be 100% confined to the EXACT skills the players have access to. If they can’t create a challenging encounter with those skills, it is time to take a hard look at the class as to why this is.

I think this is horrid idea. Players are always going to perform better than the AI; we have an unfair advantage. I think it’s up to us to rise to the challenge of strong NPCs.

Er… I don’t really have a horse in this race, but… come again? “Players are always going to perform better than the AI”? In what world? If you mean players will always have the potential to outsmart AI, sure. But that’s why games make mobs stupidly powerful, to compensate for how dumb they are, strategically. Even so, some of the mobs in this game aren’t exactly dumb or inept. Some of them are downright obnoxious and great at making a mockery of players.

Like Mordrem Snipers, for instance. In what fantasy world are players always going to perform better than them?

It’s actually not really beyond the capability of developers in this day and age to program AI that can give players a really hard time, without being much more powerful than them. And I don’t see why it should be a bad thing if there’s room for the player to figure out how to outsmart the AI’s tricks and take it down a lot more easily than they were doing prior. I mean, what’s the alternative? Being required to have more people along because the mob was given uber powers? Where’s the strategy in that?

It seems the fear is that the mobs will be too easy and therefore people will get bored and disgruntled about it. But I don’t see how uber powers is some sort of carte blanche answer to that.

I doubt it’s even true in practice. I think what keeps people entertained is more complicated than that.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Regardless, the point is that ascended was introduced so that there was some gear progress, some sinks for various mats, and some profit for crafting. It was not introduced primarily as “something to do for people who ran out of things to do.”

Astralporing.1957:

So you say. I remember it differently.

So Linsey Murdock wrote.

As we watch Guild Wars 2 mature in its Live environment, we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall.” We designed the process of getting Legendary gear to be a long term goal, but players were ready to start on that path much sooner than we expected and were becoming frustrated with a lack of personal progression. Our desire is to create a game that is more inclusive for hardcore and casual players alike, but we don’t want to overlook the basic need for players to feel like they are progressing and growing even after hitting max level. Adding item progression is a delicate process normally undertaken in an expansion, but we feel it’s important to strive to satisfy the basic needs of our players sooner rather than later.

We have always worked hard to create a sense of satisfying progression rather than gear grind and this new item progression initiative is no exception. By adding challenging new combat mechanics to end-game content and ways to mitigate those mechanics through gear progression for high-end players, we can add personal progression without making the game feel like an endless treadmill of gear that is just out of your reach. Original Guild Wars fans may recognize that we took a familiar approach to our new progression. The first end game mechanic we will introduce is Agony, which will be encountered in the Fractals of the Mists dungeon, and is mitigated by Infusions.

Ascended gear (and agony resistance) was added to introduce some gear progression. To the extent that you have to do something to get the next tier of gear, sure, that qualifies as “something to do” — the main goal was gear progression, not filler.

Well personally, when I look at the ascended and legendary gear in this game, it doesn’t look like “satisfying progression rather than gear grind” to my eyes. It looks like “gear grind.”

The fact that you can manage in a lot of content with exotics and that there are some cheap-ish ways to get exotics just means, to me, that the “gear grind” is somewhat optional. It doesn’t change that there is one.

I just get the sense more and more that this game is, and has tried, too hard to please both casual and hardcore. And while I can see why they’d want to do both, it seems to my perception like it has caused them a lot of problems, with overlap between the two that don’t really work well for either crowd.

Of course, that’s just how it looks to me. Maybe it’s that my approach to this game is too casual for it to be a good fit in the long-term with what they make. I’m not really sure.

draxynnic.3719:

Tearthy Flame.1463:

Well you should watch this recorded video during the recent live stream. ArenaNet has said it in the past they want Trench Coats to be the silhouette of Medium Professions. As for the design of Medium Legendary Armor, that’s a different issue…

The problem with that is that you can get around it by wearing outfits in PvP and WvW. There are outfits with the silhouettes of all three armour types, so you can even try to fake people out if you’re so inclined.

Yeah, I think what that guy in the comments said is on point. It’s pretty much a “because we say so” reason. Which is fine, really. Choosing an artistic aesthetic and sticking with it is perfectly reasonable, IMO.

But the “you need to recognize what they are in combat” thing always seems to be made in contexts where it doesn’t actually hold. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen in other games too, though not necessarily out of a staff member’s mouth… where the person will try to say that the design should be as is because of PvP, when there’s already some way in which that reason is torn apart.

Just kind of head-scratching to me. Like why not just say, “Because it’s the artistic aesthetic we want to stick with” and leave it at that.

vesica tempestas.1563:

‘platformer’ is just another way of categorizing a thing that someone doesnt like to make it seem incongruous for argument sake. its the same argument over and over and over ‘i dont like a thing so therefore most people don’t like a thing or its a failure’. Platformer is a game genre not a map style.

Again, people like HOT, people don’t, thats it, theres nothing beyond this, except people cant get this and think HOT is a failure because they don’t like it – they cant see beyond their own viewpoint.

Yeah, ok. I don’t believe you even read what I wrote above.

I’m hoping this other expansion will involve a change to mastery points that either gets rid of them entirely or adds in more generic ways to obtain them. I don’t like them being tied to such specific and limited sources. It seems like much the same deal with the old skill points (or was it skill books? something like that) and much the same irritations.

vesica tempestas.1563:

riiight then, maybe you want to actually read up a bit on the context of the survey and who completed the survey and why, its not a conspiracy theory to win an argument on a gaming forum for example. Alternatively, it doesn’t take a huge leap in imagination to correlate this against the gaming population in the 70s, 80,s 90’s, or even the player range – say 12-90. my original point is gamers have experience, they didnt come into GW2 cold, they know how to work things out.

ps there are other averages than median.

Challenging how the statistics relate to your argument and whether they are done in an accurate manner is not the same as saying they are part of a conspiracy.

Your original point remains unproven and largely irrelevant, as the main point being made here is that some people simply don’t like platformers, not that they are incapable of learning how to do them.

Most people in the world probably have the kinesthetic capability to learn how to be good at platformers. That doesn’t mean most of them will enjoy playing a platformer game. And whether they will enjoy it is more relevant here than whether they can do it. Cause you can teach people to do a lot of things, but if they don’t enjoy doing them, good luck getting them to stick around.

That said, I think it’s safe to say platformers are a fairly popular genre of games. But are they popular among MMO fans? How much intersection of interest happens there? That’s a big question mark. Anet may have metrics indicating that there is some strong intersection within their fanbase and that’s why they put platforming in HoT maps. Or they might have done it for some creative reason because their devs really love platforming games.

I don’t think anyone is making a serious argument that a majority of players who play, or have played, GW2 hate platformers. But some obviously don’t like it, or they don’t like vertical navigation, or both.

vesica tempestas.1563:

Labjax.2465:

vesica tempestas.1563:

i think people are forgetting what the average game player looks like, i.e over 35 with 10 years + gaming experience. Dark souls is considered difficult, or perhaps civ 4 god mode, or super meat boy, but HOT?

Where exactly are you getting the statistic that the average game player is over 35 with 10+ years of gaming experience? That doesn’t sound right at all.

A lot of people weren’t even introduced to gaming as a thing until the past 10 years or so.

?
There was a couple national studies done a few years ago and it was 35/10 years then. Bear in mind gaming started in the 70’s, those generations are still here.

edit, found one for north america

https://www.polygon.com/2016/4/29/11539102/gaming-stats-2016-esa-essential-facts

63 percent of U.S. households surveyed include at least one frequent gamer.
65 percent of homes own a video game-playing device, while 48 percent own “a dedicated game console.”
47 percent of gamers are between 18 and 49 years old.
The average guy who plays games is 35; the average woman is 44.
59 percent of those who play games on a regular basis are men; 41 percent are women.
The average gamer has been playing video games for 13 years.

Ignoring even age, The average gamer has been playing video games for 13 years. The average players is going to know how to jump on to a mushroom and control a glider.

Ok, I’m just all kinds of suspicious about these statistics (as one should be, as statistics are so easy to manipulate or confuse).

Point the first is, how number of years played is being measured. Because it could be measured as, “Here is when I, survey participant, report having first played a video game compared to the date of this survey.” Which would be a huge difference compared to, “I have been playing video games consistently, daily or weekly, for the past 13 years.”

And point the second, as to you saying “the average player is going to know how to jump on a mushroom and control a glider,” that might seem like a reasonable assumption based on the belief that the study is measuring time played as “consistently, daily or weekly, for the past 13 years.” As in, “How could they not know how from all that time playing?”

But that may not even be what the statistic means. It may just be reported time in how long people think of themselves as having gotten involved in video games as a hobby.

Point the third, it’s also possible for these kind of numbers to get skewed based on extremes. As in, say there’s a minority number who have been playing for over 40 years. That could skew the average. And I don’t exactly trust people who do statistics to take this kind of stuff into account.

I just don’t see how we can assume anything particularly relevant to the HoT discussion from these statistics. The fact is, some people hate platformers. Whether they are a minority, or an average, or a giraffe in South Africa, the point is that some of them do.

And, more importantly, what matters for GW2 is what its demographic is, not what the national average is.

vesica tempestas.1563:

i think people are forgetting what the average game player looks like, i.e over 35 with 10 years + gaming experience. Dark souls is considered difficult, or perhaps civ 4 god mode, or super meat boy, but HOT?

Where exactly are you getting the statistic that the average game player is over 35 with 10+ years of gaming experience? That doesn’t sound right at all.

A lot of people weren’t even introduced to gaming as a thing until the past 10 years or so.

Vayne.8563:

With the exception of adventures. there are virtually no mario brothers skills to get through HoT maps. Those who say there are didn’t spend long enough on those maps.

You can pretty much walk to most places. Jumping mushrooms require very very very little skill. If you can jump on the mushroom it places you were you want to be.

The fact is this oft repeated platforming claim has very little to back it up. I can walk you from one end of VB to the other. At night choppers land to take you to the canopy. You need to interact with a rope to get there.

AB is even less of a platforming experience. It’s mostly a flat map.

DS doesn’t have any platforming, except a single hero point.

It’s easy to say something. If you don’t believe me, get into the game and I’ll show you how little platforming actually exists.

Seems like kind of a strange thing to contradict someone on. Jumping on the mushrooms is a kind of jumping, whether it’s objectively “easy” or not. I don’t really struggle with it, but then, I’m not one of the people saying I inherently despise platforming either.

If someone hates platforming with a passion… well, getting on the mushrooms is a kind of platforming, regardless of how much “skill” it requires. This has been a complaint in the game any time there is something that’s considered required that you need jumping for. (As opposed to jumping puzzles, which are generally not required for anything.)

Also, I find it funky how you conveniently left out mentioning TD in your reply, when that’s obviously the biggest culprit in terms of platforming. Or, at the very least, in terms of vertical navigation, which may be where some who despise platforming struggle, in part.

Personally, I enjoy platforming, but I hate being harassed by mobs in a 3D space while I do it. Being harassed by mobs in a 2D space is annoying too, but at least they’re easier to see then. I tend to prefer platforming games that are an exercise in thought rather than reflexes. Where you can take your time to puzzle it out, rather than needing to react immediately to your environment a lot.

I also think it’s worth noting that in terms of vertical navigation, the flagship feature of HoT (gliding) is vertical navigation, so obviously there’s some emphasis on navigation through vertical space, regardless of whether it’s strictly required in every case. Heck, the DS fight at the end, as I recall, is pretty much pure vertical navigation with interludes of standing on flat ground.

So I’d say it makes sense if someone doesn’t like that sort of thing to not like HoT, considering that HoT’s flagship feature is all about the vertical navigation. So… I see your “let me prove it to you” and raise you “so what? some flat paths doesn’t change the fundamental design of it.”

I don’t think I’ve ever struggled to see what’s going on in this game past the flashiness. Maybe it’s a light sensitivity thing or something?

vesica tempestas.1563:

Others see demons in the walls and complain.

So a moment ago it was “you can’t please everyone,” now it’s “some see demons in the walls.” Or are you going to tell me that the only reason a creator can’t please everyone is because some people insist on not liking what you like?

vesica tempestas.1563:

Labjax.2465:

vesica tempestas.1563:

The issue is that you will always find fault if you pick things out in isolation. There are 37 zones in GW2, 3 have verticality that is complained about. 90 % of the maps are flat, the the latest maps in HOT are flat. some people enjoy having 8% of the maps that are not flat. GW2 did not become a bad product because someone doesn’t like 8% of the maps.

Now add on that, one of the posters also doesn’t like changes in LOTR, RIFT, TSW as well and you have a pattern there and 1 common factor.

To give an analogy, I love Pink Floyd, I didn’t like their last album so much. That doesn’t mean Pink floyd has to change or are suddenly neglecting me, it just means i didn’t like their last creation. Pink Floyd making Dark side of the moon 2 is not going to happen.

No, the issue is that GW2 chose to do something different and for some people it missed the mark. I enjoyed every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and can’t find any significant fault in the series. That is my assessment of it. I also would make a pretty confident argument that it stayed true to what it was from start to finish.

It’s not impossible to do that. Just because some creators choose to switch things up mid-stream doesn’t mean people are screwed up to ask them not to.

Also, your album analogy doesn’t make sense because GW2 is all the same album. A different album would be more like if we were comparing GW1 and GW2. But even then, using an album as an analogy doesn’t work very well. An album is something you make and then release, and that’s it. An MMO is a living, breathing virtual world and community that evolves over time. Expansions are chunks of content all at once, but they are still part of that same evolving process as part of the same game.

And because it’s an evolving process, there is usually more tolerance for change than, say, a TV series. But people usually still get attached to whatever the fundamentals are to them.

’An MMO is a living, breathing virtual world and community that evolves over time. Expansions are chunks of content all at once, but they are still part of that same evolving process as part of the same game. ’

EXACTLY correct, and GW2 has 37 zones.

‘I or we don’t like a thing’ does not mean everyone does not like a thing. You will never satisfy all the people all of the time. This will always be the case in mmorpg – case in point the guy that didn’t like change in LOTR, RIFT, GW2, TSW.

Like I said though:

But people usually still get attached to whatever the fundamentals are to them.

Just because MMOs evolve doesn’t mean they have a get-out-of-jail-free artistic card that allows them to change on a fundamental level, while staying above criticism. People still generally don’t like change.

What you’re saying is an irrelevant copout. Of course art can’t please everyone. That’s beside the point. What usually matters is that you try to please the same people that you pleased in the first place, especially if they’re long-time fans, and in particular in a situation where you’re still within the same, fundamental title. Not necessarily for the purpose of pleasing those people, exactly, but for the purpose of staying true to an overarching vision.

GW2’s overarching vision is muddled in what has been made. It’s like a game that wanted to be for hardcore players and then marketed itself to casual play and then doubled down on the marketing and became a mostly casual experience, but never left its hardcore roots behind and, later (HoT), doubled down on its hardcore roots, estranging a portion of its casual playerbase in the process.

If its history is any indication of a pattern, it’ll probably swing back in the next expansion and go the casual route again. Or if they’re sticking to it at this point, they might double down on the hardcore roots even more.

Here’s a few of my current ones.

vesica tempestas.1563:

The issue is that you will always find fault if you pick things out in isolation. There are 37 zones in GW2, 3 have verticality that is complained about. 90 % of the maps are flat, the the latest maps in HOT are flat. some people enjoy having 8% of the maps that are not flat. GW2 did not become a bad product because someone doesn’t like 8% of the maps.

Now add on that, one of the posters also doesn’t like changes in LOTR, RIFT, TSW as well and you have a pattern there and 1 common factor.

To give an analogy, I love Pink Floyd, I didn’t like their last album so much. That doesn’t mean Pink floyd has to change or are suddenly neglecting me, it just means i didn’t like their last creation. Pink Floyd making Dark side of the moon 2 is not going to happen.

No, the issue is that GW2 chose to do something different and for some people it missed the mark. I enjoyed every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and can’t find any significant fault in the series. That is my assessment of it. I also would make a pretty confident argument that it stayed true to what it was from start to finish.

It’s not impossible to do that. Just because some creators choose to switch things up mid-stream doesn’t mean people are screwed up to ask them not to.

Also, your album analogy doesn’t make sense because GW2 is all the same album. A different album would be more like if we were comparing GW1 and GW2. But even then, using an album as an analogy doesn’t work very well. An album is something you make and then release, and that’s it. An MMO is a living, breathing virtual world and community that evolves over time. Expansions are chunks of content all at once, but they are still part of that same evolving process as part of the same game.

And because it’s an evolving process, there is usually more tolerance for change than, say, a TV series. But people usually still get attached to whatever the fundamentals are to them.

jihm.2315:

the modern ideas are ruining mmos , older versions did things better.
lineage 2 and wow used to be a lot better in the past and almost everyone admits that.
gw1 i did play but i read so much positive stuff about it that arena net used to leave behind.
i think even runescape players liked their older game more.

I miss classic titles like Zelda Ocarina of Time, Goldeneye for the N64, and in the MMO sphere, SWG pre-CU.

I think there’s a charm to some of those old games that is missing from a lot of modern games, but I’m not sure what it is. It seems to be one of those things that is elusive and hard to grasp onto in art. Perhaps it’s that things are being done too much out of a money-centric philosophy than a design-centric philosophy. Perhaps it’s just that I expect every prominent game to be a classic and only a few can be.

But I am pretty certain that there are some philosophies that took hold in the industry which are detrimental to gameplay more often than not. One of them that sticks out to me is the achievement philosophy. Achievement points, attaching achievements to everything. In Ocarina of Time, you might get a special item or reward for defeating a boss, but it was focused on practicality; getting a tunic that allows you to go back in the temple you just defeated and navigate it more easily, for example. Or getting an item that you need to progress into the next part of the game.

Nowadays, we have games where there are achievements for the sake of achievements. Achievements where literally the only “reward” is a little numerical number that might eventually add up to something (or in some games, may never mean anything other than being a numerical number). It’s more just “brag points” than anything to do with actual gameplay.

The problem with this kind of stuff is that the gameplay might be really well designed and interesting, but it can get drowned out by things like reward saturation drawing your attention to something else. I mean, if I logged into GW2 and played with the UI off and just wandered around, I might find the worlds really gorgeous and engaging, and the clock disappearing.

Instead, when I log in, I find myself asking, “What reward can I get next and how quickly can I get it?”

And I just straight up did not think that way before I started playing games like this. Games like this seriously affected how I think about games and not in a way that I’m happy about.

One of the things that I believe SWG pre-CU got right in the beginning, even though many people thought it was dumb and annoying, was the time it took to get around. On the one hand, it meant you could spend 20-30 minutes just traveling to the location you wanted to do your activity at. On the other hand, it meant you had to slow down. You couldn’t rush through the game and it was a lot harder to become engrossed in efficiency. The pace meant you had more time to do that fundamental thing that MMOs get called multiplayer for: Socializing.

In most modern MMOs, the pace is so fast-moving that you almost need to be on VOIP with other people if you want to get a word in while playing. A lot of activities simply don’t have the space in them to stop and type things out.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/The-Wayfarer-s-Henge-Backpack-Disabled-May-10-2017/first#post6582427

Metrica Province looks pretty techy sci-fi to me and that’s a starter zone. I think your perception about the game is going to vary depending on what zone you start in.

Danikat.8537:

Faaris.8013:

Carighan.6758:

Uuuuh. I just walk around and explore? Why would I be in any hurry to find things?

Is that how you live your live your life??

If real life had waypoints (so I could always get back home no matter how lost I got) and preferably infinite resurrections too that is absolutely how I’d live my life.

It actually can be quite fun and a good way to find things you never knew were in your town. Although with my horrible sense of direction I only really felt confident doing it in Aberystwyth (where if you get lost you just keep going and you’ll hit either the sea or the hills soon) until last year when I finally got a smart phone (which has GPS and a map).

My problem with doing that (in-game) is I get caught up in the “what should I accomplish” mentality cause there are so many goals. So. Many. Goals.

I play a game like Skyrim and it’s not that hard for me to just enjoy wandering about. Here, it seems like everything is an objective in one way or another.

Well, part of the problem with this raids thing and exclusivity is that GW2 wasn’t even a raiding game until, what, 2015? 3 years after its release? In games that are built to support raids and have raiding be a core part of the content cycle, it makes more sense for the tippy-top of reward output in the game to be tied to raids… because for some games, raiding pretty much is the tippy-top. That’s where it all leads and other content is sideline content.

In GW2, not so much. It has 3 years worth of development in other things before it ever saw a “real” raid and that’s not including what was released with base game. So to change the tune at what is now 5 years into the game’s life is hard to justify.

They took something that has been more of a wide-range-activity acquisition process (legendary items) and, for legendary armor, easily one of the most requested features in the game’s life, released it as “raiding is the end-all, be-all.” Maybe they have plans or are open to releasing it in other content formats, but that’s beside the point. They’ve already set the precedent, making it look like raiding is their flagship content.

Which, for a game that has put so much money into e-sports and didn’t even have raids until 3 years in, just makes me scratch my head. I’m flummoxed as to why now, raids are suddenly the king of end-game. This game wasn’t even built for raiding; the combat system is a rather odd fit for it, imo.

Most raiding games use some form of the classic trinity system. This game’s classes has some possible variation in roles, but is built on a fundamental level to support a more solo approach to combat.

It’s just weird. I don’t understand the decision.

Sometimes I use a video or read a guide. Other times, I don’t. I ended up with some conflicting inner monologue when it comes to that stuff. Cause I was really impressionable in the early days of my playing games and some people I played with were “figure it out on your own, you’re a failure if you need a guide” purists and others were “who cares, it’s a game, I’m going to go read a 500 page manuscript guide now.”

So I have this push-pull thing going on where I kinda see both sides of the argument and want the satisfaction of figuring out something on my own, but also want it now and just get impatient sometimes.

Cyninja.2954:

Labjax.2465:

I don’t think I conveyed myself clearly. It was not my intention to criticize those who seek difficult-to-attain items. I was commenting on status symbols and how it is unfulfilling to seek a status symbol, since it is ultimately just a symbol and doesn’t fulfill one’s needs. I was not referring to the process of completing a goal, which can fulfill one’s need for fun and recreation.

The difference in what I’m saying is in what the reason is for which one does the activity. If someone completes a collection for the fun of achieving a goal that is different from completing a collection to gain a status symbol; when completing a goal purely for the status symbol, the person is unlikely to get any satisfaction out of the process or the results and may come away upset that it didn’t provide the satisfaction they thought it would. When completing a goal for the fun of the process, the person will be getting satisfaction as they go along and then get a sense of satisfaction when they are finished, before moving onto another goal or something else in their life.

I have a question though because it seems to me that you’re saying you are in it for the goal completion. If there was no reward, would you still try to complete them?

You keep missunderstanding, some people enjoy achieving or gaining a status symbol (not only ingame by the way, ever notice how all those million- , biollionaers compete about who has the biggest yacht? Or car, or anything for that matter. It;s not only the super rich by the way). Others enjoy the process they take to achieve such symbol. Big parts of live are status symbols bye the way. How else would you explain expensive sport cars. Yet those who own them take pleasure in owning them.

Only because you do not place value on such items does not mean others are wrong about chosing to do so. This entire game is an absolute waste of time unless you get enjoyment out of it. To argue that other peoples enjoyment is less correct than your own is insane.

Arenanet provides a canvas with different colors (aka different things people can do and achieve). How you use those colors and which colors you use is up to each individual to decide.

As far as myself, I stick to things I mostly enjoy. Some of which provide bigger rewards, others fewer. I take breaks when I’ve had my share of GW2 and come back weeks or months later when I feel like it. Would I do jumping puzzles if there were no achievement points associated? Sure. Would I do dailies if there were no achievement points associated, probably not.

I can see that you believe I’m saying what is the “right” or “wrong” way to enjoy something and that’s not the message I’m trying to convey. As I said earlier in the thread, in my experience, status symbols don’t fulfill people. Lots of people seek them and many over time, in various facets of life, have talked about their experiences with how shallow it ultimately feels when they get it. I can see that it came across like I was judging it as wrong for people to enjoy status symbols.

I was instead meaning that in my experience, people don’t enjoy them. That they are tricked into thinking they will want them, but when they get them, they don’t receive the fulfillment that they thought they would.

I have experienced this multiple times throughout my life. As I recall, it usually goes for me something like this: A fleeting sense of happiness followed by a feeling of emptiness and/or isolation. Sometimes even fear that it will be taken away. I have never, in memory, come away from it feeling like a need of mine was met.

Recently, in fact, there was a situation where someone gave me a sort of “award” for some work I had done. I didn’t know who had given to it to me at first, but I was touched by the gesture, assuming that it had come from someone who appreciated what I’d done. I enjoyed this feeling at first, but it felt kind of hollow not knowing for sure who, why, or where it had come from and been motivated by. Sometime later, the person who had given it to me contacted me and told me that it was them who had given it to me, someone I was familiar with and who had expressed sincere appreciation of my work in the past. I thanked them profusely for their gesture, expressing how it had touched me, and still find myself thinking about it 2-3 days later with fondness. It was the memory of an exchange of sincere gratitude that stuck with me, not the award itself.

Cyninja.2954:

Labjax.2465:

Vayne.8563:

Dindin.2378:

To expand on my post, progression is not the only thing lacking from the game. There is no rarity. Everything is obtainable and crafting is not the same as in other MMORPG’s. There is no excitement when killing a mob to drop a really unique item. Yes you can drop precursors, but I do not think these are enough. Maybe its tied to the lack of progression. If Legendary Weapons would REALLY be Legendary I would understand. But they are not, everybody is walking around with them. They have mediocre stats and do not make you all that powerful. There is no prestige or status left anymore with having one.

Boy am I glad I don’t play this game for status. There are skins that very very few people have btw.

99% of the players of the game probably don’t have pinnacle weapons. I have them and almost never use them. Because I just want my characters to look cool. I don’t need status to enjoy the game.

The status situation is what I dislike most about the addition of raids to the game. I thought the game was a better game before legendary armor became the new status symbol.

I would like to celebrate on this rare occasion that I agree with you completely on this one. Status symbols don’t fulfill people in my experience, but people nonetheless seek them as an attempt to fulfill unmet needs and then they don’t get what they want out of it. But they are a great way to prey on peoples’ unmet needs, whether knowingly or unintentionally.

And for those who want to fulfill their need for creativity with a greater quantity of options, the focus on status makes options more inaccessible, making it more difficult to fulfill that need for creativity through this game. That is just one example I know from my experiences where it can detract from the fulfillment of peoples’ needs rather than adding to it.

I have to disagree. Exchange the word “status” with “gear treadmill” and “level treadmill” in your post and you could say the exact same thing about MMOs that keep increasing the level or gear cap (which most other MMOs do). Yet many people crave exactly this kind of progress because they enjoy it.

Fact is, the game is supposed to be fun and if people enjoy aiming for something or want to chase after some arbitrary carrot, if they have fun while doing so they are doing it right. This has nothing to do with some kind of unfullfilled “need”.

The big difference is, GW2 aims to offer players different types of goals to aim for without seting up the requirement to keep playing just to maintain a staus quo equipment wise. This is the core point which most enjoy. Having the developers add different arbitrary goals is fine. As is, skins are optional and if you do not enjoy hunting for them because you do not enjoy the process that’s fine. Don’t look down on people enjoying the collection process only because you approach the game differently though.

I don’t think I conveyed myself clearly. It was not my intention to criticize those who seek difficult-to-attain items. I was commenting on status symbols and how it is unfulfilling to seek a status symbol, since it is ultimately just a symbol and doesn’t fulfill one’s needs. I was not referring to the process of completing a goal, which can fulfill one’s need for fun and recreation.

The difference in what I’m saying is in what the reason is for which one does the activity. If someone completes a collection for the fun of achieving a goal that is different from completing a collection to gain a status symbol; when completing a goal purely for the status symbol, the person is unlikely to get any satisfaction out of the process or the results and may come away upset that it didn’t provide the satisfaction they thought it would. When completing a goal for the fun of the process, the person will be getting satisfaction as they go along and then get a sense of satisfaction when they are finished, before moving onto another goal or something else in their life.

I have a question though because it seems to me that you’re saying you are in it for the goal completion. If there was no reward, would you still try to complete them?

Whoa. That first one makes me want to go in-game and play with colors right now. Positively inspiring.