I’m less upset about the addition of a new gear tier, and actually more upset about the change to the flavor of the game.
If you’re having fun with the game, whatever that might be, doing dailies, running dungeons, collecting mats for crafting, experimenting with recipes, doing the open world events, or participating in WvW or PvP then it’s not a grind to obtain new gear.
The original designers of the game understood this. It only becomes a grind when you are forced into a single type of gameplay that you don’t particular like to begin with or becomes boring because you have to repeat the same action and content over and over again.
If everything you do in the game (crafting, adventuring, dungeons, dynamic events) ticks you a bit closer to acquiring the top end gear in the game then you’re earning the gear as a side effect of you having fun playing the game YOUR WAY. This was the promise GW2 had over other MMO’s
I’m pretty sure this was the point of Karma, by just playing the game you earn your way into Exotic gear (the old top level gear in the game) that’s what was great about this MMO. You could also just craft your way into the best gear or if you wanted to run dungeons you could get into top end gear that way too……this system is now broken.
This addition of the Ascended gear and Infusions have basically killed many of the best “Play the Game Your Way Systems” this game had to offer from crafting to karma.
The addition of this new tier of gear is just a symptom of the pandemic of things they broke with this patch.
The original designers of the game removed things like the trinity so there were no barriers for players to leap over in order for people to just play together without the need to search for a single profession type. This new content seems to work against this principle. With the introduction of mitigation armor (Agony) players will seek out others that already have a start on the mitigation sets to group with to improve their odds and be reluctant to let players with lower resistant scores join the group.
With the scaling of difficulty players will also seek out other players that have already unlocked the higher difficulty ranges so they don’t have to repeat the lower ones. This all goes against the original ideology for the game reintroducing walls for the players to leap over to play together.
Although these walls are being self-imposed by the player base the current design teams seems oblivious to how players will twist these systems to their advantage and exclude players lower down on the food chain.
The game is making a shift more towards the instanced dungeon endgame so many MMO’s go with introducing a new token (Currency) the Fractal Relics that will unlock some of the more powerful items in the game. This power creep virtually renders much of the other dungeons in the game obsolete just 3 months after launch, good luck finding a group for any of them if you haven’t already seen them.
I see this instanced endgame shift as an unfortunate step in the wrong direction that diminishes the open world massively multi-player elements. In a game that relies on players to push back against the games open world dynamic event driven environments a critical mass of players is needed to keep these areas playable. We are already seeing endgame open world areas that have multiple way points in contention because players have abandoned the dynamic events in these areas and the world has pushed back against the environment.
My prediction is this doesn’t get better any time soon, players trying to find a massively multi-player experience in the endgame open world zones are not going to find the critical mass of players needed to contend with the many group dynamic events in these areas or throughout the rest of the game.
I’m certain that with the player base already diluted between WvW, PvP and now this new endgame dungeon designed scaling in difficulty allowing players to constantly run them as long as they like the open world will become nothing more than a virtual lobby especially since this dungeon has its own unique currency connected to the best rewards in the game.
Moving forward I see the inevitable evolution for this game is to abandon the open world dynamic events in lieu of a more traditional single player quest system.
If these design changes are intentional then bravo job well done on the part of the live team, but I signed up for a true massively multi player open world experience so I’ll be taking a pass.
“Welcome to the lobby for World of GW2 please make a selection, would you like dungeon A,B or C ….sit back relax your game will start in a moment”
If you got this far and are curious about the title of this post that’s how the Bait and Switch works when you advertise one thing and deliver something unexpected.
(edited by Logun.2349)