Guild Wars 2

Lothair.8942:

Snerf.1650:

ShadowPuppet.3746:

This is from Chris Whiteside:
Our Studio Design Director Chris Whiteside just posted this:
“I’d like to respond to concerns players have raised about ascended items. Please keep in mind that we’re releasing this as one portion of a massive November update that introduces and improves many aspects of challenge, progression, and rewards. With this and upcoming updates, we view ourselves as introducing large amounts of content with supporting systems and features, akin to an expansion pack, building on Guild Wars 2 through a series of live releases. So it’s important for us to be able to add an expansion pack’s worth of progression and rewards to support that content.
Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill. Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two. We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards. We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.
Ascended and infusion rewards will be available in both PvE and WvW over time, and be made available through all sorts of content around the world including existing content. PvP will remain unaffected to ensure our intended PvP balance going forward. We are also working on other reward and progression systems for the game that tie into current and new content and features. As you know we care very much about your support and opinion and are listening intently to what you say.
Finally we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the upcoming content, and we will ensure we share our thoughts with you on the experiences we share in the Lost Shores."
Chris Whiteside – Studio Design Director

While I think everyone appreciates some response, this response doesn’t actually allay any of our concerns.

It mentions bridging the gap between exotic and legendary. However, there is currently no statistical gap, as they are identical.

Implementing this tier of ascended gear is in fact creating a gap between exotic and legendary.

That’s why many of us are scratching out heads at the nature of the response. It uses a lot of words, but never presents evidence that the design approach remains the same.

In essence, it proposes a solution to a problem that’s only created by implementing the solution.

A riddle wrapped up in an enigma, if you will.

The communists had a manifesto too, and look how that turned out…

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Our goal is not to create a gear treadmill. Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two. We will slowly add the remaining ascended gear items and legendary items in future updates to allow people time to acquire them as we add exciting new content that deserves exciting rewards. We will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months that we expect everyone to chase after and then get the next set and so on.

Chris Whiteside – Studio Design Director

This bolded section is losing me. Exotics and Legendaries have the same stats at the moment, so the reward of a legendary is purely cosmetic. That means I don’t have to get a legendary to be on equal footing against somebody that already has a legendary. Only by adding the Ascended gear (and infusion style mechanics) is a gap being created. Which means your either ignorant of things as the actually stand, or being willfully obtuse to obscure what your doing in the hopes it will all blow over.

If you’d given me some clear reasoning, I would have at least respected the fact that you (the devs) were willing to put all the cards on the table. This more or less canned response though doesn’t restore my confidence that there’s even some well thought out reasoning behind the shift. It goes to show that yet again developers have gotten very good at using PR people to project a game image that they have no intention of maintaining.

Loosifah.4739:

If the only thing you get from new sets and new gear in new content updates is a new look, what the hell is the point in doing the new content other than “Oh wow I have all these pretty USELESS sets”?

Well at least my “pretty useless sets” still look good when my “ugly best in slot set” gets an effective downgrade thanks to a new armor tier.

obiemvy.5632:

Another voice of displeasure here. I love the idea of infusion. But I hate that there are stat increases to this new armor. It’s basically ANet stating it’s alright to throw away their ideals that the majority of us came to GW2 for… I probably won’t quit GW2… but this is a deep blow to the heart and I don’t know how much longer I will continue to play if these “blows to my heart” continue.

I’m all for infusion slots, just not for stat increases. Infusions are an ingenious Idea! But they should be more like GW1, where you do a quest/event/dungeon to get your current exotic armor to become infuse-able. It shouldn’t be an increased new tier of armor with higher stats. Base stats should stay the same with the only change being the ability to have infusion slots upgraded to your current armor set.

Agreed, and furthermore this stat creep doesn’t put money in Anet pockets. We don’t pay monthly subscriptions here, making me put more time in to get new things doesn’t give Anet another month’s subscription. Granted people that play more may spend more in the cash shop, but you don’t need to start going back on the ideals laid out in development to get people to play more.

I’m not going to stop playing over these changes, but this is a big warning sign for me. The devs set the bar high in the manifesto, and to start falling back to the old MMO staples of character progression (gear ladders) shows a lack of forethought and commitment. Ultimately, the devs could do everything they want in this expansion without changing items stats. So why are they raising the stats? I only see worrisome answers to that question.