Were their missteps, heck yes. Did it take “too long” to correct some of those, sure. But I don’t think the game is no longer what I bought in December 2012. I still think it’s fundamentally the same game.
you see that is where we differ. A lot of players in this thread feel like it’s not what they bought in 2012. And they should not be persecuted with a “you have always been a hater, admit it!” attitude.
Raids represent a tiny, tiny portion of this game, and even represent a tiny tiny portion of the expansion. There is exactly one raid, delivered in three wings, over nine months. This is not exactly something to write home about. The raid as it exists is still smaller than full raids in many other game.s. The raids didn’t take over the game.
One raid doesn’t make this a raid game. I don’t even like the raid, but that’s nothing to do with the game changing or not changing. This game started changing the moment Anet introduced ascended gear.
they actively said that they’re turning away from making dungeons and turning towards making raids and more fractals. Whether the raid is something to write home about or not, it has replaced dungeons and it is part of Guild Wars 2 present and possibly is the new direction for the future. How is that not a direction change?
Do you know why I didn’t find HoT to hard? Because I did all the achievements in Living World Season 2, and before that in Living World Season 1. This is just more of the same.
How many people do you think bothered to do all of the achievements? Still doesn’t change the fact that people entering HoT from vanilla zones found it a much harder place. You know how you do slow ramp up? You buff some vanilla zones (we had the opposite, Orr had a mob nerf right after launch pretty much and Southsun Cove received the same), you add transition zones that people are expected to navigate alone (Silverwastes and Dry Top could have fit that requirement, but they are pure farm zones with farm trains, meaning people are unlikely to explore alone and encounter enemies alone), then you add HoT zones. And the ramp up wouldn’t feel 1 to 10 anymore. As a sudden ramp up was felt, it would indicate that it wasn’t a slow change for your average player. Meaning the game did turn towards being harder.
I’ve seen you argue over multiple threads about how it is a good thing. And it may be a fine direction. However you can’t just make a jump like Anet did, because it does send a very mixed message who is your game for and what it is about.
They didn’t completely change it, you didn’t keep up. Rather they’ve been changing it a bit at a time, gradually all along. It’s been going in this direction since ascended gear was introduced a few months after launch.
oh that explains it why dungeon path still received a rework and people were encouraged to do them and we had no 10 man raids up until HoT!
It also explains why everyone that entered HoT territories found them on a whole another difficulty level that anything else in game (you can argue it was a good thing or a bad thing, but I don’t think that the argument should be about is it a thing at all), because the game was, of course, sloooowly ramping up to it!
Though one thing you did get right – this is not the first time heads of Guild Wars 2 felt free to promise something and then discard the promise as if they never made it. I should have known better sooner about that part.
Really if the next expansion will be more raids, more hard zones, more content for the hardcores, more power to them! Still I think that currently the game is disjointed and they should pick a clear direction.
Let me guess, you are one of the people who expected GW2 to be just like GW but bigger. Same degree of complexity around traits and professions. Same new expansion every year that was as big as the original game. No cash shop except of things like character slots. And because it’s not you have been rallying against GW2 since launch.
Am I close?
I thought that vanilla GW2 was great and did not play GW1.
What I want is some sort of response from the community in regards to what Anet did.
While I no longer play this game, it would be soul crushing to know that completely changing your direction mid an MMO, not delivering on the promises and abandoning parts of the game would be met with a revenue increase.
For the sake of all of you guys playing, I do not want the game to die, even though it no longer will have me as a customer, however I want Anet to realize that going back on their promises is wrong and that they should choose a stable direction for a game that is now all over the place (no matter it is casual or hardcore).
I think that that is what a lot of ex players are seeking here with venting their frustrations out. They want the company to learn and be better at maintaining the game and delivering more content. They do not like the fact that Anet’s response to a fall in revenue is to release the next expansion faster, because that might mean that they will put even less work into it.
This isn’t Wildstar. I don’t think that we’re here to go “oh yes, the game is dying, die faster Guild Wars 2!”, but rather to show that we’re angry and upset with the current mismanagement.
(edited by Mirta.5029)
I actually pre-ordered HoT because FF14 turned into a pile of rubbish with actual content droughts and really only fillers.
what content drought? In 3.3 we got 4 dungeons with one being spawned by maps and another one which was essentially fractals, wrap up of the story, a 24 man raid, new sidequests, two different summer events. That’s in the last 3 months. Heck GW2 content drought sent me there in the first place.
And I hope it stays this way. This audience is the last we need. If they want “distraction” of their life (which sounds like they are not quite in a good shape mentally),
that’s a bold statement. Why do you play MMOs then? To remind you of your life? To ground you in reality? Nice way of insulting the majority of all MMO players.
they can play some tablet games or on their phones. Same with consoles where nobody responds because they do not have keyboards/connected their keyboards (source: FF14).
If this game turns down the difficulty to cater the “console and tablet mini gamers” then I am out for sure.
it already did so multiple times after HoT released. Together with making it very easy to get Tequatl achievements this patch. As for consoles? More players never hurt. If GW2 team had the time and hit a good deal with Microsoft or Sony, I would say “go ahead!”.
Or they thought people would make them and people weren’t making them and they made a decision to stop because people weren’t utilising the content in large enough numbers.
A single example with no factual basis for the determining of the decision says very little. It’s proof of nothing.
yeah, the world doesn’t work that way. If you advertise something on your game box cover, you don’t stop making it because “not enough people will use it”. If that statement was how it worked, then raids would never have continued outside of wing one, as raids in any MMO is the content for a minority.
Actually the world works exactly that way. You’re confusing an MMO where you sell a service, you’re paying for entrance, to a product that you take home and never changes.
As an example, I’ve seen amusement parks advertise a specific ride and close the ride due to either safety concerns or they just couldn’t get it to work right. You’re paying admission to the park instead of an actual ride.
I’ve seen restaurants advertise a change and it didn’t work and they changed back.
MMOs are sold with the understanding that it can call change and MMOs change all the time and many times those changes are different from the product you bought.
Because what they’re actually selling is a key to enter the game, not what’s specifically in the game itself.
In the real world products change all the time.
it’s one thing to deliver, decide that it’s not worth it and never take that direction again, it’s another thing to sell a product advertising a specific thing and then never put it in the game. That’s sue material right there.
Or they thought people would make them and people weren’t making them and they made a decision to stop because people weren’t utilising the content in large enough numbers.
A single example with no factual basis for the determining of the decision says very little. It’s proof of nothing.
yeah, the world doesn’t work that way. If you advertise something on your game box cover, you don’t stop making it because “not enough people will use it”. If that statement was how it worked, then raids would never have continued outside of wing one, as raids in any MMO is the content for a minority.
Well you just said it. It’s a 2D game. You don’t think that would be easier to program?
3D game, 2D environment for ARR. For heavensward they butchered the engine enough to introduce full on flying and the Z axis. Because you just called it a 2D game, I’ll add a picture, just in case you’re getting confused:
http://i.imgur.com/27BgQG1.jpg
does that look 2D to you?
That being said, the point is, their engine is also a mess. They developed 1.0 on it in 2010, had to scrap the whole thing due to it being very unpopular and make the whole game anew in 2 years, so they never changed the engine.
More to the point, if FF XIV created 100 times the content for 1/10th of the price, most of that content wouldn’t interest me anyway. This is the KIND of content I want.
so you don’t like:
crafting,
dungeons,
raids,
pvp,
dynamic events
and story?
What do you do in GW2 then? WvW only? o.o
It’s great to hold people to higher standards. But before we do that, we have to know what is and isn’t possible. I see all these people saying this should be done faster or that should be done faster.
But I find it hard to believe that those people could do better or differently if they were working within the same set of circumstances.
Other MMOs are managing more. So of course there’s a higher bar to reach. GW2 managed more before. Heck they managed to introduce fractals, 3 new zones and by-weekly then monthly updates including story updates. There has been barely any content in the past 1.5 years (content draught before expansion and pretty much just one raid getting completed after) and you think that that is alright?
Different engine, different game altogether. Anet had only 50 people working on Guild Wars 1 and produced content much faster. But many of the same devs were there for Guild Wars 2 and they couldn’t do that.
Because the game engine is that much older, because actual content types are harder to develop. At least that’s my theory.
I can go to two different restaurants and order the same meal. One restaurant can prepare that meal in 3 minutes and another in 20 with the same amount of people. It doesn’t make the 3 minute meal better.
They’re different games, using different engines with different priorities. There’s no way without having worked on both games the difference in what needs to be done to produce content.
the other game is built on wonky ground too though. Heck the reason why there’s no flying in previous zones is because they’re fully 2D. There’s no 3rd plane. Not to mention building and preparing areas compact enough for PS3 to even run.
We should hold GW2 to a higher standard honestly.
I’d go and put the new Anet maps against any FF XIV maps. I played that game. It’s not centered around dynamic events. It’s centered around quests and instances, which are quicker and easier to program.
I’m relatively sure each zone in Guild Wars 2 takes far far longer to program and detail than anything in FFXIV.
So they have a huge budget and there are still people on the FF XIV forums that complain about lack of specific content. That is, the leveling content is pretty much one and done. It’s mostly dungeons and raids…instances. Again mostly easier to program.
If you like dungeons and raids I suppose that’s a fortunate thing, but I have a guy who just came back to Guild Wars 2 from FF XIV because there wasn’t anything for him to do there.
To each his own I suppose.
I found that game almost unplayable, for my personal play style.
the point is, Anet has 4X the developers. What are they doing with them? If 3 people that made on legendaries make such a big difference that they had to pull them off it, it reeks of bad management to me. Either that, or overhiring in positions that might as well have less people assigned to them.
Oh and for leveling content? They still produce 2H of story + a sidequest/sidequests every 3 months. On top of extra raids and dungeons. Anet managed to focus on their raid solely (pretty much) for the last 9 months. With over 200 people working for them they surely could have had living story season 3 running along side it.
Anet doesn’t have enough staff to get everything done at all once.
what you’re seeing is lack of organization and not lack of staff.
FFXIV functions under around 40 (!!!) staff. It’s a far more expensive game but it works under 1/4th the staff of Anet and has to deliver more content on a faster base.
The fact that Anet recalled their 3 people that were working on future legendaries, kind of shows it. They needed 3 people badly enough to dismiss something that was supposed to be in the expansion.
Without any critique, the next GW2 expansion can’t be better. Perhaps the next expansion pack
- small guilds will have their courner
- end game won’t have to be just raids
- zones won’t have to be on very strict timers
- there will be more balance between horizontal and vertical zones
- there will be more content for the price
- the developers won’t go back on their promises (the legendary fiasco)
- content won’t have to be easy versus hard
without critique, without people being unhappy or leaving, none of this will happen. Everyone knows that there are some good points to HoT, but if there’s no backlash, there’s no improving in the future.You’re compeltely missing Vayne’s point. What you see as an improvement, it’s actually only an improvement for YOU and might be preceived as negative by other players.
For example, you talk about more balance between vertical and horizontal zones.
For me, TD and, to a lesser extent, VB have been, by far, the most fun to explore areas in the game. On the other hand, I find AB and DS to be too flat and offer very little regarding exploration.You also talk about end game not being only about raids and content not having to be easy versus hard. This is something where any alternative you could figure out is going to get critiques from some part of the community. There’s no way you can satisfy everyone.
Of course, you have to deliver your own feedback, tell devs which things you liked and which you didn’t so the next xpac may be better for YOU. Just have clear that very few things are universal improvements.
really? So the end game can’t be new dungeons AND new raids? New dungeons giving better looking exotic gear and raids continuing with Ascended? In a game all about horizontal progression this would probably make more people happy.
Big guilds can keep their guild halls, but no reason why small guilds couldn’t get less expensive huts for example.
A more mixture of zones with there being bigger reward in the harder ones, but easier ones existing for casual players, you sure that is impossible?
HoT completely alienated whole lot of players. Most MMOs don’t do this. They find balance instead. There’s not going to be balance without any outrage.
What you’re saying is that you don’t want anyone that left to get ANYTHING. Which is alienating a huge part of the player base. I’m saying that multiple types of content can coexist side by side.
Did I tell you to leave, or did I tell you let me show you how good it is?
There are always people going to leave, and I’m not usually one of the people telling people TO leave. However, if a person is gone, having them come talk about a game they’re not even playing and may not even know anymore is not necessarily helpful either.
There’s no evidence yet that these changes have hurt Anet. None at all. You being a customer for HoT doesn’t break this game one way or another. Anet will survive without you. But I didn’t tell you to leave. I offered to show you around and give you a tour. If that’s telling you to leave, then I guess we’re not speaking the same language.
You say you’ve lost nothing by not learning how to play a game you enjoyed for three years and invested time and money into. It doesn’t sound that way from where I’m sitting. I’ll allow the rest of the forums to make up their mind about that one way or another.
If everyone was like you Vayne, then companies will have a free pass to roll their players in the dirt.
Without any critique, the next GW2 expansion can’t be better. Perhaps the next expansion pack
- small guilds will have their courner
- end game won’t have to be just raids
- zones won’t have to be on very strict timers
- there will be more balance between horizontal and vertical zones
- there will be more content for the price
- the developers won’t go back on their promises (the legendary fiasco)
- content won’t have to be easy versus hard
without critique, without people being unhappy or leaving, none of this will happen. Everyone knows that there are some good points to HoT, but if there’s no backlash, there’s no improving in the future.
I don´t know if HoT made GW2 better or not. Mobs were nerfed and not so strong to begin with, so this should not be an issue then. What was, is and probably will always be garbage are adventures and hero/mastery points hidden behind events, jumping/gliding escapades and walls.
My personal opinion is that it made the game much more demanding if you want to get anything substantial, basically throwing the approach of come as you are and go when you want over board in a quick toss. That certainly took away the originality from GW2 and made it into any other game, only being able to keep me here because of the lack of other, even remotely interesting games for me out there right now and my guild.
different combat style, but have you considered FFXIV? The game is very stable and has consistent patches ^^
it drove me and my guild away. Even those that did end up buying it, did not play it for long.
Biggest issues:
1. I loved GW2 dungeons. I loved working towards their collections casually in groups of 5. Old dungeons got severely nerfed and no new ones were given. Already my favorite pass time destroyed.
2. I climbed the ladder of fractals. Slowly. Now in order to continue the fractal ladder I didn’t just need to meet the infusion requirement and find a group, I had to grind out a mastery. That did not make me want to play any more.
3. As a guild we liked to Spvp. But with the expansion old builds got destroyed. It’s not that bad if you just have to rebuild. It’s bad if you’re pressed into a very specific role to be useful. What if I don’t want an elite spec because it makes me go from a DPS to a healer? And for that matter why did we even need any part of traditional trinity in the game? It used to be – everyone does a little of everything. Now its dedicated healers and dedicated DPS.
4. The grindyness of guild halls that kind of killed small to medium guilds, not to mention them collecting some perks that we had unlocked off to hide them behind a scribe.
Sometimes I rewatch old dungeons runs and our Spvp matches. Sometimes I dream about the old times and old people that I knew. But I’m not going to come back, because what the game is has completely changed. And ultimately that’s fine having in mind that I’m just one in millions of people that were playing this. I just wish that someone hosted a pre HoT changes server of GW2.
It is your opinion that HoT didn’t meet your personal expectations. Please don’t presume to speak for the rest of us.
they objectively couldn’t deliver what they have promised.
The expansion was supposed to come out with a full raid and a set of new legendaries out of the box. So many months in, new legendaries got outright canceled and the raid is only getting finished right now.
i am a casual gamer, i work 8 hours a day with only 2 days off a week. i can still raid with my guild 3 evenings a week and yes, maybe we are taking more than others raid groups to finish the raid content but we are still having fun and none of us are complaining this is too hard.
the problem is that when you say casual gamer you say solo players
that is not a lot of work time. Heck I’ve seen people with 12h work schedules be hardcore. They simply sleep little.
Stop trying to narrowly define “casual” to support your own agenda. I don’t know how casual I am, but I would identify my guild’s approach to raiding as casual:
Once per week, if enough players show up. Comp is volunteer-based. If nobody wants to perform a critical role and we don’t think it’s worth making the attempt, we skip raiding for that week. Nobody trash-talks anybody. Nobody takes it seriously. We’ve downed only one boss, but anyone is welcome to go and raid with another guild if they’d like to progress more quickly. It’s no big deal.
How is that not casual raiding by your own definition?
that’s the problem with your approach. You can come in and not get past the first boss over 9 months. How many guys that come with you actually come back? I know that guilds are less important now that you have the ability to chat with all of the ones that you’re in at once, but how many people actually spend time with you guys, instead of with the guilds that can actually clear content? Or even better, how many of those that cleared the first boss with you went somewhere else to actually learn it and came back to carry the rest of the team?
With no set team all I can call it is goofing around.
(edited by Mirta.5029)
But some non-job related things do need some level of actual organization to be pulled off. Small party for the Super Bowl? You need to know how many are coming, food preferences, etc. So you know if you need to buy 1 or 2 bags of wings and fries. It’s not like a Super Bowl party needs to be super fancy and regulated with weeks of planning and setting up. You could probably do it the morning of if you’re lucky or not picky on what flavor wings you want.
Yet, there have been posts by CASUAL PLAYERS in CASUAL GUILDS posting about enjoying their raiding experience and do not describe the experience like it was a job. I recall one person saying that they raided only if enough people wanted to play the classes needed to fill all the roles. If they had 10 people and no one wanted to fill one of the roles, they didn’t raid that week and were totally fine with that. Enjoying trying to overcome the challenge of the bosses.
So please stop saying that all casual players are the exact same when it comes to what they enjoy doing in a game and how they enjoy doing it. Not all casuals abhor challenging content like raids. Some like getting together on occasional weekends when the planets align properly for them and attempting to be successful at raiding. Even if they end up failing to succeed. IE: they’re in it for the experience and not the success or the shiny at the end. And therefore not needing to spend hours studying up on how to beat the boss or perfecting builds to be the best composition ever.
Edit to add: That being said, I do understand that raids were not content designed around the casual player. However, I also understand that ANet does have the right to throw bones to the hardcore players every so often.
this is my experience of raiding. It is CONSTANT WORK. Someone always can’t come, if the team fails enough everyone gets a rather toxic attitude, casual teams tear themselves apart on how casual they wanna be. How much ascendeds will you force your raid team to get? How much are you going to push it for it to be specific classes, because you can’t clear otherwise? Dungeons? Go with anyone. Absolutely anyone can clear dungeons. Raids? Not so much.
how is that different than buying the expansion and having to grind masteries to participate in the new content? Or grinding ascendeds to partake in raids? Actually vertical progression grind is less bad than grind currently present in HoT.
For the first couple of years Anet kept saying, we don’t want to do an expansion, we’re releasing all this content for FREE and not doing what every other MMO does with gear resets and raids and such. But players kept demanding “take my money!” and wanted the traditional MMO stuff so they stopped giving stuff out for free and here you go.
Not saying that players did not ask for this, or that there wasn’t reasons for it, just that HoT is no different than a traditional MMO expansion in how much effort you have to put in to partake in expansion’s content.
Did Anet make this so expensive. I am torn now looking at how much I have lost in material and the major grind ahead.
What ever happened to the GW2 that I bought that promised no grind?Grinding is when you log in after buying an expansion and suddenly your character is 5 levels below max and those 5 levels will take longer than the first 60 did. Your BiS gear is now two grades below and to get back to the top you need to complete two raids and go through five ranks of reputation with three different factions.
Nevermore is a pretty skin for your staff. It doesn’t offer any significant advantage (changing stats at will is not worth another 1000 gold) just bragging rights. Most MMOs reset your “progress” every year or so to keep you paying and playing.
how is that different than buying the expansion and having to grind masteries to participate in the new content? Or grinding ascendeds to partake in raids? Actually vertical progression grind is less bad than grind currently present in HoT.
With GW2 releasing more raid content recently, this seemed appropriate.
Now to those that would rather read than watch:
First of all let me start out by saying that there’s different ways of raid leading and that different things work for different people. You should also know that raid groups tend to be far more unstable than let’s say guilds and you should prepare for drama, fall outs and other things that follow leading a raid. That’s not to say that successful raid groups don’t survive long. They do. It’s just that raid groups are far more unstable than anything else I have observed. This advice is based on my experiences and beliefs alone, which are not necessarily true. I welcome different opinions in the comments, or any further advice that other raid leaders can give to people.
Having said that, let us start. Advice on raid leading from Mirta’s perspective in no particular order of importance.
1. When making a raid group, do not go for “we have no raid leader, we’re all leading!” approach. Such approach makes it far harder to put the team back together when fall out happens, tends to lack that person that can enforce order, give advice, or call out mechanics. Sure, you can give those parts of raid leading to different members, but ultimately it will be a rather unstable atmosphere. With nobody enforcing the rules, the rules will always be determined by the majority. So if enough people decide that it’s rude to remind tanks that they should pull in tank stance, that is the new rule of your group, no matter how kittened it is.
2. Do not guild AND raid lead. If you are guild and raid leading, I’m amazed at your ability to do both. Just re-recruiting for raids after a fall out, counting peoples misses, watching rotations, planning strategies will take up most of your week.
3. When starting a static and writing an ad for the static be VERY specific. “We’re a casual static!” tells me very little. Is raid food necessary in your static? What would happen if team member shows up drunk? What are the expectations for people gearing up outside the static? How many bad performance days is a person allowed before they get kicked?
Don’t be afraid to write down the negatives as well. “If you will be forgetting the core parts of your class I will yell at you quite loudly” is a good point to ad for example. Some people can’t handle that. If your tanks are forgetting tank stance, or your ninjas are going in without applying their poisons and you do snap with “what the heck are you doing?” some people can take it very negatively and quit right there. That’s why describing the attitude (both the positives and negatives on your own and what is expected from the team) is very important.
4. Emphasize communication. If your DPS are trying different rotations in hopes of increasing their DPS, it would be good to announce said thing to the party. It’s even more important that healers and tanks communicate together. If a healer will try to switch up and DPS more at a specific part, the tank should know, if the tank will try to save a cooldown here and use it somewhere else, the healer should know. Don’t assume that your static has been communicating outside of raid time. If there’s many silent pulls with no change, assume that you’re attempting the same thing over and over again. Which is not a way to clear content.
Another good practice is to stop the group in between pulls and ask what happened. “I did not do this mechanic properly” or “I messed up my cooldowns” is a valid response. However without asking such a question there may be that some of your members don’t fully understand the fight and without you knowing this you won’t be able to correct them.
5. Think twice about raiding with friends. Will them being your friends impact how you react to their mistakes and underperformance? And if you reprimand them, will that affect your relationship? Think about this long and hard.
6. Prepare for it being very personal when it comes to letting go people. Raiding is never separate from the rest of your MMO life. The way that you interact with these people, or if you interact with them ever again, changes considerably. Upon the fallout of the first raid group that I was in, we all blacklisted each other. Not that we hated each other as people, nor was the interaction outside of raid times very unpleasant, it just that the raiding falling apart did affect us all very strongly and we did not want to have to speak to one another again. My second raid falling apart was even more awkward because people that were in the raid group were my friends, my officers and people that I hung out with daily and still do. The way that I see them and interact with them has changed considerably. Hence my point number 5 – be careful when raiding with friends.
7. Raid atmosphere. There will be a point where your raid group (unless of course you’re the best of the best) will get stuck on a certain boss, or a certain turn, or a certain wing, depending on the game that you’re playing. When you do hit that point, do anything in your power to not allow the general determination of people to slip. After a long time with no progress people become agitated, snappy and even worse come into the raid just prepared to die for hours. When nobody expects a clear anymore the performance falls to such a level that a clear is no longer possible. If you see the danger signs of this happening, pull your group back. Maybe you all need a day of just talking rather than a day of raiding. Perhaps you need to prepare A, B, C and D plans and then try them out the next day. Perhaps it’s time to look into who is performing the worst and catch said player up, instead of banging your head against a wall. Or perhaps it’s time for some content change. Do speeches. Do talks. Do breaks. But DO NOT let your raid hit a point where they’re no longer even trying to clear. In raids people first and foremost have to be focused. If said focus is no longer possible, trying to raid further as is, will not help.
8. If you’re stuck, don’t be afraid to ask for help. Reddit, forums, or any other form of popular communication among those that play the same MMO as you works. Write down your problem in depth and don’t be afraid to be scrutinized from outside. Having that outside perspective and getting suggestions about using tactics that you might have never thought about in my experience was a great help.
9. Duties of the raid leader. Here I can give you a list of what is a good idea to do while in raid.
a) record your raid time, somehow. No matter it’s through a parse, or a game footage recording software. It helps to have that footage to revisit what went wrong and what can be changed.
b) call out mechanics. Might seem a little silly, because people should learn them themselves, however if you can fool proof your raid by going “turn around” or “stay away from the middle” or “run away from the boss” do it!
c) don’t be afraid to go and talk to the people holding your raid back. Underperformance does not necessarily lead to throwing them out of the raid. Ask what is happening, what they’re doing, what they’re finding difficult and set time aside to help these people practice.
if you want to be hardcore, or simplify your life a lot, knowing EVERY class in the game really helps. It’s hard to figure out what your team is doing wrong when you don’t know the skills of other classes or what they’re doing. If you did level all the classes and can play all of them well, it will be very easy to see what is going wrong, as opposed to sitting there and comparing your group videos to videos of other groups.
That is all from me. I’m sure that there are other people that can give you further advice, but this is what I gathered from where my groups have gone wrong, or right, in my time spent raiding. Besides all of that, the only other thing that I can tell you is DO NOT GIVE UP, no matter how bad it gets! And don’t burn yourself out. Raiding next to competitive PvP is probably one of the most stressful environment possible in a video game, so don’t let it get to you.
2. HoT selling has nothing to do with how many people are playing the game if the core game is free to play. It really is simple. Let’s pretend there were 600,000 people playing. And let’s pretending half of them bought HoT and half didn’t. 300,000 sales would certainly be lackluster. It’s entirely likely that some of those other 300,000 moved onto other things. But then the game went free to play. Are you saying they couldn’t get those numbers from free to play players? I absolutely believe they can.
But free to play players can’t post here and can’t talk in map chat so things seem deader. I’m a new zones running into free to play players all the time. I’m also in zones where I run into returning players.
Can you, or anyone, categorically state the number of returning players plus free players is significantly less than those who play?
Can you account for people taking a break until new content comes out that haven’t left but only log in for dailies?
Because I don’t think you can.
if for two years GW2 consistently brought, let’s say 20 million. HoT sales open up. Suddenly the profit jumps to 40 million. However the quarter following that the profit is suddenly 7 million. Something that has never happened before.
Are you telling me that free to play players buy nothing? Or that people that used to play the game and buy stuff no longer buy stuff, but still play? Drop in profit always correlates with drop in players. Especially when F2P normally brings a jump in profits rather than a fall.
EDIT: and just to clarify, for the second time, I don’t think that the game is dying. If someone wants to try it out, I would say “sure, go ahead!”. It’s in no way doomed. It’s just that the numbers and in-game view doesn’t add up with the game being at the same population as it was a year ago. From my perspective there was a clear decline.
(edited by Mirta.5029)
I would worry if this was Wildstar level of bad. Currently no, GW2 is not dying. However has it shrunk greatly in population following HoT and all HoT patches? Yes.
How do you know? What is your evidence? Source please?
1. Plenty of people have seen their servers shrink. There’s two pages of people saying the exact same thing.
2. After the profitability spike caused by HoT being sold, GW2 has fallen in profitability below what they used to make before HoT. This would have not been the case if the population stayed exactly the same, unless you think that people that used to buy things suddenly stopped for no good reasons.
I would worry if this was Wildstar level of bad. Currently no, GW2 is not dying. However has it shrunk greatly in population following HoT and all HoT patches? Yes.
Came here to support this message. I don’t know what GW2 is doing, but I know that they have 200 staff. If the only updates are still them finishing what they promissed with expansion pack, then that staff is not used efficiently.
I’m in FFXIV now. Patches, just like GW2 are every 3 months. Except that each patch 100% features:
- new dungeons
- new story (about 2H of it, so kind of similar what LS2 was like)
- new sidequests
then every 6 months we’re rotating between (every 3 months it’s casual content, every 3 months it’s hardcore content)
- casual 24 man raid (meant to be pugged)
- new hardcore raids (with easy mode equivalents for those of us that just want the story)
- new PvP mode
then every patch we also see them trying something new, so far from the small things in the new expansion we have gotten (the new expansion has launched only like a month or two before HoT BTW):
- Lords of Verminion (a strategy mini game, where you can use your minions to battle other peoples minions)
- Aquapolis (an easy mode dungeon that has a 50% chance to spawn from maps that you can gather. The allure is that it has 7 floors, but each floor is a 50%/50% chance to unlock. On each floor there’s some enemies and a chest. The chest rewards you with costumes, minions and crafting materials. As the loot table is random you can get very rare minions in there. I have some friends that are absolutely addicted to it.)
- Diadem. A timed map where you can enter with your 8-man party and either kill monsters, or gather. I love going there to fish.
and now we’re waiting for a mid patch (it’s not a full patch, but something that comes in the middle of patches. Tends to have some minor content such as a questline) as this time they’re essentially introducing solo fractals. That’s kind of what it is. It’s a dungeon that at the start will have 50 floors. You can enter it with friends or alone and the difficulty will scale. The primary reward are pretties (glowy weapons and the likes).
This MMO, while being sub based, has a smaller developer team (around 40 people that actually work on the game) and is less popular than GW2, but is capable of churning out far more content. It’s old school combat with vertical progression, so I can’t exactly recommend it to GW2 fans, however I wanted to make an example of just how much content they put in in comparison.
My whole guild outright quit on HoT. It was a major change in catering. And I don’t think we were the only ones. I honestly don’t know how they can fix this either. Suppose the next expansion pack focus on same content as vanilla and make HoT fully skippable. That’s the only way that I can see those that did not like HoT coming back.
Per the terms and conditions of your transaction, you were entitled to receive “as is” access to the game server. They did not fail to deliver on that.
the “buy HoT” is the page that I’ve sent in to UK Trading standards. That answer was directly from them. Under UK law UK citizens have the right to claim for refund.
Legal challenge: not going to happen. Everyone is an armchair law expert. Most of them are wrong.
Refund: also not going to happen unless you bought the game very recently. Even then, good luck.
If you believe anything else then, frankly, you are dreaming.
http://i.imgur.com/IL2BisD.png
you’re legally entitled to a refund. So yes, it is going to happen. Or else people can just charge back.
if anyone is interested about the trade standards answer:
http://i.imgur.com/IL2BisD.png
they have to set a date for when they deliver, or you all can get a refund.
They haven’t rendered 99% of the game world obsolete the way WoW has.
but they kind of did this to all of their content?
Dungeons – not run anymore
fractals – destroyed
WvW – not played anymore
It’s also the first MMO that I see that made their own newest expansion maps obsolete (with the small exception of metas).
1. Multiple people can ask for a refund.
2. Every single person that quit is one less future customer.
I suppose there’s no grounds to make Anet accountable for their reversal via a class action lawsuit, but it doesn’t seem right that they can sell something and then decide for whatever reason that they are no longer going to deliver what people paid for.
MMO developers really can get away with things other, more traditional businesses can’t.
report it to the trade association of their country. Legally sueing them might be a problem, but preventing them from trading in your country and selling their products is relatively easy. Report them for false advertisement, photograph that 16 lagendaries advert for HoT and the first post of this topic.
It is also important to note that even though you might have purchased HoT a long time ago, if you go and show all of this to your bank and say “I’ve been deceived”, they CAN charge back if ArenaNet refuses to refund you. This will obviously ban you from playing GW2 ever again, but if you weren’t going to play it anyway, it’s an option.
Are you saying it’s a smart idea to slow down the development of the next expansion?
yes. If this is how this expansion is going, then 100% YES. Or do you want another expansion disaster?
Lord talk about rivers of tears.
Let’s talk about what’s the best thing for the game, we’re only a small fraction of people have legendaries but everybody plays content. What do you think is more important for the masses as a whole?
I am not saying they should have canceled legendary development, but if it’s coming down to a matter of more content or more legendaries, I think it’s pretty clear that more content is more important for the player base as a whole.
and those 6 people will speed up the other 120 people working on HoT by a mile right? So much better than moving those 70 people dedicated to the next expansion, or you know, HIRING SOME MORE.
Truly a terrible analogy. A more true analogy would be like ordering a big mac and getting a double cheeseburger, actually missing components. Then when asking for the stuff you’re missing McDonalds goes, oh… Well we’ll give you the middle piece of bread but in order to do that we have to move staff from the sauce section so no sauce.
If I get half the steak that is on the ad, I’m missing components. My burger isn’t nearly as finished as it’s supposed to be, but it’s bought and voilà. ANet, however, is standing in front of the crowd, trying their best to avoid another big flop. They’re sacrificing 12 skins in order to occupy more people (I assume more people play the story than start the lendaries journey).
Also, individuals don’t have to file lawsuits. This is what class action suits are for.
My bad, not enough knowledge in these differences in English.
it’s equivalent to not getting a steak in your burger at all. And yes, you can sue for that. But really there’s no need to sue. You just report them to the trade standards and they get blocked one country at a time.
reported you to the trading standards of UK and hopefully the rest of the people in this topic will report you to their country trading standards too.
On what grounds? Do you know the meaning of the word indefinitely? It means on hold for an undetermined length of time, in its most basic use. Mo has had the brass ones to tell us this. They could have just given us a, it’s taking longer than we though, they’ll be here “when it’s ready”, then just given us “soon” .
Trading standards are not going to tell ANet they have to make the new legendary weapons asap.
All ANet have to tell trading standards is that its a technical design problem, and they full intend to honour what they said, and point out that they did not give us a time frame of when we would be getting them all, only that they would start after the launch of HoT. So in legal terms they have done nothing wrong.
ANet have not said they will never go back to them, and the dream is dead. What they have said is that after the next one, they have no time frame on when we will be getting more, as the team that was working on them has been pulled to work on other projects.
There is nothing trading standards can or will do.
on regular intervals. The first one took 4 months, meaning the next one has a max of 4 months to be released, else the interval is not regular.
That being said you can say that your kickstarter project development is on hold indefinitely. That doesn’t mean that you’ll escape a trade ban. The moment you’re not keeping your word with what is inside the product that you shipped you’re a prime target for a trade ban.
are legendaries really that important to you or am i missing the collective message here?
what you’re missing here is that the expansion not only released without features promised, but now one of those features is on indefinite hold. That was decided after they took the money.
how about all the other things that were never promised yet they still came like gliding in central tyria, Shatterer revamp, squad revamps, those dont count for anything?
of course it doesn’t count for anything. If you’re buying a product you look at the list of features and those features better be in it, as you’re buying a product based on it.
If you looked to buy a third person RPG with an open world and 100 different skills to level, you won’t be happy when you find out that the product that you actually bought is an isometric view RPG with instance based world and only 88 skills. And it won’t matter to you if afterwards they said “but we added bunnies and we never advertised them”!
What Anet did here counts as fraud. And because of that I urge everyone to report them to trade associations.
reported you to the trading standards of UK and hopefully the rest of the people in this topic will report you to their country trading standards too.
do remember that there aren’t multiple raids. What GW2 currently has is 2/3rds of a raid.
Tower of Nightmares? Marionette? Assault on LA? And some of them added non-zerg open world content too, like Molten Alliance mobs, Toxic Alliance mobs, the Wintersday Toys, which they removed because I guess some people cried the Princess was too hard for them, and many other changes to the Open World that happened during LS1.
I guess the worst mistake Anet ever did was removing LS1 content every 2 weeks. This meant that players with sort memory forgot just how much harder LS1 open world content was, compared to release Tyria.
actually all of them were just that. Zerg content. With a few exceptions of the whole map shouting “WHO IS THE IDIOT BLEEDING IT?” or “WHY AREN’T YOU MELEE?” or “STOP BEING MELEE”. That was about the complexity of all of the events. They were all being zerged in one big blob.
You are wrong about being good, there is a reason the double terragriff boss still fails from time to time because there are not enough “good players” there, there is a reason even some defend events fail, particularly at purple when the Legendary spawn, because there aren’t enough “good players” there. And to bring Dry Top to T6 you actually need some people to do some events on their own, outside the main blob, sometimes even solo.
You might haven’t noticed it because you like hiding in a big blob of people. But there ARE some people actually knowing what they are doing and how to play the game that allow the events to succeed. Without those “good players” even the simplest events would fail.
What you call “fun” is hiding in a huge blob of people and let them do anything that requires skill while you just auto attack and afk. I wouldn’t call that “fun”.
that’s nice. Why were you here before HoT then?
And where are those mass filled maps of HoT if the majority finds it fun, huh?
There’s a reason why Wildstar is on the deaths door and why every MMO that comes out now has fully accessible casual content. Because otherwise they would really suffer. Without F2P GW2 would be in a much worse place now. But thank goodness people are populating outside of HoT maps and buying those gems and trinkets so that those of you that love the hard content soooo much, can stand there and complain how broken the megaservers are, but just in the HoT areas. What an odd break.
We all died to raptors. No shame in that. But we stopped dying to them after getting killed 5 times and figuring them out. You can’t figure them out? Well, you are not a good player.
that’s a horrible thing to say about open world content. And shows exactly why HoT doesn’t appeal to everyone that core appealed to. Core GW2 was just casual and fun. For HoT you need to be a “good player”.
You are mistaken. Core GW2 open world didn’t appeal to everyone either. The only reason players are doing things like trains is because they give them rewards, remove the rewards and nobody will be doing them. As a matter of fact, before the Champion loot update, most Champions were never ever killed. Queen’s Jubilee added grind to this game, and the entire “let’s farm as fast as possible” mentality was born.
There is a reason a sizable percentage of the community was “hiding” inside dungeons until they got nerfed. Players were practising how to solo entire dungeon paths, how to solo bosses like Lupicus for a reason. Because they found the open world to be so braindead easy that it wasn’t worth going there and wasting time, unless it was to get some extra rewards.
There is also a reason Young Karka are so much harder than release mobs, Halloween Labyrinth mobs also are more powerful (try the lab without a huge blob), Dry Top, Silverwastes and every single Living Story release added more complex mobs to the game that really required you to be a “good player”.
Yet all these players stayed with the game.
actually silvervastes and dry top required to zerg. It literally had nothing to do with being good. Hence those that had fun in core, had fun there too.
Karka island was pretty much completely abandoned after the first Karka event.
LS2 you could enter with friends with no penalty boxes.
It’s safe to assume that those people that played the game as it was for 3 years liked the way that it was. This is precisely the reason why MMOs don’t change this much normally. Because with core you establish your core audience. You don’t then turn around and middle finger those people to please a different demographic entirely.
We all died to raptors. No shame in that. But we stopped dying to them after getting killed 5 times and figuring them out. You can’t figure them out? Well, you are not a good player.
that’s a horrible thing to say about open world content. And shows exactly why HoT doesn’t appeal to everyone that core appealed to. Core GW2 was just casual and fun. For HoT you need to be a “good player”.
Which part is debatable?
Did we or did we not get what was advertised, minus the legendaries?
we did not. There’s still only 1 wing of the raid existing, even though the raid was supposed to be the highlight of HoT, legendary armour is not in yet as the raid was not completed, and only 3 out of 16 legendaries are done with none mentioned to be released in the next half a year.
WvW was dead pre-HoT.
say what now? WvW was always one of the most alive parts of the game, as it filled the void with no content. Top tier worlds ALWAYS had queues, even medium tier were full. It’s no longer the case.
Except burning crusade is 2007. The fidelity and complexity of games and game engines have come a long way since WoW’s engine.
Developing content takes significantly more man-hours and money than it used to.
I was asked to compare to the first WoW expansion, so I did. Warlords of Draenor then:
7 zones + a PvP zone
Garrisons
8 new dungeons
2 raids
still more than GW2 HOT
My point is you get a whole lot more out of this game for $60 than you do from WoW which will initially cost you $40 dollars for an expansion plus the $15 dollar a month subscription.
And I would disagree with that statement.
If your main argument is that there is only one raid present in GW2 then that is pretty weak… It’s been what… a few months since this game dropped their first raid? Do you have evidence somewhere that there are no plans for a new raid ever?
How about this? What they’re dropping in updates for the next year is what they promised HoT to launch with. The first raid is not complete yet even. In the next half a year you’re a getting a wing, with still a wing unreleased. Then there’s those 13 extra legendaries that they seem to have forgotten. Then there’s the LS3 that everyone is waiting for… Do you honestly think you’re getting more than one raid an expansion?
Suckers playing WoW are basically paying a subscription to check your garrison and enjoy the old content that was released last June. Enjoy looking forward to no new content until the end of summer. Lawl.
So people playing GW2 at release or before the expansion were… Suckers?
There was a 9 month gap between last update and GW2 expansion.
There was an over a year gap between GW2 release and first content.
For what people are getting here, in the next half a year you’ll get one raid wing. That’s it for substantial content. Everything else is only gliding in Tyria, event timer fixes, balancing, bug fixing. That is all. And here people don’t even have a finished expansion to enjoy in the mean time.
When was the last time you only paid a little over a hundred bucks to play WoW? You might want to ignore the real money costs to strengthen your position about how bad some elements of GW2 are but the fact remains that for the content we get with the money we paid to get it, GW2 has massive value compared to many other mainstream MMO’s.
if you’re going to be super active, all you want to pay is the price for the game + the newest expansion. Subscription can be bought for gold now directly from Battlenet. So technically, the last time could have been when sub for gold started.
That being said “GW2 has more content than WoW” is objectively incorrect. It has nothing to do with cost. Or am I satisfied or unsatisfied with GW2, or do I or do I not play WoW. It’s a very silly statement to start your comment with. And that was my point.
I didn’t say GW2 has more content than WoW. I don’t know where you’re coming up with that. You didn’t answer my original question but that’s OK, it’s rhetorical anyways and I shouldn’t be so cryptic with some people. It does seem you aren’t able to differentiate between Cost and Value, so I will try to educate you.
Cost is part of the equation to evaluate if some gets value from a product or a service. The point the poster is trying to make, which I agree with, is that GW2 gives great value considering the content you get for the price you pay.
When was the last time you only paid a little over a hundred bucks to play WoW? You might want to ignore the real money costs to strengthen your position about how bad some elements of GW2 are but the fact remains that for the content we get with the money we paid to get it, GW2 has massive value compared to many other mainstream MMO’s.
if you’re going to be super active, all you want to pay is the price for the game + the newest expansion. Subscription can be bought for gold now directly from Battlenet. So technically, the last time could have been when sub for gold started.
My original question stands … how much could you have accessed and played WoW for the same price we got HoT+GW2 core for?
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/18141101/introducing-the-wow-token-3-2-2015
that was exactly a year ago. Currently expansion and base WoW is 40$. So I’m left with 60. Sub is 13$. So that’s aprox 6 extra months before the token got introduced, so 1.5 years + future?
That’s a nice cherrypicked value but I suppose I wasn’t clear though I don’t think it was unreasonable to expect relevant comparisons to similar timeframes between the two games. Still, let’s try again … What about when it first came out or when it wasn’t a decade old? Let’s pick a RELEVANT timeframe to compare WoW’s cost to GW2 … let’s say a little after WoW’s first expansion? I haven’t played WoW, but I bet the cost breakdown is something similar to this:
1. Cost for original game at release: about $50
2. Monthly sub for $15 × 12 months = $170ish
3. Assume first expansion after … 12 months? costs about $40?
4. a few more months at $15 to play expansion (let’s say 4 months?) = $60You can correct my numbers if you want … I suspect I was generous.
what is better a Fiat Punto or a Ferrari?
Because this is what you’re comparing. Your statement is “GW2 has great value for money, because it’s cheap!”, however that’s not how value works. Value implies quality. It’s one thing if you go “look at my red apples, they taste the same and look the same, but cost 1$ less!”, right now you’re comparing it with “look at my apples, they cost 1$ less but are also 1/10th the size!”. That’s the current comparrison.
If you’re going to change your statement even more to now include “on a similar timeline”, burning crusade released with so much more than 1 unfinished raid.
http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/World_of_Warcraft:_The_Burning_Crusade
so then what did Burning Crusade have?
Two new races
flying
11 new zones
10 new dungeons
8 new raids
1 new PvP Arena
I don’t know about you but that seems to be better value than 4 new zones, 1 unfinished raid, 1 class and gliding.
EDIT: and stop adding extra conditions on your arguments just to try and look better. Original statement that I was replying to (not made by you, but original statement)
What do you guys expect from a non-subscription game? This game delivers more content than WoW without the $15 a month.
which is objectively wrong.
(edited by Mirta.5029)
When was the last time you only paid a little over a hundred bucks to play WoW? You might want to ignore the real money costs to strengthen your position about how bad some elements of GW2 are but the fact remains that for the content we get with the money we paid to get it, GW2 has massive value compared to many other mainstream MMO’s.
if you’re going to be super active, all you want to pay is the price for the game + the newest expansion. Subscription can be bought for gold now directly from Battlenet. So technically, the last time could have been when sub for gold started.
My original question stands … how much could you have accessed and played WoW for the same price we got HoT+GW2 core for?
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/18141101/introducing-the-wow-token-3-2-2015
that was exactly a year ago. Currently expansion and base WoW is 40$. So I’m left with 60. Sub is 13$. So that’s aprox 6 extra months before the token got introduced, so 1.5 years + future?
When was the last time you only paid a little over a hundred bucks to play WoW? You might want to ignore the real money costs to strengthen your position about how bad some elements of GW2 are but the fact remains that for the content we get with the money we paid to get it, GW2 has massive value compared to many other mainstream MMO’s.
if you’re going to be super active, all you want to pay is the price for the game + the newest expansion. Subscription can be bought for gold now directly from Battlenet. So technically, the last time could have been when sub for gold started.
That being said “GW2 has more content than WoW” is objectively incorrect. It has nothing to do with cost. Or am I satisfied or unsatisfied with GW2, or do I or do I not play WoW. It’s a very silly statement to start your comment with. And that was my point.