Showing Posts For Orlandu.3781:
Heya, not to argue here.
I actually agree with you on that the Story modes maybe could be tweaked a little bit simpler. To me, those modes should be your average dungeon (dont remove the difficulty, just let it be a little more forgiving)
And your right if I have been insulting to others. For which I apologize. Not to excuse my actions, I am frustrated at some of these posts.
I dont really know how I can nicely suggest a “um, sir player, not to be rude here, but it really is an issue of learning to play”.
Theres playing, and then really learning how to play. I dont know how simple I can make it, and no matter how I say it, its going to come across as offensive. But just because something is offensive doesnt mean its less true =/
I really appreciate the issue, and yeah, a great part of the issue is that people just don’t know what to do. So I think we’re in agreement that the first one or maybe two story modes should be a good place to figure the answers out. The complaints about exploration mode difficulty are less valid, I think. At that point, when you are launching into exploration mode, you can be expected to understand what you’re getting into, and that you’re probably going to die a lot as you make progress. But for that, something should be done to improve reward. Thanks for posting back.
Well, this thread is one of the most self-righteous smug-a-thons I’ve seen in a while. I am impressed, cryers of “lp2”. Your experiences and collective creativity and insight are surely representative of the vast majority of players, who have never experienced anything like these dungeons, having been raised playing soft mmos and been given no indication by the pve in this very game of what was to come inside AC. The place where my friendly mailbox sent me a letter, instructing me to travel there with some friends to check it out! Therein lies the biggest problem with the instances in GW2. The difficulty is good overall, but there isn’t much consideration in-game for the transition, and the community’s consideration is writ large in this thread, if you felt compelled to post merely to insult others.
Consider the plight of the average player. They have played WoW, perhaps even raided. Maybe some SWTOR. Games palatable to the masses, very soft. And now they are playing GW2. Things are different. Your quests are regional, and somewhat amorphous, they are merely one avenue of progression and not the whole city. The more exciting part are the group dynamic events. You get in with other players and do tough stuff! You are taught that in order to be rewarded, you must do as much damage as possible. If you don’t do enough damage, you get little or nothing. This is the strongest PvE message the game sends. You’re finally getting the hang of your class, and just got your elite skill! You get a letter in the mail, come to Ascalon Catacombs, I’ll even show you where it is on the map! And what players find is a solid brick wall. It isn’t hard to see why people get discouraged. At first, I’m certain it does feel insurmountable.
I think more should be done to help players adjust to the demands of dungeons. Ascalon Catacombs story mode is the real weak link in the chain. As a trial-and-error learning session, it is excessively punishing and frustrating. The beginning of the learning curve needs to be more gentle. After that, it’s pretty much fine, except that the rewards are unimpressive.
tl;dr – AC story mode should be more forgiving, rewards should be either larger or flashier, people should be more understanding.
Sooo… basically in you believe the game should be dumbed down to appeal to the masses.
How about… no?
If you had taken the time to read and think before posting a two line throwaway refutation, you may have noticed that I do not think the game should be dumbed down, unless the story mode of Ascalon Catacombs comprises your entire game experience, and not simply your entire straw man.
Well, this thread is one of the most self-righteous smug-a-thons I’ve seen in a while. I am impressed, cryers of “lp2”. Your experiences and collective creativity and insight are surely representative of the vast majority of players, who have never experienced anything like these dungeons, having been raised playing soft mmos and been given no indication by the pve in this very game of what was to come inside AC. The place where my friendly mailbox sent me a letter, instructing me to travel there with some friends to check it out! Therein lies the biggest problem with the instances in GW2. The difficulty is good overall, but there isn’t much consideration in-game for the transition, and the community’s consideration is writ large in this thread, if you felt compelled to post merely to insult others.
Consider the plight of the average player. They have played WoW, perhaps even raided. Maybe some SWTOR. Games palatable to the masses, very soft. And now they are playing GW2. Things are different. Your quests are regional, and somewhat amorphous, they are merely one avenue of progression and not the whole city. The more exciting part are the group dynamic events. You get in with other players and do tough stuff! You are taught that in order to be rewarded, you must do as much damage as possible. If you don’t do enough damage, you get little or nothing. This is the strongest PvE message the game sends. You’re finally getting the hang of your class, and just got your elite skill! You get a letter in the mail, come to Ascalon Catacombs, I’ll even show you where it is on the map! And what players find is a solid brick wall. It isn’t hard to see why people get discouraged. At first, I’m certain it does feel insurmountable.
I think more should be done to help players adjust to the demands of dungeons. Ascalon Catacombs story mode is the real weak link in the chain. As a trial-and-error learning session, it is excessively punishing and frustrating. The beginning of the learning curve needs to be more gentle. After that, it’s pretty much fine, except that the rewards are unimpressive.
tl;dr – AC story mode should be more forgiving, rewards should be either larger or flashier, people should be more understanding.
Yeah! You know what else? I hate how that Hans Zimmer guy has just been riding this bellowing low brass thing for years, what a hack. Pick a dynamic range and stay there, buddy, this up-and-down crap has been done to DEATH. And get some synth, man, for real, metal instruments have been around for LITERALLY hundreds of years.
Okay, back to reality. Jeremy Soule is a wonderful composer. Jack Wall is a wonderful composer. If you think Jack Wall didn’t ride his own coattails, have you ever listened to the whole ME2 soundtrack? It’s two whole discs of five different songs. He’s got a voice, a real voice, and he sticks to it. So does Soule. That’s just life. And they’re awesome.
Oh, and another lazy jerk who just writes his own sparkly-rainbow-subtle-as-a-brick-to-the-face crap over and over? That John Williams guy. What a joke.
1: Haven’t noticed this problem, from the description though it should be fixed very quickly. That is a disruptive problem.
2: They’re fine. They are checks on movement and, in some situations, obstacles for fighting. It’s fun getting an enemy to attack mobs when trying to hit you, and ganging up on them with your new partners.
3: Unless there is only one class, people will be better at some things and worse at others. They all fit into the scheme. If you feel like you can’t accomplish what you want to with your class, perhaps another may suit you better.
4: This is only a problem when trying to push against a larger or more organised group than your world can field. Making small gains against a sea of opposition only to have a mass show up with lots of supply and siege moments later is pretty demoralizing. Until retaliation is fixed, an inferior defender cannot withstand a large, organised attacker.
5: Repair penalty skews the incentive scheme in an unfavorable way. The reward for winning is lots of money, karma, exp, and a cheerful feeling. Every victory is at the cost of the loser, however, who gains no reward whatsoever, and incurs a monetary penalty coupled with frustration. The admonishment to “stop being bad” or some equally ignorantly blithe comment almost takes as a given that the advice cannot be followed. If our opponent could simply “stop being bad” and subsequently defeat us, gaining all the rewards and incurring upon us the losses, then we would become the “bad”. And I’m sure that, in that situation, being told to “stop being bad” would sound as petty and arrogant as it always did. Okay, sorry. Rant ended.
6: I feel downed is perfectly acceptable in W3. The emphasis is on flexibility and team-oriented play, and being able to keep that dynamic going is very important. Especially when the penalty for death in W3 is relatively severe compared to elsewhere.
The problem with playing W3 in a casual way is that intensity of the experience is dictated by the most hardcore participants in your current matchup. I logged on with my static group of 4 rl friends to play around on W3 the other afternoon, and we controlled literally nothing. So we figured “Sweet! We can probably snag a couple little objectives!” and went to attack a supply camp. As we were fighting the main guard, ten or twelve players roll in and mudstomp us, then /dance at our corpses. Repeat this same scenario at another camp, and we were quite done with W3, and I don’t know if two of my friends could be talked into trying it again. And on top of the base frustration of failure and the embarrassment felt for the childish behavior on the part of whoever those people were, you get hit with a repair bill.
Until there is a way to dileneate the root cause of the problem, whether it be in the matchmaking system, incentive scheme, or game mechanics, that’s just going to be the way it is in some places.
Look WvW is a big money maker. Money sinks are needed and repair is the obvious solution. I only need to repair my armor maybe once an hour if that. I fight smart and in WvW walking around alone is not smart. Look on you mini-map and follow the paths the other dots go in order to have the best chance of making it to you destination. I know its frustrating when you appear in a zerg, so in order to combat it I played smarter.
Repair may be the “obvious” solution, in that it is foolishly simple to apply an arbitrary penalty. Unless you are on one of the perpetually demolished servers, our experiences are totally dissimilar. W3 is only a big money maker when you can take large objectives reliably. If you aren’t doing that, the monetary rewards are negligible, and the number difference on my server is so vast that trying to get a supply camp is like sneaking into Mordor. It’s just not exciting or profitable to W3 right now. And that means there’s less for the winners to do, as well.
I really hope matchmaking improves in the near future. Being the frightened mouse gorging on cheese while the cat sleeps is not as glorious as I wish it was.
The issue is that the incentives are unaligned with the penalty for “dying or being bad”. Being at a disadvantage virtually wipes out the possibility of reward, and virtually ensures the possibility of punishment. In this instance, playing “safe or better”, changing the balance of risk, reduces the reward to trivial levels. Why would I spend long stretches of time running from camp to dolyak to sentry to camp for trivial completion rewards, and high certainty that discovery will result in my death? This may only apply to my own server, but since the big guilds left (and may actually have been crushing us at some point this past week), W3 is dead, and in the short and mid-term forecast I don’t imagine that will change unless an organised guild joins the server. The value difference for an hour spent in Eternal Battleground versus an hour spent roleplaying a lumberjack should be stark and inviting on the side of the exciting, competitive gameplay mode, and for a lot of people, it just isn’t there.
To get free loot, you need to be winning, and if you are winning, your equipment isn’t getting damaged. So the reasoning that damage repair is supposed to balance out the free loot fails. The people needing to repair aren’t the ones who get loot, and vice versa.
This is pretty much the situation. Very quickly after the match starts, at least in every matchup we’ve been in, one server surges ahead and essentially throttles the other two servers. They make a lot of money and get a lot of drops. Everyone else gets a repair bill and a long return journey, during which time the winners are in a geographically advantageous position. Unless a significant resistance is mounted within a short time frame, a lot of players give up. If I log on and my server is being dominated, there is no incentive for me to play W3. When I have played, organised resistance has long since abandoned the struggle, and the rewards for taking small objectives only to draw regional attention from the strong are small. If you don’t relocate, they will find you and probably zerg you, and relocating is another very long walk for little reward, while they swiftly regain what you took. So, when I see an enemy completely own the W3 pie chart, I do something else. Unless the design intent is “whoever gains initial upper hand wins forever”, which seems unlikely, then the design isn’t 100% working. Mobility and time/gold investment are extremely important elements in the W3 equation, and are very imbalanced at the moment. Of course, within the next few posts I’m sure I’ll learn all I need to about W3 in the form of admonishments on whining from the ones with their boots on the throats of others. That is a view I understand, as my server mudstomped others at launch, until the W3-centric guilds switched servers to avoid long queues (which obviously and hilariously backfired when their new server started dominating), and W3 when you are unstoppable is highly profitable and just about zero fun. Now I know why resistance fell off a cliff after a short time. /rant