Guild Wars 2

I also looked at this game, where everyone has a magic-find set that we wear while doing the highest pve content in the game, and discover that it really doesn’t matter — our characters don’t need stats to do the content, because stats have minimal impact on the performance.

And yet, Anet made these changes…

It seems like your argument, and that of many, is that “this is no big deal” or the changes are so small as to not really make a real difference.

This begs the question:

“Why did Anet make these changes in the first place?”

I mean, if the changes are truly trivial, yet seem to totally violate the PR “manifesto” and what the entire gaming industry was led to believe about the upcoming GW2 design philosophy, why would Anet invite such chaos into their lives?

My sense is that Anet, whether spurred on by Nexon or not, is trying to satisfy those people who cannot comprehend that “gear progression” is truly a treadmill (because you never actually progress… you just run in place) in a “minimally invasive” way. They are making the increments real enough to give some people a “sense of progression” while trying to not to make it a crazy “do or die” level of change so as to placate the mass of people that actually believed they meant what they said in their “Manifesto”.

So, as I see it, Anet is trying to have it both ways. They are trying to hold onto the WoW type players as well as the GW2 players and wishfully hope that this all blows over.

However, I think they are on a slippery slope and ultimately the will end up ruining what was supposed to be an MMO where the non-instanced content and social environment is lively, engaging, and feel new every time you log in.

My belief is that dungeons and raid instances, while great in their own right, end up subverting the qualitative experience of the rest of the game outside of those instances. In a phrase, they “suck the oxygen out of the air”. If they didn’t have a deleterious effect on the rest of the game, I’d be less interested in the outcome of this newfound problem.

I thought the Anet devs really “got this” from the get-go but now I’m not so sure.

The OP is one of the most intelligent pieces I’ve seen written on the topic to date. I hope the CM’s let this thread stand.

While I totally agree that stat progression and stap capped systems both have merits and there’s nothing gamebreakingly wrong with either, I feel a few points need to be underscored.

1.) One of the major issues with stat progression models is that old content is rendered obsolete or trivial. This is a huge problem, which make large parts of MMO’s barren, meaningless, and lonely.

2.) GW2 was supposed to be a direct answer to this problem and the PR “manifesto” was a declaration of this thinking. The product was marketed a long time as an “alternative” MMO that eschewed the WoW model.

3.) Many of us, me included, helped advertise the virtues of GW2 on the basis of what we heard in the manifesto and Anet’s PR campaign. I for one lobbied my girlfriend and many of my WoW friends based on this information. I went so far as to promote and give lengthy posts on the WoW forums as to the merit of a stat capped system. It feels like a bit of betrayal that the GW2 worked to make sure that their “manifesto” went viral and then sort of pulled the rug out from those of us who spread their message.

===

In some ways, this new direction also leaves me disappointed.

1.) It does seem like Anet abandoned some of it’s original design goals. I feel these changes really contradict the GW2 “Manifesto” and Mike O’Brien’s own words.
2.) Gear progression is really a treadmill as the game just get balanced around the new numbers anyway. You end up running just to stay in place
3.) Power creep just ends up making a ton of game content effectively “obsolete”.
4.) When you offer one type of gameplay as the straightest path to the “best rewards” you end up inducing your player base to overly partake in that form of gameplay, which leaves the rest of the game empty.

Sadly, I worry that the “ascended gear” move is likely to end up siphoning off the player base into instances which will effectively hamper the rest of the game because the player base will no longer be in the “world” interacting with each other which is what makes and MMOG an MMOG.

I really wish Arenanet had stuck to their guns and focused on “open, real world pve” over the instanced experience. I know a lot of the events can seem zergy or barren at times (most of the time actually) but I think the game would be better off if they had fixed those issues rather than just give carrots and “stuff to do” in instances.

The world really didn’t need another WoW clone, even though I love WoW.