Showing Posts Upvoted By WingedLass.7456:
Obviously I go into this knowing that some players will be very upset. That’s why it’s such a tough decision.
Ankdarkwolf, Darkmikau, Ballads, Spira, Caerbannog, Cysgod, you each posted a variant of an accusation I’ve seen many times over the past few months on the forums, something along the lines of, “AN shipped half an expansion with HoT.” I take issue with that. We shipped a new region full of content, a new mastery system, gliding, guild halls, a new profession, nine new elite specializations for existing professions, and more. Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.
Mo
I’ve been playing this game for a long time. I bought it around release. I’ve been playing MMOs since early 2000. I don’t think this is a case of releasing half an expansion. This is about what an expansion means in the industry itself. Here is what people are used to.
Expansion Releases > Play expansion content for 1-2 years > New Expansion.
Now Anet has taken a different direction on how to push out content. You took on the mantle of the whole living world release style (which I loved). However, when you announced and released an expansion…people were relating their expectations to previous experiences.
For example, with WoW they release an expansion and people play it for 2 years. The content has a 2 year lifespan.
In Guild Wars 1 you pushed out expansions really fast. It was what, a year between them? These expansions were also filled with content.
So what happens when these expansions are released? People play the expansion content, almost exclusively, for 2 years. The content had a large life span.
Now with HoT, this wasn’t so. A lot of the content people did once, but they also went back to vanilla content. The content just doesn’t have a large life span. So while in terms of quality and quantity, it was pretty up there. However, it didn’t deliver on the replay ability and the life span of the content. A majority of people I knew (including myself) did the content for about a month. Possibly two. Then we found ourselves back doing Vanilla content a majority of the time. Doing the daily fractal which isn’t uncommon to be below level 50. Doing the world boss train.
The thing that makes WoW expansions so successful are the ladders. They put in a ton of ladders to climb. Faction/currency ladders, dungeon/raid ladders, gear tier ladders, etc. These weren’t optional either. You had to do some of these things to keep up. In the processes, previous content would die. We, as a community and Anet, need to find some way to replace these ladders with something that fits into the games design.
For example, right now the major reward structure in the game is gold. People seem to want to gravitate towards actions that have a good work/stress to gold ratio. One of the major reasons the World Boss train and Silverwastes chest train is so popular.
Now if we ignore the gold reward structure and look at HoT focused rewards. We have the main following. Stat combinations, gear looks, and achievements (includes collections).
1. Stat Combinations – Right now your meta (with the exception of sPvP) doesn’t change a lot. Zerker is still very popular, especially in PvE. Since the meta remained unchanged (as it always has over the course of the game that has led us to 27 stat combinations for ascended and 33 for exotic), many people didn’t care. They didn’t want to farm crystalline ore in DS or do any of those events over and over again for the new stat combinations. It simply wasn’t worth it. Especially when the currencies often had a wide range of uses and needs.
2. Gear Looks – this is pretty simple. If the gear doesn’t look good/cool to a person, they don’t want it. I don’t see a lot of people running around with Bladed or Leystone armor sets. I don’t play as often as I used too, but I think in the months since HoT I’ve only seen maybe 5-6 full sets of Leystone. Maybe 1-2 full bladed (that includes the chest).
3. Achievements – This was probably your most successful reward avenue. Often they were none grindy achievements and collections that people would complete. Collecting masks, killing a certain boss, etc. They were great. This was the major reason I saw personally people doing certain events or actions over and over again.
The rest of the rewards are tied to gold. Guild Halls? Gold drains. Scribing? Gold drain. It doesn’t matter if you make it so something is built with materials. As long as those materials can be bought and sold on the TP, people will associate them as a gold based reward structure (and then it falls upon that work to gold ratio).
Finally, you have the other parts of the game. While these were released for free, I personally consider them apart of the expansion.
1. Stronghold – A surprisingly large number of PvPers don’t seem to like this gamemode. It isn’t uncommon for me to have seen people group up and request not to be queued up with this gamemode. It’s very saddening since it was a major form of hype for sPvP in the months prior to release.
2. New Desert BL – you already know the issues behind this guy
3. Dungeon Reward Nerf – even if it was a 1% nerf, it would’ve been horrible. Not a lot of people realize that it isn’t pointless to do dungeons. But it became sort of “circlejerky” to talk about how horrible dungeons are now and they have no point. It really sped up the amount of people not doing dungeons.
I think there were a lot of better ways you could’ve taken this expansion in a few aspects.
Guild Halls should not have been gold drains. The way you should’ve expanded this content’s lifespan is by forcing guild members to group up. Invent some kind of currency that you could ONLY acquire from doing certain events/actions with guild members in your group. World Events, Mini Dungeons (I love these btw), Jumping Puzzles, Dungeons (these should’ve been made the major way to gain said currency to make up for the dungeon nerf), Fractals, WvW, sPvP, etc. The Guild Hall system SHOULD have been centered around teamwork with Guildies to progress, not gold begging/donations.
Scribing/Decoration. Decorations should not have been connected so much with Scribing. The best way to have handled decorations is to make it so decorations would have been sold by special NPCs that are locked behind certain open world events (JP, MD, Events, WB, etc). What these vendors would sell would depend on the region. Shiverpeak/norn style decorations from the Shiverpeak areas, for example. Currency used? Majority – Guild currency spoken above AND Karma. Minority – Gold. Those three currencies together with a small focus on the gold part (kind of like how the decoration merchant is now, only 10s). This would’ve also fed into the exploration and world part of the game. The world you have in Guild Wars 2 is amazing. People constantly talked about how Gw2 had the best leveling experience. Your open world was great. It was the nice mix of relaxing, actiony, exploration, lore, stories, and events. Putting these hidden vendors behind special events would’ve played into this more.
(edited by Deified.7520)