See, I don’t blame either of you for making the posts you did. Posts like these aren’t meant to be malicious, they just come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of vertical progression, and why it’s generally considered a bad thing by many players of this game. So I’ll try to break it down for you.
Vertical progression is a system whereby an already established game continues to add new equipment of increasingly higher power levels, either in expansions or patches. The sole goal of such a thing is to provide new content for max level characters to grind for, to give them a reason to keep playing. And that’s a fine goal, but vertical progression is the wrong means by which to do it.
There’s no problems with power differences between a Lvl 1 and a Lvl 80. This is part of the natural progression of any RPG: your character grows and you grow with it. You gain more traits, more skills, and can wear better gear. And again, this is fine. The problem comes in when you hit max level and suddenly you’re introducing new tiers of gear at that level on a regular basis, or when you start raising the level cap just to introduce new tiers of gear (both of which are confirmed to be happening at some point in the future for GW2).
This introduces a very common problem known as “power creep”, which simply means that the game’s “Best-In-Slot” items keep getting made obsolete by newer gear. This is, in effect, “moving the goalposts” for a player in order to keep them playing, what some people call the “treadmill”. It gives players a reason to keep playing, that much is true, but it also gives players less of a reason to play older content, generally because that older content is more poorly designed and far less rewarding in general.
We can already see this in effect in GW2. Remember how the designers wanted to make the entire game playable at any level so you could go anywhere and do anything? Have you noticed that, despite this, a lot of the older content tends not to get as much attention any more? There’s less people in the low level maps, there’s less people running non-Fractals dungeons, there’s less people running the dragons and the temples, and practically no one plays in the Southsun Cove unless they’re specifically built to farm Karka or are going after the rich Ori node. And this is because of the issue described above. What power creep does is not only raise the bar on what the “BiS” items are, it also makes a lot of existing content obsolete. Fractals is perhaps the best example of this: once it came out, the older dungeons looked positively godawful by comparison, and were less rewarding to boot, so less people started playing them. People don’t want to be funneled into one area of GW2, they want to play everywhere, but right now the devs’ steps towards vertical progression and more grinding for top gear are making that a more difficult thing to achieve.
Now the devs are taking some positive steps. They intend to introduce Ascended gear in more locations of the game, and that’s great. That’ll help keep older content useful in the game without having it all go to waste. But there’s still the core problem of power creep itself rendering a lot of the game’s older gear worthless.
(to be continued in my next post)
thanks mate