Grind Wars is a named deserve by over 90% of MMORPGs imo. It was easy to obtain gold in GW1 just by salvaging for the materials and selling the mats in Kamadan.
It’s much harder in GW2 due to many circumstance, we should also not ignore the elephant in the corner either, that it’s very alluring for a business model to have vested interest in making it harder due to the cash > gems > gold path way they have built into the game, and if you’re the beholder of a cynical attitude you can see that caked over every part of the game as a whole, the most difficult of questions to ask how to fairly balance the issue for both the company and the user of the system so that both are equally rewarded.
GW1 System was far superior when it comes to the economy, if only because you couldn’t buy gold “legally” you had to earn it.
No, it just meant players went through third parties to buy their gold illegally. Perhaps you don’t remember all the RMT scams that plagued GW1, account theft, item theft… mostly tied to people trying to buy gold from some seedy third party website.
Gold buying has always been a thing, and as much as it makes me go cross-eyed, I don’t blame ArenaNet (or any company) deciding they want a cut on that action.
I have pretty much reached the conclusion that when it comes to MMO players.
Grind (n): Stuff I don’t want to do. -ing (v)
All I can say for certain is that it’s rather impressive how many IT professional and programmers play this game. Because I swear, it’s like one out of every ten forum posters have the qualifications to speak with such authority.
I was under the impression that levels 1-50 of Fractals can still be played with the core game. You need HoT to progress beyond that though.
If you make it too easy to acquire (that doesn’t require much grind), then you get the legions of players who already have a legendary throwing a fit (imagine the “Twice-Told Legend” fury x 1000).
But they couldn’t make it too difficult either. Tie precursor hunts with something difficult like raid challenges and you get legions moaning that it’s “too hard” and “not fun.”
I’m not convinced there is a solution that will satisfy even a simple majority of players here.
Hey, I am ALL for holding a company’s feet to the fire when they say, “We promise to do [X] by [Y]” and then for one reason or another renege. I’m not sure what precisely was said pertaining to WvW, for example, but if they said, “You WILL have a solution to the population imbalances and exploits by the launch of HoT”… then yeah, fans should let ArenaNet have it.
(I highly doubt that’s what was said, but if it was… yep, give ’em hell.)
These sorts of road maps AREN’T promises, though, and we as fans need to approach them as nothing more than statements of intent if we want these companies to be willing to keep lines of communication open. Fans ALSO have a responsibility in open discourse, no matter how much we try to divorce ourselves from that responsibility.
Stuff like the start of this thread is NOT keeping our end of the bargain.
And here we go…
Players whining about promises not made not being kept already…
You are the reason why ArenaNet stopped communicating the with “fans” the first time. Stop it.
Sounds to me like you guys already know of some exploit bugs that wont be fixed at launch.
Sounds to me that bugs that cause problems that could be exploited are a given whenever you’re dealing with ANY piece of software.
ArenaNet’s relationship with “farmers” has always been cantankerous at best. The only question tends to be, “How long will I be able to farm this before ArenaNet drops the nerf hammer on it?”
It seems this is dungeon running’s time.
Yeah, I know the first quote that they didn’t want to remove the pet. I’m aware of that one.
The second quote of yours, however, I strongly suspect only exists in your mind, and is a willfully dishonest twisting of what was REALLY stated at best, and an outright fabrication at worst.
Yeah, that’s EXACTLY what they said.
Oh wait, no it wasn’t. Twisting words and intent to mean what was not said does not make you right.
My guess? They don’t want to make pet’s like WoW Hunter Pets that are just sic ‘em and forget ’em. They apparently want some sort of active play to the pet. But if they make the pet too smart, other players will complain that Rangers are “EZ Mode”. Make them too dependent on the player, Ranger players will complain that it’s too hard and not fair that they have to work three times as hard to look as good as “simpler” classes.
It’s pretty clear that they don’t want to take the simplest solution (tone down the pets importance to the class and make them largely invulnerable to splash damage), and maybe they can (and should) be taken to task for that… but the pettiness and the vitriol and the outright fabrications from the Ranger community are NOT acceptable behavior.
Yeah, THAT’S it… they haven’t ONCE looked into Ranger issues until recently. I mean, it can’t possibly be that the solution isn’t as simple as the all-knowing players think, and as such there’d be little to say about the matter other than, “Still no fix! Soz!”
Nope, it’s GOTTA be ArenaNet has been maliciously ignoring the class for three years.
Do you people LISTEN to yourselves? And think it honestly makes sense when it comes out of your mouths?
This entire thread is inane, though. There’s absolutely zero constructive about it. It’s filled with people flying off the handle for speculation that could not possibly be true if you took all of three seconds to let the little hamster wheel in your head run.
I’m as tired of waiting for fixes to either the pet AI or means that render it inconsequential as anyone. But throwing temper tantrums over categorical bullkitten doesn’t entice dialogue. It doesn’t exactly tell developers, “Oh yeah, they’re ready to have a rational talk about the limitations we have with the Ranger class.”
Scream, “YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT US” at a person enough… and guess what? Yeah… they’re gonna stop caring. It is LONG past time to pull back the reins on this community. We’re out of control.
I felt the Season 2 narrative quite clearly showed that Scarlet wasn’t entirely Mordremoth’s thrall. She was still “fighting” him in some respects.
I think in many cases the complaints about unrewarding is more a symptom than the actual problem. The actual problem being the lack of “fun” and the person complaining is trying to find a justification for why they are playing. If they were having fun and enjoying what they were doing there wouldn’t be a need to search for additional rewards.
Of course that doesn’t really help much since fun is its own can of worms.
Well… let’s be honest… MMOs in and of themselves aren’t terribly engaging.
It’s not exactly like they are a high energy sort of game. They aren’t faced paced like platformers or shooters. GW2 is one of the more “active” MMOs out there, and even then you’re still spend the majority of the time standing in one place only hitting 2 or 3 buttons. So, chances are there’s not going to be much “fun” within the game’s mechanics.
The thrill of MMOs by and large come from the rewards for doing so, whether it’s opening another part of the narrative, the social aspects (like roleplaying), or the “loot.”
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This actually is a fairly common complaint, that the game feels “unrewarding.” The problem is that when you’re dealing with a game like this… it’s hard really to pinpoint what “rewarding” could even BE.
There’s no real gear treadmill, so the color of the item you get really doesn’t mean all that much, especially since exotics are fairly easy to get. The reward of getting more “powerful”, i.e. vertical progression isn’t there… and frankly, I like that. If that’s your idea of “rewarding”, then honestly, I hope you never get what you want in this game.
Which means that “rewarding” basically falls into appearance, which is a very subjective measure. There’s “cool” looks on pretty much every level of item quality… and if you don’t like the look of the ascended or harder to get item sets, then yeah, you’re kinda outta luck there. That’s unfortunate, but I’m not really sure what can be done about that other than more varied looks, which is a very time consuming process on the developer side.
One time events were fun and all… but I think the player base quite emphatically declared that temporary content was a non-starter, and that content releases simply had to be repeatable and permanent.
Their algorithm looks at a variety of factors and all of them relate to WvW. There’s absolutely no reason to expect that a “full” server won’t have peak and off-peak hours; it’s not in the least surprising that you might not see anyone during off-hours.
They “say” they have an algorithm. They have not mentioned any of these “factors” either.
For the same reason they don’t publicly talk about the details of hacks or exploits. Telling players exactly what the system entails is basically an open invitation for players to abuse the system.
I think all likelihood will be either no Halloween content or a dialed back one day event so as not to interfere with expansion content.
Yeah… you are.
Congratulations.
Right but this event in particular makes it so that it’s good to screw over everyone else. Let everyone else complete the events I’m getting credit for, I’m just going to tag and run.
There’s no downside to it here.
Most of the mechanics in this game have been geared toward being cooperative. We can all rez each other. We dont’ have to worry about someone stealing our node, or our kill.
The problems always tend to creep up when the fast way isn’t the same way as the “intended” way. For example in the old ember farm in Orr where some people wanted to do the event and others wanted to intentionally fail it. You fix that problem by making it so that succeeding is more rewarding than failing. Then everyone is on the same page, and no one can complain. That is even the people who want to do the quick easy thing are still wanting the event finished.
In this case events need to be finished, but you don’t have to be around waiting for that to happen…and more…if you want to get max rewards you pretty much have to tag and run.
That’s just bad design, not just in and of itself. It goes against the design direction of the PvE game as a whole.
While I agree the meta-event is basically nothing more than a cheap re-skin of the Scarlet Invasion debacle, my point is that in many ways it doesn’t matter. When you have a good half of the player base hell-bent on breaking ANYTHING you put in front of them in their desire for the most personal rewards, anything you put out is going to look broken.
You’ve got so many players who simply refuse to admit that what we have now with this event is a direct response to past player behaviors.
No drops off mobs? Yeah, you can thank the Aetherblade Captain exploiters for that.
Hundreds of events to keep players active and on the move to get any rewards at all? Thank the AFKers during the Battle for Lion’s Arch.
No EXP or karma or anything for completing events? Gosh, that kinda sounds like a direct attempt to counter those people who power-leveled via the Queensdale champion train. Oh wait… IT IS in direct response to that behavior!
We’re the problem. And the first step to fixing the problem is admitting it.
(Granted with all that said, the answer isn’t a meta-event that is fundamentally broken to begin with like this mess is.)
ArenaNet doesn’t need to teach players this.
Pursuing the most efficient tactic for personal “reward” is a lesson that MMOs have taught players for well over a decade at this point. They are practically CONDITIONED to seek the path of least resistance.
Chances are this was a fairly recycled mechanic that didn’t require a terribly huge amount of coding to pull off and were able to give “something” for players waiting for Oct. 23rd.
I mean, this event looks like the skeleton of the Scarlet Invasions, honestly.
Note that I say “events”, not “mobs”. It doesn’t matter if there’s one champion or 50 due to scale-up, end reward per event should stay the same. And that’s the only reward.
I don’t really like that answer, but it’s the best one I can currently come up with.
Ah, you are correct. I did not see that.
The problem is that I don’t think your solution would solve the problem we have now. Half of the players would simply rush and tag as many events as possible for the rewards… not caring about any further events down the line… or in other words, pretty much what they’re doing now.
Simply put, we as players, have told ArenaNet we’re only willing to see things through if all the shinies are put at the end of the stick. Otherwise, we’ll nibble as far as we can easily get to, then outright stop.
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All the events would have to give loot and EXP, though.
Here’s my problem. The INSTANT you do that, at least half of the player base isn’t going to give one tenth of one kitten about the later events in the chain. You’re going to have the Aetherblade Captains of the Scarlet Invasion all over again.
You remember that? The sheer bullkitten toxicity that flooded the forums AND in-game? Screaming and harrassing people that if they complete events, other players will find them and arson their homes? Threatening bullkitten reports to try and get players banned for not killing critical event mobs?
THAT’S the issue. At the core, this event we have now is a cause of entirely player-side problems. Our own behaviors have indirectly caused this mess of a event we have now. We’re the reason we can’t have nice things.
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Not sure why so many of you are having issues killing the mobs. If you follow the big zerg, then ofc you’d have issues killing them off. If so, stop following them.
I jump to spot to spot alone and finish the event easily. People will come anyways and the event spot will get finished. Most stacks i’ve gotten is 21, I tried super hard for that tho.. (without tagging and running. I hate that people do that.. It’ll be so much faster if everyone just helps out)Anyways. If you got issues tagging mobs, try jumping around alone and watch the map for swords that pops up when 1 event spot is over.
This sort of behavior has ALWAYS happened whenever ArenaNet has tied individual performance to rewards. The, “Ima gonna get mine, and kitten you scrub” mentality that plagued the Scarlet invasions and the first part of the Evacuation of Lion’s Arch.
On the flip side, ArenaNet has ALSO seen what happens when they shift the rewards towards zone wide completion like in the second part of the Evacuation event… tons of people sitting AFK and not doing anything while the rest are scrambling like mad.
So, now they’re trying a hybrid sort of reward scheme, and THAT’S not working either. It seems like us players simply can’t handle these sort of meta events. Maybe ArenaNet simply needs to stop trying and focus more on those meta-chains like in Silverwastes, which seem to work quite well.
I’m not convinced in the slightest that the goal was to allow players to get all the rewards in these four days. It sounds like, to me at least, that the end rewards were designed for veterans of Season 1 to pick up the few items they missed during the original launch.
But if THAT was the case, it REALLY needed to be communicated better.
If that the case why make them rewards in the first place.
My guess?
For the people who did all that Season 1 stuff and missed out on one or two items.
The “new” player is supposed to kinda experience the frantic nature of these sort of events and accept that some of those “endgame” rewards are not achievable, thus keeping them “exclusive” for the veterans of the game.
It makes me wonder if ArenaNet understands their player base, especially the F2P players… but it wouldn’t surprise me. They’d hardly be the first or only developer with that degree of disconnect.
Whelp… ya wanna know who REALLY to blame for this reward fiasco?
I’ll help ya out.
Go to your bathroom. Look in the mirror. Point and say, “It’s YOUR fault!”
We were the ones that chased scaled up champions during the Aetherblade event for the sake of personal rewards over the meta-event. So, ArenaNet killed the entire mobs dropping loot bit from these sort of events.
We were the ones that parked ourselves in various corners of Lion’s Arch and went AFK while the other half of the players scrambled to complete the requirements that we then complained we didn’t get. So, ArenaNet stopped tying the biggest rewards to overall completion.
Everything you are seeing here has been made in anticipation of how players have tried to game the system in the past. And the result is an unholy nightmare.
Now, that said… perhaps ArenaNet needs to understand that us players simply can’t just play this sort of frantic “zone wide” event straight up, and that there’s going to be a massive group of people looking for the path of least resistance. Maybe the answer is more events like Vinewraith and Marionette, and less like this.
The 30+ target for extra rewards is impossible to hit in that timegap.
20 stacks give you the maximum rewards and you can do it without leeching much, even if you do have to leech a little if you know what you are doing.
Without leeching much? Dafq are u talking about? I just did an event with 21 (in the very last 5 seconds). You know what it took to do that? I LITERALLY leeched EVERY event possible. I went in…killed 3-4 mobs..went to the next…and so on. That’s it, and i BARELY made it.
Is this honestly the kind of mentality you want to see being promoted in your favorite mmo? Constant leeching?
No, it’s a terrible design that should never be in the game and shouldn’t be in the game in the future.
But there is a difference between needed +30 stacks and leeching everything.
Or
Needed 20 stack so I leech 15 events and then do between 5 and 7 events completely.
The problem is we already know what the Leechers would REALLY do in your scenario.
“Needed 20 stack so I leech 20 events and then hide in a corner and do nothing the rest of the meta-event. Complain when half of the people still trying don’t complete the objectives I desire. Rinse, lather, repeat.”
Wow. Have you even looked at the math behind how many hours it would take to get the ‘rewards’? I even agree that the way this event was done, coupled with the fact that it may or may not have siphoned resources away from expansion development, makes it more or less not worth the effort it took to make. But you could at least sound like you’ve read the reasons why people are actually complaining.
Honestly? The math involved seems pretty clear to me that they DON’T want you getting every possible reward in the 4 days available. No doubt to cater to the “exclusives” that would throw an unholy temper tantrum if everything they worked “so hard” for during Season 1 could be had in four days and is therefore now “worthless.”
So, I would say… “Working as intended?”
Your argument would make sense if these events were any fun to play. For example, the Silverwastes events are pretty fun, and I also enjoyed the Verdant Brink previews even though I wasn’t being rewarded (temporary beta characters).
These events, however, are not fun to play, and also not rewarding, and are therefore doubly bad.
Fun is a subjective thing. I personally played the new event once, and have not stepped back in it. But hey, that’s me.
Apparently there are some people enjoying this. Apparently the “bad gameplay design” is a non-issue for them. More power to them, I guess.
What worries me is the fact that there were people in /m talking about how much fun they are having doing it and that they don’t even care about getting no rewards. Are people really so easily entertained? This is the epitome of terrible gameplay.
Here’s gonna be a shocker to your MMO-reward-driven mindset.
Sometimes… I mean, just sometimes… people can have fun without a tangible “reward” at the end. Sometimes it really IS the journey that’s more important than the destination.
Yes, I know… that runs completely contrary to the conditioning MMOs have driven into your skull over the last fifteen years. But it’s true. It really is.
It boils down to Arena.net having a very specific definition of “grind” that doesn’t entirely mesh with what gamers have come to define the term.
God i miss farming greens.
Really? I don’t. I hated that endless, “Fight through mobs, discover the one you want didn’t spawn, groan, port back to Deldrimor War Camp” grind.
Then there’s the third camp. The majority of the player base that wants and is willing to participate in challenging content because it’s fun, and wants to be rewarded with cool shinies if they complete it because unique trophies are more meaningful loot than a handful of gold and rares they could have acquired elsewhere
The problem with WoW’s raids wasn’t the player base. It was the gear gate just to get started I advise you to in stead look at the GW1 elite instances, which were in fact very popular specifically because of their accessibility to attempt while maintaining a challenging piece of content to complete
Actually, your words prove you to be right in that second group. You don’t care about the challenge. You care about the rewards. If those same rewards were available in the open world, you’d MAYBE do the raid once just to say you did it, then never set foot inside again.
Change that to the “majority of the MMO player base” and I would agree. Not sure if there are enough players who want access to rewards to generate the kind of push back that Ascended did when it was introduced (and was at that time only get-able in FotM), but I suppose it’s possible.
As far as ArenaNet is concerned, the rewards are merely a means to an end. That end being encouraging players to play this content. Why? Because raids are hard work that is very resource and time intensive. It’s probably the most involving content an MMO developer does, in fact. They need to constantly develop new mechanics, new maps, art resources, special AI programming, the QA has to be heavily involved (you can get away with minor bugs in the open world, but a minor bug in a raid is going to receive a ton of scrutiny for some very loud people).
It’s the very reason “Looking For Raid” in World of Warcraft exists… because their raid participation numbers are DISMAL otherwise. It’s quickly become not worth the investment without an easy mode that more people are willing to participate in.
I’m dubious this will work for GW2 at the end of the day. There are two very distinct camps with desires that are mutually exclusive to each other.
One is the “wanna have fun” camp, who despise challenge and get violently angry that there’s content they don’t have the time or skills to complete.
Then you have the “hardcore” camp, who don’t necessarily care about the challenge (though there are some that do), but are ACTUALLY more interested in the shinies they can get that the “filthy casuals” won’t.
WoW can get away with it and somewhat please both camps by having “LFR” gear be significantly inferior than the “Normal” or “Mythic” varities.
ArenaNet doesn’t really have that carrot, and if they tried to implement it, it’d be the Ascended debacle over 9000, where everyone and their mother is enraged and about ready to set Bellevue aflame.
They’re going to have to make a choice: either make the content easy enough for the bulk of players to complete (and kitten off the “hardcore” fans), or accept that 5% of their players are going to like their resource-intensive raids (and kitten off their “casual” fans who feel they were promised “play how we want”… and possibly their shareholders who will wonder why ArenaNet is investing so much in something so few players are interested in).
If I’m not mistaken people did ask for exactly this. Locking stuff behind difficult group content is what makes the effort to learn the raid and coordinate properly work it.
Not just did the “hardcore raider” asked for this, ArenaNet also knows by this point that the only thing that will encourage players to try this “challenging content” is through “phat lewt.” Challenge is a God awful motivator for gamers, and if you give them an “easier” route to the same reward, gamers will take that easier route 99 times out of 100.
Not only did they have to come up with unique rewards, they HAD to make those rewards exclusive, otherwise only 5% of the player base would even show interest in going particularly far.
What I don’t think they realize is that it isn’t going to matter at the end of the day. The MMO player base actually DOESN’T like challenge. They DON’T like forming raids, and they WILL ignore GW2’s attempts just as much as every other game’s attempts.
Berzerker is deemed the META more because it’s a good baseline for nearly all classes to follow without requiring too much theorycrafting, rather than being the absolute best possible gear setup.
For nearly all classes, the absolute optimal loadout will mix things like Assassin’s and/or Valkyrie’s as your precision/crit start reaching diminishing returns (or even the surge in condition builds now making Sinister a viable alternative to Berzerker entirely for some classes)… but it requires a much more nuanced understanding and study of just what makes each individual class tick.
But they also claimed they would release an expansion’s worth of content, in increments, over the course of each year through living world events. that didnt happen, ever.
For what it’s worth… us players pretty much nixed that idea pretty much from its inception. This forum was rife with players demanding a traditional boxed expansion model and to drop the Living Story as the primary content delivery method.
It seems really odd to complain now that Arena.net has caved and is giving us what we claimed we wanted.
Ah Awesome, thanks. My main “aim” previously was to do… everything. As I’m at 69% map completion, I’m guess I can easily pick up 90 or more with the 30% left
I do believe that was the stated intent… that characters with 100% completion would have enough points to unlock everything (in terms of the elite specialization) initially available once HoT goes live.
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My point is that LFG is empty most of the time and it is hard to find 5 people to do a dungeon without gear reqs, profession reqs, leave outs and all this BS.
But you got offended because you call yourself a casual while probably feeling excluded from “my definition” or casuals. Fine, who cares about definitions while the fact remains. ten people raids with no hot join button will be fail for most of “my” casuals
There’s a TON of non-meta players who like to join groups, but far fewer willing to take the initiative and start one. So when those groups ARE started, they fill up (and thus get removed from the queue) very quickly.
Aye, I feel they’re a bit disingenuous with the whole “no treadmill” thing. Sure we’re not dropping off our old armor every few weeks but we do have our AR progression system and we’re getting masteries which some already sound like “you must be this tall” barriers to entry. I don’t know, maybe I just misinterpreted the “no treadmill” thing initially but not a big fan of barriers to content that aren’t purely skill based.
I think part of that has to do with how Arena.net defines the terms they use, which sometimes are oddly different than how the gamer community has come to define them (an example; how Arena.net defines “grind” in their famed manifesto in relation to how gamers would normally define “grind”).
In this case, Arena.net is using “treadmill” to refer to a very specific form of progression, while at the same time using different systems to pretty much the exact same effect.
This sort of pedantry is hardly new for them, as they used that sort of nitpicking in Guild Wars 1 as well (talking proudly about their lack of vertical progression while at the exact same time having players grind reputation for skills that… you guessed it… gave you vertically progressive numbers the more you ground the reputation).
My problem is that high quality, challenging, instanced content (dungeons, raids) is not something an intern can whip up in their free time. A lot of money, energy and time have to be invested. However, that ends up being a waste if said content is only played by 10% of the playerbase which is the usual participation rate in other games.
WoW suffered the same issue (Original Naxxramas was awesome. Or at least that’s what we heard. A whooping 0,1% percent got to enjoy it.) and instead of making high quality content for the non-instancers, they simply pushed everyone into raiding and dungoneering because that was far more cost-effective. The current expansion’s end game gives you a choice of running the same raids on 4 difficulties and the same dungeons on 3 different difficulties.
That’s what I fear that raids will bring here as well. This game has always mainly targeted casual MMO gamers. So Arenanet will either design content for a small part of their playerbase and cross their fingers that raiders like using the gem store (They usually don’t since there is no “prestige” in credit card swiping.) as to make entertaining them profitable or they try to peddle their raids in any way they can to draw in the crowd and justify the expenses.
I do hope that won’t be so.
Not… NECESSARILY.
A lot of the resource investment that went into WoW raids was through unique skills and mechanics for their bosses that were promptly used nowhere else. They’ve since started “reusing” a lot of that stuff for later content. An example is the skill Defile, which at one time was a skill used solely by one boss in one raid instance (The Lich King in Icecrown Citadel), and was later co-opted and utilized as an acquirable skill for Death Knights in the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Hell, Naxxramas in near its entirety was brought back in Wrath of the Lich King with some re-tuning.
It’s POSSIBLE to get a better return on investment for your raid content beyond the number of players that can use it, so that in and of itself CAN be worked around and repurposed. Guild Wars 2 already has adapted that policy, for example, using previous Living Story boss fights in the Fractals of the Mists.
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To be fair, while some of this thread has been a back and forth, the discussion isn’t really that toxic or bad. If it is considered bad or toxic, then maybe the Devs should reconsider their F2P decision, or think about redoing dungeons and sPVP. Much more toxicity there then in this thread.
Considering F2P players can’t even post on the forums to begin with, I don’t see how dragging that beef into this discussion is at all relevant.
And even if they did I would hope the rewards would be substantially lessened for this easier mode.
And when we peel back everything to its core… THAT is what matters to you and the “hardcore” player.
You aren’t REALLY interested in the “challenge.” You want phat loot that makes you feel and look special. And in that case, Guild Wars 2 probably isn’t the game for you… because I highly doubt that the group content is going to be all that challenging (at least nothing that half of the player base can’t accomplish given enough time), and as a result its rewards aren’t going to be particularly exclusive.
I mean… the Watchwork Mining Pick… the initial attempt at “revamping” the gem → gold exchange… the trait capture system… good God are there so many examples of Arena.net borking things completely contrary to earlier stated promises and intent.
But no, fans are locked like a pit bull on the precursor scavenger hunt (which was never a promise and never stated as one). It makes no sense to me.
I wanted to hear the outcry of the vocal players here if they had made legendarys
only available to PvP players that win some E-Sport events.And hi to my stalker NT.
Actually if you remember a year or so ago, Arena.net offered existing precursors and legendaries to those who finished highly ranked during a PvP season… and fans blew a gasket over it.
Defend Arena.net? They don’t need me to do that. Which is why I don’t. They’ve made plenty of missteps and backtracked on plenty of things (the current mastery system stems from several horrible missteps with the original trait system, for crying out loud).
The problem I have is that fans like you invoke the wrong reasons for your distrust. And yes, that matters. Using the wrong process to reach the right conclusion is a matter of chance, not an indication of sound thinking. It’s like looking at a tiger, and saying, “It has stripes, therefore it’s a tiger.” Even though you’re right, you’re still stupid.
And from there, once you discover the RIGHT reasons for your distrust, you’ll notice that it’s hardly only Arena.net that displays those flaws. It’s a systemic problem with MMO development (and to varying degrees game development as a whole). A lot of fans talk about how awesome FFXIV is right now… and it’s as if they forget that SquareEnix botched that game so horribly out of the gate that they literally had to rip it all up and start over.
And yes, their fans were just as irate and unforgiving as the dissatisfied here. Gamers possess many qualities, and another one of them is incredibly short memories.
I’m not terribly worried about the decisions Arena.net (or ANY game developer for that matter) makes simply because the solution, as I see it, is one that cannot be implemented because gamers will overwhelmingly refuse to hold up their end (either by accepting less than the absolutely top of the line experience or pay more for that top of the line experience).
And so, in that regard, I also don’t blame Arena.net or any developer for the environment of their forums. The community is more than capable of being unreasonable kittens completely of their own merits.