I never played gw1 or gw2 at lunch. I started gw2 as a f2p player when hot was out after a month or so. I did level to 80 as a ranger and did all core maps and tought what a cool game it was and the expansion would make it better and so i bought it.
Hot maps felt grindy with the meta events but it felt like i was playing an mmo for the first time(better then world bosses wich i stoped doing soon after) and even rewarding. Everything i did in core maps seemed nothing but a level experience since i was alone most of times and hot maps with end fractals and raids where the only thing to keep me playing every day.
Then living world 3 story came out and bringed some maps where they killed meta events instead they add the daily hearts and this annoyed me much, but it was ok since i tought they where some filler and the expansion maps will bring back the metas like in hot. Instead the POF demo map is just a big empty map with nothing to do other then daily hearts and bountys chase. Like wtf, this expansion maps will be dead in months if they are like the living story maps. And this will happen only becuase they listen to people like you who can’t put a bit of effort in nothing and wants to play a mmo alone. So yeah i liked hot becuase of the replayability the metas offered and this expansion looks blank and kitten me that i preorder the expansion before i knew the details and kitten the people like you who made this expansion look like a gw1 copy instead of an improvement. Thx for bringing the unidentified kitten,only the worst companys implement this kind of system and thx for the simplicity and nothingness i will find in the new maps.I understand your logic behind it, but I do not agree with it.
Your idea is that the game needs to be somewhat grindy for you to fell like there is anything to the game, Gw2 never started with this ideology, from the dungeons to the world. It was an open exploration emant for you to have fun in it, and that is what made this a 10/10 in most reviewers eyes, you had fun leveling up to 80.
Your frustration seems to come from the fact that you are a new player, and therefor did not experience the fun entailed with doing a dungeon with full lvl 25, and not 3 lvl 80 and possibly 2 people below that level, which makes it very easy to complete a dungeon, you also seem to have a different idea of this world, since in the launch people played together. I get that since we had different experience playing the game, there wont be a comparison, and I might possibly have thought the same if I played 3-4 years after launch to. But there is simply something to it, there is a huge difference from a zerg grinding (sorry to say this) but no brain movement where you are almost braindead for 1 hour straight in a timed zone that might or might not be locked. To a vast world that wants you to explore every path with at least 3-4 people around you at every time, truly helping you in every way, and not just 20+ people pressing 1 to move on.
He doesnt seem to be talking about the grindyness factor, (core is in fact more grindy than HoT) He seems to be talking about harder content and more group focused plays, with dynamic events being integral to the map.
Basically he is saying core is really easy and solo focused, and Hot had all the content that was a little more engaging.
Which most people dont disagree with, they just disagree on whether it was a good thing or not. Some people want easier maps, that are fairly soloable, and other prefer the in depth, difficult nature of Hot
i will say i think PoF probably has some difficult group oreinted maps, its probably just not all of them.
i understand both sides, but i will say this, mastery points are designed to be an incentive to complete content. At the point at which they become surplus, with no purpose, they no longer achieve their goal.
They still are an incentive to play a multitude of content. What they aren’t (and shouldn’t be) is a strongarm to make players play and excel all of the content.
its not a strongarm, if the use is not of high impact. Lack of mastery levels is high impact, you lose access to skills an abilities.
gold?
exp?
titles?
trophies?
these are not high impact, are you strongarmed into doing every dynamic event, because it gives exp/gold? Is it strongarming you to kill 1000000000000 people in wvw because a title exists for it. Do you have to farm every orichalcum every day, because mats exist?
there is huge dif to requiring people to do everything to get masteries, and giving some type of bonus if someone goes above and beyond
i understand both sides, but i will say this, mastery points are designed to be an incentive to complete content. At the point at which they become surplus, with no purpose, they no longer achieve their goal.
If that was the sole purpose, then sure, that would be a mismatch.
However, I again urge people to read what the devs have actually written about this, they want a surplus of mastery point unlocks so that people feel free to pick and choose. Adding a potential reward for maxing changes that calculus.
It’s a deliberate design decision to offer a surplus, not an accident of different teams working independently.
their purpose is to be something to incentivize exploration/mastery in each expansion. Being free to pick and choose, in order to get mastery levels is not mutually exclusive with having a different use.
yes, having surplus points over what you need for full mastery is good, no after achieving full mastery, all mastery serving no purpose at all is not good.
yes some people will complain due to completionitis, but already some will complain due to percieved waste of effort.
having some purpose or use for excess mastery points is consistent with the concept of rewarding and incentivizing the gameplay. What form it could take is up to them. It doesnt have to be crazy.
i understand both sides, but i will say this, mastery points are designed to be an incentive to complete content. At the point at which they become surplus, with no purpose, they no longer achieve their goal.
On the other side, some people dont want to have any purpose in the extra ones, because they will feel compelled to get them.
I think some people are treating this as a black and white issue, and it is grey. They can give something, without it being as compelling as leveling a mastery. They could offer to convert them to new zones mastery points at lower rate. They could give exp that could be used in otherzones to level mastery. They could recreate the hall of monuments, and offer titles/trophies for getting them.
or they could have them be worthless, but i would think that it would be better for something meant to be incentive to do things still have some incentive, even if it becomes a lower incentive.
diminishing returns on investment isnt a crazy idea.
yall are getting distracted by great drops versus crappy drops.
regardless of what drops, there is too much item/inventory management you literally have to spend like 15-30 minutes cleaning up full bags.
open all these containers
salvage all this
consume all luck
keep all that
npc all that
tp all that
put this in bank
Its a big hassle
I think you missed the OP’s point … it wasn’t the level up that made his GF quit, it was the simple storyline. To be frank, the level up experience in this game is comparatively simple and fast. I can’t imagine anyone truly complaining about GW2 that has any sort of experience with other MMO’s. In truth, there are few MMO’s that have significant content outside of leveling below their max level ranges; there is a perfectly good reason for that …. because you don’t do it again once you have leveled. It’s the nature of the genre. GW2 actually does a better job of that than most with the downscaling.
No, I understand the OP’s point (that the story is uninspiring). And I’m afraid I didn’t express myself very well in response. I’m not saying that the level-up is difficult or long. I was an EverQuest player; and I KNOW what a long and sadistic level-up is like. What I’m saying is that there’s absolutely nothing to have fun with in the GW2 level-up (and learning procerss). You can hardly even find groups for your own-level content that people don’t want to kick you out of. And I lost two people I tried to bring into the game because, by the time they hit 80, and (one of them) ground out their Ascended armor, they had a view of the game that it was totally lame and mechanistic.
I also made the observation that it’s very hard for a new player to find solid info on really fundamental stuff about this game. I only figured out a month ago how fields and finishers interacted with each other. I played three MMO’s before this, and they had infinitely better documentation online. In a lot of ways, you really just need to grit your teeth and want to get over the hump. Because you’re jumping into an environment (thanks to level 80 boosts) where everybody is doing something else and nobody is doing what you’re trying to do. Then, when you hit 80, you’re joining groups where everybody already knows the mechanics of the content and wants to insta-kick anyone who doesn’t.
i think the OP said the story was eh, and the leveling up was monotonous and boring. Which i think is pretty accurate if you level up via map completion and hearts.
You just have to do so much of it, that doesnt really feel different from like 30-65. Its kind of good if you like meandering, or you mix it up with pvp/wvw. But if you are strictly pve, it really feels kind of objectiveless and repetitive.
now, i have done it many times, i have like 8 or 9 charachters, but i generally figured out how to get around the midgame pve method, whether by crafting, mixing in some WvW, or just using massive exp boosters/kill streak and hunting for places with good bonus exp.
the game works best when you get some good dynamic event chains, but many zones dont have people doing it, or have weak/boring chains.
hmmm, gw2 isnt that compelling in the beginning, from a story stand point. Id say the 10 level story gaps didnt help. I think they spread too little story through to many levels. The mid game, from say 40-70 begins to feel pretty repetitive. Orr is where you start to feel a greater sense of urgency.
mostly the desire to level up and get greater power is what pushes most people through the boring middle part.
the game probably would have worked better with a lot less levels, and less focus on heart completion as the main way of progressing your charachter. There are a lot of interesting side stories, but theres also a lot of non interesting ones.
the game works better when you play it more freely, I think when game launched, i usually did story missions way ahead of reccomended levels. Some were pretty hard because of this, but it felt less boring
these ships have sailed though, the game is old, and 1-80 wont change much, unless they, in future expansions create an alternate low to high level experience, like gw1 its a wrap.
I am not pro gear treadmill, but a lot of standard defenders of the no gear treadmill side are missing the real point of the gear treadmill, incentivizing game goals.
There are plenty of incentives for me.
Wrong game, wrong forum.
Try BDO, BnS, WoW, SWToR, FFXIV, Archage, insert any number of other mainstream MMOs currently on the market.
out of those games i have played, yeah i will agree that they overall do a way better job incentivizing their gameplay. Also note that bns, wow, and ffxiv are currently out performing gw2.
like i said, i dont think gear treadmill should be gw2 answer to this problem. But it is a problem that every game must deal with and solve.
See there’s a problem with pointing out games outperforming GW 2. SWTOR has gear grind and doesn’t out perform Guild Wars 2, same with BDO and ESO.
WoW outperforms everyone because it can advertise on a level no other game can. When Guild Wars 2 has William Shatner, and Mr T in their commericals, we can add it to the same conversation. No evidence at all that WoW is where it is because of a gear treadmill as opposed to spending millions on advertising. Last I saw there was no Guild Wars movie.
Final Fantasy also does some big advertising. They advertised at Wrestlemania for example. It’s a very old, very popular franchise. It is, after all, Final Fantasy XIV. There was also a Final Fantasy movie. And I’m not convinced it’s doing better in the west, which is key. Take a game like Lineage, which is doing better than Guild Wars 2, but they brought it out in the west and it died. It’s doing better than Guild Wars 2 because it’s more popular in the east. The west more likely has less players. Blade and Soul is doing well but again, it’s also more popular in the East, where it’s made it’s name.
The fact is, out of Western MMOs, or doing well in the West. I’m convinced it would be WoW, which is in a class by itself and always has been, followed by Guild Wars 2…which didn’t make it in the East, because a gear treadmill is expected there.
It’s hard to say that Guild Wars 2 isn’t doing better in those games in the West…which is where I live and the kind of game I want to play. And apparently it’s the main target market for the game.
no, ffxiv is doing just as well in the west than in the east. it has 32 na and eu servers and 32 jp servers.
all of wows advertising would not work if people did not want to come back. I will not claim that gw2 is great at marketing, but while im sure advertising is a factor, it is not the only factor
you talk about these games in abstract, speaking of the ones i have played, and speaking directly to how rewarding it feels to beat endgame content, they are well above gw2.
GW2 has things it does better than them, proper balance of reward, and incentives is not one of them.
this is something gw2 designers and devs need to explore. Like i said, they cant and shouldnt use those other games answers to the question, but they need to come up with something to make it feel better to do things other than farm whatever cash meta is currently the most efficient
Here is why i hated the elite specs and i had this opinion in beta when i wrote a few threads for WvW and PvP about it.
1- Boons
I do not know why they created so much boon spam. The rev alone just gives boons with no real thought process. Warrior got a ton of boons for going into beserk mode and a elite skill to get into it which means there was gonna be constant spams.I head butt you to go beserk, i gain might, fury, quickness. Because of another trait line i gain might on weapon swap as well as a condi clear. This means i go into beserk mode to do damage with said weapon and then out of beserk mode i will sit in shield stance so i can again go into my rotation for more boons to do the most damage while playing defensively.
That partially covers A class when it comes to boons but boons use to have to be set up now we just get it from hitting 1 button and bam 25 stacks of everything.
2- Build Diversity
No matter where you looked build diversity became worse and worse in all games modes when HOT released. It was Bunker Wars in PvP with 3 mesmers and 2 revs on 16 Pro Teams between NA and EU. It was Condi Wars in WvW where classes played condi so necros could play epi off of them killing whole zergs in seconds with no counter play.Now usually PvE is play what you want but not in HOT. The key to playing HOT is AOE and playing CC. Its why people complained about pocket raptors or X vet boss. I for one dont consider this skilled game play and i find it as acheap trick into forcing most players to play the same skills.
For raids you have seen the lack of creativity with revs, engys. thieves, necros and guardians not even having a role for the meta. At 1 point it was 2 mesmers, 2 warriors, 4 eles and 2 druids. You join a pug group and this was the team comp everyone wanted because it was easy play with very few down sides.
3- The introduction of Elite Specs
Bringing elite specs into a game that has been working very well for 4-5 years you would think Anet would allow its PvP players and WvW players to work towards elite specs.Anet didnt do to include other game modes with the new abilities. This drove alot of people crazy at the start of HOT and/or players who paly multiple chracters and have to unlock it on each character.
4- The Future
Many have touched on this but Anet straight up ran out of ideas to me when they brought in HOT. Adding class specific traits so a class can use a weapon in that trait line is really dumb.They needed to add new weapons in this HOT expansion so they werent just giving classes new toys to play with. We are getting to the point were engys have weapon kits they dont use and the next weapon coming out might be grenades. Like for ele who has elemental weapons (which they nerfed to the ground) such as axes, hammer and Greatsword. They are now simply going to give ele a sword, this just shows a lack of ability to incorporate new things into the game.
You need weapons that give meaningful changes to a class. This HOT expansion gave us spam especially on classes like thief with 5 dodge 5 and dodge. Who at Anet thought staff spams was a good idea? Or the DH traps F3- F1 pull into traps.
Elite specs shouldnt have been the be all end all, they needed to add to potentially different styles of game play in zergs, 5 man teams and 1 vs X situations in PvE.
Because they couldnt balance specs classes lost the identities they had for 4-5 years. Players were happy with the state of the classes before HOT, the only people happy now are those who really like raiding.
Anet dropped the ball hard imo for HOT, if they do the same for the next expansion many will not have a reason to play it.
Side note the story of GW2 has gone full GW2 EX-Machina please get that back on track for the next expansion
Can’t +1 hard enough.
Weapons should have been incorporated into the core specializations; elites just made into new trait lines for the sake of new options or to majorly change the profession itself and nothing more. Makes it super easy to balance around because then weapons are decoupled and so on.
Everyone who played a lot of PvP and WvW (especially WvW) will know build diversity dropped massively with HoT.
the fact that elites were generally higher powered is what dropped build diversity, not the elites themselves. For elites which gave mostly different playstyles, or paths, some of the core specs still served a purpose.
basically elite specs are pretty cool overall imo, the problem is the balance is off for many classes.
We’re talking about a game with little to no difficulty in the open world. We’re talking about a game where most skills are useless, clumsy or balanced for pvp, which makes them feel underwhelming and unsatisfying to use in PvE. We’re talking about a game that still has repetitive grinds just as much as any other MMO, just with cosmetics instead of more powerful items. We’re talking about a game that forces you to go into jumping puzzles to complete map achievements, and then had a kitten bad game engine that puts invisible barriers and invisible ground everywhere you jump into.
I can go on, but GW2 isn’t exactly the champion of “fun” games.
Thank you. Independent of the thread, this summed up the issues of GW2 quite succinctly.
Show me another mmorpg with such unique things to do outside of crafting and combat? These things are not that bad, yes the jump puzzles sometimes are a bit much but beyond that it is not as flawed as people make it out to be, they have fixed it over time and made it better.
Guildwars 2 has great activities. The world is amazing, the puzzles, everything. The problem IMO is the reward for the activities. There is no thrill. Everything is linear. You know you can do X activity and get Y reward. There is (almost) no OMG I JUST GOT Z REWARD INSTEAD OF Y REWARD. Y reward most often is a currency you farm for 10 years so you can upgrade the color and shape of your shirt.
I am confused how is there no rewards? Jump puzzles have vistas and etc, then you have chests for special jump puzzles, when was the last time you played? And linear? Are you kidding me? What? This is the most free roamish mmorpg I have played that is not an actual sandbox.
And if you wanted a more of an rng factor into those chests then you wont likely like the rng range, careful what you wish for, and if they had to do it for some they would have to do it for all.
when people post a complaint, you have to look not just at the words they use, but towards the overall meaning of what they are saying.
He isnt saying that they dont give you enough items for doing things, he is saying that whatever the reward is, it rarely feels compelling.
He feels random drops usually feel compelling, in comparison with gw2 drops.
When he says they feel linear, he is saying it feels like walking 6 miles to get something you want, as opposed to finding it in a junkyard.
basically he is a lot of endgame activities dont “feel” rewarding, not that they have no rewards
MMOs, powercreep and gear treadmills
For whatever set of reasons, the concept of a gear-grind power creep took hold in the MMORPG genre and essentially took it over, to the point that those who play, and those who develop games for the genre, apparently cannot even imagine an MMORPG being successful without it. We’re all familiar with the term “content locusts” – players that consume vertical progression in a game and then either complain that there is “nothing to do” or move on to other games. Developers often attempt to keep up with vertical progression content locusts by churning out more vertical progression every few months.
Obviously, thousands of games have been successful without power creep or gear treadmills. People pour millions of hours and billions of dollars into games that have no power creep gear treadmills. So why the myopic and obsessive focus on that particular mechanic in MMORPGs? It’s obviously not necessary for a game to be successful, and you can make a pretty good case that it drives a lot of potential customers away for many reasons:
1. It destroys any sense of “fair competition” between players.
2. It “forces” players to do things in the game they do not want to do (hence the term “grinding”) in order to stay competitive.
3. It forces players to play the game as if it were their primary job in order to stay competitive.
4. It funnels game structure and design concepts down a very narrow path, basically making the game all about the grind, regardless of what else is offered in the game, which is psychologically off-putting for players that don’t want to grind to stay competitive.
5. It biases development time towards trying to keep content locust type players satisfied, which is off-putting for those who are not interested in grinding.
6. It ruins many other potentially profitable and fun systems thout could be in such a game, like WvW or PvP that is competitive from a player skill point of view.
It’s like the genre has put itself in a power creep/gear treadmill straightjacket for no good reason and cannot conceive of anyone that wants to play an MMORPG without the strraightjacket on.
this editorial is fairly biased, it also ignores the main reason power creep exist in rpgs, which is that it is one of the prime focuses of the genre. An rpg allows your charachter to grow as you progress through the game. Whether it be a dungeon and dragons charachter sheet, a final fantasy 3 adventure, a never winter nights, etc.
so, now you take that paradigm, of customizing your charachter, getting more advanced by going on adventures, finding new power and abilities after conquering that enemy, and you put it a game that you want to theoretically never end.
the shifting goalpost then isnt some crazy thing, its the simplest answer to the question.
now, i will say, maybe its time for some new answers, or remixed designs, but lets not act like progression or the desire for it is some unnatural concept within the rpg game genre.
Accept that its natural for people to want growth and progress in an rpg, now think of ways to do it without the same pitfalls old designs fell into.
It’s natural for people to want growth and progress however it does not need to be through a traditional gear treadmill, such as the OP is asking for.
This game is attempting to give growth and progress through the Mastery system. Get enough mastery points and you can glide, auto loot, use oakhearts to leap tall buildings with a single bound. All of which is growth and progression and none of which is a gear treadmill.
yeah i think the mastery system is decent, but the mastery system is focused on expansions, and generally leads you through open world content, it doesnt translate that well as an incentive for instances. Also the mastery system we saw in HoT had a number of problematic implementations, that turned off many players.
MMOs, powercreep and gear treadmills
For whatever set of reasons, the concept of a gear-grind power creep took hold in the MMORPG genre and essentially took it over, to the point that those who play, and those who develop games for the genre, apparently cannot even imagine an MMORPG being successful without it. We’re all familiar with the term “content locusts” – players that consume vertical progression in a game and then either complain that there is “nothing to do” or move on to other games. Developers often attempt to keep up with vertical progression content locusts by churning out more vertical progression every few months.
Obviously, thousands of games have been successful without power creep or gear treadmills. People pour millions of hours and billions of dollars into games that have no power creep gear treadmills. So why the myopic and obsessive focus on that particular mechanic in MMORPGs? It’s obviously not necessary for a game to be successful, and you can make a pretty good case that it drives a lot of potential customers away for many reasons:
1. It destroys any sense of “fair competition” between players.
2. It “forces” players to do things in the game they do not want to do (hence the term “grinding”) in order to stay competitive.
3. It forces players to play the game as if it were their primary job in order to stay competitive.
4. It funnels game structure and design concepts down a very narrow path, basically making the game all about the grind, regardless of what else is offered in the game, which is psychologically off-putting for players that don’t want to grind to stay competitive.
5. It biases development time towards trying to keep content locust type players satisfied, which is off-putting for those who are not interested in grinding.
6. It ruins many other potentially profitable and fun systems thout could be in such a game, like WvW or PvP that is competitive from a player skill point of view.
It’s like the genre has put itself in a power creep/gear treadmill straightjacket for no good reason and cannot conceive of anyone that wants to play an MMORPG without the strraightjacket on.
this editorial is fairly biased, it also ignores the main reason power creep exist in rpgs, which is that it is one of the prime focuses of the genre. An rpg allows your charachter to grow as you progress through the game. Whether it be a dungeon and dragons charachter sheet, a final fantasy 3 adventure, a never winter nights, etc.
so, now you take that paradigm, of customizing your charachter, getting more advanced by going on adventures, finding new power and abilities after conquering that enemy, and you put it a game that you want to theoretically never end.
the shifting goalpost then isnt some crazy thing, its the simplest answer to the question.
now, i will say, maybe its time for some new answers, or remixed designs, but lets not act like progression or the desire for it is some unnatural concept within the rpg game genre.
Accept that its natural for people to want growth and progress in an rpg, now think of ways to do it without the same pitfalls old designs fell into.
All I have to say I play this game cause I want to play the game,
not to mandatory grind to be able to play the game again.. and then on completely new gear on ALL my alts which cost a lot of time versus a little stronger enemies who complately deminish all the effort I spent in getting the new gear, while simultaneously destroying all fun playing all old content, due to me being the same amount more overpowered due to my new stats.Gear mill = an illusion…
I like my legendaries, and the skins, I have also made a choice in equipping only 1 character in legendaries and keeping all my other 20+ characters in ascended….
I finished this game also on ranger first, so I did it on necro, mesmer, warrior, guardian, elementalist, thief and warrior once more….. and I made alts for WVW or completely different geared characters… WvW, condi or PvE, DPS , healers have different characters, I have only 4 or 5 characters with 2 or more armors, cause I also like alternative gameplay and other gamemodes…
yeah, so the question becomes, how to better make doing things in the game feel more purposeful, without creating the type of problems that gear or power upgrades create.
Ahh, I see! So it’s a trick used by game companies to add new challenging content that rewards your efforts!
Sort of. This new content isn’t any more challenging if there was no gear grind and the new content was balanced for that. Basically, the company introduces more challenging content, but immediately introduces tools to reduce that challenge to the same level the previous most challenging content had when it was new.
So, it’s a trick to make you believe the new content is more challenging when it isn’t. It’s a trick to make you believe you are moving forward when in fact you are standing still. It’s a trick to make you glad for the fact that the developers keep constantly taking your accomplishments away from you and forcing you to redo them again.
you are missing the point of a treadmill. a treadmill isnt designed to make you believe you are moving forward. It is designed so you can keep running. People actually want to beat those dungeons a bunch of times, so they need the game to give them a reason to do so.
also the reality is, most games with dungeon progression arent just increasing stats, they are also increasing difficulty, and complexity of the encounter.
actually one of the biggest flaws with the gear treadmill, as anet call it, is that it isnt really a treadmill. Its more like a track that they keep building on. This analogy shows its flaw in that people get left behind, and newbs end up with an insanely long road to get to the end, or catch up.
it has advantages and disadvantages
I am not pro gear treadmill, but a lot of standard defenders of the no gear treadmill side are missing the real point of the gear treadmill, incentivizing game goals.
There are plenty of incentives for me.
based on what you have posted, i dont think the incentives are properly designed into the game for you. Your complaints about hot maps, and masteries shownthat you feel the incentives are in properly allocated, and you dont feel like the game incentivizes the proper playstyles and goals accurately.
its not a question of the number or magnitude of incentives, its about designing systems that make players feel like playing the game well (as it defines itself) is worthwhile.
I am not pro gear treadmill, but a lot of standard defenders of the no gear treadmill side are missing the real point of the gear treadmill, incentivizing game goals.
There are plenty of incentives for me.
Wrong game, wrong forum.
Try BDO, BnS, WoW, SWToR, FFXIV, Archage, insert any number of other mainstream MMOs currently on the market.
out of those games i have played, yeah i will agree that they overall do a way better job incentivizing their gameplay. Also note that bns, wow, and ffxiv are currently out performing gw2.
like i said, i dont think gear treadmill should be gw2 answer to this problem. But it is a problem that every game must deal with and solve.
Well it’s certainly easier to max your points now since you can earn more achievements in the new Living Story zones than you need to buy the new masteries from those zones. It should help make it a lot easier for those who hate doing adventures.
That said there are a couple of adventures that are very easy to do, and one that’s even easy to get gold in (maybe two or three). I don’t have gold in most of the adventures don’t have silver in others, but I’m sitting on 186 mastery points.
But we’ve seen more than one person who just started HoT post that the zones are quire busy, much to their surprise after reading some of the stuff on these forums.
I get that some people don’t like HoT, or the mastery system, but that doesn’t make either of them bad, and it’s absolutely possible to get the mastery points you need.
Again if anyone is on a US server and they need help getting into HOT or getting HOT masteries or unlocking their elite spec, I’d be happy to help them.
I have to agree with this, masterys are not to hard to get. And i do notice that i probably hate the mastery system more due to HOT breaking WvW and PvP.
HOT increased the speed of the game alot and alot of my guild members did not like it in there PvE.
I think it just got to a point where people feel like they needed masterys to progress but they were not enjoying the journey. This doesnt go for the players who like the speed and enjoy the content. Yet i also agree that alot of the complaints seem to be more about just playing the game. Yet feel they cant, i personally lost some interest since i didnt have enough MP to use the spider man skill.
HOT just brings out alot of frustration IMO.
i think the overall numbers and ideas of Hot and masteries arent bad, but they didnt actually tailor the system well.
heres what i feel they did.
picked out interesting places to go and things to do in each map, then attached mastery points to them.
created a simplified structure of reward tracks for each zone
tied abilities to experience and mastery points.
it was done too arbitrarily. the problem is there are a lot of points in the process, particularly early on, where you dont have enough mastery points to progress, or enough experience, or you used it on some mastery you didnt need yet, unknowingly. This makes adventures seem like you must do them, even though there is an excess of points in hot, instead of feeling like an option for getting more in depth in the area.
so its a good idea, but they tried to use a fairly automated way of implementing it, when it really needed, at least at the beginning, to be designed based on the game.
its like if you took a metroid or castlevania game, and just put all the upgrades in a menu, needing you to kill an arbitrarily increasing number of monsters, and go to random point on the map.
basically they should have designed the mastery system based on the maps/content, not pasted it on top of it
Adding new tiers of gear (i.e. higher stats) is a trick used by game companies to fool people into thinking that they are being rewarded but what they are really doing is stealing money from you every month to play the same content over and over.
Ahh, I see! So it’s a trick used by game companies to add new challenging content that rewards your efforts!
No, I’m afraid it is a trick used by game companies to keep people coming back. MMO business models require regular player logins. Not only does a populated world convince other people the game is thriving, but — whether they use a sub, sub plus store, “optional” sub plus store or just store — players who aren’t playing aren’t paying.
The human brain produces chemicals when faced with challenge and/or new experiences. Those chemicals produce an experience that we think of as fun. MMO content tends to lose its newness faster than developers can throw new stuff into the game. So, developers substitute anticipation of reward for the newness and challenge.
Consider the term “On farm.” This term essentially translates to, “We’ve beaten the challenge. Now, we are repeating the content we’ve mastered over and over ad nauseam until everyone gets what they need. Then, we can progress to the next all-too-short window of newness/challenge, which will be followed by more months of farming.”
Developers could just push out new content and challenges as often as is possible for them and the fun factor produced by the newness would be exactly the same, both in terms of quality and longevity. The thing is, that would mean players would leave when the content gets old, and that doesn’t work for the bottom line. Every time people leave, some of them don;t come back, Thus, carrots on sticks.
The other thing is, different companies use different reward structures. GW2 originally aimed at cosmetics as the endgame rewards. This attracted the people who dislike the repetitive nature of gear treadmill games. However, there are people who like stat chases (imo, it’s crap, but ommv).
So, what we have in GW2 is a compromise. There’s level progression, but not past 80. The idea that every player would have max stats by 80 was abandoned for the Ascended pursuit, but so far there’s no stated intent to go beyond Ascended. So, there’s not a new gear tier every (insert time period). Elite Specs and the HoT gear prefixes are technically horizontal progression, but are considered more powerful.
ANet is using compromise because while they want the game to appeal to players who like vertical progression, they also don’t want to lose the members of their core fan base who came to GW2 to escape the treadmill. As is often the case with compromise, people on both sides are not happy. However, just maybe enough people are in the middle to make the compromise worthwhile. Time will tell.
it isnt really a trick, its actually a necessity of the game design. What you are missing is people WANT to have a reason to beat it repeatedly. the design’s reward structures have to encourage people to play the game, or at very least, not make it feel less rewarding.
i am not saying that in every game they find that right balance of matching people’s desire to repeat with an appropriate amount of reward, but that goal isnt a trick, its actually an integral part of designing an enjoyable system.
I am not pro gear treadmill, but a lot of standard defenders of the no gear treadmill side are missing the real point of the gear treadmill, incentivizing game goals.
gear treadmill, is not synonymous with grind, you can have grind with no treadmill, as gw2 clearly shows. Gear treadmill, is how most developers answer the question of continuing the game.
my point is this, regardless of whether gw2 has gear treadmill or not, they need to answer the question of how they can incentivize content, and set up compelling goals.
some of this is a war of perception, and while many of you will say its the player’s fault for having different expectations, i think its primarily the game’s fault for not communicating, or defining their overall reward paradigm. In general, gw2 doesnt feel very rewarding, not because they dont give you tons of crap, but because most of the crap they give you seems like junk. You dont particularly want it, you probably werent looking for it, and it doesnt usually bring you much closer to your goals.
the flipside of this, is because the game rewards are poorly utilized to incentivize play, many people are happy they can do what they want and get access to everything. so there are some advantages.
overall though i think gw2 needed a better means of making people feel like there is a reason to do specific content.
Actually i was thinking about toughness/vitality i think the only way to make it interesting is if they tie some kind of scalling to these status as damage bonus. Like lets say a skill that have a 1.2 power scalling, we could get a skill that have 0.4 toughness as bonus damage or a skill that sacrifice your hp and deal 10x the hp sacrified as bonus dmg.
Just like some mobas have with different kind of scalling damage.But as passive damage reduction, there is nothing they can do about it without making something trivial and non interactive, which is very boring.
they could give it some active defensive uses, and probably a bit of control use. They could also have some limited skills which scale in effectiveness the more dmg you mitigate or something similar.
However, is it worth it though? thats the real question, is there a good reason to bother?
At this point we have the classic builds, (dps, healer, utility) but we don’t have a true tank.
The “tanks” in this game tanks pretty much only use toughness to keep aggro and not really for damage mitigation as the stat is designed to do. Also the tanking person’s build is heavily focused on providing buffs to the party and not on mitigating damage. This is because they can use class skills/traits/dodging to avoid the majority of the heavy damage and will rely on the healers to keep them topped off for the damage they do receive.
I’m going to challenge the assumptions here.
- Tanks in harder MMO instanced content have one job — keeping the boss’ attention. If a GW2 tank is doing that, then GW2 has true tanks.
- Only if the tank in GW2 raids is never hit does toughness play no role. It’s a passive stat, which does its job on every hit.
- Tanks in other games also have damage mitigation skills, albeit usually on long CD’s. If a GW2 tank is using active abilities in addition to absorbing the occasional hit they’re doing more than tanks in other games. From having tanked in other MMO’s, I’d say being the focus of a boss’ attacks in GW2 is more demanding.
- I’ve neither seen nor heard of a game with serious instanced PvE in which the tank was not being healed by a healer. In fact, the damage mitigation abilities such tanks do have are mostly reserved for a boss’ Sunday Punch or for a possible gap in the healer’s ability to keep the tank up.
- What is wrong with a tank also providing buffs? GW2 buffs are a much bigger part of the game than in other MMO’s I’ve played. They last much less time, and thus require more upkeep.
I’d like to see a better explanation for why GW2 should shift to more passive tanking. I don’t know about anyone else but just taking hits constantly while depending on a healbot was boring.
i generally agree with you, but id say that your experience with tanking in MMOs is not representitive. They now design it so although they are being healed, active use of skills is still required in general. FFXIV i tanked some of the mid endgame stuff, and it was just as many things to keep track of as anything else, including GW,
in fact in reality, the toughness/defense stat aspect of it, is basically a given nowadays, because gear checks and gear scores. You have no gear choice in most other MMOs so really defense stats are just a measure of your progress as a tank, rather than a choice of how to execute a tank role.
As you say, at this point there probably isnt too much difference from a top level in the gw tank, and the other games. I guess people just like the idea of being able to take hits better than anyone else, and the feeling that people will value you for it.
But would that be worth it? From what people say now, raids have many ways in which people can pull them off. That seems like a better paradigm to me.
To be honest, I don’t really understand everybody complaining about masteries being locked behind certain activities. You bought Heart of Thorns knowing that it would be this way, so if you don’t like doing adventures / jumping puzzles / whatever else, you should either have accepted and consented that you won’t have every mastery unlocked, or shouldn’t have purchased the expansion at all. And in case you didn’t actually read through what kind of features will HoT have, then, well…
Notice that this latter article (which is referenced at the bottom of the official feature description) was created in February 2015, more than half a year before the release of HoT.
Quoting from the article (highlighting done by me):‘To train a specific Mastery track, you must first unlock it by spending Mastery points. Mastery points are awarded for completing various pieces of game content. Things like completing a chapter in your personal story, completing certain achievements, reaching hard-to-find locations, overcoming challenging encounters, excelling at adventures found within the Heart of Maguuma, or earning 100% completion for a map will award Mastery points. Each Mastery point can be earned once per account, so while Mastery points allow you to unlock Mastery tracks, they are also an indicator of how much of the game you’ve experienced.’
While adventures are certainly mentioned, it is difficult to determine from those blogs just what adventures were going to be. I expected instanced content more like delves in ESO than mini-games in which the build I put thought and effort into being supplanted by something else.
i think it was clear adventures was going to be closer to mini games than what you imagined.
i dont think much actual rewarding gameplay can be tied to an increase in the use of toughness. Its passive.
Think about it, what interesting mechanics can come from toughness? Its basically exactly the same as unavoidable agony, just a gear check.
If you want to make toughness interesting, tie it to actual gameplay/skill usage.
they are also an indicator of how much of the game you’ve experienced
I quoted this part specifically to show that it doesn’t make sense for people to be able to unlock all masteries from doing only a single aspect of the game.
Besides, who looks at other peoples toons to compare themself too. I know I dont, I’m only interested in what I have accomplished.
its not about comparing oneself to others, its about having incentives for achieving milestones in the expansion.
why should you get every ability from hot, without achieving a lot of HoT goals?
lets be clear here, if you just want to ecperience hot, you dont need every mastery, hate adventures? dont get adrenal mushrooms, itzel leadership, exalted purification, exalted gathering, nuhoch alchemy, which adds up to about 75 points.
since they have a total of 190 and they only use 137, you really dont have to do a large portion of them, unless you just like completing everything, in which case, why are you upset?
I can only imagine what MMO it is out there that lets people get away with playing zero-skill maximum defense face tank gear and get away with it.
In their defense, in other games, being defensive has many more mechanics woven into it, and more benefit for them to play well in those encounters.
tanking endgame content in FFXIV for example is not easier in general, than doing dps or healing.
The problem is: every class in GW2 basically the same.
There is a lack of character variation because game companies try so hard to balance all characters to be exactly the same. It is even worse in Guild Wars 2 because there are no dedicated healers or tanks or dps. Every in-game character is all of those things which make them all basically the same.
Ages ago, when I played other mmo’s, there was a lot more distinction from one class to the next:
[]A Cleric/Priest was ‘only’ good at healing and sucked at dps and tanking was out of the question.
[]A Warrior/Fighter was tough as stones but had very little dps and had no magic at all in order to cast healing spells.
[]A Rogue/Thief excelled only at dps and could typically one-shot an unsuspecting player or mob. The thief was very fragile though and great care and cunning was required to play one.So, I think you get the point.
The point being, every class in GW2 is basically ‘exactly’ the same.
Everyone can cast magic spells.
Everyone has the capacity to do tons of dps.
And even some non-traditional classes are able to tank a boss…not that ‘tanks’ actually exist in this game, because they don’t.There is one class in GW2…it is the DPS/Healer.
If anyone reading this has ever played vanilla wow then you know exactly where I am coming from. Back then, if a rogue in stealth would one-shot me, I expected that to happen. It was part of the game. However, a rogue could never heal a dungeon party or raid. There were definitive ‘positives and negatives’ to every class.
Unless classes get some real distinction from one another, this game is going to always feel very bland and boring.
its true that those games had more defined roles, but there is nothing to suggest that more defined roles = more enjoyment in gameplay. I certainly don’t enjoy being forced to take unavoidable damage, so that healers serve a purpose, and having virtually no interaction with enemy behavior and attacks so that tanks serve a purpose.
but that is subjective, some do enjoy it.
what i can say, is i dont see the need for this specific game to be based on those old roles.
If ascended armor came in increments, then Runes could be problematic. If there were long enough delays between increments, then one would want to apply runes. If the increments came quickly enough for runes to not be an issue, then I’d think “why bother” would be the attitude.
I think things are fine as they are.
runes should always have been more removable
I just don’t get that mentality; a condi-damage can’t equate to a certain amount of a person’s HP … but if that’s a burst from a power build, no one has any problem with that.
That may be one of the biggest unclear thing about the whole DPS scene. I’d add : “there’s not enough clears to cleanse the condi application”. That’s true. There also isn’t “enough clears to cleans the CC application from power builds”. Yet, the stunlock issue doesn’t pop every week as condi does.
power builds and cc builds are not one and the same, cc access seems to be more tied to class than damage type.
True about the class thing. Yet, you can consider power mesmer, berserker, daredevil, and even dragonhunter to a certain extent : all these rely a lot on CC application to correctly land their rotation without too much disruption from the dummy in front of them…
One can say that condi builds are braindead, but not as much as power builds consisting in handcuffing the opponent behind his chair to burst him without interference.
cc isnt really power burst style in this game, you generally give up burst to get cc skills. that said, in order to do damage for melee, they either need to have great chase, or lockdown opponents, so they usually give up some burst.
that said, locking down an opponent isnt easy for melee in this game, and dif classes have access to different types.
mesmer gets a decent amount of daze, but that doesnt lock you down, you still have access to movement and dodges. most of the skills that daze can be avoided, one needs to have a succesful counter first.
basically yeah, they need to lock you down first, but that in and of itself is generally more difficult to achieve, it makes it like a 3 step process, get close, land cc, dps.
where as most conditions are ranged, so need less cc, so its just, dps.
Attrition is the breaking down of an enemy over time
Not really possible in the current combat paradigm. If you can’t kill your enemy before their skills go back off cooldown, then the fight practically resets. You have to either have dps greater than their healing capability (which can be really high for any defensive build), or be capable of a fast high-damage burst. Slowly chipping off their hp simply doesn’t work. It’s just a recipe for losing the fight.
attrition mechanics are still possible, but yes, it is rarer. Im glad people can agree that condi is basically similar burst now.
the problem is condi is similar burst, but its way easier to do usually, and its more likely to always be effective. (due to armor toughness considerations)
the design choices they made basically means they needed much more condi applications, and condi needs high fast dps, to be considered an attrition battle. They basically either need some abilities that dont cleanse or a buff that ramps up their abilities the more succesful they are.
the other problem is that pve and pvp have two different goals in balancing. high end pve needs all dps types to be able to attain similar dps over a long fight.
pvp needs to balance not only long term dps, but also difficulty, reactability, short term dps, etc.
I just don’t get that mentality; a condi-damage can’t equate to a certain amount of a person’s HP … but if that’s a burst from a power build, no one has any problem with that.
That may be one of the biggest unclear thing about the whole DPS scene. I’d add : “there’s not enough clears to cleanse the condi application”. That’s true. There also isn’t “enough clears to cleans the CC application from power builds”. Yet, the stunlock issue doesn’t pop every week as condi does.
power builds and cc builds are not one and the same, cc access seems to be more tied to class than damage type.
First things first, I’m indifferent about gear treadmills, I’m only proposing this idea for mere discourse.
Right now we have Exotic and Ascended. Many, including myself really hate the time-gated format of crafting ascended. So how about the process of crafting to the final ascended piece was the gear treadmill.
Let’s say there were 5 steps to getting your completed ascended piece. With every step you get a wearable piece with better stats than the previous step. Thus, step 1 ascended would be better than exotic, and step 2 ascended would be better than both exotic and step 1, so on and so forth. This would ultimately mean that step 5 of the ascended crafting process would be the best of the best (and what we currently have).
I think it would be cool if part of the steps had some sort of exploring factor, similar to precursors, as opposed to just needing crafting materials. We can still time-gate everything but this way it feels like over the course of that month or two you are slowly progressing gear wise. Which, ultimately, is the goal; to satisfy those that are looking for a gear treadmill.
what you seem to be suggesting isnt really a gear treadmill, just some more steps. The treadmill suggests a moving target that changes constantly.
problem is, if the end point is the same, and the time it takes is the same, will it actually feel fullfilling to get so many tiny gains?
also, those that want a treadmill, are more feeling a loss of purpose after reaching max status, more steps wont help them, they want to periodically have the game give them more progress and power.
The thing is, if they made HoT as easy as core maps, then all the people would just deplete core content and all the new players would have been leveling in empty maps with no veteran around to show them how the game operates.
No matter what style the expansion maps were, players would still be playing in those maps as well as core Tyria.
And in HoT there is no guarantee of a vet player showing anyone the ropes. I have been in several failed AB metas lately where after it failed many “vets” criticized people doing things wrong. My comment in Map Chat was “why didn’t you tell people what to do while the event was running instead of waiting until after it failed?”
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. As in for “showing the ropes” I wasn’t talking about HoT maps. I personally think that for any new player starting the game, it feels motivating to see players appearing as “vets” (due to their skin) still go back in core tyria. And that could only really happen if Anet devs, in the first place, did not make HoT content a carbon copy of how core maps operated.
I’m still not understanding – you think that vets wouldn’t go back to core Tyria no matter what style the expansion maps were? We still have dailies…
Didn’t ArenaNet kinda tell us they didn’t want the Vets in core when they killed the Champ Trains?
If memory serves me correctly folks were whining about the trains (Vocal Minority) so they killed it. Seems like the maps started losing population shortly afterwards.
They certainly didn’t want the Champ Train, but that isn’t the same as not wanting vets. By having dailies in core maps they do invite everyone to go back. But because events are spread throughout the map, instead of everyone going to a single champ, it is less toxic.
Well I afraid that’s what happened, and to be honest myself and my friends and Guild mates only go through there when we level a new character. Even with a few more events thrown in it just isn’t worthwhile.
Sorry not trying to be negative but when I have time to play I want to maximize my return for time used.
I’ll redo a few dungeons 20 times before I will roam in the low level maps, just not worthwhile. Make it worthwhile and more Vets will return, until then…………………………………
they shouldnt be trying to get vets in starter zones, unless they like newbie playstyle
Do you really want them to incentivize the most hardcore people to hang out in the lowest easiest zones?
I would like anet to scrap all the things they use HoT masteries for, and make them achieves for those who are completionists, and just make it a straight-line approach to xp leveling.
Then you d have an incentive system for exploration, that rewards you for staying at the most exp profitable event in whatever expansion its tied to.
Some times design isnt so much about X being awesome, its about Y leading to degenerative play.
I do think mastery can be tweaked, perhaps by better placing mastery abilities that you need for progress, or perhaps less lines, or let you select which mastery per line.
but an exp bar alone isnt a good way to incentivize a new area. Keep in mind gw2 doesnt have a lot of more powerful gear/special gear buffs, etc, which are the type of things games usually use to get you to go into various areas.
mastery points in HoT are not that bad, mastery points in tyria are kinda bare. In hot they seem to have more extra points, and they have masteries that are not that important, so you can skip, unless you are a completionist, in which case you d be trying to do everything anyway
but the thing im unsure of, if you hate hot, why do you need mastery points? They are for HoT content. They give you access to more of hot, and make exploring hot easier.
while i think mastery system needs tweaks and improvements, its actually over all, a really logical system. it rewards people who like to do the content with more access and depth to the content.
???
All of the HoT Masteries are also required in the maps AFTER HoT: Bloodstone Fen, Ember Bay, Bitterfrost, Lake Doric, Draconis Mons.
those are actually HoT maps, they give mastery points which can be used for any HoT mastery line. Im not sure, can non HoT players even access them?
regardless, they give hot mastery points, which you can use to unlock wallows,
I counted 34 mastery points available in the new content, 17 are required for ancient magic
that leaves 17 mastery points to use to pick up things you may have wanted from Hot
nuhock wallows needs 3 points
bouncing mushrooms needs 1
so basically you can get most of what you need to traverse those maps, by playing those maps.
But like i said, these maps are an extension of HoT anyhow, much like season 2 ls missions are extensions of core, and give core mastery points.
(edited by phys.7689)
mastery points in HoT are not that bad, mastery points in tyria are kinda bare. In hot they seem to have more extra points, and they have masteries that are not that important, so you can skip, unless you are a completionist, in which case you d be trying to do everything anyway
but the thing im unsure of, if you hate hot, why do you need mastery points? They are for HoT content. They give you access to more of hot, and make exploring hot easier.
while i think mastery system needs tweaks and improvements, its actually over all, a really logical system. it rewards people who like to do the content with more access and depth to the content.
Being hard to avoid is the trade off for having a relatively long time to react to the damage you get from it. I have YET to play an MMO where DoT damage didn’t have that trade off. The primary people I see complaining about DoT’s are burst power twitch guys and to be honest, I think it’s rather stupid for an PVP MMO to have that kind of PVP model.
and thats the problem, its bursty now, you dont have a long time to react, and you have little counterplay after popping your clears.
its not DOT any more its easier safer stronger burst.
The biggest problem with condition builds are the fact you only need the one stat for the damage, where as power builds require 3 stats in harmony.
The biggest improvement to how condition damage works would be to require power and precision to up it’s damage rather than just condition damage alone. You want a powerful condi build, you’ve got to have pow/prec to get that. How to go about reworking that is up for debate.
What ? This isn’t very accurate.
A condition build using just Condition Damage doesn’t do hardly any DPS, the people you see doing really high DPS with condition builds are running a three stat combination of Condition Damage, Condition Duration/Concentration, and Precision to land conditions on critical hits/sigils (Warrior, Ranger, Guardian, Engi, etc.).
Viper gear is used for those three stats, not the additional Power.
If any classes can do high DPS with a stock “Condition Damage” build (such as full Dire), then its something very class (and usually, weapon) specific (say, scepter Necro?) and not something that is global to the game itself …
The people who critisize condition builds as being “easy” have clearly never had to make one or seen it countered by an enemy player or encounter.
actually most classes i have played condition builds are easier to apply and maintain. there are a few classes with complex condi mechanics, but they are the exception, not the rule. Condi duration isnt really needed for many condi builds, and in pvp, its use is generally not worth it.
the condi fix the op has in mind has some merits, but its too simple. condi removal will be extremely powerful.
really condi overall is hard to solve due to various reasons.
i think for condi to reaaly be balanced and interesting, the basic design may need some alterations, it needs more counterplay and strategy if its going to be equivalent to best dps/burst.
Can’t cleanse all the power dmg someone does, but you can cleanse condi dmg after already being hit by it.
And you can block power damage.
You can block condi applications as well, you know. For the condi to be applied, the attack must hit first.
condi application is often on instant skills, ground skills, auto attacks, channels etc. basically it was designed to be very hard to avoid. it was designed to shift gameplay to an attrition battle.
condi honestly has always been a problem, its just really hard to fit into the game without messing something up. the type of design it should have for pve, isnt a very good idea for pvp
meh
I disagree with people who say the new zones are dead because you need LFG to get to them, because that’s how they were designed. It doesn’t make them dead, any mote than it makes any other form of content that needs coordination and people dead to use tools to find people to do it.
I don’t believe this to be the full story. The way mega server shards seem to propagate, and the number of people actually needed to complete zone metas says to me that ANet designed meta events to function independently of the LFG. If people stayed put, the mega server algorithms would likely result in most shards having enough people to advance a zone’s meta event. However, if people leave a zone to flock to fuller zones, this results in other shards being under-populated.
Throw in that there are (likely) a lot more followers than leaders. Even if there are enough people to complete an event, if the zone does not look organized, people will go to one that does. There is overwhelming evidence on these and other forums that as the MMO consumer base has aged, convenience has become of paramount importance.
I believe that the only way to ensure that mega shards don’t appear dead would be for convenience tools like the LFG and Join In to be removed. If that occurred, people might step up. I say might because while that’s what used to happen with dedicated servers, we also saw people guesting even back then. Guesting was a preview of the mega-server/LFG paradigm that’s in place now. I also say might because once a developer gives players convenience, at least some of them will rage and quit if that convenience is removed rather than reverting to a play-style where initiative and enterprise prevail.
Convenience, short attention spans and a desire for rapid gratification also cause at least some of the antipathy towards the LFG “solution” to “dead” zones. Once someone experiences the frustration of a “zone is full” notice when trying to Join In, the willingness to keep trying or come back later can get trumped by the myriad other forms of entertainment available on demand or other life concerns.
I really don’t think that there is a developer-side solution to the problem. ANet cannot remove the LFG or Join In without earning even more criticism than “dead” HoT maps bring. They cannot change peoples’ natures to make them choose a path of greater resistance. At best, they might be able to tweak the algorithms which open and close shards or change zone caps. I’m not convinced that either numerical manipulation would be better, though.
TL:DR: Mega-servers are designed so that most maps will have enough people to progress the meta. The “dead maps” issue’s primary cause is LFG/Join In, and there is little to nothing ANet can do to fix it. As seems to be par for the course in MMO’s these days, convenience is both the cause of complaints about the issue and the cause of the issue.
The meta event server interaction, isnt as simple as having enough people. You need people who actually either want to do the meta, or dont want to mess it up.
Scaling means you can do it with few people, relatively, but you cant do it with a few people if people are randomly entering the area, or doing some of the dynamic events tied to the meta, or are there, but not doing the needed objectives.
Basically the real key to the megaserver lfg channel surf, is to find a place where there arent too many randoms who will have a detrimental effect on the attempt.
I think the only truely viable solution is actually to give people choice. They main problem with the lfg work around, is that
A) people who dont know, dont realize why their maps are dead
B)The implementation wasnt meant for what it is used for, so it is not user friendly and is not effecient when used for server stacking.
In some way, let people Select whether to join a Meta focused Map, or an exploration(ill use this as a catch all phrase for everything else people may want to do on a map)
This will make it clear to players that maps arent actually dead, and will allow people with similar goals to be grouped together.
Essentially, one of the biggest problems with megaserver, is it puts people together on the wrong basis, its more important to group people with similar playing goals, than in arbitrary categories like servers/friendlist. as well as the fact that peoples goals may change from moment to moment.
Mounts can benefit this game only if they are implemented with mount specific combat. That may be interesting and have some potential. But to having mounts as fancy visual buffs to movespeed as they are in all generic MMOs after WoW I say “no thanks”. They do not benefit the gameplay in any way, and old maps will feel smaller than they really are because of the overpowered mount speed.
As for the flying mounts, we have gliders, that are much more fun to use than WoW-ish “floating baloon” mounts.Nuhoch Wallows, Thermal Tubes, Skritt Tunnels, Ley-Lines, Oakheart Essences. New types of transportation were used to replace many waypoints. And that’s exactly what mounts would do. Claiming that we don’t need mounts is just as claiming that we don’t need the systems listed above because we could use more waypoints instead.
Well, no. Because mounts are just a +% of movespeed with none new interesting mechanics. Masteries and glider on the other hand give the player access to unique mechanics. Gliders and oakheart essence can take the player to places he could never access on foot and create combat situations like fight with Mordemoth. Mounts are just running with extra speed buff. Nothing new, nothing exiting, just a fancy model to stick between your legs. Unless, of course, these mounts come with some new mechanics, like mount combat or ability to jump across chasms.
mounts arent always generic movement speed buffs.
a good mount changes the way you interact with the game world, giving you new, hopefully pleasurable experience.
this, is as i said, IF they are good mounts.
What game have done that mate?
I cant think of one were they arent just a speed buff.
FFXIV chocobos, can fight along side you, have different skills depending how you raise them, can participate in races, and eventually access new areas with flight
black desert, have a variety of skills for CC, unique player skills while using a mount, races, access to jumping, and depending on how they are raised, can turbo/ drift. They have certain real builds that people need certain mounts to pull off. the movement controls are different with acceleration/brake/turns as opposed to wasd run.
RO knight gets access to mount giving it new skills and abilities.
Wildstar hoverboards, which add double jump, sprint and ramping functionality.
GTA IV, access to cars, helicopters, bikes etc.
and about some leaks.
I mean some times its just a speed boost, but thats up to the developer, many games have given them new functionality/control schemes/ abilities. And i have it on good authority that their mounts will not be a vanilla speed boost. How good they actually be who knows, but i wouldnt assume they would be garbage.
Mounts can benefit this game only if they are implemented with mount specific combat. That may be interesting and have some potential. But to having mounts as fancy visual buffs to movespeed as they are in all generic MMOs after WoW I say “no thanks”. They do not benefit the gameplay in any way, and old maps will feel smaller than they really are because of the overpowered mount speed.
As for the flying mounts, we have gliders, that are much more fun to use than WoW-ish “floating baloon” mounts.Nuhoch Wallows, Thermal Tubes, Skritt Tunnels, Ley-Lines, Oakheart Essences. New types of transportation were used to replace many waypoints. And that’s exactly what mounts would do. Claiming that we don’t need mounts is just as claiming that we don’t need the systems listed above because we could use more waypoints instead.
Well, no. Because mounts are just a +% of movespeed with none new interesting mechanics. Masteries and glider on the other hand give the player access to unique mechanics. Gliders and oakheart essence can take the player to places he could never access on foot and create combat situations like fight with Mordemoth. Mounts are just running with extra speed buff. Nothing new, nothing exiting, just a fancy model to stick between your legs. Unless, of course, these mounts come with some new mechanics, like mount combat or ability to jump across chasms.
mounts arent always generic movement speed buffs.
a good mount changes the way you interact with the game world, giving you new, hopefully pleasurable experience.
this, is as i said, IF they are good mounts.
tbh the only complaint i have with the new legendaries after making hope is the event failure requirements. i take no issue with bind on acquire and i agree that its silly to be able to just plain drop 2k gold for a purple weapon. but…
lol i am not a tp baron lol shoo
try formulating an argument without attacking my character, like this:
anet screwed up with the hard time gates. they made 2 extremely repetitive systems that take onerously and arbitrarily long times to complete for no other reason than to draw it out for everyone. if they want us to show mastery of the content, the collections and 1/4-1/2 as many repetitions in each system would suffice. if they want us to keep playing the game, come up with a cheap way to draw us back in over and over (like sab reskins) and dole it out every few months as new rewards for doing the same thing again and again. both of these would drastically improve raid rewards.
i identify a problem, i offer solutions, and i dont call you a kittening elitist when you say i did it so its fine. stop calling me a tp baron, stop calling me a whiner.
and speaking of sab, i ground out both of moto’s infusions asap (in their first year) and already had the majority of the green skins because i had been grinding multiples of several pre wardrobe. those are as time gated as legendary armor and i think its a mistake to make things that hard gated and while i dont have a suggestion to mitigate the arbitrary waiting, if someone else started kittening about them the only thing i would have to say is “yep too arbitrarily hard gated, not fun” and i would not go around saying “haha cant just buy it” or “i have them already so its fine”, and yet that is what 2 of the 3 main counterarguments boil down to in all of these threads complaining about legendary insights. the only one that actually has some weight to it is that “the time gates keep people playing”. but are you having fun getting your maximum 8% / week? or 4% if its not your first set? idk about you, but limiting progress to be that slow makes me want to quit games, not play them. after i got the moto infusions, i was burnt out on all of gw2 for a month. after i did the pvp collections, i basically quit it for 2 seasons because 3 games / day for 60 days was stupid. after getting all my fractal pages, i burnt out on fractals so hard that i still only rarely do even the t4 dailies even though pages are from recommended where prior to the release of ad infinitum i had done at least the highest fractal daily a minimum of about 4 times a week for 2 years. the common thread in all of these is that they are hard time gated arbitrarily, either daily or weekly, and limited availability makes it even worse. and maybe thats just me. but all of these threads plaguing this subforum were not started by me.
yes anet is bad at balancing and hiding their grinds, this is probably because game design usually only has limited control over itemization. From what they have said, game designers design content, and itemization/economy teams decide how to impliment the grind.
imo this often leads to content that doesnt line up with its rewards. And systems that suck the life out of the experiences attached to them.
Tbh 25-30 day weird timegate is a bigger issue than op imagining things.
the LI timegate is noticeably longer than the provision timegate.
its a 24 week time gate on you second set, the 4 week one on provisioner tokens is worse.
now if your beef with provisioner tokens is you hate doing any open world, or spending gold, that may be valid, but thats not the main timegate issue.
NCsoft net plunges 74% on weak game sales.
http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/article/article.aspx?aid=3033273&cloc=etc%7Cjad%7Cgooglenews
Kind of says it all.
eh, sales are low because they didnt release anything. They are focused on creating new content/games. That doesnt really say much. Time will tell if their new stuff sicceeds, or flops, that will be the thing to watch for
riiight then, maybe you want to actually read up a bit on the context of the survey and who completed the survey and why, its not a conspiracy theory to win an argument on a gaming forum for example. Alternatively, it doesn’t take a huge leap in imagination to correlate this against the gaming population in the 70s, 80,s 90’s, or even the player range – say 12-90. my original point is gamers have experience, they didnt come into GW2 cold, they know how to work things out.
ps there are other averages than median.
“av·er·age
?av(?)rij
noun
1.
a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.
“the housing prices there are twice the national average”
synonyms: mean, median, mode"“Other averages” are not called “average”. There are other specific terms to represent different means of showing aggregate data. A professional entity would use the appropriate word. So if they say “average” they either mean “average” or they don’t know what they are doing.
although i understand your point, the link you give shows that people could mean any of 3 different things when they say average.
mean, median and mode all mean dif things.
Regardless, the point is that ascended was introduced so that there was some gear progress, some sinks for various mats, and some profit for crafting. It was not introduced primarily as “something to do for people who ran out of things to do.”
So you say. I remember it differently.
As we watch Guild Wars 2 mature in its Live environment, we have found that our most dedicated players were achieving their set of Exotic gear and hitting “the Legendary wall.” We designed the process of getting Legendary gear to be a long term goal, but players were ready to start on that path much sooner than we expected and were becoming frustrated with a lack of personal progression. Our desire is to create a game that is more inclusive for hardcore and casual players alike, but we don’t want to overlook the basic need for players to feel like they are progressing and growing even after hitting max level. Adding item progression is a delicate process normally undertaken in an expansion, but we feel it’s important to strive to satisfy the basic needs of our players sooner rather than later.
We have always worked hard to create a sense of satisfying progression rather than gear grind and this new item progression initiative is no exception. By adding challenging new combat mechanics to end-game content and ways to mitigate those mechanics through gear progression for high-end players, we can add personal progression without making the game feel like an endless treadmill of gear that is just out of your reach. Original Guild Wars fans may recognize that we took a familiar approach to our new progression. The first end game mechanic we will introduce is Agony, which will be encountered in the Fractals of the Mists dungeon, and is mitigated by Infusions.
Ascended gear (and agony resistance) was added to introduce some gear progression. To the extent that you have to do something to get the next tier of gear, sure, that qualifies as “something to do” — the main goal was gear progression, not filler.
if it wasnt meant to be something to do, it wouldnt be as grindy as it is. I have rarely seen in a serious top teir mmo, a gear teir that required as much grind to create as ascended.
its busywork.
you can spin it how you want, but at the end of the day, a rose is a rose.
actually there are a lot of dynamic quests with as much or more story than what you listed.
funny you brought up the wanna be pirate quest
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/An_Unlikely_Pirate
any how, if you pay attention, a lot of these old dynamic quest lines have some story behind, and around them. I dont know how well new zones measure up, and its notable, that these would be considered 5 quests.
anyhow, yeah hearts tend to be the lame version of quests, imo their best execution is when they are essentially just bonus exp for doing events in the area.
but i wouldnt underestimate dynamic events ability to tell stories, the main problem, is i think they were more buggy, and less easy to develop the good ones than they hoped.
they also were hard for them to properly incentivize, and many people never knew they existed.
i suppose now, with their current tools, like specific dynamic event rewards, collections, and better dynamic event announcement, they could make some pretty good stories, but they probably feel it has a low return for a substanially more complex development
At least there’s guaranteed progression. Could be RNG like some certain Spoons that can take forever to drop.
What would be your idea to keep players in a particular map for a couple of weeks without repeating content?
One thought: Don’t try to attain the backpack in just 16 days. Spread it out over 2 or 3 months so it does not seem quite so repetitive.
Pro-tip: Never try key-running.
Good luck.
I completely agree. It’s like “Hungry Hal” – everyone complained what a grind it was to run back and forth with one apple 50 times in a row. But no one said you had to do it 50 times in a row. When I feel like going back to that map, I run Hal 2 or 3 apples. Eventually I’ll have it done. I see no benefit in having it done faster.
No, people were upset to see that type of quest in GW2. I can remember people saying there’s no difference to other generic MMORPG starter quests. Many other games have some pretty interesting story lines in quests that might or might not include grind. But Anet decided to implement a ridiculous “gather 0/50 apples and bring them over there” quest with absolutely no story at all.
The same with the druid runestone. You’ll hear some lines of the druid but doing the same freaking starter heart quests 64 times has absolutely no value in terms of storytelling or gameplay. It’s just insulting, that’s how bad it is. 64 times: kill 0/30 mercenaries. kill 0/30 spiders. kill 0/30 inquest researchers. Wow. That’s the best game design I’ve ever seen.
A game that claims to be different, but introduces you to the most ridiculous, never ending tasks in its end game PVE zones, that’s what GW2 is right now. If that’s the direction Anet chose, it’s really, really sad to see what “Guild Wars” 2 has become – I don’t even want to call it Guild Wars anymore. And I hope for everyone that the next expansion will bring some fresh air.
yeah this is a problem i noticed with anet development, they pick big numbers, to reach their goals, with very little art, or game design thrown in. It often comes across as pure busywork.
we want you guys on this map for the next 100 days, so we created the 100 day map reward, we re you kill stuff for an hour for 100 days.
its so blatant, obvious and uninspired
i think people are forgetting what the average game player looks like, i.e over 35 with 10 years + gaming experience. Dark souls is considered difficult, or perhaps civ 4 god mode, or super meat boy, but HOT?
Where exactly are you getting the statistic that the average game player is over 35 with 10+ years of gaming experience? That doesn’t sound right at all.
A lot of people weren’t even introduced to gaming as a thing until the past 10 years or so.
ehhh gaming has been a pop thing since mario, Street fighter tetris, aka its been awhile. I dont know if most gamers are 35 though, though many people who are 35 played games, many have stopped.