Guild Wars 2

1. Provide alternate methods of earning currently PvP-exclusive rewards to other game modes, so that players who do not enjoy the core elements of PvP are not forced to participate in PvP anyway if they want those rewards. It does not benefit ANYONE, including hardcore PvPers, to have players in the mode that have no desire to be there.

2. Provide PvP paths towards gaining currently PvE-exclusive rewards, such as Legendary weapons. These methods can’t be simple reward tracks, obviously, but complex meta-achievement chains that require as much time and effort for even the best of players as the PvE methods would be fine.

3. Do a better job of preventing blow-out matches. Stop pitting highly effective teams against significantly weaker teams. This is unfair to both sides.

4. Never make a balance chance that is intended to make PvP more balanced that provides an unnecessary nerf to any PvE gameplay. If something is fine in PvE but unbalanced in PvP, correct it in PvP ONLY.

5. Balance out Bunker vs. Burst so that neither is terribly effective. Characters should neither live forever nor die instantly, most 1v1 battles should last at least 10-20 seconds. Players should be able to sustain themselves for 30-60 seconds, but not much more than that if under sustained 1v2 attack.

Before HoT dropped, I would have said “never,” but after HoT. . . I have to say “maybe. Sort of.” I mean, with all the people just feeling absolutely gutted leaping off things and not being able to glide, it almost seems necessary! I do assume a number of caveats though.

• They need to block off certain areas from gliding, to prevent trivializing JPs. Some things, like View Points, can be trivialized, because keep in mind that only players with level 80 characters would be able to learn gliding in the first place. This might come along with a general overhaul to JPs, to make it impossible to use portals either. I think it’d be cool if they made it so that JPs used a mechanic similar to the Griffin Rookery JP, in which to get the reward for it, you need to carry a bundle from start to finish. While carrying this bundle you would be unable to glide, and using a portal would cause you to drop it. This would prevent gliders from trivializing the JP, it would prevent portals from trivializing it, and it would prevent people from camping the finish line with alts. This would also allow them to up the rewards at the end, since you’d have to fully earn it each time.

• They would need more invisible walls. These already exist in some places, such as the fort between Wayfarer’s and Diessa, but they would need to make sure that invisible walls exist around any outer walls of the map, hopefully high enough that only gliders would ever encounter them, but just to prevent casual breakouts. These would be relatively easy to implement.

I’d at least like them to have “flying days” in the major cities, where they turn on gliding just for the day, perhaps disabling jumping puzzles (chests and achievements) for that time period if they don’t want people cheesing them.

I have yet to speak to a person who has not managed to do all of the LS2 achievements, part from lack of time / want to do so.

And after all, shouldn’t challenge-achievements be like, i don’t know.. Challenging?

I kinda mind the tedium more than the challenge level. I did all the patch 1 achievements, but just haven’t even bothered with the 2 and 3 ones, because I didn’t have any interest in playing back through the story missions. I think it should be possible to get ALL achievements in ONE playthrough, the first one if you do them right. You should only ever have to replay them if you screw up.

Story missions are fun enough to do once, because you’re learning the story, but I can’t think of even one story mission, at any point, that was as fun in terms of raw gameplay as doing open world content with dozens of other players.

This. And feline grace was BETTER than one additional dodge, it meant you could dodge more often, not get one extra dodge at the beginning of the fight.

Exactly. The Daredevil’s core mechanic is that we get back PART of what we already HAD six months ago.

Hooray.

There’s nothing fun about constantly asking guild members for donations. What’s even less fun is being on the receiving end of all those solicitations for contributions. It’s remarkable that a company with a dedicated economist on staff hasn’t found a more equitable economic system for guilds. The short-sighted design of guild upgrading has disrupted the economy to such an extent that ArenaNet has issued hints at resource farms in an attempt to give guilds a chance to recoup their lost capabilities without bleeding coin or members.

Always keep in mind, GW2 is designed so that players serve the economy, not so that the economy serves the players. It’s designed so that players will sink the mats and gold that need sinking to keep the economy stable, rather than to provide players with the things that players actually want. It’s an independent economic simulator, not a player support tool like most ingame economies strive to be.

Smooth Penguin, is that you?

How DARE you sir!

I’ve seen the suggestions that lowering the price by $10 and adding the character slot would have made a big difference, but I’m not so sure. If they gave the 50$ one the char slot, they would have had to give the higher priced ones something else. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that didn’t touch off complaints.

As someone who already bought the expansion, I wouldn’t mind if they did drop the price or offer the free slot to people who buy the $50 package, so long as they give everyone who already pre-ordered before announcing that change a Legendary of their choice.

I agree that the TP elements of this achievement are insane. They need to remove another you can buy off the TP from the requirements of the achievement, or increase their drop rates exponentially.

I want to start with a little story about one of the coolest things that happened in BWE3 to me, then how the game ruined it. I was doing the Blighted Tree missions, where you have to place the bombs. The game announced 5 minutes left! We all rushed to complete it, got the bombs planted, Diarmid spawned, 1:40 left, rush! We managed to kill her with about 40-50 seconds left, 15 second timer on the clock. . . it blew hooray! . . then the pact commanders stood around chatting for a few minutes before completing the mission, so night fell and the mission “failed” No credit was given. Hooray.

Make sure that’s fixed, credit should be awarded the instant the bomb goes off.

As for events overall, they don’t seem to award nearly enough credit. Even on just the second mastery (bouncing mushrooms), I’m only getting maybe 10% of a bar off of these things, and they happen at a relatively slow pace compared to Tyria events. I can’t imagine grinding out all my masteries under the current systems, that would be crazy boring.

The events themselves tend to be mostly quite fun, but they should have a few less “waves” than they currently do in those type of events, so that they end faster. I think one of the most annoying individual events is the one where you have to collect airship parts from an upper level, and then drop down to the lower level. When I did this last time, I have bouncing shrooms, so I could get up there fast. This time I had to two one of the two (or more?) longer paths up, which were interesting, but VERY slow, and each piece returned only seems to increment the event by a tiny amount.

My suggestions would be to point players towards one of the routes up, because I’m an explorer but others might struggle to find their way, and the more important one is to greatly reduce the amount of supply needed to clear this one, so that each player only needs to make a few trips up. Make it one of those things where the minimum is fairly easy to clear, and then he gives like 1-2 minutes more for people to get theirs in if they haven’t already. Each player should be expected to bring three supply, and the cap isn’t raised unless people deposit at least one, so that players who are not participating are not counted.

This post is ridiculous, comparing challenging group content to JPs and not thinking “dealing lots of damage means reducing defensive stats cannot mean more challenge” is just weird…

Challenge has zero to do with stats. An enemy that has 1000 HP and deals 50 damage per hit is no more challenging than one that has 100HP and deals 5 damage per hit, so long as you can just slap on armor that mitigates ten times as much damage and weapons that deal ten times as much. Just upping stats does nothing to make a scenario more challenging. Challenge comes from tactics, figuring out how to avoid their attacks and how to bypass their defenses.

Really the best way for them to balance a “challenging encounter” in GW2 would be to design it so that all damage was based purely on attack coefficient (ie the base damage it does regardless of statting), so that someone in white armor would be dealing exactly as much damage as someone in Ascended, and it all comes down to player skill.

No kidding? Where’d you get these facts from? What makes you think they AREN’T getting the bulk of the development time? Let’s see some figures here buddy when you make claims like these.

We’re talking about raids here, and currently the time spent on raids only benefits the tiny amount of players that do raids. If they were to add more casual options, then more players could benefit from them. The point is that since casuals make up the vast majority of the players, if they develop content for “all the players” then that content would be casual content.

Yes…. and they spent how many years developing this game? “They have failed at that so far.” No kidding nice opinion to back up your…arguement? Sorry, not going to let you get away with saying kitten like this.

I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make here, other than that you seem to believe my statement was in error. I stand by it. I think most would agree with it.

Seriously… you’re that concerned about traits while leveling up or traits being locked? How many of you in this thread have not made it to level 80 yet? How many of you haven’t created a character yet?

I have 8 80s, but I know what it took to get them there, and I feel that if I were just starting out I would HATE not having access to traits along the way. I think it’s bad for the game’s future to be driving away new players like that.

No one has any tolerance for learning. They want to clear it as fast as possible with as little talking as possible. They want minimum human interaction and maximum loot. Noobs get in the way of that.

That’s a perfectly reasonable desire to have though, for both the experts AND the newbs. That is the sort of game that GW2 is, outside of raiding. The problem is that the sort of culture that raids inspire by their design is 100% antithetical to the culture that GW2 thrives on.

You take those tickets and go farm gauntlet. After that you open your bags and pray for a high value item. If you do not get one then go turn in your tokens for tier 6 materials.

Enough said.

It’s a hugely grindy process at best, almost impossible to manage at worst. I mean, I can do the hammer guy’s event with three gambits on, and it takes me maybe a minute to do. I have something around 2300 tickets at the moment. That means it would take me around nine and a half hours to burn them all, and that’s IF I have an arena to myself the entire time, and I can’t imagine that ANet would imagine that to be a fun gameplay experience. And in return I would get 2300 bags back, which from what I understand would be almost entirely tokens, and maybe a couple other things. Not worth it.

If they want to make me set aside nine hours of my life for pure tedium then they need to offer better rewards. If not, then they need to provide some way to burn off these tickets without the tedium.

I agree and that’s why i want us to get to the point where we can have a clear and focused discussion on ‘as intended design’ where we aren’t tripping over unintended issues. I feel that is the most valuable way to move forward.

I understand, but I believe that same discussion could be had by just explaining which were which. Actually fixing it in game won’t immediately shift the discussion, because it’d take a while for players to experience those changes personally and the amount of them that each player experienced would vary. It’d be more useful to the discussion to just say, in plain English, “we intended for [features X, Y, and Z] to be level gated, but [features A, B, and C] are currently level gated and that’s a bug which we’ll fix.” The continued vague party line of “some of the changes are intended and some of them are not" is really not terribly informative when you never say which are which.

Waiting “until it’s done” doesn’t really help the discussion, what’s important is the information, and the information can exist before it’s ready to go live in the game. That’s really been the player’s point in this whole thread. I appreciate that you’re trying, but until you work your way past this stumbling block there’s almost no point to it.

I’m no longer going to engage with the “numbers trolls.” If you do not believe this is an issue cared about by an amount of players worth worrying about then I can’t convince you otherwise. Of course if you truly did believe that then you wouldn’t be making a mess of yourselves trying to shut people up about it, so I think we have our answer on that one. If you want to engage in actual discussion on the issue, then I’m open to it, but if all you have to say is “post spreadsheets” then I have nothing for you, and that does not bother me.

How can you claim raids were sold to new players? Challenging group content came up in CDIs, they sold it to us because we asked for it.

SOME members of the community asked for it. Plenty of others at the time were very negative about exactly what we got, elitist rewards, elitist content, inter-player strife over these things, etc. You cannot for a second claim that raids were designed to support the consensus of the players, just a vocal minority of them. If GW2 players genuinely cared about raids, then they wouldn’t still be playing GW2.

Kit Refinement is the perfect example of this. Don’t like people using kits so much, so lets not only take away one of the essential condition removals for the class which weakened it in PVE, but let’s also add things that make absolutely no sense like droplets of glue instead of full on zones. There are other examples as well. Engineers haven’t had a heal bonus at all from being downed, their downed state is the single worst downed state in the game for PVE, they need healing capabilities even if it is in the form of a trait so guess what they added, instead of dropping something useful like maybe an untargetable temporary healing turret when downed we get oil slicks, like that’s going to prevent some mob from actually finishing us off after their initial tripping.

Really this highlights my absolutely biggest, #1 absolutely crucial problem with GW2 development: 99% of all class balance changes are designed ENTIRELY with PvP in mind, without giving a second thought to how it might impact PvE utility, while almost no changes are made with PvE viability as the focus. They are, for example, far more concerned with giving players tools to avoid getting stomped, rather than to avoid getting torn apart by a pack of mobs.

No other class get its damage cut to 2/3 just to make its mechanic work.

Sure they do, they just aren’t all so clear about how they do it. If you ignore your class mechanic entirely then you’re going to lose out on 30% damage, maybe more in some cases. Try playing an all Fire Ele, or a clone-less Mesmer. Pets didn’t “steal” 30% of the damage you were owed, they just account for the 20% bonus damage that take Rangers from 100% to 120%, just as the other classes go from 100% to 120% by the use of their class mechanics.

The basic etiquette is fairly simple:

If you are Downed, it’s fair to expect people to try and help as best they are able, which sometimes means ignoring you if the area is too dangerous to stop, but usually means you’ll get rezzed, or stabilized at least.

If you are Defeated (dead), then the etiquette is that it is YOUR responsibility to WP out as fast as possible and return to battle. If it’s right before the end of an event then it can be fair to wait until the event ends and maybe someone will rez you, but you should never assume it.

it was so slow i gave up before i got the glider.

I will give a tip for quick mastery leveling, assuming it works as well as during BWE1. Remember that this is all accountbound, and the initial story chapter gives a solid chunk of XP. I took five characters through the story chapter so far, and that XP offered a significant chunk of what I’ve got. So if you can’t stand event grinding, maybe story chapter grinding would work better for you. It might not get you to maxed out masteries, but it should get you at least a Glider and maybe bouncing Mushroom. You haven’t even experienced HoT until you have those unlocked.

Yes. As we told you the last time you repeated ANet’s policy to “not tell us stuff until it’s done,” the community’s policy is to “demand that you tell us about stuff before it’s done.” For the zillionth time, please reiterate that point to the developers.

But my absolute favourite drop system is in the JRPG The World Ends With You. Each enemy drops one item depending on difficulty level, with a percentage chance of either dropping the item, or rolling for an item on the next level down. (Players are shown the drop table for every enemy.)

Yes, TWEWY’s drop system is the gold standard.

More importantly, what happens after the player gets what s/he wants? The tokens would become meaningless, unless there were secondary rewards that could also be purchased. Just about every item we receive should have multiple uses, especially if it isn’t tradeable.

There should always be “junk” uses for tokens. With Unidentified Fossils, for example, you can trade them in for loot bags after you’d got all the cool stuff you want. Same here, If they started giving out Teq tokens, and you already got all the cool Teq loot you wanted, there should always be some sort of small loot bag or something that would be worth picking up as long as you have tokens, but nothing spectacular or unique.

Why not just make everything available through laurels? Laurels already exist as a token, it is related to length of play, but isn’t detrimental to casual versus hardcore, they can’t really be farmed, and purchases can be account-bound on acquire.

I personally would not have a problem with this, as I’m a bit of a hoarder and still have most of the Laurels I’ve earned over two years of maxed out dailies, but I could see riots from people who have been spending their steadily instead. I think that to be fair, if they introduced a way of getting them via “daily currency” they might have to make a whole new currency that starts everyone fresh at zero.

Still catching up, but I wanted to stop to be clear. No to this. This doesn’t happen, it’s a cognitive bias. There’s virtually no DR active on any given day.

It would be nice for clarity’s sake if players could actually see the level of DR active on their character in the stats menu.

You’re mistaking the difference between solo content, and group content. If you have the skills to succeed at solo content (ala Liadri), then yes you deserve to be able to go in and succeed. But if you have the skills and knowledge to your part in Group content, now you’re just one piece of the puzzle. There is no “i” in team.

Like I said, tactical, not strategic. I don’t mind having to share responsibility with my own group, with the people within eyeshot of me that are all working on the same short term objectives. I don’t mind that if those people do poorly then I don’t get the best rewards. At least I don’t mind much. But dozens and dozens of people spread across an entire map are too many people for my personal fate to be tied to. If I can’t talk to you in say chat then you shouldn’t have any baring on the outcome of my gameplay experience. I do not see that as being good content, and I’m asking that they stop making it.

Just like with the Great Wurm. I know what to do, but I can’t go in by myself, and solo down all three wurms. You need people in the correct spots, who all know what to do.

And just like with the Great Wurm, the reward should be based on the wurm you’re fighting, and on how well you do at it, rather than on what people halfway across the map are up to.

You have an option of improving the OF you are in and bettering it for yourself and the others around you willing to stick around long enough to make it worth being a part of. Do this, and people will then flock to your OF.

If that actually worked for you then you were VERY lucky. Even on coordinated TTS runs, where they hand picked an empty map and stuffed it with their own people, they would tend to break down over time, going from gold runs to barely silver, to bad silver, a problem they could only solve by abandoning that map entirely and finding someplace else. If you were able to take a bronze map and whip all the players there into gold shape then you were lucky enough to end up on a bronze map with very unusually malleable and engaged players.

Honestly, I don’t mind working hard for the time that I play, but I do mind wasting time. I can’t play for 4+ hours per day most days, and solutions that involve “failing” for an hour or more to get things “into shape” don’t work for me. I want to be able to log in and instantly get started on a successful run. I’m willing to do my part to make that happen, to be working 100% of the time towards that goal, but if the content is designed in such a way that it takes a half hour or more of just standing around on the map to “get set up,” or if it requires repeatedly failing content for a half hour or more to “work the kinks out” each night, then I see that as being a content design failure. Assuming I know what I’m doing myself, I should be able to jump right in within minutes of logging in, and succeed on that very first run.

People flock to events specifically for “vanilla” credit as well.

Well, I think you’re confusing “flocking” for “doing.” Harathi Highlands is a good example that most people should be familiar with. If you shout “Modnir is up!” over the map, meaning that the quest chain is starting up, you can suddenly go from having just you in the northern camps, to within a couple minutes having at least 4-5, and several more will flock in as it goes, a couple dozen by the end of it even during low-load times. Most players that are in the zone will be there, because you get access to a chest, lots of kill XP and loot, and several distinct events, meaning 2-3 dollops of XP/cash/Influence/karma in a row. Now, there are plenty of other events in that zone, and if you start one then maybe by the time you finish another few people will wander by and decide to participate, but nobody’s going to WP across the map, or run across the map for that matter just to get there.

If someone today said “we’re doing a Guild Mission that’s [halfway across the zone]!” I wouldn’t even consider the trip and just keep doing stuff in my own area. If, on the other hand, they were able to say “we’re doing a Guild Mission that’s [halfway across the zone], and you’ll get 50s, two rares, and commendations for completing it with us!” then not only would I be willing to WP over and join in immediately, but I’d also be willing to help scout out where the bounty target is, making them much easier to track down.

Rewards that you need to do WHAT, exactly. You can get earrings and amulets from dailies. You can get rings from running fractals.

Have you ever heard the term storm in a teacup? The only people who care, are people who have convinced themselves they need this stuff to play the game. 100% untrue. You don’t even need this stuff to do fractals until you get to a ridiculously high level. Because if you’re that into fractals, you’ll end up with ascended rings an ascended back piece.

A difference that makes no difference, is no difference. These rewards that you’re so gaga about don’t change the game significantly enough for people to make such a big deal about them.

So that’s another vote for “shut down the commendation store entire?” I mean, if the loot it contains is not important enough that people should care about not having access to it, then it shouldn’t be important enough to care if mega-guilds don’t have access to it either, right?

I initially thought that the Guild District should be located in Lion’s Arch (see previously posted example titled Guild changes in Lions’s Arch). However, with the implementation of the mega-server, either the inability to keep guilds together on the same map would have to be solved or population per map would have to be drastically increased; if not, the stress on the frame rate might overtax poor LA. So maybe the Guild District in its entirety should be an instanced area of LA(most favored idea). Or maybe each guild specifically has an instance somewhat like one’s home instance in Divinity’s Reach or good ole GW1. This would hopefully alleviate that problem.

I do not like the idea of guild halls being in the open world, much less that they should have to crowd each other out for limited space. I feel that guild halls should either exist through their own portals, like the Home Instances or the PvP area, or they should be a shared phased structure in, where if you view it, you see your own guild hall and only you can enter it, but if someone in another guild sees it they will see their own guild hall. Perhaps if you don’t have a guild hall of your own, the phased guild hall could reflect a random guild that is active at that location.

This could be combined with Alien Menace’s “guild halls should be everywhere” idea by having several hall locations in each zone (some more than others), and you can set up wherever you like, so say I put my guild in Divinity’s Reach, if I go there I would always see my own guild, but if I go anywhere else in the world I would see a randomly selected guild hall from some other guild that has that location. The more rare location you pick, the more likely other players will see your hall when they see it.

There could even be a competitive aspect there, where the “best” guild, determined via upgrades, GvG scoring, whatever, is more likely to be visible than the “lesser” ones.

PvE Solution: Under this system, when visited in PvE, guild halls are instanced zones. There is a keep (of some kind), open lands, even events that fire off, ultimately (if left unchecked) leading to the mobs taking over the guild “keep.” Further, there is an outside area (or a cave/structure that is NOT an instance) that has difficult/high level scaling mobs and a boss or bosses. This area should be very difficult. It respawns once every 24 hours and of course, has great loot associated with it.

No, this sounds like too much quality content to seal off behind access to a large guild. This content should just be available in the game at large.

You still need to make a guild work for it just the same having a one man guild hall just because you where able to pay to make a guild and pay for the influence to “buy” a guild hall realty takes out the meaning behind having a places for your guild.

Large guilds can buy influence too. I made my deep vault without buying a single influence, just by playing a lot with my characters.

3. Currency. How do guild acquire guild halls and with what currency? How will this balance to provide the same level of satisfaction to new and old guilds?

While I assume the “macro” currency will be influence, the stuff used to unlock a “tier” of hall, I do hope that small improvements like decoration are done using the player’s choice of gold, karma, influence, and in many cases straight drops off mobs and event rewards.

Also I agree with Devata, no upkeep costs, what’s yours is yours. One of the great things about this game is no subscription fee, don’t put it into the Guild Hall system.

I love depth in MMOs. It is the main reason I play them over other genres. I assume there are other like me who feel the same way. Well, my idea to add more depth to GW2 involves the addition of new special themed zones with player/guild/alliance driven content. These zones will exist by districts that the player can select similar to GW1’s cities.

Only if this content is equally as accessible by players that are not in a guild. Content added to the game should be for ALL players, not just players in guilds.

Do not make Guild Halls as instances, in the way that other instances work in this game. Or in the way that the Captain’s Airship works. I think it’s very important that if you log out of a character while in a Guild Hall, you should log back in directly into the Guild Hall, without having to go through an extra loading screen.

This is how the PvP lobby works, I don’t see why Guild Halls can’t use the same concept.

Wait, are you saying that people who have leveled to level 80, when they make a new character, they won’t have to go through those unlocks like that? So what is supposed to happen for people with level 80s leveling an alt?

Even that would still be pretty terrible, because we wouldn’t be able to in good conscience recommend the game to a friend. I mean, I can’t tell one of my friends “no, it’s a great game, you just have to grind to 80 first, and then your second character can actually be almost as fun to level as the ones I made!”

According to the list at the start of the thread, 24 unlocks the final F4 skill. Still, for Eles, this is a quarter of their basic weapon skills that is locked until then.

For Mesmers, Shatter skills are nice, but there are builds that don’t need them, and most Shatter builds need Traits to be decent, so there’s an argument there to lock them away for a while.

Warriors and Thieves have full access to their class skill at level 4 (only F1).
For Necros, this means no Death Shroud until that level though.

Engies will have access to F4, but since the final support slot is at 35, it’s technically locked until then.

Guardians have their Virtues at 22, which is also kinda late.

Ranger Pet commands are locked until 22 as well, Pet Swap until 24, and according to videos, they don’t have access to Pet Management either at the start.

Did anyone actually test this? How did anyone look at this and imagine it was a good idea?

When slower allows someone to learn the class.

This doesn’t let you learn the class though, it lets you play for a couple hours, get bored with pressing 1, and then quitting to play something else. How does quitting lead to learning the class? I learned the classes plenty well under the old methods. If they want to implement better documentation and tutorial elements then that’s great, do that! But making it take more time to unlock things doesn’t teach anyone anything.

Let’s put it this way – unlocking Skill 2 took killing 2-3 enemies (or so). Now, killing 2-3 enemies (or so) gets you to level 2 (ok, actually, getting to level 2 just requires you finish the opening sequence – which is more like 6 enemies or so). But, more or less the same.

I would usually have my first three skills unlocked by the end of the tutorial, and my first 5 by the time I hit level 5 or so. Now it’s 10?

As a new player (got the game exactly 1 week ago and have 1 lvl80 and 1 lvl48 character) i feel this change is pretty much a punch in the face.

I’m very sorry for you, this used to be a VERY fun game before they started ruining it. Really it’s partly your fault though, you should have started playing earlier before they decided to start driving people away for some reason. If you’d started even six months ago you could have avoided the worst of it. Too late now.

Anyone know if buying gems is level gated? I only ask because my latest engineer just hit level 27, and I was apparently finally able to unlock my Currency Exchange in the TP interface.

That would be fair. Maybe if they level gated the gem store to only level 60+ then they would care more about what players have to do to slog through there now.

There are many achievements in the game in which you “complete” them by getting a certain number of things, say, 40, when there are actually more than that, like maybe 50 total, or even infinite, such as kill tallies. This is good, I think it’s generally a good thing to have some overflow so that non-expert people can still get the rewards for these things, like with the crystal shard attunement stuff.

That said, it’d be nice if you could still keep track of what you accomplish above that goal. If you find 50 shards instead of just the required 40, you should see a record of that, so I was thinking stretch goals. Not tangible goals, there would be no prizes or achievement points after meeting the core requirements of the task, but it would keep counting. If it was a truly finite thing, like there are supposedly 52 shards in the game but you only need 40 to “clear” it, then have additional bar space, and keep counting past 40, putting a little line in the bar to note the “official” endpoint. For infinite ones, like the Slayer achievements, just keep the number counting upwards. If somone kills 5000 undead, they’ve “cleared” that one, but if they’ve actually killed 25,756 undead, then show that too.

Therefore, I’ll just claim that less than 1% of the player population feels the same way you do, and my claim is just as valid.

Ok, you claim only 1% dislike the difficulty of certain enemies, I’ll claim that only 1% do like them, that cancels each other our, and is all irrelevant either way. Neither of us has the tools to prove any large numbers, we both have our own suspicious as to where the breakdown lies. Again, it is ANet’s job to determine how large each camp is, and decide what to do about that. Stop trying to make the case otherwise.

What they need to do is visually cue “working terrain.” If they intend to have some little nudge of terrain something you can stand on, then they need to put a little rock there, one that you can see from a distance exists as a practical ledge, and its hitbox needs to be large enough that you don’t have to be pixel-perfect to land on it.

If a player is grinding up and down against a seemingly flat wall, then he’d kitten-well better be doing it because that’s how he enjoys himself, and not because if he does it just so he’ll end up standing on a platform (while every other attempt will lead to him sliding back down).

The value of precursors on the TP will adjust according to the cost of crafting them. Do you think a precursor will still cost the same on the TP if players are able to craft them for hundreds of gold cheaper?

I’m saying it DOES NOT MATTER IN THE SLIGHTEST what the price on the TP does. The Players do not serve the TP, the TP is meant to serve the players. It is not there to “be there,” it is there to make it easier for players to get items that they do not have, and to offload items that they do not need.

If there is anything that the players would want, and you begin with “because the TP would. . .” then you’ve already failed to make a compelling response.

In this case, the goal is to make a better way for player to get a Precursor, without having to grind gold to do it. “because the TP” does not matter, the TP will have to learn to adapt.

Soon enough, the price of the precursor on the TP will be in line with the price to craft one and we’ll be at square one again.

That’s fine. The goal is not to have the price of the quests to be permanently below the price on the TP, whatever that price may be, the goal is to have the price of the quest be the RIGHT price, the price it should be, whatever that is, and whatever the TP price happens to be. That price should be negligible. Your argument strikes me a bit like that classic counterargument to smoking taxes, “well if you overtax cigarettes then people will just stop smoking!” Well. . . good.

It sounds like you’re merely unhappy with the price of precursors in general, which is a whole other argument altogether.

No, that’s the core of the entire argument. If people were happy with the existing Precursor prices then there would be no need for the crafting quests in the first place. The ENTIRE point is to drive the prices back down to a reasonable level.

If everyone was running around with one they’d lose their value and wouldn’t be very legendary at all.

No, their value is innate, it is in how they look on your character. It wouldn’t matter whether only one person had it or whether everyone had one, they would still be cool.

That’s not true. The point of being able to craft a precursor is to give another option to get one that people can gauge their progress against; that’s missing in the previous ways. NO ONE EVER said it would cost less to get one this way over any other way. In fact, anyone that thinks this way shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how the game works; there is no fixed cost to precursors in the first place.

But we already HAD an “option to get one that people can gauge their progress against;” it’s called “the wallet.” You look over there, “do I have enough gold to buy one on the TP? No? Keep farming.” Now, they’ve changed it to “have I completed all the listed quests? Yes. do I have enough gold make it? No? Keep farming.”

Huge improvement.

Yes. Given the way that the new specs seem to poor at “all arounder” status, they REALLY need to include the ability to swap between Daredevil and Deadeye when out of combat without having to manually adjust a dozen different knobs.

Please address Raziel’s question. To take a simple poll look at this thread and see which side is the majority…

That you think that this makes sense leaves me very uninterested in providing sources for you, but suffice it to say “look at this thread and see which side is the majority…” is everything wrong with the general public’s understanding of how polling works.

There is plenty of casual content in the game. We are not asking for that to be changed. Please let us have the tiny amount of slightly more challenging content. You are greedy and want to take it all away from us.

I think it’s fine to have some challenging content. That’s not what people are arguing here. The problem is:

1. Challenging content should be COMPLETELY optional. People who want to do challenging things should be able to do them, people who don’t should be able to avoid them entirely. There should be no story, no specific rewards that are locked behind challenging content, such that people who don’t want to do challenging content miss out on those things.

2. You can’t claim that the entire expansion should be just for people who enjoy challenging content. Yes, the game has plenty of existing content, but low-challenge players are as tired of that stuff as the high-challenge players are, you cannot tell them “well the new zones are not for you” and expect acceptance. Yes, the new zones can have portions that are challenging, but these should not be the ONLY portions.

A lot of the problem people have with Mordrem Snipers is not that they are impossible to handle, it’s that they are all over the place and they are more challenging than other mobs of a similar level. You can’t really opt out of fighting them, they are part of too much of the game’s content for that, and fighting a “vanilla” sniper is equivalent to fighting a Vet+ of most other types of mobs, fighting a Vet is equivalent to an elite, and so on. At minimum, this imbalance should be corrected so that they are equivalent to other mobs. If they want a difficult mob at that location, then put a Vet Sniper there in place of a vanilla, but at least label them correctly.

Wrong. Price of ascended materials is based on market situation. If it will be much cheaper then existing precursor prices, everybody will do precursor this way and price will go much higher then existing precursor prices.

That’s fine, if the prices on the TP get too high, it doesn’t matter because players would always have the option to craft their own without spending a copper.

Its legendary item, dont rush, craft everyday and its pretty much for free

It’s been three years already. Any “just take your time and enjoy the ride” arguments have long since expired.

The problem is that game encourage runing in mindless zerg. Zergs that doesn’t have any coordination should be severly punished, by champions, that have alot of anti-zerg aoe abilities. And mean Abilities, which 3 hits will wipe out entire zerg.

While I think it’s good to have some content that is designed to break up the zerg, I do not think that anti-zerg should become the new normal. Overall, the erg is more good than bad. It’s a way for players to cooperate that does not require voice or prior planning. It is easy to pick up and go, which is one of GW2’s biggest strengths. The vast majority of open world content should be relatively “zergable.”

I am also not a fan of the idea being kicked around of having significant negative consequences when people fail an event. Failing an event should maybe start a “failure condition” event that forces them to do some other activities to get another shot at completing the original event, but it should not make the whole place a hassle for a significant amount of time. I think the Modnir event chain has a suitable level of failure states.

The idea of not having a downed state is terrifying. To just fall and have nothing to do but WP? How is that an improvement?

And also the Mastery point.

Zerker needs more effort to survive because it’s glassy and usually fights in melee while condies spammer stay back with all of his soft cc and additional tankiness. Go play pvp with zerker and then condies build and tell me again how condies are “significantly harder to play”.

That’s the problem. Too much balance discussion focuses around PvP tactics, which are completely irrelevant to PvE. You can have build that devastate in PvP and are completely useless in PvE, or that are worthless in PvP but dominate in PvE.

GW2 will become nothing more then Niche game and we are expecting far to much from it. It’s simply one of those games that you can play here and there for 5 minutes to blow off steam then forget about for months on end.

That is really the bottom line.

Geez, there are still trinity whiners hanging around? Go home, you’re drunk.

If Ranger pets die to Agony, wouldn’t the simple fix be to just give all pets 100% immunity to Agony damage? I mean, they can’t avoid it at all, so giving them irremovable and massively lethal conditions is a bit unfair (for Necro and other class pets too).

If that’s somehow seen as overpowered, what about a scaled invulnerability? Like give them a multiplied version of the player’s Agony resistance, such that if you have enough resistance for your own character, then the pet would be immune to it. So like level 10-20 you’d need 5 agony resist to make your pet invulnerable, 20-30 you’d need 10, ect., but as long as you kept up, the pet would keep up.

It’d also be nice if, since pet AI is too stupid to make them auto-dodge persistent or “run-or-die” red circle attacks, pets of all types would be at least mostly immune to such attacks. They wouldn’t have to be immune to all AoE, just the types of attacks that are specifically designed to encourage players to get out of their way, like poison clouds, or “highly telegraphed → massive damage” hits. If a player gets caught up in those, they deserve what they get, but a pet/summon don’t know no better, so punishing the pet isn’t really fair.

TLDR;
We added this system as a direct result from the horizontal progression CDI. We are always reading your feedback, however, we don’t always have time to respond right away or action it quickly. We updated some trait unlocks in the past but we can do more. How can you help?
1) Give us a list of the most offensive trait unlock locations.
2) Keep giving feedback and be patient as this is a big ship and it takes time to steer it.

Please do not try to blame the players for the changes to the trait system. That was your decision, not ours. If the players had our way the system would be restored to the way it was at launchj, where you can pick any abilities you want automatically. Luckily for me, most of my characters are at 80 already, and the one that is 41, while he has to suffer through the new “occasional trait point” element, at least got in before the full changes went in so he doesn’t have to unlock anything. I have no interest in making a new character though until the “Unlock all traits as they become available” option is returned to the game.

The tweaks you listed above certainly improve things a bit, but it is still a hassle to unlock traits that you may want to use as soon as possible, and the leveling process is still significantly less interesting for not being able to access all available traits. My youngest character was level 30 when the change went in and had had one minor and one major trait, now he’s 11 levels higher and hasn’t gained ANYTHING of value in that time. I just feel very little interest in messing with him, when before these changes he would have gained another two tiers of traits by now and would be into his Master traits by now.

, but they currently do. This needs to change by launch.

I got the Bouncing Mushrooms mastery relatively early in the beta and tried out a lot of the mushrooms. I had thought that they would be like jump pads, where they just bounce you and you control your trajectory, but they instead work like the Tequatl pads, carrying you to a specific target location. . . except when they don’t.

Several times when I would use a jump pad, it would clearly fail to deliver me to my destination. Sometimes it would intend to lift me straight up and then slightly forward, and instead it would just go straight up and then drop me, causing fall damage. Sometimes it would just send me wildly off course. Several times it dropped me into the abyss.

This is fine in beta, and in areas where WPs are relatively close by and getting back is just a short glide away, but would be completely unacceptable after launch. The Verdant Brink map is already a bit short on active WPs to get you back into the action, and apparently some jumping puzzles will be using these. If I spend an hour working my way through a complex jumping puzzle, and I slip to my death, fine, that’s on me, but if instead I activate a mushroom and it flings me to my death, entirely outside my control, then that’s some Rage right there.

The Bouncing Mushrooms need to be made absolutely foolproof. They need to get you safely to the target destination 100% of the time, 0% failure rate. Maybe at least they make you immune to fall damage for the duration of the trip (plus a little cushion just in case), Maybe it checks to see if you actually reached the intended target point the “right” way, and if you somehow aren’t there when you’re supposed to be, the game just teleports you there anyways. There need to be backup plans to ensure that these things will never make the game worse for people.

Alternatively you could all just get over yourselves and do it the current way, which is well within reason, I might add. Now, to conclude with a sweeping generalization:

We could, but instead we’re asking for an alternative. That’s a thing that is happening.

Tempest is a skirmish spec. It doesn’t have ranged options, just like the Reaper doesn’t, and the Dragon Hunter is more ranged. If you want to use Tempest with a staff, prepared to get in close.

In other news, I’m still waiting for OH pistol.

You’re describing a single-player game. In a single-player game it’s the game’s job to provide the party / army / group / friends / whatever you need to succeed.

And the same is true of a multiplayer game, just with more players.

Now, if you want to play with your friends, if you want your friends to be part o that 130+ player group, then of course the tools should allow you to include them, and then it would only need to fetch the remainder, but it should fetch whatever remainder is needed to complete the challenge. And if you just want to log in and play with whomever else happens to want to do the same thing as you at the same time, then it’s the game’s job to find those people and link you together.

If you want to play with your friends, or even with a 130+ person guild, then that’s fine, you should be able to do that and the game should get out of your way when you do, but if you just want to log in as yourself and be able to participate in all the same content, then the game should support that too. That’s the most core thing that I loved about this game over any other MMO (and I’ve played almost all of them), which is that it was social without being constricting. You could just lot in, see an orange ring, run over there, have a bunch of people around, and without having having to form a party you could play together, you helping them, them helping you, all seamlessly working together on a shared objective, pure cooperation, and then as soon as someone had something else they’d rather be doing, they could do so without overly burdening everyone else, and maybe some other people would show up.

That, to me, is the beating heart of GW2, and yet over the past year or so they seem to be creeping more and more towards the corrupted heart that is at the core of some other MMOs, that priorities elitism and mega-guilds, forcing lock-step organization and pre-planning, rather than just letting players log in and have fun. The more they move in that direction, the less it is the game that I loved, and I guarantee they can’t win that way, because the people who most prefer that sort of game are the ones that quit early on and are never coming back because they’ve been doing WoW raids the entire time.

You dont understand economics at all, the reason these playstyles are so much more lucrative is because they are doing the work that most people arnt willing to do, thats how entrepreneurship works

But that doesn’t make it a good thing for the game.

If everyone is rich, no-one is rich

Yes.

If it can seriously win a 1v5, then yes, it needs fixing just to keep the game in check. But a 1v2, at high skill levels? That’s what’s called skill cap. The more skilled you are at it, the better you do. Anet may want to hit an equilibrium of skill ceiling, but that’s rather unlikely.

But my point is assuming equal skill. If you play this class, and are highly skilled, then you can 1v2 any two players on other classes, even if they are equal, or superior to you in skill. If you have the skills to pull off the God-classes basic rotation then it gives you unquestioned superiority over any other class. Given your comments on 1v5, I assume you can see the problem with that as well.

And that’s the problem with economic PvP, it’s a gameplay style that does not require extreme skill, but it is certainly not something that anyone can do well, and if everyone did do it well then it wouldn’t be worth bothering because everything would be at balance price all the time. But for those who do have the minimal level of skill and interest to do well at economic PvP, it blows all other profit methods out of the water, it “1v5s” dungeons and world bosses and map metas and anything else going on in terms of making money.

When someone says a reward isn’t ‘for you,’ I think they mean to say, ‘The content required for this reward isn’t for you.’

Yes, and often I agree with them. Where I disagree is that I believe in cases like that, the “content required for this reward” should be broadened to include more people. I don’t believe that rewards should be placed permanently out of bounds unless you do specific activities, there should be alternatives.

Woah, stop. How is Wanze or Penguin or myself or anyone directly making the game less fun for you. Go ahead, try to demonstrate it.

By defending the current economic model in which people can make gross amounts of money entirely off the TP rather than through game play. It’s not that your individual actions have caused significant damage in game, but the combined efforts of the “play the TP” crowd have certainly hurt the game for those that come to GW2 for an adventure game, and even worse, the efforts of ANet to maintain the economy to benefit those players.

You appear to be talking about the cost of items on the TP here. First, please go read something on supply and demand; they are extremely basic economic principles and understanding them would help a lot. If enough people find the prices too high, the demand will shrink and price will drop.

True, but irrelevant. You can shape human nature, you just have to work around it. If prices are too high, then actual gameplay changes need to be made to correct that, not just players deciding to deliberately abandon the TP. If prices qare too high, then either supply needs to be increased, or the need for those items (natural demand) needs to be reduced.

Macroeconomics doesn’t seem all that important to consider for you. But it’s the approach Anet has to take, as the ruling body of this system.

And in my view, it’s something that needs to be considered, but it can’t be the ONLY factor considered. The economy should work for the players, not the other way around. The macroeconomic issues, such as inflation, need to be taken care of, but they also need to pay attention to the players, and make sure that everyone is getting the things that they want at a reasonable rate.

Do you seriously intend to say that people should not be rewarded more for putting in more effort? Should we move legendaries to Day 2 Login Rewards? Should a person with <100 hours in-game get the same skins and rewards as someone like me, who has put in >3k hours? How is that in any way fair or just?

Strawman. My only point is, there should be a reasonable “effort soft cap,” a point at which you can expend additional effort, but you cannot expect it to put you significantly far ahead of anyone else. I have NEVER said that all this stuff should be available with zero, or even minimal effort, a reasonable level of effort makes sense, but all the goals should be achievable within a reasonable amount of effort, and if there are people who want to expend a great deal more than that, nobody is stopping them, they just shouldn’t have rewards exclusive to that additional effort.

So you don’t dislike the gold, you dislike that he can spend it. I see the logic…or lack thereof. Consider this: if you had the gold to buy every item on the TP that you wanted plus some, what would keep you playing?

Fun. This is Guild Wars, not Gold Wars. I don’t play this game to earn gold, and if I did I would just hang out in LA all day. There are things that I want that can be bought with gold, they would make my play experiences more fun, but it’s the actual playing of the game that keeps me playing. There are also plenty of goals to aim for that have nothing to do with gold or the TP.

In fact, if I did have tons of surplus gold, I would actually pursue ALL the Legendary Precursor quests. The main thing holding me back from bothering with them is because I know that each would require me to dump phat stacks before I could continue the process, and I don’t want to dump those stacks.

Again, find another game that doesn’t involve the mechanics you have a problem with.

Ok, do you have any suggestions? What game is exactly like GW2 in every way, including classes, gameplay, and races, but that also has a more balanced economic system? If such a game exists, I suppose I’d jump ship, but I’ve played dozens of MMOs over the years, and so far this is the best of them by a long shot. That doesn’t mean it has no room to grow.

No, the larger point is that gold isn’t everything and can’t get everything. Enough said.

True, but there is an awful lot of stuff that it can buy, and very little in the game that having plenty of gold wouldn’t make much easier.

Ohoni.6057:

If you have two players, one with zero bloodstone/dragonite/emp, but thousands of gold, and another with several bank tabs of those materials but zero gold, try to guess which of them could acquire enough mats to make a set of Ascended Armor first by completing normal ingame activities.

Now you’re the one making facetious arguments that gold buys pretty much anything. Hmm.

No, I’m just pointing out how gold is a part of almost everything. Yes, you do need some “not gold” to make ascended armor, but acquiring the required amount of “not gold” is relatively easy when compared to the amount of gold or gold-fungible materials that you would need. The player who had plenty of gold would have a much easier time finishing off his armor than the player who had plenty of Vision Crystals.

Con men build trust with a victim, then use the other person’s confidence in them. This system is utterly anonymous; no trust or confidence is involved. The parallel is only in your mind. You didn’t even address what he said. anyone can do it.

Players don’t have trust in the other buyers and sellers, they have trust in the TP prices, that the listed prices are “fair,” and that misplaced trust is what gets exploited. Plenty of Ponzi schemes and other economic scams involve the customers never interacting directly with the con men.

Then stop portraying your side as the populist angle, none of us speak for more than ourselves and maybe friends.

You’re the one that said “We know TPers aren’t that widespread.” How is the side that includes the overwhelming majority of the players not the “populist” position? It’s true whether they realize it themselves or not.

Some people do enjoy using the TP. The most enjoyable activities are the most rewarding, precisely because they are so enjoyable. This is a game that sold on the motto, “Play how you want.” You can do exactly that; don’t throttle it by shutting off other, valid playstyles.

And I’m not. Even if I got my way 100%, people would still be able to play the TP if they wanted. At most, the only change it would cause is that the profit margins would be far lower, far more in balance with other ingame activities. If you spent an hour or so on the TP, you couldn’t expect to make more for those efforts than an hours or so of dungeon running or other activities (and yes, I’m aware that the results of those TP efforts would take time to materialize). If there are daily caps to how much you can earn through things like dungeons, then there would also be daily caps on earning through the TP.

Concerning the topic in general:. . .

Well summarized.

So this basically summs down to:

- I’m not having fun, change it

To bad “fun” is subjective.

All totally true. I’d be slightly confused as to why you’d consider that in doubt, or important to point out, but this is the Internet, so of course. Fun is subjective, and some of us aren’t having as much fun as we could have with the current set-up. Luckily, this is a consumer product, so we can leave feedback as to what elements we consider to be fun, and which we do not, and the developers might choose to adapt the game based on that feedback. Or not, up to them, but we’re doing what we can to make the game as fun as possible for us, and people like us.

You are, of course, welcome to do the same, even when your opinions are in conflict with our own. I don’t have any problem with you expressing that you enjoy the mobs as they currently are, so long as you understand that this is just as much your own subjective opinion on the matter, and no more worthy of consideration than ours.

Going by the amount of interest in this topic, and going by the outcry during beta weekend 3 (which was toned down a lot in difficulty), the majority of the forum vocal player base (which is not necessarily represantative of the entire player base) wants a more challenging pve content.

Not really true, but also not really relevant, since as you say, the forum is not at all representative in number to the total game population. The forum is a good place to pick up individual unique voices, “what does this player have to say,” but it is worthless for acquiring demographic data “how many people believe X and how many believe Y?”

Take that as you want. In this case, you are the special little snowflake that wants to force their unpopular view on other players.

No more than any of you. I just want the game to be as fun as it can be.

And all of the threads end in the same way as this one. A vast majority of people disagree.

And they shout down and insult anyone who tries to say otherwise, so that’s largely to be expected. Again, not demographically relevant.

Interestingly enough, most threads come from people who barely entered the first HoT area and basically have had 0 play experience in the new zones. But I’m sure you noticed this too with the careful reading you’ve done.

If so, that would at least indicate that the learning curve is a bit too steep, that these mobs hit a bit hard for players just getting a feel for the new zones. It might be helpful to make Veteran Snipers have the stats and toolkit of a “vanilla” Sniper, and just nerf the vanilla ones to have similar mechanics, but a bit easier to handle, like lower damage, lower duration, things like that, so that they do a better job of teaching the players without killing them in the process. Reserve the harder ones for deeper in the jungle, rather than the first story mission and relatively early areas of the game.

But again, that critique isn’t really relevant to me, I’ve completed the story missions, cleared VB on one character (and most of it with others), cleared most of the next two maps with several characters, killed hundreds of Snipers, along with pretty much any other type of mob, cleared all the VB bosses, done each of the four AB sides, gained enough HPs to finish out three elite specs and part way through several others, etc. I’m far from the best player in the game, but I judge myself far from the worst, I just know what sort of encounters I enjoy, and which I definitely don’t. I actually found fighting Chak to be a lot more fun, they can be difficult, but they have a lot of counterplay to them.

This doesn’t seem like it would be all that hard to test for a reasonably coordinated guild.

1. Find a reasonably tough champ that is relatively out of the way so that nobody is likely to mess with him (ideally with some good one-shot abilities). Bring at least five peak-DPS players who are assured to be able to take the boss out well, and then a dozen or two whatevers. 2. Approach the boss, give him time to scale. Everyone tags him, again give him a little time. 3. Then let him kill everyone but the 5 DPSers, and everyone stays on the ground. Note the TTK. 4. Then repeat, only everyone WPs out when they die and stays well away from the fight (obviously if they ran back it would die faster but that skews the results).

If the TTKs are close, then dead is dead. If the latter one is noticeably faster, then WPing is absolutely necessary, but even if it’s not, it’s still considerate if just to avoid screen clutter.

For science!

But you get punished for doing so compared to people who do use it.

So you are saying that instead ALL players should be punished because the few players that don’t like WPs cannot control their own behavior and abstain from using them?

How do you support small guilds but allow for guild hopping and try prevent exploitation?

I think the answer has to be alliances of small guilds to get merit. And time limits on accounts.

Allow the guilds to activate the mission but set a limit on rewards the player gets. Similar to the way they have chest and map bosses. You can get it only once a day.

Currently you can only get the Guild Chest once per week. I see no reason for that to change. What should change is that everyone that participates gets a chest. So say I’m in a mega-guild. My guild has plenty of resources and manpower to start a mission, we do, everyone chips in, everyone gets their chest, everyone’s happy. If I think helped out in someone else’s guild mission within that same week, I shouldn’t get an additional chest.

Now on the other hand, say I’m not in a mega-guild, and for whatever reasons my guild doesn’t have the resources to launch a guild mission. I should still be able to find, over the course of a week, at least one active guild mission, one where maybe they have the resources to launch it but not to complete it on their own. I jump in and help, I get a chest for my efforts, but then if I do the same later in the week I get nothing.

Now, alliances are good, if only for coordination. I made a suggestion on that forum as to how I thought they could work, but any sort of system would be good for helping multiple small guilds to join up, but an alliance system is not strictly necessary to resolve this, nor would an alliance system alone be the solution for this. The core solution is to give full participation credit to all who participate, regardless of guild affiliation.

Yeah, morally, it’s totally gambling, but legally it falls through a loophole that allows them to do it because you can’t convert anything you find back into cash money (through approved means, at least). So long as you can’t sell a baseball card back to the company for a profit, it doesn’t matter whether you can sell it to another individual for a profit, and the same principle applies here.

I do wish that they’d do away with the principle though, because it is straight up evil, and game companies shouldn’t be evil when they can help it. I don’t mind RNG when it comes free, and I don’t mind paying for things when they aren’t random, but asking players to pay for something that is random is just plain wrong.

Gamers in general are an irrational bunch, this fact can easily be observed by taking a look at the official forums of pretty much any game out there.

That is why game developers are very vague when talking about possible additions to their games. No matter how hard you stress the point that ideas aren’t set in stone, you’ll end up with a crowd raving about “broken promises” if something ends up getting changed or scrapped even.

It’s our fault it’s gotten like this, not the developers.

Having said that, I wish game devs everywhere would grow some balls and just ignore the irrational crybabies.

Exactly. I have no doubt that if they “promise” something and then go back on it that there will be numerous loud complaints about it. That’s ok though. It will happen. I think that what is worse though is the current state of confusion and malaise, where we want something big for the game’s future, but have no idea what is coming in the big picture. I think that this current state represents more upset players than some “missed promise” would, it’s just a quieter upset because we don’t really understand what we’re missing.

WP talked about wanting an expansion because those are typically hyped six months or more in advance with all sorts of trailers and interviews and blog posts, and you can get a lot of expectation about it coming. We don’t need an expansion but we do need an expansion-like element. The “feature patch previews” hit some of these notes, but we only get them a month or so before they go live.

It’s like how Christmas is great because you are anticipating it for months in advance. Imagine if Christmas is just something that happened randomly on some day of the year and you wouldn’t know it was coming it until it happened. Some random Thursday in August comes along and you wake up to Christmas. It’d still be kinda fun, but you’d lose all that anticipation!