Guild Wars 2

Shonie.5297:

One person takes an entry level college course on something marginally relevant and thinks they’re expert on game development.
Blah blah my small guild can’t do large scale content.
Nothing to see here.

I’m not an expert on game development.

Just a customer.

A customer who has worked in high tech R&D for more decades than some posters here have likely been alive.

And a customer who knows what R&D does when there is no competent marketing or other customer engagement to guide the choice of what to do. You get product which actively drives customers away (remember “New Coke”? marketing noticed some people liked Pepsi better so reformulated Coke to taste like Pepsi. I thought it was awful. But Coke wised up after their loyal customers said “yuk” and brought out Coke Classic (meaning went back to the old product).

Game developers don’t seem to be that smart. Game after game is destroyed because the developers make changes which drive away their core customers…

Just dumb.

About 25 years ago my boss brought our entire R&D management team to a class from the auto industry, based on the process Toyota etc had just used to design products that blew GM, Ford, etc off their perch. The U.S. auto companies had become political, making product choices based on executive ego and intuition. The Japanese beat them by clearly understanding what customers wanted, and carefully tying every R&D feature decision to a customer need (which could be stated, unstated, or an opportunity to wow them in a way they couldn’t predict). The class is called QFD for Quality Function Deployment, and last I heard it was still taught by some probably by now grey haired consultant out of Detroit. Takes less than a week. I highly recommend it if you have no clue whatsoever what designing products to serve customers instead of developer egos is about. (NFI)

I just completed my daily achievement, scoring 2 categories simultaneously when I already had 4 categories complete. The indicator now says I have 5/5 categories complete, but it’s not giving me my daily reward…

For completeness’ sake: after the patch I started with the “Daily Gatherer” category already completed (the only category that still counted out of 4 that I completed before the patch… rage!!!).

I proceeded to complete the “Ascalonian Killer”, “Shiverpeaks Killer” and “Recycler” categories, for a total of 4/5 categories complete.

Then, as I completed the “Event Mentor” category I leveled up, which completed the “Skill Point Accumulator”, totaling 6/5 events. The indicator states 5/5. However no rewards were given today.

Hmmm…

OP brings up a point that I share as well…

My small guild wants to remain small, we all live in the same town.
Now we have to let in potential childish trolls and shift them all to see who remains active or who behaves?

I stop caring about the updates… my guild is already suggesting to move but I don’t know how I feel about it.

+100 The problem is, no matter what will happen now. The damage is done, they have to live with all the fallout, all the people quitting and obviously, it is going to have a huge impact on the future of this game.

The problem is, the playerbase will not grow anymore, word of mouth will spread like wildfire, truely – I just hope for all the people who are going to continue playing is that enough population remains so everything can more or less function.

W3 will not be so epic when its like 10 vs 8 vs 3 now would it?

bewhatever.2390:

2. Until release, the game is in the hands of a lead developer who has in their head the target customers of the game and a set of principles — the contract with the players, as it were — and in a hands on way imposes that on the entire development process. At release the game is handed to a live team which, not having had enough contact with the original lead dev (or worse thinking he acted out of ego) have not internalized who the customers are that must be retained, and what principles must never be violated if those customers’ trust is to be maintained.

Good analysis, in terms of the above it arguably happened with anet’s original manifesto and what the game has become. However it seems even the lead developers are now saying that the manifesto was never violated, its not just the live team.

Anet is kitten lucky that they’ve had a rather large window with very little competition unlike say swtor.

I agree. My longtime gaming friends are about to leave and play something else. ArenaNet has a very, very short time in which to respond and take a stance, for a chance to keep us, and people like us around. Ever since November, it’s been one thing after another.

I have stopped playing this game as a result of the Feb patch. I have concluded that the developers don’t know what they’re doing.

Kingfisher.7213:

Babychoochoo.5690:

I disagree. We need about 16 more currencies before I can take this game seriously. I’ve always wanted to know what Bourne felt like with a backpack full of random foreign currency. Don’t take my dream away from me.

Man, I never thought of it like this before.

Such positive thinking…way to turn those lemons into lemonade!

In the Suggestion Forum, someone asked ArenaNet if they could do something to manage all the currencies we have.

ArenaNet acknowledged they have a problem with having too many types:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Currencies/first#post1465154

Evan Lesh.3295:

You’re right that we do have a lot of currencies. We certainly know we could improve the experience here

Unfortunately, I don’t know if that will translate into a currency tab or a streamlining of how many currencies we need to manage.

I’ll reiterate.

I inherently do not have a problem with having a different type of currency for different play styles.

My issue is that each new currency now has exclusive, statistical advantages as rewards. Simply adding more space to store these currencies does not solve the problem.

It now takes over a month of playing religiously for 3-4 hours a day to acquire BiS gear for ONE CHARACTER. That is not ok.

ESPECIALLY when entire playstyles are left out (WvW in particular).

I ArenaNet kept using old currencies, they would retain their use after we had initially purchased what they were intended for. If karma or badges of honour could be used to buy ascended gear, a lot of people would have gotten all BiS within a week of it becoming available because these currencies aren’t used for anything and people have it sitting around. If Pristine Relics were used for amulets, plenty of people would have purchased their amulet as soon as it was available. Waiting 20 days and blowing your monthly laurels wouldn’t be something many would do because Pristine Relics are “easier” (harder content, less restrictive artificial calendar gating used) to get (an account has the ability to get 5 a day without upgrades).

I all comes back to this quote from Colin Johanson:

“…what if your business model isn’t based on a subscription? What if your content-design motivations aren’t driven by the need to create mechanics that keep people playing as long as possible?”

ArenaNet recognised that other MMOs create content with design motivations to keep people playing as long as possible. Very shortly after launch they did a complete 180 and now all their “progression” content is designed specifically to keep people playing as long as possible regardless of time commitment, skill level or ability. Because they use unique currencies, each new grind they introduce (Pristine Relics, Laurels, Guild Commendation) to represent the new “progression” (it’s ironic to me that an MMO that was developed and launched as a forward thinking one is now showing industry regression in the name of player “progression”) is immune to the built up resources of the last. The viable ways of obtaining them are also less. This allows ArenaNet to place a hard cap on how much of all of these resources players are able to access and control, not through challenging or difficult or rewarding content, but through days of the year (dailies – Fractal daily, Laurel Daily, days of research for Guild Missions and a weekly cap on how much can be earned). All these currencies are separate to force you into playing every day for a longer period of time, regardless of how much you play on any given day. They force you to do specific content instead of playing how you want to play. It’s ArenaNet taking more and more control over not only how, but when, players can access stuff.

It’s becoming exhausting for me personally. Keeping track of dailies, not being able to prioritise where I play, having to log in every day to keep up, now I need to find a guild to access this new stuff, the game feels more like a job than it does a game – and that’s just to equip one character, I have six level 80s now. I’ll probably keep playing for a while longer but GW2 is fast approaching a point where all the artificial gating and barriers and currencies and dailies is just going to wear me down and put the final nail in the MMO coffin for me.

Pendragon.8735:

When they announced karma as the game was being developed, it sounded like an amazing step forward. Truly next gen MMO thinking.

Whatever you do in the world, whatever quest, you get this currency called karma and it piles up as you play. Use it now for something at level, or save it down the road for a rainy day. But no matter which direction I went, or what quest types I picked, I would get this same currency that at the end, had the same value as what someone else got by doing something totally different than me, that they liked instead.

Now its practically worthless.

When the game launched think of all the ways you could get Best in Slot gear, playing the way you chose.

- Via Drops
- Via Crafting (now ruined thanks to Ascended)
- Via Dungeon Tokens
- Via Trade Post
- Via WvW Badges
- Via Karma Vendors (that could not be bought with real money via gems)

Play the way you want! And still gear up!

Why didn’t they stick with this? They traded in this awesome system that did everything they initially claimed as their philosophy, for a grindy, and in many parts ‘not fun’ treadmill, that makes you jump through hoops and frequently do things you don’t prefer in the game, just to progress along with everyone else.

This is exactly how I’m feeling right now. And it is, quite frankly, INFURIATING.

They have ALL the systems in place for everyone to play the way that they want.

• Gold for farmers
• Gems for increased revenue and people who don’t want to farm gold
• Karma as a currency for doing pretty much anything in game
• Dungeon Tokens for dungeon lovers
• Relics for fractal enthusiasts
• Badges of Honor for WvW gamers
• Guild Commendations for large group play.

With all these different methods of playing, there is SOMETHING for almost everyone.

However, instead of adding new rewards to ALL currencies, they have decided to make certain rewards EXCLUSIVE to some currencies. That would be fine if the rewards were skins, dyes, or minipets…those are justifiable incentives.

Instead, it appears that every currency is going to have an exclusive STATISTICAL increase going forward.

It would be AWESOME if we could play ANY of 5 or 6 ways to get BiS gear.

Instead, we are being required to play ALL 5 or 6 ways to get BiS gear.

When they announced karma as the game was being developed, it sounded like an amazing step forward. Truly next gen MMO thinking.

Whatever you do in the world, whatever quest, you get this currency called karma and it piles up as you play. Use it now for something at level, or save it down the road for a rainy day. But no matter which direction I went, or what quest types I picked, I would get this same currency that at the end, had the same value as what someone else got by doing something totally different than me, that they liked instead.

Now its practically worthless.

When the game launched think of all the ways you could get Best in Slot gear, playing the way you chose.

- Via Drops
- Via Crafting (now ruined thanks to Ascended)
- Via Dungeon Tokens
- Via Trade Post
- Via WvW Badges
- Via Karma Vendors (that could not be bought with real money via gems)

Play the way you want! And still gear up!

Why didn’t they stick with this? They traded in this awesome system that did everything they initially claimed as their philosophy, for a grindy, and in many parts ‘not fun’ treadmill, that makes you jump through hoops and frequently do things you don’t prefer in the game, just to progress along with everyone else.

Even if they did feel it necessary for a new tier of gear, there was no reason it could not have followed the same currencies, just taking many more of those currencies to set up the proper timetable they wanted. And still allowed the player to play the game the way they liked and not fall behind or miss out, for not liking this or that specific game mode.

The most important thing I saw was this:

Add all ascended gear types to
Guild Merits
Dungeons (i.e. require 3-4 gifts to make an accessory)
WvW
CRAFTING

It drives me absolutely bonkers that you can only get certain ascended things from doing a large list of random and unrelated activities.

Ascended gear was added for fractals. That was good because….if you don’t run fractals, you didn’t need the gear.

Then they decided to “support” ALL gameplay types. Except they made the methods toward getting ascended gear so incredibly varied, unrelated, and disjunct, that you cannot get the ascended gear without significantly impacting the way you WANT to play the game.

I get to play the game for 2-3 hours a day tops. I spend most of that time working on the daily which requires me to do stupid crap I really have no interest in. So instead of loving the game, I’m growing to resent it because in order to get that amulet for my 40+ fractal running…I can’t even run fractals. That is absolutely absurd and nonsensical.

They need to drop this paradigm right now. If I want to progress in the fractals past the 40s, I should be able to get what I need to get for progression IN THE FRACTALS. Instead I’m being forced to do something I have no desire to do whatsoever. It’s sapping the life out of the game for me.

I used to think that grinding was about be required to do one task repetitively over a long period of time.

What appears to be happening here is that we are now having to do 4-6 different tasks on a regular basis in order to have the BiS gear.

I’m not opposed to adding different playstyles, but having to do partake in 4 or 5 different playstyles, over a long period of time, to have BiS gear on ONE CHARACTER is silly.

I know they said they would add additional ascended pieces and add new ways of getting them. I am simply asking that you provide a method to achieve every piece BiS gear for each of the existing currencies BEFORE adding more.

Avecess.8513:

Anet please listen to this man (or woman).
The OP is being coherent and logical, and is completely right.

Thank you. And I’m a dude.

Anet please listen to this man (or woman).
The OP is being coherent and logical, and is completely right.

I disagree. We need about 16 more currencies before I can take this game seriously. I’ve always wanted to know what Bourne felt like with a backpack full of random foreign currency. Don’t take my dream away from me.

But the game is not about grinding….
I remember a famous quote by General Ackbar.

excellent post, i’ve +1 this and am adding my plea for this

I’m posting this to see how many people think:

A) The cost of the guild missions is crud.

B) The guild mission cost will drive smaller guilds into the ground.

C) The guild mission cost is catered to large guilds.

This topic is more less a poll.
Don’t post if you don’t agree with it as the total number of posters will be counted as people agreeing.
There will be an opposite poll to see how many like the cost and think it will affect smaller guilds well.
Other poll here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Guild-mission-cost-is-awesome-poll/first#post1523225
Do not merge this as it is a poll.
Please stick to your respective polls.

People will ALWAYS find the most efficient way to get what they need/want and do it repeatedly until it isn’t there anymore. Then they move to the next best thing and then the next best thing, and so forth. Eventually you run out of next best things…and that leads to leaving the game.

I think what is being forgotten in designing these things, from pen/shelt to the new krait stuff near Teq in Sparkfly Fen, to the changes to AC exp is that this is supposed to be a game. It is incentive-driven. No incentives=no reason to do something. Taking not only the fun out of something (with AC exp as example) but also taking the efficiency out of something (pen/shelt) is taking the GAME out of the GAME.

Please give the game back to the players. Let us have fun, Anet. It’s fun to get loot. I’m personally very loot driven and even though I have terrible RNG luck, I still get out there and farm me some pen/shelt to hope for good stuff, or run dungeons with my friends to get some gold …as in AC exp. I don’t do things that make me feel like I’m beating my head into a brick wall, especially when there’s so little incentive to do so (poor/little loot).

I am aware that the scaling is a ‘test’ for 4 events to see how it works out. I think it feels like a big failure, myself. Something else needs to be done if scaling is desired. Even if you just gave the normal mobs more health (not making them harder) it might help. But Champions go overboard and are normally a waste of effort and hit way too hard.

PROS:

• TP items are finally viewable. I can see how something looks before investing all the effort.
• AC revamp. I largely enjoyed it. It’s much more challenging for experienced players. This is also a con, listed below
• Additional backpiece customization, additional hair and eye options, all welcome
• New dailies offer more options and still change from day to day. Did keg brawl for the first time in months…I still got it
• New method for acquiring Ascended gear AND precursors. This is very welcome and I hope precursor prices drop because of this.
• Orange swords for WvW. Offers a little more cover for small groups. Appreciate that.
• sPvP: thanks for match making and removing paids
• Thanks for showing guardians and necros some love

CONS

• AC Revamp. This is no longer an introductory dungeon…not at ALL. Even though I enjoyed it, it took a skilled group of level 80s to get through it. Some of the level 80s I had actually ragequit. I love a challenge, but the BEGINNER dungeon is not the place for it. That said, this would be a PERFECT HARDMODE beginner dungeon. Doable with skilled pug, but harder than the normal version.
• sPvP…too much to write. Read the forums there
• Guild Mission Bug. This is inexcusable. You are becoming the Bethesda of the MMO world, people are now expecting a huge, avoidable bug on the day of release with later fixes that have smaller bugs and a final fix that makes it the way it was supposed to be in the first place. Get your skritt together.
• Rangers…need…help. Seriously. They need some life support. Now.
• Orr. After the EXCELLENT job you did last month fixing Orr, you decided to add champions everywhere. Why? I seriously want to know. You took what you did right less than a month ago, and now you do this…
• 72 hours until guild bounties…the most talked about portion of the patch…why???
• Most importantly…you’ve added another currency and linked exclusive statistical advances to them. This…needs…to…STOP. We have karma, gold, gems, dungeon tokens, laurels, commendations, badges of honor…USE WHAT WE HAVE. Stop making artificial gates. Karma is one of the most ingenious things EVER. Do whatever you want, earn karma while doing it. USE KARMA.

“Challenging” translates from ANetese into English as “Spam CC and conditions”

Gravelings in AC were made more challenging by, you’ll never guess…giving everything bigger than a hatchling knockback or knockdown. This means instead of a single graveling scavenger knocking you down for 4 seconds and then omnomnoming you to death, you get tossed around like a rag doll.

Personally, I’d happily go back to omnomnom as that at least made stun breakers a viable defense against certain death.

I wasn’t sure what they did – but they sure did something. I wish these changes were, at least, clearly indicated in the patch notes.

I’m not sure why mmos keep feeling that ‘more annoying & frustrating’ somehow equals ‘more interesting.’ I’d say something unexpected is interesting – like if a krait just stopped & offered me tea. Trapping me in poison would not be my idea of a pleasant surprise.

For some nebulous reason unknown to me, they apparently decided to make the krait more “fun and challenging.” I have no idea why they felt this was necessary. Was there some 100-page rant thread with people going on about how they are so bored with krait that they need to be changed and I missed it?

As much as I am loathing the direction arenanet is taking, here are my positives and negatives of this patch as I feel both are justified and warranted:

Positives:
-I like the new dailys
-I like the ability to select dailys I want to do(although the choices last night were kind of poo)
-The preview in Trading Post is a fantastic-must have addition. Good job!
-Guild Missions sound great on paper to immerse people in a zone, give guilds something to do together and to work for. However, my guild won’t be seeing it for a little while.
-Unsure about the mob loot drop changes(if there were any) but it seemed improved.
-I like that the dragon chests and world boss chests FINALLY drop stuff worthwhile.
-Haven’t really focused on class changes because changes are going to happen regardless, but I saw something for the necro that I liked that I think benefits my build.

Negatives:
-Not sure how I like the fact that I can only do each boss once a day. As it was, I only did a boss maybe twice a day anyways. Do people really farm the same dragon 10x a day?
-Including 50 globs of ecto along with 40 laurels for ascended accessories is way too much and I wish this would be changed before even one person is able to purchase. (probably too late). Why you place a crafting material for the cost of an item is beyond me.
-Adding yet MORE currencies to the game is watering down the game, much like SWTOR. Merits and commendations? I really do not like having to keep track of nearly a dozen currencies(gold,karma,dungeon tokens,laurels,commendations,merits,fractal relics, pristine fractal relics, skill points). You need a currency page in the character sheet if you are going to continue to water down your game.
-Guild missions, eventually, will impact smaller guilds. Forcing us to rely on the community is lazy and terrible design. Eventually we might not be able to do all the missions(unlockability aside) just because we chose to be in a smaller guild.
-Gating the guild missions via an insane amount of influence gives insight into your design direction, yet again. Eventually my guild of 30 members will have enough influence to unlock whats needed to do all. But not for a long time.
-Introducing another ascended item one month after the previous is a direct contradiction to what Chris Whiteside said in his AMA, that new items will not be available month after month. Did everyone forget about this little tidbit? A lot of us just finished getting our ascended amulet. No time to rest, we must GRIND for the ascended accessories.

Overall, a lot of good changes, a lot of iffy ones for me. The biggest negative I see, is the design direction.

I bought the game and bought into the hype that a developer was finally not going make the game into an item grind. Play the way you want to, max stat items(exotics at the time) will be all you need and eventually you’ll just grind for cosmetics. There will be no grind. Everything arenanet has done since November 15th has been completely, 110% against what I thought I was getting into…what I bought into, what I thought that Colin and Mike and all those guys were saying in their interviews and webcasts.

This game is a grind. This game has a bigger grind than WoW, than Rift, than SWTOR. In my opinion, this is the grindiest game on the market. This is funny because avoiding grind is exactly what arenanet set out to do and they have given us the most grindiest MMO to date.

This game teeters on item/gear progression. We all thought this to be a cosmetic game.

This game is exactly like every other MMO out there now. Get to max level, game changes. Grind for dungeon set, grind for ascended, grind out WvW progression(soon), grind for legendary, grind out influence for Guild Missions. Other than features, the core of this game is exactly like WoW and every other game. Grind for max stats. This is not the game I wanted to buy and play. But I have a lot of time invested, so I’ll cautiously see where it goes. I’ll say it again, this game is exactly like every other game out there now. Theres no difference. I thought I was playing a unique and special game.

To everyone that says “But noone is forcing you to grind for a legendary, or grind out ascended pieces”. Are you that naieve? In WoW, no one forced me to raid. But I did because what else was there to do besides acquire best in slot gear? Sure, I could have just gotten to 80, run some dungeons and get some mediocre lower ilvl epics that way withing the raid grind. But is that any different than GW2? Get to max level, grind out a dungeon set and be done? Same thing. GW2 is no different, its no special snowflake(not anymore).

morrolan.9608:

This patch is as big a fail as the infamous Nov patch.

I respectfully disagree. Nothing will ever remove 11/15 as the day of infamy. As bad as 2/26 may be, 11/15 remains #1.

Malvagite.3254:

This patch is so awesome that im contemplating uninstalling the game.

I already did, Anet is hell bent on taking GW2 down the same path as every other mmo that has been released in the last 10 years. Sorry Anet but this kitten isn’t what I payed for.

Aside from some long overdue bugfixes, a pretty dreadful patch.

Small guilds just got screwed.

Stealth nerfs to elementalists while they stampede to try and balance D/D Eles and trample people that don’t play flavour of the month spec.

I’m completely unimpressed and very kitten off.

Well, I haven’t been hovering on these forums – this was just enough to make me endure it, just for tonight. As I see it, this game, which I’ve been enjoying since beta, has suddenly lurched into the WoW/EQ territory – and I never want to go there again.

GW2 seemed to be avoiding the SWTOR face plant, and for me, besides a ridiculous number of servers, that problem was ‘wow-clone’ overshadowing the promised ‘single player aspect mmo.’ I’d be very sorry to leave this game, but I find this turn of events depressing.

The obvious reason to visit this forum, which isn’t something I enjoy at all, is because I’d really like to see this shifted. It seems obvious & easy to scale events, and to alter the method of commencing guild missions. It’s not something that appears impossible to alter – at this point.

This patch is so awesome that im contemplating uninstalling the game.