Guild Wars 2

Galen Grey.4709:

So yes obviously Agony is meant to be a limit on how deep you can dwell and how fast you can get there but its not a hard limit dependant exclusively on your gear, its a limit that can be so to say stretched using skill

Okay I understand what you mean now (I did sort of have trouble interpreting that previous post, sorry).

I’m still not in favor of Agony being designed this way because regardless of how many extra levels a skilled player can complete through skill alone, there is a hard limit on how far they can get and it ultimately has nothing to do with their skill, and everything to do with the arbitrary requirement of [item(s) with Agony resistance].

That is indicative of the differences I put in bold in my previous post.

A hard mode is tailored to require skill and give additional challenge for the players that want it. There is an inherent understanding that players of “normal” or “average” skill level will have a hard time and they choose the hard mode knowing it will be hard because they want it to be hard. There is no prerequisite except understanding that it will be hard. Just keep in mind this isn’t only applicable to Fractals of the Mist, I’m also applying this to all dungeons. A Hard Mode is the exact same dungeon with the exact same enemies with no differences other than enemy stats being increased; not so much that it is impossible without a certain level of gear, but enough that it discourages people who are not fully prepared for it. It does not rely on a new persistent mechanic to create a false sense of difficulty, and obtaining better gear will only help the player rather than determine how far they can get.

Deeper fractal tiers do not require skill. Skill helps, but it is not required. Deeper fractal tiers require [item(s) with Agony resistance]. The Fractals Difficulty Scale is not actually an indication of how hard the selected floor will be. It doesn’t matter how deep you go, the actual difficulty of the encounters remains the same. That they use the word “difficulty” is entirely misleading. By choosing a higher number you are not making the dungeon more difficult, you are simply increasing the damage that Agony will do and thus the required amount of resistance you need to survive it. That a skilled player can survive up to 18 floors without any resistance does not change that the majority of players will need it sooner than that, and even the most skilled player will be required to have it any farther than that. Lack of preparedness is not a factor that discourages the player as it is with a genuine Hard Mode, but rather a wall that disables the player from playing at that Fractal level until they have [item(s) with Agony resistance].

In my previous post I gave an example of a much better way to manage agony resistance without actually removing the Ascended Gear that gives it. In my example, the gear is not required, but it will help and reduce the need for switches to be pulled which in turn would yield greater rewards. It adds positive reinforcement for having the gear, but does not impose a requirement on players before they can continue past the gate.

My question to ANET on a level cap increase is this:

What good is increasing the level cap in a game where capped level scales down to the area/dungeon you’re in?

Is it another carrot to give the Hardcore Vertical Progression crowd something to chase for a couple days? Why not simply add more level 80 zones, given the current short supply of them? If that is already planned, then what is the time frame for the first level cap increase? Will there be sufficient time for active players of both hardcore and casual demographics to fully experience the additional level 80 zones before they are inevitably moved on from in favor of the new max level zones/events? How will you rebalance zones such as the Cursed Shore to be less hostile to individual players who may not be able to find enough people to do events to access Waypoints and Arah?

I’m not opposed to a level cap increase, I just want ANET to be absolutely positive they have weighed every possible consequence, unlike how they handled Fractals of the Mist and Ascended gear.

tkalamba.2541:

The Temporary grind.

Others have mentioned it, but it is a power creep. Meaning as more vertical progression is implemented, we will have to grind again, be it for resources to craft, WvW badges to purchase, Dungeon tokens to purchase or the good ol’ RNG in drops. Every time the vertical bar rises, we have to grind.
Every time the carrot is extended farther in front of us, we get back on the treadmill.
That is exactly what ANET said they would not do.

Galen Grey.4709:

Disagree with you here. In your context hard would still be gated content as you definite it ! if your build, gear and skill allow you to just perfectly complete normal you’re going to fail hard and you’re calling that “gating content” The content will remain gated to you until you increase any of those 3

Uh… no? The most skilled player in the game isn’t going to be able to function at a certain point in Fractals without getting Agony resistance. That is not “difficulty.” That is a gate whose key is “ascended gear.”

That same player will be able to function as normal in
Choose Difficulty – Hard
wherein enemies have slightly more health/slightly higher stats/slightly higher damage/etc. There is no artificial mechanic that will eventually force the player to get a better piece of gear. Better gear will, of course, help, but it ultimately rests on the player’s skill. Skill dependency is not the same as gated content because in my example the Hard Mode is no different from the Normal Mode except in terms of enemy stats (most games also add an additional mechanic during boss fights, but again- not something that demands an arbitrary item or gear piece to overcome it).
It is the same content except harder and therefor you need more skill to complete it.

Fractals appear to function like this, but eventually they arbitrarily demand that the player have gear pieces and infusions instead of skill to resist an arbitrary mechanic. The mechanic serves no purpose except to demand that gear from the player. If it were just another condition and it just happened to be non-removable then it would set a sort of timer on the encounters which would act as a less (but still) arbitrary means of imposing artificial difficulty if only because that timer is something that the player can measure their skill against. Agony and Agony resistance in its current iteration and progression is not a measure of skill, but rather a gate demanding progressively more [item with Agony resistance] in order to pass. There is no actual increase in difficulty, just an increase in the amount of requried [item with Agony resistance].
It is the same content always, except you need more [item with Agony resistance] to complete it.

There is a clear, distinct difference. One is a difficulty increase tailored for people who want more challenge, the other has a static difficulty and is tailored to progressively require more [item with Agony resistance].

Let me just say I am not opposed to this kind of design. There is a right way to implement this, but the Fractals do not do it properly. A better way to do it is to make the resistance available through an NPC switch in the starting area. Each progressive tier of fractals you reach, you gain another switch to pull for more resistance. This is not only a much less arbitrary way to implement Agony/Resistance, but it allows the opportunity to tailor rewards based on how many switches of Resistance are pulled. Players are no longer reliant on gear to continue to deeper levels, but as per the usual- the gear will of course, help kind of like real difficulty increases.

Having names show up in WvW opens up too much potential for griefing, harassment, abuse, etc. We have no need to see the names of our enemies other than to do these things to them.

Mitigating trash talking and harassment by way of turning off whispers in certain areas is not an effective countermeasure as the hostile environment would still be present via the griefing and abuse. We can see the names of people on our own server. This is more than enough. We do not need to be able to see individual names of other people.

The ONLY thing I might say would be acceptable is letting us see who the enemy Commanders are. Even if there are some Commanders out there who only got the book because they could, several of them are key communicators and group leaders in the actual activity and color-coding enemy Commander symbols to the server color they are currently aligned to (or just color-coding the symbol along with the server colors all together) would make for interesting risk/reward scenarios. Do we take out the enemy commander and hopefully break up their group/zerg for a few moments for safer advancement on our target, or do we choose a relatively safe target they won’t be able to effectively stop our advances against?

Still, there is not a single reason we need to see the names of enemies, commander or not. There’s no reason to ever allow us to do so. If you want to be known, do well and be acknowledged and praised by your server.

On Fractals: Difficulty Modes vs. Gated Content

Requiring Agony Resistance is not a difficulty increase mechanic. It is an additional damage mechanic used to force you to get a thing to resist it before it is possible. Kind of like Gated Content forces you to get a certain level of gear before your stats are high enough to not die.

A real difficulty change would look like this upon entering a normal old dungeon:
Choose Difficulty – Normal
Choose Difficulty – Hard
and this is key here: you would not need a special “infusion” or additional resistance mechanic slotted into your armor to do it. It would be a skill check against enemies with their stats scaled to a higher standard of difficulty or lower margin of error.

So yes, deeper sections of the Fractals dungeon are indeed “Gated Content.”

mulch.2586:

I have done it with the rings, and verified in-game as well. What looks like a meaningful bump in stats ends up being almost invisible in the damage from abilities in game. Less than half a percent from a ring. Actual amount varies, cuz of course if you have a completely defensive build +11 power matters more than if you’ve stacked power.

The greatsword or any weapons haven’t been released in the ascended tier yet.

To address your last point, as someone else already mentioned ANET accidentally bumped up Legendaries to the presumed “Ascended Weapon” stats for a short time. Those may not be the final numbers, but we have a solid idea of where they’re going to be.

Once an entire set of Ascended gear is obtainable the stat difference is going to have a larger disparity when increasing to it from Exotics than any other tier to tier jump below it. This on its own is fine (meaning the whole set of Ascended tier, not just what we currently have). The fear is that there will be additional tiers on top of this in the future that will exacerbate the problem (for a relatively decent example look at WoW’s model of increased item-level on the same level-required Epics).

Chamone.6890

Roquen.4523

It was mentioned numerous times during the recent AMA on Reddit that Anet would have preferred to roll out these items from the launch of the game.

Beware of believing this rhetoric.

It’s very easy for them to say “we wanted to do this all along!”, now that they’ve introduced it 3 months after the game launched.

It may be true, they may have indeed intended to have a gear grind in the game from the very start but lacked the resources and time to get it in. Would the game have attracted the interest of the MMO community and gaming press in general if it had the gear grind from the start? Would so many old GW1 fans have pre-ordered it? I doubt it.

Only one of two things can be the case here:

1: This is a lie, a well-phrased lie intended to deflect some of the fierce criticism the team is getting. They never intended to include a gear treadmill from the start, and in fact the main selling point was horizontal progression. The team may have had a vague idea that they could add more vertical progression in future if enough players demanded it, but it was not part of the original vision of the game.

2: This is the truth. They knew all all along that they would be introducing gear grind at a later stage, and chose to withold this information from us, the people buying their game on pre-order. It is not mentioned anywhere in the manifesto, anywhere in the development blog posts, (which do go into significant detail around Rare and Exotic gear) or any of the interviews that the team gave. If this was indeed the plan all along, they have been extremely good at hiding it.

I don’t believe that 2 is true, I have faith in Anet as a whole, I just can’t see them being so devious as to pull this as a bait-and-switch kind of deal.

I just think they’ve gotten carried away with the whole thing. The game has been far more successful than they had ever dared hope, and now they’re panicking about some of the big numbers.

I imagine that they’ve “lost” over a million players since launch, and that most of those players are citing “no PvE endgame” as the reason they’re quitting. This new gear tier is a measure to stop players who are into “Vertical Progression” from going back to WoW.

A message to Anet:

It won’t work, it can’t work, it has been tried dozens of times before and has always failed. These content locusts will eventually burn themselves out on WoW and find something better to do with their time. That might be GW2, it might not. We don’t care, and nor should you.

The number of people that want to grind for bigger numbers is getting smaller every single day. There are so many more people in the world that just want a decent video game. Pre-November, Guild Wars 2 was exactly that, you just didn’t give them enough time to let them find it.

It doesn’t MATTER if people buy your game, enjoy it, then quit. It DOESN’T. They will be back when you add more content, and they will buy gems. LOTS of gems.

Don’t try to catch the falling knife.

This is an excellent post and good advice in general to businesses facing more success than they were initially prepared for.

stpetemermaid.5947:

Now, would someone like to tell me how I misinterpreted that to mean something other than no vertical gear progression? Would someone like to explain to me how vertical gear progression was always a part of the plan? I read everything that came out from Anet prior to purchase, including this. It’s still on the Blog site.

You didn’t misinterpret it. It is exactly what they meant at the time. Some time between launch and now something changed and that is exactly why they raised the vertical bar. Whatever the change was, they are not being straightforward about it and instead are trying to re-define their own manifesto. In doing so they appear dishonest at worst and misleading at best.

Naoko.7096:

If players realised, the game is already a vertical progression from Lv1 to 80. Yet, they’ve not realised it.

This is is a fundamentally flawed understanding of any game. In a game where you’re never expected to go out of your way to achieve Max Level/Stats/Items/Whatever it’s valid (such as the games you talk about all of us expecting to be able to put down once we beat it) and it is only valid because there is often not much else in the way of “progression”. In an MMO where you are expected to achieve max level the number next to your character is a subconscious reward while you progress through learning the game. Vertical progress is measured by how much your character can grow once it’s done growing. What’s our natural stat cap at 80? 916 in each stat or something close to that? How much can your character grow beyond that? That is vertical progression. Exploring the world, finding new skins, doing dungeons and crafting are horizontal. They don’t affect your character’s growth beyond an experience notch on its belt (you’ll notice this much more clearly in GW2, since our characters continue to gain experience with no vertical reward for each “level” we gain beyond 80).

Gw2 is full of open maps and dynamic events which they can’t afford players to every players to put back the game in the shelf and stop playing for months.

This is actually the design philosophy of F2P games. They expect people to put the game down until they feel like playing again for as long as that takes. With all this backlash and negative criticism it would seem as though more people are going to put the game down for months and months than otherwise would have without this potential progression.

Players are misinterpreting “no grind for gears to experience the fun content”. This means higher tier gears are optional. Gears are not content, but rewards and bonus. You are able to experience all the fun content without the best gears in the game.

This is just completely untrue. I can see where you’re coming from but anything in the game that can be experienced by players is “content.” That includes higher tiers of gear. The content is supposed to be fun and we are not supposed to need the best gear to experience all of it.

Harbard.5738:

Well discussing statcap vs stat inflation in a GW2 forum is definitely beating a dead horse now after the AMA. The ship has sailed.

Actually it hasn’t. As long as the discussion is still going strong ANET can’t ignore it regardless of whether they participate in it. They can act like it isn’t there, but it always will be. At the very least it will serve as an extremely necessary ethics check when they evaluate themselves as a business.

If this general conversation topic is still going by the game’s first anniversary as strongly as it’s going now it will be a massive discouraging factor for any further stat progression (one can’t help but hope the massive backlash they just used Chris to shield themselves from has already achieved that). Can you even imagine? What other issue in a game consisted of half the active discussion in said game’s forum for that long without seeing results? I don’t mean some halfhearted Q&A that essentially leaves a developer to fend for himself in the face of a firing squad. That’s not a result, that’s an attempt to smooth over a volatile situation before everyone realizes the well was poisoned. Has it worked? That AMA thread is 700 posts strong and it’s just as divisive as any other thread with a heated discussion going on so the signs point to no. A result is a tangible change to the game. This is, after all, the most (not only, just most) logical explanation for why Ascended gear came so late. The discussion before Ascended gear was around was just as it is now, so they added it. Now the discussions are more heated than ever and involve more people, so what’s the proper step to address this? Probably to halt the progression and leave it at an increased stat cap (with the understanding that Ascended is here to stay).

Early 20’s, mid USA.

Roargathor.2743:

Changing game design philosophies mid swing is a bad idea. My guess is they are scrambling to recover finances and are grabbing at straws. The loot kittens (those who need item stat progression to be motivated to log in) have always proven to be a loyal bunch, even if it’s the current minority of players, it’s where they believe the money will come from in the long run. It will kill the game for most of us though. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Given GW1’s uh… relatively small playerbase with a similar purchase price then F2P setup I really doubt they’re scrambling to recover finances, especially when I know of at least a couple vocal people (which generally means there were plenty of silent people) who were willing to put down $50 on gems for Halloween items. They probably turned a nice profit with their Thanksgiving Weekend sales too. This is with a playerbase at least a couple times the size of GW1.

So either they really did lie to/mislead us (pre-launch or now, the conflicting information heavily implies it has happened regardless) or they think the vocal minority (talking extreme minority here, there were more people opposing the idea of stat progression than in favor of it every time it came up before Lost Shores was announced) on the forums is somehow representative of the much more massive number of players in-game which is silly and I hope they aren’t doing that.

ANET needs to get its PR and Marketing acts together lest the ride turn down a bumpy road.

dalendria.3762:

The manifesto came out in 2010 and was the start of their discussions about how they intended to make a “unique” MMO. In 2011 and 2012, they explained in more detail the core design principles of GW2.

There are so many interviews, blogs, articles and videos in which the Arenanet team make their positions clear about gear, end game, etc. Below are just two examples from 2012.

First, Colin Johnason, Lead Game Designer explains their position that max stat gear should exists and new gear should only be differentiated based on looks.
6/19/12
http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

“This metric of success impacted a lot of our early content-related design decisions for Guild Wars 2. Some examples include:

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too."

Second, Eric Flannum and Colin Johanson discuss end game, gear, etc.
7/14/2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjxvj2I_CCA

They make it clear in the video that Exotics will have the max stats. They then explain that Legendaries will be the same as Exotics in terms of stats. They state that the only difference will be that legendaries will have cool looks and be harder to obtain.

And these things are why I am silently in favor of the “what the hell possessed them to do this” camp.

One man being put in the line of fire to explain why there is gear progression and why it was introduced so haphazardly in a game that actively promoted that it didn’t have any after an outcry of such questions all over every medium GW2 is talked about in saying that “no really, we always planned this, but I guess we should have done it pre-launch” is not going to quiet down the people who feel their trust was misplaced, because the exact answer I just quoted is only half of an answer. It does not elaborate on why they chose not to add these items pre-launch and in so doing leaves room to doubt the truthfulness of the answer itself. There was no sign they ever had any intention of doing this until the Lost Shores event was announced.

The “what the hell were they thinking” reaction is entirely predictable and reasonable, if not always well-spoken.

Bluebird.1890:

Your suggestion is exactly what I was envisioning.

“We have the resources to go in these directions. Which does the community prefer?”

And then you have nobody that can claim that the developer isn’t holding true to the players wishes.

The problem we run into is when it’s a close vote. Something like a Presidential vote where one candidate gets 55% of the vote and the other gets 45%. I don’t think a content decision coming down that close should be acted on just because it barely won. This is about everyone’s entertainment, not the side that just barely has more people voting for it.

Bluebird.1890:

I’ll be ignoring the latter part of your post, as it is not relevant. If I wanted to gang up on people, I’d move my character to Jade Quarry and do WvW. It’d be much more satisfying.

You mean Stormbluff Isles, right? We’ve been handing Jade Quarry its own butt for almost a month now.

Bluebird.1890:

My post was directed at the people actively attacking Arenanet and trying to change the way the game is played for those of us who are enjoying it, not for people who got bored and quit.

They do this because history has taught them that communicating is effective. Communicating loudly with people agreeing with you is even more effective. I wouldn’t say the majority of negative criticism is attacking ANET, though. Lots of it is angry and has an" I didn’t get my way" vibe to it and maybe some of these angry people quit over it, but they said something in hopes that it would be discussed/debated/argued, agreed with, and acted upon. The rest is mostly innocuous posting with personal speech habits muddling the discussion; lots of “I think” or “I want” or “I feel” instead of “this is a good idea” or “this happened” or “this is why.”

Sky.9347:

Archmortal.1027:

Sky.9347:

WoW is far less of a gear grind than GW2 is, currently.

This is hilarious, thank you.

It’s true. I played WoW for many years off and on, and some of my closest RL friends still run a large raiding guild.

You made the sweeping statement that WoW itself has less gear grind than GW2 which is simply ludicrous. Ascended Gear takes a while at the moment because in terms of drops it’s pretty RNG in a bad way. But at least you can keep trying as long as you want/can tolerate. In WoW you get one chance a week to get that raid item and then you have to compete against other players for it. I played WoW for many years as well, all on. WoW as a game is built around grinding in every aspect of its gameplay. GW2 is not unless the player chooses to actively grind whether it’s because they’re used to it or because they really want [item].

The current exception is Ascended gear and only because ANET did an absolutely horrible job of implementing it. They (hopefully) fully intend to make it as widely available as exotic gear currently is which would then mean that there are no exceptions and there is still no grind unless you choose to undertake one yourself.

WoW has more players because it’s been around something like twenty times longer, was easier to play than its competition, looked better than its competition and most importantly, because it wasn’t dealing with an audience that had expectations of what an MMO should be, rather the audience just wanted an MMO to do stuff in and WoW was the most fun for that at the time.

GW2 is not a revolution, no. It isn’t trying to take WoW to the chopping block and slice off the evil hivemind that is Activision in order to free the MMO world from its corruption. But it is different and operates under a new paradigm for the MMO scene. It cannot be truthfully said that the two games are similar beyond both being MMORPGs and all the gameplay implications that come with it (stats, dungeons, exploration, etc).

Sky.9347:

WoW is far less of a gear grind than GW2 is, currently.

This is hilarious, thank you.

Bluebird.1890:

No. What we can blame people for is not having some patience after the apology is made to give them some time to try and fix the mistakes they obviously want to correct. We can also blame them for blowing the mistakes completely out of proportion to make it seem like the current status of the game is grind FOTM or you will be weak in comparison to someone who has grinded FOTM.

Neither of which is correct.

This applies to both sides of the argument though. The people that actively participate in arguing against points like Logun is trying to make are just as good at blowing said points and mistakes in phrasing out of proportion and not being patient enough to wait for the game to soothe the anger/opinion/whatever.

To be completely fair though I haven’t seen someone say people who don’t do Fractals are weak compared to people that do. Has that actually happened? I know the opinion exists that once ALL of the Ascended armor slots are out people without Ascended will seem weaker, but still.

Bluebird.1890:

If you aren’t having fun running the fractals, then stop running the fractals.

Ascended gear will soon be attainable in any portion of the game, as Chris Whiteside has attested to, and apologized for it not being done all at once.

It wasn’t about me. It was about what I see from the people talking about it.

Ditton.3149:

Columba.9730:

Danikat.8537:

Seriously?

The only reason you need Ascended gear is to do the higher levels of Fractals. And it really is only the higher levels. I’ve heard of people getting up to at least level 10, which is more than enough to have seen each fractal at least once, without ever needing Ascended gear.

If you don’t intend to try and reach the higher levels of that dungeon then you can completely ignore Ascended gear, and the only reason to try and reach the higher levels is to get Ascended gear more easily. So in other words it’s grind for the sake of grind for those who want it and everyone else can just ignore it and play as normal.

Wrong. The ascended gear is 20-50% more powerful than exotics.

show me a ring that is 50% stronger than the exotic version…

The ring with the Divine stat distribution. There isn’t an exotic version. ’nuff said.

Tolmos.8395:

“Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.”

This deserves attention but not so much because of looking for groups. This quote deserves attention because Ascended gear and the Fractals dungeon fly in open defiance of this statement. An Ascended gear piece will prepare you to have fun past Fractal 10 and additional pieces will prepare you to have fun deeper in the dungeon and so on. Looking for groups is certainly a valid concern as well, but not because we have to create our own (it’s honestly preferable to a LFD system as direct interaction is much better assurance of the player’s investment rather than a passing “oh I guess I’ll do this if the queue pops and the group isn’t horrible”).

You’d think the giant rift in the community that was created after the Fractals and Ascended gear were added would be evidence that people are not having fun from moment to moment. We’re seeing it all over the discussion and suggestion forums. Almost all the loud voices have taken a side on it to the point that someone’s common-sense post about treating each other’s posts with respect and adhering to the basic forum rules got stickied. Such a post should not have had to be made, much less get stickied to make sure no one missed it, but it was and it did because either a large or a loud (judging by in-game observation I’m leaning more toward large instead of just loud) portion of the community feels “betrayed” for lack of a better word. Ascended Gear is turning out to be a grind because they rolled it out without all the availability options and without realizing how bad things could turn out because of that. Whether they stated it’s changing soon or not, this happened because of the lack of forethought.

I still don’t see a reason to go through with vertical progression. They would have better-served their own intentions and the game community by altering Exotics rather than add an entirely new stat set to progress to.

Just wanted to pop in and say that as of my own observation, Shadow Behemoth will spawn even if broken once after a server restart be it for a patch, maintenance, what have you.

Stormbluff Isles, the event is certainly broken and never seems to trigger however every time the servers restart the required meta events to trigger Shadow Behemoth pop up within a couple hours of said reset as though on its normal timer. As I said, this only happens once per reset though.

I’ve been paying attention to it since the beginning of October and this seems to be how the event behaves in its broken state.

As far as I’ve noticed they’re on the same timer as the daily achievements. Right when the dailies reset I’m able to loot the puzzle chests again.

Lutharr.1035

DBM made WoW raids evolve which is a quote from Blizzard themselves. They knew it was there so had to incorperate it or have trivialised content. Just saying its down to number is utter BS. Every MMO has numbers involved just as GW2 has (u have noticed those numbers flash up i assume) so just breaking it down like that just shows either ignorance or blind hate.

And you’ll notice how I implied it dumbs things down which is exactly how WoW is evolving to amass more subscriptions and exactly what we were talking about in terms of difficulty. That game uses instant-death because there isn’t any. If things don’t die before the time limit, you do instead. That is the difficulty. GW2 does difficulty differently and I can’t see a reason for them not to apply the dungeon difficulty curve to the raids which is a good thing.

So again, all for small “raid” scenarios. I especially like the idea of picking bosses to affect the outcome. Right up this game’s alley.

Also, everything MasterGeese.4756 said.

As a guardian, I’d really rather just have the Warrior Longbow skillset just flat-out copy-pasted over to us. Everything that skillset does is something a Guardian should reasonably be able to do and it lines up with our functionality theme perfectly.

Lutharr.1035:

Agadar.4931:

There’s this game called ‘World of Warcraft’ where there’s an endless supply of brainless raiding. You should give it a shot.

Funny how that “brainless raiding” was 10x tougher than anything GW2 has to offer right now.

Not really. WoW raids are all about numbers and instant-death mechanics. There are exceedingly few pressure situations that cause the individuals in the group to think on their feet about how to approach the fight as it’s happening. I’m not saying GW2 is at that point yet, but just by analyzing the mechanics it’s pretty clear they’re going in a much more dynamic direction. Also third-party stuff like DBM just takes away any semblance of difficulty 99% of the WoW’s mechanics might have after being filtered through optimal stats and specializations. Every possible action is on a timer and it is guaranteed to happen at a specific time so there’s never any valid reason to lose. There’s so little individual thought or evaluation of what you should do next that would have the most benefit in the fight that it’s kind of sad (it’s also the reason I had to strong-arm my raid leader into letting me not use the damnable mod- -edited- I can’t play an MMO when success is on a timer and the only reason failure happens is because of something completely, 100% out of my control as a player).

Since a bloated number of mechanics isn’t all that interesting, depth of mechanics is where it’s at. GW2 has a whole lot of room to stretch in the depth department. Honestly, even the story-mode dungeons are harder than anything I’ve done in WoW short of Heroic raids and it’s because the mechanics have more depth than “do this or die.” Heroic raids in WoW are only so hard because they’re overtuned to drastically raise the minimum numbers required to succeed bar (because WoW raids are a numbers game).

stefanplc.5234:

I’m sure just like many others, you’ve noticed the high amount of threads just about in every section about class X being OP and about poor balancing. I think an implementation of Spectator Mode in sPvP and a proper ranking system where viewers could spectate some higher end PvP could put an end to this. If people could see good PvP players play and how they counter FOTM or so called “OP builds”, then they might stop all this crying and understand that in many of the situations it’s just a l2p issue. It’s really getting annoying and it gives GW2 a bad vibe and image while most of the time it’s just miss-informed complaints.

I know this could take a while to implement but until then a good idea would be to actually form a tournament of all the high end PvPers with a good representation of each profession and then publish that footage to show people that it’s really not that bad.

Something being done in this direction could transform all the nonconstructive threads where people just complain, point fingers and spread all this poor documented information into constructive threads where people start asking “HOW” and come up to real solutions to their problems.

Even just a ranking system similar to WoW’s armory could do the job. If people start seeing their profession at the top, they might look differently at the situation.

There will always ALWAYS be balance QQ-ing. And the chances of it ever coming from people that actually play, practice, and become good in these modes of play are extraordinarily low. The complaints always come from the people who faced person with X build and oh jeez, X build just happens to be especially good at Y role which is very effective against the build of People Complaining. It’s a pvp learning curve and a lot of people don’t realize it’s there so they get stuck in place and complain about it.

A ranking system would harm things more than help them. The current QQ wouldn’t go away, it would just shift focus because “wow, look at all of Profession X at the top of the rankings. They’re so OP!”

I can’t say much about a spectator mode but the only sentiment I’ve ever seen about it from GW1 was something along the lines of being able to see everyone’s build and a lot of people copy-pasted things instead of, you know, learning. If players don’t have access to that kind of information to copy-paste it onto themselves to suddenly do well then I imagine a spectator mode is right up the alley of dulling the QQ a bit.

pawtrisha.7234:

I love love love love love this game.
I have 2 80’s –
both fully exotic
1 with 100% map completion (the other one not that far off)
instance / karma grinds get old after a period of time.
There is absolutely ZERO reason to craft (most of the time on the market it cost let to buy the item vs the mats to make it). I do however have a 400 tailor, armorsmith, leatherworker, artificer, and cook.

I’m about to rearrange the house.. =/ that’s never any good. I would rather be immersed in your world! But no, tonight I caught up on TV shows and watched Magic Mike.

Please ~ Figure out some form of raiding.

This whole dynamic with the game where you play it and then do real life is exactly what ANET was going for. They don’t want you to be married to the game.

For what it’s worth, once ANET gets around to polishing up Dungeons and gets a better handle on the difficulty curve they’re going for I’d be all for a “small” raid scenario with 10 people. That said, with how the game works it wouldn’t be “a reason to log in.” It would just be one more nice touch for people to do whenever. If they were to impose Timed Lockouts on the raid(s) to force the “reason to log in” feeling (I can’t imagine another way to purposefully go for that feeling with the game’s current design) then they’d be actively conflicting with the design of Everything Else in the game and I don’t think they want to do that.

dangerhunt.2607

I agree with OP, there should be something similar or better than raid in GW2.
Something for people to hunt for besides weapon skins.

Not that I know what the rewards for a “raid” would be, but I imagine weapon/armor skins would be exactly what people would be doing them for. Maybe some of the sentiment I’ve seen over Exotic Dyes could be tossed into something like this as a potential reward as well.

Meow.5794:

RaGe.9834:

A: non-exsistant, Guardians are uber tanky even when they don’t try for tankyness
but more seriously, if you want to go for dmg I would go for crit since there’s little to no real condition damage and power based builds in this game are left in the dust outside of pvp

We got the lowest amount of base HP in the game, “uber tanky even when they dont try for tankyness”. I bet you never played a guardian :P

For those who dedicate themselves to “tanking” even though this game makes it pretty clear you shouldn’t be doing that (because you’ll die over and over and over), HP has extremely little to do with it. There’s a certain threshold you want just to guarantee survival against any big hit, but after that “tanking” in GW2 is all about aggro and enemy control.

For example: even though my Guardian isn’t max level I often find myself holding the enemy’s attention and then… RUNNING FOR MY LIFE while it chases me down getting any damage in I can edge-wise (Leap of Faith’s blind is aces here). That is “tanking” in GW2, just keeping the enemy’s attention away from others. Trying to take hits even if you have 30k HP is foolish.

These things happen in almost every game that cares about the story structure when implementing new content. Whether it lasts for a few hours, a few days or a few weeks there will inevitably be people who miss them.

Having a Story NPC in the home instance to view/re-view cutscenes even if you weren’t around to see them originally is a great idea and should seriously be considered, but not the part where it allows instanced/private versions of these events.

ANET called it a one-time event. They have given warning to everyone interested in the game that it’s not going to happen again. You don’t need to do it to access the resulting content, it’s just there for flavor. Saying that an extra taste somehow makes something more hardcore/elite is silly. It’s like a limited-time flavor of ice cream. Try the flavor or don’t. Whether or not everyone in the world has time to get to the ice cream shop to have a taste isn’t going to change that it’s not permanently available.

Taemek.1602:

This change simply removes the trivial application of rendering Finish Them! completely useless which again, is not the point of the mechanic. The point is, again, a second chance. This is removed with Stealth.

And this can only be said by ignoring that most professions are not at a disadvantage against Stealth while downed.

Since we seem to be completely ignoring the Group dynamic of PvP let’s focus on 1v1 while roaming again. 1v1 against any profession you are downed. That player that downed you is going to defeat you even without using a Finisher simply because the abilities immediately available while downed are not powerful enough to discourage the opponent from continuing to Do Terrible Things To Your Kittens. Now let’s factor in how much damage was done. As I stated in a previous post, unless the 1v1 was so close before you were downed that your conditions could finish the player off on their own with no additional help from your downed abilities, your downed abilities are not going to down that player fast enough to stop them from defeating you with a finisher (reminder: this is against ANY profession). Now let’s factor in interrupts and escape mechanisms. A lot of them don’t require a target to be effective as they directly affect the area around the caster/target the caster directly. Nearly all of these are effective at postponing a finisher from any Profession, stealthed or not. Is your mechanism a knock-back/down/interrupt? Did they have stability up? If yes, you’re going to die. If no, did that buy you enough time for the opponent’s conditions to down them? Yes? Great, start going to town and hope you come out on top. No? Then they’ve probably used a healing skill and have more health than when you were originally downed further reducing your chances of survival if the slow health decay hasn’t already done you in. Is your mechanism specifically for escape like Mistform? If yes, congratulations you have a 100% chance of postponing a finisher because even an Immune, Stable, Stealthed player can’t finish something that is also Immune and running away from them, but that doesn’t last very long. Did it last long enough for any of the opponent’s conditions to down them? Yes- read: go to town, No- read: they’ve probably healed now. Say you don’t have an interrupt or escape mechanism. Do you have an AoE? Lay it on yourself. Was their health low enough for that to down them when they approached to do the finisher? Yes- read: go to town, No- read: you’ve been finished. So let’s say you’ve exhausted all your options. You’re going to be defeated at that point because everything is still on CD. Did Stealth play a role in that? No. Did you hold them off long enough for the group to rescue you? No, this is 1v1 because every time Group Scenario was mentioned along with the dynamic associated with it it was ignored.

The only scenario I can imagine Stealth greatly increasing the odds of a Finisher being successful is if it’s a group scenario where members of the group are not helping to rally the downed player while the downed player is not paying attention and the stealther goes unnoticed while applying stealth while the downed player is focusing on their channeled heal to rally themselves and said stealther gets to that player and gets through at least 60% of the Finisher cast bar before stealth wears off. In any other scenario with a group the downed players are either so outnumbered that the people Finishing them could not possibly fail to do so or they are being healed up by others which is fast enough that a Finisher doesn’t have enough time to Finish Them without the downed player taking very significant damage to counteract the healing which in most cases would cause the healers to get the hell out the way for their own survival which usually leads to the downed player being defeated regardless.

So, what exactly is Stealth trivializing? Or a better question: what professions are defenseless against a stealth finisher?

Taemek.1602:

The simple fact of it is, people do not use immunity or stability based boons with x mins worth of cooldown to trivialize a finisher.

Thiefs can abuse this every 3 – 5 seconds.

If you can’t see the issue, then all you are advocating here is keeping the ability to abuse it further.

Speaking from a Guardian standpoint I can build myself to invoke stability pretty regularly. I certainly can’t keep it up as much as a Thief could keep up stealth, but with the right build it might see 10 seconds of down-time which is still plenty “abuse-able,” not to mention that I’d be granting it to several people around me. Considering again that all PvP is a group-scenario and the only way to 1v1 someone is if you encounter them roaming, there are far more people using Stability to “trivialize” the Finisher than there are people using Stealth to do so.

So yes, I’m advocating to keep Stealth as-is because it’s less powerful and less of an issue in terms of “trivializing Finishers” than any other boon that prevents interruption. I’d say Stealth ranks right there with Aegis in terms of trivialization.

I would be more concerned about the lack of group effort if people were constantly left downed or dead instead of being helped. This hasn’t happened in my experience. Sometimes when I’m defeated and don’t see anyone around I’ll afk for a few minutes just to do whatever irl and I’ll come back to someone rezzing me. The community might not be all that chatty out in the world outside of guilds, but they’re certainly helpful, friendly and willing to work together.

All it really takes to get most players talking is breaking the ice yourself.

Taemek.1602:

Archmortal.1027:

Taemek.1602:

Again, none of you are staying on topic.

You must have an enemy targeted to use that skill is what I get when trying to execute skills on a stealthed thief, so cut the crap in regards to being able to fire off ANY skill in the game on a stealthed Thief.

Secondly, once again I will reiterate, Stealth should not allow a Finish Them! move. This was not how it was designed to be used and it removes any possible second chance no matter how slim that chance might have been and trivializes the fight.

I will also reiterate that those of you who keep ranting on about stability and immunity based boons, I would agree if those skills could be used every 5 seconds, however, they cannot be used every 5 seconds. However, Stealth can be used every 3-5 seconds depending on spec.

When in Stealth, no one should be able to Finish Them!, it should be greyed out until you come out of Stealth and show yourself. That goes for all stealth based abilities not just Thiefs.

It’s like you’re just willfully ignoring the things people say about push-backs, mistforms and all of these other things. Yes, you can’t shoot any ability at a stealthed target but not only is no one saying you can use any ability on a stealthed target but not every downed ability requires you to target anything and most of the downed abilities that can be used to interrupt the Finisher one way or another don’t require a target to be selected at all. If you’re bent on using abilities that DO require a target, TARGET SOMETHING ELSE. WvW and sPvP have plenty of targets to choose from. Being able to hit that thief for 200 damage before you’re finished off is going to be a drop of water in the ocean in group scenarios unless you’re roaming and get into a fight 1v1 in which case they’d just heal up immediately after finishing you. Nothing is trivialized here.

I’ll say again Stealth has a short CD because it’s almost worthless compared to Stability and Immunity. It doesn’t mitigate damage, it doesn’t make you immune to knocbacks/knockdowns, and it has a shorter base duration than most other boon applications (other than Immunity), it just takes away an opponent’s ability to see/target you- which again won’t matter for a majority of the downed abilities that interrupt a Finisher. If all you want to do is use regular abilities that wouldn’t actually interrupt the Finisher itself then the point is moot because those abilities can’t interrupt the Finisher anyway and only a very small number of those that don’t cause interrupts would cause any semblance of significant damage.

If someone Finishing you is dying, 98 times out of 100 it’s because they’re trigger-happy in the middle of a group vs. group swarm. 1 of those other times you’re just up against an idiot, and the last time it was a 1v1 fight that was so ridiculously close that any conditions you had up will down them before the Finisher cast bar is done (which a Thief can’t just stealth out of). I’m not seeing where Stealth trivializes anything here. I’ve heard nothing of infamous thieves stealthing into the middle of groups of opponents to finish someone before the group finishes rallying them. They simply couldn’t do it. They’d have to go around the side where attacks aren’t flying at them and then make it to the downed person and sit through a 3 second cast bar before stealth wore off even once lest they be mercilessly destroyed by AoE. And all that is assuming the group hadn’t already finished healing said downed person back up.

This is a directly related issue to stealth only, so it would apply to anyone in stealth, not just Thiefs.

It has nothing, what so ever to do with immunities or stability based boons.

You guys advocating against this are simply using blanket statements to keep this in the game.

I have been reasonably specific in my reasoning for why stealth does not trivialize anything. What I see from people supporting the OP are blanket statements like “stealth trivializes the fight” with no specific indication of how it does so other than “well I can’t target them while they finish me!” – which I have been fairly detailed in responding to by elaborating on “it wouldn’t matter if you could.”

Taemek.1602:

Archmortal.1027:

Half of what you said contradicts itself just because of the assertion that time is irrelevant. Honestly that’s an assertion that would offend the senses of most people who “pull the real life card too often when in fact when they are not playing this game, you know they are playing another game…” sidenote: people that say Real Life leaves little time to deal with gated content and endless grinds generally mean it. That they play an MMO at all is a testament to how entertaining they find it- that they play one like this with no gated content or gear grind adds credence to their statement that they prefer not having them because they don’t have time to deal with such nonsense.

People have not come to expect things to be instant. People are simply coming around to the realization that Real Life leaves little in the way of free time because most jobs take up 75% of the waking day and most careers take up even more. This causes the desire to not deal with gated content and endless grinds just to play the game they like, as stated above.

“What happened to the days where people were happy spending 1-2 years gaining gear?” Well people spent a year or two doing nothing but gear-grinding and they realized it only took so long because of the endless grinding fluff and they didn’t like it, so they came to a game whose developers stated a very open, fervent intention to never have one. Turns out they like it!

You just don’t get it.

Years ago when people were happy playing a game for years, we did so for the community aspect of it. We still had social lives, kids, mortages etc. We weren’t some hermit dwelling teenage kids in mums basement who played 12 – 14 hours, 7 days a week.

We played casually for years gained what we could in the time we spent playing and enjoyed each others company while adventuring. Today however, people tend to pull the life card more then they should, we all work (most of us), we all have problems (bills, mental health issues etc), we all have social lives (going out with family and friends etc), however they tend to abuse this using it as a means to gain access to content faster. We all know that if you aren’t playing this game, you are simply playing another so the time you would of spent here gaming is just spent in another game elsewhere, so you can’t fool us, we are the ginger bread men. Nothing has changed with how we spend our time out of game any different to how it was 15 years ago with the expection of how todays generation percieves that time spent. Today people are in more of a rush.

Making content more accessible and easier has done good and bad for the MMORPG industry. It removed the fear that people like yourself had where the general perception of MMORPG gaming was having no life, living on a game to simply farm gear, which it wasn’t. This increased the amount of people to cater games too on a yearly basis where there was only 3 or 4 titles to choose from. However, what it has done over that past 15 years is, killed the community aspect of it.

There was a sense of pride and loyalty back in the day with MMORPG gaming, now, there is simply game hoppers.

So the whole argument is based on community livelihood/pride and not an individual’s potential to enjoy a game with no fluff versus enjoying a game with fluff?

Well then I don’t get it because that’s not the purpose of the topic. We’re not talking about building a fiercely loyal community, we’re talking about the potential enjoyment a player can get in a game without fluff versus a game with fluff. I hesitate to call grind-addiction enjoyment. As you said, people are in a rush these days. No one wants to spend 6 days a week grinding fluff in order to be allowed to play the part of the game they want on day 7.

Taemek.1602:

Again, none of you are staying on topic.

You must have an enemy targeted to use that skill is what I get when trying to execute skills on a stealthed thief, so cut the crap in regards to being able to fire off ANY skill in the game on a stealthed Thief.

Secondly, once again I will reiterate, Stealth should not allow a Finish Them! move. This was not how it was designed to be used and it removes any possible second chance no matter how slim that chance might have been and trivializes the fight.

I will also reiterate that those of you who keep ranting on about stability and immunity based boons, I would agree if those skills could be used every 5 seconds, however, they cannot be used every 5 seconds. However, Stealth can be used every 3-5 seconds depending on spec.

When in Stealth, no one should be able to Finish Them!, it should be greyed out until you come out of Stealth and show yourself. That goes for all stealth based abilities not just Thiefs.

It’s like you’re just willfully ignoring the things people say about push-backs, mistforms and all of these other things. Yes, you can’t shoot any ability at a stealthed target but not only is no one saying you can use any ability on a stealthed target but not every downed ability requires you to target anything and most of the downed abilities that can be used to interrupt the Finisher one way or another don’t require a target to be selected at all. If you’re bent on using abilities that DO require a target, TARGET SOMETHING ELSE. WvW and sPvP have plenty of targets to choose from. Being able to hit that thief for 200 damage before you’re finished off is going to be a drop of water in the ocean in group scenarios unless you’re roaming and get into a fight 1v1 in which case they’d just heal up immediately after finishing you. Nothing is trivialized here.

I’ll say again Stealth has a short CD because it’s almost worthless compared to Stability and Immunity. It doesn’t mitigate damage, it doesn’t make you immune to knocbacks/knockdowns, and it has a shorter base duration than most other boon applications (other than Immunity), it just takes away an opponent’s ability to see/target you- which again won’t matter for a majority of the downed abilities that interrupt a Finisher. If all you want to do is use regular abilities that wouldn’t actually interrupt the Finisher itself then the point is moot because those abilities can’t interrupt the Finisher anyway and only a very small number of those that don’t cause interrupts would cause any semblance of significant damage.

If someone Finishing you is dying, 98 times out of 100 it’s because they’re trigger-happy in the middle of a group vs. group swarm. 1 of those other times you’re just up against an idiot, and the last time it was a 1v1 fight that was so ridiculously close that any conditions you had up will down them before the Finisher cast bar is done (which a Thief can’t just stealth out of). I’m not seeing where Stealth trivializes anything here. I’ve heard nothing of infamous thieves stealthing into the middle of groups of opponents to finish someone before the group finishes rallying them. They simply couldn’t do it. They’d have to go around the side where attacks aren’t flying at them and then make it to the downed person and sit through a 3 second cast bar before stealth wore off even once lest they be mercilessly destroyed by AoE. And all that is assuming the group hadn’t already finished healing said downed person back up.

I support it having a default set of colors to switch between, but I don’t think it would be feasible or even look good if it could be dyed by every available color. I imagine glows are a tad harder to work with on that front.

Half of what you said contradicts itself just because of the assertion that time is irrelevant. Honestly that’s an assertion that would offend the senses of most people who “pull the real life card too often when in fact when they are not playing this game, you know they are playing another game…” sidenote: people that say Real Life leaves little time to deal with gated content and endless grinds generally mean it. That they play an MMO at all is a testament to how entertaining they find it- that they play one like this with no gated content or gear grind adds credence to their statement that they prefer not having them because they don’t have time to deal with such nonsense.

People have not come to expect things to be instant. People are simply coming around to the realization that Real Life leaves little in the way of free time because most jobs take up 75% of the waking day and most careers take up even more. This causes the desire to not deal with gated content and endless grinds just to play the game they like, as stated above.

“What happened to the days where people were happy spending 1-2 years gaining gear?” Well people spent a year or two doing nothing but gear-grinding and they realized it only took so long because of the endless grinding fluff and they didn’t like it, so they came to a game whose developers stated a very open, fervent intention to never have one. Turns out they like it!

Taemek.1602:

Doggie.3184:

There’s a lot of ways to fortify a finisher, why remove this one? Guardians can throw their troll bubble over people or use stability to finish people guaranteeing. You can still teleport away, hit or aoe thieves in stealth. You and your allies need to just pay attention better. Thief is also the most fragile class in the entire game and are 100% wide open during finisher. Most of the time people just aren’t smart enough to realized I’m doing a stealth finisher and are sitting there regening or rezzing player instead of swinging at me when they just saw me use stealth.

Again, not the issue.

People need to learn reading comprehension before replying to a post unfortunately.

The fact is that a Thief’s stealth is nothing more than what you see when regular enemies Stealth in solo PvE while exploring. Thiefs can use it more often but it doesn’t alter their survivability in any concrete way the way every other survivability measure does. That’s why Stealth has a shorter cooldown. Thiefs are just as kill-able while stealthed as while visible. That you can’t click on them to target them is the only means of effective survivability from stealth and it’s a freaking flimsy one at that. So a stealthed thief can’t be targeted so it’s hard for a downed player to counteract a finisher from one. The question still stands: what concrete difference is there between this and a character that applies Stability instead of Stealth? The difference is the stealther can be interrupted more easily.

I agree with the second post. It’s cool. It’s only MORE cool when it’s overlapping an actual shield.

Ever notice that Retaliation does the same thing? It looks exactly like the Shield lots of Seraph soldiers use.

I have a question. For all the QQ about “BUT YOU CAN’T TARGET THIEVES THAT MAKES THEM SO OP” has there been any consideration that you can target… other players nearby to activate your knockbacks? I can’t speak for the other professions, but for Guardian the knockback is centered around the guardian, so having ANY target, even if it’s just that dead bunny a few meters away, allows you to trigger your ability to get the desired results. In WvW if you can’t target anything then you’re doing something wrong.

Also it is perfectly valid to note that Thieves have no self-sufficient way to guarantee their Finish Them against most professions. Not being target-able is hardly the same as immunity and trying to act like it puts them at any more of an advantage than professions that can make themselves immune to interrupts when committing to the finisher isn’t valid.

It’s also not valid to ignore that yes, Stability is a thing and some Professions can put it on themselves at will regardless of whether it’s shared to the Thief or not (honestly, if it’s put on a Thief that close to the finisher, the source of the boon is likely trying to Finish You too, or is at the very least ready to go in for it if the Thief were to fail).

Just a tip for future reference: when talking about group scenarios it’s best not to ignore that it’s a Group Scenario.

I personally think the current balance is great. Some people don’t like the Downed state or don’t like how it works or how rally works. I do like it and I think it’s very well balanced at the moment.

That’s how it goes in a lot of cases spanning from other games to RL. A small group of dedicated people with a specific make-up/goal in mind will always have an advantage over a somewhat larger group of less organized individuals.

For what it’s worth, the “majority” that want more stats seem kind of out-numbered on the forums. Pretty loud, but outnumbered.

Adventure-based progression isn’t the same as a beneficial upgrade to a character. It’s an intangible increase in satisfaction upon reaching the plateau of content completion, whether it’s more content or just content that gets progressively more difficult as it’s/the more it’s done. There is no disruption in the playing field between those that are able/willing to progress at the fastest rate and those that are not able/willing to do so.

There’s honestly no “fluff” at all to this game as-is in my opinion. Real fluff is the grind that progressively unlocks more grind to do between reset timers that if you skip on, reduces your ability to progress at the same pace as your competitors. That this game doesn’t operate on a gear treadmill archetype means that perspective isn’t applicable to it or the rewards available in it. It’s a paradigm shift and needs to be looked at accordingly before terms like “fluff” get thrown around.

Fortunately for GW2, it’s not trying to follow the standard template and as of yet is following its own paradigm very successfully. The content release basis concern is valid enough but doesn’t seem to apply to this game so far. I kind of doubt Halloween and this new thing later this month were developed post-release of the game.

Demon’s Souls had three different penalties for failure. One was equipment repairs (which didn’t just result from death- it was just a thing that happened during combat and was by far the least punishing of the penalties), one was having a decreased health bar until you beat the next boss/used an expensive item (many players prefer playing like this however, especially during online play, so whether it’s actually a penalty is up to individual play-style, in addition to dying in body-form repeatedly progressively making the game harder where you died), and one was dropping all of your currency near the spot you died which would then disappear entirely if you failed to get it back before the next time you died (you were free to go to different areas and do anything you wanted as long as you didn’t die before getting back to it). The equivalent penalty in them both is equipment repairs but that was the least punishing thing that could happen in Demon’s Souls. The real killer was dropping all your currency and potentially losing it permanently if you weren’t careful getting back to it.

So I get where you’re coming from in wanting additional challenge mechanics because I love Demon’s Souls too. But half of what made Demon’s Souls challenging and satisfying was the potential punishment; the risk::reward factor. Honestly, Demon’s Souls didn’t have all that many mechanics at work the way an MMO does- even the hardest bosses were little more than straight brawls. Admittedly (speaking in terms of dungeons) with the armor/weapon sets being the only certain reward and there being no immediate gratification upon completing a dungeon of any reliable relevance GW2 isn’t up to par with that risk::reward setup. But taking out repair costs isn’t the way to go to get there. Increasing the immediate gratification somewhat would be much more effective and it could be done in any number of ways.

And the expectation isn’t that all challenges are doable if you’re willing to throw enough gold at it (would be kind of cool to have a ‘Throw [Money]’ command like some older single-player RPGs though, could fit right in with the Thieve’s Steal ability). The expectation is that anything can be done if one is willing learn the mechanics and skillfully out-maneuver them, thus incurring the minimum possible penalty and getting the biggest relative pay-out for doing so (less cost to get there = greater net reward). It matches up pretty well with the Demon’s Souls philosophy as-is. We’re just missing a fitting immediate reward for dungeon completion.

Now, if we go along a line of thought where level and stats are useless/nonexistent, therefor gear is 100% purely cosmetic, I would agree a repair cost would be nothing but detrimental to the gameplay.

My one concern is the real players sometimes mixed in with botters. Mostly only happens in event chains, but it happens.

kermit.3601

I realize this is a fine line, perhaps a slippery slope. Are you really that invested in this subject, or more interested in winning a forum debate? I’m curious, is a suggestion with the hope of encouraging people experience more challenging content, and even with the hopes encouraging Anet to develop more difficult content that misplaced?

Not at all. I just don’t see repair cost as a deterrent to players or an obstacle to harder content. If I scale my first experience with AC in a group of 4 first-timers up to level 80 in terms of repair costs, an hour of events in Orr should be enough to fund a solid two hours of repeated deaths in a dungeon, assuming slight Graveyard zerging. I cannot objectively see how repair cost is a deterrent to any but the most frugal of penny-pinchers (or as the case may be, those that spend all they have beforehand).

Piwate Quaggan all the way (Candy Day Charr is too cool to be a pet). Baby Ghost Quaggan was cute too though.

Seriously ANET, I want you to take my money. Why won’t you let me give it to you?

Never.6014:

I like content remaining relevant, and it does in some ways. Combat is still fun (not ridiculously one-shotting everything) but the rewards are terrible. I should be getting near (but not quite) the same rewards as content my level. The difference should be just enough to keep me from farming lower level areas instead of higher areas, but the gap should narrow as I do content closer to my level. This sort of a system should make level 1-15 areas less efficient, but after that it should be near what max level areas give you.

Not sure about you, but I regularly get things approximately my level (or at least things that can be salavaged into my level range’s crafted item requirements) while exploring zones I out-level. Certainly I still get low level items, but I definitely get level-appropriate things plenty of the time too.

So then the content isn’t geared for people that think the repair cost is a barrier to playing the game?

pizzamurai.8326:

Archmortal.1027:

Honestly, saying an MMO has no hope because it prioritizes fixing bugs over implementing even more buggy content is extremely short-sighted.

Everything I was going to say has already been said well by others. But please do me a wonderful favor and point out to me where I ever said this game has no hope? Pretty please with sugar on top?

I didn’t specify this game. I said “an MMO.” But you did make the general statement that if things come down to prioritizing there is no hope.
Second post by you:

Ah yes, the priority argument. If you honestly want to use that argument, you might as well just kill your hopes for any MMO now and in the future.

If developers don’t prioritize their goals things don’t get done whether it be toward fixing things or implementing new things, but making what’s there work is massively more important before adding in new things that can cause new problems.

split.3659

@Arch You are making yourself look bad by attacking other players.

I didn’t say anything negative about any real player. I’ll admit my little parody on elitist guild management might have come off that way so I apologize.