Of course the main problem is that this MMO (like most of them out there) won’t let you be a Steve Jobs. Unless the Steve Jobs game equivalent is the TP flipper, but i consider them as much of an aberration of the game idea as the farmers are.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
My achievement list shows exactly how many dives I have done for Dive Master, as well as how many hints I have done. You need merely to mouse over the description in said Achievement list. =)
The one thing it lacks is to inform you which of the dive master spots you have already discovered.
It would have been nice if the discovered spots would show on map. I have forgotten long ago which ones i have done and which only seen, which considerably slows down new discoveries (well, at least until i finally decide to just do a run through all of the locations, i guess. I haven’t been bored enough to do this yet).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Because to me the manifesto is fulfilled within the bounds of current technology.
Ah, then they promised something that was impossible for them to deliver, so instead they decided to deliver something very different? See my previous comment about being bad at designing and prediction.
Or, alternatively, they might have known they will be unable to deliver, which doesn’t actually make it any better.
And the manifesto fits what’s currently in the game only if you force it in with a sledgehammer.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
This has to be one of the most delusional posts I’ve seen in a long time.
You get anything in this game by playing it. Dungeons give you plenty of tokens to buy gear, karma, guild missions, fractals, dailies…
It’s the cosmetic skins you are talking about, not the “stuff you need”. Stop lying already.
This was supposed to be a game about cosmetic skins after all, not about stats. Which definitely makes good-looking skins “stuff you need”.
And originally all those better, rarer skins could have been acquired through consistently working towards them, without any significant RNG presence at all (with all those things you have mentioned before – dungeon tokens, karma, gold). Fractal skins were the first deviation from that path (and it’s not accident that the whole game direction changed at the same time, into far more grind and RNG reliant one).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I guess the developers should think about the meaning of these jorbreakers. I get and oppened more than 2k coffers and candy from it are enough for only 5 jorbreakers. I don’t think it’s possible to collect 100 during the event, even if it made sense.
I’m pretty sure it was designed that way. You were never supposed to be able to buy them.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I would rather invest in lower-budget games that didn’t have to implement features that don’t build upon how the game was designed simply because not enough time/money was put into designing said features.
I’m sure everyone would rather do that…but in reality, intent and execution are always two different things.
In this case the intent and execution are so much different, that one has to ask yourself whether stated intent and the actual one were really the same. Because if they were, it means Anet is just abysmally bad at designing their own games and predicting player response. Which doesn’t offer good prospects for the future.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
im wondering if this will affect the armor stats… how will they fix it? is it the new gw2 endgame? gear your character and then have it become useless?
Yes, that’s exactly the idea behind the hard to get ascended eq.
here’s the issue… If you make all those concessions, that’s the point of the gear? You’ll get it in a day.
Yes, exactly. I don’t see any point of hard-to-achieve better-stats armor except to divide the community into the elite haves minority and the casual have-nots crowd. If you can’t remove the gear from the game anymore, at least make it’s presence bearable. The game doesn’t need to concentrate on the gear treadmill – it can be way better. If only devs would choose so.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Oh I completely agree that ascended gear was….mishandled, to say the least. But it is what it is, its what we got, and if we wanted something more specific then we should have been more specific when we (the general “we” as in the community, not us as individuals) demanded it.
There’s no “we” in this – the people that demanded it were mostly already gone by the time first ascended items were introduced, and thus didn’t really care whether they were understood well or not. And as Erasculio said – they would have left anyway. We are left now with something completely other people wanted.
I think it took less time to get from 70-80 than it did to get from 20-30. You could do it in an evening. So if they make the level cap 100 you have a couple of evenings.
It’s not the levelling that is a problem. You are right, that getting from 80 to 100 will likely be quite easy.
What you forgot to mention is that raising level cap will instantly invalidate all your equipment. All that exotic gear you have? It will require quite a time or some cash to replace. No worries, though, it’s not that much time or cash, you say…. And you will be likely right again.
Now, replacing ascended gear, that is going to take an insanely long time. For whole gear set (once it’s out) – at least several months per character for a tiny minority of hardcore players. A Year or more for those less hardcore. Never for most casuals.
Sounds like fun, right? [/sarcasm]
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Ascended is a mistake in the first place…so leave it with just accessories.
all right, if we leave it with just accessories (back item, amulet, accessory, accessory, ring, ring) and how would you feel if there are more ways to obtain them?
like,
1. crafting with reasonable amount of materials
2. reasonable acquisition chance from special dynamic events
3. reasonable amount of karma
Meh. I feel that gathering laurels is an easy enough way to obtain them.
Easy, but both tedious and heavily time-gated. There definitely should be other ways – many other ways. Way more than we have now (and for every piece, without limiting slots to specific gameplay). Also, at least crafting (and not MF type item mixing) must eventually be updated to crafting top tier gear in order to stay relevant. If it won’t be updated, then it should be scrapped as an abandoned idea.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Ah, I stand corrected. However, I have seen devs post right here on these forums (during the ascended gear drama explosion) that they will not introduce stat creep or gear treadmill or have any kind of ever-increasing gear-tiering system.
This year. They also said, that they intend to “continue with the low curve item progression” in the future. Yes, according to devs it won’t be stat creep or gear treadmill – it will be “item progression”. Which is the same thing, just named differently.
Also, all of the above is completely separate from the simple effect of raising level caps. Level 100 ascended would be in reality a new tier, even if in theory no new tier was introduced. There supposedly will be also new infusions, with better stats than the current 4/5 ones. Those are the lowest level (compare tier 1 gems to orbs and their ascended slot equivalent, if you want to understand what that can mean).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
There was one quote on the 1st page, that really annoys me. Represents the casual, I-want-it-all-but-don’t-like-to-work-for-it-attitude: Not really. I just want new armor skins. I don’t feel like treadmilling I just wanna collect.
Why do you play games then anyway? Don’t you want a feel of achievement?
I play games to be challenged. I do not play them for some kind of perceived virtual reward.
Then you should be against ascended gear, as it actually decreases the challenge. It doesn’t offer you anything.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
There was a HUGE amount of people leaving pre November, because they didn’t have anything to do at 80.
For a newly launched MMO that was completely normal – those people would have left anyway. While fractals likely helped retain some people, I sincerely doubt that those stayed in this game due to introduction of ascended gear were more than a handful. Ascended eq introduced offered too small advantage for vertical progress crowd – but it was big enough to seriously discourage those that didn’t want to see gear treadmill here. There was no gain to be had here from the very beginning.
But once the grind gates were opened, the rest of the game started to follow. As many of us predicted in November.
Business make uncomfortable decisions all the time. That couldn’t have been an easy decision for Anet, but they made it for what they saw as the good of the game.
The timetable suggests they had to make that decision either around the launch, or no more than few weeks later. Possibly even before launch. Long before there was any reliable data on player behaviour. So either they were fully intending to run the hype without keeping promises from the very beginning, or they didn’t care about them and the decision to change course was an easy one.
The fact that they didn’t inform the players about that until after it hakitten, while still raking sales on original hype suggests many other things, none of them pleasant.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
First, we have to recognize what type of players there are. After some thought, I think these are the most likely.
1. Players who want new skins, but can’t / won’t spend real money for Gem Store items.
2. Players who want skins, and will pay varying degrees of real money for thier chances.
3. Players who don’t want new items.
You have missed one important group: Players who want skins, and will pay varying degrees of real money for them, but will not pay for a “chance”
And that’s actually quite a big group.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
To everyone complaining about how Ascended gear conflicts with the manifesto video, I must say that isn’t really fair. Ascended gear has nothing to do with the manifesto; it was added later. It wasn’t even a shadow in the minds of Arena Net when that video was recorded. So it isn’t really fair to say Arena Net lied to us, as I’ve seen some doing, because they didn’t; they were forced to change their tactics. Can you blame them for wanting to save their game? Can you blame them from trying to stop the endless complaints and players leaving in droves? Can you blame them for giving us what we asked for?
Yes, because:
1. I have never asked for it. Horizontal progression all the way.
2. They never admitted that they changed their tactics. In fact, by their own claim they wanted to introduce ascended (and go vertical) from the very beginning.
While it’s doubtful that last claim is true (ascended eq certainly didn’t look like anything that was well-prepared), work on it must still have started very shortly after game launch, which suggests that devs were never too strongly dedicated to their promises. And even then they keep continuing to claim that nothing has really changed, thet it is indeed the same game and the same idea they first advertised (even though it’s rather obvious it’s not).
No, i cannot blame them for changing their tactics when necessary (*), but i can (and do) blame them from doing this at the drop of a hat. I can blame them for trying to deceive people about the real direction the game is going. And i definitely can blame them for the fact that all the manifesto and surrounding ideology turned out to be nothing more than a marketing trick.
(*) assuming it was necessary, which i still find highly doubtful
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Or wait 10 seconds. I know that is a long time “forever” and all but I think most people can handle it.
Watching this dance once, twice, three times may be ok, but it’s too repatable and too boring by the time you are doing 10th effigy. By the time you get halfway, you will do anything to make it go faster.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
They had a bug where these two achievements didn’t count for meta-achieve. They didn’t manage to fix it, so they “solved” it by saying “yes, it doesn’t count, but you need only 8 achievements for wings”. Unfortunately this introduced another bug, where apparently the number of achievements needed didn’t change.
So, the moral is this: when you run into bugs, fix them. Do not try to make runarounds – you are only risking more bugs.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I used a lot of AOE – I would let the NPCs surround the attackers and I’d send grenades into the middle of them and place turrets. When an attacker was more isolated, I used crowd-control abilities and ones that put more distance between me and the attacker.
AoE is definitely a good solution there. I used my ele in a squishy staff configuration and just nuked everything from orbit before they had a chance to overwhelm NPC’s.
Don’t rush, take one group at a time, and help the NPC’s, and you should do okay. Unless you are a very tanky build able to gather and keeps enemies on you, go for damage (prolonging the fight only means more npc’s dead, and that will increase the difficulty for you should more opponents appear).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Currently if you buy ALL the taffy needed it would cost 60g. That is the price the wings were selling for at the start of the event so it seems pretty reasonable to me.
The wings cost less than 15 g now, so it doesn’t seem al that reasonable at all. Also, its true that the wings will cost more after the event, but the same will happen to taffy (and for the same reason – no more supply).
And i don’t acually expect wings to rise too much – they weren’t that desirable even during the event, and after that the hype will be gone and there will be new flavor of the month skins to concentrate on.
1. No.
2. The candy will be sticking around through the coffers that are available via the TP and the candy available there. Much like Candy Corn it will cease to drop in the open world but will still be available on the TP.
3. There is no current plan to offer Jorbreakers by any other reward mechanism.
4. Yes. The Zhaitaffy Merchant will be a permanent addition to the game sitting in Fort Mariner.
so, the nr 2. answer is also “No.” it seems. Figures. Also, lol at nr 1. answer. I just can’t keep reading it as anything else than “We intended the price to be ridiculous”.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
The devs already said that the full ascended set, including full armor and weapons, will be introduced before the end of this year.
The devs also said there wouldn’t be vertical progression in this game. Why are you believing them now. lol
Because this is consistent with the line they presented since November change. It is, of course, possible that they will again abandon their plans and decide to drop the ascended eq, but at the moment it seems unlikely.
If it happened, however, i’d be very happy.
They said that at launch, but in November they also said that content would be gated only for those with agony resistance. That’s vertical progression if I’ve ever seen it, and I have.
I dunno, I have full ascended accessories and I’ve not done fractals passed level 10 and have no agony resist. What content is gated for me? Unique boss battle? More powerful ascended gear? Nope…
Yes, fortunately the devs seem to have abandoned their original plans of introducing more and more of agony-like mechanics all over the game.
Yes, no matter how bad the ascended idea is now, we can at least take small measure of comfort in the fact that originally it was planned to be much, much worse.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I think it’s premature to worry about ascended weapons/armor. I predict that’s something they’ll release in another year (if they release it at all. I’m not holding my breath though. I’d rather they release new armor skins).
The devs already said that the full ascended set, including full armor and weapons, will be introduced before the end of this year.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
At least with other games it’s generally a finished product.
I’m sorry to inform you, but the tendency to rush an uncompleted game to the market is there since at least Fallout 2. Nowadays, it’s so common that it would be easier (much easier – though i’d be hard-pressed to name even one) to count the games that do not follow this strategy.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Give a MF buff for the zone that is inversely comparable to the number of people in it. Only few people? They get huge MF bonuses. Whole herds of farmer zergs showed up? Mf drops until it hits 0.
It can go together with the above idea of building up MF through DE’s.
Additional possibility is to buff event rewards for the events that are not being done (more time since last succesful completion of the event, greater the end reward), similar to the bonus xp on mobs.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I don’t know. I went by the definition Anet gave when they explained it. It means that you can get to max level and max gear in a variety of ways. For example…
You can get exotic armor and weapons by doing WvW, or by doing dungeons, or by doing world events, or even just staying in a starter zone and doing dailies (though you’d eventually have to go to Orr to get the karma exotics with it).
That’s what Anet said it means in more than one interview. Why shouldn’t I believe them?
Because that’s not true anymore. Remember, max gear is the ascended tier now.
I said armor and weapons, not trinkets. And for armor and weapons at this point it’s STILL true. Trinkets are neither armor, nor weapons.
You are still excluding them simply because they contradict your general thesis. Also – there will be both armor and weapons, we already know that (and there is nothing suggesting they will be any easier to get than trinkets are). In other words, you already know that they don’t intend to keep to the explanation they themselves gave. So, the answer to the question of why shouldn’t you believe them is simple – because they already said they aren’t going to stick to their own definition.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Hard to say. On one side, the farm nerfs did not affect too much the drops i get, because generally i don’t farm. On the other side price of everything goes up and up, which becomes a problem (since, as i have already said, i don’t farm).
What does affect me is the increasing trend in the game to make all content based on the dual assumption assuption that not only everyone farms, but that all content should be preferably locked out behind heavy farming (either a huge number of drops, a large number of rare drops, or behind a insanely low % RNG).
It’s not present everywhere yet (though it had been there from the very beginning), but the influence of this outlooks seems to be growing fast, and spreading even into the most casual parts of the game.
TL/DR: farming nerfs are not a problem. Game’s insistence on farming is.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
To add my own opinion: I think it’s very important that “participate in X pvp event” achievements do NOT exist, as they encourage people to ‘away from keyboard’ in pvp, which ruins it for people that want to play a balanced game.
The easy fix would be to make PvP competitions that simply cannot be akitten through. Participation means participation, and should not reward inactivity.
Also, was this really a result of a though-out decision, or just a sideeffect of being unable to fix the bug in time?
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Some guilds have been asking for challenging content. This is not a bad event for those people to coordinate.
I’m pretty sure noone actually asked for this kind of “challenging”. Which it is not – it doesn’t require any greater skill than any other events. All it requires (and it is required) is Moar Numberz.
Yes, a huge zerg guild will be able to do it. Small guilds, no matter how coordinated, if they don’t have enough people will just get annoyed.
And at the end you get a reward that is completely unrelated to the effort and time you had to put in.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I don’t know. I went by the definition Anet gave when they explained it. It means that you can get to max level and max gear in a variety of ways. For example…
You can get exotic armor and weapons by doing WvW, or by doing dungeons, or by doing world events, or even just staying in a starter zone and doing dailies (though you’d eventually have to go to Orr to get the karma exotics with it).
That’s what Anet said it means in more than one interview. Why shouldn’t I believe them?
Because that’s not true anymore. Remember, max gear is the ascended tier now.
Ascended gear is also only worth taking for one specific type of content. Completely optional content I might add. You only get ascended gear from Fractals, and you only need ascended gear for Fractals.
Oh, please.
“It means that you can get to max level and max gear in a variety of ways”. “No, ascended is not max gear, exotic is. Oh, you say ascended is actually better? Doesn’t matter, it’s optional”.
That is hypocritical.
And actually, Anet gave up on my (and its) idea, and is gradually building towards something i do not want, and didn’t expect in this game.
I definitely didn’t want them putting more and more insistence on gear and grind. And i had a reason to not expect that – everything they’ve been saying before game launched suggested they didn’t want that in their game either.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I don’t know. I went by the definition Anet gave when they explained it. It means that you can get to max level and max gear in a variety of ways. For example…
You can get exotic armor and weapons by doing WvW, or by doing dungeons, or by doing world events, or even just staying in a starter zone and doing dailies (though you’d eventually have to go to Orr to get the karma exotics with it).
That’s what Anet said it means in more than one interview. Why shouldn’t I believe them?
Because that’s not true anymore. Remember, max gear is the ascended tier now.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
You are in fact wrong. There is a supreme reason why every retail business in the known world that operates for profits transparently sells an item or service for money. It is because it is the only business model that works.
[…]
Or words to that effect; because it is the only proven business model to work over the longevity of the business.
That seems to be the problem. They are not going for the longevity, but for the short-term approach – the one when you try to get as much as possible from your customers before they leave.
This works in web browser games due to the low customer number and high retention. It won’t work in the long term in a game that plans to have a really massive player number (because it IS actually possible to run out of possible customers).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
I feel bad for Anet. They have to build content that can be run and completed by any group composition, be it 5-man glass cannon, 5-man support, assorted builds, etc, and 5-man DPS/glass cannon will always be the fastest, riskiest, and to a majority of people, ‘best’ way of running content. Thinking about it, I don’t think there’s any way for the designers to fix that.
They can’t make content that is impossible for a 5-man DPS group to finish, but allowing a 5-man DPS group to finish content means it will always be the best way to do it, for the majority of players.
Go into high level fractals… Without a skilled group and a good organized composition you will have a very bad time. All glass cannon can work, same as all tank, but “possible”!=efficient. All classes and builds synergise differently, some better than others but at the end of the day all builds have a role.
tldr: be smart.
Well if a team is good enough to beat a particularly difficult content in both a DPS composition or tanky composition, which setup do you think would finish the content faster?
If. Trust me, “majority of people” will get butchered running pure berserker dps build. I see those people everyday.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Until recently we had wow-killers jumping around every corner. Recently every new game that is announced will be better than GW2, sounds familiar? Has world given up on killing wow finnaly?
Nope, we’re just on GW2 forums. Everyone else is still comparing everything new to WoW.
And about GW2 being the best MMO of 2013… well, being the best is not that hard when the whole genre is in a deep slump.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
- In other games how many grinded a dungeon just to get a piece of equipment that still never dropped?
- In other games how many of you crafted items with proc. effect, that never did proc?
These are RNG effects too!
Yes. And there are reasons why a lot of people stopped playing those other games and came here.
Instead finding out that in this regard GW2 wasn’t any better than all those other games, regardless of the prelaunch developers’ hype.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
This is why we have a forum guy. To get questions awnsered. What do you want to me do? Garbage 1000+ rares for then come to ask if anyone more have problems? I don’t have money to spare.
Previous time a doubt about ecto salvage rate surfaced, some people did just that (and documented it). That’s why it’s been found that the rates were indeed lowered (and why Anet was forced to acknowledge that and introduce a fix).
Without proof (as in – documented effects of salvaging rares in huge amounts by many people) all we can say is that RNG is a kitten. And not even a cute one.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
1. ANet knows that to keep people interested in the game there has to be a constant excitement factor. That factor comes from what drops from creatures and chests and RNG boxes. You allow everyone access to all skins and the excitement factor drop dramatically. If you are not excited about what you might get in drops, then you get bored and stop playing.
That works only if the drop chance is high enough that you can actually expect something to drop. If you open 1k boxes and still get nothing (like some people here have already done), then not only the excitement is long gone, but a lot of (well justified) anger starts to build up. Guild wars 2 is not big enough of a game to be able to safely ignore player’s discontent.
2. Also the all the complaints about RNG represent a very small part of the GW2 community. Most GW2 gamers do not participate on the forums.
Most of those disinterested people that this forum do not represent also do not care enough to buy those boxes.In fact, it’s mostly the buyers that Anet tries to persuade to look for a better game. Which is a …curious marketing strategy for a game that is no longer in a steady growth phase.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Largely agreed, but there is some danger in the way the “best gear” thing is going. Level 80 exotics already take quite a while to get – not unreasonable, probably still within the reach of the average player, but they are expensive. Ascended equipment is even worse, and outright requires time commitment because of the laurel thing. So that’s dangerously close to the “grinding for more powerful gear” O’Brien was talking about already… it’s certainly not as bad as legendaries, but it is to the point you can only realistically get so many of them.
GW1 I’m with you 100% though – max gear was so cheap you really only needed to finish a campaign on a character and you could already buy a full set of it. The grinders were going after obsidian armor and chaos gloves, which didn’t do anything at all besides look “cool” (YMMV, mine certainly did).
15k armor took a bit longer to get then normal armor. Obby armor was ment as the super elite armor that took a massive time investment and massive amount of materials and money… It was only 15k per piece like the 15k elite armor but the ectos/obby shards costed around 1 million total.
Irrelevant. Both 15k and obsidian armor had exactly the same stats as the 1.5k one. There was a grind, true, but it covered only vanity gear. It didn’t offer you ingame advantage.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
It’s not likely to be any more “balancing” than any of the previous ones. Most likely again wars will get buffed, engi nerfed, ele d/d cut a bit (which will make any other builds even less valid) and few underwater skills tweaked.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
Presuming you meant the karka shell upgrade … 100 passion flowers can be gathered in a week or two by gathering daily on southsun.
..at the rate of 3 flowers per day it will take a bit more than two weeks.
And if you add up all the little things that can be done easily by putting just a little time every day, you’re going to end up with days that are well over 24 hours long.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
There is an interview with Colin or Mike or Eric pre-launch that talks about expansions, and all (then) future content. I had it bookmarked, but that was on my computer that died. …sigh
Anyway, according to what they said back then, they had content mapped out and planned for years ahead (including expansions).
That was pre-launch. They didn;t keep to those plans for too long unfortunately.
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
You have already answered how it is possible that some people already have it – they have it from drops. Not from merchant.
Which would make the whining about the cost from the merchant rather silly, don’t you think?
Since clearly it is possible to get it in other ways.
Why? Being able to get it any other way does not change the price being ridiculous in the slightest. If Anet did not intend anyone to buy from that merchant (and it is clear that indeed was their goal), they should not have put him in the game at all.
The way that I see it, and I am sure this has probably been stated in this thread somewhere, is that the complete wings, the non-shattered version that you get from the 100,000 candies, are a prestige item for folks who have the gold or the time to spend on them.
Nobody has enough time to farm 100k zhaitaffies, and it’s cheaper to buy the wings off TP directly. Which means, that there’s absolutely no point to the merchant at all (except as a very bad joke at the player’s expense).
Actions, not words.
Remember, remember, 15th of November
).