Guild Wars 2

What odds can I get on them adding taunt and dedicated healing and tanking trees?

Korrigan.4837:

Nimraphel.7819:

Wintyre Fraust.6534:

jboynton asks: “How does GW2 maintain its position as a revenue driver without that income in future quarters?”

How does aborting the design manifesto – which, arguably, drove those sales in the first place – help raise revenue from a game that has no subscription? Are hardcore players the top consumers of cash shop items? I doubt it. Are hardcore gear-grinders going to produce the same kind of B2P expansion sales (when one comes out) as launch? If ANET alienates everyone who bought GW2 because of that manifesto, and because of the non-grind “whole-world” end game philosophy, what are those expansion sales going to be?

It seems to me we’re witnessing a potential SWG moment here; ANET can alienate everyone who came here specifically because of what GW2 was billed as, promised to be, and for three months now has delivered by changing the core nature of the game. And for what? Players that endlessly run from game to game seeking a means to satiate a never-ending quest for avatar progression/power?

This post cannot be stated enough. This is the crux of the matter.

Wintyre, my new friend, you nailed it. Couldn’t have said it better.

Best post on the subject so far. This is a proper Ratner moment.

HawkMeister.4758:

If agony is only a condition in the Fractal Dungeon, then I really don´t see where the big problem is.

But I promised myself to not join the hysterious theorycraftig before we actually see the new content and have some hard facts.

Plz continue with the hilarities. I just hope the DEVs aren´t too swayed by these forum “flash-mobs” and remember to stay on course with their own game design vision.

Bit late to say they should not be swayed by forum mobs – how do you think they got this dumb idea in the first place.

A certain group of dev in another company must be wetting themselves laughing at this.

Schoolboy error.

Amulrei.4973:

What fascinates me the most about all this is AN’s motivation to do this.

After spending months pre-launch preaching the evils of the gear progression system and how GW2 will not have it, something pretty radical must have changed among the developers to prompt this.

For the life of me, I cannot think of why they would go ahead with this. For a game that will live or die based on the continued support of their player base, outright lying to them and betraying their trust seems like an incredibly stupid idea.

Agreed. How can they misjudge something so badly? It is like watching someone walk into plate glass window in slow motion

I know they were desperate for staff but it looks like the scraped the bottom of the barrel here.

Not the end of the world but it is the end of my spending in the gem shop.

Nope – the solution is dull and lacks imagination. I didn’t think they would be daft enough to cave to the content locusts but they did.

Kimyrielle.3826:

Cynic.3496:

I’m happy about this patch! I even hope they do add full progression raiding someday! You can’t keep people interested on cosmetic gains only and I think they finally realized that. It’s going to be nice to have a reason to login again.

I will be the mean one to point out that hardcore raiders are an group that barely would leave a dent on any game’s balance sheet if they’d all quit – we’re talking about a 5%-15% part of the population here.

In terms of size of playerbase, GW1 was the second-most successful western MMO after WoW – and it kept a very loyal fanbase around for many years without any silly gear progression game and just cosmetics.That proves your statement wrong right there.

Conversely, almost all newer MMOs having a traditional gear treadmill failed miserably on market after a few months and the raiding-focus chasing away all non-raiders (cough SWTOR).

A modern MMO can easily exist without the raiders as customers, but I am sorry to say that these days you can’t fund a MMO without the 85+% that do NOT raid. And in 2012, the non-raiders seem to be just as trigger happy with the “uninstall” button if their needs aren’t met by a game. Which is a good thing. shrug

Until we get details it is difficult to say how bad this is but I can’t believe a company would be so daft as to switch their focus to the time rich / cash poor crowd. This is a company that wants gems sales doesn’t it?
They managed to capture the market for people with little time but some disposable income by aggressively promoting the no gear grind model why would they switch? It makes no sense from a business point of view.

This isn’t a sub game – the purple pixel chasers give them nothing.

I am just hoping this is a PR fiasco rather than an actual change in philosophy.