It was a somewhat fluffy PR article. Do I want more info? Yep, but I doubt that kind of piece would ever provide.
Plus+ => culling work. Not a game breaker for me but for some. They state it was harder to fix than they expected and that makes sense. If they can make improvements, I’d be really happy.
WvW progression/titles/abilities => that usually is something nice to have, not a big seller for me personally but most enjoy it a bit. It is easy to implement but difficult to design well, so yes, this does need more stated details because this can negatively impact WvW.
Cons- => for me, no statement about WvW and gear progression. I don’t mind having to slowly build up gear and also don’t mind it if someone who is playing a lot has a 10-20% edge over me. But I don’t see this being the case in GW2, their choices point towards eventual gear chasing in order to stay reasonably competitive in WVW. Big turn-off and no statement about this within the entire article.
Cons- => lack of a clear statement on cheaters. Exploits should be stated as exploits with the extra statement that if you use them, you get banned. So yes, these should be listed out somewhere, already (article is not the place though). Cheaters should get banned, they only seem to ban botters.
That article isn’t the place for it but they should be more open by proposing changes and actually reading feedback. Players are passionate about this game and many state good ideas or critical reviews of various aspects of this game.
It’s funny, there are now four threads on the front page about the same thing, all phrased slightly differently, but about the same thing. The problem with discussing the issue from the first tier of gear is that you have people trying to minimize the problem based upon a relatively small difference in stats. The problem, as each thread ultimately gets to is vertical progression. We are not talking about a small difference in stats, we are talking about a process that leads to a large difference in stats over time. Vertical progression progresses by periodically raising the power level of players. It makes no sense whatsoever to argue about the first three pieces of a new, more powerful tier of gear.
The devs said we would have vertical progression in the game moving forward. Consider the words that make up the element of game design. Vertical: the power level increases. Progression: it continually increases over time. They said the power curve would be low. I suppose when you have a gear grind you can have a slow grind, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a gear grind treadmill.
In one of the other threads a person posted a video that details why vertical progression really needs to see the door in gaming. Or, at least there needs to be alternatives for players of games. GW2 was to be that alternative but I sense the devs got spooked for some reason by players who bought a football and now want to play baseball with it. Here’s the video link:
http://taugrim.com/2012/04/19/why-games-should-scale-horizontally-instead-of-vertically/
This. Plus some of what Wintyre has posted.
In my case, GW2 had fun PvE that allowed me to quickly get to max level where I bought a bunch of karma yellows and started to WvW while I worked on exotics. To me, WvW and sPVP was the end-game and from what the devs had said plus the way GW worked, seemed like a nice place to PvP/WvW without worrying about progression every month.
As soon as Ascended gear showed up I pretty much lost most of my interest. I have chased carrots more than enough in past MMOs to know that, fun for awhile but ultimately it just makes for horrible PvP and very boring or annoying PvE. It ruins PvP because you end up with huge gear gaps between new players and old players, which leads to dwindling numbers and eventually empty servers. That could take a long time for GW2 and the gear gap is small atm, but it has already started, which is really sad.
Its a very good game that I’ll probably pop into but the choices by the devs since launch are taking the game in a direction I really dislike.