ANY new MMO will make players curious and check it out. Doesn’t matter if it ESO or Wildstar. GW2 has been using the same recycled content since launch.
Competing with GW2 isn’t going to take a AAA title.
Horizontal progression assumes that the player achieves something and is rewarded with something that changes the physical appearance of their character/s.
Regardless of what that something is, I personally think the biggest issue here is the definition of an achievement. Is an achievement doing something difficult and overcoming a challenge or repeating an easy task for weeks/months?
Meaningful, challenging content with character build diversity and an alt friendly environment is what will build a passionate GW2 community.
Grinding, meaningless, easy repetitive tasks will chase everyone away.
Not necessarily. Some people enjoy farming(grinding to some), skill-appropriate(easy to some) tasks.
Just as what one person finds repetitive(boring), and game-breaking, another may find challenging(frustrating) content game-breaking, as well.
If you target the game to a passionate hardcore player, they’ll make videos of achievements that seem impossible, create community sites, theory craft builds, rally players together in WvW as a commander and engage with developers on core gameplay systems.
A passionate player base is the backbone of any community.
Horizontal progression assumes that the player achieves something and is rewarded with something that changes the physical appearance of their character/s.
Regardless of what that something is, I personally think the biggest issue here is the definition of an achievement. Is an achievement doing something difficult and overcoming a challenge or repeating an easy task for weeks/months?
Meaningful, challenging content with character build diversity and an alt friendly environment is what will build a passionate GW2 community.
Grinding, meaningless, easy repetitive tasks will chase everyone away.
You know, if they bring back these “expansions” we can’t play anymore, they might be able to win this exact same award with the exact same expansions in 2014.
I was just thinking the same thing.
If Darksouls 2, Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar, Warlords of Draenor, Destiny and The Division turn out to be crap, maybe GW2 can win again with recycled content.
Conditions tend to make players watch UI elements instead of the action. What I find strange is that some people like attrition in PVP. Applying damage over time and running away while you wait until your opponent dies sounds really boring to me.
Also, poison on the revivers and downed player, profit.
I would be willing to play almost any game as long as it doesn’t have downstate and rally systems. This casual clusterkitten is just too funny to be competitive.
I applaud all efforts to try to make conditions work in GW2, mechanically speaking of coarse. I think they got way over their heads when it comes to calculating the condition durations, stacking and intensity variables.
You know, engineers have a saying. Keep it simple, stupid.
I disagree that attrition tactics is allowed to be viable with the existence of dodge. It would make more sense to me to make the gameplay focus more on direct damage and have players use their tools and judgement by making split second decisions that could cost them their lives.
Alternatively, healing effects should all be interruptible, have cooldowns no lower than 30 seconds and have 3+ second cast times.
What if all conditions were removed from the game?
Damage over time effects would be removed but, not control effects. Chill, cripple, blind and poison (-50% healing) would be control effects like stun, knockbacks and knockdowns. What if stacking control effects had a diminishing return on the duration instead of an increase?
Condition damage on gear would have to be swapped to either power, precision or crit damage. Condition damage on traits changed to direct damage.
In GW2, I don’t have to spend ten minutes on a travel route, only to spend twenty minutes going to the bank and back because I forgot to bring something.
Imagine….
You had to spend 10 minutes to get to your destination while watching your back for creatures that want to eat you and an environment so dangerous that every breath you take brings you closer to death. Unfortunately, half way through your journey, you forgot your shiny glowing stick at the bank in Divinties reach. After arriving at Divinities reach, your possessions at the bank were stolen by pirates, including all your gold.
The journey is what makes the experience; not the reward. Unfortunately players like me are no longer the target market. Players like you are. Players that just want the reward and get frustrated every time there is an inconvenient obstacle in the way.
GW2 used the same strategy WoW did to Everquest. WoW made MMORPG’s more accessible by making the inconvenient into convenient.
GW2 took that strategy into overdrive by looking for and identifying every possible inconvenience in WoW and making it convenient. Look at death and travel for example. Death is so inconvenient that they added downstate and rally systems. Travel is so inconvenient that they added waypoints, health regeneration and speed boost while out of combat.
As if the secret strategy to making a game successful is by making it convenient. Lets make sure our players aren’t even using their brains. That’s obviously too much work.
Then again, designing a game for a crowd of people that just want rewards might prove to be more annoying than worth while.
Might as well just sell keys so that players can have a chance to win something cool in treasure chests. Oh wait…
It’s sad to see so many good ideas and potential being squandered. There’s a good reason why this game had as much hype as it did. Maybe we feel it can turn around at some point? Although unlikely, it’s still a possibility.
I let go of Rift, because it wasn’t the right game for me, because of design decisions made by the company. I also acknowledged, even at the time, that I understood their design decisions.
We’d like to let it go but, some of us are passionate enough to not be afraid to tell the developers that their design decisions are self destructive. When a serious competitor emerges and GW2 is still the same old daily grind; that’s when we’ll all disappear.
You can rub downed players while stealthed, taking damage and while being invincible.
Here’s the best part….
You can have 5 people rubbing a downed player and heal them faster than the incoming damage.
It’s so difficult for me to take this nonsense seriously in a PVE environment. In PVP it’s just hilarious.
I’d be very interested to hear a developer talk about core GW2 PVP game rules and gameplay systems. The reasons behind their existence and the logic behind their implementation.
There will be some new MMO’s in 2014 that won’t have this stupid downstate.
Just be patient.
Why does this feature exist?
It’s a PVE feature. Arenanet thought it would be a good idea to turn everyone into healers. That’s how they solved the holy trinity problem. Helping someone get up from a downed state is in fact healing them.
Healing is like an eraser.
It’s a mechanic that sweeps the mistakes of bad players under the rug.
Ground effects, conditions, Mesmer clones and Necro minions cluttering the screen with so much crap. Then there’s other rules that don’t make sense and are mixed in like downstate, rally, out of combat health regeneration and movement speed boosts.
Take all the screen clutter spam you can think of and add a bunch of game rules that don’t make sense into a blender and you get GW2 combat.
They must be tight on resources, hurting for cash or milking the player base.
Even I thought GW2 would be grind free, cosmetic achievements earned from challenging content. Boy was I ever wrong.
Is it easier to make an entire expansion? Or is it easier to re-skin an existing tier 3 human cultural armor set by adding some flame effects and slapping it with a 10$ price tag?
I think hardcores will be the only market to target for the MMO genre at some point in time.
Casual players can very easily disappear. They’re not as passionate as hardcore players are. They won’t exploit, test new builds, theory craft, manage guilds, create community sites, host tournaments… nothing.
A casual player can very easily swing to a facebook game tomorrow morning and disappear without a trace. Developing a game for this market is very risky.
As a company that wants to make money, would you rather keep 10 hardcore players, who will most likely buy all their gems with gold since gold is easy to get for them, or 200 casuals?
Ferrari makes cars to less than 100 people and they make insane profits. GM makes cars for everyone and they went bankrupt.
EVE has shown that an MMO for a specific niche market can be very profitable.
I would argue that an MMO that tries to have broad market appeal is more interested in people’s money than making quality content. Shareholder profits are all that matter to them. It wouldn’t surprise me that NCsoft is milking the GW2 playerbase until the last drop.
I think hardcores will be the only market to target for the MMO genre at some point in time.
Casual players can very easily disappear. They’re not as passionate as hardcore players are. They won’t exploit, test new builds, theory craft, manage guilds, create community sites, host tournaments… nothing.
A casual player can very easily swing to a facebook game tomorrow morning and disappear without a trace. Developing a game for this market is very risky.
I never understood why anyone would find gathering in video games fun. There are so many ways to gather and the best way they can think of is to run around with an axe chopping a tree.
How about we remove the axe and the tree; replace them with a big bad monster that could easily bash my face in? Or a quick goblin that I have to catch while moving through a jumping puzzle? Or saving a burning village from giant frogs? Or helping the locals reclaim their home from invading centaurs? Or how about…. ahh forget it…
I don’t understand why people feel the need to progress their characters with extra stats? If the game keeps increasing your damage by +1 over time, wouldn’t you eventually encounter a problem where NPC’s die in 1 hit? Won’t NPC health pools have to inflate in order to fix this?
What does this create other than inflated numbers popping up on the screen?
Vertical progression and power creep is a slippery slope. It’s cheap and quick to produce but it’s the lowest quality content you could possibly ever make. Players will get tired of it; look at World of Warcraft. They’re dying and reinventing themselves next expansion.
Crafting.
Seriously? No challenging content to earn great rewards? Just crafting? Obviously your target market is a very casual player who plays all their games on the “very easy” setting.
You want people to leave WoW for this? I honestly don’t know what to tell you.
That is only one more proof, that if the timegating was supposed to slow down hardcores compared to casuals, it failed badly and is, in fact, having exactly opposite effect.
Designing content for hardcore players works better with difficult and punishing content. The back lash that the casuals caused surrounding Liadri was quite evident.
It’s the casuals they want to slow down, not the hardcores.
You may not be part of it. I thought I was back in 2012. In 2013 I kept feeling I wasn’t being targeted anymore.
It’s possible they’re looking for a specific type of player. I seriously don’t think their strategy is broad market appeal. Because if it was it would be quite hilarious.
I was considering the chest armor and leg armor at the most but, the stat difference is so negligible that I’m glad I won’t have to bother with this abominable grind.
Conditions are not just overpowered they’re also idiotic. They put conditions on minor traits that activate randomly. They put conditions on auto attacks.
What kind of strategy is there here? There isn’t any. It’s just spam.
There are more reasons why GW2 isn’t taken seriously as a PVP game and failed horribly at the “e-sport”.
Colin used to talk about the plans for the game in the months ahead. Maybe they have no plans. Maybe if they don’t reach revenue targets by Dec 30th they may have to cut budgets.
One way is to look at orichalcum ore and ancient wood log price history on gw2spidy. You’ll notice that both were relatively cheap but their prices still have not gone back down to what they were before ascended weapons. They likely will not ever.
It is entirely possible that the demand for the item places enormous pressure on the supply. It is also possible that a shrinking player base contributes to low supplies as well.
I think there will be much fewer people playing GW2 in the future. After the release of ascended armor; Tier 6 items will probably become extremely expensive for a long time.,
After people finish leveling up their crafting skill of choice, they will probably dump their remaining stock on the TP. Prices will fluctuate heavily at first then gradually stabilise after Dec 10th.
In its current state it’s unlikely that GW2 will be around in 2015. If it is it will be a completely different game.
In 2014 and beyond I see tiers beyond ascended. I am convinced there will be tiers beyond ascended. I have a feeling that is it profitable for them to do so. It costs very little to produce and must generate quite a lot of revenue.
Just pray your build doesn’t get nerfed or that there won’t be a more fun build developed for your profession (both are likely because of skill balances and new skills on the horizon).
If the only ascended character I possess becomes sub optimal due to a new build, I’m done for good.
There is no way I am EVER grinding another ascended gear set. Ever.
I thought it was epic adventure to flush your money down the mystic toilet. Think of the legendary tale you’ll share with all of us when you see your new shiny floater.
I don’t know about you guys but, the same skills and utilities are getting boring. Character progression systems with new gear that provides +1 this and +3 that is also boring. It was quite interesting to watch the character progression systems video for the elder scroll online released recently.
Any idea if GW2 will have some new weapon skills, utilities and traits?
Apparently you can get the miniature of Mr Sparkles as a bonus for buying 4000+ gems with real money during december. Anet must be really desperate for money.
Quarter 4 sales can be make or break from some companies. It’s also the last quarter of the year to reach year end financial targets.
