Agreed wholeheartedly. Death penalties in WvW are killing the experience by making risk taking too costly and turning the whole thing into a boring zergfest. The developers should also remember that they stated in the past there would be no death penalties and they were opposed to them, and changing their mind on this has hurt their credibility. There is enough nickel and diming in this game as it is. Do you really need to torpedo WvW with this as well?
PVP in WoW was the only reason I stayed with that game. What I loved about it is that as I became more skilled I developed innovative tactics that i could use on my own and which were often very effective. These tactics required a lot of trial and error all of which were fun to test and discover and all of which were made possible by the fact that i wasn’t risking a massive repair bill experimenting with them.
That sort of trial and error innovation and experimentation with solo tactics is impossible in this game for me, as the cost in repairs would bankrupt me. So by necessity I do something I always avoided doing in WoW: running with the zerg like a mindless herd animal, which has its moments but for the most part just isn’t much fun.
“Probably 90% of ALL bots are RANGERS using SHORTBOW. Why do you think that is? There are literally PACKS of them running in every zone. Why? Because it was TOO GOOD. When it is so good that it becomes the bot standard you had better expect the balance bat to fall your way.”
The reason most botters run with rangers is the “Search and Rescue” ability, which you will hear them spamming constantly. If one of the bots in the group goes down, the others can use search and rescue to rez him. There is also the fact that the pet tends to pull aggro off nearby mobs protecting the ranger.
I am seeing a lot of botters start to use other classes now. One botter I have seen for weeks in an area I farm who used to run exclusively ranger bot groups is now running with an elementalist, guardian and warrior team. It could just be there were no viable bot programs for the other classes before.
At this point Eveningstar it is clear you are only interested in personal attacks rather than in the substance of my complaint, so I will be ignoring you from here on in.
“our entire response is just an angry tirade about how ANet is guilty of lying, blowing you off, disrespecting you, ignoring your complaints, taking you for granted, damaging the integrity of their own game, lacking responsibility, lacking common sense, and ideologically opposed to doing the right thing”
The did in fact ignore my complaint and refuse to compensate me. Am I supposed to be happy about that?
Corporations, governments and the media lie on a consistent basis. Unless they fall prey believing their own bs, I am pretty certain most of the parties are well aware that they are lying.
Games fail because game developers take their customers for granted and fail to deliver on promises or fix problems promptly. They fail because they have no sense whatsoever of the value of proper customer support and the value of maintaining customer satisfaction. They fail because they lack honor or integrity or a sense of fairness or responsibility when dealing with customer complaints and grievances.
Anet is guilty of all of this. When I failed to get my reward for finally completing Malchor’s Leap, which took a while because one of the skill points was bugged for weeks, I asked for compensation with in-game currency and they refused to give it to me. It would have cost them absolutely nothing but some electrons and pixels to compensate me for the anger and frustration the broken mechanics in this game have caused me as well as the loss in time and in game loot that I suffered as a result of their screw ups. It was the ONLY correct and honorable thing to do.
Instead they predictably chose to blow me off with a tepid apology at which point I told them they would not receive another penny of real money from me until I have been justly compensated for my loss. I am not the slightest bit interested in their excuses or anyone else’s for this behavior.
Any company with a modicum of class, common sense and responsibility would empower its GMs to promptly compensate customers for problems like this particularly as it costs them nothing to do so. But most MMO devs are so ideologically opposed to the idea of giving you something for nothing—even when you’ve earned it—that they would rather enrage you and turn you off to the game than do the right thing.
This is the only kind of anecdote that matters—the type that arise from dealing with this company.
Great. So right on the backs of the DR fiasco and all the anger that caused, they nerf the hell out of mithral and ori nodes by putting them on a 24 hour timer. This is world class cluelessness, but thanks for the confirmation that DR was never about bots, but limiting players’ ability to gather resources. What’s the excuse for the massive nerf this time, bots? They seem to be trying to out-Bioware Bioware in destroying their reputation and credibility. I’ve never seen any other game out there with as many bots as this one, are they really that hard to get rid of? You have to wonder if they tolerate them to have an excuse for the anti-player initiatives they keep adding to the game.
Once again they make it harder to grind for gear because grinding for gear is pretty much the endgame in this game.
As for Mr Peter’s comments, this is classic Blizzspeak. The vague, non-commital “we will look at the numbers over the next few weeks” crap was always Blizzard’s way of dodging problems and refusing to fix them promptly. They also played the game of always overnerfing things that didn’t need to be nerfed then tweaking them upwards afterwards to where they wanted it in the first place “in response to the community” as if input from the community had anything to do with it.
So they overnerf DR and then adjust the DR upward to a level they are comfortable with so all the fanbois can say “See! they listened!” In reality, if they were listening, this anti-player crap wouldn’t be in the game at all because people complained about it in GW1 and have asked for it to be removed here.
I mentioned Bioware above, but it is a fine example of how a company with a stellar reputation can find that reputation flung down into the gutter through mistreating and lying to its customers.
DR in this game is the most dysfunctional, frustrating anti-player mechanic I have ever encountered in an MMO, and that is saying a lot. It needs to be scrapped entirely. Variable drop-rate farming qualifies as a mild form of psychological torture as it is, and it it is made worse in this game by the ridiculously low drop rates for crafting mats. Setting up a DR wall lowers this frustrating process to sadistic levels.
As should be abundantly clear, none of this is dissuading botters. They can teleport from place to place at no charge and no DR you can devise is going to defeat them. It’s just another poorly-conceived anti-player mechanic in a game full of them that is angering and frustrating players and making the game suck.
My advice to Anet is throw away the bloody slide rule. You need to do away with DR right now, not three weeks from now. If there was anything Blizzard was notorious for it was the tyranny of the slide rule, always using “the numbers” to justify broken mechanics while remaining completely oblivious to customer complaints about those mechanics. It’s why I am here playing your game now and why I suspect I will be playing the next game when it comes out unless you change your tune.
You need to start learning how to err on the side of fun and player satisfaction, rather than this typical anal-retentive, bean-counter MMO mindset that hamstrings all MMO games and alienates players like me. This was supposed to be a new type of MMO that was all about FUN, remember?
We were told there would be no death penalties in this game, but they not only have death penalties, they have them in PVP. Death penalty PVP games suck, which is why most people don’t play them. The majority of people who play EVE, Pirates of the Burning Sea and other death penalty games hang out in the safe areas and don’t venture into PVP zones.
There are too many gold sinks in this game already and all they do is discourage people from participating in the game by punishing them when they do. The whole idea of punishing people for playing a game is idiotic.
Death penalties in PVP have to go.
“I have to agree with the OP – the “game with no grind” is about as grindy as a modern day MMO could possibly become…and yet they have anti-grind countermeasures up the wazoo everywhere in the game. The “Anti-Farm code” needs to go or become MUCH less strict. I seriously should not have to stop farming mobs (that I have no choice in the matter – they are they ONLY mobs outside of a dungeon no one runs that drop the item) after 30 minutes just because Anet wants to “stop” bots – come up with a better solution rather than punishing actual players.”
QFT.
We were told this game has no grind but in fact it is a grindfest from Hell. You have to grind for just about everything in this game if you want to craft. Just to move from point A to point B in Orr is an incredibly frustrating and unfun grind in itself, let alone having to fight through 300 super-fast zombies to get 15 orichalcum..
Variable drop rates are a form of psychological torture. Grinding for hours against mobs that cc you, swarm you, and respawn on top of you just to get the things you need for crafting is demoralizing. But if it is possible to make this grind even more frustrating, unfun and demoralizing, hidden “anti-farm” code that reduces the already abysmal drop rates even further or eliminates the drops altogether would surely be the way to do it.
You force people to grind, then punish them for grinding. Let’s be real here, this is horrible game design at its worst.
At the very least you should be open about what these anti-farm measures are and how they work so we can work around them. Your alleged motive for punishing players this way is botters, but I see hundreds of botters openly and flagrantly operating in plain sight for days and nothing gets done about them. They’re not felling the heat, but we are.
I get the impression sometimes that Anet doesn’t want me to play their game. They are certainly destroying my incentive for doing so.