I’m not sure that they can solve things to everyone’s satisfaction, but they should err on the side of the person who is happy having what he wants to have, rather than the person who has what he wants, but actually gets upset that other people can have it too.
I may be in agreement with you in one sense and here’s why:
People love to go on about how GW2 has no gear treadmill, but this is mental gymnastics. In raiding games, generally speaking, they have to antiquate old sets of gear (making them easier to obtain or obsolete) so that new sets coming in don’t make the treadmill too hard for new players entering the game.
For example, a raiding game might start with blue > green > yellow. Blue and green are super easy to obtain. Yellow takes some work. Yellow is also vital for contributing to the latest raids. Later they release Orange, which better than yellow. So yellow now becomes almost as easy (if not as easy) to obtain as blue and green, with Orange being the new Black. I mean, cough, yellow.
Many of GW2’s players and the devs themselves have no doubt told themselves that they don’t need to do this antiquating thing in their game with gear. Which is partly true, but more on that later.
What they are consistently missing is that in raiding games, the main end-game content is raiding and in GW2, the main end-game content is fashion. In neither case is said content the only kind of end-game content. Raiding games invariably have some content outside of raids at end-game, it’s just not very robust or has much longevity. Similarly, GW2 has some content outside of fashion, but (for the most part) it has never had much longevity to it. The illusion of longevity only comes from the treadmill for unlocking a seemingly infinite number of skins.
If you look at GW2 in the context of fashion being its raiding, there is an evergrowing barrier of entry to new players that is only increasing over time, instead of being addressed in the typical way – with old rewards becoming easier to obtain.
One might think this is some sort of twisty mind game I’m playing, but if we look at it in the context of what we’re discussing about psychology, it makes a lot of sense. Gear treadmills and barrier to entry in raiding games isn’t just about the hard barrier of not having the right gear. It’s also about the psychological barrier of feeling that you will never catch up to your peers in a meaningful way.
Some examples of how fashion has gotten worse, or stayed in much the same place: Ascended gear (which is a can of worms in itself and I don’t want to fit it into this post in full) is now harder to obtain than before. Dungeon skins are harder to obtain because less people are playing them, while the content itself remains at the same level of difficulty. Old Legendaries are still pretty much as costly as ever, despite the ability to craft the precursor. And most generalized tradeable skins are all but completely controlled by the whims of the market, so obtaining them as a new player is a highly fickle process.
Here’s the kicker (and maybe this is why some people aim their crosshairs at TP flipping): If you hit this barrier of entry in its various forms, there is one consistently effective way to get past it and that is to become good at playing the TP. It’s not an instant solution, but it is an effective long-term buffer. The problem is, it is also the only significant one in place, so if you aren’t excellent at trade or economies, then you can kiss your luck and place among your peers goodbye.
Both the GW2 community and its developers need to recognize that there definitely IS a barrier of entry to enjoying end-game as your peers do. Many of them, in fact, and the argument that the barrier is not “hard” (e.g. not Agony type hard) concerning fashion is an impersonal argument that fails to take human psychology into account.
There is also the matter of ascended/legendary gear and actual raids, but that’s a post for another time.
i found on some external forums that is gonna be fixed. I spend like 3 days to get that option, i’m playing only wvw. In big fights its lot of usless clicking.
