Guild Wars 2

Cantha confirmed, let’s go home guys.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hey Phys,

What about folks knowing the plot of Living World for example and leaking it?

Chris

One of the advantages of having a large boxed expansion with a strong narrative and design focus with a complete plot, in addition to all the other benefits it brings.

Since my proposal would be, as others have said, GvG and Guild Halls, plus QoL like alliances, can we get a bit of the C for “collaborative” from the Dev side?

Whether it’s Chris, or Colin, or someone working in upper management or other direction, and whether it’s in this thread or the guild content one: Can a developer or management talk us through the design process behind Guilds for GW2? Guild Halls and GvG were absolutely core to Guild Wars 1. Why Guild Wars 2 launched without either is beyond me.

There’s only so much we as players can speculate, ask for, and discuss. It falls on the developers to help us out, and tell us whether it was programming problems, or deadlines, or what have you, on why the game launched without these features. That’s an essential part of talking to your players and helping them understand. Two years later and we’ll all still very confused and in the dark about why these things weren’t in at launch, and why we haven’t seen them two years later. It would be such a burden off our shoulders, and allow us to sympathize with Anet, as well as contribute to discussion in a meaningful context, if we know why that’s been the case.

As soon as I logged in yesterday I knew something was off. I don’t know how noticeable the changes are to the smaller races, like Humans, Sylvari, and Asura, but to someone who plays almost exclusively Charr it was immediately obvious, and I can only assume it was the same for Norn.

I’m putting this in the bugs section because I see absolutely no reason why this would be a purposed changed. It skews the field of view and centers the camera past your character.

Luckily I found an old screenshot that was easy to replicate, so here it is:

http://i.imgur.com/kmDNOib.jpg – This is how the camera was placed prior to this patch

http://i.imgur.com/FRtpDQO.jpg – Here is the camera after, in the same spot and
zoom level. Even just switching between the screenshots, you can see the difference. It gets worse at closer zoom levels.

Just in case those two don’t make it obvious enough, I’ve overlayed them.

http://i.imgur.com/jWpHWrZ.jpg – Looking at the statue on the horizon, the camera has clearly been moved above the character, while things further off remain in place.

http://i.imgur.com/H0bBDcq.jpg – Further out, you can see the actual horizon is lined together, and while everything else is close the character model has clearly shifted down.

And, like I said, it only gets worse at closer zoom levels.

This ALSO affects the equipment panel, as seen here: http://i.imgur.com/vwHbFA1.jpg

Here’s another picture showing why this camera is annoying.

http://i.imgur.com/Osxr2pI.jpg

At a standard zoom, the camera is centered basically above your character. No matter how you turn or tilt the camera, it’s always as if you’re ‘looking past’ your character, and not at your character themselves.

I think this was added as a functionality to ignore emote (ignoring players now ignores their emotes, too)

However, it’s terribly clunk and needs to be fixed. It needs to look like the old system (Player Name emotes) or, if it can’t, it needs to remove the extra instance of the player name so it looks like (Player Name: emotes). The current version of (Player Name: Player Name emotes) is incredibly awkward and bothersome.

who inevitably will be pulled away by real life from time to time.

What about people who are pulled away because the game is dumbed down for the casual players and doesn’t offer them challenge? What about people who are pulled away because of a lack of serious content updates?

No offense, or anything, I understand why new players are important, but in the initial stages GW2 was advertised as “everything you love about GW1 and more”. GW1 was challenging and had tons of depth. GW2 is constantly getting easier without adding anything for people who are looking for a game with depth, and tactics, and strategy. Unlike the vague “it’s something we’d like to do,” the idea of Hard Mode was specifically shut down in a Gamescom interview. You guys continue to refuse to return to the highly successful PvE-PvP skill split because it ‘might be confusing’ despite the fact that it was confusing to nobody in GW1, and GW2 has far fewer skills and traits to worry about, and it was incredibly healthy for the game.

I’ve seen all the developer brainstorming on how complexity =/= fun, or how retaining newer players is important, but the game’s been along for two years. The number of new players will only go down if there isn’t something to keep them engaged in the end: content, and things to learn.

Magic: The Gathering is more successful now than it’s ever been despite being one of the most complex card games out there. They haven’t changed how the game works to attract new players. They make a game that appeals to a wide audience and has a learning curve where people feel enticed to learn on their own, not by holding their hands. People are playing MTG more and more because it’s something they feel is worth learning, not because it’s made easier to learn.

What are you doing for GW2 to make it a game that’s worth learning, and to continue to challenge players who have already learned it?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

An exercise in nostalgia is also fun to do for a while, too. How many areas of Prophecies were practically deserted except for people working out Cartographer or farming specific things? Was there a compelling reason to, just for instance, go to Maguuma Stade? How about compelling reasons to crawl through Dragon’s Gullet, or to fight Rotscale? Witman’s Folly?

How many different combinations of the skills which existed were “not viable”? Was there a very good reason, mechanically, to go R/W instead of W/R? Was R/N ever really good for anything other than “Touch Ranger” builds?

What was the vast benefit a Guild Hall would give, over just hopping to Kamadan? Were there services which were available to a guild with a hall which couldn’t be available to the members in the hub towns, and had significant impact to make the acquisition of a Hall worthwhile?

How much more grind was there to GW1 if you didn’t have the money to get yourself a shiny R9, inscribable, super awesome weapon like a Chaos Axe or Eternal Sword? (The inscribable part is the tough bit.) Does anyone here really remember the massive and utterly wasteful journey to hitting the maximum rank of “Lucky”? How about the “Gamer” title track?

Also, GW1 only had one race playable by players.

No areas in GW1 were deserted until after EotN came out. Many areas were home to unique drops, elite skills, and needed to be cleared for Vanquisher or Cartographer.

How many skills exist in GW2 which are not viable? A ton of them are just garbage. Most skills in GW1 saw at least niche use. There were always options. You would think with so few skills in GW2 that a greater proportion of them would see use, but for any given class only about half of them get played.

I’m just going to pretend paragraph three doesn’t exist, since you’re pretending GvG doesn’t exist.

Inscribable q9 weapons were available for pennies from any weaponsmith. Some weapons in GW1 actually had value, where GW2 puts everything in the gemshop, or has legendaries which are everywhere, and which receive constant clamor to be easier to get than they already are.

“Does anyone here really remember the massive and utterly wasteful journey to hitting the maximum rank of “Yakslapper”? How about the “Ultimate Sentinel”?"

You can keep trying if you like.

MRA.4758:

A long list of selection bias

You do realize how many features you described are different parts of the same update and how many weren’t content updates but changes to the game itself? Megaservers and guesting are not content. A trait system rework is content, but the reworking of the attribute system in GW1 isn’t? A lot of your items are things that also should have been in the game on launch but were added after release, like guesting, so praise Anet for for doing what they should have done.

It’s nice that you can thoroughly pick out some temporary content and non-content to pad a list, but how many races, professions, skills, explorables, weapons, guild halls, and PvP modes has GW2 added compared to GW1? How much of your list is no longer playable? An exercise in selection bias is probably really refreshing, but it does little to prove the point that GW2 does not have the amount or type of content that made GW1 successful and engaging, and that players are asking for.

I think there’s a disconnect between what content we get, and what content players feel they should be getting. If you’re asking the question “has there been content?” then the answer is, of course, yes.

If you’re asking “does the scope of the content we’ve received match what we received in GW1?” then the answer is very far from yes.

I don’t think anyone is really arguing that we haven’t been given content, but given that Anet is four times the size they were when they made GW1 and working on a larger budget game, they’ve introduced an incredibly tiny fraction of what we received in GW1 in the same time frame. That means skills, weapons, explorable areas, classes, dungeons, hard mode, etc. Living Story has, so far, failed to introduce this entirely, or on a scale that matches GW1. The game is also still missing features which should have been present at launch, like Guild Halls and GvG.

Nobody is really disputing that Anet has released content. It just doesn’t nearly match the scope of GW1.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We always do our best to listen to the community and read the forums, we just don’t always have the time to reply and engage, and it is our goal as expressed last week and over the weekend to build a better relationship with you all.

Chris

No mention of any changes for Roleplayers in the Megaserver update, despite it being a hot-button issue which you also mentioned in this thread was discussed internally. This thread also remains unanswered four months later:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Megaservers-and-RP/first

This is a good place to start, because right now part of your most dedicated fanbase has been ignored both in a very important area (the megaserver fixes) and continues to be ignored in a large, consolidated thread on the issue. These are places where listening will make a difference.

Sorry if this has been discussed at all, but I wanted to bring up an example of clear communication. You should be able to read this even without a forum account, but let me know if you can’t:

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=11317491

This is what the League of Legends forums have looked like for a very long time. They don’t hinder their developers from being explicit about what changes are in the works and what progress is being made. Note these this specifically:

• A player asks in a public method and the dev responds.
• The dev responds on a feature that is both incomplete and subject to change
• The dev goes into great detail about the problems being faced in development and, to that extent, why the change hasn’t been made yet
• The dev gives insight both into long term goals and current procedures
• The dev continues to respond throughout the thread to insight and concern

Long ago, and still today, Riot does this consistently and effectively. Recently they had a beloved champion up for change who wasn’t altered due to community feedback, and they had a massive thread where the developers talked with players about how they felt about the champion.

Anet has been around much longer than Riot. This is the kind of clear community interaction that Anet should be long famous for. And there’s absolutely no way that being open like this has made Riot unsuccessful, given they’re the most successful non-Blizzard game company.

This is what your players want to see. They want developers to talk candidly about what’s being worked on. They don’t expect developers to give timelines, but they love and accept when developers can talk about the development process and why something is or isn’t working and why it might take more time. Involve your players in the development process openly and they will love you. We you can’t open up like this it speaks volumes in the other direction: it leads players to believe you’re not working on anything important, or that your company as a whole has management issues as isn’t actually doing anything. Give your players confidence. Look at the upvote score on that dev post; talking candidly about a developing feature scored heaps and heaps of praise from the community. Nobody was mad because there we no promises, everyone was relieved.

I don’t want to want to derail the thread, but yes absolutely we have discussed player feedback about these areas of the game.

This right here is the start players have been asking for. I’m not going to say something like this is a perfect answer, because it still leaves the who, the when, and the how completely ambiguous, but it’s at least a confirmation that ‘yes, we’ve seen it’.

As a roleplayer you have no idea what an absolute sigh of relief it is to hear it’s been discussed. For that area, and many others, it would be a much greater relief if someone came in an talked explicitly about the discussions, but as a start, just being acknowledged is so much a step beyond the silence.

Just please keep in mind that because you’ve discussed these things, players will eventually want to know what the discussion bore. Obviously something like that can’t be answered now, but down the line players will ask ‘what happened to X? You said you discussed it’ if it never comes up again.

when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

This is the key statement. Many times you’re not working on what players are asking for. Then, when you release whatever you’ve designed that you believe is better for the game or community, it’s something nobody asked for, or doesn’t improve the game how players wanted. This is why Charr armor still sucks, the Zerk meta still exists, Roleplayers are still screwed, and why we have no new races or skills or weapons.

These are things that players want but you have some data point that says ’they’re not as good as thing X we’re working on instead’. In many cases X is probably some function of revenue or player retention. So you’re trying to balance what you think will keep the game alive and what the players want, but the reality is that players aren’t getting what they want nearly as much as you’d think. Sure, players are happy when we do get something, because it’s better than nothing, but it’s illogical to assume that something that players didn’t ask for will make them happier or even as happy as something they did ask for. If we wanted feature X more than feature Y, we would ask for feature X.

I understand that you can’t give us everything, and that some changes and additions have to be more broad, but where it needs improvement is that you need to give us more than what you currently do, and when you can’t, you need to make it clear why (why haven’t there been improvements to Charr armor? What are you doing to change the Zerk meta? Why haven’t Megaservers and Roleplayers been addressed? Does the scope of the Living Story still encompass races and weapons and skills?).

That’s not to say you guys don’t have any idea what’s good for you game, or that you don’t have good ideas for content and updates. You do. You just need to take more from the community.

Still running into non-TCers that troll RP when they see it.

Anet’s silence makes it clear they don’t care at all about their most dedicated section of players.

Please stop trying to make burning/condition Guardians a thing. Nobody is asking for it, and we keep getting it in place of abilities which compliment the Guardian’s role. This is part of the overarching problem with everything being far too homogenized. It’s perfectly okay to say “If you like conditions, don’t play Guardian.” That shows that classes have strengths and weaknesses, instead of trying to let everyone do everything and ending up with a game where half the traits are meaningless because they try and cover too many bases, and half the utilities don’t see use.

I’m actually curious to hear how you define each class, because every class is so samey due to lost mechanics from Guild Wars 1 that it’s often hard to describe classes in a manner other than something extremely general. When “they do damage and apply conditions at range” can refer to every single class in the game, something is wrong. If you took the previous phrase and applied it to GW1, you’d get answers of Ele, Ranger and maybe Paragon. 7 other classes, at least, do totally different things. “do damage and apply conditions at range” in GW2 could refer to Hambow, Shortbow ranger, Staff Necro, Shatter Mesmer, Staff Ele, Shortbow Thief, Rifle Engineer, it goes on and on. There’s just not enough diversity. A whole lot of homogenization, very little specialization. It doesn’t matter if the methods and style of the classes are different, if the end result is the same. Different inputs need different outputs, and classes need to be able to do things that no other class can do.

Consider: Imagine Elementalists got an elite called Chaotic Elements – in a nearby area for several seconds foes are set on fire, the earth grasps them to immobilize them, water heals allies, and lightning strikes foes. That sounds absolutely like something Elementalists would do. But it’s already in the game – as Supply Drop on Engineers. That’s the problem. So many skills and balance philosophies seem based around making things that look different, but don’t have different effects. GW2 needs more Binding Blades – skills and effects that one class has which no other class can tread on. That’s engaging and fun diversity.

Edit: I later remembered Power Block, and what a great example of specialization it was – at least until it got nerfed. While it was a PvE-centered change, mostly, it represented something GW2 lacks. A build focused on something no other class can do, which heavily defines the Mesmer. It got nerfed, and Mesmers simply fell back into the same Zerk spank meta as every other class because something role-defining was considered too strong. This does play into PvP balance too – if interrupts were too strong, players would shift toward builds which are hard to, or can’t be interrupted. The game is self balancing in that manner. But because there’s no specialization, there’s no specific classes or playstyles that accommodate anti-interrupt play. That’s something GW1 had with its wide skill array and high specialization – it was self-balancing, and the only things which were ever nerfed were builds that consistently dominated or had no counter. Everything which had a counter never became OP, because metas would shift to accommodate without balance intervention.

A little busy to elaborate, but, as others have said, please keep Megaservers out of cities. It allows roleplayers a safe place to roleplay, and gives players a place to talk to their home server members.

Open-world megaservers seem okay. Keep megaservers out of cities.

The TC RP community in the Black Citadel (Where megaservers are live) is completely split. All the RP groups are being filtered into various servers, and all the popular RP spots are packed with non-RPers.

RP has not been considered at all, and this system is shameful.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Guild Wars 1 is a very different game both in design and implementation. That’s all I can really say here.

Which is kind of sad considering this is “Guild Wars 2”.

As for an actual question: What happens to parties who complete a dungeon path in a contestable dungeon and are put into a map where the dungeon is now contested? e.g. a party uncontests CoE in Megaserver 1. They complete path 1, and when they return to Mount Maelstrom they are now in Megaserver 2, where CoE is contested. What then?

ColinJohanson.2394:

To maximize your odds of running into other RP players more often, you’ll want to make sure you’re on the same world (generally TC and Piken are viewed as the RP worlds), and in guilds with other RP members also on that same world. For example, everyone from TC currently will be set to high priority to sort together, same thing goes with people who are all a part of the same guild (so guild up RP folks!)

We’ll continue to monitor, adapt and update the system as we go forward as well, for now I’d suggest seeing how it works once we enable the mega server system across all maps and then giving comments and feedback when you see it in action!

(edited to add Piken!)

“Guild up” is not a viable option for the Charr community. Our entire RP scheme is separated into various groups – that’s how the Warband system works. The way the changes sound right now, this is not an adequate answer. Part of the RP experience is running into people you don’t know at all. That’s very unlikely to happen in the new megaserver system.

RPers are among your most dedicated fans, and I have yet to see anything indicate Anet cares about that at all. “Wait and see” has never turned out anything good for this game. The RP community wants assurance that our very niche and delicate community isn’t going to be destroyed by these changes. Specifically:

1) RP needs to be able to function even when players do not know each other or group together (if RPers are placed in different megaservers, this can’t happen).

2) RP is delicate and immersive, and easily destroyed by non-RPers (in the new systems, the popular RP spots of cities and level 15 zones are going to be filled with non-RPers).

Even if the “preference” system answers problem one, it doesn’t answer problem two.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Darmikau.9413:

Doomdesire.9365:

We want more variety in builds too…

Now you can play a burning guardian :^)

And feel like I’m gimping myself?

That’s the joke. Even if they could make burning guardian a good/viable build, I don’t think anyone wants to play it.

Doomdesire.9365:

We want more variety in builds too…

Now you can play a burning guardian :^)

Hey Bill, I’m not sure what’s been changed in this most recent patch (March 18th) But I’m already seeing some big improvements. I’m a Charr player and RPer and spend a lot of time in the Black Citadel, and normally the Factorium area only nets me around 30-40 frames on high settings. Post -patch I’m getting 50-60 consistently, tending toward 60.

Specs: i7 4770k @ 3.5GHz, GTX 780 Ti, 8GB RAM

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi,

So we discussed this idea. The fact of the matter (and I should have been easily able to answer this) is that armor is in high demand across the game and thus for the time being it would be unlikely that we would see a fractal only set.

Chris

But we get plenty of armor sets in the gem store? :/

Anyway, this might be a bit of a tangent, but I’d like a bit of clarification/discussion on:

I would worry that those Rangers that don’t do Fractals would feel left out.

What’s wrong with excluding rewards from players who don’t do specific content? The Underworld in GW1 had a spider pet which could only be obtained by doing the UW. There are pets right now that are only obtainable in the HoM. I don’t think exclusive rewards make people feel left out, I think they’re good design and let players feel special for acquiring certain items. The mindset of “Everything has to be available to everyone” is what I think turns off a lot of dedicated players. Which I suppose is fair if dedicated players aren’t your target audience, but that’s sort of not why I, personally, would make a game.

Edit: Got to the post about Ranger pets having abilities. That’s fair. But the same argument for weapons and armor still stands. You could also have the pets within Fractals have abilities which pets outside of Fractals have, the obvious difference being the Fractal animals are more prestigious. A Fractal dolphin pet could have an ability an overworld aquatic pet has, for example.

RavenRecoil.6103:

Everyone cries about the gem store. Its all a look. Luckily these items do not have stats. Now that would be something to cry about. I love the gem store busness model. Way better than paying $15 a month subscription fee for the priveledge to play the game I already purchased!! Now that is something to cry about.

I would much rather pay $15 a month and have all the content in the store available to us by actually playing the game. There’s a difference between some minor cosmetics being put in the gem store, and 75% of all content (including all entirely new armor sets except ascended, as well as large sets of GW1 and other weapons). If it were just town clothes in the store, that’d be great. Unfortunately it seems we’re forever cursed to have everything worthwhile placed up on the Wal-Mart shelves. GW2 is becoming less about being a heroic adventurer and more about being a heroic consumer. It seems like, at this point, only a paid box expansion will save us from the awful reality that all armor sets and good weapon selections are in the gem store.

1) Part of longetivity and goal-oriented rewards is allowing players flexibility to match their risks with their rewards.

Currently, Fractals set the risks and the rewards for the player. Players can’t choose riskier ventures for faster clear times, we’re always locked into the three-fractal-then-boss cycle.

2) Difficulty is inherently tied to risk, and a cap on risk creates burdens on content, rather than skill, to be challenging.

If a party wipe sent your group out of Fractals and you had to restart fully, the notion that bosses should be capable of one-shotting players would seem silly. When there are real, significant risks for failure, you take the burden off the content to be challenging, and place the burden on the players to be skillful enough to complete challenges. While granted that the “no-kick” design allows for its own flexibilities, you must consider that taking the risk burden off of players forces you to design content that might be artificially challenging (in a world where players can’t be kicked from the instance for losing, how do you challenge those players other than making bosses that one-shot them unless they dodge?). While I don’t mean to say kick-if-fail design is the only form of this risk, it is one of the more obvious implementations.

Unfortunately, how to reconcile these problems would be beyond the scope of this post, and perhaps beyond the scope of Fractals themselves. It may be entirely possible that these issues are simply something that can’t be reconciled in the context of Fractals, or in the context of Guild Wars 2’s design. If I did have to levy suggestions, it might be first in the area of player-selected risk. For example, rather than tying instabilities to specific Fractal levels, you could tie instabilities to reward levels. Instabilities which are rated as “more challenging” would then be tied to a higher reward level, independent of the Fractal’s difficulty scale, and you would receive bonus reward for choosing a higher-challenge instability.

There could be other progression dynamics tied to this as well, with their own benefits. For example, imagine if players could choose to do two Fractals for a smaller reward. Or maybe they could choose to do five Fractals in a row, for a larger reward. There could be a system where the Fractals, rather than prompt you to move onto the next Fractal, ask if you would like to do another Fractal for an increased reward. The more Fractals you do before doing the boss Fractal, the greater the reward. If you had an extremely dedicated group who chose to do all twelve non-boss fractals before doing a boss, there would be an even larger bonus reward. Consider it a sort of “trial mode.”

Or, perhaps there could be a “boss mode.” Your party, rather than doing normal Fractals, does all three boss Fractals in a row. If you party wipes on any of those bosses, you’re sent back to the observatory. Rewards would be balanced accordingly.

These are the kinds of things that allow a customized experience and allow players to customize both their time investments, and the amount of risks they take. Imagine a combination, even. What if there were a “boss mode” where you could choose difficult instabilities for a better reward? I bet the risk-seeking players would LOVE that.

It could also work with lore, you could add “historical” or “lore” trials to the Fractals. Imagine a set of three Fractals and a boss Fractal, where each Fractal is part of of the molten dungeon, or related to the molten alliance story, and then the Fractal boss is the Molten Duo. Rewards could be related to the molten alliance content (azurite, rare chance at the molten jetpack, etc). Choose a difficult instability, and there’s a higher chance at the better molten-related rewards.

All in all, some of these things are very development heavy, and take a lot of consideration about reward balance, but they’re the kinds of thing I think could really breathe life into the progression dynamics of Fractals.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Question about progression and difficulty.

One thing that I find that sets Fractals apart from previous “elite” areas, like GW1’s DoA, FoW, and Underworld, is that Fractals is just that – bits and pieces that generally don’t make up a whole. To clarify, the goal of these previous elite areas was that they were a series of overarching quests that resulted in an end goal. You did four areas, or a chain of 11 or 13 quests, and in the end you got a massive reward chest. Fractals are different. There’s no real cohesion between what you do, and the end reward. You do whatever three Fractals are handed to you, and then the final boss. There’s no real expectation of consistency in experience, other than going in knowing you need to get three Fractals and a boss done. This is why people roll for swamp, and generally hope for the shorter Fractals – all that matters is getting to the end as quickly as you can. Think of the elite areas as one giant instance, and Fractals, rather than a single large instance, is more of a bunch of separate, mini-dungeons.

While I’m not sure this is a fair comparison to make, I want to emphasize that part of the challenge of the elite areas was not only present in the areas themselves, but was made by the players. There was a self-scaling system: solo running and split groups. You could travel with a party of 8 around the Fissure of Woe and complete the quests. It was safer, but took longer, perhaps two hours or more. What players eventually came to realize is that, with the right builds, a group could split and solo each of the quests. A party of eight could, in assuming substantially greater risk, cut down clear times to thirty minutes or less. I think Fractals lacks this sort of dynamic. There’s no way for the players themselves to modify the structure to do thing faster, albeit with more risk. I think this is why there’s such a large discussion over rewards. We’re not allowed to take huge risks outside the structure of the instance, so the speed at which we receive our rewards (and the amount of those rewards) is subject entirely to the design team’s discretion.

Imagine there were a way to cut a Fractal clear time in half, but it was twice as difficult. The skilled players would absolutely take this route, because they’re skilled enough to win without failure, while getting their rewards faster. They create their own difficulty without Anet having to do anything at all.

Part of the problem, though, is simply the way the design is structured. In an absolute sense, there’s really no “failing” in Guild Wars 2. You never completely lose a dungeon, you only die and respawn until you eventually execute correctly. With that sort of system in place, it’s much harder to design content with the expectations of greater risk. There’s a hard cap to risk – you die and try again. This is different from the risk present in GW1 where, if you died, the run was botched and you had to start over completely. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure what Anet’s current stance on this is, and I won’t make assumptions. However, this all boils down to two points:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I have a few questions for the thread. Sorry I’m a bit late (though I have been reading)!

Snip about Instabilities.

As a personal anecdote, getting from 30 back to 50, it was fun seeing what each new instability would be, but only for the first instance. There were very few Instabilities that encouraged a line of thinking that “we want to go back and do this instability again,” in part because of the design of the instabilities themselves, mostly because that would require lowering the Fractal level we play at. I think a really important thing to keep in mind is that when there’s a tiered reward structure (different Fractal levels) players are automatically going to go for the highest level reward with the least impactful instability. Where it stands now, players consistently run level 49 over and over because it has the maximum tier of rewards, and an essentially negligible instability. Your gathered assumptions are pretty well-on, and I think GW1 was lesson enough the environmental effects are always the most preferable for of challenge. This is especially important to note in GW2, that stat modifiers are the absolute worst because stats are tied to difficult-to-acquire gear. Unfortunately, in not following GW1’s legacy, tying stats to armor and making maximum tier armors (exotics and ascendeds) more difficult to obtain than a simple stat swap or cheap vendor trip, means that players dedicate themselves to one stat spread and it can’t be disrupted without seriously throwing a wrench in their cosmetic and stat preferences. This is part of why I heavily advocate allowing ascended tier armor to be able to switch stats like legendaries, because then it would potentially allow for stat-based alterations, since players could alter their specs accordingly.

On the subject of disliked instabilities, I think a universal “no” is anything which directly contradicts the intended mechanics of the game. I know a lot of people hate 43 because it’s difficult. I like the challenge, but I hated 43 for a fundamental design reason; it directly contradicts the intended point of the game with no practical solution. You have to attack to kill things, and you can’t kill things by not attacking. When the only solution to not die is to not attack, you’re forcing people to not play the game. That’s design error basics. Another big “no” is artificially gating players. 40 and 50 are both guilty of this because they require you to have more AR than is actually necessary. Although you’ll have difficulty with the boss fractals, levels 41-49 can be done with 45 AR (since agony is typically only applied in 3-hit stacks). 40, however, applies constant agony, which means that you’re required to have the necessary 55AR to complete it. That artificially forces players to have more AR than they actually need. Bad.

On a more positive note, I think my favorite instability was the lightning that stuns you at random intervals. It’s an environmental effect, it has a readable tell, and it’s significant enough that you have to play around it, but not insignificant enough that it can be ignored. It has counterplay. That’s good design.

Some other things: Personally, I’d much rather have one new Fractal than thirty new instabilities. Also, a bit aside the point, but I have to take a small gripe:

They might have been more appealing and/or made more sense had we been able to implement to full plan.

Why was the full plan not able to be implemented? As a general concern I worry this is the fault of the two-week-release schedule. There was another thread a while back that stated that the two week plan is never there to edge in quantity over quality, yet I see statements like this which seems to give the perspective that a lot of content is simply thrown out, unfinished, or not able to be fully tested in order to meet deadlines. That is absolutely sacrificing quality in order to get a product or feature shipped, and with something like Fractals (hell, with pretty much anything in the game) nothing should ever be put out unpolished. “When it’s ready” was the theme of GW2 for a long time before release, and I think despite that ideal, a lot of players agree the game itself was released unfinished. I don’t like to see post-launch content also being released without an utmost level of care and design consideration. I know as designers there’s not always a level of control over being forced into deadlines or other constraints, but I think on the whole Fractals, and indeed most of the game itself would benefit highly from a more sincere initiative to make sure content is well designed, polished, and tested as a release standard, rather than being forced to conform to a two-week cadence.

This is a long post, so I’ll address the other two points (about difficulty/progression and randomness) in another post.

Happening to me too.

What if we could send players forward in Fractal time?

I think doing this creates a longetivity expectation. If you can explain the futuristic aspects of the Fractal within the Fractal itself, that’s good. But, with Uncategorized for example, people see an abandoned Rata Sum, speculate that it might be a Rata Sum of the future, and then are stuck waiting for any kind of explanation or in-game event that may never come.

Never do anything relating to “the future” if there’s no guarantee it will ever be explained. Part of players’ issues with the current GW2 story now is that there were open-ended questions left at the end of GW1, almost all of which have yet to be addressed in GW2, in favor of Scarlet and other things.

Causing players to be curious sometimes is good. But you can’t constantly make players curious AND never reward their curiosity or give them answers.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Astute post.

Chris

Just wanted to snip this and ask that if Fractals are ever balanced for personal reward based on time x difficulty, that careful consideration is used in actually balancing the rewards. I was excited to hear that Dungeon paths were being reworked to offer gold based on path length and difficulty, only to be immensely disappointed at the perceived laziness in actually balancing the rewards (AC paths are incredibly short and easy and give 1.5g each, while all other dungeon paths (except Arah) give 1g flat despite their relative balance and length compared to each other, almost all of which are longer or more difficult than AC paths). Please consider how to balance these rewards properly, if they’re ever implemented in Fractals.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Just a quick note to let you know i am up to date.

I am assuming that you all feel that for example a Dredge rework is higher priority than say a rework to rolling?

Chris

Absolutely.

Rerolling isn’t an issue. It only affects the first Fractal, and the only reason it exists is because Swamp is much shorter that its alternatives. If all T1 Fractals were as short as Swamp, there wouldn’t be any re-rolling. The only other re-roll cases I’ve personally come across are Dredge as a T3 (where it’s so long and tedious it’s just faster to re-roll) and, rarely, Molten Facility because there’s a progress bug when entering the final cage fight, which is a bug issue, not a design problem.

Dredge, on the other hand, is a constant source of frustration and discouragement. Getting Dredge is a painful experience and makes players hate Fractals. In game design terms that is absolutely not okay.

I agree with Strider. I love both the PvE-challenge aspect of Fractals and the lore-aspect of Fractals, but I don’t want to see either limited by trying to design them around each other.

I don’t want a lore-focused experienced to be diluted or soured by the PvE design of a fractal (imagine if a very important lore-set fractal had all the problems of Dredge fractal), and I don’t want my Fractal progression to be tied to lore events in particular. I think the environment for enjoying these things is very different.

The Bonus Mission Pack in GW1 is somewhat how Fractals now are, but they were personal instances with storybooks and you never ran them more than a few times. I think Fractals is a much more challenge-oriented world, and should cater to that design. The purpose of lore design is to tell a story, but Fractals tend not to focus on that. In Thaumanova, even though I’m a huge follower of the lore, I don’t stop and admire the story-telling of the Fractal, I (like my group) focus on completing the fractal as efficiently as possible so that we can get our rewards. In that sense story is lost, and I don’t want to see that happen to any really cool bits of unexplored lore.

Have you ever considered expanding the dialogue for player characters, or adding different-voice options to be purchased for further customization (giving your character a totally new voice, both for yourself and for other players to hear)?

Who currently composes the music for GW2? I’ve heard Soule departed a while ago, leaving only his prior GW1 + 2 music available from him, and the rest from new producers.

Skills which prevent damage, but not conditions (the enemy still technically does damage so their on-hit or on-crit effects will trigger,unlike with actual invulnerability):

unlike with actual invulnerability

actual invulnerability

Endure Pain and signet of stone are not actual invulnerability

Sorry warriors and rangers

By that logic, there are no invulnerability skills in the game. Even Renewed Focus lets conditions tick for damage while being used.

Condition cleansing hurts condition builds as much as protection hurts direct damage builds.

The difference being conditions are easily reapplied, and are not unique. For example, if I’m in a damage spec, I only get one of X skill (Whirling Wrath, Eviscerate, whatever you want it to be). If it’s blocked, dodged, whatever, it’s gone until it comes off cooldown. If I’m playing a condition engineer and have, say, pistol and grenades, and they dodge my pistol’s poison shot, but I then switch to grenades and apply poison that way, I’ve achieved an almost identical effect. They’re poisoned, and the poison they have now is no different from the poison they might have gotten from the pistol. In the case of important direct damage skills, they’re just gone. That makes conditions more reliable. And reliability is a really big component of balance.

Kyon.9735:

Lazy TL;DR for the best things he pointed out in comparison to Direct Damage to Condition Damage.

Raws DPS/Direct Damage
• Needs 3 stats to be effective: Power, Precision, Crit Damage
• Countered by Weakness and Protection
• Enemy dodges = 0 damage done

Condition Damage
• Needs 1 stat to be effective: Condition Damage. This leaves you free to allocate more points into Healing/Vitality/Toughness
• No condition counters condition damage
• Enemy dodges = conditions previously applied keeps on ticking.

I think he’s got a good point. I think condition ticks on dodge rolls are ok though.

Thanks.

I agree that it makes sense for conditions to tick through block/dodges if previously applied. It’s just a problem when you pile on the other advantages of conditions as well. There’s also very little comparable for direct damage dealers, there’s very few skills which are unblockable, or which make an attack or a series of attacks unblockable or undodgeable.

Rhyse.8179:

Did you get your terminology crossed? I think you mean Direct Damage instead of DPS, because conditions very much do qualify as Damage Per Second.

The advantage to Direct Damage is that it’s applied instantly, and that it scales by multiplying stats together instead of linearly.

As for dodging etc only mitigating DD, that’s bogus. If you dodge an attack that applies conditions, you not only negate the attack, but all the damage from the conditions it would have applied as well.

“Raw DPS” implies straight damage. Conditions are not “raw,” they’re conditions. And straight damage is certainly damage per second, unless you’re somehow blowing your entire skillbar of attacks in less than one second.

I don’t think you really read the post. The multiplicative stats are a disadvantage because in order to make the most of a raw damage build, you have to trait into these multiplicative stats. With condition damage you can get an equally efficient return on your stats by speccing only into condition damage, and leaving open free slots for defensive stats. By the time you’ve allocated enough stats into power, precision, and critical to make the damage markedly more than conditions, you’ve turned into wet noodle that dies in a few good hits.

And in regards to the mechanics, the point isn’t how they mitigate the attack, it’s how they mitigate the effect. The point of damaging builds is to kill the enemy. When someone dodges, for example, they negate your attack and that’s it. You’ve done 0 damage to them. You’re not fulfilling your intended role. When they dodge, but have conditions on them, your attack misses, but they’re still taking damage, which means even if your effect is mitigated, you’re still doing exactly what you intend to. If I use Whirling Wrath and my opponent uses a skill like Gear Shield, I do 0 damage to them. My method of speccing into damage-based attacks is completely negated. But if I apply a bunch of conditions to an Engineer, and then they Gear Shield to prevent further attacks, they’re still taking damage from the conditions that already exist on them. My method of speccing into condition-based damage is not being entirely negated.

And that’s just one way conditions appear the superior choice to raw damage. When you combine it with everything else, we get back to my original point. What’s the point of direct damage, when conditions and condition-based builds have so many more advantages?

Am I missing something here?

I don’t know how many threads there have been on this kind of subject, but in terms of raw damage versus conditions, there seems to be almost nothing favorable about straight, direct damage. Recently I’ve been running a Zerker-stated meditation guardian, and while it’s fun, it seems to just fall short for a myriad of reasons. I’ve converted to bunker because every game it looks like straight damage is essentially useless.

For one, running straight damage requires a three stat investment: power, precision, and critical damage. Conditions require one, and that’s condition damage. There’s condition duration, but conditions are already so spammable it hardly makes a difference. If you’re going for straight damage, you have to go all in or you see huge losses in your ability to actually hurt people, and once your raw damage is low enough, you’re getting into areas of attrition where conditions are just straight better anyway. Meanwhile, in running a condition spec, you free up one or two stat slots for stats like toughness, healing power, etc. Stats, which I should add, make you more defensible against raw damage builds (healing power and vitality are a good defense against conditions, but toughness does nothing except mitigate raw damage, and the first two also mitigate raw damage).

And that’s just the stats side of things – there’s the mechanics, too. There are so many defensive mechanics that only minimize raw damage, it’s insane. Dodging, blocking, “invulnerability” skills, stealth, they all stop basic attacks and skills from getting through. And while they do prevent condition-applying attacks from hitting, they do nothing to stop conditions that have already been applied. Dodging, Renewed Focus, Engineer’s Tool Kit Shield, Warrior’s Shield, conditions already on you will keep burning you while using them, but they make you invincible to straight damage assaults. And to make matters even worse, not only are these kind of skills and abilities abundant, but conditions themselves come with ways to out-shine raw damage. Weakness only mitigates straight damage, and it reduces endurance regeneration which is so much more valuable to raw-damage dealers who have to invest into three stats to do what they do, giving up other defensive stats. There’s also poison, which reduces healing and is invaluable for preventing all the prevalent self-healing, which a lot of the more DPS-based classes don’t get access to.

Couple these together, and you get a design scheme where the only way to become a bigger raw damage dealer is to spec more intently into less defensive specs, which is not only disfavorable due to how squishy it makes you, it doesn’t actually accomplish much because there are so many mechanics that just flat out prevent damage. You become more squishy, but you don’t actually make yourself any more effective because of all the blocks and dodges, etc.

All things considered, I get that DPS has the advantage of being burst-oriented, as opposed to the over-time nature of conditions, but it just seems like there’s such a ridiculous amount of ways that going raw damage isn’t favored in the spectrum of PvP. Which is a shame, because to me it’s one of the most fun specs available.

Hawk.3574:

Will we ever see cross race/species couples, both hetero and homo? It could bring a few new race choices for us players down the line.

Uh?

None of the races can breed with each other. They’re all independent species.

I suppose this is more of an opinion than a question, but I’ll still attempt to phrase it like one:

Why has Guild Wars moved away from setting-driven plot and toward character-driven plot?

One of the initial draws for me was how rich the world was. Recently, that’s been very shunned. Even from the onset of GW2, I find the characters are often overloaded. Everyone has something special that makes them stand out as being above the player character and the rest of the world. For example:

*Rytlock isn’t just a member of Destiny’s Edge, he’s also a Tribune and the wielder of Sohothin.
*Logan isn’t just the heir to Gwen and Kieran, he’s also the captain of the Seraph and in love with the Queen.
*Trehearne isn’t just a Firstborn, he’s also the Marshal of the pact and the wielder of Caladbolg.
*Braham isn’t just an important Norn, he’s also Eir’s son.
*Scarlet isn’t just…well, Scarlet is pretty much everything. It’s kind of ridiculous.

My point is that even among the characters I like (I like Braham and Rtylock) they feel so far above and removed from the world. In Guild Wars, Prince Rurik was simply the prince of Ascalon, and his part in the story was very small, but he’s so memorable. Master Togo was a simple headmaster of the Shing Jea monastery. But he felt so humble and grounded that he was my favorite character in GW1. The same goes for the heroes of Tyria – Cynn, Mhenlo, Koss, Dunkoro, Captain Morghan, the Acolytes Jin and Sousuke, etc etc. They all felt real and never had anything outstanding about them. They were integral to the story and even had relationships of their own, but they never became the centerpiece. They were human, and I miss that. (Even if I am a Charr player now).

Instead I find that characters are being put in place of setting. Nearly every mission in Guild Wars had some kind of important lore piece: Stormcaller and Horn Hill, the Bloodstones, the Ascension Towers of the Margonites. The Kirin of Zen Daijun, The Spear of Archemorus and Urn of St. Viktor. The first city of Elona, the waterwork of Menkhelon, and the Great Junundu. There are dozens more. These things enriched the world and gave life to everything going on.

The world felt vast and the characters small. In Guild Wars 2 the characters feel huge and the world feels tiny. And when some characters and plots fail to hold up (like Scarlet) it feels like you’ve sacrificed the richness of the world for so little gain. This is one of the reasons I loved the Zephyr Sanctum so much, beyond it being a fun update gameplay-wise. It enriched the world instead of focusing on the characters. Many of the other updates have felt like a vehicle for the characters, instead of the characters enhancing the plot.

For example, in Guild Wars 2 it often feels like we’re being specifically told a narrative about a certain characters. We’re constantly handed this idea that Marjory and Kasmeer are in a relationship. We’re constantly handed this idea that Rox is trying to get into a Warband. The characters are being defined by their own personal motivations and biases, and not by the way they interact with the player. In Guild Wars 1, one of my favorite examples is Dunkoro. He serves as a trusted Sunspear council and you can feel both his wisdom and his hesitation, but the story is never about him. He grows on you simply by the way he interacts with you as a player character. Then, near the end of Nightfall, you find out that he sent his son to the Tomb of Primeval Kings and lost him. He faces his son in the Domain of Anguish and you can almost feel his regret. We’re not hearing a story about Dunkoro, we’re being given depth and context to someone we already care about simply because they support us in our quest. And that’s where I feel GW1 hit the mark and GW2 is missing.

So, all that in mind, why the focus on the characters instead of the world, and why the emphasis on providing a narrative of a character before we’re really given a chance to make our own assumptions and preferences about them?

BillFreist.1527:

To follow up, the client optimizations that I mentioned before went out with the build today. Let me know if you saw improvements. Feel free to list your specs too!

-Bill

No change in performance in the Black Citadel Factorium (40-50 FPS)
No change in Lion’s Arch Mystic Forge square (20-35 FPS)
Improvement in the Town of Nageling in Diessa plateau (30FPS now 50-60+ FPS) [This was a weird area where I would only get half the normal FPS. Most areas sit comfortable at 60 FPS (with V-sync on) but there are a few outliers in certain maps which will cause frame losses. And, of course, more character models contributes to frame loss.]

I’ll take a look at WvW and the Twisted Marionette event in a little bit. Most settings set to high (I prefer medium shaders).

Specs:
CPU: Intel i7 4770k @ 3.5GHz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 780Ti
Memory: 8GB (2×4GB) 1600 MHz DDR3

Way, WAY too forced. Every time they talk it’s like a brick to the face. There’s nothing subtle about any of it.

Regardless of whether or not there’s some sort of agenda, you do not write couples of any kind by being this overt. The best kind of gay characters don’t make you say “oh, this character is gay.” They make you question “Oh, I wonder if this character MIGHT be gay.” There are plenty of perfectly good gay relationships already in Guild Wars. My particular favorite is the female Charr in Ascalon who talks in passing about how her female lover was killed.

The team doesn’t seem to understand that you don’t write characters whose character is that they are gay. You write good characters who also happen to be gay. I constantly dabble in this subject with writing and roleplaying, and Kasmeer and Marjory just make me roll my eyes every time they talk because every bit of dialogue recently has been “we’re lesbians.” There’s no substance, just forced romance.

lordkrall.7241:

Why do people keep assuming that adding the Living Story parts to the EotM is something done after EotM was decided upon?
It is highly likely that the living story have been part of the release of EotM since they started planning it.

Because WvW, PvP, and PvE have absolutely nothing to do with each other. WvW and PvP only exist in the abstract canon as part of the mists.

It’s trying to explain game mechanics using the story, and it doesn’t work. It’s like waypoints. They’re clearly nothing but a function of the game, and trying to explain them in a way that’s canonical not only doesn’t make sense, it hurts the lore and the believability of the world.

Part of building a world within a game is recognizing when something clearly exists only because the game’s function or balance needs it. Guns in Tyria can fire infinite rounds and never need to reload. Are you going to try and explain that in the canon? No, it’s just part of the game’s balance, and the logical explanation is that in reality the guns DO have limited ammo and DO need reloading, it’s just not considered in gameplay because it would make guns terrible.

In the Roleplay world we have IC and OOC; In-Character and out-of-character, to define actions which actually happen in the world and which are taking place in the context of a game. When designing the world, they could also stand for in-canon and out-of-canon, because there are many things in Guild Wars that should continue to exist out-of-canon because they’re game features.

I’m just worried about the way it seems there’s a forced narrative around content. Between the Aetherblades, Molten Alliance, etc, a lot of players have said that nothing in the Living Story feels connected; that it’s all designed as content and then the writers are forced to tie it together with a story.

This seems like proof still of that. Something that’s clearly a WvW feature, and was designed for WvW players, is now forcing the writers to include it in the narrative as part of the story, regardless of how much sense it makes or how compelling an idea it is. This is part of what’s so unbelievable about the writing. Nothing feels natural, and in order to achieve the narrative you have to way overstep the boundaries of the lore. It’s why, for example, many of us look at the Aetherblades as lore-breaking because they just scream “someone wanted steampunk in Tyria” and then after the content is designed it’s just written into the canon, even though Tyria has never had, and never should have had steampunk.

I would much rather see a return to overarching, campaign-style story where the narrative directs the content (Factions, Nightfall), not the content directing the narrative.

Is there any way you can comment on the “raid” aspect of these events? I think Wurm and Tequatl fit more of the example.

The fact is, these events require a highly organized and skilled group of players. Knowing this, they reach an inevitable point after launch: Players in the open world don’t attempt to do them because it can’t be done with the level of coordination that zergs have. The only people with access to these events are groups like TTS. Even on my server, TC, which is highly populous, there is almost nobody at Tequatl. If you want to do him, you have to join one of these groups, be able to participate at a specific spawn time, and have the group invite you to an overflow server. That’s essentially the opposite of open-world content.

I’d -LIKE- to do Tequatl and the Wurm, but I know I can’t without trying to join these groups. This begs the question of why these events are still open-world and not instanced. I know the world needs to be alive, but I think the fact remains that these events are simply too difficult for open-world completion and end up barren after the hype passes, which makes me sad because I actually want to do them.

Can Litany of Wrath be re-examined? Despite being a meditation it’s still not instant, which defies the very purpose of being a meditation. If it’s going to have a cast time then it needs to not be counted as a meditation (and should give a damage bonus and heal extra to make up for the loss of meditation traits), and if it’s going to be a meditation, then it needs to not have a cast time.

There is currently no reason to take this skill over shelter in pretty much any situation, which means it’s failed its purpose in providing options. In builds where Litany would excel, like a high-damage, meditation traited build, shelter is even better because the amount of damage you avoid through the block is way more than you’ll heal trying to chase people down while litany is active, plus the damage you take while trying to cast litany.

Why are the upcoming Ferocity changes also targeting WvW, instead of PvE-only? They were mentioned not to be necessary for PvP. I know it’s a small community, but this will hurt glassier builds in Obsidian Sanctum dueling. I’m guessing it also has larger implications for the Borderlands and EB, where tankier and condition/attrition builds are already more meta than pure damage builds. Thoughts?

EDIT: I posed the thread to one of my guilds since I have the first post, and they want to know when we’re getting Luxon Siege Turtles in WvW. I fully support this motion.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Nothing ever gets removed because it’s fun. It just happens that fun things can sometimes get in the way other people having fun—like an item that cripples an entire server and causes everyone to have skill activation lag.

For now I’ll be happy to answer any additional questions you might have on this topic.

On the topic, can you answer stuff about animation locking? You know, back when you could infinitely spin around as a guardian with a sword, and things to that effect. As far as I know it was harmless – you couldn’t move and it doesn’t deal damage. It was just hilarious to look at. I think that’s another case of “Anet hates fun” that bothers players. Another might be blocking off uninstanced Salma, which really did nothing but hurt RPers. Could you shed some light on what harmful things these presented, and why they were therefore changed?

I think humans can stand to take a backseat in the consideration department for a while. There’s four other races which are not catered to nearly as lovingly as humans.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Here is the next evolution of the original Vertical Progression proposal based on a summary of our discussions:

Regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method.

A review of current RNG metrics.

The ability to change gear stats (Note there is still a lot of discussion about whether people want this or not)

The ability to build up to Ascended Gear through drops rather than just relying on RNG.

Ascended Gear mats dropping more equally across the game, for example WvW.

No more new Gear tiers that make the existing tiers obsolete.

Additional ways to earn Ascended Gear at accelerated for Alts.

Note this is the formulation of a proposal for discussion. Once the proposal is finalized it will be discussed internally. However there will be no promise of actions or schedule.

Chris

Bump. We are close to being able to move onto the ‘focused’ Horizontal Progression part of this conversation.

Does anyone have anymore comments on the proposal above based on our discussions?

Chris

Please take another look at time gates. I know Izzy touched on the subject with pros and cons, but I’m still just not buying it. I think the idea that casual players somehow feel more rewarded or acknowledged by being equalized with more dedicated players is completely nonsensical.

To be perfectly honest, I see only two real benefits to timegating, neither of which are justifiable. They prevent market flooding, somewhat, and they force log-ins. While preventing market flooding does have some merit, forcing log-ins is a completely arbitrary and artificial way to force gameplay that reeks of bad design. Time gates for the purpose of forcing log-ins say, to me, that there’s some design paradigm of Anet or NCsoft’s doing to get people to log on no matter what for business purposes, like how temporary living story content forces players to get on and (hopefully) spend gem store money while they’re there.

The whole idea of getting players to play concurrently is something that should be looked at from a player-interest perspective. The way to get people to log in and play your game is not to artificially limit their abilities so that they absolutely have to log in, it’s to create exciting, engaging content that makes people come home and say “I want to play Guild Wars 2 because it’s fun.” Things like time gates take your absolute most important player-base (long-term, dedicated fans) and makes them feel alienated because this isn’t what they want. Time gates themselves make players feel like their decisions and fun are being limited, and saying things like “we wants to equalize our players” makes hardcore players feel like Anet doesn’t care about them.

Guild Wars 1 got along just fine without time gates. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t need them either. If time gates exist for some other, unmentioned reason, like extending the life of the game by making it take longer to craft armor, then that’s a completely different issue that needs to be addressed by adding more permanent, engaging content, and not by artificially forcing people to play. The necessary time gates are already there; it takes time, money, and dedication to make ascended armor. The limiting factor should never be an artificial barrier. If it’s true that you believe that everyone should play on the same field (like how all of GW1’s armor had the same stats regardless of cost) then a casual player acquiring max gear and a dedicated playing acquiring max gear should only be differentiated by cosmetics. Time gating to equalize players only suggests that you’ve created an actual disparity between maximum stat values, because if that weren’t the case, then casual players could get their maximum armor cheap and easy, while the “time gate” of investing money to buy more expensive, cosmetic gear, would be limiting enough.