Guild Wars 2

Below is a list with the level range, world region, and zone name. One zone usually won’t get you through the entire level range, so you will need to travel and do a little exploring. Every starter zone is connected to a racial city, and every racial city has an Asura gate that connects it to the world hub city Lions Arch. Travel back to your starter area, go to your race’s home city, take the Asura gate to Lion’s arch, use the Asura gates in Lions Arch to travel to one of the other racial cities, and then travel to a new and level appropriate zone. Once you’ve traveled to the other cities and explored their zones, you can travel directly to anywhere you have already been via waypoints.

Lions Arch (World Hub)
—> Black Citadel, Ascalon (Charr)
—> Divinity’s Reach, Kryta (Human)
—> Hoelbrak, Shiverpeak Mountains (Norn)
—> Rata Sum, Maguuma Jungle (Asura)
—> The Grove, Maguuma Jungle (Sylvari)

01-15 Ascalon – Plains of Ashford
01-15 Maguuma Jungle – Caledon Forest
01-15 Maguuma Jungle – Metrica Province
01-15 Shiverpeak Mountains – Wayfarer Foothills
01-15 Kryta – Queensdale
15-25 Ascalon – Diessa Plateau
15-25 Kryta – Kessex Hills
15-25 Maguuma Jungle – Brisban Wildlands
15-25 Shiverpeaks Mountains – Snowden Drifts
25-35 Kryta – Gendarran Fields
25-40 Shiverpeak Mountains – Lornar’s Pass
30-40 Ascalon – Fields of Ruin
35-45 Kryta – Harathi Hinterlands
40-50 Ascalon – Blazeridge Steppes
40-50 Shiverpeak Mountains – Dredgehaunt Cliffs
kitten Kryta – Bloodtide Coast
50-60 Ascalon – Iron Marches
50-60 Shiverpeak Mountains – Timberline Falls
55-65 Maguuma Jungle – Sparkfly Fen
60-70 Ascalon – Fireheart Rise
60-70 Maguuma Jungle – Mount Maelstrom
70-75 Ruins of Orr – Straits of Devastation
70-80 Shiverpeak Mountains – Frostgorge Sound
75-80 Ruins of Orr – Malchor’s Leap
80-80 Ruins of Orr – Cursed Shore
80-80 Sea of Sorrows – Southsun Cove

No! (needed 15 characters).

Ashen.2907:

DavidH.7380:

what I don’t understand is why some people think their preferences justify negating two years of history and invalidating the work of vast numbers of other players, despite A’net apparently disagreeing, simply because a different A’net game worked like that.

What justifies my preference, to me at least, is that marketing the game in that manner is part of how Anet convinced me to buy. BiS by max level was a huge selling point for me. The game at launch may not have quite reached that goal, but getting exotics was very quick.

I honestly do sympathize with that, and it sucks that the game was changed in a way that was detrimental to your play style, but it’s been two years. I’d hate to see that dragging down your enjoyment of the game forever. I know it isn’t what you wanted, but at least A’net recommitted recently to not introducing new gear tiers past ascended and the accessories are pretty easy to get.

I think I got my copy at WalMart, so…

I find it odd that when solo dungeons are mentioned people invariably respond that soloing dungeons is already possible if you are good enough.

If players are good enough to solo a dungeon as is, then I don’t see the problem either solo or in a group. For me, the whole point of a solo dungeon would be the ability to learn, or perhaps just accept being limited to my own personal skill cap, without having to drag down or be carried by 4 other players who know what they are doing and/or have more skill.

Arnox.5128:

Or more specifically, how utterly clunky and unfriendly to new players they are. Especially if you’re playing an Elementalist where you have 4 sets of powers you can use at any one time. I’m sorry but it seems every time I think about GW2 and how I want to come back to it, I keep thinking back to the terrible combat controls. How I have to keep track of a crazy amount of keys all while CONSTANTLY moving and dodging, UT style.

I mean, are any of your guys noticing this too? I feel like everyone’s just having a party and I’m one of the few who can’t enjoy anything there because I keep bumping and crashing into things due to incredibly terrible and cramped room layout. This is really getting quite silly.

Its not just you, though I don’t know if it is “clunky and unfriendly” as much as it is much more active and fast paced and complex than traditional MMOs and my taste.

I’m supposed to juggle 10 different skills, keep track of boss attack animations, and not stand in the red circles? I can do that. Move around and dodge at the same time…. I can manage. Add in different attunements or stances, combo fields, attack effects that hide the fight in the center of a fireworks show, and a second weapon set with 5 more skills, etc…. Sorry, but I, personally, just can’t keep track of it all, especially since I only play an average of 30 minutes a day.

Still, for a lot of other people the active combat is what they find most fun.

Ashen.2907:

DavidH.7380:

Milennin.4825:

Tom Gore.4035:

Legendaries have the same stats as ascended, so you’re saying ascende is “regular” gear?

Yes, it is. It is just way too grindy to obtain.

Draknar.5748:

…Now one month into game release, people had their exotic armor and began to complain about having nothing to work towards….

…PS LOL at 5 Days being far too long for you to have to put up with in order to get the absolute best weapons in the game. Big L O freaking L….

Sorry I’m not here to work. Working is what I do to earn money in the real world, playing games for fun is something I do in my free time. I’d like to consider Guild Wars 2 as spending my free time, not as a second job. Having to grind weeks to get materials and money to outfit one of my eight characters with gear is like work. It’s not fun.

But “working towards X” is the game (where X is whatever appeals to you). Getting to max level, map completion, seeing all the story/lore buried in the game, getting BiS gear, becoming proficient at PvP, getting a higher PvP rank, getting crafting to 500, getting all classes to 80, getting all crafting to 500, collecting all minis, getting a full set of rare skins, whatever.

It would be no fun at all if we bought the game, created our first character, and found it was created already at level 80, fully geared with BiS, with all cosmetics and minis already collected and ready to go. The point is the journey, not just the destination. And getting a BiS weapon in under 5 days isn’t much of a journey.

For some the journey really kicks in after we have BiS. The “X” you refer to, for me, is developing my own mastery of my character at his best while adventuring through the game world.

Without the BiS that I had within weeks of launch the character is not at his best and so the journey cannot truly begin. I do not craft in MMOs and so estimate that it could take decades to finally get back to having BiS gear for just one character.

You have your journey. Others used to have ours. If getting BiS is the journey for you then by all means some lengthy endeavor to attain it seems appropriate, but for others, such as myself, it should be made available as a reward for reaching level 80. You could destroy, not accept, or salvage your level 80 BiS so as to get it as part of a journey while I could take mine at 80 and begin my journey.

I understand your point, and that of the folks for whom BiS basically means having “finished” the game. I also understand trying to split the baby with 2ndBiS being very easy to obtain for the one side and BiS taking a long time for a small increase for the other.

However, this isn’t some theoretical addition to the game. We’ve had ascended gear for two years, we have a lot of players who’ve invested a lot of time and effort to obtain it, and A’net has given no indication that they think this is anything other than working as intended. So, what I don’t understand is why some people think their preferences justify negating two years of history and invalidating the work of vast numbers of other players, despite A’net apparently disagreeing, simply because a different A’net game worked like that.

Milennin.4825:

Tom Gore.4035:

Legendaries have the same stats as ascended, so you’re saying ascende is “regular” gear?

Yes, it is. It is just way too grindy to obtain.

Draknar.5748:

…Now one month into game release, people had their exotic armor and began to complain about having nothing to work towards….

…PS LOL at 5 Days being far too long for you to have to put up with in order to get the absolute best weapons in the game. Big L O freaking L….

Sorry I’m not here to work. Working is what I do to earn money in the real world, playing games for fun is something I do in my free time. I’d like to consider Guild Wars 2 as spending my free time, not as a second job. Having to grind weeks to get materials and money to outfit one of my eight characters with gear is like work. It’s not fun.

But “working towards X” is the game (where X is whatever appeals to you). Getting to max level, map completion, seeing all the story/lore buried in the game, getting BiS gear, becoming proficient at PvP, getting a higher PvP rank, getting crafting to 500, getting all classes to 80, getting all crafting to 500, collecting all minis, getting a full set of rare skins, whatever.

It would be no fun at all if we bought the game, created our first character, and found it was created already at level 80, fully geared with BiS, with all cosmetics and minis already collected and ready to go. The point is the journey, not just the destination. And getting a BiS weapon in under 5 days isn’t much of a journey.

naiasonod.9265:

CMM.6712:

JustTrogdor.7892:

Shriibot.4569:

Also, posting from my phone is a pain in the bum. Lol

I agree especially when I’m driving.

Might help if you set down the can of beer! JUST KIDDING!

I saw this guy texting and driving the other day. It made me so mad I had to roll down my car window, scream ’That’s dangerous you inconsiderate jerk!’ and throw my beer at him.

Gah! It is people like you and your distracting beer throwing antics, lane changing, etc, that keep me from finishing the morning newspaper on my drive to work.

Settle down, would ya? Some of us are trying to read.

Obtena.7952:

I doubt healthcare is driving Anet’s decisions to make the game more or less grindy ><. Just sayin …

I get it’s hyperbole but even the logic that pushing people to spend money by making the game grindy is a fallacy. There are other options to the player if they don’t like the parts of the game that are grindy other than converting gems to gold; most notably, not falling into the trap they need to grind for anything in the first place.

Yes, but you can be absolutely certain that every single decision ultimately leads back to the fundamental root purpose of making profits.

It does them no good to sell additional content if they spend all that money on the content development. It does little good to cash shop everything or sell really crappy expansions if the players mostly quit and leave out of disgust. Business is a giant balancing game between how much money you spend on providing your product/service, how much money you take in from your customers, and how your customers feel about continuing to give you money vs finding other alternatives.

So, when you say, “even the logic that pushing people to spend money by making the game grindy is a fallacy,” I would tend to agree. Overtly pushing makes the customers feel bad about the transaction. But I’m certain they are completely aware of the relative attractiveness of buying gems/gold created by the real $$ to hours of grind ratio they created.

Gene Archer.8560:

Ayrilana.1396:

Players should not get the top level gear for just showing up.

Yes they should. BiS gear is supposed to readily available and easily obtained in this game. This isn’t a gear progression game. Ascended should be far easier to obtain.

You want BiS to be hard to get? Then take your gear progression kitten and go back to Wildstar and WoW. I am sick and tired of you lot ruining this game.

I wonder why it always seems to be the people who claim it isn’t about gear that get the most twisted over gear?

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Bernie.8674:

How are you getting 5g in two hours? I might get that on guild mission nights, by doing dungeons, or by engaging in concerted farming, but I’ve never gotten anywhere near that by playing casually the way you claim. I must be playing wrong. I’m stagnant somewhere between 20 and 25 gold right now.

World Boss Grand Tour. Log on, find which boss is up next, and do the circuit for an hour. Sell the Ecto from salvaging the rares, sell Silk if I really want to make the money, and sell all the blues and greens.

Drop into Silverwastes if it’s before 1am PST and generally will find an active map. Do events, and sell proceeds much like with the Grand Tour. This one moves faster and can be more lucrative.

Harvest any trees I see there, and then take a moment to go to Pagga’s Waypoint and find the motherlode of Cypress to the west – sell Foxfire Clusters.

I think the lowest I hit was 3.8 g on a night where I forged rares instead of salvaging and selling Ecto.

I never even considered trying to sell blues and green since I couldn’t imagine there was much much market for them at or near the level cap. I’ve just been salvaging them. I assume you mean sell them on the TP, but maybe you are selling to vendors? Do you have any idea who is buying them or why they pay for items that aren’t useful and seem to be in endless supply?

phys.7689:

DavidH.7380:

timmyf.1490:

phys.7689:

timmyf.1490:

Yeah, as far as I can tell, this is the Best Possible Solution. The unlocks are only to allow you to put points into the track. You earn points by doing whatever you want.

I have a hard time calling it “grindy” when you can earn points through whatever you like.

This also gives you a reason to keep earning experience at 80 as skill points are so plentiful they’re nearly useless.

Well done, ArenaNet. You did considerably better than I expected.

generally the flaw with do whatever you like systems, is when some methods give more progress than other by a large margin, then you get people doing 1 thing again and again. Its even worse if that one things is fairly boring to begin with

so they will have to carefully balance gains, try to avoid extremely long amount of repetitions, and try to weigh the gains toward things that create a pleasurable gaming experience

This is actually a really subtle, interesting point. Which of these count as grindy?

1) You must perform Activity A 1000 times.
2) You must perform Activity A 1000 times, Activity B 500 times, Activity C 100 times, or some mix of the above where each activity gives its corresponding progress.
3) You must perform an Activity, A B or C, a total of 1000 times across all three.

I think we’d all agree #1 feels grindy. I’d argue that #2 or #3 are not grindy. It sounds like you are concerned about #2 where a certain activity is significantly more efficient, thus you don’t actually have a choice.

But I think it also somewhat depends on how long these take. If A B and C require equal time, skill, and effort, you only really have the illusion of choice. If Activity B takes roughly twice as long as Activity A, though, then it’s not grindy?

The question we must all ask ourselves is: how equal in time/effort must the alternatives be to not count as grindy? (And that answer will be unique to everybody, an opinion, and thus none of us are “right” or “wrong.”)

I think you are following along the same tracks as the Anet definition of grind, but I don’t think it serves well as a guide for what “feels grindy”. The players who complain about all of the above are coming from something more like along the lines of this:

It becomes grindy when the player feels:
1) It is not fun or inherently rewarding to do X,
2) but they have to do a lot of X to get Y,
3) and they want Y.

In that case, the player is stuck between doing a lot of not fun or rewarding gameplay to get what they want or going without. Ideally everything should be so inherently fun and rewarding that it is worth doing for its own sake regardless of repetition or item rewards. Realistically, most of us are okay with a certain level of not fun play as long as we don’t have to do it for too long and the reward is worth it.

When too many Ys are locked behind too much X that isn’t inherently fun, you get complaints that the game is too grindy. But that is really hard to measure or define… how “fun” is X? How much is too much X? How badly do you want or need Y? Is Y just rewarding enough to get people to want it or is it so rewarding that people feel it makes all the X they suffered worthwhile?

The entire concept is so subjective that it not only varies greatly between players but it also varies greatly for individual players as circumstances and stages in their lives change.

use small numbers and over arching achievements.
in terms of reducing the feeling of grind, it feels less grindy to need to beat a game that takes you 40 hours to beat, than to beat a 1 hour game 40 times for the same reward(in general)

Yeah, I think those are generally positive strategies as well since, generally speaking:

- We perceive things as less and less fun the more we repeat them after we’ve mastered them (with interesting exceptions that might be the basis for great research for future MMO design).

- We feel less discouraged when there are rewarding milestones along the way and not just one long journey to a single reward.

On the latter, I wonder if they overlooked that useless intermediate stages don’t feel particularly rewarding. A raw ore, to a refined bar, to a hilt, to a charged hilt, to a blah, blah, blah, to a super awesome sword is not as rewarding as getting a really basic sword, then a minor sword, then an okay sword, then a good sword, then a better sword, then a great sword, and finally a super awesome sword! The inherent usefulness of the intermediate stages matters.

timmyf.1490:

I agree, David. At the same time, there are enough sources of Experience in this game that no player should feel like they can’t earn enough to unlock Mastery points.

There will be ideal ways for sure (and my guess is dungeons will see a nice boost in popularity), but since EVERYTHING in the game gives XP, I think it’ll make things seem like less of a grind and more of a “I’ll get points as I play and don’t need to worry much about it.”

You may well be right. Extremely preliminarily, it seems like they are trying to split the baby between “play how you want” and “do these challenges and spread your play around the new zones”.

timmyf.1490:

phys.7689:

timmyf.1490:

Yeah, as far as I can tell, this is the Best Possible Solution. The unlocks are only to allow you to put points into the track. You earn points by doing whatever you want.

I have a hard time calling it “grindy” when you can earn points through whatever you like.

This also gives you a reason to keep earning experience at 80 as skill points are so plentiful they’re nearly useless.

Well done, ArenaNet. You did considerably better than I expected.

generally the flaw with do whatever you like systems, is when some methods give more progress than other by a large margin, then you get people doing 1 thing again and again. Its even worse if that one things is fairly boring to begin with

so they will have to carefully balance gains, try to avoid extremely long amount of repetitions, and try to weigh the gains toward things that create a pleasurable gaming experience

This is actually a really subtle, interesting point. Which of these count as grindy?

1) You must perform Activity A 1000 times.
2) You must perform Activity A 1000 times, Activity B 500 times, Activity C 100 times, or some mix of the above where each activity gives its corresponding progress.
3) You must perform an Activity, A B or C, a total of 1000 times across all three.

I think we’d all agree #1 feels grindy. I’d argue that #2 or #3 are not grindy. It sounds like you are concerned about #2 where a certain activity is significantly more efficient, thus you don’t actually have a choice.

But I think it also somewhat depends on how long these take. If A B and C require equal time, skill, and effort, you only really have the illusion of choice. If Activity B takes roughly twice as long as Activity A, though, then it’s not grindy?

The question we must all ask ourselves is: how equal in time/effort must the alternatives be to not count as grindy? (And that answer will be unique to everybody, an opinion, and thus none of us are “right” or “wrong.”)

I think you are following along the same tracks as the Anet definition of grind, but I don’t think it serves well as a guide for what “feels grindy”. The players who complain about all of the above are coming from something more like along the lines of this:

It becomes grindy when the player feels:
1) It is not fun or inherently rewarding to do X,
2) but they have to do a lot of X to get Y,
3) and they want Y.
and maybe also 4) but they don’t think it is worth that much X.

In that case, the player is stuck between doing a lot of not fun or rewarding gameplay to get what they want or going without. Ideally everything should be so inherently fun and rewarding that it is worth doing for its own sake regardless of repetition or item rewards. Realistically, most of us are okay with a certain level of not fun play as long as we don’t have to do it for too long and the reward is worth it.

When too many Ys are locked behind too much X that isn’t inherently fun, you get complaints that the game is too grindy. But that is really hard to measure or define… how “fun” is X? How much is too much X? How badly do you want or need Y? Is Y just rewarding enough to get people to want it or is it so rewarding that people feel it makes all the X they suffered worthwhile?

The entire concept is so subjective that it not only varies greatly between players but it also varies greatly for individual players as circumstances and stages in their lives change.

Vayne.8563:

DavidH.7380:

Can’t we fairly easily have enough non-grindy, grindy, and super-grindy stuff to keep everyone engaged and rewarded and entertained whether they play 30 minutes or 13 hours a day? People sometimes talk as if we have to choose between high-grind and low-grind rewards so we need to argue about which are better. How hard can it be to shrink existing game models to make more minis (or make rare minis that are slightly larger), add super rare vanity dye colors, make up new titles, add a glow to an extra rare version of an existing item, etc???

The real trick is balancing it so the more grindy stuff feels worth doing and sufficiently rewarding without making the non-grindy stuff feel 2nd rate.

I don’t think this is as easy as you think.

Let’s say some stuff is massively easy to get. Then it’s attained very fast. There are a couple of examples like this in the game. The faster something can be attained, the more of that stuff you need in the game. So the slowest, hardest to get stuff there can be less of, because it takes so long to get it. That means the stuff you need to have the most of us the easy to get stuff, because everyone gets that stuff super fast.

It would mean more content, much more content, was needed. By making everything take some time to get, you slow down the rate at which you need to provide content.

The problem is, content takes time to make and gets consumed much faster than it’s made. That’s why these slow down mechanisms exist in the first place.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed the point, but why would we need more content as opposed to just more “stuff” (not that new content isn’t also needed in general)? I play a half hour a day on average. Just finishing every jumping puzzle in the game once is a fairly significant task for me, but it would be a single day of playing for someone more skilled and with more time. Completing every puzzle 25 times might be a worthy task for them, but I’m not going to even try. One reward means choosing between rewarding me or rewarding them, and between having not enough grind and having too much grind. But if there is a “Puzzle Jumper” title for doing them all once, “Veteran Puzzle Jumper” for doing them all 10 times, “Master Puzzle Jumper” for 25 times, and “Puzzle Jumper God” for doing them all 50 times, then everyone has a target to work toward and periodic rewards that reflect their own level of commitment and investment without adding any new content but just more stuff.

It isn’t a new or particularly insightful thought, but arguments seem to rage back and forth between the “its too much grind for me to get anything” and the “you have to have lots of grind to keep people from running out of things to do” camps. It seems like both should have enough stuff targeted to their level. As always, not everyone would be happy, most likely the “I only play 30 minutes a day but want to get everything anyway” and “I play 12 hours a day but don’t want to repeat content/grind” folks, for whom I don’t have much of an answer because I don’t think their complaints can be fixed by any practical solutions I’ve ever heard.

Despite not being entitled to it, it isn’t necessarily a bad idea. I suspect people may feel less happy paying $29 for the expansion + $10 for a character slot than they would paying $34 for an expansion that includes a character slot. Of course, not everyone that buys the expansion would also purchase an extra slot separately, so Anet would probably come out ahead on the deal. Besides, if the “free” slot entices more people to create new characters then they also get a chance to sell extra bag slot upgrades and other unlocks or goodies.

Can’t we fairly easily have enough non-grindy, grindy, and super-grindy stuff to keep everyone engaged and rewarded and entertained whether they play 30 minutes or 13 hours a day? People sometimes talk as if we have to choose between high-grind and low-grind rewards so we need to argue about which are better. How hard can it be to shrink existing game models to make more minis (or make rare minis that are slightly larger), add super rare vanity dye colors, make up new titles, add a glow to an extra rare version of an existing item, etc???

The real trick is balancing it so the more grindy stuff feels worth doing and sufficiently rewarding without making the non-grindy stuff feel 2nd rate.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Dante.1763:

Vayne.8563:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

If you feel you are being forced to grind in this game.. You are either looking for grind, or just outright doing it wrong. With so much to do, I see this argument as insane.

I grind when I want. I “non-grind” when I want.

Like life, the right mantra may be:

“Play smarter, not harder.”

6300 hours
7 world completions
13 legendaries
3 ascended armor sers
one 30g random drop precursor (rage)

And I keep having fun every day by mixing it up.

You have 13 legendaries? GAH! Gratz. lol I have five, and I’m debating a sixth.

I only have one T.T How do you both have so many!! Like really, please tell me your guyses secrets, cause as it is, im looking at never getting another till the expansion because of how much gold ineed for the pres.

See, I don’t have any. But I only have 1530 hours.

Assuming you’ve been playing since launch, that is an average of roughly 2 hours a day, every day.

I feel like such a failure…. I’ve only played roughly 30 mins a day for two years. What have I been wasting the rest of my life on???

zenleto.6179:

DavidH.7380:

Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think Anet even gives a complete seal of approval to their own code. If you find something game that doesn’t work as expected, and you get an advantage from it, and they think you should have known they didn’t intend for it to work that way, can’t you still be banned for using their own unmodified game in a way they didn’t intend?

Why single out Anet for this? Every mmo I’ve ever played has had their developers do this.

I didn’t mean to single them out, it just struck me as interesting that people are complaining about being redirected to the ToS and somewhat vague guidelines for approval for uses of 3rd party mods when I realized the exact same situation most likely applies to their own official game client.

I wonder just how hard this could really be. The database has the minimum selling price they are using for new sales and a function already in place to allow a player to cancel an outstanding buy order. Seems like a cleanup function could fairly easily query the database for buy orders where the purchase price is less than the minimum selling price and then loop through the results invoking the cancellation function.

Unless I’m mistaken, I don’t think Anet even gives a complete seal of approval to their own code. If you find something game that doesn’t work as expected, and you get an advantage from it, and they think you should have known they didn’t intend for it to work that way, can’t you still be banned for using their own unmodified game in a way they didn’t intend?

Bernie.8674:

DavidH.7380:

Some of this also comes from your perspective, and a lot of that comes from your prior experiences (or lack thereof) you use as mental references. My introduction to MMOs was the original Everquest. Much of the basic low level gameplay would be considered shockingly harsh today. You didn’t regenerate health or mana out of combat, so you’d have to sit and eat/drink to regen health/magic between mobs. Can you imagine anyone making this forum post today?:

There’s a reason no MMO does all that stuff that you mentioned anymore: it’s simply not fun for most people. Just like grinding isn’t fun for most people. I know that some players love it and dismiss anyone who says otherwise as “lazy” or “entitled” (not saying that you’re one of those players, but the assertion is frequently made). In my opinion those players have lost perspective of a MMO’s intent. A MMO is not a source of accomplishment; it’s a source of entertainment. Accomplishments happen in the real world, not in an online one. After I’ve spent my day accomplishing things I like to come home and escape to an online world for a couple of hours. I don’t want to spend those hours engaging in simulated commutes or artificial drudgery. I’ve gotten plenty of that already in real life. Demanding that entertainment be entertaining isn’t “lazy” or “entitled.”

Agreed, and that is why I am as appreciative as I am of the things GW2 does well, and as forgiving as I am of what isn’t so good. From my perspective, it is better, even though it isn’t perfect, and I suspect some of us geezers who seem overly apologetic for the shortcomings are largely coming from “the glass is half full” and “you can’t expect the company to stake AAA MMO amounts of money on idealized revolutionary change instead of the steady evolutionary changes we have been seeing over time.”

naiasonod.9265:

Lheimroo.2947:

And he’s also claimed to have kitted out several characters in full ascended. Which was not introduced entirely 2 years ago, you remember, so he hasn’t had 2 years to do that.

I’m not drawing this conclusion from one datum. Vayne plays a lot.

I reserve the right to filter anything he says about the lack of grind in this game and the accessibility of ascended through that conclusion.

I haven’t a clue how much he actually plays, myself. You might be right. Irrespective to that derailing aside though, there’s an awful lot of hair-splitting I’ve seen going on about what’s ‘grind’ and what’s ‘farming’ and what’s ‘optional’ and what isn’t and…honestly…I think this game’s grindy as kittens if someone wants lots of good things and not to look like a scrub.

I don’t personally disagree with Vayne’s assessments on various things, though neither do I give a personal hoot that Anet’s definition of ‘grind’ is dang near a No True Scotsman fallacy in my opinion.

There are carrots and there are means to chase them. The ‘need’ for vanity gear here will never be relevant to whether one can complete the next dungeon, but its not so easy to quantify effective needs in a formative culture either.

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

Devata.6589:

Yeah because I was clearly the only person in this thread mentioning it. And of course a game about cosmetics clearly does not attract people who not care about hunting down cosmetics. But there is some truth in here, it’s likely that many (there is that word again) of those people have left because there preferred end-game was not here so at this moment there are less of them here (in the game). But what if they come back for HoT. You want to scare them away again.
…
And then of course Anet, they are monetizing something clearly nobody wants. And those all those people grinding gold to get them clearly would not prefer a less boring more interesting way to get it.

Really, start using some common sense.
…

Secondly, almost all cash-shop items do not drop in the world! So even your factual but realistically non-existing option of working directly towards them does not exist for those items. And that happen to be the most interesting from a pure cosmetic perspective.
…
“You told us that that staying in a area , and w8 for an item to drop over and over again for you into not grind , but a friendly farm .” The boring farm? I think I said I could be oke with a few of those when the rest was interesting. Not that that what the way I would want to see it.

“Try to take the chill pill and let us here the other ppl opinions too (even Vayne agrees with the Grind) . So chilll a bit …. for the good , of us both …. ”
I was already planning on not being to active here as I pretty much said what had to been said. But if somebody gives a comment to me (like you do now) I comment back.

Besides, it’s a subject I find interesting so I post here a lot. Having a conversation. Better then post and run imo.

I won’t try to speak for others, but for me the problems is that I see all points of view represented in the player base.

Using the cash shop minis as an example, it bothers you that they can’t be obtained in game. But there is also a vocal player base that doesn’t care how many minis are added to the cash shop as long as they aren’t obtainable in game. That group doesn’t care as long as there isn’t any confusion between an earned mini and a purchased mini.

For you, it is discouraging that rare world drops can’t be directly pursued and can only be obtained by random luck. For some others, knowing an item is a low rate drop from a specific subset of mobs makes them feel pressured to farm for it and making it worldwide frees them from that pressure and allows them to not get stuck farming. For others, a long grind/farm of very specific mobs for a very rare drop makes it the only worthwhile pursuit in the game since it is all about the rarity of no one else having it that makes it worthwhile.

Ascended gear, real money gold purchases, everything being on the TP, open world bosses, challenging content… all of it is good for some people and bad for others. This is where I personally find it difficult to talk about most or many players, especially when it comes to potential players that might be attracted by a change.

Tradeoffs is the language I find more interesting on these topics. How do we give a little to this group and still throw a bone to that group. How do we make give as many player types as possible the most of what they find rewarding while avoiding the most of what they find discouraging.

That is what I found most appealing about your idea of item versions. A basic with a high drop rate, a mild vanity rarer version, and a high vanity very rare version considers a lot of player types. Low skill/time/dedication players have an obtainable, functional, but low vanity version to pursue. More dedicated players can time sink more to chase for some vanity/cosmetics. And the elite players have a major grind / time sink / elite version to keep them busy or give them that unique peakitten feel they find rewarding.

Any change or proposal will alienate some, but like you I think the ideas are worth discussing as long as we don’t end up arguing one group against another or attacking/defending one group of players.

Vayne.8563:

Alvagon.8710:

Vayne.8563:

I don’t get some of you at all. I play this game with no ascended gear and, I don’t know about you, but I do dungeons, WvW, run around Orr. There’s NOTHING gated in this game that makes you grind if you don’t want to. Don’t have a ring or a backpack? So? This is all in your mind. You don’t need this stuff to play the game. … Grind is a state of mind. … You CAN grind, if you want. Or you can just play the game.
…
I just don’t get it. You know, I’ve played games with grind. And what made those games grind was the gating of content. If you wanted to do dungeons in Rift, you HAD TO have a minimum stat. You couldn’t even queue for the dungeon if you didn’t exceed that stat. So to get into the dungeon and experience that content, you had to grind. You had to get the required gear. That situation simply doesn’t exist in Guild Wars 2.

This game isn’t going in the wrong direction. People simply have forgotten what actual grind is.

Its smth that i found in your oldest posts and lol i must admit “Grind is a state of mind.” i can agree too that just plz plz plz tell us what you’re taking maybe a prescription ? So many more ppl can enjoy Gw2 the way you doo…

And remember “This is all in your mind.”

That’s the funny bit. Lots of people, including people in this very thread, DO enjoy Guild Wars 2 the way I do. Isn’t that odd?

I’m patient. I don’t need everything today. Maybe because I’m not a kid anymore. I don’t need to farm for a legendary. I play the game and eventually, I’ll get something I need for it and squirrel it away. Why do I need a legendary today? How does that change the game for me?

I have five legendaries now. But I did very little grinding, in my opinion. I waited till I got stuff and sold stuff I got and bought stuff off the trading post that I needed. I mean I did have to run 9 dungeons, you could call that grind, but I didn’t run them in a row. It took me months because I waited till someone in the guild wanted to run it.

That’s what I mean by a state of mind.

Some of this also comes from your perspective, and a lot of that comes from your prior experiences (or lack thereof) you use as mental references. My introduction to MMOs was the original Everquest. Much of the basic low level gameplay would be considered shockingly harsh today. You didn’t regenerate health or mana out of combat, so you’d have to sit and eat/drink to regen health/magic between mobs. Can you imagine anyone making this forum post today?:

“Mana regeneration should not be an issue with out of combat regen. You just need to “meditate”, aka sit down. So when you get low on mana, get out of combat and then sit. You should regen pretty darn quickly.

I have an 85 wizard. When he runs out of mana, I usually use the bathroom and grab a drink or something. When I come back a couple minutes later, he is 100% again. You just can’t run around killing non-stop without sitting to meditate back up. Standing regeneration is basically nothing."

Low on health after a fight? No problem, just sit still for a few minutes and you’re good to go! Man we put up with a lot back then!!!

When you died you could resurrect…. but you would lose 10% of a level of XP and your stuff would stay on your dead body. So you’d have to fight your way back to where you died and loot your corpse if you wanted to get your stuff back. They eventually changed this to be less harsh, so then you only lost 5% of a level and they allowed another player to drag your corpse to a safer location for you or your guild could help you summon your corpse back to your guild hall.

If you were in danger of dying in a fight you could run away… to the next zone. Mobs would follow you until they were killed or you left the zone and then they would run back to the location where they started chasing you. If they came across any random unsuspecting players along the way back they would aggro to them and try to kill them.

I started playing EQ knowing I would almost certainly never even make it to max level, and despite playing hundreds of hours I never did with even one character. I played WoW to the point of having several 80s, but I could never raid regularly enough to get past the first tiers in any expansion. I may or may not ever get full ascended gear or a legendary here , but I can actually see and play first hand all the content in an MMO for the first time ever.

So I play and enjoy the fun where I find it, try to avoid getting too fixated on virtual carrots that I allow myself to get drug into making the game not fun, and try to remember that even if we are a long way from the ideal theoretical MMO, we’ve come a long way from where we were and and will probably continue to have a long string of improvements in the genre to look forward to in the future.

KarlaGrey.5903:

If something is not needed, if might as well not be there to start with. Ascended doesn’t add anything to the game, and it would be a win-win situation if exotics would be bumped up to ascended level in terms of stats.
If anyone wants to complain about this, remember, the gear wasn’t needed to start with – outside fractals, that is (the agony resistance should stay intact).

You’ve brought this up a few times, but I don’t understand the thinking behind it.

They aren’t needed to complete content (other than the same fractals at higher levels), but they are needed to give stat oriented players who aren’t interested in cosmetics something relatively meaningless to sink large amounts of time into obtaining.

As I understand it, if you bumped exotics up to ascended stats it wouldn’t really do much to improve the experience of players in exotics, but it would deeply upset a lot of players who invested a lot of time and effort into obtaining a very small stat increase and then had even that very small benefit taken back.

maddoctor.2738:

Then we have a clear problem with what Support means. To you Support is only Healing, to me it’s anything that boosts characters beyond raw DPS. You only stayed on the 2 first points I posted ignoring the rest, I guess blinds, reflects, weakness are also Damage by your standards because you are not watching red bars moving to the right. The goal is to defeat your enemies, while providing enough survivability to your group to survive (that’s Support). A group without Support is weak, even if they are full DPS, the possibility of wipe skyrockets, their DPS won’t be optimal without buffs either, so in this game Support is the dominant role and not DPS.
….
And once again, what’s the point of playing the red bar game?

I think for some, the goal is for other players in the party to defeat enemies while they provide enough support to the group to survive (that’s Support).

In another game I played support roles for most group encounters, and I know killing was almost never a consideration. My entire focus was almost always on keeping my party alive while they killed stuff. When I wasn’t playing a healer, I’d spend the fight doing things like keeping a mini-boss permanently locked down and out of the fight until the rest of the group was ready to kill it, stripping debuffs from group members, debuffing bosses, etc., but directly damaging anything was about the last priority before just standing around watching.

Support certainly exists, but it doesn’t seem to be the singular or exclusive role that some people miss.

Nash.2681:

Though I’d rather have the price doubled or tripled and in return having the upgrade being account wide, that would be real convenient.

+1 for at least the option. I’d pay more for an account wide unlock, or less for a per character unlock, but the current price seems really steep if you switch frequently between multiple characters!

nGumball.1283:

tboneking.2531:

I honestly dont see why everyone thinks that adding a little bit of a need for build diversity would be a bad thing. Whats actually wrong with needing one out of five people to fill a support role? We’re not creating these posts because we’re “bad at the game” or “need to learn my class”. I have four level 80s decked out in Zerker gear, and its freaking boring. Having the same exact role, and only one required build for each class in PvE content? This is seriously what you people prefer over the trinity? If the majority of opponents of build diversity being more of a required aspect of the game can’t come up with better arguments than “learn your class” or “play a different game” than I would say that there are very few solid arguments to be made.

Having zerker stats doesn’t mean you are going to be DPS focused. That’s why people need guardians in their groups for the defensive support. That’s why you need ele for the highest dps and Warriors for their offensive support. Other classes fit in the meta too, however, some are better than others in Pve and the same goes for Pvp.
….
There is nothing called ‘’GW2 is only about DPS’’. Every class in GW2 is a DPS, a healer and a support at the same time. Some are better than others at one of these specs in addition to other unique mechanics that may make one of the classes more rewarding than other.

But it does seem to me that there is something fundamentally similar about all the professions that makes them feel more or less the same to many people, and I wonder if that is more the “active playstyle” than the lack of the trinity itself.

It doesn’t seem like there is any practical way to get out of the playstyle of attacking, and dodging, and supporting. You can’t stand safely out of the fight and ranged DPS or spam heal. You can’t stand toe-to-toe with a boss and face tank him while mocking what a weak little kitten he is. I don’t think there is any way to say, “you go ahead and attack that boss and dodge and stuff… I’m just gonna stand here in the back and buff/heal/control/ranged DPS from safety” or “y’all better dodge, but I don’t have to ‘cause I’m a TANK baby!”

I have no idea how accurate that is, but I sometimes wonder if that is a big chunk of the motivation for people who want more dedicated support or trinity in the game.

If you need a tank and a healer to complete content then the ability to swap specs doesn’t give you much real choice. I played a Healer/DPS paladin and my best friend played a Tank/DPS paladin and our only real choice was to play as a healer / tank or wait around with everyone else hoping a healer and tank would show up.

If you don’t need a tank or a healer to complete the content, then there isn’t any compelling reason to give up the DPS and you have the current GW2 situation with all DPS for all classes.

I’ve thought about it too, but I suspect then GW2 just becomes another generic cookie-cutter MMO and LFG fills with “3 DPS need Healer and Tank” groups.

Thunderbird.8036:

As for your comment on a gold sink. That is a rich persons mentality. Must have a way of taking money off others. When you are broke you do not need a place to throw more money. You need a way of obtaining what you need at a price you can afford given that money (as you are levelling toons; never mind whatever it may be like for lvl 80, toons now bored with nothing left to strive for) does not exactly fall out of trees or the pockets of many of the mobs you kill. Maybe you need something like a 60% income tax for high money earners like Governments have; verses a much lesser tax for low income earners.

The loss of major money sinks would hurt low income players more than it would higher income players. Each time people who with gold make expensive trades, large chunks of that money are removed from the game, leaving the rich a a bit less rich than before, and that helps hold down prices for the rest of us.

You are only looking at your own personal income rather than the economy as a whole. Without the tax, you would have 15% more income from sales, but so would everyone else, and the supply of items would not be increased. The price of everything would have to increase to compensate. So your 100% of sale income won’t buy you anything more than your 85% of sale income does now.

As other players earned gold and sellable items faster than you did, the rich would get richer faster than you and you would just see things become more and more unaffordable as time goes on.

Fortunately, the game economy people at Anet understand game economies better than you.

pdavis.8031:

Ok having read (most of) the thread, I feel it’s time for me to add my thoughts.
…
I for one, can’t think of a functional reason why P2P trading would work better. It seems to me to be more of a hassle than anything.

The benefit sought after was stated directly in the OP… trading safely while also avoiding the 15% TP tax.

That this would kitten the entire game economy for everyone, including the OP, is apparently not a good enough reason for them to accept the TP tax.

Elegy.2159:

If it makes you feel any better, effect details are almost as confusing as having no clues at all. Big fights can quickly turn into a big blue/purple/firey blur.

QFT. At least half the time I can’t even see the world bosses during events… just a big sparkly fireworks show in the center of the crowd.

For example:

Imagine a drop with a 1:25 probability. After 100 attempts you statistically should have 4 drops, but you might have 8 or you might have 0…. pure RNG is, well, random.

If you drop a token instead and exchange a box containing an item for 25 tokens, then after 100 attempts you will have exactly 4 items. Everything is completely predetermined and there is no possibility to be either lucky or unlucky.

I imagine a system where instead you have a 1:(base – failures) probability to get an item. If the base is 33, then your first attempt has a 1:33 probability to drop the item. The 20th attempt has a 1:13 probability and the 30th attempt has a 1:3 probability. Should you be horribly unlucky with the RNG and you make it all the way to the 33rd attempt without the item dropping, you would have a 1:1 chance which makes it a guaranteed drop. Once the item drops the failures counter resets to 0 and you start over from the base probability for your next attempt. After 100 attempts I don’t know exactly how many drops you would get, but it would be at least 3 and you would never go more than 33 attempts between drops.

I think this kind of system could be a good compromise that preserves the unpredictability and possibility of getting lucky from the RNG while adding the guarantee of rewards that is the appeal of tokenized systems. At first it is mostly random but as you get closer to the limit is becomes increasingly more deterministic.

tigirius.9014:

DavidH.7380:

Touche Amore.2083:

Easy, each time you don’t get a drop fitting into a category rare/precursor/asc drop, etc, your chance of getting said drop is improved each time until you ultimately GET THE DROP. At which point the timer resets.

Rambodacious.7495:

Hope seems to be an inherent quality of us humans. I suppose that’s why gambling is so prevalent – everyone wants to be the lucky one. However, as you pointed out, in a truly random system, like GW2, there are “losers,” through no real fault of their own.

By allowing people to build up some kind of resource to eventually get what they’ve been denied, you allow the luck/hope element to still provide the thrill of the hunt, while diminishing the justifiable frustration that would arise from a player killing Boss XYZ 1000 times and walking away empty-handed.

I like the idea presented in the first quote for the reasons given in the second. I think it retains the thrill of and the hope for getting a lucky streak, while also minimizing the possibility and effects of getting an unlucky streak.

The other options would be my second choices, but I think there is more risk of reducing drops to a pure pre-determined numbers grind along the lines of, “I’ve killed 92 world bosses so far, so 8 more more and I’ll get a ticket for or have enough tokens to buy X.”

I think the numbers being finite are superior.

Let me tell you a story about an expansion called Cata. As a hunter and a shaman getting gear in the lobby instance game was important and there were extremely few choices for extremely few gameplay styles. I was forced to participate in instanced dungeons with complete strangers most of which had the personalities of rocks in a mudslide. After running the same dungeon (the only one with any kind of upgrade to the shoulders I was wearing) 50 times I finally gave up and went online to see if others had the same issue. Sure enough, at the time this particular game had a terrible bug when it came to those exact same shoulders. The suggested solution? Play PVP until you got enough points to buy second rate shoulders ones with a high enough gear score to get me into the only other progression that existed in that game at the time, raiding, so I could see the content locked behind this type of gameplay.

That was two expansions ago. Since I’ve joined back with that game, I’m happy to say everything regarding progression is spread out across crafting, instancing, a new easy type of raiding called LFR, and a currency you collect from doing dailies.

I am absolutely much happier because as a player I have multiple choices in the matter for the same level of gear. I am no longer locked behind a seemingly unreachable goal should I choose to play LFR raiding to see the content, and instancing is no longer a requirement to progress, I’ve yet to step into a dungeon which I totally thought this title would be!

Because of their loot system here and DR dungeons seem to be the only place I can actually receive any drops that are worth anything and even then after fighting a certain set number of mobs DR starts in, I deal with that along with the growing nasty nature of pug groups when I’ve tried to play this title because it’s seemingly stuck in the 2004 mentality of “group only content or else” which isn’t healthy. It wasn’t healthy for Cata it’s not healthy today there needs to be more choices for loot, more for progression, and these goals need to be finite they don’t need to have lottery chances.

I don’t doubt this is true for you, but there are plenty of other people who are equally adamant and vocal about the discouragement they feel with tokenized or deterministic loot systems. For them, the kill X boss Y times for Z reward just makes the entire thing feel dull and grindy, even if it is significantly fewer times than the average random chance alternative. The “will it drop this time or not” gamble is what motivates them to keep coming back and trying again.

A hybrid could potentially have the best of both systems. The RNG could preserve the “will it drop this time” suspense while the history modifier pushes your odds closer and closer to a guaranteed drop every time you try and don’t get it. The potential for getting a lucky drop is preserved along with the suspense of not knowing exactly when it will drop, but the odds of running very far past the expected number of attempts due to bad luck could be very small and much closer to a tokenized / deterministic alternative.

Touche Amore.2083:

Easy, each time you don’t get a drop fitting into a category rare/precursor/asc drop, etc, your chance of getting said drop is improved each time until you ultimately GET THE DROP. At which point the timer resets.

Rambodacious.7495:

Hope seems to be an inherent quality of us humans. I suppose that’s why gambling is so prevalent – everyone wants to be the lucky one. However, as you pointed out, in a truly random system, like GW2, there are “losers,” through no real fault of their own.

By allowing people to build up some kind of resource to eventually get what they’ve been denied, you allow the luck/hope element to still provide the thrill of the hunt, while diminishing the justifiable frustration that would arise from a player killing Boss XYZ 1000 times and walking away empty-handed.

I like the idea presented in the first quote for the reasons given in the second. I think it retains the thrill of and the hope for getting a lucky streak, while also minimizing the possibility and effects of getting an unlucky streak.

The other options would be my second choices, but I think there is more risk of reducing drops to a pure pre-determined numbers grind along the lines of, “I’ve killed 92 world bosses so far, so 8 more more and I’ll get a ticket for or have enough tokens to buy X.”

Devata.6589:

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

It’s basically like the dungeon token systems, and what I have always said about the dungeon token system is that they are great but only as a side thing! Your main goal for items in a dungeon should imho firstly be some special reward you get for completing it (maybe depending on the difficulty levels or on the paths), then there might be some special RNG drops in there you might wanna get, that should be like your second most reason to wanna do the dungeon (based on the way they put the items in there) and then the tokens would be a great thing your would earn along the way. Something you are not even really farming but you earn it while going for those other things. [I think the caparace stuff is an better example of something you earn along the way and the coat as a direct reward for completing something.]
…
“You were saying?” That there is way to much grind (mainly gold grind) in this game.
Have been saying that all the time, you have not been paying attention?

Anyway, this is a good addition to the thread. Maybe Anet also thinks the grind get less if they also make some stuff available in-game, but that is of cource not the case. If I want to collect skins and special items the grind is still just as much there and if I want to hunt down for specific items changes are big those are still behind the gold-grind (or another currency grind).

It sounds like what you are describing is a system where new content (dungeon,puzzle,quest chain, boss, LS chapter, etc.) is released and completing it once or twice more or less automatically gives you the best / majority of the rewards from that content. If you want an item then you complete the associated content or, looked at from the other direction, when you complete fresh content (for you) then you obtain the important associated items and you can move on to something else that is fresh.
~Skip for space

No I said it would you would work with 3 types of reward at the same time. The one for completing it (and you can be creative with this, like complete it at easy mode and get the skin, complete it at hard mode and you get the skin but one part of it is silver, complete it ad epic mode and you get the skin to also glow)

Then there are also some rng drops in there (thats what makes it more interesting to repeat) and at the same time there is a token system that should not be designed like you have to grind it but while playing for the rng drops you get it along the way so even if you are unlucky you are not leaving empty handed.

Having one group of mobs that does drop one mini version of itself with a very rare drop-change at multiple places in the world is by itself indeed also a boring farm but mixed in with other systems it’s not that bad.

And there are so many places you can easily put those sorts of rewards they should be able to keep you going for a long time.

With a better understanding of what it is you are advocating, I’ve come to the conclusion that you have some good suggestions. I think they would be especially good if combined with the “RNG + failure bonus” ideas that are being tossed around in the RNG thread. Combined you’d have a wider variety of items and activities to pursue in the game, multiple vanity versions of identical items for the low, medium, and high time investment players, and the best combined features of both the RNG and token systems. Throw in some gold grindable/sellable rare world rare drops, gem store alternatives, and PvP / WvW tracks, and you probably would be closer to having something for everyone and less perceived grind than the current system.

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

I agree, which is why I was asking the questions for clarification. I don’t think the current system is the best possible balance, so I understand discussing ways to make grinds less tedious, but it seemed like perhaps some people were trying to argue for eliminating or severely reducing all forms of grind.

I think the answers have since established that we all pretty much have a broad consensus that the game does need some grinds and we aren’t really trying to advocate for a “no grind game”, but also that the current system clearly has room for significant improvements.

Devata.6589:

Yeah some RNG is still fine to create that rarity but it’s indeed not needed to have extremely low drop-rates on most of them just to keep people busy.

Unless, of course, people can sell everything for gold on the TP…

Ironically, it seems like Anets “no grind philosophy” is a large part of the problem of gold as the ultimate grind.

Behellagh.1468:

DavidH.7380:

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

But activity X leeds to reward Y, guarantee. It may take you 200 times to get one but you get it. And that’s the only place you can get it.

In our case you are not only grinding for a chance of the item but stuff to trade for gold to trade to acquire that item from the TP.

Is it more heroic, valiant, satisfying to receive that reward from defeating a particular boss at an event, even if you have to do that event a lot versus buying one from cashing in all the loot you get from repeating the event, from the corner shop?

In the first case you know everyone who has one got it the same way, doing the same activity. You are comrades in arms, you can kick back at the tavern with your flagon of mead and talk about that time when such and such happened.

Our way, someone who never ran level 80 content could earn enough to buy it outright. They heroic activity could just be shrewd use of the TP. While not forcing players into doing things they aren’t comfortable with while giving them the ability to get those same items sounds great, those of the first school of thought despise it. It cheapened the reward in their mind.

I don’t disagree, but that just makes the grind more acceptable, or worthwhile to do, or less perceived, correct? You aren’t trying to claim that doing things that way results in no grind existing, are you?

Talking about it the way you are makes sense to me… This kind of grind is preferable to that kind of grind. But people do seem to be talking about the concept of no grind of any kind as if that is achievable.

As I understood it, the overall discussion is that when Anet says “no grind”, and by grind we mean having to do only one specific thing over and over, people accuse them of ignoring or being blind to the other kinds of grind they have created in the game. I completely get discussing whether one grind is better than another grind, but I keep trying to wrap my head around how “no grind at all” could work.

Devata.6589:

The game itself has less or really no influence from the cash-shop and there is less grind (like the type we see in Gw2) for these type of items, you earn by far most of them directly ingame.. what is what we were talking about, not what company was more greedy.

You seem to mention earning items directly in game in some kind contrast to grind or as a way to mitigate grind in GW2 fairly often. I understand how that might affect the perception of grind, but I don’t see how it relates to presence of grind.

Obtaining / collecting mounts in WoW was discussed earlier. Deathcharger’s Reins can only be obtained as a 1% drop from a dungeon boss. If the RNG is running at average for you, that means you need to complete that dungeon and kill that boss roughly 100 times to obtain the mount. That seems to be the kind of “earned directly ingame” you are talking about, but it also seems to clearly be a grind/farm.

Devata.6589:

“I’ve almost never had a problem with the cash shop in this game.” Well I run into them all the time. You see what I just said about those 80 mounts, I like to hunt down in WoW (or special ranger pets, or toys, or mini’s or other skins). I did try to do the same in GW2.. Oow he has a cool mini oow need to grind gold for it. Oow nice weapon skin.. oow Black lion scrap skin. If I was to make a list of 80 cosmetics I would like in GW2 I would be very lucky if 10 would be available in a viable way ingame without some boring grind. And thats just how it is, that has nothing to do with opinions or seeing problems magnified. That’s just a fact. And when of those 80 things 10 are reasonable to get the whole fun of collecting them is gone (including those 10) at least for me. If it was the other way around I could be fine with it.

RE: my previous post, I just realized that part of my skepticism may be that I personally don’t care much about skins or collections or minis, so I focus primarily on weapons and armor. There are a lot fewer weapons and armor slots to fill, so I tend to think in terms of a need to spread out upgrades to a relatively small number of items over a long period of gameplay.

In your case, that probably doesn’t apply as much. It might be more possible than I previously thought to add large numbers of items to collect spread out over all kinds of tasks that keep players playing for large amounts of cumulative time without requiring as large an investment per item as might be necessary for armor and weapons.

Devata.6589:

It’s basically like the dungeon token systems, and what I have always said about the dungeon token system is that they are great but only as a side thing! Your main goal for items in a dungeon should imho firstly be some special reward you get for completing it (maybe depending on the difficulty levels or on the paths), then there might be some special RNG drops in there you might wanna get, that should be like your second most reason to wanna do the dungeon (based on the way they put the items in there) and then the tokens would be a great thing your would earn along the way. Something you are not even really farming but you earn it while going for those other things. [I think the caparace stuff is an better example of something you earn along the way and the coat as a direct reward for completing something.]
…
“You were saying?” That there is way to much grind (mainly gold grind) in this game.
Have been saying that all the time, you have not been paying attention?

Anyway, this is a good addition to the thread. Maybe Anet also thinks the grind get less if they also make some stuff available in-game, but that is of cource not the case. If I want to collect skins and special items the grind is still just as much there and if I want to hunt down for specific items changes are big those are still behind the gold-grind (or another currency grind).

It sounds like what you are describing is a system where new content (dungeon,puzzle,quest chain, boss, LS chapter, etc.) is released and completing it once or twice more or less automatically gives you the best / majority of the rewards from that content. If you want an item then you complete the associated content or, looked at from the other direction, when you complete fresh content (for you) then you obtain the important associated items and you can move on to something else that is fresh.

While that sounds great in theory, I don’t see how it could work for the players who play 4+ hours a day. The development team would have to be producing one hour of fresh gameplay every two business hours. Obviously that is a bit of an exaggeration, but probably not a huge one. The Living Story development team spends weeks creating new content that people finish in a day. And if somehow the development teams were introducing fresh content that fast, as a couple hour a week player, I would personally end up feeling like there was a content grind that I couldn’t play through fast enough to just keep up.

MMOs are generally built around producing a little fresh gameplay and hiding goodies behind an RNG or currencies that keep you repeating that hour of gameplay hundreds or thousands of times. If there exists a necessity to do that in order to keep the most dedicated players on the hamster wheel, then we just end up discussing exactly how to structure and implement a grind. Should we put the item on a specific character with a 1:1000 RNG drop rate? Or have each kill drop a token and 1000 tokens give the item? Have everything drop a generic currency and price the item at the income expected from 40 hours of play? No matter how we frame it, if we are incentivizing repeating one hour of content for dozens or hundreds of hours, then we are inevitably going to create some form of grind.

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Orangensaft.7139:

well if people actually want to be able to use the tonics/toys/consumables that they have… they easily have 100 slots of their inventory permanenty filled up together with the other stuff that everyone carries all the time anyway:

I think having a wallet style storage for that stuff might actually make it usable. I always destroy any tonics and such I get because I don’t want it crapping up my bags, and every booster I’ve ever gotten is still sitting in my bank (which doesn’t help you sell more boosters, Anet), but if I didn’t have to carry them around in my bags on specific characters I might actually play around with and/or use them.

Rauderi.8706:

Someone’s not into human resource management.

Judging by the world events I’ve seen, yes, keeping up damage is an issue. But if your only response is “wah, get better so I can lootz,” you’re not helping the situation. Rather, it’s the fast waypoint to nowhere.

If you want it to improve, educate. And don’t be a kittenhead about it.

• “Remember, this boss is an ‘object’ and can’t be crit, so please switch gear if you have it.”
• “This boss has mechanic X, so you need to do Y to get around it.”
• “Tag’s up, who’s with me?”
• “Heavy support characters, we need skills X, Y, and Z to keep people upright and boos damage.”

…Every boss. Every map. If you care at all. Otherwise, it’s more sweet, sweet, qq-tears for those who are ignoring you.

Provided the information is correct, I really love it when people do this. Sometimes I already know the info, but sometimes I don’t and I learn something new without having to ask, “I’m an idiot… how does this boss/event work or what special contribution can my class provide?”

Vitus Dance.4509:

‘the abundance of waypoints in every map makes the experience feel less authentic’

Just how authentic should an imaginary world be anyway?

I will say this… for me, the tradeoff for the convenience of waypoints is a reduced involvement with locations. I spend a lot of my play time warping into an area, doing an event, and then warping halfway across the world to do something else. As a result, I don’t really need to learn what is “here”.

In games where I couldn’t do that, location was more important. I don’t want to spend the majority of my play time hiking across the world, so once I’m done with this, what else is nearby, what is between where I am and where I want to go? As a result, I ended up learning the game world much in more detail than I do here where I just waypoint past everything other than the big events.

Lheimroo.2947:

Vayne.8563:

But grind for what exactly. If ascended gear is the last tier of armor and weapons, and that’s all that is, then I’m done grinding now. People in those other games will be grinding for gear long after I’m done.

So how can this be more grinding?

You know, this is the core of the issue.

I admit there’s something of an issue of perception here.. but ask why people perceive things one way and not the other, you can’t really say. …

I personally found those other MMOs less grindy, and I’ll tell you why.

I’d prefer an endless succession of periodic small hills to a single giant mountain. The mountain kinda makes my soul go numb in anticipation. The small hill? I can do that. I might know there’s another one coming up in another couple months, but.. it bugged me only after YEARS of playing under that gear grind system.

This one? This ‘one giant mountain, right up front’ system? It just.. right off the bat. And it ain’t just one; it’s one mountain for every alt I care to try on. So.. why shouldn’t I just say no, right at the start? It’s a genuinely unpleasant experience, to me.

I agree with you about this being a factor in how people look at the issue. I’m kind of the opposite side of the coin from you. I came to GW2 specifically because I was looking for an MMO that wouldn’t keep moving the goalposts on me every time I made any progress. For a while, the whole idea that the other games would move on without me if I didn’t play was motivating, but then it just began to seem like a pointless and endless treadmill just to try not to get left behind.

There is definitely stuff I will NEVER achieve in GW2. But so far it seems to me like the designers have made an honest attempt to do a delicate balancing act. With my relatively fresh 80s in Karma and TP exotics it appears I can do and play everything in the game with the exception of dialing up the difficulty setting in fractals. The road ahead is long and daunting, but so far it isn’t discouraging since I don’t feel restricted by the lack of progress and I know I can put it down for a while and pick it up again later without losing any ground.

Of course, motivation is a tricky thing. Once I’ve played the game for a longer period of time, I can see how those same things could be demotivating. “Should I play GW2 and work toward a legendary or go see the new XYZ movie? Eh, I don’t really need a legendary for anything, and I can always get one next month, so lets just go see a movie.”

stayBlind.7849:

They should just allow a player to type in an X, Y coordinate and instantly arrive at his/her destination. Taking waypoints still takes too long.

You know, for those days when I do not have time to play the game.

You want me to have to type coordinates?? Why can’t I just double click anywhere on the world map and instantly be taken to that very spot?

Now that I think of it, that would be really useful for Jumping Puzzles…