What should I have done in a zerg, that no one speaks to eachother in, has no damage meter, tanking or healing; to stand out as Rudolph the kittening Reindeer?
The concept may be hard to grasp, but if you wanted to talk to people, you could have tried talking to people to see if anyone wanted to engage in conversation.
I can’t help but laugh at the idea of damage meters or tanking to increase social interaction.
Will we ever get Ritualist
Engineers have replaced ritualists. The ritualists were an adaptation of the concept of engineers in the first place, in fact.
NOT an MMORPG.
Of course it’s a MMORPG.
Do you know why no one stopped to play with you after the event ended?
Because no one wanted to.
MMORPGs give people the option of playing with others. This does not mean people want to play with others all the time, or even most of the time.
I often see forumers demanding ArenaNet to make grouping with other players a requirement. Which is rather ironic – those demands come from forumers who don’t understand that people don’t want to play with them, and whose complaints are basically a way to try to force people to play with them.
We are going to get a new currency of sorts, when Achievement Points allow us to unlock some new items. ArenaNet’s blog post about the subject mentioned how it would allow us to get one-use only items, like gold, karma, and so on, so it won’t work purely as unlocks.
Meanwhile, we have some constants in the game. Look at Obsidian Shards. They are almost useless; they are used only to craft Legendaries, and to craft a single other item, the Cragstone.
We currently have the following ways to get Obsidian Lodestones:
And, again, they are nearly useless.
Let’s compare those to Charged Lodestones. They are required for:
We have the following guaranteed ways to acquire Charged Lodestones:
They are a very rare drop from a single enemy type that appears after a couple temples in Orr have been cleared, drop very rarely in CoE, and appear once in a while from Orrian Boxes.
Now, let’s make a bet – which of those two, Obsidian Shards or Charged Lodestones, do you people think will be made available as a guaranteed reward from Achievement Points?
I’m tired of exploring regions where there is nobody else.
Well, you are going to have issues with the game, then. The best part of GW2 is exploring the world and doing dynamic events, more often than not completely by yourself. The personal storyline (the instanced missions you have been doing) become worse and worse as you progress through the game. Dungeons, the first of which becomes available more or less at level 30, are kinda bad and are mostly used by farmers to make quick gold. The open world is where the fun is, if you don’t mind being alone.
I don’t want to ask them to come down to the starting area so they can kill slugs for 400xp. Its a waste of time for them and wouldn’t make me feel good asking.
That’s not how the game works. High level characters get downscaled to low levels when they move back to starter areas, and they get rewards (experience, karma and items) fitting for their true level. I was playing with a level 80 character in the human starting zone (for levels 1-15) and I got a rare level 80 item when killing enemies there. Considering how achievements work in this game, your guildmates likely are playing in low level areas anyway.
(And the high level areas – Orr – are the worst part of the open world. I have the feeling people only go there to farm.)
Do we know if accounts aren’t blacklisted for RNG?
Uh… That’s kinda ridiculous. It’s the same thing as asking if we know ArenaNet isn’t part of an alien conspiracy to take over the world, one MMORPG at a time. They already said there isn’t some kind of personal vendetta against a few players in the game. Players are just more willing to believe on crazy conspiracy theories than understand that RNG means “RANDOM number generator”.
See you in Wildstar.
Wildstar will fail like every other big MMO released in the last few years. I can actually tell you exactly what will happen to that game.
What I want is that rewards have meaning. And that’s only that.
When you begin to worry more about rewards than about the experience, you are opening the door to what every other MMORPG does – mediocre content just to get a shiny reward in the end, aka grind.
This is what people are exemplifying when they say you want gear grind – not the gear grind itself, but the idea behind playing not because you are having fun, but rather that you are playing content that is not fun just to get a reward.
And if you are having fun by playing… Why do you need a reward?
It’s the exact same thing as demanding to be paid in order to go see a movie. People go watch a movie because they enjoy it, and that experience is enough by itself. There is no need to get a reward for doing something enjoyable.
If you were not willing to play GW2 without receiving any kind of reward whatsoever for doing so… Then maybe you simply don’t like playing GW2.
What I’m reading is that your personal story cannot be completed without grouping up and going through a dungeon.
The very last thing in the personal storyline, after 43 solo missions, is a dungeon you need people for.
But if it makes you feel any better, the personal story isn’t that interesting. You will likely give up on doing it way before you reach the end, and the really good part of the game – exploring the open world and doing dynamic events – can be done solo.
I’m sure most people here don’t remember, but a long time ago, soon after release, ArenaNet mentioned how the Suggestions forum was just a temporary measure, while they planned a better way to take players’ suggestions. That’s because this forum was a bad way to keep them.
Now, I’m sure many of you have realized how bad the search feature on this forum is. Trying to search for “raid”, “raids”, “duel”, “duels”, “mount” or “mounts” show exactly zero results all the time. Which means, all suggestions here are lost the moment they move so far away that ArenaNet wouldn’t read them.
And that’s assuming ArenaNet actually bothers to read those suggestions. Even if they do, considering the high number of suggestions being placed here every day and the fact they cannot be searched, either ArenaNet keeps a small team dedicated to reading suggestions from this forum at nearly all times, or must suggestions are simply lost.
Ergo: those of you posting your suggestions here, you are basically wasting your time. This subforum most likely exist just so all suggestions can be thrown in the same place and be quietly forgotten, not so ArenaNet could find them (because it’s nearly impossible to find anything here).
Grind is everywhere, in all games, in all forms of existence, and it’s all subjective.
I’m sure Blizzard and Burrhus Skinner must be very proud of you. Congrats :-)
Yeah…30 million plus gamers and growing, and the genre is dying. Do you research this stuff, or just pull phrases out of a hat at random?
I’m simply not naive enough to take MMORPG’s developers claims of “30 million registered players” at face value, considering how most of those have left their games. Although I guess people gullible enough to believe grind is a good thing are going to fall for anything.
Accept it or don’t. Try to blame others because you don’t enjoy it. Try to blame marketing for your own shortcomings. It’s an MMO, and it’s here to stay.
Not really. Some people are happy to be completely oblivious to how MMO after MMO has failed, but those paying attention can see a very obvious trend. MMOs are a dying trend – they require people foolish enough to buy the idea that “time spent” is the greatest achievement one can have, and fortunatelly there aren’t that many gullible players in the world. Watching all recent MMOs shows more or less the same numbers – between 1.5 and 2 million players begin playing after release, most leave after a few months, and either jump back to their first MMO or hop to the next big thing. The MMO market is not growing – it’s just dying, as seen on how almost all MMORPGs have been forced to move to free to play (a format in which they are fortunate enough to avoid describing how many active players they have, unlike in subscription models).
In the end, the conclusion is obvious – MMOs are going away. Fortunatelly, they are not here to stay.
I’ve been repeatedly killed by thieves in 2, yes count them TWO hits in WvW tonight. What is the logic behind giving a class the ability to immobilize me, then 2-shot me, all in the span of less than one second, from stealth.
That’s what thieves are made for.
Thieves, or the rogue archetype in MMOs, is the ganker – the character who finds an unsuspecting target, attacks it from stealth, and who runs away through teleportation and stealth if they don’t get a kill in the first few attacks.
That’s what thieves were made to do, and that’s all they are good for. In sPvP, open world PvE or dungeon PvE, those abilities are next to useless. They only become useful exactly in the context you described.
So what’s the point of having thieves like that? It’s the entire point of having thieves. Otherwise, they may as well be removed from the game (which tbh wouldn’t be a huge loss).
Err…are you really asking if we’re sure if we want more stuff to work towards? Because the answer is a definite yes.
If by “work” you mean “doing easy and mindless activities that a bot could do better than a human being, pretty much like a Skinner rat pushing its small lever over and over”, aka grinding and farming… The answer is “no, thank you”.
Good games are about having fun, not about farming, grinding or even about receiving some kind of reward. Unfortunatelly, MMORPGs are not good games, and they have their small legion of addicts who don’t understand what a good game actually is.
like i said b4, dont give a comment unless its actually thoughtful, plz.
Ok. Competition between players is far from being a must in PvE, more often than not it’s detrimental to the game. I also won’t bother reading your post, considering how you didn’t even bother to try to write in something slightly similar to English. Have a good day!
What I’m seeing is a lot of players coming on here to express their frustration with GW2. That’s fair enough. What jumps out at me is people often claiming that they feel FORCED to play.
You are assuming people have a choice.
Ask those who have really big /ages, who spend most of their days playing. When you get honest replies, you will realize who they are – the unemployed guy who lives in a relative’s house, the guy married to a crippled woman who seeks to escape their lives by playing a game, the boy who’s simply addicted to grind, and so on.
In other words, people who feel like they don’t have a choice – that they must play a MMORPG. The kind of player who isn’t seeking a game, rather a way of life very different from the real thing.
This is, IMO, tremendously sad. But it’s the truth. And this kind of player will never really agree with those who want a game – it’s very different expectations. MMOs have catered to this kind of person, and found some measure of success, but at the price of being mostly mediocre games. Hence so many players’ obsession with farming, and why it has always been something easy and mindless – for someone without any kind of special skill, who feel completely useless in real life, watching his failure in game because he’s not good enough would likely make this player stop playing. No, the concept that anyone can be successful, the more time spent the better, is great to give those players the feeling of accomplishment that they cannot get in their real lives.
This is why MMORPGs likely won’t ever become more than the mediocre games they are right now. There is a significant number of players who crave being grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters; who need this kind of thing to feel like they have at least a modicum of success in their lives. Even if said success is as meaningless and ephemeral as a sand castle by the sea.
Unfortunately I’ve edited for a living. I know a thing or two about English. When we had this argument originally on the forums I talked to other editors. Every single one of them agrees with me.
Irrelevant. You are claiming to have an expertise we have no evidence of, plus talking to people that as far as we are concerned don’t even exist. What we do have plenty of evidence about is your strong bias regarding Guild Wars 2.
It’s easy to try to twist words around to claim that the Manifesto is 100% correct. It’s also easy to twist words around and “prove” that the Manifesto is 100% wrong. The intention behind the Manifesto was very clear, though, making it rather obvious that the goals stated in it have not been accomplished. Trying to discuss minutiae of semantics won’t change that.
And does the Manifesto matter? Of course. Even ignoring how two years is next to nothing, it was how ArenaNet described what they intended to do with GW2. Go to your wife and tell her, “Do you know when I said I wanted to marry you? Actually, that was a long time ago so it doesn’t matter anymore, bye”, and see if she replies by telling you that statement makes any sense at all.
People constantly want to hold WoW up as the epitome of grind culture in MMO’s
Because that’s exactly what it is. Blizzard’s greatest achievement was fooling gullible people into believing that all this grind was actually a good thing, hence all the “WoW was SO great!” comments we have today. But WoW’s model, to reward time spent more than skill, and continuosly add more time sinks to keep people p(l)aying the game forever doing little more than raw grind, is one of the main reasons why MMORPGs are almost always very mediocre games.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
#1: Rework Defiant
And to my eye this is the single greatest impediment to interesting boss design in the game right now.
I disagree. If you removed Defiant from all bosses right now… Nothing would change. It would be pointless to try to use any kind of control on the bosses when the best way to prevent them from doing something is just killing them. It’s not Defiant that makes control useless – it’s the fact that no boss has anything worth interrupting that makes control useless.
Imagine a boss had an attack that had to be interrupted, or it would kill the entire party. Imagine that boss has Defiant, and that we’re talking about a dungeon boss (so 5 stacks of Defiant for each interrupt). Do you know what would happen? Players would need both to use control (something they don’t need right now) and to have some coordination so people don’t waste control at the wrong time (something players also don’t need right now).
But the game is currently at the opposite extreme – control is useless since it’s always easier and better to just kill enemies. The best evidence for this is how control is mostly useless even on common enemies, those who do not have Defiant – if enemy design made interrupts actually better than just killing stuff, having control useful on anything but the bosses would even be acceptable. But as the game currently is, control is useless everywhere, not just against bosses with Defiant.
Same issue here, also in Brazil. GW2 is the only online game I play, but downloading other files doesn’t appear to be any slower. It began after the latest update.
Which Internet Service Provider are all you in Brazil using? I’m using Net.
Everything ANet said in the Manifesto was spot on what I wanted to see in an MMO, but they seem to have gone the opposite direction on some of it.
That’s true, but you have to understand the reason behind that. ArenaNet’s goal was what they described in the Manifesto – to make a MMO for people who don’t like MMOs. They failed. Like every other big MMO, as soon as GW2 was released it was filled with MMO locusts looking for a clone of every other MMORPG they have ever played. These players filled this forum with complaint after complaint asking for the same flawed content seen in the other MMOs, driving those who were hoping GW2 would be different away (and, truth be said, GW2 did already have many flaws seen in other MMOs by release).
When the MMO locusts began to leave (which they always do), ArenaNet panicked and rushed to add Fractals of the Mist and Ascended gear, something the company itself described as poorly implemented. This cemented GW2’s change, from a MMO for those who don’t like MMOs to just one more game trying to compete with all the other clones out there.
This change is in large part due to ArenaNet’s bad design decisions with GW2, but it’s in larger part due to the community of farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters who jump from MMO to MMO and who (for now) call GW2 their home (until the next big MMO is released).
Kaizer,
I really doubt what you are saying to be true.It is just not possible someone to have such awfull RNG.
Same thing for me. I have only slightly less hours played than he does, but I only got an exotic drop once.
Regardless, I have 4 characters wearing exotics.
In GW2, having exotics as drops or not is irrelevant when there are 100% guaranteed ways to get them. Not buying from other players (which isn’t exactly 100% guaranteed), but rather from playing through dungeons, buying with karma or badges of honor, crafting, and so on.
Only gloves, helm and shoulders.. /sad
/sad here as well. This kind of thing is to me a waste of time. I would rather see less gauntlets / shoulder pieces / helmets and see more full armor sets. Individual pieces mix and match worse than in the original Guild Wars.
: I farmed for 18 hours a day for 2 months straight to get everything for my legendary not including my precursor, and even considered quitting the game after getting my legendary.
… Uh, do you really think that’s something to be proud of? That you spent most of your life during those months doing something so easy and mindless that a bot could do it better than you, while hating it so much that you considered quitting?
Legendaries don’t require skill. The only thing they require is time spent, and often the stories of those who have Legendaries are like that – people who waste their lives doing something as devoid of purpose as a donkey chasing a carrot dangling in front of its face.
It’s a shame that ArenaNet rewards this kind of behavior, considering how it’s bad even for a player’s health.
Hard mode zones were in Guild Wars 1, and people LOVED them
Not really. People complained about how they were cheap ways to increase difficulty – just increasing enemies’ hit points, damage and attack speed, without actually making each individual piece of content individually challenging. The result was something very easy to exploit with Spiteful Spirit and similar abilities.
Your idea is very bad. You would basically kill the open world part of the GW2 and fragment the game’s population more than it already is. Not to mention how this is a suggestion, and so it’s in the wrong subforum.
I actually think that GW2 players are very, very spoiled.
Sure, there are problems in this game that need to be addressed, as all games have. But we still have it pretty good.
The issue with MMORPGs is that people are too used to mediocre content.
“All quests are kill ten rats quests? That’s pretty good.”
“We have to wait in line to kill a boss? That’s pretty good.”
“The storyline is a mess that everyone skips? That’s pretty good.”
“Raids are just RNG lotteries so maybe one person in a group of 40 will get the gear we want? That’s pretty good.”
The result is what we see today in GW2. The players looking for great, fun content are not that common around here. Farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters (who are all more or less the same thing, anyway), in other hand, dominate this community – which makes sense, since they are more concerned about grinding than about the content itself. It’s easy to then look at any piece of content, even if (actually, especially if) it’s just a mindless and easy grind, and say “it’s pretty good”. Unfortunatelly, as long as this kind of player is around, MMORPGs won’t be pressured to be anything more than the Korean grind cesspool they have ever been.
I hope the “new armor” described is really a new full armor set, not just new shoulder pads or new gloves. Those never fit properly with the great majority of armor sets currently in the game.
I’d say they are showing us both armour sets in the pictures and one of the weapons.
The top character is wearing Seer armor (I think the staff is new). The second screenshot shows a guy with a CoF chest piece, but it looks like new shoulders, helmet and maybe gloves.
I think the OP is only partially right. The issue isn’t just with people wanting a clone of their first MMO. It’s also a matter of all MMOs being the same – trying less to be games and more trying to be addictions. MMORPG players have been conditioned and filtered so now they are the farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters who don’t care about good content, but rather want stuff to grind. That’s the public that jumps to a new MMO as soon as it’s released, and who will soon leave, but not before complaining about how said MMO does not have enough grind to fuel their addiction.
I think ArenaNet’s main failure was how, unlike stated in their manifesto, GW2 did not become a MMO for people who didn’t like MMOs (as in, people other than the grinders and addicts). The community here is made by the same people who played WoW, Aion, Rift and nearly every single MMORPG out there, and it’s still asking for more of the same.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
I hope the “new armor” described is really a new full armor set, not just new shoulder pads or new gloves. Those never fit properly with the great majority of armor sets currently in the game.
Too bad you never hear anything from them.
You are complaining that the game is bad, the original GW was better, and so we should hear more from the GW1 since it was the better game.
The thing is, I don’t think the original GW was that much better, in the end. Considering all the grind introduced in GW:EN, it doesn’t surprise me to see the direction the GW2 PvE has taken. Considering how Izaiah Cartwright and his team destroyed PvP in the original GW, I’m not surprised the sPvP in GW2 is so bad; considering that he and Linsey Murdock were behind the reward system in GW2, I’m not surprised the system is as bad as it is.
If anything, the flaws in GW2 are pretty much the flaws in the original GW, only made worse.
Last time. I’m not saying stop making the temporary content they’re making. I’m saying we don’t need it faster. We need permanent content faster. At least understand that if nothing else from what I wrote.
I disagree with you. I won’t repeat myself from what I wrote there, but most reasons have been stated on that other topic. Your idea about adding a story that builds over the course of 6 months isn’t a good idea – not only players are not patient enough to wait for resolution after that much time, but a new player who began following the game in the middle of that period would feel somewhat lost.
One Time Events Are Good?
I’ve personally changed my opinion on this; I hope that no new professions will be introduced, for the sake of combat balance and because all roles seem to be filled. So I’m looking for news on this because I’m selfishly hoping that the devs are NOT spending time working on new professions. :P
I couldn’t agree more. One of the reasons why GW1 had to be killed was due to how ArenaNet added too many professions and too many skills to the game. This was more than they could handle, and it led to some professions receiving full overhauls so they could be useful in a party.
I would rather see a few new weapons for existing professions, and one or at most two new races in an expansion.
It’s also worth noticing how bad community feedback is about this kind of thing. Suggestions for new professions are usually copies of classes popularized in WoW (Death Knight being the most common), completely ignoring how the GW2 combat system works (a profession focused on single target damage? That’s an incredibly bad idea, considering how we are often fighting against multiple enemies at the same time). One of the worst professions in GW1, Assassins, were created by popular demand from players, so I hope ArenaNet has learned to not listen to what players ask for.
If not, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if the first expansion adds a gnome race, priests and druids as new professions, and increases the level cap to 100.
If the engineer is GW2’s answer to the GW ritualist, somebody asked the wrong question.
There’s an old interview from before the release of Factions, in which ArenaNet describes how the ritualists are basically the engineers of the (original) Guild Wars world. The engineer isn’t GW2’s answer to ritualists; the ritualist was GW1’s answer to engineers.
Surely the obvious solution to the SB issue is:
>Keep the SB range nerf
>Increase LB to 1500 always
>Replace the LB range trait with SB range to 1200
>???
>Profit
I agree, that sounds like the obvious solution for me.
it will deter new players from joining the game.
Why?
Guardians, Elementalists, Necromancers and (I think) Mesmers are fine now. They could have a better AI for their summons, they could use less useless traits and more build variety, but they are balanced.
Thieves have been made to be WvW gankers, so their abilities in PvE don’t really matter. Warriors in full Berseker trivialize PvE, but that’s more an issue in the way PvE has been built than with warriors. Engineers could still use some help.
Rangers are now very, very bad.
Also these living story content additions are honestly very thin on actual content and too heavy on RNG and tedious kill this number of mobs etc..
I agree. I think the idea is good, but execution has been very poor. I would be far happier with better storytelling once a month than with RNG boxes and Magic Find buffs every 2 weeks.
It’s the best MMO around.
The thing is, MMOs are incredibly bad games. Saying GW2 is the best MMO doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good game.
And while the game had a lot of potential, ArenaNet has been steering the game in the opposite direction of what we were told the game would be, focusing more and more in just giving rewards for grind and RNG instead of focusing on good content.
See the Southsun Cove event as an example of that.
Yes it works a few couple of times to retain players but after a while it doesn’t, with zero rewards (i don’t call a random backpiece or minipet rewards) players will still get bored and move on.
The players who only want rewards and don’t care about content are the same who keep jumping from MMO to MMO looking for a copy of their first online world. They are not reliable as a captive audience since they are not going to settle any time soon anyway.
this game has some end game?
Nope. If your definition of playing GW2 is grinding to the level cap and then grinding gear, I don’t think this game has anything for you. I would suggest trying one of the purely grind based MMOs out there, they have been made exactly for people like you.
People would run the easiest path only of any dungeon if there is a disparity in the difficulty. Ironically enough your plan to get more people to experience dungeons will actually have the opposite effect when you look at the bigger picture.
Actually, if people did the easy path of all dungeons, it would likely be more people playing more varied dungeons than we have today (in which most people play just Cof1). Besides, running the easy path multiple times in a single day would be useless; people would be forced either to wait until the next day, or get better and do the hard paths.
MMORPGs rely on keeping players playing the game through grind. This has fooled many players into believing that all MMORPGs must have grind, or they would have no possible way to keep people around.
That argument is something I discussed in another post (here), but I would like to mention the opposite point of view: grind is, definitely, a way to keep people around.
But how could you keep players playing the game without just adding layers and layers of pure grind?
Simple. You keep adding content to the game, such as once or twice per week, so players have something to do. You make this content temporary, so players have an incentive to do it NOW instead of waiting to do it at a later date, thus keeping players busy. You concentrate players in specific areas at a time, increasing population density there and thus giving people the feeling that the game has more players than it really has.
In other words, temporary, frequent content like ArenaNet has been implementing is the perfect way to make a MMO with as little grind as possible. The MMORPG community has been indoctrinated to believe a MMO needs grind, so I doubt people are going to understand this concept on their own.
“But all my friends ask what has ArenaNet added to the game, and I have to tell them the answer is nothing!” – wrong. Even ignoring all the permanent content ArenaNet has added to the game, the answer to that is, “There is a special event going on right now, and one more will happen in two weeks, and another one in two weeks, and so on”.
There really isn’t much incentive to do the hard paths. CoF is actually a good example of this. On rare occasions you may have people doing path 2 but almost never doing path 3. Everyone just wants to run path 1.
But not because of the tokens, rather to get gold. Doing the same path over and over to get tokens isn’t nearly as efficient due to the way scalling works; it could even scale further so after the third run there are zero tokens awarded.
As part of my idea, all dungeons would give less gold, including CoF1, so people would do them to get tokens, not to farm gold.
I’m concerned with the biweekly updates. I would rather quality than quantity, and so far the monthly updates haven’t been really that good; a more frequent release cycle could only make the content updates even worse, which would be really bad.
In the original Guild Wars, most caster items were somewhat useless because they had very weird stats combinations (like a Mesmer staff giving bonuses to a Monk’s Protection Prayers and an Elementalist’s Air Magic; even with the dual profession system, more often than not those were useless). There was no system to change the skin of an item, so it was common for people to have tho choose between skins or stats.
When chapter 3, Nightfall, was released, it came with a new item system, using Inscriptions – upgrades that could be removed and switched between weapons. It wasn’t exactly a way to change stats of a given weapon skin, but it was a start; it also made weapon drops significantly more useful, considering how finally the largely useless stats could be replaced by something else.
In the worst of the GW1 fansite forums, though, a small minority cried against this. “I have a collection of perfect shields” – a poster said, meaning shields that had actually useful stats – “All from the earlier chapters. If the inscriptions worked in all items in the game, my collection would become much less valuable”.
The main GW1 developer at the time, Linsey Murdock, replied with “I agree”, and so decided to keep the inscription system limited to Nightfall and GW:EN, instead of moving it to the original two chapters, Prophecies and Factions (with very few examples). To this day, even the rarest tier of item drops in those two chapters are more often than not completely useless. This is the perfect example of how the greed and vanity of a few players led to the game being worse than it could have been for the majority, and of how ArenaNet can be a very bad developer when they want to.
(For the records, people here may remember Miss Murdock from the announcement of Ascended gear. I guess some things never change.)
We still have things like that. People demanding that new rewards be exclusive to those who have a lot of free time (and no skill), assuming said rewards would then come with some kind of prestige. It would be laughable if it weren’t sad, but that’s how MMORPG communities work.
My character is like a stupid, slow, un-intelligent guy who happens to made some heroic choices. I find it hard to believe that he would ever be any help of the world.
I think some of this is due to how our characters lack any initiative. They never make plans of their own, try to find a situation before it finds them, or take the first step into solving a conflict; rather, through the entire game, we are told what to do by some NPC.
I would have loved to see a story in which our character actually makes plans without telling us about it, revealing it only when everything has fallen in place.
When designing a system with known, fixed rewards that must be accumulated over time, the hardest part is making players take the first step; the following ones are easier, as the tendency to continue accumulating the rewards go on.
Using the GW2 dungeons as an example: doing a single path gives more or less 60 tokens. That’s a fixed reward which, by itself, is not enough to buy anything useful. But, once a player has actually done a path and found himself with 60 tokens he has nothing to use for, said player has a strong incentive to do said dungeon again until he has enough tokens to buy something.
The issue, then, is how to make the player take that first step – do a single dungeon path. Between the lack of a good in-game LFG tool, how time consuming a dungeon may be with a bad group, and the need to watch YouTube videos to be aware of all popular exploits in a given path, there is a significant entry barrier that should not exist.
I believe this could be fixed by implementing three changes:
We would then have a hook to make players try dungeons and so begin collecting tokens, which would trigger the impulse to keep playing until one gets enough tokens to buy something. The “easy” path would also serve as an introduction to the dungeon, teaching players about its main mechanics and about its layout. At the same time, we would reward skilled players and organized groups by allowing them to collect dungeon rewards in one third of the time it would take less skilled players, which would also be an incentive for players who only do the “easy” path to try to become better players so they can get their tokens more quickly.
When will ANET add them? next year?
I have a lot of Laurels and guild commendations and nothing to buy….
They will likely add Ascended weapons and armors as a reward for the GW2 raids mentioned in another topic at the front page of this subforum. Your laurels and guild commendations will likely be useless to get them.
Heroes for dungeons so we don’t have to use PUGs.
That, or gear with maxed stats being available almost for free once you leave the tutorial.
I’m not working for ArenaNet so I can’t be sure what their definition of failure is but I can take an easy guess:
Empty or close to empty servers?
Very low income from gem store sales?
Not enough new players buying the game?Just some examples.
The issue with those is that, as you appropriately mentioned, we don’t know any of that data ourselves. We don’t know what definition of success ArenaNet is using, and if they are, we don’t know the data about said definition.
For example, let’s assume they are using the definition of failure as “very low income from gem store sales”. How much is “very low”? How much do they make from gem store sales? We don’t know.
So, in objective criteria, can we say Guild Wars 2 is a success? Not really, we simply don’t know. Can we say Guild Wars 2 has failed, from ArenaNet’s point of view? Again, not really, we don’t know.
ArenaNet did write a blog entry called Is it Fun? Colin Johanson on how ArenaNet Measures Success. That’s a subjective way to evaluate success, but one ArenaNet itself mentioned. And under that kind of definition, it’s possible to say “Guild Wars 2 has failed”, meaning “To me, the game is not fun”.
Problem is, they can’t “fix” pets in dungeons without completely altering how they work and play.
I wouldn’t be against a pets rework. We probably need different rules for different content anyway (I doubt pets could work the same in sPvP and in dungeons while being equally effective in both). IMO, the solution is something like the AoE damage mitigation you described, but exclusively in dungeons, and maybe exclusively for a few kinds of pets.
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