Guild Wars 2

SpehssMehreen.5897:

I think 3.5 million copies were sold and 450k players active at a given time, compared to last decembers 3mil

So we know that the game has sold more or less 3 million copies between pre-release and four months after launch, and then more or less 500 thousand copies in the following 8 months. The fall to 16,66% in sales isn’t exactly an impressive number.

But what we do know is that recently, based on an ArenaNet’s comment last month, there have been more people playing concurrently. It’s likely that the farmers, grinders and exploiters are playing more in order to farm all the new grind-based content in the game. Considering how this approach has been successful, I expect ArenaNet to add a lot more of it in the future.

Im Mudbone.1437:

SHEESH, more garbage looking weapons. BRING BACK GW1 WEAPONS.

They would only butcher them and sell them through RNG boxes in the in-game store (see Zodiac weapons).

Xaielao.8510:

Individual or guild recognition would only lead to (even more) elitism. So IMHO there shouldn’t be any.

I agree, too. Guild recognition outside of PvP doesn’t really make sense in a game like GW2.

TehPwnerer.7215:

and require more than just mindlessly shooting at his foot

How?

I have missed the beginning of the stream, so I’m wondering if there’s any mechanic I haven’t seen yet. But from what I saw, the new mechanics are:

1. Turrets around the dragon. The (rather cute) QA girl mentioned they are not really needed to defeat Teq, and they don’t appear to make much of a difference. They remind me of the Shatterer and Jormag turrets, that no one care about.

2. Sometimes the dragons teleport players to underwater, where they take damage over time if they don’t swim up. Since people can just swim up and go back to the fight, doesn’t look like much to me.

3. There’s a new wave attack that people can jump over. It looks like it does damage, but nothing too complex.

…And that’s it? The other mechanics (bone walls, the fingers, the fear-inducing breath) were there already.

I have seen in the stream a couple groups trying and failing to kill Teq – which is a good thing, we want challenging content – but not because they weren’t coordinated enough or didn’t multitask important things while doing damage to the dragon or anything like that, no; rather because they didn’t do enough damage to what is basically a massive damage sponge.

Was there more to the fight, something I missed from the earlier comments? Or is this something like the HotW boss fights, just doing a lot of damage to a sponge?

The new fight doesn’t look much better.

Still a static sponge, still something that takes a lot of people smashing into it to kill. Even the 80+ players hitting it in the video didn’t take it to less than 50% health, not because they kept dying or were busy with something else needed to kill the boss, rather because Teq could simply take the hits.

I like the change to the system – rewards given after the event is done – and I like that losing actually changes the map – as small and meaningless as the change is, people will simply avoid that little corner of the map until Teq returns, which is what already happens anyway.

The dragon itself doesn’t look any more fun to fight. Jormag still appears to be better.

Donari.5237:

Plus it requires coordination beyond mindlessly hacking at a dragon’s toe.

Why?

The dev mentioned that the turrets aren’t really necessary to kill the dragon. If anything, they look like the Shatterer’s turrets.

Eli The Yahoo.9782:

congrats Anet
http://www.gamespot.com/news/guild-wars-ii-sales-climb-to-35-million-6413775

But in January, they announced the game was past 3 million sales.

Which means, in the last 8 months the game has sold, what, 500.000 units?

Funny, because I remember someone here claiming that the game was at six million copies sold.

Elbegast.6970:

After reading that article, I am angry, disappointed, confused and very uneasy about the future direction of the game. I probably shouldn’t have read that article. I would be much happier right now.

Oh, it gets better. Read this:

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32955&storypage=1

See my signature for a preview.

Is Eric Flannum there? I wonder what has happened with the former Lead Designer. Maybe it’s him in the top middle-to-left, near a woman in blue with glasses who I think is Linsey Murdock?

I haven’t seen Isaiah Cartwright, the current Lead Designer (who used to be the guy responsible for the rewards in the game – definitely a great guy to be in charge now /sarcasm). With him and Colin not there, assuming that it’s not just my eyes failing me, perhaps they are indeed busy somewhere else, like in China.

EDIT: never mind, I found someone who could be Isaiah. He’s ironically directly to the left of the guy who I think may be Eric Flannum.

tolunart.2095:

Danikat.8537:

Why are most MMOs struggling and/or shutting down relatively quickly, or going free-to-play and attempting to draw in more causal players?

Because they tried to be a better WoW than WoW.

Truth be said, that’s what the great majority of MMORPG players are looking for.

They will never find it, of course – no game will be a better WoW than WoW – but that’s what people keep asking for. Just compare how many topics we have asking for more of the things unique to GW2 (dynamic events, personal storyline, living world), and how many topics we have about raids, mounts, the holy trinity, and so on.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Im pretty sure they also know DE’s still can’t tell stories, because you can’t have a DE tell a unique story since they repeat about every 5 minutes to an hour or more.

DEs can tell a story, a few of them do that.

I think ArenaNet gave up, though, after learning that most players are more interested in grinding than playing through a story. It’s not that DEs can’t be improved, rather that ArenaNet sees no point in doing so.

Diviner.7405:

Why cater to casuals?

If you consider casuals the players who play to have fun, and casuals the players who play 10 hours per day in order to show “dedication and effort” (aka, grind), it’s obvious.

“Casuals” are the players who want to play Guild Wars 2. They are the loyal fanbase, who could be playing anything else but keep to GW2 because they like it. They are the least likely to move to another MMORPG, because they like this one.

The “grinders”, in other hand, don’t care about the game – they care about the shinies. Pretty much like the MMO locusts who hop from MMO to MMO until they suck it try and then leave to grind in the next thing, the grinders will leave the game as soon as they have grinded everything and a new grind-based game appears in the horizon. ArenaNet is trying to keep the grinders around by placing carrot after carrot in front of them – see the slow introduction of Ascended gear – but that’s because the designers know what’s keeping the grinders here isn’t the actual game of GW2, rather the grind. If the grinders get Ascended weapons before ArenaNet releases the next carrot, and if the next wave of MMORPGs offer enough grind-based content, well, bye bye “hardcore players”.

It’s also interesting to see how the concept of the personal storyline has been thrown through the window after release. It was never that personal in the first place – our choices didn’t really matter, all characters had the same dialogue in the later two thirds of the game regardless of race and gender, and so on. But it could have been improved into something actually about our characters, in which players would feel they had an impact on the world’s story.

But no. The Living World went into the opposite direction. There, our characters are one more nameless solider working for someone else. Due to how ArenaNet made the poor decision of using expensive voice actors for our characters, they are not going to record new dialogue any time soon; and ironically, since it’s not cost-effective to record little bits of dialogue one at a time, the small updates are bad things in which record voice overs for our characters (as opposed to a full expansion, in which a lot of dialogue would have to be recorded).

This taints the storyline. Our characters are not the heroes – they are mute followers to others. We just do as others tell us to do, and only follow behind characters like Roxx.

This is the opposite of the personal storyline. ArenaNet’s promise of a game about the players has died, and been replaced by Scarlet Sue.

I think SAB is one of the few kinds of content left in which the main goal is to have fun, not grind achievement points or exploit the game to become rich quickly.

Why are you asking what is there to be done, instead of telling us what you want to do and asking us if that is in the game?

What do you want to do in the game now?

Uh…

Interview

We even have the inverse motivation against having that continual gear grind as it would separate players so they wouldn’t be able to do these things together. If there is a dragon attacking in the open world, with a vertical progression would it end up being too easy for some people and too hard for others?
Our big focus then is to give people more horizontal progression, different things to accomplish and rewards from accomplishing those things. So when we think about the kind of things we can do to update Guild Wars 2, the more traditional way would be to lay out more runway for players. You would have players at a certain level and tier of loot and you see that players are running out of things to do so you lay out more runway: more gear progression, more raids, more grind. This works for some games and for some players, but I think that players are starting to mature past the point of wanting to be on that treadmill, of being in that obvious pattern of every time I catch up you are going to put another carrot in front of me.

Ok, that’s simply not true. Even the slow pace they have been using to introduce Acended gear is exactly what he’s describing in this last line: another carrot put in front of players when they have reached the previous one (the previously-introduced Ascended stuff).

No?

Bad idea is bad. This isn’t WoW, thank you. Not to mention it has already been discussed over and over. And also it’s a suggestion, so it should have been posted in the Suggestion Forum (aka our Oblivion Forum).

Grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters are on the rise right now because they are ArenaNet’s current target audience. With the high influx of farming content (Southsun with 200% Magic Find, the Crown Pavillion with high Magic Find, the invasions that are basically farming grounds), and the fact ArenaNet cannot ban exploiters out of fear of losing too many players, it’s basically the designer’s fault that the community is becoming worse. I had made a post in jest about it, but I guess I was right.

There are multiple ways in which ArenaNet could make this issue “less bad”. They could:

• Remove the champion boxes from champions, add the champion boxes to Dynamic Events (that have been successful), turn all Champions into events (even if only “Kill Champion X” events) so there are rewards for killing all champions. Farmers would still farm, but at least they would help people complete events, as opposed to exploiting them.

• Change the invasions so Aetherblades and Molten Alliances only appear during their own wave (I have seen a map in which Aetherblades spawned during the first minion wave), and disappear once their wave has been completed (so people don’t continue killing pirates instead of going to kill the minions). Also change the way the waves are calculated, so killing Aetherblades and the Molten Alliance helps with wave completition, as opposed to only finishing events counting (while killing minions counts… Who thought this lack of consistency would be a good thing?). This would make the invasion give less of the boxes, so increase the reward for successful completition in order to make people actually care about winning.

And so on.

Brimstar.9036:

Please, take a step back and look at this game compared to every other MMO out there and how they treat their community. This company listens to their community much more then others and are quite transparent with what they can be with.

True, they listen a lot.

They listen to everyone who says, “We want more grind! More progression! More farming!”.

They listen to everyone who buys all those RNG boxes.

They listen to all the exploiters who don’t want to be banned for exploiting the EotM (exploit of the month, also called Eoten).

I wish ArenaNet would listen less to their community.

ProxyDamage.9826:

The message was loud and clear: “We don’t really want more vertical progression”. The reply was equally clear: “Tough kitten. You’re getting it.”

I don’t think that’s what happened.

I think the game released, sold a lot (like all other MMOs), and then lost a lot of players a few months after release (like all other MMOs). I think ArenaNet took a look at the players who were leaving – the MMO locusts, who hop from MMO to MMO seeking a perfect clone of their first online world (which was usually WoW) – and, panicking as the game was hemorrhaging players, the designers decided to add the features those players were asking for.

And what did the MMO locusts want? More of the same, of course. More of what there is in every other MMORPG. More progression, more grind, and so on. I believe ArenaNet rushed to make exactly those things, hence gear grind (ascended gear) and progression grind (Fractals of the Mists and Agony). The fact a large part of the then GW2 community (the players who were playing the game because they wanted to play GW2, as opposed to playing another MMORPG clone) complained was largerly irrelevant – ArenaNet knew what the players who were leaving wanted, and it was grind to become more powerful.

Hence, ascended gear is here to stay.

Now, I think some other interesting things began to happen. I believe ArenaNet began noticing how the players who played the most were not doing Dynamic Events or going to the personal storyline or exploring the map. No, the most avid players were just farming. Adding new events to the game was mostly ignored, but any update that changed anything about farming was met with a big reply. See the popularity of even low level Fractals.

So… The logical thing to do was to please those players, since they are the ones who play the most, and they are easy to please – they don’t want fun content, new DEs with unique mechanics, or a good storyline; rather, they just want to farm. Considering how many of those players were also those who were complaining about the lack of things to grind for, Ascension gear would be great for them: it would give them a motivation to farm.

Hence the avalanche of farming content. Southsun and 200% Magic Find; the Crown Pavillion, which was basically a huge farming cesspit; and now the invasions, that are basically “whack a champion” zerg-style.

Those are the players ArenaNet is catering to: the grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters who don’t care about a good game or about a good community, and rather are interested in seeking the activity with the best “gold:time spent” ratio. For those players, a new reward for mindless grind (what they call “dedication and effort”) is a plus; one that makes them more powerful, well, is perfect.

Ironically, I wonder how many of those players will leave when the next wave of MMORPGs arrives. Since they are not playing GW2 because they like GW2, rather because they want to farm, it’s to be expected that their loyalty to the game would be resumed at how willing they would be to let go of the stuff they farmed for.

The players who actually want to play GW2 – those who want a good story, a rich open world to explore, new and dynamic events, and so on – are not ArenaNet’s target audience right now, even if they would be the players less willing to jump ship from GW2 to other MMORPGs. Those players are the ones ArenaNet needs, but not the ones they deserve.

infantrydiv.1620:

I don’t feel like my character is really a part of a fantasy world.

Our characters cannot talk in the Living World. It’s hard to consider your character part of the world when he/she is just a silent observer. Or, more accurately, a silent courier – our characters basically go from X to Y following commands from other characters. Even at the beginning of Scarlet’s Playhouse, it’s Roxx who turns and says, “Everyone ready? Let’s go”, not our characters.

Besides, our characters always say the same things, no matter race or gender. When an Asura engineer has to do exactly the same things as a Norn warrior in order to build an Asura portal, you know who our characters are has very little impact on the game.

infantrydiv.1620:

The game feels highly segmented and the lore feels both flippant and disunified.

There are multiple different teams doing the lore. The personaly storyline team was different from the dungeons team, who had different writers than the open world dialogue team. The lore couldn’t possibly feel unified. Now we have four different teams doing the Living World content, so don’t expect anything to feel unified any time now.

infantrydiv.1620:

Are you ever excited to explore or do heart quests or story missions?

Farmers are excited when they get gold. They don’t care about immersion or lore or having fun at all. Each update has been catering to farmers since they are the easiest group of players to please and to herd to each new release. If you are really expecting immersion, you better pretend your character is a professional pillager, otherwise…

bhagwad.4281:

And for the final kicker, not only did Anet not ban any players for farming the gauntlet, they also said they were aware of it and had plans to manage the economic impact. In other words….it was fully working as intended.

The real kicker is – can you point a single post of mine in which I say people who farm the gauntlet are exploiters?

Chrispy.5641:

You guys might try to make the point that Farming isn’t fun and it ruins games, you need to consider that not all people really think or care the same way as you do!

Irrelevant. You can think the sky is yellow instead of thinking it’s blue, but it doesn’t change the fact that the sky is blue. We have interviews from Blizzard in the first days of WoW claiming how they were surprised that players would often flock to the grind-like and fast way to achieve something, instead of seeking the fun way… And we can clearly see how this realization has shaped MMORPGs for a very long time now. Farmers allow MMORPGs to be mediocre games. You can believe otherwise, but it wouldn’t become any less true.

Chrispy.5641:

Some you can get for less than a gold right now! Which anyone can afford, and its all thanks to those farmers you hate so much!

Wrong.

Imagine there were no farmers. Imagine everyone had the same amount of gold. We would have no absurdly priced item, simple because no one would be able to afford it. Wouldn’t make much of a difference if supply were a bit smaller, because trying to sell something for a small fortune would be more expensive than anyone in the game could buy.

Chrispy.5641:

In an Idealistic, Theocratic Utopia, that might be true, but guess what? This isn’t, and neither is Guildwars 2!

There is no reason it could not be, other than how it would kitten off the players who love, as the OP put it, “getting gold, gearing up, getting minipets, buying skins and armor to show off”. Who happen to be the same players who want everyone else to not get gold, not gear up, not get minipets, not buy skins or armor, so they can “show off”. Are you sure you want to prioritize those players over everyone else?

neon.4863:

Seriously?

No. But of course I expected reductio ad absurdum to be used as a “counter argument” as quickly as ad hominem.

Look around you. A lot of people unfortunatelly have no choice but to do something they don’t enjoy for a living. The guy who’s manning that gas station accross the street probably didn’t dream about doing that when he was a kid. Those Chinese factory workers very unfortunatelly do not have a choice – whatever abilities they have are wasted in a job that requires no skill.

Do you know what’s even worse?

When people choose to live like that. When, in a mockery of all those unfortunate people who due to circunstance cannot work on something that would make them happy, others decide to waste their time doing an activity they don’t even enjoy. Even worse, to live like that when playing a game.

That’s what a farmer is.

Kirschwasser.3972:

Again. Anet’s already addressed the issue, calling people exploiters is just kinda being all sour grapes about things not being the way you want.

No one has managed to make a solid counter argument claiming it wasn’t an exploit. The fact ArenaNet fixed it is one more sign of how it was something they didn’t intend to have in the game.

The thing is, ArenaNet didn’t solve the issue. They simply covered it a bit. We are now on the third event ArenaNet had to modify in order to prevent exploiters from exploiting. It’s about time they noticed that, unless they are prepared to change many more events, they are trying to apply the wrong fix. ArenaNet should either deal with the exploiters (something they are not going to do – we all have learned that the GW2 community as a whole is filled by exploiters, and ArenaNet cannot afford to lose all those players), or deal with the new system that has allowed exploiters to exploit so much – they need to remove the Champion drop boxes. Those should be moved to rewards for finishing the Dynamic Events themselves, and each champion in the open world should be changed to be an event (even if just like the “Kill the Champion Troll” event in Queensdale) so people would have a reason to fight them.

Until ArenaNet implements a fix like that, for the real issue behind the current troubles in the game, we are going to have the same problems over and over.

bhagwad.4281:

What is this “as intended” nonsense I keep hearing? Nothing is “intended”. It is what it is.

I have the feeling you don’t remember the other exploits in this game.

Months ago, there was a bug that made Cultural weapons be sold for a very low price. Some players quickly noticed the bug, and bought a lot of those weapons, expecting to sell them later after the price had been fixed.

They were banned from the game.

“The price was what it was”, the banned players would say, “We didn’t do nothing beyond what the game allowed us to do”.

Yet, they were banned.

A few months later, players learned that salvaging the Snowflake items could give them most of the materials back. They could salvage rare Snowflake items for a chance to get ectos, and then use the materials to make another rare item for a very low cost, effectively creating a nearly infinite, ecto-producing loop.

They were banned.

“Crafting was working as it was”, the banned players cried, “We were just doing something the game allowed us to do”.

Yet they were banned.

Exploiting means playing the game in a way that was not intended. We know for a fact that there are ways to play the game differently from how ArenaNet intended people to play. Those who abuse the game like this – the exploiters – have been banned in the past. They always make excuses claiming they weren’t doing anything wrong, but it never changed the fact that yes, they were exploiting.

And for the records, I love this quote:

Vol.5241:

It’s not an exploit. People are trying very, very hard to complete the event. But it’s too difficult.

Too difficult indeed.

Psycho Robot.7835:

So the answer is, if we couldn’t farm aethers, we wouldn’t even be there.

Ok, bye.

Right now, each map goes into multiple overflows, which means worlds get their maps filled, and the exceeding players are enough to fill many maps. Assuming two thirds of the players there are the exploiters, which is quite a high number, removing them would still leave us with at least one map full of players – the difference being that those players actually want to play the game as intended and finish the event, instead of exploiting the champions.

We don’t need exploiters. They are not helping the game. Quite the opposite – they are leeching the players who want to do the event and so happen to help them clear the waves until the pirates come.

projectcedric.6951:

IN GAMES, it is against human nature to be driven to do something without an end goal or simply “for the experience of it”.

I agree with the end goal, I disagree it’s the same thing we see in MMOs.

In many MMORPGs, I see a lot of people who don’t enjoy the experience of what they are doing, but they are doing it anyway because they want a reward in the end. We see this both in players who say it with all the letters, as well as in those who want the quickest, fastest path to whatever it is they want.

Comparing it with something else, let’s say… The first Sonic game, for example (Sega Genesis FTW!). I’m sure a lot of people had the goal of reaching the end of the game. But I doubt many people played the game if they didn’t enjoy it, just to get to the end. And, likewise, the game had a cheat we could use to arrive straight in the last level, but that wasn’t something everyone did, and I doubt very much it was something even the majority did.

There was a goal. The journey to that goal, however, was equally as important as the goal itself. I don’t believe the same thing happens in MMORPGs, when people claim they don’t want to farm but that’s the only way they will get the gold they need for the shiny stuff they want. This is what I believe happens in MMORPGs:

Genavelle.9516:

The whole point of legendaries is that you spend a lot of time doing crap nobody wants to do so you can get a special unique weapon that only people willing to do that much work can get. If you don’t want to go through that process, then don’t worry about making one.

I can’t help but think something somehow got broken in gaming due to MMORPGs.

projectcedric.6951:

However noble it sounds, it is against human nature to driven to do something without an end goal or simply “for the experience of it”.

False.

Why do people go to the movies? It’s not because they are paid for it. It’s because they will enjoy the experience of seeing the movie. Why do people listen to music? They don’t receive a physical reward for listening to 500 tracks. They do it because they enjoy the experience of listening to music.

You are mistaken when you think the experience itself cannot be the goal. Playing a game to have fun, as opposed to playing a game to reach a reward within said game, is actually the rule, not the exception, as long as you are not talking about MMORPGs. I think MMOs (and its clones) are the only games in which people are so willing to go through experiences they don’t enjoy just to get a reward. In old RPGs, those rewards were not the goal, just auxilliary to the experience.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Actually, I already did. You just skipped my entire rebuttal because I made sense. Now you’re avoiding my follow up question because you know for a fact that you’re misusing the term “exploiter” to label people like me who don’t play the game your way.

In other words, you avoided answering every single of my questions because you know they prove you wrong, and are using the “I already did” as a poor dodge. I can counter your arguments easily without having to hide behind excuses. Want one more example? Here:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You have yet to explain how my doing of Jumping Puzzles on Invasion maps is an exploit. I’m still waiting.

Show me the quote where I say that you doing a jumping puzzle is an exploit.

… Oh, you can’t? My, what a surprise!

The worst aspect of this update isn’t only how it creates a toxic community, but how it empowers the most toxic aspect of the community – ArenaNet is telling people that yes, they are exploiters, but they are not going to be punished for it. There’s little surprise in seeing how many of the Anchorage event exploiters are exploiting this now, as nothing bad happened to them after the first exploit, so it’s only logical that they would exploit more.

Ultimatelly, ArenaNet will realize that the champion boxes will have to go, or the exploiters will have to go. The game can’t work with both of those.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Erasculio.2914:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

So today I’m going to do a bunch of Jumping Puzzles while the invasion is going on. Show me what rules I’ll be breaking, and I’ll stop.

Do you want to see something interesting? Take a look at the rules of the game. Show me which rule were the Snowflake exploiters breaking, and which rule were the Cultural weapon exploiters breaking.

And comparing jumping puzzles to intentionally stalling an event: well, using a somewhat poor metaphor I have read recently, “apples and jalapenos.”

You have yet to explain how my doing of Jumping Puzzles on Invasion maps is an exploit. I’m still waiting.

Sure, answer my previous post. I’m greatly amused at the kind of excuses you people like to use thinking you will get away with them.

LotusThief.4613:

Give me the 1000g I need and I’ll stop worrying about farming. Been playing for a year and everyday the legendary costs just keep rising.

… Because a lot of other people are farming, and so costs will continue to increase. Adding more ways to farm won’t just give you gold, it will give gold to the players that increase the prices of Legendaries the most.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You just mixed the terms “RNG” and “RELIABLE” in the same argument. So in essence, you just answered your own quoted question.

I strongly suggest reading that line again. Why not, read the entire post again a couple times, may be useful. The line you bolded:

“I wish ArenaNet would introduce a reliable way to get the Lodestones, even if it’s a very slow one”

Means, ArenaNet could add a way to get materials that requires no random drops (as in, no RNG? You know, “random number generator”?). So instead of the current system, in which someone could spend a month killing enemies and get no lodestone, while someone else could spend the same one month killing the same enemies and get a stack of them… We could have a system in which a player knows exactly what he has to do in order to get Lodestones, with a known amount of effort. You know, something like what we mean with the word “reliable”.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

So today I’m going to do a bunch of Jumping Puzzles while the invasion is going on. Show me what rules I’ll be breaking, and I’ll stop.

Do you want to see something interesting? Take a look at the rules of the game. Show me which rule were the Snowflake exploiters breaking, and which rule were the Cultural weapon exploiters breaking.

And comparing jumping puzzles to intentionally stalling an event: well, using a somewhat poor metaphor I have read recently, “apples and jalapenos.”

Aberrant.6749:

So those people aren’t helping the bar move as well? It’s at a slower rate, but they are moving it and helping the overall progress. It’s not as if they are working against the other players which is more of what your post sounds like you’re implying IMO.

There are two kinds of Aetherblade pirate events:

1. “Lower the Aetherblade morale”, which is basically a “kill all of them” event. Doing this one, the farmers actually help the event as a whole. But killing champions over and over actually closes the event (morale goes to zero), so farmers have to move elsewhere.

2. “Kill the Aetherblade Captain”. This is where the issue lies. As long as you do not kill the captain, but you kill the other Aetherblades, more enemies will continue to spawn. If you ignore the captain, you won’t progress the event – it will just be stalled. But more and more champions will spawn, allowing farmers – here, exploiters – to farm in a single event by killing a continous flow of champions.

It’s similar to the Arah farm, when people farmed the Champion Risen Giant – by not killing the Giant, the event was stalled, and lots of Risen would spawn. By not killing the Aetherblade champion, the event is stalled, and (if a zerg big enough is there), a lot of champions spawn.

projectcedric.6951:

So ok, that will pacify the dispute between the champ-farmers and the event-doers, but doesn’t really do anything significant aside. Farmers will still farm – they will farm events now.

And it will deal with the issue mentioned above by Knote, about how Dynamic Events give little to no rewards. If fixing champions was worth all this trouble, and considering how DEs are far more important in the GW2 design than champions, fixing DEs ought to be important as well.

Farmers will always farm. Until they leave the game, which appears to be something ArenaNet doesn’t want them to do. The best we can do is not allow them to exploit, and not make the most effective way to farm something that goes against doing Dynamic Events. Just solving the dispute between farmers and other players is a boon by itself.

Omnitek.3876:

Then people who complained about the champ farm are going to complain again. Because no one will show up to do the events.

I would rather fail because there are few players doing the event than fail because there are exploiters becoming rich by stalling and farming the event I’m trying to complete.

Omnitek.3876:

If it wasn’t intended, it wouldn’t be possible.

Tell that to everyone banned for abusing the Cultural weapons exploit, or the Snowflake exploit.

IceVyper.6810:

This game requires a lot of gold if you want to have nice things, and this is the newest way to obtain it.

It’s not the only way to obtain it (you could farm champions in Frostgourge Sound, just to give one example – there you don’t ruin any event). It’s simply the easiest and fastest; the fact it requires people to play the game in the opposite of how ArenaNet intended people to play the game is meaningless for the exploiters, as is the fact that they are actually being detrimental to the players who want to do the event.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I can’t be banned for playing the game as it was intended.

And joining an event doing everything in your power to fail it or stall it is the opposite of playing the game as it was intended. Saying otherwise is the same as the Snowflake exploiters claiming they weren’t exploiting because they were just salvaging items, or the Cultural weapon exploiters trying to defend themselves claiming they were just buying stuff from a random merchant.

All of those are excuses. And poor ones at that.

This:

Vol.5241:

It’s not an exploit. People are trying very, very hard to complete the event. But it’s too difficult.

… I can’t even say what that is.

I don’t expect exploiters to post here saying, “I know I was exploiting and I don’t mind admitting it”. It would be nice if they didn’t try insulting our or ArenaNet’s intelligence.

Omnitek.3876:

If I do 1 event then afk, will you tell me I am an exploiter as well and call for a ban as well?

You tell me. Do you think ArenaNet intended for players to do one event and then AFK?

IceVyper.6810:

You cannot tell people how to play just because a certain way suits you.

True. I can, however, tell people that playing the game in the opposite way of how ArenaNet intended people to play is an exploit. And intentionally failing or stalling an event in order to farm is the opposite of how ArenaNet intended people to play. Ergo…

projectcedric.6951:

What makes you think this lamentation will end there?

The lamentation will never end. But unless ArenaNet did what they should really do – create an area specifically for farming, in which it was obvious drops would be better, so farmers would move there and leave the other players in peace in the open world – all we can do is make the game less bad.

We have already had multiple examples of farmers clashing with players who want to complete events. This is not going to end any time soon. Meanwhile, just like people complained that champions gave little to no rewards, dynamic events give little to no rewards.

What is better for the game as a whole, considering ArenaNet’s original vision for the game? The vision that, again, made killing random mobs give little experience, so doing dynamic events would be better? It’s obvious – events should give better rewards than killing random mobs or killing champions.

In order to fix the issue with champions giving small rewards, it’s only a matter (as mentioned in my OP and in other posts in this topic) of making every champion in the open world to be an event, even if it’s just “Kill enemy X” events like the ones we have in the invasions. This would allow people to get rewards for champions, due to receiving the reward for the dynamic event about killing champions.

IceVyper.6810:

Killing the champs is not an exploit, it advances the event

I’m amazed with the things people think they can get away with. I love this quote…

Vol.5241:

It’s not an exploit. People are trying very, very hard to complete the event. But it’s too difficult.

…Because it shows exactly what we are dealing with.

People are not killing champions to advance the event. In fact, one very easy way to farm is by not killing the event champions – in the “Kill the Aether Captain” event, ignoring the captain but killing everyone around him will assure a continuous stream of champions, as they would only stop spawning if the captain were killed. This stalls the invasion, and does absolutely nothing to help the players who are actually trying to complete the event.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

All we’re doing is playing a game.

The snowflake exploiters used very similar arguments, eight months ago.

ArenaNet intended for players to try to complete the dynamic events. Intentionally failing or stalling an event in order to farm, while being detrimental to other players, is playing the game in a way that has not been intended. Ergo, exploit.

I haven’t seen a single exploiter actually admiting he/she was exploiting. I do love some of the excuses they bring up, though.

IceVyper.6810:

Good luck getting the achievements now, when the farmers are gone and the people get their 13 maps.

I would rather fail the event because there are few players in the map than fail the event because exploiters are becoming rich by farming the event I’m trying to complete.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Sad penguin is sad…

It’s not going to work. ArenaNet should remove the champion drops and add them as rewards for event completition (plus ban all the exploiters, of course – it’s rather obvious that intentionally failing an event in order to kill more champions is not playing the game as intended). Otherwise, they will just keep removing champions from events until the entire point behind the champion drops is rendered moot.

Aberrant.6749:

If there has been a lot of currency added then yes (this isn’t currently the case).

From the mouth of your buddy:

Vol.5241:

alcopaul.2156:

rewards are crap. boxes give me liquid karma and kittenty greens.

Sure, ignore the +7s per box.

Plus, there are other ways farmers hurt the game. Even when they get materials and sell them, they are concentrating gold in their hands. This concentrates wealth and allows the farmers to increase prices, even ignoring the supply of raw gold they add to the game.

Aberrant.6749:

TLDR: Just let others play how they choose.

That’s rather naive. You are not in a bubble. The way others play the game change how you play the game, whether you want it or not.

The invasions: maps are going into multiple overflows. Which means, the maps are full. Which means, whenever a farmer stops trying to do the event just to farm, it’s not just one less person doing the event; it’s someone taking the place in that map of someone who could be doing the event instead of farming. When you have a high enough number of slots taken by farmers, instead of by players who want to play the game as intended, actually winning the invasion becomes impossible.

The Anchorage event in Orr: someone posted how he/she got even death threats by finishing the event. I think I don’t have to explain how that disincouraged people who actually wanted to do the Arah meta-event from going anywhere close to it.

Not to mention the side effects in the game as a whole. If ArenaNet notices there is a large number of players who are happy with mindless and simple content as long as they get a shiny reward in the end, why would they bother making content for the other players – the ones who actually want quality content, such as something challenging, or a good storyline, or something nice to explore – when the latter group is far harder to please than the former?

This kind of thing is the reason why MMORPGs are so bad games. They don’t even try to be fun – all they (think they) need to be a success is to become big addictive Skinner rat boxes. Farmers are to blame for lowering themselves to the level of Skinner rats, but game developers – including ArenaNet – are also to blame for allowing this behavior.

Bright.9160:

Not that they’re gonna remove the champ bags, they already stated that they like how they work.

They are not working.

This is the third time ArenaNet has to nerf champion drops in an event because people would otherwise exploit it instead of completing the event successfully.

This latest update has almost been an admission of failure. In the blog entry about 2013, ArenaNet had said, when talking about the champion loot, that…

ArenaNet

This change will make champions more rewarding, and will make playing in Orr and Southsun Cove (where events can scale up to add champions) more exciting and fruitful for guilds and players joining together in the open world.

Now, ArenaNet has been reducing how events scale up to add champions. They reduced the frequency of the event itself in Orr – a place that doesn’t even have that many interesting events in the first place, and in which the change basically means the Arah meta-event will happen even less often than it already did. This is the perfect example of the champion drop actually hurting the Dynamic Events system and the open world, instead of helping either of them.

Vol.5241:

I want to log-in and have all legendaries and skins at my fingertips

Which would allow me to say that I beat GW2 and I can move on to the next game tomorrow.

Or at least that’s what I’m getting from this forum

It’s actually easy to see what’s happening, when you try to understand different points of view.

For some players, the point of the game is to get stuff. Those are the players willing to farm through easy and mindless content they don’t even enjoy doing, just to get a reward in the end. Under this point of view, in which someone plays just to get things, having everything in the game would basically mean beating it and having to leave to do the same thing somewhere else.

For other players, the point of the game is to have fun. Those are the players who want to experience fun content, even if it has no reward in the end. The players who want to be part of a good story, to play through a cool fight, to explore a world with nice things to find, and so on. For those players, having all items in the game is just a way to have more versatility in their characters, but it has little to do with actually playing the game, much less beating it.

The first group of players causes a vast myriad of issues. The most prominent right now is: if people don’t enjoy what they are doing, but rather want the reward in the end, they will want to get the reward as quickly and as easily as possible. To many players, this means using every resource available to them, even if that means exploiting. Which is exactly what we saw in Orr – hordes of exploiters going through content many of them didn’t even enjoy, just so they could get their rewards faster, even if that meant antagonizing part of the community.

Meanwhile, the second group of players follow more closely what (most) people do in real life. We go watch a movie because we want to enjoy the experience of watching something fun, as opposed to going to see a bad movie expecting to be paid for it.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Lodestones are easy to acquire now. My personal rate of return is about 2 per invasion map, or roughly 45 minutes of play. While they are still rare, they’re so much easier to get.

Same thing with the arguments about CoE: “oh, it gives one Charged Lodestone per run”, meanwhile I have a character in CoE armor and I got no Core or Lodestone drop from there.

Do you know what that is?

RNG.

“Reliable”, in many ways, is the opposite of RNG in this game.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

The fact that you don’t want to put effort into getting them is akin to asking for Anet to just mail you a stack.

Here, here, I’ll repeat it for players who are afraid others will get their shiny loot:

Erasculio.2914:

I wish ArenaNet would introduce a reliable way to get the Lodestones, even if it’s a very slow one. Receiving one in exchange for 10 laurels? Receiving one (per week per account) after doing one of the Orr Temple events? Even if slow (even the most expensive of them goes at most for 2.5 gold, and people who want to can make far more than that in 10 days or in a week), at least it would be reliable, and wouldn’t require using the TP.

lilstev.3498:

Progression I.e. your skill and char progress by fighting harder and harder mobs over time and tiers of difficulty.

Your skill doesn’t rise as your character becomes more powerful. In fact, your skill would rise more if your character kept his power level and then faced more powerful enemies. Otherwise, you can just outlevel the things you are fighting. This is, in fact, a rather common strategy in MMORPGs – if something is giving you trouble, just grind more levels until you can mindlessly stomp it.

Likewise, those “harder and harder” mobs don’t really exist. As mentioned in my example, killing the 10.000 HP monster when you do 1.000 damage isn’t any harder than killing the 10 HP monster when you do 1 damage.

“Progression” in a MMORPG is a time sink. It’s there to artificially inflate a game’s longevity as people grind levels, gear or both. Like many time sinks in MMOs, people have been deceived into thinking it’s actually a feature, but it’s not. It doesn’t really add anything to the game, not when compared to what it takes away.