Why has the price of ectos gone up by like 20% in the past week?
Something’s gotta be at fault here… Did you nerf rare drop rates or something?
And this is why it’s a waste to have developers posting in the forum. The game director has just posted claiming drop rates were not nerfed, then someone quotes him asking if drop rates were nerfed. Definitely this is the kind of thing worth having developers stopping their work improving the game.
The price of ectos is going back to what it was before the snowflake exploit, in which a lot of people exploited a cheap and easy way to make ectos.
I know that they are tossing around this dumb idea for a scavenger hunt, but does that not just smack of even more RNG stupiditry (new word).
The person designing it is Linsey Murdock, who became famous among the GW1 community for designing a scavenger’s hunt requiring players to go accross all chapters of the game.
It’s interesting to see that IoJ will soon go back to fighting our eternal enemies, ET.
Tedious grind does not equal challenge. Current system is extremely easy because it is a tedious RNG grind
Definitely. The current system to acquire Legendaries should be changed to be more similar to what the OP is describing. The Gift of Mastery is fine, but the Gift of Fortune, for example, is mostly a joke.
However, as expected, not everyone is going to agree with the change. I’m going to repeat myself from another topic, since it’s incredibly fitting for this topic as well:
Classic MMOs haven’t been made to cater to real players, those who want fun content. No, making content that is fun is too hard – “fun” is subjective so not everyone would enjoy it, and fun content is the kind of thing that takes a very long time to be developed, but that can be consumed very quickly by players. In the context of a monthly fee, in which the goal is to keep people playing for as long as possible, those who want to have fun are just in the way.
Classic MMOs have been made for a very specific group of players: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters. Players who do not want to play through fun content; no, they are very willing to play through content that even they don’t enjoy, as long as they get a reward in the end. This is perfect for MMO developers: they can make simple and mediocre content, just by adding a lot of +1s as rewards, and know that a small horde of grinders will consume the content they make for a very long time.
The thing is… It doesn’t work anymore.
Grinders are playing games basically as donkeys chasing a carrot in front of their faces. They don’t bother with skill, or with trying to understand a game, or with anything other than time spent. Ergo, they need a game to have grind in order to get their “fix” from it. Whenever they see a game with no grind, they are going to object; they cannot understand the idea of a MMO without grind (since all classic MMOs have been made to cater to them); and whenever someone talks about how grind is bad for MMOs, they always reply with the same thing, “then MMOs are not for you”, with the unspoken assumption that MMOs cannot exist without grind.
In reality, they have been fooled by designers of classic MMOs to believe that their addiction to grind is a good thing. However, not everyone is easily deceived, and as such MMOs are becoming a relatively small market. Considering how many MMOs exist right now, there simply aren’t so many grinders in the world to keep all those MMOs filled with people. Considering how grinders are also unlikely to leave a game in which they have grinded a lot (since that would mean losing all they “worked” for), it makes sense that a single big MMO would keep a lot of grinders, and the others would only get a small group of them. Little surprise, then, that all big MMOs released recently have been failing.
The MMO genre is stagnant. Normal people look at MMOs with disgust, as they are not so easily deceived by the grind. Whenever someone tries to do something new, grinders complain since they believe all MMOs should be only a new place to grind, and nothing else.
GW2 is trying to advance the genre, though, hence the small army of annoyed grinders in this forum. ArenaNet’s strategies are far from perfect, not to mention incomplete, but they are going in the right direction. Just as people used to say “If you want a good story don’t play FPS, go play RPGs” and then were forced to shut their mouths after the release of Half-Life and Bioshock, so will one day all the grinders who say “If yu don’t like grind don’t play MMOs, go play single player RPGs” will also be forced to shut their mouths. I wait eagerly for that day, and hope GW2 will manage to be it.
Each week we get a new topic here claiming that in the previous week the drop rate of ectos was much better. The fact we continue to get the same topic over and over, always claiming that one week before everything was great, is a nice proof of how ArenaNet should not listen to the forum when seeking game feedback.
I most certainly notice it when my guildies walk away from an average chest event with 2 ectos while I’ve seen 6 on my entire account since the lost shores patch.
Ectos don’t drop from chests…
An unrewarding game is a bad game. period.
Poor thing. That’s what MMOs have taught people – that a game is a reward, instead of being an experience. People used to play games for the experience of having fun, and that’s still why most people play single player games. It’s only MMOs that cater to the notion that the experience is nothing, while the reward is everything.
I’m still amazed that people accept this. I wonder, when a grinder goes to see a movie, does he demand to be paid? Since the experience is not enough, but the reward is everything, the experience of seeing a good movie should be felt as pointless, and so a reward would have to be given.
I’ve had this suggested to me before. It’s not my style. I think the MMO community and designers are too afraid to remove things like that.
Yep.
Classic MMOs haven’t been made to cater to real players, those who want fun content. No, making content that is fun is too hard – “fun” is subjective so not everyone would enjoy it, and fun content is the kind of thing that takes a very long time to be developed, but that can be consumed very quickly by players. In the context of a monthly fee, in which the goal is to keep people playing for as long as possible, those who want to have fun are just in the way.
Classic MMOs have been made for a very specific group of players: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters. Players who do not want to play through fun content; no, they are very willing to play through content that even they don’t enjoy, as long as they get a reward in the end. This is perfect for MMO developers: they can make simple and mediocre content, just by adding a lot of +1s as rewards, and know that a small horde of grinders will consume the content they make for a very long time.
The thing is… It doesn’t work anymore.
Grinders are playing games basically as donkeys chasing a carrot in front of their faces. They don’t bother with skill, or with trying to understand a game, or with anything other than time spent. Ergo, they need a game to have grind in order to get their “fix” from it. Whenever they see a game with no grind, they are going to object; they cannot understand the idea of a MMO without grind (since all classic MMOs have been made to cater to them); and whenever someone talks about how grind is bad for MMOs, they always reply with the same thing, “then MMOs are not for you”, with the unspoken assumption that MMOs cannot exist without grind.
In reality, they have been fooled by designers of classic MMOs to believe that their addiction to grind is a good thing. However, not everyone is easily deceived, and as such MMOs are becoming a relatively small market. Considering how many MMOs exist right now, there simply aren’t so many grinders in the world to keep all those MMOs filled with people. Considering how grinders are also unlikely to leave a game in which they have grinded a lot (since that would mean losing all they “worked” for), it makes sense that a single big MMO would keep a lot of grinders, and the others would only get a small group of them. Little surprise, then, that all big MMOs released recently have been failing.
The MMO genre is stagnant. Normal people look at MMOs with disgust, as they are not so easily deceived by the grind. Whenever someone tries to do something new, grinders complain since they believe all MMOs should be only a new place to grind, and nothing else.
GW2 is trying to advance the genre, though, hence the small army of annoyed grinders in this forum. ArenaNet’s strategies are far from perfect, not to mention incomplete, but they are going in the right direction. Just as people used to say “If you want a good story don’t play FPS, go play RPGs” and then were forced to shut their mouths after the release of Half-Life and Bioshock, so will one day all the grinders who say “If yu don’t like grind don’t play MMOs, go play single player RPGs” will also be forced to shut their mouths. I wait eagerly for that day, and hope GW2 will manage to be it.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of topics about how warriors focusing on melee are more powerful than everything else in the game…
The grind is still there dude they just made it ridiculous and gave more power to the people that just play at the TP all day long and manipulate the market as they see fit!
What you call “making the grind ridiculous” was actually making the grind unrewarding. Which is an excellent idea, and probably one of the simplest ways to prevent grinders from having much of an impact on the game.
The issue is that DR, by itself, is not enough. ArenaNet was smart enough to add DR, but not smart enough to realize that, if grinders would be culled, playing the TP would still allow people to make small fortunes too quickly, with many of the same issues that grinders bring to the game.
The solution is not to remove DR – DR is great for the game and should be kept forever. The solution is to add a system with the same goal as DR to the Trading Post, in order to cull market manipulators as well. Unfortunately, that would require courage that ArenaNet probably does not have.
I agree with the OP. Making the real players (us) suffer for things that bots do is just wrong
Nope.
It’s not making real players suffer. Real players, as in players who play to have fun as opposed to grind, don’t even notice DR. It’s in place to block grinders, farmers, addicts. Those are incredibly mad with DR, which is one more reason it should stay in the game.
Because people that enjoy grinding are are so bad, I don’t understand you people.
Yep, they are rather bad. They are the reason why MMOs are mediocre games: when you have people willing to play content that they don’t even find fun, but which they play in order to get a big reward in the end, you are telling game developers that they don’t have to bother making good games, rather games addicting enough.
That’s bad game design. Grind is basically telling people they are as smart as a donkey following a carrot dangling in front of its face. It’s a shame that indeed, grinders are not much better than that, but the end result is that MMOs are now seen as games made for grinders, and not for anyone else. However, there aren’t enough grinders for all the MMOs currently available, so it’s no surprise MMO after MMO has been failing.
GW2 is trying to go into the opposite direction – as ArenaNet has said, GW2 is a MMO for people who don’t like MMOs (aka, people disgusted with grinders, farmers, and addicts). Now, grinders are facing this MMO and cannot understand why are they not being rewarded for grind, since that’s how every other MMO works – but that’s not how GW2 works. And, being unwilling to accept that, grinders fill this forum with whining and moaning.
That is the part of the community ArenaNet should ignore. They are not the game’s target audience, and they are not a valuable part of the community anyway (since they are just going to leave to a different game, as soon as the next big MMO is released).
So lets curb that by removing DR so people can farm whatever they need
In other words, allow grinders to grind as much as they want? Don’t think so. As ArenaNet has said, “we don’t want players to grind”.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
There were meta builds of course but the fact still remains variety was a billion times better and that’s what the players want. Variety. In GW2 we have like 2 builds per character, yipee!
Nope.
In normal PvE, anything worked because normal PvE was so dumbed down it didn’t provide any kind of challenge.
In PvP, only the meta builds worked, so no big variety there. In PvE Hard Mode, each profession had at most two desired build, with everything else being considered trash.
There wasn’t more variety. There were a lot of underpowered skills and some players trying to play with subpar builds, which worked in normal, dumbed down PvE but nowhere else.
Meawhile, you have not replied to my question: do you think the currently available skills are balanced? Because if you think they are not, what good would it do to add even more imbalanced skills to the game?
DR is used to extend the “gameplay experience” under the guise of deterring bots.
DR is great for the game. It’s not there to stop bots. No, it’s there to stop something far, far worse: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters.
If grinders and farmers are the enemy people need to stop complaining about tp prices because guess what its the farmers and people that enjoy grinding mobs that usually help keep prices low.
I’ll support that when I can get foefire’s essence for under 15g like the rest of the exotics. ¬.¬
Well as long as we can’t farm prices stay high.
It’s very cute to hear people saying how grinders are the heroes of the average player, spending their valuable time to keep prices low.
Unfortunatelly, that’s just a big, fat, orange kitten.
Grinders concentrate gold, and thus are capable of buying things at increased prices, making everything more expensive than it would have been without them. If grinders did not exist and players earned money only by playing the game normally, everyone would be able to afford everything, since there wouldn’t be such a huge gap between players with a lot of gold and players with significantly less gold.
Grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters are all bad for the game. ArenaNet is culling them away, but of course the grinders cannot understand how is it possible that a MMO is not cattering to them.
Running dungeons I simply like or haven’t seen or fully completed yet, helping friends achieve their goals or complete their dungeon sets, playing WvW together, leveling alts.. whatever I end up doing is fun and good times with people in a fun game in first place.
It would be good if you could get all components for Legendaries doing that. And, to say the truth, you can get many of them just by playing the game, without grind. Those are the parts of the Legendaries that ArenaNet has done right.
Some other parts cannot be earned through common play. You are not going to get Charged Lodestones playing the way you do. You won’t find yourself with almost 500 globs of ectoplasm unless you focus on earning them. You won’t get 250 of all T6 materials just by playing casually.
And even if you were to get all of those playing the game normally… It would be very underwhelming. Earning a Legendary shouldn’t be a matter of just playing a bit every day for a few years; using an example above, the One Ring in Lord of the Rings wasn’t something dealt with after Frodo spent every day tending to the Shrine. Those items sould have lore, be part of a fun task, almost small events by themselves.
No, make some other profession. Try a warrior or a mesmer.
In Guild Wars 1 for example there were over a thousand skills, all with very different effects, and due to the secondary profession model used there were lots of combinations. Weapons had some impact on skill usage and skill combinations, but it was very little.
This is very short-sightened. GW1 had over one thousand skill, most of which were underpowered so they could not make the game too imbalanced. The result was that normal PvE was dumbed down so someone could play while AFK (just send a team or heroes with henchmen and they could do anything in normal mode for you), while Hard Mode was dominated by a few favourite builds that were obviously better than everything else.
There is a very simple argument against adding more skills to GW2: do you think the current skills are really balanced? If ArenaNet can’t balance even the few skills we currently have, do you really believe adding even more skills would make anything better?
Players can fall for the illusion that “more is always better”. After GW1, I hope ArenaNet has learned their lesson and now knows better than that.
The game was supposed to not harm the playerbase as they’ve stated multiple times (we love legit farmers)
That was lip service. ArenaNet has stated over and over that they don’t want players to grind – which means, they actually punish people who grind. And I’m very happy with that.
I would love if the mods banned everyone who makes a suggestion in the wrong part of the forum, especially when said suggestion has already been made one million times. And especially when it’s a suggestion as bad as this one.
I doubt they’ll have the time and/or will to re-record all of the story dialogue. However, I would LOVE them to add in the ability to (at least outside of the story dialogues) change your characters voice. It’s one of the things that I really just didn’t understand why you couldn’t change it. You have all this customization from personal storyline, to dyes, to armor transmutation and so on, but you can’t even change the pitch of your voice. Even PSO let you choose different voices.
This in an horrible idea.
It’s likely that one of the reasons why Traheanne talks so much is due to how it’s easier to record a single voice actor delivering all those speeches than record the same with the 8 voice actors who play the player characters.
Were ArenaNet to add one single other option to each race/gender combination, we would go from 8 voice actors to 16 voice actors. And don’t fool yourself into believing that merely artifical pitch modulation would work; we would only get even more complaints about the voice acting than we already do.
When ArenaNet were to add a new race, instead of needing 2 new voice actors, they would need 4 voice actors. Two new races later, they would need to record every single line spoken by our characters with 24 different voice actors.
24. Different. Voice. Actors.
A game in which characters only growl and scream can easily offer a big array of voice options. A game that actually wants to tell a story through those characters cannot afford that kind of luxury. Unless you want something like the huge success of The Old Republic, that used a small fortune in voice acting and today, well…
When I reached the worm pit area to kill the big blue worm I just stood there and pressed auto attack once. The worm died.
My hands weren’t even on my keyboard and mouse.The point that I’m trying to make here is that it doesn’t take any human intelligence to kill NPCs in GW2. A robot could do it.
Nice to see other people killed the NPC for you. It’s a great beginning to be carried by others starting in the tutorial zone.
Forum feedback does something that is equally important because it expresses how people FEEL while playing the game. And that is every bit as important as any metric or stat.
How a small and biased minority feels. Not how most players feel.
Well I’d much rather see a gathering skill in the game, like most other MMO’s use.
LOOOOOOOOOL!
Gathering skills in classic MMOs are not a feature, they are just a time sink badly disguised.
If you want to make the gathering system in GW2 an annoyance because you can’t deal with the few copper lost when you use a high level tool on a lower level node… Well, it’s more your own issue than anything else. The current system is definitely better than the grindy, RNG based based system from other MMOs.
This guild I’m in now came from serious raiding in WoW so I have no doubt in my mind they are far better players than I’ll ever be, but something is lacking in our dungeon groups. We struggle quite a bit with almost any dungeon. When I succeed with PUGs 100% of the time.(Which is just plain wrong)
I can tell you what the issue is.
Your guild is made by “serious raiding WoW” players who probably don’t understand that GW2 is very different from WoW. They are likely trying to play GW2 as if it were WoW, which would of course lead to death after death.
In fact, one of the worst aspects of GW2 is the mass of players from classic MMOs who cannot understand the way GW2 has been built to be different from those older, outdated games, and in doing so has actually created a better system. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to try something new.
1) The gear stat difference must not be massive (but I think folks would accept an enhancement)
Yep, Ascended gear was so well received, I’m sure ArenaNet should add more tiers…
/sarcasm
Hate to burst your bubble but there WILL be more tiers of gear in the future. Maybe not this year but it will happen. What they said pre-launch doesn’t matter anymore.
Irrelevant. The poster I was quoting was talking about how people would be willing to accept a new tier of gear as if it were nothing. Ascended gear proved him wrong.
1) The gear stat difference must not be massive (but I think folks would accept an enhancement)
Yep, Ascended gear was so well received, I’m sure ArenaNet should add more tiers…
/sarcasm
Does this game have loot tables for each mob, or is it truly RNG?
Loot tables. Otherwise all enemies could drop anything, which isn’t what happens in the game. There are specific enemies that drop scales, blood vials, and so on.
Using the mystic forge is just another form of gambling. and it’s quite sick to bring this into the game.
Not really. Many Mystic Forge recipes have 100% result rates, they are not gambling.
What is gambling, though, is grinding for rare materials – you spend time killing some enemies hoping they will drop the rare material you need.
Grinders don’t oppose this kind of gambling, of course. But it’s still bad for the game.
A few environmental effects can also bypass blocks. Many traps do so, for example, as well as some dragon attacks. Invulnerability may protect against those, but I’m not sure.
I wish we had been told about what kind of AoE they will nerf. All melee attacks that can hit multiple targets? All attacks in an area around the character? All the attacks that create those white circles in the gounrd? All of the above?
Why do I need to do pvp to finish the monthly pve quest?
1. There are no quests in this game.
2. The monthly achievement, which is what I’m going to assume you are trying to talk about, requires people to play WvW.
3. Ergo, if it requires players to play WvW, it’s not a “monthly pve” anything. It’s the monthly PvE & WvW achievement.
4. If you don’t want to fulfill the conditions required for the achievement, don’t get said achievement.
My only point being that people who play the game, who enjoy it, who like it, should indeed visit the forums and see what is being written and by whom it is written. It is the players responsibility to stay informed and to voice opinions. One of the easiest, proactive ways to do this is to visit the forums for about five minutes everyday, give voice to their opinions on current topics, and stay informed about some of the crazy that gets suggested here. The player base needs to be more engaged with the forums or other media.
LOOOL! You want people to GRIND the forum now, too?
Players should never “have” to do something they don’t enjoy about a game. The forum isn’t a place with a nice community in which to talk with other players about different aspects of the game – it’s closer to a cesspool with fanboys and whiners fighting against each other. Wasting five minutes per day here is way more than this place even deserves.
ArenaNet already listen to the forum more than they should. I wish they would listen less, or ideally that they would actually close this mess and go back to a fansite forum policy, like they had in GW1. Making an official forum just because other MMOs have one has been just a massive waste of resources.
But for real, when you see people who admit to posting but not playing in a while, are they just randomly promoting other games? Or are they (we) providing input, clarification, ideas for the game?
Often, they are haters who want the game to fail.
It’s amazing to watch how haters are common in MMO forums. It’s very easy to find people who want a game to fail. Typically they are the posters who complain about each single thing in the game, who make very constructive posts such as “This is not a good game” (without any kind of reasoning or constructive comment), who claim everyone with a different opinion is a “fanboy” or a “white knight”, and who never forget to mention how other MMO is much better (oh, and let’s not forget the occasional use of “made up numbers” as absolute proof that the game is dying, too).
It’s naive to think that everyone here wants GW2 to improve and become an even bigger success. As in any other MMO, haters are going to hate. The community and ArenaNet need to learn to identify those haters and ignore them.
This whole ‘forums aren’t everyone so ignore forums’ is completely wrong. People in the official forums are the people who are most invested. They’re the front-line for spotting problems that don’t obviously appear in metrics.
And one of the best reasons to ignore forum players is due to how they think they are better (or “more invested” or “front-line”) than everyone else.
More often than not, the forum posters are more forum players than game players. It’s not an issue that forumers aren’t everyone – rather, that forumers are the worst part of the entire community.
Umm.. all those features were there before DR was implemented and before you know who started running the show
The extra tab in storage was added in the last big update… I’m breathing air, but I wish I knew what are you smoking. Those conspiracy theories just don’t cut it.
hmm im not sure what would possibly interest you in an MMO then? They are built with repetitive content in mind like dungeons, PvP, raids etc
Classic MMOs are built through repetitive content.
Classic MMOs are also mediocre games.
For people who want the same old, same old grind based repetition of classic MMOs, well, there are a lot of classic MMOs out there.
GW2 has been designed for a different kind of player, that doesn’t fall for all the tricks the designers of classic MMOs like to use in order to pretend their playerbase is little more than a bunch of donkeys chasing carrots.
Even then, I never felt any more “skillfull” than my other party mates who kept getting downed by Kholer or getting instakilled by the flaming balls of death corridor. It just makes me really sad, and frustrated for them, and frustrated AT them for not getting it after a million times, because I know how it feels like to be on the other side – to be that noob who can’t command his fingers to move fast enough to run across the kittening corridor of death. There was no “oh yes, what an achievement! I made it!” feeling. All it was was "Uggh, glad that BS gimmick is over.
It’s a “learn to play” issue. If you were really skillfull at the game, you would be able to prevent your friends from being downed by Kholer, through any skill in the game suited for this (anything that gives Aegis or Stability in an area around you, anything that reflects or destroys projectiles, and so on).
GW2 has been designed with the goal of being “easy to learn, hard to master”. Whenever I see someone claiming the game has been designed around dodge, it’s easy to find out who is someone who has just learned the game, yet thinks he’s a master.
For the most part yea.
Or thats what DR has lead me to believe :/
And that doesn’t make any sense. If ArenaNet were really interested in creating inconvenience to sell convenience, there are many other things they would have done; and more importantly, many things they would not have done.
They would:
And so on, and so on.
ArenaNet is not making inconvenience to sell convenience. The DR system is not a plot to “force” players to buy gold from the in-game store. In reality, it’s a system designed to prevent grinders from running rampant, as they do in every other MMO. It’s a great thing that ArenaNet was brave enough to take a stand against grinders, even if they took some steps back when they added Fractals. They need to add more features like DR, not remove it.
Forum feedback would show:
Nothing.
The forum community is only a very small part of the total players. To make things worse, it’s not a general sample – it’s a specific subgroup of players. And to make things even worse, it’s a specific subgroup including many of the worst kinds of players in the game.
I’m not happy with the idea of the AoE nerf. But to say “no one in the forum complained about it so it’s not an issue” is ridiculous – the forum does not represent what players think, much less what is or isn’t an issue in the game.
Players are not game designers. More often than not, players are not capable of doing good game design. Developers should not ask players to tell them how to design a game, since this will more often than not lead to failure after failure due to lack of long term planning, lack of care about the impact changes have in the game as a whole, and the self-centered nature of most suggestions.
Funny think is Anet statet in their making off book, the community is part of the game. Without us they could not make the game how it is (their words not mine). So basically they should listen more to us they do now.
Yes, the community of players is part of the game.
The forum community is not representative of the community of players. It’s only a small group, biased in a very high number of subjects, so it doesn’t work even as a sample.
To think that the complaints of forumers is the complaint of all GW2 players is a joke. If anything, ArenaNet should listen to everywhere but the forums.
Its also great for Anet’s bank account!
So your argument is that ArenaNet was creating inconvenience (the DR system) to sell convenience (gold) in the gem store?
Why is this an issue for you?
It’s written in the OP. I suggest reading it.
Besides that, are you really sure that is an actual screenshot of the final content? I’d rather take it as as draft that the final version of it.
Even if it’s only a draft, it’s worth voicing it now so ArenaNet can change the system before it’s implemented.
The posters here are some of the only people giving public feedback.
Even ignoring all the other sources of feedback ArenaNet has (fansite forums, forums in big MMO sites, Facebook, twitter, e-mail, in-game interaction with players): the community in this forum is not a good sample of the community in-game. The opinion of a vocal minoroty is far from being the opinion of most players in the game, and as such it should not always be listened to. In fact, I’m not sure it should ever be listened to.
I would be incredibly happy if ArenaNet closed this forum. I used to think I could simply play the game and ignore the kind of people who like to post here, until BAM – ArenaNet listened to whiners from this place and decided to implement Ascended gear through the Fractals. Now I post trying to point to ArenaNet how forum feedback is bad, which is likely a waste of my time, but it’s the best I can do.
Obsidian Shards have two uses in the game:
They can be acquired by using karma in the Temple of Balthazar, when it’s not contested, and more recently ArenaNet added a way to get them in the Fractals of the Mist, being sold by the Fracal relics merchant. Both those ways are not random – you know exactly how much karma and how many relics you need for a single shard.
Why, then, when we see the items available for sale in exchange for the achievement-based laurels, AGAIN there are Obsidian Shards for sale? See the image here.
Obsidian Shards are not that relevant to the game. Three reliable ways to get them is a waste. Instead, ArenaNet should use this kind of system to remove some of the annoying RNG the game has. The perfect thing to make available through those laurels would be globs of ectoplasm. They are required for all crafting disciplines other than cooking, they are required for a lot of Mystic Forge recipes, and they are also required for Legendaries. More importantly, the only way to get them is through RNG – salvaging rare or exotic high level items, which may give a few ectos, or simply give nothing at all.
Considering how RNG is simply bad for the game, this new system of laurels would be a great way to reduce some of it. With proper balancing, it could be used as a source of ectoplasm and other items currently available only through RNG, unlike the Obsidian Shards.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
DR is used to extend the “gameplay experience” under the guise of deterring bots.
DR is great for the game. It’s not there to stop bots. No, it’s there to stop something far, far worse: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters.
Every player has a different definition of fun, and I hate it when people screech that a particular event/dungeon/mechanic isn’t fun- therefore everyone doesn’t find it fun- needs to stop posting
That’s rather irrelevant, tbh.
Grind has not been made to be fun. Not even the grinders find grind to be fun. The appeal there is in “working” a long time for something, and so getting a big, shiny reward after enduring something that was not fun. For some, such appeal is a sign of dedication, and of being hardcore. For others, it’s equating oneself to a mindless donkey chasing a carrot.
well theoretically, if they decided to take it on, which they won’t, this would be the time for ANet to learn from their “mistakes” and do it right with balance engineered into it from the beginning
Said “from the beginning” would require the current GW2 skills to be balanced. They aren’t. Ergo…
but those who complain that everyone was using fotm builds so therefore there was no build freedom…. they’re probably people who never did their own experimentation, or who stuck with a horrible guild because of I don’t know why
Playing with people who were willing to accept someone with a subpar build didn’t change the fact that those were subpar builds. “Unique snowflakes” were always easily stomped by the flavor of the month. Which was mostly due to a lack of balance, which was due to having too many skills.
I wish people complaining here would read this topic, all of it.
Amazing work, congrats! I wish we could see the video in slow motion, to learn as we watch you play.
Edit: Shameless plug to my Gear Builder (For all Classes) and Elementalist Damage Calculator if you really want to know how much damage Eles can do with certain gear..
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3A3Op-Hj3dOUkJRU0xvcng5ZWc/edit.
And many thanks for that, I made a post asking for the exactly same thing a few days ago. That really helps!
Agree/Disagree?
You are wrong. It’s a matter of wearing rose-colored glasses.
The skill system killed GW1. It’s the reason ArenaNet couldn’t release Chapter 4: Utopia, and instead had to reset everything and make a new game.
ArenaNet’s mistake was making more skills than they could balance. Instead of thinking ahead, they decided to listen to players, who more often than not lack long term planning, and thus implented more and more skills because “more is always better, right?”.
Nope.
Not only we had power creep through the chapters (Searing Flame was basically required to do any group content after the release of Nightfall), but we had incredibly broken professions that took years to be somewhat fixed (example). And that’s when they were fixed – often, ArenaNet’s solution to “fix” those professions was to give them a few overpowered skills and keep the professions themselves completely broken (Assassins with Shadow Form, Ritualists with Signet of Spirits, Paragons with ""There’s Nothing to Fear!").
The reason for this was simple: the game had simply too many skills. In each new chapter, ArenaNet added too many skills, more than they could balance. This destroyed GW1’s PvP, going from the great times seen imediatelly after the release of Factions, in which the great Koreans guilds shone, to the mediocre PvP saw at the time GW:EN was released.
The easiest way to approach balance was to keep a lot of skills underpowered, so at least they were out of the way. As a result, among the 1000+ skills available, only a few were useful. PvE was dumbed down so much that in common play anyone could achieve anything with nearly any build, giving the illusion that there were many available options, while those who played in Hard Mode demanded the same builds to be used all the time.
Not to mention the incredibly long time it took ArenaNet to fix things that were obviously imbalanced – again Shadow Form, also Ursan Form, and so on.
Skills in GW1 were a mess. They were more than ArenaNet could handle. And considering how imbalanced the currently available skills in GW2 are right now, I’m amazed that someone could think that adding even more (imbalanced) skills would make it any better.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
Some players are afraid that if ANet changes the legendary model to something actually challenging, then they wont feel special anymore. The fact of the matter is, anyone, EVERYONE, can get a legendary item.
I think that’s the main issue.
Some players are simply not the smartest, or the most skilled, or the most learned. The only thing they can do is play longer. The kind of player who, when they have a level 20 characters and can’t defeat a level 20 monster, won’t bother trying to learn to play or change builds or try a different strategy; they would simply grind level 5 monsters until they are level 40, and then try to kill that level 20 monster.
That is the kind of player classic MMOs catter to. They are willing to play a very long time through content they do not enjoy as long as they get to feel special about it. It’s far easier to please this kind of player than to please players who want well made, fun and thus difficult to make content. Ergo, they are nice sources of cash for pay to play MMOs.
GW2 promised to be the opposite of this – “we don’t want players to grind”. However, GW2 is a MMO, and all other MMOs catter to this kind of player; it’s little surprise, then, that so many of them have flocked to GW2, just like they have flocked to every other MMO previously released.
What ArenaNet needs to realize is that they cannot please grinders and normal players. They have many measures in the game to cull grinders away, like the DR system, at the same time they have added raw grind in the game through Fractals and the Legendaries.
Grinders like the way Legendaries currently are, and so they want the game to continue as it is. Normal players want Legendaries to be changed, so they are fun to get, and earning them is a matter of being skilled, not a matter of being willing to spend time doing content that isn’t fun.
The question is, who is ArenaNet going to catter to? Normal players, who are less vocal than the grinders? The vocal minority of grinders? Or both, and thus fail to make something great to either group?
If you don’t like Ascended items, just don’t get them.
If you don’t like Legendary items, just don’t get them.
If you don’t like achievements, just don’t do them.
If you don’t like dungeons, just don’t do them.
If you don’t like Orr, just don’t play there.
If you don’t like Southsun Cove, just don’t play there.
If you don’t like WvW, just don’t do it.
If you don’t like sPvP, just don’t do it.
If you don’t like the game, you shouldn’t play the game.
I know that was not your point in posting the above, but I think it’s important to notice something here:
Legendaries follow the classic MMO model (which is the cheap, easy model). Guild Wars 2 promised to follow the second model.
It isn’t bad to have content in the game that not everyone enjoys. I don’t like sPvP, but I understand some people do; instead of asking ArenaNet to remove it or to change it so it pleases me (and becomes something that those who like it now wouldn’t enjoy), I simply won’t play sPvP. If a game does not have any worth content that anyone enjoys, it should fail.
What is bad, and overall poor content, is grind. I know there are a lot of grinders – they flock to MMOs since the genre usually catters to them. I know there are some players who enjoy the idea of playing through content they do not think is fun, telling themselves that the “dedication” of doing something like that 10 hours a day for 5 months means they deserve something. However, such content is simply bad. It rewards time spent, which is not worth rewarding; it is a disrespect to gamers, since it equates them to mindless donkeys chasing a carrot dangling in front of their faces; and it helps developers to make mediocre games, since grind doesn’t require content crafted to be fun. Little surprise, then, to see how all classic MMOs are just mediocre – they have been made for grinders, and no one else.
ArenaNet claimed GW2 was going to be better than that. And while they have taken many steps in the right direction, Legendaries are still everything they promised would not be in the game. It’s still just a grind. And should ArenaNet catter to grinders? No.
Legendaries should always be optional (which means, among other things, that they should not have better stats than everything else). I like the way they reward interest in (almost) all aspects of the game; someone who only enjoys WvW is not going to get one, but that doesn’t bother me since they are meant to be optional, and it’s good to have something rewarding interest in all aspects of the game.
The Gift of Mastery is a step in the right direction. It’s not a grind – it’s something earned by playing a bit of everything. The Gift of Fortune, in other hand, is grind in its purest form.
In order to fix the Legendaries, I don’t think ArenaNet should change the way they work so it’s a 1000 hours long quest – that’s not something I consider to be viable. However, they could take the parts of the current Legendaries that work, and add a quest to replace only the grinding aspects that remain. It would be great if the requirement for gifts were moved around, and the gift for each legendary (Gift of Sunrise, Gift of The Bifrost, and so on) were a reward from a quest explaining a bit of the lore behind those weapons.
So, you discovered that a skilled player can do more than a non-skilled player in a videogame, that’s right … ?
What, you want a complex game in which a bad player is as effective as a good player? Is that your definition of complexity?
I would venture to say that a good percentage of people who play the game, given the right equipment setup, traits, and weapon selection, tailored to a suitable area to perform according to the preceding requirements, and having had the copious amount of practice this individual had at this run, could do the same, yes.
In other words, someone who trains in order to build skill could become a skilled player and do something less skilled players couldn’t. Your point is?
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