Guild Wars 2

After a lot of thinking, I think the forum members who maintain no-sub/money off xpacs which benefit both the devs and the customers, pure horizontal progression development ideals, etc. are correct in their opinion.

This includes maintaining your original plan to keep lvling moderate, and reduce grind. Gating I believe is something artificial, and if can be done away with will lead to a much more enjoyable game.

A company with ideals, such as Google, will always beat a company that sacrifices ideals to profit (think MS).

It’s the best way to do things in the end, and it’s where the new direction is and also the most profitable one. Don’t get thrown into the mess a lot of other companies are dealing with as a result of caving into pressure from interfering sources who just want to run their company the way “they” want to. It would most definitely ruin their game. Losing sight of their goals is the worse thing that can happen and being too calculative with their decisions will make them fall out in the bigger scheme of things.

The ability to make new characters at a whim and lvl them quick, will only attract new customers. Appealing to selfish thoughts such as thinking that forcing players to have to re-roll a character to patch up mistakes they made with their original one, to draw things out in order to profit, is not a good idea. Go big or go home, keep it so that anybody can give all of their classes max lvl. Then, progress to new horizontal progressive content. It is not a big deal if everybody ends up with max lvl characters in a short period of time. It already takes long enough for dedicated players to reach max lvl on all characters. By keeping this time span shorter than usual mmos out there as it is, you are enabling new players to come in rapidly. You will not lose money in your pocket at all. Instead you will gain reputation and glory points.

I believe GW2 has the potential to destroy WoW, which has gotten pathetically greedy. To do this, it has to return to its source and the purest form, think God Wars 2.

Agree if you want to keep this post up as long as possible to keep the attention of the devs. Also, sticky this if you are a responsible forum moderator (only a joke).

mulch.2586:

Yes, it’s a different, very moderate approach to progressing your character. There’s a lot lot more than there was in the first Guild Wars. So it’s at least something, and you don’t see people with a full set of 8 80s (yet).

But there’s no gating at all, except for leveling. No keys, no “hell levels,” no exponential increase in xp requirements. In fact, in my experience it speeds up as you get closer to 80.

In other games I played, it was less of a problem that there wasn’t much end-game, cuz it took forever to get to max. (e.g. my first NCSoft game, Lineage 2, would take ~2500-3000 hours of /played to get to max, after which there was sub-class and nobless and …)

There’s a high skill ceiling to this game, and if you are very skilled you can exploit the lvling very easily I guess. In a past game like Everquest, it was also gated in a sense because the mobs took a long time to kill regardless of skill. In GW2, it’s a great thing it has such a high skill ceiling and the ability to reward vastly different levels of skill. However, they might have to find ways to fix this as well because like you said it can be exploited too easily due to the lack of gating.

Gating is something artificial however, and it’s ideal to be able to reward players with above-average skill. With new ideas come new obstacles to tackle.

However, I still believe ideals are the way to develop a game, such as the pure horizontal progression ideal that some players have talked about here in the forums.

GW2, is by far the best mmo since Everquest. I haven’t played much of EQ back then, but i heard that at the time it had set a certain standard. GW2 takes rpg ideals, and makes them a reality, that is what all devs hope for in the end to achieve.

That is also saying a lot, because Everquest was essentially the mmo to play. The little I played of it, I was playing in first person and the scale and size of the worlds in EQ were tremendous (think names like Planes of Power). Everquest was the definitive rpg and also the monsters took forever to kill :/.

I believe alcedonia and the OP each have a good point, the key is to find what is possible and make it happen, although having some solo dungeons probably wouldn’t hurt. But ideals still remain and you can always hope that they’ll grant your wishes. Good luck OP.

How do you expect microtransactions to last though, the player-base is a limited and fixed amount. It’s not like endless people are going to surge in and buy cosmetics. I believe microtransactions won’t work in the long run once everybody has already purchased their share of cosmetics.

But if it works out, and can power future expansions, then I’m all for it.

I’m all for these new models encouraging free media for the enjoyment of the customers, such as the free Google Cloud operating system. It seems to benefit the producers too, I’m not clear on such business models, but this type of ideal might be hard to sustain.

Once again, if it works then it’s golden.

If the devs would make it so that future expansions require a subscription, it would benefit both the community and also the developers. It would allow for the developers to have resources available to continuously develop new content, and also allow continuous endgame content for players who desire to continue further.

All in all, I believe it was a great decision to make the original game free, but allow for players who desire to play future expansions the ability to subscribe.

Thanks.

Final Edit: I now believe this to be wrong, as the user base is right in their opinion and ANet should keep its original vision and promise because it will be the most profitable one in the end.