Guild Wars 2

Arenanet should not gate progression through special events by making 5-man dungeons a required step, period.

The best answer is to make such dungeons scale. The story instances in month three of the F&F living story scaled and did so just about perfectly. There is no reason a longer instance can’t do exactly the same, whether they want to actually call it a dungeon or not.

The lazy answer is to just ensure that if a 5-man dungeon is included in a monthly or living story event, that it is completely optional and participation is not required to complete the event and any meta-achievments/rewards/titles associated with the event.

I still can’t believe that Arenanet thought it was ok to have players spend scores of hours over four months working on the living story and related content, only to make completion and rewards hinge on mandatory participation in a 5-man dungeon. That one to two hours of forced grouping, playing a type of content ANet has been working hard to ensure is only really fun for a small percentage of the game’s population and over-whelming frustration for everyone else, would trump all the time and effort people put into the rest of the LS is just plain sad.

5-man dungeons that don’t scale, in a game with so many established mechanisms for scaling, is the most selfish content in a game that otherwise accommodates dynamic passive grouping for content and formal party sizes of 2-5 in number. That development time is spent on such niche content is bad enough, but that the appeal could be greatly broadened by adding scalability, yet they chose not to do so, seems to be a very selfish design decision highly in-congruent with the rest of the game.

There are two related issues here. Gating of mass appeal community content via 5-man dungeons, which should never, ever happen and the stubborn resistance to the natural evolution of dungeon content in this game, which is scalability based on group size. In a game that has been paradigm shifting in it’s approach to game design, it’s disappointing to see one area of the game suffer under such stubborn resistance to change from stale old MMO design philosophies.

StriderShinryu.6923:

As this debate continues, especially now that it now involves the personal story and the side story of the dungeons, I’ve found myself wondering what the anti-forced grouping crowd would feel about an alternative where there are essentially 2 ways to complete the story step in question.

For example, taking the Flame and Frost arc, what if Brahamm storming the Molten Facilities in a group required dungeon was one path and Rox needing your assistance in building some sort of device to help the freed refugees was the other. Completing either path would advance you to the next part of the arc, or you could to both if you wanted. The story told in the act of completing each arc, however, would of course be different. Obviously, you wouldn’t need to do the forced grouping to progress but you would need to do it if you really wanted the entire story.

The “band-aid” fix for the F&F debacle would be something like this. If they care about the player base at all, they will push a quick fix that will allow us to complete the story with out having to do the dungeon.

However, I really want to stress that this was a bad design decision, they knew it was a bad design decision, there were alternatives that would have been much better, but, for what ever reason, they chose the path of least resistance and most harm.

They acknowledged that they knew a 5-man dungeon would tick off a lot of players, so why do it? As I’ve said before, the instanced content from Month Three scaled just about perfectly. I find it metaphysically impossible to believe that they couldn’t have produced a more in depth, scaling instance for the finale that would have looked and played almost identically to the dungeon we did get. Some things would have had to been done differently, or been designed to intelligently alter the script based on party size, but they could have given us a very satisfying ending in the same setting, with the same story and much the same game play, and done it as a scalable instance.

I’m still as dumbfounded as I was when we first learned that they intended to end the four month LS event with a dungeon. I haven’t found any reasons or thinking that make the decision any more logical or acceptable.

To be honest, even though I should love content like this, I feel like Arenanet just completely wasted my time over the past four months by encouraging me to play in F&F, only to just completely ruin the entire thing with the 5-man Dungeon requirement.

Unless they come out and guarantee that they won’t do the same thing with this or any other Living Story content in the future, I just can’t see myself giving a rat’s kitten about Living Story.

As to dungeons in general, it’s really rather sad that a game with so many tools for scaling content insists on an arbitrary 5-man requirement for dungeons. Even if they remain stubborn on non-event dungeons, there is zero, nada, zilch reason why the developers on this game couldn’t or shouldn’t design any future event dungeons to scale for 1-5 people.

The instanced content for month three of F&F scaled just fine. I don’t think anyone believes for one second that they couldn’t do the same exact thing for a longer instance that looks and feels like a dungeon.

So, yeah, please Arenanet, let us know if you plan on ruining this LS with another mandatory 5-man dungeon, so we can make an informed decision and avoid completely wasting our time and enthusiasm on content you will just go and spoil in the end.

When the game launched, I think I was getting roughly one key for every six boxes. Not long after release, it seemed to drop to about 1:10. The past month or so, I haven’t seen a single key on either of two accounts, though I still seem to accumulate chests at roughly the old rate. So, yeah, they seem to really be letting greed trump fairness or common sense. (I’ve always maintained that more key drops would get more people used to opening chests and using the contents, which would, for some, prove the value of said chests and spur higher rates of key sales, but whatever Cash Shop dudes…)

The fact is it’s not just disappointing for those who now will not see the four month Living Story to it’s conclusion, but it’s also sad to see old, failed MMO design philosophies taint and diminish a game that on so many other levels has made a point of doing away with them.

It completely obvious to anyone that if any MMO in the history of the genre could easily and efficiently transition away from dungeons with an arbitrary group size requirement into something much more flexible, it’s GW2. The game scales so well in so many ways that there is no technical excuse.

Instead, it is a failure on the part of some developers to be able to frame their approach to game design with in the paradigm shifting philosophies of the game they are working on. It’s sort of the intellectual equivalent of deciding that motor cars should be designed to accommodate horse rigging, or that cell phones need to be able to plug into a telephone jack, or that air planes should be built with sails.

I think the disappointment goes beyond the incongruity of ending the living story with a forced 5-man dungeon. It’s disappointment that Arenanet didn’t have the sense to know not to do so, or lacks in leadership to the point that no one stepped in and shot it down after the live event team working on this event decided to go that route.

2013 Arenanet is not pre-2013 Arenanet. I don’t know what happened. It could be the result of internal re-organization, the loss of key people or both. This game is completely amazing, but if I didn’t know better, it would be easy to think that the current developers are trying to actively degrade the game.

They’ve admitted that they knew that ending with a 5-man dungeon would alienate a lot of players, they still bear the burden of the fact that most people never complete their Personal Story because of the mistake of requiring a 5-man dungeon for completion and, yet, they still went ahead and ended the Living Story with a mandatory Dungeon?!?!?

We’ve all seen people who have such a strong fear of success that they sabotage themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that behavior before in a company with over 100 employees.

The immediate band-aid fix would be to remove completion of the dungeon from the F&F event completion requirements and once the dungeon closes allow people who didn’t complete the dungeon to visit the key NPCs and complete the story.

Moving forward, they really need to stop doing things they know will alienate players, (with no real good reason) and start finding ways to make Dungeons more inclusive, while maintaining the ability for five and groups to play them and find them challenging.

To be honest, the entire Living Story thing seems like a wasted four months and that development time could have been much better spent delivering on the doubling/tripling of world DEs Colin talked about last fall and finding ways to allow Dungeons to scale for smaller groups. (If they refuse to work at making dungeons more inclusive, then I’d actually prefer to see them work on more extensive open world, non-instanced “dungeons”, like the mini dungeon in Gendarran Fields, or instanced dungeons that can handle any number of players, like Flame Legion Tomb in Diessa Plateau, rather than wasting time trying to make current 5-man dungeons even more obnoxious to play).

I really hope that they will also commit to never again gate progress or completion of a Living Story or other world event with niche content, like a 5-man dungeon, which precludes a large portion of the playerbase from having fun completing, or completing at all, an event that they have spent a good amount of time following and participating in.

Yeah, pricing on these is non-nonsensical, but pretty much in line with the generally flawed pricing strategy on many items offered. It should be fairly obvious that a lower price on the hair kit would not only be fair, but might actually encourage more frequent purchase/use of those kits by people to routinely change their look.

It could be that the narrow price gap is meant to encourage people to just spend a little more for the full make-over kit, but, imo, that just results in far fewer people buying/using look changing offerings far less frequently, leading to far lower annual revenues.

I’ve stopped trying to make sense of gem store pricing. We are talking about virtual goods with zero per item cost. Pricing for maximum sales and revenue should be the goal, rather than trying to see exactly how much they can eek from a few buyers with deep pockets and/or poor impulse control, regardless of over all revenue.

lordkrall.7241:

Cameirus.8407:

No contradiction at all.

One is spontaneous grouping, no organisation involved.

One requires organisation, finding a group, and so on.

Anet i their manifesto said they wanted the first type of gameplay, but are increasingly delivering the second

Shall we take a look on the patches released since the game went live?
I can guarantee you that the vast majority of things that have been added/changed/whatever during all that time have been specifically to the first type of game-play mentioned.

Not really. Colin had said before release that they planned on increasing the number of Dynamic Events in the game world significantly over the course of the first year, with a doubling or tripling of DEs the target goal and the idea that they would have enough to rotate DEs in and out to keep the game world fresh.

We are now eight months in and there have been very, very few new DEs added to the world, (in fact, there are still DEs broken that have been broken since launch). If they had actually managed to deliver on those plans, most players who prefer not to be forced into 5 man groups for content would have plenty to do in an “Living World”.

Instead we got this “Living Story”, which was really just a lot of smoke and mirrors to try to make a very little content seem like some thing more than it was. Then, to bring the whole thing to a conclusion, (for content that needed a really satisfying conclusion to even justify the effort and development time), they decided to make that conclusion a five man dungeon! The entire event was open world or scalable instances, until the bait and switch at the end!

It makes no sense. Is a temporary, one hour dungeon going to mean anything to Dungeoneers? Of course not. All it does is rob everyone else of a satisfactory ending to a four month, content thin affair and that decidedly unsatisfactory ending just makes obvious how vapid the entire Living Story event really was.

IMO, the dungeon team should leave existing dungeons and world content alone and alternate between creating new Fractals and new dungeons. The rest of the live team should be working on Dynamic Events and Special Events and not touch Dungeons, period.

Better yet would be to have the dungeon team work on implementing and perfecting scalable dungeons, in addition to the occasional Fractal. WildStar is making dungeons that scale from one person up to raid sized groups. Given all the ability to scale content already in GW2, you can’t tell me that it would take much more than a surrendering of their stubborn insistence on 5-man content for them to allow Dungeons to scale for 1 to 5 people. If the current team isn’t capable of doing so, then maybe they need to find developers who are.

Vulpis.8063:

Joseph Skyrim.2470:

MatthewMedina.5419:

…our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

If that was really true then the game should have either been released with an in-game party dungeon finder, or better yet dungeons wouldn’t be limited to 5 man instances. Won’t comment on dungeon yet till I give it a try, but is this going to be the “standard” fare in the future? Ending stuff with a 5 man instance, so that we can play together but separately?

And funny, they do a great job with getting people to play together in the open-world events without resorting to forcing people to group. If anything, forced-grouping makes a good many people play together less, becuase they’re sick of being put into the position of having to group instead of doing if they want to group. Very important difference there.

Exactly. If dungeons could scale from 1-5 people, you would actually see more people grouping, not fewer. The arbitrary five person requirement is archaic and discourages people from doing dungeons and playing with others.

It also would have been nice, given how well the game scales, if they had designed some large non-instanced dungeons out in the game world. There are a few small mini-dungeons in the game and there is the instanced Flame Legion “dungeon” that scales to any number of players, while still being challenging and fun. The only reason we don’t have non-instanced and scaling dungeon content to a much larger degree is due to backwards, stubborn thinking.

There really are no reasons Arenanet can give us for the decision to make the conclusion to the LS a 5 man dungeon other than that’s what they felt like doing, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that the choice would alienate a fair portion of the game population. (There seems to be a lot of passive aggressiveness towards customers on the part of a portion of MMO developers every where).

Way back when Colin told us that to keep the game world feeling fresh, we would see a constant influx of new events across the game world, with the prediction that by the end of year one, we would have two to three times as many DEs in the world as we had at launch. Now, we are eight months in and not only has none of that materialized, but there are still events in game that have been broken since launch that have not been fixed or replaced.

It seems that this living story thing was what we got instead of a concentrated effort on DE development. I’m sorry, but the Living Story is just a big smoke and mirror show to try to mask how little actual content addition the game world has seen since launch!

Shelve the entire LS concept and get back to work on what was originally promised. GW2 has a massive, beautiful game world and level scaling allows players more and more access to that content as they level up. What holds the game back is the concentration of DEs being appropriate only in low level zones AND the staleness of a “living game world” where “dynamic events” have failed to evolve.

I’m guessing it’s “working as intended”. It seems to me that a portion of Arenanet have been working very, very hard to turn this mass appeal game with the potential to someday match peak WoW for success, into a niche title that suffers the same languishing fate as pretty much every MMO since WoW.

This game and this developer had something truly special that bucked established MMO paradigms and charted a new direction for MMOs that could scale content for level and numbers that broadened the appeal while not slipping into complete “easy mode”. It seems that since launch the revolutionary forces inside Arenanet have either left or have been stifled and now we are experiencing the resurgence of developers who want to make the game as much like every other failed, old school MMO that has ever been as possible. It actually feels like pre-launch Arenanet was just replaced with the SWTOR developers post launch.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

The entire point of GW2 was that it removed barriers to playing with others, rather than forcing players to play with others. You guys are getting further and further off track and it’s becoming very worrisome.

I thought one of the lessons all of us took from past special events was that people didn’t want to be forced to do five man content to complete such events. The two instances from last month scaled almost perfectly for groups of various sizes, which makes the decision to return to the tired old set party paradigm even more perplexing.

I’m sorry, but if you can make story instances scale, you can make longer story instances that approximate a dungeon run scale as well. (Let’s be honest, even regular dungeons should scale and it’s an absurd shame that even though Arenanet had all the tools needed to make it happen, it’s going to take WildStar to actually bring the obvious evolution of dungeons that can scale from one player to raid size a reality).

If the choice had been a string of four or five story instances that take an hour or so (all together) and scale just like any other story instance, VS. a five man dungeon that takes an hour, how was it not obvious which was the right choice to finish up a four month Living STORY event that hadn’t forced five man parties at any other step along the way?

Is this resume building coming before what’s actually good for the game? Or is it just “brain drain” and “thought rot” that have left Arenanet unable to progress the paradigm shifting game they created?

IMO, the entire living story has been a very mediocre affair that really needed a fulfilling conclusion that everyone could enjoy to tie things together and make the four months worth the player effort and design time. You guys chose a path that you knew would end up excluding and disillusioning a fairly large portion of the player base. You had many other far better options, but still chose the one that you knew would ruin the entire thing for a lot of people.

Why? I mean seriously, why? My brain hurts trying to comprehend the reasoning!

There is no reason to nerf the skill in PvE. They split other skills they nerfed this patch, I honestly don’t understand why they didn’t split this one when such a split was so obviously the way to go.

I can only conclude someone gets a jolly from pointless, mean spirited nerfs.

Alphonse.4356:

It seems pretty obvious that anet has its own idea of how this game has to be played. Since I don’t like this decision, I’ll just let it go. I did the same with personal story and jumping puzzles. As soon as I can find a better game, I’ll be gone in a heartbeat.

The one comment I will make is that in a game that is supposed to support “play the way you enjoy to play”, the few stubborn hold outs of old school thinking are just all the more mindless. The game is actually more “play the way you want to play, unless we decide that some content has to be played our way, in which case we will do everything in our power to ensure you play it exactly as intended, because you really shouldn’t be able to play your way all the time, or our game will be seen as easy mode and our egos as game designers will suffer and designers from other companies will make fun of us, which will make us sad, even though those other developers would die to have a game as successful as ours”.

I actually think that should be the official mission statement moving forward…

HiddenNick.7206:

Turgon.8625:

Just read over at massively that the living story ends with a 5 man instance. What a disappointment for all those out there who won’t go near that sort of content.

This feels exactly like the pain of the personal story.

You could do the entire 1-80 personal story solo except for the final mission where you suddenly had to go into a dungeon. I still don’t know how my story ends….

All the living story content has been doable solo so far, and I have very much enjoyed it – please don’t make this ending a 5 man! I am all for 5 mans being used for content just not for the culmination of a plot line that has been open to everyone so far.

I love GW2 but I would rather just logout then be forced into dungeon play.

What you really ask for is the removal of all cooperative play from the game and that’s the kind of thing that would be a deal breaker for huge majority of people! There needs to be content that REQUIRES cooperative play or only few people will continue to play it! That’s because people need to have reasons to play together. That’s a huge thing for every MMO.

Umm…no. The arbitrary requirement of having five people just turns a lot of people off of “group content” in this game. To assume that players will only group for instances if they are forced to is ludicrous. If dungeons scaled for 1 to 5 people, a lot more people would do them and a lot more people would participate in group activities in this game.

A lot of people who would rather stay away from all the large guild BS play in small guilds, which may often just be made up of a few RL friends. My guild is like this and we would all love to do group content together, but by requiring five players, rather than two, three or four, we have extremely limited opportunities to do group content together.

Forced grouping in a game that so successfully supports scaling every where else is just plain silly and evidence of backwards thinking in an otherwise forward thinking game.

We really, really need a public test server. It’s pretty obvious the Arenanet Devs doing profession balance are so over-whelmed that they just aren’t able to approach balance in a proper manner. Adding a Public Test Server will help crowdsource the tuning process and provide real feedback on the effects of nerfs/buffs on viability, playability and enjoyability.

Others have hit upon the truth that seems to have escaped Arenanet: The counter-balance to zergs is to increase the scope of AoE damage, not decrease it. Either an MMO has AoE damage that needs to be feared, which then requires people to spread out, or it has AoE that can be shrugged off with barely a snicker, in which case densely packed zergs rule.

I honestly don’t understand what has happened to Arenanet post-launch…

I completely agree with the OP. Arenanet has already acknowledged that there are too few fun/efficient/synergistic builds in the game, with some professions suffering worse than others. When you are trying to expand the number of fun/capable builds, you don’t start by systematically nerfing the builds that actually sit at what should be the desirable point of playability!

I say no more nerfs for the rest of the year, unless it is something so completely beyond balance that the need is undeniable. Focus on bringing one build per profession per month up to snuff until all professions have eight solid/fun/viable/competitive builds, then balance all the top tier builds relative to each other, using fine adjustments, rather than ham-fisted nerfs.

Thief is Tied with Elementalist and Guardian for Lowest HP in the game. They do not have the fewest weapons, (that goes to Elementalist) and what form your off hand weapons take are irrelevant. Thief is actually the only profession for whom the #3 skill varies based on which offhand is selected.

Thief is one of my favorites to play, (I have a level 80 of all professions except for Engineer). I don’t think the profession itself is over-powered, but it’s possible certain builds need to be slightly adjusted and further balance achieved by improving other professions, where appropriate. However, if you argument on why they aren’t OP’d starts with three bullet points that are misleading or untrue, you probably aren’t doing the profession any good with your post.

In general, there is a lot of buffing that needs to happen to various professions and builds through out the game and more viable build diversity for all professions should be an over-riding goal for the remainder of the year.

IMO, outside of specific sPvP tweaks, Arenanet shouldn’t be nerfing anything until they have successfully managed to boost build diversity and general playability for all the professions. One they have successfully expanded the number of fun/viable builds across the board, they may find that nerfs that mike make sense in the current meta require little or no action amidst a stronger variety of builds for all professions.

It may seem like it would be less work to just nerf the most powerful builds, rather than try to raise up a bunch more to be comparable and that may be true. The thing is, though, that many people have gravitated towards some of the top builds not because they theory-crafted for min/max or decided to copy/paste the current Flavor of the Month, but instead have arrived at their builds while working out what kind of build was fun to play for their profession. Nerfing powerful builds to bring them in line with mediocre ones is likely to also nerf fun builds to the point they are no longer very fun. Balance would be counter-productive to the game if the point of parity where one where nothing is very fun to play!

I’ve played many, many MMOs over the last 14 years and I think balancing away fun game play is probably one of the most common game killing mistakes that developers make after release. Nerfs to FotM builds tend to go overboard in most games, with developers deciding to just nerf such builds to uselessness, rather than trying to find a way to maintain the flavor, while restoring balance. I don’t think Arenanet has gone to the common extreme, but that doesn’t mean that nerfing, rather than buffing, improving and tuning, is actually preferable.

I agree. It’s one thing if some of this stuff comes back around on a yearly basis, but given how much work needs to be done on so many zones in the game, (ideally, you should not have to limit your playable zone list based on availability and density of events), I just don’t get why so much time is wasted on apparently one-off stuff.

Looking at GW2, I see a few current problems. Rewards for ordinary players are too limited. Serious deflationary pressures have ensured that most goods available for trade on the trading post can’t even fetch prices higher than what a vendor would provide, once TP fees are factored in. Certain high end items are so rare that they probably should never have been allowed to be traded, as they have just provided fertile ground for wealthy players to manipulate and profit to the detriment of the majority of the player base. Also, too few money sinks exist for the very wealthy targeted specifically at them, while some broad based money sinks are impacting the ability of the average player to fully enjoy the game. (Since inflation only really exists at the very high end of items on the Trading Post, while the rest of the player driven economy has become stagnant, current balancing of the inflow of wealth into the pockets of average players via ordinary game play has clearly become too severe. These players do not contribute to the inflationary niches in the market, they are priced too far out of those markets. However, they do find that their game play doesn’t feel very rewarding, which threatens their status as playing supporters of the game).

What real world economic theory should apply to GW2? If you paid any attention to my post, you’d know that the answer is none of them. The game economy is small enough to allow for very specific tuning and the overriding goal of managing the economy is to ensure that the economy supports, rather than impedes, the ability of as many people as possible to keep on enjoying the game.

First off, Economics is a field of many theories on how economies work. Many theories can show evidence as to why they are correct, even though the theory itself may be extremely different from another theory that can also show evidence in support of itself. Point being that there is no definitive ideological economic theory that has been proven to be “correct”, though some have been shown to be less correct than others.

Second, game economies are extremely limited in scope and many factors that play into real life economics have zero influence in a game. No one has to worry about basic human needs in an MMO economy. We don’t need shelter, food, water, health care, etc… Wealth in an MMO does not produce benefits for the economy. Wealthy players do not create jobs. They don’t create infrastructure. They don’t create investment opportunities. There usually is no ownership of land. Wealth doesn’t buy you a higher quality of life, lack of wealth doesn’t mean you can’t thrive or find happiness. Etc…

So, real world economic theories are a morass of often ideologically driven, often contrary models for trying to explain extremely complex systems of economic interactions. Most of the core driving factors of real world economies do not exist in a game economy. Thus, it seems pretty logical that going into managing a game economy, one would put ideology completely aside and be fully aware that the game economy may not evolve in a way that is in any real way analogous to real world economics.

That doesn’t mean it’s pointless to try to understand and manage a game economy. Not at all. However, observation of the economy and developing a theory of how that individual game’s economy functions trumps any thoughts or ideas one might have on real world economics. Game economies can’t prove RL theories, because the artificial system is exponentially more simple and more limited, as shown in a simplified manner above. What might be disastrous for a real world economy may be very beneficial for a game economy and vice versa. Leaving personal economic ideology behind, imo, is crucial to trying to understand and manage a game economy.

Ok. So, the wrong thing to do is to try to use the game economy as a testing ground for RL economic theories and ideology. What is the right thing to do? Well, supporting the over all design philosophy of the game is a good motivator. Ensuring players have fun is a good motivation. Allowing players to have things to work towards is good. Minimizing frustrations and ensuring that players feel that their play time is rewarding is a good motivation as well.

Really, balancing the economy to facilitate fun, motivating game play and minimizing frustrations should be key goals in managing a game economy. Inflation is often an enemy of fun, but sometimes it can be so much of a focus that rewards for game play are tightened too severely. Individuals who are able to accumulate large amounts of wealth may be seen as a sign that the economy needs to be tightened, but many players who play MMOs to accumulate wealth act as defacto money sinks, as the majority of the money they earn will never be spent, unless some high end, attractive money sinks exist in the game for them to spend their money on.

I think an MMO lends itself to centralized management than the real world does and accepting that wouldn’t make a game economist a communist or socialist. It would just make them a pragmatist when it comes to managing the extremely limited economy that exists in the game, plus the fact that the over-riding motivation is to ensure that the largest percentage of people playing the game have fun and remain customers. (In the case of GW2, overall fan base happiness and overall population numbers feed cash shop revenue. Even though only a certain percentage of players actually buy gems on a regular basis, all players contribute to the environment in which those willing to pay can find a game worth playing)!

The game has so many tools and mechanisms built in to allow for all sorts of content scaling that it’s an absolute design crime that dungeons can’t scale to party size and also offer Expert Mode for those who want even more of a challenge.

Arenanet have completely missed the boat on Dungeon content scalability for the game. WildStar is planning to offer dungeons that can scale from one player up to raid size groups. GW2 should have been the first to do so, but it seems Dungeons are one area of MMO game play where they failed to innovate and rebuild design expectations from the ground up.

GW2, in pretty much every other area of the game, has proven that content that can scale to any character and any amount of people IS THE WAY to design a contemporary MMO. Proper scaling, with additional optional difficulty modes, could allow the game to cater Dungeon Content to a large swath of players from Casuals to Hardcore. I’m still rather confused as to why they have failed to produce on this front.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

In the case that AC was made harder, that’s a matter of opinion. Having personally reduced numbers like HP and damage, and modifying the skills used to not do more devastating things, I know for certain that it is numerically easier than it was before, and more forgiving to mistakes.
However we increased team based difficulty. We designed things to require players to coordinate and work together more than before, since that is our original goal: To create challenging content build for 5 coordinated players. This is why we’re not allowing it to scale like the rest of the game does. It’s set and built for 5, so it doesn’t need scaling.

IMO, that line of thinking is just wrong and runs contrary to what makes this game work. You could broaden the appeal of dungeons in a way that would make a lot more people happy, with out removing the challenge for those who want it, but refuse to do so. That comes off as stubbornness with a foundation in stale, old MMO design tropes, thumbing it’s nose at everything that makes this game so incredible otherwise.

It’s painful for some of us fans of the game who are long term vets of the genre and can’t understand why some developers for the game seem determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory when it comes to this game. To have the tools so readily available to allow Dungeons to scale to a large swath of the player base and refuse to go that route definitely ranks right up there as one of the most mind numbing AAA MMO design missteps in at least the last half decade.

Wildstar is going even further by allowing dungeons to scale from Solo all the way up to Raid size groupings. IMO, they get the new Paradigm, while some at Arenanet don’t comprehend that paradigm, even though GW2 itself has spearheaded the current paradigm shift for the MMO genre!

You could have been the “father” of truly scalable MMO dungeon design, but apparently have decided to become a stubborn defender of a stale, dying design model, which once again is more confounding given the game you design for.

Sorry for the rant, but one of the reasons I so strongly embraced this game years before release was due to the promise and potential it exhibited in shredding MMO design tropes that have been proven time and again to be so deeply flawed. GW2 is a stand out in intelligent, creative and original MMO design, but, sadly, those traits are not consistent across all aspects of the title. I didn’t expect perfection, but I also didn’t expect any senior designers for the game to let status quo, old guard thinking get in the way of intelligent, innovative and/or fun game design.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Fiontar.4695:

I hope the other things you’ve been working on aren’t more “fun” improvements to dungeons and world PvE mobs. So far, you’ve proven the existence of “anti-fun” as a real property and your pursuit of it has been disconcerting! (It’s probably not a good sign to have some fans breath a sigh of relief to learn that the new dungeon was not created by the Dungeon Team…) ;P

What someone defines as fun is often different from what another person calls fun. I’m sorry our dungeon work has not appealed to you and others, but there is an audience for what we do. My hope is that in the future, we can build something that appeals to you and other folks currently not on board with our dungeon content, while still staying true to the people who have enjoyed our content thus far. Bridging that gap is not an easy process, but I am confident that such things are not impossible feats

The problem is that you took the lowest level dungeon and made it a nightmare for people new to dungeons. Supposedly this was to make dungeons “more fun”, but it had the opposite effect for many. Do some people find higher difficulty dungeons fun? Of course they do, but that’s why most game developers add an expert mode to their dungeons, rather than forcing the heightened difficulty on everyone.

We also heard how steps were being taken to make world encounters “more fun”. Well, the changes to the Krait vets and champs is not fun, at all. It has actually created the sad situation were people are just completely bypassing events where these new mechanics are evident.

The thing I find most odd about the strategy on dungeon development in this game is that the game completely lends itself to scalable difficulty levels for dungeons. The mechanisms for all sorts of scaling are in place. It makes the decision to redesign dungeons to be even tougher by default, rather than adding Expert Mode, even more perplexing.

To be honest, even difficulty levels for dungeons doesn’t take the obvious potential of the game far enough. Due to the way loot is distributed in the game, with each character having their own loot rolls, rather than sharing a group loot pool, there really isn’t any reason why Dungeons shouldn’t be designed to scale for smaller groups than five people. In other games, someone able to solo or duo a dungeon meant for five people would allow that person or duo to walk away with a dis-ordinate amount of loot. In GW2, that isn’t an issue. (This makes tuning of dungeons to prevent solo/duo action, at any cost, very confusing, since these people aren’t able to earn more loot than they would doing the dungeon with a group and will almost certainly spend a lot more time completing said dungeon than they would have in a competent group).

To sum up, a. please stop working on making world encounters “more fun”, if the Krait changes are an example of what you have in mind and b. it would be better to see you guys spend time on broadening the appeal of dungeons by allowing difficulty tiers and scaling for less than 5 people, rather than obsessing over finding ways to prevent people from finding ways to enjoy dungeons that you didn’t intend, but are otherwise harmless.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

This was not built by the dungeon team, but instead by the living world team. William and I are currently working on other content in the game, which is why there weren’t any significant changes to the core dungeons this last patch.
We’ve been playing and giving feedback on the new dungeon though. It’s a different flavor from our normal dungeons, but still tasty they are trying some interesting things we will be keeping an eye on.

I hope the other things you’ve been working on aren’t more “fun” improvements to dungeons and world PvE mobs. So far, you’ve proven the existence of “anti-fun” as a real property and your pursuit of it has been disconcerting! (It’s probably not a good sign to have some fans breath a sigh of relief to learn that the new dungeon was not created by the Dungeon Team…) ;P

The problem with this approach is that the most popular builds are often not played by people who have just adopted the Flavor of the Moment build, but rather have just gravitated to the build because after trying out different things found it was the most fun build for them.

All of the builds for my various alts are build I enjoy playing, most I arrived at on my own and many are close to what have become established as popular builds for their profession. (I was playing an Elementalist D/D build almost identical to recent D/D bunker builds a couple weeks after launch and with out consulting any forums for the build).

Sometimes, people arrive at these builds not just because they are the most fun for them personally, but are the only builds the player has found that make that profession fun to play.

I think this occurs fairly often in GW2 just because of the way the trait systems and individual traits have been designed. Theoretically there are tens of thousands, or even more, build combinations, but there are so many trash traits and obvious trait synergies that the number of actual, viable options are relatively few in number.

Arenanet have already said that most professions have too few viable build options. Nerfing top builds may “level the playing field”, but in the end it just decreases the number of fun/viable builds which is extremely detrimental to the “fun quotient” of the game.

They would be much better served by first buffing some popular builds in each profession to bring them on par with some of the best builds in the game. Fine tune the balance, with the goal of accomplishing at least six equally powerful/fun popular builds.

Once that is accomplished, I’d look at the metrics on the least used traits for each profession, (my guess is that each tree has a number of traits used by less than 5% of the player base, or even less). Then I’d look at either improving or replacing a few “wasted” traits in a way that would introduce a few new, different, fun and capable builds to each profession.

Variety AND fun should be the goal. Balance dictates limiting the number of truly viable builds in order to facilitate easier efforts at attaining balance, but GW2 just has too few fun/viable builds for all professions, some being worse off than others. Too often MMO devs seek to just make their jobs balancing the game easier by severely limiting viable choices, but this often just leads to a more balanced, but less played game.

I’m going to guess that they have been working on the China localization instead of working on an expansion. I would guess that NCSoft probably lent them Chinese speaking staff members to help with the language localization, but I doubt Arenanet would have handed off the entire effort to NCSoft. (Plus, I remember a couple tweets in recent months that seemed to hint that Arenanet people were working on the version for China).

That would probably actually be a good thing, since it would help explain the some what disappointing level of live development and apparent lapses in cohesive oversight seen over the past six months.

I hope they will soon be able to refocus on getting the core game back on course and begin to pull together plans for intelligent expansion of the game moving forward.

I have two accounts and do them almost every day for both accounts. This is even though they are slowly sucking the fun out of the game for me. The rewards are just to great to ignore.

I really wish they would expand the daily variety to include elements that can be readily achieved just by going out and exploring the broader PvE world, rather than being made to jump through so many tightly specific hoops. Another issue is that DEs in one form or another are often in the dailies, but the low density of DEs in the level 35-80 game world, along with the very low broadcast range, really forces people to just stick to the appropriate starter zone or 15-25 zone for their daily completion.

The dailies would be fine if you could adventure in any level range zone and have roughly equal efficiency in completing your daily. They would be even better if they covered things like Hearts, PoIs and Vistas, on top of the current selection, so that people could go back to exploring and free roaming with out having to sacrifice daily completions.

It’s obvious that it’s because…ummm…it’s just that…ummmm….I have no idea.

Well, ok, I get why they might want armor to provide a solid clue as to profession at a quick glance in sPvP and WvW, but I really don’t see a reason why “Town Clothes” couldn’t be displayed in PvE, with stats still derived from your normal armor set.

I also think it would boost sales of said clothing quite a bit.

Ursan.7846:

Fiontar.4695:

Yet another potentially huge seller squashed by insanely high pricing. They would probably have sold 100X as many at a third the price. Yep, they sure know what they are doing here at the Gem Store…

What is with people projecting their own opinions on the entire playerbase, then concluding “Yup terrible sale, Anet would’ve made more money if they only catered to me.”

Seriously? Judging from the fact that Orichalcum had a pretty significant drop in price and all the anecdotal evidence on the forums, I imagine a ton of people bought it.

They have actual sales data. You don’t. You just end up sounding stupid and self-centered when you make conclusions like that without any evidence at all.

Why would these have any impact on the price of Orichalcum? Unless, of course, not having to replenish mining picks has just made mining node bots that much more efficient?

So many businesses fail due to poor pricing it isn’t even funny. Some people are just so obsessed with getting the highest margin per sale that they lose sight of the fact that they would make a lot more money via volume with a more reasonable price point.

These are all virtual goods with pretty much zero per item cost. A price point difference of 50% is likely to have an exponential impact on units sold. For many items offered, there is no objective way to calculate value. Here there is. It should be pretty obvious that if they had priced these so that the average player would see them pay for themselves in, say, 3 months of normal game play that not only would the sales be exponentially higher, but the pricing has the real potential of developing good will with customers AND enticing players to buy gems that have mostly resisted the temptation to this point.

We are really talking about two things here. Loss of potential revenue due to poorly calculated sell price and loss of good will, which can have serious implications for the future of the game, that occurs when people come to view the gem store as nothing but a big rip off machine. IMO, who ever is running the shop is probably costing the company millions in lost revenue and damaging the long term prospects for the game due to the continual generation of ill will.

I mean, for crying out loud, what is with the mentality that a cash shop item isn’t worthy of being sold unless it is in some way a rip-off for customers? Why can’t they just sell things people want at prices that are fair and actually entice people to buy who might not otherwise because the value is so apparent?

It replaces something you buy by the stack with something with endless uses. What other way would you calculate the value than to calculate how many uses you need to break even? Plus, you don’t buy all stacks at once, you buy them as needed. As others have pointed out, there is no guarantee that there won’t be a higher tier ore in the future that these won’t work on. This just increases the odds that you won’t actually recover the cost of your investment.

Currently, trading gems for gold is really the only way to reliably support the game with out high odds that you are being ripped off in one way or another. If you couldn’t spend cash for gems that can then be converted into gold, these things would be much more subjective. However, we can calculate an actual break even point on these and I just don’t see it ever making sense for the vast majority.

Yet another potentially huge seller squashed by insanely high pricing. They would probably have sold 100X as many at a third the price. Yep, they sure know what they are doing here at the Gem Store…

They are a complete rip off. They will continue to base the gen store offerings around such RNG rip offs until people have enough and stop buying gems, period.

These “packs” are a single dye for almost the cost of an actual dye pack which contains 5 common and 2 uncommon/rare dyes. No one is going to notice, nor care, if you utilize one of the exclusive dyes in these “packs”. There are already plenty of shades across the spectrum that these just will not stick out. On top of that, it seems the odds of even getting one of the exclusive dyes is rare.

I’ve been a solid financial supporter of the game in the past, but I’m on month two of boycotting gem purchases over the long odds lottery based RNG fool-bait gem store products.

These dye “packs”, (not really a pack, since you are buying a single dye for almost the price of a regular dye pack which actually contains a pack of 7 dyes), are yet another unethical rip off attempt by whom ever is running the gem store.

Do not buy them, period, exclamation point! They are a rip off. They are designed to be a rip off. They are designed to get people with poor impulse control or gambling addictions to spend much more money than they should on the game. No one is going to even notice if you have an “exclusive dye color”, there are already so many shades across the color spectrum that no one will notice or care.

IMO, this is the ultimate “suckers test” to see just how much they can get away in a deliberate customer rip off.

Mr./Ms. gem store manager, are you deliberately attempting to turn people against an otherwise phenomenal game and development studio? It seems to me that some one is all to happy to trade flash in the pan rip off based revenue at the cost of the reputation and long term viability of the game and it’s developers.

Please people, wake up. If you keep throwing money at them when they offer this crud, they will just continue to rip us all off. For the good of the game let’s do what we can to put an end to this stuff by just refusing to buy any of it.

I WANT to support the game through fairly priced gem store offerings. I have spent as much as $100 in a month supporting the game. This is now the second month in which I have not purchased any gems in protest over the continued reliance on long odds RNG based exclusive offerings. I want to support the game financially, but I just can not support a cash shop operated in this fashion.

I do think weeklies would be better than dailies. I also think we need the dailies, if not replaced by weeklies, to always have 5 of 11 choices that can be accomplished via normal PvE world play. i.e. keep the current 5/9 varieties, but add to constants, Heart Completion and (any where) Dynamic Event completions, to make it 5/11. Gathering, Heart Completion and DEs, (non-zone specific) would be available every day, with the others rotations providing more specific achievements.

I think this would make it a lot easier for people to finish dailies by just playing where ever they want in the game world and loosen up the feeling that dailies are just a “job” or about jumping through hoops that interfere with the freedom the game offers.

Brehus.1258:

I just want to see them actually fix the performance of the game. so more people can play and enjoy the game.

I agree on that. Personally I always have had good performance from the game, but that seems to have changed for the worse with the latest patch. I’ve played another MMO recently with graphics on par with GW2 but with incredibly stable performance, which makes the performance loses here even more painful.

I still love the game, but instead of that love growing along with an expanding player base, I see that love diminishing, along with the game’s long term potential, due to some serious issues managing the post launch product.

Every patch is like watching a tug of war between the developers who get the game and those who are determined to repeat every bad MMO mistake possible. Everything new and great gets tarnished by what’s slimy and ugly.

All I can imagine is that there has been a failure in the way the company has transitioned from working as a united front to produce the game vs. the current divisions of the company into not very cohesive sub-units.

I’m also starting to believe that there are probably a very small handful of people at Arenanet who are responsible for the proper decisions being made during the creation of the game that are no longer in the position to operate as a proper filter on the sum total of the ongoing work output of the company. The numerous semi-autonomous work groups are possibly causing issues because of being given too much freedom in how they are affecting the nature of the game.

We’ll never know the full story, but I think we are seeing enough to be able to make the very strong recommendation to upper management that the reins need to be re-tightened and all work flow needs to be better directed by those senior developers who actually get what this game is supposed to be.

If there was some sort of dupe bug, that obviously needs to be dealt with. In which case, you temporarily turn off the feature entirely until you actually FIX it.

If it’s just “Oh, look, someone can use these to just keep farming an instance for hours on end by loading loot into the guild bank and then having a guildmate on the other end unload them”, then, IMO, that doesn’t even come close to warranting this change. If legit players are doing this, who cares how they spend their hours playing? If it’s a bot/gold sellers/farmer, you come up with another solution other than punishing legitimate play.

Getting so tired of them focusing on extreme examples of play by legit players and reacting to them with absolutely zero consideration as to how changes effect the other 99.9% of us!

The game is becoming more and more of a tedious grind in the name of curtailing those who identify and execute on the most profitable areas of game play. They will lose a lot more players due to this unnecessary tedium than they would have lost due to a small bump up in in game inflation. The entire strategy becomes even more absurd when you see that they have no problem with the wealthy players growing their wealth exponentially by manipulating the pre-cursor and legendary markets, markets which shouldn’t even exist on the TP in the first place!

How the company that produced this game has managed to go on to commit so many of the post launch game killing mistakes that almost every other MMO makes is beyond me. Something must be very wrong with the post launch internal structure at Arenanet.

Heijincks.9267:

Fiontar.4695:

OK Arenanet, care to explain how something is an exploit if a small guild can unlock it, but not an exploit now that you’ve placed it higher up the tier and added the additional cost which excludes guilds that can’t do Guild Missions? How, in any universe, does that make any sense what so ever?

Hard to imagine how guild transport was even an exploit in an instance. When else would you be more likely to have a need for such a thing than in an instance? Is it an exploit to have a character run an instance with all bag slots unlocked and filled with 20 slot bags? If not, not sure how the access to the guild bank in an instance could be an exploit. (Maybe it’s an “exploit” because it provided player access to additional inventory space with out having to pay gems to get it?!?!?!)

I call complete shenanigans on this one. IMO, just further proof that for what ever reason Arenanet wants to kill small guilds and is telling those of us that don’t care to belong to a large impersonal guild to go find another game.

I’m baffled.

Let me stress once again, even IF there was an actual exploit, how, in a logical universe, is a fix for such an exploit to move the exploitable feature to a higher tier and out of reach of smaller guilds? How is it not an exploit for large guilds while being an exploit for small guilds?

Makes zero sense. Zero, nada, zilch.

The exploit probably had to do with an easy attainment. If it involves gold sellers, then it makes perfect sense.

Sorry, no, it doesn’t make sense. Period. If it’s really an exploit, then it’s just as much of an exploit for a large guild as a small guild. “Ease of attainment” doesn’t change that. They are just, once again, punishing small guilds for no apparent reason.

OK Arenanet, care to explain how something is an exploit if a small guild can unlock it, but not an exploit now that you’ve placed it higher up the tier and added the additional cost which excludes guilds that can’t do Guild Missions? How, in any universe, does that make any sense what so ever?

Hard to imagine how guild transport was even an exploit in an instance. When else would you be more likely to have a need for such a thing than in an instance? Is it an exploit to have a character run an instance with all bag slots unlocked and filled with 20 slot bags? If not, not sure how the access to the guild bank in an instance could be an exploit. (Maybe it’s an “exploit” because it provided player access to additional inventory space with out having to pay gems to get it?!?!?!)

I call complete shenanigans on this one. IMO, just further proof that for what ever reason Arenanet wants to kill small guilds and is telling those of us that don’t care to belong to a large impersonal guild to go find another game.

I’m baffled.

Let me stress once again, even IF there was an actual exploit, how, in a logical universe, is a fix for such an exploit to move the exploitable feature to a higher tier and out of reach of smaller guilds? How is it not an exploit for large guilds while being an exploit for small guilds?

Makes zero sense. Zero, nada, zilch.

1 in 50 means they intend for it to cost an average of about $56/skin.

You can not tell me that they wouldn’t make a lot more money just selling the skins for $10 to $15 each. There are likely 50 people who would pay $10 for every person who buys chests until they get a skin.

It really seems like it’s a non-ethical system just for the sake of thumbing one’s nose at ethics. Or, so one can have bragging rights when talking with other cash shop managers from other games. This really needs to just end.

I’d sell them for $10-$15 each, plus have them in chests at a 1 in 20 as an added value for BLC key purchasers. The same people who buy chests will continue to buy chests for the normal goodies and for the chance of getting a skin for less than the selling price if they get lucky. The ethical balance of the game is restored and people who want to spend ~$15 a month to support the game have something cool they can purchase.

It’s so simple it’s painful trying to figure out what some people at ANet are thinking.

Ayrilana.1396:

AoE limits affects everyone including those in the zerg. It would be ridiculous when two or three players could stack their attacks essentially wiping a zerg. It would then come down to who could cast their spells the quickest/soonest.

I’ll also add that tactics like flanking do still work very well if done correctly. Staff ele is support, not main dps. They should generally not be on the front lines so speed is not an issue.

Actually, non-capped AoE would just require large groups to spread out to prevent death by AoE, rather than just roaming around as a mindless, unstoppable force that really only fears an even larger zerg.

The OP is correct. The cap is a big reason that the mindless zerg IS the superior strategy for WvW. If they ever want WvW to be more strategic and tactical and less zerg-fest, the AoE cap needs to either be greatly expanded or removed all together.

Palador.2170:

Hey all! Do you know what a “Skinner Box” is? If not, watch this (or at least the first half of it).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

Now, take a look at the Black Lion Chests. Yep, that’s a Skinner Box. And while I hate to admit it, they’re effective. They’re more than likely going to get more money this way than if they simply offered the tickets for direct purchase, even at a higher price.

The problem is, there’s a threshold where you decide the button/action isn’t working. That it’s never going to pay out. At that point, the engagement turns into embitterment, and they walk away, sometimes to never return. They feel cheated, robbed of time and money. And perhaps for good reason, too.

They say it’s a fine line between love and hate. Well, in this case, that’s true. And RNG stuff like this can push people over that line, from loving the game to hating it. So the next time they put something like this into the game, realize what might happen if you chase after it. Decide if it’s really worth it, of if you’d be better off just ignoring it.

Personally? I love the look of many of those weapons, but I don’t want to burn out on the game due to bad luck. So, I’m going to just ignore them and keep right on playing.

This is why the current implementation, no matter how much money it may make them short term, is completely destructive to their long term revenue stream. I’d point out that it’s not just those who actually make the mistake of playing at the BLC gambit that become embittered and reject the game, but a lot of people with a strong sense of ethics get turned off just knowing that a company will partake in behavior like this.

BLCs are a rip off. They could have been designed to offer a fair chance at a skin, preserving the potential for someone with deep pockets to still plunk down $100+ in pursuit of multiple skins, but apparently the lack of fairness is a key element to someone’s thinking. I guess it just isn’t fun unless they can sucker people who can’t really afford it to drop tons of money in the pursuit. Is that a lack of ethics? Or, is it something else entirely?

Stormcrow.7513:

Of course Anet wants you to break out that platinum Visa and gamble away!! I love how the white knights of Anet will be protecting their precious company with defenses like “you dont need the skins anyways” and “you can use ingame gold”.
RNG for accomplishing a dungeon or event is one thing but making the skin available ONLY via BLC gambling is just bad.
BAD BAD BAD.

Yeah. Someone really needs to be sent back to college to take a full semester of nothing but ethics classes! It would be money well spent!

Not only do I find it unethical, but I honestly believe it does irreparable harm to their long term revenue stream and player retention, so it isn’t even a good decision for someone with no ethics.

Vayne.8563:

Fiontar.4695:

April was made too easy for the portion of players who already frequent WvW and do Fractals on a daily basis. Not so easy for the rest of us. I’m glad for the variety, but I wish there were more daily/monthly achievements that rewarded NORMAL PvE world play. A problem with the current mix for dailies/monthlies is that it’s more about making players jump through not so fun hoops, rather than encouraging and rewarding the type of game play that keeps players interested in the game and the game world.

With three of the four things you need being events, veteran slayer and daily achievements for four days, all of which are easily done in standard PVe, the fourth one is a choice. If you like dungeons you do fractals. If you like WvW you kill players.

But even if you like neither of those, there’s still jumping puzzles, a part of PVe, or at very worst case scenario you can recover audio logs. In fact, if you combine recovering audio logs with events and veteran slayer, and even the daily, you can often do them all at once.

Monthlys are supposed to have “some” form of challenge to them. Admittedly this month they’re particularly easy for people who do fractals or WvW, but honestly, they shouldn’t be that hard for a PVe’er. It’s a lot of reward for relatively little work.

My gripe isn’t that they are undo-able, but once again we are in a situation where dailies/monthlies are killing the world exploration mode of PvE. If I stick to the Living Story zones, which said zones are also usually the most efficient for completing dailies, I’m sure I’ll complete the audio logs portion.

However, for me the most amazing and compelling thing about this game is the massive, beautiful game world. Before dailies, I was playing GW2 more like I’d play Skyrim. Now, I find my guild, most of whom are long term MMO vets with limited game time, just want to stick to Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau to complete their dailies and I find little ground to argue against that strategy.

Did we really need monthlies to even further reinforce the idea that we are supposed to really only be playing the game in a pair of game zones?

I think it’s good that fractals and WvW are part of a list of monthlies to chose from, but IMO both dailies and monthlies need to offer paths to completion that can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time by just going where ever you want in the game world and doing the PvE content there.

The goal of these systems should be to reward players for regular game play, rather than rewarding them for spending their game time jumping through some very restrictive hoops.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Diviner.7405:

In order to increase you chances of succeeding, you have to make sure everyone that doing it completely understand what the heck is going on. Communication is key.

This is the correct answer. Guild content is about coordination. If you truly work together, you don’t need nearly as many people to complete this content.

IMO, this is the wrong answer, because you are essentially saying “if players can’t do it, it’s their fault and if they quit the game, who cares, we don’t need them”. Yes, you do in fact need them, unless the financial success of the game runs contrary to your goals.

There are ways to introduce more challenging content with out forcing it on everyone. For Guild Missions in specific, T1 should be straight forward and not require people to memorize the wiki to complete. T2 should require a little more pre-planning and T3, well, that’s where you can put what ever challenging mechanics you want.

Same with Dungeons. Want more challenge? Add an expert mode and make normal mode more accessible. Worried that accessible Dungeon content will allow non-elite players to, gasp, earn decent coin and drops? Well, take a cue from the recent fix to world event boss chests, i.e. standard rewards for all Dungeon Runs, but a bigger reward for the first successful run of a dungeon each day, per account.

I get that you want to create content and balance difficulty around your personal preference, but GW2 isn’t some niche title where “revenues be kitten I’ll make it as difficult as I want it to be”. You have responsibility to a great many people, NCSoft, Arenanet and the millions of fans of the game to find ways to offer challenge to those who want it, while keeping all aspects of the game “casual friendly”.

This game has $Billion+ revenue potential over it’s lifetime, but it is never going to happen if you keep designing content with broad appeal to be only enjoyable for elite players.

April was made too easy for the portion of players who already frequent WvW and do Fractals on a daily basis. Not so easy for the rest of us. I’m glad for the variety, but I wish there were more daily/monthly achievements that rewarded NORMAL PvE world play. A problem with the current mix for dailies/monthlies is that it’s more about making players jump through not so fun hoops, rather than encouraging and rewarding the type of game play that keeps players interested in the game and the game world.

awe extender.1908:

Flamenco.3894:

Do not worry about these zones. I too find them not appealing because of its visuals and zombie-like creatures. Much prefer Frostgorge.

Frostgorge is the most awesome map. Ever!

I agree. That’s how a high level zone should be designed. I’d rather have three more zones of similar quality and character, each befitting of the other three major regions of the game world, Kryta, Ascalon and Maguuma, or even something completely different, than the mess that is Orr.

I get the concept of what they tried to do with Orr, but it just didn’t work. It’s sad that so much development time and company resources were wasted there.