Guild Wars 2

Yoss Elendil.5862:

Galen Grey.4709:

Beyond that there is no reason to think vertical / horizontal players are clustered only in one group or another! So I dont believe it is even possible to make such a design decission based on playstyle!

More so then that I would be really surprised if vertical players payed more then horizontal players! Its true you can buy gems and convert them to money and thus buy weapons with them but there really is no reason to! you can easily craft 1 exotic gear/weapon a day! on the other hand horizontal players generally like their cosmetics and collecting stuff making them more likely to buy skins, costumes and minis

Though obviously this is all speculation on my part!

I agree with you on most of the things I do not quote here again. On the quoted things I agree with you that should be difficult to identify pure horizontel or vertical type of players. Same goes for buying vertical or horizontel items in theorie. Still the reason for most of buyers with the high spend is staying ahead or at least showing of with items nobody has.
Big Point used to be (maybe still are) biggest publishers in browser based games and they liked to tell that item selling works best in countrys with high machismo. Thats not realy a huge point against your argument, but I think it shows the varity of actual gameplay/f2p models. Some really close to creative day light robbery, some rather just free and a lot of games in between.
My personal worries are where will ArenaNet end up?! BioWare used to be one of my favorite companies in the industrie and still they ruined SWTOR. So (as you may have already guessed) I am a big fan of GW2 and its not good to see that ArenaNet does not know where to go. So I think the concerns about the future of GW2 and if we can trust ArenaNet or not is the point in which our opinions realy differ.

I am sure some people will pay for power when they are forced to, no doubt! even gw2 is a good example, how people complain that to get Ascended armor is a massive grind yet they rush to do it just cause they have to have the best gear even though none of the game requires it! But that doesnt mean people will only pay for power! Big point might have gotten their conclusion from a sort of self fullfilling prophecy kind of thing because the little experiance I had with their games, their cash shop sell mostly power items. In battlestar galactica online you had ships and while I didnt have a first hand experiance I know that there was a story not long ago where in dark star or what its called they used to sell really expensive drones that fight along your side. in case of the drones at least the cash shop was the only way to get it! In Gw2 there is no such wall, its not pay or you will not get the item you can get absolutely anything by investing the time to play the game! on the other hand you could use money to get them but it will cost so much that hopefully that cost will work as a deterant !

I dont think Gw2 doesnt have a direction at all! I think their direction is to be as open as possible! I see that reflected in all their designs really, its not just about being vertical or being horizontal ! Their game’s moto is play the way you want after all! How many MMOs allow you to get to max level crafting? or by doing PvP? or Give you XP for just exploring around, Allow you to play any zone in the game even at max level? Allow you to get the best equipement using any game type you choose (right now this is temporaraly not the case as they’re still phasing Acended armor but they already assured it will be). To me Gw2 is all about freedom and In my opinion they do that very well!

Yoss Elendil.5862:

Galen Grey.4709:

Part of what makes the whole experiance interesting in my opinion is you can make “investements” if you want to keep going deeper in search for better rewards you invest in the gear you need! it just gives you a goal to work towards I dont see why thats a bad thing! If you’re not interested in getting the gear or invest the time they you just play casually in the levels that your gear allows you to play safely!

I agree with you in the pure theorie of the statement. The problem I see and that other posts pointed out as well is the massive concentration of players in LA to play FOTM. Try finding a group for dungeons especialy story mode. It’s even hard to find one player if you don’t have enough players from your guild. So recent changes have a huge effect on the whole game.

True but like I said in a previous post this is unavoidable so long as players are reward driven. Any new content that rewards more will always attract players who see better rewards and content that doesnt reward more will be ignored in favor of existant content that still rewards maximum!

Yoss Elendil.5862:

Yes I do make my own conclusion but it’s not about if the other 90% like the game or not (or certain aspects of the game like ascended gear). My own conclusion is about how much a developer cares about these 90% liking a certain aspect of the game. Al I’m saying is they don’t care cause 10% of the players are driving the business model and the rest has to live with it if they want to play the game.

I also think there is a huge difference in the model of GW1 and GW2. In GW1 you simply were not able to buy your armor and weapons, which you can do now. If you then see a system installed which raises the power level on a “shallow curve” throughout the game you can see where this is going. Off course you don’t need to buy. It’s still your discission. I still think it affects all players.

I am not sure if I got you right on "This of course is still skewed because it assumes f2p every person pays the same amount per month as a subscription which is not the case! " . But I am not sugesting everybody is paying in a f2p model. In fact without monthly fees you lower the entrance “gate” for players and out of every 10 new players you will have one who is paying. As I understood the dicussion at GDC these 5 to 10% of players are bringing more money than charging fees from 100% of players. (Sry to reapeat it in case you were saying the same.)

Okey I see what you mean and it makes a lot more sense. Sorry for the misunderstanding. That being said while I do agree that any publisher would decide to make paying customers happy over unpaying users you can alienate any of them. Ultimately the success of any MMO is based on all its players Paying or not! IF you loose too many players the overall experiance will drop which increases the risks your paying customers leaves!

Also players who dont pay today doesnt mean will not pay tomorrow! Not only that but while the statistic might say 10% of the players play in a f2p game it doesnt mean that 10% is month after month the same exact players. What I mean is imagine an MMO where you have 100 players and month after month only 10 players pay for something at the end of the year every one of those 100 players payed for something a few of them more then twice. Even though 100% of the players are paying customers month adter month the amount of players who have paid for something is still 10%

Beyond that there is no reason to think vertical / horizontal players are clustered only in one group or another! So I dont believe it is even possible to make such a design decission based on playstyle!

More so then that I would be really surprised if vertical players payed more then horizontal players! Its true you can buy gems and convert them to money and thus buy weapons with them but there really is no reason to! you can easily craft 1 exotic gear/weapon a day! on the other hand horizontal players generally like their cosmetics and collecting stuff making them more likely to buy skins, costumes and minis

Though obviously this is all speculation on my part!

If the shallow powercurve keeps as is +5 to a single stat it would be crazy to spend the amount of money required to craft the infusion! just bake a cake litterally high end food gives up to +70 to a single stat!

Primal.9513:

To Alice and Galen Grey, since you want to know why some of us can’t simply ignore the ascended gear, I’ll invite you to read my previous post in this thread where I try to explain it.

(basically a shameless bump, but I know how things tend to be missed if it’s not the first or last post of a thread.)

I did read your post but its just too speculative to answer!

I have no crystal ball I cannot say if new release content will be doable using anything other then ascended ! that being said current trend would say that will not be the case? why because currently there is no content that requires Exotic, Most content if not all you can ever do without any armor what so ever! (still havent tried Dungeons with no armor, didnt manage to convince my guild to let me try it … yet… , but I tried LvL 80 Dynamic events, tried WvW player vs player and tried soloing WvW dynamic events with no armor, no accessories for the most part I had no problems but didnt manage to take supply depots solo with no armor.) This doesnt mean the trend will keep hence why I said I cant talk about the future but right now you dont need any top tier armor at all to play everything!

Alice.8694:

Galen Grey.4709:

LOCO.1785:

The damage is done.

The people expecting/wanting pure horizontal progression have left.

if they left because of this, they didnt want pure horizontal progression. They wanted to have the best gear without working for it!

pure horizontal progression means you dont care about the gear and Gw2 certainly allows you to do that safely! Wanting the best gear isnt horizintal progression its vertical progression and thats the problem! people seem to want easy vertical progression which is entirely differnet from wanting horizontal progression.

I know several horizontal progression focused players and this non-controversy barely registered to them. A lot of what they saw was other people trying to sell them the hysteria on how bad the new content was.

I’ve been meaning to make a joke video where it shows lion’s arch the day before the patch… Then some clips of the doomsaying about how broken GW2 is now thanks to ascended gear… Then back to peaceful lion’s arch several days after the patch.

99.9% (since this thread is made of made up statistics, might as well join in) of horizontal content is untouched by ascended gear. Horizontal players don’t give a kitten. <—- actual kitten for dramatic effect because who doesn’t love kitties…

You mean, you mean I am not the only horizontal player trying to wonder why its such a big issue to simply ignore ascended gear and keep enjoying exploring the game! and all the amazing horizontal content!

Thank all the kittens thats good to hear ! <- actual kittens

Thanks Alice really feel less alien now

Yoss Elendil.5862:

A really interesting discussion. At the end of the day I am afraid nobody cares about a manifesto made for marketing reasons when it comes to making money. To me it seems the real turn in ArenaNets politics is going with the free to play model where it used to be the “without monthly fees”. The difference is huge while the later was the unique GW1 way, the f2p is something different. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this, since most MMO players seem to have tested f2p games. With all the variations in that there is one thing they have in common. Some sort of felt or real item progression. The important part is it only needs to be “felt”. That is sooner or later getting people to buy the equipment with real money. The figures for that are easy and there is obviously solid data for this business model. The longer you get them to play the more likely it is they will spend money. At GDC 2012 in cologne f2p developers stated that only 5 to 10 % of all players are bringing the money. Some people (thats about 1%) are even willing to spend more than 800$ a month.
So in simple math that means even if 90% of us players don’t like it – the rest is enough to meet the business model. That should pretty much answer the question why they brought it up, knowing the sh…storm would be coming.

Only a bit off topic
So far nobody seems to care about how much an individual spends on virtual goods in a game. To me every company who takes more than 50$ a month on a regular basis is exploiting peoples weaknesses.

careful, you’re making your own personal conclusions based on the numbers.

You said that because only 10% of the people pay many in a f2p game it means that 90% of the people dont like it!

But you’re making a corellation that doesnt exist. Not paying anything in a f2p game doesnt mean you dont like it or the business model! In fact it could be quite the opposite you might not pay because you’re happy with the game and dont feel like you need to buy anything. IT could be because you dont afford to pay, it could be because you dont pay for anything unless you’re forced to!

A more telling statistic in my opinion is how every single game that switched from P2P to F2P did order of magnitutes bigger profits !
I think thats a larger indication that more people embrace f2p then they do P2P especially when factoring in that if 10% of the people pay and if we take a game like say lotro which tripled its profits after going free to play it means it increased its player base by 3000%

This of course is still skewed because it assumes f2p every person pays the same amount per month as a subscription which is not the case! There is a factor (people paying more) that makes the player base smaller then 3000% and there is a factor (not the same persons pay the same every month sometimes its different people) that make the 3000% larger!

Also Gw2 and Gw1 had the same business model, buy game with an optional micro transaction system. The only difference is in gw2 the range of times in the cash shop is larger!

stof.9341:

Galen Grey.4709:

stof.9341:

Galen Grey.4709:

And since these people already proved nothing short of better reward will ever attract them away from Orr what do you expect Arenanet to do to keep the game alive?

You know what would attract people away from Orr in a heartbeat? The exact same map down to the exact same mobs and events, except that those Risen drop bloods instead of bones as fine mats.

Why do people farm Orr first and other mats later? Because it’s more profitable. More karma, more high level loots and it actually can drop T6 mats.

Why would you farm any place other than Orr or Frostgorge? It’s not significantly easier due to downscaling, the DE rewards are lower, the loot is lower level so you get fewer ectos, the T6 mats cannot drop at all and let’s not talk about getting lodestones.

Don’t take me wrong. I’d love to vary my experience but this game is making a big mistake that GW1 solved already by first making nearly all the world level cap in the first place, and then adding hard mode to change the rest of the world to level cap in the process.

Thats the thing really, doing what you suggest wouldnt solve anything I believe! there will always be the best reward! in your example for a while everyone will farm blood until price falls due to supply and its back to the bones!

The problem is people feeling that nothing short of profit is world playing!

The same problem probably exacted in Gw1 but it was masked underneat instancing

Yet it’s better to have 20 maps alternating giving the best rewards depending on market situation that just one. You cannot make it perfect but that shouldn’t be a reason to refuse improvements on the pretext that they aren’t the ultimate solution.

I am convinced it wouldnt work! I personally found starter areas to be quite profitable and I think arenanet agreed cause in the last patch they reduced the reward you get from completing dynamic events in the 1 – 15 zone range! yet few would even consider playing there for it was still percieved that Orr is a lot more profitable besides in short term order all markets will end up saturated! if you open every map for a particular fine ingerdient you’ll have people spreading all over the place in the short them sure, saturate the market, prices drop, everyone back in orr because events there reward better. If you’re lucky in time the cycle will repeat but the market saturation could last a long time! Worst yet remember the market is global so the spreading around might also not really happen as different servers might congrigate in different zones farming differnet fine materials saturating the market of all fine material even if if in every server players would be playing in one zone!

I am certainly not saying they shouldnt try to do something to address it, I am just afaid nothing they do can work as this seems more like a social issue rather then a game mechanic issue

LOCO.1785:

The damage is done.

The people expecting/wanting pure horizontal progression have left.

if they left because of this, they didnt want pure horizontal progression. They wanted to have the best gear without working for it!

pure horizontal progression means you dont care about the gear and Gw2 certainly allows you to do that safely! Wanting the best gear isnt horizintal progression its vertical progression and thats the problem! people seem to want easy vertical progression which is entirely differnet from wanting horizontal progression.

stof.9341:

Galen Grey.4709:

And since these people already proved nothing short of better reward will ever attract them away from Orr what do you expect Arenanet to do to keep the game alive?

You know what would attract people away from Orr in a heartbeat? The exact same map down to the exact same mobs and events, except that those Risen drop bloods instead of bones as fine mats.

Why do people farm Orr first and other mats later? Because it’s more profitable. More karma, more high level loots and it actually can drop T6 mats.

Why would you farm any place other than Orr or Frostgorge? It’s not significantly easier due to downscaling, the DE rewards are lower, the loot is lower level so you get fewer ectos, the T6 mats cannot drop at all and let’s not talk about getting lodestones.

Don’t take me wrong. I’d love to vary my experience but this game is making a big mistake that GW1 solved already by first making nearly all the world level cap in the first place, and then adding hard mode to change the rest of the world to level cap in the process.

Thats the thing really, doing what you suggest wouldnt solve anything I believe! there will always be the best reward! in your example for a while everyone will farm blood until price falls due to supply and its back to the bones!

The problem is people feeling that nothing short of profit is world playing!

The same problem probably exacted in Gw1 but it was masked underneat instancing!

If I wanted to explore say the old ascalon area I didnt need a group for it so I’d go with my hereos or solo. I had no way of knowing how many people were playing that content as opposed to something more profitable like say UW or even missions like Auspicious Beginnings.

Archmortal.1027:

Galen Grey.4709:

So yes obviously Agony is meant to be a limit on how deep you can dwell and how fast you can get there but its not a hard limit dependant exclusively on your gear, its a limit that can be so to say stretched using skill

Okay I understand what you mean now (I did sort of have trouble interpreting that previous post, sorry).

I’m still not in favor of Agony being designed this way because regardless of how many extra levels a skilled player can complete through skill alone, there is a hard limit on how far they can get and it ultimately has nothing to do with their skill, and everything to do with the arbitrary requirement of [item(s) with Agony resistance].

Sorry remove a lot of the quote as the post was getting too big.. Anyhow There will always be a hard limit and thats a good thing. If you’re scaling the reward with the difficulty last thing you want is your players getting to a level where they get 100s of gold worth of returns per run! you need to control that somehow. In Gw1 hard mode also had a hard limit and thats that is was limited to 1 level of difficutly. That in itself was a wall you could get beyond gear or not. Is that really any different if a level 1 infusion will not allow to get past say level 30?

Why is one okey but not the other?

Part of what makes the whole experiance interesting in my opinion is you can make “investements” if you want to keep going deeper in search for better rewards you invest in the gear you need! it just gives you a goal to work towards I dont see why thats a bad thing! If you’re not interested in getting the gear or invest the time they you just play casually in the levels that your gear allows you to play safely!

As for the difficulty, I didnt 3 levels, cant gauge difficutly per-se too limited runs! but the 2nd run did feel more involved then the rest are you sure its just agony that goes up and not everything?

LordByron.8369:

Ditton.3149:

LordByron.8369:

Galen Grey.4709:

how can you tell that more people dislike ascended gear then people like it?
!

with numeric evidence on the forums (too much for the vocal minority excuse).
numeric eveidence from internet
Just analyzing wich target audience they advertised the game to
Thinking what made GW1 successful
with the poll they did
because valuing grinding over skill has proved to be a BAD and surpassed system in mmorpgs at least 10 years ago….despite some mmorpgs still adopt this.

Now those are tools not fault proof for sure but taking all of them becomes quite a proof.

On the other side, is there any evidence most people wanted vertical progression?
I didn t see any.

Imho we shouldn t even discuss this

They just will try to keep most of their old playerbase and attract some more……quite greedy and unfair imho but its only my opinion.

speculation, they just started lumping these threads together. I would wager that if you lumped all of the “this game needs more progression” threads that it would be just as large. The GW1 fans wanted this game to cater to their needs first and it isnt, they are infuriated and dont seem to care that anyone elses playability would be stepped on as long as they got the MMO they wanted.

You are free to PROVE that current proof are not aceptable…

Feel free to post NUMBERS and FACTS….your word is not representative alone you know?

In the meantime they are not speculation…but a LOT of statistical evidences…

A Lot of statistical evidence? really? like you mean the statistical evidence that we had when shortly after launch many more people were complaining that the game lacks vertical progression resulting in nothing to do at max level you mean? back then more people complained then people saying this was fine and as intended!

Like others said firstly the sample of people on a forum are really small and out of those people the majority engage only when they dont like something!

This might or it might not map to the general population playing the game! but you cannot draw a conclusion either way and it certainly is not a lot of statistical evidence!

LordByron.8369:

Galen Grey.4709:

LordByron.8369:

Galen Grey.4709:

how can you tell that more people dislike ascended gear then people like it?
!

with numeric evidence on the forums (too much for the vocal minority excuse).
numeric eveidence from internet
Just analyzing wich target audience they advertised the game to
Thinking what made GW1 successful
with the poll they did
because valuing grinding over skill has proved to be a BAD and surpassed system in mmorpgs at least 10 years ago….despite some mmorpgs still adopt this.

Now those are tools not fault proof for sure but taking all of them becomes quite a proof.

On the other side, is there any evidence most people wanted vertical progression?
I didn t see any.

Imho we shouldn t even discuss this

They just will try to keep most of their old playerbase and attract some more……quite greedy and unfair imho but its only my opinion.

I never said its a minority, I said its no indication that its a whole! even if the people who like this are a miniority it shouldnt mean they should not get content they like!

Exactly the opposite…
If the minority wanted NO ASCENDED they deserved to play the game they bought…..
If a minority but also majority wats progression (lets call it with his name: GRINDING), well their fault they bought the wrong game.

I am sorry but I think thats really narrow sighted!

Why does being part of the majority mean you get what you bought and being part of the minority mean you get excluded? And remember there is a majority opinion on every single aspect of the game! Majority like PvP, so lets cut out PvE then !
Majority like WvW over sPvP… sPvP gone! Majority like Castle sieges, Cut out the escort missions, supply camps etc…

Majority like being on the invading side of a castle siege.. cool now we end up with a game that is all about breaking down doors and nothing else!

You really cant design a game that is about what the majority of the players want to do ! this is an extreme example of course but where do you cut the line? Ascended gear is not the only mechanic that people dislike!

And worst yet, what if it turns out more people like then there are who dislike it? should Arenanet drop all horizontal progression and focus exclusively on Vertical progression and tell us, sorry next time buy a game that has a majority of players who like what you like?

Do you honestly think any of this would be a good idea?

raenen.5807:

I wouldnt remove it I would just make ascended like spvp. You go there its on, you leave its not.

This is actually a brilliant idea! I like it!

if FoTM worked like sPvP as in you had have you own gear locker and Ascended gear would be something like the armor you get in sPvP only that can be upgraded with infusions but you revert back to your exotic set outside of FoTM… it might solve the WvW issue!

The only possible downside is people who like vertical progression might feel the rest of the game is closed to them as their best gear is locked in FoTM and so thats the only content they can play? I dont know.. anyone who likes vertical progression could possibly tell us their opinion on this idea?

LordByron.8369:

Galen Grey.4709:

how can you tell that more people dislike ascended gear then people like it?
!

with numeric evidence on the forums (too much for the vocal minority excuse).
numeric eveidence from internet
Just analyzing wich target audience they advertised the game to
Thinking what made GW1 successful
with the poll they did
because valuing grinding over skill has proved to be a BAD and surpassed system in mmorpgs at least 10 years ago….despite some mmorpgs still adopt this.

Now those are tools not fault proof for sure but taking all of them becomes quite a proof.

On the other side, is there any evidence most people wanted vertical progression?
I didn t see any.

Imho we shouldn t even discuss this

They just will try to keep most of their old playerbase and attract some more……quite greedy and unfair imho but its only my opinion.

I never said its a minority, I said its no indication that its a whole! even if the people who like this are a miniority it shouldnt mean they should not get content they like! Arenanet did the best thing possible segregating this vertical progression from the horizontal game play! Except for WvW Ascended gear will have 0 impact on anything! and in WvW I still think the impact is entirely neglagable! There are far great element thats unbalance WvW then any armor ever could! greater numbers on your or enemy side are one such obvious element! and its not like a rarity! I think its essentially every engagement in WvW has unbalanced numbers!

I am sure they didnt come to this conclusion based on a random dice rolls! Thing is there is a big contradiction in this game! the bulk of players are totally reward oriented! People refusing to call any map outside of orr as LvL 80 content because it isnt as rewarding is one clear example of that! Its like these people love vertical progression they want the best rewards so having new better rewards is giving them what they want but at the same time they dont want to and are expecting the game to protect them from themselves by actually not providing better rewards! that will stagnate the game however! You simply cant expect that Arenanet allow everyone to spend their entire game life time playing in Orr non stop! And since these people already proved nothing short of better reward will ever attract them away from Orr what do you expect Arenanet to do to keep the game alive? do you really think waiting for these people to grow bored playing the same content over and over is the right solution?

Thing is so many people are assuming Arenanet are choosing vertical progression over horizontal when they really are not! ignoring Ascended gear completely will not prevent you from enjoying absolutely everything the game has to offer including the Progression content itself! They really provided everything to everyone! and if anyone is under server it definitely is people who like progression not people who like horizontal content in my opinion!

Syrup.8019:

“how can you tell that more people dislike ascended gear then people like it?”

Talk to people about it. I haven’t met a single person who likes FOTM as an idea. Even without it being ascended the fact that the drop rate of items in it is so much greater than any other dungeon means that every other one has become inefficient. I think that they should remove the instance all together, the whole different level grinding goes against the entire games model.

“A better question is why cant you just ignore that content if you dont like it?”

Because being weaker than others is not fun. Also people like being efficient. In fact spending time doing a dungeon with much lower drops actually is psychologically troubling, as the brain knows you could be doing better.

More so the entire game was marketed as being open ended and being able to play your way. Dynamic events, the looting system, tons of gear that is of the same stats but different looks rather than endlessly progressing tiers, “personal” story etc. Yet it has been a few months or so and they are already changing things to a normal mmo grind fest, as if they forgot the whole focus of the game. I think that is why a lot of people are upset, if things go that direction in such a short time, how far will the game sway from its model later. Also from talking to others, many feel lied to and unheard. After all almost everyone has been saying how wrong FOTM is, but rather than trying to remove it, the staff keeps saying how great it is, and talking about expanding it even further.

“Some People like PvE but hate PvP, should they remove sPvP and WvW because of that? "

This is not an issue of “some people” I have not heard a single person saying they think FOTM was a good idea in game. EVERY single person I have heard when the issue is brought up have been complaining.

Look better, there are people on this forum praising it, there people praising it in the large thread that had 10k posts which even if every post came from a unique person its just a fraction of the 2m+ game population.

The thing I dont get honestly is how so many people are so against vertical progression and yet play the game with a vertical progression mind set!

I will not play dungeon X because Dungeon Y has better rewards is a vertical progression mind set! a horizontal progression mindset would be hmm I have to play Dungeon X because it has the skin I want! I have to play this level 1 – 15 zone cause I havent explored it yet! I have to wait here until this event I havent experianced yet spawns… Thats how I expect people who like horizontal progression think! yet I keep hearing this content is more rewarding so I will just play that!

I dont get it honestly! seems to me most people really want a vertical progression game that they can play horizontally or something! I honestly dont get it ! Horizontal progressive games arent about the reward, arent about the power, arent about the money! they’re about playing your way, see something to facinates you, you go explore it and not feel you’re now cut off because another player went and got the best weapon and yes Ascended gear goes against this in a sense but the game solved that issue by removing competition in PvE, having everyone on the same level in sPvP and making a single person irellevant in WvW (which is the only place that gear has an bearing whatsoever! and honestly far from what people think I am geared in Rares and do more then fine in WvW have an obsurd kill to death ratio for me who am not a PvP player! Something close to 5 kills to ever death! with sub par gear)

For your conveniance here is a post that praises FoTM:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/All-dungeons-should-receive-fractal-treatment

Always keep in mind you will always see more people complaining than praising!

for example I never saw anyone praise say level scaling, saw a few posts saying its a bad idea and players should keep the power they get as they level up… that doesnt mean level scaling isnt the most amazing feature a horizontal progression game can have right?

how can you tell that more people dislike ascended gear then people like it?

A better question is why cant you just ignore that content if you dont like it?

Like Arenanet said an MMO is played by different people who like different things.

Some People like PvE but hate PvP, should they remove sPvP and WvW because of that? But then again some people love PvP and hate PvE. Should PvE go? You could say that about every single aspect of the game from jumping puzzles to exploration!

The game gives you a lot of different content to play why is it a problem to pick the content you like and ignore the one you dont like ? the way you play will surely define the future direction of the game! If everyone plays FoTM none stop that will send the message to whoever analysis metrics that that is exactly what people enjoy doing ! so by ignoring it you’ll also help make sure we get less of it in the future !

OP, here is what I dont get…. You said you’re an explorer and you like cosmetic stuff… yet you feel FoTM was a 180 degree turn… why? Do you need ascended gear to be an explorer or to get cosmetic stuff? hmm nope! you dont even need exotic armor, I never bothered to finish the set… barely started and still have lots of fun running around trying to uncover every secret event in the game, every single hidden area outside of the beaten path and do every awesome jumping puzzle I could get my hands on!

So lets take the lost shore updates and what it meant for explorers! 1/2 a zone area to explore. Nothing really secret I could uncover but it was certainly one of the most beautiful places in tyria to see none the less! 2 jumping puzzles, on for beginners and one thats so large! that after the first time I managed to navigate the stepping stones to the top I felt lost, wasnt sure which direction to go … in a jumping puzzle! Awesome!

Anyhow you’re right, it would have been nice if there was some new cosmetic armor to get from there, but then again they’re not done with the lost shores yet, they will continue building on it so hopefully it will be just a bit more patience but for the rest all the exploration goodness is still there ! And at least to me, this MMO has some of the best exploration any MMO has to offer!

Archmortal.1027:

Galen Grey.4709:

Disagree with you here. In your context hard would still be gated content as you definite it ! if your build, gear and skill allow you to just perfectly complete normal you’re going to fail hard and you’re calling that “gating content” The content will remain gated to you until you increase any of those 3

Uh… no? The most skilled player in the game isn’t going to be able to function at a certain point in Fractals without getting Agony resistance. That is not “difficulty.” That is a gate whose key is “ascended gear.”

That same player will be able to function as normal in
Choose Difficulty – Hard
wherein enemies have slightly more health/slightly higher stats/slightly higher damage/etc. There is no artificial mechanic that will eventually force the player to get a better piece of gear. Better gear will, of course, help, but it ultimately rests on the player’s skill. Skill dependency is not the same as gated content because in my example the Hard Mode is no different from the Normal Mode except in terms of enemy stats (most games also add an additional mechanic during boss fights, but again- not something that demands an arbitrary item or gear piece to overcome it).
It is the same content except harder and therefor you need more skill to complete it.

Fractals appear to function like this, but eventually they arbitrarily demand that the player have gear pieces and infusions instead of skill to resist an arbitrary mechanic. The mechanic serves no purpose except to demand that gear from the player. If it were just another condition and it just happened to be non-removable then it would set a sort of timer on the encounters which would act as a less (but still) arbitrary means of imposing artificial difficulty if only because that timer is something that the player can measure their skill against. Agony and Agony resistance in its current iteration and progression is not a measure of skill, but rather a gate demanding progressively more [item with Agony resistance] in order to pass. There is no actual increase in difficulty, just an increase in the amount of requried [item with Agony resistance].
It is the same content always, except you need more [item with Agony resistance] to complete it.

There is a clear, distinct difference. One is a difficulty increase tailored for people who want more challenge, the other has a static difficulty and is tailored to progressively require more [item with Agony resistance].

Let me just say I am not opposed to this kind of design. There is a right way to implement this, but the Fractals do not do it properly. A better way to do it is to make the resistance available through an NPC switch in the starting area. Each progressive tier of fractals you reach, you gain another switch to pull for more resistance. This is not only a much less arbitrary way to implement Agony/Resistance, but it allows the opportunity to tailor rewards based on how many switches of Resistance are pulled. Players are no longer reliant on gear to continue to deeper levels, but as per the usual- the gear will of course, help kind of like real difficulty increases.

Is my english really that bad or am I really that bad at expressing myself? Anyway new try. Never said skill is going to take you all the way to infinity. Never said you can ignore Agony resistance as long as you’re skill full! I only said Agony resistance is only one factor on how far you can get in FoTM, skill being another ! An average player with no agony resistance might make it till say level 15. Someone with an above average skill level might make it to 18. That all I said in essence!

I dont agree that any hard mode has no pre-requists they all do else it wouldnt be a hard mode at all! Take GW1 for example You could do say I dont know the old ascalon zone in easy mode wearing lowest level armor with any skill set you want easily. Switch to hard mode and the lowest level armor / the basic skill set will not be enough. That doesnt mean GW1 is all about the gear just that those higher numbers you’re facing now require more preparation to tackle!

The agony / infusion mechanic is there just to limit how deep you can get. Much like levels limit how deep you can dwell in the game !

If what you were saying was true it was all about the gear and not about skill we would have hard limits we could say without agony resistance you will only get to level 10. Where as poeple report that without agony resistance they got anywhere from 12 – 20+ Why the gap? I’d say skill, what do you think?

So yes obviously Agony is meant to be a limit on how deep you can dwell and how fast you can get there but its not a hard limit dependant exclusively on your gear, its a limit that can be so to say stretched using skill

Archmortal.1027:

On Fractals: Difficulty Modes vs. Gated Content

Requiring Agony Resistance is not a difficulty increase mechanic. It is an additional damage mechanic used to force you to get a thing to resist it before it is possible. Kind of like Gated Content forces you to get a certain level of gear before your stats are high enough to not die.

A real difficulty change would look like this upon entering a normal old dungeon:
Choose Difficulty – Normal
Choose Difficulty – Hard
and this is key here: you would not need a special “infusion” or additional resistance mechanic slotted into your armor to do it. It would be a skill check against enemies with their stats scaled to a higher standard of difficulty or lower margin of error.

So yes, deeper sections of the Fractals dungeon are indeed “Gated Content.”

Disagree with you here. In your context hard would still be gated content as you definite it ! if your build, gear and skill allow you to just perfectly complete normal you’re going to fail hard and you’re calling that “gating content” The content will remain gated to you until you increase any of those 3

FoTM is no differnt only instead of have normal and hard. It has normal and Hard level 1, hard level 2, hard level 3 …. hard level infinity

Each one of those hard levels can be how far your build, gear, skill (and that of your team) gets you until you offset it with any of those 3 factors!

nachtnebel.9168:

Take Old Tom as an example. The GW2 combat system is totally irrelevant in this case. You either take him down before you run out of tears or you will die due to unavoidable (no dodge, no invulnerability, no protection, …) damage originating from the room being filled with poisonous gas (or whatever it is). You also can’t stop Old Tom from doing this, it just happens from time to time and the poison will last until you power the ventilation system with 2 tears and activate it. There is really nothing you can do once you run out of tears except to try to DPS him down before you die.
The colossal and the grawl shaman are similar to that, both are all about the kill speed of your team, either you take down the mobs fast enough or you will die/not succeed.

We risk ending up going in circles if you just repeat your previous statements I will keep it short. The whole poison thing is an environmental way to put the fight on a timer. A timer can be used to increase difficulty. Again think mad king tower, if it didnt have a timer it would be a lot easier to do it I have no doubt! Same here the timer forces the team to band together to increase damage as much as possible! Remember damage output of the team isnt just a gear thing. If an elementalist and a ranger fight separately they will just do their individual damage but if the elementalist drops a wall of flame they will do their individual damage + inflict an extra burning condition on their targets. DPS increased and gear had nothing to do with it! Everyone who can stacks as much might on everyone else before the fight starts and conditions including the burning condition mentioned above will do even more damage! DPS increased further and once again gear has nothing to do with it!

Also I disagree with your assesment of the colossal. It definitely is about defense and damage mitgation. So much so that the hammer itself has a defense skill! Honestly you’re underestimating the intricacies of the GW2 combat system. I personally find it to be a lot more about skill and strategy then about gear!

nachtnebel.9168:

Not quite, FotM on higher levels is all about the gear check and agony resi, it’s not more difficult than the early levels (which are pretty easy).

Well I only got to level 3 so I have no idea how hard or not it gets But like I explained previously even if the only difficulty inflicted is a higher agony level it would still be mostly a game of skill. Agony resist would only be a way to make the difficulty easier! But without any additional Agony Resist you can still mitigate it in two ways. Avoid getting agony, end up the fight before agony ends you! Its just another artificial way to put the fight on a timer. Only in this case you can avoid having the timer start if you’re good enough. As for the Jade Maw, its attacks are all dodgable at least on level 2, does it get some way to inflict agony without you being able to avoid it?

nachtnebel.9168:

If you like content gating and gear treadmill than it is an elegant solution. New and better infusions are basically a new tier of gear since they are more powerful than what was in the game before. It doesn’t matter if you call them t1, t2, level 1, level 2, exotic, ascended or if you just increase the stats on them, releasing something with better stats periodically is a gear treadmill.
Also, if we call reaching higher scales of FotM progression this still doesn’t change the fact that FotM is nothing more than another farming location. The only difference currently is that you can get things from FotM which you can’t get from any other farming location.

You’re twisting things now ! for starters like its been said countless times now there is absolutely no content gating! you can still do all the fractals without ever facing any agony! you’re not gated from any content whatsoever ! And it isnt a gear treadmill either! One single new set doesnt create a treadmill! Its an infusion treadmill yes! But You dont need any of that unless you want to seriously do FoTM in which case why would you mind having goals such as acquiring infusions? Ohh please +5 to a single stat is not even remotely close to a new gear tier That would be like arguing every new level in cooking unlocks a new gear tier because you can cook better versions of food that give an increase in stats! many times what infusions give you even! Come on lets stay realistic now!

nachtnebel.9168:

Galen Grey.4709:

It is a difficulty level, its a collection of things really gear check is just part of it of course but player skill and how well they play their build is also part of it! if that were not the case and it was purely gear based there would be a clear cut off point. Yes some people say they can get to level 10 with no ascended gear, some say they can reach level 15 and a few that said they can get past level 20.

In fact there currently are at least three simple gear checks in higher FotM scales:
- if you don’t take Old Tom down before you run out of Tears you can’t beat him unless you exploit him
- the seals on the colossals hands require you to be able to take a certain amount of damage or you won’t be able to fight off the increasing number of mobs spawning in front of them
- if you are too low on HP and DPS beating the grawl shaman is impossible

I am sorry but I think you’re serverely underestimating the GW2 combat system. You’re making it sound that the only possible cure to higher damage is higher resistance which isnt true at all !, Dodging, Blinding, Fearing, Push back, shields, teleporting, weakness, Aegis, protection, dazing, regeneration,retaliation, projectile reflection, chilling, crippling, immobilization all help eliminate or reduce damage received. nearly all of them have nothing to do with gear and stats and all to do with skill. Same thing goes for fights which are time limited Might, Fury, stability, vulnerability, cross profession combos and direct skills synergy between members of the party can all help end a fight quicker. This is not even a comprehensive list cause each class has its own mechanic that can help! like necro has death shroud, plague and lich form that can both help in terms of survivability and in terms of inflicting extra damage. Mesmers have distortion etc… There is a lot lot more to fighting than the gear you’re wearing !

nachtnebel.9168:

Level 1 – 10 dont have the same difficulty though do they?

Level 1-9 do, at 10 we have agony as an additional factor.

Its like the dreaded temple of intolerable in the war in kryta. Having your armor infused was obviously critical and a gear check of sorts but getting that out of the way didnt make it easy either !

With the huge difference that getting you armor infused is easier, way less time consuming, doesn’t rely on RNG at all and you can infuse whatever armor you want.
In addition the temple is actually difficult while the FotM encounters are rather easy. If you would remove Agony they won’t be much of a challenge, not even on higher scales (unless you don’t meet the gear requirements for certain encounters of course).

Thats my point, the agony / infusion system in both games is only one variable not the whole that the fight is about !

nachtnebel.9168:

In GW1 Underworld was a real skill check and not a gear check. So technically we could speak of a skill gate, which is fine.

And since you also get automatically hit by agony whenever you engage him after respawning there is literally no way to beat him without a certain amount of agony resi. There was no mechanic like that in GW1.

The point I am trying to make is simply that levels / the infusion / agony system, Skills whatever is simply a mechanic to slow you down ! If there were no levels in gw2 I bet a lot of people who have skipped everything and started farming Orr day one !

Same thing with FoTM with no agony difficulty level mechanic what would happen? You’d have to set a ceiling how hard you want to scale the dungeon until it becomes undoable. Say level 30 I dont know. And then you’re locked. you either release a new gear tier or you can have 0 progression in FoTM and it will end up just another farming location with a set challenge that everyone will get used to and there for one can simply ignore. But like this you can keep it going ! So this month we released infusion level 1.. that allows you to reach level 30 before agony is too much to progress. Some skill full players managed to drag that to level 33 and feel very proud of having acomplished that… and rightly so. Next month we dont have to release a new gear tier to progress the dungeon but just a new infusion level that moves the progress to level 40. And thus you have control on how far you want players to progress, allowing them that slight opening where they can challenge themselves trying to reach a higher level then others manage showing actual skill but at the same time not risk that someone beats your difficulty rating and end up progressing to a level so high that they get rewards so big they upset the economy.

I dont know why you think this is bad design in my opinion its quite an elegant solution!

Karizee.8076:

Galen Grey.4709:

Thats also ignoring the fact that the xfire numbers suggests Gw2 has 1/2 the players that WoW has and I am sure if they reached 5m sales we’d have heard about it !

Well, WoW is in Asia while GW2 is in NA & EU only.

So far

and what xfire doesnt work in asia?

but fine, lets ignore the gw2 is 1/2 the wow population part ! WoW still showed a decline from 120k hrs to 22k hrs with no corrisponding or well lets say negligable corrisponding drop in subs !

nachtnebel.9168:

Galen Grey.4709:

First a little clarrification, I might be wrong but I beleive ring drops from level 10+ not 20+

Sadly not, there are certain rings (and crafting mats) that can only drop from lvl 20+.

K thanks for the clarification, didnt know that!

nachtnebel.9168:

anyhow with that out of the way you’re making a theoretical case that I am entirely sure will never happen in actuality. Why do I say this? if you’re trying to get an ascended armor set you’re a player who has to have the best armor, you’re not going to be geared in greens especially whe
n considering by the 2nd run of FoTM you’ll be able to afford a rare set!, by the 12th run you could probably afford to craft an exotic set!

I agree here, you will most likely not run higher scales of FotM in greens. But still the fact that you can’t do it at all creates a gate.

Correction, you can do it all in greens, you cannot do all the difficulty in greens ! Which is true, no one is denying that there is a gate in FotM on the difficulty level we’re just saying there is no gate on the content. You can play every single thing in FoTM in greens no problem just up to a certain difficulty level!

nachtnebel.9168:

In anycase what you’re talking about is a difficulty barrier thats intended ! The Dungeon scales forever, even if you gear in full ascended gear with the best infusions there will be a point where the difficulty will still outweigh the best gear in the game ! That difficulty barrier is tackled part with skill and part in stats.

I agree again but I don’t like that you call it “difficulty barrier” cause that’s simple not true. The difficulty of the dungeon does not increase at all, the gear check just gets harder.

It is a difficulty level, its a collection of things really gear check is just part of it of course but player skill and how well they play their build is also part of it! if that were not the case and it was purely gear based there would be a clear cut off point. Yes some people say they can get to level 10 with no ascended gear, some say they can reach level 15 and a few that said they can get past level 20.

In any case the only real gear check comes with the agony mechanic that doesnt kick in until level 10. Level 1 – 10 dont have the same difficulty though do they?

Its like the dreaded temple of intolerable in the war in kryta. Having your armor infused was obviously critical and a gear check of sorts but getting that out of the way didnt make it easy either !

nachtnebel.9168:

In Gw1 some people where able to solo farm underworld! other people needed a good group to tackle it! Thats not because underworld was gated and it certainly is not because Gw1 had some vertical gear progression gating but rather simply speaking there was a difficulty gating !

In GW1 Underworld was a real skill check and not a gear check. So technically we could speak of a skill gate, which is fine.

In both cases it was a bit of both. Never tried it but I am guessing it would have been harder / possibly impossible to solo underworld with level 1 gear and no runes
But having the best armor alone was also definitely not enough to solo it !

nachtnebel.9168:

Same thing happened with the mad king tower for example. stats and armor played no part in it though not everyone was able to complete it ! While others could do it nearly every go ! You could argue that was gated too using your same criteria but I believe that wouldnt really be accurate !

Again a perfect example for a skill check. If the FotM scaling would work in a similar way it would be fantastic, but sadly it’s all about the way easier to implement gear check.

I think you’re generalizing a bit too much I didnt play a lot of FotM, only got to level 3 for the monthly achievement but I thought the fractals I did were pretty well done with mechanics that dont even involve gear checks. Take the swamp fractal, carrying the wisps to the tree trunks has 0 effect on gear, its all co-ordination and skill to react timely to events.

The fact there are no way points makes team work and supporting each other essential!

Again agony is obviously a gear check fundamentaly with perhaps a minsicule amount of skill (you ability to dodge the attack to inflict it) but it would be unfair to say thats all there is to FoTM!

Hawks.5736:

Galen Grey.4709:

hydeaut.1758:

HiddenNick.7206:

Gehenna.3625:

Aside from whether you like it or not, it does introduce content gating.

What exact content is ascended gear gating right now?

Difficulty level is content to you?!

If you can´t play FotM with your friends/guildmates/most other players because they are lvl 20+ and want to progress while you have no ascended gear – what else is that than gated content?

honestly the problem there is an egoistic guild / friends ! Both a guild / friends should be helping out each other! In my guild quite often people join a dungeon not because they need it but because someone else needs it !

Some people in your guild cant run higher level FotM with you? Well then bloody help them get there!

Thats what players should be like, but the majority are not and those are the people ANet wants to please. And theyve stated that quite frequently too, so the whole Ascended thing isnt really a surprise. Im beginning to realize the vocal people on the issue were the ones who created it in the first place(myself included!), there was no broken promise other than the ones that the community fabricated for themselves.

But that really changes nothing for me, Ill continue to play for fun and just run level 1 FotM because theyre really fun dungeons. Ill still do DEs in Orr because theyre fun, Ill still run story modes with friends and guild because its fun, and Ill still pop into WvW to get my kitten kicked – because its still fun.

Well the only thing I disagree with you is that Anet want to please people who want vertical progression. They’re trying to give them stuff to do yes, but from what I am seeing the deck is still hugely stacked in favor of horizontal progression!

And I totally agree that this whole ascended gear was probably created for the people who are really vocal against it ! It would make 100% sense !

Why?

Well lets think about it !

From what I am seeing people who go for horizontal progression come into two categories. 1 category is content driven! we love the fact there is so much to do, explore and experiance in the game and try to do it everything! Another category is reward driven. They still dont want vertical progression but they dont care about the soul of a horizontal game they just want the rewards and these are the people who spend their day farming

Now dont get me wrong I am not saying one play style is good and the other bad, just that they are differnet !

However people who spend their time farming the same spots I would image where the ones complaining that there were just 2 zones for level 80 players! For players who loved to explore everything there were in fact 25 zones at level 80!

Well obviously Arenanet have no way to issue enough zones to keep these players interested all the time so they came up with FoTM. Instead of having the same few DE to farm, you get a dungeon that changes and evolves with additional content updates that scales in difficulty and increases its rewards accordingly ! I am not a farmer but I would imagine its actually quite good !

At the same time people who like to explore still kept their whole world to play in !

Esrever.8613:

^ unless you can prove there is a large population bias for people who use xfire, it clearly shows a steep decline. And based on random distributions, its very likely correlates to the game pretty closely.

I showed you a large population bias!

When mists of pandaria launched daily play time shot up to 120k just like gw2 did at launch. Today WoW stands at 21k exactly 2x of what Gw2 shows today.

So if such a drop is an indication of decline especially to the level people imply dont you think we’d have heard that WoW subscription went under something like 5m by now? yet on november 7th Blizzard announced subscriptions rose to over 10 million. Xfire on that day showed 14k hours Clearly, without a shred of doubt a decline in Xfire isnt reflected with a decline in players because before MOP WoW was under 9m users

There just is no relation !
Thats also ignoring the fact that the xfire numbers suggests Gw2 has 1/2 the players that WoW has and I am sure if they reached 5m sales we’d have heard about it !

nachtnebel.9168:

HiddenNick.7206:

nachtnebel.9168:

something absolutely incorrect about the FotM dungeon.

Where exactly I’m incorrect?

As I explained in my other posting: Agony is not the only content blocker in the game. Try to reach lvl 20 with a team that only wears greens and you will see that their are certain HP and DPS checks you can’t beat without exploiting them (e.g. Old Tom, the Grawl Shaman or the seals on the colossals hands). And before you say that lvl 20 is only optional content, it’s not, you need to reach it in order to get access to infused ascended rings.

Wait until the whole range of ascended gear is released, then we can talk again.

Exactly… Until then don’t just assume it’s going to be bad!

And once again you took a sentence out of its context to proof nothing. The part you didn’t quote was the important one:
You will see that this gear either will create a gate, that content will be too easy for those that have it or that the progression will be removed due to the scaling system.

How is that more important then the fact that ascended gear is not there yet and you have no idea how it’s going to work?

If you have the two numbers 1 and 2 they will add up to 3, it doesn’t matter if you have done the “math” already or if you are just going to do it in the future, the outcome will not change.
With stat progression it’s exactly the same, there are not many different options how it can be implemented and I gave you all of them. And btw that’s why I asked you that question, which you still haven’t asnwered yet, in the first place. So that you see it for yourself.

First a little clarrification, I might be wrong but I beleive ring drops from level 10+ not 20+
anyhow with that out of the way you’re making a theoretical case that I am entirely sure will never happen in actuality. Why do I say this? if you’re trying to get an ascended armor set you’re a player who has to have the best armor, you’re not going to be geared in greens especially when considering by the 2nd run of FoTM you’ll be able to afford a rare set!, by the 12th run you could probably afford to craft an exotic set!

In anycase what you’re talking about is a difficulty barrier thats intended ! The Dungeon scales forever, even if you gear in full ascended gear with the best infusions there will be a point where the difficulty will still outweigh the best gear in the game ! That difficulty barrier is tackled part with skill and part in stats.

In Gw1 some people where able to solo farm underworld! other people needed a good group to tackle it! Thats not because underworld was gated and it certainly is not because Gw1 had some vertical gear progression gating but rather simply speaking there was a difficulty gating !

Same thing happened with the mad king tower for example. stats and armor played no part in it though not everyone was able to complete it ! While others could do it nearly every go ! You could argue that was gated too using your same criteria but I believe that wouldnt really be accurate !

hydeaut.1758:

HiddenNick.7206:

Gehenna.3625:

Aside from whether you like it or not, it does introduce content gating.

What exact content is ascended gear gating right now?

Difficulty level is content to you?!

If you can´t play FotM with your friends/guildmates/most other players because they are lvl 20+ and want to progress while you have no ascended gear – what else is that than gated content?

honestly the problem there is an egoistic guild / friends ! Both a guild / friends should be helping out each other! In my guild quite often people join a dungeon not because they need it but because someone else needs it !

Its not even like running lvl 1 fotm gets you nothing or something you’re still rewarded well! Honestly in such an event its more of a player issue then a game issue ! game isnt 100% innocent either I will give you that, if there were no levels there would be no possibility of a segregation true ! But seriously do people have to be forced in doing the decent thing? That problem can never be fully resolved anyone, even if FoTM had no levels some one might want to run say AC but the rest of the guild might want to turn FoTM and there no progression of any kind and you still come to the same impass cause thats primarily a social issue not a game issue!

Thing is once you hit 80 you can still play anywhere in the game ! I dont know why so many people feel they should / can only play in level 80 zones once they get to level 80! especially since so many people believe in horizontal progression !

This truely puzzles me greatly!
How can people be so focused on attacking any content thats reward oriented but in turn they refuse to play anything that isnt reward oriented!

Gehenna.3625:

Alice.8694:

I know a couple of groups who hit level 20 in fractals with 0 agony resistance. So within the current content… That means agony resistance is a “Make things easier” stat. Basically it’s a luxury stat… As design goes, that’s a really good concept. I hope they can consistently encourage it within future content.

I heard the same. I also heard that after that you get one shotted without it and that by then because of the RNG approach a lot of people don’t have the items yet so they get stuck at that point.

Still, my point remains that Anet already said they want to expand on this and that more future content will require this.

Aside from whether you like it or not, it does introduce content gating. You must have this gear or you cannot play. That creates issues if the gear that can be infused takes a long time to get together and to infuse, because more casual players will always be behind on gear, not being able to play certain new content when it comes out.

That future content however is likely to be new fractals added to that same dungeon! Of course nothing is stopping them from employing agony in the open world but I think it would be a very bad idea and kinda hard to implement too because you cant just exclude people who dont have agony resistance in the open world.

Gating a level is not the same as gating content ! You can still play all of the fractal content all of it without any ascended gear! you’re just limited on how high of a difficulty you can get!

Essentially its not stopping you experiancing the content only how much you can get rewarded for it without investing time into getting the gear that will allow you get a better return.

To me this is no different then hard mode in Gw1. In hard mode the gw1 got well harder and without investing time in getting good build for your and your heroes which in general might have meant hunting for specific skills, you might not be able to complete hardmode and be limited on how much reward you got out of it! but being unable to handle hardmode itself didnt gate you from content, you could still play all the map and enjoy it but on a diminished reward so to speak.

This is the same thing only with multiple levels rather then just 1

beren.6048:

Galen Grey.4709:

The story converages around the same theme true, I mean its all about zaithan but there are many different paths you can go through and only a few mission are the same across all different choices.

This really nice map some one did should clear things up a bit
beware of possible spoilers
http://gw.zweistein.cz/gw2storyline.svg

The map seems impressive, but I played many stories with friends. It felt pretty much the same. I don’t see the levels in this map and perhaps somethings are like doing the same thing in different ways. I had fun never the less (except when I had to listen to trahearne) and a branching story is new for an MMO (correct me if I m wrong).

Also, what about charm, dignity etc. it doesn’t have any effect on how you are approached or what happens. They made the system, but they didn’t do anything with it. And a person has to defeat the dragon, you can’t choose to be evil, you have to be good.

Well at the core its one storyline so the branching is kinda superficial. At all times you’re working towards killing zaithan the branching is more in terms of who you’ll allying yourself with which in turns affects what missions you’re doing using what approach but the general direction is obviously the same! However it still gives you variety if you play alts ! If on one character you decide to help out the quagen and on another you decide to help out the hylek one can claim its essnetially the same thing story wise but in practice you’re playing a completely different mission which has a completely different subplot if you will. Its not perfect but it does break the feeling of repetion imho.

As far as I know Personality traits such as Charm, dignity and ferocity just open different dialog options to you when talking to some NPCs. My main is geared nearly exclusively towards dignity and I talk to a lot of NPCs and many times I get dialog options that are marked with the dignity icon and that alone. I always thought thats because I have a lot of dignity and nearly nothing else so I just get the dignity dialog option. I always assumed if I had say mostly charm then I would get a reply thats aligned with that!

But yeah as far as I can tell its more of a roleplaying mechanic so to speak didnt really notice any effect beyond what dialog choices you get!

You’re right it could be made better by having consequences associated with it! though I cannot exclude that this might be in already because like I said I just have dignity. Must try an alt with a different personality and see if things change !

Narkosys.5173:

A 10% increase is a 10% increase as whiteside said. That advantage in WvW is the diff between a win and a loss.

To say Gw2 is less of a grind is a lie.This game shouldnt have been called guild wars 2 because it is nothing like gw1 and is incredibly disingenuous to do so.It has been shown time and time again that appealing to the 1% uber grinders is a death nail because you cant control the power creep and everyone else is left behind and they leave.
Right now the game has no direction and cant tell if it is a horizontal or vertical progression.They do nothing well and the game is suffering. Pick a direction and do it well. Just note that all Vert Prog has failed to beat wow and only a few have remained popular and provided a decent return.

Anet have to around Feb to get things in order before some things hit the net and really take the player base away. I hope they can get it together by then.

I am afraid you’re being too absolute on this ! If this was a purely gear based game with 1 on 1 battles then you’d be right 10% advantage would mean a win or loss but WvW isnt any of that! For starters gear is only part of the equation, skills is a much more important element! I only have the chest and trousers that are exotic the rest is rare, the jump in stats is 13% between rare to exotic unlikely exotic to ascended where the jump is 9% yet every month I worked towards my monthly achievement and every time died less then 10 times to get my 50 kills.

Like Arenanet have said from day 1 there are just too many variables in WvW you cant claim a 10% better stats are going to give you victory !

Not only that by WvW is about 2 week battles, individual deaths are meaningless! You could have an amazing kill to death ratio and still be loosing badly if your enemies control more of the map!

I also dont understand why people keep bringing Power Creep up, I dont see how that has any effect what so ever in Gw2 thanks to its scaling system! they could introduce a 100 new tiers and still the starter zone would be relevant content! there is absolutely no power creep here !

As for the games direction, like the manifesto says, its play it how you want to play it ! To me Arenanet managed to create a themepark then can be played like a sandbox!

Its up to you how you play it. If you want to play it 100% as a horizontal progression game you can no problem! I know cause thats what I do !

beren.6048:

Think they took some short cuts to finish up stuff. The personal story for example converges all to the same stuff. After you completed around level 25 story it is more or less all the same. For new races like silvari this seems even sooner, thats why I believe they started out with fully branching personal stories and ended up with trahearns personal story.
The gear grind I think he means that you don’t kill the same mobs over and over again. Which means that dungeons must be different all the time, such that you have to do a task to get gear, not kill 1 mob over and over. Still if you do 1 dungeon to earn 1 armor you grind the dungeon and so you also grind the mob.

The story converages around the same theme true, I mean its all about zaithan but there are many different paths you can go through and only a few mission are the same across all different choices.

This really nice map some one did should clear things up a bit
beware of possible spoilers
http://gw.zweistein.cz/gw2storyline.svg

cesmode.4257:

1:36 – Colin Johansen – We just dont want to make a game where people grind. How do you get ascended gear?

2:17 <I dont know her name> – We dont want to make the same MMO everyone else is making. What is item progression, at any degree?

“GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun” – Going after ascended gear is a grinding treadmill. Rather, the upgrades/and upgraded infusion slots over time(making the previous infusion slot obsolete) is a grinding treadmill). Ofcourse no MMO forces you onto a treadmill. I wish people would stop spouting that. “Dont run FoTM and dont get ascended gear. Its that simple, if you dont want to be a part of it” You are almost validating every arguement that is against ascended gear. If you say “Dont go after ascended gear, noone is forcing you”, thats kind of covering up the fact that you think it is a treadmill. No MMO is going to force you to grind out the best gear or items. Of course. WoW is the same way, Rift is the same way. Nothing new. But if you want to stay mildly competitive you must.

I found this in 5 minutes. Re-read carefully.

It is very different! you cannot ignore armor in most MMO because your character stats become a barrier when doing high level content! better yet try to PvP with regular easy to get armor.

You mention rift for example, when you try to travel to ember Island the game actually tells you that you might have trouble if you’re not properly geared up. More so in raids each tier of raid has 3 stats used as a gating mechanism hit, focus and toughness. Each tier has its ranges of these which the game even explicately tells you.

Gw2 is different in that there is no such thing. No content at all has an gear requirement! The only exception so to speak being that in FoTM certain high difficulty levels will include agony to which you need specific gear to counteract. So again I am saying so called because your gear will not gate the content in FoTM just the difficulty!

Also Gw2 is designed in a way that PvE is all co-operative and never competitive. So having worst gear then the next person really doesnt make you any less competitive!
sPvP provides the same gear to anyone. So gear is again a non factor

in WvW gear will make a difference but a fairly small one! There are so many factors at play that personally I wouldnt worry! Someone could have the best gear possible and still be extremely disadvantaged if the other team has higher numbers, better tactics, better position, seige weapons, more skilled player etc…

Falcon Night.4653:

Galen Grey.4709:

LordByron.8369:

So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.

did Anet broke this?
Yes actually.

Try to get an ascended backpack/ring currently…..

-Agony resistance is the DEFINITION of "spending hours preparing to have fun ".

-New tiers
-New equip level
-New tiers of ascended (i menan ascended infused, capacitor infused, ascended to talk about the 3 currently known)
-Infusions

Are a gear trendmill

Fortunately in my country you cannot wordplay to trick people, and what is important is HOW is that mannifesto interpreted by common people.

And well it seems people think is no more valid….at least actually…..they can fix things? sure
Is manifesto deceptive advertising in relation of current game state? without any doubt yes.

Enjoy your wordplay….its worth as much as ToS: nothing.

P.S. and i’m in favor to give them another chance, but please don t make people fool with these threads….

Dont you think you’re taking this too far! If you were free to interpret any advertisement your way you can be sure everyone could point out at any advertisement and say its deceptive!

You can even say that gw1 breaks the manifesto if you want just because the manifesto says I can play the game any way I want and I decide to interpret that as say being able to bot and if I do that (LUCKLY ) they ban me!

there you go

I am sorry but you’re not free to interpret stuff any way you decide ! For you Ascended armor breaks the manifesto fair enough ! for me Ascended armor is entirely optional and has 0 effect on my game so how can it break the manifesto for me? Is my opinion any less valid ?

So you are interpreting the Manifesto the way, you, want? … LOL…
As you said its your opinion.

Of course, did I tell him he is wrong? Nope I told him his opinion is fair … Highlighted it for you

Both our opinions are just opinions, his opinion doesnt mean the manifesto is a lie and as a result that is false advertisment just like my opinion doesnt mean the manifesto is absolute truth ! Its subjective like any kind of mission statement after all.

They state what they want to achieve and the way they go about doing that can vary from person to person!

Like in this case for some people Ascended gear is a mandatory grind just for the simple fact it exist!

For me to be a mandatory grind they have to gate content and/or put me at a disadvantage in some situation.

To me personally Ascended gear doesnt do that yet! now maybe in the future they will release content who’s difficulty level mandates Ascended gear and then the situation will change but right now I can still do anything in masterworks if I want.

Is any of these opposing views wrong or false?

LordByron.8369:

So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.

did Anet broke this?
Yes actually.

Try to get an ascended backpack/ring currently…..

-Agony resistance is the DEFINITION of "spending hours preparing to have fun ".

-New tiers
-New equip level
-New tiers of ascended (i menan ascended infused, capacitor infused, ascended to talk about the 3 currently known)
-Infusions

Are a gear trendmill

Fortunately in my country you cannot wordplay to trick people, and what is important is HOW is that mannifesto interpreted by common people.

And well it seems people think is no more valid….at least actually…..they can fix things? sure
Is manifesto deceptive advertising in relation of current game state? without any doubt yes.

Enjoy your wordplay….its worth as much as ToS: nothing.

P.S. and i’m in favor to give them another chance, but please don t make people fool with these threads….

Dont you think you’re taking this too far! If you were free to interpret any advertisement your way you can be sure everyone could point out at any advertisement and say its deceptive!

You can even say that gw1 breaks the manifesto if you want just because the manifesto says I can play the game any way I want and I decide to interpret that as say being able to bot and if I do that (LUCKLY ) they ban me!

there you go

I am sorry but you’re not free to interpret stuff any way you decide ! For you Ascended armor breaks the manifesto fair enough ! for me Ascended armor is entirely optional and has 0 effect on my game so how can it break the manifesto for me? Is my opinion any less valid ?

Raine.1394:

Galen Grey.4709:

Raine.1394:

Mackdose.6504:

Raine.1394:

I played WoW for years and grinded out countless tiers in PvE and PvP. The grind in WoW and the grind in GW2 are in no way comparable, you are right, but it is GW2 that utterly dwarfs WoW for the steepness or difficulty or time investment in the grind. I could get a set of gear in WoW in the time it would take to grind out a single piece in GW2—and there was zero cost in gold! Those appealing to steepness or difficulty of the grind in this way have clearly never played WoW or never marched through the tiers. It was tedious as all grinds are, but it was easy compared to GW2.

Comparing apples to apples, (max gear in GW2 to max gear in WoW) You’d have to:

In WoW:

1. Heroics for pre-raid
2. 1 raid per week, LFR, Daily grind until geared for heroic raids.
3. 1 Heroic Raid per week

I’d reckon about 2 months before you had full heroic tier, then you’d get a content patch a couple weeks later and you’d repeat the raid/LFR per week/ heroic per week/ new dailies until you’re back at status quo. Oh yeah, and you’d be doing this with 9 other people who may or may not be as dedicated as you.

In GW2:

1. Story mode once, for a given dungeon.
2. Explorables until you have a set of exotics
3. Fractals to realistically 15 before maybe you would be stopped by agony.

This can be accomplished in about a month from level 1.

Yeah, night and day difference, with GW2 being on top.

Not true at all. Nobody did heroic raids except the top tier of raiders. Everyone else geared to the tier just below. It took a couple, three weeks max. I could also gear up to the the top tier in PvP in under a month. There is no comparison between the grind in WoW and GW2 from any standpoint. Especially, when you consider that cash is required with GW2 to shorten the incredibly long grind. WoW didn’t require the infusion of real money as GW2 does. The mats required are just insane.

And honestly whats stopping you for gearing exotic in gw2?

Is there really anything you will not be able to enjoy if have an exotic set as opposed to ascended set?

My problem is conceptual. Check my sig for the low down. Vertical progression is synonymous with perpetual gear grind. Since I don’t enjoy gear grinds, yes, there are things in the new GW2 I won’t enjoy, i.e., the gear grind.

so my next question to you, why are you perfectly fine with ignoring the top tear gear in WoW but not in Gw2? Is there something tangable that makes it okey to have 2nd best gear tier in WoW but not in Gw2?

Raine.1394:

Mackdose.6504:

Raine.1394:

I played WoW for years and grinded out countless tiers in PvE and PvP. The grind in WoW and the grind in GW2 are in no way comparable, you are right, but it is GW2 that utterly dwarfs WoW for the steepness or difficulty or time investment in the grind. I could get a set of gear in WoW in the time it would take to grind out a single piece in GW2—and there was zero cost in gold! Those appealing to steepness or difficulty of the grind in this way have clearly never played WoW or never marched through the tiers. It was tedious as all grinds are, but it was easy compared to GW2.

Comparing apples to apples, (max gear in GW2 to max gear in WoW) You’d have to:

In WoW:

1. Heroics for pre-raid
2. 1 raid per week, LFR, Daily grind until geared for heroic raids.
3. 1 Heroic Raid per week

I’d reckon about 2 months before you had full heroic tier, then you’d get a content patch a couple weeks later and you’d repeat the raid/LFR per week/ heroic per week/ new dailies until you’re back at status quo. Oh yeah, and you’d be doing this with 9 other people who may or may not be as dedicated as you.

In GW2:

1. Story mode once, for a given dungeon.
2. Explorables until you have a set of exotics
3. Fractals to realistically 15 before maybe you would be stopped by agony.

This can be accomplished in about a month from level 1.

Yeah, night and day difference, with GW2 being on top.

Not true at all. Nobody did heroic raids except the top tier of raiders. Everyone else geared to the tier just below. It took a couple, three weeks max. I could also gear up to the the top tier in PvP in under a month. There is no comparison between the grind in WoW and GW2 from any standpoint. Especially, when you consider that cash is required with GW2 to shorten the incredibly long grind. WoW didn’t require the infusion of real money as GW2 does. The mats required are just insane.

And honestly whats stopping you for gearing exotic in gw2?

Is there really anything you will not be able to enjoy if have an exotic set as opposed to ascended set?

I urge people to focus on the big picture rather then single individual things. The manifesto says a lot of things and one of its core concepts is play the game they way you want. That has a ton of implications, it means the game will be designed for many different play styles and ascended gear and the infusion progression is part of that!

I personally think Arenanet are doing an amazing job fusing Vertical progression game play with horizontal progression game play… wouldnt have thought it possible without seeing it myself!

Let me just point out how they achieved this!

You have gear tiers but content is designed such even masterworks is enough to play anything in the game!

sPvP has its own max gear, if you go purely horizontal and never bother with gear you can still be fully competitive in PvP with 0 draw back.

Gear can be aquired playing anything you like (still not true for Ascended Gear but just cause they havent had the time to implement the other avenues of getting Ascended gear. It was always the plan to be like that, they even appologized for rolling out one part of the aquistion method and not all of them at the same time)

Level scaling… You have progression, you always get more powerful. At level 1 you’re not going to handle level 80 content… leveling up is without a doubt progression but that progression doesnt negate your horizontal content because you’re scalled down when going back and still rewarded!

gear progression doesnt gate any content, none ! not one tiny bit! You could wear only stuff that drops and still be able to play everything!

Simply speaking like the manifesto says you can truely play the game anyway you want! you want progression, you have it! you want to ignore progression and enjoy the sights? you got it! you want to ignore PvE and just PvP, you got it!

The game design is such That gear is unimportant! You level provides 50% of the stats so even wearing no armor at all you’re still effective having stats in direct damage, condition and support ! But thats not all everything important has a base value, Health A Necro gets 18k base health so have no attribute in vitality still makes quite effective. A weapon has a base damage, etc… More then that Combat is skill based, Stats help obviously ! doing x% less damage isnt exactly a minor thing of course but if you’re good and play well you can negate all damage done by an enemy still enabling you to win! (in PvE i would say quite easily as well)

This leave WvW which is argueably the only place where vertical progression has some effect in my opinion. Its been said time and time again that WvW isnt balanced and never was intended to be… More then that it can never be balanced! In all engagements one side outnumbers the other, almost never do you get 1 on 1 engagements. The outnumbered side still wins at times! Now ascended gear might add 2 – 5 more damage to an average 100dmg attack if you’re lucky but guess what? thats still about 9900dmg short of what a direct hit from a trebuchet will do to you! its also a fraction of the advantage an arrow cart or a ballista will provide! Its a negligable defence value to what a keep wall will give you!

Well I am taking this too far… suffice to say the game is designed so that you can be effective with any gear tier you wear! If you want the best gear, by all means go for it! but realise thats entirely your decision, it isnt the game forcing you to get it! on the contrary the game does A LOT to ensure if you dont get it you can still play everything you desire!

There is absolutely nothing mandatory about Ascended gear right now!

Alberel Leonhart.9640:

Colin Johanson

The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Just quoting this again to make sure the OP gets the message that he’s wrong. This statement explicitly states that the rarest items (ascended) are not more powerful than other items (yes, they are).

I’m sure you could come up with some way to deliberately misread it to suggest they didn’t say that but at that point you’re being willfully ignorant.

They knew the people reading this stuff were mostly GW1 fans and what they were describing was the GW1 gear system. You could take those words and apply them to GW1 perfectly. They knew full well that everyone would read it as the game having a gear plateau with horizontal progression like GW1. There were countless discussions about this on forums, including the official forums during beta, and not once did any dev correct anyone.

I honestly feel sorry for you defending ANet at this point. Regardless of what you actually think of the changes are you really so blind as to not see this for the obvious deception that it is?

Hmm I dont know about you but even though ascended gear has been introduced just for 2 weeks, the rarest items are still legendary weapons! at least on my server they are! just yesterday I saw 2 people link ascended gear in map chat! have yet to see a single legendary weapon on my server even though they had over 3 months head start!

Sorry to break it to you but that statement is still correct! Do you honstly believe ascended are more rare then legendary?

Jairyn.6913:

A good way to rapidly generate additional content is to host player generated content as exemplified by the Neverwinter Nights toolset or Architect Entertainment in City of Heroes. I believe some other MMOs (EQ2? STO?) also leverage this feature.

Of course, AE in CoH was also an example of players abusing this feature to gain unexpected amounts of xp and currency and needed to be checked, so a token/currency system would still probably work better then awarding singular items. The real appeal there is the novelty of different scripted experiences and player storytelling. Free content.

In theory, a robust system of cascading dynamic events and meta events that breadcrumb through the world and/or randomized instanced dungeons a la Diablo or City of Heroes could also provide a great deal of replayable content that remains somewhat fresher.

ohh that would be soooooo amazing!

but fear the chaos it might cause as the same time

I personally think people are being a bit too focused on details rather the big picture. Yes a lot of things are currently in flux, From the AmA I get that the crafting requirements of Ascended gear are likely to go down. I personally dont like to play the game goal oriented, I play what I enjoy and then use that to get rewards so maybe for me its easier to say. But if you’re worried about spending more then you have to on items, why dont you just play the game and for now just hang on to the materials for a while. If the price goes down you might end up having to get 2 armor pieces instead of 1 if they dont go down you can then just craft it when you feel you’ve waited enough!

I think that decisions in Gw2 seem to be taken between teams and that might cause things to be in flux until an agreement is reached! And it does make sense, from a crafting perspective someone might say ohh lets lower the requirements to craft say an exotic weapon for example. But then a team from dungeons might go no, that will make crafting a much more alluring way to get an exotic weapon and that will hurt dungeon running … just an example… So I can understand there is a lot more then just coming up with a good idea before you nail down a decision. Different departments have to look at every change and see how that change might effect the part of the game they’re responsable for ! Seeing how people tend to focus on everything said and hold it like an unbreakable promise I understand why he didnt want to commit to things that were yet ot be set in stone!

It has to be a balance. Like Red Falcon said creating content requires a lot more then it takes to consume it! Think about a dungeon for example. You have to model actual objects in the dungeon be it say a statue or an alter etc.. you have to create texture for them, then you have to place them in the world, model and create the surrounding be it a temple or a huge cavern. You need to create and set particle effects be it smoke rising from the ground or lava splashing around. You then need to create the mobs and the npcs, create the story for them, animate them, script them to behave a certain way, perhaps code AI if they engage in a new behavor that isnt yet available in game, you have to create goals the npcs are trying to achieve, You have to create traps and other mechanics, script them etc.., create travel paths. you also have to create the sound effects, possibly music or decide which existing once you’re going to use. Create NPC dialog, do the voice overs etc… Then you have to test out the whole thing, fix bugs, improve / smooth rough areas. Suffice to say it takes weeks of work to create a single dungeon.

On the other hand a player goes through it in what 45 mins? And if that wasnt bad enough an MMO should be designed to keep you interested indefinitely, its a game designed to never end. So thats where repetition comes in. But like you correctly say repetition is boring so you have to strike some form of balance there. Gw2 tries to do that by offering some variation, you have 3 explorable paths with each having different dynamic events that might trigger. Obviously the dynamic events dont really change the feel of the particular path but they help make it feel slighly less repetitive. Beyond that you have other content you can play that still rewards you with the same stats essentially enabiling you to take a break when trying to get a specific dungeon set without any negative impact.

Repetion in an MMO is unavoidable but a big variety of things to do can make it a lot less harsh then otherwise it can be!

Like Stang said it was all about time investment and not about object type or power.

In a couple of weeks you’re done with your exotic armor. Then your options were a named weapon another 2 weeks to perhaps a month or a legendary weapon which would take 6 months to a year.

Now some of us are fine with playing the game for a year before we reach our reward but others dont think like that. They arent able to enjoy the game without being rewarded and they can fathom waiting for up to a year before reaching that reward!

Thats what Ascended gear trys to do. Provide rewards that can be achieved in a single day, require a bit more long term playing but on the other hand dont leave you for months without anything tangable to enjoy.

Collossus have a really bad drop rate cause they dont drop the more common fine crafting materials but only the really rare ones, IE the corrupted lodestones. You also farm skelks you said right? I am sure they drop blood fairly often for you like eve5ryone else!

A MF set can be crafted very easily … Good runes for it are slightly harder to get, they will require about 5g still not a big deal and none of it require the fractals

phooka.4295:

Galen Grey.4709:

There is still no vertical progression, a single new tier doesnt make it so unless there is some written law somewhere that say 5 tiers is okey to consider a game horizontal but 6 tiers makes it vertical! the only vertical progression they really introduced isnt the ascended gear itself its agony / infusion system in FoTM and that doesnt even kick in after level 10.

Galen, I must admit that you’re the most eloquent, silver-tongued apologist I’ve seen here so far. However, that does not make your arguments any more valid where you’re simply ignoring the truth that’s out there for all to see (who don’t close their eyes).

The new tier was announced as the “start of the progression initiative”. Not as the “final cornerstone of level-80-equipment.”

It was announced that we’d eventually have a full set of ascended items available. So to say that it’s only rings and back is disingenious.

Also, it has been said that better quality than rare infusions will come. Even if you’re only forced to keep the wheel spinning for infusions, that doesn’t really make it less of a treadmill.

You need to periodically update your equipment or you will, over time, become less powerful than players who do. This is my personal, generic definition of a treadmill. Please tell me which part of it is wrong or does not apply to GW2. Remember that ascended gear was introduced as “beginning of progression initiative” and that higher-quality infusions were already promised if you try to argue the definition does not apply to GW2.

You can ignore the writing on the wall. Unless you update your equipment regularly, you will, over time, fall behind your fellow players as far as survivability, DPS and utility (e.g. heals for others) are concerned. Tell me how this is less like WoW and more like GW1, please.

You misunderstood a few things I said I think. I never meant to imply it will be limited to rings or back item. Obviously there will be a full set introduced no doubt. Well if we’re like they’ll rethink the whole thing but as is right now its a near certaintiy this is going to happen! Was definitely not trying to deny that I only meant to say that even with just a backpack and ring people are behaving as if the game has changed drastically from a super fun game to a disaster!

Also I totally agree new infusions will come I said so in all my posts dont think I contradicted that anywhere! only said in one post in reply to someone that claimed ascended gear + infusion is a whole new tier of gear that a level one infusion gives a single +5 to one attribute if every level of infusion goes up with +5 stats it will take 55 level of infusions before an assended gear with an infusion will be strong enough as a whole new tier. Dont think there is any thing false of misleading there? you disagree with this statement?

The part that in sPvP everyone has the same gear, in PvE everyone is co-operating and in WvW its such an intentionally unbalanced system that it doesnt matter not to mention that I still maintain skill is a lot more important! I mean seriously I am not trying to decieve anyone here! an ascended ring has what 11 more power then a exotic one? multiply that by the 12 armor / accessory slots and you get 132 extra power!
every level 80 has 916 base power + 1104 off exotic armor for a total of 2020. Will those 132 extra power provided by ascended gear really turn the tide of an WvW battle? (and yes I know power is not the only thing that improves you can get more health and more toughness etc…) but come on in most engagements you either out numbered or they you out number them, they might have a better position or you might have a better hold. They might have siege weapons, they might have npc allies . One single well timed interrupt will throw off any advantage you get no doubt!

That being said its definitely not closer to gw1 never said it was, never said I liked it and you’re wrong if you think I am defining it. Once again I think it was a bad idea and I dont like it! all I have ever said was that people are making out to be a much bigger deal then it is in my opinion, nothing more nothing less!

dalendria.3762:

Galen Grey.4709:

If we look at the posts / what people were saying when Gw2 launched you’d find lots of people complaining you can finish it all in a week or two and there is nothing left to do once you reach level 80. I am sure you’ll agree 100% with me that was entirely inaccurate!

Just cause multiple people share the same opinion doesnt mean their argument is automatically correct!

Yes, I started seeing those complaints and wondered what game they were playing. I began playing at Headstart and reached lvl 80 in about 3 weeks. Just before the 11/16 patch, I was still enjoying the game and had plenty left to strive for. And I felt like I was playing the game a lot. I guess I do not understand why people need Arenanet to offer than things to “keep them playing.” How about playing a game because you enjoy it? And if you do not or no longer do, then stop playing it.

And how does keep people playing ensure that Arenanet meets its cash shop revenue projections. Yes, the assumption could be that the more people the more they will spend in the cash shop. However, what if they play but don’t spend money. Maybe they would spend if the game was fun and continued to add more fun things to do. Maybe they would spend if the cash shop offered better items.

I am 100% with you there! I had your same exact experiance!

I dont think this is strictly speaking just an exercise to maximize cash shop revenue I mean I am sure they care about that but more then that you dont want people quiting your MMO because they have nothing to do, you want everyone to enjoy themselves as much as possible!

Perhaps more so with Gw2 since player population plays a larger then usual important part in the game experiance. If you loose enough players WvW will become boring. Zones will get taken over by hostiles, Group events and Mini Bosses will become undoable etc..

Not saying thats where the game was headed, I think there were enough players enjoying the game as it was but I cant blame Arenanet for trying to provide content to the players who were not finding it!

nachtnebel.9168:

Galen Grey.4709:

People want Ascended gear I get it, they should get them without grind! Arenanet already said they’re going to make Ascended gear available outside of FoTM so wait for that! work on your skins, level alts do what you enjoy! A backpack and a couple of rings will not change anything seriously!

The problem with this is that the pieces of ascended gear you can craft in the Mystic Forge are already a hell of a grind to get too. They are way to expensive, if the crafting recipes will look anything like that it won’t change anything.

well the idea is to have something that takes effort to craft so yeah I do expect they will require some involvement to do but since they’re not gating anything and provided like other crafting recipes they’d use materials you can get playing any content in the game would that be such a big problem?

nachtnebel.9168:

Jairlyn.1429:

nachtnebel.9168:

I seriously doubt that much player appreciate what they did with the FotM dungeon. Most feedback that can be found across the internet is negative. Yes, the individual fractals are fun – no doubt here – but as a whole the dungeon and especially the reward system connected to it is an epic fail.

Stop and think about that for a second. Why would ANet purposefully piss off its customers there isnt even any real money involved with the fractals at risk.
They gave us a survey to take and we did. Thats what they will base their decisions not on “epic fail” threads that make generalizations and assumptions of the player base.

Exactly, they gave us the survey after the forum was flooded with negative threads for days. That shows me that they are not so sure about whether what they did was right or not. In my book the whole “let them grind for gear” idea was rather a knee jerk reaction to some gear locusts leaving the game due to Pandas and not based on the wishes of the majority of the community. They didn’t want to piss us off on purpose, they just didn’t realize that what they were about to do was based on false assumptions.

It probably is more complicated than that. Lets not forget they know exactly how people play. If they saw people rushing to get exotic armor and then spend all their time farming they can extrapolate that once people get their legendaries they’re going to have nothing else to do. Also some might have gotten their exotic set and then simply left!

My fear is based on the comments I’ve seen about this story is a lot of people say they hate vertical progression but may play the game in a way that you’d expect someone who plays vertical progression!

I mean imagine you’re someone who doesnt know what people really think. (which is the case 10k people complaining is too small a sample when compared to 2m – 3m players). You issue the FoTM dungeon and you see the majority of the players drop off everything they’re doing and play FoTM non stop! What Idea would you get? people hate FoTM or love it?

Thats why a survey is important, what you see happening might not always reflect what you think it reflects!

phooka.4295:

Galen Grey.4709:

Now it seems there is another yet mis perception and yes this is a misperception because its a fact Ascended gear didnt change a single thing yet the same exact game that was amazingly fun to play has suddenly become boring?

Sorry to say so, but that sounds quite naïve.

Orr is not the same. With most players in LA, you’re likely not able to play in Orr as you were before the patch. Group events don’t happen because too few people are there to do them. Waypoints are contested.

The old dungeons are not the same. The dedicated dungeon-player knows that the time to get ascended gear is now. If he wants to continue past fractal level 10 or likely into upcoming content, agony will be there and it’ll get worse. So he knows he needs it eventually. If he gets it now, he will keep the capacity to join his (hardcore) friends in whatever content they’re up to. If he doesn’t, he fears he’ll be left behind. Therefore, many, many people grind fractals like mad. This means, however, that fewer people go to the old dungeons, especially for the hard paths that you might still need for the title “dungeon master”.

Crafting is not the same. I would’t buy a non-ascended ring or backpiece anymore. Why waste money on something I’d discard as soon as a locky drop makes it obsolete, no matter how perfect the itemization. This destroys markets.

Thus saying that ascended gear changed nothing is simply incorrect. It changed a lot for the game I used to play and the way I used to play it. Both were immensely affected. For someone levelling alts or aimlessly wandering around the countryside for fun, nothing may have changed. For me, it has.

If you fail to see this point and keep pretending nothing has happened without a qualifier like nothing has changed for me, you’re showing gross disregard for other players and their arguments. I… don’t know how to characterize such disregard. I don’t want this post deleted.

Its not naivee its making a distinction between what happens because of changes to the game and what happens because of player choices.

Lets start by saying that things are likely to be different across servers. My server (piken square) just doesnt have this issue at all! (well I dont think it does havent been in Orr for a while) but I’ve played all over the place. Frostgorge Sound, Lornar’s Pass, Queensdale, Gendarran Fields, there are always players running around!

Likewise I did a couple of AC since FoTM started and it still was easy to get a group on my server.

Why buy any exotic items in the first place you can get it 1/2 the price if you do it by yourself! answer is convinience! And most of the items sold on the TP are sold for ectos and as raw materials for precursors thats why rares still sell for 18+ s … no one needs rare items to use them as armor because like you said why spend the money when tomorrow you can buy an exotic! the problem is even less so now because it will take you far longer then a day to get ascended armor!

Also please keep in my I am not disregarding anything! Like I said plenty of times like you I dont agree with Ascended armor and would rather have never been introduced and said so multiple times !

I just dont see the big change you said it brought and disagree that the changes you mentioned are because of the update. they’re because of players attitude! If on your server players decided cosmetic skins are suddenly worthless and having the best gear is whats imperative I am sorry to say but your server loves vertical progression more then they like horizontal progression. Same thing if they abandoned Orr for the more profitable pastures!

I think you’re missing the fact your server has a much larger problem! If arenanet never releases more profitable content your server would probably just hang out in Orr Ignoring any new content with the same rewards. If Arenanet release more profitable zones Orr would still be abandond in favor of this more profitable zone.
If on your server game play is dictated by what is the most profitable content it will keep happening new gear tiers or not!

In fact you seem to have the same phylosofy. Tell me If Southern Cove had events that gave out rewards greater then Orr, would you keep playing in Orr? And if your answer is yes why do you keep playing in Orr and ignore the rest of tyria?

can we not read too much into it ! It was a generalization she didnt mean All dedicated players but rather the majority of dedicated players from what they observed!

And seeing how this ascended gear has evolved I tend to understand thats probably a large number!

I mean we’re seeing it right now in many threads people claiming how they dropped everythign to get the ascended gear as quickly as possible! I am sure they did the same thing with the exotic gear and it was easy to get that in less then 2 weeks!