Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Ah the short memories of people.

Actually the ENTIRE dye system changed. So you’d get dye seeds and you’ve had to grow them in the old system, but you could only grow one per day, unless you put money into buying plant food from the cash shop. That was FAR FAR greedier than the system they have now.

The whole system changed for the better, not the worse. If the price of me of having dyes not account bound means I don’t have to buy plant food for real money to get more than a single dye a day, I’d say it was a good trade off.

Otherwise you’d have to wait 365 days to get 365 different dyes, assuming every single dye you opened was unique (which wasn’t going to happen). Basically the old way, you’d either have to spend real money, or it would take you years to get all the dyes unlocked.

No, I remember the dye planting system just fine. I don’t see how it’s relevant. It’s not like making them account bound required a once per day time gate. This isn’t an either/or situation.

I’m honestly not sure what I’d even do with hundreds of dyes. I tend to find the couple I want to use, and get them. And once I acquired a celestial seed, planted it, and waited 24 hours, I’d be able to use it on any character. The old system would have been a pain for “collectors” who feel the need to have every single color on their palate, but the current is a pain for people who want to use them for their actual purpose. You know, customizing their characters.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

please tell me which other games lets you to use in game gold to buy cash shop currencies?

Wildstar has announced they will sell a currency that players can buy and sell for in-game money. The players who buy it with in-game money can then use it to pay their subscription fee.

Not sure how many people are aware, but dyes were originally intended to be unlocked across the entire account. Kristen Perry, who was responsible for designing the dye system, blogged about it in late 2010.

Then, in 2012, a post announced that ArenaNet had changed their mind, and were going to make them unlocked per character. The reasoning given was that they wanted dye unlocks to feel like a part of individual character progression. Oddly enough, this was not posted by Kristen Perry or another game designer. It was posted by Crystin Cox, the “monetization manager”, known for her previous work in developing Maplestory’s cash shop.

1. Trying to keep people in game with vertical progress – Namely, Ascended gear as we have it. Gradual, easily achieved vertical progression would have been fine, as would the hard gear plateau many of us expected. This grindy implementation of VP is against the spirit of the game as originally presented.

2. Lack of replacement for trinity – I love the idea of abolishing tank/healer/dps. But there needs to be something to replace it, so the game still feels cooperative among the players. What happened to control and support? They needed to be strong enough and encounters needed to be designed to require them so that everything didn’t become dps (with some passive support).

3. Too much fast travel – Waypoints are too close together. Things like champ trains are enabled by this. Two or three waypoints per zone and land mounts with a significant speed boost would have put a lot more players out in the world.

4. Not enough support for DEs – The DE concept was exciting, but seems to have been largely abandoned. The original vision was that more and more DEs would get added to zones and that you would have a different experience going back through them. Apparently we didn’t ooh and ahh enough when a few were added shortly after launch, so ArenaNet threw their hands up in the air and gave us fractals and “living” story instead.

5. Not enough support for cosmetics – If cosmetics were supposed to be the endgame carrot instead of stat progression, we needed the infrastructure for it. We need to be able to store and swap out skins easily so it makes sense to keep collecting them.

cesmode.4257:

Hahaha. Well, the nerdraging might happen, but it also could have happened in the current CDI and it really didnt. We were all pretty civil.

True. I probably should have left out an exclamation mark or two.

Still, I wouldn’t expect much would be gained from it. Just the same circular “discussion” with the only change being Chris popping in to confirm that he’s reading.

cesmode.4257:

Can we have a CDI dedicated to this very topic? It seems to be on everyones mind, including my own from time to time, for the last year+ and is not going away.

No need, I can tell you what the CDI would entail.

Unhappy Players: “But the ManifestO!111!!ONE1!! You lied >:-(”

Happy Players: “That was a long time ago, things change, move on!”

This goes on for several pages before:

ArenaNet: “We still believe in the ideas expressed in the manifesto and are working to live up to them. We believe we have been true to them. Thank you for your feedback, we’ll discuss it among ourselves, there has been some good discussion here. We’re not at liberty to tell you what is currently in the works or what to expect in the future. kthanksbye!”

Followed by more pages of the player discussion above, before the whole thing gets locked and stickied.

HiddenNick.7206:

You are talking like Vertical Progression is the next bad thing after meteor shower! And why is it so bad? Why do you think that Horizontal Progression is vastly superior to it? You’re not playing an ordinary game. You’re playing an MMO game. And that’s the kind game of game that grows vertically and endlessly (or to the moment when people stops playing it) whether you like or not. And characters should grow with it.

I’m not sure how you got that out of that post. It was in response to a conversation about whether we can accept that Ascended is the final tier of gear, which means the discussion about vertical progression is over, and we can move on to just talking about horizontal progression.

I was pointing out that, quite the contrary, ArenaNet is committed to continuing vertical progression, and therefore the subject is far from closed.

As to your assertion that MMO automatically means vertical progression, that is certainly the tradition of MMORPGs, but there is nothing inherent in Massive, Multiplayer, Online, or Role Playing Game that means vertical progression is necessary.

There are plenty of Multiplayer games, Online games, and Role Playing Games that do not have continual, vertical progression.

I am also not dead set against vertical progression. I do, however, hate the current implementation of Ascended gear for a variety of reasons I’ve listed previously.

Vertical progression that flows naturally out of immersive gameplay is fine. GW2 leveling is an example. Vertical Progression where the extrinsic reward vastly eclipses the intrinsic rewards (Ascended Gear) is what made me take a break from playing GW2.

I very much hope to see clear results from these CDI topics down the road.

It’d be great, after the process of going through the information, talking behind closed doors, spending the months it takes to implement changes, and finally putting it into game, if Chris could point back to these threads and show us where something in this conversation made a real difference in the game.

Khisanth.2948:

VOLKON.1290:

I think we’re putting too much thought into “vertical” progression. It should be clear that hardly anyone (a vast minority) wants a continual power creep to be added to the game. So, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that ascended gear is it. That is max “power”. If that can be agreed upon then the whole topic of vertical itself comes screeching to a halt and we automatically shift to the horizontal line of thinking… now that we know and have resolved ourselves to the idea that ascended is it, how accessible do we make ascended?

Are we? It was pretty clear that hardly anyone wants continual power creep a year ago as well yet here we are with the ascended gear. The strongest statement I’ve seen for not having more in the future is “I certainly hope not”, that is a very weak statement without any sort of commitment. I find the lack of conviction to be very disturbing.

Agreed. We have no guarantees. Even if Ascended is the final tier, which we haven’t been given an unequivocal statement about, we’ve also been told that ArenaNet is committed to continual, gradual vertical progression.

There are plenty of avenues for this without implementing a new tier of gear. We don’t yet have ascended equivalent runes, sigils, infusions or consumables. All of these things can gradually be implemented over the next year, and all with as steep of an acquisition curve as Ascended armor and weapons.

In addition, the last statement we have from ArenaNet is that they expect there to eventually be a level-cap increase, though we have no time-frame hinted at. That means we could have level 90 Ascended gear to chase.

Going on ArenaNet’s most recent statements surrounding this area, we can (without 100% confidence) expect not to see a gear above Ascended, but also expect that vertical progression will continue for the foreseeable future.

Statements that Ascended is the final tier of gear do not mean that vertical progression has ended.

Statements in this thread that they want to concentrate on horizontal progression do not mean that vertical progression has ended.

Anyone who thinks that the release of ascended armor has put an end to VP is either not paying attention, or really wants to believe it in spite of the evidence we currently have.

As a follow up to my previous post, I have some specifics that would make me likely to return to the game. My apologies that I’m not really in the flow of the conversation, as I don’t currently have the free time to follow it. As a passionate follower of GW2 who went from loving the game to leaving it over Ascended gear, I’d like to at least offer my two cents to the devs with this CDI opportunity.

Make high tier mats available throughout the world – What if, at level 80, you could unlock the option that gathering nodes in all zones have a chance to give you mats from any tier? People who want to farm exclusively top tier mats could still stick to their farming paths through the level 80 zones and get only top tier mats from nodes, but those of us who would like to play in the entirety of Tyria could opt to get a mix of mats. If the option is selected by the player, a node would give an equal chance of producing its normal tier of mat or higher with each harvesting tool swing.

I’ll point out that there is little risk for a character, even in cursed shore, once you are outfitted in exotics. This system, though, would address the perceived difficulty of higher level zones because you eliminate lower tier mats from your loot table when harvesting. The highest tier nodes would only give the highest tier mats. The lower tier nodes would give correspondingly fewer top tier mats.

Build on the contribution system to provide loot corresponding to effort Soloing a DE out in the world can be much more work and risk than showing up at Shatterer to PvToe. They can be as much work as dancing around Golem’s electrical fields and machine guns. Yet, comparatively, they reward nothing.

The game already has a system for judging my contribution to DEs. Expand that so that if I do a DE solo or with a few people who were nearby when it started and we put in some serious effort to defeat it, we can get awarded with dragonite, higher tier mats, and/or more cash than pocket change. If it’s possible to make the system sophisticated enough, it could even be anti-farm, since it would be able to judge that an autoattacking zerg that mows over a DE is only worthy of a minimal reward.

Make it possible for us to move through the entire world and still make reasonable progress toward Ascended gear, rather than funneling us to champ trains, world bosses, and endless node loops through Frostgorge and Orr.

Rework crafting from 400 to 500 Let us craft the pieces for Ascended gear from 475 to 500 so we aren’t just making very expensive exotics to salvage or sell. Make it so that when we hit 500 we already have the pieces and the only thing unlocked at 500 is the ability to put them together into the finished weapon.

Drastically increase rewards in WvW Enough has been said about this, but I want to reiterate it. I’m tired of feeling like I need to spend time outside of WvW if I want to progress the gear I want to use inside of WvW.

I’d much rather this apply to DEs rather than hearts. Hearts were a compromise because testers were confused that there were no “quests”. They are there just to breadcrumb us out into the world where we will encounter DEs. Hence the drop off of hearts in the last zones of the game. They’re a transitional tool from what people expect from MMORPGs, to what GW2 was trying to do.

Leave hearts a one-time deal for zone completion, then give us more useful endgame reward for going back and finding DEs in all zones.

I’d like them thinned to somewhere between 25% and of what they are now. Then give us land-based, auto-dismount in combat, can’t be used in cities/caves/buildings, +60% travel speed, mounts.

Replace waypoint goldsink with mount feed.

ArenaNet bears some responsibility.

People will always exploit and cheese things for rewards, but adding ridiculous grinds like Ascended armor encourages it.

I never did champ trains until ArenaNet decided to make crafting from 400 to 500 so ridiculously expensive. I’ll admit to using Guardian staff cheese in Scarlet Invasions to mass tag mobs, as well as in karma trains in WvW (when our zerg was rolling over the enemy anyway so it didn’t matter).

Having said that, I still use all of my appropriate skills during champ train, not just autoattack, and use melee Guardian, not staff. I enjoy dancing around the Golem, avoiding the machine guns and electrical fields. I go melee in WvW in situations where it will actually help.

Still, with the atrocity that Ascended is, I have a hard time blaming anyone for trying to shortcut to rewards.

I somehow posted this to the wrong thread. Reposting here.

Context I was an advocate of this game across several fora starting a few years before launch. I loved GW2 at launch, and approached it very immersively, following my whim through the game. I have spent money for gems, most notably to purchase the steampunk medium armor for my Engie.

I played (and paid) up until a little over a month ago, when I realized the game had become a series of checklists for me to do each time I log on. All of it traces back to the implementation of Ascended gear. I am now on an open ended hiatus from playing to see if the game becomes one I want to play again.

Early Adopter I wasn’t one who ignored Ascended. I’ve got several of my toons in full ascended trinkets, some of them in two sets for stat variety. I got weaponsmith to 500 and crafted an ascended zerker greatsword. I have artificer to 475, and hunstman to 425. I very much hope that Ascended armor and weapons will become much more accessible, as that’s what I need to comfortably return to Tyria.

Shallow Progression There are a lot of pre-launch ideals that were shared with us that people love to argue about on the forums (manifesto, everyone on equal footing at level cap), but there are two I don’t see brought up much.

1. The game should be the same after reaching level cap as it was on the journey there. It shouldn’t suddenly feel like another game.

2. Progression has a “flat curve”. It doesn’t get dramatically steeper the higher you progress.

It is the violation of these two principles, not some ideal about no vertical progression, that caused me to leave GW2. It was the implementation of Ascended armor and weapons that violated them.

Progressing from 400 to 500 crafting is like hitting a wall after the gentle progression from 0 to 400. It takes many magnitudes more resources (either in gold or gathering mats) for that last 100 crafting levels than it did the entire trip to 400.

The same is true for crafting the items. The amount of mats required is huge.

We keep hearing the refrain that ArenaNet is commited to a gradual vertical progression. This is true of the power increase, with small increments in stats, but is absolutely untrue when it comes to what it takes to acquire them.

It is also extremely different from the levelling experience. One of the beauties of this game is “Play how you want” up until level 80. Everything gives you reasonable amounts of experience, and you can ignore levelling, do whatever sounds fun, and find yourself progressing at a quick clip.

In contrast, Ascended weapons and armor require a considerable amount of time focusing on the reward rather than the activity. Dragonite requires repeated world boss zerging. The enormous numbers of high end mats require either a focus on the most efficient methods of getting gold or countless circles of the few zones with the harvesting nodes.

It’s theoretically possible to just play the game and earn the gold required to buy the mats, but it would take so ridiculously long that there will likely be many more new stages of progression implemented by the time even one character completed what we currently have.

Conclusion Since the whole point of Ascended was to solve the “problem” that exotics were moderately easy to achieve, I doubt they will ever be made easily achievable. I hope, however, that is not the case, as I would love to come back and make Tyria my home once again.

Kilger.5490:

Dont forget though, in mmos, over time they always make it more trivial to get top tier for new players entering, so in a year I’ll bet there will be many ways to get laurels.

I’m counting on this.

I’d love to return to Tyria someday. I hope when I do, the grind will have been severely diminished.

They’ve added grind to keep people playing, but for some of us, it has done exactly the opposite.

Azreell.1568:

This game does not offer enough depth or “power” gear progression to keep ‘hardcore" player’s happy.

This point needs to be made more often.

During my hiatus from GW2, I have been beta testing in some other MMORPGs. On the forums for both games there are the inevitable conversations where each person shares their MMORPG history and why they no longer play the games they once did.

A common refrain from former GW2 players is that the game offered no gear progression after level cap. ArenaNet did an about face with their gear plateau vision to try and keep those people, but it failed. They didn’t see the implementation of ascended and say, “Oh, guess I can go back to GW2 and give it another go”.

ArenaNet attempted a compromise, a “best of both worlds” approach, and ended up with the worst of both worlds.

We have gear progression so shallow that it is not going to bring back the players who are used to ever increasing loot tiers, but grindy enough to annoy and frustrate every player who was excited about the idea of a gear plateau.

To everyone who likes to pull out the “You don’t need Ascended to play” card, let me propose an experiment.

Let’s lock [your favorite profession here] from play unless you pay 2000 gems to buy the unlock pack from the Black Lion Trading Company.

You can play all of the game’s content with all of the other professions. WvW is inherently unbalanced so it doesn’t matter what profession any one player is able to play.

[Your favorite profession] will remain unlocked for sPvP regardless of whether you buy the unlock, since sPvP is supposed to be completely balanced.

If you don’t want to spend real money to unlock [your favorite profession] for play, you can always do the work in game to get the 180 gold you’ll need to buy the gems.

They have improved the game immensely with the number of to-do lists that have been added over the last year.

If you didn’t care for it at launch, you may very well like it now. After all, plenty of people who thought it was amazing for the first three months have changed their minds.

Got my weasponsmithing to 500 and made Zojja’s greatsword. Got artificer to 465 and huntsman to 425.

Realized I wasn’t having fun in GW2 anymore. Decided to play Skyrim and beta test in some up and coming MMOs.

So, for the time being, looks like the greatsword is the only piece of Ascended crafting I’ll be doing.

Shockwave.1230:

I would be very disappointed if Gw2 had it’s level cap increased. It would be like ANet finding a loophole in order to continue with vertical power progression while not doing another tier of gear.

They’ve been very clear that they intend to continue vertical progression. No new tiers was a meaningless statement to calm down the reaction against Ascended gear.

Anyone who is waiting for the vertical progression to plateau is waiting in vain.

Nar.8327:

The only bright side to next year and beyond is that they’ve officially run out of things to make stupid ascended versions of. Well, except aqua breathers.

We still have sigils, runes, infusions, and consumables that can have higher tiers added. Since we’re only on rare infusions, all of that could take next year to implement and have the players grind through.

They’ve also been pretty clear that they expect to raise level cap at some point, even if it’s not in the near future.

ArenaNet has been very clear that they intend to maintain a steady vertical progression, which they qualify by saying it will be slow and shallow. The statement that Ascended will be the last tier means nothing. There’s plenty of room to keep us chasing carrots for the life of the game without adding more tiers.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Then don’t bother with ascended and just go straight for legendary. They has said time and again that legendaries will always be on par with whatever the top of the ladder is. And now, they even have stat swapping at will outside of battle.

So avoid a grind by doing a steeper grind?

Karizee.8076:

Look back through the forum history and you will see that the complaining has been going on since the game launched, mostly by the same people.

If you think these forum wars are about ascended gear you are very naive to the ways of internet marketing.

No. I went back and did that. I read through several months of the first posts.

You will find that a lot of the people who were complaining they had nothing to do at endgame aren’t around any more. Adding ascended gear didn’t keep them nor bring them back.

You’ll see people defending the easy gear plateau. Sadly, a lot of those names are no longer seen on the forums either.

You’ll see players like me who were defending the easy gear plateau we were told was going to be in the game, who have gone from being some of GW2’s most ardent defenders to GW2’s most disappointed players and frequent complainers.

It’s not the same people, and the argument has done a 180 from “Why isn’t GW2 like other MMOS” vs. “They said it wasn’t going to be” to “Why is GW2 increasingly just like other MMOS” vs. “What they said is old and no longer relevant.”

Solid Gold.9310:

Was a bit, not now………………… just do my dailies.

Yeah.

I really loved this game at the start. I spent a lot of time on it.

The tipping point is when it became too much “ChoreWars2” for me.

Log in.
Check dailies, and plan how to hit five while doing other things.
Turn on dragon timer overlay so I can make sure to get the world bosses when they pop for that elusive dragonite.
Pick up gold and items from TP. Relist items, and put in buy orders for today’s items.
Do time-gated ecto refinement.
Log on to each character parked at a jumping puzzle for empyreal shards.
Kill 250 rats for the LS achievement.
Join in weekly guild missions for commendations.
Make sure to finish out monthlies before the month is too far gone.

Pick up Elder Scrolls Anthology for dirt cheap at Black Friday sale.

Come back and check on GW2 in a few months time to see if anything has changed to make it more like GW2 at launch.

Redenaz.8631:

I was under the impression that the Inscriptions were designed to be tradeable in order to give crafters something more valuable to sell than “exotic gear for people to toss in the Mystic Forge.” And, sure enough, Deldimor Steel & friends, and ascended inscriptions, all look pretty valuable. I haven’t done the calculations to see how much profit they’re making, once you take out the cost for materials, but apparently some people think it’s a worthwhile business, given a quick look on the TP. It still lets the wealthy cut through part of the process, but it makes crafting a more interesting market, so there’s a trade-off there, and I think it makes the process as a whole more flexible and interesting.

Yes. My intent wasn’t to criticize the system, just to point out that making the statement, “Ascended Weapons can’t be bought” is misleading, as a huge portion of everything that’s required to make them can be bought. Vision Crystals are a small, though significant, portion of an Ascended weapon, and the only part that can’t be short-cut with money.

My post was intended to make this point without weighing in on whether the game is P2W or not, Ascended Weapons have significant stats or not, but just to point out a problem in the argument so far.

coglin.1867:

We have a waypoint system. I can never wrap my head around the ridiculous obsession with mounts. They are unnecessary and generally look ridiculous.

Mounts are deeply ingrained in human history and fantasy literature. The lack of them feels weird to many people.

Imagine GW2 just like it is, but without any swords.

Just to note, ArenaNet has not definitively said, “no,” to mounts. They’ve said that there are no plans to implement them, but if they ever do, they want to do them well and not as something just tacked onto the game.

I would certainly get some satisfaction from running around catwalks hurling Dredge to their doom for a change.

Then again, it’d take all the challenge (what there is) out of the dredge mines.

On a technical note, mobs can’t jump, either. They have to path the long way round if you jump up or down a ledge. Is it possible that there are just some significant tech issues with giving mobs access to three dimensions?

Draknar.5748:

Other than a Dolyak, what animals can even be ridden in Tyria? Stags? lol

There are no horses that I’ve seen.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Necrid_Horseman

And charr can ride large Devourers.

Large drakes could also make good mounts.

I thought I remembered a mob that consisted of something riding an upright lizard in GW1, but can’t find it at the moment.

There were also large Wurms you could ride by being swallowed by them.

Morrigan.2809:

I have just never thought it worth it to convert gems to gold, given how easy it is to come by gold and how expensive it is to convert gold to gems- done that a few times.
So if I want something that costs gems I just buy gems.

I understand. I guess it depends on perspective.

With the gem cost in gold continuing to rise, it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to just buy the gold. Currently, for the price of two mochas I can get the amount of gold it would take me eight to ten hours of farming to achieve. Seems pretty cheap, and I can continue on doing WvW or exploring zones for those ten hours and still get the items I want.

Sarie.1630:

You know what really irks me, though? All that time and effort spent on the new WvW map. Sure, it looks awesome, and I’ll have fun playing on it, but I’d dearly love to be able to explore more of the existing Tyria.

Though, to be fair, if they said they were going to give us a new PvE zone and it was the size of the Edge of the Mists, people would be freaking out, flaming “That’s it!?” all over the forums.

There’s potentially a lot more playability out of that WvW map for the development resources than a new PvE map built with the same amount.

ArenaNet has a history of being overambitious.

Take a stroll through the main cities. Witness the shooting gallery in DR, subject of blog posts before launch, still closed for a private party that has lasted over a year. Or visit Rata Sum and the shiny gate to the Polymock Arena, under construction for just as long.

Next, open your character panel and see the alignment system. Nice little symbols, a name for your blend of Charm, Ferocity, Dignity, but think back to whenNPCs were supposed to react to us differently based on that.

Or open your favorite smartphone app store and look in vain for the Guild Wars 2 Extended Experience app.

Still, one of the reasons I got excited about GW2 were the big ideas that the ArenaNet team seemed to be so excited about. I’d rather hear what they hope to accomplish than blog after blog saying, “You never know, everything’s on the table”.

I just wish NCSoft would funnel more money back into ArenaNet so they could expand their staff and get more of their dreams implemented.

Morrigan.2809:

I am a very casual player- maybe an hour a day- the max amount of gold I have ever had is 30, I have also never converted gems to gold. (I didn’t seriously think people actually did that)

Of course they do. If they didn’t, the price to convert gold to gems would be much, much higher than it is now. The gem/gold conversion rate is entirely dependent on how much of one is being converted into the other.

I’ve bought gold with gems. I wanted to support the game after launch, don’t care for much of anything in the gem store, and can see the value of getting as much gold from one hours real life work as I would get in ten hours of tediously farming the most lucrative parts of the game.

For the record, I don’t see gold for gems as an issue.

However, I’d like to point out that all of the statements that you can’t buy Ascended Weapons are a little misleading. Yes, you can’t buy dragonite, empyreal, or bloodstone. You can, however, buy everything else. Mithrillium and Spirit Residue is time-gated and account bound, but you can buy Deldrimor Ingots and Spiritwood Planks made with them, so there’s no limit there if you have the resources. You have to farm the components for your Vision Crystal, but the huge quantities of metal, wood, and even time-gated Ectoplasm Refinement can be short-cut with gold.

And that’s not even accounting for arguably the largest barrier to ascended weapons, leveling a craft from 400 to 500. There’s a ridiculous amount of mats that go into that process, all of which can be bought outright and completed in an hour if you have a ton of gold sitting around.

In the interests of context, I have the three weapon crafts at 500/460/425, and have bought gold with gems in the past.

TL;DR: It’s misleading to say you can’t buy Ascended Weapons. You can buy everything needed except the Vision Crystal.

This whole argument over whether or not a player should be able to craft to level cap or not misses a simple point.

ANet intentionally made it possible to do so. This was no mistake that later got fixed. Then they intentionally changed it.

It makes complete sense to ask them, “Why?”

John Smith.4610:

Trading takes skill, and lots of it, it cannot be argued otherwise and here is why. Because the profit is so limited, the profit has to be split between all the people effectively trading. The lower the skill cap, the more people trading effectively, the less profit individuals make until there’s no longer a real market. If one argues that there is money to be made, then you are arguing that skill is involved.

While I agree with you, John, that trading takes skill, I don’t think your logic provides the proof you think it does.

There are other reasons why people avoid something that is profitable besides lacking the skill to do so successfully.

One is that the task is unpalatable. People are rewarded for doing things that most people find either tedious or distasteful. Watching markets, keeping spreadsheets, and the like is not something that many people find enjoyable.

Another is time investment. Hardcore traders spend time watching markets closely to pounce when narrow windows open with the greatest opportunity for reward.

So, yes, playing markets takes skill. But “if it didn’t take skill, everyone would be doing it and there wouldn’t be a profit” is a little simplistic. You could say the same thing about champ farming and be completely wrong. It takes no skill, but the reason everyone didn’t do it before you nerfed the rewards was because it is tedious and time consuming.

It’s more accurate to say “if it was easy, everyone would be doing it”. Difficulty comes in more flavors than just a skill requirement.

ColinJohanson.2394:

What rewards would you like to see from rewards? Would they be different when you’re leveling up than when you’re level 80? What would motivate you to want to go around the world playing as many different events as possible, rather than the same 4-5 over and over again?

Dynamic Reward Scaling

1. Rewards scale up based on effort.

I have no idea how complicated this would be to code, and can imagine there are traps inherent in the idea like creating exploits or violating the “happy to see other players” value. You have a system that rates bronze/silver/gold, however, so there’s something like it already in game.

If a friend and I duo a champion, setting up combos together, swapping aggro, and generally bring all our skills to bear to avoid death and defeat it, that should give us better loot than autoattacking the same champ down in ninety seconds with a zerg train. Doing a 15 minute event chain in a mid-level zone with a couple other players should reward as well as a 15 minute world boss with the zerg.

As well means a similar chance at ascended crafting mats, gold, karma, exotic, ascended, precursor.

If you can create a “reward for sweat” algorithm you’ll make some areas of the game a lot more rewarding without creating the new farm spot.

2. Reward scales with infrequent traffic

Champs, Elites, Veterans and DEs that are relatively infrequently done should give better rewards the longer they remain undone. This creates a whole new adventure of going out into the world and trying to find the less-traveled corners, and it automatically eliminates the chances of creating the new fotm farm spot. Since players often follow the path of least resistance, this may even correlate nicely with “reward for sweat” as events people avoid because they take more effort become more rewarding.

If you implement something like this, please make sure the API doesn’t report information that could be used to pinpoint which areas of the game have been idle longest. That would create a ridiculous zerg race and defeat the whole purpose. Part of the benefit of this idea is to put a sense of discovery/adventure back into the world.

3. Please do not just slap a daily cooldown on rewards for all champs and DEs!

This will just spread the farm. People will simply create longer farming loops or a rotation of loops so that they hit each thing once in a couple hour play session. We don’t need more restrictions on farming, we need reward equity brought to non-farm activities.

ColinJohanson.2394:

What rewards would you like to see from rewards? Would they be different when you’re leveling up than when you’re level 80? What would motivate you to want to go around the world playing as many different events as possible, rather than the same 4-5 over and over again?

I don’t really need specific rewards to get me going around the world doing different DEs. What I do need is for rewards not to drag me away.

What I mean by that, is that there have been times where I’ve happily wandered through the world exploring, discovering DEs, without any thought of reward. This game is wonderfully immersive that way.

Then ascended gear happened. At first it was dailies. If I was adventuring in Ascalon and “Maguuman Events” and “Shiverpeaks Veterans” popped up, I’d have to steer that direction. Not too big a deal, I can still wander through whatever zone and hit those.

But Ascended weapons? If I could get Dragonite from doing events outside of Orr and World Bosses, I’d be back in those mid level zones in a heartbeat! I have seven characters, 4 at level 80, 2 at 60+.

My current play looks like “log on, open up world boss timer overlay, cycle through level 80s parked at jumping puzzles, switch to main, open up resource map website on second monitor, get crafting daily, and t5 and t6 mats in run through Frostgorge, do current Living Story daily (because it’s more efficient to do dailies to get the meta than a lot of the other grindy achievements), go wherever it’s most efficient to get the other three dailies needed for daily reward, making sure to port in to a world boss whenever one procs, head to champ farm or WvW if there’s still play time left.” :P

I don’t particularly need incentive to go do other DEs. What I need is to be free from the incentives not to do them.

Yes, I could just ignore Ascended Weapons because it’s a small increase and all that. But why do I have to choose between getting BiS gear in any sort of reasonable time frame and avoiding this kind of checklist play?

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Actually I believe that the biggest reason why so many people play females in skimpy armour is because it is the only way for you to actually see some of your body.

So this.

I love the bioluminescence on the Silvari, but almost all of the armor covers it up. There’re a handful of female sets that show it, and a couple of male.

Even among the skimpy armor, there are few skins that show it well. The female skimpy armor often shows the stomach, where there is no BL, and covers up the back and legs where there is.

Could it be that when people hate on zerker gear, they aren’t really hating on zerker gear? Instead, they’re responding to the relatively shallow gameplay that is most PvE where doing damage as quickly as possible is simply more effective than anything else?

5% is still a significant boost.

Plenty of people choose +5% traits that only fire under specific conditions or +5% sigils.

One of the nice things about crafting on alts is that crafting experience boosters don’t run down when that character isn’t active.

So you can pop a booster and craft as much as you can with the materials you have available, then log that character off and come back later without losing any of the booster time.

It also takes money to switch between crafts (not a lot, but it could add up) so it makes sense to have two crafts on four different toons.

Components selling for more than the final product has been a norm for the GW2 economy for a long time.

Recipes that sell for significantly more than their component parts are the exception, rather than the rule.

I agree with TooBz’ analysis of the intent, but getting people into other parts of the game only partly works, and things like Dragonite bear to be questioned.

There are probably some people who are making their way through mid-level zones to get the hundreds of iron and platinum ore and mid-level woods required to make one ascended weapon. The numbers are astonishing, however, and for most it just makes more sense to farm the gold required to get those mats on the TP.

I suppose you could argue that if those burdensome mat requirements aren’t getting people into mid-level zones, at least they made it worthwhile to sell them on the TP, so it was good for the economy, but I’m starting to question whether a realistically functioning economy should even be a goal for a heroic fantasy game.

As for Dragonite, if they were going to draw people into disused parts of the game, why choose world bosses, which were being done for their guaranteed rare drops already? Why not create a mat that got people out doing all of those DEs that are only ever seen by players doing world completion or who still level without doing one of the XP farms?

Ascended gear feels like such a departure from so much of the rest of the game. ArenaNet touted their flat leveling progression before and shortly after launch. The idea is that you weren’t going to see some exponential requirement to continue your character’s progression. That’s true of the trip from 1 to 80, gearing from Fine to Exotic, and leveling crafting from 1 to 400.

Suddenly, when you reach Ascended weapons, the progression line drastically steepens. Crafting from 400 to 500 takes mats worth ten times what it takes to get from 1 to 400. Ascended weapons themselves require hundreds and hundreds of mats and time-gates to pass through.

In the end, though, it does come right back to the players. There’s no way for any developer to create content to satisfy people who play hours and hours a day. So, in order to keep that portion of the playerbase in game, the only real option is to create addictive game design because a portion of the playerbase wants to be addicted.

I can’t see ArenaNet’s and NcSofts balance sheets or log-in metrics. Perhaps they could have taken those players box price and then waved at them as they swarmed off to the next game so that GW2 could have stayed closer to what they said it was going to be. Then again, maybe the ship looked like it was sinking, and the only way to keep it afloat was to get the locusts to stay on board and hope most of the rest of us choose not to abandon ship.

One of the problems is that some of these things leave no option between “do the grind” and “ignore the reward”.

As was said above, putting time limits on means you can’t approach it casually. “Hey, when I pass through Kessex I’ll do a toxic offshoot or two, and some day get the reward” isn’t possible. You either hit it specifically over the two weeks its available, or you decide to just pass. It makes the Living Story a lot more love it or leave it than it needs to be.

The same is true of Ascended gear. It’s unrealistic to take an approach of, “If a world boss pops when I’m running around a zone I’ll do it, and eventually have enough Dragonite”. It takes too many world boss events to put together enough for a weapon. With 3-5 rewarded for the smaller world bosses, 15 to 25 for the bigger ones, it would take a crazy long amount of time to get to the 500 needed for one weapon if you don’t specifically head to world bosses.

The same is true for the crazy amounts of non-ascended mats needed. Compared to farming, it would take absurdly long to gather the mats for one sword if you just gather as you go about enjoying the game, rather than specifically going from node to node or grinding out the gold to buy them.

ANet has squeezed out the middleground where the moderate player can just immerse themselves in the game and get stuff in a reasonable time. They designed leveling that way… you get experience for pretty much anything you choose to do, and level up without focusing on it. That’s not true of a lot of the other parts of the game.

These threads that keep popping up are giving me a sense of urgency. I need to hit the FG train hard to get my ascended crafting done quick. It’s only a matter of time before ArenaNet pulls out the nerfhammer and smacks champ trains silly, returning ascended crafting to an unbearable grind.

I’ll echo what’s been said above about the FG train. I did the QD train for the first time for all of three champs today just to get the spore daily, so I’m completely unfamiliar with it. I’ve done the FG train quite a bit, though, and never seen the kind of rage people are reporting about QD. Nevertheless, I’m not confident ArenaNet will make a distinction between the two when they get nerfhappy.

The worst drama on the SoR FG train consists of squabbles within the train over whether or not to kill Quaggan.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

How you play, what you choose to do are all choices made solely by you. You can choose to slog through content you don’t like for a useless shiny, or you can choose to ignore it because it’s not to your taste. No one else can make that decision for you. Not even Anet, they can entice you, but they cannot make you.

Though not all the shinies are useless.

Want to maximize boon uptime? You’ll need Superior Runes of the Monk, which are only available from running Ascalonian Catacombs.

Want a 5% stat increase (calculated to be up to 10% damage increase when you include weapon damage)? You’ll need to do some world bosses.

Not every reward from these grinds is cosmetic.

Yes, you can choose to ignore these rewards. But a game can also be designed so that you get the rewards through the type of stuff you actually like to do.

I can go to a pizza joint that only serves mushroom pizza, and pick out the mushrooms. I don’t have to eat them if I’d prefer plain cheese. It’d be a lot more enjoyable, though, if someone would just put cheese pizza on the menu.

TooBz.3065:

After missing the Karka event where so many precursors were handed out, I’m “afraid” to not complete the activity.

This is one of the terrible, toxic things that has been introduced into the game by choices that have been made over the last year. I don’t really want celestial gear, but I made sure to get the quartz crystal node (I did enjoy most of the Bazaar content). Don’t care for halloween, but did enough to get my candy corn node. I’m now working on the easiest path to a Krait Obelisk, though, again, I’m not charging quartz crystals, and have hundreds of skill points on multiple characters as well as a stack of skill point scrolls in storage.

I also still have my Kiel support badges and other LS currency/mats sitting in storage.

All because ANet has demonstrated they can suddenly make something that seemed useless become very desireable later, and those items have limited opportunity for getting them.

I’ve passed on other items like soulbound minis I’m not interested in (until they stop going to collections every time I send my mats) and cosmetic items I didn’t like the look of. It’s just the stuff that might become a valuable mat or currency later that has me afraid to pass it by.

Vaxx.3178:

Like I said before, GW2 is the first MMO with training wheels.

While I can agree with the spirit of your post, this is definitely not the first, nor the worst “training wheel” MMORPG. Ever played a Perfect World game? I was shocked that quests came with a button you could click so you coul AFK while your toon walked itself to the quest location! Or that you could “train”, by setting your toon to auto-attack a dummy in the main city and leave it overnight to gain several levels by the time you woke the next morning.

Just providing some perspective there.

As to the OP…

Obviously from my response above I do content I’m not interested in solely for the reward. I’d like to point out, however, that I didn’t for the first three months or so after launch. I felt no need to do so, and moved through the world in an immersive fashion, doing whatever content caught my interest at the time.

Over the year following, however, the proportion of my play time in areas solely for the reward has steadily increased. It hit an all-time high (low?) with the implementation of Ascended Weapons. It’s a lot harder for me to ignore a 5% stat increase than cosmetic items. I dismissed Legendaries long ago as something too grindy and not rewarding enough to pursue.

Ascended Weaponry, however, has me farming for the first time. So far, it seems like an achievable goal (though I’m now focused on only two characters, rather than the eight I was playing). It’s something I can get out of the way, so I can get back to playing the game with fewer checklists to accomplish.

My fear is that ANet will continue providing vertical progression about as fast as I can accomplish it, which means I won’t escape the checklist. I might have my ascended weapons on my two toons before ascende armor is implemented. I expect to be grinding out armor around the first of the year. But if we get grindy infusions shortly after, magenta runes and sigils after that, and a level cap increase after that….? Somewhere in there it will cease to be sustainable for me, and I’ll move on to something else.

Since ArenaNet has already told us they plan to continue vertical progression, it will be all about whether they get back to “play the way you want” and give us a lot more options to get the next progression, and how often they implement each new stat increase.

Wow, so many people who have trouble counting to one.

My list:

Elementalist – Buff base health so they don’t feel pigeonholed into water traits.

Engineer – Kit damage should scale with equipped weapon.

Mesmer – Greater access to swiftness without having to rune for it.

Curse Drew.8679:

This is a game of skins, where you can get exotic items pretty easy. Collecting your look is large part of the game. Some people should standout, and be admired for thier play time investment. In most mmorpgs you chase stats, but in this one you chase skins. In this game after leveling to 80 you continue playing and building your character with awesome skins. It’s one of the main reasons to play pve after you get leveled. With all skins easy to get people would be done playing more quickly, because it’s to easy to get what they want. But with prestigious awesome looking rare skins, people desire them and will want to complete whatever task it takes to get them. A skin chasing game should have rare and admired skins.

You haven’t sold me there.

The problem with things like “easy to get” and “get done playing more quickly” is that they are relative.

You could scale things so that they felt rewarding, but not frustrating for a player who plays a moderate amount, and keep them around for a long time. The problem is that the choice is usually made to scale things so that the full-time farmer takes a while to get them, which places them at the end of a terrible slog for the moderate player.

There’s really nothing standout about playing a game like a part time or even full time job. There’s nothing worth admiring there. But such is the state of the industry, that it feels the need to cater to people who play crazy amounts and give them special rewards. I guess the professionals have looked at the data, and see that it brings in more money in the long run, so what can you do?

And honestly, a lot of what is “prestigious” in game today will probably become commonplace down the road. It’s a tried and true formula. Hand out “elite” rewards to the people who are happy to grind them out, so they feel special. Then, when they’ve gotten the shinies and move on, you get more bang for your buck by making it easier to get the same rewards, so that the people who play less but have been envying them can now realistically chase the same content, while the professional farmers move on to the new ultra-rare.

I was getting them for most of yesterday afternoon and evening as well. 503 and 502. Tried logging on from three different ISPs, two different accounts, cleared browser caches and continued getting the same thing.