Showing Posts For Guru.1582:
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I love this community.
A part of me was coming back to this thread expecting to see a litany of flames directed at me but instead I seem to have sparked a fruitful conversation. I’m happy to see that such conversations can happen and I really hope that Anet is listening.
I did want to clarify something. It’s true that the ‘legendary’ weapons are a reward only insofar as they are a skin. I get that. But it’s hard to argue that they’re not some of the best skins. Elaborate, fancy, highly detailed, wonderful. And they are only available for people who have the time or inclination to play the game in the least fun manner possible. I’m not aware of really anyone who truly enjoys the grind. They enjoy it like I enjoy my real life job. The rewards that come out of it are nice, but I wouldn’t do it for its own sake.
That’s the wrong way to develop a game. I remember listening to a pair of speakers at Pax East say the following line that has stuck with me:
“If any part of the game, any part at all, is not fun, then that is a design flaw.”
It is my opinion that the dungeon grind and the legendary grinds are huge, deliberate design flaws. Everyone who runs them does so only out of a dogged desire to have the carrot that’s dangled at the end of the stick. They’re running the mouse wheel because the developers are not confident that you’ll keep playing after you have the carrot, so they make the carrot incredibly difficult to get, to the point of impossibility for the majority of people.
This is not the way to design a game. As I said before, it’s on us as consumers to demand better. Anet should know that this sort of game design is archaic and insulting, and exposes their own insecurity and weakness. If they want us to keep playing their game, they should make it a game we want to keep playing because it’s fun. (And the sad thing is, it mostly is already.) Not a game we keep playing because it takes forever to grind our way to shiny trinkets.
Especially when they make those shiny trinkets desirable by making them vastly, dramatically shinier than all the other trinkets. Shameful skinner-boxery, and we should call them out for it.
Legendary weapons represent, to me, a betrayal of the game’s overall tone, design and structure, and stand a testament to how a game can be so progressive in so many ways, and yet still remain unable to struggle out of the old, lousy systems of the past. They reward not a desire for adventure, not a loyalty to the product, not an immersion in the game’s content; but a grind. The game says “Your experience should be an adventure, but if you want the best rewards, it doesn’t matter how you were playing, unless you were playing the way we want you to. And the way we want you to play is to grind.”
There’s your TL;dr right there up front. But if you plan on supporting or (more than likely) arguing with my points, please read on.
I love this game. I truly love it. According to /age I’ve put 850 hours into it overall. That’s more than my top four played games on steam combined. I have three 80s, and two other characters that are fast approaching 80. I’ve done dungeons, world v world, been to every zone, seen just about every event. I run a guild on Tarnished Coast. I haven’t done it all… but I’ve done a lot of it.
I got to thinking recently that maybe I would like to go for a legendary weapon. I don’t know much about them; I know they’re tough to acquire, of course, but I wanted to see just how tough. I’ve been so wrapped up in exploring the game that I never really bothered to look. To break down what was really involved. So I did.
My disappointment was intense.
After three 80s and 850 hours of regular play, I have approximately 200 gold to my name. 150 of that was due to a random karka box I received. I didn’t do that event; Lost Shores was so buggy, so lagged out, so broken that I didn’t even bother participating, but I got a box anyway that just so happened to have a precursor in it. So 150 gold out of my total net worth had nothing to do with my gameplay. It was a scratch ticket. Pure, dumb luck, devoid of any skill or real accomplishment.
And yet even with that windfall, and all those hours spent playing and enjoying myself, I’m not even close. Skillpoints, sure, I got those. World completion? Natch, no problem. But even then, I’m not even close. I ran the numbers, and I would need to double my net worth to even get halfway to the Legendary goal. A number that 3/4ths of which was due to random, stupid luck.
I’m a thirty year old office worker. My life is a grind. But I don’t mind it! I like my job; in this economy I’m lucky to have it. But it is a grind; a grind that pays off my student loans, my car, my apartment, covers my bills, puts food in my belly, and grants me health insurance. It’s a necessary grind, and one that I welcome.
I don’t play Aion or WoW beacuase of the grind that GW2 advertised wasn’t a factor. However, the rusty, jagged, ugly holdouts from a less refined era live on in the form of dungeons and legendary weapons. Would you like fancy dungeon armor and weapons? I hope you like doing the same thing over and over and over because that’s the only way to get them. Do you want the coolest weapons the game has to offer? I hope you don’t have anything better to do in your life because you’re going to have to grind. And grind a lot.
Here’s what ArenaNet has to say about the quest for a legendary weapon:
“Legendary Weapons are the end result of an epic adventure in Guild Wars 2.”
If that’s true, then my job as an Operations Support Data Analyst is an “epic adventure” every day. When I compile weekly and monthly summary reports of our call center’s statistics, I’m completing “epic” quests. Ridiculous.
The sad thing is that this represents to me a limitation of the medium. I truly think that ArenaNet, if they could, would make the acquisition of Legendary weapons and dungeon gear the end result of something that actually is an epic adventure, and not the end result of just mindless, repetitive slog.
This is an aspect of the MMO gaming sphere that needs to change. We as consumers should demand better. Legendary Weapons should be difficult to collect. They should represent something that takes weeks, maybe months to acquire. But we should demand better than just a “grind all the gold you can for as long as it takes to buy the gold sink items necessary”. There are better ways, and as a consumer base we should demand better. We shouldn’t be happy with the treadmill.
I don’t play this game to replicate the job I use the game to nightly escape from. Maybe one day, Anet will have the resources or inspiration or innovative power to find a way to break free some such archaic, outdated, silly design philosophy. But today is, apparently, not that day.
Maybe tomorrow?
These are some great responses guys. Thanks!
We know very little about Asura culture. Their general disregard for history makes me wonder if they have many traditions. They obviously celebrate Wintersday and the festival of the Mad King, but these feel like acquired holidays they’ve picked up since fleeing to the surface. There doesn’t seem to be any reference at all to Asura holidays.
Which makes me wonder if they have any traditions?
For example: marriage. Do they marry? Progeny recognize their parents and forebears, obviously, but I don’t recall if there’s references to husbands or wives. Do they form official unions, or are they just casual associates for as long as they deem it profitable and logical to remain so?
You can’t.
If thieves are specced to escape, they will escape and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. They can shake conditions off, turn invisible, run faster than you, and more. Once you see them book it, hit them as much as you can while they run, then move to a new target.
No, it’s not fair. But that’s life in GW2.
Yeah, I hate having this thing that can never die tank all the hits for me while I farm enemies. Such a hassle.
It looks really cheap and silly that my character is miming like he’s pulling out arrows and shooting them. The game doesn’t even render the arrow; it’s seriously like they’re LARPing and just playing pretend. The little white streak of where the arrow WOULD be just isn’t enough. Give us proper arrows!
I just wanted to poke my head in and say that a quiver would be very nice. It looks… cheap, otherwise. I mean the game doesn’t render the arrows or the quiver, so it just doesn’t look as cool, shooting pretend arrows.
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