This is an excellent post, not in the sense the individual statements haven’t been made, but that it encapsulates the issue within a well-reasoned argument. It also answers the question: why don’t players feel rewarded (beyond intrinsic rewards) when they play GW2. It’s simply because it’s designed to take, not give.
GW2 is certainly not alone. D3, which shares it’s monetization model, functions and feels exactly the same, same loot wasteland, same yellow brick road to the cash shop.
I’m not sure that the practice is indefensible so much as unworkable. I’ve mused long and hard on this and often that has manifested as support for the subscription model.
1. Companies need to make money.
2. We play games to feel rewarded (again, beyond the intrinsic rewards of the gameplay itself).
3. There is no free lunch.There needs to be more money changing hands than the box sale, but how to effect that? The majority of players really think that they are getting a F2P game after they B2P. And, they will defend to the death the model without ever noticing that they are being extorted in the process. As Maz says, they have some investment and they have donned Blinkered Helm of the White Knight.
Again, great post. The current model and methods around monetization are slimey and greasy. Worst of all, they make for an unrewarding game. I don’t know the answer to the problem, but I know I don’t like the B2P/F2P games I’ve played for this very reason. It’s good to have the rot exposed to the fresh air and sunshine.
Yet more proof that no game’s features will appeal to everyone. GW2’s model works very well for me. The subscription and F2P models don’t. Why? Sub games offer tiered treadmills, which feel to me like, “Gear up so you can gear up again.” F2P usually involves needing to pay out cash for in game advantages over non-payers.
I don’t feel that cosmetic items are necessary to enjoy a game. I also won’t buy RNG stuff, ever. If this practice is “slimy” and “rotten,” so be it. However, making moral objections and expecting a business to take the high road is imo a lost cause. Talk to their bottom line, instead, if you want change.
Do you know the difference between baseball cards and this?
No one knows when looking at someone else on the street exactly what baseball cards they got. But everyone can see that you have a fused greatsword. lol
Yeah, but M:tG cards can provide a better chance to actually win the game. Baseball cards can be sold for lots of real money to collectors. I’d think that either of those conditions applying to MMO lock boxes (PW, I’m looking at you!) would be a lot worse than cosmetic items in a video game.
Well there is a big difference between real world items and in game items. There’s simply no way to personally bind an item to you. The biggest complaint i have on the RNG boxes is just that.
I’ve seen posts in this thread saying that people made gold by selling stuff from the SS boxes. That means not everything is bound.
It make me think why people don’t like raid boss and why they complain so much about adding raid boss fight for end game content.
My take on why people complain about ideas that would add raids to GW2?
Here’s why.
How Loot from Raid Boss Fights should be? (ALWAYS in comparison with dungeon/open word bosses)
1. Increased chance for rare craft materials (lodestones/shards/t6 mats etc)
2. Increased chance of getting an ascendant/exotic item or a precursor
3. Increased amount of gold
4. Increased amount of karma and karma Jugs
5. Increased amount of getting “Easter eggs” (minis/Black Lion Keys etc)
6. Maybe Trade Tokens for armor/weapon skins
Peoples’ perception is that raiders want better loot than others — and they don’t want this feature added.
I could support adding more content for larger groups, however I don’t believe that GW2 needs to create more reward-imbalanced content. If there were a way to balance the rewards by time spent (e.g., if it takes two hours to complete a GW2 raid, then two hours running dungeons or DE’s should provide roughly equivalent rewards).
What GW2 really needs to do is balance rewards across more types of content. The game is “better” in that regard than it was at launch, but it still has a way to go.
I proposed instanced versions of the temple fights some time ago, so I’d support such an initiative. Maybe they could put the new Risen in there, and return the open world versions to the way they were pre-April 30.
What remains to be seen is whether the potential audience would make the effort worthwhile on ANet’s part, and whether the potential audience would accept that the main reward of raids would be difficulty and large-group content, not fat loot unavailable to anyone but raiders. The latter would mean players would need to wean themselves from the expectations generated by the way other games structure their rewards.
I’m not fond of the #2 look, honestly. The CoF armor should be … burned in fire. The first set looks good to me.
Do people get all bothered about card packs? That’s what RNG boxes are. RNG boxes are not slot machines, Texas-hold-‘em tables, lotteries or raffles. They’re kittening baseball/M:tG cards.
If you don’t like RNG boxes (as I don’t), then don’t buy them (as I won’t). Posts like these will not change the minds of the monetization crew at ANet. More importantly, it won’t change the minds of the people buying the RNG boxes — and they’re why these things keep showing up.
And as far as people who oppose certain positions, you’re over-analyzing. Many posters post in opposition for one simple reason. It’s ingrained in the human ego to want to think that we’re right, and nothing makes people feel more right than pointing out where others are wrong. This is nothing new, and the whole “Whatever happened to gamers looking out for gamers?” is remarkably disingenuous for suggesting that it was ever different. There are, of course, exceptions to everything, but as a general trend, no. Now, I’m not condoning the behavior, but the pseudo psycho-analysis is wrong.
stuff
I think that the whole "Ascended was planned before launch was a smokescreen. What I think actually happened is that ANet freaked from all of the “nothing to do” posts in September and October, coupled with declining log-on numbers, and implemented Ascended in a hurry.
The FotM/Agony aspect would have been brilliant if there had been a reason to go in there beyond just pushing the limit. Fractal weapons could have been that reason, but they weren’t about to resort to tokens given what happened with the regular dungeons and the RNG chance seems to be pretty low.
Unique, I believe, was put in as just another way to slow down players who blaze through everything at the speed of light and still want something to keep them logging in for their daily 8 hours + of video game. Once they put the rings on laurel merchants, they couldn’t change the Unique function — or imagine the outcry.
Yes, a successful interrupt produces 3 stacks of Defiant on champs. I don’t know the threshold for Defiant to scale up, because seeing a zerg in this event is non-existent nowadays.
It’s true that the more players, the easier it is to screw up the whole Defiant removal effort, because Defiant isn’t well desgined for open world PVE.
Indeed, the best way is with 4 hard CC’s. Life Transfer usually has a cooldown of 30 sec; however, I have seen something as short as 5 sec.
My setup was 3 ranged hard CC’s. I could’ve brought a 4th to ensure a successful interrupt, but its short range got me killed quite often, and a dead player can not interrupt. So, I took my chances.
It’s impossible to coordinate Defiant removal in a PUG; therefore, I adopted a strategy to somewhat increase the margin of error.
I removed only 2 stacks immediate off their cooldowns, not all 3 stacks. The remaining one stack is the margin of error in case someone else uses a hard CC in the wrong time.
When the Life Transfer was being channeled, I then immediately removed the last stack with my only available CC, and usually I had to wait for a few seconds for one of those 2 previously used CCs to be available.
Since the champ was kept out of range of Jonez, a few seconds delay posed an imminent threat only to players. And that’s the risk with my 3 CC’s setup.
So, it seems as if you’ve found a way that might work every time. While I applaud your ingenuity and skill, I have to question how many other people on different servers could manage this.
Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO.
GW was massive, it was multi-player, it was online, and it was a role-playing game. GW was imo a better RPG than any of the old stand-bys.
GW didn’t meet the “definition” of MMORPG because it lacked a persistent, open world and because your group had each explorable to itself. This was a definition derived from earlier games that even ANet bought into. Perhaps the genre should have been called, POWMMOG instead of MMORPG. That acronym would have more accurately fit the definition.
Agreed, but I do not find it significantly different in GW2. In fact, I find many bosses much easier than many of the WoW 5-man (hard mode) bosses.
I find GW2 dungeons to be a strange animal in that regard. Some of the bosses are much easier than some of the trash mobs.
I emphasized part of this paragraph since it brings up a question.
Do you consider a design consideration that places emphasis on “good reflexes and a decent system” to be a good design choice?
I’m of two minds, really. The move-while-fighting and dodge mechanics make for much more interesting game-play in the open world, where the consequences of missing a dodge or block don’t often mean you’re downed.
While there was a potential for this to also be true in dungeons, I’d have to say that with the current implementation, they’ve failed. Why? Because players who struggle due to reflex issues or systemic latency find the mechanics too hard, and thus not fun. Also, players with the reflexes and system to handle it, or who can negate damage through proactive skill use find the content too easy, and thus not fun.
This means that the sweet spot, i.e., the players who do find the content fun, is smaller than it might have been. The relative fewer numbers of posts on GW2lfg looking for the harder paths suggests that the players doing the harder dungeons for fun is small, not just “smaller.”
Both. You didn’t really need the gear if your raid was solid. There was a Chinese guild that went from BC release to downing Illidan in less than 2 months. This was when it was still required to be attuned for raid instances. They had people, in Black Temple, in T3 gear…gear allows progression but it isn’t an absolute hard cap on preogression. As for gear appearances, I have to agree. As a Prot Paladin I absolutely HATED T6 (in fact, I avoided wearing it, outside of raids, preferring the T5-ish gear from ZG instead). For me the biggest reward was 1) first kill on a boss you have been struggling on for two+ weeks and 2) seeing what came next.
Oddly, I joined WoW about when you were leaving, so my first raids were in Wrath. It makes me wonder whether they made gear stats matter more in Wrath raids. I remembering doing an Ulduar dual boss on a Holy Paly and not being able to keep the off-tank up despite pulling out all the stops (using everything available, never not casting). Later, after getting some drops from earlier Ulduar bosses, the fight was comparatively easy.
I would prefer that agony not be used in areas other than FotM.
Forget about asking others to help you on map, they will either,
a) ignore you.
b) call you a noob for not being able to solo it.
c) give a troll comment like alt+f4This is why I’m trying to make a guild that helps all the time at your beckon and call. I’m about to do my second run in with orr on my guardian.
Wow, I’m surprised. One of the other posters was praising the TC community. I’m on FC and I’ve seen a chat war only once in Orr — and that was over the post 4/30 Lyssa event. Usually, people either don’t respond or respond favorably.
I’d sure like to hear an official response considering Anet is involved in interstate electronic transmission of funds and or services with regards to games of chance which is the legal definition of Internet Gambling as governed by US law.
Some time ago, on another forum, a poster claimed RNG boxes and purchased keys violated France’s anti-online-gambling laws. Since RNG boxes all contain something that a buyer might want, they are just like Magic: the Gathering booster packs. You can buy MTG Packs in France, online, though Amazon France.
ANet and that other game company have lawyers, whose job is to protect them from making costly mistakes. I suspect those lawyers know more about the law than forum lawyers do.
I also raided for years and years so I am quite familiar with progression raids and farm status raids. Very few of those (if they are well designed) are nearly as simple/facerolly as you suggest. Some were, sure, but they were also universally derided for it (lol…lootreaver!). Players still had to mind the environment (don’t stand in green/red/black kitten) and player status (cleans the debuffs/diseases/poisons), mind their DPS (and understand aggro mechanics), know boss phases and be mindful of transitions, and a host of other skills/knowledge. You either didn’t raid much or weren’t very good at it if you think raiding in other games relied on a “trinity crutch”.
While all of that is true, do you deny that the true fun in raids was figuring all of that out? Executing the mechanics on farm was a poor second, imo, which quickly became boring.
GW2 decided to go with a mechanic that requires damage to be off the charts. It’s based entirely on avoidance, and it’s a crappy mechanic.
The 100% avoidance of dodge, block, and reflect also means something beyond exploitation. It means that if you have good reflexes and a decent system, you completely evade the damage, Thus, the only way to actually make the content harder is to use pressure tactics, lots of little attacks and attrition through conditions. Big hits can’t get any harder than a one-shot kill. This is why we simultaneously have posts saying dungeons are too easy alongside other posts saying they’re crazy hard.
It should also be pointed out that wiping for weeks on one raid boss was acceptable because the potential rewards were worth it.
Worth it inherently or worth it because you couldn’t progress without it? Given that I found very few armor skins in WoW that I liked the look of, I’d say the latter, though ommv.
I actually went to CS in Orr first thing after the 5/14 patch. There was practically no one there (people are getting the message that Anet doesn’t want them there), so I really didn’t get to test the event scaling. I did a couple events and no champs spawned. However I did notice one disturbing thing. The normal mobs seemed significantly stronger than before.
There was nothing in the patch notes on game balance in Orr. Can we get a red post on whether there actually has been any changes? Has there been a coup de grâce?
I haven’t been there since yesterday, but I have been to Southsun. It’s possible no one is in Orr because they are all doing the new content. I’ll run down to Orr later today or tomorrow and see if I think the normal mobs have been buffed.
RNG chests are a gamble, they are not illegal gambling.
/thread
Bring crowd control abilities and the champion wraith will not be a problem.
Has anyone noticed that the champion wraith only shows up in timed events (except for Lyssa event at Union waypoint)? It’s because the champion wraith is not meant to be killed, but to be stalled till the time runs out
When the Life Transfer is being channelled, spam hard CC’s like daze, stun, knock down, push, pull to interrupt it, and no one dies.
I always bring 3 hard CC’s to the Grenth event, and I spent all my time during the entire fight at the waypoint trying to stall the trash mob waves as long as I can, keeping some adds alive at the waypoint, so the next waves won’t spawn.
Unlike the sequenced trash mobs, the champions at the Grenth event are timed, spawning at 4:50 and 1:50 respectively.
Beside stalling trash mobs, my other task in this event is to pull the champion spider to the waypoint the best I can, with my hard CC, to prevent it from laying eggs near Jonez. However, if I know my group has the DPS to kill it, this task is trivial for me.
When the champion wraith spawns at the waypoint, I soft CC it first (cripple, chill, immobilize) to delay its AI script, which kicks off when it reaches the bottom of stairs. The wraith will use Life Transfer 3 times during the last 1:50 min, and they are all interrupted by my hard CCs rotation.
BTW, the champion wraith’s normal attack is weak around 3k, and its Screech and Well are easily avoided. More importantly, it moves as slow as a slug, meaning an easy kite.
So, do its Defiant stacks cap at 2? Is that why your third CC works? Champs I’ve seen have 3 Defiant stacks, which means CC would work on the 4th usage. What about if some random player applies a CC at the wrong time? I mean, no one just spams their attacks indiscriminately, amirite? So are you saying this event is doable by a coordinated team of skilled players?
Clearly the majority of players dissagree with this post. Anet tried doing the whole buy skins directly thing for wintersday. Guess what, they weren’t rare since everyone could get them so no one bought them. It was a failure. Anet has repeatedly said that they will put things in the gem shop based on what players like to buy. Significantly more people spend more money at the chance for a rare skin then those who buy a skin everyone has access too directly.
You have no one to blame but the players themselves for this.
You cannot prove the assertions I’ve highlighted in bold in your post. Since RNG items still appear, one can assume ANet is making money on them. However, there’s no way for us to know if it’s a majority of players, or a minority of players who are willing to spend large sums to get their rare shiny.
What is silly in all of this is we keep seeing large amounts of threads complaining about the lack of challenge whatsoever and ,still, people keep whining about the remaining small amount of content that could be seen as challenging (I wouldn’t even include SC in it btw, except maybe the JP).
What is silly is people inflating the strength of their position by claiming that “large amounts of threads” support it. Make your point without utilizing silly claims that you don’t back up. I could say that there are more complaints about difficulty than there are about “too easy,” but I won’t because I’d be pulling “facts” out of my kitten, like you did.
And, no, I’m not here to complain about SSC being too difficult, so don’t assume I disagree with you except about your unsupported claim.
Actually, being saturated in control effects just isn’t enjoyable in general. If you can avoid it no difference is made, if you’re constantly stuck in it until death it’s frustrating, and if you have the resilience to ride it out and save some stability just in case (i.e. my approach right now) it’s tedious.
This is ANet. Going back to GW1, the use of conditions and control effects is practically ubiquitous, just as it is in GW2. Having to build to counter such is fine. What does get annoying, though, is mobs that spam a condition or have a CC on a very short CD, so that once you’ve blown your counter, the CC or condition will just be reapplied instantly.
The only change from Anet’s side I want in this regard is a graphics option to limit or reduce skill particle effects so you can better see whats going on in a fights with many players.
TBH, I think this would at least remove some of the justification for saying stuff is too hard. I did a DE in Lornar’s last night where the animations used by the named mob (something the Chucker) were difficult to see from all of the particle effects. There were two players, including me.
Because there was no in-game warning whatsoever I just wasted forty days of my life and I have nothing at all to show for it.
While I am sorry you got burned, this sentence suggests that either your anger has gotten the better of you, or you take a game way too seriously.
We have players under the age of 18 if they do buy it is that illegal(online gambling).
It’s neither gambling nor illegal.
I don’t patronize RNG stuff online, but the way they are implemented is no different than buying a pack of baseball cards or a MTG booster pack. You always get something, even if it isn’t what you wanted.
As Jeff Strain once said… "Before you start building the ultimate MMO, you should accept that “MMO” is a technology, not a game design. It still feels like many MMOs are trying to build on the fundamental designs established by Ultima Online and Everquest in the late ’90s."
And to add to that, it feels like many non-subscription based MMOs are blindly mimicing the same designs which subscription based business models use to generate their revenue.
In the end, a lot of MMO developers have no good reason to be borrowing what they are borrowing from other MMO games. Stop it. XD
Unfortunately, consumers develop expectations based on prior experiences and developers that don’t provide MMO conventions A thru Z get lambasted for not doing so. Consumers are more responsible for the phenomenon you’ve noted than developers are.
(edited by IndigoSundown.5419)
Some players insist that an MMO be their second life over the course of months or years. They log in every chance they get. Legendaries are for them. The rest of us just have to be content with the rest of the game.
Say they introduce new permanent content. People then grind it into the ground in short order, get what they want from it, and then ignore it.
Open PvP requires factions to make sense. There is no faction war by design. Thus, there is no open PvP by design. Dueling is another matter. I have no problem with dueling if:
- There is an auto-decline duels option
- There is an unlimited ignore list just in case I get a lot of tools whispering me, “Why you no duel me, you afraid?”
- The duels can only take place in certain areas, so duelers cannot use dueling to annoy people crafting, at the TP, at the bank, who want to RP or whatever else. As long as I can go places duelers cannot duel if I want to, it would be OK with me.
Norn plus Guardian, Mesmer, Engineer and Warrior. Why? No +25% run speed boost and the Norn normal runs looks like I’m running in slo-mo. I find this boring. Ymmv.
1st rule for a explorer: Disable double tap roll
Yeah, I use button 2 on Razer Naga for dodge and have disabled the double tap. It makes for more responsive dodge in fights as well as no evading off high spots.
Besides if pulling worked, u then still have the fast (enough) respawn times.
And yeah, that bandit camp i avoid also solo.
Oh, in GW1 pulling worked, and was often necessary to do.
The difference is that in GW1 you are usually pulling one group of mobs away from another group or 3. Oh, and pulled mobs in GW1 usually stay pulled, no invulnerable, regeneration, run “home” then re-aggro.
I kiled pet and i knock them away but in both cases the ranger was still healing himself afterwards….. After knockback the healing was just delayed 1 sec.
Then that’s a bug and it ought to be reported so it can be fixed. No other channeled skill (that I’m aware of) cannot be ended by interruption.
I used to do the “seldom-attended” events in Malchor’s all the time.
Events like “Kill the Risen Worshippers in King’s Passage;” “Kill the Veteran Risen Knight That Stalks the Ruins;” “Kill the Risen Drake Broodmother;” and the 4 Vet Risen Chicken event.
The Champion Risen Worshipper uses the new noble mechanics, won’t be pulled somewhere where it’s AoE won’t completely fill the area and drops that AoE every 10-12 seconds. The Broodmother was made into a Champion, takes too long to kill and resets randomly. The Veteran Knight is now a Champion, also takes too long to kill. The Chickens now project eggs out of their kitten that can do 4.5K to 2500 armor, which can only be dodged proactively (not reactively), and which occurs often enough that being out of endurance is certain.
Now that these events have been made more interesting, the result is? They are still seldom attended.
OK, the big numbers are a bug to the scaling, but what about the Veteran summons from the Champ Spider (that drop nothing)? What about the increase in AoE’s across the board? With the latest iteration of the Risen, it can get so there is almost nowhere to go except completely away from the fight.
This happened to me on the Champion Risen Broodmother in Malchor’s Leap. I was kiting it around the tiny little island it was on when I got there. After about 20% of its health gone, it just turns around and resets. I backed up and watched it. It runs off across the lagoon. On further observation, it paths around the lagoon. I know one of the Broodmothers in CS also paths. I wonder if the code that makes it path has a timer that says, “Time to move” and that timer is not being deactivated by combat?
I think we’ll see the dungeon again. At the least, they’ll learn from it and incorporate ideas that worked into new stuff down the road.
As to the OP, yes, I loved Flame and Frost and am looking forward to see where the story goes in the future.
There’s nothing wrong with the OP asking for things he’d like to see introduced into the game. However, it was inaccurate to couch the post in terms of, “These things would make the game more casual-friendly.” I’m about as casual as it gets, and I have no interest in any of his suggestions.
Sorry to derail the derailment by talking about the original post. Carry on.
The Acolytes spawned as recently as last Wednesday. Before that, sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. The only variable that accounts for the times I’ve seen/not seen them was number of players. Every time there has been a lot of players there, no Acolytes, whereas with a smaller number of players, they did.
WoW, with its predecessors and copiers, created the expectations many players seem to have for MMO’s. They seem to expect an MMO to be their second life (pun intended). Those games fostered this attitude because they charged a sub (well, until recently) and profits depended on keeping as many people as possible p(l)aying.
GW2 is a different animal. As the OP says, if you can stop expecting it to fill every minute of spare time you can eke out and then some, you can then experience it for what it is.
Some of the mobs that look like the Shadow Fiend have the Massive Damage tag. When they get bigger, they are using their massive damage ability. Unless you are going to in-out quickly, it’s better to range them and use CC to slow, cripple etc.
This has been requested many times, and it would be a massive QoL improvement. There was a check box for “Only show things usable by me” during beta, but it didn’t work and was removed. My guess is it’s on a list somewhere and will arrive at some time.
Personal story difficulty has been all over the place, both in different episodes and in the same episode at different times. People complain on forums and fansites. I wouldn’t be surprised if some file bug reports. I know people were complaining about story missions that involved Krait after the Krait were buffed. Anyway, if enough complain, stuff gets nerfed.
The same thing happened with Ascalonian Catacombs Story Mode. At launch it was quite difficult for a first dungeon, and now it is quite easy.
Players looking for a laid-back run through a dungeon in GW2, expecting it to be the same as a dungeon in other MMO’s, are going to find the GW2 dungeons hard. Other games’ dungeons and even raids do not prepare players to be successful in GW2 dungeons, and neither does GW2 open world content.
Partly it is the culture shock of not being shoehorned into the “grab aggro,” “nurture health bars,” and “kill mobs” roles. That’s not all, though. Movement and positioning are very important. It’s necessary to watch what’s going on and act to avoid nasty looking stuff. Also, timing is important. Mitigation skills (dodge, block, reflect, invulnerability) are short-term and some have longish cooldowns, so knowing what to use them on and when is critical. I can’t even count the times I’ve seen players dodge out of red circles 2 or 3 seconds after the circle appeared, or dodge a nasty attack too soon, meaning the dodge was over before the attack hit them (Kohler comes to mind here).
Does the finisher not work underwater? If it does, and you can’t close and use it before Lick Wounds is available and the pet revives and rezes, the problem is with you.
So you’re saying it’s appropriately balanced for a pet to rez a player while taking full dmg from three foes..a pet that can’t heal, block or blind.
The thread’s not about how to finish a Ranger underwater, it’s about the pets OP healing ability.
The thread is about finishing a ranger UW. Lick Wounds is the skill that people are saying is preventing them from doing so. If the issue wasn’t finishing the ranger, no one would give a kitten.
The healing ability is irrelevant if you kill the ranger before it becomes available. Also, if you interrupt the pet the skill goes on a 20 second CD. That should give you the time to finish him off. Most classes have UW interrupts.
But, maybe you’re right. Maybe nerfing one of the class’s few advantages is the right thing to do, despite there being a readily-available counter.
Does the finisher not work underwater? If it does, and you can’t close and use it before Lick Wounds is available and the pet revives and rezes, the problem is with you.
Except that you can move around underwater while in the downed state. Face it, a lot of ppl have this issue, not one person being a noob.
So far, I count 5 people. Is that a lot?
Does the finisher not work underwater? If it does, and you can’t close and use it before Lick Wounds is available and the pet revives and rezes, the problem is with you.
Games are built using math. Content is either designed so that the numbers say the encounter can be done, or it can’t. Nobody does it if it can’t be done because it’s a waste of time.
As for “hard” content. There is no permanently hard PvE content in any game. There’s content that the best players can’t do — that’s not hard, it’s “over-tuned.” There’s content that is hard at first — until players figure it out, after which it’s “too easy.” Then there’s everything else, which is “afked” or “face-rolled.”
No its true. This game lacks in hardcore content. Especially permanent content at least. One of my friends hasnt played since february because of geographical issues but when he gets back im tryna think what to tell him is new. I mean guild missions is the only new content we’ve had in the past 5 months. thats hardcore and permanent. why anet why!!!
What non-hard, permanent PvE content has been added in the past 5 months?
The problem is not warriors, it is the combination of
- Class philosophies that are designed to promote class diversification
- Skill availability across classes that makes that diversification largely unnecessary
- Direct damage stats scaling much better and thus making more of a difference than other stats
- Combat mechanics that favor damage over everything else
I’m no more fond of the Champion Risen Noble mobs’ Symbol/teleport/pull plus knockdown every ten seconds than others seem to be. However, I never saw anyone bother to kill this Champion before the Noble Symbol ability was added either.
The two different play modes serve different populations. Some players like both, some like open world, some prefer dungeons. MMO’s need to appeal to a broad customer base. It’s good for the company and the game, which means it’s good for the players.
I’m not playing as much GW2 right now. Being a hockey fan, I’ve been watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Some players play MMO’s incessantly, and expect the game to hold their attention for months or years of play that consumes much or all of their free time. To facilitate this style of play, MMO’s create situations in which players will repeat the same content over and over in pursuit of something, whether it be prestige, better numbers or looks. Whether an individual MMO’s version of this repeat play cycle will captivate a particular player will determine whether s/he stays or goes. That said, no MMO will appeal to everyone.
As popular as the big dog is, there are people who find its gear progression and raid system a massive time sink that provides fun for 1-2 run-throughs of a new instance but forces ad nauseam repetition to be able to “progress” to the next cycle. I know, because I’m one of them. It’s just a more complicated version of a F2P MMO’s grind mobs to level up so you can grind more mobs to level up again.
Just so, GW2’s open world content, dungeons, PvP modes and living story are not going to fill the needs of some players, whether they were expecting something different or want to play it like a more traditional MMO with all that entails. That’s OK, though. Take a break. Come back later if something new in the game catches your fancy. We’ll be here.