Guild Wars 2

In Final Fantasy 11 they had a raid boss that was designed to last for a whole 48h fight… One group almost did that one but had to stop, or someone might fallen dead out of his desk chair.
I hope it’ll be more about excitment and challenge not so much about dragged out time until win or reset/retry.

PopeUrban.2578:

Dungeons can not be both challenging and have an “easy mode” that hands out the same reward.

That leads to the lackluster rewards they have now, which were nerfed in to the ground because you have to balance rewards around the most efficient method of completion.

That’s not working perfectly. That’s the definition of broken content. it was just made less rewarding in stead of being fixed to offer a challenge that is appropriate for the reward because it takes less effort to tweak a loot table than it does to alter encounter mechanics.

You are right there in the fact that yes any reward that might impact the auction house cannot be the same for different modes.
So yeah I agree at least the gold reward portion of dungeon tracks i kinda broken.
Though I don’t have any problem with peeps on easy mode getting the dungeon armour at the same number of dungeon completions. I know this statement give many people the heart attacks, but honestly I really think everyone should get their shiny based on “completed something i liked and got my shiny” not depending on the time it took them to get it. Some people also just do not only want something early they really want something exclusive to themselves and that would be best done by just offering custom armour models for the amount of real world cash that it costs to make one.
Actually since GW2 now loads character equipment models lazy in the background, having true unique amour for some rich peeps that really want it a pretty cool and probably lucrative service. And I’d like to see what peeps will order as their personal armour. Man I miss that dancing bare chested mustache Norn in front of old LA’s bank.

BetterHappy.2517:

Hey you, before you begin to enjoy the game do yourself a favor and check out the long list of bug threads which continue to grow patch by patch.

Oh and Mesmer, the class completely unique to GW2, it’s also unique in being the buggiest class as well.

Well…enjoy

Don’t feed after midnight :P

MidnightSun.7964:

2. Has much changed in the way of the “meta”? All zerk with warriors, ele’s, thief/guardian is what it was when I left.

There are still lots of peeps running “META-ZERK 8k+AP GEARPING”, but you can just ignore those groups if you are not interested in them.
In fact it is fairly easy now to get just a regular group through LFG.
Just post “Path X – all welcome” or possibly add “noskip/noexploit/full trashfight” to make a group if you don’t find such one already listed.
You can actually get a group to play any content non-Meta style now.

My experience is that when advertising a group as “all welcome” instead of meta most people that care to join are more polite and fun to play with.

People often forget that something does not become easy just because they have successfully raised their skill capabilities to a level on which they can perform a certain event to almost 100% success every time. It still is hard, you are just good enough.

Dungeons are still pretty super hard if compared to other MMO’s where they are only perceived hard because in the beginning you are by definition undergeared, when you come back to those yo can just face tank everything with just a few more shinies on.

GW2 dungeons still are hard, because almost everything will just kill you pretty quick, unless you skillfully perform adequate counter-measures, such as deep-freezing spider queen and make her blow up.

Luckily all GW2 dungeons also come with a skip-mechanic for those that just want to speed run or speed farm for the end-reward golds.
Additionally they all come with an easy-mode escape for all those are just not interested or incapable of learning game mechanics: Use the mighty Meta-Stack or just one of the many cheesy exploits to get everything go splat if you prefer to play it that way.
For example most people prefer just stack-dodging Subject Alpha but are not aware that you can actually take him on with super no risk and ZERO dodging required, if you have the right plan and ppl that are able to follow it. In fact 4 ppl can just stand still for the whole fight while 1 person walks left/right whenever an ice field comes up.
Yet this will only happen if you are not stacking on each other.

So dungeons are challenging and still you can choose to play them the easy mode.
Working perfectly from my point of view.

Taxidriver.2043:

buy candy corn cob from TP and goto Lion’s Arch north waypoint ( Commodore’s Quarter) and run north then west to npc to trade candy corn cob for 20 slot bag.
3 candy corn cob = 20 slot account bound halloween pail
u can upgrade bag slot for 200 gem by right click on the locked bag slot from your inventory.

Thank you very much for bringing this option to my attention. At last some good use for all those stacked up candy corn in my bank.

It’s Solid Snake in disguise !
Watch out for cardboard boxes :P

Marionette fight was super cool.
My only suggestion to make it even better would be to make it so that successful platform groups that finish quick should be able to walk over and help adjacent platform groups after they are done with theirs.

Take a look at the presented break bar mechanic once more Xyonon.
Actually running a full CC build will be lots more useful now, because the “heavy hitter”-CCs which cost a lot of resource/CD now have a much stronger effect on break bar breaking than the rather cheap and few ones that most Full-DPS builds bring.
So your big super traited long-time Stun/Knockdown skillls do make a real big difference when it comes to BBB (Break Bar Breaking) :P
I hope this will see the rise of the BBB-Warrior: Hammer+MaceMace/Shield.

I am pretty convinced it work far better than you fear, at least what you could see in BWE1 did.

I am totally ready for Dudu announcement,
already bought me a proper leaf armour from Twilight Arbor.

Blaeys.3102:

I think they could have done a much better job differentiating raiding from what we see in other games, especially when it comes to making it easier to actually form raids in guilds. As it stands, I see more drama and hurt feelings among friends than fun coming from this model.

That said, I do plan to work within the system they are building to offer raiding in my guild. That will mean running multiple groups a night to ensure – consecutively if we have anything other a multiple of 10 people. I am hoping that each individual raid is fairly short yet very difficult. That way we can cycle people in between wipes to ensure we all get to play together.

That is my only concern with the way they are doing raiding. Notice I said nothing about the difficulty of the raid – it is just the logistics that concern me. I led hardcore progression 10 and 25 player raids for 6 years before growing tired of them (because of the drama that comes from logistics) before coming to GW2.

And note that I am not talking about flexible raid numbers in this post (even though I still believe that would be possible – Im just ready to concede that ANET feels differently). And I am not advocating for a lesser difficulty in any way.

Short and manageable. That is my only hope. I have no problem leading groups for weeks before downing a boss. I just don’t want to have to leave friends out when we form groups. GW2 is about playing with my guild. I want to be able to play large scale difficult content without having to worry about any of them getting left out.

And, I respect that people feel differently about that. It is every bit as important to me as what you are looking for is to you. Please respect that opinions differ and that is what forums are for before making a knee jerk response yelling about how people want to nerf or water down your content. Most do not.

Best post of the whole thread, I wished I had nailed it down so spot on as you just did.

mrstealth.6701:

I think decisions like having the raid boss shown at PAX require multiple levels in glider mastery are a bit questionable. To me, that is a lot less understandable/reasonable than having the same requirement to reach a point for world exploration, or accessing hidden areas by having the necessary lore mastery to unlock them.

Are raids, or any other content requiring these, going to have upfront disclosure that you will not be able to complete them without a certain level in some masteries? It would be a pretty awful game experience to find out the hard way that some of your party lacks a mastery needed to continue.

How bad (or not so bad) this really is will depend on just what the requirement is, and how much time and effort it takes to meet it. But I do think using mastery levels as such a hard-line barrier within content that appears open without them is a mistake.

Yeah the way it sounded seemed to be a bit in contrast to the “no attunement required” statement.
But we had something similar to this when they presented that Wyvern fight.
People also asked if that glider mastery would work like an attunement and at least for that instance it was clarified that use of the glider would give you an easy option to recover from being blown off the place by making a mistake to not doge/stability during the fight.
If it works similar to that in raids, so that using masteries will add more options to you to recover from sub-optimal play execution it wouldn’t be super required.
You could just bring that extra competency required to not having to use the mastery.
So when you find out during a fight that a certain aspect is just too hard for you to consistently (every time) get right, but you could get a mastery that would let you recover from a slip up on your end once in a while, why not.
Things like basic glider mastery for 1 point being a requirement is pretty much not an issue, as you practically get that much by just walking into Maguuma already.
Higher far more expensive levels of masteries though should not be a hard requirement but it would be fun if those added some additional strategy options to a raid fight.

cthaeh.2168:

Common != Nearly Every

Yes that’s the reasoning I chose this word in that context.

And it is also common to see “all welcome” party searches, but
whenever I have opened the tool over the last months,
the amount of META announces in the list was definitely prevalent at all times.

Maybe they stay longer in the tool, because finding members takes longer ? Or they often show up for a long time because they are more. Does not change the fact this type of group advertisment is common.

Well ask ANet for a breakdown of average numbers of successfully made groups through LFG classified by type of advertisment interest, if you like to thoroughly research this.
For my part I don’t.
Facts stand pretty firm without that deep analysis:
- LFG often has lots of META-announces up.
- Also filling explicit non-meta groups on LFG works super good.
My conclusion from that is: Dungeon LFG is working right now, even though the UI is rather simplistic.

cthaeh.2168:

Substatic.6958:

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Inverse.2967:

LFF: Looking for friends, META Raid only, PING Build+ Gear :P

WoW all over again, I didn’t miss it in fact it’s why I left. Completely unimpressed about the announcements this past weekend. Raiding which I didn’t think was necessary or needed c/w content gated legendary armor to boot. I can here the elitism crap flooding TeamSpeak and map chat already.

GW2 already has this in all of its instanced PVE content. Nearly every dungeon/fractal asks for metazerk.

You should have left years ago in this case.

I would like an exact percentage on what “nearly every” means. 95%? 99%? Or are you just pulling this out of nowhere to support your (fallacious) argument?

Click on LFG-tool, browse a while. Make yourself a picture. It is common.

phys.7689:

Jerus.4350:

nexxe.7081:

Jerus.4350:

nexxe.7081:

Dahkeus.8243:

Good. There’s a reason I left WoW at Cataclysm.

Pug raids are miserable. They’re either an organizational disaster or they’re pitted against content that’s made easy enough for a pug clear.

The latter of those two options is the worst.

Here’s the moment I decided to quit raiding:

I was entering the Deatwing’s Lair raid with a Raid LFG. We breezed through every boss, downing them without a wipe. I defeated Deathwing by doing almost nothing but tab targetting and following the mob of pugs. When the great and legendary Deatwing died to this group…I realized that there was nothing to be proud of.

Deathwing suddenly felt like a pushover schmuck and there was nothing any challenging hard mode could do to fix his ruined reputation.

Please ArenaNet. Please, please, keep this content challenging and don’t ever build out a group finder. Don’t just cater to casual content and don’t just cater to hardcore content. Provide both and embrace a complex and diverse playerbase!

PUG raids work well in GW2. Teq and Wurm, and Vinewrath aren’t “disasters”.

They also aren’t very challenging.

I should’ve clarified. I meant it works well in organizing. As for “challenging”, it works well in WoW, since there’s different difficulty levels: LFR (easiest), Normal (regular guilds), and Mythic (for highly organized and progression guilds). GW2 is only catering to the latter, neglecting the former groups.

Mhm, and having diffrent tiers of difficult is good for this. But it takes more work and it’s not what GW2 has in mind. Not knowing exactly how much work either option takes but do you think your players who would use LFR would in general want a raid or another open world area or open world boss? What is that demographic’s playtime focused? So is it worth building that easy mode raid that you could complete with the LFR tool? Or is it better to spend those resources elsewhere where they would appreciate them more?

i dunno bout an LFR tool, but i will tell you its possible to complete high end, difficult raids in a LFG system. It depends primarily on the community, and how they choose to use the tool. In FFXIV it was possible to beat hard raids through party finder, i know because i did it.

It is however true the harder it was, the more lfg failure tended to occur.

I think you are so right.
Stuff does not need to be made easy for everyone to have fun.
But a good step up the usefulness of the LFG tool to actually craft a group from the crowd without the need of silly meta-announces or unfriendly default-kicking would be just right.
Also a group lead for such an event group would need better ingame tools to explain and command the flock. Yes things can be done with voice chat, but although most people have it that is an unneccessary entry hindrance. You should still use it.
But just put in some proper “raid announce” tools for the raid party manager, so he can easily paint strategy info in the map and trigger proper “raid-announce” text commands into player’s viewport (localized please).
That would make it rather feasible to make, instruct, manage and command a raid group built from LFG tool.

Jerus.4350:

nexxe.7081:

Jerus.4350:

nexxe.7081:

Dahkeus.8243:

Good. There’s a reason I left WoW at Cataclysm.

Pug raids are miserable. They’re either an organizational disaster or they’re pitted against content that’s made easy enough for a pug clear.

The latter of those two options is the worst.

Here’s the moment I decided to quit raiding:

I was entering the Deatwing’s Lair raid with a Raid LFG. We breezed through every boss, downing them without a wipe. I defeated Deathwing by doing almost nothing but tab targetting and following the mob of pugs. When the great and legendary Deatwing died to this group…I realized that there was nothing to be proud of.

Deathwing suddenly felt like a pushover schmuck and there was nothing any challenging hard mode could do to fix his ruined reputation.

Please ArenaNet. Please, please, keep this content challenging and don’t ever build out a group finder. Don’t just cater to casual content and don’t just cater to hardcore content. Provide both and embrace a complex and diverse playerbase!

PUG raids work well in GW2. Teq and Wurm, and Vinewrath aren’t “disasters”.

They also aren’t very challenging.

I should’ve clarified. I meant it works well in organizing. As for “challenging”, it works well in WoW, since there’s different difficulty levels: LFR (easiest), Normal (regular guilds), and Mythic (for highly organized and progression guilds). GW2 is only catering to the latter, neglecting the former groups.

Mhm, and having diffrent tiers of difficult is good for this. But it takes more work and it’s not what GW2 has in mind. Not knowing exactly how much work either option takes but do you think your players who would use LFR would in general want a raid or another open world area or open world boss? What is that demographic’s playtime focused? So is it worth building that easy mode raid that you could complete with the LFR tool? Or is it better to spend those resources elsewhere where they would appreciate them more?

Good question. Generally I suspect big things blowing up big time is something that many people like to go watch, especially among customers of a MMO fantasy game with big dragon fight story.
And please don’t ask for that lame kitten LFR-mode. While it did the trick for that competitor to make content more accessible, it did so in a very boring way.
I bet ANet can do content accessibility better than “dumbing it down”.
Very Hard Difficulty does not equal inaccessible, unless you intentionally design it to be so.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

not to get all techncal, but we are partly on a vertical progression here. Anet has stated that you “WIL HAVE” to get masteries in order to handle the new harder content. While it isnt a level up type progression, we have been told we earn masteries the EXACT same way as leveling… So basically its a level treadmill progression minus the official tag of a level… its a sneaky way of catering to white knights through technicalities… but keep on being lemmings!!! by all means!!!

There is no hidden technicality, it was like this:
1) new progression was asked for and announced to come
2) invalidating-type further vertical progression after ascended was definitely denied
3) HoT will bring masteries which progress into a new dimension, and they will use the same resource that you previously used for vertical level progression as that resource has become almost meaningless after lvl 80.
4) progression on masteries will be exactly as demanded and announced:
→ new way to progress, without making the same treadmill “levels/equip” go around the same way once again

The technicality here is:
- classic vertical progression by raising the primary level cap dimension will invalidate previous top tier content, also nullify previous progress investments and kind of be a forced requirement even if you did not buy into the new stuff
- the presented horizontal progression on the other hand gives you a new stretch to progress without touching the validity of the achievements already done towards “character level” up, as that one stays fixed at the top cap that it was before and thus all content referrring to that only will stay the same

- if a mastery though would give you anything that would make you like for instance eat lupicus even faster than in 10 seconds, then that would indeed be a hidden power creep

mrstealth.6701:

Out of those, the only one I can see causing a problem is the Fractals line. If these “new abilities” are usable in all levels of Fractals, then that line needs to be accessible to all players (to my knowledge, they’ve not confirmed either way) and be fairly quick to unlock. If this is locked off behind HoT’s paywall, then it could cause a split where those without access to these new abilities are unwanted in groups. I’m guessing they are probably only for higher levels that are only unlocked with HoT/mastery, but it’s something that we do need more info on.

Well causing a split there indeed would not be too cool.
Yet fractals are kinda the niche for gear up grind treadmill and they were supposed to be for the ones that want it.
As long as new fractal maps aren’t kept exclusively to super high levels some power creep in that special game mode isn’t too surprising and somewhat the core of what this special mode was about.

Natto.5819:

Its time to make friends who are good at this game. Then you don’t have to worry about fining raid partners.

LFF: Looking for friends, META Raid only, PING Build+ Gear :P

Dahkeus.8243:

Please ArenaNet. Please, please, keep this content challenging and don’t ever build out a group finder. Don’t just cater to casual content and don’t just cater to hardcore content. Provide both and embrace a complex and diverse playerbase!

Pick Up Group does not mean you get a flock of schmucks.
It just means you get a group created ad-hoc, this does not necessarily mean it will be randomized like an LFR group or created without care of a good group lead.
Actually I remember doing Onyxia Server-First with a pug organized by some very dedicated dwarf lead, while the “effort”-based closed group progress guilds were struggling for a few more weeks on it.

His clarification that there will be no “just put a randomized group” tool pretty much says that. You might still just build yourself a nice PUG from the way the regular group finder works, ain’t it say that ?

That’s a major bummer :/

Can we please have a raid for xmas where Tixx’s infinarium golem ship will go all crazy for real this time and attack new LA ?

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

MikaHR.1978:

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Yes your point is totally legit content for at least 16% customers would be more than viable, if you spent about that amount of your budget on it.
Its not really a question of how elusive things added to the game might be, it is more a question of how well to allocate from the overall budget so all your customers will feel they got what they paid for and not feel like they paid mostly for sponsoring something they do not want or worse that will make others belittle them.

Also combining your citation and my point about the earlier Naxx statements just illustrates that making sure content accessiblity must always be in balance with dev resource spent on them to make sure your product can go on an generate the most future profit so you can spent even more resource on the next big thing.

Right now it seems ANet has presented Raids to be a really big thing that they put a substantial effort into, and Colin expressedly stated they want it to be hard but access to trying it not to be artificially hindered. At least is what I take from his “bring the class you want statement”.
So I’m pretty sure they will get their balance right without making that stuff a gogo quick skip skip dungeon run later down the line.

So you are saying one raid with 3 wings is more expensive to make than 4 full HoT maps, elite specs, one new profession, mastery system, new WvW borderland, new PvP leagues, Guild Halls and all they require? I think the content they are adding in HoT that is NOT raids is quite significant and nobody should feel their money aren’t well spent.

Raids are totally irrelevant for the game, so its wasted money. And they boasted theyll do much more on regular basis.

Yet the data shows it’s not wasted money AND they’ve made significant additions that are not raids. It all depends on how their raids actually work, maybe after playing them we will all know if it’s wasted money or not.

Its wasted just like in any other game thats moving from it.

WoW can afford to waste as mch as they want, they can waste what GW2 makes in a year and not even blink.

What did Turbine cut first? Oh, i know.

Turbine is a bad argument anyway. Lotr didn’t even have such a big playerbase as GW2. Even if WoW could afford to waste all that money it doesn’t make much sense for them to actually waste them. Just you saying it’s wasted doesn’t mean it actually IS.

Scope of number is irrelevant. 5% is 5%.

Blizzard wasted over 100mil titan and dropped it without blinking because “it was not fun”. All that raiding didnt keep 5m (and counting) subbed.

Turbine is GREAT example, because they stubbornly produced them and forum was as toxic and “pro” raiding as you see here.

If they allocated their resources better they would have been more successful. simple.

Direct result is – no more raids in LOTRO.

No more raids in SWTOR for the time being, resources allocated to better stuff.

There is one confirmed reason why ANet cannot fail this:
There will be a big beautiful engi flame thrower woman!

How can this go wrong ?

Fox.3469:

So yeah, we basicly have LFR in this game already, it’s basicly silverwastes.

Yeah shocking, but Silverwastes despite being pretty simple, still have real boss mechanics and thus sometime actually fail, whenever 90% of peeps start being clueless or mouthing off at others instead of doing the fight by just reading what the text below the NPC names say what you must look out for. :P
Funny detail is: this usually does not happen during peak hours but mostly during off-peak hours when actually only peeps with immense amounts of daily-farm-AP on their account profiles still hang around. So much about “effort spent” qualification, huh.

But SW is pretty solid and working for an open world raid type.

maddoctor.2738:

Inverse.2967:

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

2.3 million accounts out of 10 million accounts is a very good sample slightly biased or not. I never said the data is completely accurate but it’s not the 5% that other players are saying. Maybe it’s not 70% but it is a very high and actually significant percentage of the population.

70% of the 2.3 mil sample is 1610000 accounts raiding. Even if those are the ONLY raiders (which is false) it’s still a 16.1% of the total population. Even that 16% is no insignificant number

Yes your point is totally legit content for at least 16% customers would be more than viable, if you spent about that amount of your budget on it.
Its not really a question of how elusive things added to the game might be, it is more a question of how well to allocate from the overall budget so all your customers will feel they got what they paid for and not feel like they paid mostly for sponsoring something they do not want or worse that will make others belittle them.

Also combining your citation and my point about the earlier Naxx statements just illustrates that making sure content accessiblity must always be in balance with dev resource spent on them to make sure your product can go on an generate the most future profit so you can spent even more resource on the next big thing.

Right now it seems ANet has presented Raids to be a really big thing that they put a substantial effort into, and Colin expressedly stated they want it to be hard but access to trying it not to be artificially hindered. At least is what I take from his “bring the class you want statement”.
So I’m pretty sure they will get their balance right without making that stuff a gogo quick skip skip dungeon run later down the line.

I want a boss where all-asuran-engi-golem strategy will be a thing :P

By the way the data cited from MMO-Champ earlier is based off of only
“The data used today is a sample made up of 7.3 million characters from 2.3 million accounts, with at least one character active after March 15. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.
"
So this picture is only a subset, we have no idea how representative this subset is for the overall population at that time of the product, only Blizz knows.
The hard fact that was given by Blizz was after the original Vanilla Naxxramas, where they stated just a very very tiny fraction of customers had ever seen that stuff from the inside at that time and the investment was a waste from a budgetary point of view.
Which is pretty much the reason why it re-appeared in Wrath later on to make something of that dev time spent.

Agent Noun.7350:

Inverse.2967:

Yeah sure that would make all people in the “guild progression race”-faction cry because it would take away their game, true. Yet I really can’t care less about that, because the world first progress race is entertainment for just a couple of player groups, it is one time only and generally there are lots of games already on the market for that kind of competivity.

I guess I just don’t understand why the inclusion of a single raid, that we haven’t even seen anything from and designed by a developer known for being obsessed with making content accessible, makes everyone jump to the conclusion that GW2 is going to become a game that caters exclusively to hardcore raiders. It’s a massive jump to make.

I didn’t say that at all.
I just said no matter how optional the stuff is, it is always a cool idea to put accessibility to it. More player attraction, more money, more content for everyone.
My point was, if you can make it accessible make it, for real challenge you don’t need to place any “effort”-check machnic of any sort to keep it “difficult”.
If you don’t have a difficulty selection function in you game, then it must just be difficult to be relevant, thus will cost some player attraction.
But if you can make a difficulty selection and even make it mixed mode that would maximize player attraction thus more happily paying peeps more money to make more raids and also other stuff.
If you can design things to be accessible make it, people completing an easy mode does not take away anything from people playing on a hard setting, except their game of being able to talk down onto other people and present their exclusivity, which pretty much may turn off the ones being talked down on, which in a situation where real exclusivity was forced then the people on the short on end of the stick would be by definition a vast majority (otherwise there would be no exclusivity)
So designing a thing not around being hard or not but around it creating an exclusive club by design instead of being limited by the number of people that actually care to play a really hard encounter setting might just be counter productive for monetization.

See if people choose not to join an exclusive club becaus they don’t enjoy spastically pushing their skill buttons for their life, that’s their choice and won’t feel put off. They just play or not play parts of the game they enjoy or not. Like PvP for instance.
Look at the rise of “LFR” at competing products: This was the result that people actually wanted to play that stuff but not on a min/max-scheme with monthly raid schedule and DKP-extortion.
And so it was made “LFR” since devs chose to not use a different solution than just setting als scalar values in that content to walk-over-easy levels.
Works but kinda a lame solution.
That’s what my point was about: If you can find a better way than straightly seperated “LFR”-dumb-down, please do it, I wanna play it – on hard mode, together with other peeps that play on whatever mode they like.

I really hope one day one developer will find a solution to make large group play so that every player can select the difficulty individually and still play together as a group.
That would be super awesome.
GW2’s inherent event scaling kinda has some tools in the box to work with that way.
Maybe not scale the mob but scale on the individual’s player’s end.
So like if it would be possible that you individually having selected “hardcore mode” will still be rotating your skill buttons for your life every second even though the other people are all just running on “let’s chill this mode”.
To you they would be just like other hardcore players just doing their job well, to them you would be just some guy that would be struggling on easy mode.
This would not do anything to the encounter or your personal challenge in it.

Yeah sure that would make all people in the “guild progression race”-faction cry because it would take away their game, true. Yet I really can’t care less about that, because the world first progress race is entertainment for just a couple of player groups, it is one time only and generally there are lots of games already on the market for that kind of competivity.
So dropping that in favor for something that gives lots of players that want to play harder game settings on an individual level would seem worth it.
Also please consider I wish to define this group as people that want the challenge, not the ones that ask for a scheme that will put them into a position of almost guaranteed bragging rights for bringning more “time and effort”.
You may have noticed “time”, “effort”, “skill” and “difficulty” have been given seperate words for a good reason.

HaxTester.9816:

Again. Use a mechanic that randomly separate players into two to three teams. Limit job classes to 3 per team. No more easy mode for you.

Yeah I loved that one in GW1’s ice elite dungeon too.

I like her, she looks super classy.

Maybe she likes to come visit my lab at rata sum after the raid :P

ANet seems to know their overall player base and what their activities are pretty well.
So whatever content they make and whatever name is slapped onto it, I am pretty sure they will have made sure that it will be a wise decision from a budget spent vs. amount of player attraction gained point of view.
You know they want to make money by selling them game and they want as many people to enjoy it, so they will not only buy the pack but also have real good feeling by buying some more quaggan back packs.
The business model pretty much makes sure that ANet can only gain from content that will be viable entertainment for most customers, and so far they have been pretty good addressing issues by not repeating old mistakes. For example not “fixing” dungeons to only be played the slow way was a proper strategical decision, you just need to look at it after taking a few steps back looking at the larger picture.

I agree traditional dungeons are a big piece glitchy exploity hell.

Yet they are not designed bad at all. All of the encounters are fun and challenging if you omit using glitches, exploits or just any of them barn-sized insta-gib loopholes in the present mechanics.
It sometimes actually is super fun to just play a dungeon no-skip/no-exploit/fullclear.
And some other time you just want that gold and just say wtf this group is competent enough so lets just gogogo quick this.
Yet I think it was the right decision of ANet to not fix the old dungeons so that they can no longer be played the fast way if you choose so.
Other vendors have always tried to “fix” their products after release whenever a play style arose that “we did not intend you to play it this way”. But what for ? If people like speedrunning/glitching/exploiting/making lupi explode let them, for they find amusement in it. This does not invalidate the entertainment you can get by just playing it without these methods if you choose so.

The only downside that I can find is that we have lots of vocal voices around that tend to try to push on their understanding of “how you must play X” onto others.
And the for example the LFG tools isn’t yet sophisticated enough to let players make their interests clear and give them proper info to make a good decision which group to join.
Just make the LFG tool more sophisticated, pop it out of that Social-Window, give it its own top menu button and a good big graphical UI that will have premade tag selections and multiple target queuing, so you can sing up for dungeon A,B and C at the same time and just see for which one a group of your liking can be made the fastest.
In order to keep the premade tag selection always up to date use the community process so that player can suggest new tags for popular interest flavors.
Also put explanations for those tags into that window so new players are now longer confused when being kicked from a group they just joined because they didn’t really know what make of that cryptic “Px W/E/T/Meta Asc/Ping” hieroglyphs in party announce.

I am curious to see whether ANet has made raids that will be really interestingly hard mechanic wise while still be made so that they do not mechanically lock out players for not finding fun in joining a fixed raid guild with all that wanna-be-elite-selection venom, DKP manipulation schemes, player spot rotation extortion and the unruly and unpleasant social drama that other raid design concepts have broought in the past.

Since ANet has a good track record at doing stuff to make things more sociably enjoyable by design I have good faith in the new raids.
So far the only hard fact is they are supposed to be designed with the original intention dungeons were: “Bring whatever friend and player character that you like to play with”
So their fundamental concept of choosing the player you want to play with over choosing any virtual toon for a required stat seems to stand still.
Let’s see what their solutions and success in this matter are when it comes out.
I’m all excited and hope this will bring a new generation of raid content design, that is as challenging as it is sociably pleasant.

Take a step back and drop the “traditional MMO glasses” for once to see this point:

HoT will introduce a new progression stretch for playing and completing the new content for the first time. Which is just natural, because playing through (progressing through) new content for the first time is just what you usually do and did when you first played 1-80. And this is fun to do: explore, challenge, discover, unlock, complete.
Yet since the masteries are account based you don’t even have to do it for every character again, as you had to with 1-80 (unless you dropped lots of craftin/tomes on them).
Yet since Masteries are made so that they do not modify the lvl 80 baseline they do not modify the established content and player progression state, as any other MMO expansion has done.
So while giving you a nice global further progression inside new content, which is pretty much the essence of progression based gameplay your individual pogression state does not change, all the stuff you accrued so far is still worth the same.

New content brings an expansion of dimensions to progress into (here masteries).
But the way GW2 does it keeps the value of the progression that you already did on the old content. Your Level 80 progression, Skill/Trais unlocks and all of your gear and the training and personal skill you acquired during Core gameplay will matter just as much when you bring them to the new expansion.
This is fundamentally different from traditional expansion level/gear-raise model where when you log in after an xpac you would have to through out all the items you played lots of iterations to get earlier just to get stuck in what basically is “starter gear for level x+ new endgame”, just acquire new gear that puts you in the same spot to be competitive for endgame all over again. Nothing changed you just ran the re-equip treadmill for no other reason than to prolongue your running subscription.

To conclude:
In HoTs there will be NEW progression but your progression so far will NOT BE INVALIDATED.
New progression is fun to do, invalidating previous progression just to have you do the same step all over again would not.

Maybe you can see the difference in that.

flatlined.6597:

what class has the most variety, build options, and playstyles?

If you dare to shuffle around a big ton of skills, toolkits and diverse builds and playstyles on a situational level go play engineer. There are very many totally different ways to play engineer and it comes with a big mix of specialties from across other classes as well.
Also Asura Engi with Golem asura skills totally hillarious RP fun.

Bring Bunny Ears back in shop, pretty pleeeeeaase !

Mcrocha.3891:

NeroBoron.7285:

Just take a look at Gauntlet Challange with Liadri the Concealing Dark. I spend 3~4 hours trying to kill her when it was released. One year later it was made so much easier. I didn’t fought her for one year, but killed her then after the first try.

So? You got to have your ego stroked for a year that you completed it and others didn’t, assuming you did in fact beat it. Who cares if it was lowered in difficulty? Why are people so concerned about whether or not other people can complete content?

And actually she wasn’t that much easier in her 2nd coming they just got rid of some of the cheap “death by crappy controls due to dome camera” mechanics.

maddoctor.2738:

We don’t even know how we will get the Legendary Armor and we get suggestions on how to change it?

I didn’t see Legendary Armour talk in this thread just a general idea of how to incentivise new approaches to inclusive group building by whatever reward system is tied to a specific group content. Could apply to any clearly seperated group content like dungeons as well.

Well Oberon is right, designing such a function actually would need to be handled with very much care. Amount of reward should scale off of actual skill performance achieved.

Yet the OP idea is actually very good in intention and the original idea to give multiplicative “starter” bonus loot is kinda workable.
On an all new raid encounter an all new group will thus get a very substantial big shower of first time only starter farm mats tokens or whatevers this content is dropping to collect. So on your first win, the big one you get something substantial out of it and not end up: okay 1 of 2337 Apexis Crystals, farm to go, but you may have enough to at least get a first step ahead. There will be still lots left to come back for you choose so, and the one time raider “yay now I’ve seen and beaten it” will have a little sum to have at least a minor price instead of having just a few tokens he’ll never collect enough of to make use of.
Also rewarding veterans to take in noobs into their trained raid is actually true to the nature to reward additional difficulty, the more total noobs you take the more difficult it will be train them all and to have your veterans compensate for what the noobs are not yet as good at, a kind of trainer reward therefore would be totally legit to give out.

The extra reward for trainers and the extra reward for first time completers should be different though and tailored to fit the totally different situations these players are in.
First time reward would be super cool if it gave you a little nice shiny reward just because you succeeded in beating a hard thing so you derserve the shiny, NOW!

Trainer reward should be given to veterans who replay the encounter depending on how many noobs have been brought to the table. And yes supply won’t be infinite. And it does not matter, this bonus should be a bonus for the players that use their time and patience to make raiding accessible to a wider audience. As noob supply runs thinner over time organizers will have to compete by quality training and politeness to attract people for bonus or just the fun of sharing.
The “Bonus or GTFO” can just do what they already do in “LFG META need GUARD gearping”, if there is actual reward for being a polite inclusive trainer there will be enough nice quality trainers so that you can just ignore that dumbo stack faction when choosing which group to join.
There will be many of the “META RAID BUILD #XYZ or GTFO” farm group announces who cares, that is fun to some people also, so let them do it.
But with substantial trainer rewards, there will be an incentive to compete for noob bonus by creating an enjoyable experience for them and take the hardships of less proficient players in order to get the trainer bonus reward. Trainers will actually play the “even harder because partially like first time”-mode, while the “META OR GTFO”-faction will play the “this on farm state let’s evade any unneccessary difficulty so we can get the goodies quick while playing texas holdem on second screen”-mode.
With trainer rewards you open new incentives for both approaches to exist and be viable, without everything will be similar to what LFG currently often looks like, with the GTFO group ads outnumbering the “all welcome” group ads.

Navi.9308:

Mesmer (1)
Guardian (1)
Engineer (1)
Thief (1)
Warrior (2)
Elementalist (4)

There I built you the best party, enjoy raids.

You obviously have no idea at all, for a 10-man raid you must bring Skritts only, because they scale up exponentionally when put in packs and are also best qualified for ninja-looting.

That Royal Guard Outfit:
Super 10 out of 10 Paladin armour ! I love it.

Also: more FROG or RIOT !

I support the initial idea of making non-mandatory healing more interesting/useful by adding some malus/benefit mechanic to the health pool other than on/off or alive/dead we already see this with the downed state mechanic that GW2 has introduced and which has made the game much more fun than previous implementations without a similar function.

The basic idea to give additional existing or potentially totally newly designed boons when “overhealing” characters could be a really interesting new support function without upping any of the current healing numbers, so it does not get into any mandatory but very useful spot.
And btw: coordinated blast finisher healing already is super powerful and for some stunts even mandatory: WvW Blast Finisher Healball anyone ?
If considering to add more flavour to the HP-Pool functionality you could also introduce some soft punishment mechanics for falling to a low HP state other than that just your uber-power-zerk-crit-spike-flash runes stop working, maybe weakness ?

Turamarth.3248:

Inverse.2967:

Wow fast insult without even looking at the saved past recordings contents !
There is just some uncommented player view stuff, pretty much not worth watching.
And to twitch recordings still appplies that you can’t see anything above “all screen funny color blocks only” on low end internet.

This should be it http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/10124128

Thank you Turamarth that was the answer I was looking for.

Wow fast insult without even looking at the saved past recordings contents !
There is just some uncommented player view stuff, pretty much not worth watching.
And to twitch recordings still appplies that you can’t see anything above “all screen funny color blocks only” on low end internet.

You know not everyone has the opportunity to structure his or her weekend around watching a tournament broadcast live or just lives in the wrong time zone. Also please do not forget that twitch’s live streaming service is unfortunately exclusively catered to the minority of users that actually have the luck to be offered real high bandwidth internet connections in their area of residency.

Therefore many many people who might be interested in watching the finals but could not do so on twitch like me now kinda might like to know where are the recordings of the live stream ?
Since you just announced all this new league tata and such it would have made a super good impression to have the recordings of this major event linked right with the announcement. So why aren’t they on the GW2 youtube channel ?
I’m kinda disappointed now to the point that I’m almost tempted to just give up on WTS coverage all together if no recordings are made available on the YT or similar multi-data-rate site in a very very timely fashion.
Just put youself into users’ perspective: If you missed the livecast and there is no recording available almost immeadiately why give any kittens about it at all, as you will be spoiled with the results already if those recordings come out only a few days later when you just won’t care about watching them anymore since you get spoiled about the suprising bits already everywhere on forums or ingame ?

Super nice artwork and website

The addressed changes fix every concern I had with the original offer.
Also the address was very well thought out and professionaly presented.

Thank you Arenanet for continuing to believe in customer satisfaction.

Animism.9803:

Nihlus.9724:

Guys, there’s a term “Time value of money.” At its most basic level it means that money now is worth more than money later. Similarly, getting into an MMO at the ground level is worth more than getting into it later. You’ve had much more time to play the game and many more opportunities to progress than new players.

Let’s say that back when GW2 first came out, you went to buy it and were given an offer. You can buy the game now at full price and play it, OR wait for three years and you’ll get the game for free when you buy the expansion. I guarantee most if not all of you would have went with the buy now option. The core game was worth more when it came out than it is now. The new players are not getting a better deal than you.

The game price constantly gets lowered for new players to have an ‘easy’ path to start playing the game…………………. Is that not enough?

Actually including the base game for new users is a good thing, splitting the user base is bad, charging for expansions one by one for new players was already super annoying when the competitors in this genre always did it. So I say giving new players the full content when they buy in is good.
It just isn’t good leave existing loyal customers feel they are drawing the short straw.
So it would either have needed a discountet upgrad price or to be made such that the package will adjust to wether you are a new or existing customer, such as giving existing customers something like free choice of an ingame-shop costumes and a character slot.

While the addon price may or may not be justified, no one knows about the actual content amount of the package, the price tag is surprising.

Also failure to include character slot for existing customers with the base addon edition could be considered a total failure for your department that set up the various editions’ content details. If you had included a char slot and some useless virtual gimmick for upgrading customers everything would have been well.
Yet this base edition feels utterly lacking and like a major mistreat of loyal customers. It gives me the same vibes as when looking at the online-store of that other game that shares the initials of your expansion HotS.

If your pre-order offer scheme would have left me in good faith I might just happily have grabbed the big 100$$$ package and be content. Yet looking at it now I feel like someone is trying to push me into a cheap cash grab, very very bad PR/pricing/product move. So looking at the various editions, no matter which one I’d choose I’d not feel like getting something cool extra, but just like being kittened over one or the other way.

The way you have designed the expansion editions just made me rethink entirely about whether I should buy stuff form you gem store again. In the past I always did this because I felt like dealing with a fair merchant and at least most items felt like fun enough for supporting the game dev this way. Seeing that even at 50$ the base upgrade does not include what an upgrading player would need to properly play the content (character slot) I feel like dealing with a merchant that simply tries to play game addiction and impulse buying to max profit, which puts your offers on par with the bad taste of mobile-rip-off-pay2wins or EA’s/Ubi’s 60$ game + 60$ DLC for full game foul schemes.

Congratulations on ruining your so far rather good standing as an ingame shop based game developer.

Today was a very sad day for me as a long time arenanet/gw fanboy.
:(