Guild Wars 2

No. If it was up to me, MMOs wouldn’t have levels at all. In most games I have ever seen, level cap increase was just a cheap way for the devs to invalidate people’s gear and make them grind for it all over again.

Tabletops/NWN modules and MMOs don’t compare very well. In a MMO you have literal millions of players, and a substantial portion of them eventually wants to have a legendary weapon, for it’s the ultimate goal in GW2 (at least as of now). If you make legendaries truly unique, you either have to include hundreds of thousands of different weapons for players to make (which is likely infeasible for the devs to do) or create a situation that only a fraction of all players can ever have a legendary weapon. In a MMO, that means the handful of fastest players will have one, the rest never will. Which is…umm…not really desirable.

The game is becoming anti-alt rather than anti-casual. With the addition of fractal levels and hard-to-come-by gear (Ascended), it’s getting really difficult to keep more than one character “high end ready”. Getting legendaries for more than character is probably out of most player’s reach, too. However, I dare saying that even casual players can still get their hands on Ascended gear for ONE character.

Um, you know that if you want to get this achievement AND be useful in WvW at the same time, just offer a commander to help building siege in any keep/tower they are holding. Most often you won’t even need to buy the blueprints that way, just run supply from a camp to the keep and back and help building whatever they need built.

The difference to your approach is that this way, they will love having you around.

@Pod: No, you can’t go into WvW for a server you’re a guest on. Preventing exactly that was -the- main reason for implementing the guesting feature in the first place.

In the end, the only reason this issue wasn’t super-pressing in the past was the free transfers that let you circumvent this broken game mechanic that is WvW mapping by just hopping to a server that owned the places you were missing. With those free transfers now gone, I guess map completion has basically become a Mission Impossible for many new characters/players.

Awesome. So far I was a bit meh about the Feb patch as other than the next installment of Living Story, there was nothing in it that remotely interests me (guild quests aren’t all too exciting for you if you’re guildless, I suppose), but this neat little feature is something I really appreciate!

runeblade.7514:

Because Anet wants storymode to be run once.

Or maybe never, given that it’s next to impossible to get a team for them these days. rolls eyes

@Kodesh – In all games I have ever played that had raiding, the raiding portion of the game took the endgame completely over and everything else became secondary to it. Not only the best gear, but the best mats, the best mounts, the best anything dropped ONLY in raids, so much that every other area became pointless to participate in. In my experience, raiders at large seem to be unable to tolerate non-raiders to get any decent reward in a MMO. So when non-raiders then ask “hey, what about us?”, the answers from the raiding community usually are something along the lines of “Of course the best stuff needs to drop in the most challenging content” or “You don’t deserve anything decent if you’re not raiding” or the classic “MMOs are a multiplayer game”. Or my all time favourite “You don’t need raiding loot when you don’t raid.” – which is totally correct and also totally disregarding the fact that in a raiding-based endgame there usually is NOTHING else to do other than gearing up. And PLEASE, don’t not try to convince me that this would be any different in GW2. If ANet would bring raids, the very first question would be “Cool – what exclusive, awesome loot will drop there?”

So in short – OF COURSE the presence of raids would devalue the game for me. It has devalued most other MMOs I tried, too. When I reached endgame level in any MMO having raids, what usually happened is me shelving that character right away, and then wiping the game from my hard drive after doing this with the 2nd or 3rd alt. What’s the point of playing a MMO where the only meaningful content is the one you don’t play?

Zeph.5927:

Of course an easy fix to this would be to make every realm alternate colors instead of always being the same one, but it seems even Anet cant be bothered to implement this simple solution to help people out.

As a fairy regular WvW player, I have wondered why they didn’t do -exactly- that anyway, and not just for making mapping more accessible. Change is a good thing and getting red castle week after week after week just because we’re the weakest server in our tier is booooring.

Not everything needs to be mindnumblingly hard to be enjoyable. At least not for me. If I want to play harder content, there is dungeons. The DEs I prefer the way they are.

That being said, I would agree that events should fail if players don’t intervene.

I could still giggle at the fact that at least three quarters of all MMOs out there have raids, but raiders buy one of the few that doesn’t have them – and then they complain about the absence of a feature this game was actually advertised NOT to have. It’s really priceless.

And raids – thanks but no thanks. I am really happy that this game doesn’t have them.

RNG works fine for mundane drops. Whites, blues, greens. We will all get so many of these items over time, that any “bad luck” will even out and we will get basically the same total worth of drops. Math will demand it.

However, RNG is an incredibly bad idea to use for anything really rare (read – having a very low drop rate). Why? Because the distribution will stop being overall even and some randomly chosen players will get MUCH better drops than others. cough the ones having a precursor dropped for them…cough

Which is…unfair and defeating the purpose of a computer game, where we generally want to see effort and skill being rewarded, no?

When I see a person having a legendary, my thoughts aren’t “Wow, awesome achievement”, the line popping up is “Wow, a truly lucky person”. Which is…not the desired effect for the supposedly mother of all GW2 rewards, no?

That’s in short why RNG for rare drops is a terrible, terrible idea.

@Relentliss – I find this opinion a bit too harsh. Yes, WvW can be improved, and this thread has actually a few really good ideas how to do just that. But overall it’s the best interpretation of a RvR I have ever seen (some say DAoC was better, but I have never played that game). There is no good reason not to incorporate your suggestion to improve the WvW rewards (which I will sign right away!) without killing WvW or turning it into something completed else, like GvG. I am guildless, so I prefer WvW remaining accessible to me, thank you. :p

By all means, bring GvG to this game in -addition- to WvW.

GuzziHero.2467:

I took an lvl 8 into wvwvw and got all the POI/vistas/SPs (did get help on the Skritt SP in fairness, from a rival server player!) and came out lvl 11.

Yes, its a challenge. Games are intended to be a challenge.

Oh, actually I did the same with a level 5 back then. Am I not awesome!!!!

Thing is – that was when my server was in a tier when we were steamrolling the opposition and owned entire maps at a time. In Tier 2 we’re the punching ball, though. Like I said, TC hasn’t been able to breach Green’s home castle in WEEKS. And yes, we tried. Getting into green castle in our tier isn’t called “challenging”, it’s called “infeasible”.

The basic issue with WvW mapping is making an individual accomplishment (world mapping) dependent on something no individual has any control over (ownership of certain WvW PoIs/Vistas etc.). I love WvW personally. Thankfully I have been able to map all WvW maps with two characters already. But ironically enough my current WvW main character lacks 3 points in Eternal Battleground and my server has been unable to conquer the corresponding strongholds in around 10 weeks. I dare saying that this situation is common for a lot of servers, not just mine. In many tiers one server is so overwhelmingly dominant that conquering their home castles is unthinkable. This means that essentially nobody is able to compete their maps at this time. And THAT is silly.

I am utterly and totally horrible at platforming. I never practiced that sort of game. I am afraid of heights in real life. I get dizzy from fast camera movements. And my reactions are not what they used to be when I was a member of that age group labeled “young”. For that reason, I disliked the Giant and Uncategorized fractals for their platforming bits even before reaching L10. They always gave me the not-so fuzzy feeling to be useless there and having to be carried by my team. I have to concentrate so hard on not missing a jump that I can’t participate in the fights going on at the same time, and I am utterly slow on top of it. Even at below-L10, these two Fractals made me uncomfortable of joining a Fractals team and embarrass myself time and again. But after having tried L10, I am outright scared of them. I wish so hard that I could uncheck the platforming fractals somewhere and be guaranteed to never see them again, but I can’t. I just wish they’d keep platforming of any kind to the jumping puzzles that people who like that sort of gameplay can enter, but nobody really has to.

I gave up on the legendary a few days ago and put the idea to rest. While I’d have most other ingredients needed, the precursor prices are about as broken as it gets, and while ANet could fix them fairly easily by increasing the supply (read: make them drop more often), they seem to be fine with legendaries being rewarded to the lucky (read: Mystic Forge gamblers) and TP manipulators instead of dedicated players. If that’s the way they want to run their economy, I can’t change it.

@Sorrow:

Let me be the first to disagree with the “everyone would love that” assumption!

I think your needs could be -much- better served by ANet introducing an actual GvG mode akin to the Guild Wars 1 one, rather than reshaping WvW into a “no need to participate unless you’re in a large guild” thing. And yes, elevating members of large guilds over smaller ones or guildless players by giving them more recognition and more reward would have exactly that effect. On TC, the -majority- of all WvWers is NOT in one of the larger WvW guilds. WvW is a community effort carried by the whole server. By all means, I will support GvG coming to this game despite I am guildless myself. But in WvW, the only leaderboard that matters is the server ranking list. A guildless person who runs supply or escorts yaks is just as vital to the server’s success as the member of a big WvW guild running with their zerg. I can’t see any good reason to treat players differently just because one is in a big guild and the other one isn’t. That doesn’t make the slightest sense for WvW as a game mode. Like I said, what you’re really looking for is a GvG mode.

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

Little to no rewards or loot, and huge repair and upgrade costs; it’s a sure way to bankruptcy. If this was a business model investors would be jumping ship with what little left they still had!

To me that’s actually the biggest issue of WvW right now. It ties into what the OP said about (the lack of) WvW rewards, but it’s really worth pointing it out. I don’t even die in WvW all that much, but since the loot is so abysmal in WvW, I am not gaining any wealth worth mentioning either. If you look at it from an opportunity cost angle, one hour of PvE would yield me 2-5 gold at least, while playing an hour of WvW will require me being lucky not to -lose- any money in the process. In terms of reward, WvW is really the red-headed stepchild of GW2, for PvE is so much more profitable that it’s not even funny. The very least ANet would have to do is making badges drop a lot, LOT more frequently and add a number of nice things to actually buy with them other than Exotic armour (which I dare saying most halfway serious WvWers bought even before they started WvW in the first place). Getting shiny things to pimp our characters with has always been a central aspect of MMOs – why WvWers are basically left out of the game’s reward system is beyond me.

I would be sad seeing the current match-up broken up anytime soon. BG and KN have both been awesome sports and a blast to fight against. I don’t think I ever had so much fun in WvW.

A few of the points in the OP I can agree with, others I can’t. The lack of progression/recognition is an issue I can see some people having – there doesn’t seem to be any reward worth mentioning for playing/being successful in WvW. However, the devs have a system in the making that should address that.

I completely disagree with the idea of elevating any individual guild’s role/reward over the general population though. WvW isn’t GvG. It’s not a guild effort, it’s a -server- effort. Why should one WvWer get more rewards than another just because they are wearing a different guild tag? I don’t get that, because they were storming that keep side by side, bleeding the same blood and hurting the enemy the same way, no? I don’t know about your server, but on mine -rarely- any objective is captured/defended by just one guild. While some guild tags are definitely more present than others, the majority of any larger group seems to be made of the people you refer to as “PUGs” (we call them “militia” on our server). These people pull their weight just as much as those in the big WvW guilds, and I think they deserve the same recognition for it, don’t you think?

I agree with the commander thing. It’s silly that it requires money to get and not badges. However, since the blue icon means nothing without people actually following you, the issue isn’t as big as it might appear at first. People will learn to follow the good commanders and ignore the bad ones anyway.

About the zerg thing I have mixed feelings. Yes, I think WvW should be more than just throwing 1-2 large zergs at each other, but zergs definitely should remain a major aspect of WvW, for I think that large-scale battles are part of the reason that makes WvW -feel- massive. Adding more options for smaller groups could be something I could get behind, though.

kevinWilson.1784:

If aNet really wants to keep this, they should either make ressing defeated players take the same time as ressing downed players.

I guess a really good way to solve this would be making the first res be super fast, but take progressively longer if you continue to get killed over and over. This way, the occasional mishap goes largely unpunished, but people would still be discouraged from being careless.

1321351

Ive never had to waypoint constantly to beat a boss, with the exception of CoF mag(which they are REDOING. Or they already have.)

Personally, I didn’t either. I don’t die all THAT much in dungeons, at least not in the ones I have been doing regularly. But the times WHEN I die, I appreciated not being a literal deadweight for the rest of the fight. Because…it’s rather boring, you know? Yes, other MMOs do it in the same way, and it was boring there, too. It’s one of the things I loved about GW2 – doing away with things other MMOs did WRONG.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am really NOT opposed to that change in general, but it needs to be accompanied by other measures, e.g. making ressing dead allies more viable (right now, ressing is more likely to get you killed on top of the already fallen because you’re a sitting duck in a danger zone for an entenity). Or stopping the ridiculous amount of situations where people can get one-shotted by making the tiniest of mistakes. Anything but making players miss out 95% of the fight because they died right at the start (and don’t give me the “L2P noob” line, please – we all know sometimes it just happens in this game).

Fractals NEVER had res-zerging and nobody really complained about that. But in contrast to dungeons, Fractals seem to be much better designed to take that into accord.

Atrius.8759:

In my experience the main reason for res-rushing is the enormous amount of time it takes for allies to get you back up once you’re defeated. If it were as fast as getting up a downed player, getting people back up would happen a lot more often. As is, it can be faster to just res and run back in.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

^ This

More often than not people didn’t try to res fallen comrades not because they are lazy or not teamwork oriented, but because it’s usually a flat out bad idea to do that. I dare saying that most deaths I ever encountered in a dungeon happened when I tried to res someone else and thus became a sitting duck for what feels like an eternity. If people didn’t play the game the way the devs seem to want it to be played, it’s because the res mechanic is broken and punishes players for actually trying get a dead ally back up during combat.

I always hated the ‘if you’re dead you’re out’ mechanism in other MMOs. I was super-glad that GW2 didn’t have it. Nothing is more embarrassing than making a slight mistake, getting one-shotted because of missing the 0.5 second window to press the correct button and then spending the next 10 mins dead on the floor doing nothing while your team mates cuss at you for having made a mistake. It’s a horrible, horrible mechanic, particularly in a game where death comes comparatively fast (cough Lt. Kholer cough).

While I loved the rest of this patch, this one change soured it up so much that I am not sure if I will bother with dungeons anymore.

I guess in terms of the ‘stereotypical’ class for a norn, warrior and ranger would likely be the clear winners as they reflect both the melee fighter and the hunter theme.

I have a stereotypical norn ranger and a not-so stereotypical norn mesmer. The latter is probably as far away from established norn-tropes as it gets.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

This is not the case with guesting, as you are still “registered” on your home world.

Fine – then send our character to the other datacenter while guesting, together with a “can’t WvW here!” flag. Come on, you guys did it that way in GW1, and now, almost a decade later you’re telling us it cannot be done and expect us to buy that? Sorry, but no.

Alternative suggestion: Re-enable unrestricted free world transfers, but everyone has to pick a “WvW home server” (since the entire reason behind the transfer restriction is indeed WvW, there is no other). Cross-continent transfers do already work, so no work needed to implement that at all. The “WvW homes server” cannot be changed unless with a huge amount of gems. Entering WvW is only possible when the character is on their actual WvW server. Problem solved and everyone will be happy.

wasted.6817:

Well, GW1 used to be divided into regions as well, for a long time actually.

That’s not quite correct, since cross-continent guesting was enabled from day 1 in GW1 – it was called “International Districts”. Only actual moving between home territories was restricted.

Jaskra.6940:

Yeah, well, you can blame the people who abused the weekly transfers for WvWvW purposes. It’s always the jerks that ruin it for the many.

The abuse was stopped by making transfers having a 7 day cooldown. People can’t just jump to the winning server all the time anymore, like they did when transfers were unrestricted. Large guilds leaving their servers for greener pastures – the new ‘feature’ isn’t going to stop that at all. It’s not like it would now magically stop bandwagoneer guilds to migrate to a different server once in a while, no?

cherrycola.3127:

I really feel you should rethink releasing this feature until you can release it in a properly completed state.

^ This. 10 million times over. For anyone having cross-continent ties, the new ‘feature’ will be a huge step BACKWARDS compared to the status quo. I would go as far saying cross-continent guesting is one of THE most important applications for guesting in the first place, as many of us want to have their home in our respective region, but have friends on the other side of the pond.

And don’t tell us it can’t be done, ANet. You did it in GW1, too.

Chaba.5410:

Paid server transfers and no ability to guest in WvW will NOT prevent spying in WvW. Large guilds on one server will just band together to pay for their spy to transfer.

Why would they do such a complicated thing when they can just buy a second account for their guild leader to run on a second box and join the enemy server with? rolls eyes

The guesting feature was delayed for that long, and now it won’t even allow cross-continent guesting? After all that time, that was the best you could do? Really???

This stinks so unbelievably hard, I lack any polite words to describe it! Boo @ANet

Before implementing such a half-arsed, badly, thought-out and flat out bad feature, better keep what’s in place now. At least NOW we can alternate between our groups of friends once per week and don’t get nickled and dimed for it…

Revitalization of the surface world is desperately needed. Despite ANet’s claim there is next to no incentive for playing on the surface world. Fractals and Dungeons are so much more profitable than events that it’s not even funny. Doing a complete Arah event chain yields you what? 50 silver, including mob drops? In the same time you can make 2-3 gold in a Fractal. Or 10 by not leaving LA at all and just playing the TP, but that’s a different matter altogether…

Giving people a reason to go back on the surface is a great idea. GW2 has mostly become a lobby game these days – people hang in LA and look for instances groups. And I don’t think that’s what either ANet or the players really want.

While all three armour types suffer from a certain uniformity syndrome (e.g. light armour is usually some more or less skimpy top plus long skirt), it’s certainly most obvious with medium. Of all the sets in the game I can name exactly four that don’t look outright horrible on my (female) ranger: Norn T1 and T3, Whispers and Duelist. I hate trenchcoats (or any coat for that matter) on a ranger, so go figure!

I really really hope that we will get more variety in styles over time. Like, you know, something a huntress would actually wear. Plus skirts of various length, tops of different styles. Pants.

In short: Actual choices!

I can’t remember any Champ/Vet dropping things for me that couldn’t have dropped from a regular mob. It’s either nothing at all, or white vendor thrash in most cases. Sometimes a blue. I honestly noticed no difference after the alleged change, for good or worse.

The melee animations could generally do with an overhaul to look more fluid. As a ranger, one of my larger complaints is that most shortbows look waaaaay too tiny on a Norn. They could do with some up-scaling to match their body size better. Now it’s almost as if she’d wield a toy weapon.
And yes, the best way to prove that our cultural elite skills are useless is that I can’t remember seeing a playing ever using them outsides of RP.

I find it interesting that this sort of discussion appears in pretty much every MMO. And yet, if the choice to be “average” or “ugly” or “fat” or “old” or “thick” is there…next to nobody ever uses it. Can it just be that the vast majority of us wants to be pretty and young rather than bland and old? And with that in mind, making those body models would just be a giant waste of resources, perhaps?

I -will- admit that given the Norn lore making women physically equally strong as their men, the males’ much thicker bodies don’t make a a whole lot of sense (why is nature giving males biceps like tree trunks if the women can achieve the same strength with a less energy consuming body?). But then again, neither do modern aviator glasses in a fantasy game make any sense, so I will just cast the mantle of disbelief on that. shrug

Personally, I’d rather change the males than the females. I don’t like their over-exaggerated bodies at all, as I picture nordic warriors to be tall and well-trained instead of the brutish bear shapes they gave them. They look more like bouncers that way.

Taste is a funny thing…

Koolthulu.9682:

KasNova.8936:

How exactly is forcing players into instanced dungeons to progress going to help keep people around for dynamic events?

Exactly. Same thing happened with Rift. Everybody was too busy gearing up in the dungeons/raids to bother doing the rift events/invasions.

The Rift events were also completely pointless to do if you had raid gear. Not only there were no drops on the entire surface world a person in raid gear would ever be interested in (of course not – nothing great is allowed to drop outsides of raids, remember!). But the gear was so powerful that you could aggro every single mob in the area at once and they still couldn’t put a dent into you. Which is one of my most basic gripes with vertical progression – it makes all other content in the game obsolete except the currently highest tier of content.

The above is the reason why I quit Rift a while ago despite it it was -otherwise- a nice game. But gear “progression” completely killed it. All people still did was standing around in their faction’s capital, waiting for their guild mates to show up for a raid/dungeon etc.

Vash.9183:

This update is a great one. Stop being so negative

If we’d all agree with that, there wouldn’t be 160 pages worth of mostly negative feedback about it, now wouldn’t it?

You like the Ascended gear idea? Fine, that’s your prerogative. I don’t. Seems many others don’t either. But what I really don’t appreciate (I keep seeing this a lot in this thread) is:

Statement: “I don’t think Ascended gear is a really good idea because…..”
Reply some variant of: “Shut up casual whiners. Your opinion doesn’t count because I have a different one.”

This is not only belittling and offensive, it’s also not making your line of reasoning look really well thought-out, you know?

Ditton.3149:

I think they should just scrap the entire thing, this whole thread is nothing but depressing and vitriolic.

Pulling the patch for now would be THE best solution at this time, but this would require ANet admitting that they majorly messed this up. Publically admitting to have been wrong takes a lot of guts and is something the vast majority of all humans seems to be unable to do, so I am not holding my breath.

But yes – delay the patch, remove Ascended gear from it entirely (and bury the idea forever!), work out new rewards for the new dungeon and then release when it’s ready. That would be the best. Right now we’re facing the danger of them releasing the patch with a system even ANet seems to have realized is a bad idea, only to have it somehow remedied later (making Ascended gear available outsides hardcore content, as their latest posting seems to indicate they would do) with a flawed result that would make nobody at all happy (hardcore players wouldn’t get their beloved gear treadmill and casual players would still have to deal with Exotics being rendered obsolete with all negative consequences thereof).

Dalris Thane.6314:

The problem with me being a niche person when it comes to entertainment is that the few things that are actually niche often becomes cancelled or mainstreamed.

This is why I’m worried about the future of GW2. I’m worried that future development time will go in large part to new tiers of gear. Here is my recent gaming history.

City of Heroes = Few raids. All small groups. Top end drops from trash mobs. Wow. That’s gotta be niche. Awesome. Wait? What? The new focus is on Incarnate content i.e. raids? You mean, like every other mainstream MMO? Darn. CoH is no longer niche. /quit.

Star Wars, The Old Republic = Story based MMO. Wow. Tons of cutscenes in an MMO? That’s gotta be niche. I love that. Awesome. Wait? What? The new focus is on group content, minimal cutscenes and gear grind. You mean, like every other mainstream MMO? Darn. SWTOR is no longer niche. /quit.

Now, I’m in Guild Wars 2. = No Grind MMO. Level playing field? What? That’s gotta be niche.

Now I’m HOPING history doesn’t repeat itself. Maybe I just have bad luck. But it feels (you know… emotions, those things some of you logical facts only people may have forgotten… hehe) like it’s happening again. So, right or wrong, I’m scared and getting upset. You know, emotional. You guys are logical. I’m sure you can look it up…

And don’t get me started on TV / Movie niche vs mainstream, hehe…

I had a really similar MMO history. I quit five games in less than two years because of that “endgame” thing that left me with nothing to do as soon as my characters reached max level (I don’t raid).

The irony is that I don’t think people like us are actually a niche audience. We’re only treated that way by MMO devs who seem to be prone to listen to the loudest voice – which tends to be the hardcore crowd. I think the strategy used by the industry was something like “Let’s appease the 10% hardcore players. The casuals are a majority, but they never seem to complain anyway despite no MMO has ever catered to them.” Or so. Thankfully I noticed a change as in 2012 the ‘casuals’ seem to be more vocal, too. Which is why we ended up with 145+ pages of feedback opposing the hostile takeover of this game by a certain segment of the hardcore players who can’t seem to accept even ONE MMO being made for people like us.

Nachyochez.9758:

For those wondering why ANet hasn’t responded to this thread:
When a designer makes a decision that is not liked, a knee jerk reaction is to be expected. Normally, if you leave the player base alone for a day or two, these reactions will simply cease. Thus, they can safely ignore the pages and pages of outcry thus far. Want to make them listen? Keep talking, and refuse to be soothed by a technique for infants.

That’s one possibility. The other, slightly more optimistic one, is that the largest ragestorm over a proposed MMO patch in years actually DID make an impact and their damage control team is currently discussing a smooth way out of this mess while saving their collective faces.

One can always hope…

In either way – we need to keep our voices heard in case you’re right.

Valento.9852:

This is just kittening annoying stupid plain whinning, they don’t have to answer you, they’ll just release the content and you will have to deal with.
S-i-m-p-l-e.

We will talk again when they one day will do things to the game YOU don’t agree with. I am highly curious if you won’t come back here and tell them how displeased you are. Oh wait – I forgot, if a hardcore player does that, it’s not called “whining”, in that case it’s “constructive criticism”, right?

GOSU.9574:

We don’t need a tier system in this game. This game is not WoW, it will never have the draw of WoW’s raiding game. They have caved in and sold out, Anet has. Very, Very, Very sad.

What no MMO dev including ANet doesn’t seem to get is that pretty much everyone who wants to play a gear grinder is playing already playing WoW. It’s the simple reason why every single WoW clone failed miserably. WoW players will stick to the original. That’s the game they invested a lot time and money in. But still everyone seems to think every MMO customer base is just like WoW’s. Which is a silly thing to assume. Looking at this thread, the overwhelming part of the responses are negative about the Ascended gear. Now consider that casual players are usually the ones who do NOT post all that often on MMO forums. Then go imagine what the GW2 playerbase as a whole REALLY thinks about this…

It’s an absolutely disastrous day for this game, which until yesterday I labelled the best MMO ever made.

Did they really think in 2012, the large majority of MMO players would -still- stand silently aside and have a few hardcore players dictate the course of the game with their “We need super-hard content with phat l00t that nobody other than us can get” whining? Errrm…no.

cesmode.4257:

I had such high hopes for this game…

Me too. Particularly after I quit a stunning five MMOs in less than two years over them being just a dumb gear grinder at max level.

I guess the loudest voices still rule any attention contest after all, and one hardcore player still seems to outweigh 8-9 of the rest of us to MMO devs when they have to make decisions like this one.

I have to say that at this point I am fairly bummed. GW2 was my last best hope for a MMO to call home after I found out the hard way that the conventional interpretation of the genre isn’t for me. I guess I put too much faith in ANet and their “we’re different” manifesto after all.

Poinky.3079:

I thought GW2 was a ‘next gen’ mmo…. whats with this kitten?

Well, as it now seems “next gen” in an MMO context means “updating WoW’s engine with newer graphics”.

Ok, I have read the blog post. I have compared the two items in the screenshot provided. Thank you for confirming my fears about a dumb, silly gear progression race coming to the game, and nice job on breaking your promises in a very thorough manner, ANet. Welcome to the World of Warclones.

Cynic.3496:

I’m happy about this patch! I even hope they do add full progression raiding someday! You can’t keep people interested on cosmetic gains only and I think they finally realized that. It’s going to be nice to have a reason to login again.

I will be the mean one to point out that hardcore raiders are an group that barely would leave a dent on any game’s balance sheet if they’d all quit – we’re talking about a 5%-15% part of the population here.

In terms of size of playerbase, GW1 was the second-most successful western MMO after WoW – and it kept a very loyal fanbase around for many years without any silly gear progression game and just cosmetics.That proves your statement wrong right there.

Conversely, almost all newer MMOs having a traditional gear treadmill failed miserably on market after a few months and the raiding-focus chasing away all non-raiders (cough SWTOR).

A modern MMO can easily exist without the raiders as customers, but I am sorry to say that these days you can’t fund a MMO without the 85+% that do NOT raid. And in 2012, the non-raiders seem to be just as trigger happy with the “uninstall” button if their needs aren’t met by a game. Which is a good thing. shrug

AcidicVision.5498:

Has anyone considered this might be a balance thing?

The forums are still full of people that cannot do a dungeon to save their lives. QQ about Lupicus and Alpha on a daily basis and can’t walk around Orr without getting omg-wtk smacked down.

Plainly, the majority of players just aren’t getting as good as Anet expected them to get. Too many habits from other games and failure to adapt.

So how do you help those people along without nerfing the entire game? Add a new tier of gear to shoot for and make the current top tier more accessible to help that base of players while adding some more difficult content on the top end for the more skilled base of players.

These people usually -have- Exotics (that is – or was, rather, the point about GW2’s gear system – anyone can have the best gear). Adding another layer of gear in a -more difficult- dungeon won’t help them either as it’s safe to assume they won’t get their hands on it if they already can’t beat content that’s easier than that.

In other words – your logic is flawed.

Bruno Sardine.2907:

Just out of curiosity…. if this dungeon offers a “gear treadmill” but is totally contained within the dungeon itself, meaning none of the “extra stats” earned work anywhere except in the dungeon, how many people would be opposed to this?

As person totally and vigorously opposed to gear treadmills – this would be acceptable. If they added a stat to this set that would be totally and absolutely useless anywhere outsides of the instance it came from AND if NO other stat on this gear would be better than Exotics, I’d be fine with it.

However, this is a purely academic question, as I have never seen it done that way in any game ever.