Since when did GW2 become a Hardcore MMO?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Lord Kuru.3685
It’s the worst possible time. It should be Friday evening like when WvW reset used to be.
Short version: ANet removed all existing and earned WvW guild capabilities and replaced them with a giant PvE grind-wall.
Not just a grind-wall, but a pay-wall: HoT is required if you ever want those WvW upgrades that you used to have pre-HoT.
If you don’t have HoT, the only single island fractal you can do is 1-20… is that right?
replacing EB with a EOTM style map will most likely kill WvW for good!
No doubt about that. If they have an EB replacement in the works, they’d best delete it right now before wasting any more time on it.
- Also you need to grind a lot for your guild and I know one guild that only does WvW and since the expansion was out they do more farming in PVE than ever to rush to the +5 supply upgrade of the guild.
The funny thing is that by the time they finish grinding that out, there won’t be anyone in WvW left to use it.
I wonder how many players in the tournament would qualify for free to play? (Running classes / builds not a part of HoT).
In this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/EU-Pro-League-Meta is a list of professions used in the EU Pro League. There’s only one player not using an HoT specialization. So P2W is a real thing now.
But what do you think prevents Anet from making this decision, I mean, why not?
Pride.
Reverting to the old borderlands would equal to admitting they made a mistake. Most developers and publishers never admit they are wrong. Now granted, Anet has showed several times that they are willing to listen to the community, but this is already implemented and live since over a month. Most changes they “revert” where only in the early stages, such as commander tag costs, the HoT character slot debacle or completely folding to PvE cries about HoT being too hard within days of release.
So yeah.
Not going to happen.
Some companies have survived similar disasters. Remember New Coke? Coca Cola was smart enough to act really quickly and bring back “Coke Classic.”
Anet could always bring the old BL into rotation, starting every other week, then two weeks out of three, then three weeks out of four, and so on. They’ll even be able to say, “We told you it’d come back into rotation,” (despite the fact that they probably never planned to do that).
That said, I don’t think it’s going to happen in this case. And as each day passes with no action, or even acknowledgement that there’s a problem, it’s getting closer and closer to being too late to act (it might already be, looking at the enormous decrease in population).
“Play for Free” is simply an attempt to avoid the words “Free to Play” which has the connotations “game is dying and needs an injection of players to hold it aloft.”
Just like “megaserver” compared to “server merge.”
did they increase the population limit or did so many people quit?
People quit. Log in just outside of primetime and it’s a ghost town — much more so than before HoT, and even in EB.
Forced grouping and raid group experience
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Lord Kuru.3685
Don’t forget all the gear (with the new stats) that are gated behind the raids. The gear grind is real.
Yes we prefer them to the current ones.
But they are still 3 year old maps which have become stagnant.
Bringing those back will again just be a temporary measure to keep whats left here for just a little longer.I want new WvW maps, not new EOTM maps!
You got new maps. And they’re are the kind of maps Anet likes to make now. This new BL was not a one-time mistake: from the old BL bloodlust area to EotM to the new BL, it’s been a natural progression of busier and busier maps, with more and more PvE and gimmicks.
You want another new map? It’s going to be more of the same. The best you can hope for are the old BLs because they sure aren’t going to be making any more maps like it.
It’s not even that challenging to be frank. The first time that I did it, I felt it was like “baby’s first raid”. I’m not saying that it is not fun, which it is, but it’s no more difficult then what fractals are before you know the mechanics.
Difficulty is measured by a percentage of the player base that can/has completed it. Honestly with how few people I hear that have beaten it, or are even continuing to try, it makes me wonder how much further they can go with it. Why develop something for that small of a population, it seems to not make much sense from a business standpoint; why put resources into something for only a small group of your customers.
I’m not saying it should be changed, or they should stop, I just think based on current metrics, it’s a poor investment :p
What you say is true. However, Anet said they expected only a small percentage of players to ever complete the raid. That would be fine if there were enough other content to keep everyone else satiated, but there isn’t.
They’ll come. Right after the fractal leaderboards, probably.
It’s not your party. You simply happened to be the one who put up the LFG. But after that, it’s majority rules. That’s how Anet wants it.
Why would they do that? They want you facing HoT players as much as possible so you get beat, thus encouraging you to buy HoT. Classic P2W tatics.
As far as the “overhaul” goes: I’ll believe it when I see it, but I’m sure as hell not getting my hopes up.
If they’ve been working on it for over a year, that means this new BL is part of the overhaul. Makes you shudder to think what else they have planned.
There is a “major overhaul” for WvW coming and they’ve been working on it for over a year so it’s probably gonna be huge. I think we just need to be a bit more patient.
First of all, the quote did not say it was “coming”, only that they’d been working on it for over a year. What have they been doing for WvW over the last year that we know of? Building new borderlands. Is that work completely finished? Likely not.
There is at this point zero evidence, indication, or reason to believe that the “overhaul” relates to anything other than the borderland change which has already occurred. You’re deluding yourself into another year of waiting around for table scraps.
This. The aforementioned overhaul is exactly what brought us the new BLs. That should actually put fear into you when thinking about what else they have coming soon™.
Just a thought for discussion.
Replace what would have been players in an empty map with respective npcs (until it reaches the player cap of that map), that is organized and constantly fight to capture and hold key strategic areas, in a perpetual conflict that would (without intervention) result in a balance equilibrium or equal points to each team. When a player does log on, they will randomly replace an npc. If enough players log on, then all the npcs will be replaced. Depending on the numbers of npcs remaining on map, their roles may change as well. Imagine the forever epic feel of logging on a map to find fights always happening!
Now a privileged player (one with commander tag or some other ability or prerequisite) could influence npcs and give them instructions and focus. So in theory, even if only one human player plays on a server in tier 8, for a few hours a day, could make a difference to their server if they make good decisions to manage the npcs.
In another scenario, imagine a lesser populated server paired off against a larger populated one. It may give a cunning player a fighting chance if the player could instruct the npcs to attempt to capture points all over the map forcing the larger group to commit players to defend.
The last thing WvW needs is more PvE. Well, second to last: the last thing we need is Anet trying to “improve” the game mode.
HoT only got 7.5 oj meta critic because there was forum campain that tell people on forum to bomb HoT with 0. Seriously look at these 0 do these people even know what a 0 means? It blew my mind.
Agree with point 1 and 2, great ideas.
Number 3 however,the complexity of such system would make it nightmare to develop and expand on. And gw2 coding is already a huge mess, could probably break the whole game.
Actually, it’s only so high because there was a forum/reddit campaign to bomb it with 10s.
Just dig out old backups of the maps all the way back to quaggan lake and revert to that state. It’ll be significantly better than what we have now.
Then don’t touch WvW anymore and just let it die it’s slow inevitable death: because you obviously don’t have even the slightest clue how the game mode is being played and what people enjoy about it, so all you’re going to do is make it worse.
Wow. Everyone seems to think they’re overhauling the HoT features in response to their massive failure, but if you read the quote:
“major WvW overhaul right now we’ve been working on for over a year”
it’s clear the “overhaul” he’s referring to is exactly what brought us the all the failed features.
If you wait a few more weeks, transfer costs will probably go down even more as the game mode empties — unless Anet makes changes to what’s considered “full.”
If their intention is to have only 5% of the player population finish the raids
Surely that would be a horrible business decision. Think about any future updates to Raids and the rage over the fact that Anet is wasting resources on such a small population of the game.
Well, they still support sPvP so it’s not like there isn’t a precedent.
Please check the facts before you make such statements.
According to anet sPvP is the “fastest-growing area of Guild Wars 2”.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/announcing-the-esl-guild-wars-2-pro-league/
So it is a good business decision to support it.
Please apply some critical thinking skills before you make such statements:
“Fastest growing” doesn’t preclude low population at all.
In fact you have no idea how they are measuring growth: is it players per day? players per week? players per month? players per year? Are they measuring in percentages?
So if the population is 100 and the game becomes F2P, and one day 50 new players click on the PvP icon by accident, do they count that as 50% growth rate? Not unlikely as their announcement was exactly as the game when F2P.
Plus, there’s the precedent where they said WvW was doing great! …and then it turned out they were including all the PvE EotM karma-train-levelers in those numbers. So we’ve seen them being disingenuous with their statistics.
By all player accounts, PvP population is low.
So it appears Anet is willing to sink lots of money and dev time into low population content. And again, they themselves have said that they only expect a small percentage of players to complete raids.
If their intention is to have only 5% of the player population finish the raids
Surely that would be a horrible business decision. Think about any future updates to Raids and the rage over the fact that Anet is wasting resources on such a small population of the game.
Well, they still support sPvP so it’s not like there isn’t a precedent.
… when throwing from ground level to walls. They get absorbed.
The bosses are already being finished with minutes to spare. I think with a few more weeks of experience, pugs will easily be able to do them in full exotics.
If their intention is to have only 5% of the player population finish the raids — I believe they’ve stated this (or something close to it) — they’re going to have to decrease the timers or tweak the bosses. Decreasing the timers is easier so probably that.
With PUG groups starting to clear the first boss, raids are already becoming more accessible. Not because they where magically made easier, but the information for the encounters is being made readily available.
Give it time, more groups will find success, and it will be more than 1 or 2% of the games population.
They did say they only expected a very small percentage of players to ever finish a raid.
That would be ok if there was enough content outside of raids for people to play, but there isn’t. That’s a big part of why everyone wants in on raids — even though it was explicitly stated that it was supposed to be for organized guild groups.
In any case it looks like they misjudged the difficulty and pugs will be speed running them pretty soon.
Master Tailor, and Master Weaponsmith. Where’s everyone else?
Well, Friday night is karma train night (as sad as that sounds).
We know that low population maps are set to close within an hour. That’s when you get that window which offers to move you to a more populated version. If you stay in the map however, it will still close within that hour, even if by then it is full. Could it be that this happened in your case too? If at the very start of the timer, the map was so low-populated that it was set to close, then everyone went there later to do the event chain, all those people wouldn’t get the message about the map closing soon, but it would happen anyway.
They don’t place people into maps that are due to close.
They’ve stated that raids are supposed to be done with guild groups. If your guild is too small, then your gameplay is not supported.
Yes pugs are finishing the raid right now, but that’s probably not intended. The raids just weren’t as challenging as Anet thought they’d be.
First try it out with a F2P account.
Throwing them upwards to cannons from the ground they often get absorbed by walls.
Can rangers still shoot through gates? If not, could this possibly be part of that “fix?”
The only reason they put raids in is because they’ve botched up the existing game so much. Clearly LS isn’t cutting it financially, and they’ve turned to old school ideas – raiding, etc.
I suspect this won’t work either. As we saw in Wildstar, and any other number of games, this type of content doesn’t make you money. Its a resource sink that returns little profit.
And it alienates the people that actually generate cash. When they leave…. Oh well.
GW used to be unique. Now it’s just like every other mmo.
Yes, Anet is obviously failing miserably, and losing money just like Wildstar! That’s clearly why they had 17.68 million dollars of sales in 2015 Q3, just like Wildstar’s 1.47 million dollars of sales!
Oh, hold on. GW2 has actually more than an order of magnitude higher sales, and the launch of HoT isn’t even included in 2015 Q3.
In other words, you’re just moaning because raids are too hard for you to beat by drooling on your keyboard, so you’re lying to try and convince people that Anet is doing a poor job, when the reality is exactly the opposite.
Just because someone failed harder than you did doesn’t mean you didn’t fail also.
You’ve got to get them to believe they made a mistake first.
DnT have been providing guides that have simplified the mindset of the community into Zerker! Zerker! Zerker! without consideration for the necessary support that is actually required to support this.
Say what? Zerkers support zerkers just fine.
how long is this first wing raid supposed to last ?
Now that we know it’s 15 minutes, they’ll never say.
I’m pretty sure Siegerazor walked through a gate and took a tower in my matchup. As I walked by the tower, it was blue (we’re green) and Razor’s yak was headbutting the gate. Walls were also up.
Next thing I know, the tower flips green. No green dots on the minimap anywhere in the vicinity.
So it seems autopilot is already happening.
As a side note. It was 10pm pacific time, tier 4, and we had maybe 5 players in all of EB… and we weren’t even outmanned. That’s how bad it is now.
Raids will be routinely and easily puggable within a couple months. And only that long because the weekly reward gate means it’ll take a little longer for people to master the encounters.
(edited by Lord Kuru.3685)
No to megaserver. Community is the only reason a large portion of the playerbase (especially those below T2) is still even in the game. Megaserver WvW and they’re all gone.
Why? Because people like to gamble. When you open a box, you even see a slot machine interface. For a game that’s rated teen it’s actually pretty reprehensible.
So… what happened?
Dungeons were hyped pretty hard leading to launch. At the bottom of these forums you can find a link to https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dungeons/ with such gems as
“Dungeons are huge, private adventure areas that only teams of high-level players dare explore. The risks are immense but the rewards are great for those who brave the hazards of the dungeons of Tyria.”
and
“There are tremendous risks for those who brave the dungeons in Guild Wars 2, but the rewards are great—each dungeon has its own unique armors and weapons that can’t be found anywhere else. The armor from the Ascalonian Catacombs is different from what you’ll find in Sorrow’s Embrace, which is different from the treasure found in Caudecus’s Manor.”
- Dungeons!!
- Fractals!! Dungeon team disbanded.
- Raids!! Fractals get the dungeon treatment. Dungeons “disincentivised.”
Those who think raids are going to solve all of Anet’s instanced content problems are going to weep when they see this pattern continue:
4. Super duper raids!! Raids get the fractal treatment. Fractals “disincentivised.” Dungeons deleted.
What happened? Check out the kill/death ratio also (matchup ending 11/14). Is the API bugged or is this for real?
Yes. Automate attacking also. Then you can have the AI fighting and nuking each other with gigantic lasers. “The only way to win is not to play.”
A message from John Corpening and John Smith:
We’ve noticed some changes to ascended drop rates that are below what we were expecting.
I’m utterly perplexed by the usage of the words, “noticed” and “expecting”. Is the drop rate not simply a fixed value that one of the developers was instructed to enter? That’s not something you would “notice” later, or something that should generate unexpected results.
Please help us to understand. At the moment I just feel like the usage of this language is an attempt to deflect fault for what was a very poorly received change.
You expected them to come out and say they made a mistake and nerfed the rewards too hard?
All this grind to get upgrades you already had pre-HoT.