Guild Wars 2

about progression I want to ask you (players as well as devs) a question:

How do you feel about the agony resist system from fractals? Do you see any cons to this system? What are they and how do you think these could be fixed?

I really like the concept of agony, having an impact on the fractals only and no use outside of these mini-dungeons. I could imagine that this system would work fine in raids as well.

A raid as being part of an epic storyline is a must for me personally. Looking back at the Lich King raid in WoW and how all the stories were intertwined made it more epic than a random fractal which is quite disconnected to the current happenings.

Yes, fractals are lore-related, but it’s very very little lore that supports these fractals outside of the fractal itself. Colin likes to talk about TV-series analogies, so to me it feels like watching season 5 of “The Walking Dead” and then putting in some scenes from season 1, but with little supporting and connection-building information.

We had some awesome fractals that show interesting szenes from lore (e.g. the Charr-party which raids Ascalon City) but there is little information about what actually happens outside (or even inside) the fractal. The info might be there, spread out to many npcs, but that’s not meaningfull storytelling to me.

Sure, a Abbadon raid sounds epic, but all the motivations behind it should be there. You should see some preparations for it outside of the raid-instance, dynamic events that support that storyline, etc.

I’m not happy about the fixed raid-size statement since it excludes friends from playing together in most cases, but if it helps to focus on moving to another topic… allright.

What I think worked quite well (e.g. in Queens Gauntlet, Evacuation of LA,…) was the option for players to choose your next encounter while others do theirs. Good players can try the challenging harder bosses while newbies go for the relatively easy route.

Very organised teams can send players to their suggested encounters and those sub-teams organize themselves via. a number of teamspeak-channels.

Queens Gauntlet had the mechanic to give the best reward if people get all bosses down at a specific time-limit. It was a nice challenge (though the rewards were very underwhelming: quantity over quality rewards).

Proposal:

What if a instance starts in a room with 6 portals.

• each portal is open for 5 players at most
• the raidgroup spreads their players to their portals of choice
• once they enter a portal/path, the timer starts ticking. You can’t go back from there on.

• example A (small group): 8 players spread:
  4 at portal 2,
  4 at portal 4.
  Each portal has a specific endboss with a unique skin-drop. Defeating both bosses in a certain time unlocks a mega-boss where all come together. He drops 2 reward chests for everyone (rare rng reward) and a special reward chest (token/unique skin choice).

• example B (big group): 28 players spread:
  5 at portal 1
  5 at portal 2
  5 at portal 3
  5 at portal 4
  4 at portal 5
  4 at portal 6
  Each portal has a specific endboss with a unique skin-drop. Defeating all bosses in a certain time unlocks a mega-boss where all come together. He drops 6 reward chests for everyone (rare rng reward) and a special reward chest (token/unique skin choice).

TL;DR: A group can freely choose how many paths (portals) they would like to try. The more paths they do, the higher the rng-chance for the rng reward. The other chest (token/unique skin for completing) are constant, no matter how many paths are done.

I wonder… will we get some dungeon rework too, with all the good suggestions here. I think it would be MUCH easier to try some of the suggested features in our current dungeons first, before we take a step up to raids.

Dungeons, especially explorable paths, should have been really challenging raid-like experiences, if I remember right. Cheap strategies like stacking and skipping made a lot of the content trivial though, if you know what you do.

My suggestion because of this: try to rethink combat on a smaller scale (dungeons) first and if it works well for 5man, it’s likely that it works well for 10-15 people as well.

Ashen.2907:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Untradeable account bound rewards are an important part of raids for me,

The exact opposite is true for me.

If a given raid’s rewards are not appealing to a given player (weapon/armor skin appeal is very subjective) then that raid is not rewarding to anyone who shares his opinion about those skins.

It’s easy to create a mid-ground: non-tradeable gear (which shows that THIS specific player has managed to get through the content) which is salvageable into a new crafting-material (which can be used to create new things which are rare but not exclusive). You could also get raid-tokens out of the salvaged gear as well.

@Naetell: I like the direction, taking a look on our stats on gear.

DPS:
Power, Precision, Ferocity, Condition Damage, Condition Duration

Control:
Condition Duration, vitality, Toughness

Support:
Healing Power, Boon Duration.

Basically our system means: if you want to do absolutely the most damage, you have no choice but choosing berserker on each piece of armor.

What if armor-design would take a slightly different approach? What if a certain slot only can offer some specific stats?

Chestarmor: only possible combinations with Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power, Boon Duration
Legarmor: only possible combinations with Toughness, Healing Power, Boon Duration, Ferocity
Gloves: only possible combinations with Power, Precision, Condition Damage, Toughness
Boots: only possible combinations with Power, Ferocity, Condition Duration, Condition Damage
Shoulderarmor: only possible combinations with Boon Duration, Condition Duration, Precision

etc.

This way people really would have to think about their build. A full damage build looks at the available chestarmor-combinations and has to decide between:

• Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power
• Healing Power, Boon Duration, Vitality
• Toughness, Boon Duration, Healing Power
  …
  none of those has huge effects on damage. Now that would be a choice.

(note: these are just spontaneous examples, I’m sure anyone of you could come up with better ones, but I think you get the core of my idea)
(note2: there could be new slot-specific stats as well, e.g. boots can offer a 5% Speed boost, gloves can offer small aoe’s for any attack,…)

Khisanth.2948:

You are also forgetting sigils, consumables, runes and rune sets. You could scale all those up but then you would end up with a situation where not being lv80 would be better or at least cheaper.

I certainly wouldn’t mind having the sPvP system everywhere but I suspect the devs aren’t willing to take it that far.

well I didn’t; basically my suggestion is a copy of the sPvP as it is now. You can choose sigils from a sigil-database which unlocks all of them for you (just like in sPvP), you can’t use consumables (just like in sPvP),…

no scaling – everyone is equal

phys.7689:

How does one differentiate if they themselves or other players have enough experience to handle the raid? Assume that this will be the most challenging content to date on an individual play level, and that a deep understanding of your class mechanics will be expected as the norm.

It’s a good question. We have nothing like this for dungeons, but I can think of something. Showing understanding of a specific profession could be done with profession-specific achievements.

Not only PvP achievements (we already have profession specific ones) but also for PvE content. Having survived x minutes without death with profession xy. Having done a number of combos with profession xy. Or dailies done with that profession… , dungeons done,… etc.

Someone who started his/her 2nd Mesmer and already has the achievements could instantly jump into the dungeon at lv.1 since gear/level/traits/skills are normalized.

Palador.2170:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

@Galen Grey
@cesmode

about normalized raid gear

Why not make the GW2 version of it, with a much more broader approach? No need for a new kind of gear, Galen already had an (imho) good idea: use the sPvP-armor build. Everyone – from the get go – has the same stats available in his build-library. You retain the skins from your PvE gear.

How about taking it a step further and taking the full PvP build idea for raids?

Everyone is auto-set to level 80, with all normal traits unlocked, just like in PvP. Gear works the same as well. Thus, anyone can quickly whip up a character and throw them into raids, or set up a character with a raid build and gear that doesn’t match their PvE build/gear.

well this was what I was talking about all along, normalizing.

I wasn’t talking about scaling characters (at least I didn’t mean to), I was talking about putting everyone on the same level.

@Malchior

You were talking about problems with buffs and scaling. My suggestion was that no scaling is happening but everyone has the same stats, no buffs allowed in raids, just as in sPvP.

Everyone has the sPvP build UI which would work for raids as well. You choose some trinkets to change your stat-distribution and that’s it. No lv.24—>lv.80 – everyone is equal. All traits unlocked as well.

My suggestion:

You want to have only experienced players in a raid.

—> A player has to have at least one lv.80 to unlock raids accountwide. Normalize gear and level for raids so that player “newthiefy” (lv.23) can play a raid with his lv.80 friends while he is on the same power-level as they are.

alternative: instead of one lv.80 go for a specific number of achievement points. This would ensure that players have done a variety of things. Don’t make the number too high, so that it doesn’t feel like a grind. (e.g. the number of AP that a player has when he does his dailies on his way to his first 80)

I think having to play content A a long time in order to unlock content B isn’t a wise choice. Players who want to play content B (raids) wouldn’t enjoy content A (level phase).

Unlocking a new map is a whole different thing. Playing content A1 (PvE zones) in order to unlock content A2 (new zone) is viable imho because it feels natural. Well, I’m not sure if others would have the same feeling though.

Crystal Reid.2481:

I bolded a section of this that I wanted to inquire about. Do you think the fact the game has been live for over 2 years now change your thoughts on this? This is definitely a common occurrence with new MMO’s that launch with raiding, but what about a game that didn’t launch with raiding? Is there still an issue of players “rushing to 80” when a large percentage of the player base already has at least one 80? Thoughts?

I think it’s important to note that a lot of players like playing with their alts. Even though they might have 7 lv.80, they might want to play with their lv.53 elementalist. It’s a chore to level the 8th character to max. level when the only thing you want to do with him is raid.

Why not take the sPvP approach? Normalize the gear and level and you have everyone on the same level to beat a well balanced challenge.

@Galen Grey
@cesmode

about normalized raid gear

WoW currently does this with challenge mode dungeons. In this game all gear above item level 463 will get scaled down. (more about it from the wiki: Gear will retain all hit and expertise, so players can remain capped. Stats that will be scaled down are secondary ones.)

Why not make the GW2 version of it, with a much more broader approach? No need for a new kind of gear, Galen already had an (imho) good idea: use the sPvP-armor build. Everyone – from the get go – has the same stats available in his build-library. You retain the skins from your PvE gear.

I love this suggestion because it solves many problems. Players would always be on the same power level so no place for gear discrimination. As only lv.80 players can enter the raid, there can be no level-discrimination as well. Balancing would be a dream come true for the devs, so the encounters could be finetuned perfectly.

As we talked about “Dodge” and how we could change it, some thoughts came to my mind (look at each one as a seperate one):

• aoe damage can’t be avoided
• only dodging in the “right” direction avoids all damage. Dodging into an attack would even hurt you. This would make it possible to create attacks that hit you from the left/right. Current attacks come from the front, so dodging into these attacks hurts you.
• dodge into an enemy let’s you crash into him and, depending on the size, let’s you/him tumble (example: if 10 players dodge into a big enemy at the same time, the boss tumbles. If you dodge alone into a troll, you tumble.
• do not make the character invulnerable when dodging but scale the damage you get with your toughness.
• there could also be new stats on our gear: aoe-dodge avoid, single-target dodge value, dodge range, dodge energy, etc. but this is quite complicated and probably a nightmare to balance

Dalanor.5387:

I would label “daddy joe” as a casual player and it’s a non-issue from a design standpoint. Thats why i said weekly or monthly resets are fine. Well, weekly is still better to let other non-casuals (read: people with more time to invest in the game) progress.
Or maybe implement and ID system as in WoW and save progress for each individual player.

Daddy joe could be hardcore daddy joe as well. Everybody grows up, most people have less time the older they get. He might be a champion-raider but one with little time left. Why would you exclude him?

Dalanor.5387:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Why not let the player decide when he wants to progress? Let average Joe take a longer break and try the next bosses with some other guys.

Thats exactly what weekly / monthly resets do.

Imagine player daddy joe enters a raid the first time on the 25th of the month. He and his team beat the first 3 bosses, 6 still left. Daddy joe then goes on holiday / looks after his little kiddies and suddenly the month is over. Reset. All his progress gone. He only tried it once.

Why not let him try with other groups whenever he wants/can play again?

I’m against a weekly/monthly reset of your raid progression. You managed to kill 2 of the 10 raid-bosses and then… family, children… all gone, just because you had to take a longer break.

Instead make it about tries. Let’s say (random number:) everyone has 15 tries. Doing damage to the next boss counts as a try. If you succeed, you stay at 15. If you lose/log out you lose one.

Why not let the player decide when he wants to progress? Let average Joe take a longer break and try the next bosses with some other guys.

A mix between open/scaleable and closed/fixed number:

• 2 groups enter a raid-instance:
• one of them – the core group – consists of 5-8 players and these do damage to bosses
• the other group is open for 5-20 players. They can’t damage bosses but they can have multiple roles in the battle as well (e.g. manning siege to kill adds, kite enemies, pressure plates behind a moving jumping puzzle while the core group fights the boss beneath,…)

Having the supporting group doing essential tasks (pressure plates behind a jumping puzzle might be the only way to make a boss vulnerable to attacks) could be really interesting. Sometimes only one player (the guy who finishes the jp fast enough) could make the difference.

This way the raid has numbers from 10 to 28 players while the core-content is still designed for 5-8 players (so no scaling issues). The rest is supporting the core group with other important tasks. The supporting group is open to new players as well, so people can enter the raid as supporting member at any time while a raid is active (as long as there are less than 20 supporters in the raid)

Chris Whiteside.6102:

A few have asked what we should start with. To re-iterate we should start by discussing what raiding could be in GW2 with the foundation based on the core pillars of our game.

So think about accessibility, how our combat works, how our progression works, and so on.

Thanks,

Chris

One of the core pillars: the end-game starts at lv.1. I’m against any entry-barriers for raids. Getting there in a natural way would be as lv.80 content to me, as soon as someone leaves the “tutorial” (imho 1-80). Why would you lock out a good player who started playing GW2 yesterday? Why would the “dungeon-master” achievement be any indication of being a good player?

GW2’s combat shines with combos. Everyone can spam skills, but combos require a minimal amount of knowledge. Having too big groups trivializes combo-fields since random activations happen often. This is why all of my suggestions were about having small groups of 5 players playing (in different ways) next to each other. (I suggested non-intersecting paths, buffs for limiting damage and ghosts for limiting effect-clutter and visibility of combos). I don’t think we should have 15 people in the same area at the same time since zerging becomes mindless quite fast.

If combos would play an important role in enemy-encounters other than having small supportive benefits, this would make combat more interesting imho.

Proposal Overview
totally crazy idea: Champions of the Mists

3 parties enter a raid. Your party looks normal to you, the other 2 parties’ characters look like ghosts (to your team only). Each party can only take down 1 of 3 health-bars of their enemies.

Goal of Proposal

• Having high amounts of effect-clutter.
• You can focus on your team instead of 14 other players.
• allows for new interesting mechanics (e.g. ghosts can walk through walls, hurt enemies only they can see,…)
• easier to design scaling

Proposal Functionality

Ghosts effects are greatly reduced for your party. You see no aoes of them and projectiles are minimum visibility.

Currently it can be a bit difficult to allow multiple roles in combat. Everybody in a zerg sees the same problems as the players around them and because of no “holy trinity” players mostly zerg down a common foe.

Imagine that your group has a bit of a different reality than the other group next to you. You see a pathway whereas another group sees a wall. The other group appears as ghosts to you, and you can see them going through a wall to find that hidden lever which opens the big gate in the room.

Imagine a boss which goes down once his health is depleted but starts to regenerate because of his other health-bars are still above 20%.

You might also see enemies the other groups can’t see. Some of them don’t follow you back around a corner but get even stronger when you leave their sight, bombarding huge areas with aoe.

Associated Risks

Players might find this idea too gimmicky.

hybrid.5027:

Example Raid An example raid would be “The Cleansing of Arah” where players would spawn in the Lupicus room and could move outward to through any of the 5 doors. There will be subquests in different areas of the dungeon, each with the sub boss. Upon completion of 6 sub quests the end boss will spawn in the Lupicus room, or a portal to the Lair of Zhaitan (hint, hint) will open there and the end boss will be combated.

I like your proposal, it reminds me a bit of the queens gauntlet. Players could place themselves where they think would fit most / their appropriate difficulty, which would work great for closed groups as well, I imagine.

In this case a end-boss would spawn in the centre after you’ve defeated all the other sub-bosses.

What if there are more than one possible end-bosses. If you’re fast, a very hard boss spawns (with a unique version of the skins that drop from the normal-version). This would encourage players to do the instance again, become faster and unlock the elite-boss… so no need for a hardmode.

Proposal Overview
dungeon-specific buffs determine roles

Goal of Proposal
Scaling seems to be a big issue. A lot of guilds want to bring tons of players into raids. Giving people certain roles via a buff-system would help scaling e.g. the bosses health.

Proposal Functionality
In the entrance-area of a dungeon there are 5 golden-glowing weapon bundles. If you pick up one of these your current weapon-set(s) will become golden glowing. Only golden-glowing weapons can hurt the boss directly.

Players without that weapon-bundle have different roles. Kill trash, kite certain enemy-types, control them, etc etc.

You can drop that bundle at any time you want, leaving it for others to pick up. The bundles ensure that only 5 players can hurt the boss at any given time. The spawns of the trash-enemies depends on the number of players in the instance.

This suggestion is an offspring of the 3-parallel-path suggestion I posted earlier.

Associated Risks

Players would likely want to do damage on the boss other than supporting only. Having players who don’t want to drop the weapon-bundle could be handled with conditions which do damage the more damage you’ve done with the bundle.

Proposal Overview
3 groups play a raid-instance parallel on 3 paths; paths do not intersect but players on a path can help players on other paths (via ranged, siege,…)

Goal of Proposal
1.) it allows for some interesting cooperative gameplay
2.) too many players on 1 enemy = problem. If parties have their “own enemies” it would be spread out, allowing for different roles in these different paths.

Proposal Functionality
Party-size is 5 at the moment, this doesn’t have to change with raids. These raids have a player-limit of 15 players. Each raid has 3 paths which are played parallel/at the same time, players can see the other 2 groups on their paths most of the time.

A party doesn’t have to be the full 5-man team all the time. Good groups may enter with 3 per group, which allows a relatively free grouping. A leader with 12 players available might suggest three very good players in group 1, four in the 2nd group and five in the last. It’s up to the players.

Paths could also help with scaling problems. Imagine a raid where only people on path 1 get a buff which can hurt the next boss directly. The players on other paths can try to damage the boss but they won’t do damage. Those players in path 2 and 3 have different roles to play in that battle.

Paths could also be designed with casual players in mind. Path 1 may be the hardcore path and the others would play more of an supporting role. Example: Guild xxXYxx has only 7 players online. They put five of their players in path 1 and spread the others in path 2 and 3. Now players in 2 and 3 can use lfg to look for more players. The boss – a huge dragon – will be faced by path 1 group directly while path 2 and 3 support the hardcores with ranged-attacks doing damage on the boss as well and killing some spawns here and there… or they support with some ranged healing/reflection/… spells.

Associated Risks
Requirement for ranged weapons; there should be some interesting mechanics in all paths to make ranged weapons less important/not 100% required.

Some paths might be more fun than others and players would like to do the other path. This might get solved by path-specific rewards (like a 3part-key which can be collected in each part for the final reward chest —> 3 runs)

TPenny.5071:

• New guild upgrades category: RAID
  1. Research Raid (Mordremoth’s Lair) Unlock – 10000 Influence over 1 week

• 10 person minimum and content scales up to the map capacity of 150 people.

• not scaling down, so don’t die

• Each boss has at least one attack that ignores agis and downstate to instantly kill you. Beware!

• All foes will no longer leash to their origin, they will now pursue relentlessly until you or they are killed.

• As new raid content is released the older raids will be rebalanced to make it more accessible

some problems that might arise here:

• costs for unlocking raids: you mentioned the importance of scaling for smaller guilds, but the price seems to be the same. Might get too difficult/expensive for smaller guilds.

• scaling for up to 150 people: I think it might be too difficult to create an interesting encounter that scales from 10 to 150 people. Seeing so many people (the clutter and the overboard-effects) in WvW makes you wonder if it makes sense at all to have such numbers in a raid.

• no scaling down, so don’t die: I think this could lead to a lot of drama towards certain individuums. Imagine player xy has to go because he has real-life duties (like a little baby crying etc.)… GW2 was always nice to such players. Why not scale back when someone has to leave, not screwing everyone else over?

• insta-kills. Not sure that’s fun. Playing with low/decreasing health feels more thrilling than some insta-kill which you might not even see coming (due to lag, hard to see telegraphs (because of effects),… )

• pursuing trash: I like that one

• making old raids accessible: I don’t think this would be fun looking at the disappointment returning players felt when they realised that a lot of content was temporary and isn’t there for them anymore. Making hardcore-encounters only temporary and “accessible” afterwards seems to be the same mistake.

Infernia.9847:

I don’t see a single plausible reason that this can’t be fixed…

The thing is: the damage is already done, if they change it back or not. This huge amount of negative publicity… I haven’t seen such a thing for GW2 yet. Ascended armor had huge outcries but Anet proved that it’s quite a good system, no more new tiers, not a significant advantage over exotic gear,…

…but here this is different. I still can’t believe that this is an idea from a developer who wants the best for the gamers. This simply looks like a management decision…

…and now the whole mmo-industry is talking about how Anet hurts their principles as well as the trust of the players. How can I be sure that there won’t be a subscription fee in the future when I can clearly see the priority money-making has currently?

Shen Slayer.3058:

Wasbunny.6531:

Not sure if this has already been posted but here is the TenTonHammer article covering what is now being referred to as ‘GemGate’:

http://www.tentonhammer.com/editorial/guild-wars-2-gemgate

Good…let everyone know how sleazy they can be.

And what good exactly will come out of this? *sigh.

lordkrall.7241:

The thing about this situation is that it will rage like mad for a couple of days and then it will blow over, just like all the other times.

It probably will, but the damage is already done and people will quote this change everytime something else like this happens, like people still mention the “promise” of a scavenger hunt for precursors. It’s food for the flamers and haters, and they like the taste.

I really see no reason why Anet would give dumbs up on that change-release. It only hurts the game.

lordkrall.7241:

Ankushp.7245:

These attempts to increase your revenues from the game are soo irritating……..first you (Anet) ended the key runs in the previous update……..and now this…….and all in the name of “simplifying”

Yes how dare a company (whose first and foremost purpose is to make money) dare try to make money?

I’m with you with the love for Anet and “our” game. Do you really think this was a good move for their business? Just look at all the rage, not only here but in countless other fan-forums too. They won’t make money that way, they will lose customers.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m not here to apologize. I’m here to communicate and right now, the communication is coming in without a whole lot of substance. Over to you for suggestions and constructive input!

I appreciate the will to communicate in a thread full of outcries, but don’t you think there is a huge reason for it? It’s not only a simple design-misstep like creating a overpowered profession. This is a design-decision which interferes with the payment-system. It’s a misstep which costs a lot of earned trust of the community.

There are a lot of things that make no sense here (new players won’t get 80g easily to purchase the first gem-step… it takes months) and a lot of things that just look purely like a cash-grab (400gems is the lowest transfer rate and a costume costs 700gems…)

I honestly lost a lot of trust in Anet this time, I just asked myself “what were they thinking… in the first place??”. You can’t just try anything with us, do you find that fair to the userbase?

I wonder why you need a lot of constructive posts, shouldn’t it be the job of the developer to create a system that is in Anets AND the players best interests? Shouldn’t it be easy enough to recognize that this change is not a good one? O_o

All that negative feedback can’t be good for the game, Anet. 12 pages already, massive threads on Reddit, what do you think new players will get from that?

What were you thinking? (I’m quite angry now, I love the game and this definitely hurts the game, sorry about that)

…and this shortly after that: http://www.tentonhammer.com/editorial/more-same-guild-wars-2

Blood and Madness, true true

Wow, this is bad news for me. Gone is the freedom of a free exchange… what with players who purchased something and still have a few gems left? They can’t buy smaller priced objects without using real money? Playing the trading post will be more important than ever now.

Obviously a money grab and insulting at the same time as the dev behind this thinks we won’t notice it. Seriously?

John Smith.4610:

I’m not adding new or personal content to the discussion yet.

I’m looking forward at you doing that, John. I wonder how you, as a player, experience RNG in GW2. Are you a lucky one? Could the fact that you are on one specific side of the bell-curve have an effect on the game…

I also wonder if you consider that people who do get ascended drops might not get the drops they want (stuff with healing power, for example). Exactly this happened to me. I had a few (2-3, can’t remember) ascended drops from rank-up chests in WvW and would consider myself lucky because of this. I’m not happy though, since none of the stat-combinations were anywhere near useful for me.

John Smith.4610:

The idea is to discuss RNG as a concept inside of games and reward systems. I think more discussion will lead to better understanding of the problems current systems may have, and the pros and cons of other possible systems.

John, could you give us a bit direction here? I’m not quite sure what specifics we could/should discuss… it seems pretty one-sided that many think RNG is bad and tokens could work.

I’d rather kill every world boss once for a special reward / “token” than kill the same ones over and over and over again. And why only world bosses? Hand out tokens for doing events which haven’t been done for a while, hand out tokens for players who play different jumping puzzles or explore the map.

Token for world bosses only just seem like an unneccasary grind to me, but I can imagine that getting more tokens for trying different bosses / different activities could feel refreshing.

I’m also for region wide tokens. Some items would require more than one kind of token.

Lighthammer.3280:

But if you play certain dungeon enough times, and gather enough of tokens/relics, you can just get it off of vendor, for 10000, 100000, 100000000000 tokens or whatever.

This sounds way too grindy. No one enjoys playing a dungeon that often.

Repetition isn’t fun if the content is always the same. Some random events (which aren’t very common in GW2’s dungeons) won’t make a dungeon indefinitely replayable.

I’m very much in favour of things that give you incentive to try new things, explore the environment and do smaller events out in the world. What if such things would increase your weekly/monthly magic find value and then reset back to your standard-magic find value?

some examples that add to your temporary bonus-magic find (which resets every two weeks):

• find shiny objects that spawn in random locations in the open world (in caves, under bridges, behind trees, in veteran-mob lairs,…)
• find hidden chests in dungeons which drop bonus mf
• kill all enemies in a dungeon
• get best player in a sPvP match
• get the most captures in a sPvP match
• kill 5 veterans in a map without waypointing out of it
• get x amount of xp in a map without getting downed
• revive/heal 20 players/npcs in a map
• get gold for escort events – the npc mustn’t go down
• repair a friendly keep/tower with 100 supply
• some enemies in WvW drop bonus-mf orbs

this would increase your magic find value considerably.

The way this could work: make it part of a monthly/fortnightly-luck achievement. Some of those are repeatable, some 1 time only, but all of them would add a temporary magic find boost.

Wanze.8410:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I’m sorry John, if my suggestions/discussions go too far away from the topic, do you want to focus on your stated 3 points or are we still on the right track, I wonder?

I also think this is going a bit off topic with a general discussion about reward structures and precursor aquisition. They are undoubtely related topics and alot of people have genuine concerns about them (and some good suggestions where made here) but i think those would be the next steps of discussion and should be discussed at a later stage in a seperate topic.

Yeah you’re right, I got infracted for posting off-topic stuff:

“Gaile, could you ask the devs if the game can now track healing-output / support skills as participation in events… now that we got the new combat log which can track healing?”

Well I guess I stop making suggestions now. Odd decision if you ask me, I was just trying to help…

Conski Deshan.2057:

I’m assuming this would be limited to chests only right? Otherwise it would be extremely overpowered for farmers it would practically guarantee a T6 a kill and in general would amount (in a maxed magic find party) to 1500% magic find or more I believe 5 rolls of 300% is more effective than 1 roll at 1500% (I’m a little rusty on my probability)

For the start only for chests, yes… but not necessarily if they can implement it in a good system. I think it’s not 1500% magic find but I’m also not very good at maths. If I remember my last 5 times when opening a chest, I didn’t magically see that “awesome” drop at my 5th chest. Getting better things… is that really bad when you look at the current drops?

Even then from chests, what if someone gets a precursor? or if they’re running Aether path and get one of the ultra rare weapons heck even COE can you imagine practically always getting a charged loadstone? it would both cause mass inflation and devaluation of rare drops.
Plus it doesn’t solve or improve RNG it maintains the same system but with a higher drop rate except that a solo player is now at a substantial disadvantage..

Yes, if one is lucky enough to get a precursor, everyone would be free to share that luck. Is this really that bad? Imho quite the contrary, people would be extremely happy that someone else got the pre and they would get it as well… a team-effort. It’s not like precursors are flooding the market, the chance is still very low to ever see such a drop in a group.

devaluation of such ultra-rare drops? Yes please. Reward group effort, so that players are really happy to see other players, maybe even in the open world (would need a new kind of UI for this).

I’m sorry John, if my suggestions/discussions go too far away from the topic, do you want to focus on your stated 3 points or are we still on the right track, I wonder?

rolling a dice is quite the contrary I think Anet wants to achieve… cooperative play, not being angry on your party-members (e.g. for getting something you did not get).

We occasionally see choice-rewards (choose 1 of these 3 items) which I would prefer. They could also add a random chance in there. Choose loot x1,y1,z1 or x2,y2,z2 or x3,y3,z3. (choose 3 in a line out of 9)

Having everyone in the party have access to the same loot would minimise anger towards other people, or the feeling to always be the unlucky one.

small crazy idea to give incentive to do content with guild-mates: shared loot

Grouped players (from a guild) don’t have only access to their own loot but their party-member’s loot as well. You have to choose which one’s loot you’ll take for your own BUT the loot is still free to take for everyone else in your party as a copy.

Example: group of 3
player A: green hammer, lodestone, blue chest, junk, junk
player B: yellow spear, blue hat, t6 mats
player C: green gloves, green sword, t6 mats, junk

I am player A. I can choose which one’s loot I’ll get. I choose player B’s loot: yellow spear, blue hat, t6 mats are mine now.

Player B chooses his own loot and gets the same stuff as well.
Player C chooses the loot from player A as he can use the lodestone.

(I’ve made this suggestion in the RNG-thread already since I think it could also work for normal groups)

a short crazy idea to increase the chance of nice rewards while at the same time gives incentive to group with other players:

Grouped players don’t have only access to their own loot but their party-member’s loot as well. You have to choose which one’s loot you’ll take for your own BUT the loot is still free to take for everyone else in your party as a copy.

Example: group of 3
player A: green hammer, lodestone, blue chest, junk, junk
player B: yellow spear, blue hat, t6 mats
player C: green gloves, green sword, t6 mats, junk

I am player A. I can choose which one’s loot I’ll get. I choose player B’s loot: yellow spear, blue hat, t6 mats are mine now.

Player B chooses his own loot and gets the same stuff as well.
Player C chooses the loot from player A as he can use the lodestone.

edit: deleted my suggestion about tracking skillful play as it is in Anet’s design to play WITH others, in a cooperative way.

Having said that I think it’s probably a better idea to reward group-play rather than individual play.

the thing is: a lot of people think that it will be great once there is a token system that guarantees you a precursor… but is this really a satisfying solution?

What would result out of this? Will the focus shift to an endless grind in order to get what you want? I mean, sure, it’s better to have a guaranteed reward rather than no reward, but this can’t be the solution imho. I’d rather see something that gives the skill-factor a hand in getting better than usual rewards. I don’t want to see GW2 turn into an asia-grindfest, but something that rewards players for putting in some effort to play skillful/focussed on aspects rather than mindless afk-shooting while watching the new Walking Dead tv show.

yeah, that’s why I wrote “it’s always exciting to find something of value” I agree, too much disappointments in opening the bags feels like punishment over time.

I think rng in general is ok, it’s always exciting to open a loot-bag and find something of value to me.

The thing is: in GW2 this doesn’t happen a lot.

How could this experience be changed with little effort? Let the drops/rng as it is for current loot and add new one. (e.g. a new set of champion loot weapons which is accountbound and therefore drops much more frequently and also drops from normal enemies. Salvageable into ascended/t6 mats).

Having bigger loot tables would mask the rare droprate of single items.

Precursors is a whole different story, collections and/or a scavenger hunt… yes please. I hope devs haven’t given up on this yet.

^this really makes me happy

Julie Yann.5379:

199 exocitic and 1 precursors (or other top value drop)

3. It keeps decaying until it you drop an exotic or other top teir loot and then it resets

from (lets say) 199 exotics there are precursors for every weapon, so it would feel quite bad if get a underwater-weapon precursor right before it resets… and you’ll have to wait for another thousands of drops to see your desired precursor.

Wouldn’t it feel odd if you have played enough / seen enough drops so that you have all the junk-items gone and keep getting good drops finally… and then it resets and you’re back at mostly junk again?

I don’t see the future of precursors in rng, if you ask me. It would just feel grindy and not interesting at all, I hope that Anet hasn’t given up on the precursor hunt yet. They’ve proven with Mawdrey II and GW1’s moa chicken that they can create interesting scavenger hunts,… and now with collections this feature could be a great part of the hunt.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I’m at 185% MF, and drop rates are fine. In the attached picture, all the Ecto you see were salvaged from Rare and Exotics (btw – Ecto salvage rates are fine too). I’ve gotten multiple Precursor drops from monsters and from Zommoros.

Your picture only proves that you play quite a lot and that you’ve probably seen hundrets of thousands of drops, not that RNG has a positive effect on your drops.

I’d like to have a dynamic magic find value based on your actions during an event. Events should track much more than a bit of participation, so that your effort and skill reflects your reward-chance.

example:

• you dodge attacks during the event (can already be tracked as it’s part of some daily achievements)
• you don’t fall below 50% health during the event
• you accomplish an optional goal (e.g. participate in killing 4 veterans)
• you accomplish an optional goal (e.g. the friendly npc musn’t go down once)

all these and more should be tracked. Events should give an extra reward when finished based on your tracked actions/accomplishments.

So basically this means that events should be given bonus objectives and a new UI should track your actions to allow greater rewards (choose 1 of 3 items which are influenced by a dynamic magic find which is based on your doings)

This would allow for a temporary much higher magic find value so that you feel the difference, not only know there should be a difference on paper. Also being able to choose 1 of 3 possible items increases the chance to get something useful.