(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
Well they’re not so where’s my %? Where’s the % for a player who regularly beat Teq when it was new and not a cake walk? For someone who hates agony and fractals?
From that line I’d say raids are content for you. Of course that’s as much a blind guess as the entire thread until the full raid content is known. Time will tell.
No. The entire fight against teq lasts 15 minutes. You may fail or succeed, but you don’t need a big block of time to attempt it. However, each raid wing will have many bosses and resets every week, so you do need more than 15 minutes to do it. Even if you are the most skillful payer among all GW2 players, you cannot raid if you don’t have a huge block of time for it.
After some thinking, I think it would be best for Anet themselves if they implement two forms of raids in game: the long epic one, and a fractals-like one which contains one instance per boss. After half a year, they will have the statistical data that shows which form is more popular. They can then concentrate more on that particular form. I would estimate that the latter form would be more popular.
Oh you want to do the content by significantly altering the content? (then you wouldn’t be doing the content because its now different content)
If each boss were put into a separate instance, then:
1. The amount of player skill required is not changed
2. The boss mechanism is not changed
3. The story is not changed if you are required to get the achievement of completing the previous instances before entering the next (but you don’t have to do them in the same week)
Everything that is related to the lore and player skill remains unchanged, so I don’t see any issue of altering the content in this way.
Except it kinda kills the epic feeling of doing a Raid (which is kinda what they are going for).
Mechanically I suppose it doesn’t change much but how a game makes you feel is important.
I agree that the epic feeling may go away, but you do realize that most people who prefer such epic feelings and have sufficient time for raids now will not have enough time to raid in a few years because of real-life commitments?
Well, I think both versions of raids (fractals-like and long epic ones) can co-exist, requiring the same amount of player skills but different amount of free time. Two versions of the same content is fine…We do have 50 versions of fractals now and there will be 100 versions in HOT (I am talking about scales).
Nobody is forcing the casuals to do the raids chances are raids will only offer different skins and not a stat boost, so why does it matter? It’s the same argument people had about not being able to get legendaries, nobody is forcing you to grind one out, but if you want it then you have to grind for it. Likewise if you like the skins offered in raids, take the time to learn how to do it.
The difference is that legendaries are rewards while raids are content. It’s fine to have less rewards or to get rewards at a much slower pace if you play less, but it’s not fine to have access to less content if you don’t have the kind of gaming time per week that is enough for a 2nd full-time job.
I think you’re overestimating the time and commitment that raids in Heart of the Thorn are going to require. Also there are always groups that don’t complete raids or do one to two bosses to get materials which would take less time. Not sure about this one but did they say that the materials for the legendary precursor are bound to account? If not you could always just buy off of the marketplace.
Well, I am afraid that you misunderstood my post. I don’t mind not having legendary armor, but I do think it wrong to restrict access to content (raid encounter itself) based on the amount of free time that one has, in a game advertised as one without “typical MMO traps”.
I mean I guess they could do what WoW did and just make multiple difficulties of the same raid and just give rewards based on difficulty, but for some reason I feel like people would end up complaining about that too.
After wow did that, I think the most complaints are from elite players who are not happy that players with less time can also see the content…at least according to the forum posts that I read at battle.net
Oh you want to do the content by significantly altering the content? (then you wouldn’t be doing the content because its now different content)
If each boss were put into a separate instance, then:
1. The amount of player skill required is not changed
2. The boss mechanism is not changed
3. The story is not changed if you are required to get the achievement of completing the previous instances before entering the next (but you don’t have to do them in the same week)
Everything that is related to the lore and player skill remains unchanged, so I don’t see any issue of altering the content in this way.
Nobody is forcing the casuals to do the raids chances are raids will only offer different skins and not a stat boost, so why does it matter? It’s the same argument people had about not being able to get legendaries, nobody is forcing you to grind one out, but if you want it then you have to grind for it. Likewise if you like the skins offered in raids, take the time to learn how to do it.
The difference is that legendaries are rewards while raids are content. It’s fine to have less rewards or to get rewards at a much slower pace if you play less, but it’s not fine to have access to less content if you don’t have the kind of gaming time per week that is enough for a 2nd full-time job.
I think you’re overestimating the time and commitment that raids in Heart of the Thorn are going to require. Also there are always groups that don’t complete raids or do one to two bosses to get materials which would take less time. Not sure about this one but did they say that the materials for the legendary precursor are bound to account? If not you could always just buy off of the marketplace.
Well, I am afraid that you misunderstood my post. I don’t mind not having legendary armor, but I do think it wrong to restrict access to content (raid encounter itself) based on the amount of free time that one has, in a game advertised as one without “typical MMO traps”.
Nobody is forcing the casuals to do the raids chances are raids will only offer different skins and not a stat boost, so why does it matter? It’s the same argument people had about not being able to get legendaries, nobody is forcing you to grind one out, but if you want it then you have to grind for it. Likewise if you like the skins offered in raids, take the time to learn how to do it.
The difference is that legendaries are rewards while raids are content. It’s fine to have less rewards or to get rewards at a much slower pace if you play less, but it’s not fine to have access to less content if you don’t have the kind of gaming time per week that is enough for a 2nd full-time job.
Don’t join a highly focused raid guild then, get a casual guild group and work your way through at your own pace. You decide how much of your time you invest in the game, when you make this decision you also need to understand you won’t be getting things at the speed people who invest more do.
The only gates are choices of yourself and those you choose to play with.
In games like WoW, I would say that more than 99.99% players who cleared a raid instance did so with a raid guild for which a raid night = 5-7 hours of game play without any major breaks, and there are several raid nights per week.
It’s difficult to get a fixed group of 10 players to learn raid encounters by playing 1 hour a time. If you would like to limit your game play time to ideally an hour a day, then most likely it’s because you have a challenging job or other real-life commitments. If this is the case, it is likely that you will play the game when you have the time and need for relaxing, and it won’t be exactly the same time very night. Because of this, you cannot join most of the per-arranged raids with 9 other players.
If you pug, then the weekly reset will get in the way. It should be easy to pug the first couple of bosses, but let’s say that the bosses become very difficult starting from the 3rd boss. Then you will wipe many times before you can kill a boss in a pug. This means that if you want to kill one difficult boss, it will require many tries and thus a few hours at least. This would be a problem if your progress is reset every week but you don’t have several hours’ time every day for gaming. If you choose to pug the entire raid instance by killing one difficult boss per day, you many need to play 4+ hours per day for 7 days in a row. That’s a lot of time and it even requires more time than doing the raid in a raid guild.
Therefore, to prevent raids from becoming time sinks, some in-game mechanisms are needed. Cutting the raid into smaller pieces so that people can attack each piece at their own pace would be a viable solution, and no “nerfing” is needed. I don’t mind wiping many times before everyone in the pug team learns a particular encounter, as long as I can spread the effort over as many months as needed.
One quick action that could be taken is to let players keep their current raid progress indefinitely if they choose to. This is not as good as providing more in-game mechanisms to help players attempt one boss a time, but it will help to some degree.
Nobody is forcing the casuals to do the raids chances are raids will only offer different skins and not a stat boost, so why does it matter? It’s the same argument people had about not being able to get legendaries, nobody is forcing you to grind one out, but if you want it then you have to grind for it. Likewise if you like the skins offered in raids, take the time to learn how to do it.
The difference is that legendaries are rewards while raids are content. It’s fine to have less rewards or to get rewards at a much slower pace if you play less, but it’s not fine to have access to less content if you don’t have the kind of gaming time per week that is enough for a 2nd full-time job.
By the way, I think people who have enough free time for raids should realize that having a fractals-like system for raids will ultimately be good for themselves. Many players bought GW2 because GW2 was advertised as a game without typical MMO traps (e.g., raids which are time sinks). Many will leave if raids are implemented as time sinks in typical MMOs. If the game becomes dead because too many players leave, then no matter how much free time you have, it’s not fun to play in a dead MMO.
Edit: They need to add the fractel system to raids so casual/normal players can do raids for the lore.
That’s exactly what I think is needed for raids in GW2. Put each boss in one instance, so that people without enough free time can attempt one boss a time and spread the effort over many months.
You say that they can still create challenging content that can be enjoyed 1 hour at a time – I think I need some examples. What elements of the PvE world are challenging yet take less than an hour to complete?
It’s trivial to come up with an example. If the raid that they will create will be challenging and it contains 10 bosses (not including mini-bosses), then create 10 instances and put each boss in one instance. It’s going to be same boss and same mechanism, and no nerfing is required. You need to have the achievement of beating the first boss before entering the second instance later, but you need not kill the first boss again each time you want to enter the second instance. Then players who know the fights can get a group and finish one instance in one hour.
They’ve chosen not to compromise their current player base to do so by making all their content accessible, if challenging.
They can still create very challenging content that can be enjoyed by people who play the game 1 hour a time, but they chose to create raids that are challenging in the sense that it is difficult for many to come up with sufficient amount of time for it. This has nothing to do with player skills.
Fractals, WvW, and PvP cater to different groups inside of the community but they’re available to everyone.
Fractals, WvW, and PvP have one thing in common: they are not time sinks. You can enjoy them even if you play the game for under 1 hour a day (Fractals may require more time, but they are going to change that in HOT so that you can choose to do 1 instance instead of 4 random ones). However raids = time sinks for almost all MMORPG games without a proper implementation of LFR. If they indeed want to give players a viable way to clear a raid by raiding one hour every few days even if players have to spread the effort over multiple years, they should have advertised it since this will be very different from raids in other MMO.
By the way, I am totally shocked that many posts suggest that casuals = no skills. In the days of vanilla WoW, people tended to think that casuals = players who cannot spend a lot of time gaming due to real-life commitments, and it had nothing to do with skills. There were many people with amazing skills in WoW claimed themselves to be casuals.
False. WoW added LFR because the majority of their ongoing content is raids, and as such they were bleeding casual players because they had not given those casual players enough to do. Thus, they had to figure out how to keep pushing their raid content so as not to make a massive fulcrum shift in the direction of the game while expanding the content for those less hardcore players. LFR was the result.
What I said about LFR is true. About 1 year before they implemented it, I wrote a long formal proposal in their suggestions forum, to suggest something similar. In the motivations section, I clearly wrote that I made the proposal because many players who have the skills for raids do not have the time for raids, and many players who once had the time for raids ended up quitting the game when they no longer had such time. I think Blizzard took such proposals including mine into consideration when implementing LFR. Of course, when they did implement LFR, they also took care of some of the players whose skills were not sufficient to give them some chance of seeing the content. I think it is absolutely fine for them to shoot two birds with one stone, since the rewards for LFR are inferior. No pains, no gains, and gains = rewards, not the content itself.
Why would Blizzard make each raid wing in LFR doable in 60-90 minutes, if their only goal was to take care of players who have enough free time but do not have sufficient skills? Of course Blizzard cut raids into smaller raid wings in LFR because they respect people’s real-life commitments, and this aspect of LFR had nothing to do with player skills.
In fact, it is false that the majority of the ongoing content of WoW is raids. They added many dungeons over time, which are not raids. How many new dungeons did GW2 add since release? There is more to do in WoW than in GW2, even for people who do not raid.
raids = time sinks. You just have to google raids & time sinks and you will find many articles. I think it is now the time for Anet to learn from Blizzard about how to respect players’ real-life commitments, and it used to be the other way around.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
Actually people do have the reasons to be alarmed. In almost all MMORPG games, raids = time sinks. Just google raids and time sinks and you will find many articles. Anet hasn’t said how different raids in GW2 will be, so people can assume that raids are highly likely to become time sinks in GW2 as well.
There are two types of players who currently think it is perfectly fine to have raids in GW2:
1. Those who think that the raid boss available in the beta weekend is the only and final boss in the raid. They are misinformed.
2. Those who think it is okay to spend the required amount of time to raid in other games. One person said: "With reference to the 30-40hrs/week some think are required for raids (I was GM for a raiding guild in WoW WotLK), firstly that was mostly for gearing requirements to ensure that team members progressed at the same rate and didn’t hold each other back since people can read up on the fights in their own time and learn the general tactics. Usually a few tries is enough to get someone into the swing of things once they’ve read up on the fight. Secondly I don’t recall ever spending 40hrs/week for a raid, maybe 20, 25 at a push. So I hate to suggest it, but maybe the guild was the problem? "
For the above argument, I would first say that almost all raid guilds in WoW indeed required 30+ hours per week for raids, before raids are made shorter in WoW WotLK. A guild who was learning BWL and farming MC at the same time often had 5 raid nights per week, and each raid night required 6-7 hours. Therefore, people who experienced raiding in vanilla WOW were telling the truth.
Second, Even if a raid wing in GW2 requires 25 hours to clear, it is still not okay as the progress is reset every week. If a player can raid 25 hours, then he probably will play 35 hours a week at least. This is equivalent to have another full-time job. How many people here with a full time job and a family can fit another full-time job into their daily life?
One can argue that you can find a raid guild who already has the raid on farm status and take a three-week vacation do the raids. Even if you can do that (assuming that you wife and kids can understand your choice of using your vacation time for raids), wouldn’t it be selfish? You were not there when guild members kept wiping to learn raid encounters (otherwise 3 weeks’ vacation wouldn’t be enough), and you wouldn’t even help the guild maintain active raid activities after you finished the raid for yourself and your vacation time was over.
In a previous post, someone used college studies as an example to show that people should make this kind of commitment to raids. Let me ask this question instead: how many college students managed to maintain a GPA of A+ while finishing all the raids that were available in the MMO game that he played during his four years of studies? I don’t know any.
Blizzard realized this problem later, and that’s why in Cataclysm, they implemented LFR. People can use LFR to do easier versions of each raid, and this easier version contains shorter but more wings, so that each wing can be done in 60-90 minutes. They did this because they respect players’ real-life commitments.
Therefore, it is not true that players who are skillful enough are able to finish the raid as long as they are willing to. Among players who have enough skills, I think at most 10% of them have enough free time for raids. For the 10% who have the time now, 90% of them will not stop having this amount of time in a few years when they have challenging jobs or growing families.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
Right. If each raid wing had just one final boss and three mini bosses, then what I suggested would be exactly what Anet had implemented. But I highly doubt that this is the case, because they said that the first area of a raid wing (not the entire wing) was made available in this beta weekend. Therefore, I made some suggestions to ask Anet to try to do something, so that raids won’t become time sinks as what they are in other games.
The least that Anet could do is to give each player an option to save their progress in a raid instance indefinitely. This is still not ideal, but it will just take a programmer a very small amount of time to implement. Some better mechanism that will facilitate those who would like to attempt one boss or two per week would prevent raids from becoming time sinks.
Indeed, Anet already decided to let players choose to do one particular fractals instance a time in HOT, instead of requiring us to complete 4 random ones in one run. The same idea can be used for raid bosses (not mini bosses). It will make it less challenging to get the amount of time needed for raids, but it will NOT make it less demanding in terms of player skills.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
oh this can already be done lets say it take 6 hours as you say then these other players only have 2 hours they down first boss on monday second boss wensday and third boss saturady 2 hours each boss and they are on the same playing field as the other raiders.
With due respect, I think you are too optimistic. In games like WoW, I would say that more than 99.99% players who cleared a raid instance did so with a raid guild for which a raid night = 5-7 hours of game play without any major breaks, and there are several raid nights per week.
It’s difficult to get a fixed group of 10 players to learn raid encounters by playing 1 or 2 hours a time. If you would like to limit your game play time to ideally an hour a day, then most likely it’s because you have a challenging job or other real-life commitments. If this is the case, it is likely that you will play the game when you have the time and need for relaxing, and it won’t be exactly the same time very night. Because of this, you cannot join most of the per-arranged raids with 9 other players.
If you pug, then the weekly reset will get in the way. It should be easy to pug the first couple of bosses, but let’s say that the bosses become very difficult starting from the 3rd boss. Then you will wipe many times before you can kill a boss in a pug. This means that if you want to kill one difficult boss, it will require many tries and thus a few hours at least. This would be a problem if your progress is reset every week but you don’t have several hours’ time every day for gaming. If you choose to pug the entire raid instance by killing one difficult boss per day, you many need to play 4+ hours per day for 7 days in a row. That’s a lot of time and it even requires more time than doing the raid in a raid guild.
Therefore, to prevent raids from becoming time sinks, some in-game mechanisms are needed. Cutting the raid into smaller pieces so that people can attack each piece at their own pace would be a viable solution, and no “nerfing” is needed. I don’t mind wiping many times before everyone in the pug team learns a particular encounter, as long as I can spread the effort over as many months as needed.
One quick action that could be taken is to let players keep their current raid progress indefinitely if they choose to. This is not as good as providing more in-game mechanisms to help players attempt one boss a time, but it will help to some degree.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
First I would like to clarify that I would be glad to see more challenging pve content added in HOT. However, I think it needs to be done very carefully to make sure that the new content is indeed challenging in terms of player skill. Please let me explain.
In most MMORPGs, a raid wing requires 10+ hours to clear, when it is on farm status. If a raid instance resets on a weekly basis, a typical raid guild would schedule two raid nights every week. For each raid night, their members login at 7pm and play until 1 or 2 am. Many skillful players cannot come up with this amount of play time. Therefore, in these cases, many players cannot participate in raiding because it is challenging to get this amount of free time for game play. It’s not because their skill levels are not sufficient. That’s why raids are often called “time sink”.
I am concerned that if this is the case with raids in HOT, then the challenging part is about getting enough free time to raid for 6+ hours straight, instead of learning the encounters. Will this kind of time sink be good or bad for GW2?
Well, three years ago, Anet said that:
“But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun”
Of course, raids being time sinks would be a typical MMORPG trap, and it wouldn’t be healthy to have it this way in GW2, since many players were attracted to GW2 because they “hate” these typical traps. Therefore, I have the following suggestions:
Divide each raid into much smaller raid wings. Each raid wing can be cleared in about an hour for skillful players who have already learned the counters. Use as many raid wings as needed to include all the raid bosses; there can be 10 or more. Initially, each player has to clear the first raid wing before moving on to the second (since there is a story associated with the raid), but he need not clear both in the same week; he just has to have the achievement of completing the first before attempting the second. After he obtains the achievements of completing all the raid instances, he can do raid wings in an arbitrary order. Each raid wing itself still resets weekly.
This is good because:
1. Raid will not become a time sink, and it will not be challenging to get the amount of free time needed to raid. This is because you just need an hour or two to attempt a raid wing, and you need not finish all the raid wings in one week.
2. Raid will still be challenging in terms of player skill. The above suggestion does not require Anet to nerf any boss or encounter.
If it is too late to do this for raids, it is still something to consider after HOT release. Those who can play 6+ hours straight will finish raids first, and when something like what I suggested is implemented, many more skillful players (without this much free time) can still enjoy the raid encounters later.
Please consider my suggestion. Thanks.
Maybe the raids in GW2 will be puggable, but then this means the raids in GW2 are much easier than a raid in WoW, and Anet should never call it challenging content.
A pug group and a guild group have only one difference, one is made of random people and the other of people who’ve been together for some time. Guild groups that are not the best team players, that do not follow set builds and don’t know the mechanics are no different than a random pug group.
I’ve done raids in games with a guild group of mostly casual players. Yes we failed a lot, more than more organized teams, but you know what we had fun doing it, we weren’t “pro raiders”. I’ve never actually done raids in a full raid guild that does raids 24/7 or even 4 or 5 times a week, when I did raids we did them once a week and that’s it.
You are making it sound that in order to do a raid you need to be in a pro raiding guild that has some very strict rules and requires players to do raids 4-5 times a week but that’s not true. You can do raids (in any raid game) only trying once a week, filling spots with friends or even pugs. You will fail often, yes, but it’s not impossible.
With respect, I think that you are being too optimistic. If each raid wing requires more than 10 hours to clear and resets on a weekly basis, then a guild that raids once a week will never see the second half of each raid wing. Even if in HOT, each raid wing requires 5-7 hours to clear so that you can indeed attempt it by doing a 5-7 hour raid once a week, which of the following two forms of content will you prefer?
1. A raid wing that requires 5-7 hours to clear. Your guild will do one raid a week. You start raiding from a particular time on a particular day of each week, and keep doing it for 6 hours straight without any major breaks. If you have to overwork on that day, or if you have to spend more time with your family on that day, you will not be able to raid in that week. If your doctor tells you that you should stop playing a game for 6 hours straight to avoid making your back pain or eye problem worse, then you will have to give up raiding completely. Unless you are very young, playing 6 hours straight regularly will likely create some health issues.
2. Each area of the raid is put into a separate instance. Right now Anet defines an area to be part of a wing with one boss and a few mini bosses. Thus, each area will require 45-90 minutes to clear, and the amount of skills required to clear it remains unchanged. You need to unlock these instances by clearing these areas one by one, but you are not required to do this within one week. After you unlock all these instances, you will no longer be required to do them in a certain order. With this, you can find a pug to do it whenever you know for sure that you have 45-90 minutes for game play. Your pug team may fail, but eventually you will likely find a pug in which everyone knows the fight. The content is equally challenging in terms of player skills.
The following reasoning is based on the assumption that Anet isn’t lying. Anet said that raid encounters are not puggable.
Raid encounters not puggable is the exact same as “requiring” ascended gear. They are both not requirements, there is no way to test if you are in a pug group, and there is no test if you have ascended either (no agony). What the devs are saying is that you need good gear and good organization.
The best gear tier stat-wise is Ascended, so they say you will need the best to succeed with the minimum amount of skill, anything less than full ascended will require some more personal skill (for obvious reasons).
Same thing with pugs. They said it won’t be puggable as the average pug group is not organized and doesn’t pay attention. If you end up in a pug group of pro-raiders that know their builds, know the mechanics and know how to communicate they will probably do the raid faster and easier than a guild team that consists of players who never ever tried to play together as an actual team and everyone uses their own builds.
People are really going overboard with what the devs are saying.
Have you tried to pug raid instances in other games (LFR excluded)?
In WoW, there were people who managed to kill Arthas in wrath of lich king in pugs, but it is very rare. It is extremely difficult to find pro-raiders in pugs, because almost all of them have their raid guilds. In vanilla wow, I never heard of people pugging the last boss in MC/BWL/AQ.
Maybe the raids in GW2 will be puggable, but then this means the raids in GW2 are much easier than a raid in WoW, and Anet should never call it challenging content.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
some people will beat this specific raid in yellow gear and with 5 members total.
some other people will simply never beat it in their life.can’t be helped, the world is different. Raid difficulty is fine atm.
The issue is not with raid difficulty, but with the length of each raid.
The following reasoning is based on the assumption that Anet isn’t lying. Anet said that raid encounters are not puggable. That’s is, to kill the last few bosses, you need to be in a raid guild. A raid guild will raid regularly, or it wouldn’t be called a raid guild. At least, a member in a raid guild is expected to spend 4-5 nights on raiding every week, to remain active in the guild. Each night, he should start to raid at 7pm and stop at 1 or 2 am. He should keep doing this until the entire raid instance is on farm status for the guild. Therefore, you do have to spend at least 30 hours per week on raiding, and more hardcore raid guilds will require you to spend 50+ hours.
Therefore, raid encounters are never about skills, but are about who has the most free time for game play. Of course people who cannot pick up a bucket to feed a cow in game will not be able to do it, but many more do have the skills and are able to learn, but cannot commit 7 hours per night to gaming. When playing wow, I learned that a hardcore friend had to quit gaming entirely, because his doctor said that if he wouldn’t, he would become blind. So, even for people who can commit this much time, it is unhealthy to do so.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
@MyriadStars So what? This is life. If we aren’t going together then I will find someone else to play it. It doesn’t mean I will break all ties with them at all. Sometimes you need to do compromises. What is more important to me? Raiding or taking care of my family/job? In my case, the latter examples. So I will give up raiding. It is not a priority anymore. Good, I had my fun times, let others have it. But I will not come and demand that because of my new life choices and time-schedules, the game should change, invalidate the opinions of the ones that have the time I once had, just to fit my agenda. I move on. If my time does not allow it, I will not raid, not get the rewards and gain my happy times in the game from other areas of it.
You are telling me something that is as normal as everyday breathing. And I agree with you, it will happen, tomorrow, the next week, the next year. But, and this grinds my gears, I will not demand the game to change based on my new schedule while ignoring a certain part of the community just because muh entitlement.
There are better options. A few years ago, in Wow, they implemented an easier version of each raid (with more but shorter raid wings) and implemented a lfg tool for it. Each smaller raid wing can be completed in under an hour, but the reward is much worse than the rewards from the normal raids which require 50 hours per week to complete.
This is the best because:
1. Players who can raid for 50+ hours per week can get much better gear.
2. Other players can still manage to see the content using a reasonable amount of time, and since they spent much less effort, their gear is much worse.
We can do something similar in GW2, so that:
1. Players who can raid for 50+ hours per week can get legendary armour and other exclusive skins.
2. Others can still manage to see the content using a reasonable amount of time, and since they spent much less effort, the above exclusive items will not be rewarded to them and actual rewards will be stuff like what they could get in scale 1 fractals.
This is ridiculous. Why are Anet catering to 1% of the population.
Hardcore raiding never works. It was shown less than 1% of the people actaully experienced Sunwell pre-wrath, the percentage of people completing it is like 1 in 10,000.
The percentage of people raiding in LOTR online is so tiny, they actually decide to remove it. And just look at Wildstar, it was shown hardcore raiding is a total failure.
Please, Anet, stop listening to the hardcore people. This was the first game designed for casual players. Now players need to grind “ascended armor” for a prerequisite to raiding. And the painful “attunement” process called grinding your mastery and experience before you can even try it.
This is unacceptable! I was kicked out my WoW guild because I can’t devote 50 hours a week to raid. And when I find out about GW2 I thought I’m finally free of this curse! But no, Anet is turning this game into a hardcore raiding game too!
So this is the representative of the casual community? I don’t know what I expected.
This entitlement agenda has to end. And it will end. More than 90% of the game is casual. Give 1-2% of it to the hardcore crowd and BOOOM! Apocalypse, the end of the game is here, it caters to hardcore crowd elite now and other drama. Why should Anet listen to you, hypocrite, and not to others? Why is your opinion a fact? Because this is how you expose it. Give me concrete numbers for your examples. Links, statements, official responses. How do you know the hardcore community is 1%? Stop the parallels with WoW, even if they would copy paste the raids from there it would still be totally different since this game does not have a hard, forced trinity.
You say you need dozens of hours. Did you play all the raids? Extraordinary! Enlighten me! What about the ones that do have the necessary time and will to dedicate to raids? Why shouldn’t they get some content? After all, except lvl 50 fractals give me one single example of challenging content is this forsaken game? We must lower ourselves in killing Lupi with no armor just for the sake of a challenge. And even there you attack us! Dungeons are meant to be played this way, and the selling of a dungeon is an exploit.
If we do the actual content too fast, casuals complain. If we do it alone, they complain. If we want profit on this hard work, casuals complain. If we get raids, casuals complain. If I want to play berserker casuals complain. All of this while over 90% of the game is pure casual. But we destroy the game. We are the problem. We want our corner. Without you. I have the right, as much as you do, to request this.
You fail to remember that the audience of this game is worldwide and not westerners only. Aka not everyone agrees with “everybody is a winner” ideology. You also forget that your same society IRL caters to a certain <2% , praising them like some sort of deities and even an argument against them will ruin your life and label you as X-phobe.
I have the time, the skill, the will, the friends and the need to play raiding-type content. Why shouldn’t Arena-net provide this to me and cater to you 100% in a game that already caters 90%+ to you. The gate of the content is open, get your friends and go in and do it. It’s permanent content. Nothing stops you from doing it. But of course you know that. You hate that a certain part of the community is gaining attention from Arena-net. You hate us. Our fun, our community, our friendships, our skills, our dedication. You hate that we have time that you do not. And then you have the audacity to come here and post as a victim?
Though luck buddy, I live in a different world than yours. My world will not kill my social life if I critique someone, my world does not brainwash me with “everybody is a winner” scenarios. My world does not equal “all pink”. Among many others I learned that if I want something I must work for it. I want the legendary armor. I will do raids. I enjoy them. You don’t? Good, you don’t do it and do not get the rewards. Fair and square. This is not a place for special snowflakes anymore.
I’ve been supporting Anet since 2005. I know what they can do and call hard. I’ve beaten DoA and I was proud of it. Not even 1% of what the raids are bringing will be as difficult as DoA. I made friends in this game. Friends that I would give anything to meet them in real life. I am part of such a wonderful community. I am proud to consider myself in the same community as Jerus, Wethsopu, Skady, dlonie, Rising Dusk, Brazil and everyone else!
I think we deserve a little spotlight ourselves after 3 years. We are not here to steal or transform the game. We just want our little corner. That’s all. But everything we do is condemned by casuals. In the end, of course, they are the victims and we are the bullies.
This is life for me, like it or not. I fail, I retry, I succeed, I reap the rewards. No buts and ifs. This is me, I am here since 2005 and I, with many others like me, aren’t going anywhere. Anet decided it’s time to honor us. We are here to stay and I will not let you spread misinformation and extremism just to fit your own selfish agenda.
Raids are coming. Do you even praise the sun, bro?
Even people who can raid for 50+ hours per week now may one day discover that they are no longer able to commit this much time due to a challenging job or a growing family. It will be a matter of time before your friends decide that they should not spend so much time on playing a game, no matter how skillful and amazing they are now. Most of them will choose to quit the game entirely if the raid content is no longer accessible to them. This happened over and over again in different games. So, yes, keeping the content more accessible will help you keep these friends.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
This is ridiculous. Why are Anet catering to 1% of the population.
Hardcore raiding never works. It was shown less than 1% of the people actaully experienced Sunwell pre-wrath, the percentage of people completing it is like 1 in 10,000.
The percentage of people raiding in LOTR online is so tiny, they actually decide to remove it. And just look at Wildstar, it was shown hardcore raiding is a total failure.
Please, Anet, stop listening to the hardcore people. This was the first game designed for casual players. Now players need to grind “ascended armor” for a prerequisite to raiding. And the painful “attunement” process called grinding your mastery and experience before you can even try it.
This is unacceptable! I was kicked out my WoW guild because I can’t devote 50 hours a week to raid. And when I find out about GW2 I thought I’m finally free of this curse! But no, Anet is turning this game into a hardcore raiding game too!
Well said. The reason why many players were not able to complete raids was not that they were not skillful enough, but that they could not commit 30-50 hours per week to raid. A typical guild raid night means raiding from 7pm to 2am, and you do this at least four nights a week. In Cataclysm, WOW overcame this by implementing an easier version of each raid (with more but shorter raid wings) and implementing a lfg tool for it, so that people nowadays no longer need this much time to see the raid content; they will need 30-50 hours’ raiding per week only if they want to complete the harder version for better gear rewards. However, GW2 developers said that they will NEVER implement a lfg tool for raids, and this essentially forces players to commit a huge amount of time to raiding to remain active in a raid guild, unless each raid wing in GW2 has very few bosses.
It seems that many people who are excited about raids are unaware of the huge time commitment required to remain active in a raid guild. Of course I would be wrong if each raid wing in GW2 is extremely short compared to other games, but is it? Already they are talking about the “first area” in the raid wing in the game patch, and I wonder how many areas there are in each wing.
It is not exclusive if YOU can fully access the content, but chose not to.
Well, I think it’s fair to be excluded from some prestigious rewards if you choose not to commit 30+ hours per week for raid as hardcore players would do, but not okay to be excluded from seeing some content if you choose to play about an hour a day.
It’s literally on a weekly reset, I am certain a casual can find time to do at least one, Unless there are cheevos or extra skins, then maybe some one would grind that much, I most certainly would not if i can get that at any time. it also will never go away, so a person who is casual can easily get what they need on their time frame. That logic is invalid :P
In the old days of WOW, playing 30 hours per week was necessary to make progress in raids. They changed that by implementing lfg for an easier version of each raid, so that you can see the raid content by finding 1.5 hours for game play.
The developers of GW2 said that they want raids to be challenging and they will never implement lfg for raids. Therefore, it is possible that 30 hours’ game play per week is needed to learn how to beat the bosses in raids, if they truly want it to be challenging.
Have you ever heard of fractals? orrrr.. that was suppose to be the “challenge” end content, what happened to that again? is that not already known by all players? Has that not changed to be the casual content? as per usual? I use to be a casual fractaler, because my internet did not allow me to stay in a fractal. Especially when they would lock you out, I still managed to get all the ascended trinkets(current at that time), a shiny back piece all cheevos(back when it was actually hard). (naturally i have now gotten better internet) but the fact is, you do not need to be hardcore to understand a game, or be locked out of content/loot.
No person will need 30 hours, a week to fully understand how a boss works -_- 1-2 raids tops. i doubt we are going to get 15 raids to match the 15 fractals, very unlikely scenario. unless you are 5, or have very bad memory.
I doubt they will not put in an Lfg tool. They wanted to avoid the gw1 Philosophy. They will not make that mistake. if this beta shows anything, they will have to add one.
If the amount of time needed to clear a raid wing is equal to the amount of time needed for the completion of 4 consecutive fractals (say, scale 10+), then I certainly have nothing to complain about. They themselves said that they will “NEVER” implement lfg for raids.
In the first few years of wow, many hardcore guilds spent 30+ hours per week for the single raid instance available at that time, in order to be the first guild that cleared it on their servers. I think it usually took a few months to achieve this.
It is not exclusive if YOU can fully access the content, but chose not to.
Well, I think it’s fair to be excluded from some prestigious rewards if you choose not to commit 30+ hours per week for raid as hardcore players would do, but not okay to be excluded from seeing some content if you choose to play about an hour a day.
It’s literally on a weekly reset, I am certain a casual can find time to do at least one, Unless there are cheevos or extra skins, then maybe some one would grind that much, I most certainly would not if i can get that at any time. it also will never go away, so a person who is casual can easily get what they need on their time frame. That logic is invalid :P
In the old days of WOW, playing 30 hours per week was necessary to make progress in raids. They changed that by implementing lfg for an easier version of each raid, so that you can see the raid content by finding 1.5 hours for game play.
The developers of GW2 said that they want raids to be challenging and they will never implement lfg for raids. Therefore, it is possible that 30 hours’ game play per week is needed to learn how to beat the bosses in raids, if they truly want it to be challenging.
It is not exclusive if YOU can fully access the content, but chose not to.
Well, I think it’s fair to be excluded from some prestigious rewards if you choose not to commit 30+ hours per week for raid as hardcore players would do, but not okay to be excluded from seeing some content if you choose to play about an hour a day.
1. It is a joke to say “there is no required grind”. In fact, there is no required grind in any computer game. Which game has a TOS that requires its players to grind? Hell, you could just buy the game, register online and then stop playing. If you do so, there is absolutely no grind. Who would say that you cannot do this?
It only makes sense to ask this question: Is grind necessary to get better gear? The answer is yes for gw2 after they added ascended gear, and the amount of grinding is much more than the amount of grinding in WOW.
2. WOW has changed over the years. Initially raid content is not accessible to players who could not commit 30+ hours per week for raiding. These days, because they implemented the lfg tools for raids and created an easier version of each raid instance with worse gear reward, it is not difficult to see the raid content without joining a raid guild.
3. Conclusion: WOW is much less grindy than GW2, and there is less elitism in WOW than in GW2.
Putting raids in game in the first place is a bone thrown to a specific player demographic. That demographic has been giving ANet’s additions to the game a fish eye fora long time now. Failure to follow up with support and new content for raids would be what would likely be a final finger in that fish eye. This would mean a lot of effort and money thrown to entice that demographic was essentially thrown away.
So, yeah, that could happen. If the raids are hard enough to please the top tier of players, they’ll be a no-go for the remaining X% of players, however large that group turns out to be. If it turns out they’ve spent all that effort and alienated a huge percentage of the player-base, we could well see a course reversal. The ANet ship has changed course so many times now, it’s not hard to imagine another one.
Well said. I used to do a lot of raids in wow, and I know how much time it took to remain an active member in a raid guild. These days I don’t have that much time, and that’s why I am playing gw2 instead of wow. I doubt that there will be sufficiently many hardcore gw2 players with enough gaming time to keep the raid content popular (unless they make the raid content more accessible)…Most of these players already “beat” the game a long time ago and switched to another game.
I also think that this will happen eventually.
Anet is not what they used to be when they created gw1, when they really cared about the guild wars games and would like to create games that they themselves would like to play. These days, they are treating gw2 as a cash cow to milk, and that’s why they created one hype after the other without enough commitment.
Dungeons have been abandoned. Fractals are getting support in the form of new level cap and high end mechanics but we aren’t getting new fractals. Why should I have reason to think Raids won’t end up just as unsupported as the 2 previous incarnations of instanced group content were? There’s a track record here for ArenaNet implementing a type of content and then abandoning it. I’d really love to hear why this will fare differently in its fate than fractals and dungeons.
One of the few people who gets it. Of course it’s going to be abandoned. That’s exactly how Anet works. To think they’ve suddenly — out of the blue — completely changed how they operate after three years is foolish.
If we extrapolate from past history, we’ll see the raid slowly roll out over a period of months (as I understand, it’ll be unfinished at HoT launch). Then one (disappointing) new one maybe 6 months later. And that’ll be it. The raid team will be quietly disbanded. There’ll be no communication from Anet about the status of raid content. Bugs from patches will accumulate, never to be fixed.
And two years later they’ll be hyping their next huge project.
Hi all,
During my past three years’ game play, I have noticed there is always some minor difference between character appearance in game, on the character creation screen, on the character selection screen and in the cut scenes of personal story. Normally these minor differences do not bother me much; or if it does, I would simply delete a newly created character and create a character with the same name. However, recently this caused an issue that really bothers me. Yesterday I used a total makeup kit, and I spent 40+ minutes triple checking every slider on face details tabs and did not click the accept button until I was satisfied with the new look (I checked from different angles). However, after I logged out and in again, I found that the character’s face on the character selection screen didn’t look exactly like what it was when I used the total makeover kit, and it happened to have created an unpleasing look even though the difference was small.
I submitted a ticket to see if they could do something to address this (this was the first time that I submitted a ticket). The reply was that they wouldn’t. I am fine if they don’t, but they didn’t offer any explanation on why this happened. Now I am afraid of getting another kit to do this again, because I am not sure how to prevent this from happening again. Could anyone shed light on this? Was there indeed a difference between characters looks on different screens, or was I just imagining things? If it was entirely my own fault, how should I prevent this from happening again? Would it be safer if I simply choose a face without adjusting the sliders?
I am posting this in this forum because I would really like to know whether this is a bug or not.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I always wanted to level up a necromancer, to share the ascended gear I crafted for my ele and mesmer. Now I feel more motivated to actually do it.
I crafted bifrost so that my ele and mesmer can share it.
My ele uses it for pve and my mesmer uses it for pvp, so it is used a lot.
sigh, why did anet have to screw it up again?
Legendary weapons will no longer be legendary
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: MyriadStars.5679
Why does something have to only be completable by x% in order to be deemed challenging? And why 1%?
Thing is, challenge is going to vary from player to player. What you might not consider challenging might provide a healthy dose of challenge for another player.
Hmmm…“challenging” could have different meanings when the context is different. I was replying to posts regarding “prestige”. I don’t really think completing tasks that most people who pay attention to builds, etc., could complete would give real prestige or distinction.
Say, running 20km would require a lot of effort for most people, but merely being able to do so is not sufficient to claim oneself a distinguished runner.
Legendary weapons will no longer be legendary
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: MyriadStars.5679
IMO, the prestige of a legend is invalidated by the fact that there is nothing particularly challenging in the process of making it, whether it’s under the current system or the upcoming system in HOT.
How do you know that none of the parts will be challenging?
Well, I doubt that Anet would make certain steps to be so difficult that less than 1% of the players will have the skills of completing these steps. It would be logical for Anet to use the new system to help them keep players playing the game, instead of using it to make players feel so frustrated that they will quit playing.
Legendary weapons will no longer be legendary
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: MyriadStars.5679
I’m concerned that with precursor crafting, legendary weapons will lose the exclusivity and prestige associated with them. Part of the allure of such weapons for some players is that they are rare, unique, hard to obtain, and that there aren’t that many of them. The old system has many drawbacks, but one advantage is that by controlling the precursor drop rate, the prevalence of legendary weapons can be controlled. If the drop rate of precursors is %0.01, then only the top %99.99 richest (or luckiest) players will have a certain legendary. A similar principle exists in PvP, where only the top x players on the leaderboard are awarded with mini llamas or glorious hero’s armor. Does anyone else share my concern?
Sadly, the prestige of a legend is kinda invalidated by the fact that anyone can buy one with a credit card. The new ones will fix this, so that’s good. As to how much prestige the new ones will hold, it all depends on how hard it will be to obtain them, but considering that most of the game’s pve (if not all) is really not hard at all, I dunno… But the prestige of the current legends will be indeed diminished, even if it’s only because new ones come out. On the other hand, their prestige might actually go up if the new legends are way too easy to aquire… Time will tell, atm we know too little to be sure.
However, your comparison with the PvP exclusive items is incorrect. Legends (the current ones) can be bought with a credit card instantaneously and at any time; a win in high-ranked PvP tournaments or top spot on the leaderboard cannot. I am only talking about the special armor, since llamas are often given away at raffles or on twitch and such, and therefore hold little prestige imo.
IMO, the prestige of a legend is invalidated by the fact that there is nothing particularly challenging in the process of making it, whether it’s under the current system or the upcoming system in HOT.
In fact, it’s more challenging to justify using a credit card to pay $400 USD to get a legendary weapon than to simply playing this game to craft one.
Legendary weapons will no longer be legendary
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: MyriadStars.5679
By the way, if you decide to buy a legendary off the credit. How much would it cost you anyways???
$400+. I don’t think many people did that.
New ways of obtaining precursors and the current login rewards will certainly make legendary weapons more easily obtainable. Grinding gold for precursor (when they were 1300g each) / mats (when it actually required work to get laurels) would take much longer for an average player.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
The issue is that not every one of us has the time to play multiple hours every day. If I could, then I would definitely find a team to do spvp, like what I used to do in wow 10 years ago (and I did win many matches back then). Right now I don’t have the time due to work, and I wonder whether it would be healthy for gw2 to lose all the players who can only play about 30-60 minutes at a time on most days.
I love that SoloQ is gone. It makes people bind together in teams, create friendship, notice and listen each other on Teamspeak. This what PvP should be like.
Not everybody likes teaming up….As a solo player I don’t want to be forced to do that. I like the flexibility of playing when I want it for as long as I want it , with other random solo players, without have to team up and have to follow other peoples schedule etc. I want to play , I don’t see it as a chance to create friendships and all that.Before they remove the solo arena we had a choice, now is either team up either have to deal with the unfortunate situation to be against a premade group . I don’t understand the benefits of removing the solo arena
This product is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game). This is not a game where you play alone, all by yourself. This is a multiplayer game, where you team up with other players against other players or environment, with the purpose of having fun together.
If you wish to play alone, explore alone, and have fun alone, it is almost impossible, because you will always interact with other players in this game, whether it is PvE or PvP or WvW or just auctioning. Possibly you have chosen the wrong game.
You didn’t understand what I said. I am fine playing with other people , but I don’t like to be forced to make organized teams in order to play. Is a different think. For example, for pve if I want to do a dungeon I will just team up with random people using the lfg tool, fine by me…for WvW there is the option to roam or just join the zerg… again fine by me…for pvp there is still the option to go solo in a team of randoms but it should be against another solo team and not premade
This is the game, MMORPG is it’s standard basic concept. A multiplayer online game should not be changed to a standalone game just because you enjoy playing alone in a MMORPG. It is like forcing me to play solo just because you (a solo player) want that. This game is a massively multiplayer and it’s concept is to make people interact as much as possible.
My opinion: find a different game.
Hi Justin,
I had my weirdest spvp experience last night. I solo queued and played for 2+ hours, and lost all my matches. I lost count of how many matches that I lost, but it must be 10+ matches. Before last night, it had been very rare for me to lose more than 3 matches in a row, and I don’t think I ever had a losing streak at long as this, not even when I was learning to do spvp.
Since you have been kindly analyzing people’s data, I wonder whether you could help me as well. In particular I would appreciate if you could give me some advice explicitly: If I still would like to win about 50% of my matches (as I used to after I became familiar with spvp) under the new matchmaking system, should I avoid solo queue entirely, and try to find a team?
In the past two or three days, I have had an abysmal win-loss rate. Up until then, I managed to hover between 48-52%, which I assumed was fairly normal, given that I queue solo most of the time. Since the leaderboard was reset on Saturday, I am now 28-44. I know I haven’t gotten suddenly much worse than I was before, but I have felt overmatched significantly more often than before, and I’m wondering if the reset or something else affected my MMR, or if there was some kind of change to MMR itself. I did recently rank up to bear, I’m not sure if that would have an impact, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated with imbalanced matches which, for whatever reason over the past few days, have seemed overwhelmingly in the opposing team’s favor. I don’t play for leaderboards or reward tracks or increasing rank. I just want to have fun, evenly matched fights that, even in a loss, I can at least learn something from, and it’s pretty hard to do when your team is getting rekt right from the start seven out of every ten matches. Beginning to feel like all really is vain…
Sorry for the delay, I’ve had your game history up all day just waiting for me to respond.
I don’t believe your issue is premades. Of the 72 games you played, only three had you stacked against premades (11111 vs 311, 11111 vs 311, 2111 vs 32). Every other instance involving premades also had your team with an equivalent premade.
I’m at a loss to explain your losses. I’ll keep an eye on your account over the next few days to see if anything stands out.
WoW vanilla required fire resistance for MC. That was in 2004. Agony is not something new.
I liked the way they released new content as chapters in GW1. How I miss missions!
I doubt that the decisions were made by the developers alone, so I agree with you to some extent. That why I am still playing even though I am not happy.
If I were one of these developers (my background is computer science), I would rather polish the game by eliminating the bugs before developing more content. It seems that they were pushed to develop all this content in a rush.
(edited by MyriadStars.5679)
I don’t think we’re supposed to acquire this gear in a day (or even a week). If you don’t have as much time to play per day that just means it’ll take you more days to get the gear. This in no way means you have to go buy gems. They said they’re not releasing new gear every 3 months, and either way do you think it will even take you a full 3 months to get the gear? Why is it such a bad thing that better gear takes time to get? I know some people enjoyed the ease of acquiring max level gear in guild wars 1, but I personally have been enjoying the time I spend working towards my gear.
In GW1, i enjoyed the time I spent acquiring prestige armor sets and I acquired 3 full sets. They have the same stats as the basic armor.
Oh great, now the conspiracy theories have started.
This is not conspiracy theory. There has to be a reason why Anet suddenly released something that is not consistent with their original manifesto.
I’m pretty sure it’s because of profit…otherwise, why?
This is my guess:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/This-is-why-they-introduced-gear-grind/first#post819496
In any case, if ascended gear brings in more profit, then they will introduce more. There is no use complaining…It seems that presently we will have to either live with it and play, or quit the game for something else.
No matter what we do, the lack of response from Anet and their heavy forum censorship are not professional. I saw lots of posts of complaints on the official forum of Diablo 3, and nobody complained about censorship. What happened here actually made me think more highly of Blizzard. There were lots of posts regarding leaving diablo 3 to play gw2 and torchlight 2, and the moderators there did not delete them.
I think they are counting on the fact that wow requires a subscription fee.
Type A: Those who had much MMO experience before but cannot commit enough time to gear grind as they now have a challenging job.
Type B: Those who have a lot of time for gaming.Really? I thought this game was for Type C: people who don’t like other MMOs and don’t have a lot of time gaming (or at least don’t want to spend all the gaming time in an MMO)
hmmm, there might be some subtle difference between types A and C, but there is not too much difference between what players of types A and C would like to have in an MMO.
I think they expect that in the long run, decisions like this would be profitable.