Guild Wars 2

He brought up the argument first, my response was a retort for this line.

And again, nothing he said involved a quantity. He did not say “the majority,” or “most” or anything that would require evidence to support it. You, on the other hand, insisted on at minimum a more than 50/50 ratio in favor of more guilds than less, and to support this premise, you would need to have figures on how many guilds collapsed verse how many thrived. I’m asking for that evidence.

If the other solution is yours and ohoni’s, i prefer 100x the dev solution. Yours will just destroy raid. At least, having an easy encounter will induce more people to try, train, and maybe succeed. So after, they can decide either to train for the next bosses, or just stay with the easy boss and have some raid rewards, with is fine as well.

But you’re describing EXACTLY what I’m asking for. You have the easier version, you can use that to train and move on to the harder version, or you can stick with the easier version, up to you.

Hmm, for you it seems so easy, but if it were the case, don’t you think devs aldready would have done that? but no, they come with another solution. If you don’t like it, it’s your right, but just get over it, really. Moreover, you also have another problem, wanting raid loot in easy mode, unlike some defenders of easy mode raids.

I’ll keep working for the version of the raids that I would enjoy, until they happen. Just because you wipe a few times doesn’t mean you should give up, right?

f you want the rewards that T4 fractals give you have to do T4 fractals. and T4 fractals do have unique rewards.

There is already precedent for content having unique rewards that if you do not like an aspect of the game but want the reward that comes with it, you have to choose which evil you deal with: not having that reward or playing the aspect of the game that you don’t like for as long as it takes to get the reward.

Precedent is not justification. Just because something has been done, doesn’t mean that it should be done in future. I would prefer to not have to choose between the lesser of two evils, and I will continue to push for the game to recognize that.

Gift of Battle requires playing WvW long enough to finish up the required WvW Reward Track for it. There are easier dailies that help with small little items that boost progress, but you still have to play WvW.

Endless Fractal Tonic requires playing Fractals to get as it’s account bound on acquire.

Gift of Exploration requires playing Open World PvE to get it.

Yes, and each of those is something that could be changed to improve the game. Their existence does not preclude making positive changes elsewhere, nor is there any reason why those things would have to be changed first before other changes get made.

So if sometime in the distant future (it’s obvious by the post here that it’s not something that they currently plan on adding at all), it should not offer all of the rewards that the hardest tier Raids offer. Which I would say would exclude the legendary item at minimum. LI would be debatable depending on how they did it.

Why?

Much like Fractals were designed to be shorter dungeons for those who can’t spend a couple of hours trying to figure out a dungeon, mini-raids would be the equivalent.

In their original implementation, Fractals were the long dungeons. The actual dungeons were the shorter versions. It took several years for Fractals to become the short version.

hat way full raids keep their exclusive skin and those who don’t want to do full raids can get the same stat swapping ability and a unique skin of their own.

I don’t want stat-swapping armor and the “unique” skin might not be as good as the raid one. The raid skin is the goal here, not just “any Legendary.” To offer “some other Legendary armor” is not a compromise position.

Crystal I’ll give you 100g if you please, once and for all, debunk this ridiculous notion that you guys can crt+c/crt+v anything in game and magically create working content in no time flat.

Pretty please?

What would lead you to believe that they can’t? Note that I did include that they would have to manually balance the bosses’ stats, but basically the entire environment would be identical, copy/paste. All the lore stuff would be identical, copy/paste. All the models, animations, audio, visual effects would be identical, copy/paste. And then you have the stats, which presumably are stored in some sort of table, so you just go through the table, and you delete a few zeroes here and there. Maybe you take one listing that has an affix “automatically defeats players,” and you replace it with “deals X amount of damage.” It would take some time, but it would take far less time and far fewer developers (since most of them would have no role at all to play in the process) than building the raid from scratch.

Evidence?

The same place he pulled his anecdotal evidence from.

He said that his guild broke down. He cited his source. You claimed a numerical statistic, that for every guild that broke down, another was created or strengthened by the raids, -1 +1. I’d just like to know where you got that information.

Well the reason I say less or no rewards is its kinda like the current fractal daily rewards. ascended armor and weapon boxes don’t drop out of t1 boxes, but out of t4. (Though with my luck I never get them, but that’s not the point, the all knowing wiki says it does.) So if they do add a easy mode (or tiered system) the “t1” wont give LI but the “t4” will. Make sense?

No, it doesn’t make sense. All that would do is encourage players to “train up” and do the hard mode version, but the entire point is to allow players who do not enjoy hard mode to not do hard mode. You shouldn’t have to do t4 Fractals unless t4 Fractals are something you actually enjoy doing. If you do enjoy t4 Fractals, then they should be the most efficient use of your time, but if you don’t, then you should be able to do t1 if you like, and still progress towards your eventual goals. There is no merit in having players doing content that they do not enjoy.

sorry but when i read that, for me it means that raid tier difficulty like fractals won’t happen, because raid were not developped with that in mind.

They didn’t have to be developed with tiers in mind for tiers to be implemented. They already have all the tools they need to copy/paste the raid, then tweak the bosses down slightly, then provide players access to these duplicate wings via the same UI they currently use to choose between raid wings. All the bits already exists, they just need to combine them.

For every guild that raids were the ‘last straw to break apart’ for, another guild returned or was formed to dedicate to the new content.

Evidence?

But I take great offense to the notion that raids were purely the cause of the fractures in your story. It’s highly likely there was far more going on. There’s also the lovely bit of knowledge known about raids, in their optional status. If I had to speculate the turn of events, Raids were the first difficult group content your guild needed to create groups for, as you said. But given the group constraints, gear requirements, time, organization…it was only natural for certain members of your guild who managed to pull something together to want to progress together, without bringing anyone else with them at that point.

Well, you would clearly know better than he why his guild broke down.

TL DR; If they add a easy mode, it doesn’t give the same rewards (not even just less, ie: none or different ones) and its just there for lore, storyline and learning for the people who don’t want to do harder content but can still do the storyline.

It should offer the same type of reward, just less of it, so that players who do easy mode would need to make more repetitions to achieve the same results as someone on hard mode. People who actively enjoy hard mode should have absolutely no reason to NOT play hard mode, because they will get a higher return on their time investment by doing so, but players that do not enjoy hard mode would not be completely locked out of anything either.

If they like the idea of existing raids, they should not hate the challenge level. Your statement in of itself is a contradiction.

Not as I said it, that’s why I coupled those two statements. It’s like saying “I enjoy this spicy chicken sandwich, but it’s too spicy for me.” What that means is “the other elements that make up this sandwich are things that I enjoy, but the spice is ruining it for me. A version with less spice would be awesome.”

So I believe that there are plenty of players, myself obviously included, who would enjoy a type of content that includes all elements of the raid that are NOT about challenge. This would include the setting, the specific boss encounters, all that, just toned down in risk so that the results are less likely to lead to a wipe if mistakes are made. I understand that this is not the experience you want, and that’s fine, because you already have your version, but I have trouble believing that you cannot even comprehend the sort of version I am describing. I mean, if someone came to me and said “I’d like to see a Shadow Behemoth encounter, only much more challenging,” I could easily picture numerous ways to make that happen, even if it’s not necessarily something I’d want to play myself.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This comes up a lot so I’m going to jump in quickly since it’s a new post.

Tier systems for Raids come up a lot as a result of what Fractals did. I worked on the original Fractals team and a tiered system with increased difficulty scaling was always part of the original plan for that team. It was never a plan for Raids. They are, and should remain, the most difficult content in the game.

Accessibility in terms of difficulty is something we talk a lot about internally. We’ve made efforts to help players get in by delivering entry level encounters that ease you into the content (STK) and you’ll see more of that in the next release. You’ll still see encounters that live up to previous raid expectations for mid tier and final bosses. And if you think Matthias is a chump then we have something for you as well.

Accessibility in terms of “Hey, my 5 man Fractal group wants to try raids, but we can’t find 5 other players!” is also something we talk about. It’s just a much more difficult problem to solve.

All we need is some sort of easier versions of the existing raids, so that players that like the idea of the existing raids, but do not like the challenge level, will still be able to play and have fun with the content. The hard mode raiding is just not everyone’s cup of tea, and yet so much of the new stuff is locked behind it, like lore, environments, legendary weapons, and the ability to do anything with XP in Maguuma maps.

Except raid are like actual explorable dungeon..

No, if raids were like Explorable dungeons then we wouldn’t have an issue. The issue is that they require a significantly higher investment of time, gearing, coordination, and practice than any explorable dungeon. What I’m looking for is a Forsaken Thicket experience that is comparable in time and challenge level as an average explorable dungeon. You can’t rationally argue that this is already available, only that you don’t want it to be available.

Dont you want easy mode for the story and peacefull fight without wipe? that’s like story mode dungeon for me.

But the thing with Story Mode dungeons is that they have no replay value, and if they design it to be something that everyone only plays once, then I don’t feel it would be worth the investment. If they’re going to take the time to develop an alternate version of the raid, then it should come in the form of replayable content, something that players can do on a weekly or daily basis and feel that their time was well spent.

For you, it’s a mistake. Not for me. On the contrary, following your ideas would be a huge mistake, destroying one of the most successfull thing in HOT. There are things to fix, but not raids.

That’s your opinion, I was just responding to your assertion that “because this is how ANet did it, it is the Right way to do it, and they’ll never change their mind on it.” It’s your opinion that raids are already in their perfect state, but just because this is how they are right now, means nothing about what they could be in the future. Remember that the game did without raids entirely for three years, and was fine without them, so if we were to apply your same logic to the game this time two years ago, the result would be “ANet has decided that this game should not have raids, and it never will.”

if it’s like story mode dungeon, why not ^^ after all, less challenge, less reward (quality and quantity, that’s just logical, asking the contrary would just be illogical).

I was aiming more for Exploration Mode dungeon. Making a Story Mode version would likely not be worth the effort.

And Anet disagrees with you, after all, they put raid well knowing it would be more challenging than the rest of the game.

ANet makes mistakes. Constantly. Usually they get around to fixing them. The only problem with making a mistake is when you refuse to fix it.

you are, actually. Remember, you want envoy armor in an easy mode raid as difficult as infantile SAB…(remember, you want no wipe, no training mode, no group composition, just spam 1 with whatever random player / build in order to have raid rewards)
so yes, you want to be rewarded for just participation.

The reward would be reduced from the current level, and would require more attention than you describe, but would be more in line with the difficulty level of the rest of the game. I understand that this does not appeal to you, but you are not the intended audience for this mode, and will already have a mode more suited to your tastes.

Could you just accept that there is a content not for you, while you can enjoy 95% of the game freely? Or you’re just greedy and you won’t give up until you can have legenderay armor? you should look closer to your signature btw…

I put that sig there for a reason, because it’s a silly statement that I receive constantly. and why should I just give up on things I want just because 95% of the game is something else? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to give up on having 5% of the game all to yourself? That’s the whole problem here, that this is mostly a game very much unlike raids, and yet raiders feel entitled to carve a chunk out of it that the rest of the players cannot be a part of (without radically changing how they play the game in ways that they will not enjoy).

I think it;s more important to be consistent, that a very hard game remains very hard throughout, and that a relatively casual game be relatively casual across the board. Having out of place difficulty spikes just disrupts the overall harmony of the game, like having a mild cake with a wad of pure sugar in the middle, or a plate of mild buffalo wings that have one ghost pepper wing in there.

When you asked people to leave the game ?

I didn’t ask anyone to leave, I just suggested that people who are unsatisfied with the overall difficulty level of GW2 might be happier moving to a game that offered the difficulty level they desired in most of their content, rather than attempting to wedge that hire difficulty into a game where it just does not belong. People that are happy playing the game as it was before raids are welcome to stay.

Funny, couldn’t the same be said of your literally handing out participation awards method ? Or your pro easy mode push ?

Nobody is asking for handing out participation awards, and the pro-easy mode push is to bring the system in line with the existing game in a way that the current raids are not. That’s the issue here, that raids have dragged the game’s meta away from where it naturally was before, and some players want it back where it was. It is better to have the content in the range of the rest of the game than to have it only exist at a difficulty level that is beyond the rest of the game’s content. You may disagree with that, but I struggle to understand how you cannot even understand that.

Odd how you resort to opting to silence people who disagree instead of having a civil discussion and understanding that people aren’t going to agree with you at every turn.

When have I attempted to silence anyone?

Yeah but again. The first Raid shouldn’t be so difficult that every Boss takes 600+ Wipes just to kill it, it should be there to get People comfortable into the Concept of Raiding, but in Future Anet should release really hard Raid Encounters where it takes really long to kill the Boss. ( But pls not due to some cheesy Things like RNG deciding which Mechanic comes now ). First Raid itself has the right difficulty, we just need more Raids that are more Challenging ( and a better PvE Balance :P )

Or people could just play a game where that sort of thing is expected, and leave it out of Guild Wars 2 entirely.

But TBH if the first Raid of GW2 would like that, with Bosses on Mythic Archimonde Level in Terms of difficulty, it would be too much of a culture Shock. The first Raid is there to introduce GW2 Players into Raiding, it don’t need to be really difficult, its Challenging but you can still mess up a few Things without wiping the entire Raid and I think the second one will also more like getting People more comfortable with Raiding but then Anet should amp up the difficulty of the next Raids

So you agree that raids are difficult enough to be a culture shock to existing players, but not that players should have any right to be upset about how much more difficult raids are than the content they enjoy?

There is currently no reward in the game that has a higher barrier of entry, except perhaps Glorious armor, and that’s just a flashy visual effect on top of Heroic armor, which is effortless to get.

That’s you not disregarding a kind of armor that matches the exact scenario stated above? Because it certainly sounds like only when the reward is something you actually want will you care about how to acquire it.

Correct, it is not. I was making the point that GH armor was the only example of armor harder to get than Envoy’s, and it was only a minimal visual difference from the much easier to acquire Hero’s armor. I was NOT saying that I agreed with their choice to make GH armor that difficult to acquire, just that I did not personally see it as a big deal, given the minor differences.

How about this as a compromise then, they make alternate methods available to acquire Envoy and Experimental armors as we’ve seen them, either through easy mode raids or some other element of content entirely, but only raiders are allowed to have “Glorious Envoy” armor, which is identical to the existing ones, but covered in glitter?

Or, and this would be a great sacrifice but I’m prepared to make it in the name of peace, the raid Envoy armor could be like the ones they’ve already shown, while the non-raid Envoy armor would be the same, but without the totally awesome spikes on the shoulders, elbows, and calves?

That’s still holding a double-standard. You are only making these arguments to suit your own wants, without regard for other players. It’s quite definitively the ‘GIVE IT TO ME’ Attitude that once you are satisfied, who cares about anyone else?

Everyone has priorities, there’s no shame in that. I see you spending a lot of time trying to make sure that people who want easy mode raids don’t get what they want, but that doesn’t make you a hypocrite for not also spending the time to crush other people’s dreams. You’re free to obstruct the goals of as few or as many people as you care to. There is no obligation on you to crush ALL dreams or none of them.

The value of the other things you have suggested is far less, you would get nearly everyone I know on board with Legendary Armor elsewhere, instead of the insistent posts repeating the same thing ad infinitum.

That’s the Fractal backpack, which we haven’t even been talking about. But ok, let’s get on that then, alternate locations for Envoy Armor (because in the past a LOT of people seemed to take issue with that for various reasons), but that’s for a different discussion. The idea of easy mode raiding, however, is a separate issue, and one I’d like to see continue even if they were to mail every player Envoy armor for Wintersday.

THAT. That is why we will always have an issue. Because your arguments have always been for your wants.

As have yours. We each speak for ourselves. I fully believe that what I want in this would make a lot of other players happy, and have said repeatedly that if it would only make me happy then it’s not something they should do. I don’t see how that’s any different than your position on the matter, we just disagree over how many people we believe it would make happier, and/or the amount that we care whether those people are happier or not.

Ok, easy fix then. Lets go the other way with this argument….make raids, dare I say it, HARDER! Yup, make a oh I dunno, say, Heroic mode, and have the special armor/rewards associated with such tied to completing them in that mode?

“You just care about the rewards!!!”

No, seriously, if you want a harder mode, then sure, they can make that. It’s not the priority, since the existing mode is already much harder than the baseline for the rest of the game and an easier mode should come first, but after they get to work on an easy mode, they can work on a hard mode too. It should definitely not have unique skins to it, obviously, but it can have titles or nametag flair or whatever so that people can show off their virtual codpieces.

I’d say i was surprised but after those horse has been beaten, broken, brought out back, shot in the face, and beaten again it comes down to the same 4 posters claiming there’s something wrong.

I’m afraid it’s pretty much inevitable at this point, until such time as ANet actually adds meaningful content to the discussion by letting us know what they are working on to correct these flaws in the existing raid structure, and why. With the current lack of information, all we can do is speculate among ourselves.

Pray tell, where would the resources for creating these easy modes come from? Are you implying that you want to strip open world devs away from open world?

I can’t speculate on exactly where and when the devs would be taken from other projects. I’m confident that it can be done without meaningfully impacting development resources from other projects. Obviously it’s not worth “infinite resources,” if it would take a preposterous amount of time and effort to make it happen, then fair enough, not worth it, but I’d at least like to hear an explanation from the developers as to why this would take a ridiculous amount of man-hours, and what those people have accomplished instead. If it delays the next raid by a few days, or even a few weeks, well I’m sorry to make you wait soooooooo long, but I think it would be a petty reason to not do it.

Degrades the reward for doing the much more difficult mode, divides the raiding community, no ‘transition’ or ‘training’ for the normal mode functionality…

It doesn’t degrade the reward in any meaningful way. If it does degrade the reward for you then I don’t respect your reasons for feeling that way, and do not believe that your feelings on the matter should trump the feelings of those that don’t have those rewards at all.

As for “dividing the community,” all I can say is, “if you love someone, let them go. If they don’t return, they were never yours to begin with.” If easy mode raiding in any way reduces the population of the existing raids, then those players were never yours to begin with, and they are happier for the change.

And as for the “no training” part, we’ve been around and around on it, I know for a fact it would help me, I fully believe it would help others, many of you disagree, and fine, whatever, but even if it does end up serving zero training function, that is not the priority for having it in the first place.

Yep, that’s exactly why you are demanding an easier mode.

I’ve given two reasons why I am demanding an easier mode. You keep insisting that only one of them matters to me. That is why you’re wrong.

I’ve already said that, just as I’ve always said that it’s not relevant to this discussion. If you want to talk about Glorious Hero acquisition, go to the PvP board.

You didn’t before until I brought it up, against your own words here:

I didn’t bring it up here because it isn’t relevant here, but I certainly have raised the point of Glorious Hero armor before in the past, and if you’d like to search the forums to back when it was first announced you can find those comments.

You have zero issue with potentially EQUALLY difficult, no, rather a much harder to get armor set in a mode that you clearly did some content for (The Ascension). And yet now you seek to undermine Raids because you have an issue with getting a set of armor in them. And somehow you deny that you don’t have a bias here?

Well look, it’s not like I’m ever going to get a piece of Glorious Hero armor, so it’s not like the issue is “I got mine, now I’m coming after yours,” I just don’t much care about getting Glorious Hero armor, so it’s not an issue for me. As I’ve said though, if you really want it for yourself, I would not stand in your way as you’re trying to stand in mine. And as I said, I worked hard for my Ascension, but I would welcome any move they made to make it more available to other players.

I am consistently in favor of any move to make skins more available to those players who want them, but that does not mean that I personally fight for every possible skin evenly, nor do I think it should be a reasonable expectation that I would. It’s like if someone comes to you to support a charity, and your comeback is “yeah, but why aren’t you supporting this other charity, you hypocrite?”

Because your version would directly impact the quality and quantity of the raider version.

Nope.

Because your version deviates significantly away from the intent of raid content in general.

Working as intended, but irrelevant to you because it’s not for you.

The mere existence of a ‘trivialized’ raid would obstruct future iterations of a kind of End-Game content.

Nope.

All for the sake of rewards that you would have more success asking Arenanet to put elsewhere.

Nope, but that would be a nice bonus.

This is why we keep coming back to this, you aren’t offering a reasonable solution for the end-game. An ‘Easy-mode’ for raiding isn’t reasonable.

Why not? I get that you wouldn’t want to participate in it, but it’s not for you, so why should it bother you? You already have the version that is for you.

So now you are saying that the Glorious Hero’s acquisition is flawed?

I’ve already said that, just as I’ve always said that it’s not relevant to this discussion. If you want to talk about Glorious Hero acquisition, go to the PvP board.

You are the one directly opposing that system, so you should have been gung-ho on denying how to get the Glorious Hero’s from the get-go.

No, again, that’s not my concern. You want to portray that as hypocrisy , but that’s not how hypocrisy works. Hypocrisy does not mean that you aren’t allowed to care about anything unless you care about everything, it just means that you can’t care about two conflicting things. You could not, for example, say that the Glorious Hero armor is working great, but the Envoy armor is bad, that would be hypocritical. But you can say "they both are not working well, but I care about this one more, so this one is where I will spend my time. If you’d like to spend your time arguing about the other one, then I won’t get in your way, but it’s not my fight to fight. "

Yet we consistently see the argument that ‘Because raiders want to keep their rewards in their content, that they too want to be a special snowflake’.

Which is true, and not at all conflicting with anything else I’ve said (and not at all conflicting with anything you’ve said).

Then ask for it being accessible elsewhere, I still have not seen one single argument from you for putting a kind of Legendary Armor acquisition elsewhere in the game!

I have, but that hasn’t been the topic of discussion lately. Alternate locations for earning Envoy armor is a perfectly fine topic of discussion, and I fully support it, but that doesn’t reduce the value of anything else I’ve said.

Hell, we should just get a new set and put it into WvW, giving everything in the game a Legendary Component agenda!

To me, that would be no solution at all, as WvW is not an ideal location either, and a different set of armor would be a different set of armor. More locations is good, more armor is good, but still not what I’d like to see happen, and therefore not what I would advocate for.

And again, you fail to comprehend that one of the core tenets of a raid, is that it is content you can likely wipe constantly to.

Yes, and for you that’s fun, and for me it’s not, so for you you should have that “Sisyphus-mode” version, and for me there should be a “have fun” version, and both of us can be happy because each of us has the version he enjoys. You would be no more intended to like my version than I was intended to like yours, but it’s ok because we’d each still have the version that we preferred.

I really like how you have to inject your subjective opinion of the PvP armor and how it justifies why you can ignore content you aren’t interested in because it’s just flashy.

“So no, I’m sorry, but “all the other game mode are jumping off a bridge, so why not raids too?” just doesn’t apply here. For that argument to make sense, raids would need to be much more accessible to the average player than they currently are.”

Look, if the argument you are making is “Glorious Hero armor should be made available through more methods,” then ok, make that argument and I will support you 100%, but that’s not my argument to make because it doesn’t personally bother me. I will not argue against you, but neither is it something that I care to spend my time working on.

But if your argument is “Glorious Hero armor is hard to get, therefore it’s ok for Envoy armor to be hard to get,” well no, two wrongs don’t make a right. Them doing one bad thing does not justify them doing more bad things. If you believe that Envoy armor being hard to get is a good thing, then make that case, but you can’t do so by pointing to other flawed elements of the game.

I hope you understand how much of a hypocrite it makes you given you are doing the opposite with Legendary Armor in a mode you aren’t actually interested in but are pretending to be.

See, it’s this type of talk that bothers me. You are accusing me of being dishonest with you, and I suspect that a lot of others believe this as well. How can we have a reasonable discussion if we can’t even believe that the other person is accurately representing their own position? Everything I have said to you is 100% true. You can disagree that it matters that it is true, but please don’t be so disrespectful as to question whether the opinions I state are in fact my own opinions.

Anyways, the model you refer to here, isn’t a ‘some situation’ kind of deal. It’s happening everywhere in GW2. So why should Arenanet break away from their reward system just because of raids? For your selfish whims?

Because like I said, the raids are the straw that broke the camel’s back. The raids are the element with the requirements so much higher than most players are comfortable with that it moved from “annoyance” to “serious problem.” I may not have enjoyed earning The Ascension, I very much might not have enjoyed it, but at least it was a practical goal to work towards. I very much would prefer that they offered alternatives there, but could at least move forward in a lack of options. This does not apply to the Raids, which is why they are a larger issue.

The statement that most players have never set foot in the Forsaken Thicket is not supported by the shards data. If however the claim is that most people have not managed to defeat a raid encounter, then the LI data does support this. However, given that raids are designed to not hand LIs out to people autoattacking while watching the latest episode of Westworld, this is probably working as intended.

I don’t think it matters how many people entered the raids at least once, what matters is how many people actually completed them. If someone tried raids a few times and then left empty handed and never came back, that isn’t likely to represent a player who really had a blast doing raids. “We got them to try it at least once, but turns out they hated it” is not a ringing endorsement of a game mode. Their success should not be represented by how many people they got through the door, but by how many people they got to the other side.

But if you enjoy WvW and I don’t, but I am ‘forced’ to do WvW because I ‘need’ a Gift of Battle or whatever, it doesn’t necessitate me writing over and over again asking developers to rework WvW to suit my tastes.

Sure it does. This is a consumer product, and if you’re dissatisfied with an element, you have every right to express that displeasure and push for changes that you believe would make the game better for you, and people like you. It’s up to ANet to evaluate whether they feel they can make those changes in a way that benefits more players than it harms. I would fully support any changes that remove the need to WvW for a Gift of Battle, but that’s a different topic entirely.

If you can respect that PvPers, WvWers, achievement hunters, jumping puzzle fans, fractal/dungeon runners etc. have their niche areas of the game that they enjoy, then raiders should be extended the same courtesy and respect as has been extended to these aficionados of other GW2 content.

Again, to go back a few pages, I am totally fine with raiders having their own niche content that is for them and them alone, so long as the following conditions are also met:

1. That players who do not enjoy that level of difficulty also have their own variation on the content, so that they could experience the same lore and general combat encounters, without the unpleasant difficulty spike. Raiders would still have their hardcore version, this would be the festivus for the restofus.

2. That there be some alternate path to Envoy armor. It’s fine for raiders to have their own niche content, but only so long as there is no compelling reason for any other players to go there. If you do not enjoy raiding, then you should not have to raid, full stop. There should be no reason to raid other than an enjoyment of raiding. If you do not enjoy raiding, but want to get Envoy armor, then you should be able to pursue some other path to that goal. So long as raiders insist that Envoy armor can only be acquired through raiding, they cannot simultaneously claim that “this is just content for us, and if you don’t want to raid then you should just not raid.”

What more do you expect from their future plans other than a clear outline of what’s coming?

A clear outline of what’s coming, but basically a lot of what you said above that is the sort of speculation we were talking about, guessing that because they put in a second raid door, for example, that this indicates a second raid will go there, rather than some other feature entirely. I think you’re correct there, but it’s always possible we’re both wrong on that, as they’ve confirmed nothing of the sort.

The Raid rewards interest you, not the raid itself.

As I’ve said repeatedly, both do. When I watch videos of the raids, they seem like potentially fun content, but the constant wipes absolutely ruin them for me as content. A version without the wipes would be a lot of fun.

I’m really not sure why, when I know for a fact most of you have read me say that at least a dozen times by now, you guys continue to forget that I’ve already made this very point before each time.

And since the reward structure in this game has always through theme, or the kind of content, created different branches to earn each different reward, Raids are not changing the formula here.

Just because a model works in some situations, does not mean that it works for all situations. The way they are currently set up, the barrier of entry for raiding is too high for most players, and so it is an unreasonable barrier of entry for Legendary armor. There is currently no reward in the game that has a higher barrier of entry, except perhaps Glorious armor, and that’s just a flashy visual effect on top of Heroic armor, which is effortless to get.

So no, I’m sorry, but “all the other game mode are jumping off a bridge, so why not raids too?” just doesn’t apply here. For that argument to make sense, raids would need to be much more accessible to the average player than they currently are.

It is absolutely irrelevant to the casual gamer who is not interested in raiding, it does not change anything on how the current game lore played out. You haven’t come up with any counter here to my argument, nor do I suspect you actually care about the lore unless you can use it as a weak tool to convince Arenanet to open up raids to people like yourself who don’t care for the current one.

Your argument counters itself by being factually incorrect in the first place.

I’m sure Anet and NCSoft appreciate how a bunch of uneducated and biased stranges on their forums perform analysis of their business plan and draw conclusions about how certain element of the game affects the revenue, although I believe they already have experts taking care of that, not to mention they have much more data available than the aforementioned forum warriors.

We’re forced to game-theory their future development plans because they insist on keeping that actual plans a secret from us. When they don’t give us much to work with or hope for the future, we’re forced to do our best to make our own hope.

1. Again for PvP that all depends on how successful you are. There are many people who find PvP way more difficult and more stressful than getting into raids.

I don’t know man, I HATE PvP, I wish PvP were completely shut down, and I still didn’t have any huge difficulty meeting the requirements for the Ascension. It took me four seasons rather than 2-3, and I hated every single step of the process, but it wasn’t actually hard or terribly stressful, and anyone who can find a coordinated group of ten people to regularly raid with would have a far easier time finding a coordinated group of five people that would make climbing the PvP ladders a cakewalk.

You know how they say “anything you can do, I can do better?” Well “any challenges to getting the Ascension, getting through raids is worse.”

But again, I AM in favor of them opening up more opitions for how one can earn PvP-base rewards, so in this case, even if you think the current options are awful, it does nothing to justify the raid rewards.

The fact that it isn’t available yet has 0 relevance in relation to how difficult it is to aquire since we “know” the LI mats ahead of time.

And the fact is that most of the timegate with The Ascension came from them having gaps between the seasons. If they hadn’t, then even one of the sub-standard players like me would have had The Ascension unlocked before anyone had 150LI.

“Rewards should never be behind challenging content. If they are not behind challenging content, it is 100% always better”.

This is true. They can be behind challenging content, but that should never be the only way to get them, since plenty of players do not enjoy challenging content, and those players play Guild Wars 2.

Crafted every Legendary?
Done all the Masteries?
Gotten all those lovely ‘Skin list achievements’?
Have you been achievement hunting at all?
Created every profession and messed with every build?

I’ve done all the stuff that’s interested me. Stuff that does not interest me is not relevant to me. There is no reason why I should have to do content that does not interest me in order to gain the right to be bothered by flaws in content that does interest me.

I assume you mean ‘Wrong’ as in “I was wrong, Bloodstone Fen lore can exist entirely on its own, the Living Story can outright ignore the Raid Lore.”

Yes, you were wrong, Forsaken Thicket lore is directly connected to Bloodstone Fen lore, and to Ember Bay lore, and so on. it’s all part of the same game world, and all the lore matters. There is no argument that can be made that the lore contained in the Forsaken Thicket is “irrelevant” to anyone.

1. Pending how good you were at PvP, the time gate behind the PvP legendary backpiece was much longer than getting 150 LI.

Time gate? Maybe, but who cares? The actual effort gate was WAY lower. And besides, what do you have to show for 150LI right now? Nothing! So the actual time gate to getting actual Legendary Armor is at least 3-6 months higher than The Ascension.

2. “Making sure that desirable rewards are not locked off behind undesirable content” – this sounds like you are stating it as a fact, when it is your opinion. Personally, a reward is only desirable to me if it is locked behind some sort of challenging content. Otherwise I don’t find it desirable.

Then they shouldn’t waste desirable content by putting it behind such things. I mean, if I care about it whether it’s locked behind challenging content or not, and you only desire it if it’s locked behind challenging content, then they should obviously NEVER lock it behind desirable content, and instead, for people like you, have completely undesirable rewards that are locked behind challenging content, because you’ll enjoy those exactly as much.

Let alone if we talk about Raids, the apex or epitome of proving what you can do with your character. I want to know honestly from some of these players who cry out against Raids now, if they truly believe they ‘loved’ the way they could play their characters, that they were comfortable spending hundreds of hours not worrying about their stats, build, utilities…typical things you would normally see any regular MMO player worry about.

Yes. That was the exact reason that I was playing Guild Wars 2, and NOT one of those many other games that obsess over such things.

And why do they feel like Raids which make up such a small insignificant amount of content in the game currently, are a smack to the face when I bet you they haven’t even come close to exploring all the other casual content in the game.

But I have explored all that other content. I’ve done all the other things. And raids are currently blocking me off from things that I’d like to have available.

Raids are not blocking “relevant in-game lore”. Someone who is saying that has never dealt with raids and their lore profoundly.

Wrong.

Really? You are making that argument? That’s ANY game anywhere and not even anywhere near to what is trying to be discussed here. As mentioned before I like many do not PVP, never have and most likely never will. But does the game suck or is it not fun…not even close.

Some people make the argument that those who claim to not enjoy raiding just haven’t given it enough of a chance, and that if they were only to drink the Koolaide, they would love it as much as raiders do. Now you might recognize that as completely ridiculous, but I was pointing it out for those who actually believe that.

I’m totally fine with there being parts of the game that I don’t enjoy, so long as 1. they don’t block off relevant in-game lore (which raids do, PvP and WvW do not), and 2. They do not block off access to rewards that interest me. Both PvP and WvW do block off access to some rewards, but gaining access to them is MUCH easier than gaining access to raid-locked rewards, so while it may not be pleasant, it’s at least relatively quick and accessible when compared to raids.

They could do better in ALL of these areas at making sure that desirable rewards are not locked off behind undesirable content, but failure in one area does not in any way justify failure in another, so “but they do this in some other part of the game” is never any excuse.

This is gw2efficiency’s table of magnetite shards. Assuming people don’t spend them as soon as they get them, if you are making an argument for how ‘most players have never even set foot into raids’, you’ll need to explain how more than 50% of the playerbase who’ve clocked a few thousand hours into the game – the ‘veterans’ that have supposedly been driven away in hordes by the raid content – have a few shards in their wallet.

You do understand that GW2 Efficiency does not track most players, right? It only tracks players who have chosen to give them their information. Since the people most likely to give GW2 their information are those sorts of “highly invested” players, the mini-maxers, meta builders, etc., any results you find on Efficiency will always skew in favor of the hardcore, the PvPers, the Raiders, the wealthy, basically any significant category of achievement, you’ll find a higher percentage of them on Efficiency than in the general population.

Also for the record, I have a couple dozen shards myself, I just can’t spend them on anything ankitten ot likely to get any more any time soon, so “some amount of shards” is no sign that players are actually enjoying the content.

The reluctance to experience raid content is largely driven by players who have to overcome their mindset that the raid experience is necessarily going to be like XYZ. If you spend 15 minutes in teamspeak with any static team, you know it’s a fun experience for people. Otherwise no one would be doing it.

Except that it’s not a fun experience. It might be fun for you, but that doesn’t mean that other players will have just as much fun with it. Resistance to raids has nothing to do with “not giving it a chance.”

An almost 5 year old game not seeing big returns! Must be a symptom of the features they added. Couldn’t possibly be the story being short, a bad launch followed by a poor reception to general gameplay that require the better part of 5 months to address, or the WvW fiasco that disenfranchised that part of the player base. Must have been that filthy raid which is actively retaining people as its one of the few group based activities that people log-in and do.

Poe’s Law?

I don’t know, I don’t think it’s unusual for the game to settle a bit after HoT, but seeing as how the biggest drop-offs came when raids were added, and this drop-off leveled out a bit after LSs3 was added, I think that at the very least the claims that the raids were good for the game are well exaggerated.

Legendary weapons have nothing of legendary, they are just a really boring gold sink. So now that we have the first legendary item that isnt locked behind a gold wall, and is at least a bit “legendary” you want it handed by only doing AB multiloot for hours.

Nobody said anything about that. Personally I hope that they have methods that include LESS gold than the current version, because I think the gold economy is the most corrupt and uneven portion of this game. Basically exploiters and market manipulators are fabulously wealthy while people playing the game as intended typically have much less to work with.

I want them to be earned through hard work, like what the raiders are doing, just not inside raid content, because not everyone enjoys raids, and people who don’t enjoy raids shouldn’t have to raid (and YES, that argument does also apply to every other content/reward in the game, so everyone can stop casting strawmen).

And A-Net never said that the legendary armor from raids would be the only legendary armor in the game. I think its high probably that the next expansion will have a legendary armor outside of it.

Possible, but 1. The problem is not access to [any Legendary Armor], the problem is access to [envoy armor]. A different set of Legendary armor would do nothing to solve that. And 2. Even if what you say is true, that’s many years down the road, and non-raiders should not have to wait many years for a solution. They should be working to get a solution out as soon as they possibly can, ideally before the raid armor is even released (not that everyone would be able to immediately get it, but they would at least have a reasonable path that they could start on, rather than a vague hope for a future plan).

And what next, you will want the legendary backpack from PvP or Fractals given by gold too?

Again, not gold, but I was pushing for an alternate method of earning the Ascension since day one, and even though I already have mine, after spending four torturous seasons on the PvP ladders, I would still like to see them open up alternate methods for other players to earn them, because I’m not a little kitten.

So all this discussion because of that…you’re just not happy because you want legendary armors but don’t want to raid. Pls, be honest, you don’t care about raid, all you care about is reward.

Why do you keep saying this over and over and over as if you’re making a cogent point? Do you think it would somehow be less of an issue if people did just want the Legendary Armor? That this would somehow be less worthy of resolution? I strongly disagree with that. People wanting the Legendary armor is a perfectly valid reason to be upset, and to push for some change to make that a more pursuable goal.

But the fact remains, and will continue to remain, that while I’ve always been up front about wanting Envoy armor as one of my goals, it has never been my only goal in this discussion. Sorry to disappoint you with the facts.

That’s not a problem of raids, that’s a problem of nearly all rewards in GW2. Many rewards are bound to special content and if you don’t do that content you don’t get that reward. You can’t get any of the new Legendaries without doing much PvE, which excludes PvP and WvW Players.

And that would be a valid argument, if acquiring a Legendary weapon were anywhere near the burden that acquiring the armor is. But of course it’s not. Any player who is capable of getting Legendary Armor is also capable of getting a Legendary weapon in 1/10th the time and effort. The requirements involved are fairly minimal relative to clearing dozens of raids. It’s not even comparable. And conversely, plenty of people who can get Legendary weapons in many cases completely lack the means to get Legendary armor under the current systems.

So there’s just no basis for comparison, no justification for saying “well it’s just like this other part of the game.” No, it’s NOT like any other part of the game.

You already told it to yourself: All the things have to coexist on one single map with mechanics being active at the same time while they aren’t in a raid wing.

Yes, but “coexisting on a map” is not a lift, in and of itself. They don’t interact with each other, they can all be happening at once, or not at the same time, the game goes on regardless. I could understand if it were a single complex chain, like Dragon’s Stand, but there’s no need for that.

Not to mention way more space you can move on while following a narrow path in the raid tube, way more different enemy types while actual raids have a handful with HoT-mechanics (!) and open world map designs are richer in details and depths than raids.

You’re talking about things they could add, not things they would need to add. They could have launched it pretty much exactly as it is. They could maybe choose to throw in a few existing mobs, whatever, but they wouldn’t have had to create much in the way of additional content. Dropping in the existing raid content as an open world map, even if it would not be as content rich as some other maps, would still be more casual PvE content than dropping them in as a Raid provided.

How many additional maps would be outta there? While I say 1 more because the whole raid with 9 bosses won’t even come close to a comparison of a complete HoT map.

Ok, one is fine. The raid map may be linear and windy, but the three wings combined takes up as much geography as any HoT map, and each is about the same size as Drytop or Bloodstone Fen.

First of all: A another big amount of players wouldn’t play this game any longer. Why is that so? The reason is simple: It doesn’t matter if we have 1 map more on the field. Sh_t’s getting boring. Those open world maps are a source of replayable content but just a little one besides the farmed ones – on the contrary to raids which are repeated like dungeons were in the past and/or fractals now.

People who would only play because of raids already wouldn’t be playing the game, because the game did without raids for years. People already playing and enjoying the game for what it is, did not in any way benefit from the addition of raids.

It’s undeniable that even with one map plus we would have the tremendous complaint in the general forum about the lack of content. Not only from the ones who are raiding atm.

That’s the good thing raids have brought to this game but I tell you something:

I agree with you that players do not like content droughts, but I don’t see how raids have helped that in any way, as the players impacted by the content drought mostly do no raid either. It’s like telling a room full of people “I know you’re all thirsty, so here’s some water for Fred. Everyone enjoy Fred drinking his water, doesn’t he look satisfied!”

Despite having raids in the game, players still leaving this game because the 3 wings are not enough. I haven’t logged in since 3 weeks now and I was playing daily before, btw. without raids I would have thrown the game away way earlier. .

So you agree that the current wings are not reason enough for raiders to keep playing? So what benefit is there to the devs splitting their focus to try and entice people to play, who really aren’t into most of what the game has to offer? Sure, they could keep creating content for raiders at the cost of everyone else, but the raiders will never think it’s enough anyway, and will just move on regardless. Why not instead focus that effort on the players who actually like the vast majority of the game for what it is?

It becomes even more doubtful when Anet stated that raids were a success in their eyes. They have the numbers of players in contrast to us.

Yes, but there’s also a thing called “positive spin,” companies are much quicker to admit to great success than to failure.

Nobody ever dropped a game because they added a mode that you can play it or not ( its not mandatory). Like other games that add “Brawl Mode”, a lot of people dont like it so they just ignore it and play what they like. A lot of people dont like WvWvW will they quit every time something come to WvW??
Players that dont like raid just play other things. I find funny people that complain that things like BSF are too easy then ask for easy raids.

People drop games when they feel they have no means of progressing their goals. When you set in things like Legendary armor, and people want that, but the only way to get it is through content that they will not do, then they get disgruntled. And they may not ragequit on the forums, but they do play less, and less, and eventually stop. You can’t tell people in a game “that’s not for you,” and expect them to like it.

Sry, you have no clue what you are talking about. Look at a raid wing: It’s a linear tube. One thing is triggered right after the other has been done. Only this thing is a overwhelming difference to an area of an open world map which has to synergize with many things inside it.

What are you talking about? Look at Ember Bay. What do you have there? There is the Dom pre, which launches the Dom boss. There is the Karka Pre escort, which launches the Karka boss. There is the Sloth food collection, which launches the escort, which launches the boss. There is the Jade pre, which launches the Jade boss. There is the Wurm pre, which launches the Wurm boss. Then there are about a dozen or so small and unrelated events like Convergences and Destroyers. Outside of those specific linkages, there are no connections whatsoever from event to event, they each just do their own thing. You could as easily do the same with the raid wings, just have a VG on a loop, a Goreseval on a loop, a River of Souls that is open most of the time but is an event every half hour or so, etc.

Additionally the wings weren’t designed from the scratch when the previous one was finished. Most of the work was done during the HoT developing phase.

So what? They still could have spent that time on content for everyone, and it would have been available within the same timeframe.

And yes, you have to compare team sizes: If over 100 people are working on LS3 and open world content and they wouldn’t be as productive as the small raid team with around 4-6 people don’t you think we would have seen Anet firing people and recruit more productive designers?

I really feel like I shouldn’t have to point this out again but the people working on raids was never “4-6 people”. That’s some weird myth based on a misunderstanding. That is the core raid team, sure, the people who work on nothing but raids day after day, but it’s not as if everything you see in those raids is 100% hand crafted by those people. The art was done by people in the art department, the sounds by people in the audio department, we don’t know total numbers, but likely a couple dozen people had their hands on at least portions of the raid.

And again, IF the raids were designed by only a handful of people, then they are clearly exceptional developers, and could have produced an equivalent amount of non-raid content if given that task instead. It’s nothing to do with the size of the team, it’s about what content they actually produce, and they produced a lot.

What also speaks totally against your so called “theory” (it is not worth to be called like this): We would have seen many complaints about raids in the general forum and the statement of people: “I leave this game because raids destroyed it.”

And there were some, but the forums are only a tiny portion of the playerbase, and not a representative sampling. People participating on the forums do not necessarily indicate what the game’s overall population believes.

No you’re wrong, the drop coincided with HOT, when many things went wrong. Raids are probably the best thing with HOT.

You liked raids. That does not mean that the community liked raids. The dropoff happened AFTER HoT came out, around the time of wing 2.

Again, on the contrary, without raid, you would probably see a bigger drop-off (and no new content btw, since raid team is a small team)

Again, no, because the number of people playing raids is not large enough to matter in terms of dropoffs. And if they hadn’t have made the Forsaken Thicket into a raid map, they could have taken that same terrain and enemies and balanced it out as an open map, or as a series of single player (small team) story missions, which would have helped during the content drought. Raid proponents keep talking about how it’s a “small team,” but the size of the team is entirely irrelevant, what matters is what they actually produced, and regardless of their team size, they produced a significant amount of game content when no one else was.

Really, your hate on raid made you think silly things…how can you tell that the drop is due to raids? I think that without raids, the drop would have been much more important, so raids saved the PVE in this game.

The drop-off coincided with the release of the raids. I don’t think it could be much clearer than that. And the player rates for raids are not large enough to have any impact on the game’s bottom line. Any impact they do have is on how players outside the raids react to their presence.

Yeah, so expected spike on or around launch, then relatively stable through the launch of HoT, then it shot up considerably with HoT’s launch, and then due to the focus on raiding it quickly dropped below previous stable levels. Hopefully LWs3 will pick things back up a bit, but I still think they need to do something to make right with players over the raids.

There are plenty of LFGs without any limitations. There are also plenty of guild and group advertisements on reddit and forums.

I can never find any. There are just “met and LI” groups, and “training runs” which go nowhere.

First, remove that “we” from there you aren’t talking about the entire community.

Nope. I am referring to this game’s community.

A big “what if” question, but would we have Raids now, if they continued releasing new Fractals and Dungeons with the same pace as they did during the first year?

As impossible to determine as it is irrelevant to the conversation.

They are unnecessary to complete the task. Your problem was fixed before raid release during the design process.

That statement will be a valid answer when there are plenty of LFGs for raid pugs without any limitation (not just for training runs). Until then, they’re just sad excuses.

That’s what those who never played GW2 at the start or during the first year of the game say or those who have a malfunctioning memory.

This game was never advertised as not having challenging content. Even pre-release they were calling the events in Orr to capture the temples “their version of Raids of other MMORPGs” if you recall.

They may have marketed it that way, but it never lived up to that hype, and we liked that it never lived up to that hype, because we didn’t like that hype. And then the game ran three more years, and we were hopeful that hype was fully in the rear-view mirror, but then the HoT hype started, and we hoped that too would prove to be nonsense, but then it ended up mostly being true, which was lame.

First year of GW2 we had 11 dungeons released, 2 temporary ones, Molten Facility and Aetherblade Retreat, and 9 Fractal dungeons. All of them weren’t “easy mode” or not challenging. They offered unique challenges (at the time) and to my knowledge they were viewed mostly positively by both the casual and the hardcore.

I played and beat Molten Facility, Aetherblade Retreat, all the Fractals, etc., all usually in the first weekend of their release. They were nothing on raids. Don’t even raise them for comparison.

Still, for those actively participating in the events, the Marionette, the Assault Knights and Skarlet’s Holograms weren’t an easy mode events and offered some form of challenge.

Not really. This is a point of confusion for some people, but let’s be clear “high chance of failure” != “challenge.” Challenge is entirely about what YOU can do to prevent failure. If you do everything to can right, but an event fails because various other players completely drop the ball, that is NOT “challenge,” that is just happenstance. And that was the nature of those open world events, that the individual player challenge was there, they were slightly challenging, but they weren’t especially challenging, they just had a high failure rate if you didn’t end up on a map with a skilled and dedicated party, because, using the Marionette as an example, if even a couple of people on a couple of platforms were to drop the ball, then the efforts of dozens of other hard working players would be wasted, and those other players could do nothing about it (for which there was a great deal of complaint at the time).

Likewise, the Assault Knights were super easy, they just required that the players on the map divide themselves VERY evenly between them, and the UI tools available made that extremely difficult to coordinate, especially on pug maps where plenty of people did not understand or care that this needed doing.

you can run around with words but facts are facts \[T]/
you have the logic by your side, i’ve the reality

I have to admit that you’re at least half right. The real problem here is that ANet spent three years carefully cultivating a playerbase that does not enjoy challenging content. They drove away all the WoW raiders, drew in all the MMO expats who wanted an escape from the hardcore raider mentality that poisoned so many other games. And then they crammed a raid into their game, and the raiders tarted showing up and poisoning this game like so many others. So really the obvious and simplest solution would be to just remove the raids entirely, but I don’t think that’s absolutely necessary. I think there are other solutions that can mend this divide, while leaving raids largely intact for those that enjoy them. But there MUST be compromise, the solution can’t just be “raids stay how they are, git gud.”

there is no problem here that anet can fix. the only problem is the playerbase.

That’s a nonsense answer. This is a game, if the" problem is the playerbase," then the actual problem is in the game design, it is not serving the needs of the players adequately.

what anet can do against the lfg 70+li VG exp zerk PS chronotank groups? n

Make them unnecessary to complete the task, so that LFR would be like LGF for dungeons after launch, where there would be those “Zerker Warrior meta exp” postings, sure, but it was plenty easy to find a more casual group on there, and that group would succeed anyway. So long as meta exp groups are not only faster, but actually much more likely to succeed at the content, they will continue to be the only game in town.

I do have one suggestion on how to actually end this sort of thread, permanently. Any of you guys who are soooooo tired of these threads, Gaile, if you’re out there, listen up, because this is really very simple:

Fix the underlying problem.

Simple as that. Fix the problem, and people will stop complaining about it. Now I know some of you believe that the problem is already fixed, but if that were the case, then people wouldn’t be complaining that there is a problem. Most of us used to think “hey, there aren’t any raids for me to play” was a problem that had been fixed since the beginning of the game and didn’t need any additional fixes, but then things changed, and now we have raiders around, so. . . there’s that.

Clearly people have issues with how things are currently working. Find a solution that genuinely satisfies their concerns in some way. Telling them to shut up will never cause an actual solution. You want them to shut up, create a solution that works for them, not just for you.

My main concern is the balancing issue with an encounter where personal damage plays close to no role at all.
People min-max the kitten out of everything as we know. Parties fully geared in defensive gear, with even more healing thrown in, would either turn it into a joke or force the developers to balance the encounter around them which then meant said encounter would be close to impossible with different gear.
You’d essentially only change one debatably dumb meta for another. The current meta actually looks more versatile and open compared to something like that.

What if they went with the sPvP model?

Do away with stat gearing entirely for raiding, treat raiding as a fully distinct game mode (it already is in many ways, since it’s accessed via a lobby like the Mists, and shares no terrain with other content).

Make it so that there is a “raid template” you can set just like the PvP templates. This would not only mean that for casual raiders they wouldn’t have to worry about buying complex gear specifically for the raid meta, but for raiders it would mean that they wouldn’t need to manually swap gear and traiting when shifting from raids to other PvE content.

And further, it would allow them more control over the meta, by just not offering medallions for stat combos that they consider to be “toxic,” such as overloading on glassy DPS or tanky healing.

I can see some people not liking it, but I think there are a lot of upsides to the deal.

1) Open world is for everyone… This by its very nature contradicts your own goal of having it be challenging.

Not true. Adding challenge to an open world is challenging, but far from impossible. We’ve even seen attempt at it in the form of the Marrionette, HoloScarlet, Vinewrath, etc. I think that the important things to successfully adding challenge to open world is:

1. Make sure that it’s not too disruptive to normal play. Set it off to the side so that players who don’t want to do it can get on with their normal play experience. Don’t require absolutely stacked up maps in order to stand a reasonable chance of success, instead scale the needs of the content to the people actively participating. The “attunement” model used in Fall of LA and Silverwastes is good for this, design it so that attuned players count towards scaling, non-attuned layers do not (but also get no rewards and cannot participate until they do attune).

2. Design the challenge to NOT be around whether the overall group succeeds, but rather about personal score. If you have dozens of players, over whom you have no real control, it’s unreasonable to design the encounter so that if not everyone works together perfectly, the entire thing collapses and nobody gets anything. The minimum bar for overall group success needs to be very low. “But where’s the challenge in that?!” Well the challenge is in some measure of personal contribution, challenging tasks that a player can choose to accomplish that up the difficulty but also the reward.

For example meleeing the Golem MKII is considerably more risky than ranging him, so why not have some stacking score bonus on you whenever you are within 600 range of his center, resulting in better reward at the end, and maybe some titles or other perks if you do it well?

Alternately, you can have an encounter where there are multiple tasks that need doing, some just zerging, some requiring personal skill and timing, and the latter offer higher individual perks.

3. When you do implement “challenge” rewards, you need to not alienate the players who don’t want challenge. They can’t be things exclusive to that challenge. Completing the challenge objectives should provide more reward, and maybe shorter paths to fancy unique rewards, but the more casual roles of the encounter still get the same types of loot, just less of it, and would still have a longer term path to acquiring the same rewards. Like say the challenging version would have a decent chance of dropping some unique item, and a large chunk of a currency that could be used to buy it, while the more casual players would still get a little currency. Like this is not an ideal example because the encounter is still not that hard, but say in Ember Bay, there was a cool unique item for 5,000 Petrified Wood, but if you melee the Jade Armor long enough then you not only get a chance of that item dropping, but also get 50 Petrified Wood each time (but probably a separate currency specific to items of this type).

Following those rules, I think you could make open world content that would be challenging to those that enjoy challenge, without alienating those who do not.

Also, one system that might work with this, if they can work the kinks out, is the new “infinite heart” system. I often use the EB Dominator fight as a quick way to complete the local Heart Quest, but what if it were the ONLY way to complete it? What if every task related to filling the bar could only be done during the event, different tasks filled it more, and if you failed to fill it, you’d need to wait for the next cycle, or maybe get nothing at all and it resets. Maybe have several tiers to it, each harder to fill, so if you wanted to max it out you’d need to do the hardest tasks, while if you just wanted to play casual you could diligently clear the first tier and get less reward.

Now obviously used in this way it shouldn’t be a “heart,” it shouldn’t be a part of map completion or anything, but the basic mechanic of “do certain things, bar increments, get a prize when it fills” is a great personal reward mechanism.

I changed some the skills to give a bit more group healing. This spec would be mainly helpfull in WvW and PvP but I do think that for any future PvE boss that has alot of boons this spec would be great.

You need to balance it to be valuable in ALL game modes, and I can’t imagine “CC spec” ever being useful in general PvE. If you want a CC-spec, it needs to be a variable in the traits, that if you trait one way, it’s at least solid DPS, a general purpose “killing mobs, contributing to boss fights” design, and then if you trait a different way it loses a lot fo damage in exchange for CC boosts. But you can’t just have an entire spec that says “well, you’ll do pathetic damage, but plenty of CCs!”

Advanced weaponry-Player shots pierces with a rifle or harpoon gun(those skills have reduced recharge) and rifle attacks heal allies on hit(example: if an attack would deal 10,000 damage it also heals any allies in the shots trajectory by 10,000).

Interesting, but unlikely to build around this, since lining up piercing attacks to usefully heal people is very tricky, and one decent heal is not a Heal build.

Reload- costs 4, and then can be stationary channeled for up to four seconds: restoring 2 initiation per second, 2 seconds of vigor per seconds, and granting 5 seconds of stealth

Hmm, but reload was already pretty great. It’s a tricky balancing act. I assume that the stealth is applied when you start it? The balance issue there is that it makes it harder for enemies to counter the channel, which is the counterplay to it. The upside to it is that it gives you two usage options, either to channel it out to full for max regen, or just tap it and then use Deadshot for damage. Spammable no-target Stealth seems a little worrisome.

Without specific counters built into it, you could spam this ability ASAP and end up with about 15 seconds of stacked Stealth, then run away, then channel it to full (gaining a second more), then move, channel again (gain a second more), then spam a few more times to gain another 10 or so, etc., it’s casual perma-Stealth until you feel like attacking.

I think Reload needs to have Reveal built in, rather than Stealth, so that enemies can counter it. What Stealth is in the toolkit should either require hitting a target, or have a respectable CD.

Maybe take Smoke Grenade, and add a built in Blast finisher, or give one of the base moves a Leap Finisher effect, so that you can use the smoke field to generate a little Stealth.

Not a high damage elite spec. You are supposed to be supporting your allies and picking off low health and downed enemies.

Every spec needs to be high damage to some degree. Not necessarily peak meta DPS, but you need a reliable rotation that can actually kill healthy enemies, otherwise it’s completely pointless. You seem to be focused on the PvP applications, but how would this class play during PvE roaming? During PvE boss fights where enemies are mostly immune to CC and debuffs are not all that important?

I have seen many thief builds that generate a ton of stealth on their own so I didn’t want to have overkill with the stealth when combining them with the Agent.

But again, where would you get ANY stealth in this build? I don’t tend to go heavy into stealth, so I can’t claim to know all the tricks, but so near as I can tell, there is no way that a Thief using a Rifle and only Agent utilities could enter Stealth at all. The only way an Agent could enter stealth is by swapping to his second weapon and using its ability to go into stealth (many of which require melee range), using the Hide in Shadows heal, Blinding Powder or Shadow Refuge, I suppose the most casual option would be Hidden Thief, proccing Stealth every time you Steal/Backflip, but that’s on a fairly long CD.

I think it’s fine to have a Thief build with minimal Stealth options, like many core Daredevils, but given how many skills and traits in the set are based on being in Stealth, it pretty much requires convenient access to it. I think that either there needs to be a relatively short CD stealth utility of some kind, or some stealth built into the weapon set, OR there needs to be less abilities based on Stealth in the spec, like taking Deadshot and making it a non-stealth ability, with the Stealth version just having a CC buff to it or something.

How about this for an idea, remove #4 Multishot, and replace it with an ability that has a cost of around 5, grants you 2s of Stealth, but also Crippled, so that you can use it to set up attacks, but it’s not too much of an “escape button.” The only trick I can see there is the potential to activate it while under pressure, then use Retreat to move away from where you’d been. It would also need a target, so you couldn’t just spam it in a corner to stack hours of Stealth.

Retreat-(range 1,000) choose a target and teleport behind your current position by 1000

I like the idea of this, but I suspect it may be really hard to design. I mean, there are shadowsteps, but they take you to someplace you’ve already been, or to a valid opponent target, or to a ground targeted location, so if it were a Shadowstep then the issue would be accurately targeting a spot behind you. If it just literally means “wherever 1000 units behind you is,” then that could be off a cliff, up a vertical surface, inside a map, whatever. It would have to be able to detect walls and edges and stop you short, which might be easy, or could be very hard. If they can make it work though, it’s a sound option for at least some Thief spec.

The rifle skills sound interesting, but might depend on how much damage each of the attacks do. Outside of the Deadshot, which attacks are meant to be consistent damage dealers?

Also, Reload could be tricky to balance, but it inspired an idea. What about instead of restoring 8 Ini flat, make it an ability that costs 4, and then can be stationary channeled for up to four seconds, restoring 2 ini per second (8 total on full channel)? Leave the Vigor in. That gives it more play, in that if you just spam in in a panic, it ends up costing more than it restores (although it does restore vigor, so might be worth it when bugging out), but on a full channel you end up with a net gain of 4, so very useful when you can spare the time to use it. It should probably also apply 1s of Revealed for each tick, so that you can’t do it while stealthed. It leaves you very open in exchange for a strong potential benefit. And of course the counterplay is that if you get interrupted then you get little to negative gain from it.

As for the utilities, I’m not sure you conveyed your vision for Shadow Matrix. Is it meant to just be a PBAoE burst skill? I feel like you had more in mind than you described.

The elite skill might be a bit much, since you could just go to town with the biggest attacks, but also might be a bit weak, since it only lasts five seconds and that’s only enough time to get off a few attacks anyway. It would depend on the cooldown, perhaps. Maybe instead, it could be a long CD ability that would instantly refill your ini, and then double the regen for ten seconds or so? That would give it more functionality as a “going for broke” moment, but you could still run out if you were just spamming away like mad. Not sure on that though.

One big red flag I’m seeing though, a lot of abilities, including the major damage dealer and numerous traits, seem to rely on being in Stealth, and yet I’m not seeing anything that actually generates Stealth. How do you see the Agent entering Stealth often enough to do his job?

Now, in no way are the raids in this game easy. What with the class restrictions put upon everyone from the meta community to the pages of text that proceed this post, they are tough. But that’s a good thing!! End game is meant to be that. And this game is still very young in MMO years and they have a long way to go raids to improve, and I think they will.

You come from WoW, which is a very different game, and I don’t think you mean any harm by it, but the GW2 community was founded on the notion of moving AWAY from that sort of “this is endgame, it’s supposed to be hard” mentality. Not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, and this was once the game for those players to live. The concern is that we’re moving away from that Elysia.

This is why I say an easy mode that allows players to experience the story (and only the story) is fundamentally different to an easy mode that is there for training (and training only),

It could be different, but it wouldn’t have to be. The one could easily serve as both.

If they wanted to they could remove all hard mechanics from the bosses, lower the HP/damage considerably, remove all phases other than first one, and call it story mode so players could experience the story part even solo.

Sure, but they don’t have to dumb it down QUITE that much. I mean the nice thing about ten man groups is that there’s plenty of room for reasonable redundancy. On an easy mode version, I think even the weakest players could tag along and reasonably help, even if ten players of that caliber wouldn’t be able to do it themselves.

And about the last bit about accessing the legendary rewards through the easy mode of raids, I think the biggest obstacle here as expressed by many is the Envoy Armor (notice: Envoy, not Legendary in general), remove that from the easy mode raids and there is a good chance more people will agree to it, at least as far as rewards are concerned.

Again though, I don’t see that it MUST come as a part of easy mode, but 1. it would greatly increase the long term participation of that mode, as if easy mode just offered “decent loot” then many players will soon migrate to other forms of “decent loot” as they’ve migrated from dungeons, and 2. there should STILL be an alternate avenue to envoy armor, because hard mode raiding should NOT remain the sole source of it. It’s far to niche an activity to be the only place to earn an armor with mass appeal.

Take a look:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Why-does-Lege-armor-have-to-be-tied-to-Raids/first

Yes, I read some of that thread. I know that spreading Envoy armor to other places would upset certain factions, but that does not mean that those factions deserve to get their way. If spreading Envoy armor to other players brings about the greatest happiness to the greatest number, then it’s the right call to make, even if some people don’t like that.

And there is another thing, the initial topic was about raid accessibility, not about access to the rewards of the raids.

True, and I try to only address the topic of rewards when directly questioned on it, but motivation IS a factor of accessibility and why it is necessary. It’s all a fluid system, and no single factor can be discussed in strict isolation.

So I was wondering, after 5 full pages, how is an easy mode for raids going to make the normal mode of raids more accessible? Or that’s not a goal at all?

Well, two responses. The first is that it would make the hard mode more accessible because it would increase the total participants. By itself having a lower barrier to entry, people who gave up on raids entirely would be at least “raiding” in some sense, and that is likely to increase their confidence, skill level, and interest in attempting hard mode raids. I would predict hard raid populations dropping slightly for a few weeks or perhaps months as “easy mode” was the new thing to check out, but in the long term the population should end up higher than before them due to migration.

And as to the second, the topic doesn’t specifically say “hard mode raid.” Easy mode raids, done well, would be another valid form of raiding, and having an inherently more accessible version, one with fewer barriers to practical entry, would be “more accessible raids.” Even if no one migrated up to hard mode, the “more accessible raids” issue would have been improved.

Exactly this won’t happen. It was proven in multiple games that most players won’t advance through the difficulties.

Not all will, some will though.

You have a new signature I would like you to change [some task] to [random task].

No reason, I just really like Austin Powers.

Buy me some gems and I’ll consider your opinions to carry some weight (intended for satire, not intended as actual request).

he point was that those who do the higher difficulty Raids in WoW do not use the easier difficulties to train for them, they just go to the higher difficulty versions directly

Well, that’s up to them. If that makes them happy, who are we to judge?

That’s what the difference in audience between the easy mode and the hard mode means, easy mode has more players.

Then it sounds like if one were to allocate developer resources into only one or the other, then easy mode would be the way to go, right?

Yes sure, and ofc without reward, except 2 greens and one blue. You know, like in story mode dungeon. I’m sure you’ll be happy to enjoy easy mode raid, isn’t ?

As I said when this was floated months ago, it would be better than nothing, just not by much. If they introduced it like this, I would do each of them one time, just for the experience of having done it, but of course they would not be worth repeating in that form.

If they had serious, but non-specific rewards, like guaranteed rare/exotic with various other nick-knacks, something worth the equivalent time and effort from some other activity, but no progress toward Legendary or anything of that sort, then I would still probably do some of them on daily/weekly rotation for a while, at least until, I got bored with it, and I’m sure some people would take them quite seriously.

With the latter though, I would STILL push that they either add a path to Envoy to those raids, OR add them elsewhere in the game, so that non-raiders can acquire them.

I was never completely opposed to the idea of an Easy Mode for Raids, it’s when it gets to a point where you have to choose between: yes or no to easy mode Raids and you miss the entire point of discussing how it should be dealt with. This isn’t a black and white thing where you take one side or the other.

I think that if the decision is made to make easy mode, it would be pretty hard to do it wrong. I mean, they can make mistakes, obviously, as they did with dungeons, as they did with the raids as they launched, as they’ve done with almost any new feature, but those mistakes can and would be corrected. And I push for my ideal version of easy mode raids, since this is all theoretical so why not, but that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be reasonably satisfied if they went a different direction. The key bullet-points that I need hi to be fully satisfied are below, but just one or more of them would be a serious improvement over none of them.

• To be able to play through the Forsaken Thicket content with lower risk of wiping. This could theoretically come in the form of an open world version or something like that, but any option other than “easy mode raid” seems like it would be much harder to produce, since it would require the same amount of work, PLUS whatever differences it would bring.

• To be able to progress towards earning Envoy armor without having to do the existing raids. This progress could come from anywhere, an easy mode raid, map completions on the Forsaken Thicket open world map discussed above, some sort of Legendary quest chain, whatever, so long as there is a path with reasonable goals to it for non-raiders.

• To have a more easily puggable version of the raid experience, one with lower tuning so that players can take incoming players largely as they are and find a use for them, no comms needed, basically the same difficulty as the average dungeon or lower tier Fractal.

Of the three, the last is the least vital to me, but I fully believe that a lot of other players still want that.

I’ve laid out at least some of the details of what I think would be the ideal combination of those factors, and would be happy to answer anyone who still had questions, but I don’t insist that my version would be the only worthwhile combination, so long as the core goals are met.

The majority of actual raiding guilds don’t even touch the easier modes and the vast majority of players who do play the easier modes do not touch the higher difficulty modes. That’s very easy to check if you see the world first clears are on hard mode versions while the number of people who finish the easy modes are a lot more than the people who do the harder modes (no shock there).

I’m not really sure what your point is, but everything you said in there sounds really great. Let’s import that all to GW2, stat!