Look, convincing people they should PvP so they can maybe be internet famous and make a couple thousand dollars is cheaper and easier than fixing its glaring design flaws and making it more attractive to a larger audience.
Literally the entire games industry has jumped on this bandwagon, just like the microtransaction bandwagon before it, because they’re businesses with bottom lines, and creating that coveted fully voiced, immersive, story driven PvE content we expect from them now has become significantly more expensive to produce at what people consider a “AAA experience” level.
So, basically, deal with the minor inconvenience because its entire goal is to spend less time and money developing PvP so those resources can be used elsewhere.
My problem in HOT is the unavoidable attacks. For example when you engage onto a smokescale, it goes untargetable and teles to you, taking off half your health. Nothing you can do, be you melee or ranged, to avoid this. The Ogotl are similar in that they can go invis and hit you for large chunks of health while still invis and thus you can’t really avoid it. Your only hope against them is blocks or reflects, which makes it required to have at least one of those slotted in HOT maps even if they aren’t normally a part of your rotation.
Or, you know, dodge. Which is a defensive tool everyone has access to, and is exactly why they gave those abilities to the HoT maps cooldows which roughly align with the amount of time required to recharge enough endurance to dodge again.
If you’re taking half of your Hp from a smokescale, you either weren’t paying attention and aggro’d it while fighting something else, you are just plain wasting your best defensive tool for non-defensive reasons, or you’re deliberately pulling more mobs than your build is designed to handle solo.
So they built a minority of the content for a minority of the player base. I fail to see the problem here.
Hell they actually mothballed legendaries JUST to focus on LS, as LS is still, to this day, seen as the most important content in the game. The vast majority of content in HoT is open world and solo instances. The two cores of GW2 PvE.
Your complaint is, literally, that they added a type of content you don’t like in stead of adding the type that you do.
Suck it up. The game had a serious lack of appeal for a certain demographic, and that demographic is important as a part of the whole community. When you break it down, if you quizzed every single player of any given MMO about what they want added to the game immediately, in the very next patch, you’d end up with so many sub-communities that literally anything you add only serves a minority.
The appropriate goal, and the one Anet is still using, is to equitably treat all of those minorities in sequence. They’re done with the first raid now. The last wing is released. They’re done with the pvp league system. They’re still hammering out WvW updates. All large parts of their design that have been hilariously unserved for literally years in GW2. The next major updates, now that they’ve made real attempts to equitably serve those portions of the community, are targeted at the start of the circle again. More LS and open world.
Complaining that every single update does not serve your personal interests is selfish and silly. The game does not revolve around you. It revolves around a massively diverse community. They released with the promise of four pillars of play. Accessible cooperative open world., soloable personal story, challenging group instances (yes, the original dungeons were billed, pre-release, as extremely challenging content for challenge seekers) and competitive small and large scale PvP modes.
What has changed is that they’re finally taking a holistic approach rather than hyper-focusing on one part of that design.
Anet never promised there would be no grind. They did say there would be no grind for BIS gear. Obviously even that’s questionable with ascended weapons which were meant to be a longer term goal but you absolutely don’t need a legendary weapon. It’s an optional feature.
It’s something put into the game to give people who want to grind, something to work towards. Some people like and need that.
No required grind is very different than no grind. No grind for BIS gear is very different from no grind.
Even ascended, you don’t need them to play the game, except for the highest level fractals.
May I ask what cool, special weapons/armors are available out there that us non-grinders are able to obtain? It just feels like all of the cool stuff is meant for the few who have the time and money to do it.
Are you asking “what special loot can I get for doing nothing special”?
The vast majority of the skins in the game are relatively cheap and easy to acquire. The “special” stuff is special specifically because of its rarity or difficulty to acquire.
Of course, the real problem is the cash shop, as the vast majority of skins added to the game are cash shop skins that can’t enter the economy without somebody buying gems.
Legendary crafting was never intended to make legendaries cheaper. It was intended to create a direct path for you to slowly craft the legendary start to finish without buying anything at all so that your only option isn’t just farming gold or sacrificing a goat to RNGesus for a precursor.
It isn’t going to happen. We used to have team and solo que, and they had to merge them because the pvp community isn’t big enough to support both. No matter how much time and effort Anet invests in bringing more players to PvP it simply doesn’t catch on with the esports crowd they want to capture, or draw enough interest from the GW2 PvE crowd.
Basically, it is an unpopular mode in an unpopular PvP game. That is why they merged ques, and even then there are still massive wait times to find matches due to this low population of players. You’d be even more salty about 15 minute ques all the time than losing a match because you got set up with bads.
Also, you’re playing solo and complaining that you get random teammates you can’t control. That’s what happens. You told the game you wanted to be put on a team with four random people you don’t know.
If you expect to have reliable teammates in a team based game, you might want to, you know, form a team before you start playing it.
Portal is a largely borken and useless mesmer skill at this point any way, compared to its original design.
Originally, there was no “hit f” interaction, as it was primarily used as a combat tool. the mesmer and his allies could use to to warp back and forth between points in combat as much as they wanted to flank/confuse mobs, etc.
These days it is literally only ever used to skip mobs in dungeons, cheese jumping puzzles, or to move around in wvw.
In truth it should absolutely be a utility item, and the mesmer’s version should be changed to something more useful in an actual fight.
I don’t understand what they can do to Pvp at this point aside from minor balance updates. Literally every time they’ve tried to add something new to PvP people hate it, because the GW2 community just wants to play the same handful of maps they had at release from now until infinity.
PvP got what thee community really asked for, a proper ranked system. At this point it doesn’t need more maps. The PvP community hates new maps unless they’re reskins of the old ones with the exact same mechanics. The PvP community loves new build options, which are apperantly solely the domain of expansions now. Unless its a matchmaking update or something, I can’t understand why more than a handful of designers and engineers need to be working on PvP. People don’t want new maps. They want balance changes and finalized versions of “testing” and “iterative” map designs.
Really though, the PvP community as I’ve experienced it would be happiest if every map had the same layout with only three capture points, no additional mechanics, and the exact same routes and is much more concerned with profession balance and build diversity than map diversity.
Heck, Rytlock dropped down a wormhole to who knows what (not us: we still haven’t found out where he went off to) and lived to talk about it (and introduce a new prof, conveniently in time for the expansion).
Since when did he start talking about it?
He’s gone out of his way to NOT tak about it, probably because he has some super-secret LS3 related bombshell to drop that we’ll all be completely unsurprised by when it eventually hits our screens because of Anet’s ham-handed attempts at foreshadowing and clues.
At the very least Eir’s death wasn’t predictable. Could she have gone out better? Yeah. Did she need to die for the story? Probably.
However, it would have been a better moment if she tried to fight alongside, beat up as she was, us and in stead went down halfway through the fight and was finished off by Faolain, who stabs her in a misguided attempt to appease mordremoth to save her own skin and escapes.
The way it went down it just seems like faolain stabbed her for no good reason, and she decided to sacrifice herself so we could escape, and then we were like “nah, escaping is for pansies, sucks your mom died braham”
The raid story isn’t separate, it’s part of the same storyline, but not a linear part.
Think of the LS episodes as the main show, and the raid storylines as the webisodes or direct to dvd deleted scenes or director’s cut. Or like the GW2 novels. They’re canon content, but not really necessary to understand the main plot.
You’ll still get the full story from the LS, and the most important events will happen there, but raid storylines may fill in some character backgrounds or explain some ancillary lore that you don’t need, but might want to know about the events of the LS.
Imagine you, outside the raid, have the same lens as the NPCs. We’re doing a lot of leyline/bandit research right now with small white mantle hints. The raid story explains in more detail the specific events that put all that in motion, but once the LS starts it isn’t so important how we got to episode 1 as the bigger, world-spanning story it starts. You might miss some small interesting details without experiencing it, but the LS is meant to be a self-contained and explained story all its own.
At some point you have to let them solve their own problems. I mean I’ve done my part for years and as far as I can tell it hasn’t changed much. I with there was a “explain that doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity” dialogue option just for giggles.
Yeah, basically where in WoW you dunked your gear every expansion, GW2 has a somewhat more arduous path to BiS gear through ascended crafting, but once you get it it is always BiS, and can be cheaply re-statted to new sets when they release.
Where WoW is about an endless chase for mechanical power, GW2 is about an endless chase for pretty skins, which you can chase or ignore however you like. Kinda built to let you focus on the things you want rather than telling you what you have to do.
If you like building stats, fracals are there for that, and to some degree WvW has those mechanics as well, but you won’t even need to do one type of content to get gear for another type, and for the core pve content the stats are designed to get you in playable shape easily with a little bit (10%) of a stat buff for grinding out or getting lucky on the top tier stuff, and then the legendary tier is there if you really truly want the last piece you’ll ever need.
Take me for instance. After finishing my ascended I don’t skin hunt a lot. What’s important to me is my guild hall now. because of the way the game is designed, I’m free to spend all my gold on hall upgrades and decorations because I know that my gear is “finished” in a stat-wise sense. Occasionally (VERY OCCASIONALLY) they actually add some skins you can obtain from means other than the cash shop and if I like the skin, I can go after it. If I don’t, I’m safe to ignore it.
It’s a good way to re-use some content for the living story I think, just like how LS instances are the “introduction” to the open world maps they become. Raids would be the “introductory instances” for these areas, and now that we have the aerodrome you could remove the open world raid portals when they’re “defeated” in the LW chronology so its a seamless transition like any other zone, but still have the ability to do the raids from the aerodrome.
The world maps they become would be sort of like exploration mode in dungeons, what the map becomes after the main story is finished. I could imagine a lot of priory combing the current wing looking for clues, bad guys from “that faction” trying to retake the place from them, etc.
Would be a great way to save time and also to keep non-raiders “in the loop” as the NPCs there would know very well what went down.
Heck, they could even use the story-relative HoT conversation tech so that the NPCs in the new zones recognize you if you’ve cleared the wings and have conversation with it about you, like some of the HoT NPCs do.
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No, making a legendary requires either playing every part of the game, or paying someone else to do it for you. This has been the way of legendaries since launch. If you can’t be bothered to do it yourself, pay someone else for their effort. It’s a skin. You don’t need it. It isn’t preventing you from playing the content you do enjoy.
I play melee thief in HoT and have since launch. None of these mobs are impossible to melee, you just have to counter their mechanics, usually by way of learning the big, obvious tells and having stun breaks just as you would in any of the harder core content.
I’m all for making these sets avaliable through other means, laurels being the best option since its an existing system. That’s how they handled guild commendation trinkets and other stuff. You either do the “original” content, or you can wait a bit and get them with laurels less efficiently.
I like that raids have unique rewards, but this is GW2, and just like the first game content isn’t supposed to be a hard barrier to getting stat gear, but a soft barrier where its faster/cheaper to get the pieces through the direct path, but a secondary path always exists through trade, farming, or other methods.
How about one JP that has multiple chests with moving platforms (cranes, airships, etc.) and they move slowly enough that you could only reach one chest per, say, 5 minutes.
They did make a pretty big deal of adding proper moving platform support to the game with HoT, though they only really used it at the tail end on one story mission, unless they’ve used it in the recent raid paths I haven’t had a chance to visit yet.
As I understand it, the game couldn’t properly process moving platforms before for stuff like ground targeting and persistant effects, so they made some engine updates (which broke SAB)
I’d like to see the aerodrome, or somewhere, make use of the new tech for a JP or minidungeon with crazy moving platforms for sure.
Remove them from the game. Offer black lion tickets as gem store purchases. Stop relying on predatory and willfully value obfuscating microtransactions to exploit whales and in stead offer more fair up front values and pricing information to encourage more users to make smaller individual purchases rather than subsidizing the majority at the expense of the minority.
Change ingame key rewards/drops to scraps.
Display real currency amounts alongside all gem prices in your region’s currency.
Basically, adopt an ethical microtransaction model. Like GW1.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
I am not saying that Anet violated anything. I am saying they had it right at launch. I have 18 characters and plan to make more. It really gets old going to designated points over and over. It really is silly too. I could be in the heart of Maguuma doing event chains day after day after day and never progress. In fact, my character could be in the jungle for years and never progress unless he did these specific tasks. Years in the jungle and learned nothing…… 3 seconds of communing and bam wow I know things now!!!
So what you’re saying is you rolled 18 characters and you don’t like doing the same thing over and over?
I am honestly confused.
That’s my point. Nobody is complaining about microtransactions. The problem is the sheer volume of microtransaction items when compared to items with similar reward value obtainable by playing the game.
At this point more than half of the post-launch item rewards (and let’s not mince words, skins are items in GW2, that is the primary function of acquiring items long term) can not be obtained by playing the game, and must be obtained, directly or indirectly, by someone purchasing gems.
There’s nothing special about a set that can only be acquired by dunking gems in to a slot machine.
Special skins require effort on the part of those that wield them. Special skins are tied to specific pieces of content. Special skins pay out unique rewards for unique challenges.
No part of anything sold in the gem store is special. It’s cannibalizing the efforts of an excellent art team to nickel and dime a user base because Anet continues to lean on the tired excuse that gem store items are “just cosmetic” despite cosmetics being the primary reward mechanism for GW2.
Count the number of armor sets added in the fifty dollar expansion you sold. Count the weapon skins. Got the count?
Now count the number of outfits and skins exclusively obtainable via gems since the release of HoT.
This is not what your player base asked for when it asked for expansions. You built this IP around a paradigm that allowed successful sales of one expansion to fund the next. That was what people wanted when they asked for expansions.
Transitioning to an expansion model was something your user based asked for because they wanted to pay you for quality content with a requisite expectation of unique rewards for that content. People wanted an expansion model because they were tired of being excessively pushed toward the gem store to get the vast majority of “rewards” in the game.
The excuse that these items are “merely cosmetic” is not a satisfactory one in the item reward system offered by GW2.
If you continue down this path, you will face another round of poor sales for the next expansion. People did not want expansions tacked on top of an even more predatory microtransaction shop. They wanted expansions so they could support development and spend less on microtransactions.
What you’ve delivered since the release of HoT is content largely bereft of reward, and reward largely bereft of any meaning other than farming gold or whipping out a credit card.
You are abusing your user base to cover a monetization problem you created by not presenting expected value for the price of your expansion. A problem largely created by leaning so hard on the cash shop in the first place.
These items are not “merely cosmetic” because the PRIMARY REWARD PARADIGM OF THE REWARD SYSTEMS THE GAME IS DESIGNED AROUND IS PURELY COSMETIC
The argument you are not selling stats/items falls flat for this very reason. You are selling items with the exact same appeal to the user as those they are encouraged to acquire ingame, and furthermore you are willfully not offering even a tenth of that volume of the core reward mechanism to players to earn by actually taking part in the challenges designed to be rewarding
Players do not want to play content simply to shuffle gold in to a gem trade. Players want to play content to earn rewards. You deliver quality content. The reliance on microtransactions was perfectly acceptable in the old monetization model, as it was your only revenue stream.
However, you did not change revenue streams. You simply tacked an additional cost on to your existing revnue stream, expected everyone to be okay with it, and then were apperantly blind sided when your expansion did not sell as well as expected.
When you tout gliding as a core feature of your expansion and then have the audactiy so tell players on the day on release they can’t actually earn glider skins, but they can pay you gems for them… that sends a clearer message than any collection of pretty words strung together in a forum post.
This weapon set sends a similarly clear message. You care far more about players purchasing gems, directly or indirectly, than you care about the satisfaction of your user base.
As you have illustrated, it is unimportant which method players use to purchase gems, as the end result is the same. Trying to dress it up as a service to players is pure spin, and its not even very well executed spin.
You already have a system in place to cater to people with excess tickets. You specifically designed the black lion skin system to be self adjusting, reward immediate purchase, and control ticket hoarding through scaling up the price of older skin sets.
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I’d say it wasn’t the commander’s fault at all.
The commander can’t fail a lane. The people in the lane can fail a lane.
If the lane fails, its the fault of the whole lane, not one guy with a shiny icon over his head.
I could put on a tag in DS and stand around singing I’m a little tea pot for three hours and the map can still finish just fine.
Commander tags don’t give people authority. They just give them an icon and a chat channel. if the lane failed it was due to the rest of the people in the lane being too stupid to do it without a commander.
Look, If I can deal with the obnoxious timer based cluster kitten that is Temple of the Silent Storm, you can deal with a couple NPCs.
Best map is obviously Foefire.
If you’re a WvW player, you can unlock the elite specs via scrolls of heroics.
This.
If you’re salty about having to do PvE for it then… like… don’t.
So you’re saying you don’t want the AP back pieces that require even more AP? I mean if I were you I’d want an awesome white halo to go with all that glowy armor.
Who cares?
This game needs more rare drops. Stats are easily obtainable so the only thing that makes loot worthwhile or interesting at all is its rarity or prerequisite difficulty conditions.
Stronghold is a great idea with a serious flaw. Players should ne be able to kill guards. Because of this and this alone, virtually all stronghold matches just become about which team can successfully bomb rush all the way to the lorn in the first couple minutes of the game.
Stronghold was a lot of fun before people figured out rushing was the optimal strategy and the relative uselessness of archers.
If we had to use archers to kill the guards (similar to needing creeps to kill towers in the early game of traditional MOBAs) the game would be a lot more fun.
As it is now, you could almost just take out all the the doors and the game would play almost exactly the same.
Again, Anet does not use the gem store as a balancing lever for the gold economy. There are numerous public websites that have tracked the exchange rates since launch.
The gem store is and has only ever been adjusted for the real money to gems economy. More desirable gem store items are directed at encouraging money>gems purchases. Whether those purchases are made with the intent of trading the gems for gold at a better rate, or buying the items directly is not a consideration for Anet as the goal of time limited sales are rollouts of new gem store items is always players purchasing more gems.
Gold/Gem conversion rates are not an issue Anet cares about, because it is a system designed primarily to sell more gems, not a system designed to allow players to avoid buying gems.
Gold/Gem conversions are very much important to Anet if they make a profit from the gem store. Think about how much gold has been saved up after everyone bought what they wanted in weapons and armor. The amount of people who are sitting on their gold has increased with time. Its important to remember that The gem/gold conversion rate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. changes to both how much gold can be made in game, and how often people buy items at the gem store play a role.
Just imagine if everyone made 20g extra a day, what do you think that would do to the gold to gem conversion rate?
It would skyrocket to meet the new standard and the actualy ingame effort required to buy one gem from a paying customer would remain unchanged. Just like how handing out extra gold for dailies and generally increasing rewards across the gam resulted in a larger spike in gold prices than simply adding rotating sales alone.
It wouldn’t change the amount of gems purchased by a significant margin at all.
Except for the part where WvW, as a game mode, is specifically designed to encourage and reward “blobs” by rewarding based on personal participation rather than map-wide victory conditions.
WvW was always designed around blob fights. Just because some blobs appear more skilled than others doesn’t change that. If people cared about controlling blobs they wouldn’t have complained so hard about the desert BLs, which were almost completely anti-blob maps.
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
Just out of curiosity how would you break the existing revenant into 8 distinct elite specs?
It’s not a 1:1 conversion, but rather a balancing and R&D consideration.
The various new tech they built, new resource system, etc. For instance the entire ventari design could have easily been an elite spec for another class, as could the central mechanics of the other legends. The concepts behind several of the weapon skills, etc.
Basically, what I’m saying is a reasonably similar amount of design work could have been put toward second elite specs rather than adding a new class which creates more, not less, difficult balance considerations in the future.
Elite specs are at a basic level a great idea. They’re a good way to add skills and abilities to the game that are easier to balance since they only ever have to “play nice” with established parts of core classes. Adding a completely new class requires a lot of reinventing the wheel with far less overall benefit. Revnant needed up being largely redundant with, like the other elite specs, only one really compelling build option that in itself also requires an elite spec.
It is my personal opinion that what Revnant adds to the game in terms of build diversity and ongoing usable content is just not that compelling. Its core design is even more strict in terms of build options than any existing class, and thus far more difficult to design for going forward. Compared to a second elite spec for existing classes, a similar number of skills, weapons, and art assets could have been designed, tested, and created and had much better results for the longevity of the game, and would have more accuraurately showcased the new Elite Spec system the expansion introduced as the future of GW2.
The second expansion would have been the time to add a class, if at all. At that point people would be used to the tradeoffs in the elite spec system, and adding one option as an alternative to two others would have been valuable build diversity. Adding one option in a system that’s really designed around having at least two isn’t an option. It’s a mandate, and Revnant as a class suffers from it as much as the existing core classes.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
Again, Anet does not use the gem store as a balancing lever for the gold economy. There are numerous public websites that have tracked the exchange rates since launch.
The gem store is and has only ever been adjusted for the real money to gems economy. More desirable gem store items are directed at encouraging money>gems purchases. Whether those purchases are made with the intent of trading the gems for gold at a better rate, or buying the items directly is not a consideration for Anet as the goal of time limited sales are rollouts of new gem store items is always players purchasing more gems.
Gold/Gem conversion rates are not an issue Anet cares about, because it is a system designed primarily to sell more gems, not a system designed to allow players to avoid buying gems.
I wouldn’t be so quick to place all the blame on Colin. It could very well be that most of it he had no choice on. We just don’t know.
As director, making those choices was literally his only job. He had a grand vision, and a compliant publisher. He did in fact carry out the grand experiments he intended to. I don’t fault him for trying, but we now know that those experiments failed.
Moving forward Anet needs to own that. This kind of failure isn’t a cause for shame, but failing to learn from it is.
I don’t fault Colin for trying something new. He was responsible for perhaps the grandest public experiments in shaking up the genre anyone has tried. It is unfortunate that the community was repeatedly nonreceptive to those experiments and each was met with a desire for more of what they already had in stead of genuine enthusiasm for the new things he was trying.
Anet is now past that point. HoT’s entire design ethos was stop experimenting, start building an easily extensible, sustainable future building upon lessons learned about what works and what does not.
Unfortunately the one place where those lessons are being most successfully applied are in the realm of monetization rather than customer satisfaction.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: PopeUrban.2578
All balance moving forward is supposed to be done through the lens of elite specs.
The problem is that they released an expansion with only one elite spec. The balancing lever is elite specs as choices relative to one another, however Anet decided to waste time and effort on adding a completely unnecessary class rather than a second elite spec.
By design, there was no way a “core” spec was ever going to remain truly competitive against an elite spec simply because Elite specs are designed as singletons, and core specs were moved to supporting those specs. In order for future additions to remain balanced, it is necessary that the things you can combine with them be of generally lesser power level.
Had Anet scrapped the entire concept of Revnant and focused their efforts on Elite specs we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Everything that revnant has and does could have easily been packaged in to second elite specs for existing classes, and nobody would have caared that they didn’t have another class to roll because they’d have effectively as many or more new build options.
TLDR: Elite specs are intended power creep relative to core specs, because they are intended to be balanced choices. however, HoT did not release choices of elite specs, and thus they are simply required upgrades with no build diversity. The reason this happenned is because adding “a new class” on the box was deemed more important than the long term health of the game or the utility of the expansion content for existing players.
Maybe there should be a vip option so anet can make more money, its hard for me to believe they make allot of money off the item shop, there isnt that many cosmetics, toys, and etc at once they do change them up, once people spend money on bag slots, bank spaces and etc what else is there to get other then cosmetics?
It isn’t that they need more money. It’s that they are hilariously fragmented for a studio of their size. At any given time they have far more projects under way than they have people to work on them, and for this reason they don’t push out updates for any part of their game fast enough.
More money won’t fix the underlying problem. Management of the studio, as a whole, has too many teams on too many projects with not enough people on any given team. Giving them more money in that environment without more cuts like the unpopular decision to halt legendaries won’t change a thing.
Everybody liked Colin’s smiling face, but he drove Arenanet in to the ground and Mo is trying to pick up his pieces.
Anet built a successful franchise by being realistic about its limitations, and focusing on leveraging existing systems with minimal systemic updates every expansion, and leaning on a core game that was well designed.
Anet damaged that franchise by spending years reinventing the wheel in all of the experimental gameplay, massive systemic updates, and multiple false starts since.
They don’t need more money. They need more agile management and a more realistic view of the limitations of the skilled staff they already employ. A money shaped band-aid will not fix the problems Anet has.
Mo is doing a good job filling Colin’s recently vacated shoes. He’s making logical cuts and actively engaging the player base. That needs to continue with whomever he hires to permanently fill that position.
You people should start seeing this as a problem. It’s going to come to a point where only farmers will be able to purchase anything from the gem store while the more casual set of players won’t. I play this game for fun, I try my best to get gold, but it takes time. Getting 160g for the old gem amount was already tough, but now it’s narly impossible.
That’s the point.
The gold to gems conversion system wasn’t put there because Anet wants you to buy gems for gold. It’s there because it provides additional incentives for people that buy gems with money to do so, and so they can say “well you can acquire those items by playing the game”
Anet does not now, now will they ever care about the price of gems to gold conversion because they set that system up specifically to encourage buys to buy gems, not to encourage gold traders to avoid doing so.
It is a self adjusting system. When less people are selling gems, the price goes up, which encourages people to buy gems rather than trade gold for them. The fact that the gold price is increasing is an intended part of its design. If the number of gold traders versus gem buyers gets out of whack, the exchange rate is explicitly designed to make it unattractive to continue to trade gold for gems and extremely attractive to buy them for personal use or sale in stead. If the value of gems drops so low that they’re only attractive as gold trades, the system is designed to raise the price due to less supply so that people are, again, encouraged to buy gems.
Nothing in the cash shop was ever designed to be acquired by simply playing the game. That’s why nothing in the cash shop is, by the strictest definition, required to do so. This allows them to lean extremely heavily on the cash shop while still technically claiming that you don’t have to fork over your cash for those items.
They could be producing more expansion content and offering fair trade under the new model. It was a successful model for Anet for GW1. They chose to in stead rely even more heavily on the cash shop, release a lackluster expansion, and then double down again on the cash shop to make up for its poor sales.
Expecting a change in this behavior while financially supporting this model won’t make gems more accessible. Nor will it result in improved expansions going forward. Complaining about the gold price of gems while still encouraging others to buy gems, or buying them yourself will not change things.
You need to make sure ground targeting is set to “normal” and not any of the fast/instant options.
Once you do that you can hit the place key to get a preview, and rotate that preview with RMB before you place it.
Somebody at naet needs to make targeting automatically set itself to normal when you neter place mode and revert back to whatever you setting is when you need it, because it’s kind of annoying to have to constantly go in to options :P
TBH, might and fury are both really boring buffs that just pad numbers. If we’re going to reinvent the wheel, we should look at the whole wheel, not just PS. The boon/condition system as a whole has some interesting effects, and some effects that just pad stats. Stat padding is always going to be preferred because it doesn’t take any additional work to get the value out of, so straight up stat padding buffs are always going to be the most desirable.
Taking PS out of the equation just shifts the meta to the next, most reliable source of flat stat buffs. That is to say “how do I get the most +damage with the lowest fail chance due to user error”
They are consistently killing off characters to make room for cheaper voice actors.
Also because the part line is that all of the cuts made to HoT were made to enforce a sense of urgency in the storyline and not, you know, because it was too kitten expensive.
The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.
I think that virtually everyone would agree with this in principle, but requiring the same “build and playstyle adjustments” for 20 of the 25 t4 scales also seems to be off the mark. It’s not really “adapting” if it’s what you do 80% of the time.
As a daredevil, I have zero problem with the instability that halves end regen. I fail to see how this is any different. I swap a few traits and utilities, by damage and defense is compromised, yet I can still complete the encounters. Certain instabilities will hit certain classes/builds harder than others. it is simply not possible to design an instability (or any content really) that treats the myriad number of builds available exactly equally. That’s why its group content. When your build is severely down, another one is covering for you.
I’m not saying it’s inappropriate to have certain classes/playstyles be impacted more by certain instabilities, or even that they need to be “fair” in any sense. I’m saying that it’s stupid and lazy to have the same instability for every one of the last 20 scales, especially when those 20 scales encompass 80% of fotm play for players who only do dailies (which is most people).
You say “when your build is severely down, another one is covering for you”. Yeah, and for scales 81-100 if your build/class sucks against boon thieves then you have to be covered by something else. In general there’s no problem with having to switch builds to face various challenges, and obviously it isn’t impossible to get through t4 fotm with guardian or other classes bad against boon thieves. But even if you can complete the encounter, it gets old when your favorite class/build is subpar for almost everything you do in fractals, and it gets old steamrolling with the exact same comp every single time because of the way instabilities for t4 scales are set up.
If it were up to me there would be a different instability (or set of instabilities) for every scale in t4, or else the instabilities for each would be randomized daily.
Absolutely true, and furthermore a lot of the new instabilities are just plain less interesting than the old ones. Boon this, condition that, but we’re missing the interesting ones. In fact, here’s a reddit thing where I collected (and invented) a bunch from a couple separate threads.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3wv4ak/collected_compendium_of_player_designed_fractal/
I’d much prefer a system in which instabilities were tiered by difficulty, and the fractal level simly adjusted the difficulty tier and number of instabilities present. having the same one for 10-20 fractals is a bit dull no matter what the balance is like.
Fractals are about randomness after all, shouldn’t the instabilities reflect that?
Some of those are really clever, others are horrifyingly unbalanced.
I can’t claim credit for all of them, but in a certain sense I think some instabilities really should be horribly unbalanced, assuming that you have enough you’re virtually guaranteed different sets each day for dailies.
You sure do sound like a sleazy salesman pope. etc.
Not saying I like it or agree with it. You’re absolutely right, and I’ve said several times that the best sales tactic should be offering a stand out product. However, I’m also a realist, and it’s pretty darn obvious how Anet’s monetization strategy works at this point.
For the record, I have worked in sales, and I sucked at it. Mostly because I say stuff like this to customers, and am usually responsible for a lot of lost sales.
They’re not interested in your repeat business, and they’re not concerned with user retention. Arenanet has gone full on mobile game marketing strategy. Get the new users, pump them for all they’re worth, and discard. That’s why the game is a far better deal for new accounts than existing ones, that’s the entire reason ranked PvP is even a thing, and that’s why they don’t care.
Back in GW1, when the original anet crew broke with blizzard to start a new studio, they did it with a vision of routinely giving their customers excellent value, and using the proceeds to offer a similar package consistancy. Over time, GW1 began to play with microtransactions, As the data rolled in and the industry at large figured out microtransactions and nickel and diming could squeeze a disproportionate amount of money out of a fraction of the user base, they went for it. That money exceeded what could be made from selling high value-for-dollar packages to every user equally, and somewhere someone decided that repeat business was less valuable than new business, especially when, in an MMO, your product actually becomes more valuable and thus attractive to new users over time.
This happened all over the industry simply because the actual costs of producing what people expect in a AAA game have significantly increased, so the quickest solution was figuring out how to get more money to cover the cost and push out substantial amounts of content.
Anet got caught up in those metrics before the release of GW2, and decided microtransactions were the way of the future, and built a significant amount of their revenue model around them. Then, when users clamored for a return to the big, meaty expansions of the past, they decided that existing users were so acclimated to the fact, and new users expectations wouldn’t be damaged by their inclusion. So they did it. They ramped up costs to produce said expansions, which in turn meant a need to ramp up revenue. They already had a model in place where they could finely tune revenue streams, so in stead of doing the responsible thing for the consumer and swapping to the old expansion revenue model, they decided to continue with their new one and just slap it on top. That way they can say “we did what you wanted” while theoretically making more money to do it better.
That’s where there’s a suspicious lack of rewards in HoT. That’s why there was so much day one cosmetic microtransactions. Many of the outfits and skins we’ve seen since HoT were probably originally designed within the framework of HoT as ingame rewards. At some point someone said “the numbers don’t add up, we need more money to give our users what they say they want and to bring in new ones.”
So they sacrificed focus on the existing users in favor of new ones because, when you roll over the data, people complain about DLC, microtransactions, and being nickel and dimes, but the numbers show, overwhelmingly, that even the loudest complainers are perfectly willing to be nickel and dimed for a game they’re invested in than they are willing to part ways with the sunk cost fallacy and quit due to business practices they feel are exploitative or unfair.
Until consumers change how they actually behave, these practices will contine across the industry. People can complain about being treated unfairly as consumers all day, but as long as they’re still buying while complaining, nobody cares.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.
I think that virtually everyone would agree with this in principle, but requiring the same “build and playstyle adjustments” for 20 of the 25 t4 scales also seems to be off the mark. It’s not really “adapting” if it’s what you do 80% of the time.
As a daredevil, I have zero problem with the instability that halves end regen. I fail to see how this is any different. I swap a few traits and utilities, by damage and defense is compromised, yet I can still complete the encounters. Certain instabilities will hit certain classes/builds harder than others. it is simply not possible to design an instability (or any content really) that treats the myriad number of builds available exactly equally. That’s why its group content. When your build is severely down, another one is covering for you.
I’m not saying it’s inappropriate to have certain classes/playstyles be impacted more by certain instabilities, or even that they need to be “fair” in any sense. I’m saying that it’s stupid and lazy to have the same instability for every one of the last 20 scales, especially when those 20 scales encompass 80% of fotm play for players who only do dailies (which is most people).
You say “when your build is severely down, another one is covering for you”. Yeah, and for scales 81-100 if your build/class sucks against boon thieves then you have to be covered by something else. In general there’s no problem with having to switch builds to face various challenges, and obviously it isn’t impossible to get through t4 fotm with guardian or other classes bad against boon thieves. But even if you can complete the encounter, it gets old when your favorite class/build is subpar for almost everything you do in fractals, and it gets old steamrolling with the exact same comp every single time because of the way instabilities for t4 scales are set up.
If it were up to me there would be a different instability (or set of instabilities) for every scale in t4, or else the instabilities for each would be randomized daily.
Absolutely true, and furthermore a lot of the new instabilities are just plain less interesting than the old ones. Boon this, condition that, but we’re missing the interesting ones. In fact, here’s a reddit thing where I collected (and invented) a bunch from a couple separate threads.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3wv4ak/collected_compendium_of_player_designed_fractal/
I’d much prefer a system in which instabilities were tiered by difficulty, and the fractal level simly adjusted the difficulty tier and number of instabilities present. having the same one for 10-20 fractals is a bit dull no matter what the balance is like.
Fractals are about randomness after all, shouldn’t the instabilities reflect that?
Sounds like a perfect reward for collecting all the gold skins.
+1
Collections are fun. This sounds like a good one that wouldn’t even take that much work to create.
How about a gold infusion while we’re at it, to give your armor that gold sheen? Collect the gold capacitor, legendary backpack, and a fully upgraded catbot mini or something.
The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.
I think that virtually everyone would agree with this in principle, but requiring the same “build and playstyle adjustments” for 20 of the 25 t4 scales also seems to be off the mark. It’s not really “adapting” if it’s what you do 80% of the time.
As a daredevil, I have zero problem with the instability that halves end regen. I fail to see how this is any different. I swap a few traits and utilities, by damage and defense is compromised, yet I can still complete the encounters. Certain instabilities will hit certain classes/builds harder than others. it is simply not possible to design an instability (or any content really) that treats the myriad number of builds available exactly equally. That’s why its group content. When your build is severely down, another one is covering for you.
They can walk away while the damage they applied ticks. You can mitigate that damage while they walk away. Defending against condi damage is actually easier than spike damage because you have a much larger time to react.
“But what if I don’t have cleanses?”
What if you don’t have dodges, blocks, blinds, or invulns?
I fail to see the difference.
Everyone has dodges while blocks, blinds, and sometimes even invulns can be found on weapon skills whereas cleanses are typically on a utility.
Blocks, blinds, dodges, and invulns are equally effective at mitigating condition applications. Cleanses, however, can not mitigate direct damage. As well, not every class has the same access to condition output, cleanses, dodges, blocks, or blinds.
Typically, builds that are heavy on one are light on the other, and classes that are weak to conditions are specifically designed as such because they are naturally stronger against direct damage.
The difference is that people feel like they were cheated when they get killed by a DoT, despite being able to use all of the same defensive utilities to counter that damage on top of a host of skills specifically intended to counter only that damage.
Or, to put it simply, people don’t mind getting punished for failing to mitigate damage immediately, but have a real problem with getting punished for failing to dodge ten seconds later.
In the end, there’s not much difference. It takes no more or less skill to utilize or counter one method of damage versus the other, and in both cases there are varying levels of timing and accuracy requirements on both sides.
It is popped in huge vats and sold by vendors in the Queen’s Gauntlet during the minor league exhibitions when we’re all too busy fighting dragons and such to compete.
I mean they don’t need refreshments to draw a crowd when we major leaguers are on display.
Just kidding, there is a canon explanation:
Tyrian candy corn is actually magically transmuted from corn. Farmers must produce it year round to build up stockpiles large enough to keep the Mad King and his brat at bay for a couple weeks a year. The wizard Isgarren has an entire tower devoted to its production, complete with rivers of corn syrup and diminuative orange minions tasked with keeping the entire enchantment facility working. Year round pack bulls cross kryta under threat from centaurs, bandits, and all manner of threats to keep corn supply to Isgarren’s magical candy corn tower running.
Krytan farmers have done more to safeguard tyria than any fight against the elder dragons ever, and have toiled in obscurity for hundreds of years.
(edited by PopeUrban.2578)
It doesn’t really matter since there’s a built in limit to chest loot, and that limit is keys. The contents of those chests aren’t balanced around time spent to complete the meta. They’re balanced arount time spent to acquire those keys, which is constant. No matter how many alts you have you won’t acquire keys any faster than someone who only plays one character.
So why do we even open chests? Why not just give us the loot instead of keys? We could just spend map currency and instantly get the loot that was in the Grand Chests.
-1 internet points.
Because chests are loot in a shiny box that is a lot more fun to open.
Because clearing the meta event to get to them means there’s a point to the meta event, but unlike the SW meta it is not the only thing worth doing in the zone.
Because getting a bunch of loot from chests gives you more time to filter through the trash, sort your inventory, and throw away less stuff because you’re too busy getting beat in the face by monsters.
The proper response to this issue is asking a different question:
“Hey arenanet, I have this disconnect bug, can you fix that?”
It’s like you have a leaky boat and rather than getting someone to fix the boat, you’re looking for a bucket salesman.
The whole point of instabilities is to require you to make build and playstyle adjustemnts to counter them. If you refuse to adapt to instabilities, then you’re missing the whole point of high level fractals.
If you don’t think they’re grindy, don’t post.
That’s not how discussion forums work. You say your thing, people say their thing. They are allowed to disagree with you.
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