Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

And that’s how the most catastrophic failures occur.

What, by understanding scopes?

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but not significantly better than they currently offer, just significantly better than easy mode, which they always would. If hard modes raids do deserve a bump, and there seems to be evidence that they do, that is a separate matter entirely from easy mode, and would be equally true with or without easy mode.

Please refer me to this evidence

Ohoni.6057:

Then it should remain unchanged, end of story.

Not the point.

Ohoni.6057:

If the rewards for it are fair and that isn’t enough to fuel active participation then it would deserve to be a dead mode. How could you argue otherwise?

Because making dead modes is a waste of time?

Ohoni.6057:

The goal should not be to artificially inflate participation, it should be to ensure that “natural” participation levels are not reduced by unbalancedly low rewards.

GL finding a ‘balanced’ ‘low’ reward for scrubcore raids that gets people to actually keep running the content.

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t think there’s any hope whatsoever of individual GW2 raids “going forever.” That is just not a thing that will exist in reality.

Then raid development should be discontinued completely.

Ohoni.6057:

That’s just the nature of the beast. They are dealing with a relatively small population of players that will ever participate in hard mode raiding, and will shrink over time.

On what basis, man who has no interest in raiding or researching raiding?

Ohoni.6057:

Perhaps a little, but only by offering freedom to players who didn’t particularly want to be part of the hardcore scene in the first place.

Hardcore is an imaginary arbitration that you’ve made. There’s no reason to conclude that you’ve accurately pegged what constitutes a ‘hardcore’ raid, especially considering that you don’t seem to have ever done it.

Oh, and people can opt out of the hardcore scene already. Nobody’s holding a gun to your head and forcing you to raid.

Ohoni.6057:

Their participation in the overall raid process gives MORE justification for spending resources developing the raids, not less.

Which is bad. I don’t want all of ANet’s resources to be funneled into raids. I want them to have other content on the table as well.

I don’t raid in this game; I doubt I’d be interested in raiding an easy mode. If they were to spend even more of their limited resources on raids, the game would be significantly worse for me.

Ohoni.6057:

No. I don’t care about you. I care about the topic, I speak to the topic, I do not speak only to you.

I thought we had something Ohoni. A real bond. But if that’s how you feel… I suppose the problem’s me, then. I’m sorry. I thought our relationship was deeper than that.

But nah look if you’re making rebuttals making generalized rebuttals is just boring. Directly refute what I’m saying.

Ohoni.6057:

Content inevitably dies.

Why people still running Orr then? Didn’t get the memo that content should die at some point?

Why Foefire and Niflhel still most popular maps? Out with the old and in with the new, I say. Stronghold and Skyhammer ho!

And I must say, I pity the fools who want Alpine Borderlands back.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, anyone who believes that some variation on “learn to play” will resolve anything here has completely missed the point. You can say it all you like, it’s just never going to change anything.

Rubber glue. Who has missed the point? You.

The point is the distinction between the words you are saying. “Capable” and “willing” are different words. You have made it amply clear that you are not willing to engage the raids as they are regardless of whether you are capable of doing so. Which you are.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, I’ve been very clear about the specifics of my proposal because I believe that it is both the best outcome AND the easiest to implement if they intend to implement anything at all. I’m flexible in the details so that it would fit their goals, but I’m tired o people insisting that I have “no idea how it works” when I’m making very grounded proposals.

“making grounded proposals”
You have a total of 7 hours of raiding under your belt with no kills
How could you possibly have an estimation of what constitutes a grounded proposal

Ohoni.6057:

Could they make dungeons popular again? Sure, but it would involve basically creating NEW content there, involving environmental artists, mob artists, new animations and AI patterns for the bosses, major changes to the visuals and gameplay of the dungeons, which no matter how you try to frame it is WELL beyond the scope of anything I’ve been recommending for easy mode raids (and in fact I’ve fought against such changes).

Someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.

Ohoni.6057:

You can argue that easy mode raids would take more work than I believe, you can do that all you like, but there is no way that easy mode raids, as I’ve proposed them, would take more work than overhauling even one dungeon to a state that people would actually care about.

There’s a pretty easy way that scrubcore raids would take more time than overhauling dungeons; they have to implement the system. What takes more work, retuning or retuning and adding a system?

And again; someone who has admitted they are not a regular dungeon runner claims they have a clear understanding of what would revive dungeons.

Ohoni.6057:

We haven’t had them in GW2 before, so there’s nothing to research. They’ve existed in other games, perhaps, but other games behave VERY differently than GW2, and the communities rarely see eye to eye.

How can you possibly have any contextual understanding of what makes raids different in GW2 from other games when you have neither played raids in GW2 or other games for any reasonable amount of time, have scored no kills, and refuse to research them?

You said you made grounded proposals. Grounded in what?… Your stunning in-depth analysis of GW2 raiding, which you’ve done 7 hours on and have made no headway with? Your examination of other games which doesn’t exist? I’d wager that just about everything you know about other games’ raid models was told to you by me.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m presenting them with a scenario that would satisfy me, and I believe satisfy most players currently unsatisfied with the current options, in what I believe to be the most efficient manner.

Why? LINK YOUR DATA

Ohoni.6057:

If they have better ideas then that’s great, I’m just saying it doesn’t have to be this whole huge thing that would take away a ton of resources.

Yes, I’m certain your assessment of the resources required to implement something for a company you don’t work at in a field that you probably don’t work in is bang on.

Ohoni.6057:

We don’t know how their QA teams are currently being used, but since they’ve brought in player guilds in the past to test raids, and since as “easy mode” raids these would be much less sensitive, they could similarly employ player teams to test out the content. All they’d need to do is make sure they basically worked, since unlike the hard modes, the core elements of the content would already have passed testing, and the tuning would not need to be nearly so fine. And again, if it releases and bugs happen that cause various issues, it’s far less of a big deal than if it happens to the hard mode versions, since nobody really cares about “firsts” or anything like that.

Again, if you don’t work at ANet, how would you possibly know what kind of work needs to go into their QA? Are you a QA guy at ANet? Are you a QA guy at another games company? Are you a QA guy in any professional capacity?

Nevermind that it doesn’t actually address the point that there are better places to spend those resources.

Ashen.2907:

I would rather see the resources spent on dungeons.

Hypairion.9210:

same, rather than useless easy mode raid…

PAY UP OHONI
momma just bought her 5 acc-wide slots and she needs some cash in the kitty

Tontonino.9736:

And nobody knows what is going to happen afterwards!

Enlighten us!

(ffs)

they will make a balance sweep
they will test the changes over the interim period
the next season will start about a month after the end of the season

Ohoni.6057:

Well I said that, I would play it with relatively minimal loot to progress towards my legendary armor, and once I had no need for that anymore, I’m not exactly sure how much generic loot would be necessary to keep me running it regularly, it would really depend on what else is going on at the time. I can say what I would want, but I’m not the only factor to consider, and as someone who doesn’t regularly Fractal or Dungeon, I’m not the best audience to target those factors towards.

Not answering the question.

Ohoni.6057:

Well, it’s relevant when we’re comparing easy to hard rewards. If the argument is that raid rewards have to be X amount better than easy or nobody will run hard, and also factor in that the rewards to each would need to be strong enough to justify running them even after achieving all the unique loot, then the system must be viewed as a whole, not each segment in isolation from the rest.

It’s not relevant. The relation between the two is the only item of import. Viewing the entire system is just a waste of time when we only need to look at specific pieces.

Ohoni.6057:

No. They do not need to be given any benefit for the sake of enabling easy mode. They are not “owed” anything for “allowing” easy mode to happen, that is not their choice. Now I think it is reasonable that they can have a certain higher level of reward, but if a reasonable amount of reward is not sufficient, if they are given enough that they make significantly more than in any other activity and they’re still like “I’m going to need more than that if you want me running hard mode raids,” then clearly there’s no actual audience for hard mode raids in the first place and they’re just chasing the best possible loot. If that’s the case, then why bother bribing them to do content they don’t want to do?

Yes they do, you said so yourself. Hard mode raids would need to be provide significantly better rewards to be justifiable over scrubcore raids.

Ohoni.6057:

No, have the reward payout for hard mode be FAIR, have it so that if there were no loot in the game at all, if every activity were purely “what do you want to do today,” then players who chose “raid” under those conditions would also choose “raid” with the loot being offered here, but there’s no need for more than that, no need to convince people to raid who would at all prefer to be doing something else.

The reward payout for hard mode already is fair.
The patterns of behavior that we’ve seen in the game and are currently seeing heavily imply that going drastically beneath this point will just leave a dead mode.

Ohoni.6057:

What is this CE you speak of? In any case, I staked out “three times the loot” as the target, so even if easy mode offered 1g per kill, that would make hard mode 3g per kill, not 8g. Still, I think even less could keep easy mode rolling for quite a while, as player chase the legendary components for the better part of a year or more (like dungeon tokens), and the novelty of the new content. The generic rewards aren’t encouragement to do it like in dungeons, they are just a token payment to keep the work/time balance.

CE is cutting edge. The double your gold thing. Idk what it’s called in GW2.
It doesn’t need to keep rolling ‘for a while’. It needs to keep rolling FOREVER. Temporary content and temporary fixes is what got GW2 in the mess it’s in.

Ohoni.6057:

People talk about the demise of dungeons as if it’s some great shock or tragedy, which it was neither. This is three year old content we’re talking about, the shock is that they remained active for so long, not that they’re dead lately. I don’t expect raids of any difficulty to remain high demand content indefinitely, I just expect it to remain in high demand over a reasonable period of time to properly return on the investment.

I’m not people. I’m me. Look at what I’ve said. Don’t care what other people say. Talk to me.
You’re completely missing the point by dismissing it that way. If you’re shocked that it lasted so long then you’ve got your priorities out of whack. Content should not die.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, any problems easy mode would have retaining players would only be WORSE if only hard mode existed. The players capable of it would earn all the unique rewards much faster than in easy mode, and the players who were not capable of it would never engage the content at all.

Simply put, no. If they provide good material rewards, which they do, and players can clear the content, which they can, people will run them for quite a while. There’s not much of a reason not to do raids over other content if you’re capable of it, even if you’ve got all the shiny skins.

And you’re conflating ‘capable’ with ‘willing’. You’re perfectly capable of doing the raids as they are currently. You’re just not willing. Try learning how the game works and how to gear and spec your character. That’s all this comes down to; “I don’t want to do this content at this level”. And you’re not even the target audience anyway by your own admission so why should they bother satiating you beyond trying to give you a sugar rush

Ohoni.6057:

I’d take that bet. I bet if you asked people who ran dungeons regularly before the nerfs: Which would you prefer, that they take the time to make an easymode version of the raids that is comparable in difficulty to dungeons, or that they spend that same amount of time updating the existing dungeons in some way (which would amount to basically tweaking some damage numbers on the bosses of 1-2 existing dungeons, tops)?

This entire assessment underlines the issue here. You don’t understand what’s going on. You’re making assumptions about the resources required. You’ve got specific demands that don’t fit any kind of good change. I don’t know if you’ve even realized that implementing multiple modes on its own takes resources.

Ohoni.6057:

I bet they would choose the new raid experience over tweaking some numbers on the old dungeons.

1. The ones who still play are probably already enjoying the new raid experience. A scrubcore mode wouldn’t do anything for them.
2. Scrubcore raids are nowhere near the same experience as real raids.

Ohoni.6057:

Now, if you offered them meaningful upgrades to the old dungeons, like entirely new paths, with entirely new combat mechanics, that they might want, but that would be magnitudes more work than anything I’ve suggested involving raids, even for one dungeon, much less all of them.

Yes, making good changes takes a longer time. I’m aware. That’s kind of the point. If you’re going to make a change, make it a good one and make it a longer one. Scrubcore raids are an easy, quick fix that cause damage in the long run. If you did your research, you’d know this.

Ohoni.6057:

And Gaile still hasn’t gotten back to us with QA different figure on how much time it would take. All she said was that on a completely different game that she was following, a completely different process than what I was talking about might take more time than I was assuming. And why not ignore the QA work? I mean, that’s work, it needs to take place, but it’s a separate team, it doesn’t slow down the efforts of the people actually building and tweaking gameplay systems.

Gaile never said she’d get back to you. She just told you to direct your feedback to something that’s actually relevant. Telling the devs specifically what you want is kinda pointless considering they’re far more aware of what resources they have available than you and what direction they want to go in than you.
QA resources are limited. Saying “QA is a separate team!” is irrelevant because you’re still spending resources that could otherwise go into better places. There are at least two better places to put them that are currently in the pipeline.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m personally very flexible on the generic loot for easy mode raids. I don’t really have a solid grasp on what the community would demand. I’m just saying, based on what people have said of the hard modes once you’ve got them on farm, I’m assuming an average easy mode run of Spirit Vale, start to finish, would be about 30-45 minutes or so? And of comparable difficulty to a mid-tier dungeon or low end Fractal.

So given that, if you want people to do it just long enough to get their Legendary, and then bounce, then you could have relatively minimal generic rewards. If you want it to be something people add to their rotations even after getting their Legendary, then it would need to be roughly equivalent to a dungeon/fractal of comparable length and difficulty. Just slightly more, perhaps, to account for taking just slightly longer to form a party (once the LFG has been fixed).

Saying “I don’t know about the community” is a copout. Tell us what you want. It’s your easy mode, it’s your baby, you tell us.
Yeah like I said, CoF1 pre-nerf. 1g. People ran that in that time and got that reward and were happy with it. A bit more in reality, but I can’t be bothered doing the rounding.

Ohoni.6057:

Hard mode raids could offer way more than that, I don’t think many would have too much of a problem with that.

And keep in mind, any arguments made on “well if the generic rewards for easy aren’t good enough then nobody will run it after getting their Legendary,” well that’s true, so you do want the rewards to be “enough,” and the same applies equally to hard mode raiders, who will be getting their Legendaries earlier than easy mode. So if legendary rewards are the only draw for hard mode, then hard mode would be a ghost town way before easy mode would be.

That’s beside the point. If the raids need their rewards buffed beyond the legendary items, raids will get their rewards buffed. But it’s irrelevant for the sake of the comparative reward rates.

Ohoni.6057:

I think it’s important that the higher the “total reward” gets, the more of it is shifted from liquid gold to fungible assets. I mean, if it’s ever determined that 16g is a reasonable drop from a given boss (and I’m not sure where you’re getting that), it should not come in coin, that should cap out in the 4-5 range, but rather most of it should be given out in stable materials, resellable exotic gear, things like that. The total amount of wealth gained would be appropriately high, but the liquid currency added would be relatively low. Since relatively few players would be earning these amounts, it shouldn’t even have a huge impact on the resale markets, so long as they choose the right markets to use for this purpose.

That’s true, it could be moved into fungible assets, but that does not change that this group of people would be given a pretty huge economic benefit for the sake of enabling an easy mode. Turning 8g into 20 ecto is ezpz and limits the inflation factor, but they’d still be gaining pretty massive economic power as a direct result of easy mode being added.

Ohoni.6057:

I think your high-end here is getting a little preposterous. If you have to bribe players that heavily into doing hard mode raids, then the indication would be that hard mode raids are just not a thing anyone actually wants to do and they should be scrapped. The rewards should be fair, such that someone inclined to hard mode raid will feel that his time was well spent, not a bribe to convince people that hard mode raiding is the only reasonable activity to pursue.

No, I don’t necessarily think that people need to be bribed that heavily into doing hard mode raids. YOU think that people need to be bribed that heavily into hard mode raids. You have made these projections yourself; you thought 25s was a reasonable reward for an easy mode raid while 2g is the current reward. 1g is an actual reward that people will run for; you carry the numbers forward, 2g per kill becomes 8g per kill. It gets doubled during CE. Full clears with more wings increase the total amount of money earnt.

And I agree. It shouldn’t be a bribe that convinces people to think that hard mode raiding is the only avenue worth pursuing. This is the problem. To actually create rewarding, distinct easy modes and hard modes that will not die out on their own, you need to create this kind of incentive structure that distorts the players’, and more importantly the devs’, efforts.

Ohoni.6057:

I believe it would take considerably less work to make an easy mode raid than it would take to make a vanilla dungeon relevant again, but assuming that it would take an equivalent effort, DEFINITELY easy mode raid. I mean, there’s not even a question there. The vanilla dungeons have been out for years now, people have run them to death, whereas the raids are new content with more interesting mechanics to them. I mean this one’s a no-brainer, obviously easy mode raids. Who do you think would choose otherwise?

…Anybody who likes dungeons?
I’d choose otherwise. I think a lot of people would choose otherwise. I’ve already explained the damages that irrelevant dungeons cause.

Again these projections of how much work it takes are completely off base. Gaile’s already told you that you don’t know what you’re talking about if you aren’t an ANet dev. That you previously said “well just ignore the QA work” is exhibit A-Z.

Linken.6345:

why do easy mode have to have any liquid gold at all they run them for the legendary pre how ever long that take 8-15 months

I’m not suggesting it, I’m just pointing out the flaw in the logic.

If it has no rewards beyond legendary components, then it shouldn’t exist because once everyone has it, the easy mode will be dead, and that’s wasted work.

Wasted work is why LS1 was terrible for the game, and is broadly a big issue for the game. ANet is making an MMO and they’re banking on content which the player base will have a reason to go to until the day the servers shut down- the entire reason not to add an easy mode is that one way or the other, one mode will be wasted work.

While I wouldn’t be bold enough to wager a definitive guess… The amount of work that would go into building an easy mode could be resources spent on retuning a dungeon back into relevancy. What would you prefer?

metabattle.com

ask people what their builds are, compare them to the metabattle ones, ask why they make differences

really, a decent loose standard is just having them run stat spreads, gear and traits that make sense together

Ohoni.6057:

That’s why you skew that ratio strongly in hard mode’s favor.

Ohoni.6057:

The niche I need filled is the “easy mode raid” niche, and no amount of other content, no matter how appreciated, would remove that particular gap.

Here’s the problem.

What’s a reasonably strong skew?
You posted earlier that 25s with 10% the solid rewards (which becomes reasonably negligible) was a reasonable liquid money reward for scrubcore; is x8/x16 a reasonable skew as it would be under that model? I figure it would be, otherwise you would have not made this estimate.

The basis for a reasonable amount of gold to grant for the amount of time invested (10/15 minutes is a reasonable expectation for each boss in a comfortably easy mode) is probably around the amount that a CoF1 run granted; 1g26, iirc, not including the liquid rewards. Probably prune that down to 1g; CoF1 was overly rewarding and it makes the math easier. If you go below that mark, at some point, everyone will already have the secondary rewards like legendary progression and bonus skins, and they’ll not bother. It’s not a sustainable model.

Should individual boss kills therefore be granting 1g in liquid rewards in easy mode?
Should individual boss kills therefore be granting 8g in liquid rewards in hard mode?
Should individual boss kills therefore be granting 16g in liquid rewards in hard mode CE?

What sort of impact would giving a specific set of players 72g a week have on the economy? It’s pretty clear that there are obvious massive inflations on prices. How does this impact you as a player who only has proportional access to that gold flow? You’ve been very unhappy about the economy in prior threads and even in this thread. And this number will only increase as the number of raids and raid wings goes up; and they definitely will go up, if you’ve pushed the participation rate high enough with multimodal raids- there’s no reason not to push raids as the only form of content, as everyone’s doing them! It’s only two raid wings before they’re earning 100g a week just for clearing raids.

So the big question;
Are you willing to give a select elite (if you express the will of the proletariat as you proclaim) a massive gold spigot?

Ohoni.6057:

If this were true then Silverawastes would not be a worthwhile use of time. The fact that it is a profitable way to play indicates a flaw in your calculations.

what, that the champ bags are the only valuable item in the boxes? i suppose you’re right, you can get a single piece of cloth in the boxes as well, sometimes you get lucky and roll linen

that the champ bags are self nerfing? that’s self-evident, compare prices of bonetti’s pre and post sw

the idea of ‘profitable way to play’ is really really weird in an environment where you have no actual costs other than secondary currencies. outside of wvw, there’s practically no content that is really unprofitable

Ohoni.6057:

The value of keys and shovels is negligible, especially when you run in packs that can share in shovels. Perhaps if each player needed his own shovel to open a chest, rather than one shovel opening it for everyone around, they would be a more scarce resource.

no they aren’t negligible

you can pretty obviously only hit one chest with one key, and the keys are nowhere near self-replenishing without doing events

shovels are completely unobtainable without doing the events, yeah you can share them but sharing is a good thing

if you want to do chest farming in any capacity you actually have to do silverwastes runs

Ohoni.6057:

I don’t think liquid gold should ever be treated as a special reward. It’s more convenient than other rewards, but in practical terms there are only two types of rewards, account-bound rewards and gold-fungible rewards of varying degrees of inconvenience. There is no player-centric difference between 5g in raw currency and a drop that can be reliably sold for 5g on the market. Gold is certainly easier to message of being of a given value, but perhaps they could put more effort into cluing players in that a given item can be sold for 10g on the TP.

uh, what
liquid basic currency is a massively important part of any virtual economy
it should be the most special of special rewards from a design perspective, if it’s mismanaged or given out too readily it kills game economies and in some cases even games

a ui feature which puts the current tp buy or sell order price into the tooltip of an item would actually be super helpful

but you’re so careful about the side effects of the silverwastes choo choo train, why are you not concerned about the side effects of an easy mode raid?

Ohoni.6057:

I am concerned about it, I just don’t see any reason to be concerned.

spock sez you are illogical

but nah like i’ve said already of course you don’t, you haven’t seen the effects of the suggestions in action

Ohoni.6057:

And I’ve seen no thesis on it being any less sustainable.

it’s pretty basic
if the ratio of reward:emeffort:hmeffort is too high in one mode’s favor, the other mode will be ignored
if a mode is ignored, work is wasted
finding the balance is extremely difficult and i don’t know if there even is a sweet spot
and then you need to consider the reward that the player can get from any other content in the game; if people can do silverwastes (lazy example but it fits) and get way way more money than they can get from ezmode, completionists will only do the content for skins and non-completionists may never do it at all, beyond once.

see dungeon uptake rate for present examples

Ohoni.6057:

If anything, it should be more sustainable because it would engage a larger portion of the player base.

this is an argument for easy raids, not multimodal raids

Ohoni.6057:

Each version would need to be rewarding enough to justify its existence, but if a player can effortlessly clear hard VG in a half hour, or easy VG in ten minutes, but hard VG gives significantly higher reward, then why wouldn’t people run that?

firstly vg is like
10 minutes v 13 minutes
time only increases meaningfully on late phase wipes, and if a raid team can’t do VG without wiping, it’s not effortless
secondly because why not run both? raiding the same content on two different difficulties is boring af and drains the excitement from the hard mode
thirdly because you’re approaching the problem from a bad point of view; the target is not “i can comfortably do this raid” it’s “can i comfortably convince 9 other people to do this raid with me”. again, i’d love to do dungeons, but i’m a loner with no friends to do them with me i don’t even have dungeonmaster

Ohoni.6057:

I think there’s a balance well between median difficulty and ‘run around a zone collecting loot.’ I don’t think ‘run around a zone collecting loot’ really should be a viable method in this game, as it falls so well below the median, and if people want to do that, then they should not see significant reward-per-hour for doing so.

sure, it’s a spectrum
but it’s still there
and like i’ve said you’re missing the cost:benefit ratio of the silverwastes farm, it isn’t infinite as the suggestion ‘run around and loot’ implies

Ohoni.6057:

There is, but what I’m asking for here is raid content and unique rewards to be available at that median difficulty as well. It is not difficult to understand, you just disagree that I should have what I’m asking for.

you should have nothing
i am here to ruin your fun

but there are things i’m pretty happy to say that should be available at the ‘median’. you should be able to get viper’s trinkets. maybe you should be able to get a set of legendary armor (and don’t trot out ‘anet are incompetent and won’t make more legendaries!’ that’s a boring nothing answer)

like, to be completely clear
it’s just the skins that should be locked to the difficult mode
and it’s just skins

what would you think of the following:
ez mode sv
loots from each boss:
50s
2-4 rares/exotics
10% chance at generic ascended weapon or chest

Ohoni.6057:

No, but neither are solutions to the systemic problems surrounding HoT a solution to the problem of a lack of easy mode raids. The two have nothing to do with each other. They should solve both.

“lack of easy mode raids”
i don’t think there’s a lack of easy mode raids because they’re a continuation of other small-group content
there is a lack of small-group content which is easier than raids
i would really like dungeons to step up and do their job

but y’know, we’ve said all of this already

Ohoni.6057:

It would be in balance if there were maybe 1/4 as many chests or less. If you could Silverwaste farm, and get all those rewards, but you’d be getting 1/4 or less per hour for doing so. Right now it gives far too much per hour, given the low level of player engagement.

I got into this discussion months ago, but basically people too often conflate “challenge” with “engagement.” You don’t need to be challenged to be engaged by content, and I seek engagement, but not so much challenge.

if you want to address the silverwaste farm the better way to do it would be to target the loot table itself, but the only item which actually holds any value on that loot table is the champ bag (a value which is self-nerfing as all items within the champ bag lose value as more are opened and their contents are added to the market). lost bandit chests are balanced against key and shovel availability; while you’re pushing the hours up, you’re keeping the value of the keys and shovels where they are

silverwastes in any form versus raids just does not make sense as a comparison because the liquid gold is the only thing that actually matters. fair currency reward examinations should be made between dungeons and raids, or any other kind of content which is principally ran for the sake of raw gold return

Ohoni.6057:

That’s why I want an easy mode that has all the same mechanics, just with reduced penalty, because I don’t want to fail, but I want to have all the same opportunities to succeed as in hard mode. I like gameplay that gives players things they CAN do, but that doesn’t implode if they don’t do everything just right. Let players choose for themselves how much or how little they want to engage themselves into that content.

but you’re so careful about the side effects of the silverwastes choo choo train, why are you not concerned about the side effects of an easy mode raid? i’ve seen no thesis which carries reasonable expectations of sustainability between multiple modes of raid, especially not those which you prefer which provide identical rewards on longer timescales

Ohoni.6057:

But yeah, they could balance all other content rewards to the level of Silverwastes, but if they did that, that would cause some serious economic upheavals. I think it would be better to balance a few areas up a bit more, and Silverwaste and perhaps a few other areas down a bit.

nah just give zones gear bags

Ohoni.6057:

For the same reason I do want raids to be accessible at the game standard level, because I want everything to be in balance around a median difficulty, with more difficulty stuff offering more rewards, but less difficult stuff offering less rewards, If people find Silverwaste farming to be fun, they can do it, but it should have rewards comparable to the engagement, roughly equivalent to farming trash mobs in starter maps. It should not be offering champ bags and other fancy loot.

you see the balance that’s been created here though, right?

if you want stuff below median difficulty, you can do the chest farm train – and again, ‘run around a zone collecting loot’ is an oversimplification.
if you want stuff above median difficulty, go raid.
if you want stuff of median difficulty, there’s an entire game just sitting there for you, waiting for you to plunder it. open world content, dungeons, casual/core fractals, personal story.

there are massive problems with it as it stands, but knocking down raids will just change the problem from “no content that isn’t 2 hard for me” to “no content”. easy mode raids aren’t the answer to systemic problems which resulted in the 8m/8m content droughts surrounding hot

Nerf chill damage.

Nerf to Sigil of Hydromancy. Possibly disabled for spvp.

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, but I never claimed otherwise, I claimed that it was a poorly balanced reward mechanism, which it is.

but it isn’t, it’s a perfectly balanced reward mechanism- at least, it should be in your eyes

it’s a casual way to get money on a timescale. you should love that, you love getting things on a timescale.

seriously it’s not imbalanced, it’s just really strong. more zones should be built like Silverwastes.

Ohoni.6057:

A piece of content can succeed at doing one thing but fail in other, more serious ways. The fact that it keeps coming up as an object lesson in lazy gameplay offering great rewards is a major sign of its overall failure.

the only component of silverwastes which suggests that is ‘you can taxi in and still get full rewards on breach/vinewrath’, which they went out of their way to address in the new HoT zones; they just need to reimplement it for SW/DT

Ohoni.6057:

If the goal is to “keeping down the prices of salvaged materials,” they can achieve that in all sorts of ways with lower negative side effects.

what are the ‘negative side effects’ of letting you pick what tier you salvage from

that’s pretty much the only strength silverwastes has over other zones

Ohoni.6057:

You can, but apparently not enough of it to knock Silverwaste farming off as the ideal effort/reward mechanism. If enough linen dropped off of those sources, then they could obliterate Silverwaste farming and not impact those markets at all (beyond some short term corrections).

…why do you want to obliterate silverwaste farming

you whinge at raiders for not going down to the standard that you want the game to be at but now you’re here telling people that you want to obliterate silverwaste farming which is actually fun, because you think it’s ‘lazy gameplay’

so what exactly is it that stops a raider from telling you that you’re lazy because you don’t buck up and get the gear and do the research which will actually allow you to push into current raids

Ohoni.6057:

There would be other ways to resolve that though.

That doesn’t mean that SW isn’t doing the job of keeping down the prices of salvaged materials across the board. To say otherwise is lying or ignorance.

Ohoni.6057:

For another, add more linen scrap to other areas, including raid rewards.

Except they did exactly that. You can get Linen as map rewards in the middle range maps. You can get it from all PvP tracks in the same way you get it from Silverwastes. You can still get salvage drops from mid-level areas and get it from that.

Oh and you can still buy it with gold if you’d like. Just like you can buy raid runs. This is all so far divorced from the original post that it’s incredibly difficult to argue that these diversions about hard modes and now silverwastes rewards are on topic, when rewards are rarely in scope when it comes to whether raids are a good idea.

Ohoni.6057:

But we all agree that Silverwaste is a badly balanced system

But it isn’t. Silverwastes fills an important role in maintaining the price of certain items. If SW were nerfed, don’t be surprised if you saw Linen Scrap go up to 10s overnight.

STIHL.2489:

LOL, so, “not being complete accurate” is how you describe posts that are totally contradicting each other. Cute.

Well come back when you all get your stories straight.

If you want us to review every single post in the thread for factual accuracy… Well, you first, please.

STIHL.2489:

In either case, with each passing post, I gotta admit regrettably my respect for the Pro-Raid crowd takes a hit as their stands, points, and pretty much everything they have to say, flips and flops all over the place.

If you’re gonna get your knickers in a twist over one post not being completely accurate with another post in two threads on the same topic whose pages total around 40 you’re kinda taking the kitten.

style.6173:

tldr; farming solo pugs is good for those who can’t win solo

til teamplay should not be rewarded in an mmo

Ohoni.6057:

No. It’s not like that at all. If we’re going to use that analogy, it’s like you don’t make enough to go to Taiwan

Hold it right there.

You don’t need to go to Taiwan for a holiday. It’s not a hardship. It’s a holiday. That’s the point. If someone says “oh woe is me my life is terrible I can’t afford to go to an exotic foreign country for my vacation” they don’t get an ounce of sympathy from me.

Similarly, you don’t need the rewards from raiding for much of anything. Skins do literally nothing for you mechanically. Legendary armor is a convenience, and is probably going to be more expensive to make than it will be to simply make ascended armor of each of the relevant classes (basically just Zerks and Viper’s). There’s no argument to make that Legendary armor is anywhere near required.

Calling “I have to pay for a raid clear!” a ‘hardship’ is taking the kitten. You’re playing a video game and you’re calling your inability to obtain pixels a hardship.

Here’s my map suggestion for everyone to chew on

It’s a map
It has three points
You capture the points to get points
First team to 500 points wins

And now we just need to throw in a bonus objective. Idk, uh, there’s a farm with a giant boar in it. If you kill the boar you get points.

For PvE no, you should pretty much always use a purely offensive stat spread unless you are tanking.

For PvP/WvW Toughness can be useful but it depends on your class. Generally speaking if you are vulnerable to Power based attacks, your priority is Toughness, and if you are vulnerable to conditions your priority is Vitality.

HOT stat combo trinkets

WvW exclusive :^)

Ohoni.6057:

Because those people are profiting off of their fellow players hardships, and actively fighting to MAINTAIN those hardships so that they can continue to profit. If you don’t see what’s wrong with that then I’m afraid I cannot help you.

It’s not a hardship. It’s like saying you want to go to holiday in Taiwan so you’re working some overtime to make money for your vacation and your boss is exploiting your hardship.

Like what. It’s a videogame. It’s not like going without legendary armor or the raid skins means you’re going to have to choose between feeding yourself or your children.

I’m not sure if the conspiracy theory that ANet nerfed dungeons to get people into HoT holds up under scrutiny when we consider that there are great ways to get money in the base game. My main meal ticket at the moment is the stack of alts I have parked near the Rich Iron node in Brisban for example.

I honestly do believe ANet when they say that they nerfed the dungeons because they were adding too much liquid gold to the economy. And this all ultimately has little bearing on whether the dungeons should be given love or not, as they should; they just need to push the rewardingness into methods other than liquid gold.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

“Dev data says that raids are successful and target audience loves them. But I dislike them! They are lying!”

Yeah I don’t get it. Discussion on how many resources ANet has or whether they’re telling the truth is boring and doesn’t get us anywhere.

Anhomedog.7968:

Maybe I just want it back cause I play Elementalist, but I want some damage back…. Clerics is getting old

build a dps ele and play that instead then

Smaller group balance is not more difficult in and of itself but it makes class balance more difficult. Stuff like projectile reflection can be insanely strong in that context. You’ll end up having Class X be the buttmonkey because their viable builds don’t fit the demands of the encounters or the demands of the group (read: necros).

GW2’s equipped to deal with this by giving things like kits to players which allow them to deal with specific mechanics while not necessarily being that kit, but it still takes more work.

liquid gold v other rewards is an important distinction, max speed raids provide very little liquid gold compared to max speed dungeons

it’s not just the raw amount of time it takes to clear or the expertise but it’s the weekly cap that helps keep the amount of money injected by raids limited compared to dungeons

if dungeons ran on a weekly cap similar to raids they could probably reward more liquid gold and still feel rewarding

I thought this was a request for RL swag when I read the subject.

Norn Monk gear for girls please

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You can’t, actually. Minions don’t benefit from banners, even if there aren’t any nearby players.

Really? That’s no fun.

SirPrizeBartSachs.4670:

However where are you getting your minion heal scaling factor of 0.66 from? The wiki has no mention of it. It only mentions that ‘consume blood fiend’ scales 100% with the necro’s own healing power.

I’m not sure where he’s getting it from but you could easily test it using a warrior’s banner of tactics.

Ohoni.6057:

I’m putting raids, fractals, and dungeons into the “sPvP” PvP bucket, the “instanced small group content” bucket, when compared to the Open World PvE/WvW side, the “large scale, large map, large number of players” options. Raids are just another version of dungeons just as Sronghold is another version of sPvP, but both are within the “small group instanced” content branch rather than the “open world content” branch.

A more useful distinction but until they start turning off your gear in dungeons/fracs/raids I’m not gonna have much love for this (raids=/=pve)=(spvp=/=wvw) assertion.

Astralporing.1957:

By that argument WvW and sPvP (i’m 99% sure when Ohoni said PvP he meant sPvP mode) are the same content also (being PvP, and all that). And yet somehow it doesn’t stop them from being treated completely different.

If we’re gonna take the “raids is to pve as WvW to PvP” assessment seriously; really, once you look at the reality of the game, it’s completely off-base.

The key differences between Raids and its closest cousin in PvE, dungeons, are the player cap, the general tuning, the rewards and developer support. Its closest actively supported cousin, Fractals, adds the fractal scaling (which is having serious issues at the moment) and Agony to that list.

WvW/sPvP’s differences include but are not limited to complete gear restructuring, reward restructuring, different objectives, different active game times, guild upgrades, core systems including masteries being different or disabled, and what was that other thing I listed. I’m sure there was another. It’ll come to me.

Queues would take longer and you’d never gain any benefit from queuing as a small group. They’ve already hard blocked 5m premade from fighting pure sq. No thanks.

Shylock.4653:

Einlanzer.1627:

Raids were needed, and their popularity shows how you can’t replace controlled small group content with uncontrolled zerg content

Popularity? Do you have any proofs for that?

According to gw2efficiency

58,5% of the players have 0 Magnetite Shards = most probably, have never raided
20% of the players have > 76 Magnetite Shards = most probably, have tried raiding but weren’t very successful
10% of the players have > 240 Magnetite Shards = most probably, raids sporadic
1% of the players have > 1,271 Magnetite Shards = most probably, raids often

Content which is used regularly only by a few percent of the player base can’t be called popular. On top of that bad numbers I’m quite sure that gw2efficiency is mostly used by more ambitious players so the numbers across all players are most probably even worse.

How does GW2 efficiency deal with inactive accounts/accounts which don’t have HoT?

It’s also worth noting that the OP’s point revolves more around dungeons than around raids themselves. Raids were necessary because they filled the hole that dungeons’ falling out created- or, imo, that they never adequately filled in the first place.

Ohoni.6057:

Right, but my point is that they are both just PvP, in exactly the same way that open world and raids are both “just” PvE, so lumping all PvE content into a single mass is just arbitrary, when most people already make a distinction between WvW and sPvP.

And my point is that people make that distinction because while they may both be PvP modes, they’re explicitly designed to have radically different structures that meaningfully set them apart.

If you want to make some distinctions between “regular PvE” and raids, be my guest. I think you won’t find very many beyond “it needs 10 people” and “it has legendary armor”.

Ohoni.6057:

Exactly. It’s the same basic content, just with some slightly different rules in place, just like a raid.

You have a capacity for ignoring people that I find truly admirable.

Ohoni.6057:

Not really. “Citation wanted,” perhaps. Good luck with that.

You want to make a sweeping generalization with dubious basis in fact, you’re gonna need to provide some evidence if you expect the point to be uncontested.

Ohoni.6057:

No, the problem being “I can’t get legendary armor without playing a lot of hard mode raiding, which I don’t enjoy."

“Effort” really isn’t at issue here.

Oh, my mistake. “I can’t get legendary armor in the exact convenient way I like it”.

I’d like legendary armor for erping in salma district. I’ve put in the hours, I’m ready for my loot.

Ohoni.6057:

Think about it. What is WvW? It’s essentially “open world PvP,” just on a different map than core Tyria. It’s PvP, with dozens of people in zergs, just as open world PvE is “PvE with dozens of people in zergs”.

The distinction to make is between sPvP and WvW, not between PvP and WvW. PvP is an abbreviation for the sake of everyone’s blatant hatred of the letter s.

Ohoni.6057:

What is sPvP? It’s instanced PvP, essentially the dungeon to WvW’s open world.

A dungeon which disables your gear, has balancing specifications that are completely different from WvW, overrides your elite specialization unlocks, disables your masteries, has a completely different reward schema, unique rewards, and has relevant tournaments currently running. And that ANet specifically considers to be a completely seperate avenue of play since some of their earliest press releases.

Yes, it’s completely identical to WvW. Except for all the things that make it completely different.

Ohoni.6057:

really, if you looked at various groups of players, players who enjoy raiding are actually more likely to already be WvWing and PvPing than the PvEers who don’t like raiding

[citation needed]

Ohoni.6057:

because raiding and PvPing are both more “high challenge” type content. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t actually exist, rather than the one that actually does.

That problem being what? “I can’t get legendary armor without putting in some effort”?

Ohoni.6057:

You guys are making a very self-serving argument here because the content that gives the reward is content you happen to enjoy.

You’re in such an immaculate glass house. Please keep your stone throwing to a minimum

Ohoni.6057:

They are at least as different from standard PvE content as PvP and WvW are from each others.

wat

Ohoni.6057:

The point is, they need a method fo PvE-only players to earn them that don’t involve going into hard mode raids.

let’s leave the unsupported argument for now, i want to get back to “raids are not pve”

Definitely staff.

Staff costs more materials to craft and it’s in a more obscure crafting school. I don’t think thieves or revs use any other weapons from Artifice, while all other Rev and half the other Thief weapons use Weaponsmithing.

Staff is a better Revenant weapon than Sword is a better Thief weapon.

Outside of rewards, the problem with dungeons is almost exclusively just the difficulty and tuning.

Tune up the dungeons to require Exotic gear rather than blues/greens as is the current tuning point.
Tune up bosses and mobs with more relevant mechanics, as well as new AI that we’ve seen around the place, particularly the Shatterer remix.

Raids build camaraderie because they’re hard and you actually need to work together. Most dungeon paths don’t seem to do that.

Ohoni.6057:

Why should PvE players be left out, but PvP or WvW players get a glide path?

Raids are PvE content.

Gene Archer.8560:

Orange is on the TP. It drops from any of the modes, and is also available via a daily. Orange isn’t the prestige you think it is.

Oh, it’s BoE? Didn’t know that. I thought it was exclusively from the daily/‘weekly’/collections.

Having the alt color set opened up for means other than the trib mode seems gross to me. I hate trib mode, but I wouldn’t want the rewards from some other method; frankly, I’d feel patronized if they say “that’s alright Sarrs you can just do this pvp track to get them”.

The base blue set, maybe. A completely separate color set, maybe. Green/Yellow/Orange? Nty.

Swagger.1459:

Anet is now starting to be mindful of the over grind they have created and we will just have to wait to see where it all goes with collections and Legendary Insights.

“Over grind” seems a bit silly considering it’s a set of gear which you can swap to any stat, including future sets.

Astralporing.1957:

Because it’s not work? I have enough of this in RL already, don’t need to repeat it in a kitten game.

This logic extends to everything. Why should anything in the game require effort?

Astralporing.1957:

Now, that’s massive discrepancy in price. Nothing even close to what’s being proposed. You’d do better to look at precursor crafting collections – there are people doing them even when buying that precursor from TP would be much cheaper.

Precursor crafting is very, very different from buying the precursor from the TP.

Raids with the numbers tuned down are just numbers tuned down.

Astralporing.1957:

Why?

Nothing worth having comes easy?

Ohoni.6057:

If easy mode gave the same rewards as hard even hardcore raiders will abandon it.

Which means that the hardcore raiders, given the opportunity, would prefer to NOT have to do the challenge that they claim they want. They’ll only do it if their rewards are substantially higher.

If someone wants Eternity and ANet decides that you should be able to buy Eternity for 1c, they would buy Eternity for 1c.

That doesn’t make the game better. It makes it worse.

CasualWanderer.5824:

Blizz has even removed good tier gear from LFR, and people still go there, faceroll that, and forget about the raid.

Well, that depends on how you slice it. Before they added valor, LFR was a ghost town, and on quite a few bosses because there were no competent people in the raid, they still failed and pushed 6+ determination, including 10 determination on Archi.

STIHL.2489:

If it’s all about Challenge = Better Reward, well, WvW is a lot more a challenge then any PvE content in the game, including the raid, yet they don’t get some legendary armor, or special ascended boxes, or whatever for their constant efforts, why should you get anything better then what they get?

I’m pretty much okay with WvW getting a rewards revamp up to and including legendary armor? I’ve said this already.

STIHL.2489:

You were not entitled to a raid at all to start with, and many feel that even making the raid was a total waste of resources, so, moving on, can you give me one reason that is not totally pathetically self serving to not make an easy mode?

I’ve posted several through the thread, feel free to review.

STIHL.2489:

What a petty and self serving reason.

I want to be able to get Eternity for 1c. Do you think that would devalue Eternity?

STIHL.2489:

They they would not have to. See having choices means they can play the want, removing choices forces people to play in a way they don’t want.

No, you don’t understand what I mean. In a progression environment, tackling lower raid difficulties before doing higher ones is practically mandatory because you push into deeper phases and deeper bosses, and can get experience on bosses you haven’t seen yet in your ‘hard mode’ runs. This is especially the case in the mode suggested in which all mechanics are added; you already know everything that happens in the hard mode fight, so it’s effectively just more of the same.

STIHL.2489:

If Ohoni was advocating for removing the Normal Mode and making only an Easy Mode, you would have a point, but they are not, they want to everyone to enjoy the game, and play in a way that pleases them.

Flat nerfs to the raid would probably be a better choice than multimodal raiding.

STIHL.2489:

Don’t you want everyone to enjoy a game?

Yeah, but that doesn’t entitle you to raiding. If the only content you enjoy is easy mode raids, there’s already tons of large group content in the game in the open world.

It’s bizarre. You’re lasering in on this one specific thing, when there’s already about 30 PvE maps, 6-10 of which carry meta events, there’s 8 dungeons in the game with a total of 33 paths, Fractals, dozens of world bosses and more- not to even mention sPvP and WvW. If easy mode raids are the sole issue that’s preventing you from enjoying the game, there’s something you’re not being honest about.