Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

That’s not an assumption, that is a fact. Ask anyone.

ok

hey tex, is ohoni making assumptions

gg no re

Ohoni.6057:

Knowing that GW2’s audience was very different than other games

speaking of assumptions

Manasa Devi.7958:

Something they claim is still worth anything to you? Poor soul.

Why would they lie tho

Ohoni.6057:

That’s not what they said. What they said was that they were doing better than many other MMOs, which is actually a pretty low bar to jump. Whether that number is actually where they want it to be, or might want it to be in future, is unknown.

The logical inference being that they thought “hey raids have this participation rate in other games, they’ll have a similar rate in GW2”. The boss gave the go-ahead with that information, and raids have had a higher rate. Pretty straightforward.

Ohoni.6057:

So what you’re saying is that you have no interest in constructively participating in the discussion, but want to post anyway? I believe there’s a term for that sort of behavior.

TIL having fun is against the rules

Look man if you’re gonna report me, report me. If you don’t think my posts have merit then you shouldn’t be engaging me. Something something courage convictions. But frankly, I have a hard time thinking someone would push two threads to 11 pages and 14 pages respectively if they didn’t enjoy it on some level.

maddoctor.2738:

No. To me it’s more like a player issue. Players themselves need to understand the learning process and do things “in order”.

It’s partly that, but it can hardly be blamed on raids that dungeons and fractals are not holding up their end of the bargain. Dungeon content has no draw at the moment and fractals of the swamp is, well, swamp

Ohoni.6057:

Not the issue, which you know because you’ve been reading this thread

Haha, no I haven’t

Ohoni.6057:

If, on the other hand, Anet now or in the future (or in the recent past) decides that this is an unsustainable, wasteful model, and that they could get a lot more bang for their buck by expanding raids to be more accommodating to the majority of players

Raids have already exceeded their target participation rates by ANet’s own admission

Ohoni.6057:

If you’re right, you have absolutely nothing to worry about, so don’t worry, because you know that you’re right and I’m wrong.

Right?

Yeah. But I know you enjoy making these threads and I enjoy participating in them. Let’s not peek behind the curtain and ruin the fun.

LordOtto.2650:

- 75% solo ,25% duo-trio, when I had a winning strike I played, when I lost 2 times in a row, stopped playing for 3-4 hours, to not get the same team/opposite team.

The taking a break part is so stupidly important. It’s not just that you get stuck in and against the same teams but losing, for most people, puts them on tilt. Taking a break and resetting really does help a lot.

It could be interesting but not in the current game. If you were to have 8v8 I’d say you should have an extra capture zone or two.

Trigr.6481:

Stand The Wall.6987:

From a viewers perspective, increasing the player cap would be a good thing.

That gif is amaaaazing

Ohoni.6057:

Agree to disagree then. You have your own idea of how GW2 works, I have mine, and I doubt you could ever be convinced to change your mind, so we’ll have to see which of us turns out to be right in the end. I would tell you how it’ll turn out, but spoilers.

So long as you’re having fun man, there’s no need to get bent out of shape over raids, there’s tons of content in the game for all difficulty ranges.

Anchoku.8142:

Perhaps Rise! should have something like a passive 8% damage reduction per active Horror rather than a flat 50% for attacking minions. That might help diversify MM builds away from Death Magic. Add more damage on the shout or a brief stun to promote more active play.

MM will never move out of Death Magic. Death Nova is too strong to move out of.

Ohoni.6057:

GW2 is entirely about making everyone who says “it’s an MMO after all” look the fool.

Back to insults. Good on you.

Ohoni.6057:

It’s the MMO for people who don’t like how MMOs typically operate.

In your opinion. Again; a value judgment with no substantiation. In reality, GW2 only makes relatively minor direction changes from modern MMOs, the only particularly significant divergence being a static stat cap.

Ohoni.6057:

Because the basal mode of all other content is within the reasonable achievability of the average player. It all has a generally equivalent difficulty baseline. If you can play most of the game, you can play almost all the game, with the exception of the higher Fractal tiers (as you note), and the raids. If the argument is that raids have absolutely no need for multiple difficulties, then they only way that works is if that one difficulty it has is the same basal level of difficulty as the other content in the game, the difficulty that the majority of the population finds comfortably challenging. If they want to have A mode that is well above that basal level of difficulty, then it needs to offer alternatives to the rest of the plaeyrs.

Firstly, this isn’t true. If you’re a scrublord, you’re going to have a rough time doing the harder dungeon paths like Aetherpath or Arah P4.

Secondly, you’re assuming that all content needs to cater to the lowest common denominator when that’s not true. You haven’t established that causal link. But we’ve told you all this already but you don’t get it.

STIHL.2489:

Perhaps then what the raid really needs is a hard set Gear Check built in, like Fractals have with Agony Resist.

This doesn’t seem like a good solution to this imaginary problem.

Ohoni.6057:

But again, that is an unrealistic goal for this content.

No, it is. It’s not unrealistic for content to expect you to have some friends. It’s an MMO after all.

Ohoni.6057:

and an alternative to that IS warranted.

Value judgment which has been dismantled repeatedly before.

Ohoni.6057:

Real players have real lives

Implying that people who can raid don’t have real lives. For someone who complains about exclusionary raid groups you sure are quick to bat when you have the opportunity to insult people.

Ohoni.6057:

and can’t be responsible to always be available to raid when the other members of their team are. They need the flexibility to come and go without disappointing nine other people. They need the flexibility to be able to raid when it is convenient for them to spend that time and effort.

This is called a bench. If you have a competent raid team, you’ll have one that you can sit on.

Even then, there are better options than what you suggest when a raid member wants to sit out, like a variable raid size.

Ohoni.6057:

You can’t simultaneously make the argument that "raids place this, and this, and this, and this burden on the player, " and ALSO “and that’s ok, no alternative to that is necessary.”

Uh, yes I can. I don’t see anything exclusive about those two positions.

Ohoni.6057:

Either the one and only version of raids is flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of players, OR there needs to be alternate versions of raids that are more flexible to their varying needs.

But there are already multiple forms of content that aren’t flexible enough to adapt to a wide range of players. There is no structured high-difficulty version of the Vinewrath. Dungeons have fixed difficulty levels. The only case you can make is Fractals, which are completely in the toilet at the moment. How can you make this case when almost every other form of content in the entire game does not have multimodal play, and the one which does is currently public enemy no.1? Spoiler: the answer is self interest

Ohoni.6057:

But again, the team you have today may not be the team you have tomorrow, so if you want to get consistently better results, improving your own strengths is the most important part.

Now this is a rostering problem that you’re looking at.

If you’re tackling the content as its intended, in a raid group with a more or less fixed raid team, you will have the same team today as you have tomorrow. There is variation as benchers move in and out, and as new team members enter and old team members leave, but your raid team usually stays pretty fixed in a scheduled raid team.

Not having a consistent team is a risk you’re accepting when you PUG anything. Dungeons, PvP, raids, fractals, everything has this. That’s no reason to change the mechanics of these modes.

This doesn’t really have any bearing on a game mode which is intended to PUG (again we have to go back to the open-world PvE content but you’ve already said you’re not interested in going there). But the assertion that “you may not have the same raid team” means that you’re not addressing the content as it’s intended.

I’m going to prune a little for the sake of keeping the post short.

Ohoni.6057:

Fair enough.

So both gear and rotations can be a lot less efficient? That is not going to be accomplished purely through a 10-20% reduction in HP.

Ohoni.6057:

The goal wouldn’t be that if they can beat him just under the enraged timer they would be ready to take on hard mode

Assuming you’re only targeting health tuning. Real tuning, you’d be looking at something in the field of 4 minutes.

Ohoni.6057:

Well, the target would be that it would down any player who were not fully healed from other effects (and again, this is for players who would not be super-efficient at staying about 90%)

This is the status quo, though. It already is “if you have max health and Protection, you will survive a green circle blast”. If you do get downed because you’re below that threshold, you need to get ressed.

Ohoni.6057:

What would your alternative be, to have the same required actions to “do it right,” but with a more survivable penalty?

Don’t have an easy mode for starters. You say you should be doing this mode to practice that mechanic, but the game as it stands does that. You still practice managing the lightning strikes on the current normal mode throughout the entire fight.

Ohoni.6057:

Again though, if the result is that players are able to ignore this effect, that wouldn’t be so bad. It’d be better than having the effect cause wipes, and players who intended to use this for training would still be able to do so.

Ignoring mechanics should never be an option. If a player is ignoring a mechanic then the content is not doing its job.

A better way to create an easy mode is to flat-out strip mechanics instead of massive across-the-board tuning reductions. Instead of every ability dealing half the damage it currently does, remove some of the more basic mechanics. For example, a strategy to make the lightning manageable would be to remove the orb adds. It doesn’t remove the danger of the lightning strikes but it reduces the number of complications needed to overcome the lightning strike.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, I don’t have the hard numbers of exactly how much CC is necessary to break it

This is a raid composition issue, and again, if you reduce the damage you are pushing the mechanic into irrelevance. Though it would be funny to see a raid trying to DPS VG while they are both in a charged zone and being hit with the firestorm. That’d be an interesting failure state.

Ohoni.6057:

I think it’s hard to rule anything out.

No, you need to rule things out. Changes without strict objectives don’t pan out very well.

Ohoni.6057:

There are probably ways to heal through the color field right now, if you overload on healers.

That’s the current mode. You can carry plenty of healers to make your transitions very easy.

Ohoni.6057:

And don’t forget that an inexperienced group would find themselves “blued” into a damage zone from time to time.

If the purpose of this raid difficulty is to teach them, they will very quickly realize that the blue lightning is bad.

Ohoni.6057:

That would really depend, but from my experience alone, I don’t think it would be necessary. I think the more chip-attacks and that sort of thing could largely be left intact. I might be wrong on that, and maybe reducing the damage of this or that would help, but in lack of testing, I think this is a good place to start.

Chip attacks have massive issues in this game because they are very easy to recover from because of the downed state. If you have one guy who gets chipped down, he isn’t going to stay chipped down for very long, and then it takes several chippings for them to re-enter the downed state… Just for them to be chipped down again.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, keep in mind that the goal to all of this is NOT to make it impossible for players to “study to the test,” and build themselves in ways that only work in the Easy mode and get by with some exotic tactics. That’s likely inevitable, but at the same time the benefits to doing so are minimal, because the rewards would be reduced, it should be easy enough to do it “right” that going it “weird” is not a huge advantage, and anything you learned to do there would be pointless in hard mode anyway, so ultimately it’s a plus, because it gives a space for players to experiment with weird combinations in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone.

You’re making an assumption that moving up is the ultimate result of completing the content when from everything I’ve seen and heard it’s incredibly unlikely that people will do that. Easy modes are a prime target for a set of players who, if they had the option, would not enter hard mode at all. This includes people who would otherwise experience hard modes, were easy modes not in the game, and find that they quite enjoy them.

Also, on the topic of ‘learning raids’- this isn’t really the raids’ job. I’ve said it before in one of these threads I don’t remember which since they’re the same bloody thing; learning raids is the dungeons’ job. These raids are not supposed to be where you start; they’re supposed to be towards the end of your bloody slog through dungeons and fractals. Dungeons and fractals have done a terrible job at creating that progression, both on the gearing and learning front.

Ohoni.6057:

Are you saying it would take 10 hours per week to clear all three raid bosses

Ohoni.6057:

If you mean that it would be expected to take 10 hours of raiding each week to clear the bosses

Ohoni.6057:

If you mean that it might take ten hours to get it down, but then subsequent raids would take around the same amount of time as Easy mode

The third one. It’s the progression barrier. Letting people clear the entire raid in an hour, and need to clear the raid three times for reasonable rewards, vs putting them against the progression barrier is how you create a time investment that shunts players out of the ‘real’ mode and into the ‘training wheels’ mode permanently. Human beings do not think rationally about rewards, and 90% of the time if they are presented with steady rewards for 20 minutes of time v large investment of time until first reward, they will not accept the delayed gratification and will go for the easier option.

Ohoni.6057:

So you might have to put more time in up front, but and in your first 3-4 weeks you might make less each week than the Easy Mode people make over their first three weeks, but after that you’d be making three times as much, so you should never fall behind them, and once you get going should skyrocket away from them. Plus, you can always do Easy Mode yourself, in addition to Hard Mode, giving you one more thing you can do in a given week for a reward, and adding their reward to your own.

I want to pull back a little here because we’re going somewhere which is really difficult; the timegating that you’ve suggested on the easy mode. Timegating is very dangerous because content is intended to be timeless in GW2, and having an easy mode that opens “some time down the line” is a big issue (well, at all really, but I needed somewhere to put it). This is why I put forward that rewards issue earlier:

Either the rewards will be so high that progressing into hard mode never happens, or the rewards will be so low that after initial participation boosts, the mode will be abandoned.

As you’ve presented the reward schema it bends both ways. It would be the quickest path for a returning player to access legendary armor… But it gives worse money rewards than dungeons currently do.

See Aetherpath and Fractals of the Swamp for more. Aetherpath may be fun but the rewards are junk, so there’s not much reason to go. The entire range of fractals may be fun, but why would you ever do any Champion fractal other than Swamps, when everything else has lower time efficiency and you still hit your target by doing fractals? Easy mode raids will fall into the same trap: The rewards will be junk, so though they may be fun, there’s no reason to go. But for legendaries, why would you do anything else?

Ohoni.6057:

Ultimately I think this is a case where they can leave out the mastery achievements, but for the game as a whole they need some new sources of HoT mastery points (or fix Adventures, but that’s another thing entirely).

I have no strong feelings one way or the other so idc I guess just wanted to get your feelings.

Astralporing.1957:

That’s because the core role of guardian, the one around which the whole profession has been designed (support bunker) has been made completely useless in the current meta. That’s why Guardian is really outdated as a profession.

Well, no, that isn’t true. There is a spec which is a very powerful support bunker in the current meta: Aurashare Tempest.

Ohoni.6057:

Again, flexible, but my proposal is that his HP be reduced by around 10, maybe 20%, subject to tuning, so that players in full mis-matched Exotic would be equivalent in DPS to players in full min-maxed Ascended gear.

10% pushes it into a comfortable gearing range for people in exotics+rares. 20% pushes it into a comfortable range for people in greens.

Ohoni.6057:

The green circle damage would be reduced to perhaps half as much, such that more players would be likely to survive a failed “catch,”

This is nerfing the mechanic by far too much. You’ve made it ignorable. It doesn’t occur frequently enough to actually knock anyone into the down state, and it’s very easy to recover from the mechanic.

Ohoni.6057:

the breakbar during the “fireball spam” phase would be easier to break,

How much easier? Personally I don’t think the breakbar’s that big a deal but to each their own.

Ohoni.6057:

and the colored damage fields would have reduced damage such that it would be difficult to heal your way through them indefinitely, but easier to get out of them alive if you fall in somehow.

Difficult, but possible? You have to keep in mind that if doing the boss with double or triple healers is viable, people can and will do it. Reducing the boss’s HP drastically increases the amount of leeway you have for healers.

I’m really skeptical of any adjustments to the damage zones seeing as they’re primarily a tank check. Only that person is actually responsible for the mechanic.

Ohoni.6057:

That seems sufficient to me, but again, the outcome is the goal, not the specifics. All I care about the specifics is that they keep every mechanic the same, that you would have to go through the exact same motions to avoid all negative impacts, but that only those negative impacts are reduced in strength, such that the unsalvagable becomes more of a minor setback.

And the minor setbacks become even more minor, or they remain as they are?

Ohoni.6057:

Yes, give or take. I think 1/3 is fair, I’m definitely not looking for more than that, but I definitely wouldn’t accept some “punitive” model of “so little gain that it’s not even worth bothering.”

The thing is we have to look at that “so little gain that it’s not even worth bothering” in the context of the hard mode as well. If you get 1/3rd of the legendary progress in an hour when 3/3rds of the legendary progress would take 10 hours of progression raiding, why bother with progression raiding?

Ohoni.6057:

None of the “prestige” achievements would apply at all in easy mode. You could accomplish the tasks necessary for Legendary armor or other physical rewards, but nothing that grants a title or just exists to say you did it. If they want to create a separate line of achievements specific to easy mode, that’d be fine, but totally not necessary from my perspective.

More pointedly, I’m speaking about the Mastery achievements.

This’d be really interesting, especially since people standing around in Verdant Brink can have impacts on the meta’s progress there.

And what are the VG mechanics changes and retunes in the easy mode?

Let’s not worry too much about specific numbers for legendary progression since we don’t have the full track known yet. Would you say 1/3rd the “normal” rate would be a fair approximation of the target?

What about achievement eligibility? Full eligibility? No eligibility? Some achievements eligible but some (like the one where you’re not allowed to die) locked to normal mode?

Astralporing.1957:

Which will negatively impact his play even more? Great suggestion.

If your play starts getting worse as soon as you have a sip of liquor idk what to say.

If the problem is your performance is getting worse because of jitters- you’re screwing up your rotation, you’re missing calls, you’re missing mechanics- then it can help you settle that down, and frankly have more fun. I’m not saying get kittened as a fart- Just have one or two.

Astralporing.1957:

Also, you are aware that for a many, many people drinking would have the exact opposite effect (making you rage even more)?

Which can be very productive in a raid environment. At worst, it’s very funny on the forums, which is a win for me.

I’m not joking. If your problem is that you’re stressing out over mechanics and DPS and that is negatively impacting your play, have a drink. I got my best Socrethar, Tyrant and Iskar parses while I was drinking.

Ohoni.6057:

The rewards should be good enough so that those who can do Hard mode would never want to give it up for just Easy mode (at least not so long as they’re still serious about the raid itself), and good enough that players on Easy mode would want to move up if at all possible for them, but the Easy mode rewards not so bad that they are worthless, or don’t provide a viable path to eventually getting the good stuff through Easy mode alone.

Fairy talk.

Give me a precise model.

Ohoni.6057:

Because it is a lower stress environment!

If you want a lower stress raiding environment, try alcohol.

maddoctor.2738:

Exactly why I’m asking about it. I want to see opinions on the subject. There are three possible outcomes:

I don’t know, I’m looking at it from a different point of view. I see two possible outcomes:

1. The mode is too rewarding and nobody ever has a reason to go up to hard mode. This is bad for obvious reasons.
2. The mode is not rewarding enough and once everyone’s had a short-term fill of the content, seen all the shinies and all the bosses, nobody goes back and it’s impossible for new or returning players to get back into it. This may even invalidate the hard mode, because the mode is still providing one form of the reward (seeing the story), and then there’s still no reason not to go up to hard mode.

And there isn’t a third bowl of porridge. Under the fixed group size model in a game without ilvl, there isn’t a bowl of porridge that’s just right.

I look at it through this lens because we’ve already seen how the reward balancing dance works in GW2 with dungeons.

maddoctor.2738:

I think the question could be rephrased with: Can the developers “win” by adding an easy mode? Or we’ll enter an endless loop of easier mode requests?

Firstly, the developers can’t win because they’ve already won. Raids are exceeding their target participation rate.

Secondly, yes, you’re right. If they DO add an easy mode, they do risk falling into a progressive nerfing cycle.

maddoctor.2738:

Reducing damage by half makes things easier, but reducing damage by 10% is also making it easier (comparatively). So, honest question to all of you asking for an “easy mode”: How easy do you want this easy mode?

If there’s going to be another mode for the sake of ‘letting the casuals see the content’, then an easy mode as presented won’t suffice. A fixed 10-man mode will either not have enough rewards to encourage people to regularly run it, or it will be so rewarding that it is not worth running hard mode.

LegACy.1296:

@GoldenTruth welcome to the “trying to have conversation with Ohoni” thread. Anyway, spoiler: Ohoni doesn’t exactly want an “easier raid so more people can play it” nor he wants “easier raid so people can do the harder raid”. What he wants is a raid that he can easily completes that gives the same type of reward as the current raid.

Yep. He’s done this on the legendary PvP wings and now he’s doing it on raid rewards. He isn’t actually interested in the health of raiding or the game, just the sugar rush of getting free stuff.

WereDragon.6083:

Rise is beyond useful. 50% damage reduction and ALOT of people are forgetting that six horrors up is six more bodies for the purpose of AoE targeting. Now I believe AoE randomly picks targets in the circle. But more targets is less chance my 20% HP dragon hunter team mate takes a mark. Or my Low HP aura share ele getting bombed by something.

This is a good point of AI/minion builds in general but it’s worth keeping in mind that Rise will only activate 6 minions if it strikes 5 targets. The dream 6 minions is feasible but only in good group engagements.

While I would like in-game DPS meters just to really simplify testing I think this would open up a whole can of worms.

It’s not just DPS meters that makes DPS meters valuable. It’s healing meters, overhealing meters, interrupt meters, damage taken. Allowing addons could mean allowing boss mods with timers. Is that a Pandora’s Box we want to open?

GoldenTruth.2853:

Accessibility: Raids require 10 people unless you want to cripple yourself on purpose. This in and of itself is a large hurdle for most people as playing organizer/waiting for a group to me made can be a huge hassle. Particularly, for people with an inconsistent schedule. Fixing Raid LFG will help a little, but I would suggest Anet make raids scale from 8-12 people. The mechanics themselves would need to scale based on the # of players (which would make this very hard to balance well), but would be a very good step in making raids more user-friendly as you can bring friends and don’t feel as pressured if you need to go.

I was thinking they should make it scale up to like, 20. Bigger raids actually help a lot when it comes to improving accessibility because you don’t need to swap to alts to bring utility, you can just natively fit whatever your raid group is.

maddoctor.2738:

What about the rest of the rewards? Like Ascended items? You can’t get those while failing.

The thing that gets me is that I’ve never seen a reward schema for this sort of content – raids with similar raid sizes and difficulty modes, that is – that actually does a good job.

Of course scrubs get into diamond. There’s no tier loss for A, E or S and you can just RNG your way through them. Ruby is better, but it’s only one division which needs to be punched through.

Game needs more divisions with tier loss.

They also could’ve gotten to that point by spamming Stronghold with one of the FOTM builds.

While I don’t care one bit about legendary weapons I do wonder about what sort of economic impacts this will have in the long term.

Astralporing.1957:

The best solution i have heard so far has been mentioned in the AMA in passing (as one of the things devs are thinking about).
1. Get rid of the current 1-100 scale.
2. Each fractal gets 4 scales: adept, veteran, elite, champion (based on the current reward tiers).
3. Each tier gets a 3-fractal daily
The points above alone would eliminate 3xswampland runs, but would likely result in doing 3 easier ones, so we still have to add 4th point

4. rewards for individual fractals become dependant on fractal type (and tier), with those for more difficult/longer fractals, like cliffside, getting significantly better.
(that last point need to be done regardless of the solution used anyway)

That sounds interesting, though I’d be curious how fractals which have variety (like Swampland has Mossman and Bloomhunger) pick their boss. RNG?

I want to lean towards Guardians because they have two weapons, Hammer and Mace, that are really incongruous for PvP. Symbols in general are just really really underwhelming in PvP.

I think a big part of the expansion was because they wanted to get down systems that were perfect rather than get down content that was perfect, which makes their jobs much much easier down the line. In particular, stuff like Adventure coding is something that I think is one of the features that people think is really small because in the gamespace it is, but it probably took a lot of back-end work to make happen.

randomguy.1283:

They’re already making a less challenging version of the raids in fractals now.

Source? I want to see some more specifics.

Astralporing.1957:

You haven’t seen raid cdi, i guess? People in it weren’t mostly interested in dungeons. They wanted specifically Raids.

…Could that be because posting about dungeons in a raid CDI would have been offtopic and either people were sensible enough not to bark up the wrong tree in that thread, or the thread was pruned because it’s a CDI thread and CDI threads are very actively moderated?

Astralporing.1957:

Oh, you are going to suggest that nowadays almost everyone except raiders are second class citizens? I agree, that’s what i was saying from the very beginning.

This is really weird.

“The people who got the last set of content patches are the chosen people of anet! Everyone else is second class citizens!”

So when Living Story starts again, then the raiders will be second class citizens? When a new PvP map is added, all PvE and WvWers will be second class citizens? When WvW revamp happens, everyone else is a second class citizen?

Astralporing.1957:

Raiders (well, would-be raiders then) did, when they said the game is too easy and needs to be more challenging.

No, people who thought the game was too easy were not necessarily asking for raids.

I thought the PvE game was pretty shallow, outside of deep Fractals, before HoT and I’d hardly call myself a raider in GW2.

Astralporing.1957:

You are missing a point. GW2 is not a sushi bar. It’s a hamburger joint. Those people that started to ask for out of place food, and complain that what they get is poor quality? We call them Raiders here.

I think I missed something- who’s complaining about quality?

Lord Kuru.3685:

GW2 was a hamburger joint that decided overnight they wanted to become a fine dining establishment. Both restaurant types have their place, but when you make a switch like that your old customers are going to be unhappy. And that’s what we’re seeing.

But they’re still going to make open world, living story and fractal content.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Looking at the poor sales of HoT, it doesn’t look good.

Not necessarily related. You haven’t drawn a correlation between the raids being added and a reduction in users. Conjecture at best.

I don’t mind the idea of a story mode if its rewards are suitably reduced (I think what you’ve said, champ bags and next to no gold, is pretty much spot on).

I think it would be strictly better if story modes were all single-player content, though. Group content ‘story modes’ end one of two ways: they either have bad rewards and they become impossible to group for once the content has expired, or they have good rewards and the LFG tools are clogged with speedrunners and people who want to skip cinematics and gogogo for rewards. In particular we’ve seen this in GW2 with story mode dungeons- there are next to no rewards so they can be tricky to find a group for, enough so that they changed Arah to solo.

For legendary completions from such a story mode, I am skeptical. I don’t have a problem at all with the legendary gear being behind that ‘exclusivity’ wall of raiding. I would much prefer it if different legendary armors were added in other modes of the game so that those skins maintain that prestige of “imma raider”.

I’d like the sets already in game please

Pour one out for our homies Stalwart and Tribal

TexZero.7910:

Tired of quoting those massive walls and fixing it.

Ohoni wants something very specific; he wants multi-modal raids with new modes tuned down. He’s spent the entirety of two threads, one 400+ post, one 500+ post, poking at this nest, and he’s received a lot of counterarguments without really honoring them. There are other people who’re actually willing to honor counterarguments in these threads so if you want an argument on the merits of rewards/modes/etc, it’s better to talk to them rather than keep going after the guy who thinks “Nope.” is a fair response to counterarguments.

Astralporing.1957:

That’s a tricky question, because i don’t actually know how that armor would look like, but i think i can safely say, that if there wasn’t a visible difference in armor quality, that would at least partially satisfy me. Although i dislike the idea of full skin exclusivity locked behind hard content, it’s nowhere close to my dislike of locking out a whole category of gear.

By visible difference in armor quality I’m not entirely sure what you mean. Legendary tag for stat swapping? Armor resolution and texture? Subjective value judgment on which armor set is better looking?

Astralporing.1957:

There’s also the stat exclusivity from the new stat spread trinkets available only through raids. But on that point Anet already mentioned they are Doing Something (not at a satisfying pace, but at least they are aware of the problem and seem to agree that it IS a problem, so i guess that will have to suffice for now)

Yeah no argument on that. I don’t understand why they don’t bite the bullet and go for ascended JC; then they never need to do a thing about it.

Manasa Devi.7958:

What is the rate of participation?

I’d have to find the source, but iirc it’s higher than it is in other MMO raids.

messiah.1908:

but what will happen if lets say i master only thief. and there are 2 thieves . the other thief also master thief

if we rerole to a class which we dont know it will be bad for the team thus you force ppl to know all classes

no it won’t, understanding aurashare ele at a basic level is really easy, and you’re better having 1 average aurashare and 1 good thief over 2 good thieves

Lol it’s fine

Stacked necros doesn’t work

Astralporing.1957:

If it offered me an alternate way to get at legendary armor, it would be okay, as it would fulfill both my wishes (being able to get LA without needing to do raids as they are now, and having a new content i can play in).

To continue the line of inquiry; it provides legendary armor, but not with the same appearance as the legendary armor from Spirit Vale/Salvation Pass. Would this be up your alley?

Astralporing.1957:

On the other hand, that would require more developer investment than easy mode raids idea, so it has a way lower chance of happening, unless raids get completely axed.

Completely ignoring the issue of resources, are there other negatives?

STIHL.2489:

From everything I have read, and see, honestly, there is nothing gained by trying to conscript or coheres casuals players into doing what is hardcore content.

I have to disagree with this, honestly. If the uptake rate is higher than the rates in other MMOs, then it seems to me there’s quite a bit of benefit, especially in an MMO like GW2 which is usually considered to be one of the more casual MMOs on the market.

If providing that content to casuals wasn’t viable, then why does it have such a high rate of participation?

Ohoni.6057:

I am not looking for “whatever” of equivalent difficulty to an easy mode raid, I am looking for an actual easy mode raid, the parameters of which I defined in some post that got swallowed in the morass of the megathread.

Hypothetically; what if they had a separate raid which was the perfect difficulty for you, but was a different environment, different bosses, etc?