i cant tell if shockwave is really slow or trolling.
Other people are communicating poorly. There’s clearly ready up buttons in 3 different parts of the process to starting a match.
Your are put in the match if you dont press anything, just like the match starts even if you dont ready up
So the ready buttons already exist, what people actually want is to change the way that particular part of joining a match works. They want the yes to mandatory to enter the match, and for the auto join after the time limit to go away.
I should add to this. You’d also want to leave the existing time limit counter and kick the player that doesn’t select Yes to enter the match after time expires (a short time limit, under 30 seconds). Finally you’d want to quickly pull in another player and give them the short time limit as well, and they can either select Yes to join, cancel, or be auto kicked after the time limit. Repeat until the match is even.
What’s the dev team’s vision of the ways the elementalist should play in PvP?
How is the dev team trying to make those kinds of builds viable on the elementalist?
Your are put in the match if you dont press anything, just like the match starts even if you dont ready up
So the ready buttons already exist, what people actually want is to change the way that particular part of joining a match works. They want the yes to mandatory to enter the match, and for the auto join after the time limit to go away.
They have a ready button, it’s the Join button.
They have another ready button when the match actually starts.
Your looking real stupid right now with that comment
In fairness, he may have a very good reason for not knowing this. One way to never know that the “Join” button defaults you into the game after 2 minutes, is if you’re never AFK and always click it.
Can’t really fault a guy for never AFK -ing.
You can when they get on the forums acting like they know everything
So if you don’t confirm you want to enter a match then after 60 seconds people are entered anyways?
They have a ready button, it’s the Join button.
They have another ready button when the match actually starts.
when identifying whether a game is pay2win, we need to actually understand the meaning of pay2win.
first of all the wordings itself, pay to win. win against what ? the common sense is that when we talk about pay to win, it is usually win against other player, i.e. in pvp, in GW2 case sPvP or WvW.
now, name an item in the game that you can buy from the gemstore, and not available in-game, that give you an advantage over other player if you have it in pvp. i don’t think i can name any, therefore GW2 is not a pay2win game.
if you pay-to-win beauty contest.. well that surely is… lol
In P2W games I’ve seen you can still technically get the gated content/rewards without paying it just takes an absurd amount of time. I’m sure people have actual examples that they remember, but I can’t think of the game names atm.
Besides the obvious things said about this map, Anet should realize that a lot of players are afking or just leaving when this map shows up , seriously guys enough is enough.
ANet has quantifying data to determine if it’s actually a lot. Lets be real, in your opinion fall kills suck.
I don’t see the problem with the map. A skilled player is aware of that possibility and minimizes that happening. It’s no different than a skilled player messing up timing or a rotation and losing.
It sounds to me like people who think they should be 1337, are mad that they have to think about edge positioning, and are losing because they are doing it poorly.
Skilled player? Edge positioning? HAHAHAHA
Anyone who defends Skyhammer is either:
1) Trolling
2) Plays a class/build that has tons of knockback, pull, fear and/or stability
3) Eats crayons for breakfast
In order of ease of availability
Stay on the otherside of the Guardian?
Dodge?
Blind?
Stun Break?
Stability?
Invulnerability?
“The jack of all trades, master of none,
is oft outdone by the master of one.”I don’t know who said it originally (I doubt anyone does), but I’m pretty sure this applies nicely to eles.
Exactly, why use a profession that specializes at nothing and isn’t strong enough in enough areas to compensate, when you can use a profession to fulfill a role on a team better.
In PvP there’s two roles. Bunker and roamer, the ele can do neither near as well as other professions and it’s not good enough at speccing for both at the same time to warrant taking either. In fact most other professions are also better at speccing for both roles at the same time than the Ele.
…Do people realize how expensive it is to buy gold and become ‘pay to win’ in this game?
Dropping a few dollars a month is fine. It’s not going to destroy gameplay. If you’re making so much money that your spending becomes gamebreaking, you’re probably already working a career that takes a chunk of your life and likely don’t have the time to ‘work’ up to those high end stuff anyway.
You can’t buy skill in this game. Boosts are nice but not necessary. Cosmetics are nice but not necessary. Anything in the gem store is nice to have, but NOT a necessity to advance gameplay. And if you’re going to argue about ‘buying gold’ to get gear you want, well…anyone who is just bad at gameplay will fail, no matter how many exotics and legendary weapons they buy. There is nothing exclusive with real money that cannot be obtained without money.
And if you wanted to, you can buy gems with ingame gold! the gemstore is not exclusive to paying customers!
If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!
Game over
Ranger runes are bugged and the six bonus procs all the time
Spike coming to the price of Ranger runes.
Market manipulation?
Sorry but I can’t resist!
The skill I want back: SMITER’S BOON!!!
High five for you if you understand the fun in this post! :P
They already brought it back. It’s called Ride the Lightning now
That made me laugh so hard.
Btw, totally forgot that Smiter’s Boon is already in GW2. But they made it “20/180” (Tome of Wrath) instead of “25/90”. Memories, memories…
Hopefully many ANet employees are laughing too in anonymity
I don’t see the problem with the map. A skilled player is aware of that possibility and minimizes that happening. It’s no different than a skilled player messing up timing or a rotation and losing.
It sounds to me like people who think they should be 1337, are mad that they have to think about edge positioning, and are losing because they are doing it poorly.
The game doesn’t have the same restrictions a P2W game has. But you can win with cash for sure.
The steps to Winning Guild Wars 2:
1. Having 8 level 80 characters (1 for each profession)
2. Having completely Legendary gear from Armor, to Weapons (all weapons), to Trinkets to swap stats at will
3. Having a free superior rune dispenser
4. Having a free superior sigil dispenser
5. Having 100% waypoint completion
6. Having a free skin dispenser
This will allow you to do whatever you want whenever you want.
Easy mode for achieving the above
1. Dev hacks
2. Money
Sorry but I can’t resist!
The skill I want back: SMITER’S BOON!!!
High five for you if you understand the fun in this post! :P
They already brought it back. It’s called Ride the Lightning now
asuran skill pain inverter for certain
there is that skill but it is reatliation/confusion
Not on par
Confusion only triggers once per skill. Retaliation would have to be on everything you strike for a similar effect. Also the intensity of the skill was insane.
Ele’s are a great class for PvE, no doubt.
The OP would be speaking in regard to PvP.
In PvP the elementalist has nothing they can fall back on. They’re good a numerous things, but not great or exceptional at anything.
Come up with any elementalist PvP meta build and there’s another class with a similar build with better survivability, mobility, or DPS. Those three things are what dominate PvP.
Word of Healing
As inflation continues and the gold/time rate stays consistent or gets lower the game becomes more and more of a pay to win environment.
Hi All,
This is my last day at work before the holiday season and I am going to be very busy!
Once I am on vacation I will have more time to respond and engage.
I am therefore going to postpone the focused discussion on Horizontal Progression until tomorrow. I will catch up post page 36 today (or at least try).
Meanwhile I have a question. This thread is BIG. Would the folks who have already commented on Horizontal want a new thread which is just based on Horizontal or should we just carry on with this thread?
Regarding my reminders from you about comments on some kind of reward for the Fractal reset, I am still thinking about feelings around it.
Chris
If it makes more sense to repost horizontal progression topics in a new thread that’s fine. It seems like some people’s ideas on horizontal progression may have been forgotten or overlooked in the early pages.
There’s an obvious reason why warriors are so effective with minimal skill. Because there needs to be builds or classes like this for newbies to PvP.
It’s not worth discussing whether or not warriors are too good for low/mid skill players, because that doesn’t matter for top tier pvp.
The question really worth discussing is are warriors OP compared to the other classes when played at their skill cap?
To add to a lot of what people are saying, there’s a lot of l2p in Gw1. It’s an awesome game when you learn the combat, and when you get enough heroes and equip them with the right builds you can pretty much play on autopilot if you want. I’m not sure what the status of the end game is, but if there’s people available to play it, it’s very challenging.
It looks like people are already protesting. I haven’t seen many good elementalists in PvP recently.
Hi All,
Here is the next evolution of the original Vertical Progression proposal based on a summary of our discussions:
Regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method.
A review of current RNG metrics.
The ability to change gear stats (Note there is still a lot of discussion about whether people want this or not)
The ability to build up to Ascended Gear through drops rather than just relying on RNG.
Ascended Gear mats dropping more equally across the game, for example WvW.
No more new Gear tiers that make the existing tiers obsolete.
Additional ways to earn Ascended Gear at accelerated for Alts.
Note this is the formulation of a proposal for discussion. Once the proposal is finalized it will be discussed internally. However there will be no promise of actions or schedule.
Chris
Bump. We are close to being able to move onto the ‘focused’ Horizontal Progression part of this conversation.
Does anyone have anymore comments on the proposal above based on our discussions?
Chris
Just that I’d like to voice support for changeable stats
While it is true in how we work it’s hard to get fast turn around to ideas and I think a lot of the discussion and ideas need to be vetting more to make sure we are not missing something I do find these open discussion help drive discussions in the office and can help with priority. The goal of these in my mind isn’t to come away with a set of action items but to help share some insight on how we do things and why. This in turn gives people a greater understanding of how our game is made and can help improve communication between the dev’s and the community which can often lead to higher enjoyment for everyone.
Izzy,
It seems that the team would be in a great position to start coming up with a lot of smaller and maybe new fresh ideas for character progression. It’s early on in the game’s overall lifespan (knocks on wood), you’re trying to learn more about what the community likes and wants.
Now seems like a really good opportunity to break down character progression into numerous smaller pieces, there’s already lots of LONG term goals. What and how to do this are pending, but big picture if progression content is scatter throughout the world in smaller chunks (relatively speaking, with perhaps some variations in size) a couple important things may happen.
1) The concentration of players may change, and people might start exploring maps for the character progression content.
2) People may feel better about progressing alts, because they can go after smaller things they want for specific characters.
3) The dev team can collect metrics based upon the content that gets put out to see what people are doing most, and what people are repeating.
The hope for the team would be that releasing fair amounts of smaller character progression and related content is more feasible when it comes to turn around time. Spreading it throughout the existing world would hopefully allow reutilization of some existing content as opposed to having to completely develop from scratch.
I don’t know how the teams at ANet feel about casting a wide net of small content for progression, but RPGs are all about character progression, so you’d be pretty guarenteed all the content would be encountered a lot and can get a good idea of what to expand upon.
Food for thought.
Has the issue of content location concentration been addressed yet in regard to progression?
Obviously many people play mmos for progression, but this is an ANet MMO with a vast world, lots of art and lore.
So is there serious consideration for dispersing content throughout the zones of the world?
Is there consideration for mixing lore/story with the acquisition of character progression?
It’s important, with this discussion topic especially, to address other problem areas, because character progression is such a big deal for the RPG genre that by doing it right you can solve problems in those other areas that can be improved (such as story/lore and empty zones).
High level ideas for implementing Horizontal Progression to help populate existing maps.
Some of the most important things in regard to populating the world and providing good pacing is to make horizontal rewards not grindy (so people will want to play alts an bring them through the content as well). I know that seems counter-intuitive at first, but if it’s grindy, players are more likely to just stick with their main. Whereas if it’s not grindy players are more likely to bring alts, which is potentially 5 or more times to revisit the same content and experience it in a different way.
Another important aspect of implementation is to disperse horizontal rewards throughout the world (self explanatory, the travel time helps slightly with the pacing too). It’s also going to be important to release A LOT of these at once, otherwise you’ll run into the problem of there being a few hot spots. Finally, and also very important, apply horizontal progression to content of varying difficulties (easy-hard skill hunting unlocks for example).
I mentioned this before, but it’s important enough to repeat. When making new skills accessible, avoid the recent approach taken with healing skills. 25 skill points is a lot to access a skill players should be using frequently. If there needs to be a skill sink find another way to implement it, because it’s not new player/new character friendly.
(edited by Shockwave.1230)
Brainstorm statement.
I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.
Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.
So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?
Chris
I am trying to see if we can just remove conversation around any form of statistical evolution in the CDI?
Chris
If it seems necessary to have any kind of Vertical progression do what y’all did with PvE skills in Gw1 and make it feel less grindy than that. Make such skills have a normalized power in WvW.
Many would be fine without stat power creep. A lot of people see it as artificial content or a treadmill, but as a compromise the shallow skill progression offered by EotN wasn’t too grindy towards the beginning of the Gw2 release. As long as we don’t have a hot situation like Ursan Blessing it’s a solid system that can be improved upon.
I personally would have preferred just hunting the skills offered in EotN, but the skill progression being so shallow wasn’t a deal breaker and it had a power cap, plus those were PvE only skills so it didn’t break pvp.
@ OP
That build is solid for pure DPS. You’re squishy though, so you’ll have to adjust to different situations.
At times depending on the situation I think you might want to consider dropping fire a bit to grab Renewing Stamina and Tempest Defense.
Swapping out Arcane Wave for for Glyph of Storms for the Blind from Sandstorm or Armor of Earth might be useful at times as well.
A small point about skill progression, as it was implemented with the healing skills. This will not be helpful for new players trying to learn their class. 25 skill points is a lot for a skill they should be using frequently, and significant barrier to it’s use for new characters/players.
I would abandon the idea of making new skills a skill point sink, and implement something else to serve that purpose.
If the goal is to have players work for the new skills spread their acquisition out across the land. Keep the skill point investment normal, so that people have incentive to get them on alts as well to help further populate the land.
A question to help direct the discussion a bit:
What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?
For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.
The systems introduced by GW:EoTN were incredibly brilliant. Scattering meaningful horizontal progression throughout the world (skills, moa chick scavenger hunt, Thackery scavenger hunt, etc.), providing multiple ways to progress, and giving a very shallow grind for vertical progression with a low/medium grind cosmetic progression that was achieveable by the masses, AND allowing for further progression for bragging rights and minor passive buffs via titles… dude someone on that team was brilliant!!!
Who came up with that idea Colin? Was it you?
(edited by Shockwave.1230)
Recap of things in people’s posts that have been very interesting
(not in any specific order, summarized with empty quotes added for credit, reference, and post character length)
1. Having weaknesses in Content that allow for more mindlessly gaining character progression diminishes the importance of that progression/reward (i.e. easy dungeon paths).
snip
2. Character progression is very focused around crafting and the mystic forge. More ways to progress that involve story/lore would be appreciated (i.e. skill hunting – helping a tribe of tengu and learning a new skill)
snip
3. Vertical cosmetic progression, i.e. Fractal Capacitor
snip
4. The path for progression should not be a narraow road towards one end. It should be many roads with breadth towards numerous ends.
snip
5. Mixin somekind of character progression with story progression for the orders, similar to luxons/kurzicks of Gw1
snip
6. Unique particle effects for skills gain via profession specific challenges
snip
7. Gear could have swappable/unlockable stats or upgrades as unlocks to reduce demand/increase supply thereby making build diversity more available to the masses, but still require some time to unlock.
snip
8. A great definition of horizontal progression.
In my book horizontal progression means that you are able to continually expand your character in to more varying content; have more builds, explore more areas, experience stories which branch out; basically expand outward in variance rather than upward in scaling.
Recap of noteable improvement areas (not in any specific order)
1. Build diversity progression is inhibited by the difficulty of changing stats, as well as the limited number of skills
snip
2. Technical/artistic issues such as clipping take away from the want to work towards cosmetic goals. Also the large amount of dyes, them being soul bound, and the significant price of the good colors take away from the desire to work towards cosmetic goals.
snip
Other points (these are listed in order of importance, but all are important)
1. There’s a wonderful definition of horizontal progression above (point #8) by Conncept.7638 (he’d be a big picture guy on my dev team for sure having this mindset). Horizontal progression is not just creating grind towards cosmetics. It’s giving people cosmetics, cosmetic effects, combat effects, skills, etc. for going out and experiencing the games content. This is something that could be implemented so much better in this game, and the lack of it in combation with a lack of realistic progression for alts on par with mains is part of why the vast majority of the world is empty.
2. There is a right to be concerned about people’s feelings on the slowness/quickness at which rewards are obtained. More importantly different rewards should be added. Rewards should also involve skills, combat bonuses, and reduction of the time it will take to progress these things for alts. All concepts taken straight from Guild Wars i.e. skill hunting, title bonuses, and unlocking skills to obtained via tomes. It doesn’t have to be those exact things or if it is some of those things, done in the exact same way, but they worked when they were done.
3. Most if not all of the progression upon end game is based upon acquiring currencies. It’s all currencies, currencies, currencies. Provide people progression rewards for completing tasks, the example above of Helping the Tengu to obtain a skill is a great one. It also mixes in lore/story progression potentially.
4. Rewards/time rate significantly out of balance through various parts of the game. Normalizing the rewards/time rate would help everyone progress with gear at a similar pace, assuming similar play times.
5. Normalizing the rewards will not have a noticeable impact on the rate at which low time/low money players can obtain rewards. Introducing skill > time rewards would help some of these people (specifically the one’s complaining the most) bridge the gap, these people complain because they know they are in the top quartile of combat effectiveness but have real world limitations preventing them from having their character progression show it.
6. Alt progression should be more enjoyable and feel less like a grind towards being able to play content people like in a different playstyle.
tl;dr
If there’s any one thing that to take away from this post, I would hope every takes Other Points #1 with them. Own it, live it, breathe it, and apply it.
Thief is still OP, a very high uptime evade build concept was just nerfed
Elementalist has been toned way down over time, but pure condi builds are sad bcs of Diamond Skin
Warrior has probably been buffed overall by heal signet alone, but the control build’s damage was nerfed slightly two days ago, but it’s still boarderline OP.
Guardians haven’t changed too much, but people have found creative ways to make them dps.
All in all each class has it’s own “OP” qualities, which is to be expected since they have differences
why is ele underpowered? with diamond skin ele could beat every class in 1v1’s now
Any class can always beat any class. Diamond skin does not make eles better vs a class it makes eles better vs condition builds. They won’t have 10% of their health in almost every situation other than 1v1 pure condi builds.
Some fun facts
Vitality > Toughness (always)
1 Vitality = 10 effective health
1 toughness = 0.0545% (not 5.45%) damage reduction for an ele, if you’re ele had 18k health your effective health gain from that is 9.81 and only vs direct damage. The lower your health the lower the impact toughness has on your effective health, at 12k health your effective health gain is 6.54 from 1 toughness.
1 toughness = 0 effective health v condition damage
Toughness increases effective healing on only yourself in the same way it impacts direct damage reduction. It boosts effective healing by 0.0545% per point of toughness. This means you can further increase healing effectiveness by speccing highly in to both toughness and healing, creating a slightly curved growth in effective healing. Somewhat ironically toughness is better at impacting heals than healing power is even though a single point’s impact on healing is about 1/19th of 1 percent.
To reduce an elementalist’s health below 10% in pvp it takes between 1081-2344 damage. Most likely to be around 1.4-1.6k.
The game already has gear in place that a Casual player can get: Exotics. If you want BiS, you need to invest time to get them. By speeding up the process for Casuals, you then must speed up the process for Hardcore players. Then we have the problem of maximizing gear all over. Hardcore players will reach the goals too quickly, and will demand more progression. Then the cycle continues, with Anet having to consider another tier.
By gating things, both Casuals and Hardcore players move at the same speed. The major difference here is the cost of having all the materials required for the BiS gear. Hardcore players will be able to farm and “grind” out wealth to have mats. Casuals have access to the same content, albeit at a slower pace.
You’re talking about what kind of carrot to give people on the stick. Give them the Guild Wars 1 model of progression. I played that game for 4k hours over it’s life and never finished the progression in that game, plus the content was compelling enough to make me want to play it with alts and there weren’t huge alt barriers like in GW2.
I just threw down some initial thoughts for the CDI tomorrow about Vertical and Horizontal progression. Anyone who wants to add theirs to this thread go right ahead. I’m sure a number of us will be at work or otherwise busy, so we won’t be able to get into the initial discussion.
I happen to lean way towards a horizontal progression model similar to Guild Wars with little vertical progression, but for anyone that leans towards a the far otherside with vertical progression feel free to post y’alls initial thoughts here as well.
Hopefully people in on the initial discussion can carry over ideas in this thread for both sides.
Horizontal v Vertical progression
Shockwave.1230
The risk you run when implementing vertical progression is not allowing the player to return to a similar experience to what they were having. Updates to skills, and traits does this too, but that is negated by there being no time barrier to reworking your skills and traits. Time barriers do exist when you implement Vertical progression
The horizontal to Vertical progression ratio should be less than Guild Wars 1. In Guild Wars 1 the only vertical progressions were leveling from 1-20 and the incredibly shallow PvE Skill progression / passive title progression of the LB and EotN titles. The main reason it should be less is because when the title vertical progression first was implemented it was more significant than it became later. The later levels that it arrived at when it was first implemented was perfect from the casual player perspective. Plus you’re ANet, your innovations in that game gave you almost a cult following, why not take those same things that worked and innovate them further, while NOT utilizing the things people complain about for existing MMOs.
It was perfect from that perspective because of the exponential diminishing returns and because numerous skills would reach maximum effectiveness midway through the progression all while being able to be obtained in a timely fashion. It worked well for hardcore players too because there were meaningful rewards for maxing title progress, such as the awesome Rainbow Phoenix (which was the same as any other pet, but way more aesthetically pleasing). Guild Wars’ horizontal and vertical progression model should be the model to follow.
Also yes, ANet should keep the casual player in mind, because that’s how you grow your userbase. You appeal to untapped markets for growth and untapped markets are casual gamers. People for example spend millions on micro transactions for candy crush, so one thing ANet should also do is provide options for smaller purchases of Gems as they grow their user base.
Time gating things that people view as extremely meaningful needs to stop, and time gating horizontal OR vertical progression will only serve to irritate players. Work on good pacing with multiple ways for people to progress so that they aren’t only stuck with a couple of things to do. The more ways people have to progress a single “whatever” the less stale content feels over time and the less grindy it feels. So no time gating progression please, hard line on that.
Recap:
1. Use GW1 as a model for horizontal and vertical progression. You’re ANet, be the ANet we loved that innovated, not an ANet that takes things from the existing MMO genre and reskins them.
2. Cater to the casual for vertical progression while providing exclusive value to the hardcore player via horizontal progression, (I know I’m just saying the GW1 model again with a little more detail, but it was great so innovate it in a good way!)
3. Absolutely ZERO time gating on progression both horizontal and vertical (it severely repels casual and middle of the road players, you need to be casual and middle of the road friendly while still providing value to the hardcore group)
Most importantly ANet keep the people with little time and money in mind.
~~~snip~~~
4) There’s no real way to help the Casual player who has little time to play this game. They must make the choice of either playing more, or learning to live with what they can afford. If you give access and wealth of a player who plays for hours daily, to a player who plays 1 hour a week, that would be unfair to the other. That sort of thing would invalidate all the hours the other player put into the game.
Allowing players with little time and money the means to reasonably obtain almost anything is part of what made the first Guild Wars great. It wasn’t unfair there, it wouldn’t be here. The players with a lot of time that you think it’d be unfair to will always be ahead of the players with little time. I have no problem with that being the case, it makes sense. I’m just talking about closing the disparity of the gap that exists.
Is the fun the journey to collecting mats and crafting BiS? Or is the fun in having the BiS?
The problem isn’t what’s fun. The problem is what’s not fun, and that’s grind. Grind by it’s definition is not fun. Grind lacks mental stimulation due to its repetitive nature, stimulating content is what entertains people. When content becomes labeled as grind in someone’s mind that’s when the content itself is no longer fun, and literally the only reason people continuing do what they don’t find fun is toobtain something they will enjoy.
Ok. So what do you get if you eliminate the “grind”? Click a button and get Ascended gear, like a vending machine. Is that what you truly want?
Repeating something isn’t the same thing as grind. Grind involves repeating content, but is not the same as repeating content. Replay value, is important. Quality of content is important. Quantity of content will come with time, though it is inhibited by temporary content.
Providing 1 route to obtain something and limiting progress per attempt from 0% to a non-double digit percentage of progress is going to cause people to feel something is a grind. Providing 2 routes to obtain something means that small percentage can be the same and it feels less grindy. Providing 3 routes to obtain something means that small percentage feels even less grindy, hence dungeons (solid idea making multiple paths).
Even though there are multiple paths to gain progress towards something two things prevent people from participating.
1. One problem everyoen is experiencing, is that there is one most efficient way to obtain rewards, and so many people follow that most efficient way that it impacts the entire game economy and therefore impacts everyone playing.
2. The other problem people face is that content isn’t compelling enough (high enough quality) to feel worth doing. If people don’t feel the games content is compelling enough, then what happens is they either stop playing until it is, or if they feel compelled enough to go after rewards instead, they follow the most efficient path to get them, because if they’re going to do content they don’t feel is compelling they’re going to do the content that gets them the most quickly what they want.
To answer the question, no, I don’t want a vending machine.
What I want is either buffs to obtaining rewards across the board, or nerfs to existing farms to normalize the rewards/time investment.
I also want the removal of time gating, because all that does is put more money into the hands of people playing the TP, not people playing the game. It also limits the progress people can make who log on infrequently.
I also want an effective skill > time option for rewards so that people who don’t have time to play can learn how to play well in order to catch up to farmers, since they inflate the game economy and buffing rewards or nerfing farms across the board by itself won’t be enough to give players with less time a way to compete on a rewards level with players who have more time.
I also want ANet to disregard the gem exchange rate when making these decisions, and make these decisions with the players in mind instead of profit, because the fallback of everyone is that if you don’t have the time to spend then you can spend the money. This alienates everyone that has low time and low money, and at the very least since 97% of the United States population only holds 3% of the country’s wealth, and there are only single digit million amounts of accounts in GW2 whereas there are over 300 million people in the country, I’d imagine most of the country has other things to do with their time as well.
There’s probably other measures I want too, but this is all that’s rattling off my brain atm.
Is the fun the journey to collecting mats and crafting BiS? Or is the fun in having the BiS?
The problem isn’t what’s fun. The problem is what’s not fun, and that’s grind. Grind by it’s definition is not fun. Grind lacks mental stimulation due to its repetitive nature, stimulating content is what entertains people. When content becomes labeled as grind in someone’s mind that’s when the content itself is no longer fun, and literally the only reason people continuing do what they don’t find fun is toobtain something they will enjoy.
Collision detection isn’t a feasible option. Even if it’s combat only, I can imagine groups of corruption necros putting themselves into combat via self conditions to body block friendlies in WvW or the Bank/TP in LA, etc…
Diamond skin is a hard counter to pure condition builds. All you need to do is inflict 1,500-2,000 damage then you can continue melting Elementalists as normal.
Honestly looking back, the Scarlet story arc isn’t necessarily bad. The problems are:
A) You never seem any closer to understanding her end game.
B) It took way too long to show the players visibility into what’s going on. This story arc has been 1 whole year in the making it’s taken this long to finally start making sense, because we have inklings into Scarlet’s motivation thanks to Fractured.
C) It has only just now begun to potentially be tied into the main conflict of GW2, dragons (I won’t spoil the theories here)
D) Much of the story telling elements for the arc were temporary
These are HUGE problems for story buffs. Following and wondering about a storyline for a year without ANY idea of what the direction of the story is? Who honestly thinks putting viewers/players through that is a good idea? And then removing story telling elements?
It’s not for me. I prefer to buy an expansion so I can binge on story if I want, or go at whatever pace I want. Compare this to an experience that you get from other story providers like Netflix, and it’s night and day. It’s like a tortoise vs a hair in a way. This is the fundamental problem I have with MMOs, they want to pace you by giving you a little bit of what you want and a lot of what you don’t so that you are enticed to be logged in a lot.
I wish ANet would have made another CORPG instead of making a classic MMO style game, I realize more and more that the experience the first Guild Wars provided was much more sensative to people’s time and provided a lot more value for the time that was spent.
(edited by Shockwave.1230)
This thread is a great example of why catering to your audience is important. There are two very different philosophies attempting to coexist in this game, satisfying them both at the same time has proven to be the challenge.
I would very much like to see metrics of the activity levels of the Guild Wars 1 population, as from my experience it feels like we’ve gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to catering to a target audience.
Superspeed is only noticeable if you don’t have swiftness up or if you are in combat. Movement speed has a hard cap.
The new healing skills have been called bad, they’ve been called good.
I for one am just glad to see new skills, but here’s the thing. People are not measuring whether a new skill has its uses or not, they are measuring a skills effectiveness by how many situations the skill is good in, which is fair to certain point.
Basically players will find themselves in different kinds of situations in this game, or any game. Players are doing well identifying what scenarios skills are useful in. The thing is that you don’t want a skill to stand out as superior in every situation. What you really want are baseline skills that are “good” in every situation, and you want other skills that are great in some situations, but weak in others.
I see the reactions to some of the new healing skills and feel like people are forgetting this. If a skills is superior in every situation it’s OP. It becomes mandatory and the thing that happens is you go from having many choices to only 1 choice, which means you have no choice.
This is not to say people don’t have valid concerns about the new skills, but keep in mind that the skills are supposed to have strengths and weaknesses.
I would imagine that there are many who don’t know about the Gw1 skill system. Simply put it had a lot of baseline skills that were good in numerous situations and a lot more situationally useful skills. This was important, bcs it allowed for a lot of build diversity, but also coordination, because some of these specialized skills were extremely useful if you could coordinate to exploit the situational effectiveness, but they wouldn’t be useful unless you had that coordination. Gw1 Vets probably most recently remember the Panic buff.
Obviously we want it now and to get lost in coming up with good builds sometimes, but with iterative releases that won’t likely happen. We’ll have to wait for an expansion for a moment like that.
Reflecting back on Gw1, I am noticing that traits seem to be shackeling ANet. They can’t easily make meaningful change via traits, bcs of the impact to current builds.
In Guild Wars 1, there weren’t traits to worry about. Just skills and the primary attribute effects. We very rarely saw much change to the primary attributes, which is what I would equate to traits. The real change was with new skills.
Basically what I’m saying is don’t expect trait changes to be the thing that results in build diversity. That’s not ANet’s history. The new skills that get released are what’s really going to open things up.
I’ve been keeping tabs on the ele, bcs it’s my opinion that it’s the most challenging profession to play, meaning it’s the profession I want to play.
I’ve noticed frequent nerfs to the class. Though the conjure buffs were appreciated.
I have to wonder if being the most challenging class to play is a draw for skilled players. I wonder this, bcs the there is only one logical explanation I have for why the elementalist is constantly underpowered and requires playing near the skill ceiling to operate at the effectiveness of lower skill ceiling professions.
The explanation is quite simple. Ele’s are so much more challenging to play well than other professions that they can only be played by the most skilled players, and these players reach the skill ceiling like they would with any profession and dominate the opposition.
This makes the elementalist look overpowered when it’s not. Any profession would look OP when played by these types of players, but they choose to play the elementalist bcs they enjoy the challenge.
I’m definitely not one of these players, and this explanation I have isn’t necessarily true, but I would love to hear a better explanation.
Thank you ANet.
The framing of this is great, retelling the story of what happened to Marjory’s Helper Dee. It’s great being able to come back and do this part of the living story, especially because it’s such a change to the landscape.
It’ll be even better if you guys can add a replay of the cut scenes leading up to “The Nightmare Ends.”
Thanks again!
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