Guild Wars 2

eekzie.5640:

There’s a difference between grind, and working towards stuff. You clearly don’t like either… plenty of people who do like it.

And there’s plenty of companies that do that for gear grind and the things I’ve said I don’t like. ANet got away from doing the things I (and others) liked from Guild Wars, which is why me and a bunch of other people are upset, but mostly because they were niche and no other company has made a game like ANet’s original Guild Wars, or if one does exist I don’t know about it.

Gehenna.3625:

Galen Grey.4709:

People already find the minuscule effort required for a single daily daunting and boring… Multiplying it by 7 will make it 7 times worst.

That’s because there have been too many games that went for instant gratification in most of their content. They made it easier so people got lazier. It’s a trend of our time. Continue to cater it and it will just get worse.

People don’t value stuff anymore because they simply feel entitled instead of giving it value by having to do something for it. And no I don’t mind silly grind, that isn’t satisfying either.

It really is ok to have to work for something, but the effort/reward balance has to make sense and in this game it certainly doesn’t make any sense at all.

Why are people looking as video games though they should provide something to work towards? It’s not a job. I don’t want to spend tons of time working for something in a game. People do that in real life. In my video games I want instant gratification.

milo.6942:

Furutre.2193:

The reason i asked was becouse i havent heard anything about it, its not a complain post ;P

If they have comfirmed it, its great news Thats what i wanted to hear.

it was a pvp dev that confirmed it was on the way, and also in gw1 the template system was more useful in pvp than pve. In pve to change your traits you need to spend money to respec, so I don’t know how it would work or what you should expect.

You only needed to spend money on gear. Your characters attributes spread you could customize for free and at will, while not in an instance.

Build templates in PvE can’t exist with the current format. They would have to remove the gold sink from traits and give players the ability to load weapons out of thin air. I would love both of these things of course.

I have to admit, full celestial with all ruby mods on armor and trinkets does surprise. Looking at the numbers compared to full berserker has converted me. Almost 70% increases in overall effective health ((1+Damage Reduction) x Health) and only around a 25% reduction in overall damage. It actually seems kind of unreal.

Vayne.8563:

It’s not quite level grind. Colin as talked about, on more than one ocassion, how in most games you have to hit max level before you get to the fun stuff. In other words, you grind as fast as you can to get to max level to raid. You don’t do fun stuff till the top level. That’s what he’s talking about. That’s what I’ve said repeatedly. Your refusal to acknowledge not only that I’ve said this, but that Colin has, just shows how far you’re try to go to prove your point.

Like taking a line out of the original manifesto or a SINGLE WORD out of that article. This is an argument you’ve already lost. I don’t know why you can’t see it.

Take the dye system. You take that out of context too. Look at you pointing out that they changed the dye from account unlocked to single character unlocked. You know, that’s absolutely 100% true. But what you ignore, against taking it out of context, is the accompanying changes that made that dye collection far more of a grind in the first place. A dye seed, which you could only grow once per day, taken to an NPC in your home instance. And if you want to see more than one dye per day, you have to spend money on the cash shop on plant food. And the dyes were account locked but also couldn’t be sold on the trading post. Anet didn’t JUST change the dye to make it character bound, they changed the entire dye system and the new system is less greedy than the old one and makes it easier to get dyes.

I think maybe you should stop taking stuff out of context to try to prove points that are clearly not true.

It’s seems a bit delusional to defend the dye system being character bound. It’s obvious that it was changed to create a significantly larger gold sink. It doesn’t even matter if they left the old dye system, most people don’t want every single dye color, they just want to be able to easily preview every single color (whether they have it or not) and get the few ones they like. Now most people have to get the ones they like multiple times, once for each character.

Vayne, if it was so obvious that their only marketing intent when referring to grind was to communicate you don’t have to grind to get to the fun content, then why do we see new people continuing to pop up in threads (people I’m not familiar with bringing it up before either) referring to the manifesto with the understanding that people like Erasculio are communicating?

It’s because of a number of items, some of which Erasculio references, and the impressions ANet left on people from interviews and articles leading up to release. Telling us all the things we loved about Guild Wars would be in Guild Wars two, we loved grind only impacting Titles and Aesthetics, yet that’s not the case. How can people not understand that one of the biggest draws of Guild Wars was that there was no focus on vertical progression, the focus was on horizontal progression. Saying these things should have been understood by people, means we should have disregarded everything they gave us in Guild Wars and not trusted them. You’re saying people should have seen it coming that ANet was going to cater towards a very different crowd and not the market share they had. You’re saying we should have either A) understood they were going to abondon their previously ideologies or B ) understood they were going to use deceitful marketing involving the developers (who have the most insight into the game and were familiar with the previous game). But if this is not what you’re trying to say in any way at all, it sure comes across like it is.

eekzie.5640:

Lets go through your list:

Infinite use mining picks, logging axes, and gather sickles, because I don’t like having to waste inventory space keeping extras, and I run out of charges and forget to grab new ones.

They were available for a limited amount of time.

A set of weapons, armor, and trinkets that scales with level and has top tier stats @ level 80, and that can be use with transmogrifier stones, so I can change my skins (which I would still be willing to grind for)

Level 80 exotics is pretty much non-farm. Just work your way through the stuff you like and within very reasonable time you should have plenty gold to get it. Any gear needed to 80 will be readily available on the TP.
The ascended trinkets isn’t really that ’’grind’’, more just a progression as you need to do daily runs of fractals and do guild missions.

The means to set my weapons, armor, trinkets to any top tier stat combination that’s available in the game, because I just want to experiment with different max potential build combinations and find the ones I like, not spend a bunch of time trying to reach max potential.

Will be available with legendaries. Legendary ’’gear’’ will become available later on. I hope this included jewelry.

The ability to reinvest my trait points at will while within a certain proximity of a waypoint while outside of combat, except for WvW and PvP, because I don’t like being restricted to only one build spec unless I go to a major city and I’d like to respec more frequently to see how different builds play in various situations, so the cost of retraiting hampers that.

They didn’t want this. So unless they change their mind… I don’t think this will ever happen.

3 x $10 x number of rolled character is a lot by itself.

Level 80 exotics are a farm. I don’t just get 1 set of gear that I can tweak for builds. I have to get different sets of gear for my builds. It takes up inventory space and multiplies the exotic armor costs.

Ascended trinkets are clearly a grind. You have to log in daily or grind to get them.

Legendaries are absurd to obtain.

I have never played an MMO before Guild Wars 2. I played the Online RPG Guild Wars. I’ve never liked MMOs because of the way grind works, you grind for power. I don’t want to spend my time grinding for power. I just want to do the few things that I’ve listed. My time is too important to me to waste it doing uninteresting repetitive tasks. I don’t want to run a daily rotations of achievements.

This game is slowly becoming more and more about fulfilling chores to get max gear and time savers. The game should just be convenient from the start with a focus on creating challenging content and important storylines.

It’s all designed to be painful so you have to spend money in order to get convenience, so since they want me to spend money to get convenience, I’m willing to if they let me spend a lot of money once so I never have to worry about it again. $300 over the next 5 years of the game to never have to worry about additional tiers of gear, and being able to customize my builds at will is totally worth it. It’s like paying $60 every year for a new game, since they’ll hopefully be releasing content that’s not timeboxed so I can splurg, then stop playing a while, then play a little bit consitently if I want, then splurg again, and stop a while…

The game isn’t playing out to be pickup and put down like they described, like what they had in their last game. They were supposed to do an MMO like they did their last game, but they are doing an MMO like all previous MMOs. Either take my money and give me the experience I want or get no more from me and see me jump in game get frustrated and stop. I don’t like ultimatums, but what they are doing is extremely frustrating when I think back on my experience with Guild Wars.

Player Character.9467:

Shockwave.1230:

Player Character.9467:

Question, why do you play video games? Comment, anet isn’t going to let you skip the time gating of ascended armor/weapons.

I play this game, because it’s the sequel to the game that I drew a lot of enjoyment from via it’s challenges, combat, lore, and stories. Guild Wars was, and Guild Wars 2 is the only game that I play with any regularity (Guild Wars 2 is my first MMO), but I do enjoy each new release of Halo too because I find the characters, story, and gameplay compelling.

So if you like gamePLAY why do you want to gamepay and sit in LA?

Who said anything about Lion’s Arch? I explained what I like to do in game above. Challenges I like include jumping puzzles, dungeons, and fractals.

I like the lore (would like to see more of the meaningful storylines though and better story telling aspects).

I also like playing different combat styles and tweaking builds to perfection.

Esplen.3940:

Erasculio.2914:

-snip-

So then what should players work for? What should differentiate the player who plays for 8 hours a day versus the player who plays for 10 minutes a day (and yes, the average time played for players who get on GW2 is ~12 minutes a day everyday).

I think the metrics that are more important are…

How many days a week do people want to play, which can be tracked by looking for days where people play for more than 45min (since they probably don’t want to play that day and are just getting on to do the daily)

How many hours do people play on days that they want to play?

A metric saying that people just play for an average of 12 minutes per day tells you that you need better metrics to understand your players.

Sobat.8650:

ellesee.8297:

i am pretty sure they are adding both abaddon and reactor fractals regardless who wins. it’s just which one is going to come out first is being determined now.

I think they mentioned something about wanting the players feel like their votes matter and will not be developing the losing fractal in an interview somewhere.

Player’s who don’t pay attention to the main site or forums likely don’t even know about the new Fractal, which I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half the players have no idea about the fractals. So for all they know the only thing coming out of the vote is someone winning an election.

Player Character.9467:

Question, why do you play video games? Comment, anet isn’t going to let you skip the time gating of ascended armor/weapons.

I play this game, because it’s the sequel to the game that I drew a lot of enjoyment from via it’s challenges, combat, lore, and stories. Guild Wars was, and Guild Wars 2 is the only game that I play with any regularity (Guild Wars 2 is my first MMO), but I do enjoy each new release of Halo too because I find the characters, story, and gameplay compelling.

I wish they would have given us the best of both world and stuck Abbadon with the Human, people can obviously relate to a human more than a Charr.

If people want daily content that’s fine. It takes like 30-45 minutes to do the daily activities. I just want to be able to get get the same out of 7 hours of playing over a weekend as they get for that 30-45 minutes over 7 days, which is currently not possible.

I miss the much freer feeling Guild Wars offered and not having these reward restrictions. Why is ANet trying to control when we spend our time in game? Rewarding people who can log on daily is not fair to people who can’t.

I’m learning more and more that I prefer the style of an online RPG over an MMO, there’s a reason Guild Wars 2 is my first MMO, and that’s bcs I loved Guild Wars so much, and fell for the marketing since I trusted ANet would provide the same kind of experience with this game.

Dear ANet,

I understand you would like to bring in a lot more revenue than what you did with Guild Wars. Obviously these are different games. The lore and storytelling and challenges that I enjoyed so much from Guild Wars, seem like they do exist somewhere in this new installment called Guild Wars 2.

The difficulties I have, are a lot of distractions and conceptual changes that I don’t want to have to deal with. These are things such as power grind for gear, gold sinks in the form of travel, gather materials that have charges, changing builds, armor repair, having to buy gear with different stat combinations for various builds…

It’s all very exhausting, feels like work, takes away from the relaxing experience I used to have in the original Guild Wars and is just distracting from the experience I want. I just want to be able to spend my time playing the game for the combat diversity, challenges, and stories mostly. I don’t like having to be concerned about my character’s power or grinding gold to be able to experiment with different builds and stat combinations or wondering what it’s going to take to get enough gold for a set of max stat gear during dialogue sequences.

I don’t mind having something to grind for that shows people, “Hey, I put a lot of time or money into this, here’s my proof!” In Guild Wars that was cosmetics and titles, which I’m still 100% fine with.

I want to spend MY time the way I was able to spend it in Guild Wars. I just strongly dislike the above mentioned additions in the game. It’s my understand that you’re not leaning towards doing expansion, and I’d like to continue contributing towards you as a company so I am willing to pay $300 for the following to be added to my account on each character and any character I create going forward:

• Infinite use mining picks, logging axes, and gather sickles, because I don’t like having to waste inventory space keeping extras, and I run out of charges and forget to grab new ones.
• A set of weapons, armor, and trinkets that scales with level and has top tier stats @ level 80, and that can be use with transmogrifier stones, so I can change my skins (which I would still be willing to grind for)
• The means to set my weapons, armor, trinkets to any top tier stat combination that’s available in the game, because I just want to experiment with different max potential build combinations and find the ones I like, not spend a bunch of time trying to reach max potential.
• The ability to reinvest my trait points at will while within a certain proximity of a waypoint while outside of combat, except for WvW and PvP, because I don’t like being restricted to only one build spec unless I go to a major city and I’d like to respec more frequently to see how different builds play in various situations, so the cost of retraiting hampers that.

I understand, some people would view this as a slap in the face. But that slap in the face already exists, because we all know there’s people who have way more money than $300 to spend on gems to get whatever they want (such as legendaries, which is not what I’m asking for at all) and still be able to have the experience we had in the original Guild Wars, where they don’t have to spend time on the things they (and I) don’t want to. I too frequently just stop playing, because I don’t want to deal with all of these little things nickle and diming my time. It takes me time to get gold, and all these little gold sinks feel like time stolen.

Basically I just want to feel like I did spending my time in Guild Wars, and Guild Wars 2 does not give me that feeling due to what I’ve explained above. So my offer is on the table, or if you have another more affordable solution for me, that still involves playing this game of course, I’d be willing to take a look.

Julie Yann.5379:

I was more curious about the numbers, not sure what I want to do with this ele yet and I like to experiment. I must have made a dozen build/gear/accessoires for my warrior and guardian each. ATM I got celest coat, pants, amulet, and rings, cavalier back, PPV 7% crit accessories, and zerker everything else. 0-10-0-30-30 staff build for WvW. Since the ele is very versatile I was thinking that all-stats would make it good at everything but not great at anything which is what Anet was going for with the ele which might be an advantage since there is no real weak spot to exploit.

If you want a stat combination to boost your overall character effectiveness, mix knight’s, berserker’s, and valkyrie. I would always lean more towards berserker’s if you have the skill to pull it off well, because the design of the game is more supportive of dropping opponant’s as quickly as possible.

There’s always going to be a better piece of gear than celestial to use than celestial to boost your stats.

From the perspective of character strength celestial is optimal at nothing, therefore it’s use would be a budget way to be somewhat effective at whatever build you choose to run.

No matter what with celestial you are losing attribute points when you use it. You always lose points to healing power, better spent on toughness or vitality for survival. And you will lose points to condition damage (except in PvP, where condition damage is useful), when it could be spent on either power, precision, or prowess.

LightningBlaze.4913:

The Game Slayer.7632:

mjharrison.3209:

Neko.9021:

We have all been asking this question, every day, ever since the game was released.

The other question we ask every day is why we all have to spec 20-30 points into arcane just to make the class playable.

To make the class playable? Ive got 1400 hours played on my ele on my 2000 hour account. I almost never run arcana anymore unless i need to, such as staff trait or bunker. This isnt a case of it being unplayable at all, its a case of the players not wanting to try other things and get used to not having arcana. Believe me, it is the players not wanting to change, and resisting it. Adapt to the game, and you will find out you CAN play the ele without arcana. I honestly feel like arcana traitline is training wheels for a noob ele player. (unless, like ive said, you NEED to run it for staff or bunker). L2P.

I second this ^. Never been a fond of investing more than 10 points in the arcane tree. As a burst focused ele , more than 5 points in it is not necessary and it is most certainly playable.

These two comments I whole heartedly disagree with. As an ele besides a Lightning Hammer build, optimal efficiency comes from having access to any one of your skills at any given time. Our skills are gated twice, once by the skill recharge and a second time by the attunement cooldown.

The attunement cooldown has one sole purpose, to not allow the elementalist to use whatever skills they want that are on cooldown. Why create something with that purpose? Because you haven’t spent the time to balance the way the skills interact with each other.

I see Fresh Air as an attempt by ANet to slowly work towards reducing or getting rid of the Attunement cooldown, because it gives Elementalists access to Air attunement whenever they want to use it. That’s 1/4 attunements that they are potentially reviewing for reducing/eliminating the cooldown.

We all want the attunement cooldown gone, the only thing standing in the way is balance. Once ANet figures out how to balance it, we should see the cooldown on attunement recharge reduced.

Fuzzion.2504:

Yes, mix is the best. But Mix is something you will have to try and balance. Are there templates out there for the copying, yes. Do you really want to copy them exactly? No. Everyone has a different playstyle. Fiddling with your gear till you find the perfect mix is very fun but also very opinionated, Some say might makes up for low pow, some say pre scales better than pow, some say tuff at 1600 is fine, some say healing at 700 is comfortable, some say blah blah blah

By the numbers precision is actually better for your Average overall deps than power.
Also by the numbers vitality is actually better for your overall effective health.

That said, this is only partly a numbers game. Your overall build, skill, and playstyle are important too.

Celestial Gear is useful if you want to change builds often while retaining okay effectiveness between them. Otherwise is far more efficient to use stats catered toward the way you want to play. I like to play with DPS stats and some survivability so I prefer Berserker gear with a few knights pieces.

It all depends on how you want to play as to what stats you should get. I recommend thinking about that and asking for feedback.

Fortus.6175:

Simple question really, do seeing a person with a legendary make you go like; “Ohhh!”, are you indifferent, or another reaction?

Is there any reputation on getting one?

Would you go for it for the reputation or for the looks?

If it became harder/easier would you appreciate it more/less?

If you do appreciate something from legendaries or its users, what is it?

There are two things that impress me in life regardless of what it pertains to. People that do something others don’t have the skill or physical prowess to do, and people who can lead others. Legendaries are not challenging to obtain, they just require a lot of one of two resources, time or money. Showing people you have a lot of time or money to spend in game is not impressive. If legendaries were associated with an incredibly difficult challenge, they would impress me.

Respected people in WvW and PvP are impressive, especially Commanders who can coordinate well. It’s hard in general for me to be impressed with someone over PvE, because it’s not very challenging in my opinion.

I get where the OP is coming from. There’s a lot of attention that the devs and content crews seem to be paying towards generating revenue through the cash shop. I feel like the business side of ANet and NC Soft think that the amount of money they generate is the reflection of how happy players are with the game, just my opinion on their view. The amount of money we shovel over though is not an indication of how much we like the game though, correllation does not imply causation.

With so much attention being paid to things like cash shop items and the living story (which you’d think would really add a lot of value with lore), it seems like they’re overlooking the importance of telling a good story, and the idea of removing access to the story shows that it’s not very important to the lore. If it was, why would ANet take important content away from the players?

Maybe, all of these living story segments are building up to something big and important in the game’s lore, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it is right now. Ultimately the measure of franchise’s success comes from the storytelling, and how compelling the story is. There’re are these dragon threats out there, there are factions of each playable race that are threats out there (inquest, sons of svanir, etc), there’s orders and a pact that can have storylines, there’s all of these important bigger things in the world, and the lack of development on them that the players see is startling.

If you had all expansions, speed leveled your character, and asked for the best hero builds while following the wiki you could get 30/50 in about a month if you played hardcore.

It’d go way faster if you found someone with game experience to carry you in their party with their heroes. It would be really boring since, I know from experience you can make hero team builds that can basically steamroll the game in normal mode for you. But then again that was one of the things I like about Guild Wars, there was easy mode to enjoy the storylines and hard mode to enjoy the challenges.

And if they have a bunch of extra non-devoted mini’s, easy points. If they have extra hero armor pieces, easy points. If they have extra game currency and mats sitting in their bank to give you so you can buy armor and weapons, easy points x2.

Honestly there’s some people who could make some serious bank from their old Guild Wars accounts, or if they’re just feeling generous make a bunch of friends in Guild Wars 2. I’m sure there’s a number of people in GW2 who would like an easy extra 300 AP while learning about why people love Guild Wars 1 so much, and learning about the lore.

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 2 was never a worry depending upon what you wanted to do in it. It was often a worry to me, forced to grind through zillions of levels of PvE only skills to be accepted into a group for DOA.

Again do not confuse the existence of PvE skills with power progression. When you played the game you got to r3-r6 for the titles impacting pve skills. Skills I’ve seen you use examples with like save yourselves and pain inverter were just as effective at those early title ranks as they were at higher title ranks. This is true for save yourselves bcs it was spammable. Its true of pain inverter bcs the damage cap was 80. The skills existing on their own was not power progression. The titles impacting them were, and the impact of that progression was negligible, bcs of reasons such as above.

Vayne.8563:

They abandoned? Really?

You’re trying to say this game has full on vertical progression. So far, it has ONE TIER OF GEAR. That’s it. Actually sorry I’m wrong.

It was one tier of ACCESSORIES.

I think abandoning their vision, all things considering is a little strong.

What Anet did was compromise. Reasonable people are usually for compromise. If you have to have it all your own way, then in my opinion you’re not being reasonable.

It’s not reasonable to say I want this and Anet didn’t do this so I’ve been betrayed. Particularly when so many Guild Wars 1 players ARE playing and enjoying this game.

And if you continue to compare this to Guild Wars 1, which remained a niche game and was always a niche game, I’ll remind you, again, that the staff is five times the size and a niche game won’t pay their salaries.

From what I see, a bunch of Guild Wars 1 people got it in their head that ALL vertical progression is a gear grind and thus a bad thing. I don’t ever feel like I’m grinding in this game. Because I choose not to grind. We don’t have a gear treadmill. And since vertical progression was in the game AT LAUNCH, Anet abandoned nothing.

I think some people are way to attached to vertical progression being negative automatically. It can BECOME negative, if not watched, but Anet hasn’t flooded the market with gear tier after gear tier.

Sorry but the response of a small portion of the fan base doesn’t indicate Anet abandoned anything.

In fact, this game is the true spiritual successor to Guild Wars 1. Want to know why? Because Anet is innovating and trying different things, and that’s precisely what Anet did with Guild Wars 1.

Guild Wars 1 players wanted Guild Wars 1.5…but then that wouldn’t be a true successor to Guild Wars 1. Because it wouldn’t have been as innovative.

Guild Wars 1 was hailed as a landmark game because it innovated. Now Anet is experimenting and innovating again. So Guild Wars 2 is the true spiritual successor to Guild Wars 1.

They have added vertical progression to what they do, no one is saying it’s the same degree as other MMOs. The “innovation” they’ve done with vertical progression is what you are calling a compromise. They took something from other games, something they didn’t do and made it less painful by (hopefully) not continuing to add tiers of gear.

Did other games not already do that by just sticking with the gear power they had at launch? I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t play any online RPGs before Guild Wars due to the rediculous amount of emphasis placed on powering up your character, Guild Wars was my compromise for vertical progression (because it stopped quickly). People do play games without power progression.

An even greater degree of innovation would have been to be the first MMO where power progression stopped early on in their overall content. Lots of people thought they were going to just have the illusion of power progression because of their original intentions with scaling, they were going to up and down level scaling, but they cut out up scaling (except for WvW).

Regardless of the number of tiers of gear, if players could obtain the top tier of gear from a playthrough of the story, people like me wouldn’t care how much progression there is in between, because there would be little to no need of having to think about managing our resources or currencies. People would just play through and they can focus so much more on the content, the challenges, and combat due to there being no need to worry about vertical progression at all.

Instead, players have to worry about managing their game currencies on not just for gear, but seemingly everything else from repairs, to waypoints, to a virtual stock market.

Guild Wars was a game, where that kind of thing was never a worry. If you had time constraints and were only willing or able to play 10 hours a week, it didn’t matter. Because in under a month you were on the same playing field as everyone else.

You never had to use anymore of your currency after half way through a campaign, because you were at peak power by then.

Vayne.8563:

So you think the Guild Wars community would have been better served letting the game settle into oblivion? Because that’s what would have happened.

This game has much higher operating budget that Guild Wars 1 did, with five times the number of employees, bigger headquarters, etc. This game would have languished and died without players. There aren’t enough players like you and even me. Sad to say, but true.

So yeah I like the idea of no real vertical progression but Anet has to worry about feeding families of the people that work for them, in addition to being loyal. But even then you’re missing the point.

Because I’m no less a loyal Guild Wars fan than you are, and I LIKE the changes. So do others I know. So only SOME of the Guild Wars fans felt betrayed not all of them. There are an awful lot of guys running around with GWAMM titles who seem to like this game.

So in your mind betraying you (while not betraying me) is a betrayal of Guild Wars 1 players. Well, sorry to tell you, not all of us feel betrayed. So what did Anet really do?

They made a decision for the benefit of their game…which some of us don’t mind and some actively like.

They betrayed, your words, a portion of their playerbase. In my mind, letting the game languish would have betrayed a bigger portion.

Things aren’t so black and white as you’re painting them.

No one is saying they were unjustified to lookout for themselves. Companies do it all the time. NC Soft and ArenaNet are bringing in far more revenue now, great for them. The market that likes vertical power progression has another system in another game they can play, wonderful.

What I’m saying is that they abondend their philosophy of not doing vertical progression that impacts gameplay. They didn’t have to abondon that philosophy, but they did.

They could have chose to stick with that philosophy and things would have played out differently. Would it have been better or worse? No one really knows for sure, but they probably would have had more players than Guild Wars but less than they have now, because it seems like the larger portion of the gaming community does want power progression, which they already have an abundance from every MMO. Would they have done their hirings and budget differently too? Probably. Would the game be different? Definitely. A lot different? It would be fairly different. Is that good or bad? It’s just different. Would they be hearing about how people are upset about grind for vertical progression? Not if they had stuck with their original philosophy, and maybe had a sprinkle of it like they had previously done.

They had however many millions of copies of Guild Wars sold, and it was sold on the idea of quality buy to play CONTENT. It wasn’t about vertical progression to suck you in and make your character more powerful or about a monthly fee to suck you into playing. Just pick it up, put it down as much as you want. Enjoy the content, enjoy the stories, repeat content and dive into the lore, progress your title’s for bragging rights if you want, and progress your character’s look if you want. There’s still more to it than just these things obviously.

Still millions of copies sold without power progression being a theme of the game, which allows players to focus on so much more than their character’s power. It was obviously a different concept, but still successful and enjoyed.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Vayne.8563:

He said it, but there was vertical progression in Guild Wars 2 from day one since 80th level exotics are better than 80th level rares. More to the point, Anet also said that ascended gear was meant to be in at launch but it didn’t make it on time.

So it would have been just another level of gear that the game launched with. Which presumably wouldnt’ have been a problem.

There’s nothing that can be done about the past. It’s history, the game launched with substancial vertical progression, even though I didn’t understand it at that time. ANet’s history before that was not vertical progression, because of this it makes sense that people such as myself would impose as much pressure as possible to prevent any further vertical progression and to push for the grind to continually be lessened on that vertical progression.

Even though they’ve stated Ascended gear was meant to be in the game at launch, given the way ANet has done their marketing and communication with the community I don’t feel like it’s as straight forward as that. But it is further evidence to show they released before they were ready, if that is in fact true. I’m more apt to believe that when ANet says ascended gear was supposed to be in the game at launch, they meant that all the tiers of gear should have been introduced at launch to avoid the backlash that they face, but that’s just due to my inability to be as trusting with their words now with Guild Wars 2 as I could in the past while I was playing Guild Wars.

I think that’s probably one of the biggest things actually for people’s expectations, as part of the following in Guild Wars 1 there was communication on the wiki with the devs and release notes and more statements of intent, more detailed transcribed documentation on what they were doing basically. When ANet reps communicated back then, we just knew what they meant. Naturally as the build up occurred towards Guild Wars 2, many people thought they knew what ANet meant as they always had. Obviously things turned out the way they did, and now communication from ANet feels far less genuine and feels like it holds a lot more spin than it used to. This is just me personally speaking of course based on my experiences and from conversation with the people that I played Guild Wars with.

I followed this game religiously and very very little surprised me. The addition of ascended gear DID surprise me, and I said at the time, I’ll wait and see how it plays out. To me it’s fine. It doesn’t stop me from doing anything I want to do in the game. I have characters with and without ascended gear and I do most of the same stuff on all of them, the exception being high level fractals.

The problem is, most people see this vertical progression thing as this huge breech of promise, when in fact, vertical progression was in the game from day one. Beyond that, however, most people who play this game, the overwhelming majority, don’t even know what vertical progression is.

I’m willing to wager less than 25% of the game’s population know or understand vertical progression as a concept at all. Of those who do understand it, not everyone is against it.

So the question is, what percentage of the player base is negatively affected by this and what percentage of the player base is positively affected?

That sounds like the ends justify the means, which in this scenario show’s a company is more concerned about the bottom line than it’s existing playerbase. I already feel like ANet is less of a players’ company than they were, which may not make sense to some due to them likely having increased their audience. But every other MMO already had vertical progression. ANet was the company who’s online rpg didn’t have it. Their grind was purely cosmetic and for title. Their grind didn’t impact gameplay and it didn’t impact combat, save the first 30 or so hours to level and the minor impact to PvE skills. That’s what their playerbase liked, and now they’re doing the same things every other company else does to pull a larger share of the overall market instead of catering towards the market they did have. So to me they feel like less of a players’ company because they don’t cater towards what their existing playerbase wants, they make decisions to gain a larger share of the overall market. Which is good for business, but bad for the needs of playerbase that they had. They pretty much abondoned the don’t do vertical progression, don’t let grind impact combat gameplay philosophy and thereby alienated that whole part of the community.

Vayne.8563:

He said it, but there was vertical progression in Guild Wars 2 from day one since 80th level exotics are better than 80th level rares. More to the point, Anet also said that ascended gear was meant to be in at launch but it didn’t make it on time.

So it would have been just another level of gear that the game launched with. Which presumably wouldnt’ have been a problem.

There’s nothing that can be done about the past. It’s history, the game launched with substancial vertical progression, even though I didn’t understand it at that time. ANet’s history before that was not vertical progression, because of this it makes sense that people such as myself would impose as much pressure as possible to prevent any further vertical progression and to push for the grind to continually be lessened on that vertical progression.

Even though they’ve stated Ascended gear was meant to be in the game at launch, given the way ANet has done their marketing and communication with the community I don’t feel like it’s as straight forward as that. But it is further evidence to show they released before they were ready, if that is in fact true. I’m more apt to believe that when ANet says ascended gear was supposed to be in the game at launch, they meant that all the tiers of gear should have been introduced at launch to avoid the backlash that they face, but that’s just due to my inability to be as trusting with their words now with Guild Wars 2 as I could in the past while I was playing Guild Wars.

I think that’s probably one of the biggest things actually for people’s expectations, as part of the following in Guild Wars 1 there was communication on the wiki with the devs and release notes and more statements of intent, more detailed transcribed documentation on what they were doing basically. When ANet reps communicated back then, we just knew what they meant. Naturally as the build up occurred towards Guild Wars 2, many people thought they knew what ANet meant as they always had. Obviously things turned out the way they did, and now communication from ANet feels far less genuine and feels like it holds a lot more spin than it used to. This is just me personally speaking of course based on my experiences and from conversation with the people that I played Guild Wars with.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Vayne.8563:

tigirius.9014:

Be careful, someone might come on here and claim you don’t know what you’re saying, or that you are completely off topic, or some other such nonsensical attack on your personal ethical standards when it comes to business when you point out things like that OP.

Despite the naysayers again coming onto this thread and claiming what is not true about the design of this title and the methods they are still using for the acquisition of both wealth along with the problems they’ve allowed to continue with the loot system and the DR (bugs or not they are still in the game) I can say you are spot on about everything you’ve posted OP.

ie. we were told DR would be ajusted in the open world so that it wouldn’t have and impact on farmers because they love farmers, we were told greens and blue would be made viable for salvaging and that they’d change how salvaging works so that more T6 materials that were previously more rare than clean water in a desert would be collectable, I watched as they made items exclusive and only available in the store while not doing a single thing to help with the acquisition of gold, we were told many things and here it is the anniversary and these things haven’t happened.

It does count when promises are made prior and not just for 1 month before beta but years upon years of promises because that is advertising via word of mouth. So much disappointed came from this game that my friends and I won’t ever be buying anything supported by NCsoft again. When it’s okay to lose customers like that that’s when you know there’s a problem.

I’m far more disappointed in the player base than I am in Anet. I think common sense must taken a day off.

Anet has made some design decisions that would upset certain people, but that isn’t a lie…it’s a choice that’s not well received. In any event, isn’t it about time you found a game you like? This probably isn’t doing much for your state of mind.

If you know of an online rpg without Vertical progression please share. That’s guild wars. Simply put it’s all about horizontal progression and the content and the stories (and PvP too).

Guild Wars had vertical progression through skill leveling. Stop saying it had no vertical progression. What it had was no gear progression. All the luxon/kurzik/sunspear/lightbringer/norn/asura/ebonvanguard/deldrimor skills had vertical progression and for many of us that was a big part of Guild Wars 1.

Again, if vertical progression was so prevelent in Guild Wars then why am I quoting Mike O’brien at the beggining of this thread saying there was no vp in Guild Wars.

It’s not completely true, as previously explained, as it exists in Guild Wars in the form of leveling up characters and PvE skill progression as well. You level so quickly and grinding out titles only marginally improves PvE skills it’s like vp isn’t there. The vp is so negligible Mike O’brien said there was no vp. So while it’s there, it’s effect goes unnoticed, except in the case of Ursan Blessing, which was a mistake ANet remedied.

Fund Cantha and Elona through crowd sourcing?

Vayne.8563:

tigirius.9014:

Be careful, someone might come on here and claim you don’t know what you’re saying, or that you are completely off topic, or some other such nonsensical attack on your personal ethical standards when it comes to business when you point out things like that OP.

Despite the naysayers again coming onto this thread and claiming what is not true about the design of this title and the methods they are still using for the acquisition of both wealth along with the problems they’ve allowed to continue with the loot system and the DR (bugs or not they are still in the game) I can say you are spot on about everything you’ve posted OP.

ie. we were told DR would be ajusted in the open world so that it wouldn’t have and impact on farmers because they love farmers, we were told greens and blue would be made viable for salvaging and that they’d change how salvaging works so that more T6 materials that were previously more rare than clean water in a desert would be collectable, I watched as they made items exclusive and only available in the store while not doing a single thing to help with the acquisition of gold, we were told many things and here it is the anniversary and these things haven’t happened.

It does count when promises are made prior and not just for 1 month before beta but years upon years of promises because that is advertising via word of mouth. So much disappointed came from this game that my friends and I won’t ever be buying anything supported by NCsoft again. When it’s okay to lose customers like that that’s when you know there’s a problem.

I’m far more disappointed in the player base than I am in Anet. I think common sense must taken a day off.

Anet has made some design decisions that would upset certain people, but that isn’t a lie…it’s a choice that’s not well received. In any event, isn’t it about time you found a game you like? This probably isn’t doing much for your state of mind.

If you know of an online rpg without Vertical progression please share. That’s guild wars. Simply put it’s all about horizontal progression and the content and the stories (and PvP too).

Ashen.2907:

Shifty.5187:

Ashen.2907:

Sorry, but you hold GW1 to a standard of, “to be effective,” and GW2 to a standard of, “the best possible.”

That is, by definition, a double standard.

You can be effective in GW2 without the best gear. The amount that the stat gain going from rare to exotic armor/weapons affects your build in GW2 is far less than the difference between an unranked character with nearly half of his entire skill bar comprised of PvE skills and that same build with max rank.

I see your point, but you should also see his. He gives a very reasonable clarification of his position. Would you mind focusing on the actual problems at hand?

What problems at hand ?

The only problem, if you can call it that, presented in this thread is that the OP is comparing the grind inherent in getting the minimum level of performance affecting elements of GW1 with the grind inherent in getting the maximum performance affecting elements of GW2.

As the OP is using GW1 as an example of the ideal approach to avoiding grind while getting the very best performance his entire position is rendered invalid by the fact that the grind for, “the best performance,” was much higher in GW1 than in GW2.

It doesnt get more blatant than stating that you, “can be effective,” without the grind in one game while claiming that merely being effective is insufficient for the other.

---

Beyond that, OP you can be effective in GW2 without the grind you seem to despise. Problem (?) solved.

You are caught up on one phrase and not focusing on the entire body of my position. You can be effective in combat as a theif at level 30 in combat with 40s by doing some death blossoms throwing on some evading bleeds and shadow refuging to hide and run away until you can do it again. Is your effective contribution as much as those lv 40s? Probably not. It all comes down to your view of the degree of effectiveness whether you agree with me or not about the numbers. I’m saying the disparity holds a lot of weight. You disagree, which is fine.

As for vp in Gw1 if it was so prevelent why in my very first post on this thread am I quoting Mike Obrien saying they never added vp in GW1? In actuality he is wrong, but in his view the amount there is negligible enough to say they never added it.

Ashen.2907:

Shockwave.1230:

Ashen.2907:

Shockwave.1230:

Did you have to grind out titles for any PvE skills to be effective? No they were naturally effective. Up to 3 skills in your bar gained marginal power by grinding. Do I like that this was true? No. But I also understand that when you got the skills they were still incredible on their own with even trying to do the vp associated with them. Do not mistake the skills existence with vp. Just playing the game you had r3-r6 for various titles, without grinding at all. When you got those skills they were still incredible without the grind. Asura summons were wasted skill slots in my opinion. SoS or an MM was better for dealing and soaking up damage, but that’s neither here nor there.

The point is you can’t try to say that the marginal increase in power obtained from vp grind that affects 3 skills in a bar was a philosophical pillar that Guild Wars lived by. It was obviously not.

You are exhibiting a double standard here.

You use the standard of, “to be effective,” for GW1’s version of vertical progression while you hold GW2 to a standard of, “best,” gear.

The reality of the matter is that no you did not need max rank with a PvE skill to be effective in GW1. Nor do you need the best possible gear in GW2 to be effective.

If you chose to put the time in to maxing your ranks to fuel your PvE skills in GW1 you would have higher performance than if you did not. If you choose to put the time into gaining the best possible gear in GW2 you will have better performance than if you do not.

It could take hundreds, if not thousands of hours to max out your titles to power your PvE skills in GW1. It takes a fraction, a tiny fraction, of that to get the best gear in GW2.

Both games had vertical progression that affected character performance. GW1’s took longer to pursue.

I also stated that I didnt like the vp in Gw associated with PvE skills, bcs it was a grind to max them and it was a chore.

I was able to deal with it bcs the power increase impacted 0,1,2, or 3 skills in a build and the increase in power was small enough from what they were naturally obtained at to be mostly unnoticable.

Additionally the vp imact on PvE skills were added towards the latter half of Guild Wars’ life. It was not a foundational pillar of the game.

The only double standard I am holding is that I dealt with the minimal to 0 impact of vp to only part of builds in Guild Wars as opposed to the much heavier impact gear vp plays on entire builds in Gw2.

Sorry, but you hold GW1 to a standard of, “to be effective,” and GW2 to a standard of, “the best possible.”

That is, by definition, a double standard.

You can be effective in GW2 without the best gear. The amount that the stat gain going from rare to exotic armor/weapons affects your build in GW2 is far less than the difference between an unranked character with nearly half of his entire skill bar comprised of PvE skills and that same build with max rank.

I already clarified this and you are telling me I dont mean what I said.

Again naturally, the title progression for those few pve skills in a build came out to r3-r6 for just playing the game’s story. It was different per title which rank specifically. The difference in those few skills power was small from what you naturally got them at by just playing the game. Small enough for me to overlook the impact of 3 skills in a skill bar even though I didn’t like it. It only affected power in part of a build. Not the entire build. In Gw2 if with a masterwork set of gear and a rare set of mods I’m hardly less power effective than someone with exotics and ascendeds, you won’t see me complaining bcs thats more than easy to make up for by paying a little more attention while playing. But look at the actual disparity between masterwork gear and exotics/ascended. Look at the difference between rare mods and exotic mods. It’s way more than negligible, which is where I admit to a double standard. In Guild Wars the vp was negligible, I don’t like it but I’ll deal. In GW2 it’s not, and I won’t deal.

Ashen.2907:

Shockwave.1230:

Did you have to grind out titles for any PvE skills to be effective? No they were naturally effective. Up to 3 skills in your bar gained marginal power by grinding. Do I like that this was true? No. But I also understand that when you got the skills they were still incredible on their own with even trying to do the vp associated with them. Do not mistake the skills existence with vp. Just playing the game you had r3-r6 for various titles, without grinding at all. When you got those skills they were still incredible without the grind. Asura summons were wasted skill slots in my opinion. SoS or an MM was better for dealing and soaking up damage, but that’s neither here nor there.

The point is you can’t try to say that the marginal increase in power obtained from vp grind that affects 3 skills in a bar was a philosophical pillar that Guild Wars lived by. It was obviously not.

You are exhibiting a double standard here.

You use the standard of, “to be effective,” for GW1’s version of vertical progression while you hold GW2 to a standard of, “best,” gear.

The reality of the matter is that no you did not need max rank with a PvE skill to be effective in GW1. Nor do you need the best possible gear in GW2 to be effective.

If you chose to put the time in to maxing your ranks to fuel your PvE skills in GW1 you would have higher performance than if you did not. If you choose to put the time into gaining the best possible gear in GW2 you will have better performance than if you do not.

It could take hundreds, if not thousands of hours to max out your titles to power your PvE skills in GW1. It takes a fraction, a tiny fraction, of that to get the best gear in GW2.

Both games had vertical progression that affected character performance. GW1’s took longer to pursue.

I also stated that I didnt like the vp in Gw associated with PvE skills, bcs it was a grind to max them and it was a chore.

I was able to deal with it bcs the power increase impacted 0,1,2, or 3 skills in a build and the increase in power was small enough from what they were naturally obtained at to be mostly unnoticable.

Additionally the vp imact on PvE skills were added towards the latter half of Guild Wars’ life. It was not a foundational pillar of the game.

The only double standard I am holding is that I dealt with the minimal to 0 impact of vp to only part of builds in Guild Wars as opposed to the much heavier impact gear vp plays on entire builds in Gw2.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

There is no treadmill anywhere in this game other than the fact thakittens a RPG, which inherently means that it includes continued adventure for new items and new levels of progression, but beyond level 80 this is all optional. GW2 does it in a much more fair and accessible fashion than other MMOs.

Again I think where many people have gone wrong with this game is to play it in a fashion they don’t enjoy. They ‘grind’ and ‘farm’ for things and its not fun, but they do it because they feel compelled to do it. Honestly that sounds like someone with a problem and that person should probably step away from the game and take a reality check, reassess their situation, and get back to playing games in a fashion that they find enjoyable.

Guild Wars did not have veritical progression and it was a role playing game. Max stat gear was readily available.

I stopped playing GW2 for months because of the grind. When I came back there’s even more vertical progression, ascended items.

So would your suggestion be for anyone who enjoyed ANet’s last game and was expecting their next game to follow the same philosophies to not push for the things that drew them to the development company in the first place to be brought back?

Guild Wars 1 didn’t have vertical progression? I beg to differ.

The PvE only skills ALL had vertical progression. What it didnt’ have was vertical GEAR progression. But you can’t tell me people didn’t grind to get lightbringer points or kurzick/luxon points, or any of the EotN reputation points with the four different factions.

You can say Guild Wars 1 didn’t have vertical progression all you want. All I can say is LFG R8 Ursan.

There was plenty of vertical progression in Guild Wars 1. You just don’t like that they shifted it from skill progression to gear progression.

Already addressed this previously. UB was nerfed bcs it incentivized people to do vertical progression due to its power and effectiveness. The VP associated with titles could only increase the power of 3 skills at most in a skill bar at any given time. The PvE skills themselves were impactful without grinding out the titles. While the vp made up to 3 additional skills stronger it was of minimal impact overall and not a theme of the game.

So yes potentially 3 skills in a skill bar could have vertical progression. The overall difference in power between different ranks was small enough to go unnoticed, save Ursan blessing which was a mistake Anet remedied.

I totally disagree with this. Some of the skills were the centerpoint of builds. I didn’t make up people looking for R8 ursans for example, that was not only in the game, but it was common enough for Anet to nerf it.

I’m sure perma-sins required a leveled up PvE only skill to be permasins and I’m 100% sure that people had to level up their luxon/kurzick skill Save Yourselves to be an imbagon paragon.

And there were people who LIVED on pain inverter and technobabble, not to mention the Asura summons for most people.

Some of those skills were almost as good as elites and often they REALLY REALLY helped with content.

You can say it was only 8 skills all you want, but I NEVER could justify not taking necrosis on my necro. I just couldn’t do it.

You’d probably be right of those skills weren’t better than 90% of the skills in the game.

Arguably, ascended gear means LESS than the PvE only skills in Guild Wars 2. No one makes any builds around ascended gear. It’s nice to have but it doesn’t affect content nearly as much as some of the PvE only skills did.

I mean how many people demanded an Imbagon in their group before they’d attempt DOA?

Did you have to grind out titles for any PvE skills to be effective? No they were naturally effective. Up to 3 skills in your bar gained marginal power by grinding. Do I like that this was true? No. But I also understand that when you got the skills they were still incredible on their own without even trying to do the vp associated with them. Do not mistake the skills existence with vp. Just playing the game you had r3-r6 for various titles, without grinding at all. When you got those skills they were still incredible without the grind. Asura summons were wasted skill slots in my opinion. SoS or an MM was better for dealing and soaking up damage, but that’s neither here nor there.

The point is you can’t try to say that the marginal increase in power obtained from vp grind that affects 3 skills in a bar was a philosophical pillar that Guild Wars lived by. It was obviously not.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

There is no treadmill anywhere in this game other than the fact thakittens a RPG, which inherently means that it includes continued adventure for new items and new levels of progression, but beyond level 80 this is all optional. GW2 does it in a much more fair and accessible fashion than other MMOs.

Again I think where many people have gone wrong with this game is to play it in a fashion they don’t enjoy. They ‘grind’ and ‘farm’ for things and its not fun, but they do it because they feel compelled to do it. Honestly that sounds like someone with a problem and that person should probably step away from the game and take a reality check, reassess their situation, and get back to playing games in a fashion that they find enjoyable.

Guild Wars did not have veritical progression and it was a role playing game. Max stat gear was readily available.

I stopped playing GW2 for months because of the grind. When I came back there’s even more vertical progression, ascended items.

So would your suggestion be for anyone who enjoyed ANet’s last game and was expecting their next game to follow the same philosophies to not push for the things that drew them to the development company in the first place to be brought back?

Guild Wars 1 didn’t have vertical progression? I beg to differ.

The PvE only skills ALL had vertical progression. What it didnt’ have was vertical GEAR progression. But you can’t tell me people didn’t grind to get lightbringer points or kurzick/luxon points, or any of the EotN reputation points with the four different factions.

You can say Guild Wars 1 didn’t have vertical progression all you want. All I can say is LFG R8 Ursan.

There was plenty of vertical progression in Guild Wars 1. You just don’t like that they shifted it from skill progression to gear progression.

Already addressed this previously. UB was nerfed bcs it incentivized people to do vertical progression due to its power and effectiveness. The VP associated with titles could only increase the power of 3 skills at most in a skill bar at any given time. The PvE skills themselves were impactful without grinding out the titles. While the vp made up to 3 additional skills stronger it was of minimal impact overall and not a theme of the game.

So yes potentially 3 skills in a skill bar could have vertical progression. The overall difference in power between different ranks was small enough to go unnoticed, save Ursan blessing which was a mistake Anet remedied.

Stone.6751:

There is no treadmill anywhere in this game other than the fact thakittens a RPG, which inherently means that it includes continued adventure for new items and new levels of progression, but beyond level 80 this is all optional. GW2 does it in a much more fair and accessible fashion than other MMOs.

Again I think where many people have gone wrong with this game is to play it in a fashion they don’t enjoy. They ‘grind’ and ‘farm’ for things and its not fun, but they do it because they feel compelled to do it. Honestly that sounds like someone with a problem and that person should probably step away from the game and take a reality check, reassess their situation, and get back to playing games in a fashion that they find enjoyable.

Guild Wars did not have veritical progression and it was a role playing game. Max stat gear was readily available.

I stopped playing GW2 for months because of the grind. When I came back there’s even more vertical progression, ascended items.

So would your suggestion be for anyone who enjoyed ANet’s last game and was expecting their next game to follow the same philosophies to not push for the things that drew them to the development company in the first place to be brought back?

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

AntiGw.9367:

Basically, do dynamic events.

The chains to be done may differ from time to time. I leveled my thief almost entirely on Molten Alliance portals.

If it’s really possible to level from 1 to 80 via DEs in 30 hours then example of it being done would great. When areas had players running around them at launch and I was contributing to get bronze jumping between events while they were parallely in progress bcs multiple bronze rewards provide more exp than single gold rewards I couldn’t level at a pace of 1 lv in under 30 minutes. I was getting about 1 per hour on average.

And player’s would still be playing handicapped at lv 80 when it comes to gear. Grinding to reach maximum combat efficiency is not fun. Playing challenging content without being handicapped figuring out the most effective way to overcome a challenge and executing it is fun.

This post more than anything else shows the difference between how you play and what you find fun and how I play and what I find fun.

While I can enjoy challenging content, I don’t care at all about maximum combat efficiency. I managed a retail store for a long long time. the last thing I want to be in my game time is efficient. I want to get lost in the world, explore, have fun, fight some stuff…and the occasional challenge is welcomed at times when I want it.

But in general your idea of fun sounds pretty unfun to me. The thing is, there aren’t many MMOs (I can’t think of any) that support my style of play. There are tons of MMOs out there that support your style.

I just don’t get why people want to change this game to be more like so many other games, when those games are already out there.

Because if you guys succeed in changing this game into something you like, it’s extremely likely that those of us who like what this game is will have no MMOs left to play.

In Guild Wars I was hardly compelled to do this at all, because maximum efficiency came so quickly. I was able to just get lost in the world and the content. 300 hours into GW2 and I’m still not feeling anywhere near emersed bcs there’s this handicapped feeling in the back of my mind.

I honestly don’t understand how players can be content playing content while not being on the same level playing field as every other player. The argument I always see in response to that is you play a game for yourself and don’t worry about other people. To which I ask, if people were worried about playing a game only in regard to themselves, why would they play be playing online games? Why not play single player games. It’s bcs online games are social and competitive, even PvE in MMOs is competitive, just look at the outrage of the leaderboards due to HoM, repeatable achievements, living stories, dailies, and monthlies. The only explanation I can think of is there are some who play online strictly for the social aspect and not for the competitive parts at all, which makes me ask, why play games at all? Aren’t they fun bcs they challenge people competitively whether it’s AI opponents in a game, opponents in multiplayer, or opponents in real sports. Doesn’t competition drive the fun in any kind of game? And aren’t the most competitive and interesting matches between evenly matched opponents where the same parameters apply to everyone? So in PvE you’re not just competing against AI for a challenge, you’re also competing against other players. And when you play casually and time is a constraint, but you’re a skilled player you fall behind in the competition with other players, because you don’t have the resources to keep up in gear. Then when things like player build previews come out, people reject you from joining in on things like dungeon runs bcs they think you are handicapping the group. And more gear of higher tiers comes out and high end content gets balanced around it. It all adds up to me wondering why they made vertical progression so grindy, when you’d think everyone wants to do the challenging content, but not everyone has the time or money to get the gear to be on the same playing field as everyone else.

These kind of thing wasn’t an issue in Guild Wars, bcs there was no vertical progression beyond level 20, and they are introducing issues that weren’t around in their old game bcs they’ve moved back to doing something every other MMO does. The only time in Guild Wars I saw people getting rejected for not being on the same playing field as everyone else was when Ursan blessing was first introduced and so strong it only made sense to grind out the title. Then they thankfully nerfed it, so that the title progression impact on people’s power wasn’t anywhere near as significant, mostly due to the downtime.

AntiGw.9367:

Shockwave.1230:

People who don’t know would like to be enlightened on how to play and get to level 80 in 30 hours. If it involves crafting I’m sure they’d like to know how to get the gold it would take to craft while playing a new character in 30 hours.

Basically, do dynamic events.

The chains to be done may differ from time to time. I leveled my thief almost entirely on Molten Alliance portals.

If it’s really possible to level from 1 to 80 via DEs in 30 hours then example of it being done would great. When areas had players running around them at launch and I was contributing to get bronze jumping between events while they were parallely in progress bcs multiple bronze rewards provide more exp than single gold rewards I couldn’t level at a pace of 1 lv in under 30 minutes. I was getting about 1 per hour on average.

And player’s would still be playing handicapped at lv 80 when it comes to gear. Grinding to reach maximum combat efficiency is not fun. Playing challenging content without being handicapped figuring out the most effective way to overcome a challenge and executing it is fun.

People who don’t know would like to be enlightened on how to play and get to level 80 in 30 hours. If it involves crafting I’m sure they’d like to know how to get the gold it would take to craft while playing a new character in 30 hours.

Personally I already use masterworks bcs of their price point that has been determined by the market.

Where does that leave people when it comes to sigils and runes? The disparity between effectiveness of the different sigil and rune tiers is incredibly high, up to twice as effective I’ve seen.

AntiGw.9367:

Erasculio.2914:

AntiGw.9367:

Ascended items are available in fractals, dailies, guild missions AND achievements. That’s at least 3-4 ascended items in a month of fairly casual, non-grinding gameplay.

You cannot get backpieces without grinding FotM, they are not available anywhere else. You need to either grind Factals for the rings, or you will need 100 laurels for rings and the amulet, not to mention the 100 ectos for the accessories.

This goes directly against what ArenaNet described when talking about how gear would work in GW2.

A month of guild missions gives you two ascended accessories. A month of laurels gives you an amulet plus some leftovers for a ring. A few runs of fractals can get you your back piece.

That doesn’t go against anything Arena.net described. On the contrary, they constantly introduce new ways to get these things – consider that at launch all we had was karma farming for exotics if we didn’t want to do dungeons.

I could login to Guild Wars and in start a new character, play for about 30 hours and be max level with max gear having earned the gold for it in that time, and just play the game after that for it’s stories and challenges without ever having a thought cross my mind about am I playing with handicapped stats.

That’s no where near a possibility in Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars felt much more about enjoying well thought out quality content and stories. Guild Wars 2 distracts from that way too much with it’s grind.

Morrigan.2809:

An MMo is a work in progress it will be for as long as it runs- nothing is cast in stone. Things change, games mature etc etc.
What would you say if someone showed you a quote from when you were 1st grade and said you claimed you would become an astronaut, since you became (insert profession here) you were lying and betrayed your teacher and parents? Silly huh?

Imagine you were in your 20s and 30s with brilliant ideas and wonderful execution of them. Now that your in your 80s and 90s you have changed some of those ideas and someone shows you your work from you’re 20s and 30s.

Someone points out how some of those changes are good while there are other changes that aren’t. This is GW to GW2.

marnick.4305:

Shockwave.1230:

The dye thing is a small concern by itself. The broader implication of multiple concepts that penalize players by taking in game currency unnecessarily is that you force players to spend more time or money to get that currency back. The dye thing isn’t even a penalty, but it in combination with other design choices that are penalties do exactly what I’ve described, which ultimately incentivizes players to lean towards shortcuts of getting game currency, which leads to more gem purchases for gold.

Now I’m sure people think I’m nuts, bcs my views are driven by the original Guild Wars, but I expect not to lose time or money to do the following…

Fast travel
Change my build
Death penalty – removing this was skilled play
Get the best stated items
Trading fees – didn’t exist

I expect only to grind for cosmetics and achievements. I also expect that every player have easy access to the best stated gear so that they can’t feel handicapped.

There’s a few things to note here. Sure there were no gold sinks in GW1. Trading fees didn’t exist simply because there was no functional trade system except for spamming in Kamadan.

No gold sinks lead to an extremely inflated economy, to the point where a new player simply couldn’t catch up anymore. Compare this to GW2 where precursor prices have been stable for almost half a year … Inflation is non-existent in this game.

Gold sinks are an economic necessity. The only one I don’t like at all is the waypoint cost. But on average, my gold keeps its value over a long time. As such, buying gems is hardly necessary. Even then, it’s not necessary to buy from the black market like GW1. It all makes for a healthy and stable economy.

This argument doesn’t hold true. I started playing Guild wars after the nightfall campaign, and started caring about getting gold the 4th year of the games existence. Just to do it I filled my characters gold up to 100k, then I got over a million gold to see if I could fill up my bank. Was I ever going to have stacks of ecto or zkeys or armbraces? No, but then again it didn’t matter, bcs max sets of armor were only 1k and most armor mods were just as cheap. It only took about 20k to get a set of max armor with alternate head pieces. That’s like 2-4 runs in UW or FoW, which take about 1.5 hours. I also got my Obsidian armor late in the games life only having enough transferable wealth on my account to be 1/3 of the way there. It took like 6 months, but I got it and the best part is that it’s cosmetic only.

The only items that were out of reach in the original guild wars were mini’s that had a limited volume by design. Literally no other way to get these minipets than to trade another player for them.

Basically the inflation that existed wasn’t painful, at all.

In Gw2 the gold sinks hurt and the trading post is run by semipro stock brokers.

The problem with gear that results in people grinding is that there is no low fixed price for the best stat gear like in GW1. It’s all variable and driven by the trading post. This is bcs they go from no vertical progression to more than a casual player can manage, especially if you want to play multiple builds.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

But I still disagree here. I do think this has a lot more in common with Guild Wars 1 than WoW. Compare.

WoW..unlimited skills all at once.
Guild Wars… limited skill bar

WoW. Taunt mechanic/true tanking
Guild Wars. No taunt mechanic

WoW..mounts
Guild Wars no mounts (except the broom if you want, but we had siege devourers in game in Guild Wars 1 anyway…not quite the same as the mounts in WoW)

Then you have stuff like story and explorable mode dungeons, already done in Guild Wars 1. As an example, Bloodstone Caves, the easier explorable mode as part of a story followed by the explorable mode when you went back to it.

The fact is, with the exception of “making builds”, this game works a whole lot like Guild Wars 1 did, far more than it works on WoW.

Guild Wars tries to tell “your” story.
WoW- Just as a story of the world, nothing is really your story.

WoW . Thrives on player made mods. The whole game was pretty much a mod fest.
Guild Wars. Very limited use of mods

WoW. Gear score…encouraging players to be competitive.
Guild Wars….each person gets their own drops, you’re not rolling against other people

Guild Wars…doesn’t lock you out of content due to gear
WOW…locks you out of content due to gear

Then you have stuff that WOW and Guild Wars 1 has that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have…like faction rep grinding.

Yeah, I don’t think this can in any way shape or form be considered WoW 2.0. Rift can, but not this. It’s way too different.

I’ve extensively played a lot of WoW style MMOs, and this has a lot less to do with those than you’re admitting.

Check my last post for some of the design changes I’m referencing.
Also add to that a gated aspect to builds was never in GW. The whole gating concept in the trait lines really bugged me when it also applied to major traits in the betas. That dies not help with build diversity, you limit the number of possibilities, if they were concerned with traits not seeing use, then make better traits.

The grind is what really gets my gears though. How can a company go from 0 power progression to over over 10% disparities on weapons and armor and ridiculous disparities on runes and sigils. That in combination with the trading post being the only viable way of obtaining the items… just look at the prices of the best stat items. How can you expect someone to get a full set of max gear and mods in a day or two like it was so easy to do in Guild Wars? You can’t because the current systems don’t allow it.

One of the best aspects of Guild Wars was taking your character through content in different ways by playing different builds. Which you can’t do in GW2 bcs build are so equipment based. You’re gated from playing lots of different builds, bcs it’s so expensive to get gear and it even takes currency to respec your traits and trait attribute bonuses. Builds are like relationships in this game, you do a good job finding one bcs you’re going to be with it for a while.

I relate it all back to freedom that players feel within the system the developers make. GW2 feels very limiting to me compared to GW, and those limitations remind me of how I felt when I tried to play WoW and never could fully commit to it.

Klawlyt.6507:

Holy crap, Shockwave, You’re right! ANet is eeeeeeeeeevil! Let us all run! Run from this place! Yes let’s go, go somewhere else full of bunnies and golden coins! Yes let us run… run… is he gone?

Look, the manifesto is an ideal, and it contains the guiding principles behind the development of this game. I think they’ve largely stuck to the broader manifesto itself. I think the fractals were the beginning of a step away from that, but I think ANet also saw the blowback that resulted and learned from it. Is the manifesto still relevant? Absolutely. Is it a contract between anyone and anyone? Nope.

Now let’s be honest. The dye thing isn’t about the manifesto. The dye thing is a matter of you liking the idea of a beta iteration of a system you never tried. You like it better because it adhered to your ideals better, and because you never tried it, and don’t know the drawbacks first hand (which have been discussed at length by now). In your mind the equation is as simple as account bound=good, character bound=bad. There’s a lot more to this, and your oversimplification of the system as evil and money grubbing doesn’t really further any discussion.

The dye thing is a small concern by itself. The broader implication of multiple concepts that penalize players by taking in game currency unnecessarily is that you force players to spend more time or money to get that currency back. The dye thing isn’t even a penalty, but it in combination with other design choices that are penalties do exactly what I’ve described, which ultimately incentivizes players to lean towards shortcuts of getting game currency, which leads to more gem purchases for gold.

Now I’m sure people think I’m nuts, bcs my views are driven by the original Guild Wars, but I expect not to lose time or money to do the following…

Fast travel
Change my build
Death penalty – removing this was skilled play
Get the best stated items
Trading fees – didn’t exist

I expect only to grind for cosmetics and achievements. I also expect that every player have easy access to the best stated gear so that they can’t feel handicapped.

Which is why I would call it WoW 2.0, bcs its the something different WoW players are looking for, not what Guild Wars players wanted. There’s too many swings in direction on key concepts for it to be considered better conceptually than Guild Wars. The combat is improved and the world is persistent, those are definitely better.

Stone.6751:

Shockwave.1230:

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Uhh…yea. But people have beaten this horse to death, drudging up old comments made by ANet employees from years ago, writing page long posts, and even linking “the manifesto” in their signature.

I like to talk about games too. I’m just saying that people take the complaints to the level of an unhealthy obsession.

The game is what it is.

This is what happens when a company backtracks on the philosophies that drew people to it. Guild Wars and Wow seemed pretty much like opposites in the gaming world. Guild Wars 2 conceptually is WoW 2.0, not Guild Wars 2.0. Like I mentioned earlier if this was Blizzard, whole different story. But there’s this whole market of gamers wanting a modern game with the ideologies that drive the original Guild Wars and all that in a persistent world. I doubt it’s going to happen, at least not in the lifespan of Guild Wars 2, but if it did expect most of the GW fanbase to pick it up.

Stone.6751:

Its simply amazing that people care so much about this. I don’t even know what to think about it. Its like an obsession for some, an unhealthy obsession.

It’s a debate on getting value for your time as it relates to gaming philosophies. I openly admit to being obsessed with getting value for my time. It doesn’t have be monetary value, but I can say that I spent $220 on Guild Wars over 6 years and 4500 hours of play and enjoyed it more than any other game I’ve played including GW2, and that time has been far more enjoyable and valuable than the $140 I’ve spent thus far in Guild Wars 2 for the near 300 hours I’ve played it.

Vayne.8563:

Shockwave.1230:

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.

Sorry but the old dye scheme, the one that Anet showed, would have been more likely to increase sales in the gem shop., not less.

See this is something else taken out of context. Anet had one system in place and changed THE WHOLE system. That includes whether a dye is account or player bound.

Now, you might think that you can pull one change out of the system analzye it and say that change is bad, but Anet had something really horrid in the cash shop (The plant food) and took it out. The system that you’re trying to make look more greedy is actually LESS greedy than it was before the change.

You then take one thing that’s changed not all of it, and point it out to make the decision seem to be nothing but greed. If Anet wanted to be greedy they’d have left in the original dye situation where dyes were account bound but you couldn’t sell or trade them and you had to buy plant food to grow more in a day.

Imagine how it would have been. You get a dye seed. You’re already growing one. You can’t grow another until you buy plant food from the cash shop. So you don’t buy it and you wait. 24 hours for a dye seed to mature, then you go and find out it’s the same dye you already have. But you can’t sell it on the marketplace. You can’t use it, because it’s account bound. You just have to delete it, because it’s worthless to you.

Do you really think that’s a better system?

Simplifying information is fine, as long as the full story emerges from that simplification. Taking a single change out of context and making it look like something it’s not (let’s say more greedy instead of less greedy), is misleading.

Anet didn’t just change the dye from account bound to unlocked on an individual character, but they revamped the whole dye system…and it’s much better this way than it was in beta.

And on that topic, it’s infinitely better than the dye system in Guild Wars 1 where you needed a bottle of dye each time you wanted to dye your armor for each piece of armor.

What you’re describing seems neither here nor there, it might have been better or worse. like you’ve said systems evolve. Fact of the matter is that Anet was looking at dyes being account bound and changed it to character bound thereby increasing the amount of time and or money players must invest into getting the colors they want. There is no denying they were well aware that account bound dyes are more convenient to a player than character bound dyes. This fact can’t be spun. They did character bound bcs it causes the player population to spend more time/money meaning more revenue for them.

It’s the same reason they did the repair penalty, waypoint penalty, gold/gem exchange penalties, trading post listing penalties, and vertical progression gear. The more time it takes players to accomplish something they want the more willing they are to find a way to do it faster, people become more willing to part with their money, because it saves them time on doing what they don’t want to do. So in order to incentivize people to part with their money they made fundamental shifts counter to what they did in Gw1.

If this was Blizzard doing these things I’d be impressed and singing their praises, bcs they’d be progressing towards something more favorable to the player than what they were. But it’s ANet, they were already ahead of the game with what they were doing in Gw1 and backtracked. That’s what gets to people, they had a game where you paid for new content, actual content once, and you had the option to pay for cosmetics and account supplements like character slots and storage, and low level bonus items, and max level weapon skins, and bonus missions.

They were going to come out with Guild wars utopia, but did Gw2 instead. Though guild wars 2 is a better game technologically, it turns out that conceptually, Guild Wars was the utopia for players.

This kind of stuff really ruins the game for the masses…

The Sixteenth.2561:

You don’t have to do dailies or grind a lengendary to have the BIS, and they made ascended gear quite easy to get for casual, no need for grinding, just wander through its beautiful landscape and look at the cute little crabs on the beach, and you can get all 6 ascended items. No, you just have to play and, well sometimes you only need 1 more thing to end your daily, just do it, let’s say you do one daily a week, you still will get your ascended gear, nice and slow. Grind if you want to rush things like a 10yo, or just have fun with your friends and do some RPevent with the major RP guild or just watch them. You still will get your ascended, and even your legendary, with no grind of any kind.

Define casual, I’d call it playing 11-12 hours a week. Just to get all the dailies it would take most of that time and feel like a chore, dailies already feel like a grind to me.

Challenging puzzles, combat, platforming, and problem solving is how I want to be rewarded. That’s how Guild Wars was, minus the platforming. The only thing I ever was grinding for was titles, I was always on the same playing field as any other player when it came to combat. In this Guild Wars 2, that’s not true, you can’t get cheap max stat 1k armor and because of the trading system there’s no way for market amatuers to pull in wealth. You can’t just go find a handful of rare items that you’ll be able to get a piece of max stat gear in 2 hours or less.

In Guild Wars 2 you grind for vertical progression. People say that Exotics aren’t a grind, but they are. Even rares are a grind for casual players. I miss being able to just play and not have to worry about my stats at all, because I knew everyone else had the same stats as I did. You just play and you know that you’re not g|mped from what you could be at. That’s the biggest problem I have with Guild Wars 2, I couldn’t care less about grind when it comes to aesthetics, but when it comes to power progression and being on the same playing field as everyone else when it comes to the challenging content… that really rubs me the wrong way, because the game is centered around combat and it’s important everyone be on the same playing field when it comes to combat. I play with masterwork gear, because they’re cheap enough for the amount of time I have available to get what I need and be able to change my build and not have buyers remorse. If I spent more on gear I’d feel locked into a build and if it turned out to be a poor choice I’d be s.o.l.

It’s just information in a raw form Vayne.

We’ll never know if the old dye system could have been implemented in a player friendly way, but I know that character bound isn’t as player friend as account bound. That much is obvious.

Dye’s being changed from account bound to character bound is obviously a way to increase revenue through the gemstore.

Really the issue people have is that they originally were thinking about the player’s convenience and decided to go against that for dollars.