Guild Wars 2

Grimwolf.7163:

Twoflower.7031:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Twoflower.7031:

Because they want the events to feel like real things that change Tyria forever, and making them repeatable rather ruins that feeling. If you wanted to go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to see the ball drop, they’re not going to redo it after because you couldn’t make it.

Can you think of an event that would have a bigger effect on the world than the killing of an Eldar Dragon ?

Because they let us repeat that.

That’s part of your personal story, that’s an entirely different matter.

No, it’s part of a dungeon. Which you are expected to grind repeatedly to get the armor from.

Grinding the story mode doesn’t give you any tokens, meaning no progress to your armor. To get armor you grind explorable, which takes place after Zaitan died.

But even the explorable modes have you repeating events that should really only happen once.

Wreckdum.8367:

Power creep doesn’t work when you only need one set of gear… You get ascended then you start running regular dungeons for the cosmetic gear… The same thing everyone has been doing since September when they already hit the gear ceiling. It doesn’t change anything. The game is still easy and short.

What makes you think that ANET won’t add another tier of gear later ?

The Fractal dungeon does let you buy shards. But only if you grind up fractal tokens to buy them, your karma is useless there.

As for the Temple, FOTM has depopulated Orr by being a better place to earn coin and the only place to earn Ascended gear. So don’t expect to ever see the temple open unless a guild decides to open it for themselves.

Either this is all intentional on ANET’s part, or they weren’t paying attention to how players behave in other MMOs. Believe whichever you want.

Mhyrria.4160:

Sion.1653:

The OP nails it on the head. This is precisely what is happening and what has already happened and what’s going to happen if Anet doesn’t turn around now.

They won’t. They already had a set of plans to follow, adding more powerful infusions. Nexon saw it fit to make a cash cow out of the GW2, which is, imho given a few more months, could be sit side by side with WoW clones. With the lack of bug fixes to a whole lot of things, you can pretty much tell that they spent their resources on this update. There’s no way in hell that executives would retract this.

Fixed that for you. Nobody is ever going to come anywhere near WoW’s success by coping WoW.

Twoflower.7031:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Twoflower.7031:

Because they want the events to feel like real things that change Tyria forever, and making them repeatable rather ruins that feeling. If you wanted to go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to see the ball drop, they’re not going to redo it after because you couldn’t make it.

Can you think of an event that would have a bigger effect on the world than the killing of an Eldar Dragon ?

Because they let us repeat that.

That’s part of your personal story, that’s an entirely different matter.

It’s still an event that should have a much larger effect on the world than anything ANET has done in a one time event. It’s still an event that takes place in the game lore.

So making it repeatable with no major effects, while not allowing smaller events to repeat doesn’t make any sense.

If you want to make the world feel alive, you need one where the developers focused on the day to day events of the world and make it feel like there is stuff happening there at first glance (fortunately ANET did do this with DEs). Don’t do that and the one time events just change the world from one static state to another.

Static worlds are just one of the limitations of the them park model of game design. If you want to make the world truly feel alive, then it needs to actually be alive. Which means a sandbox model with plenty of room for emergent behavior from players.

For example Eve Online feels much more alive than anything I’ve seen in a theme park game. So alive that I’m still paying attention to what happens there even though I haven’t played in years, because interesting things keep happening.

Rhyse.8176:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

There is one major difference in Monoclegate and GW2’s introduction of Ascended gear:
– Monoclegate didn’t go against the core concepts of Eve. It just ate up development resources to produce a really stupid addition. Then CCP backed down quickly.

No, but the leaked internal newsletter suggested plans to do so for the future- namely, introducing pay-to-win microtransactions. That’s what really pushed the community over the edge.

Fortunately that was only something CCP said. So CCP’s mistake was in not producing spaceship content, while saying something stupid. So their mistake was in what they did not do and what they said.

Now we have ANET who made the mistake in what they did, and what they didn’t say.

Anet’s (and many others) mistake was aiming for WoW status, or thinking they ever could with so many competitors.

Has any game aiming for WoW status ever done well in the long term ?

Amra.6028:

Let’em fuse those items into existing ones, making the items we already have viable for this kind of content while removing them from the game, having new players attune their gear for new dungeons by other means.

Come to think of it, if they just make the Ascended stats easy to acquire while saying that they there will be no more ascended items it will be a pretty good band aid on the situation. Keep infusions as the standard upgrade on rings/back braces, just like we have sigils for weapons and runes for armor.

Easy to acquire should also be easy to code: Create items with the stats and a different skin, then create a vendor who sells the Ascended items and the infusions at a cheap enough price.

This band aid will hold until ANET raises the level cap for the next expansion (I believe they have at least hinted at doing this), allowing higher level exotics with higher stats than current Ascended items.

A test server would be a good idea.

Who knows, ANET might even be able to get away with charging gems to access it since knowledge of upcoming changes and a chance to practice in an environment with them already live will give test server players a small advantage.

Twoflower.7031:

Because they want the events to feel like real things that change Tyria forever, and making them repeatable rather ruins that feeling. If you wanted to go to Times Square on New Year’s Eve to see the ball drop, they’re not going to redo it after because you couldn’t make it.

Can you think of an event that would have a bigger effect on the world than the killing of an Eldar Dragon ?

Because they let us repeat that.

But that would mean players would be rewarded for smart play. We can’t have that.

That’s why ANET makes enemies go invulnerable if they can’t find their way to you. Or if they just feel like it.
That’s why ANET has made it impossible to knock enemies off ledges.

I’m partially joking, partially serious.

There is one major difference in Monoclegate and GW2’s introduction of Ascended gear:
– Monoclegate didn’t go against the core concepts of Eve. It just ate up development resources to produce a really stupid addition. Then CCP backed down quickly.
– The manifesto made “no grinding for stats” seem a core part of GW2. Ascended items directly contradict that. ANET is silent.

Then we come into removing the problem:
– For CCP, all they needed to do was to apologise and focus towards spaceship content again. Did they ever remove any of the stuff they added in Monoclegate ?
– For ANET, removing Ascended gear is going to be painful however they do it. Drop the stats, people complain. Make them quicker to acquire, or boosting exotics to their power, and the higher stats make all the content easier than before. Rebalance existing PvE to for Ascended gear will be a lot of work.

Another advantage to making stuff tradeable: It means that, even if the item is a RNG drop, every run you make is still some measurable progress towards acquiring the item.

With the item being bind on pickup and RNG, if the run doesn’t drop the item, then the run hasn’t made you any progress. At most you make it to a higher level of FOTM, and you have your drop rate go up by an unknown amount.

If the items were tradeable, then you would still have a guaranteed way out if the RNG hated you: When you had enough coin to buy the item.
So you would have progress on every run. The RNG would just allow to suddenly jump ahead.

But with the essence being bind on pickup, you don’t make any noticable progress. You don’t know if you will get what you want this run, or 1,000 runs from now. Especially once you hit the highest FOTM level your gear allows you to.

Squirrelbane.2510:

I don’t see how GW2 has seen the franchise turn its back on the fans. For me it’s an evolution, not a jump to the side.

Vertical progression based on a RNG.

If you want to actually make things more difficult and interesting you increase the enemies stats without also increasing the players stats, give them different skill combination, better AI or some unique thing you have to do to beat them (obviously the first is the easiest option).

Every one of those things, with the possible exception of AI improvements, is something that ANET did do in GW1. I only make an exception for AI because I’m not sure.

Everything relating to Ascended gear should not be soulbound or account bound until you upgrade it, and binding on upgrade is only because the only other alternative is for the TP to have multiple listings for every Ascended item, one for every possible upgrade. Including all the stupid choices.

By everything I mean everything. From every ingredient use to make Ascended gear and infusions all the way up to the items themselves. If ANET doesn’t want to make items purchased with skill points tradeable, then make Fractal Relics tradeable and we can buy skill points through them.

This should do a few things:
– Allow people who don’t enjoy FOTM to acquire Ascended items via other means of their choice.
– Reduce the grind to acquire them, as people will farm them to sell.
– Even out the population across FOTM and any future sources of Ascended items by making the highly populated sources less profitable.
– If ANET does this while reducing and coin faucets of FOTM, it might even breathe life into areas depopulated by FOTM because people want the coin.

Ascended items will still be effectively bind on equip, as people will be upgrading them with infusions.

Blacksarevok.8104:

Phy.2913:

Then you should hope they bring in those pvp Asc gear they promised soon, before people start making wild accusations that the sky is falling.

We’ll see. If they do it within a reasonable amount of time, then I will retract my statements. But they lied about not adding a gear ladder, so I really don’t have any reason to believe they will add ascended to other facets of the game at all, let alone within a acceptable window of time.

How long it takes ANET to add the Ascended gear isn’t important. What’s important is how long it takes players to acquire it after it goes live.

That would be nice. It would also get the party formation out of LA and into an area that only gets visited by FOTM players.

Awesome.6120:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Every 5 levels, but a new set of gear from the trading post. It will be sufficient.

Every 10 levels is quite sufficient.

Depends on your class. My necromancer needed every 5 levels, my guardian managed to do 10 without me noticing I’d forgotten to upgrade.

You can get by just fine without crafting. In fact on your first character I think it’s probably better to skip it and sell most of the crafting materials you find.

Agreed. Lots of people are crafting stuff merely to get to 400 in that discipline for Legendary weapons. Then selling anything they crafted at a loss, to get what coin they can out of it.

You can start doing dungeons at 30 but you may find AC kind of difficult at that level.

Assuming you can find people to go in there with you. I don’t know how it is for story modes, but you are going have to search for a while to find an explorable mode group that takes anyone below level 80.

The wiki has a list of recommended levels for each dungeon. My recommendation is that, unless you have something else to do in the zone while looking for a group, don’t try them till 80. Finding a group to take you will just take too long.

Two things have depopulated Orr:
– The weekend event. This is temporary.
– FOTM. This is permanent.

To tell the effects apart, we need a comparison. How deserted was Orr during Halloween ?

Taerik.3405:

It was announced that the higher tier gear will be available in more than just the pve dungeon, to include WvW

Yes. But how much grind will be needed to acquire them ?

Will the WvW options cover every stat combination, or will players be forced to PvE just because the gear that is best for their build is PvE only ?

Diviner.7405:

Unspecified.9142:

kKagari.6804:

Hows that selfish. We’re protecting our own interests. I only have 24hrs in a day and so do you, I don’t want to waste my time on YOUR character progression.

Definition of SELFISH
1: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself : seeking or concentrating on one’s own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others
(taken from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/selfish)

I’m not sure where the confusion is stemming from.

What others are talking about is a thing called “Paying it forward.” Someone, somewhere, sometime, gave you your first chance at running it. It wouldn’t kill you to do the same for others now and then. Sub-optimal does not equate to useless or wasting time for nothing.

One of the inherent rules of human nature is that EVERYONE is inherently selfish whether they admit to it or not. You are always consciously or subconsciously looking after yourself before others. You cannot deny this, but neither is there anything wrong with being selfish.

I could point out that your argument is selfish because you want other people to do what you want them to do, and you are not adherent to group decisions.

Moral: Selfishness is not wrong despite what society might define it as.

The best you can hope for is a situation set up so that the selfish individual is encouraged to cooperate. Mostly GW2 is set up like that, magic find gear and FOTM are the only current exceptions.

Colton.9460:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Colton.9460:

Sometimes people on this forum confuses me. How does rewarding players for playing the game not equate to people having more reasons to play the game?

Because we don’t want to play the same content over and over just to get the gear. Gear that is mandatory for the next tier of content.

Because ANET’s manifesto promised that this wouldn’t happen.

Because we play games to enjoy ourselves. Grinding the same content over and over is more like work than fun.

You would rather play the same content over and over again for nothing?

Cosmetic rewards are not nothing.
Also, I wouldn’t be playing the same content. I’d be switching it around to play whatever I felt like on that day, or just helping guild mates. There is no tangible reward there, but I do it anyway.

Or do you really have fun playing the same dungeons over and over agian, if so why is getting a reward detrimental to that?

I don’t. Which is the problem. The stat rewards force me to grind the dungeon that I don’t like over and over until I have the stats I need for the parts of the game I do enjoy.

The old system just left you a bunch of dungeons to redo or reexploring places you already went to before.

So ?
If I was bored of all the GW2 content I had another option: Stop playing for a while, come back later.
But with the gear treadmill that option is gone. If I leave because I find the treadmill too much like work (meaning not fun), it will mean that when I return I’ll have to work even harder to catch up with guild mates.
So if I fall off the gear treadmill, I’m not getting back on.

Manifestos are not legal contracts with players, if your design isnt working you are crazy if you dont fix it in fear of breaking a “here is what we hope to accomplish” statement.

But they are advertising. False advertising does get people in trouble in countries with working consumer protection laws.

And I do find it fun to do something till I progress, it is kinda my manifesto..

What if the thing you have to keep repeating is just boring ?

And you have to play it for at least an hour a day for months before you make progress ?

Also, make the game harder, please, after farming gear for hours you do pick up some skill on the way; believe it or not.

How does “make the game harder” fit with vertical progression ?
Any extra difficulty is just going to be removed when you get higher stats.

fixit.7189:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Legendary weapons don’t come with any stat improvements. Meaning they are exactly what ANET promised in the manifesto: Items that are " differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone"

Right now they don’t, but soon they will have best stats. If you want proof, dig thru forums and look at the screenshots of the buffed legendaries that mistakenly got buffed when patch first went live. Since they can have any sigil, they will be superior to even Ascended which have only have a infusion slot. Thus legendaries a) become the best b) mandatory.

Time to whip out the ol credit card, eh?

True. But that change is a result of Ascended items. If there were no Ascended items, there would be no stat change to Legendary weapons.

Even after the change, Legendary weapons are still no better stat-wise than Ascended weapons. So the manifesto would still hold regarding them.

Corvindi.5734:

However, other players may feel differently. If the vast majority of MMO players prefer vertical progression that is what they’re going to get from any devs/publishers intent on maximizing player base rather than carving out a niche.

Which doesn’t mean it’s smart to trade a niche market for a broader one. Sometimes that works, sometimes it fails horribly.

The broad market for MMOs has been WoW. Every attempt I’ve seen for someone to take WoW’s market has failed.

In fact, when I look at MMO subscription numbers I notice that all the games it tracks are in decline, with two exceptions:
– Eve Online. An MMO older than WoW that is targeted for a Niche audience. It’s still growing.
– WoW. The Panda expansion did up it’s numbers, but the charts are out of date and don’t show the effect.

So trying to attack WoW head on looks like a bad idea. The only other MMO I know is still growing is one that will never attract the WoW audience.

Many people who bought the game read the box or feature list.

Does anyone have the box art ?

I have been suggesting people check out their local consumer protection laws to see if there is anything that they can hit ANET with. Problem is I’m in New Zealand, so I doubt my local laws have any power over an internet purchase.

But if it’s on the boxes, then that means it becomes false advertising that my local authorities can take action on.

It also shows how Steam has affected my buying habits that I didn’t even think of checking a box, because I’ve been buying games online for years.

ckeeton.4907:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

ckeeton.4907:

they never said they would never add it either so that argument can go both ways. wow theres vertical progression omg worlds going to end because someone has better gear then i do. i really dont care about having the best gear if im HAVING FUN.

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

Is Ascended gear more powerful than exotics ?
Yes.
Is Ascended gear rarer than exotic gear ?
Yes.
Is Ascended gear rare enough that some players can’t " realistically acquire it," ?
Everything I’ve seen says yes.

So it is exactly the kind of gear the manifesto promised wouldn’t be included.

using that arguement, you can also argue legendaries are “unrealistic to get” yet i dont see anyone being mad over that

Legendary weapons don’t come with any stat improvements. Meaning they are exactly what ANET promised in the manifesto: Items that are " differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone"

The Golden rules of Guild Wars 2. Another document that Ascended gear disagrees with:

Take risks

“Let’s try it.” You hope to hear that phrase at the end of a meeting, especially if that meeting was contentious, or if the idea discussed is new and radical.

Imagine a playground full of kids playing. At its best, playing is making mistakes in a safe environment and learning from those mistakes in a way that encourages growth. Trying out new ideas or making drastic changes is the way we as designers get to play with the game. It’s where we slip and fall, scrape our knees, and otherwise monkey around on the jungle gym. While we don’t try out every idea, we use our collective experience to get a sense for what has promise—what we should follow down the rabbit hole. We look at where our ideas break, how they break, and why they break. You can see this in how we redesigned the sylvari, or in how we have developed the professions. They’ve all undergone quite a bit of transformation over the last few years as we have tried out different approaches and learned from those very playful experiences.

Purpose: To reinforce our general design culture of iteration. You can’t innovate in an environment that is averse to failure. You must embrace the risk of making mistakes. At the end of the day, if something doesn’t quite turn out the way you wanted, it’s not failing, it’s playing—and you grow for having done it.

Ascended gear looks like ANET is playing it safe and copying other MMOs. Not taking a risk by doing something new.

Respect the player

We respect you—as a player, as a human being. This game we’re making may end up competing with your real life. It might fight for your free time alongside your friends, your family, your work, and whatever else you might be doing. Because of that, we want to give you a meaningful experience, not one that is a vapid waste of your time. Whatever your reasons for spending time in Tyria, we don’t want to waste it by doing stuff that isn’t fun.

Gear treadmills force players to keep repeating content they don’t enjoy, just to get the gear they require for the content they do enjoy.

ckeeton.4907:

they never said they would never add it either so that argument can go both ways. wow theres vertical progression omg worlds going to end because someone has better gear then i do. i really dont care about having the best gear if im HAVING FUN.

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”

-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

Is Ascended gear more powerful than exotics ?
Yes.
Is Ascended gear rarer than exotic gear ?
Yes.
Is Ascended gear rare enough that some players can’t " realistically acquire it," ?
Everything I’ve seen says yes.

So it is exactly the kind of gear the manifesto promised wouldn’t be included.

Colton.9460:

Sometimes people on this forum confuses me. How does rewarding players for playing the game not equate to people having more reasons to play the game?

Because we don’t want to play the same content over and over just to get the gear. Gear that is mandatory for the next tier of content.

Because ANET’s manifesto promised that this wouldn’t happen.

Because we play games to enjoy ourselves. Grinding the same content over and over is more like work than fun.

You can get obsidian shards by grinding the Fractal Dungeon.

Eveningstar.6940:

I can back up my points if you’d like. I thought I did, but I can clarify. Is there a part of my post that you feel requires more evidence?

Do so. I don’t see any evidence from you, just speculation. By evidence I’m talking about links to elsewhere so I don’t have to take you at your word.

Another question: If the manifesto was wrong, why hasn’t ANET come out and said that it was wrong ?
If they do, I expect that most of the people complaining about the gear grind will just leave and the controversy will die overnight.

Every 5 levels, but a new set of gear from the trading post. It will be sufficient.

Once you hit level 80, you’ll be wanting exotics. If you can’t buy them from the trading post, check the dungeon vendors in LA to find one with stats you like. Do that dungeon to earn enough tokens for the set.

Then start grinding for Ascended gear and infusions.

SpaceTurtle.1923:

I certainly agree with the OP. The important thing to understand is they have stated ascended gear can be obtained not only through the dungeons but in other methods. They have confirmed alternate methods to obtain it WILL be in the game so that any play style can obtain the gear.

ANET made the manifesto a lie when they introduced Ascended gear. Why do you expect anything else they say on the same topic (Ascended gear and infusions) to be the truth ?

gwawer.9805:

To the people who are saying “I didn’t buy this game to grind dungeons I just wanted to stroll about in the world and do my thing and enjoy dynamic events la la la”…

Are you actually doing that? Are you actually going back to zones and re-experiencing the events and the world? Or is this just an ideal that you wish you could do, but never actually could get yourself to do?

Maybe this is why Anet is being flexible now with their original philosophy, because they see that despite their own ideals of having players go out into the world and just “having fun” people simply don’t do that anymore.

Yes I was.

All speculation without evidence. Which has how this whole argument has gone on the forums:
– People post things saying that they are worried/angry about Ascended gear.
– Someone steps up to defend ANET and tries to say why we shouldn’t worry.
– Someone posts details of Ascended gear. The numbers they show consistently make Ascended gear look worse.
– ANET stays silent.

Do you have any evidence for your speculations ?
Or are you just trying to defend ANET despite the evidence ?

Bear with me for a second. It may be hard to swallow, and it may be difficult to accept, but what if, just maybe, gear progression is an inevitable reality of a successful MMO?

Are you saying that Guild Wars 1 wasn’t successful ?
Sure, it’s not an MMO. But it was treated as one by a lot of players, so it’s close enough for this comparison.

Shooopa.5632:

Actually they have a third path which they’re already taking:

Plagiarize the kitten out of World of Warcraft because it’s popular.

Has that ever worked ?

If you like vertical progression, and you did research on GW2 before buying, why did you buy it after ANET made a big deal of promising that there wouldn’t be any ?

Lets see:
– Get better looking gear. I’m thinking stuff that takes even longer to get than Legendary weapons.
– Get achievements.
– Level alts of other classes.
– Find harder content and complete it.

Note that vertical progression goes against my last point because higher stats make everything easier.

How would things go down if the grind was only in regards to infusions ?
Specifically:
– To infuse your armor, you need to infuse the upgrade. Which means combining the rune with the infusion in the Mystic Forge.
– The infusion only comes with agony resistance.
– Infused upgrades can go on any gear the regular upgrade can take. Or maybe the only difference of Ascended gear is that it can take infused upgrades
– The only point of agony resistance is to get further in places like FOTM which consist of repeating content with higher agony levels. But the lowest level of FOTM-like dungeons remains one without agony.

So to see the content, no grind is required. But to have bragging rights or the increased reward, you need to grind. Though the higher rewards can’t be anything that generates coin, only stuff that other players will buy, otherwise the economy will be affected.

People who want gear progression would have it. People who don’t can just skip it.

Malefactor.2971:

Forum goers themselves are a minority of an MMOs playerbase, an even smaller number than that bother to post. While it’s certainly possible that the views here could be held by a “majority” of players, it’s equally possible that they are not.

What we do know atm though, is despite all the moaning on these forums, the servers are jam packed, with overflows in many zones, which might suggest that the majority have no issue, or at least not enough to cause them to stop playing the game, with the recent changes.

Or they haven’t thought through things as far as forum posters have. So they don’t understand enough to complain, even if they would agree with the posters. But they will complain once they are forced to see the reality.

But your point remains, we don’t know what the silent majority thinks. All we know is that the majority isn’t talking.

Overflows don’t tell us anything unless we know how many overflows there are. Especially with all the trial accounts skewing the numbers.

Columba.9730:

so why play this game vs. WoW at this point. WoW has everything this does now, and better quality. Seriously, how is this game differentiated vs wow now?

Dodge rolls. In WoW you role a die, in GW2 you roll your character

StevenMah.9854:

Guys, if your expectations are that high, start paying $30 a month, or else please appreciate what ANet has done and stop complaining that much. They obviously don’t have to bring out new contents in such a short time.

True. I wish they would stop bringing out the content and redirect those resources towards fixing problems with existing content.

Some of them make noise.

In GW1 some mini versions of enemies even made the right sound, which would startle party members.

Wait a week or two for people to work it out, then check the wiki.

Moving the fractal dungeon might help. Maybe make the observatory a city, instead of an instance, so that all the LFG Fractal spam moves in there.

LA is a travel hub. It’s going to be popular whatever they do. So I don’t get why they want to make it more popular.

Alberel Leonhart.9640:

Ganzo.5079:

i couldnt agree more, if ppl like us simply are enraged, and they dont care about something, they simply quit, and kitten off…

but its not this the case, we are here, we are screaming because we love this work, but this last patch have a really bitter taste…(some part are very very good, some others are forgettable) and the way the are handle the community and the related problems, are a lot bitter.

This being the free trial weekend also means any potential customers have all seen the game at its worst. They’re not just pushing away their loyal customers; they’re scaring off potential customers too…

Now think about what those potential customers are thinking when the person that was pushing them to try GW2, and maybe even gave them a trial key, is now telling them not to buy it.

What’s even more frustrating is that you’re aware the problem exists, but continue to release content that will never function correctly as long as the problem is around. It’s like you’re designers are creating content for a game that has already licked the issue, when in reality you haven’t. Why allow this?

Because writing to the limitations of the medium seems a lost art in video games.

Your special events keep breaking after being activated repeatedly. And I wish this was something that I had confidence that you could fix, but the truth is even your normal events have been suffering from this same problem since launch. If you haven’t been able to fix those, you’re not likely to fix these anytime soon. This, to me, seems like another reason to stick these special event NPCs in private instances. At least then the players have the option of resetting the instance if something in the scripting jams.

I’m going to try and defend ANET here. Their stated method is to fix the underlying cause of the problem, not to band-aid each individual occurrence. Which is the better long term solution.
But then we see that they keep making events that hit the same bug, we are back to your first point and my defense fails.

How often do the writers ever talk to the bug fix guys ?

Merthax.5172:

MistaMike.7356:

waah waah I love playing the game but the moment Anet attaches a reward to something it becomes work.

The problem is that it funnels you into playing content in a certain order.

I wouldn’t call forcing people to play content in a specific order a bad thing. In fact, I’d call it a good thing because when you go looking for a PUG you know that if they are allowed to attempt one thing, then they are at least good enough to have completed previous things.

Lets take GW1 Prophesies as an example. The hardest mission to PUG was Thunderhead Keep. Not because it was harder than later missions, but because it was impossible to skip. A lot of people skipped the early missions, didn’t learn the player skill those missions would have taught. Then they reach THK and can’t complete it because they lack skill (a lot of them also lacked levels, but they were easy enough to avoid). But there are a lot of them, so they bring down the skilled players in PUGs.

But once you passed THK, PUGs became much easier because the only people who got there were the people who had enough skill to complete THK.

Then Factions came out, with a lot more points that could never be skipped, and it never had the THK problem because each unskippble point only needed a bit more skill than the previous one.

The problem is that it funnels you into playing the same content over and over again ad nauseum.

Instead of choosing the content that you enjoy most, you are pushed to playing that which gives you the reward.

This however is a problem. Forcing players to repeat content they did well is not acceptable.

Wasselin.1235:

Amulrei.4973:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Oh kitten off. I play games to enjoy myself when I am not working. I do not pay for a game just for more work.

You will have to forgive him. WoW-type games have conditioned an awful lot of people to view this as acceptable.

Not even. The grind in WoW I think is actually more enjoyable because you are getting more “upgrades” along the way that you need to face challenges that are just a tiny bit harder. In WoW the grind might be longer and higher, but there are more steps along the way. In GW2 the grind is like three gigantic and long steps.

So first they make challenges harder. Then they give you new gear to make them easier again.

I’m confused. Does Blizzard want to make the higher geared content easier or harder ?

Or do they just want to keep the difficulty the same, while slowing your progress down with gear upgrades ?

Looks like a Skinner box to me.

tigirius.9014:

So someone on another thread was talking about a second bullet point, in this bullet point they claimed that one of the head devs addressed the armor being only from dungeons issue with this patch and said that it would be available from other means keeping in line with the horizontal progression (crafting karma etc.)

Can anyone confirm he said this? I have yet to see anything on it.

Why should we take ANET at their word on Ascended items when the very existence of them breaks ANETs word ?

As you get further into the Fractal Dungeon, agony gets stronger, making your progress harder. At the same time, increasing your agony resistance makes them easier again.

Does ANET want people to be completing harder or eaiser content in the long run ?

If they want people to complete harder parts of FOTM, why provide agony resistance ?

If they want FOTM to just keep getting easier, why have agony at all ?

This is a good idea. It will clear up the issue and the people who don’t like the answer will still know what the answer is. Then they can leave because they know that GW2 is not for them.

No nonsense about what the ‘silent majority’ thinks because we will now know.