I think that is why they called it tribulation mode rather than hard mode.
Tribulation means to go through suffering or pain (which I think they accomplished with the mode) – so the warning is right there in the name.
Remember, SAB was never intended to be serious content. It’s an homage to old console games that started as a bit of an April Fool’s Day joke by a developer in his spare time.
That’s it?! Tribulation Mode is a work of art requiring memory, judgment, and excellent fine motor skills. The next expansion’s map needs to take inspiration from Tribulation Mode and have exploring those areas as difficult and in the same way, but more difficult overall because you’d have new enemies slightly tougher than the ones in HoT areas. You’d even have narrow landing ledges and trampolene like world 2-stage 2.
Imagine what the developers could do with expansion maps? You’re dodge jumping to a ledge and narrowly make it, then you perform a tight dodge jump around the corner…only to be confronted with the next expansion’s equivalent of shadow reapers and mordrem tormentors? And they’d respawn too.
What does this rant have to do with the message you replied to?
I checked last night incidentally. Deldremor Steel and Elonian Leather were still profitable(>1g). Spiritwood and Damask were extremely marginally profitable(<20s).
I hadn’t been checking the trends leading up to this, so it may be an anomaly from SAB weekend.
I’ll admit that toys are in a bit of difficult position. Aesthetically they are cool, but in terms of actual gameplay Anet killed the costume brawl (heck how many ppl know that was a thing).
How so? They’ve been consistently releasing new Tonics.
… their GW2 experience is an obligation, and not enjoyable to them, I really don’t want to see SAB relegated to such a status.
…
Thats the thing though. It currently is an obligation, since we only have it for two-ish weeks. If it was permanent, I wouldn’t feel the need to only play SAB and pretty much ignore everything else. When they make things temporary, it makes it feel more like a job to have to play that content, at least for me, because it’ll be the only time I get to play the content. And it would allow me to work on trib mode (at least world 2) more on my own pace instead of trying to grind it out in two weeks.
I’ve been on this thread since jump street. I don’t feel the need to explain my endgame again.
But I’m gonna state, when Anet does something unethical, a “we hate Anet circle-jerk” is an appropriate response. That’s not all this thread has been though.
When I started GW2 it seemed as though the developers poured their hearts and souls into development but they lost that mind frame somewhere along the line…
They did, but you can’t keep doing that forever, and a long time ago they decided it was unsustainable.
If that’s the kind of content schedule you feel you should be getting, it’s probably best you move on.
What ANET has done, as pointed out by someone else, is put all their eggs into one basket which is RAIDS… A massive amount of players don’t do raids and it is a very niche gameplay style of GW2 only found in that aspect of the game.
Well it also has by far the least content in relation to other game modes (except WvW I suppose) despite having the most regular recent releases.
That’s a really interesting point. So are you saying that some players posting here have demonstrated that the decision isn’t a good one because there might be some data Anet doesn’t have that would possibly change their decision and it comes from the very players that are arguing to keep Legendary development? I would love to see what this data is! I’m all for getting more Legendary weapons if Anet is so incompetent that average players have some data they have missed that is so pivotal to their decision.
The data is people that are voicing that they aren’t going to spend money on the game because of the decision.
So you’re saying … that Anet didn’t know or consider that this would make people upset and those people might stop spending money on the game, so it’s a bad decision to stop Legendary development? See, I think you’re wrong about that. I know Anet understands people would not like this decision. The first post from MO tells me so.
Well, clearly, the people you are arguing against really don’t care what you think, and they have no reason to give Anet the benefit of the doubt.
That’s a really interesting point. So are you saying that some players posting here have demonstrated that the decision isn’t a good one because there might be some data Anet doesn’t have that would possibly change their decision and it comes from the very players that are arguing to keep Legendary development? I would love to see what this data is! I’m all for getting more Legendary weapons if Anet is so incompetent that average players have some data they have missed that is so pivotal to their decision.
The data is people that are voicing that they aren’t going to spend money on the game because of the decision.
And you haven’t answered my question yet. What is your goal here?
Why should anyone who is alienated by this care about whether or not Anet is successful? And why, if their trust was betrayed, should they give Anet the benefit of the doubt?
All people are doing here is demonstrating the degree of the validity of the decision. This is why I’m asking you what you mean to accomplish here. People you are arguing against are just giving more data to Anet.
Lack of valuable loot is really killing my interest in doing PvE.
Most games/game modes are the same. Kill monsters and gain loot.
Loot makes up a huge part of the game IMO.
I really need better and more valuable loot dropping =/
And dropping for solo play too. Not where I need to form teams for raids or join large groups to kill world bosses.
I really need solo play good loot drops.
I’m referring to loot that is worth 100+ to 1000s of gold.
Like precursors etc.
I’ve played for 2+ years and only got 1 precursor drop.
Other then that 1 precursor, I have got no other drops that is worth more than 50 gold by itself.
That is so sad! 2 Years!
That’s how supply and demand works. If more valuable loot dropped, it wouldn’t be as valuable.
When I went in I expected an actually difficult experience that would test my performance and skills. Instead what I have discovered is a long trail of “no, ur ded :P” traps that instantly kill you hidden in the ground across the place.
It’s not an obstacle course that tests skill. It’s just an exercise in tedium.
Please change the text on the Tribulation Mode Cloud, so that others won’t be mislead into seeking a difficult experience and finding a boring one.
An example might be, “Click here to embark upon a three hour journey of tedium and general misery that will test your blood pressure to its limits”. That would be much more fitting, because talent isn’t mentioned.
Thanks, Anet.
~Somebody that was hoping for a jumping puzzle
I think that what the part about Masochists is for.
It makes sense for it to only last a few weeks if there are slated changes coming in the April patch which could potentially break it, as was mentioned by ANet themselves for not keeping it as a permanent feature. I’d rather have the April patch than permanent SAB, to be honest.
While you are absolutely correct about potential incoming breaking changes, when you put it like that and they just spent a relatively long time fixing SAB, it’s a huge shame to think that it will be broken in but two weeks time… even though no matter how small scale the update to SAB itself was, fixing it must have taken longer.
And if this is true now, why would the commit to do the same thing each year. Yeah SAB may be a wonder of creative thinking under the hood prone to breaking because the engine was designed for an MMO not a platformer… but if they have any sense now that they have commited to an yearly thing, it doesn’t make any sense to keep deliberately breaking the thing either.
It actually took about 2 weeks. They talked about it in Guild Chat.
Is it really? I don’t think Anet would agree with you when it’s taken them 6 months with a team of devs to deliver … ONE.
Just because it has an issue doesn’t mean the issue is that it’s unsustainable. Like I said, it doesn’t need to be sustained. It’s a one-and-done(well, literally a 16 and done) deal.
Really? Based on what? Complete lack of data?
Based on intuition. People are allowed to base their opinions on intuition if they don’t have access to the relevant data. And they are allowed to voice their opinions on this forum as long as they don’t violate TOSA.
Would it be feasible to outsource SAB design to the community as a contest?
I’m confident that the community has creative modders and designers, or even players of piecemeal sandbox games like Minecraft. It’s disappointing that SAB is almost certainly going to be left unfinished, and I’m sure plenty in the community would jump at the chance to take the design portion off your plate, afterwords the developers could implement the changes during crack between other projects.
Arguments about financials from players that have none of them is pretty presumptuous. Frankly, I think it’s ridiculous that people are suggesting that Anet has not first and foremost considered this factor; it’s a business, it impacts employees in significant ways and obviously affects us as players. The suggestions here people make indicate Anet have taken this decision lightly. I can assure you they have not.
I’m confident they factored it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they correctly estimated the value of the factor.
No, you have options … you can either accept that Legendary crafting was unsustainable content, forget it and enjoy the other aspects of the game or decide that it’s such a big deal to you that you quit the game.
If anything were to be labeled as unsustainable content, it’s living world/story content that we’ve seen for the past two seasons. A couple hours of content that takes weeks to months to develop, followed by weeks or months of nothing new to do. It’s just not possible to make content at the rate players are able to go through it.
But I’m not going to argue for the suspension of that type of content. Even though I was far from impressed with the majority of Anet’s installments, I understand the value of such content. It offers change and growth to the world, and the ability to progress the game’s narrative. It keeps players interested and involved with the game’s world.
I’d prefer spend my time on long-term reward goals over more episodic story but I do not want to see living world content sacrificed for it. I don’t have the right to tell players that content that is important to them shouldn’t be made because I think the content that matters to me is more important.
Also, it’s pretty absurd and irrelevant to call legendary collections unsustainable. They have a set number they announced. They don’t really have to sustain anything once that’s delivered., other than maybe unforseen bugfixes.
And it’s already been proven that they can both, a) successfully make an arbitrary collection b) Create 16 legendarys(they already created 20 before the game launched)
Honestly, I think you expect too much. There is no way for a company to keep ahead of the content curve. The reason that they had a big content drought post-LWS2 was because they had to shift to making expansions, because Living World was unsustainable.
At some point people should accept that they will eventually run out of content and accept they are bored with a game.
Although, honestly, the current content “drought” is a myth. They’ve been releasing raids pretty regularly. I’m not saying you have to play and enjoy raids, but accept the fact that they are releasing content, it’s just no what you are interested in.
I think their most competent devs and artists came up with the SAB design and it was unexpected from Anet that it would be of such a high success and of such original quality.
Basically they see SAB as a competition to their own game, as something that will take players away from their open world, raids, dungeons, etc.
It was a huge mistake on their part not to make it a more important part of Guild Wars 2, since it’s probably the best thing that happened to Guild Wars 2 in it’s 4 years life-cycle. They could have made it work if they had more vision, just like WvW could have been 5 times more engaging than it was if they actually cared.
For me it’s over, I uninstalled the game last week even with the return of SAB. The cancellation of SAB future worlds, WvW complete disaster, removal of long terms rewards and the fact my friends have left already was enough to make me move on.
If you’re still compelled to post here, you haven’t moved on.
This is what many many players demanded. There were constant threads of players demanding SAB to be released even if it didn’t include new content. It’s strange now since there’s people demanding more because that isn’t enough. Kind of the same thing with the duration. It’s like people demand one thing, get it, and then decide that they want more because they got what they had originally demanded.
You don’t even need to buy the infinite coin. Normal continue coins can be bought with baubles.
Good luck trying Tribulation mode with normal continue coins…..
You can get 150 continue coins per world daily just from the Bauble Bubbles in the Glorious Chests.
The ironic part is that MO didn’t reply for the last 40 pages.
He cares THAT much about his community being angry.
He practically dropped the bomb, said that HoT, in his eyes is perfect, and that we’re all wrong and then put us on ignore.
It’s frustrating but I don’t think it’s in the least big ironic. He framed the by saying he knew people were going to be upset, and that he’d watch the thread for a couple hours.
I’m also not sure what do you mean with “sustainability” & “drought of content”.
Hi! I just want to clarify that a drought of content refers to the fact that we have not gotten any content updates other than HoT and festivals. Mr. O’Brien is trying to distract people from being angry about the lack of legendary weapons by suggesting they be angry about a different failure. It is a pretty curious tactic, in my opinion.
I’m clarifying because the rest of your response seems to be working under the assumption that it means the opposite of that. In short- you’re right. Content does not seem to be a priority.
Do you mean we haven’t gotten any content since HoT, or that all the content we got is HoT related?
I was going to make a long winded post explaining why it’s better for it to be seasonal and the problems with it being permanent, but then I realized there’s not really any point in doing so since that’s the way it’s going to be anyway.
I just don’t understand why they even use the bobbles to get the stuff from Moto. They are charging coin for it anyway, why don’t they just charge coin for all the items. Other then the skins and a few misc sab items, the other stuff can be gotten without using coins. To me it defeats the purpose of playing SAB. Well other then just for fun but that is a given.
It’s called a gold sink.
Giving a vendor money is one of the only ways to remove liquid currency from the game. Put that in a high demand temporary content and BOOOM. Watch the gold wash away.
To clarify; they may have decided to hold off on announcing the Legendary suspesion until it was close to SAB being reintroduced in April, but I do think it’s basically a 0% chance the decision to reintroduce SAB came about as a response to the outrage of the legendary suspension.
So Mike,
do you really think this makes us forget that you scrapped content we already paid for?
Sometimes I wonder what’s worse; that you think people are that stupid or that you might actually be right.
Implementing it temporarily in April was probably planned long ago. This most likely has nothing to do with the Legendary suspension.
You know the announcement date of Legendary cancellation, but not the date it happened… which is likely the day before SAB was greenlighted.
Nah, I’m thinking it was decided no later than a week or so after the Play-for-Free announcement, as the twitch comments basically were 60% SAB requests.
People who think SAB returning is because of the legendary announcement then you’re crazy. Players have been asking for it’s return. Players have complained that they sold us a infinite continue coin on the TP and then SAB vanished for nearly two years.
This has been in the motion for months now and April 1st is the logical release date for it, that’s all.
Except….. It didn’t release on April 1st, it released on March 31st.
But timing.
Announcement of Legendary suspension: at the start of a long weekend that’s a major holiday. After 2 posts on the thread all red posts essentially disappear from both the official forum and Reddit. Not even Gayle posts during that time.
Then after 4 days: the announcement of upcoming changes….that will be in 2 or 3 weeks
Then the next day: Sab is released after a nearly 2 year absence. And not on a Tuesday, which is when most updates happen and not on April 1st, but on a Thursday.
I see some managing of player reactions with the timing of all this. First the bad, then let us talk to ourselves to exhauation, then two good things back to back and an update on a non Tuesday.
They may have delayed the legendary announcement to coincide with it, but it’s pretty safe to assume they’ve been planning on rereleasing SAB for a while.
not really sure what to say about that in light of all the uproar over putting the team members in better spots.. i guess we now know where that better spot was…
oh well
It’s very safe to assume this has nothing to do with that. They probably had this ready to go for months.
Mike I like how nobody from anet has addressed anyones concerns about what they actually want (the legendaries you promised) but here you are, cajoling and plastering fake smiles all over content that nobody gives two kittens about, like we are little children that need to be told what to get excited over.
I’m as mad as anyone else about the legendaries; but you gotta be pretty far out of the loop to think at this point nobody cares about the WvW stuff.
This discussion hinges on one thing: how you define the ‘legendary weapons’ problem.
Firstly, I think Anet implemented crafting because they thought it’s what players wanted, otherwise they wouldn’t have done anything and just made new precursors and recipes for new legendaries with the old process.
Secondly, I don’t always believe that players know what they want or are honest about what they want. I really don’t think the majority of people wanted anything but an easier/cheaper/faster way to get a Legendary weapon and pushed the idea of crafting as a way to get that, being naive thinking it would give them the easier/cheaper/faster way they desired.
Therefore, I think the situation we are in, no one wins. Anet wasted lots of time implementing something players told them they wanted but didn’t and increased the work needed to make new legendaries.
I’m with the OP, conceptually. I think future development on new Legendary weapons should just go away, for good though. They little function beyond their Ascended weapon cousins and cosmetically, are unique because of footfalls, but not visual effects.
I think the solution is to offer ways to ‘earn’ the effects that Legendary weapon give and apply them to characters (I would love lava pools on my Condition Guardian or black holes for my theif). That’s a win IMO because it’s another level of visual customization, still gives endgame goals that legendaries do and may be a little simpler to implement for ‘earning’.
But players DID want crafting. What they didn’t want was such a complex, time consuming, hideous gold sink. They boxed themselves into this by creating such a convoluted system.
NOBODY asked for that.
See, I consider anyone that talks like that to be one of the people that fooled themselves into thinking they wanted crafting as a method to get easier/cheaper/faster way to get a Legendary weapon … because you DID get crafting.
If you wanted crafting and got it and complained about it, then there is some more significant underlying desire that doesn’t align with what Legendary crafting delivered. THAT is exactly what I’m saying when I say the the whole Legendary issue depends on how you define what’s wrong with it.
The fact that all Legendaries have been suspended pretty much says that Anet thought it wasn’t a good system, moreso than even the players.
End of story.
CLEARLY, it’s not.
Also, responding to the above, complexity is a high value factor for some MMO players. Which is why I said speak for yourself.
It actually takes quite a bit of time to dust off old content and bring it up to the current game state, so it won’t happen in time for the quarterly release. Instead we’ll launch the quarterly update with improvements to Desert, use that as an opportunity to get the community’s feedback on those changes, then we’ll swap to Alpine when it’s ready.
The borderlands change obviously being the change to Alpine. But sure edit it.
That confirms what I said.
“We’ll launch the quarterly update with improvements to the Desert…”
This is obviously the things we need to know before the update is out. The rest is nice to know but not as important.
He’s basically saying: Stop scribing, Finish those fractal achievements and we are making the borderlands change except it wont make the April Update.
Is it me or are onlh half the ppl able to read?
It actually says we ARE going to see changes(and a feedback phase) to the Desert BL for the update, but there isn’t enough time to ship the changes in the Alpine one in time for the quarterly update.
I don’t see why people are arguing about this. It’s very obvious that they are trying to fix both Borderlands maps. If they were just planning on trashing the Desert one, there would be no point in another feedback phase.
I’m not saying that they won’t ultimately trash it though.
But players DID want crafting. What they didn’t want was such a complex, time consuming, hideous gold sink. They boxed themselves into this by creating such a convoluted system.
.
