Guild Wars 2

Taury.7108:

Well I don’t know when the ascended armor was added to the game but as far as I know, exotic armor has been there since start. And I believe that most people still run around in exotics, if not on their mains then most definitely on their alts. Not that it’s that much of a difference since ascended is only 5% boost compared to exotics. So you must be doing something really wrong outside of armor rarity choice.

It’s hard to say, without really knowing what he was up against. I will say there are a couple WvW WXP bonuses which are worth knowing about. The stacking bonuses for “Applied Fortitude” I think it is.

Vayne.8563:

Novalitus.7382:

So let me get this straight…
The people on the forums are the small population and therefore its OKAY for Anet to ignore them? Every single one of us on these forums actually also bought the game and maybe spend money on the cash shop too.

No matter how small, every costumer should count. Otherwise what is the point of having a forum at all?

Actually this is completely impossible.

Every customer should count. And that means what? If I had a shop and 1000 people wanted meat and one person only wanted vegetable dishes, how many vegetable dishes should stock for that one person.

Okay, I’ll bite.

“Every customer should count” should sound familiar to anyone who ever had to work in any sort of service job. It’s customer service rhetoric used by managers and those higher up the food chain to justify trying to placate any and all angry or dissatisfied customers no matter what their complaint is.

It’s an outgrowth of “treat the customer as if they are always right” (which has been distilled down into the wrong “the customer is always right”) approach. You listen, you smile, you never . . . ever . . . contradict them directly or say they are wrong. You apologize for things which aren’t your fault, you promise to fix things which aren’t in your control, you offer any and all things in order to get to that one thing which will satisfy your dissatisfied customer.

And then you take it to someone with the authority to make it happen. It’s out of your hands, and you can faithfully say “I already informed management about this, I apologize it is taking so long to get this settled” or some permutation.

Customer relations is one of those jobs where you have to basically be able to not snap someone’s metaphorical neck over them being raging kittycats to you. It takes never personally owning a complaint as though it was against you, no matter what invective is being spewed your way. And most of all it takes being able to continue on with a calm, reasonable tone despite whatever you may be facing.

It is a carefully crafted illusion like every bit of stage magic you go to watch Penn Jillette do.

The reality of “every customer should count” is how it is a tool used to filter out those who have aptitude for customer relations, and those who do not. If someone can leave each customer who comes through the doors satisfied, no matter how vicious their complaints were? If you have someone at the front desk who can spin that illusion properly and get it believed? That’s the person you want in that position, so you do everything you can to keep them there.

Karizee.8076:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Azrael.4960:

Trouble is that the noise is being made by a tiny minority of players who inhabit the forums. The vast majority who play don’t even come where and only hear about changes when they log in and then check wiki

Do you have any evidence that only a small minority visit the forum?

Yes, Colin mentioned it 2 days ago when he was discussing the revamps for new players.

“We have millions of users, and a tiny % of them frequent game forums or reddit..”

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2etzxq/a_fresh_start_the_new_player_experience_in_guild/ck35771

You know what comes next, right? “Well how do we know he’s not misrepresenting figures to suit his own ends?”

Also, worth pointing out . . . to be fair . . . they can only track users based on account numbers and whether they log into the game on a given day. Technically they have “millions of registered accounts”, which may or may not be all individual users. And technically, there’s no proof each poster on Reddit is one person and also not one person with many many accounts.

Or that everyone who posts on the sub-reddit actually does play GW2 . . .

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t know….people didn’t think silk would be worth anything some time ago, either, so…. /shrug

On the contrary, it was cited as one of the few “safe” things to give to the Zepyrites for their RNG loot boxes

Yes. I definitely feel the home instance is under-utilized for the amount of effort which went into creating it as an instance different for everyone. This was brought up a while back during the first round of CDIs, specifically “Horizontal Progression”. As in, this is one thing players could affect as a means of horizontal progression to just fill it with things which mean something to them. Sort of like a Hall of Monuments for GW2, only . . . with more to it.

I want to mount a piece of the Shatterer on a plinth for my Blood Legion charr warrior. And then tell Rytlock if he ever wants to take another push at the Elder Dragon who made it, to come recruiting at the Vigil where he’s stationed currently.

I want to have my human ranger build a monument to the fallen of Falcon Company. I want to have Lord Faren around in the tavern telling those who would listen about how his close personal friend took him out for an adventure or two, and get called out by the Great Zehtuka’s descendant in a boasting contest which would make norn raise eyebrows.

I want my norn guardian to start collecting trophies of her hunts so she can rub Eir’s nose in it. Tattered Svanir banners, the wing off one of the few Tyrian black moas, the jaw of an ice drake broodmother, a cute lil drawing from a refugee child . . .

I want my asura to have a project to “work on” now and then in his lab instance. After all, an asura should always be hard at work making physics (and causality!) cry like a lil cat.

And if I played my sylvari character at all, I’d really like them to collect journals and mementos of his journey so he can point to them and tell ‘younger’ sylvari “this is what awaits you in the world beyond the Grove”.

sirian.4981:

Gaia Orunitia.5794:

I want a Dark Knight Quaggan.

I was just thinking, Quaggans really should be a playable race. Its disappointing that they aren’t. Plus, Arenanet is trying to attract new players and what better way than with a cute mascot?

Depends on what new players you want to attract.

IT’s hard to say what was going on without both seeing what you had/have on and what the other person was wearing. I know I was quietly told to ignore the zerker meta and go defensive if I planned on not being in the middle of a zerg but more “roaming/scouting”.

Also, odd you said your ranger was the one with the big damage spikes. I’m sure you’ve got something going wrong there. Everyone knows rangers are crap

Gummy.4278:

Ok let me add some spice to this kitten pot!!!!

Who wants to stir this:

Dwarven / Berserker (Great Axes)

Dwarves make no sense to return at all, being stone creatures now which apparently have all gone deep into Tyria. They cannot procreate anymore, which means if any are destroyed then they cannot replenish.

If “Berserker” was a class, I don’t know if it would be set apart any differently from Warrior.

Great axes sound interesting, but every time I see mock-up skills they tend to be cherry-picked from the features of other weapons into one godly weapon, rather than its own identity.

If I had to choose?

- Add Tengu. (And while at it, fix the issues with nonhumans and armor issues.)

- Mystic. (Roll Ritualist and Dervish into one thematically. Mechanically, treat as a class which is meant for low-power multi-target hits in melee which carry secondary effects. Or alternatively, could use long-range spirit-based magic.)

- Polearms. (“blade on a stick” for the Mystic to focus with, add them to Mesmers, Warriors, Thieves, and Rangers. Melee weapons with a reach but a straight-forward area of striking rather than sweeping.)

Lheimroo.2947:

I’m never ever going to criticize tutorials.

I will. I will criticize the heck out of tutorials which are clunky and written in a way which pull the player out of the game and into “now you’re going to be forced to RTFM”. I also will criticize tutorials which cannot ever be skipped by choice.

It’s as terrible as putting a 30 minute cutscene before a difficult boss with no save states between the start of the cutscene and the boss being beaten. These things are #4 and #7 on my list of “great gaming sins”.

Nerelith.7360:

If you do not wish to buy an expansion, you do not have to. But if you choose not to, then you choose to exclude yourself from the content contained. That is not a reason to deny those of us that wish to have a paid expansion.

“Since I do not consider it worth it, to pay for a Box at the stadium, and I do not wish that those that do consider it wortwhile to experience something I cannot experience, no one should have the option of renting a Box at the stadium”

Is this what you are saying?

No, it’s not. But you might as well assume that is what I am saying since you are trying to boil it all down to a soundbyte you construct to make your point.

What I am saying is the same thing I said at the start of this thread: I do not think an expansion will fix anything, or solve any issues with how the players feel. I have no personal objection to an expansion. I said I would purchase it if it came out, in fact. (Twice.)

But it’s, in my view, not going to solve what people expect it to solve.

Shockwave.1230:

Prices will equalize due to supply and demand, there is no issue.

They should equalize due to supply and demand, if the assumptions hold true.

As everyone has said: “time will tell”.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

Just watched a WoodenPotatoes video about some of the things that existed in older versions of the game and to me the idea of in game books is a really good idea. I know there are still a handful of readable books in game but I get the impression it could have been much more previously.

Was it a fear of being too expository or locking lore down where you could not go back and change it to fit new ideas?

Supposedly it was an idea they had no time to really expand on further so they cut it out after they realized they couldn’t “complete” it in time for release.

Whether or not they’re being sincere on that reasoning is up to the individual to decide. I’ll note it’s not the only thing in the Beta builds which disappeared.

Ashen.2907:

pdavis.8031:

Im still not convinced of that. Its such a small increase as it makes little difference in the long run. You’d have to have a ridiculous amount of drops for it even to be considered an advantage. 1g over 430 gear drops isnt that much.

This is the part that has me scratching my head.

Development takes time and money. If these changes are not going to be noticed why spend the money to implement them ?

They might not be noticeable at 80 . . . but may be huge at earlier levels. That’s what comes to mind first via Occam.

I just got the infinite tools to save on that trouble, and the trouble of carrying around three axes (iron, mithril, orichalcum) . . . and two scythes, and three picks.

Nerelith.7360:

Tobias, the facts are that whilr you may have grown tired of your ranger, your Mesmer, your elementalist, etc etc etc somwhere out there, is a player that likes theirs.

I still like my ranger. I just am tired of him is all. Playing him is, as I said, something like wearing an old suit I know intimately. Or pulling out my old deck of Magic cards and knowing exactly how to play the opening hand I draw. That doesn’t mean I don’t put the deck back on the shelf for a few weeks/months.

As long as there are enought players that like Playing their rangers, their mesmer, their elemetalist, etc etc… there are players that have not " exhausted" the content that was here on release.

And yet . . . there are people who say they have. You can figure out what they mean by that, because I don’t have much interest in trying to speak for others I don’t agree with.

I tried to appeal to you, in terms I thought you might understand. But what I realize is, i just need to explain that while you may be tired of every class, and every weapon, and every skill..( judging from your responses to me..I simply wonder if you are serious, or if you have another agenda?), and therefore you personally may have “exhausted” all the content that came on release. There are people that haven’t.

And there are people who have, and will burn through content just as fast the next time around. As if there’s some race to get to the end, some prize for being first to a race nobody is keeping the scoring for.

I can understand the desire to latch on to the " Paid expansions suck, because we will all exhaust the content." but the fact is, the type of content that comes with paid expansions… New Professions, new weapons, new skills, new features…. because of their very nature, are only exhausted when enough players get exhausted of the game…that they close the servers.

I can’t disagree with the logic here. However, I can disagree with the sentiment and spirit of what is being said. People can, do, and have gotten tired of content in expansions swiftly enough in the past.

Sure, if you’re still playing, you haven’t technically “used up” all of the content. But that’s because we’re not talking of a finite measurement. If you can show me a gram of raiding, or a liter of farming, I might consider it possible to “use up” a game in the traditional sense of it.

But what we’re talking about is not “you haven’t gotten to the end of the Falhammer Hall instance so you’re not done with the content” versus “I have no more desire to even set foot in there” in terms of “exhausting content”.

I realize you are different, but…. there are players that play professions and do not exhaust professions, until they get so tired of the game that they move onto something else. The same for skills, and weapons.

I’m not different in that respect, but I am different in the respect of getting tired enough to just step back and try something else. Either in the same game, or to try another game for a while. I have Minecraft – I can always find something to kill time until my interest returns.

You need to claim that " Oh content in a paid for expansion will be exhausted in a month" but that only applies to the type of content that Anet has been releasing in it’s " Living Story" and that it says is " expansion-like."

In My opinion, this argument is a non-argument, and is rather disingenuous at best.

As such, you can keep making it if you wish, personally I do not see it as a real issue.

I do apologize, I should have stated myself clearer.

I think the content will be termed “exhausted” in a month by the same people who claim there is nothing left to do currently.

Sorry for the mistake.

gobax.6185:

Wow youre going to be successful in life thinking like that! So funny!

Why buy if you can farm them for free?

Do you want the short answer or the long-winded one? I’ll give the short one and expect someone as intelligent as you to figure out how it matters.

Time.

Why invest your money to buy and sell a product if you can directly get them from the source?

I can bake a cheesecake just fine, but I still purchase them now and then. Why? I already gave you the answer.

Nerelith.7360:

Have you exhausted your Ranger?

In a sense, yes. I still play him, but only because he’s the most familiar to me and the one character I can play the strongest. But I’m still, honestly, bored with him at times and saddened there’s no real need for a Ranger anywhere.

(Mostly just contempt.)

The fact that any new content will be exhausted seems to argue against any expansion. This is a non-argument. May as well cancel TV series, since the “content” will be “exhausted eventually.” Actually the shelf life of the average TV show is less than that of a paid for expansion of an MMO. You see it once, it’s exhausted.

And yet, we still see season after season of popular TV shows.

Let’s see season after season of Firefly If you can produce that, I’d have to find where you are so I can deliver endless amounts of cupcakes.

This " the content gets exhausted" is a non-issue. Since whether it is " days" for Living story" or " Months" for a paid for expansion…. the content that is exhausted .." New maps, new quests, new Boss mobs" IS what Living story focuses on.

What you would get with a paid for expansion…" New Professions, new weapons, new skills" never gets exhausted until every player stops playing, or the servers shut down.

Technically, neither does “new content” unless it stops existing (-cough cough- Marionette). But it more is about the feelings of those who cry the loudest for an expansion because they’re bored with what’s already out there (which they also haven’t “exhausted” entirely, they’ve just done all they care to do).

Getting an expansion will shut these sorts of things up for, hmmm . . . I’d put 10 gold down it’d be five weeks before we saw the first “okay, now what” type post. Followed by a lot of people chiming in about how the content is boring, repetitive and just “a grind”.

The only thing I think it might “fix” is making those sort of threads more scarce for a time. I think it might break more things (in some cases, breaking them worse than they already were).

And yes, I’d still buy the darn thing and play it through. I’d probably even enjoy most of it. My misgivings are whether it would do anything to “fix” things instead of adding new things to get “fixed”.

Show of hands, who here would want to see two new professions before they fix all those mesmer bugs on list? Or before we can actually get engineers to a point they don’t feel like the unfavorite stepchild? How about an expansion which contains nothing which would actually impact WvW at all but give tons of stuff to those who play in the PvE . . .

Hayashi.3416:

Ohoni.6057:

if you take long to kill him the punishment would be that it takes longer rather than you getting nothing at all

Can we make this happen?

It has happened, it was the normal way of things a while ago. That’s why the timers were enacted – it was a case of “when we kill it” rather than “if we can kill it”. Every world boss was possible for five people (or one really determined solo person) to just res-rush until dead.

I know. I had to do Claw of Jormag that way a couple early mornings.

I find it less desirable to guarantee a reward and take the punishment out of failure.

Nerelith.7360:

Could it be that some of those, not all, but defenitely some, are not objecting to the idea of expansion, and are in fact just objecting to paying for it… and have seized on the " exhaustion of content in a month or two." simply as an excuse so they don’t have to admit.." I want it free" ?

No. I can and would repurpose the money I spend on trying other games or buying MTG to buy an expansion if it came out. The price is less an issue for me (currently) than feeling all it would do is shut up the complaints about being bored for a couple weeks before it started up again.

Most of what would be part of a paid expansion never gets exhausted. No matter what they say … How does One exhaust New professions, anyone Exhaust the Mesmer or the Warrior yet?

I’m done with my mesmer. Also done with my elementalist too. Sorry, I just don’t like playing the classes so they might as well be exhausted.

How does One exhaust new weapons? Anyone exhaust their greatsword yet? Or their Short bow? Maybe the staff has been exhausted?

By all accounts, it’s wrong to use a longbow on a ranger so . . . guess that weapon is exhausted.

New Maps can be exhausted, New Quests can be exhausted, even new Boss mobs can be exhausted. And isn’t this what Living Story delivers?

Which is why people want “expansion”, which would contain much of this stuff as the content and still get “exhausted” all the same. Just with more time since there’d be more of it all at once.

xev.9476:

Given that GW2 seems to be hemorrhaging veteran players, I’d say there are excellent reasons to think shabby LS content (which does nothing for PvP or WvW players) is insufficient.

And things which do things for PvP or WvW players aren’t going to do anything for PvE players, either.

I think it’s hemorrhaging veterans primarily because:

- They’ve gotten bored with everything, and don’t feel any reward is worth the effort anymore.
- They feel ANet hasn’t been too good with the whole communication thing over the last year, if not longer.
- They “won” the game by getting what they wanted to do done, and don’t feel like doing the rest of it.

Though I will note – if you’re not banned, you can always come back. You’re not paying a subscription fee, and your characters are likely still there where you left them. Veteran players who quit still can come back if they feel there’s something they want to do.

Nerelith.7360:

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

All I can think of is that it’s better to have a portion of the playerbase divided than a portion of the playerbase not playing at all.

I agree 100 %. Those that make the " divided player-base" non-argument, act as if this " division" were being forced on them. If they are " divided" out , because they did not buy the expansion, that is something self-determined.

Secondly, as Devata said. The whole" divided player-base" argument was a misunderstanding of what Anet said about " stand-alone" games. Guild Wars: Factions for example. While " stand-alone" was an awesome concept that is what Anet said divided the player-base. That is what they said they would never do again.

Anet does not divide the player-base by offering expansions, the player-base divides itself by choosing to not buy the new expansions. People not wanting to pay for an expansion is not a compelling argument for why Anet should not offer one.

My friend, I’m already “divided out” by playing Ranger and using . . . at any time . . . a longbow and a bear, and being seen to do so. And it’s not ArenaNet doing that “dividing out” either.

I agree with your sentiment that “people not buying it shouldn’t be a compelling reason not to make it”, though. It still sits in memory of me not getting expansions on day/week one but waiting even a week and finding myself “behind” on it so far I might as well have skipped it entirely.

To the heart of my reservations on this topic: I have few actual . . . logical . . . objections to an expansion. I will freely admit that. But I find I can’t dismiss it – I don’t think it would be a “magic bullet” to “save the game”, and the game needs things ahead of an expansion.

Since the release of UO… paid-for expansions have been offered, and some players buy it, and some don’t.

The Vale of Sorrow and the fey elhai say differently on when things have been offered. But that’s okay, I don’t think anyone else here played that game either.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

(I will trot out my “East Karana Silk Farmer” bumper sticker if I need to.)

Loved the Karanas also. I still remember my first encounter with Grimfeather, that bird still owes me 50 platinum.

It’s entirely off-topic why I loved the Karanas despite them getting gradually emptier over time until I was pretty much all there was running around. It hinges on the “appearance of unintentional design” which had come in, and other things.

But in EQ, I reserve my hate not for the super-griffon (yes, that is how they spelled it) but more for a figure to the west: Miss Windstalker. Well, that and the people who trained without shouting a warning.

xev.9476:

Ayrilana.1396:

Please don’t resort to strawman arguments please. Nowhere did I state that I did not want content. I just don’t think expansions are a good idea with this particular game. There are other ways of releasing content.

You just want all of the content at once. That is all. Once you’ve exhausted all of that content within a matter or months and become bored, we’ll be right back here where we are now.

I asked a question – if you were arguing against new content. That’s not a strawman, it’s a question, and I’d wager a good one since several people have pointed out how silly your claim that people exhaust content in a month or so is.

It’s not that silly. There were people who rushed to Orr and were there within a month, if I recall. And in Orr with enough numbers to start doing the event chains there, and to find out some things weren’t working right.

. . . heck, I made it to Orr before the end of September. And I wasn’t trying all that hard. There was a big thing about there not being enough to do in the game, even back in 2012.

What’s silly, at least to me, are the people who rushed to get to Arah without touching all the rest of the content. I haven’t done more than a couple cursory PvP matches, which confirmed I still suck sweaty balls at it.

What’s sillier is expecting an expansion which is smaller in any way than the core game on release isn’t going to be “exhausted” inside the same timeframe.

Meglobob.8620:

I think this feature patch is aimed at the ‘new’ Chinese players mostly and anyone else new who picks up GW2.

The ‘new’ Chinese players have most of this already. I have the suspicion they’re normalizing the two games as much as they dare so they’re not too dissimilar in function.

Devata.6589:

That is all fine and we can talk about that but it is not a point to argue if there would be an expansion or not. Only way I can make sense of that is that you truly believe that a paid expansion will for sure do that and patches will not do that. I think changes of that happening are equal and so see it as unrelated to the expansion discussion. But that’s me.

I believe my experience with an expansion-based MMO where steadily everything moved into the expansion areas and away from anything which the game launched with . . . barring, of course, certain zones which were either community-agreed to be hubs or areas where the loot/XP farming was significantly easier than elsewhere.

(I will trot out my “East Karana Silk Farmer” bumper sticker if I need to.)

If you want to know why I am concerned mostly about this thing, it’s just because I lived it once. I rather am hesitant to back a “traditional expansion” concept since those have a rather specific flavor to them I don’t like.

I did not have a trouble with how GW1 handled it, primarily because it did interlace better. But GW1 was . . . really an aberration and not an MMO. (It was, to put it mildly, Diablo 2 rebuilt with a side of PvP intended to be in it and kept moderately balaned . . . rather than thrown in on for the heck of it. But that’s another topic.)

I didn’t have a problem with how UO handled it, because the vanilla world still was important – more than likely, all your housing and stuff was still there and required careful attention to avoid getting things ripped off. (But then, I didn’t think much of how UO handled a lot of things, I was too busy never leaving town most of the day.)

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

LostBalloon.6423:

This is even worse than not having any red in the thread. It’s horrible and gives people the impression they are being totally ignored, which is what that ANET employee, Regina Buenaobra, did. And I’m not trying to single her out, she’s an example, she’s far from being the only one that does that.

I don’t get it, Regina answers directly to a question (which wasn’t posted here, taking stuff out of context, great guys!). Here again the original quote:

DiogoSilva.7089:

All those changes are important because they fix the several flaws that GW2 has early game: the lack of a sense of progression, poor tutorials, directionless, forgottable rewards and jumpy story instances that forced you to level up midway, interrupting the flow of the story.

So far, this feature patch is great for new players, but, what about the veteran players? It doesn’t seems to offer much to make us stick to the game.

Regina’s answer:

More information will be released next week about features that are more suited to veteran players.

HOW IN THE WORLD is this actually “ignoring the players”??? Do you really wonder why Anet has a hard time talking to us? I do not.

It’s ignoring all the players who are complaining without actually raising questions to answer . . . a legitimate question put respectfully.

I think Chris has spoiled us rotten. He tries to respond to four posts in quick succession instead of one question he can actually answer, even if his posts are basically “let me go ask someone”. (Which in an objective way, is exactly as useful as nothing at all.)

gobax.6185:

Not dungeons but for farming maps. But who knows. If people farm dungeon for mats then definitely they will use mesmer necro and elems

Don’t people already farm zones for stuff? And if the most efficient/productive farmers are the silk-generating classes, wouldn’t that start to affect the price? I’m not sure, but seems like it’s self-defeating and might just make silk go into a glut if everyone moves to farm that.

Though, honestly, I don’t think it will really matter one way or the other.

Devata.6589:

Then you should talk about those specific element not wanting them in an expansion. Not wanting an expansion to make older stuff irrelevant not not wanting an expansion. Also without expansions you can get patches that has these sort of effects so that’s completely unrelated to expansions by itself.

Not sure I understand that there.

So then you don’t want any changes at all or you don’t want changes that make old stuff irrelevant but then that’s what you should focus on. Not expansions themselves.

Oh, right. Well we are talking about expansions here, not the nebulous changes which are all in our heads over what is/should be in an expansion. Everyone has their own benchmarks . . . which are pretty high numbers and goals to add. 20 zones, seriously? That’s considerably close to half the size of what we have now. New races and/or classes . . . though I recall how that kind of wound up getting less good with Nightfall’s Paragon. (Either too powerful or too pointless.)

The whole (non) argument that expansions would separate the player-base is something that in fact seems to come from these forums from people who where trying to defend Anet for not implementing expansion and using a statement from Anet but not understanding what Anet was talking about.

Oh. No, no it’s older than that.

You see, GW1 had standalone expansions. That where basically separate games not additions that expanded the current games. Some people would prefer one of those ‘games’ over the other and so the playerbase got divided up. Because of that Anet said they would not have standalone expansions for GW2 because that would divided up the playerbase (but that they would have expansions for sure.. that’s what they said back then). Some media did then report that incorrectly as GW2 will not have expansions because Anet thinks it’s separates the player-base to much. Something sill being used in these forum by people trying to defend Anet for not having released an expansion so far.

I played GW1, thanks. I know about how it was designed and the trouble that had – I had family I basically couldn’t do content with because they only had Nightfall for several months.

But in all reality it is not a very valid point. On average active players who where willing to buy the initial game will also be willing to buy an expansion. That’s how it go’s in most MMO’s so there is no reason to think that in GW2 when we would have expansions the player-base gets divided up a lot. It’s just not realistic.

It’s probably not a strong point, agreed. What follows later is a little stronger though.

About the people who can’t buy it right away. Well they can buy it a little later. There is no problem with that is it?

That depends on whether they can get to it when the new content is still being done often enough to make it “do-able”. Like how anyone coming late to Tower of Nightmares had a rougher time trying to do it since the bulk of people were finished with it.

That’s the division I’m somewhat more leery of.

AngelDiscarnate.5489:

The basics of heart quests are already in the world for the Orr maps, but there are no hearts there.
Maybe add some there too?
O_o
Or would the farm train get too overpowered with accidentally completing hearts over and over again over time?

No hearts in Orr was a design decision, I remember reading, because it’s meant to focus on very quickly repeatable quests taking the place of them.

I don’t think it would stop complaints, I think it would change the content of the complaints. Mostly to “why did you make quaggans playable, I wanted kodan/tengu”.

Nerelith.7360:

Through all MMO’s I have ever played, …expansions came every couple of years… ( Gw2 is about due.). And the expansions would expand how the game was played, they would give players NEW ways to enjoy old content, along with new content.

I don’t know, did you play EverQuest and how some of those expansions pretty much continually made some content irrelevant? Zones going pretty much dead, or just farmed for a couple of the item drops? How about the one which almost made an entire class minor feature irrelevant? (Plane of Knowledge book portals making it almost unnecessary to bum rides off Druids/Wizards with the teleports.)

Then there was the failure which was “Lost Dungeons of Norrath”. Interesting concept . . . turned into one heck of a grindfest in execution.

Each time that an expansion came out, I had to ask myself. “Do I want to pay $20 to $30 for new maps, new professions, new skills… new mobs..etc?” and the answer was usually yes.

I still want my money back for Lost Dungeons. There were not really new maps so much as instanced missions, no new professions/classes, no new skills, just grinding for the new shiny loot object – “Augments”. Things we now have as a standard in the MMOs. And they weren’t really as useful as Runes/Sigils are currently Yes, any of them. Even the silly Pirate ones.

THIS is Not a reason why Anet should not provide a paid for expansion. If players do NOT wish to pay for the content, they are free to NOT buy it. But ..that is Not a reason for Anet to not give the rest of us the option. " But I won’t be able to explore the new content" is the price paid, for not paying the price of the expansion.

I agree. It should be the consequence of not paying for the expansion . . . not having access to anything out of it. But that’s also the problem with expansions, one of the principal ones with paid expansions. It starts dividing up the pool of players a little at a time, and it can seriously be a detriment to those who can’t afford the expansion right away. (Or at all.)

Oh, and woe be to the company which puts out an expansion which is lackluster or ripe with any form of power-creep within it. (While I mostly trust ArenaNet could make sure no raw power was gained, I do not trust them to put out an expansion where it wouldn’t wind up more advantageous to own it and have the content there to farm.)

The main thing an expansion can do which a Living World release can’t . . . is deliver it all at once.

Anything else is semantics on what constitutes actual expansion content. I’ve seen expansions without new classes or races, expansions without new areas to explore, expansions without actually increasing content and only focusing on revising the game itself, and expansions which were little more than “we’re still alive, we promise”.

A way you earn gold isn’t ever going to be properly balanced when there is a desire, nay, a “need” . . . to have the most gold ever and not do anything with it except make more gold.

Quaggans as a new playable race.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Boneheart.3561:

Lord Kuru.3685:

… monkey’s paw…

So you worded your desire incorrectly.

With the monkey’s paw, it doesn’t matter how you word it.

Isn’t that the one with the safest wish being “I wish the monkey’s paw never wound up in my keeping”?

I remembered Jeff Grubb works/worked there so now there is only one real answer:

“Dragonbait”

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Question is, what should be the reward? I don’t find the PvP rewards very compelling.

I find few current rewards very compelling, aside from doing them. But there are some people who really find it worthwhile so . . .

Broseph.9283:

-What if we had PVE reward tracks? They could be exactly like the PVP ones but you would have to do dynamic events or hearts of any level to fill them up. This idea solves many issues in my opinion.

1) No new currency would need to be added. Other systems could remain as is.

2) Incentive to complete old content and go looking for events.

3) Reward progress could be equalized between events from different level ranges so that we could choose to go anywhere we wanted.

4) Small dev time involved (likely) since we could port the pvp system over and add new skins at a later time.

5) You could even make it regional. “Complete Krytan events or hearts to fill out this reward track and earn Krytan themed rewards.”

Again, I am looking for simple ways to spice up old content. I personally love the PVP reward tracks and I wish that I could do something similar in PVE.

That . . . seems like it could work rather well.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Thanks for all your comments, everyone!

Thanks for your attention Anthony!

• The reward structure in Dry Top is desirable for many people. But Dry Top lacks some favorable elements from earlier open world maps such as chaining or random events. My thought here is that one does not exclude the other and in the future we could incorporate both the best of both designs.

That has me more curious about what you mean, but so long as we’re looking at something which isn’t “do events for 40 minutes, then sandstorm for 20” in nature? I think you’d get something fun for most people.

• Some people would like to an option repeat hearts. Many people are opposed to being required to repeat hearts which is probably enough reason not to require it. In the future we ought to consider repeat rewards or even a prestige system for voluntarily replaying one-time content.

Probably the best way. I do note “required” is used in the same way as people are “required” to do things for achievements if they want the goodies. I would like the option to repeat some of the hearts but the ones in low-level zones aren’t all that . . . how do I put this.

At least one of them makes me want to kill bunnies with nuclear weapons.

I would suggest a limit on the replay. Not “only once” but ‘only once within a certain time window’ or ‘only once until something happens to reset a heart, like a nearby event’. Like needing to upkeep the one Shaemoor farm after bandits poison the water supply successfully (requiring one of the events in that block to fail) or explode the pipes (a failure of a different sort), but only after the successful cleaning/repair of the water system.

• Karma may be an underwhelming common event currency.

I’d say more along the line of “Karma is an underwhelming common event currency”, but that’s because that’s what I think of it. Though it is useful, sometimes.

Clearly I’m willing to ramble over this, so maybe someday we should have a thread on event complexity vs fun vs replayability. ;]

Go kidnap Chris and “suggest” it as a CDI topic.

Uuni.3561:

Why aren’t you the lead writer of this game again?

Same reason I’m not . . . nobody likely knows either of us exists as far as writing goes.

Vayne.8563:

I’m really surprised at how many peopl are actually against expansion. I’m not personally against it. It seems I’ve fallen again for the old so many threads are asking for it, everyone must want one. I should have known better.

I think expansions will do better to get the game’s name back out there, far more than living story content would ever do. I also don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.

I’m not exactly against it . . . I just don’t think it would fix anything.

Evermore.5649:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

- More people seem to just reach for the “naked greed” card very quickly. I don’t ever deny they need to make money to keep the servers on, or their staff paid. (Not. Once.) But it seems people like to think they’re all about raking in a pile of money to Scrooge McDuck in while laughing at our gullibility. (Not you, you at least attributed it to the need to make money, not the desire to fleece the customers.)

I’m sorry to unleash a piece of reality on you, but at the end of the day, profit is literally the only thing companies care about. All their customer relations, PR, game updates and whatnot serve only 1 purpose — increasing profits.

You do realise corporations (generally speaking) outsource their entire manufacturing to developing countries, set up bank accounts in dodgy places, step on the throat of workers’ rights, destroy the environment with no remorse and pay pocket money to politicians, only so that they can achieve a marginal increase in their profits?

When NCSoft bigwigs have their meetings with fancy powerpoint presentations, do you think they care about anything that goes on in the game? If people are unhappy because they can’t craft precursors?
Literally the only thing they want to see is MORE MONEY. And how they get more money is up to the managers, the managers’ managers, the managers’ managers’ managers and so on, trickling down the corporate food chain.

See, now we’re derailing the thread talking about this and trying to discuss something which can’t be discussed rationally. Because it relies entirely on whether or not you distrust the company in question, and how you see employees of the company . . . as chess players working a board dispassionately with us as pieces, or as people.

And when it comes to people . . . I’m afraid I’m an optimist who thinks there is more interest in their efforts than squeezing every dime they can out of their customers.

Apologies.

(And no, I’m not going to reply to anything on this line further, and will skip over posts quoting this or earlier sentiments. Don’t waste your time doing so. PM me if you must about it, but don’t expect me to reply to that, either.)

BrotherBelial.3094:

I like your ideas. But as for saying no to Karma, just because some people have loads of it should not mean that players with out should suffer. Some people can make gold easy, others struggle.

I don’t know if you grasp the magnitude of just how much older players have access to, or the disparity of gain between Karma and Coin. Karma gained much faster, because its use is highly limited (as in, it was not intended to be a quick/easy way to bolster Coin earning). It’s throttled back a lot with the change from handing out Jugs (5000) to Drops (600) of Karma on completing the Daily, but I think the danger of linking things to a Karma purchase . . .

If it’s low enough to make it possible for people to do a few events in an area and snatch it up? It becomes trivial for long-time players, much like a “gold sink” of the likes around the new Trait system is either trivial for some or crippling for others.

I’m against Karma becoming dominate over Coin or others because of the myriad problems that is likely to bring. Specifically, Event farming becoming a bigger part of the game again . . . as in “Queensdale Train’s glorious return to service”.

I’m not wanting to actively discuss this further on this thread, can you go to Broseph’s thread?

kta.6502:

Some of the devs play the game. I’ve noticed that they tend to design the game from a dev POV instead of a player POV. That’s terrible because it has led to bad game design. unnecessary nerfing, exploits, and banning folks for playing the game. The Arah explorable dungeon paths are a very good example of this.

Well of course they design from a developer POV primarily, because . . . I need you to focus . . . that is their primary employment. They may want certain things as players, but they do have to step back and go “wait, what will this do?” to inspect it from outside the player’s POV first.

I know because this is how I have to design when I put together D&D campaigns.

If Anet takes over and people start to complain on the forums, I will refer folks back to this thread. I will say, “YOU gave away your chance to influence things. Don’t complain. This is what happens when you give away your power. Remember that.”

But . . . we don’t have any such power. Speaking purely cynically, we have the illusion of having that sort of power, because we’re allowed to believe we can choose the topics and what is to be discussed. But all it takes is careful misdirection on those topics to get to discussing not what you want to discuss, but what other people do.

And furthermore, that’s the other half of it – while “we” may choose a topic, or make “our” voice clear? There’s endless other choices or voices which aren’t being made clear, or are getting pushed aside, or decide “why bother speaking up, nobody will listen anyway”.

But keep thinking “we” have the power, when all we have is their attention. Like a gentleman standing in a store with a loaded weapon, we have their attention. We do not have any power over their choices if they choose to disobey.

There are alot of areas in the game that have been ignored for too long. I really think that players need to take the floor with this new set of CDIs regardless of the votes. I don’t want to see another riot and troll-fest.

You’ll always be seeing them, because they worked this time. So now it will be the tactic people go to the next time. That’s what happens when you let this sort of thing let “the people” think they have power. Next time they want something, there’s now a reason to go right to this method again.

Diovid.9506:

I think Dry Top would have much more replayability if it had event chains similar to Orr or at least one or two meta-events similar to the one in Harathi Hinterlands. Those are rewarding in terms of both narrative and gameplay. I think the current events in Dry Top are very lack-luster in those respects, focusing on just loot, xp, karma and other such rewards (both for the individual and the map) instead of focusing on the intrinsic fun of doing the events.

Coming after the discussion about the “event chain” in Cursed Shore being farmed into science by people? I really don’t think talking about them as though they aren’t used for personal game is a good move.

I do get your meaning, but consider Straits of Devastation, which I think is still mostly run only when a meaningful attempt at the Temple of Balthazar is intended to be pushed. So many event chains and so many interlocking events and it’s not really worked with.

Substance E.4852:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Because I really don’t feel the need to attribute malice or greed to the company

You don’t have to, NCsoft will do it for you, and them.

You don’t understand me. And that’s all right, because what follows shows exactly why I don’t get into these conversations.

I mean, seriously, you don’t want to say they are motivated by Profit (greed) and yet a single set of armor costs 1/5 the cost of the entire game? No armor in this game takes anyone 1/5 the time and money to make as the entire game did.

They cost 800gems because that’s the most they could reasonably charge for them.

I’m not saying they are cartoonishly evil corporate villians or anything, but corporations exist, first and foremost, to make money. We are just lucky that they tend to make the most when we are happy playing their game and buying things in it but they will still try to squeeze as much out of us as they can.

Ask yourself why they didn’t allow gems to be bought and sold on the TP like you can with PLEX in EvE (the system cited as the inspiration for gems). There’s no explanation that makes sense aside from it allows them to control the buy and sell price of gems.

I don’t want to get into it because:

- I don’t work for them, so I can only assume why they make certain decisions. Especially when it comes to pricing. Where you’re asking me to make a statement on what I think, which leads me to look into my experience with artistic commissions and put a price on their time . . . and go “well it’s to pay the artists who worked on it”. But, of course, that’s not a really legitimate answer for a lot of people. They’d rather rely on the next bullet point.

- More people seem to just reach for the “naked greed” card very quickly. I don’t ever deny they need to make money to keep the servers on, or their staff paid. (Not. Once.) But it seems people like to think they’re all about raking in a pile of money to Scrooge McDuck in while laughing at our gullibility. (Not you, you at least attributed it to the need to make money, not the desire to fleece the customers.)

- There’s no way to rationally debate about assumptions neither one of us can really back up with anything other than hearsay, rumor, innuendo, cynicism, or even optimism. We don’t have access to facts about why Tormented/Chaotic Weapons were put out there, or why they set the price points, or where the money goes. (And we will never know some of that, and even if they told us it’s nothing sinister, there is enough cynicism about the company now . . . I don’t think anyone would believe it.)

OmaiGodman.2098:

Seera.5916:

Did you know that the game originally didn’t HAVE Hearts?

But players didn’t know where to go to find the events. So ANet put things to do to pass the time in areas were events tend to pop up. These are the Hearts. They are primarily there to slow your progress in an area down long enough for you to see an event occur. They put it towards map completion and gave rewards to it so that players would have incentive to slow down when they ran into a heart.

And no to a reset that I can’t control. The right side of the screen is already cluttered with personal story and daily/monthly achievement and living story stuff and world event stuff. I don’t need to be forced to have heart information there when I’ve already done it.

That’s funny, I saw a video from Woodenpotatoes yesterday with footage from the beta that showed the game once having twice as many hearts as it has today.

Different Beta. They were put in for the open Beta but from what I understand an earlier build had no hearts.

There was also a build with no levels either but the testers didn’t like the effect.

process execution.8014:

Olvendred.3027:

I definitely don’t think that cluttering up the game with new, specific currencies does anything more than promote the most efficient farming method… which is really boring and doesn’t at all encourage people to play in varied ways.

I agree that new currencies aren’t the best idea; fortunately we already have somewhat niche currencies that could be expanded upon quite cleanly:

I think a simple and obvious currency would be the dungeon tokens for each region, e.g. Completing DE’s in Ascalon rewards you with Ascalonian Tears, Kryta rewards you with Seals of Beetletun, etc.

. . . we get into another issue then, where you now have people who can grind “easy” dungeon paths for that currency instead of, well, doing other things.

AlphaNeonic.1925:

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Also . . . I don’t think the hesitation is based on their RMT through Gems so much as watching the Trading Post go absolutely ape-kittykitty if it’s ever announced to be on the way, and the current high-end economy collapsing from hundreds of gold to something else . . . or maybe even the reverse if people expect the crafting will make them harder to get ahold of or more limited!

The potential of such a shakeup is not to be lightly disregarded or tossed aside.

Therein lies the problem of attaching in game currency to real world currency.

If the value of gems is too low, people can easily convert in-game gold to gems and no one buys gems with real money. It it ALWAYS in Anet’s best interest to do whatever possible to keep the value of gems high. The “good” side of this is that if you ever decide to convert gems to gold, you’re getting more gold for your money.

Yes but now you’re attributing to ANet a semi-sinister motive to not doing this. I’m not quite that cynical about this.

The bad side is basically everything else. Every aspect of loot is now affected by gold, gems and cash being tied together. Precursors and Legendary Weapons available on the Trading Post. Certain mats like Crystal Lodestones being kitten near unfarmable. Make it a grind, but offer a shortcut… all it takes is a little cash.

If you’re going to just continue to assume ArenaNet willingly designed the Gem-to-Gold exchange, and is trying to keep it ‘advantageous to them’ through either inaction or action, we’re not going to keep to a rational discussion. I’m real sorry, but I’ll have to back out.

Because I really don’t feel the need to attribute malice or greed to the company, when there are other motives which make much more sense to me.

It’s a shame. The items that should have held some prestige and maybe have been a mark of what someone has accomplished, are just a reminder that anything can be acquired, for a price.

. . . this is always how it is, since the dawn of MMOs and the time when someone realized they could trade items for real actual cash. Not the companies, but player to player transfers. Just because it’s now a legitimate purchase through the company doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before.

It even existed when it was in game currency for the prestige of things in GW1. There’s no prestige in anything you could get in that game short of titles, because you could farm endless amounts of platinum and just buy it . . .

laokoko.7403:

Substance E.4852:

AlphaNeonic.1925:

And on that note, why would Anet make them craftable? It doesn’t make them any more money. Keeping the demand for precursors high and the drop rate low just means more and more people biting the bullet and finally shelling out real cash for them.

And there it is…

I don’t really think people take into account the absurd amount of money they make every time someone caves and RMT’s a pre or the full legendary.

Assuming a 10-1g gem to gold ratio and a price tag of 600g or 3000g for the weapon, it would take 30,000 gems to buy a full legendary and 6,000 gems to buy a precursor.

That’s a lot of cheddar they have to consider giving up.

Right but I think they’ll eventually add in precursor crafting. And I think we’ll eventually have an expansion.

They’ll release precursor crafting before the expansion to throw people some bones and hope they come back and play GW2.

I think we’ll not get “precursor crafting” like “here’s a Recipe for Weaponsmith (500) which will net you Dusk”. I am thinking it would wind up being more a quest or a more involved thing.

Sort of like how Mawdrey’s creation is much more involved than “insert items, get backpiece”.

Also . . . I don’t think the hesitation is based on their RMT through Gems so much as watching the Trading Post go absolutely ape-kittykitty if it’s ever announced to be on the way, and the current high-end economy collapsing from hundreds of gold to something else . . . or maybe even the reverse if people expect the crafting will make them harder to get ahold of or more limited!

The potential of such a shakeup is not to be lightly disregarded or tossed aside.

Look, this is simple.

Just get the Queensdale farmers working on some plots of catnip.