Guild Wars 2

ZeroStatic.2176:

Rynarx.6124:

According to the post by Anet, looks more like the latter

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first

I’d say that post hit it right on the money.
Unless the staffmember lied (Or terribly misphrased what he was trying to say), it’s the latter.

It just seems odd to me that every day a bunch of people transfer off of the servers on off hours, then suddenly transfer back on when prime time hits

mavet.3047:

The plural of “math” is “math.” “Maths” is not a word. Just thought you should know

Your nationality is showing

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/math-or-maths/

It’s most definitely the former. I have had friends join my full server, Tarnished Coast, only recently by waiting until 3-4am, when the server suddenly dropped from full to high. For several weeks, up until recently when the population on the server picked up, it would drop from full to high every night around this time. It was also on “high” status early in the morning (5-6 am), nearly every morning

Here are some statistics for you

http://poll.pollcode.com/ttb2am_result?v

DarcShriek.5829:

Any corelation to the total population is merely coincidental.

Aka… random? >_>

Rusty.7942:

Game has NOT changed

The game not going downhill is subjective, so I won’t argue there. You don’t think it is, and so to you that’s true. But the game not changing is not subjective- it HAS changed. It went from a gear plateau, story driven horizontal progression game to a gear driven, vertical progression game. All with 1 patch.

That’s as big of a change as an MMO can get…

GregT.4702:

Tolmos.8395:

What kills me… is that I believe 100% that this is how MMOs these days determine what is “fun” or not, because it explains perfectly why MMOs are becoming such crap. :-\

You missed or misunderstood a step.

I was proposing a way to determine if a player is motivated to do content by the reward.

You seem to have assumed that if they are, in fact, grinding for the reward, that the developer would think that was good and be satisfied.

I was implying that if they are repeating content for the reward rather than the fun, then the content was insufficiently fun and the design process had gone wrong, and the developer would retune the content to, if nothing else, be more friendly to (non-reward-motivated) casuals.

Sorry for the confusion. The basic point stands, that metrics can tell you more about what your players are doing and why than anecdotal evidence can.

Fair enough. That I can see. I still don’t entirely agree with how that information is being derived, but I agree with your point in any case.

Still… I personally think log in polls would be far more accurate. lol. I’m sure a psychologist and mathematician in a room could devise 100+ ways to determine the motivation of a player doing something, but being a lazy programmer I can’t help but just think “Why not just ask them?”

Nurse.1085:

A free to play game going down hill after 3 months with 2 large upcoming patches in both December and Jan? Right after a large content/holiday patch in October and November? Yeah…..Uh.

You can figure it out. If you’re over the game, then you’re over the game. Come back in 6 or 12 months if you feel like it, see where it’s at then.

I thought the exact same thing about Star Wars Galaxies when NGE released… also on November 15th, amusingly enough.

That’s a baaaaaad day for MMO patches lol

GregT.4702:

nachtnebel.9168:

As I mentioned before, unproven or just wrong assumption like those are the reason why games keep getting worse nowadays. Companies think players like neat graphics more than challenging gameplay mechanics or that people actually enjoy grinding.

If you want to use a method like that you would, at the very least, have to change your parameters. Only those people who have everything they can get out of FotM and still continue running it, do it cause they like it. Based on that assumption, the data recorded during the last weeks would be completely pointless since there are not much players that really have anything FotM has to offer yet.

No, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not saying we’re looking for players who get a high RNG and never run FOTM again. I’m saying we’re looking for players who take a high RNG as their trigger to take a break and log off, before coming on and doing more of it the next day. They’re players who are continuing to grind because they want rewards. We already know from other studies (BF Skinner and others) that in activities with mixed fixed/variable reward systems (such as FoTM, where you get a big reward of some kind every fractal, with some bigger than others) people are MOST likely to discontinue the activity when the time until the perceived next reward is longest. In FoTM, that’s going to be at the end of a fractal after a perceived “good” drop. Players who break here are more likely to be motivated by the reward schedule than the process of getting to the reward. It’s basical behavioural psychology.

Likewise I’m not saying that “high mouselook in rest periods” is people liking pretty graphics. (And remember this is a hypothetical anyway.) I was suggesting that it either (a) it may correlate to people being more engaged with their surrounding and companions and therefore having more fun, or that (b) it may be an involuntary reaction correlating to fun, the same way that people enjoying a conversation will semi-involuntarily lean in, make more eye contact, and nod or shake their head in response to the speaker’s attitude.

It may not correlate. But over the vast number of statistics measurable, SOMETHING will correlate to “fun” gameplay, and it’s reasonably trivial for someone in Anet’s position to determine what that is and track it. There is a lot of behavioural psychology out there, much of it specifically aimed at video games and play states in general, and humans are, in the end, predictable creatures with observable tics that betray our emotional states.

If you’re actually interested in this, PM me and I’ll direct you to some of the people doing work on stuff like this.

What kills me… is that I believe 100% that this is how MMOs these days determine what is “fun” or not, because it explains perfectly why MMOs are becoming such crap. :-\

Step 1) Create a dungeon and put the best rewards in it. Doesn’t matter if the dungeon is fun. Doesn’t matter if the players like it. What does matter is that there are rewards that are unattainable elsewhere within that dungeon, and these rewards affect other portions of gameplay (the ability to see the next content that releases, PvP, open world PvE events, etc)
Step 2) Measure how many people run the dungeon, how often, etc.
Step 3) When you see that the majority of players are running the dungeon, not taking breaks as often and continuing until they receive their rewards, declare that the new content is “fun” and, as Arenanet put it, “wildly successful”.
Step 4) …
Step 5) Profit???

Are you seriously telling me you see NOTHING wrong with this method? Because when I look at it, I can suddenly see the clear answer to every question about why MMOs are heading down a winding road of becoming crappier WoW clones.

People are driven by rewards, but they don’t always enjoy it. Why, then? Because they want to do other content. They want to see the next dungeon when it comes out. They want to PvP on even ground. They want to get rewards for doing events and not have their damage drowned out by higher geared players. So if something completely crappy gets added to game, and its the only way to get rewards, guess what happens? Everyone plays it anyway! They grind and bear it, as best as they can.

And the result? The content is declared “Wildly successful” and more appears. All based on the statistical methods listed above.

Edited by moderator: post edited since the message quoted does not longer exist

I’ve only heard about fractals atm, but they do intend to put in other methods later and have publically apologized for only releasing 1 method. They said all future gear will be released with multiple attainment paths at one time, and that they jumped the gun here.

Oreoz.2573:

JarekCyphus.7068:

Siobhan.3582:

Mirta.5029:

Ned Stark.9356:

Mirta.5029:

kKagari.6804:

Mirta.5029:

kKagari.6804:

How has the game gone uphill then? There are less people playing and everyone is shuffling themselves to that new dungeon. So much harder to get a group to do any PvE content that is non dungeon.

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/6915/99384436.png
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/9392/52397020.png

There’s just as much people playing as there was.
If I want to do an event, all I need to do is yell about it on t

he map chat. I’m seeing plenty of people and we got new content. How did it go downhill?

Actually, this was explained by an Arenanet employee that it isn’t indicative of how many players are actively online at that time.

I’m referring to how before Nov15, there was the ever present issue of player congestion in Orr, and that there was simply no reason to go elsewhere in the game. Arenanet’s solution, to introduce FotM, simply solidifies this problem by adding another tier of loot only accessible via one dungeon in the game, with horrendous grind. There’s simply no-one in the mid level areas, and with good reason too.

Then why am I actually seeing people in the mid level areas? No matter what zone I went to there were still people doing events with me. There is still the same population. In level 70-80 zone people are still doing Claw of Jormag in big numbers. You can catch groups doing events in level 50 zones… The only less populated place is 2/3 maps of Orr and even then I’ve seen 6 people there. Starter areas are booming in population too.

I want to see a time stamp on those photos or your just making crap up. Anyone can post a photo and claim it’s from a certain time when it doesn’t have a time stamp.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/6718/46261331.png
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/9786/47349487.png

I included my calendar into it while printscreening. If you want you can a) check it for yourself b) I can runout into a random zone and photograph people for you.

They can change the number of people to make it show high at anytime though.

If numbers dip you can change high at 2000 to 1250 to high to give the impression of volume. Numbers lie

Fortunately, the contested waypoints around the Straits of Devastation don’t. Even if the game servers WERE full, it doesn’t change the fact that everyone’s funneling into the fractal dungeons now, rather than helping their fellow players achieve exotic sets in Orr.

This effect alone is pushing players out the door. Anyone who thinks this game is going anywhere BUT down is out of their minds. All but five people in my guild have stopped logging in over the course of the last two weeks. According to the posts of others in this thread, I am not alone in this plight.

The demographics are pretty telling.

Orr isn’t empty due to Fractals. I can almost guarantee it.

Orr is empty because Orr never works. That’s why.

Up until November 15th Orr was as lively as ever on Tarnished Coast. I completed my full Arma set in 2 weekends because of the sheer number of people doing Plinx farm.

GregT.4702:

Tolmos.8395:

Again, that is by far the most inaccurate way to determine enjoyment of content. Pretending to have some nonexistant knowledge of stats and probability beyond that of mortal men won’t change this.

The only situation in which I have knowledge beyond that of mortal men is if mortal men have no knowledge of statistics. I’d like to say you’re making a good case for that but I’d just be following the errors throughout this thread about sample sizes and representative samples.

I’ll give you two really good metrics RIGHT NOW to gauge how much of the community is actually enjoying the fractals:

(a) Check the average “fractals completed” numbers across all players who completed the fractals component of their monthly achievement for November. If you get a lot of numbers in the 7 to 10 range it’s likely a lot of players weren’t motivated to come back after completing their monthly. That’s only a one way correlation, obviously – if the numbers ARE higher they obviously may just be hunting the rewards, not having fun.
(b) Check the average hours spent dungeon/fractal instancing across players who did more than 15 dungeon runs over October against the same stat over November. If it’s gone up, they’re either enjoying fractals more or more strongly motivated by them (or some combination of the above). You then check the loot from their last fractal before log-off – if it’s at the top end of the RNG it’s likely they’re loot motivated. On the other hand if they’re coming back for more after high RNGs they’re probably enjoying the experience (whether or not they’re actually griping). Yes, this has a high anomaly rate across individual players but is reasonably reliable over hundreds of thousands of them.

You could do a whole ton more except for the stupid November monthlies being dungeons and fractals, which will distort your stats. As soon as they run a month without fractals in the monthlies we’ll be able to get some much better hypothetical metrics about fractal use.

It’s also likely that there are other kinds of metric that correlate to fun activity. You might find, for example, that players use emotes more on average when they’re having fun, or guild chat more, or mouse-look around the environment more just rest periods or something like that. None of those are immediately intuitively right, though, so you’d need a bit of research to sync them up. It’s research that’s reasonably easily obtainable though and I’d be surprised if Anet doesn’t already have some informing their analysis of the metrics.

Fine, we’ll play it your way. The ONLY way that method would be even remotely accurate would be to limit the measure to how many times anyone who has finished their monthly AND gotten the ascended gear runs fractals, and that’s it. Because anyone else will continue to run those regardless of whether they enjoy it or not- it is a means to an end, and nothing else.

The moment you include anyone without a full set of ascended gear or their completed monthlies in on that, it becomes the single most inaccurate way to measure player enjoyment of the content.

GregT.4702:

nachtnebel.9168:

If the market research sector really thinks of that kind of data as a gold mine then I know why games keep getting worse. Log files of what people have done doesn’t tell you anything about what they want to do. Running 20 fractals per day doesn’t necessary mean that that player likes the dungeon, he could just want the 20 slot bags or is maybe hoping for a good ring to drop.

In-game activities don’t tell you anything unless you can link them to a players motivation, which you can’t get from just evaluating log files, you have to actually talk to him.

If you were only sampling one player this might be an issue. But you’re sampling ~1 million players, so it’s not. If you find that players stop running a dungeon as soon as they get a 20 slot bag, then it’s a safe assumption they’re running the dungeon to GET the 20 slot bag. If, in addition to that, you find that players who already HAVE 20 slot bags don’t run the dungeon at all, then probably the dungeon is not inherently fun and it’s all about the bag.

You can also compare it to the play patterns of casuals. Casuals aren’t going to run all the dungeons, and they certainly aren’t going to grind them. Looking at which dungeons casuals DO play, and in particular the ones they repeat, gives you a pretty good idea of which ones are fun, especially if they’re different ones to those being hit by reward-motivated players.

This is all year 8 statistics stuff, guys. It’s not rocket science. A statistic by itself can be misunderstood; the more intersecting statistics you have, though, the more likely you are to have a true picture of the situation. Anet has a LOT of intersecting statistics.

For someone who supposedly is a master of stats, you sure have some funky notions about how they work…

Just an FYI- the majority of posters here, like myself, are likely software engineers, probably also sitting on masters degrees. We all went through the standard stats and probabilities courses. We all got our minors same as the rest. I’d bet good money that if you polled the audience here, you’d end up with a vastly larger audience of people in mathematics based professions/studies/etc than not.

Just remember that as you post to us

Mirta.5029:

oney.5067:

im on sorrows furnace log in around 5pm pst btw nothing was empty except malchors leap untill plinx nerf

So it’s American servers having a population problem then?

Not really. We’re just all in fractals hating our lives. It’s not the servers that are empty, its the zones within those servers. Everyone is crammed into 1 spot atm.

GregT.4702:

Tolmos.8395:

In the end, the only way that metric could show player dislike over something would be if they stopped playing. And deciding that something is fun and accepted simply because the playerbase didn’t quit overnight hardly seems like an efficient way to do things.

You, my friend, do not understand metrics. :-)

Assuming Anet gathers anywhere near as much information as, say, Valve (and they should) then they gather statistics on things like “last activity before log-off”, “first activity after log-in”, “activities repeated immediately upon completion”, “amount of chat interaction during activity”, “variety of skill use during activity”, “mouse-look variety during activity”.

They can use this, across a vast number of players, to determine which activities are probably triggering people to log-off (or take a break), which activities are prompting people to log in, which activites are producing repetitive (grindy) gameplay and which ones are promoting experimentation and exploration. They can tell which activities you talk about to your friends (although it might be harder to tell whether you’re griping or being enthused). And they can profile you to determine your player type and then see which activities are only being engaged in by high-end players and aren’t attracting casuals, and vice versa.

If you think metrics can’t be used to get a pretty good map of where the “fun” is in the game, you need to do more reading on statistics, analytics, and game design.

Again, that is by far the most inaccurate way to determine enjoyment of content. Pretending to have some nonexistant knowledge of stats and probability beyond that of mortal men won’t change this.

Players in MMOs constantly do things they don’t enjoy in order to achieve a goal that they would want. If the players who hate fractals right now want ascended gear, they are going to run fractals over and over. It might be the first thing they do when they log in, they might not take a break in between, and they might spam chat with “LFG LFG LFG” and “LFM LFM LFM”, while being generally unhappy with the entire situation… but the ends justify the means, so they keep with it.

You can read 100,000 books on statistics and probabilities, take as many game design courses as you want, and at the end of the day that will not make this failed method any less inaccurate than it currently is.

Astraea.6075:

Or ArenaNet could gather metrics to see what the majority of players are doing while playing the game…
.

That’s the most inaccurate way to measure it for sure. Take right now- even those of us who despise fractals are doing them simply because it is the best (or rather, only atm) way to get ascended gear.

Players will constantly migrate towards whatever the best method is, not always what the most fun is. In the end, the only way that metric could show player dislike over something would be if they stopped playing. And deciding that something is fun and accepted simply because the playerbase didn’t quit overnight hardly seems like an efficient way to do things.

Talyjta.9081:

There’s at least one additional option:
D) Ask all the players, and if needed repeat until you got answers from the majority.

Probably there are other options, given that there’s a lot of studies about the possibility to get meaningful results from surveys.

That would be outstanding if it were doable. There are games that force a survey question or poll question at login, and I personally would be all for it… but that sort of thing gets shot down whenever it is brought up on these and other modern MMO forums

Chorel.1720:

penatbater.4710:

I know alot of people who play the game but stay away from the official forums due to the massive amount of QQ.

Or the complete opposite in the massive amount of brown nosing.

This. I understand being a fanboy as much as the next MMOer, but some people take it extremely far in the “my game can do no wrong” viewpoint.

Medazolam.3058:

Zenyatoo.4059:

While forum users are a minority, most people who use it as an argument are using a logical fallacy

That is, they assume that everyone who is not posting on the forums, must not have the same mindset as those on the forums. Or that the forums does not indicate in any way the overall mindset of the larger population.

Forum posters are a minority. But it doesnt mean that our viewpoints and complaints are not indicative of what the majority of GW2 players also believe.

True, but it it doesn’t mean they are indicative either.

Thus returning to what I said above. Since the majority refuses to voice their opinion, you can either base your feedback on the minority who does, or just ignore ALL feedback and do whatever the crap you want, purely under the assumption that if your entire playerbase doesn’t quit overnight when you do something, it must be a good change.

Currently, I am wearing armor that looks terrible with a backpack attached, so I keep mine hidden. However, whenever I swap to a kit, I get a sometimes even bulkier attachment than my usual backpack! The real kicker is… it completely ignores my selection to hide my back slot item. ;_;

Another situation where this would be useful- some female engineers have terrible, TERRIBLE clipping issues with the grenade kit, having it completely swallow their head. Very annoying, to say the least. It would also be very useful for them.

So please, if the player has the hide back slot option selected, have the kits respect that and actually hide the backpack. I would use them so much more…

GregT.4702:

alcopaul.2156:

GregT.4702:

alcopaul.2156:

do you have to eat all the fishes in the sea to know what fish tastes like?

you just need to eat one to 2 fishes.

I was going to blast this and then I realised you were being sarcastic.
Good show. Well trolled.

The quote implies that i can take 1 player from say 1.6 million players who don’t go to forums and enjoy the game, get his opinion and that one’s players opinion is enough to represent those 1.6 million people’s opinions.

Yes, I know. Which is patently ridiculous.
It would make elections a lot cheaper to run if it were true, though. :-(

It doesn’t matter whether you think it is true or not. Since apparently the “silent majority” doesn’t care to get their votes in, you have one of three choices:

A ) Listen to the “vocal minority” who are actually giving their feedback, and base it on that, since the ‘silent majority’ isn’t bothered you give you any feedback to work with at all
B ) Do what most players here seem to do and take wild, completely uneducated and totally baseless assumptions as to what the “silent majority” wants since they aren’t here to represent themselves (and coincidentally the “silent majority”’s point of view is ALWAYS argued to be in favor of whatever said poster personally believes) and base everything on that.
C ) Not give a crap what ANY of the players, silent or vocal, want and just do whatever you think makes you the most money (the approach A-net is currently using).

The “silent majority” will never give its feedback unless forced via log in polls, and since those keep getting shot down whenever suggested it leaves you in a situation where you can either listen to the “vocal minority” as the representative group of players, or just ignore ALL players and do whatever the crap you feel like.

While we’re on the topic of turret ease of use, the addition of a hotkey to focus my turrets on a target would be kind of nice. Like, if I were to set the hotkey to mouse 4 for instance, then when I hit that button all my turrets on the field focus their fire (if possible/in range) on the target I have selected, instead of shooting the invulnerable targets or inanimate objects they seem so grandly focused on…

GW1 is not the future.
WoW is.

This game has proven that hands down. At the end of the day, a game with a gear plateau that based on story, individual player skill and immersion does not sell as well as a game with a gear grind and focused on dungeon running.

Sorry

Ditton.3149:

Ive yet to read a legendary tale where the great conquering hero says “yeah this armor is awesome..but would look so much better in baby blue, yeah!!”

At the same time I have difficulty seeing some legendary story’s hero saying “Ok guys, I know we just finished clearing out that cave and and saving the town from total destruction, and I know what I’m about to say makes no sense whatsoever… but let’s go do it again! Someone in there might be wearing a legendary chestguard of smashing, and I need that for my set!” or see them say “Hang on guys, I need to kill 20 more lions out here in jungle so that I can increase my physical strength by buying a new set of boots! Because boots obviously make me stronger!”

Narkosys.5173:

Sad and sorry state the GW1 that stagnant thing Mike O said will out live this game and continue on because it is what people want.

GW2 does have 1 good aspect here- a lot of the players are coming to GW2, seeing that it is nothing like GW1 but remembering how fun GW1 was… maybe it will push the playerbase size of GW1 back up to a solid amount and we’ll see more patches for it =D

Anyhow, back on topic- I have to agree with the OP. The adding of ascension gear was a radical change that came without warning, completely shot everything we thought we “knew” about the game, and flipped endgame upside down. All the people who invested time and money into getting exotics, especially those who got multiple sets, because they thought those items were going to be BiS forever (like GW1 before it) had everything thrown out the window in a matter of seconds.

Why Arenanet decided to try to recreate Star Wars Galaxy’s NGE, even down to the release date, is beyond me. It’s like they are trying to purposely scuttle their AAA MMO.

Pistol Joe.3741:

And it has the Same stats as an Exotic so .. it is Purely optional

For the next few months. Then they will finally update the legendary stats to be BiS and it will become a lot less optional…

Some of us already got to see those stats when they accidentally released them a few weeks ago, before reverting back to exotics. Not looking forward to that.

Because end game means doing fractals now, and that’s not fun. So we’re playing alts and trying to pretend like the Nov 15th patch never happened.

Apathy.6430:

oney.5067:

thousands of people played the same gw1 content for 4 years and its audience barely diminished untill the day gw2 came out. it did not have a shelf life it needed an update or xpac.

It clearly had a shelf life if it needed an expansion pack.

And a small segments of plays will actually play any game indefinitely. There’s still people playing Diablo 2 and Starcraft. The vast majority of people eventually move on though when new content dwindles, as it pretty much stopped with GW1 several years ago.

If GW had an expansion the size of GW2, I’d be playing the hell out of it. But am I going to continue playing through content I’ve finished dozens upon dozens of times? Na.

I wouldn’t even require a graphical update out of it. Just more content to play. =D

If nothing else, Guild Wars may be the last of its kind. A game that doesn’t introduce level cap increases, doesn’t introduce gear grinds… it’s just about playing the story, getting better looks and skills, and bettering your own player ability. I guess GW2 is proof that this no longer sells, so I want to enjoy it as much as I can while I can.

Legendary farming is supposed to be ridiculous. True to the Guild Wars series and unlike WoW, you are farming for the looks only and not the sta- … oh wait.

oney.5067:

i played gw1 and wow at the same time and i always quit wow for gw1. i got bored with wow because of the elitism that comes from bigger better gear and always looking for a dungeon group. i played on the top server in wow MG for 2 years. but gw1 always took over. i loved how all the gear was the same stats and all was different was how it looked and the runes we put in it. i loved how we could immerse ourselves into to game content with heroes if we chose to or join a group for dungeons and elite dungeons to grind for gem sets and rare weapons to keep or sell for platinum. wow was too much politics and could never find groups for leveling and i hated doing dungeons cause you might not get the gear you “needed.” gw2 has become more like that other game. i waited for gw2 for 6 years! now that its here im unsatisfied about how its turned out. i dont wanna be forced to do dungeons i wanna farm to get the best “lookin” gear and do dynamic events. im depressed for the fact that noone plays gw1 anymore or id quit gw2 and go back

If they released a GW1 expansion, I’d be all over it in a heartbeat.

GW2 successfully did 2 things for me: A) made me realize that if I’m going to play a gear grinder, I should play WoW or something more established and B ) made me realize that GW1 really is a unique gem that will never be repeated. Even the company that made it failed to recreate its glory and had to fall back to the industry standards of themepark MMOs.

Engineer. We’re versatile and semi-durable. We’re like what the elementalists were supposed to be =D

Unfortunately, instanced gameplay is what Themeparks are all about. GW2 was a happy little hybrid- Sandbox/themepark that seemed to make it’s playerbase happy in the middle. However, it is now trying to focus more on becoming a classical Themepark MMO. I guess they decided the sandbox portion wasn’t making enough money, and wanted to try to scoop up the WoW crowd. :-\

You will see a lot more instanced content. That’s the natural progression for themepark MMOs. If you are looking for a game where people spend more time in an open world than holed up in their own little 5-40 man zones, you are looking in the wrong place.

Mercucial.6759:

GreyFeathers.8175:

Honestly if only content that forces me into parties and dungeons are going to be added this is one player who isn’t going to do those and sadly at some point I’ll be forced to decide if I continue to play or leave. I’d much rather be roaming around and doing dynamic events, renowned hearts, and being my character. Instead if I want to be able to achieve the same goals as your so called " elite " players I’ll have to play the trend mill and endure what I have always hated the most about MMO’s.

This is what I don’t understand about all the people complaining. Why do you want to achieve those goals? If you don’t want to do fractals then don’t. There’s still plenty of content for you to do. Find a like minded group or guild and do what you want. The guild I’m currently in has everything going on. Some of us do fractals and some of us run around completing zones or doing explorable dungeons or whatever. The option for you to do whatever you want is there, but most of you guys would rather just complain.

It affects my WvW gameplay, my open world gameplay and my dungeoning.

WvW – There will be a stat difference between those with ascended gear and those without. The difference is minor now, but when the full set is released? I wonder. And then when an expansion comes out… will levels be increased? If so, that means the max level gear will be another gear grind. If I were to describe all of this to a GW1 player before Nov 15th, they would say I’m talking about WoW. They would have an impossible time believing that it was the successor to their game.

Open World – This is only temporary, but at the moment still worth mentioning. Everyone is in Factals, or Lions Arch getting ready for fractals. Karma farming is close to dead on my server, Orr being a ghost land. Other dungeons? Fat chance.

Dungeoning – What if I do want to do fractals, for the CHALLENGE and not the grind? To get to the highest levels of fractals, I don’t need to better myself but rather my armor. I need to RNG until my eyes bleed to get the agony resistance necessary to achieve levels 20-30+. That is not at all the game I started playing. If I was of a level to do something, then the only thing stopping me from achieving it was my own player ability… not some pointlessly added number attached to my gear, which I attain my repeating the same task 50+ times.

Mercucial.6759:

I completely understand where you’re coming from, but like I said if I ever got to the point where I felt like the “gear treadmill” was hindering my experience, and it’s something I did not enjoy participating in, I would just stop playing. Sure it would suck to stop playing a game after devoting so much time to it, but I wouldn’t spend my free time doing something I didn’t enjoy.

This I agree with. Which is, unfortunately, why I have stopped playing. And from the looks of the forums, I’m not alone.

We’re still here because we loved what the game was, not what it is now, and we have some desperate hope that maybe this was all just some huge mistake and a middle ground compromise can be found by Arenanet that makes this game once more GW2… and not the themepark clones #5,812 that it is trying to become.

With all the talk of folks feeling disheartened and generally no longer motivated to log into GW2, those who don’t feel the same can’t help but ask “why”… and up until now, I haven’t been able to describe why properly. It’s something that a lot of us feel but few can place exactly- we used to love to log into GW2, but after the Nov 15th update it’s just not… GW2 anymore.

Then, today, I ran across a completely unrelated post from 2011 about Immersion in MMOs that I think hit the nail on the head perfectly for me. The particular paragraph was this:

I’ve been in games where gamers were discussing how they need one piece of equipment because it will will boost another ones str by .3% or something like that. When you start discussing percentages and ratios, crunching numbers, when you basically have playing an mmo down to a science, are you really immersed in the mmo or is this just another type of game play style?

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/312791/Is-it-possible-to-be-immersed-in-an-mmo-nowadays.html

With the end-game heading in a direction of gear progression, when most of us thought it was a gear plateau and based instead on story progression, the immersion of the game suddenly took a fall.

Before, when I logged into my character I knew that, stat wise, he was done. It was no longer about numbers. I had my build, my exotics. My character was, for all intents and purposes, “complete”. This is how GW1 worked; it made sense that GW2 would work the same. From that point on, what I would be working towards was bettering my own player skill, getting whatever looks I desired, and completing whatever story was left. Any content that came out I could do, limited not by my armor like so many WoW clones but by my personal player ability. If I was good enough, I was going to complete the content.

So when that changed, it was a sobering reality. In the end, this game like all the others is about gear as much (or more) than player skill. Without ascended gear, I will not achieve level 20 or 30 of fractals, regardless of how good I may personally be. Without ascended gear, I will not be 100% equal in stats to those who have it in WvW. Suddenly, as with other gear based games, the phrase “more skilled” is synonymous with “better geared”.

GW2 was amazing because it was immersive. Moreso than any other game. But that immersion has been slaughtered.

THAT is why I am demotivated.

The more dye that drops in game the less dye you will buy from Black Lion.

It isn’t dying, but it did suddenly become a completely different game (overnight, no less) than what a lot of players signed up for, so they are moving on to other games.

GW2 was a niche game that threw its niche out the window in order to try to be more mainstream. Of course there is going to be a loss of players from doing so. But its a gamble. All we can do is wait and see if that gamble pays off in the way they wanted it to and, draws in more WoW crowd players than they lost in GW1 players.

Ursan.7846:

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

Anagna.8376:

To be fair, you had a whole month to do it and you left it to the last minute.

You have no right to complain.

A problem similar to this one is affecting Dailys. There needs to be a common reset time that is not different for each server and is well known, i.e., midnight of the last day of a month, or, for Dailys, at midnight of each day. Less problems, less headache.

There is one common reset time for every server though. 4 pm pacific time (whatever that is in GMT.) All servers reset at this one time.

Are you positive on that? Has it changed recently? Because up until I stopped logging in 2 weeks ago it reset at 7pm CST every day like clockwork. I would finish my dailies mere minutes before reset, as late as 6:55pm CST.

That would be 5pm pacific time.

Ouch. 0_o Much larger difference than I thought.

Looks like I shall hop aboard the treadmill after all.

Thanks for the info!

I’ve seen some people go back and forth on this and I’m looking for a definite answer. If not, I won’t worry about getting Ascended gear. If so, it seems like something I should be working on.

The following picture shows only a minor disparity between Ascended gear and Exotic gear, but I’m noticing the giant gaping hole that is the unused infusion slot : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/2/22/Ascended_example.png

Sooo… what’s the verdict on this. Those of you who have infused this ring- did it give you actual stats, beyond agony? If so, can you post a screenshot of the stats so we can see the actual numbers involved?

Between 2 rings it would only be a minor difference, but across an entire set it would definitely be something I’d need to work towards if that were the case.

Level 80 Engineer
323 Hours
141 Deaths

deborah.2068:

My thoughts … If you comparred GW2 with other verticle progression they cant compete for long others have 10/25m raids and better costumer service bugs are fixed with in hours a day or two most dont take 3wks in their november event fiasco they barely have told the people the will receive something next week I can remember Rifts first raid when it came out they had a 3 part event but some couldnt complete the third event (due to level) for acheive thru no fault of their own they had the acheive before the event was over. If they want to be a verticle progression mmo let them be judged as such I say and well they are lacking in big ways

Yea, Arenanet messed themselves up here. As a unique, horizontal progression based semi-sandbox MMO Guild Wars 2 was amazing. It stood out as being distinct from the other games in having several awesome features, chief among them being a stat plateau.

But as the gear grinder, vertical progression based WoW-clone they are striving to become, they lack greatly. There are other games that do a far better job of it.

And unfortunately it won’t have the effect they are hoping for. The content locusts will eat through this content more quickly than they can put out more, while the more devoted GW1 base will migrate back to GW1 OR realize they actually like vertical progression and move to one that does a better job.

All that’s left are those apathetic to the situation, not caring one way or another. I wonder how much of the population that group constitutes…

Having played mostly PvP MMOs since I started MMOing back in ’99, I can say this is the prime example of a bug that gets patched one way or another. Now that Arenanet has been made aware of it, it WILL go away.

And chances are, the fix will not be something any of us will be overly happy with lol. It will likely be in the form of a logout timer if you are in combat, leaving your character in game for ~10+ seconds if your client closes out. Which really sucks for people who actually DC mid fight. :-\

But that’s how it goes. A few children/immature adults will ruin it for everyone else. It’s like being in elementary school all over again lol

+1 for this idea. It is actually a pretty important feature for those it affects

I am generally very anti-grind, and was on the front lines of the anti-ascended gear treadmill grind…

That said, THIS type of grind is what Guild Wars is all about. A horizontal progression that takes gobs of time for same stat but better looking items (I say better looking loosely. I actually find the human T3 fugly, and not even worth 5g much less 120g, but you get the idea).

This was meant to give people something to work towards who like working towards stuff. Of course, then they went and introduced… nvm. I won’t go there.

Main point is- this is no different than the nightmarish grinds we suffered in GW1 for our pretty pretty armors and fits within the scope of what the Guild Wars series is about.

Someone brought up a really good point earlier in the thread.

Yes- Legendaries will always be BiS, and maybe ascended will be the only tier they add… but what level legendaries and ascended gear? =D

Say I grind out my level 80 legendary sword, and then the xpac releases and now max level is 90. Sure, a legendary weapon will be the best… but it might be the new level 90 legendary they just introduced, which were added alongside the new level 90 ascended items they just introduced. =D

“Legendaries will always be best in the game… kittenOLOL”

hehe

Since GW2 is aiming towards becoming more of a gear grinder, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. If this were GW1 I’d say “yea, go for it!”. I left GW1 for almost 2 years straight, came back and hopped right into the newest content. But GW2? 6 months might be enough time for them to release the full ascended set and possibly some forms of gear check (inspect option, addons, etc) to allow players to see if you have the set or not. If that’s the case, you’ll be WAY behind on the gear grind and need to focus on catching up in that first.

I’d keep playing so you can make sure to keep up with the gear as it comes out to avoid getting behind.

GW2: Instanced gathering nodes. This is something that all MMOs could live from. Long gone are the days where I rush in, desperate to get to an ore node because of the fear that Bob the Ranger over there will wait for me to get attacked and get it first.

SWG’s November 15th patch didn’t make that list? Really?

“Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.”

If that was true they would have added an LFD tool so that we could go out into the world and actually play the game while looking for dungeon groups instead of standing around in LA/other towns for an hour beforehand screaming “LFG LFG LFG” or “LFM LFM LFM”

I appreciate you posting this. I had not seen it. I know most people won’t care, but as a software developer I was always interested in some of the design and coding aspects of large scale, high budget AAA MMO projects.

Really neat getting to see this.

I was hoping this would be an acceptable compromise, giving dungeon runners what they want (higher stat gear and gated content) and giving the rest of the population what they want (GW1 style gameplay, throwing the WoW gear grind out the window. They don’t have to deal with the extra stats affecting their gameplay).

It seems neither side is overly happy this particular compromise… or perhaps neither side wants a compromise at all. =D

Ah well.

TWMagimay.9057:

If gear made a big difference, people wouldn’t be pvping on lvl 1-40 chars in lvl 1-40 gear…

Just because you can enter pvp on 1-40 characters in 1-40 gear doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a difference.

My toon is 80 in full exotics. Someone pre-80 can’t kill me. Period. I can and regularly do fight multiple pre-80 toons at once simply because the difference in our characters stats, not our personal skill, gives me a MASSIVE advantage over them. 1v1? It’s a joke. I’ve yet to see a pre-80 who could get me to 50% hp, much less have a hope of killing me.