Guild Wars 2

I don´t know if HoT made GW2 better or not. Mobs were nerfed and not so strong to begin with, so this should not be an issue then. What was, is and probably will always be garbage are adventures and hero/mastery points hidden behind events, jumping/gliding escapades and walls.

My personal opinion is that it made the game much more demanding if you want to get anything substantial, basically throwing the approach of come as you are and go when you want over board in a quick toss. That certainly took away the originality from GW2 and made it into any other game, only being able to keep me here because of the lack of other, even remotely interesting games for me out there right now and my guild.

I would also like the limit to stay at 150. In this way, I can finally get this legendary armor stuff out of my GW2 experience. No way I would farm(grind?) bosses over and over, a breaking point is reached.

Pompeia.5483:

So question, why do the non Raiders not complain so vehemently about all the ascended backpieces, armour skins, and content you see and the rewards of reward tracks in pvp and WvW (outside of gift of battle)?
It just irks me I guess that that is a complaint, which I feel is fairly unjustified.

The story complaint is similar because even I joined too late to witness season one and the epic scarlet boss my friend always brags about at work.
I do not even see any real story elements during the fights. And barely still outside of them. How could they have made the raids have a purpose, other than raw challenging content, without a semblance of story? I am only able to picture empty boss floors with some path from one to the next like in wow raids and that is certainly dull.

However, spending time with a group of friends is the biggest reason I can think of as to why I am still raiding, still teaching others to raid. If I could get the same social experience elsewhere, and not have the frustration of dying a lot, I would take it. But to my knowledge, the only other stuff for this is either blobs or tiny groups of five people that finish something in twenty minutes and forget you exist the next. This contributed a lot to why I quit wow and Rift. Queue, dungeon quickly, leave, repeat.

If you follow my posting history, you will see that I argued against exclusivity of items and skins from the start. All these measures were taken to lure people into content they normally would not do on their own. I find it distateful and cheap in every instance, although I do wvw and sometines pvp too.
Contrary to raids, every one of these modes has an easy mode for anyone.
You suck at PvP? Cap points.
You suck at WvW? Escort caravans.
You suck in fractals? Do lvl 1 to 10, your girl or boyfriend who watched you play occasionally can probably contribute enough to a lvl 1 fractal if you have to take a biobreak or something.
I am not arguing for easy modes per se in raids, mind you. I don´t want any part of a raid, even if it would be a trip to candyland. I am arguing for taking exclusivity away from it. If you ask me, everyone who wants to do raids should get handsomly rewarded for sitting through such a torture, but not with exclusive armor.

If you are honest, gw2 is a wasteland of lost opportunities regarding story. I can understand anyone who wants to get even a tiny shred of new content when the world largely stayed static since the end of ls1.

LegACy.1296:

Anyway, you laid out the counter argument for your proposal in what you wrote:

The fact is that raids accomplished a great deal for the game that was truly needed. They introduced content that genuinely requires intelligent play and sticking to mechanics in a game in which, other than the two large world boss events, no mechanics really mattered and autoattacking was good enough to clear anything. They took the control and support roles, which had never actually had any value for the life of the game, and made them useful, rewarding, and heck, worth running. They introduced a reason to actually make use of some of the enormous variety of stat sets that have long been in the game but for just as long had no purpose beyond leveling crafting. They did a lot more, too.

You see, raid did all those great things exactly because they’re hard and there’s no easy mode. If it’s easy, why bother doing anything other than autoattacking? If it’s easy, why bother using cc or healer? If it’s easy, why bother thinking about stat sets like condi armor or healing armor?

This reminds me of my time when I learned to swim:
Go in the water with inflatable wings. Some rows, you´re tired, pause. Rinse, repeat.
Go in the water with a foam board, Some rows, you´re tired, pause. Rinse, repeat.
Go in the water, make some rows, grab the edge of the pool, you´re tired, pause. Rinse repeat.

I can swim today, and I learned it just once. I just don´t want to learn to swim over and over again in GW2.

[quote=6234591;skarpak.8594:
so, you still didn’t answer my question, why is the meta bad for you?
why do you see it as a bad thing for you…or more: why don’t YOU want the best build there is for you AND the group?[/quote]

Because it isn´t always fun to play your class effectively. Just branch out to wvw for a moment, everyone plays a roamer warrior in only one way, a hard hitting guy that can run away as fast as nearly nobody else when the tide turns against him.
Effective? Yes. Fun? Ehm…

On the other hand, you can´t play a raid with a fun armor, that should be very obvious.

Cristalyan.5728:

Astralporing.1957

But the real reason why LFR is often mentioned to be a huge mistake by some raiders? Exclusivity. It opened the WoW raids to average players, instead of keeping them restricted to only a small minority.
Which is apparently a crime.

This is valid for GW2 also – opening the content to ALL players is a major crime. At least for one part of the community.

This is highly debatable since there are less than 20 people in this forum complaining about raids. It’s rather the other way round: There is a tiny or very small minority of players who is directly against raids and wants changes.

Well, due to the massive drop in the player base, it seems that the percentage of raiders raised :-)))). I saw in this forum a 20% percentage of raiders ?!?!. It seems Anet is seriously thinking to have a 100% raiders community. Even if this means to find methods to make the rest of the non raiding community to leave the game :-)). In the end, only the raiders will stay – and even if the number of raiders will be the same as now, the percentage will raise to 100%. Still, i have serious doubts that the 20% raiders represents a reliable number – look at the topic asking lowering the LI request for Legendary. I think that a LOT of the raiders are non permanent/dedicated raiders. The number of hardcore raiders is probably much lower. And because they can raid only once per week they have plenty of time to post here on forum. Waiting the next week raid :-)). I think that only around 5% of GW2 players are raiders.
But to become serious: I don’t know if is very accurate for a representative of a 20% part of community to call the other 80% “a tiny or very small minority of players” (the bold is mine). In designing the HoT, Anet kept in mind the demands of the “large” 20% “majority” of gamers: challenging content (aka hard to impossible to complete for the (filthy) casuals), exclusive rewards – available only for the raiders, grinding, grinding and grinding. The results: The player base is now very thin (to the point the few raiders represents 20%! of the entire player base), Collin lost his job (they needed a scapegoat for the calamity named HoT), the officials almost apologized with the famous statement: " we learned the lesson" and the promise to “repair” what was destroyed.
This was the result of ignoring the 80% of the playerbase (representing the tiny or very small minority of players) voice. And Vince is asking Anet to do the same thing in the future :-)) Nice :-))
To answer to the OP question: Future of the raids?
Well, if Anet will continue on this line, by making some pieces of content only for the “large 20% majority” of the players, they can very well start preparing the burial rituals for the GW2.

Well, I can surely say for myself that I don´t want to raid. I probably could, but I don´t want too. I simply fail to see the magic in continual wipping and the satisfaction that you made another step(or not) before the timer kicked in, but that is just me.

The strange part of this is that I got six magnetide shards from the tower events and other attempts when I was dragged kicking and screaming into practice runs from my guild, and Anet probably considers me to be a raider while that is far from the truth.

With that in mind, I hope Anet manages to balance raids and other content that is not Esport, but I seriously doubt that. So in my personal! opinion, I hope that Anet fully returns to living world one day.

Funny enough, I think that your perception of Anet thinking that everyone is a raider could be really spot on. Mr. O`Brien also once stated that he thinks that every wvw player is also a pve player by hearth.^^

I kind of accepted along the ride that was raids that I would have to sit through boring hours of training, wiping and group finding stuff to get legendary armor. That of course does not mean that I would not be overjoyed if I somehow could still avoid doing them.^^

Nozome.7853:

People here are suddently begging for easier modes just so they can do the legendary armor :^)

…And we´re back full circle… ^^

I was trying raid wing 3 at the weekend to see how much of the lore promise Mr Stein was able to hold, but on the way to look at it, I realized why I personally don´t like to raid:
Its boring to run on again and again against the same obstacle while you have to pay attention to it at same time. My team mates went nuts when we fought on for another little patch of land at the tower stuff, but I simply could not get the thrill of that. I did not even have the short lived rush of attempting VG for the first time.

Accessibility is surely not a problem for raid wing 3.

AliamRationem.5172:

Torolan.5816:

The failure in this reasoning is that raids are intruders to the game, there was no justified waiting for raids. I may not remember every word and sound of it, but I really remember how excited I was when I heard that GW2 will be raid free and totally novel in its art of storytelling, including home invasion. Anet was forced to backpeddle quickly on point 2, but they stayed strong in point 1 until last year. And there was justified waiting for harder content, I agree with that. Anet also delivered said content, but people could not be brought to the idea to abandon their zerker toons and were slaughtered relentlessly by karka dishing out retaliation and ducking out of mega damage attacks. worst of all was though that they were forced to play with Joe Gamer, something no reputable pro gamer can actualyl do without being ashamed as it seems.

If this has brought good or bad things to GW2 is up to Anet, but I think the fact that raids have “intruded” the game can´t be disputed. Sadly the winner is writing history.

I don’t know what you’re on about. I enjoy raiding. My guild enjoys raiding. But none of us are elitists. How could we be? We aren’t even any good! We’ve only killed VG so far! We raid once a week, if enough people show up. It’s really no big thing.

Raids and raiders are not “intruders” in this game. I don’t dispute the fact that some players are obnoxious no matter what content they’re into, but this is not an issue specific to raiders.

I am not talking about elitists, that is another story. I am also aware that the raid team works independently of the other team.

Dungeons were supposed to be raids, with the explorer modes being the hard, instanced content people were asking for. That it did not work was both the fault of Anet in how they designed them and the fault of players to exploit that. The main selling point of GW2 was still that you could reach everything at your pace, avoiding the usual mills in many MMOs. Now take a look at how raids are supposed to work, even the most casuals of approaches ask you to train, train, train. Runs very contrary to the initial selling point of GW2 if you ask me.

Of course philosophies change over time, and Anet obviously chenged his mind over and over again. So raids were added at a much later time, intruding the casual approach of vanilla GW2 with a long training phase and a need for special equipment. You can also say this about fractals to a certain degree, they also nailed you down for about an hour initially. But the difference is that there are very, very easy fractals which enabled you to get the ascended backpiece even if you were basically playing with your nose instead of your hands.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Torolan.5816:

AliamRationem.5172:

webtoehobbit.4201:

With this severe content drought and nothing but very specific content aimed at the more hardcore crowd, I can’t help but to feel a bit forgotten. Sure we have current events, but those are nothing compared to the love that the other parts of the game have seen.

Do you think that the casual base is a minority? I have always felt that the casual gamer base was quite populous in GW2, but maybe I was wrong, maybe its full of hardcore players.

I’m just feeling left out lately, waiting for Living World Season 3 is going to be tough. :-(

I don’t think you’re wrong. But look at it from a different perspective: What if you were the raiding type? How long did you have to wait for the first raid? Four years or so, right? And you know that while raid wings are still being released, LS3 and other more “casual” content is coming, too.

They didn’t forget their base. They adjusted their focus to attract and retain a broader audience. We can debate the wisdom of that choice, but as a new player to GW2 this year I’ve enjoyed the content HoT has to offer more than the core game.

The failure in this reasoning is that raids are intruders to the game, there was no justified waiting for raids. I may not remember every word and sound of it, but I really remember how excited I was when I heard that GW2 will be raid free and totally novel in its art of storytelling, including home invasion. Anet was forced to backpeddle quickly on point 2, but they stayed strong in point 1 until last year. And there was justified waiting for harder content, I agree with that. Anet also delivered said content, but people could not be brought to the idea to abandon their zerker toons and were slaughtered relentlessly by karka dishing out retaliation and ducking out of mega damage attacks. worst of all was though that they were forced to play with Joe Gamer, something no reputable pro gamer can actualyl do without being ashamed as it seems.

If this has brought good or bad things to GW2 is up to Anet, but I think the fact that raids have “intruded” the game can´t be disputed. Sadly the winner is writing history.

Hard, instanced PvE content was always part of the plan for GW2, going back to before launch. Mr. Johanson even called the explorable dungeons, “the raids.”

• Was there originally content called raids? No.
• Was there an intention there be an equivalent? Yes.
• Did that equivalent provide the challenge ANet originally intended? At first, yes, but that evaporated with time, nerfs to mobs, buffs to player capabilities, and the development of ways to minimally engage with the content and still reap the rewards.
• Did that equivalent content suffer from accusations of elitism and exclusion? Oh, yes!
• Did players buy GW2 because the game was promised to have raid-equivalent content? Certainly.
• Have all of them left due to ANet neglect of dungeons? Unequivocally, no.

So, while raids are a change in the way Anet provides harder, instanced content, they are not in any way “intrusions.”. So, yes, your claim can not only be disputed, it’s spurious.

He called it the equivalent of raids from other games if I remember well, not that there would be raids in general.

Then the players who bought GW2 waiting for a raid did not really pay attention to the receptions it initially got:
GamesRadar’s Hollander Cooper wrote in his review:
“Everything a massively-multiplayer online RPG should be. It’s original, massive in scope, and wonderfully social, removing many of the gates that held back the genre in the past. Being able to play with friends regardless of level or class is a gigantic leap forward, and one that, when mixed in with all of the other innovations in the genre, make Guild Wars 2 one of the best MMOs currently available.”
Computer and Video Games Games Editor Andy Kelly:
“An entertaining MMO that combats the dreaded grind with smart design.”

Call it as you want, playing with your friends regardless of their abilities and/or level is pretty much the opposite of raids. Anyone wh played regularly while waiting 3+ years for a raid surely is much more patient than I am.

AliamRationem.5172:

webtoehobbit.4201:

With this severe content drought and nothing but very specific content aimed at the more hardcore crowd, I can’t help but to feel a bit forgotten. Sure we have current events, but those are nothing compared to the love that the other parts of the game have seen.

Do you think that the casual base is a minority? I have always felt that the casual gamer base was quite populous in GW2, but maybe I was wrong, maybe its full of hardcore players.

I’m just feeling left out lately, waiting for Living World Season 3 is going to be tough. :-(

I don’t think you’re wrong. But look at it from a different perspective: What if you were the raiding type? How long did you have to wait for the first raid? Four years or so, right? And you know that while raid wings are still being released, LS3 and other more “casual” content is coming, too.

They didn’t forget their base. They adjusted their focus to attract and retain a broader audience. We can debate the wisdom of that choice, but as a new player to GW2 this year I’ve enjoyed the content HoT has to offer more than the core game.

The failure in this reasoning is that raids are intruders to the game, there was no justified waiting for raids. I may not remember every word and sound of it, but I really remember how excited I was when I heard that GW2 will be raid free and totally novel in its art of storytelling, including home invasion. Anet was forced to backpeddle quickly on point 2, but they stayed strong in point 1 until last year. And there was justified waiting for harder content, I agree with that. Anet also delivered said content, but people could not be brought to the idea to abandon their zerker toons and were slaughtered relentlessly by karka dishing out retaliation and ducking out of mega damage attacks. worst of all was though that they were forced to play with Joe Gamer, something no reputable pro gamer can actualyl do without being ashamed as it seems.

If this has brought good or bad things to GW2 is up to Anet, but I think the fact that raids have “intruded” the game can´t be disputed. Sadly the winner is writing history.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Halvorn.9831:

Beldin.5498:

After stopped playing last wintersday, i wonder if its now really time to delete
the game from my disk ?

If i think back at the days of LS1, i really wonder if only a quarter or a 1/10 of the
team is left, or what the hell is going on.

I am very worried that LS3 will be another chain of story instances and nothing else. LS1 was soooo much better than LS2. I rarely ever do instances in this game at all – no raid, no dungeon master title, fractal level below 20. I only did personal story and HoT story on one character so that at least I have seen it. LS1 however I played the hell out of it.

Somehow i doubt you’ve played S1 more than S2 content. Unless you haven’t stepped foot in Silverwastes or Dry Top in the last 18 months. Both of which were introduced with LS2.

LS2 was just about right. It has instanced stories, along with introducing new armor sets, new achievements, 2 new maps, and a variety of events. They also had a release schedule of about once a month though there was a 3 month break at the half way point.

If LS3 is going to be 2-3 month between each release plus the 9 month head start they had then I expect each release to contain a full map, 3-4 story chapters, a new armor set, new weapons, new achievements, and much more content. That would be just a little more than the LS2 pace which makes sense since they’ve had 9 months prep.

Have to disagree here. Not with the schedule, I am glad about every shred of non-raiding release to be honest, but ls 2 was the most horrible stuff ever produced by Anet. And I say this in spite of a string of failed attempts to put esports over. It was all at once frustrating if you did it solo(aw, the blabla champ hits you in his death throes with 24 damage, all your effort was in vain and you get zilch for your time), it was boring if you did it with friends(stay there and don´t move!), it was downright laughable in its execution(This is Belinda and…she´s dead.) and gates a set of skins and some AP with the same nonsense.

Lord Darghaz.2314:

Torolan.5816:

Yes, it seems fair from a pure numbers point. But how does that help me? It´s like the visit of the weird uncle at the holidays for me with raids, you just hope that he goes away soon or at least talks to some relatives he knows better than you. I mean good for you, but you basically build a roadblock into my favorite game, and I can´t lie good enough to tell people that this does not irk me.

And again, I believe Mr Stein that raids do not steal developing time from other stuff, but it is stealing lore away from me. And it also outright bans me from ever obtaining legendary armor, but that is another story. And I really hope Mr. Stein is going to properly adress at least the lore issue.

I am sure you can find some friendly people in order to experience the whole raid.

Until then, if you need a group, you can contact me ingame and i will try to organize a run for you soon.

I appreciate your kind offer, but no thanks. The funny thing is that I actually declined invitations to raid from guild members, but once in a few months they drag me in for training because I am probably stupid or something.^^
I simply have no interest in practice, mastering the techniques or knowing the mechanisms needed to defeat raid content, and I don´t want to be dragged through. A simple little lorebook like after the end of ls1 would actually already fill my need in this matter.

valheru.7891:

Torolan.5816:

Izithel.6853:

valheru.7891:

Why even complain about raids? You knew raids where coming with HoT. So why did you bought hot then if your so hard against raids?

I think most of them are just mad they can’t get the unique skins and other rewards from raids, not because it’s to hard but simply because they can’t be bothered to invest the time and effort into it like most other people.

The complaints about lore, accessibility and other new pve content being lacking is just a distraction from what they really want: loot.
If the PVP leagues and recent WVW changes had added ways to get more ascended or new legendary gear they would be complaining about that too, make up a bunch of excuses to hide their true intentions (from both themselves and us) and whine that everyone who disagrees with them is just an elitist trying to keep the loot to themselves.

Also sup Valheru.

I bought it because I bought “HoT, the expansion of GW2”, not “A Raid, featuring HoT”. If your prefered game was overall great and would get an expansion with a bitter pill at the side that you have to swallow, wouldn´t you buy it? I am sadly not one of these guys that is smart or patient enough to wait a year before things get nerfed again.

Try to look at it this way: As soon as Hot releases you go in verdant brink and you stay there for 3 months before you go to auric basin. So you enter auric basin in december, you do the same again so you enter tangled depths in march, you do it again so you enter Dragon stand in June. Oh wait where still june and you already have 4 maps while we have only 3 raids wings. And you have so many events and story’s in all those maps. and adventures and meta events that weren’t easy to complete at the start. In 9 months we only had 9 bosses with a minor event in between. I think that seems fair no?

Yes, it seems fair from a pure numbers point. But how does that help me? It´s like the visit of the weird uncle at the holidays for me with raids, you just hope that he goes away soon or at least talks to some relatives he knows better than you. I mean good for you, but you basically build a roadblock into my favorite game, and I can´t lie good enough to tell people that this does not irk me.

And again, I believe Mr Stein that raids do not steal developing time from other stuff, but it is stealing lore away from me. And it also outright makes me uncomfortable in my chances of ever obtaining legendary armor, but that is another story. And I really hope Mr. Stein is going to properly adress at least the lore issue.

Izithel.6853:

Torolan.5816:

So no fun allowed in GW2 if you want to be up to date with equipment?

I didn’t know you couldn’t get ascended gear anymore outside of raids?
Nor did anyone tell me you needed the latest of the best gear to enjoy the game?

Is an armor upgrade an upgrade, despite people deeming it as useful or not?
So if I don´t urgently need it, I should just not worry about it?

Yes, good old Malediktus delivering again.^^

Even after careful reading over and over again, I still don´t really get it. So someone like Malediktus with 30K+ achievement points is/was really worried about people catching up with him when they enter now? Really? I played not exactly for AP in the first years but still have nearly 22K and so have some dailies left, but I am pretty sure that someone entering today will never catch up with me if I keep on playing.
This is just as entertaining as people complaining that they had to farm long and hard if they wanted to squeeze out every AP before it was capped at 10.
And as a little sidenote, nobody cares if you fought hard for AP, it is the same as that nobody cares if you have a legendary or not. Like everyone with over 15K, I probably did some really stupid stuff too like making some collections with a laughable reward, conquering thousands of towers or killing 5K minotaurs. But that is exactly my fault and nobodies else.

Having said that, the AP cap is stupid and should vanish or at least be expanded. There is no reason for a cap as an Ap is an AP. It is of no difference if you got the AP because you were the guy who kicked the last mushroom right between the mushroom kings legs or if you got it because you vanquished Scarlet. That´s what titles are for.

Izithel.6853:

Astralporing.1957:

Currently, no, but what exactly is preventing you from asking for them to be available somewhere else?

Because I’m not an entitled kitten who thinks all content and their rewards should be available and cater to me and my preferred play-style.
Maybe you should go play some single player RPGs so you can mod in whatever you want instead of complaining that in an MMO some prestigious items are not easily and widely available.

So no fun allowed in GW2 if you want to be up to date with equipment?

Izithel.6853:

valheru.7891:

Why even complain about raids? You knew raids where coming with HoT. So why did you bought hot then if your so hard against raids?

I think most of them are just mad they can’t get the unique skins and other rewards from raids, not because it’s to hard but simply because they can’t be bothered to invest the time and effort into it like most other people.

The complaints about lore, accessibility and other new pve content being lacking is just a distraction from what they really want: loot.
If the PVP leagues and recent WVW changes had added ways to get more ascended or new legendary gear they would be complaining about that too, make up a bunch of excuses to hide their true intentions (from both themselves and us) and whine that everyone who disagrees with them is just an elitist trying to keep the loot to themselves.

Also sup Valheru.

I bought it because I bought “HoT, the expansion of GW2”, not “A Raid, featuring HoT”. If your prefered game was overall great and would get an expansion with a bitter pill at the side that you have to swallow, wouldn´t you buy it? I am sadly not one of these guys that is smart or patient enough to wait a year before things get nerfed again.

As we are back at numbers guessing now, let me ask you a question then:
I entered a raid for about 3 times now, the second and third time already kicking and screaming and being shoved into by people, and may have spend around 12 hours or so in them.

Am I a raider now? Would I be one of the thirty percent if I had an account there?

I don´t even dispute that GW2 raids are from my point sadly more accessible than other raids and obviously popular enough to continue them. But 21% of all players seem a little bit too much and I don´t think that the registered people are a cut through the general people of GW2.

Vinceman.4572:

Astralporing.1957:

So, for raiders it is all about shinies too. You simply don’t want to share them with others. Because apparently you think they will make you special, or something.

For some it is, not for all. But the logic behind is that you shouldn’t get things on the fly because you don’t get them anywhere like this in the game. For higher fractal rewards you need to play higher fracs. Getting the PvP achievements is only achievable by playing PvP, same with WvW.
Just saying, there is also a little bit skepticism about shutting content down or to dumb it down like we had in the past with dungeons or fractals. We don’t want the same mistakes to be done again.
And at last, raids are easy enough. The complaining and “not-trying” fraction should step aside and have a proper look onto this content and they realized that they are able to play and succeed in this content if they want to. We have people coming here that never set a foot into raids and they complain as hell although even in this forum we have offers of players to help ppl out besides the looking-for-forum.

Lets assume that I force myself through raids for hours and hours until I have practiced enough to beat every single boss available, have I not just qualified myself for a grind then because I have to do them over and over again for the armor, making it basically a glorified dungeon? I mean it is actually quite funny that people really support their right to grind on a much higher level than before and for an item most raiders deem useless anyway.

I like the theme of Mai Trin, steampunk pirates with flying ships are cool.
I also laughed at the harbringers of doom idea. Nothnig good can come from a quaggan anyway, they are the Asura of the sea.^^

OP, I am usually a firce critic of the wibbly wobbly adventure land that still is HoT even after it was nerfed, but the mobs are not the problem, even if you are not that good of a player or don´t play a meta build. Take some time to see how mobs tepegraph, take a break if it sucks too much.

Waiting for maps, navigation and gating were, is and will be the problem of HoT.

eduardo.1436:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont see how they would work as 10 man raids. Marionette, Breachmaker, and the 3 bosses in lion arch would be 25 man raid content tbh.

To be completely honest my original post was gonna be “how about 50 man instanced content?”…..but I(and thought others would think the same) thought that was too silly or that Anet will never do that :/

And you would have been right with your assumption. I guess the realyl large WoW raids work because they have such a vast pool of people playing. I don´t think that is possible in a game like GW2 if you want to just break the 1% participation barrier.^^

Which , as funny as it may sound in the ears of some people, is pretty much spot on the grind they seek to escape in the open world.^^

I gladly admit that I know next to nothing about programming a computer game.

But don´t you find it strange too when a team of 5 guys produces content like 3 raid wings and a much larger team only manages to churn out a few small events lately, rework a boss and rework an expansion in an admittedly major way? Is it really so implausible that some people think that raids are slowing down the process of all other content from that point of view?

I actually believe Mr Stein when he says that the raid team has no influence on the larger team but I can understand how people can also think the other way.

CorruptEagle.1948:

Story is gated behind ls, story is gated behind dungeons, and story is gated behind raids. But why is it only raids that people get mad about having story gated behind? Just because raids are less popular?

“Raids need a Story Mode / Dungeon Mode / Solo Mode / Easy Mode / Casual Mode” No, they don’t NEED any of this. I think the definition of “need” is a bit different than what you seem to be using it for.

“expecting the other 99% of players to read it on a Wiki or go into a empty stale cleared Raid instance.”

Again, if you want to experience the lore behind raids, then the simple solution is to play raids. If you don’t want to experience the lore enough to play raids, then why do you keep complaining here about wanting to experience the lore?

I can only speak for myself here, but the difference for me is that I neither have to:
a) re-equip
b) learn through practice over and over again in a rather short time. If I fail Arah today and don´t want to do it tomorrow, I just don´t do it and let nobody down. If I abandon my raid quad, 9 other guys have to look for a quick replacement.
c) assemble the same people most of the time
d) spend hours for it
when I want to do a fractal or a dungeon.

Your point is still valid from a certain point of view, but validity is not really the question here. I pretty much guarantee you that people will rather quit than getting forced into raids by default, RPers are a really strange folk. I knew that I personally would quit if the lore of the game would be raid exclusive only or the main canon would suffer under the storyline of raids. As a RL example, I have a rather vast collection of Warhammer 40K miniatures that was quite expansiv but I stopped playing instantly when the Black Crusade came to an end and the story was stopped. Luckily Mr Stein stated that this will not be the case.

CorruptEagle.1948:

Dimitris.3195:

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Dimitris.3195:

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Dimitris.3195:

Neox.3497:

Ohoni.6057:

It is a good thing that Raids exist in this game, it adds to the variety and now that fractals are getting certain attention and dungeons have improved as well as a game feature it is one of the best time for PvE players.

You mean instanced content players. For players that enjoy open world content the only new things added over the past six months have been the Leyline events, Bandit bounties, and Legendary moneypits, most of that over the last couple months.

Also the amount of story in the 3 wings are like 3 of the 16 HoT story missions and the 3 wing maps together are like 1/3 of a single HoT map. So the 3 wings are basically only ~15% of the HoT open world maps in terms of content.

And it’s also better than the whole of the HoT story! That is the point, not that its’ quantity is big but that its’ quality is superb and not everyone can experience it.

Ask someone to open you a finished instance. Done. You are experiencing raid story like all raiders. Or even better watch a youtube video from gw2 lore nerds and get a detailed recap of the story complete with explanations, theories and other stuff. Literally the only thing you will miss is a bit of gold and some loot from the raid bosses.

Do you really think that is the solution? To me that statement is as lazy as when the developers said it themselves, it is like telling someone to let you enter the end of the Arah story mode and talk to the NPCs to get the story of said dungeon.

Raid story is told through hidden notes, environment and npc dialogue. It does not work like arah.

Are you telling me that Matthias, the very first true White Mantle member in Guild Wars 2 or his dialogue during the fight does not tell part of the story? Simply not true! To the story fighting Mordremoth or Zhaitan in person is as important as fighting Matthias or whatever the last boss of the Stronghold of the Faithful is going to be (possibly Lazarus), and just a run through of what remains isn’t going to give the full context of the plot of the Forsaken Thicket. And telling to experience the story through Youtube is even more atrocious, I paid the game to watch the story through that medium, not through one of the lore experts.

If you wish to experience the lore of raids, there is a very simple solution: play raids.

If you don’t want to play raids, then perhaps you don’t care about the lore that much anyways.

Do you really think that roleplayers would gear up for the raid and practice bosses for hours? That is basically the diametrical opposite to roleplaying. A point blank strategy like you suggest will probably not win this kind of people over to raids as they simply are not interested in the competetive side of GW2.
Luckily, these type of player can generate their own content in their community, so they are very easy to keep in general but hard to lure into something. That does not mean that they are not interested in canon lore as it mostly the basis of their roleplaying efforts.
Only because knights and damsels are not viable in GW2 does not mean that people do not want to play them. People form RP communities for a reason, mostly because they want to play in a way that is not viable for raids.

I think an ingame book with the lore like for ls1 would be pretty sufficient for all sides.

Edit: I actually agree with you regarding ls2. That was boring and frustrating all at once.

This has nothing to do with feeling, this has something to do with the ability to read. NcSoft and Anet themselfes have published that they expected HoT copies to sell better in various reports.

Neox.3497:

Just a reminder that you got 4 big open world maps in the last ~7-8 months. That’s like 1 new big open world map every 2 months. And more open world maps are probably on the way with LS3 too.

So yeah not sure why you complain.

Because SuperMario Wars 2 was not what I had hoped for after the content drought. Of course you can answer “well, this is your fault then.” and basically, you would even be right to it. I made a bad choice by purchasing it.

I am personally hoping that raids take a backseat again for a while and easier, less time consuming stuff will be coming in soon again.

Rising Dusk.2408:

• I play fewer than 6 hours of GW2 in an entire week.
• I spend 4 of those hours raiding.
• I have a casual guild full of extremely introverted people, 90% of which don’t have ascended gear.
• We decided “let’s yolo raids and see how we do”.
• We killed VG after a great deal of practice, and it was one of the most rewarding experiences for us as a group of friends since release.
• We have gone on to beat every single raid encounter thus far.
• We are now much better players and you probably couldn’t distinguish us from the “elite” anymore, whatever that is.

Anyone can raid if they’re willing to put in even a modicum of time into it. If you’re playing GW2 for 30 minutes a week, sure, you probably won’t be able to raid (but neither could you do much of anything else in-game either). Outside of that, all it takes is the will to keep trying and the right, cooperative attitude. You’ll be a better player for it, and if you enjoy GW2’s combat system at all you’ll find it surprisingly fun.

I am not exactly the biggest fan of raids, and the first two of your sentences are the reason why. You spend 2/3 of your time in raids. I have around double the time as you have to play atm, and I don´t have the slightest interest in assembling 9 other people to wipe at the same content over and over again or relearn my class for a raid. I know that some people enjoy the thrill of that, but I certainly don´t. I also disilke PvP, but I still play in the season because you can get over with it quickly and just step out of it after 15 minutes.

Correct me if I am wrong, but people like me seem to be a large majority. I am pretty pleased that Anet at least tried lately with open world events, but the prospect of another raid outright depresses me if Anet plans to play along the tactic they have been using in the time since HoT was released. Which, by the way, was not such an overwhelming success supporters try to sell everyone even in the words of Anet.

I ask the team of raids to give out the lore of the raids like Anet already did with the book for ls1 that now rests in one of my bank tabs. I don´t intend to raid for various reasons, and don´t want to miss out on anything interesting lore wise.

And as you, Mr Stein, maybe still read this:
Please don´t go down the road of instanced ls2 again. That was very boring most of the time(Bomb Sylvari), repetitive(Dragon Minion goes on the hunt, fails, another one appears), without impact(Belinda appears and dies nearly in the same week) and had so many points to loathe that I still have not managed to get all the achievement points and the jewelry hidden behind it. It also had some good points, but the bad ones far outweighted the good episodes.

Lol. Great stuff with the butress.^^

Yeah, uhm, ok. I don´t really mind to be a Drakkar guy now for the moment. I rather see myself as a “Drakkar featuring Miller´s Sound” guy right now.
How would you justify a second spanish server? Shoveling Mexican people on it? I know that Spanish is rather well distributed, but geographically, most of the countries involved are near NA, or not?
I did not even notice spawn siege until very recently to be honest.^^

gitflap.9031:

Oh yeh, you just reminded me. Some solo Ranger/Mes/Thief contesting a structure by hitting the door/NPCs a bit is also nonsense.

Why? I am pretty sure that guards will voice an alarm if an attacker attacks them, doors will be closed etc etc…
Regarding the walls, if I fire a heavy stone at the meetinmg line of two walls, would they not both be damaged?

What really dampens my fun in the game is the repetition Anet forces us through since the end of ls1. One horribly boring lukewarm festival from last year with a new currency hunts the next one. Classical guinea pig wheel stuff here.

Although I am curious for the actual bandit events, that is finally good stuff again.

Ayrilana.1396:

Ramoth.9064:

Ayrilana.1396:

Things have changed in a very permanent way through the living story.

The thing you have to realize is that not just you play this game. They can’t have things that are completely permanent in the open world that only you experience. This is why you have events that run on a cycle. The kind of permanency that you seem to be looking for only occurs in single player games.

That could be said about pretty much any game. GW2 is not unique at all in this matter and this whole changing the world thing is just a marketing spiel.

I bought a car in gran turismo, I’ve permanently changed my experience in game by purchasing a car, I now have said car

Go out and do some dynamic events. Areas on the maps do change and last for some before the cycle resets. There have been some permanent changes to the maps since launch as well. The unfortunate thing about that is that newer players did not get to experience it nor will they ever.

That’s a bad analogy. This is about the game environment changing and not personal feelings someone may have when purchasing an item in-game such as a car.

Although I can partly agree with the logic involved here, I remember how fired up I was when Anet announced that you would actually be able to change the world! I am usually a pretty calm and collected person, but oh boy, I could not wait to throw my money at Anet after this announcement. Imagine my sad face when I found out that your contribution and the world changes are very, very limited. I don´t know if this already counts as a bait and switch tactic, but it sure felt like a kick in the balls. Obviously the work involved into somewthing like that is too much, but Anet promised, and I would have bought the game for this reason alone if i had not played GW1 too.

As with legendaries, Anet did at least not fully deliver here from the start, although they tried valiantly and I still had a blast with ls1 in general and the original story. Contrary to legendaries, that is something I care for so I can relate with the people that feel burned here.

It´s actually pretty easy.

If you swim into a pond filled with sharks or salmons who think that they are sharks, you either have to be:
a) brightly coloured to show everyone how poisonous you are aka persuade them with your performance. Probably won´t happen as a shark is a rather straightforward animal and can only live while swimming on and on, but no shark tries to swallow a brightly coloured spined fish more than once.
b) camouflage and pretend to be a stone. Most people probably can´t read your DPS, so if you are good with TS persuasion and know your stuff in general, you can shift the blame on someone else.
c) be a shark aka follow their shark rules.

For the sake of fairness, people should indeed bend over to the raider rules if they enter a group of them.^^

Tzozef.9841:

I think so.

If they added raids without the expansion. It would have been awesome.

You guys already know the issues, don’t need to explain.

It would have been boring and of no use for a large majority of people who were waiting for new PvE stuff that does not require min maxing of gear and skill rotation. It´s bad enough that Anet thinks that it is ok to hide story and exclusive stuff behind raids, but I surely would not have bought an expansion to raid.

HoT maps were harsh, hard to navigate, unrewarding, full of filler stuff, rather small but not unbeatable. Anet removed the first and third point, so they are reacting to player numbers I guess.

Guild Halls are blatant useless in my opinion, but people were all over them.
The desert map simply was not good in many aspects. Not to say that the alpine map is the solutiuon to the wvw problem, but it is better in the eyes of many players.
anet corrected many points lately.

@Zenith and Ashen
I was in no way trying to white-knight here for Anet and I completely argee with the both of you in this case. I did not even question a new slot until I learned that there would not be one for base HoT buyers and was really baffled that you got a class without a slot. I was just saying that Anet was not obliged to do it and it is more something that people expected in a common sense fashion than an actual obligation.

Vayne.8563:

Dante.1508:

Thanks good info, Someone above said the events in Hot are bad, i disagree the events are fine if they weren’t so hard to do, they’d actually be fun..

That said the figures on all those games apart from Linage seem really low, not great not overly bad except poor Wildstar..

Either way i think NCsoft might be going into damage control from the way it came across, on all games not just GW2..

I see no real evidence that that’s the case, and I don’t know what you specifically see that gets you this idea.

To put it into perspective, Guild Wars 2 is actually roughly steady for a couple of years now. It hasn’t gone down in profits. NcSoft is saying that HoT didn’t meet sales targets and there are many reasons why that happened. One of the biggest, in my opinion, is that character slot fiasco. That was just silly. For $50 Anet should have given a character slot with the expansion.

But once the bad feelings/publicity started, before the game even launched, obviously that would heavily affect preorders. Lots of people decided to wait.

And of course a myriad of complaints followed up the launch, so that didn’t help either.

But at the end of the day, the company is fine. The only real issue right now is Wildstar, and that’s had issues for a long time now.

To be fair, Anet was under no obligation to throw in a free character slot and to my knowledge never suggested that there would be a free slot. As someone who played GW1 though I expected such a slot in the tradition of said game where you always got new slots in expansions. The outrage that followed showed that I was not alone in excepting Anet to hold up that concept.

I bought HoT two days before launch and was thinking hard if I really wanted to buy something that would include raiding, gating and jumping in massive quantities, but my love for the franchise won over these concerns. Awkward silence from Anet did not help to push me to buy it either.
Many choices Anet made were just unpopular from the start, like the many hero points needed for the new skill bars or adventures that were basically locked 23/7, a rather meek story and some of them have been indeed given attention too. But that is probably too late for HoT now.

I am as qualified as anyone else to open the hostilities then ^^ :
Not that many people as Anet expected like or bought SuperMarioWars 2 aka HoT.
Shocker.

TexZero.7910:

Torolan.5816:

So is accessibility and varying degrees of difficulty a crime now in games?
Should you get more than the other players? Yes.
Should you get unique rewards in any game mode? No.

Completely disagree.

If all modes of play have homogeneous rewards then there’s no incentive to branch out and do anything other than what offers rewards quickest, which turns the entire game into gold farm simulator 2016.

Unique rewards are required in this game for driving players to different aspects and area’s in the game.

I don´t want to promote gold farming either. I personally don´t usually spend much time farming this or that, at least not for days and the whole day. But if someone wants to spend his game time doing this, I see no reason why Anet should attempt to lure him away from this.

I dispute the claim that it should be mandatory to improve in a given role while having fun.
Playing games has the effect of improving on all of us anyway, it is our way of finding things out we are good at and things we are bad at.
Free play and the situational approach are the way to go in modern education.
Education long tried to waltz out faults of children, but modern education tries to find strengths instead of averaging weaknesses in children. Too bad that this collides with the acadamic mindset of being at least average in everything, so we are in for an exciting time when we try to stuff a child that was raised with free play and choices into a system that enforces obedience, sitting still and doing things you are not the slightest interested in.

A content has to stand on his own feet or is relegated to its own fanbase. An unique reward is a crutch to make it more desireable when you in fact do not desire to make the content. It is a tactic I utterly despite although I have to use it on children very often for the sake of meeting the educational goals the country government sets up with them.

Coconut.7082:

STIHL.2489:

The Zealous Templar.3861:

I mean to be fair you’ve made several sweeping statements about the raiding community and raids with very little experience.

How many times would you need to chew on razor blades, before you discovered you didn’t like it?

Hey guys, I decided to try fractals today, so I went into this fractal called Molten Furence. Me and my group couldn’t finish it because we couldn’t avoid dying in the trap room in the end, but I think this fractal is very easy and the Drill mechanic is too boring.
Thetefore I conclude that all fractals are so easy and boring, and I won’t be trying them again.
Also I think that the Ascended rewards should be removed from such easy content, they should only be given for actual hard content, like Tequatl.

Btw, organizing a Tequatl squad, req: 10+ Spoons and Sunless title.

So is accessibility and varying degrees of difficulty a crime now in games?
Should you get more than the other players? Yes.
Should you get unique rewards in any game mode? No.

Even when I see how this is all sarcasm, I would dare you to replace one of your party with someone who knows how to do this fractal. If you do not manage it then, you should probably ask for a disability discount at your local store. An experienced fractal player can carry a group of toons that are piloted by a chimpansee, a raven, a dolphin and a jojo tied around the mouse through a lvl 1 fractal.
I am pretty sure a single experienced raider can´t pull 9 people with him through raids with a reasonable chance of success.

When I started to do Tequatl, I did not even know which successes were there to get and most of them I got by accident. If I had kept them all together, I would own a shop named “Spoonatorium” right now. That title basically kept on hounding me.^^

See the difference? You can come and go as you please from fractals and Tequatl without sinking the ship that is the content. So of course people will be mad when they have to prepare for hours and some people don´t cut the standard in raids.

I think nobody really disputes that raids are harder and less accessible than fractals.
And yes, there are more than enough fractal snobs too.

In my opinion, 1325 dated map should be upgraded, at least to the next step. Make the Zhaitan arch available in episodes like ls2 for those coming in new.

Why?
Because old content is old. Making maps dynamic is cool and helps keep content relevant. Please just replace some risen with mushrooms or some mordrem in the beginning maps, and place some patches of green in the first map of Orr. You could make some advertising for F2P players(this is how HoT are looking) in the same way.
New races. Most oponents of lets say Tengu, argue that it would not make sense to introduce new races because it would break continuity. Although I find that argument completely hilarious after the introduction of the revenant and the wild mish mash of maps who are in diffrerent time zones, it would finally push that obstacle out of the way.

testpig.5018:

4: nothing about the relics promote PvE… it’s all about incentive to engage on WvW. I guess you never played DAOC or Warhammer online, or even GW2 during the relic days. Capturing a a heavly defended keep from the enemy realm, and transporting the relic under enemy fire back to your corner keep.

I cant say how this works in GW2, but a Relic Keep was indeed the best defended treasure of a given server side and drew defenders from many other contents if the home relics were under attack. And Mythic did not make it more easy to get them over time, it was made harder and harder with the addition of watch towers you had to take to get a shot at the main castle.
Too bad that they could not get over themselves to make buff bots obsolete much earlier and open the game mode for a more casual audience. DAOC was very much superior regarding wvw to any game I ever played, despite GW2 being the best wvw around today. There were leaderboards for both players and guilds to show them that guilds are valued and mean a kind of fame, guild message when your tower was attacked etc etc…
It gave a feeling of real importance to wvw, something that is sadly mostly missing in GW2. If a big guild stops playing today, nobody will know its name in six months.

Sarrs.4831:

Torolan.5816:

The ones that are are real pains in the behind though and should be banned from everything involving other people until they come around.

>people disagree with me, ban them!

this is basically all i got from this man

Lol, sorry that I wrote that the largest majority of raiders are not toxic. Won´t happen again.

If there is only the slightest critic about raids or raiders in a post, you guys go all ballistic. I have to dissapoint you though, I still won´t sing a praise for it.

Ayrilana.1396:

Torolan.5816:

There is one jumping puzzle that is part of map completion.
I did not have full map for years because there was jumping involved. But that is just 1 thing you could not do.
Fractal can and is done with mesmers.
And to indirectly quote myself, jumping is indeed much more needed with the advent of HoT, the jumping components are the make and break of HoT. I don´t see how this contradicts my opinion that nobody asked for SuperMarioWars2. We got it, people played it. Neither does suggest that people enjoy it, and some probably did it to get over with it. I for example have several silvers and could have very well lived without them.

Many vistas require jumping. Some hero points require jumping.

You’re assuming every group has a Mesmer. Not always the case.

HoT was advertised to include jumping just as GW2. A game that includes jumping would most likely use that for various things. To expect differently is wrong.

You shrug off map completion as one thing people can just not do if they don’t like jumping. Well adventures are just one thing that they don’t have to do as well.

Compare the effort of a common vista to a common adventure and the jumping in vanilla and HoT and tell me again how nothing has changed. Adventures are small jumping puzzles, not vistas.

There is one jumping puzzle that is part of map completion.
I did not have full map for years because there was jumping involved. But that is just 1 thing you could not do.
Fractal can and is done with mesmers.
And to indirectly quote myself, jumping is indeed much more needed with the advent of HoT, the jumping components are the make and break of HoT. I don´t see how this contradicts my opinion that nobody asked for SuperMarioWars2. We got it, people played it. Neither does suggest that people enjoy it, and some probably did it to get over with it. I for example have several silvers and could have very well lived without them.