To be fair, at the very least, it says that a vocal minority feel passionately that the new zones are too difficult to solo.
In ANet’s shoes, I would take note and start communicatating more clearly that expansions change the game in all sorts of ways and that people need to be ready to adapt.
Yes: “Be warned that we are going to change the game you love into something completely different!”
For the most part Anet didn’t change the existing game. They expanded the totality of what was available. If I map into Orr today, not only is it not completely different, it is largely the same region that I have loved since first encountering it.
When there is an MMO expansion, generally people move into that expansion unless they are creating a new character or for limited time to accomplish some specific thing. This is what I was referring to.
In a traditional MMO where they raise the level cap, this is true. In a game where there’s no downleveling this is true. But this game isn’t like those other games, which is why some of us have come here.
In other MMO an earlier zone becomes pointless. Not so here.
I don’t know I think vocal minority is a very important concept.
Of course only Anet has any idea whether a POV on the forums is a minority and they aren’t likely to tell us. So anyone making statements on the forums about a POV being a minority doesn’t know what they are talking about.
But Anet did say something. They said that the problem with the HoT sales not meeting expectations were with new free to play players not upgrading to HOT. They have no idea why those players didn’t upgrade any more than you or I do.
The thing is I’m not coming to the forums stating strongly that HOT isn’t soloable. I’m refuting people who claim it isn’t because I factually solo a good portion of it.
When people come to forums and express their view in the strongest manner possible, using hyperbole or exaageration or even straight up misinformation, then someone is going to post back and state their opinion. That’s sort of what forums are for.
But I’m not even sure how Anet can know that difficulty is the reason HOT didn’t sell as well as expected. It could have just been bad publicity. People saying stuff is often enough to put people off from spending money.
My own pet theory is that it’s simply too expensive for what it offers.
To be fair, at the very least, it says that a vocal minority feel passionately that the new zones are too difficult to solo.
In ANet’s shoes, I would take note and start communicatating more clearly that expansions change the game in all sorts of ways and that people need to be ready to adapt.
Yes: “Be warned that we are going to change the game you love into something completely different!” No, I don’t think they’re going to say that to the vast majority of their players. I’m pretty sure that there is a good reason why the more generic areas that people go to get info on HoT (the webpage duh) don’t have even a tiny mention of higher difficulty. They want people to actually buy the expansion.
Except the game didn’t change that drastically for all of us. You think the game has changed significantly but having done all the achievements in Living World Season 2, some of which were quite hard, I didn’t find the game changed.
The fact is, HoT was a good continuation of the game I was already playing.
What you’re really saying is if a person stood in Queensdale all day and that was their game, they shouldn’t expect the game to get any harder when new content isn’t introduced because they’ve decided Queensdale is the game.
But Queensdale isn’t the game. Dungeons are part of the game too. Fractals are part of the game. Living World Sesaon 2…part of the game.
The game didn’t change. People just ignored parts of it.
To be fair, at the very least, it says that a vocal minority feel passionately that the new zones are too difficult to solo.
In ANet’s shoes, I would take note and start communicatating more clearly that expansions change the game in all sorts of ways and that people need to be ready to adapt.
Well, adapt or leave; I’ve chosen the later. And, I’d be careful when using the term “vocal minority” as it’s usually merely a rhetorical device used to bolster an actual minority opinion on the forums. There is no vocal minority on the forums, there are merely voices—and, they are either in the minority or the majority. Do they represent all player voices—no. They merely represent all the voices on the forums.
I’ve determined that the current game is unplayable solo. And, let me be more precise in my definition: it is unplayable solo while having fun playing it. You see, one of my gaming principles in that the time I play should feel like play and be fun. I’m always returning to the forums every few months or so looking for changes in the games direction.
I don’t know I think vocal minority is a very important concept. Let’s say a small group of people make so much noise that people think they’re a larger group than they are. It’ causes a chain reaction.
You’re not having fun soloing HoT and you said so loudly before you left, I’m sure. Other people are saying they can’t solo HoT as well. This is in spite of the fact that there are people who enjoy soloing HoT. But of course, complaints get more air time and they’re usually louder.
So people read this over and over again and they believe, rightly or wrongly that HoT isn’t soloable. They don’t then buy HOT to try it themselves.
I’ve seen more than one post by someone who’s hesitated buying HOT because of people saying it was so hard, but they didn’t find it that hard and they were enjoying it.
So yes, vocal minority can be an issue and saying it’s all just opinions and numbers don’t matter, probably isn’t the whole story.
In the case of GW2, people have been playing core quite happily and suddenly they give us HoT. In that case, players who are upset by this change are not looking in the wrong place for their gaming amusement. They had it all through GW2 as it was initially presented.
They didn’t give us HoT. We had to choose, in light of its advertised increased level of difficulty, to buy it.
Looking at a product advertised as being unlike core GW2 for an experience like core GW2 might be accurately described as, “looking in the wrong place.”
Can you point out to me where Anet “advertised” to those already playing GW2 that HoT had “increased level of difficulty”? I just looked at the HoT web page out of curiosity and don’t see a single word that even implies it.
http://buy.guildwars2.com/store/gw2/en_US/html/pbPage.heartofthorns
Was there only a brief mention?
Pretty much every interview I can remember talked about increased difficulty. Surely anyone into the game enough to look into the expansion and not just read the website (which really didn’t have much information before launch anyway), would have understood that HOT would be harder.
Anyone who played Guild Wars 1 and remembers that “true expansion” EoTN would have some clue it would be harder too.
You make it sound like harder content is something odd or strange for MMO expansions to offer. Its’ really not. It’s the norm. In most games, as you’ve said, that comes by way of dungeons and raids.
But this game has always centered on the open world, and it needed for some of us, the need for harder open world content.
The website isn’t the advertising, it’s only a small part of the advertising. This game had months, 9 I believe, of pushing the product through appearances at cons, interviews, and blog posts.
I don’t know how anyone who kept up at all didn’t see the content would be more difficult.
Generally when you come on here people are going to say they love HOT maps because the people who hated HOT maps quit the game. It’s called “survivorship bias”.
I didn’t think the mobs in HOT are that hard at all, I just got annoyed because the 2D minimap is completely useless for a 3D map and there’s a lot of routes that involve backtracking. Dry Top is 3D but when you want to go up, there’s almost always a thing that gives you the jump ability.
In HOT when you want to go up, you can be sure the bouncing mushroom was 400 yards in the opposite direction and you have to backtrack until you find it, take the mushroom, then an updraft, then a ley line, to get to where you want to go.
Offset by the fact that more people are likely to complain when they don’t like something than say nice things when they do. That’s a bias too.
Forums of every MMORPG are filled with people complaining. They go to forums TOO complain. I have well over 200 people in my guild playing and enjoying the game. I think 3 of us post on forums. The other 197 are playing and having a good time.
There are people I know who USED to post on the forums, who still like the game and stopped because of the negativity here. It affected their enjoyment of the game. It was too much work to say they liked something. They were attacked as fan bois or Anet shills or white knights.
Saying more people are saying they like it because those who didn’t have left the game is only a small part of the story. I think the people who don’t like it are going to talk a lot louder than the people who do.
I actually agree with you but that is kind of my point. The complaints of HOT maps has gone down a ton over the last year and I think your point is very right: Generally, people complain louder than they praise. Therefore, the fact that the complaining has subsided means these people have given up and left. =)
NEVER be happy with people leaving an MMO. As numbers drop, so does revinue. Also, people only complain when they CARE. Less complaints usually means less people, and less people caring anymore. Both signify bad futures for MMOs.
I’d rather see 50 new complaint threads a week than 3, if only because it meant people were interested, invested, and care about the game.
You don’t have to be happy with people leaving MMOs to acknowledge that it happens and it happens relatively normally. There are more people who have stopped playing WOW than who have ever played Guild Wars 2. That’s just the nature of hte business.
That’s why it’s important to attract new customers as well. That’s why changes can be important. You lose one demographic and gain another.
As for the sales being less, I dont’ buy as much in the gem store because I have all the outfits I ever intend to buy and I have enough glider skins already. There’s very little for me to buy that I’m interested in in the gem shop.
Also, the AB meta multimap made a lot of people filthy rich. People have enough money to get what they want from the gem store without paying a penny for gems.
I love it when everyone jumps on me. Usually means I am pushing the right buttons.
Sarcasm aside. Every attack was over the top, however every weapon should have an attack on it, somewhere, that effects that bar.
As for the person that goes “you choose not to use those utilities” everyone’s playstyle is different. Many people prefer tankier builds which means your utilities are all for self defense/cleanses/etc, not for attack purposes. As I’ve said before, forcing that change without recompense is bad design.
Yes I’ve beaten the story without any breakbar skills. Not what I would consider fun though heh.
There just has to be a better way to handle this.
If you completed it without breakbar skills why do you complain about needing one ?
I do not always take positions I personally feel in discussions. This is a forum, it’s purpose is for discussions, preferably with emotion removed from the equation and neither side feeling anything personal.
Breakbars are also a thing I see in mapchats that people complain about. The Patriarch meta boss I see a lot of complaining about the breakbar…or rather lack of people trying to break it to stun it.Remove emotion, remove any personal attachment, feelings that ‘you can do it with this’, and simply look at the merits. Can this be changed to open up more builds, or to reduce the lack of non-involement with it?
The patriarch doesn’t have a break bar, so I assume you’re talking about the matriarch. And yes, people complain about it, but just as many people or more used to complain about defiance which was the mechanic that break bars replaced. They do the same thing but break bars are easier to visually see what you’re doing. Defiance was terribad.
The thing is, just because people complain about something doesn’t make it bad for the game. People complain about not having mounts, but a lot of people seem to think that’s a good idea.
There are a bunch of CC skills that were basically sitting and gathering dust. There was no variety in PvE before. There was no reason to take a CC skill pretty much ever in PvE. That lack of variety in skills, where everything was about damage damage damage, hurt the game and there were tons of complaints about that.
The break bar solved a problem. That doesn’t mean it was introduced well, and it doesn’t mean there’s enough explanation of it, but those two things don’t mean it was bad for the game either. It added to the game an element of thought and strategy that had previously been missing.
Surely the mechanic isn’t so hard that people can’t learn it. And yes, having to learn stuff is part of playing MMOs.
snip
Seriously, play through the story of HOT without a single skill on your bars that effects a break bar, or only one skill that isn’t spamable that effects it, and you have a lot of weapon/build combinations people enjoy playing (typically these are the medic builds or pure self survival builds). Now try to solo it all. Emphasis on solo, no bringing in anyone else, ever. I’ve been trying this and, frankly, HOT looks like a giant kick tot he nethers if you despize some of the build changes it forces on you.
If you force people to change builds to fit content, you failed at building your content. Every build should be viable, thus the break bar mechanic is a failure that needs retooled. Seeing as an entire map chat on a meta agreed with this, almost all of us having solod the story and most of the maps, there could very well be something here as to why HOT is so hated. As the vast majority of people despize any reason to alter their build. They built it to suit their gameplay style, there should be no reason to alter it just because of a kitten mechanic.
Every single MMO I’ve ever played has forced people to change builds to clear content, even Guild Wars 1 did. I dare you to take your normal build into Slaver’s Exile in Guild Wars 1 without changing your build.
Builds weren’t made for you take take any random skill you want to succeed. That was never the intended design. They were made to make builds to solve problems. Anyone who thinks one build in this game will do everything they want, probably isn’t familiar with Guild Wars 1.
Guild Wars 1 was called build wars for a reason. They toned it down a lot in this game, but it’s still there…and it should be. Saying I shouldn’t have to change my build is an opinion.
I disagree. Changing your build is how you learn and grow with the game.
You choose GW1, when the devs themselves routinely said THIS game would not be like the old one. You said you played many MMOs yet failed to ever use one that wasn’t GW1…which the devs themselves said they would not build this game to be like that one. The actual tag line for GW2, and it is STILL used in their promotional material is to “play your way” not their way. In otherwords, you were not supposed to be forced to change your build to fit with specific content.
I mean seriously, you didn’t consider it anoying in GW1 to change your build several times a run? I sure did. I played it for PvP though so didn’t need to shift my build much personally.Try a different one. How often did you change your Ranger build in DAoC? You know, the premier and highest ranked RvR game of all time? The Chanters of Aion? Tanks in literally almost every game ever?
Traditionally you changed your equipment to match things, NOT your build in MMOs. Your build was your build, and traditionally cost you serious coin to change. Thus you changed your gear to change your defenses. This has been industry standard for a long time, most people coming tot he game expect it to stay.Now you say to change your gear. Now, if breakbars never go anywhere or change…how will weapons that do not effect the breakbars ever become viable? They won’t. This limits build viability which is a bad direction to go in a game you still advertise as “play your way”.
Actually the devs said that this game will take everything you love about Guild Wars 1 and put it in a persistent world.
The actual play your way comment which is often misquoted, was used to refer to how you level. To some degree they undid this with mastery and they’ve been slowly fixing it. It wasn’t meant to say that every single thing in the game would be beatable by every build. That wasn’t even true in the core game. When the game came out. you still needed to change your build for certain content. Trying to take play your way as meaning I never have to change my build is a huge stretch.
I’d like you to show me where the devs actually said they wanted to build a game completely different from Guild Wars 1. I saw them say we wanted to make a game with the same sensibilities as Guild Wars 1 but the code was too old and the way it was set up we couldn’t do what they want.
You can’t only count the quotes you want to try to make your point. The devs, in the early days, did talk about builds and characters and how you could change up your builds on the fly, even between bosses. Now why would they do that if that wouldn’t sometimes be necessary?
Old fashioned learning through discovery – there was a time that people understood and relished this over dull predictability and dot to dot instructions.
Unfortunately, some gamers seem more interested in convenience than anything else. Having to think and perhaps struggle a bit is inconvenient. I believe that the ubiquity of TV is at least partially the cause. TV only requires that you pay your cable bill and turn on the TV to be entertained. The only struggle might be finding something worth watching.
Some gamers seem to want a similar experience in their games. Buy the game, turn it on, be entertained without any struggle, with no significant effort or investment. Just look at the massive popularity of the mindless Facebook games. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that attitude, those who want that kind of experience in a given game cannot be catered to with the same content that is aimed at players who want something more than minimally active amusement.
Games are for entertainment – you know, fun? I’m not sure why you are trying to say that how anyone PLAYS a game is “wrong”. If I play GW2 by doing nothing but craft and never go out of a city, that would still be a completely reasonable way to play.
he is saying that some people don’t have fun and blame the game when actually the root cause is elsewhere.
That’s not how I interpret what he said, but whatever.
In the case of GW2, people have been playing core quite happily and suddenly they give us HoT. In that case, players who are upset by this change are not looking in the wrong place for their gaming amusement. They had it all through GW2 as it was initially presented.
By the same token people did walk away from the core game because they thought it was boring. There was tons of content for casuals and very very little content for people who wanted challenge. Most MMOs have a mix of hard and easy content.
Look at what there was for PvE players who wanted challenge. There were dungeons but virtually all of them were around at launch and we’d done them a million times. They were certainly no longer challenging. Even the hardest dungeons didn’t really represent a challenge.
There were fractals but they had several issues, among them the time commitment required to play them ( you had to do four to get credit) and the fact that the randomness of the fractals made it hard to control your experience. I didn’t enjoy the dredge fractal for example and got it often enough where I simply stopped doing Fractals.
That’s pretty much it. There was nowhere particularly challenging or interesting in the open world.
Anet used HOT to fill in a gap in the content and told people it would be harder content. It wasn’t some super secret hidden agenda Anet had that no one knew about.
The people that loved core Tyria exactly where it was, those people were NOT served well by HoT. But the people who wanted more and different and something that progressed were.
There are numbers on both sides. The problem is, one side used to have pretty much everything. Now there’s a range of things.
Generally when you come on here people are going to say they love HOT maps because the people who hated HOT maps quit the game. It’s called “survivorship bias”.
I didn’t think the mobs in HOT are that hard at all, I just got annoyed because the 2D minimap is completely useless for a 3D map and there’s a lot of routes that involve backtracking. Dry Top is 3D but when you want to go up, there’s almost always a thing that gives you the jump ability.
In HOT when you want to go up, you can be sure the bouncing mushroom was 400 yards in the opposite direction and you have to backtrack until you find it, take the mushroom, then an updraft, then a ley line, to get to where you want to go.
Offset by the fact that more people are likely to complain when they don’t like something than say nice things when they do. That’s a bias too.
Forums of every MMORPG are filled with people complaining. They go to forums TOO complain. I have well over 200 people in my guild playing and enjoying the game. I think 3 of us post on forums. The other 197 are playing and having a good time.
There are people I know who USED to post on the forums, who still like the game and stopped because of the negativity here. It affected their enjoyment of the game. It was too much work to say they liked something. They were attacked as fan bois or Anet shills or white knights.
Saying more people are saying they like it because those who didn’t have left the game is only a small part of the story. I think the people who don’t like it are going to talk a lot louder than the people who do.
I actually agree with you but that is kind of my point. The complaints of HOT maps has gone down a ton over the last year and I think your point is very right: Generally, people complain louder than they praise. Therefore, the fact that the complaining has subsided means these people have given up and left. =)
Or some of those people started enjoying HOT maps after the April fixes. That’s another possibility.
I noticed a drop in complaints after that update came out.
Generally when you come on here people are going to say they love HOT maps because the people who hated HOT maps quit the game. It’s called “survivorship bias”.
I didn’t think the mobs in HOT are that hard at all, I just got annoyed because the 2D minimap is completely useless for a 3D map and there’s a lot of routes that involve backtracking. Dry Top is 3D but when you want to go up, there’s almost always a thing that gives you the jump ability.
In HOT when you want to go up, you can be sure the bouncing mushroom was 400 yards in the opposite direction and you have to backtrack until you find it, take the mushroom, then an updraft, then a ley line, to get to where you want to go.
Offset by the fact that more people are likely to complain when they don’t like something than say nice things when they do. That’s a bias too.
Forums of every MMORPG are filled with people complaining. They go to forums TOO complain. I have well over 200 people in my guild playing and enjoying the game. I think 3 of us post on forums. The other 197 are playing and having a good time.
There are people I know who USED to post on the forums, who still like the game and stopped because of the negativity here. It affected their enjoyment of the game. It was too much work to say they liked something. They were attacked as fan bois or Anet shills or white knights.
Saying more people are saying they like it because those who didn’t have left the game is only a small part of the story. I think the people who don’t like it are going to talk a lot louder than the people who do.
Less people playing this content and less people playing GW2 anyway. If we can take the earnings and the forum posts as an indication of declining popularity, it is no big surprise it takes a long time to find people.
Except it doesn’t take a long time to find groups for fractal dailies, or even the leather farm. Raiding is simply done by the smallest percentage of the populous.
And lower earnings isn’t necessarily an indication of less players. I still play but I spend less than I used to.
Just as long as it’s not Scarlet coming back from the dead, I’m okay with it. lol
I use looking for group all the time. I’m not convinced a huge percentage of the playerbase raids, and I"m fairly certain most who raid don’t pug.
I’ve done Tarir about a dozen times since the patch that changed it and people do it all the time. I can guarantee you there is no time of day that it comes up that it’s not being done by a group.
You’re less likely to get into an organized map now, because it’s not happening automatically on every map. You have to get there a bit early, open up the LFG tool and get to a map that’s doing it.
When doing that I get on maps that have plenty of people doing it. The only time it ever fails is when some side burns before they’re supposed to, just like it used to.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
To be honest, you might want to spend some time learning your preferred profession a bit better before moving on to HoT. The content in the core game doesnt really teach you much about playing well. HoT is supposed to be more challenging for play by those who have a better handle on their characters.
If 80 levels doesn’t teach you how to play your class properly then ‘Houston we have a problem’!
It teaches you how to play the game if you go through Living Story Season 2, which ramps up in difficulty. The problem is that’s not a free item and a lot of people skip it.
I disagree. Changing your build is how you learn and grow with the game.
Lolwut? Dude, it’s a game, not a lifestyle…
Unless you have no other life.
That’s like saying I play chess and I only use one opening and that’s all I ever use. You grow with any game you play for years. That’s how games work. Any decent game anyway.
You play baseball, you learn more. You find different ways to pitch to people because they figure out what you’re doing. You change it up.
You don’t need to live in a game to what something different after 4 years. Saying that you have to live a game to want to get better at it is pretty much against all gaming logic.
Even Pacman levels got faster and faster, but when they maxed out they made Ms Pacman. Games grow in complexity so they don’t stagnate.
I’m not even sure why this is a discussion.
I don’t think many people here remember how bad definance was. Break bars replaced definance and it was a step in the right direction.
In the old game, CC skills sat unused in PvE altogether. No one every took them. Not sure how anyone thinks that’s good for the game.
You know, a huge problem in HOT was shown to me a few days ago when a bunch of us were talking about it in a map chat after a successful meta. The reliance of the devs on break bars SEVERELY hampers build diversity to the point they really just need to make any/all attacks effect the break bar to bring back some diverse builds. A lot of the problems in soloing things are 100% the break bar and it is a mechanic completely ignored untill HOT with NO EXPLINATION OF IT ANYWHERE.
Seriously, play through the story of HOT without a single skill on your bars that effects a break bar, or only one skill that isn’t spamable that effects it, and you have a lot of weapon/build combinations people enjoy playing (typically these are the medic builds or pure self survival builds). Now try to solo it all. Emphasis on solo, no bringing in anyone else, ever. I’ve been trying this and, frankly, HOT looks like a giant kick tot he nethers if you despize some of the build changes it forces on you.
If you force people to change builds to fit content, you failed at building your content. Every build should be viable, thus the break bar mechanic is a failure that needs retooled. Seeing as an entire map chat on a meta agreed with this, almost all of us having solod the story and most of the maps, there could very well be something here as to why HOT is so hated. As the vast majority of people despize any reason to alter their build. They built it to suit their gameplay style, there should be no reason to alter it just because of a kitten mechanic.
Every single MMO I’ve ever played has forced people to change builds to clear content, even Guild Wars 1 did. I dare you to take your normal build into Slaver’s Exile in Guild Wars 1 without changing your build.
Builds weren’t made for you take take any random skill you want to succeed. That was never the intended design. They were made to make builds to solve problems. Anyone who thinks one build in this game will do everything they want, probably isn’t familiar with Guild Wars 1.
Guild Wars 1 was called build wars for a reason. They toned it down a lot in this game, but it’s still there…and it should be. Saying I shouldn’t have to change my build is an opinion.
I disagree. Changing your build is how you learn and grow with the game.
the next xpac should be harder so people who really like autoattacking actually leave for real, because this stupid hate has been going on too long.
Dont say everybody or nobody btw, say i. Just because YOU want something does’t mean every player wants that.WildStar, which did what you ask here, is => over there, happily failing into oblivion because it turns out that y’all ask for this harder stuff, but you don’t like it when you get it.
I wish people would stop saying this. Wildstar had tons and tons of problems other then being difficult. As an example, in the early going, I couldn’t even play the game from Australia because the lag was so bad it was flat out unplayable. There were many many bugs. People complain about the bugs here, they should have played Wildstar at launch. The game needed probably another year in development before it was released. It was released way too early.
It’s true some people wouldn’t like the hard core nature, but there was a huge grind to get to the harder stuff that wasn’t fun at all.
There’s actually no evidence I can think of that Wildstar didn’t do well because it was hard core. Wildstar had all kinds of other issues.
you do not get your car, or house before the bank clears it. AC or no AC.
That’s true. But when I bought my house, the bank made it clear how long it would take.
I used to go for those 10 point dailies some days. I took a good hour to get 10 points, sometimes more. Now it takes ten minutes.
I think things are equitable the way they are. If the cap wasn’t in place, new people could never catch up on daily experience. But making it even easier, that wouldn’t sit well with me. New players get plenty veterans didn’t get. I mean I wasn’t getting 2 gold a day for doing 3 dailies.
No, the cap actually favours the veterans, as they no longer need to work hard in order to stay ahead.
…it takes less than 10 minutes to finish the daily now. While it took considerably more time to finish them (and get 10 AP) with any of the old systems. You can’t call spending 10 minutes to earn 10 AP “hard work”
but also because it was much easier to earn them then
To get 10 AP with the previous system to the one we have now it took considerably longer than now.
This is absolutely true. In the old days to get 10 achievement points, you had to do ten dailies. Now you can do 3 easy dailies for 10 achievement points. There were easier dailies back then, but doing ten of them meant not only doing PvE achievements but also PvP or WvW achievements.
Except that they all come with zones that take six months to make. People really do expect too much. If the story instances were all there was, they might well be faster, but Anet isn’t just releasing story instances. They’re expanding the world.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
Daily used to be set at 10k and was boosted up to 15k recently. Previously you could earn significantly more AP per day due to monthlies and separate daily rewards.
The daily system used to work as you want it to – You had tasks and each task gave AP. The more tasks you do the more AP you gain per day. However, Anet noted that this was very grindy and so they overhauled the system so that players need only complete 3 achievements to receive 10 AP. This means everyone receives the same amount of AP per day for doing dailies.
The idea behind the cap is so that players that have been playing since headstart do not get too far ahead (in terms of AP) of players just starting out. A difference will always be there, but a new player can’t expect to quickly catch up to a veteran.
This isn’t quite how I recall it. I believe the cap has always been a cumulative 15,000 cap between dailies and monthlies. It hasn’t been changed since it’s been introduced.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
It is for this reason of not wanting to put off more casual players, that the majority of MMOs introduce content designed to be challenging in a separate way than in the open world (Raids, Dungeons, etc.). Whether you believe that casual players are the majority or the minority (most studies and articles I’ve read say majority), they are still a significant portion of the base.
And specific to GW2 is the emphasis on the story which has been made inaccessible to many players due to difficulty. It makes zero sense to take the part of your game where you offer players lore and give them a sense of immersion in your game and block it off behind difficulty. Players shouldn’t have to try and find a way to experience the story in spite of the game mechanics, the story should be something the developers want everyone to experience easily.
The emphasis on Guild Wars 2 has always been the open world. Some of us, myself included, play this game because of that emphasis. I care less about instances than I care about open world. Therefore, I need open world end game. Without open world end game I wouldn’t personally be satisfied with the product.
Raids don’t do it for me. Dungeons don’t do it for me. So putting challenging content in instances doesn’t do it for me.
This game was advertised as a living breathing world. It centers on the world. I’m here for the world, not to be squirreled away in an instance, story or otherwise.
That’s why end game open world content is important to this game and why it doesn’t matter what other MMOs do. I’m not playing them for a reason.
Not sure what you’re saying Vayne. Even if there’s a majority for something it doesn’t mean everything. What really would anyway. Like you said, there’s alot of things that affected the lesser sale. (Some bigger than others, for example I don’t class a bad launch as a little thing but okay) That means a majority doesn’t mean everything either.
I just proposed that if a significant amount of people would drop the game, lets pick a random number like 20%. That would mean a minority, but it could also mean 20% loss of revenue. Which, while you’re right about it being a minority could very well mean the end of funding for Anet. (In this highly hypothetical case anyway)
Making it sound as simple the majority wanted higher difficulty in your example, and a few wouldnt also says basically nothing. Because how much higher or lower difficulty? How big a minority or majority? Not to mention that difficulty is so subjective, that a simple majority actually doesnt tell you anything. Its not that simple at all.
So yeah any individual majority means about as much as any individual fix.
What I’m saying is that if you don’t know why that 20% stopped, you can’t make changes to know you’ve kept them. There’s a concept in this thread that if HoT were easier more people would have stayed. No one knows that.
There definitely needs to be a bigger warning before purchase. When you buy a produce and get the product you expect to be able to use the product fully.
If I bought a car and the AC didn’t work for 4 days I’d be livid.
I understand why the restrictions are in place and I agree on the need for them, but that needs to be spelled out and sold to people who are buying the game.
Just because you feel strongly about something doesn’t mean you’re correct or representative of the majority.
Noone is really. There has been this focus on there not being a majority or being a minority in pretty much every argument. But it doesn’t really mean anything.
All that really matters is If it is a significant amount of people disliked HoT.
After 4 years, you don’t want to lose/disenfranchise a significant amount of your loyal players.
Actually it means everything. Saying a lot of people don’t like the expansion isn’t necessarily helpful if you don’t know why they didn’t. That’s the important bit.
If one person says it’s too hard and Anet makes it a lot easier, but more people like it hard, then that’s going to end up being a problem for a larger group of people.
I believe there were a lot of little things that ate away at expansion sales, not the least of which was the bad launch which is always a problem. Everything else just exacerbated the situation.
Did HoT sell less than expected? I believe it did. Does that mean any individual fix would have made it better?
There’s simply no way to know.
As you said – there was mention of it.
If a friend texts you some info do you also expect them to send a whatsapp, facebook msg, email, handwritten letter, leave a msg on your answering machine and mailbox and come by in person to make sure you got the msg?
Presumably my friends will contact me by a method they know I use. Anet doesn’t have that. I don’t use twitter. I don’t like twitter. I don’t care about twitter, and I only use Facebook grudgingly. I prefer email to my email address as a prime form of communication though friends can obviously call me.
If a friend tweets something or posts it on Facebook, I’m not likely to see it for a long long time…if ever. But my friends know that.
If Anet wants to communicate with people, putting it out in one place isn’t really good enough.
This is all unimportant, cause noone wants to join Dragon Watch. Since creation DS got zero new members, everyone we invited rejected the offer.
DW looks like an average half-dead MMO guild. Created by a hardened veteran, who became bored now and 95% of the time is not even online (Rythlock). The only active members are the girl who’s there only because of her guilt complex (Caith) and the nerd who knows everything but never goes out of the home town (Taimi). And player character, who just can’t leave this guild cause he has officer rights.
The irony will be complete if Braham’s Desteny Edge will be a guild that invites everyone, has like 100 active members, but everybody are just doing their personal business with zero in-guild communication and activities.
And yet Destiny’s Edge never had more than six members, and they’re one of the most famous guilds in the world.
I think the problem with HoT is the sudden spike in difficulty, especially for “new” players who go to HoT as fresh level 80s. Instead of tweaking the difficulty of HoT though, I’d say that tweaking the rest of the game is more important in the long run.
HoT comes with a level 80 boost which most players buying HoT (+ core) as their intro to the game are going to use right off.
This is true. I’ve seen a few players in my guild use the level 80 booster and some of them can’t handle HoT because they’ve leveled up a profession they don’t know and some of those people have left the game.
But out of the people I know who have used it, most of them get on fine in HoT, most with minimal help. It depends on the background of the specific gamer. There are people who came to play HOT because they heard it was harder, after being bored by core Tyria for a couple of years.
You can argue that it’s too late, and the horse has already left the stable, but that STILL doesn’t really indicate WHY the horse has left the stable. There are only theories here, being stated as facts.
I wouldn’t dignify most of the speculation as theories, nor even hypotheses. More like guesses skewed by Confirmation Bias.
It’s true, I’m absolutely certain myself that most people who stopped playing, stopped because they can’t bear the loss of Trahearne.
You can argue all day long, but in the end it’s all a numbers’ game for ANet, and I think they had their lesson learned for the next expansion.
You can already see that now in LS3. Compare the final fights in HoT or even LS2 episodes to current ones, for example.
It is always a number game for any company. That’s true. The argument is is what the numbers portend. Anet made changes to the living world which didn’t change the numbers at all. They’re not making more money now than they were before the living world came out.
You can argue that it’s too late, and the horse has already left the stable, but that STILL doesn’t really indicate WHY the horse has left the stable. There are only theories here, being stated as facts.
Doing some spore events solo is tough…as tough as many events in HoT even.
The Toxic Krait events are tougher IMO.
I guess I should go back and try them all again. I remember getting close to finishing one and have one of the last kraits rez the one I was about to finish and ending up wiping.
Plus, they have always (again imo) been a terrible effort:reward ratio, whether the reward is measured in loot or just fun.
Sure, but the toxic spore is nice though. It’s worth well over 10 silver, which is more than you get for any other dynamic event.
When you go to HOT as a new player, it should tell you straight out that this zone is difficult and the game should recommend content to do before you actually do HOT. It’s not unreasonable.
This game lacks a breadcrumb trail. As someone who has been here from the beginning, I didn’t find the jump from Living Story Season 2 to HOT to be that big. But not everyone has Living Story Season 2 and that’s a major problem. Even if people did, not everyone cares enough to play it.
HoT is meant to be end game content for max level characters. It’s supposed to challenge you. I think it might have been better to let people know in game, so they go in braced.
Guild Wars 2 the Musical….don’t tempt me. We’d all regret it. lol
How do people feel about the difficulty of the Maguuma Wastes maps? Dry Top and the Silverwastes were added after Core Tyria but before HoT, so it should have been the transition map, really. And you have to go through the Silverwastes to get to Verdant Brink anyway. Maybe this is the transition map people need, but keep overlooking because they just want to jump into the new expansion.
Not just that, but for people playing from the beginning, they often did those maps when they were new and packed. You don’t really learn much in a zerg with 50 other people. If you go back there later, that’s when it becomes more challenging.
Those maps are harder than the core maps to solo, but how many people solo them?
Solo, the Wastes are just not enjoyable. They were truly targeted to group play, even moreso than Maguuma maps, but I’d agree the difficulty feels in-between that of core and Maguuma.
Instead of nerfing the Heart, I’d rather want NCsoft increasing core Tyria’s difficulty. Maybe not to the level of the Heart, because Core should be accessible without ascended or elite specialization, but definitely overhauled so that full exotic players cannot rofltstomp champions anymore.
I think the only thing I have a hard time with in core Tyria, even before the xpac, was the legendaries. Anything below that and it was perfectly doable. It was boring.
They did that a bit with krait buff a long time ago and the toxic spore events, which are harder than typical core Tyria events. That’s another thing I forget.
Those events are in the game for along time, and people just skip them, then complain nothing in the open world teaches them how to do events. There are toxic spore events in Kessex, Gendarran, Brisban Wildlands, probably other zones I’m not remembering as well.
Doing some spore events solo is tough…as tough as many events in HoT even.
But you’re making the assumption and it’s a bold assumption that the reason they’re leaving is HOT difficulty.
This is wrong!
I specifically said that some players “find HoT unfun, grindy, unfriendly towards new players and simply not worth their time”. I even went on to say that “those players might be a small minority”.
I stopped playing for several reasons. Difficulty was not one, so why would I assume that to be the main reason?I actually doubt that even Anet knows why people stop playing and I’m surprised they don’t seem to ask players whose activitylevel suddenly drop from >50 hours to ~1 hour a month.
Bottom line is: HoT underperformed and f2p conversion is lower than expected!
The mantra: “You just need to keep doing something you dislike until you like it” clearly does not work in a highly competetive field.
Right the point is this post is about the game being unplayable solo. Enough people can play it solo to make that proposition a false one, even if some people can’t. But as always it’s a point of thresholds.
There are people who couldn’t play core Tyria solo either and complained about difficulty. Should we make the game easy enough for them? If we did, how many other people would leave.
That’s really the issue with this entire argument. The idea that people left because the game is too easy/hard or anything else is just a guess.
People seem to think that there opinions are shared by enough people to make a difference. But of course they have no way of knowing if the game was made just the way they liked it that things wouldn’t be worse now.
How do people feel about the difficulty of the Maguuma Wastes maps? Dry Top and the Silverwastes were added after Core Tyria but before HoT, so it should have been the transition map, really. And you have to go through the Silverwastes to get to Verdant Brink anyway. Maybe this is the transition map people need, but keep overlooking because they just want to jump into the new expansion.
Not just that, but for people playing from the beginning, they often did those maps when they were new and packed. You don’t really learn much in a zerg with 50 other people. If you go back there later, that’s when it becomes more challenging.
Those maps are harder than the core maps to solo, but how many people solo them?
Of course before HOT many people were complaining the game was too easy. And yes, HoT is not friendly to new players…because it’s not meant to be new player content. It’s meant to be end game content.
You may be 100% correct, yet the “problem” persists!
Some customers (however few) leave – Even fewer joins: This is a VERY real problem for any entity outside the non-profit realm!
edit: Heck, even non-profit org’s offer less with fewer followers ;-)
But you’re making the assumption and it’s a bold assumption that the reason they’re leaving is HOT difficulty. Maybe some people are leaving because WvW is no fun for them anymore. There’s a lot of complaints about WvW> Maybe some are leaving because they only like instanced content and raids aren’t enough. Maybe some are leaving becaues there’s not enough difficult content, and they’ve done it all. Maybe some are leaving because they don’t like the balance changes, or the elite spec for their profession.
Unless you can put a cause and effect like this is hard so many people leave as a definitive, and you can’t, then you can’t really make the argument you’re trying to make
Even MMOs that get easier lose players over time.
Edit: Not to mention there may be little correlation between the amount of money the gem store is producing and how many people are playing. The free to play crowd may represent reasonable numbers but may be less likely to buy stuff in the gem store, and players like me, who have everything, may not like the new stuff being introduced in the gem store. I spend less than I once did on this game.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
Theres a big differance between challenging content , and content that is fun and entertaining to do.
I found the Mordremoth fight doable, just, but it sure wasnt fun, and theres no way Ill do it again.
On the other hand other events in the game are fun even though they arnt challenging.
The AB meta event is like this , easy and fun.
Games must be entertaining, and that means providing content that people are happy to do , and enjoy doing it,such that they will do it again.
The problem is there is no objective definition of fun. I don’t like the AB meta. I don’t find it fun. I found the last story more fun than the AB meta. Mind you the last story needs adjustment to be truly fun, but the AB meta simply annoys me.
Solo’d all of HoT Story, and everything from Living World Season 3.. so far.. what’s the problem?
Well good for you!
One problem is that some players (unlike you) find HoT unfun, grindy, unfriendly towards new players and simply not worth their time when other games simply are more welcoming to their needs and expectations.
While those players might be a small minority it adds to THE problem: This game loses more players than it attracts.Fewer players = Less money to develop what you like = Problem! Got it?
Of course before HOT many people were complaining the game was too easy. And yes, HoT is not friendly to new players…because it’s not meant to be new player content. It’s meant to be end game content.
The real point to me is that this thread is called hot is unsoloable, which is very very different from saying I can’t solo HoT. That’s a very different statement.
You need to have knowledge of your class and some small degree of skill (yes, small) to solo HoT. Again not every hero point, but to get around solo and to get to where people are doing things. And it’s not intuitive, it takes time to learn.
There are always people that will start a book find it not interesting and close it before the first chapter, but some books are fantastic if you stay with them. Many people have felt that about HOT. The more you play it the better you get.
Generally I’ve found the people who like it least aren’t people who can’t play it. They’re people who can’t play it but don’t want to because all they want to do is get their mastery points so they can play the game, rather than playing the game to get their mastery points.
HoT has entertaining and complex event chains. It has interesting dynamics. It has maps that make you think and not everyone is going to like that. That why AB is so good for most people. It’s less twisted.
But why shouldn’t this game have a couple of zones that are more complex?
“This chicken is too hot.” Obviously I mean “for me”.
But you’re not just saying for you, are you? Because in another post, you claim new people will buy the game and they’ll come here and make the same complaints. You believe most people feel this way or you wouldn’t have said that.
And I’ve yet to see any evidence of that.
There’s a handful of people in this thread saying HoT is too hard, a handful saying it’s not too hard and a handful saying it was too hard but I learned how to do it.
I loved the final battles. They were difficult but not terribly difficult. I beat all of them on my first try without researching them at all. Ran through them again with an alt and had the same results(aside from one bugged run). It comes down to understanding mechanics and responding to them more than anything. Also don’t go in with a 1 dimensional build. In general when soloing I tend to make sure I have good ranged and melee options as well as some solid cleansing/healing/mobility.
I don’t see an issue with them being hard…I mean it is essentially a boss of the game. Why should it be easy? The only issue I have with them is they are still relatively buggy. Going in to what can be a really lengthy boss fight and dying due to a bug can be really frustrating. If you are unable to beat it try adjusting your build/strategy or round up a bit of help.
I don’t understand why people think that if someone says that a fight is “too hard” that means they are asking for it to be “easy”. There IS an entire range of difficulty between those two extremes, FYI.
I agree with this. Though I have no trouble doing Heart and Minds, I think it’s overtuned for a personal story. And I never said it was easy. It has several issues which make it hard for people who say are clickers instead of mouse turners and keyboard users and yes, everyone should be able to finish the story.
One of the issues is that you have very little time to figure stuff out and not everyone likes to repeat stuff again and again. So the updrafts, which aren’t updrafts they’re spouts and have to be run into instead of jumped into (like every updraft in the game), there’s no time to figure that out and then you die. Die a few times it becomes unnecessarily punishing.
But my least favorite feature is the penalty box. If you’re teaming up with people and they can’t keep up you’re doing it alone.
I know this instance is too hard by the number of times I’m either in the penalty box, or more often, finishing the mission on my own.
I think the instance should be made easier, and given a challenge mote for people who want something harder.
The fact that we still have topics like this 1.5 years after release means that HoT did something very wrong, there’s no point in defending it and trying to find excuses.
Yes, HoT had a very steep difficulty increase to address the vocal minority that was crying that the game is too easy for them. In return that screwed up the majority of the casual players, since ANet decided to treat all players the same instead of focusing and splitting the content to different kinds of player groups.
Every single game I’ve ever played a year after it’s out has had people complaining about it, including Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall. Only that there was no official forum stopped it from being as public.
People complained about the introduction of heroes in Guild Wars 1 for years after, saying how heroes ruined the social aspect of the game and people didn’t have to team any more. That doesn’t mean heroes weren’t well done or that most people didn’t like them.
If you believe, seriously believe, that complains about something a year and a half after it happened is an indication of anything at all, I’m not sure what to tell you. This has not been my experience however.
There will always be a percentage of disenfranchised players in any MMO, and they will often vocally complain.
It doesn’t make them some sort of majority however.
You bring up a good point about GW1, I personally loved the addition of Hero’s. Folks can (and will) complain about the “Social Aspect” but truth be known this gave a sector of players who “prefer” to play solo or in smaller groups the ability to still play, still be successful, and to just have fun.
Something else GW1 did I would like to see added would be (as I’m sure you remember) the ability to play a map in Hard Mode once you finished on regular. I think this could possible solve several issues in regards to the “too hard or too easy” argument.
Actually I don’t believe it would solve anything in this game. Just remember Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. I didn’t need people to do stuff.
People are complaining now about not enough people to do certain events in HoT. They’re not correct, but let’s take it into the future. Hard mode would double the number of zones. You’d halve the player base in each zone. It’s exactly the thing Anet wouldn’t want to do.
I think that the real answer is that you have harder zones and people play the zones to their level of comfort. I don’t believe most people aren’t capable of playing or learning HoT.
I think most people are attached to the way they do things/have always done things, and don’t like change.
But in MMOs changes in inevitable.
There are things I don’t like about HoT as well (raids cough) but you know, I’m not the only one here, and a lot of people do like them.
I think it would resolve most of the “Too Hard or Too Easy” issues since they could choose the map they wanted, and if you think about it they wouldn’t need addidtional servers because it would be the same number of players just split between hard and normal.
It would also allow players to learn the mechanics better then proceed to more difficult content if they chose.
We know most people will gravite toward the easier mode. That wouldn’t leave enough people to do the hard mode. And this game requires numbers for certain things.
Right now I can call out on maps to get hero points. But what if there was an easy mode. It’s not that I can’t do the hard mode, but why would I? What reason? That’s the issue. If the rewards were significantly better, the players who want that easy mode would complain and if the rewards aren’t significantly better, there would be less people doing hard mode, because why would they? |
If you want your hero points fast to unlock your elite spec, you’d do it the easiest way possible.
In a game that requires numbers for meta events, this would not work. This didn’t happen in Guild Wars 1.
Then you’d have people who wanted the more challenging mode being shafted by everyone taking the easy route.
You see this in dungeons all the time when the community does stuff that’s borderline exploit because it’s easy or profitable and people who want to do the content the “real” way, the way it was intended, end up screwed.
The fact that we still have topics like this 1.5 years after release means that HoT did something very wrong, there’s no point in defending it and trying to find excuses.
Yes, HoT had a very steep difficulty increase to address the vocal minority that was crying that the game is too easy for them. In return that screwed up the majority of the casual players, since ANet decided to treat all players the same instead of focusing and splitting the content to different kinds of player groups.
Every single game I’ve ever played a year after it’s out has had people complaining about it, including Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall. Only that there was no official forum stopped it from being as public.
People complained about the introduction of heroes in Guild Wars 1 for years after, saying how heroes ruined the social aspect of the game and people didn’t have to team any more. That doesn’t mean heroes weren’t well done or that most people didn’t like them.
If you believe, seriously believe, that complains about something a year and a half after it happened is an indication of anything at all, I’m not sure what to tell you. This has not been my experience however.
There will always be a percentage of disenfranchised players in any MMO, and they will often vocally complain.
It doesn’t make them some sort of majority however.
You bring up a good point about GW1, I personally loved the addition of Hero’s. Folks can (and will) complain about the “Social Aspect” but truth be known this gave a sector of players who “prefer” to play solo or in smaller groups the ability to still play, still be successful, and to just have fun.
Something else GW1 did I would like to see added would be (as I’m sure you remember) the ability to play a map in Hard Mode once you finished on regular. I think this could possible solve several issues in regards to the “too hard or too easy” argument.
Actually I don’t believe it would solve anything in this game. Just remember Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. I didn’t need people to do stuff.
People are complaining now about not enough people to do certain events in HoT. They’re not correct, but let’s take it into the future. Hard mode would double the number of zones. You’d halve the player base in each zone. It’s exactly the thing Anet wouldn’t want to do.
I think that the real answer is that you have harder zones and people play the zones to their level of comfort. I don’t believe most people aren’t capable of playing or learning HoT.
I think most people are attached to the way they do things/have always done things, and don’t like change.
But in MMOs changes in inevitable.
There are things I don’t like about HoT as well (raids cough) but you know, I’m not the only one here, and a lot of people do like them.
The fact that we still have topics like this 1.5 years after release means that HoT did something very wrong, there’s no point in defending it and trying to find excuses.
Yes, HoT had a very steep difficulty increase to address the vocal minority that was crying that the game is too easy for them. In return that screwed up the majority of the casual players, since ANet decided to treat all players the same instead of focusing and splitting the content to different kinds of player groups.
Every single game I’ve ever played a year after it’s out has had people complaining about it, including Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall. Only that there was no official forum stopped it from being as public.
People complained about the introduction of heroes in Guild Wars 1 for years after, saying how heroes ruined the social aspect of the game and people didn’t have to team any more. That doesn’t mean heroes weren’t well done or that most people didn’t like them.
If you believe, seriously believe, that complains about something a year and a half after it happened is an indication of anything at all, I’m not sure what to tell you. This has not been my experience however.
There will always be a percentage of disenfranchised players in any MMO, and they will often vocally complain.
It doesn’t make them some sort of majority however.
You mean something like this?
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Special_Forces_Training_Area