Guild Wars 2

Faux.1937:

Vayne.8563:

The new content should be removed for the same reasons that old content in most MMOs is completely dead. Anet doesn’t want to keep dividing their audience further and further. Right now it’s hard enough for some people to get dungeon groups for existing dungeons (with some exceptions).

Once you start adding in newer dungeons, and then more new dungeons…remember they’re coming out with new content now every 2 weeks. What’s going to happen in a year after 26 patches?

Could you imagine what Dragon Ball would be after six months with ten new minigames out? No one would be there at all. You’d have one guy, probably me, standing in the Dragon Ball arena, all by myself, waiting for someone to come. It’s already happening with Keg Brawl. If you want to play you’d better go on daily days because the rest of the time, it’s dead.

Too much content splits the playerbase too finely and then people will complain the world is dead because they can’t get a group.

No one does Dungeons now well some, b.c they are far to hard/long and annoying for the crap reward, no one wants to do AC/CM and Arah 20+ times to get armor when they can just farm CoF for 3-5hours and out right buy armor with same stats from TP those 20+ runs from CM/AC will take x3 or x4 the time and effort than CoF, Hotw or SE.

The Minigames/activities in this game arnt well made, myself and all the gw1 players that remember the old racing games and dragon ball arena find the new games/activities to be lacking and dont do them for those reasons.

You can still have the new content stay in the game, same with mini games, even if you could only do them for one weekend each month I still be happy with that. Just have the dungeons (new dungeons and events) on a rotation for weekend events. Not the full even like living story, just the new content.

There are many ways to have them in game and still make the main world popular.

How would you like it if Xbox, PS or Steam gave you 10 games to play and only those 10 for the next 5 years, then they say “we are giving you a new game ever 2 weeks but at the end of 2 weeks you can never play them ever again”…. does that sound fun to you?

What about he 70% of the players that are not hardcore into the game and have lives, they will be missing out on all these events and dungeons/mini games.

Yes that sounds fun to me, because variety can be fun too, where doing the old stuff over and over is not fun to me. Different strokes I guess.

I’d rather not watch the same TV episode over and over, I’d rather watch a new one. I’d rather not do the same dungeon over and over I’d rather play a new one. Once I’ve played it a few times, I don’t CARE if I ever play it again.

Why would I?

Kaaboose.3897:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

‘(Feel free to sub in any Show/Book/Game/Media/Etc. if you don’t like Game Of Thrones!)’

I would like to insert ‘EastEnders’, ‘Days of Our Lives’, ‘All My Children’ or any other soap opera. They were pretty successful back in the day with that model. =)

This is the only reply so far that brought up any positive light on temporary content actually working! I can see the slogans now: Guild Wars 2! The soap opera of MMOS!

But seriously, Claiming temporary content is good because it makes people play it just highlights the point I made about creating a sense of urgancy to make the content seem more compelling. If a developer can’t make a mode that can hold a players interest then maybe it’s not that good to begin with.
I could be wrong since I’ve stoped playing WoW but I’d wager players still do Warsong Gultch and Alterac Valley, Mode that were put in 8 years ago.

And people still do WvW, but that’s PvP. In PvE content, most old dungeons and raids in WoW, by comparison to new stuff especially, are dead. People don’t need or want them, because they want to get the new stuff.

So don’t compare PvP content to PvE content, because it’s not the same.

Primernova.5791:

I don’t think I have ever played an MMO without a PTR, seems silly not to let the players flood through and find the issues.

The only place I have ever seen it be kind of a problem was with world firsts in WoW, and even then that was very debatable.

It’s only silly if you have enough players to test both the test server and populate the main server. In a game like Guild Wars 2, where you need people in the open world for group events, and what have you,. it wouldn’t be smart to siphon people out of the real world.

Shadow Blade.1324:

Vayne.8563:

Sorry that I have to provide a basic English lesson here, but this had NOTHING to do at all with the definition of grind. It does have to do with the definition of fun. Obviously to anyone, fun is subjective. No game can make something fun for EVERYONE. It’s not possible. There’ll always be someone who finds something unfun that others find fun, so the subject if fun is not on trial here.

That leaves us with grind. Grind has lots of different definitions. Therefore, I don’t try to define it once it’s ALREADY defined in a piece of writing. That’s because it’s up to the writer to define how he’s using it. That was done here. It’s very specific and it’s very obvious. The only people who can say otherwise are people who are trying to overlay their definition of grind over the type of grind that Colin is talking about. There’s no mystery here. Most people get this. The people who don’t are starting off with an attachement to what they think grind is.

If Colin says: In most games there’s this boring grind to get to the fun stuff, then when he mentions grind a few seconds later, he’s talking about that grind. The boring grind to get to the fun stuff. He’s not talking about gear or end game. He’s talking about the boring grind to get to the fun stuff.

You don’t have to be an editor to understand this. You shouldn’t have to be an editor. The ONLY people who say it means otherwise are people taking it out of context.

The more you post about it, the more obvious the truth becomes. Feel free to keep going.

your reading comprehension is terrible, read what i wrote, not what you think i wrote
this isn’t so much a basic English lesson as a rant that doesn’t address any of the points.
if this is the quality of your lessons, I’m glad your not employed as a teacher.

He does not define grind, if you look at my post you can see several instances of the definition of grinding in this context, unless your arguing hes using the definition “To crush, pulverize, or reduce to powder by friction” or similar then its clear hes using the definition i cited from 3 separate sources. that is the definition PERIOD. he uses combat as an example of grind not the definition. he broadly referred to grind in other games. as what you do to get to the fun stuff. that is also not the definition of grind, it is a statement of where you find grind in other games.

if fun is subjective that means gearing and endgame can be fun too, understand?
that means when hes talking about grinding to get to the fun stuff hes also talking about fun in those instances. and any other instance where there may be a grind to get to the fun stuff, he does not at any point in the video state he is excluding areas of the game from this statement. you are projecting that.

where are the sources you cite? do they even exist? you repeatedly state you have them on hand yet when i asked you for them you have failed to provide them. if you have the links please do post them.

Being an editor has nothing to do with this, as i stated before that has ZERO bearing on this discussion, it does not support your arguments despite what you may think. it actually gives the appearance that your arguments cant stand on their own merit so you need to use that as a crutch. to attempt to convince readers you may know what your talking about. i have yet to see any evidence that you are a reliable authority on this in even the most miniscule sense of the term. so kindly stay on topic and stop giving irrelevant details of your personal life to strangers on the internet

If you’d said you were a Lexicographer that might have had some bearing on this but your not. so i will reiterate; look in the dictionary, you will find something similar to the examples i gave.

Repeatedly broadly stereotyping everyone who disagrees with you isn’t helping your argument, it just makes you look petulant.

Your attempts to derail this topic into arguments on semantics aside the OP is correct in the 3 statements indicating that the design philosophy has veered sharply, this is easily seen in the repeated use of monotonous repetitive tasks that you have to grind through to progress living story meta achievements which are further exacerbated by time gating.

You’re reaching. He defines grind by saying that you have this grind to get to the fun stuff. The stuff you do to get to the fun stuff is the grind. This isn’t a theory. It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact, backed up by countless other interviews Anet have done where they’ve gone into detail about this.

They’re talking about leveling up to get to exciting encounters nothing more. You can insist it’s not defined till the cows come home, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was, nor the fact that it was subsequently backed up in other interviews.

Give it up….because this is one battle you can’t win.

Nurgle.6597:

the whole game is obsolete, 0 new PERMANENT content

This doesn’t make a game obsolete. It may be something you don’t like, but clearly a lot of people are enjoying it. I don’t know about your server but every patch day, I end up on overflows. Someone must be playing the content and probably some of those people are enjoying it.

Maybe some people feel that leaving content around to get stale, so it can sit there unplayed, is a good idea. I know from experience how much old content gets played in other games. So if Anet left everything in, a year down the road, you’d just have a bloated game, most of which would be ignored by the player base.

Leaving everything in would bloat this game needlessly.

The new content should be removed for the same reasons that old content in most MMOs is completely dead. Anet doesn’t want to keep dividing their audience further and further. Right now it’s hard enough for some people to get dungeon groups for existing dungeons (with some exceptions).

Once you start adding in newer dungeons, and then more new dungeons…remember they’re coming out with new content now every 2 weeks. What’s going to happen in a year after 26 patches?

Could you imagine what Dragon Ball would be after six months with ten new minigames out? No one would be there at all. You’d have one guy, probably me, standing in the Dragon Ball arena, all by myself, waiting for someone to come. It’s already happening with Keg Brawl. If you want to play you’d better go on daily days because the rest of the time, it’s dead.

Too much content splits the playerbase too finely and then people will complain the world is dead because they can’t get a group.

We know for a fact they have one, because it’s been referred to. Anet has said straight out that there’s a server that they test things on, and that it’s constantly in a state of flux. That they’re trying new things out on it all the time. In fact, we know some journalists that have been invited to that server to see content, prior to it being released.

I think too much temporary content will harm Guild Wars 2 for a certain percentage of the playerbase, but I don’t think it’s the majority of the player base.

In a recent interview, Chris Whitside said the population is growing and from the way things look on patch days, I don’t really doubt it (though how much it’s growing might be a matter of some conjecture).

I think a lot of people, maybe even most people, just want busywork. Stuff to do. Something to occupy their time without too much stress. I think that’s what Anet is delivering. It’s certainly what Farmville delivered and that had more players than any game in the history of games.

I think the living story is a smart way forward, because I don’t see other games doing anything like it. Wildstar will have to compete with a lot of games….not so much Guild Wars 2. They’re traveling their own road.

That will definitely lose them some of their player base, and probably gain them some other types of players as well. I mean some people bought Guild Wars 2 just to play SAB. It wasn’t my thing but some people really loved it.

As always, it’s very easy to assume our own point of view is in the majority, but very often it’s not.

Fairymore.8609:

Vayne.8563:

1. The reason, in my opinion, temporary content is temporary..particularly things like dungeons, is because after a month or two, those dungeons would take traffic away from everything else. Anet wants people in the open world, not in a handful of dungeons. People who like dungeons and come from other games were dungeons are central don’t get this at all. Dungeons aren’t really central in this game. Anet wants the world to be bigger than the dungeons. Leaving the dungeons in divides the playerbase. They saw this with fractals. Everyone complains there are less people in the world. Right. Because five people at a time in a dungeon means less people in the open world.

I liked your other points but I am quoting you here because I believe this is what the Devs promised – to bring us back into the world. If I may let me recap:
-F&F was good at this because it brought us back to Wayfarer and Diessa where we had achievements to do, refugees that needed various things, and the entrance and exit to the MF dungeon.
-SouthSun was their best attempt because it (for a short while at least) resurrected, an otherwise waste of development time, SouthSun Cove. New events and a world boss.
-Dragon Bash and Sky Pirates are the worst because they took place in what is already the most popular area to park your character…Lions Arch. Dragon Bash is a holiday so I excuse that but Sky Pirates being exclusive to LA and even having its dungeon located there too is ridiculous design wise and lore wise(how do you explain a base being built in LA without the Vigil, The Whisper, or the Priory not to mention the Lion guard noticing??)
-Bazzar of the Four Winds is out tomorrow but it has its own little area exclusively for itself. This is probably the worst because its taking place outside of the world completely. In a vacuum if you will.

Below I have attached a map of the world and I have colored the areas which I feel could use some attention. 12 areas that I never visit, at all. After World Completion these areas might as well have dropped off the map. I was pretty generous too as I only went to Blazeridge Steppes tonight to help guildies with the world boss, I go to field of ruins because its usually empty and i can farm coffers, and I put Southsun Cove because I went once to check out the new content but I havent been back since.

These places can use a make over, use some new events, new world bosses, new vistas, hearts, races, jumping puzzles, what have you. Why couldnt they just build the floating Bazzar above one of these empty areas? Would bring players back to the area and at the very least revitalize some already existing events. No actually that wouldnt be the very least, the very least would be that it would get players to remember that this particular area exists at all.

I think that getting people back into the world is important but I don’t think it’s so important that it’s all you do. Whenever any new map opens up, it’s going to be widely used when it opens up…until the next thing.

The important thing is to keep areas jumping by having lots of people in them. You’re not going to be able to beef up 12 slower zones all at the same time, because that would mean dividing the playerbase 12 ways and it will show.

What Anet is trying to do is traffic control. Drive people to where people are. Some months there’ll be people in the open world and some months there’ll be people in new instances.

I don’t even know if this new instance is permanent, but it looks like a lot of fun. And I for one can’t wait to try the racing game. That looks like a blast.

The thing is, the Living Story is going to get us grouped together wherever this is. I’m certainly all in favor of new zones, and they shouldn’t not make new zones to keep people in old ones.

As long as the Living Story can keep traffic flowing, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.

frostflare.6390:

Vayne.8563:

There are two points I’d like to make, regarding recent posts in this thread.

snip——

It’s a matter of personal taste, but I’ll never play a subscription game again, because subscription games are designed to slow you down….far more than a game like Guild Wars 2 is.

I dissagree-At least to a point. Anet would never convert this game to a sub-fee game. Ever-It won’t happen. If they did the backlash, and the damage it would cause there company would be irrepressible. Simply put, anet made its name on being a Buy Once, Play forever with a cash store. Now-That said, It sort of is moot to compare Gw2 to a sub based game. Yea Sub games were horrible, but This is not much better. A cash shop is great-But I question HOW did anet have a cash shop that kept gw1 alive as long as it did(and still alive mind you)?-Yet never once did you need to get out your credit card to look decent. You had to pay for expansions(BUT THEY WERE STAND-ALONE GAMES! All but 1) Anet made bank in gw1, So I’m not sure why they seem to be so “strapped” in gw2.

The game feels like a starving wasteland. The cash shop is overbearing on the players . It screams with the temp content “I’m your only hope!” And even then its not a guarantee. Part of business is SUSTAINING business. Anet Should want to make players “want” to play the game. Also people spend more money when they want to, not when they feel they have to. Business is not difficult-people are like sheep. If you poison the herd though-There goes your cash cow. Anet does not seem to grasp this.

They truly don’t. I can’t tell you how many players I used to love to group with who wont come back because of Rng boxes. Or players who really loved a temp content and now its gone forever. I know I myself bitter because F&F actually carried a very important and interesting STAT combo in it-which btw as far as anyone knows is never coming back. My server is poisonous, They warn new players to leave the game, and spit and hiss. The game is not in a bad state yet-But Cash shop has a very STRONG bearing on everything in this game. Not just statistically or cosmically. But The environment that players interact with each other in is altered by it too. There is a reason why many Ramshackle towns fight, and few get along. People get bitter, and angry when they feel starved and stressed. For a casual player like me-I am stressed from gw2. Part of my enjoyment is looking good. I step out for 2 weeks-AND BAM missed something forever. The armor skins, the weapon skins, the dungeons Those need to be permanent. They make new players look at the game and say “WOW-the developers have just made this game better and better, meaning more for me to do”. Rather then “WOW-I wish I was there for that event a year ago-I feel bummed now”

It is a oxymoron that anet says “Living story is to enhance the core game” and yet nothing is effect the core pve game other then mechanic overhauls. It dissipates in 2 weeks and is gone forever. The core never keeps it-It never strengthens it. I’m sorry, its a weak excuse that I can’t believe smart players buy into. Its not even the expansions. Anet could do living story for 10 more years, and maybe it will be great. Yet they are using the living story to sell the cash shop-and through this they are poisoning the environment. They dump sludge in the river that powers the building they work in-I only question how long till the sludge dams it. The cash shop is great-If people want to buy from it. This last update had so little range it was great. They even offered armor straight buy. Awesome. I hope anet continues this-and stops the cash shop from being the most important aspect of the game. Where it sits right now. All is balanced off it-even skill balance. Anet seems to be pulling away from that-I’m glad. I just hope it stays like that.

It’s funny. I don’t find the cash shop overbearing. I buy what I want and don’t buy what I don’t want. It’s called self-control. I need nothing in that cash shop to play the game with the arguable exception of bank tabs. Everything is is optional. I can buy stuff if I want, but I don’t have to.

It’s not like Lotro where quests and areas are completely locked off if you don’t pay. Where entire professions are locked off if you don’t pay. It’s just your mindset that makes it overbearing, which I would say is your problem.

When you have to pay for content (not skins), I’d agree that it’s getting into murky water. but paying for skins that don’t give you an advantage?

That’s sort of what cash shops are for.

morrolan.9608:

Vayne.8563:

It’s a matter of personal taste, but I’ll never play a subscription game again, because subscription games are designed to slow you down….far more than a game like Guild Wars 2 is.

This is wrong, it is quicker to get BiS equipment in games like SWTOR and WoW. We’ve had the evidence cited on this forum before.

Quicker to get BIS equipment has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how fast it is to travel around Tyria, which on SWToR and WoW would normally take you considerably longer. You ever try to craft 150 things in WoW? Get up. get a cup of coffee, stretch, because you’re going to be a while. And getting BIS gear also depends often on luck of drops. It’s not JUST BIS gear is the BIS gear you want.

You’re confusing grind with something like time delayed stuff, which I have no problem with.

The fact is, you can level in a day through crafting in the game from level 1. Try that in WoW.

Shadow Blade.1324:

Vayne.8563:

Out of context means taking one line from the whole and assigning it a definition. I’ve done that nowhere. But people quoting the line “we don’t want people to grind in Guild Wars 2” are most certainly taking that line out of context. How do you know?

Because they’re ignoring the reset of the paragraph around the sentence. That’s the definition of taking something out of context.

snip

You can argue till you’re blue in the face and it won’t change the fact that the language is supporting what I’m saying.

the language doesn’t support what your saying, you don’t even support what your saying from post to post you say It’s not about certain grinds , but also that fun is subjective and they don’t want you to grind to get to the fun.

So either fun is subjective and it is in fact about all grinds to get to the fun or fun isn’t subjective and its about the grind to get to what you personally consider fun. please clarify what you mean as you are contradicting yourself.

snip

The Little Oxford Dictionary of Current English:

noun grinding; colloquial hard dull work

Free Dictionary:

4. Informal A laborious task, routine, or study
laborious adj.
1. requiring much work, exertion, or perseverance: a laborious undertaking.
2. characterized by or exhibiting excessive effort; labored.
3. industrious.

Merriam-Webster:

4: drudge; especially : to study hard <grind for an exam>
drudge
intransitive verb
: to do hard, menial, or monotonous work
transitive verb
: to force to do hard, menial, or monotonous work

You can try to redefine it all you like it the definition stands. grinding is not just combat or leveling. grinding is ANY task that fits the definition, and many of the monotonous tasks that gate progress fit the definition. kill hundreds of X or “gather 100,000 candy” as an example.
Just because you personally find it fun and it doesn’t feel like grinding to you, does not mean it is not a grind.

Vayne.8563:

There are other interviews you can quote where Anet talked about other things, maybe, but the “grind” quote in the manifesto is Anet talking about not going through the boring stuff to get to the fun stuff. It’s not about gear grind or end game grind or any other grind.

I see so according to you gear cant be fun or end game etc? they were talking about Any grind. Anything that can be fun which as you say is subjective can have a grind to get to, not everything does, thankfully, but its featuring more and more along with time gating to artificially extend the amount of time it takes to do anything.

Vayne.8563:

And yes, I can produce interviews were Anet has said that there would be things to grind for for people who enjoy that play style.

Please do and link to all those "Clarifications " you mentioned previously if they exist,
there is a BIG difference between grinding for an optional title that saves you money on lock picks or improves some optional skills from hundreds that are available. and grinding for best in slot gear that is also time gated and not available without some form of grinding.

Sorry that I have to provide a basic English lesson here, but this had NOTHING to do at all with the definition of grind. It does have to do with the definition of fun. Obviously to anyone, fun is subjective. No game can make something fun for EVERYONE. It’s not possible. There’ll always be someone who finds something unfun that others find fun, so the subject if fun is not on trial here.

That leaves us with grind. Grind has lots of different definitions. Therefore, I don’t try to define it once it’s ALREADY defined in a piece of writing. That’s because it’s up to the writer to define how he’s using it. That was done here. It’s very specific and it’s very obvious. The only people who can say otherwise are people who are trying to overlay their definition of grind over the type of grind that Colin is talking about. There’s no mystery here. Most people get this. The people who don’t are starting off with an attachement to what they think grind is.

If Colin says: In most games there’s this boring grind to get to the fun stuff, then when he mentions grind a few seconds later, he’s talking about that grind. The boring grind to get to the fun stuff. He’s not talking about gear or end game. He’s talking about the boring grind to get to the fun stuff.

You don’t have to be an editor to understand this. You shouldn’t have to be an editor. The ONLY people who say it means otherwise are people taking it out of context.

The more you post about it, the more obvious the truth becomes. Feel free to keep going.

AlietteFaye.7316:

Krosslite.1950:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Krosslite.1950:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Negatives:
1. Content is removed, no permanent additions (Happened in the past we don’t know how content will be addressed in the future) NON ISSUE
2. Content lacks a cohesive story in order to allow people to jump in at any time (as per design so new players will not fill left out or lose) NON ISSUE
3. Rewards are rushed, undyeable, not varied between armor types, recycled skins, clipping issues. (tons of new armor, weapons skins and other rewards due tomorrow) NON ISSUE
4. New “maps” are rushed and subpar, lacking poi’s, WPs, vistas, SP’s and hearts. Maps are either removed after the event and if they do remain they are disjointed and not connected to other maps thus ending up ghost towns. (what the heck are you talking about. Only one new map was South Sun Cove)
5. No new races, classes, skills, instead we get lots of expensive RNG boxes to continue funding the game. (content like this should never be expected in the first year of ANY MMO) once again NON ISSUE

Are you even playing this game or just trying to start something. Your statements are not factual and full of wholes. Please research before you post are at least play the game.

Sorry I don’t live on promises and hopes. They’d had 10 months to do it.

Let me show you another MMO

Star Wars: TOR Launched Dec 20 2011
Their first expansion launches April 14 2013

That is one year and 4 months. This is in line with 90% of the MMOs that have ever been release. To expect anything in the first year of an MMO is like really living in a fantasy world.

Anet has put these guys to shame. So your entire threat is; as was not only pointed out by me but others; totally nonfactual and inflammatory.

Please don’t bring up SWTOR as a defense for Guild Wars 2.. SWTOR was definitely considered a massive failure for all of its shortcomings.

Okay how about Rift then. Came out in March 2011, and didn’t have an expansion till November 2012.

That’s a year and nine months by my count (and most people consider it to be the most successful MMO of recent years).

Azjenco.9425:

Why not try this:

Get a whole lot of gamers (say 600-750, not sure) to sign up for testing. Let them agree to an NDA and have a set period (the entire week after the latest patch went live, maybe?). The chosen players can go crazy and play their hearts out during that week, submitting their finds.

When the time comes for the next patch, ANet can again invite the players they liked, while excluding those they didn’t (like info leakers or players who didn’t log the agreed upon hours). Also they invite new players, and keeping the ones they’re building a trusting relationship with.

Wouldn’t something along those lines work?

Anet already had this on their alpha server.

tigirius.9014:

Nurvus.2891:

@Vayne
They specifically say:
“We just don’t want players to grind in GW2.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35BPhT-KI1E#t=1m40s

I’m not twisting their words.
I’m not quoting them out of context either.

We grind dynamic events. Cycles of dynamic events, even.
We grind dungeons.
We grind fractals.
We are encouraged to repeat tasks.

And to clarify, grinding becomes more apparent when all your effort is poorly rewarded, such that you must repeat the task.
If I want a certain item skin, I must do a certain Dungeon X times, a different path each time.

ANet doesn’t need White Knights, they need people to properly help them improve the game as much as possible.
If ANet gives in to the requests of fickle players who move to the newest MMO, they will get nowhere.

@Devata
With or without the ( ), what you posted has nothing to do with the differences between what ANet promised vs what they gave us.

@Siphaed
1) What I loved about GW1 is a matter of gaming concept.
Trash loot being a given in MMOs is utter nonsense. It just introduces coin into the game at no cost and hurts the economy.
Trash loot is called Trophies in GW2.
Trophies existed in GW1. They could be sold as trash to vendors.
However, there were collectors. So there was no item with the sole purpose of being vendored.
It is a silly concept that no game needs.

2) Grinding is not a matter of content.
It’s a matter of activity.
As an example, fights that require you to do more than bash enemy skulls, are a good thing.
The current combat system is built in a way that makes it very difficult for the game to not feel grindy.
A few professions break this mold due bundles, etc, but for the most part, it’s extremely repetitive combat, both from the character’s and encounter’s perspective.

3) Hypocritical?
I am criticizing the fact that the way dynamic events are balanced encourage grinding.
The fact there are “dynamic events with phat loots” is part of the problem.
I refuse to rotate/grind the “phat loot” DEs.

I want every activity to present itself as more than viable – to be attractive in terms of effort vs time vs investment vs risk vs reward.
Anything you do, if you do it well, should feel rewarding.

I agree with you honestly Vayne has taken what he’s said out of context. What he considers fun is the grind apparently and continues to support the arguments that A: the game doesn’t have grind despite what’s obvious to everyone else and B: one should play the game for the fun of it, who needs rewards.

What he fails to realize here is by having such a stranglehold on the economy, by making the rewards system less than, and by not allowing even their most basic drops have any value (greens, blues) they are doing just that causing a grind.

Further he uses the quote talking about combat being boring by swinging a sword, and swinging it again, well having played since launch I can assure you and him that this is exactly what’s happening with their skill system. So much emphasis is being placed on the #1 skills and nothing else. They need to increase the overall damage of the 2-5 skills and make a #1 skill a finisher at most to fix this problem. In other games one has lots of choices to use for skills, when you shorten that skill list down you have to make sure the skills balance properly so that we’re not doing #1 #1 #1 so not only is it a grind to repeat events in the lack-o-rewards system they have now but the combat is also severely lacking due to the #1 skill focused design.

Out of context means taking one line from the whole and assigning it a definition. I’ve done that nowhere. But people quoting the line “we don’t want people to grind in Guild Wars 2” are most certainly taking that line out of context. How do you know?

Because they’re ignoring the reset of the paragraph around the sentence. That’s the definition of taking something out of context.

If I said to you: In most games you have this boring grind to get to the fun stuff and shortly after say: We don’t want people to grind in Guild Wars 2, there’s clearly a link here. I’d be saying we don’t want people to have to go through a ton of boring stuff to get to the fun stuff. That’s ALL that means.

You can argue till you’re blue in the face and it won’t change the fact that the language is supporting what I’m saying.

There are other interviews you can quote where Anet talked about other things, maybe, but the “grind” quote in the manifesto is Anet talking about not going through the boring stuff to get to the fun stuff. It’s not about gear grind or end game grind or any other grind.

And yes, I can produce interviews were Anet has said that there would be things to grind for for people who enjoy that play style.

Not a fan of blood FX. I’ve seen it in other games and usually it’s way overdone. It doesn’t make or break a game for me either way…but in AoC for example it was way over the top. And it’s completely unnecessary for me to enjoy a game.

There are two points I’d like to make, regarding recent posts in this thread.

1. The reason, in my opinion, temporary content is temporary..particularly things like dungeons, is because after a month or two, those dungeons would take traffic away from everything else. Anet wants people in the open world, not in a handful of dungeons. People who like dungeons and come from other games were dungeons are central don’t get this at all. Dungeons aren’t really central in this game. Anet wants the world to be bigger than the dungeons. Leaving the dungeons in divides the playerbase. They saw this with fractals. Everyone complains there are less people in the world. Right. Because five people at a time in a dungeon means less people in the open world.

2. People say subscription games are better because when a game uses the cash shop to fund itself, everything becomes about the cash shop…and to a degree that’s true. What those same people aren’t saying is that when a game is a subscription everything about the game is put in there to get people to play LONGER. Everything about the game is slower. You level slower. You have dungeon/raid lockouts. You have very slow crafting. You have flight paths. You have no instant travel. You may or may not like any of those things, but the whole idea is, the longer they can keep you playing, the happier you are.

I’ve played many subscription games over the years and I don’t like them. By the same token I’ve played many free to play games and I don’t necessarily like them. Lotro cost me a small fortune because much of the content had to be paid for. SWToR can’t really be played, unless you pay. This feels like a lie to me.

So far at least, I can play Guild Wars 2 without paying a fortune in the cash shop and I don’t have those annoying lockouts or things that really slow me down. I can just play the entire game.

It’s a matter of personal taste, but I’ll never play a subscription game again, because subscription games are designed to slow you down….far more than a game like Guild Wars 2 is.

My guild has people people who have helped people get points in Guild Wars 1 as well as playing Guild Wars 2 together. Once you have a couple of friends to help you, there’s no reason you can’t go back and get 30 points. It’s not that hard, even if it takes a while.

DiogoSilva.7089:

It was GW2 that has failed to appeal to a big portion of its demographic. It is currently only successful at holding wandering casuals, mindles farmers and rich gamblers; and everyone else is either giving up, or faithful waiting for their promises that everything will get better someday.

I’m not a wandering casual, I’m not a mindless farmer and I’m certainly not a rich gambler. Yet Guild Wars 2 still appeals to me. Maybe you missed something in your calculations.

Nick.6972:

tolunart.2095:

Moz.8264:

tolunart.2095:

Moz.8264:

What else is there to do in the game? Grinding legendaries is almost the same as grinding achievements.

I don’t do either, and I’ve been playing off an on since last September. If you really don’t see any other options this isn’t the right game for you.

I asked what else is there to do in this game and you say the game isn’t for me, what? I don’t think you’re aware endgame is pretty much cosmetic.

I have 14 character slots and five max-level toons. I’ve never done guild missions, fractals, and only ever entered one dungeon since I started playing the game, and I have not yet run out of things to do. Most of my toons have a specific look that I like, I’m an artist and visual appeal is very important to me.

There is no such thing as “endgame.”

How the hell is that even possible?
I only have 1 lvl 80 and 5 50-40lvls and I’ve done almost absolutely everything.

I still haven’t done everything and I’ve played a lot more than you have.

Zacchary.6183:

Vayne.8563:

Mercurio.4970:

NCSOFT is committed to their vision of a “budget” online RPG. They have always had a strategy of keeping the overhead low, so they drastically scale back on things like Customer Support and UI development. It’s just how the model for the guild wars games go. We are never going to see much improvement in these areas, unfortunately.

So they created a budget MMO by having several motion picture’s worth of voice acting in it? Failed logic there.

This game cost quite a bit of money to design, because voice acting is expensive. Voicing the personal story, several quests, and many of the in world NPCs wasn’t cheap.

But like all games, there is a budget and every game will list it’s priorities. Star Wars ToR did terribly because all their money went to cinematics…it’s the most expensive MMO in history.

No MMO, even ones with big budgets, have enough of a budget to prioritize everything.

The least they could do is polish the game before they launched it. If I had the time to list all of the aesthetic and functional problems that need looking at, I would but the list is too long for me to place it anywhere near the top of MY priority list.

See, this is the problem. The least they could do. Completely wrong.

Why do you think almost EVERY MMO launches before it’s completed? The only exception I can think of is Rift and they did that by having a polished but very very small world. Sure if you have a tiny tiny world it’s easier.

There’s no such thing as infinite development money and at some point, ready or not, every game has to be pushed out to make money to pay people that have been working for the last five years. Anet needed another year, and very likely didn’t have the funds to wait. Plus they felt they had to strategically launch before MoP.

You didn’t invest millions of dollars and five years to make a game. They did. So you don’t actually get to pick when it launched. This is why so many MMOs come out with huge bug lists, missing features and a lack of polish.

SWToR had a MUCH bigger budget than Guild Wars 2, they worked on it for the same amount of time and it still launched missing features and filled with bugs.

It’s the nature of the beast I’m afraid. Unless you know a multi millionaire who’s willing to wait an indeterminate amount of time to see a profit, that’s how most MMOs are going to launch.

I have mixed feelings about PTRs. I played with one in Rift and it was always dead. The problem is if people are playing there, then they aren’t in game. People are already claiming the world is dead. Do we want to split the player base further?

Furthermore, there were tons of leaks about upcoming content. Nothing was every a surprise. As it is, I think Anet gives out too much info about upcoming events. Too much guidance as to how to do things. Too many arrows and stars about exactly where to go.

So while I can see the use of a public test server, there are some very big strikes against it.

At any rate, I doubt Anet will ever create one, so I don’t think you have to worry OP.

Familiarize yourself with the Living Story, because that’s going to be PvE moving forward.

pricer.5091:

And reading what yiou have just written shows me you didnt read what I wrote. Again.

Personal story is not RP. RP is something you DO. It involves creating a personality, home, business, speech style, morals, family and then adhering to that personality to submerse yourself in the game.

The only point you have made that is anything at all to do with what I was referring to is the size of the cities…which are great and usable in an RP context.

If RP was about personal story. Every single character in this game would be Trahearnes General.

Please, please, please…if you do nothing else today. READ the posts you are responding to?

I’m really sorry you didn’t understand my post so you believe I didn’t read yours. But it’s okay. I’m quite done talking to you for the night. When you stop with personal assaults, and dismissive, derisive behavior you MIGHT be worth responding to. Until then, argue with yourself. I know you don’t get it…and that’s fine.

I’m glad so many other people do.

Insignya.8625:

@pricer bro, please, don’t feed the troll, just ignore it. It’s written 107 pages of quoting people and arguing with them. I mean, I haven’t seen trolls that pathetic in all my years of playing League of Legends.

Of course, anyone who disagrees with you is a fan boy, a troll. If your arguments were stronger you wouldn’t need to call people names.

pricer.5091:

Vayne.8563:

pricer.5091:

If you are specualting about whether ANet are listening or not, they are. This is most evidenced by the heavy use of suspensions and infractions however and not in their patches.

Most infractions just serve as warnings as they have no points associated with them. Infractions with points generally means you crossed a line.

I’m guessing from the nature of some of your posts that you set your lines at different places than some other people might.

Are you aware that you have 107 pages of posts? 107 pages of posts and only one message? I’d take a break if I were you and go play the game.

I’m not sure how this is your business. And it’s not one message. You are mistaken. If you don’t know, it’s okay to say you don’t know.

Other people have acknowledged that I’ve said stuff that goes against Anet, I don’t know why you can’t.

pricer.5091:

If you are specualting about whether ANet are listening or not, they are. This is most evidenced by the heavy use of suspensions and infractions however and not in their patches.

Most infractions just serve as warnings as they have no points associated with them. Infractions with points generally means you crossed a line.

I’m guessing from the nature of some of your posts that you set your lines at different places than some other people might.

pricer.5091:

And in this one its limited to the fact that you have town clothes and an imagination.

A less true statement you have NEVER made.

For one thing, Guild Wars 2 does give you options on how to play your character. You may not like the personal story, but that doesn’t mean that no one likes it. More to the point, you can actually get different dialogue options depending on how you play your character…ie the choices you make. I’ve had different dialogue options with different characters in the same personal story. This doesn’t happen in most MMOs. In fact, only SWToR of all the other MMOs I know has a personal story.

But it’s much more than that. It’s the size of the cities, that actually make them feel a bit like cities. Did you play Rift at launch? Their two biggest cities were like large quest hubs. It was horribly disappointing.

There’s a ton of attention to small details that make the world feel more alive. Lots of hidden stuff. More emphasis on looking around and finding things, than just going to the next star (though you can play the game going from one heart or POI to another).

And the game doesn’t just support exploring, it rewards it. I’ve found stuff in some of the oddest places in this game.

Saying what you said shows me you’re completely out of touch with this game, and the intentions of the game designers.

I still think you’re better off finding an ultra casual guild that doesn’t really care if you represent all the time. It’s not just about dungeons. It’s about stuff like Guild Missions. It’s about stuff like finding that one tough group event and not being able to handle it. It’s about having someone there to just check to see where the last heart you’re missing might be.

There are lots of guilds that also have couples in them. Lots of people in guilds play by themselves, and come together when they feel like something a bit different.

Two man dungeons won’t allow you to see guild missions and some of them can be quite fun.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Mercurio.4970:

well, every couple of weeks there’s a new gambling box with some skins in them, and either a temporary dungeon, jumping puzzle, or temporary “click on things” quest. This is how new “content” comes to the game. If you are looking for rewards and items, or a real mmo, you have come to the wrong game.

This is the correct answer.

An opinionated answer by someone who’s clearly not part of this game’s demographic is the right answer. I’d go as far to say that for a person who likes the RPG side of MMORPG, this is one of the first real MMOs, at least in recent history.

Most of the other so called mmoRPGs are just MMOs that have completely forgotten what RPGs are all about.

Karast.1927:

I think getting use to the living story content requires a change of perspective from the more traditional mmo mindset of grind it now, grind it fast, be the first to finish.

If you look at it from the perspective that every time you log in, that there is something new you can do for a few hours or in addition to your normal WvW, PvE groups, or TPvP it’s really nice.

You can take a break for a week or two and come back to something new, and for a long time player you can have neat items and skins for xxx event that others who weren’t in the game at the time don’t have.

You might be a bit miffed that you missed that content, but there is more coming.

I kind of look at the living story now as a daily newspaper or a T.V. show, something new each week that I can sink a few hours into on top of my usual stuff.

Rather than from my old mindset of “I’ve got 3 weeks off lets grind this out, and watch all of xxx T.V. show in one sitting”

If I had to play like that, it would kill me. You could play relatively casually and still get enough effigies to burn doing them every time you went near one on a map, if you play normally.

You can do the same with pinatas. Every time you go to Lion’s Arch, or any city, or any time you pass one, just bakitten. If I had to sit there in LA and bash every pinata on the same day, I’d think it was a huge grind.

I think this new content is more grindy for a casual player who has less time, and not nearly as grindy for me.

I’m not even trying to grind this stuff and I’m done with a week left till the next update. Of course, I could have gone through those achievements in record time.

One thing I try never to do for this sort of content is consult the Wiki or Dulfy.

Anakita Snakecharm.4360:

Vayne.8563:

While I agree it would be nice to fight more elder dragons, other things happen in the world. The elder dragons are still local in a sense. If you read Destiny’s Edge you’d get this.

Zhaitan was the dragon bothering the Tarnished Coast and Kryta. Other dragons invaded different areas. The Krytans aren’t straight up affected by Jormag at all. He’s up in the Northern Shiverpeakes.

They’ve just had a major war against the dragons, one would think there would be time to celebrate and or deal with other matters. It’s not like other things aren’t problems too.

snip

Guild Wars 2, like just about every MMO in recent memory, released far too early (the exception was Rift which was relatively small at launch). The game needs to be worked on BEFORE another dragon is worked on.

The Living Story is filler content to keep people playing. Nothing more. There’s no monthly fee. If you don’t like what you see, take a break until the next dragon comes out.

But don’t blame the living story because programming stuff takes time, or because the game needs to be strengthened before it moves on.

Even from a story telling point of view it’s important for everything not to be epic.

Couple of things:

1.) The people who are asking “What about the Elder Dragons?” are not, for the most part, suggesting that we need to have epic battles with them on a regular basis. What we’re saying is that the story does not appear to have any forward motion in that direction at all.

I don’t expect us to go off and attack Jormag right now.

It would be nice to do a Pact mission now and then, though – and that doesn’t need to be any more difficult to program and implement than any random side story.

People seem to forget that the Zhaitan story wasn’t just the Arah dungeon. There were lots of other small steps leading up to the confrontation. What we’re currently lacking, in my opinion, is not the epic battle but instead those small steps.

2.) What you’re saying about the dragons being less of a direct threat than the other issues we’ve been dealing with only really makes sense from a human perspective. This isn’t a human-centric world anymore. What is most threatening to Kryta doesn’t make sense as the primary focus of everyone all over the world.

I mean, think for a moment about the difference in scale between the incursions of the Sons of Svanir and the Icebrood as compared to the Molten Alliance. Jormag made refugees of the entire Norn nation, not just the inhabitants of a few farmsteads, and Jormag’s minions are (in lore) a major threat all over the Shiverpeaks. You say you’ve read Edge of Destiny. Remember how it starts?

Also, bear in mind the effect the dragons are having on the world’s magic. If we wait to address that till it reaches a crisis, addressing it will no longer be possible, so moving preemptively is really the only option.

As I said, I’m not suggesting we need to go kill a dragon in the next two-week patch. What I’m saying is that there needs to be some sense that 1.) the Pact is still active and scheming against the dragons, and 2.) the existence of the dragons still affects people.

If the Elder Dragons are a threat we can safely ignore for a year or so, what was the point of all the effort and sacrifice that went into taking down Zhaitan even after pushing him back from Claw Island?

The writers can’t really have it both ways on this, is the thing.

Spoilers from Edge of Destiny.

I do remember how Edge of Destiny starts. I also remember how Destiny’s Edge went and solved that problem by killing Jormag’s lieutenant. They also destroyed the one near Rata Sum.

Presumably getting another one this powerful takes time, so there’s time for a breather.

The Norn are not nearly in the same situation they were before Destiny’s Edge got stuck in and the Sylvari and Asura probably aren’t either.

Which leaves the Charr.

Last I heard, the Charr dragon vacated the premises and absconded to the Crystal Desert. Their biggest problems are Flame Legion and Ghosts STILL.

This situation right now is that though dragon minions are a problem, other problems still exist and need to be dealt with.

Presumably the pact isn’t completely idle. That doesn’t mean you’ll be doing every mission they’re doing.

My guess is there’s a lot of scouting and exploring and developing of weapons, all of which takes time.

Furthermore, we pretty much knew exactly where Zhaitan was. I’m not sure we know exactly where any of the others are at this point in time.

Tiger.7506:

No endgame.
removed the grid, ok.
dont put anything in place of grind.
empty
appearance is secondary in a MMORPG.

Is this an attempt at haiku…because it’s pretty good.

Appearance is secondary in an MMO to players with a certain mind set. There have always been people who played MMOs mostly for appearance. This is neither new, nor as uncommon as you think.

And of course in Guild Wars 1, which was unquestionably successful, appearance was all you played for at end game.

Mercurio.4970:

NCSOFT is committed to their vision of a “budget” online RPG. They have always had a strategy of keeping the overhead low, so they drastically scale back on things like Customer Support and UI development. It’s just how the model for the guild wars games go. We are never going to see much improvement in these areas, unfortunately.

So they created a budget MMO by having several motion picture’s worth of voice acting in it? Failed logic there.

This game cost quite a bit of money to design, because voice acting is expensive. Voicing the personal story, several quests, and many of the in world NPCs wasn’t cheap.

But like all games, there is a budget and every game will list it’s priorities. Star Wars ToR did terribly because all their money went to cinematics…it’s the most expensive MMO in history.

No MMO, even ones with big budgets, have enough of a budget to prioritize everything.

minbariguy.7504:

Okay, here’s the problem I have with Living World vs Expansions:

Living World takes one of the crappiest parts of Real Life — the fact that we often miss out on fun things due to other commitments — and puts it front and center as though it was a cool new feature.

Remember that time you and your friends were going to go on Spring Break together, but you came down with the flu all week and had to stay home and miss the fun? Or that time everyone was going out to that awesome new nightclub, but you had to work so you missed out? Or you couldn’t be there for a friend’s birthday party because you had other commitments? Living World is like someone thought of all those crappy moments and said, “Hey, let’s put that in our game! What fun! It’ll be great!”

You know what else would be like real life? How about if our characters get sick from time to time, and their stats drop and they can only walk instead of run? How about if our characters all had to pay rent or property taxes? Or had to eat food daily or die? All these things would make the world seem more “real”, but who would want them?

Living World has completely driven me away from GW2. Expansions present content you can do at your own pace and complete whenever you like. Living World, on the other hand, is a constant reminder that although we all paid our money, only some of us get to be lucky enough to experience certain limited-time content. That’s not fair. And one can justifiably counter by saying that Life isn’t fair, either, and I will agree.

But why on Earth would you want your game to reflect that?

If I missed out on one trip but there was a trip every two weeks? I’d live with it.

You’re comparing a once in a lifetime spring break to chapters in a story that are coming fast and furious. I can even see people taking a break and intentionally skipping some of the story, just because they’re inundated.

It only means when you come back from whatever break you’ve taken, there’ll always been something new to do, not that you have to do ALL of it.

Maybe you miss X piece of armor or Y weapon skin…but there’s another one around the corner. And everyone will have different stuff, so we all won’t look exactly the same.

Not a bad thing in my book.

frostflare.6390:

You know-I agree, The op made a mistake and it cost him. He made a faulty choice. What I don’t agree with is that Anet ENCOURAGES such scamming. I know it’s not supported, and he does not deserve his stuff back. But People Should be Banned for doing what The Scammer did. Perma Banned even. Its EXPLOITING Players, which is a form of exploiting. What I find most disgusting is everyone here seems to be “defending” the scammer. Like “Well, Its ok that he screwed you over-cause Unless you read the forums you don’t know that Mail is not for trading. He’s doing gods work he is”. Why defend a theif? Thats like locking the Woman who saw a murder in jail, but leaving the murder to kill again. Its sick-Anet should at least Put a handle on doing things like that. Op does not deserve his stuff back, but the player deserves a perma ban-Forever and a Day!

The problem with is is the number of service tickets that would be generated or have to be dealt with. The amount of investigation that would have to be done. It’s just not as simply as saying, they should ban this guy.

Suppose a group of guys hate another guy and all get together and say he scammed them. Of course, Anet would have to investigate it, even if it wasn’t true. And stuff like that happens all the time…false reports and all.

Anet doesn’t have the customer support staff to investigate in detail every single scam. And then where do you draw the line. What about people who invite you to do a dungeon, kick you at the last boss and let a guildie in to get credit for the run. That’s a form of scamming too. Those people should be banned.

Once you open this particular pandora’s box, you need to hire a whole lot more support staff. And it slows down everyone else’s support.

Anyone who trusts someone to send them something after they sent them gold is asking for trouble. I don’t blame the OP, and I do blame the con man…but I don’t believe Anet should take a hand in what follows, simply because it would affect customer service drastically.

pricer.5091:

Vayne.8563:

As I said THOSE events are not fun now, but many OTHER events are fun. Did you somehow get from the manifesto that every single second you play will be fun or equally fun? Because you’re losing credibility by the second.

I realise that you are a professional editor and therefore don’t presumably need niceties such as these, however I went to the trouble of looking up the dictionary definition of “game” and it is as follows: “activity engaged in for diversion or amusement”. So yes, it is not unreasonable to expect most, if not all, activities present within said “game” to be entertaining. That they are or not is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

The combat system isn’t just swinging a sword, since you can dodge in this game (and you can’t in most others).

You can in fact dodge in EVERY single MMO I have ever played, you just can’t “dodge roll”. In fact in every single MMO I have played dodging is a key factor in staying alive. Avoid the red circles, move out of the bosses telegraphed attack etc etc. There is nothing new here except an animation.

So dodging isn’t swinging a sword. Using environmental weapons isn’t swinging a sword either. He’s talking about making combat fun, and whether you personally like it or not, enough people think the combat in this game is fun, compared to the combat in most MMOs.

And enough people don’t. Your opinion (like all of your opinions and equally all of mine) is subjective and whether or not “many” people agree with you, equally as “many” do not. You are losing credibility here.

Colin (paraphrased): We want people to have fun with the combat. We want them to start having fun earlier in the game instead of grinding to get to the fun stuff. We want to change the way people view combat.

Personally, for me, me alone and not “many” or even “others”…this is not what they have achieved. Your opinion is obviously different and I respect that. Respect mine.

You personally may not like the combat, but that’s not a broken promise on the part of the devs. That’s a matter of personal taste.

Indeed it is a matter of personal taste, as is your support of the system. What IS a broken promise on the part of the developers is a lack of a persistent world in which you make a difference and a general statement that “we don’t make grindy games”, which, however you choose to interpret it….has A LOT of people stating that in fact in many ways this game is “grindy”.

Clearly, we are never going to agree. However you are no more right in your opinion than I am in mine. So stop acting like the voice of the people when you are in fact, exactly like I am, merely stating your own personal opinion.

With every post you become more and more disingenuous. The post above is riddled with logical errors and opinions that don’t even call to the conversation.

As I have said numerous times, fun is subjective. No game will be fun for everyone. Looking up game in the dictionary is irrelevant to this conversation. For some people chess is fun for some people chess is boring. What does any of this have to do with the definition of game. That’s not even apropos enough to be a strawman argument.

Anet said long before release that the open world is persistent but not permanent and that’s exactly true. Anyone who followed the game as you claim to have would have known this. They gave chapter and verse on dynamic events, down to including specific examples of them. They’ve always said event chains would ping pong back and forth along a track. They never said you’d change something in the world permanently, only persistently. Your personal story is the permanent part (so much so that you can’t even repeat it). Once you make a decision you’re locked into that decision and you can’t go back and redo it.

They also said pre-launch there would be things to grind for. It’s nice that you can take a single quote to prove your point and ignore all other quotes, but that’s not really how arguments are supposed to work.

And anyone that’s played Guild Wars 1 would know that the kind of grind that exists in Guild Wars 2 more or less existed in Guild Wars 1 as well. You had to grind for rep in Guild Wars 1 to make your PvE only skills more powerful, grind for titles, that gave you better percentage chance of retaining a lockpick without breaking it or a better chance of salvaging a rune off armor without breaking it.

So when a dev says, more than once, that there would be stuff to grind for in the game but that it wouldn’t be mandatory, why do you ignore that?

Edit: Oh and enough people don’t? How many is enough? It doesn’t work that way. Enough people have to like it. I believe enough people do. Anet does too or they wouldn’t be doing it this way.

stayBlind.7849:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

There’s a Moa race achievement, it cost 50 silver a pop at a chance to get the achievement, how are new players suppose to afford this? This is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure less than 1% of players actually have all the achievements.

Why the sudden change? Last year the achievements were feasible, even the holiday ones, now it’s just pointless

Okay now this I have an objection too. The Emporer title costs a whole lot more than 50 silver and that’s been in the game since launch. How are new players supposed to get it? They save for it, that’s how.

Not everything needs to be attainable right away.

Yeah but the Moa Race achievement is time limited, the Emperor title is permanent and allows people to work for it in time

The moa race is permanent content, not time limited.

I thought it was part of the dragon bash achievements?

Though it’s listed as part of the dragonbash achievements, it’s still permanent content added with dragonbash. After dragonbash goes away the moa race will remain.

How exciting.

Mini games with the depth of Facebook games keep me on the edge of my seat.

The new jumping puzzle is permanent too. The karka event was permanent before that. Anet says they’re going to increase the amount of permanent content moving forward as well.

Whether you like it personally or not, there are people who really do like the moa race (I’m not one of them).

Moz.8264:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

There’s a Moa race achievement, it cost 50 silver a pop at a chance to get the achievement, how are new players suppose to afford this? This is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure less than 1% of players actually have all the achievements.

Why the sudden change? Last year the achievements were feasible, even the holiday ones, now it’s just pointless

Okay now this I have an objection too. The Emporer title costs a whole lot more than 50 silver and that’s been in the game since launch. How are new players supposed to get it? They save for it, that’s how.

Not everything needs to be attainable right away.

Yeah but the Moa Race achievement is time limited, the Emperor title is permanent and allows people to work for it in time

The moa race is permanent content, not time limited.

I thought it was part of the dragon bash achievements?

Though it’s listed as part of the dragonbash achievements, it’s still permanent content added with dragonbash. After dragonbash goes away the moa race will remain.

Moz.8264:

Vayne.8563:

Moz.8264:

There’s a Moa race achievement, it cost 50 silver a pop at a chance to get the achievement, how are new players suppose to afford this? This is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure less than 1% of players actually have all the achievements.

Why the sudden change? Last year the achievements were feasible, even the holiday ones, now it’s just pointless

Okay now this I have an objection too. The Emporer title costs a whole lot more than 50 silver and that’s been in the game since launch. How are new players supposed to get it? They save for it, that’s how.

Not everything needs to be attainable right away.

Yeah but the Moa Race achievement is time limited, the Emperor title is permanent and allows people to work for it in time

The moa race is permanent content, not time limited.

Moz.8264:

There’s a Moa race achievement, it cost 50 silver a pop at a chance to get the achievement, how are new players suppose to afford this? This is ridiculous, I’m pretty sure less than 1% of players actually have all the achievements.

Why the sudden change? Last year the achievements were feasible, even the holiday ones, now it’s just pointless

Okay now this I have an objection too. The Emporer title costs a whole lot more than 50 silver and that’s been in the game since launch. How are new players supposed to get it? They save for it, that’s how.

Not everything needs to be attainable right away.

Astralporing.1957:

Vayne.8563:

There’s no reason that a person who has 10 alts should be able to get 10 of a reward that disadvantages people who have single characters by comparison.

It would disadvantage the single character people only if they were putting the same effort into their single character as someone put into their multiple alts. Which is possible, but in most cases is simply not true.

People that created many high-leveled alts (yes, i agree that low level alts should be prohibited from benefitting in some way) have to put a lot of effort into those chars. That is their disadvantage.

So yes, in lot of cases people that have only single char are and should be disadvantaged. There might be mechanisms to limit that disadvantage, but if it were completely eliminated, then i fully expect any disadvantage of posessing more than one char would be eliminated as well.

And back to the main topic… i wonder, besides the node in the player instance, will there be any other way to get those resources? And if it will be, will it be permanent addition, or temporal one (like azurites, that really should have been added to normal node drop tables)?

In a game where you can level a character in a day to max level using crafting (a few hours actually), this argument doesn’t really stick.

I person could have four 80 level characters in 4 days just to gather those nodes. They’d be doing minimal work after those days.

The fact is this is all speculation. We don’t know anything about the nodes. Are they account bound? Can they be sold? Are they used to make something special? Is there any other way to get them?

Until we have more info, no one can say who is or isn’t being disadvantaged.
I

pricer.5091:

Hey, being cynical as I am, a game that is doing well doesn’t have to bribe people with goodies to get 1 million likes on facebook. It just occurs.

Then most MMOs aren’t doing well, since most of them have similar tactics. Actually, what MMO do you think IS doing well?

I used to think collecting achievements was about completeness, but I’ve changed. Because there are some achievements simply not worth doing…and I’m not going to force myself to do them just because they’re sitting on a page.

While I agree that some people do want to complete every single achievement, last Halloween, I couldn’t do the jumping puzzle. I couldn’t complete it. The Christmas one…no problem. Halloween, not a chance. Maybe next year.

But the thing is, once I didn’t have that achievement, I realized, hey, I’m not going to get every achievement and from that point on, I enjoyed the game more.

Not for everyone, of course, but this is my experience with achievements.

ilr.9675:

They already post too much as it is…

….Without actually saying anything at all

Talking is easy. It’s Listening to other people first that’s the hard part.

But listening to WHO. In case you haven’t noticed, there are several opinions in every topic. Maybe they are listening and they’re just not listening to a specific percentage of the player base.

In fact, if they were listening to a specific percentage it would be guaranteed that a different percentage would feel like they didn’t listen.

Well yeah but some of these spoilers are major plot points for the book. This isn’t well done as far as I’m concerned. Fortunately I read the book before looking for the plaques.

Mercurio.4970:

well, every couple of weeks there’s a new gambling box with some skins in them, and either a temporary dungeon, jumping puzzle, or temporary “click on things” quest. This is how new “content” comes to the game. If you are looking for rewards and items, or a real mmo, you have come to the wrong game.

Maybe true, but this is one of the first mmoRPGs that I’ve played. The rest of them are MMOrpgs.

I can think of very very few MMOs that actively gain player base over time. WoW has lost 1.7 million people in the last quarter. Rift saw a spike when they went free to play but that will taper off as well. To expect any MMO to have continual growth is just not reasonable. Why? Because there are more MMOs than ever before, but not more MMO players than ever before. There are probably as many people leaving MMO space as there are playing MMOs.

Guild Wars 2 seems to be doing fine. If they weren’t doing fine, they wouldn’t come out with content every two weeks without making an expansion, since game companies seem to make expansions to bring people back to the game. It also brings in more money by selling more boxes.

Anet said they don’t have to do this, therefore the game is doing fine and perhaps better than fine.

There’ll be a big influx of cash once the game launches in China too but we won’t see those players on our server, because you can bet Anet will have their own server park in China.

But I log in on patch day and the game is swamped with people on my server. A whole lot of people.

I don’t think millions of people are playing this game, but I don’t think millions of people are playing any MMO but WoW. And since WoW has the biggest advertising budget of any game, that’s not surprising. You put commercials on TV with Chuck Norris, William Shatner etc and you’ll get the rabble joining in. But WoW is still bleeding subscriptions. They’ve lost almost as many subs in the last year or two as Guild Wars 2 has sold copies.

No, it’s unreasonable to assume a steadily growing player base for any MMO these days. The only one I can think of that has accomplished this is Eve and Eve still only has half a million players all up.

Nemmar.8491:

Because despite big cheers from commercial reviewers for beeing so revolutionary and breaking with all conventions, they forgot to make a game that is actually fun and engaging to play.

Well it got them the reviews, it just didnt get them the players.

The people are speaking. The question is if anet will realise what they have done wrong.

So those of us who find the game fun and engaging (of which there are many) are lying?

Maybe the game is fun and engaging to a certain player base, and you’re not part of that player base. Because it’s sure as hell fun and engaging to the people I play with.