But I do play every day and I’m still having fun. lol
Actually it’s true, my guild has a lot to do with that, not just the game itself. It’s a casual, enjoyable, fun experience. If you’re coming here for hard core competitive PVe, you’re likely to be let down.
But the world is large and beautiful and full of hidden stuff. Even with zone completion you still miss a whole lot of things.
You also miss a lot if you just run to Dulfy.net and look at guides instead of trying to find stuff yourself, or at least I would be missing a lot of the experience if I did that.
Anyway glad to see other people having a good time in game.
@Vayne
I don’t care about DR or laurels, BiS or RnG. I’ve said many times, people can have all the nice shinies they want, it won’t detract from my experience. I don’t know why you keep coming back to that, when that’s never my point this whole time.
I didn’t specifically refer to “Agony Resistance” at the start of this discussion because I wanted to refer to ‘gear checks’ in general (which in the future can mean even higher tiers of gear). You then proceeded to talk about BiS, and Vertical Progression, and Ascended gear and how to acquire them and how they are validated when my concern lies solely on ‘gear checks’.
You’re right, if we talk about BiS, RnG, DR, Ascended gear, there’s no gear checks, but then I’m not talking about those things am I? Agony Resistance is the current in-game gear check, and if possible, Anet should at least rethink or refine it so it isn’t like that.
Agony resistance though, was the whole point of the exercise. I understand now why you’re upset but the stat upgrade was something else. The agony resistance was still required for the fractals. Why?
Because even after you get the BIS gear you want, the levels of resistence you need to get add far more time to the equation. The further you go in fractals, the more you have to upgrade your equipment even more.
In other words, the stats, by themselves, didn’t do the trick for some people and the agony, by itself, didn’t do the trick for others. The combination of the two, however has kept players playing for a long long time.
If that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t be feeling left out now by your guild. You’re feeling left out because what Anet did WORKED. You’re living proof.
If it didn’t work, your guild wouldn’t be running it at all.
If high level fotm is still some of the hardest PvE you can do and maybe appropriately rewarding for the effort, my friends would still run it, with or without agony mechanic in place. The only difference is, I get to join them right off the bat after I took a break.
But we’re not really talking about “your friends”. People play for different reasons. There were reasons for certain people to play already…people like me. There were no reasons for other people to play.
The biggest dynamic of people who weren’t being catered to, were people who liked to grind. Not farm…grind.
Anet introduced something that appealed to them. And you know, as much as people claim that the hardest content gets done without specific rewards, we know from other games that very very few people do the hardest content if it’s not rewarding. In other words, rewards have to equal time.
Anet has to balance giving people too much reward for the effort input (they failed in this in CoF path 1).
In other MMOs, people raid for different reasons. Some raid for the difficulty but when raids were really difficult, only 5% of the population ever saw that content. That’s a quote from a WoW dev. Only when they made raids easier did people actually start doing them. And they did them for rewards, not challenge.
A very small percentage of people PVe for challenge. This has been shown again and again. A lot of people PVe just to relax or enjoy themselves, or for social reasons or to bum around the world.
Anet needed to make Fractals challenging for the small percentage of people who like that, and they had to make it profitable in the sense of stats for the people who liked that. Furthermore, they had to put in agony to make the stuff hard to upgrade, so it would take forever, so you could progress, because that was sort of the point of the whole thing. Hold on to those players.
I feel sad that you’re not able to play with your guildies. You may not get that, but it’s true. I do feel bad for you.
But it doesn’t change the fact that Anet had reasons for making these changes that seem to have worked.
@Vayne
I don’t care about DR or laurels, BiS or RnG. I’ve said many times, people can have all the nice shinies they want, it won’t detract from my experience. I don’t know why you keep coming back to that, when that’s never my point this whole time.
I didn’t specifically refer to “Agony Resistance” at the start of this discussion because I wanted to refer to ‘gear checks’ in general (which in the future can mean even higher tiers of gear). You then proceeded to talk about BiS, and Vertical Progression, and Ascended gear and how to acquire them and how they are validated when my concern lies solely on ‘gear checks’.
You’re right, if we talk about BiS, RnG, DR, Ascended gear, there’s no gear checks, but then I’m not talking about those things am I? Agony Resistance is the current in-game gear check, and if possible, Anet should at least rethink or refine it so it isn’t like that.
Agony resistance though, was the whole point of the exercise. I understand now why you’re upset but the stat upgrade was something else. The agony resistance was still required for the fractals. Why?
Because even after you get the BIS gear you want, the levels of resistence you need to get add far more time to the equation. The further you go in fractals, the more you have to upgrade your equipment even more.
In other words, the stats, by themselves, didn’t do the trick for some people and the agony, by itself, didn’t do the trick for others. The combination of the two, however has kept players playing for a long long time.
If that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t be feeling left out now by your guild. You’re feeling left out because what Anet did WORKED. You’re living proof.
If it didn’t work, your guild wouldn’t be running it at all.
Because there will NEVER be enough content for the content locusts in ANY MMO.
Guild Wars didn’t slow people down enough with dungeon DR, so people got all the tokens they ever needed. By creating a more or less open ended experience, like the fractals, Anet may well have saved the game, in spite of the number of people who left over it, or the number of people who are annoyed now. It was a stop gap measure and it seems to have done the trick.
Yes that was the purpose of Fractals and it served it’s purpose and would have done so without the addition of Ascended gear.
People didn’t leave back in Nov because Anet introduced a new dungeon- they left because Anet introduced another gear Tier.
Ascended gear caused more problems than it ever solved
Except the Gfox isn’t complaining about the stats. He’s complaining about the agony mechanic.
The stats were put in for another reason. There are many MANY people who simply won’t go after something if they don’t get a higher number out of it. You aren’t like that, and I’m not like that, but too many people are. That’s the sad, sad truth.
I spent a lot of time on this chart, to catch you all up:
You win the interwebz. This is the best thing ever. lol
It’s under the patch notes for the last major update. Just scroll down, they keep adding the minor ones underneath.
Ascended gear feels like WoW releasing more gear with each expansion and making the old one obsolete…
Where is the GW1 feeling…? Is this game going to take the WoW way and not the GW way
Yeah where is the GW1 feelings? Grinding up titles so your skills become stronger I really miss that!
I remember grinding out luxon points in Guild Wars 1 so I could actually make “Save Yourselves!” useful as a paragon. And grinding Asuran points for technobabble and pain inverter. And grinding sunspear points for necrosis.
Then there were people who with RNG farmed voltaic spears and frog scepters and all sorts of stuff.
How fast people forget.
The necessarity for grind in GW1 was a little bit more subtle I guess. Especially when you look back to prophecies and pvp. Sure you could make yourself a premade with max armor etc but you were still lacking certain stat-combinations like +10 armor vs dmg x, those turned out to be pretty important and the only way you could obtain them was by pure luck.
I didn’t know that about PvP…I did very little PvP in Guild Wars 1. Probably mostly Jade Quarry and Alliance battles, some random arenas, but nothing like GvG.
@Vayne
They can remove mechanics such as Agony Resist, keep ascended gear and fractals and it would still fulfill that need for BIS you’re referring to. I’m not left out of Fractals because I don’t have BIS, I’m left out because my AR isn’t high enough. Frankly, I don’t care about BIS and have no intention of constantly chasing after it.
It’s odd you think they won’t expand on this Agony mechanic they already put in place. It won’t surprise me at all if they add new dungeons that require even higher levels of Agony Resistance.
If they expand it, they’ll make it easier to get gear for it.
When Colin was asking people about complaints, he told them to omit the slippery slope argument. I suspect there’s a reason for that.
Then it accomplishes nothing for the people it’s trying to cater to if they make it easy to get.
You’re reaching here.
It was made the way it was for a point in time. That’s it. And during this point in time, it’s served it’s purpose. Look at my argument again.
People had nothing to do, until such time as Anet was able to add more stuff. As they add more stuff, they won’t need it as much and they’ll make it easier to get. Guild Wars 1 did the same thing and every MMO I’ve ever played has variations on the same thing.
In the future, they won’t need to make this hard to get, because in the future they’ll have something else that’s hard to get. That’s the nature of MMOs. It’s not likely to change any time soon.
Sure, people had nothing to do, so new content isn’t enough? Just Fractals isn’t enough? What’s the relevance of agony resistance to address the lack of things to do? what’s the relevance of higher tiered gear?
It’s all about slowing down progress. I’ve said this before in other threads, but I’m happy to say it again here.
There is only X amount of content in any game. In sandbox MMOs (which Guild Wars 2 is not) people make their own content and that’s great. In theme park MMOs, companies have to create content and no company can keep up with demand. It’s not possible. So they find ways to slow people down.
RNG is one way, lockouts, as were done in WoW and Rift are another way. You can try a raid once per week, but if you fail, or even if you succeed you can’t try it again till the next week. And since the gear you need to have drop for you needs to be rolled on, even if it does drop you’re not guaranteed to get it. So you have to log in next week.
Anet introduced the fractals to slow people down. You can get fractal tokens but only once per day so people spend time every day doing their fractal daily. They’re trying for specific rings. They got tokens too, so in ten days time they can have the ring they want..one that most closely matches their build. But if they want a second ring and it doesn’t happen to drop for them, they have to play dailies for another ten days. This slows people down.
Because there will NEVER be enough content for the content locusts in ANY MMO.
Guild Wars didn’t slow people down enough with dungeon DR, so people got all the tokens they ever needed. By creating a more or less open ended experience, like the fractals, Anet may well have saved the game, in spite of the number of people who left over it, or the number of people who are annoyed now. It was a stop gap measure and it seems to have done the trick.
Ascended gear feels like WoW releasing more gear with each expansion and making the old one obsolete…
Where is the GW1 feeling…? Is this game going to take the WoW way and not the GW way
Yeah where is the GW1 feelings? Grinding up titles so your skills become stronger I really miss that!
I remember grinding out luxon points in Guild Wars 1 so I could actually make “Save Yourselves!” useful as a paragon. And grinding Asuran points for technobabble and pain inverter. And grinding sunspear points for necrosis.
Then there were people who with RNG farmed voltaic spears and frog scepters and all sorts of stuff.
How fast people forget.
How about Zero RNG and Tokens and just have everything drop from specific places, oh wait that would be too easy and fun and people might actually farm items and get stuff easier, yeah we can’t have players enjoying themselves…
I miss the old days when loot just dropped and players just farmed…and if i wanted to spend money in the cash shop i could actually buy the said item and get on with it…
Strangely enough, most people aren’t having fun when they have everything they want. I know it defies logic, but it’s pretty easily demonstrated. It’s when people have everything they want that they usually want more.
There are rarely people who want stuff, get it and never want anything else, but they’re the exception to the rule. Believe it or not I first learned about this while watching the original Star Trek when Spock said (in the episode Amok time): Ston, you may have her. After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical…but it is often true.
This bit of human analysis really is true. Give something everything they want in a game and they’ve won. Then they walk away. The way to keep people playing games is to give them something to work towards.
So while you personally might have fun getting everything from drops in short order, many many others would end up leaving the game. And an MMO with no people in it isn’t much fun…at least, it wouldn’t be fun for me.
@Vayne
They can remove mechanics such as Agony Resist, keep ascended gear and fractals and it would still fulfill that need for BIS you’re referring to. I’m not left out of Fractals because I don’t have BIS, I’m left out because my AR isn’t high enough. Frankly, I don’t care about BIS and have no intention of constantly chasing after it.
It’s odd you think they won’t expand on this Agony mechanic they already put in place. It won’t surprise me at all if they add new dungeons that require even higher levels of Agony Resistance.
If they expand it, they’ll make it easier to get gear for it.
When Colin was asking people about complaints, he told them to omit the slippery slope argument. I suspect there’s a reason for that.
Then it accomplishes nothing for the people it’s trying to cater to if they make it easy to get.
You’re reaching here.
It was made the way it was for a point in time. That’s it. And during this point in time, it’s served it’s purpose. Look at my argument again.
People had nothing to do, until such time as Anet was able to add more stuff. As they add more stuff, they won’t need it as much and they’ll make it easier to get. Guild Wars 1 did the same thing and every MMO I’ve ever played has variations on the same thing.
In the future, they won’t need to make this hard to get, because in the future they’ll have something else that’s hard to get. That’s the nature of MMOs. It’s not likely to change any time soon.
@Vayne
They can remove mechanics such as Agony Resist, keep ascended gear and fractals and it would still fulfill that need for BIS you’re referring to. I’m not left out of Fractals because I don’t have BIS, I’m left out because my AR isn’t high enough. Frankly, I don’t care about BIS and have no intention of constantly chasing after it.
It’s odd you think they won’t expand on this Agony mechanic they already put in place. It won’t surprise me at all if they add new dungeons that require even higher levels of Agony Resistance.
If they expand it, they’ll make it easier to get gear for it.
When Colin was asking people about complaints, he told them to omit the slippery slope argument. I suspect there’s a reason for that.
Because it would give people with tons of time the ability to get stuff a lot faster than people who can’t live in game.
Not per character.
And yes people would complain if it was changed, people complain about everything.
So you’re saying seperate the laural currency so only one character gets it? Because that’s what they’d have to do. The way it stands now, they’d not only have to make dailies character bound, but laurels character bound.
If they didn’t people would farm dailies on every alt to get more laurels to get stuff faster. I’m not sure I want to see laurels character bound, either.
@Vayne
Anet’s recent actions still speak volumes about the direction they are taking. I’m not turning a molehill into a mountain here. I already said many times, it’s still a molehill, and I’d prefer it does not turn into a mountain.
You probably don’t even understand what my concern is, you just generalize me as one who blames ‘vertical progression’ as a whole and one who just ‘got to have the best gear or QQ’. That’s not it. My only problem since the beginning of ascended gear is Agony Resistance and I have little concern with whatever else they have implemented in the game. It’s a lame mechanic that creates artificial challenge and gear check for group play.
Before there was agony resistance, I could group up with pretty much anybody I want to do anything in the game at 80. Somebody on LA says LFG Hotw, I’m in. Someone on guildchat says LFM Arah, count me in! AC all paths? I’ll join!
Now, there’s a small portion of the game where I can’t “just play with my friends” because of the AR mechanic, and I have a feeling that portion will grow soon. It’s irrelevant how big or small that portion is because having even a tiny portion means Anet’s already got their foot in the door.
For me, they can just remove Agony resistance, keep high level fractals more challenging (without the agony mechanic) and appropriately rewarding.
EDIT: Also, you keep insisting I’m one who is resistant to change. Well, not all change is good, and the bad ones I’m resistant to and if a change makes the experience even a tiny bit worse for me, I’ll definitely complain about it. You’re the one who made a mountain of argument over this, when my only concern is, if possible, anet should keep gear checks in the game zero, not “to a minimum”, zero.
The reason why I think it’s a mountain, is because there’s very little evidence, thus far, that it’s going to get out of control. Anet isn’t looking for gear checks, except in that one place. There are more and more ways to get ascended gear and there will be even more. I mean you can get them from dailys, fractals, guild missions…you’re not that limited any more. And dailies don’t take that long…even monthlies don’t. I got my monthly already this month, that’s 10 laurels right there.
The fractals was introduced to fill a certain need and it filled that need. I don’t see this as a trend.
Thanks for your thoughts, Vayne. I think it’s best to agree to disagree at this stage.
Also, I’d like to apologize. Sometimes I’ve been too harsh toward you. That’s inappropriate. This is a game after all!
All the best.
Wow, I’m floored.
Honestly I respect your views (even if it doesn’t always look like it). Like me, you’re passionate about the game, and you want to see it improve.
I think we just have different angles from which we approach the game, and the way I approach it it works for me. That’s not to say that it can’t be improved.
Perhaps there’s a compromise that could leave everyone happy.
And there are some people who are playing since launch who are still having fun. That core population will probably remain also.
You must be doing something wrong, because I have superior sigils and runs on most of my guys and I have a legendary and I’ve never spent time “farming” or selling gems for gold.
ya but a huge part is because it is cheaper to get legendary back a few month ago.
That being said, I estimate a legendary cost about 300 hours to get now. You really need to farm 1 hour a day for 10 month. Depend how you look at it.
You really only need to make 8 gold a day and in half a year you can afford a legendary. Well, that’s probably how Vayne get his legendary.
I got my legendary by playing the game. When I get ectos I tend to throw them into the mystic forge with coins and skill points in order to produce tier 6 mats. I have far more clovers than I need, but seeing as it’s so easy to get ectos these days (the maw, the wurm, the shadow behemonth, the dragons etc) I just get ectos from salvaging golds. I do also help guildies with dungeon runs and fractals which makes me money and gets me rares or very rarely exotics.
Build up a bunch of ectos, do dailies and monthlies for coins, do events for karma (it helps that I enjoy events) and get skill points, even on alts, to use the 10 mystic clover forumula. Sometimes you get junk, sometimes you get 40 vials of powerful blood or 36 elaborate totems. It all counts.
Do your 9 dungeon runs, farm in WvW while you’re getting your badges (jumping puzzle chests can give you rares too).
The hardest part, of course, is the precusor. I was lucky enough to have one drop. If that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have my legendary. On the other hand if that hadn’t happened, I probably wouldn’t be worrying about a legendary.
Another cheap trick is that if you want to go for a legendary and don’t want to spend a fortune for a precusor, look at the underwater ones. The precusor for kraitkin, for example, was 22 gold the last time I priced it. My wife bought it a couple of days ago for 25 gold.
So you can have a legendary, just maybe not the greatsword.
you know… honestly if not getting a legendary was the most of my worries, I would be very very happy… I started playing at release day, granted I took a month or so off afterwards and progressed slowly initially, I would say that I’ve been farming CoF P1 significantly on a daily basis… and guess what? I still can’t even afford superior sigils on all my characters (I have 5)… I have one set of skinned CoF gear on all of them (I’m not exactly balling out on a cornucopia of gear for each character here) and most my weapons still have major sigils in them… and I farm a significant amount… I farm 1-2hrs daily at the minimum and probably minimum 5-6 hrs over the weekend and I can still barely afford things… I have no chance in the world of getting a legendary… I just want to gear up properly so I can actually go and enjoy playing the game and not just grind but 9 months into the game, I’ve yet to be able to do that… so, you’ll still see me on gw2lfg (still no group finder 9 months into the game) farming with my warrior who only has one superior sigil in his gear… fun…
You must be doing something wrong, because I have superior sigils and runs on most of my guys and I have a legendary and I’ve never spent time “farming” or selling gems for gold.
If you aren’t supposed to kill monsters(??) in an MMO, they should make a different genre of game.
you are supposed to kill them for quests. You are not supposed to depopulate the world -_-
You’re a hero that defends the world from dragons and goes to do dangerous missions in dungeons, or fight the invaders in WvW. You are not some lonely village hunter that kills bears repeatedly.Serious question…….if that’s the case, why do they populate the entire world with mobs? Shouldn’t there only be mobs in dungeons and around quest following that logic?
Getting drops is different from farming them. It gives people stuff to kill going from one place to another. If someone wants to stay in one place and kill the same mobs over and over again, that’s fine, but there will eventually be diminishing returns. If they keep moving, then there won’t be.
I don’t see a problem with this.
Your focus on this one element is what makes it seem so huge to you. But in reality, it’s not as big a change as you think. For example, you say you want no vertical progression.
Well, exotics from rares. that is vertical progression.
Clearly the issue is adding more tiers of progression after release. At release, it was possible to skip certain steps in the gear progression. By definition it is impossible to skip current steps to obtain yet-to-be-released gear. This adds layers of forced inefficiency, the go-to for average MMO companies everywhere.
This was a huge issue to the swarms of people who left the game after ascended gear was implemented. To claim that it’s not a big change to him is hubris masquerading as objectivity.
There was a time I could log in with BIS for all my gear and never have to worry about farming another piece of equipment again. Now even if I went ahead and did the grind for all the ascended pieces, there is a very high probability that this gear will need to be replaced later in order to maintain competitiveness in WvW and access to some of the (ostensibly) best and most difficult PvE content in the game. This is antithetical to a core principle of the Guild Wars franchise. It is a highly significant change to many people who had no desire to have to worry about changing out their gear by the mere fact of artificially raising stat or level caps. It also reduces the incentive to collect and apply certain skins, which indirectly, yet significantly, affects a core principle of cosmetic-based rewards.
Some people have the time and energy to spend the dozens of hours necessary to obtain new tiers of gear. To those people, of course these changes seem minor. But many of us have full-time jobs, families, volunteer opportunities, etc. I don’t have the desire to chase artificial stat increases. After an initial investment, I want to be able to play all available content. I don’t want to have to significantly reinvest in gearing up all over again just to be able to enjoy new content.
Far from being revolutionary, the addition of new tiers will transform this from an above-average MMO to a mediocre one.
And if those new tiers of gear were locking me out of content, I’d agree with you, but that hasn’t happened yet. And I’m not convinced it ever will. This isn’t like gear treadmills in WoW or Rift or other games. This is something completely different.
People want BIS gear, because they feel they need it. Those who don’t feel they need it still beat content. So they don’t need it. This is about a percentage of people who are addicted to having BIS gear.
If you feel you have to have it, these changes are intolerable. If you don’t feel you have to have it these changes are not important. You obviously feel you have to have it. I don’t.
But it’s a myth to say that you have to have it. It’s not true. The game doesn’t force you to get ascended gear. Take your time, do the ocassionally daily and you’ll eventually get a piece. If you like fractals run them and you’ll get many pieces.
At the end of the day, I can still play WvW, SPvP, go and beat Arah, do guild missions and do all the content without ascended gear. That makes this different from other MMORPGs.
After reading through the forums a bit I think some ppl are confused :P
1st up MMO Massively Multiplayer Online, this can mean many things but nowhere in the description does Massively Multiplayer Online mean 5 mans/dungeons, running about doing hearts, helping ppl do skillpoints, DE events are all Massively Multiplayer Online events, 5 man seems to limit the amount of players in groups or in play not really a Massively group, Multiplayer yes that word is right for 5mans but so is Mario kart :P
2nd up GW2 is a B2P game we paid for it, but yet we get a F2P game mechanics as in DR and the Gem store, first up DR was put in a while after launch to combat bots, with bots under control why is DR still here ? Gem Store is fine until they started to add new skins to the game only in store not as drops, F2P games fine u expect it but to pay for a game then get offered new skins as Shop only that’s not right.
3rd farming, many ppl play MMOs to relax, chill out and just grind mobs, and yet even with the slogan of “play your way” the ppl who like to farm are limited to how and were they can farm by the DR coding, again in a F2P game sure u expect some limits but GW2 isn’t free, it might help crafters make more of a profit, cheaper mats sell item for more like in any MMO.
I guess you missed the whole WvW/commander thing. Or eight vs eight PvP. Good job there.
Didn’t include w3 because that is MMO my point was in other posts ppl claim 5mans= MMOs and ppl who don’t party to do them need to play skyrim….. As for 8v8 I’d stick that with 5 mans lots of games offer 8v8s but don’t call it a MMO
There are still things for guilds to do in the open world. Guild missions are more than 5 people. The temples in Orr are more than five people. There are plenty of people doing temples at the same time in Orr, making this game massively multiplayer. If you choose to ignore it, that’s fine. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.
I disagree. I don’t find PVe or competitive play shallow. I’d say that’s an opinion.
Build variety is okay in some professions, not so okay in others. Anet is working on it and will continue to work on it.
The fact is, everything you feel about this game is pretty much your opinion, and other people have other opinions.
And for a game that’s shallow, I’m still playing it 9 months after launch and still happy with it.
Today we did a great guild rush, got by it by the skin of our teeth. We failed our bounty before that. Took us too long to down Mayana. There’s always next week for that.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just what you’re looking for in a game isn’t here..which doesn’t make the game shallow. It just don’t fill your expectations.
Other people have different expectations.
There needs to be more ways to get ascended gear, not any change to the daily system. Changing the daily system would kitten more people off than it would aid.
Why would it?
Because it would give people with tons of time the ability to get stuff a lot faster than people who can’t live in game. And that means that you’d have to devote your life to the game to be competitive, particularly in WvW. If you don’t think people will complain about it, you’d be wrong,
Other people would complain because they feel forced to do the daily on every character every day. There are already people complaining about the daily as it stands.
One thing Anet didn’t want was that people who didn’t have a lot of time would fall so far behind. That was the point of making it so you couldn’t earn guild commendations or daily rewards faster than anyone else.
This change would completely undermine the purpose of how they made it in the first place.
There needs to be more ways to get ascended gear, not any change to the daily system. Changing the daily system would kitten more people off than it would aid.
1st up MMO Massively Multiplayer Online, this can mean many things but nowhere in the description does Massively Multiplayer Online mean 5 mans/dungeons, running about doing hearts, helping ppl do skillpoints, DE events are all Massively Multiplayer Online events, 5 man seems to limit the amount of players in groups or in play not really a Massively group, Multiplayer yes that word is right for 5mans but so is Mario kart :P
My assumption is the 5-man limit is so because this is how the dungeons have been balanced? Guild Wars 1 also had 12-man instances in elite areas – there is nothing to say higher capacity instances will not be implemented in future.
In addition to the above, Aion’s maximum party size for instances was 6. That’s only one more, and it called itself an MMO. Aion didn’t even have Dynamic Events. As for hearts – did you see Queensdale on release? That first heart area at the farm, oh lord, the people. Of course you complete the content for yourself, but when it comes to fighting monsters you can fight the same monster as any other player and still receive heart completion progress.
You seem to be trying to push another “Definitions Game” like so many interwebbers like to do. I’m not buying your arguments.
Gw2 is meant to be a next gen MMO not an old way of doing things
Guild Wars 2 is most assuredly not a “next-gen” MMO. It’s an evolution not a revolution. Why? Because people don’t jump, they walk. They want what they’re used to in various degrees and if you change it too much, most won’t even consider the game. This was part of the problem with Guild Wars 1. Great game, but didn’t catch on quite the way games like WoW did, because it was too different from what people were expected.
Anet learned from this and made some changes. Subtle and vital changes, but not complete changes. This game is better than most MMOs on the market, to the point where newer games coming out are starting to copy it.
Individual nodes for gathering. No mob tagging (everyone gets full experience), everyone can rez everyone else, no tank (taunt mechanic), no dedicated healers, no static questing, dynamic events (as opposed to just Rifts), downed state (which was in other genres of games but not MMOs), underwater combat that actually changes your skills, and you don’t have to keep surfacing…this game has added a lot to the genre, some of which will become standard moving forward.
Is it next-gen? I don’t think so. But I didn’t think it would be before it launched either.
After reading through the forums a bit I think some ppl are confused :P
1st up MMO Massively Multiplayer Online, this can mean many things but nowhere in the description does Massively Multiplayer Online mean 5 mans/dungeons, running about doing hearts, helping ppl do skillpoints, DE events are all Massively Multiplayer Online events, 5 man seems to limit the amount of players in groups or in play not really a Massively group, Multiplayer yes that word is right for 5mans but so is Mario kart :P
2nd up GW2 is a B2P game we paid for it, but yet we get a F2P game mechanics as in DR and the Gem store, first up DR was put in a while after launch to combat bots, with bots under control why is DR still here ? Gem Store is fine until they started to add new skins to the game only in store not as drops, F2P games fine u expect it but to pay for a game then get offered new skins as Shop only that’s not right.
3rd farming, many ppl play MMOs to relax, chill out and just grind mobs, and yet even with the slogan of “play your way” the ppl who like to farm are limited to how and were they can farm by the DR coding, again in a F2P game sure u expect some limits but GW2 isn’t free, it might help crafters make more of a profit, cheaper mats sell item for more like in any MMO.
I guess you missed the whole WvW/commander thing. Or eight vs eight PvP. Good job there.
@Vayne
I’m sorry, but, have you ever tried creating something for the long term? heck, I’m just a painter, not a full time developer, but even I have a ‘general vision and direction’ of what I want to achieve when I’m working on something that will take months to finish. Sure the tiny details may change, but the composition and vision does not.
If you’re telling me that the devs having no direction for the game is a ‘good’ and ‘natural’ thing, then, wow, I just don’t know what to say.
Ok first of all the quoting system sucks because I want to include your post and the one directly below you
I can relate to what you are saying because I am a painter too, mainly in oils, because the medium is very forgiving.
When I make a new painting I have an idea, a theme and a vision of how the finished painting will turn out.
Very very rarely have I stuck to this rigidly, in fact my most compelling paintings came from making changes to what was simply not working as I envisioned it.My husband is a developer, he does the same thing..
Things change, parameters are sometimes not valid anymore.I think an iterative process is really the only sensible approach to take when you are working on such a massive project as GW2.
This is why we give our voices.
Anet has been extremely creative in dealing with this process, sure some of their iterations are not great but they continue on and keep on trying different things.This is awesome to me because it shows their dedication and passion for their work.
All we can really do is give feedbackI change things too, small details and such, but then if I make a huge change or redo, then it’s no longer the same painting, is it? The first idea was scrapped for a new one.
Anet had a vision, they already sold that vision. I just don’t want to see that completely change somewhere down the line because, then, it’s no longer the same game.
I scrapped half a book I had under contract because it wasn’t working and rewrote it completely. It was better after the rewrite. The characters were the same. The story was not quite the same. It was better with the changes, but they were drastic. It happens sometimes. It was a much MUCH bigger change than what Anet has done to this game.
Your focus on this one element is what makes it seem so huge to you. But in reality, it’s not as big a change as you think. For example, you say you want no vertical progression.
Well, exotics from rares. that is vertical progression.
It’s been said people can’t do fractals with their guildies because they weren’t geared up to do them. If the stats on ascended gear were equal to the stats on exotic gear, and the only thing that was different was agony resistence, you STILL wouldn’t be able to do them. It’s not the vertical progression that makes the fractals undoable, its’ the extra condition which would have been part of the fractals with or without the stat increase. People would be in the same boat, with no vertical progression.
This whole thing is a mountain made out of a molehill. Anet didn’t put in full fledged gear grind here (as some people call it), they put in a gentle gear slope that people can get if they want without too much trouble, without being locked out of 99% of the content in the mean time. That’s not a gear grind and it’s not a huge change of policy.
Anet’s policy was to play the game your way. Well a lot of people were walking because they couldn’t, so Anet offered these people a new experience to give them something to do too. That’s all this is.
@Vayne
I’m sorry, but, have you ever tried creating something for the long term? heck, I’m just a painter, not a full time developer, but even I have a ‘general vision and direction’ of what I want to achieve when I’m working on something that will take months to finish. Sure the tiny details may change, but the composition and vision does not.
If you’re telling me that the devs having no direction for the game is a ‘good’ and ‘natural’ thing, then, wow, I just don’t know what to say.
Ok first of all the quoting system sucks because I want to include your post and the one directly below you
I can relate to what you are saying because I am a painter too, mainly in oils, because the medium is very forgiving.
When I make a new painting I have an idea, a theme and a vision of how the finished painting will turn out.
Very very rarely have I stuck to this rigidly, in fact my most compelling paintings came from making changes to what was simply not working as I envisioned it.My husband is a developer, he does the same thing..
Things change, parameters are sometimes not valid anymore.I think an iterative process is really the only sensible approach to take when you are working on such a massive project as GW2.
This is why we give our voices.
Anet has been extremely creative in dealing with this process, sure some of their iterations are not great but they continue on and keep on trying different things.This is awesome to me because it shows their dedication and passion for their work.
All we can really do is give feedbackI change things too, small details and such, but then if I make a huge change or redo, then it’s no longer the same painting, is it? The first idea was scrapped for a new one.
Anet had a vision, they already sold that vision. I just don’t want to see that completely change somewhere down the line because, then, it’s no longer the same game.
Anet sells access to a world. You’re asking a question that’s been asked a thousand times about a thousand products…but you’re not paying for a game when you buy an MMO you’re paying for admission to a theme park.
If Disneyworld were to close Horizons in Epcot Center (one of my favorite experiences), then I have the choice not to go again the next time…but I don’t get a choice to get a refund for today’s ticket. I don’t get to control what Disneyworld does. This is a theme park MMO and things will be tried and changed…just like every other MMO. Why do you keep ignoring this.
Most of what was said prior to the games release is still there, but other things were tried and didn’t work…so they were adjusted. That’s all. I saw the same ad material you did, but I walked into the MMO understanding I was just buying an admission ticket. That things can and would change. Anyone who walks into an MMO without knowing that has pretty much fooled themselves. In fact, when you talk to WoW people, how many walked away from that game because it’s changed? MMOs change, evolve, grow. Some people don’t like the direction in which they grow and they leave…but it changes nothing. You’re not buying a game, you’re paying for access to a space. If you don’t like the space, you can complain and you can leave…but there are no guarantees about what that space will contain long term.
If they simply did the following, most people would be happy:
1.Release fractals as they are today(OK they couldnt see the player gated content on day one until it happened..its a lot better now though, so thats progress).
2.Release Ascended gear with the same stats as exotic/legendary. The ONLY difference is, this gear has infusion slots so that people can eventually acquire this gear(progression) and eventually acquire the infusions(progression). Thus, not creating ANY gear treadmill since the innate stats on the gear itself is equal to that of exotic/legendary. They could have even included the stats you would get from runes or whatever. No stat increase. Just a dungeon-specific gear to allow you to progress into the higher levels.They keep saying “You dont need ascended gear to play any part of the game, just high level fractals”. Well, if you truely believe that, why give a 5-10% stat boost on the gear? Why not make them equi-statted to that of exotic gear, with one extra slot for infusions?
And to correct you, ascended gear wasnt intended and then scratched. Whiteside said, it was always intended..it was always coming, always on the table. They just chose not to inform us, and knew we would get PO’d…makes no sense to me.
You can correct me all you want, I still believe it wasn’t a definite decision. That’s my belief. Nothing you can say is going to change it. My belief is based on knowing how the company works long term. If they’d planned on putting it into the game at some point, we’d have had a whiff of it before it came to pass. Something would have leaked. Nothing did.
I’m sure that it was being designed earlier than we saw/heard about it, but you know, companies like Anet they have a lot of chefs. Some guys expect it will go in, some guys are against it. It’s a company, not one person. So Chris Whiteside, who was presumbly for it, says yeah, it was always going to go in. I’m not sure every dev would answer that question quite the same way, because they were against it. And yes, I’m sure some devs were against it. It wasn’t a unanimous thing. It seems people forget that Anet is not a person but a group of people and they won’t always agree on everything.
I also don’t believe that having the same stats and an infusion slot would be enough for most players. People like BIS gear, even if they’re not doing fractals. They don’t need it, but they want it. They want it enough to do fractals to get it, which is sort of the point. It gave people stuff to work for.
Vayne, good points..but there are still the “nothing to do at 80 posts”.
A side debate if you will—
So…
They release ascended gear with the Nov 15 patch. A huge backlash came about. I think even Colin and one of the game’s producers said they expected this. In the AMA they had a week or two later with the producer(whiteside is the last name), he said in a direct response to MY very own question I posted, that ascended gear was always intended. Well, if it was always intended and you seemed to have expected the community to freak out like it did, why didnt you launch the game and give us some heads up? Why not give the playerbase a headsup saying "Hey, we are releasing with XYZ tiers, and in a few months adding one more. " It was all hush hush until November 15th patch, or thereabouts. From an outsiders views, yours and mine, it would seem they were responding to the whiners and complainers of “nothing to do”…and added another tier into the game. It seemed this way because there was no mention of ascended gear in any betas, in any interviews, at launch, in the few months after launch. Nothing.
But it was always intended to be in the game…right?
I dont think so. I think that was a BS line.
Actually I don’t think it was a BS line, but I think it was a bit of spin. I think it had been discussed and tabled, but then shelved because they didn’t have the manpower to bring it out. Technically I don’t think there was a decision to definitely include it, but I believe it was already on the drawing board. Not really a lie, so much as spin.
As for why they didn’t say anything…look at what happens when Anet does say stuff. Suppose they said something and they decided not to use it?
As for the nothing to do at 80 posts, there are one or two a day now. There were so many more before the fractals came out.
There’s a difference between people who can’t find “end game” and having no end game. Not everyone needs or wants end game, but many, many people do.
Half the nothing to do at 80 posts now are people posting because they literally don’t know where to find stuff. That was far less of the case back then.
SPvP has had a bit of rejuvenation from various sites that own private PvP servers offering tournaments and prizes. .
I’ve only seen a handful of custom servers and they always seem to be empty…
Right, because tournaments have schedules. They’re not random. It’s not like playing on a custom server the rest of the time nets you anything.
If spvp were popular, there would be people playing all the time – they aren’t, so why are all the balance decisions being based on a failed game format? Makes zero sense.
I don’t think it’s quite this simple. Sometimes something in a game starts off with less fanfare and becomes popular. I’m thinking that SPvP has the potential to become popular. Anet is working toward that. You can’t say because it’s not “popular” at the moment that it will never be.
But anyway, the skills should be divided so that one side of the coin doesn’t affect they other.
Check out:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Diminishing_returns
You will never see any in-game indicator of DR status. It states that it is not designed to affect the “average” player. If average players saw how often they were playing under DR the forums would be on fire. This is why you will never see a DR indicator.
DR, as a concept, is flawed. What exactly is wrong if a player wants to play DE’s for four hours in one area? Do we really need a minder micro-managing our playstyle to this degree?
Couldn’t agree more. Sometimes, especially after a long day, I just want to farm because it’s not in the least bit stressful, and actually kind of relaxing since I don’t have to pay all that much attention to what I am doing. This is my “solo” content, it’s what I do when I just want to relax a bit (usually Im just chatting it up in vent with friends). The DR makes this a nearly pointless excercise however since after, a far too short, period of time I might as well be sitting in LA staring at my screen.
Just farm in different areas. Surely it’s not that hard. If you farm in Orr, then farm in Southsun Cove, then farm in Forstgorge sound, you won’t end up hitting DR.
I agree with OP and it’s a reason I gave up on GW2 dailies and pretty much the game as a whole just recently. Currently I’m not even logging in anymore, I’m trying out neverwinter and find it much more fun and alt friendly.
Sadly it doesnt have much PvP in the way I like, like WvW type of PvP, but my PvP needs are met by playing BF3. I found the NW PvE part and leveling much more fun.
GW2 really needs to broaden their laurel system and let us do dailies/monthlöies on each toon if we like. Make laurels soul bound if needed. Some will say economy will get kittened up… well it already is, and it’s not a big issue.
I’ve been playing NW as well. I like the game more so than I thought. Reading zone chat, I think a lot of other people do too. The one thing people complain about is the cash shop. Its why I might be breaking from that game already…but overall, its a solid game.
The cash shop in every PW game I’ve tried has been pretty dreadful. I’d never go back to that company under any circumstance.
@Vayne
I’m sorry, but, have you ever tried creating something for the long term? heck, I’m just a painter, not a full time developer, but even I have a ‘general vision and direction’ of what I want to achieve when I’m working on something that will take months to finish. Sure the tiny details may change, but the composition and vision does not.
If you’re telling me that the devs having no direction for the game is a ‘good’ and ‘natural’ thing, then, wow, I just don’t know what to say.
The devs have a general vision and direction too. I’m a professional writer and editor. I’ve had long term visions for books I’ve written that changed mid project. It happens. You try something, you see it doesn’t work, and you change it. That’s exactly what happened.
When this game launched, there was little vertical progression. Only masterwork to rare to exotic, which is of course a progression. But there were no ascended items. They tried it. And they found it wasn’t working. It worked FOR ME. It worked probably for the people complaining in this thread. However, if it doesn’t work for the bulk of the population, then something has to be done and Anet did it.
Let me put it another way. If it wasn’t something that absolultely had to be done, why would Anet have done it? They know what they said, They knew there would be a major backlash. They knew people would leave the game over it, but they did it anyway.
Don’t you think they must have had some sort of strong and compelling reason?
Not quoting to avoid walls of text, but…
@vayne: To one of your previous posts, “Noone can say where the game is headed not even the devs..its an iterative process”. Yes. But that doesn’t mean you have free reign to stray on what sold your customers. Why even bother to have blogs, interviews, webcasts talking about the game. Why even bother telling us anything about the game if you, as the developer, reserve the right to go back on anything you have said and change the game.The reason they say some of this, is because its supposed to be “stone”. At its core, set.
Again, tweaks are inevitable. Some things change, etc.
No vertical progression was mentioned in 2 or 3 interviews. It was never in game ads. It was never posted on their website. It was an intended design direction that didn’t pan out. It SUCKS that it didn’t pan out, not just for you, but for me too.
But I was here when the nothing to do at 80 posts were everywhere…not like now. There was a huge profusion of them.
And I don’t have the information Anet had about how many people got to a certain point and stopped logging in…but you can bet Anet had that information. The ascended gear was the fastest stop gap measure they could implement. Other stuff would have taken longer and I really don’t believe they felt they had much longer.
Taking stuff said in three interviews by devs and making it a core game promise, as opposed to taking it as a statement of intent will only lead to disappointment. A core game promise is no monthly fee. That’s on the box. It’s advertised. It’s what the game was sold on.
There have been to my knowledge, 2 maybe 3 quotes about vertical progression. It’s not in the manifesto. It’s not in ads. In each case it’s been in an interview and it was how the game launched. But what was Anet supposed to do if it literally wasn’t working? What would you have done?
So, if it happens, legendary weapons will become ascended but will there also be other weapons that will be ascended as well? I mostly ask this cause I like quite a few of the skins out there and would like to be able to at the least transmute them to be ascended (no, I would never transmute the stats of a legendary weapon to the skin I would prefer, that would just be a huge waste of gold).
Do you think there will, or should be, other ascended weapons if legendary ones become as such?
Funny, I know theres a video on this site even, where a game designer said legendaries will equal exotics in terms of stats.
Watch that interview, specifically at 8:45. Eric Flannum specifically says, and I quote “Legendary weapons, of course, are not any more powerful than the top level exotic weapons. Infact each legendary is based off of a specific exotic weapon, so they are the same level power wise but look a whole lot different”
Here we go again with the debate. Are they going back on this one?
Seriously, if you’re about to flame me, at least watch the video at the specific point so that I can take you seriously when you decide to shoot me down…because you have a developer on camera saying legendaries are the same level power wise as exotics, they just look different. By the way, if ascended was ever intended during development, don’t you think they would have mentioned ascended items, maybe in this interview?
I know the video. And I’ve answered this question at least twice or three times before. It has nothing to do with flaming you.
Anet has said, over and over again, that they’re an interative company. This means things change. Do you have any idea of the list of things that have changed since this game was annouced?
Dyes were originally seeds that you planted and then you had to go to a special dye vendor to grow the seeds. You could only grow one at at time and it took 24 hours to find out what your dye was. They sold plant food in the cash shop to speed this process up. This was removed in favor of the current dye system. Did anyone complain about this? Nope. Because they LIKED that change.
Originally energy existed for skills. As such, people would run out of energy and there would be energy potions in game. Energy was later scrapped for skills, and energy potions along with them. Did people complain? Nope. They liked that change.
Lengendary weapons were originally supposed to be part of a horizontal progression, but not enough people were taking up the hunt for them. Anet looked at it and decided what to do, the same way they changed energy. The same way they changed dyes.
Yes, Anet said all three things, but only one of them gets complained about. I think it’s pretty disingenuous to bring up old interviews in an attempt to catch MMO companies in lies. MMO developers, unlike any other type of game, perhaps, are forced to make changes to the game on the fly. It happens all the time in every single MMO.
You either can live with the changes, or you can’t. But everyone becomes a back-seat developer and assumes they know what’s best for the game better than the devs. Sometimes, some of those people are right. Games like Star Wars Galaxies were absolutely destroyed by some of the changes that the developers made. Other games, however, were saved.
I guess in a couple of years we’ll know which way Guild Wars 2 went.
Dude, we aren’t talking about some Alpha feature or content that was initially slated in the game when they were actually drawing the art. The video I posted was made a mere one or two months prior to release… Not 1-2 years. Its a little bit different context. The video posted was during a time when the game at its core, and most of its systems, were set in stone. Yes, always iterations to these systems, but they are tweaks. Not game changing additions or subtractios. Adding in a new tier of gear is game changing if you are one of those MANY people that Want and thought they had BiS gear.
So you can’t compare something that was initially intended for the game 1-2 yrs prior to launch to something that was “intended” for the game 1-2 months.
They dye system appeared in the first beta and they changed it after. It doesn’t matter when. MMOs, ALL MMOs, evolve and many evolve heavily. There are things that will change a year from now. Two years from now. That’s the nature of MMOs.
Every line from a devs mouth isn’t a promise to you personally. It’s an intent at direction which may or may not pan out over the long haul. I’m pretty sure Anet devs don’t own crystal balls.
I don’t believe there are enough people working on Guild Wars 1 at this point to finish new content. Last we heard there was no one working on anything beyond the Winds of Change.
However, WoC was so badly implemented, I’m not sure I’d want to see more.
Anet did what any intelligent business would do.
There are other ways to make money that don’t entail selling out. You built your response on a faulty premise.
There are other ways to make money that don’t entail selling out. Do you know what options Anet considered before making the decision to make a change to the game. Because in your mind, Anet sold out. In Anet’s mind, they iterated. You call it selling out, which is a faulty premise.
Anet has said all along, before the launch of the game even, that they’re an interative company. That they try things and make changes. You’re so focused on other things they said, you’ve ignored that one. They not only said it, but they posted an entire blog post on their site about how they iterate. Just about every single blog post before and since had the word iteration.
So you conveniently pull out every quote that Anet said about horizontal and vertical progression, while ignoring every single quote they said about iteration. Iteration means they try stuff, they see what works and they change what works. There were always going to be changes in this game. There were always changes, sometimes major changes in Guild Wars 1. Some people didn’t like the introduction of heroes and left the game. Some people loved them. Some people don’t like ascended gear and left the game, Some people do like it.
Anet’s didn’t “sell out”. Anet made changes to a game they saw as necessary. There are in fact, many other things they could have done, but not many of them could be implemented as quickly and most of them would have been bigger gambles. They made a decision you don’t like, and I get that. I simply say that they did what they had to do to protect their game.
What are all these other things they could have implemented in a timely manner?
The reason the game discourages you from farming is because you are NOT supposed to FARM in this game.
loooooooooool
So you’re supposed to get all those ecto and T6 stacks (legendary, ascendeds, MF skins) by not farming? GL doing that.
But that’s how I did it. I get ectos from just playing the game. I get karma from playing the game. I get mystic coins from playing the game. I get skill points from playing the game. Mystic coins are also cheap on the marketplace right now.
Then I play the mystic forge for clovers. I have far far more clovers than I need to make two legendary weapons but they also reward me, sometimes, with T6 mats. Doing this when I get ectos and enough coins have given me enough T6 mats to get my legendary. I tend to get more elaborate totems and powerful blood than other T6 mats, but I just sell those and buy the mats I need.
In the end, it took a look time, but it wasn’t impossible….and I didn’t farm to get them.
With all the time you spend on the forums you must have really good luck with drops ;-)
Due to chronic pain, I dont’ sleep. I have plenty of time to be in the forums and still play the game. Even I can’t play a game more than 12 hours a day but I’m awake 20 hours a day. I find the forums entertaining and even distracting from pain, so I hang out here. Distraction for pain is better and more helpful than most medication.
Most of the people who were going to leave because of ascended gear have lft already. The few people who stayed, if they leave, it’s not going to make a tremendous dent in the playerbase. That ship has sailed.
Most of the people who are left behind either don’t care enough about it to leave, or like the progression.
You do not have the data necessary to demonstrate this. But that seems irrelevant now:
I didn’t think it was possible, but if you are correct in everything you’ve written in this thread, the implications merely lower my outlook of the game. If true, then ArenaNet sold out, alienating its core supporters in favor of a steady flow of casuals and whales, riding a monetization scheme that depends on gambling impulses and gives economic incentive for the developers to focus their efforts on whatever creates the most cash shop revenue.
Apparently gear tiers fit that model, and now that it has been tried and shown to be successful, you cannot put Pandora back in the box; I now have all the more reason to expect a raise in the level cap at expansion, as what better way is there to achieve an influx of new and old players, many of whom will rush to the cash shop and oggle at its offerings.
If you are correct, the game will almost certainly increase and maintain its population, although for all the wrong reasons, and in such a way that I would come to regard the game as “Guild Wars” in name only. It would also mean that the strategic depth many of the more intelligent players hope for will never come to pass, since there is no money to be had in making a complex, intellectually stimulating system of PvP or PvE; casuals do not care for such things, yet they make the bulk of cash shop purchases. (This mentality would certainly explain the stagnant state of class development.)
So let us hope you are wrong then, as I have no interest in seeing this game become a more casual version of WoW, where people always have in the back of their minds that the current crop of gear is a temporary placeholder for whatever comes next, and any cosmetics they achieve will have to be transmuted—for a real dollar price—onto the next set of farmed gear.
If everything I said is true Arena net sold out who?
Anet is a business that invested millions of dollars into a game. At some point they saw people leaving at an alarming rate. According to what Anet has said, after the november exodus, the numbers started to grow again (we have no idea how much or whether that trend has continued since then, but we know it was growing).
I seriously believe fractals actually saved this game. Too many people expect MMOs to be pretty much their only game forever and too many people were leaving. Anet was in a mad scramble to keep people. This is betrayal to you? What about the jobs of the people at the company. When companies like Star Wars Tor, a game from a much bigger company, had to lay off half it’s employs….half…only six months after launch…in an industry where TSW had to lay off a third of its employees less than six months after launch, you suggest that you’ve been betrayed because a company made a decision about how to keep players in the game?
Anet did what any intelligent business would do. They attempted to compromise. The players who won’t compromise left (feel betrayed as you do). Some of us saw the reason for the compromise (like me) and stayed. I don’t like or love ascended gear. I see why Anet did it. Do I feel betrayed?
I’d feel a lot worse of they didn’t do it and there was a much smaller group playing the game and Anet couldn’t offer updates at all, and they had to fire half their staff to cut costs.
@Vayne
What makes you think I’m only focusing on that area of the game? The reason I don’t farm Fotm is because there’s a bunch of other things I’d rather do, instead. I’m just voicing out how unfortunate it is that there’s a portion that I’m totally left out of, a portion that could grow in the future. This was something I thought would never ever happen to this game.As for my concern, it benefits the ‘big picture’ that I voice it out, because I want to know where this game is headed. ATM, the ‘big picture’ is unsure, and my voice counts towards one side over the other.
No one, not even the developers can say where this game is headed. Because of the iterative approach they use, they keep trying new and different things. Some you’ll like and some you won’t.
If you’re looking for a pre-made direction that will be stuck to, you’re likely going to be disappointed, because that’s really not how MMOs work. A lot of Guild Wars 1 players, for example, hated where Guild Wars 1 went, and left the game. A lot more signed on. Heroes for example, destroyed the game for a lot of people who want to group. Additional PVe only skills destroyed the balance of the PvE game for some people. Some people loved the skills.
The game won’t please everyone and the decisions the devs make won’t please everyone. But there is no “direction” that might not change. And there really can’t be. Because at the end of the day, an MMO is a business. You didn’t buy a game, you bought access to a server…a membership. What any company does with a game is what they see is best for the game, and that can change.
By all means, register your complaints, as you did, clearly and fairly. But don’t expect a roadmap for the future that extended beyond a month or two because in MMOs everything can change, quite quickly.
So, if it happens, legendary weapons will become ascended but will there also be other weapons that will be ascended as well? I mostly ask this cause I like quite a few of the skins out there and would like to be able to at the least transmute them to be ascended (no, I would never transmute the stats of a legendary weapon to the skin I would prefer, that would just be a huge waste of gold).
Do you think there will, or should be, other ascended weapons if legendary ones become as such?
Funny, I know theres a video on this site even, where a game designer said legendaries will equal exotics in terms of stats.
Watch that interview, specifically at 8:45. Eric Flannum specifically says, and I quote “Legendary weapons, of course, are not any more powerful than the top level exotic weapons. Infact each legendary is based off of a specific exotic weapon, so they are the same level power wise but look a whole lot different”
Here we go again with the debate. Are they going back on this one?
Seriously, if you’re about to flame me, at least watch the video at the specific point so that I can take you seriously when you decide to shoot me down…because you have a developer on camera saying legendaries are the same level power wise as exotics, they just look different. By the way, if ascended was ever intended during development, don’t you think they would have mentioned ascended items, maybe in this interview?
I know the video. And I’ve answered this question at least twice or three times before. It has nothing to do with flaming you.
Anet has said, over and over again, that they’re an interative company. This means things change. Do you have any idea of the list of things that have changed since this game was annouced?
Dyes were originally seeds that you planted and then you had to go to a special dye vendor to grow the seeds. You could only grow one at at time and it took 24 hours to find out what your dye was. They sold plant food in the cash shop to speed this process up. This was removed in favor of the current dye system. Did anyone complain about this? Nope. Because they LIKED that change.
Originally energy existed for skills. As such, people would run out of energy and there would be energy potions in game. Energy was later scrapped for skills, and energy potions along with them. Did people complain? Nope. They liked that change.
Lengendary weapons were originally supposed to be part of a horizontal progression, but not enough people were taking up the hunt for them. Anet looked at it and decided what to do, the same way they changed energy. The same way they changed dyes.
Yes, Anet said all three things, but only one of them gets complained about. I think it’s pretty disingenuous to bring up old interviews in an attempt to catch MMO companies in lies. MMO developers, unlike any other type of game, perhaps, are forced to make changes to the game on the fly. It happens all the time in every single MMO.
You either can live with the changes, or you can’t. But everyone becomes a back-seat developer and assumes they know what’s best for the game better than the devs. Sometimes, some of those people are right. Games like Star Wars Galaxies were absolutely destroyed by some of the changes that the developers made. Other games, however, were saved.
I guess in a couple of years we’ll know which way Guild Wars 2 went.
So what do those guys do. They don’t have legendaries to go for, which should have been keeping people busy longer term. They had nothing to go for after exotics. The gap between exotics and legendary is too large. There should have been something, from launch, in that gap.
They should take a break.
GW2 is brimming with content. The only reason those type of folks run out of content is because all they want is content that give more stats.
And that’s the question of course. If the game had launched with ascended, would people still be complaining like they are today?
It’s irrelevant to talk about ‘what could have’. Anet has made their move, and right now, they’re in this ‘phase’ of testing concepts, letting us test ideas via living story and whatnot. It’s a good time to actually voice out what players want to see in the game, instead of saying ‘everything is going to be okay’.
Saying people should take a break (because that’s what you would do) is pretty strange. People don’t want to take breaks from MMOs. They want to play them all day every day. I know it sounds strange, but it’s true. There is perhaps no other genre of video game that comes with the same level of expectation that an MMO does.
In fact, some of the people who complain the loudest about Guild Wars 2 are Guild Wars 1 players who say things like I played that game for thousands of hours and never got bored. That level of expectation sets up just about any new game for failure if you ask me. That said, I have yet to take a break for the game and I’m still enjoying it.
However, you don’t get to tell people how and when to play. Nor does Anet. People do what they do, and Anet, wrongly or rightly, has to respond to that.
Feel free to add Cador Shrike to your friends list.
@Morrigan
You’re absolutely right when you say that the gear tier was a stop gap measure. It was introduced because Anet could introduce that much faster than they can new content. When there’s enough new content, it will be interesting see how the chips fall.
In some ways, that’s why I’m a bit confounded by the temporary content, since you don’t get all of it at once. I think Anet is thinking that the more stuff you have all at once, the more divided the playerbase is, but putting out new things for limited times focuses the playerbase. I’m not sure if that’s wise or not, but then, I’m not a game developer.
As for the backlash from a new tier of gear…there were, over the course of Guild Wars 1, 7 million people who played games with vertical progression. WoW still has 10 million players. That’s all at the same time. If you add up all the players from other MMOs you get considerably more than 20 million players.
The horizontal progression in Guild Wars 1, as brilliant as it was in that game, won’t have the mass appeal that Anet thought it would. And I really do believe they thought it would. But then we have a lot of people who don’t care about legendaries because the stats are the same as exotics. Enough of them have said on on the forums.
So what do those guys do. They don’t have legendaries to go for, which should have been keeping people busy longer term. They had nothing to go for after exotics. The gap between exotics and legendary is too large. There should have been something, from launch, in that gap.
And that’s the question of course. If the game had launched with ascended, would people still be complaining like they are today?
@Vayne
People who complained there’s no “stuff to do” will keep complaining there’s no “stuff to do”.Meanwhile, folks like me who were drawn to this game in the beginning, with the promise of aesthetic/achievement “progression” and never had a problem with it now have to live with these compromises, which Anet seem to plan on building on in the future.
You talk about catering to ‘both sides’ now, when there was actually a time when it was just one anti-farm, anti-grind side, and the side that wanted to grind was told to go check out the dozen other MMORPG out there that does a better job to cater to their needs. I wonder how Anet plans to succeed by catering ‘half-baked’ to both sides.
EDIT: just to add, you also seem to quickly dismiss the validity of my concern based on how ‘little’ the portion of game I’m missing. Like I said, it has nothing to do with ‘content’ I’m missing, but the time I could be spending with friends for the short time I can log in to play that is prevented due to these ‘compromises’.
I’m not dismissing your concerns. I’m saying that you’re focusing on one area of the game period end of story. I’m saying it because it’s what you’re doing. I’m sorry you feel left out that your guild can do something you can’t. But that has nothing to do with what I said. Anet made, in my opinion, the best decision for the game. Since that is my opinion, what you’re complaining about, as much as it annoys you, doesn’t change the fact that it was done for the best reasons.
Your comments about people complaining about having nothing to do will continue to complain, that maybe be true. But in my experience only the top few percent of people who complain will leave the game over it. Most will complain and stay. Again, that’s my personal observation, I can’t prove it, but it seems to have worked that way. The players we lost in November were players that simply would not compromise.
I followed the game as long and as hard as anyone. I was a GW 1 player for five years. I have GWAMM and 50/50 in my HoM and my opinion is worth no less than yours. Sure you have a concern. I’m still thinking Anet knows the game and the market better than you do. It’s not YOUR game, it’s THEIR game. How much time and money do you have invested in it, compared to the developer? Not much I think. When a company makes a decision for the benefit of the game, you either suck it up and deal with it, or you walk away. Clearly they made this decision because they believed it was for the benefit of the game. They didn’t make this decision to kitten you off.
We all have to deal with things in the name of compromise. I had to deal with it too. The difference is, I really do believe it was better for the game. If you don’t…that’s fine. But it’s your opinion. I’m not dismissing your concerns. I’m saying there’s a bigger picture beyond your concerns.
I also think when culling ends in PVe, we’ll see more people. As it stands now, you can be relatively close to people and not see them at all.
Ascended gear feels like WoW releasing more gear with each expansion and making the old one obsolete…
Where is the GW1 feeling…? Is this game going to take the WoW way and not the GW way
This is a bad question, because it’s only assuming two ways. I see the potential for ways that are neither the WoW way or the Guild Wars 1 way.
The problem with the WoW way is that content is gated behind gear that you have to run specific content to get. I don’t believe Anet wants to do this. The exception to this would be fractals, which were designed just for those people, but even there, you can enjoy lower level fractals and see everything without any of that gear. Higher level fractals are the same thing as the lower levels ones, but the bosses have more health and use the agony condition, which is punishing. But essentially the design of the different fractals is the same. Only the difficulty goes up.
I think Anet wants to create a more gentle gear curve than WoW has as a compromise. Those who just want to play the game and not worry about gear can without jumping through hoops to see content. Those who want to see their stats increase, albeit not very much, will keep chasing the carrot on the stick.
As the game progresses and more and more content comes out, ascended stuff will become much easier to get. The whole idea of it was to give people stuff to do…because that’s what an MMO is all about.
The compromise is to try to make it so those who don’t want that particular stuff to do aren’t greatly inconvenienced by the gear.
It’s not just about experiencing new content though. The biggest reason I play is to do things with friends. Sometimes, I only have a couple hours to play, and I see my friends forming for a fotm 30+ run, I feel left out. I took a break from the game and now I’m ‘behind’ for some portions of the game that my friends happen to enjoy playing.
This is something I never imagined I’d have to deal with, back before launch when the game had all these promises about no grind and stuff.
There is precisely one single area of the game you can’t do at this moment, because it just so happens that one single area of the game was created specifically as a compromise with those who wanted gear progression.
Anything else and I do mean anything else in the game your guild does, you can do with them. WvW, no problem. SPvP, no problem. Any other dungeon, no problem.
In addition, it would take you a very very short amount of time to get where they’re going, if you really wanted to get there.
Anet made a compromise for people who wanted this kind of play, without affecting the rest of the game…and it WAS a compromise.
A good compromise will inevitably involve sacrifices from both sides. You have one single dungeon you can’t enter at every level and those who want progression want a whole lot more progression than they ended up getting.
But in my opinion, this compromise helped the game more than it hurt it. Because a lot of people were walking when they didn’t have “stuff to do”.
Most of the people who were going to leave because of ascended gear have lft already. The few people who stayed, if they leave, it’s not going to make a tremendous dent in the playerbase. That ship has sailed.
Most of the people who are left behind either don’t care enough about it to leave, or like the progression.
I do not agree with you Vayne- many people were very unhappy about the addition of ascended gear because it was essentially a sop to the players who came from more traditional gear based MMO’s, burned through the content at the speed of light and then shouted MOAR.
Those people made no attempt to actually figure out what GW2 was about and many of them left regardless.Many people did leave the game, some like me stayed because I was not willing to give up on a game I enjoyed because of one massive blunder that I could mostly ignore.
Please note that I do care, do not like the progression and I am sure that I am not alone.
I am watching the state of affairs like a hawk- so far I have been able to continue my game like Ascended does not exist, however hearing people quite happily talking about a raised level cap and even more tiers of gear makes me very very uneasy.I have spent many hours and a lot of gold to get my characters how I like them- if that is taken away from me for the sake of some random numbers that has no meaning, to feed the ego’s of players who like bigger numbers for the sake of bigger numbers- I will be furious.
Add to that if level cap gets raised and another tier of gear gets added the new content will have to scale up to match it.
This will make it harder and eventually impossible for people who do not have the gear to do the content.Ascended gear still smarts for many people- gentle curve is meaningless because it satisfies no-one, not the people who want horizontal progression nor the people who want vertical progression.
It doesn’t matter how gently you rub salt in a wound- it is still salt in a wound.I am sure I am not alone
You’re not alone. I never said you were. That said, the percentage of the playerbase that will leave at this point because of a new tier of gear, I"m relatively sure is relatively small, even if some do. Again I just don’t think it will make a dent. Here’s my thinking.
A good portion of the playerbase who signed up originally have run out of content and moved on to other things. The new people who have signed up will probably make up more of the future than most of the people who were here originally.
I mean in November, the population dropped drastically. From what I can tell, we’re about up to the same number as before, maybe even more.
But these new people didn’t follow the game for years. They don’t have the same aversion to vertical progression that the original people had.
So of the original people left playing, most people say it’s way less than half the population, you have people who stayed. There’s no one in my guild who has a problem with vertical progression as long as content isn’t gated. A good portion of us started when the game started, but a lot of people are new too.
I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to assume most new people don’t care at all about vertical progression one way or another, or even that many expect it to some degree.
In the end, when that cap is raised, I think those who think there’ll be a mass exodus because of it are going to be very surprised.