(edited by Vayne.8563)
You’re making the assumption this has been a positive financial change. I’m making the assumption that those numbers aren’t in yet. Of course they’re going to finish the raid,t they’ve been working on it, it was supposed to come with the expansion, but these chips haven’t been counted yet.
I’m stating the fact that a surprisingly decent amount of players have cleared/worked on content in the raid wings.
According to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/47um5k/raid_5/
41.5% of players have at least stepped foot in the raid and attempted a boss. About 21% of players have cleared a boss, or wiped enough to gather up 50 magnetite shards. What’s more is this is an understatement since a lot of raiders do not use gw2efficiency. You may think “Well 21% (Most certainly more) of the player-base is not significant.” I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. It was speculated that HoT sold about half a million copies. If 21% of the player-base came to this game to raid, or raiding keeps them interested I’d say this is having a positive impact on sales. As time goes by the content will become natural and more and more players will participate. Evidence points to you being the minority when you account for all aspects of this game.
I personally wouldn’t mind seeing these numbers matched up with WvW’ers, sPvP’ers, Dungeons, Fractals, Open world Meta’s, or… what do you guys complaining do? Mine ore all day and SV trains?
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
Correction, there’s been a significant backlash from the 1% of casuals that take up these forums. Also, Anet is revisiting HoT outside of raiding. That statement is pointless to this conversation unless you want to show me where Anet stated they were revisiting raids in April.
@Aenorio
Tl;DR I’m guessing you had a bad pugging experience. Part of raiding in pugs is dealing with people who have already cleared the content you are learning. These are people who read up and watched videos on the fights. If you come in, messing up the mechanics or whatever your role is the people running the pug have two options. They can give you constructive criticism, which pretty much no one online can take, or they can kick you out and replace you. It’s fair game and this isn’t elitism. It’s called looking for people of similar skill. If you are looking for people to casually raid and learn together. Find a guild! It’s not that difficult of a concept!
I don’t know what Anet can do about you feeling like the raiding community is “toxic.”
It’s not 1% of the casuals, and for each person that posts, you know a hundred won’t. But aside from that 41.5 percent set foot in a raid means 60% of the playerbase never set foot in a raid, and that includes pretty much everyone in my guild who wanted to see the inside who never raided. Lots of people are curious.
20% beating A raid boss means 80% haven’t beat a raid boss. That means you’re taking a chance at alienating a majority of the player base. Those numbers also include people who have bought raids, because some people sell them.
So tell me, how have you determined this 1% number, may I ask? Can you show me your calculations?
In most single-player games 20-30% of the playerbase never reaches the end. Does that mean that no ending. Does that no mean no ending should be provided?
You obviously have very little understanding of how to read metrics. Face the simple fact that raids were embraced by a large part of the community and are being played a lot. I just cannot even fathom how you even being to rationalize being against OPTIONAL CONTENT that doesn’t require that much resources to develop, people enjoy and play, but you don’t? And to repeat, it’s COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. None of your arguments have even the slightest shred of logic backing them up, especially in the face of the fact that NOBODY is forcing you to play raids AT ALL.
No one is forcing me to play this game at all. And if I get disenfranchised enough, eventually I’ll leave it, as I did Rift and other games before that. I don’t want to leave, but I certainly will.
I’m not the one reading metrics. Anet is. We’ll see down the road, when it’s had time for the novelty to wear off, how many people enjoy it, how many people continue to enjoy it.
But I’m thinking more people are feeling annoyed by the push toward more challenging content than are embracing that challenging content. That’s an opinion, just like you have an opinion.
Neither of us has evidence, but Anet knows. Still, I dont’ think Anet would admit there was a problem if they didn’t perceive it to be a serious issue of the player base.
Time will tell. I’m happy to wait and see.
Exactly! And raiding takes less or more time and commitment than waiting for a meta?
Definitively the raid by a big margin. But the commitment and expectation of commitment is different here.
Commitment
In the new HoT it’s structural. Whatever you do, the commitment is there. The maps are 90-120min long, the big reward is at the end, they completely through out of the window the principle of entry and exit point, you rely massively on the LFG which is a pain to use (this was also present on Silverwaste and Dry Top, but those were the minority of maps, while it’s the majority for HoT maps).Raid on the other end, the commitment is about forming a squad and the level of difficulty. If you have a squad with good player the commitment is pretty much zero. If you don’t have a squad and have average players the commitment is too big for a lot of people.
Expectation of Commitment
Open World is suppose to be casual, there were designed that way and that’s the natural environment for casual. All open world map were pretty much for a more casual crowd. And I’m not just talking about casual player. I’m an hardcore players, but I want to play casually when I go into open world.Raid were suppose to be hardcore content from day one.
So that’s my point. I’m a full time carer for a dsiabled person. I have tons of time, but I can’t always plan that time. If I do a DE, I can leave whenever I want. I affect no one but myself. But walking away in the middle of a raid would be considered bad, even though sometimes I might have to.
The raid is the complete antithesis of casual content. Let’s say I walk away at DS. The worst that can happen is I die. I’m not likely to cause a the entire party to wipe. Even in a dungeon or Fractal with my guild, they know my situation and sometimes I have to walk away. That’s a whole lot harder in a fractal. Scheduling my time is tough.
I’ve spent MORE time trying to organize fractals with people than I have waiting for meta events in HoT by a considerable margin.
The amount of time practice to get to the point where raids are faster is a hell of a lot longer than 1.5 hours.
Sorry to disagree, but my experience is that the meta events are far easier for someone to get into than raids.
You’re making the assumption this has been a positive financial change. I’m making the assumption that those numbers aren’t in yet. Of course they’re going to finish the raid,t they’ve been working on it, it was supposed to come with the expansion, but these chips haven’t been counted yet.
I’m stating the fact that a surprisingly decent amount of players have cleared/worked on content in the raid wings.
According to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/47um5k/raid_5/
41.5% of players have at least stepped foot in the raid and attempted a boss. About 21% of players have cleared a boss, or wiped enough to gather up 50 magnetite shards. What’s more is this is an understatement since a lot of raiders do not use gw2efficiency. You may think “Well 21% (Most certainly more) of the player-base is not significant.” I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. It was speculated that HoT sold about half a million copies. If 21% of the player-base came to this game to raid, or raiding keeps them interested I’d say this is having a positive impact on sales. As time goes by the content will become natural and more and more players will participate. Evidence points to you being the minority when you account for all aspects of this game.
I personally wouldn’t mind seeing these numbers matched up with WvW’ers, sPvP’ers, Dungeons, Fractals, Open world Meta’s, or… what do you guys complaining do? Mine ore all day and SV trains?
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
Correction, there’s been a significant backlash from the 1% of casuals that take up these forums. Also, Anet is revisiting HoT outside of raiding. That statement is pointless to this conversation unless you want to show me where Anet stated they were revisiting raids in April.
@Aenorio
Tl;DR I’m guessing you had a bad pugging experience. Part of raiding in pugs is dealing with people who have already cleared the content you are learning. These are people who read up and watched videos on the fights. If you come in, messing up the mechanics or whatever your role is the people running the pug have two options. They can give you constructive criticism, which pretty much no one online can take, or they can kick you out and replace you. It’s fair game and this isn’t elitism. It’s called looking for people of similar skill. If you are looking for people to casually raid and learn together. Find a guild! It’s not that difficult of a concept!
I don’t know what Anet can do about you feeling like the raiding community is “toxic.”
It’s not 1% of the casuals, and for each person that posts, you know a hundred won’t. But aside from that 41.5 percent set foot in a raid means 60% of the playerbase never set foot in a raid, and that includes pretty much everyone in my guild who wanted to see the inside who never raided. Lots of people are curious.
20% beating A raid boss means 80% haven’t beat a raid boss. That means you’re taking a chance at alienating a majority of the player base. Those numbers also include people who have bought raids, because some people sell them.
So tell me, how have you determined this 1% number, may I ask? Can you show me your calculations?
The problem isn’t raids. It’s the perception of elements in the casual community which, rightly or wrongly, believes this game is no longer a game for them. The more stuff you have that people can’t get the more disenfranchised they’re going to feel.
I warned Anet on these forums about this before raids were ever introduced. You simply can’t lock an entire tier of gear behind one game type and expect people not to complain about it. If it were just crafted there’d be a riot.
No you’re trying to take something complex and make it simple. It’s not simple. Raids aren’t the problem…they’re part of the problem.
There are a host of dissatisfied people. There are multiple threads on reddit, and this forum posted by disenfranchised casuals You may think that’s not a problem but I assure you Anet does and they’d be wise, in my opinion, to listen, because they’ve built the game on casual content and suddenly changed it. They went off in a different direction that threatens at least part of the core base of players they’ve built up.
Raids alone aren’t the issue. The shift in focus is the issue, of which raids are a part. Sometimes, you have to look at the forest, not just the trees.
Well yes, but it’s not for the same reason.
Most people are against the structure of the HoT and the fact that HP were designed around group event rather than just normal event that you can do alone. Very few really complain about the difficulty of these new mobs. Yes some people do complain about that, but as much as people complain about the difficulty of mobs in silverwaste and who complain about that anymore. People get used to the difficulty of mobs.
But people can’t get used to the difficulty of getting your HP when you play solo or having to wait 1 hours to have a 15min window to get into a DS map for 90min before you get your reward. And, it’s not about casual vs hardcore there. I consider myself an hardcore players and my friends are hardcore player too, but these obstacle are still there for us and that doesn’t make those activities appealing.
Exactly! And raiding takes less or more time and commitment than waiting for a meta?
Actually you don’t know what the backlash is, but changes are being made to HoT to pander to players who have less free time and are more casual. That’s what Anet has said.
Do you really think that they would do that if their metrics didn’t show it was necessary? If they didn’t feel enough people were affected.
Face it, if Anet is making substantial changes to the new zones, they realize there’s an issue. Hell, they’ve admitted there’s an issue.
I think that’s a pretty good indication.
What does tweaking HoT maps have to do with raids, can you please explain that to me? Or are we just talking about whatever and ignoring the topic at hand?
The problem isn’t raids. It’s the perception of elements in the casual community which, rightly or wrongly, believes this game is no longer a game for them. The more stuff you have that people can’t get the more disenfranchised they’re going to feel.
I warned Anet on these forums about this before raids were ever introduced. You simply can’t lock an entire tier of gear behind one game type and expect people not to complain about it. If it were just crafted there’d be a riot.
No you’re trying to take something complex and make it simple. It’s not simple. Raids aren’t the problem…they’re part of the problem.
There are a host of dissatisfied people. There are multiple threads on reddit, and this forum posted by disenfranchised casuals You may think that’s not a problem but I assure you Anet does and they’d be wise, in my opinion, to listen, because they’ve built the game on casual content and suddenly changed it. They went off in a different direction that threatens at least part of the core base of players they’ve built up.
Raids alone aren’t the issue. The shift in focus is the issue, of which raids are a part. Sometimes, you have to look at the forest, not just the trees.
…
So just don’t play raids. Why the hell is this still a discussion?! You don’t like them, don’t play them, there, solved your issue!
Well, it’s a good thing you are not forced to raid? It is perfectly justified to offer unique rewards through a hard-core system. It’s amazing how entitled you feel about this subject.
If you can’t deal with this then that sucks. Anet made a business decision here. Obviously raids must attract more people then they deter.
Correction. Anet attempted to try something that might or might not pan out in the long term. They made the decision to include legendary armor into the raid rewards before the first raid ever shipped.
Do you think Anet expected the backlash they received from the casual community? I don’t. Anet knows how many people play more, play less, stopped playing.
You’re making the assumption this has been a positive financial change. I’m making the assumption that those numbers aren’t in yet. Of course they’re going to finish the raid,t they’ve been working on it, it was supposed to come with the expansion, but these chips haven’t been counted yet.
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
Anet made a business decision which they may yet regret. I think the raiding community might end up being surprised at how much backlash their actually is, and what that means for the future, only Anet can say (and they probably won’t).
However, if I were you, I wouldn’t count my chickens before they hatch.
No, there isn’t a significant backlash of any kind, there has been some complaining that the only new content this year has been raids. In fact, raids have been repeatedly praised for being as good as they are and even more casual players got into them. Raids in GW2 are played by a much bigger part of the playerbase than is common in most MMOs, and this is official info from Anet.
It’s amusing how much you are trying to turn this into a big deal when in fact it very much isn’t. The player-base has either embraced them or just don’t play them (because they are not mandatory in any way) and Anet have stated that they are very happy with how it all turned out. So all this backlash is mostly in your own head.
Actually you don’t know what the backlash is, but changes are being made to HoT to pander to players who have less free time and are more casual. That’s what Anet has said.
Do you really think that they would do that if their metrics didn’t show it was necessary? If they didn’t feel enough people were affected.
Face it, if Anet is making substantial changes to the new zones, they realize there’s an issue. Hell, they’ve admitted there’s an issue.
I think that’s a pretty good indication.
I have fully optimized characters and alts. I have the skill and ability to raid should I choose to do so. I don’t want to do so. I don’t enjoy the experience enough to devote major time to it. I’m sure I’m not the only person who came to this game to avoid raid centric games, or games where not raiding makes you a second class citizen.
So now, having the skill to raid, and the ability to raid, but not enjoying raiding, I don’t want to see rewards that give gameplay advantage locked behind raids. I could grind away at raids to get legendary armor, and yes, I’d really like to have armor where I can change stats, but if I’m forced to raid to do it, I’ll dislike the game, and it will increase my change of leaving.
Knowing that I can’t get this convenience unless I do something I don’t enjoy for hours really does make me want to leave the game. That’s how I feel about it.
I didn’t buy a game to work. I bought a game to have fun. Until now I could get the best gear in the game without doing something I didn’t enjoy for an extended period of time. Now I can’t.
That’s an issue for me and people like me.
Well, it’s a good thing you are not forced to raid? It is perfectly justified to offer unique rewards through a hard-core system. It’s amazing how entitled you feel about this subject.
If you can’t deal with this then that sucks. Anet made a business decision here. Obviously raids must attract more people then they deter.
Correction. Anet attempted to try something that might or might not pan out in the long term. They made the decision to include legendary armor into the raid rewards before the first raid ever shipped.
Do you think Anet expected the backlash they received from the casual community? I don’t. Anet knows how many people play more, play less, stopped playing.
You’re making the assumption this has been a positive financial change. I’m making the assumption that those numbers aren’t in yet. Of course they’re going to finish the raid,t they’ve been working on it, it was supposed to come with the expansion, but these chips haven’t been counted yet.
There’s been a signficant backlash from the casual community against raids and HoT in general. Significant enough for Anet to revisit HoT and even admit it was too grindy and didn’t mesh with their stated objectives. That kind of backpedaling doesn’t happen when all is well in Denmark.
Anet made a business decision which they may yet regret. I think the raiding community might end up being surprised at how much backlash their actually is, and what that means for the future, only Anet can say (and they probably won’t).
However, if I were you, I wouldn’t count my chickens before they hatch.
Angelica, the problem is, while you want Guild Wars 2 back there were people who weren’t satisfied with how Guild Wars 2 was. Those people felt justified in asking for harder open world content and they got just that. For each person who wants to solo, there’s probably another who wants harder group content. Or some challenge in their play. It’s almost impossible to please everyone.
My best advice to you is join a casual guild and not try to do everything alone. We ran a hero point event today and had a great time. A lot of the people couldn’t have soloed the stuff we did, but with even a small group it becomes quite fun.
SNIPWhile you answer has a lot of truth where it fails is that I get Forgotten City only once in 10 tries. Worst is I have been attempting to get Vinetooth Hunter for two weeks. Even when people do show up it fails. So may more examples I can add too.
Why do I have to play day after day and just get fails because ANET rewards people for leeching and not trying to help?
I don’t know about you but I’ve beaten the AB meta probably 90% of the time. I think I might have failed in twice. And even failing it we succeed at one gate and get some reward. It’s not like I get no reward, just less of a reward. The only way you can fail every time is if you’re not looking to be on a map that’s going to win in the first place. Triple trouble has the same problem. It requires a modicum of effort to get in a winning server, but it’s really not that hard.
Vinetooth Hunter is probably harder, because the VineTooth prime often does run out of time. Of course, the problem with achievements is if you make them easy enough for everyone to do they have no value. Some achievements really have to be harder. There’s no time limit on this.
If I were you I’d find a casual guild with no requirements that does content. Because that’s the easiest and most fun way to get this stuff done.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
You can always go do what you enjoy and then buy the raids to get your legendary armor.
This is true. I can do that. I can enter into a non-supported transaction with other players, where if I get screwed over I don’t get a refund.
Not really why I play games. If you want to offer raids a unique reward, offer them really cool skins, not a quality of life feature that can only be gotten through raiding, because that’s problematical for me.
You want to know what’s awesome? There are very few mechanics that actually cause a raid-wide wipe unless you’re talking Sabetha or Matthais. Seriously.
And yet I’ve spent dozens of attempts on these raid bosses and not completed one yet, so clearly something is causing a wipe. If you mean one single attack that is guaranteed to KO everyone at once, sure, you might be right, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the attacks that might drop only some of the players, but in a way where the party cannot any longer pull out a win.
Your issue is you refuse to practice the fights and perfect the few mechanics that are tossed your way.
Yes. I’ve said as much, and then you’ve said “Your issue is you refuse to practice the fights and perfect the few mechanics that are tossed your way,” and then I’ve said yes, and then you’ve said “Your issue is you refuse to practice the fights and perfect the few mechanics that are tossed your way,” and then I’ve said yes, and we can keep that up all week but I honestly don’t consider it terribly productive.
Find a guild man/group man. You’re wasting your time here. Literally. Go post on every recruitment forum. Go apply to 10 guilds. Do you need me to go out and find these guilds for you? Do you even have a fully optimized character and an alt?
I have no interest in that. That is not the game I want to play. I keep explaining the game I do want to play, why do you keep ignoring the words that I tell you and go off on tangents about how I could instead do things that I have no interest in doing, and have said as much? I’m really starting to worry about you here.
There are people who like to raid who simply don’t get why other people don’t like it. Because they don’t understand, they try to guess why this might happen. It’s human nature. They can’t conceive of the fact that even some people who can beat this content don’t enjoy it for other reasons.
My entire reason for playing this game is a living breathing world, not challenging content, not boss fights, not repeating the same boss fight over and over again locked in time until I beat it. It’s not why I bought this game. I bought this game because I wanted a skyrim-like MMO. And for a long time, that’s what Guild Wars 2 provided and still provides in most of the game.
But as we move forward and raids are pushed, I feel like I’m being herded toward a different game than the one I bought. That’s really this issue.
Want legendary armor? Sure I do. But not enough to do something for hours I don’t feel like I’ll enjoy.
Those people felt justified in asking for harder open world content and they got just that.
And yet they continue to spam their 1 button while only playing with the zerg and grouping for solo content. All HoT did was kill off the less populated maps. The increase in difficulty simply made certain people fear playing outside of the zerg. Designing everything to split up the zerg is what killed it. Where you only needed 5+ people in the past, you now need 20+, though people want 50+ and commanders everywhere.
If they want to continue with this zerg design, they need to split the meta from the maps. The meta by itself should happen in its own sectioned off instance where everyone there is only there to participate. Dragon’s Stand is very close to that design.
I tend to agree with this analysis, and would support that kind of play for the large meta events. Keep the exploration objectives gettable without completing the meta so those who want to get them can not taxi to the populated map.
The thing is, I don’t always play HoT just to play the meta and I don’t really love to zerg. Sure I’ll do a meta if it comes up, but I actually do enjoy running around the zones, in the same way I ran around zones in the open world. I don’t really care how populated a map is and yes, I know it takes longer to get currency this way, but I don’t like game design necessary change how I have fun.
Today me and a handful of guildies ran around VB on characters to unlock some hero challenges on alts. We didn’t zerg. We just got together as a group and had some fun. We didn’t pay attention to the meta. We did do some of the events we came upon. It’s was a lot of fun.
Not sure why some people seem to think there is only one way to play these maps.
You want to know what’s awesome? There are very few mechanics that actually cause a raid-wide wipe unless you’re talking Sabetha or Matthais. Seriously.
Your issue is you refuse to practice the fights and perfect the few mechanics that are tossed your way. Everyone has a job. Put in a dozen attempts. You keep dying to something. Address that and fix it. You’re taking the easy way out.
Comparing raids to zerg-fests and live ammunition to airsoft is hilarious. Sorry guy, if you don’t do the time, you…wont do the crime? What no that’s not right…
Find a guild man/group man. You’re wasting your time here. Literally. Go post on every recruitment forum. Go apply to 10 guilds. Do you need me to go out and find these guilds for you? Do you even have a fully optimized character and an alt?
I have fully optimized characters and alts. I have the skill and ability to raid should I choose to do so. I don’t want to do so. I don’t enjoy the experience enough to devote major time to it. I’m sure I’m not the only person who came to this game to avoid raid centric games, or games where not raiding makes you a second class citizen.
So now, having the skill to raid, and the ability to raid, but not enjoying raiding, I don’t want to see rewards that give gameplay advantage locked behind raids. I could grind away at raids to get legendary armor, and yes, I’d really like to have armor where I can change stats, but if I’m forced to raid to do it, I’ll dislike the game, and it will increase my change of leaving.
Knowing that I can’t get this convenience unless I do something I don’t enjoy for hours really does make me want to leave the game. That’s how I feel about it.
I didn’t buy a game to work. I bought a game to have fun. Until now I could get the best gear in the game without doing something I didn’t enjoy for an extended period of time. Now I can’t.
That’s an issue for me and people like me.
Angelica, the problem is, while you want Guild Wars 2 back there were people who weren’t satisfied with how Guild Wars 2 was. Those people felt justified in asking for harder open world content and they got just that. For each person who wants to solo, there’s probably another who wants harder group content. Or some challenge in their play. It’s almost impossible to please everyone.
My best advice to you is join a casual guild and not try to do everything alone. We ran a hero point event today and had a great time. A lot of the people couldn’t have soloed the stuff we did, but with even a small group it becomes quite fun.
And this game has ALWAYS had stuff you can’t do alone when you want to. The temples in Orr for example, which have been here since launch.
At the end of the day, there is plenty of casual, solo content in this game, but proportionately very little for people who want harder difficulty.
In Prized Possessions the first skill doesn’t appear when it’s supposed to. In fact, it doesn’t appear at all. The two and three skills work on schedule, but the one skill doesn’t appear.
It’s not a bug…well not technically.
Lower level accounts, accounts without an 80 in them, don’t get the same dalies as low level accounts. Today for example, accounts with 80th level characters had maguuma wastes gathering, which obviously low level characters can’t do.
Those characters got shiverpeakes mining instead. So if you do one of the lower level ones, even though it doesn’t appear on your list, it still counts as a daily.
You can find what the dailies are by going to the wiki, and see all the dailies. Even if you do an unlisted daily it counts toward your progress.
Ok, so I take this to mean that you don’t intend to engage in a productive discussion? If we can’t even agree that the Earth is round what’s the point of debating Heliocentricity?
There’s a vast difference between fact, speculation and falsehood. With regard to this topic.
FACTS
- The generally accepted bellwether for WoW raids was that ~5% completed one or more raids. That was before Looking for Raid, after which that percentage doubtless went up.
- 5% of WoW’s 12M apex is 600,000 players.
- HoT was marketed as including raids. That means that the raid demographic was targeted by HoT marketing.
- An article in Fortune, written to tout the partnership of ANet with another company to promote GW2 PvP as an ESport cited 1.5M monthly logins before PFF.
- The revenue figures for GW2 in Q4 15 reveal that in addition to gem sales — which were cited as “stable.” — GW2 brought in an additional $13-14M during the HoT launch period.
- ANet stated the participation of GW2 players was higher than in other games. They did not say whether that was based on pre-LFR or post-LFR numbers.
- The persistent world content in HoT dwarfs the content in two raid wings by an order of magnitude.
- ANet has announced an upcoming “casualization” of HoT (whatever that means).
- ANet is a business, which exists at least in part to make money.
- Casual players do not speak with one voice. Just on these forums, the word can mean casual (time), casual (no hard content), casual (hates grind) and doubtless other preferences. These subdivisions of casual do not all share the same inclinations or desires.
SPECULATION
- It’s unlikely that HoT sold more than 560,000 copies in Q4 15. The number of copies is more likely somewhere in the 300-400K range based on the reported revenue and the retail and wholesale prices.
- 600,000 WoW raiders is a substantial demographic, larger than HoT sales. Did ANet hope to entice raiders to buy HoT who had not bought GW2? Did they get such sales? It certainly seems possible. It also seems possible that some of the existing GW2 players bought HoT because of raids.
- ~1M or more accounts logging in per month did not buy HoT. Surely some of these are 2nd, 3rd or nth accounts. Surely some are people who only log in for daily login rewards taken in case GW2 changes to their liking down the road. Surely, though, some of them are active players who chose not to buy (those who complained about the price, for instance).
- Whatever making HoT more accessible to casual play means, it seems likely that it is going to take substantially more dev resources to accomplish than it took to make three raid bosses.
- Whatever changes there are to HoT, it seems possible (if not likely) that ANet is hoping to sell more copies as well as to address some of the complaints.
FALSEHOOD
- Since casuals do not speak with one voice, you cannot be said to be speaking for casual players en masse.
I don’t have any problem with most of this but I absolutely 100% do not believe that Anet was targeting WOW raiders with this release. Not even a tiny little bit. Not at all. It doesn’t make sense.
Assuming that WoW has 600,000 raiders, they also have many many raids. They’ve been making raids for a long time. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t even have a single raid yet. No one, and I do mean no one, is going to leave a game with a dozen raids for a game that has two raid wings. Anyone with half a brain, and I assure you Anet devs are smart enough to know this, is that they won’t get 1% of WoW raiders. They’re not after that market.
What they are after is people who are no longer playing WOW for other reasons, who still want raids in their game. Which might be more people or less people.
Back in the 80s and 90s, if you wanted to be a name in electronics in NYC, you had to have an electronics store on 47th Street in Mahanttan. No one ever opened a store there thinking it would be profitable, to my knowledge anyway. People opened stores there to have a presence, because that was a row of electronic stories, and to be there meant you were in the game.
I believe that Anet felt GW 2 wasn’t being taken seriously on other MMO forums and sites, particularly because people could repeat the oft used phrase no end game. Over and over. You see it all the time. It doesn’t matter if the game has an end game or not, people always said it didn’t.
By putting raids into the game (ie opening up a store on 47th street) they were hoping to add another word to their ads to attract people in general or expected raids in MMOs whether they raided or not.
I think that’s far more likely than ANet trying to get people away from WoW. Because that makes no sense at all to me.
@Palador
And… What makes you think they’re exclusively working on new raid wings?
They’re not. We all know that.
However, they’ve stated that we’ll not see LS3 until after the third and final wing of the raid is released. That’s the SOONEST we’ll see it, mind you, by their own words.
And the “common sense” is that bored people don’t keep playing the same old game. They tend to move on and find something more interesting to do. I’m sure you’d agree with that, right? If not, then they’d never need to make any new content for anyone.
Right now, it’s the non-raiding players that are bored, because the only recent content has been raids. And the next upcoming content, again by ANet’s own words, is raids.
I’m just saying, I didn’t say I’d quit the game when they added in keg brawl. That mini-game offers a nifty title. I didn’t rage because I had no kegbrawl team and I didn’t claim that I was going to quit the game and that all Anet is doing is catering to the hardcore kegbrawl players. Where’s my free title???
This isn’t about rage quitting, it’s about quitting because the game’s no longer fun. People do that all the time, no matter how they define fun. When they stop having fun, players tend to leave.
I’m not trying to start an argument with you, really. Nor am I trying to demand that the raids be removed. I just wanted to point out that you were getting into a no-win argument there, one you may not have seen for what it was.
The spring update has a chance to revitalize hot though and that comes before the next raid wing. There are a lot of people who barely set foot in HOT who might well be willing to retry the jungle if it’s changing. I know I took a break from the HoT zones because if it is less grindy, I’d rather put less work into farming currencies than more and that might bring some people back and hold them till the Living Story is released.
Remember the 2nd raid wing didn’t drop with the spring update, but before it, so in theory you’d have the hot adjustments this season update and perhaps the living story on the one after.
Which is not that bad as things go.
The real issue here isn’t fairness. It’s perception. A percentage of the playerbase feels disenfranchised by raids for different reasons.
Wouldn’t it better if new content was released for those that don’t Raid, instead of making the Raid accessible to them?
And besides that, I get the question all the time: “Can I raid in Exotics, or do I need Ascended?”
This question means a simple thing: the player asking it hasn’t done 5-man content of the game. Otherwise, if they’ve done their number of dungeons and/or fractals, they’d have Ascended ready.
It’s not as simple as the OP says “let’s make it accessible to more people by making it easier”, we are talking about people who can’t dodge Kholer’s spin (yes they still exist), should the Raid be made for them too? There are people who haven’t done Mai Trin level 50 or killed Giganticus Lupicus in Arah, unless they bought them, or got carried. Should the new “easy mode” be for them too?
Making an “easy mode” opens a new can of worms. Let’s make an honest question, in terms of Fractals, at which level would you put this “easy mode”?
It would be better of we didn’t feel we were missing particularly story. That’s a big thing for some of us. I play for story. Story is my progression, more than anything else.
Locking story behind the raids, unless it’s something like Fractals where the stories don’t pertain to the world, disenfranchises me.
And not being able to get the ability to change stats on armor bother me some too. It’s not like it’s something you can show off. Why not make a super cool amazing raid skin for raiders and not deny others that functionality.
I mean a guy who does nothing but WvW is going to perhaps want legendary armor. Making someone raid to get it seems excessive.
Provide skins, minis, titles to raiders, not items that give them an actual benefit that others could benefit from as well.
The highest level zone to have hearts is Frostgorge Sound. The three Orr Zones, Southsun, Drytop, the Silverwastes and all four HoT zones don’t have them.
Hearts are not traditional quests and in fact didn’t exist in the game at all until the 3rd beta. They were added to keep people to where dynamic events spawn.
However, the story quests are like traditional quests and many of the collections are more similar to traditional quests as well.
HELL NO!
storyline quests are NOT normal quests, if they were, i would had quit mmos a long time ago
storyline quests are (mostly) like mini dungeons: play this way..or fail
that “gather the pact” quest is prolly the worst of them: really long and annoying,
and BUGGY AS HELL
getting an error message after an hour of intensive skill spamming is NOT funny
i just dont do them anymore, rather have my toon stuck, than playing something like thatNo idea what you’re talking about even a little. They play like regular quests or quest chains because they usually have multiple objectives and contain story. You kill certain things or obtain certain things or destroy certain things, much like a quest.
If you think the personal story events needed to be played a certain way, I’m not sure what to tell you. Because I’ve beaten personal story on every profession but revenant so far, and I’ve never had to do anything special on any profession to beat it. Saying that some stories have bugs is true. But then I’ve run into bugged quests in games too.
I can certainly see why someone might compare hearts to quests, excepting the fact that they’re always localized, and you can complete them many ways, even by doing a neighboring dynamic event and ignoring the heart altogether. Just the fact that most hearts can be completed incidentally makes them unquestlike to me.
However, yes, none of the later content has quests by design.
I still, however, have no idea why you’d have problems with most personal stories.
try reading the thread again, because i already wrote why
i have played many mmos, and GW2s story quests are same level of difficulty , as
the dungeons in many other mmos
hell, the longest of them take as long, as a dungeon to finish too
theyre basically asking the players to solo hardcore content
PS try standing still, and just use autoattack, as hardcores claim you can do EVERYWHERE IN TYRIA
I’ve played Lots of MMOs and I haven’t played any that are the same difficulty as dungeons in other MMOs.
There are differences in the combat system/style of an active combat game of any time, and a stand around a cast spells without moving game, that’s true. But beyond just knowing hot to move and craft, I completely disgaree. Most other games dont’ have solo dungeons anyway and you can take other people into your story.
So five people in a story vs five people in a dungeon?
No contest.
Is it going to be 50 dollars again and come with the base game for no reason?
I’m not sure how you figure there’s no reason for HoT to come with the base game that’s already mostly free to play anyway.
For one thing, Anet has to compete with other MMOs, which are doing the very same thing.
And removing barriers to entry for new players is good for the game over all. New players start MMOs late at a serious disadvantage. Anything a company can do to encourage more people to play in this day and age is a good thing, yes, even for veterans.
Saying there’s no reason to include it doesn’t mean there’s no reason to include this.
It means more people buy HoT, it means more people in those zones which are often more fun with more people.
The real issue here isn’t fairness. It’s perception. A percentage of the playerbase feels disenfranchised by raids for different reasons.
They want legendary armor, but they’re forced into a content format they don’t like.
They had missing story and feel raids are too far out of their comfort zone.
They don’t like the idea that there’s content they they perceive to be beyond their ability or time schedule to do.
It doesn’t matter if this is fair or not, or if those feelings are right or reasonable. All that really matters is the percentage of people who feel disenfranchised and how that affects the game over all.
I don’t think Anet will be sitting there thinking this isn’t fair to raiders if people are leaving the game, and this is one of the reasons.
Ultimately it comes down to people’s perceptions. I think HoT was fine, but it doesn’t matter what I think because a lot of people, for different reasons, disagree. That means those people didn’t buy the game.
Anet therefore would care less about my opinion than that of those who didn’t buy the game. That’s a business decision and it’s a good one. No reason to bother sellign the game to me, since I already bought it.
However, I do feel a bit disenfranchised by raids. I don’t like the effect it has on my guild and I think they really shouldn’t have been brought into this game. Over time, it may be that enough people will feel disenfranchised enough to walk away and find another game.
Raiders might say good. They don’t deserve those rewards. But if enough people leave and not enough people raid, there eventually will be less game, less staff, less updates.
Anything Anet can do to bridge the gap between raiders and non-raiders simply might be a good idea from a business point of view, depending on programming cost vs. number of people who want it.
I’d prefer an easier mode raid just to experience the story without all the tedious mucking about finding a group of people and banging away at it.
Don’t care about Raids, but requiring you to play to get a mastery point is just wrong.
raids aside there are already enough mastery points in game that if you got all of them and unlocked all the masteries you would still have spare. this is an invalid complaint because you DONT have to do the raid to get enough mastery points, you dont even have to complete all the non raid mastery points to get enough
Two of the mastery points are only for raiding and the raid contains 3 mastery points. If you’re never going to raid, you absolutely don’t need those masteries.
The highest level zone to have hearts is Frostgorge Sound. The three Orr Zones, Southsun, Drytop, the Silverwastes and all four HoT zones don’t have them.
Hearts are not traditional quests and in fact didn’t exist in the game at all until the 3rd beta. They were added to keep people to where dynamic events spawn.
However, the story quests are like traditional quests and many of the collections are more similar to traditional quests as well.
HELL NO!
storyline quests are NOT normal quests, if they were, i would had quit mmos a long time ago
storyline quests are (mostly) like mini dungeons: play this way..or fail
that “gather the pact” quest is prolly the worst of them: really long and annoying,
and BUGGY AS HELL
getting an error message after an hour of intensive skill spamming is NOT funny
i just dont do them anymore, rather have my toon stuck, than playing something like that
No idea what you’re talking about even a little. They play like regular quests or quest chains because they usually have multiple objectives and contain story. You kill certain things or obtain certain things or destroy certain things, much like a quest.
If you think the personal story events needed to be played a certain way, I’m not sure what to tell you. Because I’ve beaten personal story on every profession but revenant so far, and I’ve never had to do anything special on any profession to beat it. Saying that some stories have bugs is true. But then I’ve run into bugged quests in games too.
I can certainly see why someone might compare hearts to quests, excepting the fact that they’re always localized, and you can complete them many ways, even by doing a neighboring dynamic event and ignoring the heart altogether. Just the fact that most hearts can be completed incidentally makes them unquestlike to me.
However, yes, none of the later content has quests by design.
I still, however, have no idea why you’d have problems with most personal stories.
i remember before gw2 are out people are defending gw2 for not having raid.
now people are defending anet for having raids.
quite funny since I used to be pro raiding and questioning gw2’s reason for not having raids. now I’m so casual I really don’t want to raid for legendary armor.
Well I’m as big a white knight as anybody but I’m surely not defending Anet for having raids.
I’ve always liked Colin. He seems like a genuine guy to me. And I don’t think anyone can doubt his passion for Guild Wars.
Colin, wherever you go and whatever you do, I hope you’re happy and fulfilled.
Shortbow and mace…yeey….nobody use those. So 9 months until next…nice.
In less than a minute, I found at least two builds on meta battle (metabattle.com) for shortbow and mace. In fact, the build I’m using now for my warrior uses a mace in the offhand and it’s a pretty popular build. Shortbows are more useful now on something like a ranger than they used to be, because condition damage is a thing now, and years ago it wasn’t. Not in PvE anyway. And of course, many thieves use shortbows while running from place to place for the mobility. Not to mention tagging lots of mobs in events.
As for the length of time between weapons, I suspect we’ll start getting the regularly with each quarterly patch. Just a guess, but it makes sense.
The highest level zone to have hearts is Frostgorge Sound. The three Orr Zones, Southsun, Drytop, the Silverwastes and all four HoT zones don’t have them.
Hearts are not traditional quests and in fact didn’t exist in the game at all until the 3rd beta. They were added to keep people to where dynamic events spawn.
However, the story quests are like traditional quests and many of the collections are more similar to traditional quests as well.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
Of course I would. Then again, I like HoT.
You should read the post right before me, the one I responded to, and place my post in that context.
WvW is already getting updates and the whole thing will be delivered over time. Quite recently the much hated Oasis event for example was turned off.
They have a track record of not delivering, but recently it’s been the polar opposite. We do have a dedicated fractals team and we are getting new fractals this year. Raid wings actually do get released every couple of months."
The polar opposite? They’ve delivered hardly anything significant in ages, except for raids.
Sure, they’ll release something someday, that’s usually been the case (far from always.) But for now, it’s all talk.
Well some people would say HoT is significant. Obviously you don’t like it, so it’s not but saying hot is insignificant is just your opinion.
WvW has had some minor changes and it has a new map. The new map was not well received but it’s significant. If nothing else it was significant enough to cause people to leave WvW. Significant doesn’t have to mean good.
There has been a significant change to WvW and that’s one of the reasons people are complaining. It’s not that it didn’t get a change, it’s that they didn’t like the change it got.
same.
killed Chak Gerent (100% participation on a lane), completed the meta event (got the achievements), received the big (on screen) loot boxes, and nope.. still no drop.
no sign of Mistward Helm Casing.
But did you open the big chest that looks like a monument, because the event chest is where you get it.
Look, when they deliver, they’ve delivered.
When they’re announcing future deliveries, they’re talking.
It’s not rocket science.
No it’s not. But pointing out that most of the stuff they’ve talked about HAS been delivered is not rocket science either. They’re usually delivering something. When people complained about culling it was fixed. We didn’t expect the fix, but it was done. When people complained about the trait system, they were working on it. It eventually got fixed. When people complained about the falling bug, or even the gliding lag when opening gliders, people thought they weren’t working on it.
Considering Anet has likely implemented more than 90% of what they talked about, and I think a bit of research would bear that out, saying it’s just talk is misleading. Saying it’s talk is not really the case. They’re said they’re working on it and if I see very little reason not to believe it’s true. Stuff just takes longer to deliver than some people seem to think it does.
Yes, turning off content. That’s delivering!
For the moment, it’s all talk except for the raids.
People said that before every update that appeared out of nowhere. It’s happened all along. It’s always all talk until it happens.
People said there wouldn’t be an expansion even though it was being worked on for some time. People said there wouldn’t be a new profession. There wouldn’t be new maps. People said gliding would never come to central Tyria.
Turning off an event that is not liked to make something more appealing is a tiny step in the right direction, but I don’t understand why anyone would think major changes aren’t coming to WvW.
So much baseless hate, with people like you around, no wonder Anet doesn’t post here often.
Raids being in the game is not a bad decision or has bad implementation, what the hell are you talking about OP? 5-6 people work on raids, that has no impact on the rest of the game at all.
Colin was not fired, did not leave because the game was dying, he left on good terms and clearly stated why.
The game is far from dying. To quote NcSoft, it’s one of the main revenue drivers consistently.
LS3 is probably coming in July. That’s the quarter update right after May/June, I hope you do realize that?
PvP leagues are not broken. They are working quite well.
re Colin, thats what they say, that he left amicably. But thats what most companies say – because it looks better. Facts are the xpac didnt do as well as expected, and Colin is the guy in charge. He, as game director, is ultimaltely responsible for the game performance.
Lets face it. Things for a long while now have been…. unsettled (perhaps not the right word im looking for). The game has had many system changes, and tweaks, but has never quite reached that ‘outstanding’ level that it should have, given the time and resources thrown at it. We all know this. I think perhaps the xpacs not exactly universal success – it was rushed and unfinished – basically gave them an excuse for Colin to bow out gracefully. The games development is so uneven and hodgepodge – dungeons, wvw, pvp, etc. The list goes on and on.
As for pvp, yeah it is a little broken, given how horribly ranked is being abused. Im not surprised i guess – people are nothing if not ingenious! lol.
Anywho, out of all of this, i hope whoever they get to replace colin focuses more on pumping out content regularly and less on system changes. We’ve had enough!
I’ve almost never seen a company under fire say that someone is leaving on good terms. They want to make it clear that they’re taking charge and reacting to the problem. That restores confidence in the company.
This sort of thing serves no purpose. They didn’t announce a new direction, or say anything was changing.
If you don’t think the game is worth $50 it’s often on sale at DLGamer for $35, so you don’t have to pay full price.
Immersion-wise, the HoT event cycles are the worst thing ever anyway. Every cycle, practically all the VB and DS chains rewind the clock to just after the crash and everything plays out again like Groundhog Day.
Silverwastes at least tried to dress it up as a continuing experience where the cycle was an ever repeating “Mordrem forces renew their assault, aaaaaand… we’ve beaten them again, phew!”
Like every zone in the game. Drytop has a sandstorm that makes a scheduled appearance. I know for a fact when I go into Drytop I’m there at the time right after the Zephyrites crashed. Orr is locked in time too. All the zone are technically locked in time. It’s just the way the game is.
Saying that the HoT zones aren’t immersive because they’re doing what the rest of the game does doesn’t really make sense.
I mean since we’ve defeated Zhaitan why are we still fighting over temples in Orr?
Nope, it’s not at the laurel vendor. At this time there’s no way to get this potion.
If you talk to an NPC in LA, in addition to getting a trailer to Season 1 to explain it you can talk to them and get the explanations of who they are. It’s not a bad intro. Not the same as playing, mind you. I’ve also told the story to newer members of my guild which is considerably better.
I’ve seen on countless sites that GW2 in on the top mostp layed MMOs out there, mostly in second or third place.
I also noticed a lot of the controversy caused by the expansion — more related about its content, features, perfomance and price.
I’m on a weak laptop, but I manage to run GW2 with average 25-30 fps in all of Tyria. Sadly my fps are below 10 in HoT, but I manage to play it if I select the lowest graphical setup available.
I don’t really like the new maps. They’re really hard and I feel lost. I prefer to play by myself and when I bring a friend we just rush it. I also have died a lot.
There are way too many threads complaining about GW2: HoT. Many people have left because of the expansion and another handful of players avoid the expansion like the plague. I also heard that the HoT sales were dreadful. Is this true?
hey man, i hear you. tbh, me and my guildmates, started playing since the betas. we kept at a solid pace of playing up until the release of the HOT. we stopped playing, why?
because we felt short changed. think of it like we felt we were robbed at some point. here’s why. we bought the game for $60 the gw2 original game, which we enjoyed without a doubt. and when we heard that the game was going to be for free, we were like oh okay thats cool. so more people could play.. But then we thought, how does the pre-paid players differ from the new free guys who play now? whats the $60 advantage over the new ones?
free story expansions? more character slots? which are more or less UNLOCKABLE as a free player, and a FRIGGIN AESTHETIC SET.. thats all?
and those who would opt to buy the HOT is the SAME PRICE as the original game?!?!
so we thought maybe an incentive would be nice to the OLD players who built this game’s pillars and reputation, maybe arenanet would give us like a discount on the HOT, i mean for the existing players… maybe we play $30 more for expansion? seemed fair. but noooo… arenanet wants to milk our wallets.we found it unfair.. a lot of us did. and to think, we beta players believed that we would be taken care of. veterans of the game are then shrugged off to the sides… no mere compensation for the hours we put into the game….
all we asked for was a mere respectful “discount” to the pre-buyers of the game.
so what did we get from the $60 before?
a friggin set, extra expansion slots, inventory slots, adventure content..and to think, aside from the set, the others mentioned could be farmed for within the game. great sale value for $60…. what a rip off.
i dont hate the game. i loved the game for all its content… we just felt short changed and very disappointed with how they, arenanet, wont give an acceptable compensation for the veterans.
sorry for the rant. i just thought i could share my guild’s, my friends’, side on this matter.
goodluck to you mate! i hope arenanet serves you guys better than they did us.
Free players are HEAVILY restricted. They can’t buy and sell stuff on the trading post. They can’t talk in map chat. They don’t get daily log in rewards. In fact it’s very very difficult for free to play players to make money at all, or get ascended gear.
Try that without laurels one day (which mostly come from log in rewards they don’t get). Not being able to buy and sell freely, or access a guild bank, or talk in map chat is a major handicap. It’s more like an unlimited demo than the full game.
You really should try a brand new free account with no help for a while, because you really have no idea of the limitations it comes with.
I say it’s the best thing they could do, to provide something for everyone.
So why didn’t they do that with HoT?
And why are they still not doing it, 5 months after?
Will they be doing it in April?
Actually they did add something for everyone, just not ENOUGH for everyone. They added elite specs for every professions. You may or may not like an elite spec, but that was definitely something for everyone. They added combat mode. They added a story (which some say was too short, but it is something for the more casual player base). The added a mastery system in core Tyria. The made Fractals MUCH easier and allowed you to pick which one you want. That’s all stuff for a more casual crowd. Even the Shatterer revamp that came later was received pretty well.
I don’t think they have the capacity to deliver stuff to everyone all at once in quantity and that’s the issue. They can deliver raids for the hard core crowd, because its’ three bosses and done. It’s not as time consuming or resource cosuming. The new zones, like them or not, took a lot of time.
They added collections, too for those of us who like that sort of thing, PvP seasons and a new map for WvW. Everyone got something. Not everyone likes what they got however.
Sure the participation will be higher than other Mmo because there is no gear treadmill but let’s say 2% of all the playerbase playing an mmo with raid, in gw2 it will be 3%, that’s not much maybe if they deliver some numbers like the % of players doing regulary raids .
Do you have a source for your 3% or do you just pull that out of your kitten?
I won’t pretend that I know what percentage of the player base do raid, because I don’t. But here the number that I do know about my guild.
We are about 450 players in my guild. We have 30 players that play raid on a regular basis like several time per week. I know of about 15 others that play raid from time to time. And another 10 that tried raid at least 2-3 times. That’s more than 10% of my guild. And to be honest, this number is growing because we include more and more people in our group. And I’m sure that this number is actually higher because I know that some people are pugging, but i don’t know who and how many.
Yep, maybe that my guild, which is pretty average and have a lot of different people in it. It’s far from an hardcore guild of something like that, have a higher percentage of people doing raid that the total playerbase.
The fact is we don’t know how much people are doing raid. If it’s true that only 3% of the active playerbase are playing raid, then you guys are right that maybe raid ain’t a good idea. To be honest, i wanted group challenging content, but i would have been happier with 5 man content like hard more dungeon and fractal. Simply because it’s easy to get 5 good players together, 10 is a lot harder. But I seriously doudt that only 3% play raid. My guess is more about 10-15%.
My guess is also that this number could go higher if anet fixed several things around the raid.
- Make proper section for raid in LFG
- Make a lobby for raid, easy to access with basic commodity
- Make the Squad work with the LFG
- Make ascended gear more available (not easier to get, just more ways to get it)
- Better balance between profession so you have more than 1-2 options per professions that are good for raid.
- An easy mode of raid with less reward for people that want to raid, but can’t. Either because of lack of skill, difficulty to pug it (will be a lot easier to pug an easy mode), not able to create a proper group, not able to get ascended yet, etc. To serve as an introduction to raid, will help both the current raider and people that can’t raid, but want to. Ideally, I would also want an hard more, but it’s less important for now or as long as they keep putting new wing.That said guys. The amount of people working on raid is pretty low. There were only 5-5 devs working on raid, while there is 120 devs working on the current game and 70 for the next expansion. So yah, if those 5 people would be working on something else, yes that something else would be ready faster. But only like 4% faster (not really but you see my point). Raid doesn’t take much ressources.
Source : http://dulfy.net/2016/03/05/gw2-reddit-developer-ama-summary/#Raids
But would so many people be doing raids, if there was other new content on offer. It’s like I went to this restaurant that only served fish and most people, not surprisingly were ordering fish. Sucks that I was in the mood for steak, but in that place, I didn’t really think the steak would be great…it was a fish place, so I ordered fish.
New content comes out people try it out, but if it’s basically the only new content coming out…well, you’re going to get more people trying it by percentage.
I don’t like raids and I’ve tried it. It doesn’t make me a raider, and I’d be happier if I had other options that were new that I haven’t played.
I love you think you’re the epitome of casual.
People in your guild who have burned through thousands of dollars are not casual.
Do raiders buy more keys? Who knows.. isn’t that the point?Say we swap “raider” for “guild hall”. Did you “casually” max out yours? No.
Did the game shaft the “actual base” when they introduced guild halls? No.Your point seems to be “my guild and i blew thousands of dollars on this game and we’re casuals” which I don’t really think adds anything.
I run a casual guild, advertised as a casual guild, with a couple of hundred people, most of whom self-identify as casual. The work casual means we don’t take this so seriously. That’s all it means. I know people who play less who are more hard core in their approach to the game and I know people who play more who follow the world boss train around, in between bouts of chatting in map chat. These people have mostly not done triple trouble, but they do SB and the Fire ele all the time.
I think they’re casual.
Depends on the piece, but none of it was too hard. It’s not all that grindy if you’re in the right place, killing the right mobs.
I’m sure with most of those people, the “you didn’t give me what I want” remains unspoken or it isn’t expressed explicitly.
I’m pretty sure that a whole lot of those people wouldn’t be complaining on the forums at all if HoT had given them significant amounts of content to be excited about.
That’s what the currently happy people like to counter dissenting opinions with: “all the happy people are in the game and not complaining on the forum.”
I think Manasa is right. I like most of the hot content, got a couple of hundred hours and I’m content. People who don’t like what’s on offer are annoyed when even more comes out that’s on offer. Anet overestimated the hard-core ness of the playerbase I think.
If we’re talking “actual base” and looking at who makes anet money.. it’s still not the casuals you’re talking about.
Those collections and achievement points.. there’s a lot of those bow bear rangers you mention that think even those things are too hard. There might be a LOT of those people but you wouldn’t want them to be your base when you need your game to make money.
Those raiders that come and play then leave? Maybe they bring thousands of dollars each time they come around. That would make them a desirable group to target.
All of which is a bit irrelevant. The “actual base” of casuals is not being ignored by the addition of the raid which is being worked on by a separate team.
Evidence? I have people in my guild who have burned through thousands of dollars that never ever entered a raid. All you need to do is buy black lion keys for that. Do raiders buy more black lion keys than casual players?
Casual players are often casual because they don’t have huge time. They won’t necessarily be playing hundreds of games. Maybe they don’t have time because they’re out working. Maybe people who have more free time raid and people who have less free time are more likely to raid.
Raiders may very well convert gold to gems and not spend a dime on the cash shop. Casuals however, who like the game but don’t have time, could easily blow some money on gems to convert to gold that they can then use to buy whatever they want.
This isn’t really guesswork on my part since I’ve seen a lot of casuals I know personally blow a lot of money on the cash shop. It’s not that I think this happens. I know this happens.
Unless you think I know the only 20 or 30 casuals who do this and it’s some weird abberation.
I’ve not seen any figures to suggest the casual player (plays casually, doesn’t have enough gold to buy gems, doesn’t have enough commitment to but gems with rl cash) contributes more than the raider (major time investment, totally committed to the game, very high chance they convert gold to gems and use cash to buy gems) is their actual base.
If you mean there are more casual pve’rs than raiders then sure but I’d imagine that raiders spend more than casuals and also that casuals are more likely to become raiders than vice versa.
You could say the same thing about dungeoners and fractalers and scribes.. It’s more a measure of involvement than anything, doesn’t matter what the current label of the latest thing you dislike is.
I’d be willing to be the opposite is true. You think casual means not commited, but I’m casual by nature and very commited Pretty sure I’ve spent more on the game than most people. And I have a guild full of casuals that buy wings and outfits and bank space and stuff…but they don’t raid, and most of them don’t run dungeons either.
Thinking casual isn’t dedicated is wrong, any more than thinking hard core = dedicated. A lot of hard core players are the first to leave a game but they’re so hard to please. Not enough hard content, hard core players get annoyed, post on forums and make leaving threads.
Casual players just enjoy doing what they’re doing. They’re not too stressed about balance, or playing a profession they like or not getting into speed run groups because they’re a necro. They don’t care that they’re bear bow rangers.
But very often, casual players do things like collections or hunt achievement points. They just enjoy banging around the open world more than challenging instanced content.
Raiders raid until they hit their cap and go do something else. Casuals are often here day in and day out.
I guess the people playing the raid will have to spend the money on the gem store in the meantime. It’s not my cup of tea either.
I wish I knew what percentage of the playerbase was actually raiding and how that compared to the percentage of the playerbase who did Living Story stuff.
I am shocked how few you played in HOT maps. Why so shy? A friend of mine just got into it and after a couple of times and getting used to it he told me how awesome the new maps are. Just get used to it and you will finally get more of your masteries…
It’s a few people who answered the thread on the forums. In a guild of well over 200 people, the only people in my guild that haven’t played HOT content are people who didn’t buy HoT, mostly a few new free to play players. All active players in my guild have played the hell out of hot.
All you need do is look at the LFG and you’ll see HoT stuff all pretty much all the time.
Not sure why anyone would think this thread is representative.
Apparently everything these days is a fail of someone doesn’t like it.
The “Fail” is a headline to attract more people to come to this thred.
So it’s like click bait. All the fail does for me is make me want to ignore the thread, because anyone who categorically says something failed is stating their opinion as some kind of fact.
What you’ll end up getting is people disagreeing with you just because you’re using confrontational wording.
If you’d written I don’t like the mastery system, I wouldn’t be in here not at all. You’re entitled to that opinion.
Instead what you get is a contrary opinion. I think the mastery system is just fine.
Pretty sure using Fail is going to invite more people with a contrary opinion than the same one.
I wouldn’t expect new legendaries before the end of April. Anet said the shortbow and the mace were the ones closest to ready, so I would assume we’ll we one or both of these, perhaps in the spring update, but I seriously doubt we’ll see them before.