Guild Wars 2

At some point people will realize tht “play how I want” ~= “be easily able to exclude others from playing with me.”

Edit: And seriously, where’s the Keyser Söze with these supporting posts?

I wouldn’t count on being able to use any of the new content without buying at all. I’s possible, but work from an assumption of ‘no’ and be pleasantly surprised.

About the class, their plan seems to be to keep the specialties about equal in power to the base classes, kind of a give/take thing. HOw well they succeed is still to be seen.

Purple Miku.7032:

I have sympathy for you Nevets Crimsonwing. I completely agree with every single point you’ve made and honestly can’t fathom lasting as long as you have repeating yourself and dealing with all of the illogical whining.

I commend you.

Maybe then you can explain how cheating is involved.

Vix.6730:

Liars and cheaters? I hardly think gear ranks high in that category. You can tell quickly enough if a player cannot pull his own weight on a five man team. The game is plagued with enough elitists, why encourage them?

I’d missed the ‘cheaters’ line, and am left wondering how cheating possibly applies in this case ><

Anger aside, you’re clouding an important difference. If people have a problem with ‘zerkers’, it’s not their build style, it’s the ‘play as I do or kitten off!’ element.

I’m like Ashen, I actively avoid ‘zerk only’ groups. For a number of reasons, actually.

At the same time I use zerker gear on a number of my characters, as I feel is appropriate.

I don’t want to avoid playing with anyone unless they’re putting off some serious danger signs (such as ‘zerk only’ lfg messages), which might be why the tool seems a silly waste to me.

The tool is only useful to people who want to exclude others based on their build. This is one small part of the player base, and a controversial part at that. Until you can get past this essential problem this feature is going to be an extremely hard sell.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Windsagio.1340:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Then please vocalize your legitimate opposition to allowing all people to group with others of similar interests.

They can do that already. There’s no need for additional tools.

As I noted above, they cannot do that already. They TRY to do that already, but then it’s very easy for people to lie about gear and traits. In fact, some people on these very forums are open about how they join groups, ping zerker gear and then don’t wear it. It becomes very difficult to pin down who is being a leech and who is lying.

Edit: Unless of course they run with people in guild groups who they are friendly with or know in real life. If your argument is that people shouldn’t be able to group with RANDOMS of similar interest, then the LFG tool should be changed to a random group generator.

You’re just wrong, Steven.

First you have the ability to request ‘zerker’ or ‘meta’ or ‘heavies only’ as you wish. It’s possible people will ignore your wishes, but you have the ability.

Now, lets say they ignore your LFG message. There are really 2 possibilities.

1) You don’t notice, no harm no foul.
2) You do notice, and if even 1 other person agrees with you, you kick them.

Honestly though, I think you’re making this problem for yourself by being so militant about it. Don’t go borrowing excuses to be outraged.

~~

As to my personal position, I think it’s a dumb request (to be frank), but I’m more interested on trying to get people to try to look at it from a developers point of view rather than a “I want it! MEME!” point of view.

Everyone knows you want it, and everyone knows why you want it. The question we have to ask is, why would arenanet want it enough to justify the development costs and server load?

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Then please vocalize your legitimate opposition to allowing all people to group with others of similar interests.

They can do that already. There’s no need for additional tools.

Ashen.2907:

Windsagio.1340:

Ashen.2907:

I dont think that choosing to not play with someone is limiting their play. I suppose that if they define their personal playstyle as being able to play with people that dont want to play with them then they have chosen to limit their own play.

Edit to clarify: As previouly mentioned. I still oppose a gear inspect function.

You’re in essence saying ‘if you aren’t set up the way I like you can’t play with me.’ and it’s certainly MUCH more controlling than joining a group that doesn’t want you (and can kick you)

Which is anyones right, but do you really think it’s an attitude Anet wants to encourage?

Point of clarification: I only play in “open to all,” or no requirement listed groups.

I think it is not only perfectly reasonable but actually ideal for people to choose to play with others who have the same or similar definition of fun. It is not controlling at all to choose to play with people who are going to have fun the way I do. It is completely unreasonable, IMO, to insist that four other people have to forgo having fun in order for me to enjoy myself.

They can do that now. It’s not in anets interests to encourage exclusion.

I think that’s the other piece of it actually, they have a very clear policy of being gear and build neutral. It hasn’t worked out in the wild, but that’s pretty clearly the goal.

As a statement of intent, gear inspections would be entirely undermining that goal and philosophy… and every feature implementation is a statement of intent. Gear inspection goes against their core philosophy. They don’t limit people trying to filter their groups in other ways both for the reasons you’re stating and because it would be utterly unenforcable, but making a tool to make it easier is an entirely different beast.

~~~

Anet lets people play how they like, even if it’s in the form of excluding others. They’re not going to legitimize it with a tool, just like they don’t legitimize run-selling by protecting sellers or legitimize DPS tracking by putting in an in-game DPS meter.

continues beating drum

The extreme nastiness of this discussion is further evidence that Anet won’t touch this with a million foot pole. If even talking about it turns us all into raving hate monsters, can you remember the rage if it were implemented?

Edit@Nevets

“Carried” isn’t right. They’re entirely capable of completing the content and contributing. Neither is the ‘lowest common denominator’ really, it’s just different interests and different styles. Judging everyone by your personal tastes and treating your personal tastes as law of gameplay is exactly the problem.

Ashen.2907:

I dont think that choosing to not play with someone is limiting their play. I suppose that if they define their personal playstyle as being able to play with people that dont want to play with them then they have chosen to limit their own play.

Edit to clarify: As previouly mentioned. I still oppose a gear inspect function.

You’re in essence saying ‘if you aren’t set up the way I like you can’t play with me.’ and it’s certainly MUCH more controlling than joining a group that doesn’t want you (and can kick you)

Which is anyones right, but do you really think it’s an attitude Anet wants to encourage?

And there’s still the elephant in the room.

What’s arenanets gain from giving you this tool?

What are the costs?

How do they want people to act?

KGS.9842:

Honestly it’s hard to see why people have a problem with this idea
I assume that people who don’t like the all zerker meta don’t want to join all zerker groups in the first place, and so a gear inspect won’t affect them in the least
(also whenever I check lfg only 1 in 8 parties or so is zerker only so they certainly have where to go, and no one is imposing anything on them)

seeing how this thread is going i’d say that some people will just take any opportunity to try to spite and insult other players just because they have a different play style and want something to facilitate it

This ties in with the posts aboe (bold mine)

It’s always the other guy, it’s never me!!!

~~~~

Coming from other games, there’s a lot of ‘being judged by your gear’ that goes on. It’s less meaningful in GW2 (except for people who decide to make it meaningful to exclude), but people are people, both in remembering past slights and in wanting to be exclusionary and ‘better’.

One side wants to inspect explicitly to judge and exclude others, and the other side naturally bristles at that concept. The second is especially a natural reaction, if a little irrational.

Back to the quote, you’re getting it exactly backwards. You are trying to limit others play, and arenanet isn’t giving your more tools to limit others play. Other people with gear you (arbirarily) don’t like isn’t limiting your personal play, unless your style is so limited that it just falls apart if your group isn’t perfect.

People spent a year shouting at them to do it one way, and now once there’s adoptation, they’re shouting at people to do it another way.

Pugs don’t know you from kitten in the wall, and they have absolutely no reason to believe you know better.

edit ‘hole’ gets censored?

edit2 oh I get it, it’s ‘a’ with that other thing so people can’t cheat with spaces

I have to keep repeating, the whole point is moot. Anet isn’t going to give players tools explicitly designed to enforce their playstyle on others.

There’s a few reasons I’d argue that they won’t do that.

First, as mentioned above, it’s a non-zero effort for them for a very small gain from anets. It shows no sign of increasing engagement for casuals or for increasing spending for hardcore. As a QOL improvement it’s a mixed bag at the very best, many people really hate the idea.

Second, culturally they clearly don’t want build enforcement. As much as people rage about the PHIW crowd (and label/dehumanize the ‘enemy group’) it is a concept that Anet is pretty serious about enforcing. It’s why they’ve made all these encounters beatable with any collection of players, sufficiently skilled.

Third it’s likely much harder than people think. New UI aside, they probably send the bare minimum of player data to the other players in a group as a network optimization issue. Your client doesn’t actually need to know what my AR is or my toughness. I could be wrong with this one, because I know there are third party tools that people use to get estimates (although my impression is that it’s reading ui data and the combat log), but they’re going to send as little info as they can to keep server load down.

Altair.8402:

I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to implement… they already have something similar for previewing dyes and armor.

Those are some seriously famous last words :p

The issue is that it takes some to implement, and it’s at best 50/50 in player opinion and it doesn’t really do much for QOL except for people that are trying to police groups, which I’m not entirely sure anet wants to encourage anyways.

It’s more complex than that though, they’d have to build an entire ‘inspect’ ui for looking at other players.

Could be hallucinating, but a lot of things seem minorly off in fractals right now. I think there are more tweaks that we’re not quite picking up on yet.

KGS.9842:

I meant a reward that is tied directly to your skill instead of luck; those were the two parts of the equations
challenge <—> reward; in this case it is
challenge <— lots of luck —> reward

Well of course that goes back to the old chestnut that the most important skills for raiding are organization, following orders, massive repitition, and a big enough carrot at the end.

~~~

I still feel that extremely hard 5man content would be a far better marker of skill than a 10-15-20 man raid. Except for key trinity players big raids tend to make each players contribution much less important, barring specific fight gimmicks.

The barrier of getting a big enough group together is the most artificial of artificial barriers. If it’s challenge and skill you want, harder small-group content would just be better for that, without the barrier.

Lifestealer.4910:

I like how people try to use failed MMO as example of why raid is bad. I can play this game too. Look at games like WoW, FFXIV and Tera, all are very successful because of raids.

It’s not that raids are bad per se, but rather that they’re not terribly played or a terribly good business decision to invest in..

Still never had a problem with this in hundreds of runs. Maybe I"m just lucky!

Nokaru.7831:

Windsagio.1340:

Those are the things I’m basing it on.

If you’re going to start comparing things to other games, maybe you should also run your numbers on this little MMORPG called World of Warcraft.

If you want to raid, that’s the place where they’re most heavily supporting it, so feel free.

Skillpoints are going to become much nicer to have a consistent source of.

Ranael.6423:

Some games fail some don’t. If raid were coming in GW2 I would like to see them not fail and for that I think we as player are really responsible of how it will end.

I’d also like to see it not fail if it happens, and I’d like to see people get the content they want (if it’s not too costly to others).

What I’d like and what I expect to happen are entirely different though, and I worry people talk themselves up.

spoj.9672:

So you cherry picked one game? Its hardly a trend.

Wildstar was actually very successful with raiding. Its just the rest of the game was terrible. Which is the real cause of its failure. It could have worked if more effort was put into the rest. I mean a big part of raiding is having alts and if the leveling experience is crap then thats basically asking for failure.

I sourced 3 games, although I was being cute with 1.

1) Wildstar – People make excuses, but one of the main things they’re trying to change to salvage the game is raiding
2) Lotro, ABSOLUTELY EXPLICIT
3) GW2 – designed without exclusive raiding. Also, apparently poor dungeon participation and disbanded dungeon team.

~~~

I’ve been accused of being dismissive, and I want to be careful with that, but this really reads me as a case of you seeing what you want to see. There’s nothing that will convince you, but you’re only setting yourself up for an ugly reality check down the line.

spoj.9672:

Windsagio.1340:

Looking at the genre: The movement is away from instanced raiding. Why is this if it isn’t due to cost/benefit analysis?

Ive not seen any evidence of this. Are you making it up?

Leaving Wildstar aside, earlier in the thread there’s a post with a bunch of stats and quotes relating to LOTRO and them backing off of raiding, including estimates of user engagement. There’s also of course GW2 itself which has spent most of its development time with no instanced raid content nor any indication of any.

Those are the things I’m basing it on.

So then, what would raids entail in GW2?

The things I’m seeing are:
1) Scale: People usually ask for 2 group, often 8-15 players
2) Closed instances.
3) “Challenge” Fingerquotes because this is such a hard to pin down term
4) Reards
5) Recognition

What of those factors am I wrong about being key, and which of them would be different between GW raids and other games raids?

rotten.9753:

I don’t want to go back to other games, I want to see statistics concerning gw2 population. Your argumentation is as solid as everyone’s else as long as you don’t present valid arguments.

So we agree there’s no valid polling statistics for GW2. In this case, we look at other games in the genre and analogous situations in GW2.

Looking at the genre: The movement is away from instanced raiding. Why is this if it isn’t due to cost/benefit analysis?

Looking at analogs in GW2: They’ve stopped development on dungeons and didn’t even touch fractals for almost a year (up to the current round of bugfixes). We don’t have Arenanet’s internals, but what would the reason be if it weren’t poor player participation?

~~~

You don’t ignore industry trends because you don’t like their implications.

rotten.9753:

Windsagio.1340:

Bold mine.

No, really, really it’s not, especially in comparison to the player base.

Really though, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, not staring the facts in the face doesn’t do you any good.

What counter statistics are you able to present except pulling out “I know better” card?

We can go back to LoTRO or Wildstar if you want, also some quotes have been put above in this thread.

Further, although it’s not evidence per se, the likely reason that Arenanet has quit supporting dungeons is most lkely because not enough people do them to support the cost of further development. It’s certainly not spite, despite what you read on the forums.

If anything I’m baffled how you guys can convince yourself that the majority (or even a significant minority) want this content and will do it. I’m presuming its a ‘well I want it and the people in my guild who I talk to about it want it, so everyone else must want it!’

Edit: It doesn’t hurt me what you guys tell me, and it doesn’t hurt me if you guys get your content (although I’d question the business sense HEAVILY in an environment when the trend in the genre is generally away from instanced raids and they’ve had success with their dynamic event/world boss system). I honestly think you’re setting yourselves up for anger and dissapointment by telling each other it’s popular and demanded.

SkylightMoon.1980:

Astralporing.1957:

SkylightMoon.1980:

Oh look another gamer who fears raids being introduced because of no reason whatsoever besides difficult content that they can’t do. Nothing new here.

Way to build your whole sentence out of mostly incorrect assumptions. Also, way to show exactly the reason why i might not want that “different breed” of players with the same attitude in this game.

SkylightMoon.1980:

With a poll of 250 votes, 2/3rds say that yes.

Oh yeah, ~150 people said yes. Out of over million players, and at least several thousand active forum posters. Great majority you have here.

Also, you really should brush up your info about MMORPG demographics. Raiders are always a minority – even in raid-heavy games, which GW2 is not. It is not an accident – you can say, it’s by design. By design, because, after all, raids are specifically made to exclude average and below-average players – they wouldn’t be challenging otherwise. That already places them as a content for minority, and that minority gets smaller and smaller the more challenging you want them to be.

If someone from top 10% wants a challenge, they would expect that challenge to be for them, not for someone of lower skill/gear plateau. If someone from top 1% wants a challenge… you get the picture.

TL/DR: Raids are a small minority content. They are a small minority content, because the raid community wants it that way. Even if they later try to fudge the numbers trying o pretend that they are more important than they really are.

200-300 is a significant sample size. Go to a math class please. So by your logic, because only 10% of the playerbase uses the forums, our opinions are the minority? Thats not hte assumption Anet operates under lol. Because the forums or reddit are the only place you can get an idea of what the players want, since there are no in games polls.

Again, Raid like content has already received a significant liking from the community. Raid bosses like teq and the wurm received a very good response when released. The only prblems people had, revolved around their open world aspect.

Bold mine.

No, really, really it’s not, especially in comparison to the player base.

Really though, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, not staring the facts in the face doesn’t do you any good.

spoj.9672:

Windsagio.1340:

Fractals and dungeons both are substantially less exclusive than instanced raids, and that’s the basis of the problem.

Heres the big problem. You are coming into this thread with a predefined idea of what raids in GW2 should be. Who said anything about instanced raids being more exclusive than fractals?

This discussion was done to death in the Raid CDI. The devs explicitly told people to stop talking about predefined ideas of raids from other games and basing complaints off of them. And told people to come up with ideas on how raids could work in GW2.

And to be honest it would be good of you to do the same rather than just argueing against content because your current ideas of it arent what you desire. It would be much more constructive to give feedback on how instanced content could be implemented in a way which you can support. Rather than just flat out saying no because of your experiences in other completely different games.

Blaeys hit it, but it’s pretty simple; it’s more exclusive because it takes more organization and coordination.

On your last para, I have several times, but to repeat:

1) Guild summonable private versions of world bosses. Personally not in love with this idea, but it’s a very nice compromise
2) A focus on extending single group hard content. I don’t think they’ll do more dungeons, but I’d love it if they did.
3) More complex open world encounters (note how this interacts well with #1).

Easy compromise that’s not as resource intensive and is more accessible.

There’s a lot of ‘live by the sword’ here.

Jerus.4350:

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I agree that everyone’s personal Fractal ring collection should be useful for more than just 4.96 silver each. I think I’d be okay with an actual collection for them except for the fact that the game regards infused and uninfused variants as different items entirely. We can see this in action already by how the Royal Signet of Doric won’t work for the Treasure Hunter collection unless uninfused.

I also agree that at a minimum they should be worth more to a merchant than what they are now. I’ve always felt that they should be worth 1g each, and that feeling stems from the idea that getting one should feel rewarding even if you already had it. Given the average time it takes to run a Fractal and that some very fast Arah paths reward 3g each, I don’t find the idea of an extra 1g some of the time over the top.

That difference between infused and uninfused is actually perfect.

Uninfused = fractal skin of your choice.
Infused = trash item, part of a collection along with all the fractal weapon skins for the fractal tonic?

I’d go along as long as there was a ‘de-infuse’ mystic recipe. Until HoT got announced I wasn’t packratting rings ><

Taht’s it, fill in with the pristine relics

Oh duh, yeah. A use!

Fractals and dungeons both are substantially less exclusive than instanced raids, and that’s the basis of the problem.

Everything is sliding scale, and of course Arenanet wants to balance players needs, but instanced raids (it’s important to emphasize both parts) are pretty far down the slider as far as accessibility and exclusivity go.

Also, seriously, I shouldn’t have to note that not all content is ‘just zergable’ open world. You know the usual suspects :p

Jerus.4350:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I agree that everyone’s personal Fractal ring collection should be useful for more than just 4.96 silver each. I think I’d be okay with an actual collection for them except for the fact that the game regards infused and uninfused variants as different items entirely. We can see this in action already by how the Royal Signet of Doric won’t work for the Treasure Hunter collection unless uninfused.

I also agree that at a minimum they should be worth more to a merchant than what they are now. I’ve always felt that they should be worth 1g each, and that feeling stems from the idea that getting one should feel rewarding even if you already had it. Given the average time it takes to run a Fractal and that some very fast Arah paths reward 3g each, I don’t find the idea of an extra 1g some of the time over the top.

That difference between infused and uninfused is actually perfect.

Uninfused = fractal skin of your choice.
Infused = trash item, part of a collection along with all the fractal weapon skins for the fractal tonic?

I’d go along as long as there was a ‘de-infuse’ mystic recipe. Until HoT got announced I wasn’t packratting rings ><

spoj.9672:

I dont see how open world content where im forced to play with complete strangers is comparable to a raid or other instanced content where i have complete control over who is involved. Triple Trouble, Tequatle and Vinewrath are far from raids. They are just open world bosses. Although with a bit more of an organisation requirement. They are not worth the time due to how poor the rewards are compared to the time taken. And they are not fun because my individual contribution is essentially nothing when in a zerg.

And to clarify. I really dont care what anet calls it. I just want some new challenging instanced content. They can call it raids, dungeons, missions or elite zones. As long as its challenging, instanced and has good rewards then i will be happy.

And this is the problem, one of your base needs is excluding others. That’s gotta be a hard sell to anet, and that inherently puts you in opposition with the majority of players.

And, yes there are zero-sum (or near-zero sum) elements to this discussion, because instanced difficult content inevitably involves resources that aren’t used on other game elements.

Standing bet that fractal masteries will include a ring collection.

~~

I also have this weird suspicion that they’re going to be part of the mastery scavanger hunt, that would be epic for the hate generated ><

It’s interesting to me, the people most engaged in this discussion on both sides seem to have a fair amount of raid experience ><

Cannon is fun, if you’re in a group with friends it becomes a minigame in and of itself ><

The ugly fact is that there’s not much economic incentive to please the people that want instanced raids. The opposite, if anything.

That doesn’t mean you guys won’t get them, they might want to expand their variety of encounter or try something out.

Still, every trend I know of in MMOs is against instanced raiding, and GW, which never liked the concept anwyays doesn’t seem likely to take risks or buck that particular trend

Fall damage is def. fixed on Uncategorized (Had a bad run last night). It seems bizarrely lenient even, I never saw someone go all the way down from falling (and we were being seriously clownshoes, so it came up).

I think you’re right, they’re cleaning up fractals all of a sudden.

Altair.8402:

So to sum things up:

People are divided about GW2 having raids.
Most people want more challenging content.
Most people don’t want the elitism and grind that goes with a traditional raid’s gear treadmill.
So make raids (or whatever you want to call it) with GW2 style rewards. Problem solved?

The question is ‘instanced or not’ when you get down to it.

The best compromise I can come up with is making a guild hall danger room that spawns private instances of world bosses.

On this note, they also fixed fall damage in uncategorized, so it seems likely.

Knighthonor.4061:

Wait SPvP has better rewards than WvW, so should SPvP be removed as well?

There are actually fewer barriers of entry to pvp than to competitive wvw.

spoj.9672:

The same arguement can be made for Triple Trouble, Tequatl and Silver Wastes. I forced myself to play those just to get a few achieves and exclusive rewards. I will never touch them again now that im done because they are just completely unfun and not worth the time. There is already exclusivity and inaccessibility in the game. I dont see why a new part which satisfies a rather neglected part of the community is suddenly so outrageous.

Silverwastes certainly not, they’re utterly accessible and beatable to anyone putting in the time.

Teq and worm are interesting, they’re entirely accessible just not super easy to beat. Exclusvity is there in any number of ways, but except for some fringe things (fractals) accessibility is exceptionally high.

Instanced raids raise the accessibility bar substantially by putting in an organizational and often (but certainly not always) a time-sink barrier. additional environments for the instances greatly increases the development cost.

So you’re adding content that historically hasn’t performed well (Wildstar, LoTRO) and is more expensive to develop for that poor performance.

About the ‘exclusive rewards thing’, I think this hits to the core of the issue when we get down to it.

If we wanted to change it, we could say “People want special recognition for their achievements”. This is traditionally due to special rewards, unique skins, and titles.

That in and of itself is fine, but there are a few side-effects of this.

1) We’ve seen, excuses aside, that people won’t do content that doesn’t reward enough. If ‘harder’ means more time consuming, and it often does, there’s complaints that the special rewards aren’t worth the time.

2) People want their recognition to be exclusive. This also makes a lot of sense on one level, but it puts the dev in a hard spot. How do you get relatively exclusive rewards and recognition without creating content that inaccessible to the vast majority of the players? For Arenanet their primary solution is token/collection schemes. What unique boss skins they do have are recolors, because again, they want to give that recognition without throwing away too many resources.

~~~

I get why people deny the exclusivity/props motivation, it sounds selfish, and the exclusivity ends up changing it into a haves/have nots situation pitting the raiders against the non-raiders (and kidding aside, we know how those numbers go down, even in ‘raid’ games). Still, I think most of us know that without that exclusivity/props (and titles aren’t enough) those raids would be empty as hell.

~~~

Oh also, about the ‘poll’, theres multiple levels of self-selection that make it even more meaningless than usual. We’re selecting by people who both go to the official forums and care enough about raids to have an opinion on them. Most people simply don’t care and ignore it either way.

I’d go with Nash, fractal pugs are pretty clean usually, the worst are the 10-15 range in my experience.

Didn’t notice it was necro’d, I got trolled

SkylightMoon.1980:

Bump. Despite what the naysayers may say, the so called “vocal minority” actually ends up being the majority. Who would have thought

WildstarSaysWhat?

It’s a small number of very very very vocal people asking for it ><

Also Conncept: You can’t both complain about instadeath attacks and in the same breath talk about how useless defenses are. Most attacks aren’t actually Touch-of-death unless you’re running pure DPS stats.

It’s a pretty kitten sweet outfit, I can’t wait to get home and try it out ><