Guild Wars 2

Jski.6180:

Doing a daily or weekly events is not a grind. Even fractal are set up to be a mostly non grind daily chest. See a grind is something you do over and over to mostly progress your hero to a higher level grinding gear is part of this but this is more of the view of what you do in one day. So in this game the only true grind is farming gold to BUY items that you want or to kill mobs to level up eveny thing else is just an intensive not to spend all day on the game and only log in once a day or week.

Its like the view of grinding from mmorpg has changes the sec GW2 came out where in WoW you had to spend weeks doing the same thing over and over in the same day was not a grind but doing something once a day is? I am sry but that is out right morally wrong to call GW2 a grind. Look at other games FF11 the one i mainly know you got to spend days to get 1 level and your killing the same mobs over and over items and gold where comply on a different level. Look at EQ1 the “first” high pop mmorpg from what i know you had to do a lot to get items and level and to even get to new content. If you got to go out side of mmorpg even the new fps games make you kill x number of ppl with a type of gun to unlock other guns that IS a grind.
Tell me what game had no grind in it?

You’re completely missing the point in your desperate attempt to defend the devs here.

I agree that it’s impossible to remove all grind from a game, because by definition, grind is repetition. And you can’t avoid content repetition. That doesn’t change the fact that the devs promised a no-grind game, and yet are continuing to release content that makes the grind worse. That’s a complete 180 from what they said they were doing.

Sorry, but this sort of thing is completely indefensible, and it’s perfectly fair for people to call them out on this.

penatbater.4710:

They didn’t say there would be no grind

Incorrect.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/

I would also like add that we have never said there would be no vertical progression. We do intent to focus on horizontal but we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve.

They promised a no grind game after people got kitten off back in November. And yet the grind for ascended gear has only continued to grow worse, just as the “doomsayers” predicted back in November. Guess they weren’t as crazy as everyone thought.

March’s monthly is one of the first I’ve seen that I genuinely was happy about. Kudos are indeed deserved.

I’m worried that people want the daily change added to monthlies, too, considering that the daily change only made them more obnoxious than they used to be. Yes, more obnoxious, not harder. They’re still easy, they just require that I go out of my way to earn them now….which is against the “play the way you want to” mentality.

It’s disappointing that many of the people posting against the OP clearly don’t understand what she’s talking about.

She’s not saying that she plays less than the average Joe but still wants to be rewarded the same. She’s saying that players who play an equal number of hours aren’t being equally rewarded.

Player A plays 10 days a month for 5 hours. Net result: 20 laurels.
Player B plays every daily for a total of 50 hours. Net result: a minimum of 38 laurels.

This is why time gating is a poor choice for providing players with rewards. It means that two players might play the same amount of time, but aren’t being rewarded at nearly the same amounts.

I don’t think that it will. Their last attempts to “tweak” the system into producing less culling only made the problem even worse. They keep saying they’ll fix it, but….we’re now six months in, and it’s worse than ever. It’s understandable that people would look at that and have a lack of faith in their bold predictions that they’ll “eliminate” it entirely when they have yet to even improve it, much less get close to eliminating it.

Unfortunately, culling’s one of the big problems plaguing this game, so if this patch goes through and doesn’t actually fix culling, I think the forum reaction will be much worse than the Feb patch produced.

locoman.1974:

Two things happened, guesting is only one of them (and I bet the minor one). The main reason (IMHO) was that the dragon chests became too attractive with them containing a guaranteed rare each, which could be salvaged to up to 3 ectos (which sell for 30s each) each, so that everyone is trying to do them.

I’d bet that if they did turn off guesting the net result would be the same, instead of the guests from other servers you’ll have people from your own server that used to guest on other servers taking their place.

But of course, we can only guess, only anet has the actual data on how many people did the events before, how many do them now (we can’t even see them all because of culling), and how many are guests.

I’m not disagreeing that there are other factors.

I’m simply disagreeing with the notion that guesting isn’t contributing to the problem, because all “evidence” we have suggests that it’s at least a partial contributor to the problem.

MrInfinit.1864:

How about getting over yourselves, and stop blindly blaming something you can’t even prove is the cause. How about waiting for an official response from ANet?

btw this was a problem before guesting… overflows and lag at launch? yes. overflows and lag at the Karka event? yes.

=)

Both of which are totally unrelated events to this.

It’s not hard to figure out what the problem is. There weren’t overflows for World Events all that often prior to the guesting patch. Now, suddenly, everyone’s complaining about it.

Let’s add two and two, here, rather than waiting for the professor to tell you that the answer’s four.

It’s the guesting that’s causing the overflow. They’re abusing an exploit that allows them to break the one-chest-per-day limit on World Events. If they hadn’t bothered implementing that ridiculous policy in the first place, it wouldn’t be happening.

kratan.4619:

Fortunately, if immersion is running CoF path1 all day, you can still run this dungeon as many times in a row as you want. I have not yet been locked out of the dungeon just because I ran it over and over.

And I have to admit, that confuses me.

They only want us doing World Events once per day, to the point where they actually locked the chests for anyone who tries multiple runs….but they’re fine with us farming a dungeon over and over, getting rewards every single time?

Doesn’t make sense to me. If your goal is to discourage people from doing World Events so often, why not do what you did with dungeons: You get the best possible rewards on your first run, and then lower quantities of rewards in the second and subsequent runs. So for example, instead of getting three item drops and two gemstones, you only get one of each after the first run for that day.

Jski.6180:

Well the events they are putting out for these story are not buggly and they do not cause lag. So they are higher quality just not that big as the 30$ expansion they are more like 10$ ones but they are still free.

And yet, many of the things they’ve introduced in the last two months have caused significant problems.

Guesting, for example, has created a system whereby people who play on Server X can’t even play the game on their own server because the guested players have flooded their high population server to farm World Events.

Jan’s patch introduced “something” (they never told us what) that was supposed to help cut down on problems in WvW rendering, and it only made the rendering problems even worse than before, to the point where people started having the problem in PvE as well (which is why the recent dev claims that March’s patch would strike a major blow to culling are being taken with the tiniest grain of salt by many).

It’s true that the new story content hasn’t been majorly buggy, but there hasn’t actually been much of it, either. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the claim that patches of “higher quality” have been coming out recently isn’t really all that accurate. What we’ve been seeing is more large-scale problems introduced by a team that likely didn’t think the consequences of that change through. This is why so many have clamored for a PTR, so that the players can tell the devs “hey, this thing isn’t working quite right” and the big bugs get squashed before they go live.

Uncle Salty.6342:

Sorry but you aren’t thinking very far.

What you have suggested would only be viable if…. extreme DR is applied on FOTM or on the gullible assumption that players would only do fotm once a day. Which wouldn’t be the case if loots were improved to levels of your suggestion.

Dismantle your own suggestion again and think over it.

Loot balancing has never been easy. Simply because farming isn’t illegal yet hardcore farmers though a minority are able to tip the economy by that much. Yet if you introduce quotas/limitations, wholly ‘legitimate’ players would be QQing about being unable to play as they please.

So think it through. Hard. It isn’t easy.

You haven’t actually stated why my proposal is bad. You’ve only insisted that it is bad without providing any body of evidence to support that conclusion.

So I’ll ask again: please, prove to me that my proposal is unreasonable.

Mackdose.6504:

Colin went on record saying that after the rush of the Lost Shores and Halloween patches, they’ve switched back to a “when it’s ready” model of development.

Expect more delays with higher quality releases going forward.

Other than that, we’ve known Flame and Frost was a 4 part series since the second week of February.

Which is fine. Except that we’re missing the dialogue.

“Hey, I know we said X would be this month, but we need another month on it.” Simple, to the point, and helps take bites out of the communication issues we’ve been having.

And I have to admit that I haven’t seen higher quality patches. In fact I worry that quality is going down, not up. Just looking at Feb’s patch, for example, they had to reset the servers several times after it rolled due to major bugs that it introduced.

GW2 would not even exist if not for the players of Guild Wars 1.

I think a couple of really fancy skins is a perfectly fair way for those players to be rewarded for their contributions to making GW2 a great game.

Not to be a brat, but GW1 had the same problem with there only being a “few” “viable” builds.

That should be read thus: there are actually plenty of GOOD builds, but people are much too focused on having tons of OPTIMAL builds. Which is fair enough, but let’s not pretend that there isn’t any variety out there at all. I’ve seen several different variations of the most common build choices, usually based on personal preference.

My problem with Trehearne is how badly written he is.

I was doing the early Trehearne missions on my Guardian, and it reminded me of how much I hate the way that he was added. From the very first mission you meet him, he has diarrhea of the mouth and cannot stop spouting exposition and whining.

“A Light in the Darkness” is, for me, the perfect example of this. Instead of moving forward with the story, we have to stop dead in our tracks to talk to the Pale Tree, who spends most of the quest telling Trehearne how important he is and how he must take up this legendary sword that only sylvari characters know a thing about. And Trehearne himself spouts a massive exposition that basically summarizes GW Prophecies in the most revisionist way possible. And what frustrates me most is that this vision sequence has some GOOD stuff in it, but it’s all drowning in the terrible exposition and sudden shift of worldly importance onto this guy that we literally just met a few quests ago.

Uncle Salty.6342:

So what are you lot whining for?

More exotic drops? Guaranteed multiple rares in FOTM?

What constitutes as “fair loots”. If you can’t have a straight answer off the top of your head which is what I’ve yet to see on this thread. As it is obvious solutions has Anet in a bunch and now you want them on more balancing issues. Really now. Big picture.

Don’t keep mentioning dragon chests as a precedence and ride the wave just hoping for more loots.

Okay.

Veteran: Fine drop (or better)
Champion: Masterwork drop (or better)
Legendary: Two Masterwork drops (or better)
Regular chests: Three Fine-level drops (or better) + 1 gemstone
Large chests (like World Boss chests): Three Masterwork drops (or better) + 2 gemstones

There ya go, that’s my answer to your question. Please, go ahead and explain to me why my suggestions are unreasonable. Because it’s my opinion that, as things stand, people don’t feel all that inspired to bother with champion mobs because they don’t offer very good rewards. If they offered at least green drops, people might be more willing to tackle them.

Mudfin.4637:

Actually I read your posts, and points. I just don’t agree with them at all. I only commented on the two above because they were the ones I had an opinion I felt like sharing. So please don’t assume I didn’t, that’s rather arrogant. If by my response you don’t think I did than maybe you didn’t express your self very good, or like I personally believe, I just don’t agree with you.

Do you have a side? Yes you do. One you stated rather well both before and after your “break”. Is your whole thesis based on your beliefs on what you think is happening? Yes it is. All I stated was that I agree with Mackdose that they have picked a path after reviewing their data and are staying with it. Again, you don’t agree. It is my opinion that you don’t agree because it is not your side, or what you’d like to see.

Yes, I have a side. No, I don’t care if they decide to choose my side or not. I may disagree with it, but I’ll at least be happy they picked a side to begin with.

Again, if you think that I posted this only to express my own opinion on the game’s direction, then you clearly didn’t read my posts at all, you just think that you did.

I am insisting on a clear, defined direction for the future of this game. Playing to the middle will hurt them long-term. Would it be nice if they agreed with me on what direction the game should go? Yeah, in my opinion, it would be preferable. But if they want to go the opposite direction, that’s okay too. But it’s about time to make that decision. They can’t keep trying to play along the middle forever. It’s been tried before, in other MMOs, and it doesn’t work well.

As to vertical progression we will just have to disagree. Yes, I will be “behind” poor choice of words, since you took it literally to fit your argument. But to use your analogy, in the marathon I don’t care that someone beat me, I wasn’t racing. I was just running to do it, and I did. In most games competition in the PvE environment is only determined by World Firsts, and that only happens once. Everyone else is completing content to achieve a goal, or, in other words, progress. I could care less if I am not the first. I can be the 1000th and be happy that I progressed. So, you see, vertical progression is not for the hardcore. It’s for everyone who wants to put forth the effort.

Just because you run the marathon for the sake of completing it doesn’t mean that it only existed for the purposes of completion.

Vertical progression is designed to appeal to the people who want to race to the top. Just because it makes a good long-term goal for you doesn’t mean that’s what it was designed for.

Mudfin.4637:

It really is a subjective opinion to state vertical progression favors the hardcore. No it doesn’t. It favors those who are willing to put in the effort to progress. In a game where PvE content was relegated to 40+ man raids, then yes, I would probably agree with you. In GW2 that is not the case. I progress based on my effort. It might take me a long time to achieve that progress, but I can and will achieve it. I am not falling behind anyone. yes their are some stat increases, but they do warrant any concern from me as the difference is not that significant.

Except that you are, and you even admitted that you are by stating that it will take you longer to achieve that progress.

Vertical progression naturally favors the hardcore player because it will take them significantly less time to progress than someone like you. Ergo they will reach the peak faster than you, and will outperform you until you reach the peak too. At which point, the peak will be raised another few thousand feet, and you’ll fall behind again.

This is effectively the same as claiming that completing a marathon is the same as winning first place. It’s clearly not. The guy who runs faster and smarter than you clearly beat you in that race, and he had an advantage up until you finally caught up at the finish line. And he will continue to beat you every time a new race comes up. You might be proud of yourself for completing the goal eventually, but if you’re wise, then you wouldn’t ever try to claim that you’re a better runner than he is.

Hardcore players are favored by design in a vertical progression system, because they always finish the content and obtain the stats before everyone else. Long-term, certainly, you’ll have caught up and obtained that same gear….but in most games, the hardcore player is already yet another tier ahead of you by then. The much slower rate of growth in GW2’s vertical progression system will lessen this problem, but not remove it. It’s still going to be there, and when Ascended armor and weapons come out, it’ll get even worse as the stat gap (and the time it takes to catch up) significantly widen.

I am also like Mackdose in that I think they have made a decision and have picked a side. It just does not appear to be your side, or, for that matter, the hardcore side. It seems they have taken to the middle path and that seems to work for me and many others.

You didn’t read my earlier posts, it seems.

I’m getting tired of repeating this, so this will be the very last time: I don’t care what direction they choose, so long as they choose one and tell everyone about it. If it’s the opposite of the one I want, so be it. But they need to look over their data, choose a path, and then stick to it. A lot of the bitterness in this forum is simply because of that refusal to decide what direction GW2 is going to go, that feeling that the game is flipping and flopping on what it wants to do and who it wants to be. Playing to the middle isn’t going to work in the long-term. It hasn’t for any other MMO out there, and GW2 isn’t unique in that regard. They need to decide which players they intend to keep over the life of the game, and start trying to cater to those players. And they need to make that decision soon. This series of patches they’ve promised that would deliver “an expansion’s worth of content” is, at least judging from the responses in these forums and across multiple internet polls, a sort of “make or break” period for many people. I’d like to see it succeed, but to do that, they need to start making those tough decisions as a dev team.

I appreciate that you have your own opinion and you’re welcome to it, but I would appreciate it if you took the time to actually read my opinion rather than responding to a false straw-manned version of it.

I must be honest, so far the Living Story hasn’t really had much story in it….or content in general. While previous monthly patches kept me busy for days, I’ve been able to easily sit down and finish each new part of the Living Story within a single day’s play time, and that’s despite having less time available to play than ever before. So I’m not really all that interested in the continuation of the story just yet, because it really hasn’t gone anywhere yet.

I’ve also noticed that, yet again, the goalposts have been shuffled backwards a little. Now the story is four months long? It was originally a Jan/Feb patch, then they pushed it back to being just a teaser for Jan and Feb/March would be the bulk of the patch. Now, everything up to now was just “teaser” stuff, and the real bulk of the content is for March and April. If this patch isn’t significantly large and we’re later told that it was just more “teaser” material, I’m going to be extremely disappointed. Just be honest with us, guys….if you need to push content back, push it back and then tell us that you needed more time. Simple. Don’t overhype the patch as being huge if it’s not huge.

Well, see, they can’t have you making money. That would go totally against their anti-grind philosophy, you see. That’s also why they capped World Boss chests to one per day. They’ve said they don’t want players repeating events over and over to farm them.

Of course, what this perspective fails to understand is that there’s nothing inherently wrong with people farming if it’s something they enjoy doing. I, for example, like killing the Shatterer, but now that he doesn’t properly reward me, I don’t waste time killing him at all any more. Same thing happened to Fractals: I liked the experience and I felt rewarded for my time. Now, not so much, so I haven’t run Fractals in a while. Instead of encouraging me to “mix it up”, they’re driving me away from content that I previously found rewarding and fun to play.

They don’t want people farming (even if they enjoy doing it), so they’re setting strict limits on how often you can do anything in their game and significantly reducing the amount of loot you can earn when you play. Setting daily/weekly limits on content, loot table adjustments, diminishing returns, etc.

I think that GW2’s devs need to talk to the original devs of FF14. FF14 employed something called a “fatigue system” whose primary goal was to punish you for playing extended periods of time in the game by giving you lower experience and poorer loot drops. Sort of like how GW2 is becoming increasingly about limiting the repeatability of content and the rewards provided by that content. I wonder how that worked out for FF14? Oh, right….

Well, maybe lightning won’t strike the lightning rod twice?

Yargesh.4965:

Airien.4798:

Excellent news! Good to know.

Asking questions like that about a game just 6 months after launch is merely shoddy reporting and a lack of creativity.

It is reporting on what people want to know. How is that shoddy?

Who “wanted to know”? Everyone in the entire gaming world (except, apparently, this reporter) knew that there wasn’t going to be an expansion this soon. MMOs don’t tend to release expansions this early into the game’s life.

WoW went three years before its first full paid expansion. Aion went for about two years. SWTOR’s first paid expansion is coming out about a year and a half after it’s initial release. And TERA still hasn’t released a paid expansion.

MMOs don’t tend to release expansions in the first year of the game’s lifespan, much less the first six months. So any reporter asking this sort of question is, indeed, being a rather shoddy journalist, as they are demonstrating their lack of knowledge about their chosen field of employment.

However, to this reporter’s credit, at least he’s not purposely and grossly misinterpreting Colin’s statements to mean something sensationalistic….

No, we leave that kind of shoddy reporting to the fine folks at the Escapist.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122516-Guild-Wars-2-May-Be-The-End-Of-The-Franchise

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

As much as I would like devs to answer these kinds of threads, what you posted in the OP is basically your very subjective view of the game.
Point 1 is “I don’t like dailies”, ok, that’s your opinion. Others do.
Point 2 is “I don’t like GW2’s progression system”. Others do. Your point?
Point 3 calls out staff for being liars without providing evidence and say you dont trust Anet. So?

This thread isn’t listing real issues but simply “I don’t like this and that”.
So what? I don’t like some stuff myself but I don’t demand an answer from Anet.

You clearly didn’t actually read the post so much as skim it.

Please go back and read it again. I don’t appreciate people being blatantly dishonest about the contents of my post simply to make their own point.

Mackdose.6504:

-snip-

I’m not missing that at all. Most opinions on virtually any topic have grey area involved, and the majority floats near the middle.

That said, vertical progression is a model which distinctly favors hardcore players. It’s designed to keep these sorts of people playing by introducing gear at a rapid rate, because even though it can’t possibly keep up with the hardcore crowd, that’s who it’s aimed to cater to. You don’t build a game around vertical progression unless your goal is to keep people playing long-term by chasing after better gear. The horizontal model, by comparison, thrives on making new and shiny gear instead of just making it better. Ergo it’s a model better suited to a casual audience even if the grind for such items is enormous….because throughout that period, they’re not placed at any sort of significant disadvantage statistically. They can still pop in and out of the game and have a decent opportunity at success.

What GW2 is trying to do is have both: it’s introducing vertical progression but at a largely decelerated rate. The idea is pretty obvious: if you introduce it slowly, casuals aren’t hit as hard by the growth in overall player power and have an opportunity to keep up a little better. But at the same time you’re still giving the hardcore players new, better gear to chase after. It would seem, on paper, to be the best of both worlds.

Unfortunately, the core problem behind such a setup is that you can’t possibly introduce the content at a slow-enough rate for most casual audiences, relegating such “grinds” to a long-term goal that feels out of their reach. A month of dedicated daily play for one item isn’t something that a typical casual player is able to do. On the other hand, when you introduce it as slowly as GW2 has, your hardcore players gobble it up in days and are once again left with nothing to do but wait and complain about a lack of content. Thus both parties end up unhappy to varying degrees. Yeah, you minimized the number of very vocal complaints because only the extreme ends of the spectrum are totally outraged at the very idea of what you’ve done….but the groups in the middle aren’t necessarily placated by what you did either.

Indeed, casuals have the same access to the game, and can eventually earn the same rewards as long-term goals. But that’s missing the forest for the trees. The problem isn’t the notion that the game is half-hardcores and half-casuals, the problem is that you’re trying to appeal to both extremes at the same time, and the result is a model that doesn’t please either extreme, and often leaves the people in the middle disappointed to boot. They would be better off picking one end and then compromising to a very limited degree towards the middle, as that has the best shot of retention and general happiness. Trying to continually play the middle isn’t actually making the middle people necessarily “happy”, and it’s making both extremes mad.

And while I appreciate your anecdotal evidence, I have some of my own to the contrary. I know a number of people who have given up on the game because they didn’t like one thing or another that was implemented after release. None of them were on either extreme of the casual/hardcore “scale”. They were all middle-of-the-line guys. Trying to appeal to the center doesn’t necessarily mean that the center always ends up happy with what you’ve created. It does, however, virtually guarantee that both extremes will be unhappy.

That’s why I’m saying that it’s time to get off the fence and choose whether they want a game that is friendly to casuals or one that caters to hardcore players. Because their attempts to appease both sides just aren’t working right now.

If they’re bothering you, report them.

But I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, and it’s very very easy for you to turn off map chat if you don’t like reading it.

Karizee.8076:

Would be interesting to compare numbers by region

Not really. GW2 has just over 3 million sales total, according to its dev team. WoW’s recent expansion was widely considered a market failure, and it sold that many in a single week.

As far as TESO, no doubt there are many people from all kinds of gaming communities that will try it, but I do think WoW has the most to fear.

I don’t. TESO is clearly made and marketed to go after the people who played GW2 and Skyrim.

DemiGod.6413:

Yes they will. I acquired and transmuted The Moot roughly a month before they upgraded the look. Guess what. When they upgraded the effects mine was upgraded as well. So yes i believe that they will know I have a legendary, transmuted or not, and bump up the stats to BiS. Had mine not of received the new effects i would say no. But it did. As to what stats it will have that is easy. It will revert back to the original solider stats. So I will “grind” or really just play the game until i get the ascended stats that i want.

Off-topic, but minor note: You clearly don’t understand how transmutation works, or how skins work.

The reason your transmuted Moot now has the new graphics is because they literally replaced the original graphics of the Moot with the new ones. So when your item is loaded on your client, it calls the new file because that file replaced the old one. The game can’t call on graphics that no longer exist.

It has nothing to do with the stats. In fact, I strongly suspect that when “legendaries” are upgraded, that absolutely none of the ones that were transmuted will get the upgraded stats. Why would they? Your “legendary” is really just a skin now so far as the game’s code is concerned, so it’s no longer looking at the original file’s stats to determine how strong it is. If you transmuted an Exotic’s stats onto an Ascended item, you wouldn’t magically get bumped up to Ascended power, so why would anyone assume that a transmuted “legendary” will be any different?

And we’ll have tons of people in these forums whining about how their transmuted “legendary” no longer is the best in the game, even though it’s rather obvious that it wouldn’t work that way. They’d have to do all sorts of tinkering to make it work like that, I’ll bet.

leman.7682:

It wasn’t. End of topic.

It was. And it’s not your topic to end.

It’s a great game, despite its growing list of flaws.

Karizee.8076:

It’s the game everyone is playing – new MMOs are taking their design ques from GW2 because players won’t settle for less anymore

The figures on games like WoW and other popular MMOs would beg to differ. They’re lower than they used to be, yeah, but they’re still the dominant force in the market and GW2 is still small by comparison. And judging from GW2’s sales figures, it’s not all that likely that all those people who left WoW came over to GW2, so it’s not like people are shifting over to this game.

And I suspect there’ll be another mass exodus from GW2 once TESO comes out, as it’s a very similar sort of game. So I maintain that it’s much too soon to be declaring GW2 as some sort of massive “revolution” in gaming: it still hasn’t proven that it’s had any sort of massive impact on the market.

Vanthian.9267:

I am impressed that you would even being to compare Guild Wars 1 story to Guild Wars 2.

I am impressed at the lengths to which you would go to misread my post as something it’s not.

I didn’t say GW2’s story was better. In fact I didn’t say anything about GW2’s story, or my personal take on it, at all.

I said that it’s hilarious for someone to say that they miss the “serious” tone of GW1’s story when it was laughably absurd from an outside point of view.

Avatar.1923:

^

farmers zergs are making the game worst; the open world content they decide to farm suddenly becomes so boring and unflavorful for all the other players.

thats my issue.

How does someone else’s decision to grind an event directly influence how you feel about that same event?

And have you stopped to consider that, in that scenario, the problem isn’t actually the grinders, but rather the fact that your own tastes are fickle enough to be dictated by others rather than yourself?

I’ll run the content I want, whether there’s two or twenty players running it with me. Why and how does someone else’s choice to grind an event ruin it for you?

I’m not trying to be mean, mind, I’m just genuinely asking because that point of view makes no sense to someone like me, who is perfectly happy doing whatever content I feel like doing, regardless of what everyone else is doing.

The reason they’re doing it is because of their dedicated expression of being “against farming”.

I used to think the same way when I was helping in game development, but eventually I changed my mind. Why? Because I realized that, as a developer, if you’re looking to provide optimal freedom, you can’t get rid of farming shy of equalizing every bit of content to the point of being stale….nor should you actively be trying to achieve that goal.

If people honestly find grinding fun, then let them do it. They should at least get the right to decide how to waste their own time. The rest of us will mix it up and love it. But if I feel particularly dragon-slaying-happy one day, I’d like to feel rewarded every time I kill that dragon, not just the first time.

You can’t say that you want people to “play the way they want to” and then place arbitrary time constraints on the majority of your world content that prevent them from repeating content, because that’s discouraging them from playing the way they prefer….which isn’t good for long-term retention.

darkdomino.9578:

This is something that has kinda bugged me from the get-go. The tone and style of Guild Wars 1 was fairly dark, post-searing… The dialogue was fairly serious, people talked about serious things. Even though the storyline was kinda disjointed, it still had an air of legitimacy.

Let’s review the plot of Prophecies (and since we’re looking back, we’re going to ignore the context provided by GW2):

• A menacing race of cat-people called “charr” attack the human settlement of Ascalon because….um, they’re evil, that’s why! And their shamans’ gods told them to do it, because….they’re evil too, I suppose.
• The humans keep fighting but eventually their prince decides that they can’t hope to win, so he takes some refugees to Kryta….clearly forgetting the very realistic notion that the charr have no reason not to follow them into Kryta.
• On the way to Kryta, the prince is killed by the leader of a faction of evil dwarves.
• The refugees reach Kryta, only to discover that they have an undead problem.
• The refugees help the current Krytan leadership of the White Mantle fight off the undead….only to discover that the White Mantle is secretly evil!
• The refugees fight against the White Mantle for a while, then flee to the desert to train with a dragon, who reveals that they are the chosen one who will save Kryta from the unseen evil force that leads the White Mantle (the ones who they mistakenly believe to be “gods”).
• The chosen fight the Mursaat and the Stone Summit with the help of a mysterious man named Vizier Khilbron, who is also revealed to be evil and working for a mysterious group of creatures called the Titans.
• The chosen defeat the Titans and Khilbron, thus saving the world from the dreadful fate that would never have occurred if they had just let the Mursaat keep killing people.
• It’s eventually revealed that the charr shamans worshiped the Titans too, even though it’s unclear how they even knew of their existence.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that entire sequence of events hilarious. Primarily because the narrative seems to think that this is a logical sequence of clearly related events, rather than a hilariously maligned set of coincidences. Seriously, we meet no less than four completely separate evil factions, none of whom are directly working together ,and all of whom completely hate your guts for no discernible reason. All of whom are enacting their evil plans at exactly the same time. That’s pretty funny when you think about it. That’d be like if Magneto, Dr Doom, Thanos, and the Mandarin all concocted evil plans for world conquest and decided that this coming Tuesday would be the perfect day to set them into action.

As I said before, it’s a matter of trust, as far as I’m concerned. I would much rather have the developers be firm and pick a stance that diametrically opposes my own preferences than to see them flounder on the fence, because when they can’t pick a side, that means that neither group can commit the full burden of their trust to that dev team. Yes, people will always be angry, no matter what you do. People will always scream “BETRAYAAAAL” at everything. That’s part of the job. But that doesn’t mean you should flip or flop on issues, nor should you stay quiet on major issues that concern your players. You need to decide which group of players you want, and dedicate your content to them, so that the people who aren’t getting what they want can move on and find another game that suits their tastes better. As is, you’re stringing them along, keeping them hoping that maybe the next update will reverse the trend and start things going back in the direction THEY want the game to go.

Yeah, I’m not happy with the game’s current direction. But that’s neither here nor there, and has nothing to do with the flaw I’m expressing. The flaw isn’t that the game isn’t going in the way I want, it’s that the releases to date suggest that it’s trying to go in two directions at the same time. When a developer can’t seem to pick which side of the fence it is on, that results in both sides being disappointed to one degree or another, and both sides are hurt. I’ve seen a lot of people whom I vehemently disagreed with on one topic or another who have gone from expressing total faith in the game’s direction to being very confused and upset because of recent changes. I’m asking in the most polite way possible for ANet to please lay out precisely what they intend to do. No vagueness, no double talk, and for all of our sakes, no PR stuff. Just say “here’s what we want to do with this game”, and if people don’t like it, they can move on. It’ll dramatically cut down on the number of complaints you’ll have to field (as the people whose personal vision doesn’t match yours will have left) and it’ll make everyone happier in the long run. What I’m seeing is an effort to compromise on virtually everything and anything, which isn’t the right way to handle this. At some point, you have to choose a direction to steer your ship, or it’ll ram straight into the dock.

Alright, I’ve returned. I apologize for my extended absence and inability to immediately respond to those of you with valid points, but I suspect you can surmise for yourself where I’ve been the past several days.

I want to start by thanking Martin once again for his contributions to this thread. While I strongly believe that he misunderstands the purpose of this thread as an opinion from an honestly concerned player, rather than a sensationalist topic written by Fox News, his contribution to this thread did actually help this discussion, as many posters here have pointed out, and it was unfair of me to be so curt to him in my last reply. I do apologize for that and thank him for his contributions.

Now then, I notice that many have posted in favor of my concerns and I do appreciate that some of you feel the need to express your concerns as well. I’m glad to know that I’m not just crazy….unless this entire forum only exists in my head, which would be a level of crazy much too complicated to cover here. I genuinely appreciate that you have helped defend my original post while I was unable to.

I notice that there are also several of you who, given your statements, have not actually read the post in its entirety (or at all), and I strongly encourage you to do so. After all, you cannot contribute meaningfully to the discussion if you cannot even take the time to make certain that you understand what was said in the first place.

I’ve thought on how I might describe this for those of you who aren’t understanding what I said before, and here’s how I think I’ll try to explain it:

I am a huge fan of the game as a whole. I love it and want to see it succeed. However, I have serious ongoing concerns about the direction it has chosen. I am not complaining about the fact that the game is going in a direction I don’t like, so much as the fact that it appears the game is not trying to appeal either to its originally intended niche or the current majority of its players. Instead, it seems to be trying to teeter carefully between several different groups, to the detriment of us all.

It’s trying to appeal to a hardcore crowd by dedicating itself to vertical progression, but also swears that it’ll be a slow progression to appeal to casuals. The result: a system that’s inaccessible to most casual players but not nearly enough of a grind for hardcore fans.

It tries to keep itself accessible to people who haven’t played GW1 by running on an entirely new storyline, but doing so forces them to “tweak”, ignore, or even retcon some prior canon to achieve results. The result: the world and lore of GW2 is rich and deep, but the stories themselves feel significantly flatter.

It tries to be a very rewarding game by throwing lots of new currencies at us even as the devs lock down, reduce, or even eliminate the rewards in various locations to keep people from “farming”. The result: a game world where we’re running out of bank slots to store all of our currencies, but still can only expect a guarantee of a blue drop when we solo a champion mob.

And they make announcements that end up being altered, changed, or dropped entirely. The result: players getting told that AoE will be nerfed across the board but on a case-by-case basis, that the precursor scavenger hunt is actively in development but not being worked on, and that the problems with condition builds are both an active focus and not even on the radar.

All this does is fuel the fires of those who genuinely do want to see the game fail, and disappoint the game’s genuine fans, myself included.

(continued below)

1) Guardian.
2) Engineer with Ranger as a close second.
3) Dungeons, especially with regards to their rewards systems.
4) 3. It’s inflating much too fast.
5) 3. They’re starting to get too frequent.
6) Dungeons.
7) Between players and players, 8 or 9. Between devs and players, 2.

Ursan.7846:

Because Anet made this game just for the heck of it? Of course they want to keep the general player base happy.

Exhibit A: Electronic Arts.

They sure don’t make games to make their players happy. :p

It’s incorrect because you’re applying your own opinions on the general player base. You see things they do and you think they aren’t catering to your interests/thoughts/opinions. That’s perfectly fine. I’m sure there are plenty of other players who really enjoy everything Anet has given us so far and love everything you hate. Thus is individuality.

This is nothing shy of willfully misunderstanding what I’ve said.

I said in no uncertain terms that I’m perfectly fine with them pursuing a path that I don’t like so long as it appeals to the majority. But that isn’t what they’re doing.

Also, lets not ignore the fact that often times, what a player “Wants” is not necessarily good to the longevity of the game itself.

Agreed, but at this point, I would challenge you to locate one item in the game which was changed against the players’ wishes “for the benefit of the game”. Because I don’t think you’ll be able to find one that doesn’t cater to your own opinions, thus, proving the point I made above.

Again, I’m so sorry to hear the game is causing you such distress. I am not being sarcastic in anyway, I do feel sympathetic, because I want everyone to also love the game that I love. But if the direction they’re taking is really not what you’re looking for, I suggest you take a break. Like a jilted lover, the more you think about her the more pain you inflict on yourself.

The problem with taking a break is that I’ll return to a game that may be even further from the one I’d been told I was buying.

I’m complaining now in the hopes that I, and other players out there, don’t have to return to such a scenario later.

Avatar.1923:

reduce everything to an equal level, then up everything equally.
its better than pumping everything up to the level of broken stuff like CoF and breaking the games economy.

No, it’s twice as much work for no gain.

Just buff everything up to a set level and save yourself the work of nerfing it at all.

i dont know how you cant feel rewarded as there are so many different rewards and token to get.

That’s part of the problem.

There’s nothing wrong with providing long-term goals, but not every single reward should be a long-term goal. This is basic psychology, here. You aren’t going to get people motivated to perform the tasks you want if everything takes a long time to get. Human beings do not work that way. You have to mix short-term and long-term rewards together to achieve a motivational effect that lasts for the long-term. This is how successful teachers train their students to become self-motivated: providing small, short-term rewards and then slowly building up some long-term rewards and goals for those students. Eventually the student becomes motivated to the point where rewards are hardly required to stimulate the proper activity at all.

ANet is constantly cutting down on its short-term rewards and increasing the number of long-term ones. That’s not a balanced approach, and it’s going to lead to fatigue.

imo, participating in an event should be like the new boss chest; more rewarding but only once per day per event.

I mean no offense, but I must be honest….this is quite possibly the worst idea ever expressed in this forum.

Ursan.7846:

Also…

I’m only giving my own opinion.

I can no longer trust that the developers of GW2 have our best interests at heart

Should change that to “mine”

No, it’s correct as it’s written.

It is my personal opinion that the developers do not have the general player base’s interests, thoughts, and opinions at heart when they go about developing new content.

If my interests aren’t the same as the majority’s interests, then fine, I’ll just have to deal with it. But if the majority’s interests aren’t being catered to, either, then we have a problem.

Avatar.1923:

people dont like to farm; they like the most rewarding thing.

No, you don’t like farming.

Some people do like to farm and shouldn’t be told that their method of playing the game is “wrong”.

And if the goal is to make multiple things equally rewarding, why not bring other areas up to the level of the farmed areas rather than nerfing the farming places down to the much poorer levels of everything else? People will never feel rewarded playing your game if you keep reducing the rewards.

Avatar.1923:

considering gw2 is a themepark, they had to look at how to make people try different rides instead of putting everybody in the same lineup for CoF or Pen/Shelt.

Here’s my question, then:

Suppose you own a theme park, and your visitors love to get on one ride in particular. Do you make a concerted effort to make that ride less appealing in the hopes that they will start trying your other rides? Or do you just sit back and count your cash, perfectly fine with people spending $60 for admission and choosing only to ride a single ride over and over again?

I know which one I’d pick, especially if I’m looking to retain those customers long term and not lose them to other theme parks.

Some people want to farm. Let them. They have every right to play the way they want to, even if it’s a boring and stupid way to play. There’s no point in telling them they’re not allowed to play unless they play your way.

Mackdose.6504:

I finished my dailies yesterday twice in a 1 hour span of time. They didn’t butcher anything. “Level up once” doesn’t require dedication, and neither do any of the other tasks.

Ah, good, I was waiting for you to show up and misinterpret me again.

It’s not a matter of difficulty. It’s a matter of good design vs bad design.

This game was pitched as one that you could “play as you want to”, yet it has made increasingly large strides towards forcing people to play the game the way the devs want to. The old dailies allowed players to play in any zone they wanted, the new dailies obligate people to play in certain locations to complete them. That’s not “playing the way you want to”. The dailies from yesterday are perhaps the best ones to date but they’re still inferior to the original model, which was completable in any zone at any time with minimal effort.

And the dailies are just one example. The constant nerfing of “good farming spots”, limiting world chests to once per day, buffing things that didn’t need buffing, etc….these are all things which they have done not because the players actually demanded them, but because the players were farming them. Well, I hate to inform the devs of this, but there’s a difference between saying “we don’t want you to farm” and actually removing any and all forms of farming as they crop up. The former is a misunderstanding of how human beings function, and the latter is a complete violation of the “play the way you want to” mantra.

MMORPG: Back in January, one of the fixes for culling went into place, and it seemed to help a bit. But how will the changes coming in March eliminate this completely? There are a few skeptics in Bill’s (Murphy) guild that think it can’t be done.

Habib Loew: Hah, yeah we have seen a lot of the skepticism on the Internet. The change we made in January was really just a tweak to the system. It changed the priorities of Culling but did not eliminate it. The change in March will turn off Culling completely.

I have absolutely no faith in this claim.

Why?

Because this is the same dev team that claims that the January patch was supposed to “help” with culling, and it only made culling clearly and measurably worse.

Hard-hitting journalism there, though. “The Jan patch seemed to help”, eh? MMORPG’s staff clearly hasn’t played the game at all since January.

I actually don’t have a problem with dailies being “kill X of Y” at all really. They were originally intended as an optional form of game play that was intended to reward casual players despite a minimum time investment. But now they’ve butchered that and turned dailies into something that requires playing in specific regions at specific times and doing specific things, requiring more dedication to complete than ever before. And it really has cut into my normal game play….I’ve found that much of my time is spent pursuing daily stuff when it should be spent “playing the game the way I want to”.

Syktek.7912:

-snip-

You clearly know nothing about Ascended items whatsoever.

1) Devs have confirmed that there will be Ascended gear of all types: weapons, trinkets, and armor. There’s a screenshot floating around of what Ascended stats on a weapon look like from back when they accidentally upgraded the “legendaries” too early during the Nov patch.

2) Devs confirmed that the intended power increase per item is between 5% and 10%, not 3-5%. And if you’d even bothered to compare the stats on existing Ascended gear to their Exotic equivalents, you’d have known this.

3) A mere 5% increase in three stats for every article of gear yields roughly 13% better performance in terms of damage (and 5% better armor, obviously) on a Berserker build. A 10% increase is even more significantly lopsided. Anyone claiming that the difference between Exotic and Ascended is “small” hasn’t done their homework, including the devs themselves.

The OP has a perfectly valid, reasonable point. The devs stated that the sale of so-called"legendaries" was perfectly okay and not against any sort of game mechanic, that it was an intentional design. So if we can sell these so-called “legendaries”, why can’t we sell Ascended items? Heck, why are there Exotic items dropped in Fractals that also can’t be sold? Why is ANet so adverse to the idea of players making money off of gear that they don’t want to use themselves?

Ursan.7846:

While you’re correct, they have already stated that your achievements will be converted into laurels. So honestly I won’t worry about it too much.

No, what Colin said was that they would retroactively reward players for their achievements.

However, because some of them are hard to balance against each other, he also stated that the rewards may be laurels or a different type of currency entirely. He did not promise that all past achievements would definitely lead to future laurels.

So I would keep that concern of yours, OP. Because it’s a perfectly healthy concern to have until a dev states otherwise.

No, what they need to do with dungeon tokens is what people thought they were going to do: implement it so that one run of an explorable dungeon nets you one token, which you can exchange for any one piece of dungeon gear.

Then, instead of grinding a dungeon 23 times for a full set, you need only run it six times. That’s far more manageable, reduces the game’s grind, and encourages players to try dungeons now that the entry bar has been lowered significantly.

You actually missed some currencies in your original list of currencies.

The original list should read:

• Gold, Karma and Dungeon Tokens for PvE.
• Badges of Honor for WvW.
• Glory for PvP.
• Skill Points for the Mystic Forge.
• Gems for the Cash Shop.
• Other Tokens (Pact Victory Token).
• Influence for guilds.

And they’ve since added:

• More Dungeon Tokens (Fractal Relics and Pristine Fractal Relics), Laurels and More Tokens (Commendations) for PvE.
• Merits and Guild Commendations for guilds.

And there’s already talk of more possible currencies. I recall Colin suggesting that retroactive achievements might end up using a different currency altogether if they proved too difficult to balance with laurels.

I have to agree. There’s too many now, and there’s no place to store them all. It’s going to start occupying a lot of space in inventories and banks if they keep this up.

Tweekon.2510:

The 40 laurel/50 ecto price is for the people now making long kitten posts about being stuck in small guilds, and not waning to socialise.

Did you go to public school? If so, then clearly you know the names of every single person in your entire senior class. What, what do you mean you don’t? Why not? Are you anti-social or something?

That’s your argument in a nutshell. It’s easy to know and get social with a small group of people, it’s much harder to remember 100+ distinct individuals in a large group. Just because some people choose not to join a large guild doesn’t mean they’re anti-social.

DreamOfACure.4382:

I’m going with the following:

• They plan on retroactively rewarding Laurels for non-daily/monthly achievements a few patches from now. Players will have 10~30x more laurels then before, and the prices won’t look as steep as they do now.

Currency will be printed – But prices won’t change.

Hallelujah~

Hate to burst your bubble, but it was stated that the retroactive rewards for other achievements might be either laurels or a completely different currency system.