(edited by maddoctor.2738)
Valid comparison when your usage of terminologies are questionable? Fine, believe what you want to believe.
A “Raid” or “content to attract Raiders” needs to have some very specific aspects. Team work, builds, encounters that make you think, proper team composition and balance. This is the meal that Raiders want, this is what makes Raids, Raids.
There was explicit mention that dungeons would work like GW1 elite instances, which combined most of the above features. There was also stated that their dungeons would appeal to Raiders, which means they would include the above features, otherwise they wouldn’t appeal to Raiders. After all, how can something that doesn’t provide what Raids do, appeal to a Raider? It doesn’t make sense otherwise.
A Raider wants to eat meat, and “meat” is the above aspects that were expected to be in dungeons. Dungeons were supposed to be meat in order to appeal to those who love eating meat.
But in the end, none of the above aspects could be found in dungeons. They were advertised as meat but in the end we found out it was soup. They spiced it up, they used new recipes, but in the end it was still soup. And by offering soup in your restaurant you can’t appeal to someone who wants to eat meat.
Now they added meat, as advertised so many ago to be on their menu, to actually and truthfully this time appeal to that crowd. Will it work? Who knows, maybe the GW2 raids will also end up being well disguised soup in the end. Time will tell
Why did you start counting from the start of living story and not right after the release of the expansion? where the base of these complaints are born from?
The first Raid – the entire thing- WAS a part of Heart of Thorns, that was released over multiple months. Either you start counting at the release of LS3, when the actual after-HoT releases started, or you start pre-HoT (and include HoT) because Forsaken Thicket was part of HoT.
Either 8 zones + 6 fractals vs 4 wings, or 4 zones + 6 fractals vs 1 wing. Pick one.
Wasn’t Meteor Shower for elementalist just changed due to hitting big targets aka raid bosses too many times?
The nerf to Meteor Shower could be seen a long time ago, and it was a messed up job anyway since they decided to nerf one skill and leave all others that work the same un-touched.
What a foolish comparison.
It’s actually a valid comparison. It’s good that you cant’ find a way around it though.
The point is still in development, what they initially planned will not always be so at the release.
Obviously that’s why they tried to introduce more difficult encounters in nearly every single release. Most of them failed, that’s why they tried Raids and for the first time since release they succeeded.
No, the fact remains, it is never equivalent to raid.
Only that’s exactly what they said it will be, not Raids, but equivalent to Raids. Content for those who enjoy raiding in other games, so content equal to Raids.
are meant to attract the crowd that would normally be raiding in other MMOs
How can content that is meant to attract crowd that normally is raiding, not in any way similar, or equivalent to Raids?
It’s like opening a restaurant and saying, we’ll offer soup that will attract players that normally eat meat. No, to attract customers who eat meat, you will provide meat, not soup.
There is nothing subjective about it, the dungeons were in fact and beyond any kind of doubt going to be their equivalent to Raids. But they failed as such.
On your argument about difficulty similar to gw1, do kindly note that the second article you have provided is dated in 2011 which is a year different from the first article which is dated 2012 though both are before release, it is only logical to take 2012 article as the more relevant reference.
And your point? That they changed their attitude and decided that their “challenging” content would be a joke that doesn’t require any kind of coordination?.
Shouldn’t difficult contents something more widely available?
No. Both the newer dungeons and the open world events were harder than most content released prior to the game. Them being one-off content is irrelevant.
Well, let’s write the same thing using different words
Blame the re-work of HoT zones for that. Since you count the first Raid (which was part of HoT) why don’t you add the 4 HoT zones in your total?
Reworking other fractals I don’t consider to be new content.
Making completely new boss encounters isn’t “new” content? That’s really sad.
This seems to be so much for all the other players compared with what the raiders got after the HoT launch?
Yes if you know how to count properly and remember why LS3 didn’t start sooner. General PVE players got 8 full maps and 6 Fractals, compared to the 4 Raid wings it doesn’t look so good now does it?
A more accurate question seems to be Which skill was nerfed due to Raids? . And you can have a loooooooooooot of examples. Think about Signet of Inspiration. Or the wells. Or the way Alacrity was adjusted. This is only the Mesmer. So, YES, the raid was the reason (sometimes the only reason) for a lot of skill nerfs.
Funny, those mesmer adjustments happened for WvW and not Raids. Got any actual examples of skill changing due to Raids?
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
I’m not ignoring simple facts that Anet lied to us when they dropped dungeon support and said that fractals will be their new PvE endgame focus, and then switched their focus to raids without saying a word.
Fractals were “supported” without adding a single fractal in 3 years. Right, they “switched” their focus by going back to focus on Fractals and actually release some. You are contradicting yourself here.
Assets are sign of attention. When developer decides that content is not important enough to ask designers for at least some new models, then it’s a pretty clear indicator of their priorities. That means that content was made either in haste because making new models takes time (2016Q2 financial results, eh?), or they are not considering it important enough, so designers are making new content for something else (geeee, I wonder what exactly).
Assets were re-used from LS1, just like most of Fractals is based on historical events in Tyrian history. Re-using those old LS1 assets that were removed from the game was an excellent move for content that is all about that.
Snowblind isn’t. Chaos and Nightmare aren’t easier than old fractals either.
Snowblind IS considerably easier now, the initial part is a joke, the elemental is a joke, the boss doesn’t even hit hard and has low hit points. Chaos and Nightmare and really easier than Volcanic and Underground.
Yes, as you mentioned, it is to appeal and they never said it is to be equivalent to raid so his claim is still invalid.
No it’s not. How can something so easy as the dungeons became after some time be “appealing” to those who liked Raids in other mmorpgs? The claim is still valid, and your counter is invalid.
All in all, don’t twist the words for your own convenient arguments.
You are the one twisting words for your own convenient arguments. Didn’t you read the second interview that they wanted their dungeons to be like old challenging areas of GW1? Have you ever played in those areas? It was impossible to complete without organization, without team building, without teamwork and without proper builds. In contrast, dungeons in GW2 are done sole while naked. They said their dungeons will be about coordination. Stop twisting their words for your convenient arguments. The words are simple and have a simple interpretation. They said they will have Raid-like difficulty but they didn’t, nothing more than that.
They said the content would attract the Raid group, so it will be equal to Raids in other games in terms of difficulty/challenge, otherwise it wouldn’t attract the Raid crowd. It’s that simple. There aren’t multiple meanings to what was said, they wanted to add content that will challenging, only in a way a Raid can be, and failed to deliver. Now they do.
Edit2: Also, I have to correct you on something. Aetherblade, molten etc weren’t designed to be regular dungeons, it were designed as special dungeons available alongside with living story 1. They simply put it back in the game since people were like, why is anet making contents only to delete it later? Again, you seems to be using those as convenient arguments to justify something.
There is nothing to correct. Those dungeons were designed as gimmicks, making gear and build nearly irrelevant, all that was to them was added challenge by having puzzle elements. I was talking about the initial additions in LS1 not the fractal versions.
Raids influence things outside of raids. They don’t exist in a bubble and though I can ignore them, saying that they don’t affect anything else is demonstrably not true.
Of course they do. And PVP influences PVE as well and has always been, while PVE is affecting WvW. But how are those changes that were a result of Raids made your experience in general PVE worse? How did those changes negatively altered your game play?
As far as difficulty I’m not so sure you or I are in a position to judge. I know for a fact I’m more powerful with my elite spec and I get the whole break bar thing, which a lot of people don’t.
If they are doing T4 Fractals (which is where CM Nightmare is, and where the hard fractals are) they should know how to breakbars and how to play the game. If they do not that’s not a problem with the game, they can go back to VB (or T1 fractals) and they can learn all about how to play. Uninformed players have no place in T4 fractals
One question….do you honestly believe, in your heart of hearts, that the ranger elite spec would have been a healing spec if raids weren’t in the game. Because we all know no where else in PvE needs a healer. So if raids are the reason that was decided that raids are affecting the game.
A lot of builds can heal. The Druid isn’t the first choice of healer because of their heals but because of their damage boosts. Remove the damage boosts from Druids and other builds can be better healers. There have always been healers, just take a look at the bunker builds in pvp, they existed since day 1. You could use a healing spec for an Elementalist and face tank the spider at AC for example, or use a healing build as a Warrior to facetank Lupicus in Arah without even dodging, and that’s before elite specs. Healing builds existed and made the game considerably easier, however they also made the content take an insane amount of time, and since content was easy pre-Raids, a fast completion time was what everyone was looking for.
No area of this game exists in a bubble. Open world PvE seldom sees nerfs for anything but my skills will get changed based on what happens in raids whether I raid or not.
Which skill is so useful in open world pve and you can’t finish content without it, that was nerfed due to Raids?
The rest of the game changes, because raids are now in it. It’s not just raids. A dev said straight up they intentionally made the swamp fractal harder to prepare people for raids.
Link for that AMA?
Yet the rest of the Fractals they added were easier than core Fractals, and all the changes to Fractals were straight up nerfs in difficulty. They are ALL easier now.
When content added for raids is at least equal, if not greater, than one added for core gamemode?
They are adding MORE content than they did at any other point in the game’s history, that’s a fact, what they do with Raids is irrelevant. What you are calling core gamemode is irrelevant too.
Also, they didn’t add more Raids than other types of content.
Re-posting:
Well since LS3 started we got 4 new pve maps, 2 new pvp maps (in beta), 2 (+4 with tweaks, total 6) Fractals and 1 Raid Wing. I’m not seeing that “raid focus” direction at all. In fact since LS3 started every type of player got more content than they did at any point in the game’s lifetime. What’s not to like about the new direction?
In GW2 it wasn’t clear from the beginning. And yet the game does seem to look like a raid-focused one more and more.
By adding more content for all other game modes than ever added in the game’s history it becomes raid-focused? Nice leap of logic there.
And hard fractals with a challenge mode. Dont’ forget fractals are getting harder too.
That’s false, only challenge mote (which is an extra difficulty, outside the fractals scale) and maybe Swampland are harder, the rest of the changes made their respective fractals easier not harder. All of them good changes btw, I’m not complaining.
Maybe so. Like I said, I’ve seen what happens over time in other games, and this game is moving in that direction. If I were on a sled, sliding down a snow bank moving toward a cliff, I wouldn’t wait to go over the cliff to say something. Just saying.
Well since LS3 started we got 4 new pve maps, 2 new pvp maps (in beta), 2 (+4 with tweaks, total 6) Fractals and 1 Raid Wing. I’m not seeing that “raid focus” direction at all. In fact since LS3 started every type of player got more content than they did at any point in the game’s lifetime. What’s not to like about the new direction?
The last Fractal update before Heart of Thorns was added on November 2013
Chaos Isles was added on July 2016, that’s 3 years of 0 Fractals. For an actual Fractal player the pace of Fractal releases now is amazing compared to what it used to be. You don’t compare fractals with raids, which is something completely different, but with fractals. And the pace of new fractal releases is absolutely great.They added 2 completely new Fractals, Chaos and Nightmare. They added a new version for Nightmare fractal (CM). They completely reworked Swampland and Thaumanova Fractals (they are like different Fractals now), they changed Snowblind drastically.
Don’t say that the Fractals team hasn’t been doing a good job because they are doing an amazing job. Also, you need to recall that Fractal releases started in July 2016, Raid releases started in November 2015, that’s a huge head start for the Raids. Since Fractals started releases we had 2+1 new and 3 greatly reworked Fractals versus 1 single Raid Wing. Again, you are devaluing the very important and great work the new Fractals team is doing.
For an actual Fractal player the pace of Fractal releases is mockery. They started to do something only after they realized how hard their shiny new raid-centered strategy backfired right into their core audience. Only then they made 2 fractals (out of already existing assets) and started to release LS3 chapters. And we still don’t have even a single brand new one fractal map (by “new” I mean made from zero, not reused old parts/models). Or fractal boss. Or even piece of fractal loot, outside of legendary backpack.
So you ignore the simple facts that Fractal release pace is faster than it has ever been in the past for the game called Guild Wars 2, that’s a proven fact and you can’t deny it calling it “mockery”. If the current pace is bad for you then why haven’t you quit the game in the last 3 years we got no fractal release at all? Where were you then? Oh right there were no Raids back then to be your one and only focus.
You also ignore the simple proof that we got 6 fractals over 1 raid wing, since fractal releases started. That’s huge. And what do re-used assets have to do with anything? The bosses and the re-worked encounters use completely new mechanics not found anywhere else in the game. That’s what counts, not the shiny textures and models.
And about fractal loot, fractals won’t get new loot, because of how their reward system is designed. Since you probably ignore, adding a new fractal is much more complicated process than adding a new Raid. This includes adding new rewards for them, since they need to be balanced for all current fractals.
Though to be fair, it’s not just the FotM pace which is very slow.
FotM pace is slow compared to what?
3 years → 0 Fractals compared to 8 months → 6 fractals. How do you call this “slow pace”?
I guess the 4 brand new pve maps weren’t released either.
In 8 months since LS3 started we got 4 new maps. In 3 years before Heart of Thorns we got 3 new maps. Heart of Thorns itself had 4 maps.
How is that SLOW PACE? It’s the fastest pace the game has ever seen since release.
We have raw development output. Everyone can see it. And that output is showing something quite different than “small side content, nothing to worry about”.
The last Fractal update before Heart of Thorns was added on November 2013
Chaos Isles was added on July 2016, that’s 3 years of 0 Fractals. For an actual Fractal player the pace of Fractal releases now is amazing compared to what it used to be. You don’t compare fractals with raids, which is something completely different, but with fractals. And the pace of new fractal releases is absolutely great.
They added 2 completely new Fractals, Chaos and Nightmare. They added a new version for Nightmare fractal (CM). They completely reworked Swampland and Thaumanova Fractals (they are like different Fractals now), they changed Snowblind drastically.
Don’t say that the Fractals team hasn’t been doing a good job because they are doing an amazing job. Also, you need to recall that Fractal releases started in July 2016, Raid releases started in November 2015, that’s a huge head start for the Raids. Since Fractals started releases we had 2+1 new and 3 greatly reworked Fractals versus 1 single Raid Wing. Again, you are devaluing the very important and great work the new Fractals team is doing.
Gw2 used to stand for innovative and game play.
They changed the quest system of GW2 and I didn’t notice? No they didn’t.
Did they change how pvp works and making all players equal? No they didn’t.
They changed the gameplay of the game? If anything, they improved the gameplay of the game by making encounters harder so you actually have to use more than your auto attacks in a fight. They improved the combat system of the game by making encounters more engaging (and deadly)
What exactly did they change?
Well, no, because some of the things I started playing for aren’t there. The lack of raids is one of the reasons I started playing Guild Wars 2.
How is something that is self-contained in its own world affecting the rest of the game?
How is something you can ignore affecting how much fun you are having in the game?
Would you say that having big pvp tournaments (with cash rewards even) is affecting your enjoyment of the game? They also have unique rewards.
Would you say that having one encounter (like Liadri) is affecting your enjoyment of the game? It also has unique rewards.
If simple encounters are what’s affecting your overall enjoyment of the game then you probably didn’t find the rest of the game compelling enough to begin with. Or you are looking for excuses.
Actually for me,. not having raids was part of this game’s identity.
Some new content that you can always ignore was added and it changed the game’s identity… how is adding something, without affecting the rest of the game, changing the identity of a game? And because you said it bellow, was adding Liadri to the game a change in identity?
Changing the way rewards are, ie making rewards more grindy, when the original grind wasn’t the same, that’s another change.
Changing how some rewards are and making them require more grind, doesn’t make the entire game more grind-y. A game’s identity is about the game as a whole, not a couple of things here and a couple of things there. And there have always been legendary weapons in the game, those are the at the top of the list of “grind”
Saying something hasn’t changed when it obviously has isn’t really helping the discussion.
The discussion is about the game’s identity, not if something changed here and there, obviously many things changed, but the core game (its identity) is still there.
There were loads of reviews for Guild Wars 2 at release. They all praised certain aspects of the game, and that’s what the core experience of the game is, that’s it’s identity, what many/most consider the actual strengths of this game. A couple of rewards changed, and a couple of new bosses or encounters added that are different/harder yes but that didn’t change the core of the game. The same reasons someone started playing GW2, still apply
So you’re ignoring everything else I said?
Check out the posts above yours, it wasn’t a response to you. All the posts above yours belong to your “average anti-Raid thread” and not here. Now we go back to how much development time is spent on Raids, how adding multiple difficulties will help with Raids and so on, things had been discussed a million times in other threads, yet they are being brought here too.
I gave my response on the topic of identity:
Maybe there is a huge difference in how we interpret the word “identity” when used for a game.
Changes in mechanics only inside Raids (like not allowing rez, or requiring healers), the grind for a specific item (winter’s presence) or not having things for sale on the tp for gold, to me has nothing to do with a game’s identity. Those either affect very specific content, or very specific rewards, not the game as a whole.
I call a “game’s identity” the big picture and the core aspects of it, that are still there for the vast majority of the game’s content. And besides, even the OP said what he meant with identity change:
TLDR; What makes GW2 different than any other generic MMO right now?
And we can all agree that despite the changes, the game is still different to most other generic MMO out there and the identity change the op was talking about is wrong.
… the ability to change stats on the fly with Legendary weapons/backpieces/armor is simply a way to not screw players over when they do want to change stats. It’s far cheaper to craft multiple Ascended weapons and armor.
You can’t change the sigils/runes (And runes are more important than sigils, I think), so it’s not much of a benefit, anyway.
What I find more interesting in the last couple of pages is that the identity of GW2 apparently changed because they didn’t add multiple ways of getting Legendary Armor. So the Legendary Armor being only available in Raids is a “loss of identity” for the game… How can anyone take this discussion seriously, if all it devolved into is a discussion about Raids and legendary armor?
You can say nothing’s changed over and over again, but in fact, some stuff has changed.
There is a difference between saying something changed and the game “lost its identity”.
There are important things that make GW2 the game it is, and none of that changed. The core philosophies of the game never changed. Sure they made other changes here and there but the core game is still there and it’s the same as ever. If the core game is the same how can you say that the identity changed?
Maybe there is a huge difference in how we interpret the word “identity” when used for a game. As I said, if you go play another mmorpg just for a couple of hours, you will miss things of GW2 for certain. Those things you will miss are the game’s identity, and it has near nothing to do with hero points requiring a party, the difficulty being increased in the expansion and the way you get new legendary weapons. To me those really CORE features (that are still there) are the identity of the game, not a minor little feature.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
There’s no downside to providing players the ability to experience all content at a difficulty that they can enjoy.
That would require 1000 difficulty versions. I can think many downsides of that
You can find lots of info and discussion on the subject of Raid difficulty by reading the appropriate threads. Last I checked this isn’t about that. Now this is getting completely off topic, or rather there are more threads on the topic of Raid difficulty that have a proper discussion, repeating the same arguments here won’t help anyone.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
What do you mean it didn’t stop any complaints about them?
The PVP forums had a lot of pve players who couldn’t get their shinny pvp backpack even though they had access to the fractal backpack. Same types of players also complain about how they changed the ascended acquisition method from pvp. They were pve players, not pvp players.
We’ve seen several people say that they believe the identity of the game changed, and those people are right to them. To those people the identity of the game has changed. And though raids all by themselves aren’t the cause of anything, they’re a very visible poster boy for the way the game is changing.
This goes to the phrase of the OP:
TLDR; What makes GW2 different than any other generic MMO right now?
All the things that GW2 did differently than other games somehow stopped existing because they added Raids?
Did they stop adding dynamics events and went to a traditional quest system? No.
Did they made it so you curse when other players are around and steal your mobs and your nodes? No.
Did they made the combat static with passive defenses? No.
Did they remove the ability to enter pvp and be at max level and have access to nearly everything? No. (Expansion excluded, you don’t have to level up, nor grind to be effective in pvp)
The identity of the game is still there and nothing changed. They added new things you can safely ignore and go focus on the things that you like. How can anyone say that the identity of the game changed when all the pillars of the game are still intact? I believe those that say that the identity of the game changed should go play some other mmorpgs for a while to REMEMBER what GW2 did better than those games, and still does.
See you’re saying what I’ve said all along. Legendary armor takes an insane amount of time (read resources) in addition to the resources of making raids, but only a small percentage of the population will benefit from it.
I’m going to ask here, if there was another way of getting legendary armor would we be having these types of discussions? Because although we got two methods of acquiring a legendary backpack (Fractals and PVP) that didn’t stop any kind of complaints about them.
I don’t think making legendary armor takes loads of resources. I think it’s more that they do not allocate enough resources in the making of armor, and less about how hard it is to make some. Heart of Thorns itself was often criticized for having so few armor sets, so it’s not a problem specific to the legendary armor.
It’s either their engine, their armor creation process, the lack of enough people working on armors, or a combination of the above that’s the real problem. And like all problems, it should be fixed. Armor sets taking so many months to create is an excuse. If it takes so long, then hire more armor artists… like all those they had while armor sets were offered on the gem store (we got a new set every so often), or how many sets were included in the game at release.
But you can get a legendary backpack from PvP or Fractals.
They added multiple legendary backpacks because it’s easy for them to do so. Legendary armor takes an insane amount of time to finish as we’ve already seen. Who is to say that they won’t add another method of acquiring Legendary armor (different skin) once the first one is out? It happened with ascended rings, it happened with legendary backpacks.
The problem here is how long it takes for them to finish one set of armor. If the reason this discussion even exist is because they don’t have multiple ways of giving out Legendary armor, then that has little to do with identity or direction and it’s all about the developer being so slow in creating armor skins.
It happened with hats in GW…eventually.
It also happened with Ascended Rings in GW2
The newest content (Fractals) got the newest item tier (Ascended Rings)
Now the newest content (Raids) gets the newest items (Legendary Armor)
The main difference is that Rings are easy to make, armor took them a year or two, so the next Legendary armor (from other type of content) will probably take a couple more years. If it was me, I’d put the second Legendary armor in the next expansion, as an extra incentive to buy it (not in the next expansion’s Raids)
They are not songs created by Anet, that’s why you can’t find them on Anet’s soundcloud.
You can find them all on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtHH_PJNHVo&list=PLXFkFY5UgQwMZQinFt4pPdhv34ONdZTT5&index=1
Dungeons are nothing like raids in reality, no matter what was said. And again, challenge to developers is often very different from challenges to players.
Yes but for a limited time they were.
Only because people weren’t fully geared and levelled up yet. Try to run dungeons with a pug of level 40 players in blues and greens, and they won’t be all that easy even now.
That’s not true at all. If that “pug” level 40 player is someone with experience (has other level 80 characters) then it’s still very easy to run the dungeons. Dungeon running is purely about having experience to run them, once you know what to do and how to play the game you can run them without issues on next characters regardless of your gear. If they are fresh level 40s then yes it will be hard even now.
Yet when Fractals were released in November they were still hard for a great deal of players. Posts about nerfing dungeons, adding easy mode for dungeons didn’t stop appearing and players had more than enough time to gear up and get to level 80. Gear and level is irrelevant here.
You can also see it very clearly in Raids now. With the best gear, build or team composition teams struggle and many of them can’t beat the Raid. Yet some of the teams get better and better and once they get enough experience, without changing anything in their build or composition, they faceroll the Raid encounters.
Given enough time, lots of players will be able to clear the Raids
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
There is nothing wrong with continuing the discussion so that – among others – the developers can see the continued community interest and pros and cons of this direction.
That’s provided there is actually a constructive topic, as in a very specific suggestion on how a mode look like would work. For example, in the OP you can find the suggestion of a spectator mode, yet the thread didn’t discuss it much. On the other hand, the thread that had the developer response had quite a few rather detailed ideas on an “easy mode”.
@everyone: it’s time to move past the “Should there be an easy mode?” question. The better question is “How should an easy mode be implemented so everyone is happy with it.”
These are all valid points against an easy mode, so an easy mode that will be added by the devs needs to address all of them:
- “Story-Mode is still too hard!”
- “WTF Story Mode doesn’t give real loot?”
- “Now that you gave us story mode, give us Legendary Armor!”
- “Another broken promise, Raids no longer the most difficult content.”
1) If the story mode is still too hard we’ll be back to square one.
2) If the story mode doesn’t offer any real loot we’ll go back to Arah story mode
I believe an ANet dev said recently that they were looking at ways to offer the lore in raids to players who don’t/can’t raid in some other fashion. I’d say, let’s see what they do before demanding a story mode, unless of course the real reason is the prize, not the packaging.
Yes that’s true.
Link: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/A-Plea-for-a-Raid-Story-Mode/first#post6416831
They should make it a sticky or something so threads discussing an easy mode can stop and wait for the actual release announcement.
What I find ironic is that most of Maddoctor’s points about why the vanilla leveling game fails to entice PFF players to buy are things that were put into GW2 with the NPE, an initiative to make the game more inviting and accessible.
The NPE was a disaster in my opinion and made the initial parts of the game more confusing rather than less confusing.
Dungeons are nothing like raids in reality, no matter what was said. And again, challenge to developers is often very different from challenges to players.
Yes but for a limited time they were. Dungeons weren’t this all inclusive content that we know now and for some time the dungeons of Guild Wars 2 were considered some of the hardest dungeons in an mmorpg.
You are right about the challenge to the developers being different than the challenge to the players. The pace of community improvement surprised the raid developers who said they didn’t expect the community to get so good so quickly.
In a very similar situation they added the Ascended gear tier because they didn’t expect the community to get so fast at acquiring Exotic gear.
More importantly is that PvP a mode that a player can start and play a character at lvl 1 with the only PVE requirement is the game intro and entering the pvp lobby now have to do other modes. If your one of these pvp born players who for over four years never had to do any content in any other mode to be successful how would you take this change?
I fail to see how Ascended stat gear helps a pvp born player in being “successful”.
Let’s not pretend that adding Ascended to pvp happened to help pvp players. Same way that adding dungeon reward tracks in pvp didn’t happen to help pvp players get dungeon gear. Dungeon skins were ALREADY available to pvp players with the old system, but it required a high enough rank to get dungeon skins.
Both changes happened so pve players that cannot run dungeons or cannot get ascended in their preferred mode can get it with an easy mode pvp system. Both systems aimed at pve players to drag them into pvp and less about giving new and interesting rewards to pvp players. The glory system was far superior to the current system for pvp players, the reward track system is for pvers to get from pvp what they can’t get in their own mode.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
This never meant that those two things were supposed to fulfill exactly the same role.
They said that explorable dungeons and the temples of Orr would be this game’s Raids. They were supposed to be the hard and challenging content that we were used to from other games. And for a couple of months they were, while the game was new and we (as a community) didn’t know how to play.
Example:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1185945-Dungeons-Explorer-Mode-
Nah, the “mass exodus” was just the content locust leaving. This happened to every MMO game for the past many years. Those people would have left anyway.
Not really. If there was interesting end-game at release a lot of them wouldn’t leave. You can easily verify this by the amount of players who left GW2 after the first few months and now they are coming back because of Raids. These players would’ve never left the game if Raids were in the game at release, or their “Version of Raids” was what was advertised and expected.
There is another thread going on about how gw2 (allegedly) has lost its identiy. Changing the core game would probably push those people away.
That thread is about different kinds of changes. I’ll give a couple of examples that I think are dumb and push new players away:
a) The requirement to reach level 10 before you can start your personal story. The story should start immediately after the tutorial and not tell you to level up first.
b) Having no gathering nodes in starter areas. Why in the world where those removed?
c) No underwater combat, but lots underwater areas in starter areas. I know they removed underwater combat because they thought it was confusing, but the new system is MORE confusing
d) Mobs that state they have abilities, but in reality they have no abilities. Spiders state under their hit points that they poison foes, but they never do because there are no conditions in starter areas
e) Terrible crafting experience for new players. With the way ascended crafting works, low level materials are really expensive, pushing newer players away of any kind of crafting. Crafting a piece of low level armor or weapon to use it in combat costs way more than buying it from the Trading Post. This means that crafting as a means to help your character in combat is effectively useless
f) Lack of any kind of meaningful tutorial, the tutorial instance isn’t a tutorial at all. A lot of players find the game really confusing and maybe that’s because it is…
g) The content helper that is supposed to direct you to events or unexplored areas still sends you to high level areas for you to die
h) A lot of really boring fights in the personal story. Mobs and bosses with insane amounts of hit points but next to no damage. Forging the Pact is a prime example of a horrible boss fight, it has millions of hit points, can chain CC the player, to make the battle take even longer, and his attacks just tickle. But other encounters in the personal story are really silly hp sponges
I can go on forever but this is besides the point of this thread. I doubt any of the above changes can affect the identity of the game in any way or form.
The free to play portion of the game (core game) should be the game’s seller. It should make the players interested with it, excited with it, so they invest and buy the game. Since SALES is where the problem of the game is, focusing on this experience is how to improve SALES and no amount of expansions can help with this starting experience.
“Don’t worry, it gets better at higher levels.” isn’t a good argument.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
If ANet keeps the pace and quality of the updates, if they release the next expansion in a reasonable time and if it is a successful one, we’ll see GW2 figures improve. Until then it is only normal to see the small decline we’re seeing.
I doubt an expansion is what Guild Wars 2 needs. An expansion, even a good one, won’t make free players convert, I’ve read it a billion times on these forums (usually as an excuse) than this game is full of casual players, and casual players do not read forums, nor review sites. An amazing expansion won’t turn these players into buying customers because apparently they won’t know about it, and since we are being told they are the vast majority of the GW2 audience, an expansion would be useless. Sure it will boost the sales as current players will buy it, but then we will be back to this situation.
The core game needs to be better. The core game needs to be exciting and inviting to new players, so they turn into paying customers. If the problem (as said by NCsoft themselves) is conversion of players into paying customers, an expansion won’t help as much with THAT. Fix the core game and sales will skyrocket.
Please oh wise one tell me how the acquisition of ascended gear in fractals and pvp became so much more easier and so much more intuitive by tying it to pve crafting. To buff something is to make it easier of course so how did these changes make it easier??
Getting Ascended gear from Fractals costs half of what it did before the change. From 550-600g to ~350g, how is that not “easier”? Even if you include the cost of leveling crafting to 500, it is still way cheaper than the old version. You also need less fractal pages, so less days, less grind, to get it.
I just feel like there’s a new breed of dev at Anet who thinks dying repeatedly and running back or trying again and again is fun for most people, because they themselves find it fun. They’ve even bragged about it. They find it fun to die and bang their heads against those kinds of walls.
That’s how dungeons were supposed to be. Remember at release you could even use a waypoint even while your party was in combat, to return to a fight, once you died.
That was removed from the game because it cheapened the dungeon experience.
They expected us to have a very hard time in dungeons, especially explorable modes.
They expected us to have a hard time coordinating the Orr temple events.
It’s not a new breed of dev, it’s the release/original dev idea being brought back.
I have a different issue with polls like this, namely what do you compare the result with? If you compare the percentage of players raiding with the active population of the game, then it won’t give very useful information regardless if it’s a high or a low number.
It would be much more interesting to see the percentages of raid participation compared to other activities in the game. That could certainly show some really useful results. For example, although the participation of Raids has been often been assumed to be low compared to the overall population, the amount of players running T4 fractals, or more specific level 100 in CM isn’t really high either.
A person doesn’t have to be a vet to be loyal but the term honeymoon phase comes to mind. People don’t take new people seriously because there just in the honeymoon phase. It’s when you can list, acknowledge, and accept the existing problems with the game and continue to play after that people will take notice because the honeymoon is over. Not just games cause the phrase A"honeymoon phase" obviously didn’t originate in gaming.
The difference is, before free 2 play was added, to reach the “honeymoon phase”, and then go beyond it, you had to pay. Now you don’t, leading to that loss of revenue from sales. Back before the free version, in order to find the problems of the game, you had to pay for it first (since it was buy to play), so Anet always got a boost from the sale, no matter if you liked the game or not in the end. Now you can identify the problems with the game without paying anything, and then leave the game forever if you find those issues too hard to accept.
With the implementation of this kind of raiding, Anet – whether they believe it or not – are shifting their brand away from some core tenants that brought people into the game. That will be off putting to many. Now, I accept that some may see that as a positive move. I do not.
And they are also bringing people back that expected something different before from the game based on what was said before release and what was found at release. They’ve been drifting away of the release vision for a rather long time, this was never advertised as an easy mode casual players paradise, it turned this way later in its lifetime, now they are trying to bring it back to the way it should’ve been.
Remember that explorable mode of dungeons was supposed to be their RAIDS?
Remember how the event chains in Orr were supposed to be their RAIDS?
Well a few months after release it was evident that neither dungeons nor the event chains in Orr were anything like Raids at all. That led to a mass exodus with the argument “there is no endgame”
Rather than having to go through that, here’s a quick view:
So another person who has no idea how to read earning reports. Posting diagrams means nothing.
This is what was stated in the NCSoft reports and it’s a fact:
I thought the NCSoft people said Gem Store sales were steady, and only box sales were down these last few quarters. If so, I guess that would negate some of the theories.
Gem sales are steady. Players aren’t leaving because of this so called identity change, or those leaving aren’t as many as those coming back, or those still playing are paying more money for gems. Financially it’s stable
What hurt the quarterly reports is going free to play. What also hurt their revenue is Heart of Thorns selling less than Guild Wars 2 Heroic Edition did back in 2014, which means before the free 2 play announcement the CORE game was selling more than the expansion does now. If there was no expansion and no free 2 play the game would still be selling, and selling better than the expansion, despite how weird that might sound.
Since Anet said that people who were free to play didn’t buy the expansion in the numbers they thought they would…well if you’re really loyal to a game and company one would think you’d buy the expansion, I know I would.
That’s true, loyal players would have bought the game.
However, there is another important question to ask regarding free players:
WHY aren’t they converting. Is it really the fault of Heart of Thorns that they aren’t converting (something they can’t see or experience) or of the core game (something they actually experience)?
Maybe the real issue with the revenue drop is in the Core game and not Heart of Thorns, and it wasn’t visible because before free 2 play you had to buy the game to experience it, now you experience it for free and if it’s not gripping/exciting enough, you can always opt not to buy it.
(edited by maddoctor.2738)
….many of the initial core supporters of the game decide the frustration and limitations make it no longer worth it to log in….
While this would be unfortunate, it wouldn’t be the end of the world for Guild Wars 2 and Arenanet. There are sometimes things called acceptable losses. If they don’t address it, as you and other say they need to (even though they don’t think that they need to), then that would mean that if you left because of this, that you were that acceptable loss. I know no one wants to consider that a company that they have supported might consider losing them an acceptable loss, but it happens all the time.
Exactly.
The gem sales are rather stable, so the number of players boycotting Anet because they disagree with the new identity isn’t as high compared to new players who agree with it, despite what some vocal forum posters are saying. In other words, the financial impact of this “new identity” just isn’t there. All those leaving can be considered acceptable losses, if at the same time someone leaves, another one joins.
Remember the game sold millions and only a tiny (really tiny) fraction of the initial buyers stayed with it because probably they didn’t agree with the direction the game was going, which was completely different to what was advertised. One of the chief complaints back during the first months was the lack of endgame, that send players away by the thousands, combined with the lack of meaningful end game rewards. That was confirmed by Arenanet developers themselves, as the Exotic acquisition wasn’t enough to keep players interested and they got bored and left. That’s why Ascended was introduced.
Now they added some actual end-game. Winning back some of the millions that left might be worth it, even if it means alienating a couple hundred of the current players. It’s obviously a gamble, is it working or not? We’ll see the results soon enough.
If the problem is that there will always be an optimal composition then how exactly are other games doing it?
By reducing or eliminating the unique features every profession has to offer.
Is it better to keep a unique feature to one class, so it’s essential in Raids, instead of spreading it to more classes to offer more choice?
Giving Engineers the trait that gives condition damage to the group was a good thing.
Allowing Revenants to use Alacrity was another good change.
Baby first steps towards better game balance.
I just pointed out the problem of this idea in another thread – here
If the problem is that there will always be an optimal composition then how exactly are other games doing it?
What needs to be changed is “looking for Druid” or “looking for Chrono” types of posts.
It needs to transform into “looking for Healer” or “looking for Support".
Bring the role not the specific profession.
As always these types of threads revolve around how to “fix” the game by improving the dps of the various builds. It’s always sad when I read that, all you can think about to make some build viable is to increase their dps or make their rotation easier. Right now we have multiple roles in a Raid, we have a tank that is very useful on lots of fights, a healer and buffers.
I’ve always said that focusing on opening up the tanking, healing and buffing roles is far more important than increasing the dps. Chronomancers, Druids and PS Warriors should be the targets, and not by nerfing them, but by allowing different builds to do what they do.
As for your suggestions:
Revenant can be switched to be a buffer compared to either PS Warrior (Might) or Chronomancer (Alacrity/Quickness). Make Rev an alternative to one of the two, we DON’T need another dps build.
Necro: Can’t viably heal, isn’t a buffer class, so the only roles we can look at for necro to fill are dps slots.
Why can’t they give a Necromancer the ability to heal and/or buff then? Rangers couldn’t heal either and their buffing was only one skill (Frost Spirit), now they are the kings of healing and buffing.
This has been my stance since the first post on Raid balance ever appeared on these forums and will always be. Chronos, Druids and PS Warriors are in every team leading to 6 professions “fighting” for the last slots as the dps roles. Say no to this. Say no to “looking for Druid” or “looking for Chrono”. Say YES to “looking for Healer” or “looking for Might stacker”. That’s in my opinion how they can make the game better, more balanced, and open up all professions for Raids.