Guild Wars 2

serenke.4806:

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

naiasonod.9265:

serenke.4806:

The whole problem is non-existent, since you get ascended chests drop in every area of the game, you are not required to craft it.

You’ll probably win the Powerball jackpot before you get one of those. Good luck.

Thanks, i’ve equipped two characters with those and have additional 2 dozen sitting in my bank.

Uh huh. Is ‘every area of the game’ fractals by chance? Because if you do anything outside of fractals? Yeah, you’re both wrong and hilarious. In factals, sure.

Running around out in the world? Doing world bosses? Killing mobs? Doing dungeons?

NNNNNNNNOPE, swing and a miss. You’re either mistaken in what you mean by ‘every area of the game’ or you’re lying through your digital teeth.

By every area of the game i mean the weapon chests i got from pvp, the armor chests i got in wvw and sure also in pve.

you are an outlier. most people havent got 3 ascended boxes who played the game for 3000k+ hours.

sorry but you will have to ignore your experience in talks of normal experiences of players, much like the person with the 240 IQ cant talk use his experience as a basis for how easy a math question is.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

The point is many people would consider gw2 to be grindy. Even the people defending it dont disagree that it is grindy, they just say it isnt grindy if you ignore all of the things that are grindy, and only focus on the things that are less so.

Let’s get something straight – I’m not defending Ascended as not grindy or as an entity at all. I think it was a big unnecessary step . . . which can rightfully just get shoved in a closet and ignored by anyone who finds it too onerous to deal with. As I liken it to chasing Obsidian Armor back in GW1. I think it’s a little pricey to just buy your way through the materials, but if you’re patient and work on them it’s more likely you can make it work in a timeframe which is expected.

btw 5 gold a day isnt a lot of money, just to meet the 100 silk requirement per day for crafting, which would take you about a month, you would need 5.94 gold. Thats just the silk, doesnt include the linen, cotton, etc.

See, there’s your problem! I get my silk off salvage Especially easy with Silverwastes now pouring low-end loot into my inventory faster than I can salvage it.

Its not about “requiring ascended to progress” its about the goals the designers set for the players, and how what/how players would have to do to get it.

keep in mind if most the goals designers set for players are grindy, most players will tend to feel the game is grindy.
whether they put a metaphorical gun to your head or not, its the truth.

Well, if you’re going to agree grind is subjective – which you have – then claim it’s the truth – which you did – . . . you’ve got a problem. You see, truth isn’t subjective. Truth is something which an objective fact which can be proven.

I also say it’s probably the quintessential right of players to refuse to do the grinds which they neither wish to do nor need to do. I’d go so far as to say it’s their duty if they ever wish to try to change it.

Assumedly, it worked with regards to Precursors.

2/2

truth is subjective too, but lets not get existential. lets just say, that it is likely that a decent amount of people will describe your game as grindy, if your designers give it grindy goals. Now some people will ignore these goals, and just enjoy whatever facets they enjoy. So you designed a grindy game, and some people ignore those elements, They are playing what amounts to a different game. Or a meta game.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

So’s the argument about “requiring” Ascended armor to progress. TTS doesn’t even do that despite posts saying they do. The only thing which requires Ascended is high-tier Fractals. And there’s little point to doing those.

But then, we’re circling back to this point. Again. And I have yet to have someone point out why spending countless time and energy getting the Ascended gear they want is significantly more important than spending countless runs of UW/Fissure for Obsidian Armor.

(Because both Ascended Armor and Obsidian Armor look ridiculous to me.)

There’s no reason to really go for it except . . . to go for it. Which is why I compare, ceaselessly, the Ascended grind to grinding your titles in GW1 – there’s really not much of a point.

As such, if you want to go stuff your hands on to the Ascended Grind third rail, I’m not going to get behind you crying about how you need to do it. Could it be easier? Sure as skritt love shinies. Should it be easier? Not my call; I’d like it to be easier but it’s easing up anymore with the tons of materials salvaging my Silverwastes loot has given me.

Do the drop rates stink like Risen in tropic heat? Sure seems to, but as I got my Wupwup Longbow off the first WvW Season midway? What kind of hypocrite would I be to say it needs to be better after already winning “the lottery” once?

Do Precursors need a review? Apparently they got one. I’m patient to wait to see how HoT handles it.

Does Yakslapper require too much work? I think so, but then I’m not a dedicated WvW player. Ask one of them.

Is gold a grind? I find it hard to say yes when two hours a day will net me roughly 5g without sticking my head into dungeons. If I did dungeons or spent longer, probably could up that to 20g. And I’ll lay out exactly how I do the 5g to anyone who asks – it’s not a secret, it’s not hard, it’s just working with what you have to do.

you realize the game designers have already said ascended isnt the equivalent of a vanity title right? It was introduced supposedly as a good mid range goal for players. They are supposed to feel gratified working towards/getting ascended.

Ascended isnt supposed to be getting a legendary, its supposed to be your goal after you get 80.

I know you choose to see it as a pointless task.

But lets say its supposed to be your goal after you get 80, to keep you doing the things you enjoy, and feeling rewarded as you play post 80.
How does it measure up with those set of specifications?

How do any of the post 80 goals that are supposed to serve those purposes feel?

and as for the whole oh thats subjective, i told you before. There is a great many things in life that are subjective, and yet people are expected to still be able to know/ be responsible for subjective things.
like being rude
personal space
driving too fast
driving too slow
painful

you can be like omg subjective is impossible to speak on as much as you want, but we have to do it every day, we have to communicate and try to understand other peoples perspectives,
If you refuse to speak on subjective matters, you may as well stop talking to any other human ever again, because there is more subjective than there is objective in our worlds.

so yes, you, when talking about grind, have to consider the more universal themes, and common threads to how people use it. And when you use the word grind, you have to consider, and clarify what you mean, and what your intent is.

And even if your meaning doesnt follow their meaning, you should seek to understand what they are really saying, and the point behind it.

The point is many people would consider gw2 to be grindy. Even the people defending it dont disagree that it is grindy, they just say it isnt grindy if you ignore all of the things that are grindy, and only focus on the things that are less so.

btw 5 gold a day isnt a lot of money, just to meet the 100 silk requirement per day for crafting, which would take you about a month, you would need 5.94 gold. Thats just the silk, doesnt include the linen, cotton, etc.

so essentially your whole days gains would be dedicated to just the 100 silk daily portion of obtaining ascended gear. (keep in mind this is a daily limit, which means they would expect people to be doing this once per day)

Its not about “requiring ascended to progress” its about the goals the designers set for the players, and how what/how players would have to do to get it.

keep in mind if most the goals designers set for players are grindy, most players will tend to feel the game is grindy.
whether they put a metaphorical gun to your head or not, its the truth.

Serophous.9085:

naiasonod.9265:

DavidH.7380:

The biggest unquantifiable, IMHO, is the why behind the motivation and feeling of reward.

Why do people play, what do they get from the experience, what do they find fun, what do they find rewarding, and is it a mistake or not to tend to equate fun with rewarding? Do people really want a highly likely success or a challenge with a real possibility of failure? I don’t know the answers to those kinds of questions, and I suspect it will be a lot of trial and error before the gaming industry discovers reliable guidelines.

I absolutely agree. I find it stunning and odd that they’ll blow trumpets and create pageantries of attention for hiring real economists, yet I’m not sure if they’re aware that economists are almost as qualified to do a sociologist or cultural anthropologist’s job as might a car mechanic or a part-time rodeo clown be.

We desperately need some social science experts up in these businesses, methinks. I honestly don’t trust the metrics of an economist’s purview when it comes to things like community management.

Managing people isn’t something mmo devs seem to be very good at, anyway. I’ve seen far, farfarfar better implementations of community building and management…heck, anywhere that real attempts by genuinely proficient human resource directors were made.

The company I work for retains the services of a whole image consulting agency that does nothing but provide the execs and department heads with insightful guidance on inter and intra-office culture, how to foster successful business relationships and how to engage clients in terms that are most likely to appeal to them.

And bloody hell if it hasn’t had a dramatic impact. Real experts on how people work and why people do what they do versus some folks with engineering degrees, some MBA’s and a passel of yet others with physics degrees?

There’s no contest. And I suspect there’d be no contest in the outcomes real experts on how people work and why people do what they do could bring about in comparison to the best-guess figurings a bunch of computer science and game development and art majors can come up with respective to such matters either.

I dunno. I don’t see the effects I’d expect to see if game studios actually employed humanities experts upon such endeavors. The human animal isn’t nearly so mysterious as it likes to think, but you can spend billions of dollars trying to come up with magic algorithms and heuristics and tools for refinement of metrics to predict it…and fail. Or succeed so marginally that you might as well have just consulted tea leaves, or a magic 8-ball.

Time = value. People want to put a value on their time, even if its in a game. They then want something to show inside the game to others their time spent, or at least be towards something that they can show off later.

What makes me smile though, is that people complaining about rewards have NO IDEA how scarce they were when the game launched. Again, when i was going back through the forums, people were whining about having only 5g once they hit 80. Or not enough karma to buy a full exotic set from the temple vendors.

Course then, the november patch came out, and then drop rates were affected by a bug they anet wouldnt respond to until a french forum mod finally replied, then we posted data for months, and finally anet caved and helped rebalance drop rates and give us the boss chests.

the feeling of lack of reward isnt just about how much you get, its about the overall item design/loot/drops.

You get a lot more stuff in gw2 than in most mmos, in terms of shear volume, but you get way less that is of value to you. Thats why people say the game feels unrewarding. giving people more grab bags doesnt make the game feel rewarding, if the grab bags have 95% chance of something you didnt really want anyway.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

aerial.7021:

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Grind?

Go play Pac Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, or pretty much any of the video games that introduced the world to computer gaming. That is what grind is.

Woefully incorrect, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Donkey Kong in fact any old game in the era you are talking about on the whole was NOT about grind at all! it was about who could get the highest score, because those games do not have an end-game at all period they if anything loop and you just keep playing for as long as you can stay alive, more importantly they where developed for Arcades Halls, the 2 cannot be compared at all there in different eras, let alone genres.

You’re right. It was only a grind if you cared about the prestige of seeing your name on the leaderboard.

So . . . self-inflicted grind.

. . . I’m having a sense of deja-vu . . . nah, wait, that’s just my Tetris flashbacks.

you guys are taking grind out of hand, probably on purpose to debase the point.
Tetris had no grind, first of all high scores werent hard to reach
they generally reset the machines everyday.
The top scorer in say tetris, probably played for what, 10-20 minutes conescutively?
Tetris had increased speed, and different initial block placements, making each level unique.

so a game you have to play well for 20 minutes, to get the top score, or 5 minutes if you are early in the morning, which has different levels the fiurther you get is a grind?

yall are just being ridiculous

McSlappy.1372:

Vayne.8563:

Have most of those people who play WoW even thought about or heard about Guild Wars 2? Maybe not..

Most people have actually. The funny thing is it’s just with many other games in the long list of the next big WoW killer. Which is always funny because we always talk about the WoW killer IN WOW lol. Loads of people I know in WoW tried GW2. And I can’t name a single one that still does or has any interest. Even when we were talking about the expansion. None really interested. Are you still going to waste hours and days and not really get any reward for it? Yup. Neh pass. Didn’t want to pay for that then why would we want to give them more money for the same thing. They’d have to come up with something interesting for the current game to get people back that they didn’t have to buy an expansion for before they can get people re interested in the game. Many people look at this game as a bait and switch at the least. Blatant false advertising as the standard.

They talked about putting the scavenger hunt in right after the games release long before an expansion and now they’re going to only allow people with the expansion to do it. Yeah that was false advertising. Ohh we’re working on alternative ways of you getting things like we originally promised but didn’t deliver on. They are coming just keep playing our game. Oops now you have to pay more for them……. Glad the only thing entertaining for me from ANet is their forums lol. Those are free!

Personally will never pay a dime for this game until they’ve removed the grind, have a guaranteed fast way of getting a precursor for a new Legendary and have gotten that in the game before considering paying for an expansion. Of course that won’t happen so I’m happy to say Anet won’t be getting money for me or really anyone I know. They’re mostly all happy playing the WoD expansion right now and GW2 is pretty much a bad WoW challenger memory that happened 2-3 years ago.

yeah this irked me as well, none of the solutions to problems of old systems should be packaged with the expansion/require expansion to play. The expansion should be the development of new systems, and extension of old systems.

it is possible though they arent going to lock precursor collections to the expansion, just that thats when they will actually deliver the fix.

It is pretty bad regardless that it looks like it took them 2 years to come up with what amounts to a scavenger hunt. wasnt that the first idea that came out? Isnt requiring people to do X Y Z fairly old hat, and easily programmed? eh well whatevs

Vayne.8563:

McSlappy.1372:

Vayne.8563:

@Devata
The MMO community is more fractured now, with less people playing each game. I don’t believe there’ll ever be another WoW, because WoW only got where it did by coming out when it did.

In the end, there’s only you saying this would work, with no real evidence to support it, except Anet did it years ago.

I strongly believe it wouldn’t work now, but even if I thought it would, I still couldn’t ask a company to risk losing everything on such a small amount of evidence.

Yes and no. There were EQ1 and other MMOs out at the time. But what WoW did was really create and vitalize the genre. Blizzard banked on their wildly popular IP of strategy games to make a great MMO. But They didn’t hit their peak till Lich King. Why because they kept improving the game. They removed things that were not fun and introduced things that were fun. This is something that ANet has proven they are not capable of nearly with almost every release of a content patch.

Granted that last statement is personal opinion of course. But looking at launch population and current it would seem that is the opinion of the vast majority of people that have played the game at one point or another and are no longer playing. Blizzard is getting record numbers back again why? Because they’ve listened to they’re paying players and produce a game worth paying for access too. Really looking forward to seeing the sales figures for the GW2 expansion.

Blizzard is getting record numbers back because they advertise like mad. If they didn’t have very very expensive commercials all over the place, they’d probably have a lot less people. They have the money to do it because of when and how they came out.

There are tons of people who played WoW back in the day and hate where it’s gone. I’ve always maintained that most gamers don’t think about their experience any more than most people eating at McDonalds think about what they’re eating. You walk into stores where some people still buy games and WoW is there. It’s harder where I am anyway to find copies of Guild Wars 2. It doesn’t have the machine behind it.

Have most of those people who play WoW even thought about or heard about Guild Wars 2? Maybe not.

The great masses of people who follow the advertising and don’t look any deeper (and there are plenty) have one option…it’s WoW.

its not simply advertising which makes wow win. Ads can get you to try, it doesnt get you to stay. And gw2 got a record number of people to try (fastest growing MMO in first 6 months) the difference is retention.
GW2 had an awesome box game with a ton of potential. after about the first 6-11 months, the game didnt really deliver. People stay with wow because for whatever reason they found it compelling and worthwhile to stay.

Perhaps this expansion will change things, but i really hope they seriously vet a lot of their changes. Many were not satisfied with the execution of a lot of their updates

Serophous.9085:

Bernie.8674:

Serophous.9085:

Bernie.8674:

Serophous.9085:

GW1 had plenty of grind with its faction grind and grinding for ectos. Then grinding the same mob over and over again for its rare drop.

But there were also many title tracks that were not so grindy. Legendary Vanquisher, for example. Also, I got full sets of BiS end game gear by simply playing through story lines. We didn’t hit level 20 only to discover that we were going to be collecting silk for the next year or so before being able to craft our BiS gear. Plus, there were tricks to reducing your grind in GW1. Soloing high end mobs was feasible with certain builds, and three-manning eight-man content was often effective as well.

Because some elements of not so grindy doesn’t mean there isn’t grind. Its still grind. There are tricks to reducing the grind in gw2 as well. But its still grind.

There was grind for ectos, but there was no compelling reason to get ectos unless you wanted to play fashion plates with your in-game characters. It turns out that lots of people actually enjoy that sort of thing, so ecto farming was immensely popular. There was grind for faction, but there was very little need for that until EotN came out. I agree that EotN introduced a bunch of grind with their faction-dependent skills, but most of it was actually pretty easy to get over the course of normal playing. For the most part, a concerted grind was optional. When I finally got to the point where all that was left was a grind, I gave up and played WoW for five years.

In GW2 there is every reason to get ascended gear. The stats are far better and no other gear in the game has agony resist. That’s the difference. The elements of not so grindy were the core of the game. The grindy portion was for icing on the cake. Not so here. My guild mates call this game Grind Wars.

There isn’t every reason. Ascended is barely better. Again, I have yet to come across something, other than high level fractals, where I’ve needed ascended gear. As for agony resist, only one place in the whole game has it, and its level 10+ fractals, a small portion of the game. If someone doesn’t do fractals above 10, agony resist is pointless.

Now, I agree that ascended is a grind for, but mostly in the sense that
1. Its a pain to get low level cloth unless you have an alt around level 50 or want to kill your mouse clicking and putting karma gear in the forge so you can salvage the result.
2. The time gate.

I agree the time gate should be removed, and there needs to be better ways to get the cloth (mainly) and then other mats. If anything, and what I suggested before, one way to speed up the acquisition is to start using karma again for more end game stuff, you get that currency from basically doing anything in the game anyway. We have laurals and guild tokens able to be used to by the accessories, why not use karma for the armor and weapons materials? Make a bag costing 200k karma (made up number, dont freak out) that will give you raw crafting mats and a chance at a bolt of damask, Elonian Leather square, Spiritwood plank, the Deldrimor steel ingot, and globs of dark matter. If you don’t get the ascended mat, well then at least you get the crafting materials towards making your own.

Add a recipe that includes the ascended reagent and 5 ectos to make a dark matter.

At least it will shorten the grind then.

progress should never have required crafting, i like crafting in general, but its stupid to force it on people for combat, and up to level 500?

bleh this is ine of many misteps

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Bernie.8674:

Serophous.9085:

GW1 had plenty of grind with its faction grind and grinding for ectos. Then grinding the same mob over and over again for its rare drop.

But there were also many title tracks that were not so grindy. Legendary Vanquisher, for example.

I stopped reading here, because that particular title was so repetitive and boring . . . I gave up.

The only time I vanquished was with the alliance to keep me entertained.

it may have been boring/tedious to you, but it was not repetive, you only had to do each zone one time, and every zone was different.

tedious/boring/dont like does not equal repetitive

Vayne.8563:

Erick Alastor.3917:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Minor nitpick to your minor nitpick.

The game world in GW is not persistent. Only the towns/outposts (i.e., the lobbies) are.

Towns/Outposts were and are part of the world and the platforms that promoted social interactions. There were mobs to kill there? No, but that’s another story.
An online world is not by definition a place where you have to/can kill stuff.
Anyway this thread is not about GW1vsGW2. Feel free to prove that I’m wrong in what I say, I don’t care, I’ll stop now derailing the thread. Have a nice day :*

But there is a significant factor in this thread that is on topic. Devata believes that this game can get updates as fast as Guild Wars 1 did and I don’t believe it can. Those updates were easier to program because there were less people in each zone.

You do realize that in outposts in Guild Wars 1 you couldn’t even use skills. They were literally lobbies. The game was played in on a playing field where Anet knew exactly how many people would be present at each encounter. Either one person with 7 heroes in all of Sparkfly Swamp or 8 people. That’s what they had to design for. Those events didn’t scale. They didn’t interact with each other. Creatures didn’t spontaneously spawn.

That makes it harder to make and test a game. It takes longer. You need more dynamic events than quests (by a magnitude of 3 according to what Anet said) so that there’s usually something for people to do in a zone.

So where does grind fit in?

Grind is there to keep people from leaving the game between content updates. If you give people nothing to chip away at, many people will get bored and walk away.

There are many types of players, but I believe most of them don’t know how to make their own fun. They have to be led around by the nose.

It goes back to the release of ascended gear and keeping players in game. Would it have been better to have more content instead of ascended gear? Absolutely. But how many months would it have taken to make that new content, as opposed to added ascended gear to the game and once people blew through that content, what would Anet do then? It would take them months to make more content.

Anet added the ascended gear grind for the reason every MMORPG has grind. To keep people playing who need something to work on that shows a gain in power. Without that, people lose interest, as was the case with both my sons.

Not all people, but probably enough people to make a statement.

people need goals, and progression, not necessarily grind.
how well you can interweave this and maximize the enjoyment of of your content/game is the goal.
I feel with most of gw2 endgame goals they are failing to make the game more enjoyable. The game is best enjoyed by ignoring most of these endgame goals, thats a flaw in design.

the rewards as part of game design, are designed to enhance the experience and incentivize interesting play. If your rewards arent doing this, its a flaw in the design.

Vayne.8563:

Erick Alastor.3917:

Vayne.8563:

At the time Guild Wars 1 was created there were no free to play MMOs out at all.

False.

Vayne.8563:

And even though Guild Wars 1 itself wasn’t an MMO, it filled the niche of an MMO type of game for many people.

False.

CORPG is a term invented by anet. GW1 IS an MMORPG. You don’t need the ability to create a “zerg” to kill mobs in a persistent world, you need a virtual persistent 2D/3D world that let you meet and interact with many other people supported by a system that facilitate social interaction and roleplaying.

I bet one day the term will be even more extended of what it is today (that is even more complex of what wikipedia suggests). Mmorpg are not all about grinding, quests and killing respawning AI, mmorpg are (and in my opinion should be more) about people.

We can discuss if GW1 it was more closer to a sandbox or a themepark of what GW2 is, but not if it was or not an mmorpg.

By the way, back on topic, regarding the no grind philosophy I do fear the mastery system and the idea that you will be facing some challanges that you won’t be able to overcome not because you lack of skills, but because you lack of mastery points. What will happen if I have all the points required to travel to a specific location of the map, but a friend of mine, after stopping playing for few weeks will come back? Will we still be able to enjoy together the new content? Or will I have to wait untill he will have grinded all the points he needs to reaches me?
If he’ll need to grind, won’t this fracture the popolation? Isn’t the same as introducing a gear treadmill? Those are all the questions running through my mind.

Anyone who thinks 12 people in a zone at one time is an MMO and not a lobby game, I have no idea what to say to them. Anet said the game wasn’t an MMO. Most sites that report on gaming agree Guild Wars 1 isn’t an MMO. And most fans I’ve talked to over the years agree Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. This has been addressed exhaustively by a lot of people, but almost everyone that I’ve talked to over the years, including people on this forum, agree that Guild Wars 1 didn’t have a persistent world.

In fact, when the Guild Wars 2 FAQ first came out,. it asked the question is Guild Wars 2 an MMO and the answer was yes, Guild Wars 2 will have a persistent world. You can make up any definition you want, but more than any, the existence of a persistent world is what defines an MMO. That is to say, you can run into people in the open world randomly. Guild Wars 1 was a lobby game. You not agreeing doesn’t make me wrong, and this has been discussed so many times, I can’t even imagine anyone would contradict a company about what their own product is.

Now, since you say when Guild Wars 1 came out there were other free to play MMORPGs around perhaps you’d like to name one. I’ll wait here.

The free-to-play model originated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coming from a series of highly successful MMOs targeted towards children and casual gamers, including Furcadia, Neopets, RuneScape,⁹¹⁰ MapleStory, and text-based dungeons such as Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands.¹¹ Known for producing innovative titles, small independent developers also continue to release free-to-play games. The Internet has been cited[by whom?] as a primary influence on the increased usage of the free-to-play model, particularly among larger video game companies, and critics point to the ever-increasing need for free content that is available wherever and whenever as causes.

gw2 didnt orginate f2p, or b2p either for that matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play

Serophous.9085:

Well then, this thread is moot really as people just need to not think of what they’re doing as a grind and just have fun. Then anet told the truth, gw2 isn’t a grindy game.

yeah you are getting way off track into debate, as are many people here.
The reality is that gw2, in practice, has you doing the same things many many many times in order to progress item wise for most post 80 goals. while in theory you could do anything that gives you gold, logic dictates if certain things are noticeably more effecient at getting gold, people will do these things.

and yes grind is not an absolute term, there is subjectiveness involved, however just because something is subjective doesnt mean it is meaningless. If a lot of people find getting stabbed painful, and some find it pleasureable, that doesnt mean stabbing should now be considered a pleasurable activity by and large.

back to the point, most of the goals players would have as they get deeper into the game feel quite grindy to many players. If anet thinks they created a game that doesnt feel grindy, there are many who would disagree.

by reference and comparing hours of repetive tasks/number of repetitions to other popular current mmos, for later game goals, gw2 is far more grindy than ffxiv, wow, ffxi, and swtor,

Stark.1350:

Bernie.8674:

Stark.1350:

So because you have more important things in real life to attend to, you should feel you should be handed everything in game. If your guild mates are so high up there, why don’t they help you get mats? Nevermind the fact that the chest of loyalty at the end of the monthly login period gives you free ascended mats.

That’s not what I said. I have no problem with having to grind for this like prestige armor and high end achievements. I just want the game to be more like GW1 where your got the best armor in the game over the course of playing through your story. Also, the free ascended mats don’t mean jack if your crafting isn’t maxed. Furthermore, the biggest barrier to getting ascended armor isn’t even ascended mats. It’s usually silk, oddly enough, and there’s no way to get that through the loyalty chests. I’m sure my guild would pitch in for those mats if I asked them to, but I prefer to work up my own character without having to leech off my guild mates.

Having to leech off your guild mates? That’s what a guild is for. Helping each other out. I’ve helped seven different people get their legendary weapons, often by handing them precursors for nothing.

Silk drops like candy in this game. Go run any level 80 zone. Done.

you need 36×100×3 silk scraps, so thats 10800 peices of candy.

yeah gw2 has a problem with these large numbers, kind of odd, they made items in stacks of 250, but just saving this much silk would take up 43 slots.

oh yeah, thats just the silk requirement by the way. you also need 720 linen 720 wool 360 cotton annnd theres still more.

grind it up,

Serophous.9085:

uhh…SAB when it first came out can be compared to silverwastes now:
Oh hey, need baubles? Fastest way is to just GRIND level 1-1 over and over again so you can buy all your skins easily. Oh sure, take the rare chance for the sellable skin to drop, but now that becomes worthless to me, i’ll just sell it in hopes of someone who doesn’t want to do this process will buy with gold.

Sure, first playthrough you didn’t know where all the abilities are or the cost, but once you did, back to level 1-1, farm up a bunch again, and buy all easily. when the v2 came out, this was basically a must because of the lack of baubles in world 2. Face it, SAB was pure grind, but people had nostalgia or fun doing it, so it was hidden.

Comparing it to silverwastes….
Oh hey! I can run around and collect bandit crests to buy the armor pieces. Oh sure, there are chests, or bosses, or the maze that can drop additional pieces for me to shorten the grind, and yay for that! And yay for the final boss dropping chest, but boo its not for sale.

Its all the same. Replace crests with baubles, and you are running around basically collecting them by doing events instead of them just lying about.

actually i got more baubles, and entertainment, by running through all the levels, they had some hidden spots with lots of baubles, some of which were harder to get to, or only effecient to get if you were fast, and you got chance of sellable versions, and guaranteed baubles from the boss as well. It was basically about going everywhere and hitting as many hidden spots as i could, beating bosses on the way.

Im sure it wasnt perfect, but it was a heck of a lot better than the reward structure for most of the content now.

events as they are currently designed, arent really thrilling, there is a lot less conscious design in most of the content in gw2. They kind of just throw a bunch of enemies at you. Most of the time the best solution for them is line of sight them and burn em down with enhanced cleaves/aoe.

oh and getting an item to sell to people who dont want to do/or arent good at a certain type of content is fine. The point is the content wasnt really grindy. It required few repetitions, and mostly just beating the content and learning the secrets was enough to get the reward.
heres how you reduce grind
1) lower required repetitions
2) reward players more for playing better/learning better
3) have many paths to achieve the same ends (within that game aspect)

an example of 3 with sab, is that you could do level 1 level 2 etc, target bosses, or target hidden orbs. You could run the last world and target harder to get to orbs, but if you were fast/good at getting them it was faster/as fast as other methods.

Ayrilana.1396:

aspirine.6852:

Well if you played gw1 you would know what Anet did right in the past. The drops there were hard, but fair. This game just has no loot, there is noway in hell you can say that playing for more than 2 years and not a single good drop is good for any game.

How many players stopped playing after they got all of the loot that they wanted? The majority of what you played for in that game was for titles. This game has a ton of loot and even more so than the first. If you increase the drop rates to level that people want, what you consider a good drop down will eventually fade to being considered junk as I’ve already said.

phys.7689:

thing is the loot system isnt really working well to encourage play. They give you too much stuff too randomly, and they dont have much high value things you can get via drop (that you will realistically ever see)

the fact that the player could gather that many bags, is a testimony to an over saturation of crap.
then consider, that after gathering all this crap. how much of it was personally usefull to the user? if the user isnt into crafting, something like what 1%?
this is why people say the loot sucks, because its 99% not of use or interest to them. Its just fodder for the TP machine.

How would that be any different for the stuff that people do currently want if the drop rates for them were increased to the level that they desire? Those items would lose value and that loot system wouldn’t encourage players to play as well.

Players can sell the loot that they don’t want. Would you prefer to not get the “junk” drops period? Anet already is improving the loot system by adding a sort of progress to obtaining them through the collection system like they did with luminescent and eventually precursors. People still complained about the little RNG that was there because they wanted it all now rather than later.

I’m almost tempted to suggest that a server be created where players that want zero RNG can go flock to. It would be completely isolated and nothing obtained from that server could be transferred to the existing servers. This includes the characters. How quickly, do you think, it would take before players got everything and would be bored?

the answer isnt really to increase drop rates overall. Its a complex balance that would probably be more about decreasing drop rates, unifying currencies, rewarding tokens more accurately based on task, most drops takeable to market created through intent. Specific drop types from certain content.

It probably will never be changed, but its really poor, not just in terms of rewardingness feeling, but also in terms of inventory organization item/glut.

Serophous.9085:

DavidH.7380:

Like Vayne, I’ve played (not a whole lot) traditional MMOs that would do things like require you to kill 1,000 centaurs in Queensdale to get a rare drop or to level the faction reputation necessary to purchase the fractal dungeon key that is required to even enter a level one fractal and see the content. And there is no other way to see the content / item except to spend days doing nothing but running in circles killing centaurs. And as soon as the next content or items are added you’ll have another similar gatekeeper grind to do somewhere else.

In my opinion, Anet does a decent job of avoiding that kind of traditional and content limiting grind in the game. They don’t, however, eliminate the necessity to engage in significant repetition of content in order to obtain worthwhile rewards. I doubt that is even possible. IMHO, that is really the heart of this discussion… is it even possible for a MMO to largely eliminate significant content repetition, and if not, how do we make what clearly IS a grind / farm not feel so grindy / farmy?

Then let’s actually discuss the heart of the discussion rather than go around in in a circle like we have.

So you run a dungeon once, and your are garunteed an item you wanted, why do you want to go back? Sure, can be fun the first five times, but it gets boring, specially if you are getting the same item over and over.

Make the dungeons harder or longer? Yeah, I think anet will tick off the demographic they are aiming for doing that.

Let’s face it, in this day of age, those of us who look at YouTube or the net for guides get content done fast, because in pve, its all scripted. Even if you change it up, there are only so many variables that it wouldn’t matter since it will still be memorized.

Anet only has so much man power to pump out content and test it privately, then release on a two week schedule, so adding content faster is really asking for a lot.

So how exactly do you implement something that retains players, and isn’t considered grind?

the game doesnt have a good balance of rewards. Other games juggle it a lot better. SAB (the first one)juggled it waaaay better.
A) you get content sensitive rewards/abilities from mastering the area (find this go here, etc)
B) you have a rare chance of sellable drop on success.
C) you can get a non sellable version by either mastering the levels (finding and getting all the hidden marbles as fast as possible) or at a slower pace with low mastery through repetition.

there are even better versions, but the main point is gw2 current system isnt working very well, loot/grind/rewarding feeling wise

Ayrilana.1396:

aspirine.6852:

Well Anet, how about you discuss this?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/I-just-opened-13985-bags/first#post4755387

How do you even try to explain this utter crap what you call drops.

If they increased the drops rates to how people want them, those highly valuable items people want would eventually no different than the blues, greens, and rares that people common toss aside and consider “utter crap” drops. If everyone had easy access to everything, like you would in a single player game, how long before people get bored and stop playing?

Unlike many other games, GW2 also has a loot system where everyone gets loot and the rolls for what they get is done individually. You don’t have it where in some games people form a raid and then have to decide who gets what using a DKP system. Doing all of the content is also infinity easier than in other games and you get so much more opportunities for loot.

These are just a few of the reasons why we have what we have in this game. Would many people still be doing Silverwastes if everything had a near 100% drop rate? Even at a 50%, a large percentage of people would have all of the drops. What reason would they have to continue playing that particular content?

thing is the loot system isnt really working well to encourage play. They give you too much stuff too randomly, and they dont have much high value things you can get via drop (that you will realistically ever see)

the fact that the player could gather that many bags, is a testimony to an over saturation of crap.
then consider, that after gathering all this crap. how much of it was personally usefull to the user? if the user isnt into crafting, something like what 1%?
this is why people say the loot sucks, because its 99% not of use or interest to them. Its just fodder for the TP machine.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

End game in this game could be:

Living Story (Lvl 80)
Explorer Dungeons (Lvl 80)
fractals (Lvl 80)
WvW (Lvl 80)
Achievement points
Collections (Lvl 80)
Cosmetics
World bosses (most Lvl 80)
and more…

Sadly there hasn’t been and updates to Dungeons, fractals and WvW for a while and the so called End Game content has been old and booring and thats it.
Call it Stuff, content or End game content it is still stuff to do once you hit level 80. I do not call it End Game content becouse it is not the end of the game. GW2 is evergrowing and it never ends, I see no end in this tunnel.

1)living story, basically endgame story, true, but the experience isnt very compelling to me.
2)only the last two explorable dungeons, and the twilight path make full use of your abilities, all the rest can be done before 80.
3)fractals, definately endgame, but still fairly shallow, too many repitions per difficulty increase. you dont really have to beat it 30 times to be ready for level 30
4)WvW definately endgame, but its a very specific market, those who like massive multiplayer PVP (zerg versus zerg)
5)Achievements, i wouldnt call this endgame, its mostly just repetions, aside from like jump puzzles, and mini dungeons. (kill 1000 rats, is an achievement, but its not an endgame)
6)collections guess this is endgame for collectors,
7)cosmetics is basically same as collections
8)world bosses, are not really endgame, most of them require no skills other than showing up.

all in all i would say that list could be cut to,
wvw
fractals
collecting/cosmetics

main problem is other than collecting/cosmetics, WvW and fractals are fairly shallow. in the first couple weeks of WvW, you probably experienced most of it. fractals, likewise.
cosmetics is pretty large, but the method of obtaining most cosmetics is very poor/grindy, so it doesnt enhance the game much.

Berelious.3290:

The problem is that people still have the ancient MMO mentality that the level and the gear make the end game, and that isn’t how GW2 was designed. Gehenna, Alvagon, the very first thing you have to do before continuing is throwing everything you’ve ever experienced in previous MMO’s out the window, because GW2 is not now nor will it every be like them, and you’ll continue to be sorely disappointed if you keep that mentality.

sorry man, yeah, i am outside the box, i dont think mmos really need levels or arbitrary stat increases, but gw2 is very shallow when it comes to things that show mastery of the game, or depth.
endgame in gw2, is mostly about pursuing cosmetics, not bad on its own, however, the ways in which you actually do it, and the amount of repeition based activity, is not a good deal.

a lot of their good features, that could be endgame like, are not well developed/fleshed out.

however they suggest that the expansion will be the new endgame. Lets see how that works out

pdavis.8031:

Conncept.7638:

pdavis.8031:

Conncept.7638:

Or ANet could actually put in some effort to make other builds playable, to fix their non-functioning stat system, their skill-less binary evasion system, and branch out more than the handful of fight mechanics (all of which have only one response, dodge) they use designing every… single… encounter.

Why even have a build system if all content requires the same build?

Theres been countless discussions on making different builds/gear more viable. However in order to do that they’ll need to completely redo the entire combat system. However, they did do some changes with Silverwastes, with having some of the Mordrem be more resistant against physical damage, making Condi builds much more valuable, however with the condi cap, it’s still not as effective as it could be.

And what would be wrong with that if they did? There’s a certain other ummentionable MMO where they have completely overhauled the build and stat system in three of their five expansions. It is not at all an unreasonable expectation, especially two years after release with having had so obvious a need since launch day.

It’s not just a build/stat system. It’s the entire active combat mechanic system. As thefantasticg said: It would be a totally different game. It would have to change from no longer being an active combat system. Which means the whole dodge mechanic would have to be taken out, which means all traits, items, skills, etc. that provide endurance and endurance regen would have to be removed and reworked. Also any dodge skills would have to be reworked as well. They would have to introduce a “trinity” system, which leads to fewer “effective” build options and forces certain classes into certain roles. Any immobilze skills would become obsolete, and need to be changed as well. Which means several class skills/traits/etc. are no longer in the game. Which in turn limits build options.

In the end combat would look more and more like a WoW clone than anything. No, the very nature of active combat means that DPS gear/builds are going to be supreme because all damage can be mitigated with active play. But even so, it doesn’t force anyone into using a DPS build. Only those really concerned with DPS builds are in PvE, and are looking to do things in a certain way at a certain pace. Most other people don’t really care that much. Other builds are actually very valuable in the other game modes (WvW/PvP). While in a zerg, or even roaming, its beneficial to have more healing going on for your group then just DPS glass cannons everywhere. As they tend to drop quickly.

not exactly, they would just need to increase skill use frequency, and enemy skills. is Becuase the same system works in pvp, and is even more active

Obtena.7952:

Blade Syphon.4325:

Because right now, yes, getting Ascended Armor is either a very expensive endeavor, or a very long grind of doing the same mundane tasks to get the materials needed to make the armor. Hiding behind the arugment of “But we have more then one way to get those materials” doesn’t work either, as like I said before those other methods are either just as repetitive (replacing World Boss grinding with Guild Mission grinding for Dragonite Ore, as an example) or so unrewarding (PvP Tracks), that there’s very little reason to actually do it.

OK but that’s inventing your own definition of what grinding is so of course you conclude you have to grind. The relevant one is from Anet’s perspective because they design the game. If your definition of grind includes multiple methods to be done to get the mats then no reasonable content can be devised to ensure you don’t think the game will be a grind for ascended gear. Literally, Anet would have to devise content for EVERY instance of need some portion of the mats you need to satisfy an extreme definition of no grinding. I think we can agree that would be insurmountable.

he clarified what he means by grind, but regardless of what he means, the “grind” that people often dislike involves repetive non interesting tasks that you have to do many many times to achieve your goals.

now if he means by the definition i just gave, masteries, and this expansion wont be grindy, then many will be happy.

But if he simply means it will either not be required for survival, or that there will be multiple repetive, uninteresting things you can do 1000s of times, they wont be that happy.

what people in this thread are trying to point out, is that regardless of what colin means when he says grindy, the game overall in fact feels very grindy to them. So much so that whenever they mention a lack of grind the players feel a strong disconect with how they expereince the game, and what the developers think is happening.

this bothers them a lot, not just because grind exists, but it makes it seem like the developers arent really on the same page as the players.

a grindy game where the developers are like we want people who put a lot of time in to feel rewarded, or we want you to be working on X item for 3 months. At least you are sure the developers intent. But when people hear them say gw2 isnt grindy, they are often like wait what? you mean you didnt do that on purpose? Im not supposed to be gathering gold or grinding cloth for my ascended armor for 30 days?

evilunderling.9265:

phys.7689:

and i was specifically commenting on what you were saying about healing being complex because of these variables, which are missing regardless to healing existing or not.
what im trying to say is, the trinity isnt what leads to these poor fights, its just poorly designed fights in general.

I mostly agree. I was specifically responding to the people who regard healing as just a pointless exercise in watching red bars.

Consider this sort of thing:

• Twintania marks the dragoon for a fireball. The white mage knows who’s going to take the hit, so she targets and stacks on the dragoon (fireball does split damage, so this prevents her teammate from being one-shotted), pops Surecast (otherwise, the fireball would interrupt her heal), and begins casting Cure III (a big, expensive TAoE heal) when Twintania turns to cast the fireball.
• Twintania’s Death Sentence attack is up. The off-tank anticipates it, and provokes her, causing her to change targets and hit him with the incoming heal debuff instead of placing it on the main tank. The white mage sees what’s happening, and casts regen on the off-tank as Twintania begins her death sentence cast, circumventing the debuff.

Now compare it to this:

• The guardian, ranging a boss, sees a tell for something like Dagger Storm. She runs towards the boss and pops shield of absorption. The rest of the group realises what’s happening and stacks on her for defence from the projectiles.

The thought process isn’t actually different, is it? One thing we definitely didn’t gain from abandoning the trinity is some new, proactive combat paradigm.

Note that none of these examples are strictly how groups do things.

i get what you are saying, and yes ffxiv has way better designed encounters, but they have skills with similar benefits/anticipation in theory in this game, but reality is its never needed.

monster has dangerous aoe attacks, guardian could give aegis to everybody then mesmer follows blocking another attack by using signet of inspiration.

or two big aoes hit team saves blast finishers for when this happens, and ele throws out a water field which they blast back up to full.

or ranger places a healing circle just to the left of the monster so when people need heals they blast over there, the right is reserved for might stacks.

the possibilities are there, just the fights themsewlves arent designed to make you use your classes potentials too the fullest.

not disagreeing with you here, just adding that its most the encounters themselves, and not the toolbox of abilities.

also doesnt help that they rather negate player skills rather than let them be used. Like blind on a boss is basically a joke.

Blude.6812:

Wuselknusel.4082:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

I just want to take a second to address this topic, because it’s something we state as one of our key philosophies – but don’t often clarify exactly what we mean we say it. And because everyone and their mother has their own unique interpretation of what grind can mean, it’s very simple for this to feel like we’re not following our own guidelines when we build and implement content.

When our company president said we have an anti-grind philosophy way back before Gw2 shipped, and when it has been repeatedly reinforced since then, our statement is simply: “We don’t think you should need to grind to get the best gear and stats in Guild Wars 2”.

So what exactly does that mean:

[…]

I would like to chime in here because that is the part where my interpretation of grind is diverging from your interpretation if grind.

First of all, I think it’s pretty cheap to say that you don’t want the player “to grind for stats”, since GW2 isn’t about stats but about skins. It’s like, to put it hyperbolic, the devs of Tetris saying they’ve aimed for the best possible story ever told in a videogame.

But we can see how your motive influenced the game:
Nearly all rewards are given through RNG. You have the chance to get everything from nearly everywhere and if you don’t you can atleast buy it from the traiding post.
Now the problem is that this design creates new issues, funny enough, those issues lead to feeling the need to grind.
As I’ve said, the RNG lets you get everything almost everywhere. This has two consequences:

• First, the player is never able to say “I am going for X”. You are not able to say at the moment: “I am going for a precursor right now.” or “I am going for tier 5 blood”, you can just say: “I am doing this activity and hope that I get what I want.” This creates dissatisfaction for the player because he can’t control when he gets the items he wants, other than rolling the RNG dice a second, third or fourth time.
• Second, the player is creating items he can’t use. He is selling them because he want atleast to get some gold for those items. This creates another two issues:
  • If the item is unwanted, the traiding post gets flooded with it. The devs then can’t use this item for new possible uses, because their metrics tell them that this item is way too common, unless the increase the quantity you need for the new use. this happened with ascended gear. And what is the complaint about ascneded gear? That it feels too grindy.
  • If the item is listed in the traiding post, it’s most of the time easier to get the gold to buy the item instead of playing the game to get the item as drop. So the average player of GW2 will start to get gold. To make more gold, he’ll start to look for the best way to make gold. Once he has found it, he will do it over and over until he got enough gold to get what he wants. And that repeats for every item he wants. And what do we call doing the same thing over and over? Grinding.

So in the end, by not giving the player a special way of obtaining an item reliably, so this special way doesn’t get grinded, you’ve created a grind for the only option left to obtain an item reliably: Buying it from the traiding post.
And I’ll go out on a limb and say that acquiring an item yourself feels more awesome than running to the traiding post with all your savings to buy it.

And the RNG, in it’s current state, completerly excludes some players while giving many to another group of players, so I have GRIND to make gold, it will be the only way I will ever get a specific item. Colin is now ready for politics—- sorta like a former President saying what was not sex.

missed the post you quoted, it shows one of the reasons why the gold standard still leads to grindyness.

evilunderling.9265:

phys.7689:

once again, you are mixing in healing with more complex fight design. Most of the fights in the game dont require you to pay attention to what others are doing, watch for telegraphs, or anticipate. It is not a lack of trinity that is the issue, it is fights/encounters that were not designed with much in mind

“once again”? That was the first time I’ve posted in this thread, and the paragraph I wrote about healing was just an aside, not a major part of what I was saying.

i meant once again in terms of many people linking healing to more complex fights. sorry for that misunderstanding.
and i was specifically commenting on what you were saying about healing being complex because of these variables, which are missing regardless to healing existing or not.
what im trying to say is, the trinity isnt what leads to these poor fights, its just poorly designed fights in general.

evilunderling.9265:

On one point and one point only, I think the OP is correct. I don’t agree with his assessment of what’s wrong, and I certainly don’t agree with the proposed solution, but I do think that a problem exists and that it’s worth fixing. The question is what, and dismissing every trinity thread and every nerfzerker thread out of hand doesn’t help.

The trinity does bring some baggage with it that I think is well worth doing without. But that doesn’t mean that it was always pointless. The trick is to find ways to get the benefits of the traditional holy trinity without the attendant baggage. And to do that, there needs to be some agreement that there were ever benefits, and on what those benefits were.

The other thing I’ll add is that healing in “the traditional sense” might not be that difficult — you’ll still be saddled with extra roles like extra DPS and prodding stuff with your use key — but it is still significantly more involved — and proactive, for that matter — than it’s made out to be by certain individuals. You need to be keeping an eye on the field, watching for tells and telegraphs, researching and memorising fights, and also paying attention to what everyone else in the group is doing. Good healers anticipate damage and are ready to heal it before it even happens. A healer tunnel-visioned on the party list just filling bars up is a struggling healer, whether that’s because they’re bad, there’s something wrong with other players in the group, both, or neither.

once again, you are mixing in healing with more complex fight design. Most of the fights in the game dont require you to pay attention to what others are doing, watch for telegraphs, or anticipate. It is not a lack of trinity that is the issue, it is fights/encounters that were not designed with much in mind

Obtena.7952:

morrolan.9608:

slamfunction.7462:

“Grinding” is perception. You can get a majority of the materials you need for ascended armor, just by going through each of the maps on your toons or even doing the LS content.

No you can’t, not due to the sheer volume required. To get the mats in any sort of timeframe requires grinding for the mats and gold.

You’re confusing grinding with farming. Not the same thing. Grinding would be doing the SAME thing to get gold and mats. Anet has fixed that; you can do ANYTHING to give you gold and mats.

yeah and somethings will take you 2-10 times as much time to achieve the same goal.

illusions of choice are not real choices.

Stark.1350:

phys.7689:

Stark.1350:

I’d like to add it took me THREE MONTHS in Everquest to GRIND for my legendary, because I NEEDED it/was REQUIRED to have it for raids.

btw, they already said you will need the new masteries to succeed in the new challenging content. which im not saying is horrible, but welcome your required progression to advance back

If they’re setting up masteries similar to WvW masteries, getting them will be easy.

which they arent really, because wvw masteries are not required for anything. they said masteries will be required.
Now im not saying this is a bad thing, that entirely depends on
how interesting it is to progress with masteries
How many repetitions you will have to do to build them up
how varied the activities which allow you to build them up are.

Stark.1350:

phys.7689:

Stark.1350:

morrolan.9608:

slamfunction.7462:

“Grinding” is perception. You can get a majority of the materials you need for ascended armor, just by going through each of the maps on your toons or even doing the LS content.

No you can’t, not due to the sheer volume required. To get the mats in any sort of timeframe requires grinding for the mats and gold.

And what timeframe are we talking about here? It’s so stupidly easy to make gold, buy mats, or get mats from doing events, it’s ludicrous.

GRIND IS SELF-IMPOSED WANT. There is nothing you NEED in this game, thus nothing you have to GRIND for.

It’s amazing how easily things come to you, if you just log in, play the game, do a variety of things, and after a month, see how much loot you’re swimming in.

there is a daily craft limit, one can assume you should be getting enough materials to do this once per day.

how much loot you are swimming in is irrelevant, its what you can do with said loot. I ll tell you that a month of 1-2 hour per day play will not give you enough resources to craft full ascended, unless that 1-2 hour per day play happens to be the most effecient farms in the game.

If you can’t get enough stuff to craft ascended and you play 1-2 hours per day, you’re doing it wrong. And if you consider yourself a casual player, which is fine, there’s no need for you to get it anyway unless you’re doing level 30+ fractals.

So again. Want is a self-imposed grind/source of frustration.

uhh sure you can, if you do the most effecient repetive activity with that 1-2 hours, and thats all you do. But i thought your point was you could just do normal ineteresting fun content without a care, and you would have enough to get this stuff.

ill tell you some content that will not help allow you to get ascended mats in the time frame we speak of.
random dynamic events in non crowded places.
jumping puzzles
fully completing the hardest dungeon paths (without massive skips)
regular non EOTM WvW
defending/upgrading things in WvW
opening treasure chests.
high level fractals
spvp
mini dungeons

you see when you said you are doing it wrong, yup, you hit the nail on the head. If you play properly and do the most effecient things, repetively, of the course of a month, you will achieve best in slot. which is what i also said.

karakurt.8690:

Gw2 was my second mmo after Lotro (I was playing lore master there,support/crowd control/debuff you can understand what is my play style) and I experienced worse dungeon system here which are skip trash and push boss to a corner,dodge zerk,dodge zerk,dodge zerk… really no strategy…etc Whatever it is called “Holy Trinity” We need more roles out of just zerk.

to be perfectly honest skip trash, push boss to corner would not change with a trinity. The encounters themselves are weakly designed, has nothing at all to do with trinity, and the addition of a trinity would only further cement those issues.

Stark.1350:

I’d like to add it took me THREE MONTHS in Everquest to GRIND for my legendary, because I NEEDED it/was REQUIRED to have it for raids.

btw, they already said you will need the new masteries to succeed in the new challenging content. which im not saying is horrible, but welcome your required progression to advance back

Stark.1350:

morrolan.9608:

slamfunction.7462:

“Grinding” is perception. You can get a majority of the materials you need for ascended armor, just by going through each of the maps on your toons or even doing the LS content.

No you can’t, not due to the sheer volume required. To get the mats in any sort of timeframe requires grinding for the mats and gold.

And what timeframe are we talking about here? It’s so stupidly easy to make gold, buy mats, or get mats from doing events, it’s ludicrous.

GRIND IS SELF-IMPOSED WANT. There is nothing you NEED in this game, thus nothing you have to GRIND for.

It’s amazing how easily things come to you, if you just log in, play the game, do a variety of things, and after a month, see how much loot you’re swimming in.

there is a daily craft limit, one can assume you should be getting enough materials to do this once per day.

how much loot you are swimming in is irrelevant, its what you can do with said loot. I ll tell you that a month of 1-2 hour per day play will not give you enough resources to craft full ascended, unless that 1-2 hour per day play happens to be the most effecient farms in the game.

morrolan.9608:

slamfunction.7462:

“Grinding” is perception. You can get a majority of the materials you need for ascended armor, just by going through each of the maps on your toons or even doing the LS content.

No you can’t, not due to the sheer volume required. To get the mats in any sort of timeframe requires grinding for the mats and gold.

not only that but this is on a daily basis, lets say you figure out the best way to get these items, and it takes 1-2 hours a day. You will have to do that same thing for 28 days. Now imagine if this technique is also not very interesting, like killing the same mobs over and over again in a cave.

now one could say, hey! just do it with gold, but then you are faced with picking the highest gold meta,

I think the biggest flaws as i said, they pick a high amount of repetitions, and generally the best way of achieving X isnt that entertaining.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Now that the HOT is out of the bag, we’re able to update this thread with more details. With the introduction of the new account based mastery system for end-game progression and growth in PvE, we’ll also be re-evaluating our other systems of character progression to ensure they match our over-all pillars and goals for Gw2.

In doing so: we’re going to be removing the current trait unlocking system currently on live and replacing it with a more simplified system that supports where skills-traits-specializations are going in the future. We’ll go into more details between now and the release of HOT on how skills, traits, and specializations will work in the new Gw2 world.

Thank you for all your passionate feedback on this topic – it not only helped our dev team lead to this decision, but has played a large role in helping us define how to build our exciting new account based mastery system for end-game progression in PvE as well.

i like that you found this thread useful, but what parts? It would have been good if you could have sounded off to us what you gathered were the most important points causing the trait system to feel flawed. Because a lot was said, not sure if we really are on the same page.

So far the main link i see, is account bound, anyhow i hope this change will be a good one, that answers the needs of the players, not all the changes we saw in 2014 hit this mark well imo.

nGumball.1283:

You have also to into account that you can’t make the game less grindy. There is nothing called hard content as it will become a walk in the park after 2 days. There is nothing called enjoyable content because it will be done in a week. The solution is to twist the reward system so it feels more rewarding as grind will always be there.

i disagree here, many games combine scaling difficulty, with certain styles of reward and enjoyable gaming to achieve an excellent balance.

For example basketball, is easy on a low level, but challenging at a high level, the rewards are rare, but act as a good encouragement for people who seek a reward for it. Most of the games that have been around for a long time (not just video games) find a good balance.

Now of course having pvp can help a lot in doing this type of thing, but creators also find ways to come up with enteraining things. Of course they will have to keep creating content, but that is the nature of the beast

I would say the key to reducing the perception of grind,
less required repetitions
more interesting means
more varied methods of obtaining

anet has tried a bit of this, but generally they are really poor with required repetitions, and generally the most interesting content is not the most rewarding content.

Serophous.9085:

Orpheal.8263:

The game has alot more grind, than many people think .

Other than ascended gear, name one other thing that is a grind in this game. Colin even gave their definition of what grind is to them. So by his definition (as everyone is just ignoring it and submitting their own), name one other.

there is a ton of grindy things in this game, but you will say most of that is cosmetic. Ascended however is in bounds in the discussion on required grinds, according to colin. He said something to the effect that is not considered a cosmetic goal.

in order to communicate well, you generally have to be on the same page with your terminology. If he defines grind of having only one possible choice of repetive tasks, he is correct. However, for most people having two choices or thee choices of repetitive tasks doesnt really change the feeling of grind.

lets say in order to get something you want you can.

A) write i want X item 10,000 times
B) Walk on a treadmill for 20 miles
C) put in 10,000 batteries in remotes

all of those options are grindy, having the option to do 3 grindy things barely lessens the actual feeling of grind.

now lets say they throw in more interesting things, but reduce the effeviency

D) skateboard for 1000 hours
E) draw 2000 illustrations
F) dance the samba 30,000 times

while those options are more interesting, they are not real options due to how ineffecient they are, also, even if you enjoy these things, given those numbers, they will, for most people begin to feel grindy.

so really, i would say what makes something feel grindy, is how interesting it is, and how many repetitions you have to do to achieve a certain goal.

Varying the methods of aquisition is one good way to lower the feelings of grind, but the methods of aquisition have to be compareable, and no matter what if all of them have a huge amount of repetitions, it will feel grindy as long as you are focused on the goal. Now, yes, everyone has different feelings/definitions/thresholds for grind. Still there is some common points, between people, and somethings that you just have to look at the numbers to know, this will be grindy.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

I just want to take a second to address this topic, because it’s something we state as one of our key philosophies – but don’t often clarify exactly what we mean we say it. And because everyone and their mother has their own unique interpretation of what grind can mean, it’s very simple for this to feel like we’re not following our own guidelines when we build and implement content.

When our company president said we have an anti-grind philosophy way back before Gw2 shipped, and when it has been repeatedly reinforced since then, our statement is simply: “We don’t think you should need to grind to get the best gear and stats in Guild Wars 2”.

So what exactly does that mean:

- The best gear/stats: This means to have statistically the best abilities in the game, you shouldn’t need to, by our definition of the word, grind. This goes for leveling and getting top gear (by our definition that’s ascended gear, legendary being an optional extra thing you can do, but don’t need to do.)

- Grind: To us, grind means being required to do the same boring activity over and over again. In particular, the biggest reference we’re talking about here in traditional MMO’s is having to kill the same creatures over and over again to farm for levels or gear. In Gw2, you can gain exp and levels from a massive variety of game play, game modes, and content types. Same goes for the ability to acquire the gear to build up your characters. Similarly, ascended mats can be acquired from a wide variety of content types and game modes to allow you choice and options so you don’t need to grind to complete those goals. Our new mastery system continues to this promise as well, which we’ll go into more detail on soon.

There are certainly optional activities in the game players can embark on that I think we’d openly accept fall into the category of our definition of more “grindy”. Earning certain unique skins, and in particular some titles absolutely qualify as things we’d put on this list. Legendary weapons have components to them that fall into this category, though we’ll be doing work in HOT to make this much less the case. We feel these are optional choices players don’t need to do, but can if they want, and because they are optional are acceptable within our statement that “Gw2 doesn’t make you grind to have the best gear/stats”. That doesn’t mean we can’t make those activities more fun as well, but when we say “no grind philosophy” we’re not including optional things you can do, but don’t need to do, in our definition.

Hope that helps a bit, that’s our philosophy and definition we’re going by when we make those statements. They may not align to your definition of grind, and that’s ok – we’re fine with that! It’s just important you know what we mean when we make that statement so you can make decisions about how you view Gw2 and judge us by our actions/words.

Thanks again for being so passionate about this topic and the game which ever side of the discussion you fall on. It’s something incredibly important to modern MMO’s and gamers in general, and we truly appreciate the dialogue you all are having on topics like this. It’s what makes better games for all of us.

I get what you are saying, but the big flaw in your reasoning, is assuming that multiple avenues are not also grindy.

For example, in general, the other avenue is to earn gold. Like you mention in traits, or in ascended, you could try to get 100 silk a day, or you can buy it.
but the reality is that once you enter the earning gold system, there will generally be a meta, or most effecient means to earn gold. Though in theory people can do anything, most people are going to do what is most effecient, the more the difference in effeciency, the less options you have. for example, doing jumping puzzles is not a viable alterantive to EOTM, Completing random dynamic events througout the world, likewise cannot compete.

Also, with the price thing, you have to realize, that if you set something at an equivalent value of say 2-3 hours worth of a players work (like getting 100 silk, 40 linen, 30 cotton) then people will roughly sell it for what they feel is a similar value. aka 2-3 hours work. This means the only way that you get to do these things without a large amount of work, via gold, is by being much more effecient at obtaining it. Which, will lead to grinding the most effecient gold earning mechanisms.

I get that you have options, but like you guys said with skills, bad skills are not real options, likewise alternate methods, that are highly ineffecient are not going to make the game feel less grindy.

Also, if you set something to take a large amount of grind in order to get, that will generally translate to a large grind in whatever form you want to play to earn gold that is equivalent. Having like 2 options doesnt change the actual feeling of grind on the streets.

like i said, this is just marketing speak. The reality is guild wars is just as grindy as any other game when it comes to best in slot, and way more grindy when it comes to cosmetics.

Thats ok, it really doesnt matter.
most of the people discussing here, have accepted the grind, or they ignore it. Also If guild wars does what they say they want to do, and makes more challenging content, you best believe people will want you in whatever is the best gear. Regardless of whether its possible to win, if it makes it less likely, they will want you in gear, and if it fails they will blame the people with low gear.

i know this will happen because it already happens in GW2.

and you will grind to get that gear, or those masteries, so you can access those extra areas.

The do hope they realize the game was actually grindy, because if whoever picks their numbers for things keep picking the numbers, you can look forward to ascended, halloween II, mistfire wolf mini, WvW achievement like numbers for your new progression.

IndigoSundown.5419:

phys.7689:

Even exotics would be a serious grind if they did it the way they intended. Imagine if you couldnt buy exotics on the market, you would have to get 40000 karma per peice, or run dungeons 23 times to get a full set (doesnt include accessories or weapons)

The original intention for Exotics was, “Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game.” You’re referring to the revisionist history used to “justify” why they added Ascended.

As I recall, 42K karma per piece would have meant a long grind, for sure. My first character to 80 had not earned enough for one piece, never mind a set. But dungeons? Please. 23 runs is actually 23 paths, or 8 days for a full set of Exotic armor. If that’s grind, then patience is dead in this fallen world.

23 paths is 23 dungeon runs, (the fact they are paths isnt to relevant, its how many times you have to do it. i can tell you from playing other MMOs recently, by the time you run it 23 times you likely have every drop there. The big difference there is lockouts. Which arent nearly as popular as they used to be.
They even said part of the reason ascended was needed was that they miscalculated how long it would take to get best in slot. (the market)

They did say they wanted people to have some 80 gear by the time they were 80, but then they also said they didnt expect people to hit max so quickly. Doesnt make too much sense but this is what they said. It does make sense for those who played at launch though. Getting crafting maxed, and then obtaining all the ecto, materials, was not much easier than running a dungeon a bunch of times (also back then people were taking 30-60 minutes per path)
So likely they didnt expect people to get it so fast, but people figured out how to earn gold fast, and how to beat certain dungeon paths in extremely fast times.

Point is, the game grind wise isnt any better than any other game. And for many things is in fact more grindy.

Its not the end of the world, but i think the point of the OP was, do they realize that this game is in fact just as, if not more grindy than the games its competing with. I would say for best in slot its only slightly more grindy than other mmos.

overall, its way more grindy i have never seen anything like the 10,000 candy corn for crafting materials, or people opening 10000 bags for mini’s Or 7200 silk for an armor peice, or 250 powerful blood for an accessory in an MMO for a long long time.

some come close with certain legendary quest item type things, but this game does the same type of thing for best in slot, seasonal, etc.

sometimes you just have to accept that somethings are just marketing talk.
“no grind philosophy” as it applies to this game is in fact one of those marketing talk catch phrases.

he defines no grind in this case as being not having to do the same thing over and over on multiple charachters, and yet thats exactly what trait obtaining is right now.
Ascended is most obviously and completely a grind. Probably one of the most grindiest grinds out of most popular MMOs. Even exotics would be a serious grind if they did it the way they intended. Imagine if you couldnt buy exotics on the market, you would have to get 40000 karma per peice, or run dungeons 23 times to get a full set (doesnt include accessories or weapons)

so yeah just marketing speak, dont take it serious

Anyone who has played this game knows it has just as much if not more grind to achieve many things.

Vayne.8563:

phys.7689:

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

Many of us told them so. Nothing else really made sense.

Honestly I did not expect it to be a traditional MMO expansion for the same reasons you stated that you thought anyone expecting an expansion was just hoping.

Vayne.8563:

If anything, the announcement the way it’s phrased, is specifically telling us there will be no expansion. Anyone who expects one with that wording is just living in hope.

The wording talks about new ways to expand the Guild Wars 2 universe. Expansions aren’t new ways to expand it. That’s old school. To me this implies new things that aren’t being done in the industry at least commonly. Ergo, it won’t be an expansion announcement.

I am glad that we were both wrong.

Sorry mate, but I wasn’t wrong. It’s not a “traditional” expansion. No new tiers of gear and no new level cap. I’ve yet to play a traditional expansion without those things.

final fantasy 11 released 3 of those types expansions, gw1 released one. Its not really a new concept

I was talking about MMORPGs. I sort of thought most people would have assumed that. I don’t compare expansions of say Skyrim to MMO expansions.

final fantasy 11 is an MMOrpg, its still around and for like 10 years they didnt raise the cap, or add gear teirs.

rise of the zilart
chains of promathia
treasures of art urgan
wings of the goddess.

4 expansions, no new gear teirs, no new levels.

max level 75.

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

Many of us told them so. Nothing else really made sense.

Honestly I did not expect it to be a traditional MMO expansion for the same reasons you stated that you thought anyone expecting an expansion was just hoping.

Vayne.8563:

If anything, the announcement the way it’s phrased, is specifically telling us there will be no expansion. Anyone who expects one with that wording is just living in hope.

The wording talks about new ways to expand the Guild Wars 2 universe. Expansions aren’t new ways to expand it. That’s old school. To me this implies new things that aren’t being done in the industry at least commonly. Ergo, it won’t be an expansion announcement.

I am glad that we were both wrong.

Sorry mate, but I wasn’t wrong. It’s not a “traditional” expansion. No new tiers of gear and no new level cap. I’ve yet to play a traditional expansion without those things.

final fantasy 11 released 3 of those types expansions, gw1 released one. Its not really a new concept

the official info makes it sound like one per class.
you’ll unlock access to a weapon previously unavailable to your profession as well as new traits, skills, and unique mechanics – all of which will transform your profession into something new.

basically seems like elite classes would be in old rpgs

Electro.4173:

phys.7689:

very disapointed in shield for mesmer. they should at least have a new main and offhand. 2 new skills isnt a big deal/changing your playstyle much.
Also shield doesnt really exemplify mesmer.

Maybe they will have a new mainhand and offhand and we just didn’t see the new mainhand. I mean, we didn’t see anything for half the professions in the game, so I think its fair to say they could still be hiding a new mainhand for Mesmer.

yeah but the official website info specifically says specialization will add A new weapon. dont think they would have gone out their way to go singular.
basically that floor thing in the trailer is probably half of mesmer’s new weaponskills

engi getting 2 handed hammer looks cool though. just seems like it will suck for people who’s new weapon is an offhand.

very disapointed in shield for mesmer. they should at least have a new main and offhand. 2 new skills isnt a big deal/changing your playstyle much.
Also shield doesnt really exemplify mesmer.

got to go off what they actually said, not off what you think could be the case. Any how, good there is an expansion in the works, we ll see what it entails as they release info.

Jana.6831:

phys.7689:

No, I think you think pve is more important than it is actually. It isn’t that hard, until you try to solo anything and I think even mesmers solo dungeons.
And well stuff that works on this boss doesn’t have to work on that boss – like I said: you have to adapt – you can’t interrupt a lot of bosses, so are you going to complain about that as well as you have to have to interrupt everything? Anyway, I’m out, i think I said everything that I think is important on this topic, at least to me.

its not about how hard the game is, its about how much fun you have doing it. Being able to do a clutch interupt, or gain swiftness then immediately shove your enemies back with proper timing, is fun cool, exciting. having to wait a second is less exciting, less verstatile, and has less applications.

And when you add up all these type of changes it makes something overall exciting, more lackluster.

old ranger quickness, for you and your pet, essentially combing rampage with quickness and pet gets boon when you get boon trait was like you and your pet going berserk, highly entertaining, but it was op in PVP, no one complained about OP pets/rng combos at the time.

Its not about the bare minimum people need to succeed, its about succeeding with style grace, and entertainment. Sure i can win practically any fight in the game with dodge roll, and the 1 skill if i play right, but no thats not really the point of skill system in the pve game.

Jana.6831:

phys.7689:

what does spamming your skills have to do with anything?
mesmer has a skill, which places a cripple on the floor, that you can turn in to a pull. It used to be instant, and you could use it for quick interupts, saves, or controlling monster positions.

You mean the temporal curtain? 0,5 seconds is still pretty fast and you could also equip a GS if you want to interrupt – not every weaponset has got the same skills, so you have to adapt. I have no interrupt at all.
But you’re right, I got you wrong, that skill has got nothing to do with cooldowns, but still teach Billy how to play.

Edit (let’s see if I finish this before you reply): I get your point, I really do, i have been a pve player myself and never got why my vitality depended on wvw, I still don’t but since my focus has shifted to wvw and even pvp I don’t get what pve players are complaining about. And I guess that was the motivation behind my reply. I have no idea why the different games modes aren’t separated but I can imagine that doing a different balance for all 3 is a lot of work and might lead to some other problems “we only want warriors in our party” which then might make even more sense as in pvp the classes are balanced on how they compete against each other so they’re ideally “equally strong”

its a false idea that balance is universal. Balance in pvp is about how balanced it is to face another player. balance in pve is about no class becoming indespensible, and having viable abilities.

While in spvp, a cripple swiftness that you can turn into a pull knockdown is powerful, in pve, control is barely a factor, interupts are generally ignored, in fact they made the control game of mesmer, which was already fairly weak in pve, even weaker with the change.
And this is the flaw, its not the same game, the goal of the balance is difference, and whats good for one is not necessarily good for the other.
When they made the change they looked at how it would effect pve, and was probably like, ehh its not that big a deal, but the sum total of all these changes that arent a big deal = overall your class is less exciting, has less versatility/identity in pve.

Jana.6831:

phys.7689:

I have to wait .5 seconds on my mesmer to pull monsters for control/interupts because in pvp people felt other players werent given enough time to respond. This has elimated key party saving control for mesmer in pve, and made the skill a lot less usable/logical.
oh snap! 5 enemies are going to kill billy! let me pull them away! in .5 seconds… oh billy is dead.

Its not that pve skills should never be nerfed, its that if they are nerfed, it should be for pve reasons, in ways that are consistent with class designs/play and make sense for pve

Well, then don’t spam your skills or teach billy how to play.
Sorry, but it’s true – I have been on my ranger for the first time in a year today and I absolutely hate knockback, always did, but I thought I put it to some good use and do a teq fight, so I choose the battery with the exploding zombies to knockback them and only had troubles with my cooldown once – it’s more than enough time if you don’t spam skills. And well, there were other people around who could’ve attacked/immobilized/feared the zombie.

what does spamming your skills have to do with anything?
mesmer has a skill, which places a cripple on the floor, that you can turn in to a pull. It used to be instant, and you could use it for quick interupts, saves, or controlling monster positions.

They changed it to now require you to wait like 1 second before you can use it as a pull, because in pvp, they felt it didnt give players enough time to respond to the skill.

now the skill is less useful as an interupt, less reactionary, and provides less control in pve, so that in pvp it feels less cheesy.

It has nothing to do with spam or cooldowns. It would be like they made your knockback skill not work for 1 second after you hit the enemy so that players in spvp could dodge roll the knockback if they see they got hit by the skill.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temporal_Curtain

can go into this

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Into_the_Void

point is anet makes changes based on how things feel in spvp, that dont really have anything to do with pve, and reduce your options, and playability in pve. Now, i have accepted that this is the way it will be, but it definately does not improve pve to have these changes that have no consideration for the goals/play of the pve game mode.

Mirta.5029:

The Snowblind fractal is now up as well ^^
So I only have Thaumanova left.

Now I do not understand why did this have to become into a fight between all the guide writers. Kudos to you all guys for writing your guides. All guides are all useful in their own way and chances are plenty of other guild forums have their own guides written for their own members too. There’s no reason why many guides can’t exist and still be useful in their own way.

basically, wethospu, though he is bad at saying it, would prefer most people in the community to be working on sperate things, or work on improving a primary resource rather than creating new ones.

However, people are not going to feel like working under someone else all the time. They will be limited by the style, expectations, and opinions of whoever is in charge there.
As evidenced, weth doesnt see the purpose of the new guides, and probably wouldnt have done it/changed it/updated it the same way even if mirta came to him and said i think we need these new guides.

Jski.6180:

cillard.3986:

Jski.6180:

cillard.3986:

Sarrs.4831:

Because PvE balance is relatively easy to do compared to PvP balance.

You are leaving out WvW from your reply.

Also, your logic isn’t very good. Why potentially unbalance other aspects of the game to try and balance sPvP when you can just make the changes specific to sPvP only. Seems to me it is a lose-lose situation as you create more work for your company while kittening off your player base at the same time.

Wvw not made to be balanced in a lot of ways it CANT be balanced that just how open pvp works and when you add in large numbers that have no min or high max to the mix you see even less balancing.

Again.

What reason is there for not balancing sPvP in sPvP only? It has been done in the past.

The issues they are balancing for are generated from sPvP only.

That the thing they do but only to a point of small changes to game play. The aim for GW2 is to be the same game though out the types of games in it. You do not remove dodge rolls and add in the 3 class system for pve it would take the player out of GW2 and make it feel like a different game.

problem is, it is a different game. Pretending otherwise is the big problem.