Wildstar hasn’t failed other than expectations and hype. It’s first full quarter numbers are still better than any of NCSOFT’s previous subscription MMOs marketed only in NA/EU.
But as we saw with AION’s numbers this quarter, which have been poor since B&S came out in Korea implying players jumped from AION to B&S, a subscription game (AION still is in Korea) can bounce back.
@Middzz – average exchange rate for 3Q was 1023.19 KrW per USD, 2Q was 1027.78 (Oanda historical data, average bid for each quarter). That’s less than 1/2 of one percent.
it is true wildstar caught a really bad reputation for no reason.
Although a lot of gamers were talking about it, it appears the hype was never real. They also didnt start out with an insane starting amount of players, and they retained a decent amount of those, to be reporting 14 million earnings (15 a month means they have about a 200k-300k) because some of that is still box sales. This for a start up MMO with no established franchise or liscence (gw WoW ffxi SWTOR)
that said, this is if it stabilizes, the worry is probably that it will continue to go down.
That said, expectations matter. Doesnt always make sense, but you see the same thing in music. If beyonce makes 600 thousand, her album is a flop. If joe shmoe makes 500 thousand, hes a rising star
*edit.
whoops careless mistake, a quarter is 3 months.
wildstar is looking at about 300k players most likely.
kitten thats interesting, subscription probably isnt as dead as people think based on this
i think buy2play could be just as big if you can put out good expansions at decent clip.(12-16 months)
interesting
(edited by phys.7689)
Again a thread about expansions… haven’t you heard? They don’t reveal any information about upcoming releases so we will get the expansion announcement a week before it’s released :P
Anet: “GW2 expansion coming next week!”
Players: “Wait what?”I personally would not mind in the least if they did this.
“Nintendo style.” Anet announced GW2 five years before it was released… we’ll get the expansion announcement five months (or five weeks) before it’s released. :p
it really would be horrible if they did do that. that would mean they are going to release a very poorly marketed expansion, also not taking advantage of the anticipation to fuel sales/player numbers leading up to said expansion.
I suppose in theory one might get some sort of viral surprise reaction, but i doubt it can make up for the aforementioned losses of oppourtunity
If it were on the “lower end of OK” why didn’t they lose a single one during the recent lay-offs?
Seeing as lower end of OK would suggest it is not doing well enough and as such it would make sense to lay-off a bunch of people, which very clearly didn’t happen (despite happening to all the other western companies of NCSoft.)
gw2 has been coasting on a huge release for a long time. The fact that other western projects failed is not a bonus. It would imply they may be better off not publishing in the west. If my home brew games are making me more money, with less costs/risks why should i invest overseas?
also, i would say this is the turning point, up till now, i would personally be taking more of a wait and see approach, but now? the game with 165kmw in 2 quarters has dropped off to the point its earnings are only 19kmw in a quarter. Aion many consider a flop, but fact remains, 3 -5 years into its development, it doesnt seem to go below 20kmw and has hills and valleys up to 30kmw. It also has a smaller staff.
but now, with consistent downward earnings, averaging 5-10% per quarter, (which would put it at 17 mill next quarter if this trend continues, having probably reached saturation on new box sales.
nah this is not good. Swtor made 165million last year, compared to gw2 reporting 90million US in the last 4 quarters, FFXI which is supposedly nearing 3 million players, would be pulling 3×15million per month, or 45 mill. even if its inaccurate and they only have 2 mill, thats still 30 mil per month, or 120 mil a year, not counting box sales.
for comparison, 19krm translates to roughly 17 million. So yeah, they are doing lower side of OK right now.
Like i said though this isnt the end of the world, as long as they turn the trend around, by some means, its no big deal to have one or two lukewarm quarters. The key thing people are looking to see, is what is arenanets bottom (earnings) going to be?
anet pays lower than average for the area according to glass door posts. average 40k per designer and 80k per programmer. no idea what other staff get paid, but most likely the higher ups get paid in the millions. They also have general overhead costs, marketing costs and equipment costs. They are doing alright, but not great.
GW2 is already profitable, it will never be a flop, overall. But that is based on the past, when they look at current revenue, and reinvestment into the GW2 product, people will look at how much is this making now, and is it worth money to try to invest in the product, or would it be better spent putting the company on a new product.
GW2 was so far, most effecient upon release. where they made in the first two quarters, more than they made in the second year.
(2012 q3-4 compared to entire 2013+2014 q1 or 165000mk > 148,000mk)
this basically implies, they should probaby have stuck to a b2p game style, with semi yearly expansions, and modest cash shop offerings. they would likely have had more return buyers, even though they would have had a greater drop off for the next 2-3 quarters before the expansion hits, pre expansion hype may even have made it a drop off for only 1-2 quarters
hindsight is 20/20 and it looks pretty clearly like the a yearly expansion of meaty well honed proportions would likely have made them more money, and satisfied many people.
Tweaks to the game have not retained, nor expanded playerbase/profits.
They now are operating at earnings level thats between blade and soul and Wildstar. Will gw2 die? probably not, but if it continues on this path, you can expect very small reinvestment and probably budget cuts.
UNLESS, the people in charge think that this trend is about to be reversed by some actions/plans.
Which is possible. A really good expansion hype complete with previews of some of the best new systems/features they are adding would probably do wonders.
An insanely strong LS (complete with heavy features, not just story could also do it)
essentially they need a real strong showing of new content, or previews of content coming and a lot better PR than they have been getting recently.
but make no mistake, they are currently on the lower end of OK for what the title expectations are. aion was making 36,000mk+ 3 years after release, and now, 5 years after release, 32,000mk.
no, gw2 is not doing well as compared to what the company’s other top games have been doing, in the long term.
(edited by phys.7689)
If, however, the purpose is to be a long term goal that carries the prestige of being both time consuming and rare, then, yes, there must be a cost intensive aspect.
That is literally what the icy runestones are for.
That is a fixed, insignificant cost. They exist exclusively as a minor gold sink.
legendaries would not need precursors to be legitimate long term goal, ignoring the precursor completely, a substantial amount of time is spend on the other components. They have people who got a lucky precursor a year ago, and are still working their way towards the non precursor requirements.
I got my lucky precursor early this summer. I’ve only got the Gift of Magic and Gift of Might left to go.
I’ve been casually farming the materials (saving my precious gold) and as of right now, of the 2,250 T6 Materials and Glob of Ecto required for the Gift of Fortune, I’ve got only 768 left to go (that number is actually less, as I haven’t updated my tracking log in 2 weeks).
I am coming from a nearly empty bank of T6 as I was leveling up to 500 in several crafting professions when my lucky precursor showed up.
It really does not take that long to accumulate the non-precursor parts if you are working towards that goal.
4-5 months is a long term goal in a videogame. You also probably had karma already.
regardless i think that spending 4-5 months on one item is about as much as developer should ask.
NCSoft is more or less the Blizzard of Korea. Before WoW was released Lineage 1 + 2
were by far the MMOs with the most subscriptions. They both hat around 2 Million
at that time i think, while in the west MMOs at that time nearly ever touched
500.000.However in NA we were proud to have 64.000 players in Lineage 2 2 months after release ..
Here is also a list of the most popular games in Korea from August :
https://www.techinasia.com/south-koreas-top-10-most-popular-pc-games-august-2014/MMO wise its all NCSoft ..
1. Lineage 2
2. Aion
3. Blade & SoulNone of them however is sucessfull in the west. B & S has still not even been released here.
aion made a bunch of money, it just isnt making money any more. On release here, i think it made 1 mill or more. It had 400k preorders alone.
which goes back to my above point that while yeah, gw2 made a ton of money early on. That doesnt mean if they continue to drop in earnings they will warrant large budgets for gw2. When MMOs arent meeting earning expectations, they just reduce expenditures.
The second you said Guild Wars 2 would be right next to Wildstar, a game that didn’t make six months before they laid off people and canceled their holiday updates, you lost any credibility.
Even if Guild Wars 2 spiraled down now (and there’s no real sign of that) it’s far more successful than Wildstar was. Comparing the two on any level can’t be anything but disingenuous.
It’s like saying that if the game hasn’t been moderately successful for the last couple of years, it would have been the same as a failure. Terrible comparison.
im talking about earnings right now, its right next to wildstar in earnings at this moment.
gw #4
ws #5
lineage2 #6
point is, if you think wildstar isnt making enough money this moment, what does it say that gw2 is right next to them in earnings? If wildstar keeps earning at this same pace, it will justify the similar budget to GW2.
past success isnt really relevant to the current product. Ncsoft will just be like, yall were real good at making a new game, go make a new game, dont waste time on GW2, give it minimal updates. If they feel gw2 has peaked in terms of earnings.
(edited by phys.7689)
All I see is that the game still goes South.
All those changes made in regards to the NPE only helped losing players faster in China than GW2 did in the West before we were told how to play.
Yes this game is two years old, but if it wants to exist long enough for us to actually see all six elder dragons, something has to change.
Unless they are satisfied of being #4 of 6, of NCsoft.
B&S is a subscription based game. It has recently expanded into Japan but it’s Korean income hasn’t been stellar.
B&S is free to play in China, you do not even have to buy the game. The Korean version is free till level 16, than if you want to play further you have to pay a sub. So B&S earns more with just the subscriptions from Korean players past level 16 and the cash shop than GW2 does with selling copies and cash shop all over the western world.
Mindblowing.
it wouldnt include china, that would be in the royalties section. It may include japan though.
that aside, you are basically right, except i highly doubt it will get closed, its still making good money, it may just see less resources/more budget crunch.
This year has really been a pretty bad year for gw2 imo. And yeah, NPE failed to retain players in china, and far as we can see in NA+EU as well. But you know, people told them this long long time ago, during chinese beta, when china came out, before they adopted the same things to NA version.
eh well whatevs
Yeah that is what I wanted to say. B&S earnings in the report are just from the subs and the cash shop in Korea (really, MMOs for PC are just not a thing in Japan, there is no money to be earned, so you can neglect the influence). They earn more with that game in Korea than they do with GW2 in Europe, all of America and Oceania…
in their defense, korea is a huge MMO market, the competition is crazy, and its still profitable. Still, they should at least have been sitting at around 2600kmw with the start they had.
If they had went with an expansion focus, with a small cash shop, i think theywould have made a lot more money. Year 2, i think they could have got 2 million of that 3.5 million coming back for more. Unless the expansion they make now looks like a game changer, it will probably only sell 1million or less.
If, however, the purpose is to be a long term goal that carries the prestige of being both time consuming and rare, then, yes, there must be a cost intensive aspect.
That is literally what the icy runestones are for.
That is a fixed, insignificant cost. They exist exclusively as a minor gold sink.
legendaries would not need precursors to be legitimate long term goal, ignoring the precursor completely, a substantial amount of time is spend on the other components. They have people who got a lucky precursor a year ago, and are still working their way towards the non precursor requirements.
booom forum page fix bug
All I see is that the game still goes South.
All those changes made in regards to the NPE only helped losing players faster in China than GW2 did in the West before we were told how to play.
Yes this game is two years old, but if it wants to exist long enough for us to actually see all six elder dragons, something has to change.
Unless they are satisfied of being #4 of 6, of NCsoft.
B&S is a subscription based game. It has recently expanded into Japan but it’s Korean income hasn’t been stellar.
B&S is free to play in China, you do not even have to buy the game. The Korean version is free till level 16, than if you want to play further you have to pay a sub. So B&S earns more with just the subscriptions from Korean players past level 16 and the cash shop than GW2 does with selling copies and cash shop all over the western world.
Mindblowing.
it wouldnt include china, that would be in the royalties section. It may include japan though.
that aside, you are basically right, except i highly doubt it will get closed, its still making good money, it may just see less resources/more budget crunch.
This year has really been a pretty bad year for gw2 imo. And yeah, NPE failed to retain players in china, and far as we can see in NA+EU as well. But you know, people told them this long long time ago, during chinese beta, when china came out, before they adopted the same things to NA version.
eh well whatevs
Just wait for ESO. Okay just wait for WS. Well just wait for the new WoW expansion.
This time for sure.
We did wait for each of those… and each of those games showed a 5-10% drop for GW2. GW2 can only handle so many 5-10% drops before there is no one left to drop…
Maybe Anet should consider making actual content for a change and try to recover some of those players?
Really? 5 – 10% drop? I’d love to see the numbers that show this amount of loss that directly correlated to the release time period of these other games. I haven’t been able to find any substantial concurrency (or any other kind of) numbers about Guild Wars 2’s playerbase. Could you please post the link? Thanks in advance! =)
Well its actually correlated by definition, it may not be CAUSED by those launches though.
Regardless, it would be better if they lost people due to those games, rather than if they lost them just based on people losing interest in general. Because if they lost it when those games came out, they may get em back when they are no longer as enamored. If they lost them due to people just not wanting to play gw2 anymore, thats a harder thing to flip.
You can put your head in the sand, but fact is gw2 profits have been consistently trending down for the whole year, and are behind last years numbers noticeably every quarter. Its not the end of the world, but it is something you anet should take notice of and react to. Im pretty sure they have also seen a substantial drop in players, but all we can be sure of, is a substantial drop in profits.
On the bright side, its theoretically possible that their profit per player may have increased, which means the game may last a long time, though it will have less players, and many things will be cash shop focused. But still a smaller, tighter more profit per cost venture.
Shame though, the game started out so strong.
So according to this report, Guild Wars 2 is making $5,968,222 per month…roughly anyway.
Seems pretty good for a two year old game without an expansion…to me anyway.
aion is way older, lineage 1 is way older. Its doing as well as blade and soul virtually which has started off with a lot less numbers.
If anet hadnt reached so many people it would be doing ok, but it started high and has consistently sunk this year. blade and soul for example, has been generally stable. Whereas say a blade and soul can still hope to expand, gw2 has basically gotten and lost all of those customers. They wont get most of them back unless they give them something substantial.
B&S is a subscription based game. It has recently expanded into Japan but it’s Korean income hasn’t been stellar. Of course this excludes the royalties from China. Royalties they pointed out as “decreased royalty sales from B/S China” in this report.
Income from Korea – millions of KrW – % of overall income from Korea
4Q13 – 17,887 – 100%
1Q14 – 19,234 – 100%
2Q14 – 16,632 – 86.9%
3Q14 – 17,046 – 86.3%B&S had a three month head start on GW2 and even if we exclude GW2’s incredible 4Q12 income (so B&S has roughly 6 months more income), GW2 still earned 24.5% more than B&S. Not bad for a subscription free game over it’s lifetime.
L1 was South Korea’s UO and AION their WoW. And until this quarter AION’s numbers had been steadily falling. TTM AION’s income was still less than ours. And like B&S, over 80% of AION’s income, excluding royalties, is from Korea.
I’m not ready to put on my DOOOOOOM!!! hat for $6.4 million USD per month (average exchange rate for 3rd quarter was 1023.19 KrW per 1$), equivalent to 427 to 534 thousand subscriptions worth (at $12-15 a month) of income. Again, not bad for a free to play after purchase game.
Just wait for ESO. Okay just wait for WS. Well just wait for the new WoW expansion.
This time for sure.
exactly, blade and soul never had the start up and number of players trying it out that guild wars had, and now, here we are today, with the same revenue. A revenue which has been stable, they arent losing many players for blade and soul. Also korean market + the american market has less gamers than the US+NA markets.
Also as you say blade and soul came out 3 months earlier, and is still bringing in the money.
Yeah, GW2 hit hard, it started huge, could have blown up the world, and now it falling behind a game (in quarterly profits) thats been out longer, has a pay model that most analysts claim is the losing pay model, Hits a smaller market, had less initial sales, less development time(far as i can see 2-3 years versus 5)
gw2 also has continually fallen whereas blade and soul has mostly stayed stable.
Its doing ok, right now, but its trend is downward, and its underperforming based on what it should be doing.
That said, there would be no reason for them to cancel it yet. Its making nearly as much money as blade and soul. However, should this trend continue gw2 will be right next to the wildstar, which many people claim is a failure. (its actually pretty near it right now)
Every quarter, i have said, this is a bad trend, its falling down, and losing people/revenue. And every month you guys seem to suggest that something will change on its own. Especially with the hardcore cash shop focus in this last quarter, (halloween, long sales, bonuses, and an expanding cash shop every 2 weeks) their total profits still going down.
yeah, i would say its time to come up with some new strategies, and make the product appeal more. In fact i really hope they have already done that, because it will be a hard time if they only begin dealing with this now.
That said, i think good content will cure all woes. People will quickly forget the past/problems, as long as you can give them something really good. Of course, i havent seen something really strong for gw in a long long time. (the type of thing that makes people change opinions, or reignites interest)
Have there every been one of these reports that didn’t state that there would be an expansion coming soon?
And yeah.. clearly that have not been the case, so I wouldn’t put too much into it this time either.
yeah they had a disclaimer that every thing they say in the report may not come to pass, so its not a guarantee. It reads more like, its been 2 years, its about the time arena net should be looking at an expansion.
So according to this report, Guild Wars 2 is making $5,968,222 per month…roughly anyway.
Seems pretty good for a two year old game without an expansion…to me anyway.
aion is way older, lineage 1 is way older. Its doing as well as blade and soul virtually which has started off with a lot less numbers.
If anet hadnt reached so many people it would be doing ok, but it started high and has consistently sunk this year. blade and soul for example, has been generally stable. Whereas say a blade and soul can still hope to expand, gw2 has basically gotten and lost all of those customers. They wont get most of them back unless they give them something substantial.
And royalties are down QoQ (quarter over quarter) by 40.7%. And since Blade & Soul China is also under royalties it looks as if both Chinese ventures aren’t panning out as well as some at the Mothership
hypedhoped.As for the “expansion” packs. I’ll believe it when I hear ANet say it. Expansions had been reported multiple times during investor calls only to have ANet go “whoa their Tex” and publicly correct the Mothership. Something that normally isn’t seen in Korean business culture, an underling correcting/contradicting their boss.
QoQ GW2 is down only 8.5% compared to 11.6% 2nd quarter in KrW.
They are still the 3rd largest earning in reported games, now behind Blade & Soul as WildStar’s earnings fell 42.9% as B&S improved slightly by 3.3% putting it only 73 million KrW over GW2.
Things they didn’t report but can be calculated. GW2 earned roughly $95-96 million USD. Also last year 4Q earnings grew 37.1% over 3Q due to the holiday season. It will be interesting to see what kind of bounce we see this season.
they are 4th, aion beats both blade and soul and gw2 substantially.
Wildstar is actually doing surprisingly well considering such a small playerbase/interest/bad press.
Sales usually go up around christmas, if they do not for gw2 that would be a complete shock. Then again, i dont think they can attract many new players without new of an expansion. (1 box sale is bigger than like 5 players in terms of profit per year)
hmmm as i predicted last quarter, further sliding and now dropping behind blade and soul. Aion now beats both, which recently announced an update.
they almost always say an expansion is in the works for anet though. At this point i think it will be a really bad idea for anet not to announce one, even if they have no real plans, because the game will continue to drop without a substantial real update to the game.
Thanks for agreeing with me that right now forging precursors is cost intensive.
That was never in doubt by anyone, the point is that it doesn’t have to be.
Right now, you can pay 100 bucks for gems to buy a precursor.
Give me 1 reason why Anet should devaluate their product just because they have the posibility to do so?
if precursors were meant to be gem store item, they should just have put it in the gem store and been done with it.
I dont think they were created for that purpose though
Truth be told, there are those who will never understand how Capitalism works. This applies to both virtual worlds like GW2, or in the real world. The same person complaining about desirable Precursors being priced high would question why a Ferrari 458 Spider costs $250,000+. And the same argument would be made when saying they want Precursors and the Ferrari cheaper so everyone could afford them.
As mt stated above, you’re paying a premium price for instant gratification to get something everyone wants. If you’re unwilling or unable to pay the price others are willing to fork over, then you have other options. Pray that RNG has the item in question fall in your lap from mob loot, or feed Zommoros items and pray for RNG. You can increase your RNG odds by using lv 80 Exotics, or get even better chances when tossing in the same weapon type. I got a Chaos Gun from using 4 random lv 80 Exotics, and Spark from using only Daggers. Took a while, but that’s the downside to playing with RNG instead of buying it directly.
There are good debates and bad debates. I think the RNG thread John started is a great way to discuss the pros and cons of the RNG concept. Feeling Entitled to getting the luxury good for a price that you can afford isn’t a valid argument that can be debated seriously. Not caring about the health of the economy collapsing just so you can get your way isn’t a valid direction to take either. You play in a game with other players. If you’re so adamant to push an idea or suggestion who’s main point is to only help yourself get what you want, at the expense of balance and enjoyment of the rest of the population, then perhaps MMOs aren’t for you.
its not really like a luxury car at all. luxury cars cost more because they are better designed, and not as optimized manufacturing wise, they are also specially designed, so you have to pay the developer the price they want for it. Fact is, a lamborghini simply costs more to make, and you are also paying for how much an artist values his work. Its not really pure capitalism at work anyhow, because patents/copyrights are a big part of it, which lowers competition. Not to mention that all goods are not uniform.
Now, if they allowed people to design their own legendaries via graphics editing software, and then attached skill and time into crafting the items. which overall effected the performance of the weapon. Then, legendaries might be like luxury cars, where you are paying for higher production costs, and the genius/artistry/intellegience of the designers.
but this is not the case.
btw, i would love it if the game could actually add that.
Let’s take one of the pricier ones, Sunrise. The Gift of Metal would cost ~38g retail, but an experienced player would have all or most of the metal needed for that. A Gift of Light would cost a staggering 337g, largely due to the ridiculous price of Charged Lodestones (which I think most agree could also use a price correction), but again an experienced player would likely have at least a decent amount of those sitting around, and they are more farmable than many other ingredients if they are your goal. Then there’s about 100g in ectos, which again a player should have plenty of, then we have 823g in T2 mats.
So in total we’d be looking at 1198g in TP-able materials, and that’s IF you start at zero on all of those. If we assume the player has half or more of the mats required as a side effect of the adventuring he needs to do to acquire the ingredients, it would be closer to 400g in mats, then plus the fixed costs of 220g for recipes and icy runestones. At current market values, the Precursor would still be the largest monetary expense involved.
It takes time to farm the materials for the gift of metal just as it takes time to farm the gold. You won’t have all of that ore by the time you had farmed all of the karma, badges, tokens, and world completion. The nodes are not as frequent and especially if you’re farming those non-TP components on the same map as the nodes take time to respawn.
Have you tried farming charged cores and lodestones? I don’t think so. I forgot what the level range was before certain enemies and bags started dropping them. However, you won’t really be farming these while going for the non-TP components. You’d maybe have a handful of charged cores and lodestones, if you’re lucky.
A stack of ectos can be bought for about 105G. You need 481 which puts the actual cost for ectos at about 203G. World completion will not net you many rares/exotics. I believe that there are only 4-5 zones that would give you rewards that can be salvaged for ectos. You’d probably get a few rares and maybe a lucky exotic while doing dungeon runs for the tokens. Farming karma normally involves farming things that give loot which could be rares and exotics. I’ve farmed EotM, which is currently the best place to farm karma, and I’m not really swimming in rares and exotics.
since the random chances are substantially less, its highly likely that you can work toward all other items in legendary, even if you choose not to buy it. For some items its gold earning ineffecient, but thats mostly due to them putting ever drop in every monster.
So essentially the prices for other items in the process, you have a very realistic, progressive method to earn all other components. It may be long but its fairly predictable.
The worst offenders were lodestones pre champ bag. You could farm lodestones for 2 hours and still see nothing. Essentially random chance starts to break down the lower the odds are. However, lodestones were still something you could work more towards than a precursor.
So honestly, more expensive prices for other goods wouldnt be as bad as more expensive precursors. the range from unlucky to lucky would often be as wide. Also, if the price of materials all goes up, once you have hunted enough of one thing, you get more money from selling it.
If all lodestones go up 3x times their gold cost, it will still take the same amount of excess onyx to get one charged
(say charged is 5 gold and onyx is 1, triples in price charged is 15 gold onyx is 3, its still 5 onyx for every one charged, hypothetical)
It really would be more ideal if farming was more targeted though
I still don’t understand what the problem is when you can use the mystic forge to get the specific precursor you want. Just because Dawn is behind a RNG wall doesn’t mean you cant get one. Just keep plugging away the rares and exos to get it.
lol you guys.
It’s true. It’s just you don’t like the RNG factor about it which means that a small percentage may find themselves outliers on the wrong end.
a small % does not mean negligable.
2% is not a small number of people, if there were 500,000 people who attempted it 10, 00 people will have horrible experiences.You diminish people who through no fault of their own will inevitably be on the bad side of a random distribution, and say oh well sucks to be you. only 1/2000 people die of car accidents? bleh may as well do nothing about that.
I never said negligible. I was just stating that your arguments usually involve that group of people. I wasn’t really making an argument.
ah, sorry then
I still don’t understand what the problem is when you can use the mystic forge to get the specific precursor you want. Just because Dawn is behind a RNG wall doesn’t mean you cant get one. Just keep plugging away the rares and exos to get it.
lol you guys.
It’s true. It’s just you don’t like the RNG factor about it which means that a small percentage may find themselves outliers on the wrong end.
a small % does not mean negligable.
2% is not a small number of people, if there were 500,000 people who attempted it 10, 00 people will have horrible experiences.
You diminish people who through no fault of their own will inevitably be on the bad side of a random distribution, and say oh well sucks to be you. only 1/2000 people die of car accidents? bleh may as well do nothing about that.
I still don’t understand what the problem is when you can use the mystic forge to get the specific precursor you want. Just because Dawn is behind a RNG wall doesn’t mean you cant get one. Just keep plugging away the rares and exos to get it.
lol you guys.
random means its possible that you will never get it. It isnt assured that you will succeed.
not everyone falls withing the average part of the distribution.
2% of people who attempt it with 1/900 chance, would end up having to try 3400 times. at .59 gold a rare, at 3 per attempt, thats 5884 gold.
1% of people, 3850 attempts, 6865 gold.
some poor smuck, mister 1/1000 people? 5700 attempts 10164gold.
could someone be this unlucky? well if the random is working according to the rules of random, most assuredly he would exist, if people didnt quit before then.
and thats not even the mr 1/10000 chance.
so yeah, its not a simple matter of just grinding it out. The nature of chance is that if you are unlucky, you will be screwed.
(edited by phys.7689)
I believe those “shouts” are about non-story grinds like Legendaries and Ascended stuff.
In that case we should of course also take into account the title grind and such in Guild Wars 1, seeing as those gave actual skills and stats, right?
The fact remains that claiming that Guild Wars 2 is the most grindy thing ever and then referring to Guild Wars 1 is quite silly, seeing as both of them had rather much grind.
gw1 had some insane grind for titles, and rep was pretty heavy, but most of those skills were completely OP with half max rep. But for the main plotline, i cant see calling it grind.
dont really remember any grind in the main or any campaign really. In fact the first time my friends skipped a ton of crap.
In order to get past certain points in Factions and Nightfall you required a certain level of “reputation”.
oh yeah, but you could get enough just from doing the missions/quests in the area. I think it was only a grind when you wanted to power up your skills, or get armor without doing the story/missions been awhile though
GW2 doesn’t stand for Guild Wars 2 it stands for Grind Wars 2.
People always seems to throw this around, and yet this game have a grand total of zero required grind, while GW1 on the other hand had grind that was REQUIRED in order to even complete the main campaign.
dont really remember any grind in the main or any campaign really. In fact the first time my friends skipped a ton of crap.
Basically atm, you waste to much time (and power to understand), to get your traits. Basic traits 6×6 = 36. While every single task may be small, it adds up a gigantic time sink. At on top of that, that some require an event to spawn (wich may not spawn for ages), and you create an even more crazy time sink. Then repeat that for 8 profession, And repeat that for optional alts, and you got absolutely a korean grind game. I have relatively low impact by this patch, cause i can play my 10 chars (made before patch). I got now 12 other chars, that I planned to play someday, but is impossible because of the super grind, necessary to get them going.
I wasted all skill points i could find on lvl 80 ele, and guess what, he still only has the mandatory traits, and somehow she still feels weaker then my other ele. It took me 1,5 months, but now i have 60 skill point scrolls, wich should boost, the amount of traits on that Elementalist considerably. But do you even consider this? 1,5 months farming on main (+ all the gold loss), to even make an alt viable without being hurt by the time sink. Now it’s kind of a passive time sink for me, since I can enjoy my main, slowly progress the alt, but still, having to wait that long, is tedious. But more so, I got the luxury of having mains, new players don’t. Take my word for it, someone planning to play 100’s of (fun) hours in guild wars, will not take this grinding, and will leave instantly. A lot of wow players are getting bored it seems these days, it’s time you fix guild wars so it is the same alternative as it was a year ago.
Thanks Anet… It’s for your own good. I know it’s hard to admit. Just do it, don’t even need an announcement. Keep it secret if you want. But fix this already, thanks.
took me 16 days to get my engy to level 80 and unlock all my traits…
did you do every trait unlock quest?
I can see it being possible, but only for a gw2 veteran, which most players are pretty far from, especially new players.
Also how did you get to 80? how much of that time was spent post level 80 to get those traits? (if you didnt buy them)
16 days, with how much time played each day?
curious
I know that there was a guild vs guild in original gw but I don’t see any specific guild related pvp but just fighting against other servers (WvW). What’s the point of being this game called GuildWars 2? Just because it is the sequel?
generally, the fact something is a sequel is the main reason to call it “insert name here” 2
1. creates a split community. The people who participate in the farm quickly gain wealth, while those who don’t are left behind. This leads to a rich get richer, poor get poorer scenario where the community is fractured.
How do you measure “wealth”? Is it directly tied to being happy in a game? What is more important – amount of gold in the bank or being able to get the thing you need after several fixed reward dungeon runs because others have farmed enough of it and brought the price down? How long will a farm live until it balances out with every other thing in the game and put everyone on equal ground?
2. Mats become too common, continually falling in price until they eventually hit vendor price. This may seem like a good thing until you realize that the only thing that keeps most people playing the game is having long term goals. If they can suddenly buy every awesome skin they want in one day the game quickly becomes stale and boring and many players leave. This was a major problem in the beginning of the game and is why ascended gear was introduced. Devaluing ascended gear like this farm did is going to end up with a lot of players quitting and they may need to add in a new gear tier to bring them back.
See this paragraph at the very top:
In this thread, I want to look at how farming works, and why moderate farming is actually good for all players in mid-term. (In long term, the desired scarce items may be the only reason for people to continue playing, and if there are no scarce prestigious items, many players may not have a reason to play at all – but these situations will require extreme farming anyway which can only happen in an abandoned game).
Indeed, this is a problem with human psychology. Developers are trying to balance it out so that people always have long-term goals but some short-term goals are still achievable. That’s why they nerf farms which make long-term goals considerably shorter. However there always are people who believe that long-terms goals are too long and are made such to squeeze extra real world money out of players who can’t invest enough time (and I also believe this is what’s happening).
It’s like Anet’s message is: want to play for fun? ok, have fun with the limited content we throw at you. You want to play for rewards? switch your brain off and be prepared to throw your day in the trash bin.
From a gold or gear point of view, this game only cares about how much time you throw at it, and how repetitive the things you do are. More time + more simple, repetitive stuff = more gold or gear
Just the opposite of what it should be, if you ask me.
In an ideal world, a game has infinite new things to do with infinite amount of cool rewards for it. In real world, developers have that much real world money to develop that much content, and have to gate rewards behind repetitive grinding and/or real world money to keep players playing until they come up with something new. That’s how all MMOs are, it’s business.
as far as your dungeon farming theory, most players/casual players do not earn much direct gold. Dungeon runners arent really casuals. But yeah, for dungeon runners, prices going down is good. For regualr players, most of your money comes from selling crap on the TP.
As far as coming up with infinite content, and grind, hmmm id say that MMO developers should focus on two things
1) creating a very easy system for creating content/adventures
2) focus primarily on creating highly repeatable content.
Reward goals should be to incentivize the most entertaining aspects of play, and also to incentivize the type of play you want players to have.
of course, thats a lot harder than just giving some items a drop rate, and making a recipe/npc that wants 1000 of them.
farming as a playstyle is all good, but generally these games at least create different areas/methods to farm, and the more valuable the item, the more difficult it is to farm. That is often not the case here.
i remember in another game, there were so many various means of earning money, from growing plants, to crafting, to fighting 100s of weak monsters to fighting one huge super powered monster, to hunting a rare monster, and even hunting treasure chests and robbing enemies. eh well. whatevs.
at the end of the day if they had fun new content people would care less, but the reward system isnt really working to the game contents advantage very often, as has been noted with most of these nerfed farms.
The context of this discussion started with stating that not all precursors are priced out of the range of a fair chunk of players who play casually. Of course the precursors that aren’t are simply unpopular as weapons or only useful in an underutilized aspect of the game and therefore spending what’s required to promote them to legendary status isn’t seen as worthwhile.
But someone decide to hijack this thread into their own personal rant about the unfairness of market forces and reward methods of the game and simply can’t help but post this argument over and over and over again until they have, and I’m guessing here, a third of 680+ posts in this thread.
Point made. If you wish to chime in on rewards go to the RNG discussion thread.
Edit: But of course you are already there.
i know you dont like it, but essentially the point of the initial post was, stop complaining about precursors being overpriced, you can get these ones instead! The ones people want are meant to be out of your reach.
Which essentially brings in the whole, should high demand precursors be out of reach or not discussion. This thread was always meant to incite this type of debate. Penguin just chose to frame it in a way that diminishes one side.
the problem with your whole theory is every one in the game is a farmer. So decreasing the value of goods, due to competition, and effecient farming can also hurt casual player earnings.
Basically they increase their wealth through grind, and decrease your wealth for not grinding.
Its a more complex situation than you think.
But the way i see it, it all boils down to a reward system where you cannot target rewards.
In normal life the fact that a method of obtaining massive amounts of a specific item exists, merely means the value of farming that item will come into equilibrium with how difficult/desired that item is to obtain. Lets say someone comes up with a way to create silver out of sand super easily, the value of silver will go down only, until it reaches a price which the populace feel is worth the effort of obtaining.
But here? 90% of items drop anywhere. The best way to get anything is to kill as much as fast, and as easy as possible. and doing this lowers all markets. Its always the best answer. Therefore there isnt a value placed on different playstyles, difficulties, knowhow, or prefered enemies etc.
So the problem isnt really farmers, its just the natural progression of the system they put into place. As long as the drops structured the way they are, you will always get the easiest most effecient way to kill massive amounts of enemies with the least work possible as the main way to succeed.
Illogical or not, it’s the way it works. This is not debatable. Anyone that understands how players are rewarded in this game would not make such a remark. The random nature of loot distribution ensures that there are very few opportunities in this game to target and farm a specific material or specific level of material. Even in the instances where their is a target for specific mats, that doesn’t change the fact that it is not more efficient to farm them than it is to farm gold and buy them.
Should it be different? Maybe … that’s a different thread though.
And the natural result of a design that prioritizes non targeted rewards, is quantity over quality approach to obtaining things, and very difficult to balance supply systems.
unfortunately this does have something to do with precursor prices, because part of the reason precursors price/method of obtaining them is so grindy is to act as a sink for the overproduction of items withing the game. That overproduction is primarily a result of a quantity is the only way to get ahead method for obtaining virtually any item.
Which leads players to produce even more crap, which then goes down in value, which they then need to farm more crap. viscous cycle.
(edited by phys.7689)
MF doesn’t work if you’re expectations for how it should work isn’t how it works. Make sense?
magic find is supposed to be a stat that increases your odds of getting good stuff. But the game is changing so less and less stuff comes from enemies.
Hence magic find is becoming a more and more useless stat. It would be fine if only certain goods were not involved. But more and more often we see monsters with no drops.-
also i think the bag versus magic find thing was a system created for a different time. Its an issue, but so far it still has use.
Most? Perhaps you should look at the actual items that you need before making that claim and using it as an argument.
I have, and it remains true.
How do you figure that?
Because it’s easier to farm for the non-Pre ingredients of a high-demand Legendary than it is to farm for the pre, I don’t know how to explain it better than that. Why does this confuse you?
Why? because it’s easier to make money that it is to farm targetted materials … money comes from doing anything AND selling materials you don’t need, which you would have in way more abundance than the targetted ones you are after.
its kind of illogical that the cheapest way that something comes in to the world is not by targeting it.
No one in the real world could run a business other than merchanting if this was the case.
I guess whoever was saying earlier that they’d talked to an ANet dev on-map who said the spawn rate of chests wasn’t working the way it was supposed to was telling the truth after all.
Don´t believe that “we fixed a bug”-lame-excuse, they simply didn´t think about whole maps cooperating on chest-digging.
bug is a different term for anet. Anything with undesired results is considered a bug.
My main problem with these type of things, is that most of the problems are not small/numbers correction based, they just built a lot of things in a way that causes this to happen again and again.
truth is, you ll never really get ahead in the long run, increased farming will eventually lead to lower prices for your goods. Increased gold earning leads to inflation. The key to success is riding the waves at the right time. Anyhow they changed it now, lets see how it works out.
It’s a drama we’ve seen oh, so many times. Will the devs ever learn?
So, I logged in and went to Silverwastes to work on AP and titles. Everything is going fine at first until I make it to Amber. I was surprised to see so many people there in one spot. There were banners and a bonfire, so I knew that there was something here that was good, but I didn’t know just what it was. . . yet. The chests. I still don’t quite understand their mechanic on how they spawn, but they’re everywhere. Why here? I still don’t know, maybe there’s big clumps of them other places, just not discovered yet. Well I had a bunch of keys, so I’ll jump in and get some too, I’m just not going to spend hours here like everyone else is.
Then it happened. Defense phase hit and someone calls out in map chat, “Blue needs help”. Silence for awhile, then again “Is anyone coming?” Silence again, then “Why am I the only one here at Blue?” Finally someone replies, “Why don’t you join us at Amber, we’re all here”. Then the guy at Blue states the obvious “Isn’t that what we are not supposed to be doing?” referring to us being all gathered at one fort.
So there it was, letting certain events fail so you could benefit in other places. How many times has this happened before and it keeps repeating itself? Now one of two things will happen to this chest farm based on Anet’s history of these things. 1. There will be a slight nerf to chests, but ultimately inconsequential. 2. A big nerf that causes players to completely abandon the map. My bet is on number one. What’s sad is that’s obvious something will be done soon, and it’s not even a week old yet.
So do the devs truly not understand that if we players are given a choice of events or loot that we will always choose loot. Loot seems to be the one thing we are all drawn too in this game or any other games. We like those rewards, it keeps us going!. So then my not amp up the rewards for defense? Those events are a lot of work and the rewards aren’t that much better – again this is a pattern we are oh so familiar with. If it was worth the time and effort to do these events we would spend the time doing what the map was designed for rather than focusing on a unintentional side effect of bandit chests. This can also be said for all those things in dungeons, fractals, WvW and other PvE things we just skip rather than fulfilling the original design.
It’s been over two years and it seems that they are still not learning from the mistakes of the past.
OP – what you’re saying is ridiculous. Let me explain why.
I understand how participating in an event and letting it fail on purpose can be seen as an issue but honestly not caring about an event and not bothering with it isn’t the same.
You could consider it unintended if people fail the event they’re dong on purpose but if they just don’t bother with an event is it really the same?
All over the game’s map there are events nobody is doing and nobody cares about because they’re somewhere else doing somewhat else. Does that mean they’re wrong? No.
Does it mean they’re abusing the game? No.If I don’t care about an event I won’t do it and that’s just it. There’s no reason to think things should be otherwise.
I don’t recall signing any paper giving me an obligation to complete every event I come across.
Also – if we all like loot – why are we complaining here? We’re finally getting some loot in this game. Why are you crying about it?
i think his point is not they shouldnt give loot, its that they should make all events compete for giving good rewards if well executed.
It’s good to see that the Devs still believe that players will do an event “right”. Sadly though more and more players choose how to play solely on accumulation of gold per hour.
They don’t want to spend actual cash for gem store items or want those few very expensive items on the TP ASAP. Too many players reduce gameplay of any genre game to a series of mechanics. Story no longer matters. Setting no longer matters. Any and all sense of RP is gone. You aren’t an elven archer anymore, you are a range specialist with a variety of spike and AoE damage abilities. You aren’t fighting back the hoard attacking a town for the sake of the town. You’re doing a task to get a reward. Too many players have become mercs, sell-swords out for themselves with no imperative to fight for the greater good.
So like every great meta event they’ve tried before. This one will also have to be nerfed reward wise because too many players simply want to line their pockets by doing the least work possible (just like porting in just before a boss battle so they wouldn’t have to be bothered doing the pre-event tasks).
On one hand I applaud the devs for trying to stick to their story telling vision. But on the other, sadly they will have to begrudgingly take into account the greedy human nature of their clientele who for the most part don’t care about story, only what rewards they can get the fastest.
reward design should be built into level design/progression design. Its not that people are bastids, its that if you have to design rewards to incentivize proper play. If you want people to go to college dont offer them a free gold mine for not going to college. Also, though they may hate to do it, they need to embrace the idealogy of earning more through skillfull play. If your going to offer chests with cool loot, at least make it a dangerous area to be in.
game has severe risk/reward issues.
As to the people saying use lfg, that isnt a horrible solution for differing playstyles, but if that is the solution they need to build it into the game design. lfg is not that embedded a tool that the average player thinks to use it. Many players dont even concieve of using people as taxis.
Do you have a point to make Ohoni other than keeping this thread on page one?
.The point is, he’s enjoying all this attention. Even the dimmest bulb would have lit up by now.
economists dont just predict, some of them are engineers, mechanics, scientists, theorists.
sometimes they are weather men, sometimes they make the weather
It’s unpleasant and unfair. And it doesn’t feel like rng at all, I know people that got 6+ precursors and I didn’t even get 1 and I play twice as much as them. That’s not rng.
Not working in your favor doesn’t make it unfair.
What makes unfair is different people putting in the same effort and getting different results. Gambling is always unfair, thats its strength and why many people enjoy it.
But having gambling (with low odds) as the primary means of achieving something should be something that is very rare and limited
It gave items that had little to no value some value. Hardly much of an impact compared to what dropping precursors prices to the level that he wants would do. They did not alter the very nature of the market.
What you, and everyone else that wants cheap precursors, fail to realize is that there are other components that go into making a legendary than just the precursor. If you make precursors around 250G (he has stated that he wants this and kitten the economy) then what do you think will happen to the prices of everything else used to make a legendary? Then go further and look at what the prices of everything else in the game that uses those components in one way or another.
Yeah… that’s the same as when ascended was introduced.
I’m not denying that they won’t do something to influence the economy. It happens every time they introduce a new item (usually a back item). However, those changes would be nowhere near as large as if you nerfed precursor prices. Again, I’m going off what he wants.
See below for some of his posts. Essentially if everyone wants cheap precursors then it must be so.
Not VERY low, but reasonable. The 50-250g range someplace, or work equivalent to that.
And yes, I don’t care about the impact. They should try to reduce the impact as much as they can manage, but if they can’t manage it to have zero impact, then so be it. The economy serves the players, not the other way around.
No. If it satisfies most players, then it’s a win. The economy does not exist for itself, it only exists to satisfy most players. If the market is failing at that, then it deserves to die. If both can be saved, then all the better, but we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
it gave a much larger impact than you realize. I believe JS mentioned it at somepoint in passing, but you apparently dont believe me. As i said, i know very clearly that a decent amount of high traffic items basically have their main value tied to the production of precursors. However, just because production is tied to X, doesnt mean changes in the market would crash the entire market. It fully depends on how, and what is executed.
Also, if it is true that precursors drive the entire economy (which may be the case) thats a major flaw in the economy. It essentially means that many prices are set based upon something that only a very small portion of the population makes use of. It means they need other driving forces within the game.
As for you saying i want 250 gold precursors, i never said that. In fact im not really looking to put a direct price on precursors. More so, i would give methods of obtaining it that are based on finite amounts of effort (random is always potentially infinite). After this, the price for precursors would represent the effort/skill/knowledge whatevers value to produce. I would also make randomly obtained precursors in the field come from precursor boxes (that allow you to select precursors) Annd i would make precursors generated from putting random exotics in the forge instead give an account bound token that could be used with laurels and the precursor knock off exotic (like usoku needle) to create the precursor.
This would essentially normalize the value of all precursors. the cheap precursors would cease to exist, but the hyper expensive ones would begin to go down as well. The overall demand of precursors would not change, but the supply would be 100% player controlled.
By combining supply created 100% by choice, and creating a finite path (even if its time consuming/difficult) I think you will create a healtheir precursor market. Players will gladly give their money knowing what they are paying for, or do it themselves, and precursor markets will be more based on how the players value their time, rather than straight up gambling (though gambling will still be an option!)
That’s essentially what your comment is coming off as. I trust you can see the trend/similarities between my examples and how your comment came off as.
Of course, because you like to mock things that you’df rather not be true, but the fact remains that they’ve made similar moves in the past, and likely will in the future, it’s not nearly as preposterous as you seem to wish it were. Hell, maybe at some point they’ll even go so far as making dyes account bound or adding an entirely new tier of armors and weapons above exotic.
Ascended and the wardrobe changes are absolutely nowhere near the level of change that you want including the impact it would have. You can claim it’s similar but it’s very very far from that. My post was not to mock but show you how flawed that statement was.
ascended crafting totally altered the very nature of the market. it effected a great many prices, and created tons of demand, on a daily basis, im guessing more so than legendaries, which use substantially less basic materials, and much less of them are created.
Primary thing legendaries do is eat t5 mats.
anyhow, i guarantee you its only a matter of time before they do something else to alter the economy’s model. Its honestly not good that 1 thing is so dominant, thats one bonus i will admit to ascended, it created a lot of demand for many excess items, that is pursued by high level players.
They need some more diverse markets, so that precursors are less of a crutch, but honestly the best solution would probably be to change the loot system, but i dont see that happening.
It’s not the existence of the meta that is a problem.
It’s how much that meta is better than alternatives,
By better, you are presumably talking about a ratio of kill speed to being able to make a mistake. So, let’s say you want to adjust that ratio. Do you:
- Adjust defensive stats to be more powerful, either by adjusting damage calculation in their favor or by scaling defensive actives based on stats, as the OP suggests? Either would break PvP. Either would make PvE easier than it already is for the defensive player. Thing is, defensive is already really strong in PvE. As an experiment, I took a bunker Engineer into Labyrinth on Monday. In fights where both the Horror and the Viscount were present (happened 3x), the Engie was darned near unkillable, while the zerg was dropping like flies. How much stronger would defense need to be?
- Rework the damage calculation so that a greater percentage of the product is generated by weapon strength, but the product of power builds remains about where it is? This would increase damage of lower-Power builds while not affecting glass or Soldier set-ups. It would also buff the damage of healing based stat combos. If you do that, what happens to the opportunity cost of having stronger healing?
- Rework critical, which has been done once already, with the net affect being that the meta was completely unchanged? However, what is the opportunity cost of having access to high crit rates and multipliers? I submit that cost should not be calculated based on dungeon play where anyone who doesn’t know them by heart still struggles, regardless of gear.
Other alternatives exist. You could further reduce the defense available to glass builds. However, this would be very contrary to the game’s active combat aspects.
and how useless most of those alternatives are.
Very much disagree with this part. The other stat combos are presumably pretty useful to people who run them, whether that be in PvP or PvE.
Disclaimer I’m intentionally leaving condition damage builds, offensive or defensive, out of the discussion, as their uselessness is not a factor of stats, but of other game design issues, particularly infrastructure.
it wouldnt really break pvp to increase/decrease effects based on stats. It would of course need to be balanced. But any change they make would need to be balanced.
However, i do recognize its unlikely they will do a thing that would require so much balance adjustments at this stage,
Chris,
I want to ask you something.Will Defiance be redesigned?Is there any plan for it at all?Because right now it is removing the need of any CC in the fights.If raids come will interrupts,stuns,fear become an actual mechanic?Will they be more useful from now?
All I can say on this is we have been talking about it internally and trying to come up with different solutions that make CC valuable without allowing players to “stun lock” creatures (which would be a very real problem if we did not have Defiance). I can’t say any more on that at this time, so here’s a better question for you:
If we removed Defiance, how would you propose a replacement that makes CC (interrupts, stuns, fears etc) valuable without creating a situation that allows players to CC a creature to death.
i showed this during the last discussion so yall may have already seen it.
basically bosses should build a resistance to control effects that lowers the effect duration based on how much CC and how powerful/long the CC that has been done to it.
so when you use a few cc effects, your 2 second effect may only last .5 seconds(when its at 75% reduction)
When it reaches 100% it will completely negate all crowd control until the resistance degrades below 100.
here is an example with jsfiddle, if you press the hsho(headshot) button and the stun button you can see how the resistance goes up.
i would, upon adding this system increase the base boss action speed (so they do more stuff)
Also, though i didnt program it in, i would make stuns under a certain amount of time get negated, but still add to the meter.
so lets say you headshot 75%, it wont actually stun/interupt, but it will add to the meter.
http://jsfiddle.net/phyicus/N3WCk/
so now, stuns would become less effective when spammed, but still usuable unless you are spamming.
a pro at using control would maximize the use of the CCs, and what they have available. Some times using fast interupts, some times using long controls. when his bar is high, only the strongest(longest CCs) will get through his resistance, but only last a moment (basically an interupt)
(edited by phys.7689)
I agree, but i notice many people dont understand what he means.
He means essentially, any outfit that creates a skirt after the waist.
he doesnt mean what we think of as skirts today. (usually what women wear, no pants)
but closer to “: the part of a dress, coat, etc., that hangs from the waist down”
put it like this on male or female charachter, how often could you see their pants pockets(if they had some)
I get the overall feeling that the people in charge of armor/costume design have a distaste for butts (in pants). Sometimes it seems they go out of the way not to show it.
yeah, he understands it, but its pretty flawed. With the current system, they should probably remove all gear stats, and create a setting you adjust on your charachter
dps-def<——I————————————————->def-dps
thats basically all the gear currently means for most of the stat sets.The flaw was using an old-style MMO stat system which is rooted in games which feature tank/heal/DPS. I’d rather have seen something different, but they opted for something the same, probably as a point of similarity for fans of other MMO’s.
Your offense/defense continuum is essentially what the game offers. It just does so in a confusing and round-about fashion by offering 20+ stat combos at max level. Yet, when a given combo isn’t available, people demand it, so obviously some people are using these stats.
More defensive (and healing) stat combos serve two functions: they’re used in PvP; and more defensive set-ups are used in PvE by those whose reflexes, situational awareness and/or connections preclude being glass.
I understand the desire for build diversity. However, I’ve yet to see a stat-dominated game where there is much build diversity in optimum party setup. Sure, there’s the optimum tank build, the optimum healing build and the optimum DPS build for the various classes, but that’s just required roles, not diversity like I saw in the original GW.
yeah, gw1 was the game that actually offered you multiple ways to skin a cat, that varied based on your playstyle.
the most interesting GW2 stat sets usually involve tweaking your dps style (crit versus power or how much condi you can have), or a rare stat set up that might be useful if the coeffecients work out (but they seldom do)
on this issue, i think its safe to say anet doesnt care at all.
or rather, its working how they want it to.
Again, there’s no inherent risk attached to DPS gear. If there is, I’d like you to show that.
if you do a mistake you are dead. thats the high risk of dps gear. you have to play well, you have to know the encounter, and you have to use the right skills at the right time. in tanky gear i can ignore all of that.
I’ve played in tanky gear too, and it’s not exactly what you’d call fun. It takes everything out of the game, and if you combine it with dodging you might as well be invulnerable the entire time. With the added problem it takes you hours to do anything and you don’t get rewards as easily in the open world because it’s all calculated on DPS done.
On none of my full glass characters have I ever had that feeling of imminent danger in this game.
And there’s no raiding mechanic that can change that.So, I really do wonder where this notion comes from, that there’s an actual split between skilled and not-skilled players based on the gear the wear.
its not that because you wear berserk, you are automatically a better player. Its that the better you are, the less need you have for the defense.
You say with your tank gear, the encounter is too easy, and you cannot die. What is the advantage of tank gear?
Tank gear in this game exists primarily to set your handicap in battle. the more tank gear you have the more mistakes you can make. I am not saying every player in tank gear does, but thats the main advantage of it.I’d argue against that on the premise of creating a fake difficulty.
The game is plenty forgiving even in full glass. The prevalence of tank gear in the game (and this is simplifying and generalising it by a lot) gives players the idea that it is not only okay, but expected to wear some amount of it. There is no reason to have more than 100% survivability.
Better yet, if the game is built on the premise that all damage can be avoided, then this tanky gear is hampering people’s learning process by reducing the need to learn how to dodge.
From that point of view, it is hard to defend tanky gear at all.But as a PVT War my goal is to ensure the rest of the group doesn’t get downed so we can win as my DPS is poor. I love this role and even when I dodge effectively there are still plenty of attacks that catch me off guard. So therefore I see my armor and traits as a way to better support my group.
It doesn’t matter if i can stay alive ad infinitum (which I can’t). What matters is that I can help my group to help us all win.
Chris
The percieved problem here is not that the PVT warrior (heal shouts) is an ineffective build. (It’s not, it’s one of the most powerful support builds in the game, I’d argue)
The point is that the sacrificed DPS do not mathematically align with the support gained. You could use the same build in PPF or VTP gear with the same level of support given.
Theoretically, the dodge alone + the self-healing ability you have are enough to make it through an encounter as encounter time drops the more DPS you deal. The longer any encounter takes, the greater the theoretical chance becomes of anyone making a mistake, and the added survivability mattering.
Tequatl as an encounter tries to balance the equation by taking Precision and Ferocity out of the equation, and that works to some degree, but this does tend to annoy DPS players.Now the real questions and issues begin when looking at stats that actually do matter for support. Healing and Boon Duration exist, they are on gear. (Not many in the case of BD, admittedly) However, these stats do not affect support in the matter DPS is affected by gear. Instead, sufficient support is added without these stats according to many experienced dungeon players.
But maybe this is just me thinking too much like a theorycrafter than as an actual player.
I think your comments are well made. And therefore what I would say is that the notion of support, co-operation and a role is very much dependent on the kind of encounter that is built then with a delta of skill and armor and traits that is not as important as knowledge and co-operation in said raid encounter but important none the less.
I suppose that this is the core of the approach I would like us to discuss.
knowledge>skill>character setup>group number
And the reason group number is last is because I think that by following the paradigm we discussed and in the confines of this proposal that player’s could complete a raid with less than the recommended amount by increasing their acumen in Knowledge>skill and character setup.
Chris
what do you mean by charachter setup?
if bosses dont have enrage timer, berserker players will kill stuff faster, but berserker wont be a requirement.
players who use other gear will need longer to kill stuff, but will have an easier time to survive. so isnt that a good trade off?As i said, if you have your survival-per-second rating better by even 50%, but the encounter takes 3-4x longer, then your survival chances actually go down. And, as i’ve also said, this is conservative estimate, it’s actually much worse.
As the game is now, you sacrifice dps, but in exchange you don’t really get “better chances to survive”. All you get is more chances to make a mistake. I wouldn’t call it a good trade off.
what you are saying is kind of true, but not exactly.
The major difference is, if you team up with the right players you will be totally unkillable in tank gear. In berserk gear this isnt really the case. You dont often see it, because thats not the meta, but a couple people have done videos of face tanking the hardest bosses in the game with some team support.
I am not really advocating for either style. But i think the fundamental disconect is having stats primarily be about only those two forces. In gw1, increasing stats was more about increasing the viability of a playstyle.
You’re coming at from the perspective that toughness and vitality don’t do what they are supposed to do. However they do work. Players in PvP do use them. The problem is that you don’t need that sort of work in PvE because players use well tested tactics and can run the dungeons in any gear whatsoever. Note that – any gear whatsoever. They therefore use the highest dps gear. Making other defensive gear even more defensive isn’t going to change that.
Reducing existing defenses to make dungeons harder for speed runners is actually just going to hurt the newcomers who already find dungeons tough, very tough. Newcomers can use all sorts of builds and tactics to get through dungeons already. It’s just not optimal.
Giving defensive stats an extra bonus to defense or offense is just going to break PvP where plenty of builds can work already.
This poster understands the game.
yeah, he understands it, but its pretty flawed. With the current system, they should probably remove all gear stats, and create a setting you adjust on your charachter
dps-def<——I————————————————→def-dps
thats basically all the gear currently means for most of the stat sets.