196 replies to this topic

[Daesu]

Gremlin, on 14 November 2012 - 12:47 AM, said:

Fair point, but then some players will always have better equipment than others often by a lucky drop.
Armour and weapons gradually protect more and do more damage as you progress in the game.
More and more "slotted items/effects" come in.
To me it makes sense for something to have the title Legendary to in some way be better.

Players who are able to fulfill the points needed to find buy create or craft such a weapon deserve more than it to just Look better.
Others are free to attempt the same or not.

I don't agree that Legendaries should be better in terms of stats but I would agree that Legendaries should be better in terms of looks and that is what players would grind for after endgame.  This has always been how it works in GW1 too.

Max stat items should be easily obtainable after completing the game, then people can grind for cosmetic upgrades if they choose to.  I  don't think it is right to relegate poorer performance to other players who do not have as much time to play, just because they have kids or have more real life responsibilities.  If anything, they could even be more experienced or skillful players but just do not have as much time to play as some people without a life/jobs, do.

I would prefer the game to reward real skills over amount of time played.  The fewer real life responsibilities you have, the more powerful your in-game items would be just doesn't make sense to me.

In terms of dealing with bots, this also makes sense.  Bots do not have real player experience and skills which can be hard to automate, but bots can play the game 24/7 no problem.  Should bots be rewarded, with more powerful items, more than real players?  Should players who simply grind like mindless bots 24/7 be rewarded, with more powerful items, more than skillful players?  I don't think so.  If you give such excellent rewards based on grind, the bots will end up being the winners because no human being can ever out-grind the bots who don't need to sleep or eat.  Giving such rewards to players with simply "bot-like" play style (reminds me of Chinese prison farmers) is also wrong.

If you give more incentive to bot, there would be more bots.  If you take away the incentive to bot, then you keep the bot population under control.  No game can ever keep bots out, but you can reduce the incentive to bot through better design by choosing skill over grind.

Edited by Daesu, 14 November 2012 - 01:52 AM.

[Omega X]

Linfang, on 14 November 2012 - 12:05 AM, said:

Nexcom and NCsoft assimilated Anet like the borg. Get out your wallets, resistance is futile.

That's Nexon my dear. They bought a majority stake in NCSoft. These days they're like the Korean EA, buy up everything and ruin it right after.

[Dasryn]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 01:04 AM, said:

What I think is Arenanet was counting on the people that play guild wars 1 to play guild wars 2. What ended up happening was that a lot of them did not transition, but a lot of players from other MMOs did. So now, this lack of gear progression while not directly present in guild wars 1 (it was via titles and pve only skills), caused a significant amount of players to leave the game, which is always a bad thing. And this is how they are reacting to it.

In some ways this ascended gear might be needed as a test to see how the fanbase is going to react imo. Personally, i think the whole no gear treadmil is a little unrealistic for an MMO, because a good chunk of the players NEED directions on what to work on. Gear is an easy way to lead them. People have no objections running the same thing for weeks to get a piece of gear.

wow. . .you really put that in perspective, i think you may be on to something.

[Krazzar]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 01:04 AM, said:

What I think is Arenanet was counting on the people that play guild wars 1 to play guild wars 2. What ended up happening was that a lot of them did not transition, but a lot of players from other MMOs did. So now, this lack of gear progression while not directly present in guild wars 1 (it was via titles and pve only skills), caused a significant amount of players to leave the game, which is always a bad thing. And this is how they are reacting to it.

In some ways this ascended gear might be needed as a test to see how the fanbase is going to react imo. Personally, i think the whole no gear treadmil is a little unrealistic for an MMO, because a good chunk of the players NEED directions on what to work on. Gear is an easy way to lead them. People have no objections running the same thing for weeks to get a piece of gear.

Yeah, GW1 couldn't support much progression to begin with. Again Anet overestimated players, they expected people to do the things in the game, instead people grind Orr. Legendaries are supposed to be pie-in-the-sky, but it seems enough people ignored every other goal in the game so Anet's adding more tiers in between to make people feel like they're getting somewhere on the long road to a legendary. The bar is already set way out there with legendaries and they're filling in the middle, something everyone should like, but instead people see it as a threat to their fragile status quo.

What's odd is infusions are literally horizontal progression and people are upset about them. It seems people just don't want to have to do anything to get something.

[Specialz]

Krazzar, on 14 November 2012 - 01:43 AM, said:

Yeah, GW1 couldn't support much progression to begin with. Again Anet overestimated players, they expected people to do the things in the game, instead people grind Orr. Legendaries are supposed to be pie-in-the-sky, but it seems enough people ignored every other goal in the game so Anet's adding more tiers in between to make people feel like they're getting somewhere on the long road to a legendary. The bar is already set way out there with legendaries and they're filling in the middle, something everyone should like, but instead people see it as a threat to their fragile status quo.

What's odd is infusions are literally horizontal progression and people are upset about them. It seems people just don't want to have to do anything to get something.

In  a lot of ways I feel sorry for Arenanet, they can't win, they wont win. No matter what they do, people are going to complain. Like you said, they overestimated the type of people that play MMORPGs. They thought, hey with leveling scaling everything is content, so they created a big open world and nobody seems to care. They all care about getting loot. They let instances have no CD, people ran and ran until they got their armor then complain how there is little to do.

IN a way, It was inevitable that arenanet was going to go down this path. I mean people need motivation to have fun, which is sad imo. The people (some) complaining how little there is at 80 are complaining about getting new gear as motivation for, when their own actions have proven that cosmetic gear is no sufficient to get a significant potion back into dungeons, once they get their gear from another source.

I personally run around in orr in rares, but a lot of of people have exotics yet I don't feel threaten by it, I guess its just me.

[Age]

Noirr, on 14 November 2012 - 12:19 AM, said:

i believe GW1 sold 6.5 million copies since 2005 till today , i think it took them to reach the 2 million copies sold in 1 year while GW2 reached those numbers in less than a year...so if things continue to go well it may surpass its predecessor in sales or match it

I sure hope not and much of those are multiple accounts.It was the thing to do rush through GW in 05 to get everything unlocked.

You will have to wait longer to see if it is trouble maybe first quarter in the new year.

Edited by Age, 14 November 2012 - 02:03 AM.

[omar316]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 01:04 AM, said:

What I think is Arenanet was counting on the people that play guild wars 1 to play guild wars 2. What ended up happening was that a lot of them did not transition, but a lot of players from other MMOs did. So now, this lack of gear progression while not directly present in guild wars 1 (it was via titles and pve only skills), caused a significant amount of players to leave the game, which is always a bad thing. And this is how they are reacting to it.

In some ways this ascended gear might be needed as a test to see how the fanbase is going to react imo. Personally, i think the whole no gear treadmil is a little unrealistic for an MMO, because a good chunk of the players NEED directions on what to work on. Gear is an easy way to lead them. People have no objections running the same thing for weeks to get a piece of gear.

Right on the money.
Absolutely this.

What Anet has done is not a bad thing at all. But instead of doing something truly different they patched together a frankenstein of a game. They went the jack of all trades and ace of non. Giving 3 games, all sub par experiences: WvW, sPvP and PvE, while not focusing on any core element. The game has got no identity, all it's doing is riding off the coat tails of Guild War's franchise name and offering a generic flavour of the month MMO.

In fact moving away from raids and the trinity seems all the more gimicky now. They wanted to be different for the sake of being... different.

[Quietus]

Strawberry Nubcake, on 13 November 2012 - 10:48 PM, said:

Dedicated players are people that race through all the content as fast as possible so they can live in Orr.  They tend to bore easily.  Gee, I wonder why.

Orr is a dull, grey maze swarming with annoying zombies. Who wouldn't get bored of that?

[Deyadissa]

Bottom line, If they screw with PvP at all with stats I'm done with this game. I even bought Guild Wars classic and this game specifically for the fact that there is no gear grind, only vanity.

[Aodan]

Sephirox507, on 13 November 2012 - 10:53 PM, said:

the game is not in trouble what is in trouble is the MMO community, raging through forums when the content has not even come out....

This is about 98% of my oppinion. Most of those making posts about GW2 sucking or being bad are either 1. Not very good players or 2. Have expectations that GW2 should be populated like WoW.

In regards to 1. These people esp in the spvp area of the game are usually teams/players who don't compete in competitive teams or base horrible hot join as a basis to rate this game on.

In regards to 2. There are people who will continue to play their respective other MMO's because of how attached they are to their characters. Also since GW2 requires no monthly, why not.

This is why 99% of the time I question the posters credibility before I even begin to read their rant.

[ilr]

Shiren, on 13 November 2012 - 10:37 PM, said:

We’ve all seen the never ending posts about the game being empty, people flocking to other games and countless “this game sucks” posts. The rest of us kept playing the game. Most of us expected the game to lose people as we distanced from launch and the population levelled out. I suspect ArenaNet was on the same page. The launch population wasn’t going to be the active player base.

Only three months in we now see a radical turn around and abandonment of one of the core philosophies of the game, it’s development, it’s marketing and our trust: the introduction of a new tier and the promise of a treadmill.

I agree very much with the first part. We expected huge drop off and It wasn't fanboying either that kept us from worrying about.... it was probably Apathy more than anything.  Some of us never wanted all those people here in the first place.

But for me it's not the promise of treadmill that's most concerning.  It's this poor communication we're seeing from the Devs on the EXISTING CONTENT.   How many times does a huge progress-blocking Bug (affecting 100's of thousands of people) have to be reported before they rush out a Hotfix to change it?   THEN, we see things like a hotfix for Dye drop rate and we're literally screaming "WTF?", "How does that issue get attention before all these other things people are actually putting real effort into reporting??.   Or how about the things that have been "unrewarding" since BETA, like boring Bosses & broken trash mobs with huge hitpoint pools but they still won't say one damn thing about ever changing it?   Oh, and Huge problems in PvP?.  Longer queues than GW1 had just a year ago b/c too many people already quit?... "oh we're sorry, we cant' hear you over our BEST HALLOWEEN UPDATE EVER!".

More and more, the real mechanical problems, Bugs, and greatest of all:  things we hate becuase they're not fun and we want them to get fixed so they are fun...  are definitely definitely being left out of all these Dev-Posts,  or worse: pushed way way back behind all this new stuff that no one is asking for.  People aren't asking for more gear, they're asking for more End Game activities that are different and new from what we have right now.  There was a bit of a pattern of this in GW1 but it was Never this pronounced.  Sure they'd rush out some content in every expansion that made some older content obsolete.   But they never so Blatantly just "paved over" some "older mistakes" which is what this signifies to me:   That they're not even interested in looking back and fixing the stuff that would have made this content enjoyable from the very beginning.

Edited by ilr, 14 November 2012 - 03:18 AM.

[Specialz]

ilr, on 14 November 2012 - 03:04 AM, said:

[/indent]
I agree very much with the first part. We expected huge drop off and It wasn't fanboying either that kept us from worrying about.... it was probably Apathy more than anything.  Some of us never wanted all those people here in the first place.

But for me it's not the promise of treadmill that's most concerning.  It's this poor communication we're seeing from the Devs on the EXISTING CONTENT.

People have the habit of complaining about communication then when they do communicate the complain how either it is not enough or not what they wanted to hear.

Looking at Guild wars 2, I think (hope) Arenanet has learned on thing, being as open about their design principle and actively getting your audience involve in it is a horrible idea, because once the information gets out, it cannot be undo. If mitt, could have pulled in 57 million people by being as vague as possible then people in general don't really care to know a lot about things.

Edited by Specialz, 14 November 2012 - 03:41 AM.

[Xellial]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 03:40 AM, said:

People have the habit of complaining about communication then when they do communicate the complain how either it is not enough or not what they wanted to hear.

Looking at Guild wars 2, I think (hope) Arenanet has learned on thing, being as open about their design principle and actively getting your audience involve in it is a horrible idea, because once the information gets out, it cannot be undo. If mitt, could have pulled in 57 million people by being as vague as possible then people in general don't really care to know a lot about things.

What you're saying is awful. So they should basically be vague, and secretive, instead of communicating with their player base? Their communication is what spread the hype of the game, got the name out. The community did it, they didn't need Mr. T or Chuck Norris like WoW, they had their fanbase do it for them, for free, all they had to do was talk to them. Not a bad deal, no?

The only reason they're in trouble, I dare say, is because they STOPPED communicating with their playerbase, and pushed this shit out without asking the gamers "Hey, we were thinking of doing this ascended thing, what do you guys think about it?

Bam. Shitstorm averted.

What you're saying is incorrect, in my opinion. And for the love of god, keep Politics OUT of your comments, this current issue is heated enough... It's like you're trying to set off a nuke.

Edited by Xellial, 14 November 2012 - 04:02 AM.

[ilr]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 03:40 AM, said:

pulled in 57 million people by being as vague as possible then people in general don't really care to know a lot about things.

Touch`e


Edit:  Gotta side with Xel tho... that's horrible and I don't want to live on this planet anymore

Edited by ilr, 14 November 2012 - 04:12 AM.

[Volias]

I don't think gw2 is in trouble at this time. I still see a lot of activity going on in game and forums. I do think a lot of players might be taking a break for other games right now. Holiday season is always slammed with blockbuster releases and since there is no subscription tied to gw2 you can easily put it down for a few days and pick right back up.

I know I haven't logged in for a few days because I'm doing that, but I'll be right back on the 16th for the lost shores content and I'll keep working my alts after that. I'm sure a lot of others are doing the same.

[Specialz]

Xellial, on 14 November 2012 - 03:47 AM, said:

What you're saying is awful. So they should basically be vague, and secretive, instead of communicating with their player base? Their communication is what spread the hype of the game, got the name out. The community did it, they didn't need Mr. T or Chuck Norris like WoW, they had their fanbase do it for them, for free, all they had to do was talk to them. Not a bad deal, no?

You are right what i m saying is awful, but that doesn't mean I m wrong. Go read the forums whenever a developer tries to communicate or even think about when  before the game was released. If you were here long enough, you shold remember the QQ of the month things.

The reality is that a lot of games get a way with just showing enough to keep interest, most game companies are not open and yet they still get a way with it. Arenanet was open and everything they said in the past is coming to bite them in the butt, it has been for years. An example, remember when introduce dye and then later changed it, if they hadn't release that initial information the reaction when they did changed it would have been a lot different. Or even when they talked about how sidekicking up in PvE zones wasn't in the game.

Again, you are absolutely correct, what i am saying is awful but it is the truth in most cases. There is no inherit benefit to be open other than to make people happy temporary but when they are happy all those good things go out of the window, so why bother being open. Communication is never enough, if you communicate but things don't pan out as plan they complain.

ilr, on 14 November 2012 - 04:08 AM, said:

Touch`e


Edit:  Gotta side with Xel tho... that's horrible and I don't want to live on this planet anymore

You are right it is is horrible, that's why I had a back up plan to move to canada .

Edited by Specialz, 14 November 2012 - 04:18 AM.

[Dasryn]

im going to grind for my tier 3 cultural rares.

then im going to find a cool group of folks to play with that dont mind that im in rares and we're going to run dungeons and get loot.

the thing is, the game is not dead.  well maybe im spoiled because im on Tarnished Coast?  idk but i just ran the Maw and the Dome DE in Wayfarer Hills 5 times each tonight and there were LARGE crowds for each event.  people communicating over map chat when the events popped.

it was a blast, i wish i could keep going but ive got work in the morning.

what i find awesome about DEs, is that they are like Rift's Rifts.  you can take a break from questing and just complete minor objectives leading up to the main event.  its awesome and addictive.

for no sub, this is great!

[omar316]

Aodan, on 14 November 2012 - 02:36 AM, said:

This is about 98% of my oppinion. Most of those making posts about GW2 sucking or being bad are either 1. Not very good players or 2. Have expectations that GW2 should be populated like WoW.

In regards to 1. These people esp in the spvp area of the game are usually teams/players who don't compete in competitive teams or base horrible hot join as a basis to rate this game on.

In regards to 2. There are people who will continue to play their respective other MMO's because of how attached they are to their characters. Also since GW2 requires no monthly, why not.

This is why 99% of the time I question the posters credibility before I even begin to read their rant.

Your view is completely narrow.
I don't think anyone is going to come into this game solely for sPvP. In fact sPvP is better and more balanced in MOBAs, and to a large extent GW1.

Why would majority of players want to play something which is exactly the same and a poorer version of it, even if it's free.
And how would you even get any more players interested to play a mode which is of not their core concern without getting them interested. PvE is the biggest factor to retain players.

[Xodiak]

It could be in trouble.. but not quite yet. Eventually people are going to need more than just looks on gear that they can obtain in 2 months without much effort, and instead need higher quality items and tougher content.
Hopefully they deliver that.

[omar316]

Volias, on 14 November 2012 - 04:16 AM, said:

I don't think gw2 is in trouble at this time. I still see a lot of activity going on in game and forums. I do think a lot of players might be taking a break for other games right now. Holiday season is always slammed with blockbuster releases and since there is no subscription tied to gw2 you can easily put it down for a few days and pick right back up.

I know I haven't logged in for a few days because I'm doing that, but I'll be right back on the 16th for the lost shores content and I'll keep working my alts after that. I'm sure a lot of others are doing the same.

If this were the mindset of 30% of the population in every server, lol... Mergers here we come.

[Xellial]

Specialz, on 14 November 2012 - 04:16 AM, said:

You are right what i m saying is awful, but that doesn't mean I m wrong. Go read the forums whenever a developer tries to communicate or even think about when  before the game was released. If you were here long enough, you shold remember the QQ of the month things.

The reality is that a lot of games get a way with just showing enough to keep interest, most game companies are not open and yet they still get a way with it. Arenanet was open and everything they said in the past is coming to bite them in the butt, it has been for years. An example, remember when introduce dye and then later changed it, if they hadn't release that initial information the reaction when they did changed it would have been a lot different. Or even when they talked about how sidekicking up in PvE zones wasn't in the game.

Again, you are absolutely correct, what i am saying is awful but it is the truth in most cases. There is no inherit benefit to be open other than to make people happy temporary but when they are happy all those good things go out of the window, so why bother being open. Communication is never enough, if you communicate but things don't pan out as plan they complain.



You are right it is is horrible, that's why I had a back up plan to move to canada .

You're quite smart with your business practices. I agree it's smart from that stance. You're completely right. I think you already know how I feel about it from a principle manner

Hopefully one day we get to the point where Developes can be open with consumers, and we can actually converse and work together for the game that we, as gamers, want. Hopefully we can craft a game for a specific group of players, and keep it for those players instead of seeing the dollar signs and trying to appease entirely new groups of gamers and creating scandals such as this. I'm a realist, but it's nice to have an optimistic dream sometimes, to get by.

I do find what you said kind of sad though, about Anet that is. About the Dye things, and broken/failed promises. If they had stuck to their guns in the first place, perhaps it would actually have been better for them, financially. I guess we'll have to see how things pan out from here on out. Will these decisions end up helping them, or will it be detrimental, in the long run?

Edited by Xellial, 14 November 2012 - 04:28 AM.

[caballo_oscuro]

The reason they're adding this gear treadmill is to appease the player base who claim they now have nothing to do, there's no incentive to play.

The original premise of the game was to provide level scaling to encourage players to wander back through the world of lower level content to experience new dynamic events they might have missed but as with any mmo the high level players would want equivalent loot which just didn't happen.

Players wanted to experience all the dynamic events on one run through so the turn over rate was increased to accommodate. This led to more rushing through content and less incentive to revisit earlier zones.

Thus for progression to be something tangible anet has decided, against their usual ethic to tweak the power numbers. The original gw theme of no need to grind for gear, cosmetic upgrade and content replay intentions matter less and less.
Now tiers of gear with even slightly better stats still matters because it differentiates the gear grinders from everyone else and creates a two tier population.

With less places to acquire it and the fact that the new dungeon allows the group decide what level they start at increases the amount of gear apartheid in the game because the high level long hours grinding groups will simply refuse to deal with people who haven't put in.the hundreds of hours in their little dungeon to date.

lfg will eventually not entertain the players who can't otherwise attain this level of loot scaling as quickly but i think this is inevitable.

There does have to be a differentiator but this sort of tiering does make certain content unavailable to certain demographics.

There are also always going to be some areas that require a certain level of capability and groups now have a physical differentiator to promote this, however how it us implemented could have a detrimental effect on how content could become unavailable to a huge swath of players.

A differentiator is inevitable but how large the gap will be depends hugely on how accessible the new content is and how attainable the new gear is... We will have to wait and see what the weekend brings.

[omar316]

caballo_oscuro, on 14 November 2012 - 04:32 AM, said:

With less places to acquire it and the fact that the new dungeon allows the group decide what level they start at increases the amount of gear apartheid in the game because the high level long hours grinding groups will simply refuse to deal with people who haven't put in.the hundreds of hours in their little dungeon to date.

lfg will eventually not entertain the players who can't otherwise attain this level of loot scaling as quickly but i think this is inevitable.

There does have to be a differentiator but this sort of tiering does make certain content unavailable to certain demographics.

There are also always going to be some areas that require a certain level of capability and groups now have a physical differentiator to promote this, however how it us implemented could have a detrimental effect on how content could become unavailable to a huge swath of players.

A differentiator is inevitable but how large the gap will be depends hugely on how accessible the new content is and how attainable the new gear is... We will have to wait and see what the weekend brings.

Many assumptions:
1) All the LFGs are people with intention of grinding said Acended gear
2) Acended gear cannot be attained by people who play 1 hour a day.
3) If you're trying to gratify these 1 hour a day people then please don't. They won't even be in exotics for that matter.
4) Slight change in numbers does not affect the population at all. WvWvW is still a numbers game, and unless you can give concrete evidence that the top tier guilds are all running in the best exotics, and are all in best gear/traits combination( which is completely possible yet incredibly hard to manage) then these numbers don't amount to anything at all.
5) I still have guildies who got no clue about what traits and gear do and yet we manage to kill and get badges all the same.

[Ardeni]

I think that this new decision shows that Arenanet is surprised about the (supposedly) decreasing player numbers. As I read the yesterday's blog, I almost felt like it was the first of April. It was that surreal how the blog post seemed like and I would never really have expected such a post. I doubt that Arenanet intended such a move at any point and they just figured that adding a gear treadmill would keep people playing the game. However, I don't think that this is the case.

As said, I could imagine that Arenanet's intention is to increase their player numbers by this move. I don't think that this will work. People who already quit the game won't come back just because there is a new tier of items that you can get with who knows how much time and work invested (and actually, for me, the time required to get the ascended items is the main unknown factor that decides whether I dislike or hate this move). Some of the people who are still playing might continue playing longer, but again depending on how long it takes to get the gear, these people are most likely only hardcore players. Then there are the casuals, most of whom will most likely quit the game at least if getting the new gear is at least comparable to the legendary weapons.

I don't know what others might think, but to me it matters whether my gear has max stats or not. The whole thing about stats is knowing that your stats are as high as possible so that you can focus on other things (alts and cosmetics). I bet that eventually this move will decrease the amount of players who play the game on a weekly basis. Also, considering the blog post, which mentioned that they are specifically tailoring these new items for those who have ran out things to do, I bet that getting ascended items will be hard. I most certainly hope that the new dungeon won't be anything major, at least in terms of gaining gold, since otherwise there's no way that the other dungeons weren't affected by this as well. If the majority of people will only focus on running the new dungeon, the other dungeons will be deserted and thus the people without ascended items can no longer really run dungeons (which are the core of endgame in this game at least for me).

But well, the time will tell how they really implement this. Hopefully they'll at least listen to the protests if this turns out to be a flop instead of being stubborn and sticking to their bad decisions. Should this thing fail, Arenanet should have the guts to remove the system from the game entirely.

[Corvindi]

Linfang, on 14 November 2012 - 12:05 AM, said:

Nexcom and NCsoft assimilated Anet like the borg. Get out your wallets, resistance is futile.

Actually I find it easy to stick to my purchases of inventory slots and storage space.

Guild Wars 2 introduced gems for gold stating that if you have time you can grind (although they didn't call it grind of course) and if not you can buy gold from players who do have time, through Anet, of course.  And I guess they expect to make a good chunk of profit from that and maybe they already have.

Unless the majority of players are like me and take them at their word that the game doesn't require a grind.  I'm blissfully ignorant of so many things that can be farmed, grinded, or bought on the TP to improve my character that you'd think I was stupid.  But I'm not.  I'm willfully ignorant.  If I can't get something fairly easily and without buying gold, I do without.  If it ever gets un-fun to do without, I quit.

Simple and cheap as that.  In other words, I play the game the way I want it to be.  And it's not horribly far off that ideal (yet) or I wouldn't still be enjoying it while running around in unslotted greens.  That's right, I rarely even bother to slot my gear, unless I need to free up some bank space.  I draw the line at going around in blues, though.  I have some pride.

A few days ago I was finally enthusiastic about hitting 80 and changing my 'lazy' ways a little by gearing up in exotics.  But now, meh.  Don't care.

Also, I think this whole industry might be in trouble.

Edited by Corvindi, 14 November 2012 - 05:30 AM.

[Minion]

I don't really care. The more annoying thing than this new gear is that they're releasing new content without fixing old and well-documented bugs. For example, atleast on Desolation, CoF's DE was bugged, so the dungeon was shut down for a whole week. That lead to the tripling of ectos, which I was happy about but it wasn't exactly fair.

[Skolops]

I think the biggest issue the game may have is PvP.  However the official marketing went, the "word of mouth marketing" done by everyday folks on the internet seemed to focus tremendously on PvP  People stormed forums far and wide to bash the PvP in other games and to proclaim GW2 as some great panacea to cure everybody's PvP woes.  Add to that all of the game being an e-sport, and there were a LOT of people who came to this game for the PvP.

Fast forward now to a few months into the game, and we have a situation where since launch day, PvPers have largely been unhappy. They don't like the balance, they don't like the limited game style, they don't like the clustered mess that the screen becomes in a match, they don't like having so many pets/turrets/etc. in PvP matches, and so on and so forth.   While I haven't PvPed in 2 months (even though I came to the game for the PvP), I hear on reddit and the forums that sPvP ques are starting to take a noticeably long time.  This was bad in games like TOR, which has single server PvP.  In GW2 with global sPvP, it's got to be a considerably worse sign.

[ilr]

Corvindi, on 14 November 2012 - 05:29 AM, said:

Guild Wars 2 introduced gems for gold stating that if you have time you can grind (although they didn't call it grind of course) and if not you can buy gold from players who do have time, through Anet, of course.  And I guess they expect to make a good chunk of profit from that and maybe they already have.

Most who would otherwise pay real money, all seem to agree that you don't get enough Gold yet.  I took a bunch of my gold a few weeks in from release to invest it in gems because I thought they would keep up with inflation and my own accruement rate of disposable income (even after subtracting the 30% fee for speculating on gem fluctuations). 2 Months later those gems are still sitting there with me regretting it b/c the exchange hasn't gone up much.

I've had 15g in currency I don't know what to do with and I don't "play the Market". But I still want some kind of Savings-Bond to protect it against inflation.  And I'm looking at Gems going "Nope...not judging by current Trends".  They should be atleast 1.2g by now but they're what... only 80s ?? (per 100).  Either there's a built in calculation consistently reducing their value over time, or there's a bunch of rich bastards still snagging up lot of gold through it while the joe schmoes making $5 an hour after state/local/fed taxes, FICA & basic cost of living; looks at that return rate and just says "screw it, I'll just go follow the Zergs around for an hour"

Edited by ilr, 14 November 2012 - 06:13 AM.

[Bloggi]

Ardeni, on 14 November 2012 - 05:06 AM, said:

I don't know what others might think, but to me it matters whether my gear has max stats or not. The whole thing about stats is knowing that your stats are as high as possible so that you can focus on other things (alts and cosmetics).

Well, I have exceedingly few complaints about this game and very happy with it overall. But the introduction of this new tier of gear does make me a little miffed. Not game-breaking, but miffed. An annoyance caused by working towards dungeon armor and weapons which were once max stat, and now realizing I have yet something else to, dare I say it, grind for.

There will always be people who are restlessly looking for the next big thing to work towards. Personally, I'd rather just get max stat gear ASAP, then work for the aesthetics (if I didn't already get them on the way to max stat gear), with a focus on exploring the game, mastering the professions and enjoying the social side of things.

[Princess Fatora]

I'm not sure. It may be NCsoft that is in trouble, and may be trying to reposition GW2 into a more mainstream MMO title to attract more people.

Current MMOs have failed to expand the playerbase mostly, which is why MMOs keep cannibalizing each other. GW2 is the first one that actually attracted people outside of the MMO pie ever since WoW pulled that off in 2004. However, the numbers may not be enough for NCsoft, resulting in them traying to cannibalize other MMOs just like Warhammer etc have done.

It's a pretty desperate move, since they are risking to lose 10% of their core fanbase (which is how much you usually lose by going against core premises, +/- 5%). That's substantial. They need to get at least 5% new/returning players that stick due to this change for it to be worth it. It's no surprise they are coupling this with free trials, likely to help recouping losses.

That they are taking this risk-( and it's a BIG one, which is why very few games actually try this) means that they want new people fast. Will these changes be enough to attract more people than they lose? I would doubt it, but maybe they can manage.

Wish em the best luck at that, if they truly want to go along this path, at least.