24 replies to this topic

[lmaonade]

Just had a funny but decent read on Guild Wars 2

Should take anything with a grain of salt of course, but it's still a decent read imo and definitely has to do with GW2, just thought I'd share

[two maces]

How many times do you have to link this troll thread.

[SevereEpicz]

ok, lets blame nexon

[lmaonade]

two maces, on 25 November 2012 - 05:48 AM, said:

How many times do you have to link this troll thread.

1 time because it's the first time I've linked it, just though I'd share since it was funny and cynical, I'm a casual forum browser so I hadn't seen it here before, sorry if people are annoyed

[Nox_Aeterna]

Reality hurts. It hurts bad and deep.

Honestly , yeah , GW2 is not what it was promised to be. The question now is , what it will become? Even better , will the result still even be something we could call GW at all?

These are questions without answers atm. I hope they can make changes to make up for it.

[DuskWolf]

That does sound like a very accurate appraisal of the situation.

[lmaonade]

Nox_Aeterna, on 25 November 2012 - 06:39 AM, said:

Reality hurts. It hurts bad and deep.

Honestly , yeah , GW2 is not what it was promised to be. The question now is , what it will become? Even better , will the result still even be something we could call GW at all?

These are questions without answers atm. I hope they can make changes to make up for it.

It may be better for Anet from a business standpoint (Nexon, everything aside, knows how to make money), but personally, I hate the gear treadmill, and though I'm sounding like a broken record right now, I played GW2 hoping it would stick to GW1's philosophy of a set in stone equipment tier. I'm not even talking about money, I've definitely already played out my 60 bucks, I have about 500 hours spent, and I don't regret a second of it. I don't even mind the Ascended stuff right now, I'm never going to participate in it but it's not very significant in terms of stat differences from exotics, so it's no problem for me.

More worried for the future, Anet said they wanted to add more to the legendaries, including armors and stuff, which is fine and all, but if it's just going to be more stat increases and further separation from exotics, then it'd really rustle my jimmies lol. I take more of an on the fence or in between standpoint on this, if the stat increases aren't too drastic that it'd force me to grind for them just to keep up, then w/e I don't need max stat equipment to continue playing, but if they are significant then that's another story.

[Arkantos]

two maces, on 25 November 2012 - 05:48 AM, said:

How many times do you have to link this troll thread.

Hard to call an article a troll when it brings up some very valid points.

[Nox_Aeterna]

lmaonade, on 25 November 2012 - 06:56 AM, said:

It may be better for Anet from a business standpoint (Nexon, everything aside, knows how to make money), but personally, I hate the gear treadmill, and though I'm sounding like a broken record right now, I played GW2 hoping it would stick to GW1's philosophy of a set in stone equipment tier. I'm not even talking about money, I've definitely already played out my 60 bucks, I have about 500 hours spent, and I don't regret a second of it. I don't even mind the Ascended stuff right now, I'm never going to participate in it but it's not very significant in terms of stat differences from exotics, so it's no problem for me.

More worried for the future, Anet said they wanted to add more to the legendaries, including armors and stuff, which is fine and all, but if it's just going to be more stat increases and further separation from exotics, then it'd really rustle my jimmies lol. I take more of an on the fence or in between standpoint on this, if the stat increases aren't too drastic that it'd force me to grind for them just to keep up, then w/e I don't need max stat equipment to continue playing, but if they are significant then that's another story.

Well im on the same spot , or a bit further the intolerant side.

Honestly , im waiting to see what Anet will do , only reason im waiting is the great guild i got into , i would like to keep playing so i dont leave them , but if the game keep going like this ... well it was a good ride for a while.

And yeah they are getting money. What im not sure is if they are planning long term or to burn out the GW name getting all the money they can before the ship sink.

[Alleji]

Arkantos, on 25 November 2012 - 07:14 AM, said:

Hard to call an article a troll when it brings up some very valid points.

The article needs to get its basics straight: you can't buy ascended gear from the TP.

[Daesu]

Alleji, on 25 November 2012 - 07:31 AM, said:

The article needs to get its basics straight: you can't buy ascended gear from the TP.

Yup they are account bound so you cant sell them in the TP, at least for now.  Currently the only way to get them is to grind FOTM.

[Resolve]

Alleji, on 25 November 2012 - 07:31 AM, said:

The article needs to get its basics straight: you can't buy ascended gear from the TP.

He means you can buy a lot of the materials for them off the TP.

[Waar Kijk Je Naar]

Alleji, on 25 November 2012 - 07:31 AM, said:

The article needs to get its basics straight: you can't buy ascended gear from the TP.

Daesu, on 25 November 2012 - 07:46 AM, said:

Yup they are account bound so you cant sell them in the TP, at least for now.  Currently the only way to get them is to grind FOTM.

It actually is correct. Ascended is made by throwing ridiculous amounts of high level mats (ecto's, T6 mats) into the Mystic Forge. And guess what, you can buy those mats from the TP.

[Var]

Waar Kijk Je Naar, on 25 November 2012 - 08:07 AM, said:

It actually is correct. Ascended is made by throwing ridiculous amounts of high level mats (ecto's, T6 mats) into the Mystic Forge. And guess what, you can buy those mats from the TP.

You still cannot buy it. It doesn't matter if you can buy 99.99% of something, if you can never get all of it then you haven't bought "it", you've bought a bunch of "other" things and are buying "into it" but you haven't bought the "thing". The article is full of sensationalism.

You cannot buy the rings. You cannot buy essence. You cannot buy and buy-ascend the fractal backbrace.

Edited by Var, 25 November 2012 - 08:16 AM.

[Alleji]

Waar Kijk Je Naar, on 25 November 2012 - 08:07 AM, said:

It actually is correct. Ascended is made by throwing ridiculous amounts of high level mats (ecto's, T6 mats) into the Mystic Forge. And guess what, you can buy those mats from the TP.

That's very different from buying ascended gear from the TP.

Ok, you can buy gold and buy the mats. You still can't make the gear without drops from Fractals.

[FoxBat]

I'm as pissed as anyone at Arenanet, but this article is horrible.

A big part of Lost Shores content has nothing to do with ascended grinding. Southsun cove and all those one-time events do not get you ascendeds, do not feature agony. They do try to sell you limited time weapon skins and random boxes in the cash shop, but those aren't P2W.

Nexon might have had some kind of hand in this whole "limited time, exclusive, one-shot events with horrible buginess and poor timing" etc, but they really didn't have to. GW1's microtrans model for quite a while was to put out new cosmetics along with new content, and at a limited-time sale offer on whatever the new thing was. GW2 is merely developing a model they had already played out with GW1, making money off of people returning for events, rather than playing endlessly under subscription fees. You might look to Nexon for how the randomized elements or occasional booster ended up, but everything else about it is thoroughly Arena.net style.

Now, as for the still significant Fractals of the Mists and its gear grind... yes, they did betray their anti-grind stance. But no, that isn't automatically the same as P2W.

- That it's "so hard to make gold" means nothing. if gold was raining down like plat in GW1, the market prices of crafting materials that you are "P2W"ing for would rise accordingly. You'd also see the gold price of gems rise commesurately, and you are more or less back where you started. The only possible question is how gold sinks affect casual players vs. farmers, but the mere presence of strong gold sinks itself is meaningless to the gem market.

- Alot of the FotM elements are account-bound. The mist essences are, the fractal essences and their resulting gifts, and most of the straight-out ascended drops are account bound too. Buying ascended is fairly difficult, particularly for the usual no-time can't-grind type that will dump money from their high-paying job into a game. If anything, this is preventing ascendeds from becoming "P2W." It is telling that the article author originally didn't even know that ascendeds themselves were not tradeable, and wrote the rant without having a clue about how they actually work.

- If P2W was Anet's plan, they are doing pretty badly at it. Gem prices are as high as ever and going up, which indicates players want cash shop stuff increasingly more than they want gold. They are making a ton more off all those limited-time cosmetic lotteries than people paying for power. It pretty much always has to be that way, because selling gems for gold is a meaningless zero-sum game to Anet, without gold grinders being enticed by the pretty shinies in the cash shop. Otherwise we end up with very low gem prices that fewer and fewer people are willing to sell for gold (and more turning to RMT sites for discounts), as happened in the early life of the game when not that many had full exotics.

In short, FotM is largely about keeping people *playing*, grinding away on a WoW-treadmill. It is likely in the hope that a more active hardcore community will lead to more overall sales directly or indirectly. That is selling out, but it is not P2W.

[Ritualist]

Alleji, on 25 November 2012 - 07:31 AM, said:

The article needs to get its basics straight: you can't buy ascended gear from the TP.

Which means they went back on another one of their promises - they said players will be able to invest either time or money to play this game. Now, vanity was always off-limits to people investing money, but power never was - you could simply throw money at A.Net and get the strongest gear.
Now time is the only way to get the best items in the game.

[Var]

FoxBat, on 25 November 2012 - 08:26 AM, said:

That is selling out, but it is not P2W.

Which really is baffling when, considering the turn out on Lost Shores, they can pull people back with these events (and given how many skins and mini were in the shop, they sold a lot of those boxes). They don't seem to gain anything from this grind introduction (nothing can be directly linked to the shop, everything is account bound). I honestly think they just did the same stupid mistake they did in GW1, trying to please too many people at once.

Its an error we're going to have to live with but its also an error they can fix by adding these nebulous "alternatives" to slamming my face into FotM.

[Wayshuba]

I think the current debate on the Ascended gear finally helped to put something in perspective for me.

First, I want to say that them introducing this gear did not change my opinion of the game at all, since the gear is currently only needed once you hit fractal level 10 and beyond. Not only that, it is minimal enough that it isn't currently required, or needed, for anything in PvE outside of the fractals.

However, based on the massive amount of negative feedback, the perspective I gained was this:

Western MMO markets (North America, Europe and Oceania) are NOT the same as Eastern (China, Japan and Korea mainly) markets. It seems the sub model is a much better model for Western and micro-transaction for Eastern. However, the two models are more than just introducing two different pay methods since micro-transactions require some kind of limitations in the game design to be successful.

I am of the belief that the business model is just as important as the game now a days. Unfortunately, with the move to F2P in the industry as a whole, this has caused many a company in Western markets to 'lose' their reputations to pursue this model. It seems the whole industry has turned into a cash at all costs approach and foresee that it will eventually kill this industry as a whole in Western markets if it continues much longer.

What ever happened to producing quality games, that people could be proud of, and making money by delivering customers a quality product?

[Daesu]

Waar Kijk Je Naar, on 25 November 2012 - 08:07 AM, said:

It actually is correct. Ascended is made by throwing ridiculous amounts of high level mats (ecto's, T6 mats) into the Mystic Forge. And guess what, you can buy those mats from the TP.

You still can't make Ascended gears without the vial of condensed mists essence and the only way to get that is to grind FOTM since it is also account bound.

End of the fourth paragraph in the article says:

Quote

...or pay to keep up by buying gems in the cash shop, converting them to gold, and then buying Ascended gear and infusions off the trading post.

You can't buy Ascended gear or infusions from the trading post, at least not at the moment.  So the article is inaccurate on this point.

Perhaps ArenaNet will allow Ascended gear to be traded after they have introduced other means of acquiring them besides through FOTM, but that is just speculation at this point in time.

Edited by Daesu, 25 November 2012 - 10:29 AM.

[Resolve]

Alleji, on 25 November 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

That's very different from buying ascended gear from the TP.

Ok, you can buy gold and buy the mats. You still can't make the gear without drops from Fractals.

Lol. It's really not that different at all. You'll be spending more time grinding or buying gold than getting the other component from drops.

[Dasryn]

welcome to corporate America boys and girls.  i dont know of a gaming company(or any company) that doesnt like to make money at the expense of us the players.

so before you go knocking at Nexon, how about that 25 dollar character server transfer fee that blizzard charges?  or the 15 dollar name change?  or the 30 dollar mounts in their store?

you guys are acting surprised.

well here's a SPOILER ALERT:  i predict that the next set of news will be of ANet founders leaving the company to start their own studio.

[sakura az]

Rickter, on 25 November 2012 - 03:14 PM, said:

well here's a SPOILER ALERT:  i predict that the next set of news will be of ANet founders leaving the company to start their own studio.

Little late on that one, 2 of the 3 left a long while ago to pursue other ventures.

[Shroomhead Fred]

Rickter, on 25 November 2012 - 03:14 PM, said:

well here's a SPOILER ALERT:  i predict that the next set of news will be of ANet founders leaving the company to start their own studio.

Why?  So they can sell out under a new name?

[Leyana]

This is old news and already being discussed here: http://www.guildwars...ares-of-ncsoft/. Nexon bought a controlling interest in NCSoft back in June. This article is an opinion piece and if you want to continue discussing this, take it up in that thread I linked.

Thanks