271 replies to this topic

[Arkham Creed]

raspberry jam, on 04 December 2012 - 01:04 PM, said:

-snipped to reduce wall-of-text syndrome-

Incoming wall of text.

I can see where you’re coming from of course, but I’d still have to disagree with your points. First I’ll quickly digress back to my GW1 build. Yes I did stick to one build mostly, but that is not the point I was making. I went through several, perhaps over a dozen, equally viable builds before settling on my Ignite Arrows > Splinter Weapon > Incendiary Arrows combo, and in fact even spent a while as a toucher in RA PvP. However the point is that once I had my preferred style I never had to change it or alter it. While it was true that you could play dozens of different specs and some missions required you plan ahead a bit and make build adjustments beforehand, there was no mid-combat tactical thinking or decision making. You defined a role for yourself and you stuck to it. The moment to moment gameplay was pretty static, regardless of how involved and diverse the preparation phase seemed to be.

That said your example about Sever Artery and Gash verses Jagged Bones and Gash is a pretty bad one. By the same logic the same type of gameplay can be achieved in GW2. I’ll cite an example for you. As a thief I could bring Smoke Screen and a shortbow for Cluster Bomb, intending to use the area stealth effect, or I could forgo the shortbow if I know the warrior in my party has a hammer. Or I could keep the shortbow and forgo Smoke Screen if the engineer uses a flamethrower and still have the same effect. It is literally the same system you just applauded from GW1; Sever Artery and/or Jagged Bones (the bleed condition) was the initiator, Gash is the finisher, and the Deep Wound condition was your resulting effect. It is the same system only you are using in environment effects rather than on character effects.

If I may be so bold, I think, based on your last post to me, your problem is the currently limited number of ways each player and profession have to build off of each other, the limited number of ways skill can interact. In short, our tool box is smaller. However you must consider that GW2 just came out, and GW1 had three expansions worth of additional skills to draw from, so of course its tool set will seem comparatively larger in hindsight. Further I’d be remiss not to bring up the massive balance issues caused by the GW1 system, or the vast number of overlapping skills (there were literally several skills in the game with the exact same effects and stats). And of course, if you don’t think GW1 had its own form of vertical progression via power creep in the skill system you are obviously living in denial.

Finally, while I would agree that granting players increased versatility and cross profession/player synergy would be greatly preferable to a direct statistical increase, it is still ultimately a numbers game. The core rules of the game are already in place, and expressed in simple math as everything within a digital environment has to be (Ones and zeros, remember?), so either way what we’re talking about is the manipulation of data. Vertical progression is simply making important numbers bigger, while horizontal progression is adding ancillary number to the equation to raise complexity (versatility in function).

The problem with this is that vertical progression is predictable, easy to develop, and can be strictly controlled post development. Horizontal progression takes longer to develop, is often underappreciated by the players, takes greater man-hours and budget for implementation and testing, and leads to more wildly unpredictable results post development making it nearly impossible to balance. And this inherent mathematical imbalance is what resulting in GW1 balance being an eternal uphill battle, and why even horizontal progression therein still had a clear vertical slant. Frankly, while I prefer Arena Net not take the path of least resistance here, I don’t begrudge them for doing so given the unfair time constraints they are forced to work under because of fan-boy bitching.

You have to admit that we’re not exactly giving them a lot of time to solve these problems, especially considering that when you get right down to it what most of the people here on guru and other such places are demanding is that they make future problems even harder to solve. By that I mean that horizontal progression is inherently more complex to program and balance, and more unpredictable as I’ve said. And this means that such issues in the future will take more work to resolve because of the more complex math we’ve demanded they use, and as such future content will be even harder to develop because of these interlocking and increasingly complex systems, leading to even more unforeseen issues needing to be resolved. In the end, I honestly don’t think the community realizes just what they are asking for, and what that entails.

We’re impatient because we don’t understand, and we don’t understand because we’re too impatient to consider all the details. As has been suggested before by myself and others; take a break, catch your breath, and come back later. No sense in stressing yourself and Arena Net out by continually complaining about problems that simply can’t be solved anytime soon. I didn’t say won’t, that implies Arena Net is slacking off, I said can’t. You’d be surprised how often the element of time is overlooked in discussions of research and development in any field.

Edited by Arkham Creed, 04 December 2012 - 03:59 PM.

[Robsy128]

raspberry jam, on 04 December 2012 - 02:56 PM, said:

Yes, exactly. That is why the comparison between GW1 FoW armor and GW2 dungeon armor is not accurate (not to mention the difference in prestige between them). A better comparison would be GW1 racial EotN armor vs. GW2 dungeon armor. Robsy didn't even play GW1 so he doesn't know what to compare to, so it's ok.

They do put in diminishing returns in order to slow people down, agreed, which is also what I said. If they removed it, I agree that people would probably complain about endgame because GW2 has very little enjoyable content (in my opinion). GW1 was in a similar situation, except that endgame content was actually enjoyable (in my opinion) (especially after the arrival of SF and the conversion of Tombs into a PvE dungeon). Going for FoW would of course entail grind (at least initially, unless you were a capable PvP player, in which case a couple of celestial sigils would buy you a suit), but it was a highly personal choice since it was all about wearing a specific armor skin. FoW didn't mean any sort of stats advantage whatsoever. The only comparable items in GW2 are legendary weapons, and they do not only confer an advantage over exotics, but are the only items ever guaranteed to be best-in-slot, meaning that you actually grind for something that is meaningful in terms of game mechanics.

I don't know where you got your pants on head definition of pay2win. Mine is: a situation where you can pay to, permanently or temporarily, elevate your efficiency within a nonstrict subset of a game, with the exclusion of paying for the right to access content (the last part is there because buying the game or paying a sub fee for it is not pay2win). Efficiency defined as the rate at which you progress towards your goals in the (nonstrict subset of) the game. Basically, if everyone else has to struggle with PvP matches until they get enough points to unlock skills, a skill unlock pack would be pay2win - for the subgame of unlocking PvP skills.
Even if that was not so, of course, the GW2 xp/karma/etc. boosts fulfills your definition exactly.

If you (or anyone else) were the only level 23 character and everyone else was level 80, there would not be a problem. Slow leveling is not equal to grind. In fact most people don't know what grind is, they think it has something to do with repetition of content... It does, but that's not the definition of it. Grind is things that you would normally not do, but that you do anyway, for the explicit reason of either accelerating vertical progression, or activating it (such as doing FotM for the ascended gear and infusions instead of for the challenge). That usually means repeating highly rewarding content over and over, such as the basically identical kill X of Y quests in WoW, the labyrinth aatxes in GW1, FotM in GW2, and so on.
Correct, I'm not having much fun in GW2 (I thought we already had established that).

Yes, there is a deeper reason for the mining animation. I already explained it to you. Comparing it with the walking animation says nothing, because the walking animation doesn't set the speed of walking (proven by that some characters seem to moonwalk and glide around quite a lot while walking).

Regarding that guy who invested another $20, you say you don't care about him... Well neither would I. Why would I care? He is not me. And that is, of course, entirely beside the point. Because the point is that he could be me, or rather, I could be him. Her. I could invest $20 on my level 1 character and turn it into a level 80 and be able to access the content that I want to access, not the content that ANet wants me to access. The $20 puts the choice into my hands. It buys me free of the work simulator that you "love" the feeling of - without realizing that it is designed to make you tell yourself that.

Regarding your first point, I was talking about the 'grind' required to get the prestige armours (in this instance, dungeon armours) in Guild Wars 2, not the level of the armours themselves. You say that there is nothing but grind in Guild Wars 2, yet I just proved that you have to grind in Guild Wars 1 in order to obtain the prestige gear anyway (this includes grinding for the EOTN armour as well). Of course, I don't play Guild Wars 1 according to you. You know what they say about assuming things, right?


But that's how it is in Guild Wars 2 as well. You farm/grind for the skin. Do you honestly think people would put on level 55 Twilight Arbor armour when they're level 80? Of course not. They have the option of going for that skin if they want it. They also get rewarded with money, which they can use to actually buy the best gear possible and then transmute the skin over. It doesn't entail any more grind than Guild Wars 1.

As for endgame content, GW1 had what?

• Go achievement hunting (which entailed getting elite skills, getting 100% map completion, redoing all of the campaigns in hard mode and PvP).
  
• Elite areas such as FoW and UW.
  
• Dungeons, which were added in Eye of the North.
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it was AB, in which case you were defending against the other side of players.

And GW2 has?

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Story mode and explorable mode dungeons (basically 4 paths per dungeon including story mode).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's WvW, in which case you are defending against the two other servers.

I agree, they need more elite areas like FoW and UW in Guild Wars 2 but aside from that, the endgame content is pretty much the same.


As for pay to win, here: http://www.urbandict...term=pay-to-win
Your definition isn't related to 'winning', it's related to being more efficient, so you should really change the title of the definition to: 'pay to be more efficient' rather than 'pay to win.'

Guild Wars 1 had no vertical progression, so your definition of grind is completely wrong and is pointed more towards Guild Wars 2 (or any other MMO) rather than a general explanation that can fit any instance in which it is used. Grind is simply repeating the same content over and over again; usually in the hopes of achieving some kind of reward, but not always. Since you don't do that in Guild Wars 2 to level up, you're not grinding. Perhaps you, personally, feel like that dynamic event feels exactly the same as the one you did a moment before, but that's just you. There are so many different things you can do to level up, and that has been proven by pretty much everyone who has got to level 80.

There is no deeper reason to the gathering animations. Seriously, it's all in your head. Animations in video games are just there to provide the player with some kind of visual feedback for what they input. For example: shooting your gun in halo plays the shooting animation. Using the hookshot in Zelda plays the firing animation, and so on. It's exactly the same in Guild Wars 2.

All video games are designed with the intention of putting players on a particular path. I don't see your argument. The only things that are unlocked at level 80 are the dungeons and the various PvE areas in the world, but since you go through them when levelling up anyway, I don't see the point in buying your way to level 80.

[Bryant Again]

Regarding the gathering animations: How would everyone feel if they made it when you canceled the gathering animation, it would give you all of the mats from the node? It'd be optional, of course !

Edited by Bryant Again, 04 December 2012 - 04:44 PM.

[BrettM]

Arkham Creed, on 04 December 2012 - 03:51 PM, said:

You have to admit that we’re not exactly giving them a lot of time to solve these problems

How much of that is our doing and how much is theirs? ANet is planning on dumping an expansion's-worth of content on us over the course of three or four months, beginning before the game was even three months old. Essentially they're creating new problems many times faster than the rate at which they can reasonably be expected to solve them, so they aren't giving themselves time.

New expansions tend to be universally game-altering, changing the way in which existing content is played. New content introduces new goals, possibly invalidating some of the original goals before the player has even had a chance to achieve them, and new ways of meeting those goals (skills, weapons, etc.) that can also be used in existing content. This leads to the possibility of unintended consequences, or even unanticipated exploits, that will require changes to the old content, giving them even more problems that need to be solved. This ambitious plan of rapid introductions of major amounts of content worries me.

[Arkham Creed]

BrettM, on 04 December 2012 - 06:37 PM, said:

How much of that is our doing and how much is theirs? ANet is planning on dumping an expansion's-worth of content on us over the course of three or four months, beginning before the game was even three months old. Essentially they're creating new problems many times faster than the rate at which they can reasonably be expected to solve them, so they aren't giving themselves time.

New expansions tend to be universally game-altering, changing the way in which existing content is played. New content introduces new goals, possibly invalidating some of the original goals before the player has even had a chance to achieve them, and new ways of meeting those goals (skills, weapons, etc.) that can also be used in existing content. This leads to the possibility of unintended consequences, or even unanticipated exploits, that will require changes to the old content, giving them even more problems that need to be solved. This ambitious plan of rapid introductions of major amounts of content worries me.

A valid point to be sure, but you have to consider a few things. Firstly; when a problem does show up we demand it be solved immediately. We do not even grant enough time to properly compile and analyze enough data to be sure what the problem actually is, instead instantly demanding on every forum even tangentially related to the game that the perceived problem be solved immediately, often before we ourselves are even sure there is a problem.

Secondly there is the issue of development expectations. It is no secret that the number one worry about a supposedly free-to-play title, never minding that GW2 is actually buy-to-play and thereby a different animal entirely, is that there won’t be any post release content updates. I agree that these updates should slow down a fair bit for the good of the game, but a part of me can’t help but believe this rapid content production is an effort to prove that Arena Net actually can produce post release content in the first place. As such you have to wonder how much of this hyper accelerated development cycle is really what they want, and how much is marketing demanding it to assuage these fears within the community and maintain/create interest in the game.

Finally there is the issue of grind. As I alluded to in a previous post even the best designed limited-grind game is at odds with grind-obsessed players. Again, if you truly want a grind-free, or at least a minimal-grind game the community will actually have to stop grinding first, otherwise you end up with the community breaking and exploiting content in order to consume it much faster than intended. This is what I feel to be the core of GW2’s recent problems; an ongoing effort to balance enough grind to maintain the intended content lifespan, with the community’s hypocritical rejection of grinding as a whole. And make no mistake it is hypocritical to complain about grind and demand an end to it, only to turn around and grind through content in order to complete it potentially months ahead of schedule and then complain about a lack of content and demand more.

Edited by Arkham Creed, 04 December 2012 - 09:20 PM.

[raspberry jam]

Arkham Creed, on 04 December 2012 - 03:51 PM, said:

Incoming wall of text.

I can see where you’re coming from of course, but I’d still have to disagree with your points. First I’ll quickly digress back to my GW1 build. Yes I did stick to one build mostly, but that is not the point I was making. I went through several, perhaps over a dozen, equally viable builds before settling on my Ignite Arrows > Splinter Weapon > Incendiary Arrows combo, and in fact even spent a while as a toucher in RA PvP. However the point is that once I had my preferred style I never had to change it or alter it. While it was true that you could play dozens of different specs and some missions required you plan ahead a bit and make build adjustments beforehand, there was no mid-combat tactical thinking or decision making. You defined a role for yourself and you stuck to it. The moment to moment gameplay was pretty static, regardless of how involved and diverse the preparation phase seemed to be.

That said your example about Sever Artery and Gash verses Jagged Bones and Gash is a pretty bad one. By the same logic the same type of gameplay can be achieved in GW2. I’ll cite an example for you. As a thief I could bring Smoke Screen and a shortbow for Cluster Bomb, intending to use the area stealth effect, or I could forgo the shortbow if I know the warrior in my party has a hammer. Or I could keep the shortbow and forgo Smoke Screen if the engineer uses a flamethrower and still have the same effect. It is literally the same system you just applauded from GW1; Sever Artery and/or Jagged Bones (the bleed condition) was the initiator, Gash is the finisher, and the Deep Wound condition was your resulting effect. It is the same system only you are using in environment effects rather than on character effects.

If I may be so bold, I think, based on your last post to me, your problem is the currently limited number of ways each player and profession have to build off of each other, the limited number of ways skill can interact. In short, our tool box is smaller. However you must consider that GW2 just came out, and GW1 had three expansions worth of additional skills to draw from, so of course its tool set will seem comparatively larger in hindsight. Further I’d be remiss not to bring up the massive balance issues caused by the GW1 system, or the vast number of overlapping skills (there were literally several skills in the game with the exact same effects and stats). And of course, if you don’t think GW1 had its own form of vertical progression via power creep in the skill system you are obviously living in denial.

Finally, while I would agree that granting players increased versatility and cross profession/player synergy would be greatly preferable to a direct statistical increase, it is still ultimately a numbers game. The core rules of the game are already in place, and expressed in simple math as everything within a digital environment has to be (Ones and zeros, remember?), so either way what we’re talking about is the manipulation of data. Vertical progression is simply making important numbers bigger, while horizontal progression is adding ancillary number to the equation to raise complexity (versatility in function).

The problem with this is that vertical progression is predictable, easy to develop, and can be strictly controlled post development. Horizontal progression takes longer to develop, is often underappreciated by the players, takes greater man-hours and budget for implementation and testing, and leads to more wildly unpredictable results post development making it nearly impossible to balance. And this inherent mathematical imbalance is what resulting in GW1 balance being an eternal uphill battle, and why even horizontal progression therein still had a clear vertical slant. Frankly, while I prefer Arena Net not take the path of least resistance here, I don’t begrudge them for doing so given the unfair time constraints they are forced to work under because of fan-boy bitching.

You have to admit that we’re not exactly giving them a lot of time to solve these problems, especially considering that when you get right down to it what most of the people here on guru and other such places are demanding is that they make future problems even harder to solve. By that I mean that horizontal progression is inherently more complex to program and balance, and more unpredictable as I’ve said. And this means that such issues in the future will take more work to resolve because of the more complex math we’ve demanded they use, and as such future content will be even harder to develop because of these interlocking and increasingly complex systems, leading to even more unforeseen issues needing to be resolved. In the end, I honestly don’t think the community realizes just what they are asking for, and what that entails.

We’re impatient because we don’t understand, and we don’t understand because we’re too impatient to consider all the details. As has been suggested before by myself and others; take a break, catch your breath, and come back later. No sense in stressing yourself and Arena Net out by continually complaining about problems that simply can’t be solved anytime soon. I didn’t say won’t, that implies Arena Net is slacking off, I said can’t. You’d be surprised how often the element of time is overlooked in discussions of research and development in any field.

Man what are you doing. If you fire an arrow through that you will get this -------->
LOL

Damn, that's a neat combo. Ignite/Splinter/Incendary, I mean. However, I disagree that there was no mid-combat tactical decision making.You had to make new decisions all the time... That charr warrior just started running for your monk, will you ignore him or will you cripple him? Maybe you didn't bring a snare; the amount of decisions available to you were limited by your build. In other words, if you made a versatile, flexible build, you had all the decision making you'd want. If you design a build that is only a DPS machine and nothing else, you can't blame the game on that. On top of that, things like positioning, correct pulling, using the environment etc. are tactical decisions. Battles could look very different depending on just one character standing a bit more out of the way of the enemies.
While you are right that you built a role that you had to stick to (even if that role could be flexible), the depth of tactical decision making in GW1 can only be understood if you consider the team, and what effects your actions has on it. I'd call such decisions more actually tactical that ones that are about deciding what skill to use.

Exactly, in GW2 you could give up the shortbow. Which of course means that you also forego all the other shortbow skills, and possibly need to reset your traits (not necessarily in this example, but in other ones). In your example, that is not a great loss because the shortbow was brought only for Cluster Bomb. But that in turn is a waste of role space - that thief could fulfill two entirely different primary roles in the team by using both weapon sets fully. In other words, the thief using the stealth provided by the hammer warrior should be the standard case whenever you have a hammer warrior in the team (you can switch weapons at any time), while a GW1 necro using Jagged Bones instead of a warrior using Sever Artery took actual communication and setup time.

I agree, the toolbox in GW2 is smaller. By design, too. Is this a good idea? I'd say, no. Yes, GW1 got bloated. Yes, it had balance issues. Not so many as you'd think, though... Most were easy to solve, but were not solved. Why? To hand new players a "stick in the grass" so that they can get going quickly? Absolutely not, because most of the issues were due to experienced players combining skills across campaigns, and usually not involving early-game skills. Sales trick? Maybe, but possibly not. Several of the issues stemmed from things that were hanging above our heads already in Prophecies, but that didn't truly fall on us until later on (SR and Expertise would be the obvious examples).

IMO, ANet made three mistakes in GW1.

1. Two new professions in the two first expansions. What were they thinking? Six professions was already one too many. The dual classing system essentially meant that GW1 started out with no less than 30 classes, cross connected so that skill changes to one class affected 9 others. Sounds like a balancing nightmare? The case with 4 more professions was 90 classes, each one connected to 18 others! The balancing of the game would increasingly look like an infinitely tangled up ball of string. A better solution would be, if the number of attributes in the game needed to be expanded, to implement additional attributes in existing professions. Horizontal progression is all good, but it's only balanced if there are limits to it, forcing the player to make opportunity-cost choices. If you increase the amount of profession while not maintaining those limits, the opportunity cost will decrease even without power creep. Which brings us to...

2. Power creep combos together with glued-on-bar skills. Power creep was absolutely present in GW1, though I would not call it vertical progression. Power creep shuts down previously viable strategies, just like vertical progression does, but without it being a silly reward effect. Instead, you power creeped because you paid for the expansion, not because you grinded (ground?) some more. Anyway, it was disastrous to some professions. I remember playing an elementalist in Prophecies - I provided both damage and midline control/support (the "new trinity" of GW2 was already present in GW1, of course). By the time I finished Nightfall, that elementalist was reduced to being a Searing Flames/Glowing Gaze spammer. Sure, I did more damage, and possibly provided more value to the team. But gameplay was changed from watching the battlefield and responding to its situation to merely running a skill rotation, because my bar had only damage skills, energy management, and a rez on it. Other professions were less affected; some (such as warrior) actually had their number of viable moves increased. Again, this was possible to do with all professions, but the sheer number of classes (see point 1) made it impossible to do so within a reasonable time. Obvious solution is obvious, but would require ANet to solve point 1 as suggested above.

3. Shifting from PvP focus to PvE focus. GW1 was from the start a PvE-to-PvP game, as can even be seen in some Prophecies missions (and actually, I'd *ing LOVE to see a PvP version of Aurora Glade - and I don't mean GvG flag running because that's just one point to run to). One last attempt was made with Factions, but once ANet realized that they could make $$$ on the PvE crowd, there was no going back. Not sure if that happened before or after Factions release, but despite Hero Battles (lol), Nightfall was definitely more PvE oriented. However, the strength of GW1 PvE was that it was so... PvP-like. There was no direct aggro management, for example. Instead, you had to manage aggro by tricking the (quite primitive) AI. That was easy, but it still shaped the game to be very different from other MMOs (or MMO-likes). Obvious solution is obvious here too: keep the focus of the design principles on PvP, improve the PvE AI to make it more "human-like" (though not necessarily smarter, as that would make the game more difficult).

This is not even mentioning minor mistakes like waiting three damn years to nerf Soul Reaping. SR was more of a symptom than a big fundamental mistake.

Horizontal progress isn't just about "adding ancillary numbers" to some equation. If you have a blue +1 and a green +1, adding a red +1 just means that you have another number, that you're a bit stronger - which is vertical progression! Horizontal progression is all about adding that red +1 while telling the player that he can only pick two of the three. Juggling the available options within a limited space is what it is all about (and that is also the reason why reversible choices is so vital to horizontal-progression games with a lifespan this long; you don't want to be *ed over because of some random choice made two years ago). In other words, what makes horizontal progression less (and in the same way, actually, more) of a numbers game is that it relies more on what choices the player makes instead of what choices the player can make (what choices he has "earned").

Does that make horizontal progression more unpredictable? Hell yes, it does. That's why we saw stuff like IWAY or droks runners or any other amount of stuff that the devs didn't think of at all. However, that is a good thing. The mentioned IWAY, for example, did become the "stick in the grass" for many PvP players (including myself. I'm R11 now). Droks runs was an excellent way of getting an alt to level 20 areas quickly (no big deal since you had already played the storyline with your main). And so on. At the same time, these unpredictable things never actually ruined the game - until the above mentioned mistakes were made. For some reason, ANet decided to not learn a single thing from their GW1 mistakes. Instead, GW2 has:

1. Too many *ing classes. At least they are not cross connected, but having that many fixed classes instead create a situation where the field of expertise of each class becomes either very narrow, or nonexistent. Having wide-capability classes is all fine, but no more than five are ever needed.

2. Glued-on-bar skills provided by your weapon. Want to play your greatsword warrior in a different way? Then equip the longbow. Oh wait now it's not a GS warrior anymore.

3. Massive PvE focus, including having fear skills in PvP lol.

Anyway. I think that ANet can make a better game than this, I think they can improve GW2 despite its fundamental flaws. That's how much I believe in them. Probably a bigger fan than you are, then... And yes, it does take time. It also takes motivation, though. And as long as we calmly play on and not raise all hell about the problems, ANet aren't even going to start thinking about doing anything whatsoever about them!

[raspberry jam]

Robsy128, on 04 December 2012 - 04:37 PM, said:

Regarding your first point, I was talking about the 'grind' required to get the prestige armours (in this instance, dungeon armours) in Guild Wars 2, not the level of the armours themselves. You say that there is nothing but grind in Guild Wars 2, yet I just proved that you have to grind in Guild Wars 1 in order to obtain the prestige gear anyway (this includes grinding for the EOTN armour as well). Of course, I don't play Guild Wars 1 according to you. You know what they say about assuming things, right?


But that's how it is in Guild Wars 2 as well. You farm/grind for the skin. Do you honestly think people would put on level 55 Twilight Arbor armour when they're level 80? Of course not. They have the option of going for that skin if they want it. They also get rewarded with money, which they can use to actually buy the best gear possible and then transmute the skin over. It doesn't entail any more grind than Guild Wars 1.

As for endgame content, GW1 had what?

• Go achievement hunting (which entailed getting elite skills, getting 100% map completion, redoing all of the campaigns in hard mode and PvP).
  
• Elite areas such as FoW and UW.
  
• Dungeons, which were added in Eye of the North.
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it was AB, in which case you were defending against the other side of players.

And GW2 has?

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Story mode and explorable mode dungeons (basically 4 paths per dungeon including story mode).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's WvW, in which case you are defending against the two other servers.

I agree, they need more elite areas like FoW and UW in Guild Wars 2 but aside from that, the endgame content is pretty much the same.


As for pay to win, here: http://www.urbandict...term=pay-to-win
Your definition isn't related to 'winning', it's related to being more efficient, so you should really change the title of the definition to: 'pay to be more efficient' rather than 'pay to win.'

Guild Wars 1 had no vertical progression, so your definition of grind is completely wrong and is pointed more towards Guild Wars 2 (or any other MMO) rather than a general explanation that can fit any instance in which it is used. Grind is simply repeating the same content over and over again; usually in the hopes of achieving some kind of reward, but not always. Since you don't do that in Guild Wars 2 to level up, you're not grinding. Perhaps you, personally, feel like that dynamic event feels exactly the same as the one you did a moment before, but that's just you. There are so many different things you can do to level up, and that has been proven by pretty much everyone who has got to level 80.

There is no deeper reason to the gathering animations. Seriously, it's all in your head. Animations in video games are just there to provide the player with some kind of visual feedback for what they input. For example: shooting your gun in halo plays the shooting animation. Using the hookshot in Zelda plays the firing animation, and so on. It's exactly the same in Guild Wars 2.

All video games are designed with the intention of putting players on a particular path. I don't see your argument. The only things that are unlocked at level 80 are the dungeons and the various PvE areas in the world, but since you go through them when levelling up anyway, I don't see the point in buying your way to level 80.

But what would be your point in grinding for those armors? They're just cosmetics. There are cosmetics in GW2 too, but in GW2 you have to grind for non-cosmetics as well. And yes, it entails more grind than in GW1.

Competing for recognition, which is the same as getting cosmetics/titles for recognition. Or you could get either cosmetics, achievements/titles, or PvP success for yourself. This is the same in both games, but the process of doing so is more fun in GW1. Certainly, the PvP is (was) superior in most respects (gameplay and surrounding structure, such as ladders, was superior in GW1. GW2 has superior... graphics).

Anyway, I first thought that pretending that Sorrow's Furnace and Tombs were not dungeons just because the name "dungeon" was introduced in EotN was as ridiculous as you were ever going to get, but then you linked me to Urban Dictionary to make a point. What's next? Referencing 4chan maybe? How about taking arguments from that pony cartoon show?
Anyway, here ya go.

http://yourlogicalfa...al-to-authority

You used the opinion or position of an authority figure, or institution of authority, in place of an actual argument.

It is important to note with this fallacy that authorities in given fields may very well have valid arguments, and that one should not dismiss another's experience and expertise. To form an argument, however, one must defend it on its merits i.e. know why the person in authority holds the particular position that they do. It is, of course, entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not.

This would, of course, hold extra true about a website where anyone can post their deluded explanations of any words whatsoever.

Pay2win does not mean pay to actually win. In that case, you'd fork over cash, and then a victory screen would pop up, and that'd be that. Also, being more efficient in a game is highly related to winning that game. Basically, I'm right and several of the suggestions on the page you linked to support my definition.

GW1 had vertical progression. You obviously didn't play it: not only did it have 20 levels, it also had titles that affected gameplay mechanics, including quite powerful skills tied to those titles. Those things are vertical progression. Do you even know what we are talking about in this thread?

No, the mining animations are there for a purpose. The animations you mention, such as gun-shooting animations, are also there for the a purpose, but not the same one. Just like the walking animation, the gunfire animation does not slow down gameplay: your rate of refire is limited for balance reasons, and is unrelated to the animation (also, there's a lot of games where the actual muzzle flashes etc. doesn't even correspond to each bullet being fired!). The mining animation actually breaks the flow of gameplay and slows you down.

The point of buying level 80 (not that I'd do it, but if I would) would be to instantly unlock access to all that content without having to level up first. Simply walking to a certain location is much faster than leveling up until you reach it "in the way that the devs intended". Don't you agree?

Bryant Again, on 04 December 2012 - 04:44 PM, said:

Regarding the gathering animations: How would everyone feel if they made it when you canceled the gathering animation, it would give you all of the mats from the node? It'd be optional, of course !

That'd be cool

Especially if it would save me some uses of the gathering tool.

[Robsy128]

raspberry jam, on 06 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

But what would be your point in grinding for those armors? They're just cosmetics. There are cosmetics in GW2 too, but in GW2 you have to grind for non-cosmetics as well. And yes, it entails more grind than in GW1.

Competing for recognition, which is the same as getting cosmetics/titles for recognition. Or you could get either cosmetics, achievements/titles, or PvP success for yourself. This is the same in both games, but the process of doing so is more fun in GW1 in my opinion). Certainly, the PvP is (was) superior in most respects (gameplay and surrounding structure, such as ladders, was superior in GW1. GW2 has superior... graphics).

Anyway, I first thought that pretending that Sorrow's Furnace and Tombs were not dungeons just because the name "dungeon" was introduced in EotN was as ridiculous as you were ever going to get, but then you linked me to Urban Dictionary to make a point. What's next? Referencing 4chan maybe? How about taking arguments from that pony cartoon show?
Anyway, here ya go.

http://yourlogicalfa...al-to-authority

You used the opinion or position of an authority figure, or institution of authority, in place of an actual argument.

It is important to note with this fallacy that authorities in given fields may very well have valid arguments, and that one should not dismiss another's experience and expertise. To form an argument, however, one must defend it on its merits i.e. know why the person in authority holds the particular position that they do. It is, of course, entirely possible that the opinion of a person or institution of authority is wrong; therefore the authority that such a person or institution holds does not have any intrinsic bearing upon whether their claims are true or not.

This would, of course, hold extra true about a website where anyone can post their deluded explanations of any words whatsoever.

Pay2win does not mean pay to actually win. In that case, you'd fork over cash, and then a victory screen would pop up, and that'd be that. Also, being more efficient in a game is highly related to winning that game. Basically, I'm right and several of the suggestions on the page you linked to support my definition.

GW1 had vertical progression. You obviously didn't play it: not only did it have 20 levels, it also had titles that affected gameplay mechanics, including quite powerful skills tied to those titles. Those things are vertical progression.

No, the mining animations are there for a purpose. The animations you mention, such as gun-shooting animations, are also there for the a purpose, but not the same one. Just like the walking animation, the gunfire animation does not slow down gameplay: your rate of refire is limited for balance reasons, and is unrelated to the animation (also, there's a lot of games where the actual muzzle flashes etc. doesn't even correspond to each bullet being fired!). The mining animation actually breaks the flow of gameplay and slows you down.

The point of buying level 80 (not that I'd do it, but if I would) would be to instantly unlock access to all that content without having to level up first. Simply walking to a certain location is much faster than leveling up until you reach it "in the way that the devs intended". Don't you agree?

... No... you have to grind for cosmetics. Non-cosmetics are easy to obtain. Exotic gear can be obtained as soon as you reach level 80. You've proved nothing to say otherwise, and no, ascended gear doesn't count at the moment as it's in the process of being changed. We can only discuss it when Arenanet have supposedly 'fixed' it.

You really should start using that phrase more rather than spouting everything as fact. You also completely missed the point I was making. Strawman argument says hello

Did I say Sorrow's Furnace and Tombs were not dungeons? No. I actually completely forgot about them when writing that post.

Clearly you would rather attack the small things I say rather than the actual argument which I took the time to write out. I only used Urban Dictionary as 'pay to win' is not in any English dictionary. I guess you don't look up words or phrases often enough to know that, though. Considering Urban Dictionary has a voting system, and there were more votes up on the definition than down votes (quite a considerable difference when you look at it, actually), I'd take that as a very good definition. I have no idea where you get yours from. All I can say is that it's wrong.

We are talking about the mistakes Arenanet made/admitted. Fair enough with the vertical progression in Guild Wars 1 - I forgot that some titles affected some PvE skills, thus making them quite powerful with each rank you got. And yes, I did play Guild Wars 1. I don't know why you keep insisting I didn't. So I forgot a few things. I haven't played the game in about 8 months. Why would I? It's boring and dead now anyway.

Yes, the mining animations are there for a purpose - to show you that your character is mining.And actually, gathering items speeds you up because you get exp for it (quite a bit as well per node). It takes you, what? 5 seconds to mine/gather? It takes about 10-15 seconds to kill a mob which would give you the same amount of exp. I can't see how it slows you down at all. Maybe you just don't like gathering.

Sure, buying your way to level 80 would be faster and you could access the content you wanted to access faster, but you'd miss out on 9/10s of the game. If you did go back and explore the entire world and do all of the PvE content, then you just wasted your money getting to level 80 because you could have seen it all and done it all which would have got you to level 80 anyway. Personally, I'd much rather level up and look forward to the various pieces of content that awaited me in the future rather than buying my way to it. If you just buy your way to everything then what's the point in even playing the game?

[BrettM]

raspberry jam, on 06 December 2012 - 01:44 PM, said:

The mining animation actually breaks the flow of gameplay and slows you down.

Even worse is not having a "take all" option but having to individually click on each item gathered in a cycle. And repeat if the node can be used more than once. And having to wait out a full cycle of animation even if the repeated use only yields one extra item. Sports have penalties for "delay of game", and I sometimes wish I could apply them to game developers who do things like this.

[raspberry jam]

Robsy128, on 06 December 2012 - 02:22 PM, said:

... No... you have to grind for cosmetics. Non-cosmetics are easy to obtain. Exotic gear can be obtained as soon as you reach level 80. You've proved nothing to say otherwise, and no, ascended gear doesn't count at the moment as it's in the process of being changed. We can only discuss it when Arenanet have supposedly 'fixed' it.

You really should start using that phrase more rather than spouting everything as fact. You also completely missed the point I was making. Strawman argument says hello

Did I say Sorrow's Furnace and Tombs were not dungeons? No. I actually completely forgot about them when writing that post.

Clearly you would rather attack the small things I say rather than the actual argument which I took the time to write out. I only used Urban Dictionary as 'pay to win' is not in any English dictionary. I guess you don't look up words or phrases often enough to know that, though. Considering Urban Dictionary has a voting system, and there were more votes up on the definition than down votes (quite a considerable difference when you look at it, actually), I'd take that as a very good definition. I have no idea where you get yours from. All I can say is that it's wrong.

We are talking about the mistakes Arenanet made/admitted. Fair enough with the vertical progression in Guild Wars 1 - I forgot that some titles affected some PvE skills, thus making them quite powerful with each rank you got. And yes, I did play Guild Wars 1. I don't know why you keep insisting I didn't. So I forgot a few things. I haven't played the game in about 8 months. Why would I? It's boring and dead now anyway.

Yes, the mining animations are there for a purpose - to show you that your character is mining.And actually, gathering items speeds you up because you get exp for it (quite a bit as well per node). It takes you, what? 5 seconds to mine/gather? It takes about 10-15 seconds to kill a mob which would give you the same amount of exp. I can't see how it slows you down at all. Maybe you just don't like gathering.

Sure, buying your way to level 80 would be faster and you could access the content you wanted to access faster, but you'd miss out on 9/10s of the game. If you did go back and explore the entire world and do all of the PvE content, then you just wasted your money getting to level 80 because you could have seen it all and done it all which would have got you to level 80 anyway. Personally, I'd much rather level up and look forward to the various pieces of content that awaited me in the future rather than buying my way to it. If you just buy your way to everything then what's the point in even playing the game?

But reaching level 80 is a grind. Hell, even unlocking your weapon skills is grindy. Easy, yes, quick, yes, but grindy.

I use the phrase "in my opinion" when I'm talking about my opinion. "Fun" however, is not a question of opinion, but about enjoyment. Something is either enjoyable or not, or more or less enjoyable, objectively - but differently for different people. If something is fun for you, the fact that it is fun for you is a completely objective fact. Naturally, since I'm a complete egoist, when I use the word "fun", I mean fun for me. It is not my "opinion" that X is fun for me, it is a fact.
You're free to hold opinions about your own sense of fun, but it would serve you well to actually find out what you think is fun and not.

I didn't miss your point: your point was that the two games offered basically the same things. I ignored the point since more or less every MMO out there offers the same things. You can m.. in fact let's do it.

GW2 has:

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Story mode and explorable mode dungeons (basically 4 paths per dungeon including story mode).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's WvW, in which case you are defending against the two other servers.

WoW has:

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Normal mode and heroic mode dungeons (basically different ways of playing dungeons even though it's not, just like GW2).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's BGs, in which case you are fighting against other servers.

Let's not stop there. Minecraft has:

• Achievement hunting
  
• Peaceful mode and survival mode, plus you can find dungeon like things
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear (diamond armors are piiiiiiimp).
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP (well, sort of)

Your list argument can basically be used to claim that GW2 is a WoW clone that plays like Minecraft. It totally ignores all the differences of these games and thus it is a worthless argument.

Eeeeeh... Yes, you actually did say that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon, since you said that dungeons were introduced in EotN.

Of course English dictionaries don't have the definition of pay2win... It's a jargon/slang expression. You say that my definition is wrong, what do you base that on? And what is your definition? Please post it here. Remember to make a full definition, or I'll post more links to th... Oh I almost forgot.

You said that Urban Dictionary had a voting system.

http://yourlogicalfa...s.com/bandwagon

You appealed to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.

The flaw in this argument is that the popularity of an idea has absolutely no bearing on its validity.
If it did, then the Earth would have made itself flat for most of history to accommodate people's popular belief.

I love that site. Don't you?

No, the purpose of the mining animation is to break up the flow of the game. It also makes you focus on the actual items and xp you get - because why else would you stop playing such a beautiful and amazing (lol) game for the several seconds it takes to harvest a node?
The "speed up" you mention isn't even related to anything in the game world, it is purely about manipulation of numbers. You don't even realize this because you already swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker, but the fact is that if you consider the rate by which you obtain xp as your "speed" in the game, you are no longer placing the gameplay experience as primary.

In which way did I miss out on 9/10 of the game by buying my way to 80? Is there some special significance to being level, for example, 13? GW2 downscales its high level characters, so that when I'm in a level 10 area I'll be like level 15 or something - which someone who leveled up "normally" easily could be in that same area. The difference between me and him is that I can pick and choose what I want to see and what I want to skip. So how did I miss out on anything whatsoever, apart from the doubtful pleasure of getting brutally killed because I accidentally entered a level 20 area when I was level 6?

Also if the content is worth playing, why would you rather look forward to it than actually be playing it?

[Robsy128]

raspberry jam, on 06 December 2012 - 02:56 PM, said:

But reaching level 80 is a grind. Hell, even unlocking your weapon skills is grindy. Easy, yes, quick, yes, but grindy.

I use the phrase "in my opinion" when I'm talking about my opinion. "Fun" however, is not a question of opinion, but about enjoyment. Something is either enjoyable or not, or more or less enjoyable, objectively - but differently for different people. If something is fun for you, the fact that it is fun for you is a completely objective fact. Naturally, since I'm a complete egoist, when I use the word "fun", I mean fun for me. It is not my "opinion" that X is fun for me, it is a fact.
You're free to hold opinions about your own sense of fun, but it would serve you well to actually find out what you think is fun and not.

I didn't miss your point: your point was that the two games offered basically the same things. I ignored the point since more or less every MMO out there offers the same things. You can m.. in fact let's do it.

GW2 has:

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Story mode and explorable mode dungeons (basically 4 paths per dungeon including story mode).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's WvW, in which case you are defending against the two other servers.

WoW has:

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• Normal mode and heroic mode dungeons (basically different ways of playing dungeons even though it's not, just like GW2).
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP for... recognition? Unless it's BGs, in which case you are fighting against other servers.

Let's not stop there. Minecraft has:

• Achievement hunting
  
• Peaceful mode and survival mode, plus you can find dungeon like things
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear (diamond armors are piiiiiiimp).
  
• Crafting.
  
• Competing in PvP (well, sort of)

Your list argument can basically be used to claim that GW2 is a WoW clone that plays like Minecraft. It totally ignores all the differences of these games and thus it is a worthless argument.

Eeeeeh... Yes, you actually did say that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon, since you said that dungeons were introduced in EotN.

Of course English dictionaries don't have the definition of pay2win... It's a jargon/slang expression. You say that my definition is wrong, what do you base that on? And what is your definition? Please post it here. Remember to make a full definition, or I'll post more links to th... Oh I almost forgot.

You said that Urban Dictionary had a voting system.

http://yourlogicalfa...s.com/bandwagon

You appealed to popularity or the fact that many people do something as an attempted form of validation.

The flaw in this argument is that the popularity of an idea has absolutely no bearing on its validity.
If it did, then the Earth would have made itself flat for most of history to accommodate people's popular belief.

I love that site. Don't you?

No, the purpose of the mining animation is to break up the flow of the game. It also makes you focus on the actual items and xp you get - because why else would you stop playing such a beautiful and amazing (lol) game for the several seconds it takes to harvest a node?
The "speed up" you mention isn't even related to anything in the game world, it is purely about manipulation of numbers. You don't even realize this because you already swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker, but the fact is that if you consider the rate by which you obtain xp as your "speed" in the game, you are no longer placing the gameplay experience as primary.

In which way did I miss out on 9/10 of the game by buying my way to 80? Is there some special significance to being level, for example, 13? GW2 downscales its high level characters, so that when I'm in a level 10 area I'll be like level 15 or something - which someone who leveled up "normally" easily could be in that same area. The difference between me and him is that I can pick and choose what I want to see and what I want to skip. So how did I miss out on anything whatsoever, apart from the doubtful pleasure of getting brutally killed because I accidentally entered a level 20 area when I was level 6?

Also if the content is worth playing, why would you rather look forward to it than actually be playing it?

Easy and quick are the opposites of grind.

Fun is a matter of opinion. It's my opinion that skiing is fun. It's somebody else's opinion that skiing is not fun.

So we can conclude that Guild Wars 2 offers as much endgame content as GW1, WoW and Minecraft; which was my point in the first place.

I made a mistake haha. I never directly said that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon - I admitted that I completely forgot about it. Next time, don't read into it so much

Your definition doesn't agree with the definition everyone else agrees on. I posted the accepted definition before. Considering many people gather together to create definitions of things anyway, I can safely say that Urban Dictionary has the correct definition of 'pay to win'.

Why would you stop playing the game to gather some materials?
Well, first of all, you're not stopping the game. You're still playing because gathering is a part of the game. Gathering materials also opens up the possibility of crafting - another part of the game which you now have access to. I could understand if the game was purely hack n' slash and then suddenly a crafting window pops up in the middle of the screen. Yes, that would stop the flow of the game. But an MMO is different. There are so many things you can do. Perhaps crafting is the game for some. Maybe they don't actually do any personal storyline or PvE content at all (aside from gathering materials to craft).

Well if you paid your way to 80, you clearly didn't want to explore the lower level areas for whatever reason. Again, you're just buying time. What's the point in buying your way to level 80 when you're just going to go back to the level 1 area anyway and experience the content there? Sure, you can then hop from the level 1 area to the level 40 area to do a dragon fight, but the person levelling up would probably experience much more content because they want to level up (i.e. complete maps, do a lot of dynamic events, etc).

[Arkham Creed]

raspberry jam, on 06 December 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

-snip-

Well I would hardly say that I continue playing without saying anything, as I said am currently on break from the game, and would argue that you could in theory raise all the hell you want and never be noticed because there is no definable decline in the concurrency numbers. That said you and I have a clear difference of opinion on how to get Arena Net motivated to make changes. I don’t know about your life experiences, but I’ve personally found that raising your voice get attention, not results. It is better to use a calm, rational argument that subtly guides your opponent to reaching the conclusion that they’ve done something wrong on their own. You can’t just tell them they did something stupid, and you certainly can’t scream it from the rooftops. That just makes people defensive, and defensive people are receptive to neither criticism nor suggestions.

To that end I’ve actually posted a few threads on the official forums, trying to outline my complaints calmly and clearly, giving lots of details and suggestions, but I don’t rant nor throw what my fiancée likes to call a “bitch fit.” Those never work out as well as you would like. Be passionate, not offensive. A fine line to walk and one easy to stumble over.

Now on to your points. I’d have to say I actually agree with a lot of it, however I completely disagree with the comments about the number of classes. The simple fact is that I’ve never been able to find a class I truly liked in any MMO. Champions Online came close with its archetype mixing, before the free-to-play fiasco, but that was about it. I settled for the ranger in GW1 because of the lack of a better option, and while I like the engineer here I  am still just settling for it, rather than truly wanting to play it. In order to appeal to as many players as they can, and truly let players play how they want, you need as many different classes, or I should say play styles and themes, as possible, and in that regard I’d say that neither GW1 nor GW2 has enough.

Further when it comes to the “glued on” weapon skills, I actually like these feature and see both the logic and realism within the world of the game, and why Arena Net chose to do it for their own benefit. To be frank, you wouldn’t use the same tactics with a longbow as a greatsword, primarily because a greatsword doesn’t shoot projectiles. And if it does I’d say you’re in the wrong game Link. Likewise a greatsword isn’t the right kind of weapon for trying to slam the ground and make a shockwave. You try that and you’ll just slam the ground and get your sword stuck. But putting snide comments aside, perhaps a compromise is in order. Perhaps weapon should have fewer skills directly tied to them. Perhaps….1-3 are weapon skills, 4-5 are “general” attack skills, and then 6 can stay the healing skill, 7-9 utility, and 0 being the elite.

Keeps the same internal logic within the game world, but gives a more modular design and allows more flexibility in your offense. Of course it won’t happen because the game is already made and I don’t see them making that big a change to fundamental systems post-release, but hey, theory crafting is all just theory anyway.

[raspberry jam]

Robsy128, on 06 December 2012 - 05:48 PM, said:

Easy and quick are the opposites of grind.

Fun is a matter of opinion. It's my opinion that skiing is fun. It's somebody else's opinion that skiing is not fun.

So we can conclude that Guild Wars 2 offers as much endgame content as GW1, WoW and Minecraft; which was my point in the first place.

I made a mistake haha. I never directly said that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon - I admitted that I completely forgot about it. Next time, don't read into it so much

Your definition doesn't agree with the definition everyone else agrees on. I posted the accepted definition before. Considering many people gather together to create definitions of things anyway, I can safely say that Urban Dictionary has the correct definition of 'pay to win'.

Why would you stop playing the game to gather some materials?
Well, first of all, you're not stopping the game. You're still playing because gathering is a part of the game. Gathering materials also opens up the possibility of crafting - another part of the game which you now have access to. I could understand if the game was purely hack n' slash and then suddenly a crafting window pops up in the middle of the screen. Yes, that would stop the flow of the game. But an MMO is different. There are so many things you can do. Perhaps crafting is the game for some. Maybe they don't actually do any personal storyline or PvE content at all (aside from gathering materials to craft).

Well if you paid your way to 80, you clearly didn't want to explore the lower level areas for whatever reason. Again, you're just buying time. What's the point in buying your way to level 80 when you're just going to go back to the level 1 area anyway and experience the content there? Sure, you can then hop from the level 1 area to the level 40 area to do a dragon fight, but the person levelling up would probably experience much more content because they want to level up (i.e. complete maps, do a lot of dynamic events, etc).

No it's not. In particular, grind is usually very easy: you just do a not very complicated thing over and over. The only hard part is to motivate you to log in and do it.
Quick is not antithetical to grind, it just determines how much of it there is. Quantity isn't the same as quality.

It's might be your opinion that skiing is fun. It is also an objective fact that it is fun, since there are people who think that it is fun. That something is "fun" just means that there are people who get a feeling of having fun while they do it.

GW2 offers less endgame content than GW1 or WoW, and more than Minecraft. The nature of the content has nothing to do with the amount of it. Quantity isn't the same as quality. You seem to have a problem with this fact.

Yes, you said that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon - or you claimed that it was added together with EotN. Yes, it was a mistake.

Pretty much everyone agrees on my definition. It fits any and all cases of pay2win. Name some examples and you'll see that it is true.
That people create definitions by majority vote isn't true at all. They create informal meanings of words by that process. Definitions are formal concepts that try to codify those meanings. That is why what you said was a fallacy.

Correct, you are stopping one subgame - the hack'n'slash one that most people play when they run around in the open world - and transition into another, that of gathering and managing crafting materials, part of the whole crafting metasystem. You are also correct in saying that it stops the flow of the game. Of course, taking the other possibility, we see that people who are out specifically to gather materials for crafting (or selling) are stopped in their game by combat. In both cases, you are continually forced to shift between relatively fast-paced action and the intentionally slowed down process of harvesting a node.

Incorrect, I might still want to explore the lower-level areas even though I paid for level 80. It could just be that I want to exlore those areas on my own terms, instead of being artificially prevented (by enemies that are low level, yet higher leveled than a beginner character) from entering certain areas when I want to enter them. Buying level 80 means that you get instant access to all areas in the game, including low level ones - you can decide entirely which ones to skip and which ones to play a lot in.
But of course, there is a reason for ignoring low level areas, right?

[raspberry jam]

Arkham Creed, on 06 December 2012 - 06:18 PM, said:

Well I would hardly say that I continue playing without saying anything, as I said am currently on break from the game, and would argue that you could in theory raise all the hell you want and never be noticed because there is no definable decline in the concurrency numbers. That said you and I have a clear difference of opinion on how to get Arena Net motivated to make changes. I don’t know about your life experiences, but I’ve personally found that raising your voice get attention, not results. It is better to use a calm, rational argument that subtly guides your opponent to reaching the conclusion that they’ve done something wrong on their own. You can’t just tell them they did something stupid, and you certainly can’t scream it from the rooftops. That just makes people defensive, and defensive people are receptive to neither criticism nor suggestions.

To that end I’ve actually posted a few threads on the official forums, trying to outline my complaints calmly and clearly, giving lots of details and suggestions, but I don’t rant nor throw what my fiancée likes to call a “bitch fit.” Those never work out as well as you would like. Be passionate, not offensive. A fine line to walk and one easy to stumble over.

Now on to your points. I’d have to say I actually agree with a lot of it, however I completely disagree with the comments about the number of classes. The simple fact is that I’ve never been able to find a class I truly liked in any MMO. Champions Online came close with its archetype mixing, before the free-to-play fiasco, but that was about it. I settled for the ranger in GW1 because of the lack of a better option, and while I like the engineer here I  am still just settling for it, rather than truly wanting to play it. In order to appeal to as many players as they can, and truly let players play how they want, you need as many different classes, or I should say play styles and themes, as possible, and in that regard I’d say that neither GW1 nor GW2 has enough.

Further when it comes to the “glued on” weapon skills, I actually like these feature and see both the logic and realism within the world of the game, and why Arena Net chose to do it for their own benefit. To be frank, you wouldn’t use the same tactics with a longbow as a greatsword, primarily because a greatsword doesn’t shoot projectiles. And if it does I’d say you’re in the wrong game Link. Likewise a greatsword isn’t the right kind of weapon for trying to slam the ground and make a shockwave. You try that and you’ll just slam the ground and get your sword stuck. But putting snide comments aside, perhaps a compromise is in order. Perhaps weapon should have fewer skills directly tied to them. Perhaps….1-3 are weapon skills, 4-5 are “general” attack skills, and then 6 can stay the healing skill, 7-9 utility, and 0 being the elite.

Keeps the same internal logic within the game world, but gives a more modular design and allows more flexibility in your offense. Of course it won’t happen because the game is already made and I don’t see them making that big a change to fundamental systems post-release, but hey, theory crafting is all just theory anyway.

Calm, rational argument? The post you quoted (and then for some reason threw away) was a calm, rational argument. Meanwhile, you were calling me delusional or whatever lol. The post wasn't even intended for ANet (unless you work there. Do you?).
If (when) people are wrong, though, I'll tell them exactly that. If they are offended by truth it's their own fault.

You haven't been able to find a class that you liked. And how many MMOs have you played and how many classes did they have? Exactly, too many, that's how many! Limiting the number of classes would have to mean that each class would have to suit more people. Imagine if there were, let's say for an example, three classes. One melee guy, one sneaky guy, one magic guy. And the rest of the class you build yourself by mixing and matching things. The sneaky guy could become a thief/assassin, or a ranger, depending on how you build him. The melee guy becomes a shining-armor knight or a brutal berserker or an elegant rapier fencer. And so on. Of course they would not be called "ranger" and so on. In reality, that system is too simplistic. Five base components that can be mixed in different ways would do the trick.

I really don't see what you mean when you talk about the weapon skills. First off, what I meant when I said "glued-on-bar skills" was that there were some skills that just never left the bar (unless you had something very special going on). For example, GW1 elementalists would use the attunement of their element (or EE) for energy management. Warriors (good ones at least) would have one or two stances. There were cases where if you brought one skill you had to bring another, too: If you brought Comfort Animal, you pretty much had to bring the other one skill (forgot the name now) to heal and rez it (yes, they later changed this). Naturally you would not use the same skills with a longbow, greatsword, or hammer. That you get a new skillbar when you change weapon is a decent idea. What is not a good idea is that all weapons of a certain type have the exact same skillbar. It would be pretty cool if you could add skills to a weapon, or if weapons dropped with certain skills on them, etc., allowing you more flexibility while still playing the same weapon. Then, you actually could play your GS warrior in different styles, even though he's still GS.
Of course because of skill cooldowns etc., this is a balance issue as well. But that could be handled.

You do have good ideas.

Edited by raspberry jam, 07 December 2012 - 01:56 PM.

[Robsy128]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 01:28 PM, said:

No it's not. In particular, grind is usually very easy: you just do a not very complicated thing over and over. The only hard part is to motivate you to log in and do it.
Quick is not antithetical to grind, it just determines how much of it there is. Quantity isn't the same as quality.

It's might be your opinion that skiing is fun. It is also an objective fact that it is fun, since there are people who think that it is fun. That something is "fun" just means that there are people who get a feeling of having fun while they do it.

GW2 offers less endgame content than GW1 or WoW, and more than Minecraft. The nature of the content has nothing to do with the amount of it. Quantity isn't the same as quality. You seem to have a problem with this fact.

Yes, you said that Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon - or you claimed that it was added together with EotN. Yes, it was a mistake.

Pretty much everyone agrees on my definition. It fits any and all cases of pay2win. Name some examples and you'll see that it is true.
That people create definitions by majority vote isn't true at all. They create informal meanings of words by that process. Definitions are formal concepts that try to codify those meanings. That is why what you said was a fallacy.

Correct, you are stopping one subgame - the hack'n'slash one that most people play when they run around in the open world - and transition into another, that of gathering and managing crafting materials, part of the whole crafting metasystem. You are also correct in saying that it stops the flow of the game. Of course, taking the other possibility, we see that people who are out specifically to gather materials for crafting (or selling) are stopped in their game by combat. In both cases, you are continually forced to shift between relatively fast-paced action and the intentionally slowed down process of harvesting a node.

Incorrect, I might still want to explore the lower-level areas even though I paid for level 80. It could just be that I want to exlore those areas on my own terms, instead of being artificially prevented (by enemies that are low level, yet higher leveled than a beginner character) from entering certain areas when I want to enter them. Buying level 80 means that you get instant access to all areas in the game, including low level ones - you can decide entirely which ones to skip and which ones to play a lot in.
But of course, there is a reason for ignoring low level areas, right?

It depends on what you are grinding. Are level 30 fractals easy? No, not really.
Quick is the opposite of grind. Grinding takes time in order to achieve the result you want. Quality doesn't even come into the equation.

Considering that GW1 and WoW have been out for 7 years, yes they would have more content. As we've already discussed, GW1 had a few dungeons and elite areas for endgame, as well as some PvE skills you could have obtained if you wanted a better build. GW2 has dungeons as well as various other activities. The quantity doesn't come into it, but the quality is, again, a matter of opinion. I personally think that GW2 has much better dungeons than GW1 (especially the fractals dungeon). You clearly don't like the fractals dungeon.

I didn't say Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon. Seriously, quote me saying that very sentence. You read in-between the lines so much, you see things that aren't there.

I'll ask you to prove that point haha. I have at least 64 people who agree with my definition, and no, your definition does not fit every instance where 'pay to win' is used.

But hardly anyone does one or the other - a lot of people (I'd wager around 95% of people) do both, thus it doesn't interrupt the flow of the game because they're still enjoying both aspects of the game.

Again, you'd more than likely miss out on a lot of dynamic events. Sure, you could hop around whenever you want, but the person levelling up can still do the same when they hit level 80 - the only differences are time, and the fact that the person who played the game gets a sensation of progressing.

Edited by Robsy128, 07 December 2012 - 03:08 PM.

[Arkham Creed]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 01:54 PM, said:

Calm, rational argument? The post you quoted (and then for some reason threw away) was a calm, rational argument. Meanwhile, you were calling me delusional or whatever lol. The post wasn't even intended for ANet (unless you work there. Do you?).
If (when) people are wrong, though, I'll tell them exactly that. If they are offended by truth it's their own fault.

You haven't been able to find a class that you liked. And how many MMOs have you played and how many classes did they have? Exactly, too many, that's how many! Limiting the number of classes would have to mean that each class would have to suit more people. Imagine if there were, let's say for an example, three classes. One melee guy, one sneaky guy, one magic guy. And the rest of the class you build yourself by mixing and matching things. The sneaky guy could become a thief/assassin, or a ranger, depending on how you build him. The melee guy becomes a shining-armor knight or a brutal berserker or an elegant rapier fencer. And so on. Of course they would not be called "ranger" and so on. In reality, that system is too simplistic. Five base components that can be mixed in different ways would do the trick.

I really don't see what you mean when you talk about the weapon skills. First off, what I meant when I said "glued-on-bar skills" was that there were some skills that just never left the bar (unless you had something very special going on). For example, GW1 elementalists would use the attunement of their element (or EE) for energy management. Warriors (good ones at least) would have one or two stances. There were cases where if you brought one skill you had to bring another, too: If you brought Comfort Animal, you pretty much had to bring the other one skill (forgot the name now) to heal and rez it (yes, they later changed this). Naturally you would not use the same skills with a longbow, greatsword, or hammer. That you get a new skillbar when you change weapon is a decent idea. What is not a good idea is that all weapons of a certain type have the exact same skillbar. It would be pretty cool if you could add skills to a weapon, or if weapons dropped with certain skills on them, etc., allowing you more flexibility while still playing the same weapon. Then, you actually could play your GS warrior in different styles, even though he's still GS.
Of course because of skill cooldowns etc., this is a balance issue as well. But that could be handled.

You do have good ideas.

Ah, a miscommunication then. I apologize. That said let me also say that I was referring to the Guild Wars 2 community in general rather than you specifically when I spoke of going overboard with an unproductive argument. I tend to drift back and forth between addressing individuals and groups, and that does lead to occasional confusion. Again, I apologize for not being clear.

That said I do think it would be interesting to see multiple swappable weapon skills within a given type. That would be cool; however as with my previous idea I just don’t see it happening this late in the game. Maybe if Arena Net decides to pull a Square Enix and reboot the game from scratch like Final Fantasy XIV, but personally I think that little stunt is going to fail even more miserably than FFXIV did originally; the MMO player community rarely gives second chances, and never at full price. But I digress.

I think the core issues with GW2 that need to be solved right now are the even widening wealth gap between casual and hardcore gamers (solved by removing bots and adjusting drops rates. Maybe provide some sort of loot buff for the first hour or so of gameplay, or just increase the value of rewards gained from daily achievements), and the increasing focus on grind. As I’ve stated in past posts the grind issue is a delicate one and I doubt it will be resolved in the next few patches, although I have hope that it is resolved by the end of this expansion cycle sometime around February. Beyond there are just client stability issues during the large events, a few bugs here and there, and –as much as I hate to say this- a bit more endgame content.

Now on endgame let me say that I personally never saw the big deal, but then I am not a grinder and as such haven’t even finished the release content yet. However I do realize that a lot of players have ground through everything offered and or now demanding more, again a bit hypocritical of them considering that they intentionally subverted intended gameplay styles in order to do this, but it happens. The best bet here is more repeatable content. The new dungeon is going on the right track, but I feel like we need a bit more of it’s like in order to appease the hardcore endgame grinders for a decent span of time.

Off topic digression

As to the games I’ve played and the classes therein, I’ve played a ranger, warrior, necromancer, and Mesmer in GW1, everything but the warrior in GW2. A paladin/warlock/rogue/shaman in WoW. A Rogue, sorcerer, bard, cleric, fighter in DDO. And I guess if you count all the combinations I tried in Champions Online about thirty classes from it. Ultimately I prefer three specific archetypes that are rarely found, sometimes never, and wouldn’t be a part of your little list. Without them I just have to feel around and make do.

[raspberry jam]

Robsy128, on 07 December 2012 - 03:06 PM, said:

It depends on what you are grinding. Are level 30 fractals easy? No, not really.
Quick is the opposite of grind. Grinding takes time in order to achieve the result you want. Quality doesn't even come into the equation.

Considering that GW1 and WoW have been out for 7 years, yes they would have more content. As we've already discussed, GW1 had a few dungeons and elite areas for endgame, as well as some PvE skills you could have obtained if you wanted a better build. GW2 has dungeons as well as various other activities. The quantity doesn't come into it, but the quality is, again, a matter of opinion. I personally think that GW2 has much better dungeons than GW1 (especially the fractals dungeon). You clearly don't like the fractals dungeon.

I didn't say Sorrow's Furnace wasn't a dungeon. Seriously, quote me saying that very sentence. You read in-between the lines so much, you see things that aren't there.

I'll ask you to prove that point haha. I have at least 64 people who agree with my definition, and no, your definition does not fit every instance where 'pay to win' is used.

But hardly anyone does one or the other - a lot of people (I'd wager around 95% of people) do both, thus it doesn't interrupt the flow of the game because they're still enjoying both aspects of the game.

Again, you'd more than likely miss out on a lot of dynamic events. Sure, you could hop around whenever you want, but the person levelling up can still do the same when they hit level 80 - the only differences are time, and the fact that the person who played the game gets a sensation of progressing.

You misunderstand "quality". I meant it as a synonym to "characteristic", not as a synonym to "good". I'm sorry, I assumed you knew English. I will talk down to you from now on.

30 levels of fractel isent so hard if u hav all the infisions (unless u r noob ) an quick aint the opposite of grind it means how much u gotta grind and no i ment gw1 and warcraft had more endgame content when they were new but u r rite i dont liek fracktels cuz its borin

Argh...!! Sorry, I can't keep it up. Anyway, you said that dungeons were introduced in EotN. That can only be true if Sorrow's Furnace is not a dungeon. If it can, please explain how.

My pay2win definition fits any pay2win case. I throw that out there, as a hypothesis. If you can find a single example that breaks the definition, that'd be great! I like being proven wrong, it increases the amount of right I am in the long run.

Enjoying something doesn't mean that flow is not broken. For example, I like both numetal and dancepop, but that certainly doesn't mean that I want to interleave songs of those two genres when I'm listening to music. It does interrupt the flow, and that interruption is critical to the business model of games like WoW or GW2.

I honestly wonder what you mean by missing out on dynamic events. Not even that I somehow would be uninterested in participating in such exciting things like killing the spider queen that appears in the Queensdale apple orchard every 5 minutes - just that you would think that you are not missing out on DEs while you level as normal?? A friend of mine loaned me the official GW2 game guide book (yes there is such a thing, even in this day and age, I found it amusing), and there were DEs in it that not one member of my guild had heard about. But we went to the place and sure enough there was a DE there. As shitty as the rest, sure, but still a DE.

Sense of progressing lolz. From what, leveling? Grow up man, you're not progressing unless you learn skills as a player - and you do that with or without leveling.

[RandolfRa]

raspberry jam, on 06 December 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

1. Too many *ing classes. At least they are not cross connected, but having that many fixed classes instead create a situation where the field of expertise of each class becomes either very narrow, or nonexistent. Having wide-capability classes is all fine, but no more than five are ever needed.

Sure are if you want to sell your game. If there isn't a profession in the game that I like, I don't buy it. If I feel that the game doesn't have lots of variation in professions and roles I think it's either boring or too simple, and will go for some other game before even trying.

Quote

3. Massive PvE focus, including having fear skills in PvP lol.

Fear was a nice addition, but the control abilities in gw2 are still way too soft.

Edited by RandolfRa, 07 December 2012 - 06:00 PM.

[raspberry jam]

Arkham Creed, on 07 December 2012 - 04:54 PM, said:

Ah, a miscommunication then. I apologize. That said let me also say that I was referring to the Guild Wars 2 community in general rather than you specifically when I spoke of going overboard with an unproductive argument. I tend to drift back and forth between addressing individuals and groups, and that does lead to occasional confusion. Again, I apologize for not being clear.

That said I do think it would be interesting to see multiple swappable weapon skills within a given type. That would be cool; however as with my previous idea I just don’t see it happening this late in the game. Maybe if Arena Net decides to pull a Square Enix and reboot the game from scratch like Final Fantasy XIV, but personally I think that little stunt is going to fail even more miserably than FFXIV did originally; the MMO player community rarely gives second chances, and never at full price. But I digress.

I think the core issues with GW2 that need to be solved right now are the even widening wealth gap between casual and hardcore gamers (solved by removing bots and adjusting drops rates. Maybe provide some sort of loot buff for the first hour or so of gameplay, or just increase the value of rewards gained from daily achievements), and the increasing focus on grind. As I’ve stated in past posts the grind issue is a delicate one and I doubt it will be resolved in the next few patches, although I have hope that it is resolved by the end of this expansion cycle sometime around February. Beyond there are just client stability issues during the large events, a few bugs here and there, and –as much as I hate to say this- a bit more endgame content.

Now on endgame let me say that I personally never saw the big deal, but then I am not a grinder and as such haven’t even finished the release content yet. However I do realize that a lot of players have ground through everything offered and or now demanding more, again a bit hypocritical of them considering that they intentionally subverted intended gameplay styles in order to do this, but it happens. The best bet here is more repeatable content. The new dungeon is going on the right track, but I feel like we need a bit more of it’s like in order to appease the hardcore endgame grinders for a decent span of time.

Off topic digression

As to the games I’ve played and the classes therein, I’ve played a ranger, warrior, necromancer, and Mesmer in GW1, everything but the warrior in GW2. A paladin/warlock/rogue/shaman in WoW. A Rogue, sorcerer, bard, cleric, fighter in DDO. And I guess if you count all the combinations I tried in Champions Online about thirty classes from it. Ultimately I prefer three specific archetypes that are rarely found, sometimes never, and wouldn’t be a part of your little list. Without them I just have to feel around and make do.

Yes... The community has both calm & rational arguments, and very overheated ones. Not just about things that ANet did wrong, but also about things that they did right, or things that will supposedly take place later... I definitely agree!

I don't think we'll see swappable weapon skills. The most I'd imagine would be a higher tier of weapons with certain skills replaced with other skills... But even that sounds like a massive stretch. On the other hand, so did GW1's assassin attack chains.

Yeah, there are bugs bugs bugs, and those must be solved quickly. And there's the economy... But I think that that is quite a tricky problem given the structure that is already in the game. Multiple currencies that change values compared to each other as quickly as the ones in GW2 does always open up for powertraders and always make people that went in early and had good predictions (or lucky guesses) filthy rich while leaving the people who just want to play the game behind. "Tax" in GW2 isn't progressive, it isn't even proportional. It's regressive, enforcing the gap instead of closing it. There are no simple fixes for this, not even dramatic ones like removing the merchant (forcing all trade onto the TP) would do it. The only thing that would solve it is waiting until enough "common people" have played enough to save up decent coin resources. The gold sinks ("regressive tax") slows this process down though, as does fever pitching (like ANet loves to do: release something that drives up prices for something that is used for something else, which now becomes economically unviable and therefore essentially leaves the economy and blocks a lot of people from ever getting it - see: ectos).

Endgame content though... we already have endgame content. The problem is that that endgame content is not fun. It's done for the rewards, but unfortunately ANet decided to make the rewards easy to get, which means that there's no longer any reason to do it. That doesn't mean that they should crank up the rewards threshold (like they did with FotM), because that just means that you keep players doing unfun things for the rewards. They need to release well designed content. Remember the Lost Shores event? Yeah. Not like that one. I saw people still asking if they should keep some quest item two weeks after the event was over, because some NPC that was no longer relevant had told them that it was important for some follow up quest that no longer existed. I saw people during the event that were desperate to play the new exciting event yet not actually doing that, simply because they had no idea of what to do. Sure, that was partially because many NPCs were bugged, but also because the event itself was confusing and badly designed.
Also, of course, one-shot events doesn't really count as endgame content...
Either way, repeatable content isn't a bad idea. A truly endless dungeon that kept turning up the difficulty is a great idea in itself. But that's not what FotM is. After a certain point, you progress just because you have new gear, especially infusions. If you get stuck, you wait until you get an infusion, then you can move on. It is a test of skill to a certain point, after that it's a test of your gear.

Intended gameplay styles don't mean anything... If players "subverted" those, it's a sign of bad design. It's a designers job to get inside the minds of people who are playing a game that doesn't even exist yet. The game should be designed in such a way that players want to play in the intended way. And not because they want the rewards (that's how to design a grind game), but because they genuinely want to play that way. It's not an easy job and it's obviously easy to make mistakes, but here, such mistakes were made.

Your favorite class would be part of my list, because you'd build that class yourself. Actually, I would like it most if you didn't choose a class at all, instead constructing your character from scratch by adding "class fragments", or some type of characteristics, to it. But I figure that would be a quite hard system to balance. Maybe in a single player game.
Hmm, you're making me curious, though. Can you say something about these three preferred archetypes?

[Cruxisinhibitor]

raspberry jam, on 27 November 2012 - 01:17 PM, said:

Chris Whiteside has repeatedly proven to be completely wrong. I might be wrong. Let's see what happens (e.g. removing/destating ascended tier, adding guesting, making dyes account unlocked).

I honestly think that a lot of what they do is just a field test for what they might want to do later on. If you catch on, it seems like they are experimenting with game mechanics to see how the community responds to them. I think they know full well what type of blatant mistakes they are making, but i feel like there is some intended psychological examination of the community macrocosm disguised in  what they do. It sounds very complex, but i think they intended to monitor the amount of grind and adjust it with time.

Some other things that i feel are limiting the longevity and pushing away players in this game are:

Lack of solid roles.
Homogenized builds, specs, and gear setups and how minimally these things actually effect the gameplay. (Read: workaround for gutting trinity mechanics that doesn't work out very well.)
Lack of real skill choice or deckbuilding.
Lack of combat depth.
Lack of desirable progression.
Poorly paced progression.
Lack of proper LFG system.
Lack of basic QoL improvements dampening player mood on a daily basis.
No reason to re-visit old zones.
Poorly implemented scaling system.
Very poor loot tables and loot balance.
Seemingly non-existent class balance that feels like classes were thrown together mechanically and only hashed out conceptually.
No real reason to group with players outside of dungeons because of the lack of roles or effective teambuilding / specs.
Lack of effective means to communicate build choices or setup because of trait system structure ; dampens strategy.
No REAL (armor, weapons, professions, zones, skills, elites, etc.) desirable content patches in the works that we know of.
Willingness to go back on design decision, but not where it actually counts (Trinity)
Poor communication from developer to community.
Deliberate lies and rationalization of said lies by the developer.

Edited by Cruxisinhibitor, 07 December 2012 - 06:08 PM.

[raspberry jam]

RandolfRa, on 07 December 2012 - 05:47 PM, said:

Sure are if you want to sell your game. If there isn't a profession in the game that I like, I don't buy it. If I feel that the game doesn't have lots of variation in professions and roles I think it's either boring or too simple, and will go for some other game.

Consider that MtG is built on five colors.

Edited by raspberry jam, 07 December 2012 - 06:05 PM.

[Asudementio]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 06:04 PM, said:

Consider that MtG is built on five colors.

But of course lets ignore multi color cards right? Oh and that there are different play styles even among cards of the same color.

Could they have launched with 5 professions? sure but people will often clamor for some variety whether it be from dual professions or multiple play styles in each of the 5.

[raspberry jam]

Cruxisinhibitor, on 07 December 2012 - 06:03 PM, said:

I honestly think that a lot of what they do is just a field test for what they might want to do later on. If you catch on, it seems like they are experimenting with game mechanics to see how the community responds to them. I think they know full well what type of blatant mistakes they are making, but i feel like there is some intended psychological examination of the community macrocosm disguised in  what they do. It sounds very complex, but i think they intended to monitor the amount of grind and adjust it with time.

I think so too. Ascended gear feels as if it was rushed out before it was completed, but it also feels as if the entire design of the game is intended to accommodate things that they said would not appear - gear tiers, higher levels (yeah, they actually said that they would raise the cap, but people thought that they wouldn't), I've suspected since the betas that grind would increase sooner or later.

The Nov 15 patch was seemed like panic, not an experiment, but the AMA and the general way that they handle community responses (who can forget all the "Thanks for your feedback" thread-closed messages on the official forum?) definitely looks like they are poking our brains to see which leg/arm will make a little jump.

I agree with your list. It's a mix of intentional stuff and honest mistakes, and just bad performance from ANet really.

Asudementio, on 07 December 2012 - 06:11 PM, said:

But of course lets ignore multi color cards right? Oh and that there are different play styles even among cards of the same color.

Could they have launched with 5 professions? sure but people will often clamor for some variety whether it be from dual professions or multiple play styles in each of the 5.

Let's not ignore multicolor cards (or colorless ones, heh), and let's certainly not ignore different play styles. Because that's my entire point: classes should be few and broad instead of many and overly specialized. You should build your own character from a certain base, given by the class... As I said, ideally you should be allowed to mix anything, balanced by an opportunity cost, just like you could mix any amount of colors into a MtG deck (opportunity cost in the mana base makes it so that most efficient decks are one or two colors though, or possibly two + splash). That might be very tricky to implement though.

[Asudementio]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 06:16 PM, said:

I think so too. Ascended gear feels as if it was rushed out before it was completed, but it also feels as if the entire design of the game is intended to accommodate things that they said would not appear - gear tiers, higher levels (yeah, they actually said that they would raise the cap, but people thought that they wouldn't), I've suspected since the betas that grind would increase sooner or later.

The Nov 15 patch was seemed like panic, not an experiment, but the AMA and the general way that they handle community responses (who can forget all the "Thanks for your feedback" thread-closed messages on the official forum?) definitely looks like they are poking our brains to see which leg/arm will make a little jump.

I agree with your list. It's a mix of intentional stuff and honest mistakes, and just bad performance from ANet really.

Let's not ignore multicolor cards (or colorless ones, heh), and let's certainly not ignore different play styles. Because that's my entire point: classes should be few and broad instead of many and overly specialized. You should build your own character from a certain base, given by the class... As I said, ideally you should be allowed to mix anything, balanced by an opportunity cost, just like you could mix any amount of colors into a MtG deck (opportunity cost in the mana base makes it so that most efficient decks are one or two colors though, or possibly two + splash). That might be very tricky to implement though.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea or that even the current system is ideal- just two approaches to the same problem. That said my favorite class system in any game is Rift's because of the points you mentioned.

[Arkham Creed]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 05:58 PM, said:

Yes... The community has both calm & rational arguments, and very overheated ones. Not just about things that ANet did wrong, but also about things that they did right, or things that will supposedly take place later... I definitely agree!

I don't think we'll see swappable weapon skills. The most I'd imagine would be a higher tier of weapons with certain skills replaced with other skills... But even that sounds like a massive stretch. On the other hand, so did GW1's assassin attack chains.

Yeah, there are bugs bugs bugs, and those must be solved quickly. And there's the economy... But I think that that is quite a tricky problem given the structure that is already in the game. Multiple currencies that change values compared to each other as quickly as the ones in GW2 does always open up for powertraders and always make people that went in early and had good predictions (or lucky guesses) filthy rich while leaving the people who just want to play the game behind. "Tax" in GW2 isn't progressive, it isn't even proportional. It's regressive, enforcing the gap instead of closing it. There are no simple fixes for this, not even dramatic ones like removing the merchant (forcing all trade onto the TP) would do it. The only thing that would solve it is waiting until enough "common people" have played enough to save up decent coin resources. The gold sinks ("regressive tax") slows this process down though, as does fever pitching (like ANet loves to do: release something that drives up prices for something that is used for something else, which now becomes economically unviable and therefore essentially leaves the economy and blocks a lot of people from ever getting it - see: ectos).

Endgame content though... we already have endgame content. The problem is that that endgame content is not fun. It's done for the rewards, but unfortunately ANet decided to make the rewards easy to get, which means that there's no longer any reason to do it. That doesn't mean that they should crank up the rewards threshold (like they did with FotM), because that just means that you keep players doing unfun things for the rewards. They need to release well designed content. Remember the Lost Shores event? Yeah. Not like that one. I saw people still asking if they should keep some quest item two weeks after the event was over, because some NPC that was no longer relevant had told them that it was important for some follow up quest that no longer existed. I saw people during the event that were desperate to play the new exciting event yet not actually doing that, simply because they had no idea of what to do. Sure, that was partially because many NPCs were bugged, but also because the event itself was confusing and badly designed.
Also, of course, one-shot events doesn't really count as endgame content...
Either way, repeatable content isn't a bad idea. A truly endless dungeon that kept turning up the difficulty is a great idea in itself. But that's not what FotM is. After a certain point, you progress just because you have new gear, especially infusions. If you get stuck, you wait until you get an infusion, then you can move on. It is a test of skill to a certain point, after that it's a test of your gear.

Intended gameplay styles don't mean anything... If players "subverted" those, it's a sign of bad design. It's a designers job to get inside the minds of people who are playing a game that doesn't even exist yet. The game should be designed in such a way that players want to play in the intended way. And not because they want the rewards (that's how to design a grind game), but because they genuinely want to play that way. It's not an easy job and it's obviously easy to make mistakes, but here, such mistakes were made.

Your favorite class would be part of my list, because you'd build that class yourself. Actually, I would like it most if you didn't choose a class at all, instead constructing your character from scratch by adding "class fragments", or some type of characteristics, to it. But I figure that would be a quite hard system to balance. Maybe in a single player game.
Hmm, you're making me curious, though. Can you say something about these three preferred archetypes?

The issue of playing for the game and playing for the rewards is something of a thorny subject, as there are some players who are simply only happy if they’re getting some kind of functional reward, regardless of how independently enjoyable to content actually is. So for that reason there will has to be some sort of desirable reward to all content, and the vast majority of MMO players only desire more powerful stuff. People like you or I may balk at the idea of continual statistical progression but the simple fact is that most player prefer it, including those who came to GW2 to get away from it. I’ve heard many reports of players draw to this game because of the lack of endless grindy progression only to turn around a month later and realize that they really did want that in the game. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you no longer have it. Arena Net is just trying to adapt.

That said I enjoy GW2 because of the content. The personal story is interesting enough for a MMO, although there is one character I wish had lived, and one character I would like thrown off a cliff…I won’t say who for reasons of spoilers, although I imagine most already know. I find the dungeons I have played to be a challenge and rewarding in that regard, although I tend to only go in with PUGs and that can make things more difficult, so perhaps it is an artificial challenge. And as for rewards, I am crafting my rare armor now, though in no hurry, and plan to eventually obtain a set of dungeon elite armor just because I like the look. Aesthetic is also the only reason I want a legendary weapon, and like my armor because I see little value in the core stats I’m in no hurry to grind for these things, instead making them nice little bonuses I’ll get for long term play. I realize of course that not everyone views content in this way, and because of that I feel there is a problem. Right now GW2 endgame is prefect for me, but I’m a minority and not so selfish that I’ll demand the game cater only to me and my ilk.

Digression

Well as far as my preferred archetypes the first is the stealthy rogue. Now obviously most people would point out the thief class here, but I reject it as a stealth class. You see I am an old school console and PC gamer with a strong fondness for stealth action games like Thief: Deadly Shadows, elements of the Elder Scrolls series, and Dishonored and Deus Ex Human Revolution from recent memory. For me stealth gameplay is sticking to the shadows, using cover, and sneaking around. Just pressing a button and turning invisible is a tool for a lazy mage not a rogue, and I find the MMO genre’s insistence on that style of gameplay to be an insult to the very spirit of stealth gameplay, and by extension an insult to everyone who enjoys it. To be honest I don’t think proper stealth is even possible in a multiplayer game, and certainly not a MMO. And if it is I’ve never seen it.

Besides I am not a fan of glass-cannons. I want my characters to have a bit of sustain, rather than being a squishy burst character. I want to savor the battle. I want to skirt around the outside of the battle, dashing in to pick off weaklings one by one, making their allies panic as they try to figure what is happening…I’m evil like that.



Secondly I’d prefer the summoner type. Again most people would chime in about the necromancer here, but again it is…off, to be kind. When I think of a summoner I don’t think about a minion master; I don’t want to wave my hand and create a swarm of disposable and irrelevant fodder. I see summoning as an agreement, a pact, a kind of arranged partnership between two or more beings. I would greatly prefer charging into battle with one or two dependable and persistent allies with some degree of individuality and independence. The WoW warlock came close to this, but was a little too mage-y for my taste. This is partly because I dislike cloth or leather armor. I am charging into battle not going to a costume party, so I want some degree of functional battle attire. Of course that argument can apply to pretty much every class in WoW given their late game armor sets.

There is one game that kind of gave me this style, a free to play MMO that shall remain nameless because I grew to hate every second of playing it for various reasons. Ultimately though I tend to look to rangers or other beastmasters for a semblance of this style, but often find myself disappointed in how few viable builds these style offer, and how like minions a ranger pet is treated as a tool, not an ally.

Finally there is the shadowmancer. A kind of…almost telekinetic character who shapes shadow and dark energy into constructs to bind, hinder, and tear at their foes. Champions Online had an archetype like this, and when combined with a few others was really close to what I’d call perfection. Sadly I am a free-to-play player and as such can no longer create my ideal character in that game.  However I have actually found it in another. Recently I’ve been drawn into the pen-and-paper RPG Dungeons and Dragons, learning the ropes of the newer “Essentials” rule set and therein there is a subclass of the warlock called “Binder” that when created with the “Gloom Pack” build is basically what I want. A leather clad, simple weapon wielding shadowmancer with a high focus on control rather than burst, and can even summon persistent allied creatures. Heck, multi-classing into a rogue to grab their sneak attack or backstab skills is glorious. If only there was something like that in the MMO genre…but no point dwelling on what I wish was, better to focus on what is.

[Sinful01]

I'd like to suggest people read this: http://www.gamasutra..._mmo.php?page=3

"Rethinking the MMO"; It has some solid good points (I liked the page about grind) and is a good read, IMHO.  Funny thing is, it was written back in 2007 and not a lot seems to have changed.

Robsy128, on 06 December 2012 - 05:48 PM, said:

Easy and quick are the opposites of grind.

From the article: Grinding is the act of playing in a repetitive, unexciting, or otherwise un-enjoyable fashion in order to make faster progress.

I'd agree with that definition (it is also the one on Wikipedia, pulled from that article).  It isn't about speed or ease, it is about repeating something you do not want to do just to get to the thing/level/item you do want.

I remember "grinding" in single player RPGs way back in my early days.  I ran up and down the same little hallway in the first Final Fantasy game on the NES to "grind experience".  I didn't need to do it, I chose to do it because I wanted to get my little pixel-people more powerful to better survive the game, but it wasn't required. It wasn't mandatory as I could have gone on and finished the game, gotten every item, beaten every boss and done it all without grinding.

In MMOs (and specifically GW2 since that is the subject at hand) you're basically forced to grind.  You cannot do the full game's content, get all the items, go everywhere and do everything without grinding.  You can't get a Legendary without grind (unless you throw money at it - but there are still grindy parts you can't buy).  You can't get Ascended without grind.

You can't even get exotic (which isn't the top anymore) level equipment without grind anymore.  You need to run a slew of dungeons for the tokens.  If you want to buy the stuff ... well, the economy is so screwy currently you can't afford it if you just play normally.

(.. and yes, yes "well one example is a single player game, don't like grind, don't play MMOs" is usually spewed at me right now.  Remember: just because MMOs were built about grind before, doesn't mean they always must be.  New, different, 'not your typical MMO' shouldn't just be a tag line to get people in the door then switch-a-roo on them.)

[Impmon]

Instead of adding new content I'd recommend they begin by fixing what we already have.  Duct tape works good in most situations but you can't use it to permanently fix anything.  

How about examining & adjusting the prices of cultural weapons & armor.  No they're not status symbols regardless what you think.  They employ gold farmers that is all.  To show how ridiculous the costs are for cultural armor;

On my 30th alt I go into a borderland & checkout the karma vendor for some new weapons at 30th level.  All the trading co. has is blues.... I'm wanting something like a green at least.  Oh, the green 30th lvl weapon is only 10 more dps then my 20th lvl... and it costs 2000+ karma  lol  wtf is that b.s.  Oh wait a sec, that blue weapon i disregarded on the trading co.  is 100+ more dps, more stats & is only 45 copper !  Seriously ANET.  Get someone on that crap now.  Fix the costs of karma weapon / armor.

[Robsy128]

raspberry jam, on 07 December 2012 - 05:19 PM, said:

You misunderstand "quality". I meant it as a synonym to "characteristic", not as a synonym to "good". (Removed junk).

30 levels of fractals aren't so hard if you have all the infusions (unless you are a noob ). Quick isn't the opposite of grind; it means how much you need to grind, and no I meant gw1 and WoW had more endgame content when they were new but you are right I don't like Fractals because it's boring.

Anyway, you said that dungeons were introduced in EotN. That can only be true if Sorrow's Furnace is not a dungeon. If it can, please explain how.

My pay2win definition fits any pay2win case. I throw that out there, as a hypothesis. If you can find a single example that breaks the definition, that'd be great! I like being proven wrong, it increases the amount of right I am in the long run.

Enjoying something doesn't mean that flow is not broken. For example, I like both numetal and dancepop, but that certainly doesn't mean that I want to interleave songs of those two genres when I'm listening to music. It does interrupt the flow, and that interruption is critical to the business model of games like WoW or GW2.

I honestly wonder what you mean by missing out on dynamic events. Not even that I somehow would be uninterested in participating in such exciting things like killing the spider queen that appears in the Queensdale apple orchard every 5 minutes - just that you would think that you are not missing out on DEs while you level as normal?? A friend of mine loaned me the official GW2 game guide book (yes there is such a thing, even in this day and age, I found it amusing), and there were DEs in it that not one member of my guild had heard about. But we went to the place and sure enough there was a DE there. As shitty as the rest, sure, but still a DE.

Sense of progressing lolz. From what, leveling? Grow up man, you're not progressing unless you learn skills as a player - and you do that with or without leveling.

I know what quality means, thank you. As I said, quality doesn't enter the equation. 'Quality', 'character', 'aspect', 'attribute', 'feature', 'constitution', whatever you want to call it still doesn't enter the equation. Grinding is not quick. That was my statement before, and you've done nothing to prove otherwise aside from writing one sentence about quantity vs quality. You didn't elaborate at all, therefore it makes no sense.
Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive tasks during video games. Now the tasks themselves may be quick to do, but the overall rate of progression towards the reward? It's slow. Usually painfully slow.

Onto the actual argument itself, level 30 Fractals is hard if you have infusions. And how do you get infusions, anyway? By playing through the harder content. I can also safely say that it is harder content because a lot of people complained about the difficulty of all dungeons on release. Arenanet were prompt with their reply and said, more or less: 'good - they're meant to be hard.'
As I proved before, however, Guild Wars does not have more endgame content than Guild Wars 2 (at least, not at release). I don't really know about WoW's original endgame content because I only did one or two instances at level 80 in WoW before I got bored to tears and decided to move on. As you're measuring quantity here, you have to count what there is in both games.

Guild Wars (now):

• Go achievement hunting (which entailed getting elite skills, getting 100% map completion, redoing all of the campaigns in hard mode and PvP).
  
• 7 Elite Areas (2 of which can be called 'dungeons') (including Sorrow's Furnace, Tombs, Urgoz, UW, FoW, etc.)
  
• 18 dungeons (which were added in Eye of the North)
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Competing in PvP

Guild Wars 2 (now):

• Achievement hunting (which entails 100% map completion, PvP, minigames, crafting, and more I can't remember).
  
• 9 Dungeons (each with 4 different paths that last just as long as one another. One could argue, therefore, that there are 36 dungeons, although it would be more as Fractals of the Mists has 9 random maps that last 15-20 minutes)
  
• Farming/grinding for better-looking gear.
  
• Crafting
  
• Competing in PvP

Of course, it's unfair to compare the endgame content of Guild Wars 2 to Guild Wars 1 because Guild Wars 1 has been around since 2005. I personally wasn't there at the launch. I started playing shortly after Nightfall was released. All I know is that hard mode wasn't added to the game until April of 2007. Sorrow's Furnace wasn't added to the game until 5 months after its release. Most of the other elite areas were added in campaigns and the dungeons (excluding Sorrow's Furnace and Tombs) were added with the expansion: Eye of the North. I'm sure I don't have to write out all of the maths, but I can conclude by saying that Guild Wars 2 has more endgame content than Guild Wars 1.

Your definition doesn't fit the case where they sell 'Sword of +100 power' in cash-shops.

Comparing songs to a video game is just bad. Songs are very linear, whereas games have a lot more to offer. Stopping to gather doesn't break the flow of the game because it's still part of the game. If you gathered whilst in the middle of combat, then yes, that would stop the flow of it. Your suggestion of walking over the node to gather the materials also provides no immersion whatsoever. People like to be immersed in the game world.


I'm not saying that there's a 100% chance that the person levelling up will come across the DE - I'm just saying that they're more likely to come across the dynamic events because they stick around for the chain events to get exp, money and karma. Therefore they're more likely to experience more content than the level 80 hopping around to the areas he wants to.

Clearly you didn't read my sentence. I said that it provides a sense of progressing. But sure, I'll write it out in simple sentences for you as you like jumping onto singular words for your arguments.
You're talking about progressing as a player - learning skills to do with the game mechanics.
I'm talking about character progression.
Both are valid forms of progression.

Sinful01, on 07 December 2012 - 06:48 PM, said:

I'd agree with that definition (it is also the one on Wikipedia, pulled from that article).  It isn't about speed or ease, it is about repeating something you do not want to do just to get to the thing/level/item you do want.

In MMOs (and specifically GW2 since that is the subject at hand) you're basically forced to grind.  You cannot do the full game's content, get all the items, go everywhere and do everything without grinding.  You can't get a Legendary without grind (unless you throw money at it - but there are still grindy parts you can't buy).  You can't get Ascended without grind.

You can't even get exotic (which isn't the top anymore) level equipment without grind anymore.  You need to run a slew of dungeons for the tokens.  If you want to buy the stuff ... well, the economy is so screwy currently you can't afford it if you just play normally.

(.. and yes, yes "well one example is a single player game, don't like grind, don't play MMOs" is usually spewed at me right now.  Remember: just because MMOs were built about grind before, doesn't mean they always must be.  New, different, 'not your typical MMO' shouldn't just be a tag line to get people in the door then switch-a-roo on them.)

I know... I explained the grind above.
What content are you supposedly incapable of doing without grind? I've got 100% world completion and that was achieved with blue gear. By the time I reached level 80, I had enough money to buy 2 full exotic sets (and that was before starting my world completion quest).  

Legendaries are meant to be grindy. The way which we get ascended gear will change in the future. We can't really complain about it until Arenanet have supposedly 'fixed' it.

As for full dungeon gear? Yeah, I'd say that's grindy as well, but for a nice-looking skin? Worth it!

Edited by Robsy128, 07 December 2012 - 09:32 PM.
Removed deleted content

[Feathermoore]

People need to stop making underhanded or snide remarks about the person they are talking to. Failing to do so will result in infractions as it is quite obviously getting in the way of civil discussion.

Don't get angry if someone doesn't agree with you, and stop rising to bait and baiting the other person back.

[raspberry jam]

Arkham Creed, on 07 December 2012 - 06:44 PM, said:

The issue of playing for the game and playing for the rewards is something of a thorny subject, as there are some players who are simply only happy if they’re getting some kind of functional reward, regardless of how independently enjoyable to content actually is. So for that reason there will has to be some sort of desirable reward to all content, and the vast majority of MMO players only desire more powerful stuff. People like you or I may balk at the idea of continual statistical progression but the simple fact is that most player prefer it, including those who came to GW2 to get away from it. I’ve heard many reports of players draw to this game because of the lack of endless grindy progression only to turn around a month later and realize that they really did want that in the game. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you no longer have it. Arena Net is just trying to adapt.

That said I enjoy GW2 because of the content. The personal story is interesting enough for a MMO, although there is one character I wish had lived, and one character I would like thrown off a cliff…I won’t say who for reasons of spoilers, although I imagine most already know. I find the dungeons I have played to be a challenge and rewarding in that regard, although I tend to only go in with PUGs and that can make things more difficult, so perhaps it is an artificial challenge. And as for rewards, I am crafting my rare armor now, though in no hurry, and plan to eventually obtain a set of dungeon elite armor just because I like the look. Aesthetic is also the only reason I want a legendary weapon, and like my armor because I see little value in the core stats I’m in no hurry to grind for these things, instead making them nice little bonuses I’ll get for long term play. I realize of course that not everyone views content in this way, and because of that I feel there is a problem. Right now GW2 endgame is prefect for me, but I’m a minority and not so selfish that I’ll demand the game cater only to me and my ilk.

Digression

Well as far as my preferred archetypes the first is the stealthy rogue. Now obviously most people would point out the thief class here, but I reject it as a stealth class. You see I am an old school console and PC gamer with a strong fondness for stealth action games like Thief: Deadly Shadows, elements of the Elder Scrolls series, and Dishonored and Deus Ex Human Revolution from recent memory. For me stealth gameplay is sticking to the shadows, using cover, and sneaking around. Just pressing a button and turning invisible is a tool for a lazy mage not a rogue, and I find the MMO genre’s insistence on that style of gameplay to be an insult to the very spirit of stealth gameplay, and by extension an insult to everyone who enjoys it. To be honest I don’t think proper stealth is even possible in a multiplayer game, and certainly not a MMO. And if it is I’ve never seen it.

Besides I am not a fan of glass-cannons. I want my characters to have a bit of sustain, rather than being a squishy burst character. I want to savor the battle. I want to skirt around the outside of the battle, dashing in to pick off weaklings one by one, making their allies panic as they try to figure what is happening…I’m evil like that.



Secondly I’d prefer the summoner type. Again most people would chime in about the necromancer here, but again it is…off, to be kind. When I think of a summoner I don’t think about a minion master; I don’t want to wave my hand and create a swarm of disposable and irrelevant fodder. I see summoning as an agreement, a pact, a kind of arranged partnership between two or more beings. I would greatly prefer charging into battle with one or two dependable and persistent allies with some degree of individuality and independence. The WoW warlock came close to this, but was a little too mage-y for my taste. This is partly because I dislike cloth or leather armor. I am charging into battle not going to a costume party, so I want some degree of functional battle attire. Of course that argument can apply to pretty much every class in WoW given their late game armor sets.

There is one game that kind of gave me this style, a free to play MMO that shall remain nameless because I grew to hate every second of playing it for various reasons. Ultimately though I tend to look to rangers or other beastmasters for a semblance of this style, but often find myself disappointed in how few viable builds these style offer, and how like minions a ranger pet is treated as a tool, not an ally.

Finally there is the shadowmancer. A kind of…almost telekinetic character who shapes shadow and dark energy into constructs to bind, hinder, and tear at their foes. Champions Online had an archetype like this, and when combined with a few others was really close to what I’d call perfection. Sadly I am a free-to-play player and as such can no longer create my ideal character in that game.  However I have actually found it in another. Recently I’ve been drawn into the pen-and-paper RPG Dungeons and Dragons, learning the ropes of the newer “Essentials” rule set and therein there is a subclass of the warlock called “Binder” that when created with the “Gloom Pack” build is basically what I want. A leather clad, simple weapon wielding shadowmancer with a high focus on control rather than burst, and can even summon persistent allied creatures. Heck, multi-classing into a rogue to grab their sneak attack or backstab skills is glorious. If only there was something like that in the MMO genre…but no point dwelling on what I wish was, better to focus on what is.

No. Let's get this established right away: most of the time, people do not know what they think is fun. I have had so many conversations with people who freely admitted that every part of WoW was boring, that they could be bored in several successive play sessions, yet insisted that they were "having fun" in the game. I have no doubt that I will be having similar conversations with people about GW2 rather soon (in fact I have already almost had one).
Why do people "like" rewards in such a game? Cognitive dissonance. Habituation. Operant conditioning. Other psychology terms that sound quite incredulous, because why would they be put in a video game? And intentionally so? And yet they are. People don't actually like the rewards. Well, that is, not enough to keep playing. But since they do play, they must rationally (because every one of us is, you as you know, a rational being... right?) have some good reason to keep playing. And since progression seems to be the only thing that keeps them going, they hang up on that. Basically, you put in so much effort into getting reward X (that is, once you have it, pretty useless compared to reward Y) that there would have to be a good reason for it. That reason will disappear as soon as you get X, but since admitting that would amount to admitting that you were fooling yourself all this time, people insist that the reason is still there.

I can guarantee you one thing though: you can take the most "hardcore" grindmonkey imaginable, and still find some game with gameplay that involves no rewards whatsoever and he'll still think that it is a fun game - as long as the gameplay is content- or skill-driven (probably content driven as grindmonkeys are always casuals at heart no matter how "hardcore" they claim to be). As soon as it's reward driven though, the old mechanisms are back, and then it's just about who built the best Skinner box. Again.
And yeah, people flocked to GW2 because they believed in what the devs said (and conveniently ignored some things that they said a bit more quiet, such as that they would be raising the level cap). But GW2 was never what the devs said it would be. It was a reward-driven, grind-based game right from the start. Everything from killing mobs to unlock skills, to the progress bar heart quests, to the progress bar crafting, to the resource harvesting animation, to the incessant gold sinks for map travel and armor repair, to the slightly-too-long distances you need to walk to get where you're going... All of these encouraging, prodding even, players towards thinking of what they'll get once they are done with doing the one boring thing they are doing right now.

When you have an entire game that is nothing but the above, what do you expect will happen in one month, when people have gotten so far that they don't have much to look forward to? They know that even though they are (still) doing boring things, they won't get a shiny this time. And so they want more... Right?
Wrong. You say that ANet is trying to adapt. To what exactly? There were already people getting Legendaries. The "legendary gap" which they were trying to "bridge" with ascended gear never existed. ANet were not trying to adapt, they were trying to pre-empt. Because if they didn't act when they did, people would actually start getting legendaries in large numbers and then it would all be over, because legendaries were supposed to the the ultimate thing to look forward to while you did boring things.
So you're right in the grand view of things, just wrong in the details. And looking at the even bigger picture, you're wrong again.

I have no idea how you find the personal story interesting (I've been playing Pathologic for a couple of days now, and damn, there you can talk about an interesting story. I highly recommend that game if you haven't played it yet. Everything you do matters to the story - or at least to the game experience, which in turn is told from three different views depending on which character you play as - I can tell you, playing as the girl is hard). But as for PUGing dungeons, no - that's not an artificial challenge, it's a very real one, in fact more real than presenting difficulty by cranking up the damage output of enemies.

GW2 is already catering to your "ilk", since you are a casual and so are the grindmonkeys. The difference between you and them is that you have the balls to admit it, and to play as a casual.

About your digression...

In my imagined system, the stealthy rogue definitely have a place - and just in the way that you describe. Having real stealth (not click-button invisibility) in a multiplayer game, even in an MMO, is possible. I've been advocating for a long time that sitting still in a bush or something would render you hard to detect to other players. In the case where you see enemies on a minimap/radar, like in GW1, stealthed characters - or rather, those that you don't see, because they are behind a wall or something - should not appear. The stealth system should accommodate a stealth archetype by making clunky and/or noisy gear less stealthy! Try to move quietly in full plate... Not gonna happen. In tight soft-leather armor, though, it's very possible. That should be how to build a stealth archetype - a sneak/move quietly skill, and the right gear. Not click a button to become invisible while three people is staring right at you.

Summoner - yes, I know. This one is tricky! As you say, necromancers have quite disposable summons. Rangers have more persistent ones, but they're still tools, not the allies you want. At the same time, though, they can't be too much of a non-tool: if the summon is not a projection of yourself - if the sum total of your non-summoning capabilities and those of the summon is not balanced against a non-summon-archetype character, then the summoner will be overpowered. That is why summoners/characters who have allies (GW1 ritualists, GW1/2 necromancers and rangers) either use them as tools or let them be disposable, even fire-and-forget ones. It's possible, but a hard problem. So much needs to be designed around the summoner and the ally being summoned.

"Shadowmancer". Hmm, I checked out the binder on D&DWiki, he seems to be a rather straightforward summoner-type character, though different from the one above. Many of the more combat oriented aspects already existed in GW1 as the curses necro (I always imagined Spiteful Spirit as being an actual spirit that I summoned to hurt my enemy when that enemy did something). Assuming that the components exist in the game, this one is possible in my system.