Velicia

Kerrath, on 11 April 2013 - 08:23 AM, said:

I'm just gonna leave this here for everyone.

TGIFrisbie, on 07 February 2013 - 08:37 PM, said:

This is an excellent point many miss, especially those newer to the genre.  MMOs are begining, if not already, saturating the market.  It has been pointed out in other discussions the general MMO community of players is finite.  There are only so many gamers interested in the genre, and all these MMOs on the market are competing for the same limited, although large, pool of gamers.  Many break out with all their bluster and vigor as if they are the NEW BOSS MMO to DOMINATE the current market, and quickly get the air let out within 3-6 months from release.  A niche MMO or niche MMOs are probably the future.

That was probably the downfall of many of the post-WoW attempts to develop MMOs.  Everyone saw the enormous growth of the market caused by WoW and assumed they could outdo Blizzard or at least jump in and add to that growth.

The market has been getting saturated by the post-WoW MMO design (fantasy genre, level progression, loot tables etc).   As much as enjoy GW2, and I’m having more fun with it than any MMO I’ve ever played, I think a good deal of its success could be from drawing away WoW players from the existing MMO market.   I'm not sure GW2 is generating many new MMO players.

But I would argue the overall MMO market still has room to grow. The games simply need to be smaller in scope.   Smaller games require less money and that means there is more acceptance of risk.   It’s always been single player games that have brought innovation to gaming, it would be cool if smaller MMOs could start to contribute in a similar way.

Devs could explore more specific markets like perma-death hardcores or RPers or whatever.   By limiting their scope, rather than trying to rake in the whole market, we could end up with more quality games and more choices for players.   Which sounds like a good thing, I think.

Luther Keeler said:

aurora2 said:

Programs Used:

- Rainmeter (32 bits version // 64 bits version)
- RocketDock(you can't see it because it auto hides but it has useful shortcuts)
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Themes/skins for Rainmeter

- Razor - Items Used: Trash, Reader, Network, MultiDock, Battery, Anydate
- Hero- only used ClockWeather
- Enigma (comes with Rainmeter) - Used Twitter-Reader and G-mail Reader
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Windows 7 Theme

- Soft 7 v1.8 - Best Theme out there

How to Install:

- Use "Soft7" if you put your superbar on bottom or on the left
- Use "Soft7 on top" if you put your superbar on top or on the right


1) FIRST, DOWNLOAD AND RUN THIS Universal Theme Patcher IN ADMINISTRATOR MODE (right-clic > "Run as administrator"), UAC must be turned off
After patch, restart computer to take effect

2) extract content (soft7.theme & soft7 folder) into C:\Windows\Resources\Themes
and double-clic on soft7.theme
Then restart in order that everything take effect !
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Icons

I used the icons on the superbar

- Token(pack with 128 icons)
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Orb

Backup your Original Orb first (C:\Windows\explorer.exe) - rename it for like explorer_backup.exe

- SteelOrb Watch out for 32bits and 64 bit version included in this pack.

- Instructions

My new fur and armor!
t3 helm
arah shoulders and gloves
shadow chest
cof pants
hotw shoes

Well color me impressed, this threads been up for hours and nobody's thrown in some super negative twist on this good news. Good job
Really like how much control they are giving us with these options, can't wait to see WvW with this.

New armor for my elementalist. Inquest leggings, order of whisper chest, AC boots and karma gloves. I am not sure about colors yet (whisperer colors were easy start). Also the weapon is still mystery.

Ok, I agree with some points made but other points are extremely exaggerated.  It's always the same train of thinking I see in these threads, 5 people do not make up millions guys.

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This is an unfair assumption. It took the devs 5 years to create but to compare that flat out to gameplay hours is insane.  It takes a long time to actually create every grain of sand and structure, it's not the same as going through it and playing on it.

That's like saying you took 15 yrs to build a new model car and it should take people 15 years to break said car, it just doesn't always work this way in the real world.  Manpower hours never directly= hours of use.

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I don't agree, these "millions in denial" are actually doing what they want to do.  I hate how everyone acts as if people are so stupid and brainwashed when in reality you just don't agree with what they enjoy as "fun".  If someone likes apples and you like oranges just let the other do what they wish.  Besides, their are a lot more new WoW players than before.

In fact I wish ppl would really stop bashing WoW for no reason and just focus on GW2.

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The thing with this is that most people don't care about what ascended armor is today. They care what it will become and can change GW2 into.  The bigger picture is will this have an effect on this game within 5 months or not.

The world in GW2 isn't the key thing, it's the gameplay.  People don't care how lavish your farm looks that you took 5 yrs to make, they care how it feels when you play on it.

I really don't envy the life of a game developer, it must be very disheartening to be constantly moaned at by your player-base. How much is enough for the MMO gamer? Will you or I ever be pleased?
"oh this is too easy"
"this is too hard"
"this is too grindy"
"there isnt enough grind, nothing to do"
"too much to do"
"too random"
  "ugh, such boring loot we all have the same"
  and it just keeps going.

The fact is they cant please everyone, no one can. Do we have to jump on every decision? Every piece of content? It will never be perfect for us all.
Look at the clock-tower, the dev actually apologized for making it too hard? Are we all that pathetic that any challenge in a video game is cried about so much, we need a sorry note from the creator?

Most of us gamers now are 18-30, we grew up with games...cant we all just grow up in general? Sure post constructive posts about issues, but leave the crying in the cot with the bottle.

An interesting read which summarizes my feelings. I enjoyed running te fractals in the beginning, but let's all be honest here, after level 3-4 we've had enough. We KNOW how the fractals work, we've done them, redone them and for what? 15 tokens + 20 each bonus? To get to a back slot ascended that requires 1350 tokens AND an insane amount of materiae and ectos? That's not what I want to be spending my play time on.

If these items end up being mandatory for future dungeons, then ANet will have disappointed me greatly, no matter how.. Easier it will be to get them.

Ascended Gear is designed to fill the 'Time' gap

They did this by requiring outrageous amount of materials like 250 of T6, and bringing your progress to a grind in order to fill the "time" gap.  This was an easy way out and a sloppy, rushed decision.

We will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve.

Ok, so a couple rings and a back piece are a low curve however, zero grind is insulting. I would like Anet explain how I get 250 t6 mats, 50 ectos or 1700+ shards without zero grind

We absolutely design everything we do with minimal grind and will continue with this principal moving forward.
We are currently discussing these particular items and it is fair to say that we don't want have such big hikes in requirements moving forward.

OK so now we went from zero grind to minimal grind to oh shit, maybe those hikes are too high and grindy allow us to back pedal.

I agree that the crafting materials required for Ascended Gear are to much of a grind and we are looking to balance the requirements

~facepalm~

Progression through tokens and mats is something we are having a good look at currently
Our intention is to deploy ascended components and gear across the whole of the game rather than focus it in one particular location. This was a a mistake and one that we will not be making moving forward.

So they admit it was a mistake making it too narrow focused with too high of requirements. Ok fine, whatever, but if this was your game why did you allow it to ship this new content in this condition? Let me answer that for you. It was Ncsoft/Nexon arm twisting your arm to add Korean grind so we spend more time in game as crystin cox manipulates and snakes her way through the cash shop to nickel and dime us to death with RNG fluff.

In retrospect Ascended should have been deployed pre launch and earn able throughout most activities in the game (which is how we are moving forward).

Meaning we needed the box sales, so 3 months in we drop the bomb and you will just have to deal with it.

No we were acutely aware of the what the reaction was going to be.

This is quite the most disturbing quote of the entire AMA. They knew we would not like it but threw us under the bus anyways. Good way to violate the trust of your player base. Every time he mentions moving forward he is referring to a backpedaling oh yea we messed up sorry about that let us fix it. I actually feel bad for Chris Whiteside. He must of picked the shortest straw in the draw on who gets to take one for the team and get steamrolled as they provide a lethargic attempt to damage control. Just the AMA alone is an admission of guilt.

What they really need to is emphasize the use of combos. It should be used to create teamwork so that it is important to use whether with a group or outside of one.

Don't put back the trinity. If they ever did that it would put the nail in the coffin of the game as far as I'm concerned.

The British author GK Chesterton once asked his readers to consider the case of some men wandering through the deep jungle and stumbling upon a modern, western style house in their path.  Not really having any idea what this house was doing there, these people might decide to knock it down so as to clear the path and continue upon their way.  However, Chesterton insisted that this would be the wrong decision.  It would be absurdly irresponsible, he asserted, to raze this building without knowing why it was there in the first place.  

Perhaps the point was made more commonly known at the mouth of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park as his character admonished John Hammond that he had been so concerned with whether or not he could clone dinosaurs that he never considered whether or not he should do so.

The "trinity," as it's been called, has been around MMOs since MMOs have been around, and in the zeal to eliminate it many have failed to consider that if it has been so common, there must be a reason.  It is simply not likely to be the case that its near universal presence is simply a result of the influence from Everquest, WoW, or any other game.  After all, there are simply an enormous variety of game designs and mechanics in any number of genres.  That the MMO genre would have simply remained so stagnant were there other options available seems improbable at best.

I think, ultimately, that this system has existed for so long because of the intrinsic nature of combat itself.  Any time any two entities battle (be it in video games or even real life) there are three and only three - no more and no less - basic things that can happen: The first entity can cause harm to the second, the first entity can be harmed by the second, and the harm done to one or the other could be alleviated by some means.  There is no way around this inherent aspect of combat.  It is, in large part, what in fact defines combat.If one wishes to make a game where either two players or a player and an AI fight, there exists the possibility of doing damage, of receiving damage, and of healing damage.  

All the "trinity" is, is a set of roles concerned with doing each of these three things as well as possible.  In video games as in life, the act of striving for the greatest success leads to a consolidation of resources.  We don't have firefighter-doctors, because a person who has invested in learning and practicing the arts of medicine and firefighting would be worse at either of them than another person who has invested all of his resources into any one of the two.  Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but as always those exceptions simply prove the rule.

The point here is that in eliminating the trinity system, all GW2 has done is made all characters less efficient at dealing, receiving, and healing damage.  An class which is able to simultaneously heal, tank, and damage must either be inadequate at all three, or be so strong by virtue of its abilities at all three as to make combat meaningless.  The reason that this system simply doesn't seem to have worked as well as many had hoped is because, while the classes themselves are all able to do each of the three roles to some degree, the enemy characters are still dealing damage as do all opponents in combat, and they therefore still follow the basic rules of combat.  

In the end, I think that one of the reasons that so many find this game boring is because given their greater personal skill and the utility of their classes at all three roles, their characters are too strong, or because given their lesser personal skill and the lack of efficient specialization for their class, their character feels too weak or the world too strong.

Darkobra, on 21 November 2012 - 06:45 AM, said:

Two things:

1. It hasn't even been a week and people are advertising from 1-12 from what I've seen on my own server and overflows. It is also a touch more difficult to get past the lower levels because people are not familiar with the maps yet (Get swamp? Quit and re-try without voice comm) so wipes and rage quits come faster. It's going to be difficult to find a PuG for this very quickly. If it's not meant to be PuG friendly then the November 15th update was a whole lot of terrible.

2. The ascended item drops are account bound, not character bound. The difficulty levels earned may be character bound but I would never willingly limit my group options by jumping on another character when I could get so much more playing whichever of my characters has access to the higher levels. This is especially true since the ascended items come level 10+ are going to become more of a necessity; I'm not about to blow 500 T6 materials and 100 ectos just so I can have two characters who can perform on equal footing.

Ascended items, in their words, were supposed to be something to work on after exotics but before Legendaries. See, I find that kind of funny since when I look at the recipes for making those back items they require 250 of a T6 material (needed for Legendary), skill points (needed for Legendary), and ectos (oh look, needed for Legendary). How am I supposed to work on my Legendary when my ascended gear is consuming the materials I also need for my Legendary? Also, the whole fact that an exotic piece will cost a gold piece if you're not picky about the skin but ascended items? Probably 20+ gold, in that range? Anet that's not another step, that's a gargantuan leap.

So, a Vial of Condensed Mists Essence dropped for me today.  My first thought was "Awesome! I can make an ascended item!"

...until I looked closer at the mat cost.  Potent bloods are almost 25 silver each and I need 250 of them.  And that's before even counting the ectos.

Now, to give you some background, I don't get a ton of playtime.  Between my family and my job, I don't get to put in nearly as many hours as I was able to do back in my college years, but that's why I came to GW2.  I played GW1 back in the day and I was really looking forward to a game where I can jump in and be judged by how well I played, not how long I played.

After hearing ArenaNet's manifesto on the game, I thought that's what I would find.

And it was.

Until this latest patch.  

I know to a lot of other people, this mat cost is nothing, but it's sad that it feels like I can't play MMOs and still be competitive anymore.

Andy88, on 17 September 2012 - 04:20 PM, said:

Sad, but true.

Having a system that facilitates forming groups should not be considered a bad thing just because another game did it.