Thyya

Robsy128, on 30 November 2012 - 01:17 AM, said:

That's fine for Ascended. What about the geometric increase in the materials requirements between Fine, Masterwork, Rare, and Exotic? Three fine mats, eight, fifteen, followed by the jump to ectos and T6 mats. Is that minimal grind? Not from my perspective. Yet they have been on a course of exacerbating the grind rather than eliminating it by taking mats out of the economy (MF recipes to soak up "excess" mats), increasing the amount of mats required for refining in some cases (e.g., more logs required to make each plank), and nerfing farming paths. How does that square up with statements that they want to balance and eliminate grind?

In GW1, there was one set of level-20 stats. In GW2 there are three tiers of stats available at level 80, with an expense that increases on a steep curve. Which scheme encourages less grind? Did that grind just somehow sneak into the game by accident, slipping under the noses of vigilant developers committed to a philosophy of no grind? Was it done on purpose by developers who were just too stupid to realize that they were introducing grind? Can you come up with any explanation for this that does not make the company look either moronic or hypocritical?

If you can, please do! I would LOVE to let them off the hook. But I fear I'm going to be wary of anything they say on this topic now until they back it up with action.

stefanplc, on 27 November 2012 - 11:58 AM, said:

Actually, Ascended was dreamed up post-launch.  What they wax on about is wishining it had been in at launch so they could avoid a majority of this snafu.  Otherwise Legendaries would have had the higher values.  Ascended is clearly an afterthought,

I have better games to play if I want to satisfy my vertical progression-needs.

Has none of you played GW1? or red Anything about the 4* gw1 games Anet made? In all GW games you get to max level very quickly, often in less then 1level per hour, max or nearly max gear is practically thrown at you as soon as you hit max level. None of the content is held ransom behind months of subscription fees, you gear is generally not rendered obsolete with new content etc... so none of the "traditional" reasons for keeping playing apply here.

IF you care absolutely nothing for how your gear looks or don't enjoy exploring the world, or against repeating content with others... you just stop playing the game to come back when something changes, new content is added or not at all. That is Not a failure of the game or its developers...

It's really beyond my understanding that they have been working on GW2 for 5 years and that they so radically changed ideas a month after release.

How fickle can you be? And what does that predict about the future?

paradiselight, on 27 November 2012 - 02:03 AM, said:

That is a fairly remarkable post, and there's much I agree with in it.

He was being diplomatic regarding vertical progression, though. I feel that vertical progression is for the young, those who've forgotten how nice it is to reach a culmination. The power plateau is that culmination, and vertical progression is the antithesis of it. I see the power plateau as reaching the last chapter of a really good book. You can then read it again, or go back and casually paw through the pages of your favourite chapters.

If you introduce vertical progression, it's like... having the last chapter of a book dangled in front of your nose. But you have to read the previous chapter 20 times in order to 'earn' it. Then when you get that one, it isn't really the last chapter, it's a bunch of dramatic padding. You feel short-changed and you decide to put in the grinding time to get the next chapter, hoping that one is the ending. Eventually, you do enough of this that you condition yourself to believe that doing this is okay, that just being given a good ending to the book is contrary to what you'd believe is fun.

I'd say that vertical progression is a cancer to game design for that reason, due to endlessly moving goal posts. You can never reach the power plateau and then go and explore all the nooks and crannies of the game at your leisure because you haven't reached the end. You haven't hit that power plateau. And as that power plateau is pushed ever further and further away, and future 'chapters' (future content) is gated behind the endless grinding required to get in, you lose interest.

That's the problem, vertical progression eventually and inevitably leads to gated content. ArenaNet have pretty much told me at this point that they're going to get to a point where there's going to be a lot of gated content that I either have to pay money for gems to enter (likely as well as buying the expansion pack), or I have to grind grind grind my way there. I don't think that's fun. I have a clear idea of fun and that's not it. To me, that seems like a cancer that's eroding good game design amongst MMOs. There should be a power plateau, an end point. All good games have that.

Otherwise it's an incomplete experience. And nothing bothers me more than that.

Furthermore, contrary to the post, there are MMOs out there which actually do have a power plateau, and I enjoy them. Guild Wars 1, Star Trek Online, Champions Online, and so on. Now what this means is that I've dumped GW2 in favour of other games, because I don't want to be chasing goalposts. I want to be able to play the game leisurely. And in my opinion, if you haven't hit the power plateau, the game does punish you with cheap mechanics (like one-shots which are caused purely by a foe's numbers being better than your numbers).

Maybe if GW2 wasn't so obsessed with the notion of my numbers versus those of my foes and was actually a more skill based game (like, say, Mass Effect 3's multi-player), then perhaps the power-plateau wouldn't be necessary. But in a game that fetishises stats to such a profound degree, GW2 needs that power plateau. We were promised that power plateau, that end to vertical progression. That was a lie. Almost hoping someone will have up for that, to be honest, because by saying that they're including vertical progression now, the promise of a power plateau was a total lie.

The post makes a great case for why GW2 needs a power plateau.

But what game doesn't have a power plateau and does decide everything by numbers? Oh, that's right. WoW. Weren't we here because we didn't want to play WoW?

I kept thinking about the progression issue and evaluating all data and opinions during this time, I think I got to my answer.

Progression is indeed needed to keep a MMO alive, but not necessarily in the form of new levels or gear tiers.
The aforementioned are bad forms of progression, and a lazy one to implement (yeah, add 5 levels and 5% stats, expansion done!).
What I want to see is customization progression.
I want to be able to customize and empower my current skills.
I want more customization for stats on my gear.
I want more slots for mods on my weapons, and more mods.
I want new weapons, new skills and new traits, even if doing new content is required to unlock their best versions.

NEW, MORE, CUSTOMIZATION. These are the words of progression for me.
Not 5% more stats. Not 5% more weapon damage range. Not a new item color. Not 5 more levels.

This patch did not add anything to our characters.
It added a new, awesome dungeon system that I hope they keep sticking to, but in regards of character progression and customization it did absolutely nothing.
This is the wrong way of doing progression and I hope they realize it.

Chris - "I would also like add that we have never said there would be no vertical progression. We do intent to focus on horizontal but we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve."

How can you have vertical progression with zero grind? How can you be both sober and intoxicated at the same time? Who is Chris Whiteside and why did we not hear asinine statements such as this from this clown before the game was released?

But, IMHO, bigger problem is really this clown.. "I completely agree that there needed to be something else to pursue after exotics. One could obtain a full exotic set with pretty much the exact stats one desires rather quickly after reaching 80.'"

Why do you need to pursue only gear in a game? Why do you not pursue how to play "my class better than I did today"?

Why is this mentality? I mean, why do you have to play every single game to get better gear and measure your progression in the game based on what gear you acquired vs. how well/comfortable you are in playing certain classes?

Is this truly the "WOW" effect?

RAD, on 27 November 2012 - 03:12 AM, said:

I think that for min/max builds in WvW that it will certainly make a difference.  For some it'll push their stats into a really ridiculous territory and as these gear sets expand it'll only continue to get worse.

I'm just trying to provide some perspective; that of a player upset by the direction this gear grind is going.  I play more than most players, logging tons of hours per week.  I'm certainly not casual... but I spend *all* of my time in WvW.  I was happy with the lazy grind to get crafted exotics and my gear *looks* like crap but I'm on equal footing with everyone else.  

These changes are pushing me and many people that I play with towards other games.  We should be an easy demographic for ANet to keep around but they are pushing us away.  This is a financially dumb move for them.

Shatteredz, on 27 November 2012 - 01:52 AM, said:

I'm going to keep quoting this wonderful post so that people understand why we are upset.
Why The Stat Cap Is So Important

Shatteredz, on 27 November 2012 - 01:52 AM, said:

Do you realize how ridiculous your statement is? Just imagine what would have happened if you posted that pre-launch.

Var, on 27 November 2012 - 12:14 AM, said:

This is also from the guy that, literally two comments above, claimed they weren't grindy at all, or required zero/minimal grind.

As you might surmise, I hold very very little stock in what he says. If he thinks 300 ectos, 1350 fractal relics, 24 skill points, and 250 T6 mats is "zero" or "minimal" grind, then what are they going to change it to?

ArenaNet flushed their credibility down the toilet. That was their decision, it's hard to fault me for not taking things they say at face value (especially when they contradict themselves literally minutes apart).

To recap why I find it absurd.

ArenaNet

1) Sold us GW2 by saying things like "We don't make grindy games"
2) Releases a new tier that requires hundreds of hours of grinding only three months after release.
3) Goes into public and claims the massive grind for those items does not exist and is "minimal" or "zero" grind.
4) Only a few minutes after claiming that there is zero/minimal grind for the items, changes their tune and says it's too grindy.

Forgive me if I don't buy into them saying they'll fix the requirements (not that I don't think they'll be changed, I just don't see them being fixed).

The problem that you and many other players have can be summed up by pressing Control-F and typing "toward" into the box that appears. Four of the six results are preceded by WORK, and a fifth is preceded by GOING.... in this case meaning work.

This is a game.  It isn't and shouldn't be work.  It should be fun.
If you're playing for any reason other than fun, you're doing it wrong.

Just because a certain game has made a gear treadmill a usual thing doesn't mean that the usual thing is the right thing or the best thing.  If people need to feel that they're WORKING toward something, then perhaps they should find a more productive hobby than playing a game. Go build a bird house or something instead.

In my not so humble opinion, anyone that requires any kind of progression at all beyond what this game already provides should find another hobby.

Lordkrall, on 21 November 2012 - 09:32 AM, said:

Following your argument they may as well have released pacman, because they didn't promise anything.

And also you're implicitely say we shouldn't trust anything ANet (or any) people say unless they say "I promise".
That's not how the world works. At least not the one I live in, perhaps everything you say is meaningless unless you say "I promise"?

I'd have to say that it does set a worrying precedent. Guild Wars 1 managed just fine with no upgrades to item levels throughout its run - once you got the best items you were done (unless you wanted to shoot for fancier skins) and could just concentrate on overcoming challenges. And now Guild Wars 2 couldn't even get past the first quarter without escalating gear an additional tier - something that's inevitably going to downvalue the exotic dungeon armours that had previously appeared to be intended to be the equivalent of Guild Wats 1's 15K armours?

One of the big draws about the franchise - especially if they're going to claim "if you hate MMOs, you really need to check out Guild War 2" - is that it didn't have the "progression" treadmill that's the traditional carrot-on-a-stick treatment offered to MMO players. However, this precedent being set so early in GW2's run raises the spectre of the gear grind proving to be worse than WoW's ever was - if they can't make a quarter without upgrading the gear levels, how far is it going to be upgraded in two years? And how high is the barrier for entry for new players going to become as a result?

dss_live, on 25 November 2012 - 01:36 AM, said:

I don't know about you, but most people do WORK for their money in real life.

Why do gamers always think real money fall from the sky?  Yeah "lazy" people go to work to twiddle their thumbs everyday for their easy money unlike hardworking gold farmers in the game.