Rifky Rayn

Lordkrall, on 14 May 2013 - 06:42 PM, said:

Well then, that is good news. I do like the idea of having limited time events that make uncommon crafting materials a bit more common. I noticed the same thing with the passiflora flowers in the notes.

Also, if the boxes drop frequently enough, then that is also very good. Not for nothing, but when they say rare drops, I kinda thought they would be rare, like the frequency of rare gear drops.

Well, I take back everything I said. If the RNG isn't atrociously pushing people to go to the gemstore and the gemstore is merely a convenience for people unwilling to do the content, then that is a good step in the right direction.

I may have to log back in and check it out.

A 1st year birthday present that isn't linked to the gem store.

zwei2stein, on 26 April 2013 - 11:25 AM, said:

Yeah, you get where this is coming from. For instance, if Factions were made today, NC Soft would definitely chafe at the presence of samurai-like characters like Shiro. Why? Samurai are used as imagery of horrible brutality and oppression in countries outside of Japan, particularly Korea.
And yeah, the nazi analogy actually works -- Korea suffered some horrible stuff at the hands of Japan, especially in World War 2. History that most of us haven't even read about and I couldn't even write here without my post being automatically flagged. That's why it's actually exceedingly rare for samurai to be present in RPGs that Japan exports that don't explicitly take place in Japan. The swords might be there, but pretty much everyone agrees those can still be awesome sometimes.

I'm actually absolutely sure NC Soft will let ArenaNet do Cantha things in the future if they promise to do more research than they did when Factions was released.
For comparison's sake, I actually thought it was extremely tasteless that Nightfall had a slavery-themed subplot with the centaurs. If I were one of the writers, I wouldn't have put a slavery subplot within a lightyear of an African-themed game. That's a bottomless can of worms that opens up into an endless series of cans.

But yeah: I'm not asking ANet to never do Asian stuff. I'm asking them to not be lazy or careless. And lots of "cultural" things about GW1 would be considered both by today's standards, where research is easier than it's ever been in human history. And contrary to the people arguing otherwise, it's not a double standard -- there's plenty of ways to portray medieval European stuff as offensive. It's just that most of us who grew up in western culture already intrinsically and unconsciously avoid those pitfalls. We don't even notice ourselves doing it, it's that deeply conditioned.

A good example is the topic of christian exceptionalism in western society. I know some of you might be already cringing, and some moderators reading this might already be snapping to attention ready at any moment to jump into the topic to say "don't go there, back on topic please". Which is exactly my point -- we just know to avoid it. Someone making a game overseas might not, and I suspect it's why certain games like the original Final Fantasy Tactics or Xenogears had all the tact of a drunken hippo.


EDIT: Oh, as a more modern example, Operation Darkness already almost fits zwei2stein's analogy .

I for one am super offended that Tyria makes a mockery of my European roots.  I studied the great European castles and medieval  architecture in school and I am extremely offended by ANETS use of such imagery in this game.  I am also offended by the Charr as a race as I am a cat.  Meow.

Darkobra, on 31 March 2013 - 11:20 PM, said:

Probably because its a parody.

Anywho, I hope its not too over the top in the difficulty department. I get war flasbacks to all of those 8-bit games I've played that were insanely hard.

Diovid of the Land, on 20 March 2013 - 02:35 PM, said:

Funny. I rather think commandigon shockaxe, escape DB spam, and spirits + soul reaping + healing would be big balance issues. Actually thanks to dual classing many of them were, but it would be even worse when you get the runes going and more freedom with secondary choice.

Basically as you keep adding truly new functionality to existing classes, you will wipe out their distinguishing weaknesses, barring some specific countermeasure designs that GW2 currently lacks; or you water down the new functionality so much that it has minimal impact. That doesn't automatically rule it out, but it is a significant limit on how far you can take things.

Given GW2's lack of secondaries you also have to significantly bloat options within a class rather than simplifying for the end user by cordoning them off in a separate class, and you also greatly increase the number of intra-character combinations to worry about. And really GW2's total number of skills is not small compared to say prophecies. It's the limitations on how they can be combined (no secondaries, chunked into weapons, synergy minimized, etc.) that have kept the balance more controlled. And nothing is more controlled than grouping new skills into a totally new class that can't combine with the others.

I tend to think that the introduction of new classes wasn't the primary reason for some of the imbalance that creeped into GW1.  More, it was the introduction of massive numbers of skills combined with the dual classing system.  To make players want the new skills, anet went down the road of making the new skills more powerful than the old ones in many cases.  So we had power creep (pretty impressively in Nightfall) combined with what eventually became a huge list of skills to try to keep in mind when talking about balance.  The dual classing was never particularly balanced even from the start (plenty of profession didn't get much better even with their 2nd prof, while several could become massively powerful.... like necros and eles).

Since GW2 system is so simplistic, I tend to think new professions wouldn't be very problematic to balance... other than a few class specific issues, many of the current professions already feel basically the same.  I personally find that kind of boring... but then I've never been one of those people who thinks things are always best when well balanced.  If GW2 had been a game designed so that what you do is more situational than what it is now, lack of balance wouldn't be a big deal in many ways.  As it is, when fighting mobs in PvE you can pretty much do the same thing in every fight and be successful, and a lot of PvP seems to work that way too... it makes it more boring, but easier (and more important) to balance.

I get the point about currency multiplication, but If GW2 as a whole is "too complicated" for an MMO, I may have to give up all hope in humanity.