"We started this company to innovate and bring players new experiences. Guild Wars 2 is the perfect game for Guild Wars players, but it’s not just the same game repeated again."
"Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee."
"It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment."
That's how they got money, you can't change that and claim that you are offering the same game. I call whitewashing if your only response for chucking the entire reasoning of the game is "things change". They got the sales they did because they talked down on those other systems, making a change to BE who they said was WRONG to begin with is exactly the words they used on us being used back on them. If the "same mmo everyone else is building" was wrong when you said it, it's still wrong when I say it too.
I may change my clothes and I may change what I eat but I never change my gender after 3 months of marriage and just come home one day with different parts after saying nothing to my spouse. That's the analogy you need to grasp understand this. This change was the soul of the game, the entire philosophy.
When you try to say "things change" you either think people are stupid or willing to take abuse and offer the other cheek.
Pretty much agree. I am still enjoying the game but..........
The game went from being about exploration, character building and PvP to being focused on keeping up with the gear treadmill.
Unfortunately, there are far better gear grinders available on the market right now, so that puts GW2 in a bad position. They alienated their devoted fanbase, and the content locusts who wanted gear to grind are finishing up this batch and will start shuffling off to their next target to ruin.
If they'd succeeded at making the entire game as endgame, more people would be playing it that way, and none of this would have been an issue.
It has a sustainable endgame...
Thing is most of you themepark guys don't consider cosmetics worth the trouble.
You forced A-nets hand tbh.
Me? No, I'm more of a sandbox guy. but yeah, still don't consider cosmetics worth the trouble. Least not that much trouble, and not as my highest possible aspiration in a game.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Arena Net said one thing and is dishing out another, there is no way to spin it, so people who believed the game had little to do with gear are going to be dissappointed. I for one never cared, as much of the game restricts the gear anyways, and I knew that even for cosmetics some treadmill must be added.
I'm dissappointed with GW2 for whole different reasons personally, and this is a silly thing to tie peoples panties in a knot ;o.
When you try to say "things change" you either think people are stupid or willing to take abuse and offer the other cheek.
SNIP!
This whole situation reminds me of this saying "money talks, bullshit walks" Arenanet have just learned the hard way. Their hand was forced but to my mind this is still a test to see how things go down so they are being clever with the way they are introducing the Asceneded gear they could string this out for quite a long time and then just stop there, it gives them time to work on other progression systems, it was easy to implement with the FotM dungeon which was going to be in the game anyway and guess what if it never had the Ascended rewards the bitching ther other way would have been very loud as well, maybe not as loud but still the bitching would have been there.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
The whole game is endgame but you cant expect everyone to stay in one zone and farm events all day to gear up your alts.
No it's not. End game is sitting in LA and farming the fractals dungeon. Be realistic. Everything changed when they added Ascended Gear.
Yes it did, instead of people leaving because they were done with the events they now have a dungeon to run.
The fractals are in place for one reason and one reason only, to stop the bleeding.
You want everyone in the zones helping you gear up? Guess what the game would be dead in 6 months and closed down in 12 if you had your way.
If they just made all the karma gear available without a need for 10 or 20 or even more people to be present at the same time to take down an abnoxiously difficult to kill mob, it would also solve the problem at hand. The champion events need to scale to be just about soloable because if they aren't, they're just about useless with the bleeding, from the world, the introduction of the new fractals dungeon caused.
The horizontal progression was well advertised but dumped in favor of vertical progression. I guess ArenaNet's got the numbers to support that this is the way to go. The premise of the whole game being end game just went out the window for good. I guess this never appealed to you and you're happy with the change. It did appeal to me and I'm not happy with the change. For me it was in fact THE unique selling proposition of GW2. If it had a sub, I'd have cancelled after that patch since it's a blattant bait and switch. Since it doesn't have a sub, I'll wait and see if they can still fix it. Make WvW use the PvP gear and all is fine again for casual players.
Wait and see. Content gating and gear tiers are a must in an MMO these days? If so, then bummer, don't play MMO's if you don't want to build your life around them. Unless they can make the gear grind completely optional.
I don't know for sure where you got your 6 month and 12 month predictions from, but I assume the sun doesn't shine there. Ever heard of the original Guild Wars? It was shut down after 12 months right?
Arena Net said one thing and is dishing out another, there is no way to spin it, so people who believed the game had little to do with gear are going to be dissappointed. I for one never cared, as much of the game restricts the gear anyways, and I knew that even for cosmetics some treadmill must be added.
I'm dissappointed with GW2 for whole different reasons personally, and this is a silly thing to tie peoples panties in a knot ;o.
The same people complained before because there were no gear improvement after the easy to get exo gear. So they listened and now you are complained for that as well.
Personally wont I complain any way until I see a complete set of ascended gear and how to get it. A backpiece and a few rings are no too much to judge anything on.
Arena Net said one thing and is dishing out another, there is no way to spin it, so people who believed the game had little to do with gear are going to be dissappointed. I for one never cared, as much of the game restricts the gear anyways, and I knew that even for cosmetics some treadmill must be added.
I'm dissappointed with GW2 for whole different reasons personally, and this is a silly thing to tie peoples panties in a knot ;o.
The same people complained before because there were no gear improvement after the easy to get exo gear. So they listened and now you are complained for that as well.
Personally wont I complain any way until I see a complete set of ascended gear and how to get it. A backpiece and a few rings are no too much to judge anything on.
I'm complaing about the new gear.
Please go find a post where I complained that there was nothing to do after exotics.
The same people my ass.
Some always complain regardless but I've seen a ton of people complaining about this that didn't complain before (myself included).
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I think I get what they are going to do. In most MMORPGs they release a new tier of gear all at once. ArenaNet isn't doing that here. It looks like they might release Ascended gear slowly over time. They said they will be releasing this gear over time, but they never stated at what pace they would be doing it. We might not get "a new tier of gear every 3 months", but we might get this ascended tier of gear a few pieces at a time over a prolonged period of time. Is that any better than what we are used to with MMORPGs?
There are a lot of threads on this subject, this seems to be the active one now.
No matter which way you spin it, it does appear that a Gear treadmill has been added.
You had Exoctics and Legendary which were on a par. Now you have a near tier, Ascended, which is better than Exoctic regradless of how much of a percentage increase there is. This was added because of the incredibly long grind needed to get Legendary, as stepping stone if you will.
New content was added with a carrot :- Ascended gear.
However as Legendary was only a cosmetic change from Exotic as large number of players would not bother trying to attain it. Increasing the stats so that they are better than Asceneded give incentive to acquire them, a carrot.
This makes it a treadmill, regradless of how you try and spin it.
There are a lot of threads on this subject, this seems to be the active one now.
No matter which way you spin it, it does appear that a Gear treadmill has been added.
You had Exoctics and Legendary which were on a par. Now you have a near tier, Ascended, which is better than Exoctic regradless of how much of a percentage increase there is. This was added because of the incredibly long grind needed to get Legendary, as stepping stone if you will.
New content was added with a carrot :- Ascended gear.
However as Legendary was only a cosmetic change from Exotic as large number of players would not bother trying to attain it. Increasing the stats so that they are better than Asceneded give incentive to acquire them, a carrot.
This makes it a treadmill, regradless of how you try and spin it.
so what they added new ascended rings but its soo easy to get them
There are a lot of threads on this subject, this seems to be the active one now.
No matter which way you spin it, it does appear that a Gear treadmill has been added.
You had Exoctics and Legendary which were on a par. Now you have a near tier, Ascended, which is better than Exoctic regradless of how much of a percentage increase there is. This was added because of the incredibly long grind needed to get Legendary, as stepping stone if you will.
New content was added with a carrot :- Ascended gear.
However as Legendary was only a cosmetic change from Exotic as large number of players would not bother trying to attain it. Increasing the stats so that they are better than Asceneded give incentive to acquire them, a carrot.
This makes it a treadmill, regradless of how you try and spin it.
so what they added new ascended rings but its soo easy to get them
already got like 10 by doing lvl10 and 20 dailies
Not everyone will see it as a treadmill and will continue to argue the point until blue in the face. What happens when a new dungeon is added with one more piece of acended gear, but to do the dungeon you need to have an infusion gem?
Perhaps that won't happen and you can do that dungeon in Exotics too.
But if the stats make a difference in any area of the game, especially in PVP zones, then it becomes a must have tier of armour.
If any new content is added that requires infusions it becomes required to be able to enjoy new content, if all new content that is added does not require infusions then the armour becomes worthless, except for the slight edge that the stats give.
At the end of the day Ascended is the carrat at the end of the stick and is the main reason people will do the Fractals dungeon.
Disagree with the treadmill tag. I have 4 characters at various levels. My level 80 ranger has a mix of exotic and rare gear and I am quite happy with that. I don't need all exotic gear and am now exploring and leveling my alts. Also, I don;t game 8 hours a day/7 days a week as I have a life (not to mention that spending 8 hours a day gaming is not exactly the healthist thing to do).
Look. GW2 isn't a gear grinder game unless you want it to be. That hasn't changed. Many people just choose to go after legendaries / ascended items now that the game has been out for a few months, and those are very grindy.
The misconceptions / missinformation start coming from people who assume that just because something is difficult to get, that they have to have it. You don't. You can still dominate WvW w/ out ascended gear. You can still do all the other dungeons, events in the game w/ out ascended gear. You can still do sPvP without ascended gear. You can still do fractals up to difficulty lvl 20 without ascended gear.
In short, you can still experience all of the games content without ascended gear, and do fine. The only thing ascended gear really does for you atm, is to allow you to farm higher difficulty lvls of that one dungeon (fractals of the mist) in order to have better chances at rare drops. That's it.
That said, people should absolutely be looking at Anet carefully going forward. Currently, it's not all about gear grind (i.e. the grind is entirely optional), However it is entirely possible that they will start going w/ a linear progression, which would be a huge mistake for GW2.
The game has a lot of issues it needs to work on, but once again people are blowing this one way out of proportion.
Look. GW2 isn't a gear grinder game unless you want it to be. That hasn't changed. Many people just choose to go after legendaries / ascended items now that the game has been out for a few months, and those are very grindy.
The misconceptions / missinformation start coming from people who assume that just because something is difficult to get, that they have to have it. You don't. You can still dominate WvW w/ out ascended gear. You can still do all the other dungeons, events in the game w/ out ascended gear. You can still do sPvP without ascended gear. You can still do fractals up to difficulty lvl 20 without ascended gear.
In short, you can still experience all of the games content without ascended gear, and do fine. The only thing ascended gear really does for you atm, is to allow you to farm higher difficulty lvls of that one dungeon (fractals of the mist) in order to have better chances at rare drops. That's it.
That said, people should absolutely be looking at Anet carefully going forward. Currently, it's not all about gear grind (i.e. the grind is entirely optional), However it is entirely possible that they will start going w/ a linear progression, which would be a huge mistake for GW2.
The game has a lot of issues it needs to work on, but once again people are blowing this one way out of proportion.
Exactly. Like people are saying, but its an 8% upgrade. Sure it is from exotics to ascdend, when you do the math from your character stats, you realise that the upgrade is far lower than that, its like 0.8%. So yeah go figure why people are complaning for something they don't even understand properly.
The only way you can call this a grind is if the armor had "I win" componants in them, but they dont. This is not WoW people, stop treating every game like WoW.
I have some crappy gear on my Ranger, but I seem to get a lot of kills in the WvW, go figure....lol
The only way you can call this a grind is if the armor had "I win" componants in them, but they dont. This is not WoW people, stop treating every game like WoW.
I have some crappy gear on my Ranger, but I seem to get a lot of kills in the WvW, go figure....lol
When the armour drops in the other areas of the game then there will no longer be a treadmill, except for the optional grind for legendary.
Until then they have a treadmill, it does not require "I win" components. To continue to do the dungeon you need the ascended armour and it also gets harder each time you do it. At what point does it become uncompletable because you are not tough enough?
The only way you can call this a grind is if the armor had "I win" componants in them, but they dont. This is not WoW people, stop treating every game like WoW.
I have some crappy gear on my Ranger, but I seem to get a lot of kills in the WvW, go figure....lol
When the armour drops in the other areas of the game then there will no longer be a treadmill, except for the optional grind for legendary.
Until then they have a treadmill, it does not require "I win" components. To continue to do the dungeon you need the ascended armour and it also gets harder each time you do it. At what point does it become uncompletable because you are not tough enough?
This is conjecture only.
You can get upto difficulty lvl 20 without any ascended items. This is not to say that after difficulty ~16 or so, you will be able to complete them if you suck, though.
Either way, the way the new dungeon is designed, it's the same dungeon mostly, it's only the difficulty that changes.
Comments
Pretty much agree. I am still enjoying the game but..........
GW2 just became Fractal Wars 2 for awhile
It has a sustainable endgame...
Thing is most of you themepark guys don't consider cosmetics worth the trouble.
You forced A-nets hand tbh.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
Yes it did, instead of people leaving because they were done with the events they now have a dungeon to run.
The fractals are in place for one reason and one reason only, to stop the bleeding.
You want everyone in the zones helping you gear up? Guess what the game would be dead in 6 months and closed down in 12 if you had your way.
Playing: Nothing
Looking forward to: Nothing
The game went from being about exploration, character building and PvP to being focused on keeping up with the gear treadmill.
Unfortunately, there are far better gear grinders available on the market right now, so that puts GW2 in a bad position. They alienated their devoted fanbase, and the content locusts who wanted gear to grind are finishing up this batch and will start shuffling off to their next target to ruin.
Me? No, I'm more of a sandbox guy. but yeah, still don't consider cosmetics worth the trouble. Least not that much trouble, and not as my highest possible aspiration in a game.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Arena Net said one thing and is dishing out another, there is no way to spin it, so people who believed the game had little to do with gear are going to be dissappointed. I for one never cared, as much of the game restricts the gear anyways, and I knew that even for cosmetics some treadmill must be added.
I'm dissappointed with GW2 for whole different reasons personally, and this is a silly thing to tie peoples panties in a knot ;o.
This whole situation reminds me of this saying "money talks, bullshit walks" Arenanet have just learned the hard way. Their hand was forced but to my mind this is still a test to see how things go down so they are being clever with the way they are introducing the Asceneded gear they could string this out for quite a long time and then just stop there, it gives them time to work on other progression systems, it was easy to implement with the FotM dungeon which was going to be in the game anyway and guess what if it never had the Ascended rewards the bitching ther other way would have been very loud as well, maybe not as loud but still the bitching would have been there.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
If they just made all the karma gear available without a need for 10 or 20 or even more people to be present at the same time to take down an abnoxiously difficult to kill mob, it would also solve the problem at hand. The champion events need to scale to be just about soloable because if they aren't, they're just about useless with the bleeding, from the world, the introduction of the new fractals dungeon caused.
The horizontal progression was well advertised but dumped in favor of vertical progression. I guess ArenaNet's got the numbers to support that this is the way to go. The premise of the whole game being end game just went out the window for good. I guess this never appealed to you and you're happy with the change. It did appeal to me and I'm not happy with the change. For me it was in fact THE unique selling proposition of GW2. If it had a sub, I'd have cancelled after that patch since it's a blattant bait and switch. Since it doesn't have a sub, I'll wait and see if they can still fix it. Make WvW use the PvP gear and all is fine again for casual players.
Wait and see. Content gating and gear tiers are a must in an MMO these days? If so, then bummer, don't play MMO's if you don't want to build your life around them. Unless they can make the gear grind completely optional.
I don't know for sure where you got your 6 month and 12 month predictions from, but I assume the sun doesn't shine there. Ever heard of the original Guild Wars? It was shut down after 12 months right?
The same people complained before because there were no gear improvement after the easy to get exo gear. So they listened and now you are complained for that as well.
Personally wont I complain any way until I see a complete set of ascended gear and how to get it. A backpiece and a few rings are no too much to judge anything on.
Is more people playing now than before Ascended items?
It doesn't match my observations.
The MMO space is filled with gear grinders that drop population.
Gear grind keeping people playing is a myth.
What brings people back is new content - Halloween event, tons of people. Lost Shores, tons of people.
One just have to check stuff like xfire to see the spikes during these events.
What keeps people playing is good gameplay combined with new challenges.
GW2 has much better gameplay for my tastes than "roll to hit" games, including WoW.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I'm complaing about the new gear.
Please go find a post where I complained that there was nothing to do after exotics.
The same people my ass.
Some always complain regardless but I've seen a ton of people complaining about this that didn't complain before (myself included).
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
I think I get what they are going to do. In most MMORPGs they release a new tier of gear all at once. ArenaNet isn't doing that here. It looks like they might release Ascended gear slowly over time. They said they will be releasing this gear over time, but they never stated at what pace they would be doing it. We might not get "a new tier of gear every 3 months", but we might get this ascended tier of gear a few pieces at a time over a prolonged period of time. Is that any better than what we are used to with MMORPGs?
There are a lot of threads on this subject, this seems to be the active one now.
No matter which way you spin it, it does appear that a Gear treadmill has been added.
You had Exoctics and Legendary which were on a par. Now you have a near tier, Ascended, which is better than Exoctic regradless of how much of a percentage increase there is. This was added because of the incredibly long grind needed to get Legendary, as stepping stone if you will.
New content was added with a carrot :- Ascended gear.
However as Legendary was only a cosmetic change from Exotic as large number of players would not bother trying to attain it. Increasing the stats so that they are better than Asceneded give incentive to acquire them, a carrot.
This makes it a treadmill, regradless of how you try and spin it.
so what they added new ascended rings but its soo easy to get them
already got like 10 by doing lvl10 and 20 dailies
Not everyone will see it as a treadmill and will continue to argue the point until blue in the face. What happens when a new dungeon is added with one more piece of acended gear, but to do the dungeon you need to have an infusion gem?
Perhaps that won't happen and you can do that dungeon in Exotics too.
But if the stats make a difference in any area of the game, especially in PVP zones, then it becomes a must have tier of armour.
If any new content is added that requires infusions it becomes required to be able to enjoy new content, if all new content that is added does not require infusions then the armour becomes worthless, except for the slight edge that the stats give.
At the end of the day Ascended is the carrat at the end of the stick and is the main reason people will do the Fractals dungeon.
This is only conjecture and opinion.
Look. GW2 isn't a gear grinder game unless you want it to be. That hasn't changed. Many people just choose to go after legendaries / ascended items now that the game has been out for a few months, and those are very grindy.
The misconceptions / missinformation start coming from people who assume that just because something is difficult to get, that they have to have it. You don't. You can still dominate WvW w/ out ascended gear. You can still do all the other dungeons, events in the game w/ out ascended gear. You can still do sPvP without ascended gear. You can still do fractals up to difficulty lvl 20 without ascended gear.
In short, you can still experience all of the games content without ascended gear, and do fine. The only thing ascended gear really does for you atm, is to allow you to farm higher difficulty lvls of that one dungeon (fractals of the mist) in order to have better chances at rare drops. That's it.
That said, people should absolutely be looking at Anet carefully going forward. Currently, it's not all about gear grind (i.e. the grind is entirely optional), However it is entirely possible that they will start going w/ a linear progression, which would be a huge mistake for GW2.
The game has a lot of issues it needs to work on, but once again people are blowing this one way out of proportion.
Exactly. Like people are saying, but its an 8% upgrade. Sure it is from exotics to ascdend, when you do the math from your character stats, you realise that the upgrade is far lower than that, its like 0.8%. So yeah go figure why people are complaning for something they don't even understand properly.
Still chasing those pixels??
The only way you can call this a grind is if the armor had "I win" componants in them, but they dont. This is not WoW people, stop treating every game like WoW.
I have some crappy gear on my Ranger, but I seem to get a lot of kills in the WvW, go figure....lol
When the armour drops in the other areas of the game then there will no longer be a treadmill, except for the optional grind for legendary.
Until then they have a treadmill, it does not require "I win" components. To continue to do the dungeon you need the ascended armour and it also gets harder each time you do it. At what point does it become uncompletable because you are not tough enough?
This is conjecture only.
You can get upto difficulty lvl 20 without any ascended items. This is not to say that after difficulty ~16 or so, you will be able to complete them if you suck, though.
Either way, the way the new dungeon is designed, it's the same dungeon mostly, it's only the difficulty that changes.
Ascended are only optional if you don't mind being gimped.
In a game where the output of your actions is controled by numbers, maxing those numbers is not an optional part of the game.
Getting a Legendary item is optional, getting an ascended item is an integral part of reaching the cap of your character.
Getting items is not a proof of skill - it is a proof of time spent grinding.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders