On difficulty modes (Game Maker's Toolkit)

I thought that

It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

@"thrag.9740" said:1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with.

True, but better to split a population in a way that allow both to have fun, than to just not allow one group to have fun. If there's only one mode, then you have three groups of people, a) those who enjoy the existing raids and would be doing the harder version regardless, b) those who don't enjoy the existing raids, and bow out of the process entirely (and therefore aren't part of the population pool in the first place), and c) those who don't enjoy the cuyrrent version, but do it anyway because it's the only game in town. You are arguing that without group c being made available for your benefit, you might have a harder time finding a full party.

This is true.

But those players do not owe you anything.

Other MMOs offer split difficulty raids, and seem to do just fine. Even an indy game called "Guild Wars 2" offers 100 different levels of Fractal.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'.

And the answer is "yes, obviously."

But it's not so black and white, since offering easier modes should not radically increase development times. All they have to do is make the same higher difficulty versions they do now, and then copy/paste a new version and start knocking a few holes in the walls, reducing the negative impacts of failing various mechanics so that they don't end the fight entirely. If they'd like to spend a little more time sprucing the systems up, that's great, but it really shouldn't reduce their release schedule by a huge amount, and in return they can engage a much larger portion of the players.

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded.

Nah. There's no reason why players who enjoy higher difficulty content should receive significantly higher rewards than those who enjoy lower difficulty content. Play how you want to play. When the higher difficulty versions take more time to complete, they can receive slightly more rewards, comparable to the time they take, but there's no reason why they should have rewards unique to those modes, or have massively higher quantities of rewards. Players who enjoy higher difficulty content should be playing those modes because they enjoy it. We've already seen this effect in the game, where teams have cleared various raid content under numerous self-imposed handicaps, such as minimal armor, deliberately bad team comps, few members, etc. They were not rewarded bonus for this, they did it anyway because they enjoyed the challenge. That is, and should be the reward for playing more difficult versions of an encounter, so long as reward/time balance has been accounted for.

This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem.

I think two tiers should be plenty. Three or more would be unnecessary hair splitting.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@"thrag.9740" said:1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'.

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded.

This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem.

No thank you.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@thrag.9740 said:1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with.

@thrag.9740 said:2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'.

Should? Should not? Who is to say? Instead look at Anet's track record. How many times have fractal been completely overhauled because they had a new vision for difficulty tiers? Many people compare f50 to t4s, but does everyone remember that f50 wasn't even the first edition of the difficulty system? Toughness scaling, mist instability reworks, reward system reworks. You can't just ignore how much trouble the difficulty system has caused Anet in handling fractals, and assume none of those problems will be present in raids.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@thrag.9740 said:3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded.

This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem.

GW2 was released in 2012, 5 years ago. Since then, Anet has never successfully balanced content rewards based on how long it takes to complete. Do you even remember how much of a failure swamp of the mists were? What about Aetherblade path? Arah p4? COF p1 vs p3. How many players low skill players never leave t2 fractals because the completion time is properly balanced? Not many. How about escort vs xera? Same gold reward. Balancing based on completion time is a completely absurd argument counter to all past performance Anet has given us, believing it is even possible without a huge investment of man hours is ridiculous at this point.

@thrag.9740 said:First off, raids are never the only game in town. There is so much content in gw2, dungeons, fractals, wvw, pvp, open world. Not to mention other games outside gw2, there are so many games on steam, on nintendo switch etc. If you don't enjoy raids, I have no idea why you would force yourself to play raids. Unless you just want....legendary skins? The overwhelming majority of players I know that have 150+ LI don't even like the skins. I myself re skinned my legendary armors because they don't dye well. So its hard for me to believe that is motivation for playing content you don't enjoy.

That's ok, you don't have to understand. It's not important to any of this that you do understand. All you have to do is accept as a fact that players do feel that way, whether you can understand why or not.

Should? Should not? Who is to say? Instead look at Anet's track record. How many times have fractal been completely overhauled because they had a new vision for difficulty tiers?

But the thing is, most of the efforts they've put in is to make things more difficult. And that is hard, because you have to finely tune the content to be perfectly balanced with the capacity of the players (or at least that's the goal). Balancing an easy mode is a lot easier, because you just take what you already have and loosen the bolts. You don't need to add new mechanics, you don't need to balance it just so, you just make it so that the things that really punish you for failure in the harder mode, don't punish you as much. And if they get it wrong on the first pass? No harm done, they can tweak it a bit more in the next, which is different than the hardcore raids, where players would be disappointed by a boss that was a pushover in the initial pass.

GW2 was released in 2012, 5 years ago. Since then, Anet has never successfully balanced content rewards based on how long it takes to complete. Do you even remember how much of a failure swamp of the mists were? What about Aetherblade path? Arah p4? COF p1 vs p3. How many players low skill players never leave t2 fractals because the completion time is properly balanced? Not many. How about escort vs xera? Same gold reward. Balancing based on completion time is a completely absurd argument counter to all past performance Anet has given us, believing it is even possible without a huge investment of man hours is ridiculous at this point.

I'm fine with them erring on the side of caution here. They can make the hard mode twice as rewarding per unit of time as the easy mode if they like, so long as the easy mode does provide some meaningful progression. A year ago or more I was fine with there being significant time gates for earning Legendary armor via an easier mode, but that ship has sailed, since there has already been a two year time-gate in place. At this point easy mode should provide the armor at roughly the same speed as hard mode provided it, although newly added rewards can have added time gates to keep hard-mode players ell ahead of the easy mode players.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@thrag.9740 said:First off, raids are never the only game in town. There is so much content in gw2, dungeons, fractals, wvw, pvp, open world. Not to mention other games outside gw2, there are so many games on steam, on nintendo switch etc. If you don't enjoy raids, I have no idea why you would force yourself to play raids. Unless you just want....legendary skins? The overwhelming majority of players I know that have 150+ LI don't even like the skins. I myself re skinned my legendary armors because they don't dye well. So its hard for me to believe that is motivation for playing content you don't enjoy.

Designing content for players who choose to play content they dont enjoy is a fools errand. Its ok, you don't have to understand that, all you have to do is accept as a fact that it is.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@thrag.9740 said:Should? Should not? Who is to say? Instead look at Anet's track record. How many times have fractal been completely overhauled because they had a new vision for difficulty tiers?

No, there have been plenty of updates both ways. Swapping from fractal 50 to t4 was specifically for the casual players who wanted to do easy fractals like swamp every day. The first iteration of fractals, some players pushed all the way to fractal 80, and back then you only had the AR to protect you up to about level 30. Literally everything was a one shot if it inflicted agony. Anet didn't change that to make it harder. Everything in the game has a noticeable animation tell now or it doesn't hit as hard, such as mossman's big attack. Overall, it has been a wash with a mixture of updates making it more and less difficult.

But at the center of it all, we see the tier system constantly slowing down development. Every new fractal they have to figure out how to reorganize everything to fit into their 1-100 scheme, aquatic fractal use to have two distinct paths, now it has a random choice between those 2 paths. Every new fractal has to released in at least 4 versions. For example, thaumanova reactor use to be radically different at lower tiers (entire rooms skipped). Only for Anet to overhaul that concept years later. An overhaul that would have never been necessary with a single difficulty tier.

You can't ignore fractals while proclaiming that difficulty tiers wouldn't slow down raid development.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@thrag.9740 said:GW2 was released in 2012, 5 years ago. Since then, Anet has never successfully balanced content rewards based on how long it takes to complete. Do you even remember how much of a failure swamp of the mists were? What about Aetherblade path? Arah p4? COF p1 vs p3. How many players low skill players never leave t2 fractals because the completion time is properly balanced? Not many. How about escort vs xera? Same gold reward. Balancing based on completion time is a completely absurd argument counter to all past performance Anet has given us, believing it is even possible without a huge investment of man hours is ridiculous at this point.

Ok. So you spend about 1 hour getting the kill on easy mode, and then 50 hours getting it on challenge mote. So if easy mode gives 1 gold, challenge mote would give 100 based on your ratio?

Oh but some players take 100 hours and some take 10. How do you balance for that? Look at all the examples I gave above, Anet is not capable of doing what you claim. If you want to request such absurdities you might as well make a new thread asking Anet to release a new raid, fractal, and dungeon every week. Because your asking for something they simply can't do while pretending its trivial.

@"thrag.9740" said:Designing content for players who choose to play content they dont enjoy is a fools errand. Its ok, you don't have to understand that, all you have to do is accept as a fact that it is.

Agreed, I totally understand that, but it's not relevant to the topic at hand.

But at the center of it all, we see the tier system constantly slowing down development. Every new fractal they have to figure out how to reorganize everything to fit into their 1-100 scheme, aquatic fractal use to have two distinct paths, now it has a random choice between those 2 paths. Every new fractal has to released in at least 4 versions. For example, thaumanova reactor use to be radically different at lower tiers (entire rooms skipped). Only for Anet to overhaul that concept years later. An overhaul that would have never been necessary with a single difficulty tier.

Ok, but that also isn't relevant to what I was talking about, since I'm not suggesting anything so complicated. Same rules, just less hard hitting. Basically if the existing raids have "high AR," all the single easier mode would offer is the same content with "lower AR required." No major pathing changes, no core concept redesigns, just less damage on the bigger hits.

And again, no need for more than two total modes for each fight, unless they decided they wanted to add more for funzees.

Ok. So you spend about 1 hour getting the kill on easy mode, and then 50 hours getting it on challenge mote. So if easy mode gives 1 gold, challenge mote would give 100 based on your ratio?

I doubt any fight in the game routinely takes 50 hours to complete. If you're talking first time completion, that's something else entirely. If they want a higher reward for first time completion of hard mode, fine, but we're talking about "on farm" times.

Oh but some players take 100 hours and some take 10. How do you balance for that?

Well, in the current game, how much more do players who take 100 hours to get than the ones who only take 10? Let's just keep that reward difference exactly as balanced as it currently is.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@"thrag.9740" said:Designing content for players who choose to play content they dont enjoy is a fools errand. Its ok, you don't have to understand that, all you have to do is accept as a fact that it is.

But at the center of it all, we see the tier system constantly slowing down development. Every new fractal they have to figure out how to reorganize everything to fit into their 1-100 scheme, aquatic fractal use to have two distinct paths, now it has a random choice between those 2 paths. Every new fractal has to released in at least 4 versions. For example, thaumanova reactor use to be radically different at lower tiers (entire rooms skipped). Only for Anet to overhaul that concept years later. An overhaul that would have never been necessary with a single difficulty tier.

This only means you don't understand the matter. Reducing the incoming damage will do nothing for the non-raiders. You don't fail raids because the boss deals too much damage. You fail raids because you fail the encounter mechanics. And any meaningful change in raid mechanics is neither trivial nor fast. So in the end it IS a question of "more content vs more difficulty tiers".

@"Feanor.2358" said:This only means you don't understand the matter. Reducing the incoming damage will do nothing for the non-raiders. You don't fail raids because the boss deals too much damage. You fail raids because you fail the encounter mechanics.

In most cases "failing the raid mechanics" leads to catastrophic amounts of damage (or in some cases just "infinity damage"), which leads you to be downed, which in aggregate leads the group to wipe, which ends the attempt. I'm saying that "failing the raid mechanics" should lead to less damage, which does not (likely) lead the party to wipe, allowing them to continue with the encounter. Again, the enemy would still do all the things it normally does, it's behavior patterns and timings would be identical, all that would change is the strength of the effect that procs when "bad thing happens." There might be some raid encounters that would not work this way, but from all the ones I can think of at the moment, it would work out fine. If you'd like to provide an example of one you think would not, we can discuss it.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@"Feanor.2358" said:This only means you don't understand the matter. Reducing the incoming damage will do nothing for the non-raiders. You don't fail raids because the boss deals too much damage. You fail raids because you fail the encounter mechanics.

So what you're saying is you want basically new mechanics. Which, as I said, is neither trivial, nor easy/fast. Just think of mechanics which aren't directly related to damage. Like running out of updrafts on Gorseval, failing to get away from its World Eater attack, Sabetha platform breaking down, poison area catching up with you because of slow movement on Slothasor, too slow cc on the sacrificed member on Matthias... Do you want me to continue with the examples?

@Feanor.2358 said:So what you're saying is you want basically new mechanics.

I believe that's the exact opposite of what I said. I'm genuinely concerned that you got there.

Like running out of updrafts on Gorseval,

Just have them recycle from scratch when they run out.

failing to get away from its World Eater attack,

You take some damage, but not enough to completely kill you, and someone should be able to rez the party.

Sabetha platform breaking down,

Don't allow it to reach zero damage, but ideally signal to players that it would have so they'll know.

poison area catching up with you because of slow movement on Slothasor,

Less poison damage and/or reduce the time they stay up.

too slow cc on the sacrificed member on Matthias...

Reduce amount of CC required to breakbar them and/or don't defeat that player, just down him

Do you want me to continue with the examples?

Please do, if you think they'd help your case.

@Ohoni.6057 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:So what you're saying is you want basically new mechanics.

Like running out of updrafts on Gorseval,

failing to get away from its World Eater attack,

Sabetha platform breaking down,

poison area catching up with you because of slow movement on Slothasor,

too slow cc on the sacrificed member on Matthias...

Do you want me to continue with the examples?

The problem with all this is you want to trivialize mechanics which are quite fundamental to the fight itself, and by extension - the fights. Nevermind that most of then are basically new mechanics.All of them require a brand new balance, done from scratch. It's neither easy, nor fast. Not to mention the fact that you'd kill any feeling of doing something special. Facing a bloodstone-infused elementalist so powerful that he can't control his own power? Bah, we do that every day and we can like, just use healing skill, right? Facing the fallen god of death? Cakewalk. It ruins any immersion. And unlike facing the distracted fallen god of fire in PoF story, you want to just faceroll these epic-level enemies without any external help. Just because you don't feel like putting any effort.

@thrag.9740 said:It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

1) Population is already split. People who can raid, and people can't raid. Assist mode would bring in more people who can't raid to people who can.

2) If I can't play raids, then the quantity of raids does not matter to me.

@runeblade.7514 said:Assist mode would bring in more people who can't raid to people who can.

That's demonstrably false.

@runeblade.7514 said:2) If I can't play raids, then the quantity of raids does not matter to me.

But it matters for people who raid, and by extension - to the developers. Understand already, the game tries to offer different types of content for different types of players in order to increase the overall population.

@thrag.9740 said:It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

1.) Right now you're also splitting populations in raids for example. You have 2-5% of ppl that play raids, the rest doesn't. You also seem to assume that somehow with lower difficulties like (t1-t4 for raids, with t4 being the current difficulty), the ppl that right now play raids would scatter over all tiers. But that's very unlikely what would happen. What would actually happen is that far far more people start raiding in general and some if not many will climb the tier ladder up to t4, resulting in even more ppl to play with at the current difficulty level. Also, most ppls would rather choose to wait a bit longer for a grp in t1-t3 instead of never playing at all.Same thing with hard modes for open world content. I would rather wait longer for getting a hard mode meta map with good rewards than continuously running around silverwastes for the next few years.

2.) Difficulty levels are the - and I mean this seriously and literally - most efficient way of releasing content. Yes, they are content and also new content to all the 90-95% of players that never went before into some of the raids for example. They are far far easier and quicker to make than another full raid or meta map. The assets, sounds, engine changes, mechanics, rewards, npcs, dialogue, lore, maps, basically everything is done. All you need to do to make new content for a massive amount of players is rebalancing.If we talk about X man hours to create content that is played by Y players, then the current implementation of a single difficulty level of raids for example would be devastating and even with hard modes for open world content, there are some maps that are played by almost no one, these maps could hugely benefit from a hard mode that would be played by massive amounts of players.

3.) If we apply this mindset right now we would've to delete istan and silverwastes and some HoT meta maps immediately from the game. This is also almost the same argument as in 1.), so it's already answered. The point is, to give people choice of playing what they want. Right now Anet cramps everyone into a single level of difficulty (except with fracs). This means that maps are full but are they full with really satisfied players?It's not bad if some maps or instances are not played as much as other, as long as the ones that players do play are filled with ppl that had all the choices and now have really found something they enjoy playing.

You could also make the hard mode open world maps make rotate on a weekly basis, so that you only ever have 2-3 hard mode maps with good rewards in the game that are super filled. There are many ways to improve GW2 massively without redoing anything from scratch or breaking the rest of the game, several difficulty levels for raids, open world would be one of them.

@ Ohoni: Would like to see some examples, well could you tell me how you would change the bosses in the Forsaken Thicket for an easy mode?

And for the Easy mode itself: The problem is, if you want the easy mode to teach players the mechanics while still being easier than normal but not trivial, you need quite the amount of finetuning to make sure that the easy mode of an encounter or an entire Wing works as intended. If doing it wrong it will either be too hard to be called easy mode or so easy that it doesn't teach people anything or in the worst case scenario teach them the wrong habits and its harder to train people who have learned the wrong habit than people who are completely new, I could even see LFGs with " No Easy mode players" if this scenario would occur.So to do this right, you need ressources. To get those Anet could take longer to release raids, but they are already releasing them very slowly and releasing them even slower would be detrimental to the raid community.Since we don't want slower releases the raid team needs more manpower and the only way to get more manpower without interfering with other teams is to hire more people, which costs money and it takes quite a good amount of time before the new people can work efficiently. ( And if they are doing easy modes they should go this route )

@"Ohoni.6057" said:I thought that

was really insightful in the benefits of having alternate game modes available for difficult content. I think that perhaps any of the "hard mode is good enough for everyone" players (and developers) might benefit from watching this. I really wish that more games employed this open-minded philosophy.

Extra credit also made a vid on hiw raising the game's price to 70$ instead of having microtransactions dlc etc is a good idea. That didnt really fly well.

@"Ohoni.6057" said:I thought that

was really insightful in the benefits of having alternate game modes available for difficult content. I think that perhaps any of the "hard mode is good enough for everyone" players (and developers) might benefit from watching this. I really wish that more games employed this open-minded philosophy.

Diff modes wouldnt really work and prime example can be fractals. U get ppl complain in te daily how hard t4 fractals are and when they are told to go down a dificulty they get defensive and the thread derails into nothingness.

Also unlike companies like blizzard and square enix anet doesnt have the staff or the money to sustain modes without hurting raids.

@Adenin.5973 said:

@"thrag.9740" said:It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

1. Wrong conclusions. There is nothing supporting the claim that hypothetical raid tiers will create any influx of players, let alone a "massive" one. Actually, there's hard evidence that it won't - Fractals of the Mists. According to gw2efficiency, 2.7% of the players have unlocked "Leaves No Hero Behind" title, which is only slightly above the number of players having "Demon's Demise" one (2.3%). Meaning that the number of people raiding is about the same as the number or people playing top-tier fractals (which it t4 cm by the way, not t4 itself). So how come? There are difficulty tiers in fractals all right, 5 of them. How come the 54% of the population who have the "Professor" title don't play t4 cms?

2. Wrong perspective. It doesn't matter if creating a new balance is easier than producing new content. ANet has to produce new content anyway to keep their players in the game. So creating new balance levels always comes at the cost of slower content updates. That's in neither players' nor devs' interests, considering it brings little to no benefit (see above).

@Feanor.2358 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@"thrag.9740" said:It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

1. Wrong conclusions. There is nothing supporting the claim that hypothetical raid tiers will create any influx of players, let alone a "massive" one. Actually, there's hard evidence that it won't - Fractals of the Mists. According to gw2efficiency, 2.7% of the players have unlocked "Leaves No Hero Behind" title, which is only slightly above the number of players having "Demon's Demise" one (2.3%). Meaning that the number of people raiding is about the same as the number or people playing top-tier fractals (which it t4 cm by the way, not t4 itself). So how come? There are difficulty tiers in fractals all right, 5 of them. How come the 54% of the population who have the "Professor" title don't play t4 cms?

2. Wrong perspective. It doesn't matter if creating a new balance is easier than producing new content.
   ANet has to produce new content anyway to keep their players in the game
   . So creating new balance levels
   always
   comes at the cost of slower content updates. That's in neither players' nor devs' interests, considering it brings little to no benefit (see above).

1. Not true at all and also making a false connection. First of all, fractals is not only t4 cms, its t1, t2,t3,t4 and cms. If you're now saying that only t4 cms count or that adding 3 other tiers hasn't increased player count and that every single player in t4 or that is playing cms would still have played when the entry difficulty for fractals would've been t4 or even cms, there's no more point in discussing it because one of us is clearly lacking any sort of reason.Also, what is your connection between players that play cms and raids proving? That difficult content is a shared niche for the very same players? Well guess what: The entire reason for making several tiers of difficulties is based on that exact fact you have just discovered. To make an entire game mode accessible to more than just the same 5% of players.

2. Talking about wrong perspective here. What is more important, keeping 5-10% of the playerbase happy with a semi constant flow of new content or reaching the other 90-95% of players and give them also new content, even if it means in a slower pace.Also, how can you say that's not in the players interest? Again, if 5% of ppl have to wait a month longer on a raid release, why is this worse than 95% of players getting finally a raid difficulty they can run/enjoy? On what basis do you make such a statement? Stop thinking a moment like an elitist that wants to keep his content entirely for himself and think objectively what benefits the entirety of the games population and you should be able to understand that the more people play raids with any sort of difficulty, the more people will keep logging in and keep buying gems and expansions and the more Anet can hire new people to make even more raids.

When all 5% of the uber raiders left immediately the game, when t1-t3 raids drop, the game as a whole would still massively profit, since the ppl that don't like raids currently far overwhelm the number of ppl liking and actually playing them regularly.

The video is nice, but you missed one point, the major point:Arena Net already communicated that Raids are meant to be difficult. That's how they are meant to be consumed, and reducing the difficulty is akin to spoiling the whole content.

@"Adenin.5973" said:

1. Not true at all and also making a false connection. First of all, fractals is not only t4 cms, its t1, t2,t3,t4 and cms. If you're now saying that only t4 cms count or that adding 3 other tiers hasn't increased player count and that every single player in t4 or that is playing cms would still have played when the entry difficulty for fractals would've been t4 or even cms, there's no more point in discussing it because one of us is clearly lacking any sort of reason.Also, what is your connection between players that play cms and raids proving? That difficult content is a shared niche for the very same players? Well guess what: The entire reason for making several tiers of difficulties is based on that exact fact you have just discovered. To make an entire game mode accessible to more than just the same 5% of players.

Fractals is pretty much T4 + CMs. You have some activity in T1, just a few in T2 & 3 (mostly "rec fracs") and the main lfg here is T4+. It is even used by the most groups for "rec fracs" which are of T1, 2 & 3. Thinking that lower fractals play a significant role in the fractal population is just plain ridiculous.

And yes, most of the players would be there if the entry level was T4 because they are not there due to the constant progression from lower tiers to top tiers, they are there because they like the rewards + the group challenge and that's the reason why they are coming back on a daily basis. Imagine what happens if you offer the same rewards to T1. Almost all people would stop playing T2, 3 & 4 and - ta dah - 75% of the content would be wasted.So, next step would be proper reward balancing. Gl hf with that. Raids already are very unrewarding because of their weekly limit + even then all farming methods are better. Only lucrative thing about raids would be selling but I think we can leave this one out. If you balance the rewards against the actual ones you would get like 2 whites and a green item + 50 copper. Yeah, that would bring 95% of the playerbase into raiding for sure. /s Increasing the rewards would harm the economy (even more, not that it's already in a bad shape ^^) and people that are not playing the actual mode woud complain harder because raid rewards were gigantic.

2. Talking about wrong perspective here. What is more important, keeping 5-10% of the playerbase happy with a semi constant flow of new content or reaching the other 90-95% of players and give them also new content, even if it means in a slower pace.

People already are rebelling about the actual content release cycle and that it's only stuff for roundabout one week unless it's not a farming map like Istan. If the majority of the playerbase would really be interested in instanced group content that is not hard they would play T1 & 2 fractals all the way, n'est-ce pas? Look at the reality (see above). It's not true at all.

Also, how can you say that's not in the players interest? Again, if 5% of ppl have to wait a month longer on a raid release, why is this worse than 95% of players getting finally a raid difficulty they can run/enjoy? On what basis do you make such a statement? Stop thinking a moment like an elitist that wants to keep his content entirely for himself and think objectively what benefits the entirety of the games population and you should be able to understand that the more people play raids with any sort of difficulty, the more people will keep logging in and keep buying gems and expansions and the more Anet can hire new people to make even more raids.

It's not elitist thinking. It's just that there is a (veteran) group of players interested in challenging group content and Anet is serving to them as well because they recognized that those players also bring money into the game. They need that otherwise they'll lose that group completely. The fact that they haven't abandoned challenging content is a clear indicator that either money is a factor for them or dedication to the game itself. We live in a business world so I heavily doubt the main reason is the last one.

When all 5% of the uber raiders left immediately the game, when t1-t3 raids drop, the game as a whole would still massively profit, since the ppl that don't like raids currently far overwhelm the number of ppl liking and actually playing them regularly.

No, as I stated above. A lot of players wouldn't even be interested in raids or won't replay them due to bad rewards. And a watered down but still rewarding raid would lead to an exodus of players.

@Adenin.5973 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:

@Adenin.5973 said:

@"thrag.9740" said:It was an interesting video op, but ultimately it is not very relevant to gw2 because it misses out on 3 important points:

1.) Splitting populations. This video was entirely based on single player games. There is no que time involved there, but in an mmo you need teammates to play with. Splitting the population up among many different difficulties can slow this down. If you try to find a sam cm group in the lfg, vs a regular sam group, you will see this principle in action.

2.) Man hour priorities. The question is not as simple as, 'would difficulty tiers be nice?'. The question is, 'Are difficulty tiers more important that releasing more content?'. For example, right now we have 16 encounters that give LI with a wide range of difficulty ranging from escort to dhuum cm (or w/e you consider the hardest piece of content). If Anet spent the time giving every encounter difficulty settings, how many encounters would we have? Is it better to have fewer encounters with settings, or more encounters with out? No one can deny that escort and MO are as easy as any easy mode should be. Is having an multi mode dhuum worth taking MO out of the game?

3.) Rewards. Any online game has an aspect of competitiveness to it, and so rewards need to be balanced properly across difficulty modes, or players will feel unrewarded. This then leads to uneven population splits among the tiers and even longer que times, making point 1 even more of a problem. You can experience this in fractals right now. T4 and T1 fill quickly, but T2 and T3 not so much.

1. Wrong conclusions. There is nothing supporting the claim that hypothetical raid tiers will create any influx of players, let alone a "massive" one. Actually, there's hard evidence that it won't - Fractals of the Mists. According to gw2efficiency, 2.7% of the players have unlocked "Leaves No Hero Behind" title, which is only slightly above the number of players having "Demon's Demise" one (2.3%). Meaning that the number of people raiding is about the same as the number or people playing top-tier fractals (which it t4 cm by the way, not t4 itself). So how come? There are difficulty tiers in fractals all right, 5 of them. How come the 54% of the population who have the "Professor" title don't play t4 cms?

2. Wrong perspective. It doesn't matter if creating a new balance is easier than producing new content.
   ANet has to produce new content anyway to keep their players in the game
   . So creating new balance levels
   always
   comes at the cost of slower content updates. That's in neither players' nor devs' interests, considering it brings little to no benefit (see above).

1. Not true at all and also making a false connection. First of all, fractals is not only t4 cms, its t1, t2,t3,t4 and cms. If you're now saying that only t4 cms count or that adding 3 other tiers hasn't increased player count and that every single player in t4 or that is playing cms would still have played when the entry difficulty for fractals would've been t4 or even cms, there's no mort point in discussing it because one of us is clearly lacking any sort of reason.Also, what is your connection between players that play cms and raids proving? That difficult content is a shared niche for the very same players? Well guess what: The entire reason for making several tiers of difficulties is based on that exact fact you have just discovered. To make an entire game mode accessible to more than just the same 5% of players.

Except it doesn't make it more accessible. Fractals have tiers, yet you don't see new players going into cms. It's predominantly raiders who play these. Now, of course, people start somewhere. I myself started with low tier fractals, progressed into t4 and then into raids. But that's the thing - the tiers already exist for the players that have the motivation and desire to progress. Adding tiers to raids would change nothing. Just like casual players don't play fractal cms now, they won't start playing raids either. Because the challenge level of this content exceeds their comfort zone. Otherwise they'd be raiders already, or they will become ones anyway. Your theory is wrong, and it is proven wrong by the existing state of the game. Refusing to accept it doesn't change the facts.

@"Vinceman.4572" said:Fractals is pretty much T4 + CMs. You have some activity in T1, just a few in T2 & 3 (mostly "rec fracs") and the main lfg here is T4+. It is even used by the most groups for "rec fracs" which are of T1, 2 & 3. Thinking that lower fractals play a significant role in the fractal population is just plain ridiculous.

What? There are tons of ppl playing the lower tiers. The reason why T4 is most filled is, yes because many ppl really want to get the most rewards but it's also because of how the lfg works. In t4 and cms the groups take quite some time to fill compared with non meta groups in lower tiers or even t4.When I make a non meta t4 daily, I sometimes have a group within under 10 seconds, then my grp is no longer listed and it appears to have never existed for someone that looks a moment later into the lfg.Same reason why the raiding tab is still "filled", its because grps take a long time to fill up, not because it's played that frequently. Same with dungeons. Appears to be empty and yet, every time I list a "p1" in one of it, I get a grp in <1-2 min.

So no, it's not "plain ridiculous". If you go now and count the numbers of grps listed in the lfg at the exact same moment it tells you exactly not a single thing about how many ppl are running the content.

And yes, most of the players would be there if the entry level was T4 because they are not there due to the constant progression from lower tiers to top tiers, they are there because they like the rewards + the group challenge and that's the reason why they are coming back on a daily basis. Imagine what happens if you offer the same rewards to T1. Almost all people would stop playing T2, 3 & 4 and - ta dah - 75% of the content would be wasted.

"Liking the rewards" and "climbing or not climbing the ladder" have not even a logical connection. It makes no sense to say that someone that likes rewards didn't want or need to climb the ladder. Srsly think a moment for yourself what you actually wanted to say with that because it makes no sense.

So, next step would be proper reward balancing. Gl hf with that. Raids already are very unrewarding because of their weekly limit + even then all farming methods are better. Only lucrative thing about raids would be selling but I think we can leave this one out. If you balance the rewards against the actual ones you would get like 2 whites and a green item + 50 copper. Yeah, that would bring 95% of the playerbase into raiding for sure. /s Increasing the rewards would harm the economy (even more, not that it's already in a bad shape ^^) and people that are not playing the actual mode woud complain harder because raid rewards were gigantic.

Well how about T1 giving 20% of the rewards and 20% of the drop chances that T4 offers , T2 30%, T3 50%. Easy. Some of u ppl really don't WANT this to happen and search desperately for excuses. It's not rocket science guys.

People already are rebelling about the actual content release cycle and that it's only stuff for roundabout one week unless it's not a farming map like Istan. If the majority of the playerbase would really be interested in instanced group content that is not hard they would play T1 & 2 fractals all the way, n'est-ce pas? Look at the reality (see above). It's not true at all.Last sentence I can agree, I've already said that your idea that everyone plays T4 is not true.

It's not elitist thinking. It's just that there is a (veteran) group of players interested in challenging group content and Anet is serving to them as well because they recognized that those players also bring money into the game. They need that otherwise they'll lose that group completely. The fact that they haven't abandoned challenging content is a clear indicator that either money is a factor for them or dedication to the game itself. We live in a business world so I heavily doubt the main reason is the last one.

Anet has made severe mistakes in the past, looking at you LS1 and yes, I truly believe that raids will see an end sooner rather than later and it will be because well, simply too few ppl are playing them.Also, you don't want Anet to add difficulty levels for raids, that are not played by 9/10 players simply because you think that the level of difficulty is not what keeps people from playing that content, yet you tell me the very reason other ppl are playing it IS the difficulty of it. This makes no sense at all. Ppl are running fractals and dungeons, ppl cry about the new fractals being too difficult, too raid like, with too many mechanics, they're telling anet that they simply skip the dailies for these fracs. And you're telling me that difficulty levels are not the problem?

I am asking you a very simple question this comes all down to. Is there in your opinion a problem with the current implementation of raids, where 9/10 ppl don't play them? Yes or no?

Because if you don't think there's any problem with raids, then it's pointless to discuss any "solution" with you.