Time Gates (Specifically IG-6417)

There are so many time gated things in GW2 that I really shouldn't have been surprised that the "quest" for the backpack IG6417 was also time gated.I took 30 or so minutes to collect all the Modules from Sand Swept Isles, and now I'll be feeding the mini golem one per day for another 6 days.Bag space -6, sigh.Guess I'll drop them on a character I don't use.

Please in the future, use less time gates, it's ok to make things hard, or cost alot.It's really disappointing to think you're about to be on the next step and then realize it's going to take a full week.

You can do research on things like this. Here is a helpful site...http://dulfy.net/

@"Halvaard.1034" said:Please in the future, use less time gates, it's ok to make things hard, or cost alot."Hard" is subjective. If you want rewards that most players can (eventually) get, then "hard" is even counter-productive, as there is a huge difference between players, be it from understanding game and class mechanics, personal restrictions (not everyone is 21 any more), or even technical restrictions (latency is a thing for those that live far away from the servers).

Best thing to do is a good mix of rewards, some for gold, some for challenge, some for time. And the game already does this. It's unfortunate if a reward you want is gated by a method you don't enjoy, but that doesn't make it wrong in general.

@"Halvaard.1034" said:There are so many time gated things in GW2 that I really shouldn't have been surprised that the "quest" for the backpack IG6417 was also time gated.I took 30 or so minutes to collect all the Modules from Sand Swept Isles, and now I'll be feeding the mini golem one per day for another 6 days.Bag space -6, sigh.Guess I'll drop them on a character I don't use.

Please in the future, use less time gates, it's ok to make things hard, or cost alot.It's really disappointing to think you're about to be on the next step and then realize it's going to take a full week.

It shouldn't be surprising. The content you are talking about is part of a LW chapter, which get released every 3 months or so. From a design perspective, ANET wants to give the players 'something' to do on that map that will occupy them for about 2-3 months. Not an elegant philosophy, but very logical.

My personal problem is that none of that content interests me enough to bother with it. Soon after finishing the chapter's story, I'm back to WvW, fractals, map completion, metas, etc. I think I completed the meta for Thunderhead keep for the first time a week or so ago, and that was only to earn enough jewels to craft the 1 (one) Dragonsblood weapon I thought was nice. Now I know that other people love this content and devour it, and that's fine, we all have different tastes.

But if all the available content in a LW chapter could be completed within 48hrs after launch, people would be complaining about a lack of things to do, so ANET is damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

There are very few timegates like that in the game and they already are the exception to the rule so I don't see them changing anything about it in the future.

I need 12 more Glob of Elder Spirit Residue so I guess I'll log in for 12 more days. I'm sure I can find other stuff to do in-game as well. I have other thoughts about time-gated resources but I'll share them tomorrow...

There are a number of reasons to use time gates, not the least of which is that it artificially extends the period in which people participate in events/maps, which turns out to be helpful in keeping maps active.

I don't like gating and some forms of it bother me more than others. Time gating, for me, is not that big a deal. If I'm enjoying a game, then it's not the biggest deal to suffer defer gratification — after all, I'm going to play regularly anyhow. (I think it's a bigger problem for those who can only play once a week or less often.) In contrast, I loathe gating content behind story for alt characters. I've already done the content; it's a paternalistic mistake to force me to repeat it with each new character (and serves little gameplay purpose since it's 5-person instanced content).

That said, I haven't bothered with IG's final achievement/collection. I did all those events in the past; I have no interest in doing them again for a skin I won't be using anyhow.

The issue is as much about timegating as the annoying inventory clutter. The timegating could have been left without having the inventory clutter. The only different would have been implementation details. When talking to the golem instead of checking for a particular item in the character's inventory it would have just checked for some hidden flag which would have been flipped when you would have obtained the item. Overall as the game has gotten older it also feels like some aspects of how the game is implemented has degraded. In older/launch content similar "quest item" type things didn't generate this sort of inventory clutter. "This item only has value as part of your collection" is another symptom of the same problem.