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What's amazing is that Guild Wars 2 managed to last 7 years with little to no gear progression


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@Knighthonor.4061 said:Kind of crazy to think of a MMO doing such a feat. People didn't like this at first and many still don't like this. But somehow the game managed to last this long with little to no gear progression. I am now curious how long this can keep going to keep the lights on and content flowing going forward.

Gear progression as in being able to upgrade your existing gear or as in higher tiers with higher stats than ascended and legendary?

If the latter, what do we need that for? It would add even more imbalance to the meta.

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@Ashantara.8731 said:

@Knighthonor.4061 said:Kind of crazy to think of a MMO doing such a feat. People didn't like this at first and many still don't like this. But somehow the game managed to last this long with little to no gear progression. I am now curious how long this can keep going to keep the lights on and content flowing going forward.

Gear progression as in being able to upgrade your existing gear or as in higher tiers with higher stats than ascended and legendary?

If the latter, what do we need that for? It would add even more imbalance to the meta.

I wonder the same. Why do you need higher tiers?Atm if you havent played for many years you could still join in on high level content.

Without insane amounts of leveling or grinding to do

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@Knighthonor.4061 said:Kind of crazy to think of a MMO doing such a feat. People didn't like this at first and many still don't like this. But somehow the game managed to last this long with little to no gear progression. I am now curious how long this can keep going to keep the lights on and content flowing going forward.

Huh? If I had the best gear and new gear came out that was better I would find a new game. It is a key selling point of GW2.

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Amazing is a fact, that every player can enter almost every end-game content without grinding and working for super-strong gear. You can do everything with exotic gear which is cheap enough (yea, Fractals requires ascended, but asc gear is only 5% stronger) to allow everyone enjoy the game at the same level.Amazing is also a fact, that your character is strong because of your reflex and skill. Gear and build are very important, but even the best possible gear and build won't let you play like a pro if you can't play this game.

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@Cronospere.8143 said:

@Knighthonor.4061 said:Kind of crazy to think of a MMO doing such a feat. People didn't like this at first and many still don't like this. But somehow the game managed to last this long with little to no gear progression. I am now curious how long this can keep going to keep the lights on and content flowing going forward.

Gear progression as in being able to upgrade your existing gear or as in higher tiers with higher stats than ascended and legendary?

If the latter, what do we need that for? It would add even more imbalance to the meta.

I wonder the same. Why do you need higher tiers?Atm if you havent played for many years you could still join in on high level content.

Without insane amounts of leveling or grinding to do

This is one of my favorite things about the game.

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@Knighthonor.4061 said:Kind of crazy to think of a MMO doing such a feat. People didn't like this at first and many still don't like this. But somehow the game managed to last this long with little to no gear progression. I am now curious how long this can keep going to keep the lights on and content flowing going forward.

Is there any reason to think GW2 can't keep going without gear progression? They've done it for 7 years so far, and introduced numerous new maps, storylines, new game modes - even raids in that time. Is there a reason they need to change now?

If anything it seems to me that other MMOs are moving away from the enforced gear grind as the reality hits that their audience has gotten older and has more real-life responsibilities which have to take priority. WoW and some other games introduced ways for players to skip most of the levelling/gear grinding process (as did GW2), Elder Scrolls Online stopped adding new 'levels' and equipment tiers a few years ago and no one seems to miss it (they say they're reviewing the system but have promised to address the issue of progression invalidating your gear if they do add anything new).

Personally I much prefer this approach in MMOs. To me gear progression is just another way of gating content and whilst I can see the value in doing that early on so new players don't end up lost or overwhelmed and so mechanics can be introduced gradually I prefer it when the game opens up and I get the freedom to choose what I want to do. Especially if they also rely on random drops so you're stuck farming the same dungeon over and over and over to get the piece/s you need. Thankfully GW2 has always stayed away from that approach - so often I see people in Elder Scrolls Online saying they finally got the drop they needed and now they're never going back to that dungeon ever again because they're so sick of it, which I imagine is not the memory the developers want them to have.

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@Danikat.8537 said:

If anything it seems to me that other MMOs are moving away from the enforced gear grind as the reality hits that their audience has gotten older and has more real-life responsibilities which have to take priority.I would add that this demographic probably has more disposable income with which to buy gems for the items in the gem shop that they want especially if they do not have the time to grind for gold to convert. This might be one explanation for the more recent focus of the gem shop by Anet, whales notwithstanding.

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It does create a small problem though....once you have legendary everything and no longer have to farm for new stats or gold...what keeps you playing?That is the point I am at. PVE couldn't possibly drop anything I need. WvW stays in a stale meta...pvp never needed gear...kinda bored now, really. Without new elite specs to fiddle around with you are kinda stuck in limbo.

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@Acheron.4731 said:It does create a small problem though....once you have legendary everything and no longer have to farm for new stats or gold...what keeps you playing?The same things that kept me playing before - story, friends, and the content i can play with those friends.Spoiler: while currently GW2 is lacking in all those things (story is okay...ish, but Anet was always reluctant to delve into anything more nuanced, and my friends long left, due to the problems with the last item on the menu - the content we could play together), none of those are lacking due to not having gear grind.

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@Danikat.8537 said:If anything it seems to me that other MMOs are moving away from the enforced gear grind as the reality hits that their audience has gotten older and has more real-life responsibilities which have to take priority.

Not so flattering of a reality. I don't think it's that their audience has more responsibilities... It's probably the opposite, in fact, with parents using tech to babysit their kids or not having them to begin with.

I think it's that advancements in internet bandwidth and PC specs allow for less DnD dice rolls and more twitch reaction combat gameplay. The whole purpose of gear is to gate content. Now there are other ways to accomplish that.

That older audience are just the not-kids who haven't abandoned the level system along with the gear grind.

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@Acheron.4731 said:It does create a small problem though....once you have legendary everything and no longer have to farm for new stats or gold...what keeps you playing?That is the point I am at. PVE couldn't possibly drop anything I need. WvW stays in a stale meta...pvp never needed gear...kinda bored now, really. Without new elite specs to fiddle around with you are kinda stuck in limbo.

I don't have full legendaries, I only have full ascended on 1 character (out of 11) but that's never been what motivates me to play (which is one reason I haven't got it, I've been more focused on other things). As I said earlier to me a gear treadmill is just another way of gating content - forcing you to complete it in a certain order or to repeat sections until you've got the gear you need to move on. Without that I don't have less to do, I just have the freedom to focus on what I want to do, rather than what the developers want to keep me doing and I think it actually makes me less likely to get bored with the game because if I'm not enjoying one part I can move on to something else instead of being stuck there until I'm allowed to progress.

What motivates me is a combination of wanting to do the content for it's own sake because I enjoy the gameplay and the stories, and things I don't need but I do want to have, like new skins and mini pets. (Especially mini pets, I don't fully understand it myself but I really like them and collecting them has been a hobby-in-a-hobby for me since I first found out about them in GW1.)

@Leo G.4501 said:

@Danikat.8537 said:If anything it seems to me that other MMOs are moving away from the enforced gear grind as the reality hits that their audience has gotten older and has more real-life responsibilities which have to take priority.

Not so flattering of a reality. I don't think it's that their audience has more responsibilities... It's probably the opposite, in fact, with parents using tech to babysit their kids or not having them to begin with.

I think it's that advancements in internet bandwidth and PC specs allow for less DnD dice rolls and more twitch reaction combat gameplay. The whole purpose of gear is to gate content. Now there are other ways to accomplish that.

That older audience are just the not-kids who haven't abandoned the level system along with the gear grind.

It's not my theory, I'll see if I can find the articles. A while back (I think around the time GW2 was released) various companies started looking at what was happening with the MMO market and in particular why fans seemed to be moving away from older games which were still releasing content and hadn't changed in any major way (meaning it seemed unlikely they were unhappy with the game itself) and apparently the same reason kept coming up again and again - I don't have time any more. Players got into MMOs as teenagers (this would have been back in the early days of WoW, or before) but now they had jobs and families and other responsibilities and were looking for games which fit around that, rather than games where you had to be online every evening to be part of the community or had to make raid night/s every single week just to keep up with everyone else.

I'm in a similar situation myself, my first MMO was Ultima Online and sometimes I really miss that 'sandbox' style gameplay where so much depended on what players chose to do with the world rather than the game laying out activities and directing you to them. But to make that work you really need to be online regularly, not just on most days but at the same time on the same days so you're meeting the same people, and for several hours at a time. For me that hasn't been possible...well since I quit UO, so about 20 years ago now and isn't likely to happen any time in the next decade at least.

I know the stereotype is that MMO gamers are all losers who resorted to a virtual life because they have no real life and never do anything outside of the game unless it's unavoidable, but in my experience that's never really been the case. You're more likely to run into a couple looking for something they can do together when the kids are in bed (or with their kids) than someone who can't remember the last time they left the house.

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Gear progression means power progression and endless grind. ANet did it once when they introduced ascended gears years ago.

I remember that time for weeks the forum was flooded with topics against it. But ANet went ahead anyway (as usual) and players left. Many, many, many... left. My guild went dead over just a week. My RL friends, including my ex-bf who bought this game for me, 6 of us, we quitted.

Till today none of them returned but me. I stopped playing for about two years and came back only after HoT was released.

So.. No please. No.

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the best thing in the game is that u don't need to grind gears to play everything, also you can change every stats of your gear and skills any time, that's why this game is alive and is so different and way better than any mmo, what is the point of grinding just to play the content and tank everything? it's way better to be player skill dependent and have all the game at your disposition

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@Acheron.4731 said:It does create a small problem though....once you have legendary everything and no longer have to farm for new stats or gold...what keeps you playing?

Monster bashing and camaraderie. The only things that would keep me here. Chasing pretty pixels is boring to me. Whether it is the shiny, or mathematically better, it turns into a grind.

One of the best things about the early days of Ultima Online was the simplicity of the gear. When a piece of armor or a weapon wore out, I went to my house, pulled a spare out of a storage box, and went back to monster bashing. It was about the fun of the game and the community, not the pixels or the math.

As far as I am concerned the ascended et al have already gone too far.

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@"Acheron.4731" said:It does create a small problem though....once you have legendary everything and no longer have to farm for new stats or gold...what keeps you playing?That is the point I am at. PVE couldn't possibly drop anything I need. WvW stays in a stale meta...pvp never needed gear...kinda bored now, really. Without new elite specs to fiddle around with you are kinda stuck in limbo.This certainly is a problem for a part of the players, those that are motivated by rewards. On the other hand the game has focussed on the other part from the start, those that are motivated by the activity, and to those players nothing has changed, no matter if they "have legendary everything" or not (since legendary everything never was a motivator for them to begin with).

Personally I came to GW2 from another MMO because I was tired of having to regear in a fairly linear way every expansion. To keep up with my raid group, I had to make sure to rush the new story to level cap, then grind a specific set of dungeons and well as a specific set of reputation dailies until the (rare) best in slot equipment for my class/role dropped. There were so many other things to do for me in that game that I loved to do, but the game forced me to choose between keeping up with my raid group or ditching raids and going full casual open world without instanced group play. At 40+ with family and fulltime job, I just didn't have time to do both.

If what motivates you to play MMOs is the activity rather than the reward, then GW2 is doing an awesome job to keep you playing, even 7 years in. That's why I believe that GW2 will keep being an MMO with "little to no gear progression". ANet knows the kind of playerbase they have, and they know that while a lot of people come and go, many are here to stay because "no preparing to have fun" is the main draw for them, even if it's the main reason for others (usually those more reward oriented) to leave.

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Agree with this, games based on power curves means you grind tomorrow for +42 making your +1 you got today a waste of time, and so on forever. This power curve wrecks balance, making large skill sets prohibitively expensive if not impoasible to balance. Small skillets makes for stale gameplay.

GW2 however has none of these constraints, and we have massive skillets and lots of gameplay styles. Lots of gameplay styles plus lots of types of content that is not destroyed by balance is fun to play for fun sake - with a sprinkling of rewards and achievements to give a sense of improving your player profile.

Also worth noting there is no surprise here, gw1 had the same design princioles and was very successful and long lived.

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