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@Astralporing.1957 said:

Raids
  • Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.
  • Our intention was for Strike Missions to be that intermediary step into 10-person content. As we've mentioned before and you've likely noticed, strike missions are getting harder. Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up. In addition to that, we're striving to make improvements to Strike Missions themselves to make grouping easier, and to improve the rewards. We hope this will help introduce more people to 10-person content, which will in turn increase the number of people interested in Raids.I'm afraid it's not that simple. The gap exists not because there's no middle content (although there isn't one, which is bad - and strikes do not bridge that gap, for a multitude of reasons, one of them due to them being a 10-man content). It exists, because the game system magnifies even tiny differences in gear, build and skill. The game as it is cannot realistically help players bridge that gap. All it can do (and what you're doing with strikes) is to try to incentivize players to get better. Problem is, the players need to learn
    how
    to get better on their own - and those players that know how to do that (and have a mindset that is required to follow through with that learning, which most players
    do not
    have) are improving already, without the need for strikes. For everyone else, it will just be more and more aggravating, as they will just see more and more content placed in front of them, but just outside their reach.

Was already quote once, I will re-quote again because Astralporing has nailed the issue.

I do believe a few more players could be motivated to raid once they realize that 10 player content is to their liking, the question is: how many?

There is a reluctance in part of this player base to improve or even reach a minimal baseline of skill. Which is fine imo, that's what many players have grown accustomed to in open world content. It does create the great performance difference between players we have now though, issues which at their core can only be solved by players WANTING to improve (or potentially a complete overhaul of the combat system, which in turn could again alienate other players).

Maybe a personal toggle able damage meter could help here so players actually have some feedback on their performance. That could also terribly backfire once players realize how weak their performance actually is (and most important, this feature would have to be personal and toggle able only).

Otherwise, the feedback is very much appreciated. Thank you!

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@Jables.4659 said:

@jasonorme.5014 said:I'd love to start raiding but It's too difficult for new raiders to join raids as groups want proof of experience with a currency we are unable to get because we can't get into a raid group because they want a currency we are unable to get because we can't get into a raid group because groups want proof of experience with a currency we are unable to get because we can't get into a raid group because groups want proof of experience with a currency we are unable to get because we can't get into a raid group because... you see the problem?.

Watch an extensive guide for the raid wing you want to do. Determine which role you are going to fulfil in the meta by checking snowcrows or another resource freely available to you. Make a post for your own training group on the lfg, and preferably have a discord set up for the players to join. Get your team comp setup, help explain the mechanics to the other players, and give it a go. You will get kills eventually, but not with every group. After a while, you can start joining or making semi-experienced groups for these same bosses, and slowly work your way through. Its time consuming, I know, but it does work. Its the same thing but easier for fractal CMs since the party size is more manageable.

The problem with that is that many of those guides use strategies that bypass a lot of mechanics and are only achievable if everyone on your team is on their game. Not really suitable for groups starting out. It's like learning how to run before learning how to walk. There are some basic mechanics that should be learned even though they can skipped because some other boss will have those same or similar mechanics and you won't be able to skip those.

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i sure hope your definition of replayable content isnt sticking a piece of armor (Reliquary of the Raven Ceremonial Garb) in a strike mission with an abysmal drop rate. do you realize how many ppl wont be able to complete this nice armor set because of this? why even bother getting the other pieces knowing there's no chance of ever completing it? who though this was a good idea.?

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@"hugo.4705" said:

Please, add tengu tonic. Add largos tonic.

I was disappointed they added a 2nd Kodan tonic this update but I guess it adds variety. People keep asking for new races, which is a waste of time imo till the issues with current ones are polished (Norn males need a redesign, Sylvari need unique animations and Sylvari males and Charr still need armor fixes,.) But tonics were a good solution; basically every LS entry the first thing I want to know is "Is there a new Combat Tonic?" I mainly want a Skritt and Quaggan one. The "just for fun" type of content is always entertaining to me.

And now with that, the previous LS added a new thing for me where for now on I'll also wonder every LS release if they've added new T-Shirts or other Casual-like clothing.The Raven Sandals made my Thief very happy as I hate medium armor longboots and the two normal-ish shoe skins are meh. (I dislike majority of medium in general, lack of variety and many of it fits like crap on male Sylvari) Oh and invisible shoes are still rediculous. :)

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I'm sorry but i fully believe that strikes won't do a thing to help people do raids, they will just make people do...strikes instead. There has to be some incentive for newbies to tackle raids instead, something that rewards them either greatly for doing for the first time, or for people to help them.

Such thing already exist through training discords., but im sure many feel intimidated by them or don't know how to start or that they exist. The best way of doing this is to introduce some mentorship program where people are incentived to squad up and train people who has never done raids before. Now i'm not sure what would be the better way of doing this, but i think a good start is to reward people who train others. Something like give them better or unique rewards if they full clear a raid with at least 3 new people who has never gotten a kill. They could be something like titles, chairs, anything that is just frilly. Another great thing that would help is a official anet training discordor at least one that they woulld advertise in their site, or even ingame...where anet would curate trainers and give them roles to train, and the appropriate rewards.

Really it is all that it takes to get new people into raids. Training, mentorship and rewards that come with it. I have seen a great deal of amount of this in the Raids academy discord where trainers help newbies every single day, communities like those, and the people all involved in it is what makes the mode grow stronger and help new people become stronger. Raids are not as hard as people all imagine to be, only wing 5 and some bosses are a huge step in difficulty. I would say the new strikes are already harder than most bosses from wing 4

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My fundamental problem with this game has always been its combat system.

  • Obsolete DX9 game engine that doesn't use modern hardware properly, so you're fighting the tech as much as the mobs. It says a lot about how bad the game is when you upgrade your hardware and the game's performance actually gets worse.
  • Few actual mechanics in combat. Mostly just bombardments of AOE that hit far too quickly to avoid, with total sensory overload from all the visual noise, which is multiplied in story and group content.
  • Characters aren't tough enough for this combat system, and the build system exacerbates that. Full zerk DPS build is meta but leaves your character with minimal HP and Toughness? Great, here's a constant barrage of one-shot AOE every two seconds! But if you try to toughen up your character, you end up losing so much DPS that fights take forever, and good luck beating anything with a timer. It's completely unbalanced.
  • Let's face it: relatively few people actually enjoy the combat in this game. We're mostly here for our friends and the game world and story. "Git gud" isn't the answer when most of the player base are casuals.
  • And then you have the NERVE to lock the map completion achievement in Bjora and Grothmar behind Strike Mission content? Really?
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Greatly appreciate the communication.Especially the life sign for Fractal CM's. After 3 whole years without content, I think most of us have given up. Going to be interesting to see how this goes.

As for more information on not addressed things, although the chances are small:

Are there any plans to rework the Build Loadout feature? Both in terms of functionality (adding actual template functionality with save/load feature, extending the feature in slots, linking of gear and Traits into a single proper Template) as well as updating the monetization scheme (drastically reduced pricing that doesn't completely cripple such a basic feature for anyone but extremely high spenders as it currently costs hundreds of Euros/Dollars to make it even somewhat functional for hardcore players, merging the feature into single loadout slots, account wide slots, full account unlocks for all characters of all slots at a greatly discounted price)?I know the chance i nigh zero, but have to ask.

Any plans for Elite Specialisation and/or any other actual expansion features akin to Gliding, Mounts, things like the Mastery System etc.?

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Yaaay, communications.Thanks, I like it a lot.To note some feedback...Part of the success of season one was in my opinion that it isn't replayable. It turned into this mythical status where people forgot bout all the bugs and issues. The content was mediocre, but the fact that you where part of something came cause it was an event and not permanent content. This led to criticism by those who missed out, but it is the nature of an event. I hope this is what you realised. I was born in the seventies, but a great fan of the sixties. I missed it, but I can still enjoy in the memories, the music and the stories.Make living world like that. Events to introduce the stories and permanent content as a reminder.

As for strike missions as a lead up to raids. I do not think it will work. The elitism is too big. What I see often in games with vertical progression is that old content becomes the step forward towards the newest end game content. At the same time, the game could use some new impulses when it comes to elite specializations. Use it to make some existing raids easier with those specialisations and at the same time introduce new ones with new challenges for the new specialisations. Repeat this 2 or 3 times and the raids will have more a difficult curve in a very natural way.

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The issue with raids is also their length - strike is one boss, in and out. Even when it goes sour it's a quick sortie and it's fine.In raid there's need to learn whole wing and new players (to a given raid, not to game in genereal) have an uphill battle as most teams want experienced players/full wing run and you got catch 22. Newbies need experiece, experienced want no newbies.

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Maybe, just maybe - boost rewards from raids? People will choose over RIBA if they know that they can gain more gold in two hours than run w1-w7 (which is ~30-40 gold more or less). If they would be more rewarding, maybe more people would be into it. There is a reason why people do RIBA - money. Nothing more.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Fire Attunement.9835" said:
Raids

(snip)I'm afraid it's not that simple. The gap exists not because there's no middle content (although there isn't one, which is bad - and strikes do not bridge that gap, for a multitude of reasons, one of them due to them being a 10-man content). It exists, because the game system magnifies even tiny differences in gear, build and skill. The game as it is cannot realistically help players bridge that gap. All it can do (and what you're doing with strikes) is to try to incentivize players to get better. Problem is, the players need to learn
how
to get better on their own - and those players that know how to do that (and have a mindset that is required to follow through with that learning, which most players
do not
have) are improving already, without the need for strikes. For everyone else, it will just be more and more aggravating, as they will just see more and more content placed in front of them, but just outside their reach.

I agree with what you're saying, but it's even more than that IMO. I guess I can only speak for myself, but:

  1. 10 vs 5 group size is a HUGE jump for casual/PUG/LFG participation in content. It increases your waiting time for a group a LOT, and that adds to frustration and abandonment when you either have to wait too long, or by incentivizing gating behaviors because the groups that post want only fast clean runs because they already had to wait so long. This is further exacerbated because...

  2. For dungeons, for the most part PUG groups could get started with fewer people if they were experienced, and in many cases complete the dungeon with < 5, adding some flex and less downtime. Raids and strikes are tuned to REQUIRE 10 (yeah, I know that there's probably some ultra-HC group out there that does perfect raid runs with 5 or something; I'm talking about the average LFG user).

  3. Dungeon paths all had, shall we say, two ways to complete them. The "intended" way, which was clearly communicated by the dungeon's script and would be slower but mostly doable for groups of average skill. And the "fast" way, which included all the shortcuts, skips, and boss strategies (generally, "stack in this spot" but still) - the "fast" methods were easy to communicate, teach, and adopt, and as they became more common knowledge dungeon running became more frequently successful and therefore more profitable and worthwhile. Raids, by contrast, are punishingly exact in their demands on how to complete them, and you can't get simple instructions from seasoned players to quickly contribute to a win. The gap between players that want to watch videos for strategies, do raid training, commit to specific raid times, use voice comms, etc. and the ones who are decently skilled and geared but aren't going to do content they can't just jump into on-demand is real and it is big.

  4. Which again leads to all the gating and toxic behavior that makes most people just happy to ignore raids completely. It makes the days of pinging your zerk gear seem quaint - at least then pretty much any class and any group comp was fine as long as you could do damage. You could fix your gear and build and learn the tricks with one nice person giving you 15 minutes of time. With raids, if you're a PUG and you're not bringing a highly in-demand spec with LIs or KPs or whatever to prove yourself you might as well not bother looking at raids. It DEMANDS that you invest a lot of time and training up front before you will succeed at any kills and see any reward that most players just aren't going to do.

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Said before, will say it again:

  • PvE maps with a tide-oriented focusIt's good to see them go back to the original design of the game. That's how many of the old core maps with dynamic events were built, eg., Harathi Hinterlands. It's simply the studio finding its way home again and recommiting to the dynamics of dynamic events: The game's original selling point.

  • Raids and stuffThe mistake with the Strike-Raid dimension is that they did it backwards. People have argued for introductory content for Raids but Raids should be the introductory content for Strikes instead. Strikes are just boss fights where the boss mechanics are central. That's where you create a challenge to keep the competetive PvE scene entertained without burdening them with a score of assets that affect cadence. Raids (and possibly dungeons) should be more for everyone, for appreciating the story and playing socially and should replace the solo-instanced stuff in the LS. So have maps with good replayable themes, tie World bosses / meta events into it again, have a limited amount of single player content and add in some group social content tied into that pakage. Then do Strike-like content as hard-modes for competetive PvE. They could even bag that into the package by tying it to the World Boss / Map theme making it a Strike-instanced hard-mode of the World boss.

  • WvW or true MMO and sandbox stuffStop hurting that community and betraying yourselves by being dishonest and stringing them along. Either divert substantial assets to it, speak about it in detail and deliver on what you say or let people know that you have given up and cut them free to decide if they should stay or go for themselves. Don't keep teasing about it year after year and never deliver from 2014 and forward. You have not implemented anything on a grand scale for that mode since Edge of the Mists. Everything else that has been described as major have barely been scraps off the other modes' tables (reward tracks from PvP, mounts from PvE etc.). Even Alliances / World Restructuring is just Megaservers half a decade or more later for that third-string mode. The fundamental problems that mode faces are still the same in 2020 as they were at release in 2012. That is a monumental failure on the studio's end. Both the players and the studio have kept talking about rectifying those issues for as long as the game has been out. Commit, do it, deliver or be honest and admit that you have given up. Either be an MMO like GW2 with coherent attention to your modes or say that you are a CRPG like GW1. Don't say that you are GW2 while you are GW1, that's just dishonesty. We can all see it, so either say it or commit to change. You are saying the contrary in this very thread yet again. So what is it going to be? Are you liars or are you honest?

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Ive never done raids. The closest i get to Raids is watching ppl do them on twitch, especially when a new raidwing come out. Now, why havent i done them ? They look awesome but whats the reward for the "hard work" ? Legendary armor, right ? Almost everything in the game rewards you with ascended and its SO easy to swap stats on it. There are ZERO reason for me to do them - especially with buildtemplates.
Youre forced to do wvw to make legendary weapons. If you want ppl in raids, give it unique rewards. New ppl will try and some might even end up enjoying it, like me with wvw.I hope there will be new raids wings. Not for me, but for the ppl that enjoy it and again, it´s awesome to watch ppl trying to complete them.

Anyways, i really like the communication. Should have done that years ago. Starting now ? we`ll take it. I hope you still got alot of stuff up your sleeves.

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Enjoy communication. But to me still seems vague (in your own words) and uncompelling. I get your pr move, and cannot commit because then we can hold your feet to the fire.

  1. REWARDS REWARDS REWARDSno one does raids because there is NO meaning. You cornered yourself because you do not have stat creeping over time (which is fine). Therefore, you have to find a new way for people to keep playing raids and enjoying the content, 2g and a random exotic IS NOT THE WAY. The currency is eventually worthless. Don't know why you even made ld... they serve the purpose of what? 1-2 legendaries? Ok what about us long term raiders ? WE DONT CARE. And those that hate raids... find it a chore and will do it and quit. Updated achievements perhaps? Redoing some bosses? I dunno. But rewards is a big thing.If you don't give meaning to playing the content and without creep stats as most mmos do to keep things relevant, you have to find unique ways to keep people coming back. We should not have to do your job and the community to do YOUR job. What do I mean? Asking for qol ideas, asking for feedback, etc. you don't need that. YOU are the ones that decide, make it, implement it professionally , and you will get feedback. If it is all negative over and over then maybe some people need to get axed. If we love it you will see by us investing more play time. It's like asking a kid, do you like the trip to the zoo? What can we do better next time to have more fun? No. The kid laugh played, pet the animals, enjoyed the lunch. Said it was yummy, etc. then they had fun. They say "I want to go home, this is boring, we done yet ?" Then it sucked. You are the parent. If you have ask however million you say play the game "what can we do?" Then your own creativity and imagination is low and sad to say but is no good. Imagine asking 1,000 kids in your school "if you were president , what you want to do?" Yah you get LOTS of things, maybe some are good but that is not going to deter your primary and main goal/focus. We are not the developers and workers.Sorry about that rant but i sense laziness in creativity.I also have MANY GOOD THINGS to say about the game but if you put a bandaid on a chopped off arm, and put more on it over and over, you won't fix the problem.

Wvw: needs update, continuous balancing . Etc PvP the samePvp - better matchmaking . Had the same team 3 times in a row in which at least 1 bot . Guess how those games went? Not good. Reminds me of gw1 and their botting problem in its pvp decline.

You have A LOT or work to get our confidence and respect back (especially after your "secret game project" without a peep). That or people will not trust you anymore and that's where the stance is : WE DONT TRUST YOU. So earn that back . And fast please. Earning it back will do more than any big gemstore item. Stop milking and being lazy with creativity and uniqueness and give us the spark again. Best of luck.

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@"Fire Attunement.9835" said:

  • Regardless of if that succeeds or not, we understand the importance of balancing our efforts between accessible content with broad appeal, and content that appeals to the more hard core audience, and recognize that we need to do a better job of supporting the latter.

If I understand this statement correctly it means that when balancing efforts between "accessible content with broad appeal" and "content that appeals to the more hard core audience" ArenaNet needs to do a better job of supporting the "hardcore content" ?Sorry for my question but I want to be sure if I have read this correctly.

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I have to say I never liked to do the raids because of them being crazy hard and having to worry about mechanics and such I am a just get in there and hit things til its dead kind of player (strictly PVE player too.) will keep my eyes open for the future PVE stuff hopefully they can bring back the Marrionette fight as I couldn't get that thing down and maybe i can go in and just hit it til its dead.

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Strike missions - Raid comparison is nonsense. They offer nothing for upcoming raiders since they will still end up unexperienced , undergeared and lacking of killproof. People need a reason to do things other than just the fun that will last 10 wipes on vg. Raids arent empty cause of the lack of new people, the real issue with RAIDS is that , you get to make 3 legendary armors (that for me at least are harder to craft than to get the collection done in raids), get some skins (most people will just ignore them). There is a huge lack of rewards there. Noone wants to repeat content over time and end up with some gold and grind that LI. Most raiders will just stop very quickly. Adding appealing rewards like mounts (-remember Warclaw that filled WvW with people?) , mountskins or unique skins for that matter, new collections, maybe new Challenge Modes (or setting the difficulty scale - makes more sense than strike missions), or maybe add guildquests for raids and new rewards for the whole guild, for me at least would be the reason for a comeback.

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Think about it like this when you hear talk about training and stuff spending hours upon hours of preparation to kill one thing. Also so what if I bring my minstrel deadeye shamanlord that fires cucumbers from my rifle. Thats how I want to play and Mike O'brien said play as you want so I am going to shoot ramen noodle arrows from my shortbow once condi spam is back. It might still be the shape of a brick duct taped to a toilet plunger but that is how I plan to do a raid if I were to ever want to spend hours getting ready to kill one thing.

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That's not the case at all, people want to raid but elitist gatekeepers push them away.The stupid thing is, as Andrew has stated " raids attract a small audience", and that audience will never grow if more people aren't let in.Raiding needs to become accessible for all, otherwise, Anet won't focus their development time working on raids and those elitist gatekeepers will have shot themselves in the foot.

I was hoping youre memeing, but youre actually serious. There's no "elitist gatekeepers", there's just people who don't want to make every raid a training run. There are plenty of training groups, or you can make your own training group and learn together. Or maybe its that these new people just want to get carried in raids instead of going through the learning process that all the experienced people once did?

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