Erise.5614

So, just to clarify. Your only concern is popularity? And if ANet had data clearly showing that it would be a very popular grind you would support such an implementation? Or do you have other concerns, other reasons to oppose the suggestion?

You purposefully misunderstand the point about accessibility so you don't have to respond about any actual arguments. OW benefits more from legendary armor than PvP. We already have numbers on gw2 efficiency that very clearly suggest that armor is the least popular category of legendary content. Heavily implying that a lot of people would care about alternative acquisition methods. Waste of ANet resources is the first legitimate concern I have seen in your comments. Which is a valid point. It's hard to tell from the outside and if that is the reason ANet doesn't implement it then fair enough. Just to clarify though, your only concern about OW armor is that no one would do it and it would waste time? So if there is internal data at ANet suggesting it would be popular you'd support the implementation? Or do you oppose the implementation for other reasons as well?

That's not an argument against a fourth method of acquisition. The game offers three ways in three types of content (PvP, WvW, Instanced) that are collectively less popular than the fourth (OW). Raid selling is so close to being a rule violation you aren't allowed to advertise it as selling the armor. You may only sell a spot in a group. Which will cost you about 8k for one set of armor. Comparing that to buying a weapon for 1.5k from TP is utterly ridiculous. Method of acquisition, how legitimate it is in the eyes of ANet and price are so far removed from one another it's not even comparable. It very obviously needed quite a lot of twisting on your end to arrive at this cheap "gotcha" point. The comment is just petty. Without any arguments or substance but trying real hard to make fun of people who have a different opinion.

No one is asking to make all armor skins accessible to OW. The topic is about access to legendary armor. Skins are and have always been fine to lock behind certain content. Gen2 are just a set of OW exclusive skins. Not more.

It is very easily accessible. Not quickly, not cheaply. But easily. Without getting a single gift of anything. You can just buy G1 and G3 legendary weapons off of TP with gold.

According to GW2 efficiency: There's twice as many people who have a legendary weapon as have a single piece of legendary armor. Almost four times as many have a weapon than one complete armor. About as many have Aurora / Vision as have one complete armor. Legendary armor, despite being some of the older legendary content and the cheapest legendary content (besides regalia), is among the least popular legendary content in the game. Even among the more hardcore part of the audience who use gw2efficiency. Each kind of legendary weapon is entirely accessible to PvP, WvW and raid players without ever touching OW.

On one side, this is the same "hurr durr lazy" point that keeps being repeated all the time while not holding any merit. That factor is entirely subjective and honestly feels like it's mostly shared by people who went through the motions and don't want others to enjoy their time getting to a similar point. Out of spite. There is no need to add such rewards to the highest yielding OW farms and plenty of OW content has rewards far below the other modes. Some of it is even popular. Just because people like the content. But even the premise of legendary armor as bonus loot is wrong. By making the armor more accessible without trying to push people into failed game modes you also increase the amount of players who craft it. If well implemented it is an excellent introduction to legendary crafting. Taking years for 3 sets while only taking a month or two for the first piece. This increases mat drain from the economy, decreases material supply, increases material value. This would mess up the current reward structure and require ANet to increase supply. Which could be done, for example, by increasing WvW and raid rewards. Dumping lots of mats at players. Meaning technically, players get a tiny amount of "bonus" to their gameplay / farming. But in practice it just shifts value around to the point where it can even reduce the attractiveness of some of the notorious OW farms and solve several reward structure problems we have in the game right now. I don't necessarily agree with the suggestion in this thread. I still believe specificity is not helpful to the discussion. But that narrative of bonus loot, free legendaries, lazy players and this somehow leading to ANet handing out easy and quick legendary armor is just wrong and only intended to attack the character of others who make suggestions. Rather than pointing out specifically how it would harm the game, which could be discussed, it just aims at the other person painting them as spoiled and bad intentioned.

You are, of course, correct in a lot of points regarding New World. However, their attempts at fixing the game were exactly what most people who are against a 4th acquisition option ask for. Updates over the past 6 months made enemies in high level zones harder, make more of the games content borderline mandatory and PvE dungeons have gained escalating difficulty. You can not even notice the effect of those changes in the player stats. It neither brought players back nor did it keep players engaged. In fact, it's hard to think of a PvP focused or difficulty focused service game that aimed to be around for a long time... ever. Yet, I can very easily name several games that took out escalating difficulty or reduced competition to great success. Whether you look at PoE, RuneScape or even things like the big Battle Royale titles which are still PvP but make rankings less important while focusing on small scale rewards in form of a battle pass. It's a real patchwork solution and MMOs can do reward structures much better than that. But it's the same trend over and over. Even WoW and other older MMOs turned away from many of the design philosophies that just make things harder and forcing tight player communities in favor of making it more convenient and pleasant to enjoy the game. Some complain about that but we have a pretty nice case study with WoW classic that shows just how little the overall community cares about these aspects that are often brought up as positive or "the real MMO experience" (including here) and how much higher the appeal of the streamlined version of the game is.

I even agree with the goal you seem to go for. But come on. Your arguments are pretty weak. In the sense of how you argue them. There is weight to the points. Though too many comments are unnecessarily confrontational / personal or otherwise derailing the thread and very few focus on the topic. It's legitimate to not respond to unconstructive comments.

That's just incorrect. We know of several retention models that do not at all depend on escalating difficulty. Also, it's hard to make any acquisition method easier than WvW / PvP. And again. How slow or fast one can get it is up to ANet. Or are you genuinely scared they'll just gift every player a legendary armor?^^ I mean. Mechanics in GW2 are mostly skipped by just out DPSing them. The fundamental combat system is creating such a huge rift that it's literally impossible to balance mechanics around any significant amount of the player base. And GW2 is leaning hard into DPS as the only measure of success. The struggles here are self inflicted and need to be designed around. Not into. But more importantly. Games designed for perpetual playing can not be designed around escalating difficulty and infinite improvement. It is vitally important for them to be engaging and interesting without getting more and more difficult. Too high difficulty just leads to players dropping off. We can see in every major game that survived for a decade or longer at this point in time that challenge is not a significant factor to its success. Most of them have niche communities of hardcore players looking for extreme challenge. But the successful ones all designed heavily if not primarily for other kinds of players. Offering variety in other ways without demanding constant increase in skill of their players. Because that is what leads to player loss long term. Or even short term. See New World. They are loosing 50% of their players week after week due to being focused extremely high necessary time investment and escalating difficulty as primary loop. That's what your points boil down to. You ask questions only to paint others as lazy. Two sentences ago you paint the mere idea of wanting OW legendary armor as wanting it fast and easy. Down below you say asking for OW armor is asking for more rewards with less effort. And that people just "have to play the content to get the reward". Ultimately, your points boil down to you suggesting others are too lazy to get the armor. A true masterpiece of argument: "Nu-uh!" Though I will gladly point out that additional players interacting with material sinks is good for the economy and gives ANet more freedom to introduce more rewards and encourage participation of different kinds of content without crashing the economy. It also supports newer players by increasing mat prices, reduces inflation and reduces the possible impact of TP barons. So long as it's actually designed to fit into the economy similarly to other legendary items it can be a magnificent introduction to legendries and do a whole lot of good for the game! Specific numbers are worthless because we would need more data to talk about specifics. The discussion should be about goals that can be accomplished with the change and risks associated with it. Specifics are just used to throw personal attacks at each other. As we have seen numerous times in recent threads. I'd like a direct quote for the first one. I do not believe I've seen that before. Two is true. A good progression curve and high, long term player satisfaction is better for the game. If the current implementation does not serve the community in a clearly positive way there is no harm in expanding options as an easy to implement method of getting a larger part of the community into legendary crafting. And the last point you misconstrue. The combat system is hard to understand and the lack of stat flexibility poses a serious barrier to learning, especially when the game makes it so difficult to understand the overall system. A lot of players, good and bad, never get into theory crafting or making their own builds because of this. Due to the necessarily large effort to make a legendary armor it wouldn't fix skill. But it could get more people into theory crafting as an additional kind of gameplay which has a good chance of increasing retention. Helping the game. Not by increasing skill but putting it into a better state regardless. And again with your point of others just being lazy. Unless there is a good reason for the game to close that entire category of reward behind some of the least popular content in the game, it should be available elsewhere. Not every reward. But at least every category of reward should be accessible. At the very least in theory. Without spending months of super active grinding in content one does not enjoy. Nudging players to give it a real try? Cool. But months upon months are not nudging. Everyone has given it enough effort and understands the content after the first dozen hours. Demanding more despite dislike is harming player enjoyment and therefore has a real chance to harm player retention which has a real chance to harm the game. Profit is meaningless if there is no solid progression path. If you are not gaining anything towards. The people motivated by that play the game via trading guilds, legendary factories and the TP. That's where the real high profit per hour lies. Farming weapons is an incredibly high barrier. Being asked to pay 1.8k when you never had more than 100 liquid gold is extremely intimidating. The step from ascended to legendary weapons in terms of cost and effort is huge. And still ~40% of players on GW2 efficiency did it. Compared to 20% who made a single piece of armor. Which has more utility, doesn't cost 1/4th of the gold and is much faster to farm. I find that hardcore players and raiders are much more focused on reward value. While a lot of OW players are more focused on subjective values (e.g. mount access or skins) and less concerned with min/maxing. Drizzlewood is less popular than several metas with drastically lower rewards. E.g. Chak. An no. Most people aren't there just to gamble for the infusion. Another great example of you suggesting others are just lazy and a pretty bad argument. Exotic sets are short term. Ascended mid term. Legendries have to be balanced in such a way that they won't be attempted before either. They are the step afterwards. Even ascended is, in the context of an MMO, really more a short term goal. You can be done with a full set in like a month after hitting 80. Half a year if you take a while to figure out what to farm and focus on seeing everything first. Long term goals in an MMO have to be thought in years. And a legendary armor set is an excellent entry point into that. As you already have it chopped up into bites that can be a month or two each. Creating a smoother transition between ascended and legendary farming. This is such a weird point. You bring up ascended items as long term reward. Yet you get them thrown at you in raids. Considering this, the progression speed when playing raids is drastically higher than OW. So is your point really that lower difficulty makes for better replayability and better engagement all by itself? If so, what's the point of not giving people armor to grind for? If it increases engagement that's just good for the game!? Why must legendary armor be some weird kind of prestige for raiding, WvW or PvP. Rather than simply being the long term goal that nudges you into all kinds of content (an hour or two at a time) with shiny skins or titles or what not giving you the bragging rights raid players so desperately crave as anything but exclusive gear and high liquid gold will depress them and drive them away from playing. Enjoying their time playing the game is just not enough. Only OW players should have to deal with lack of progression options. Raid players need everything thrown at them. Ideally to the point where they can dominate the entire economy because that would make raids finally popular and totally improve the game! Obvious hyperbole. But there is a disconnect in the two arguments to me. I believe there should be a better reward structure for raids. That encourages doing those. But not through exclusive utility. Rather through acquisition speed of exclusive utility and shiny bragging rights. Ideally with an infinite sink making it ever shinier. While offering everyone to get each category of reward in a method they enjoy or with only a few hours of trying out different content. Rather than months of grinding.

Anything anyone would consider more enjoyable that doesn't harm the game. That doesn't make the game worse makes the game better. By default. The question there is whether it's worth the effort. How many people are served by the change and how large the investment would be. There are legitimate concerns for potential negative impacts and whether it's worth it. Just calling everyone lazy or saying it's not a problem is not one of those arguments though. On one hand, you are generalizing few peoples points. And yeah. I'm sure some ask for unreasonable things. I'm also sure most players do not understand game economy or retention design. But even those kinds of threads don't call it a serious problem. I consider anyone who fixates on specifics to be derailing anyway. ANet needs to look at the data they have and make the best decisions for the game. If they implement an alternative path they have to and obviously will make it appropriately expensive and long. If that's your concern, then there really isn't a reason to be concerned. It would be news to me if ANet starts handing out freebies. Especially since EoD they have gotten a lot more stingy with rewards and I'd expect that trend to continue. Because OW is lacking in long term goals. Weapons have a limited appeal and are a huge step to get into legendary crafting. Armor could make for an excellent path into legendary crafting by being more expensive to craft but cutting that cost in 6. Making each individual piece a much more approachable goal. Nudging players into different kinds of content is fine too. But the entire history of Arena Net is overvaluing certain aspects of the game before having to backpaddle. From GW1 being originally PvP focused. GW2 releasing on the same assumption that OW and even instanced content is just a stepping stone into the two PvP modes. That is what the progression and reward structure of release built up to. That's what their esports push was. ANet shifting focus to then overestimate instanced content three times over. The worst offender being Raids where they invested huge amounts of resources for limited appeal despite having some of the most desirable content in the game locked behind them. As well as the easiest and fastest access to all other actual combat progression. It is valid to experiment with something. It is valid to encourage people to play certain content. But OW is PvE endgame too. Honestly. Legendary armor as it exists right now is poorly designed from start to end. Each piece should require limited amount of engagement with all modes. Let's say, for arguments sake. One hour of each. With a collection before you can start making your first armor requiring 4 - 6 hours of each mode. And then a lot of effort in whatever mode you prefer. So you can spend the majority of your time invested playing the content you enjoy most. Being aware of all of them. Haven given all of them an honest attempt. But being able to decide based on your mood what you'd like to play. It's bad there's 3 versions of the armor. And it's bad that they require such an excessive amount of play in one single type of gameplay. To me, that says quite loudly that ANet has no idea how to make those modes appealing. How to get anyone to play them. So they had to lock some of the most desirable content in the game behind them. And even then all modes have low participation. While also building up resentment against the modes and the game. Leading to plenty of negativity along the way which isn't good for the game. Maybe ANet should work on increasing the inherent appeal. Making it enjoyable to more people. Rather than dangling golden carrots in front of people who don't enjoy it? Artificially inflating the player numbers? Even big content creators complain about raid participation and players in their communities outright stating they only play for the armor and want to drop off right after. The problem here isn't the reward. It's the content itself. Or associated systems (looking at you LFG). At least that's my perspective and opinion.

There's a difference between a problem and QoL / positive change for the game. Making a game more convenient with no downsides to it isn't solving a problem. It's just making the game more enjoyable. You are calling it a problem. You are saying it's just about easier / faster acquisition. You are the one calling people lazy. But these are all things you interpret. Thing you claim.

Literally no one is claiming the game is unplayable because of it or that it's a huge problem. Lol

But we already have legendary weapons and trinkets for OW which cost a lot more and require extensive effort. Hours worth of various meta maps, all kinds of obscure stuff. Events that happen one hour after the previous one so you can never know when and just have to wait up to an hour. All of that exists. How is that not causing outrage? And why is armor different?

Since you'd only need to go there to spend it, it wouldn't actually serve the purpose to increase participation on LS4 maps. It would encourage people to not play LS4 but only go there to spend their currency (e.g. Humble Stone & IBS strikes). However, since you must play raids before you can spend LI the situation is different here.

There is literally nothing you can do with LI unless you played a significant amount of raids. It's like the game design in most mobile games with premium currencies. Giving out a bit of currency to make the difference seem smaller and get people to make their first purchase. Or in this case, give people a currency they will look into how they can spend. Having them start raiding. Strikes overall are a pretty clear attempt to push raid like content. Which, just to clarify, I think is a good idea. As mentioned above. I consider the onboarding experience to be a huge factor. Strikes are better in a lot of ways. From mechanics during the fight requiring more even participation by everyone to teaching at least some of the mechanics in easier versions. Lots of good stuff. We'll see whether it's good enough. Though it's a step in the right direction. But unless there's a major change in how LI can be spent adding it as reward to strikes is primarily a way to get more people into raids.

The problem with raids is on boarding, the problem with raids is the outdated LFG format, the problem with raids is that they are more fun if you exclude beginners, the problem with raids is that they demand a huge, long term commitment to actually get enjoyment out of them. Most of the mechanics are fine in theory. The content is very possible to clear. It's not some ubar hardcore complexity. And yet, it's still very unenjoyable unless you are an extremely hardcore player who organizes their life around the game. Because it doesn't get more enjoyable the more you play. Raids get more enjoyable the better your team performs. You get better over time. Smoothing out your contribution. But unless you play in a static or with a consistent community the increase in fun caps out very quickly. As you keep struggling with the same encounters over and over in the no KP runs you are allowed to join. I have enough LI for an armor and still aren't accepted in most groups. Which is insane. Not that gaining those is the solution I'm looking for. I dislike the need for gatekeeping that strict inherently. The content is built in such a way to foster group building and regular participation. If you do not form a community and keep at it every week you have a drastically worse time. If that's not your cup of tea then the content will simply remain a mostly unenjoyable experience. No rewards can fix that. Locking a reward like legendary armor behind it just feels antagonizing and reinforced my negative opinion of the content and it's community. The format, just like most competitive modes or games (aka PvP), inherently fosters exclusion or toxicity. Sometimes even both. Because that's the optimal way of engaging with the content. The only fix to participation is streamlining the experience when playing and when entering the content. Which strikes once again messed up by having different mechanics in all 3 versions. And LFG didn't get any better either. In fact, I suspect it exaggerates the toxic and abusive parts of the hardcore community by very prominently featuring the same style of gatekeeping and selling individual strikes for 300+ gold. In content that really does not need it in the slightest. EoD normal strikes do not need either of that. The problem with raids is how ANet teaches players the game, what ANet expects of the players and the behavior these two things encourage. The problem with raids is that at their very core they are built to create negative experiences unless you plan your life around the game.

Technically. In the context of how they counted the data. What counts as attempt has massive impact. Also, this is the average number which is more prone to extreme values than the median. E.g. counting daily successes by a highly active guild as one success a day throughout a month as equivalent to 30 maps worth of players loosing once and never trying again. Context matters. That's the beauty about statistics. It's not about individual experiences. Statistics deliberately drown out individual data points and often even explicitly exclude extreme data points so a global trend can emerge which is more useful than any anecdote would be. The real question is about how they collected data and what the distribution looks like. Not necessarily, is the point. Or rather. Not necessarily to a significant degree. This is an interpretation and assumption on your end. A valid hypothesis that could be true. What if I put up the hypothesis that the performance of your map is more important. That if you analyze success rate based on whether the performance of any individual player mattered (by adjusting the result depending on average map performance). If you analyze it like that, I put up the assumption and theory that the impact will not be significant. In theory that's just as valid a hypothesis and neither can be proven with the information we have. As mentioned above. An impact sure. But does it affect success rate? We can't even say for sure it did in a single attempt. It's an easy knee jerk answer. Just support, just do boons, just be early, just get the buff, just ask the comm some simple questions to gauge whether they know the event well enough to assume whether this map has an increased chance of success so with time and experience you can increase your chances by a bit. It's literally that simple!!!1! And, you know. As best anyone knows it might be. Just as it might not be. I did. Which is why I think your claim of a minimum of 60% is unfounded. Just like your example here is only valid on an assumption of what precise data was evaluated by ANet. It assumes they counted dead maps. It assumes the fight scales down very slowly if at all. There's really only 3 things you can do with the statistic as is. Accept it at face value. Attempt to interpret it based on assumptions and personal belief. Disregard it for lack of information. And none of them are particularly constructive. The thread has a point. 60% doesn't sound good and offers obvious assumptions that guilds and communities are extremely overrepresented. I too would like more data about it. But then again, more public data doesn't improve the game. It just increases drama. So that's probably not a good idea for ANet to release. I do think it was meant motivationally. But even the 60% number was probably a mistake to release. Just like plenty of the design flaws and bugs on the event were a mistake to release. They really need a better beta format for difficult content. A lot of negativity and bad experiences could have been avoided with more solid beta testing. And would have made most of these discussions obsolete.

The comment was in response to someone claiming to join random LFGs. This fact you bring up here just means the real win rate of those situations is below 60/40. Unless we get more context for the data it's really not a good argument one way or the other. Depending on what perspective you wanna push you can interpret whatever you want into the number. It's all baseless assumptions. Either you accept the number at face value to represent the average player experience or the number is worthless due to lack of data / specificity. A good support build can increase team performance. But since support is inherently about amplifying effectiveness of your team rather than doing everything yourself the impact depends a lot on your team. Meaning it will only affect win rate in close runs. Which again requires more information and more data (like this thread asks for). Whether it would have any impact at all and how large that impact could possibly be. Again. There is no data. So either you have to just accept the data we have or make assumptions based on personal belief.

And let's not forget all the complaints about legendary weapons and legendary trinkets! Basically the same kind of content, so it's an even better comparison! And we have nothing but complaints about those! More than anything else combined I'm sure! Everyone hates those! /s

My comment was literally in response to It would be appreciated if you would actually consider the context of the conversation rather than attacking me personally.

I'm still talking about full armor sets. Which are 37 weeks of full 7 wing raid clears or 50 weeks of full HoT clears. At 20 minutes per boss on average (which is still generous and pretty much assuming static raid groups) that's 250 hours of raiding. Avoiding as much OW as possible you can get everything that must be gained in OW in somewhere around 12-15 hours total. Even if I count 2 Chak and 2 AB per piece. Reverse the two. Necessitate 15 hours of raids (should be somewhere around 1-2k magnetite?) have people farm a mat that drops doing certain things in OW which you can only get once you start grinding a piece that takes a total of 350 hours for all armor. And I'd be thrilled.

I can agree with several of the points. But would like to point out a few points. The design changed. A lot. The original raid armor was fine. It was a flashy and gimmicky reward for high dedication. Nice to have. However, with the addition of it to WvW, PvP and the addition of the armory this changes. It's not tied to where it's useful (PvP), it's not a reward for mastery of the combat system (WvW & PvP) while being a highly desirable long term goal. Something that is missing from OW. Weapons loose appeal quickly, have much lower utility and much larger steps between completion. A legendary weapon costing 2k is only rewarding in a single burst at the very end. Whereas 6 pieces of armor, each costing 400 gold make for a much more gradual progression. This is why I believe it fits as long term reward for OW gameplay. Filling a niche that is underserved and getting more people into that aspect of the end game grind. Though a different set of long term rewards other than the armor would be valid too. So long as the desirability, kind of grind towards it and cost per progression step is comparable. The QoL isn't necessary. And you don't maximize benefit in OW. But it's still extremely desirable. Making it a good fit. Now that Raids are abandoned in favor of Strike CMs an overhaul of PvE armor acquisition would be appropriate anyway. Even if just replacing the Envoy collection and keeping the LI gates. I still disagree with those but that would already be a step in the right direction. Options are always good. Doesn't have to be efficient options either. And, as a side note. I don't believe I've ever seen the skin in game. I know a whole bunch of people who have the armor but they always transmute it into other skins.

No. I am saying it is theoretically possible. You can get Provisioner Tokens with only Karma. By converting karma into obsidian into provisioner tokens at a rate of 1 per day. If you are fine putting in some gold you can up that to 15 provisioners tokens per day. No OW gameplay necessary. You can get HoT map currencies via 20 exotic luck on new years festival via the tyrian exchange voucher or various other tradable currencies during other festivals. Auric Ingots can be gained at a rate of ~100-180 depending on how many chests you open and whether you do pre events. Avoiding OW it is extra work, is slower and next to no one is going to do it. But it is mostly possible. And the remaining necessary time can be minimized extremely if so desired. Succeeding at all 4 raid wings and doing it for months on end is not avoidable. And I sincerely believe it should be (mostly) avoidable. Similar to how most OW farming can (mostly) be avoided if one absolutely doesn't want to play OW. That's the point. Too many people say "just suck it up", "want the reward, play the content". While having options to avoid almost all content they don't like. Giving them actual options and decisions to make. They can choose to suck it up. But it's not a necessity.

I literally just ran it getting 3 (not counting daily chest).