Mistwraithe.3106

OK, but you're just proving my point. Your complaint isn't really about the hooks (legendary relic in this case), it's that you don't like SOTO. You think it's a bike instead of a Lamborghini and you aren't interested in bikes.

I think you were completely correct in your first sentence, Anet pretty much said as much that they needed a more stable economic model. The rest of the paragraph is your interpretation though. Anet have essentially said the new model is so they have the regular revenue to keep up development of the game and their team has actually grown. So you are saying the opposite . Maybe you are right but your comments seem to come from your disinterest in the SOTO content (which some others have said they like) rather than from any objective evidence to back them.

Ok, but that’s what I have been saying too. Astralporing’s complaint is really about not liking / appreciating the SOTO content. But it’s been put across by them and others as though Anet have recently become greedy and exploitative with hooks to force people to buy expansions when demonstrably it’s no worse than 9 years ago. Lets stick to what the real complaint is.

I understand what you are saying but I don't agree with your conclusions. In this post and others you are essentially saying Anet have got greedy and have put too many hooks into SOTO to force people to buy the expansion to compete in combat/gameplay. But I think it's pretty indisputable that the combat/gameplay "hooks" in SOTO are weaker than they were in HoT, PoF and EoD. Each of those expansions had elite specialisations which added significant combat options (and also a bit of power creep as demonstrated by the fact that Snowcrows doesn't list any core professions on its DPS charts, only elite specs). You need those HoT, PoF, EoD elite specs much more than you need SOTO's weapon specs and SOTO specific relics. So why are you losing it so much over SOTO? If anything it demonstrates less greed and less hooks than previous expansions.

Not quite. That's just the price to replace it if you accidentally lost it. Either way you need to have done the achievements which gives you the original copy (and allows you to buy a replacement). Some of the achievements are quite tricky, specifically Sentient Aberration where you need to do the Chalice of Tears jumping puzzle yet. I have the other three but not that one so I don't have the Gleam of Sentience yet (planning to try it when I get the rewind position device in LWS4).

You seem to be working on the assumption that making SOTO relics only available to people who bought SOTO somehow took a lot of development hours and consequently reduced the amount of other content. That seems extremely unlikely. No content was killed in making SOTO relics require owning SOTO. So really your complaint boils down to not liking the "content" or amount of "content" in SOTO rather than being about how legendary relics work?

I know what you are saying. But the reality is that Anet need both good content which makes the game (all modes interesting) AND combat/gameplay reasons for people to want to buy the expansion. I absolutely guarantee that all of the expansions sold more copies than they would have if there hadn't been elite specs, weapon specs, and now relics, that you needed to buy the expansions to use. It's just common sense and economics.

New strikes or a raid wing is indeed good expansion content for instance players. But pretty much everything else you mention, while a good idea, doesn't offer a hook to encourage these players to buy expansions. Unless Anet start making new fractals only available to people who own the next expansion? Or somehow improve class/PvP/WvW balance only for people who buy an expansion? I think there would be a far greater outcry if they did either of these. Seems to me that the weapon specs, soto relics, easier skyscale, strikes were pretty good ways of adding nice benefits to people who bought SOTO while still keeping the impacts pretty mild for people who don't buy SOTO. It seems inline with the benefits from elite specs, gliding, mounts, strikes/raids introduced in earlier expansions. If anything SOTO seems rather milder in terms of penalising people who don't buy the expansions than previous expansions were.

What's good content? I presume you mean a good story? I agree a good story is important. But a significant number of players have openly said in this thread and elsewhere that they don't care about the story, they only play for WvW or PvP or instanced content (there's a thread right now about someone who says they only play instanced content and don't care about the story). What's the hook for people who play these modes and essentially care mainly about the gameplay / combat system and? Elite specialisations were the hook but Anet rightly concluded it would be a mistake to add new elite specs every mini-expansion. Surely it has to be things like the expansion relics and new weapon specialisations? So exactly what Anet are doing and you are complaining about? I feel like many of the people posting in this thread haven't even tried to understand why Anet might be acting the way they are.

That's fair and I agree that straight up is what I would have liked to see (not that I think they were particularly trying to hide it but they also didn't clearly communicate this). Unfortunately Anet get a huge amount of criticism whatever they do. I feel that Anet have become fairly minimalist at what they say because every word they say gets over analysed and debated at great length, often with miss-quoting or interpreting. No joke that people are quoting things they said 8 years ago and trying to hold them to it, as though business doesn't change. Maybe you wouldn't have complained if they have been more upfront as you say - or maybe alternative universe you would have complained even more loudly. Maybe Anet would have had a massive firestorm and people jumping on a boycott bandwagon if they had been more upfront. I dunno. I look at threads like this and see how heated up people have got about what I view as minor things that have quite a small impact and I wonder...

Exactly. Because they need to make money to continue to develop the game and many of the obvious hooks that could be put into new expansions are already well served (gliding, mounts, elite specs, legendaries). Your choices are really to either have game support and development reduce or accept that they need to make a few (relatively minor tbh) changes like this to add extra benefits to buying the expansions. Note that it's just one lever, they also have more things (eg last expansion had OW legendary armour, extra weapon proficiencies, strikes, accessible Skyscale and story) they add in each expansion but Anet clearly feel they need the relic lever as well. I'm fully in the latter camp as I want GW2 to continue to be developed as much as possible. This is a non-issue to me and tbh I'm surprised that legendaries weren't made this way from the start (ie it's surprising Anet didn't make it that you had to buy expansions to unlock stat bonuses in your legendaries from the start).

Sorry, but anyone who was expecting a one year mini expansion to have as much content as a full expansion plus living world is plain delusional (plus has reading difficulties as Anet explicitly said what was going to be in the one year cycle).

That's great news! It means even when GW2 is in maintenance mode they will still be releasing new expansions, new elite specs, new build options, new LWS, new legendaries, new fractals, new strikes, etc. We can't lose then! Even when Anet stop developing GW2 they keep developing it. Woot!

The bits quoted are part of the larger article from Anet talking about the system of needing to do achievements within expansions to unlock relics even if you own the legendary relic. That is also what they were talking about when they said Legendary relics will come with all SOTO relic effects unlocked, as in you wouldn't need to do achievements within SOTO to unlock them. I agree the article wasn't as clearly written as it should have been though as it left the question of whether you would need to actually own SOTO up in the air. Previous comments from Anet had indicated you would need to own SOTO to get access to the SOTO relics, including the wiki page linked to from that article (which says "12 expansion relics at launch, available exclusively for the owners of SOTO") but those places didn't specifically address the question of whether Legendary Relics would bypass this. So, yeah, it was left fuzzier than it should have been and some people have assumed a different interpretation from what Anet meant. I personally always assumed that you would need to own SOTO to use the SOTO relics even with a Legendary Relic because that seemed to be the overall direction of what they were saying.

Quoted for truth, many devs don’t understand that the gnarly complex parts of a code base are quite often there for a reason 😀 There are times when starting again is the right move but it’s a big call and needs to be considered carefully.

By jove, that’s a brilliant plan! It is so unfair that my ping from NZ is poor which makes pvp hard. This will totally solve it. You’re my hero!

Ok, some fair points there. But it’s also completely unfair that you assume Anet don’t have a clue what they are doing and have switched to mini-expansions because they are greedy rather than because they needed a new model. Let’s put it this way, how many freemium funded games are still going after 10+ years and releasing new gameplay content all the time? I don’t know of any but my game knowledge isn’t that wide, maybe you do? Furthermore, if any exist then do you want to be playing them? The freemium model is most successful when it is extremely exploitative and it milks whales dry, often over quite a short 1-2 year lifespan. Fortunately, GW2 haven’t taken that approach and my impression is that income has been a challenge for many years. Certainly they have had it much harder than their subscription based competitors (tho GW2’s model has made it easier to just survive, I think a subscription model is intrinsically easier to get into a death spiral if your subscriber base starts dropping significantly because a subscription is a big barrier to new players). Anyway, there isn’t much more to say. Logically the mini expansion model provides more reliable income to Anet at a price (for players) which is very cheap compared to subscription competitors while also letting people keep playing for free by opting out of buying the expansions. But if you choose to distrust Anet and assume the worst about their motives then there isn’t anything more I can do about it.

I can't believe this thread is still going. It's comical. Just let it go...

I'm not convinced it is irrelevant where you kill them. I've felt before that killing someone who was inside the walls was almost a dead cert way of getting defence participation. This seems to work immediately after a tower/keep flips too, if there are members of the opposing side still in there and they run then taking them down while they are inside the walls seems to give defence participation. However, it's hard to know for sure. Maybe in all the instances this has seemed to work there are other explanations (eg maybe after the flip the opposing players did some damage to us before fleeing, dunno).

Well, I disagree. I believe it is well established that current customers of a game are the ones who will be most willing to pay for new content. Deliberately not charging active players and instead trying to charge later/new customers is reversing this and I can't see any reasons why GW2 would by so different from all other games that normal economics should be reversed. I can't prove it tho :-).

Totally agreed. Arguably GW2's greatest strength is that the open world maps and events (including metas) are good fun to play. As someone currently playing through the story for the first time (up to LWS4) it's been very noticeable that there are deliberately inserted gaps between story missions where you need to gain experience, complete hearts, etc before you can proceed. And I've enjoyed that. I want to explore the new zones and see what it is going on. It's a feature not a bug or a problem. I don't know specifically how SOTO has done it (as I'm not up to that point of the story), maybe it could have been done better, but I'm fine with the general principle.

I don't think a good case can really be made that Anet are delivering less quantity of content currently compared to their norm (quality maybe, but not quantity). I am sure they are delivering less content than they did in the period 2015-2017 when LWS3 and PoF were both released very quickly - I assume that was also when they had their peak team size, or maybe they just had some very efficient and effective people (or maybe a lot of crunch, I really don't know). So LWS3/PoF seems to be peak output. But if you look at output outside of that period I think Soto compares pretty well with it. 1 year of development for 3 maps, 2 strikes with cm, 1 fractal with cm, additional weapons and a new legendary armour suit is pretty much on par I believe? They've also made a number of small QoL changes during this time. I think your complaint is really about quality rather than quantity. That's a tricky one because it's somewhat subjective, tho there are enough people saying it to give credence to the idea. I also find that complaints are largest when a release come out. I read plenty of people slamming EoD in the forums in the year after release, and there's still a decent number of them around but I also see a growing number of people saying they quite like it or even it was their favourite expansion. I presume those people who like EoD were also around in the year after release but didn't have any particular reason to be posting in the forums so their voice was drowned out at the time. Hard to say how much that is happening with SOTO. Regardless, there's no doubt some good feedback for Anet in this and the other similar threads.

I agree with the view that Research Notes serve a purpose as a material sink so they are likely here to stay. I also agree with those who said they should make it faster. GW2 generally does a pretty good job of respecting the players time and towards that goal Anet should consider options to make it faster (either research note specific crafts which are fast and consume a lot of resources at once, or vendors, etc).

I think the mini-expansion model is here to stay as it's the best economic model Anet have come up with (free LW seasons for active players made no economic sense and big expansions every 2-5 years isn't a very steady business model either). So really if you want this debate to be useful then you need to identify what made the "real" expansions better than LW. And I'm not even convinced it's that simple as plenty of people seem to like LWS3 and LWS4 as much as HoT and PoF, at least from a maps and metas perspective, so the assertion that LW < real expansion isn't that straightforward. So maybe it's the elite specs and the mounts which were the parts which made the real expansions better for you? Or is it really that everything around that period, inc LWS3/4, is better?

My post was quoting soulknight and was entirely on why it needs to cost money for the mini-expansions because the free LW model was unsustainable and a mistake. Whether you want to say the mini-expansions are more like living world content or the old big expansions is a different matter. It's also not necessarily that relevant given plenty of people are saying in this thread they really liked LWS3 and LWS4. So the underlying point of your post is probably more whether you like the content. Again tho, not what my post was about which was purely the economics of the models.