Penarddun.6827

Hi there! *waves* Our community and guild does raid trainings twice a week. We currently do a beginner class on Mondays, and a more experienced group on Thursdays. The trainings have been very successful and we'll be adding a third day soon! If you want to know what our trainings are like, you can check out the VODs on my husband's stream. He, and another officer in our guild, lead the trainings. This was our Adina training from tonight: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1446681339 We are very friendly and make sure everyone has fun while learning. Our goal is for you to leave the training with a ton of new knowledge and applicable experience, while still having fun during the process. If you're interested, feel free to join our discord and sign up for our next training! 🙂 https://discord.gg/MaericTV P.S. We *are* a multi-gaming community, so you'll see other game channels and a lot going on, but GW2 is our main game.

I've been checking back every day and each map I go to has Subject S standing in his bubble in front of a non-attackable golem. sigh

If people like the gamble and just enjoy the thrill, well then I guess they would like RNG in games. It gives the same rush as a casino. Bright lights, dazzingly colors, a sound effect. I notice my pulse start to race. It's all there. That's what the "lootbox" is, a virtual slot machine. Press a button, instant sensory stimulation. As virtual, un-tradeable items, if you get something you don't want, it's basically getting nothing. So same as a casino in my eyes. RNG is bad for games in the long run, because it causes non-RNG content to be second priority. A lot of the backlash could have been avoided if there were non-RNG and non-Gemstore ways to obtain mount skins. Like as a reward at the end of a raid, or the end of the PoF storyline, or for completing a challenging achievement. It's the extreme one-sided-ness of 30 mounts being dumped into the gemstore, all at once, behind high paywalls and/or rng that has caused this effect.

I personally would much rather have a subscription fee with no micro-transactions at all. I read the official response. It just showed that they had no idea this was going to finally cause players to start to wake up to the type of marketing manipulation going on, and they needed to do damage control. Sadly, most will become complacent again after the statement was posted, whether anything changes or not. The problem still remains that a major game mechanic (yes, mounts and fashion wars 2 makes it a major game mechanic) is not customizable with any non-gemstore means, and the majority of even those are behind rng walls and expansion price (not-micro) transactions. I personally would still like to hear a second statement, once more time is taken to decide their direction with the gemstore and game in general.

I don't reply to the forums often, but when I do it's because I feel very strongly about something and therefore take my time to write out a long, detailed post. What's different about this mount fiasco is that it is such a letdown that I don't really care all that much about responding and so didn't for days. You know what they say is worse than hate... apathy. This game's end content... is fashion. I raid, I do fractals, I do PvE, WvW, PvP, but what drives me to do that content.... fashion. It is Fashion Wars 2 and we all know it. Therefore, a cosmetic category being exclusively behind an RNG pay wall is damaging to my gaming experience. I bought the expansions, I even bought the Ultimate Edition. Mounts are to PoF what gliders are to HoT. A major new mechanic and fashion category. I can't even change a mount's colors adequately with the default 1-slot dye option to customize it for my character. Bad enough they are all gem store purchases, but then adding insult to injury and implying... "Nope, can't buy the one you want, sorry, pay us more than the entire Ultimate Edition of the expansion that you just bought for the one skin you want... or gamble," is messed up. I've never been a fan of Black Lion Chests. I don't participate in them, because gambling makes me unhappy (Lucky me!), but they flew under the radar because they weren't so integral to a major game component. These mounts are. (So congratulations, you just put yourselves in the spotlight for a practice that is under more scrutiny now than ever). There is no way to get these mounts but to gamble or pay an absurd amount of money for them, and support something sleazy while doing so. Not interested in semantics. Don't care about what is "legal," at the moment, or not. I do very much hope some legislation is passed to combat this type of practice in the future, for all gaming companies. In the meantime, I tried to ignore it. But guess what? I can't. I log into the game, and all the guilds I'm in are talking about it. So there is really no escaping or ignoring this one. This thread alone has over 50k views and it's in published articles, on reddit, and social media. Maybe ANet is hoping that bad publicity is better than no publicity? Well, you got it! But speaking for myself, every new post I read, or comment I see, makes me want to play less.... not more. I've currently reduced my playtime to once a week with my raiding group. Too bad a really cool mount skin isn't available for actually beating game content. Luckily I have other games to play right now. Games that provide me positive feelings, not negative ones. shrugs