soulknight.9620

I would even go further and say gw2 is adopting a lot of typical mobile gaming practices like battlepass, timegated resource farms, oversimplified class system (well like you know when you pick up a mobile game and pick a character it doesnt really matter which one you pick, the skills are similar, the dps is similar, the only thing that stands out is basically the "skin" of a class), constant "supersales" (that basically is focused on getting gold/gem prices to rise and push players to spend real money on gem store instead of farming gold), etc.

Why would anyone want to play an ele as a range spec? Are you out of your mind? Do you expect a "wizard" archetype to attack from a range and not jump into the fray like a mad berserker? Now thats just silly!

So you basically asked me a question and a few paragraphs down you say you dont want to engage in a discussion with me because you dissagree with one of my arguments. Yeah... So why should i bother to answer the question then? But i will add a thing to close things up a bit. Time it takes for anet to pump up content can be shortened/altered by: 1) hiring more people and increasing their production capacity since by your own saying they received more financing with the new model, 2) reforming their production process and contract more outsourced staff/companies (which is a common practice in game development industry). 3) getting more development "lines" setup so that more content packs/releases are developed at a single time (they actually did have this back in the living world days). Thats just a few examples. If they take 4 years to develop and expac and while developing it they wont pump up content for a mmo project then they SHOULD just close the project and call it a day because they wouldnt understand the concept of an mmorpg. And this "example" is out of context since this never happened with gw2, the longest content drought we had was 6-9 months in HOT era i believe (but i could be wrong a bit). For past 5 years they released content on regular schedule so i dont see the problem here. Where i do see problem is that they changed their model to yearly PAID content packs that provide LESS content with LESS quality than FREE living world seasons. If they want to earn money - thats fair. But they have to EARN it. I believe you are argueing with the wrong person. If anet wants to make paid content - im fine with it (which i said multiple times), the problem here is that there is a decrease in quality and quantity of said content compared to previous living world releases that were free for the majority of active playing people. As for the "gems" question. Do you have a proof that gems that are sold ingame are the same gems that other people paid for? I dont. Can we run out of said gems to purhcase with gold? I dont think so. It is a virtual currency that anet controls and can "print" in any quantity they want (just as gold). The sole fact that the exchange rate is affected by the amount of bought/sold gems doesnt suddenly make gems be "paid by other people". As for anets bussiness models. Are you sure you are argueing to the right person? I didnt say once that anets bussiness model was great back in the days. I did however say they made a lot of money with cash shop alone when there were no paid expansions. That can be easily doublechecked by publicly availible NCsoft financial reports. And again like i said before im not here to provide analitics for anets current/former bussiness model. Thats their problem. My current problem is that as a customer im forced to pay more for less content of a lesser quality than before. Please dont shift the blame of anets bussiness model on to their customers. It was anets decision to advertise as an mmo that plays by different rules than the rest of the market. Which includes: horizontal progression, free living world updates, no subscription, a solid buy-to-play model, casual friendly game. The majority of gw2 success was dictated by this qualities. When i personally bought this game back in 2014 the major selling points were exactly the ones i listed above. If they want to change their model - sure why not, its their choice, but at least make it better for customers (for ex. more content and/or better quality content) and not just anets financial reports. P.s. a sidenote, if you gonna reply to someone please read the arguments first. Because from your post it feels like you "dissagree" with arguments that i didnt make.

Should it bother me in some weird way? A simple common sense check: can you purchase gems with ingame currency? yes! Can you buy lw episodes with it? yes! So thats basically what i said. And just for you to think about it a bit: gems do not hold any value to the extent that they are "printed" by anet in quantities that they see fit. There is no physical limitation on the supply of gems. The price of them varies on sell/buy coefficient sure, but they are not limited by the amount other players have bought. POF+HOT is 29.99, so that basically POF for 15 euros. LWS4 and IBS can be unlocked via ingame currency. LWS4 is 960 gems, thats equal to 12 euros roughly. IBS is 960 gems too, so add another 12 euros. Thats 15+12+12= 39 euros in total. And another thing - steam lets you buy the whole dragon saga (thats HOT, POF, EOD, all of the LW 2-4 and IBS) for 99 euros. So you can get it even cheeper (cause HOT POF EOD cost 60 euros on gw2 official shop). So as i was saying - get your math right before throwing arguments. Time is not relevant because you cannot measure its value. It is highly subjective. No, its not flawed. The way anet ships their content (in smaller bundles or larger expacs) doesnt change the value of the content pack. You get what you get, period. There is no additional value of content being sliced up and fed to you in small portions and vice versa. I didnt pay for it. My wife didnt pay for it. My friends didnt pay for it. Most of my guildies didnt pay for it. So what "standard" are you talking about. And you know what? You can still not pay for lw2-4+IBS with real money and basically get it for free via gem/gold conversion. If it was just a "promotion" then anet would lock it up just as they locked expac purchases behind real money payments. The way that you can simply get content (lw) with ingame currency is not different to any other content you get with ingame currency like a skyscale/griffon/collections/skins etc. You get things by playing the game. You wouldnt say that skyscale and/or griffon is locked behing a paywall wouldnt you? Yes, it took that promise and i did get dissapointed that it wasnt delivered on. Was it my fault to trust anet? Sure. But that doesnt change the simple fact that content quality is subpar compared to lw. And again. As a paying customer i do not have to take into consideration how much effort and time it takes anet to get content out. Its their bussiness and their internal processes are not of my concern. I pay for product and thats it. If i buy a cake i want it to be tasty and fresh. And i dont want to hear from the baker that "something went wrong in our bakery and i didnt have time to bake the cake in proper way". Im not here to compare one feature of the content pack to another. I am saying that as a content pack SOTO is lacking compared to LW. Ive said it multiple times. I dont know why you keep trying to argue with arguments that i didnt make at all. Have you seen their financial documents to call it unsustainable? I sure didnt. From public financial reports gw2 was doing just fine. And there may be a simpler explanation for the "plan change" and "layoffs". NCsoft wanted more money. And when a parent company wants more money - you cut costs (fire people, cancel unannounced projects, change monetisation model). And from what i see in SOTO they cut costs a lot. Loads of reused models, textures etc. Have you seen the "new" models of "demons" in latest patch? The ones that look the same as quaggans, move like quaggans and fight like quaggans, but with a diffrerent skin texture? And thats just one example. But the worst part for me personally is the lack of creativity from anet. Did you find the latest mastery good? Oh look you can craft an armor now. Not that we already had an option to craft lege armor and weapons. So what was the point of that mastery aside from anet marketing "NEW MASTERY TO UNLOCK". If that doesnt scream "cut costs" then i dont know what is. As a matter of fact they are relevant. If anet would be a monopoly and the only way i could play mmos was gw2 then sure i would be worried about their fate a lot more. But there are other games that can provide similar experience and fill my need for mmos. The point you were trying to make is a trap that i didnt want to set my foot in. As simple as that. The argument of "but what would you have if anet go bankrupt, you would loose all of your purchases and time put into gw2" is a manipulative way to inflate the value of anet and gw2 and try to make me fear loosing access to gw2. I do not value games the same way as you do. I buy a game, have fun, get all the content i want done and if the game has nothing more to offer me i move on. I have no need to tie gw2 to my self identity or my life as a whole. And atm seeing how gw2 is starting to put less effort for higher price im thinking that its time to move on. Thats the point i made. The only reason im here on the forums is to try and do my best to give feedback to anet and hope that they would actually change something about the future of gw2.

If we go into this territory then we would also have to take sales into account for older expansions/lw since if you werent playing at the time of the release you might aswell buy it on sale now for far less then people paid lets say day 1 of the expac. And you could and to this day can buy lw episodes via gold/gem conversion in-game, but you cant buy SOTO the same way, so this argument is questionable. It still doesnt require you to pay real life money for that content. Ofc living world was restricted to owning expac, dont know why you brought that up, but if you want to compare "per dollar" spent value of expac+lw4+ibs (since both of them were tied to PoF) then sure, lets compare PoF with LW4 and IBS for 40 euros to SOTO for 25 euros. We all know how would that end. And again "time" is not important here. From the start i stated that i only compare quality and quantity of content of these content packs. There is literary no reason to tie it up to "time" it takes for anet to develop it and cadence of releases. I dont see the problem of LW being free for players that play the game once every 3 months (that was the requirement after all, that you only had to login once for a few secs to get it for free). But thats not the point here. We compare a content pack that you didnt have to pay for and still can get it via ingame currency to a paid content pack of a lesser quality. Nothing else. It literary doesnt matter. Yes, i do think it is unfair. And ofc i refered to my own experience (well since im not a hive mind and cant think for other people). Because in the end the formula for me as a customer is simple: i got more content for free than i get now for a price tag. If anet said: "ok guys, we gonna give you more content and better quality content than the previous formula, but you would have to pay us a bit every year", i would be ok with it if they actually delivered on this. I was one of the first people that expressed an opinion that paid expacs on yearly basis would be better IF they would provide appropriate quality and quantity of it (basically more content and better content than free lw content). But the sad truth is - they failed. And i see no reason not to tell anet that they underdelivered. Everyone knows cash shop provides more profit than expacs (you can check a few yearly reports for periods where there were no expacs and gw2 scored nice profit for NCsoft). Anet is constantly recruiting new staff, they said themselves that gw2 playerbase is at its peak atm, so their financial situation is far beyond "unsustainable". So considering all of that, if they choose to take more money from their customers yearly they must provide more quality/quantity of content compared to previous formula. And in no circumstances i would "stay with nothing to show for all the things you bought so far". There are other games and other developers. Someone would step up and fill the niche of casual horizontal progression based mmo and who knows maybe they would offer more value for the price. Ok, im not making a point that gw2 is a bad game and a bad deal in general. I still think that a lof of the thing are made right for this game (for example mounts, combat, transmog system, meta events etc). If a new player would ask me if he should play gw2 or any other mmo out there i would recommend gw2 for sheer number of content this game provides in total. But i do see a pattern that anet is starting to provide far less value for the price they are asking COMPARED to their previous model. Like i said earlier im only comparing content pack of SOTO to content pack of lw4 from a customer point of view in this particular debate. Im not here to provide full bussiness model analitics of Anet as a whole you know.

It doesnt matter in this debate. The question is not how much content anet can dish out per minute. The question is that we have a paid package of content (SOTO). And we had a free package of content (lw4). And lw4 provides more content and better quality of said content. I will not be accountable for anets decision to switch their bussiness model from "buy an expansion for 40-50 euros and get a whole lot of content day one and 1-2 living world seasons as a bonus" to "get a paid expac for 25 euros thats basically provides less content than said living world season". Its not a matter of cadence. Thats far beyond my control as a customer and i cant take it into account since anet and many other companies freely shift their release dates as much as they like. The question is as simple as this - the amount and quality of content i get for what i paid for.

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And whose problem is that? anets or mine as a paying customer? Let me get this straight - I dont care what it takes them to develop the product, I dont care how much time they spend on it, I dont care of any difficulties they experience, I dont care how much people or resources they spend on it. As a paying customer the only thing i care is to buy a product and get good quality product in return, i dont need to make excuses for anet for the lack of quality. Ah, my bad, i missunderstood there.

There is a "update" tag on wiki. You can go there and see for urself. Just a quick compare to lw4: LW4 had: 1) 6 maps (vs 3 in SOTO) 2) 2 new mounts (beetle and skyscale) (vs 0 in SOTO) 3) 3 raid wings (although you may argue its a expac content, but it was released during lw4) (vs 0 in SOTO, but we got 2 Strikes) 4) 6 legendary weapons with unique look and effects, 1 legendary raid ring, 1 legendary accesory (vision), legendary runes and sigils. (vs legendary armor and sigil in SOTO with questionable models) 5) 3 fractals (vs 1 in SOTO) 6) Unique armor skins for each armor type (elegy+ requiem, mist shard+blossoming mist shard+ corsair pieces) (vs 3 identical sets for all armor types - thats 3 models compared to 6-12 models if you count in upgraded versions separetly) 7) 2 spvp maps (vs 0 in SOTO) 8 ) New masteries (cant actually count how much there is since im not ingame atm) Thats just major features, it would be too much for me to list every single addition here. But you can check it urself. https://wiki-en.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release Sure you can argue that there are rifts, but its just a glorified on demand map event. Convergences are a bit unique in that aspect. And new weapons, but that was tied to elite specs and expacs, so you cant directly compare them, but just saying designing a weapon is far less work than a full elite spec. Relics are kinda "removed and reintroduced" 6th rune piece bonuses. Weaponmaster training isnt even a proper feature (well you know they could have removed the elite spec limitation any time if they wanted to). Even IBS had similar content if you look it up.

@OP the problem you are describing is basically - SOTO is a glorified payed living world season. The same structure, same type of content, same quality and quantity (although i would argue that quality was better in lw4).

Ah yes, the beautiful logic of anet. A pistol that shoots physical bullets augmented by magic is condi and a scepter that basically conjures magic to attack the targed - power.

Dont worry guys, SC are already throwing in 45k benchmarks with pistol, so in a few weeks it will get nerfed further. You know... if it works on a stationary golem - it must be good! (c) Anet

sPVP and WvW sets say "hi". Although in this particular case having a lege armor with no animation would mean that price hike on "living world" (and yes i do consider SOTO a glorified paid living world season) is unjustified cause we were promissed improvements in quality of content. And whats the deal with tier 1 and tier 2 lege armor? According to wiki shown sets costs roughly the same amount mats/money to craft (and similar effort) like raid lege armor. If we need to pay up more to get some kind of tier 2 just for the animations that would be just dumb and a final nail in the coffin of this game for me personally.

Surprised? Its basically an illustration on how ele balance patches are handles compared to other classes.