shrew.3059

You sound reasonable and experienced. You’ve convinced me.

All good questions! I hope they’ve thought of this and we don’t just have a lot of traits invalidated, reducing our options.

This is a suggestion box, not the Moscow–Washington hotline.

I have, and I don’t. Your move. Pro tip: “all” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Do you work in an industry where rigour is unimportant?

To be clear, my point wasn’t that players can’t contribute to design, it’s that we should realise the limits of those contributions. Presumably, the devs have more experience on the design/development side of this game, but we can certainly help them with our perspective of how that works out in practice. In my opinion, reporting bugs, experiences (good/bad), strange interactions, are more useful than trying to do armchair software design. Can we try to act like junior partners in a complex collective project rather than arrogant, unsolicited consultants?

Maybe my point is pedantic, and we’re both heading in the same direction, but I suppose my issue is that we stand a better chance of getting what we want if we’re systematic about it. Devs are building a complex system, and so if we’re going to help them, we need to first gather data about how our part of the system works before we start tinkering with the whole thing. Hopefully your post encourages people to poke and prod the spec in ways that will contribute to making it better.

The reason you have to repeat this is because people want to pay less for more, but often phrase their disappointment as a fundamental flaw rather than an unrealised preference. This post sounds like: this game is too expensive for me, so I won’t be playing it. Which is okay, I guess; maybe this feedback will be useful for ANet’s business team when developing their business model.

I think feedback and sharing experiences is important, so I don’t want to discourage that. I do think that, as a community, we need to have a lot more humility. Playing a game a lot does not necessarily grant the skills and perspective required for game design. There is a reason game designers spend a lot of time sharing high level, theoretical insights on their craft at events such a GDC, rather than just playing more games. While playing and craft inform each other, there is a fundamental difference between them. Consider the relationship between eating and cooking; it is not the case that the people who eat the most are the best chefs, you need some additional thoughtfulness to turn that eating experience into cooking mastery. Let’s at least wait to see how the profession plays before trying to “fix” it, and let’s have some humility in our approach: can you build a better bus just because you take one to and from work every day? Note: there are some threads listing mechanics we should test during the beta and these are very helpful. Rather than jump to the modification phase, we should be gathering information to inform our suggestions. Being methodical and systematic will be far more helpful to the devs than trying to tell them you are better at their jobs than they are (even if that may be true).

The one thing I’ve learned from GW2 Forums: everyone is a part-time game designer with extensive experience in balancing MMO classes.

Mounts are designed as low level skill-based tools. As far as I can see, unlimited flight removes the skill-based component and therefore does not align with the design of mounts in this game. WoW has its thing, GW2 has its thing. Forum requests notwithstanding, GW2 is not designed to be a free-to-play version of WoW.

If I understand the complaint correctly: killing mobs with a quick respawn timer slows down the rate at which I can gather resources. The problem is you are thinking of “farming” much too literally; it’s more like hunting game than pulling turnips out of the ground. GW2 is not supposed to be about picking berries, it’s about combat, where picking berries is the reward.

Yes, we are ignoring that. Maybe it will play test terribly, but even if it doesn’t, we’ll still find something to be salty about.

You must be new here: GW2 Forums are the place to be if you’re angry. The angrier the better.

No. Also: I’m happy to hear your life has been so awesome thus far that this is the most annoying thing you’ve ever encountered.

I just disagree that’s the same as being overpowered when you are not significantly better at killing anything. It’s like the flipside to being a glass cannon; Soulbeasts can instagib the unwary but I don’t consider them overpowered because they can be countered and they can be killed.

You can write it, but it doesn’t make it true. I guess fighting Thieves in Forum Wars 2 is easier than fighting them in-game? You could probably delete Thieves from the game entirely and outside of some changes to PvP in terms of map rotation, not sure the meta would change very much. Sounds overpowered to me.

Thing is, if you beat a Thief they will die. If they flee, you didn’t beat them.

Because nothing says “Adulthood” like a gear treadmill. Good thing there are games out there for big, responsible adults like you.

Some games are freemium, some are subscription, some are DLC. Are you suggesting that anything other than freemium is a bad model, because that’s a very good way to get yourself thrown out of any business strategy meeting that matters. The idea that free-for-me is the only “consumer friendly” practice is an odd hill to die on in a capitalist market. The DLC being discussed actually is free if you are already playing, so it’s weird to suggest that it should just be free in perpetuity, revenue be damned. Beyond which, I would wager GW2 already is freemium insofar as the Gem Store whales likely subsidise content more than any other group.

It’s amazing what you can get used to, or how easily that can be spoiled. There are a lot of things to like about WoW, but after the fluidity of GW2 combat, the freedom to play solo if I want, and the beauty of the world, it’s hard to go back. But if WoW is all you’ve ever known, or if the things I just mentioned are not a priority, I can see how people would not be interested. The impact of psychological inertia and game priorities vary from player to player and even from moment to moment as player lifestyles change.

I don’t have a “weird issue” with WoW players since I played WoW from launch, and I don’t think I have any weird issues with myself or those I played with. I like that GW1 was never a MMO and that its successor only made slight accommodations to fit into that market. I also played and enjoyed Wildstar, which did everything possible to be WoW, and it did not succeed. I don’t pretend to know exactly why that is, but I could guess. I’d probably be wrong since my area of expertise is not MMO market dynamics. I like that there is some market diversity. Slight variations on a theme or wild departures, try everything and let the market decide. I agree with you in that GW2 is niche, and that’s okay. But to be honest, I don’t have enough data on what MMO players want, and what they are willing to give up. Maybe they need vertical progression, maybe they are just used to it and care more about the IP and the gameplay mechanics, maybe it’s the community or where their friends play. I guess if I have a problem with anything, it’s the army of armchair/keyboard analysts who know with absolute certainty what players want, why they are leaving, how to increase revenue, what the appropriate business model should be, etc. This is not a comment directed at you, I just quoted you as a jumping off point.

Maybe you’re lost? You’re not talking to the people who set business strategy for the game. It’s nobody’s responsibility here to expand the player count by voting on business models proposed by other players. I would be delightfully surprised if anyone who sets business strategy even reads the forums or manages to get through these threads. All you can do is say “this was an experience I had” and all you can expect in return is “this is what I think about your experience”. At best this is a suggestion box, not a business meeting.

It’s not crazy, it’s because subscriptions are specifically designed that way. It’s why it’s so attractive as a business model, it’s why gyms can be profitable and empty, it’s why they sell them to you as “$0.0x per day”. Unless you log in regularly, you’re paying the company a premium to hold your character data for you. I think that this is a packaging issue and less a price issue. Giving away story episodes for free is not tenable since that’s revenue lost for ANet, but it does make sense to package the episodes with an expansion or at least give players a clearly labelled option during purchase of that expansion.

I don’t know that this is true. You don’t know this is true. I think the “typical MMO player” is flexible enough in their thinking to embrace changes to the standard formula given that the genre itself doesn’t have that many examples and hasn’t been around that long. It does seem likely that MMO players who expect a WoW-style game will be disappointed, and maybe the “typical MMO player” just means “player expecting WoW” to some.