Solvar.7953

While I have all the GoB (and GoE) I'll likely ever need, I also never think it is a good idea for games to make players play game modes they really don't enjoy. What it will likely do is just make them quit playing the game and play something else instead (if I'm doing something on my limited free time, it should be something I enjoy doing, not something I find annoying). Sure, legendaries are not required to play the game, but it is a valid (and one of the few) end game goals people may set up for themselves. If the suggestion above to remove all legendaries form the game happened, I'd think there might be a noticeable number of GW2 players who quit because it becomes 'what goal do I have now' situation. And if that did happen, everyone who currently has a legendary would probably quit out of disgust/removal of something of great value to them. I'm all for an exchange mechanism between the different gifts - I don't see any real harm in it, and it would seemingly make a good number of players happy. Having happy players hardly seems like it would ever be a bad thing.

Curious how many people play the beta characters and why they do so. I've personally skipped the past few betas, partly because there are no rewards in it (anything the beta character gets go away at the end, including achievements). And since it is just a new spec, I figure it will show up, and I don't have huge confidence (based on past balancing) that the beta helps things out a huge amount. Plus, if Anet wants me to be a QA tester for them, they should give me something for that work. I did play the beta for PoF - at that time, I was sort of on the fence about buying the next expansion, and being able to see what they had done gave me more confidence in buying it. Best I can tell (have not tried it out), this weapon preview beta does not give access to places a character does not have - I think that could be interesting if Anet did that (eg, core accounts have access to PoF, HoT, etc) as just like my experience, it might convince some players to buy those expansions (especially if they start the plot line and get drawn into it). But curious on other players experiences and what they get out of the beta.

If you farm the LWS3 currencies (or have the home instance nodes), you'll have more than enough materials to buy all the trinkets you need. I did this for quite a while - whenever I needed to change a build, I'd have the currencies to buy whatever trinket I needed (IIRC, when you buy the trinket, it is stat selectable, but fixed once chosen). I mean at one side, if it is like changing stats on ascended armor & weapons (though presumably cheaper), I don't know I'd care - I'd never use it, but if someone else thought it was the best way to go, they could. Of course, this diminishes the importance of the blood ruby pieces. But given this content has been out for years at this point, it seems like something that is unlikely to change.

It is also worth considering that compared to when the game first came out, getting gold through playing the game (not dailies) has become easier. New rewards/meta has increased gold supply, but players also better understand how to get gold (fast farming guides, etc). However, most worth is not direct gold drops, but rather items/materials one might sell on the TP, in which the transaction fees suck some gold out of the economy and other players need to have gotten actual gold through some means to buy those items. It would be interesting to know how much actual gold is added by various sources. I have a feeling the dailies/weeklies may be a big portion - that isn't to say it is the fastest way to gain wealth, but I don't I'm getting 4 gold/day in actual direct drops or trash I can sell to merchants, but then I don't do a lot of fractals. Though if actual gold supply was a real issue causing inflation, one would expect to see it beyond the gold to gem exchange - prices for most items on the TP should go up due to inflation, because best I know, the WV did not really increase supplies of various crafting materials or mystic coins that much, which would be a balancing factor.

I'm just waiting for them to put Gifts of Battle in the gem store. Based on the number of posts of people wanting other ways to get them, they would get a decent number of people buying them. Some number of people would go apoplectic, some players might actually quit, but I suspect Anet would make more money from those buying them vs lost money from those who quit (probably same for this hero point change - I suspect the few players who really do quit the game because of this have not spent much money on the game recently, but rather have been unsatisified for quite a while, and this was just the final piece to make a tipping point). Lets face it, Anet is in the business to make money, so they will sell whatever they can. There is a minor balancing act of not annoying your players so much that they quit in large numbers - I don't think this crosses that line.

I do think WV has added more gold to the game - you still get ~2 gold/day if you do the dailies (1 from daily chest, and another for 30 AA, and you get more than 30 AA if you do the dailies). And then they added weeklies which add another 750 AA (or 25 gold). And this does not even include the discounted gold that costs less than 30 AA. One pretty quickly buys all the non gold items from the WV, so is left making ~50 gold/week doing dailies/weeklies. If Anet wants to reduce gold coming into the game, they should add more repeatable non gold options to the WV that are actually worthwhile.

My complaint isn't that the daily activities take some amount of time, my complaint is that it is something that pretty much no one ever does unless it is a daily. I don't mind spending 5 minutes doing some daily I find interesting - the activities are almost never that situation. Most of the weeklies take some amount of time - doing 3 bounties is probably going to take me more than 5 minutes, but at least it is interesting content so I don't mind doing it. I remember I did one of the activities when it wasn't a daily (completing it was showing up on my 'almost completed' panel, so I decided I'd just finish it out). I was the only person in that activity (easy first place). Does anyone actually enjoy the activities and play them if they are not a daily?

While I can understand timegates when content is first released (to slow the pace and stabilize markets), after a while, that purpose seems to go away - I don't see there being a huge rush of people making ascended equipment right now that would inflate prices of those base materials. I thought the daily rewards (now wizards vault) was the incentive to log in daily - not sure if daily cool downs help out. I have enough of those materials that it isn't an issue if I need to make something, but I still find it annoying to have a bunch of daily chores (convert that stack of mithril ingots into mithrilium at 1/day). I'd much rather these be weekly cooldowns - then I would just know to dedicate an hour or two once/week to deal with all those crafting cooldowns, things that can be purchased 1/day (would rather be 7/week), etc

Anet could probably come up with some logic to prevent AFK participation farming - if the same group of people are exchanging damage for longer than X time, they stop getting participation. Or if the battle is happening in the same area (players not moving much), participation stops. AFK farming is the only real issue, because there really isn't any way to prevent active play farming (people run from base camp and meet and kill each other, and survivor then runs someplace near the other persons spawn so that person can kill them in return) I don't think the current participation system is that good (I'm better off not taking part in a battle I don't think I can win). But I don't really have a better situation, other than to make it purely objective driven (which then might make teams even less and effectively just constantly swap stuff on the map). Maybe if you got a couple minutes of participation if you were killed by another player? I can't see how that will get abused by AFK farmers, but would at least give some incentive to take part in fights where one is not sure of the outcome. Though I imagine then, you might just get players kamikazing into enemies to get that minor participation.

I wonder if some of this is people who will spend $x on a game per quarter. In the case of an expansion coming out, that money is spent on the expansion, where as at other times it is spent on gem store items. So while SotO may do well, it may have poached some sales from the gem store. There are certainly posts in the forum now and again of players who want to support the game and give Anet money, and thus buy gems to do this. So when the expansion comes out, they buy, and met their goal of giving Anet some money.

I wonder if one reason that you can exchange candy corn is you can get the candy corn home instances (and thus get candy corn year round), where as the for the others, once the festival is over, you are not getting them anymore except by buying off the TP. I thought at one time, they had some of the festival vendors stick around for a week or so after the festival ended, just so people who forgot to do their purchasing could still do it.

One reason they started bundling HoT with PoF (and then related, with EoD) was to reduce the odd combination of what features does someone have on an account. I imagine EoD without mounts and gliders would be a different experience - but more so, it would require Anet to test that configuration (can someone play through on that?) Living worlds added very little such content in comparison, which is why they still don't need to be bundled in order to play the game. I do wonder how many sales of those Anet really gets - hard to imagine at this point in time that sales of LWS2 is at all significant, but maybe it still brings in enough that they don't want to throw it away.

This happened last week for those who had purchased up through EoD. However, the complete X events (I think it was that one) counted double - eg, you did it, and it counted as 2 of the weeklies done. Though of course, you only get AA for that once. But it meant you only had to do 4 other weeklies to complete the weekly meta. Not sure if that is the same thing here, but it might be. Still seems like a bug, however.

There are 2 different things - the daily login rewards, which you literally got for just logging in. Then there was the 3 daily tasks you needed to complete. Both of these have been rolled into the new wizards vault. If you always did the 3 daily tasks, the new system is no questions better in terms of reward. If you only logged in for the login reward, you still get 5 AA for that, but that is worse than what you got from the old system (though still, 60 AA/month will let you buy some mystic clovers and mystic coins, so not bad, but overall, you probably don't get as any rewards). I'm personally fine with the new system (though would like more choices in what I do - like someone else, I pretty much never touch WvW now where I used to be more active there). But I could imagine if someone had a lot of alternate accounts, and has time to log in for the previously daily login rewards but seldom did the 3 dailies, they would feel short changed by the new system. And I think this change was in fact totally aimed at doing that, so I would not expect it to change. You can be upset with Anet about it, but since I feel that a fairly small number of players have many accounts, the vast majority of won't see the need for any change.

The new system certainly gives more rewards for Astral Acclaim for those that purchase SotO (as a non owner, legendary starter kit is not available as well as heavy crafting bag). So the new system certainly adds some more reasons to buy SotO for better daily login rewards. In the old system, everyone got the same rewards, regardless of what expansions they own - they just got different dailies to do based on what they own (which is also true for the new system). So I can certainly believe some of these changes was to try and get more sales for SotO - it certainly adds more value to it than if the above mentioned rewards were available to everyone.

Does anyone actually like busy work? I can't see that it really changes game play metrics or anything (daily purchases do that), as if someone has X time to play a given day, and need to spend Y time doing busy work, it means that the amount of time they are doing enjoyable content is X-Y. If Y was reduced to near zero, they would probably still spend X time in the game. I just don't really see how having a player WP around to a bunch of different maps to interact with vendors adds anything for anyone. One of my biggest complaints of GW2 is the amount of busywork one has to do.

I've not bought the expansion yet, partly because I don't want to buy something without knowing what I'm getting. That decision is based partly on the fact I've not been that impressed with most of the content starting from IBS. But also largely because there are some other games I want to play right now, so I'll take my time and play those and come back to SotO when I've finished those up. And I think that is where some of the 'is $25' a fair price comes from - it isn't just looking at SotO on its own, it looking at what other games are out there. You can get Baldur's Gate 3 for $60, and people might argue that it contains a more than 2.5 times the content of SotO, so is a better buy for the money. Each person has to make their own decisions on what something is worth - the fact it doesn't cost much might not be a good deciding factor for some people.

In particular, I would expect a decent number of Wintersday specials to show up, just like we had for Halloween.

I briefly looked at working on getting provisioner tokens, and the thought of going to a bunch of different maps to interact with vendors really had no appeal to me. It isn't hard, but it isn't very interesting and I'd rather be spending my time doing something better than that. So putting a vendor in central locations with all the exchanges seems like a good idea to me. I can't really believe that waypointing around is meant to be an important part of the process.

There is a huge amount of weekly content that could be grindy (WvW skirmish reward track, wvw weeklies, or pretty much any weekly). And there are tons of achievement which simply put are just plain grind. You can choose to do that content or not. In the case of the Halloween festival, each day I'd just do the 3 raceway events, whether it was a daily or not. Takes maybe 5 minutes. One gets decent loot for the first run each day, and IIRC, each race is worth 5 points towards the weekly (so 3 * 5 * 7 = 105, the other half needed).

Rewards certainly draw players in. But time it takes to do the meta is also a big consideration. EoD (and Gyala Delve as an extension) added some long metas. The problem with long metas is that no players that want to do them need to make sure they have that much time blocked off. If a person only has 1 hour to play a day, and the meta starts 30 minutes in to that play time and runs an hour, that is a meta that person can not do. The other problem is that there are just so many metas and world bosses out there that players have other (better) choices. Not everyone chases maximum loot - a lot of players are doing it for the enjoyment, and there are other more enjoyable metas out there.

To me, the biggest problem with Tangled Depth (and any similar maps) is that the map (brought up via the M command) still makes navigation difficult, even if you have explored the entire map. It is just hard to tell where blocking walls/paths are, how to get from point A to point B, etc. That may be the point of the map, but figuring out how to navigate maps is not something I find particular fun. If the full size map somehow conveyed better information, this wouldn't be as much a problem.

For review sites, it probably depends on the reviewer and how much time they want to spend. Do they just want to play the game for a few hours and write up their thoughts? This would mimic what most players do (which is not read forums). Or they could look at forums and other sites about exploits, hacks, etc, but then the question is, how prevalent are they? If the person writing the review never saw any during their brief play, it might actually be a bit unfair to say that the game is full of hackers when they never saw one. They could obviously play a lot, do a lot of research (see where exploits happen, try to go to those spots, etc), but the reviewer may just not care that much about it. All the above said, I often find game reviews lacking - they can give good information, but the reviewer typically plays the game for <10 hours before writing the review. Where as if it is a game I like/am into, I will likely spend a lot more time on it, so how a game hold ups to 100 hours of play becomes more relevant - and MMO more fall into this later case - there are certainly other games where the life of the game is 10 hours, so a review on that is somewhat fair.

I actually like mounts - it gives me a chance to catch up if I'm stopping to carve pumpkins or mine candycorn. But when I catch up, I just dismount and don't use the attack feature. And the raptor race would have issues if you can't mount up for that. The labyrinth is an odd mix - you have mobs of low power creature, so ideally the squad running is doing low DPS so everyone can tag things before they die. But then you run into the bosses, where you want high DPS or the fights will take forever.

Given that there are certain games whose entire focus is on competitive play (which translates into esports), it is hard to see how GW2 can really match that when it focuses on so many different things, and the apparent team size for competitive play is quite small. And many of the top competitive games were designed from the ground up with that in mind, where GW2 primary design seemed to be on OW content.