Astralporing.1957

There were several succesful MMOs around that time. That was a long time ago though, and the market has been already tapped. Notice, btw, that one of the reasons for why GW2 was succesful was that it ended up interesting for a group of players whose needs for an MMORPG were significantly distinct to what other games could provide then. And that Anet tried (quite unsuccesfully, i might add) to shift away from that group many times over since. If GW3 will be another attempt at this, it will fail - for the same reason why so far all dev attempts to push more hardcore playstyle were met with, let's say, extremely limited success.

Who do you think wrote GW2 code? It's primarily inhouse stuff (apart from some modules like webbrowser support that noone does on their own anymore). If anything, the new code will be worse in that regard, because they willl be using UE engine. Some stuff you like will probably remain (or will get included). Some of those things however will likely not be - and the game is practically certain to include a lot of stuff you won't like. The GW philosophy will definitely not remain, because they can already seen to be ready to abandon it. Expect gear grind, for example. Expect greater emphasis on instanced content (seeing as they keep pushing it forward over and over again). Expect even greater impact of gemshop. Expect cheaper "player engagement"mechanics that rely more on grind than quality. Expect far less of a "freestyle" play (they do like to channel players towards specific maps/activities nowaday, so 100% this will be their modus operandi in GW3 as well). Again, you might end up liking some of this stuff, but for me a lot of those things are deal breakers.

Not the same characters (you don't enable support for individual characters). The same fonts and utf-8 tables. Basically, if you enable everything that's needed for those 4 languages, you can be practically certain that all the tables needed for all latin-based EU languages will work. Notice, how japanese is not part of those.

Yes, it is.You are not only repeating hearsay based on people not understanding what was going on at some (very old) point in GW2's history, but also remember it wrong on top of it. First, it wasn't about participation, but about qualifying for drops. Second, the issue with this was that it was based on flawed tagging system where the threshold was set at certain percentage of overall damage caused to mob (which put hard limits on how many people could qualify). Third, the tagging itself was a little bit wonky when scaling mid-fight happened. And fourth, since there was no such thing as dps meters then, players tended to heavily overestimate (or underestimate) their own contribution. Notice, that's an extremely old issue, that was fixed maybe few months after champion bags were introduced, and had nothing to do with event participation. The first time that real event participation wonkiness happened was recently when Anet messed with WvW event participation, and even there it's not random, but a sideeffect of badly designed participation requirements.

They aren't supporting 24 official eu languages. They are supporting 4. The others are just covered as a byproduct of that (basically, if you cover english, spanish, german and french, you are either already using fonts/codepages with support for all other EU language specific diacritics, or are using some extremely old font/codepage implementations). Japanese (or cyrilic) are not covered in that way however - they'd require Anet to put additional effort to implement.

It's a classic case of boling a frog. They tried to push for a direct change of gear progression paradigm once (when they introduced ascended, and mentioned they will both continue with gear progression and raise a level cap) but got stopped by a massive backlash. So, this time they went for a gradual approach, where every single step seems really minor. Each individual step is too small to cause a major outrage, and seems like it's not an issue after all, but each of those steps keep adding up, and weaken the old paradigm more and more with each attempt. Relics alone went through three of such steps (removing part of functionality from a gear slot and transferring it to a completely new slot that needs to be obtained separately, weakening the legendary functionality by announcing legendary relic will need to keep being unlocked, and then by quietly removing access to SotO relics from non-SotO owners in direct conflict with earlier announcement - and making decision about that change practically right after said announcement has been made). With each step they make with lack of strong opposition from community they get encouragement to make a next one that pushes the boundary just a little bit further. Expecting that it's going to stop at some point is naive.

Stil, the key issue of that thread was "too many modes, which results in most of them not getting enough support, so let's reduce those for GW3". And it got completely ignored over a tangential extreme example. The real answer to "how we'd do X mode inside Y mode" would be "we wouldn't", there would just be less (sub)modes to go around, and less divisions inside those modes. Let's be honest, again, the main issue is very real. We have instanced PvE modes split over 5-man, 10-man and 50-man. Each of those is split again (5 man into dungeons, fractals and DRMs, 10 man into raids and strikes). There's no unified lobbies for all of that either. And it's not just having fractals, strikes, raids and dungeons separated into different lobbies, but also strikes being separated into 3 different lobbies as well - and for no good reason at all. Ignoring all of this just to debate about "how to put fractals in OW" is trying to sidestep the very core of the issue at hand and concentrate at arguments that are at best tangential to that. Tangential, but easier to argue against, i guess.

You mean 5 or 6 people?

They've just decided (again, i might add, that's a recurring situation) that not including gear grind in this game was a mistake. Gear grind hamster wheels are just easier to make than good content after all.

Then perhaps you should have been responding to that post. Instead you were responding to one that did not mention any of that. Notice, that the points raised by the post you quoted were completely valid, but you decided to completely ignore them and respond to something else completely.

No country banned lootboxes in any way. The ban comes completely from Anet's side. Hint: what happened is that some countries decided lootboxes are a gambling mechanic and asked Anet to follow gambling regulations. Anet could do that, but that would mean admitting lootboxes are gambling, and they weren't ready to do so (out of fear for impact it might have elsewhere). So instead of doing that they've decided to sidestep the issue by removing contentious items from the store in those countries. Notice, that it means Anet's not going to do any workarounds for those countries, as it would bring attention to this specific case and attention is exactly what they want to avoid.

Yes, it is possible, but only in the same way as one person can be luckier in real life than another. So, we'd be talking here about nebulous mystical quality of a character (as influenced by RNGesus), and not about actual game mechanics impact. Edit: correction, magic find boons can and will influence drops on per-character basis. Notice, that magic find affects only a certain subset of drops (i.e. most of drops are currently being delivered through chests, which aren't influenced by MF). Notice also, that a large part of Magic Find value comes not from those per-character boons, but from permanent account-wide Magic Find stat (that is obtained through achievement point tiers and from eating Luck).

FF XIV doesn't support all languages either - and there are some unique national language characters that can be used in GW2, but not in FF XIV.

Yes, you are obviously reading it wrong (or not reading at all), since you are asking questions about things that weren't in the post you responded to. Hint: noone's saying that everything should be bundled into a single mode.

...yes? It would not be the first (or likely last) time either. They do like to channel players towards niche content and do it on constant basis. It rarely brings the results net expected, of course, but for some reason it doesn't stop them from trying. Nah. It's not like the case of legendary armor originally. It's small enough time investment that a lot of players will still be doing it, even though they do not like the content. It really doesn't make anyone happier though. Except maybe for some WvW players looking for free loot bags of course. Still, the reality is that a huge majority of MMORPG players dislike PvP in any forms, and trying to push them towards those types of content can only result in lessening their enjoyment of the game. It's not something exclusive to GW2 either - it's been well known for years (although in GW2 it might be even more visible due to more casual playerbase it has). It's not as bad if you are in for one or two GoBs, but if you are after a lot more, then it starts getting painful. I know that at least for me GoB is one of the things that heavily slows down my legendary gear production, with bigger and bigger impact on every subsequent legendary i make. And i have been semi-casually WvWing at some point - i know players that are so incompatible with the content that for them each GoB farming session means they need to take "vacations" off the game afterwards just to cool off.