Anet needs to move away from Open World design and make new dungeons.

[kharmin.7683]

14 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

 

 I'm an open world/story player primarily, but if every time I start to tire of that or just feel like a change of pace I have no alternative for new content, that's when I go find another game.  Maybe I come back or maybe that other game becomes my new thing.

I don't think you have to be a hardcore player to appreciate some variety in content.

There is some validity to this, I believe.  As a very casual player, I've accomplished pretty much everything that interests me in GW2.  While waiting on the expansion to be released, I've started playing SW:ToR and have been playing that more than GW2 for several months now.

Once EoD is available, I'll be back to dive into that content, but how much of my limited time is spent in GW2 or SW:ToR will remain to be seen.

[robertthebard.8150]

2 hours ago, Tails.9372 said:

And that's the important thing to remember, most instanced content is not designed for the enjoyment of the average casual player and unsurprisingly the one that is (namely story content) has the highest amount of engagement (at least initially, the issue here is a lack of replay value). On the flipside at the beginning of HoT they tried to introduce significantly more difficult OW content which most people also couldn't stand and OW maps which are neither a profitable farm nor a requirement for important collections are just as dead as some of the instanced content in this game.

Indeed, but you were doing the exact same thing earlier in this thread so you're not the one to talk.

How so?

[Obtena.7952]

2 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

There is some validity to this, I believe.  As a very casual player, I've accomplished pretty much everything that interests me in GW2.  While waiting on the expansion to be released, I've started playing SW:ToR and have been playing that more than GW2 for several months now.

Once EoD is available, I'll be back to dive into that content, but how much of my limited time is spent in GW2 or SW:ToR will remain to be seen.

Your experience illustrates an important aspect of the game ... GW2 is DESIGNED to allow people to do this without significant detriment to their GW2 game experience OR to Anet's revenues. That requires people to think differently about assessing how Anet implements content AND what content they create. When people apply the 'WoW' game model to GW2, it's clear they don't understand how different GW2 is from the typical MMO. 

I'm just going to put this out there as a hypothesis:

The current business model of the game would NEVER support a high, majority portion of group instanced content for PVE.

Instanced content requires players to be committed to the game. Shifting the game to a higher portion of group instance content indicates a sub-based business model.

Edited December 25, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[robertthebard.8150]

2 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

That's an important consideration ... GW2 is DESIGNED to allow people to do this without significant detriment to their GW2 game experience OR to Anet's revenues. That requires people to think differently about assessing how Anet implements content AND what content they create. 

I'm just going to put this out there as a hypothesis: The current business model of the game would NEVER support a content spread like the OP is suggesting. Instanced content requires players to be committed to the game. That indicates a sub-based business model.

I might agree, but DDO's entire quest structure is instanced.  Now, one can open all quests on Normal w/out a sub, and a sub, VIP there, allows one to open the quest on any difficulty they desire, but the quests are all instanced, and if a F2P player runs a quest on Normal, they can then repeat it on hard.  If they advance to where they can reincarnate their character, even w/out a sub, Hard becomes available as an option, and if they get to a third life, all content difficulties are available.  Reincarnation simply starts your character over at level 1.  It's more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this, it will suffice.

[Obtena.7952]

43 minutes ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

I might agree, but DDO's entire quest structure is instanced.  Now, one can open all quests on Normal w/out a sub, and a sub, VIP there, allows one to open the quest on any difficulty they desire, but the quests are all instanced, and if a F2P player runs a quest on Normal, they can then repeat it on hard.  If they advance to where they can reincarnate their character, even w/out a sub, Hard becomes available as an option, and if they get to a third life, all content difficulties are available.  Reincarnation simply starts your character over at level 1.  It's more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this, it will suffice.

Well, this is where it's difficult because comparisons with other games aren't really valid. GW2's business model and content implementation are related ... and it works for GW2. MAYBE a DDO content implementation would work in GW2 or not (and to be fair, GW2 storyline is also instanced and many quests at some early point in the game history DID require some people to get assistance to complete).

The valid discussion here is how much can Anet deviate from EITHER their business model or their content implementation strategy and still make the game successful. The problem I see in the thread is that some people believe one of those things is signfiicantly 'wrong' and the game is on a path to failure because of this wrong thing. Reality doesn't support that because the runway for the game to survive either of these things being wrong has more than run out.  

Right now, I would say that even with some mis steps like HoT and IBS ... Anet knows the path this game needs to take for both those elements to be successful. They tested the boundaries, they know the limits. I see evidence they have learned from some of these mis steps. They also know the consequences for going outside those limits. 

Edited December 25, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

3 hours ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

Show me where I've said they must cater to any group.  It's really easy to defeat arguments that you make up in a post, but let's talk about what I said, instead of what you want me to have said.  Sound fair?  Excellent.

Did you know that I found GW 2 game hopping from another MMO, because I was bored?  "Which MMO", one may ask, ESO.  I played ESO because I was bored, and had seen that Malukah was doing the female bards in the Vanilla release, so I went ahead and got it.  I wasn't looking for Skyrim Online, so I wasn't overly disappointed with it, played for a year or so.

In the time I've been playing here I've been distracted by a lot of other games, some new releases, like AC Valhalla and CP 2077.  Others not so new, like Horizon Zero Dawn, when it released for PC.  I've even been distracted by Baldur's Gate, the first one.  The list goes on, but what's the point?  Here I am, logging in and playing, and even on the forums discussing it.  I've had to wait an hour for updates to install on some of my older MMOs too, swtor is really "good" at that.

These trends existed long before GW 2 and will continue to exist long after it's on maintenance mode, if it's even online at all at that point.  "The grass is always greener" after all.  I mentioned above that I used to be in a raid guild, that jumped games for new raids in other games.  I was there for about 2 years, and I left 5 years ago.  So that trend was well established, even back then.  I've seen the "but people are playing other MMOs instead" argument in a lot of those MMO forums too.  Guess what:  People jumped ship from another MMO, in a lot of cases, to play here too.  I cited GW earlier, to show that retention is a thing for this franchise, even when the game is technically on Maintenance Mode.

This is akin to pointing to Steam charts for a game that doesn't require Steam to launch and claiming it's dead.  I've seen that too.  I've seen a lot in the last 15 or 16 years of playing MMOs a lot.  I've seen "no updates will be the last nail in the coffin for this MMO" and "that update will be the last nail in the coffin for this MMO", in the same MMO, from the same player.  Nearly 12 years later, they were, eventually, right.  So hey, there's hope for the doom and gloom, just stick with it, after all, a stopped clock is right twice a day.

 

Certainly the grass locks greener on the other side but I don't think that the only reason.

 

1.Players are burned out of the current content that is similar again to players who plays wow. Basically you run the same fractals , raid the whole time over years . In someway this is the same for PvP and Wvw

 

2. Strike Mission aren't taken too seriously by high/endgame players there are a lot of reasons, too cheap, too easy (for the most part) and too alien for the players we had dungeon, we have fractals and we have raids so how make this new system sense?

 

3. The rewards structure in this game is or became messed up. When you start the game your first ascended gear can take relative long . When you start doing fractals you already get those thrown at you , when you have full legendary gear you don't need it anymore . On the personal challenge side the game becomes  even on CM modes easier when you do it on a daily basis . Yeah that is the missing content. What made it worse is that extreme tanky builds like cFB , Scourge became top dps and meta which took every challenge out of the cms also CM without C.

 

 

 

MMOs don't  die that fast but the majority of people will move on when they stop doing content updates.

 

 

[robertthebard.8150]

2 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Well, this is where it's difficult because comparisons with other games aren't really valid. GW2's business model and content implementation are related ... and it works for GW2. MAYBE a DDO content implementation would work in GW2 or not (and to be fair, GW2 storyline is also instanced and many quests at some early point in the game history DID require some people to get assistance to complete).

The valid discussion here is how much can Anet deviate from EITHER their business model or their content implementation strategy and still make the game successful. The problem I see in the thread is that some people believe one of those things is signfiicantly 'wrong' and the game is on a path to failure because of this wrong thing. Reality doesn't support that because the runway for the game to survive either of these things being wrong has more than run out.  

Right now, I would say that even with some mis steps like HoT and IBS ... Anet knows the path this game needs to take for both those elements to be successful. They tested the boundaries, they know the limits. I see evidence they have learned from some of these mis steps. They also know the consequences for going outside those limits. 

I was just pointing out that one could make a lot of instanced content, and still be reasonably successful.  DDO has been around for 10 or 11 years now with this instanced formula.  Here, they could, and I guess are adding more instanced content with the next expansion, w/out having to deviate from what's apparently been working.  I'm not onboard with the premise of the thread that they need to deviate away from it, but they could throw that population a bone.

1 hour ago, Lord of the Fire.6870 said:

 

Certainly the grass locks greener on the other side but I don't think that the only reason.

 

1.Players are burned out of the current content that is similar again to players who plays wow. Basically you run the same fractals , raid the whole time over years . In someway this is the same for PvP and Wvw

 

2. Strike Mission aren't taken too seriously by high/endgame players there are a lot of reasons, too cheap, too easy (for the most part) and too alien for the players we had dungeon, we have fractals and we have raids so how make this new system sense?

 

3. The rewards structure in this game is or became messed up. When you start the game your first ascended gear can take relative long . When you start doing fractals you already get those thrown at you , when you have full legendary gear you don't need it anymore . On the personal challenge side the game becomes  even on CM modes easier when you do it on a daily basis . Yeah that is the missing content. What made it worse is that extreme tanky builds like cFB , Scourge became top dps and meta which took every challenge out of the cms also CM without C.

 

 

 

MMOs don't  die that fast but the majority of people will move on when they stop doing content updates.

 

 

For all the "it makes no sense", it seems like people are playing them.  I know people are complaining about them on the forums, mostly "but nobody does anything I think they should do" style complaints, sort of along the lines of "we need to be able to inspect player's gear before we allow them in our group".

Define "majority".  I'm reading "everyone I know" or "all of my friends".  Also, which content would be the content that "saved the game"?  As I mentioned earlier, the maps are reasonably populated, so much so that we have threads complaining about people afk on maps during meta events.  Instances close all the time, which means that there were enough players to necessitate multiple instances.  I've had two instances close within a half hour. 

Yes, this means that people are either logging out, or changing instances or maps.  Neither of those are necessarily bad.  I log out of games all the time, that doesn't mean I'm quitting, just that I have other things to do, like go to bed, or like here shortly, where I'm going to get on my bike, and head out of town to hang with my family.  I also head to LA or DR a lot too, to ditch stuff.  It's not like we can say "but there's no new content coming", when there's a new expansion on the horizon.  Just because it's not aimed at a particular subset, or someone doesn't like it, doesn't mean it's not coming.  Games do things that people don't like all the time, and yes, some leave.  It's the nature of the business.  But until there are only 100 people per server online, we're really not any where near being in trouble.

[voltaicbore.8012]

On 12/24/2021 at 9:52 AM, Hume.2876 said:

judging by how well korean games do - I suggest they steer away from that and look to the leaders.

Like it or not, many Korean games are fabulously profitable despite outright abusive publisher practices and, in many cases, very poor game design. I suspect that even the Archeage trainwrecks (including the kakao version) paid off in the short term, which is why the game keeps changing hands and going through fresh new versions of soulless cash-grabbing. The other proven title in this area, BDO, is also performing quite well for PA, and has been for years. BDO has transcended pay-to-win; it's pay-for-a-chance-not-to-lose. Even more insultingly, you have to actually have a decent understanding of the game's systems to effectively make use of the resources you bought with real money. It's one of the most consumer-unfriendly games I've seen of that scale, but it's doing well in NA (but admittedly seems to have lost some whales from EU). I suspect that even though most Korean games don't have the populations to stand toe-to-toe with the juggernauts at the top, they are probably among the most economically efficient games out there. If you want to make cash more than you want to make a good game, seems like the Koreans figured out how to do it.

As for looking to the leaders, I agree it should be done, but purely from a business practices standpoint. I'm talking about day-to-day management, setting deadlines, high-level planning for narrative control, etc. It's that kind of thing - not extremesuperhardbigPPelitemode raids - that I think matter more in terms of how a game fares in the long run.

Edited December 25, 2021 by voltaicbore.8012

[Tails.9372]

4 hours ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

How so?

Your "What makes you believe that..." in your last reply to me only works it if I actually do what you claimed which I don't so your entire post was essentially just you replying to something you made up yourself.

[Astralporing.1957]

9 hours ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

How many employees does ncsoft have? 

See it is a pointless question. Because ncsoft does nothing for this game besides marketing and CS. 

You (again) miss the point i am making.

Team working for FF XIV is not a separate business. It is an internal dev team dedicated to a single game within the whole Square-Enix structure. It consists of developers, and practically noone else.

Anet is not this - even if it's owned by NCSoft, it's still a separate business, with its own non-dev staff (many of whose duplicate functions that already exist in NCsoft).

Case in point - FF XIV cashshop is actually not managed by FF XIV team. Naoki Yoshida mentioned more than once he has little to no control over it. The building managements staff, and a lot of tech staff are also Square-Enix, not FF XIV team.

Anet however need to staff a lot of those positions on their own, even if NCSoft has their own people doing the same thing. And at times that non-dev staff could be as much as half the company employees.

Another case in point - Anet is working on more than one game (yes, even now - even though some projects of theirs got cancelled, they still seem to have at least one-two more of those on the table)

And people for some reason very much like to confuse Anet's number of employees total with their number of developers. And think that all their devs work on GW2, which is also not a case.

Quote

I am sick in tired of people giving anet a pass because they claim it is a small game studio with no sub fee, when in fact it is the same size as its competitors that are not blizzard, and it probably rakes in more money from the whales than it could ever do with a sub fee. 

I am not giving Anet a pass. I actually tend to be highly critical about them on a lot of issues. I was just pointing out that this specific "methodology" used to argue about Anet dev resources (and its possible division on different projects) is highly unreliable at best, with no connection whatsoever to reality at worst.

Edited December 25, 2021 by Astralporing.1957

[Sobx.1758]

On 12/23/2021 at 4:01 PM, Teratus.2859 said:

The kind that would just spout nonsense like "you just don't want to learn" or would accuse you of trying to control who they were allowed to play with etc.

Very common strawman arguments I heard often when arguing with some raiders who would just dismiss everything you say and claim nonsense like that to halt discussions.
Best part being during discussion topics that largely had nothing to do with them in the first place.
A lot of causals tend not to want to associate with hardcore players all that much anyway.

There were some bad easy raid ideas going around for sure but plenty just wanted the in game tools to help them experience the content and learn in a less punishing environment with like minded and similarly experienced players.

But it usually devolved into just fighting and toxicity which is the main reason I eventually stopped giving a crap about raids entirely as well.

Sure, except that's not what was generally happening with ideas not aiming at skipping the content by introducing tranining modes with main rewards in them. I also don't see how "trying to control who they were allowed to play with" would have anything to do with the idea of training modes. Aren't you mixing up different threads here?

Edited December 25, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[robertthebard.8150]

On 12/20/2021 at 12:52 PM, robertthebard.8150 said:

What makes you believe that this is limited to A-Net?  I can assure you that it's not.    Where it exists, it exists to provide challenge for those that are looking for it.  ESO and swtor both have instanced content designed for this very thing, and some of it is even story content, for swtor, anyway.  While Rappelz didn't have instanced dungeons initially, the dungeons they did have were harder content with the "trash mobs" being the equivalent of field bosses, not world bosses mind, just field bosses, with dungeon bosses in certain areas.  Even DDO, where all the content is instanced, had dungeons that were harder than regular content.

 

9 hours ago, Tails.9372 said:

Your "What makes you believe that..." in your last reply to me only works it if I actually do what you claimed which I don't so your entire post was essentially just you replying to something you made up yourself.

You mean this post, where I asked you what made you believe that instanced content being harder was limited to ANet?  You made a statement about instanced content being harder by ANet's design, and I asked what made you believe it was limited to ANet.  I was bemused by that statement, because it's a pretty common practice in MMOs, so I asked for some clarification.

[Tails.9372]

31 minutes ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

...so I asked for some clarification

Not really, you made an assumption and went on from there. If you just wanted to ask for clarification your question would have been: "Do you believe that...". Not that this would have mattered at all because A-Net is obviously not bound by what's "common practice in MMOs" and merely saying "but other MMOs" by itself is not a substantive rebuttal to anything I actually said in the post from me you quoted.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Tails.9372

[Hume.2876]

16 hours ago, kharmin.7683 said:

There is some validity to this, I believe.  As a very casual player, I've accomplished pretty much everything that interests me in GW2.  While waiting on the expansion to be released, I've started playing SW:ToR and have been playing that more than GW2 for several months now.

Once EoD is available, I'll be back to dive into that content, but how much of my limited time is spent in GW2 or SW:ToR will remain to be seen.

 

Yes player retention is their big problem and the problem for any MMO.  But what I don't want to see happen is the self fulfilling prophecy that comes from neglecting your high end PvE players. 

 

What is interesting about the MMO space is that while initially it seemed smart to focus on hyper casual players - players who were satisfied with a long grind for cosmetic items - it has proven not to be the best business decision.

MMO games with more of a focus on high end PVE content - that featured somewhat difficult instanced content over cosmetic grinds have proven to be more popular with the MMO playing base. 

 

So when you look at GW2 on the one hand you notice most people playing your open world zones. But on the other hand you notice the popularity of your game is not great overall. So the question is what are those games doing that you are not?

 

It's like a car company that makes great sports cars - say Porsche - deciding to branch out into SUVs.  They never really wanted to make SUVs - they aren't really know for their SUVs. But by doing so they stay afloat - and grow the business.  Because sales of the sports cars - just aren't very big.

 

GW2 has some instanced content - but I don't think its enough to keep the high end PvE crowd interested.  Honestly they are in a super tough spot. They have to make compelling high end PvE content without spending a ton of money.

 

If they go down the path of just making cool open world zones with easy content and cosmetic achievement grind they are doomed, IMHO.  Maybe they could convert their living story into dungeons that you can replay once you unlock them..

 

To me this is the point the OP really hit on to start this thread.  Its a balancing act and its a tough one. But like Porsche - maybe if they get it right they can grow the business and hire more developers and be one of the big guys again.

 

I wish them luck.. They brought their big guns back - and they are redoing the graphics engine. So we have some hope..  

 

 

[Teratus.2859]

9 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Sure, except that's not what was generally happening with ideas not aiming at skipping the content by introducing tranining modes with main rewards in them. I also don't see how "trying to control who they were allowed to play with" would have anything to do with the idea of training modes. Aren't you mixing up different threads here?

A lot of these discussions tended to devolve into the same kind of arguments from my experience, even if it had little or nothing to do with the original idea.

When it came to the whole "controlling who they can play with" thing it was simply a strawman.
Nobody on the pro training raids side of the argument ever pushed for it, I always stated we wanted our own casual community for the content that would rarely if ever interact with the existing hardcore one.
Pretty much exactly what happened with Dungeons and Fractals.

I've always believed those comments were just an attempt for raiders to keep pugging free from casuals because they didn't want non meta conforming casuals filling it up and making it harder for them to find groups of people who want/enjoy playing raids their way.
I cannot see any other reason why they would make such claims otherwise, specially when I was very vocal on multiple occasions about never wanting anything to do with their kind of group in the first place.

Thus requesting in game training modes = "you don't want to learn"
And "I don't want to play with you" = "your just trying to control who we can play with"
Many raid arguments devolved into this nonsense.

[Teratus.2859]

On 12/23/2021 at 11:51 PM, Sir Alymer.3406 said:

So, there's currently a post in Instanced Group Content:

that requests "As far as rewards, ANet could slightly reduce loot tables for public versions (as Blizzard does) but still give the Divinations/Insights to allow more players to craft Legendary Armor. "

Yeah these do pop up from time to time as well, I don't deny their existence.

As said though I do not agree with the idea of allowing easier access to legendary crafting items but I am not totally against the idea of having some diminished rewards in easy mode raids.. though a rewardless tier of difficulty is also fine with me.
Having some diminished rewards may help populate the easier mode for longer though, but if you want the big shiny rewards you should have to beat the normal content, that's important to keep.

On 12/23/2021 at 11:51 PM, Sir Alymer.3406 said:

I've always been for easy mod raids.  In fact, I've always wondered why ANet didn't just introduce raids like fractals.  Raid tiers with T1 being easy, T2 being current, then T3 for CM, T4 for even  more challenge.  But that never came as, to ANet, raids are r aids and can't have scalable difficulty (Or consistent difficulty between bosses, but that's another problem entirely).  But I've never been for giving the same rewards per teir.  Maybe splitting LI/LD into shards of LI/LD, give the shards out on the easier difficulties where  x many shards = 1 LI/LD where, yes, technically you could still progress, but a full clear of T1 raids would net you less LI/LD per week than just doing T2 or higher.

My guess is they just didn't expect raids to drop off over time like they did..
But generally I agree that it is something they should have implemented from the beginning, and I think Raiders in general would have appreciated it as well had they done so as it could also have provided even higher tiers of difficulty for them to enjoy as well.

But I don't think giving the LI/DI out easier even in diminished form is a good idea, this is one thing I do agree with many raiders on.
The easy mode raids should be setup in a way that teaches players how each raid fight works, the bosses mechanics and what they need to avoid etc and provide them with the most vital tool they need to beat the normal raid.. hands on experience.
Nobody is going to learn anything when they are face down on the floor constantly, and they're not having fun when in that state either.

Best idea I could come up with is replacing character deaths with unique stacking death debuffs which will indicate after each fight how many times you would have "died" in a normal run and to what mechanic, be that insta death, boss timed out and enraged or you simply died of health loss.
The boss itself would otherwise be identical to the normal one and if you and your group could kill the easy mode boss without any death debuffs, then you have already proven your group is fully capable of beating the normal boss in a deathless run.

Something like that imo would be immensely helpful for casuals to learn how each boss works.
And if all they want to experience is the actual story of each raid then they could do it in this mode too and not impact any normal raid runs.

On 12/23/2021 at 11:51 PM, Sir Alymer.3406 said:

I honestly don't know what to tell you.  Raids are group content through and through.  They're balanced with 10 people playing specialized roles in mind.  There's not really a way to scale back the difficulty to allow one player to do them.  See  CoF  P1/P3 or other dungeon/fractal instances that require multiple people to get through.  Generally there's some exploit involved that makes it clear that solo isn't intended.

This is not entirely true.. at least what you said about balanced for specialized roles.
This is something I have argued a lot with some hardcore raiders on as well and a lot of them have been very stubborn about defending this misconception.

There is a lot of breathing room in raids when it comes to build diversity and there are a number of raiders who agree with this and even raid content creators such as Mighty Teapot have said this on more than one occasion.
There are a lot of raid viable builds in the game, and by that we mean simply mean "yes you can beat raids with this build"
They may not be specialized, they may not be efficient but they can provide enough DPS or Support etc to beat any normal raid boss.

I have seen this happen with other people, my own wife who is one of the most casual Gw2 players I know and who has almost no understanding of the build system has beaten a couple of raids with her normal PvE pistol spam thief.. I have also beaten some raids myself with a group of casual players just running their basic PvE builds.
Raids are in fact balanced around the average player's skill level and this is largely why many raiders find raids to be "too easy" after a while.
The biggest difference is that casuals don't have enough of or any hands on experience with the bosses and their mechanics which is the main reason they die a lot in raids, it has very little to do with their actual builds.
I would even argue that any team of players running full zerker stats and skill spamming damage skills is more than sufficient to beat any raids group DPS requirement.
Support Roles are king in this content and that's where real player skill matters imo, for DPS you simply have to stay alive and smack the thing lol

[Rasimir.6239]

2 hours ago, Teratus.2859 said:

The easy mode raids should be setup in a way that teaches players how each raid fight works, the bosses mechanics and what they need to avoid etc and provide them with the most vital tool they need to beat the normal raid.. hands on experience.

This sounds great in theory, but in practice I have found that this simply doesn't work. That's not even a technical problem, but a people problem. If the "easy mode" requires the exact same mechanics as the normal (or hard) mode, then it isn't really any easier, since the challenge in most if not all fights is directly tied to proper execution of mechanics.

 

You need to put in safeguards that allow you to succeed even if you fail the mechanics if you want an easy mode that is actually easier than the regular encounter. This does however take away the feedback of "you failed because you didn't do xyz", which is crucial to learn how to properly do the mechanics and succeed in the regular encounter.

 

More importantly though, it leads players to totally ignore the mechanics, in which case it fails at teaching simply because you never do it properly anyway. You can see this in fractals where players that have played through all tiers still arrive in the upper tiers totally clueless since they never noticed the mechanic as lower tiers allowed them to stack and heal through anything the fractal might've thrown at them. Other fractals that require key mechanics on all tiers (most notably the newer ones) rarely get played at lower tiers because "too hard".

 

It's not only a fractal problem or even a GW2 specific problem. I remember a raid group I was in in LotRO some ten years ago, where the raid lead insisted on "skip mechanics" tactics on the entry level of a raid, then was totally thrown off when his raid group was unable to do the mechanics once they switched to the higher difficulty. It's human nature to go the path of least resistance, and there's no real way to technically counter this.

 

If you have a full raid of people willing to do the mechanics, then of course you can also do them in easy mode raids (or fractals or whatever), but honestly in that case you can just do it on the regular mode, too, since the vast majority of wipes happens not because of low dps but because of failing to properly do the mechanics.

 

Personally I would actually like a story mode, since I haven't seen all of the raid stories yet either, but simply to experience the story. I have no illusion that it would have any impact on getting people into raiding or training them to beat the regular encounters.

[Sobx.1758]

12 hours ago, Teratus.2859 said:

A lot of these discussions tended to devolve into the same kind of arguments from my experience, even if it had little or nothing to do with the original idea.

Yes and a lot of that was due to misrepresenting other people's oppinions, where if -for example- I was against training modes rewarding end-goal rewards, later someone (and to be clear, I don't mean you) kept repeating I'm somehow against any and all ideas of training/easy modes, while it was -and still is- far from the truth. Your post I initially responded to looked like that's what you're doing as well, which is why I'm pointing out that the idea of training modes was not "repeatedly shut down just because training mode = bad". If anything, pretty sure "the opposition" rather boiled down mainly to "trying to skip content and still asking for rewards = bad".

Quote

When it came to the whole "controlling who they can play with" thing it was simply a strawman.

Ok.

Quote

And "I don't want to play with you" = "your just trying to control who we can play with"
Many raid arguments devolved into this nonsense.

Interesting, since I kept -and still do- repeating that people already can play with whomever they want by using lfg. But then again, I'm not some vague "raiding community" hivemind. 😛 

 

 

11 hours ago, Teratus.2859 said:

but if you want the big shiny rewards you should have to beat the normal content, that's important to keep.

Yup, that's about it.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Sobx.1758

[Obtena.7952]

7 hours ago, Hume.2876 said:

If they go down the path of just making cool open world zones with easy content and cosmetic achievement grind they are doomed, IMHO.  Maybe they could convert their living story into dungeons that you can replay once you unlock them..

 

Seems to me we have 9 years of game experience that says otherwise. 

[Shadowmoon.7986]

4 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Seems to me we have 9 years of game experience that says otherwise. 

The only time in the games history that this was tried was at the start of IBS, and we all see how that turned out. 

First it dungeons which most players could not finish, then fractals, then raids and fractal cms. They have always had releases to challenge players until the start of the IBS where everything was dumbed down. Compare Son of Svanir is Bjora and Bitterfrost, they are the exact same but Bjora does at least a 3rd the damage. And all the strikes were unfailable dps golems at the time. This was prior to them breaking boneskinner. 

It is funny everyone tends to forget Andrew Greys "stop the bleed message" from February 2019 pretty much begging people to stop leaving the game and promising a fractal cm in 6 months and harder strikes, which manifested in WoJ and a broken Boneskinner.

[robertthebard.8150]

On 12/20/2021 at 10:43 AM, Tails.9372 said:

That's because the content is not made for them, "KP" only exists for content were things can go downhill / drag on for too long if players don't bring a certain level of performance / understanding of and willingness to do the mechanics.

You're right that many people would love to play instanced content in an environment tailor made for their enjoyment but the main issue here is A-Nets design philosophy of "non-story instanced content has to be more difficult".

 

13 hours ago, Tails.9372 said:

Not really, you made an assumption and went on from there. If you just wanted to ask for clarification your question would have been: "Do you believe that...". Not that this would have mattered at all because A-Net is obviously not bound by what's "common practice in MMOs" and merely saying "but other MMOs" by itself is not a substantive rebuttal to anything I actually said in the post from me you quoted.

So, I'm left wondering, what was the point of that last comment in your post?  I provided it here, so feel free, explain what is meant by "the main issue here is A-Nets design philosophy of "non-story content has to be more difficult"".  Pointing out that it's not just Anet's philosophy doesn't relate to the statement?  Pointing out that it's used genre wide isn't relevant to "Anet's philosophy"?  I pointed out that it's a common practice, in the industry, not just ANet's philosophy...  Yet that's not relevant to what you actually said?  I provided what you actually said in this post.  I didn't even cherry pick one little line to reply to, but provided the whole post, for context.

[Obtena.7952]

20 minutes ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

The only time in the games history that this was tried was at the start of IBS, and we all see how that turned out. 

First it dungeons which most players could not finish, then fractals, then raids and fractal cms. They have always had releases to challenge players until the start of the IBS where everything was dumbed down. Compare Son of Svanir is Bjora and Bitterfrost, they are the exact same but Bjora does at least a 3rd the damage. And all the strikes were unfailable dps golems at the time. This was prior to them breaking boneskinner. 

It is funny everyone tends to forget Andrew Greys "stop the bleed message" from February 2019 pretty much begging people to stop leaving the game and promising a fractal cm in 6 months and harder strikes, which manifested in WoJ and a broken Boneskinner.

I don't think you realize this but all the examples of failed instanced content attempts pretty much makes my point. But sure, don't let that stop anyone claiming the game is 'doomed' if Anet stops their numerous attempts at failing at making this kind of content. 

When Anet actually shows they can create sustainable endgame instanced group content ... we can talk again. 

Edited December 26, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[AliamRationem.5172]

2 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

I don't think you realize this but all your examples of failed instanced content attempts pretty much makes my point, but sure, don't let that stop anyone claimig the game is 'doomed' when Anet stops their  numerous attempts at failing this. 

When Anet actually shows they can create sustainable endgame instanced group content ... we can talk again. 

Fractals are sustainable if they'd average developing more than one of them every year-and-a-half.

[Obtena.7952]

41 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Fractals are sustainable if they'd average developing more than one of them every year-and-a-half.

Here is my problem with what some people are saying.

People are claiming the game is 'doomed' if it doesn't develop instanced endgame content. If that's actually true, GW2 does not proof of that claim because of all the abandoned instance content developments. If anything, this game shows that we can have sporadic and short lived group content with all kinds of different implementations ... and STILL be successful. The ONLY constant of this game in PVE is the OW content. 

Sure Fractals COULD be sustainable IF ... but what is the reality of the game? Again, we can't put the cart before the horse here. Assuming some category of content, like fractals,  being adequately patronized by players to be sustainable IF some condition were met is just speculation. Speculation does not prove or even reasonably indicate we NEED this kind of content for the game to not be doomed. 

I even agree with your speculation about Fractals ... it could totally be sustainable content for endgame. i don't know why it's not be developed as such. But the sensational statements people are making here do NOT align with the reality of this game. 

The claims that game would be healthier by increasing  PVE content to more instanced groups  is based on the fundamental assumption that the demographic of the game will shift to accept whatever content Anet provides. This has NOT been the case in the past.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Obtena.7952

[Tails.9372]

50 minutes ago, robertthebard.8150 said:

what is meant by "the main issue here is A-Nets design philosophy of "non-story content has to be more difficult"

Should be apparent if you look at the context. Just ask yourself ""the main issue" in regards to what?". That the content isn't designed to be enjoyed by the average player exactly because of the design philosophy they choose to adopt.

Your "it exists to provide challenge for those that are looking for it" doesn't really hold up here because "providing a challenge" does not require all non-story instanced content to be more difficult.

When it comes down to it the actual conceptual difference between "OW" and "instanced" content is fundamentally just the content structure with difficulty being a non factor so there could easily be more variety here but they, for some reason, don't seem to want that and thus most people are stuck with one type of content.

Edited December 26, 2021 by Tails.9372