Time gates don't help with player retention

[kharmin.7683]

2 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

To your original point, agreed that it would make sense to review time-gates periodically to see if they're still helpful.

It may well be that Anet already does this and is satisfied with the current status.  Not that they'd tell us, though.

[ugrakarma.9416]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Okay but if you're a newer player and you want to get a set of celestial gear, that sorta hurts you a bit.

The last thing a new player will try is a celestial gear.

 

The berserker is the "default" on large majority of mmo's, when new player arrive he think he just need maximize damage.

 

And unless someone will try solo a champion, the large content of gw2 is soloable.

 

Is forum myth the idea that new player run around with nomad, celestials or other uncommon stats. 

[kharmin.7683]

36 minutes ago, Bobzitto.8571 said:

 

Nobody needs anything in this game. Question is, what is the harm in reducing the timegate to obtain it for anyone who wants it? If I want to spend the whole day gathering to craft a ton of ascended mats/gear for myself,  why can't I?

Because of the economy.  Make the required materials account bound, then sure, gather 24x7 if you want.  I'm not convinced that this type of set up would be healthy for the economy.

EDIT: I also don't see how this affects player retention.

Edited April 14, 2022 by kharmin.7683

[Gibson.4036]

One way to keep the benefit of time gates but provide fairness for players of different playstyles would be to increase the time but also the number.

So instead of 1/day, make it 7/week. Or 30/month. That way players who load up on long, infrequent sessions can cover the same ground as those who steadily log in for small amounts.

This loses one benefit, though, in that if ArenaNet can entice you in for 20 minutes to do your daily, you might end up staying 2 hours, thus increasing the amount of people actively playing the game. And as we've clearly seen from "EoD zones feel empty", people feel it when the can't see other people playing in an MMO.

[Gibson.4036]

3 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

The last thing a new player will try is a celestial gear.

....

Is forum myth the idea that new player run around with nomad, celestials or other uncommon stats. 

Well, except for the fact that anyone buying EoD or PoF is handed a level 80 boost that gives them a complete set of celestial.

And the fact that with the adjustment to celestial stats and hybrid possibilities in some professions, players have been finding some celestial builds that work and are showing up on the build sites.

[ugrakarma.9416]

4 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Well, except for the fact that anyone buying EoD or PoF is handed a level 80 boost that gives them a complete set of celestial.

And the fact that with the adjustment to celestial stats and hybrid possibilities in some professions, players have been finding some celestial builds that work and are showing up on the build sites.

bizarre "hybrid" is another gw2 thing. the last thing a new arrival coming from other game will search, is for a hybrid.

[Gibson.4036]

2 minutes ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

bizarre "hybrid" is another gw2 thing. the last thing a new arrival coming from other game will search, is for a hybrid.

As a new player, if I google "GW2 best builds 2022", I get GuildJen and Metabattle as the first two options. They currently feature some celestial builds, and recommend celestial gear as an alternate to others for more survivability.

I don't need to search "hybrid" to end up there.

[kharmin.7683]

1 minute ago, Gibson.4036 said:

As a new player, if I google "GW2 best builds 2022", I get GuildJen and Metabattle as the first two options.

 

I never understand why new players need to have best builds when they have no idea of the game mechanics.

[Gibson.4036]

Just now, kharmin.7683 said:

I never understand why new players need to have best builds when they have no idea of the game mechanics.

Personally, I do research on games because my time is limited and I don't want to spend it trying to puzzle out all the interactions. Add to that the tendency of RPGs to make it difficult to rework your character. I don't have the time for multiple playthroughs of most games.

The theorycraft just isn't interesting to me, so I tend to read up.

Probably goes to something like Bartle's taxonomy of gamer types. I'm in an RPG for the story, immersion, and power-fantasy, not to figure out the mechanics and how to use them optimally.

[ugrakarma.9416]

16 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

As a new player, if I google "GW2 best builds 2022", I get GuildJen and Metabattle as the first two options. They currently feature some celestial builds, and recommend celestial gear as an alternate to others for more survivability.

I don't need to search "hybrid" to end up there.

Lmao "best build 2022" is already too sophisticaded ..., serious u smart guys need to think out of box.

When i came to gw2 from other games: dragon age inquisition, titan quest, never winter, and many others what they have in common? berserker gear.

Even if new player arrive with a soldier gear from "heaven", they will realize they are too slow on killing stuff, its how i noticed theres 'something wrong' once time i forget i was using a soldier gear.

Edited April 14, 2022 by ugrakarma.9416

[Gibson.4036]

3 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

Lmao "best build 2022" is already too sophisticaded ..., serious u smart guys need to think out of box.

When i came to gw2 from other games: dragon age inquisition, titan quest, never winter, and many others what they have in common? berserker gear.

Even if new player arrive with a soldier gear from "heaven", they will realize they are too slow on killing stuff, its how i noticed theres 'something wrong' once time i forget i was using a soldier gear.

Well, I guess it's different for different people.

First thing I did when I downloaded Titan Quest and D.A.:Origins was google "beginner's guide to" and "best character class in". 🤷‍♂️

Edited April 14, 2022 by Gibson.4036

[yann.1946]

Personally I liked the time gate of the skyscale. It made it feel more like raising an animal. This was something I missed with the turtle

[Ashen.2907]

I think that there is a misconception about marathoners and their interaction with sprinters. A marathoner is as likely to desire their reward now as is the sprinter, he is just more willing to deal with delays such as time gates patiently. If those time gates go away and he sees others getting the shiny sooner rather than later he is likely to adjust to the new paradigm and try to do the same, even if not to the same degree.  This effect is amplified by the knowledge that the lack of time gating means that others will gain the reward faster and move on to the next map, event farm, etc.  By waiting, in the absence of a time gate keeping a larger portion of the playerbase engaged with specific content for a longer period, the marathoner has increased the likelihood that he will never get the reward. 

 

I dont like time gates but I do understand that they exist not just to slow sprinter player X down but also to ensure that the content is active for as many people as possible for long enough for marathon player Y to have the opportunity to engage with it as well.

[Khisanth.2948]

4 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

To your original point, agreed that it would make sense to review time-gates periodically to see if they're still helpful. With the prevalence of ascended gear now, are ectoplasm refinement time gates still necessary?

Who do you think would actually benefit the most from that change?

 

[Gibson.4036]

3 minutes ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

Who do you think would actually benefit the most from that change?

 

That's a good question. I'm not sure. I don't know the full range of what ecto refinements are used for. I kind of threw it out as a question to see if anyone with more knowledge would be able to say why it would be a good or bad idea.

It would certainly shorten the process for people crafting ascended gear. I know ecto refinement is used to make some legendary weapons, but as far as I'm aware there are already far worse time gates involved with them, so it hardly seems getting rid of the ecto refinement timegate would impact them much.

Perhaps an even better question would be "Who would be hurt by that change?" I'm vaguely aware that there are avenues for crafting items from refined ecto mats that people resell to make money off them, but it's always looked like some work to determine what actually sells so I've never explored that. So removing the timegate would impact people who are making a little gold steadily supplying those.

Your question makes me think you have a good idea of the answer. So who would benefit the most from removing the ecto refinement timegate?

[Gibson.4036]

2 hours ago, yann.1946 said:

Personally I liked the time gate of the skyscale. It made it feel more like raising an animal. This was something I missed with the turtle

It is kind of funny. Dump a ton of food into your turtle and it goes from that cute little fellow to a hulking beast almost instantaneously.

[Labjax.2465]

10 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Do you mean Anet should get rid of literally all the time gates in the game? For example someone should be able to do as many sets of 3 daily achievements as they can fit into 24 hours and get rewarded for each one?

Or are there specific time gates you consider to be a problem for the players you've described and would like to see changed or removed?

I assume it's the second one, but in that case it would be helpful to say which ones you think should be removed instead of assuming everyone reading this post will feel the same way you do and consider the same time gates to be a problem. Otherwise you run the risk of someone at Anet seeing this post, using it as justification to their bosses for removing the time gate they personally find annoying and totally missing the one/s which bother you.

I think Anet as designers can probably understand what I mean on this issue better than I do actually, given their design experience, i.e. if any of them do read it, they are going to consider it in relation to their familiarity with consciously implementing time gates and whether they believe what I say has any merit based on the data they have and reception of various time gates they've done in games they've worked on.

But for the sake of clarity since you asked: I'm considering a time gate to be something that openly blocks progress based on time limits. Though I guess you could technically say that dailies are included since they award AP, they are designed to be a doable daily goal in itself that encourages daily play, not block your progress toward another goal. If you could do them more than once a day, they wouldn't be dailies; that's their fundamental identity.

Time gates are usually pretty straightforward about it: you can only craft this once a day, you must wait X amount of time to continue this collection (ex: skyscale), you can only farm this special node for this special piece for this collection once a day per character and sacrifice to the RNG gods to get more from other nodes (a PoF collection, I forget the name). The theme is that they are actively blocking your progress toward a goal, to force you to slow down and develop a daily habit of play, rather than rush through and leave. And my general point here is that such doesn't work the way games think it does and you can't just strongarm people's brains into working differently.

I wanted to keep it focused on that one point in the OP, but if I were to get deeper into it, games with long-term goals pretty much all have time gates if you want to get technical, in the sense that if the goal is long enough, it doesn't matter how much you speedrun or game the system, it's going to take you a while. The difference with time gates in the way I'm talking about them, which I believe is what people usually think of as time gates, is that they are consciously and openly designed to limit your progress and stop you from rushing through. They suggest a mindset that you shouldn't be allowed to choose your own pace because then you might go too fast and leave, so you should have to do it at a pace no faster than the game decides for you.

[Labjax.2465]

2 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I think that there is a misconception about marathoners and their interaction with sprinters. A marathoner is as likely to desire their reward now as is the sprinter, he is just more willing to deal with delays such as time gates patiently. If those time gates go away and he sees others getting the shiny sooner rather than later he is likely to adjust to the new paradigm and try to do the same, even if not to the same degree.  This effect is amplified by the knowledge that the lack of time gating means that others will gain the reward faster and move on to the next map, event farm, etc.  By waiting, in the absence of a time gate keeping a larger portion of the playerbase engaged with specific content for a longer period, the marathoner has increased the likelihood that he will never get the reward. 

 

I dont like time gates but I do understand that they exist not just to slow sprinter player X down but also to ensure that the content is active for as many people as possible for long enough for marathon player Y to have the opportunity to engage with it as well.

This seems to suggest to me a problem of giving people enough reason to continue doing certain content in general? Or am I misunderstanding what you're thinking of? Like if Dan The Weatherman Bay has a fancy new Weatherworn Umbrella skin that takes grinding Dan The Weatherman Bay currency to get, I take it your concern is without time gates, the sprint players will get the skin ASAP and the marathon players will rush more than they would normally because of fear of getting left behind with no one doing the content? If so, I don't think time gates fix that because it's still going to be a problem later on for new players coming in that most other players have moved on and it's evident that's in some part at least why Return To was made.

[Obtena.7952]

Time gates might not even be implemented to retain players in the first place. NOT having time gates doesn't help with player retention either so ... maybe the whole premise there is a relationship between player retention and time gates is completely flawed in the first place. 

I mean, if you don't like something, you just stop doing it. It wouldn't seem honest for someone to tell me anyone is playing this game JUST because they have that time gated thing they want to finish before they quit the game. If you are doing something you don't like doing just because you are restricted by time in finishing it .. that's even MORE of a reason to stop doing it. Time gates are implemented DESPITE player retention if anything. 

Edited April 14, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[Silent.6137]

11 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Sprint people tend to operate on bursts of high energy prolonged effort, followed by long periods of downtime. In MMO terms, these are the kind of people who take a month (if not less) to burn through content that took years to produce.

 

If you want to engage sprint people in the long-term, you have to first accept that many of them won't be engaged in the long-term and there's nothing you can do about it. And when they do, the only way you'll get them to return is if you ensure they have a (positive) memorable experience and/or strong social ties. Time gates might be a memorable experience of the unwanted kind, but they aren't going to get them to come back.

 

So... let go of the time gates.

Time gates or not, you will never retain Sprint people. They get bored easily and move on. They might return after a long hiatus, either for new contents or because they got bored with other games.

These are the kind of people that you'll see in lots of pay-to-win MMOs. Spend stupid amount of money to get the items so they can be the best. But very few of them will stay for long.

If they can buy their way to the top in this game, that's what they'd be doing, so they can move on.

[Labjax.2465]

6 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

The last thing a new player will try is a celestial gear.

Granted I am not new (I'm returning) but when I came back, I started fresh on a new character and I looked up builds for the class, for solo open world. I found a great build by WoodenPotatoes, celestial ele, and I've loved using it since I got it working with the right gear (which was hard, had to make a lot of use of wiki to find pieces I could choose stats on).

42 minutes ago, Silent.6137 said:

Time gates or not, you will never retain Sprint people. They get bored easily and move on. They might return after a long hiatus, either for new contents or because they got bored with other games.

These are the kind of people that you'll see in lots of pay-to-win MMOs. Spend stupid amount of money to get the items so they can be the best. But very few of them will stay for long.

If they can buy their way to the top in this game, that's what they'd be doing, so they can move on.

I'm doubtful those are sprint people primarily, as bypassing the goal with money means there isn't a goal to do anymore, which wouldn't be sprinting so much as avoiding goal-based gameplay entirely. If I had to speculate, I'd guess those people who "pay to win" are mostly just busy regardless of what way they more lean in accomplishing goals and that's why they go for the bypass, is to catch up or feel powerful despite not having the time to get there the regular way.

I do agree to a point though that retaining sprint people is mostly a wash and that's why I emphasized focusing on social ties and making sure a solid experience is had instead. In the 2nd case, that way when they think about your game again, they'll want to give it another go, not be put off. In the 1st case (social ties) they may stick around longer than they would otherwise for the people.

Edited April 14, 2022 by Labjax.2465

[Khisanth.2948]

42 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

That's a good question. I'm not sure. I don't know the full range of what ecto refinements are used for. I kind of threw it out as a question to see if anyone with more knowledge would be able to say why it would be a good or bad idea.

It would certainly shorten the process for people crafting ascended gear. I know ecto refinement is used to make some legendary weapons, but as far as I'm aware there are already far worse time gates involved with them, so it hardly seems getting rid of the ecto refinement timegate would impact them much.

Perhaps an even better question would be "Who would be hurt by that change?" I'm vaguely aware that there are avenues for crafting items from refined ecto mats that people resell to make money off them, but it's always looked like some work to determine what actually sells so I've never explored that. So removing the timegate would impact people who are making a little gold steadily supplying those.

Your question makes me think you have a good idea of the answer. So who would benefit the most from removing the ecto refinement timegate?

The major issue is that people talking about the removal of the time gate ignores the fact that you need to be acquiring enough materials at a equally high rate.

What would change for you if the time gating on the ecto refinement was removed today? For me I would go through refining all the mithril assuming I don't run out of ectos but then from tomorrow onwards it would be as if nothing has changed. I would still be missing all the iron and platinum necessary to actually finish this off and deldrimor steel ingot is probably the easiest one. Are you getting enough cloth and leather to craft multiple of those a day if there was no time gate?

A group that will definitely have enough materials are people who will see the change on patch day, buy all the materials they need to refine and craft the result for a nice profit. People who like playing the TP.

A second group might be people farm enough to craft multiples per day. If they are making use of the material themselves then it would be beneficial but if they are selling the final product then these people would probably get undercut by the previous group. So good for some and bad for others in the "farming" group.

A third and final group I can think of are people who only look at the crafting once in a while. It should be purely beneficial for this group but that might not be the case. The problem with an unrestricted supply is that it is possible to push prices down to the point where you would be better off selling the raw materials and using the profit to buy the final product instead. It is already that way for spiritwood with the right combination of buy and sell. At that point it could simply become a trap for the informed.

Of course this isn't a problem for all time gates. For example the weekly cap on raid/EoD currency.  Did the game ever have a problem of people raiding too much? What about dungeons? Certainly there was a time when it seems like everyone was farming CoFp1 but that was many years ago and that wasn't for the tokens anyway.

If the final product is untradeable and it can not be made into anything else tradeable then it is harder to find a reason for why the gating should continue to exist.

That brings us back to the original question. Who would benefit or who are you trying to help with the change? Without a clear goal it is hard to determine if a change is good or bad.

In the case of charged quartz there are ways to reduce/bypass the need for it for gearing purposes. Does that mean the gating for that should no longer exist? Maybe, not sure if that argument is entirely sound.

[Gerrick.7489]

One of the things time gating does for Anet is reduce player burnout. When there is a Most Effective Tactic Available for earning currency it encourages players to run it repeatedly. That's when a game turns from a fun experience into a grind.

[Labjax.2465]

10 hours ago, Aaricia.9758 said:

Well written, OP. I was able to easily follow your point and I do agree that decreasing the use of time gates would be better. My only question is this: could you give examples of the time gates you believe to be detrimental to the current gameplay? As you've seen, some responders are taking your meaning from one side of the spectrum to the ridiculous side.

Thanks, I'll reemphasize some examples of time gates that I mentioned in my response to Danikat:

Quote

Time gates are usually pretty straightforward about it: you can only craft this once a day, you must wait X amount of time to continue this collection (ex: skyscale), you can only farm this special node for this special piece for this collection once a day per character and sacrifice to the RNG gods to get more from other nodes (a PoF collection, I forget the name). The theme is that they are actively blocking your progress toward a goal, to force you to slow down and develop a daily habit of play, rather than rush through and leave. And my general point here is that such doesn't work the way games think it does and you can't just strongarm people's brains into working differently.

I'm kind of wary of getting too specific about "examples I believe are detrimental" though because in my experience with internet forums, if you focus too much on one issue as the example, people will decide that issue itself is the topic, rather than the principle behind it. And also in this case, the principle behind it is the topic at hand that I'm bringing up. I realize, however, there may be some disagreement in definition, since we are just players discussing this who aren't gonna be using standard industry design terminology. I don't know what to do about that.

I can say that part of what prompted me to think about this on a design principle level was reading a thread from a couple years ago about the skyscale collection before its time gates were nerfed and reflecting on the flaws and problems with it people brought up. For example, how restricting to reset, meant that if you wanted it sooner, you were punished for not accomplishing every step you could before reset. I think that's a fairly universal problem with time gates and the impact they have. Like it's not just that they stop you, they also make the fastest progress be a daily habit that maxes out what you can do in a day and for some people, that makes it unfairly harder because of how their schedules are, let alone getting into the differences in psychology I've brought up here.

I hope that makes sense.

8 hours ago, ugrakarma.9416 said:

No, thanks.

The disaster of ED meta is already showing its harm.

The devs should learn that they will always lose players when try fix the players instead of fix the game, most ideas on GW2 that ended in disaster(specially alienating casuals) walked that path.

The Xpac is infested with time gates? fix the game, make a better xpac, instead of rushed content.

When I talk about encouraging people to talk to each other, I don't mean having to organize for metas. I wanted to go more into that point, but the post was already long. I can tell you, sometimes in AB I ask how other lanes are before octo starts even if it doesn't seem needed, just because I don't want the first thing we say to each other in map to be complaints about not coordinating. In another game, in pug dungeons, I would always try to say hi at the beginning for the same reason. I'm not a big socializer myself unless I'm comfortable and I wouldn't want to be forced to get on discord for content or something, but I still think it's important to emphasize our humanity to each other in these environments.

What I think of when it comes to chatting is games like the original SWG. It was a whole system that was interdependent, so communicating in friendly ways came naturally. It wasn't that you needed to be coordinating an intense meta all the time, you could chat with an entertainer while healing up in a cantina. I don't expect GW2 to transplant something that systematized into their game, but that's the kind of thing I think of when I talk about encouraging talking.

Edited April 14, 2022 by Labjax.2465

[Luthan.5236]

While I also think they don't help ... on the other side they also won't hurt. Cause you can just still do the stuff a bit slowly and have other content to play.

The only problem would be if time-gated stuff was the only content and players logged only in to do a few things. Then logging out. But then they would even be finished faster.

I wonder what they are going to do about the "new player retention" t hough. Recend announcement on the website said they want to test some changes for new accounts ... about changes made in 2014 that might get reverted. I did not play in 2014 but I heard about gated (not time-gated though but with achievements/stuff you had to do) unlocks for the skills and stuff. (Where now you just use hero points to unlock.) That would be a prime example of bad gating ...

cause most new players want to progress pretty quickly. Especially with the mounts. (Getting skyscale fast. Maybe they also need to remove the strike requirement from the turtle before going live on steam.)

I think there are not too many annoying time gates that can't be bypassed. For he ectoplasm refinement (once per day) I think the next step is purchaseable at the TP. Some collection crafting - they are meant to be slowly.

So we only need to talk about the crafting for gear here. Ascended ... yeah seems annoying. But tere is a lot of other options for gear. Especialyl for the new players that to not have the money yet for ascended stuff. (And for the stuff where you play in exotics only ... it does not really mattter I guess. No big optimizing needed here.)

As long as they don't to stupid stuff as locking skills/traits beyong achievements (jumping puzzles) again ... to scare away new players - I do not see a problem.

They should focus on improving other stuff though. I agree that time-gating won't get players to play other stuff repeadtedly. (They will leave after having done the time-gated stuff.) It also won't scare them away too much though. (If they dislike it they can play other content! If they only wanted to get the time-gated thing and aren't interested in the other content - it wont't make a big difference!)

Edit: I think the only annoying time-gate that comes to my mind was in Draconis Mons - for the ascended back item you needed to also for the legendary trinket collection I think. For ceratin stuff it sometimes makse sense to wait - especially with the mounts. (The turtle grew pretty fast by just dumping all the food in a few seconds at th evendor lol. :D)

When grind + time-gate is combined it gets annoying. On Draconis Mons you could not just buy one of the items at each heart vendor every day ... you even had to complete the hearts every day. (Or being even slower and only buying 1 ... I think there was 1 at the vendor near the starting waypoing where no heart was required.) And you could not just plan "1 day of boredom" to take time to do all the boring stuff at that 1 day.

Just "collect a node once a day" is no big deal compared to this. I think the Thunderhead peaks has some achievements with the dwarfen catacombs ... but neede much less days and felt less grindy. (And only minor achievement I think.)

Edited April 15, 2022 by Luthan.5236