Legendaries.

[ArchonWing.9480]

3 minutes ago, SlayerXX.7138 said:

PvE Amulet is a little bit to cheap. PvP Amulet needs a lot of resources. So if you play PvP you probably better of doing the PvE Amulet, because you save so much Gold. On release Mystic coins where still 2g. So that alone was 500g saved. I did the PvE amulet too because it made economic sense. Still have my Vial of Salt lying around.

Not the end of the world and with prices coming down less serve then it was on release.

Yea but you also have to spend a lot of time doing the Living Story return; the biggest turn off for me is having to do the end of IBS.

I don't pvp either, but honestly I think time >>> gold in terms of the detour.

Edited July 1, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Batalix.2873]

19 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Yea but you also have to spend a lot of time doing the Living Story return; the biggest turn off for me is having to do the end of IBS.

I don't pvp either, but honestly I think time >>> gold in terms of the detour.

Mmmmmmmm.

The Living World Amulet really was not much of a time investment. I mean yes, it's not nothing, but when most of it is "do a few events", "do the meta", "do the gathering" and none of the particularly difficult achievements (and no requirement to redo story chapters), it was nowhere near as much of a grind as the Aurora/Vision collections which required full map mastery. And THOSE required substantial resource dumps for crafting on top of the grind.

In retrospect I think the amulet was kind of a cop-out, an easy throwaway carrot to give players who were really disappointed with the direction of the game post-IBS, and try to keep all the old content/maps populated (and generate casual interest in legendaries) while the devs scrambled to stabilize. Not saying I didn't get it, or that the PvP amulet is really all that desirable, but "hard to get" it is not.

[Gibson.4036]

7 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

Mmmmmmmm.

The Living World Amulet really was not much of a time investment. I mean yes, it's not nothing, but when most of it is "do a few events", "do the meta", "do the gathering" and none of the particularly difficult achievements (and no requirement to redo story chapters), it was nowhere near as much of a grind as the Aurora/Vision collections which required full map mastery. And THOSE required substantial resource dumps for crafting on top of the grind.

In retrospect I think the amulet was kind of a cop-out, an easy throwaway carrot to give players who were really disappointed with the direction of the game post-IBS, and try to keep all the old content/maps populated (and generate casual interest in legendaries) while the devs scrambled to stabilize. Not saying I didn't get it, or that the PvP amulet is really all that desirable, but "hard to get" it is not.

It also serves as a gateway leggie. I played at launch. Took a break, but have been back for years. Always thought of leggies as out of my casual reach. I did the Return for the Amulet, and then went on to do Aurora, Vision, Ascension, and two armor pieces so far.

It’s not bad to have some on-ramp leggies.

[Batalix.2873]

Just now, Gibson.4036 said:

It also serves as a gateway leggie. I played at launch. Took a break, but have been back for years. Always thought of leggies as out of my casual reach. I did the Return for the Amulet, and then went on to do Aurora, Vision, Ascension, and two armor pieces so far.

It’s not bad to have some on-ramp leggies.

It did the same for me. So I'm not exactly ragging on it even though it does smack of weird developer-player PR-politicking. But it's definitely the easiest leggy by far, and anyone saying the tradeoff is "time" isn't exactly correct either, because every other leggy takes even more time.

[SlayerXX.7138]

3 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Yea but you also have to spend a lot of time doing the Living Story return; the biggest turn off for me is having to do the end of IBS.

I don't pvp either, but honestly I think time >>> gold in terms of the detour.

Time is gold. Gold is time. Regalia is relative quick. On release the resource cost of the PvP Amulet was pretty high. Don't remember but probably 1500+ gold. Doing Regalia was probably the most profitable farm I ever did. On top of the saved gold, doing Regalia gives gold and other stuff too. 

[ArchonWing.9480]

20 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

it was nowhere near as much of a grind as the Aurora/Vision collections

Oh dear, I have a headache just from seeing this.

Vision was going pretty good for me until I realize you have to do the entire meta achievement for one of the chapters "A Star to Guide Us". I ran into a time gated thing and just stopped lol.

8 minutes ago, SlayerXX.7138 said:

Time is gold. Gold is time. Regalia is relative quick. On release the resource cost of the PvP Amulet was pretty high. Don't remember but probably 1500+ gold. Doing Regalia was probably the most profitable farm I ever did. On top of the saved gold, doing Regalia gives gold and other stuff too. 

Fair. Gold values have fluctuated since which is why I see it differently.

And yea since I will probably never pvp again, it seems like I should get back to it eventually.

Meanwhile I am very slowly working on getting another gift of exploration.

Edited July 1, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Tails.9372]

11 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

it was nowhere near as much of a grind as the Aurora/Vision collections which required full map mastery

Neither Aurora nor Vision are even close to the amulet in regards to how much PvE gameplay is actually required to obtain them. The bulk of the achievements are in the episode related master achevents which in 11 out of 12 cases can be skipped entirely by playing either one of the competitive game modes which is not possible for the amulet.

[Batalix.2873]

4 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Oh dear, I have a headache just from seeing this.

Vision was going pretty good for me until I realize you have to do the entire meta achievement for one of the chapters "A Star to Guide Us"

Fair. Gold values have fluctuated since which is why I see it differently.

And yea since I will probably never pvp again, it seems like I should get back to it eventually.

Meanwhile I am very slowly working on getting another gift of exploration.

I did the full PvP track for A Star to Guide Us and was so peeved. It ultimately wasn't that bad with a story replay and with some focus I did it in a few nights, but ugh those map complete cheevos are brutal.

4 minutes ago, Tails.9372 said:

Neither Aurora nor Vision are even close to the amulet in regards to how much PvE gameplay is actually required to obtain them. The bulk of the achievements are in the episode related master achevents which in 11 out of 12 cases can be skipped entirely by playing either one of the competitive game modes which is not possible for the amulet.

I did the PvP reward tracks, which require much less time investment than the WvW tracks if you only play a match a day. Still took me like a month or two for Aurora and two to three months for Vision. Yeah I probably could have done the actual map completes over a couple weeks, but that would still have taken more time than the few evenings it took to hammer out the Amulet. Amulet took me, as I recall, less than 10 days, probably only playing the game on five of them.

Yes, PvE is not *required* for Vision/Aurora, but no matter how you slice them the time investment is way higher.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Tails.9372]

15 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

Still took me like a month or two for Aurora and two to three months for Vision.

Your total time frame working on it ≠ the time you actually spend doing so / the amount of PvE content you have to play for it. You stretched your time frame by minimizing your engagement but that doesn't change that the amulet has a considerably higher amount of required PvE engagement overall.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Tails.9372

[Batalix.2873]

1 minute ago, Tails.9372 said:

Your total time frame working on it ≠ the time you actually spend doing so / the amount of PvE content you have to play for it. You stretched your time frame by minimizing your engagement but that doesn't change that the the amulet has a considerably higher amount of required PvE engagement overall.

Yes but again not all engagement is equal. You can easily knock out several maps (or most of them) in a night, because the actual achievements are less demanding than for full map mastery.

Plus I would absolutely argue the case that heavily incentivizing the player to repeat story, or to grind for crafting (which encourage repeated gathering/hearts), or to engage specific events (some in meta chains that are more easily missed than merely being at the end of the meta), or to complete hub quests, or to search the wiki for secret achievements, is overall going to take much more effort than:

* Do the meta.

* Do three hearts.

* Do a few bounties 

* Do a few gathers.

* Do a few events (any)

So your idea of "engagement", to me, seems mostly defined at the surface level of looking at a to-do list, and not at what the objectives actually are.

[Tails.9372]

3 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

You can easily knock out several maps (or most of them) in a night, because the actual achievements are less demanding than for full map mastery.

Except your "full map mastery" is skippable in almost all cases (that means it's not a requirement). Take it away and the map related achievements for Aurora / Vision become: "do the hearts", "do the meta", do a JP"... stuff like that. Sound familiar? The main difference here is that without the master achievements e.g. Aurora doesn't even have 100 of these more simple ones while the amulet has about 250.

[Batalix.2873]

8 minutes ago, Tails.9372 said:

Except your "full map mastery" is skippable in almost all cases (that means it's not a requirement). Take it away and the map related achievements for Aurora / Vision become: "do the hearts", "do the meta", do a JP"... stuff like that. Sound familiar? The main difference here is that without the master achievements e.g. Aurora doesn't even have 100 of these more simple ones while the amulet has about 250.

It's not skippable, though.

For one, you are twisting my very simple argument from "time to grind" into some semantic nonsense about "engagement".

And for two, either way, the amount of time needed to grind map meta achievements OR PvP/WvW is still substantially longer than the time needed to knock out the Amulet. Period.

Add the crafting grind/cost for both (which, btw, includes, at minimum, another full WvW track that can't be obtained any other way; AND grinds for ingots and incense which can only be obtained through map "engagement"), and the disparity is only greater.

Amulet is not much of an achievement. It was a token thrown at the players for other reasons, but it fundamentally is not designed to be difficult or even especially time consuming compared to the game's real grinds.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

Hum, then can we talk about open world, where meta are mostly abandoned when they are not rewarding enough, should we conclude that ow is not a self sustaining content ?

So, you're going to talk about content that the vast majority of players of this game prefer? Yes, sure, why don't we talk about that.

[Batalix.2873]

12 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

So, you're going to talk about content that the vast majority of players of this game prefer? Yes, sure, why don't we talk about that.

One thing I will say, preferred or not, OW is bolstered as evergreen content by incomparable gear and feature grinds. PvE Legendary armor and trinkets encourages raiding and HoT/LWS3 map participation (and I guess LWS4 somewhat). Skyscale encourages PoF/LWS4 participation. The rune system encourages players play dungeons.

Obviously these aren't the only reasons players frequent those maps and Gen 2/3 Legendary weapons will still be a reason to visit those parts of the game. But overall, introducing more and more of these "comparables" is going to be a pretty large hit to older parts of the game if the devs don't introduce new reasons for players to visit.

[Astralporing.1957]

34 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

One thing I will say, preferred or not, OW is bolstered as evergreen content by incomparable gear and feature grinds. PvE Legendary armor and trinkets encourages raiding and HoT/LWS3 map participation (and I guess LWS4 somewhat). Skyscale encourages PoF/LWS4 participation. The rune system encourages players play dungeons.

Obviously these aren't the only reasons players frequent those maps and Gen 2/3 Legendary weapons will still be a reason to visit those parts of the game. But overall, introducing more and more of these "comparables" is going to be a pretty large hit to older parts of the game if the devs don't introduce new reasons for players to visit.

You are confusing two completely different ideas. First is making a content rewarding to play, second is using rewards as justification for content. First is used for content players like, to keep those players happy. Second is used to push players into a content they would not play otherwise. One is good, the other is not. Guess which one we were talking about here.

[Ashen.2907]

10 hours ago, Nightcore.5621 said:

The time ? Each raid boss take around 5 min to kill or less .. 

To be fair, I have spent hours waiting to start so that we could beat tbe boss in five minutes. In my experience much of the time spent on raids is in the organization stage.

[Batalix.2873]

38 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

You are confusing two completely different ideas. First is making a content rewarding to play, second is using rewards as justification for content. First is used for content players like, to keep those players happy. Second is used to push players into a content they would not play otherwise. One is good, the other is not. Guess which one we were talking about here.

The first exists in a lot of old content, but a large amount of the playerbase won't see it or abandon it if the second isn't also maintained.

False dichotomy there, at least when relating back to the secondary effect of maintaining player participation in OW group content. Which is a kind of feedback loop that affects game quality regardless of which of the two we care about.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Tails.9372]

3 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

It's not skippable, though.

Then how about you elaborate on how these achievements are "not skippable" when all you need from the master achievements are the same items which you can get from the reward tracks.

3 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

For one, you are twisting my very simple argument from "time to grind" into some semantic nonsense about "engagement".

I'm not twisting anything here, if you're not engaging with the content then by definition you're not grinding it either.

3 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

And for two, either way, the amount of time needed to grind map meta achievements OR PvP/WvW is still substantially longer than the time needed to knock out the Amulet.

That depends on the player and what exactly the master achievement entails and even then only for PvE players. sPvP and WvW players can just throw some reward track potions against the track in question and reduce the time investment for those instantly to "0".

3 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

Add the crafting grind/cost for both (which, btw, includes, at minimum, another full WvW track that can't be obtained any other way; AND grinds for ingots and incense which can only be obtained through map "engagement"), and the disparity is only greater.

The gold costs are higher but that's also beside the point as nothing here forces you to grind the related content. Even the Ingots and Incenses can be obtained without actually having to grind it.

3 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

Amulet is not much of an achievement. It was a token thrown at the players for other reasons, but it fundamentally is not designed to be difficult or even especially time consuming compared to the game's real grinds.

None of them are difficult and the arguably most difficult parts (the LWS3 JPs) are also required for the amulet (which is something Vision is completely exempt from).

Edited July 1, 2023 by Tails.9372

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Batalix.2873 said:

The first exists in a lot of old content, but a large amount of the playerbase won't see it or abandon it if the second isn't also maintained.

False dichotomy there, at least when relating back to the secondary effect of maintaining player participation in OW group content. Which is a kind of feedback loop that affects game quality regardless of which of the two we care about.

Contrary to what you try to imply, players of OW content are not drawn from other content players in order to populate that content. It's Raids that tried to "pay" OW players to get interested in that content, never the other way around. OW never needed a cruth like that to prop up its validity. The amount of players that do OW content that is clearly undervalued (like old world bosses, core maps dynamic events etc) is still way greater than players that do any other types of content. Now, it's true that OW players often follow the rewards - but they still do that within the borders of the content they already like. If you made OW content unrewarding to the point OW players would no longer be interested in playing it, they would not move to other, more rewarding parts of the game. They would quit the game completely.

So, please, do not be disingenious and pretend those two cases are similar, because they are not.

[Ashantara.8731]

On 7/1/2023 at 12:11 AM, ArchonWing.9480 said:

I wonder what will happen if the open world content is challenging. What would be the cope there?

*is having flashback of the Dragon's End meta cryfest*

[Batalix.2873]

1 minute ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Contrary to what you try to imply, players of OW content are not drawn from other content players in order to populate that content. It's Raids that tried to "pay" OW players to get interested in that content, never the other way around. OW never needed a cruth like that to prop up its validity. The amount of players that do OW content that is clearly undervalued (like old world bosses, core maps dynamic events etc) is still way greater than players that do any other types of content. Now, it's true that OW players often follow the rewards - but they still do that within the borders of the content they already like. If you made OW content unrewarding to the point OW players would no longer be interested in playing it, they would not move to other, more rewarding parts of the game. They would quit the game completely.

So, please, do not be disingenious and pretend those two cases are similar, because they are not.

You are painting with very broad strokes. Just because players prefer OW as a mode does not mean that they play all of it equally. Many OW features would and do go totally missed by players because they have very little direction and unsure exactly *where* the content is or why to do any of it. So fundamentally you will see more players in core (free players) and the most recent expansion (new paying players), closest to where they start and where the population is most concentrated because that is what they *know* exists and what immediately grabs their attention.

This is not and will never be uniform for all open world maps, and the point of baking incentives into things like non-fungible legendary mats is to encourage players to find these many locations and discover reasons to visit or even repeatedly engage with those maps. So providing alternatives naturally pokes holes in the funnels that are keeping older maps alive.

You are overgeneralizing and I'm not responding to this train of conversation either. Really on a roll here.

[Astralporing.1957]

9 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

You are painting with very broad strokes. Just because players prefer OW as a mode does not mean that they play all of it equally. Many OW features would and do go totally missed by players because they have very little direction and unsure exactly *where* the content is or why to do any of it. So fundamentally you will see more players in core (free players) and the most recent expansion (new paying players), closest to where they start and where the population is most concentrated because that is what they *know* exists and what immediately grabs their attention.

This is not and will never be uniform for all open world maps, and the point of baking incentives into things like non-fungible legendary mats is to encourage players to find these many locations and discover reasons to visit or even repeatedly engage with those maps. So providing alternatives naturally pokes holes in the funnels that are keeping older maps alive.

So? I don't see your point. Sure, there are things, including rewards, that move OW players around from place to place. This is still, as i pointed out, moving them within the borders of the same content they like. It is not a case of using rewards to move players into a content they dislike that we were talking about originally. Those two things are completely distinct, and (like i have already told you) should never be confused. One is fine, the other is not. Raids were clearly the second case, not the first. And the fact that some people were (and still are) so terrified of consequence of allowing PvE players to earn legendary armor in non-raid pve just underscores it.

9 minutes ago, Batalix.2873 said:

You are overgeneralizing and I'm not responding to this train of conversation either. Really on a roll here.

The one that tries to overgeneralize and muddle the specifics we were talking about is, again, you, not me.

[Peter.3901]

IMO we should have a full trinket set of legendaries in open world.

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

16 hours ago, Peter.3901 said:

IMO we should have a full trinket set of legendaries in open world.

Then WvW and PvP should also have full sets of legendary trinkets.  

[Omega.6801]

We  NEED a full set of legendary armor, weapons and trinkets from fishing and/or idling in major cities. Play how you want they said. They did mounts. Anything is possible.
/s