In 1 1/2 years after an expac release, you only added a single map with 2 metas?

[Ashantara.8731]

Just a quick side note:

8 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Finishing off the DX 11 [...]

You call that "finished"? 🤔 Many vital effects in endgame content still don't render at times, and I still only see pitchblack boulders in the Sunqua Peak fractal. Let alone the flickering light and shadows here and there.

[Vayne.8563]

3 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

Disagree on revamping old content being the same as new content.  A new strike is new content, but it's still just a standalone boss. 

Also disagree that this is a bad analogy, but analogies aside, my opinion is what it is. This game has a slow release cadence for new content.  I don't consider it a positive that I get nothing but don't have to pay for it.  If it meant a regular release cadence, I'd pay a sub for that without thinking twice.

I don't disagree that the cadence for new stuff is slow. I'm simply saying it would be faster if they weren't doing other stuff that's just as important that people have asked for. I prefer getting some of that future proofing stuff out of the way. We'll see how slow it feels when the new stuff kicks in. Right now, we're between schemes. Weird time to even judge it.

[Vayne.8563]

Just now, Ashantara.8731 said:

Just a quick side note:

You call that "finished"? 🤔 Many vital effects in endgame content still don't render at times, and I still only see pitchblack boulders in the Sunqua Peak fractal. Let alone the flickering light and shadows here and there.

Of course it's not finished. The driver for nvidia isn't finished either and I paid for that card five years ago.  Some stuff never finishes. But having a vision bug on a system upgrade doesn't mean we didn't get it, and it's out of beta. And I don't know why you're getting those bugs, but I get relatively few bugs. There are some, but then, I'm not sure every graphic bug I've ever seen is related to DX 11 either.

There are other reasons graphic bugs exist. When I changed from an nvidia card to an ATI card, by graphic bugs went down and my frame rate went up considerably.

[Obtena.7952]

 Once people have to start paying a market-level price for all content, frequency will not be their concern. Some people just don't realize how cheaply Anet priced  content in the past. 

Edited July 15, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[AliamRationem.5172]

3 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

I don't disagree that the cadence for new stuff is slow. I'm simply saying it would be faster if they weren't doing other stuff that's just as important that people have asked for. I prefer getting some of that future proofing stuff out of the way. We'll see how slow it feels when the new stuff kicks in. Right now, we're between schemes. Weird time to even judge it.

To be fair, they're always "between schemes".  Consistency is not in this studio's vocabulary.  So, no, it isn't a weird time to judge anything.  The cadence is slow.  It's been slow.  And you're on the good copium if you think this latest course change (from "We're working on the next expansion!" to "Introducing: mini-expansions!") is going to result in more content delivered in less time.

Is it unexpected from an aging MMO?  Not really.  But as a player long invested in this game who has seen it in its prime, I'm always going to be disappointed when they deliver less.  I wish they had the resources to deliver more, but that isn't where we are.  It doesn't matter why.  It is what it is.

[Gravitron.7982]

23 hours ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

How is it possible that a year and a half of content updates added only a single map with 2 metas that you can only do once per day?

Why can't I spam it, either? Why is the game still "go farm drizzlewood" 4 years later?

No, LS1 is not content. It was a 1 year content drought(again), and I have absolutely no idea why you'd harm the game with LS1's content drought not once, but twice. No one even does the LS1 ""metas"" as they have essentially no reward.

What did you even do the entire time? Other games release entire raids, zones, new gear sets, new entire systems, etc MULTIPLE times in this time frame(3 times, in fact). Yet you give..a single map? My head is exploding in confusion.

Can we expect beter from SotO? I sure hope so.

 

I agree with you there, kind of disappointing, and we can always expect better. At this point (the year 2023) I don't have high hopes that Anet will meet yours and my expectation. But I'm sure some people will say it's the greatest thing in the world lol.

[Dante.1508]

9 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

Almost everyone in my two guilds quit (including myself). I didnt come back until season 2. I wanted to see if ANet still considered lighting torches to be content.

I also quit mid LS1 i never did see that forced end raid to progress the story. I always wondered how they beat Scarlet when it was removed.. I also returned in LS2 and hated it more 😲

[Ashen.2907]

8 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

Well, if you're talking about the very first installment, that's fair, but you know., it was one chapter.  If you don't think the two dungeons were popular, or the marionette or the nightmare tower,. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Oh and esccape from Lion's Arch was very popular. The Scarlet invasions were popular.  Not sure why you think they weren't, but okay.

I didn't say anything about the dungeons, Marionette, or the Nightmare Tower, and didnt comment about popularity at all for that matter, so you will have to agree to disagree with someone else.

The Invasions were the final straw for my guilds. After having lighting torches presented as content the Invasions demonstrated (to me and others in my guilds at the time) that ANet didn't have a clear vision of what constituted quality engaging content at that time. I am glad that it got better after those two portions but when the appetizer/first course of a meal are putrid I don't hang around for dessert.

[Vayne.8563]

4 hours ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

To be fair, they're always "between schemes".  Consistency is not in this studio's vocabulary.  So, no, it isn't a weird time to judge anything.  The cadence is slow.  It's been slow.  And you're on the good copium if you think this latest course change (from "We're working on the next expansion!" to "Introducing: mini-expansions!") is going to result in more content delivered in less time.

Is it unexpected from an aging MMO?  Not really.  But as a player long invested in this game who has seen it in its prime, I'm always going to be disappointed when they deliver less.  I wish they had the resources to deliver more, but that isn't where we are.  It doesn't matter why.  It is what it is.

They're not always in between schemes. They had Season one for 1.5 years. Then they did Season 2 for close to 2 years. THey haven't had a solid plan since EoD and now they do. They pretty  much had to get rid of the living world though as it was  too confusing.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

I think taking a starting point of completely ignoring the work they did re-releasing LWS1 is very unreasonable. You might not be interested in the content but others are as some in this thread have said. And it’s an important improvement for new players which is where a lot of the money to pay for new content presumably comes from.

As a newish player myself I only recently hit LWS1 and I have been really enjoying it. I am very glad they released it again and I’m finding it better than the core story. So for me it was great content for them to spend time on.

[Gehenna.3625]

22 hours ago, jason.1083 said:

Progress is slow indeed, although there's a lot more to the game than Drizziewood Coast. I know this still means the devs are leaning onto old content to stall new releases, I hope that means SotO will actually be decent at least. 

What disappointed me most about Gayla Delve wasn't the amount of content rather than quality and replayability of it. It took me 3-4 times of doing the meta before I got to the point where I just started leeching it, as an Auric Basin regular I'm the same way there, but it took me a few hundred times of doing the meta before I got sick of it. To me that's the problem, that they couldn't design a meta engaging and interesting enough to keep players busy as they worked on SotO. 

As I already said though, I hope SotO will be a strong comeback. 

I think they changed the definition of engaging to annoying down the line somewhere.

[Dante.1508]

18 minutes ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I think taking a starting point of completely ignoring the work they did re-releasing LWS1 is very unreasonable. You might not be interested in the content but others are as some in this thread have said. And it’s an important improvement for new players which is where a lot of the money to pay for new content presumably comes from.

As a newish player myself I only recently hit LWS1 and I have been really enjoying it. I am very glad they released it again and I’m finding it better than the core story. So for me it was great content for them to spend time on.

Its different now to what it was when Living Story 1 released, its been remade.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

the main reason no one does the lws1 metas is because they're instance-based. after they switched to instanced metas in icebrood saga, pretty much the only one anyone ever does on a regular basis is dragonstorm and players just ignore the rest.

 

i'm pretty sure dragon's stand gets done more often than every single drm, marionette, tower and lion's arch combined.

 

at some point arenanet forgot that the point of open-world and megaserver was to keep content from being dead. its a bit different from low-man content like fractals, raids and strikes where they're easy to fill, but you can't be expected to fill an instance with 50-80 players regularly throughout the day, especially when those same instances were originally open-world (twisted marionette, battle for lion's arch..) and spiked in difficulty as a result.

 

if tower of nightmares was open-world in kessex hills for example, you'd see it active 24/7. i just can't understand what they were thinking when they made these decisions, starting with icebrood saga, and seeing them fail and then keep doing them more.

 

the rewards descrepancy also amases me, like how dragonstorm has platinum-tier rewards and battle for lion's arch is bronze-tier.

Edited July 16, 2023 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Zok.4956]

On 7/15/2023 at 1:02 PM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Even though supposedly Anet should have similar amount of devs (if not more) as then. WHich means that, again, most of their effort and resources is likely placed in non-GW2 projects.

I agree. While we don't know the exact number of developers working on non-GW2 projects, based on the content produced (quality + quantity), it certainly seems that way.

[Zok.4956]

16 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Once people have to start paying a market-level price for all content, frequency will not be their concern. Some people just don't realize how cheaply Anet priced  content in the past.

The market price for F2P-content is "free" (the costs are payed from the in-game shop).   GW2 has for content until now a mixed monetization scheme with B2P (for expansions and living world if you are not present during release cycles) and also a F2P-like gem shop microtransactions (one of the better ones).

How much money Anet puts into GW2 development/content or gives its shareholders or puts in other projects is purely Anets decision. There is therefore no direct, automatic correlation between a higher price and more GW2 content.

[Astralporing.1957]

18 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

 Once people have to start paying a market-level price for all content, frequency will not be their concern.

Assuming that money will get back into GW2. Considering that Anet seems to be funding quite a big project (or several projects) with their GW2 earnings now, it's as likely that you will end up paying more, but still get worse and worse results when more and more funds will get funneled away from GW2.

[Obtena.7952]

56 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

The market price for F2P-content is "free" (the costs are payed from the in-game shop).   GW2 has for content until now a mixed monetization scheme with B2P (for expansions and living world if you are not present during release cycles) and also a F2P-like gem shop microtransactions (one of the better ones).

How much money Anet puts into GW2 development/content or gives its shareholders or puts in other projects is purely Anets decision. There is therefore no direct, automatic correlation between a higher price and more GW2 content.

Sure ... but I'm not talking about F2P content, nor is anyone else and I never claimed there was any such correlation either.

I do think it's necessary to remind many people here that these new expansions are a change in Anet's business model and the price and release schedule will unlikely be inline with any expectations people have that are based on what we had in the past. 

Edited July 16, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Kozumi.5816]

7 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I think taking a starting point of completely ignoring the work they did re-releasing LWS1 is very unreasonable. You might not be interested in the content but others are as some in this thread have said. And it’s an important improvement for new players which is where a lot of the money to pay for new content presumably comes from.

LS1 was a massive waste of resources and put the game into a 1 year content drought twice. It's a baffling decision to re-release it.

New players can't even do it because no is doing the metas. It's a failure, that they allowed to happen twice. This is why we learn history in school - to learn from our mistakes.

[Zok.4956]

10 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Sure ... but I'm not talking about F2P content

Well, you did write "paying a market-level price for all content" and this not only includes content monetized with B2P but also content monetized like F2P with gemshop/microtransactions. And because of this mixed monetization in GW2 the wording "paying a market-level price for all content" as an argument doesn't really make sense.

 

10 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

do think it's necessary to remind many people here that these new expansions are a change in Anet's business model

Yes, they are a change in how Anet wants to deliver and monetize content for GW2. But they are not the first such changes. Anet changed it several times in the past because it didn't work well. There is therefore no guarantee that it will work better than before with the new changes.

Anet did dump IBS (Season 5) to work on EoD and the expected and communicated "Cantha-Season" (Season 6) after EoD was dumped (only one episode content that was split into two releases) for the new (mini)-Expansion.

 

10 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

and the price and release schedule will unlikely be inline with any expectations people have that are based on what we had in the past. 

What is your point? Expectations are always based on how a company has behaved in the past, what it said and what it then delivered. And whether you then expect more or less is a personal matter of judgment.

 

[Obtena.7952]

55 minutes ago, Zok.4956 said:

What is your point? Expectations are always based on how a company has behaved in the past, what it said and what it then delivered. And whether you then expect more or less is a personal matter of judgment.

I think my point was pretty obvious. We have gotten lots of content at a low cost. The ratio of price-to-content is going to change compared to what we saw in the past.  The question the OP brings up isn't the concern. The real question is how much people will pay to get the content Anet delivers, regardless of the schedule. In fact, it's even WORSE if Anet releases a mini-expansion frequently. I'm sure people who complain about the frequency of things like LS will be MORE than eager to complain that all the sudden, they are paying hundreds of dollars a year to keep up with frequently released expansions. Entitlement is a hell of a platform for people to complain. 

I mean, if your confused, just stay tuned ... 

Edited July 17, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Linken.6345]

24 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

I think my point was pretty obvious. We have gotten lots of content at a low cost. The ratio of price-to-content is going to change compared to what we saw in the past.  The question the OP brings up isn't the concern. The real question is how much people will pay to get the content Anet delivers, regardless of the schedule. In fact, it's even WORSE if Anet releases a mini-expansion frequently. I'm sure people who complain about the frequency of things like LS will be MORE than eager to complain that all the sudden, they are paying hundreds of dollars a year to keep up with frequently released expansions. Entitlement is a hell of a platform for people to complain. 

I mean, if your confused, just stay tuned ... 

If its yearly releases and its 75 for ultimate how can it become 100 let alone multiple hundreds of dollars a year for the new mini expansion cycle?

[Obtena.7952]

15 hours ago, Linken.6345 said:

If its yearly releases and its 75 for ultimate how can it become 100 let alone multiple hundreds of dollars a year for the new mini expansion cycle?

It can't ... but that's not my point. 

I'm not here to speculate the number and cost of expansion releases. My point is that there is an underlying premise of entitlement related to game content in these threads. OP doesn't think Anet added enough content since EoD. Just imagine if they had to actually pay fair market value for the content we DID get since EoD.  Just wait until he has to PAY for the content they do add.

Edited July 17, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[HonesltlyX.7164]

Cuz they spend a lot of time during that year catching up and patching the game that was neglected of it for many more years due to their old model of just chugging out new content. Chill TF out a new xpac is coming next month.

[Ultramex.1506]

They moved to the new model so EoD maps + Gyala Delve are what we will get for SOTO and upcoming expansions.

[Luthan.5236]

The expansion should give a lot of new content (if people wanted to try out the different elite specs) for some time. Also we had the usual stuff in between: The festivals.
Recently a new fractal. And some nice convenience upgrades. (Changes for the lfg tool and other stuff. Nice that we now can queue into other PvE map instances.)

So ... this is enough. I mean: You don't play the game just for new content. (Then you'd be finished quickly lol. And I wonder what people will do when the game is "finished" and not getting more content - at some point in the future.)

Most that complain do - I bet - not have all achievements completed yet.

Most important though (I guess): The season 1 returned. For a lot of newer players this might have been the first time they were allowed to enjoy it. Yes - not a lot of new stuff here (since they just had to rework the old things) ... but they probably had already people working on the expansion and less people dedidacted to work on other (smaller) content updates.