Feedback on Various Changes/Updates

[Caelin.9167]

I don't post often, so this will be long. Mods, please pass this along to relevant developers/managers. Thanks.

There are two (semi-) competing theories in game design.
1. Keeping eyeballs on the screen always eventually leads to income. The idea being that it doesn't matter how you keep a person playing, just so long as they're playing. If they play, eventually most will fork over some cash. There are games that ascribe to this theory that deliberately tap into compulsive behavior and addiction-oriented brain chemistry (reward response). MMOs tend not to focus quite so heavily on this sort of thing as say a slot machine, but elements certainly still apply.  

2. Quality of play matters more. The former seems to have a good short-term financial value, but people tire of repetitiveness, grow weary of spending money, and of course, there's the diminished reward response that sucked them in in the first place. This begs the question for major franchises: how to keep people ingame permanently? Usually, developers turn to the above theory, but the correct answer - obviously beyond keeping things fresh with new content - is to not annoy your players with repetitive nonsense.  

When I first came to GW2 I thought, "Here's a game created by developers after my own heart!" All currencies are account bound, for example, so players don't have to waste time moving currency between toons by some tedious method. Same story with crafting materials. No endlessly shifting of mats around. Some games consider making players spend hours fussing with this a good thing. It keeps them in front of the screen after all. But even the most fastidious of organization-obsessed players will tell you that that that sort of thing gets old really fast. Even people who usually thrive on that dopamine end up hating it. That is why theory 1 is just plain stupid. Sure it works for awhile, but not for long. Players who grow too annoyed leave, and many will never return. If they do, they often may play new content for a bit but will soon say to themselves, "Oh yeah, now I remember why I left."

The better option is not to simply make addictive content, but to make fun content. It's all about quality. WoW, for example, does this well, but unfortunately they pair it with a lot of grind, and a ridiculous amount of travel time (at least historically). Travel time is not fun content. The original GW2 crew knew this so they put waypoints everywhere. Fractals are super quick dungeons with little downtime between bosses. Smart.  

Another WoW problem (at least as I recall) was that they added a lot of buffs that you can acquire, but if you were going to go raid you had to prep several yourself, and go do various events around the world in order to have them. You could literally spend an hour just buffing up (repetitive boring content) BEFORE you ever got to the fun content you were after. Dumb.  

I point all this out because it seems like Anet has hired a bunch of Blizzard coders. Things are getting way more like game style #1 and a lot less like game style #2. Some examples:  

A) I have to park my toons in Arborstone to get the rested XP buff.  I can no longer park them where they are most helpful like sitting on chests or at a flax farm, or convenient like at the raid portals, if I want the buff - which of course I do.  Now I have to teleport around adding load times (and server load) to everything I do. Additionally, why would any player buy access to Lily of the Elon or any of the others if they have to park their toons in Arborstone? 

B) If I want the Seitung Province training heart XP buff - which of course I do - I have to teleport to Seitung, spend 10 minutes buffing up, then go wherever I'm headed.  

C) If I want the EoD Offensive/Defensive Jade Bot buffs - which of course I do - I have to hop out of Arborstone into Echovald, take ziplines and grab batteries, go back into Arborstone, return, repeat. 10 minutes. To make matters worse, the first buff takes annoyingly longer than the additional. And even more infuriating is that while the max is 2hr 15min, if I end up with 2hr 4min, I can't simply top it off and cap out at 2:15. Oh no. It stays at 2:04. Of course, somebody thought it would be a good idea to consume the charge anyway - which means they were either horribly lazy, or they were outright intentionally making things annoying for the players (if so fire them, they are costing you players). In the end the player is forced to decide if they want to leave right away or wait around for 4 minutes so they don't have to interrupt play so soon to come back and rebuff. Which of course, people also have to do, or choose to go without. The feeling is something like this, "Oh my buffs are gone. Ugh." That's what this buff system in lieu of direct power creep has imparted on your players - every 2 hours or so. 

None of these are at all enjoyable for players. The last two are particularly burdensome. I'm sure some are saying that those are all entirely optional. Well, I would agree, but C isn't anymore. More on that in a bit.

Part of the problem is that game developers are essentially playing 2 roles. First, they're the Game Masters a la D&D. They're the people pitting monsters against the rest of the players. Second, they're the people who are writing the rules of D&D altogether. These are definitely not the same roles. GM's have to abide by the rules of the D&D world as designed by the authors just like the party members have to. They are not allowed to bend the rules whenever it suits them. They can't for example change the laws of physics. In video game development, however, the devs can do that anytime they wish. 

[Caelin.9167]

The difference in terms of quality of life often looks something like a really challenging boss fight versus a really challenging to use mount. To return to the WoW example: slow mounts or obscure locations that take forever to get to. Travel time is not challenging enjoyable content, it's just difficult to manage. Developers often use their ability to dictate the world the player has to travel through as a replacement for creating actually challenging content to play. It's the difference between fun gameplay and simply tedium that keeps people in front of a screen longer. 

The Offensive/Defensive bot charge thing is an example of completely unnecessary tedium. Gyala Delve's long upward turtle march is another. There is no challenge. It's just slow and tiresome. It took me 3, maybe 4, times to be completely sick of it and wishing I didn't have to do more to complete the achieves. My strenuous advice to you: stop following development style #1 and refocus on #2 like the original GW2 crew did. Change the cultural mentality of the developers to make challenging/fun gameplay the priority, not challenging/difficult world physics.  

Perhaps not surprising to readers at this point: I haven't played much this past year. I came back to get the new content going. My legendary runes are a lot less useful I notice. And despite having waited a while already the legendary relic isn't available yet. (How long is that annoyance going to be imposed on us?) What's more, the relics are kind of awful for PvE. Just looking at power there are only 2 options really. The good condi one frankly is only good if you apply a lot of bleeds or are in group play, and requires you to buy it.

(Again, when's the legendary relic coming so I don't have to squander currencies? No matter, I'll just disappear for a few more months until it's out. That's not a passive-aggressive joke. I'm serious. I'm going to get the masteries and most achieves and then I'm out. I'm not bothering to fix all those 27 toons' builds without a legendary. We're talking many builds on each of 9x OW/Raids, 9x Fractals, 9x WvW. Not happening.) 

And the really painful kicker - the reason I decided to write this post - is that these crappy relics killed a whole lot of my builds. I have builds for various purposes. In a raid I don't need to provide myself with most boons unless I'm playing a boon giver class. But in OW - which is what I'm doing with the new content right now - I make sure my toons can provide themselves with at least Fury and some Might. So... what happened to Pack Runes' special? What happened to Fireworks'? It seems solo players (including anyone doing map completes for Gifts of Exploration) were forgotten about and got the shaft with the relics. Seriously, I was looking at my Reaper and the build is basically unchanged except now I'm on Dhunter runes with a relic that doesn't give me Fury anymore.

I have no personal source of Fury? Except to take the Fear trait? Who wants that? I don't want mobs I'm about to kill to run away from me. I want them grouped. I can't have 100% crit uptime? At least, not without a group? This is insane. The only choice here is to always go back to Arborstone/Echovald every 2 hours and spend 10 minutes rebuffing the Offensive boons so I have some sort of source of Fury. You see? It's no longer optional. In the old days I'd simply let the buff run out and not worry about it. Half the time I wouldn't bother getting it at all. Now on my necro I have no choice. I haven't looked to update all my toons yet but I imagine the necro won't be the only one that gets screwed here. With these relic options the power creep is now fixed into the game.  

And as long as that's the case, y'all might as well just have those things sitting by any waypoint in all EoD+ maps (and frankly, by at least one WP on all OW maps). And keeping with style #2 you should make it take a single charge to get 2:15 because the tedium of buffing that stuff up is so blatantly bad for gameplay QoL. Especially considering if you enter any instance it gets stripped away. (Did y'all make it persist after the instance yet? You should do that with all buffs that get stripped anywhere. WvW'ers get screwed on that quite a bit.) 

Another example of more tedium are the daily system changes. It is noticeably more difficult to do dailies. To the point that I look through the list and sometimes just Nope. That mini dungeon in Echovald? Nope. What happened to the one in Queensdale? Now that was nice and quick. Y'all made them harder and more time consuming. How about that WvW defend one? I spent 15 minutes defending SMC the other day - fighting the whole time - before I finally got credit. I know you didn't want to reward the AFK'ers anymore, but it's ridiculous how hard it is to get defense credit for daily/weekly achieves. I can't even figure out what exactly the requirements are other than a kill seems to be one of them. I don't play the game to do dailies. Nobody does. They are a semi-necessary evil in order to make money.

Here's what I'm getting at: 10 mins for home instance, 5 mins guild hall nodes, 5 mins in Drytop for quartz, 5 mins for Matriarch, maybe another 10 mins on the really quick S03 and S04 dailies worth doing. The old dailies could usually be folded into all that fairly easily. Now it's more like 15 mins WvW and 10 minutes OW dailies. I can easily spend an hour and not have done anything fun yet. And festival dailies are fairly constant as well. Now there's a mandatory (for some toons) 10 mins to get jade bot buffs. It used to be something like a half hour on basic money/daily stuff which was manageable. Now it's closer to an hour which is not. I don't bother much anymore. This all is going in the wrong direction. 

Clearly there are some specific suggestions above. But the real point I want to make is one of mentality. I feel like GW2 has taken the road most travelled recently when they used to be on a better path. The drive should be towards removing obstacles to the gameplay people want, not inventing new ones.

Thanks for your time.

Edited October 28, 2023 by Caelin.9167

[costepj.5120]

35 minutes ago, Caelin.9167 said:

I have to park my toons in Arborstone to get the rested XP buff.

Why do you need the rested XP buff? I have never bothered with it ever. It's very easy to get your characters to max level and max masteries without it.

[Chichimec.9364]

OP, even though you are aiming this at the game developers, there are things here that I agree with and other things I disagree with, so I'm going to throw in some of my own reactions here. To give some context to those reactions, I'm a casual player, not at all a min/maxer nor part of the "git gud" crowd.  Atm I have one main account and five alt accounts. Given the current set up of the Wizard's Vault, I find it comfortable to do the dailies and weeklies on four of the alt accounts. Doing them on all five is too much for me. With that background in mind, let me dive into what you are saying here...
A. The Arborstone rested exp buff - I have something like 42 alts on my main account and an average of 4-5 of them on my alt accounts. Out of all those alts, I only leave one in Arborstone to get that exp buff. The only thing I need exp for at this point is gaining masteries in new content and that Arborstone alt is set aside for that. I have any number of alts parked at various jps and mat gathering spots. They don't need exp though so it doesn't bother me in the slightest that they can't get the Arborstone buff. My active alts, the ones that actually run around Tyria doing things, are generally parked at the Lily of the Elon for easy access to other parts of Tyria. My dedicated WvW alts stay in Armistice Bastion. As far as I know, the Arborstone exp buff doesn't work in WvW otherwise those alts would live there of course.

B. I don't bother with the Seitung Province training heart XP buff myself, so that's not an issue for me.

C.  The EoD Offensive/Defensive Jade Bot buffs is one of the places where I very much agree with what you are saying. I used to try to keep those buffs on the alt parked at Arborstone but they are too cumbersome to get and are lost too easily by going into an instance. I don't bother with them anymore and that's a shame.

Relics are one of the things I half way agree with you on. Yes, stripping away the bonus from the runes was an ouch but it hasn't actually impacted my own gameplay that much. Remember, I'm a casual player and am not particularly concerned about maxing out my DPs or other numbers. The only place I've bothered to consciously use the new relics is in WvW, to help my squad there.

Another place where I both agree and disagree with you is on the new daily/weekly system. My main account is set to the WvW dailies and I generally get them done fairly quickly on my guild's daily WvW run. Yes, the Defender one is generally the last one I get, even though we defend a lot. However, over the course of our two hour run, I have yet to fail to get the WvW dailies done. Four of my alt accounts are set to PVE dailies/weeklies and I get them done on a regular basis. Yes, the dailies can get to be a bit tedious sometimes, especially with the repeated inclusion of activities and the same few dungeons, but I am still able to get them done on all four alt accounts every day. The pve weeklies I generally enjoy as they keep taking me back to content I haven't done in a while. That's things like the Chak Gerent, the Octovine, the EoD metas, and so forth. All that has actually reignited my interest in the game and keeps me happily occupied in a game that I have been playing for almost six years now.

TL/DR There are places I agree with the OP and places where I disagree with them. There are things in GW2 that I really like and there are things I would like to see changed or improved. However, my first 6th year birthday present will be arriving this December and I am still going strong in GW2

Edited October 28, 2023 by Chichimec.9364

[Danikat.8537]

11 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

Why do you need the rested XP buff? I have never bothered with it ever. It's very easy to get your characters to max level and max masteries without it.

I agree, spending time getting an XP buff seems counter-productive to me, because it reduces the time you can spend earning XP. Mathmatically it could be worthwhile if you get  significant XP boost quickly enough that your overall XP gain goes up in spite of the time spent getting the boost instead of getting XP.

But even then an XP boost is basically a way to reduce how much time you need to play to get to the next level, mastery or spirit shard and even if the maths works out spending time doing something you don't enjoy so you can spend less time doing the things you do enjoy seems contradictory to me. I'd rather skip the XP boost if it's annoying to get and just play more events to make up for the missed XP.

I'm not saying it's a bad choice for everyone, I know people who like the idea that their character goes 'home' to a fixed location at the end of each play session and if home can be a location that also gives a rested buff that's an added bonus. But the OP clearly doesn't enjoy this complicated chain of activities to stack different buffs, so I don't think it's worth doing for them.

[Lucy.3728]

12 hours ago, Caelin.9167 said:

I don't post often, so this will be long.

You should change that.

Another theory: people have shorter attention spans and a wall-of-text discourages many from even getting past the first paragraph.
So if you want a lot of people to read, give feedback, keep it short.

Spread it out over several topics, one by one.

[Funky.4861]

Re: the rested exp buff. You can get that by sitting in a chair whilst u open and salvage ur stacks of unid gear, or place ur buy/sell orders on the tp, or make urself a cup of tea/coffee. It takes 5 mins of just sitting in ur chair.

[Farohna.6247]

You seem to be really stressing about "buffs".   Are you still obtaining masteries?  I definitely would not go out of my way for them.   Jade bot charges are all over EoD, so I don't see that as an issue either .. seriously, they're very plentiful.  You're making it harder on yourself than needed.   Also in WoE raids, you took along different classes to keep you buffed, it was about organization, it wasn't hard.  

Relics....there are many threads already on this, might consider looking at those.  

Personally I like the new dailies, and I don't find them any more tedious than the old ones.  Half the time my WvW ones and PvE ones can be completed simultaneously (dodge some enemies, kill a veteran, etc).   No different than when I had to go run Dragon's Stand for a daily in the old system, and that took more than five minutes.  Currently I knock those out (I do most of my weeklies on the refresh day), then farm the guild hall and home instance, stop by and pick some flax on a couple of maps, quick ore or wood farming, then off to do Mad King.  I play less than two hours a day, I still have time to enjoy my gameplay.  

Relax, take a breath, stop making it a job.  It may not be how you wanted the game to go, but here we are.  

[Danikat.8537]

1 hour ago, Funky.4861 said:

Re: the rested exp buff. You can get that by sitting in a chair whilst u open and salvage ur stacks of unid gear, or place ur buy/sell orders on the tp, or make urself a cup of tea/coffee. It takes 5 mins of just sitting in ur chair.

It even works when you're not actually sitting in a chair but just faking it. 😄

[Caelin.9167]

So here's another example I noticed from the new content.

Apparently I cannot account unlock the portal from Lion's Arch to Wizard's Tower simply by completing the story one time and using it. Same thing from Beacon of the Ages to WT. It only works for the toon that completed the story. You can go from WT to BotA, but you cannot go back. Why would you do that? Do you really expect people to complete the entire story on ALL of their toons? That's completely unrealistic. It amounts to character-binding instead of account-binding. Again, it feels like some ex-Blizzard employees have invaded and are imposing this mindset more and more often. This is the wrong direction.

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

6 minutes ago, Caelin.9167 said:

So here's another example I noticed from the new content.

Apparently I cannot account unlock the portal from Lion's Arch to Wizard's Tower simply by completing the story one time and using it. Same thing from Beacon of the Ages to WT. It only works for the toon that completed the story. You can go from WT to BotA, but you cannot go back. Why would you do that? Do you really expect people to complete the entire story on ALL of their toons? That's completely unrealistic. It amounts to character-binding instead of account-binding. Again, it feels like some ex-Blizzard employees have invaded and are imposing this mindset more and more often. This is the wrong direction.

Get the Wizard's Tower Teleportation Scroll. "Problem" solved.

[costepj.5120]

26 minutes ago, Caelin.9167 said:

Apparently I cannot account unlock the portal from Lion's Arch to Wizard's Tower simply by completing the story one time and using it.

Which is exactly the same as the airship from LA to Amnoon:
 

• Complete the Story mission Sparking the Flame from Path of Fire.
• The Lionguard Aircrew at Sanctum Harbor in Lion's Arch will take here any character who has already unlocked this zone through the storyline.

[Astralporing.1957]

On 10/29/2023 at 7:19 PM, costepj.5120 said:

Which is exactly the same as the airship from LA to Amnoon:
 

• Complete the Story mission Sparking the Flame from Path of Fire.
• The Lionguard Aircrew at Sanctum Harbor in Lion's Arch will take here any character who has already unlocked this zone through the storyline.

Yep. And in both cases it was a bad design.

[costepj.5120]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yep. And in both cases it was a bad design.

That may be true, but it still contradicts the OP's hypothesis that it's a result of some change in strategy triggered by hiring ex-Blizzard coders.
Also worth pointing out that anet was originally formed by ex Blizzard employees who wanted to take the game in a different direction.

[Astralporing.1957]

3 hours ago, costepj.5120 said:

That may be true, but it still contradicts the OP's hypothesis that it's a result of some change in strategy triggered by hiring ex-Blizzard coders.
Also worth pointing out that anet was originally formed by ex Blizzard employees who wanted to take the game in a different direction.

The part about ex-blizzard coders never made any sense anyway - it's not the coders, but the management that decides on design strategy. Still, there has been a design change into the more boring and more grindy direction OP talks about. It's just not a single point of change, but rather a slow gradual shift, that started even before PoF launch.

[kernco.2431]

Biggest QoL wish for me is account-wide crafting levels. Is there a good reason to require each crafting profession to be leveled on a specific character and then needing to log into that character to use that crafting profession? I guess selling the extra crafting profession slots?

[Sobx.1758]

On 10/29/2023 at 12:55 AM, Caelin.9167 said:

A) I have to park my toons in Arborstone to get the rested XP buff.  I can no longer park them where they are most helpful like sitting on chests or at a flax farm, or convenient like at the raid portals, if I want the buff - which of course I do.  Now I have to teleport around adding load times (and server load) to everything I do. Additionally, why would any player buy access to Lily of the Elon or any of the others if they have to park their toons in Arborstone? 

The whole idea that you somehow "have to park characters at arborsone" is wrong in itself. If you want to park a character at a chest or a flax farm then that xp buff provides little to no relevance to you. Just logging a character to grab a chest or a few flax nodes doesn't take a long time at all, so even if for some reason you feel the need to have that small bonus xp buff on you while you're pressing "f" 1-to-5 times, you only "need" to charge that boon once in a while. Although I still wouldn't say it's worth minding that at all.

On 10/29/2023 at 12:55 AM, Caelin.9167 said:

B) If I want the Seitung Province training heart XP buff - which of course I do - I have to teleport to Seitung, spend 10 minutes buffing up, then go wherever I'm headed.  

C) If I want the EoD Offensive/Defensive Jade Bot buffs - which of course I do - I have to hop out of Arborstone into Echovald, take ziplines and grab batteries, go back into Arborstone, return, repeat. 10 minutes. To make matters worse, the first buff takes annoyingly longer than the additional. And even more infuriating is that while the max is 2hr 15min, if I end up with 2hr 4min, I can't simply top it off and cap out at 2:15. Oh no. It stays at 2:04. Of course, somebody thought it would be a good idea to consume the charge anyway - which means they were either horribly lazy, or they were outright intentionally making things annoying for the players (if so fire them, they are costing you players). In the end the player is forced to decide if they want to leave right away or wait around for 4 minutes so they don't have to interrupt play so soon to come back and rebuff. Which of course, people also have to do, or choose to go without. The feeling is something like this, "Oh my buffs are gone. Ugh." That's what this buff system in lieu of direct power creep has imparted on your players - every 2 hours or so. 

B/C) Yes, you have to do stuff to get stuff. Looks like a normal thing in games, not sure what the issue here is supposed to be, but it increasingly looks like a general complaint about "having to play the game" instead of "having things passively because I want them".

C) Yes, if you want to have some bonus boons instead of building your character around them then you have to do some additional stuff for them. Luckily for you, the game generally isn't balanced about having those boons up at all.

[kharmin.7683]

51 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

B/C) Yes, you have to do stuff to get stuff. Looks like a normal thing in games, not sure what the issue here is supposed to be, but it increasingly looks like a general complaint about "having to play the game" instead of "having things passively because I want them".

This, sadly, has become quite common around the forums here lately.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

1.) Your formatting is great which makes it easier to read. 👍
2.) I could agree with some of your complaints, more or less. Depends a lot on personal perspective.
3.) I only go with the jade-tech buffs topic here. Else this post would be way too long. 

My guess with the jade-tech buffs is, that they planned to make the access easier. But then scrapped the idea as the feature was causing problems with their balancing. I don't know how much you have played yet, but currently all classes can buff the combat-relevant buffs (fury, might, quickness, alacrity). As far as I interpret their 'plan' they want us to use these options instead of the more convenient self-buff options. One of the reasons why the Runes of the Pack/Fireworks had to go. Both runes allowed a lot of players to ignore most of the support-traits, while still having access to the relevant boons. But they want us to play their group-content and their meta-events. This is also imo one of the main reasons why they gutted the sustain of every single class on the launch of End of Dragons. Before EoD, most classes could survive a lot of encounters easily. After EoD launch, healers were a lot more important. This is probably also a reason why the Rune of Sanctuary had to go, which was cheese for a lot hilarious builds that nullified enemy damage easily.

Most of their changes are totally reasonable, if you think of a bigger picture. The problem is, big parts of the community who are harmed by those changes do not care about that big picture.

We had this very annoying confrontation in End of Dragons, where ANet pinned casuals and tryhards against one another. Hoping one (certain) side would lose and the problem would solve itself. In the end they had to powercreep the classes drastically and add alternative options to unlock the turtle. Currently there are alternatives for the DE meta and the Strike Mission. - Not everything works according to the plan. 

At this point, I do not know where they really want to go. It currently looks like they are still experimenting, which is quite disturbing. A few months ago, it was their highest priority to remove the cooldown-reduction traits for all classes completely. They have done one bigger patch, where a lot of them were removed. But then they suddenly lost interest and completely ignore that some traits still exist. Why? No clue. They found something more important obviously.

We are basically still waiting for implementation of the jade-tech buffs in core-tyria. The only things they have added were jade-bot-consoles to the cities and work-benches to the guildhalls. As the buffs are allowed to be carried over, installing the stations would make sense. But they refuse to do it. It would reduce the amount of players willing to play support-roles? At least in open-world. And without proper training, support-classes will not work for group-content. So my guess is that they keep everything as it is. If you want the buffs, you have to pull a lot of effort. But if you want a reliable source, bring a team or play support. 

And instances? I doubt they will remove the block. As you have noticed, the buffs drastically boost the players performance. One of the main reason for the instance-blocks is imo, that we have a lot of challenging story-achievements which would be a lot easier if the buffs worked. It would remove a lot of the challenging solo content and turn a lot of group-effort tasks into solo-tasks.