Passion has gone my friends [Merged]

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

There is a "update" tag on wiki. You can go there and see for urself. Just a quick compare to lw4:
LW4 had: 
1) 6 maps (vs 3 in SOTO)

2) 2 new mounts (beetle and skyscale) (vs 0 in SOTO)

3) 3 raid wings (although you may argue its a expac content, but it was released during lw4) (vs 0 in SOTO, but we got 2 Strikes)

4) 6 legendary weapons with unique look and effects, 1 legendary raid ring, 1 legendary accesory (vision), legendary runes and sigils. (vs legendary armor and sigil in SOTO with questionable models)

5) 3 fractals (vs 1 in SOTO)

6) Unique armor skins for each armor type (elegy+ requiem, mist shard+blossoming mist shard+ corsair pieces) (vs 3 identical sets for all armor types - thats 3 models compared to 6-12 models if you count in upgraded versions separetly)

7) 2 spvp maps (vs 0 in SOTO)

8 ) New masteries (cant actually count how much there is since im not ingame atm) 

 

Thats just major features, it would be too much for me to list every single addition here. But you can check it urself. https://wiki-en.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release

Sure you can argue that there are rifts, but its just a glorified on demand map event. Convergences are a bit unique in that aspect. And new weapons, but that was tied to elite specs and expacs, so you cant directly compare them, but just saying designing a weapon is far less work than a full elite spec. Relics are kinda "removed and reintroduced" 6th rune piece bonuses. Weaponmaster training isnt even a proper feature (well you know they could have removed the elite spec limitation any time if they wanted to). 

Even IBS had similar content if you look it up. 

I think that the person you responded to was saying that there's no way SotO is as good as LS3 and 4.

[soulknight.9620]

9 hours ago, YAMBE.8104 said:

If you look at the wiki you will see that they take nearly 2 years to fully release LW4. They launched the first chapter at november of 2017 and finish the story wih the release of war eternal at may of 2019, they also had more people working on LW4 than when SOTO was launched (they have been hiring people throughout last year).

And whose problem is that? anets or mine as a paying customer? Let me get this straight - I dont care what it takes them to develop the product, I dont care how much time they spend on it, I dont care of any difficulties they experience, I dont care how much people or resources they spend on it. As a paying customer the only thing i care is to buy a product and get good quality product in return, i dont need to make excuses for anet for the lack of quality. 

11 hours ago, Assolador.3598 said:

thats why I said its not the same quality bruh

Ah, my bad, i missunderstood there. 

[soulknight.9620]

doubleposted

Edited March 2 by soulknight.9620

[soulknight.9620]

doubleposted

Edited March 2 by soulknight.9620

[Holmindeboks.3490]

8 hours ago, illuminati.8453 said:

Completely disagree.  They are not working really hard on GW2 and this is not the 'best' content available.   They are doing the bare minimum.   And spreading it out over an entire year to boot.   

They working hard on GEMstore skins because the more skins the more money. They ignore other things what players want (maybe because there is no budget for) new races, classes, specs, pvp, wvw (bug free), raids or what players all want. 
 

gemstore skins are just skins without to have to programming mechanics like a raid. So i think its just a fast money grab. 
 

but why should they? If the players are addicted to the game and keep spending and your business stay healthy. Then milk it. 
normally company’s only change when numbers of players going drastically down. If that wont happen then you keep mostly gemstore content. 
 

ppl always say stop buying the game. Like call of duty. Then it maybe gets better. 

[Labjax.2465]

18 hours ago, Seon.8402 said:

The nice part about GW2 is it's easy to come back to later when they do add more 🙂

It was. 😞 After what they pulled with runes and relics, they seem to be going in a direction of making it harder to come  back than easy like it used to be.

[Labjax.2465]

11 hours ago, Batalix.2873 said:

I would agree with this, if the game still focused more on iterating and adding to the game's edifice, rather than eroding and demolishing it.

The current dev team does not seem to have the foresight/interest in preserving a lot of GW2's stronger systems. Nearly everything has been cannibalized or obviated in order to fit these "new" ideas they think they are introducing. I can't even enjoy HoT/PoF expansions because the especs don't play the same anymore, everything is so overtuned, the masteries matter less and less, and even a lot of other subsystems now have had easier equivalencies introduced.

I haven't substantively played this game in over a year, other than a brief half hour to try the new weapons in beta. If the devs had just left the design of core/HoT/PoF well enough alone, even if it meant even less "new" content, I would still be playing this game. I would rather have just received new maps and story--no masteries, no kittening around with especs and weapons, no abominable reimagining of runes--than what we have received under the guise of "content."

The EoD/SotO development team is embarrassingly inept. They would rather totally break down every strong, marketable aspect GW2 had, than admit that they just don't have the ingenuity or resources to meaningfully build on the game. Instead of allowing GW2 to wrap-up and age gracefully, they are necroing it into oblivion, where it will have virtually no long-term/niche/nostalgic appeal by the time GW3 comes out.

This is the part that's most upsetting to me. They messed with simple enjoyable stuff like what you get out of holiday bags, for the sake of research notes (unless they went back on that at some point? I remember that happening while I was still playing in 2022). Now, with relics, they took away quirky rune effects some people had simple fun with, with no reassurance (that I'm aware of) of them ever returning. I can try to be understanding of a lot of things. Messing with plain ole fun in a video game is not one of them. I don't believe it's at all overstating it to say that fun is the most important part of a video game's design, fundamentally. If you aren't making that a priority, what are you even designing? And it's not like this is some naive indie dreamer position. The industry titan Nintendo has long been known for prioritizing fun and GW2 of the past created enormous amounts of creative fun, like turning the trope of simple "speed boost" mounts into individual mount types with unique physics. Where are those GW2 developers? Were they all laid off in 2019?

[Gerebos.1065]

2 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

And whose problem is that? anets or mine as a paying customer? Let me get this straight - I dont care what it takes them to develop the product, I dont care how much time they spend on it, I dont care of any difficulties they experience, I dont care how much people or resources they spend on it. As a paying customer the only thing i care is to buy a product and get good quality product in return, i dont need to make excuses for anet for the lack of quality. 

Ah, my bad, i missunderstood there. 

Little bit harshly expressed but ^this

Anyway Ncsoft haven't pulled out a proper game in Aions..uhm Eons... what are we exepecting as major share holder they can improve?xD

I do not envy the position of any developer under a chinese company because their only orientation are profits based and if possible 500-1000% .

There's not much solution yet other than wait to rebalance the quality of the game which is not that bad but far from good.

and a thing is for sure,I won't preorder the next expansion...I haven't played this one for more than 30 hours xD

[Labjax.2465]

Just now, Gerebos.1065 said:

Little bit harshly expressed but ^this

Anyway Ncsoft haven't pulled out a proper game in Aions..uhm Eons... what are we exepecting as major share holder they can improve?xD

I do not envy the position of any developer under a chinese company because their only orientation are profits based and if possible 500-1000% .

There's not much solution yet other than wait to rebalance the quality of the game which is not that bad but far from good.

and a thing is for sure,I won't preorder the next expansion...I haven't played this one for more than 30 hours xD

NCSoft is South Korean based company, not Chinese.

[Padrion.7382]

On 3/2/2024 at 10:30 AM, Holmindeboks.3490 said:

They working hard on GEMstore skins because the more skins the more money.

True. As I said in another thread: as long as players are willing to spend almost as much money on a skin as on a full fledged expansion, then of course the developer's top priority has to be skins, as making them takes only tiny fraction of the effort.

Edited March 4 by Padrion.7382

[Gerebos.1065]

2 minutes ago, Labjax.2465 said:

NCSoft is South Korean based company, not Chinese.

Was* is true that Taek-Jin-Kim  is the major shareholder and few more Korean companies but chinese companies from Hong Kong have set foot in it ,take a deeper research and you'll see.
It's just a matter of time.

[Labjax.2465]

5 minutes ago, Gerebos.1065 said:

Was* is true that Taek-Jin-Kim  is the major shareholder and few more Korean companies but chinese companies from Hong Kong have set foot in it ,take a deeper research and you'll see.
It's just a matter of time.

I mean, either way, I don't think that has anything to do with it. US based companies do this kind of stuff all on their own plenty of times. SWTOR (EA-publisher) went through some similar problems in recent years. Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) infamously changed the entire core game in a desperate bid to be more like WoW and then eventually shut down.

[Trejgon.9367]

17 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

There is a "update" tag on wiki. You can go there and see for urself. Just a quick compare to lw4:
LW4 had: 
1) 6 maps (vs 3 in SOTO)

2) 2 new mounts (beetle and skyscale) (vs 0 in SOTO)

3) 3 raid wings (although you may argue its a expac content, but it was released during lw4) (vs 0 in SOTO, but we got 2 Strikes)

4) 6 legendary weapons with unique look and effects, 1 legendary raid ring, 1 legendary accesory (vision), legendary runes and sigils. (vs legendary armor and sigil in SOTO with questionable models)

5) 3 fractals (vs 1 in SOTO)

6) Unique armor skins for each armor type (elegy+ requiem, mist shard+blossoming mist shard+ corsair pieces) (vs 3 identical sets for all armor types - thats 3 models compared to 6-12 models if you count in upgraded versions separetly)

7) 2 spvp maps (vs 0 in SOTO)

8 ) New masteries (cant actually count how much there is since im not ingame atm) 

 

Thats just major features, it would be too much for me to list every single addition here. But you can check it urself. https://wiki-en.guildwars2.com/wiki/Release

Sure you can argue that there are rifts, but its just a glorified on demand map event. Convergences are a bit unique in that aspect. And new weapons, but that was tied to elite specs and expacs, so you cant directly compare them, but just saying designing a weapon is far less work than a full elite spec. Relics are kinda "removed and reintroduced" 6th rune piece bonuses. Weaponmaster training isnt even a proper feature (well you know they could have removed the elite spec limitation any time if they wanted to). 

Even IBS had similar content if you look it up. 

One thing that this comparision is omitting is that LWS4 happened in a span of 2 years, while SotO is spread over single year.

PoF Released on September 22, 2017
Daybreak followed in November of same year,
War Eternal released on May 14, 2019
Meanwhile in approximate year from SotO release we are bound to be having next expac all together. So of course SotO is going to have less content to it than LWS4 had, because the studio didn't double on manpower in between.

And even if we apply the most generous limiter on LWS4 of exactly one year after Daybreak release, we are already dropping off:
2 maps, 1 mount, 1 Raid Wing, 2 Legendary weapons, legendary raid wing, legendary accessory, olegendary runes AND sigils, 1 Fractal,  Mist shard and blossoming mist shard armor skins, and a fair chunk of masteries. The difference becomes much less stark, and if we narrowed down scope of what we are looking at of LWS4 to approximate even more fairly how much dev time SotO is scheduled to get, it would be much more comparable.

2 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

And whose problem is that? anets or mine as a paying customer? Let me get this straight - I dont care what it takes them to develop the product, I dont care how much time they spend on it, I dont care of any difficulties they experience, I dont care how much people or resources they spend on it. As a paying customer the only thing i care is to buy a product and get good quality product in return, i dont need to make excuses for anet for the lack of quality. 

I mean cadence of releases is definitelly something, you as a paying customer should be interested in. And LWS4 has very unstable cadence of releasing varying anything between 2 months between big chapters to half a year between the same. And there are two holes of half a year withing LWS4 alone.

Now do you wanna go and compare what SotO managed to release in half a year that in LWS4 we took waiting in between Daybreak and bug in the system? or between star to guide us and war eternal? I guess that comparision would not be so favourable for LWS4 anymore.

[Albadaran.1283]

10 hours ago, Mukizo.1269 said:

I think the main issue is between the relationship with Anet and NCSOFT. Failed expectations and fundamentally different approaches and ideas on how to reach them.
The MMO and live service genre in general is a flawed model, nothing can stay relevant forever. Passion and care fades out, both for the consumer and the developer.

Imagine having to do the same thing over and over and over for 12 years, most people can’t do that. Thus we get different devs and different players over the course of time, values and expectations get shifted. 

The core game was about breaking the boundaries and limitations of traditional mmos, while expanding upon with what they tried to achieve in guild wars 1, Utopia which proved to be too difficult. Thereof they made a completely new game called guild wars 2, which was all about having choices that mattered in the collective (living world). This failed eventually because of many reasons and was significantly changed. Already here early on a conflict was established.

HoT was all about filling out the spaces where the game lacked. More ways to play, more ways to explore and traverse the environment. End game content. There were a lot of issues when this expansion first launched, however, most of these issues were ironed out over time and resulted in an excellent high quality experience all around.

PoF was amazing. You could see the excitement, care and passion the developers had in the various trailers centered around each aspect of the expansion. Mounts with the most innovating and ground breaking mount system we have ever seen in any mmo till this date. Vast maps bigger than ever before with various different environments to traverse, each balanced around its mounts. Elite specs carefully crafted to synergize with its environment and fill in different roles (some argued they were overtuned) but I overall enjoyed them a lot.

Season 4 was great and perfectly summarized by the various posters above me.

Then we had Ibs, EoD and SoTo and we all know the story from there….

Ibs started out great, but some conflict within the studio and publisher appeared which resulted in a second horrible rushed part. EoD was a prime example of quantity over quality in all kind of forms.
 

SoTo is a new approach, while at first promising it ended up rather starving the current player-base out, delivering far too little content in terms of both quality and quantity. Everything is reused and piled together in a huge dung of confusion. Hopefully they will learn from this new format and experience, and improve upon it in the next mini “expansion”.

It's obvious that there is a change in direction during the last 3 years: From classic MMO type of playing (exploring, character devellopement, new classes, etc.) to fast action and fashion (e.g. Like in BDO where you almost for nothing can level fast and than pay for fashion). For new players this is great. You don't have to play for many hours in different expansions, but within a week or 2 you have everything you need to join high level content.

But for experienced players this very soon becomes utterly boring. The only thing left than is play for fashion. For all other things in PvE, PvP, WvW are more of the same. What they need are new professions and new skills.

[Edibleghost.5631]

5 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

As a paying customer the only thing i care is to buy a product and get good quality product in return, i dont need to make excuses for anet for the lack of quality.

Yeah, it's insane to me how much people lose sight of this when it comes to games and especially mmo's. They get paid a salary, they may work hard or not, they may like the playerbase or they may absolutely despise them, it may be their passion project or they're ready to dive on the next job offer through the door. They don't need you to be their friend because they're not yours. By not being honest with how you feel about what they're selling you're driving down standards across the industry and depriving developers of an understanding of how to improve so that they still have a job.

The only thing you OUGHT to do is be polite and constructive and remember they're still just people at the end of the day. The wallet is the strongest voting tool you get and it's better when you only have to use it as a measure of last resort.

[Ashen.2907]

15 hours ago, YAMBE.8104 said:

If you look at the wiki you will see that they take nearly 2 years to fully release LW4. They launched the first chapter at november of 2017 and finish the story wih the release of war eternal at may of 2019, they also had more people working on LW4 than when SOTO was launched (they have been hiring people throughout last year).

My prediction for the next expansion is that they will add a new skill tree to support the new weapons added in SOTO,  new legendaries (probably legendary weapons based on the weapons added on SOTO), a new raid (they said in a interview that they have a big surprise for the next expansion), probably new masteries with improvements over an existing mount and 3 new maps. The thematic and story of the expansion will be totally different or could continue in some way the plot of SOTO.  in fact, people often forget that LW4's story had 2 plots, with 3 maps for each of them. The first focused on Palawa joko and the second on Kralkatorrik. 

They could have divided LW4 into 2 expansions and we would have a situation similar to the current one

A year and a half is as "nearly" one year as it is two.

How many people they had working on one set of content compared to another is largely irrelevant to a consumer looking at the size of one vs the other.

[Sobx.1758]

8 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

It was. 😞 After what they pulled with runes and relics, they seem to be going in a direction of making it harder to come  back than easy like it used to be.

Even if relics will be powercrept (which I hope they won't, but lets be real: they probably will be), I don't think it will make it somehow "harder" to come back to the game after breaks.

Edited March 2 by Sobx.1758

[soulknight.9620]

4 hours ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

One thing that this comparision is omitting is that LWS4 happened in a span of 2 years, while SotO is spread over single year.

It doesnt matter in this debate. The question is not how much content anet can dish out per minute. The question is that we have a paid package of content (SOTO). And we had a free package of content (lw4). And lw4 provides more content and better quality of said content. 

I will not be accountable for anets decision to switch their bussiness model from "buy an expansion for 40-50 euros and get a whole lot of content day one and 1-2 living world seasons as a bonus" to "get a paid expac for 25 euros thats basically provides less content than said living world season".

4 hours ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

I mean cadence of releases is definitelly something, you as a paying customer should be interested in.

Its not a matter of cadence. Thats far beyond my control as a customer and i cant take it into account since anet and many other companies freely shift their release dates as much as they like. The question is as simple as this - the amount and quality of content i get for what i paid for. 

[Lucy.3728]

On 3/1/2024 at 10:46 AM, csuvix.9284 said:

Cantha in GW1 was my favourite. I got lost in Seitung, Kaineng or Echowald for hours

The dirtiest areas in all of Tyria were your favorites? (Excluding Seitung)
Kaineng seemed like a big latrine and all of Echowald was the place your parents always warned you not to go in alone at night. Except it was always at night there.

*spits over the shoulder*

Not much has changed at the Echowald now, just a garbage dump has been added. Which was inevitable after the old Kaineng was flooded. The garbage dump in the Echowald has more similarities to the old Kaineng than the new Kaineng.

On 3/1/2024 at 10:46 AM, csuvix.9284 said:

I'm starting to lose all hope and I am feeling the same downfall of GW2 as I felt it with GW1. The only problem there is no GW3 in sight and I don't want to play Throne and Liberty.

There are always changes. And how they are received is very individual. In the virtual world as in the real world. People come and go, you accept that too. Or are you talking to God about how kitten the world has become?

For me, the steam was already gone after just 1 year of Guild Wars 2. Back then, the game consisted only of fractals and WvW.
It bored me. I stopped playing.
It's just a pastime, an entertainment.
After a 7 year break, I tried GW2 again and it was like a completely different game.
Since then I've been playing again and I also like EoD. I've played it 5 times. 3 times more than PoF and HoT. I could only finish HoT with other players anyway because it annoyed me so much that I couldn't bear to play it alone and abandoned the story.

So GW2 is not your game anymore.

Take a break.

Happens. It's ok. Maybe come back in a few years. Maybe not.

I think after such a long time, a break is long overdue if, like you, you haven't had any real fun in the game before.

[Trejgon.9367]

6 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

And we had a free package of content (lw4). And lw4 provides more content and better quality of said content. 

To be precise, we had a series of updates, that were free if you were playing when they released (with bonus giveaway some time later) that happened to release over longer timespan than SotO is scheduled to. Oh additionally, access to those updates was restricted if you didn't have relevant expac as well, so even tho you could obtain it for free, you'd still need to buy expac to actually access it. If you missed out on the freebie tho, access to each of the maps and story bits requires you to pay gems for it.

10 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

I will not be accountable for anets decision

Nobody is saying you are accountable for it. We just tried to pointing out that comparision you are trying to draw is inherently unfair, and mildly unreasonable.

11 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

from "buy an expansion for 40-50 euros and get a whole lot of content day one and 1-2 living world seasons as a bonus" to "get a paid expac for 25 euros thats basically provides less content than said living world season".

That is also incorrect. They switched from "buy an expansion once in eternity for a price, get some front loaded content and features, and then if you keep logging in when we happen to release an episode, you may obtain one season for free" to "who needs expansion anyway, here is new formula that is still free if you log in when it releases, and will totally be equivalent of an expac as a whole" and then to "we will be doing more but smaller expansions, that then will give you some follow up updates for free guaranteed no matter if you log in or not"

14 minutes ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Its not a matter of cadence. Thats far beyond my control as a customer and i cant take it into account since anet and many other companies freely shift their release dates as much as they like. The question is as simple as this - the amount and quality of content i get for what i paid for. 

It is definitelly matter of cadence. The fact is that you are trying to draw equivalency, between series of updates that may have been free for you (were not for everyone mind you) that were releasing in haphazard cadence over considerably longer duration, to a paid expansion that guarantees further updates being free for the rest of that particular year. You are then trying to call the latter less fair to you, because somehow, within a single year the studio cannot outdo two years of it's past, even if they are releasing in much more stable cadence in this new system.

And in the end, since we established that AN is a business, the matter of how long they take to develop things, is precisely your concern because, if they cease to be profitable, they will go out of the market, and then you will stay with nothing to show for all the things you bought so far. So you should definitelly not be expecting AN to run unsustainable prices for you.

And before I wrap up that particular opinion piece - there is also a subject of comparing to other available products on the market, in which case, AN is still the best price to content ratio out there in mmorpg market. It is pushing out comparable amount of content to the other big b2p title, ESO, on yearly basis, but expects you to pay once a year for whole year worth of updates, as opposed to said ESO, which expects you to either pay separatelly for each quarterly update, and/or pay for a recurring subscription along the way as well. And while I cannot comment on how much yearly is WoW or FF14 pumping out, both of these, are primarily subscription-based games (with FF14 having some sort of a freebie trial available, similar to GW2) which I am fairly confident would still translate to much more cost expected to be paid for same amount of content.

[soulknight.9620]

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

To be precise, we had a series of updates, that were free if you were playing when they released (with bonus giveaway some time later) that happened to release over longer timespan than SotO is scheduled to. Oh additionally, access to those updates was restricted if you didn't have relevant expac as well, so even tho you could obtain it for free, you'd still need to buy expac to actually access it. If you missed out on the freebie tho, access to each of the maps and story bits requires you to pay gems for it.

If we go into this territory then we would also have to take sales into account for older expansions/lw since if you werent playing at the time of the release you might aswell buy it on sale now for far less then people paid lets say day 1 of the expac.

And you could and to this day can buy lw episodes via gold/gem conversion in-game, but you cant buy SOTO the same way, so this argument is questionable. It still doesnt require you to pay real life money for that content. 

Ofc living world was restricted to owning expac, dont know why you brought that up, but if you want to compare "per dollar" spent value of expac+lw4+ibs (since both of them were tied to PoF) then sure, lets compare PoF with LW4 and IBS for 40 euros to SOTO for 25 euros. We all know how would that end. And again "time" is not important here.

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

We just tried to pointing out that comparision you are trying to draw is inherently unfair, and mildly unreasonable.

From the start i stated that i only compare quality and quantity of content of these content packs. There is literary no reason to tie it up to "time" it takes for anet to develop it and cadence of releases. 

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

That is also incorrect. They switched from "buy an expansion once in eternity for a price, get some front loaded content and features, and then if you keep logging in when we happen to release an episode, you may obtain one season for free" to "who needs expansion anyway, here is new formula that is still free if you log in when it releases, and will totally be equivalent of an expac as a whole" and then to "we will be doing more but smaller expansions, that then will give you some follow up updates for free guaranteed no matter if you log in or not"

I dont see the problem of LW being free for players that play the game once every 3 months (that was the requirement after all, that you only had to login once for a few secs to get it for free). But thats not the point here. We compare a content pack that you didnt have to pay for and still can get it via ingame currency to a paid content pack of a lesser quality. Nothing else. 

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

It is definitelly matter of cadence. The fact is that you are trying to draw equivalency, between series of updates that may have been free for you (were not for everyone mind you) that were releasing in haphazard cadence over considerably longer duration, to a paid expansion that guarantees further updates being free for the rest of that particular year. You are then trying to call the latter less fair to you, because somehow, within a single year the studio cannot outdo two years of it's past, even if they are releasing in much more stable cadence in this new system.

It literary doesnt matter. Yes, i do think it is unfair. And ofc i refered to my own experience (well since im not a hive mind and cant think for other people). Because in the end the formula for me as a customer is simple: i got more content for free than i get now for a price tag. If anet said: "ok guys, we gonna give you more content and better quality content than the previous formula, but you would have to pay us a bit every year", i would be ok with it if they actually delivered on this. I was one of the first people that expressed an opinion that paid expacs on yearly basis would be better IF they would provide appropriate quality and quantity of it (basically more content and better content than free lw content). But the sad truth is - they failed. And i see no reason not to tell anet that they underdelivered. 

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

And in the end, since we established that AN is a business, the matter of how long they take to develop things, is precisely your concern because, if they cease to be profitable, they will go out of the market, and then you will stay with nothing to show for all the things you bought so far. So you should definitelly not be expecting AN to run unsustainable prices for you.

Everyone knows cash shop provides more profit than expacs (you can check a few yearly reports for periods where there were no expacs and gw2 scored nice profit for NCsoft). Anet is constantly recruiting new staff, they said themselves that gw2 playerbase is at its peak atm, so their financial situation is far beyond "unsustainable". So considering all of that, if they choose to take more money from their customers yearly they must provide more quality/quantity of content compared to previous formula. 

And in no circumstances i would "stay with nothing to show for all the things you bought so far". There are other games and other developers. Someone would step up and fill the niche of casual horizontal progression based mmo and who knows maybe they would offer more value for the price. 

1 hour ago, Lord Trejgon.2809 said:

And before I wrap up that particular opinion piece - there is also a subject of comparing to other available products on the market, in which case, AN is still the best price to content ratio out there in mmorpg market. It is pushing out comparable amount of content to the other big b2p title, ESO, on yearly basis, but expects you to pay once a year for whole year worth of updates, as opposed to said ESO, which expects you to either pay separatelly for each quarterly update, and/or pay for a recurring subscription along the way as well. And while I cannot comment on how much yearly is WoW or FF14 pumping out, both of these, are primarily subscription-based games (with FF14 having some sort of a freebie trial available, similar to GW2) which I am fairly confident would still translate to much more cost expected to be paid for same amount of content.

Ok, im not making a point that gw2 is a bad game and a bad deal in general. I still think that a lof of the thing are made right for this game (for example mounts, combat, transmog system, meta events etc). If a new player would ask me if he should play gw2 or any other mmo out there i would recommend gw2 for sheer number of content this game provides in total. But i do see a pattern that anet is starting to provide far less value for the price they are asking COMPARED to their previous model. Like i said earlier im only comparing content pack of SOTO to content pack of lw4 from a customer point of view in this particular debate. Im not here to provide full bussiness model analitics of Anet as a whole you know. 

[Ashen.2907]

If we are going to falsely claim two years for LW4 when it was actually one and a half, can we claim that SotO is one and a half years (artificially adding six months) to be fair?

LW4 at two years delivered well over double what SotO is going to deliver in a year and a half.

That said, if the previous model was not financially sustainable I do not disagree with greater monetization. Its just unfortunate that the greater monetization doesnt include a similar level and quality of content.

[Vavume.8065]

22 hours ago, Holmindeboks.3490 said:

I already left. My goal is to only play games that dont make me angry. Also quit call of duty and battlefield 2042. 

This is a wise decision, it will be better for your health.

[Yttris.2945]

20 hours ago, revolucion.7518 said:

Wow.

No, GW2.

To me, GW2's strength is it'll still be around when you get back to it so there's no rush to keep up. The problem is the weakness is the same thing.

[Trejgon.9367]

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

And you could and to this day can buy lw episodes via gold/gem conversion in-game, but you cant buy SOTO the same way, so this argument is questionable. It still doesnt require you to pay real life money for that content. 

All gems you obtain through this way have been paid by someone else with irl money. Just FYI.

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Ofc living world was restricted to owning expac, dont know why you brought that up, but if you want to compare "per dollar" spent value of expac+lw4+ibs (since both of them were tied to PoF) then sure, lets compare PoF with LW4 and IBS for 40 euros to SOTO for 25 euros. We all know how would that end. And again "time" is not important here.

Right now, if you wanted to get access to POF, LWS4 and IBS on fresh account you'd need to pay (or have someone pay for you) much more than 40 euros.

And you trying to dismiss time is just you trying, because time was and is very important part of the packaging.

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

From the start i stated that i only compare quality and quantity of content of these content packs. There is literary no reason to tie it up to "time" it takes for anet to develop it and cadence of releases. 

And the point you keep missing or purposefully ignoring, is that you are not comparing two content packs, but series of separatelly priced content packs against a smaller series of permabundled content packs. Glad that you managed to get it at promotional value of free, but that does not change that the comparision you are trying to draw is flawed, for the purpose of making look one of these much worse than it is.

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

I dont see the problem of LW being free for players that play the game once every 3 months (that was the requirement after all, that you only had to login once for a few secs to get it for free). But thats not the point here. We compare a content pack that you didnt have to pay for and still can get it via ingame currency to a paid content pack of a lesser quality. Nothing else. 

The only "problem" with the fact of having to log in during the period, is that it makes the "free" deal a promotion, and not "standard" pricing.

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

It literary doesnt matter. Yes, i do think it is unfair. And ofc i refered to my own experience (well since im not a hive mind and cant think for other people). Because in the end the formula for me as a customer is simple: i got more content for free than i get now for a price tag. If anet said: "ok guys, we gonna give you more content and better quality content than the previous formula, but you would have to pay us a bit every year", i would be ok with it if they actually delivered on this. I was one of the first people that expressed an opinion that paid expacs on yearly basis would be better IF they would provide appropriate quality and quantity of it (basically more content and better content than free lw content). But the sad truth is - they failed. And i see no reason not to tell anet that they underdelivered. 

You take the "promise" of AN to be delivering more and better quality content at a yearly pricetag, but then get angry because you keep insisting on dismissing the time factor... Again going, by timescale even going in a way still favouring LWS4, the difference between LWS4 and SotO content quantity is much lesser than you keep pushing. Sure when you go by flat numbers of things like exact amount of new maps or fractals, SotO is still falling behind LWS4 even on exact fair timescale, but it is not falling behind as much as you are claiming.

In terms of quality, That is arguable. LWS4 varied wildly in quality of it's releases, with some episodes being indeed superior to even best pieces of SotO content, but in other episodes the quality was much much lower. Averaging out, I'd say in my opinion they get comparable, with LWS4 having higher peaks, and lower dips, and SotO being more consistent.

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

Anet is constantly recruiting new staff, they said themselves that gw2 playerbase is at its peak atm, so their financial situation is far beyond "unsustainable".

Yes, under release of EoD, and with new model. And how the cash shop sales were holding up with no expacs, you could see during IBS, where in the mid-season they had to drop half the plans they had, get everyone to work on expac instead, and in the middle of that they were also hit with layoffs. I was calling LWS system of releases unsustainable, not what they are doing right now.

 

4 hours ago, soulknight.9620 said:

And in no circumstances i would "stay with nothing to show for all the things you bought so far". There are other games and other developers.

Other games and developpers are irrelevant to the value you get from GW2 purchases if servers were to shut down. Way to miss the point and try to deflect with irrelevant statements, in the same post that kept trying to dismiss other things as irrelevant. Nicely played.

3 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

If we are going to falsely claim two years for LW4 when it was actually one and a half, can we claim that SotO is one and a half years (artificially adding six months) to be fair?

If you keep insisting to be nitpicky to this degree, maybe check your math?

LWS4 started releasing at November 17th, 2017, and finished releasing (based on the features listed by the comparision post) July 30th, 2019. Considering full 2 years would be at November 17th 2019, quick calendar check implies that the difference is approx 3.5 months (not half a year, July 30th is end of the month, and 2 years passes in mid november, meaning we deal with august, september, october and half of november of a difference)

But if we are to apply same nipicky standard of measuring to SotO, we are not landing with full year, but with speculative (going off by specials tab countdown, but not confirmed date officially yet as far as I am aware) of release period from August 22, 2023 to May 14, 2024. To the full year there we are missing: Half of May, June, July, and most of August. Meaning that if we "artificially add" to SotO release time scale, the same we "artificially added" to LWS4, then lo and behold, we land same approximation 1 year for SotO vs 2 years of LWS4. Which was the approximation I have been consistently using in this thread. Whom could have guessed that the person so stubborn to point out to compare time scales fairly, was using same approximation for both timescales involved. Mostly because using exact counts would be to tiresome to keep doing.