I'll check back in a few months from now to see where ArenaNet took this... we'll see who of us was blinded...
[Edit] from the official forums:
Could that really be just a coincidence, or could it be that some ArenaNet employees aren't happy with the direction this game is heading either, but are being forced into this by NCSoft ?A golem named BUY-4373, an NPC named Subdirector Blingg, and a jumping puzzle named Under New Management.
Last edited by Centaur; 11-18-2012 at 06:56 AM.
As I said earlier, in other posts, there have been many creative differences over the years in Anet, not just now. Some of the info in the making of book speaks of it. Not everyone is always going to be on the same page in a company. Just as this forum is divided, I can't imagine 270 people who are all on the same page.Originally Posted by Centaur
Some of us don't see this as a catastrophe and some of us do. The same can be said of Anet. Just as the original Anet founders left Blizzard because they didn't like the way the company was going, so it might be happening again. History repeating itself.
Maybe some Anet devs will leave and make a game like Guild Wars 1 all over again, which will get a modest following. Maybe then they'll want to create a bigger and better game, which requires a bigger and better staff, who they then have to pay. Maybe in order to do that they'll have to go mainstream. And maybe then a group of new devs will not like the direction of the changes the game needs to make to stay viable. This has happened before, it will happen again.
But the point is not everyone does agree. Some people see this as selling out and some people see it as pragmatism. You may not realize this but before this upgrade announcement, I saw the difference between exotics and legendaries and I felt personally frustrated by that. Because it'll be a long LOOOOOOOONG time before I get a legendary, if I ever get one. 500 badges of honor? A bunch of dungeon runs. Over half a million karma, easy? A long long time. It's actually harder for those who play a lot of alts to get it than someone who focuses on one character. That's not me.
So I was happy to see something I could work towards that wasn't quite so distant, because I was feeling that distance. That's why I'm not sad to see this stuff in the game.
I might not even ever get to the new stuff, but I'm happy it's there. That long, long term goal, all by itself wasn't working for me.
That said, of course, they could have left everything at the same stats. The question then becomes how many people saw that as a goal and worked for it and how many people didn't.
I think it's relatively safe to say that too many people didn't see cosmetic only gear as a goal worth striving for.
The problem is this wasn't a matter of need, this was greed.
They hadn't tried anything else first to bring back customers, they immediately jumped to this. If the game was dying and they had dun out of options it would have been easier to stomach but we haven't seen them implement anything else.
They set a direction for Guild Wars 2. They even made it part of their manifesto, and all the public statements they released were supporting that same direction. They made everyone believe that this game would not have gear progression at level cap, and that they had alternatives to keep people playing. They made us believe that this would be an exception to the stale MMO genre. Now, only a few months after the release, every single thing they release is actually moving the game closer in the direction of all the other MMO's, with endgame and gear grinding. So far nothing they have released after launch gives me any confidence that they actually intend to uphold their manifesto or that they intend to work on giving their original fans what they came on board for.
If a company does that, then yes, it's perfectly natural that players quit playing, and that devs lose faith in the company.
They said in their direction that there wouldn't be gear grind. Long before this, you had to grind if you wanted a legendary. The real question is, do you NEED to grind this gear. Some think you do and some think you don't.
And no one knows, because so far, there's nothing in game besides a ring and a backpack.
It's one thing to predict that a game will become gear grind. I simply prefer to wait and see. Here we are a day after the update and my game hasn't changed at all.
You know grinding for legendary wasn't the same thing. Legendary was supposed to be cosmetic making it completely optional, the same way obi armor was in GW1.
Just because you are going to ignore certain content doesn't mean other players won't need to gear up in order to play it. That's the big difference between the voluntary grind to show off cosmetics and the mandatory grind they are now implementing.
Just because you don't plan to participate doesn't mean the gear grind isn't there.
Show me what you need to gear up and play. List it all. I'll wait here.
You're pre-empting. You don't know this will be the case and you can't admit that you don't know. You're guessing, I'm guessing, everyone is guessing.
Yes, if you need this gear to do content, and if it's not easily available, you're right. I agree with you.
But I haven't seen that happen yet. We just have a theory out there that it MIGHT happen.
You didn't have to grind to get max stat gear, because legendaries and exotics had the same stats. The only difference was in looks. ArenaNet specifically told us so when they were introduced:
Now all that has changed. Now you have to grind if you want max stat gear. Which makes it a completely different ballgame.And Legendary Weapons ofcourse are not any more powerful than kind of the top level exotic weapons. In fact, each Legendary Weapon is based off of a very specific exotic weapon power wise, so they're exactly the same power wise, but they look a whole lot cooler.
They have released a lot of crap double talk statements in the past couple weeks but when they were describing infusion they said it was there to counter agony which would eventually overwhelm you. Since you can't infuse exotics you will need to gear up for the new content.
The only way this won't happen is if there is a big enough backlash from the community.
Or if they make it very easy to get the gear, or if they limit where that happens to just one dungeon, which also provides the way to get the gear as you do it.
There's not just one way that this can go down. The way I'm reading it, this condition only exists in the fractals, which is where you get the gear to fight it. If you never go into the fractals you don't need the fractal gear, even if it gives you slightly better stats.
I'm pretty damn sure if they make it so that agony affects the open world, they'll make it much easier to get the gear, which means that it's not grind.
You're making assumptions based on what? Did they say that agony would be floating around the open world or in older dungeons?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote