ANet: Get rid of the "locked door" concept in Nightfall

/signed

Doing all the missions is a pain sometimes, especially when you're short on time. I am pondering whether to remake my Ranger, but the reason it's still here is that I don't have time for the missions.

I like the locked gates, the way I see it there are two options to stop runners - 1: locked gates, 2: make the areas so RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing annoying that no one can run them (then we get to suffer through them when we *do* pve).

I heavily prefer locked gates over the perma ice-snared state I find myself in during the southern shiverpeaks or the OMFG RUN FROM TEH SCARABS crap in the desert.

I agree, the locked gates should go. Seeing lvl3 players in Droknar's annoyed me a lot less (= not at all) than having to play all the missions over and over again in Cantha, in the same order too. Actually I've taken only one of my Tyrian characters through GW:F, the rest are still at Nahpui/Tahnnakai. Same goes for the one Canthan character I made.

So where are all of the characters nowadays? In Tyria exploring, doing quests and missions in whatever order they want, skipping the things they don't feel like doing at the moment.

You know this comparison is ridiculous - sorry if my post gets included in the +20% chance to delete now.

I think we'll have advanced when most of the players will have understood you do not have to beat all the campaigns, with all your toons, and that it won't even penalize your chars (as you can unlock skills and buy them anywhere - etc...).

Alright, so here basically, we have 2 sides, unable to talk to each other: the pros (including me) who cannot find any reason to let players skip a part of the game, and the cons who cannot find any reason to have to play the whole game.

If you want this thread to become constructive, maybe it's time to propose new stuff, to try to make everybody at least partially happy.

Let's take Tyria as an example (note: I'm not suggesting ANET to change Tyria: I'm just using this example to have places and missions well-known to illustrate this idea). Would it be that unfair if it was locked by "region", ie: you can wander arounf Ascalon, or Kryta, or the jungle, etc, but you gotta complete a few missions/quests to reach the next region. Using such a model for the next campaigns would let players explore many maps without having to beat a mission every map or so, would let them skip some quests if they want to, but at the same time would prevent people from running the whole game.

That's the fairest for everybody I can imagine.

Now, if you wanna keep flamming each other, go on.

That destroys the illusion of a world though. I don't care much for runners to be honest, I think it's silly, but I also think that's the players business and not mine.
I don't like the locked gates because there are times I can't find a group of friends online to group with and henchies don't always cut it. So I pick up and explore the land. I find this a great deal of fun and entertaining. In Factions, I could not do this and it completely ruined a HUGE amount of fun for me.
In the idea of thinking constructively, I'll add again the idea I posted before:

Make the merchants refuse to sell you armor or skills further through the story untill you have completed certain quests and missions. There would be no reason to be run then other than just to explore and play the game.
Tyria as example again: Droks merchats will ignore you untill you have completed ascention and gone through Dragon's Lair.

I am not saying that all people who have a complaint are whiners, I undertsand that there arevery valid complaints with good backing that are very constructive and do include ways to fix the problem. I am trying to rid these boards of the useless whiners, who constantl fill the board with useless statements and complaints about thing that should not be changed due to the fact that it would do more hurt than help, and also come in with out validating their complaint or giving reasons to fix the problem, I want these whiners to leave so that we can answer the truly valid complaints, I am doing this due to being tired of having to fish through various threads to find the one credible post.


Edit: And uh Wasaguest, this came to my mind when thinking of tyria, the reason that the missions have to be done also, is for the sake of a timeline, now think of it, suddenly you come out of presearing and you play through the missions up to the shiverpeaks, now some time MUST have passed during that time, so it wouldn't really make sense if someone can suddenly pass a "year" of the game by getting run through it now would it? A good RPG must have a storyline and a timeline of some sort..

Consider the amulet-reward at the end of the game.

It wouldn't be worth much if you could just speed your way to the end. Granted, there are some problems with the door system, especially concerning buddies, but it worked well in making Factions a challenge. The world is supposed to inconvenience you!

/N-S'd, make the next chapter even more brutal and hair-tearing!

/signed

I loved the sense of freedom when I first time stumbled to Lion's Arch.

I don't disagree at all with the timeline point. In fact I support it via differnt methods. If merchants didn't sell to you, or you couldn't enter "future" missions without finishing the ones previously the reason to skip areas would be only to explore. I do not support a closed world that destroys the game world though, and that's what the locked gates do.
Imagine this:
I'm exploring through cantha and come to a broken bridge being repaired by NPCs. They tell me the repairs will be done shortly so I have to turn back. Ok, I can't go that way as the "story" hasn't been completed there yet. I finish a mission and now the bridge is completed and I can pass. Story line moved and there was a reason the pass was out.
As it is now, I can wander around and for no reason at all, there's a gate that's locked. Why? No reason a gate would be there in the middle of a city. How do merchants and tradesmen within the city import and export their goods? How does the city transport food into and out of the city?
The entire illusion of a real city is shattered with lock gates and no explanation behind them as to the story of why.
I have yet to see a valid reason to keep the locked gates however other than it annoys people that others chose not to play through the game. That's not a valid reason, that's why I don't like it, but that's a personal option and opinion and my opinion shouldn't be forced on others. It doesn't weed out anyone, it doesn't filter better and worse players so grasping at possible reasons seems silly.
The only reason that makes even a slight amount of since is that Factions is too short and the gates were added to make it seem longer; that's a design flaw and hopefully will be addressed in Nightfall.

If you Dont like runners dont use them,

I Dont Get the Kill all the Runner attitude, infact i despise it.

In a MMO there should eb a option to do what the hell you want for the MOST PART not the whole game.

and you can mooooooan and hate runners all you want, but why do you really CARE... remove the locked gate because the idea of a partly linear MMO is not apealing to most Gamers.

and i hav no idea why people would VOTE to keep something that will NOT make a differance to them anyway.

They shall be named... The Running Nazi's

/Signed

/signed . .. i like the freedom to choose how I play

No it isn't. There was some magazine article or other (or maybe it was a web interview I forget exactly) where Anet employees acknowledged running exists and said it was part of the game.

That kind of kills the "it's to stop running" argument, unless Anet have changed their minds again, in which case nobody knows because there's been no official word about it.

Tyria: freedom to do what you want and go where you want, except some key areas. Free to skip the eye wateringly boring parts to find the places you do like being.

Cantha: well, not really.

Here we go I found it:

http://guildwars.gameamp.com/guildwars/gwInterview

So there you have it. I'm convinced more now than ever the gates are there to prop up a short and poor PvE campaign.

So make the amulet available to people who only complete all missions. Its not hard you know.

Myself, i loved going through all the missions and primary quests over and over and over, 5 down. 3 more chars to go. Fun isn't it? /bullshit.

Infact i love them that much i just run the ones i can. Things like Stolen Eggs, and practically anything that doesn't need me to escort/kill people.

You Should Get some kind of Award for that Post. Lol!

/signed

One thing I hate about Factions compared to Prophecies is the inability to explore and play the game how I want to, (might explain why all my Factions toons are in Tyria)

Not singed and no need to speculate what they are going to do since it’s just a waste of time and energy. At the end of the day Anet is going do what they want anyway.

in the same way it's a waste of energy and time to live since we're going to die anyway

Yes but at least we have the choice how live our lives where in case of Anet we don't at the end of the day.

Yes but at least we have the choice how we live our lives where in case of Anet we don't at the end of the day.

QFT

I made a survival monk, my 5th character after some deletions and reconsiderations. Started in Cantha, went to Prophecies. Got the first title but it's over now - but I wasn't keying on titles 2 and 3 anyways, if it happened, great . My point?

I can't stomach pre-sear or ascalon anymore, Cantha gets you going quickly [But had I WANTED a story and growth, Shing Jea is rather lame/short]. Pop over to LA, got myself to ToA and Fishermans, Sanctum, *BAM* I'm at the Desert. Some might run Drok here but already have KC armor and I want secondaries. Why didn't I do Cantha even after I lost further survivor? I *really* didn't care to do Mayhem, VSquare, Nahpui, Takanai to get Senjii. Capping too of course, got ascended, got WoH and the Dragon Lair caps as appropriate and in Drok. Now I can veer off and hit Snake, GF, SF etc w/o being forced into channels again. Yeah if I want Ring of Fire I have to go through a little more mission work but a lot more has been opened up.

On the flipside Cantha there's all sorts of roadblocks all over. Yeah I liked the story the first time well enough (even with the bugs and glitches and the Oracle taking two different forms... jarring gaff ) second ok... 3-4-5? Just like elsewhere in this thread, I don't need to be forced into some tight paths.

Take it this way - 10k faction friends both sides to keep moving? Thankfully after the first time through for the next step I got *3* of my characters through on the next sets of 10k faction a side. Yeah so I had a bunch waiting at the 'gate', farming away ftw. Another reason why I don't see my monk moving far along Cantha anytime soon, beyond the 'regular' gated path.

Gotta like being friends too and still dealing with NPCs not talking to you but that's another poor decision a bit OT

Yeah it happens a lot. Have constructive critiscm, suggest things, try to open some eyes, and they come out of the woodwork. It's a game, the goal should be fun to play within different playstyles. I won't have my monk available for any guildy/friend anytime soon deep into Cantha. c'est la vie I suppose, but why such the hurdles? They already made it tough to run with in some cases no less than 3 groups of pop-up (I had a warden, oni, luxon pop-up in kurzick territory lol.... yeah it didn't go well) along with some crazy patrols and #s in general.

Just seems they went a bit crazy - maybe they felt too much chp1 was getting run but that's more because people moved on and the way you have to re-aquire stuff in chp1. chp2 they make you buy all your skills anyways

Up until this post, I had been lurking, but I figured now would be a good time to register and give my opinion.

I strongly dislike the idea of locked doors.

I have not been playing Guild Wars for long. I only have Prophecies, so I have had no direct encounter with locked gates. Still, if they work the way I understand they do, (sealing off outposts and missions until you beat all the missions prior to them) I cannot say the idea has too much appeal to me.

I love exploration. It's tremendous fun. I go out with a group of henchies, and just wander around the map, finding little areas I've never been too, outposts I didn't know existed, and connections to other maps. The most fun I've had so far was when I decided to go out on a little adventure, after beating one of the quests in Iron Horse Mine. I saw that there were paths leading out further into the zone, so I figured that it was a good time to see what was down them. It was neat. I saw the scenery, encountered some mysterious levers, beat the crap out of some dwarves, and had a good time in general. And then, after fighting my way through the zone, I came upon the door to Anvil Rock. I had come this far already, so I figured I would give it a shot.

When I stepped out into Anvil Rock for the first time, I encountered this beautiful zone that was unlike anything I had seen previously in the game. Big open paths, giant fields of snow, huge mountains. I was awe-struck. It was then that I knew that Guild Wars was an absolute keeper. The feeling of discovering an area I hadn't been told by the game to go to was unmatched. I just got that feeling of exploration and discovery that so many MMORPGs try to capture but few actually manage. Sure, the zone was a little too high level for me at that point, but that just made it all the more exciting. The battles were hard-fought and desperate, and sometimes I had to run like hell from groups that were too tough for me to beat. It was exhilarating, far more so than any mission I had done before that.

I came upon Ice Tooth Cave, a little outpost which was almost empty, and seemed to serve no purpose besides being there. Then I wandered south, climbed this cool winding path up a mountain, and found myself at Frost Gate, a mission ahead of where I was "supposed" to be. Finding those places by myself, without the game giving me a little hint on the map, was far more fun and rewarding than playing through Borlis Pass and getting there automatically would have been. And if I had come to either of those outposts and the game told me that I had to beat some mission all the way back in Traveler's Vale, it would have been frustrating, and would have totally spoiled the sense of immersion.

I didn't skip Borlis Pass because I was lazy or it was too hard or because I had done it on a previous character. In reality, I hadn't even tried it yet. I just found a path while doing a quest and wanted to follow it. I felt like doing something else instead of sticking to the beaten path and doing the mission, and enjoyed the fact that the game gave me the freedom to do so. And when I did finally end up in Frost Gate, I decided to map back to Borlis Pass and beat it, because I didn't want to play the game out of order, or leave that mission unbeaten.

I understand a lot of people on this forum hate runners. However, locked doors don't just lock out the people that have been carried to new zones, they also lock out the people who worked hard, explored the game, and found it themselves before the plot took them there. Haven't they earned it just as much as the people who have done missions? They play the game at their own pace, just like you play at yours, and that's one of the many things that makes Guild Wars so different and so much more fun than its rivals. Locked doors can only subtract from that freedom, and less freedom means less fun.

Sometimes people just want to get into the interesting stuff, and skip the hundreds of boring Fed-Ex / Kill 5 xxx missions that pop up. Factions was tediously boring at some points, with all it's Fed-Ex missions and what not, after my first id certainly like to have been able tog et straight out of the city as I hated the FPS lag I got in there, especially when spells started flying.


//Signed.

POssibly something like NPCs at gates saying "Normally we wouldn't let you pass, but XXXXXX (chara u have finished game with) vouched for you, and so you may pass"

I mean I dunno about you guys, but I have 10K Kurzick faction saved up for my account bcause I hated the faction questing bits and repeating it, any new charas skip thatr bit out almost now.


And to agree with the above poster, I love to explore, see whats going around, byt the end of factions I had given up on that, whats the point in going to x location, when its probably blocked off, and no point heading west, when the story will take u that way if u can, its boring!

I remember getting to my first locked gate, and being told I cudnt pass, it was such a minor place, being on Shing Jea Island, but I knew I would experience it alot more, and even tho it was like 8am, the end of the first hour of factions 24hr pre-release, i knew i was in for a bad time with these locked gates.

IMO they simply ruin the game

Now, I loathe runners, hate them with a passion, but I have to agree that the gates need to go. I hate having to repeat quests to continue the game as much as I hate runners. I'd rather ANet find a different way to make runners' lives miserable. Like making it so you CAN'T do a mission until you've done the mission that's supposed to come before it. That would be good.

I don't really have a problem repeating missions, just boring-ass quests.

Keep the locked doors. Locked doors seperates the men from the boys, if your character hasn't completed the story, then you can't be wearing the end game armor. It makes total and perfect sense to me to prevent players from "running to the 15k armor guy" / last few missions.

I like that locked doors creates a population in all the towns along the way too, well, mostly. Imagine if there were no locked doors in factions? How many MORE towns would be empty? I'd wager a lot more...

/NOT SIGNED

How that?

***press Enter mission***

*One of the players of your team has been badly ran and cannot enter the mission*
*Are you sure you want to continue?*

***Press No***

Leader: aiight, who didn't do the last mission?
Leader: anyone?
Leader: Bah, let's go.

***press Enter mission***

*One of the players of your team has been badly ran and cannot enter the mission*
*Are you sure you want to continue?*

***Press Yes***

Leader: aww that was the monk.

This made me laugh. The system could be made very easily using NPCs to start the mission rather than just hit the "Enter Mission" button. The system itself could be made to make sure each person has completed the previous mission by having X Primary quest active.

An NPC could also be made to act as a "I'm ready" so that each person in the group must click them before the leader can select "enter mission".

Merchants could also be made to see what missions you have completed before selling end game armor or "the next level" of armor.

So still, there is yet a good reason to have the locked gates in place other than to annoy, destroy imersion and generally lengthen a way to short game (a design flaw and not something the players should suffer for).