Dev Update: Ranks & Elite Mission

Ok, so I got bored and had to stop reading these threads at about the third page, as it was all the same whining about titles and the elite mission. Personally, I think the way the Sunspear Title works is great - only characters made in ELONA can obtain the highest Sunspear rank, which personally, I feel is awesome. Why should characters from Tyria and Cantha, foreign characters to Elona, be able to obtain one of the most sacred titles of Elona? I would be upset if my Tyrian or Canthan characters could obtain the rank of Spearmarshal... As I stated above, they are foreign characters and should not be able to gain the rank as they are not native to Elona, they are merely "guests" or "visitors".

Are you really at all familiar with the workaround people are using to get rank 9 sunspear? It's completely independent of where a character was made. It also gains them nothing, and will be available to everyone in a couple months, so does it honestly matter?

Why, then, should an Ascalonian be able to get the rank of General and report directly to Warmarshal Varesh Ossa? Surely General Bayel must be stripped of his rank...

I'd like to call that 'regionist' - you should really be able to get the same ranks whether you're originally from Cantha, Tyria or Elona if the rank is dependent on what you've achieved, not who you are. Sure, it may be harder if you're not starting in Elona, but there shouldn't be a region-specific cap.

And yet, everyone pissed and moaned when they couldn't get Defender of Cantha/Tyria for characters from opposite continents, and Arenanet decided to let them get it. The idea for combining games on an account is to give all your characters 100% access to every continent, and titles count for this.

This is off topic, but there is no way access to the Elite missions will require that you max out Sunspear or Lightbringer titles. Can you imagine trying to get 3 or 4 characters there? It may require some difficult feat, but not grind.

I hope the elite missions dont require max titles. you can beat the game having just sunspear general title, and rank 1 in lightbringer, I for one dont want to have to grind my way to max titles(..dull anyone?) to access a mission.

but unfortunatly, only 3 gems per character.

And whops.. I mis-read I thought we were talking about the lightbringer title.

This entire issue is being handled horribly by ArenaNet. I'm not going to shoot the messenger (Gaile, in this case), but come on. Even if it may not hold up in a court of law, we see clearly that there was supposed to be an Elite mission. There was supposed to be an extra Hero. There are supposed to be maxed titles that are achieveable in a logical way. They aren't here.

What does ArenaNet do? They spin it to try to make us think that we are getting something for free out of the goodness of their hearts.

Honestly, if you guys are behind schedule, say so. That's fine - it happens. It's perfectly fine for a game like GW to delay some content and release the rest, while promising to get the rest out soon. In fact, that was probably the best of available options.

However, this spinning the event into how great ArenaNet is for giving us free major updates is just insulting to the player base's intelligence. Period.

If I were someone in ArenaNet making the call about what sort of info regarding upcoming features to dole out to the public... This thread would make me very, very wary of releasing ANY news until I was absolutely, positively, 100% certain the feature would be done. And then I'd still have to think about it a while...

Sometimes I feel kinda bad for those guys (sometimes). You work your arse off for a year getting what you feel is a great game out to the public and... so much of what you read on the forums is people's inventive use of hyperbole*. I suppose they probably get thick skins after a while, but geez... I have to wonder about people like that who are always the first ones to spew out a contemptuous sneer of "gg anet". To those people, sometimes I really wish a million people would publicly critique YOUR work (or homework, if young enough). God forbid you actually make a mistake or anything, or don't get things exactly right the first time you try something new and difficult.

I guess I just wish some people would get a bit of perspective on these things. I'm not saying some of the issues discussed don't have merit, but bugs and suggestions can be reported without taking cheap shots at the devs. I actually do believe they really care about what their customers and fans think, and I'll bet that many who actually watched the "making of" DVD would probably agree with me. Call me a sucker if you like - but I've seen a lot of "making of" featurettes, and often you see some producer from the publisher doing all the talking, when you know all the guys behind the scenes did all the work.

* I was originally going to try to be cute and say something like "99.9% of what you read here is just exaggeration and hyperbole", but thought better of it. I figured I'd just get some clever response telling me (quite sincerely) that I was guilty of said sin myself, completely missing the intentional irony. Ah well...

That is exactly what I'm sayin'. Thank you for putting a bit more eloquently than I did. Though I doubt there's going to be any admittance of err, and soon this horse wll be dead. Maybe they'll learn - fool us once, shame on them, fool us twice, well you get the idea.

EDIT: We're not upset because "all the content wasn't done and delivered as promised". Well, at least Slayermann, I, and a handful of others arguing this. We're upset because it's explained away as if we're almost foolish to think it should've been done, and we should be ecstatic that it's even going to be done and offered as a 'free' update months later. We're upset by how the situation is handled, not the situation itself.

Wow, too much for me too read.

Please tell the dev's they did a great job. I understand what they go thru to get a game out on a set release date. The only critisism I have it to post ont he websit(and maybe include in the box) any information about parts that may not be released with the actual box. This way people will have something to look forward to instead of whine about.

If you think GW is bad, try playing Anarchy Online....FunCom doesn't do crap for the community. The game is 5 years old & they still can't fix old bugs. GW has a great dev team that is active & listens to the community.

/goteam

Good job Guildwars Dev team, I'm enjoying all 3 of your games, keep up the good work.

Indeed. Its almost as if they're saying, "You expected the game to be finished on its release date? Well that's your problem. Consider yourself lucky that we're still working on it."

Yeah, a better mini-pet would be nice since the Varesh is such a flop. I got the CE & preorder and was really hoping for something a bit nicer....The other 2 have nice dragons...I would really like to see one for NF...but then I haven't seen any dragons in NF so far either

Yeah. Seriously, what the hell? Do you really think everyone here is so dumb that we're going to go, "Oh, we get the stuff the manual lists as being features! OMGNOWAI! ANet, you're so awesome." ANet IS awesome, but not for providing stuff that is, (not to beat a dead horse) IN THE MANUAL.

French sondage :

Did you think that the Elite zone of Nightfall was going to be included ?
1 - Yes, I bought Nightfall while thinking of having access to the Elite zone
2 - No, I thought the Elite zone would be accessible only after a future add-on

Current result (124 votes) :
1 - 81,45% (101)
2- 18,55% (23)

http://forums.mondespersistants.com/...7&page=1&pp=20

Sorry for my weird english, I'm French.

I'm still not quite clear on what the Elite mission is.

I bought Nightfall from the online store, downloaded the manual last night (haven't had time to read it yet) and am enjoying it immensely. I don't feel betrayed by the lack of an 'Elite mission'. So my answer to that survey is c) neither. I didn't expect one in the game, and I didn't expect one in a later update.

Still haven't quite finished Factions either, mind you.

Wow... Gaile I'm sorry.... people really do whine about anything! ohhh noooessss I can't get lvl 8 sunspear title... If your playing guildwars for the repeatable pve -_- I'm sorry.

Clueless... You have it exactly the wrong way around.

If it were possible to move on to spearmarshal with blessing while we do our quests, explore and cap our elites, we wouldn't have to repeat (much) PvE to get there. As it happens, we'll have to get back later to the content we're playing now if we want the title, because the title remains frozen until some future update. ANet is guilty of creating the need to do 'repeatable PvE', not saving us from doing so, by not allowing us to move on now, while we're playing through the game the first time.

i play dervish, i capped 14/15 dervish elite skills so far. but i can't find "ebon dust aura" skill. and (according to forums) noone else can. so there is my question: is the skill in the game now or it will be added later?

You seem to forget option (3): Plan to release the game a bit later but with the elite mission(s) and stuff in it like you guys did with the previous chapters. I hope the money call won't influence Anet that much like it did for Blizzard. All in good time, don't forget where you came from Anet. And I was there too, like many others. Critical fanboi from the first hour, don't embarras us, thank you.

No. No. Just... No. First, your logic, and apparently many others' is bass-ackwards. Think. What is missing from the game is the elite mission. What is missing from the game is the "anticipated" ability to achieve the highest ranks of the titles. It makes no sense to conclude from this that the highest ranks will be required to gain access to the elite mission. What does make sense is to conclude that these highest ranks will become available in the elite mission. Let me repeat that for the hard-of-reading. It is likely that the elite mission will be the mechanism by which the highest titles may be obtained. That is, among the rewards for completing may be SS or LB points, or perhaps blessings will be available, or perhaps subquests, or whatever. Either way, throughout the storyline, we are cut off from using low level areas to acheive higher ranks in those titles. It only makes sense that the highest level area will be where we will achieve the highest level title. Woo Hoo !!!! Discovery !!! So logical.

Also, the "work-around" is not exploiting a bug. Gaile Gray acknowledged that it was clever and that the priests were cutting off future blessings exactly as intended. Is it an exploit to get 7,510 SS points even though if you left the zone at 7,500 points, you would not be able to get those 10 ? That's pretty ridiculous. Exploiting bugs is a bannable offense per the EULA. This is not a bug - it is working exactly as intended - and thus it is not an "exploit". It is merely planning within the parameters of the game to achieve an end that would not be otherwise possible. Do you consider it to be an exploit for those achieving level 20 in pre-searing ? Do you think the devs anticipated the methods employed to do it ? Heck no. But now, ANet has not only given a title to these characters, but they have removed their previous nerf to enemies levelling up, for the specific purpose of allowing people to do this.

I have no complaint with those achieving the max title using the "work-around". In absolutely no way, does it negatively affect my gameplay, nor anyone else's. This is coming from someone who achieved Castellan before realizing there was a work-around. Do I want the max SS title ? Heck yes. Have I ever considered it a bug that I wasn't able to get it yet ? Heck no. I knew there would be a way, and now that I know it will be available in a few months, that's fine - I have plenty of titles to get in the mean time.

Now, on the original topic of Gaile's post and the whole discussion of the elite mission not being in the game. I am among those who can accept that it is not in the game, even though I do believe I was lead to believe it would be and expected it to be upon release. Any rebuttal that the elite mission was promised, but not promised for release is complete and utter bullshit and ANet should know better. The fact is, ANet invited a game reviewer to come in and write an article about the game, knowing full well that we would read it and be expecting an elite mission. There were numerous threads permeating these and other forums searching for the elite mission. ANet's response should have been much sooner, and frankly, should have been upon release or earlier since they, no doubt, also read that same article. While ANet is apparently not in control over what is written, they should take responsibility to clarify any inaccuracies. As time went on, as you can read in the other forum, I based my contention that the elite mission HAD to be in the game, because certainly ANet would have told us by then if it weren't. More experienced posters than me tried to show me the light, but I held fast to my belief in ANet.

Anyways, it's water under the bridge now, and I'm glad to see Gaile's most recent post in this thread proactively clarifying certain things. This is in no way an attack on you, Gaile. I think you do a wonderful job and you are restricted as to what you can say and when. However, I could have done without the presentation in the "aren't you lucky, we're giving you a free update that will include the elite mission" post. Not an exact quote.

OK, thanks. I tried to abandon this thread after Gaile's most recent post, as I felt there would be nothing more worthwhile, but then I saw the post about only locals getting the title and some other crap being posted, so I felt like responding.

Why are so many of you worried about an elite mission? It's just one very small part of a great game. You'll get it eventually. Gaile said it wasn't supposed to be included in the game. If PC Gamer said it was, it's not Anet's problem. Gaile also said that the manual contained a lot of info that was simply informing us of what's to come. Choose to believe her or not, but try to get over it.

I suggest some of you stop rushing through the game and try to enjoy it. Someone said they beat NF within 48 hours of starting! That's ridiculous. He obviously took his lvl 20 Tyrian or Canthan character and rushed through.

Play the game however you want , but trust me, you'll enjoy it a lot more if you take your time and focus on enjoying this awesome game rather that trying to see how fast you can beat it.

I think it's completely stupid to prevent people from getting the top rank in the Sunspear track. To be honest, I tried the trick to get to R9 but thanks to GW's wonderful code my computer did a hard reboot (the only game/application/etc in which it does so) in the middle of it and now I'm stuck as well. Maybe A-net should work on fixing the lag/error 7's/crashes instead of delivering promised content for 'free' months behind schedule.

Are you guys just going to pull this "additional content" every time you miss a deadline? Perhaps your development schedule is far too ambitious....

Summary: Remove rank limit - it discriminates against all the players who weren't informed the launch was incomplete ( The "oh hey guys this isn't a bug it's a feature!" excuse is a lame excuse Gaile - take the blame where you deserve it!)

really at the end of the day if it was in the manual or not, mentioned in a magazine or not, they have released an incomplete game as they have already acknowledged.. it was probably planned to have the elite mission in the game from the beginning but time-constraints stopped it however they could have shown us a little more respect and just said that the elite wasnt finished yet so they could have held back the game or given us the majority of it. I think a lot of the talk in this thread stems from that and most people would have been happier if we had been given the knowledge before we had the game in our hands, its not like it would take much time out of someones day to add a couple sentences to the FAQ or post a note on the front page

since it take at least a few months time to release the elite mission, i am sure the dev team know they can't deliver elite mission on release date 'few months' before release. It seems to me they didn't release such info anytime sooner due to marketing reason.... Honestly, I can't think about any other benefit they can have on holding back such important info to players giving that they invest resource(ie, gaile & frog , etc) to regularly release info about game development. I am sure they do know the down side of telling player late. But obviously anet weighing the marketing reason as sth more important then player's feeling.


i hope i am wrong here. But if i am not, then anet is going down to the same track as NCsoft's strategy in online game(eg. Lineage2, etc). They simply don't bother about customers as they thought most players are just teenages...

I'll agree somewhat with the fact Nightfall wasn't finished when released; after all, does anyone else remember that nifty little "feature" that prevented characters from reaching the main continent? (To Anet's credit, though, they did fix that bug within hours of release.) Simply put, I think the 6 month timetable for new expansions (yes, that's what they are) is a bit unrealistic for any developer, and clearly they're still working out the kinks in the process... as Guild Wars players, I guess we're just going to have to recognize that there's going to be some expected content which won't make the cut come release time.

As for Sunspear rank 9... I'd love to have that title too, but let's all recognize the simple wisdom that if blessings weren't capped, it would be insanely easy to attain. I've had KoaBD since Factions, and I'd already resigned myself long ago to the fact that a million people (an exaggerated figure of speech, obviously) would be running around touting "Kind of a Big Deal" not long after Nightfall came out -- that's just how easy it is to get Protector titles. 3 Prots + 3 maps = KoaBD And 1. I guess what I'm trying to say is that an easily attainable max title that everyone can get isn't worth much credibility, and if you are aiming for KoaBD, you should, at the very least, put the minimum effort needed for mapping, especially when 3 freebies are practically handed to you on a platter (another exaggeration ). Suffice to say that I agree wholeheartedly with the blessing cap, though it would've been nice to have that "more direct" method of earning promotion points available already

Gawd I just got through two pages of this yammer and I'm depressed, every other post, was a a moaning kiddy that wants more now and for free... patience is a virtue children. -.- I swear this was a teen game, not a 5 year old game for little kiddies who want everything now. Please Anet start charging for this game. I may not be able to play it anymore but at least then it will teach the kiddies a lesson.

on a lighter note, I am EXTREMELY happy with the current content! It is going to have me engrossed for quite a long time because I don't spend 22 hours a day on the computer so that later I can whine about not having anything to do. Even though I likely won't even be anywhere near the elite mission in order to do it when it comes out I am excited about it nevertheless. Basically thank you Anet for continuing to provide us all with entertainment for a mere 50 dollars for a massive gaming experience.

soooooo let me get this straight, you wanted them to hold back the release of the ENTIRE game for a few more months, for ONE mission?! And now you are complaining about them releasing a majority of the content in a quick and timely manner, and worse going off and saying they should have held off release for a few more months for ONE mission so you could moan and groan about the game not being released on time? IF this is so then you sir, are a fool.

I got way, many more pages to read before I know everything that was said here, but I'm three pages in and I just cannot believe what I am reading.

What a bunch of freaking whiners!!!! OMG who do you people complain to when things disappoint you in real life? NOBODY!

Upon reading these first three pages I'm amazed that Anet wants to give us anything at all, let alone new, free content.

I, for one, am very happy there is no elite mission yet. Everybody who rushed through the game just so they could find the elite mission and sell whatever great drops there are for millions of plats and ectos. Good! I'm glad you people have to wait. Glad that other people will have a chance to get most of their characters to a place where they can access the "elite" missions and get good drops for themselves.

*encore* I didn't see the elite mission situation quite that way in now we all have a chance but I like that sentiment that now even people with limited time on the net *me* can still get some of that oh-so-beautiful cash XD

Please sit down, what I'm about to say will no doubt come as a shock to you.

Are you sitting? Good... You see, the fact of the matter is that here, in the adult world, knowingly releasing an unfinished product without informing consumers prior to the sale generally lands one in court -- bankruptcy court at the very least.

So the answer to your question is not "NOBODY", but instead a judge, class-action laywer, or an attorney general.

The gaming world is not the real world, of course. The gaming world is a place where releasing a product with more bugs than a flea circus is the norm and where companies make you agree to an uneforceable contract before you can use the product you bought and can't return because those companies know that no one in their right mind is going to spend the kind of money it would take to have such agreement laughed out of court. The gaming world is, in short and quite sadly, the kind of place where these kinds of shenanigans are commonplace and even loudly defended by the less clueful. But, even in the gaming world trying to sell a patch as a free and wonderful gift costs customers, far more so than simply having come clean before release would have.

Free content? You mean you didn't pay for Nightfall?

Anet does not "want" to give you squat, and they certainly aren't giving you anything for free. They are a business, you are a consumer, your relationship with Anet is inherently advesarial -- they want to produce the least amount of content for the most amount of money, you want to get the most amount of content for the least amount of money. Anet is not your friend, they do not love you, and the aren't going to do anything they don't feel is beneficial to their business model. That's reality, and not an overly difficult one to discern once you get past the laughable "gifts under the Christmas tree" BS.

Someone needs to do a paper on Transference defense mechanisms and gamers, I suspect there's a Nobel prize in there somewhere.

Wow, finally someone with a clue.

But on the same angle, companies that do sell products other than software also have things happen after the release & have to have recalls on products. I can understand being late & not delaying the release date, but FFS, just let us know so that we are informed consumers....then it's up to us to buy it at release or wait til the missing content is available.

Thing is, all the people pissing & maoning that ran thru the game in 2-3 days would have STILL bought the darn game....they can BS & say they would have waited, but we all know better....you guys are the ones that are hooked on the games like crack, there's nothing that could have kept you from getting it short of being abducted by aliens.

If i call you a kid 6 times, i would have used the word more than you, do i win the argument then?

Ahhhh, but a EULA means you can do what you like, and then when you do deliver advertised content, you can pretend its extra content.

@ Myria: I believe the free content he was speaking of is things like Sorrows Furnace and The HUGE free update that Gaile said were to expect in the next month or so.

If you go back a few pages in this post, Gaile states that the elite mission was NOT supposed to be included in the game. That's what she said. It's a fact. Now whether you wan't to call Gaile a liar or not is up to you. PC Gamer was the one that said Nightfall was to include an elite mission on release.

Also how is Nightfall an unfinished product? If you can install it on your computer and it works and contains the gameplay as decribed on the box you bought it in, then it is finished. That of course doesn't mean that any bugs Anet may have missed wont be fixed or patched nor does it mean that they wont release new content for the game later.

I think the "whiners" certainly have the right to whine in as much as the complainers of the whiners have a right to complain. Clearly a-net fumbled, business model or not, friend or foe, a-net made a rash error in judgement apon release.

Really, even the casual players like to be included in "whats available" content and those that are early in the game with several hours of content ahead of them really aren't that concerned.

I don't think this is going to break the franchise, but it doesn't bode well for a trust relationship with a-net and it's consumers/users. I imagine if there weren't water under the bridge of past flubbs and misunderstandings this would be a very minor issue. Yet since there is a history of these misleading informative decisions in the past, the consumers/users are a bit leary.

All this is due, most likely, to the fact that a-net has A LOT of plans, with very small windows and limited staff. If we were talking about a pay to play game, this company would be bankrupt.

The game released to us was rushed, I cannot even think of calling it a standalone game, complete games has small cg's at the beggining, so did prophecies, so did factions, where is nightfall's? well that doesn't matters really, but can give you an idea of how much investment they wanted to do on this chapter, and of course the next ones...

Are you sitting down Myria??? I guess you missed the part where Gallie said..

"And, I’m happy to tell you, some planned Guild Wars updates include content and features that, frankly, you really don’t have a clue about yet, ‘cause we’re not talkin’."

THAT'S THE NEW CONTENT I'M TALKING ABOUT!

I'm shouting so you will pay attention and maybe actually read what the woman wrote. FFS.

If, and I think this is what you were getting at, you wanted to sue Anet for not giving you an elite mission? Please tell me I'm wrong here. We aren't talking about a company not telling consumers that the valves in their artificial hearts give out after 4 months. That is something to take to court. Not, Anet said they'd give us an elite mission and they didn't...*sob*

Anet doesn't have to give me squat huh? Yes that is true, and yet, they have. They are not required to give us a Halloween, Christmas, 4th of July Festival and yet they still do. How does this effect their bottom line? How much more money do they make from doing these things? Hmmmm? They also do not need to hand out all kinds of headgear, nor did they need to give us Sorrow's Furnace, which was indeed free, was indeed huge. Anet is a different kind of company, and they are trying. They do NOT charge us a monthly fee, when by all rights they could. They also do not have to come on here and tell us anything, nor do they have to listen to any constructive criticisms we might have and try and accomodate us.

he didnt pay for nightfall, and neither did you, or anyone. what you paid for is the privelage to play nightfall on arenanets servers. wether you get the whole game on day one or within its lifecycle is irrelevant: youre still getting what you paid for.

This is how I see it, one, anet is doing the right thing. I can wait until anet takes their time and finsh a product! Nightfall is a full game. The content is more than what alot of games have to offer, that is fact!

Anet is on the mark of putting alot game companies out of business.(mmorpgies) Sure they need one more team to give them more time on a game. However anet and people must under stand there will be people who don't like anet or doesnot want anet to grow. So they will try to put them down, or put anet people down.


right now as it is anet is offering more than some of these mmorpgies out there! (when YOU BUY THE GAME)

All anet needs to do in this game is better end game content. things other than pvp or farming and this game will sky rocket. like say mounts,ships,racing and homes.

as for content this game already has alot of content, more than some games have to offer on the market right now

So anet take your time and complete missions.


P.s anet please do not take the cg part lightly, you now need a cg team when you the finacing to do it and one more team to give more time to make a game coming out every 6 months

Still waiting to finish up my Sunspear title track. We shouldn't have to wait for something like this. Any new info would be greatly appreciated.