Why does ANet have to cater to the "inexperienced?"

Three things:

1. In WoW old players pay the bills too. Every month.

2. Yes, the game does get handed to you. A couple months ago they pretty much cut the leveling time in half through quest reward buffs, difficulty nerfs and flat out reducing amount of XP needed to level by 15%. All pre-60 elites (hard mobs) have been either dumbed down or lost their elite status completely.

3. I'm pretty sure almost everyone who's the least bit serious about the game has seen SSC. I mean, of course, the random guy with a 40-something as his highest char after a year of playing hasn't seen it, but that's WoW's equivalent of people who think that 1-20 in GW is anything but the tutorial. These players don't know about ursan and probably have 3 elites capped, so they don't even benefit from dumbing down of the game.

I friggin hate WoW, however, I will be the first to admit that WoW has more quality and quantity. Guild Wars has been dead for a long time. I would say a month or two into Eye of North.

Thing is, Guild Wars isn't WoW. Comparing the two is retarded. Guild Wars is unique, though.

Guild Wars reminds me of the grinding in Diablo II, now. I remember when Diablo II died and you still had tons of players just grinding away. Baffles the piss out of me, however, I still log on (after quitting yet again) and grind away.

I wish they would continue to introduce more content for Guild Wars, however, much of the mechanics of the game has been f*d up since the release of EotN. What I used to consider Elite missions are the only missions I do now, and the game has no challenge for me anymore.

Anet has never catered to the "newbies". They are a company that has to squeeze life out of their product. Most of the old players that I remember from a year to two ago have quit and moved onto other games. If Anet didn't change things, the game would fade away (hard to believe that, huh?).

GW2 is going to come out eventually. I really look forward to meeting up with all my old guildies and Alliance members. Things will be good for awhile.

In the end, if you are new to online gaming, understand that your favorite game will die eventually. It has happened to me with so many games already. Guild Wars was a great game. Now it is more of a social thing for me. I have made a lot of friends through it.

WoW pratically gives top end pvp gear and pve gear for free with Honor/arena points and Badges of justice. It's much easier to max a character in WoW (besides the levelling part) then it is to max guild wars titles.

MMORPGs are suppose to be easy because their business is run by casual gamers, hence why MMORPGs have such low computer specs requirements, that's the point "Massive" , if they made the game as challenging as a FPS or if the computer specs were top end, the game would probably not get that Massive population.


PS: You think that getting T6 or T5 is harder then achieving r12 or r5+ champion? lol . The hardest thing in WoW is to get 25 morons working together.

Yes, it does affect your play. If you want to do UW, or FoW, or DoA, or dunegons in EotN, guess which skills they expect you to use? And since ANet refuses to let us use full hero parties in such places, we ARE force to use those skills to play that content.

Dumbing down the game ruins it for everyone.

Took the words outta my mouth. GW basically died because of EoTN. Sure, I beat it, but afterwards, I was not compelled at all to repeat all that grind just to beat it again. I've beaten the l33t areas with Ursan, I've beaten them without Ursan, with guildies, with PuGs. The only things I do now are farming once a while to collect weapons, armors or log just to see who is online and chat. If those buddies of mine left GW, I'm gone as well.

Wear lower-leveled armor, don't use certain skills, don't kite, don't heal, etc. If you find the game too easy, then there are numerous ways to "gimp" yourself.

That's what's happened in Guild Wars. By not using consumables, by not using PvE skill bars, or by not using Ursan Blessing, I am gimping myself. I am not using the tools given to me.

And I'll comment a bit on this point, though I don't want to get too far from what I've been talking about:

I'm part of the PvE crowd, and I certainly did not "beg" for this. All I had to do was change my skill bar to something good. If I couldn't do that, that means I didn't know my class too well, i.e. I lacked experience, i.e. I was inexperienced.

Seeing as skills aren't restricted in terms of areas, that's an incredible oversight on ANet's part. I highly doubt that it was on "accident", since I don't think ANet is that stupid.

If "most people" didn't think that, than why hasn't Blizz handed the end game to those "most people?" The majority of WoW will never reach even halfway past the end game, and there's still a huge chunk of the playerbase that will never set foot in a raid. How is Blizzard able to devote so much time, effort, and polish to the endgame areas that no one's able to see and still hold onto so many players?

Last I recalled, Onyxia - among many other old world raids - still required an attunement.

I also don't recall there ever being a "party reduction requirement" in terms of raids. I don't recall seeing any update notes at the release of TBC on the lines of "reduced the difficulty of MC, Onyxia's Lair, and every other 40 man so it can be done with a smaller level 60 group". Unless you're talking about raids requirements be lessened because of higher leveled players - in which case is a different matter.

They can devote more resources into those areas because they are being fueled by constant free money as part of the pay to play platform. No one can even deny the fact that at least 50% or more of any MMO's player base are solely suckered in and continue to play said games because they are grind fests and as an incentive you are left with the feeling of " I don't want to stop after all this time, effort I've put in already" and continue to play a bored filled pay to play game.

Right now I can stop playing GW and come back months later knowing my account will still be live and active, other games you'd have to wait out the billing cycle or choose to throw money away or maybe even be faced with a limited amount of inactivity until your account is rendered closed.

GW's introduction of Factions made GW what we know it as now. Before then, it was just an awesome online game to play. I remember how Factions solidified that guild unity for many people. How you could have all these people logging on together to either compete with other guilds, AB, RA, GvG or Faction Farm for borders between the Kurzicks and the Luxons. I honestly believe that Guild Wars should have introduced the rivalry again in GW2. I missed those days of grinding to talk crap to other guilds. I am not a fan of them, however, GW started to die when the Seven Deadly Sins got beaten out for HzH. It just completely died for me when EotN came out. I had done everything in Guild Wars.

PvP has become stale and nearly impossible to stay committed to (I am talking about myself).

PvE is filled with new people who only know Ursan and older players who isolate with their friends (like me).

Anyway, I know my guild went from being a known guild in the faction farming community (held every friggin town on the Kurzick side at least one, if not more often)... to an awesome farming and Elite guilds (pre-EotN)... to a title hunting guild(post-EotN)... to a small collection of friends that log on because we miss each other's jokes and conversation.

Heh...

PvE/PvP skill split anyone? I think ANet seriously underestimated just how complicated the skill system was going to become once they started adding new chapters and professions. I don't know if I'd call it stupidity, but I think it really was an oversight and they just didn't realize three years ago how complicated and unmanageable the game was going to become.

I think you're wrong on that. They did simplify the pre-Outlands raiding so that practically anyone could PUG it, plus they handed over Elite PvP gear to anybody with the patience to grind for it. I think they'll turn over the Outlands content to more casual people when Lich King comes out, and when the game finally starts to trail off, I think they'll turn the LK content over to the casual players as well.

[quote]Last I recalled, Onyxia - among many other old world raids - still required an attunement.[/qutoe]
Many of them had that - as well as raid-specific requests - removed in 2.4

No, that was my mistake. I meant to refer to the 25-man raids in TBC that are available as 10-mans instead so that it's easier to get into them.

An interesting comment I missed:

I wouldn't compare the two on PvE/PvP terms. I think it'd be more accurate to compare guild rankings in GW to team ratings in WoW.

That said, I think getting one of the PvP titles in WoW would indeed show as much prestige as a R12 in GW.

This we can partially agree on, but it's not the matter of discussion I'd like to push this towards to, since I found there were better choices and alternatives than adding a split.

Pre-raiding only became "simplified" via the new level cap and the gear gap. So as a by-product it does becomes simplified, but not in a direct sense. But this is always a by-product of releasing new content.

The issue, however, is more about seeing the "next big thing". By the time those raids + instances become available, they lose their appeal, much like Deep/Urgoz lost theirs when DoA became released. In this sense, I am starting to slightly understand the course of action ANet took. I do, however, believe it to be done in too drastic a fashion.

Those are TBC instances. The first to receive the removal of attunement was SSC/TK, then came Hyjal and BT, then Karazhan.

Due to the emphasis on gear in WoW, these are still far from being totally open. You'll get squashed by the trash mobs if you don't have the required gear earned from previous raids.

Similar to saying "40-man raids in TBC that are available as 25-mans instead"? I didn't know that they were originally going to be released as 40 mans. I've found the 25 man to be a bit more preferable because there's less people sitting on their ass this time around. While this does make it a bit stricter in terms of gear requirements, I think it balances out in terms of total effort.

Incorrect: they nerfed the world quest-related elites or, in some cases, completely removed their elite status. Even quests now labeled (group) are often soloable with decent DPS.

Regarding the rest of the comments we've been tossing back and forth, I think we've beaten it down to mostly a difference in opinion, so I won't comment on them specifically.

Well I certainly don't want a repeat of the same GW so what is there left to be, but, a watered down version of WOW? We've already seen the focus in NF and most especially GWEN that this IS their focus a watered down version of WOW with not so heavy on the "i'm better than you because" lean, I think it will be a nice balance of both that is what I'm wanting.

A version of GW that doesn't screw over PvP, and doesn't kill PvE balance with a single skill and still retains challenge. Something along them lines would be perfect.

That is fine and would be ideal.

I have been speaking in reference to endgame raids and the like. It's quite apparent the nerfs they put in place for leveling from 20-60.

You're kidding me right ? There's dozens of gladiators in WoW and arena was only released about a year ago, guild wars has been out for 3, how many r12s do you know? Sure the wow population is about 3 bigger, but still, there's atleast 10-20 gladiators for every rank 12.

Besides, haven't you read my Merciless Gladiator guide?

Step1) Roll Druid, Warrior or Warlock
Step2) If W find Druid, if Druid find W
Step3) Join arena and roll face on the keyboard
Step4) Profit

Honestly man, I don't play GW anymore, but i got my tiger and that took 100x more effort + time then getting a 2300+ arena team...

lolright

Arena is a joke. Yes, I realize HA is now a joke too, but arena is a whole different level of "joke". Compared to WoW, HA is near-perfectly balanced.

Well, I guess I would be impressed by a mage or a priest gladiator (or another weaker class), but you know what? I've never seen a mage gladiator on my server. I've seen dozens of warlocks and druids. In WoW, your arena title actually shows what class you played, so if you're a warlock or a warrior wearing the gladiator title that's effectively putting a banner over your head that says "IWAYED MY TIGER"

WoW does not deserve to be discussed as a serious PvP game, no matter how much Blizzard tries to hype it up as one. When all of PvP is based around not letting your opponent play the game, how can you take it seriously?

It's the "Oh shite, we promised them stuff in GW2 for filling their GW HoM" syndrome. WoW has no need for accessible end game content yet, it has no sequel to push. Several gradual changes in PVE (skills, hero AI and mob AI) have been making it easier pretty much since GW2 was announced.

I'd also have something to say about the Factions elite missions allegedly being "accessible".

I'd like to butt in and share my personal experience on this subject. A big part of the reason why the % of people who hasn't seen endgame raids is so small (I belong to such %) is because the servers are "advanced" already and we cannot find groups for instances that are required to equip for such raids. I'm having a really hard time trying to gear up for Kharazan and no one of the guilds I've been in helped me consistently, for WoW sucks people into the grind threadmill where every split second mustn't be wasted.

In WoW's case, being "inexperienced" can't be helped: it's not like I want to be inexperienced. In GW's case, lately Anet has been catering to "dumb" people.


P.S. It should be noted that I'm neither a tank nor a healer, and it all depends on the server.

I saw a post in the WoW forums once about a 2v2 match where one team had rolled two Druids to heal each other on the assumption nobody would devote the time to killing them and just quit, causing a de facto win.

The person posted the result - it took several hours, and the lock on the other team had single-handledly done well over 1 million damage, but the Druids eventually lost.

No, ANet has been catering to people who haven't been willing or able to devote the time required by the original game mechanics.

Frankly, most of the non-storyline portions of Guild Wars are pure, unadulterated stupid (and the storyline portions were never that hard to begin with). Grinding out ectos and shards for prestige Fissure armor, for example, isn't hard, just extremely time-consuming. Nobody who's picked up Fissure armor post-Prophecies did it due to any skill, they did it because they have ludicrous amounts of spare time on their hands. Things like Ursan are just catering to those of us who don't care to pledge our lives to a stupid digital graphic (although I still don't have the patience to grind out the required amounts, even with the changes...)

The thing is, the time "required" could be lessened - greatly - if you were good at the game. That's why so many are up in arms with these wholly imba PvE builds: It doesn't cater to those who don't have time, it caters to those who lack the experience and skill.

Now you're just being a tool. I solo'ed FoW and UW for what I obtained before I got fed up with it. If you have a more efficient way to obtain ectos and shards than a 15 minute solo run, I'd love to hear it form you, oh might lord of the Guild Wars, because the problem was never that it was hard to get them, it's that the f***ing things are so rare it just takes forever.

I figured it out, just for kicks:

I picked up 45 ectos and shards each in 4 weeks, averaging about 9 hours of play per week if you use my current /age data, factoring in the assumption that I spent 20% of the time AFK and only spent half of my remaining time in that 4 weeks doing UW and FoW. Taking all that into consideration, I was getting about 3.25 ectos/shards per hour.

At a total of 240 ecto and shards combined, that would take me almost 74 hours of playing time. At my 9 hours a week of play, which was already boring the ever-loving sh*t out of me, it would take me more than 2 months of doing nothing except UW and FoW to collect enough ecto and shards for 1 armor set.

No, thank you. I can think of much more entertaining things to do with my time. Stapling my face to my shoulder, for example, would probably be more rewarding.

I'm going to reference back to the original statement you made:

I'm not referencing it to farming, but rather using that in reference to the game in its entirety. I don't take farming into the equation since it's largely an optional choice of play. Regarding your "ecto/shards" post, I'm unsure why you needed to have all of these?

Yea... except the primary use of the imba skills is farming. I doubt that many people who are having substantial trouble with normal areas of the game have the ability to get things like Ursan Blessing.

Because that's how you get Obsidian Armor. You know, armor and title grinding? HoM? Anet's stupid idea of end game content?

It's the fact that these imbalanced builds and skills turn the difficult areas *into* farming areas that is part of the problem. It should be a challenge, not a systematic and simple process.

Which in effect does...what? ANet already stated that the "bonuses" you receive from decking out your HoM will have no beneficial impact in GW2. The most I'd expect would be a party hat.

It doesn't matter what it SHOULD be, it's what it IS. It IS a time-consuming waste and the imba skills speed it up. Farming for materials or title points to place crap in the HoM was never hard for most people, it just takes forever and they switched the imba skills to speed the process. The fact that they also make other parts of an already easy game even easier is irrelevant since there was never a significant challenge in those areas to begin with.

That there's little challenge left once you figure out the game's storyline areas is a whole other problem that existed even before the imba skills.

I don't know, go ask the many people who are still grinding for those bonuses. I concluded long ago that all the extra skins and titles were a stupid and unimaginative waste of time. I don't actually grind for them, I'm just pointing out that if you watch the Ursan groups form it's mostly people that ARE grinding for those titles and skins that are using the imbas. Hang out in various EotN outposts for awhile. Almost all the Ursan groups are just grinding out rep points to max titles. If you watch LFG requests for UW/Urgoz/etc. you'll usually see that for every one person looking to do the area's quests you've got three or four groups forming very specific builds just to farm.

Well, if these areas were so easy then I'm even further confused of why people needed these skills in the first place.

However, this further brings up the point: If WoW has been able to see success - an ever-rising succes, reaching to a peak of 10 million active accounts - without just easily handing everyone the end result, while still requiring everyone to go through all of this "grind", in addition to the challenges and bosses that wait within the raids, then why has ANet had to resort to giving everyone easy and quick access in order to be successful?

This problem was slightly helped with HM, but then brought right back up with all of the updates + additions that further dumbed down PvE.

The more, the merrier.

Plain and simple.

I was obviously talking about Ursan and heroes. Guild Wars has never forced you to take Fissure armor to be on par with others: THAT was the reward of those with too much time on their hands.
You're not playing the same Guild Wars game we played in 2005 while Ursan-ing: I distinctly remember playing the role of a water Elementalist back then, and I wasn't certainly spamming two keys on my keyboard regardless of profession.
Before, to succeed in the game you were given skills as you progressed and you had to make up a playstyle tailored to your own tastes. Now, you simply need to buttonmash like a howler monkey to obtain even better results.

Now that's dumb, not non-grindy.

Blizzard makes money from monthly fees, A-net from sales of new accounts.

Try economics 101 for dummies

Well, In looking at Blizzards success with WoW, we might want to take into account that WoW benefited from following in the footsteps of Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, etc, while ANet purposely chose not to follow the standard RPG P2P structure.

WoW repackaged the same type of game in a pretty package and made it easier for a person to level without having a group. They never changed the marketing strategy but they did make the grind easier. They do not have to make changes today to make it easier because that was part of the original design. WoW is easy: it's just so humongous that it seems like it goes on forever. There is always something to do.

Blizzard sold WoW to a younger crowd that was ripe for the picking, launching when Everquest was just about at it's peak. Sony tried to capitalize on that same idea with EQ2 but failed, in part because players were too loyal to EQ and in part because WoW launched in the same month. Blizzard also got a huge step up marketing as the fourth World of Warcraft release: older WoW fans bought it just to see how it crossed over to a MMORPG.

In the five years between Everquest's and WoW's launch dates, people were more than ready to spend 15 bucks a month to play an online game, or let their kids do so. When EQ launched in 1999, we had a lot of single computer households where parents were not going to let the home PC and phone line be locked up for hours so junior could play a game all day and night. The player base was an adult crowd. In 2004, we had multiple computer households, dedicated internet connections and a culture of gaming. And by that time, I dare say, 15 bucks a month didn't seem like a lot of money to keep your kids out of trouble and out of your hair.

The lesson Blizzard definately learned from Verant Interactive and Sony is the player base will pay 15 bucks a month in order to grind to max level, gather forces, aquire treasure, and build your character up just to wait for the next push into new territory when the next expansion comes out. The loyal player may "cheat" on their game for a while with another game, but they will keep paying their 15 bucks a month to keep their accounts current and active. Once you are in the system, you'll stay and pay.

Guild Wars is not WoW: it's in the RPG genre, but it was never meant to be a better WoW, it's not the same kind of game. WoW was definately built to a better Everquest. I think Blake Wilfong had it right when he basically said GW was an Everquest-like game that tried to fix all the negative things that Everquest-like games have: pay-to-play, camping, raiding, kill stealing, wide level disparity, harmful death penalties, and high system operating and bandwidth requirements.

Currently, WoW has 10 million subscribers. Blizzard makes 150 million dollars a month in subscriber fees on a proven gaming model that sells itself. I believe that since GW does not bring anywhere near that kind of cash, anything that the designers are doing in GW now is an investment in the future of GW2. They've made so many titles that I don't know them all, but they count for the Hall of Honor and your future in GW2. They have made things easier, a la Ursan, to encourage people to buy all of the current chapters as a player's personal investment in GW2. The Guild Wars chain, despite current grumblings by the player base here and elsewhere, is very successful.

I believe that ANet is attempting follow Blizzard's playbook: create and deploy a successful sequel to a successful chain of games, timed for when the most successful game of the genre, World of Warcraft, is at it's peak.

That's probably a lesson that ANet's founders learned from originally being developers at Blizzard in the first place.

EDIT: corrected "math" error

They have to cater to the inexperienced because if it catered to people like me and Sha, no one would ever win anything.

That's some awful maths right there. They ACTUALLY make more like 150 million dollars a month.

Personally, I bought this game years ago not being a hardcore gamer. The sole reason I picked this game over many of the other ones out there, was because this one claimed you could play competatively without having to devote your life to it.

So there's a very big draw to a game like that, so them catering to the inexperienced players, however annoying to the experienced ones, is one of the major draws of this game.

Of course after three years, you'd think they might have switched that up a bit since there really isn't many new players coming in. But hey, at least they're consistent. We got what we payed for.

Oops. You're right. But it's not awful math, it's a loss of place. Awful math is when you add 2 and 2 and get 150 million.

Blizzard "keeps" alot of their subscribers because to quit after investing 6-8 months of subscription fees, it's easier to continue paying than to press DELETE CHARACTER. Instead of continuing to play because they're interested in the game, they now feel obligated because of the investments they made... and the longer they wait, the harder it is to quit.

While in GW, playing for only 3 months cost essentially the same as those who played for 3 years. There's no ball-and-chain of financial guilt.

Impeccable post my friend. I quite enjoyed the read. Thank you.

Well said. This is one of many reasons why I refuse to play monthly fee games. It's not the end of the world if people stop playing Guild Wars, it's always there for you.

Also, Anet isn't catering to inexperienced players with the recent updates, they're catering to hardcore farmers. Joe Palooka who just bought Prophecies doesn't have r10 ursan, and doesn't shadow form farm, he doesn't care much about recent updates. All these changes do is pump a few more bullets into the bloody corpse of "skill over time".

I really don't know what ANet's done with this.

As much as it pissed me off when Mallyx was bugged to shit, it was interesting because he was hard.

Now, there is nothing my guild and I can't annihilate in less than an hour. It's pathetic. That whole "post your fastest elite times" is indicative of this nonsense. We're not supposed to be able to blow through FoW in an hour.

I'd be really impressed if ANet produced some content that was crushingly difficult, and no one could beat it. It'd show they at least had some balls left.

But they won't. Sucks.

Anet fell into the same trap of "difficulty = unfairness = big domage" when they added HM. If you had to take on certain areas, even in NM, without heroes and with the Prophecies skillset, I'm sure they'd feel crushingly difficult.

there's a fine line between difficult and challenging... there will always be someone bragging about how fast they can defeat the last level in every single game that exists. it's a strange, but long standing, tradition.