Thursday November 13, 2008 - update notes

Thanks for the explanation, this sounds much better. But you really are just making my point for me. When you played and did whatever it was, you knew what the "reward" was going to be and you chose to play the game for that reward. So, why would you think you deserve anything more then what you have "already" received.
Like it or not things are going to change, it is what make the game fresh and attracts new players, if you feel you have been wronged in some way for playing a game then there may be other problems or things in your life you should dealing with instead of playing a this game. (That is in no way meant to be an insult just a word of advice.)

I really think you are in a very small group here instead of a large one. I have played GW from beta till now and I am in no way disgruntled or disappointed in this update or the game for that matter. As I will go into GW2 and play it as well. I am not trying to say how people should or should not play, but if you are starting to think that a game owes you more then the entertainment you got out of playing it in the first place then you might want to step back and maybe reevaluate some of the priorities in your life.

Again this is not to be insulting, and I am not directing this at any one specific person, just something for those who really believe that ANet owes them something after this update for a game they have already played.

So the parable of the worker lives on and the Grumblers grumble so that the new players can quit cause this is YOUR game cause YOU paid for it.

Please Quit.

My mother used an example when talking with her Board. She is the Priest at a church. It goes like this.

She would mention doing something like adding electric guitars and drums to the service. Someone on her board would say something like that was wrong and "Over My Dead Body". So my mother would reply, "Nothing like a timely death".

Your stuck in the past. Anet does not need you. They HAVE YOUR MONEY. The need NEW MONEY. Quit please quit or play and be content. You are not content cause there is no peace in your heart and until there is you will not find it here with me.

All you are doing is making the new player feel less worthy. Tell you what. You had better start getting those books and stuff cause your going to be left out in the cold as the new players pass you in Eliteness.

remember that is always going to be someone that is faster and stronger and smarter and better looking and is paid more and has a bigger house and has a better car and more kids and so on. You need to learn to live with that you have.

As this credit crunch continues because of the housing market collapse cause people wanted bigger better stronger faster you are going to find that you will have to cut back on things in order to survive. This is life in the real wold. So just do us all a favor and quit.

Quit complaining and wreaking things for others. Just quit. Quit please. We do not like it always complaining. Always wanting more. Not excepting the reality of a Level Playing Field or of Equality. Just quit.

thanks

This is the key factor in why the Kurzick/luxon faction changes are so good! Now, a player isn't locked in to only one way of grinding faction. Tired of filling out books? Vanquish for a while. That's getting dull? Hit the AB's! AB's happening in those stupid fortress maps? FA or JQ (if there's any life there) are options. Got a bunch of Guildies/Allies looking for something to do? Urzog's is always open for a good romp & the chance for some nice loot!

YES! YES! YES!

I don't understand people who argue against this sentiment...what are you trying to prove?

Z-Keys don't add gold to the economy -- that gold comes from what other players have already had fall for them. Consider that for every Legendary Guardian in the game there would be 4 hardmode books and 3 normal mode books completed and ready to turn in RIGHT NOW. Surely you can see that this huge and very sudden influx of gold into the universe would not result in economic stability. To compare this with the distribution of the tournament reward points is not realistic. Z-Keys do shuffle money, but they only create money when people sell the trash golds to the merchants.

I'm glad they took the time to think of things from more than one angle before implementing the update.

Great job Linsey and A-Net!

It wouldn't be so irritating to read everyone counter the idea of books being retroactive if their own reasons against doing it were in line with the one reason that was stated. ANet's representative didn't say that they were preventing it because everyone should have already gotten their reward through the fun of playing the game, nor because they already got their title when they did it and that was the only motivation at the time.

Rather, she was very specific - it was prevented because of a perceived negative impact to the economy. So really, if you want to incessantly argue for or against the idea, wouldn't it make the most sense to focus on agreeing with or countering this singular idea??

The fact is that if this is their sole reason for preventing this, then there have already been solutions that would remove the detriment. People have suggested an equal payment to counter the gold rewarded, and from what I've read the faction reward (for Factions books) goes straight to your rep. title and wouldn't enable transfer into commodities.

To be blunt: I care much more about the game than you do because I do not look at it as "what it should be", but rather "what it can give me" (i.e., fun). Caring about a game is not asking it to satisfy all your wishes, it's admitting that an online game has to satisfy a lot of people, and thus you'll have to make sacrifices. And if you made too many sacrifices, it probably means that GW1 is not the right game for you.

(but I wouldn't say that I "love" GW or Anet!)

They already got their rewards, the (leg.) guardian titles. Now they want more retroactively applied stuff.

From Linsey's own words:

You have a (minor) point: they should have added a small sum of factions and money for those that already completed the titles. which leads us to your following comment:

Link please?

The first part of your sentence is very probable, they want people back in the game, but the term "grind" is not appropriate, unless you consider playing the missions "grinding", even if you want (no one forces you to) to do them several times. It's nothing like HFFF (which I never did) or raptor farming, or etc.

It's apparently already bringing back some. And it may put some people off, but I've got the feeling that the problem is blown out of proportion here. It may be a bit unfair, but as Linsey said above, players that have already done most of the things that have been affected by the update (it's a more appropriate term than "new" or "experienced") also had something that didn't do it don't have (e.g. title, be it for fun or showing off).

Tbh, I'm surprised that players that call themselves "experienced" would react that way. What about all the fun you should have had doing these things? Shall I ask Anet to give this "fun" directly to me in addition to the new update too for the sake of fairness?

You're looking for honor where there should not be: you had fun with an online game that you paid only once, now people (including you, can't you do all the missions again?) are getting ways to have fun that you didn't have before and you want something "more" for your past actions? You have a bigger /age than these people, isn't it enough?

Here's another solution. If ANet is concerned about excess gold flooding into the in-game economy, then don't give gold as a reward for filling books for players who have already done the missions. Just give the points, since that's what most players seem to care about the most in terms of rewards. I don't think it'd be an insuperable programming challenge, since the information on who's done what and how many times is right there in their account files, right?

-Joe-

True.

But consider this: if we had been given the rewards as we first progressed in the game, would not the money mass been the same?

If now the rewards are viable and, say, the population magically doubles and completes the game and legenedary guardian within the week...would it damage the economy then? Or even better: if we all stopped arguing and started completing books like crazy would THAT not damage the economy?

Are the money sinks not effective anymore?
Will 40-60Kish (or whatever) of extra money per player which has legendary guardian and which - following new regulation - deserves this freely created money (i doubt it's a high percentage over the total ACTIVE population) topple it with inflation?

To that respect I wish we had more data really...like how many people are still active (played within a certain time period) and how many of them have achieved legendary guardian or completed at least one campaign in hard mode.

Good point. I have said before that I was definitely not in the sphere of popular opinion on this one. Definitely in the minority. I then contradicted myself in the quote you selected which qualifies as an oops on my part. What I meant to say there was not that the particular group in question was a larger majority, but rather that of those disgruntled the larger majority of them are older players.

They dont owe me anything more than entertainment, but they do owe respect to those who invested a lot of time in titles, whether the player enjoyed getting them or not. That part of this update could have been done better.

Myself, I loved getting the titles I have and I have avoided the ones I consider grind for grind's sake. Every player looks at that and makes their own assessment.

I have. Its why I no longer play. Thought about moonlighting a little when I first read about this update, but I suppose not.

Oh and you win the minority vote. Seriously though, I have thought that myself. Biggest problem I have is titles relating to GW2 and to PvE skills. They should be unlinked and would remove any feeling of mandatory grind completion anyone might have and return titles to purely being optional and fun for the ones you pursue and no loss for the ones you dont.

You get a cookie. Flat out unfiltered honesty rocks.

Except I never said I wanted the rewards. I wanted fairness in implementation.

Or, better... Since factions goes straight to your rep, they could have added it directly to the title, just like they did with the extra faction bonuses in the 2 missions in the game.

I just find it odd that the same people who say a) this caters to new players, its making things too easy for new players
are also the ones saying b) I want money now because I have guardian.

You don't want to make things easier, but you do when it benefits you?

A) "Better rewarding" doesn't mean "Easier"
B) We're talking about every other reward bar the money. Congrats for skipping all the thread and missing the point completely
C) Would you do your Legendary Guardian again, just to get the reward a newly accomplished Legendary Guardian gets today for doing something you already did once without getting anything?

EDIT

So, okay, seasoned players got the title, got the fun, the enjoyment and so on. That's great, you all say, and we should be happy with it. So, why doesn't that suffice anymore for newer players? Why are they rewarded better than the older ones?

I'm very happy with these updates:
Dungeons

* Increased the repeatable Dwarven, Vanguard, Norn, and Asuran title point rewards for completing a dungeon to half of the first time reward.

Maybe dungeons will get a little busier now, and not be such a useless waste of time...


Wisdom/Treasure Hunter Titles

Both the Wisdom and Treasure Hunter title tracks encouraged players to stunt their playing habits to progress in these titles. It was to their advantage to only use one character to open chests or identify items, meaning they had to pass all their rare items to that character and not open any chests run into on other characters. This behavior is not something we want to encourage so we have made these titles account-based. In order for accumulated points on different characters to count towards your total, you will need to log into each of those characters at least once. When you log in to a character, the points will be added to the account title.

Well, yeah. If it takes 10,000 points to get a max title of course you're going to use one toon. To those who have been grinding at these titles and feel cheated that they've made them easier, keep in mind GW2 will come out sometime(?). There isn't enough time to put into to some of these title, even if you play a lot.

Overall, it looks great to me.

they arent magicians, they have proven that they are capable of realizing their mistakes, hopefully the next update will have PvP update. you just need to give them a chance. OT i wanna marry lindsey now, this is probably one of the very few AWSOME updates. bits and pieces that are still sucky but daamn, this ones nice.

You see another thing I don't understand is that on one side they tell us that the problem with making the update retroactive *spooky voice* """damage the economy""" which I find quite amusing.

And on the other that:
----------------------

The first argument I have argued earlier.

The second argument is quite puzzling...I can understand them not knowing how many times a character has repeated all of the quests. But Come On. Surely they know who has the title and who hasn't. Why not assume each character has completed the campaign JUST ONCE and credit the FACTION points to them directly and get this over with?

I like the update, I don't think it makes titles that much easier to max, just easier to get a good rank. And I love my free faction.

I am, however a little curious how A-net determined how much we should be rewarded for books. It seems quite odd that it takes 83-84 HM Factions books to max the allegiance title, but it will probably only take 6 or less Night Falls books (guessing based on NM reward of 6,000 rep) to max SS or LB. Meanwhile, Gwen titles are the easiest to max, requiring only 4-5 HM books to max. Is this balanced? I also find it weird that the young heroes of tyria book gives the least reward out of them all....

That's not to say I don't like them or I won't do them (working on young heroes right now and having fun) but I don't understand how they are equal at all.

The answer, of course, is that they aren't.

If a Legendary Guardian with 36 months under his belt and a relatively new player both go out and complete a campaign in HM next week, they'll get exactly the same reward. The game doesn't differentiate between older and newer players.

The only difference is that the older player will have gotten one part of the reward, the title, before starting again next week. This, as it turns out, is precisely the reward advertised when he went for the title initially.

... and must do it all again to get the rest. For no apparent reason, since Anet themselves admited that books were meant to be retroactive, but then they gave up to not impact economy.

Changing the advertisement is what I didn't like btw. That's and unilateral change. An ill-timed one. Had they introduced books 1 year ago, nobody would have complained. It's hard not to see a mere attempt of recycling old content with this whole operation. "Play it all again you title-monkeys! There's nothing else to do and GW2 is vaporware, so quit now or grind your reward".

Because life isn't always fair and if it brings new players into the game so be it.