Keys, Anet and WoW.

So I logged in for my monthly dosage of zaishen keys. Event reminded me ofHFFF, And realized one thing:

Anet should look onto something that Blizzard did and start thinking. Here is longwinded explanation:

WoW is game of grind. It survives by making grind doable. It survives by making grind doable casually. How is it?

Daily quests. Daily quest quest like any other, but it is repeatable each day. It has usually very good reward, on par with one-time quests. Now, we have something similar in GW. Repeatable quests. But those have fatal flaw and lead to deformed bot-like gameplay - see HFFF.

GW titles are ballanced about this deformity - player seems to be expected to create routine and farm them in botlike manner. Also, those titles can be gained lightning fast by some players while look unachiveable for others. Now, WoW titles are ballanced about fact that player logs in every day and does one or two simple quests - neatly repackaging grind that GWer would experience in day or two to month worth of what suddenly became gameplay.

Now, they also do something for leet people:

Another issue with GW is that rare items tend to loose rarity fast. All it takes is creation of rocksolid build to farm item and couple of weeks later you merch that thing rather than bother asking if someone wants it for free. Either that or lottery-like chance of drop making it unachiveable.

Now, most valuable dropped loot in WoW that can be traded is in inpenetrable safe of time. Noone can farm raids for boes the way we farm elite areas in GW, because they are on timer - no player can complete them more often than once a week. Regardless of how little life he has, he just can't do extra runs (unless he has no life can has several raid-ready characters). Droprates can even be two digint numbers!

Even crafting can't flood market - craftable items of actuall value are on timers too. And since they may require other items as material which also have cooldowns, it can take up to weeks of dedication (= one click a day type)

The most valuable loot is doubly locked - not only is it beyond upenetrable wall of timer, it is also customizes to character when it is acquired. Making mere gold farming / egold useless if one wishes to acquire wow epeen.

---

What, so what is the point (go play wow already, lolol)?

Point is question: How would GW play if:

* All elite areas were on one week cooldown. If you kill boss, you have to wait for reset-day to be able to enter again.
* All "elite" items were customized-upon-acquire.
* All dungeons were on 1 day cooldown. Again, boss kill triggering it.
* All reputation factions got major repeatable quest on 1-day timer giving as much as ~1% of max title points.

?

so how many keys you got?

well, GW has way too few elite areas to put them on weekly reset while dungeons are all but 3~rarely played anyway.

I don't know about wow, but I played Lineage 1 for a very long time and it is a different beast than gw. gw uses instances, which makes boss farming/dungeons/elite areas easily farmable. Lineage, and probably wow, were big worlds that you shared with everyone. Meaning that everyone camped the boss spawn areas so if you needed that one drop from that one boss, you'd better be prepared to sit there day and night waiting for it in the hopes that you were the first one to see it and try to kill it before the others steal the drops from you. And if it's something you really need, well too bad for you. Can't sit there for weeks trying to get it? Hope you're super rich cause you're gonna need to buy it. Anet is gonna keep releasing things that will be the next 'it' thing, so even though voltaics have dropped in price, you can still get a decent amount for them, celestial compasses, frog wands, dryad bows etc. Can't wait till they do another design a weapon contest.

most of interesting areas of gw are obviously elitist. If theses become time-locked necessarily most of interesting part of gw's gameplay disappear, imho.
trades are the basis of gw's economy and, most generally, the basis of most important rpg, why limit it?
may be an option for not-instanced games, but gw.....
uhm.....may be......

I lol'ed thanks you made my day

Limiting the ammount of successful runs (completes the objective and/or kills boss) and unsuccessful runs (normal failing or farming) would increase the value of items I guess but also increase elitism.

However I do agree that introducing dailies in GW would be awesome, the rewards don't need to be high, but people will at least log on to complete them. 500g and some kurz/lux faction (if the daily is in faction) won't break the economy if they are account wide.

There was something called, "The end of runescape." It's basically what your saying, things prices drops. It becomes to easy to get something. At merchant it was 50k, but you can buy it for 10k.

How did runescape prevent the bitter end?

Adding stuff. Fixed the problems. By adding stuff money dumped. People were happy to try the new things.

Boss camping... That's... stupid.

Hmm, I wonder what the point of the weekend events are?

this is why gw is so boring, lack of diversity, everything is repeatable and elite missions easily done within the hour
________
EXTREME Q VAPORIZER

So you grab a build, steamroll through one of the few Elite PvE areas that is remotely fun, pick up your uber loot, and then what? There's nothing else to do. But I guess that's how it should be, have your GW fun and gtfo of the house.

As has been said in interviews with GW developers more than once. They didn't know this was going to happen, GW was a completely casual game. They expected people to pick it up, play it for a month, beat everything in it then happily wait for an expansion. That didn't happen so titles were added for the more hardcore crowd. Even that didn't work, and thus GW2.

I also think it would be terrible if dungeons and elite areas had a cooldown. One thing you never do in an online game is discourage a player from repeating a dungeon. It's one of the things I've always hated about WoW, people can clear all current endgame raids in just a day, then what? Dailies? lolPvP?

I kind of agree. But only if the timer was 12 or 13 hours.

hmmmz i like the idea of cool downs for bosses.... kinda would kill CoF running and my dungeon running. so for dungeons no thanks
DoA , FoW , UW = guuuuud imo. would increase the rarity of Eternal blades etc imo thats dangerous of falling from grace fast.

and the BDS thats going to be cheap in a few weeks.
i suppose the best example of a rare item becoming cheap in recent weeks would of course be the V-Spear. So perhaps some system should be installed. but i doubt it will

anyways

5* thread for discussion!

Hmmm... so what you are saying is that to make GW a better game, it should be made more like WoW?? I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. If you want to play WoW, go play WoW. Even if GW could use some improvements, making it more like WoW would not do that. The fact is that instanced zones are just way cooler than a non-instanced world because they put your character in the focus and allow the story to unfold. The last thing I wanna see when I'm doing a quest or killing a boss or farming is for someone else to come along and disrupt my efforts. As for dungeon cooldown timers... No. Just no.

I like the idea, and have often wondered about this myself. However, GW1 was not setup for this, and could not effectively be applied.

Possibly in GW2 *if* it comes out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by zwei2stein Point is question: How would GW play if:

Sort of like this. Dailies are awesome (especially that one). But other than that...

Instance cooldowns and raid lockouts are a bad idea, for the original concept of Guild Wars, because they are better left to games that promote "time spent = rewards earned". Now, with the way Guild Wars is currently going, they'd be okay on paper, but in practice, they'd only kill the game more so than the rest of the stuff going on right now is, due to the fact that the majority of the appeal of the game right now to the general PvE masses is that it's a game without monthly fees that you can get shit quicker in (basically, an easier and cheaper WoW). Make it harder, or take longer, to get the phat lewts, and maybe people will start going to (or back to) WoW/L2/LOTRO/EQ2, where there is actually some form of substantial endgame content available (okay so L2 has shit-all endgame and only Auron's dad still plays EQ2 but come on...).

fixed

but really...jus go play wow instead d00d

L2 still has female dark elves. they will make up for whatever's lacking in L2.

Cool downs are, at best, an artificial constraint that doesn't affect the more casual player since he wasn't going to try and get through it more than once anyhow. The catch is that this is still true for GW.

Despite the "truth" of the GW world conveyed on this board, the real truth is that it's probably utter bollocks. The percentage of people burning out because they killed Mallyx (or whatever other elite area you *think* is so damn easy) 25X a day for a month is almost certainly a teeny percentage compared to the percentage of the player base that never even beat it once, ever.

In WoW, these spoiled brats just work out routines on how to min/max their time spent for gain. In GW, they burn out farming ectos or armbraces so the can "be rich".

Meanwhile, the other 97% of the player base is just fine with both games as is because cool down or no cool down, the just don't have the time or inclination to be a no life loser who "burns out" on a game.

Lock outs would suck. Then what do you do while you're waiting a week? I don't know why anyone pays for that kind of thing other than sheer gullibility. The good solution would be Anet actually having a content team, then the game would feel alive and fun all the time if you were getting say 8 hours of gameplay added every couple weeks or month, along with new items and features. Apparently it's not something they give a damn about though, and if GW1 smells old and nasty like grandpa's underwear at this point they're not showing any notice.

guild wars does not have enough players interested in elite areas to support cool downs. all that would happen is:

-less players being able to find a group
-less players learning how to do elite areas from experienced players

probably leading to the eventual death of the elite area

Lock-outs and dailies are done as they are in WoW to slow down your character's progression. Since GW doesn't have a monthly fee it'd be a bit pointless to do so.

Pretty good idea actually, I like it at the least.....except if Anet put a timer on areas like UW or the elite dungeons, expect there to be an uproar from the GW community. People here are waaaay too accustomed to farming gold on a daily basis and making assassins solely so they can solo farm FoW or any other of the "valuable" areas.

Almost, but no. I don't want to lose the ability to help someone with a dungeon (or get help from someone) just because I played it earlier that day.
Now, I would be OK with being locked out of the end chest during a 1-day cooldown in exchange for good drop rates. (And please give me an indicator of when my cooldown period is over that I may view before I leave town.)

Yuck, no. So I finally get a dryad bow to drop, and it instantly customizes to my necro? HELL NO. I want to move that to my ranger.
Now, I might be OK with the item being customized to my **account** instead of to the character who picks it up. But even then, I'm not sure. I'm losing the ability to cash that item out and buy another item of equal rarity that I like better. You'll need to give me an awful lot of improved drop rate to make up for that.

I wholeheartly approve of this.

i don't want a game telling me when i can and cannot play it.
maximum freedom of gameplay is worth more to me than a forced pseudo equilibrium between casual and hardcore players.

i think it is cool that players can be filthy rich or dirt poor (depending on their playstyle) and still be able to play on the same level.

repeatable daily/weekly quest thingy for kurzick/luxon/norn/asura/dwarf/ebon/sunspear/lighbringer etc would be pretty awsome.

id like to add that such quests should give you *account* points, to avoid multi character grind farming, after your first character to complete the quest, the others dont get the same quest reward

^honestly, I don't think it matters much whether it's account points or not (is it even possible to limit quests to accounts only?)

the people that aren't interested in L/K won't be making extra toons, and let's face it, making a toon that can do the said dailies shouldn't take more than day given how fast Factions goes if you're worried about a disadvantage. Coupled with the fact L/K is a horrendously long title, it balances out.

As for the people dumb enough to buy extra slots just to L/K farm...well, w/e floats their boat, and more money for a.net to go into GW2 right?

like so many well-intentioned suggestions, this comes way too late in GW1's life. It is what it is at this point.

As for GW2, since we have no idea what it will be like, it's difficult to suggest improvements or modifications.

So because you cant afford WoW you go to an unrelated game who is PvP focused instead and was formed against all traditional concepts of a MMO when it comes to level caps etc you push them into making it into a free version of a game you want to play but can't.

Am I close? GW is what it is because of what it is. Anet did right by not going with the masses and making a generic MMO that dies out in months like 99% do and has all of its players shift to WoW every expansion. If GW supported your wants/need it wouldn't be what it is, it would shift to PvE, balance would be lost, well basically where it's going.

And in this PvE Guild Wars 2 there will be a million new people just like you QQing how they bought the game for $20 on ebay and demand a new update every week for their "money". Seriously...go play WoW...THIS IS GUILD WARSSSSS originally intended for casual players/PvPers adding a que to everything and a cool down to stall it out when unlike WoW you aren't making any money would be pointless.

Most people would simply find another free mmo that lets them do what they want, hell even in Runescape you can grind all day without it saying no.

Did you even read the thread? the entire suggestion of adding dailies etc. was to make grinding easier/reducing grinding.

Before you go on with the whole going against the masses is cool deal, you have to keep in mind a.net is a company, and like any other company, is out for profits. Making a game, no matter how well made, with no monthly fee that only cater to a extreme minority does NOT bring in profits.

GW is very similar to D2, there is only so much you can do in PvE, afterwards, it's PvP. However, I'd say at least more than half of D2 players play it for the PvM aspect instead of PvP. D2 keeps it fresh by periodically wiping the ladder, which GW can't do (I personally wouldn't mind, but imagine the QQ if that were to happen).

Furthermore, from patch 1.10 to 1.12, Blizzard has added new runewords to keep people playing, because D2 PvM essentially boil down to lvl grinding --> MF for phat lewt ---> use said phat lewt for more lvl grinding. By adding new runeswords (the phat lewt), it keeps people playing.

GW PvE essentially boil down to missions ---> cap skills ----> purple bar pushing/farming. You need to add things to keep people playing.


If GW were what you have in mind, we'd have next to no people joining. Look around forums, the first things most people ask about GW is not "how's the pvp?" instead, they want to know about the PvE end of things, how populated are towns, how easy it is to find groups, what is the level cap, etc. I'm sure you'd like for GW to be all pvp to suit your taste, but the fact is, a small population cannot sustain GW, especially since its revenue depends on new buyers instead of charging existing customer monthly fees.

Stop kidding yourself. GW may be INTENDED to be PvP focused, but for the average joe it's all about PvE, and the average joe is where the majority of profits comes from.

QQ more plz.

On lock-outs... I largely agree with Cthon. One of the things I like about Guild Wars and the low level cap is that I like being able to play the character I choose when I want to help someone out, instead of worrying about whether the levels are compatible or whether my character has been locked out of an instance.

I also note that UW and FOW are already on a kind of time limit, since unless you burn a scroll, you have to go in while the world has favour.

On elite items being bind-on-pickup: What is an elite item? In Guild Wars, that's determined almost entirely by the player base (although rarity does have an influence) - after all, once you've got max mods on an item, it's all looks. The only items that are distinguished in-game are ones that are essentially created by the player rather than dropped - crafting a destroyer weapon or trading an armbrace for a tormented weapon to go in the HoM.

On dailies... ANet doesn't really have the incentive to create anything time-based that WoW does because they don't have a financial reason to want people dragging out their progression rather than doing it all in one day if they can. That said, repeatables on a timer may allow more casual players to progress on rep titles at a decent rate while more dedicated players can then switch to other methods of rep grind, thus reducing the tedium somewhat.

Also: Valcion, while What Now was probably a bit more abrasive than necassary, I think you've missed What Now's point. WoW is the guerilla in the market, which on the one hand makes it look like copying them is a good strategy... except that getting too close to the gorilla is a trap. Being too similar to WoW means you're competing directly against WoW, and unless you somehow manage to beat it (and obviously no-one has, otherwise we'd be talking about its successor instead), that means you're setting yourself up to lose.

(Even if you do manage to make something that's technically better than WoW, the investment that goes into making a character means that the 'incumbent advantage' is probably even bigger in MMOs than it is for governments... especially when Blizzard can just steal your ideas and close the gap in the next expansion.)

Yes, GW has its share of players who are here because they really wanted to play WoW but don't feel they could afford it - which, personally, I think ANet has already accomodated far too much (especially since half of them likely will go to WoW when their financial situation improves), and seems to be leaning towards accomodating more in the sequel. However, GW also has plenty of players that like it because it's emphatically different to WoW.

This is something ANet is aware of, although sometimes it does seem otherwise. Jeff Strain pointed out nearly two years ago that the reason a lot of MMOs fail because they think "Our game will be like WoW except better because it has (insert gimmick here)", and then it fails because despite the gimmick it isn't seen as better, and likely as not Blizzard steals the gimmick for the next expansion. The way to survive in the MMO market is not to directly compete for the same playerbase, but to find the people who are dissatisfied with the other options and cater for them.

Might be a little late in the development of the game to be doing all of this. And since there is hardly any info about GW2 around let's wait and see what they come up with instead of saying what parts of the game would be better off playing like other games already out there.

Dailies for experience and titles right? Because doing the same thing over and over every few days isn't grind xD I'm sure Anet can find a better way of pulling this off without ripping off a game I really did not find enjoyable to any extent but watching people stroke themselves off.

D2? Erm...so much you can do? *points to the title* It's a PvP game...PvE was then added in..and if you pay attention through prophecies you end up doing relic runs and everything! It's a mass training ground disguised as a walk in the park...

Technically they don't have to do anything you already paid the money for the product as it was and the profit was made. Acting like it's their responsibility to update it more is selfish, that's like calling up Call Of Duty and asking for more updates every week when you bought the game, you're not paying their wages and they have better things to do.

Only thing anyone asks about this game is "What is the level cap?" Go back a few years and ask people what they want it to be and you'll get at least 100. That would of completely altered the game and in the end it might of not blown up nearly as much and in the end no matter how you answer these questions it's how Anet pulled off what they wanted in a game and got everyone else to enjoy it that made it succeed.

Dungeon Runners
Perfect World
Rose
Archlord
....(100 more)

All free MMOs that all offer different things that people can try. If you try and be like another MMO they'll simply play that MMO. People want to play a game for the reasons it is what it is, in this case the armor, the level cap, etc. It was meant to be a casual game title farming came on when people had nothing else to do because people can't get lives. Which is why in GW2 if they don't stick with a lot of original concepts and expand on them such as actual balanced PvP it'll be in it with Runescape.

Now pretend to be above everyone else, call them QQs, and jerk off to the fact that you paid $50 for a game and expect more work from them. Way to be a bum. When you pay a monthly or start shipping them money they should listen to you otherwise I don't think their entitled to do anything but keep up what they have done.

Remaking the game will make even that small population of gamers who liked a rare breed of game like GW fall away so what would be accomplished. Either way no matter what when GW2 comes out people are gonna beat it in a week and QQ there's nothing to do while shivering at the thought of PvP.

If in reply to the OP, no. Zwei is simply taking into account that WoW isn't just successful because it brainwashes you. There is actually quite a lot to respect in it.

If I wanted to play WoW I would. I play GW cause it isn't a traditional MMORPG. It is a Single player game that can be played in a cooperative way.

GW2 can become like WoW and then I'm going do something else (probably D3) or it can drop all the extensive beginner stuff, reward players that have multiple professions, get a better AI and promote interactive gaming between players and the AI (random patrols, random group constitution and really solid builds) and stop being about exploits. Some of the mobs in gwen are quite nice - they are just always the same.

Regulary read reviews on WOW. Recent review of Wrath of the LK specifically pointed out that Blizzard was concerned that only 2% of ALL players have actually finished the burning crusade expansion. That is pretty sad IMO. Just with that stat alone I would think that WOW is NOT in any way casual. WOTLK review also boasts of adding even more complexity to the game/grind. Again not casual. Granted I have never played WOW, but I have never seen anything the even remotely hinted that WOW is casual. If you need 25 people to complete an area is that casual? Are there that many areas in WOW you can solo or w/henchman or a few friends? Or do you 10+ people who have advanced understanding of the game to complete an area?

Making GW have all kinds of timers and cooldowns to keep track of would be boring in my opinion. It would also take away the freedom to do what you want when you want. The game should not dictate to people when they play or how they want to play. Someone may have only a hour to play, but since they did X area 22 hours ago they cant do it today.

/begin rant
I love Blizzard, but lately I am confused by the offerings, they have had nothing really NEW at all, all rehashes of Diablo/Starcraft/Warcraft. The only Blizzard game I do not own is WOW. At this point how many fricking times do I have to kill Diablo for him to stay dead already. In the last 4 years it has cost blizzard 200 mil to maintain the WOW servers(stat from latest issue of PC Gamer). In that same period they have made approx 4 billion dollars ($15x12 months= $180 x 10 million x 4 years "shaved some money off since they did not start at 10mil subscribers") and all the can offer is more of the same. You would think with that kind of money they could come up with something new. Just one game that is not Diablo/Star/War related.

I cannot speak directly about WOW since I refuse to pay a monthly fee for a game I already paid for, and have never played WOW due to that. (Damn EQ for making the monthly fees acceptable). Most people can easily afford it, but would you rather spend $200 a year on 4 other games or paying $200 to access a game you already own. If you had to pay all that money up front would you pay it?
/end rant

Buying D3 and Starcraft 99.9% for me, but sure would not mind see something different. Props to GW for not making us kill the same crap for the last 2 decades.

I suggest you don't make an assumption about a game you never play. The reviewers may say the truth, but you may not understand it correctly because you've never really experienced it yourself so you don't know what they mean.

Case in point: "Finished the Burning Crusade Expansion"

In this case, by "finished" they mean getting into the most difficult (stat-wise) end-game raiding instance (Sunwell) and cleared the place. Raiding is designed with hardcore players in mine. Blizzard never expects every player to get to experience such places (whether this kind of design is good or bad is another story). So if you're a casual player who can play 2-4 hours per day, you won't get far in term of raiding.

Is that a bad thing? Personally I don't think it's that bad. There're more endgame content than just raiding alone. Hell, you can even get raiding-equivalent gears by just running heroic dungeons with 4 other people and collect badges (which you always get from defeating a boss. No "zomg it doesn't drop this run" dilemma like we have in GW) then trade said badges for good gears. Sure, you're missing out on raiding content, but what do you expect? You don't have the time to invest, deal with it.

I am a non-raider myself. And there're things I can do after max level.

And please don't bring up the fact that you need 25 people for raiding. There is a smaller raid group which is just 10 people. For Wrath of the Lich King, each raid instance has 2 versions; the easier, 10-man version and the hardcore, 25-man version. As I said don't talk sh*t about a game you don't really know.

10-man raid requires LESS people than...umm... the 2-3 ELITE ZONES that GW have, in case you wonder.

I'm not gonna talk about WoW's soloability though because it's just too famous. Just go ask your neighbor.

Cool downs Killed Wow for me (that and Grinding farm animals to level...).

I'm having far more fun Playing GW, a non PTP game, then I ever did Paying for WoW. Plus theres much more versatility on GW.

FOTM Items are good for economies and games and keeps trading from being stale and stagnant. FOTM Builds do the same as much as people may loathe them on both counts.

Cool downs on Crafting is huge Fail from WoW IMO.

Actually the Only thing I like from WoW is the Auction House. Put a similar thing like that in GW2 and it might just be heaven.

I must admit I already traded GW for WoW (Private server) for the time being, not really for the points mentioned but because WoW has a much deeper and broader character development. Sure, it takes some grinding but I have no problem with that. It's quite doable to get to 80.

Just to add: I still love GW and played it for 3000+ hours (Title hunting, HoM etc.)

My ideal: merge them together:

GW with high level cap or no lvl cap, much better gear and actually gives better stats for rare items, levelable professions like in WoW, soloable with heroes, many skills, a decent trading system, titles/achievements, map travel, cinematic missions, and GW's awesome PvP system. Oh boy.

GW2 maybe? I keep hoping.