promote skillful teamplay and revitalize guild wars in one day!

Hi GwG community,

We all know the player base is dwindling. So who is left?

Most of those that were content based left when they completed all the areas a few times.
Most of those that played for purely for 'fun' are happily playing COD and other games.
Most of those that played for the community left for newer community based games with larger population e.g. aion
Many of those that played for pvp left for games that are newer or offer better rewards for pvp.

Those that are left are mostly:
1. dedicated pvp'ers (which is still unique and enjoyable as long as skill updates are regular, which to them is equivalent of new content)
2. title hunters
3. accumulating wealth to purchase items/titles they desire or sell gold to new players

In a nutshell, those that still PvE seek REWARDS BASED GAMEPLAY.

Here's some proof. When skeletons were added to uw, the rewards effectively decreased and so did the 10000s of daily uw groups. Most players went to do fow or DoA. When dhuum was added (rewards increased) there was a large increase in players.

As far as I know, anet is in process of nerfing OP skills and solo farming. These are two good ideas, but they are not enough alone.

This solution would cause elite areas to be done much slower, and also slow down rewards from solo farming. This discourages new players (they get less rewards than old players for their gameplay) and veterans (why should I play anymore? I used to get twice the stuff in half the time.)

I see 3 large problems in the current pve state. And I suggest 3 simple solutions to promote fun, teamplay and revitalize the game.

1. Solo farming, powertrading, running services, botting all offer better and more consistent rewards than pve team based activity
Easy solution: add more value to dungeons and elite areas in the form of end drops

2. Elite areas and dungeons are done in a matter of minutes
Easy solution: skill nerfs

3. The most valueable items in this game are luck based (mini raffles, henchmen contest) or art based (art contests). A handful of people were rewarded far more from winning a contest/raffle than they did from playing the game for 4 years. This reinforces NOT PLAYING the game.
Easy solution: use them as rare drops to satisfy problem (1)

These changes accomplish 3 things:
1. They give new content in the form of skill nerfs.
2. They encourage forming teams to do dungeons and elite areas.
3. They reward skill and gameplay over luck, powertrading, repetitive farming, scamming, botting...

WORST IDEA:
do (2) and nothing else
Some elite areas rely heavily on gimmicky builds for fast runs. Nerfing those skills after allowing them to prevail for such a long time and keeping the rewards the same makes those areas less desirable to do.

Historically, this is the direction anet has taken. Ursan was around for a long time. SF has been around for far too long. I strongly believe the end result will be a mass exodus from pve team-based play, seeing as most pve guilds and activities revolve around fow, DoA, uw.

BAD IDEA:
do (1) and then (2) later
e.g. add dhuum and then nerf SF months later. this promotes farming of the area now, and never going back after the nerf.

MEDIOCRE IDEA:
do (2) and then (1) later
Those areas won't be touched until they offer better rewards.

GOOD IDEA:
do (1) and (2) at the same time
e.g. nerf SF and add dhuum in the same update

easy nerfs:
smite
obby flesh tanks
SF tanks

Example easy rewards to add to end chest (with low drop rate of course). I say easy because they are already developed, and they would encourage play in that area. THESE ARE JUST EXAMPLES:

hall of heroes: everlasting henchmen tonics
gvg: unfortunately it is too easily synced (like hero battles) so no further rewards should be added.

the deep: mini kanaxai
urgoz: mini island guardian

mallyx: gold items, summon stones and chance of mini zhed

Dungeons need better end drops period. Odds are you will get a diamond and an onyx. Why not have them drop at least 2 gold items, 1 diamond, 1 onyx in HM?

kathandrax: mini shiroken
rragars: mini grawl
cathedral of flames: mini grawl
ooze pit: mini oni
darkrime delves: mini yeti, swamp club
frostmaw's burrows: mini panda
sepulchre of dragrimmar: mini polar bear
Raven's Point: mini destroyer
Vloxen Excavations: mini vizu
Bogroot Growths: mini gray giant
Bloodstone Caves: mini ceratadon
Shards of Orr: mini naga
Oola's Lab: mini asura
Arachni's Haunt: mini asura
Slavers' Exile: mini mad kings guard
Secret Lair of the Snowmen: mini polar bear
Heart of the Shiverpeaks: mini shiroken

Some items will go from priceless to obtainable, and some items could remain similar value (1000e+) depending on drop rates. Hundreds of veterans with stashes of rare minis will hate this idea, and some will commit suicide. However, i'm not concerned about that 0.005% of the guild wars population

The rewards can also be new skins, new tonics, new minis, new items. However, this requires work from the legacy crew and their time is limited.

The best part is, this update could be done in one work day.

tldr: nerf SF, obby flesh, 600/smite and add better rewards to chests (especially dungeons) at the same time

the major problem in your thinking is that even after nerfs and all that stuff people will rather play with heroes and henchmen than form pugs. or they'll run a second account for more drops and complete a dungeon in 7/8.
so a way to corelate everything with teamplay promotion would be needed.

and what when the playerbase adapts and finds new ways to run dungeons fast? maybe not as insanely as now, but still faster than with a balanced group. more nerfs? no thanks.

If it's gimmicky, nerf it fast (weeks) as opposed to months or years.

I would hope an organized team could finish the dungeon much much faster than a H/H group.

Okay, what is skillful teamplay?

organised =/= pug. and lots of guilds do things together, they promote guild-teams to complete certain goals or finish some areas already.

i never said it did

the answer is subjective. to me it's basically anything that involves multiple players striving towards the same goal who are not afk or mindlessly pressing c,1,2,3,c,1,2,3

so what's the use of strong promoting something that's already being done?
if someone wants to participate in skillful teamplay, he should just join a pve guild and organise events there.

unless you want to enforce teamplay, as in 'play with a team or be handicapped'.

This is the sad fact. The addition of heroes did more to hurt the "skillful teamplay" you speak of than anything else.

Yea... uh... this will never happen. Remember how long it has taken Anet to make a skill update for PvE? The last one was in September and there isnt going to be another one till... February. It shouldnt take that long to change skills but apparently, it does for Anet.

Mindlessly pressing c,1,2,3 is possible because this game is nearly 5 years old, and the PvE you encounter stale as 2 weeks old bread.

It's not the player that's in need of change, because that is never going to work. Nerfing farming/speedclears/or easyway builds will just bring new ones, because players that use them in farms or speedclears are not interested in playing for the sake of playing but playing for rewards.

It's PvE as a whole, with it's predictable foes and builds that need to change. Implementing better rewards for endchests would only add more incentive for speedclears or farming some dungeon mindlessly over and over again.

I do agree that rewards for end chests need to be improved, or reworked. But I'm definitely not for adding those minipets to dungeon end chests, and rare tonics and everything else to other formats. What else is going to be left for people that hoard mass amounts of wealth? Save all their money in the form of armbraces?

Forming teams to do elite areas isn't going to improve, or be more encouraged, or happen, unless there's some easy, gimmicky way that we don't want for doing those elite areas, or the Party Search system improves.

lol.

I have to say you brought up great ideas. However I only play gw for farming and title hunting. I find farming fun like places like soosc. If anet nerfed 600/sf then you couldn't farm for fun anymore. I'm not a fan of pvp either.

Typed on my iPod Touch.

can't solve a 4 year old problem in one day, pffft

There are still some that play pve because we enjoy it, you know?

umm, yes please? the more time anet put into keeping this game fresh, the more people will play it. if anet basically nerf gimmicks capable of completing dungeons easily and quickly, and also increase the drops from endchests SIGNIFICANTLY, so that you can easily get 10-20k worth of stuff from an endchest (remember people get way more than that from doasc). then they need to keep it like that, so that the best way to make money is to go and play with friends. and if any more gimmicks arise, nerf them QUICKLY.

If anet had nerfed permaform a week after it had been discovered, then people would probably have been dissapointed, but they would have accepted that it was too imbalanced. By allowing it to stay in the game for years, anet have just been digging a deeper hole. More and more people are doing nothing but SCs and when it gets nerfed i can easily see a large amount of people leaving the game..

But i suppose that as usual, anet's solution will probably be badly thought out and half-arsed.

Im afraid we are the minority nowadays.

1. Since release PvE has been a single player game with option of co-op, your ideas won't change that.

2. Game needs new players, both pve and pvp, no way around this, nothing to address this.

I agree with the idea of mroe rewarding gameplay. Look at the 'F2P' MMORPG's for gods sake (say Dragonica for example),where instanced dungeons are very rewarding.

The game is too focused on destroying farming builds or tryign to achieve 'balance' without actually making playing hte game rewarding. We need something like double dungeon drops (for a full party maybe),higher gold drop rates in general and more gold(the currency) being dropped in HM.

And after this, PvE still sucks. Funny how that works.

they go for a gotta catch 'em all mindset mann.
ghostlys drop in game , still 1000s of ectos.
dhuum drop in game, still almost 1000 ectos.

now if you add them all, instead of farming/powertrading for 3 years for 1 mini, you get all of them.

then the only pissed off ppl would be people with every one of those mini and henchie tonics.
which 0 people have.

Either that or you could mitigate the pricing problems of rare mini's by offering them as drops from gifts, canthan new year, wintersday, ToT bags etc. so that they will be still rare and not farmable.

God, no, minipets are retarded.

And yeah, what I'd like to see is new content, or the ability to do existing content with greater ease (full hero parties).

Worst. Idea. Ever. Sounds like you want all the stuff the general population can't afford easier to obtain so they can afford it? Yeah brilliant idea as the GW Economy is already in the toilet, and money is already stupid easy to obtain. Making it even easier, will make this relate to the American Economy.

Adding mini's to the end chest=stupid to begin with as those Mini's are considered rare for a good reason. They aren't suppose to be easily obtainable, and only a select number of them are available in the game for the most part. Also adding them to the end chest of dungeons is just not smart, as many, many guilds/alliances out there are plowing through many of those dungeons in under 15 mins or less. So in theory it may sound good, but think about the repercussions of your idea, and you will see that it is bad. Very bad.

The game is already easy, and to an extent fun to play. And what you are proposing will take more then 1 full work day, as you put it to implement. So /no.

and are they happy with the end chest/quest/zbounty rewards?

or just delete pve, let the pve community either leave or start pvp, BALANCE PVP, organize 100k usd tournaments every 6 months and advertise guild wars more(tournaments, highly competitive, etc..).

fixing pve is actually possible in one day.

Too bad people rather have "easy play" than "skillful teamplay." That's the nature of people, and Anet needs to find a good balance between the two so they don't piss too many people off.

Unless you get double r9 silverwings/dryads/emerald blades/froggies/VS noone is really happy with the end drops to be honest. But then again, most of us are doing the speed clears now could care less about the drops, and more about advanced tactics, and seeing how fast we can go. The quest rewards have always been the same, and there is no reason for them to go up.

You seem to be promoting getting rich quick ideas, which in my mind is stupid. Money isn't everything, it is called E-peen for a reason. It serves no purpose but to make it seem like your a better player because yours stuff is shiny and others aren't.

As for Z-bounty rewards, its just a perk if w/e we do is the Z-bounty, otherwise I know that everyone in my guild could care less. But for the other thousands of guilds out there, I can't comment.

Seems to be a lot of hating on your ideas, but I like them!

Be good to be able to aquire some of the rare mini's and I don't see how the game would just be flooded with them if the drop rate was mini polar bear low.

Let's face it - if you haven't been playing from the start (and putting in tonnes of hours) most of these mini's are unobtainable, and for those that are somehow obtainable it's only really for powertraders rather than for people who are actually out playing the game with their friends and guildmates (and heaven forbid PUGs). Even for people who have the ecto's some are simply not for sale. I think rather than encouraging people to play - it rewards those who aren't.

For the players that have beaten the game ie GWAMM the only thing left to do is fill their halls with statues - if you've farmed DOA to get your tormenteds, got the armours, then the only thing left is the mini's.

The other advantage of making them end chest drops in dungeons and elite areas, are that these elite areas and dungeons might be populated again. The only losers are those players who have the rarest of rares, and at the end of the day, they really aren't losing anything at all apart from bragging rights.

Not that I'd really mind seeing changes in GW, especially if that means Dungeons. But there's something I noticed...
FUnny thing is that this could be rephrased : " and at the end of the day, they really are only loosing the whole point of having those minis.

I'm pretty sure the only hope for GW PvE is GW2. GW was made a PvP game first, PvP and PvE later. It's very, very hard to give PvE players what they want when much of the coding of the game prevents that.

I don't have any hope for GW PvE anymore, and I only hope GW2 is some miracle that makes me interested again.

Ehm...

Decent starter idea...new rewards would be good to make up for the months of allowing these builds to run rampant and causing the price of things to drop...

Bad idea to use those minis. Ruining the price of them as well is just a bad idea...I own none (used to have a naga but its a long sad story involving char deletion) but I understand that making them common like that is just a bad idea.

Rather introduce new minis... shouldn't be hard as the models already exist...maybe a mini version of the end boss or something... I know that won't work for the ooze pits and such just as a general idea that could be fixed for dungeons where a mini of the end boss would be stupid or already exists.

i cannot emphasize this more . please don't drop minipets . IMO, minipets are a waste of money . please . drop some other good looking skin weapons .

a bit better end chest drops would be good. a few new skins, maybe released every month, would be good.
what i don't like here are superb drops you propose, the 'ideal' attitude as if your propositions would heal whole pve out there and the encouraged nerfing. more skills nerfed = less skills to use when playing ^ weaker monsters. less skills = less entertaining game, the same routine. weaker monsters = easier pve. add superb drops and something's obviously wrong.


so powertrade until you can afford a mini you want. look for opportunities. i'm not playing from the very beginning, i don't farm 24/7 (don't like farming, i get bored after 5-6 runs), i don't waste 12 hours daily in kamadan, i don't do zaishen bounties. and somehow i was able to get an unded grawl and buy stuff for my consuming titles...

Its a shame in a way that instead of making the codex arena, that they didnt put the energy into "codex bosses" ie, bosses whose skill set changes with some form of randomizer timing.
Yes, people would hate it as it would stop their "standard pvxwiki setup" but it would certainly make it more challenging and require a more balanced team to be taken to cover possible foes skills. This would have required higher rewards of course to encourage people to do the dungeons/areas.
Just a passing thought in the "will never happen" section.

Agree with the general idea of nerfing what's obviously stupidly overpowered AND at the same time providing new rewards worthy of the new challenge. Anet keeps failing at this.

But I must disagree with adding more and more minipets as rewards everywhere. There are already WAAAY too many of them in game, they're such a waste of storage space, and some should just remain rare value holders, since they're useless anyway.

adding a mini-pet is no new content
adding a skin is no new content
changing chest rewards is no new content
balancing skills is no new content.

New (PvE) content was when Factions, NF and EotN were released. GW2 will be new content. It could be argued that Codex is new (PvP content.

Anet is doing a good job making GW less attractive to existing players and to new players, letting it die a slow death so they can pull the plug quietly some time after GW2 is released. And I can't say I blame them.

I just said that the only way to get said mini's is to powertrade, which isn't playing the game. The OP said to make the drop rate very low so as not to devalue the rarity of the mini's, but would be nice to have a chance to get some rare stuff by actually playing the game content.

Of course new skins etc would be great but that involves a great deal more work I'd imagine.

I mentioned this earlier that it would be better to have a boss or situation that randomizes a skill bar so that no one build can really dominate an area. I think the change will make things a bit more interesting than the same old scenario. However there needs to be a theme to give the dungeon/area character and thus it is difficult for significant bar changes without violating some parameter that gives the area its character.

I dislike fast farming (or farming in general) because I do not enjoy farming for what it is but only getting the items at the end. It becomes a quest for getting more stuff and it becomes old very fast. I think the enjoyment of PvE should be in the process and not the end.

... that would mean everyone would be guaranteed a $5k drop (or more at todays zkey prices) instead of that very probable onyx &/or diamond.

That way, for players that have already MAXED their EoTN titles, the chest drop would have some additional utility instead of just the chance for a rare drop from the end chest. Who knows, maybe players would actually do Vloxen HM (LOL) since today there is 0% chance at a "valuable" drop from that dungeon end chest.

maybe give people straight up cash when they open a chest? the end chests could be like pirate island treasure chests that are hidden under an "x". After your party kills the boss, you dig up the treasure chest and open it to reveal a bunch of shiny gold coins.

Then again, that would just make more people like "ZOMG, WE HAVE TO RUSH THROUGH THIS DUNGEON LIKE SUPER FAST SO WE CAN GET THE PRETTY COINS". In other words, adding more stuff to the end chest isnt going to accomplish the goal of the OP. At all. Its just going to promote more of a "speed clearing" attitude.

some of us do play PvE just for fun you know. Would you really want to take that fun away from us?

People speedclear dungoeons, more and more Zkeys starts getting into the game, prices start to drop to for each key, Zkeys become 1k each, people complain about chest drops being crap.
Every dungeon has an accompanying quest which gives xp and gold already.

How can you say minipets are retarded? I earned so much cash trading those .

Full hero parties is just lame. The fact that you can fill half your party with bots using good bars is bad enough.