How can we as a community get our voice heard with the devs regarding grind?

Lazarous please stop responding to posts with the sole intention of insulting people, im pretty sure it goes against one or more of this forums rules.

Adding an unlock all skills button is going to unbalance the game for those people who PLAY THE ENTIRE GAME. Every single player who does not use a PvP only character in HoH GvG, etc. is going to be absolutly at a disadvantage when it comes to pvp.

This will split the game into two distinct parts, and regardless what you were 'promised' by a.net this clearly is not their intention.

I think we should have a poll regarding the number of people who consider the quality of a game, before their own ease of playing it, im guessing the number would be rather low..

Keep posting on the forums, and other forums, continue to make as much noise on the subject as possible, and im pretty sure someone will have to atleast look at a post eventually.

Guild Wars is not meant to be a game where the casual 30 minutes per day player can log on and expect to compete at the very highest level of PvP compitition, should this ever be the case I WILL leave the game. This game was never EVER advertised as a pvp only battle game, please stop asking the developers to turn it into such.

This button had it's purpose in the beta for testing purposes to see that everything worked properly and if not would be fixed. An unlock all skills button, as Corwin said, would cause either a segregation to be forced due to the steep unfair advantage pure PvP characters would have over those PvP characters who start as PvE.

If everything for the PvP side of things is unlocked, would it not, theoretically, cause players to become bored, or frustrated with things, and thus perhaps quit the game?

If this is brought into play, what would be next? PvE players would then complain about the unfair advantage and demand something be done and thus it would become a never-ending war where balance is thrown out of the window and chaos reigns.

Never have I seen such... debate... in a game over something that is opinion and things that were merely for the testing of parts of the game.

EDIT: I'm pretty sure the devs know about the complaining being done for this, obviously they do as they are starting to slowly work new things in to help alleviate this... 'problem'... An online petition wouldn't do much more than add alot of spam to the busy devs and ANet I'm sure. Just because there is something signed, doesn't necessarily mean it must be done because people demand it.

I am thankful that Guild Wars is a free game, and so far has done exceptionally and amazingly well at keeping up with the bugs, exploits, suggestions and the like. An update a week is a big step, I don't believe you get this kind of service with other games this good. The devs and ANet obviously want to try and make us GW fans happy, but as I have been told by someone I care about very much:

"You can please some people all of the time and all people some of the time... You can't please them all, all of the time no matter how hard you try."

They could easily have an UAS HoH & GvG ladder and the regular HoH & GvG ladder. This would be segregated, but there would still be a ladder for both aspects.

Very true. I think the UAS however better serves the PvP crowd and is better for the game as a whole despite the segregation that can result.

How so? If the PvPers who use the UAS only play with PvPers who use the UAS, wouldn't this have almost no tangible effect on the PvEers? If the PvEers want to play a game where they earn their abilities, they can compete those with the same mindset.

Adaria, the game was advertised as a no grind game :\

http://www.guildwars.net/gameinfo/default.html
I hope you can agree that this is untrue with the current state of the game.

From the sounds of what it said, this means it does not take hours to level your character. You have templates you can use and once you learned the skill setup on them however you set them up, you could be as competitive as any other from-the-box PvP player.

Also, if this were to happen, wouldn't it also cause more servers to be needed to keep track of the PvP UAS players as well as all of the PvP/PvE players? We haven't any idea how many servers it takes now or how difficult it would actually be to impliment it.

Also, the advertisement can be interpreted many different ways as it was not perfectly clear on exactly what they meant by not needing hours to stay competitive. That may merely have been referring to level, or not, we do not know this for sure it is o nly speculation. I myself interpreted it different than you, but only Arena Net can say for sure what EXACTLY they meant by that.

EDIT: Ok, I know I pretty much just forgot the word 'leveling' in the quoted advertisement, it is late here [EST time], though I'd like to add, you DO NOT need hours to level up, they never said that getting 'elite' skills was not going to be without work if you were willing. Nothing says Elite skills are any better than the regular skills, you can counter them with regular skills as you can counter elites with regulars as well. It would destroy the balance of the game if elites were massively 'uber' and such.

And with that, I'm done for the night, this sucked my brain dry.

Adaria, I'm sure you can see how those who don't even know there were runes in the game or how the skill unlocking system worked would be very misled by that statement based on previous MMORPG experience they may have had.

I think that the system requirements to keep track of both UAS players and non UAS players is a serious thing to consider and something I'd really like the devs to comment on. I don't think the actual tracker itself would require much more additional hardware and just more code. I don't even think the servers itself would have to be segregated (although I could be wrong) since it's all instances.

An idea that wouldn't split the community and isn't an UAS but might be good enough is allowing all runes, skills, and weapon mods to somehow be gained through purely playing PvP in either 4v4 or 8v8. One could also match PvPers with similarly skilled PvPers by introducing a kind of tier system with those who have similar numbers of unlocked abilities.

IMO make it so you can have an 'unlock all skills' button if you win HoH or are at the top of the GvG ladder. You pretty much have to complete all the PvE game to get the elite skills atm, make it so that 'PvP-only' characters also have to prove they are worthy of them. I don't think it would be wise at all to make it *easy* for all PvP'ers to get all the skills, they get a huge advantages as it is with the premade builds (and the whole premade lvl 20 is either rare or unique in a MMO).

I see this as a natural progression of adding runes in to the winnings for HoH, you get the stuff via PvP-only methods but you have to be prepared to win them rather than being handed them on a plate.

QFE. Context, people. They said NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Grind.

Read carefully.

I'll put it in PLAIN ENGLISH:

You wont NEED to spend the time.

Need is a very different thing from having the option to.

We have the option to. If you're so tired of the grind, play PVP chars only.

Thus the game offers longevity!

Ah, this thread is great for a laugh.

What happened to not arguing about the merits of the UAS button airong?

Laz

Aiwahead, it's very misleading and has many false implications. Technically it's true, but it's not what someone who just bought the game would know.

I suppose I give up too easily, Laz ^^

I played in two BWE's and never for a moment misconstrued anything said by Anet as meaning that if I went straight for PvP I'd have the entire array of things in the game handed to me on a silver platter.

I read exactly what it said and interpreted it as I could jump right in and compete with a max level character or going about it the hard way I wouldn't take 100's of hour to reach the level cap.

No one I know personally or have spoken with saw anything different either. They didn't promise no grind.. They said you would compete without putting 100's of hours into leveling your characters.

Anyone who thought that they were implying otherwise believed so because that is what they WANTED to believe...plain and simple. You can compete in very short order at the highest character level within 5-10 minutes of breaking the seal on the cd case. All of those runes, elites, and upgrades are not required to compete. They are designed to give players that put some effort into experiencing all aspects of the game a reward for doing so.

Anything they do to make things the way you and those like you want would either completely segregate or imbalance the game. While I can't say with absolute certainty, I'd be willing to bet you that ANet will do what they can to make things better, but they will NEVER kill their creation by making it so unblalanced and will not seperate it into two games in the same box. Maybe you can sweet talk them into a purely PvP Arena Edition that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of their universe other than the classes and combat system.

Delete this thread. I'm going to be a little man and insult. I've failed to steer discussion away from people who can't let go of their Everquest mentality and believe that grinding is somehow "earning".

There is no required grind to play PvP.
Anyone who grinds does it by their own choice - this is not Anets problem.
If you don't like the grind - don't do it - the choice is there.

You don't understand competitive PvP.

What does that have to do with grinding?

If elite skills are so "must-have" for high end PvP then GW is not really a "skill" based gamed but loot based - with "elite skills" being the uber-loot.

And its all BS anyways - I know a number of people who don't have a single elite skill that do very well in PvP.

That's flawed. That's like saying not being able to beat someone of equal skill level who always spawns with a rocket launcher and full armor in quake means quake isn't a skill based game.

I am sure the devs are very aware of your want for 0 grind. They have very good reasons to keep the "grind". And I am a firm believer in not telling game devs how to make a game. They are the experts (in game making) we are not.

Every game I play without fail there are people complaining about something. I don't know how devs put up with it, I really don’t.

And with every game I play I hope the devs trust their own expertise and don't listen to the players. I know most gamers won’t agree with my point of view but I don't tell other experts how to do their jobs.

One additional skill in your bar out of 8 is nothing like that hyperbole. If elite skills are so good that a single one of them can be leaned on like a crutch in that manner then I think the issue isn't if there is a grind or not but the "power" of these elite skills.

Now if I understand things correctly, the majority of the "Hardcore" PvP crowd comes from MMORPG's or some sort of Multiplayer FPS.

Provided that is true, the biggest part of PvP in MMORPG's is what amounts to a gankfest and not real competition unless you have worked for several months and in some cases for years to level out and equip a character. You had to play not 100's but 1000's of hours to be even able to set foot into PvP and hope to have any chance of winning. That is where the entire idea of "grinding" comes from.

FPS generally don't have a grind persay and all things are readily available to players in short order.

GW is NOT either of these type of games. You can have a character ready to compete with in 5 minutes or within a week or two at the outside. Perhaps not the ideal character, but competative all the same.

The game is designed for balance. SO even if you have a team with all the doo dads facing a team without them all, you can still haved a good match and if the lesser equiped of the two teams is skilled enough, they can beat the team that has all the extra junk.

I've seen all the comparisons that if 2 teams of equal skill compete.. one with crap .. and the other without.. the team with the crap will win.. Well DUH!! But if the team without all the extra garbage is good enough .. they can win.. THat is competative if you ask me.

So any idea that people have that they just can't compete without having to go through the trouble of collecting all the optional stuff in the game are doing it to themselves. If the object of thh game is to have better skill at playing then play the game to be better. The extras will come when they do. IN the mean time the only ones stopping you from enjoying this excellent game is yourselves.