Instanced raids require more development time and money and generally get experienced by a fraction of the playerbase. It's not a solid investment. Besides, the game already has open world raids which fit perfectly with ArenaNet's vision for GW2.
I wasn't saying they should try and cram them in for launch, only that it's something to think about for future content.
Generally instanced raids get experienced by a fraction of the community. It would be a waste, in my opinion, not to mention contrary to ArenaNet's philosophy.
Their resources would be better spent developing more dynamic events and large world boss encounters, which are basically open world raids anyway. This way, they can pretty much guarantee that new content will get experienced by the majority of their playerbase.
GW2 will not appeal to the elite and hardcore in PVE because you'll likely have to try and work beside newbs who spent 100 hours on their class that they still haven't learned to play. Elites like to only play with Elites. Elites will not have the power to simply raid kick someone for standing in the fire.
Not entirely true. I've raided in WoW, Rift and TOR hardcore since BC in WoW. I've cleared every hardmode in WoW with my guild up until we disbanded. I went over to Rift and found the raiding boring and leveling worse. I went to TOR, enjoyed leveling to a point and beat every nightmare mode.
That being said, I really dont care that GW2 has raids, as long as it has a challenge. From playing BWE3 and a few stress tests, I enjoyed the PvE and PvP respectively and thought the combat system was new and exciting. I also fought one of the raid bosses (syvari zone, giant worm thing) and thought that it was at least fun, not exciting sadly since it was in the BWE and there were way too many people there.
Even though I'm a hardcore raider I couldn't care less about gear, besides for the showoff of it. I can't tell you how many times my epeen rose when I got tells from people who were shocked at the gear I was getting. That being said, cosmetics seem fine to me as I can still do anything I want to without farming to do it. The stats on the items keep my interest in that I can still mess around with specs and gear stats to fit my play style.
Honestly I pose this question to the "end game is pointless because there is nothing to do". How many people would go back and play WoW if they got rid of gear requirement, leveled you down and let you play any raid/instance that was ever created in the game and make it as challenging as it was back when people did it in vanilla/TBC/WOTLK?
And to keep on subject, the reason that I feel they didnt bother with the "raid once a week to get urself gear to to do the next raid blah" is that there is no subscription. When theres no need to farm gear, y bother pushing yourself to get you moneys worth every month. Theres no need to play 10 games of PvP or run a raid for one piece of loot till next patch comes out.
If I were to make an analogy to what I feel GW2 is like, I'd say Skyrim comes to mind, since beating the game isnt the point of it. The whole point of the game is to get the whole experience, explore and do whatever you want. So basically I'm playing a MMO Skyrim, pretty sure that will get my attention and get my moneys worth.
TL:DR: Not all raiders care about progression of gear or instances. All content being available at basically anytime is fine and will keep attention. GW2 masks the adventure over the destination.
Clearly you aren't the elite and hardcore raider I'm talking about. You see...there are many types of hardcore and elite raiders. There's even a difference between hardcore and elite. I don't know where you fall. For all I know you we're in a hardcore or elite raiding environment and were just a tag-along allowed to stay because you were fun in Vent. I dunno. The Elites and Hardcore that I was refferring to are the ones who like to control or like to be controlled by the leader (ie. I mentioned raid kicking raiders for standing in the fire). I am not sure how possible it will be to have a personality like "More DoTs raid-leader-guy" in GW2...or even how necessary that personality will be.
Clearly you aren't the elite and hardcore raider I'm talking about. You see...there are many types of hardcore and elite raiders. There's even a difference between hardcore and elite. I don't know where you fall. For all I know you we're in a hardcore or elite raiding environment and were just a tag-along allowed to stay because you were fun in Vent. I dunno. The Elites and Hardcore that I was refferring to are the ones who like to control or like to be controlled by the leader (ie. I mentioned raid kicking raiders for standing in the fire). I am not sure how possible it will be to have a personality like "More DoTs raid-leader-guy" in GW2...or even how necessary that personality will be.
I've been in both situations. I've been in guilds that were elite, downed bosses as soon as it came out and tried to get server and world first (that was a stretch but even getting top 10 was pretty hard if you've ever tried). I've downed many bosses on high pop servers first in guilds. I know the raid environment. That being said, you clearly are not talking about us as a singular person and instead as a group. Do we all like to be controlled, manipulated or do the latter? No. We find friends and work as a tight knit group while still enjoying ourselves as a whole. Are there those you've mentioned in our groups? sure. Lots of people only came to raid and not for the group.
That being said, GW2 doesn't need a group of "I dont care about anything but raiding" people because there seems (we haven't tried Orr, but I doubt anyone besides the people trying will care about server first) to be no reason for them to form such partys. What you said that bothers me is not that there are elitist people, its that you said that "Elites and hardcores will not like the PvE in GW2" and thats a flat out lie. I can name hundred of elitist friends who are playing GW2 for the experience and not the end game.
I'm not saying that you are wrong and that a lot of raiders and elitist and hardcore will not like this game, but I'm saying that not all of them will not play the game simply because of the system that GW2 is implementing. Saying that elites will quit the game purely because while leveling there is a guy who stands in fire and kills himself or doesn't get out of an easy mechanic is not true. If they are that concerned, I'm sure they have a group of elitist friends to walk around with them so that even if said person dies they can still pull together to do what is necessary.
Clearly you aren't the elite and hardcore raider I'm talking about. You see...there are many types of hardcore and elite raiders. There's even a difference between hardcore and elite. I don't know where you fall. For all I know you we're in a hardcore or elite raiding environment and were just a tag-along allowed to stay because you were fun in Vent. I dunno. The Elites and Hardcore that I was refferring to are the ones who like to control or like to be controlled by the leader (ie. I mentioned raid kicking raiders for standing in the fire). I am not sure how possible it will be to have a personality like "More DoTs raid-leader-guy" in GW2...or even how necessary that personality will be.
I've been in both situations. I've been in guilds that were elite, downed bosses as soon as it came out and tried to get server and world first (that was a stretch but even getting top 10 was pretty hard if you've ever tried). I've downed many bosses on high pop servers first in guilds. I know the raid environment. That being said, you clearly are not talking about us as a singular person and instead as a group. Do we all like to be controlled, manipulated or do the latter? No. We find friends and work as a tight knit group while still enjoying ourselves as a whole. Are there those you've mentioned in our groups? sure. Lots of people only came to raid and not for the group.
That being said, GW2 doesn't need a group of "I dont care about anything but raiding" people because there seems (we haven't tried Orr, but I doubt anyone besides the people trying will care about server first) to be no reason for them to form such partys. What you said that bothers me is not that there are elitist people, its that you said that "Elites and hardcores will not like the PvE in GW2" and thats a flat out lie. I can name hundred of elitist friends who are playing GW2 for the experience and not the end game.
I'm not saying that you are wrong and that a lot of raiders and elitist and hardcore will not like this game, but I'm saying that not all of them will not play the game simply because of the system that GW2 is implementing. Saying that elites will quit the game purely because while leveling there is a guy who stands in fire and kills himself or doesn't get out of an easy mechanic is not true. If they are that concerned, I'm sure they have a group of elitist friends to walk around with them so that even if said person dies they can still pull together to do what is necessary.
Ok...so then in GW2 they are no longer elitists. Clarification: People who played with an elite and/or hardcore mindset can enjoy GW2 if they are able to play without the elite and/or hardcore mindset. There are proud elites out there who will not be so fast to shed their glorified status. GW2 will be the most leveled playing field I have yet seen in MMORPGs to date.
There will likely be a lot of unskilled players in world encounters that contribute little more than making the encounter itself more difficult because of the 2 reasons of: They aren't contributing as much as they should and the encounter will be scaled up because of their presense. I can see this annoying the elitist minded people when such an encounter fails.
Now...if world encoutners do not fail despite the bad players then the elitists will say they are too easy. Elitist players want challenge. Another factor that can drive them away.
One of the biggest 'wins' about not having raids? Server cooperation! Everyone can run a 'raid quality' meta event daily (or more). Any group of 5-10 people can choose to begin the meta quest chain, run it to completion, then have the whole server show up and do the 'Raid'. Seriously, think about that! At any time the word can come out on yyour server that you can kill whatever major boss someone had interest in getting to show up. Cooperative gameplay at it's finest, killing the stranglehold of content by the elite! Socialism wins again!
Originally posted by eggy08 What you said that bothers me is not that there are elitist people, its that you said that "Elites and hardcores will not like the PvE in GW2" and thats a flat out lie. I can name hundred of elitist friends who are playing GW2 for the experience and not the end game.
Ok...so then in GW2 they are no longer elitists. Clarification: People who played with an elite and/or hardcore mindset can enjoy GW2 if they are able to play without the elite and/or hardcore mindset. There are proud elites out there who will not be so fast to shed their glorified status. GW2 will be the most leveled playing field I have yet seen in MMORPGs to date.
Well in the definition of elitist, basically completing content in the shortest amount of time to flaunt their epeen, sure, I can see that they would not be that. But again, how much you want to bet there is at least 1 guild who will get together, blow throu the whole game to get to Orr and beat it within ohhh lets say a few week before anyone else and probly every dungeon in every difficulty. The only difference is that I doubt GW2 will go, "well these people beat the content alrdy and are asking for more, what do we do now?" The game isn't designed for that.
Or lets look at the elitist who loves achievements. He goes out of his way to get every single one, in every part of the game. I'm sure that person can be happy with what he gets as well since there is a system like that. So that elitist is satisfied.
Or the elitist PvP'er who wants to rush to 80, get high ranks, win tournys and make a name for himself as the best "insert class here" on the server. Again, pretty sure that possible as well.
There are many elitist definitions that can be used in many different situation, saying that every elitist is someone who likes being controlled and falls into the first catagory is not entirely true. Can they get the 60 bucks worth of the game, sure if thats what they want. Will it be like WoW where they compete that hard for server first... probly not. But who knows. This game is not meant for everyone and I respect that. But to say that just because this doesnt fall into elitist teritory is kinda vague. Elitist raiders are such a minority nowadays that you'd honestly be lucky to find a game as good as WoW to get your perfect PvE experience. If you want to list the games I played as elitist territory I can easily prove to you that they can never be that competitive due to lack of content and the way content was presented.
Anet isn't neglecting or making contents unavailable to players, They are making an MMO that they don't want Raids in.
Its their game, they call it GW2, they said no Raids in the traditional terms, so No RAIDS.
Whats the big deal, they are also making Dynamic Events, they call it Dynamic Events, they shown us their versions of Dynamic Events. Rift called their Rifts Dynamic Events. So its up to the Developers to create a game they want to create.
And it seems that atleast a Million players have agreed to play their version of Dynamic Events, and their game call GW2.
By playing their game, we also agreed to their vision, their vision to not include any RAIDS in the traditional sense.
Whats so hard to understand it, there are hundreds or even thousands of MMO's with RAIDS in the old way. They told you there are no RAIDS like you are used to upfront. Its not like they said buy the game, and maybe there are RAIDS that we know from all the previous games.
Even all the defenders are telling you that there are no Raids like you know them before.
So whats the big deal.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
GW2 will be the most leveled playing field I have seen in MMORPGs to date.
Since this is devolving into doing a lot of talking without saying much ^^^ that ^^^ really is all it boils down to concerning my sentiments. How ^^^ that ^^^ is recieved by the "Elitist Jerks" type communities remains to be seen.
Instanced raids require more development time and money and generally get experienced by a fraction of the playerbase. It's not a solid investment. Besides, the game already has open world raids which fit perfectly with ArenaNet's vision for GW2.
I wasn't saying they should try and cram them in for launch, only that it's something to think about for future content.
Absolutely not! You already have just about every single MMO that offers raid progression, allow us at least one frakking game, you greedy bastages.
I don't think you saw the whole exchange between myself and heartless...
I'm no raider btw, I'm just looking at this from a business perspective. I wouldn't do raids if they were in GW2, I might try one but that's about it, as long as they weren't gated and all about gear. In the end though I really for the most part partake in PVP and just PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
There will likely be a lot of unskilled players in world encounters that contribute little more than making the encounter itself more difficult because of the 2 reasons of: They aren't contributing as much as they should and the encounter will be scaled up because of their presense. I can see this annoying the elitist minded people when such an encounter fails.
Now...if world encoutners do not fail despite the bad players then the elitists will say they are too easy. Elitist players want challenge. Another factor that can drive them away.
Dont edit as I'm responding. Bum.
I will agree with this. Elitist hate when encounters are catered to casuals. What ruins a lot of games for them. And without hard modes in the open world, its hard for them to get all they want out of a boss encounter. But they can still do instances, while only 5 man, have harder difficulties that can hopefully prove a challenge. If elitist really want a challenge, I'd say that low pop servers, although subtracting from epeen values, will prove a difficult experience. If you can run around with your guild and do any raid boss that you want with little to no interference from outsiders, that basically fixes the problem of a fight becoming too easy regardless of the people you bring. However, on the note of the boss encounter not being scaled high enough for those elitists, they will have to suck up the fact that bringing to many people to a raid will always prove that the encounter is easier, on most cases, hence why raids are generally only a certain amount of people. So going by their elitist manner, they kick out whoever they dont want to join them and run around in their elitist squad to challenge themselves to raid bosses with less people than required or just enough. Will it fix the encounter for them? probly not, but honestly I never felt I had a challenging boss fight after TBC, maybe LK fight, but that was still just fazes. The only solution for elitists to make a fight difficult is to scale gear in most games, which leads to a very boring boss fight and boring mechanics. If the boss encounters have some cool mechanics that require you to think and be on your toes then they might be fine with the raids in GW2.
Instanced raids require more development time and money and generally get experienced by a fraction of the playerbase. It's not a solid investment. Besides, the game already has open world raids which fit perfectly with ArenaNet's vision for GW2.
I wasn't saying they should try and cram them in for launch, only that it's something to think about for future content.
Absolutely not! You already have just about every single MMO that offers raid progression, allow us at least one frakking game, you greedy bastages.
I don't think you saw the whole exchange between myself and heartless...
I'm no raider btw, I'm just looking at this from a business perspective. I wouldn't do raids if they were in GW2, I might try one but that's about it, as long as they weren't gated and all about gear. In the end though I really for the most part partake in PVP and just PVP.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
I remember Blizzard revamping every (other than BC) quest hub area. That must have taken a huge amount of development time. The problem is that raiding (unless your the sentimental type and are all for the experience) is far more rewarding. Blizzard tried to close the gap here when they introduced the token system so that you could acquire SOME tier pieces from pve/casual-centric dungeons. Then again with LFR where you can get the less powerful raid sets. Would GW2 make raiding far more rewarding too? I just do not see it in Anet's vision (or mine for that matter [yah I'm biased])
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
The problem with that statement is that it assumes they are targeting a playerbase that likes instanced raids so much that they will not play a game without them. They just left those people out in the cold and I don't see anything wrong with that. That is not a "wrong way to do business." They decided where their priorities lie, and decided that raiding was not one of them and didn't fit all that well with their overall design. But it should be noted that players that play MMORPGs for that exclusive reason should probably not pick up GW2.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your example. Are you saying that WoW has gone overboard in it's focus on one segment of players? Because I don't see that either. They actually have quite a lot of options for more casual style play and are even introducing a Pokemon-style system to their game.
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
I don't have any data, but I would assume that most people don't even reach level cap, either due to working WoW into a busy real life schedule, or because they play at the pace of a snail. Those who do reach level cap likely still have a busy schedule and thus treat WoW in a not super serious manner, unlike the tiny minority who raid and do high end PVP.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
I didn't say they only focused on Raids, I said it's also a large focus on progression based activities, like PVP gear for instance. Hence why so many are tired of the WOW type of themepark, and dislike the spin offs that don't focus on much else post release.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
I remember Blizzard revamping every (other than BC) quest hub area. That must have taken a huge amount of development time. The problem is that raiding (unless your the sentimental type and are all for the experience) is far more rewarding. Blizzard tried to close the gap here when they introduced the token system so that you could acquire SOME tier pieces from pve/casual-centric dungeons. Then again with LFR where you can get the less powerful raid sets. Would GW2 make raiding far more rewarding too? I just do not see it in Anet's vision (or mine for that matter [yah I'm biased])
Who knows. From a gear upgrade standpoint, no, that will almost never happen. From a stat bonus standpoint (min/maxing what they want for their spec) I'm sure it can be. For the kill and the feeling like you accomplished something, it depends on the experience. If your one of many 50 people in an area that downed a big boss, maybe not. But if you were one in say 10 who did it and the fight made you try, then maybe it felt like a raid to you. Sure you weren't getting bossed around by someone to watchout for fire if you didnt know the people around you. But honestly, if you have been in guilds who are about the experience of the fight, being first to down it and getting the satisfaction, you know a few things.
1. No boss fight should be a bunch of idiots yelling get out of the fire. They wont hold your hand throu content, they expect you to adapt and know it.
2. If you wipe to a boss and come back in with a new strategy, i.e. actual planning and working out between your team to down it, I think GW2 can provide that in those low amount of player boss battles.
Again GW2 did a good job wetting out feet in the betas, but never got us into the big boss battles. Or at least I hope not. So only time will tell if either point is possible. The reward for some is to get enough gear to progress, while others is to get the challenging fight down. I think the achievements that were added to bosses made every fight a lot more fun for me and others when it came to the boss fight. Even the bosses that were easier than some became challenges doing the things that were necessary to get the achievements to flaunt. Can GW2 do that? I'm sure they could with dungeons, with raid bosses I cant see y not.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
The problem with that statement is that it assumes they are targeting a playerbase that likes instanced raids so much that they will not play a game without them. They just left those people out in the cold and I don't see anything wrong with that. That is not a "wrong way to do business." They decided where their priorities lie, and decided that raiding was not one of them and didn't fit all that well with their overall design. But it should be noted that players that play MMORPGs for that exclusive reason should probably not pick up GW2.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your example. Are you saying that WoW has gone overboard in it's focus on one segment of players? Because I don't see that either. They actually have quite a lot of options for more casual style play and are even introducing a Pokemon-style system to their game.
The only info I can go on is what I read every-day, a good example of that is the popularity of GW2 and the many players who are looking forward to it, because the genre took to a focus on what WOW offered. IE development based on Vertical progression. I didn't just say Raids I said Raids and progression based updates. WHich has turned many off of the WOW model, be it WOW or any other game doing what it does. WHat after all are the many posters in this thread saying when they say " Why can't we have one game that doesn't focus on Raids"?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
I didn't say they only focused on Raids, I said it's also a large focus on progression based activities, like PVP gear for instance. Hence why so many are tired of the WOW type of themepark, and dislike the spin offs that don't focus on much else post release.
Finished raid, stuck our thumbs up our asses and called it a day.
WoW implemented many things to do. Rep farm at the begining but still prominent throughout the game, crafting (specially at the begining for gold and to better the guild), try to get PvP gear that matched stats or were better than what you had for PvE (or in TBC days for druids, tank gear grrr), make an alt to level up and raid on off days... I mean saying raiding is the only end game people did and a game without it serves no purpose is just silly. Once WoW became raids only since rep farming/PvP/alts were just getting unnecessary is what killed it for most. People stopped logging on until raid day since there was no need to do anything. Sure you could run around and grab achievements, but after 1 main, getting achievements over seemed pointless to me and since I got a lot on my main I didnt find much to do after that. I could go back and do old instances or raids, but y bother, they didnt give me gear I could use or gear that looked good enough to wear over my overly stated hunks of metal, so y bother.
GW2 said they would change DEs on a decent basis and going exploring to do DEs is kinda the point for my alts anyway so I dont feel like "hey, I'm doing this just for the achievement" I'm exploring and doing content because its relevant to my char.
If you want to see a game that flopped because of focus on much else besides release look at TOR.
At the end of the day in an end game with gear checked instanced content the time you spend on original unique content can be measured as 1-2 days. its instance its static. Not having to do so will allow players to have fun in a broader spectrum of content at level 80 from dungeons to de's. from orr' meta events to finding those secret mini dungeons and puzzles.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
The problem with that statement is that it assumes they are targeting a playerbase that likes instanced raids so much that they will not play a game without them. They just left those people out in the cold and I don't see anything wrong with that. That is not a "wrong way to do business." They decided where their priorities lie, and decided that raiding was not one of them and didn't fit all that well with their overall design. But it should be noted that players that play MMORPGs for that exclusive reason should probably not pick up GW2.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your example. Are you saying that WoW has gone overboard in it's focus on one segment of players? Because I don't see that either. They actually have quite a lot of options for more casual style play and are even introducing a Pokemon-style system to their game.
The only info I can go on is what I read every-day, a good example of that is the popularity of GW2 and the many players who are looking forward to it, because the genre took to a focus on what WOW offered. IE development based on Vertical progression. I didn't just say Raids I said Raids and progression based updates. WHich has turned many off of the WOW model, be it WOW or any other game doing what it does. WHat after all are the many posters in this thread saying when they say " Why can't we have one game that doesn't focus on Raids"?
Yeah, that patch based gear progression annoys me a bit and I'm glad it's out.
To me at least, the problem is making huge gear gaps in the population where, if you are not a person that enjoys raiding, you will be weaker than everyone else. It's systemic. That's what makes it feel mandatory instead of a part of the variety. And that's also why I would have no problem with them adding dungeons in GW2 intended for greater than 5 players as long as they stick to their system. But that also takes a lot of development energy to do properly and I'd personally be happier if they went in another direction.
Variety is good in my opinion and ArenaNet does appear to be trying to offer that. There is a cost/benefit associated with adding and balancing raid sized dungeons. I'm not sure that the benefit of the very few outweighs the cost.
I tell you all this there are some encounters I have done in GW 2 that make some raid bosses in other games look real easy infact I was playing DDO and doing the Desert raid agianst the naga queen yesterday epic normal and it was fun and all but after doing that raid 100+ times over the years yesterday felt slow and boring and we all knew exactly what to do on the fight. Then on Friday last week was in a dungeon not like Ascalon but over world dungeon in the lvl 25-30 human area north of Lions Arch and in the middle north part of the map is a dungeon that a group I ran across was in and followed along with and we got to the end boss a spider and it was one hard A$$ fight that thing dropped us like flys and we where fighting to keep each other up and when we figured out how to kill it and we did it was amazing.
This is not the only boos fight like that I have done in all the different BWE's or stress test but one out of maybe 90 that where like this. Yeah in time the new will where off but till then theres at least 900+ more bosses I will get to kill plus the world dragons and then if its ture Sarrows is in it and then Orr and fire isle and deep Maguma northern shiver peaks and Shatter will keep me busy for a long time. Hell Shater alone is going to be epic and something I will help with alot.
To me this isnt a God send cause I am a Taoist so we dont have a god persay. But its going to be a huge game that will be pretty big and if it dont have the normal raids and has only open world raid fights so be it bring it on this will be something to remember mostly when the game does do well and oes make a big splash if it does not then come back and tell me I told you so it really wont hurt my feelings.
Sherman's Gaming
Youtube Content creator for The Elder Scrolls Online
There is 1 very good reason that there should not be raiding in GW2 that has nothing to do with the merits of raiding - its just nice to have a game that has a different approach and style.
Think on this, if GW2 did have raiding, then a fair chunk of its future development resource will be routed away from the things that make GW2 fresh and different to make future raiding content. Horses for courses, other games are there for raiding, GW2 offers a different type of game (note 'different', im not saying better or worse)
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
I don't have any data, but I would assume that most people don't even reach level cap, either due to working WoW into a busy real life schedule, or because they play at the pace of a snail. Those who do reach level cap likely still have a busy schedule and thus treat WoW in a not super serious manner, unlike the tiny minority who raid and do high end PVP.
That's why numbers are often lies. Look at it this way, take all the wow players that are "currently online playing", you really think only a small faction of them have raided?
Comments
Generally instanced raids get experienced by a fraction of the community. It would be a waste, in my opinion, not to mention contrary to ArenaNet's philosophy.
Their resources would be better spent developing more dynamic events and large world boss encounters, which are basically open world raids anyway. This way, they can pretty much guarantee that new content will get experienced by the majority of their playerbase.
Clearly you aren't the elite and hardcore raider I'm talking about. You see...there are many types of hardcore and elite raiders. There's even a difference between hardcore and elite. I don't know where you fall. For all I know you we're in a hardcore or elite raiding environment and were just a tag-along allowed to stay because you were fun in Vent. I dunno. The Elites and Hardcore that I was refferring to are the ones who like to control or like to be controlled by the leader (ie. I mentioned raid kicking raiders for standing in the fire). I am not sure how possible it will be to have a personality like "More DoTs raid-leader-guy" in GW2...or even how necessary that personality will be.
I've been in both situations. I've been in guilds that were elite, downed bosses as soon as it came out and tried to get server and world first (that was a stretch but even getting top 10 was pretty hard if you've ever tried). I've downed many bosses on high pop servers first in guilds. I know the raid environment. That being said, you clearly are not talking about us as a singular person and instead as a group. Do we all like to be controlled, manipulated or do the latter? No. We find friends and work as a tight knit group while still enjoying ourselves as a whole. Are there those you've mentioned in our groups? sure. Lots of people only came to raid and not for the group.
That being said, GW2 doesn't need a group of "I dont care about anything but raiding" people because there seems (we haven't tried Orr, but I doubt anyone besides the people trying will care about server first) to be no reason for them to form such partys. What you said that bothers me is not that there are elitist people, its that you said that "Elites and hardcores will not like the PvE in GW2" and thats a flat out lie. I can name hundred of elitist friends who are playing GW2 for the experience and not the end game.
I'm not saying that you are wrong and that a lot of raiders and elitist and hardcore will not like this game, but I'm saying that not all of them will not play the game simply because of the system that GW2 is implementing. Saying that elites will quit the game purely because while leveling there is a guy who stands in fire and kills himself or doesn't get out of an easy mechanic is not true. If they are that concerned, I'm sure they have a group of elitist friends to walk around with them so that even if said person dies they can still pull together to do what is necessary.
Ok...so then in GW2 they are no longer elitists. Clarification: People who played with an elite and/or hardcore mindset can enjoy GW2 if they are able to play without the elite and/or hardcore mindset. There are proud elites out there who will not be so fast to shed their glorified status. GW2 will be the most leveled playing field I have yet seen in MMORPGs to date.
There will likely be a lot of unskilled players in world encounters that contribute little more than making the encounter itself more difficult because of the 2 reasons of: They aren't contributing as much as they should and the encounter will be scaled up because of their presense. I can see this annoying the elitist minded people when such an encounter fails.
Now...if world encoutners do not fail despite the bad players then the elitists will say they are too easy. Elitist players want challenge. Another factor that can drive them away.
Well in the definition of elitist, basically completing content in the shortest amount of time to flaunt their epeen, sure, I can see that they would not be that. But again, how much you want to bet there is at least 1 guild who will get together, blow throu the whole game to get to Orr and beat it within ohhh lets say a few week before anyone else and probly every dungeon in every difficulty. The only difference is that I doubt GW2 will go, "well these people beat the content alrdy and are asking for more, what do we do now?" The game isn't designed for that.
Or lets look at the elitist who loves achievements. He goes out of his way to get every single one, in every part of the game. I'm sure that person can be happy with what he gets as well since there is a system like that. So that elitist is satisfied.
Or the elitist PvP'er who wants to rush to 80, get high ranks, win tournys and make a name for himself as the best "insert class here" on the server. Again, pretty sure that possible as well.
There are many elitist definitions that can be used in many different situation, saying that every elitist is someone who likes being controlled and falls into the first catagory is not entirely true. Can they get the 60 bucks worth of the game, sure if thats what they want. Will it be like WoW where they compete that hard for server first... probly not. But who knows. This game is not meant for everyone and I respect that. But to say that just because this doesnt fall into elitist teritory is kinda vague. Elitist raiders are such a minority nowadays that you'd honestly be lucky to find a game as good as WoW to get your perfect PvE experience. If you want to list the games I played as elitist territory I can easily prove to you that they can never be that competitive due to lack of content and the way content was presented.
I just don't get it at all!!
Anet isn't neglecting or making contents unavailable to players, They are making an MMO that they don't want Raids in.
Its their game, they call it GW2, they said no Raids in the traditional terms, so No RAIDS.
Whats the big deal, they are also making Dynamic Events, they call it Dynamic Events, they shown us their versions of Dynamic Events. Rift called their Rifts Dynamic Events. So its up to the Developers to create a game they want to create.
And it seems that atleast a Million players have agreed to play their version of Dynamic Events, and their game call GW2.
By playing their game, we also agreed to their vision, their vision to not include any RAIDS in the traditional sense.
Whats so hard to understand it, there are hundreds or even thousands of MMO's with RAIDS in the old way. They told you there are no RAIDS like you are used to upfront. Its not like they said buy the game, and maybe there are RAIDS that we know from all the previous games.
Even all the defenders are telling you that there are no Raids like you know them before.
So whats the big deal.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
Since this is devolving into doing a lot of talking without saying much ^^^ that ^^^ really is all it boils down to concerning my sentiments. How ^^^ that ^^^ is recieved by the "Elitist Jerks" type communities remains to be seen.
I don't think you saw the whole exchange between myself and heartless...
I'm no raider btw, I'm just looking at this from a business perspective. I wouldn't do raids if they were in GW2, I might try one but that's about it, as long as they weren't gated and all about gear. In the end though I really for the most part partake in PVP and just PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Dont edit as I'm responding. Bum.
I will agree with this. Elitist hate when encounters are catered to casuals. What ruins a lot of games for them. And without hard modes in the open world, its hard for them to get all they want out of a boss encounter. But they can still do instances, while only 5 man, have harder difficulties that can hopefully prove a challenge. If elitist really want a challenge, I'd say that low pop servers, although subtracting from epeen values, will prove a difficult experience. If you can run around with your guild and do any raid boss that you want with little to no interference from outsiders, that basically fixes the problem of a fight becoming too easy regardless of the people you bring. However, on the note of the boss encounter not being scaled high enough for those elitists, they will have to suck up the fact that bringing to many people to a raid will always prove that the encounter is easier, on most cases, hence why raids are generally only a certain amount of people. So going by their elitist manner, they kick out whoever they dont want to join them and run around in their elitist squad to challenge themselves to raid bosses with less people than required or just enough. Will it fix the encounter for them? probly not, but honestly I never felt I had a challenging boss fight after TBC, maybe LK fight, but that was still just fazes. The only solution for elitists to make a fight difficult is to scale gear in most games, which leads to a very boring boss fight and boring mechanics. If the boss encounters have some cool mechanics that require you to think and be on your toes then they might be fine with the raids in GW2.
Isn't that exactly what a lot of us are griping about? "Blizzard is more business minded than player minded"...."Blizzard now develops expansions for the money and not for the art and enjoyment of its players"...
Just saying...
There's a right way to be business minded and a wrong way, the wrong way is not accounting for the entirety of your playerbase and instead focusing on one segment almost exclusively, in WOW that would be raiders and those seeking constant progression based updates.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I remember Blizzard revamping every (other than BC) quest hub area. That must have taken a huge amount of development time. The problem is that raiding (unless your the sentimental type and are all for the experience) is far more rewarding. Blizzard tried to close the gap here when they introduced the token system so that you could acquire SOME tier pieces from pve/casual-centric dungeons. Then again with LFR where you can get the less powerful raid sets. Would GW2 make raiding far more rewarding too? I just do not see it in Anet's vision (or mine for that matter [yah I'm biased])
I really look at it as exaggeration and make up number to prove a point.
Another question is what exactly do people do after they reached max level in wow. Doing the same dungeon over and over again? Arena? battleground all day? raid?
If you think very small amount of people raid in wow. What do they do all day.
The problem with that statement is that it assumes they are targeting a playerbase that likes instanced raids so much that they will not play a game without them. They just left those people out in the cold and I don't see anything wrong with that. That is not a "wrong way to do business." They decided where their priorities lie, and decided that raiding was not one of them and didn't fit all that well with their overall design. But it should be noted that players that play MMORPGs for that exclusive reason should probably not pick up GW2.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your example. Are you saying that WoW has gone overboard in it's focus on one segment of players? Because I don't see that either. They actually have quite a lot of options for more casual style play and are even introducing a Pokemon-style system to their game.
I don't have any data, but I would assume that most people don't even reach level cap, either due to working WoW into a busy real life schedule, or because they play at the pace of a snail. Those who do reach level cap likely still have a busy schedule and thus treat WoW in a not super serious manner, unlike the tiny minority who raid and do high end PVP.
I didn't say they only focused on Raids, I said it's also a large focus on progression based activities, like PVP gear for instance. Hence why so many are tired of the WOW type of themepark, and dislike the spin offs that don't focus on much else post release.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Who knows. From a gear upgrade standpoint, no, that will almost never happen. From a stat bonus standpoint (min/maxing what they want for their spec) I'm sure it can be. For the kill and the feeling like you accomplished something, it depends on the experience. If your one of many 50 people in an area that downed a big boss, maybe not. But if you were one in say 10 who did it and the fight made you try, then maybe it felt like a raid to you. Sure you weren't getting bossed around by someone to watchout for fire if you didnt know the people around you. But honestly, if you have been in guilds who are about the experience of the fight, being first to down it and getting the satisfaction, you know a few things.
1. No boss fight should be a bunch of idiots yelling get out of the fire. They wont hold your hand throu content, they expect you to adapt and know it.
2. If you wipe to a boss and come back in with a new strategy, i.e. actual planning and working out between your team to down it, I think GW2 can provide that in those low amount of player boss battles.
Again GW2 did a good job wetting out feet in the betas, but never got us into the big boss battles. Or at least I hope not. So only time will tell if either point is possible. The reward for some is to get enough gear to progress, while others is to get the challenging fight down. I think the achievements that were added to bosses made every fight a lot more fun for me and others when it came to the boss fight. Even the bosses that were easier than some became challenges doing the things that were necessary to get the achievements to flaunt. Can GW2 do that? I'm sure they could with dungeons, with raid bosses I cant see y not.
The only info I can go on is what I read every-day, a good example of that is the popularity of GW2 and the many players who are looking forward to it, because the genre took to a focus on what WOW offered. IE development based on Vertical progression. I didn't just say Raids I said Raids and progression based updates. WHich has turned many off of the WOW model, be it WOW or any other game doing what it does. WHat after all are the many posters in this thread saying when they say " Why can't we have one game that doesn't focus on Raids"?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Finished raid, stuck our thumbs up our asses and called it a day.
WoW implemented many things to do. Rep farm at the begining but still prominent throughout the game, crafting (specially at the begining for gold and to better the guild), try to get PvP gear that matched stats or were better than what you had for PvE (or in TBC days for druids, tank gear grrr), make an alt to level up and raid on off days... I mean saying raiding is the only end game people did and a game without it serves no purpose is just silly. Once WoW became raids only since rep farming/PvP/alts were just getting unnecessary is what killed it for most. People stopped logging on until raid day since there was no need to do anything. Sure you could run around and grab achievements, but after 1 main, getting achievements over seemed pointless to me and since I got a lot on my main I didnt find much to do after that. I could go back and do old instances or raids, but y bother, they didnt give me gear I could use or gear that looked good enough to wear over my overly stated hunks of metal, so y bother.
GW2 said they would change DEs on a decent basis and going exploring to do DEs is kinda the point for my alts anyway so I dont feel like "hey, I'm doing this just for the achievement" I'm exploring and doing content because its relevant to my char.
If you want to see a game that flopped because of focus on much else besides release look at TOR.
Yeah, that patch based gear progression annoys me a bit and I'm glad it's out.
To me at least, the problem is making huge gear gaps in the population where, if you are not a person that enjoys raiding, you will be weaker than everyone else. It's systemic. That's what makes it feel mandatory instead of a part of the variety. And that's also why I would have no problem with them adding dungeons in GW2 intended for greater than 5 players as long as they stick to their system. But that also takes a lot of development energy to do properly and I'd personally be happier if they went in another direction.
Variety is good in my opinion and ArenaNet does appear to be trying to offer that. There is a cost/benefit associated with adding and balancing raid sized dungeons. I'm not sure that the benefit of the very few outweighs the cost.
I tell you all this there are some encounters I have done in GW 2 that make some raid bosses in other games look real easy infact I was playing DDO and doing the Desert raid agianst the naga queen yesterday epic normal and it was fun and all but after doing that raid 100+ times over the years yesterday felt slow and boring and we all knew exactly what to do on the fight. Then on Friday last week was in a dungeon not like Ascalon but over world dungeon in the lvl 25-30 human area north of Lions Arch and in the middle north part of the map is a dungeon that a group I ran across was in and followed along with and we got to the end boss a spider and it was one hard A$$ fight that thing dropped us like flys and we where fighting to keep each other up and when we figured out how to kill it and we did it was amazing.
This is not the only boos fight like that I have done in all the different BWE's or stress test but one out of maybe 90 that where like this. Yeah in time the new will where off but till then theres at least 900+ more bosses I will get to kill plus the world dragons and then if its ture Sarrows is in it and then Orr and fire isle and deep Maguma northern shiver peaks and Shatter will keep me busy for a long time. Hell Shater alone is going to be epic and something I will help with alot.
To me this isnt a God send cause I am a Taoist so we dont have a god persay. But its going to be a huge game that will be pretty big and if it dont have the normal raids and has only open world raid fights so be it bring it on this will be something to remember mostly when the game does do well and oes make a big splash if it does not then come back and tell me I told you so it really wont hurt my feelings.
Sherman's Gaming
Youtube Content creator for The Elder Scrolls Online
Channel:http://https//www.youtube.com/channel/UCrgYNgpFTRAl4XWz31o2emw
There is 1 very good reason that there should not be raiding in GW2 that has nothing to do with the merits of raiding - its just nice to have a game that has a different approach and style.
Think on this, if GW2 did have raiding, then a fair chunk of its future development resource will be routed away from the things that make GW2 fresh and different to make future raiding content. Horses for courses, other games are there for raiding, GW2 offers a different type of game (note 'different', im not saying better or worse)
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
That's why numbers are often lies. Look at it this way, take all the wow players that are "currently online playing", you really think only a small faction of them have raided?