Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
Pre-release they never said there would not be an expansion. Most expected it.
They had an expansion planned from the get go, it was talked at the release time and NCSoft even mentioned it in their first couple financial quarterly reports.
Then the cash shop numbers came in.
And they were better than expected.
Suddenly there was no time pressure to release an expansion. In fact the cash shop revenue was so large (larger than GW1 expansions revenue) that Anet could have a dedicated Live team several times larger than GW1 live team and hence the Living Story was created - an opportunity to give junior (mostly) staff experience while the main worked in an expansion or expansion content.
With an expansion time frame of 2+ years after release there was no benefit into talking into one and any word about expansions died out and all the hype went into the Living Story.
Detractors and anti-fans of GW2 chose to believe that an expansion wasn't being made because there was no money for it and that GW2 was a failure, when the fact Arenanet kept their staff number (even increased it) and had 2+ years to work on an expansion is the best proof of GW2 commercial success.
Now suddenly an expansion is a bad thing. sigh.
5 years to develop a game. 2 years to develop an expansion.
How many publishers give that to a dev team/studio?
And we are talking of NCSoft here, one of the most ruthless publishers.
You are mistaken on a few matters.
1) It's true that they never technically said "there will never be an expansion". But that's playing to verbal technicalities, like they did when they released Ascended tier equipment. "We never said there wouldn't be more tiers!" was the defining battle cry of a dev team struggling to rationalize why the game needed "more progression" two months out of the release gate.
They made it very clear that they didn't want to make an expansion, and that the Living Story was their replacement for such a thing. They stated many times the reasons why they didn't like the traditional expansion model that other MMOs employed. Ergo, the announcement of an expansion would effectively be them backpedaling on over two years of monologue about how they were going to do things differently and blaze their own trail.
You can argue "they never technically said that exact combination of words" until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that people didn't just fabricate the "no expansion" concept out of thin air. It was directly inspired by the words of the devs, how often they said they weren't looking at expansions, and how often they made their opposition to expansions clear.
2) The devs were not working on an expansion for 2 years. The dev team wasn't even large enough to accommodate that sort of thing at the time of the game's release. They had to commit to several new hirings in order to expand the team to a size large enough to push the Living Story to a two-week process. And we have several quotes from ANet devs last year which suggested that they weren't even looking at the idea, and felt no pressure to make one. So if this is an expansion announcement, they've been working on it for no more than a year (or else they've been lying to the media and their players about it).
3) THEY set the expectation, not us. I'm going to repeat that dev quote again, this time with bold for emphasis. "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." So, by their own words, if they are indeed releasing an expansion, then they failed. They are admitting that they failed to deliver a compelling Living Story that kept players engaged and satisfied. They are admitting that they failed to deliver the significant content updates that they promised. And they are admitting that they are hypocrites for criticizing the gaming industry, but ultimately being forced to follow in its footsteps in order to stay alive.
I can think of no more sincere evidence of failure than the devs of GW2 being forced to eat their own words. And they've been doing an awful lot of that over the last two years. Plenty of things they promised or at least hinted at doing, but never delivered.
Oh, I'm sure that some folks will flood back to the game, at least for a little while, and everyone will praise how great the new expansion is (if indeed that's what this is). But I won't be one of those people. For me, this would be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. It effectively indicates that they've admitted total failure with the Living Story, and instead of fixing the mistakes they've made and delivering on promised content that has been missing since beta, they will just go for the quick money of an expansion instead. Guess we can wait another two years for guild halls, more expansive PvP, support for guild-vs-guild, extensions to the precursor and legendary mechanics, etc, right? After all, I really want to hear more about how wonderful Scarlet was, how she was really right all along, and how I should feel bad for hating her. That's what good story looks like....right?
If you want to salivate all over a new expansion, have at it, but don't you dare criticize me for calling them out on their own hypocrisy. They were the ones who set the unreasonable expectations upon their shoulders. Now they have to bear that weight, and folks like me who remember the lofty goals they set for themselves are not going to support them in their efforts to abandon everything that made them unique. If this is an expansion, then they've finally given up the last major strand of uniqueness they had....and in that case, I have no reason to ever come back, because all of the story and the content that I'd want to explore when I got back will be locked behind paywalls.
I bought GW2 because it promised to be different. I ultimately stopped playing GW2 because it started becoming all of the things it said it wasn't going to be. An expansion would be justification enough to finally give up hope that GW2 will keep to its unique approach to the MMO genre.
So you would rather have them stay on course even though it's failing? What is your solution? It's easy to criticize, but you haven't offered any suggestions or solutions of an alternative to an expansion.
You say you want uniqueness, and GW2 tried that. As you said, it failed, so what should they do? It seems like you just want to scold them, without offering anything substantial to your tirade.
Am I the only one who still remembers how much they insisted that they never wanted to do traditional expansion packs? And how, even after Season 1 had ended in what most folks concluded to be a dismal failure, they still insisted that they believed in the Living Story and how they were going to stick with it? Or, most of all, how they wanted to avoid expansion packs because it isolated certain regions and classes, keeping everyone from being able to experience everything?
I'm amazed at those of you clamoring for an expansion pack, to be honest, considering it would be pretty much the final nail in the coffin of GW2's claims towards being "different" from every other MMO out there. I mean, I get it. I truly do. GW2 is starved for content, and expansions fix that itch like no other....but only for a short period of time. And then you've got large portions of content that returning players can't play because it's behind a pay wall.
Ultimately, I bought GW2 because it promised to be different from other MMOs. I quit playing when it started rapidly becoming just like other MMOs. If they announce an expansion, it'll probably be my cue to uninstall the game for good.
Pre-release they never said there would not be an expansion. Most expected it.
They had an expansion planned from the get go, it was talked at the release time and NCSoft even mentioned it in their first couple financial quarterly reports.
Then the cash shop numbers came in.
And they were better than expected.
Suddenly there was no time pressure to release an expansion. In fact the cash shop revenue was so large (larger than GW1 expansions revenue) that Anet could have a dedicated Live team several times larger than GW1 live team and hence the Living Story was created - an opportunity to give junior (mostly) staff experience while the main worked in an expansion or expansion content.
With an expansion time frame of 2+ years after release there was no benefit into talking into one and any word about expansions died out and all the hype went into the Living Story.
Detractors and anti-fans of GW2 chose to believe that an expansion wasn't being made because there was no money for it and that GW2 was a failure, when the fact Arenanet kept their staff number (even increased it) and had 2+ years to work on an expansion is the best proof of GW2 commercial success.
Now suddenly an expansion is a bad thing. sigh.
5 years to develop a game. 2 years to develop an expansion.
How many publishers give that to a dev team/studio?
And we are talking of NCSoft here, one of the most ruthless publishers.
You are mistaken on a few matters.
1) It's true that they never technically said "there will never be an expansion". But that's playing to verbal technicalities, like they did when they released Ascended tier equipment. "We never said there wouldn't be more tiers!" was the defining battle cry of a dev team struggling to rationalize why the game needed "more progression" two months out of the release gate.
They made it very clear that they didn't want to make an expansion, and that the Living Story was their replacement for such a thing. They stated many times the reasons why they didn't like the traditional expansion model that other MMOs employed. Ergo, the announcement of an expansion would effectively be them backpedaling on over two years of monologue about how they were going to do things differently and blaze their own trail.
You can argue "they never technically said that exact combination of words" until you're blue in the face, but it doesn't change the fact that people didn't just fabricate the "no expansion" concept out of thin air. It was directly inspired by the words of the devs, how often they said they weren't looking at expansions, and how often they made their opposition to expansions clear.
2) The devs were not working on an expansion for 2 years. The dev team wasn't even large enough to accommodate that sort of thing at the time of the game's release. They had to commit to several new hirings in order to expand the team to a size large enough to push the Living Story to a two-week process. And we have several quotes from ANet devs last year which suggested that they weren't even looking at the idea, and felt no pressure to make one. So if this is an expansion announcement, they've been working on it for no more than a year (or else they've been lying to the media and their players about it).
3) THEY set the expectation, not us. I'm going to repeat that dev quote again, this time with bold for emphasis. "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." So, by their own words, if they are indeed releasing an expansion, then they failed. They are admitting that they failed to deliver a compelling Living Story that kept players engaged and satisfied. They are admitting that they failed to deliver the significant content updates that they promised. And they are admitting that they are hypocrites for criticizing the gaming industry, but ultimately being forced to follow in its footsteps in order to stay alive.
I can think of no more sincere evidence of failure than the devs of GW2 being forced to eat their own words. And they've been doing an awful lot of that over the last two years. Plenty of things they promised or at least hinted at doing, but never delivered.
Oh, I'm sure that some folks will flood back to the game, at least for a little while, and everyone will praise how great the new expansion is (if indeed that's what this is). But I won't be one of those people. For me, this would be the final straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. It effectively indicates that they've admitted total failure with the Living Story, and instead of fixing the mistakes they've made and delivering on promised content that has been missing since beta, they will just go for the quick money of an expansion instead. Guess we can wait another two years for guild halls, more expansive PvP, support for guild-vs-guild, extensions to the precursor and legendary mechanics, etc, right? After all, I really want to hear more about how wonderful Scarlet was, how she was really right all along, and how I should feel bad for hating her. That's what good story looks like....right?
If you want to salivate all over a new expansion, have at it, but don't you dare criticize me for calling them out on their own hypocrisy. They were the ones who set the unreasonable expectations upon their shoulders. Now they have to bear that weight, and folks like me who remember the lofty goals they set for themselves are not going to support them in their efforts to abandon everything that made them unique. If this is an expansion, then they've finally given up the last major strand of uniqueness they had....and in that case, I have no reason to ever come back, because all of the story and the content that I'd want to explore when I got back will be locked behind paywalls.
I bought GW2 because it promised to be different. I ultimately stopped playing GW2 because it started becoming all of the things it said it wasn't going to be. An expansion would be justification enough to finally give up hope that GW2 will keep to its unique approach to the MMO genre.
What defines an "expansion" anyways? Does it have to cost money? Does it have to be a certain size? What if they call it a DLC? They did say something about this announcement having to do with the next evolution of the living story.
I can think of no more sincere evidence of failure than the devs of GW2 being forced to eat their own words. And they've been doing an awful lot of that over the last two years. Plenty of things they promised or at least hinted at doing, but never delivered.
If you want to salivate all over a new expansion, have at it, but don't you dare criticize me for calling them out on their own hypocrisy. They were the ones who set the unreasonable expectations upon their shoulders. Now they have to bear that weight, and folks like me who remember the lofty goals they set for themselves are not going to support them in their efforts to abandon everything that made them unique. If this is an expansion, then they've finally given up the last major strand of uniqueness they had....and in that case, I have no reason to ever come back, because all of the story and the content that I'd want to explore when I got back will be locked behind paywalls.
I bought GW2 because it promised to be different. I ultimately stopped playing GW2 because it started becoming all of the things it said it wasn't going to be. An expansion would be justification enough to finally give up hope that GW2 will keep to its unique approach to the MMO genre.
It was never part of their manifesto that there wouldn't be any expansion - actually the expectation for most was that there would be one. Apparently, the last tier of weapon was also announced before release (you can investigate the matter if you are interested).
It's true that Living Story wasn't quite like what Anet (and the players) had hopped - especially LS1. You can even find Arena Net saying so in the forum here and there.
It's fine. They're grown ups, they can admit when something didn't quite go according to plan. So it was back to the drawing board for them.
Maybe you are one of the few people who found LS to be everything you wanted... in that case, perhaps you should have been more vocal about it. My understanding was that a majority of players didn't enjoy it as much as you. So my expectation is that you are a minority here (saying: "Go on with Living Story and no expansion please"), and that their estimated income will not suffer if you decide to not purchase the (presumed) expansion pack.
Frankly, I like the hybrid "best of both world" approach where they release an expansion pack here and there (if it is one indeed) for major continent updates like new races, weapons, guild hall features and all - which are impossible to deliver as part of LS, let's face it, so expansions is where I will want them to deliver this kind of content - and Living Story for the minor updates to the plots, things like elections and crap like that which are temporary fun that keep me coming back to the game.
3) THEY set the expectation, not us. I'm going to repeat that dev quote again, this time with bold for emphasis. "If we do this right, we will probably never do an expansion and everything will be going into this Living World strategy." So, by their own words, if they are indeed releasing an expansion, then they failed. They are admitting that they failed to deliver a compelling Living Story that kept players engaged and satisfied. They are admitting that they failed to deliver the significant content updates that they promised. And they are admitting that they are hypocrites for criticizing the gaming industry, but ultimately being forced to follow in its footsteps in order to stay alive.
So whats your point? You admonish them for going back on their word to the point of listing that quote TWICE and bolding it once....but did you even read it? What did they say? They said, IF WE DO THIS RIGHT......and you then say they failed. So we can assume they did NOT do it right.
So we can then assume that the rest of that quote goes out the window since the conditional that was at the beginning was not met. Now given the fact that they failed, and you clearly are still upset that they are going with an expansion, what else do you expect them to do? Keep going with the failed living story content? Shut down the game servers just because you don't like it and think they lied?
Eric Flannum sent us a note to clarify a couple of things about their plans for Guild Wars 2 post-release content:
"We haven't decided on what exactly we are or aren't going to offer for money post-release. We're open to whatever our players seem most interested in. If, after release, you guys would like more story content, more dungeons, more events, more maps or whatever, it's something that we have to consider because ultimately making you happy is what makes us successful. Whether we release that in DLC (like the bonus mission packs in GW1) or whether we do it through expansions (Like Eye of the North) is yet to be determined. As to whether or not there are going to be items like XP boosts available in the in game store, I can only reiterate what we've said before (and will continue to say,) that we'll release details on it when they are available, and that our core philosophy of not requiring you to spend additional money to play the game and not making the game difficult or painful to play in order to encourage you to buy things from the store still stands."
We today know a number of the high-level features that we're going to do, and expansion content for years to come," said Price. "No, it's not drilled down in a way that is - it's all at the five-thousand foot level and above, from a big picture [perspective]. But every month we go through time, we get closer and it gets down and, OK, now we're actually creating content for it."
"Look," concluded Price, "even from our standpoint we've got years of work, of great work, that players are going to be able to enjoy.
"We're launching a service - you don't launch a box and be done with it. We have years of awesome, fun work ahead of us."
The question of when Guild Wars 2 will launch in 2012 depends on the results of the beta tests. That was the official line from ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brien, given to Eurogamer during our recent invasion of Guild Wars 2's home.
"We have a couple of really big Guild Wars projects cooking in the background," Johanson told me.
Later, he added: "Some of our players believe that because we are doing this Living World seasons, and these features or these big feature-builds, that it means that the features you would traditionally get in an expansion, or the content you would traditionally get in an expansion, is not something that will get added to Guild Wars 2. And that is not true at all.
"Not only are we doing those things, new features and content you would traditionally get from a boxed expansion are also things that will be added to Guild Wars 2.
"The thing that we haven't decided yet," he went on, "is what form that type of content will take. Is it right for Guild Wars 2 for that kind of boxed expansion? Is it right for that to be something we add, live, through storylines in the game? Is that something we want to sell through our in-game store? There are a lot of different options available to us.
Bottom line is:
- Content has been created in the background since release.
- The Living Story/Live Team is a faction of Anet man power.
- Expansion content has always been in the plans and the question is how it will be release - DLC via cash shop, free via Living Story, boxed content or even a combination of 2 or all 3 of those.
GW2:HoT is an expansion - we just don't know how we going to pay it.
One has to read PR for what it is PR.
During the release of Living Story, Anet was focusing on it, hyping it, since that would be what was new for GW2 players for 2 now years.
It should be easy to understand why they didn't want to talk about expansions then.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
A buy to play expansion means I probably won't log into GW2 ever again. They have a cash shop, therefore they are not permitted to charge a box price in my way of thinking. I used to love buy to play, sub to play, and hate f2p, but now I'm embracing f2p, and I am all in, f2p is not going anywhere, which means that's the only option for me especially when games like GW2 try double dipping , you don't get to double dip. Double dip means I skip.
Originally posted by Battlerock A buy to play expansion means I probably won't log into GW2 ever again. They have a cash shop, therefore they are not permitted to charge a box price in my way of thinking. I used to love buy to play, sub to play, and hate f2p, but now I'm embracing f2p, and I am all in, f2p is not going anywhere, which means that's the only option for me especially when games like GW2 try double dipping , you don't get to double dip. Double dip means I skip.
They only double dip if you choose to buy from the cash shop.
Since there is nothing in the cash shop you actually need that f2p makes you dip much more.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Apologies that I didn't quote anyone specifically here, but I couldn't find a way to satisfactorily quote all of you. I will do my best to respond to all three of you at once.
1) askdaboss, I can tell from the opening lines that you didn't actually read my post. I made it very clear that while no explicit promise was ever made that there would "never be an expansion" (in that they never specifically said the words "we will never make an expansion" in sequence without attaching a qualifier to it, which as I said is being overly technical), the player's expectations that no expansions were coming were based on factual statements made by the development team. The expectations of "no expansion" didn't just appear out of thin air, they were based on over two years of continuous rhetoric from the ANet team against the idea of expansions and the very idea of being just like every other MMO. And the players, at least for a while, supported them on this. So you can't pretend that they didn't kick-start the idea themselves. Gaia_hunter, you should read those statements too, because you seem to be claiming that "expansions were always planned"....they clearly were not, and we have developer statements proving as much.
2) No, I didn't actually like the Living Story up to this point. I hated it. But I didn't hate it because of the way it worked, I hated it because it was altogether poorly written. The Personal Story was similarly poorly written, with all of your individual choices dissolving into thin air as the story became all about Trehearne's quest to purify Arah. Season 1 then focused wholeheartedly on Scarlet, who was portrayed as an impossibly smart individual who knew everything and was always ten steps ahead of the player, and everything you did only helped her plans along (the Mary Sue was strong in her). And then Season 2 rolled around, the story didn't get any better, and yet they started locking individual story segments behind pay walls, as if they were worth paying for. An expansion is not going to fix the problem of bad story writing. A better writing team would.
3) You ask me to define an "expansion". Alright. Let's look at the common elements that exist in virtually every expansion:
A new level cap (usually)
A new campaign/storyline
New weapons and armor
New modes of play
New territory to explore
New dungeons/raids
Now let's compare that with the "expansion-sized" update they had promised to be arriving in April, and the other one they did in September. It added....none of these things. Oh certainly, it made some significant improvements to the game's existing systems. But you may want to take a moment and notice that when it comes to GW2, almost all they've done is improve upon existing content. They're not making new content.
I should clarify. When I say "content", I mean "something not directly related to the story" (i.e. things like the list above). When we take into account all of the things GW2 has done over these last 2+ years, they don't end up on the positive end of things on that list above.
The level cap hasn't moved, and they have suggested (though not explicitly stated) that they might not move it at all.
The Living Story is their substitute for expansion stories, and to date, hasn't been written very well. This is perhaps best shown by the fact that the biggest "twist" of Season 2 (that the Sylvari are/were Mordremoth minions) is something players had predicted before the game even released, and surprised absolutely no one.
The game has seen a number of new weapons, though relatively few new armors. Also, despite multiple requests for it, the devs have not spent so much as a single man-hour working on improving the looks of armors for charr or asuran characters. Heck, in the former case, they are on record as saying that charr armor fixes are considered a minor concern to their staff purely because less people play as charr than as humans or norn, where the stretching mechanics they use for armors look fine.
They have delivered very, very little in the category of new game modes. I'm told they added a single map for "Deathmatch" PvP recently, which is effectively the only major new mode they've added to PvP in 2 years. GvG remains completely unsupported, despite it being the largest and most popular form of PvP in the game. WvW has received one new map in 2 years, and gets an occasional tournament to "shake things up" (it doesn't) or a new passive ability line, but is otherwise mostly abandoned by the devs. And in terms of PvE content, the only real "new mode" of play is the addition of guild missions over a year ago.
Prior to the start of Season 2 back in July, you could count the number of new maps on a single hand. Now....you can still count it on a single hand. There's only three new permanent maps in two years: Dry Top, the Silverwastes, and Southsun Cove. If you tack on the temporary Bazaar of the Four Winds map, that makes four.
There have been a few "mini-dungeons" added to the game temporarily by holiday events, but if you look only at permanent dungeon content, there's been one: Fractals of the Mists. They also removed a path from one dungeon in order to add a Living-Story-related path to it instead, but since they removed content in order to add new content, it's effectively a one-to-one tradeoff.
And that's not to mention the numerous other bits of content we've been promised in some form or another. Heck, some things, like guild halls, were promised before the game even released....and they still aren't available.
No matter how you shake it, GW2 has made a lot of promises it never delivered on. And while the game has taken some steps forward, it's easily argued that they haven't taken nearly enough steps forward to keep the players actively engaged. The mere fact that we're here discussing the possibility of this being a formal expansion is proof enough of that. Which leads into....
4) I'm a little baffled that any of you actually think that an expansion is anything less than an admission of failure. Especially since it clearly is, when you take into account their own words on the subject. Season 2 was an admission that they couldn't deliver on the promise of free content, and had to lock the story behind a pay wall in order to keep their finances up. If this is indeed an expansion and contains the common elements of an expansion (new classes, weapons, and other forms of content other than just story), then it is an admission that they couldn't deliver on the promise of free content in general, either.
5) You ask for "solutions" that avoid the necessity for an expansion. Okay then:
Significantly reduce the size of the writing staff. You have too many writers to begin with, and the ones leading the charge aren't very good at it. Hire new writers who are willing to focus on the stories their players want to hear, rather than writing self-insert fanfiction (see: Scarlet).
Reduce the Living Story back down to a monthly pace, if not slower. The two week model has caused quality to suffer significantly, even with all the staff they've hired on. They need more time to come up with a better story structure.
Balance out the workload so that all of the game's needed areas (story, content, PvP/WvW) have enough staff to work on updates at the same time. In one interview, it was stated that the dev team had FOUR Living Story teams, yet the teams for WvW and PvP remained woefully understaffed and overworked for many months. And while they have been supposedly working on traditional expansion content to introduce into the game for some time now, they've seen no progress on it, which means the team doing that work is also probably understaffed. Having more equally sized teams will reduce the amount of story they put out at once, yes, but it'll also increase the amount of work getting done on literally everything else. There is no reason that you couldn't put out an update to each major area (story, content, PvP/WvW) once a month if you have equally sized and equally important teams.
Stop herding players. We're not sheep. We don't need or want to be herded into singular spots on the map so that your metrics can be satisfied. Continue to rely more heavily on instanced story content to give the story a more personal touch, and keep away from having major story requirements bound to particular maps.
None of these things are largely profound ideas, they're things that players like myself have been suggesting for well over a year. Hell, ask most players who left what they would do, and you'll probably hear at least one of these four core ideas in some form or another. The few friends I have who still do play GW2 even admit that all four of these things would dramatically improve the game. The game always had too heavy of an emphasis on its story and never nearly enough emphasis on adding new content. That's why most of their updates for the last two years have been fixes to old content that didn't work as intended, rather than the addition of new content. Finally....
6) Stop acting like every time someone criticizes the game, it's a personal slight that must be attacked and defeated, as if criticism is some manner of great evil on the horizon. And I know what you're going to say. "I didn't do that"....but look at your replies to me again with a critical eye. One of you dismissed my post as a "rant" against a game I "hated" (which is absurd, since I was among the first of the pre-purchasers and a fan of the game since they first announced it was coming). Another acted as if I'm one of the minority of players who liked the Living Story (even though I said I hated it in multiple posts prior to this). A third acted as if I'm one of the folks who clamored for an expansion and am now suddenly changing my mind (I've never given any indication of such a stance). In all three cases, you immediately jumped to the assumption that you knew all about the sort of person I was, and marched forth to belittle my argument by way of attacking the base upon which you THOUGHT I stood. Three swings, and three misses.
There are some pretty defensive MMO fan bases out there, but I've never seen one nearly as vicious as GW2's fans. In many respects, it's folks like you who drove away so many* because you refuse to admit that the game does have some flaws, and take every criticism like it's a personal insult. I gave up on the GW2 forums because the environment became a battle of toxic forces. On one side was the players who would support GW2 no matter what they did, and they were at constant war with the other side, full of players who decried the shift in design philosophy away from what was "revolutionary" and towards traditional MMO design. Both sides flinging insults back and forth, and the moderators enforcing rules with a clear bias. It got too frustrating to watch, much less participate in. It seems like no one on the "pro-GW2" side is actually interested in so much as hearing the valid criticisms of the game from people who try to skirt the median. It's much like politics in that respect. The whole conversation seems to boil down to "If you don't agree with every word I say, you must be one of them dirty Dems/Repubs that I hate so much!", with no interest in actually addressing the criticisms or being honest about them.
It's especially baffling here, because I'm even admitting that it was a great game to start with. What ultimately sold me on the game was its pledge to be a game which you "bought once and played forever", that they would continue to update the game with new classes, equipment, and story for free. But GW2 just went down a path that it said it wasn't going to....the path towards traditional MMO staples. This is an MMO which sold itself on being different. If they choose to stop being different, they deserve to be called out for it. If that makes you mad, well, tough. I want what I've always wanted, the game I was originally promised. A game which provides free content and story updates on a consistent basis. When they give me that game, I'll open my wallet back up and start dumping money into gems like I used to. But not a moment before.
And stop blaming myself and others for the desperate situation they now find themselves in, and the fact that they now (apparently) feel an expansion is needed to keep the game alive. Never forget that the devs are the ones who set up their own high standards and all of the lofty expectations. And ultimately, the folks who quit did so because the game they were delivered wasn't the one they felt they were promised. You can argue about what was technically "promised" until Judgment Day if you so desire, but you can't deny that GW2 built its foundations on a pledge to be an "MMO revolution"....ergo, by resorting more and more to traditional MMO staples, they are moving further and further from the game they wanted to become.
Ergo, if this is an expansion, then I will take that to mean that they've finally given up on any desire to be different, and that they're just in pursuit of the easy money they feel that they "need" in order to survive. That's reason enough for me to uninstall.
* And please, let's stop denying that the numbers are down....the devs haven't bragged about sales figures since last year, they haven't bragged about concurrency figures in a VERY long time, and expansions are typically a reaction to a significant decline in users.... so it's easy to draw conclusions from there.
Originally posted by Battlerock A buy to play expansion means I probably won't log into GW2 ever again. They have a cash shop, therefore they are not permitted to charge a box price in my way of thinking. I used to love buy to play, sub to play, and hate f2p, but now I'm embracing f2p, and I am all in, f2p is not going anywhere, which means that's the only option for me especially when games like GW2 try double dipping , you don't get to double dip. Double dip means I skip.
You're entitled to your own feelings on the matter, but I also feel you are being extremely self limiting. As others have said there is NOTHING on the cash store that is even remotely required it's all convenience and cosmetic. Additionally, if you know how to earn gold in game you can trade in game currency for gems on the gem store. So yeah, the "double dipping" is more or less a non-issue.
Additionally, your attitude of what ANet is allowed to charge for is self entitlement at it's worst. It's called a free market.
Originally posted by Battlerock A buy to play expansion means I probably won't log into GW2 ever again. They have a cash shop, therefore they are not permitted to charge a box price in my way of thinking. I used to love buy to play, sub to play, and hate f2p, but now I'm embracing f2p, and I am all in, f2p is not going anywhere, which means that's the only option for me especially when games like GW2 try double dipping , you don't get to double dip. Double dip means I skip.
They only double dip if you choose to buy from the cash shop.
Since there is nothing in the cash shop you actually need that f2p makes you dip much more.
If you want to replay Season 2 chapters, you need to pay for them if you miss logging in. To me, that goes against everything they said they wouldn't do, and it isn't fair to new players or returning players. The story instances are denying access behind a paywall. This content is way different than a cosmetic skin or a booster on the Gem Store too. It's actually a crucial component of the game, otherwise you cannot progress through the story, which has achievements tied to it also. So in a sense, it's double dipping.
Originally posted by Battlerock A buy to play expansion means I probably won't log into GW2 ever again. They have a cash shop, therefore they are not permitted to charge a box price in my way of thinking. I used to love buy to play, sub to play, and hate f2p, but now I'm embracing f2p, and I am all in, f2p is not going anywhere, which means that's the only option for me especially when games like GW2 try double dipping , you don't get to double dip. Double dip means I skip.
They only double dip if you choose to buy from the cash shop.
Since there is nothing in the cash shop you actually need that f2p makes you dip much more.
If you want to replay Season 2 chapters, you need to pay for them if you miss logging in. To me, that goes against everything they said they wouldn't do, and it isn't fair to new players or returning players. The story instances are denying access behind a paywall. This content is way different than a cosmetic skin or a booster on the Gem Store too. It's actually a crucial component of the game, otherwise you cannot progress through the story, which has achievements tied to it also. So in a sense, it's double dipping.
There's already multiple aspects of that which can be considered caveats in this situation.
1) The story content that 'new players' may have missed, were originally going to be temporary anyway. Meaning, they wouldn't have even had the option to play it, period, if they weren't logged in during each event.
2) To this day, there is nothing in the cash shop you are forced to spend money on. Everything can be bought using in-game currency.
3) With the current system every can access the content they've missed (outside holiday events), even if they took years off from the game.
Indeed many of these types of arguments seem a mixture of catch-22s, distorted memories of what anet actually promised, and idealized fantasies of what each person individually wants from the game. GW2 is one of the most fair (to the players) MMOs on the market, by quite a large distance. No other MMO gives you the same amount of content for (what's currently ~30$), a price cheaper than most games, let alone MMOs. But while this game is extremely fair with it's pricing, it doesn't run for free. Money is required to make content happen.
Perhaps THE biggest criticism of GW2 today has been that it needs an expansion. Anet has said (from before day 1 release) that they will do their best to listen to players and adapt to what we want for the game. That doesn't mean implementing every little complaint joe random posts on a forum, but it does mean exploring popular demands as possibilities to the game.
This expansion is something that has been asked for (by us, the players) for a very long time. Now that it's a reality, it seems hypocritical (and even irresponsible) of us to do a 180 and pretend we were against it all along, or that Anet are somehow villains for listening to our own demands. I know not everyone asked for these changes, but the vast majority of this games playerbase did. Indeed many are excited for it. Never has a game survived on listening to 5 angry players inspite of 100,000 dedicated ones.
There's already multiple aspects of that which can be considered caveats in this situation.
1) The story content that 'new players' may have missed, were originally going to be temporary anyway. Meaning, they wouldn't have even had the option to play it, period, if they weren't logged in during each event.
2) To this day, there is nothing in the cash shop you are forced to spend money on. Everything can be bought using in-game currency.
3) With the current system every can access the content they've missed (outside holiday events), even if they took years off from the game.
Indeed many of these types of arguments seem a mixture of catch-22s, distorted memories of what anet actually promised, and idealized fantasies of what each person individually wants from the game. GW2 is one of the most fair (to the players) MMOs on the market, by quite a large distance. No other MMO gives you the same amount of content for (what's currently ~30$), a price cheaper than most games, let alone MMOs. But while this game is extremely fair with it's pricing, it doesn't run for free. Money is required to make content happen.
Perhaps THE biggest criticism of GW2 today has been that it needs an expansion. Anet has said (from before day 1 release) that they will do their best to listen to players and adapt to what we want for the game. That doesn't mean implementing every little complaint joe random posts on a forum, but it does mean exploring popular demands as possibilities to the game.
This expansion is something that has been asked for (by us, the players) for a very long time. Now that it's a reality, it seems hypocritical (and even irresponsible) of us to do a 180 and pretend we were against it all along, or that Anet are somehow villains for listening to our own demands. I know not everyone asked for these changes, but the vast majority of this games playerbase did. Indeed many are excited for it. Never has a game survived on listening to 5 angry players inspite of 100,000 dedicated ones.
1) I hate that people try to use that defense as if it means anything. This isn't a choice between "temporary and free" vs "permanent and paid". The dev team just wants you to think that it is. There was absolutely nothing stopping them from keeping all of Season 1's content available on a permanent basis, heck, when this new system rolled out, they promised to eventually find some way to release Season 1 using this system too. Neither the old nor the new system increased their costs by any significant or meaningful amount. Yes, having Season 2 permanently available is an improvement. But that's one step forward, and asking people to pay for their (to date) lackluster storyline is three large steps back.
2) This is technically true, even if you count the story content, since that's not worth paying money for, either. So no argument here.
That said? GW2's model does smack of something rather foul overall. Not because it "forces" you to pay money, but because much of the dev team's focus was spent on adding new stuff to the cash shop instead of the rest of the game. I recall one stretch of several months in which absolutely no new full sets of armor skins got released, except to the cash shop. The team has always focused rather heavily on making cash shop content and has put much less effort towards the rest of the game. That is definitely a problem, when players get the sense that the cash shop is getting more new equipment than the actual game. And then they started asking us to pay for story content. Now, there's this (possible) expansion on top of that. Do you honestly think that it won't reflect negatively on the game if they're making you pay full expansion prices *plus* money for Living Story releases *plus* cash shop?
Also, I particularly hate the "everything can be bought with in-game currency" argument, too. It's true, but it's hardly a practical move to do so. The market is regularly manipulated to keep prices high (and I know this because I was friends with one of the people who bought a ton of gems early on in the game's lifespan, and uses his wealth for that exact purpose), you'd have to shell out an awful lot of gold to get the kind of gem count you need to have real buying power. Just because you *can* buy things with in-game currency doesn't mean you'll be able to do so on a regular basis. There's a healthy balance between "too easy to farm up the money for cash shop items" and "too hard"....and GW2 tilted into the latter category months ago. It's still not as bad as other games I've seen, but it's a lot worse than it should be.
3) Only if they pay significant amounts of money for what amounts to a relatively poor storyline. That is NOT much of an improvement.
It's interesting that people like to pretend that everyone's complaints against GW2 are "fantasies" when they're often based upon the spoken word of the GW2 dev team, things that they either literally said or things that were clearly implied with absolutely no chance of confusion. The dev team has outright 180'd on its players before and there were folks who still defended them through it (myself included, at one point, if the 180 was justified). But it comes as no particular surprise to me. As I said in an earlier post, I have never seen a fan base more defensive of their game than GW2's. And that fan base will do or say absolutely anything to convince themselves that GW2 is still exactly as it was promised. Even though by all measurements of the word, it isn't.
Now it's fair to say that some of the criticisms against the game have been unfair and were based strongly upon the hype that the devs created for themselves, rather than anything factual. But a number of things that the devs clearly said have indeed been violated since the game came out, and I really do not understand why people are in such denial over it. People have laid out list after list of things that were expressly stated by the dev team that didn't come true, not to mention the laundry list of content promised nearly 2 years ago which still isn't in the game now. Admitting that the game hasn't lived up to all of its promises does not mean the game is "horrible". Heck, I even still admit that it's a good game with a (mostly) fair cash shop system. It does a lot of things better than its predecessors, too. And no one can live up to all of their promises, ultimately. But GW2's unfinished list has grown far, far too long in the (nearly two and a half) years it's been out. The game is still lacking some of the most basic features, things that even GW1 has, and the devs have had plenty of time to deliver. Heck, I'd argue that GW2 is not even the "revolution" it claimed to be, anymore, if it's being forced to revert to traditional expansions in order to keep its name afloat in the sea of MMOs. And the sooner folks are willing to admit that it's okay to criticize the flaws in this game without it being considered "bashing" the game, the better off we'll all be.
And as to the notion that a "vast majority" asked for an expansion, that is true. A lot of people did. But a lot of people can still be wrong. You made a point earlier that many complaints about GW2 are fantasies"....it's ironic that you would say such a thing, but then proceed to explain that a lot of people complained about the lack of expansions and that's why they have to release one....and you never thought to put the two together. You never thought that perhaps the complaints for an expansion were one of those "fantasies" that people have about the game. I'd say that it's pretty likely, considering that some people try to pretend that GW2 has "always" been working on expansions as if they were always part of the plan (even though devs were quoted as early as last year that they had no active expansions in the works at that time, nor any interest in making one).
An unfortunate truth of retail is that the customer doesn't always know exactly what they want. Many people's cries for an expansion over these years were based out of the fact that, when compared with the Living Story up to that point, an expansion was the far superior option. It offered them things that seem like they may never come to GW2: new classes, equipment, new continents, etc. So when given the choice between a game that releases small amounts of lackluster content for free, and a paid box set with tons of content, there's only one natural choice. I suspect many people crying for an expansion are mentally comparing a potential GW2 expansion to the expansions of other MMOs, as if they're going to be exactly the same. They're judging the idea based on their own "fantasies", essentially. I have every reason to suspect that if this is indeed an expansion, it probably won't be "traditional" in nature (at least, not unless the devs are willing to abandon several years of expressed distaste for the traditional expansion model), and that will probably upset a lot of those players who were clamoring for an expansion because it won't live up to their expectations. Just as the core game didn't live up to some of its expectations, either.
Rather than an expansion pack, I would think it would be awesome if they announced that Anet was going to continue with Living story implementation of new content, and that Anet had purchased the rights to World of Darkness and were going to be starting beta testing by the end of the year. I was really excited about that game but we need the IP to be in the hands of a company that can actually get things done.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
Originally posted by BillMurphy I have zero real knowledge, but I'm betting on SOME sort of expansion announcement. Though a traditional boxed one is probably not what we're looking at. Rather, I'd bet on some sort of DLC type announcement.
I'm sure most sales will be digital, but my guess is that there will be a boxed version and that that boxed version will include the base game and the expansion in the price.
Digital distribution is becoming more and more prevalent, but shelf space and Sunday circular ads still drive video game sales, even if to a lesser degree.
Do I want an expansion? Yes. An awesome expansion may be the only thing that can get the game back on track financially. No game as good as GW2 was at launch should ever have bled as many players from the player base as GW2 has over the last two years. It's peers have been even bigger duds and there has to be some potential for ANet to win back a lot of players who left with a kick ass expansion and a much better live development strategy than the one they deployed with "Living Story".
Originally posted by eyelolled Rather than an expansion pack, I would think it would be awesome if they announced that Anet was going to continue with Living story implementation of new content, and that Anet had purchased the rights to World of Darkness and were going to be starting beta testing by the end of the year. I was really excited about that game but we need the IP to be in the hands of a company that can actually get things done.
Living story needs to be put out of it's misery if the game has any chance at a recovery. Obviously, it has probably contributed to many of those who have remained staying with the game, so current players would have a pro-LS bias, but this game should have been growing it's player base, not hemorrhaging it.
If the announcement is another game, rather than an expansion, then you are probably right that LS will continue, as they give up on doing anything with GW2 other than maintaining it's diminished customer base, while putting new hope in another title. GW2 should have been $Billion lifetime title. That's a lot of potential blown and a lot of potential perhaps worth an effort at reclaiming.
If they do hope to renew GW2, regain lost players and improve market share, first step would be a kick @ss expansion, and the second step would be to NOT do what has lost them so many customers since launch, a big part of which was the Living Story strategy.
BTW, no, Living Story catch up is not worth $30. It's worth was the small potential that said content might re-wet a lost player's appetite to return. LS is nothing but a peckish appetizer's worth of content spread over many mini-bite-sized portions. Putting it behind a pay wall for returning players absolutely nixed the vast majority of any benefit PR over LS events managed to produce.
Now, even though the vast majority of the player base has evaporated away, maybe some portion of what is left stayed, in part, because of the sparse content released under the Living Story initiative. Even though those development resources where very inefficiently spent, maybe they kept just enough die-hards around to pay for themselves. Maybe. That doesn't at all negate the fact that they failed to maintain a much larger portion of the customer base than they did. When you have the best MMO released in a decade and still lose a massive portion of players in the first two years, that's a failure of ongoing development strategies.
A successful Expansion will prove just how pitiful LS has been as content. A $50 expansion with less than 50X the content of the entire Living Story would be viewed by many as a rip-off and a failure, which justly puts a $Dollar value on the entire LS of $1 for it's entirety.
Comments
So you would rather have them stay on course even though it's failing? What is your solution? It's easy to criticize, but you haven't offered any suggestions or solutions of an alternative to an expansion.
You say you want uniqueness, and GW2 tried that. As you said, it failed, so what should they do? It seems like you just want to scold them, without offering anything substantial to your tirade.
What defines an "expansion" anyways? Does it have to cost money? Does it have to be a certain size? What if they call it a DLC? They did say something about this announcement having to do with the next evolution of the living story.
It was never part of their manifesto that there wouldn't be any expansion - actually the expectation for most was that there would be one. Apparently, the last tier of weapon was also announced before release (you can investigate the matter if you are interested).
It's true that Living Story wasn't quite like what Anet (and the players) had hopped - especially LS1. You can even find Arena Net saying so in the forum here and there.
It's fine. They're grown ups, they can admit when something didn't quite go according to plan. So it was back to the drawing board for them.
Maybe you are one of the few people who found LS to be everything you wanted... in that case, perhaps you should have been more vocal about it. My understanding was that a majority of players didn't enjoy it as much as you. So my expectation is that you are a minority here (saying: "Go on with Living Story and no expansion please"), and that their estimated income will not suffer if you decide to not purchase the (presumed) expansion pack.
Frankly, I like the hybrid "best of both world" approach where they release an expansion pack here and there (if it is one indeed) for major continent updates like new races, weapons, guild hall features and all - which are impossible to deliver as part of LS, let's face it, so expansions is where I will want them to deliver this kind of content - and Living Story for the minor updates to the plots, things like elections and crap like that which are temporary fun that keep me coming back to the game.
So whats your point? You admonish them for going back on their word to the point of listing that quote TWICE and bolding it once....but did you even read it? What did they say? They said, IF WE DO THIS RIGHT......and you then say they failed. So we can assume they did NOT do it right.
So we can then assume that the rest of that quote goes out the window since the conditional that was at the beginning was not met. Now given the fact that they failed, and you clearly are still upset that they are going with an expansion, what else do you expect them to do? Keep going with the failed living story content? Shut down the game servers just because you don't like it and think they lied?
Since 2010 Anet line as been the same.
http://www.pcgamer.com/guild-wars-2-to-have-dlc-microtransactions/
UPDATE:
Eric Flannum sent us a note to clarify a couple of things about their plans for Guild Wars 2 post-release content:
"We haven't decided on what exactly we are or aren't going to offer for money post-release. We're open to whatever our players seem most interested in. If, after release, you guys would like more story content, more dungeons, more events, more maps or whatever, it's something that we have to consider because ultimately making you happy is what makes us successful. Whether we release that in DLC (like the bonus mission packs in GW1) or whether we do it through expansions (Like Eye of the North) is yet to be determined. As to whether or not there are going to be items like XP boosts available in the in game store, I can only reiterate what we've said before (and will continue to say,) that we'll release details on it when they are available, and that our core philosophy of not requiring you to spend additional money to play the game and not making the game difficult or painful to play in order to encourage you to buy things from the store still stands."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-04-23-guild-wars-2-developer-has-plans-for-literally-years-to-come
We today know a number of the high-level features that we're going to do, and expansion content for years to come," said Price. "No, it's not drilled down in a way that is - it's all at the five-thousand foot level and above, from a big picture [perspective]. But every month we go through time, we get closer and it gets down and, OK, now we're actually creating content for it."
"Look," concluded Price, "even from our standpoint we've got years of work, of great work, that players are going to be able to enjoy.
"We're launching a service - you don't launch a box and be done with it. We have years of awesome, fun work ahead of us."
The question of when Guild Wars 2 will launch in 2012 depends on the results of the beta tests. That was the official line from ArenaNet co-founder Mike O'Brien, given to Eurogamer during our recent invasion of Guild Wars 2's home.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-01-14-you-thought-that-was-it-for-guild-wars-2
"We have a couple of really big Guild Wars projects cooking in the background," Johanson told me.
Later, he added: "Some of our players believe that because we are doing this Living World seasons, and these features or these big feature-builds, that it means that the features you would traditionally get in an expansion, or the content you would traditionally get in an expansion, is not something that will get added to Guild Wars 2. And that is not true at all.
"Not only are we doing those things, new features and content you would traditionally get from a boxed expansion are also things that will be added to Guild Wars 2.
"The thing that we haven't decided yet," he went on, "is what form that type of content will take. Is it right for Guild Wars 2 for that kind of boxed expansion? Is it right for that to be something we add, live, through storylines in the game? Is that something we want to sell through our in-game store? There are a lot of different options available to us.
Bottom line is:
- Content has been created in the background since release.
- The Living Story/Live Team is a faction of Anet man power.
- Expansion content has always been in the plans and the question is how it will be release - DLC via cash shop, free via Living Story, boxed content or even a combination of 2 or all 3 of those.
GW2:HoT is an expansion - we just don't know how we going to pay it.
One has to read PR for what it is PR.
During the release of Living Story, Anet was focusing on it, hyping it, since that would be what was new for GW2 players for 2 now years.
It should be easy to understand why they didn't want to talk about expansions then.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
They only double dip if you choose to buy from the cash shop.
Since there is nothing in the cash shop you actually need that f2p makes you dip much more.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Apologies that I didn't quote anyone specifically here, but I couldn't find a way to satisfactorily quote all of you. I will do my best to respond to all three of you at once.
1) askdaboss, I can tell from the opening lines that you didn't actually read my post. I made it very clear that while no explicit promise was ever made that there would "never be an expansion" (in that they never specifically said the words "we will never make an expansion" in sequence without attaching a qualifier to it, which as I said is being overly technical), the player's expectations that no expansions were coming were based on factual statements made by the development team. The expectations of "no expansion" didn't just appear out of thin air, they were based on over two years of continuous rhetoric from the ANet team against the idea of expansions and the very idea of being just like every other MMO. And the players, at least for a while, supported them on this. So you can't pretend that they didn't kick-start the idea themselves. Gaia_hunter, you should read those statements too, because you seem to be claiming that "expansions were always planned"....they clearly were not, and we have developer statements proving as much.
2) No, I didn't actually like the Living Story up to this point. I hated it. But I didn't hate it because of the way it worked, I hated it because it was altogether poorly written. The Personal Story was similarly poorly written, with all of your individual choices dissolving into thin air as the story became all about Trehearne's quest to purify Arah. Season 1 then focused wholeheartedly on Scarlet, who was portrayed as an impossibly smart individual who knew everything and was always ten steps ahead of the player, and everything you did only helped her plans along (the Mary Sue was strong in her). And then Season 2 rolled around, the story didn't get any better, and yet they started locking individual story segments behind pay walls, as if they were worth paying for. An expansion is not going to fix the problem of bad story writing. A better writing team would.
3) You ask me to define an "expansion". Alright. Let's look at the common elements that exist in virtually every expansion:
I should clarify. When I say "content", I mean "something not directly related to the story" (i.e. things like the list above). When we take into account all of the things GW2 has done over these last 2+ years, they don't end up on the positive end of things on that list above.
And that's not to mention the numerous other bits of content we've been promised in some form or another. Heck, some things, like guild halls, were promised before the game even released....and they still aren't available.
No matter how you shake it, GW2 has made a lot of promises it never delivered on. And while the game has taken some steps forward, it's easily argued that they haven't taken nearly enough steps forward to keep the players actively engaged. The mere fact that we're here discussing the possibility of this being a formal expansion is proof enough of that. Which leads into....
4) I'm a little baffled that any of you actually think that an expansion is anything less than an admission of failure. Especially since it clearly is, when you take into account their own words on the subject. Season 2 was an admission that they couldn't deliver on the promise of free content, and had to lock the story behind a pay wall in order to keep their finances up. If this is indeed an expansion and contains the common elements of an expansion (new classes, weapons, and other forms of content other than just story), then it is an admission that they couldn't deliver on the promise of free content in general, either.
5) You ask for "solutions" that avoid the necessity for an expansion. Okay then:
6) Stop acting like every time someone criticizes the game, it's a personal slight that must be attacked and defeated, as if criticism is some manner of great evil on the horizon. And I know what you're going to say. "I didn't do that"....but look at your replies to me again with a critical eye. One of you dismissed my post as a "rant" against a game I "hated" (which is absurd, since I was among the first of the pre-purchasers and a fan of the game since they first announced it was coming). Another acted as if I'm one of the minority of players who liked the Living Story (even though I said I hated it in multiple posts prior to this). A third acted as if I'm one of the folks who clamored for an expansion and am now suddenly changing my mind (I've never given any indication of such a stance). In all three cases, you immediately jumped to the assumption that you knew all about the sort of person I was, and marched forth to belittle my argument by way of attacking the base upon which you THOUGHT I stood. Three swings, and three misses.
There are some pretty defensive MMO fan bases out there, but I've never seen one nearly as vicious as GW2's fans. In many respects, it's folks like you who drove away so many* because you refuse to admit that the game does have some flaws, and take every criticism like it's a personal insult. I gave up on the GW2 forums because the environment became a battle of toxic forces. On one side was the players who would support GW2 no matter what they did, and they were at constant war with the other side, full of players who decried the shift in design philosophy away from what was "revolutionary" and towards traditional MMO design. Both sides flinging insults back and forth, and the moderators enforcing rules with a clear bias. It got too frustrating to watch, much less participate in. It seems like no one on the "pro-GW2" side is actually interested in so much as hearing the valid criticisms of the game from people who try to skirt the median. It's much like politics in that respect. The whole conversation seems to boil down to "If you don't agree with every word I say, you must be one of them dirty Dems/Repubs that I hate so much!", with no interest in actually addressing the criticisms or being honest about them.
It's especially baffling here, because I'm even admitting that it was a great game to start with. What ultimately sold me on the game was its pledge to be a game which you "bought once and played forever", that they would continue to update the game with new classes, equipment, and story for free. But GW2 just went down a path that it said it wasn't going to....the path towards traditional MMO staples. This is an MMO which sold itself on being different. If they choose to stop being different, they deserve to be called out for it. If that makes you mad, well, tough. I want what I've always wanted, the game I was originally promised. A game which provides free content and story updates on a consistent basis. When they give me that game, I'll open my wallet back up and start dumping money into gems like I used to. But not a moment before.
And stop blaming myself and others for the desperate situation they now find themselves in, and the fact that they now (apparently) feel an expansion is needed to keep the game alive. Never forget that the devs are the ones who set up their own high standards and all of the lofty expectations. And ultimately, the folks who quit did so because the game they were delivered wasn't the one they felt they were promised. You can argue about what was technically "promised" until Judgment Day if you so desire, but you can't deny that GW2 built its foundations on a pledge to be an "MMO revolution"....ergo, by resorting more and more to traditional MMO staples, they are moving further and further from the game they wanted to become.
Ergo, if this is an expansion, then I will take that to mean that they've finally given up on any desire to be different, and that they're just in pursuit of the easy money they feel that they "need" in order to survive. That's reason enough for me to uninstall.
* And please, let's stop denying that the numbers are down....the devs haven't bragged about sales figures since last year, they haven't bragged about concurrency figures in a VERY long time, and expansions are typically a reaction to a significant decline in users.... so it's easy to draw conclusions from there.
You're entitled to your own feelings on the matter, but I also feel you are being extremely self limiting. As others have said there is NOTHING on the cash store that is even remotely required it's all convenience and cosmetic. Additionally, if you know how to earn gold in game you can trade in game currency for gems on the gem store. So yeah, the "double dipping" is more or less a non-issue.
Additionally, your attitude of what ANet is allowed to charge for is self entitlement at it's worst. It's called a free market.
If you want to replay Season 2 chapters, you need to pay for them if you miss logging in. To me, that goes against everything they said they wouldn't do, and it isn't fair to new players or returning players. The story instances are denying access behind a paywall. This content is way different than a cosmetic skin or a booster on the Gem Store too. It's actually a crucial component of the game, otherwise you cannot progress through the story, which has achievements tied to it also. So in a sense, it's double dipping.
There's already multiple aspects of that which can be considered caveats in this situation.
1) The story content that 'new players' may have missed, were originally going to be temporary anyway. Meaning, they wouldn't have even had the option to play it, period, if they weren't logged in during each event.
2) To this day, there is nothing in the cash shop you are forced to spend money on. Everything can be bought using in-game currency.
3) With the current system every can access the content they've missed (outside holiday events), even if they took years off from the game.
Indeed many of these types of arguments seem a mixture of catch-22s, distorted memories of what anet actually promised, and idealized fantasies of what each person individually wants from the game. GW2 is one of the most fair (to the players) MMOs on the market, by quite a large distance. No other MMO gives you the same amount of content for (what's currently ~30$), a price cheaper than most games, let alone MMOs. But while this game is extremely fair with it's pricing, it doesn't run for free. Money is required to make content happen.
Perhaps THE biggest criticism of GW2 today has been that it needs an expansion. Anet has said (from before day 1 release) that they will do their best to listen to players and adapt to what we want for the game. That doesn't mean implementing every little complaint joe random posts on a forum, but it does mean exploring popular demands as possibilities to the game.
This expansion is something that has been asked for (by us, the players) for a very long time. Now that it's a reality, it seems hypocritical (and even irresponsible) of us to do a 180 and pretend we were against it all along, or that Anet are somehow villains for listening to our own demands. I know not everyone asked for these changes, but the vast majority of this games playerbase did. Indeed many are excited for it. Never has a game survived on listening to 5 angry players inspite of 100,000 dedicated ones.
1) I hate that people try to use that defense as if it means anything. This isn't a choice between "temporary and free" vs "permanent and paid". The dev team just wants you to think that it is. There was absolutely nothing stopping them from keeping all of Season 1's content available on a permanent basis, heck, when this new system rolled out, they promised to eventually find some way to release Season 1 using this system too. Neither the old nor the new system increased their costs by any significant or meaningful amount. Yes, having Season 2 permanently available is an improvement. But that's one step forward, and asking people to pay for their (to date) lackluster storyline is three large steps back.
2) This is technically true, even if you count the story content, since that's not worth paying money for, either. So no argument here.
That said? GW2's model does smack of something rather foul overall. Not because it "forces" you to pay money, but because much of the dev team's focus was spent on adding new stuff to the cash shop instead of the rest of the game. I recall one stretch of several months in which absolutely no new full sets of armor skins got released, except to the cash shop. The team has always focused rather heavily on making cash shop content and has put much less effort towards the rest of the game. That is definitely a problem, when players get the sense that the cash shop is getting more new equipment than the actual game. And then they started asking us to pay for story content. Now, there's this (possible) expansion on top of that. Do you honestly think that it won't reflect negatively on the game if they're making you pay full expansion prices *plus* money for Living Story releases *plus* cash shop?
Also, I particularly hate the "everything can be bought with in-game currency" argument, too. It's true, but it's hardly a practical move to do so. The market is regularly manipulated to keep prices high (and I know this because I was friends with one of the people who bought a ton of gems early on in the game's lifespan, and uses his wealth for that exact purpose), you'd have to shell out an awful lot of gold to get the kind of gem count you need to have real buying power. Just because you *can* buy things with in-game currency doesn't mean you'll be able to do so on a regular basis. There's a healthy balance between "too easy to farm up the money for cash shop items" and "too hard"....and GW2 tilted into the latter category months ago. It's still not as bad as other games I've seen, but it's a lot worse than it should be.
3) Only if they pay significant amounts of money for what amounts to a relatively poor storyline. That is NOT much of an improvement.
It's interesting that people like to pretend that everyone's complaints against GW2 are "fantasies" when they're often based upon the spoken word of the GW2 dev team, things that they either literally said or things that were clearly implied with absolutely no chance of confusion. The dev team has outright 180'd on its players before and there were folks who still defended them through it (myself included, at one point, if the 180 was justified). But it comes as no particular surprise to me. As I said in an earlier post, I have never seen a fan base more defensive of their game than GW2's. And that fan base will do or say absolutely anything to convince themselves that GW2 is still exactly as it was promised. Even though by all measurements of the word, it isn't.
Now it's fair to say that some of the criticisms against the game have been unfair and were based strongly upon the hype that the devs created for themselves, rather than anything factual. But a number of things that the devs clearly said have indeed been violated since the game came out, and I really do not understand why people are in such denial over it. People have laid out list after list of things that were expressly stated by the dev team that didn't come true, not to mention the laundry list of content promised nearly 2 years ago which still isn't in the game now. Admitting that the game hasn't lived up to all of its promises does not mean the game is "horrible". Heck, I even still admit that it's a good game with a (mostly) fair cash shop system. It does a lot of things better than its predecessors, too. And no one can live up to all of their promises, ultimately. But GW2's unfinished list has grown far, far too long in the (nearly two and a half) years it's been out. The game is still lacking some of the most basic features, things that even GW1 has, and the devs have had plenty of time to deliver. Heck, I'd argue that GW2 is not even the "revolution" it claimed to be, anymore, if it's being forced to revert to traditional expansions in order to keep its name afloat in the sea of MMOs. And the sooner folks are willing to admit that it's okay to criticize the flaws in this game without it being considered "bashing" the game, the better off we'll all be.
And as to the notion that a "vast majority" asked for an expansion, that is true. A lot of people did. But a lot of people can still be wrong. You made a point earlier that many complaints about GW2 are fantasies"....it's ironic that you would say such a thing, but then proceed to explain that a lot of people complained about the lack of expansions and that's why they have to release one....and you never thought to put the two together. You never thought that perhaps the complaints for an expansion were one of those "fantasies" that people have about the game. I'd say that it's pretty likely, considering that some people try to pretend that GW2 has "always" been working on expansions as if they were always part of the plan (even though devs were quoted as early as last year that they had no active expansions in the works at that time, nor any interest in making one).
An unfortunate truth of retail is that the customer doesn't always know exactly what they want. Many people's cries for an expansion over these years were based out of the fact that, when compared with the Living Story up to that point, an expansion was the far superior option. It offered them things that seem like they may never come to GW2: new classes, equipment, new continents, etc. So when given the choice between a game that releases small amounts of lackluster content for free, and a paid box set with tons of content, there's only one natural choice. I suspect many people crying for an expansion are mentally comparing a potential GW2 expansion to the expansions of other MMOs, as if they're going to be exactly the same. They're judging the idea based on their own "fantasies", essentially. I have every reason to suspect that if this is indeed an expansion, it probably won't be "traditional" in nature (at least, not unless the devs are willing to abandon several years of expressed distaste for the traditional expansion model), and that will probably upset a lot of those players who were clamoring for an expansion because it won't live up to their expectations. Just as the core game didn't live up to some of its expectations, either.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
I'm sure most sales will be digital, but my guess is that there will be a boxed version and that that boxed version will include the base game and the expansion in the price.
Digital distribution is becoming more and more prevalent, but shelf space and Sunday circular ads still drive video game sales, even if to a lesser degree.
Do I want an expansion? Yes. An awesome expansion may be the only thing that can get the game back on track financially. No game as good as GW2 was at launch should ever have bled as many players from the player base as GW2 has over the last two years. It's peers have been even bigger duds and there has to be some potential for ANet to win back a lot of players who left with a kick ass expansion and a much better live development strategy than the one they deployed with "Living Story".
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Living story needs to be put out of it's misery if the game has any chance at a recovery. Obviously, it has probably contributed to many of those who have remained staying with the game, so current players would have a pro-LS bias, but this game should have been growing it's player base, not hemorrhaging it.
If the announcement is another game, rather than an expansion, then you are probably right that LS will continue, as they give up on doing anything with GW2 other than maintaining it's diminished customer base, while putting new hope in another title. GW2 should have been $Billion lifetime title. That's a lot of potential blown and a lot of potential perhaps worth an effort at reclaiming.
If they do hope to renew GW2, regain lost players and improve market share, first step would be a kick @ss expansion, and the second step would be to NOT do what has lost them so many customers since launch, a big part of which was the Living Story strategy.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
BTW, no, Living Story catch up is not worth $30. It's worth was the small potential that said content might re-wet a lost player's appetite to return. LS is nothing but a peckish appetizer's worth of content spread over many mini-bite-sized portions. Putting it behind a pay wall for returning players absolutely nixed the vast majority of any benefit PR over LS events managed to produce.
Now, even though the vast majority of the player base has evaporated away, maybe some portion of what is left stayed, in part, because of the sparse content released under the Living Story initiative. Even though those development resources where very inefficiently spent, maybe they kept just enough die-hards around to pay for themselves. Maybe. That doesn't at all negate the fact that they failed to maintain a much larger portion of the customer base than they did. When you have the best MMO released in a decade and still lose a massive portion of players in the first two years, that's a failure of ongoing development strategies.
A successful Expansion will prove just how pitiful LS has been as content. A $50 expansion with less than 50X the content of the entire Living Story would be viewed by many as a rip-off and a failure, which justly puts a $Dollar value on the entire LS of $1 for it's entirety.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
