Less content of worse quality, but much more aggressively monetized? Half the content at the same price?
Anet axed Living World, rebranded it as “Mini Expansions” and is reselling it to us at full price. Complex mount system gets sidelined in favour of A mount to rule them all. Class skills and mechanics that have existed for years and years and years without issue are suddenly a problem and get gutted, dumbed down or removed. Classes get homogenised and simplified. Very little actually new systems get created, instead the existing game gets switched around as a much easier alternative. More focus on easy and cheap to develop daily/weekly content for whatever the current’s expansion faction is.
I know that pattern.
I also know another pattern. SquareEnix. ActivisionBlizzard. NCNet.
There are definitely a lot of changes going on these days, but I don’t think they’re all that negative. I’m actually happy to see them charge for yearly content releases now, as only paying once for three substantial releases (PoF, S4 and IBS) is not at all sustainable. This is more in line with other games, but still quite affordable. Hopefully, this approach benefits the health of the game in the log run. We’ll see.
Oh, they’re absolutely not all negative. A legendary armour free from raiding or WvW/PvP as a gatekeep? Great. But the pattern is the usual pattern of MMOs that enter their twilight years. Less actually created systems and innovations, more re-shuffling already existing stuff. More aggressive monetisation, less and weaker/easier content. The addition of dailies and weeklies as a main feature is striking.
The old model not being sustainable has no basis in reality, I feel. GW2 always made a hefty profit, but NCSoft is known for shutting down perfectly viable games for not generating enough profit, e.g. CoH. (Obligatory Fuck NCSoft at this point.) Rebranding their Living World as Mini Expansion and selling them to us at full price is the exact Twilight Years thing to do. Up until today the Cash Shop paid for Living World. But that profit isn’t enough profit anymore. Gotta get a slice of that ActiBlizz cake.
A legendary armour free from raiding or WvW/PvP as a gatekeep?
I expect that gonna be gated in other ways because they won’t give away leggy armor that easy. Probably a set of achis inside strike missions will be added retroactively.
I agree it does kind of signal a new, less ambitious phase for the game. I’m hoping they pump out enough new content with enough consistency that the game continues to be fun for a while. You’re certainly justified in your concerns that we’re going to run into the same problems as WoW where everything feels the same from expansion to expansion.
new, less ambitious phase
I like that phrasing.
I think people are seriously overreacting. From what I see all changes seems to be done with a positive intention (not saying that the balance will be better or worse, but their intention is to make it better)
They have been struggling to find a good and sustainable content delivery system since the start of the game, this is just the latest idea. And there is no aggressive monetization in it, it’s still the cheapest model between all the main mmos. Expansion/content ratio got a bit more expensive compared to before, true, but it’s hardly aggressive or expensive. To be honest we had it way too cheap until now compared to the average market prices, it’s understandable. And until now they always offered super cheap bundles for old expansion after a bit, if someone prefers to wait a bit and save money.
And I’m having a hard time to see how more weapons on all elite specs + new core weapons can be negative in any kind of way (outside of balance concerns, but I haven’t seen anyone worry about that) The new combat changes don’t even require the new expansion from what I got…
And the new reward system is just daily/weekly/monthly achievements but hopefully done better.
If anything they are showing interest in making the game better and more stable
There’s definitely pros and cons. It looks like there will be some fun stuff, and GW2 is still cheaper than every single other MMO on the market (WoW and ESO+ cost 6x as much as GW2 per year), but it does feel like a lot of content, especially OW, is slowly being invalidated by crazy new mechanics and power creep. I mean, we’ll soon be able to mount up in combat? Death was already pretty meaningless lol; now you’ll never die unless you’re actively trying to.
The combat and exploration is still the best of any MMO on the market though, so yeah, it surprises me how extremely negative some people are about what’s coming.
Yeah, the powercreep is a totally legitimate concern since HoT Mounting in combat feels a bit cheap to me too, can be useful when going around gathering or stuff like that but maybe it’s a little bit too convenient
Not sure I agree with most of this, though I do feel one part sounds about right and that is the part about making the classes homogenized.
Feel like heal scourge got a big hit from that with latest patch. Alacrity at a bad uptime at the cost of good reviving ability, because all other heals offer alacrity or quickness so this one must too rather than being it’s own thing
I agree that the homogenization trend is real and bad, but heal scourge has no problem overcapping alacrity by just using f1, f3, and traited F5. In 80% BD, which leaves you room to use Mercy runes instead of Monk and retain the interaction they have with Ritual of Life.
If you want to mega overcap alac, you can take sand flare and also use serpent siphon on cooldown instead of holding it for aegis, but it’s pretty easy to get to 30s overcap with just a few Sandstorm Shroud f5s.
It’ll be incredibly flexible once it gets a frankly absurd duration boost in the July patch, especially since that same patch will allow for easy perma protection too.
Yeah probably I underestimated it, as only did a quick test without proper gear and just made estimate from 0% BD, as well as misunderstanding how the trait worked at the time to only thinking it triggered on F1.
Not looked too much into the July patch only thing I gathered from it was that the shades would last longer, and with that can understand increasing the duration a bit, and that likely causing it to go too far if they didn’t take the other barrier sources into consideration.
You guys are familiar with all these Asian-themed mmo login boards, spinning wheels and so on? I’m having a bad hunch that this new rewards system will feature this in the Wizard’s Vault as a physical objects.
Oh god, I hope not. It’s like its own awful mini-game collecting rewards in those game… NCsoft is Korean and it is possible they would push ArenaNet to introduce it.
I know we like to indulge in some FUD but I feel like you could have made that argument at any point after PoF, we’ve had very little changes to core gameplay besides balance since then. And it might not be necessarily a bad thing either if their current team can’t support it - we’d all love 9 perfectly balanced classes with each elite spec being useful and completely distinct but it is kinda obvious to anyone that this is just not possible, and maybe it never was in the first place.
If anything, I feel like the relic changes and addition of new weapons for every class is a pretty big change to the game, larger than what we’ve had in years. They are focusing on the skyscale and griffon for a flying sky-themed map, but that just says to me that they are finally focusing more on mounts and flying rather than making another formulaic ground meta-map where everyone just raptor-dashes or roller beetles around.
Don’t forget making sure that even the people in full purple need to buy the newest expansion to stay meta in their old content. You think your (for example) condi willbender build is going to be any good whatsoever when you can’t equip FB axe? You thought when overpaying 2000 gold for a set of legendary runes that your full purple account with 30+ characters would be able to change to whatever the developer chooses to implement in the future? Fuck you, new slot, already confirmed that you need to do account bound grind for a build based upgrade.
Oh shut up. This is one game that never changes. You don’t NEED any expansion to do most and this new expansion will be the same. Sit down and shut up.
Every other expansion has had this be true. I’ve got a couple raiding alts and neither has EoD, I can raid just fine on builds that use HoT or PoF specs/gear. Once this new system hits, using the meta weapon on a build will require a new exclusive $25 mastery. No other expansion has required its purchase to enable the use of old specs at full potency. Do you think any condition Necromancer spec is going to survive being balanced around pistol+torch as a weapon set?
Splitting off the only thing that made legendary runes even slightly useful, the ability to skip grinding account bound content like dungeons for Monk/Nightmare runes on 20+ healer/condi dps gear templates is something worth complaining about.
Nah, you’ll be fine with base. Sit the fuck down.
