Originally posted by Tommay
Just as guild wars 1 worked, would you support there being raids if it was purely cosmetic Edit: messed up the poll by Accidently clicking a button:/

So how does this put in that raiding would have some kind of gear progression, without the gear having any kind of actual stat bonus, or effect on the game except that you could show off that you did the content. Even in the title of the thread it states "Would you support Raids with just cosmetic rewards?", and that does not imply the raiding would have a gear progresson factor to it as the gear would be for looks only. If you think that means it will have a gear grind than you have a worse issue of not knowing what a gear based progression is. A gear progression is when you need gear to progresss from one set of content to another set of content, and which bars you access to the next content till you have the needed gear. Learning to understand what you are reading is good, as you would have known that nothign about that means you are forced to play it, or havng a gear progression placed into the game either.

Asuran, I do know what "vanity gear" means and again: I have nothing against raids as long as rewards are cosmetic. :) But certain people in this thread tried to to tell us about how GW2 would be better with gear progression and how everyone who didn't want to put up with their favorite treadmill was lazy and overall inferior.

Like I said: read the thread.

Yes, but on a casual level. 

No raiding rosters and pref in the open world and not instanced :p

Originally posted by silvermember

the question should be: would raiders raid purely for cosmetic reward?

Wow, dozen new pages to catch up on.

Yes and no.

"Raiders" don't operate as a group, you can't push the button and predict how they'll respond.  I know raiders who would, and I know others who wouldn't.

Most of the arguments that try to treat them as a single cohesive unit fail pretty miserably (as you can tell from the poll results).  So do most of the Straw Men raised up to speak for them.

New gear really is only one of the things that motivates a raider to raid.  In my opinion, one of the most minor motivators, but clearly the carrot that Blizzard chooses to build games around.

Which came first, the carrot or the raider?

Originally posted by wowfan1996

But certain people in this thread tried to to tell us about how GW2 would be better with gear progression and how everyone who didn't want to put up with their favorite treadmill was lazy and overall inferior.

Like I said: read the thread.

Don't worry; at the opening of GW1 there was an effort to convert the game to WoW too.  Anet resisted most of the "do it just like wow does it" ideas fairly well.

I have nothing against providing fun challenging (instanced) content for groups larger than 5 people, that only offers cosmetic rewards. So I guess that's a yes.

YrOriginally posted by wowfan1996

Asuran, I do know what "vanity gear" means and again: I have nothing against raids as long as rewards are cosmetic. :) But certain people in this thread tried to to tell us about how GW2 would be better with gear progression and how everyone who didn't want to put up with their favorite treadmill was lazy and overall inferior.

Like I said: read the thread.

Yet regardless of what many are suggesting that is against the actual meaning of what the thread is about should not really matter, as having gear based progression that is not mirrored in other parts of the game is faulty anyways. The thead topic is about would you raiding with vanity gear as a reward being somethgin you would support. As has been said gw devs have had a history of never stepping out of their prefered style, outside of what is actually desired by players they have, and also would work with their style as well. A grind is a grind weither it be pve based, or pvp based, and so in some ways you will have a raiding grind in that if you want the gear from the raiding you willl have to grind raids, just like if you want the gear from pve or pvp content you would need to grind them as wel. Those seeking to put stat progression into game are realy blind to the fact of what gw is about, not to mention most likely part of the group most of the people seeking for vantity based raiding content are seeking to get away from. I would have no issues with lore based ways of baring or attuning to content such as rads, in that when you finsih a certain amount of quests or dungeons you gain access or knowledge of the raid, and which would be the way to conclude the events of the zone for those want to feel a much more final conclusion. In my opinion raiding should be a much more used part of pve, and not solely a end game feature as it is.

Originally posted by Asuran24Those seeking to put stat progression into game are realy blind to the fact of what gw is about, not to mention most likely part of the group most of the people seeking for vantity based raiding content are seeking to get away from.

Hell, I've been answering things theoretically as an ex-raider; had no idea we were supposed to be speaking in advance as anet fans.

When you guess at other people's motivations, you're going to be wrong frequently.  Raiding in GW2?  I'd fall back on the default 'unecessary, I'm ok with the games remaining distinct from each other and doing some things differently' position I've held since the first week of GW1.

Originally posted by Sephiroso

Originally posted by heavyhebrew

Originally posted by Boatsmate

You mean like heal a group for 3 hours through 10 hard bosses,dying 20 times, and get a, "Easter Bonnet" as a reward? No.

Or in a more sinister light, grinding those bosses, week in, week out. Only to watch your one piece never drop. Until that week you took off, then it dropped.

Sometimes I thought WoW loot system was ran by Mephistopholes.

shit happened to me in WoW, week after week i had perfect attendance to raids in icc, the ONE  week i don't go, sword drops, i was pissed. to make matters worst, chest dropped that no one else needed(but i did) too. soooo pissed.

I wonder if you will do that in guild wars 2. Farm a dungeon for weeks for a certain cosmetic item.

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Asuran24Those seeking to put stat progression into game are realy blind to the fact of what gw is about, not to mention most likely part of the group most of the people seeking for vantity based raiding content are seeking to get away from.

Hell, I've been answering things theoretically as an ex-raider; had no idea we were supposed to be speaking in advance as anet fans.

When you guess at other people's motivations, you're going to be wrong frequently.  Raiding in GW2?  I'd fall back on the default 'unecessary, I'm ok with the games remaining distinct from each other and doing some things differently' position I've held since the first week of GW1.

YEt having raiding in the game that is merely about vantity, and lore, with no actual stat gear incentive would be vary different from the normal compeltely. It would give pvers that want to have actvites on or near par with the mists for the sizeof the groups being used, and yet would be different from other games in the genre for the fact you would raid for the challenge, lore, and for vanity gear that is in them. That is a larrge way of doing raiding content differently from the normal raiding mentality, also it would bring in more like minded players that seek to play what they enjoy, and scare away those with a elitist raiding mentality as they have little or nothign to lord over others. How you do somethign makes more difference, then if you do it. Since in not doing raiding you merely shrink your playerbase, whiledoing raiding in a difference fashion with different types of rewards machanics, and such allows those that actually enjoy raiding to find the game more appealing to them.

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

I wonder if you will do that in guild wars 2. Farm a dungeon for weeks for a certain cosmetic item.

Depends on the other question; is the encounter fun in its own right?

Hell, when I was doing it as a full-time thing, we'd raid for boredom relief. 

Friday night, you're already on--what else is there to do?  Let's go run Kara again.

A, there are no raids in GW2,

B, there doesn't need to be raids in GW2. People can live without them.

It is my honest opinion that every game of the last 7 or 8 years that has failed has done so partly because of the expectation of available endgame and expectations of raiders. The expectation is that raids will be designed to cater for those who like to eat up content as fast as possible. These people put undue pressure on developers to make content for them and their game devouring friends. Developers then always seem to do that and it ends up to the detriment of the game.

Without raids that circle will hopefully move elsewhere and make the game a better place.

For sure there will still be people who sail through the game and swallow up all the beautiful content that has been developed. But hopefully then they won't be shouting about how they're in the best damn guild on the planet and how they beat the biggest abd arsed raid boss faster than anyone else.

I've tried raiding. I really don't see where the enjoyment is in it. GW2 will be better without it.

I will galdly have raiding tossed out with quests. Thank you Arena Net for having the courage and please don't bow to pressure.

Originally posted by Cinge

You are going to get blasted by the GW2 white knights and the mob mentality on these boards.

 

Btw I would answer yes, more choices is better. If its cosmetic, like all gear in GW2 is, you don't have to do it if you do not want too. No different then any other aspect of the game.

Why is it whenever there are a group of people that disagree with something that they will be labelled white knights?

Get rid of this notion of white knights battling the people who want something. It's old, it's weak and it shows a distinct lack of intelligence to formulate a counter argument.

Originally posted by DeserttFoxx

Originally posted by Sephiroso

Originally posted by heavyhebrew

Originally posted by Boatsmate

You mean like heal a group for 3 hours through 10 hard bosses,dying 20 times, and get a, "Easter Bonnet" as a reward? No.

Or in a more sinister light, grinding those bosses, week in, week out. Only to watch your one piece never drop. Until that week you took off, then it dropped.

Sometimes I thought WoW loot system was ran by Mephistopholes.

shit happened to me in WoW, week after week i had perfect attendance to raids in icc, the ONE  week i don't go, sword drops, i was pissed. to make matters worst, chest dropped that no one else needed(but i did) too. soooo pissed.

I wonder if you will do that in guild wars 2. Farm a dungeon for weeks for a certain cosmetic item.

I won't seak for them, but i can say i would. I  farmed both new, as well as outdated instances in many games for what would be vanity gear (most of which was used for rping, and such,). I ran black temple many times when the warglaives actually were allowed to be used by Dks, farmed the legendaries from re-bc when we found out they were being discontinued, and many more items from many other games. Raiding for vanity is more about those collector types, lore nuts, and such that enjoy that style, and feeling of pve over pvp content.

For the people who treat raids as achievements, I imagine this would be fine. For those who want the best loot in the game, this is not going to be acceptable.

I don't like raiding - I tried it years ago when I could have had the time for it - but I do respect it as a viable form of progression in terms of experience and loot. However, as a non-raider, I always want an alternate way to achieve the same loot as this aspect of any game is not attractive to me. If that is through 5-man dungeons, PVP, etc, it is fine, as long as people are given options to obtain comparable equipment.

Originally posted by Asuran24

Raiding for vanity is more about those collector types, lore nuts, and such that enjoy that style, and feeling of pve over pvp content.

And the people who still have locker space.

I would not say that raiding is the worst fact in mmos, or even in playerbases, but that it is the mentality that the game starts at end game(weither it be via raiding, arenas, or other forms of pvp or pve content.). This mentality rushes the content in both style  into production, and so you get the pirana effect, as the content is a bleeding fish put into the water with piranas aka players, since the  devs have no time to fine tune or create trully challenging content in the time needed. IT is the mentality of getting to end game that destroys mmos, not the fact of one style or antoher that does it, content is created for fun, but badly made or shoody content is like a home. THe players rip thru it with ease finsihing what took months to create in hours or weeks, but go back to older games with raiding, it took much longer to fnsih such content making the experinces much more rewarding when it was fisnihed. Even when wow launched much of their content took most guilds vastly longer to finsih compared to newer raids, but they were much more challenging than mordern raids too, but the fact that much of the best items beign at the end did not kill the game till raiding content got progressively easier later on.

Originally posted by Asuran24

Originally posted by heartless

Originally posted by Asuran24

Originally posted by heartless

GW2 already has raids of sorts--the zone bosses. And that's just how I like it. Big bad boss appears and everyone in the zone bands together to defeat him. What I don't support are WoW-like raids with 10, 25 or 40 people basically running a dungeon together.

It cheapens the experience, when you farm the same raid over and over and over again until you finally execute the strategy you read on wowhead.com to the tee.

So a zone grouping up to kill a boss in a zone when it pops up is fine, but having something that would be more like the dungeons in gw now, except larger  giving the players more complexty to the dungeons comparitively. Now if it were somethign like how wow does the fights with them being made for a trinity that would be an issue, but if they built the raids around the ideas of their own systems they have now it would not be raiding in wow or other games at all. In this fashion only the fact that the content is built with the idea of having much larger numbers of players in the content, but the machanics or the styles of the encounters in the content woould be different from wow raids merely by the fact you do not have deticated roles in the game.

You and me both know that the raid dungeons do not offer more complexity. They are basically small group content that was buffed for a large amount of players and they don't fit in with GW2 or GW1 philosophy. I can understand huge zone bosses requiring a lot of people to kill but most of these raids have trash mobs which require the same amout of players to kill, make no sense.

GW1 and 2 are always about small group PvE content. If you want to whack on big mobs with 25+ people, you have WoW and a whole bunch of other games that tried to copy it. Leave GW2 to those who do not want the extreme minority to dominate the whole game.

It depends on what era of raiding you are talking about really for how complex the content was, if you take raiding back in standard wow then yes it was more complex then most other conent in that everyone had to do their jobs nearly perfect, but complared to what raiding has become no the complexity s not the same but that is more of a change in how many of the raiding base play then the idea of what raiding should be. I prefered when roles had specific jobs to do other then merely being tanking, healing, and dpsing. Now withoout needing to have certain roles in a raid you could have trully complex encounters in the raids that would be more like how raiding was made prior to modern raiding.

To me it sounds like you are taking WoW mentalities and applying it to the idea that the only difference is the lack of holy trinity.

Seen any videos of the dungeons lately? people wont stop complaining how confusing it looks with all the things going on. thats just 4 players. its absolute mayham because unlike wow - you have multiple roles, everyone must heal themselves and keep themselves alive, which was something you had glorified healbots doing for you in WoW. 

Has it occured to you that the way aggro works in this game and the action combat system might not translate well to an instanced raid?

It's a silly argument that because people want it, they should add it. Thats how you ruin your own game - by trying to please everyone. Id rather see Anet just specializing on what I would call TRUE MMO content, which is open world content. 

Dynamic events are not perfect. TotalBiscuit said recently that some events he tried in the last beta build didnt scale well, and with a certain number of players, no matter how many enemies the game spawned, the players just became too powerful in mass and zerged the living jebus out of it. Who knows how tight the balance will really be? But I hope it will be.

Do you know why instanced raids were developed? Because they were a compromise. Why? Because people got frustrated over having other guilds steal their raid bosses. so they developed instanced raids so people wouldnt be able to grief each other.

the down side - it was instanced, and had less impact and made it more single playerish and away from the virtual world. GW2 has solved this issue because nobody can kill steal or grief. furthermore the system in theory behind scaling is supposed to make an adequette challange regardless of the amount of players who participate. 

Open world raids is what it is about. instancing is primarily used for structured pvp and telling the story as well as a players house hub. 

So I will argue that adding instanced raids - itemization or power loot is a moot point. instanced raids are simply counter-intuitive to the idea of overcoming massive obsticales in a shared community with strangers and friends alike.

we already have dungeons for those that really, really want a hardcore challange. it will take years for them (if ever) to really nail it I think. adding more kinds of content means having less improvement on each of them seperately.

so let us just get great DE and great dungeons, and have them work on that along with pvp. That way there is a higher chance of significantly higher quality content than if they started designing for massive raids. 

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Asuran24

Raiding for vanity is more about those collector types, lore nuts, and such that enjoy that style, and feeling of pve over pvp content.

And the people who still have locker space.

eh if you need to find space, than your either not looking hard enouph, or your not one of those. I have guild banks, alt banks, and what not all put up to support my habit.

I fully support this idea. I know there are a lot of players that like the cosmetic rewards, and even though I PvP mostly, I like to do dungeon crawls sometimes, especially with guildies.

As long as they dont do what WoW did, and forget the PvP part of the game.