Originally posted by heartless

[mod edit]

Considering your knack for doing 180 on games you really don't have a lot of room to talk but for once you are right.

Wouldn't be surprised to see ample gripes from you as well though not long after release.

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

I hate the idea that elite mode/hardcore difficulty only applies to endgame players. A lot of players simply enjoy a challenging leveling experience.

I'd throw my money at this game instantly if they decided to make a hardcore server or something.

And again, I will state the same thing I did before. If you want a hardcore experience then thats entirely up to YOU. There are hundreds of ways to make a game hardcore without begging for it in the game. Because we all know that people will complain and if something is too hard for you to beat since they made it harder there is no way you can go back. You'll be stuck not completing it, as opposed to if you made YOUR own hardcore mode, you can break it at any time to complete content if it seems too hard. The devs don't make the games easy, only you do by doing the actions that make the game easy. They won't make games as hard enough so that only about 5% of the population of the gamers can make it to max level, that would lose so many casual gamers and people who just want to enjoy the game for what it is.

Or rather than having players intentionally gimp themselves to make a game hard(which is pretty stupid idea, considering growing your character is half the fun in an rpg..), they could have a seperate server with toughened monsters. Casuals can have standard servers, and those who want a harder game can play on the harder one. Both sides can experience the game how they want to this way.

Again you missed my point, once you get to a point past your level of skill, then what do you do? I'm sure you won't be too happy if they made something too hard for you to complete, even if someone who is in the top 1% of gamers can. So you get frustrated trying over and over to no avail, you just can't beat that DE. How exactly do you want them to scale it? Based on your preference, based on the top 10%/5%/1%? Its too hard to make it catter to everyone. Hence y there is dungeons with harder difficulties to make a challenge. But if they made those way too simple that you can just breeze throu them without really trying I can see your point.

You switch to the other server if you find the harder one is to difficult. Or like any other person with common sense, you try and improve your character/skills. The point behind the harder difficulty in really any MMO at this point would be to make the game more group-oriented/challenging for those who felt the default was to easy

As to how it's scaled, that's something that would have to go through testing and feedback. And if a handful of people end up thinking it was scaled to hard, guess what? They always have the choice to go back to the normal server.

Not going to even get into the amount of testing and scaling they would need to do for just a small portion of servers to make it different. The concept is nice and I would like something like it, but realistically its not viable. Only a really small portion of people hardcore raided and got it down. The less people on that server makes it almost impossible for raid boss DEs to get done since the lack of players in certain levels will be very varied.

I was a hardcore raider, I love the challenge, but I don't feel that a challenge is the same thing to one person as it is another. If you played D3, was that a challenge to you in inferno. They made that game "challenging" to the masses by making mobs 1 shot you so only ranged had any chance of progressing past Act 1 for months on end. Is it fair that a certain class gets an easier experience in some cases and another doesn't, no but that's playstyle. So how do you propose they make it more difficult but still fair for every class? It's a very hard question.

Again, the point is making group-play more viable and fun for leveling characters. This really has nothing to do with raiding. Vanilla servers are more often than not already balanced for soloplay, which is where solo prefered players could enjoy the game. Ideally a hardcore server isn't going to be fair for any class. It's just hard all-around. Think FFXI.

If they want to put in new content on a regular basis they have to balance that then go back and rebalance it all over again, which puts them behind and makes updates fewer and farther apart.

"...with toughened monsters." How do you make the mobs tough besides giving them more hp and more damage, because this logic was used in D3 and then only ranged classes could play because they were the only classes who could kill mobs without ever being hit.

I didn't play Diablo 3, but I know for a fact the Diablo series does not play similarly to most MMO's, so i'm not sure why you're bringing it up. A simple increase to monster health and damage is a fine start in making the game harder, along with giving creatures additional/better skills for handling players. Heck you can even make elemental resistances/weakness more prominent . 

Until you play D3 or look at the forums or look up the problems that arose with this game, you wouldn't understand my argument. Go read up on it, and you'll see their mistake.

Everyone was basically in agreeance that once you get further in the game, the mobs are harder and take a lot more effort to kill.

The game isn't even out yet, and what late-game stuff has been experienced has gone through changes pretty much every beta, so you and "everyone" are speculating as far as this goes. That's something that will be judged when the game is actually out.

exactly so calling for more challenging content might as beworthless to state as well is it not?

And going back on my old post, "hardcore" or "elitist" servers or not, if you were forced to fight a mob that was rediculously tough at the very begining while you are trying to get all your 5 skills, how much fun are you really going to have? I had troubles killing a mob at my level (level 8 I think) underwater trying to get my 5 skills bec all I had was my very first skill which did maybe about 5% of his life. Add more health to that mob and I never would want to level up my skills again because I wouldn't be able to kill anything to do so. "Well go back and kill some lower level mobs". Well in your scenario since you get leveled down in GW2 that point is invalid since it will be just as difficult as before. The reason the starter is so easy is so people can get used to the game and get their weapon skills. Otherwise they would quit in no time if they cant even kill the mobs required to get said skills.

Again, if you don't like it, don't play on the harder server. That's the great thing about it, you give everyone a choice. One of those goals of making a harder server would be to encourage grouping and teamwork, so as far as how to solve your little scenario, just find some friends to help you with it. This is an MMO afterall..

Again I wouldn't mind what your talking about but its not realistic. The population of hardcore gamers is too low to implement the changes that you want.

 

 

It's hardly unrealistic. In fact it's been done before, albeit in lobby-based RPG's. And there is definently a playerbase out there that's been looking for a tougher MMO experience than what we've been getting the past couple of years. It's been a common complaint I hear from a lot of players who have been ditching recent games. I think many casual players would even find more replayability in the game if it offered a harder server for them to try out after playing the game on it's vanilla difficulty.

The only thing preventing any dev teams from doing it is laziness. And hey, if A-Net/future developers don't want to do it, it's their loss, potential customers will look to the future for something better, or go back to some older games that are a bit tougher.

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by gessekai332

   Sure, we all play games to have fun, but in order to have fun you also need to be challenged to some extent. I have leveled a couple characters to 20-25 and what i've noticed is that DE are mind-numbingly easy mode (no chance of failure) when there is a zerg, very slightly difficult when there are 2-3 people, and slightly difficult when you are by yourself. I don't think there has been anything yet where a goal seemed overwhelmingly difficult. I feel that in order to motivate players, you NEED to have content that must be very difficult to accomplish (but accomplishing it is voluntary, not necessary for character progession). By difficult i do not necessarily mean grind. Even as a casual player, i like the idea of having elite dungeons that only a few people can complete, even if myself I probably would never be able complete it.

 

     How would you all feel if by 1 week into the game, people already had reached max level and the master ancient dragon, who laid waste to half of Tyria, was already put onto farm status by a bunch of guilds? Pretty lame if you asked me. The master dragon of tyria should only go down if 75% of the server population was beating on him at the same time or if somehow all the tyrian gods were summoned at the same time and started knocking the crap out of it. 

 

      A good distribution would be like 60% normal content, 20% somewhat hard, 10% very hard, 9% super hard, 1% virtually impossible.

Heres a hard mode for you, take off all your gear besides weapons. Now everything will probly one shot or close to it. Now try not to get hit by anything and kill shit. Enjoy.

 

Ah, the cop out answer.

Not only is this the laziest and most poorly thought out response possible to give... but did you even consider that even if the OP does that, and gets himself killed, that the other players will kill the mob anyway, thus STILL no chance for failure?

I agree with the OP, in the last beta event they nerfed the difficulty to the point where I could pretty much just stare at the tv and hit one button and win.

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by gessekai332

   Sure, we all play games to have fun, but in order to have fun you also need to be challenged to some extent. I have leveled a couple characters to 20-25 and what i've noticed is that DE are mind-numbingly easy mode (no chance of failure) when there is a zerg, very slightly difficult when there are 2-3 people, and slightly difficult when you are by yourself. I don't think there has been anything yet where a goal seemed overwhelmingly difficult. I feel that in order to motivate players, you NEED to have content that must be very difficult to accomplish (but accomplishing it is voluntary, not necessary for character progession). By difficult i do not necessarily mean grind. Even as a casual player, i like the idea of having elite dungeons that only a few people can complete, even if myself I probably would never be able complete it.

 

     How would you all feel if by 1 week into the game, people already had reached max level and the master ancient dragon, who laid waste to half of Tyria, was already put onto farm status by a bunch of guilds? Pretty lame if you asked me. The master dragon of tyria should only go down if 75% of the server population was beating on him at the same time or if somehow all the tyrian gods were summoned at the same time and started knocking the crap out of it. 

 

      A good distribution would be like 60% normal content, 20% somewhat hard, 10% very hard, 9% super hard, 1% virtually impossible.

Heres a hard mode for you, take off all your gear besides weapons. Now everything will probly one shot or close to it. Now try not to get hit by anything and kill shit. Enjoy.

BTW, GW2 never once states that you need to wear gear, so basically the gear is just cattering to casuals like not going to those spyglass icons to see the whole map.

Lol.  Try to artificially manufacture challenge in the game by completely eliminating one of other most fun and appealing features of RPGs and MMOs, character progression.  Sounds like a grand idea!

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by tabindex

Originally posted by bcbully

90% of the game was built casual from the ground up.  

 

You're right.  But sadly, this statement applies to pretty much everything that's come out in the past ten years.  And now, thanks mostly to Wow, that everybody loves to play RPG's besides nerds, it's never ever going to change. 

 

:(

he's not right but you guys can believe what you want.

It is what it is.

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

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Originally posted by bcbully

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Originally posted by Aerowyn

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Originally posted by tabindex

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Originally posted by bcbully 90% of the game was built casual from the ground up.  

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  You're right.  But sadly, this statement applies to pretty much everything that's come out in the past ten years.  And now, thanks mostly to Wow, that everybody loves to play RPG's besides nerds, it's never ever going to change.    :(

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he's not right but you guys can believe what you want.

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It is what it is.

 

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

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no, but it isn't necessarily true. and thats often the problem with overgeneralization and hyperbole. your statements here, pierced to their extremes by research would appear to contain no actual information as read by many.

it reads a bit like buzz-word soup to me.

are you trying to say that people who play the game very little will enjoy PVE and WvW while people who play the game often will play structured pvp? you simply have no reasonable basis for such a claim that i can think of.

Originally posted by bcbully

 

It is what it is.

 

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

it wouldn't be a bad thing if true bit it's not.. not sure why you feel you know so much about the game when obviously you don't. You do get casual PVE and casual PVP in this game as well as very challenging version of both..  to say the whole PVE game is targeted only for casuals is a straight out lie

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by bcbully

 

It is what it is.

 

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

it wouldn't be a bad thing if true bit it's not.. not sure why you feel you know so much about the game when obviously you don't. You do get casual PVE and casual PVP in this game as well as very challenging version of both..  to say the whole PVE game is targeted only for casuals is a straight out lie

Bully never lets facts or knowledge get in the way of his opinion

1. casual gamer (GW2 PvE),- Sorry Bully , Gw2 just straight out offers the best open world pve I have ever played  …not built for raid centred dungeon grinders, they have WoW and her clones ,but without a doubt the best and most interesting pve experience out there is GW2
2. new/casual pvprs- I guess Bully …I’ve pvp’d in every mmo since DAoC - Shadowbane through WoW and its clones and the WvWvW is exactly what I have wanted since RvR in DAoC. WvW is not designed for the open world free for all pvp crowd but sure hits the nail on the head for a theme park MMO
3. hard-core pvprs- Bully spvp will certainly appeal to a hard-core team based crowd but having rated matches also appeals to any player that wants to jump into a quick skill based match

I’m not sure why a TSW fan would even bother opening up a pvp can of worms, but it seems a little strange for someone playing TSW to refer to any pvp as casual/new when the weakest part without a doubt in TSW is the pvp

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

 

It's hardly unrealistic. In fact it's been done before, albeit in lobby-based RPG's. And there is definently a playerbase out there that's been looking for a tougher MMO experience than what we've been getting the past couple of years. It's been a common complaint I hear from a lot of players who have been ditching recent games. I think many casual players would even find more replayability in the game if it offered a harder server for them to try out after playing the game on it's vanilla difficulty.

The only thing preventing any dev teams from doing it is laziness. And hey, if A-Net/future developers don't want to do it, it's their loss, potential customers will look to the future for something better, or go back to some older games that are a bit tougher.

But here's the thing, the game did a better job than most RPGs for early game/mid game difficulty INSTEAD of front loading it all into late game. And most of those late game front load of difficulty is hardly that big of a jump anyway. This game at least requires more skill than others and requires you to pay attention to simple things. The AI in this game is more advanced than any other I've ever seen. How many times have I played a game and just put a bunch of mobs in a group then aoe'd them down, these mobs won't sit in it like most, they move and dodge aoe, move out of fire, and punish you for trying to tank and spank them. You can call it whatever you want, but in the end it is unrealistic to spend that much money on such a small player base when the game COULD  (and I say this because nobody has seen late game, and I doubt you have seen past level 15) pose a challenge that warrants enough skill to accomplish it.

Edit: Let's take a look if they made this higher difficulty mode for the 5% hardcore player base out there. Let's start with the problems that could easily arise from this happening:

1. Low population: A lot of hardcore gamers want to play with their friends and thus won't join these servers in fear of outcasting their friends from playing it. Most won't go on there because they are too busy with characters on other servers and don't want to push their experience yet. This problem comes into play for the next point:

2. Group oriented DEs: I'm talking raid bosses, raids on cities, waves of mobs, exc. This game has a lot of these, at least 1 raid boss per area. How many players do you honestly think you'll have throughout every zone to accomplish these tasks? If it is in fact difficult to level, most won't get past 30 I'm sure before going back to normal servers. So zones in higher levels will have so few playerbase to defeat the content that it becomes a problem for Devs that they have to either nerf the mobs higher or find some way to get more people in these areas. In the end, you might have to go back to lower level zones to level just because of lack of playerbase.

3. PvP. If these servers are PvE oriented since that is all they can make harder (they can't buff players or make hardcore players join the server who are good at PvP), the PvP on this server will be sparse and there will be a lack of WvWvW action and a lack of sPvP action. This is a problem for PvP'ers who want a challenge since they can't enjoy all aspects of the game respectively.

4. End Game max level content. If you have ever been on a low pop server in other MMOs, you know how shitty it is getting a group at max level to do instances later. With the vast majority of the playerbase probly at level 30 and lower, you will have troubles doing stuff like Orr or hardcore instances with a group since only a select few might make it to max before they gave up, Without cross server queues for instances like they implemented in WoW, it could take you hours to find a group to do what you want and this is a game where there are no requirements for classes like tank and healer.

THAT is why it's impractical and you can argue that any of these points aren't going to be an issue because there are so many people who want hardcore stuff... But looking at statistics for other games, that's not true. And every issue is out there.

Originally posted by Tibernicus

 

Ah, the cop out answer.

Not only is this the laziest and most poorly thought out response possible to give... but did you even consider that even if the OP does that, and gets himself killed, that the other players will kill the mob anyway, thus STILL no chance for failure?

 

I agree with the OP, in the last beta event they nerfed the difficulty to the point where I could pretty much just stare at the tv and hit one button and win.

Right, because you'll be sorounded by people no matter where you go at any time right? I've had quite a few DEs that I had to solo because noone showed up. Besides, it was just an idea, sure you can come up with plenty that fix that idea. Taking off pieces of gear to make things more difficult is just an idea that doesn't require massive Dev updates to hinder the experience of every single player around you.

Originally posted by Homitu

Originally posted by eggy08

 

Heres a hard mode for you, take off all your gear besides weapons. Now everything will probly one shot or close to it. Now try not to get hit by anything and kill shit. Enjoy.

BTW, GW2 never once states that you need to wear gear, so basically the gear is just cattering to casuals like not going to those spyglass icons to see the whole map.

Lol.  Try to artificially manufacture challenge in the game by completely eliminating one of other most fun and appealing features of RPGs and MMOs, character progression.  Sounds like a grand idea!

Did I say you had to throw away the gear and not collect it, no. All I'm saying is that you take off a piece of gear to mess with your stats to fix the clearly under powered mobs you're fighting. But hey, let's instead talk about later progression of difficulty in the game... oh wait, we can't. So until game comes out and we are basing our opinions on BWE3 which was nerfed in difficulty, let's ask for the game to become ninja gaiden so that only a very select playerbase can get to max level.

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by bcbully

 

It is what it is.

 

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

it wouldn't be a bad thing if true bit it's not.. not sure why you feel you know so much about the game when obviously you don't. You do get casual PVE and casual PVP in this game as well as very challenging version of both..  to say the whole PVE game is targeted only for casuals is a straight out lie

But everyone in this game looks at BWE3 and makes assumptions. GW2 is only casual PvE if you follow around a group for every single event/heart. Well since you can get rezzed and have people kill mobs for you it's easy. Ya... so would every MMO if you ran around in a group finishing every quest, at least the DEs scale relatively well. Sometimes I wonder if anyone who is bitching about diffiulty has made a char past at least 15 and had to solo mobs and DEs or found harder mobs later on.

Dunno if you've tried out TSW (The Secret World), people were saying the same thing, about having higher difficulty things to do, and there was.  All they did was just added some Elite specific zones in the middle of every map where there were bosses and some group quests to do, and dropped max level gear QL10 or w/e even while leveling, and it just threw the game off for me.  Why put such content in the middle of nowhere like that.

If GW2 did that, it would ruin the immersion, but there could be a possibility of making different instances of difficulty, that you could choose when to have this elite difficulty for the whole map so that organized PvE groups can get better drops.  But tha also limits the casual solo player, almost forcing them to group up if they want the best stuff late game.  There are so many Pros/Cons of such content.  In my opinion, content should just be hard to begin with, and I think they've balanced that out for the most part, and it's mildly hard throughout the entirety of the game for the most part.

From ur question i can tell that u have not played GW but ill tell u this there will some damn hard parts in this game like dungeons.

If u played GW u would know that everything could have been done in 2 modes after finishing game hard or normal and there were some misions that would really beat the sh** out of u.. so im expecting no less from this :)

Originally posted by eggy08

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by bcbully

 

It is what it is.

 

There is a nice size market for the casual gamer (GW2 PvE), a growing market of new/casual pvprs (WvW is where they will be), and there is also challenging pvp for the hardcore pvprs. 

 

Is this such a bad thing? No need to make up what it's not.

it wouldn't be a bad thing if true bit it's not.. not sure why you feel you know so much about the game when obviously you don't. You do get casual PVE and casual PVP in this game as well as very challenging version of both..  to say the whole PVE game is targeted only for casuals is a straight out lie

But everyone in this game looks at BWE3 and makes assumptions. GW2 is only casual PvE if you follow around a group for every single event/heart. Well since you can get rezzed and have people kill mobs for you it's easy. Ya... so would every MMO if you ran around in a group finishing every quest, at least the DEs scale relatively well. Sometimes I wonder if anyone who is bitching about diffiulty has made a char past at least 15 and had to solo mobs and DEs or found harder mobs later on.

I think we should be careful about making assumptions from what we see in the starter areas. Of course, when the game launches, you will see masses of people moving from location to location in a typical "zerg" fashion. Yet even in BWE1, we saw what would happen when zerg met fire shaman- a massive amount of dead strewn over the map.

We saw the same thing happen when the opened up the Asura area when I personally was introduced to the fire elemental along with 20 or so other people. Speaking of which, there's a pretty good video on this topic of both difficulty as well as some highlights of that fight starting around 2:15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn1bHEJFKTE

Additionally, we KNOW that due to an error on their end, BWE3 was tuned TOO EASY. I expect the final product will be like BWE2, which to me was just right.

Finding the right difficulty will take time. As is said in the video, I'm not opposed to challenges where people have to know strategies and a decent grasp of their character's abilities, as well as a coordinated effort, in order to succeed. But no win situations is not good game design.

So I expect a learning curve at launch that escallates in difficulty as we progress through the game. And I expect that they will be tuning the game as we go, which should be simplified given their ability to update content on the fly. Developers collect data on player deaths and amount of time to complete content and use this to determine something that works for the most people most of the time. Unfortunately, in MMOs, games are not tuned to you or for you, so some people will just have to get over it.

The other thing to keep in mind, which some certain people seem to intentionally forget, is that all events have fail conditions. And because of persistance, they remain "failed" until a player or group of players begin to push the event back in the other direction. I expect failures to be more significant as the game goes on with more serious consequences.

But again, everything as of right now is conjecture based off of gameplay up to the level 35 zone and running 1 dungeon on story mode, if you got that far in a BWE.

It would be just lovely if the people who haven't even played the game and yet have somehow stylized themselves to be armchair experts would stop making broad proclamations about how easy or hard something is, but I'm not holding my breath.

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by stevebmbsqd

Originally posted by Aerowyn

Originally posted by ariboersma

Originally posted by Zezda

Explorable dungeon mode.

 

[Edit]

 

And no, not all DE's are mind numbingly easy. I can assure you of that.

this

seems basing the entire game on the first 10-20 levels is the new "cool" thing to do these days.

Some might turn that around on you and say that it seems like people like you hype the game based on the first 10-20 levels. I like most of the things in GW2, but I am still apprehensive about the things I haven't seen or tried personally and try not to talk about or hype much of what I haven't experienced yet.......

i talk about what I have experienced and show videos on aspects I have not yey experienced.. people here are making assmuptions on not only content they never experienced but also content pretty much no one has.. i feel there is a big difference there.

Not really. Videos can differ greatly from actually playing something. I am not trying to attack you, but you do make lots of assumptions based on what you have read on the internet or have seen. There really isn't much of a difference between that and the people who are stating on opposing opinion to yours. These people have read something and watched videos and state what they believe to be true. The truth is no one will know until we get to play the game beyond the starter areas. Until then, it is only conjecture.....

Originally posted by gessekai332
 

UPDATE: after reading the posts and videos on this thread and doing some of my own research i discovered that arenanet does have lots of difficult content in store for us at later levels. explorable dungeons will be very difficult to beat and world content will get much harder as we all level up as arenanet weans us off the handing-holding heart quests and pushes us into more complex dynamic event webs. They have also stated numerous times in their interviews that they know that hardcore gamers make up a very significant part of the population so they have ensured that content is in place for us as well.

Nice to see you are beeing honest with yourself & with the rest of us.

That is ALWAYS nice too see.

Kudos to you ;)

I'm still looking for an answer as to what are you all considering as "hard" in an MMORPG.

I've played most of them and can't remember anything particularly hard anywhere, before max level that is, maybe it's just me but I always found leveling to be super easy in every MMO.