Comment on Just because a jaded veteran post his opinion, doesn't mean it's negative.
pory@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, the writing’s on the wall here. The only problem with the HOT-POF LS3/LS4 model for players was the release cadence for raids/fractals/new metas. Anet has fixed this by just not releasing those things ever anymore. We’re getting single boss Strikes instead of a multi boss raid wing or a boss + event Fractal. Outside of the elite specs, the Dragonfall episode of LS4 alone added more meaningful content to the game than EoD did.
lulztard@lemmy.wtf 1 year ago
cHalLenGinG ConTenT never has been worth the manpower in history of MMOs. Difficulties, story mode, implementation of the Fractal-system would all have been ways of varying effort to make it worth the investment, but raiders and developer both were very outspoken against filthy casuals staning the hallowed halls of raiding with their unworthy presence. I’m very clearly remembering both reddit as well as dev posts. While I’m not surprised to see that opinion in the active-on-social-media part of the playerbase, I was quite impressed that the devs would unironically rather stomp the entire content branch and replace it with strikes than to give access to raids to a wider audience. While I may not agree, I can respect them being consequent in their design philosophy.
But yeah, those things won’t be an issue anymore. Extrapolating the path taken since IBS I doubt that Anet will ever put that much effort into the game again. And what you said about 406 is both hilariously true and absolutely mind-blowing.
I’ve thought about it, and I tend to flirt with the opinion that we lost 90% of the effort. The overwhelming majority of SotO is rehashing existing stuff and the rest is consolidating too broad a game into more narrow, easier to manage paths. E.g. classes, mounts, etc. It’s crazy to think back that once upon a time Anet put so much time and effort into the game that their devs had the room to solo things like Action Cam or SAB. Bloody hell, Exordium alone is worth like five EoD legendaries. Nowadays the best they can come up with are fishing, more skills for Skyscale and decoupling T6 rune boni. Makes that 90% unreasonably reasonable.
GW2 will be able to exist for years on this level, but it’s going to be just another MMO.
Well, let’s see if my prediction comes true, we’ll know more after the SotO release.