Curse

BahamutKaiser · Jul 25, 2006, 04:51 AM // 04:51

When GW first came out, we had 6 classes, easy missions, and a year to beat the game over and over with as many classes as we can in the 4 character slots we were granted. I beat Prophecy missions with nearly 3 characters, and progressed with a 4th before Factions came out.

When it was just prophecies completing the game with a half dozen characters wasn't a huge feat, but with Factions, it is difficult to get one character though the game, expecially if you chose one of the factions characters, and going through the game with all my other exsisting characters as well would be an overwhelming time sink.

Beyond that, repeating a bunch of missions is almost brain sapping, GW has defeated level and monitary grind, but we still have a new form of grind, Mission grind. With these easily leveled characters we have more time to spend leveling up several characters, but each one of them needs to be drug through 20 something missions and hundreds of quests to get the locations and skills available for that class. Then you can tack on some alot more time if you want to gain alternative secondary skills for them, hundreds of hours, which is skill grind.

So instead of Experience and Income grinding we now have Skill and Mission grind. Well I think it is time for Anet to improve on one of the founding successes of this Game, Axe The Grind!

OK so gaining skills and missions arn't so bad the first time, going through the game (one of the chapters) with each new character is a worth wile expedition granting you insite and experience with that class function and an enjoyable experience of the story elements. But, repeating them is in the least enjoyable.

Here is my proposal, Cross Completion. This basicly means, at a given point in your characters progress, they gain access to a certain portion of the progress of all your other characters who have also reached formentioned point of progress. What point of progress.... that is up for debate. How much progress shared, that is also up for debate. Hell the entire concept is up for debate......

The points of progress I suggest is either A) Accention/"Closer to the Stars", B) All missions, C) All Missions and Bonuses, D) marked harder point of completion, and E) something else.

What should be shared is really obvious, the one thing we want (I want) from my other characters progress more than anything else is his skills. I have already done quests, paid for, or captured these skills before, At some point I would like to be able to add all my accessed skills on my other characters so I don't have to spend hundreds of skill points and 1k each for skills I already captured, especially every weak or simple skill. I would understand if Elites where excluded, but I would also understand if they were included. The second most useful progress to be shared would probably be city and town locations. Those of us who have traveled to all these cities and beaten these missions have done it once before, doing all these missions over again can be torcher, you can realize this by the natural compultion of most players to skip every cinematic, this is because at least a few of your party members have done this before and are stuck doing it again and again, and again.

Progress I don't think should be shared is Mission completion and quest completion. Being able to skip through to the locations or missions you have beaten before allow you to avoid redoing them again if your not interested. but sharing completion of these missions removes the challenge of completing every mission with that new character, which many may still enjoy. This way you would have access to all the places you've been before, but not need to beat all of them again if you didn't want to.

With the new system of buying most of your skills the first time in Factions, the aquisition of even your primary and secondary set of skills is extremely costly, in gold especially. Having to do this dozens of times for every class who wants any Factions skills you want to aquire and any other skills you don't cross back to tyria to quest for, of which many of the quests are unavailable.

The biggest reason I think this is an important addition is the rate at which we are expecting new Chapters. Mass content isn't bad, alot of time taken to get through that content isn't bad either, but repeating the content isn't good, and when new content is going to be released regularly, repeating previous content will require outragious amounts of time, which will exponetially grow with every new chapter and every new character made.

So Exactly How Does This Work? For example. My Elementist/Monk beats every mission in Prophecies, and after that he does X new quest to gain Cross Completion (CC), He gains nothing, he is the first. My next character, Monk/Warrior Beats Prophecies and completes the CC quest, He already beat every mission Elementist beat, so he doesn't gain any locations, but he gains every skill learned by my Elementist/Monk (at least all non-Elite), and my Elementist/Monk also gains every skill the Monk/Warrior has. Rinse and Repeat for all my other Prophecies characters. Now Factions comes along, and I make an Assassin and a Ritualist. My Assassin beats all of Factions and finishes a new CC quest in Factions, he now gains all skills learned by all other CC characters, and also gains all the Mission and City locations in Prophecies, and also all the other CC characters gain all the Assassins skills as well as all Mission and City locations in Factions. Rinse and Repeat for Ritualist.

To continue that, I make Paragon, yada yada yada, same same same, you get the point. Alot of you may be thinking that going through every single mission, quest and traveling between locations with each PvE character you make for every Chapter is part of developing that character, but it isn't the same as it was when we only had Prophecies, we had a year to beat an onslaught of simple missions and enemies, with Chapters like Factions which are 90 percent max level material and drawn out missions, as having to buy 90% of your first set of skills not to mention your alternate secondaries, this will very quickly become an epidemic of grinding and repeating increasing numbers of chapters with increasing numbers of characters.

I personally think that all mission and city locations and all non-elite skills granted, upon the requirement of beating all missions in one chapter and completing CC is a reasonable function. The CC could involve a significantly difficult quest or cost something like 10k, or a combination. In this way we will only need to beat one chapter with each character in order to gain access to all the normal skills we earn and all the mission/city locations conquered. CC characters can still enjoy other chapters by actually beating thos missions, exploring the landscapes, locating the minor towns, beating the normal quests, and most likely enjoying the most challenging and enjoyable parts of that chapter, instead of repeating the entire chapter to enjoy the good content in it.

This would return a massive part of the pick up and play function to GW, having to repeat dozens of missions and travel through dozens of locations to enjoy the exceptional features of that chapter with each active character is madness, and the madness will just increase with every chapter and every new character, putting more and more characters into disuse, and leaving endless gaps in skill aquisition for each character. It is a far cry from the ease of unlocking mods, skills and runes for PvP characters with your PvE characters and Arena Grinding, with reasonable amounts of difficulty, yet much less strain in repetition.

In order to keep new characters for cheating the system by only completing each chapter once and having all other characters complete the easiest chapter (Prophecies), each character could be required to complete all missions and CC in the chapter that they are made. Meaning all characters made in new chapters, either because they are new classes or because they are new feature models, would have to beat the Chapter they start in, so it wouldn't be an easy task, even though it wouldn't be most neccessary since you would at least have to beat that chapter once to get access to its skills and locations, so it wouldn't be a crime if they just beat any chapter.

I believe this is a neccessary addition, you may not see it my way yet, but mark my words, in 3 more chapters, it will ridiculous to complete every Chapter with each character you make, all just to gain skills and reach the enjoyable parts of that Chapter. After chapter 4 or maybe 6, it will be unreasonable to repeat all of the missions in each chapters with each new character, obtain the thousands of skills including secondaries, the retardedly high amount of grind to get platnium for those skills and armor, and then getting premium weapons for them, and all the little quest and what not that are in the way as well.

I can't stress this enough, it is a serious problem which will multiply faster than rabbits, Anet, please add Cross Completion for skills and locations.

TadaceAce · Jul 25, 2006, 05:14 AM // 05:14

ok I read like the first 5 paragraphs before I decided to read war and peace. Basically, its once your beat factions, you have access to prophecies outposts and vise versa, not mission completion though. Sounds good

Bahamut man your post is too long, people aren't even gonna scroll down far enough to read my paraphrase in 3 sentences.

/signed

BahamutKaiser · Aug 01, 2006, 03:04 AM // 03:04

LOL, all of my threads are long, well all of the important ones anyways.

Anyone who cares about the improvement of the game or the support of it's players will take the time to read a thourough idea; and who cares about the opinion of people who don't care about the game?, I don't, and I imagine Anet doesn't either.

Yeah, the short of it is that the continous addition of chapters will make it ridiculous to go through each chapter from start to finish with every character you have, and gaining every skill for each character with the increasing number of classes which are added in every chapter is also too time consuming.

Skill Grind is basicly another form of EXP and Finacial grind which should be remedied, I hope Anet realizes this and makes this improvement an addition by chapter 4.

actionjack · Aug 01, 2006, 03:41 AM // 03:41

OMG... try as I might.. and I really do try hard, as I want to give well-educated and thought out opinion to our good friend Bahamut.... I just couldn't get pass the 7th paragraph!

You hated the grind... yet you enjoy us to read grind your post.... the irony of life...

(I will maybe try another attempt later... when my eye can open again...)

benmanhaha · Aug 01, 2006, 03:57 AM // 03:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by TadaceAce

ok I read like the first 5 paragraphs before I decided to read war and peace. Basically, its once your beat factions, you have access to prophecies outposts and vise versa, not mission completion though. Sounds good

Bahamut man your post is too long, people aren't even gonna scroll down far enough to read my paraphrase in 3 sentences.

/signed

Yea, I kinda liked the whole summing it up in 3 sentences like you did, but I get the basic jist. I really don't know what to make of this suggestion. In my opinion it can't hurt to offer Factions characters access to Prophecies outposts, but I think it should only go to THK. I dunno why, but that mission is very helpful in weeding out people who shouldn't be going to the Ring of Fire, and being summarily rewarded with all the non-elite skills your heart can handle.

Edit: I have just read some more of your Godzilla-sized post, and I see you want to offer this cross-completion for the same chapter, offering all learnt skills from one char to another. I think that is a no-no. I don't mind offering outposts and mission locations, but not skills. I mean, whats the point then?

BahamutKaiser · Aug 02, 2006, 04:32 AM // 04:32

If you read the post you would have gotten to the part where I explained why it is so Neccessary to have cross completion of skills. With the ever growing number of classes, characters, and added skills, as well as the cost per skill in chapters like factions, it is utterly outragious to grind for all the exp and gold neccessary to learn every skill for every class.

Eliminating EXP grind is just a cover up for not eliminating skill grind, in exp and cost, with 7+ characters, 10+ classes, and (who knows how many skills are in the game so far), it is ridiculous to get all the skills over and over again for each class.

In order to gain access to these skills you would at least be required to beat a chapter, so nobody is buffing up characters they haven't taken the time to develope or train, you have to beat all the missions in a chapter, so you have experience, and you have to beat each new chapter with at least one character to gain CC for those, so you arn't inexperienced with those missions either. This is a suggestion to allow completed characters to share the progress of other completed characters at some point, instead of grinding for the same skills and through the same missions over and over again.

Yes AJ, I grind the forums in hope to remove the grind and tragidy from the game. If everyone like the way the game was, and trusted Anet to improve the game the way they wanted, there wouldn't be a suggestion forum.

DEATH TO EXP GRIND (masked as skill grind).

P.S. I don't make posts this long with room to disagree, there is only room to dislike, the rational and reasoning is sound.