I’d like to follow this point up, in particular. Cutting back resources to drive purchases doesn’t work as well as they might have thought because it caused a recession, which even in a game economy, inhibits spending. Then, as things start to level off, new costs get introduced - which actually might work as a stimulus if the costs were universally viewed as a good way to spend. Instead of people having less resources to spend and converting to purchases to fill in the gaps, most will simply cut back on their spending as much as they can. In this case, since the new costs are some of the worst value, this will be one of the things cut if not already. Players need to want to spend their gems in order to want to buy them, no matter how “good a deal” they are (and right now, cash conversion is in the toilet regardless). The way it stands now spending, simply put, feels terrible. People aren’t hype getting a rare troop, they are relieved. You can see this over and over in player sentiment how they are “getting robbed of their gems”, and while I disagree that that is happening here because these sinks are mostly of a voluntary nature (discounting peer pressure, they exist in their own bubble and not participating/performing in one won’t affect other modes too much because the rewards are terrible, and if they weren’t terrible then they would actually be “worth the gems” and then there is no problem.) People aren’t hype getting a rare troop, they are relieved. Both shop revamps and attractive (not manipulative/pushy) ways to spend gems over VIP/Gem chest purchases are needed for the game economy to move toward a position of health.
I’d also like to address this. I mostly agree here, however, a strong case can be made that, if approached from a place of ignorance, these modes are resource traps and blind dead ends for progression. Not many people have bothered doing the math on Zuul’Goth and many might trust out of the gate that it is a thing they can get “eventually” (without realizing “eventually” more than likely means after the game is no longer around)
or that the orb rewards have some overall usefulness greater than the amount of man-hours of effort put in to obtain them (when for the most part they don’t). This bothers me more as a designer - as a player, I can choose to ignore it, but as a designer it is hard to think of this as anything but a beginner’s trap, a way to divert some of the players time away from reaching a goal rather than just adding a goal that is worthy, and these tend to cause frustration and aren’t even effective long term. There are just so many better ways to do this where the designer puts their needs in line with the players wants.
Now, those on the leaderboard with resources to burn… yeah, they should know better, and its on them if they want to spend their gems like this and be out of the running when a more appropriate way to spend gems finally appears and/or they run into a bad unluky streak. If that is what you want to do, have at it. However, nearly all of these are spending gem gluts from the ill-advised bracket 1 guild wars gem prizes. And at the end of the day, sinking these gem gluts off these players with “too many” gems isn’t going to convert to purchases (nobody that ever had 100,000 gems is going to buy 2,000 for $100 except out of a place of both altruism and financial liquidity, no matter how much they sink into new modes) and is, for now at least, totally inaccessible through gems made with cash purchases except if they are unaware just how many it takes to even get to top 100.
To bring this back to the original post, I wish raids and invasions were alternative forms of gameplay that could be done. I’d be a lot happier with them, even in their current iteration. The only thing that bothers me even about the Guild Wars format is the obligation side. It was never competitive for me, nobody will ever convince me that it is competitive. Having the teams you fight being set up entirely by players was bound to be rife with repetition, but there are some varance in brackets 8-10. I like building teams for specific things with some restrictions, I even occasionally enjoy playing out a battle where I’m constantly in a state of disadvantage, which, gameplay wise, I view as core to the mode - not the “competition”. I. Just. Hate. The. Obligation. We have reached a point where, particularly at endgame, the game’s activity hooks are almost the entire game instead of something that gets you started playing and has you branching off into doing stuff that you might make some advancement in. Guild Wars took a long time for our guild to hit a balance where it finally felt “optional” to me to jump in and not affect our placing into a lower or higher bracket, which in turn just made it a better experience over all despite it being the exact same thing it always was, even with occasional days completely full of the same meta team even down in bracket 8-10.
Obligation kills desire. As the feeling obligation fades, and with some proper reward buffing for the act of completing the battles themselves so it doesn’t totally feel like a waste of time, I believe I will start to enjoy Raids and Invasions more (but still think they would be better suited as single player content). Right now, I’d like to see as little of them as possible, so I don’t guilt-trip myself into spending more time than I really should participating in something whether I want to or not and thus I’d rather just see Guild Wars. Basically, the lesser of two evils at this point.
tl;dr: Run whatever event in whatever order they want as long as they don’t feel so obligatory and are such baseline gigantic time sinks.
