I am going to lock the thread in preparation for the horizontal discussion thread. Thanks for your awesome participation and the value that you have added to GW2.
See you soon. Note I still have quite a lot of work to do today so please bear with me.
Looking forward to my vacation……
Chris

So I know time gates is a pretty hot topical overall as I’ve had some pretty heated debates in the past over it. So here is my view on them.

Summary
Overall I think time gates are important for an MMO, while they have pro’s and con’s for sure, in my opinion the overall gains come out ahead. That said I think there is diminishing returns to the number of time gates in a game. This brings up a core design philosophy which is “it’s always easier to add to then it is to take away” (while in this example it is a bit inverse, as adding a time gate is “adding” but it’s really taking away the players ability to repeat the action as much as they want). Meaning, we error on the side of time gating as we can always remove a time gate if needed but it’s really hard to add one. One clarification I would like to make is there are two different time gates: One time and repeatable. I think most of the complaints about time gates are all on the repeatable end, so I’ll focus my thoughts on that one.

Con’s
- Time gates hurt players with more time (by this I mean players with more time run up against time gates more and their time becomes less rewarded over time.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to complete the content before the gate resets, this can add fatigue to players play experience (If I have 15 things I need to do every time I log in, I never feel like I get to do what I want to do.)
- Time gates are very calculable (You know how many dailies you need to get x reward.) It’s hard to say how many days it takes to hit level 80 as it’s very dependent on too many factors. Knowing the time can sometimes make it feel more daunting or tedious.

Pro’s
- Time gates help players with less time (If I can only play an hour a day, my time is more rewarded.)
- Repeatable time gates add “pressure” to log in which helps create possible reward loops and play patterns (I want to log in every day, which often can become play experiences, talk with friends, strengthen relationships and get players into a pattern of seeing what’s going on.)
- Time gates equalize players by bringing the hardcore and the causal players closer together. (Players play at an variety of different times and intensities. This makes balancing wealth disparity and play times/progression much harder without actual gates.)
- Time gates help group players up (guilds 1 week timer helps group a large amount of play times into the same time frame.)

Reasons for time gating
- Exploits (Many time gates are there to avoid exploits)
- Overflow issues (the way our tech works without a time gate, you can use overflows to reset your timer)
- Reward Equalization (keep the time to do something more even between hardcore and causal)
- Character vs Account (some things we want to reward the account and thus an account time gated reward allows us to do that cleanly, which stops people from deleting characters and renaming in order to acquire a large number of things)

Overall I feel like time gating is important for an MMO because it’s important to close the gap between the causal and hardcore group so you can make sure your future rewards and content are useful for a wider variety of players. For example if there was no level cap and everyone could level as much as they want, hardcore players would be at level 4561 and a causal player would be at like 100. Once that happens, it would be very hard to make anything that both of those players would be happy about getting. MMO’s also have what I like to call “mass” to them, the more people playing and logging on, the more fun they are and systems which encourage people to log in often help create that mass. People see their friends regularly even just to say “hey there is an event this Sunday with the guild” or “hey lets set aside some time Friday so we can do fractals”. Now this doesn’t mean I feel like we can just add time gates everywhere. In fact I think you need either a very large amount of time gated stuff so a player can play for ever and never run out of things to do (which is a bit unrealistic) or you need non-time gated rewards and game play. This is why we create places for people to farm for all types of things. We like people who farm a lot, we are just always trying to make sure farming doesn’t blow out an item so much it’s no longer worth farming as it sort of defeats the whole reason to farm. A nice mix of time gates and non-gates is important. I think there are some valid complaints that we have over time gated some areas of the game and we should do some reviews of our time gates to see if adjustments should be made, but the game needs time gates for many reasons and if they were not there the game would be way less fun for any type of player.

Source : https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/g … ost3384259

Well the crafting gating we added was actually for a different reason then gating the speed in which someone can craft ascended gear. We wanted to make people who level up crafting able to do something to gain gold each day. The time gate here goal is much more focused around making gold then limiting crafting as you can bypass it with gold. This does break down when someone has a lot of characters and has an endless demand for these mats. This problem I put under alt problem and we just need to brainstorm more ideas on how to make life easier for people with lots of characters.

I think your totally right and I think we do keep these in mind, it’s why we made sure for each mat people can acquire it in both multiplier and single player ways. We don’t try and balance these to be equal just to make sure they are reasonably doable. We did be a little cautious on ascended mats in WvW as we didn’t want to drive people to farm there in an unnatural way. After playing it I do think we need to make some adjustments in this area.

Well this comes down to your play style it’s not like there is anything forcing you to log in every day just slows you down if you don’t and as for being behind I think when the new thing comes out there is a stronger pressure around “being behind” but as time goes on that pressure goes away. Sense we are normally planning on how something will work in the long term we are ok with there being a bit more pressure when something first goes out but someone who starts one month from now will have a very different feeling.

Source : https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/g … ost3384741

I was using the example to explain how time gates help equalize players goals and focus them together. Another example would be guild timers without them a super hard core guild would have finished all guild levels in 1 night where other guilds of equal size might take months. Then if you design new content around the guild that can do that much content in 1 night then the other guilds just get left behind in the dust. Vertical or horizontal progression doesn’t matter a player who is going to take 3 years to do something everyone else and in a few weeks makes it hard to balance. Now gates don’t make them equal at all, the players with more time will still complete things faster take my guild example the super good guild still finishes something in 5 weeks that took the other 3 months, but it does help close that gap. You really don’t want them to be that close you just don’t want them to be crazy far apart.

    This also is super important for wealth disparity as far as economy goes but I’m keeping the examples as much around progression as economy is a totally different discussion.

Source : https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/g … ost3384860

This is why we really count crafting gating as a soft gate it is not meant to be a hard gate, but we have a lot of other time gates in the game daily, gathering, guild mission cool down, fractal daily timers ect. I know most of the concern about gating is directed at the crafting gate but I’m more trying to give insight to why we use time gates at all.

Source : https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/g … ost3384781

Hello Fellow Collaborators,

Welcome to the last CDI topic of 2013. In this topic we will be discussing Character Progression. The CDI rules are as follows:

Rules
1: This initiative is all about discussion.

2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.

3: Anger and emotion will have less impact than intelligent discussion.

4: Together we will share and evolve design philosophies which will impact how we develop the game moving forward.

5: Aggression and disrespect to a fellow community member or developer will not be tolerated, and in the extreme could lead to the shutting down of the initiative.

6: The teams primary focus is work toward the development of GW2 and therefore posting of discussion and commentary may not be as frequent as you like. Please do understand that the initiative is taken very seriously by us all and that we will be reading the discussions and joining in as often as it is possible to do so.

We will be talking about both horizontal and vertical progression and I hope we can stay focused on what is in game now and what we would like to see in the future.

The two main areas for discussion will be Horizontal and Vertical progression, however please understand that the commentary and ideation we are really looking for regarding vertical is around its accessibility in game.

Finally please note this is not a competition either between yourselves or the developers in regard to one up man ship. The point of this Initiative is to work together to make the game better.

Note: We will disclose the ideas we do or don’t like as a group but we will not discuss schedules or timing around implementation. If there is still concern surrounding how seriously we take community collaboration then please do take the time to think about how much impact the community has had on the working of this game over the year.

Chris

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

videoboy.4162 a écrit :

Chris,
Before I really get into this CDI, I was wondering. Is there any info you can give us about the much-wanted Skin Wardrobe? I know I’ve watched an interview where Colin said that it was something ANet fel was really missing from the game.
- Is this an idea that is actually possible to add to the game?
- If so, is it something that would take a very long time to create?
- what are you personal thoughts on the idea?
I realize that you may not be able to answer all of those questions, but would you be willing to address this desired addition in some way?

It is an idea that we are certainly very fond of (-:
Chris

As chris said going to be hard to keep to a 3 page summary with this one but I’ll get started 

Topics
*Fractal Resets
*Ascended Gear
*Horizontal Progression
*Vertical Progression
*Grind
*Art Progression
*Alts
*Gates
*Map progression
*Ascended creation time

There where a a lot more topics but I figured I’ll get a start before I head home

Fractal Resets
See my above post on this.

Ascended Gear
Horizontal Progression
Vertical Progression

I’m going to lump these three together and talk about all three. The goal of progression is for you to feel like your character is growing as you spend time in the game. It can also serve as a common system that the different playstyles of people can use as a common language to communicate their accomplishment between each other. For example saying I reached level 80 or have full ascended tells someone of your accomplishments but you could do that in many different ways.

Vertical progression
Some games choose vertical progression for this system and I think vertical progression has it’s place it’s a very strait forward system that has natural gating built in and makes you feel better when you get stronger and overcome those gates. The place where I feel it breaks down is when you start adding to a game. This changes the feeling of vertical progression as your accomplishments start to become a bit more of a moving target I think this problem hasn’t really be solved for vertical progression as most games just live with this downside and enjoy vertical progression for it’s easy of use and clear system the biggest solution I’ve liked is soft caps where the cost gets so high you effectively have a cap but it’s a little more grey you lose some of the clarity of vertical progression but you gain some constraints. In Guild Wars 2 we wanted from the start to try and solve this paradigm so we said let’s use vertical progression at the start as the gate can be a great tool to teach people slower and to grant access to different areas and build that sense of growth, but we found in GW1 that a max to that time allows for us to have a common end point for people and from there we grow horizontally.

Horizontal Progression
With horizontal progression, it has some tradeoffs it’s great for adding to as everything you add takes away a lot less from the things you made before. Making it a great system to add to it also keeps things fresh as it can add more choices and options. It’s weakness are mostly with clarity and gating, it always takes a lot more effect to explain what someone needs to do next with horizontal progression which means your often spending a lot of time and UI to tell people what to do to overcome this weakness while this can happen with vertical progression too it’s normally a bit simpler and easier sense it’s often more liner. Vertical progression naturally gets gateing built in and while you can add gating to horizontal progression it once again takes more UI and systems to explain why that gating matters you could easily add content that you can’t do unless you have this skill but how do you that content is there?

This is why for GW2 our goals from the start where using Vertical progression for teaching and clarity and then have a common understandable end point at that point switch to a more horizontal progression system which is easy to add too. We’ll still have to overcome some of the downsides with horizontal progression and it’s something we are contiung to work on.

Ascended Gear
So then why did we add ascended gear, well the reason is we wanted sometime between the transition and what we shipped with was very little time turns out global trading post has a lot more effect on this then we had original thought which made us need a non-tradable gear step. We still have some progression to smooth out around the rare -> exotic area as mostly you just jump from leveling greens to exotics and rare is really only used for salvaging into ecto. We have been spacing out adding each slot of ascended gear to make sure we don’t make our original mistake again and I’m sure we’ll need to continue to evaluate the time to gain this gear like we do all things.

Art Progression
Art progression! It’s horizontal why not do it more!!! Well we do this a lot all ready and a lot of it’s constraints comes down to costs. Every single piece of art we make is not liked by everyone and so the amount of art you have to make to give everyone a smooth art progression curve is very high. The cost of making some pieces of art is also very high (Armor especially) sense very pair of gloves = 10 pairs of gloves due to race/sex. We think art is a great horizontal progression system but not something that can stand 100% alone due to constraints of creation.

Grind
Alts

I group these together because I think they have some relation. Grind well I think grind is a kittene to fully describe because it really comes down to each person own personal feeling of I can only do x action so many times before its fun faction goes down and thus starts to feel grinding. For some this can be do something twice others 100 times, our goal with how to keep grind out of the game is the relation between time based and skill based gating. I think this is an area we are always trying to get a better sense on as we start to make things harder to add more challenge to the game sometimes we cross the time gate and skill gate too much and things feel more grindy then we intend. As for alts why I lump these up is I think often leveling up alts can feel grindy, our goals here are really about how we make things feel a little less grinding for some actions and we’ve been making a lot of steps with that combing WvW xp, adding tradable level up books, birthday gifts that level you up ect.. I think we are not done with the initiative to progressing alts being a bit more smooth and it’s something we will keep working on as we move forward.

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

Ok so that was a wall of text and clearly needs a cool story bro, but I wanted to get my thoughts out there before I head home for the day. Thanks everyone for posting we are reading it and maybe I’ll jump on after dinner if I get some free time.