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I know it's entirely my own fault, but I somehow feel I have to get the weekly rift hunts and weekly vault tasks done, before moving on to things I actually like to do in the game.
Rifts are the biggest, most glaring evidence how NCNet went from "play as you want" to "play what we want".
And still there are quite a lot of players who seem to like doing rifts. Which is the actual scary part to me. If using the Open World Legendary Armor as a Carrot on a Stick is enough to sell this uninspired, repetitive, boring and terribly implemented grind to enough players, there is litttle reason for ArenaNet to put effort into explorable content.
It's what I like to call cannibalization content. Shit low-effort content loops with vastly powerful rewards tied to them to make people play them short-term. It's a pattern that shows up whenever investors take control of subsidiaries to maximize profit.
That has nothing to do with the crowd that just likes to grind to make the number go up. Those are a thing as well, and it's completely fine. You don't need much of a carrot for those, those just enjoy the zen. The carrot you need for the people that'll drop the content like hot coal the second they're done with their armour sets.
Also, keep in mind that NCNet literally and in broad daylight repackaged Living World as "mini expansions" and sells them to us for almost full box price and people couldn't be happier. It's 2023, mate, over at LoL people are angry that they don't get enough microtransactions, and releasing beta versions has been a thing for over a decade now. Feeling old yet?
Tbh I don't feel this "pressure" to do rifts at all. I do them when I stumble upon them, but have never farmed them repeatedly. What gives you the feeling " I need to do rifts"?
IF I want the advertised core feature of the DLC, THEN I will have to do the content that rewards me with said core feature.
But what is the advertised core feature exactly? Open world legendaries, story, wizards vault, achievements? IMO there is no single core feature, it's a collection of things you CAN do.
I finished the story, played the strikes and did some rifts in the process. I still haven't used a single essence and honestly don't know for what I should use them.
I'm satisfied with the time I got out of the addon and am looking forward to coming back to single bits of the addon any time in the future.
We're specifically talking about legendary armour. Potentially also legendary relic.
@Ravi @lulztard Unless and until they come up with another way to get the kryptis essences, rifts are the only way to get the thousands you're going to need for even just one piece of the new Open World Legendary armor.
I suspect this is the pressure that many feel regarding rifts. I'm still hopeful they come up with a new way in the next release to gather this essence besides rifts. Otherwise I'll probably be in WvW for my legendary armor tbh.
Needing to do exactly one type of content is what is necessary for every type of legendary armor. If you don't like the rift farming, you can also get the armor through the classic ways: raids, wvw, pvp. Except for raids the time invest for those is also pretty high. Raids are ridiculously fast and easy IMO.
exactly one type of content
One very, very, very specific type of content in this case. Also, it's not so much the act of grinding itself which I oppose. I have done my fair share of grinding in MMOs and I can see why this is something one might even enjoy. What I strongly dislike is the you have to do exactly this today/this week, if you don't want to miss out on rewards.
Pvp is: Play about 1.5k ranked games for the whole set, that's it. About 250h conquest, nothing else contributes to that goal.
In addition: We don't even know the full requirements for the open world armor yet. Maybe you need to do all the achievements as well. Maybe you have to finish the meta of the upcoming map 300 times. We simply don't know.
The point is: you don't have to do any of it to get legendary armor and you don't have farm rifts for it either. Choose your preferred way or mix them of you want to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything of it. If you don't enjoy any of it: build 8 sets of ascended armor for every character you play and you get a similar result.
Just stop playing the game for a while and it'll feel less like a chore:)
That's not quite the issue I'm having. Of course "not playing the game" solves all issues. The weird and imho disturbing property of the new Open World Legendary Armor is that so far almost all required currencies (Essences from rifts and map/meta currencies form SotO maps only) come from a very, very small fraction of available Open World PvE content as opposed to the other legendary armors, where you pretty much just play the respective game mode (Raiding, WvW, sPvP).
Which means that even when I enjoy playing Open World PvE content, most of the things I do, e. g. other maps, metas or events do not grant any progress towards the armor. I really hope that ArenaNet changes this and greatly increases the variety of contributing Open World activities.
Imagine you would make progress towards the armor regardless of what map or events you do in Open World, maybe even include story instances, strikes and DRMs, but have (weekly/monthly) diminishing returns or limits per map/event/activity so people need to spread out for max efficiency. Pretty much the opposite of what we have now.
Yeah, the rifting gets very repetitive. But nobody says you have to grind all the mats before it's even out.
They might even introduce better/different sources or lower requirements later on, so don't fret over it now