Proving Grounds for the try-hards

"Surgical_dan;c-2428944" wrote:
Agree it would be nice to be able to replay post-7*, but there are some good resources out there that you can point guildies to e.g. Reddit PG.

Thanks for posting the reddit link - I'm aware of it, and it looks like the best resource currently. It's helpful as a jumping off point but I'd still like to be able to do some theory crafting with specific characters to help guild mates find winning teams that are within reach for their specific rosters. Just a bit frustrating that the entire community of people who fully engage with conquest (lots of whom probably buy the conquest pass) are locked out of this content.

It's like - if you fully commit and do this thing we want you to do (conquest) you get the new shiny - but there's this other game mode that you'll lose access to for doing so because... why? because... we DON'T want you to engage with this part of the game (proving grounds)?

From a design perspective that's just weird - why create content and intentionally block players from it because they're 'too good' or 'too dedicated' or 'too advanced'? - it's weird. From a social perspective it creates a division between the people that do conquest and the people that choose not to or just can't for whatever reason, because this is a game experience that they can't share - again, a really weird thing to intentionally do. From a game play perspective it puts the player in a situation where if they "win" (do conquest) they can't engage with another part of the game. So - again - weird.

When all of those things are taken together, as a whole - it starts to look like the only purpose of proving grounds is to punish those that don't engage with conquest, or happened to come to the game within the last two to three years. I really don't think that's CGs intention - but it's difficult to draw a different conclusion, and I have yet to come up with one.