TO CONDENSE MY SENTIMENTS:
Good players are not rewarded for overcoming challenges – the majority of the game’s status symbols and cool items are gained from performing an easy task for an inordinate amount of time. This sums up my opinion, and why I think GW2 is not as good a game as it could be – but I implore you to read the rest of the post if you’re going to add to the discussion.
I believe that Guild Wars 2 was designed with the philosophy of urging players to spend money to buy Gems to convert to Gold – first and foremost; with every system in the game pushing players to spend money on the Gem store for gold.
Every single item that is even remotely neat or hard to get in this game is received from the Mystic Forge.
Not only does tossing a huge amount of trade materials into the forge remove flavor from the items you’re getting; but it empowers players who have a lot of RL capital to spend far more than it should.
The exotics for a fresh 80 are cheap enough – 12g maximum to deck yourself out, inclusive of exotic jewelry. This ignores runes and sigils.
After this, players go for cosmetic gear to transmute their stat-gear into. Here is where the tacky design starts up.
When you transmute gear’s appearence, you lose the actual item you’re transmuting. The two items fuse into one. That means that if you ever want to use that item’s skin again, you need to reacquire it
After getting the item skins and transmuting your exotics to what you want, what do we, as players, have to strive for? Vanity items, like Mystic Weapons and other neat-looking gear from the Mystic Forge.
Mystic Weapons are Okay. They have a feasible grind attached to them. To make a Mystic weapon, it usually costs between 7 to 12 gold , which is entirely feasible.
But, check these recipes out:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge/Other_Items
Most of these unique equipments take an excessive amount of gold, or an unfeasible amount of grinding to get. No flavor. No quest. No challenge. No adventure. No journey. No ~fun~. Just grind. Plain, boring gold grind.
These equips don’t even have a unique sigil – just a skin.
With the way the market works, it’s nearly impossible for the average player to amass money at a decent rate without grinding, unless they convert bought gems to gold. Killing a champion in the world does not give you appropriate reward for the effort involved. Aside from this fact, Champions are generally pretty bland – just normal mobs with more health and damage. ~That’s it~.
As you can tell, I am very disappointed with how GW2 turned out – and have seen these sentiments mirrored by many other hardcore gamers. The game’s combat is fluid, and the gameplay is solid – but gameplay should be supported by strong systems that reward good players – and GW2’s economic and legendary/vanity item systems simply do not deliver on that. They reward spending real money on the gemstore and converting to gold; or grinding easy content until you drop.
As far as discussion goes, I’m interested to see what the broad community of GW2forums think about the state of the game; and what they feel about my opinions on the underlying item-acquisition systems of GW2; independent of the gameplay.
(edited by Soki.3027)