Guild Wars 2

I posted this elsewhere in the forums and thought I’d post it here too. If only 1 ANet developer reads this, my work is done.

First of all, I played Guild Wars for over 2000 hours on multiple accounts. Initially, I wasn’t too impressed (I started playing in 2006) but over the years—-and expansions—-it got better, more addictive and, ultimately, more rewarding.

Guild Wars 2 is amazingly beautiful. Jeremy Soule has done a masterful job, as usual.

But after playing Guild Wars 2 for over 220 hours, to say I’m disappointed would be a gross understatement. This isn’t even a ‘There is no endgame’ gripe’. I’ve been reading lots of posts by people who purportedly enjoyed getting to level 80, only to be bored and disappointed with a lack of endgame, but I was bored really from the start.

I have many problems with this game, but ultimately, because of everybody’s time, I’m only going to address the big three. Again, I’ll preface by saying I played the original Guild Wars for 2000 hours, I’ve never touched WoW (lest I be called a Blizzard fanboy) and I come to this game after years of waiting and anticipation. I’ve tried my absolute best over the past 200 hours to love this game. I spent three grand on a system that would be able to max it out. And so far, I’ve been bored out of my mind.

My big three problems:

Dynamic events. Dynamic events were the worst implementation of a pitifully bad idea I can possibly imagine for a video game. Any dynamic event, whether it’s fighting 8 centaurs or battling a dragon, is essentially a boring, monotonous hackfest that begs to be ALT-TAB’ed. Scaling is pathetic (try doing a boss by yourself, which happens often these days in low areas) and quickly goes from impossibly difficult to profoundly boring. As soon as a sizable group of players appears and the boss’ stats scale, it turns into a 5 minute auto-attack where you hope you’ve done enough damage to get XP by the end, followed by one amalgamated mad-dash to the body to see if there’s any loot. It’s profoundly boring, every single time.

This, of course, doesn’t even address the fact that dynamic events themselves are boring. Oh, someone’s been kidnapped and taken to a cave and I need to save him (aka, hackfest a boss for 5 minutes)? Great, I’d rather find a rusty fork and plunge it into my eye. The only time boss fights are enjoyable is when there is a very low number of people (think 3-5) and so you feel like your hits are actually doing something, and yet there is also a true risk of failure. When there are 50 players hacking at a boss, big deal if you get downed or (unlikely) defeated: you’ll get resurrected straight away. (Continued)

In fact, that latter bit leads to a bit of a digression, viz., that the game’s just way too easy. There are waypoints everywhere, and there’s no death penalty. Remember how fun it was fighting from Beacon’s to Drok’s to get max armor as a newly created level 17 or 18 (or lower)? Remember when dying actually meant something, and dying several times meant you’d have to zone and evaluate your options (see: strategising, which is actually fun)? Well, keep on remembering because there’s none of that here.

Dynamic events have absolutely no back-story. They’re uninteresting, and they’re boring. In GW1, once you did a mission, you were given instructions on where to go, and if you went to an outpost, you spoke to someone who gave you a ‘quest’ (oh noes!) that furthered the storyline, made chronological sense, and added coherence to the overall story. Even if some of the quests were boring, they at least made sense from a storytelling point of view, and as you unlocked new outposts (and thus new quests), your understanding of the world was increased. ArenaNet said they wanted to make GW2 ‘more fun’ and that quests were ‘antifun’, but what they failed to realise is that, whether you get instructions to kill something from an NPC in an outpost or you just randomly find some while you’re running around, it’s the same thing in the end. Only, because every single dynamic event is either a hackfest or a repetitive ‘activate, pick up, or otherwise give yourself an epileptic seizure whilst completing this mind numbing bore of an activity’, it’s the same thing anyway, except dynamic events lack any direction or chronological/lore meaning.

In short, they’re really boring, and doing them for 80 levels sucks.

Ultimately, I can’t see why you wouldn’t allow players to choose what’s fun for them. Give us quests for those who want them, and give dynamic events to people who like those (though I have yet to talk to anybody who doesn’t abhor dynamic events). Forcing people to level up by doing a mixture of Hearts (which are, again, so boring that I’d rather scrape my eyes out) and dynamic events (ditto) just seems unnecessarily draconian. Why not just implement both?

Skills. Why do I need the first 5 skills to be straight out of a cookiecutter? Why can’t I edit them? Why are there hundreds, if not thousands, of skills in GW1, and what feels like 50 in GW2? Why would you take out Elite Skill capping? Why would you prevent people from taking a second profession? The entire skills platform has been so dumbed down and simplified that I can only assume ArenaNet can’t be bothered trying to balance it or something. Capping elite skills in GW1 was fun because you felt like you were accomplishing something, doing so was usually challenging, and you actually got something you could use in the process. (Continued)

Guild Wars 2 neutered that and gave me a League of Legends-style trait menu that I can’t even save. Strategizing via the skillbar is laughable in GW2, like it was designed for simpletons.

The Asura would be ashamed.

(Why not do something like add Cap-able elite skills to dynamic event bosses? You won’t completely reduce how bloody boring DE are, but at least you’ll add a little bit of meaning to them.)

Trading post. So you wanted to prevent spam, ArenaNet? Well, taking out the TP didn’t do a thing. Every time I log in, I have at least 2 messages from gold sellers in my inbox. Why not make a chat channel that is just for trade? Why prevent people from trading? Again, just like with quests, there’s no reason to take out something that has worked beautifully for a large proportion of your player base over the many years Guild Wars 1 was out, and replace it with something that is, in many ways, vastly inferior.

Why can’t we have both?

You think a 15% fee is going to somehow force people to buy gems? Again, I’m dumbfounded and don’t understand. Just have both. There’s absolutely no reason to have the fee, and if you’re going to argue that you’re trying to simulate a real economy, people pay cash in hand all the time. You’ve taken a feature out of the game with the TP without replacing anything close to it in terms of functionality or entertainment (see: haggling). That seems to be a recurring theme throughout, actually.

I could type for hours, and this is far from exhaustive.

Where are the actual titles like Legendary Survivor and Vanquisher? Where are the rest of the emotes? Why can’t I have heroes, at least for my personal story missions? Why is the voice acting still so cheesy and bad (except for Rytlock), and why do I have to feign belief so often while playing through storyline missions (from what I’ve played, the Asura storyline was the worst with this. Bad voice acting and lack of believability in terms of how supposedly ‘genius’ beings would behave make for a bad time). Why’d you take away elite skill capping? Why’d you absolutely murder the skill system that made Guild Wars 1 playable for 6 years+? Why don’t I get XP for helping my friend do his personal storyline mission? What was wrong with the holy trinity in the first place?

You’ve messed with a lot of stuff just to mess with it, and frankly, it didn’t work.

Ultimately, I’ll never understand why so much was changed. Guild Wars 1 was immensely enjoyable, even years after it should have gotten boring. Some people don’t mind grinding, and I’m not saying everybody should have to grind. But you should certainly allow those who want to grind, or are willing to grind, to do so. All you’ve got now is a player base filled with casuals who will be gone in 6 months.

For the rest of us, the people who would actually spend money and tons of time in your game, well, we’re already really bored.

Thanks.