Guild Wars 2

You did away with the working system you had in Guild Wars. Rather than improving upon it, you have scrapped it, and tried something completely different when everyone was expecting Guild Wars 2 not SuperCoolMMO2.

My issues which are mostly commonly shared by the community

To start this off, you have clearly increased the difficulty of the explorable dungeons. What I want to know is, why? The problem was not that the enemies were too easy. That was not the case. What is the problem, is that you can very easily run a dungeon using no skill at all by “Corpse Running”. You couldn’t do this in Guild Wars. Why did you change the working system you had before? This also applies to the PvE game in general as well.

Making all enemies into champion versions of themselves does not make it fun. It does not make it interesting, it does not make it more enticing to fight. It just makes it very annoying and displeasing to play the game. (Take note that while you may not have done this yet, this is the road you are heading down). If you want to add difficulty add incentives to stay alive, have the least amount of deaths possible, and be more tactical about how you take down enemies. Armor repairs are not a deterrent. You can just as easily skip a few steps of the corpse run and just remove your armor from the beginning and start with just your weapons and only repair those.

What happened to resurrection shrines and not waypoints? Being able to teleport around the entire map does not make the game more expansive. It is WORSE than having mounts. You see absolutely nothing but a loading screen vs when you use a mount you at least see the scenery passing by you and possibly an event or two you may want to stop and do on your way to your destination. Having waypoints really makes the game feel like its more segmented into areas around waypoints rather than a full map. This kills the immersion factor by a lot. There is no adventuring, just teleporting to waypoints. The only real adventure is the first time around. In which case, you just added another blow to endgame.

Also, before you even do this I might as well point this out to you that it is not going to work. Adding more hp to the dragons will not make them more fun. They will just become a little more annoying to kill and still require little to no skill from any class as all classes have ranged weapons which they can use to auto-attack the boss from outside of the dragon’s range. It is absolutely ridiculously easy to take one of these things down. You could easily just AFK your character, leaving it at range auto-attacking until you hear the event finish then come back and reap your rewards. This is not fun. Never was, never will be. It’s boring. At this point the only reason I play is to PvP, which still doesn’t have a ranking system so I’m not finding myself compelled to play anymore than to just experiment with a couple builds then do something else with my time.

My ideas on how to fix it.

- The only waypoints that should exist are those that take you to a city. Add mounts to the cash shop just to make people stop crying about it; this will even bump your revenue. As for those who do not want to buy them through the cash shop, add areas in the game where you can get mounts, but have them extremely difficult to get to and level80 to use them.

- You also need to add incentives to staying alive during a dungeon like you tier DE’s. Gold for 0-1 death, Silver for 2-3 deaths, bronze for 4+. Adjust the chests accordingly, Gold gets the intended chest, Silver gets the splendid, bronze gets the plain chest. It is not that difficult. Making all enemies into champion versions of themselves =/= fun.

- Lastly, add more ranged attacks to the world bosses. More random AoE’s, more areas that are affected by it’s attacks, make them bite as much as they bark. Make there be no place a safe place to sit back, relax, and afk.

and put a gosh darn barber shop!! I’m tired of looking at my toon!! and a cash shop option to change races!! I play asuran and having a tiny hit box as a guardian is just dumb.

and yeah mounts.

I share your sentiments. The true revolution to the MMORPG genre was GW1 itself, it was a fresh breeze; much different from the regular MMO experience. To me a much more tactical, intellectually compelling, fluid en fun experience than what is offered in GW2 right now, where grind and big numbers have taken the place of tactics and teamplay. Calling this a revolution is a joke because GW2 basically turned into an improved generic MMO, instead of an improved GW1. ArenaNet’s definition of revolution seems pretty out of this world.

There is barely any room for creativity, which together with dual class and more than a thousand skills was the most important thing that kept GW1 alive. The experience felt fresh and fun even after rolling my eight character, while at GW2 I am already getting bored running around with my second character.

Dungeons are simply ill-designed. Take the dungeon design in GW1, they were absolutely perfect. Why on earth would you change a perfect formula?! Now every dungeon has basically turned into a grind-fest, where people are actually complaining about the rewards they give. They are not even focussed on the fun of the dungeon itself anymore, as if rewards would make an unfun experience fine! First announcing that this wouldn’t just be another ’I swung a sword, I swung it again, and again…" grinding kind of game and then releasing these kind of dungeons is an offense. Thinking up strategies and using teamwork to beat dungeons, many different sub-quests and bosses is fun. Having to wait 2 minutes at every trash mob because they have a million health only to be greeted by an auto-attacking boss with 100 fold the health is NOT fun, and you know that very well ArenaNet.

Final point: the story, it’s just ridiculous. GW1 portrays a whole new world to explore, believable people and many plot lines coming together with quite a few twists. GW2 feels like a bad joke, as if the story was written for a cheesy comic book. The only thing that interested me was the history of Orr, but I’d rather actually have my character be there when Orr fell. At level 20 it was already pretty much clear how the story would end ( playing as norn ), not really fun at all.

DistantStatic.6098:

- The only waypoints that should exist are those that take you to a city. Add mounts to the cash shop just to make people stop crying about it; this will even bump your revenue. As for those who do not want to buy them through the cash shop, add areas in the game where you can get mounts, but have them extremely difficult to get to and level80 to use them.

Awful idea. Waypoints are what makes the travel in the game work. To take them out and force all non-80s to literally run everywhere would be a completely terrible idea. I would be pretty angry if this ever happened.

DistantStatic.6098:

You also need to add incentives to staying alive during a dungeon like you tier DE’s. Gold for 0-1 death, Silver for 2-3 deaths, bronze for 4+. Adjust the chests accordingly, Gold gets the intended chest, Silver gets the splendid, bronze gets the plain chest. It is not that difficult. Making all enemies into champion versions of themselves =/= fun.

Again, awful idea. There’s already a penalty for dying, why do you need to add incentive to staying alive? Do you believe that people aren’t actually attempting to stay alive? This idea would promote people screwing people over that they’re running a dungeon with. I’ve only run a handful of dungeons, but it’s easy to see that at times, the person dying the most is contributing the most to the success of the group.

DistantStatic.6098:

- Lastly, add more ranged attacks to the world bosses. More random AoE’s, more areas that are affected by it’s attacks, make them bite as much as they bark. Make there be no place a safe place to sit back, relax, and afk.

Agreed completely.

I disagree zydal.

zydal.2790:

Awful idea. Waypoints are what makes the travel in the game work. To take them out and force all non-80s to literally run everywhere would be a completely terrible idea. I would be pretty angry if this ever happened.

Waypointing everywhere makes the game feel instanced. It does not make the game very fluid. If you were a GW veteran, you would be familiar with running builds. In fact, it would be more viable to do this because you can easily switch builds anywhere in the game as long as you are not in combat. For example: my guildmate plays warrior. He lays down 3 banners, we pick them up and speed boost each other and just run to where ever we need to go in an unexplored map. It’s sometimes faster and always more fun than just waiting at a loading screen.

zydal.2790:

Again, awful idea. There’s already a penalty for dying, why do you need to add incentive to staying alive? Do you believe that people aren’t actually attempting to stay alive? This idea would promote people screwing people over that they’re running a dungeon with. I’ve only run a handful of dungeons, but it’s easy to see that at times, the person dying the most is contributing the most to the success of the group.

There is no penalty for dieing. You simply start to lose armor pieces. That is a marginal penalty compared to what you get from completing the dungeon. I have even provided you with a way in which repairs can even bee minimalized (simply running with weapons and no armor). Corpse Running is not fun. This is supposed to be a dungeon not another regular area in the game. It is supposed to be a switch of pace that challenges what lessons you have learned throughout the rest of the game, not another learning phase. It is like going to take a test where you do not get penalized for getting an answer wrong, just how many times you end up going back to change your answer and caps at 16 tries within the same test. And as long as you complete the test, you still get an A. That does not test your adeptness in the subject of the test. Same as the dungeons do not test your adeptness to the game.

In fact even if death count does not feel right as you have pointed out a decent point, there are other ways.

- Timed rewards. Gold reward = “near perfect time here” Silver reward = “decent time here” Bronze = " everything else". Same chest rewards system as my OP.

- Bonus Events. Gold = 2 bonus events Silver = 1 bonus event. Make the Bonus events a boss which automatically regens to full HP when he is not being agro’d ( when the entire team dies for example and is respawning). This keeps it from being a corpse run. You aren’t throwing yourself against the wall countless times until you finally break it.

You lost me at the “mostly commonly shared by the community,” like you have some sort of survey of the entire game. Stop acting like you people speak for the rest of us. Especially when your opinions mostly comprise of uneducated bull kitten to begin with.

How exactly do waypoints make the game feel instanced? That doesn’t make any sense to me. An instance is defined quite obviously as a separate instance of the game world for each group that accesses it. This is quite clearly not the case with this game. Unless you think loading screens equate to instances? Which is a very weird way of looking at it.

How can you say “there is no penalty for dying” and then you explain exactly what the penalty for dying is? I’ve been in instance runs where people played stupid and died repeatedly, and I’ve been in instance runs where people played intelligently and didn’t die. If you think there’s no difference, you’re delusional. The reward is completing the dungeon in a quarter of the time it takes for “corpse running” groups.

If people are content being in groups that just corpse run all the trash and bosses, good for them. I’ll continue getting better at the game with my friends who are also getting better at the game and we’ll complete dungeons faster, way more efficiently, and way more cost-effectively.

I also feel that the waypoints are excessive.

Tradewind.6913:

You lost me at the “mostly commonly shared by the community,” like you have some sort of survey of the entire game. Stop acting like you people speak for the rest of us. Especially when your opinions mostly comprise of uneducated bull kitten to begin with.

The only uneducated thing I’m seeing here Tradewind is someone who can only criticize others by insults. Come back when you actually have a well placed opinion.

zydal.2790:

How exactly do waypoints make the game feel instanced? That doesn’t make any sense to me. An instance is defined quite obviously as a separate instance of the game world for each group that accesses it. This is quite clearly not the case with this game. Unless you think loading screens equate to instances? Which is a very weird way of looking at it.

How can you say “there is no penalty for dying” and then you explain exactly what the penalty for dying is? I’ve been in instance runs where people played stupid and died repeatedly, and I’ve been in instance runs where people played intelligently and didn’t die. If you think there’s no difference, you’re delusional. The reward is completing the dungeon in a quarter of the time it takes for “corpse running” groups.

If people are content being in groups that just corpse run all the trash and bosses, good for them. I’ll continue getting better at the game with my friends who are also getting better at the game and we’ll complete dungeons faster, way more efficiently, and way more cost-effectively.

The problem is that they will still get what you have. It may not be the same day, or the same week, but they will eventually all get it. Then what makes it special? Why spend your time studying for a test if you are going to get an A on it anyways? As for finishing it quicker than a corpse run group, the amount of time you spend avoiding death closes the margin between a corpse run group and a decent group.

If you do no die in a dungeon then why do this matter to you? You are going to receive the same rewards, if not challenge you a little bit more.

DistantStatic.6098:

Tradewind.6913:

You lost me at the “mostly commonly shared by the community,” like you have some sort of survey of the entire game. Stop acting like you people speak for the rest of us. Especially when your opinions mostly comprise of uneducated bull kitten to begin with.

The only uneducated thing I’m seeing here Tradewind is someone who can only criticize others by insults. Come back when you actually have a well placed opinion.

Why so we can have some sort of circular argument on why you’re right and I’m wrong and vice versa? This thread has already consumed 2 minutes of my time, to skim through and write these short responses, which is more than it deserved to begin with. Especially since you seem to fall into the category of people who wanted GW2 to just be GW1 with better graphics.

Oh and there’s still the whole speaking on behalf of everyone thing.

In no way, shape or form would I support the removal of waypoints unless they were replaced with something like flight points. No more waiting for the boat in Everquest, thank you very much. And I would wager that a HUGE portion of the playerbase would agree with NOT taking away fast travel.

Tradewind.6913:

You lost me at the “mostly commonly shared by the community,” like you have some sort of survey of the entire game. Stop acting like you people speak for the rest of us. Especially when your opinions mostly comprise of uneducated bull kitten to begin with.

This

Couldn’t disagree more about the waypoints. I find the waypoint system extremely immersive. Why? Because the decision of whether I want to get from A to B quickly or stop and smell the roses is totally up to me.

I often walk in the game world because it’s so beautiful and dreamlike. I encounter a lot of stuff that way. But sometimes I just want to get from A to B. The possibility of doing either at will makes the game extremely immersive because at no time am I pulled out of myself by annoyance with the travel system (as I am with most other MMOs – i.e. “mounts” are usually goofy and immersion breaking in that you can whip them out of your kitten, plus they litter up places where people congregate – Fallen Earth’s the only game that made mounts immersive by the player having to actually dismount and leave them somewhere).

I like the waypoints, and agree they offer the choice. If you can’t be bothered to take the scenic route, even as a proponent of taking the scenic route, because waypoints exist, then you disprove your own argument. If you can, then sweet, you and everyone else have options. There are issues in the game, but I pretty much disagree that what you have pointed out and the proposed solutions are them.

Yes, GW1 was groundbreaking. Yes, I wish there were a little more of GW1 in GW2. I loved the massive library of skills you could pull from to create unique builds. I miss dual profession, but I can see why they didn’t do it in GW2.

However…

I think GW2 is beautifully done. I love how real the world feels. I love that I don’t have to spend an hour running on the back of my warbear to get somewhere just to do a measly quest. I love how I’m constantly immersed in the events of the area, rather than running to and from questgivers and mobs with poor drop rates on skinned hides. I love how I can complete a quest in any number of ways.

I think, after some time goes by and the balancing & bugs are handled, we will see more utility skill options, perhaps ways to augment our weapon skills further, and more awareness of how it’s the trait system now that gives us build variety.

…and remember, you don’t have to use waypoints. You’re quite free to run from place to place. I don’t miss mounts at all. Don’t cry about how GW2 differs from GW1 and then beg for mounts.

Seras.5702:

Don’t cry about how GW2 differs from GW1 and then beg for mounts.

When did I beg for mounts? Please work on your reading comprehension.

Tradewind.6913:

Especially since you seem to fall into the category of people who wanted GW2 to just be GW1 with better graphics.

You haven’t read the post.

Tradewind.6913:

Oh and there’s still the whole speaking on behalf of everyone thing.

“Mostly” doesn’t seem like everyone to me. Let’s go check the dictionary. Oh, it does not mean everyone either. My response still stands. come back when you have a real counter point.

Can argue semantics all you want, when in actuality the “complaints” are coming from less than 3% of the game’s population there is no room to refer to anything as common beyond “common among the people with complaints.”

I sympathize with the OP’s res shrine point. Too many times when I have died and try to go to a way point I find the nearest one or two way points are “contested” so I can’t res there. When that happens I just go do something else. It’s a minor annoyance to be sure.

valdamus.6289:

and yeah mounts.

Waypoints. No need for mounts.