Guild Wars 2

To whomever it may concern,

I’d like to start by saying I bought the digital deluxe version the day it went on sale, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have confidence that GW2 would turn out to be a great game like GW1 was/is. I’m also aware that this will likely come across as a complaint, sorry about that, it’s (mostly) unintentional.
I don’t mean to hate on anyone at ArenaNet, I like you guys, I like what you do, I think GW2 has the capacity to be a very good game, but I also think it has some teething problems and some (to my mind) glaring issues.
I mean no disrespect, so please bear with me.

Based on my own experience, which unfortunately I find rather negative overall, I have to say that Guild Wars 2 is not a multi-player game. It’s massively single player.

It seems to me that for all the touting of the social aspects, GW2 suffers from a very pronounced ‘army of one’ syndrome. It is technically very possible to play through better than 95% of the story without involving another person. The biggest exception there is the story mode for the Arah dungeon to kill Zhaitan, which because it’s a dungeon, requires 5 people. The trade off to playing by yourself is the enemies in explorable areas. You can and will be vastly out numbered, and being even marginally out numbered (2/3v1) can be a recipe for pain, suffering, and steadily shrinking wallet.
As an aside, I don’t have any problem with armor repairs and waypoint transfers being a money sink, but it becomes very much a problem when you die frequently and often, with little to no profit to offset the cost.

I find there is very little incentive to grouping in the game, beyond possibly not getting your kitten kicked all over the map, costing you many coins in armor repairs and travel costs.
I see very few people actually running around any given area, almost all of them in singles, maybe pairs. The only time I see more than that together are the occasional bot armies, [trains/mobs/swarms] of players running around farming dynamic events, and everyone that’s standing outside a dungeon entrance (and generating better than 95% of the local chat with LFG spam).
On the occasions where there is a proper group, the five-player limit means any group is smaller than a comparable GW1 group, which of course was an eight-player cap for most of the content (whether or not you want to count heroes/henches as ‘players’ for filling out parties). Or else there’s a massive mob of players who just coincidentally happen to all be doing the same thing for a brief moment, a dynamic event or boss fight usually, never story content.

Granted, the few guilds I’m in are on the small side, with only a handful of members on at any given time, and that may very well contribute to a bias of not easily being able to find other players to party with, but again, from my perspective the vast majority of players who LFG in local chat (because there’s no good party search mechanism ala GW1) are LFG dungeon explorable content. It’s very difficult, and in practice, certain degrees of impossible to find a PUG for personal story instances. If there even is someone else in the area doing story content, they’ve almost certainly doing a different story, or are at a different point in the story from you. This also applies to Renown Hearts, skill points, most dynamic events that don’t involve a champion-level boss, the jumping puzzles which include enemies (not counting the camera, which you must also fight) and the general world exploration/wildlife endangerment all new characters go though.

My first character was a ranger, and overall it was more enjoyable than not. Having the pet around gives you a fair chance of taking on enemies slightly above your level, or similar/lower level but in small groups, and have a reasonable expectation of walking away from a fight. If things get hairy, you can generally sacrifice the pet while you escape. Most of the time.
A large part of the problem in PvE when you’re by yourself is the re-spawn rate of enemies. I’ve seen others in my guild express a similar opinion as well, that by the time you can clear some breathing space around you in the direction you’re wanting to go, enemies behind you have started to re-spawn. This is especially problematic in high-level areas (Orr, just to name names), where the time it takes to kill even a couple enemies all but guarantees something else has just re-spawned nearby (lets say within Bow range, for the sake of argument). Areas very quickly become a slog-fest to get anywhere, or an expensive proposition to travel between waypoints, this contributes to players not wanting to re-do an area, which leads to less people around, and makes it just that much harder to get a group, and that much more difficult when playing by yourself.

To date, my ranger still has not finished the story, largely, I believe, for this reason. There just doesn’t seem to be anyone around interested in Arah Story Mode (to say nothing of the recent bug which actually prevented Arah from even being accessible), and because it’s a dungeon, it’s a safe bet that the difficulty curve will have been ramped up significantly compared to open world areas, making it an exercise in futility and frustration for all but the most skilled/deep-pocketed solo players.

I recently started a warrior, and that too was fun…for about the first ten levels. I’ve since found that a 2v1 fight is usually going to be a crapshoot as to whether or not I’m able to walk away (much less to come out on top). Just today (and to be honest, what prompted this wall of text), I found myself at the losing end of a 2v1 fight, but just barely, which followed two successful 1v1s. By the time I walked back from the nearest waypoint (which really, wasn’t all that far) and engaged the next nearest enemy where I died, the enemies I’d just recently killed had re-spawned, and I found myself on the losing side of a 3v1. I was quickly Downed, and defeat wasted no time in following. This costs me coins for re-spawning at the waypoint, plus more for for repairing my armor. I don’t recall if I managed any loot from that mess, but if I did, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to cover the costs.
One more aside, the warrior downed skill Vengeance is, in my opinion, an absolutely terrible skill. There is nothing favorable I can say about it. I understand there is a (slim) chance to rally before it expires, but unless it’s traited, the skill is effectively a death sentence. kitten if you do, kitten if you don’t. You’re defeated regardless, you lose, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 dollars. It’s just horrendous, utterly worthless.

WvW and the lack of a guild Alliance system (as a carry-over from GW1) also negatively impact the single player experience. It’s fine if you want to restrict players to a home World server for PVP, but it prevents a NA member from playing with their EU guildmates, and vice versa. That’s less of an issue if you can get everyone on the same world server, nobody’s required to play on the same server as everyone else (nor should they be).
Alliances are essentially dead. While you can roll all the alliance members into a sort of ‘meta’ guild, members are typically off representing for their individual guild, and there’s no easy way of communicating with another guild within the game like alliance chat (if there is, I haven’t yet seen it in use). And if they’re also spread out on multiple world servers, communication and teamwork become that much harder.

On a more positive note, I’ve had fun with the larger meta events. Dragon champions, Mad King Thorn, the Ancient Karka. Those were fun (due in no small part to have an abundance of other players around, I’m sure) despite the massive amount of complaining I’ve seen about MKT/Halloween and the Lost Shores content.
And frankly, my experience with Lost Shores again was in the form of large mobs of players going in the same direction. Still not much in the way of grouping there, but at least there where other players around, and it was all the more enjoyable for it.

Again, I’m sorry if that came off sounding like a complaint or whine of someone who doesn’t feel that their $80 was well spent (I don’t regret the purchase) or has an overblown sense of entitlement because of that large investment (I’ve been on the other side of those overly entitled types, I really don’t want to be ‘that guy’). As frustrating as all this is (heck, I find it’s frustrating enough simply not to like the game as much as I want to like it), it’s not going to make me stop playing (play less, sure), and ArenaNet will get more of my money in the future.
I can understand how GW2 is a much more complex game than its illustrious predecessor, but in talking with guildmates who’ve been around since the very early days of GW1, GW2 has more/larger problems than GW1 did at the same age.

GW2 can be a very good game, it certainly is pretty good for the most part, but it has a LOT of room for improvement. I don’t want to feel my faith is misplaced, and I don’t think it is, but I don’t believe GW2 is all that it should be, or could be.