Guild Wars 2

This game lacks motivation
TL;DR version
-There are lots of things to do in this game but no rewards for doing any of them
-Events have no actual meaning or impact on the world
-You have almost no reason to hunt after events other than the daily rewards
-If you do hunt events, go to Queensdale or Cursed shores because everything else is a waste of time as it is hard to find events, there’s no pointer towards them or anything of that sort (other than contested waypoints which are not enough)
-Npcs are not a threat at all and cannot take over entire maps or cities, which is a shame because we did not get the living breathing world that we were promised
-World bosses are a bad joke that just repeats itself every 3 hours
-WvWvW is a zergfest with next to no strategy involved
-sPvP is a mess, queueing is horribly done, no ladders or rewards
-There is no spontaneous pvp (WvWvW is just one big battleground
If you agree with the TL;DR version or at least consider some of my points interesting then please take some time and let me elaborate to you, read the rest of the post.

First of all I’d like to start by saying that I really like gw2, I enjoyed it a lot and I still do after spending 450 hours on it, and that is the reason I’m writing this. This game has disappointed me in quite a few expected and unexpected ways. Basically, what I’ll be doing here is comparing my expectations to what actually happened and I’ll be talking about the things in this game that lack just that little something, in order to make them perfect.

As the title says, this game lacks motivation, a lot. I hate it when people say that there’s nothing to do in guild wars 2, because oh boy, they are wrong. You have LOTS of things to do in this game; dungeons, spvp, wvwvw, rerolling alts, crafting, jumping puzzles, event hunting, world completion, trying to acquire a legendary weapon, personal story completion and so on. The problem isn’t that there’s nothing to do in this game, the problem is that you have no reason to do it. Yeah, you could do dungeons, but there’s no reward for doing them, I mean, you do get that nice looking gear, but after you obtain the first one you have no reason to do another one. It would be fun to have more dungeon gear, but that would just be a waste of bag space. Now if the dungeon gear could be stored as collectibles (or in some OTHER way), and you got a certain title for obtaining them that would be awesome and who knows, I would probably even go for it. Now imagine if they even added a new dungeon every month or two and gave you additional storage space for the armor gained from the new dungeon, now that would be something. It would also make life easier if they added a dungeon finder because spamming LFG in Lion’s Arch is not fun (just wanted to throw that in there).

The reward doesn’t even have to be gear or a certain item, it can be something completely different; like an entire instanced map that belongs to you where you can build a huge fortress, small city, just a tiny house or something like that, and the materials required would be scattered all across Tyria and in dungeons and pvp zones and such. The most important thing is that the rewards are fitting and just around the corner. Of course there should be rewards like the legendary weapon, but scatter some neat stuff along the way of obtaining the weapon, that way; you fuel the motivation of those seeking it.

Events – my first disappointment… kind of… Again, don’t get me wrong, events are fun. They’re certainly more fun than quests that we see in other mmorpgs. But after a while you realize that events are meaningless quests with a timer. I thought events would have meaning, I thought that there would be more player driven events and that the impact would be meaningful. Just imagine if one day a happy bunch of centaurs cut off the food supplies from Divinity’s Reach, the npcs cry out to the players but the siege goes on without anyone helping and suddenly the centaurs take over Divinity’s reach, taking down statues and buildings and placing their tents all around the ruins. The friendly npcs move into camps surrounding the city and a quest appears on the screen of all players asking them to take it back. The players arrive to the captured city, push through the main gate in large numbers and take their city back.

Imagine how awesome that would be. Maybe it doesn’t even have to go that far, you could just make a zone with the seraph, centaurs and dredge (just an example) and they’re constantly fighting over the land with there being an actual threat of your camps and outposts being taken over. That way, you could even just look on the map and see where the borders are and come to the conclusion that the war is held at the borders and therefore, you should also be able to find quite a few events always available there.

That’s what I thought Guild Wars 2 would be about; taking care of the world with there being consequences if you don’t do so, gaining reputation through doing so and unlocking mounts (yes mounts), minipets, gear, vanity items, materials and such with the earned reputation. They said that the enemy wouldn’t just mindlessly stand in one place and not do anything other than wait for you to kill them, but they are doing that exact same thing. They’re just standing there and every now and then a happy bunch of them jumps out and decides to kill your local merchant Bob, you revive Bob kill the enemy and get karma.

I thought it would be a kind of population control, for example, you go to Hoelbrak and a norn directs you to go and kill the dredge that are grouping up just north of the city, if enough dredge are killed by you and other players through regular grinding and events (that help you push into their zone) the dredge are silenced and no longer a threat. However, if the local dredge population reaches a certain number they assault Hoelbrak and everyone is noticed through world chat (or at least the higher levels), after which the situation that I described at Divinity’s Reach repeats itself. That would make it a living breathing world. If the world functioned like that, I probably wouldn’t even need any motivation or rewards, just add a new zone every now and then to keep it fresh and I would be beyond happy.

Another thing, the world boss battles are horrible. The mechanics are non-existent and the loot is hideous in most cases to say the least. It just falls down to 50 unorganized people auto attacking with next to no chance of dying. If you just stand away from the boss at a safe distance and auto attack you’ll be fine. That is not good, that is not fun. And the fact that they appear every 3 hours just makes it all less magical and special. Every 3 hours, Jormag jumps up and you kill him, he falls off a cliff and you get bad loot. Imagine if Jormag won. Imagine how awesome that would be. He just wins, flies to the top of his mountain and starts raining ice elementals down on everyone, and it’s up to the players to organize and push aside the ice elementals, win back their outposts and kill Jormag at the top of his mountain.

The lost shores- Thank you for adding a new zone that I have no reason to go to. Seriously, was it so hard just to add a couple of hearts, vistas and skill challenges after the initial events were over? I hope I’m not missing something. Fractals are awesome though, I’ll give you that much.

Spvp- Wait what? How did this happen? Why didn’t they copy/paste the GW1 pvp? Seriously, I loved it the way it was, seriously, what is this? I have no idea where to start, but I’ll go with the good thing, It’s fun. The pvp is fun, the maps are neat (nothing more, nothing less) I had quite an awesome time playing, and I’ll play again. But what’s wrong with these rooms? Why is that there, that shouldn’t be in an mmorpg. We should just queue for a map or something random, solo or with a friend and after the game finds 20 willing and able people, we get thrown into a 10v10 map. After it’s done, we get a ladder with stats to see how we did, leave and re-queue if we feel like it, not this! I tried queuing with friends and it was horrible. First of all we had to find a room with enough people and after we found it we were pitched against each other. Am I missing something or is this working as intended. Another thing, the re-selection thing where team members get swapped… Why does that happen? Wait until there are an equal number of people on both sides, and then start the game, if someone leaves add in another person that queued recently. Why wasn’t it done that way is beyond me.

Speaking of sPvP, where’s the ladder, the ranks, the rewards? Don’t tell me to go buy tournament tickets, that’s just a money sink. I want a ranking that depends on my success in the arena and shows how good I am in spvp (without having to pay for it). It also fascinates me that there are no guild battles in a game called guild wars2 but hey, that’s content that I do not really care for anyway.

WvWvW – I thought this would be fun. When I first jumped in, I was bored, then I figured out how the system works and got excited. Holy cow, there’s so much to do, and the war is ongoing and the battles are fun and let’s take all their stuff, but no. There’s no reason to go there. Every now and then I go to WvWvW, run around for a couple of minutes and get zerged. There’s pretty much no tactic involved, no rewards, and skill is mostly not required. You either get zerged, or you join a zerg and horribly murder the enemy, until they gather into an even bigger zerg and murder you, and that’s it.

The thing that makes me sad is that there’s no spontaneous pvp. You won’t be doing an escort event when suddenly someone from the opposing faction attacks you unexpectedly. In other words, you know that WvWvW is just one big battleground and that’s it. There’s no way for you to be assaulted by an opposing faction in metrica province or the cursed shore, even though I would love that.

Well, that’s pretty much it, If you came this far then that means that you probably red my post instead of just typing tl;dr in the comment section and for that I thank you. Keep in mind that these are just my opinions and nothing more, I’m not bashing the game or antyhing of that sort. Please leave a comment because I would love to hear your ideas, I think this game has a lot of potential and it has a good chance of fulfilling it in the upcoming years.

After looking at this post for about 3 minutes I finally decided to read it. I have to completely agree with everything you said. I loved this game so much when it came out, i spent hours and hours on it daily, but after getting two characters to lvl 80 I’ve lost any motivation to play, now i spend more time reading the forums for news of updates then I actually do in game. DE’s (especailly orr) and scaling was a let down. I thought DE’s could have been so great, but they’re too easy, too basic. Although one of your points about not knowing where the battles are and constant fights if you go to kessex hills there are always battles between the seraph and the centuars in the world event, but the battles are so easily won it’s boring. But there is normally a battle every 5-10mins (especailly the battle over the farm/mines). But everything else you’ve said i have to agree with, we need a reason to go back and play the game. I have not even completed 100% world complete because I have no real reason too

Firstly: You might want to make the paragraphs a bit clearer. Use Page breaks (lots of minus signs) Maybe bold the topics.

Motivation

• Dungeons – Maybe sell cores and lodestones in exchange for a combination of tokens i.e. 60 AC, 60 TA + 60 CoE tokens can be exchanged for 5 Charged (60 being the number of tokens awarded for the first fun of the day). lodestones can only be bought after getting the entire armour set for that dungeon.
• Aesthetic Meta-Game – A wardrobe in your personal instance could house all your different armour / weapon sets, saving space. Maybe have titles for acquiring complete sets, which would fill out the fashion achievement section nicely.

Events

This is where the problem with events lie. Too long a gap to keep immersion, and people have trouble leveling, complain it’s a grind ect. Too short to ensure the problem in the first point doesn’t happen and it becomes a case of they can’t have a meaningful effect on the world, breaking immersion. Events also require next to no communication, so while the concept behind them is good (both as content and a social tool), the implementation isn’t so.

How this can be fixed:

• Events are harder – Events have more too them, different objectives ect.
• Events evolve in difficulty – Managed to drive the Centaurs back? Then next time they bring a Champion with them. That didn’t work? you got a bunch of them on a hill raining down siege and arrows on your camp, and you need to fight your way up there to get rid of them, all the while a group needs to stay down the bottom to guard the camp. This would give a fresh feel to events as opposed to just the same lot just attacking the camp.
• Events Influence each other – Say the Centaurs managed to take the camp. This would then affect other areas. Local events will become harder, since the Centaurs now have a foothold, and can more easily launch raids on nearby areas.
• Events happen in random locations – This applies to meta-events as well. Increases the feeling of continuity. Managed to drive the Centaurs from one camp? Then they rally and try their luck on another.
• Pre-Events – These events basically give you time to prepare for a massive evasion. Scouts have sent a message to say that Centaurs are just over the hill. You then got 5 minutes to gather supplies and fortify the camp (Fences, Traps ect) to aid you. This will determine an easy to a hard fight.
• Consequence – If an area has been entirely taken over, then Waypoints cannot be used, and in the case of the starting areas, the cities can be attacked. In terms of those fights concerning Ghosts, Risen, Necro’s and Orr, letting NPC’s die just allows them to be rezzed as enemies.
• More Filler – As in something else to work on in-between events. Scavanger hunts, menial tasks ect. Not every activity in life is a spontaneous event.

Meta-Events

The problem with these are they require no co-ordination, mechanics don’t have enough importance, and they’re static.

How this can be fixed:

• Events happen on more than one level – Take the Shatterer. In the vicinity, there are multiple outposts which he totally ignores. Add some mortars / grappling lines there, some mob invasions, and the consequence that if it falls, not only have you lost some firepower, but the mobs can then focus on where the majority of the cannons are, ramping up the difficulty. Again with the different levels, the Shatterer will occasionally attack these, breaking down the mortars. You then need to gather ore from the surrounding area for an engineer to repair them, with people staying there to guard. I.E. Multiple objectives to promote teamwork.
• Events need to happen in random places – Why do they happen in the same place? Why doesn’t he go attack large areas? Keep it within the map, but in random places (i.e. Steeleye Span)
• Fights need to be mobile – If you’re getting wailed on, you don’t just sit there. Have the events move about. In the Shatterer fight, you could have grapple lines that keep him pinned for a short while before he breaks loose (in which you need to go out and find more rope / resources ect).

Lost Shores

They said they’ll be adding to it. My money is on the Feb / March updates.

Spontaneous PvP

In the sense of how the game is built, it wouldn’t make sense, since the whole point of PvE is (supposed to be) co-operation. For PvP such as this to happen, they’d have to implement 5 different factions (i.e. Inquest, Separatists, Flame Leigon ect). Not only that, the big events would open people to griefing.

Just as you’re about to down Jormag, there’s only a little bit of red left. You worked incredibly hard for the victory since there’s only 13 of you, then suddenly a bunch of kitten come in. and between Jormag and them, they wipe you out, causing the event to fail. I personally can’t see it being popular enough to warrant it’s own server, or all that work being put into it.

i agree with almost everything you said…also i would like to emphasize more on what you said about the game being named guild wars 2 when there are no actual guild fights…for me this is actually really important because i think that it would be a great reward and really motivational to fight against other guilds and build a great reputation inside your server..

Well, you pretty much repeated what I said in my own post, but maybe you went a little bit more in depth in some aspects so thanks for that at least (i wanted to keep the post as short as possible)
And as for this

Just as you’re about to down Jormag, there’s only a little bit of red left. You worked incredibly hard for the victory since there’s only 13 of you, then suddenly a bunch of kitten come in. and between Jormag and them, they wipe you out, causing the event to fail.

That’s why there are pve and pvp servers, if someone was to go to a PvP server they would sign up for that pretty much and tbh, that would make boss fights difficult and exciting once you get the loot. Plus, server transfers are free, so if that makes someone really mad, they can always go to a pve server.

To all GW2 developers, take those ideas and make them into reality. I didn`t buy this game just to farm/collect/get achievements mindlessly. True, the game offers many fresh and exciting moments that make you play it, but it gets old fast.

Rather than replaying the game with multiple characters, I`d like to dedicate my time to one or two, but make them feel, look and play to the max, which is , except going for the legendary/more stylish gear and lots of exploring, currently impossible or immensely time consuming (boring farming, nobody wants that).

Also, apart from the starting areas and cities, the game lacks in players, so they should consider to implement a server merging mechanism just to make the events flow and give you a chance to actually see another player while exploring a zone for two hours.

All in all, GW2 will be a great, much better game in a couple of years, after some big expansions. Stick to the name and add some GUILD (wars) aspects and also more carrots.

I agree with 90% of your points, especially in regards to WvW and sPvP.

The two things I have to disagree with you on are your points about events not effecting the world, and spontaneous pvp.

Events:

There are tons of events throughout the world that do exactly what you are talking about. Recently I was in …Sparkfly Fen I think, and I stumbled across a small town overrun by Risen. Every NPC was dead, including the merchants and heart-npc. Clearly, an event had arisen to defend this camp, and the players had failed. It took myself and 3 other players about 10 minutes to clear out the 30-ish risen required to “drive them off” and be able to reuse the town.

Events like these spawn all over the world, that is just one that I can remember immediately. Just because they aren’t huge-scale seiges on capital cities (which are separately instanced zones by the way, so it would be difficult to have queensdale interact with divinity’s reach event-wise), doesn’t mean that there aren’t constantly events going on that are effecting outposts and towns in a negative way.

Spontaneous PvP:

No. It goes completely against the lore of the races of the world putting aside their differences and uniting against the threat of the elder dragons. Even if they were to implement factions, they would have to make them the evil npc factions (inquest, flame legion, etc), and implement storylines for those factions as well.

Guild Wars is, and always has been, about uniting under one banner to defeat a greater evil. How would you even begin to explain the existence of “The Pact” in faction-based game? Would you be forced to join it for the story’s sake regardless of your faction? Would late-game zones be PvP-free because you’ve all agreed to cooperate and take down the elder dragons?

Even if they made the world PvP not faction-based, like TERA Online did, it simply is not in the spirit of Guild Wars to have players randomly slaughtering each other in fields. The whole idea of cooperative DE’s would go completely out the window, and players would never do anything with one another for fear of their current ally suddenly turning around and ganking them.

Keep PVP in designated areas, or arenas, as this series always has.

Once again, I thought you made good points and agree with you on almost all of them. These are just two things that I found I didn’t agree with you on.

Funny how after reading the above posts a theme stands out. This game is too EASY ! Ive said this right from pre-launch. Make a game to easy, too predictable and people have no sense of achievement and soon lose interest !
Ive made a couple of posts with suggestions for dynamic events, multiple path events. Most of the coding for such things is already in the game. Anet just need to re-arrange things a little and they would feel so much better.

It’s just a huge fantasy online playground, you’re lucky you got 400+ hours of fun out of it.

The existence of a cash store and the lack of a sub fee should be enough pointers at what we have here.

The game is a huge achievement anyway, it surpassed my expectations mostly, while disappointing by an occasional weird cheapness that doesn’t mesh with the high quality of the overall product. Things like near instant creature re-spawns and the existence of farming bots are unacceptable., and so are some of the quests.

There seem to be gameplay mechanics that come into effect only within a group, like different professions can combine skils. Eg if someone makes a fire circle, my ranger can stand inside it and use the spinning dual wield skill to shoot fireballs in all directions.

There are things like medical kits that turn your character into a purely support team mmber running around dropping potions for other players to use.

Several skills are made for use in a group situation, and offer comparatively little benefit when soloing. It’s an open world game so people have to be inventive rather than just farm and spam the same attacks all the time.

Zephelle.9503:

Events:

There are tons of events throughout the world that do exactly what you are talking about. Recently I was in …Sparkfly Fen I think, and I stumbled across a small town overrun by Risen. Every NPC was dead, including the merchants and heart-npc. Clearly, an event had arisen to defend this camp, and the players had failed. It took myself and 3 other players about 10 minutes to clear out the 30-ish risen required to “drive them off” and be able to reuse the town.

Events like these spawn all over the world, that is just one that I can remember immediately. Just because they aren’t huge-scale seiges on capital cities (which are separately instanced zones by the way, so it would be difficult to have queensdale interact with divinity’s reach event-wise), doesn’t mean that there aren’t constantly events going on that are effecting outposts and towns in a negative way.

I was going to say that.

Go to Orr, you’ll see plenty of outposts and camps that have been taken by Risen, or are attacked by Risen. The same happens in other places too, most notably with the Centaurs in Queensdale.

Sadly, the only sign of this takeovers is a contested waypoint. And the reaction most people have to a contested waypoint isn’t “Oh my, the Centaurs are attacking, let’s go beat them!”, but something more like “Ugh, now where’s the closest waypoint?”. Especially true for Orr.

It could be changed by adding colours to the map to designate who is currently holding it. Bandits, Seraph, Lionguard, Risen, Centaurs, the like.

And ideally, you should have some kind of option to trigger the events that allow you to take back a contested waypoint. Of course, if it’s just been raided by the enemy and you lost it, there should be some time before you can do that. But something other than having to wait until one of the NPCs decides that it’s been long enough and it’s assault time.

Olba.5376:

Sadly, the only sign of this takeovers is a contested waypoint.

There are events where bridges are destroyed Even some buildings can burn when you fail events.

About the Opening Post. I do agree with some of the things you wrote. Especially with: “there are so many things to do but to few reasons to do them”. I just hope that ANet knows that.

But with some of them I can’t agree. Especially those where you expect some things because you imagine them differently.

Thank you all for commenting on my ideas it truly means a lot to me, however, I need to reply to a few things.

First of all, yes I know that centaurs actually do take and lose some encampments and that risen do this quite a bit more but it’s just so easy, insignificant and has no consequences. The npcs target only small camps that aren’t really all that important and if you manage to take back the camp it instantly rebuilds and the merchants are (almost) always available. Plus, as I previously mentioned, some additional indicators that they are there would be nice (it would also be nice if we could flood in through contested waypoints).

I know it would be difficult to create such things but it would function pretty much the same way that it does now, all that they would need to do is create a certain path through which centaurs and seraph would send reinforcements and depending on where they clash, a certain event would pop up. The event would end with either sides winning and a new event would be created at the appropriate place.

Second – Why wouldn’t npcs from Queensdale be able to invade Divnity’s Reach? Think outside the box for a bit, why wouldn’t an npc be able to cross to another zone? Just scale him up to an appropriate lvl and have fun!

Third, faction based pvp servers would not make people hate each other because you volunteer for the pvp , in fact, it would make you appreciate other players of the same faction a lot more and it would motivate you a bit to stick with them because if WvWvW has taught me anything, it’s that strength lies within numbers. Who knows, the problem could probably even get solved if we got another WvWvW map that is a lot bigger and has pve oriented events, just imagine the glorious carnage!
However, player combat like in some older mmorpgs that allows you to randomly attack anyone and get attacked by anyone is horrible in my opinion and would make some events way too difficult due to accidental and intentional friendly fire.

Oh and one more thing that I forgot to mention in my original post. In the first guild wars you had certain abilities that came in the eye of the north expansion. All classes could use those abilities and they could only affect pve monsters. These skills were unlocked through achievements and certain quest, so why isn’t that in gw2? Having such spells could even help classes like thief and mesmer in farming events in orr and such where mob tagging is important, and spell hunting would be such a fun activity!