Guild Wars 2

This post is going to have some things people will certainly disagree with. If you are one of these obstinate players, please skip to the bottom section of my post, because the rest of what I have to say is for the betterment of the game, and not for a flame-war of impulsive sensationalists. Before you all scream fanboi, I’m a WoW veteran of 7 years…

To Arenanet:
I saw the changes today and was like “hey that was quicker than I thought!” I have to say thank you for addressing the problem so quickly to be honest. Speed farming is not in your interest, it’s not in my interest, and it shouldn’t be in the interest of the rest of the community. I’m not sure how much you listen to the naysayers, but please don’t. They’re trying to undermine the unique system that you’ve built, that I and many have come to appreciate.
I personally have never run a consecutive CoF in a single day, and I still come out satisfied at the end of the day. In fact, the first time I tried the Magg side of CoF, I felt extremely dirty and cheap. So much to the point that every time a guildy mentions it I have to twist their arm not to do it so we can actually do some challenging content. For the actual challenging content- thanks a lot. I’m sorry to say that I don’t think the majority of the community has even experienced the actual fun content of explorables. Granted, explorables take time, and I’ve only done 1, maybe 2 a day, so there’s much learning to do; but I think that’s how you wanted it to be played.

I want to point out some really fun encounters that a lot of people might be missing out on, and that deserve a “well done.” The laser field in Crucible is super tense, but it’s a lot of fun to do while heckling with guild-mates once you get the hang of it. Also, the Submarine wing of CoE with the bomb golems and trying to set the trigger…probably my favorite event so far. I forget the wing, but the CoF event with the 4 flame bubbles was interesting too. I’d like to see something like this with a little more complexity for a possible boss fight or something. I suck at remembering the exact wings, but the last boss in Arah to hold nodes while kiting the specters was a lot of fun as a necro. I pretty much found the profession’s strength in that fight. Basically what I’m saying is, there’s so much more in these dungeons than loot, and I wish everyone would understand that.
With that said, I do think there needs to be a little more incentive to complete these. Not everyone is like me and wants to play for the sheer enjoyment of the dungeon. I as well like to have a carrot at times. I don’t think we are being properly rewarded for some of these especially difficult encounters. I don’t play this game only for material reward, but I do believe it’s necessary to have something that’s worthy of time/effort. More currency reward should definitely be considered. If I’m lucky, on a random explorable, I’ll make scant amounts of silver, or I’ll even lose money from the instance. I think that’s a little harsh. Chest rewards need just a little bit more. I actually tend to find better loot in 30 min of farming Orr than the chests. Nothing extravagant- just something worthy of the effort.

To the players:
Chill the (furry feline) out! This game is not about loot, as much as you want it to be. The game has been advertised to be a change from traditional MMOs, and that’s exactly what we see. You’re just going to have to adjust from your single-minded view of “I can have my cake and eat it too.” I had hoped not to allude to this, but if you want quick rewards, go play WoW. You can get full top level purples in 3 days time there. This game for me, is actually a nice breath of nostalgia, of time when people who put in their time got all the goods and prestige. You’re not going to get that here in a few days time. I’m pretty sure Anet isn’t going to budge to your ad hominem like Blizzard does. I even had the disgusting pleasure of reading a thread today that had a guy ranting for paragraphs on how to properly release a patch. Who the (cuddly critter) do you think you are!!? So you’re an expert on speed-running dungeons. We’ll celebrate your awesomeness with laughter and finger pointing. You have no clue how to develop a game, so you really have no place in telling people how (you) wanted a patch to be released. Again, I point you to a good MMO for that. Don’t bring it here. The people here are looking for a good time with earned rewards, not freeloaders.

Sorry bud, but taking a grind-fest for gear, and making it a grind-grind-grind-fest for gear is not changing the game from “traditional” MMOs. Their reasoning for the dungeon changes was to keep players from grinding.

I want to know in WHAT WORLD that makes sense. When i read that I was like….are you KIDDING me? Who in the world even THOUGHT of that logic?? It’s a complete mental break.

They made the dungeons harder, and the rewards worse. That means MORE grinding, or just giving up…which I suppose stops the grinding from one point of view.

Chill the (furry feline) out! This game is not about loot, as much as you want it to be. The game has been advertised to be a change from traditional MMOs, and that’s exactly what we see. You’re just going to have to adjust from your single-minded view of “I can have my cake and eat it too.”

This is where you are completely wrong.

GW2 just turned out to be more of the same ole’ MMO.

Hickeroar.9734:

Sorry bud, but taking a grind-fest for gear, and making it a grind-grind-grind-fest for gear is not changing the game from “traditional” MMOs. Their reasoning for the dungeon changes was to keep players from grinding.

I want to know in WHAT WORLD that makes sense. When i read that I was like….are you KIDDING me? Who in the world even THOUGHT of that logic?? It’s a complete mental break.

They made the dungeons harder, and the rewards worse. That means MORE grinding, or just giving up…which I suppose stops the grinding from one point of view.

Come up with an MMO design that keeps people playing and doesn’t involve grinding and come back. I’m all ears.
Yeah it’s a grind, but people are approaching it in the wrong way…you’re not getting me here. Their changes today even spelled it out for us. You’re supposed to change it up on a daily basis. Play around with all that the game has and eventually you’ll get what you deserve. Spamming “LFG CoF speed run” is only going to get you a set of gear that makes you look like all the other scrubs in 3 days time…and burnout to follow because you have nothing else to work for.

This game is not about loot or for levels or money? Then why is it a game? It should be a movie, then, not a game.

Yeah man I totally agree with the OP, thanks for making us run 2 hour dungeons 70 times for a full set of gear, its a ton of fun!…….also thanks for not properly fixing it like proper dev’s just breaking it and making it buggy like you’ve done with the rest of any kind of farming in this game, thanks for nerfing Orr so I can only spend 10 minutes there before it becomes pointless, also thanks for the broken buggy event’s, thanks for making all the karma weapons massive event grinds, thanks for making all the cultural armour a massive gold grind that is now a struggle because no one can farm anything anymore thanks to your hasty fixing of botting, thanks for making all the light armour and staff’s look garbage, thanks for the no power and precision end game karma gear, thanks for the awful loooking Orr gear, oh oh one more and thanks for the 20 slot bags costing 12g each. So thanks for all of that….did I say thanks enough?

Borked.6824:

Hickeroar.9734:

Sorry bud, but taking a grind-fest for gear, and making it a grind-grind-grind-fest for gear is not changing the game from “traditional” MMOs. Their reasoning for the dungeon changes was to keep players from grinding.

I want to know in WHAT WORLD that makes sense. When i read that I was like….are you KIDDING me? Who in the world even THOUGHT of that logic?? It’s a complete mental break.

They made the dungeons harder, and the rewards worse. That means MORE grinding, or just giving up…which I suppose stops the grinding from one point of view.

Come up with an MMO design that keeps people playing and doesn’t involve grinding and come back. I’m all ears.
Yeah it’s a grind, but people are approaching it in the wrong way…you’re not getting me here. Their changes today even spelled it out for us. You’re supposed to change it up on a daily basis. Play around with all that the game has and eventually you’ll get what you deserve. Spamming “LFG CoF speed run” is only going to get you a set of gear that makes you look like all the other scrubs in 3 days time…and burnout to follow because you have nothing else to work for.

This would make sense, except there really isn’t a way to change it up once you hit 80. the LVL 80 zone is either completely broken, or there just aren’t any events there. That is super….lame. I have spent many hours there already, and only run across ONE. SINGLE. SOLITARY. event. In a dynamic, event driven game, how in the world do you have your highest level zone contain almost NO events?

It’s also a major pain to get anywhere because there are undead by the droves just standing around, and you end up having a massive hoard of them following you any time you just try to run down the road….?

Even that one event became a massive zerg-fest because so many players showed up at the prospect of an event, that enemies died as soon as they spawned, and the framerate went to complete pot.

You can go back to the slightly lower level zones, but they suffer from almost the same thing. There are more events, but many of them are extremely broken and can’t be completed.

Apologizies…it was two events. Had a champion something or other show up outside a WP once.

I understand that he did not mind the changes. His playstyle is supported by the patch, and the patch hurts those that do not share his playstyle.

However, he lost me when he said Guild Wars 2 was a departure from traditional MMOs.

Guild Wars 2 is starting to remind me very much of traditional MMOs, and not the casual WoW types. It is starting to remind me of federal pound you in the … Korean grind MMOs.

Killing if I rememeber right 1.2 million of a certan level 60 mob to get the rep for the purple cat mount is definately a grind…WoW had 100s of grinds that literally required farming over 500,000 of a mob and you really want to compare that to running a dungeon 10 times for a piece of gear? Wow also was the king of 3 pieces from the end boss for 40 people to split. Even with 100% no overlaps no unnneeded drops etc you would still need 14 runs to get what you want. Add in overlaps and unneded drops and more like 100 runs. By those wow standards even the legenday weapons are not much of a grind…

Well I honestly think all the fanboys here just like to kiss ANet’s kitten.
OP, you are part of the minority because you fail to see how this update is making the game unbearable.
No one wants to go into a dungeon to spend 2-6 or more silver on repairs, 1-3 hours of hard work, and countless deaths just for a reward of 80copper-1silver.
You now lose money when you run a dungeon.
What the hell is that?
What game have you ever played where you go into a dungeon and LOSE MONEY.

“Hey guys lets go lose our hard earned money by running dungeons!!!”
No.
Never.

Pony.3256:

Well I honestly think all the fanboys here just like to kiss ANet’s kitten.
OP, you are part of the minority because you fail to see how this update is making the game unbearable.
No one wants to go into a dungeon to spend 2-6 or more silver on repairs, 1-3 hours of hard work, and countless deaths just for a reward of 80copper-1silver.
You now lose money when you run a dungeon.
What the hell is that?
What game have you ever played where you go into a dungeon and LOSE MONEY.

“Hey guys lets go lose our hard earned money by running dungeons!!!”
No.
Never.

I rememeber farming for days to get the mats for food and potion to be able to do endgame dungeons…Most high end raid guilds you have to farm for the stuff to be able to do the dugeons. So yes quite often you do loose money in dungeons for the right to get the gear you want.

Fluffycalico.2715:

Pony.3256:

Well I honestly think all the fanboys here just like to kiss ANet’s kitten.
OP, you are part of the minority because you fail to see how this update is making the game unbearable.
No one wants to go into a dungeon to spend 2-6 or more silver on repairs, 1-3 hours of hard work, and countless deaths just for a reward of 80copper-1silver.
You now lose money when you run a dungeon.
What the hell is that?
What game have you ever played where you go into a dungeon and LOSE MONEY.

“Hey guys lets go lose our hard earned money by running dungeons!!!”
No.
Never.

I rememeber farming for days to get the mats for food and potion to be able to do endgame dungeons…Most high end raid guilds you have to farm for the stuff to be able to do the dugeons. So yes quite often you do loose money in dungeons for the right to get the gear you want.

In every game I have played, if i had to farm to make consumables, the reward at the end of the dungeon was always worth it.
You’re still not seeing the point that this game has the worst dungeon rewards.
I have played many many games and all dungeons have a decent reward that is actually worth the time and effort put into the dungeon.
The dungeons in GW2 aren’t worth it at all anymore.
What game did you play where the dungeons were like this?
Where you’d go in the dungeon itself and spend more money inside it than you’d get from it.

Pony.3256:

Well I honestly think all the fanboys here just like to kiss ANet’s kitten.
OP, you are part of the minority because you fail to see how this update is making the game unbearable.
No one wants to go into a dungeon to spend 2-6 or more silver on repairs, 1-3 hours of hard work, and countless deaths just for a reward of 80copper-1silver.
You now lose money when you run a dungeon.
What the hell is that?
What game have you ever played where you go into a dungeon and LOSE MONEY.

“Hey guys lets go lose our hard earned money by running dungeons!!!”
No.
Never.

My beefs were addressed specifically regarding the constant speed farming of CoF, nothing more, which (I think) is what the changes were intended for. The overall lack of money and the abundance of gold sinks is a different issue, and I actually addressed it in my post. I’m not kissing anybody’s cats either (love this filter). I just really like the game. It’s got more problems than one could shake a stick at. They’ll get fixed eventually. The intended changes were warranted though, because people trying to bring their entitlements into yet another game.

I get that you have had extensive experience in doing tedious things to get gear you want. I’m sure we all have that.

I am curious as to how much experience you’ve had with the current patch. Are you done getting a set? Are you in the process of getting a set? This might help illuminate how we’ve come to very different opinions of how this patch affects us.

@OP Well it’s nice to know that not everyone on the forum is some loot kitten that’s butt hurt about the difficulty of getting the loot, and the lack of loot overall!! I personally LOVE dungeons as is (if they made them harder i’d be happy too but what they have is good for now too!!), and i like that Anet is sticking to their guns and not nerfing everything down to super easy mode like most other mmos tend to be doing…

Borked.6824:

Pony.3256:

Well I honestly think all the fanboys here just like to kiss ANet’s kitten.
OP, you are part of the minority because you fail to see how this update is making the game unbearable.
No one wants to go into a dungeon to spend 2-6 or more silver on repairs, 1-3 hours of hard work, and countless deaths just for a reward of 80copper-1silver.
You now lose money when you run a dungeon.
What the hell is that?
What game have you ever played where you go into a dungeon and LOSE MONEY.

“Hey guys lets go lose our hard earned money by running dungeons!!!”
No.
Never.

My beefs were addressed specifically regarding the constant speed farming of CoF, nothing more, which (I think) is what the changes were intended for. The overall lack of money and the abundance of gold sinks is a different issue, and I actually addressed it in my post. I’m not kissing anybody’s cats either (love this filter). I just really like the game. It’s got more problems than one could shake a stick at. They’ll get fixed eventually. The intended changes were warranted though, because people trying to bring their entitlements into yet another game.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game.
I just don’t like the updates that they keep releasing.
You can see a lot of people are upset and usually changes are made when there is an uproar like this, but I honestly don’t see ANet changing anything back.
That’s what sucks.
Most companies like to hear feedback from the players, but the devs here don’t seem to care if we like the update or not.
It’s already hard enough for me to try and convince my friends to play this game.
When people make threads on fansites and other websites about how these updates come and how it’s ruining people’s fun, people who are considering buying the game will just walk away.
I understand the buffing the dungeons.
I don’t care if they add more mobs and make them harder, but nerfing the rewards after making us spend more time and money in a dungeon?
That’s a joke.
A very bad one.

I don’t mind challenge. I like difficult things.

I understand that you should be doing content for content’s sake. And yes, dungeons are enjoyable when you first experience them. They are worth doing. Each and every one of them, even though a lot of them are bugged in some way.

The problem comes when you are to do a dungeon 50+ times. At that point, it’s not doing content for content’s sake. You’ve seen all the bosses. You know what everything does. You know how to approach everything. You are now doing it for the reward.

Arena Net can make all the dungeons harder and more challenging. I will enjoy it. I’ll enjoy them a handful of times. But if I have to do the challenge 50+ times, I want just a bit more incentive than 2 silver and 17k experience.

Those are not exaggerations.

miya.5160:

I don’t mind challenge. I like difficult things.

I understand that you should be doing content for content’s sake. And yes, dungeons are enjoyable when you first experience them. They are worth doing. Each and every one of them, even though a lot of them are bugged in some way.

The problem comes when you are to do a dungeon 50+ times. At that point, it’s not doing content for content’s sake. You’ve seen all the bosses. You know what everything does. You know how to approach everything. You are now doing it for the reward.

Arena Net can make all the dungeons harder and more challenging. I will enjoy it. I’ll enjoy them a handful of times. But if I have to do the challenge 50+ times, I want just a bit more incentive than 2 silver and 17k experience.

Those are not exaggerations.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but is this your first MMO?

I’m also glad that they made these changes, Explorable modes were meant for organized groups (like guildies) to go through, making the Armor sets exclusive. Before this patch the Armor set was one of the sets I loved, but seeing so many people speed run it to acquire it made it more or less unappealing (everyone looks the same now). The devs said so many times that Explorable was meant for organized groups in reddit and twitch tv broadcasts.

Its not like the gear is going to min/max your set anyway. I love how gear works right now. I dislike that people get it so fast that they feel bored or they don’t get it fast enough that it is a terrible grind.

I think the root is there are to many sets stretched across to little content. If you cut the amount of sets in half and spread it over multiple dungeons for a single set you would probably have been fine the way it was.

This is one thing I thought blizzard did ok on. You would not need to nerf the individual dungeon. And we wouldn’t be forced to try for 2 sets at once.

More than anything. The rewards only happening at the end sucks. I got to last boss in AC and 2 people left. They were just done. Had to get another group to come in and finish it with me. That hurt them for their next full run because now everything else is nerfed for rewards.

If I invest in breaking my gear I should not be punished because I am breaking it the same way I did 40 minutes ago. Lessen the drop rate or reward system is fine. Taking away the xp and silver gained is really harsh. They “fixed” 2 things when only 1 thing needed the fix. XP and grinding for levels is not the issue. Getting your set of 80 gear within a week of 80 is the problem. Maybe use a token system that you can purchase the set pieces you are looking for and double the cost.

Anet doesn’t want us to feel like it is a terrible grind but they don’t want it to be an issue of simple either. Neither of these things was fixed with the change. What did happen is they broke a viable way to get experience.

If I get half the silver for rerunning a dungeon can I get my repair cost cut in half also. This is becoming more stick with less carrot option. If you don’t want to get screwed by the system as it is changed you have to pay more for repair or you have to pay to use WP back and forth every other run…. That is of course assuming your not working with a group that has become used to working together and doesn’t waste time dying resulting in a quick smooth run of a dungeon. If your group is good you need to work on 3 sets at a time instead of focusing on your set that you want.

This is a band aid on a bullet wound. The issue is not how fast people can get gear but how the gear is distributed.

Was this supposed to be the typical MMO grind?

You said it yourself in your original post. You like that Guild Wars is a departure. Are you now admitting that it is not as you say it is?

So you’re not defending your views. You’re just defending your game, for now. It is in your favor, for now, so you will defend it from any angle—even if the angle changes.

How disappointing.

You say this game is not a grind fest for gear, and yet why do we see tons of dungeon NPCs out in the open teasing its players with exotic gear that require 180-330 dungeon tokens a piece?

miya.5160:

I don’t mind challenge. I like difficult things.

I understand that you should be doing content for content’s sake. And yes, dungeons are enjoyable when you first experience them. They are worth doing. Each and every one of them, even though a lot of them are bugged in some way.

The problem comes when you are to do a dungeon 50+ times. At that point, it’s not doing content for content’s sake. You’ve seen all the bosses. You know what everything does. You know how to approach everything. You are now doing it for the reward.

Arena Net can make all the dungeons harder and more challenging. I will enjoy it. I’ll enjoy them a handful of times. But if I have to do the challenge 50+ times, I want just a bit more incentive than 2 silver and 17k experience.

Those are not exaggerations.

While I agree I also disagree. It is touchy. Running the same dungeon over and over is bad.

The issue is not that you have to run each one so many times the issue is that everyone can be cleared in an hour.

To balance and give an epic feeling instead of “I decided to grind the same hour 50 times in a row” they need to make the content more difficult. They need to put a timer on how often you can run not punish you for running it. And their really needs to be a separation from a 5 man dungeon and a guild run raid.

Why would you put your pride and joy that your devs worked so hard making in a dungeon that takes an hour to clear? You want it to feel epic? You want your item sets to be epic? You make bigger badder content that is not based purely around aoe covering the whole ground and the boss randomly choosing who they will one shot next.