Guild Wars 2

Hi Anet, we’ve been playing your game for a couple of months now. The five of us have playing online games for a lot of years now ranging from hardcore Everquest and Warcraft guilds, serious Diablo ladders, high ELO League games, and the like. Not professional by any means, but as pretty serious hobbiests. We’ve had a lot of conversations about what we like and what we don’t and now I figured I’d take the liberty to post up these thoughts to offer some feedback.

First off, we love the difficulty level of dungeons. One of the things that kept me away from Guild Wars when the game first launched was a lack of raids. I love raiding and always have, so when Guild Wars said “no raids only five mans!” I pretty much just wrote it off. That was a big mistake on my part. When we first set foot in Caudecus Manor we had no idea what we were in for. That golem just destroyed us for like half an hour – it was crazy. And doing the explorable mode at level 50 was like a four hour endeavor. When we got to the hallway of 1shotting turrets that you had to knock over I was in love with your game. Things like this spice up dungeons and are more reminiscent of the table top RPGs I used to love. The golem shield puzzle in arah, the laser puzzle in CoE, the ball passing puzzle – all of these things are brilliant additions to the dungeons which, to me, sets them apart from just about any MMO I’ve played. The lack of a traditional “trinity” makes it so different people can fill different roles on the spot and every player is always engaged. In other MMOs doing 5 man content is very, very easy. Like “Oh? a dungeon? let me go make a sandwich and prepare for auto-pilot” easy. We love that you actually have to pay attention, make strategies, and communicate to get through this content. In just my opinion, it feels better than raiding in other games because I can do it with my four buddies and don’t need 5-15 other strangers to get through it.

Unfortunatly, a lot of this challenge is circumvented by the community. This is the single thing that has made us put down your game and walk away from it for days; our disgust at the people we have to pug who insist we do everything from leash mobs (that inevitably kill us because we suck at running away from mobs) to straight up exploit walls to bypass huge chunks of the dungeon. Sometimes it makes sense to leash a bunch of mobs for the sake of speed, but there’s a part in Arah p2 that, with some clever jumping, you can get behind a wall to circumvent a HUGE chunk of the dungeon. This kind of cheating and should be bannable – but its the accepted way to do the path! While its not 100% the fault of the game designers, it is unintentionally encouraged to cheat your way through the dungeons. The trash is harder than the bosses, and the bosses are the only ones who drop noteworthy loot anyway(shards and the occasional rare). To a person only looking to efficiently farm out a dungeon to get their goodies it makes the most sense to skip everything they possibly can. I suppose we’re in the minority of players who, at least on the first couple of play throughs, enjoy the challenge and experience of a whole dungeon but it makes us wonder what the point in going for our full sets of Arah gear even is when exploiters can get the same stuff with minimal effort. While its hilarious to see a guardian with map completion star and “Been There. Done That.” die on every single pull because the rest of the group refuses to ‘sploit through a wall its frustrating to know that I won’t ever be able to pug a “fast clear, experience only” group because while I can play fights with the best of them, I don’t know all the cheats and tricks to bypass content. It all feels unfairly penalizing to us for actually playing the content you’ve made.

There are a couple ways we think you could fix this. Most obviously would be to fix your broken walls, bugged mobs, and remove leashing from dungeon critters. And I understand the challenges making perfect dungeons for you guys are. You make good use of the Z axis on your maps which allows for more interesting layouts and tactical play with the flip side being more “holes” to jump through which allows those cheats – but there are some things you could do. For instance, give bosses an AoE pull with a 1shot move if players can hit it, but it can’t hit them. Now, fixing all these things a year into the game might feel unfair to people who prefer to speed clear – which merits consideration on all but the biggest exploits (broken walls and bugged bosses that don’t even attack back). So, why not give players like us some incentive? Put chests with actually good loot (maybe even 4-5 shards) in commonly skipped areas. You could make magic find actually worth a kitten to encourage clearing trash. Put in objectives like kill X amount of mobs for better chest loot. Stuff like that. That way the people who want to speed clear for shards still can have their fun, but people who want to experience the full dungeon don’t feel like they’re ultimately wasting their time. For example, if players could kill an extra 25-30 mobs for even the most minuscule chance at a precursor from an endboss chance they’d be willing to do it. Or, if that’s too game breaking, how about a low drop rate of dungeon appropriate weapon skins to save people 3-4 runs if they don’t skip trash. Those are just some ideas off the top of our heads.

A lot of this “just skip it” mentality comes from the discrepancy in challenge between trash mobs and bosses. Some of the trash is just out-of-this-world insane in terms of incoming damage, hit points, and awareness check. The bosses, on the other hand, are usually very simple and easy to defeat once you (maybe) learn its gimmick. So far, the only counter example to this we’ve found is Giganticus Lupicus. This fight is awesome. You have to pool your dodges for the right time, kite him around, constantly be aware of your position, swap to adds, etc. There is a lot going on and any slight mistake can put your kitten on the floor. For many, many players they just want their rewards. This is legitimate to me, its inherent in the MMO genre. Everything in these games takes a lot of time to obtain, so you plot of the most efficient coarse of action and get it done. So with the loot being so very bad and the trash being so hard, why wouldn’t you just skip it? I’ve never, ever been one to cry “nerf!” but I think your dungeons would discourage cheating and allievate frustration if you toned down the trash a bit and beefed up bosses with better mechanics. Don’t nerf anything per say, but shift some of the difficulty to where, in our opinion, the difficulty should be.

Honestly, it all just boils down to Risk vs Reward. As MMO players, we love shiny things. We love loot. The loot in Guild Wars 2 sucks. You get very little for playing through pretty difficult content, and the best stuff comes by simply exploiting your way to bosses. We think that if you rebalanced the effort-given to rewards-gained ratio your game would be 10x more fun to play on the pve end of the spectrum. The fact that people, as the standard of acceptable play, cheating past even the most trivial things indicates that there’s a problem with your current model. We love the challenge, we love that the game tells us to “get better” instead of getting easier, but if people want the best things they should have to put forth the same effort. As it stands now theres no incentive not to cheat, other than our video-game-nerd pride that makes it take twice as long to get what we want. Your game is fun, we want to keep playing, but we paid for Guild Wars 2 not “Sploit in Walls, Skippin Mobs 2” and the fact that all advantages are given to lazy and/or bad players for cheating has made us put down your game for a couple of days here and there; it would be tragic to us if one of these times we just didn’t pick it back up.

Well, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be, much too long for the average internet user, but hopefully someone at ANet reads it. I don’t read the forums too regularly, so maybe these sentiments have already been echoed here, but these are the things we’ve noticed in our couple of months of playing and figured our points were valid enough to give voice to. If you’re like us, and don’t like to cheat, go ahead and add my tag – we do Arah and other stuff pretty much every night. We love Guardians and social people (we’re always in mumble and it makes playing dungeons a lot easier).

There is no mechanic that increases your chance on better rewards when you clear out foes that you can skip. So it’s only a matter of time before people figure out the most time-efficient path to loot anywhere.

Very good post, I agree almost 100% with everything.

Sounds like YAPAS (yet another post about skipping).

Good try though, most anti-skipping posts make the authors sound like incompetent noobs. Your post makes you come off like some kind of knowledgeable pro.

But in the end, it’s still Yet Another Post About Skipping and no new or interesting perspective was offered.

The caribou have left this place, and now so must we.

I feel the same way about this PvE content. I think the Dev’s want this game to be PvP though.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

Sounds like YAPAS (yet another post about skipping).

Good try though, most anti-skipping posts make the authors sound like incompetent noobs. Your post makes you come off like some kind of knowledgeable pro.

But in the end, it’s still Yet Another Post About Skipping and no new or interesting perspective was offered.

The caribou have left this place, and now so must we.

honestly, its not even the skipping that is a problem. skipping past mobs makes sense a lot of the time and to skip them well requires a certain skill set too – the ability to chain defensive moves together without getting your kitten punched in while skipping a lot of mobs is something we have yet to master. the real problems are the wall glitches and ability to stick bosses in rocks and stuff like that; the outright cheating seems unfair to me.

i tried to look at the issues objectively so i’m not surprised i didn’t come up with anything 100% new and exciting. like i said, i don’t read these forums a lot (wow forums have made me fear and loath mmo communities) so if this is all just a repost then the only purpose it serves is to throw an agreement onto the pile. i’m okay with this i guess, because the more people who offer this kind of feedback the more likely a dev is going to take it seriously. GW2 is a great game, and the most fun pve I’ve done in a long time. I just want it to be even better.

As far as them wanting to make a “pvp” game, well, look at warcraft – one of the reasons Blizzard is so successful is because they try to give appropriate attention to both ends of the spectrum. Now, I know I’m asking for “well this isn’t wow go play wow if you want to play wow” comments – fair enough. But! Let’s face it, they are the 800lb gorilla in the room, and looking at what Blizzard does well and what they don’t is probably a good idea. That being said, I’m not asking for another warcraft game, just suggesting that they give attention to all their content to appeal to a wider variety of people

This thread again. Sigh. Nothing worthwhile to see here.

Nilkemia.8507:

This thread again. Sigh. Nothing worthwhile to see here.

+1