To preface, I hope to illuminate the reasons I, and I think others, feel bored, or that the endgame is lacking. My goal is to avoid using broad terms, and give a valid argument. I welcome any comments, suggestions, or quips that anyone may have.
I have a tendency to be rather lengthy on forum posts, so I will try to keep the nonessential parts short. To give a starting point to my discussion, know that I come from WoW, being a fairly competitive raider, and pvper for some time. This means when I played, I was working for top boss kills, and for high end arena rewards. I say this not to brag, but to hopefully give an idea of what I look for in a game.
I notice that a lot of the players that have the same opinion of the game, are complaining mostly about gear. This bothers me. While I feel that the endgame is lacking, it is not because of a lack of gear, or the ability to get gear. This is ignorant, because really, raiding in WoW, at least to me, was never to get gear. The gear was a means to an end. I got gear, so I could progress farther in whatever I was doing. Gear was only an issue to the point I felt that my skill level could not overcome the lack of gear, so I had to get better, or get new gear. Because of this, I really think anyone that complains about lack of gear in this game is really foolish.
That being said, this mentality was really brought out by Blizzard. When raiding was still a rare thing for your average player to be doing, average players automatically related seeing someone is high level gear as being really good. Thus, they wanted gear, so they can be considered good. As raiding became easier to get into, this ushered in more loot ‘streetwalkers’ if you catch my slang… As such, since the majority of people are average players, hence the term average, this mentality has stuck as this is still the philosophy that Blizzard supports to this day, as of my knowledge.
In my opinion, this is the issue GW2 faces with these types of players. I will be
facetious here and state that I consider myself an above average player. I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way, only to further my point. The point being, that I don’t feel as though there are that many, if any at all, venues to showcase personal skill. I do not feel justly rewarded, for being slightly better than another player. As such, I feel as though GW does not provide enough options for challenging actitives. To me, I see there are a bunch of things I can do, but most of them seem just like time consuming, tedious activities that I could do in most single player RPGs.
I don’t see that as a bad thing necessarily, but when I play an MMO with several PvP and PvE options, I want to see a valid method of competition available. Honestly, most of the PvP seems more like two groups going for PvE objectives, and occasionally fighting each other when they happen to run across each other. And as far as PvE goes, I see no reason to run a dungeon 70+ times, to get gear to prove that I ran it 70+ times. As I said before, gear is simply a tool used to progress farther. So if I have already progressed it once, why go again if nothing changes, and no harder mode is available?
So to tie my ideas together. I feel that players like myself, feel a bit left out because most objectives are a bit easy, and mostly tedious time sinks, with no real sense of competitive accomplishment. I feel that other players see the gear as giving this a status of being good, and are unclear on why they can’t obtain it easily, or why the stats don’t make them better than they are.
In the latter case, I think the developers have a very unique idea of equalization. I am a fan of this personally, because I thought this would cut out the gear grind, which was my least favorite part of WoW when I quit. However, since I don’t have to grind out gear to be competitive, where is the competitive side of this game?
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and possibly comment on my concerns. I am in no way stating that this game is terribad and you all sux, but I would just like to voice my concern that most of the endgame challenges don’t seem to have a competitive side to them, at least not from what I have seen. It is very possible that I am stupid, and have overlooked something huge, and it wouldn’t be the first time I had to stick my foot in my mouth.