Guild Wars 2

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.

Anyways, I believe all we need is more stuff to do at 80.
A new hard dungeon with unique skins (maybe give a token so you can trade for your class?), a new zone, new events (major city sieges?) new sPVP.

Those are always cool.
Game isnt lacking at all. There’s just too much to explore and I highly doubt every 80 out there tasted every zone, with every meta events happening.

But adding more couldnt hurt either.

In my opinion, GW2 is the best MMORPG in the market.

Edit: I totally agree with you on not comming back to the same dungeon for tokens once you completed it. But there should be dungeons that are so hard and requires such well coordinated group that you couldnt possibly beat it in one night, or in a few attempts.

You summed up my point very well. There is a lot to still do in the game, that is not an arguable point, my point is that I wish there were more competitive options, such as the idea you just said. That’s a good idea to make pve more competitive, a progression based dungeon.

I think, for those people, maybe ANet should put in an additional mode into all the dungeons, “Ranking mode” (They did something like this in GW1 didnt they?)

In that mode, you receive a score/ranking based on how quickly you completed the dungeon, zero/minimal number of deaths, optional-objectives completed, percentage of enemies killed etc.

People at the top X% of the ladder for a dungeon get to use some special item skins / capes / titles / auras whilst they maintain their ranking.

So there you go, competitive PvE.

Rieselle.5079:

I think, for those people, maybe ANet should put in an additional mode into all the dungeons, “Ranking mode” (They did something like this in GW1 didnt they?)

In that mode, you receive a score/ranking based on how quickly you completed the dungeon, zero/minimal number of deaths, optional-objectives completed, percentage of enemies killed etc.

People at the top X% of the ladder for a dungeon get to use some special item skins / capes / titles / auras whilst they maintain their ranking.

So there you go, competitive PvE.

Doesn’t sound bad. GW1 did have outposts that could be controlled by the dominating guild that completed challenge missions with the best score which opened up merchants and such, also ranking which would display your guilds name if you were good enough on a challenge mission.

They could implement so many cool things for pve I’m surprised none of this was on release.

In my opinion PvE should not be competitive.
I mean, PvE is meant to be cooperative, it was like that also in Guild Wars and many liked it. The only things that makes PvE competitive is Archievements, some of them also gives special titles. So, why don’t you guys who feels the PvE not enough competitive don’t seek for a special title like most of the Guild Wars players did? I mean, there was a title in Guild Wars called “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals”, which gave players who had it a great prestige, but it was hell hard to get because it required 30 other titles maxed out. When you’ve finished the game and you are fully geared as you wanted to, just get all the titles and wear them!

There is also PvP to be competitive, where the skill cap is way, way higher than you expect. To master properly a profession you need at least than 100 hour of gameplay, if you’re very good at gaming. But also when you mastered your profession, there are another 7 waiting for you.

Rukia.4802:

Rieselle.5079:

I think, for those people, maybe ANet should put in an additional mode into all the dungeons, “Ranking mode” (They did something like this in GW1 didnt they?)

In that mode, you receive a score/ranking based on how quickly you completed the dungeon, zero/minimal number of deaths, optional-objectives completed, percentage of enemies killed etc.

People at the top X% of the ladder for a dungeon get to use some special item skins / capes / titles / auras whilst they maintain their ranking.

So there you go, competitive PvE.

Doesn’t sound bad. GW1 did have outposts that could be controlled by the dominating guild that completed challenge missions with the best score which opened up merchants and such, also ranking which would display your guilds name if you were good enough on a challenge mission.

They could implement so many cool things for pve I’m surprised none of this was on release.

There is something like that in WvWvW, which is halfway between PvP and PvE (just like it was in Guild Wars, because to get an outpost you have to pay in factions point, which was really hard to farm only in PvE). I don’t know exactly how it worked, but there is something like that, that’s sure.

This is a good post OP. I think every person who plays MMORPG’s wants to be able to brag, show-off or be able to showcase their skill or achievements. And there are a few different ways to do this, but what you are trying to say is most of these objectives are enormous time sinks.