Guild Wars 2

Posted from FB, it’s so long I needed multiple posts.

For the past 3 days, I have been playing Guild Wars 2. Not grinding, but playing. I have reached level 30 thanks to the help of the guilds I’ve joined. Here are my thoughts on GW2, my opinions on some of the major features of the game, how they work, and, how they may not work. As a note, I am playing a Norn Ranger.

Open tapping (mob sharing): This is pretty darn amazing, and something that is hard to get your brain wrapped around at first. You can help any other player, not in your group. You can attack the same creature, and you will both get loot, and XP. This is amazing. It makes for all sorts of interesting possibilities, which they have capitalized upon. However, it somewhat discourages grouping. Since there is no need to group to get credit for kills. 

Events (quests/hearts): There are no quests in the game, not like you would find in a traditional MMO. You don’t go to a quest hub, and pick up 5 or 6 quests, go do them, come back, turn them in, get 8 or 9 more, etc, etc. Instead, as you’re running through the world, an event will pop up in a tracker letting you know what to do, sorta. There is no quest journal (at least not that I have found yet). It doesn’t hold your hand and tell you exactly what to do step by step, or where exactly something is, or what exactly to do. You have to figure it out. Which is cool, I guess, but it can be frustrating. But, if you get fed up trying to figure it out, just go to a wiki. Now for the bad part of this. Without a quest journal to keep track of what you have and have not done, for their event that is happening this weekend, it’s hard to figure out exactly what steps you are on. You have to remember. For anything other than this special event, the lack of quest journal is fine, your progress on the event is displayed on the tracker.

XP gain: While you could, in theory grind mobs endlessly, GW2 has done something that makes me very, VERY happy. Everything you do in game (besides standing around or emoting/RPing), gives you XP. Crafting? Gives you XP, and not just crafting xp. Nope, you can legitimately level via crafting. Exploring? THIS gives a TON of XP. Explore everything on the map, and get bonus xp (hearts, POIs, skills, waypoints, and vistas). I love exploring, and getting a huge reward for it is really nice. My first day, I got to level 12, from exploring 2 maps. The starter area, and my race’s home town. My guildmates were amazed at how quickly I had leveled. Events. These give a large chunk of XP as well, depending on how much you contributed to the event. 

Player Level Scaling: This. I want EVERY MMO to look at this and find a way to make it work. As someone who has just started in an MMO that has been out for a number of months, I was well behind the curve of my friends who I’ve been playing with. They had told me about this, but I got to see this work in action. When you go into an area that you have “out leveled”, your level is scaled down to be appropriate for wherever you are. You do NOT scale UP when you go to a higher leveled area (trust me, I was dragged to a level 50 zone, and died, lots, although I give the guys credit, they tried really hard to keep mobs from killing me). The only exception to the leveling up rule is special events and PvP/WvW. For those you are scaled up. I was able to experience the new content that was just released, as a level 23, because of this feature. It was amazing. Your gear doesn’t change, but it does appropriate damage, your armor gives appropriate coverage, your stats are all boosted. The only thing you don’t get are your skill points, at least for the event. I have not participated in the PvP aspect of the game to give an informed decision on that. Being able to get help from my friends, and do things with them, has made my experience that much brighter. If it’s an area that they have not been to, they also get appropriate xp, and gear for their actual level. So it’s a win-win for everyone (except Chuck, because he’s max level). The only possible downside to this is gathering crafting materials from low level zones. You still can, because you’re more powerful, but there won’t be grey mobs to run past, you’ll still have to fight for those nodes, which brings me to my next point.

Crafting Material Nodes: This works. It works so well. Everyone can harvest from the same node. There is NO node stealing. That’s right, NO NODE STEALING! I about kittened out a friend for stealing the node I was gathering from, when they laughed and told me to relax, and that everyone can gather from the same node, and still get the same amount of resources. My response: Oh…that’s AWESOME!

Crafting: I haven’t done a whole lot of crafting, but, apparently, as you’re leveling, crafted gear is better, sometimes, than looted or reward gear. The system is fairly interesting. You’re given some basic recipes, however, you can also discover new ones. I’ve done a few of these and it’s pretty interesting. You add components to a special crafting screen, and it tells you if the combination can make something, or if you need to add more components. I haven’t looked up anything online about combos but I’m sure there is something out there that lists all known combos. You also do not lose any ingredients, as you can only craft something once you’ve discovered something new, and to add it to your known recipes list, you must craft the item, which gives you the item AND the new recipe. 

Story: The only “quest line” in the game is your character’s story. There are cut scenes (your character and the one they’re talking to on a static background), and these are fully voiced. Some of the characters in the world have voice-overs as well. You aren’t forced to do your character story line to level, and get to new areas.

Patching: ArenaNet and NCSoft have done something very unique and awesome with this. Instead of servers going down for 3-4 hours (or more) for each small update/patch/bug fix, they patch the server, and inform you to log out, to pick up the patch. This takes, maybe 20 minutes if the patch server is slow or overloaded. At least for the fixes they’ve put in so far. The game was down while they deployed the new area and event stuff for this weekend, but that was a major publish.

Character Customization: I like my character to look good in the game world. I like them to match, and to be able to have armor be the colors I want them to be. This might be a holdover from my days in SWG, where I could get clothes/armor in the colors I wanted to create a unique look for myself. The problem with SWG was that I had HOUSES full of clothes because you couldn’t change the color of your clothing/armor. Not here. You can change the color of your armor at any time. Yep. Decide you’re tired of black and red and want to switch? Go for it. You’re given a basic set of colors, and you can get more through dyes, that you keep, forever, for that character. I don’t mind LOTRO’s system of using dyes on each piece of clothing, it’s just expensive. 

No Subscription fee: You pay for the game, and get all content, and content updates for free. None of this paying for areas. Expansions (if they end up having them) will probably cost, but I have no problem paying for something that adds a large amount of content to a game I’ve been playing that hasn’t been charging me a monthly fee. 

Gems: You can call those little points you get from free to play games whatever you like, in GW2 they’re called Gems, in SWTOR they’re called Smuggler Coins or some such, in LoTRO and DDO they’re called Turbine Points, SOE calls it Station Cash. Whatever you want to call it, you can buy it in GW2 with in game coin. You can spend your hard earned (and extra) gold/silver/copper for Gems, and you can buy gold/silver/copper with Gems. 

Gold Sellers: They exist, but, due to open tapping, they can’t disrupt your game play. Want to spend real money for gold? I’d seriously consider buying Gems, and selling them for cash. Support the game, not the gold sellers.

That was all my praise, with a few bits of “this is what might suck about it”. Now, you’d think this game is perfect, and awesome, and that everyone should be playing it. Well, maybe that last part, especially if you’re an explorer type. However there is one major flaw with the game. There are a very large number of glaring bugs. Some of which break events completely. Let me re-iterate: Three months after release, and some of the original Events (quests) are still broken. What’s worse? The major event for this weekend, the ONE WEEKEND ONLY stuff that was to draw people into the game and make them interested enough to purchase it, was BROKEN. There were MULTIPLE NPCs that did not behave the way they were scripted to. And they have REMOVED the ability to complete the event completely from the game. So there are a large number of people who will never complete it, and an elite few who did. I’m not entirely sure who to blame for these issues, Dev for ignoring QA, or QA for not pushing hard enough to get things fixed, or the environments on which they’re testing not matching what the public servers are. Perhaps these issues are due to load which can’t be tested internally, I’m not sure, but they desperately need to iron out whatever the internal issues are so they can focus on getting the fixes in.

TL;DR: The game has sucked me in, there’s lots of good things about it, and there’s a few bad. There are bugs that have been around for awhile, and the limited time event for this weekend was broken, horribly. Despite that, fun game, and yes, I can say I own the game now.

Good summary and thanks for posting. It is nice to remember that this is largely a good game. There were just some problems this weekend that will hopefully be addressed.

It is pleasant to see you taking the path many of us took not so long ago.

Unfortunately, this ‘new’ wears off, for reasons ill describe in other posts.

Great post and I agree with everything, GW2 has such great mechanics that it’s difficult to let the game go. I tried playing RaiderZ, I just… couldn’t accept it, everything felt so shallow and not smooth at all. (even though I kinda like their idea of combat)

Anyway, cheers! ^^