Guild Wars 2

The following post was written by me and a friend. It is presented “as is”, and I’m not asking anyone to agree with us. In fact, if you are not going to read the whole thing, please don’t even bother answering. Our perceptions may be skewed at points, but they stem from our own gaming experience with Guild Wars 2, particularly as GW veterans.

Disclaimer: This is not a petition, it’s customer feedback.
Without further ado…

An Appeal for Less Time-wasting, More Relevant Content and Clearer Design Policies

Part 1

I don’t know whether other players share this perception, but Guild Wars 2 often makes me feel alienated by design policies that indirectly enforce grinding or otherwise pressure me to waste time on activities I’m not interested in. I only have a couple of hours per day for this game, so I would like to invest them on activities that are fun and fulfilling – but that also feel rewarding. Below, I will comment in detail about some of the issues that bother me the most about Guild Wars 2:

Stats dependent on item rarity: I know it’s unfair to compare GW 2 to GW 1, since they’re different games, but I had never expected 2 to be so farm-oriented – it stands in stark contrast with the first installment of the series! I feel like the root of the problem is that item rarity is associated with actual combat stats: this strongly compels players to go after equipment with the highest stats available. The result is an endless pursuit of grinding, which in turns pumps dangerously high amounts of money into the economy – which the design team has to manage by creating infamous money sinks and other frustrating changes to “slow things down”. Is it too late to revert this vicious cycle? Possibly, but things can surely be made better one step at a time.

Focus on the economy: Currently, many aspects of the game feel like money/time sinks. The tier system introduced in the April 2014 feature pack is a good example: you don’t have to spend gold to respec traits anymore, but now you have to spend it to learn them! (Unless you have enough patience to complete the incredibly long list of “quests” instead.) Another example: Fractals is a dungeon specifically designed for farming, yet it comes with a sink in the form of agony resistance infusions. This goes to show just how much the design is being influenced by ‘economic issues’, often at the expense of fun. Personally, I feel dragged into a different game called “Grind Wars”. In GW 1, I could choose not to be an active part of the economy and still have top-tier equipment (stat-wise), which enabled me to participate in anything I wanted. Sadly, in GW 2 this option doesn’t seem to exist. I find this hard to understand, considering the large amount of awesome content present in Guild Wars 2.

Transparency issues: There are patches very often, but to access the patch notes, one needs to login at the forums – I wonder how many players do that (I confess I only found that out after a nasty change caught me by surprise). Why not give more visibility to the changes you make? You have a news screen at the game loader, for Christ’s sake. It’s important to explain the rationale behind changes; this way, even if players don’t agree with you, they’ll at least understand where you’re coming from. For example, the official explanation given in the patch notes for dismantling the Queenslade farm train seemed like just a vague “front” and not at all related to the real reasons behind this decision. If you’re nerfing a drop rate or a farm route, explain that openly! Otherwise, you earn mistrust from players who, by not being let into the mindset and objective behind changes, can’t help but feel betrayed (especially when it comes to economics). Lack of a public and transparent design policy is a dangerous thing.

Part 2

Minor nuisance – Long-standing unfixed bugs: Speaking of patches, what about that Orrian Sapling that spawns inside a prop half of the time in Cursed Shore? Or the broken Harpy Queen in Harathi Hinterlands (this one seems to have been fixed, but it sure took a long time!) Or Taidha Covington’s looping death scene? Or the Megadestroyer pre-quest that bugs when people stand at the NPCs’ spawn point? There are other bugs, but those are the ones that come to mind more readily. Once again, it begs the question: where are your priorities?

The almost-mandatory crafting system: In all honesty, I despise the crafting system. It’s tedious, slow and wasteful, not to mention that the interface is confusing and looks like it has been specifically designed to make you waste time scrolling up and down repeatedly (it doesn’t even have an auto-assembly system for intermediary materials). Leveling up crafts feels excruciatingly slow and forces you to squander resources on useless items until you finally reach a high enough level to make what you actually want. I would like to stay the hell away from this and just send materials to my buddy for him to craft the items for me, but guess what? Ascended gear is not tradable. Thus, the only recourse left is grinding. Even if I did enjoy crafting, I would have to spend ungodly amounts of time leveling up multiple crafts and farming up the materials anyway, so in the end, it all goes back to farming.

A tangent – Odd economic consequences of the crafting system: As I’ve just said, there is a strong pressure for people to be crafters. And, since all you have to do to become one is talk to an NPC, everyone and their mother is a crafter. Rather than being a profession your character can specialize and work on, crafting disciplines end up becoming a mandatory hindrance to your adventuring career. You could be planning and preparing for that dungeon with your guild, but instead everyone is trying get the huge amounts of hard to find materials it turns out they’ll need (many of them for intermediary items that will never actually see any use). Because of this, the demand for crafting materials is normally higher than the demand for finished items. In terms of actual finances, this means you often end up spending more money to craft an item than you would if you bought it on the trading company… talk about a messed up economy.

Traits now require unlocking: There were positive changes in the trait system with the April 2014 feature pack, but requiring new characters to do “quests” to unlock traits was definitely not one of them. Personally, I neglected to pre-create my remaining characters before the feature pack, so I’ve been hit pretty bad by this change. Contrary to what was intended, this feels like a chore and a waste of time. Even if you decide to buy the traits, you’ll have to farm up the gold and many, many skill points, so it goes back to farming and wasting time yet again. I have no words to express just how much of a bother this is – it simply takes away the fun of a new character. Suffice to say I’ve stopped leveling up my new characters, and I will never pick them up again. Evidently, I’ll never spend money on a character slot if things stay like this.

Another tangent – Suggestions for the trait system: The idea of requiring “quests” to unlock traits is not a bad one, but I would restrict them to the grandmaster traits, since those quests are interesting (read: end-game; actually challenging; don’t feel like a chore). This would be much closer to what capturing an elite skill felt like in GW 1. I would make the adept tier unlocked at level 20, the master tier unlocked at level 40 and the grandmaster tier unlockable from level 60 onwards. I believe this would offer players a nice window to experiment with traits and start working towards getting the grandmaster traits.

Low levels overly extended: Let’s face it, the game truly starts at level 80. However, it takes relatively long to get there, and this interlude feels basically like a limbo, a long wait until you can properly start playing that character. Even if there are low-level dungeons, people will wait until level 80 to do them. I don’t know if the new trait system was supposed to give you ‘something to do’ during that wait, but the fact is it doesn’t add any fun to your low-level experience – on the contrary, makes it harder. Much of this would be solved if leveling-up was faster and most mid-level areas were rescaled and redesigned to expand the end-game experience. The game needs less mid-level areas and more max-level areas. Challenge, not chores, is what makes a game fun to play.

Part 3

Lack of meaningful challenges: Like I’ve said, what makes a game fun to play is the reward and the feeling of achievement you get when you overcome difficult challenges. Sadly, much of the end-game content isn’t actually very challenging on a strategic or tactical level. Most world bosses are just a matter of having a big enough zerg – except for Tequatl, who just feels overpowered. Then you have dungeons, which are nice, but their rewards are hardly worth the trouble and time and it takes (Fractals being the exception). Somehow, it feels like the push for extending low-levels happens because Guild Wars 2 “doesn’t have enough end-game content”. If that’s the case, shouldn’t the focus be on increasing the amount of end-game content? And what about making the end-game content that already exists more relevant? Cursed Shore, for example, is currently a stroll through the park. Personally, I would suggest converting a lot of the mid-level content into end-game and rescaling the difficulty accordingly. Some end-game areas should be oppressively difficult – this encourages social behavior and give players a more real feeling of achievement.

The reward system: This goes back to the first things I talked about – if strong equipment is the final reward of the game, players will fall back to grinding and make it impossible to have a balanced economy. GW 1 mitigated this by making stats largely independent on gold – aesthetics were the final reward. However, in GW 2, there are so many skins that they’ve become something like a commodity, lost much of their value. Additionally, since they can also be bought with gold, they contribute directly to the grinding frenzy. I don’t know what to suggest on this end, only that the core values of the game may benefit from a long-term revision, one step at a time.

Bosses immune to critical hits: Personally, I was under the impression that standardizing mechanics was one of the original design policies aimed at making all builds equally viable (after all, that’s why conditions like bleed and poison apply equally to all enemies). Players don’t get that many options in terms of builds; and Crits are one of the most important combat mechanics, often used to trigger boons and conditions. Making important bosses immune to Crits not only makes subpar equipment with Precision or Ferocity, but also severely cripples a wide range of interesting builds. Are players supposed to get a secondary set of equipment (complete with runes, sigils and builds) just for those? Honestly, this feels like yet another money sink. If you wanted to make those bosses more challenging, you could have just reduced the extra damage they take from critical hits, rather than nullifying whole builds altogether.

The Bottom Line

I don’t mind some measure of farming, but when grinding is a part of the core gameplay experience, something’s wrong. It’s understandable that you want players to spend a lot of time in the game, but there are surely better ways to accomplish this. A design policy that enforces grinding only depreciates the game, making it more ordinary and easily comparable to lesser MMORPGs (which are best left unmentioned). It detracts from the very things that make Guild Wars 2 truly unique and attractive. Business-wise, this “strategy” (if it can be called that) is the exact opposite of a competitive advantage (and I’m a senior business consultant, by the way). As a customer, I don’t feel inclined to spend additional money on Guild Wars 2, even though I own well over 200 League of Legends skins.

This game doesn’t require grinding to have fun. It’s the individual player’s desires to get certain things that drive one to grind. Once you understand this, most of what you typed will be resolved.

I have many hours invested in this game, and I’ve yet to ‘grind’ or ‘farm’ (with the exception of some BLTC keys, which I enjoy obtaining) for anything. I never understand this need so many have for grinding. There are so many things to do, why repeat something over and over if one finds it boring?

But, that’s just me…obviously part of the minority on the forums, at least.

@Smooth Penguin: Yes, you’re absolutely right. As I’ve written, the desire to have optimal equipment is what drives people to grinding. My point is that grinding is required in order to get such equipment. At least that’s how it feels.

@Inculpatus cedo: So many things to do? You may have a point. How do you suggest I spend my time, then? What are the things you usually do?

Ehrotic Avenger.7426:

Low levels overly extended: Let’s face it, the game truly starts at level 80.

…and that is where you lost me. Sorry but I whole-heartedly disagree.

Once I hit 80 with a toon I know I’ve hit endgame. Which means I’ve hit the content free peak that is GW2, where the majority of us just farm in hopes of having a good stockpile when new content is actually released. That is not a start to a game. Well… not my game.

WvW isn’t really an option for me anymore either as it seems to be dying too.

I have been playing more on my lower, “overly extended”, level toons far more than I have my 80s for a long while now.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

This game doesn’t require grinding to have fun. It’s the individual player’s desires to get certain things that drive one to grind. Once you understand this, most of what you typed will be resolved.

Your right, you don’t have to grind to have “fun” in certain parts of the game. Ascended gear does however improve your characters performance, and those that are competitive want an edge so they will have to level up crafting professions, grind and spend lots of gold or buy gems and convert. You seem to have missed where ascended gear was marketed in an interview by one of the devs as… “a minimal stat increase with the focus on zero grind”. That was a lie and players have a right to complain about being forced to craft and grind for said gear.

Skimming through what the op wrote holds true for a good chunk of players, so no you are not correct. I’m assuming since you post in the bltc threads a lot you are one of those gamers that likes to play virtual economy while many of us want a decent game closer to what gw was. There are many players out there that have not forgotten the “everything you loved about gw” statement and we many of us will bring those things up until it becomes closer to the truth.

Swagger.1459:

That was a lie and players have a right to complain about being forced to craft and grind for said gear.

Yeah NO. You aren’t, in fact, being forced to craft and/or grind. Again it is something you and other players have chosen to do. Its oh so very easy to blame, or in this case complain, when you shake off the responsibility of your own stress and try putting it on others because you argue the equivalent of “I have no choice” – Sorry but that doesn’t fly.

Sir, no-one’s forced to do anything, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the need to. It’s not about what people have to do, but what they feel they have to. Sure, I could give up on getting ascended gear for all my characters, but then the ones without would always feel subpar. No-one likes being at a disadvantage.

In my case, I feel like exotic equipment is “barely acceptable” and ascended is “ideal”, simply because ascended has better stats than exotic. Stats do affect a character’s efficiency, otherwise they wouldn’t even exist. And as long as there are different tiers of equipment, most players will be driven to go for the top tier.

Hi, I’m “The friend”.

I think with equips, part of the disparity of opinions come from us being veterans from the original Guild Wars. And as such, there is a very clear disparity disparity between equipment with “the correct numbers” and absolute rubbish. I think it’s reasonable to stretch this a bit for GW2. Full Exotic is, imo, the base of comparison for any character. If your equipment is not exotic, it’s basically trash. Ascended equipment have better stats, this makes Exotics now, also trash. Because Ascended equipment is the one with the correct numbers. Even worse, they have a whole new class of upgrades. If you have any intentions of getting into doing fractals, you need them. So when Ascended exists, Exotics are now trash as well. But they’re the trash most of us can get.

And yeah, it’s not that there’s a gun pointed to our head that says we have to craft or gtfo, or we have to grind or gtfo. But if we don’t, it’s cool. We’ll just be locked out of content and have no option but to play with sub-par equipment.

Again, this could be a reminiscent of our experience with guild wars. “You’ve finished the tutorial! Congratulations! Now go get the grown-up swords and have fun!” and the difference between common and rare equipment was all in the swagger. A Tormented shield was no better, it was all about status. And this is still present in a way with legendaries. I look at, say, The Juggernaut and I WANT to put effort into getting that skin. But there’s the thing. I WANT that skin. And I need to level up my crafting to get myself ascended equipment because I don’t want to feel like I’m playing with a crippled character. Because that’s the bottom line. A character without access to “the proper equipment” is crippled, you’re locked out of content, out of “your character’s potential” because you haven’t put in the X hundred hours for that piece of equipment that makes you deal 10% more damage, have 10% more health….

Azhure.1857:

Swagger.1459:

That was a lie and players have a right to complain about being forced to craft and grind for said gear.

Yeah NO. You aren’t, in fact, being forced to craft and/or grind. Again it is something you and other players have chosen to do. Its oh so very easy to blame, or in this case complain, when you shake off the responsibility of your own stress and try putting it on others because you argue the equivalent of “I have no choice” – Sorry but that doesn’t fly.

please reread what I posted before you decide to reply again. choice or not, there was not supposed to be a gear grind. there are a bunch of other dev quotes relevant to the ops topic that I can share and discuss if you like?

here is something else to read too…

“Ascended Gear is designed to fill the ‘Time’ gap in regard to the distance between exotic and Legendary in terms of progression and in retrospect would have been better to have been rolled out pre launch.

I would also like add that we have never said there would be no vertical progression. We do intent to focus on horizontal but we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve.

Please understand that we see the community as a ‘whole’ and therefore are not intending to design again for one specific type of player over another. This is a misconception and one that is not promoted by the team. We will continue to develop the game for the community as a whole offering game play that caters to lots of different types of players in a unified approach that will evolve over time based on feedback and the direction the team as a whole wants to take."

My reply to that: And here’s some feedback, do with it as you will.

Azhure.1857:

Swagger.1459:

That was a lie and players have a right to complain about being forced to craft and grind for said gear.

Yeah NO. You aren’t, in fact, being forced to craft and/or grind. Again it is something you and other players have chosen to do. Its oh so very easy to blame, or in this case complain, when you shake off the responsibility of your own stress and try putting it on others because you argue the equivalent of “I have no choice” – Sorry but that doesn’t fly.

In order to progress, uh yeah you are. Because top tier and the best gear isn’t from karma vendors, neither are most of the best kinds of runes or sigils, neither are the T6 mats that you have to gamble for. These things aren’t just dropped out of the sky for you, and yes vertical progression is in the game, that happened in Nov 2012.

Denying it doesn’t make it go away.

Not sure if they will use semantics there OP but Appeal might be construed as a petition by the forum mods.

Ascended trinkets and weapons are so pathetically easy to get, its not a grind.
The only thing that’s grindy is ascended armor but anet made the stat increase for ascended armor so incredibly small compared to the weapons/trinkets that it is absolutely pointless to get it.

If you go after ascended armor, you are voluntarily inflicting the grind on yourself. its not required, not for such a miniscule stat increase.

Going back to their statement: “We will continue to develop the game for the community as a whole offering game play that caters to lots of different types of players in a unified approach that will evolve over time based on feedback and the direction the team as a whole wants to take.”

That sounds like a politically nice way of being vague and uncompromising. When has this abstract entity called “the community” ever agreed on anything? It goes back to what I’ve said about transparency issues: this kind of statement doesn’t actually say anything at all about where they want to take the game.

Listening to customer feedback is the least expected from any serious company, it doesn’t really count as a policy.

Also, people are focusing on the grinding and ignoring the other issues raised, but that comes as no surprise.

Great post op! Thanks for taking the time and effort to write it all out!

Excellent post. +1s all around. Agree with the whole shebang.

I think the point about transparency is vital.

Gw2 has too many misleading tooltips and ninja changes that aren’t obvious in-game. Not everyone looks on these forums or whatever, after all. And the game’s mechanics are just woefully inconsistent.

Although the tooltips have gotten better, I do feel like Anet goes too much like “here, deal with it” way too much.

+1

Especially with regards to transparency.

I agree with some points and disagree with other.

The stuff about grind has been beaten to death and really doesn’t bear repeating.

The more general stuff relating to content and transparency is a real stickler. Quite frankly, there is an appalling lack of engagement from the developers with the community. Yes, it’s quite difficult to engage when 80% of the time all they get is vitriol and QQ, but by skimming off the cream and engaging those who do have meaningful contributions and ideas is the only way to move the game forward.

A lot of the game feels as if it’s in a limbo where designers couldn’t decide between A or B, tried to sort of compromise and ended up failing to service either end properly.

The situation with levels and scaling, imo, is one of these…. Back in GW, (Prophecies aside) once you finished the starter area, you were almost at lvl 20. You’d reach Kaineng or Kourna at like lvl 17. And the game very clearly started at lvl 20 because that’s what was expected of your character. GW2 stretched the levels (I could never find a good reason for this… still can’t) and we ended up having only two end-game areas, Cursed Shore and, later on, we got Southsun Cove as an update. We do have Frostgorge Sound and Malchor’s Leap as areas that “welcome us” to end-game, but that’s about it. The rest are scaled down, so that players can “progress through them”… except everything else in the game is designed to start at 80. You have loads of dungeons around.Except there is just no way you’re going to go there before 80. That lvl stamp is nothing more than a lie to the player. Those places are difficult, and that is good, that is excellent, imo. You need top tier equipment and all your traits and experience… that is very much end game content, but it is labeled otherwise.

So, what IS there to be done from levels 10 through 79? Not much that is productive, unless maybe you go to WvW or get a boss train like the old Queensdale train and power-level your character up… You can do map completion, you can do your personal story (but that one turns real bad starting with Battle for Claw Island, basically the time it stops being personal). Whatever it is that you do, it’s all just a wait for you to finally get to level 80, for you to finally have access to dungeons and Teqatl, and Karkas, for you to finally be able to get all your traits, for you to finally feel like investing in equipment is worth cause you’ll use it for more than a couple of weeks….
The game wants to tell us that it scales smoothly and that we have loads to do… but everything we do is just a waste of time because we’re waiting to unlock the relevant content.

Same situation with builds… So much is gone…. Some came back with trait changes, but that is one heck of a hydra. Your first character in GW2 can feel interesting and like a surprise. Starting from the second, you know how the game works. So you make your new character. You take ALL THAT TIME just to learn how the weapons work with your new class, having to kill things at random just to get your basic skills unlocked. Once you’re done, you decide to understand how the class works. You press H and go check your skills… but you can’t… before you level up and unlock them, you have no idea what they do. So you have very little idea of what kind of tactics are available to you. You go to trait tab… except you can’t even get there… What do my minor traits do? Is this weapon going to be viable for a condition build? You can’t answer any questions… nevermind not HAVING the traits, which is already very depressing as a player, you don’t even get the opportunity to fantasize with them… The game keeps telling you you have options but you’re not getting any. (not to mention all the grind that was introduced in just unlocking your traits now). At the very least, they dealt away with the abomination which was having to pay to re-specc your traits but then WHY can’t we save builds? It’s not like it takes long, sure, but why can’t we? Why can’t we easily show and tell, compare them, discuss, show a trait we just discovered in our class? This was such a huge part and as it HAS been maimed with utility skills being VERY much secondary in character, the vast majority of elites being fairly useless and weapon choice determining about 80% of your strategy… but where are the scraps we were left with? I want those scraps…I still treasure them above the vast majority of what this game came to offer me when all that was Guild Wars went away (Because, let’s face it. GW2 is not a sequel and that it is NAMED as one is merely a coincidence). But Anet gets stuck into telling me they’ve given me those scraps and presenting me with an empty basket.

This is why we talk about policies and honesty and transparency. I DID find many things I like about this game, but I can’t help but play it feeling deceived all the time. They tell me they still want no grind and put in a whole new tier of items which are better than what we had and cannot be bought or gifted, you have to grind for them yourself. Then they tell me they want to make traits easier and more meaningful and they make them harder to get. They tell me that we’re going to have this underwater thing and it’s going to be awesome. Breathers are hard to find, require a seventh rune, more weapons, bad camera and if you’re an asuran elementalist, you only have ONE choice of underwater elite.. and that’s a tier 2 elite, that’s your fiftieth skill point.

I would like to quote an e-mail that I received from the support regarding the wvw rewards.

I think this relates to the transparency issue you mention.

We suggest you check the website, forums, or social media for updates on the situation.

When I read that, I thought that they were mocking me. I need to check 4 places to find a piece of information? Yes 4, at least: the website, the forum, Twitter and Facebook?

Can’t ArenaNet focus in one place (their news website) then put references to that article on the other locations? I think this is misinformation by obscuration. There are 4 buttons below to follow them. It doesn’t mean you have to get 1 to have access to all information, no: it means that I have to have access to all 4.

Fror.2163:

I would like to quote an e-mail that I received from the support regarding the wvw rewards.

I think this relates to the transparency issue you mention.

We suggest you check the website, forums, or social media for updates on the situation.

When I read that, I thought that they were mocking me. I need to check 4 places to find a piece of information? Yes 4, at least: the website, the forum, Twitter and Facebook?

Can’t ArenaNet focus in one place (their news website) then put references to that article on the other locations? I think this is misinformation by obscuration. There are 4 buttons below to follow them. It doesn’t mean you have to get 1 to have access to all information, no: it means that I have to have access to all 4.

The thing is, we have entered a time where Twitter and Facebook are important parts of publicity. Not only is it free publicity in a very visible location, but a well-executed Twitter can bring widespread attention to your product that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Halfassing Twitter or Facebook by only linking to your main site is a very, very bad move.

As for the forums: It’s a place where the playerbase can have proper discussion on their updates and a place where interaction between the company and the playerbase leaves a tangible print that you can reference to later.

And finally, just like there are people who would prefer all of the information on the launcher, there are people who spend more time on the forums. And people who spend more time on Facebook or Twitter than they do on Guild Wars 2.

Regardless of where they put the information, it should be easily accessible from all of these channels. Once a new patch is released, fine, let’s say full patch notes are only in the forums… But when I see my game downloading stuff I want to know what it’s about. The launcher should have a news item pointing us to the forum post with the patch notes, their facebook and twitter should also do the same: “New item in the gem store, event fixes in Kryta, and more on the newest GW2 patch! <link here>”
It’s important that this information is easy to access and know about. Even if it’s something small and irrelevant, like “A problem with the last patch, half an hour ago, caused one of the children in beetletun to spawn dead and untargetable. This quick fix is just to patch that”…
It’s all about reassurance. Right now we have a small patch like that and the feeling is like “Okay, which item I need has had its drop rate reduced this time?” And because the patch just comes, you can never be sure. Unless, MAYBE, if you dig the forums and it turns out there are notes for that patch there. But you, the player, have to stop and go out of your way to search for the information, with no guarantee you’re finding it even if you do

Honestly, the design of this game often reminds me of a hydra whose heads are constantly biting each other. Paradoxes and inconsistencies ahoy. I feel like they sorely miss a set of strong and publicly divulged pillars upon which to build the game.