Guild Wars 2

One of the major selling points of Guild Wars 2 was its truly mobile combat – a system that uses very few self-roots and allows for nearly all skills to be used on the move. And yet the community is content to exploit flaws in content design to ignore the advantages of this combat system by hiding in a corner and spamming auto-attack until everything dies.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I understand why people stack – it’s fast, easy, and smooth to a degree that trivializes content. But it’s clearly not intended. It may be a “victimless” crime, but it defies the game’s design philosophies and destroys the quality of the gameplay itself. In the end, the victim is everyone. The victim is the game, which is given a bad reputation to the outside MMO community. The victim is the player that just wishes to play the game, but cannot do so without explicitly forming “no-stack” groups and waiting a considerable amount of time for like-minded players to show up. The victim is every single player who has grown sick of the content as a result of such mindnumbingly bad community-driven gameplay.

Stacking may not “hurt” anyone in the most basic sense of the word, but it is a disease on the game and on its community – and it’s one that we inflicted on ourselves.

Rangers – The kings of kiting… noone wants to kite.

We’re in the same boat. I’ve been completely turned off dungeons due to ‘skip-n-stack’ being the rule rather than the exception. A-Net is aware of this problem though as they mentioned it as one of the mechanic choices for the Tower of Nightmares (the toxic zerg killing exploding pod things that kept everyone on the move). Molten Alliance boss fight also comes to mind.

I think we’ll see more improvements to this problem down the road with more interesting encounter mechanics punishing those that just stack in the fire.

Agree. It saddens me to see people stacking on easy fights like the ac bosses. Just have fun?

fadeaway.2807:

Agree. It saddens me to see people stacking on easy fights like the ac bosses. Just have fun?

Some find it fun to beat the boss/dungeon quickly. Some are just there for the gold to aid in the ascended grind. AC is actually easy without stacking also. Are you saddened to see people not running it naked with no traits and only white weapons?