Guild Wars 2

Long story short I left gw2, played eso, came back to gw2.

For those who played or haven’t I wanted to share my thoughts on things I think gw2 severely suffers from that could truly make this the best mmo ever.

Things eso I think did very wrong compared to gw2

1. Combat. The combat was not that fun, skills did not feel fluent at all, a lot of bugs, most skills just didn’t even hit an enemy directly often to hit. Gw2 just feels so fluent with the combat in my opinion and has few bugs.

2. Armor/dyes. Let’s face it in an mmo you want to look awesome. Even though people may argue gw2 armor sets are boring it’s sure of a heck lot better then any other mmo by far. Ff14 sure they look incredible but every single person your class looks the same. Eso there was mixing and matching sure but the dyes never matched then unless black dye. Gw2 did a wonderful job with armor.

3. Armor sets. Gw2 just has awesome sets plus the runes for very nice customization

But what did I like in eso?

1. There was stuff to do. They keep adding actual fun content, not just meta events. For example you can pickpocket most npcs, get loot, get caught and in trouble, sell the stuff. Get repeatable quests for missions that are rewardable and fun to do. They keep adding content over and over with new places to explore and new people to talk to, skill lines that are a lot of fun to level.

2. In the past year they added thieves guild, dark brotherhood, an entire new map called wrothgar with lots of new skins for armors and weapons and world bosses a pvp/pve map imperial city.

Even though gw2 has an amazing combat system, wonderful story, great events, great armor and weapons they just don’t release content to keep a player going. Sometimes it would be nice to introduce not just a map here and there with a meta event but some really fun smaller things more often.

Say for example a thieving system in this game would be awesome to level.

Or adding a map with very hard heart quests that can even be done once a day and each one gives either a nice reward or special coins and x amount buy rewards. Just some things ANY player can hop on each day and enjoy on there own schedules.

Just a couple small examples, but gw2 by far has more potential then any game I have ever played in my life. Wish they’d use it

I agree and nice points. Why it takes arenanet so long when it looks like other devs pump out content is a mystery. Maybe it’s the engine, the way GW2 is set up idk. If they couldn’t even finish off the legendary weapon series what hope is there for the things you suggested? There is a lot about gw2 that feels that it is done on a budget. Even the raids. When do you raids in wow, there is a build up, a journey..in GW2..not so much. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them, but everything feels a bit bare bones.

And yes, there is FAR too much focus on huge map meta events. They of course can be fun, but does every new map from now on have to revolve around a big meta? There is room for smaller, more interesting focused content too?

It still remains my fav mmo, but I have given up hope of them regularly making new content. The legendary farce shows there is a LOT of organisational upheaval and poorly prioritised projects.

To be honest, the longevity of the added ESO maps comes mostly from grinding out the new crafting materials for better weapons and armor. It’s a direct product of the traditional gear-based system where every update invalidates your former best in slot equipment and forces you to farm/grind the new content to keep your characters relevant.

We already have tons of content in this game that any player can do daily for extra rewards. Dailies, fractal dailies, daily dungeon bonus, daily world boss bonus, daily (hp) champs in the HoT areas, daily crafting (and the material gathering involved in that), and probably many more “daily extra rewards” that I can’t think of at the moment.

There really is no need for another “do this task daily for rewards” system in this game, especially not if it’s content that’s made exclusively to be a playground for daily farming/grinding routines.

ESO is a nice game that has a lot of strong points. I like to play it occasionally, and a lot of good friends of mine from former MMOs play it fulltime. But saying that they’re putting out more content than GW2 is (in my opinion) false. They only put our “more” content if you define the content by the time you need to grind through the gear treadmill tier that content introduces, which is absolutely not what GW2 is about.

I am not sure if we are playing the same GW2. Sure since HoT this game has had a big content drought but before that it was almost bi-weekly updates with story, new enemies, new maps, new skins and new meta events. I hope that soon this will start to happen again but yes, the latest 6 mounts has been pretty boring.

Rasimir.6239:

To be honest, the longevity of the added ESO maps comes mostly from grinding out the new crafting materials for better weapons and armor. It’s a direct product of the traditional gear-based system where every update invalidates your former best in slot equipment and forces you to farm/grind the new content to keep your characters relevant.

This.

I think many people underestimate how big the move towards a non-degrading gear system is for GW2. It removes all the easy possibilities for the developer to simply “add on top”. Most traditional MMOs keep firing up the gear treadmil, usually combined with some minor new gameplay additions to not make it to obvious, to keep players happy and farming. In GW2 this approach does not work.

This also shines a very interesting light on the entire reward behavior versus fun mentality of gamers, but let’s not get into that.

Suffice to say, for GW2 since there is no gear degradation the available approaches arenanet has for item reward mechanics are limited to:

- alternative methods of aquisition (ideally without making older ones obsolete). See ascended items via achievements, alternative currencies, event rewards etc.
- new stat combinations and makeup (see 4 stat combos added with HoT and new suffixes)
- content specific lockouts (see agony and fractals)

It’s a lot harder to keep that player scratching that itch once material gain has subsided, and we are back at reward mechanics.

To be fair this is following on from a year in which ESO got just 1 update with new content, and that was Craglorn which is basically just another generic zone (with the exception that you can’t realistically do it solo).

It’s just a different way of doing things – they did what many people frequently ask other MMO developers to do which is focus on fixing the content they’ve already got before adding more (although according to some people they haven’t even done that. Mention anything you want added to ESO and someone will shout at you for suggesting they should do anything before fixing lag in PvP). Some people liked that, other people were bored and frustrated and much happier now they’re adding new things regularly.

I play both games, I like both and while there are definitely things I think one game does better than the other I don’t think I’d want them to be identical. I’m not sure it’d work. For example I’d love a transmutation system in ESO, but then you’d have to change large parts of the crafting system and I like how that works. It’s complicated.

Cyninja.2954:

Most traditional MMOs keep firing up the gear treadmil, usually combined with some minor new gameplay additions to not make it to obvious, to keep players happy and farming. In GW2 this approach does not work.

Yeah, GW2 instead has made major gameplay additions and kept firing up living story, sPvP tournaments and WvW to keep players happy and farming.

The horror!