Guild Wars 2

Acidic Vision, I have to 100% agree with your post above… that is what’s missing (along with a few other things, but you’re onto something there).

GW2 isn’t GW1… how many times can someone say that as “the answer” and expect to not be laughed at? No, really??

None of us GW1 lovers ever expected GW2 to be a repeat of the original. We knew that from the get-go. But there are now too many changes to the core of the Guild Wars “phenomena” that make the 2nd like a poor sequel to a great original.
I will also say that GW didn’t grow up (as some ridiculous poster said somewhere else, in much less respectful terms), nor did all of us GW fans really grow up either.
The gaming experience has changed. It just doesn’t have the team feel anymore. I have no reason to be in GW2 – nothing to work towards. I could care less about legendary weapons. I have no sense of “guild” or “team”, and I am not going to play to get on a gear treadmill or buy gold sufficient enough to ease the pain of farming.
There are other gear progression games out there – people played GW (and dare I say it, planned to play GW2) to stay away from all of that.
I do believe Arena Net staff must have changed drastically from the original core of masters who created GW and who cared enough to give GW2 a vision and breathe life into it… to a group of people doing only what they are told to do by their parent company. The “team” just isn’t there. Or at least that’s how it feels.
I’ve got so much more I could say – but let’s just keep it to a minimum…
I’m disappointed, Arena Net’s staff psychologist has completely missed the boat on guiding them to building an addicting game, and if I want gear progression, I’ll go play other games that have that niche of the gaming world really sussed out.
I don’t want GW 2 to be an exact replica of the original (just in case I wasn’t clear earlier), but I do want it to be its own unique entity without striving to be so different that its actually just the same as any other game out there, once you strip it down.
Another disappointed fan…

Isslair.4908:

Meret.5943:

I can’t explain it. There’s just something missing here.

It’s called growing up.

People change and things they loved yesterday now seem stale and boring. Not the game’s fault.

Thanks for trying to speak for me, but you’re wrong.

I played GW1 for 4 years, took 3 years off, tried GW2 for a couple months and now I’m back in GW1 and loving it. That’s not “growing up” if your definition of growing up means you don’t like playing games anymore.

Also I’ve heard the same sentiment of “something is missing” from others of varying ages in our guild. None of us can really put our finger on it.

Speaking of growing up… it helps to read a post before responding to it. I said, I can’t explain why GW2 doesn’t do it for me personally. I never blamed the game. It is possible the game will win me over, but at the moment, no.

TsubakiChi.8507:

GW2 isn’t GW1… how many times can someone say that as “the answer” and expect to not be laughed at? No, really??

If the answer is so obvious, how many times are we going to sit through the “why isn’t GW2 just like GW1 because it does ‘x’”? question? If you want a useful answer, come up with a useful question…. Which, BTW, we did eventually get to.
[/quote]

None of us GW1 lovers ever expected GW2 to be a repeat of the original. We knew that from the get-go. But there are now too many changes to the core of the Guild Wars “phenomena” that make the 2nd like a poor sequel to a great original.

Agree: GW2 is fundamentally different from GW1.
Disagree: GW2 is somehow less than GW1.

I will also say that GW didn’t grow up (as some ridiculous poster said somewhere else, in much less respectful terms), nor did all of us GW fans really grow up either.
The gaming experience has changed. It just doesn’t have the team feel anymore. I have no reason to be in GW2 – nothing to work towards. I could care less about legendary weapons. I have no sense of “guild” or “team”, and I am not going to play to get on a gear treadmill or buy gold sufficient enough to ease the pain of farming.

I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not convinced it’s a factor of game as much as it is of timing and circumstance, or willingness to use what you have. I never did have that team/community/whatever feeling in GW1. For me it was always solo. However, in a different MMO, that was very much there for me. Recently, though, it was not so much. I could look at it and blame the recent expansion, but I think it’s more than that. Peoples lives have been changing, the kinship grew, some people got busy in real life. That core team that I was used to hanging with and running with is not the same, any more than the game is.

But, honestly, it was just accident that I found them the first place. Maybe that accident will happen for me in GW2 as well. Maybe it’ll happen to you. I do know this, it’s all about getting past the gear greed and just finding something to do which is fun. I’m not sure I could define that for you. I wonder if the people you are playing with are defining it the same as you would.

There are other gear progression games out there – people played GW (and dare I say it, planned to play GW2) to stay away from all of that. I do believe Arena Net staff must have changed drastically from the original core of masters who created GW and who cared enough to give GW2 a vision and breathe life into it… to a group of people doing only what they are told to do by their parent company. The “team” just isn’t there. Or at least that’s how it feels.
I’ve got so much more I could say – but let’s just keep it to a minimum…
I’m disappointed, Arena Net’s staff psychologist has completely missed the boat on guiding them to building an addicting game, and if I want gear progression, I’ll go play other games that have that niche of the gaming world really sussed out.
I don’t want GW 2 to be an exact replica of the original (just in case I wasn’t clear earlier), but I do want it to be its own unique entity without striving to be so different that its actually just the same as any other game out there, once you strip it down.
Another disappointed fan…

Can we please, please, please, please, please, please, please (I could keep going) put aside the grind/treadmill question until they have a chance to rectify the mistakes they have stated they made regarding gating and paths for gear acquisition?

Loved GW1 (1500ish hours), love GW2 even more.

shrug

Have a 50/50 hall and GWAMM.

I like GW2 more :/

And GW1 was amazing.

GW2 aint’ perfect and ANet keeps kicking themselves in the nuts, but it has an excellent foundation

TsubakiChi.8507:

It just doesn’t have the team feel anymore. I have no reason to be in GW2 – nothing to work towards. I could care less about legendary weapons. I have no sense of “guild” or “team”, and I am not going to play to get on a gear treadmill or buy gold sufficient enough to ease the pain of farming.
There are other gear progression games out there – people played GW (and dare I say it, planned to play GW2) to stay away from all of that.
I do believe Arena Net staff must have changed drastically from the original core of masters who created GW and who cared enough to give GW2 a vision and breathe life into it… to a group of people doing only what they are told to do by their parent company. The “team” just isn’t there. Or at least that’s how it feels.

Well put. I ended up playing GW1 for the longer term primarily because there was nothing quite like going out as a party of 4 or 8 and having fun with something different (completing missions as a PUG was often an optional extra. GW2 feels like such a dramatic upgrade of the world, and yet such a downgrade in how it conveys a sense of belonging or a sense of changeability (not a word). It’s essentially a bunch of people running around, but nothing brings them together, and they rarely if ever change what they’re doing or why they’re doing or how they’re doing it.

There’s nothing akin to the desperate flight from Ascalon to Kryta (for example) to string together events. The dynamic event system isn’t long-term enough or wide-reaching enough to have players go ‘ok, tonight we’re going to push the centaurs back to the border’, and the player communication system isn’t sophisticated enough to turn a 30-person zerg on the last big enemy of an event into the pleasant experience that was a smaller party pinging targets and skills, coordinating without anything but in-game tools (and often coordinating well). I didn’t need loot narcissism or gear treadmills to replay Thunderhead Keep over and over; it was a fun challenging mission that was difficult to attempt, and fun to tweak builds and/or heroes over (the brilliant post by AcidicVision nails that aspect as well).

If anything, I would say that this complaint (mine at least) is that I want more from GW2, not less. I want better tools to coordinate & feel like I’m part of people taking down some nasty enemy beyond spamming in the lag; I want reasons to go kill stuff beyond ‘diminishing returns loot, please go to the cash shop’ etc. I want reasons to replay the same area or event trying a different approach for my own personal player progression & skill. Maybe the personal story just didn’t grip me and that’s what was missing for me; I don’t know.

This last paragraph is deliberately exaggerating for effect. GW2 ends up, for me, feeling soulless. It’s as though I turn up e.g. as an elementalist, and have one role, and most of that is spamming buttons. There’s no flavour to it, nothing that suspends the disbelief, and nothing that suggests the people around me care any more about what they’re doing.

Grammarye.3064:

This last paragraph is deliberately exaggerating for effect. GW2 ends up, for me, feeling soulless. It’s as though I turn up e.g. as an elementalist, and have one role, and most of that is spamming buttons. There’s no flavour to it, nothing that suspends the disbelief, and nothing that suggests the people around me care any more about what they’re doing.

A lot of good and relevant stuff that I snipped there. I particularly want to commend you on the thoughtfulness of your post. :-) This, BTW, is one of the areas that I think GW2 has fallen short of my expectations. I want sweeping long-term effects based on my long-term activity. If I hit level 80 and then spent my time with a bunch of others keeping the Sons of Svanir penned up, so that the low level characters could gather ore from a particularly good mining spot (or pick your real-world consequence) that would be amazing to me. The game is close there and I can suspend disbelief for long enough to feel like I really made a difference in that Krytan village I just rescued from centaurs. But it misses the boat in that I can’t maintain the changes that I’ve made.

However, with the theme of this thread… I’m certain that always bothered me more about GW1. Changes were only in instances. If I went back to a 4-man area, no one had noticed the changes wrought in the world.

JaironKalach.4938:

However, with the theme of this thread… I’m certain that always bothered me more about GW1. Changes were only in instances. If I went back to a 4-man area, no one had noticed the changes wrought in the world.

Thank you, and quite right on the instancing effect – I think this is what inverted in GW2 but needed to go further.

I think the essence of my post, on re-reading it, is that in GW1 what changed is you the player – for example you experimented with a build, went out into an instance, got your kitten kicked (or not), and learnt from that. In GW2, that has gone, but much less changes instead. I find myself yearning for that larger-scale change & consequence to my actions, as though I end up yelling internally ‘is anything I’m doing here achieving anything at all?!’

If nothing else, it’s an interesting discussion on what psychologically we perceive as progression vs stagnation, and how that varies from player to player.

I have become less tolerant of class railroading over time. A lot of people love building classes and characters. All the MMO’s I have played in the last 5 years only allow very specific builds.

I thought Rift might change this, but instead they ended up with complete cookie cutter builds. And as the game went on, they nerfed and nerfed until you only had a couple of character choices in the end.

I guess I miss being able to invent a character and class.

GW2 is a “big boy’s” game? Made me laugh so much I almost fell off my chair.

As for the Nay sayers…….. if you want to play a gear progression game go play WoW or 4Story or a heap of others. GW1 was unique in that you had to learn to overcome restrictions and improve your play/setup. They have taken everything from GW1 for sure, but instead of using it they threw it in the bin, thus leaving a game that has nothing whatsoever special about it.

I’ve realized I had stopped playing this game for the past 2 weeks or so and didn’t even think about it. The horizontal progression was great in gw1, I always had max level gear and always craved to obtain new weapons and skins that were rare. Even farming in gw1 was alright, it wasn’t mandatory and a lot of the rare stuff dropped from mobs. The art style and the whole atmosphere/feeling of the game seemed better. The shiverpeaks were my favorite area and with the dark, cold, and snowiness along with the incredible music was just awesome and made the game more immersive. Everything seems so cluttered and unorganized in this game. I have like no desire to even get any of the exotic skins, not sure why that is I have no real reason but they don’t seem epic or anything. Everything seems generic and since armors are based on armor class you aren’t really able to feel a style within your own profession. Now the skill system has also started to wear me down…. It’s boring now. Really boring. Sure it’s more action oriented, sorta fps-ish and 3rd person action game-y but I’ve gotten bored of the same couple skillsets I’ve had since the first ten minutes I started. I love that they tried to do a more action packed playstyle, but with an mmo it just turns into a dodge fest. Action game playstyles don’t really seem to work too well with rpg combat. I still like the gameplay, but Idk it’s not like I prefer it over gw1. Gw1 action was more precise and crisp. Now back to the limit of skills. Sure you can argue that in gw1 a lot of skills were useless and there were meta builds, but then again the combat was more pre planning and strategic. In gw2 I don’t feel like my character has changed from level 15-61, where 61 is my highest level atm(mainly cus i don’t have the urge to play or obtain higher levels). I’m using the same skills, starting to obtain some more unique skins for stuff but it all looks generic still, and I totally miss capping elites. Capping and elite was awesome fun in the first game, and sometimes challenging. To summarize my thoughts on the skills, I miss the customization and uniqueness and the discovery of new builds. The lore in the first game was wayyyy better, it was darker and had intelligent bad dudes who actually had a personality. I actually wanted to kill the eff out of shiro for being such a kitten. But in this game we’re fighting dragons. Now I love dragons, but I just don’t get it. Dragons come to tear stuff up, so the human gods decide that they are wussies and run, but I don’t really feel a real threat. The story missions for me has mostly been that I get targeted by a mod and run in circles throwing aoe behind me untill they die.

But all the biased hate aside, I believe the real reason this game is going downhill is because they give you everything you need to easily, then make all the rare things way to hard to obtain. They are balancing the game around bots in order to make the market stable, but its keeping any normal human being from obtaining anything desirable and goals that are just not worth reaching. Cosmetic achievements are rad, but are only worth it to a certain point.

I played GW1 off and on since the very beginning and this is my take:

I think I’m echoing a lot of the previous posters when I say that the thing I miss most about GW1 is the meta-game. I probably spent more time theory-crafting new builds than I did actually playing those builds. I loved finding that perfect team composition where all the parts combined in just the right way to counter the latest fad.

With that being said, I don’t think it’s been long enough to see how the GW2 meta is going to play out. GW1’s meta evolved incrementally over the years while GW2 has been out for a few months. Interestingly enough, I think the trading post has introduced a meta-game that’s evolving more rapidly than the game-play. My out-of-game time has shifted from theory-crafting new builds to theory-crafting new ways to play the TP.

What do I like about GW2?
- The sense of community. GW2 encourages you to play with other people. Once they added heroes in GW1, I didn’t PvE with randoms ever again.
- WvW combat. In fact, WvW is probably the primary thing that keeps me playing GW2.
- Quality of life improvements. Depositing collectibles to the bank or selling to the TP on the fly takes away the pain of inventory management from GW1 and other games.
- The emphasis on spatial awareness. GW1 did this well too, but having an awareness of what is going on where on the battlefield is more important than ever. This is probably the most salient quality that both games share in common. A well timed Entangle brings back fond memories of placing Ward Against Foes in a choke point.

If I were to suggest a direction for GW2 to go in the future, I wish it would be easier to store gear/trait/skill configurations. Inventory space is at such a premium in GW2, that carrying around a Power set, Condition set, and Tanky set isn’t really feasible either. I think that being able to store and change builds/gear rapidly would help encourage more build experimentation. This in turn could help the meta evolve a little bit faster.

Just my $0.02.

AcidicVision.5498:

Rose tinted glasses. If you look back at the first GW, it launched with precious little content. For PvE you only had the story and two “dungeons”. For PvP you had Arenas, GvG and HoH.

Not to mention they changed builds every day – so when you found a build you like be ready to find something new next week.

Though I believe leveling was less boring in gw1, still took a while. It’s a matter of prospective, and anyway you slice it time = progress in any game.

Crafting – pretty easy and painless imo. I remember gw1 I run to the next town, save money, spend all the money upgrading my armor… continue. (Until I started charging for that long run on my warrior). Crafting offers a little more variety and honestly is cheaper if you keep it up every 5 levels.

Gems – most bonuses can be gained though guilds, but yes, it’s a necessary evil. Business model standing, no way it can stay free and provide constant new content without a p2p mechanism. Board Members > Publishers > Developers – way of the world my friend. You don’t ‘have’ to use the store, most are for convenience above all else.

Gold – Quite easy to earn gold – I just run a few instances like AC. 20 minutes, 20 silver or so. Fractals is a bit better if you sell what you find.

Grind – Only true grind is dungeon armor, which can be obtained by crafting (looks a bit silly imo). It’s free and relatively painless. It took me a week or two to get my full 80’s gear at a lazy pace.

So yes, I GW2 provides me the entertainment I need. I found some aspects more enjoyable in GW1 (especially the stories), but GW2 runs with the same spirit.

Also you need to be aware that launch of GW1 was terrabad. If all the rebuilding due to changes didn’t kitten you off, the lack of content would. I honestly see GW2 have a TON more content then GW1 did at the start.. and it’s only just starting.

So don’t base your opinions on a game that ran 3 years with 234234 expansions yet, give it time. Or find a game you find more enjoyable on your limited time.

Well OP asks why I feel the way I do but honestly you took all the words out of my mouth and as I’ve stated these issues across the boards for months they all go ignored by ANet. It’s clear they are aiming towards a new demographic not old GW fans so we are being left behind in the dust.

That’s the sad fact and yes it hurts :/ RIP GW franchise, at least we still have a dead game to go back to though right…?

I saw some kid mention rose colored glasses.. all I’ll say to you is go back to the WoW forums please, leave that stuff out of these boards. These are all legitimate complaints.

Rukia.4802:

Well OP asks why I feel the way I do but honestly you took all the words out of my mouth and as I’ve stated these issues across the boards for months they all go ignored by ANet. It’s clear they are aiming towards a new demographic not old GW fans so we are being left behind in the dust.

That’s the sad fact and yes it hurts :/ RIP GW franchise, at least we still have a dead game to go back to though right…?

I saw some kid mention rose colored glasses.. all I’ll say to you is go back to the WoW forums please, leave that stuff out of these boards. These are all legitimate complaints.

And that particular member had some quite legitimate answers to many of those complaints. He or she was also quite articulate and thoughtful with the post. Not attacking, or rude. Maybe you should go back to the WoW forums with that kittenty attitude, eh?

Also, why are so many people coming out and speaking for GW1 players as a whole? Surprise: You don’t. Lots of words being thrown around like ‘most’ and ‘we’ and ‘us’. You can speak for yourself, yes, but I certainly didn’t sign off on my voice being lumped in with the all the naysayers. I logged 2000+ hours into the first Guild Wars, and I certainly don’t agree with much of what has been spouted in this thread like it’s some sort of community manifesto all of us have unwittingly signed.

Though I don’t want to take anything from some of the points that have been raised. Yes, I would like more variety in builds. Yes, I’d like my actions to have a more lasting presence in the game world than just a ten minute pause between the bandits coming back for the 10,000th time. Bugs need to be fixed. Balance issues addressed. Not arguing that. But the rhetoric from the grumpy-bums around here is getting nauseating.

But what do I know? I’m just a long-time Guild Wars player that happens to love Guild Wars 2, despite its imperfections. So return to your previously scheduled kittening.

I played GW1 for years also.
What I miss are the pre-sear area, the missions, the variety of skills, and the guild halls. I miss the collectors. I miss having districts instead of different servers. I miss the heroes too but I understand why we don’t have them here. I miss the funny conversations the heroes would have. Somehow the npc’s in gw1 seemed to have more individual personality to me than most of them in gw2.

I like GW2 gameplay. I like that you can cast spells while moving. I like the way you can have all your pets with you. I like the map completion method here. I like having more than one race to play. I like jumping. I like that I can heal or rez other people not in my group. I like that you can play together in the open world rather than it all being instanced.

I feel the same way in many aspects. I’ve stopped playing GW2 since just after The Lost Shores, partly due to finals coming up, partly due to lack of interest. I almost feel like going back to GW1 until something else shows up.

I attribute my lack of interest to 3 main branches.

1- Lack of progression. GW2 lacks a sense of intermediate progression, take for example the title track system. Until you fully complete the requirements for a title, you get nothing, once you acquire the title, there’s nothing more to be done. The GW1 title track comes with varying levels of completion, which indicates the dedication of a player, and gives a sense of progression and accomplishment, without a massive overarching long-term goal.

2-Combat- This is largely based on opinion but the combat in GW2 feels like every time I enter a fight, I’m just going through the motions, it basically feels like I’m fighting from muscle memory. You could argue that every MMO is like this, but GW1 really instilled a sense of complexity, you had to react to changing conditions, and most importantly it got you to think about what you are doing.

3- Anet Blunders and Apathy- I really am sensing a sort of Apathy from Anet. This doesn’t feel like the company that made and ran GW1. They keep the community in the dark concerning their gameplay changes, while the community is desperately trying to determine some sort of pattern or order to the decisions ANet makes. Please ANet, we aren’t troglodytes, communicate with us! Oh and the way ANet continually chases the White Whale of Esport is akin to a doctor in an ER show, continually defibbing a patient that’s dead. It’s NEVER going to happen. Meanwhile, WvW is all but ignored with a massive playerbase that are thrilled, and are waiting for Anet to take it to the next level.

If anyone needs a Ritualist in GW1, please send me a message, I may just go back, If I can find a motivated group.

Grammarye.3064:

If anything, I would say that this complaint (mine at least) is that I want more from GW2, not less. I want better tools to coordinate & feel like I’m part of people taking down some nasty enemy beyond spamming in the lag; I want reasons to go kill stuff beyond ‘diminishing returns loot, please go to the cash shop’ etc. I want reasons to replay the same area or event trying a different approach for my own personal player progression & skill. Maybe the personal story just didn’t grip me and that’s what was missing for me; I don’t know.

I agree with this. The more I think about it, this is exactly what started chipping away at my smile every day I logged on to GW2. I didn’t feel like I was really a part of anything. I didn’t enjoy the story. The rewards for doing anything are generally minimal. There’s no real incentive to play with other people, because outside of dungeon grinds, nobody really wants to do anything with other people.

Metalripper.5406:

3- Anet Blunders and Apathy- I really am sensing a sort of Apathy from Anet. This doesn’t feel like the company that made and ran GW1. They keep the community in the dark concerning their gameplay changes, while the community is desperately trying to determine some sort of pattern or order to the decisions ANet makes. Please ANet, we aren’t troglodytes, communicate with us! Oh and the way ANet continually chases the White Whale of Esport is akin to a doctor in an ER show, continually defibbing a patient that’s dead. It’s NEVER going to happen. Meanwhile, WvW is all but ignored with a massive playerbase that are thrilled, and are waiting for Anet to take it to the next level.

And this iced it for me. I think, with all the issues I had with the game, this is what killed my enthusiasm altogether and turned me into a very disappointed fan. ArenaNet doesn’t communicate often, or well. They speak in vagaries. Their explanations and defence of the manifesto is weak, weasely, and generally ignored as much as possible. Staff comments are buried in Reddit, and players on their own forums are generally ignored.

And when they do talk…

- I’ll refer to the AMA here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PmsDw6AfTYzy7Wh1j_bnaz4Fyop3_8wpbxGcxrhgNUI/preview?pli=1&sle=true

- and this post, buried in Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/13tuac/im_the_studio_design_director_on_guild_wars_2_ama/c7762pk )

…it always seems like they’re trying to convince us, the players why we should like what they’ve made. If we need convincing, something is wrong! If this game was healthy, I think we’d be talking quite a lot with ArenaNet about the future of the game; rather, there is no dialogue and we get infrequent and weak semi-answers to player’s concerns. This just doesn’t feel like a healthy relationship, to me.

At any rate…

A few of you who like GW2 have said so here (and thank you for those responses!) but I haven’t really heard a convincing argument about why it’s such a special game. I guess this was a last-ditch effort on my part to find a reason to keep playing – but so far, all I see is that almost everything that kept me coming back to Guild Wars is gone from this game. I’ll keep checking back to see what people have to add to the discussion, but I’m not feeling very confident at the moment.

Fuz.5621:

To OP: I, and many more, share your sentiment.

They had an amazing game in their hands, and they’re destroying it piece by piece.

I agree sad to see all that potential just flushed down the toilet.

No they aren’t the same games but after years of WoW and WoW clones there is a significant market ready for something different especially on a ftp model… This is what GW2 promised and this is also what they have failed to deliver it’s getting more and more clone like with every patch.

Well, it’s important to realize that this isn’t Guild Wars, but rather a true MMO where classes and progression matter more.

Having said that, there isn’t a real manifestiation of goals or things for players to do. As a subscription game, this would be faring worse than even TOR. But since it’s free-to-play, it will be hard to tell of it’s actual success.

I personally think without major new systems such as raiding added, the game will be a niche of a niche even more than GW1 was, and something tells me that’s not enough to support it.

I think that they have been caught also.
Before launch people hung on what they said and took it to heart. Gamers looked forward to it.
Now they have done things that have caused us to scrutinize their work. We challenge them on everything they say now.We arent the happy people we were we are now demanding customers.
They should have been prepared for this but werent.
I find it really sad that they cant even come out and state a long term vision or goal for this game.
If they have a direction and plan show it so people can just leave instead of checking back in the forums to see if Anet said anything about a certain topic or what the plan is.

I’m in “nearly” full agreeance I play almost exclusively pvp nowadays because nothing else holds any interest, like you said everything i absolutely LOVED to death from gw1 is just flat out gone… it doesn’t exist at all in this game, this is coming from a true pvx-er in gw1 my time was like 50/50 pve/pvp played gvg (which why the kitten is there no guild wars in ze gilde worz), dungeons and just played casually and loved all of it, I’ve got 2 characters to lvl 80 and just about ragequit the first time through i REALLY think they should have stopped the leveling at 30-40, there’s no real function to having stupid-long leveling leveling should be (as the gw1 philosophy goes) just there to teach you the basic mechanics of the game and give you a semi-decent feel for what you’re doing, anything beyond that is a frustrating grind (so much for eliminating the grind from gw2)
But yeah… no i’ve not been playing the game that much, i feel horribly left out as a huge gw1 fan and i feel i’ve been completely cheated out of my money, and when i’m playing the game pvp is the only part worth playing because at least there everyone’s roughly equal, and I can play whatever class I want, whenever I want and there no 100+ hours of grind to get there and subsequent gold-farming (which anti-farming code, really anet? really?)

Chuo.4238:

Stuff like that is just not possible in GW2. Of course GW2 isn’t GW1. I didn’t expect it to be. However, I DID expect it to be better

I’m fine with this sentiment. I understand where it’s coming from. You spend years of your life investing time and money into a game, enjoying it for at least enough time to give you a good impression of it after the fact. It’s part of your development. Many of us grew up and matured with GW1 – it’s like a friendly old family dog who’s getting a bit old. GW2, by comparison, is a new puppy – it might be fun on occasion, but it’s not the same and it never will be. It’s too different – too needy, too noisy and it’s not house-trained yet.

But some of the expectations heaped on GW2 seem unreasonable to me. I wouldn’t deny that ANet had the potential of changing up the MMO market with the game, and I wouldn’t deny that many seem to be basing their feelings towards the game on the pre-release communications which spoke pretty highly of the game they were working on (and understandably, both from a business perspective but also because the Devs probably believed a lot in the game themselves and I’d hope still do). But expecting GW2 to be better than GW1, after years of build-up and only a few months of release is asking a lot – perhaps too much, considering your potential emotional investment in the whole thing.

For every person I see say that they’re leaving, I think it’s a shame. Instead of contributing to and shaping a new community and experience, they’re cutting loose – I understand why, but I just don’t feel the same as them.

proxy.7963:

For every person I see say that they’re leaving, I think it’s a shame. Instead of contributing to and shaping a new community and experience, they’re cutting loose – I understand why, but I just don’t feel the same as them.

Some are still here, trying to share how they feel about the game.
But gw1 community got screwed up, Gw2 is a full new game (and does not take everything we loved about Gw1, best joke ever), I don’t feel I owe anything anymore, I’m waiting to see what’s coming next before I trust them again.
And people they got buying the game, coming from other well known games… Meh, it can’t be the same spirit anyway, their vision is different.

And maybe I will address some prayer to the green frog.

proxy.7963:

For every person I see say that they’re leaving, I think it’s a shame. Instead of contributing to and shaping a new community and experience, they’re cutting loose – I understand why, but I just don’t feel the same as them.

Not cutting loose yet. I think a lot of us who have gone back to GW1 or other games, are still coming back here, and following GW2 on facebook, etc, to see how things might progress. Can’t give up so fast.. been waiting 4 years for this game lol.

Alipius.4783:

And maybe I will address some prayer to the green frog.

Hear hear! Hat’s off to that sentiment

Meret.5943:

been waiting 4 years for this game lol.

Yeah, you have. Awful quick for anyone to give up just yet, if you ask me.

Alipius.4783:

Some are still here, trying to share how they feel about the game.
But gw1 community got screwed up, Gw2 is a full new game (and does not take everything we loved about Gw1, best joke ever), I don’t feel I owe anything anymore, I’m waiting to see what’s coming next before I trust them again.
And people they got buying the game, coming from other well known games… Meh, it can’t be the same spirit anyway, their vision is different.

And maybe I will address some prayer to the green frog.

You don’t owe anyone anything – that’s true. But if any of those who really love GW1 want GW2 to be a similar experience – not the same, because it can’t be, but provide you with similar good feelings – then refusing to support these shaky first few months is the worst thing you could do. I see complaints about the negative feedback threads and sometimes I agree, sometimes not (largely it’s the way the feedback is being given that’s the issue with me) but that you apparently believed in GW1 as much as you did is a testament to the quality of the game – a game that was shaped over the years by its players. GW2 will never be able to mature like that without contributions and ANet will never make changes that you’re happy with if you don’t support them while they do. It’s counter-productive. From an emotional standpoint, it makes pretty good sense that you’d want to leave after being let down. But not if you actually want things to change.

proxy.7963:

But if any of those who really love GW1 want GW2 to be a similar experience – not the same, because it can’t be, but provide you with similar good feelings – then refusing to support these shaky first few months is the worst thing you could do.

I agree. Which is why I started this thread, and have shared my opinions in other threads. I’m hoping that ArenaNet see a trend here, and accept some of the feedback they’re getting from their longtime fans that are now feeling alienated.

I really, really hope that people of consequence at ArenaNet, and not just Moderators, read this stuff and discuss it at their meetings. I just wish they’d talk more about it to us.

I’d like to see threads like this one stay alive, constructive, and polite, so we can get our point across before it’s too late.

Please please, everyone, however you feel about the game, let’s talk about it so, hopefully, things get better for all of us.