Guild Wars 2

WARNING : very long post so sorry about that but I barely ever post so i’m saying everything on my mind Also english isn’t my primary language.

Hello, in the light of Chris Whiteside rescent post, I would like to give a shot at giving constructive feedback to the company whose game i’m trying to enjoy. Please keep in mind that it’s all my personnal opinion. I don’t feel that Anet should do everything I want just because I paid 60 euros on the game + maybe 20 euros on gems. But we all know that ignoring players concerns isn’t the way to make a succesful mmo.

My gamer’s profile : “serious casual” gamer, I play 2-3 hours a day but i’m not interested in power leveling or farming for anything. If it’s not fun, i’m not doing it (exception for the dailies in GW2 but more on that later.) I’ve never enjoyed mmorpgs i’m more of an action game fan (BF3, L4D2, Borderland2 for exemple). I always wanted to enjoy mmorpgs but i’ve tried quite a lot and I find them all unexiting gameplay wise and with boring questing so I usually quit within weeks. Until GW2.

1st of all about Chris post : thanks a lot for posting something, as you aknowledged, the level of communication from anet has been sub-optimal to say the least. Sadly, what I get from your post is a lot of PR/marketing blabla (awesome, groundbreaking etc…) and (i’m sorry to say) I felt that my intelligence was a little insulted by it. Why not say : “Please i’d like to remind you to be respectful to each other and our staff, these are real persons behind the computer, infractions will be given accordingly etc…” But anyway I don’t take it personnaly and again something is better than nothing so thanks for posting.

What I do in GW2 : mostly WvW, some PvE but only because i’m a complesionist and I like going for 100% map explo on my characters.

I’d like to enjoy PvE as I love colaborative stuff but it has several issues. For me, the main issues are the poor story and the way a story I find deeply unintersting is delivered (dialogues in the personnal story). Our character has no personnality, never gives an opinion and is given very gimmicky choices on the way. Also the lore on the open world isn’t delivered very well. Why am I “doing hearts” ? Because I need XP. Not because I want to save the day or I want to solve whatever is going on in the area. So it becomes more like a chore list then anything exiting. My favorite zones in the game are the 3 Orr zones, because there are no hearts and it’s all story/event driven. I’d love all the zones to work this way. You enter a new zone, there is something going on, events pop up around the place and you jump in, doing whatever needs to be done at that time. On the way you discover cool places (panoramas, PoI etc…)

The events are imo the best feature of the game. I do them for fun (except the “gathering” events). Of course the events would have to scale very well according to the numbers of players in the area. And i’d love all the events to give way better rewards, with maybe some unique rewards attached to the area. That’s how I would love to progress in the world. At the moment, it feels to me like a chore because of the hearts.

I personnaly find the random “living stories” totally underwhelming, with ridiculous “achievements” that do not reward skill at all or do not feel epic what so ever. It’s a grind in the sense that you are doing unfun stuff like clicking F many times to go get done with the story. Also the temporary nature of some of it I don’t like. I came back in the game after a 3 months absence to find out that there wasn’t nearly anything new to the game. So I don’t do living story anymore.

I don’t like the dungeons but sadly I wouldn’t be able to tell you why exactly so my opinion on the topic don’t really matter. Still i’d say it’s probably because of the bosses that are HP bags and because of the fight mechanics that mainly involve avoiding red circles on the floor.

I haven’t done many fractals (I think i’m level 3 or 4) but I found some of them way more fun except i’m not going to do them over and over again. But I think it’s quite nice that they are here for people who enjoy dungeoning.

About gearing, I, like many posters, totally dislike the ascended grind. It was the reason why I left months ago before coming back. Because ascended are now in the game, i’d like to be able to get them with more currencies (pvp glory, WvW tokens, karma, gold, whatever). Bottom line : i’m doing my daily to get whatever ascended I can get with laurels but if I ever feel that i’m on a disadvantage in WvW because of ascended (hasn’t happen yet as I feel most serious and skilled WvWers don’t like to grind for ascended), i’ll just quit. If it was (a lot) easier to get, I would’nt mind.

About cosmetics, I find it really sad that you have to pay gems to get all the new cosmetics that you seem to release. Also I think we need a wardrobe to change our look “on the go” without having to bind a specific gear to a look. That would be some kind of horizontal progression I would love. I love trying to match different cosmetics but sadly i’m limited in that by the system.

I don’t sPvP because of the build restrictions.

So I spend most of my time in WvW. I personnaly feel that it’s the “true endgame” of GW2. It’s the reason why I build and equip my characters. There are so many things that I find wrong about WvW that I don’t know where to start. I want to think : “Thanks to WvW GW2 is the game i’m gonna be playing for the years to come.” WvW is the motivation behind going back to PvE and levelling new characters. But sadly the true at the moment is as soon as another mmorpgs is releasing something similar to WvW, i’m going to jump ship (maybe to be desapointed by this new game but that’s another story).

1st : despite everything that i’ll say later, it’s still somewhat fun. I love roaming, I love destroying bad players, I love being destroyed by better players, and coming back to be destroyed by the same players over and over because I think i’m learing from them. I love zerg versus zerg huge messy fights, I love guild raiding and wiping bigger zergs because we are organized and they are not.

But, the biggest issue is population unbalance. I’d love to have an idea to fix it but I don’t. It’s a huge issue as it’s not fun playing blowouts (doesn’t matter if you’re on the winning or losing side). One think that might even things out a little bit is to stop rewarding the most populated server. The bloodlust buff is doing just that and the AOE cap as well. There should be a way for 10 well organized skilled players to wipe 30 pugs.

The one thing that would have, I think, a huge positive impact would be to remove the downed state. Remove the AoE cap as well. Buff the undermanned server with actual stats increase (like the bloodlust buff) and make blood lust a buff that impact dolyak speed, improvement construction speed etc…

The commander system needs to be grealty improved. (guild only commanders, PU commanders, roaming camp-capping commanders) with easier ways for the commander to communicate with whoever is on the map. (let him “mark objectives” for exemple).

Many players had some very good, probably hard to implement ideas about how to improve WvW (I remember a fun “mercenary” idea from a poster in WvW forum where you could fight for an undermmaned server if you queued on your own server).

What puzzles me the most is that I understand that WvW doesn’t have the same manpower as PvE, but this manpower is “wasted” (it’s the way I feel sorry) on things like blood lust or the upcoming leagues. Why create leagues when the game is so unbalanced ?

The level of communication in the WvW forum is terrible. We are not given any reasons as for why the stuff the devs there are making happen. Maybe there is a master plan and it will all come together latter on. Could you please share it with us ? From our perspective it all looks totally random.

Anyway thanks for reading this very long post, I hope I didn’t come up as insulting our upset or whatever. I just sincerely wanted to share some “constructive” feedback. If the game doesn’t entertain me, I won’t make no drama, i’ll leave and life goes on