Guild Wars 2

Hi,

This post is to talk about about some things which, as a veteran player, I still find counter intuitive after years of playing Guild Wars 2. I’m writing this to sort of highlight these things for the Devs who are trying to draw in new players. I’d expect that if I still find myself thinking this way then a new player will struggle with them too.

Guilds Serve No Purpose:
This really should come last, but I’m going to put it up first because that is how it usually has gone in the MMO world. In MMOs the classical model has been the Holy Trinity. Thus, you do things as a group with a set score of people who – over time and experience – you’ve confirmed are solid people for your play style and objectives.
Classically this meant you formed 120 people together to take down a Dragon, 70 at minimum. They didn’t kill-steal, deliberately wipe the group, and didn’t go out of their way to be inconsiderate in whatever way that happened to be on that particular MMO.
In Guild Wars 2 most of the content can be done without ever interacting with another human being. This never really changes as, while the game may be designed in such a way that it mimics the classical experience of the uber-zerg (40 person plus blob of people moving around by accident) the fact is this is not accidental. The blob-train / zerg-bolb of Guild Wars 2 is (now) a simple fact of game mechanics.
New players to Guild Wars 2 will find this to be considered ‘group content’ counter intuitive. The same goes for anything related to ‘raiding’ and ‘guilding up’. Most games work on the model (and always have) that you build up a guild of at least 40 people and thereby you are set. With this guild you’re going to do a fair bit of everything the game is ever going to offer. Additionally, and very important as well, you’re going to need to do this.

No Down Time, No Nostalgia, No Community:
- Nothing really classical about MMOs goes on in Guild Wars 2. It has its roots in those things, but the game is much more fluid. In fact, players will spend most of their time moving rather than camping an area of the game for any period. Whole zones are accounted as ‘places to be’ rather than sections of the zone.
Currently it appears that Silverwastes is ‘the place to be’. Arah is for those few souls who learned it enough to feel confident there, but that’s the exception. Silverwastes is the perfect example of the Guild Wars 2 experience and how very different it is from any other MMO. In most MMOs the Silverwastes would be considered a once a year event. This would be ‘the place’ where ‘that thing’ occurred ‘last year’ everyone’s still talking about. The hordes of people moving around would have been organized by major guilds of this or that server. During the down time to regenerate health, mana, endurance and/or other stats players would talk about the battle they just had, life in general, and fret if they would regenerate enough for the next fight. All of this builds up community and a sense of “I’m with them” and vice versa. Just as important these down time periods made players feel as though “they” were the ones who “held the castle”. Strategies would be discussed. New tactics would take place. They’d be using “that brain thing” and “that heart thing”.

In Guild Wars 2 most of the experience of game play is ‘keep moving, keep moving, KEEP MOVING!’. Nothing lasts and nothing’s given enough time to have any feels about it. The rare exception to this is a fight that bugs and was ‘solved’ on the fly, someone messes up and things “turned epic”, and the like.

Especially this lack of the sacred comes out strong in WvW where the loss of a keep is meaningless just as holding a keep is meaningless. These things are ‘flipped’ like pancakes. Everyone gets a slice, but it doesn’t matter this constitutes a loss for your ‘team’ (server).

Most MMOs have downtime, “hold the castle” camps (be it in dungeons or open world), etc. Nothing they do has any consequence on the world. Saving a town in Kryta from Centaur is meaningless since they’ll take it back in a few minutes. Whereas the expectation of a Dynamic Event is that “Now the centaur have a foothold here. Doesn’t that mean they’ll expand?” They don’t, they won’t, and they never will. So, players learn quickly the whole world is just a series of binary events infinitely repeating. It’s not ‘Dynamic’ because nothing is random and nothing changes. The average player from another MMO may find the sum of these experiences as something like a desert or flatland. The absence of consequence in the game because of the near-instantaneous of all things in the open world has remained immensely jarring from me compared to other MMOs.

The real exceptions to this sort of thing are jumping puzzles as players frequently work together to complete them, tutor, or assist in various ways through the difficult parts.

Some Positive Things, but Have to be Learned:

Exploration and full use of the map is really where this game signs. From 1 to 80 the game is really sort of a drag. Just like Guild Wars 1, if you’ve played from level 1 to 20 you’ve played through everything the game has to offer challenge wise. It’s when you’ve reached level 80 and are beginning to 100% maps that the world really shines. The frustration of being skill locked (thanks to the new and unnecessary system) or always present access to appropriate gear stats for the level range is over. You can go off and do what you want to do. Unfortunately, this is usually not a problem in other MMOs. In those the armor systems, weapon systems, and skill gains, follow in a way appropriate to the character’s level range. It’s not an arbitrary shortage. The whole game follows a design of increasing difficulty in tune with appropriate gear/skills/abilities. Having only 10 skills and maybe as many more (counting weapons) a player will ever have and want to use is a massive kill-joy for many who are used to playing games with 60 or so abilities they can fit on their action bars by endgame. Having played long enough, I actually do like the limitations of Guild Wars 2. It may be frustrating to have 10 skills and few I find useful, but the long term result is that things are balanced and managable. Unfortunately all of this is so 180 degrees from the classical and standard model of MMO design that most new players I’ve talked with find it all very confusing. This isn’t really a bad thing and I’m fairly convinced it’s one of the major reasons this game thrives it is very jarring for a beginner.

There’s Really Nothing to Do:
This comes back to grouping. The longer you play this game the more you realize how lonely it is. This is probably the hardest thing for sticking with Guild Wars 2. I didn’t join an MMO to play solo. Unfortunately, the game is so watered down when it comes to group content, challenging group content, and trying to be different when it comes to how group content takes place that I think the devs simply have forgotten games are meant to be a place to “play” and “have fun”. It’s a little hard to do that when there’s no healing class, the only meta is berzerker, and the only things to do force you to be running ALL THE TIME. Whereas, I could log on World of Warcraft, slap on some vanilla gear and go do a classical dungeon raid with every expectation “this could take a while, but while we’re waiting for mana/health and cooldowns (sometimes as much as half an hour), ‘How was your day?’” Or “Geez, Balzog really cut it close on that last pull, huh? I had to use my cooldowns.” …which follows with some fond laughter, “I know right?” And so the conversation goes on. This is how friendships come about and years later you’re still talking with each other. In Guild Wars 2…

So, while I think the game has improved and continues to improve over the years, it’s really become something completely different from the usual MMO. Generally all of these differences have proven to be for the better, but not all are necessary and many fall short of their potential.

Just some thoughts that have stayed with me in the years playing this.

Waypoints – Death, Dying, Community, and Content Appreciation :

Waypoints are one of the other big things that sets Guild Wars 2 apart from other MMOs. While many MMOs have had a teleport system of one sort or another, usually such a system would take you only so far as a capital city, a port of harbor in some frontier, or an outpost. In the vast majority of all of these circumstances it was a player-character who actually preformed the teleportation.

Guild Wars 2 has eliminated both of these things (the player teleports and the limited location teleports). This is one thing which I think has greatly diminished the game which most other MMOs have been careful to avoid. Dying has increasingly become a less punished thing in MMOs, but it is creeping back to a real factor of gameplay for some very simple reasons.
The first of these is that when you die you have to come back to the last place you ‘bound’ your character’s ‘soul’ or whatever the lore says about it. Bind Locations are usually outposts, cities, and the like. When a character dies in this way they don’t simply open the map and teleport to the nearest Waypoint. Instead, they have to run (sometimes through many regions) without any teleport what so ever. This increases the sense that there is actually a ‘world’ to be played rather than a series of instances and moments disconnected from any continuum. The world’s aesthetics become tangible and its various constitutions have a depth (bought about by the circumstance of temporal transitions) – travel.

This is another quality of Guild Wars 2 which can be dissuasive for many players of more classical MMOs. There is a real issue that, again, after level 20 a player has really seen all the mechanics of this game. Traveling through a frontier is one of the only things this game has absolutely no content for (save when there was a Super Adventure Box) and that doesn’t count. Jumping Puzzles are as close as it comes in this game to the experience of real risk and real loss (of time).

Again, this may be another one of those things that will really dissuade new players who are very quickly going to be looking for new experiences in the game and finding very little. This will intensify with age. It’s one of the rare pieces of content in this game which actually does get worse with age and yet cannot really be argued to do so in other MMOs where travel between locations is a timely affair by foot, mount, or some version of a delayed process like air travel. It’s also one of the more bizarre things to be lacking on as the really brilliant thing about this game is de-leveling to a region’s max level or leveling up to 80 for wvw, pvp, and the like.

I definitely understand what your saying in this wall. Some of these are why I cant get into guild wars 2 fully, I play for 2 weeks maybe a month max then take a year break. So far I am disappointed with my GW2 experience.

A lot of these are reasons that this is the only MMOG that I’ve ever enjoyed.

They set out to be different from other MMOGs so as to avoid catering to the same market and trying to compete with already far more established MMOGs.

I tried WoW, and it was awful. The worst part of it to me was all the waiting. Log onto my hunter to see if Ban’thalos is up, no? Try again in an hour until it is. Want to do literally anything while traveling? Stand in place for a few seconds to remount every single time. Play an arcane mage? Stop to regain health and mana after every single challenging encounter.

Agree with a lot of the things said, not everything natural (this is the internet after all!).

Especially liked the comments about how group play works in this game.

Also, I respect a good old fashioned wall of text, +1 to you sir.

In every MMO I’ve played, Zerging was a derogatory term. I still can’t shake that feeling, and I avoid the world bosses because of that. Champ farms were even worse.

Every morsel of new content devolves into a timed Zerg stampede.

Loss of our home server communities made this a very lonely game indeed. Most of my friends list were people I would chat with in Fort Aspenwoods LA, and honestly, all of them are gone. I don’t form those friendships now, every map is random and transient. I only go to LA now for the mystic forge, and only when we lose garrison in WvW.

I appreciate your sentiment but I totally disagree with you.

When I play a game the goal is to actively engage in gameplay. NOT SIT AND WAIT. I love being able to kill something, get OOC (out of combat) and be ready for the next fight in a few seconds. I spent enough time in GW1 spamming “GLF Monks 6/8”

You complain that you are lonely. Then you complain that every event is a blob fest.. You are SURROUNDED by other players. If you are lonely its because you choose not to interact with others.

You also said guilds have no point. You complain that you are lonely. Join a fun guild and you will quickly see the point to guilds.

You dislike being able to waypoint to a nearby position if you somehow manage to die in open-world content. I absolutely love that option. I don’t want to waste 5-10 minutes of my day running through trash mobs just to reach a place I have already been. Dying should have very little consequence… In the end its a game and I should not be punished for playing it. They removed armor repair costs for this exact reason! No one wants to be punished for learning a new build or class. If you don’t like waypoints then you can choose not to use them.

You say that new players experience all features of the game by level 20. I don’t think that is a bad thing at all. Would you rather spend the first 60 levels only being able to use 2-3 of your weapon skills? Players gain access to gameplay feature early because it makes the game interesting and gives them a chance to hone skills needed in competitive gameplay.

While I agree that dynamic events really don’t cause meaningful changes, they do provide interesting mini-stories within zones. As a new player you don’t realize that what you are doing has been looping non-stop for 3 years. Those centaurs own a bunch of land and its your job to take it back!

Sorry if this post came off as hostile. I started my MMO career playing Everquest on the PS2. Gameplay consisted of forming 4 man grps (tank, healer, 2 dps) stacking near a spawn point, and pulling mobs to the group 1 at a time. You ground to max level (took at least 6 months) then made a new character. Sometimes I do feel nostalgic for the good ol’ grind. That’s when I head to the SW or join the World Boss train. If GW2 doesn’t scratch your MMO itch then maybe its not the game for you.

A lot of you complaints are what bring people to the game.

PacoXI.7690:

A lot of you complaints are what bring people to the game.

I find this too. I’m here because a lot of this doesn’t exist. As for reason to be in a guild, well, being social and having people to play with is a great reason to be in a guild. Not everyone likes to pug. I prefer to run dungeons with guild mates.

People’s time is important to them. The OP wants to stand around and wait, and then pug a dungeon with a bunch of strangers who might or might not give him a positive experience. My down time is too valuable to me to waste on taking a chance on strangers.

So the guild becomes the social center of the game. I choose, to some degree, the people I play with. That’s important to me.

As for waiting around, the OP probably hasn’t done much Teq or Triple Threat, because the big guilds tend to be there 45 minutes to an hour before spawn setting up.

Due to the sheer size of this wall, I’m going to keep the things I’m commenting on and cut the rest, to save space and my own sanity.

Sigh…

Eirdyne.9843:

Guilds Serve No Purpose:

Guild storage, guild banners/buffs, special mission for commendations which unlock guild weapons or other special things, their own chat channel…those seem like purposes to me.

This really should come last, but I’m going to put it up first because that is how it usually has gone in the MMO world. In MMOs the classical model has been the Holy Trinity

We don’t need the Holy Trinity. It is a tired old limitation formed by developer’s own limits on their classes/professions and what they could do. Want to fight a boss or go do a dungeon? Better have a healer handy, and a tank too, if you can’t dodge/mitigate damage well. Playing as a healer? Have fun always needing someone with you to kill even normal enemies quickly. Just no.

In Guild Wars 2 most of the content can be done without ever interacting with another human being.

Open world content, yes, save for world bosses and other big meta events. Dungeons? No. Fractals? No. PvP? No. WvW? Definitely no. And, unlike most other games, GW2 actually encourages grouping, with everyone getting credit/loot for taking part, whereas other games divide up EXP, make you roll for loot against everyone else instead of just giving each person their own, or just giving credit/loot to whoever hit the monster first. That’s stupid.

No Down Time, No Nostalgia, No Community:
- Nothing really classical about MMOs goes on in Guild Wars 2. It has its roots in those things, but the game is much more fluid. In fact, players will spend most of their time moving rather than camping an area of the game for any period. Whole zones are accounted as ‘places to be’ rather than sections of the zone.

Yes, the game encourages moving about over staying in one spot for a long time. I don’t see a problem with this.

Currently it appears that Silverwastes is ‘the place to be’. Arah is for those few souls who learned it enough to feel confident there, but that’s the exception.

Well, a very rewarding open zone versus a dungeon that only gives its best rewards once a day per path, assuming you can deal with them all. Of course Silverwastes will win out.

Silverwastes is the perfect example of the Guild Wars 2 experience and how very different it is from any other MMO. In most MMOs the Silverwastes would be considered a once a year event.

GW2 is not “most MMOs”. And that’s for the better.

During the down time to regenerate health, mana, endurance and/or other stats players would talk about the battle they just had, life in general, and fret if they would regenerate enough for the next fight. All of this builds up community and a sense of “I’m with them” and vice versa. Just as important these down time periods made players feel as though “they” were the ones who “held the castle”. Strategies would be discussed. New tactics would take place. They’d be using “that brain thing” and “that heart thing”.

Between guildies on (insert voice chat program here), perhaps. Not among players who are strangers to each other, no.

Most MMOs have downtime, “hold the castle” camps (be it in dungeons or open world), etc. Nothing they do has any consequence on the world. The average player from another MMO may find the sum of these experiences as something like a desert or flatland. The absence of consequence in the game because of the near-instantaneous of all things in the open world has remained immensely jarring from me compared to other MMOs.

This “most MMOs” and “other MMOs” thing again. Guild Wars 2 is not meant to be like them, and that is part of why it’s so good.

Seems to me you just enjoyed the old school mmos more. I personally love gw2 because it does things differently from other mmos.

I agree with lots of the things you’ve said. My first MMO was GW1 and so II was always used to the waypoint everywhere, content made to be enjoyed solo (with you team of henchmen), so GW2 doesn’t feel so much of a shock to me.
Meanwhile I did try other MMOs between GW1 and GW2 and I completely agree with your points. The fact that I can waypoint everywhere does make the world feel a lot smaller, and the fact that you can just waypoint next door whenever for some reason you die kinda takes the risk and reward part out of the equation. Everything feels easy and even if you die it doesn’t matter because there is no consequences to your actions. I miss having to be careful, I miss having the possibility of failure as a possible outcome.
I also agree that the lack of trinity doesn’t help with forming community bonds. In other games when you find a good healer or a good tank you make sure that you keep those people on your friends list for the next time you go into a dungeon, or alternatively if you are a healer or a tank you get other people asking you to play with them. That simply doesn’t happen in GW as without the trinity we are all equally unimportant and replaceable and anyway it is almost impossible to fail at clearing content. There is absolutely no incentive to create a bond with anyone as you can just pick up the next DPSer in line.
I do enjoy GW but I sure do miss the community feeling that you got from other games.

Some Positive Things, but Have to be Learned:

From 1 to 80 the game is really sort of a drag. Just like Guild Wars 1, if you’ve played from level 1 to 20 you’ve played through everything the game has to offer challenge wise. It’s when you’ve reached level 80 and are beginning to 100% maps that the world really shines. The frustration of being skill locked (thanks to the new and unnecessary system) or always present access to appropriate gear stats for the level range is over. You can go off and do what you want to do.

Umm. No. Lv1 – 20 does not show you all the game has to offer. Also, leveling is not so much of a drag here because you can gain Tomes of Knowledge, either from your dailies or reward tracks in PvP to speed up the process if you feel that leveling up through the world is too boring.

The whole game follows a design of increasing difficulty in tune with appropriate gear/skills/abilities. Having only 10 skills and maybe as many more (counting weapons) a player will ever have and want to use is a massive kill-joy for many who are used to playing games with 60 or so abilities they can fit on their action bars by endgame.

At best , they could unlock the F6 – F10 for more skills, but we don’t need whole skillbars cluttering the screen that few can keep complete track of.

Having played long enough, I actually do like the limitations of Guild Wars 2. It may be frustrating to have 10 skills and few I find useful, but the long term result is that things are balanced and managable. Unfortunately all of this is so 180 degrees from the classical and standard model of MMO design that most new players I’ve talked with find it all very confusing. This isn’t really a bad thing and I’m fairly convinced it’s one of the major reasons this game thrives it is very jarring for a beginner.

Once again, this is not meant to be a “classical” or “standard” MMO.

There’s Really Nothing to Do:

No. There are lots of things to do, the trick is what there is that you want to do.

This comes back to grouping. The longer you play this game the more you realize how lonely it is. This is probably the hardest thing for sticking with Guild Wars 2. I didn’t join an MMO to play solo.

Really? I find Guild Wars 2 the least lonely compared to the others I’ve played. And, while having things that require groups is inevitable in an MMO, I’d rather that grouping was encouraged, but not forced, and that I have the choice to seek out one or not. I’d read of an MMO that required players to group up for nearly everything in it, and it sucked.

Unfortunately, the game is so watered down when it comes to group content, challenging group content, and trying to be different when it comes to how group content takes place that I think the devs simply have forgotten games are meant to be a place to “play” and “have fun”.

They seem to have a better grasp of it than other MMO developers these days.

It’s a little hard to do that when there’s no healing class, the only meta is berzerker, and the only things to do force you to be running ALL THE TIME. Whereas, I could log on World of Warcraft, slap on some vanilla gear and go do a classical dungeon raid with every expectation “this could take a while, but while we’re waiting for mana/health and cooldowns (sometimes as much as half an hour), ‘How was your day?’” Or “Geez, Balzog really cut it close on that last pull, huh? I had to use my cooldowns.” …which follows with some fond laughter, “I know right?” And so the conversation goes on. This is how friendships come about and years later you’re still talking with each other. In Guild Wars 2…

Yeah…no. If I had to spend half an hour waiting on cooldowns/mana/etc, I’d be tabbed out watching or reading something instead. Again, this sounds like something guildies might do over Teamspeak or something, but not between strangers. Also, the dungeons in this game have been run to the point where now people tend to want to just get through them in a reasonable amount of time to get the tokens and other rewards and get on to something else.

So, while I think the game has improved and continues to improve over the years, it’s really become something completely different from the usual MMO. Generally all of these differences have proven to be for the better, but not all are necessary and many fall short of their potential.

This paragraph above might be the only one I agree with. Although, I see it being different from usual MMOs as a strength, not a flaw like you seem to.

The horrible downtime in Lineage 2 when i played it, just made me smoke much
much more .. that was all.

And now to the second half…sigh.

Eirdyne.9843:

Waypoints – Death, Dying, Community, and Content Appreciation :

Waypoints are one of the other big things that sets Guild Wars 2 apart from other MMOs. While many MMOs have had a teleport system of one sort or another, usually such a system would take you only so far as a capital city, a port of harbor in some frontier, or an outpost. In the vast majority of all of these circumstances it was a player-character who actually preformed the teleportation.

Guild Wars 2 has eliminated both of these things (the player teleports and the limited location teleports). This is one thing which I think has greatly diminished the game which most other MMOs have been careful to avoid. Dying has increasingly become a less punished thing in MMOs, but it is creeping back to a real factor of gameplay for some very simple reasons.

Are you seriously trying to say the waypoint system is a flaw now? I’m starting to suspect this is an elaborate troll post because so far nearly everything you’ve typed seems to favor regressing back to some mythical “good old days” of MMOs.

The first of these is that when you die you have to come back to the last place you ‘bound’ your character’s ‘soul’ or whatever the lore says about it. Bind Locations are usually outposts, cities, and the like. When a character dies in this way they don’t simply open the map and teleport to the nearest Waypoint. Instead, they have to run (sometimes through many regions) without any teleport what so ever. This increases the sense that there is actually a ‘world’ to be played rather than a series of instances and moments disconnected from any continuum. The world’s aesthetics become tangible and its various constitutions have a depth (bought about by the circumstance of temporal transitions) – travel.

Spare me. You do realize that in order to unlock a waypoint, you have to have at least been to where it was once, correct? And I know this might come as a shock to you, but when most die in a fight against anything, the last thing they want is to have to spend so many minutes getting back to it because there where no bind points nearby or something dumb like that. Dying itself is already something I hate, we don’t need penalties rubbing salt in the wounds too.

This is another quality of Guild Wars 2 which can be dissuasive for many players of more classical MMOs. There is a real issue that, again, after level 20 a player has really seen all the mechanics of this game. Traveling through a frontier is one of the only things this game has absolutely no content for (save when there was a Super Adventure Box) and that doesn’t count. Jumping Puzzles are as close as it comes in this game to the experience of real risk and real loss (of time).

Then they can go back to their classical MMOs if this doesn’t suit them. And, there is content for exploring the maps, it’s called map completion.

Again, this may be another one of those things that will really dissuade new players who are very quickly going to be looking for new experiences in the game and finding very little. This will intensify with age. It’s one of the rare pieces of content in this game which actually does get worse with age and yet cannot really be argued to do so in other MMOs where travel between locations is a timely affair by foot, mount, or some version of a delayed process like air travel. It’s also one of the more bizarre things to be lacking on as the really brilliant thing about this game is de-leveling to a region’s max level or leveling up to 80 for wvw, pvp, and the like.

I’m not even sure what you’re referring to now. But if you want to travel by foot, you can do that. If you only want to use certain waypoints in certain places as if you’re “bound” to a certain spot, you can do that. But don’t try suggesting that it should be forced on the rest of us.

No mounts or air travel here, because those are unnecessary in this game and the air travel thing is just a stupid waste of time when teleporting is a thing.

That’s it? Finally. Thank the Alchemy.

Nilkemia.8507:

The first of these is that when you die you have to come back to the last place you ‘bound’ your character’s ‘soul’ or whatever the lore says about it. Bind Locations are usually outposts, cities, and the like. When a character dies in this way they don’t simply open the map and teleport to the nearest Waypoint. Instead, they have to run (sometimes through many regions) without any teleport what so ever. This increases the sense that there is actually a ‘world’ to be played rather than a series of instances and moments disconnected from any continuum. The world’s aesthetics become tangible and its various constitutions have a depth (bought about by the circumstance of temporal transitions) – travel.

Spare me. You do realize that in order to unlock a waypoint, you have to have at least been to where it was once, correct? And I know this might come as a shock to you, but when most die in a fight against anything, the last thing they want is to have to spend so many minutes getting back to it because there where no bind points nearby or something dumb like that. Dying itself is already something I hate, we don’t need penalties rubbing salt in the wounds too.

Ok .. there is a reason i could agree tohaving horrible punishment for dying,
and that is that maybe people stop complaining that everything is too easy
and needs to be much harder, as long as they are not dying at least 50 times
a day.
Sometimes i even wish they should be flagged to a Diablo like hardcore mode
whenever they post something like this in the forums.

Personally i hate every single dead and try to avoid it like i did in D2 hardcore
and i also don’t need extra punishment .. but for most other players it seems
that they have no problems with dying or they are even unlucky when they
not die often enough, so that very hard punishment is maybe really needed.

Eirdyne.9843:

The whole game follows a design of increasing difficulty in tune with appropriate gear/skills/abilities. Having only 10 skills and maybe as many more (counting weapons) a player will ever have and want to use is a massive kill-joy for many who are used to playing games with 60 or so abilities they can fit on their action bars by endgame. Having played long enough, I actually do like the limitations of Guild Wars 2. It may be frustrating to have 10 skills and few I find useful, but the long term result is that things are balanced and managable.

Even thief has 17 skills at a time (Not counting using the item they steal), and that’s the class with the absolute least. You’re allowed to specifically choose your elite/utility/healing skills individually from a fairly substantial list, and can select weapon groups that have the abilities that appeal to you. If you’re not finding them useful, pick something else.

For instance, when I play dagger elementalist, I end up using 27 out of my 30 skills fairly regularly. Not counting conjured weapons, as I don’t always have the skills for them slotted.

sendaf.8375:

I appreciate your sentiment but I totally disagree with you.

You complain that you are lonely. Then you complain that every event is a blob fest.. You are SURROUNDED by other players. If you are lonely its because you choose not to interact with others.

You also said guilds have no point. You complain that you are lonely. Join a fun guild and you will quickly see the point to guilds.

You say that new players experience all features of the game by level 20. I don’t think that is a bad thing at all. Would you rather spend the first 60 levels only being able to use 2-3 of your weapon skills? Players gain access to gameplay feature early because it makes the game interesting and gives them a chance to hone skills needed in competitive gameplay.

While I agree that dynamic events really don’t cause meaningful changes, they do provide interesting mini-stories within zones. As a new player you don’t realize that what you are doing has been looping non-stop for 3 years. Those centaurs own a bunch of land and its your job to take it back!

You are lonely because the game does not encourage you to actually interact with other people, which is also reflected in the gameplay, where everyone is simply a damage dealer and usually only watches out for his own butt. Everyone is minding his own business, which is why a zerg never feels like a zerg. It’s the same thing with Guilds. Guilds in this game are more like contact agencies to find people with the similar interest in guild wars 2. but it’s never required to actually create a bond with other players because, once again, during usual play everyone really plays for himself, and the social interaction takes place outside of the actual game. This fault goes deeper, down to the very concept of the game and I’d need to write a wall of text complimentary to OP’s one…
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“New players have seen everything after level 20” does not only refer to the gameplay.
After you reach level 20, until level 80, there is nothing you can do other than grinding up your character level, because you have seen everything there is to see within the boundaries of where you can go. PvE is the same wherever you go, and you’re unable to play WvW because you’ll get kittening STOMPED by nolifers with ascended/legendary armor/weapons and accessories with glasscannon power infusions.

Tell me: besides new environments, what is there to see between level 20 and 80?
It’s also by this time as the illusion is uncovered, where a player sees that events simply repeat themselves without any kind of meaningful outcomings.