Guild Wars 2

I had posted this in another thread, but decided to expand on it a bit.

For the past month, players have been bashing Anet on this forum and others, covering everything from Ascended gear to nerfs, etc. For many of us, one patch changed the game in a vast way. But while everyone is upset with changes, few bothered to thank Arenanet for the awesome job they did BEFORE those changes.

To me, pre-November 15th GW2 was the closest to the perfect MMO that I had seen. A beautiful, immersive world. Horizontal progression. Rewarding exploration. A focus on open world play over instanced dungeons. Alternate level routes (can level entirely on crafting if you can find a way to afford it!). Awesome diversity in armor styles. A stat plateau, something that all those WoW clones lack miserably.

I was like a preacher, screaming of salvation on the shores of new Tyria. Anyone I could convince to try this game, I would. And why not? When you play a game so immersive and different from the rest of the games shaping to WoW’s mold, you can’t help but want to show it off to as many people as you could. It had a few quirks, but they were things we expected would be fixed at some point so it didn’t matter. And expansions would increase the content of the game without power creep, just like its predecessor did.

Unfortunately, things change. The stat plateau was scrapped, the open world play was slapped in the face and the focus was shifted towards dungeon grinding for bigger numbers on your gear. It changed from trying to be a sequel to GW1 and more to be a hybrid of the story of GW1 and the gameplay focus of WoW. It was the greatest disappointment of my MMO career.

However, for those 2 months I got to experience a truly unique and different MMO. I logged well over 500 hours during that time, and bought quite a few gems. At the end of the day, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Even though this is no longer the game I enjoyed, with its dead zones and everyone standing around LA screaming “LFG LFG LFG” for the latest and greatest gear that the treadmill has to offer, I won’t forget the fun I had in it originally and will give credit where credit is due.

For 2 months, Arenanet held the single greatest MMO I had played.

There are still things in the game which break the mold, and for that I’m happy. The size of the cities. Not many people mention this, but to me that was the first big draw of the game. The first time I walked into Divinity’s Reach and realized “This city is larger than most leveling zones in other games”, I was blown away. And it was one of several.

The engineer class. Yea yea, it’s a little broken atm, but the CONCEPT. I can’t think of another class in a fantasy MMO that plays like it does. Also, the necro class: it, too, is a little broken, but it can be a zookeeper… with CoH/CoV gone, it’s the last bastion for pet class lovers in MMORPGs. The issues with both of these classes are superficial- quick fixes with a content patch if they sit down and do it, so I’m not at all concerned with them. It’s the CONCEPTS of these classes that I love.

While I no longer log in (though I do check forums from time to time to see if Arenanet has thrown a bone to those of us who came from GW1 and still hold a foolish hope for a stat plateau), I can honestly say I don’t regret the time I spent in this game. In fact, my only regret with GW2 is that new players will never get to experience the game that I did.

Cheers, Arenanet. You gave me an awesome MMO experience.

I stopped playing because of some of the language I read in LA Overflow. A few players were using /map to RP (I guess they were RPing because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise) and what was said was pretty damn sick.

It made me realize what kind of people I was playing alongside with. Needless to say my game time dropped dramatically and it’s back to casual FPS for me.

All I gotta say is, I hope future MMOs can somehow deter this kind of behavior. This is a game (read: kids are playing), not your fantasy.

Some very good points OP. Before 11/15 I didn’t frequent the forums as I was having too much fun in the game to be distracted—maybe a couple three times at most. GW2 got so much right. Just the simple making of quests/resource nodes non-competitive dramatically influenced the game culture for good. I witnessed and played cooperatively. This was a refreshing experience after the rat’s cage of my previous MMO.

More than anything, without vertical progression, I just felt I could relax and play for once. It was a wonderful two (almost 3!) months. And I want to give credit for the founding game design philosophy. It was brilliant.

I just don’t like FotM. Or the current dungeon system for that matter. They shouldn’t have focused end-game on dungeons. But whether it will change or not, it doesn’t bother me the least. People will do whatever they want and you can’t blame players for aiming to be “the best” (in a non-competitive mmo!) and all the calculative, grindy mentality that it entails. I can feel in-game that there is still a big part of the player-base that hasn’t been herded towards this kind of gameplay.

Tolmos.8395:

There are still things in the game which break the mold, and for that I’m happy. The size of the cities. Not many people mention this, but to me that was the first big draw of the game. The first time I walked into Divinity’s Reach and realized “This city is larger than most leveling zones in other games”, I was blown away. And it was one of several.

I was just telling this to a friend the other day. The towns are absolutely stunning. They are (unnecessarily) huge and about half the scale of what a real town would be.

This wouldn’t matter much to most players, and I bet some could even find the argument against it from a utilitarian perspective, but to me this element alone -and the obvious amount of effort invested in the environment- is already worth my time and money.

I can live with the fact that Ascended gear exists since it’s supposed to be just an additional tier not a gear treadmill. Although I would prefer that it didn’t exist…

My problem is that the only way to have Ascended gear is by running dungeons. I don’t like this game’s dungeons and I’m penalized for it. If they ever introduce a way to gain access to ascended gear without dungeons, I don’t think there would be nearly as much complaining.

I guess after the november patch nexon forced them to make stupid vertical progression and random boxes and way to force us to buy gems. Cause the last game i played got taken over by nexon too and it was alot better than it was before nexon took over and now every event they do is some stupid money grubbing trash.

Instead of playable events we get " test your luck with the new item mall box pay $10 for a chance to get a christmas hat" or something along the lines

I hadn’t noticed the nexon shares in ncsoft. And that an ex nexon employee being the cash shop manager. That explains the stupidly low chances of getting any good item in chests.

From now on I’m staying away from any store chests after the junk I got in christmas

After almost a decade of free-to-play mmorpg domination of the industry, any gamer should, by now, have learned about the thievery which is the real-cash lottery system common in almost all f2p games.

The inclusion of this element to GW2 is mind-boggling to me (although their business model is not really conventional either). It is highly more likely that Nexon plays a huge part than not, but can’t be certain.

What can be said for certain though, is that if anybody still subscribes to this lottery after a decade of lessons, no one can save their soul. Especially when the game doesn’t require them to.

Okay, this has got to be the most passive-agressive and manipulative approach to creating another Ascended gear whine thread I have seen. Were you worried that a more direct post (like “Acended Gear Bad = I’m quitting”) would have just been ignored? Devs, please just consolidate this post into the trashheaps of posts about the same subject.

i feel sad for the people who didn’t experience the vibe of pre-November 15.