Guild Wars 2

Dear Guild Wars,

This missive is long in the making, but I wanted a good sense of what you have offered us in terms of Guild Wars 2 before presenting my critique thereof. Please take what follows for what it is and understand that it comes from a true fan of Guild Wars 1, where I had 2 accounts and thousands of hours of joy.
I now have 2 level 80 chars, one 46, and a a full slab of alts

I’ll start with the praise, then get down to brass tacks.

Part I-The Good
What is greatest of all about GW2 and its predecessor is the caliber of game you produce without a monthly fee. I think it baffles both players and makers of other games that you succeed with the model you do. Obviously, you’ve come closer to other F2P formats with the gem store, but you remain rock-solid in terms of money buying speed/decore as opposed to actual power. At the end of the day, money does not buy one a prevailing advantage in this game, and wht one pays for vis a vis the product purchase does not make one a second-class citizen if you don’t pay for more.
You’ve also advanced the graphics and gameplay to a 2012 level. The many of us who waited from circa-2008 in anticipation of a 2010-11-12 release have not been disappointed, and it’s been worth the wait, at least for me.
The races, I think, have been implemented successfully. I, like many, have hated the Asura and still do. I equate them with Lucas’s ewoks, unjustifiable cuteness, yet the chance of playing one with a massive afro has somewhat curtailed disliking. I guess I’ll give ‘em a chance. Playing Norn and Charr is fun. I think you should’ve waited to give the Sylvari a back story before you introduced them (as in they could’ve been NPCs and introduced later in an expansion) but not a major gripe.

Part II- The Fixable-progressing from least bad to worst

Elite weapons/armor
The Armor I’m generally OK with, and, TBH, Guild Wars has never been good at this (remember that elite sin armor with daggers coming out of every orifice of his body?). You guys haven’t done anything silly with armor …yet, but I offer criticism here in hopes of preventing things getting sillier. What’s already full-on past silliness are the great number of people running about with their turquoise-encrusted letter openers and cake servers. A sword is a sword, m’kay. It doesn’t become exotic because you could balance 4 tennis balls on it. You want exotic? Make ‘em BIG! Make ‘em SHINY! Make ‘em look like they’re dripping with the blood of a thousand elite foes! DO NOT make ‘em look like spatulas, ladels, or turkey basters. Look at the GW1 skins that succeeded, and model forward.

Events v quests v dungeons
People were all jazzed about your development of dynamic events, but that’s devolved into boredom. Adding dynamic events was good, but “kill ten rats”, despite its infamy, still had its place. Put it back. And, in terms of PVE, having rez points in dungeons removes the challenge. I have to honestly say that, in retrospect, I thoroughly enjoyed doing Arborstone and wiping at the end of the schlog, or going into UW with people who got hosed in the entry area. It made all of us better players. You started the dungeon rez points in EOtN, and it was a bad idea. You removed the challenge. You removed it further by adding all the quick armor repairs and such now. All of that made more sense when you added it to GW1 at the end of development, not now.

Story/Lore/Progression
Playing through Tyria in GW1 (2006), you were rewarded by moving on. The lowbies are kind of alone at first, but you see more and more players you progress to Yak’s, LA, Drok’s. That was FUN. Moreover, you were playing a story where you are assisting, with the help of others, in increasingly greater events. Again, in retrospect, it was great to be stuck at certain points until you found a group to go with. You’d be asked to ping your bar and kicked if you weren’t up to snuff. That gave you good reason to go learn how to be better. Now, you do your own personal story and if you suck you go level outside and come back to wipe it. All the dungeons have rez shrines. Outside help is an option but not mandatory. BORING!

Human interaction
So, as above, you’ve limited interaction and teamwork. In doing so, you’ve also limited the chances of players meeting players. My enduring friends were people I met when stuck at various points when I was new or others who were stuck that I helped through. Now, I call random people on the map to help with the Wasp Queen, and it doesn’t matter whether we fail or succeed because none of us are stuck at the wasp queen. What do we do to help each other? Come and kill. Swap builds? Nah. Continue on together? Nah. No reason.

And, as much as you problems with scammers, I learned so much from Spamadan. I knew what was hot and what was not. I occasionally got screwed, but mostly again, I met kind players wanting to offload inventory space selling to do so. There was a camaraderie that the BLTC doesn’t offer. I will argue that there is a good 10% of players playing it like a market and 90% who just use it to offload/purchase random crap. The fun of a real live market is gone.

Levels
So now we go to 80. I understand this development as something to entice players from other places where, unlike GW1, 85% of the content was endgame. BUT, what really happens between 60 and 80? Nothing. You, in GW1, were anti-grind, but what non-grinding excitement have you added? Don’t start with Dynamic Events again…Clearly someone drank the Kool-aid there. I don’t care if some people can do it fast. Grinding is grinding. You’ve got a lotta grind here.

Dervish
You created one player class that was unique and original in GW1..where is he? OK, he’s coming. I’ll leave it at that (assuming he’s coming).

Transition
I started GW2 with a mesmer only to be completely befuddled. He’s got mind wrack and diversion, but these have jack all to do with GW1. He’s got a ginormous sword? Huh?
a) Change the names of your spells
b) Caster swords were an interesting player-initiated boon to GW1, but put something in the intro to explain to me why my Mesmer is now wielding a claymore. It’s silly, either way, but justify your silliness.
I told people that all the hours they put into grinding gw1 HoM stuff would be a flash in the pan. Basically, that’s what it’s been. I thought, at least, that HoM would be a place I could go back to with friends and show them what I’d done. Nope.

Transport
In GW1, once you’d unlocked an area, you were free to zip there anytime free of charge. Would GW1 have been better if you’d charged every time? Absolutely not. So, now we have to pay to teleport… Again, it doesn’t make the game more challenging, it’s just a built-in money sink. Many of us play MMOs to enjoy realities without the daily hassles of things like taxes. This is a daily hassle and brings nothing to the experience. Remove the fees.

Part III-The Unfixable?

Borrowing
So, it became immediately apparent that you’d had a look at other games out there and used some of the ideas from them. I won’t mention THAT franchise, but there is another (with strong hooks to movies and books) that GW2 grew strongly similar to. WvW is a near copy of its not-too-special pvp. So are the weapon-based bars, paying to re-spec, and its annoying paid transport system.
You borrowed those concepts, but didn’t borrow two of its best: playable music instruments and a meaningful day/night cycle.
a) Randomly running into a guild playing Freebird on the bagpipes and a zither is fun.
b) Being scared out of your pants because you’re in the wrong part of a map and the sun is setting is exciting…no matter how many times it happens.

Bar + class combos
BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT…what you absolutely killed me on was your restructuring of skills and elimination of class combos.

For years, when I played other MMO’s, I would openly scoff when people asked about each other’s “builds”. “Spec”, I believe, is the better word for tweaking what you can about character performance, but GW1 is the only game I’ve ever played that has “builds”: an 8 –skill bar combining primary and second classes with a choice of 400+ skills plus a vast array of weapons, armor, sigils and runes to combine in virtually infinite combinations. It was, in no uncertain terms, beautiful, innovative, and engrossing. All matter of off-hours in my life were occupied thinking of new builds. You could play popular builds, then tweak them to your liking, but the best was that I, and I’m sure MANY others, had my own personal builds. And they were MINE, like secret recipes. Even if HA and GVG degenerated into meta-builds, I had my own that I was proud of for my own purposes.
And, over the years, what the community did with the builds was AMAZING. Touch rangers, assacasters, ritualists playing all necro skills, necros playing all ritualist skills, 55 monks, Dervish healers, bunny thumpers… It was brilliant, and the brilliance lay in one fundamental aspect: you provided the players with a kind of DNA, and they engineered it into things the developers had never fathomed. THIS Is what made the game for me.
AND it was part of your original promotion: that you could do anything. AND it was amazing how each new GW1 product built upon it.
AND you killed that? AND I honestly don’t see, in your architecture, how you would ever be able to put it back. AND, this all holds my attention for now, but it is not a lasting interest. It hurts me to say that to my one beloved franchise, but it’s the truth.
I’d trade all of the pizazz and beefed up graphics for 300 new GW1 skills and stay there…until someone (apparently not you) makes a new GW1-esque modern MMO. It may involve a long wait, but I’m sure there is a market for the game I desire. I hope its yours.

NO NO NO! It should of been the Ugly! you just kittened it all up man!

But i agree!