Guild Wars 2

This post serves two purposes. First, as a way to vent several hours’ worth of frustration, and second, as a way of providing feedback to the development team. Since my brief scan of the website revealed no way to send a private feedback ticket or email, the public forums will serve that purpose. This is a long post (split into multiple due to message length limits) because I spend a lot of time on my forum posts, so if that’s not your thing then you don’t have to stick around.

My sister and I have been playing GW2 since it began. We pre-purchased the game the first day we could, and played every BWE since then, as well as many of the small one-day betas for stress testing. All in all, we have thoroughly enjoyed this game, and would highly recommend it to any friend.

So when our mother expressed an interest in trying it, we were happy to encourage her. She bought it for herself as an early Christmas present, and after an overnight-into-afternoon download, she sat down to join us.

Our first issue that we ran into was that our server was full. It had not even occurred to me that this could be an issue. Yet, out of all the North American servers, only three at the time were not full. Thus we come to my first issue: Why are there so few available servers? It’s not just a “wait for them to balance” problem — there is no place for servers to balance to. They are all full. This has been a problem since launch, but until my mother tried to join us I had not realized that it was such a problem. Before I even have a chance to sit down and play with my family members, we have hit a huge roadblock.

This leads into our second issue. In attempting to find a solution to not being able to play together, my sister transferred to the server my mother had chosen. In the confusion and stress that we had accumulated to this point, she missed the fact that she would be stuck in that other server for a week, missing out on events that our guild has been planning as well as risking not being able to come back to our home server. Yes, she can maybe move back in a week, if the server isn’t full then, but that doesn’t fix the main issue. Why is the limit one transfer per week? I’ve heard all sorts of reasons for making it what it is now, but none of them are conclusive or satisfying. My opinion is that there is no excuse for forcing someone to wait a week to play with their friends on a different server.

This brings me to my conclusion. A night spent preparing for spending time on a game we enjoy, this time with a family member included (who isn’t much of a gamer, mind you) was wasted, resulting in a near-shouting match, an excessive amount of stress, and shutting down the game to do something else. All we wanted to do was get our mom to play Guild Wars 2, but we kept hitting one roadblock after another. We’re not quitting; we’ll come back to it once we’ve had a break. I still love Guild Wars 2, and it’s going to take more than this to make me quit.

But it all boils down to one thing: When we tried to get a new player into the game so that we could all play together, the system crumbled. Games, up to this point, have been mostly judged on two things: Half the game is gameplay, and half the game is the graphics. Guild Wars 2 seemed to break that mold, being composed of 1/3 gameplay, 1/3 graphics, and 1/3 social — playing with your friends at any time, any place.

Up until now, I had thought that Guild Wars 2 mostly, if not fully, delivered on its promises — because, having been settled comfortably since launch, I had no idea the problems I ran into that night existed. The game is still growing and learning, and that means tweaking systems and trying new things; in a game that is revolutionizing a genre, that means trying things that have never done before. But I have a feeling that sacrifices have been made where they should not have been made. In a game where one-third of the experience is playing with your friends, not delivering on promises to make playing with your friends fun, simple, and fast means one-third of your game is missing.

I love the gameplay, and I love the graphics (even though my gaming machine is mediocre, the game still looks great) and I really like that the game is still getting new content (even if I don’t get to play it — I’m an altoholic and none of my 8 characters are level 80 yet). But there is still a lot of work that needs to be done on the social aspect. Trying to bring a new gamer into the group to play with friends or family should not be as troublesome as it has been.

I’m not a game developer, so I can’t say how to fix this. But as a gamer, I can say what needs to be fixed. I love Guild Wars 2, and I love how ArenaNet is taking the development of this game seriously. I’ll say it again: This isn’t a hate post about how I’m leaving if you don’t do what I want you to do; this game is amazing, and I have enjoyed it for many months since launch.

I know that systems are being developed to streamline server transfers and implement guesting to play with friends in other servers, but when I tried to find information on them, all I could find were speculative, opinionated, unofficial forum posts. When it comes to official updates, I was left in the dark. Some more information on plans for these systems would be greatly appreciated.

ArenaNet, thank you for Guild Wars 2, and thank you for putting up with a long-winded post like this one. My initial, infuriated disappointment has faded, so I can honestly say that you have done amazing things with this game. I only hope that it gets better — and with a great development team backing it, I know that it can.

(While this post is intended more for feedback, discussion is still encouraged as long as it is kept friendly and constructive.)

The main problem is that nearly all of the servers are full.

You could try what my friend did to get on to my full server:

Check the server list at 6am or so – even full servers drop to “very high” at that hour, and your mother can jump in.

I faced the same problem when I bought the game as an early Christmas present for my son, my server was full and there was no way I would move from it (tarnished Coast is unofficial NA rp server). So from time to time I was checking the server to see if a gap would appear and right before dinner it did, we quickly transfered him over. Meanwhile he was learning the basics so no time lost really. I just have to say hang in there a gap will open and not at weird hours of the night.