Guild Wars 2

I play WOW and GW2. ( OMG noooo wayyy!) There are differences between the two. It’s like comparing apples to oranges really. They both have their strengths and weaknesses.
IMHO Gw2 is NOT designed to be taken so seriously. Its not a raider’s game it just doesn’t progress that way. Are there flaws with Gw2? Sure. No game will ever be perfect, but the beauty of Gw2 is its ability to be there and your character to still be relevant weeks or months down the line due to how the game handles gear.

Does this make the game have lack of end game? Sure, but I really like the fact that you have a choice once you hit max level and you have your max level gear. Play or don’t. Roll and alt or wait until more content is released, or max out professions or try to get that Legendary skin. If you want gear progression you all know where to go. There are other MMO’s that will feed this.

Why so serious?

I agree with the OP. It’s beautiful how the DEs link together and affect each other. There are times I’ve gone thru a zone with an alt and I do completely different DEs than I did with my main the first time around. Players want an immersive, realistic world but won’t follow the NPC for a minute after a DE finishes to see what’s next. They want it now now now and want to level faster faster faster and complain about zerg-fests when they themselves are a part of it. I’ve been playing since the 1st hour of advance launch and still haven’t hit 80 because I play slow, enjoy the story and the DEs, rol alts, try different storylines, explore the beautiful world that Anet gave us, etc.

Let’s keep our MMO history straight. Tabula Rasa or RIFT did NOT intro the idea of open-world quests Warhammer Online’s Public Quests did that, albeit poorly. And older MMOs had open-world bosses as well, even if they were constantly camped.

Misunderstood is probably a good description for GW2. I think back about when I first tried GW1 and became so annoyed that I quit shortly afterward because I did not do the research needed to understand how the game was meant to be played. There is less of that problem with GW2 but I think it could still be an issue.

I am greatly enjoying the game but I think I’m having fun because I’ve tried to think about how ArenaNet intended the game to be played and I’m trusting them to follow that lead. So far I haven’t been disappointed. I’m playing 4 alts at once even though I have limited gametime and the story, exploration and PvP have all been fun. The crafting is a bit annoying but I’ve never really liked crafting, still GW2’s version is more palatable than most for me.

MMOs have a reputation of letting people play them ‘how you want’ but in truth, any non-sandbox MMO will have restrictions on how you can play just like single player games. It seems like people are coming to GW2 and playing it the way they expect the game to work, rather than playing the game the way it was designed.

I think the secret is that this is a game meant to be savored. You’re meant to follow the NPCs after a DE and see what they say. You’re meant to explore over that hill and see what’s there. You’re meant to get distracted while finding mats for crafting and end up finding something you’ve never seen in a zone.

Maybe that’s just not for the people who play MMOs to get the l33t PvE gear and stand in front of the bank.

pencapchew.5432:

If you want gear progression you all know where to go. There are other MMO’s that will feed this.

Why so serious?

Agreed. What I’ve been seeing as complaint for a lack ‘end-game’ have been complaints about a lack of gear grind. There are plenty of other MMOs that provide that.

(One last point Tabula Rasa died for good reasons, it was a horribly implemented game. If it had any redeeming features it might have limped along like Vanguard but it didn’t. The market decided the fate of that game).

I agree with you OP. And some of the comments you attracted prove your point . I didn’t really get a proper handle on them until I’d seen a full DE from beginning to end, and even then I’d been through it partially on another toon.

And even when many of us do, it’s not having an impact for a lot of people, there’s just too much resistance to what is ostensibly a looped event that repeats and doesn’t phase. Personally I have no issue with that because I do appreciate it. It’s a nice halfway house. I was never fully sold on WoW’s phasing either, it was a good attempt at trying to configure the world around you, but still felt very artificial to me, you could still see the strings.

So I’ll more than settle for GW2s DEs, especially if they shift them about a bit now and again to keep them fresh.

So people who don’t like the game (I do BTW), are too dumb to understand the complexity, I get you now. OP likes game, any other opine is based on ignorance as they furrow their brow in a feeble attempt to understand.

Honestly I think it’s because people still get heart quests and DE’s mixed up. They look at this and think, oh it’s just like regular questing what’s the big deal? Eventually they give up and ignore the random DE’s and DE chains that occur. I completely agree that people leave after a certain DE because they think that the whole event is done after they’ve received their reward and the little medal on the top of the screen pops up. Maybe it would help if Anet added a “big neon sign” so to speak so that people would know that the chain isn’t quite finished yet. Sometimes it takes a few seconds for the DE’s NPC dialogue to fire up and I know that I’ve missed a few secondary DE’s because I didn’t stick around long enough.

I will never stop saying this but the thing is that when Anet decided to call GW2 an MMO it was subjected to all the prejudices and expecations of traditional mmo players. Why do you think there has been so little change in the industry with most games? TSW (though they do have horizontal progression, holy trinity still exists from what I hear.), Tera, SWTOR etc. hardly deviate because they are afraid of losing players who expect to have tank-healer-dps roles, or traditional endgame and questing content. Yet many of them are bleeding subscriptions and players by the day.

Now I’m reading that jaded players are saying that GW2 isn’t even an MMO at all. :facepalm: The MMO community as a whole is very rigid and unmoving when it comes to MMORPG’s and as a result a lot of people will never embrace change. That’s why so many people resub to wow even after they claim to have ‘burn-out’. They can’t let go of the feeling the wow provides for them.

I really hope that Anet just continues to work on the features that they’ve been promising to deliver from the beginning. So maybe there were somethings they couldn’t deliver by the release date, that’s ok! They need to focus on what they are good at doing, not try to emulate what wow already does well, because there is no way they can match that. They’ve already set themselves apart now they just need to refine and upgrade all the things that make them unique and successful.

- Sorry for the rant. >_<

Mitlandir.8306:

what I want is for you to accept the possibility that GW2 caters to a different (and maybe more sophisticated) taste.

Might want to lower your nose…..you might drown if it rains.

The vast majority of players I meet in game are thrilled with the GW2 conceptualization of a MMORPG.

A very small vocal minority is making a fuss on forums, most of them referring to WoW’s gamestyle.

What we need to remember is less than 10% of WoW’s playerbase raids. Knowing this you start to understand the motives behind these game bashing posts that pick apart every single aspect of the game.

The game is doing great, the worlds are packed with players. Just ignore the haters, they have a different agenda.

First of all: DE’s are not a world first. Actually really nothing in this game is…

Secondly, yes its a great game overall, but in my opinion still needs some tweaking and improvement in several areas.

The first area of the game they could have improved on would be Orr: it just feels really generic and the Risen feel like they are out of horror movie turned comedy… They just don’t feel threatening as more of annoying. Sure it can still be the same as the rest of the game (like how they wanted it to be the “entire game is end game” sort of thing), but they could have scaled up the events to be much more massive. It seems like the area was kind of rushed (well the events and enemy placement etc; aesthetics wise its alright, not one of the the best areas in the game, but still looks alright) as you see some elements of certain things earlier, but by cursed shore it just become completely generic. Personally I would have loved to have seen more events involving siege weapons (like how they set up the arrow carts in the Straights of Devastation at the Lone Post and the event where you can get the bombardment pack from an NPC to kill a giant etc.). Maybe even have players move from fort to fort by means of escort DEs in those areas. I mean they have some of that as in the example of the Lone Post, but it just feels really, really watered out.

If they really wanted to push things to the limit with Orr they could have the events there spread out to some of the other maps a bit (like seeing a bit heavier of a presence of Risen in certain areas on the mainland near Orr etc.) and even allowed the Risen to take maps like Cursed Shore and Malchor’s Leap over completely (meaning that there are no safe forts for rest areas). They could have used the map zergs to the events advantage in Orr like having them be designed for a big offensive against the Risen and a push into Orr.

Secondly, they need more incentive for players to play in other areas other than Orr and Frostgorge Sound. Players only play in those areas because they give the best Karma, items (whether mats, nodes, trash equip drops, etc.), etc. This is actually my biggest gripe in every MMO I have ever played and I was happy to see them have player levels scale to the area they are in, but disappointed to still see the items and rewards not scale as well to what players need (I understand that some may view this as a way to get items too easy by going back and doing the “easier” lower leveled events, but there are ways to design this stuff to not end up that way).

Thirdly (and lastly for this thread), DE’s are just way too easy in some (scatch that; MANY) cases. Yes, there are a few that are difficult (in a very uninteresting way and usually because they are bugged in some sort of way too), but for the most part the whole Dynamic part of the DE doesn’t happen because the events just get stuck in the same part. The only places I see the happening are in areas that players either A) dislike and so no one plays there, or B.) there are no players on the map because there is no reason to stay there longer than for map completion. Thus, no one is there to do the events and it becomes an auto win for them (finally allowing the events to proceed to their other stages).

Those are the big ones… most of the other things I could nit pick about are things that can be nit picked in just about any game and mostly come down to preference lol (like wishing the game had truly action oriented controls … ). Things like how I wish there were multiple ways to get to things like the legendaries (right now it seems like they need a little of everything… which is kind of boring), but another time and another thread maybe…

I dont get why people complain about the DEs,they are awesome for most parts and Do have a story to tell if you’re willing to hang around.It can be a zerg, ( Orr mostly ).I do agree about how easy most events are though,they should increase the difficulty on alot of events,i really agree on this.Other then that,after not having played for about 2 weeks i was having alot of fun yesterday doing some low lvl events eventhougj im 80 already,and forgot track about time aswell…Need to go to work soon aswell in a couple of mins..but i really rather fire up gw2 at this point…sigh.

WoWs phasing changes the world in a more meaningful way then any DE in GW2 does…Just sayin’.

I like GW2 as a game overall but I think they stopped a bit short in their ambitions with Orr being a pretty blatant example…Just waiting and watching now to see where they take things from here.

I think that DEs are not much better than standard quests that we are all used to do. Their main attraction (imo) is their “new” status. They are something new and exciting and that means they automatically get more attention and love. Just think about that guy that thought he was holding an I phone 5 in his hands just because someone told him so and he was confident enough to state that this, new I phone 5 (which was actually I phone 4) is obviously so much better that his old I phone 4 which he was holding in his other hand at that time.
They “feel” more dynamic but after 2 or 3 repeats they lose all of their dynamic feel and become just another quest you already did.
The nice thing about them is an option for others to join. But that started to be an annoyance as well.
10 people waiting for start of a DE. Some already know where foes will be coming from. And while most of us wait inside the camp we are suppose to defend, few of us go out, to meet foes head on. We are waiting and watching those 2 entrances to see our enemy, but that group of 3 already dealt with them. Then another 3 decide to do the same and goes outside of the camp to stand in the other way of other waves of foes. So it becomes just a competition who best knows how DE will develop. Its ridiculous.
If they were dynamic in a way that what happens is slightly different every time they repeat, it would make a world of change.