Guild Wars 2

I have been through these forums for the last few months and see the likes and dislikes of the new HoT release.

For my play style and those who play as I do, solo adventurer who does guild stuffs when he can, HoT has some hindrance for us casual players.

Like most MMO’s, if you want the great loot, the shiny things and the good things in life in game then you need to be the crafter, the dungeoneer, the PvP elite or now…the raider.

I am good with that as it is something I am accustomed to and know will not achieve greatness due to time constraints. I work a tough schedule and use GW2 to chill, relax and not think about work; except for holidays and vacations, this is the only time I can try for the shiny things. Other than that back to soloing and hanging with the peeps when I can.

GW2 has let me do what I want and plays to my play-style since it first released where other MMOs have failed for me (not that they fail, just not my play-style). There is not too big of an advantage of not having more than Exotic in slots. Though I have taken advantage of the laurels for ascended ACC slots and a nice ascended dagger from Teq.

In comes HoT. Love the new zones but map progression is blocked by timed massive events or access to areas only on successful event completion which are not always polite to me. Tyria mastery points nearly impossible for me though I get one here and there. Sitting on two Tyria maxed XP lines with no mastery points to give. Ok I have like 3 but need like 8.

This is the only issue for me in advancing my character with the masteries. The dungeons…the raid…the little offshoot games….the PvP…none of that has ever mattered to me though I find them fun when I get the time to do them.

Overall I think HoT is a good expansion except for content that is blocked by gates and depends on events that not all can attend. Mastery points take time and cooperation that can be difficult for the casual player. Mastery exp is maybe focused on Gems for boosts? Interesting thought but I really hope HoT doesn’t turn GW2 into a rich man’s game as others have.

There was the “Beta”….again for the curious but more for players that are elite and can dedicate the time to explore upcoming content. I spent maybe a total of 60 minutes in Beta but got yelled at less in boot camp than Beta….lol…true story!

I enjoy the game and the people I have met I just wish we were not “forced” into something to do that is advantageous for those who can and do over those who paid the same price but lack the time and or want……………to do them.

Anywhoo….I don’t plan on rage quitting as there is much more to the game that these little QQ’s I have. Just sharing some thoughts.

I dont understand the “I am being forced to do something” line thats seems to be common in complaints on this forum.
In an MMO you are NOT forced to do anything.
There seems to be a mentality that if I want XXX and I am required to do YYY to get it then I am forced to do YYY.
Not everyone can have everything, unless you are prepared to meet all the criteria needed to get everything.
In all reward based MMOs , in order to get a reward of some type you will be required to do something to get it.
But you are not being forced too, as getting the reward isnt mandatory.

Hot works for me except for one major thing … openworld content that requires multi group co-operation on a TIMER. It’s simply too many constrictive elements to make that work for someone with my playstyle.

If the meta could be initiated by a group, 5-10 people say, and simply followed through until completed by the same group and whoever else joined the map with no race against the clock, that would have been awesome. Or even if it was just like it was now … without the timer … that’s still OK, because you could enter a map and participate without fear of it ending in failure because of time.

For me, that’s where Anet lost their vision of the core game. The second time became a factor in success was the second they killed it for anyone limited by time; the casual player.

mauried.5608:

I dont understand the “I am being forced to do something” line thats seems to be common in complaints on this forum.
In an MMO you are NOT forced to do anything.
There seems to be a mentality that if I want XXX and I am required to do YYY to get it then I am forced to do YYY.
Not everyone can have everything, unless you are prepared to meet all the criteria needed to get everything.
In all reward based MMOs , in order to get a reward of some type you will be required to do something to get it.
But you are not being forced too, as getting the reward isnt mandatory.

I hate these lines of arguments…

“The reward isn’t mandatory” …. but the “reward” is the whole freaking point of gaming…

I mean you don’t play games for no rewards… You play for the reward of accomplishing virtual goals… Unless you honestly are saying you play games for… nothing? People usually do things because they are rewarding in some way. It’s a basic psychological principle.

I don’t care for HoT It’s really a personal opinion, either you like it or you don’t like it or you are ambivalent. I play GW for the skins. I’m not into “challenging content”. I prefer various ways (PvP, WvW, open world, Story, TP) to get the same skins.

If you are someone who dislikes much or most of what HoT offers, then spending money for it makes little sense. I didn’t buy it myself until after the middle of December, when I found a new copy for a reduced price on Amazon. That was close enough to what I believed HoT to be worth for me that I bought it. I encourage you to do the same, if there is indeed a price where it would make sense for you.

I’m finding that some of the elite specs are worth using, and Revenant can be fun to play. I’m finding that I don’t really care for the zone design all that much, but I expected that — and some of the meta events have been fun.

Here’s my idea about HoT :

Do i reget buying it ? No. It’s 80 good/20 bad, but the 20% bad is so bad it brings it down to more of a 50/50 level.

Would i buy it again ? No. Definately not.

Would i recommend HoT ? Only if you want to prolong your gameplay as long as you enjoy it and have not found a better game to replace it.

Mind you, i still enjoy GW2, but i’m impatiently waiting for another game to come out in a few months. I won’t stop playing completely, but it will just be for something ‘in between’. It’s kinda like not watching several soap episodes, you’ll never really miss anything.

After letting this post sit for some time let me try to explain my position a little more clearly.

1. I can go anywhere outside of HoT and get all the Hero Points
a. In HoT this is not possible unless meta events are done as some are blocked.

2. Mastery point system is new but to us casual players or better yet those of us who cannot devote the time to get the desired amount of points is difficult if not impossible for some of these points.
a. Unless I start doing achievements I will never reach those rewards. I am fine with that to a point but now we get into the area where the rewards are beneficial instead of bragging rights of titles and chests.

3. HoT depends on large groups of people. Miss the timer? Here’s an empty map…good luck.

4. I am not someone who dislikes HoT altogether. I am just disappointed that the casual player gets boned so to speak in the area of the mastery system. I really think this is where the greatest concern for most of those disappointed.

5. Would I buy it again. Yes. Like I originally stated I like many of the changes but there are some that a community of people are having issues with. Mastery seems to be the main one.

6. There are things I just do not do in game because I don’t have the time, cannot use the likes of teamspeak and such due to personal constraints and learn to live with it. I am never bored when I play but I can’t say I have played another MMO where it is MANDATORY to get achievements to advance content. Achievements seem to always be bragging rights, titles, mounts or some reward players can live without. HoT mastery system seems to put a halt to advancing the game play.

Again, just my input.

mauried.5608:

I dont understand the “I am being forced to do something” line thats seems to be common in complaints on this forum.
In an MMO you are NOT forced to do anything.
There seems to be a mentality that if I want XXX and I am required to do YYY to get it then I am forced to do YYY.
Not everyone can have everything, unless you are prepared to meet all the criteria needed to get everything.
In all reward based MMOs , in order to get a reward of some type you will be required to do something to get it.
But you are not being forced too, as getting the reward isnt mandatory.

OP, probably just like me, chose GW2 because you could achieve everything without spending massive amounts of time being online. For example, you could always take a break after a dungeon, which required about 15 min, go spend time with your family and then go back online with no loss. Now, you can’t do that: either spend at least 1h+ in one map or no shinnies for you.

Yes, I can still achieve a lot of things in GW2 after HoT without huge time commitment, but not everything. And why I chose GW2 in the first place? Because I could have EVERYTHING. No I can’t. Has the HoT failed me? Yes.

Getting the rewards is not mandatory, yes. Playing GW2 is not mandatory too. While I’m there, could anyone recommend another MMO, which still meets my time criteria?

usnedward.9023:

6. There are things I just do not do in game because I don’t have the time, cannot use the likes of teamspeak and such due to personal constraints and learn to live with it. I am never bored when I play but I can’t say I have played another MMO where it is MANDATORY to get achievements to advance content. Achievements seem to always be bragging rights, titles, mounts or some reward players can live without. HoT mastery system seems to put a halt to advancing the game play.

Replace “achievement” with “questline” and you’ve got your comparison. Every MMO I played had some kind of content that was mandatory to advance, mostly “main quest” type of stuff. In GW2, the personal story looks like it is that kind of content, but in reality it isn’t. The achievements are, although there’s enough of them around to allow you to pick and choose rather than being forced into doing a specific set of them.

I’m probably what you’d call “casual”, too. Married with kids, fulltime job, and long past the age where I could devote most of my attention to MMOs. I can’t schedule my gaming time around ingame timetables, but rather have to take what I can get. That’s probably one of the main reasons why I usually avoid world bosses, I don’t like how they make me drop everything I do and go to a specific place at a specific time just for one event (or a short chain), then try to take up what I was doing again.

Despite liking instanced group content a lot (I’ve been a regular high-end raider in other games and very much enjoy dungeons and fractals in this game), I’ve only been in our new raid once so far, and have yet to get close to even downing the first boss. But there’s so much to do in HoT, I actually don’t mind.

I find that I don’t need to schedule my playtime around HoT meta events. I just take whatever I can get, and if a map can’t give me what I’m after just now, I’ll switch to a different map, or a different character, or both. There’s always something do to somewhere.

I log into a character I want to explore VB with but find that it’s just at the start of the night boss phase, making it very difficult to explore the map? I quickly switch to another character that’s actually only missing some of the points up in the canopy for map completion, and before I know it, he’s got his 100% VB. The other character can explore another day, VB won’t go anywhere anytime soon .

I’m messing around AB, looking for some fallen masks, when I realize it’s Tarir defense time, and the map actually looks promising, so I jump right in. I’ve got 12 successful Tarir defenses by now, either by friends calling out promising maps in guild chat or (mostly) just by stumbling on them by chance. It’s slow compared to those who schedule their game time around it, but I’ll be getting there eventually.

Just like I eventually got all the Silverwastes stuff done I had wanted to do, including getting coat boxes from Vinewrath (that one took me 30+ tries across several months). Again, it took (a lot) longer than some other people, but in the end I got where I wanted to go. Just like I got my first character to lvl 80 in the beginning of this game, weeks after seemingly everyone got theirs to 80, but it was inevitable to get there one day.

I was lucky with Tyria mastery points, seeing how I had all of the fractal points for my fractal masteries as well as all of the story points (except for some of the season 2 achievements) for my pact masteries (I don’t care much about legendary crafting) right at the start of HoT, but even if I hadn’t, those would’ve come eventually. You don’t even need teamspeak for the low-level fractals, which is all you have to do for those mastery points.

The point of my ramblings? Yes, HoT is full of long meta event chains and timetables, but you don’t have to schedule your playtime around it. Just look around the maps and play whatever appeals to you that day, and you’ll get your chance eventually, just like I will. There’ll be lots of people faster than us, but we’ll get there in good time, and enjoy our way there, too .

Manthas.6234:

mauried.5608:

I dont understand the “I am being forced to do something” line thats seems to be common in complaints on this forum.
In an MMO you are NOT forced to do anything.
There seems to be a mentality that if I want XXX and I am required to do YYY to get it then I am forced to do YYY.
Not everyone can have everything, unless you are prepared to meet all the criteria needed to get everything.
In all reward based MMOs , in order to get a reward of some type you will be required to do something to get it.
But you are not being forced too, as getting the reward isnt mandatory.

OP, probably just like me, chose GW2 because you could achieve everything without spending massive amounts of time being online. For example, you could always take a break after a dungeon, which required about 15 min, go spend time with your family and then go back online with no loss. Now, you can’t do that: either spend at least 1h+ in one map or no shinnies for you.

Yes, I can still achieve a lot of things in GW2 after HoT without huge time commitment, but not everything. And why I chose GW2 in the first place? Because I could have EVERYTHING. No I can’t. Has the HoT failed me? Yes.

Getting the rewards is not mandatory, yes. Playing GW2 is not mandatory too. While I’m there, could anyone recommend another MMO, which still meets my time criteria?

This guy gets it. I also still play GW2, but plese understand that HoT is leading the game into a direction where people like me can only scavenge for various reasons. And would you continue a game where you can only scavenge and are plothammered in everything else?
Just as an example, I suck at adventures. And still there is a mandatory adventure in almost every collection, something which I find very funny to do in general. So what, you might say, suck it up and do it. But I say no. I won´t do anything in a game that is not fun for me and where I fail for various reasons over and over. If I wanted to do something frustrating, I would do my taxes. Or would anyone of you do something he dislikes voluntarilly in his free time?
I would not even mind that if this were only the case with single things, but adventures are basically everywhere in HoT.

The main point of logging for me right now is nostalgia, guild chat and the faint hope that Anet will steer the wheel around some day.

I and sadly so many others have the same feeling. The game is starting to become an endless grind. For example, if you are going for Nevermore you’ll need the precursor. To obtain that precursor you need to the the collection. all is fine till that point. Cause once you start with the collection it’s not about how good you are at the game it’s about how many times you are able to do a Wood chopping run a day. If for instance you can only play 2 hours a day you should be farming wood instead of running around and enjoying the game. If you like to farm than there’s no problem but if you don’t … well basicly bye bye legendary cause imo there is no other way to get it since there is no decent way to make money like you used to before hot unless you farm stuff to put on the TP. Thus the endless cycle of farming.
I believe this is one of the main reasons people are actually leaving the game and yeah they might come back for LS3 or w/e but that’s not how you treat customers. It’s about keeping them happy 24/7 and not once a month.

Heart of Thorns is a lot of fun. It’s just the balance that’s been skewed behind the scenes that takes away from the experience.

Once all the ‘new’ and shininess of the new zones and the experiences/event-chains etc etc wears off it’s the mechanics & balance with relation to progression (Achievement-wise or otherwise) that keeps players happy and playing the game for months and years.

Masteries is a prime example of this imbalance. No developer in their right mind would make a game where to get to the maximum level you’d have to kill every single enemy in the game once to get enough experience to do so. Yet, this is basically what they’ve done with masteries.

We can only hope that with time they’ll amend things. Or at least come out and be open with their community that they want to turn the game into a ‘harder-core’ MMO, so those of us that are tired of the incessant grind that seems to go hand in hand with such a title can move on.

Too much wall of text, it’s simple:

-if you played gw2 before than I recommend to wait for discounts, 45€ is too much for this mess.

Ragnarox.9601:

Too much wall of text, it’s simple:

-if you played gw2 before than I recommend to wait for discounts, 45€ is too much for this mess.

yononan.8931:

mauried.5608:

I dont understand the “I am being forced to do something” line thats seems to be common in complaints on this forum.
In an MMO you are NOT forced to do anything.
There seems to be a mentality that if I want XXX and I am required to do YYY to get it then I am forced to do YYY.
Not everyone can have everything, unless you are prepared to meet all the criteria needed to get everything.
In all reward based MMOs , in order to get a reward of some type you will be required to do something to get it.
But you are not being forced too, as getting the reward isnt mandatory.

I hate these lines of arguments…

“The reward isn’t mandatory” …. but the “reward” is the whole freaking point of gaming…

I mean you don’t play games for no rewards… You play for the reward of accomplishing virtual goals… Unless you honestly are saying you play games for… nothing? People usually do things because they are rewarding in some way. It’s a basic psychological principle.

I would like to play the game for fun and not for rewards.
Wouldn’t it be better if you enjoyed the gameplay so much that the rewards are just a bonus? I have played games like that.

The negative side of the psychological principle you talk about is justifying boring gameplay by adding a shiny reward at the end.

luzt.7692:

I would like to play the game for fun and not for rewards.
Wouldn’t it be better if you enjoyed the gameplay so much that the rewards are just a bonus? I have played games like that.

The negative side of the psychological principle you talk about is justifying boring gameplay by adding a shiny reward at the end.

This is MMORPG. Fun = rewards. You could enjoy gameplay for a while, yes, but without rewards no mmo would live longer than a month.

I will say that HoT does seem like it should be hard for a solo player, but I solo play all over the maps myself without issue. I will say that Hero Points are difficult for a solo player in some cases, as they spawn champ mobs with some nasty abilities, but usually there are HP Trains running on every map, or more than one player willing to join in on them.

I will also say the new map bosses are very fun. I can only say this about the Verdant Brink, Tangled Depths, and Auric Basin locations so far, I have not done much in Dragon’s Stand yet. The best part is each boss fight has different mechanics based on which side you take on, and the rewards aren’t that bad.

I appreciate many of you who can see some of the stuff in game the way I do. I am fine that you need to farm for Ascended gear if people want it as I don’t think it is something that should be just “handed” out. My main concern for HoT is the blocking of content unless you spend oodles of time in game. It is just something I have to live with I suppose and explore what I can, kill what I can and just chill with people when I can. Hopefully ANET will see some of what they broke but then again maybe not.

Happy Gaming folks!

Usnedward, I was concerned about the gating when I bought Hot too, but it’s actually really mild.

You need the very first level of a couple of mastery lines for the story, I don’t think either of those took me more than an hour to achieve.

There are also some hero points that are gated behind masteries, but you don’t need those specific ones to achieve your elite specialization, and they’re all achievable with help from a Mesmer. There are public groups helping with things like that fairly often.

Manthas.6234:

luzt.7692:

I would like to play the game for fun and not for rewards.
Wouldn’t it be better if you enjoyed the gameplay so much that the rewards are just a bonus? I have played games like that.

The negative side of the psychological principle you talk about is justifying boring gameplay by adding a shiny reward at the end.

This is MMORPG. Fun = rewards. You could enjoy gameplay for a while, yes, but without rewards no mmo would live longer than a month.

Diablo 3 had amazing loot but was a snoozefest. Fun and engaging gameplay for me anyday over everything on a silver plate.

NotOverlyCheesy.9427:

Manthas.6234:

luzt.7692:

I would like to play the game for fun and not for rewards.
Wouldn’t it be better if you enjoyed the gameplay so much that the rewards are just a bonus? I have played games like that.

The negative side of the psychological principle you talk about is justifying boring gameplay by adding a shiny reward at the end.

This is MMORPG. Fun = rewards. You could enjoy gameplay for a while, yes, but without rewards no mmo would live longer than a month.

Diablo 3 had amazing loot but was a snoozefest. Fun and engaging gameplay for me anyday over everything on a silver plate.

100% agree.
However, as I said, mmo has to last longer than a month. This means that players will have to repeat content over and over again. How many times have you played trough a singleplayer game? For me, in some cases it would 3 or 4 times at best. That is not enough for mmo no matter how engaging gameplay is.

Solutions are:
1. Create more good content fast. As we all probably know that is not possible. And new players would still want to do older content, but they won’t have anyone to do it with.
2. Give long term rewards for doing the same old content. This way players will get into loop of continuing the same things with the sense of achievement.

So, no matter how you look at it, rewards are important. The only exceptions probably are all kinds of pvp modes. Defeating other players is an award itself, but only a few would call pvp the best part of GW2 right now.