Guild Wars 2

So many people tell me that level 80 end game, is… well…. boring?

I’ve been playing for a long time and still don’t have an 80, you see I suffer from Rerollitus so I’m constantly trying different professions back n forth, I still enjoy the game despite low level areas being almost completely dead, I don’t even remember the last time I saw the swamp boss

Anyway…

Is there anything being done to keep people playing? because everyone I know that has high level characters with high level gear says the same thing over and over..

“I log on, stand in Lions Arch for a party.. either I find one and repeat the same RNG dungeons or i log back off…”

I think the 3 most important things in ANY mmorpg are the following.

1. Something to do.
2. Keep people coming back.
3. Make sure people are always out in the world.

There are plenty of things to do, people just don’t do them.

use gw2lfg to find a group.

then, while waiting for a group, work on world completion or achievements that interest you. there is plenty to do. Some of it is grindy, most of it can be done very quickly.

Sounds like you know some very boring people. Ive been lv 80 for 3 months now, fully geared/aesthetics and still find stuff to do.

people who say they have nothing to do…

1. paid cash for their levels and items
2. refuse to do sPvP
3. refuse to help out in WvWvW
4. refuse to do dungeons
5. refuse to reroll

Take your time and explore the game. Play the way you want. I took me more than 1 month to reach lv 80 and 2 months to finish story the first time. Now i have 3 lvl 80s’, 1 lvl 61 and 2 more on the way. Unlike ppl i never level my alts with crafting. Sometimes i work on getting exotics/gold, sometimes i lvl my alts.

While the endgame currently seems limited compared to say GW1, the game is also still new and new content is added every month. And dont forget this is after all just like any game (a time sink).

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

There are plenty of things to do, people just don’t do them.

Exactly this.There are so many things to do even at lv 80-dungeons,map completion,world versus world,crafting,doing various achievements…I have 3 lv 80,close to 800 hours played,highest with 81% world map discovered and not feeling bored at all.Lots of things to do in game from my point of view.

I think the game has too many crybabies.
There is plenty of stuff to do, if only you look around. And btw OP are you in low populated server? Because I play in High one aaand, i create alts every few days, aaaand i pretty much meet people ALL the time, especially when there is event boss, or just some event. It becomes crowded in a minute. Even with people who have 100% world completion, like me in my main. So yeah, I think the game has plenty to offer, but some people just don’t want to see further than their nose.

P.S: Fractals is not a requirement. It has never been and it is no longer a RNG dungeon, thanks to Wintersday. I urge you to tell your friends to read the patch notes of the last 2-3 updates. Valueable info in there

Went exploring today, found a fairly interesting little instance called Vexa’s lab.

It was a nice surprise. I saw some platforms that I thought simply led to a viewpoint, only to find an asura lab, which lead me to a small instance that was pretty fun to complete.

Shadow behemoth has been bugged for a couple months now, coulda sworn everybody new about this allready……

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

Went exploring today, found a fairly interesting little instance called Vexa’s lab.

It was a nice surprise. I saw some platforms that I thought simply led to a viewpoint, only to find an asura lab, which lead me to a small instance that was pretty fun to complete.

Accidentally found it last sunday while trying to get the vista near the entrence for my alt. Fun change of pace, rite?

There is a lot to do on the way to 80, there is very little to do in terms of PvE once you reach 80 though.

1. You have the jump puzzles, but most of those can be done on the way to 80 and often by your first character and thus offer no real incentive to continue doing beyond the one’s in Lion’s Arch for vendor loot.
2. There are the dynamic world boss events for high levels, or the temple events but the time spent to reward gained ratio is terrible which turns people away from doing them
3. You can farm…and very few people like farming. Whether it’s farming T6 mats, or Karma, or Gold, it’s all rather boring to a lot of people.
4. You can run the same dungeons over and over for gold and tokens, but that’s just farming with a party, and gets boring just as fast as basic farming.
5. You can run Fractals, because apparently a dungeon that gets harder each time you do it is supposed to keep you entertained with it, but doesn’t. It’s the same thing over and over with a slight increase in difficulty. Nothing spectacular.

Leveling an alt is a nice way to spend more time with the game, learning a new class and playing a different way. But eventually you level enough of them and even the earlier content gets repetitive and dull.

So that leaves doing either WvW or PvP. If you’re a player that lacks any sort of interest in that form of play, you are again stuck with very little incentive to actually log on and do anything.

I say this with some trepidation, however I believe the Dungeon Finder Era has ruined the imagination of a slew of gamers.

Folks are used to logging in, hitting the lfg button, and silently plowing through some dungeon that looks a lot like the one you did last year. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that to a large degree myself.

However, I got tired of it having played a game or three that was very similar in styling since ~2004. I am not alone, but I don’t think I’m the majority either. Some folks are into their comfort zone and refuse to get out of it, others are simply too interested in vertical progression to be bothered to find something to do here. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it just is what it is.

Basically this game is different. There is literally a ton of stuff to do if you’re willing to do it. But, if you want to just queue for your LFG run of the day / week, well there are other games on the market that are probably more of what you’re looking for.

Low levels are completely dead?

My server is flooded with players in low level areas right now.

That’s only because level80 isn’t suppose to be the ultimate goal of the game.

If you head to level80, expecting some magic door of content to open up, then you’re surely mistaken.

The game is built to be enjoyed wholistically.
-Exploration
-Lore and Game-world culture
-Crafting
-WvW
-Personal Story / Story dungeons
-Explorable dungeons

For players who can’t just appreciate this kind of stuff immediately, I’m sorry but it seems somewhere along the line, you broke your ability to immerse yourself.
You need to take a step back, relax, and try to remember the eager-to-learn curious-to-fault gamer inside you.
If you can find that naive little kid again, you’ll be having a fun time soon enough.

I don’t believe a game’s purpose is to keep people coming back. That’s like having a book that’s so difficult to understand you must keep reading it over and over, hardly getting the point.A well written book can communicate the ideas hopefully in one read. A game, even an MMO, is capable of doing the same thing.

This is not the same as a book you can re-read and get a different meaning. When people refer to a game’s “re-playability”, it’s not intended to praise the game’s ability to occupy players, but intended to appreciate how a game can give multiple, diverse experiences to the one player each time they play it.

MMOs HAVE been made that people keep playing them without gaining more meaning. This is done, true, but perhaps it is not best for the playerbase. Occupation without new meaning in MMOs is perhaps something that can be toned down in the years to come in online gaming.

People do, and should, reach an acceptable limit on the game, and leave it for the next thing. It’s a natural and normal maturation process for the player. What’s not so normal or “healthy” is getting stuck in one game and not moving on. People can weigh up a personal time-to-benefit ratio amongst a handful of choices according to their own value system. If they find they get through a game, are still playing it, and not enjoying it, there’s plenty of opportunity for them to hear what their own minds and bodies are telling them and weigh up their choices. The rest of us, not at this state yet, will keep playing until we reach our own fill.

karma.8763:

Shadow behemoth has been bugged for a couple months now, coulda sworn everybody new about this allready……

i did Shadow Behemoth about two weeks ago.
@ Op
I have been 80 for months now and I am really not bored- I don’t run dungeons because I have a small kid and I find dungeons mindbogglingly boring.
I don’t PvP either.
I find a ton of things to do- one poster as talking about replay-ability and comparing it to a good book, this is very much my experience- I find new things everywhere I go, this game world is so amazing if you play it like a virtual world instead of a grind/farm/dungeon run.

I have alts too and I enjoy the different perspective other classes can give, if you find your server empty by all means find one that is active in PvE it makes a huge difference.
Just last night I helped a new player with his personal story that he couldn’t even find on the map. He was happy and I was happy I could help.
No one can tell you how you should experience your game- have fun

I have 2 level 80’s for quite some time now, yet I’m hardly ever bored. And tbh, whenever I’m bored it’s not because there’s nothing to do.
I have yet to get to 100% completion on a single character, yet I’m not really trying hard to get to it. I explore when I feel like it, I search for jumping puzzles, do jumping puzzles I already did again, sometimes run a dungeon or just fool around with some friends, sometimes pve, sometimes pvp. I don’t enjoy WvW and stay away from it. So far I’ve been in fractals only once and I’ve never sat around in lion’s arch LFG.

The thing is, which is a problem for some people I think, is that the game doesn’t force you to do anything at all. You don’t have to do certain things to keep up with gear, or levels.
Some people (like me) love that aspect of the game, it keeps me playing. Some people however find it boring.

Braxxis.7062:

There is a lot to do on the way to 80, there is very little to do in terms of PvE once you reach 80 though.

1. You have the jump puzzles, but most of those can be done on the way to 80 and often by your first character and thus offer no real incentive to continue doing beyond the one’s in Lion’s Arch for vendor loot.
2. There are the dynamic world boss events for high levels, or the temple events but the time spent to reward gained ratio is terrible which turns people away from doing them
3. You can farm…and very few people like farming. Whether it’s farming T6 mats, or Karma, or Gold, it’s all rather boring to a lot of people.
4. You can run the same dungeons over and over for gold and tokens, but that’s just farming with a party, and gets boring just as fast as basic farming.
5. You can run Fractals, because apparently a dungeon that gets harder each time you do it is supposed to keep you entertained with it, but doesn’t. It’s the same thing over and over with a slight increase in difficulty. Nothing spectacular.

Leveling an alt is a nice way to spend more time with the game, learning a new class and playing a different way. But eventually you level enough of them and even the earlier content gets repetitive and dull.

So that leaves doing either WvW or PvP. If you’re a player that lacks any sort of interest in that form of play, you are again stuck with very little incentive to actually log on and do anything.

No right now you actually can’t farm because the drop rates are so low that even the farmers can’t play, It’s quite ridiculous to suggest that when the game is broken for so many due to DR, lowering drop rates by the day, permaDR bugs across accounts, broken magic find all in the name of stopping bots when history shows it doesn’t do that at all. Heck they’ve even lowered the farming of karma and xp recently. Weird huh.

Their focus on the dungeons has completely backfired on them and now there’s a struggle to try to get back to the plan they had at launch. Which ironically was working perfectly fine until they changed everything. Kinda supports the “ain’t broke don’t fixit” argument don’t it.

Mister Mustard.7203:

I say this with some trepidation, however I believe the Dungeon Finder Era has ruined the imagination of a slew of gamers.

Folks are used to logging in, hitting the lfg button, and silently plowing through some dungeon that looks a lot like the one you did last year. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that to a large degree myself.

I come from GW1 which did not have a dungeon finder. For the longest time it was the same as GW2. I find it more difficult to find groups for GW2 content than I did in GW1, even when the game is dead. Because the game is split into servers and you can’t freely transfer amongst them, I am unable to access all the people who wish to access the same content I want to play. In GW1 everyone was placed in the same districts and could freely access the other districts (assuming there were others with enough people filling them up). This made finding groups for content much easier (honestly, it was functionally still pretty bad compared to a dungeon finder, but it was league ahead of the current terrible design GW2 is slowly suffocating on) than it is in GW2.

So no, the current state of people not bothering to sit in LA spamming for an hour to access a dungeon, designed to require several daily runs to complete the reward sets you want to earn from them, has nothing to do with people being spoiled by LFG. Guild Wars 2 didn’t distribute items and rewards correctly, too much RNG and insane grind was put on end game hunts (even just chasing rare crafting materials is poor design when it comes to player activity, RNG on a dungeon boss meant players had to run the dungeon, the current design favours playing the market over playing the game) and there is little incentive to repeat dungeons for the post gear checks. Even those who want to gear up are faced with the prehistoric and increasing failing lack of any kind of LFG tool.

FacesOfMu.3561:

I don’t believe a game’s purpose is to keep people coming back. That’s like having a book that’s so difficult to understand you must keep reading it over and over, hardly getting the point. A well written book can communicate the ideas hopefully in one read.

You know, the best book I have ever read keeps telling me new things each time I read it. I wish all books did that, but only the very best manage it.

It’s not that it’s hard to understand, but that it’s that it’s so full of nuances.

The book is by Miyamoto Musashi.

Also, every game is striving to be the next Chess or Go. If those games didn’t keep people coming back, we wouldn’t even know about them today.

Illiander.8049:

You know, the best book I have ever read keeps telling me new things each time I read it. I wish all books did that, but only the very best manage it.

It’s not that it’s hard to understand, but that it’s that it’s so full of nuances.

The book is by Miyamoto Musashi.

Also, every game is striving to be the next Chess or Go. If those games didn’t keep people coming back, we wouldn’t even know about them today.

Yes, I agree. A book (or game) that continues to give new meaning as you read or re-read it is excellent. A book that causes you to struggle a lot with it asks you to accept the struggle or leave it. One that ceases to provide enough meaning for the time you give it also causes you, the reader/player to face the same ultimatum.

It will be great to see what games and books persist through time, like chess, checkers, hopscotch, solitaire, minesweeper, etc. It may be that they will last NOT because we keep returning to them, but because we see them to have enough value to teach to others. Even those players, however, will cease playing them when they give no new meaning.
We can already see how the education and entertainment industry (e.g., toys) is so incredibly competitive and market driven.

Put it this way if this game was p2p the servers would’ve been taken down months ago.

There is severe lack of content for an mmo.

It does seem one of the more popular exploits right now is coming to the forums and complaining about there being nothing to do ingame, which is odd, as im always overwhelmed by tasks when I login to GW2, and rarely have the time to complete them all.

I don’t play in excess though. With there being no monthly fee, I limit myself to a few hours a night at max, and never feel rushed or over committed to things. I think the general problem here is that people are spending massive gaming sessions in GW2 daily, and complaining that they are out of things to do, when infact they are burning themselves out due to playing in excess.

Bastion.2457:

It does seem one of the more popular exploits right now is coming to the forums and complaining about there being nothing to do ingame, which is odd, as im always overwhelmed by tasks when I login to GW2, and rarely have the time to complete them all.

This is true for many games.

A good example is Mabinogi. Just looking at it, you’ll find tons of content to keep you busy.
-Dungeon-crawling in their infinite-dungeon-generation system (with many tiers of difficulty)
-Learning/Training combat/magic skills
-Storyline
-Domestic skills
-Daily jobs (in-game time, so you can do them once every 1~2 hours)
-Farming (real crops and —--, not item-farming)
-Boss-hunting
-Title acquisition
-And loads of other content that’s been released since I quit

And yet, members on their forums will still complain that there’s nothing to do.

That’s because there’s always players out there who exhaust their options (although, for some, it’s because they really have done everything lol) and trick themselves into believing they can’t do those things anymore or that those things are somehow boring.

They try too hard, and lose their ability to immerse into a game.

Havent looked at other posts here but have you tried completing the world map? Including all of the jumping puzzle achievements? Those are extremely fun with friends! I’m saving all of that stuff until I get bored so I’ll have something to do until next patch/expansion. =) Also I highly HIGHLY believe that a lot of players THINK they know all there is to do so they fool themselves into thinking they’ve done it all. There’s a ton of stuff to do in this game.

I feel like the player mentality has changed since GW1 launched. My favorite time was when it was just Prophecies and everyone was doing FOW, UW, & Tombs. Same dungeons over & over again, but they were fun, challenging, and had the potential for great chests/drops. Can’t even guess at how many times I ran each of them, and I had a blast every time.

Now, it feels like people only want to run fast dungeons for immediate rewards. When dungeons offer tokens upon completion, that’s all that matters. Get in, go fast, get my token, repeat. What happened to playing because it’s fun?? If it isn’t fun anymore, you’re either focused on the wrong things, or this game just isn’t for you. Cuz there’s plenty to do and we’re only 4 months in.

Seras.5702:

I feel like the player mentality has changed since GW1 launched. My favorite time was when it was just Prophecies and everyone was doing FOW, UW, & Tombs. Same dungeons over & over again, but they were fun, challenging, and had the potential for great chests/drops. Can’t even guess at how many times I ran each of them, and I had a blast every time.

Now, it feels like people only want to run fast dungeons for immediate rewards. When dungeons offer tokens upon completion, that’s all that matters. Get in, go fast, get my token, repeat. What happened to playing because it’s fun?? If it isn’t fun anymore, you’re either focused on the wrong things, or this game just isn’t for you. Cuz there’s plenty to do and we’re only 4 months in.

The design of GW2 as not only helped create this mindset but very strongly reinforces is. Some people try to say there’s plenty to do, but there really isn’t. Single player fluff simply doesn’t appeal to many.

The problem is GW2 and the fact it’s designed around long, boring grinds in an attempt to get you to spend money in their shop.

I think the community is too black and white. The game is not dieing and yes there is a lot of content. But the content doesn’t keep. It is not interesting for difference reasons.

WvW is problematic because it is often 1 server being totally outnumbered and this is not funny for any side. There are keeps and castles, but the interchange every 5 minutes. It is no real conquest as their is no long lasting benefit and everyone from your server can enter “your” tower / keep / castle.

Dungeons are just problematic because they take too much of your time and their are no multi-party epic boss instances to do with guild.

In general though I believe that people are more demanding then they used to be. Many are quickly bored.

Btw. world completion is not end-game stuff. It is not something you can keep doing, at some point it is finished. And besides, not everyone is interested in that.

I have 4 80s so far and I have plenty to do. Also, there isnt much RNG at endgame, people say there is but its minimal.

Anet listened to the people and added tokens for the fractal rings, 10 fractals will net you atleast one ring of your choise. I hardly call that a grind or RNG. The RNG factor only comes into play a little bit, you might be lucky and get 1-10 other rings during those runs.

So far I’ve got 1 great ring on each of my 80s and 1 decent on each of them, the decent one isnt optimal, but it works for the specs just fine til I exchange them for one I really want. I’ve gotten most of these by just running the lvl 10+ daily on 1 character for quite a while, now it will be faster since all my 80s are 10+.

I’m glad they added fractals and the few new pieces of gear, its a bit more fun than buying everything directly.

Besides fractals there are alot of dungeons to run for armor and weapon skins and even stats at times if you miss an exotic part here and there. There is also WvW to fight in and sPvP/tPvP, farming (fractals give you better gold than farming though). You can always reach max level on multiple toons, finish each of the factional stories (vigil, whispers, priory).

The only part of end game I feel as a boring thing to take on is actually legendaries, it doesnt feel legendary the way its designed now, a quest chain (a long one) would be much better suited for it, a pure solo quest.

Rekuja.6318:

3. Make sure people are always out in the world.

So any MMORPG going the WoW train has failed.