Guild Wars 2

A thread with a few points from everyone would be nice. I’ll start… Here goes.

It took a little over 350 hours for me to develop this opinion. I only really came to the conclusion of how I truly felt about the game this evening.

Despite being in denial, I’ve accepted that GW2 isn’t all that I hoped it would be.

1) An instanced world. Having to hop in waypoints at a price takes away from a very rich aspect of most open world MMORPG titles, and that’s having the ability to venture from one zone to another without the feeling of a limitation. No mounts of any type further brought this negative out for me. There’s little urge to go back and enjoy the scenery of older zones, which really is a shame for they are beautiful.

2) Poor “end-game” is my second gripe. There I stand in my favorite look of dungeon armor, on a character that has dried up with the well of interest. I could help guild mates, I could get world completion. Heck, my achievements are over 2k and it was ok to work towards a lot of them, but the sense of satisfacation and reward dwindles.

There is a limitation in armor (not stats, but looks) and the issue with “equality” in this game in the sense that there are only a few cosmetic sets to go for outside the 100g+ cultural or those on display in Lion’s Arch, which are shared with others. All light armor wearers sharing the same looks, that repetition that exists and is present virtually everywhere. Karma is practically useless on top of this.

The fact that the pre-cursor of a legendary is being dependent upon gambling or insanely absurd drop-rates is a huge low for me. Being forced to spend real money on huge amounts of gems or save money for literally months to catch up with the momentum of the price of these pre-cursor items like Dusk, etc is ridiculous.

There’s a severe lack of diversity unless one wants to spend real money, and I see this invisible hand at work beyond the illusion of the “no grind”, even if others refuse to see there is a fowl grinding atmosphere. I will say that this game was worth every penny, and that I am satisfied with what the game offered, but simply put, the end of the game is lacking, whether you’re grinding the same aggro-infested areas in Orr, or scrambling to find the limited amount of Orichalcum available (on a constant reset).

Please share your gripes, or discuss the points I have raised if you agree or disagree.

A transparent map, a decent LFG tool, and SPvP variety.

permanence. nothing ever really changes. sure you have events, but they just loop and repeat themselves. It would be great if things could…. say, where’s the lion?

It’s missing a prioritization of Bug fixes.

Peoples’ main storyline has been broken for going on a month now.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/The-hatchery-bugged/page/6#post614279

Lack of GvG.

Storyline NPCs you feel some kind of identification with. Ones in the storyline so far either get killed off or dumped after the starting zone. Perhaps the option to dump Trahearne on a faraway island somewhere & resurrect Tybalt et. al. ? Or more involvement from that group involved with the dungeons?

At the moment Mad King Thorn feels like the only other character who isn’t two-dimensional.

1. Gear, I pretty much had the same looking armor until I got to level 70ish, theres not much variety in looks until 80 when you start using tokens.

2. Dungeon rewards, I was doing dungeons just above minimum level but never really got anything rewarding. I got tokens but I had to wait till I got to 80 to put them to use. I think if a dungeon says a certain level then you should be able to get a rewarding armor set for that level.

3. Dungeon bosses seem to lack character and mechanics.. maybe this is already being worked on, not sure.. it would be nice if the bosses spoke a little more with a cut scene or something before you start fighting them. I can’t really even remember any of the bosses names. Wish they were more like the mad king now thats something I wont forget.

4. LFG for dungeons needs a better system.. Hopefully we could get atleast an LFG channel.

5. Not enough variety in monsters.. the zones are nice but the enemies you fight arent very interesting. I think part of it is because everything you fight is about the same size as the character your controlling. It would be nice if we can chop down much bigger enemies that are cool looking. The only big things I can really remember are those walking tree looking guys, other than that I can only remember centaurs and harpies.

6. Mounts.. to me its a standard thing that majority of mmo players like. Id like to re visit alot of the zones again but there is no way I wanna do it running on foot. I am not in favor of flying mounts in GW2 only ground mounts.

7. Dueling, I hope they add this because I really want to duel sometimes when im just standing in front of AC or something, theres so much room right there to duel people.

8. No end game raids… game is still new so I’m pretty sure will get some better end game stuff soon.

9. race change or character customization in the game store.. I wanna change my human to a norn now.. will gladly pay if we had the option.

10. controls and camera. this has improved alot since the release. I absolutely hated the float with the smoothing before. They made a little fix to it and its much better but I wish I can disable it completely. Fov is better now but I think it can probably be better. Maybe in time everything will be straightened out. Good work so far though.

11. Abilities don’t feel right sometimes. Some abilities have a loading time to it which doesn’t feel good. Some examples is with a warrior, the number 5 ability with the rifle is a knock back move were you swing your rifle up close. Moves like that would feel better if it was instant instead of having a load time. Same thing with an Elementalist when your casting auto fireballs with a staff, it feels slugish before the fireball is released, it should come out fast not slow.

Most of what you said.

But my main gripe is the low amount of customization we have.

Traits aren’t completely doing their job imo. They need to change these up alot more.

+1 for a radically improved LFG tool. I can’t believe they’re not even working on improving access to dungeons, but can find time to add more of the blasted things. Can’t we at least have a random party join button for story mode and festival dungeons? Hot joining to fill spaces left by quitters would be nice, too.

Loot variety in open world PvE is really, really dull and it doesn’t get much better when you look on the trading post. I’d like to blame dungeons, but since dungeon runners complain too, I’m going to suggest it’s down to rewards being so specifically tied to particular tasks and areas, that it makes it all rather boring and repetitive, wherever you play.

Oh, and town clothes need auto-switching. I bought a costume over Halloween and I think I displayed it twice. Just kinda forgot about it.

PVP, no open world pvp , wvw is zerg on zerg, arena is boring, there is no free premade team arena fights, overall pvp is really bad. IA on world bosses, legendary is a grind joke (nothing legendary about it ), RNG. Support.

My only gripe is lack of ways to set yourself apart aesthetically. Yes, there are tons of armor sets, but they are all fairly easy to obtain. If there were more options, i think i would feel more unique.

- Lack of LFG tool or LFG channels
- Large group PVE contents, and contents that can do with guild mates, also GvG.
- End game progressions. (Not mention about vertical progressions, but the game should have somethings that allow players working on it at max level.)
- Ranking system, Leaderboard, and players Armory.
- Lack of In-Depth Combat mechanic, lack of variety of attributes building.
- Lack variety of sPVP.

The game lacks developers with imagination and foresight. This is a huge hit on this game. Instead of some common sense solutions we see farming and repeat dungeon running as the primary thing to do in this game. We see boxers happily farming too, these are as bad as bots, worse in my opinion. Boxers are being ovelooked.

There are many common sense things to solve a lot, if not all of the problems in this game but the devs are either being held back by suits or they cannot think of ways to do something better or they are afraid to upset their core farming community.

In either case this game is no better than the great farming games already out there.

This is how i sum up the game to date. A lovely golden brown baked, flaky, layered pastry shell, lightly sprinkled with sugar and baked to perfection that smells divine………… filled with crap. Pretty much sums it up.

LFG or a Dungeon Queue would be cool. I guess it would reduce the exploration aspect of running to the dungeon to get the WP for it and such, but it would give you something to do and give you faster access to it.

I kinda miss the raid aspect.. The feeling of 40 men downing a great big something.. And where every 40 men jave to coordinate or something.. Well maybe just 10-25.. Still feels more epic than just 5:)

I miss the interaction with object not being enviromental weapons.. Such as chairs, tables, food on the tables, drinks on the tables etc. I miss an arena where u can fight ppl from your own server.

I miss fishing, or well just fish for my cooking.

I miss Canthan…

Stable, glitch-free sound engine. xP I wish they would fix this. GW2 doesn’t have rich, detailed ambient sound in 1st place (frankly speaking, as opposed to game’s visuals, it’s very poor compared to some other titles (just listen to ambient in, say, Stormwind and then compare it to DR, sigh)), hearing it disappear ruins game’s atmosphere completely sometimes.

I would prefer to be able to pick the weapon skills i want from a selection rather than be stuck with the same skills on a specific weapon (something akin to the Secret World style skill system would be great)

Would love to have mounts available (and it’s surely a missed opportunity to get people buying gems for mounts in the shop)

Some less combat oriented things (such as fishing) would be great.

I don’t miss raids because they have stated all along that raid wouldn’t be in the game, and because the group mechanics as they are at present don’t really fit well into a
co-ordinated raid type environment

lack of guild halls, GvG, ladder, mAT,any other sPvP mode other than “capture” …

I just want a nice horse ..or a unicorn mount.

Preferably without a bunch of dumb armor all over it.

Real boss encounters.
Not just spam & dodge.
Can’t agree with most points though, that’s what you get in other games, I’m fine finally having something different.

bug fixes and code testing

Lack or endgame content and lack of pvp arenas. I’d also like to see costumes that don’t require 6 inventory slots or the one time use of transmutation stones.

Amra.6028:

Real boss encounters.
Not just spam & dodge.

This.

…also challenging content for bigger groups (zerg events dont count).

I think it was in the manifesto they said "We don’t want people to grind’

…. and then they put the bulk of the best rewards in this game behind a "grind wall’
…. but they don’t want us to farm. The irony.

Also in the manifesto (correct me if I’m wrong) they said they don’t want people spending their time ‘getting ready’ to play, but rather just play.

….. and then they add prohibitive waypoint costs to make you go through multiple loadings screens, town hopping, foot running, portal jumping, more loading …. to finally get to the point where you want to play with a friend.

So what is this game lacking?
A lack of accessibility. Make it easier to have fun with other people and get meaningful rewards without having to grind.

How do you do this? Just for the 2 examples I gave above:

- all dungeons have the same tokens (if you do all 8 dungeons with 3 paths for each you should be able to get a dungeon set of choice; instead of doing a single dungeon 20+ times for the same reward – same work involved, less content grind). Also make dungeon chests drop random exotic gear for the added ‘woah’ factor.

- remove waypoint cost completely or make it so small that nobody would have a second guess using the WPs they want. Make it easy to jump from orr to ascalon. Why does it have to be complicated or taxed? Why? There are plenty of gold sinks in this game with the TP tax and the mystic forge RNG.

People may say end game and pve but to me this is a pvp based game so I wasn’t expecting much for an end game pve wise and I am glad I didn’t because the pve isn’t that good. But what it is lacking is what it is supposed to be about….. pvp. I am not much of a pvper and am an end game raider, but I got GW2 in hopes for a fun and different pvp experience. But after playing it some and reading a lot from those who actually pvp on other games, I find it lacking a lot. Very disappointed in it so far.

There’s no reason to socialize in this game, it’s like playing with glorified AI. People converge on an event and then go about doing whatever they were doing with no real coordination or communication. The lack of people actually wanting (or needing) to organize and do things is the biggest reason I don’t play anymore.

sPvP is disappointing and was full of elitist pricks two days after launch. There’s tons of maps but they all have the same capture objective so there might as well only be one. It’s essentially the same as battlegrounds/warzones in any other mmo only less interesting and everyone has the same gear.

Dungeons gave crap rewards and they weren’t fun. I had plenty of good and bad groups throughout and as a personal preference I missed having a defined role as in other mmo’s.

Little things like the Magic Find stat. Why do I have to choose between being able to get a decent chance at loot and actually putting worthwhile stats on my armor?

A lot of other things people mentioned contributed. I was looking forward to this game for a while but I’ve recently stopped playing altogether.

Had to think about this a bit and then work out how to phrase it without it coming across as merely a complaint.

Immersion: Immersion is severely limited IMO. The game world is gorgeous and I can see a lot of care went into making it feel and look alive. Yet, when I create a Norn, Charr, Sylvari or Asura I walk into the game world dressed as a human? All the NPCs around me look like the belong IN the areas I am in. They look like they are actually Norn, Charr, Sylvari and Asuran… not the players though.
This completely removes me from the moment, breaks the 4th wall and kills the enjoyment of playing those other races. (Personal Opinion of course)

Holding the content to the Lore: This moderately fits in with the above. I hate the Risen. They are the silliest foes I’ve ever come across in an MMO (outside the usual K-grinder starter mobs of ’shrooms and goo bubbles). So, when asked why these silly things are standing around doing nothing, or why there are so many and why they move so stupidly fast; the answer was “Lore”.
Erm… If we hold the game to be solid with “Lore”; then why does my Norn start dressed as a Human*? – “Lore” should not be an excuse, it should be a rule of design that holds true to all parts. Not just the parts that require the least amount of effort.

*Now if the personal story said my Norn had just returned home from Kryta and was then chosen for the Great Hunt; I might forgive the human starter gear… but ONLY the starter gear. It would not explain why all the drops and merchant armor IN the Norn area are all designed exactly like the Humans. – and yes, this has bugged me way more than it probably ought too since BWE1. lol

WasAGuest.4973:

Had to think about this a bit and then work out how to phrase it without it coming across as merely a complaint.

Immersion: Immersion is severely limited IMO. The game world is gorgeous and I can see a lot of care went into making it feel and look alive. Yet, when I create a Norn, Charr, Sylvari or Asura I walk into the game world dressed as a human? All the NPCs around me look like the belong IN the areas I am in. They look like they are actually Norn, Charr, Sylvari and Asuran… not the players though.
This completely removes me from the moment, breaks the 4th wall and kills the enjoyment of playing those other races. (Personal Opinion of course)

This is a big one. They always gave the impression that there would be a uniqueness to all the races, but there’s a major lack of differentiation in ordinary gear unless you start on the dungeon wheel. There ought to be racial specific starter armour & a set of racial specific armour that drops in appropriate zones (e.g. like how the Country Armour drops). I kind of feel the same about weapon skins, especially from vendors & that come out of the crafting process. I kind of wish there were more designs to choose from when crafting.

Tying in to what people have said above, the cities look amazing but feel kind of like empty movie sets with a generic stock of actors walking around. There’s nothing much to do in them. There are no real “social hubs” like taverns and there are no ‘specialised’ vendor locations, like in other MMOs where you have districts with buildings with certain types of merchants in (e.g. town clothing shop, wine shop, cheese shop). In GW2 merchants are largely just dumped in streets & sell mostly the same stuff. The lack of simple interactive things like chairs doesn’t really help. I was amazed, initially, walking around Divinity’s Reach, but at the moment there isn’t a lot of reason to go back to most of it at all.

The only thing that really bugs me is that you can’t make separate key binds for each character.

PvE challenges (in the DEs and dungeons)… there’s really few that are legit challenges or at least require some level of real coordination other than adding everyones damage together.

Lack of customisation.

I think the game would look a lot better if characters weapons were always on their back. So if you arent wielding one set it sits sheathed on your back at all times, and you oughta actually motion to get your equips.

LACK OF GROUP JOINS!!
I’m tired of being with my guild/party and we can’t queue up together in things like keg brawls, or Lunatics Inquisition when it was around! T__T

needs moar minidungeons.

10 / 25 man dungeons are pretty much what GW 2 lacks. Even if its not perfect most other gameplay styles are covered by content. In my eyes this would round out the package and make this a game to really challenge for the number 1 spot.

Character builds.

‘Useless’ skill are more fun than ‘useless’ passive (zzz) traits IMO.

Balanced class tweaks.
When was the last time the thief class got rebalanced instead of outright nerfed?

And enemies that are challenging instead of annoying.
A massive health bar does not make an enemy challenging. It makes them annoying and pointless to fight. You make them challenging by making players think about how they can fight them instead of leaving their computer for 10 minutes after turning on auto-attack.

bosses / group events that aren’t just tons of hit points with some red circle dodging

more personal story flavour thrown throughout the storyline, connecting earlier choices with later ones

Lore and lack of competation due to having no playable opposite side, teleporting to another instance to kill each other without a reason or purpose in order to do pvp..
The game is too casual, characters, bosses has no depth even their voices are so awful like they read an article.

PvE rewards for participating in activities like DE’s/Dungeons/Champion Mobs/etc are severely lacking

Smaller dungeons made for 1-2 people with decent rewards would also be welcome

isn’t missing anything imo.

out of every mmo ive ever played, GW2 is probably the best in terms of launch status

The storyline for me kills it the most, seeing it as nothing more than Kormir 2.0. The dungeons aren’t really all that fun, Anet had some really nice ideas to spice them up but I miss the wide open space, the bigger group size, and the frantic and chaotic aspect of GW1.

Here it just feels small, closed in, and the fights feel too intimate like 1v1 dueling than a group of people fighting against a big group of monsters. It doesn’t have that same arcade feel of a beat em up that GW1 had. Vizunah Square is a perfect example of a simple but fun instance. GW2 dungeons on the other hand feel more like all the other 5 mans in every other stale MMO out there.

I think it has to be realized that it’s not always about the mechanics of a fight it’s also just the mindless fun factor which makes people want to just do it for kicks.

I agree with much that has already been stated but I’ll add my list:

1) Content launched very bugged; recent stuff too not even addressing the launch.
2) Disapointing rewards in almost every aspect of play; play can be its own reward and at the same time, momentous feats in the game don’t feel like they end up where they should.
3) Shoddy title display.
4) Tedious dungeons. Enough has been said on that. I’m taking an approach of do story once and never go back.
5) Orr; redundant feeling zones. By the time I got to cursed Shore it did not feel epic, it felt like Malch’s Leap +.
6) Dyes; if they were account wide I’d chase every kitten one. Being character-based I buy 3-4 that I like for my toon’s flavor and then I’m done. (minor gripe at most)
7) WvW: No grace period to zone back in to WvW after a crash/lockup. Back to the queue with you!
8) FoV/mouse scroll: this might be game-breaking for me. Hate the arbitrary limitations.
9) LFG: Can’t believe in 2012 we are standing around spamming LFG X-story 80 engi full exotics
10) Guild features: when guildies log on and last log in data would be nice as well as a guild event calendar.
11) Not enough uses for karma; why not have a few minis here and there that are available from a vendor for karma after you beat a series of appropriate events? Answer below.
12) Very blatant money grabs from the cash shop. I don’t begrudge them their monetization model as I’ve spent a decent amount on gems just to support the game. However, some of the design choices appear to be ’let’s make a game that is great at making money’ as opposed to ‘lets make a great game that makes us money.’ Maybe they could do both but they seem driven by the former.

Some things others have issue with that I’m fine with:

1) Lack of ‘end game.’ For me getting to level cap and getting exotics, doing map complete and finishing the personal story is the game. I’ll chase a few achievs, do a lil pvp and get myself some decent looking swag but I’m ok with logging out until new content is published. I don’t feel a game needs a list of things for me to do every day for 365.

2) Legendaries: With few exceptions the art/effects on these are such that I would not bother if the costs/effort were cut in half. Bragging rights is not that meaningful to me so this is something I have simply written off as ‘not intended for me.’ And, I’m not complaining about the effort/costs – I just can’t get myself to be interested in this aspect of the game even though I get the sense I’m supposed to be motivated by this.

Cezton.2415:

A thread with a few points from everyone would be nice. I’ll start… Here goes.

It took a little over 350 hours for me to develop this opinion. I only really came to the conclusion of how I truly felt about the game this evening.

Despite being in denial, I’ve accepted that GW2 isn’t all that I hoped it would be.

1) An instanced world. Having to hop in waypoints at a price takes away from a very rich aspect of most open world MMORPG titles, and that’s having the ability to venture from one zone to another without the feeling of a limitation. No mounts of any type further brought this negative out for me. There’s little urge to go back and enjoy the scenery of older zones, which really is a shame for they are beautiful.

Just a nitpick about this, the game’s areas are not instanced, they are zoned. There is a massive difference. Instances in the technical definition of the word are created on demand for one player/group of players and are not around when no players are present.

Zones are loaded regardless of what players are in them.

These two things are very different, just FYI.

On topic – personally my biggest grips with the game are:

1) End game goals boil down to grinding – grinding is not fun.
2) Loot in general throughout the game is 99.9% trash and is not interesting at all, and ends up simply being sold to the vendor. I have not ever looted anything I wanted to keep or was excited to get.

The first point is a real problem for the “self made” sort of goals to get cosmetic weapons, especially legendaries. I am absolutely fine with them taking a huge amount of effort to get.

What I don’t like at all is that 99% of that effort is simply a gold grind, and gold grinding is not challenging, difficult, and most importantly, it’s not fun.

I’m not sure why people think that the process for getting a legendary should not be interesting or difficult in any way, and simply require a mindless 1000+ hour gold grind.

It’s a boring design, isn’t reflective of the name “legendary” at all, and is antithetical to the stated design of the game.

lack of reasonable dollar→gem→gold conversion rates.

1…Horrible customisation, look at LOTRO to see how it should be done, and that game is over 5 years old.

2…Crafting system is seriously one of the worst i have ever seen in a MMO.

3…End game…if you are not interested in grinding for pointless skins then you have little if anything to do.

4…LFG…this game has the worst grouping mechanics of any MMO out there.

The problem is that in an effort to be “innovative”, Anet has compromised playability and long term survivability.
They seem to have steered away from things that work just because some other MMO already did it…well im sorry Anet, you are not all that innovative, you just removed the need to pick up quests is all…“dynamic” events are just soft quests, they even have the “million HP boss beat down”, which most other MMO’s are trying to steer clear of because its old and has been done to death.

If you had taken the best from other MMO’s instead of staying away from everything that made them popular, you might have had a winner