Guild Wars 2

When I read the explanation for why Downed State was being moved to level5 on reddit, I was open-minded and found it understandable.

• Mainly because I personally view the Downed State as a flawed mechanic, but that’s a lengthy armchair-game-design post for another day.

I read that the Personal Story was being compressed into chapters unlocking at intervals.

• Alright… Given my recent venture into key-farming, that also seemed reasonable and I didn’t take issue as it was undesirable player behavior anyway.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when on patch day, I went into reddit and these forums to find that, for the starting zones, they had:

• Locked gathering nodes? Well, that was sort of expected from the potato debacle.
• Level-gated weapon / utilities even further Eww…?
• Removed bundles? Huh…?
• Level-gated skill points and vistas. WHAT?! -You can even hear the camel’s final yelp in agony-
• Shuffled or removed various parts of the Personal Story. YOU DID WHAT NOW?! -The camel’s body does not bend that way-

I’m not an expert at this. I know some stuff, but I can’t begin to fathom the mindset of someone who does this for a living, so maybe I’m missing granular nuances that makes this all fit together.

But here’s where I connected the dots.

China’s GW2 launches with restructured content
-> Dev states playtesters took issue with learning mechanics
-> We can deduce that such playtesting occurred before the China launch
-> They must have had a healthy number of of Chinese play-testers (That’s just smart game development, right?)
-> A quick glance at China’s MMO market suggests a lot of copying and scarce creativity
-> Playtesters with MMO preconceptions is to be expected, leaning towards traditional WoW-type games
-> Confusion and/or aversion to Guild Wars 2 mechanics is to be expected

Neither playtesting data or community feedback is not suppose to directly influence development. The developers should be matching the feedback with their design goals and figuring out a way to bridge gaps where needed and avoiding features that contradict the goals (despite player-pleas).

But, instead of developing tutorials and features that further encourage embracing the points that fulfill GW2’s marketed goals for the player experience…

…they went and developed away from the game’s points of uniqueness and catered directly to the preferences of the play-testers?

• A compass should be not available/visible 90% of the time, leading players by their noses, and discouraging exploration. (And that’s ignoring the atrocity of its clearly poor designed coding that’s leading players to inappropriate level zones)
• The Personal Story, as silly or poorly written as some portions may be, should have had parts shuffled or removed for the sake of theme… Continuity and consistency in story-telling always reigns supreme.
• A player should not be level-gated from picking potatoes or attempting a skill challenge!

There is a blatantly obvious divide/disconnect between certain choices in game design here and the game’s marketed goals and appeal. I would go as far as to say incompetence among some staff for choosing lazier responses in how they dealt with player feedback.

Post 1/3 – Facts, opinions, and resulting reckless accusation. Check, check, and check.

To quote my friend:

“I feel like we’ve been nexon’d”

And you know what? My lizard brain thinks my friend’s sarcastic dread might be onto something.

ArcheAge’s launch is literally next week. Maybe Trion is bitter about Rift tanking while GW2 is somewhat steady. Maybe they planted staff over in ArenaNet a year ago, staff with devilish charisma to push for questionable feature and slowly twist the perspectives of developers.

It was all a brilliant plan that sprouted from the sign of weakness – Allowing staff who were former Nexon join the company. Okay, now I’m really starting to sound crazy.

Well, whatever the case may be… This patch bombed, if the forums are to be considered at all representative of GW2’s most passionate.

For the first time since the start of Season One, I am unhappy with the direction the game is going – And I am one to fight tooth-and-nail for the developers when they try new things; I firmly advocate that every update between August 2013 to this August 2014 was pure gold. I ate up every bit of it. No regrets.

But today, there is evidently too much weight being placed upon play-testers discomfort compared to the game’s overarching goals or community feedback.

At least, that’s how I’ve interpreted things. My reasoning to why we’re here is far-fetched, my gut suggests I’m merely being swept up by everyone else’s negativity…

But the level-gating and removals to the starting zones… Objectively, knocks all my GW2 enthusiasm right out of me.

Post 2/3 – Sleep deprivation might be involved.

So, to contrast and counterbalance the walls of vile suspicion up above. Here’s what I LIKED about the Feature Pack:

Indicator gestures to your heal skill when you reach low health

• An excellent minor nudge, the kind that should have been used for unlocking weapon skills, using utilities, teaching dodging, downed state, etc..

Collections, and their rewards.

• Truly a magnificent feature that compromises the need for thematic-rewards and generically available achievements
• It’s very similar to Dry Top’s reward system. If it were up to me, the people who worked on the collections, Dry Top, and the Aetherpath dungeon would be in charge of EVERYTHING gameplay-related.

The ‘concept’ of the compass

• If this were polished to not lead players to their doom and only appeared occasionally (randomly or manually, but with a cooldown), it’d be an excellent guidance tool for those genuinely lost without stealing away the game’s atmosphere of exploration.

Auto-unlocking level-gated weapon skills

• Weapon skill gating, as it is now, is a massive damper on the experience; however, what was also sometimes a damper is unlocking your 4 or 5 slot skills… They always took so long compared to the others. It drove me mad whenever I decided I wanted to remake my Elementalist as a different race.
• If skill-gating were less spread out and applied more sparingly, I wouldn’t mind those some skills being gated.
• Example: Skill 1/2/3 unlocked by default. Skill 4/5 unlock at 3 and 4 (but only if you already unlocked skill 2 and 3). Utilities, 5, 10, and 20 like before.

UI updates to Minis, Finishers, Trading Post, etc..

• Long awaited changes. It was what saved the slew of teasers, that most felt were underwhelming, from being a complete bust. Shame the patch felt like a complete U-turn.
• Now if only you would do the same for the Gem Store’s style section, so we can preview them however we’d like and purchase sets of skins in individual pieces. (You’d make more money for it.)

Gear / other useful item rewards upon leveling

• If this was the extent of leveling changes; none of the zone-differences, skill/content gating, and arbitrary attribute shuffling – I’d be stoked.
• You could have made these chests that fell out of the sky, instead of arbitrary fancy graphics, and play them up as “Supply Drops”. That’d be so cool.

Guild upgrades unification

• I was never affected by this, but nice to see the game be more cross-server- and alt- friendly with every patch.

Balance changes

• Always exciting to see these, both for professions and WvW mechanics.
• So many buffs (Guardian and Mesmer specifically come to mind) that rekindled build ideas in my heart

How easy this patch makes it for a loyal player to consider leaving.

• Dailies? Not worth it anymore.
• The ongoing farming/crafting projects? They can wait.
• Alts we wanted to leveled up? AH-HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

• Me and my friends have decided to retreat from GW2 for a weeks out of disgust. Maybe more! Depends on the mood of things around here by the time we’re sick of whatever else we’re find to fill the time.

This is the best part of GW2’s model! We can leave and come back any time after the initial purchase – But only when we are interested.

I cannot, in good conscious, recommend this game to myself anymore, let alone to my friends. Taking leave is the only way I can truly vote and it is what I shall do.

Post 3/3 – Bye!!

EDIT: Curses… This would have been the perfect opportunity to use my tunneling toy as an exiting gif, but my editing software is dead.