Guild Wars 2

This post is primarily a message to the developers showing the problems most players have and why they have them.

Been playing since around the time Guild Wars 2 first released and I have pretty closely watched how Arena Net has been developing the game. My conclusion now is this is probably the most unstable game i have ever come across from a development standpoint and is mostly made up of a world that removes the need for a player to progress.

I started with the necromancer and spent most of my time while on, playing PvE. I never tried any other class until months after i hit level 80 because class jumping really is the most awkward thing you can do in an MMORPG. Each time you do it you have to start again playing the same content, looking for the same way points. This gets very old very quickly, especially if the content doesnt allow you to think making it an extremely boring task.

This would have been fine , I could use just the Necromancer and play through all the content but then I realize that the class had so many issues especially in pvp:
- Virtually immobile but was still susceptible to stuns
-Slow attack patterns making it vulnerable to faster classes
-Choosing a build that best fits your playstyle doesnt work if you don’t have basic counters in it first, like condi removal, stun breaks, etc

Reached Dragon rank and after months of frustrating incidents, even though there were good ones mixed in, I had to switch to thief. Now since all my PVE progress is on necro, it means that i have one class for pve and another for pvp, which is very far from ideal. Playing two different characters in one RPG sort of defeats the purpose of an RPG and is a good way to break immersion. Any creative person or anyone who grew up playing MMORPGs should understand this.

Thief was a lot of fun. It was (pre June 23rd 2015) an effective class that didnt have the sort of irritating limitations necromancer had. This was partially due to feline grace. Playing an evasion thief put a lot of emphasis on my reaction and judgment abilities which meant that there was not a single dull moment.

So I played necromancer for about 2 years got into PVP, discovered how riddled with issues it was, switched to thief and all was good (in PvP) until they removed feline grace. Feline grace gave thieves a fixed amount of endurance each time they dodged. When coupled with vigor thieves had a lot of endurance regeneration. Removing this fundmentally changed the class causing it to have almost no survivability unless you went full stealth

Stealth builds require no skill to play and essentially breaks down every fight to a game of hide and seek. Meaning other classes cant do anything unless the thief appears. Thief quickly became one of the worst classes right next to necro and created a very unstable environment in the PVP community with one of the meta classes going from 100 to 0 within one patch.

So why didnt i go back to spending the time in PvE? PvE on the base game essentially is designed for kids between the ages of 7 and 12. There is almost nothing that requires any level of real thinking to solve problems. To make matters worse, reaching end game wasn’t anything sepecial, end game dungeons where mostly just skip and stack with mobs hardly being a challenge, getting high end gear was really more for cosmetic purposes and high end world boss events really was just 99% of people stacking on some place whacking a pinata as hard as they can

.At this point, Necro which should have been given substantial improvements wasnt and Thief which was an effective class and demanding to play (if evasive) was pretty much axed. PvE , boring to play due to simplified content with no real goals except world completion, and high level gear which are both cosmetic and unnecessary.

How does it all fair with the release of HoT? well this is where the unstability of the game and clear lack of direction really shows. This ill explain in a new thread later. In that thread ill show lot of the changes and how the studio has done complete 180s on class designs to the point that you don’t know what your class will look like 6 months from now.

Ragion.2831:

PvE on the base game essentially is designed for kids between the ages of 7 and 12. There is almost nothing that requires any level of real thinking to solve problems.

Yes, if only there were puzzles of some kind that required thinking and perhaps jumping. Anet should really get onto that and give us ..ahem… 7-12 year olds something to do.

If you’re making another thread then this thread right here is really pointless. It’s nothing but ‘how I played PvP and how I went from Necro to Thief’, without any contructive points or even ground for discussion.

While I agree that this game feels like it has been lacking direction since around LS1 was introduced, I don’t think OP’s post offers anything worthwhile.

Ragion.2831:

Playing two different characters in one RPG sort of defeats the purpose of an RPG and is a good way to break immersion. Any creative person or anyone who grew up playing MMORPGs should understand this.

Hmm. I feel like I’m fairly creative. I write short stories, fashion acceptably good Shakespearan sonnets without turning them to doggerel, I at least used to be able to draw good character sketches, etc. I’ve got a room full of period costumes I’ve sewed using proper fabrics and construction.

And I have a LOT of alts, a good many of which have ongoing RP stories, some of them interwoven but most kept separate from each other because the RP is meant to be with other players, not with myself. My newest one was made for a mystery plot I and a guildie are running and I came up with a ton of detail for a “dungeon crawl” based on it. Seeing Tyria from a number of viewpoints makes it feel richer, more detailed, and bigger for me.

Whatever other points you may have to make, claiming a creative person needs to be limited to one PoV to immerse themselves in an MMO world isn’t one with which I’ll agree.

Ragion.2831:

This post is primarily a message to the developers showing the problems most players have and why they have them.

Given the rest of your diatribe, I very much doubt that most players share your problems. Try speaking for yourself instead of people you don’t know.

Playing two different characters in one RPG sort of defeats the purpose of an RPG and is a good way to break immersion. Any creative person or anyone who grew up playing MMORPGs should understand this.

Looks at this post, looks at my 9 level 80s. Thinks to self, Self, I don’t believe this person is speaking for me and how I like to play. He talking about how HE likes to play and thinks that everyone is just like him. He’s going to have a shock later on in his life when he finds out that different people like different things and have different opinions than him.

“So why didnt i go back to spending the time in PvE? PvE on the base game essentially is designed for kids between the ages of 7 and 12. "

I agree. There is definitely too much complexity here for toddlers and that makes them better than many games on the market.

Hmm…let me see…

I have quite a few 80s: Ranger – Guardian – Ele – Mes – Necro – Rev – Theif so the part about more than one character breaking stuff isn’t me.

Something about 7 – 12 year olds…nope not me either

Something about meta builds…again, not me…

So who is this guy talking about other than himself?

As Just a flesh wound said “He talking about how HE likes to play and thinks that everyone is just like him. He’s going to have a shock later on in his life when he finds out that different people like different things and have different opinions than him.”

I agree on that 100%. The point of any and all MMOs is not to play just like everyone else…that makes the game boring and stale in my personal opinion and experience. Yeah a lot of people follow base meta builds for big events…but each one differs slightly from the next, and no 2 players play exactly the same way all the time. This builds synergy through diversity, and that is what makes this game a success.

As for the talk about the dev team and all, personally I think they are doing one heck of a job as the team at ArenaNet is much smaller than most other big named MMOs GW2 is in league with. The fact that their team brought so much to the table with GW2 is incredible.

So yeah, to the OP…sometimes you have to think outside of the box…unless it is the Tardis in which you do want to think inside of it…after all, it is smaller on the outside.

Ragion.2831:

This post is primarily a message to the developers showing the problems most players have and why they have them.

Its fine to post your personal opinions about the game, even when I disagree with you. But when you state these “are the problems most players have”, I really need to ask you to prove this claim. How do you know what “most players” think or how they play or what they consider problematic in the game?

I think Most Players must be Ragion RL name. Most John Players Smith. Jr.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Playing two different characters in one RPG sort of defeats the purpose of an RPG and is a good way to break immersion. Any creative person or anyone who grew up playing MMORPGs should understand this.

Looks at this post, looks at my 9 level 80s. Thinks to self, Self, I don’t believe this person is speaking for me and how I like to play. He talking about how HE likes to play and thinks that everyone is just like him. He’s going to have a shock later on in his life when he finds out that different people like different things and have different opinions than him.

So you are telling me that you played through guild wars 2 base game 9 times to level those characters without using tomes of knowledge?

How i like to play is really very simple, give me a compelling reason to progress and make me work a little for it. That’s it. Do you know how i know that my opinion is a little more than that? the fact that the over the years, the reward system and the hand holding nature of the game are two things that have been pointed out so many times that the studio had to do something about it in HoT. If this wasn’t true, they would have stuck to what they did in the base game.

The problem now that only people who have followed the class development for a long time will notice is that they seem to not know what they want to do with the classes. They would say in a live stream, thieves mindlessly dodge so therefore we are going to remove flat endurance gain from feline grace and nerf vigor by 50%, then a few months later, they buff vigor to 100% and put in an extra endurance bar and flat endurance gain on a heal skill and call it an elite spec. A complete 180 and other classes have experienced something similar.

There is another problem with the classes too that is very slowly getting worse which i will explain properly in a new thread if i ever get around to writing it

Ragion.2831:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Playing two different characters in one RPG sort of defeats the purpose of an RPG and is a good way to break immersion. Any creative person or anyone who grew up playing MMORPGs should understand this.

Looks at this post, looks at my 9 level 80s. Thinks to self, Self, I don’t believe this person is speaking for me and how I like to play. He talking about how HE likes to play and thinks that everyone is just like him. He’s going to have a shock later on in his life when he finds out that different people like different things and have different opinions than him.

So you are telling me that you played through guild wars 2 base game 9 times to level those characters without using tomes of knowledge?

How i like to play is really very simple, give me a compelling reason to progress and make me work a little for it. That’s it. Do you know how i know that my opinion is a little more than that? the fact that the over the years, the reward system and the hand holding nature of the game are two things that have been pointed out so many times that the studio had to do something about it in HoT. If this wasn’t true, they would have stuck to what they did in the base game.

The problem now that only people who have followed the class development for a long time will notice is that they seem to not know what they want to do with the classes. They would say in a live stream, thieves mindlessly dodge so therefore we are going to remove flat endurance gain from feline grace and nerf vigor by 50%, then a few months later, they buff vigor to 100% and put in an extra endurance bar and flat endurance gain on a heal skill and call it an elite spec. A complete 180 and other classes have experienced something similar.

So you are telling me that you played through guild wars 2 base game 9 times to level those characters without using tomes of knowledge?

Not my Revenant, because it was the first day of the expansion and I was more anxious to get her to the new maps. but yep. All the others were leveled with no tomes or writs by doing map completions. I have 8 chars with 100% map completion and I’m working on my Revenant. If it hadn’t been for the expansion giving a new class and maps on the same day I would have leveled her by map completion just like the others.

Quit thinking everyone plays like you.
Don’t speak for others when you post. Only speak for yourself.

I applaud you mate, seriously. That is excessive, 8 times playing through something that offers next to no challenge. Unless you want to argue, that you found the base game challenging, then that is a different story

Not everyone wants to be challenged sure, but you cant say a large majority dont when you look at the most popular criticisms of the game and generally just how games are developed.

The main reason people generally like being challenged is because when they are successful, it is rewarding. Sense of reward for a task is a basic human thing not a game design thing. That is not even remotely debatable.

Ragion.2831:

I applaud you mate, seriously. That is excessive, 8 times playing through something that offers next to no challenge. Unless you want to argue, that you found the base game challenging, then that is a different story

Not everyone wants to be challenged sure, but you cant say a large majority dont when you look at the most popular criticisms of the game and generally just how games are developed.

The main reason people generally like being challenged is because when they are successful, it is rewarding. Sense of reward for a task is a basic human thing not a game design thing. That is not even remotely debatable.

Yeah. Them making HoT harder has really reeled in the population. Why the number of players is increasing by leaps and bounds now that they’ve made the new areas harder. There have been post after post on the forums saying how packed the game is now that they’ve made the new areas tougher.

Not.

Many people get their challenge from the real world and not from steering a set of pixels through a computer landscape. There are people who only play to relax. They might sometimes like a challenge but mostly they’re playing to enjoy and shake off real world stress, not add more challenge after a long day of working.

Quit thinking everyone plays like you.
Don’t speak for others when you post. Only speak for yourself.

I’m pretty sure my first six or so 80’s were done via leveling up without tomes or writs because those characters were leveled up before writs were a thing, and before tomes could be achieved outside of sPvP.

OP is making some serious assumptions about how people play, which from what I can gather, are very, very incorrect.

I’d also further mention that new characters needing to re-play old content in an RPG setting isn’t at all illogical or unstable; when you start a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign, you don’t get to take the level and gear from the highest-level character you’ve ever made, and continue on your level 20 quest to slay gods. The campaign happens under the DM’s rules and under the rules of new characters. You’re going to deal with the low-level humanoid bandits and the likes repeatedly over many campaigns. That’s how RPG’s are when you start anew, and since game video game development is a slow and expensive process, creating new settings and stories ever character is impossible and an unreasonable request.

A lot of PvE is definitely easy, or at least from my POV, and many others. But age means very little in regards to difficulty. I recall back in my early teens I was min-maxing in Runescape and become one of the top 1% PvP’ers in the game. Even then, PvE content, and really, GW2 as a whole, is meant to be approachable by a very large audience. ANet has to account for players of low skill and allow for them to be able to beat the story content and make basic progression. The big selling point of the game was “play how you want.” We don’t need to enforce difficulty standards to cater to a certain specific type of player. It’s why OW PvE is easy and Raids/high-level fractals are meant to be difficult, and why there are two different PvP formats.

You’re absolutely right that ANet has made horrible decisions on a lot of the HoT content and made 180’s on its core design principles. That said, this has nothing to do with playing a single character or any kind of progression system.

Solipsism is a helluva drug

I will have to say I haven’t used any Writs or Tomes on any of my L80s. I think I have 8 or 9 now. Lol, I don’t even use them on my key-runners; I don’t know why…I have nearly 200 Tomes in the bank.

I enjoy the Open World; I find some of it easy, and some of it ‘challenging’. I’ve certainly seen more threads about HoT maps being too difficult/‘challenging’ than I have the opposite. Most seem to want more maps akin to Core Tyria in the future. /shrug

I don’t think the DnD is a fair example, because new toons go through new stories :P I do think the OP is off base in assuming he is in the majority, but I suppose we all like to feel like our position is the norm from time to time.

I will confess to toming up two of my 16 80’s. I wanted to duplicate my norn Reaper from beta, so I made her as a Necromancer and tossed paper at her. And my newest guy was made for RP and I wanted the flexibility of going anywhere for the purpose, plus it opened up a bank slot as I used up my second pile of tomes.

But the other 14 have leveled through playing and I have one Ele in his 60s that is going to do the same, as will my Rev once made. It’s not boring when you intersperse it with RP and use your world traveling to fuel your stories and journals. Also it gives continued projects in which you can feel progression happening.

Sorry, OP. I know your post was about more than just that (not that I agree with most of it), but you gotta know that when you diss playng multiple alts, the althoholics are gonna point out the fallacy of calling it uncreative.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Ragion.2831:

I applaud you mate, seriously. That is excessive, 8 times playing through something that offers next to no challenge. Unless you want to argue, that you found the base game challenging, then that is a different story

Not everyone wants to be challenged sure, but you cant say a large majority dont when you look at the most popular criticisms of the game and generally just how games are developed.

The main reason people generally like being challenged is because when they are successful, it is rewarding. Sense of reward for a task is a basic human thing not a game design thing. That is not even remotely debatable.

Yeah. Them making HoT harder has really reeled in the population. Why the number of players is increasing by leaps and bounds now that they’ve made the new areas harder. There have been post after post on the forums saying how packed the game is now that they’ve made the new areas tougher.

Not.

Do you have numbers showing that population hasn’t increased? Also i did check what people think about the increased difficulty and generally people like it. Some even say certain things are “OP” but in a good way. Wooden potatoes also made a video about game difficulty and is also in favour of increasing the skill requirement of the game. So unless you just started playing recently im not sure how you can make this argument.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Many people get their challenge from the real world and not from steering a set of pixels through a computer landscape. There are people who only play to relax. They might sometimes like a challenge but mostly they’re playing to enjoy and shake off real world stress, not add more challenge after a long day of working.

Quit thinking everyone plays like you.
Don’t speak for others when you post. Only speak for yourself.

Ill just say that it is actually both. Ill leave that to you to figure out.

I mean, OP still hasn’t said anything that can be counted as (constructive) criticism. It was really just a blog post about his PvP endeavours and ‘the game lacks direction’, to which I agree, like I said. But I don’t feel like panning out why, apparently just like OP.