Guild Wars 2

mekkanic.4759:

phys.7689:

mekkanic.4759:

Wish they bring back build templates and get rid of the cost of retraiting.

cost of retraiting is honestly not an issue. It costs 3 silver for a level 80 to retrait, i wouldnt really notice nor care of the difference. Build templates though would be good, and im guessing they may return, especially if they split PVE an WvW skills, in fact they would probably get rid of cost of retraiting too.

Still i think the problem is the cost of re gearing, and not just with money, but with convenience, inventory, and manageability.

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary. Its not needed. I would love to retrait while im in wvw without having to go visit someone just so I could retrait. It could cost 0 silver. Its just the fact that I have to go to an npc to do it. It wasnt in gw1…why is it in gw2?

it does need to be at an npc imo. Teleporting is free in WvW, but do you really think it would be a good idea to change traiting completely on the fly in a PVP enviroment? how good you are would have a lot to do with how many trait changes you could do while moving to objectives. Change to running traits while running change to long range dps and tank on wall, change to skirmisher outside wall. At some point you shouldnt be able to specialize for every situation, and have to choose an overall focus with advantages and disadvantages.

Sometimes I ve wanted to change traits on the fly, but i think it would be bad for the game overall.

I think you need to give the game more time. After you hit 30 and do some dungeons you will start off hating how hard they are because it differs so much from regular PvE. I play a Warrior as my main and in PvE I can faceroll everything. In dungeons I have to dodge perfectly and be careful where my AoE hits and focus on the same target as my team or we will wipe.

Personally I was having problems staying with the game. I took about 4 months off of my level 72 Warrior because I was not enjoying getting to 80. I started playing again and fell in love again I strived for 80 and once I hit that there was nothing standing in the way anymore. I am running dungeons almost every day trying to get armor and working on my map completion.

The difference between a good Ele and a great Ele is huge. Keep playing and you will reach bigger and better things.

I do not believe that WoW had all their low level dungeons when they started. I believe that many were added in later. I may be wrong though.

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

darkace.8925:

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

This is true. Combating inflation is a good thing. Personally, I would make waypoints that are further away from cities cost more to travel to.

I agree with all of your points to an extent, but in particular #1. It could be argued that GW1 had too many skills in the end, but GW2 definitely needs more than it currently has.

One of the big draws to any game like this is having lots of ways to slice and dice your character and what they can do, which allows you to experiment with new things enough to keep the gameplay from getting too repetitive and stale. Watering down the selection for the sake of ‘balance’ is not the way to go (see: Diablo 3).

I also agree that the number scaling is needlessly high. The level cap should have been 40 and the leveling speed should have been slower. And frankly, gear shouldn’t have had both levels and rarity, it should have only had the latter. It’s totally pointless to have multiple iterations of the same piece of gear whose only purpose is to inflate the same stats a little more.

I really like GW2, but I’m very fearful they’re going in the wrong direction with it and it’s going to drown the game.

So play GW1? Just because you are not hooked (in fact if your looking to get addicted to something i think playing what game is the least of your problems) dose not mean other are not enjoying it. GW1 was a niche game most ppl played WoW because it was an mmorpg and GW1 was not. GW2 IS a mmorpg so thoughts who did not like mmorpgs to start with would not like GW2 even if they liked GW1.

More skills are harder to balance, I mean in GW1 as soon as there was an OP build or something that was extremely effective……BAM…. Insta-nerf and the skill becomes completely useless. I agree though that a lot of the utility skills we are given are pretty ‘meh’ and that runes and sigils are expensive. I also hate the fact you can’t re-spec when you’re out of combat, but I guess it’s like GW1 in a way where you couldn’t re-spec in instances other than towns.

I saw Anet state somewhere that higher numbers are easier to balance, in GW1 10 damage was a lot and removing that was a HUGE impact on a skill that was focused on DPS. But here they have more to work with.

I can’t believe you don’t take advantage of combo fields, they can double your teams effectiveness. Especially when some combo fields allow area might, area healing, area stealth, perma-blinds on some bosses. They are VERY effective.

Open world PvE is the easiest part of the game and so to say the game is simple based on the first few levels of PvE is well… In WoW the first levels of the game are really easy also. It doesn’t get harder till you level up. I think you expect too much too quickly you have to be a bit more realistic when you are still very low level.

Mesmer for example, they don’t started to become really interesting till they are level 40-ish when traits allow them to become more effective. Traits are what largely dictate your plastyle and depending on your traits you use corresponding weapons/utility. (Or you pick the weapon you like best and then work your traits and utility around that).

I would also recommend going into sPvP, you can do this starting from level 1. You get separate gear and access to all traits/runes/sigils/weapons in sPvP so you can get a feel of what it’s like then. You will see that what you thought was simple gameplay is anything but as you get beaten by other people quite easily because you aren’t familiar with how to play efficiently. The game isn’t easy to master.

Dungeons are also a huge step up from open world PvE. Personally I still find them not hard enough but I’m a hardcore player. To most people they are just right or even hard. You will find that when you do a dungeon with a full group of newcomers it is anything BUT simple (which I would highly recommend doing, half the fun is learning this stuff without piggyback riding on veteran players).

All in all if you don’t have access to dungeons that means you aren’t even level 30 yet. That means that you haven’t even started to get into the more complex game play. Especially as Elementalist where you essentially have 4 weapons (20 weapon skills) that you need to manage including your utility and traits so it does get a lot more complex at later levels. Again though Open world PvE = EASY

While I love the PvP in both GW1 and GW2, I really miss the mesmer class of GW1 thatm to this datem still is unique IMO.

darkace.8925:

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

Why?

So the trading post might go down or up? i’d have been fine with zero trading post as per GW1.

gkrit.9416:

1. Minimal Build diversity/customising
2. Re-spec’ing
3. Health vs. Damage

1. The diversity is there, you just have to stop looking only at the best specs. The diversity is in the playstyles and the damage. For example, as a Warrior, just from the popular weapons you got GS, Axe/Shield, Sword/Warhorn and Hammer. Each of them have sets of traits that compliment them and each of them can be made with healing banners or shouts if you so desire.

2. You should be glad that you have respecing at all. I know games that had no respec at all, or where the respec required a rather expensive cash shop item. Honestly, if you think that 3.5 silver is a lot, you’re doing something wrong.

3. The differing amounts of health allow for different styles of survival. Guardian has low health, but survives with boons and heavy armor, whereas Warrior lacks defensive boons but has heavy armor and high hp. Necromancers lack defensive boons, but got high hp. Thieves got stealth. Elementalists got tons of boons.

Also, higher numbers allow for higher accuracy. For example, 10% out of 2385 power is 238.5, which you can round to either 239 or 238, whereas 10% out of 15 is 1.5, which you can round down to either 1 or 2. The difference in the rounding is massive.

Playing subpar builds for the sake of being diverse isn’t interesting.

As a GW1 player of over 6 years, i definitely feel where TC is coming from.

I’ve been feeling the same since way before launch. Even when they launched those theorycrafting build tools, i was feeling a distinct lack of variety. I think that in a lot of ways, they’ve compromised the skill variety into a very poorly designed trait system that homogenizes everyone into either glass cannon, tanky, or condition spec. 1 of those is barely even viable because of system limitations. I’ve been harping and agonizing on this for so long, but these topics just never come to any type of unity. It’s really hard to pinpoint the problems i feel GW2 has compared to GW1, but i just dont find myself logging in for the inherent gameplay like i did in GW1. I think that most can agree this game has just become a soulless zerg grind for cosmetics because everything else is so shallow.

First off, in my opinion, removing direct, targeted support and the healer paradigm was an extremely poor decision. All it really does is sate casual whiners who dont wanna wait on other people to play an MMO. AN MMO. A game based completely on the community and social interaction. For an MMO, this game severely downplays those aspects. People in real life have roles. A team structure, a content design structure…almost impossible to pin down and design for in absence of this system. In its’ place, we have classes that clearly outclass others, making them useless because with no trinity to split roles, every class is competing for the same party slot. Why take a Ranger over a Guardian? The classes are fundamentally imbalanced without the trinity system. So in sating the casuals looking for something different, you have to build a basically structure-less system that all gameplay (combat) content is focused on. This is why we have bosses with health bars in scientific notation that can 1HKO a party.

Not to say the game doesn’t work, but it has major problems. If i walked into AC explorable as a level 35 noob with a lv 35 noob party, the spider is going to transcend my comprehension of game mechanics and most likely infuriate me to the point that i never play the game again. This is poor design, plain and simple. You don’t have a class system structure, noobs wander in and get destroyed because the dungeon says lv 35, but truthfully, the dungeon is still ridiculously hard at 80 with full exotics if you don’t have a guardian or two that know what they’re doing. So did you truly remove the trinity or did you just make it even more confusing for new players to pick up on? Im not a game designer yet, but that seems like a pretty kittenty way to build for longevity. For a game designed with ease of use in mind, you’re pretty off the mark. No customizable UI, no dungeon finder, etc.

Terrible ideas:

-lousy, unimaginative, lazy skill procurement system…skill challenges are a joke.
- hearts bring nothing to the game
- without class structure, everyone just DPS everything down, encounters have to be designed braindead simple…THE GAME IS TOO kitten EASY.
- Terribly designed instances and encounters that literally force people away because the class systems are so detatched from how combat actually plays out. Did you test Caudecus’ Manor internally at all?

Beyond that, encounters are awful. The developers have no idea how to design fun, adequately challenging, and strategic encounters that accent and amplify the depth of the skill system. Combo system is consequential of normal actions, but it doesn’t encourage or support any real need for deep inter-class synergy. World events are joke pinatas for free loot…it’s like an insect lamp for the worst, lazy type of gamers. This game is lazy and id even argue that it’s more of a cash shop pitch than a game, aside from the art, the systems design completely lacks passion.

The combat is shallow, you can basically excel by blowing your cooldowns and most instances require no human interaction and very minimal skill system-related inter-class interaction. Again, combo fields are a joke. If a zerg of players get together, a fire wall doesn’t mean crap and it’s a waste of bar space. Bring back hexes, bring back some depth to the kitten game.

I’ve had more engagement, mental stimulation, encouraged teamwork, interclass synergy, and integrity of purpose in one Alliance Battle match with my guild in GW1 than everything ive experienced in over 1000 hours of GW2.

This game is an absolute joke, please, ArenaNet, get back to your roots.

In Gw1, you had roaming mobs that had team synergy themselves, the AI, the engagement, the amount of skill it took to play GW1…GW2 pales in comparison…why such a departure? Where’s elite skill capping? Molten mining pick? Is there no soul left in this dev team for the GW1 vets? Is this seriously the game we waited 5+ years for?

GW1 never hooked me like GW2 has.

phys.7689:

1) GW1 skills were perfect, to you. To me GW1 had too many skills, i mean i enjoy deck building, but it reached the point where you needed a side program with search features to make a build. Which is sort of entertaining to me, but i dont think its an optimal situation for players at large, and lead to many cookie cutter builds and builds that overperformed. Balance was a lot less important in GW1, because it was by an large instanced, it was fairly easy to ignore what everyone else was doing as the game progressed.

That said i dont think GW2 is at optimal amount of skill choice either. I think they probably need at least 1 alternate skill choice per weapon type (which would greatly help them having to try to make every weapon set have so many things it can do, and yet still be balanced)

2) re speccing in GW1 was not really that easy in prophecies, everyone remembers how easy it was after factions and nightfall, but when i first played prophecies, minor runes cost 1 plat+ highly valued runes were like 6 plat plus. You couldnt change the prefix on weapons, and your earning potential was fairly low. Not to mention they didnt give out as many perfect salvage kits.
That said, i think that respeccing in GW2 is also pretty bad with regards to gear, not even really due to money, but due to inventory, and each gear having its own unchangeable stat distributions. IMO they should develop a system where you can store and change your gear stats. This can be a form of horizontal progression, and makes it so you dont need to walk around or store 3 different gear sets, and makes it so you can actually experiment with different stat builds.

3) health versus damage, i believe it has been shown that for programming it is easier to scale up rather than down. Rounding and trunacation causes some issues, as well, GW had a level cap of 20, it wasnt really meant to scale at all, so lower was fine, even for that it had some problems, like some skills benefitted from one point of attributes, and others didnt, sometimes it was worthless to add a stat point due to to truncation/rounding effects.

4) depth of battle. GW1 wasnt very deep in battle to me. It was deep in terms of planning i suppose, but once you had your plan, even robots could beat the hardest content in the game, aka 90% of hero battles. This had its strong points an some fun, but the visceral combat in GW2 is way better to me, there is also still that ability to, with the perfect plans make content a lot more faceroll ish, but it requires more coordination and planning. I think this will be subjective to whether you prefer to come up with an equation that equals winning, or whether you prefer to have to actually execute well. Its going to be subjective.

Honestly i feel GW2 combat is pretty good, though i wish they had more synergy, less nerfs to synergistic systems (they nerfed combo fields effectiveness, predictability, nerfing, mes boon building, rangers use of quickeness to burst, everyones ability to CC)
and more difficulty levels wherein higher level difficulty requires better use of personal synergy and team synergy.

Yep no side program needed for this game you build for damage and buy all berserker’s gear and that’s about it. You can spec for support but Pugging won’t be easy and your loot will be even worse than if you stuck to damage.

PvE felt like PvP in GW1 because the mobs were generally using the same skills and had the same kind of party components as you. In fact, when there were multiple mesmers/monks in the mobs, PvE could be quite challenging. The same cannot be said for GW2.

Also, another thing to note, no matter what game you play anywhere, there will always be a best way found to do something in PvE. Saying that GW1 specifically was easy because you could find ways to roll content on PvX Wiki is a flawed argument because we can say that about any game.

The combat in GW1 had way more depth to it than GW2 combat has or can have based on damage being the only strong component to this game,

Dante.1508:

darkace.8925:

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

Why?

So the trading post might go down or up? i’d have been fine with zero trading post as per GW1.

Even in Guild Wars 1 there were gold sinks. Identify kits, salvage kits, for some people con sets…there were plenty of things in Guild Wars 1 that took gold out of the economy. And the economy did suffer at times as well.

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard. Everyone had a zillion gold and could charge anything they wanted for anything. New people could never hope to catch up. That’s why karma was such a good idea. You can get a lot of stuff for karma, without having to spend gold.

Those who played Guild Wars 1 for a long time don’t realize how hard it was to break into coming late to the party.

Dude, I knew a bunch of people that played for like two months who had stacks of ectos and ambraces and were much richer than me and I was playing for like 5-6 years. Incredibly easy to make money if you took the time to figure out how. Speed runs, droks runs, even UW and FoW farming was easy for the most part if you just watched a video first. Don’t go around spreading lies about how hard it was making money in gw1. The problem happened with the duplicating glitch, and they banned most of those people so really the excess of ambraces and ectos lowered those prices allowing more people to get them.

lothefallen.7081:

Maldavos.4871:

GW1 never hooked me like GW2 has.

- Probably never PvP’d
- Probably came to GW1 from a more traditional MMO.
- Scared away because you couldn’t jump.
- Couldn’t get past the heavy instancing to enjoy the real game.
- Was bad at the game.
- Too casual or low IQ to pick up on the nuances of the skill system.
- Don’t like RPGs.
- More of a console gamer.

Pick your reasoning(s).

Or I just didn’t like it. It was actually my first MMO, I tried and tried because I really wanted to justify the $50 I spent on the game, but it didn’t stick. The game felt repetitive and the story, at least at the beginning, seemed bland and generic. My two main genres are RPGs and strategy games, so I wasn’t coming from a lack of understanding of how games worked.

Or, maybe you’re right and I’m just not of the intellectual caliber required to enjoy the same video games you do. Oh, if mother had only fell for that quantum theorist I may have been able to hang in GW1 with big boys and their huge, incredible brains. We could recite early Lithuanian poetry together, proof-read each other’s theses, and coordinate our outfits to match our favorite paintings from the Louvre. Instead it’s all bologna sandwiches and GW2 for me; poor stupid me.

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard. Everyone had a zillion gold and could charge anything they wanted for anything. New people could never hope to catch up. That’s why karma was such a good idea. You can get a lot of stuff for karma, without having to spend gold.

I didn’t realize that was the reason that GW1 lost so many players. Mind posting to the proof of that?

I thought it was because they stopped making expansions for the game and decided to make GW2.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Dude, I knew a bunch of people that played for like two months who had stacks of ectos and ambraces and were much richer than me and I was playing for like 5-6 years. Incredibly easy to make money if you took the time to figure out how. Speed runs, droks runs, even UW and FoW farming was easy for the most part if you just watched a video first. Don’t go around spreading lies about how hard it was making money in gw1. The problem happened with the duplicating glitch, and they banned most of those people so really the excess of ambraces and ectos lowered those prices allowing more people to get them.

So I see. What you’re saying is like anyone can come into Guild Wars 2 and farm CoF path 1 endlessly and get rich. No wonder we don’t agree. We’re playing different games.

You see, a lot of people, even a lot of people I know, didn’t come to Guild Wars 1 to farm DOA. Some people of course did, but then, some people actually wanted to play the game. And playing the game, instead of endlessly farming is not what some of us have in mind. If you really think it’s that easy to get those items, you’re not thinking like a casual person starting a new game.

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

Plus, no ritualist, no cantha, no elona, no realm of torment, no wonder of the southern shiverpeaks, and no old school mesmer. Real bottom hurt about all these things. I like gw2 for what it is, but I liked gw1 for what it was way more.

ScottBroChill.3254:

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

I don’t know. I think you’re misrembering how hard it was to make money if you bought the game after the rush. As a casual player, not hard core. Because unless you were looking up farming videos online or find out how to solo farm the underworld for ectos, you were getting prophecies drops. It was kitten hard to make real money that way. After a month you might have the 5k you needed for elite armor. You know how I know? Cause that’s how long it took me to get it.

It’s nice that you like to defend the old game, but you’re thinking more like a hard core player and not appraoching it as someone logging in who didn’t know.

And btw, I have 172 gold in Guild Wars 2 at the moment, I’m most of the way to my legendary and I’ve never gone out farming. I never ran CoF multiple times, never farmed pentitant path, never did anything just to farm.

I find it just as easy to make money here without farming as I did in Guild Wars 1 without farming, once I learned what was what.

ScottBroChill.3254:

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

The lack of vertical progression and the ease of getting cheap green weapons and being just as powerful as someone with a perfect req. 9 fellblade was one of the best features of GW1 in the sense that you didn’t need money to be decked out in max stat gear.

There was very little monetary requirements in the game to be as effective as anyone else. The only thing that really mattered was skill. Skill, that is sorely missing from GW2.

Whatever makes your meat loaf man, different strokes for different folks. I’m glad your enjoying the game though.

clay.7849:

ScottBroChill.3254:

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

The lack of vertical progression and the ease of getting cheap green weapons and being just as powerful as someone with a perfect req. 9 fellblade was one of the best features of GW1 in the sense that you didn’t need money to be decked out in max stat gear.

There was very little monetary requirements in the game to be as effective as anyone else. The only thing that really mattered was skill. Skill, that is sorely missing from GW2.

I agree with this, actually. You didn’t need as much money in Guild Wars 1. But there’s still people with chaos gloves dancing around in LA and you’d say, oh those are cool where did you get those.

And they’re like it’s easy all you need it to get 80 ectos. Do you know how hard it was for a new person to get 80 ectos? Even if you wanted to farm the Underworld so many groups didn’t want to play with a noob.

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

ScottBroChill.3254:

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

The lack of vertical progression and the ease of getting cheap green weapons and being just as powerful as someone with a perfect req. 9 fellblade was one of the best features of GW1 in the sense that you didn’t need money to be decked out in max stat gear.

There was very little monetary requirements in the game to be as effective as anyone else. The only thing that really mattered was skill. Skill, that is sorely missing from GW2.

I agree with this, actually. You didn’t need as much money in Guild Wars 1. But there’s still people with chaos gloves dancing around in LA and you’d say, oh those are cool where did you get those.

And they’re like it’s easy all you need it to get 80 ectos. Do you know how hard it was for a new person to get 80 ectos? Even if you wanted to farm the Underworld so many groups didn’t want to play with a noob.

Vayne, I wish you played GW1 earlier. Honestly.

The game you describe to me, which was after I left, sounds awful. Seriously. And, I hear it from a lot of people and I think they played well after Nightfall was released.

I never had a problem getting in a group and I was never denied entry to a group based on my build. Sure, we all made fun of Healing Breeze Warriors, but PvX Wiki wasn’t around and there generally weren’t speed runs or anything like that. At least, I never experienced it.

Even getting into PvP wasn’t hard. There were some easy to run builds like iWay that provided a low barrier of entry to get into HA but weren’t OP enough to cause any real problems for higher skilled players.

GW1, IMO, went downhill with each expansion, and many of the problems people have with GW1, IMO, are the same problems I had or would have had with it. But it wasn’t always like that.

Anyways, the same thing can happen to GW2 now that I think about it. CoF Part 1 is a good example. It is tough to create content that isn’t going to get the “you need to run it this way” treatment – especially as certain areas are dubbed more profitable than others. Basically, it isn’t just a GW1 problem, it is an MMO problem.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

ScottBroChill.3254:

But it was barely farming dude. The only time I farmed was the last week before perma stealth got nerfed because I don’t usually farm but felt that If I played gw1 for so long and didn’t get the kitten ele obsidian armor I would be dissapointed in myself. I farmed for like 4 days and had like 70 ectos or something and used the rest of what I saved up that hadn’t been spent on weapons and elite armor for the rest of the materials and money need to buy it.

The difference is in gw2, instead of having a multitude of different options to make money for the specific thing you want, you have to farm the same thing over and over and over. It’s basically worse than ecto farming I’ll tell you that much.

Btw vayne personal opinion. Don’t get all bottom hurt about it, dude.

I just wanted to correct you about how you said it was incredibly hard for beginners in gw1 to make money near the end, when in fact, it wasn’t. I bought like 4 sets of elite armors just from playing alliance battles selling amber I made, and doing missions and selling gold unids I didn’t need. If you identified and sold all your drops you didn’t need you easily made money and the market wasn’t that unstable.

The lack of vertical progression and the ease of getting cheap green weapons and being just as powerful as someone with a perfect req. 9 fellblade was one of the best features of GW1 in the sense that you didn’t need money to be decked out in max stat gear.

There was very little monetary requirements in the game to be as effective as anyone else. The only thing that really mattered was skill. Skill, that is sorely missing from GW2.

I agree with this, actually. You didn’t need as much money in Guild Wars 1. But there’s still people with chaos gloves dancing around in LA and you’d say, oh those are cool where did you get those.

And they’re like it’s easy all you need it to get 80 ectos. Do you know how hard it was for a new person to get 80 ectos? Even if you wanted to farm the Underworld so many groups didn’t want to play with a noob.

Vayne, I wish you played GW1 earlier. Honestly.

The game you describe to me, which was after I left, sounds awful. Seriously. And, I hear it from a lot of people and I think they played well after Nightfall was released.

I never had a problem getting in a group and I was never denied entry to a group based on my build. Sure, we all made fun of Healing Breeze Warriors, but PvX Wiki wasn’t around and there generally weren’t speed runs or anything like that. At least, I never experienced it.

Even getting into PvP wasn’t hard. There were some easy to run builds like iWay that provided a low barrier of entry to get into HA but weren’t OP enough to cause any real problems for higher skilled players.

GW1, IMO, went downhill with each expansion, and many of the problems people have with GW1, IMO, are the same problems I had or would have had with it. But it wasn’t always like that.

Anyways, the same thing can happen to GW2 now that I think about it. CoF Part 1 is a good example. It is tough to create content that isn’t going to get the “you need to run it this way” treatment – especially as certain areas are dubbed more profitable than others. Basically, it isn’t just a GW1 problem, it is an MMO problem.

Well, I think that human nature is the problem. Really if you didn’t have the build of the month you were NOT getting into a group. I had to level an imbagon paragon just to attempt DOA. No one would even talk to me because I didn’t have the build of the week.

And I’m the kind of guy who likes to try things and experiment and try to beat stuff without looking up a build on a wiki. I’m pretty old school in my gaming. I’d rather just figure stuff out than look it up on youtube. But people weren’t buying.

You should have seen the voltaic spear farmers. It’s like they had their own code. You couldn’t even understand what they were saying when they talked. I used to stand around in the Umbral Grotto and ask questions, like what certain abbreviations meant. Most of the time I didn’t even get an answer.

Guild Wars 1 was STILL a great game. But it suffered from some of the same problems Guild Wars 2 does now.

Do you know two things that were in Guild Wars 1 that I’d like to see in Guild Wars 2? The hall of monuments, or something like it, a place you can go to see your achievements instead of just a list, and the zaishen menagerie, which was just awesome. Of course, they couldn’t put that in Guild Wars 2, because only rangers could really use it, now that I think about it.

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

I mean I got groups in the shiverpeaks using a water magic build. That kind stuff isn’t allowed in elitest games. I just told people I liked water magic and they went with it.

ScottBroChill.3254:

Whatever makes your meat loaf man

How many ways are there to make a meat loaf man (or a meat loaf woman, for that matter)?

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

Torvic.8256:

ScottBroChill.3254:

Whatever makes your meat loaf man

How many ways are there to make a meat loaf man (or a meat loaf woman, for that matter)?

Many ways my friends, just whatever makes your’s loaf you do it

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

That is much better. Thank you.

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

I think we made some real progress today.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

I think we made some real progress today.

If this keeps up, I can stop trolling.

It does get tiring, the hours are ungodly and the pay is kitten poor.

clay.7849:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

I think we made some real progress today.

If this keeps up, I can stop trolling.

It does get tiring, the hours are ungodly and the pay is kitten poor.

I think I liked you better when you were trolling lol.

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

I think we made some real progress today.

If this keeps up, I can stop trolling.

It does get tiring, the hours are ungodly and the pay is kitten poor.

I think I liked you better when you were trolling lol.

Sadist.

clay.7849:

Vayne.8563:

clay.7849:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Yep, you’re right. Let me correct that I said, hang on. Do you know one of the reasons that Guild Wars 1 lost so many players in my opinion? Because starting the game after the fact became really really hard.

There you go, all fixed.

I think we made some real progress today.

If this keeps up, I can stop trolling.

It does get tiring, the hours are ungodly and the pay is kitten poor.

I think I liked you better when you were trolling lol.

Sadist.

I think the word you’re looking for is masochist and it’s probably true to a degree. lol

Vayne.8563:

Dante.1508:

darkace.8925:

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

Why?

So the trading post might go down or up? i’d have been fine with zero trading post as per GW1.

Even in Guild Wars 1 there were gold sinks. Identify kits, salvage kits, for some people con sets…there were plenty of things in Guild Wars 1 that took gold out of the economy. And the economy did suffer at times as well.

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard. Everyone had a zillion gold and could charge anything they wanted for anything. New people could never hope to catch up. That’s why karma was such a good idea. You can get a lot of stuff for karma, without having to spend gold.

Those who played Guild Wars 1 for a long time don’t realize how hard it was to break into coming late to the party.

How do you know why GW1 lost so many players or is it just your opinion that they did and is it also just your opinion that they lost players for that reason? I thought we wanted facts instead of opinions stated as fact? :-)

GW1 was a different MMO, so it attracted the people that were tired of the other MMOs.

GW2 promised to be a different MMO, and then chickened out.

Drew.1865:

Vayne.8563:

Dante.1508:

darkace.8925:

mekkanic.4759:

Its not really a matter of cost…its just unnecessary.

Gold sinks are absolutely, positively necessary.

Why?

So the trading post might go down or up? i’d have been fine with zero trading post as per GW1.

Even in Guild Wars 1 there were gold sinks. Identify kits, salvage kits, for some people con sets…there were plenty of things in Guild Wars 1 that took gold out of the economy. And the economy did suffer at times as well.

Do you know why Guild Wars 1 lost so many players? Because starting that game after the fact became really really hard. Everyone had a zillion gold and could charge anything they wanted for anything. New people could never hope to catch up. That’s why karma was such a good idea. You can get a lot of stuff for karma, without having to spend gold.

Those who played Guild Wars 1 for a long time don’t realize how hard it was to break into coming late to the party.

How do you know why GW1 lost so many players or is it just your opinion that they did and is it also just your opinion that they lost players for that reason? I thought we wanted facts instead of opinions stated as fact? :-)

Even the fan boys are telling me they lost players. Clay is telling me how great it was and how many players there were at launch. I wish you guys would get together and figure out if they lost players or they didn’t.

Are you trying to tell me that Guild Wars 1 kept gaining players after Eye of the North’s heyday? Because that would be quite a feat, if they could pull that off. Gaining players with no major updates for years? Really?

Yeah, the overall population of Guild Wars 1 went down. Don’t believe it. I can’t prove it. And the core population probably did stay roughly the same, but that doesn’t mean the population didn’t drop.

They lost players, after eye of the north. That game sorta ruined a lot. A lot of people liked heroes, but I think they ruined the social aspects of the game pretty bad, but even when nightfall came out and for awhile after it was alright. It was just until they announced that they gave up on the game people started leaving.

I can’t agree more. I miss the complexity of GW1… :-(

I’m considering to quit GW2 for the second time (I quit for roughly 3 months before). GW1 was imo a much better game because:

1) Skill System
With its skill system it made sure you’d never get bored, you could play a different build every day, and still be effective every day. It also rewarded your own creativity, even with all the PvX stuff it was still possible to make your own builds that weren’t on there (I used to do that) and perform even better. Build making is simply a form of player skill.

GW2 has it in the form of traits and utilities, but this is very much restricted. Changing utilities doesn’t really change a build. If you are playing glass cannon GS warrior with 5 signets, and swap out your utility signets for shouts, you’ll still be playing glass cannon GS warrior, just with a slightly different flavour. If it was GW1 you’d be able to change skills 1-5 also, and not be restricted to a very small pool for 6 and 10.

2) No vertical progression.
Now, I played a lot of MMOs, and don’t mind vertical progression. I loved trying to get better gear, looking at other people’s shiny weapons through gear inspect etc. It’s an awesome system. Yet GW1’s system is also awesome. No gear grind at all, the only challenge was actually beating the content. What I absolutely HATE, is GW2’s “in between” version of the system. Yes ofc I want ascendeds, because if I get 6 of them, that’ll be roughly a 10% dmg increase. But then again, all content apart from fractals is easily doable without, and in WvW it’s usually zergfest and your personal 10% will be negligable compared to the 100000 dps the zerg is bringing. Vertical progression is there, yet it doesn’t matter much. I find that a terrible system.

3) Challenging content
GW1 had it. And it even had it in various forms of difficulty. You could find challenge in simply completing the missions, or in doing them all with the bonus objective in hard mode. Or maybe you felt strong and wanted to go to the elite areas of the game, like the Urgoz’ Warren or the Domain of Anguish.

GW2, for me, had no challenging PvE at all. Yes, sometimes when one group member was performing like a [not so nice word] it could be hard, but that’s not because of the content. The only challenging PvE is the one that scales: fractals. Oh, on fractals:

I loved the idea of it when they first announced it. However, the agony mechanic ruined it for me. It’s a worse gear requirement than in traditional MMOs even, since if my group had subpar gear in for example Aion, we could still complete the content, even though it was slower and we had to play better. If a group doesn’t have the gear req in GW2, it will die, because agony will kill you since it’s uncounterable. (yes I experienced this before). So if you are a good player, all that stands between you and high level fractals is gear grind. And if I wanted that, I’d go back to Aion or RIFT or w/e, since they implemented gear grind better.

4) proper PvP
sigh… I’m not even gonna compare sPvP to GW1 PvP, has been done countless times anyway

What I will say is that GW1’s Jade Quarry / Fort Aspenwood / Alliance Battles were very much fun and GW2 could use something in a similar setup. A story driven scenario with NPC defenders, where 2 medium sized, randomly formed player groups would compete in a new map that is not about “go capture 3 points”, and where there is no hot join function.

5) something to play for
GW1 always gave me goals, things to want to play for. There was stuff like the Hall of monuments, and titles. Titles were very well done, the perfect way to keep track of how much content you completed, and a way to show other players that you completed a certain thing. For PvP, you had the champion and hero titles, which would also function as a group requirement sometimes (unfortunately players took that a bit far in the later years). GW2 replaced this system with totally meaningless achievements. Meaningless because dailies and monthlies give points too, so it’s just a matter of who’s logged in the most days, rather than who’s completed most content. How is this “fun” ? If you don’t try to max out achievements though, GW2 doesn’t exactly have much to play for. I have my legendary, I have a couple of ascendeds (the rest being gated behind daily / guild mission reset timers). After doing my daily, I don’t feel like logging in because there’s nothing to log in for. Never had that feeling in 5-6 years of GW1.

I totally get that not wanting to play after doing dailies feeling, and I didn’t get that in GW1 either.

I think if you thought of a spectrum of MMOs as a line between GW1 and WoW, GW2 would fall much closer to WoW. And I’m not trying to say it’s a bad game by any means. The game critic Jim Sterling said about Resident Evil 6 that the issue with the game was that it was trying to be things that were not its strong suit (being a survival horror game). I feel GW2 is much the same way, adopting the more standardized conventions of its peers instead of holding onto the conventions that made people like me keep playing it for every expansion and for the many years during which the developers slowly turned their backs on it.

I feel that it is unfair to compare a game still in its first year to a game that has had years to build upon it, but at the same time I do remember what it was like when I started playing it the christmas after it came out, before anything had been added onto it. It was already a far more engrossing experience. Being able to adjust my attributes and skills freely, not having it cost me if I die, and being able to grab henchmen whenever I wanted made it a convenient challenge. While I can understand people’s complaints about the later Heroes, the emphasis always remained creating a build that was capable of overcoming the challenges presented to you. I spent hours researching skills, existing builds, mechanics, and enemy behavior trying to find or create better builds that could get me through the next challenge. And when I reached a point with my builds that I was able to breeze through a section of content, I felt triumphant in my discovery. Until I challenged something new.

So what then is GW2? Is it a matter of creating builds to overcome all of the challenges presented to you? I don’t think anyone could say it was even that focused. There is a semblance of the core systems of GW1 in there, but not the fulness of it. All of the attempts to be more of an action game are to the detriment of this core of skills and builds. Placement was important, but now holding still is folly. The greatest challenges presented in the game are Jumping Puzzles, which are just the game trying to be something that it isn’t.

What is a sequel if it doesn’t actually build upon its predecessors? Is it really unfair to compare something that was wholly conceived afterwards to its namesake?

Yes, I prefer GW1. Absolutely. If they decided to continue giving it full support while working on GW2 I would have happily kept buying campaigns and expansions. I would not feel the same disappointment that I do now, because I would still have my continuing cherished experience, and I would have GW2, which would be a nice addition. But that did not happen, and I have already sucked the marrow from GW1 as thoroughly as I was willing while waiting for a promise that did not deliver.