Raiding, while not necessarily fun, is at least emotionally engaging in many other games.
You do it with more or less the same group of people. People you hate, people you like, and these are people you care about. These are people you make meaningful bonds with, at least as meaningful as it gets on the internet. When your guild clears an raid, there is this deep and lasting sense of achievement that is shared by everyone in the same guild.
In Rift, when my guild finally cleared Greenscale, and mind you, it was the easiest raid at that time and many guilds have cleared it and have it on farm, everyone was cheering hard on vent, you could feel the excitement like they were beside you in real life. Because this was an achievement, that no matter how small it was, was something a family accomplished together.
In this game, “raids” are revolving door hotels. You join in an event, kill something not very noteworthy, then leave to do the same in another. To be sure, GW2 seamlessly weaves interaction between players that other competitors on the market cannot even come close to doing.
However, the interaction in GW2 versus its competitors is like the relationship between quantity versus quality. Interaction between players are frequent, but shallow. There is no reason, aside from maybe WvW and competitive sPvP, that emotionally compels even an entire guild of players to band together to clear content.
You can achieve pretty much anything by yourself, and maybe pugging for dungeons, most players you spam in /map for dungeon clearing are skillful and humorous enough to clear many of the “farm” explorable paths.
Why would there be a need to assist a guild member or a friend to experience content? There are plenty of other people in the game with mutual goals as them, no need to go out of the way to help them. It’s not even about the tangible incentives, like gear upgrades, skins, currency or whatever, you just don’t feel emotionally rewarded for helping out because other people will come along and do it for you anyway when they want to complete that DE.
The first ever guild I joined in GW2 was a guild filled with about 150+ players. It was a glorified chatroom. People did whatever they wanted. Farming, doing events, doing spvp, doing wvw. Nobody actually did anything together for the most part. There just isn’t a compelling reason to do these together.
Another guild I used to belong to had regular WvW guild events. With each passing day, lesser people turned up.
I guess it all boils down to GW2 not reinforcing the benefits of having meaningful commitments with its content. This really suits casuals, since the playstyle of casuals is, ultimately keeping commitment down to the bare minimum – commitment is something that requires time, and effort.
The point of this thread? I don’t really know it myself. To me, there’s just something lacking in this game compared to the previous games I was in. An unscratchable itch, if you would call it. I do not hate this game, and I definitely don’t feel this game wasn’t worth more than every single cent spent, though. In the end, it’s just a different experience, and maybe simply because it’s different that it sits uncomfortably lukewarm with me.
Your thoughts?
(edited by Pikafan.3792)
