Guild Wars 2

(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own. They are opinions, very little written here is completely objective, and I do not claim to speak for anyone else. This is meant to lay my thoughts out for feedback on the game, not to whine or claim I’m quitting the game. I’ll still be playing, but I’m playing far less than I have been. You’ll see why in the post.)

I play games for fun. I play them for distraction from the stress of real life. When Guild Wars 2 was announced, I pre-ordered it and it was one of the few games that I’ve not regretted my decision in doing so. From the beginning it was a lot of fun. I’ve taken breaks from the game, but I’ve always come back to it. The graphics are beautiful, the story (while at times quite campy) has been fun, and the gameplay is both intuitive and refreshingly free of the ability bloat of other MMOs where most my screen is action bars. A lot’s changed in that time, and these changes have been gradual. So I’m going to go over them in a somewhat organized manner.

Content and Gameplay

1.0 Guild Wars 2 had its problems. I’m going to go ahead and state that up front. It was not a perfect game, there were issues, but forgivable ones that could be ironed out in time. One of my issues with the game was there from the start, so I’ll go ahead and address that. It’s my main complaint, and it’s only gotten worse with time.

RNG is something I’ve long come to terms with in MMOs. I’m sure many here have played WoW, and comparisons to that game are inevitable, so I’ll simply use it as a point of reference without focusing too heavily upon it. GW2 has, from the beginning, been heavily about RNG loot. Occasionally you get good things, but often what you get is utter garbage (garbage you can salvage is still garbage). I often found my bags filling up with greens and the occasional yellow that’s only use were to be broken down into hopefully useful materials that I can presumably use for other things.

I have to question the reasoning behind this. It’s tedious to click salvage on what ends up being dozens of otherwise useless items. This has only grown far, far more pronounced in the new content to the point where I don’t even want the loot for the sheer tedium of having to go through my bags every half hour salvaging oodles of worthless items for semi-worthless materials and then pitch all the accumulated Minor Sigils of Why Are These Even Here Get Out of my Bags. It’s ultimately tiresome.

Next up is shinies. Everyone’s favorite game to hate, WoW, actually had a pretty good base system for their dungeons. It ended up ultimately not working for various reasons, but say getting one piece of guaranteed loot per dungeon run (or some other content chain) and collecting tokens as a consolation prize if that loot isn’t what you wanted. Those tokens can then be spent to get the loot you do want. Terrible RNG loot boxes full of garbage aren’t something I’m terribly interested in. By all means, gate the shinies behind content to be completed. Offer it as rewards, not handouts, but that brings me to the main point of this post.

Make. The content. Fun. In my time playing MMOs I’ve been both a casual and a ‘hardcore gamer’. I’ve done everything from an hour of play a week to logging on multiple nights a week for 8 hour stretches to do server first-seeking raids that other MMO I mentioned. I understand well the appeal of challenging content, and I don’t begrudge those who enjoy the raids in GW2 their rewards for doing so. I’ve been tempted to get into them myself, though the attitude of some people has kept me from seriously pursuing this as I have no real interest in optimally gearing in solid ascended gear for a spec that they think is what I need. I butted heads with enough raid leaders in another game only to be able to say “I told you so” in the end. It’s more stress than I want to deal with.

But the “casual” content that has shipped with Heart of Thorns is…well, in my opinion, awful. I don’t know what ArenaNet was going for, but outside of the story content it is pretty much nothing but grind, grind, and more grind. Grinding by it’s nature is known as such because it’s not fun. It’s a chore done to get something you want, a shiny for example. If I’m going to do a chore, I’ll do it in real life and actually accomplish something like making my house spotless. Chores are not fun. Grinding is not fun. What grinding is, however, is an artificial way to extend content.

Let’s say that to get Shiny of Awesomeness that I really want, I need to complete all the events in Verdant Brink X number of times. I’m perfectly fine with doing events a time or two. Ultimately though, they’re not fun as a whole. Whether it’s being nearly insta-gibbed (in soldier gear) by enemies I can’t even see for all the people running around, or simply completing the same tired ‘defend this outpost, collect these things’ events over and over…it’s not fun past a certain threshold. And yet I’m encouraged to do these if I want the Shiny of Awesomeness.

This isn’t good design. Make challenging content, make me have to learn the right steps, but once I do, let me get the reward. Make it so that if I continue to do it I can get more rewards I want, but more than anything, make the striving fun. Grinding isn’t fun. Grinding has never been fun, and never will be fun. I want to get a new item and think “Hurray! This is awesome!” rather than “At last…urgh, now I’m going to log and not play for a week.”

Grinding encourages addictive behavior. It’s holding a carrot just beyond reach and getting someone to run a marathon for it. And it’s a marathon you have to run without shoes, and there’s broken glass all over the ground. But since you want that shiny at the end, you suffer through it. Suffering through something, feeling like I ‘have’ to do content I don’t enjoy isn’t my idea of fun. It’s great in the short term as it encourages people to keep playing, but ultimately many realize they’re simply not having fun and quit the game. It’s certainly happened to me with other games.

I don’t have any good, solid suggestions for what they can do instead. This isn’t really constructive criticism, it’s feedback. It’s my feelings on the matter, and people can take that as they will. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything or say the developers are evil, terrible people and don’t know how to build a good game. They’re human, and humans are capable of making mistakes and/or having differing opinions. I just feel that playing should be fun rather than a chore.

I understand their reasons for designing things in such a way, but it’s seriously putting me off of the game and has already caused multiple friends to move on to greener pastures. It’s the exact kind of thing they began playing GW2 to get away from, what I started playing it to get away from, but it’s like a bad odor drifting on the wind.

Gem Store

I’m perfectly okay with the idea of a cash shop in a game without a subscription. I like all the fun cosmetic items you can buy in the Gem Store, but there’s a few more recent decisions that are really rubbing me the wrong way and give me concerns as to the future of it. I know Anet is trying to keep things fresh and supply new offerings, but I’ll simply list the main concerns.

Packs: I’m totally cool with some packs. Like the Identity Repair Package. Name change, total makeover kit, etc. That’s a great idea for a pack, especially if it’s at a slight discount from what the items would cost individually. What irks me are packs which sell for upwards of 2000 gems which contain one thing I want (which cannot be obtained any other way) and a number of things I care nothing about. Packages should put things together that make sense and give you a bit of a discount on buying it all together. They should not bundle one thing you want with a number of things you don’t and offer no alternative way to get that thing. My opinion on the matter, obviously.

Endless Gathering Tools: Quality of Life improvement, convenience items, whatever you want to call them. I really like the cool effects associated with them. What I don’t like is their pricing. 1000 gems for one of these things. Maybe if $10 bought you 1000 gems, this would be fine. But it doesn’t, it buys you 800. Not even enough for one. This change really struck me the wrong way and came off as money-grubbing and generally greedy. There was no good reason for this as far as I’m concerned.

Account Bag Slots: Wonderful in theory, but how much is it for a single slot for a single item? That’s…silly. I mean, very convenient but it seems to be following the trend lately of encouraging people to pay lots of money for convenience. I’ve spent quite a bit in the gem store over time, but this kind of thing makes my wallet zip itself shut.

Outfits: …I liked the armor. I like customizing my characters. I don’t like looking like a carbon copy of every other person wearing the outfit but maybe a different color. I appreciate the fact that outfits are free to put on, but this is something that could have been adapted to any ‘gem store’ armor. There’s nothing objectively wrong with outfits, but I don’t like the system in general. As I said, feedback.

Conclusion

Ultimately I was going to add more to this post, but I feel like that might better be covered in discussion with any replies to this. GW2 is not a bad game. It’s still fun in many ways, but the direction that the development has taken recently has really begun to concern me. It’s moved away from fun and more towards inducing addiction. I’m uninterested in the destructive behavior that encourages.

Games should be fun. When something isn’t fun, I have to question if I should be playing it in lieu of something that is. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into this game, I’ve derived a lot of enjoyment from it, and I’m posting this not because I’m angry but because I have a vested interest in continuing to do so. I fear if things continue in the direction they are currently that such won’t be possible much longer, and I’ll simply have to say “well, I had some good times, but it’s time to move on”. I’m not there yet, but I’ve played a whole lot less than I had previously. I want to enjoy the game, I want to spend my recreational budget on cool stuff in the gem store. I don’t want to feel like I’m being baited or shaken down, however.

(Also, for goodness sake, you have a rather sizable RP community. You should probably throw them a bone now and then. And for the love of all that is holy please stop basing everything around the horrible grindy crafting system. I think it’s absolutely awful.)

Edit: And please bring back the awesome holiday events that change up each time. Halloween was simply a rehash of the last one with a couple things you could grind endlessly for added, and the Winter event was….incredibly disappointing in every conceivable way. I once bragged to friends about how “look how they’ve redecorated the ENTIRE CITY for this holiday” as compared to a couple cheap decorations. Now I have to eat those words after Wintersday was confined pretty much to the Crown Pavilion. Meant to add this in the initial post but forgot.)

Starlightmagus.8654:

RNG is something I’ve long come to terms with in MMOs. I’m sure many here have played WoW, and comparisons to that game are inevitable, so I’ll simply use it as a point of reference without focusing too heavily upon it. GW2 has, from the beginning, been heavily about RNG loot. Occasionally you get good things, but often what you get is utter garbage (garbage you can salvage is still garbage). I often found my bags filling up with greens and the occasional yellow that’s only use were to be broken down into hopefully useful materials that I can presumably use for other things.

I have to question the reasoning behind this. It’s tedious to click salvage on what ends up being dozens of otherwise useless items. This has only grown far, far more pronounced in the new content to the point where I don’t even want the loot for the sheer tedium of having to go through my bags every half hour salvaging oodles of worthless items for semi-worthless materials and then pitch all the accumulated Minor Sigils of Why Are These Even Here Get Out of my Bags. It’s ultimately tiresome.

Never fear, explain man is here.

You may remember the emphasis on playing how you want that was part of GW2’s design. Well, to accomplish this there were a few stipulations. In particular was the loot system. In older games, loot was tied to the area it was found, the enemy who was killed, whomever dropped it, etc. This traditional design decision is actually fairly good, since unique drops would mean that an area would always have players in it, so long as those materials are demanded.

But, to have a PHIW game, this loot system would have to be largely abandoned for a different one. You would need a loot system that rewarded, fairly randomly to maintain scarcity and a dynamic market, an even spread of materials regardless of your location and preferred game type. Thus, we got the random loot system we have now, where no matter where you go or what you do you receive an endless stream of generic, low quality gear. The high crafting costs and demands for items was tacked on later as a sink for these materials, as well as a method to provide demand for low level materials, which per original design were to be largely abandoned once you outleveled them.

The complicated nature of the loot table in the game meant that, in order to meaningfully impact loot, ancillary tables needed to be added. You may know these as boxes or bags. The advantage to the system of constantly tiering boxes and bags is that, if an item is to be introduced into the game (I.E. ascended crafting materials), it is most easily done by manipulating the drop table of boxes and bags than it is manipulating the drop table for every enemy who might be at the appropriate level. Hand health problems aside, of course.

Now, as these bags have their own loot table (and thus a range of items they can drop), for newer HoT content, it was again simpler to, instead of making the new crates and caches drop those same items, the caches and crates would drop the boxes and bags which dropped those items. So really, the whole bag issue is a product of a game design shortcut. This wouldn’t be so bad, if there was a “click to open all boxes” button.

As for the constantly growing influx of loot, that also has an explanation. Since everything is rewarded everywhere for doing anything, there are very few draws you can put into an area to counteract the increased difficulty it may have. That draw, of course, is the volume of loot you receive. You can’t really receive better items, but you can definitely receive more items. Very easily actually. You just increase the number of bags. But, to keep the exotics market stable, you can’t just have more and more exotics. The reason why rare things are valuable is because they are rare, and if they quit being rare then they would quit being valuable. So, you just get more junk loot.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Never fear, explain man is here.

You may remember the emphasis on playing how you want that was part of GW2’s design. Well, to accomplish this there were a few stipulations. In particular was the loot system. In older games, loot was tied to the area it was found, the enemy who was killed, whomever dropped it, etc. This traditional design decision is actually fairly good, since unique drops would mean that an area would always have players in it, so long as those materials are demanded.

But, to have a PHIW game, this loot system would have to be largely abandoned for a different one. You would need a loot system that rewarded, fairly randomly to maintain scarcity and a dynamic market, an even spread of materials regardless of your location and preferred game type. Thus, we got the random loot system we have now, where no matter where you go or what you do you receive an endless stream of generic, low quality gear. The high crafting costs and demands for items was tacked on later as a sink for these materials, as well as a method to provide demand for low level materials, which per original design were to be largely abandoned once you outleveled them.

The complicated nature of the loot table in the game meant that, in order to meaningfully impact loot, ancillary tables needed to be added. You may know these as boxes or bags. The advantage to the system of constantly tiering boxes and bags is that, if an item is to be introduced into the game (I.E. ascended crafting materials), it is most easily done by manipulating the drop table of boxes and bags than it is manipulating the drop table for every enemy who might be at the appropriate level. Hand health problems aside, of course.

Now, as these bags have their own loot table (and thus a range of items they can drop), for newer HoT content, it was again simpler to, instead of making the new crates and caches drop those same items, the caches and crates would drop the boxes and bags which dropped those items. So really, the whole bag issue is a product of a game design shortcut. This wouldn’t be so bad, if there was a “click to open all boxes” button.

As for the constantly growing influx of loot, that also has an explanation. Since everything is rewarded everywhere for doing anything, there are very few draws you can put into an area to counteract the increased difficulty it may have. That draw, of course, is the volume of loot you receive. You can’t really receive better items, but you can definitely receive more items. Very easily actually. You just increase the number of bags. But, to keep the exotics market stable, you can’t just have more and more exotics. The reason why rare things are valuable is because they are rare, and if they quit being rare then they would quit being valuable. So, you just get more junk loot.

That’s a very good explanation. Thank you for taking the time to type it all out, and it really does shed light on some of the reasoning behind what is becoming an epidemic of junk loot. Understanding the ‘why’, however, doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s a good system. Perhaps some streamlining is in order, even if it takes some time to implement. Because right now, we got junk in our pouches in our boxes in our crates in our bags. And when you step back and look at it, and all the various junk loot you accumulate through this system, it’s really rather silly.

This so-much-garbage-stop-filling-my-bags-already-loot is extremely annoying. The game is not created to make designers life easier, it is created for players to have fun. And the amount of garbage drops is simply not fun. The game would become so much more enjoyable if all that rubbish would be turned into gold automatically and only drops you would get would be actually useful items.

Starlightmagus.8654:

But the “casual” content that has shipped with Heart of Thorns is…well, in my opinion, awful. I don’t know what ArenaNet was going for, but outside of the story content it is pretty much nothing but grind, grind, and more grind. Grinding by it’s nature is known as such because it’s not fun.

Agree. It’s so bad I actually can’t be bothered with it.

there is another explanation for bags of loot in the game. there weren’t that many bags at the beginning, but as the normal loot table is affected by magic find, this doesn’t apply to the loot table from a bag or a chest.
when arenanet decided we deserved an account bound magic find instead of it being a stat you can equip with gear in the game, they also decided to turn most of the loot to chests or bags. so yes magic find is still there as a relic of the older way but pretty much worthless because the rarity you get is in form of a bag. at this point as other people already said i would prefer directly the silver instead of going to the process of selling everything to the vendor or salvage for silk and wood. but this will not happen either since there is the account gold find increase.