Guild Wars 2

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

I feel that way as well. I feel like no logical thought went into the rewards in this game at all. The rewards should progress as the difficulty progresses, but the rewards are a jumbled mess of confusion. The Living Story should provide incentive to play it all the way through, and not just provide a minipet that I will never use. As of the moment, there is absolutely no incentive for me to do anything but champ farm because it is the fastest way to earn rewards.

Completely agree with you, but its not a game i would buy after a try at least would have to think or try other games, i was expecting the add of more mechanics after the beta and the first months of the game but that eventually ended when i notice they would not had anything that i call “new” and this game is far from being inovative.
Updates on this game when they touch class are weird ones, making the game even more unbalanced and more unplayable for some and easier for others that already do better with much lesser effort.

Game engine must be maliable and easy to deploy new mechanics, a feacture that failed during the creation of the game, its seams to be lack luster and frozens the game itself in a stale content development, Living story is a good exmple of that while anet choosed to creat overflow system at first looks like a clever engeneering solution but when you apply content that only happens in main overflows its the same as having a timer to travel to that place, i do remmember “Scarlet minions are not invading this world please travel to you current world”, while was impossible to travel to there, i feel like i was on a overflow of an overflow becouse when i could travel i entered in another overflow system but there i did find some guilds of my server also waiting to travel to where the events were happening.
Not the only problem i see in PvE, Dragons design are just plain with good artwork Teq update isnt that good, at least is what i feel, i posted in some thread how Glint moves on the map in the first serie of GW and it feels much better than dragons in GW2, this is where i think game engine is limited and devs cant improve that fight as we were used to flee/kite from glint.

Classes design i think it kinda hurts to talk about this becouse i believe no dev like crtics to the classes, being GW2 an action game and dont get me wrong but i only see one role for each class being DPS its a fast n’ kill game with no thinking required, player only need to play with the actual classes that make better damage to win, wich i hope it changes within the next updates as Anet said they would had new skills and weapons.

Letting the trinity aside also makes the classes with their main roles depreciated, except those classes who where originally designed to DPS they will always excell at it while other classes will have to sacrifice way to much to compete in DPS otherwise they will be stale and cant do almost nothing becouse support defense will never be important as damage output.

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

This is my biggest concern with PvE as well. They do seem to be rectifying it though, like adding Aether weapons to TA Aether Path.

The champ trains I feel are more of a player-exploit than a failure of game mechanics. Although I think there needs to be much more incentives to revisit an area and do DEs. E.g. Important skills or traits which can only be obtaibed through points for doing a specific area’s events.

“Dedicated players are left wanting more depth and polish.”

+1

Pretty spot on post.
After having ran arah p4 and some 45+ fractals recently it does get a bit daunting to end up with a handful of blues and nothing to really show for the hours of work you just spent. I haven’t even minded some of the ascended grinding its at least kept me away from spending all my time grinding ap.
Maybe one day they will expand their grind so that I can pick an area and at least know what items I could get, instead of farming everything with a fixed percentage rate.
I can say if my rl friends didn’t drag me back after I quit last December I would still be long gone, the pve here needs some love.

Excellent post.

As a former game developer, I’ve been defensive of ANet, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. The video wherein ANet employees couldn’t find an old, oft-used Ranger trait, and where both devs acted bored about the class — well, that destroyed my faith. I’m not one to kitten about my class, but that video was pathetic and dispiriting for people who favor rangers. Some of us, most of us, take the class seriously.

This “balance patch” did little to increase class or build diversity for any class.

As for content updates, they are beyond disappointing. The world is far from living. The stories are disconnected for players, and Scarlet invasions only reinforce zerging as a primary form of play.

I still enjoy many aspects of the game, and plan to stick around for awhile. But with so many games on the market, GW2 should strive to be more.

My biggest problem with the game is the massive disconnect between the story and the living story. I was fighting dragons for the first 100 hours of this game. My entire personal story and a huge chunk of the other PvE content was dedicated towards stemming the tide of dragon minions. And then when they release the living story, do they expand on this? No, they add some sky pirates which has no precedent in the GW lore at all. They replace a dungeon path which makes some sense in the GW2 lore with one that doesn’t. Every new “living story” is just a glorified loot piñata, one after the other. And there’s absolutely nothing moving the storyline forward. PvE in this game is more stale than in any other MMO I have ever played. I just can’t fathom for what reason they chose to go this path instead of expanding upon the existing lore which they dedicated the entire game world toward.

Meanwhile, PvP is being ignored by a large chunk of the population because of the huge disconnect between PvE and PvP. It’s hillariously amusing how they talk about not separating PvE and PvP skills, all the while everything else between the two game modes is separated. A game mode like Fort Aspenwood or even BG-style CTF a’la WoW where you are allowed to play with your PvE/WvW gear, in your PvE/WvW build, would have 10x more players than what sPvP has currently, I swear. Watching the “balance” developers on the live stream was just an entirely sad ordeal. It seems they are incapable of actually balancing things for the sake of balance. Instead, just about every change they had made was justified because it was a “cool” addition, or a “cool” feature etc… Dota 2 just had one of it’s biggest balance patches in a long time. Here are the changes for one hero:

- Attack point improved from 0.4 to 0.3
- Viscous Nasal Goo is now dispellable
- Viscous Nasal Goo cast point improved from 0.4 to 0.3
- Warpath max stacks increased from 5 to 5/6/7
- Warpath stack duration increased from 10 to 14

This is a balance patch. You know, where things are actually balanced. Meanwhile, if you read the GW2 patch notes, you realize that 75% are bug fixes that should have been fixed back in beta, and this took them 4 months to accomplish. What the hell?

What about WvW then? WvW is just a glorified loot pinãta too. For 90% of the WvW population, playing or not comes down to one question; do we have more players than them? The only reason you would ever bring 70 people to take a tower (I have seen this), is to make sure nobody can engage in PvP with you while you are taking it. This is just completely backwards for a game mode which is supposed to incorporate PvP. Every design decision the WvW team makes just solidifies this type of game play as the only one encouraged.

Arena Net just feels like a bunch of cliques of developers desperately trying to force their own vision on the game, with absolutely no regard to what the players think or want. Or to quote a good friend of mine;

“I’m about to quit this game. I am so bored, and they just keep adding kitten no one ever asked for.”

I have said so many times that this game has amazing potential. But I’m getting tired of saying it and seeing the developer’s fail to capitalize on it patch after patch after patch…

While there are a few things in this post that have some merit, some of the post is either uninformed or misses the point completely.

The part about hearts for example. Anyone who followed the game know that renown hearts were neither changed nor toned down. They weren’t included at all at first and were ONLY added to keep people in areas where dynamic events happen. They were an afterthought and there to serve a purpose. They are not the meat of the game. That’s why there are 300 hearts but over 1500 dynamic events, which were supposed to be the meat of the game.

The living story is another thing that is misrepresented here. Do you know why the living story is what it is? Because it’s exactly what its designed to be. It’s not supposed to be a deep story that enthralls, because it’s temporary. No one wants to miss a deep enthralling story. And Anet wants to make a game that you can walk away from and come back to. If you make it so that the living story is something you must do, then you’ve missed a basic tenet of the game. That’s why there’s little plot. So people can pick it up whenever they join up to it. It’s not meant to replace personal story, it’s more meant to do what adding more dynamic events would do.

Finally the dynamism of the personal story is limited by man power and money. Anyone who expected a vast range of options (when I knew for over a year before launch that all roads lead to Zhaitan) wasn’t paying much attention.

The risk verses reward comment, however is spot on.

I feel that way as well. I feel like no logical thought went into the rewards in this game at all. The rewards should progress as the difficulty progresses, but the rewards are a jumbled mess of confusion.

That would be vertical progression with rewards based on difficulty based on new tier of equipment, something that every other MMO based on and which Anet decided to not follow.

The Living Story should provide incentive to play it all the way through, and not just provide a minipet that I will never use.

I’m really sorry, could you please repeat that again? Living Story should provide incentive to play in terms of reward? I thought Living Story represent piece of content based on ongoing story and there are no incentive to play it until you really into you know, Story.

I’m really confused what is going with people saying that rewards are not good in Gw2, it feels like everything people want to see is the rewards (and better come with shiny item with awesome stats), is it really so exciting to get an item and… hm… equip it I guess, so what is next? Repeat cycle continuously? Sounds like progress bar game to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0HaeOuDQuw

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

Vayne.8563:

While there are a few things in this post that have some merit, some of the post is either uninformed or misses the point completely.

The part about hearts for example. Anyone who followed the game know that renown hearts were neither changed nor toned down. They weren’t included at all at first and were ONLY added to keep people in areas where dynamic events happen. They were an afterthought and there to serve a purpose. They are not the meat of the game. That’s why there are 300 hearts but over 1500 dynamic events, which were supposed to be the meat of the game.

The living story is another thing that is misrepresented here. Do you know why the living story is what it is? Because it’s exactly what its designed to be. It’s not supposed to be a deep story that enthralls, because it’s temporary. No one wants to miss a deep enthralling story. And Anet wants to make a game that you can walk away from and come back to. If you make it so that the living story is something you must do, then you’ve missed a basic tenet of the game. That’s why there’s little plot. So people can pick it up whenever they join up to it. It’s not meant to replace personal story, it’s more meant to do what adding more dynamic events would do.

Finally the dynamism of the personal story is limited by man power and money. Anyone who expected a vast range of options (when I knew for over a year before launch that all roads lead to Zhaitan) wasn’t paying much attention.

The risk verses reward comment, however is spot on.

What you described sounds like a horrible game that would be fragmented and boring. I am sad to say this but it does remind me of GW2. I think Anet’s biggest downfall right now is this push to be completely different.

What did they expect right now this game has no meat left on it. There are no raid’s to keep people coming back. The new Tequatl fight was there answer to instance raiding that failed (its a ghost town on all but a select few servers). Then there is the 1 new dungeon they added that has minimal rewards for major risk.
Then there are living stories that feel like Naruto/Bleach Fillers. That give sub par rewards because the cash shop got anything decent that is related to the living story.

These 1 off cosmetic rewards are just down right ridiculous. Then every once in a while I get a mini pet from them big deal since mini pets don’t auto summon and you have to have a special 1 off bag to store them in.

Then there are skills and such for each class feeling broken. Then had the perfect answer in GW1 for skill balance. That simply was different skills for pve and pvp. That is the only way to truly balance skills.

The only thing keeping me in the game at this point is my guild if not for them guys I already split.

This game needs some serious work and a major overhaul they have had a year to get there stuff together.

One more thing I will throw in and I know I am not alone on. I dread Tuesday’s in GW2 because of patches. There has not been a single patch lately that hasn’t caused some kinda adverse affect on the game in some way shape or form.

It has been said that Living Story is vapid, and without depth. No real story to follow and not worth doing the content. It has also been said, that one can not take a break from GW2 because you will miss the ‘temporary’ content and be left behind.

Poor ArenaNet, what are they to do? It must be very confusing trying to decipher what it is the playerbase really wants.

Great post OP, and totally right, i do agree with you and i also hope Anet reads this and takes it all as things need to be fixed on multiple levels, will it cost a great deal… yes, will it be worth it in the end… i think so, a more Guildwars 1 direction is very much needed if they want to salvage this game.

But from what i’ve seen and how the company works it feels like we are screaming into the wind so to speak…

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

You know, that’s really not a big issue. I work rotational so every 3 weeks I am gone to work and cannot play the game. I still read the forums and patch notes so I’m not lost when I come back, but its not a deal breaker. So I miss some temp content that is just some basic pvp and jumping puzzles, neither of which I enjoy. Yeah, I miss some LS-only loot and dailies and ap… Meh. More important I make money to pay the bills so that I can continue to have a house to house my PC , pay for internet and electricity so I can play. If I can deal with it, there’s no reason any one else can’t deal with it either.

Of course, I Just bought a motorcycle and photography is another hobby of mine so… here my last vacation home I played maybe 50% of the time I would have before I got the bike. Only time I play more is when it is raining outside thus I can’t go take pictures or ride my bike.

Vayne.8563:

The living story is another thing that is misrepresented here. Do you know why the living story is what it is? Because it’s exactly what its designed to be. It’s not supposed to be a deep story that enthralls, because it’s temporary. No one wants to miss a deep enthralling story. And Anet wants to make a game that you can walk away from and come back to. If you make it so that the living story is something you must do, then you’ve missed a basic tenet of the game. That’s why there’s little plot. So people can pick it up whenever they join up to it. It’s not meant to replace personal story, it’s more meant to do what adding more dynamic events would do.

I can’t believe you are defending Anet by saying they produced a lame storyline on purpose…

Utriel.5013:

I feel that way as well. I feel like no logical thought went into the rewards in this game at all. The rewards should progress as the difficulty progresses, but the rewards are a jumbled mess of confusion.

That would be vertical progression with rewards based on difficulty based on new tier of equipment, something that every other MMO based on and which Anet decided to not follow.

The Living Story should provide incentive to play it all the way through, and not just provide a minipet that I will never use.

I’m really sorry, could you please repeat that again? Living Story should provide incentive to play in terms of reward? I thought Living Story represent piece of content based on ongoing story and there are no incentive to play it until you really into you know, Story.

I’m really confused what is going with people saying that rewards are not good in Gw2, it feels like everything people want to see is the rewards (and better come with shiny item with awesome stats), is it really so exciting to get an item and… hm… equip it I guess, so what is next? Repeat cycle continuously? Sounds like progress bar game to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0HaeOuDQuw

I think you need to look up what vertical progression actually is. In no way, shape, or form is that even close to vertical progression. Example: You fight a boss at level 80 that takes 2 minutes to kill and you can stand still for the entire 2 minutes and auto attack. Reward: 2 silver. You run a jumping puzzle that takes 5 minutes to do, and at the end you fight a boss at level 80 that takes 10 minutes to kill. Reward: 20 silver. This is how it should be. Instead, the rewards are almost identical from each event.

The rewards are completely and utterly useless in this game. What have you gotten from the Living Story in the past year? Backpieces that you most likely will never use, mini-pets that you put in your bank for all eternity, and a statue that you can whip out and show to your friends. Ooohh. -sarcasm-

The rewards should be armor skins, weapon skins, and money. Those should be the main rewards that the Living Story gives you for completing it. Those are, in fact, the main rewards that any mmorpg will give you… and they will give you minipets as a side quest or something that is completely optional. Instead, Anet gives minipets as the main reward and armor skins, weapon skins, and other things are sitting on the sidelines where the minipets should be. It’s completely illogical from a veteran mmo player’s perspective.

I’m telling you right now…. people got into RPG’s and MMORPG’s because they offered you a way to get rewarded for your efforts. You enter a dungeon, kill a few goblins, and expect that they will have a nice little cape or a shiny magical necklace that you can loot off their bodies. The only reason I, and many of my friends, got into RPG’s is because of the rewards. And to come to a game that dares call itself an “MMORPG”, yet it doesn’t have rewards…. it makes me wonder. And yes, for a lot of people, looting amazing gear or really cool rewards is way more exciting than what Guild Wars 2 has been doing.

If I can play any other mmo with a borderline addiction, but I can’t play Guild Wars 2 for 5 minutes without feeling unrewarded for my effort, then there is something seriously wrong in that aspect of the game. I would seriously spend 10-12 hours a day in WoW doing dungeons, leveling, raiding, and having fun with people. I would spend 5-6 hours a day on Aion doing the same things. I never in my entire life felt unrewarded in any mmorpg besides Guild Wars 2 and Jade Dynasty.

Sytherek.7689:

As a former game developer, I’ve been defensive of ANet, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

This always rustles my jimmies. As a person working in the medical profession, I’ve always been critical of my peers, because my responsibility is to my patients, not the medical staff.

Trying to cover up for people’s mistakes within your own field, because of a misguided feeling of defensiveness, is always wrong and leads you to try to rationalize outright wrong decisions.

I hope this is a lesson to you. If you have to take sides, it should be good developer vs. bad developer and not developer vs consumer.

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

But what do you miss when you miss that temporary content? Some achievement points and a backpiece? A minipet.

I think the idea is you pick and choose the stuff you want to do. Unless you have borderline OCD, you don’t have to do living story every month. Those who feel they have to probably have bigger problems than the game.

It was designed so there was always something new to do. Not everyone does everything.

JK Arrow.7102:

Vayne.8563:

The living story is another thing that is misrepresented here. Do you know why the living story is what it is? Because it’s exactly what its designed to be. It’s not supposed to be a deep story that enthralls, because it’s temporary. No one wants to miss a deep enthralling story. And Anet wants to make a game that you can walk away from and come back to. If you make it so that the living story is something you must do, then you’ve missed a basic tenet of the game. That’s why there’s little plot. So people can pick it up whenever they join up to it. It’s not meant to replace personal story, it’s more meant to do what adding more dynamic events would do.

I can’t believe you are defending Anet by saying they produced a lame storyline on purpose…

I’m repeating what they said. Literally. They said why the living story was just a bunch of loosely related content updates, that doesn’t increase the main story. I didn’t actually say this, they did.

Edit: You know the living story doesn’t need defense. It’s what it’s supposed to be, pretty much exactly. It’s 2 week content updates and that’s all it is. It keeps the world moving. That’s why they changed the name from Living STORY to Living WORLD, which better represents what it is.

I get it, everyone wants new dragons every week, and deep meaningful story, but that’s neither realistic, nor even particularly desirable. It’s content for people who enjoy doing achievments or minigames, or in some cases dungeons or challenging content. You want a two week update to be what you want it to be. That’s not fair or reasonable. Some updates will have stuff people like, some won’t. Not everyone is going to like SAB, but a lot of people do.

Hmmm, the thing about reward systems in this game is that…… It’s different. In dungeons, normal MMOs would give you the dungeon hear we got as rare drops from the boss. We get them as a fixed reward after doing a certain number of runs.

This has the huge advantage of eleminating RNG, but there needs to be something which gives you the excitement if looting a boss’s corpse. I think the new TA path is going on the right direction, by giving unique skins as RNG drops as well as fixed token rewards.

DEs ate a whole different issue though. I think you should get Ascended materials for crafting armour from doing a certain number of DEs per day per area, and a different material for finishing meta events.

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

The fact that the living story is not related to the main story of the game is the best part of it, and is the very reason why it is friendly to players who do take hiatus. I took a 7 month hiatus, so I missed a lot of that temporary content, but I do not feel that I missed anything all that important, and it wasn’t very hard to find out what has happened in the story in that last 7 months. I love the living story, it is fun to play through the new content every 2 weeks and watch the living story unfold, but at the same time I feel like I can leave the game for extended periods of time and not miss anything truly important.

Now if the living story was actually a part of the main story, then it would be a whole different situation, and then it would it would be hostile to taking a hiatus.

IMO, Anet are genius in this aspect, they did the right thing in making the Living Story a not so important aspect of the story of the game. If it is going to be temporary content in an MMO, it is best to make it not so important but fun to play, if it is related to the main storyline, then that needs to be permanent. I have a feeling that when they decide to progress the main storyline (Dragons), that it will be with permanent content.

I partly agree with Vayne here. I don’t remember hearts being toned down in any way during the develompent – quite the opposite. I also understand the need for temporary content, that (while engaging) is neither too important or too rewarding. People that missed an arc of temporary living story cannot miss too much, after all.
Unfortunately, that’s only a small part of what OP was talking about – and most of the rest is pretty much spot on.
And even things that Vayne mentioned are very conditional:
While hearts weren’t nerfet in importance, karma vendors (mentioned by OP in the same sentence) definitely were. While karma was originally supposed to be an important currency, we’ve seen it being completely abandoned by the devs after the start. Even last attempts to increase it value again (by massively nerfing it’s income) weren’t exactly well thought-out, and never addressed the main reasons why it was mostly useless currency lately. In many ways, it only made the situation worse.

And while creating a constant stream of temporary events to keep players engaged (living story) seem to have been a good idea – most of the players (especially casuals) do like to be pointed at some shortterm goals – the pacing of LS events seem a bit too fast now, leaving people burned out. Also, for the MMO to really feel alive, some of the changes must be permanent. And those changes must be of way better quality than what the LS shows us now. Which of course means that they cannot be based on poor quality living story arcs (yes, Twilight Assault, i am looking at you).

…and story even for those short-term temporary content could be improved in quality, and made more consistent with the world, instead of producing some really wtf effects. In that context flame and frost was okay, but the Aetherblade/Scarlet part was a great disappointment.

Astralporing.1957:

I partly agree with Vayne here. I don’t remember hearts being toned down in any way during the develompent – quite the opposite. I also understand the need for temporary content, that (while engaging) is neither too important or too rewarding. People that missed an arc of temporary living story cannot miss too much, after all.
Unfortunately, that’s only a small part of what OP was talking about – and most of the rest is pretty much spot on.
And even things that Vayne mentioned are very conditional:
While hearts weren’t nerfet in importance, karma vendors (mentioned by OP in the same sentence) definitely were. While karma was originally supposed to be an important currency, we’ve seen it being completely abandoned by the devs after the start. Even last attempts to increase it value again (by massively nerfing it’s income) weren’t exactly well thought-out, and never addressed the main reasons why it was mostly useless currency lately. In many ways, it only made the situation worse.

And while creating a constant stream of temporary events to keep players engaged (living story) seem to have been a good idea – most of the players (especially casuals) do like to be pointed at some shortterm goals – the pacing of LS events seem a bit too fast now, leaving people burned out. Also, for the MMO to really feel alive, some of the changes must be permanent. And those changes must be of way better quality than what the LS shows us now. Which of course means that they cannot be based on poor quality living story arcs (yes, Twilight Assault, i am looking at you).

…and story even for those short-term temporary content could be improved in quality, and made more consistent with the world, instead of producing some really wtf effects. In that context flame and frost was okay, but the Aetherblade/Scarlet part was a great disappointment.

I agree with a lot of what you’ve said here. The karma was over-nerfed. The pace of the living story is too fast.

But I disagree about Twilight Assault. It’s by far my favorite dungeon in the game to date..well maybe except for the Fractals. But it’s up there.

The OPS’s post pretty much its the nail on the head.

I feel pretty confidently that what’s causing most of the ire surrounding this game is that there is way too much focus on the Living Story at the expense of pretty much everything else in the game. The pace of releases is too rapid, causing many people to just stop caring and jump ship, and the heavy focus on it means there isn’t enough development focused on meaningful growth of the game in the ways most people want to see (new zones, dungeons, weapons, skins, skills, traits, etc.)

It’s fine if they want to do a “living world” concept but the focus of should be quality over quantity, and opening up new areas to explore, not temporary content (which should always be a minority of new content). Otherwise, as said above, the game doesn’t actually grow any and not only starts feeling stale to existing players, but also turns away returning players, which is what they should be working hard to attract.

On top of that, persistent and frequent class balancing is one of the most important aspects of any MMO (because the character is the primary focus of any player), and Anet is failing massively hard here. Not only do they clearly not have enough resources dedicated to it, but the resources they do have are… not great. Feedback is typically ignored while changes are frequently myopic, inconsistent, and/or trivial. There are quite a few things in the game that are clearly out of whack and haven’t been touched since launch. It’s really not a healthy status quo.

I have to say too that after playing Marvel Heroes the last few months and spending a lot of time on their forums, the difference is night and day in terms of community interaction and real response to feedback. It makes this whole thing look really bad in comparison and explains the majority of why there’s so much rage on the forums- the MH forums are comparatively quite positive and friendly despite the fact that the game has a lot of shortcomings it’s still working on.

Anet wants to shift the blame to an ungrateful playerbase, but it really falls more on their shoulders for questionably management. I still have optimism for this game though and faith that it can morph into something great; let’s all keep our fingers crossed for year two.

Vayne.8563:

But I disagree about Twilight Assault. It’s by far my favorite dungeon in the game to date..well maybe except for the Fractals. But it’s up there.

Is it because of the mechanics, story or both? While i am not really fond of aetherblade retreat-style dungeons and think that Assault could have been made easier a bit, i can understand that there are people that like it. That’s not what i was talking about. I was solely concentrating here on basing its fluff on aetherblade/scarlet story arc (though i guess i didn’t make it clear enough).

Astralporing.1957:

Vayne.8563:

But I disagree about Twilight Assault. It’s by far my favorite dungeon in the game to date..well maybe except for the Fractals. But it’s up there.

Is it because of the mechanics, story or both? While i am not really fond of aetherblade retreat-style dungeons and think that Assault could have been made easier a bit, i can understand that there are people that like it. That’s not what i was talking about. I was solely concentrating here on basing its fluff on aetherblade/scarlet story arc (though i guess i didn’t make it clear enough).

It’s not much worse than any dungeon in most MMOs. Everyone seems to think that every story has to be high drama and engaging. Dungeons in most games have mediocre stories. In fact, stories in dungeons are really just excuses for mechanics. If I want great stories, I read books.

The idea isn’t really a bad one, set up wise. You’ve got the Lion Guard who have reason to be angry at Scarlet over the death of a captain. You have Caithe who is lured there for other reasons. And your’e in the middle clearing the way.

The story does exactly what it’s supposed to do for a dungeon. It sets up the action. That’s it. That’s the purpose of stories in dungeons. As far as I can remember, it’s pretty much always been the purpose.

I mean it is better than Heart of the Shiverpeakes in Guild Wars 1 where we’re sent to get a hammer to do a ritual? I don’t think so. That entire hammer quest was an excuse to make is go through a dungeon. The end boss mechanics was more like a minigame. It was fine because that’s what stories in dungeons are. A reason to go do them.

Incoming rant from a disgruntled ex-player:

That OP is pretty good, but I still think that MMO players as a whole have become far too obsessed with the concept of rewards, and developers have been pandering to them to the detriment of what should really matter: game-play.

I stopped playing GW2 just before SAB2.
I’d gotten fed up of running the same content multiple times in order to get some achievement points / useless shiny reward.
I’d been offended by the introduction of time-gated content that relied on the player performing lots of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks on a daily basis in order to increase their power level.

And here’s the core of the problem, and I don’t think it’s something a developer like ArenaNet is capable of addressing:
I and many others play games for the exploration, the discovery of something new and the challenge. What would really keep me playing GW2 instead of all the fluff that is constantly released would be constant, large, permanent updates. New areas on a monthly basis (and remember, an experienced player can map 2 whole maps in an evening). New dragons, not just revamps of existing ones; we’ve seen Zhaitan, where the Hell is the Jormag content?
To me, it feels like they’ve lost control of their own story and are floundering with a lack of focus.

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I first completed the game I thought that I understood what I could expect to see in the future. The Crystal Desert would get opened at some point and we would see a Zhaitan-sized personal story update concerning Kralkatorrik.
Similarly, we could expect to see other updates for Jormag and the Northern Shiverpeaks as well as the other Elder Dragons.

Instead, we get the bitty Living Story where quality lurches from decidedly average to outright awful.

We get drip fed endless FedEx quests that require insane amounts of repetition in order to claim some pointless bauble.

We get a new tier of equipment that requires you log in every day in order to work towards it, and if you don’t, you’ll be playing at a lower power than those who have continued to log in every day. You also have to do particular activities in order to get the things needed to gain this equipment. You can’t just play “Your Way” any more.

Want an Ascended backpiece? Yeah, you HAVE to do Fractals.
Ascended Trinkets? Make sure you’re logging in every day and MAYBE in a month you’ll have done enough daily and monthly tasks to afford ONE.
Ascended Weapons? Log in every day, kill your set amount of champions then stop because the materials can only be crafted at a set rate, again ensuring you have to do the same boring drek day-in, day-out.

This isn’t a game.
It’s a job.

And insanely, for a company seemingly obsessed with their own gemstore, you can’t even buy your way back in if you’ve stepped off of the progression train.

It’s now 14 months since release, and while they’ve busied themselves distracting the audience with meaningless glitter, there are still massive holes in the Exotic gear tiers and acquisition. You still can’t get a breather with a rarity higher than Masterwork.
You can’t acquire all stat combinations through all means; you can’t craft Soldiers, you can’t get Knight’s from Temple vendors, etcetera, etcetera.

What I’m saying is, they didn’t even finish the base game before getting carried away making fluff.

For me, they need to take a long, hard look at gear and how it’s acquired if they want to encourage build diversity.
Top tier gear should be easily attainable. I mean a full-set-in-one-day attainable.
ALL gear should have the Legendary swappable stats feature. You shouldn’t have to fill up your bags and storage with armour for every occasion.
Similarly, runes and sigils should also be swappable, requiring unlock by acquisition ONE TIME ONLY.
If you make gear hard to acquire, people take the easiest route. This is why everyone goes for Berserker’s. It’s too expensive to experiment, and Berserker’s is tried and tested.

The ONLY things players should look towards attaining as a goal are cosmetic changes. In addition, those cosmetic changes should also have a drop-down menu to select them. Once you unlocked a particular look, you should be able to change it whenever you want.
These cosmetics shouldn’t require massive amounts of repetitive tasks to acquire. Instead, they should be the rewards for completing good multi-part quest-lines, like the mini black moa chick in Guild Wars 1.

But this won’t happen, as it’s too hard to make this content instead of endless “Kill X amount of Y” quests.

And also, the entrenched, typical MMO community would object to such a radical overhaul. You see according to them, if someone hasn’t worked for the opportunity to play the game, they don’t deserve it.

Such a disgustingly twisted group of people.

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

If you come back looking for something new isnt there also, and childish cosmetics/gameplay content, besides that players might find the new meta dev’s create by changing some classes its like they force players to play in a certain way, wich IMO is the worst thing that any company can make is to force player to select more some classes than another.

I do not have the antipathy for the LS that others do. I think the idea of serial story telling in small chunks, like a comic book really, that flesh out the world beyond the overarching campaign story is wonderful. Absolutely love the idea.

Having those additions, or some significant portion, be temporary (in my comic book analogy above you can always choose to pick up back issues that you missed during a hiatus) means that there is an element of, “if you ever take a break you will miss stuff that you will never be able to see again,” to the mix.

I am not sure how, “if you take a break you will miss out on stuff that you will never be able to catch up on,” is supposed to not discourage people from taking breaks.

Mungrul.9358:

Incoming rant from a disgruntled ex-player:

That OP is pretty good, but I still think that MMO players as a whole have become far too obsessed with the concept of rewards, and developers have been pandering to them to the detriment of what should really matter: game-play.

Removed most of the quote to save space. I agree with all of your points. Also liked the OP. This plays into what I rediscovered today when I came back for a couple hours after having quit months ago. Sadly, I’ll be leaving again for those same reasons. There’s just nothing here for me right now. I miss the first GW, and would still be playing if my account hadn’t got hacked. This was before they implemented the account roll-back feature, and at the time all they could do was tell me I was SOL. I just didn’t have the heart to regrind my Obsidian set and everything else.

I believe the issue’s with Living Story are purely pacing and polish related. Much like the needed mechanic and bug fixes. The whole game needs polished. Bugs have been in since Beta and still are not fixed. The game servers are so in-optimally set-up at this point that they have crappy mechanic limits like the condition cap. They need to go to 1 LARGER Living Story release every 2 months, with a mix of temporary and permanent content and an increased focus on polished and thoughtful bug fixes.

Cutting the bug list in half would make a lot of the game just “feel” better. Additionally resolving the mechanic limitations by shifting where some of the damage calculations occur to the client, and resolving class balance issues would make the game feel 20x better than it currently does. Separating PvE/PvP/WvW traits and skills will also make the game feel more finished, and making maintaining balance easier. They just need some subtle changes to the whole system to make the game feel much better, RNG removal and moving to a better drop system for instance would resolve some of the zerging issues. Removing zerg friendly AI limitations, etc would improve PvE. It’s actually gonna be fairly easy to knock out a lot of the game issues, just by slowing the living story pacing, to allow more time to polish the game up.

“Anet keeps its people on a very tight leash.”

Every game is built with the same intent in making the company money. Sure the employees enjoyed making/creating the game and I am sure they love their work. The end-product is the definition of the ultimate goal: make money.

By curving this, and curving that the company is able to push the game in the direction it needs while placing some fun in it for the players.

I’m not saying ArenaNet hates its own product, they love their product very much. To keep the game going, and to keep the majority happy, certain aspects are driven to keep the players satisfied while at the same time making a buck.

They’re going to bend what needs bending to offer pleasure to those who purchase their product. To keep that product alive the players must adjust to those changes/bendings. A company only cares greatly at the time of market for its fan-base. After this the fan-base becomes “customer-base”. From this point the leash is shortened with a tighter collar and the means to profit.

Do I hate ArenaNet? No
Do I hate GW2? No
I just hate when politics destroy good things.

Launch.
Fixed weapon skills got boring and legendary’s were too hard for casuals and too easy for hardcores. Plinx nerf aftershock. Time gate. Stat progression due to skills not being there. Announced new skills be added in the form of being gated by a better means than launch. Plans to continue fixed weapons or unfixed pools for each weapon/profession?

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Risk/Reward is messed up everywhere in the game.

Pvp balance especially.

My biggest grievance with the game is the lack of skills/build variety and just…. “FUN”.

Still over a year in and still no new traits/skills, and on top of that, skill/traits that have been garbage since beta… are still garbage… Over a year in.. Cmon now.

Sytherek.7689:

Excellent post.

As a former game developer, I’ve been defensive of ANet, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. The video wherein ANet employees couldn’t find an old, oft-used Ranger trait, and where both devs acted bored about the class — well, that destroyed my faith. I’m not one to kitten about my class, but that video was pathetic and dispiriting for people who favor rangers. Some of us, most of us, take the class seriously.

This “balance patch” did little to increase class or build diversity for any class.

As for content updates, they are beyond disappointing. The world is far from living. The stories are disconnected for players, and Scarlet invasions only reinforce zerging as a primary form of play.

I still enjoy many aspects of the game, and plan to stick around for awhile. But with so many games on the market, GW2 should strive to be more.

This too..

I sat there watching them “We dun know what to do with mesmer sceptre”, and then they buff #2/3 which were already more than fine…. it’s just… wow.

It’s really hard to defend them after seeing stuff like this.

Knote.2904:

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Risk/Reward is messed up everywhere in the game.

Pvp balance especially.

My biggest grievance with the game is the lack of skills/build variety and just…. “FUN”.

Still over a year in and still no new traits/skills, and on top of that, skill/traits that have been garbage since beta… are still garbage… Over a year in.. Cmon now.

I still can’t see how people think this is better than GW1 was, at any point from launch.

DocHolliday.5921:

Knote.2904:

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Risk/Reward is messed up everywhere in the game.

Pvp balance especially.

My biggest grievance with the game is the lack of skills/build variety and just…. “FUN”.

Still over a year in and still no new traits/skills, and on top of that, skill/traits that have been garbage since beta… are still garbage… Over a year in.. Cmon now.

I still can’t see how people think this is better than GW1 was, at any point from launch.

Even after Eye of the North?

Kozume.9035:

DocHolliday.5921:

Knote.2904:

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Risk/Reward is messed up everywhere in the game.

Pvp balance especially.

My biggest grievance with the game is the lack of skills/build variety and just…. “FUN”.

Still over a year in and still no new traits/skills, and on top of that, skill/traits that have been garbage since beta… are still garbage… Over a year in.. Cmon now.

I still can’t see how people think this is better than GW1 was, at any point from launch.

Even after Eye of the North?

Sorry, just realized I badly miscommunicated what I meant to say.

What I meant was, if you make like a timeline of both games and compare them at launch, at 1 month, at 6 months, at 1 year, etc. I don’t see how GW2 is better in any of those comparison points.

Edit: And yes, Eye of the North was easily the worst part of GW. And you know what? I never finished EotN either. Heck, I never even got a single armor set from there, and that’s after getting nearly every other set of elite armor in the game for my mesmer (yes, including obsidian). It just wasn’t worth the straight-up grind to me. With the rest, you could do the grind however you wanted because all the materials could be bought off traders.

Here’s my thing: If they want to keep making money, the best way is to keep the players happy, or to use the same to terminology you did, they have to bend to the players. That is the plain and simple of the issue at hand. They want to succeed as a company they then need to keep the game fair and balanced. New Shiny stuff only works for a while.

Currently Guild Wars 2 isn’t going to last as long as Guild Wars did; nor will it be remembered as fondly.

DocHolliday.5921:

Knote.2904:

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Risk/Reward is messed up everywhere in the game.

Pvp balance especially.

My biggest grievance with the game is the lack of skills/build variety and just…. “FUN”.

Still over a year in and still no new traits/skills, and on top of that, skill/traits that have been garbage since beta… are still garbage… Over a year in.. Cmon now.

I still can’t see how people think this is better than GW1 was, at any point from launch.

It depends on what you play for. Guild Wars 1 had great skills and great builds, but not everyone liked that aspect of the game. Guild Wars 1 was completely “pathed”. It was hard to go off road. If you ran into a log, you had to turn around and go back. Not all people liked that aspect of the game.

But mostly Guild Wars 1 was instanced. There was no chance of running into a random stranger out in the open world and a lot of people, myself included, simply prefer a persistent world.

Maybe I don’t want to start over in a zone if I want someone to join me.

Vayne.8563:

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

But what do you miss when you miss that temporary content? Some achievement points and a backpiece? A minipet.

I think the idea is you pick and choose the stuff you want to do. Unless you have borderline OCD, you don’t have to do living story every month. Those who feel they have to probably have bigger problems than the game.

It was designed so there was always something new to do. Not everyone does everything.

Temporary content detracts from actual, useful content. We all know they can’t and won’t make Living Story rewards interesting and actually rewarding, because then you’d REALLY miss out and be punished for not playing. Yet without something fresh that’s there to stay, there is no reason to come back. I’ve recently made the mistake of leveling a new character and if it wasn’t for the champ train in Queensdale and the Halloween champ farming, I’d never gotten to 80 with it. The regular zones are empty, unchanging and plain boring. The classes are still pretty much like they were on launch.

There is nothing to keep me interested, nothing to new to try and thus no reason for me to play or spend money on the game.

Technically:

-Precursor should be a lot cheaper

-Champ train should be less rewarding ( Easy, Increase the re-spawn duration in areas that packed with champs or make vastly different respawning durations for each champ ).

-Higher difficulty content should be a lot more rewarding ( Frac lv 48 and lv8 rewards are pretty much the same for me in term of profit ( with the exception of few special things like ascended rings <which are invading my inventories, have to make a character just to store them> , ascended weapons and fractal weapon skins )

I completely agree with you OP, thanks for posting this.

As for the story, GW2s Living Story(or World) is like getting to read 20 pages of a terrible book each 2 weeks, but when you get new pages, the old ones disappear.

On a side, after starting to get into Dota 2, I feel the need for more depth to the combat in gw2 in both PvP and PvE. I log into GW2 every once in a while to check out something new, only to get bored after ~10 minutes. Then I quit and play some Dota instead.

And another thing. The Living Story does not punish you for missing out on them, because the rewards are small and the story is shallow. But at the same time, if the content is so insignificant that you can miss out on it, what is the point of doing something so insignificant?

rjnemer.7816:

As a Pve ’er my main problem with the game is how broken Risk vs. Reward is. The fact that you make equal if not more money running in a champ train over running the most difficult content (arah/48+ fractals) blows my mind.

We need INSTANCED elite content as well. PvE is way to easy right now.

Stopped playing PvE altogether.

Arimahn.3568:

Vayne.8563:

Sytherek.7689:

Vayne: ANet has not made a " a game that you can walk away from and come back to."

If you walk away for even a couple of weeks, you miss temporary content.

If anything, ANet has built a game that is hostile to taking a hiatus.

It’s like putting down a book, and coming back to find unread chapters ripped out and gone.

But what do you miss when you miss that temporary content? Some achievement points and a backpiece? A minipet.

I think the idea is you pick and choose the stuff you want to do. Unless you have borderline OCD, you don’t have to do living story every month. Those who feel they have to probably have bigger problems than the game.

It was designed so there was always something new to do. Not everyone does everything.

Temporary content detracts from actual, useful content. We all know they can’t and won’t make Living Story rewards interesting and actually rewarding, because then you’d REALLY miss out and be punished for not playing. Yet without something fresh that’s there to stay, there is no reason to come back. I’ve recently made the mistake of leveling a new character and if it wasn’t for the champ train in Queensdale and the Halloween champ farming, I’d never gotten to 80 with it. The regular zones are empty, unchanging and plain boring. The classes are still pretty much like they were on launch.

There is nothing to keep me interested, nothing to new to try and thus no reason for me to play or spend money on the game.

Yep, I agree with you. There’s no reason for you to play the game. Obviously you know you better than anyone.

But I strongly suspect you don’t represent the majority of people who play games like this. Constantly changing, having to come to terms with new builds doesn’t necessarily keep other people playing and can even frustrate and turn people off. Because to me the game isn’t about builds. I’d much rather fire and forget than constantly sit around tweaking my build…and you know, in Guild Wars 1 I loved builds.

But the game became build wars. I wasn’t fighting anything in the world, I was just working on my build.

And I completely disagree that temporary content isn’t actual content or somehow ruins content that’s there. I don’t know why people believe this.

The last good addition to the game were Fractals. It was obvious that the team that made them really learned something about designing dungeon instances, considering how awful the regular dungeons were and still are. The same can not be said about the Living Story. It’s still badly written and nonsensical and, since it’s on such a short cycle, there probably isn’t much room for sitting down and thinking of ways to become better. That’s why I assume the LS hurts real content.