Guild Wars 2

Clearly if you want a more social game, you’re going to have to start the conversation and not rely on others to do it for you. You really can’t complain about the game being anti-social when you yourself won’t bother to strike up a conversation.

The questing system can be revolutionary if you approach it differently than checking off a to-do list. A lot of players use reknown hearts, vistas, and POIs as their quest list… they do each item until it’s checked off then move on to the next zone. That’s playing the old questing way… give me a quest, I do it, move along. The idea was to just head off in a direction and do whatever you ran across along the way. No to-do lists to check off, you just explored your way around. If you do it that way, you have no sense of a questing system at all. You do it the other way, and you might as well be killing 10 rats, then picking 10 flowers, et al.

The game can be played like all the others… with the same results… or played differently, with revolutionary results. It’s a players choice… unfortunately most players refuse to embrace the new idea, they try to change it.

DE’s and heart quests don’t get people gathering together? On my server theres normally people calling them out in map chat and people come from all over the place to join in.

As for talking to people, I think it says a lot that you apparently see no point in saying hello unless you need something from them. In most real life situations I’d agree that you shouldn’t bother random strangers for no reason, but it’s a pretty safe bet people playing an MMO are willing to talk to other players. I think you should try saying hello, especially to people who are doing the same things as you.

With the quests I think the part they consider new and special (I’m not sure I’d go as far as ‘revolutionary’) is that the quest will start whether you choose to participate or not. When the guy at Morgans Spiral is crying for help because the undead are attacking they don’t all wait in the wings for someone to speak to him and agree to fight them off. They’re attacking and they’re going to attack whether the place is defended or not. That is what is supposed to make it seem like it matters.

That and the part where if you no one joins in, or you fail, whatever is being attacked will be destroyed, or conqured or whatever and the next event will be trying to take it back. (This seems to happen a lot with the defend the pump station chain in Queens Dale – the pipes all get destroyed and then you have to defend the workers as they try to repair them.)

I feel similar. However there are certain aspects which will get better at higher levels

“You don’t see groups of people roving around together.”

This changes a little in certain zones where specific large Dynamic event chains can be found. My first experience with this was harathi hinterlands. There is a large dynamic event chain that begins with several small events scattered around the entire zone. Once these are fulfilled a much larger event starts at one specific spot. This leads into another and another, before culminating with a large world boss fight.

World boss fights are also another slightly more social aspect. You can often miss out on them in starting zones (especially ones such as caledon forest, plains of ashford, or the norn starting zone) because they arent called out. However once you reach later zones, plenty of players will be asking or responding to when they occur, and when they do, its not unlikely to see about 5 players calling for assistance, and then a giant fight with 40+ people happening in 1 location.

AS for the renown heart system, I believe a dev commented something like this on the situation (Note: I may be remembering horribly wrong, so sorry to any Anet dev who reads this and thinks im a loon)
“We wanted to not have them. We wanted a scenario where a player would run by an npc standing near a burning house, and feel compelled to ask what was going on, which would then enable them to help out. But we ran into trouble, our playtesters kept asking us where they were meant to go. We could tell them ‘run, explore, discover’ but they were constantly looking for an NPC with a glowing mark over his head”

So basically they wanted to have a much different quest system, but it was deemed to be too complex? Unobtrusive maybe. For the average player.