Guild Wars 2

I’ve been an MMORPG player for over 10 years now. From EQ, to WoW, to Flyff, to TERA, you name an mmorpg 2011 or earlier and I’ve probably played it.

Before I start, this is a long winded post and will take some time to read. I wrote this out in MS Office word before posting because I really wanted to take some time and really write out what I think guild wars 2 is lacking, or needs to improve.
Now when I came to guild wars 2 I took my time to play and mess around, I wanted to really just have an adventure. I fell in love with the Norn and their interesting culture and their REALLY big people. I absolutely love the guild wars 2 atmosphere, and the games play style.

There’s a lot of really good things about guild wars 2, the class and race options are wide open, the questing and adventuring is legit awesome. One of the best quest and event leveling ideas of all time. It gets people to play together without even saying a word. That is AWESOME.
However, When I got to level 80, I went and geared up my avatar, found a look I really liked, played through story elements, and then I just ran out of engaging things to do. I tried some of the living story stuff, and I feel rather let down.
From this let’s get into what I feel the game is lacking or needs improvement or work.

PVP, serious lack of an involved PVP element.

“But what about sPVP?” That’s a MOBA, it really is. sPVP is Guild Wars 2 the MOBA, that’s how I see it and feel about it.
It’s just so disconnected from the way the game is on the story/progression side of it. Restarting a character from the ground up? No thanks, that doesn’t take my fancy. I worked really hard to get the skins, armor and items in my armor, and if i want to PVP now with them, i have to ditch it all and build new armor? Never mind that, I’ll just go play another game where i don’t have to do that.

sPVP is fun, it’s great for a competitive scene, but it’s too disconnected to feel like it’s a part of the Guild Wars 2 I wanted to experience.
sPVP provides a structured ideal place for players to learn to PVP and fight on a balanced level, but how many mmorpgs do this?
World of Warcraft, has fairly balanced PVP, but it’s part of the characters progression. It doesn’t feel like a MOBA, it feels like I created and progressed a character, and that all my efforts come down to the stat builds and gear types and talents I strived for in while playing through the game.
This is a huge missing piece of guild wars 2 for me. Most MMORPGs use this method, many are imbalanced, and need tweaking but it still allows a player to use their progress made with their own adventuring. I really don’t like trying to play with a character that I have already progressed and moved along and then all of the sudden I want to PVP and I have to play a completely different game to do that.
Battlegrounds would have been a great idea for this problem, especially because of how interchangeable the guild wars 2 avatar builds are. BGs rated or not, allow a player limited team vs team match up that would involve characters already made and give them a way to compete vs one another.

WvWvW. WvW is a siege and zerg fest, i was quickly turned off by it simply because all that you need to take points in WvW is just have the bigger zerg rush. There’s no serious involvement in such a mode, some people may love it, but for me its simply an odd of option of something to do.

So what does seem like a good idea? I know the whole standard thing gets old, but guild wars 2 really skipped out on things it would have been REALLY good at doing.

Open world PVP/PK, this game would have been marvelous for this. especially since you can port around the map in an instant. If a player flags for PK and manages to kill someone, give em karma, restrict their teleporting to only nearby or something similar limitation. if someone’s being a jerk, a couple others could port in and give a beat down. or it could totally start a skirmish between a bunch of players, The option is interesting, i think it should really be explored. I tend to PK a lot in TERA and WoW, its an interesting way of playing and making the stakes higher.

Speaking of skirmishes, Guild v Guild, aka Guild wars.
Look I know the name of the game is a reference to the lore, you don’t need to tell me that, but this is an element missing from the game that above all else, should really have been there. I mean “Guild Wars” doesn’t have guild wars. It really should have been a part of the game, especially when there’s no factions in the game.

Map to Map area fractioning and guild control would have been excellent one guild could take control of an area on a map and set up taxes or something like that, and it puts them up to being attacked and challenged. All out skirmish and turf warfare which is something Guild Wars 2, could have served very well. Guild vs Guild staged fights gives a guild a reason to run a structure of PVPers and providing consistent game play options for those trying to build a strong guild.

There’s a lot of elements to Guild Vs Guild, and open world PVP/PK that guild wars 2 could serve very well, and yet these elements are completely missing.

Warring Guilds leads to long lasting conflicts and impressive and inspiring fights and leads to a hierarchy of guild reputation throughout the servers. Who here knows about Dara Mactintre? If you do, you probably played world of warcraft. Because Dara was one of the most powerful guilds in WoW’s history.
Some PVP elements are seemingly missing that once again guild wars 2 would have served well for. The main one I know i would have loved getting into is raiding.

Ok so PVP yeah.

But PVP options aren’t the arguments that really bring much the devs can do if they want to really extend the game play.
Raiding and PVE, Character Progression.
Living story is cool and all, but to me, it doesn’t feel engaging. It didn’t captivate me, it didn’t make me want to log in, some people might like it, but me it’s a big weakness of the game. Why is it not being implemented as expanded story play and created as limited time based involvement? That’s an awful idea. I really think that Living story is just not being done correctly, it’s really hindering the way guild wars 2 could be built up with content over time. Maybe release some content for living story that’s limited, such as rewards, but provide a permanent content play option that adds to what a player can play through. A new player would enjoy the massive amount of post 80 content that they’d get and they wouldn’t feel left out of a previous story progression.
I played 2 living story elements, dragon bash and Queens Jubilee. Neither of which made anything feel like progression.

The dungeons in guild wars 2 seemed not very well thought out, I don’t like the idea of having to huddle in a corner to kill a spider or an end boss. why exactly did this end up happening? Why design a system that you need to glitch to win? That defeats the point of trying to enjoy a dungeon run in the first place.

It’s a terrible thing really, every time I ran a dungeon we had to use some glitch to progress, stacking up in a corner, that’s not fun, that’s immersion breaking. It’s stupid, and I don’t understand why ArenaNet hasn’t fixed this and retuned the dungeon system.

You do not need, nor want a trinity style dungeon, I get that, and it’s really cool to not have to find tanks healers and DPS, everyone needs to DPS, some people need to be tanky.
But supporting exists, toughness and vitality exist, and high DPS builds exist. People can insta-swap items. Why not build the dungeons around this fact. Remove dedicated tanking and supporting, make people want to fight in a way that they provide support and taunt and combat elements, so that everyone can join and fight, but no one is stuck doing something they don’t want to do. A Meta team to playing dungeons isn’t a bad thing. We shouldn’t be using glitches and weird tricks to defeat a dungeon, we should be drawn out into a hell of a fight.
Guild Wars 2 is not the only game to avoid trinity dungeon running. In-fact Vindictus is a great example of a game built entirely on no trinity dungeon running. The current state of dungeon’s isn’t acceptable in my opinion.
If guild wars 2 wants to avoid trinities, that’s great, but make the dungeons outright playable.

This leads into something else though. The lack of truly playable dungeons, leads to the lack of Raiding. Raiding is fun, and can lead into intensive play, and it allows progressive play. Raiding is an extended way of engaging a player and giving PVE heavy players a definite source of content to play. And creating a new raid or so every few months shouldn’t be all that difficult if living story is being pumped out so quickly. Open world raiding is a pretty interesting idea, which is somewhat explored with the champions. I think that was a pretty fun thing seeing champion mobs show up and there’s a handful of players chasing them around. That idea is great let’s see more of that, evolve that into something greater. Lots of games have open world bosses, Guild Wars 2 isn’t all that different, but there could be more.
Raiding, be it premade, open world, event or whatever is a heavily engaging thing to do.
What about Factions? Reputations? This is mostly a WoW player’s question because I had a lot of fun rolling through dungeons and quest lines in WoW to gain reputation, and to get access to items because of it. I’m not saying copy pasta world of warcraft, but it’s a content approach that once again gives even more character progression.

“Sounds like you want to make GW2 just like every other mmo” Partially yes. There’s a reason why mmorpg players play MMORPGs. There’s certain elements that really get a player into playing an mmo.

The continuing living story is great, but the game seemed more like a once or twice play through of an open world RPG with embedded multiplayer options.

I really want to play this game. I really like the character I created, I love the Norn, I love the ranger class, and I love how beautiful and interesting Tyria is, but the game in my opinion is lacking so much that would have made it something I couldn’t wait to play every day that I got home from something or another.
But there’s nothing there that’s making me want to log in. In fact I’ve not logged in for a while and went and found other games to play, but there’s a bit of a sinking feeling when the game I want to play all the stuff I’m doing other games, just doesn’t provide that level of engaging content.
I feel like I played an online RPG, that’s really how I feel about this game. I feel like I played an online Skyrim… sort of. If you understand what I’m getting at. I spent money on the collector’s edition, got some interesting extended game play and a game that keeps giving me free DLC… Was well worth it for the time played, but now I just don’t play it.

There are so many possibilities for expansion and player involvement and character progression, but Guild Wars 2 is lacking so much of it and it makes the game all that less engaging. I want to play Guild Wars 2, but the content that I would have played the game forever on, simply isn’t there.
Thanks for consideration and reading,
~Franbunny Alice V.

Want me to remove my post, it sort of messes up your setup… ^^

Done. So how about Asheron’s Call 2, ever played that?

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Want me to remove my post, it sort of messes up your setup… ^^

That would be helpful yes. I didn’t realise there was such a limitation on the posts in the first place here. I just wrote this out in MS word so I don’t know the character counts.

It’s relevant to this issue. Don’t mind the title. Listen to the first 10 minutes, and if you feel the need to listen to more, listen to the entire 21 minutes if you dare.

Galtrix.7369:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6oVX4jPkSY

It’s relevant to this issue. Don’t mind the title. Listen to the first 10 minutes, and if you feel the need to listen to more, listen to the entire 21 minutes if you dare.

I’ve actually watched this a few times, and there’s parts i agree with him, and parts where i outright disagree.

My post is about what i feel would improve guild wars 2 as a whole seeing as what the game could possibly support with its design.

Not necessarily whats in other mmos but what could really enhance the game’s elder game, and the way the game could provide engaging content for a player to play on a regular basis.

That’s what im really trying to get at with this thread.

Everything else you say is invalidated the second you claim that GankPvP is as good idea.

Conncept.7638:

Everything else you say is invalidated the second you claim that GankPvP is as good idea.

PKing is fun, when its regulated by karma, please investigate the mechanics of something before assuming i was talking about world of warcraft.

Just one thing, you don’t need glitches to win most dungeon fights, it’s just that most people are lazy and prefer it over normal coordinated fights. Glitching Colossus Rumblus in AC P3 is the saddest example of that. This fight is so easy done properly, come on. :>

Some people are so bent on glitching that they hug the wall during the spider queen fight in the very same dung, wiping the team more often than when fighting her in a straightforward way. :P

Asmodeus.5782:

Some people are so bent on glitching that they hug the wall during the spider queen fight in the very same dung, wiping the team more often than when fighting her in a straightforward way. :P

The fact that people can and do this constantly and can do it everytime, shows there’s a problem with the design.

the glitches should be fixed and a meta method for fighting dungeons should eventually come to light.

The fact that is not being addressed in my eyes is a serious problem.

FranBunnyFFXII.3508:

Conncept.7638:

Everything else you say is invalidated the second you claim that GankPvP is as good idea.

PKing is fun, when its regulated by karma, please investigate the mechanics of something before assuming i was talking about world of warcraft.

It doesn’t matter how it’s regulated, most PKers do not care what they gain or lose from doing so or how those gains and losses are metered, they play to ruin other people play experience, not to experience the game themselves.

Yeah, check out EVE’s Goonswarm. They’re willing to pay real money just to see others rage.

Galtrix.7369:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6oVX4jPkSY

It’s relevant to this issue. Don’t mind the title. Listen to the first 10 minutes, and if you feel the need to listen to more, listen to the entire 21 minutes if you dare.

I saw corspealot and I didn’t dare watching past the 3 second mark