Guild Wars 2

Honestly, all I’ve seen on the forums are just whining and complaining rather than constructive feedback. People complained and threatened to quit because GW2 didn’t have a endgame. Now they added a form of endgame, and people are complaining and threatening to quit again because of gear progression. Honestly if I was Anet, I would be confused as hell to what people wanted done. Whats your suggestions, and constructive feedback, on how you’d change this without a single person complaining? How would you change the game?

As for the gear progression, isn’t the new items just rings and a back item? I have not seen the Ascended armor set, unless someone can prove me wrong on this. I dont see a problem with ascended items being added.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/A-pregressive-question-of-why/first#post827944

I would have added more armor styles into the game, as well as a way to unlock new slot and weapon skills as sort of an after max level leveling system (similar to how gw1 worked). The weapon skills could swap just like slot skills do now, still only giving players 10 skills in combat but many to choose from.

I would NOT have thrown the guild wars fan base under the bus by ignoring the primary selling points of the game and introducing higher stat items less than 3 months into the game. We loved this game because it was different, a breath of fresh air in a overwhelming sea of raunchy WoW clones… Now that it isn’t different anymore, what’s the main selling point?

You don’t seem to realize that the ones who complained for traditional endgame, are different people from the ones that are complaining now.

The ones who wanted this “treadmill” added, are the ones saying thank you. While the ones who didn’t want this and wanted GW2 to remain true to itself, are the ones complaining.

And currently yes, the new items are just rings and a back slot. But they already stated they are planning on adding the rest of the Ascended gear in future content. This way people can be completely decked out in full Ascended gear.

Tolmos.8395:

I would have added more armor styles into the game, as well as a way to unlock new slot and weapon skills as sort of an after max level leveling system (similar to how gw1 worked). The weapon skills could swap just like slot skills do now, still only giving players 10 skills in combat but many to choose from.

I would NOT have thrown the guild wars fan base under the bus by ignoring the primary selling points of the game and introducing higher stat items less than 3 months into the game. We loved this game because it was different, a breath of fresh air in a overwhelming sea of raunchy WoW clones… Now that it isn’t different anymore, what’s the main selling point?

Exactly this. Also, more personal story progression. More interesting zones. More events like the Hunger games event or the event where the corrupted could turn other players, like we had during beta. This is how you make a good game.

Adding more grind and unwanted gear progression is not an endgame. It’s just caving in to a vocal minority that rushed to lvl 80, instead of actually playing the game.

They would probably have gotten away with this if it was much more time into the game, 3 month well it isn’t long enough for people to miss the game for those of us who decided to “temp leave or even perm leave”. Anet is like Lyssa! becareful, they have many faces XD. One minute they give you the world, the next minute they are reaching for your wallet XD

Tolmos and krookie, I like your suggestions.

Perhaps being an optimist, but I think they could still salvage things, stopping at ascended gear and not adding additional statted gear every so many months. I am just not sure who is in charge now tho, or if there’s been a power shift, and perhaps will never know for sure. But I do think it’s not too late to stop with ascended and make future content more in line with the original vision of Anet.

Whether or not that will happen though, that is my question. At the moment, still playing and watching to see what develops …

Mira.3681:

Tolmos and krookie, I like your suggestions.

Perhaps being an optimist, but I think they could still salvage things, stopping at ascended gear and not adding additional statted gear every so many months. I am just not sure who is in charge now tho, or if there’s been a power shift, and perhaps will never know for sure. But I do think it’s not too late to stop with ascended and make future content more in line with the original vision of Anet.

Whether or not that will happen though, that is my question. At the moment, still playing and watching to see what develops …

Agreed. At this point in time, a few back pieces and a couple of rings are not going to change the game much. So if they stop with this ascended nonsense, it wouldn’t really impact the game that much.

Once they start adding ascended armor and weapons though, then it would be too late to revert as it would cause many more people to quit.

Valentine.6529:

Honestly, all I’ve seen on the forums are just whining and complaining rather than constructive feedback. People complained and threatened to quit because GW2 didn’t have a endgame. Now they added a form of endgame, and people are complaining and threatening to quit again because of gear progression.

For the most part, these were completely different customers. Some of us believed in their vision, Endgame Imagined. It did not support or require gear stat progression or content gating or gear treadmills.

What would I have done?

1. Introduced the new map area – done with Lost Shores.
2. Made sure new area had the core elements that the starting area had (“everything you can do at lvl 1 you can do at lvl 80”). DEs, Creative Boss battles, jumping puzzles, etc.
3. Introduced a new SPVP map – done
4. Introduced guild supporting tools. Tools to help guild leaders and members experience the benefits of being in a guild.
5. Fixed the bugs blocking the wonderful content (DEs, Group Events, Skillpoints) and damaging professions or WvW or SPVP.
6. Introduced better Veteran, Champion and dungeon boss mechanics for existing content. Make sure they do not always move on the same path. Maybe shake people up by changing how they attack.
7. Introduced new DEs and Group Events in the lower lvls. They promised to do this. Not sure if they have.
8. Introduced some small events in lower lvl zones to get people to visit. Nothing on the scale of Halloween. That takes a lot of time to do. But smaller things that tied into that area’s racial background or key themes within the bridging personal story.
9. Introduced Personal Story epilogue content. For those that finished, kind of what next. Could have been used to tease their first paid expansion theme.
10. Introduce World scavenger hunts. Little quests that took you into many different zones. The reward would be a mini-pet or skin. They had something similar in GW1.
11. Better promoted the existing Exotic weapons that are harder to get. Had a small event as a tie-in to encourage the hardcore to go for it. This would have been the Cosmetic weapon tier between “easy to get” Exotics and Legendaries.
12. Introduced new Elite skills that could be obtained by killing bosses in the world. They did this in GW1.
13. Introduced new armor with better looks but not better stats.
14. Introduced mini-games.

I could go on but have seen even better suggestions. There were many new and interesting things they could have done instead of moving to “gear stat” progression.

I fail to see how there is any “confusion”. A few people wanted the game to introduce WoW-like elements. AN ignored the majority of the player base and went ahead to do so even in the face of massive opposition.

So what am I doing? I will be going back to WoW. If I am going to have WoW-elements forced upon me, I might as well do it in a game that is designed around it. Also as a PvP fan I find the admission that the entire class balancing/testing is handled by two people comical if also downright depressing. I’ve seen higher quality standards in indy titles.

Either way, I suggest people opposed to the new “form” AN is taking to do whatever they feel comfortable with. If you are unhappy with the direction GW2 and AN are taking, find a game which does satisfy you. We have done pretty much all we can to make our voices heard but AN refuse to address to issue and seem content in letting a successful MMO slowly bleed out. They have proven to be both untrustworthy and disinterested in what the majority of players have to say so there is little hope in getting them to see reason.

It is a crying shame to see so much potential go to waste but that is the cards AN have dealt. There is little point getting emotionally invested in the situation any more when AN themselves have shown they simply do not care about the majority of players or even their own design tenants.

Here’s what I would do. There are basically three main ideas that I would implement across the board; I’ll post them separately so as not to provide a single supermassive wall of text.
None of these (save maybe the last one) are simple, or easy band-aid fixes, but all of them would maintain the spirit of the game and correct some of the more glaring problems that GW2 faces:

1. Overhaul the leveling scheme along with the entire overworld.

Guild Wars 2, like Guild Wars 1, is a game where advancing from level 1 to the level cap is meant to be (and generally is) a relatively quick and painless process. This is good.
However, unlike Guild Wars 1, Guild Wars 2 shipped with a critical dearth of actual content for max level players.

Consider this: In Guild Wars Prophecies, somewhere in the area of 25~33% of the Explorable Areas, 25% of the story missions, and all of the unique ‘dungeon’ style areas were made for players who had achieved the maximum level.
In Guild Wars Factions and Guild Wars Nightfall, this percentage was significantly bumped up, to approximately 75~80% of the game’s Explorable Areas and Story Missions, along with all of the ‘dungeon’ areas.

In Guild Wars 2? One Explorable Zone out of Twenty-Five was actually created for true level 80 characters. Only four percent of the game’s overworld is appropriate for max-level characters. In addition, very little of the Personal Story is meant for level 80 characters, and none of the Personal Story is repeatable (which should be an option). Level scaling is most certainly not adequate to make up for this. Ten out of the thirty-three dungeon paths the game shipped with are played at level 80, which looks better – until you compare them with the 100% of ‘elite’ content that was meant for max-level characters in GW1.

Is there really any surprise, at all, that players became frustrated by a lack of things to do? Were they really clamoring for more gear? Or was it just the fact that more than 90% of the game space becomes effectively useless to you once you (fairly quickly) hit the level cap?

So, having explained the reasoning, I would make the following change: Double the leveling speed. Double the levels of all content from (the current) level 1 to level 40. Make every area that is currently for levels 40 and above, and rebalance it to be level 80 content.

In addition, give people credible reasons to disperse around the (newly level 80) world. In Orr, taking back Temples from the Risen affects whether or not players in entirely different areas have to deal with extra debuffs. Make the zones interlock. A chain of events, doable by a small group, in, say, Sparkfly Fen, should be able to cut off the supply chain of the Risen down in Straits of Devastation, and events there should reflect that change in difficulty.
Give people, all over the game world, in small groups, the opportunity to affect the world, as a whole, for a few hours. Events are too localized, and too often depend on NPC timers to re-trigger, making players less likely to just wait around for them to start up.
Take the timers off of bosses like Claw of Jormag, The Shatterer, etc. Just make the pre-requisite events into a huge web, where a large number of players acting in concert have to slowly unravel the web, until finally the main event is triggered. A large (50+ person) guild should be able to trigger and complete one of these fights on demand, by splitting up, clearing a lot of prerequisites, and then finally regrouping to finish the fight.
If a guild wants to do that now, they can have a few people clearing a few prerequisites, but a lot of time they spend trying to fight The Shatterer is going to be spent just idling and waiting for the event timer to cool down. I think we can all agree that that doesn’t really sound like much fun.

(As an aside, note that the condensation of sub-80 content down to the current sub-40 zones also helps with the feeling that many of the mid-level zones in the game are desolate and empty of other players.)

Amulrei.4973:

I fail to see how there is any “confusion”. A few people wanted the game to introduce WoW-like elements. AN ignored the majority of the player base and went ahead to do so even in the face of massive opposition.

So what am I doing? I will be going back to WoW. If I am going to have WoW-elements forced upon me, I might as well do it in a game that is designed around it. Also as a PvP fan I find the admission that the entire class balancing/testing is handled by two people comical if also downright depressing. I’ve seen higher quality standards in indy titles.

Either way, I suggest people opposed to the new “form” AN is taking to do whatever they feel comfortable with. If you are unhappy with the direction GW2 and AN are taking, find a game which does satisfy you. We have done pretty much all we can to make our voices heard but AN refuse to address to issue and seem content in letting a successful MMO slowly bleed out. They have proven to be both untrustworthy and disinterested in what the majority of players have to say so there is little hope in getting them to see reason.

It is a crying shame to see so much potential go to waste but that is the cards AN have dealt. There is little point getting emotionally invested in the situation any more when AN themselves have shown they simply do not care about the majority of players or even their own design tenants.

A few rings and a back item seems hardly a reason to quit a game. My confusion is with these forums. A month ago all I saw was forums saying “End game is boring, quitting guild wars, nothing fun to do anymore, by guys.” And then continue complaining. Its as if half of the userbase wants progression and the other half doesn’t. Or at least that’s what it looked like to me. It isn’t just the majority of people, I see an equal amount of people praising the idea. They just dont post about it on the forums because they dont want it to change, while those who dont like it post on the forums hoping Anet listens to them. I understand that they might add an armor set, and hopefully they dont. But all I see are others arguing over a few rings that you can even see, and a ugly back item.