(edited by lothefallen.7081)
Where is the cohesive vision in this game?
YES! Lothefallen, if you are interested in making this better, we should chat some time about ideas to make things better! I’m trying to lead a push to make this game much more playable, and enjoyable!
Anyone else want to share their thoughts? I’m feeling very disappointed in the lack of mental engagement this game’s gameplay provides. The dynamic grouping is impersonal and shallow as a result of the skill design. It’s a long shot away from the tightness, customization, and sheer skill-based enjoyment of GW1 combat / PvP. Team synergy mattered in GW1, in this game it feels marginalized. It just feels like they sold out hardcore with this game.
I think a major problem is that loot scaling doesn’t really work. You get like 10 times the value of loot in cursed shore than a low level zone.
“,,, There needs to be more incentive for people to actually group up strategically and less like an unintelligible mob of single players. There needs to be more reason and depth to the areas so that people will go back and play in them.”
I agree 100% with this.
Regarding the rest of your post, mostly disagree. To pull out a few things: Personal Story is the vehicle that moves you forward in the story. It is a replacement for Missions in GW1 they are better voice acted than GW1, the writing is pretty good. The only thing is they can be ignored and a lot of people are.
Primary quest would be replaced by dynamic events. These tell the world story
Hearts are like seondary quest.
There needs to be more incentive to play together, but as far as having a clear path through a story that gives you a reason to want to fight Zhitan, Personal Story is the only answer.
The trouble with putting together a complicate world encounter that can’t simply be solved with a zerg is the way of getting everyone to be doing the right thing. Successful WvW groups are generally on voice-comms together and can co-ordinate over large groups of players. Thanks to the commander role, even those out of comms has an idea where people are headed and what they are doing.
Now, it is not impossible to do this in a world-event (people have yelled out what should be happening), but it’s less cohesive as there’s no central leadership roll. However, I don’t think this is the crux of the problem. One could argue that nobody needs to try and communicate well because the event really doesn’t require it. When one is going up against the shatterer or the dragon in Sparkfly, one just needs to avoid AoE and pound the dragon… and yet even on the latter I’ve seen people caught at the back with the adds because there wasn’t enough people there to take them down. And yet, nobody cried out “Help on adds!” and were promptly swarmed.
Putting more complex events in the game would be good. Events that required certain things to happen, and a zerg would simply wipe. Perhaps ANet should add in one or two of these as a bit of a litmus test to see how long it takes groups of people to start synergizing their actions using the map chat.
Some ideas:
1) Perhaps track players success during events. The game could randomly nominate a commander for that event (based on how many times the player has successfully completed the event), and which the player can refuse (in which case the game picks another). The player then gets a symbol over his or her head and an icon by his name, when in….
2) An event chat. When an event kicks of, it has it’s own chat. It’s accessible via the /event command. Event is unique to the zone of a particular event, and lasts for a certain number of minutes after the event has finished (say, 2 or 3? I dunno). It is within this event chat that the “Event Commander” gets his little commander icon/colour.
I’d definitely like to see more interesting world events, but then the game needs to provide easy ways for event communication. /map is not enough given multiple events in the same zone.
I think a major problem is that loot scaling doesn’t really work. You get like 10 times the value of loot in cursed shore than a low level zone.
Also, for 50 levels, i’ve been seeing the same items and gear drop off enemies. No new skins, nothing. It’s really boring and linear gameplay rewards. In GW1, bosses had unique names, unique drops, they had a persona almost. In this game, everything is just a trash mob. I just feel like this game is seriously lacking creative vision. The only thing that seems inspired is the art. At the end of the day, i’m not playing Okami here.
The trouble with putting together a complicate world encounter that can’t simply be solved with a zerg is the way of getting everyone to be doing the right thing. Successful WvW groups are generally on voice-comms together and can co-ordinate over large groups of players. Thanks to the commander role, even those out of comms has an idea where people are headed and what they are doing.
Now, it is not impossible to do this in a world-event (people have yelled out what should be happening), but it’s less cohesive as there’s no central leadership roll. However, I don’t think this is the crux of the problem. One could argue that nobody needs to try and communicate well because the event really doesn’t require it. When one is going up against the shatterer or the dragon in Sparkfly, one just needs to avoid AoE and pound the dragon… and yet even on the latter I’ve seen people caught at the back with the adds because there wasn’t enough people there to take them down. And yet, nobody cried out “Help on adds!” and were promptly swarmed.
Putting more complex events in the game would be good. Events that required certain things to happen, and a zerg would simply wipe. Perhaps ANet should add in one or two of these as a bit of a litmus test to see how long it takes groups of people to start synergizing their actions using the map chat.
Some ideas:
1) Perhaps track players success during events. The game could randomly nominate a commander for that event (based on how many times the player has successfully completed the event), and which the player can refuse (in which case the game picks another). The player then gets a symbol over his or her head and an icon by his name, when in….
2) An event chat. When an event kicks of, it has it’s own chat. It’s accessible via the /event command. Event is unique to the zone of a particular event, and lasts for a certain number of minutes after the event has finished (say, 2 or 3? I dunno). It is within this event chat that the “Event Commander” gets his little commander icon/colour.
I’d definitely like to see more interesting world events, but then the game needs to provide easy ways for event communication. /map is not enough given multiple events in the same zone.
I think the answer is structural. It’s in the skills and the combat. The nature of the overworld events likely won’t change and the depth of the pve combat will probably only amount to zerg, but by tweaking the skills, adding more options and depth, there’s a lot they can do with instanced content. In my opinion, they need to add more non-instanced mini dungeon type areas that get players to group up based on skill and necessity. The skill and class system homogenizes everything so that theres no inter-player dependence and therefore no depth. Sure it’s great for a casual game, but this is an MMO. I want to play WITH people and feel mentally engaged by it, not play alongside people with a 1-5 macro while i sleep on the keyboard.
Lets be honest with our selves here 80%~90% of players in any game are lone wolf type or play with a select group of friends. And the random people who do try and group together are punished by game mechanics. Go try a dungeon and come back and tell me how much you like grouping with randoms.
Even in dungeons the combat is homogenous and incoherent. It’s not fun and solid like GW1. It’s a hot mess as far as i’m concerned. It’s because of the way they’ve limited skills. In GW1, even enemies had player-available skills so that the players learned through consistency and strategy. Enemy casting WoH? I’ll use Disrupting Chop and put it on CD for 20 seconds. No such strategy in GW2. No Thief skills that break stances, cooldowns and effect timers make everything weak and non-threatening. Your best friend in GW2 is auto-attack, which takes up a skill slot by the way. There’s just no depth to it. DPS → Stunned? Stunbreak. → Dying? Skill 6. Rinse, repeat. No healers to mitigate damage and broaden the paradigms, everything is just homogenous and marginal. No real player customization because ArenaNet doesn’t want to do balance work. Oh well, who cares, they’ve got your money and no sub so who cares. They don’t care if the combat is shallow and braindead as long as it attracts more Angry Birds gamers.
At the moment you either die in the Orr areas as there’s no one doing that event ever.
Or there so many people doing the event, such as the trinity of camps and Grenth that whilst you might be earning Karma, forget even bothering to try and play tactically or skillfully, all you try to do is at least touch one mob before they’re all dead in seconds.
The type of zerg you see in Orr when it is busy is the most pointless gaming experience I’ve ever had. It puts me off playing in such a big way.
All of the above is taking into the consideration that Orr DEs aren’t bugged which they are for me, in some way or another, nearly all of the time.
Outside of this dungeons are tactical and allow for strategy, but my dedicated group of friends no longer play and a pick up group is such a lottery, where you lose nearly all the time, that’s it not worth it.
WvWvW is just zerg until stuff dies or breaks, unless you’re lucky enough to have a group still around that can all tolerate the ridiculous waiting times to access an area.
From a skill and tactics viewpoint, the only time I really get to flex my skill muscles is when soloing, which I can do in most places with consumate ease, but unless I’m moving around the whole zone I also get punished for this by the DR system.
So the only thing I can do, to make me feel like I am actually applying some skillful play is move around a PvE area in big circles, which gets extremely boring extremely fast, when every mob you come across is the same as mobs in other areas just with the addition of “risen” infront of its name.
You hit the nail on the head in your last sentence of your last post.
Money and profit is vastly more important these days. Long gone are the days of Blizzard North, Squaresoft et al, you now have Activision Blizzard and Square Enix.
Corporate behemoths that only care about a corporate profit, as quickly as possible, leads to the release of games being rushed and badly executed.
We’ve already paid upfront for this experience any further payments they get from us are just a bonus.
I’m sorry but the gameplay is utterly atrocious in this game. I’m so disappointed.