Guild Wars 2

Shadey.2180:

Needless to say hes hooked and has even decided not to bother with upgrading for gw2.

He made a good decision if i could get my 80 bucks back iwould do it in a second and return to the original game.

Motoko.2875:

darkace.8925:

According to who? You? I, for one, wouldn’t play Guild Wars 2 if it were like its predecessor. What you call a mistake, I call a sound decision. And guess what? My opinion on the subject carries as much authority as yours.

Congratulations, you are part of the minority who was not disappointed in the false sequel.

The fact you dislike GW1 and enjoy GW2 is a core problem in the creation of this game.

What I call a mistake, you call a mistake that accidently benefited you.

Guess what? You’re still in the minority.

Proof? Because I see an awful lot of people running around the game with God Walking Among Mere Mortals title. I’m one of them. So is my wife.

Don’t use words like minority or majority if you can’t prove it.

Truffles.4362:

Shadey.2180:

Needless to say hes hooked and has even decided not to bother with upgrading for gw2.

He made a good decision if i could get my 80 bucks back iwould do it in a second and return to the original game.

So much this.

LFG for Great Northern Wall HM

Resonance.4216:

Truffles.4362:

Shadey.2180:

Needless to say hes hooked and has even decided not to bother with upgrading for gw2.

He made a good decision if i could get my 80 bucks back iwould do it in a second and return to the original game.

So much this.

LFG for Great Northern Wall HM

Like you need a group for the great northern wall hard mode. lol

DiogoSilva.7089:

If anything, heroes would only improve the game, because it would increase the build diversity of your builds.

Eww.

Can you imagine 50 × Koss running around next to their owners in open world dynamic events? This is not to mention all the others, trudging about in 5-man parties with everyone else’s 5-man parties. I do not – I NEVER – want to see a time when GW2 allows heroes/henchmen in the open world.

CoRtex.2157:

1. Told you in my post: the level cap, the grinding for special items, the open world grinding (when you level, you are just running around solo for half a month). The skill system.

Half a month to level?

Grind for what “special items”? Everything you need – that being stats – you can achieve quickly and easily. If the “special item” is a skin you want, grinding for that seems fair, doesn’t it? It doesn’t make you any less competitive in PvE.

CoRtex.2157:

2. GW1 is an mmo. In GW1 you always have to play with other people. There is no way around it (except for some solo farms).

No. Outside of rare 12-man areas you never had to play with “other people”. Heroes and Henchmen allowed this, which I’m pretty sure you know.

CoRtex.2157:

Ow & about the thing you said about having your own set of skills in GW1 locked to your class isn’t really true. It seems like you have no brain for some reason. You had DUAL professions. your second prefession was changable to any class u wanted. Giving you access to 80% of the skills of that class. 1 character could have 80% of the skills of the entire game. That’s some next level right there.

Some people miss dual professions, and I think it’s a personal thing. My view is it just made the game harder and harder to balance. If you ignore the fact that GW1 had dual professions and look at how GW2’s skill system works I think it works very well. I don’t feel like I’m missing much in my GW2 professions as a consequence. The skill types that worked well together in GW1 seem to have been combined and transferred into GW2, and distributed around the professions there pretty well.

I do tend to knee-jerk panic when there is change. Reading about the intended GW2 skill system a long time ago I wondered how long I was going to be able to put up with it. Now though, I love it.

As a final thought, Guild Wars 2 seems to have aspects to try to please most types of customer.

The open world is solo-able.
Dungeons give players a need to group.
There is a formal mode of PvP.
There is a more chaotic, open world form of PvP.
There are mini-games.
Story missions are instanced, and solo-able.
There are achievements.
There is a z-axis!

I’m getting a bit sick of people picking one thing on the above list and complaining that they can’t do it “their way”.

-“OMG why can’t I solo dungeons???”. You can solo just about everything else, get over it.
-“QQQQQ I dun liek minigames y u no remove”. Get over it.
-“Why can’t I have heroes/henchmen QQQ??”. Kitten well go back to Guild Wars 1 then.

Well my personal impression on all this is that of course the statement “everything you love about GW1…” is perceived differently by everyone which seems to be the main argument for those who want to see this statement relatavized.

But this can be exhausting to counter-argument individually regarding to the difference of the given reasons what “everything” may or should have included.

The easiest way to counter this is to point at the statement and say “kids, this is only PR!”, basically justifiying the intentionally misleading nature of advertising in general.

And so it becomes more of a discussion about a salesman ethic between those who take such PR for granted and those who dont, at least as far as I am concerned.

On the other side I can perfectly tell what “everything” meant to my friends (those who played GW1) and me, which interestingly can be boiled down to few key aspects what we loved about GW1.
Here the consensus on what we miss most can be summarized to:

a: the skill-system and
b: customization mechanics

To have the possibility to almost endlessly experiment with different builds/profession combination and having mechanics to support this instead of restrictions (remember where Anet got rid of the atrribute reassigning points which where coupled with gathering XP).
The GW2 skillsystem shows no real advantage over the old one, not even in terms of balancing.

Of course we used those fruits of the community using generally known effective builds but this was only the first step.
The real exitement came when we customized those builds to our gusto and also just to create new ones from the ground up.

I enjoyed those moments like the one where that monk poked me who I completely shut down with my anti-energy mesmer using the panic elite (before the revamp where it was commonly perceived as “ineffective” and rarely used) and then trying to optimize that build together ending in a stimulating discussion about replacing one skill or not, changing inscriptions etc and going out being able to almost immediately test it.

Now some could say “But you had to get those skills first! Or even capture them from an elite boss who might be even challenging!”.

Then I’d say "Great! This is a real rewarding goal, getting a new skill, isn’t it? Or even that elite which is not just useful but so important that your build creating evolves around it (elites in GW2 dont even deserve that name compared to that).

For us this is what gave depth to GW1.
For us this is what we loved about GW1.

Experimentation is not really an enjoyable procedure in GW2:

“First go to that NPC to reset (for a fee ofc), then go and get a new set of armor.
You want those stats…go to that NPC who is….on the other end of the world (and hope he is accessible too).
Oh you need Karma…lots of it!
Ah why bother I’ll craft one! Good thing those globs of ectoplasm can only be salvaged out of rares.
Dont forget those runes and sigils…..oh what was the name again of that sigil?
Aaah thats the one i want, thanks Wiki.
Ooook now i will craft that…oh…ooh….its not craftable. Or maybe yes? Wikiiiii!!!!!!
Aaah mystic toilet…
Or probably not……huh…I need [enter super rare ingredient]x250…mmmh.
Ah well, what do I have all that gold for i just buy it from the TP.
Dumdidum….uh… whaaat? [enter casually gained gold amount] gold?!?! EACH?!?!?!”

( And that gamer who just wanted to reskill was hence forth seen farming Instigators)

;-)

Yeah, so much for casual …

The best to describe our impression about GW2 is the game being that famous headless chicken trying to find a direction (Anet themself gives as reason for certain complaints that they are still experimenting iirc).

>>>

<<<

And adding to those things we miss, we agree on two aspects of GW2 we dont like:

c: gem store focus

In GW2 the store was much more a background feature and still, it seemed to have generated enough revenue to allow or at least justify GW2s development.
GW1 had more of an “game from gamers for gamers” feel.
In fact, for us GW2 seems to be specifically created to shift the focus on the store rather than “taking everything we love”.

d: (best descibed as:) “infantile design tendencies” (eg: my little pony bow, no one meaning NPCs- really takes anything for really serious up to a point where we dont either).
Fun and jokes are welcome and many in GW2 are well done, but there is a strange lack of ‘real danger’.
For us, GW1 found a better balance here.

Again, I am not saying GW2 is a bad game per se (it certainly is not in terms of art&animation. This is where it outshines many other -if not all- big title-MMOs in our view).
Personally I love those Dynamic events which are much more immersive than a simple quest where the NPC just stands around.
And of course we realize that GW2 is relatively young.

But in comparison to GW1 just in these aspects….GW2 doesn’t come close to that level of unique gaming experience we had in GW1.
Its more the standard MMO experience whit a few “AAHs” and “OOOHs” at the beginning ….as usual.

Now some say “Hey, you cant compare GW2 with GW1, they are completely different games!”

“Oh, really?”

End of story is that out of those ~20 GW1 buddies none (0, zero) are left in GW2 (good thing i can’t see their last login date I guess).
And no, they are not those “MMO-hoppers”.
If they play an MMO, then they stick to it and this is something which is decided in the first months (which they did).
Our guild lies as a reminder in my guildlist of what I (respectively we) miss or dont like in GW2.
So all I can say is GW2 failed to attract my GW1 friends to stay.

From this perspective others attempts to somehow explain whether it was expectable or not are irrelevant.

Sarie.1630:

I’m getting a bit sick of people picking one thing on the above list and complaining that they can’t do it “their way”.

Fair enough, I get tired of people saying that ANET shouldn’t bring back the old GW1 skill system because a) it was hard to balance or b) because they could only play 1 viable build and the rest of the skills were garbage.

In response, I say:
a) Seriously… It’s like saying ANET shouldn’t add more content to GW2, because it would make their jobs harder and give them more to do. We shouldn’t have more fun, because ANET would have to balance skills.

b) You only play the way other people tell you to??? I’m sorry about your peer pressure.

Hopefully the trait balancing on the 25th will move the GW2 skill system in a better direction. We’ll just have to wait and see.

GW1 is one of the best MMORPGs of all time, a quick jot over to mmorpg.com’s games list will show you that; after many years, it Prophecies still ranks among the top 5 or so.

It featured a living economy, tiny item shop, content that made players work together and think about where they were going, or they died from lack of preparation.

It had a driving story that kept the game interesting and pushed all the other content in front of it, and made you feel accomplished when that demon-god or Betrayer or world-ending Lich finally went down at the end.

It had drops that were gleaned from regular play that made players proud to wield them, and made their enemies cringe in fear. There was no grinding for levels; by the time you left the second or third region, you were max level, able to play whatever your little feet carried you to. Top-level armor and weapons meant top-level. Period. Since launch. No exceptions. You wanted 15k armor because it looked cool, not because it was better, and the same went for greens.

I played GW1 for seven years. I completed every dungeon, every campaign. I have 30 points in the HoM, and a healthy guild that is still active in GW2. I cleared UW, FoW, and most of DoA. My dad played GW1 from launch, still does. I feel confident assuring you that GW2 is nowhere near the level of its predecessor.

Instead of story-driven world, we have world-driven, uninteresting story.

Instead of teamwork and strategy, we have an over-abundance of button-mashing soloers who could care less if those people around them live or die.

Instead of a world open to someone who plays for a week to level 20, we have a world that is becoming increasingly hard to play in as what is “top-tier” changes out from under us.

Instead of a story that grows upon itself, changing and becoming deeper with every content update, we have tidbits of content every two weeks that feel largely unrelated to one another, and that many players cannot complete within their time limits.

Instead of classes that require a deep understanding of their role in a party, we have classes built around a “jack of all trades” mentality that are not truly suited to any playstyle, and make becoming a master with any one class a pipe dream.

Instead of meaningful drops with unique names and acquisition stories, or armor sets that offered a choice in style and not stats, we have been forced into a one-size-fits-all system whereby the top items (at this point, ascended and gem-store skins) have one look, one attainment method, and favor those who put meat world money into the game in exchange for gold or gems.

Instead of instancing that forced players to evaluate their skills builds and teamwork before heading out, we have been given an-beautiful, don’t get me wrong-open world that encourages soloing, and poses no challenge to those players skilled in the art of ability-spamming.

GW1 was revolutionary. No game before it played like it, or enraptured players the way it did. Kamadan still has 3+ districts for crying out loud. GW1’s back-end hardware architecture, built from the ground up by brilliant, kittened-off former Blizzard devs, allowed it to be completely buy-to-play, and gave developers, loremasters, and content authors to take care in design and pride in their game, with their full focus on providing the best kitten gaming experience they could.

GW2 is not revolutionary. It combines elements from other game models to appear revolutionary, but the vast majority of gameplay in GW2 has been done before. As a GW1 player you has played GW2 since launch, I feel that GW2 has sorely disappointed me.

Every time I think about the fact that they abandoned developing another expansion for GW to make GW2 I cry a little bit on the inside. The lore is still here, and the graphics are very nice, but the deck building, the team oriented play(which I admit was dumbed down in GW with the addition of heroes) and the awesome pvp are all gone. It has more grind than its predecessor, even if it is light compared to other MMOs. I didn’t need stats, 80 levels, or gear tiers either, but what we have is what we have.

Not that GW was all roses, as I mentioned, the addition of heroes hurt the entire game by eliminating the need for teamwork and socialization. The abundance of skills that made deck building so interesting also made balance a nightmare, and until they made attribute points free to redistribute(oh god give us this for traits already) changing builds was tedious. Not having an auction house made buying and selling pretty obnoxious. That’s just to name the most glaring things off the top of my head.

I’d still be playing GW to this day if the community hadn’t gone other places, and if people were still playing together in PvE instead of running around with all NPC groups. New content would have been nice too, but I’d have lived without it. I played the game for seven years. I just can’t see that happening with GW2, not at this point in time.

Everything I loved about GW1:

1. No sub fee.
2. Flat stat curve.
3. Gorgeous artwork.
4. Amazing score.
5. Interesting lore.
6. Fresh take on fantasy.
7. Fun, engaging combat.
8. PvP

Manifesto: 1 — Unrealistic Expectations: 0

One thing which people do seem to overlook is that in almost every MMO I’ve ever played, you have all your skills available to you at once.

In Guild Wars 1, you have to load out your skills before you leave an outpost.

At least in Guild Wars 2, that’s mostly the same, though slightly improved in that I can change both skills and major traits without returning to an outpost and starting over.

Vayne.8563:

One thing which people do seem to overlook is that in almost every MMO I’ve ever played, you have all your skills available to you at once.

In Guild Wars 1, you have to load out your skills before you leave an outpost.

This is one of the aspects I prefer about GW1 over most MMOs. I do like the ability to shift things around while out of combat without returning to an outpost.