Guild Wars 2

It seems like no matter what MMO I play, they are rife with issues. There is always something wrong with either the way they fund the game, way the game is maintained and updated, or core systems that ruin the game for me.

I came to GW2 expecting something better and thought it would finally be an MMO I could get invested in. Its gem store was fair, combat was the best I’ve seen, you could actually get the most prestigious items through normal play, and had a lot of good going for it.

However it also had a lot of issues, my main one having to do with how the game functioned in large scale combat. The enemies were not designed to deal with more than a small group of players and the combat started to fall apart the more players were around, making open world and WvW of little interest to me.

I thought “no problem, I’ll just stick to the better designed parts of the game and wait for them to add more content, new game modes, and hopefully fix the flaws with the game”.

Since then, over 2 years since release, they have not begin to address the core issue with the game, have added little new permanent content, have done little to improve current content, and have redirected their focus to the worst designed area of the game; open world and large scale content. They have said they have no plans to add new dungeons or rework the current ones. The only updates we seem to be receiving are 10 minutes of clicking through text bosses followed by a somewhat interesting boss fight that gives no incentive to replay after you finish the achievements.

And yet here I am, still waiting for that which will likely never happen, but with the current direction of this game, I won’t be around much longer.

Massive Multiplayer Online games is not an easy job, even single player games has lots of flaws and bugs, ArenaNet actually make a very good job sharpening GW2 as they can, of course, there are some bugs since release, but hey, look at the game we have, the time I start to not have fun anymore with a game, i just stop playing it.

Mmos are extremely complex. I feel the same way. To this day I still think WoW has gotten the balance closest to being right. Its not as great as it once was, but it still can’t be beat in what it does. I also think eve online is right next to WoW.
No trinity is what I would think hurts the game. It makes its awesome combat a complete zerg fest and doesn’t allow interesting boss mechanics, which is why we see the dungeons being bad compared to other mmos that do have the trinity.

MMOs are always going to be broken somewhere, because there’s always somewhere the developers and designers have as a “blind spot” which they don’t think of when they make the game.

Also, it’s not just MMOs. There’s a long history of games which were broken and still released, even in arcade days. To where if one knew patterns and methods, you could basically go forever as long as your reflexes held out

Other posters nailed it, complexity. Specifically it’s a matter of negative emergent properties (what the opposite of synergy?). With so many different mechanics potentially interacting with each other one can possibly break the other.

Fernling.1729:

To this day I still think WoW has gotten the balance closest to being right. Its not as great as it once was, but it still can’t be beat in what it does. I also think eve online is right next to WoW.

Well WoW must have massively improved since I left, I seem to remember all the bugs in Cata. WoWs big advantage is that most of the content in Raids so that’s relatively simple-ish. Don’t know about Eve though, like literally all I know is that it’s complicated, has space ships and a horrible player base.

Another part of the problem is that MMOs, by their very nature, must satisfy the needs of hundreds of thousands…even millions…of players. It is inevitable that something in a game that is spot on for one player will be “broken” for another player. One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn with MMOs was that just because I felt something was wrong did not make it wrong. In many cases, things I absolutely hated were absolutely loved by other players. Getting that balance right for a wide diversity of play styles and preferences is…as others have noted…very complex.

I don’t believe complexity is the main issue, rather the direction, resources, and priorities of the game.

Of course the complexity of systems can cause initial problems, but these become clear with time, as are the solutions. However as I have witnessed time and time again, these “issues” often remain unacknowledged and unresolved, despite being blatantly clear.

The cause of this could be a lack of resources, priorities being elsewhere, technical issues with providing a solution, but more often in this game I believe it is the direction of the game and viewpoint of the developers.

As Elothar put it:

It is inevitable that something in a game that is spot on for one player will be “broken” for another player. One of the hardest lessons that I had to learn with MMOs was that just because I felt something was wrong did not make it wrong.

Take Edge of the Mists. When players like I try it out, we are disgusted. We have certain standards which must be met to enjoy a PvP format, few of which are present.

• Does it provide fair competition? No.
• Is the objective meaningful? No.
• Does it have interesting combat? No.
• Is the combat well designed and balanced for the objective and encounters? No.

Yet someone else could come in with a completely different goal in mind and enjoy it. They could not be looking for a PvP experience but rather to gain gold, levels, or run around shouting at people and enjoy it.

In the end it comes down to what you want to achieve with the content. If you look at EotM from a competitive PvP viewpoint, it is severely broken. Yet look at it from another viewpoint and its a perfect farming area. I bet the developers aren’t looking at it, or WvW for that matter, from a competitive PvP standpoint, that’s for sure. That’s where the “its not meant to be fair” stance came from; a completely casual viewpoint of WvW, not a competitively fair one.

In essence if you are playing this game for the game-play you’ll notice many issues and if not, you won’t. What this game seems to excel in isn’t the game-play, despite its potential to, but rather the social aspects. I suppose is why they focus so much on open world and large scale encounters, being the worst designed part of the game from a game-play viewpoint, but one of the best social aspects of the game.

Failing to appeal to both these groups is poor game design however. It is a good design practice to create something which is strong in both the social and game-play aspect, and that both the casual and hardcore player can enjoy.

But what is the cause of that? Complexity? I think not. Rather, their focus is too heavily shifted towards the casual and social aspect.