Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

Yes Guild Wars 1 had no grind. There was no luxon or kurzick track. There was no lightbringer track. There was no deldrimar track. There was no drinking title. There was no need to farm at all, because everyone has a mini polar bear, right?

You’re right about not giving Guild Wars 2 a free pass, but that has nothing to do with there being plenty of grind in GW 1.

That is correct there was no grind in GW 1. Regardless which campaign you started from you were max level way before end of storyline. Title bonuses were helpful but not required to continue progression. Saying titles were necessary is like saying you need legendarys to complete content. Im all for that grind.

You all realize that grinds are necessary in mmo’s because its end game content. They provide a goal to work towards. GW2 has no end game, players fiend for new content and when it does drop they rush to complete it within a day only to repeat the cycle.

Now grinds with constant gear checks,like how d3 was on release, is a terrible system.

I always enjoy people that complain about grinds comparing it to a second job but yet if the grind wasn’t there they wouldn’t have any issue still spending 40+ hrs a week playing the game XD XD XD XD

Sarrs.4831:

Conncept.7638:

That’s what they said up until less than six months before they added ascended gear…

And they’ve held off on adding a new tier after ascended for the last what, 3 years?

Not the point, the point is it doesn’t take much time or much thought for ANet to pull a full face-heel turn on design principles they’ve touted and sold millions of copies of the game for. It shows an extreme lack of design and business integrity.

If the developers actually decided to make a grindier top tier of gear (which they did) long before the game released (which I don’t believe they decided, since they still lauded and even advertised the game for this design choice for months after its release) then they should have stated so and players may not have invested their time and money in to the game in the first place, knowing that it would become just the type of grindy experience they were trying to avoid by purchasing it.

But like I said, I don’t think they made any such decision before launch, I think they just saw how fast some players were blowing through the vanilla content and leaving, and decided they needed filler to slow them down while they worked on other end game content and got the LS running. And now this unfortunate crap has become a part of the game they are even balancing content around.

Sarrs.4831:

Mil.3562:

This game is for hardcore gamers only. To fully enjoy the game, you’ll need full ascended gears and legendaries. If you are prepared to grind for at least 5-8 hours every day and for one to two years , this game is for you.

But you don’t need to grind 5-8 hours every day for one to two years for Ascended gear. ._.

Maybe not to get it in two years but to get it in a reasonable amount of time that’s pretty accurate. Especially if the player actually wants to make things himself, y’know, actually play the game to progress instead of playing John Smiths sick and twisted personal game of monopoly. It takes 250 tier five mats to make any of the ascended pieces of gear, and several need more than that, the best farming spots I’ve ever seen in the game drop maybe 20-40 in an hour. You also need various lower level mats which don’t even freaking drop for you once you are the level that can use ascended gear!

Five to eight hours a day over a good couple of months actually sounds about right. And it’s a completely unreasonable amount of time which only exists as busy work for braindead players that blow through content so they can call themselves 1337 and hardcore, while the developers totally disrespect the time investment of casual players who actually enjoy the game and will stick around if treated well instead of moving on to the next shiny as soon as it comes out.

Vayne.8563:

Because

1. you don’t need ascended to do content, it’s not gated by armor, you can do quite nicely with exotics and

2. there’s no new tier of gear next week, or next month, or next year. Sure it might take you 2 months to get your gear. But that’s it.

You may find that grindy…but I don’t.

You don’t have to do anything in a video game. It’s a video game. Don’t like end game raiding in WoW? Don’t do it. Don’t like PvP? Don’t do it. Don’t want to get better to get to level 10? Stop at level 8.

The problem I have with this argument is you can pretty much leverage it to defend anything in video games. Don’t like the game? Don’t play it.

But that doesn’t mean it removes the merits of discussing whether or not something is worth being in the game and whether or not it makes it a good game.

Just because, arguably, the bulk of what we got in an expansion is focused heavily on grinds, most of them god sinks, which exists as “optional content”, because of an arbitary criteria that it’s not a prerequisite to other “optional content” doesn’t mean that constitutes a “good game”.

I mean, if my invested interest in a game is PvE and if I get 4 maps with content I can play in 2 weeks and then my remaining options is replaying that content with the motivation of grinding out the items requires to complete all the other content in the form of collections, achievements, legendary items, guild halls and mastery levels still makes it a “grindy game”, despite the fact, that I can use my incredible power of choice not to do any of that grindy content to begin with.

Ascended would take like 1-2 months for casual players

Wrong 2 years playing 5-10hrs a day wanna know how many ascended Armor i got dropped for me ? ZERO

There is only 2 places you can get them reliably and they are both elite area’s fractals and raids most casuals like me just don’t want to do that and wont

Mil.3562:

Btw, I am downloading D3 as I post here, lots of positive feedbacks on that game after the developers listened and acted on gameplay improvements.

I stopped playing GW2 for about two years and came back to play for about a month now. Yep, nothing has changed (enjoyment wise) only more nerfs, especially visual nerfs on skills :/

Yeah, it’s improved dramatically and Reaper of Souls just smashed it. Extremely impressed with Blizzard for managing to turn that game around after an epic failure at launch.

I think an example of things being less casual are the strict timetable for the new maps. If you try going into Dragon’s Stand at anywhere other than when it starts, or you arrive at another map when the meta is far off, you’ll have a crappy time. It’s sort of like my disdain for World Boss schedules taken to a new level— you play to the game’s timetable, or you can just bugger off.

This is opposed to a lot of other content where you can just hop in and start playing. To make matters worse, people taxi to circumvent the issue, leaving even more maps empty, and even if you want to play on the map you zoned in, the game will CLOSE the map you’re on and forcing you to go elsewhere. And your participation goes down to 0%.

The inactivity timer is also very poorly designed. While it’s geared to stop leechers, it creates bad situations where you might die and if waypoints are contested you might get dinged for inactivity. This isn’t discounting the time when the poor design of events makes you punished for inactivity when the NPCs are talking and thus there’s nothing to fight anyways.

There was one time where I was starting the Ordinance Corps meta where you have to clear out 3 sets of enemies. The 3rd set was so far away that I got inactivity for walking over there. If someone had cleared it out in the meantime or I died en route, then I would have gotten zero credit despite doing 2/3rds of the work! Fun! I appreciate how the game’s basically saying “Nope, you just wasted your time here”

While I think the new maps have been great for group meta content, it is not so great when players are more sparse or want to play in lesser numbers. And sure, you can LFG and zerg the map; but that being the solution to everything isn’t particularly fun either.

Valky.2574:

Ascended would take like 1-2 months for casual players

Wrong 2 years playing 5-10hrs a day wanna know how many ascended Armor i got dropped for me ? ZERO

There is only 2 places you can get them reliably and they are both elite area’s fractals and raids most casuals like me just don’t want to do that and wont

You are forgetting 1 place: crafting stations. That’s where I got most of my ascended stuff.

To have an idea of what I think a casual looks like, I’ll say I play at most 15 hours every week. I almost never do anything “speed” or “farm”, because I don’t like it. No speed running dungeons, no speed fractals, no SW farming, no key farming, etc. Most of the time I stride through the maps just doing any event I found interesting, killing things and helping another players. I don’t camp maps for long (2 days on the same place are too much for me). I don’t PvP, and rarely do WvW. I never use meta builds, and hate the berserker mentality. A year ago I tried to make profit through the TP, but got busted, so I left it.

Is that casual enough?

Well, I made a full celestial ascended armor in 3 months, plus 2 weapons.

Vayne.8563:

Because

1. you don’t need ascended to do content, it’s not gated by armor, you can do quite nicely with exotics and

2. there’s no new tier of gear next week, or next month, or next year. Sure it might take you 2 months to get your gear. But that’s it.

You may find that grindy…but I don’t.

Yet, people require you to have Ascended Armor to even be allowed to do Raids.

Bristingr.5034:

Vayne.8563:

Because

1. you don’t need ascended to do content, it’s not gated by armor, you can do quite nicely with exotics and

2. there’s no new tier of gear next week, or next month, or next year. Sure it might take you 2 months to get your gear. But that’s it.

You may find that grindy…but I don’t.

Yet, people require you to have Ascended Armor to even be allowed to do Raids.

Ignore those people then..

This game isn’t grindy at all if you don’t care about cosmetics.

Oh, by the way, Cosmetics is what this game is all about.

But you guys notice the direction that this game is going with the new stat spreads(viper’s, trailblazers, etc), and the materials needed to create them. They are gonna find ways to make you grind. That’s what keeps mmos going.

Sicarius.4639:

Mil.3562:

Btw, I am downloading D3 as I post here, lots of positive feedbacks on that game after the developers listened and acted on gameplay improvements.

I stopped playing GW2 for about two years and came back to play for about a month now. Yep, nothing has changed (enjoyment wise) only more nerfs, especially visual nerfs on skills :/

Yeah, it’s improved dramatically and Reaper of Souls just smashed it. Extremely impressed with Blizzard for managing to turn that game around after an epic failure at launch.

Blizzard learned one big thing that has yet to sink in around GW2 headquarters -

It is simply not fun when the primary means to acquire something in game is to grind currency and buy.

Dragonax.6487:

And the most terrible thing is almost none of those require any amount of skill.

because, to arena net, casual player = lobotomy patient.

So, to cater to caual players, most of the content in this game requires 0 skill, but infinite amount of time, so the casuals don’t complain after 2 days that there is not much to do.

The worst thing? every time anet launches some challenging stuff (that doesn’t reward you anything worthy either) a lot of these casuals flood the forums complaining how the game isn’t casual oriented anymore.