Guild Wars 2

At this present moment in time, my first character is level 40. I have had to walk away from about a dozen group events during the leveling process, some of which are the culmination of the zone’s story, because there aren’t enough players joining in.

When I bought this game (back in April when ‘pre-purchasing’ first began), I did so in the belief that the side-kicking system would mean that max leveled players would be able to play anywhere in the world without being overpowered. I actually believed that the world of GW2 would be thriving with players, instead of being just another dead world, same as the majority of MMOs.

Where is the intelligent design, the questioning of long standing concepts, in what you have done with this game? Was it always your intention for max leveled players to grind dungeons for loot while the actual PvE world remains solely for those leveling their characters? This game is yet another in a long line of boring MMOs that goes to great lengths to create a world, and then gives players no reason to be part of it once they reach the ‘endgame’.

I can understand why people are walking away from this game. You tried so hard to convince everyone that you were doing something different, but under the surface this game is so much more like WoW than it is Guild Wars. I can already see your first expansion raising the level cap (to reset gear), adding new leveling zones and most importantly, adding new dungeons to grind for new loot. Yawn.

I doubt I will even get to level 80 at this rate, the game is simply too boring to play for any reasonable length of time. The AI of the PvE mobs is laughable, the more interesting dynamic events require more people to take part, and the fact that I have to pay silly amounts of money to respec my traits just for a bit of variety are all combining to make the leveling experience a chore instead of enjoyable.

One of TotalBiscuit’s GW2 videos (I think from Eurogamer 2011) shows him fighting a huge boss, Tequatl the Sunless, with only one other player taking part. That is the real GW2. Which makes me wonder, why did you even bother with group events?

I now understand why you insisted that players pre-purchase this game before you let them play it.

I wholeheartedly agree. Today I actually found myself doing an event with gasp …3 other people. It was amazing.

On the other hand, you can get to level 80 perfectly fine on your own. Just play the game (with or without events) and you’ll get there at a fast enough rate. Do some professions, and it goes even faster. But I agree, in such a big world, it does get lonely at times.

Have you tried joining a guild that focuses on planning and playing open world pve events? Almost any problem can be solved with a sizable guild.

There is just no incentive to do dynamic events at lower level. Hell, even right now in orr, people selectively choose the dynamic events that spawns many mobs / loots. Otherwise, people just tag some mobs and run away expecting others to complete the DE for them.

The problem with that is, what do I do when I reach level 80? My gaming time these days is limited (as exhibited by the 4 months I was unable to play the game due to work :P) so I want to spend it playing the content I enjoy.

Grinding dungeons again and again for gear when I would rather be in WvW with my Guild is a waste of my precious gaming time. Wasn’t this supposed to be the game that let us play the content we enjoy without having to jump through hoops first? I tried WvW as an under-leveled player, it was awful being killed in 1-2 hits (even more so when you consider the silly repair costs). All I can really do is use siege gear and drop combo fields for my Guild to use.

As it is, I am spending more and more time playing Firefall, and that game isn’t even finished yet :P But a large open PvE world, fun skill-based combat, player generated content and dynamic events that always attract a large amount of players make it hard to resist.

I suppose GW2 is always there for the times when I feel anti-social :P

Yup it was a flawed design decision. What also killed it is the fact that they removed the loot drops from the open world compared to dungeons.
Doing events doesnt net me enough to cover the cost of waypointing.

It is really sad that you have a dead world and players have 0 incentive to go back. They force you to grind dungeons for loot and gear.

This was probably already said earlier in the thread, but..

There just isn’t enough reward for going back into lower level areas.

I go into, say, Iron Marches and see a small handful of people in the zone. Then I go to Cursed Shore and see a large number of players doing very specific events that spawn a lot of mobs. It’s pretty obvious that farming in Orr gives a vastly better reward then exploring the world.

Leveling in WvW is pretty quick if things are busy. Level 80 really isn’t that hard to reach.

What I do in GW2 nowadays is just log in to do my daily and then farm ori node for each of my characters to make money that’s about it.

Exploring the world after completing the World should be much more rewarding.

This is what bothers me. In GW1, if I wanted to craft some exotic gear, all I needed was the coin and mats. And I could get those anywhere. This gave me a lot of freedom to choose where I wanted to play, and with so many zones all tailored to level 20, it never got boring.

From what I have read, when you reach level 80 in GW2, your experience bar continues to fill up and you continue to gain skill points, much like GW1? If this is true, then that would be a much better basis for purchasing gear, as players could then play whatever content they wanted, and gain the exact same rewards.

I think this is something ArenaNet should consider, as part of the reason I am struggling to maintain interest in this game is knowing that the gear grind hasn’t even started for me yet

I don’t see why any MMO game released this year must have levels and areas for them. Levels are something from first games – 40 years old rule, which makes playable only 10% from the map. If there is no levels people will play on 100% of map. This is MMORPG or it shall be. MMO- means gaming with many other players, RPG means to choose alone how to play. Nor for first neither for second you need levels. Levels are from Tetris where you reach the max level and turn the game over. But people from gaming industry, including these in Anet, make almost same games from years, they not need levels, but they have no idea how to make it without levels. And to make new type MMO is so easy.

Zantetsuken.9051:

When I bought this game (back in April when ‘pre-purchasing’ first began), I did so in the belief that the side-kicking system would mean that max leveled players would be able to play anywhere in the world without being overpowered. I actually believed that the world of GW2 would be thriving with players, instead of being just another dead world, same as the majority of MMOs.

During the first months most zones were full of people and dynamic events were happening all over place, everyone was enjoying the content and the “different” way of questing. Unfortunately, as the days progressed that changed for the worse.

Where is the intelligent design, the questioning of long standing concepts, in what you have done with this game? Was it always your intention for max leveled players to grind dungeons for loot while the actual PvE world remains solely for those leveling their characters? This game is yet another in a long line of boring MMOs that goes to great lengths to create a world, and then gives players no reason to be part of it once they reach the ‘endgame’.

That’s exactly the problem, what makes a character “different” be it with the best gear or simple skins is simply… gold. So people ignore the low level content, or dynamic content, and instead farm endlessly dungeons and those few events in Cursed Shore. Anet failed to give enough motivation for people to go and explore, go and try do different things like puzzles/meta events etc, they went the easy way of RNG/luck and impossible amounts of materials/gold required to “progress” in the game other than providing incentives to go and have fun in the world.

The system is already in place, just take a look at the achievements tab, only instead of rewarding useless “points” they could make it more worthwile, or add the old system of books/dailies from Guild Wars 1, motivating people to visit one zone each day to get rewards there, or rewarding people who actually do a variety of activities instead of grinding/farming one dungeon path (not even full dungeon run) or a few events.

What did the devs do? The decided to “nerf” farming… as if the issue was that those activities were super rewarding, completely missing the point, that everything else ISN’T rewarding at ALL

On the contrary, leveling is fastest from doing dynamic events like the Maw chain at foothills, seraph overlord chain at Kessex Hill etc…

At lvl 80 i also went back to lower lvl zones and did dynamic events along the way to get achievement points, end of zone loots, and ultimately world completion to eventually get legendary gear. The different hearts, dynamic events, unseen content was enough to get me back to lower levels.

I don’t do dungeons for loot too, I mainly do the raid-style dragons for loot.

I can’t share the original poster’s viewpoint based on my GW2 experience so far, almost at all.

Compared to traditional questing like killing something x30 with “kill stealing”, waiting for mobs to return from death, and running back and forth to hand in quests, I would do dynamic events every time as long as there are enough people participating in them.

This leads to my complaint that there are too many concurrent events in any zone which repeat sooo frequently that you cannot have lots of people doing them all the time. On top of this, there are zones which share the same level ranges which divides the population further.

As a solution do what other MMOs do, and have EVERYONE go through the same zones and have fewer dynamic events in each zone, AND make them run at different times, preferably after each other as opposed to at the SAME TIME. Then, a lot more players can participate in dynamic events!

EDIT: Also, don’t have different zones for the same level ranges like 1-15 x5! Each new zone should be for different level ranges like 1-15 x1, 15-30 x1, 30-45 x1 etc! Again, this will unite players.

I’m starting to think Arenanet wanted to split everyone up by design! :O

I have a couple of characters at 80, close to full exotics. I don’t play dungeons, just PvE and WvW. I like lower level zones as some of the events are quite enjoyable, much better than trying to tear down a wall of risen.

The problem is the cost associated at level 80. Waypointing from Orr to a lower level zone for example, can cost 3-4 silver, meaning you don’t break even on completing an event, especially with the messed up drop rates. For example, I was Gendarran Fields simply as I like the zone when another player called out on mapchat that a Champion mob had respawned. He called out for 5 minutes and no one turned up so I finished what I was doing and we took it down together. Waypoiting there cost nearly 2 silver. The beast dropped nothing (champions are supposed to drop every time, I don’t think this was an event so no reward from that). In terms of economics, I wasted 2 silver for no reward, other than helping a lower level player out and the enjoyment of seeing 2 mesmers work together to take down a champion (so many clones lol).

I don’t think these issues will go away until an incentive is given to go to lower level zones. They did increase the drop rate of scales gear in lower level zones – so at level 80 I get level 80 gear approx 60% of the time I think it is. But this doesn’t take into account crafting mats, waypoint costs or the fact the current loot tables are messed up – so there is little reward or incentive to do this unless playing with lower level characters, aiming for map completion or sheer joy of how beautiful the zones can be. Also as quests always give a generic reward, there is little reason to seek variety in quests. If unique rewards were given on a quest by quest basis, the loot tables were fixed (don’t expect anyone to admit they are broken though) and crafting mats where better distributed the zones may become more full. Or more imporantly, move away from this constant RNG/grinding gold mentality which overshadows the game… There are some quite large patches coming up so hopefully that may help.

For the OP – there are event chains in zones like Harathi Hinterlands that generally have a large number of players involved as they can be quite large chains. Once you get used to seeing what is around in the world it may be a better experience.

You don’t need to waypoint to lower level zones – use wvwvw and get into LA and then use whichever portal you need – yes, bit of running invloved if you want to go a bit further but hey

They highly overestimated how successful they thought this game would be. Imo they will have to cut some of the servers soon.

Sadly, and like many before him, the OP is correct. No amount of “join a guild that focuses on world completion and DEs” negates the fact that the world, for some servers, feels empty. I am leveling my fifth toon to 80 and I am on a server where this is not a problem. I see many players in any zone. But I can see for other servers, this is a problem.

The dynamic event system and group event system is contingent on many players traversing the open world of Tyria. Now, admittedly(sp), arenanet screwed up royally by making ascended gear obtainable via Fractal GRIND, and they are taking measures to fix that. Why so long? Why is there no word on this subject yet after 1.5 months? I dont know.

But unless they want zones to remain empty, they need to increase the incentive for high level players to return to zones. I made a post about this in the first first week or two, that the reward for mylevel 30 character to return to a level 10 zone and complete a DE was disappointing. It is hard to say how much, but I was receiving about 30% of the reward that I normally would as a level 30. This needs to change.

I know, its logical to say “Why would we want max level characters, even down leveled, to gain maximum reward in the easiest areas? Places like Orr will be left vacant”. I agree. But you have to do something. Once people stop leveling alts, and all of their friends are leveled up, even servers like mine that have no issues with population, will see empty 1-70 zones. Look at WoW…I started playing that game right as TBC came out. Going through the zones while leveling, I hardly saw other players. Everyone was at max level waiting for the next raid. Same thing here… Everyone is at max level running dungeons, kharma farming in Orr, or Fractal grinding their faces off. Arenanet has not created anything new here even if they will scream until they are blue in the face that their world is fine.

What they need to do:
-Increase the kharma/gold/xp gained from events throughout the world, no matter what level of the event, to max level reward(relative to the character).
-Introduce a new currency for completing Orr dynamic events, to be used in addition to Kharma when purchasing the kharma sets in Orr. This will make it so that playing in Orr isnt useless, especially if you want to get those kharma sets.
-Create more Kharma sinks. I have a hard time fathoming that they didnt see this coming. Youre a developer, and my simple country mind was able to see that if you have one kharma sink in this game, kharma becomes utterly useless especially for those of us who hate the look of the kharma sets.

I mean, there are just so many things that were overlooked when designing this game, that took 5+ years. The fractal leveling system, “pushing” Fractals out the door when the reward system wasnt in place, not releasing the game with ascended gear in the first place, emptiness of zones, no kharma sinks, DE bugs(if you actually QA your work…just a thought), etcetc. I find it so hard to believe that developers who sole purpose is to create this game, do not see the problems of their systems or ideas. Or if they do, the systems make it to the game anyways.

Its laughable that us simple players see this before it happens, much like a pre-cog, just from reading a blog from arenanet…where arenanet has had months of development behind them and dont realize it. You should be paying US.

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

I do them because I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and my server is one of the most populous so I rarely have a problem getting them done.

Pro-tip, advertise them. If you come across one let the zone know, and link a nearby waypoint. Literally every time I do this a bunch of lone wolves suddenly appear and we get it done.

lagrangeify.5641:

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

I do them because I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and my server is one of the most populous so I rarely have a problem getting them done.

Pro-tip, advertise them. If you come across one let the zone know, and link a nearby waypoint. Literally every time I do this a bunch of lone wolves suddenly appear and we get it done.

This. Very well said.
I am also on a very busy server and people advertise events all the time. All it takes is a waypoint link and they will come. When I play solo I have never had an issue because I do this all the time. I’ve even seen people asking for help with personal story quests in map chat.

lagrangeify.5641:

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

That won’t help taking people away of the same Plinx/Shelter/Penit farm events in Cursed Shore… On some servers those are still getting farmed, even more than any dungeon (except fractals)

MMO developers need to start learning that having group quests/events in the world in the leveling up zones is a bad idea, it doesn’t take long for those quests/events to go unused.

How melodramatic. I’ve taken a break from dungeoning recently, decided to tour the explorable areas, and found them very much alive (on my server at least).

People are far too ready to become doomsayers.

Regarding the cost of waypoints:, this is by design and largely wont change. Here is why:

-There is not subscription fee for this game.
-Consider the cost of paying employees, overhead for the building(s) that arenanet occupies, infrastructure, equipment for their employees(laptops, desktops, etc), maintanance, creation of new content, etc. You do need consistant revenue to pay for this game if it is to stick around and continue evolving throughout the years. How do we do this without a subscription?
-Gem store. “Hey you can purchase gems via real life money in the gem store”
-“Once you have your gems, you can trade them for gold to use in game.”

So consider:
-“Man all of this waypointing around, repair costs, high material costs for legendaries, ascended infusions, etc…it requires lots of money! Man this game really revolves on having a boat load of gold. How do I get this quickly”
-“Ah, I know. I’ll trade in some gems for gold”.

Youll have people with the mindset that they will buy 10$ of gems per month to offset the cost of what they would pay in a sub game per month…trade that in for gold. Or the idiots that will spend 200$ a pop on gems for gold. The entire game revolves around gold. It makes everything spin.

So while 3-4 silver a few times a night wont make an enormous visible impact on your gold in the short run, there are a lot of people that will offset this via real money and THAT is what arenanet counts on.

They need that real life money to continue their monthly updates, so any avenue to get it(including keeping travel costs high), they will leave alone.

Or, more interestingly, ever wonder why there are no mounts in the game? Do you really think it is because they want the player experience to remain intimate with the world and community? No, it is so that you waypoint around, spending money, see your in game money start to dwindle the lazier you get, and contemplate trading gems for gold…thus buying more gems to do it all over again once you realize how easy it is.

Arenanetis a company and needs to make money, like any other.

With all of this said, and even my previous post….The game is still better than games like WoW in many areas. I think WoW does dungeon grinding a bit better. Blizzard handles bugs and QA tests their game wayyyyy better, but I do think that Arenanet has the opportunity to continue to make this a fantastic game. it already is, but you can see some direction they are heading and I hope they don’t continue down the path of the wow clones via dungeon grind, small item progression, empty zones, etc.

I have 2000000 karma, I would happily go back and do the lower zones even at reduced karma if karma had any value whatsoever.

I have suggested this several times for a kharma sink:

Purchase the ability to use the “skin storage” via kharma. Suggested amount: 5,000
Everytime you want to swap out a skin for one slot, have it cost kharma: Suggested amount: 500

There is your kharma sink.

But this wont happen, and it goes back to my previous pount about in game money and arenanet making money. If people want to keep their skins and gear, they store it in the bank. Bank space is at a premium and purchased with gems via the gem store. Gems are purchased via real life money, and that is what arenanet is after.

I dont think they are quick to take away this avenue for revenue. And if arenanet dares to make a feature like this(able to easily swap out skins) available via gem purchases… I will flip. The. F. Out. And I will look elsewhere for my MMO experience. This will solidify the inkling I am getting about this company just out to make money, rather than a quality game….limiting quality of life changes just to make a buck.

About WvW. I made my monthly 50 kills with my lvl 20+ warrior.

So you can play there even on low levels. Especially so if you have a guild to play with. And you don’t even need to go to dungeons to get gear.

But I kinda agree that there’s no point doing low level events.

On the other hand, it’s a player issue. They will always find some best place to farm and focus on it.

cesmode.4257:

Regarding the cost of waypoints:, this is by design and largely wont change. Here is why:

-There is not subscription fee for this game.
-Consider the cost of paying employees, overhead for the building(s) that arenanet occupies, infrastructure, equipment for their employees(laptops, desktops, etc), maintanance, creation of new content, etc. You do need consistant revenue to pay for this game if it is to stick around and continue evolving throughout the years. How do we do this without a subscription?
-Gem store. “Hey you can purchase gems via real life money in the gem store”
-“Once you have your gems, you can trade them for gold to use in game.”

So consider:
-“Man all of this waypointing around, repair costs, high material costs for legendaries, ascended infusions, etc…it requires lots of money! Man this game really revolves on having a boat load of gold. How do I get this quickly”
-“Ah, I know. I’ll trade in some gems for gold”.

Youll have people with the mindset that they will buy 10$ of gems per month to offset the cost of what they would pay in a sub game per month…trade that in for gold. Or the idiots that will spend 200$ a pop on gems for gold. The entire game revolves around gold. It makes everything spin.

So while 3-4 silver a few times a night wont make an enormous visible impact on your gold in the short run, there are a lot of people that will offset this via real money and THAT is what arenanet counts on.

They need that real life money to continue their monthly updates, so any avenue to get it(including keeping travel costs high), they will leave alone.

Or, more interestingly, ever wonder why there are no mounts in the game? Do you really think it is because they want the player experience to remain intimate with the world and community? No, it is so that you waypoint around, spending money, see your in game money start to dwindle the lazier you get, and contemplate trading gems for gold…thus buying more gems to do it all over again once you realize how easy it is.

Arenanetis a company and needs to make money, like any other.

With all of this said, and even my previous post….The game is still better than games like WoW in many areas. I think WoW does dungeon grinding a bit better. Blizzard handles bugs and QA tests their game wayyyyy better, but I do think that Arenanet has the opportunity to continue to make this a fantastic game. it already is, but you can see some direction they are heading and I hope they don’t continue down the path of the wow clones via dungeon grind, small item progression, empty zones, etc.

The developement cycle for gw2 was 5 years at a cost of $16.3m per year @ lets just average box sales to $49.99 initial sales were reported at 2m+ boxes I think this is more of a corporate greed issue than a revenue problem kind of like the US government having a spending problem rather than a tax revenue problem.

cesmode.4257:

Regarding the cost of waypoints:, this is by design and largely wont change. Here is why:

-There is not subscription fee for this game.
snip

I’d say you’re pretty close to the mark to be honest. I feel the gem store has had a little too pervasive an impact on some basic fundamental stuff, and it’s selling the experience short. I feel ANet gave me this great big world to play in, but they’d prefer to funnel me into the narrowest and least remarkable aspects of the game (dungeons) if I want to get a decent tangible amount of reward for time and effort. That approach is short-sighted and it won’t end well if they persist with it.

They need to be a little more flexible in their thinking of ways to entice us into RMT, rather than smothering the game experience with false ceilings and bold as brass cash sinks.

To put this in perspective, if NCSoft could guarantee that every player of Aion FTP spent $50 on stuff in their shop during their entire lifetime playing the game, I imagine they’d be over the moon and rubbing their hands with glee.

ASB.4295:

Have you tried joining a guild that focuses on planning and playing open world pve events? Almost any problem can be solved with a sizable guild.

Yep…you “can” solo a lot of this game. Joining in DE’s as they pop. But if you want to run with large pve groups, you need to find the people that do those kinds of things.

So much of these kinds of complaints could be solved with a good guild.

I’m thinking the OP wouldn’t be happy no matter what. I do tons of events, mostly solo, and usually at least a few times per day I do group events with other random players. Yesterday I was in the lvl 70 area before Orr and had about 10ish players doing the group events there. A few days ago I did a massive group event in the volcano in the previous zone with again, about 10-15 players. Even many of the soloable events get an extra 1-2 players along, especially the escorts or longer events.

There is no MMO in the world that has bustling and overflowing leveling zones. If you’re going to leave GW2 because of that, I guess you’re simply not going to play any MMO at all.

The leveling experience in this game is far superior to that of any other MMO I’ve played. Certainly leaps and bounds beyond WoW. If all you want to do is race to 80 by farming group events or chaining hearts, I can see your frustration but then again that’s your loss for not enjoying the best part of the game. Once I refocused and worked on zone completion rather than simply gaining xp, the events and experience fell into place by itself.

Morrigan.2809:

lagrangeify.5641:

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

I do them because I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and my server is one of the most populous so I rarely have a problem getting them done.

Pro-tip, advertise them. If you come across one let the zone know, and link a nearby waypoint. Literally every time I do this a bunch of lone wolves suddenly appear and we get it done.

This. Very well said.
I am also on a very busy server and people advertise events all the time. All it takes is a waypoint link and they will come. When I play solo I have never had an issue because I do this all the time. I’ve even seen people asking for help with personal story quests in map chat.

If you upped event rewards all you’d get is lvl 80’s farming the best events. All the others would still be dead. They’d also need to have harsh diminishing returns on repeated events for there to be any real difference.

I did an event last night at 2am EST with about 20 people. It was a slideshow.

I frequently participate in events with 5-10 people at just about any hour of the day. It isn’t an event problem, it’s a problem with your server.

Yaki.9563:

Morrigan.2809:

lagrangeify.5641:

It’s very easy to resolve – up the rewards for completing dynamic event chains and watch as people start farming them again.

I do them because I really enjoy that aspect of the game, and my server is one of the most populous so I rarely have a problem getting them done.

Pro-tip, advertise them. If you come across one let the zone know, and link a nearby waypoint. Literally every time I do this a bunch of lone wolves suddenly appear and we get it done.

This. Very well said.
I am also on a very busy server and people advertise events all the time. All it takes is a waypoint link and they will come. When I play solo I have never had an issue because I do this all the time. I’ve even seen people asking for help with personal story quests in map chat.

If you upped event rewards all you’d get is lvl 80’s farming the best events. All the others would still be dead. They’d also need to have harsh diminishing returns on repeated events for there to be any real difference.

DR on repeated events are really not a bad idea but I can see it being a problem even for non farmers because often we will finish an event and still be in the area when it triggers again and then go and do it to help some other players.
In Orr the temple events can go quite fast and then if they fail you try again- at least we do with Balthazar.
So I’m not sure how to implement DR on event farming.
Sure Orr is most profitable but I think that it is possible to make lower lvl maps lucrative for lvl80’s.
Add unique drops to map bosses ( I mean the big ones like Shadow Behemoth or Fire Elemental)
Add unique skins per regions: Kryta, Far Shiverpeaks, Ascalon, Meguma- purchasable skins with karma as well as recipes to craft those skins, regional food recipes as well as more regional harvestables.

Actually if drops on the other maps where on par with Orr- people would spread out like crazy

short dynamic events or dynamic events that kill stuff are great for exp and loot.