Guild Wars 2

It’s been a year, and although there’s been a lot of changes over the course of that year, what happens when you’ve pretty done them all, and you just kind of ask yourself what do I do now?

fotm
I’ve run the same fotm content over/over, there’s no new element here and no reward carrot to chase, so the nessecity for continuing is depleted. Hopefully the newer additions, such as molten facility, aether, and the reactor will pick up the pace, but for now, this content is dull/boring/repetitive. It also needs a reward upgrade, the loot falls short for the amount of teamwork/time spent in higher levels.

sPvP
This is a basic drop in and out content, but the gameplay is all the same, cap or defend 3 bases, some have different variables like skyhammer and boss/tower buffs, but that’s just it, you just make punching bags of everyone or try to back door around the enemy, the only reward is cosmetic upgrades inside the spvp realm only, so there’s no purpose for PvEr’s outside of AP.

WvW
You essentially get 2 maps to play with, EB or the large server maps, but that’s just it, the maps are large, so when you die in the server maps, that’s a long walk back into the fight. EB has a little more adventure to it since most content is nearby and you can play against the other 2 servers all you like, but what happens when you play the same map over/over/over? It becomes predictable, you know where to cap in specific routes and can easily pinpoint enemy movements, the content is PvDoor or ZvZ, so after several hours you can do the same content again and again just aiming for more and more rankups, but really the rewards are also non-existant and there’s no realistic AP value outside of daily/monthly, so why exactly am I doing this content again? Hopefully the season revision fixes the issue with this.

Dungeons
The standard of MMOs taking you and a group of friends/guildies/randoms, through challenging encounters to acquire loot. But what happens when you’ve done them all, you realize some have poor design and you ignore them completely (Arah p4), and some have the fastest routes (CoF p1), so you essentially only run those to limit down the time vs. reward, why work harder when the rewards round out the same. If you’ve been here for a year, these dungeons are essentially dead for most of us now, I thought the gold revision for completing the dungeon would make me want to re-run them, but 1g for 30mins? That’s a pass for my book, the standard is 7-10g/hr in open world, so why limit myself here, when really, I’ve done the content so the intrinsic/extrinsic values are gone.

Open World
This was suppose to be the big picture of Guild Wars new design, where you can play anywhere and play with anyone else in open world, no mob tagging, shared loots, and tons of dynamic events working with others. So what happened? Most maps are deserted now, and only a couple of stragglers remain leveling up a new character. So when you walk pass a dynamic event that requires a group effort, how do you complete it when there’s no one nearby, how do you enjoy one of the key element of the game when everyone else left the maps? how did the fundamental design of the game fall so flat? Answer? Everyone rushed to 80, because nothing in those maps were rewarding, and if you stay there you lose out on your time vs. reward scale. Why do an event that may take 10-20mins when the end result is 1s and 200 karma, and it doesn’t change the world and will be back up again in 10mins, so it was ditched. Now that everyone is lvl80, they are asking for harder content, and that’s where the next section came in…

Raiding
One of the key design of pass MMOs, taking down large bosses with coordinated efforts with lots of other people for gear progression. Many people see these as challenging content, and only the best of the best will complete it. So they decided to add a new encounter, that incorporates different design features.

Tequatl, the new raid content.

But what happens when you ask for to many players. Most raid content only required 10-25 players because it really is that difficult to seek out more people. So what happens when you ask people to fight content that requires 80+ people, things fall apart, fast. I’m not saying the encounter is bad by all mean, it’s the requirement around the encounter that you have to fight that makes it hard.

AFKs, troll turrets, Disconnects/Server lags, Overflows, Graphical hitbox detection, 3rd-party program requirements (TS3).

The other issue is the amount of effort you put in doesn’t mean equal rewards. If you had 150 people raiding ONE boss, you can’t give them all expensive loot, not everyone can get the top loot, the teq weapon skins, as it would devalue that loot.

In a raid environment, a boss usually drops 3-5 loot that splits across the guild, but that was okay because as you geared up the players equally in your guild, everyone was stronger in the end. So what happens when you fight with randoms? You can’t justify putting your effort in and having no value in return. For many of us, who have managed to beat him, we see blue/green loot and a lucky few get a pet/weapon. So, the extrinsic value of this encounter is based solely on RNG and being able to be on at the right time, even earlier to avoid overflow, and really, that just sucks. A simple solution is to obtain tokens based on teq kills to build towards his loot table and still have a chance for it to drop at the same time, we saw this with the watchwork shoulders, you either got tokens to build towards one or rolled the rng on the chests, that in the heart was good design because you had a choice of progression.

Rewards

Whether you want to believe it or not, the primary goal of MMOs is rewards for the player, you work through difficult challenges to gain epic loot to display for your work. So why is the reward system so little in this game, why is most items obtained through either RNG or Gold. There’s nothing epic about buying the best item in the game outright, it doesn’t show you overcame obstacles, it just shows you either had a lot of time to kill gold-farming, or purely bought the gold itself outright. What happened to risk-rewards-time structures, why did everything become gold-based rewards? There’s no extrinsic value progression other than repeating gold-farming functions for hours on end that eventually stops you in place and ask why? why am I do this? why am I working like a chinese gold farmer for loot that doesn’t make me any better then anyone else?

conclusion
So, what do you do when you hit a wall, and you’ve basically can’t make any progression in the game. What happens when you’ve done everything and yet, feel like you’ve done nothing, most people just log in for their dailies and then log right back off. And really, that’s whats killing the playerbase, you might of sold the games to tons of players but how are you keeping those players in the game longer if they’ve done everything, and essentially only log in for the LS updates for the new AP stuff for 3 hours and then wait 13 days for the next update. Re-evaluate the time vs. reward vs. challenge structure. Don’t make the most difficult content in the game so overwhelmingly un-rewarding, and then make the easiest part of the game the most rewarding (ie champ farming, p1 rushing, etc).

Change a way you think and start treating game like a game not like ego proving grounds?

You take a break. You do the same thing in real life.

When work wears you down, you take a few days off.

When your family wears you down, you walk away and spend some “me” time.

When your hobby wears you down, you find something else to do for a bit.

The only constant in life is change, and because of this doing the same thing again and again can only be enjoyable for so long. After a period of time we are going to desire some measure of change. It’s normal.

Take a break for a while. Play a different game. Dust off the book you’ve been intending to read. Go have a girls or guys night out. GW2 will be here when you’re feeling reinvigorated enough to play it again.

I would say take a break from the game, just go do something else with your free time for a week or two.

well typically when i hit a wall i say ouch . Thankfully it doesn’t happen very often

Go take a break. I’m playing GTA 5 in the meantime. I’m kind of burnt out on GW2, but I don’t go all preachy on the forums proclaiming and threatening to leave the game..

I agree with all the replies you got Charak, it’s all your fault, the game is perfect in every way.

Pariah.8506:

I agree with all the replies you got Charak, it’s all your fault, the game is perfect in every way.

lol it’s far from perfect, but people do burn out and just need a break. it’s normal. of course, he could take a break, find something else he likes better, and then said break becomes a permanent hiatus. like i said, the only constant in life is change.

You go do something else. Seriously, if you don’t want to play the game then don’t play the game.

Read a book? That’s what I do when I have free time and don’t feel like video gaming or going outside…

What happens with me? I go buy a game like Don’t Starve and wait for them to fix this stuff read the news about it and if it sounds good come back and test it like I did with the magic find change. I’m watching really to see if they actually are doing what they claim, listening to the playerbase.

The only point I agree with is in relation to the dynamic events. Now, I don’t want people to be doing them as end game content (zerg/farming/etc), so the laurel system, combined with the karma system encourages the casual who has hit 80 to re-play these areas. I know I played through them in order to get some item skins (dark armor) and will now play them while I’m trying to get my exotics (laurels/karma). Its a delicate balance because you want to see people out playing when you’re leveling up a new guy, but you don’t want it to be zerg zerg zerg like it was when the game came out. Combine that with the fact that you can join a guild and ask for help… I think its a bit short, but its close to working as intended. Perhaps they can add some item mats or non combat items for sale by karma on vendors at the end of a dynamic event chain?

I agree with the risk vs reward part. Anet has no clue how to balance it. It was 100x more balanced in gw1, but like many great things gw1 had, Anet seemed to totally forget about them while making gw2.

Hit the wall back?

rjnemer.7816:

I agree with the risk vs reward part. Anet has no clue how to balance it. It was 100x more balanced in gw1, but like many great things gw1 had, Anet seemed to totally forget about them while making gw2.

It was GREAT at the beginning of the game. When I first logged in and got to 80 in that first two weeks. (took my time on purpose) I thought WOW here’s a company that cares about their playerbase listens to them makes a great game and allows people the chance to get loot in the open world. Then November came along and poof, the loot was being manipulated so no more rares or exotics for many of us even for doing events, the loot system broke with the introduction of heavy changes to the magic find system and the addition of DR and I thought, what in the world are these people thinking?! don’t they realize what they have done? So far since it’s been one disappointment after another regarding rewards, they still haven’t realized yet.

OP, what makes Arah p4 poorly designed besides the fact that you quite obviously just can’t do it?

colesy.8490:

OP, what makes Arah p4 poorly designed besides the fact that you quite obviously just can’t do it?

arah p4 is the longest dungeon design in the game, but at the end, the rewards are no greater. A good dungeon design means it can be cleared in under 20mins, any longer and you bypass time vs. reward card and itself becomes useless. Most people only run it once for the AP, but other than that, there isn’t an value for doing it. It’s not hard, it’s just time consuming.