Hesitant to Write, but Healthy Topic: Gliders
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Eirdyne.9843
Hi,
This is not a complaint. I want to emphasize that.
I’m beginning to think I’m seeing something in Guild Wars 2 that is a Maguuma issue only. It has to do with Gliders and most gamers who are older will recognize it.
The issue is flight.
When traveling around Maguuma during Beta I genuinely enjoyed it. It was quite a lot of fun. I died a lot. I wanted to scream a lot, but this was a beta and each new beta things got better.
The one thing about beta that really stands out to me was I basically never got gliding. I didn’t want it. I didn’t understand how to get it and so when I finally did betas were just about done.
This meant I spent most of my time running between location A and B. Now more recently I threw most of my time on here into getting Gliding. This was entirely under the presumption it would be a good mechanic to have and it would remain fun for me long after everything else flattened out.
I was right about this for myself . Now more recently I’m noticing that Gliding has impacted me in other ways I really didn’t anticipate. Instead of leading me to more content, I’m actually missing out on a lot simply because I’m not running around. Most important of which is Experience gain.
So, I stopped that. Then I noticed I was pretty lonely. It wasn’t just that I was alone and this was bothering me. No, that would have been fine. Rather, there is rare a moment when I’m seeing people.
This causes me a little anxiety. Where is everyone?
After a night of more going nowhere and finding no events being done I turned around and said, "The heck with Maguuma right now. I’m going to focus on leveling up Legendary Crafting in Central Tyria, getting done with the Achievement Points I need for that and then I’ll take a look at scribing
I went off with some groups doing obscure places for the huge exp bonuses these could bring. I soloed some areas formerly I couldn’t be bothered with. A very healthy thing to note!!!
Then I noticed something wholly absent from my Guild Wars 2 experience before now… I was running into quite a lot of people. They were doing events, leveling up just like me, and then it hit me… No gliding.
Since then I’ve been looking up a lot in Maguuma. The maps aren’t dead at all. It’s just there are a lot of people doing a lot of flying around.
This may just be a trend for the time being. Some sort of lull in anyone getting anywhere because we’re all doing the perpetually in transit thing and goofing off with it too.
However, this happened in World of Warcraft and, as most probably already know, Blizzard too flying out of their most recent expansion at the start of launch and it was generally received as an improvement. Later people wanted it back and it came back, but for a good while they didn’t have it.
I’m not sure how this is going to turn out. Gliding is a lot of fun, but in the future it may be the issue of how to get people together will be more complicated by it. Right now Central Tyria is booming, but Maguuma is starting to feel a little bit like a ghost town.
One of the things I remember from 2006 when Burning Crusade came out was a lot of people really loved it for all the new land. Then about week 2 people started getting not just their fliers, but epic mounts.
The new areas became something like giant farming zones and areas where (if you weren’t on a PvE server very high levels perpetually ‘ganked’ people trying to level). Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have ‘ganking’ to worry about so I’m thinking people have reached some sort of weird space right now where they have travel options/conduits that are making things feel far less populated than they are. This is complicating things a bit further since then people say, “Well, if no one is here I guess I should go try to find them…” And then people really think things are hollowing out.
This should be something to watch. I’m not sure what more to say about it.
If anyone has anything kindly constructive to say about these thoughts or have some of your own this is probably a healthy topic to explore.