Identity Crisis
I’ve noticed something comparing the base GW2 to HoT, the game seems to have serious problems figuring out what it’s going to be. I didn’t want to type this until I’d played the game for a few weeks, just to get a good feel for it. When the game came out, it seemed to want to be a casual game people could play without investing much time, and being able to get the most out of a few hours of game play. You could take a 3 month break from GW2, come back, and still be able to play all the content. The balance for the game wasn’t perfect, but you could pretty much use any gear, nearly any build, and do almost any content in the game.
Then we compare it to HoT. Now with masteries, the grind it takes to get them can be very arduous. It takes a large amount of time so playing for 2-3 hours a day doesn’t feel like you’ve accomplished much. It requires a less casual player. I feel like if I were to take a 3 month break from HoT, no one would be doing the multiple player hero points, I would need friends or a guild to finish it, same with some of the events, something that wasn’t in the game before. The amount of work there is in the game seems overwhelming, from the perspective of someone who plays the game casually. Especially because so much content is locked behind an exp grind. A grind that takes as much xp as getting 1-80 several times over.
In summation, it just seems that GW2 can’t decide what it wants to be. Does it want to be a casual game with lots of boomerang players? or a hardcore game with a small but steady hardcore audience? Do you want a lot of people to be able to experience all the content right away, or lock the content behind grinds, and group content? Both perspectives have their merits, but it’s important to decide on one, as trying to do both will most likely result in no one being happy.
I think it’s hard to admit this, especially someone who logs in lots of hours every day in game, but you aren’t wrong. Whenever there is a big update to the game, such as living story, introduction of fractals, and most blatantly with the release of HoT, Anet tends to change their entire system or mechanics. With living story they went from having open world experience to an instanced experience (which in my opinion was a change for the better), dungeons were supposed to be THE instanced 5 map party runs but that was soon dropped very early into GW2, with fractals the system has been changed twice already (some might say for the worse especially with HoT), trait system has been overhauled twice already along with the acquisition of utility skills, WvW has been changed here and there, and so on.
I believe that the problem with Anet is that they lack the ability of hindsight and listening to the player community. It was a problem at the start of GW2 where they simply made changes and never told anyone why. Now, they fixed that and explain most of the changes they do (definitely not all). The lack of hindsight about their in game content and how it would look down the road, along with what the player community actually wants, and what Anet wants for the game at times, are strangely distant from one another.
Anet stated that people will stop running dungeons if we take away the reward which was explicitly stated by the devs just before the release. They feared that people would prefer old content over the new stuff. Even with the reward nerf for dungeons, people are running them, probably to the same equivalent (if not more) than pre-HoT. With fractals, we were promised new, more, and unique instabilities which is actually the complete opposite. Anet also stated that they did not want their player community to have to roll for the easy ones anymore and instead stated if they make each level a specific island, people will run all of them. This is partially true in that their are new achievements that require players to run all 1-100 for the full reward. However, with the poor implementation of some mechanics, once players reach all the achievements (who many have already done so), will only run the same 3 fractals over and over for the daily achievement because they are the easiest/fastest. This is an example of lack of hindsight, something that the player community told them would happen the moment they released news of fractal changes. In the previous system, you were able to roll for swamp, but the next 3 fractals were a mystery, which to me at least made it more fun to guess what would be coming next. The old system made it so that only underwater fractal wasn’t run because people rolled swamp. Soon, (and you will notice it a bit now too just weeks into HoT), that people will now only roll the same 3 or 4 fractals to get the daily achievement and ignore the rest. It’s also important to mention that there is no new news of any new fractal levels.
Again, this is just my opinion and only several of the examples that quickly come to mind. I just wish for Anet to listen more closely to it’s community. Their lack of responses and communication on the forums and reddit as of recently is also quite disheartening. Let’s hope for the best.
19 days since HoT has been released. I keep asking this and nobody has an answer.
What MMO expansion or otherwise, been released and within a month of release ALL the issues the player base complains about have been researched, coded, tested successfully the first time and released in this very short time frame?
19 days.
I understand the complaints – I think the expectation of immediate fix is amazingly unreasonable.
@Eight Samurai.6840
I agree with everything you said, but I think you hit on something I didn’t talk about in my post. The whole herding players to where they want to take them. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? If players like playing dungeons, why not add more dungeons instead of trying to get players away from them?
As for them changing their idea with each update? I think it might be lack of hindsight, or maybe lack of confidence. You saw the result of that with the Sonic the Hedgehog series of games. They kept adding, and innovating, to the point where the base game was unrecognizable from the newer ones. Some times, more of the same thing isn’t a bad thing. If you keep trying to improve what’s already fun for everyone, you’ll end up wrapping everything in bandages.
19 days since HoT has been released. I keep asking this and nobody has an answer.
What MMO expansion or otherwise, been released and within a month of release ALL the issues the player base complains about have been researched, coded, tested successfully the first time and released in this very short time frame?
19 days.I understand the complaints – I think the expectation of immediate fix is amazingly unreasonable.
I’m not making a complaint, I’m making a comparison. You can’t fix the entire direction of content you added. I’m not comparing an unbalanced mechanic or anything, I’m comparing the base philosophies, as I interpret them, from the way the content looks to how it looked in previous versions.
19 days since HoT has been released. I keep asking this and nobody has an answer.
What MMO expansion or otherwise, been released and within a month of release ALL the issues the player base complains about have been researched, coded, tested successfully the first time and released in this very short time frame?
19 days.I understand the complaints – I think the expectation of immediate fix is amazingly unreasonable.
I’m not talking about bug fixes or balancing. I mean having a clear vision of goals and somewhat of a pathway for the future of their game. Changing me hanics and systems so often shows they lack this ability. WvW being literally dead is one of them, literally everything with fractals right now is another, very short personal story for HoT is another, deciding for the players that we don’t really run dungeons for fun is another, removing SAB too.
Let’s also remember this game is 3 years old it is far from new. They have had plenty of time to figure things out.
(edited by Eight Samurai.6840)
@one prarie…
I dont think its as much about lack of time playing the game that is the issue (or comparison to the state of other MMOs’ expac releases). I think it is more that people expected the game to be more finished, and in line with what they were being told, than it is. Im not so sure bug fixing will alter the foundation in a way that it will turn this game around to be what they originally told us HoT would be. Cuz it is not the same.
@one prarie…
I dont think its as much about lack of time playing the game that is the issue (or comparison to the state of other MMOs’ expac releases). I think it is more that people expected the game to be more finished, and in line with what they were being told, than it is. Im not so sure bug fixing will alter the foundation in a way that it will turn this game around to be what they originally told us HoT would be. Cuz it is not the same.
I’m fine with the amount of content in the expac. I’ll admit the story was a bit fillery, but the maps are entertaining. I also don’t mind waiting for them to roll out content. My biggest complaint was the departure from what GW2 was pre HoT to what it is now. The two gaming philosophies are vastly different. A casual experience, that you could play for a few hours and feel like you accomplished something, you could take a break from, and boomerang back to vs well… this. It feels like the only content that we can do is this insane xp grind, which is 1-80 several times over. Parts of the map are blocked off behind mastery gates and event gates, which never happened in GW2 before. You could map complete without really having to do the events in the map. Now it seems like you can’t dedicate yourself to one task. It’s do everything at once, or get overwhelmed and go play something else.