Guild Wars 2

So I pretty much quit this game right after release. I was a huge GW1 fan, best game I’ve ever played in the entirety of my gaming ‘career’ (by career I mean free time.)

When I left, part of the frustration was due to admins/developers/etc. not responding or recognizing the pvp community in any way shape or form. It seems like that might have changed?

So, below is a post i made the first September after the release of the game. Would it be unreasonable to ask a dev to tell me why the just left GW1 playstyle in the dirt (see the post for a full description of why GW1 was so good.)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Lost-potential/first

eSports!

/Message Body length must at least be 15.

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

Hey Diage.

Its been a while.

I get the feeling that the reason they abbandoned gw1 style/formats of PvP boils down to them feeling it was “too elitist,” and not “bad player/scrub friendly” enough.

This “scrub friendly” mentality has permeated everything in this game even to the point where the leaderboards for competitive PvP don’t even show who the best players are anymore. Only those who grind the hardest. Apparently to “reduce elitism and give all players a chance.”

FrownyClown.8402:

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

The question to ask though is.. should it have been?

Diage.6451:

FrownyClown.8402:

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

The question to ask though is.. should it have been?

That’s pretty much any game with a sequel; it brings along new directors, programmers, etc. It can’t be helped. The Lore, however, is still pretty awesome. In the PvP aspect of things, they’ve acknowledged many issues us PvPers have been facing. Most notably Matchmaking, balance issues, even trying to implement new gamemodes. I myself am looking forward to Stronghold.

I would have been overly excited if there was a form of 2v2/3v3 type style of play but i’m sure there’s reasons as to why that hasn’t been implemented. When it comes down to number crunching, the majority of people simply preferred something like Stronghold and other, more favorable content.
Can’t blame them myself

Saiyan.1704:

Diage.6451:

FrownyClown.8402:

the people who made gw1 are completely different. think of gw2 as a different game with the same lore.

The question to ask though is.. should it have been?

That’s pretty much any game with a sequel; it brings along new directors, programmers, etc. It can’t be helped. The Lore, however, is still pretty awesome. In the PvP aspect of things, they’ve acknowledged many issues us PvPers have been facing. Most notably Matchmaking, balance issues, even trying to implement new gamemodes. I myself am looking forward to Stronghold.

I would have been overly excited if there was a form of 2v2/3v3 type style of play but i’m sure there’s reasons as to why that hasn’t been implemented. When it comes down to number crunching, the majority of people simply preferred something like Stronghold and other, more favorable content.
Can’t blame them myself

Here’s the silly thing though…
This group of Anet litterally tore the ‘competitive’ world apart searching for inspiration to make a great pvp game. The irony behind that is simply that the best pvp for their format was right in front of them. Naturally, it wasn’t perfect… but instead of trying to fix the issues they scrapped it and instead tried going towards a game mode that was from other genres which means now they have to try to appeal to a very small niche of an audience instead of the general RPG audience they could have initially appealed to.

Reikou.7068:

Hey Diage.

Its been a while.

I get the feeling that the reason they abbandoned gw1 style/formats of PvP boils down to them feeling it was “too elitist,” and not “bad player/scrub friendly” enough.

This “scrub friendly” mentality has permeated everything in this game even to the point where the leaderboards for competitive PvP don’t even show who the best players are anymore. Only those who grind the hardest. Apparently to “reduce elitism and give all players a chance.”

I can 100% agree that GW1 was overly complicated. As someone who has spent large amounts of my time studying game mechanics and design, I will note that when adding a component into a game you have to weigh its complexity/skill cap. The ideal competitive game has a high skill cap and low learning curve. GW1 had a very high skill cap, but a very high learning curve as well. Obviously, this helps to keep the game interesting and competitive but makes it difficult to attract new people to the audience and to keep people who take a break the ability to get back into the game. GW2 on the other hand went straight left field and reduced the skillcap to 0 as well as the complexity. So now all the truly competitive players left the scene because it really isn’t a challenging game at it’s core.

Anet needs to take a moment and ask what kind of game they’re making, what is their audience and evaluate the cost/gain of each of the mechanics they are adding and ask each of those mechanics is the cost to complexity worth the skill cap (or in their case, does this do anything to help us actually produce a higher skill cap.)