To whomever it may concern,
I’d like to start by saying I bought the digital deluxe version the day it went on sale, and I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have confidence that GW2 would turn out to be a great game like GW1 was/is. I’m also aware that this will likely come across as a complaint, sorry about that, it’s (mostly) unintentional.
I don’t mean to hate on anyone at ArenaNet, I like you guys, I like what you do, I think GW2 has the capacity to be a very good game, but I also think it has some teething problems and some (to my mind) glaring issues.
I mean no disrespect, so please bear with me.
Based on my own experience, which unfortunately I find rather negative overall, I have to say that Guild Wars 2 is not a multi-player game. It’s massively single player.
It seems to me that for all the touting of the social aspects, GW2 suffers from a very pronounced ‘army of one’ syndrome. It is technically very possible to play through better than 95% of the story without involving another person. The biggest exception there is the story mode for the Arah dungeon to kill Zhaitan, which because it’s a dungeon, requires 5 people. The trade off to playing by yourself is the enemies in explorable areas. You can and will be vastly out numbered, and being even marginally out numbered (2/3v1) can be a recipe for pain, suffering, and steadily shrinking wallet.
As an aside, I don’t have any problem with armor repairs and waypoint transfers being a money sink, but it becomes very much a problem when you die frequently and often, with little to no profit to offset the cost.
I find there is very little incentive to grouping in the game, beyond possibly not getting your kitten kicked all over the map, costing you many coins in armor repairs and travel costs.
I see very few people actually running around any given area, almost all of them in singles, maybe pairs. The only time I see more than that together are the occasional bot armies, [trains/mobs/swarms] of players running around farming dynamic events, and everyone that’s standing outside a dungeon entrance (and generating better than 95% of the local chat with LFG spam).
On the occasions where there is a proper group, the five-player limit means any group is smaller than a comparable GW1 group, which of course was an eight-player cap for most of the content (whether or not you want to count heroes/henches as ‘players’ for filling out parties). Or else there’s a massive mob of players who just coincidentally happen to all be doing the same thing for a brief moment, a dynamic event or boss fight usually, never story content.
Granted, the few guilds I’m in are on the small side, with only a handful of members on at any given time, and that may very well contribute to a bias of not easily being able to find other players to party with, but again, from my perspective the vast majority of players who LFG in local chat (because there’s no good party search mechanism ala GW1) are LFG dungeon explorable content. It’s very difficult, and in practice, certain degrees of impossible to find a PUG for personal story instances. If there even is someone else in the area doing story content, they’ve almost certainly doing a different story, or are at a different point in the story from you. This also applies to Renown Hearts, skill points, most dynamic events that don’t involve a champion-level boss, the jumping puzzles which include enemies (not counting the camera, which you must also fight) and the general world exploration/wildlife endangerment all new characters go though.
My first character was a ranger, and overall it was more enjoyable than not. Having the pet around gives you a fair chance of taking on enemies slightly above your level, or similar/lower level but in small groups, and have a reasonable expectation of walking away from a fight. If things get hairy, you can generally sacrifice the pet while you escape. Most of the time.
A large part of the problem in PvE when you’re by yourself is the re-spawn rate of enemies. I’ve seen others in my guild express a similar opinion as well, that by the time you can clear some breathing space around you in the direction you’re wanting to go, enemies behind you have started to re-spawn. This is especially problematic in high-level areas (Orr, just to name names), where the time it takes to kill even a couple enemies all but guarantees something else has just re-spawned nearby (lets say within Bow range, for the sake of argument). Areas very quickly become a slog-fest to get anywhere, or an expensive proposition to travel between waypoints, this contributes to players not wanting to re-do an area, which leads to less people around, and makes it just that much harder to get a group, and that much more difficult when playing by yourself.
go straight for the dolyaks, i have no idea how you’re supposed to get the canceled achievement.