Guild Wars 2

Seras.5702:

Are you referring to Legendaries?

Pretty much.

Theres frustratingly little to set people apart. Dyes might, if you couldnt spend a couple silver and have everything but the swooshy metallic looks (and at night or indoors, everything looks a muted shade of dark anyway). Armor sets do in theory, but in practice do not, normal weapon skins get lost in PARTICLE EFFECTS (dear gods, why wont setting those to lowest keep them from being everywhere on allt hings at all times) and even class mechanics (have fun with that offhand as a guardian, lol!).

You’re left with distince items with particle effects or … exactly jackall to do otherwise. The game does a good job at hiding the entire lack of meaningful end-game content while you’re leveling and exploring, which is great.

The problem is, you get to the endgame and go “well kitten, I am out of things to do except farm for the ONLY thing that makes me stand out”.

Actually, I lie, you can also farm for a blue dorrito above your head too.

As to the fun part of that, I havent had any “fun” with a lot of the new events or with re-visiting a lot of the old content. They exist to be done and shower you with gobs of loot (most of which turns into a silver) and points towards sparkly boxes with ugly skins that glow.

In past MMO’s, I didnt need a reward for having world or server firsts, because kitten yeah, I did it first.

And now as games scale down difficulty and scale down the significance of being rewarded, the intrinsic rewards also matter less. “I put a month of failing and finally worked out the strategy” is meaningful. “I logged on first on the new content patch!” is not. When your hardest content is beatable on the first day it releases, or on the first blind attempt, there (in the vast majority of cases) cannot EXIST an intrinsic reward, because there is nothing to feel rewarded for doing. (Note: In some cases, you can find that combination of skill and luck to accomplish the first attempt or first day kill of something difficult. Then you usually fail miserably on it the next far too many times and wonder what the hell happened)

Intrinsic rewards require something that makes you feel rewarded when you finish.

Then again, I come from a time when the answer was “figure it out your own kitten self” (which included guilds and friends) and not “Oh, soandso wrote a guide”.

But now I’m grumbling.

Dynamic events are interesting. The first time.

There is all of one thing that really means anything in the game (thats even debatable), and it requires gobs and gobs of $ or farming, and Anet is pretty much anti-farming (which is problematic when its one of the few aspects in the game with meaningful reward and replay value). Therefore, theres only one meaningful question to ask after you’ve seen the content once, and thats “Is this a good source of gold?”. If the answer is no, then its not worth doing again, because theres no benefit to people for the time spent doing it.

Additionally, the focus on “DO THIS CONTENT IN THESE TWO WEEK CHUNKS” “living” story nonsense is not exactly helping any. I’m going to do limited content (which in many MMO’s is the best way to make money) or I’m going to do the other best ways to make money. I’m not going to trapse around and do events that Anet has never managed to properly reward (I cant really name a quest reward or reward chest in GW1 or 2 that is correctly balanced for the difficulty) when it doesnt reward me or affect the world outside of possibly un-contesting a waypoint for a random length of time (as short as a couple seconds).

Even Casual McSuperCasual (Who I am not, never have been and never will be) has goals in games, and in this game, it ends up being the same kitten thing as everyone else.

Also when the dynamic event is “Kill stuff here for 6 minutes, and then we go ‘yaaaaaay you won’”, is that really noteworthy, or is it the worst way to spend 6 minutes if you arent also getting good drops + heart completion? Heres a guy with a bomb running uphill in the same path every few seconds after it dies as it did the last time. what fun and interactive that event must be. Oh wait, no, its the exact opposite of that.