Guild Wars 2

Well, sadly it’s too little, too late for many players and guilds, but this is the first time I’ve ever read a list of changes from Anet and agreed completely with each of them.

The only thing I’d add is that the new borderlands look nice, but regardless of siege requirements and autoupgrade changes, most players will not play on them.

They are too large, the terrain is not conducive to fighting (which is why we’re in WvW to begin with), there’s PvE and chokes and fall damage everywhere, on top of the map gimmicks that just aren’t fun…

If you guys did a poll asking WvW players if they’d just rather have the old borderlands back, I’d wager you’d get a resounding ‘Yes’.

Even so, these proposed changes look great. Wish it was being rolled out tomorrow.

Adine.2184:

I want to say it looks like Primeval Armor but i cant find a picture for it with a Charr

I’ve already got that on two characters (including 1 charr), so it’s not this either :-/

100% not HoM stuff

I’ve got all the HoM rewards, and nothing looks like that, IIRC. I’ll have another look now, but any other ideas? I’ll come back to confirm once I’ve checked.

Thanks.

I should specify, the armor the charr is wearing.

http://imgur.com/RfJr4

Thanks.

stormstrike.9147:

I wouldn’t exactly use the words “it’s all gone now”. GW1 servers are still up and running.

Yeah, that’s viable. We’d be better off playing Skyrim, at least it was designed for single player.

Payne.5062:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Valkyrie.2678:

Battle Rifles.2965:

It’s difficult to hear everybody here. Is something in your mouths?

It is nice to know that we won’t be seeing you ever again when that panda pack is out.

Hmm… panda pack?

they added pandas in wow ..as a rip-off to Kung Fu Panda movie ..he though you where into that

..also how dares the op to love this game without your negativity

..ppl can’t understand that when someone sez they love this game so much it means the problems with the game are insignificative compared to it’s beauty and the fun it brings

Sorry, I legitimately cannot ascertain what you’re trying to say.

My apologies.

Euthanizor.7241:

First of all, you should take the time to read this.. Whether bad or good, I’d really like to hear what you guys have to say about YOUR opinions on these topics.. Not my own.

For me, MMORPG’s have been about the journey of reaching a high lvl, getting gear, etc. However, I must say my biggest satisfaction about an mmo is the feeling I get when I go to a lower level area to farm, or help a friend of mine. The feeling of destroying things easily that I previously had a very hard time with is very satisfying.

I feel as if Guild Wars 2 has robbed me of the satisfaction of playing a character that feels powerful and unstoppable. This isn’t about why, or how.. Just in principle, that I feel like I’m playing a game that has no progression. I know they can’t remove the downscaling, I know a lvl 80 can’t come one shot a boss event in a level 15 area because it wouldn’t be fair to the people that are actually lvl 15.. But it’s a feature I hate.

Guild Wars 1 was all about the skills. Finding skills to perfect a build you think is going to be great! Finding elite mobs forcing you to bring 7 of your best skills and a signet of capture. Grabbing HUNDREDS of skills and trying to reach vendors all over the map. It was the one thing that made the game completely unique from other mmos’. Now.. I have 5 skills that I cannot change at all, one slot STRICTLY reserved for a healing skill, and 3 skills I can chose from…. REALLY? I’m sorry but I actually have some hard feelings over this. . I expected a skill system at least semi-similar to the first game.. I Have 3 slots to give my character his or her own skills. That’s it! I’m of course excluding the very few heal and elite skills provided.

See a warrior with a greatsword?? Well, I already know EXACTLY what he’s bringing to the fight… I can almost be sure what his healing skill will be along with his elite as well.. Most of the time it’s not even hard to guess what his whole 3 other skills are either.

The lack of the ability to change any of our 10 skills (to anything we want) is killin me…

I’m an extremely hard core GuildWars 1 player. I’m very disappointed on how the second game turned out.. I honestly bought it because after reading the book I had to keep the story going. I love the story, but I can’t say I’m really enjoying the game.

It’s hard for me to see how Arenanet went from a wonderful skill based game to a completely different jump.. This reminds me of how Mass effect turned out from 1-3.

Summary:
Between the great story and the amazingly beautiful artstyle it’s hard for me to say anything bad about GW2. I just really dont like the lack of skill choosing/swapping/selection/diversity, and the the level downscaling. It’s too bad there isn’t many people playing GW1 anymore..

-I miss Running a group for 2s to droks
-Sorrow’s furnace—(I frantically rushed to this dungeon.. I was very disappointed. . )
-Getting my armor infused
-Capturing elites
-SoS builds
-Chest running in the underworld
-Ecto Farming.
-Vanquishing Hardcore mode

Such good times.. It’s all gone now. . .

We might be soulmates:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-I-find-the-game-uninteresting-From-a-longtime-Guild-Wars-1-player

Missing the Drok’s run and elite caps like hell.

Cawesome.1580:

Lot of fanboys in this thread, I do have to agree, a lot in this game was a huge disappointment. After you get out of the beta tested areas it’s just one broken DE after another, and even when you do find a working DE it’s just a spam fest of just aoes, and all people do at level 80 is grind grind grind for 63k karma. Dungeons in this game are a joke, sure the first run was hard when you didn’t know what to expect but after that…a joke. I’m not sure what Anet did wrong, I watched their manifesto, read all their updates and it seemed to be going well. I was expecting a world that would be alive, not just have X centaurs that are standing still and need to be killed, or just have X centaurs attack a place and need to kill them. What did we get? X centaurs standing in a field or X centaurs attacking an outpost that need to be killed.

Replace “X centaurs need to be killed” with “X X need to be killed” and you’ve got the entire game, with bad mechanics and a simpleton skill bar to boot. Oh, and there’s a new goldseller email every time you log in.

SpectacularYak.6518:

And here’s the thing. You actually seem like a smart guy, and you were pretty calm and seemed to be well rooted in the fact that this was your opinion, your disappointment was your own, and that there was really nothing to be done about things. Then you started ARGUING with people, and…quite predictably…the more you argued, the more polarized you got, and now you’re just talking rubbish. When you go off on rants about ego and money and “players like us” and the evil casuals and yada yada yada you sound like a clown. And I don’t think you’re a clown. I think you’re a reasonable fellow who didn’t like a game, and you got slammed for it, and now you’re throwing wild punches.

For starters, any thread like this is inherently opinionated. That’s the nature of any forum, so I won’t apologise for giving my opinion. You’re criticising me for trying to pass my opinions off as facts when this entire thread is a discussion about whether or not my opinions (ie., personal preferences) make any sense, and if they’re held elsewhere. Plenty of other people agree with me, and a lot of people disagree with me. But don’t misconstrue what’s going on here: There’s 200 comments relating back to 3 main ideas, and those comments are about what I think is wrong with the game.

There are no objective facts about “what’s fun for everyone”, and the response that’s made so many appearances has been, “The game’s not for you, move on”. It’s accepted that people have variations in taste, lifestyle, time constraints, etc.

I have absolutely railed against casual gamers, and here’s why: Every multiplayer game I’ve ever loved that has had a sequel —- or indeed a series —- has followed the same pattern, which is: Small developer makes a game that develops a niche following > game gets good reviews and gets more sales > Developer gets purchased by somebody larger > Developer makes sequel, only this time the larger, parent company is on their tail about shareholders and profit margins, and the game is dumbed way down > repeat. Eventually the small developer gets consolidated.

The gaming industry is absolutely saturated with this archetypal story, and since you seem half-educated yourself, you know this.

Casual gamers mean a less complicated, shorter, and thus a less engrossing, less challenging game, because they don’t like to grind, they don’t like hard stuff, and they’d rather do other stuff most of the time anyway. But they do spend lots and lots of money, so they’re the cash cow.

Ultimately, this entire thread is based on opinion, and yes, opinion about ‘what is fun’. I’m not a soothsayer, but I’ll be right here in 6 months’ time rubbing in how right I was if everything plays out that way (we’ve all got egos).

At least, I’ll be here if ANet isn’t bought out or consolidated by NCsoft, who had the same thing happen to them, by a company composed of once smaller companies, and on and on and on, and the servers get shut down.

It also isn’t a thread where we’re expecting there to be Venn Diagrams and logical proofs and Punnet Squares on the chromosomes you have if you like the game and the ones you have if you don’t. Even my original post is full of bias. That’s the nature of forums.

I’m glad you enjoy the game. As I’ve said multiple times, I hope they alter it so we can both enjoy it, but I’m not so entitled as to think it will actually happen. Posts like this are just one small way of achieving catharsis.

Edited before Anet brings the banhammer again.

Cezton.2415:

It may get old, but so long as content rolls out in the future, and people have something to work for, I guarantee this game won’t die like Warhammer, Conan or Rift did.

You guarantee?

So what do I get in six months when, if they haven’t dramatically altered things, this place is a ghost town and we’ve both long forgotten about this thread?

Nothing, right?

Rhongomyniad.5081:

I simply adore Dynamic Events and pretty much everything about this game in PVE/WvW/PVP ..

There are some good suggestions out there as to how to improve these things, e.g. making DEs more ‘intelligent’ and challenging etc. but overall I’m extremely satisfied.

Can’t believe I got all this for only 60 bucks! Plus you may leave and join whenever new content comes out

Not that I’m complaining about having to pay for content (because I’m happy to do so) but, if this is anything like GW1, when there’s any sort of meaningful update, it’s usually $20-$30. Again, I don’t mind paying, but until we get meaningful updates for free, as they’ve said they’ll do, to suggest otherwise is just misinformation.

SpectacularYak.6518:

Battle Rifles.2965:

And, I should add, this game is very Jobsian in the sense that it’s taken aspects from a multiplicity of other games, reworked the artwork a bit, and then called itself revolutionary.

Are you really going to start a crusade against marketing hyperbole now?

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but marketing hyperbole is not a new concept, nor is it limited to companies that you dislike or products you hate.

I rail against crap whether it’s something I like or not, actually. And dishonesty in particular pisses me off, especially when every airhead on the interwebs can’t come up for air long enough to realise how deluded they are.

I’m sick of being told I’m playing a game with all this new great stuff in it, when I’m not. There’s nothing revolutionary about anything in this game, not the DEs, the boss fights, anything. Anybody who’s played anything else can attest to this (and really, if you’ve played anything else, the statement is laughable). And yeah, it angers me that players are repeating verbatim precisely what the developer has been spoon feeding them for the past 2 years.

(And hell, I LIKE ANet).

SpectacularYak.6518:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Guild Wars 1 wasn’t a sequel, it was made by former WoW employees as a direct competitor to WoW.

I wouldn’t post these complaints on the Eve forums or the xxx MMO forums, but since GW2 is the sequel to a predecessor, I can be reasonably expected to assume it’s going to carry over many things from the first. And from those expectations I got… an incoherent storyline full of nauseatingly bad one liners. That’s it. That’s the carryover from GW1.

I didn’t have expectations for GW1, aside from conceptions about WoW, maybe, and that’s the difference.

Ultimately, they probably should have just named GW2 something else altogether.

Perhaps, but this is hardly the first time games of a different stripe have shared an IP. I find it hard to be overly sympathetic with the ardent cries of “It’s not at all like GW1” since you had many years of the developers telling you it wasn’t like GW1, and many months of beta demonstrating that it wasn’t like GW1, which I think constitutes fair warning. That you then bought the game anyway, played it to “completion”, and are now angrily storming the forums caterwauling that the game isn’t GW1 makes me wonder where the hell this expectation came from. You’d think 5+ years would have been ample time for you to adjust to the realities of the situation.

Battle Rifles.2965:

I’ve addressed this multiple times over the past 4 pages, and I can’t be bothered rehashing it again to some Tyrian Steve Jobs who can’t get rid of the past quickly enough.

Well, no, you haven’t “addressed” anything. You’ve offered up some opinions, and you’ve made some pretty hilarious and poorly reasoned arguments in an attempt to elevate those opinions to the status of fact.

Examples?

SpectacularYak.6518:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Guild Wars 1 wasn’t a sequel, it was made by former WoW employees as a direct competitor to WoW.

I wouldn’t post these complaints on the Eve forums or the xxx MMO forums, but since GW2 is the sequel to a predecessor, I can be reasonably expected to assume it’s going to carry over many things from the first. And from those expectations I got… an incoherent storyline full of nauseatingly bad one liners. That’s it. That’s the carryover from GW1.

I didn’t have expectations for GW1, aside from conceptions about WoW, maybe, and that’s the difference.

Ultimately, they probably should have just named GW2 something else altogether.

Perhaps, but this is hardly the first time games of a different stripe have shared an IP. I find it hard to be overly sympathetic with the ardent cries of “It’s not at all like GW1” since you had many years of the developers telling you it wasn’t like GW1, and many months of beta demonstrating that it wasn’t like GW1, which I think constitutes fair warning. That you then bought the game anyway, played it to “completion”, and are now angrily storming the forums caterwauling that the game isn’t GW1 makes me wonder where the hell this expectation came from. You’d think 5+ years would have been ample time for you to adjust to the realities of the situation.

Please take the time to read the preceding posts before wasting mine.

I specifically avoided playing the BWEs because I didn’t want any spoilers. Ditto for avoiding any coverage.

If that makes me another naive consumer then fine, but when I pre-ordered this months ago I had no actual idea what to expect, other than that I was buying… Guild Wars 2.

And, I should add, this game is very Jobsian in the sense that it’s taken aspects from a multiplicity of other games, reworked the artwork a bit, and then called itself revolutionary.

SpectacularYak.6518:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Right, I fail to see the light so I’m a Luddite stuck in the grasp of the past.

The only reason these changes were made is so the game could accommodate ‘the everyman’, and that’s because casual gamers spend money. They’re also not a niche demographic. So it is about money, and I guarantee you it’s about ego, too. You’ve got people like Mark Chen (or whatever his name is) tweeting crap like, ‘NO MORE QUEST HUBS YAY!’. You think he’s going to go on record in a few months when there’s nobody playing consistently and admit he screwed up? No way. He’ll tout the fact that it sold 2 million copies, slap that on his resume, and move on up the ladder.

But yeah, the Luddite argument has to be number 2 in the pro-Guild Wars 2 manual, after number 1 “You’re playing it too much get a life” and number three “Guild Wars 1 was too complicated and grindy”.

I don’t recall using the term “Luddite”, but you are suggesting the 2nd iteration of a game is a failure due to the fact it did not closely mimic the first. So yes, you are arguing that “change is bad”. And you’re using the extremely tiresome “No True Scotsman” fallacy about casual gamers and “the everyman” in order to support that argument.

I’ve addressed this multiple times over the past 4 pages, and I can’t be bothered rehashing it again to some Tyrian Steve Jobs who can’t get rid of the past quickly enough.

SpectacularYak.6518:

Battle Rifles.2965:

The entire game has been dumbed down. The only complexity they added was crafting; everything else was cut off and left to die (see: direct trading, where you could haggle) or simplified beyond cognizance (see: the skill bar, elite skill acquisition, no class specialisation, multiple runes on an item, weapon upgrades, et al for a very long time).

It’s like ANet’s target audience went from being any of the major playable races to being the grawl or the skritt.

It’s all about money.

GW1 itself was a “massively dumbed down” version of some of the games that preceded it. Does this mean GW1 was itself a bad game and all about money?

Guild Wars 1 wasn’t a sequel, it was made by former WoW employees as a direct competitor to WoW.

I wouldn’t post these complaints on the Eve forums or the xxx MMO forums, but since GW2 is the sequel to a predecessor, I can be reasonably expected to assume it’s going to carry over many things from the first. And from those expectations I got… an incoherent storyline full of nauseatingly bad one liners. That’s it. That’s the carryover from GW1.

I didn’t have expectations for GW1, aside from conceptions about WoW, maybe, and that’s the difference.

Ultimately, they probably should have just named GW2 something else altogether.

SpectacularYak.6518:

Rifles, while I’m sympathetic to some of the issues you raise, and I can understand where you’re coming from, I fundamentally disagree with your premise that a failure to re-embrace the design philosophies of GW1 necessarily makes the sequel a waste of time. Are Dynamic Events particularly dynamic, or challenging? No. Is the skill system in its current incarnation as deep or intricate as the one you enjoyed for the bulk of your playing time in GW1? No. Do these changes automatically make the sequel a lesser game? No.

I’ve been hearing the “It’s lost it’s complexity, it’s lost it’s challenge, the genre is crap now” call to arms since Everquest. Too many casuals leaking in, theme parks, hand holding, welfare epics, face rolling, yada yada yada yada yada. Every day there’s a new jeremiad about why the terrifying new direction the developers have taken product X in spells doom for the game and the genre as a whole, and why can’t things be more like the good old days. Then we turn around on the other hand and enjoy post after post about how the genre has stagnated and no one is trying anything new.

This is the cost of experimentation and innovation, we leave behind systems that are more polished, more established, and have entrenched fans such as yourself. The same argument is made about raids, and the holy trinity, and the traditional questing model. The same arguments were made about death penalties, and leveling speed, and barrier to entry 8 years ago. The genre is going to continue to progress, and it’s not always going to progress in ways that sees it align with your particular tastes or your particular demands. That does not make the game an edifice to “ego and greed”, it does not automatically mean it is “boring and not fun”, and the fact you’ve found people that endorse your perspective on a message board…which is not terribly hard to do…does not mean you are a Bringer of Truth. Your perspective is 100% valid for you, it’s true, and it’s unfortunate you didn’t enjoy the game. I too wish I enjoyed everything, and occasionally I make loud demands that things be altered to fit my preferences, and much like your demands are going to be ignored, mine are always ignored too.

I find the game a lot of fun. Is it a panacea that solves all the ills of the genre? Certainly not. Is it a flawless gem? Certainly not. But there’s a lot to like about it, and I’m glad I’m able to recognize and enjoy those things, because hey…that’s another game I enjoy, right? That’s a win for me. It needs a lot of work still, but personally the last thing I want to do is see it take the retrogressive path of embracing 5, 10, 15 year old MMO design paradigms because an aging and phobic population of die hards doesn’t want to let go. I’ve played those games. I’ve been playing them for years. I’d like to see something new now, and I’m not prepared to throttle it in its infancy because things ain’t exactly the way they used to be.

Right, I fail to see the light so I’m a Luddite stuck in the grasp of the past.

The only reason these changes were made is so the game could accommodate ‘the everyman’, and that’s because casual gamers spend money. They’re also not a niche demographic. So it is about money, and I guarantee you it’s about ego, too. You’ve got people like Mark Chen (or whatever his name is) tweeting crap like, ‘NO MORE QUEST HUBS YAY!’. You think he’s going to go on record in a few months when there’s nobody playing consistently and admit he screwed up? No way. He’ll tout the fact that it sold 2 million copies, slap that on his resume, and move on up the ladder.

But yeah, the Luddite argument has to be number 2 in the pro-Guild Wars 2 manual, after number 1 “You’re playing it too much get a life” and number three “Guild Wars 1 was too complicated and grindy”.

Willowleaf.5721:

I’m a long time GW1 player as well and I disagree with the OP with most everything.

The one thing I do agree with is the simplification of the skills in GW2, which destroyed the mesmer class and everything that made mesmer the most awesome cool fun class ever. The mesmer in GW2 is nothing but the shadow of its old self. I’m guessing some people didn’t have enough brain in GW1 to deal with mesmers in PvE and especially in PvP and whined a lot about it.

The entire game has been dumbed down. The only complexity they added was crafting; everything else was cut off and left to die (see: direct trading, where you could haggle) or simplified beyond cognizance (see: the skill bar, elite skill acquisition, no class specialisation, multiple runes on an item, weapon upgrades, et al for a very long time).

It’s like ANet’s target audience went from being any of the major playable races to being the grawl or the skritt.

It’s all about money.

juiceman.2870:

I can understand his points its kind of like regenerating health in every FPS game now just because 10 years ago one game did it successfully. This game removed or at least disguised quests but some people might miss the old ways. I got bored of guild wars 1 pretty fast but I feel this game is a lot more interesting and is more fun to play.
From what I remember in GW 1 the skills were intimidating and complicated as an elementalist. There were a lot more choices but it made it a lot more confusing so they probably did try to simplify which I can understand how that gets some people made. Look at what it did to D3.
This game has a lot of room for improvement though and overall I think it is still a top game in this genre especially for having no fees.

You’ve basically just autobiographically restated my point that the skills are a profoundly dumbed down Skritt version of the original Guild Wars skill bar.

Zeph.1260:

balmung.6217:

Did you guys even read it?he actually gave some good advice.I wish the devs made the bosses a bit more interesting such as it starts out where only melee can hurt it then it enters a phase where they cant be hit anymore you gotta use cannons or something to knock off shields, after a bit the other players way across the map had to hit some sort of switch or something to make sure it stays off then even when its off then you can resume hitting for a bit untill they come back up then he switches to range damage can only affect him so everyone whos melee could switch to buffing or something making melee ranged and buffing all in one usefull.Lets go even further and add a timer so teamwork would have to be tight between the zerg.Now thats a boss fight as of right now i sit here click my auto attack button and sometimes dodge.Not a bad fight but boring yes.

I have found one already and it was almost impossible.

Fight with Fire Golum Kodu in Dungeon in Sorrows embrace.. (STORY MODE NO LESS!)

RIDICULOUS and plenty of time for raging and complaining and then figuring it out.

not going to happen without some coordination

and awsome.

I think most of the STUFF the OP is WHINING for… actually just has not been found yet. or its not as public yet.

thats what i think is going on…

200 hours in 14 days? whats that like 14 hours a day every day ?

GW1 added content Even to prophecies even after Cantha came out.

calm down and be patient this was a huge undertaking… and the endgame content is there

also the WVW and PVP is there.

you are home… relax and it won’t get boring…

they will grow their lovechild… calm down

not everyone has 14 hours a day to play and Consume it so quickly.

I keep seeing posts like, “Go play WvW or sPvP”, but the thing is (and I know I’m not alone here), I couldn’t care less about player vs player. There are many, many more PvP games out there with huge player bases (SC2, LoL, Dota, any MLG game, really) that GW2 cannot even hope to overtake, regardless of how badly ANet wants to. That’s not a knock on the game, it’s just a fact with this particular sector. It’s like Valve hoping that Dota 2 overtakes League of Legends in its Korean market: it’s just not going to happen.

So, that leaves PvE, which is what GW1 was about, and what most people who bought GW2 purchased it for in the first place. That isn’t to say PvP can’t be fun, but if the saving grace of the ‘pro GW2’ argument is, “Go play PvP, it’s actually fun”, then it’s an outright failure as an MMO. We want our storyline, we want our gear, and we want to have fun while we’re getting our gear and playing our storyline. You can add extra content like PvP on top of that, but to deviate from PvE as the basic model means you’ve betrayed a huge swath of your player base.

I do hope they alter/improve things but, as I say a few posts up, I don’t think they have much incentive to do so.

Also, just to address what you said about playing for 200 hours (and I’ve seen this argument a lot, as well), I have two points:

The first is that those 200 hours weren’t spent having a blast and then getting to the end and realising there’s no endgame. The 200 hours were spent laboriously grinding through boring, repetitive ‘go zap this ooze with an Asura gun for 10 minutes’ quests (and they are just quests that ANet have tried to re-label as somehow being ‘dynamic’ or ‘hearts’).

The second point is that, even if I had enjoyed the 200 hours, why make it that easy to level up in the first place? There were 6 people in my guild who had level 80s in the first week.

You had how many BWEs and how much in-house testing? They had to know people would level up fast, and they also had to know there was no endgame (and this is a flaw I don’t even touch on, really anywhere, because it’s been rehashed ad infinitum elsewhere).

The levelling up process is tediously boring and there’s no endgame, and the pro-GW2 response is to go play PvP?

No thanks.

I know this wasn’t exactly what you were saying, but I thought I’d address it.

Stark.1350:

Well, thank you for your subjective opinion on what is fun and what is not. I came from WoW and EQ2. I’m having a blast with the game.

Thanks. After 3 posts of hot air you copy word for word the same inane post I’ve seen 100 times already in this thread. Great.

Stark.1350:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Stark.1350:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Stark.1350:

Why do people think having the name Guild Wars 2 automatically makes it an sequal to Guild Wars 1? Everquest 2 was NOWHERE NEAR what Everquest 1 was.

Are you just a really bad troll?

From Merriam-Webster:

se·quel
noun \?s?-kw?l also -?kwel\

1
: consequence, result
2
a : subsequent development
b : the next installment (as of a speech or story); especially : a literary, cinematic, or televised work continuing the course of a story begun in a preceding one

What part of Guild Wars 2 has you confused? The Guild Wars are the number 2?

Look out, he’s getting upset! I meant sequel in terms of you wanted the exact same game, but with better graphics – or what Dusk said after me.

Where have I ever said I wanted the exact same game?

Complaining about problems with the sequel means I wanted Guild Wars 1 with better graphics?

You’re just one non sequitur after another, boet.

And yet you make direct comparisons to all the reasons you dislike about GW2 and how much better it was in GW1 in your original post.

You put 200 hours into GW2 and yet you hate most of the game. Why would you dry hump a cactus for 200 hours?

GW2 is a sequel. There’s no debate about that. Now, I expect a sequel to be an improved, evolved, better version of whatever came first in the series. This rarely happens in the real world (think films), but you’ll notice in the definition that ‘subsequent development’ implies improvement (because you can learn from the past).

Still with me?

Guild Wars was amazing. I expected its sequel to be amazing. That doesn’t mean the sequel has to be exactly like the first, but I did expect it to be fun. The reason GW1 gets brought up so much in threads like this, in case this still isn’t obvious to you, is because it’s the followup game by the same developer and it’s continuing the same story in the same world with the same people. It makes sense to talk about how the first iteration worked, and why the followup doesn’t, in those terms. Now, you’d have a point (I guess) if I sat around comparing Guild Wars 2 to Eve Online or WoW, but I’m not, so you don’t.

Hopefully you can understand this, and if not, well, gg.

We’re getting way off topic anyhow, and this thread is returning to that didactically maternal modus operandi again, so I’ll bugger off for a bit.

Stark.1350:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Stark.1350:

Why do people think having the name Guild Wars 2 automatically makes it an sequal to Guild Wars 1? Everquest 2 was NOWHERE NEAR what Everquest 1 was.

Are you just a really bad troll?

From Merriam-Webster:

se·quel
noun \?s?-kw?l also -?kwel\

1
: consequence, result
2
a : subsequent development
b : the next installment (as of a speech or story); especially : a literary, cinematic, or televised work continuing the course of a story begun in a preceding one

What part of Guild Wars 2 has you confused? The Guild Wars are the number 2?

Look out, he’s getting upset! I meant sequel in terms of you wanted the exact same game, but with better graphics – or what Dusk said after me.

Where have I ever said I wanted the exact same game?

Complaining about problems with the sequel means I wanted Guild Wars 1 with better graphics?

You’re just one non sequitur after another, boet.

Stark.1350:

Why do people think having the name Guild Wars 2 automatically makes it an sequal to Guild Wars 1? Everquest 2 was NOWHERE NEAR what Everquest 1 was.

Are you just a really bad troll?

From Merriam-Webster:

se·quel
noun \?s?-kw?l also -?kwel\

1
: consequence, result
2
a : subsequent development
b : the next installment (as of a speech or story); especially : a literary, cinematic, or televised work continuing the course of a story begun in a preceding one

What part of Guild Wars 2 has you confused? The Guild Wars or the number 2?

Knote.2904:

Tbh while I’m not as doom and gloomy as you are in this post, I agree with you for the most part.

I wasn’t a huge GW1 player. I think was played somewhere during Prophecies into Factions, and was in love despite all of the bad things I heard of it. I absolutely loved the pve/story in Factions, I don’t know why, but it was just great.

Most importantly I was absolutely blown away by the skill creativity, the condition and boon-type spell system that made everything synergize, and of course the massive amount of abilities that you could build to completely customize your playstyle really in depth.

Compared to what we have here, definately it feels lacking. However it was definately worse during beta, and they’ve made alot of good changes to traits and added new and more interesting ones, as well as good changes to some weapon skill. In the end I still have hope that Anet will get there eventually.

Honestly I don’t feel like traits are even close to finished, for any class, traits still need alot of work. And there is always the possibility of them sprucing up weapon skills to give them more depth. Comboing skills together more for more synergy as well as allowing us to stagger auto attack chains for more combos. Such as Skill X does dmg plus w/e condition and makes your next Y apply cripple or next Z become an AoE.

Another great thing would be having alternative abilities for each weapon skill slot we could swap around that is slightly different than it’s original version. Such as warrior sword auto chain is, bleed —> bleed --> big hit, could be swapped to an alternate auto chain that does cripple —> vuln x2 --> big hit. Wishful thinking.

With skills, even if they altered the full skill bar, modified the skill chains, or changed the way traits and elites worked, it still wouldn’t change just how fundamentally broken combat is.

Every single fight is the same: Click the enemy (this is often painfully more difficult than it needs to be because finding your pointer, in a big fight especially, is next to impossible without pulling a Michael J. Fox with the mouse, and then clicking your intended target is pretty much impossible to do on the first try). I usually accidentally click allies first, especially in a DE or boss fight (and most things fall under that umbrella) where allies are everywhere.

Then, after you’ve targeted them, it’s time to either hold down the right mouse buttom while you stay in range (and if you’re melee, my condolences) and move around half-heartedly hoping you don’t pull aggro. Keep pressing 1 every time it stops autoattacking, wait a few seconds, and move on to the next enemy.

There’s no challenge, there’s no strategy, and worst of all, IT’S BORING. If it’s a veteran fight, just increase the above routine by about 45 seconds, and if it’s a boss, increase by about 3 minutes.

Combat is fundamentally boring, and mucking with the skill bar wouldn’t fix it.

Nemmar.8491:

Battle Rifles, i am so happy you have made this post.

I am also a long time Guild Wars 1 player. I love the game and only left it because Anet stopped adding meaningful content to it. To this day though, when i log in am still amazed by the graphics, sound and incredible combat system. If anet brought out more expansions or campaign for GW1 i would jump right in.

I looked forward to GW2 ever since it was first announced. The game of my dreams, GW in a persistant world. It had eveything to work, it was gonna be the best game ever.
Alas, my dreams were shattered upon release of this game. There are many problems with this game, but the most daring one and the one that bothered me ever since i could see something off in the BWE is the combat system. It is an utterly gutted version of what we had in GW1 to the minimal common denominator.

Seeing the comments by the creators, things were looking up as the “magic the gathering” phylosophy behind the combat system was beeing kept. Unfortunely its not what came to pass. The excitement of visceral soon gave entry to lack of depth, lack of energy gave room to lack of proper DPS skills and lots of auto-attack boremdom, lack of skill variety led to lack of strategy options, repetitiveness and lack of healers led to brainless zerg’s.

Ever since day one i felt the combat was boring, uninspired and required zero skill and no strategy. Dieing didnt lead you to reavaluate your option, it was just a nuisance. Playing the game was not an exercise on fun, but an exercise on my abillity to withstand the boredom i was in.

Are the events repetitive and zerg fests? Is there lack of end-game content? Those i can live with. What i cant stand is a combat system designed for so little. I am disappointed as i absolutely love the GW universe, but playing GW2 just makes me sad.
Something that gutted me especially was when i saw the fear mechanic in the game. For years i could say how perfect the combat system in GW1 was and how it would never remove control over your character. You could have hexes on you, conditions, snares, but you could always control your character. Unfortunely GW2 took the high road of fears and stuns that WoW and other MMO’s have always been so criticized about.

If i could, if anyone could. I would remake this game with the GW1 combat system and everything would be forgiven. Really, dont even need to go that far, but healing and greater skill customization need to come in place if this game is ever to thrive.
As it stands, i have no more interest in further delving into the world of GW2. I cant stand the boredom and sadness of what could’ve been and was originally touted back when the game was announced and never came to be.

It was so simple and we were so close to the perfect MMO. Why change the perfect combat system to something so poor? Its tragic to see how things turned out.

The biggest problem now with any of these issues being resolved is that the development time for GW2 was absolutely ridiculous, and after years of players and more importantly investors (more important to ANet and NCsoft) waiting for this release, I don’t think it’s very realistic to hope that ANet capitulates and sees their errors.

The bottom line is they’ve sold 2 million copies (on hype alone) and, let’s face it, the game is ridonkulously beautiful and it’s easy to Prscrn and upload a photo and make it look like the greatest game in the world. The reality is that regardless of what we think as players, they’re part of a business that’s all about money.

Also, many of their devs have spent the past 6 or 7 years of their lives on this thing, and I don’t doubt that it’s very much their baby, or that a lot of these ‘innovative’ implementations are seen as personal pet projects for them (read: egos are at stake).

Thus, people like us are up against both the multitude of casuals who think the game is great as well as the devs themselves because they’d have to admit their ideas weren’t the greatest. That’s a pretty formidable opponent, when you combine the two.

I don’t have much hope that anything will be changed. Reading this thread has given me a bit of solace because I know there are a lot of people who agree with me, but I think that —- ultimately —- we’re up against egos and greed and we’re not liable to get very far.

Vadnarr.5764:

Battle Rifles.2965:

If we say things that aren’t age appropriate for a 4 year old’s ears, ANet thought it’d be cute to substitute ‘kittens’ instead. Because we’re all 4, remember? And if you don’t like this feature, it’s part of the endgame, because the entire game is endgame, and if you don’t like this, feel free to leave and good riddance, and you obviously didn’t research the game well enough before you purchased it.

U sound mad, bro. :-3

Should I really have to

/sarcasm

after something so obvious? Really?

If we say things that aren’t age appropriate for a 4 year old’s ears, ANet thought it’d be cute to substitute ‘kittens’ instead. Because we’re all 4, remember? And if you don’t like this feature, it’s part of the endgame, because the entire game is endgame, and if you don’t like this, feel free to leave and good riddance, and you obviously didn’t research the game well enough before you purchased it.

Agreed 100%.

See also this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/From-a-longtime-Guild-Wars-1-player-on-why-Guild-Wars-2-is-so-far-a-huge-failure/

Have fun dealing with the fanboys though. Apparently they’re having so much fun with the game that they can’t help but troll these forums 24/7. I know my first instinct when I’m completely immersed in a game is to hit up the forums in raucous defence.

The game’s boring and unplayable for me. So, unless things change (and let’s face it, ANet’s going after casuals who will spend their money on cosmetic items they have neither the time nor the skill to obtain in-game) I won’t be back.

Best of luck, Tyria. It’s been a fun ride.

knightblaster.8027:

Okay. I guess some people did that. It’s odd to me because I would never assume anything about a sequel just because it’s a sequel, but I guess other people could. Anet did bend over backwards to tell people it wasn’t like GW1 in design, but I guess there are people who prefer not to seek out that information in order to avoid having the surprise of the game spoiled in some way.

I don’t doubt they did.

I hope I find it more enjoyable in the future. That’s all really.

I’m out for now. See you in Tyria sometime.

I’ll be honest, once I got all my HoM stuff I ignored the hype as best I could because I didn’t want any spoilers. I didn’t know much about GW2 before I made my first char, and I thought that would be the best way to go. I’ll probably be criticised for not doing research about it beforehand, but it’s Guild Wars 2. If ANet made another game I’d have looked first, but it’s the sequel. How can you butcher it to the point that it’s unrecognisable?

knightblaster.8027:

Why on earth would someone spend 210 hours doing something they found to be boring unless they are being paid to do so. Isn’t that simply insane?

Most of us held out hope for the end game. When the end game came and we all had blueballs, well… that’s how threads like this happen.

DusK.3849:

You want evidence this is valid? More people are playing the game right now than have posted on this forum. Where I see the same 30 or so people posting, Xfire shows that nearly 75,000 people are in-game right now, and that includes only the people who have Xfire running (and Xfire itself has seen a big drop in its user base over the years, so think about that). And if you want evidence that this is valid, that people are -what a shock!- enjoying the game, go into a zone and just ask if people are enjoying the game. You won’t see a whole lot a whiners, but you will see a lot of praise. You’ll hear from 80’s working on their world completion. You’ll see clumps of players gathered around dungeon entrances looking for groups. You’ll see people amazed at all the neat little things hidden in the game. You’ll see people en masse doing dynamic events and cheering when they achieve victory. You’ll see people asking when the Shatterer will be up, and getting ready for him if he’s close.

These people will stick around, because these people are like me; they knew what the game was going to be when they bought it, they know what the game is now, and they know what the game will be down the line. And when the content comes in addition to the hundreds of hours of content ANet gave us on launch (and yes, there are hundreds of hours in this game, find anyone with 100% map completion and his /age will be no less than 250, likely more than 300), they’ll be around playing that too.

You seem to have this hilarious idea in your head that the only people that will be around years down the road are the same masochist workaholics who think the stupid crap you think is fun is something we all do. Those people are the ones who will leave (and good riddance, because they’re annoying and really bring down the community as a whole), while the kinds of folks that cause WoW’s active subscribers to go from 12m to 9m because they got bored grinding dungeons for loot so they can grind dungeons for loot so they can grind dungeons for loot will be hanging around here.

You act like this MMO, which is nothing like other MMOs (no matter how badly you want it to be), should be compared to those other MMOs. How can you not realize the massive flaw in that logic? Those other games were built around sinking countless hours into the same dungeons several times a day to boost some small set of stats by 10. This game is based around fun. You don’t see people complaining on the BF3 forums that their character never levels up after they’ve unlocked their kits. You don’t see people at the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Tournaments complaining about how their main character’s attacks don’t increase in strength whenever they beat arcade mode. So why, oh why, are you complaining about how a game doesn’t have that same endgame crap as other boring MMOs when we knew, right from the start, that boring gear treadmills and racing to 80 to get to “the fun stuff” isn’t what this game’s about?

If that’s TL;DR, I’ll say what it all really boils down to: If you don’t like the game, by all means, don’t play it, but please don’t try to change it into something other than what ArenaNet has been saying they’d give us. Please don’t try to turn this into the boring grind-fest MMO’s we bought this MMO to get away from. Because honestly, all the stuff you and the others are whining about… it’s like coming to UT3 from CoD4 and complaining that the gameplay’s too fast, there’s no killstreak rewards, and you can’t go prone in a corner and get a free win.

Actually, I came simply from Guild Wars to Guild Wars 2. If you read my initial post, you’d know I’ve never played any other MMO.

And you know what? Amazingly, I’d like to have fun, too.

So don’t lump me in with the hordes of disgruntled WoW players. I’m a disgruntled Guild Wars player, and I’d like to have fun just as much as you do. I’ll call the crap I see in this game, and if it isn’t fixed, I’ll find something else I enjoy. But again, the amount of false dichotomies that have popped up in this thread (grinding, for example, when I specifically said it wasn’t necessary) is pretty absurd.

Also, I’ll just add that I have a friend at 100% world completion and 210 hours played. From what he tells me, he found it pretty boring.

Don’t underestimate how boring something is just because A.) The player isn’t complaining about it in-game and in forums, and B.) Just because they’re actually doing it.

What was his alternative for leveling up? Dynamic events and hearts, and we all know how those go.

Matze.6014:

I just dont understand your thought process, because he has no evidence that the majority does like it, its not valid. But your statement that most that majority will not be playing in 6 months is valid? You also have no evidence to support this, you cannot accurately reflect the results from the past 10 years of MMO’s to this, as it changes the dynamics. By your same logic your statements have no relevance, as you have no factual data to back up your claims, your 8 friends do not even represent .1% of the population, aswell as your trying to back up your argument with agrees from a forum?

My statement about the majority now not playing it in 6 months is based off of the last decade of online gaming history. I’m not a developer, nor do I work in the games industry, but if someone who does shows up and reads “But your statement that most that majority will not be playing in 6 months is valid? You also have no evidence to support this, you cannot accurately reflect the results from the past 10 years of MMO’s to this, as it changes the dynamics,” they’ll laugh pretty hard.

The majority of people playing now will not be playing in 6 months. It’s a fact of life in the MMO world. Realistically, it’s probably more like 3 months, but 6 months is easy.

Again, this thread’s become way too maternal. I can’t be bothered researching the numbers for you, but feel free to and come back with your report. Or rather, sit in shame when you come to understand that, not only will the majority of players who are playing now not be playing in 6 months, but the first out the door are the casual masses (and they make up the largest demographic). If ANet wants to go the way of LoL (and it sure looks like that’s what they have in mind), then fine. But LoL caters to long time Dota players as well as brand new gamers who can’t use hotkeys. I don’t see GW2 being able to do that, especially on the PvE side of things with high skills caps, and I think that’ll be a big problem.

Matze.6014:

I’m sorry, but because you and your 8 friends do not like DE then they should completely rework how their leveling system is? The leveling system that completely separates them from every other MMO on the market? You make it sound like that is something that is feasible, if your going to try and be constructive, atleast make a suggestion that makes sense.

Lets look at this from a transaction point, using your numbers. The game industry today is catered towards casual gamers(FACT. First thing learned in electronic game design – development classes in every university/collage)as the general population is not able to spend 10hours a day every day playing a game. So that being said your 30% that does not like it, will eventually leave. And out of the 70% that stays, probably 60% of those will be casual gamers, and in mmo history casual gamers are the ones that are more likely to spend 2x more then the average full time players in micro transactions. Therefore making up for the loss of the 30%, not even calculating for the additional players added and lost over time.

My point is, why would a company spend alot of money and thousands of man hours to remove/change there own innovative design to suit 1 person, and his 8 friends, along with his 30%? Yes there are many bugs that need to be addressed, aswell as balancing, but the game has only been out for 2 weeks. Aslong as bugs get fixed, and content comes out at a pase that will keep up with the majority of populations needs, then the game will servive, with or without you

Sadly, this is mostly right, and I understand that. It’s a game that’s clearly been geared towards casual players. Like I said, all I can do is hope for the best and prepare to move on. I disagree with your numbers a bit, but yes, casuals make for lots of microtransactions.

All my suggestions, aside from elite capping, could be implemented alongside the current system. Do I think it will happen? No. But I have given my ideas about how it could happen.

DusK.3849:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Of the 8 people I know personally who play (or have played) GW2, not one of them likes the Hearts + Dynamic Events way of leveling up.

Not one.

That’s nice for them. The majority of players enjoy it. Stop trying to change the game to appease a cookie-cutter MMO grind minority.

Also, you’re in no position to call anyone a “bad player” if you’re complaining about the dungeon difficulty.

So here’s my question:

The majority of players right now enjoy it? Ok, I’ll bite. Let’s say they do (despite the fact that you have no evidence that this is valid).

Do you think the majority of the players who are playing right now will be playing in 6 months?

The answer is an absolute no. Go look at the history of MMOs over the past 10 years, and examine their populations post launch. The only people who will be playing this consistently in 6 months are currently a minority of the current population anyway, so any argument you make for the majority now has no relevance to this discussion, because that majority will be gone in 6 months. I’d draw you a pie chart, but this is all turning a bit too didactically maternal for my liking.

Naminator.9316:

It’s intellectually dishonest to call something perfect when there’s a sizable portion of relevant users who think it’s severely flawed

You call someone “Intellectually dishonest” while at the same time strawmaning their argument and trying to it look like he said something he didn’t.

Maybe YOU should go and look up what it is to be “Intellectually dishonest”?

At the same time could you please give us some insight as to what is a “sizable portion” that you are talking about?

Just about every reviewer out there, including user reviews praise ArenaNET for taking a new direction with the quest system!

So where is this sizable portion you are talking about? I don’t even see any forum posts besides your that complain about the quest system!

And from my very long experience on official forums for many many MMOs, I can tell you that you people will kitten and moan about ANYTHING, and your thread is most likely one of the biggest examples of that yet!

Ohhh and while your at it, could you describe to us whats a “Relevant user” is?

Because I really like when some pretentious a-hole comes around and thinks he gets to decide who’s opinion is relevant and who’s isn’t.

“Yes it would in fact be hard to implement a completely separate open world pve system (questing) when there’salready a prefectly good one in place.”

That is being intellectually dishonest. There’s not already a ‘perfectly good [system] in place’, because many users loathe it. A perfect system would satiate all users; now, I don’t think that’s possible, but if you want to play semantics, I’ll kick you up and down the block.

Now, who are the many users I mentioned? Of the 8 people I know personally who play (or have played) GW2, not one of them likes the Hearts + Dynamic Events way of leveling up.

Not one.

Now, you could accuse me of simply associating with people similar to me, but when those eight people span the spectrum of good friends to people at work to friends of friends, then I think you’ve got a sample size that outruns that accusation.

I certainly don’t think everyone hates the system, but heck, have you been reading for the past two pages? A good 30% of the posters here agree with me, at least to some extent. That’s a sizable portion, in case you’re too dull to figure it out.

A ‘relevant user’ means someone (and this sort of kicks your ‘reviewer point’, if I’m charitable enough to call it that) who will actually play the game. Not some casual who has 3-5 hours a week to screw around and gaze at his cute Asura, and not some reviewer who plays for two hours, likes the graphics, and then writes an App review.

I’m talking about the people who spend (here we go again) a sizable chunk of their time playing the game (or at least wish they enjoyed the game enough to play it). These are the people who would still be here in 5 years.

Now, I realise there’s a disconnect between hardcore players (hardcore in terms of time spent in-game) and casual players, and the monetary lines both demographics cross is pretty blurry. Casual, bad players will spend money on cosmetic items (anybody who has played League of Legends will understand this: if they’re skinned, there’s a good chance they’re bad; good players spend too much time switching between various champs to care what any one champ looks like). Whatever ANet’s revenue goals and planning going forward, I think players who spent so much time (and money) enjoying their first game have some legitimate gripes with this one.

And that’s all this is, sure, me griping, whining, whatever. I think what they’ve done is pretty stupid. I think it will fail in the long run. And I think certain aspects are fixable.

Ultimately, pretension comes with showing up late to a party, running your mouth without having even read anything that came before (and you clearly didn’t, or else we need a dictionary for Archer and several trillion brain cells for you), and expecting to be taken seriously.

From your ‘very long experience on official forums’, you think you’d know how pointless it is to blow hot air, huh?

Do I think they’ll change their game? Not really. But I’ll give them my opinion, and my advice, and if nothing changes, I’ll move on.

Archer.6485:

Oh I forgot. The dynamics events work GREAT and maybe they don’t work perfectly, but they certainly work better than any other questing system I played before. And no this is not intellectually dishonest, it’s my thought out opinion which many others share. You don’t get to set the standard of what is intellectually honest or not just because it doesn’t coincide with your opinion so I’d avoid such comments if I were you.

It’s intellectually dishonest to call something perfect when there’s a sizable portion of relevant users who think it’s severely flawed. Perhaps you can research the meaning behind it while you’re looking up ‘haggle’ as well.

Also, you like the realistic economy? Seriously?

Again, you’re trolling. In the ‘real’ economy, people sell things cash in hand all the time. They don’t pay taxes. This counts for sales as well as wages.

Again, why not implement both? This question hasn’t been answered.

An automated economy is great for certain things. Peer to peer (ie., direct trading) is great for others. There’s no reason to create a false dichotomy between the two, but that’s exactly what’s been done.

Archer.6485:

I understand the TP didn’t get rid of the gold sellers but at least it’s good for other things, like I don’t know… Trading? You want to haggle? Put up a buy order and you’ll see if someone is willing to sell an item for that price.

Do you know what haggling is? Is this a troll?

" Put up a buy order and you’ll see if someone is willing to sell an item for that price."

Either you’re trolling or we need to get you a dictionary.

Haggling is the ability to message another player, talk to them, and charm or otherwise connive your way into getting them to lower their price. It isn’t setting a price in an auto-market and hoping some desperate soul capitulates and sells something.

As for the rest of your post, I’ve already said multiple times that I don’t see why they couldn’t add in quests for people who like them, and keep DEs in for people who like those. Saying DEs are a system that ‘works perfectly well’ is intellectually dishonest, and you’ve got a plethora of comments in just this thread that prove that.

Korrigan.4837:

mercury ranique.2170:

Anet isn’t to blame, but the people stupid enough make goldsellers profitable.

This is a VERY important point, true for all MMOs and not only for GW2.
Gold sellers, their spam, and their account hacking, only exist because you have losers who buy their gold. If nobody would buy their gold, they would not exist, since no buyer = no market = no seller.
So to the people who search for a culprit after having their account hacked by gold farmers or who are simply annoyed by the constant spam in game chat… don’t blame ArenaNET or NCSoft… blame the persons who buy gold from unauthorized source. It’s because of those people that your account got hacked and used for gold farming/selling.

Edited by moderator: Edited to leave the disrespectful comment out

ANet has done an admirable job combating account compromises (which, since there haven’t been any server side breaches, can only be blamed on the user), but implementing the TP doesn’t do anything to put an end to gold sellers, not even in theory.

Let’s say your argument is that now I can buy gems and then buy gold. Really? At the moment, the exchange rate for $ = Gems = Gold isn’t just bad, it’s laughable! (It’s about $10 for 2 Gold, last time I checked). Now, I’m not here to argue in game economics, but gold sellers always advertise ridiculously cheap prices (for example, in GW1, I know you could get 200k for $5, at least at one point).

It’s done nothing to prevent gold sellers. They’re still here spamming away and sending mail. I’m not sure how you eradicate them, but the trading post isn’t the way.

Another kneejerk reaction by ANet is the diminishing returns system, and this has been widely discussed and —- from what I’ve seen —- is universally despised and, again, seen as draconian.

You get to 80 after 65+ hours of grinding through hearts and DEs, and now you want to farm (see: grind) so you can afford to buy Exotics? Great. Go kill some Risen for 20 minutes, but after that you’ll need to find something else to do because the rewards scale in proportion to how long you’ve been doing any one thing. Everybody is ultimately presumed to be a botter.

So where do we go? Frostgorge sound? Great, I love being level 80 and killing groups of level 70s.

I mean, my post touched on a few problems with levelling, but it doesn’t even address the utter lack of endgame, which has been and will continue to be rehashed elsewhere.

My TP points ultimately related to the fact that they’ve removed a feature (direct trading) and added nothing that equals it. Mailing items to someone does not enable me to trade with them. Don’t believe me? Okay, I’ll pay you 60 gold for your Sword of Rage. You send first, and I’ll send you the gold. We’ll see how that works. It does not allow me (or you) to haggle for price. And there was no obvious reason to take it out.

Again, another post, but a familiar refrain.

Synn Dinalt.7251:

I’ll add my reply, though to be honest I think GW2 falls into one of two camps – you either love it or don’t love it.

Anet are to be commended for trying something different and new – they’ve created a beautiful world (if you’ve got the setup to truly show it), and a world that’s rich in graphical niceties.

But for me – and this is only my view btw (so don’t get upset), the PvE side of GW2 is a massive disappointment.

Probably part of the fault is mine – GW2 is probably aimed more at a new generation of players, or those who’ve never really been into MMORPG’s or RPG’s in general.
It’s definitely aimed more at PvP or WvW – which again is fine.

I’ve played RPG’s through Baldur’s Gate to Diablo, through Icewind Dale, through Neverwinter, through Guild Wars 1 etc. (And many others besides).

And all those games provided a real sense of accomplishment when you’d completed a task – and a massive sense of accomplishment when you finally completed the game.
If you were playing PvE you had recurring characters, or heroes/henchmen you took with you – and it was a pleasure seeing their stories unfold, or customising their weapon sets for specific levels.

Now queue the groans as I say that GW1 was (and is) superior to GW2 in terms of PvE. (In terms of PvP GW2 is doubtless better than GW1 – no question about that, but PvE is definitely inferior).

Why do I say that ?

Well, firstly I’m already finding the PvE aspect of GW2 dull. Before a million and one replies descend to rip that apart, that’s only my personal take on the game – and as I said earlier, probably my fault coming from ‘classic’ type PvE experiences.

It seems like a never ending grind with no real ‘payoff’ – again only my view – you’ll either love just exploring and doing the heart events, or you’ll find them tedious.

Personally, the structured grind has been replaced with a more free roaming grind – but to the detriment of the storyline and character development. (Again only my view).

There’s no real sense of accomplishment in PvE – for me. Again only my view, others may love the PvE environment in GW2, but for me there’s no sense of satisfaction or accomplishment at all.
Just run around with a lot of other players, killing things/picking up eggs or whatever the event is – and in combat gain experience all too quickly just because you’re participating.
And because the skills automatically appear, there’s no sense of really having earned anything.

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Only my view (again), but the PvE side of GW2 just comes across as an extended training mission for the PvP aspects of the game. A chance to build your skills up before entering PvP or WvW.

It’s a shame, as in GW1 the PvE/PvP enjoyment was well balanced………………..you could enjoy the game equally, whichever your preference was.

For me there’s something seriously lacking in the PvE enjoyment in GW2. Maybe it’s the lack of heroes or henchmen, maybe it’s the lack of a cohesive storyline – maybe it’s the fact you can get to level 80 relatively easily……………and then find yourself wondering what to do next.

In GW1 it could be argued that the PvE game actually started when you hit lvl20 (the max for that game) – whereas in GW2 it seems to be entirely endgame. Yes you can craft or go for legendaries, but again it seems to be content entirely to benefit the PvP side of things.

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As I say – only my view. Others are free to disagree as they see fit.

This. You’ve said exactly what I was trying to say, and you’ve done it in a way that isn’t inflammatory at all.

I second what you said about expansions (hopefully) adding greatly to the PvE element. I’d gladly pay for them, and I hope they come to pass.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what the problems are with PvE (they’re so diffuse, after all), but you’ve nailed it in that it’s just a general feeling you have playing through it, getting to 80, and having nowhere to go. I certainly think ANet have gone the way of wanting to get the game more involved in competitive play like LoL or SC2, but I think that’s really detracted from the PvE side of things.

You still haven’t answered my question, and I guess nobody but ANet can.

Only time will tell. Later guys.

Guild Wars 2 neutered that and gave me a League of Legends-style trait menu that I can’t even save. Strategizing via the skillbar is laughable in GW2, like it was designed for simpletons.

The Asura would be ashamed.

(Why not do something like add Cap-able elite skills to dynamic event bosses? You won’t completely reduce how bloody boring DE are, but at least you’ll add a little bit of meaning to them.)

Trading post. So you wanted to prevent spam, ArenaNet? Well, taking out the TP didn’t do a thing. Every time I log in, I have at least 2 messages from gold sellers in my inbox. Why not make a chat channel that is just for trade? Why prevent people from trading? Again, just like with quests, there’s no reason to take out something that has worked beautifully for a large proportion of your player base over the many years Guild Wars 1 was out, and replace it with something that is, in many ways, vastly inferior.

Why can’t we have both?

You think a 15% fee is going to somehow force people to buy gems? Again, I’m dumbfounded and don’t understand. Just have both. There’s absolutely no reason to have the fee, and if you’re going to argue that you’re trying to simulate a real economy, people pay cash in hand all the time. You’ve taken a feature out of the game with the TP without replacing anything close to it in terms of functionality or entertainment (see: haggling). That seems to be a recurring theme throughout, actually.

I could type for hours, and this is far from exhaustive.

Where are the actual titles like Legendary Survivor and Vanquisher? Where are the rest of the emotes? Why can’t I have heroes, at least for my personal story missions? Why is the voice acting still so cheesy and bad (except for Rytlock), and why do I have to feign belief so often while playing through storyline missions (from what I’ve played, the Asura storyline was the worst with this. Bad voice acting and lack of believability in terms of how supposedly ‘genius’ beings would behave make for a bad time). Why’d you take away elite skill capping? Why’d you absolutely murder the skill system that made Guild Wars 1 playable for 6 years+? Why don’t I get XP for helping my friend do his personal storyline mission? What was wrong with the holy trinity in the first place?

You’ve messed with a lot of stuff just to mess with it, and frankly, it didn’t work.

Ultimately, I’ll never understand why so much was changed. Guild Wars 1 was immensely enjoyable, even years after it should have gotten boring. Some people don’t mind grinding, and I’m not saying everybody should have to grind. But you should certainly allow those who want to grind, or are willing to grind, to do so. All you’ve got now is a player base filled with casuals who will be gone in 6 months.

For the rest of us, the people who would actually spend money and tons of time in your game, well, we’re already really bored.

Thanks.

In fact, that latter bit leads to a bit of a digression, viz., that the game’s just way too easy. There are waypoints everywhere, and there’s no death penalty. Remember how fun it was fighting from Beacon’s to Drok’s to get max armor as a newly created level 17 or 18 (or lower)? Remember when dying actually meant something, and dying several times meant you’d have to zone and evaluate your options (see: strategising, which is actually fun)? Well, keep on remembering because there’s none of that here.

Dynamic events have absolutely no back-story. They’re uninteresting, and they’re boring. In GW1, once you did a mission, you were given instructions on where to go, and if you went to an outpost, you spoke to someone who gave you a ‘quest’ (oh noes!) that furthered the storyline, made chronological sense, and added coherence to the overall story. Even if some of the quests were boring, they at least made sense from a storytelling point of view, and as you unlocked new outposts (and thus new quests), your understanding of the world was increased. ArenaNet said they wanted to make GW2 ‘more fun’ and that quests were ‘antifun’, but what they failed to realise is that, whether you get instructions to kill something from an NPC in an outpost or you just randomly find some while you’re running around, it’s the same thing in the end. Only, because every single dynamic event is either a hackfest or a repetitive ‘activate, pick up, or otherwise give yourself an epileptic seizure whilst completing this mind numbing bore of an activity’, it’s the same thing anyway, except dynamic events lack any direction or chronological/lore meaning.

In short, they’re really boring, and doing them for 80 levels sucks.

Ultimately, I can’t see why you wouldn’t allow players to choose what’s fun for them. Give us quests for those who want them, and give dynamic events to people who like those (though I have yet to talk to anybody who doesn’t abhor dynamic events). Forcing people to level up by doing a mixture of Hearts (which are, again, so boring that I’d rather scrape my eyes out) and dynamic events (ditto) just seems unnecessarily draconian. Why not just implement both?

Skills. Why do I need the first 5 skills to be straight out of a cookiecutter? Why can’t I edit them? Why are there hundreds, if not thousands, of skills in GW1, and what feels like 50 in GW2? Why would you take out Elite Skill capping? Why would you prevent people from taking a second profession? The entire skills platform has been so dumbed down and simplified that I can only assume ArenaNet can’t be bothered trying to balance it or something. Capping elite skills in GW1 was fun because you felt like you were accomplishing something, doing so was usually challenging, and you actually got something you could use in the process. (Continued)

I posted this elsewhere in the forums and thought I’d post it here too. If only 1 ANet developer reads this, my work is done.

First of all, I played Guild Wars for over 2000 hours on multiple accounts. Initially, I wasn’t too impressed (I started playing in 2006) but over the years—-and expansions—-it got better, more addictive and, ultimately, more rewarding.

Guild Wars 2 is amazingly beautiful. Jeremy Soule has done a masterful job, as usual.

But after playing Guild Wars 2 for over 220 hours, to say I’m disappointed would be a gross understatement. This isn’t even a ‘There is no endgame’ gripe’. I’ve been reading lots of posts by people who purportedly enjoyed getting to level 80, only to be bored and disappointed with a lack of endgame, but I was bored really from the start.

I have many problems with this game, but ultimately, because of everybody’s time, I’m only going to address the big three. Again, I’ll preface by saying I played the original Guild Wars for 2000 hours, I’ve never touched WoW (lest I be called a Blizzard fanboy) and I come to this game after years of waiting and anticipation. I’ve tried my absolute best over the past 200 hours to love this game. I spent three grand on a system that would be able to max it out. And so far, I’ve been bored out of my mind.

My big three problems:

Dynamic events. Dynamic events were the worst implementation of a pitifully bad idea I can possibly imagine for a video game. Any dynamic event, whether it’s fighting 8 centaurs or battling a dragon, is essentially a boring, monotonous hackfest that begs to be ALT-TAB’ed. Scaling is pathetic (try doing a boss by yourself, which happens often these days in low areas) and quickly goes from impossibly difficult to profoundly boring. As soon as a sizable group of players appears and the boss’ stats scale, it turns into a 5 minute auto-attack where you hope you’ve done enough damage to get XP by the end, followed by one amalgamated mad-dash to the body to see if there’s any loot. It’s profoundly boring, every single time.

This, of course, doesn’t even address the fact that dynamic events themselves are boring. Oh, someone’s been kidnapped and taken to a cave and I need to save him (aka, hackfest a boss for 5 minutes)? Great, I’d rather find a rusty fork and plunge it into my eye. The only time boss fights are enjoyable is when there is a very low number of people (think 3-5) and so you feel like your hits are actually doing something, and yet there is also a true risk of failure. When there are 50 players hacking at a boss, big deal if you get downed or (unlikely) defeated: you’ll get resurrected straight away. (Continued)

Myrina.4658:

You say that ArenaNet listens to the playerbase, and I agree with you. To that end, I have a question for you: who should ArenaNet listen to in this case?

Would it be so hard to compromise, and maybe put quests in for people who don’t mind doing them, while leaving DEs in for people (like you) who enjoy them?

I just feel like a lot of it hasn’t been well thought out or considered. I don’t know why you’d isolate a substantial portion of your playerbase (and again, I’ve talked to a lot of people about this) over being ‘innovative’.

Why not have both? It’s grindy either way, so you can’t try to say, “Well, we’re eliminating the grind.” No you’re not, you’re simply changing how I grind. Instead of having a quest hub I can reliably go to to get stuff to do, I run around ad nauseum waiting for some event to pop up, often with obscenely contradictory results. One minute I’m helping the dredge or the trolls, and the next minute I’m killing them, depending on where I am in a map.

Dynamic events have little meaning IMO. If you truly enjoy them, I’m happy for you. But why eliminate quests? Let’s have both. As I’ve said, it seems they’ve ‘changed’ just for the sake of it.

Wortermelon.6035:

Battle Rifles.2965:

Greyfeld.7104:

After that flamebait of an opening post, do you really expect people to just agree with you, and pat you on the back for “finally saying what everybody is thinking”?

Seriously, it read like you were pounding on the keyboard in a fit of rage. You’re not going to win any friends or supporters by being insulting.

While I certainly wasn’t flaming or trolling, I also wasn’t trying to make friends. I just hope the devs, or at least one of them, reads it for some perspective. Considering how dedicated they’ve been from the beginning to listening to their fanbase, I don’t think that’s so farfetched.

You mean the devs, who have spent all their time and hard work creating the game to a point it is at now, with several years of planning and preparing, are going to re-think everything when they read some shoddy quickly written 10 minute piece of writing?

Sure, they take user based constructive criticism on board, but not someone complaining that the new game they’ve been trying to make is too different from the old one. That’s the whole point.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is their baby, and I know they’re liable to be very protective of it. I also know that, of all the gaming companies I know of, I’d count on three of them to actually listen to their users: Valve, Bethesda, and ANet. I don’t expect many to agree with me on here, certainly. Forums are known to be saturated with fanboys, and that’s no surprise. I do know that between talking to RL friends who play the game and lots of people in game, something needs to be done. Now sure, short term they’ll get all the casuals who will spend $60 and beef up their margins, but as I said, if they want to keep people interested, they’re going to have to pay attention.

This isn’t even an issue with any of the other people here. Really, I shouldn’t have commented at all after posting. This is just my small pipe dream of hoping that an ANet employee comes along, reads my thing, and perhaps sees where there can be some improvement. I hope that after playing GW1 for so long, and having such hopes for this one, that I’d have at least a few iotas of credibility. That’s all I’m after and, if it doesn’t happen, this whole thing was a bit cathartic for me, so no big deal, I guess. I got it off my chest, and the rest is up to them.

DusK.3849:

Battle Rifles.2965:

I’ve done dungeons, and didn’t get any satisfaction from them. I’m open to trying them again, but if dungeons are all anybody has to look forward to at endgame then, well…

What were you looking for in the endgame, then? Because if it’s a gear treadmill a la WoW, then you have nobody to blame but yourself, because ANet said a long time ago that that crap wouldn’t be in this game.

I want something that’s going to keep me playing PvE for the next 6-7 or whatever years. They did it with GW1.

That’s all I want, actually.