Guild Wars 2

Seems pretty clear at this point that ArenaNet want the game to be about mindless and painful grinding and nothing else.

Any other conclusion is hard to draw given how anti-player and anti-fun these changes have consistently been.

Good job destroying a brilliant game, ANet. Bravo.

They still haven’t freakin’ fixed this yet? This is seriously pathetic.

Because some people are incapable of understanding that RPGs don’t need to be about mindless grinding for slightly larger numbers, and ANet decided to throw their entire design premise of the game out the window (and their credibility with it) to please said people.

lynspottery.6529:

I don’t think they are really interested in helping us at all. Sorry folks, but from everything I’ve seen posted and moderator’s commentary, I get the feeling we are pooched, so to speak.

+1 to that!

This is my impression as well. Most players are accepting this massive drop in loot as just fine, even though the loot was pretty abysmal (especially after they implemented DR) to begin with.

I haven’t even been playing since it became apparent that loot was nerfed into non-existence, but I have been monitoring it because I love the gameplay of GW2, but it’s impossible to play when it’s so absolutely ridiculously unrewarding.

At this point unless it’s fixed I probably won’t ever pick up the game again, which sucks bum because I followed GW2 from the first announcement and was a firm supporter of its design vision to people that wanted lame gear grind and holy trinity design stagnation.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I posted this elsewhere, but just quickly wanted to update where we stand on this issue:

<snipped PR nonsense>

Yay, more PR speak and excuses instead of actually doing anything.

I guess I’ll check back in two more months for another dose of PR speak and excuses.

Mozzyrella.4517:

So, when is the promised AMA is going to happen? The one Chris promised “after the hollidays”? I don’t know how long these hollidays are gonna last, but aren’t they over yet?

Who cares, the last one was little more than veiled PR doublespeak anyway, as well as blatantly ridiculous claims (250x Ectoplasm = “not a grind at all” according to him).

Personally, I think their credibility is in the toilet, solely from their own actions. I don’t need to hear any more ridiculous excuses. I just want them to fix the freakin’ game already.

Action speaks louder than words, especially when you are developer with zero credibility or integrity left in the eyes of your customers.

I just want the game I was advertised for 7 years, instead of this stupid Korean grindfest garbage.

Optional.7934:

I quit playing after the first week, because some stuff in real life came up. To be honest, I completely forgot about this game. I started playing again tonight and.. well suffice to say my server’s lower level areas are deserted. It’s not very inviting at all..

Well, they changed the game drastically since release. It’s no longer a low/no-grind game, and instead is heavily focused on grinding Fractals of the Mists for “Ascended” gear (i.e., gear-treadmill, they added Ascended after the fact with the Fractals patch, in which they also nerfed open world loot into nothing).

FotM provides the best loot, where all the open world events now provide next to nothing and are a total waste of time, so get your grinding hat on and queue up for those mini-dungeons: that’s what GW2 is about now, grinding dungeons.

If you want to circumvent the massive and painful grind, be prepared to empty out your bank account buying gems.

Despite the massive outcry since they made these incredibly destructive changes to the game, ANet has remained completely silent on the issue.

TL;DR: The game is now more grindy and less rewarding than even the worst Korean-style super-grinder MMOs. Welcome to Grind Wars 2, please enjoy buying gems constantly or making zero progress ever.

Yes.

Ever since the incredibly massive nerf to open world drops (Nov 15th patch) and the addition of super-grind Ascended gear from FotM, the entire game is designed around super hardcore dungeon grinding to the exclusion of all else.

It’s a great example of what happens when a company sells out all of the design principles of the game and completely destroys it in the name of pushing people to buy more gems.

I think they are just trying to further cement the new title for the game – Grind Wars 2.

Gotta add more RNG and more super-grind currencies, can’t be outshined by the Korean hyper-grinder MMOs after all.

Considering the last time they “fixed” rewards, and their “fix” actually heavily decreased drop rates, I am not willing to lend any credence to this post.

I think if we insert a couple of words it might be more accurate.

Instead of

DEs and the open world (thus open world raiding) will be the core of their efforts.

I think this is more accurate

Nerfing DEs and the open world (thus open world raiding) to the point of unplayability will be the core of their efforts.

Hydra.8196:

Medazolam.3058:

If DR wasnt such a mystery than we would know how to avoid/reset it.

And that’s exactly what Anet wants to prevent. If we knew how to avoid/reset DR then GW2 might actually be fun.

Fixed that for you.

Aproposs Of Fire.4056:

ANet post about 30 minutes ago:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Where-s-the-Scavenger-Hunt-post/1190541

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey guys,

Just a quick update on where the whole scavenger hunt system stands since I know that’s a topic many of you have brought up recently. We’re not currently actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this is something we want to do in the future and we’re in the midst of designing how this would function, but no one is actively building this feature and you should not expect in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.

We are however working on expanding reward systems to make them more re-rewarding across all parts of the game, making the open world more rewarding, and adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world.

Some of these additions will come as early as the January release, and will get covered in more detail in the next week or two as well release all the details about this release once testing has signed off it’s all ready to go in January. (we’ll also provide a high level summary of our goals with reward systems, etc. in our 2013 blog post, which should be out next week)

That doesn’t mean much. After all, the infamous patch that nerfed rare drop rates into nothing claimed to have increased those same drop rates.

It’s more likely (based on historical data) that their patch to make things “rewarding” again will simply further nerf the drop rates into the ground, since they seem to think “rewarding” means getting nothing but 2c garbage loot for thousands of hours on end.

Dradiin.8935:

Fact of the matter is, if Anet wants me to buy stuff from there store they need to communicate more and in a better manner, and start backtracking to what they PROMISED in there manifesto.

Such as a heavy focus on extreme grind, poor loot/income generation and doing nothing but dungeons to the exclusion of everything else?

Oh wait….

Aproposs Of Fire.4056:

Chair and Nay – The really frustrating part of this is that many, if not most, players are getting normal loot which means it could be an account-bound issue. These forum threads on this issue would explode if most accounts are affected.

The forums did explode right after the patch. In typical fashion, “They” merged all threads into the megathread, then “They” just locked the megathread without a response and created this one in order to make it seem like it’s not an issue (gotta fill that rug up, I think there’s a quota).

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Over the past month:

close to 100 fractals runs (this includes mob drops as well as chests):
- 0 exotics
-2 rares
-aprox 20 greens
-aprox. 20 blues
-untold amounts of junk

Aprox. 30 Dungeons (mob drops as well as chests):
-0 exotics
-0 rares (unless you count tonics, then about 3)
-Aprox. 30 greens
-Countless junk

Open World (across all zones @ roughly 7 hours per day gameplay):
-0 exotics
-5 rares
-50 greens
-Countless junk

Champions (roughly 15 total):
-0 exotics
-0 rares
-0 greens
-2 blues
-1 junk

Veterans (roughly 50 total)
-0 exotics
-0 rares
-0 greens
-2 blues
-10 junks

To this date have been playing the game since the first public beta and have never gotten a single exotic as a drop, only as zone completion reward. Most of my overall number of champions and vets may be conservative, I’m sure I’ve done more, but I can only clearly recount that many and the drops from them so I’ve omitted the “guessing” ones.

Worst RPG in terms of loot I’ve ever played, and I’ve played a massive boatload of RPGs in the 20 years I’ve been playing games.

SniffyCube.6107:

really do not see where you are getting the “grinding” or what your definition of “grinding” is because this is pretty light compared to some other popular mmos

That was true up until they added FotM and nerfed the crud out of open world drops.

I disagree! Fractals being the only place anyone ever goes has been extremely healthy for the game. /s

They haven’t fixed anything (hyper-nerfed rare drops, for instance, or the massive focus on constantly grinding FotM) so there’s no reason to come back.

Oh well, as long as the no-lifer hardcore grinders are having fun mindlessly mashing buttons, it’s mission accomplished (given that ArenaNet sold us on the game being extremely grindy and catering to people that love extremely super-grindy games – /sarcasm).

Just checking in to see if they’ve bothered to fix the game yet.

I’m guessing based on the last posts that they still haven’t. Oh well, guess I’ll check in in another 3-6 months, not that I hold much hope that they’ll fix it ever.

Rather pathetic, really.

Infernia.9847:

Well if it’s a ‘coded’ issue then maybe buying a second account and starting over may be worth it for me. I want to roll 4 more char’s and the cost is what.. 3200 gems?
So the cost is close to a new box. At least I could get lucky and this new account won’t be saddled with the kitten poor luck my main account has. And I could actually have a comparison.
I don’t know though if I had two accounts with this issue I would be more than upset so… maybe I’ll just wait and see.

If I were you I wouldn’t buy a second account until (or rather, IF) they fix it, just to show that you don’t support this mentality of screwing players over and making the game as unfun as possible.

Raf.1078:

Define fun. You can’t.

Its purely subjective to each players experience and to add another highly subjective descriptor…their mood.

No, but you can easily define things that aren’t fun.

In an RPG, a genre which has and always will be heavily influence by loot, having insanely low drop chance loot and nerfing drop rates into the ground is the antithesis of fun.

GW2 has some of the worst loot of any RPG game, period.

This problem was created by “them” (since invoking “their” name = ban) when they implemented FotM and Ascended gear extremely poorly (not making other methods of getting the same rewards etc.).

Even literally seconds of thinking about the effects of FotM and Ascended gear on the rest of the game could have prevented this, but I guess it’s more important to cater to masochistic WoW-grind lovers than to actually make sure the changes to your game don’t obsolete 99% of the content in it.

arabeth.2361:

For the most part, the majority of the forum complaints and frustrations seem to ultimately come from two meta design decisions in GW2: degressive random chance, and pure capitalism.

By saying “degressive” random chance, I am making a distinction between the more Eastern-style MMOs that rely heavily on cost-intensive random chance to acquire some of the most sought after things in the game, and “progressive” random chance that more Western-style MMOs tend to use where random chance is mitigated over time. For example: a progressive random chance would be something like running a dungeon with a boss that has a loot table that includes an item you want, but regardless of whether or not you receive the item, you get tokens that enable you to purchase that item (or one similar) after you’ve gotten enough. So it’s like random chance, but you still have progression. You still feel like eventually you will get the item, even if your luck is bad. And importantly, you certainly never lose ground – running the dungeon just costs you time, but you still get enough of whatever so that you feel your time wasn’t wasted. By contrast, “degressive” random chance is exactly that: you are just as close to receiving the item on your first try as your 1000th try, except “tries” cost you something – gold, time, whatever – and they don’t give you enough to make you feel compensated. So, after 1000 tries you are further behind where you were when you first started, and you still have just as much chance to get the item as before.

What really makes this style of random chance a killer, though, is a low drop rate. In a certain Western MMO, thanks to a much smaller variety of gear stat configurations, you might have about a 1 in 10 or even 1 in 5 chance of getting an item you can use from a boss in a dungeon. You have to add loot rolls into the equation, but generally you might get a useful item every 5 or 10 dungeon runs (or at least, this is how I felt like it worked). In GW2, most sources of rewards have extremely low drop rates – something like the 1% range – which are orders of magnitude different. This ends up making hard items harder to obtain, which is great for keeping them truly “rare” – but it also ends up feeling less rewarding.

The cash shop chests are degressive random chance. They also have an extremely low drop rate for all the “good” items, and most of the “bad” items are low-to-zero value – meaning, there is no sense of “progress” or even a small reward worth receiving. People used to the other style of “progressive” random chance are having a very hard time with this model.

Spot on OP, you hit the nail directly and firmly on the head. “Degressive” random chance systems are anti-fun and anti-player, and they suck any enjoyment out of the game.

Constantly moving goal posts suck.

OP, haven’t you heard yet? The game only exists so you can grind FotM ad infinitum, or just buy gold with gems.

How silly of you to think you can actually simply play the game to meet your goals. Obviously you’re intended to grind FotM for thousands of hours or buy gold via gems if you actually want to meet any goals.

Welcome to Grind Wars 2 enjoy doing nothing but grinding dungeons.

Pretty ridiculous that we still don’t have a response – even if it were to just say “Yes, this is the new normal, don’t expect to get any loot.”

At least then we could know for whether or not GW2 is a complete waste of time or not, rather than being stuck in limbo like this.

I really wish they would fix this or just say “tough luck, buy more gems” and get it over with. I want to either play the game I payed for (i.e., sans hyper-nerf to drops) or get confirmation that GW2 now stands for Grind Wars 2 so I can decide once and for all whether I’m ever going to play again.

plasmacutter.2709:

tpriel.8517:

the silence of the dev’s is deafening…

They don’t want to look into it because it’s an annoying bug to track, but i’m already seeing the impact of this.

Half of my guild doesn’t want to go to dynamic events anymore because every.. single… time.. they get no substantive reward while they watch their buddies who are not affected by this DR bug salvage 3 ectos and add to the mounds of gold.

Half of us are being denied the full game experience at this point, and indeed, the dev silence is deafening.

Yeah the impact of this massive nerf to rare drop rates has been huge in my group of friends.

All of my friends had been playing GW2 to the exclusion of everything else since the headstart.

Now? None of them are playing GW2 and they haven’t bothered to log in since the rare drop super-nerf.

Parvil.6804:

This game should be titled Fractals of the Mists i think

+1

Grind of the Mists, or Grind Wars of the Mists would also be appropriate.

Thanks for testing guys. Sucks they didn’t fix anything. Not surprised, gotta keep funneling people into FotM to get them on the hamster wheel of grind.

Any change (to the hyper-nerfed rare drop rate in open world PvE) with today’s update?

The massive nerf to rare drops has completely screwed up the game.

But I guess that’s okay, since the goal is to make the grindiest Korean-style supergrinder possible in order to force people to buy gems.

That’s not the game I paid $60 for. I want Guild Wars 2 back, I’m not interested in playing Grind Wars 2, which is what the game has become with the constant anti-fun anti-player nerfs.

coglin.1496:

Guild Wars 2 Forum Code of Conduct

) Read the forum before asking a question. There’s a good chance your question has already been answered.

That would make sense if this concern had actually been answered. But it hasn’t. That’s why you see duplicate threads.

In any case, I agree with the OP, Lost Shores and FotM destroyed the PvE zone gameplay completely. It’s a ghost town.

The game I paid for doesn’t even exist any more, except as a pale shadow of its former self, completely unpopulated.

That’s what happens when you create content that has better drops than any other content in the game, is the only place to obtain best in slot gear, and then go and nerf drops in regular PvE.

This problem could have been avoided with even a couple of minutes of thought on the consequences of these actions, but I guess that’s unimportant compared to catering to the WoW-locusts/making the game into a Korean-style super-grindfest in order to drive gem sales.

Half a gold is about 25 greens or 50 blues (give or take a bit). Where are you getting that much loot?

Rares don’t count obviously, since they aren’t dropping anywhere near the rate they used to (probably 1/1000th or less of the pre-nerf rate).

Mad Rasputin.7809:

A lot less people would be complaining if ANet just came out and said we tweaked the drop rates and this is the new normal.

Instead, the Nov 15 patch said they changed the drops for champs supposedly for the better(which still suck and ain’t worth doing for a big ole blue). No mention of any other drop rate changes in general.

If this is working as intended, just say so already.

The weird thing is that the patch notes said they increased the rare and exotic drop rates, when that is clearly the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Ath.2531:

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times: The point has been made. Let the thread die. It’s of no use keeping it on life support.

I for one, would like the game I paid for back.

I’m not going to stop replying to this thread until they either say “Haha losers, it’s intentional, buy more gems” or admit it’s a bug and fix it. I really like GW2 and it would be a shame to file it away because they are so intent on destroying any modicum of fun in the game.

tigirius.9014:

That’s the thing with me, I took it to game support they said:

“we’re sorry you are having bad luck, hope to see you in game”

uhm it ceases to be bad luck when thousands of players are experiencing it.

I think “bad luck” in this instance actually means “You obviously aren’t buying enough gems if you don’t have all the gold you want. Buy more gems and just convert it to gold, why do you even want to play the game in order to get rewards, that’s boring.”

Rarespawn.6028:

Also, to the person who said you should just buy dye packs with gems, this isn’t a reliable way to get rare dyes either.

I probably should have been more clear, but that post was tongue-in-cheek. I was pointing out how screwy it is that you can’t even farm to make something as simple as a dye without insane RNG rearing its ugly unfun head.

Your mistake, OP, was thinking you could meet goals in the game by simply playing the game and farming. That is a huge mistake.

Instead, as you should know, you’re supposed to buy gems and purchase dye packs.

Wow, still no fix, or even a response for that matter!

Really disappointing. Oh well, back to playing games that aren’t trying to actively waste my time and be as unfun as possible.

Stop giving NPCs way way too much health.

Navi.7142:

Is Torchlight rewarding and fun?

Yes. Much much more so than GW2 with the constant nerfs.

I had a blast playing Torchlight 2 with a friend (that usually plays GW2 with me) last night.

It’s refreshing to play something that’s not actively wasting my time, or moving goal posts out from under me via nerfs to income generation/drop rates.

I won’t be playing GW2 until (or I guess, “if” since they aren’t responding at all) this is fixed, and neither will my friend.

It’s just not worth grinding and grinding all to get garbage loot and pocket change. I’d like to play something that respects my time, y’know, how GW2 used to be before being nerfed into the ground.

I stopped bothering after a week or two of doing at least one or two of them each day only to get 2x blues 1x green every time.

It’s not worth going there to just get the same horribly bad rewards every time. The event was cool and “fun” by itself the first four or five times. I’ve done it dozens, so I want something halfway decent for spending all my time there. Since it doesn’t actually give you anything decent, I’ve stopped bothering.

Ahlen.7591:

As someone who loves both horizontal and vertical progression: Yay.

Seriously, some of us like having something to strive for in games.

Yay, numbers get bigger! So satisfying, such an amazing sense of progression.

By the way, ProgressQuest and WoW exist. If you play MMOs to “see the numbars get biggar”, you can always play them, since they cater exclusively to that mentality.

They didn’t say one way or the other whether or not it’d be the last tier forever. Since we have to go by what they didn’t say instead of what they actually said, we have to assume they are interested in potentially adding a new tier later on (after all, they didn’t say they wouldn’t, explicitly).

They did say they will be introducing an Infusion treadmill though.

tkalamba.2541:

Cortechs.3265:

I’ve already uninstalled because of Ascended Gear (btw Anet, your ‘Exit Survey’ is broken — surprise, surprise). Horizontal progression was the main reason I bought the game. There is no reason to continue playing now.

The forum does provide marginally entertaining lunch distractions though.

Honestly, buying a MMORPG with 80 levels expecting Horizontal progression, you bought the wrong game, or are using a very loose definition of Horizontal.

See… getting from level 1-80, with 5 tiers of gear, is anything but Horizontal. Even with a plateau, this doesn’t fit the idea.

Horizontal progression would mean, from day 1, no levels, all gear being equal. We would never of had to bother leveling our characters. Just like is sPVP. This was never the case in any of the Beta events and it has remained exactly the same to today.

You don’t understand the concept of horizontal progression, or how it worked in GW2 prior to Ascended gear at all.

The fact that there is a stat progress prior to the level cap does not mean that GW2 did not have horizontal progression. Horizontal progression means cosmetic progression instead of stat progression at max level. That last part is important. At max level. Read it again.

GW2 WAS based on horizontal progression, at max level. It isn’t any more. Get your facts straight before going off on someone.

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

I admit I’ve taken it too personal, but this is just how I feel about the game at the moment. I want horizontal progression and expanded content, not new stats and gear treadmills. Besides arguing about new gear and such, has anyone actually permanently or temporarily quit the game due to the introduction of Ascended Gear? Whoever has temporarily put the game to rest, how will the next big update change your mind? Are we over-reacting and taking it too personal?

Combined with the massive nerf to rare drop rates in PvE, the Ascended Gear thing has made me quit, at least for now. If they don’t address the massive grind and fix it, I probably won’t ever bother to come back.

Last night was the first time since GW2’s head start that I played something else instead. It’s refreshing to play a game made by developers that aren’t so ridiculously fond of massive boring grind.

For the first time since the first day of GW2’s head-start, I played a different game last night. The massive nerf to rare drops has sapped all desire to play GW2.

crystal.5930:

This is an entirely subjective little ramble, but you know, I’m not a particularly loot-driven player. Sure, I like loot and part of the fun of the game for me is getting my characters the weapons and armor I want (which don’t always have to be top tier to make me happy). But I’ll often spend time doing things just for kicks that I know are not going to be profitable for me, but they’re fun so I don’t mind. What I’m winding up to here is that when I start to notice the lack of decent loot drops, that to me is a signal that the game must be really, really stingy. And like others who’ve posted in this thread, I do believe this is a change. I don’t recall having an issue equipping my other lowbies just from drops, but my baby Charr, at level 9, is still in mostly her starter armor. (I’ve crafted armor and weapons for her that she can equip at level 10.)

Thanks for this. Often times people that don’t pay attention to their loot closely come into threads like this and naysay everyone that does pay close attention.

Honestly though, I noticed it immediately, but it took a week or so to really confirm it with enough trials to know it wasn’t just RNG.

When you’re going from 3-4+ rares in one run of Plinx and related events to a single rare in three days of farming it’s pretty easy to tell something is up.

Anyway, I agree, something is very wrong if players that don’t normally pay attention to loot are noticing this (and I think something is very wrong, and is clearly evident from the strong agreement about the decrease in drops across the ~13 pages of replies).

Science.6709:

Been reading this thread this morning, and a funny thought: what if GW2 failed as a FTP game and became a sub based one? Because my position is, I’d pay 15 a month to play this without the gem nonsense.

I’d pay $15/mo if they reverted the game to the state it was in at launch/headstart in terms of loot etc., that is, with all the current bug fixes intact, but none of the DR, massive income nerfing, massive drop rate nerfs etc.

Basically, I’d pay $15 for them to un-mess up GW2 back to when it was working just fine (in terms of loot/rewards) before they decided to break it with DR and constant nerfs to income and loot.

Last night was the first time since release I played something other than GW2, and this issue directly contributes to my lack of desire to play.