Guild Wars 2

Its a geat concept “this game is about fun, not rewards”.

But GW2 does not reflect this at high level. If its just about fun at not rewards why are there all these hugely expensive items in game. How much fun is it to try to earn huge ammounts of money, tokens, karma for end game items.

The list of required mats for the legendary weapons is not a roadmap to fun, its an invitition to a major grind fest. A grind fest that now has a number of artificial roadblocks added to slow down how quickly people will achieve it.

Its not honest design on the one had to say we are about fun, everything else should happen organically while the fun happens and then say btw you need 525k karma (probably neary 750k by the time you have made your mystic clovers) for your legendary weapon.

Think about it , if you repeated enough of the events currently in game to earn 750k karma who you honestly still be having “fun” or would you be bored to tears by the repitition of it all.

I suspect the truth is near to this:

Anets major design concept was “fun not reward or grinding”.

Much of the early game this is very true.

Financial / time pressures forced them to release early before enough end game content could be finished.

In an attempt to keep players in a game without the ammount of end game content they had planned earlier in development. They put in the legendary weapons and high price appearance sets to keep players repeating the end game content and not leave the game.

An unforeseen side effect of this is it pushes the hardcore players to try to farm materials or cash but such a large ammount of repitition of the same content isn’t at all fun.

Grind to me means doing the same thing over and over. The grubs were grinding but so are all the orr events and the dungeons and the rest of the end game PVE content if you are required to repeat them a huge number of times to get mats for legendary weapons etc.

The policy of not letting players farm mats would be ok if there was a fun alternative for getting the mats/ badges you need. Look at the legendary’s for example 2000-3000 DE (assuming 350 karma for each) is going to involve one hell of alot of repeating the same DE or WvW. Dungeon sets are the same alot of repeats required for each piece of armour. T3 culteral armour (basically for looks only) 20-25g per peice (lots of farming required)

Too me this looks like a company that has released a game before it was ready (look at all the area’s on the map you cannot access) and instead of including some end game progression or enough content they have just made the end games items hugely expensive and are trying to prolong the life of the game by stomping on farming.

Frankly in the face of this I have no problem with people finding creative ways to minimise the grind provided by anet. Its certainly not the moral issue some people seem to think it is.

I support and agree with the OP. I would like to see :

Anti farm code scrapped or modified to a level where is does not effect player who are not botting.

GM’s hired to identify and ban botting players.

Sensible risk vs reward for dungeons, one thing there really didnt need was less reward for the effort.

I don’t object to hard dungeons, I can live with a slow burn on my content and I commend arenanets attempts to do something different by abandoning the holy trinity system.

However I feel that the dungeon system is deeply flawed. It not just a question of difficulty its lack of fun. To have a design where its neccessary to have a system where you can rez zerg the bosses highlights the inherent weaknesses of the system.

If you removed rez zerging what % of the playerbase could deal with these dungeons, I doubt it would be a majority even in story mode.

Rez zerging is lame. Its a lazy balancing aid, just like all raid mobs in Swtor having an enrage timer.

Please consider doing the following:

1)Remove rez zerging.
2)Rebalance some to the dungeons certainly the story mode along these lines:-

Story mode – Puggable without lots of deaths and if anything is going to one shot you it should be clearly broadcast with enough time for your average joe to avoid.
Explorable option 1 – harder needs some co ordination
Explorable option 2 – noticiably harder than option 1
Explorable option 3 – noticiably harder than option 2

3) When building difficulty in dungeon encounters do it via scripting, mobs waves, random ambushes, vastly out numbering players. Not via adding 0s on the mobs HP totals and damage output.

4) Rewards. The current reward system for dungeons makes them not worth the time spent and in some cases it can end up costing you alot of cash when learning them. I am not sure that is justified when all you are getting is appearance rewards.