Guild Wars 2

I’ve tried opening my mind and giving it another try, but unfortunately my opinion hasn’t changed. To me, having to unlock traits feels like a chore. It’s frustrating, really. I’ve already abandoned two new characters because of that.

If it were just the grandmaster traits, I might look forward to it, but having to go out of my way to unlock adept and master traits is such a bummer… I want to buy another character slot to make a guardian, but I know I just won’t. Not under this system.

Is a class without a passive move steed boost truly playable?!! We live in the age of speed xD

Has everyone here already read this? I think it’s relevant for the current discussion:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Effect_stacking

And I’d like to present an alternative solution for the stacking problem: Infinite stacks with diminishing returns. Everyone deals damage for all stacks they’ve applied, but the total damage increases at a diminished rate according to the total number of stacks applied.

There are a few problems with this solution, though:
- Increases processing load for the servers
- The formulas would have to be very well designed in order to properly reward (instead of hurting) people with condition damage builds

The immersion issue is one I agree with. If this kind of change was to be implemented, I imagine it would erase your whole storyline and ask you to start from zero. And I’d still pay for that.

Agreed. I wish I could just buy a “change everything” contract and restart my female thief as a male guardian. Even if I had to play the storyline from zero, it would be worth it. Currently, she’s sitting on level 46 because I can’t bother to level up a class I didn’t really enjoy.

And there’s no way I’m going to just “make a new character”, because I’ve spent a birthday experience scroll on that one.

It all goes back to this: it takes a long time to unlock enough skills and traits for you to get a real feel of the class, so it’s a hit or miss thing. I did previous research on wiki and thought I’d enjoy thief, but it turns out I didn’t.

Yeah, I’ve disabled auto-target as well.

But the thing that bugs me the most is when I have locked into a target and then “lose” the target because it went slightly out of range. Then I have to re-target it, but there are closer mobs making “closest target” useless and forcing me to either click the enemy (often fails) or cycle through all of them with “next target”.

In the fight with Tequatl, for example, this is just HORRIBLE! Every single time he does his leaning-back-attack-animation, the cannons on the east post lose targeting, then you see yourself shooting at nothing or a random mob.

I think players complain about zerk builds because they seem a bit “too” effective, too prevalent. Since they are so common, people who enjoy different builds feel at a disadvantage. Back when I was admin for an MMORPG, we used to say that if a build pops out too often, it deserves a closer look.

It’s all about trade-offs: you can’t be good in one area without sacrificing efficiency in other areas.

This seems to be a problem with zerk builds at the moment. Whether equipment is a contributing factor, I’m not sure, but the fact that there is gear that boosts three offensive stats simultaneously – all of them tied to a single mechanic – is an indicative of imbalance.

As I understand it, the role of equipment is to support your play style, whatever that may be. Note that I’m talking about “play styles”, not “party roles” or anything like that.

The talk about “roles” itself is pretty sketchy in GW2. The mechanics were designed so that all classes are able to function stand-alone: you don’t “depend” on other people to play the game. Your class will always have options that support both independent and cooperative play. And this holds true whether you’re squishy or tanky.

In my opinion, this independence came at the expense of mechanical diversity (all classes look somewhat similar to the unaccustomed eye, since they all have the same base elements), but I think it was a good decision in terms of balance. Recently they brought back some build diversity with the revised traits, so nowadays I don’t really have any complains. (Except that traits now require “unlocking” for new characters; I’m hoping they’ll change this.)

Missing paragon already?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Paragon_Elite_Sunspear_armor

Back in GW 1, consets never bothered me much. I was a seller, but it didn’t require much farming at all. If you just kept playing normally (advancing characters, doing dungeons, etc), before you realized it you already had almost everything needed. Then you just farmed a couple of feather stacks (which was pretty quick, btw) and voilla! 10 consets. I usually sold 7 and kept 3 for my guild.

However, the GW 2 system seems so messed up in comparison, I can’t help but to agree with your post.

Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll ever remove consumables, because it’s a massive money sink for the economy – and they desperately need those, considering the way things are. The fact that there’s food to improve your magic find is enough proof of how much grinding is emphasized in GW 2.

Honestly, the design of this game often reminds me of a hydra whose heads are constantly biting each other. Paradoxes and inconsistencies ahoy. I feel like they sorely miss a set of strong and publicly divulged pillars upon which to build the game.

Also, people are focusing on the grinding and ignoring the other issues raised, but that comes as no surprise.

Going back to their statement: “We will continue to develop the game for the community as a whole offering game play that caters to lots of different types of players in a unified approach that will evolve over time based on feedback and the direction the team as a whole wants to take.”

That sounds like a politically nice way of being vague and uncompromising. When has this abstract entity called “the community” ever agreed on anything? It goes back to what I’ve said about transparency issues: this kind of statement doesn’t actually say anything at all about where they want to take the game.

Listening to customer feedback is the least expected from any serious company, it doesn’t really count as a policy.

My reply to that: And here’s some feedback, do with it as you will.

Sir, no-one’s forced to do anything, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the need to. It’s not about what people have to do, but what they feel they have to. Sure, I could give up on getting ascended gear for all my characters, but then the ones without would always feel subpar. No-one likes being at a disadvantage.

In my case, I feel like exotic equipment is “barely acceptable” and ascended is “ideal”, simply because ascended has better stats than exotic. Stats do affect a character’s efficiency, otherwise they wouldn’t even exist. And as long as there are different tiers of equipment, most players will be driven to go for the top tier.

@Smooth Penguin: Yes, you’re absolutely right. As I’ve written, the desire to have optimal equipment is what drives people to grinding. My point is that grinding is required in order to get such equipment. At least that’s how it feels.

@Inculpatus cedo: So many things to do? You may have a point. How do you suggest I spend my time, then? What are the things you usually do?

Part 3

Lack of meaningful challenges: Like I’ve said, what makes a game fun to play is the reward and the feeling of achievement you get when you overcome difficult challenges. Sadly, much of the end-game content isn’t actually very challenging on a strategic or tactical level. Most world bosses are just a matter of having a big enough zerg – except for Tequatl, who just feels overpowered. Then you have dungeons, which are nice, but their rewards are hardly worth the trouble and time and it takes (Fractals being the exception). Somehow, it feels like the push for extending low-levels happens because Guild Wars 2 “doesn’t have enough end-game content”. If that’s the case, shouldn’t the focus be on increasing the amount of end-game content? And what about making the end-game content that already exists more relevant? Cursed Shore, for example, is currently a stroll through the park. Personally, I would suggest converting a lot of the mid-level content into end-game and rescaling the difficulty accordingly. Some end-game areas should be oppressively difficult – this encourages social behavior and give players a more real feeling of achievement.

The reward system: This goes back to the first things I talked about – if strong equipment is the final reward of the game, players will fall back to grinding and make it impossible to have a balanced economy. GW 1 mitigated this by making stats largely independent on gold – aesthetics were the final reward. However, in GW 2, there are so many skins that they’ve become something like a commodity, lost much of their value. Additionally, since they can also be bought with gold, they contribute directly to the grinding frenzy. I don’t know what to suggest on this end, only that the core values of the game may benefit from a long-term revision, one step at a time.

Bosses immune to critical hits: Personally, I was under the impression that standardizing mechanics was one of the original design policies aimed at making all builds equally viable (after all, that’s why conditions like bleed and poison apply equally to all enemies). Players don’t get that many options in terms of builds; and Crits are one of the most important combat mechanics, often used to trigger boons and conditions. Making important bosses immune to Crits not only makes subpar equipment with Precision or Ferocity, but also severely cripples a wide range of interesting builds. Are players supposed to get a secondary set of equipment (complete with runes, sigils and builds) just for those? Honestly, this feels like yet another money sink. If you wanted to make those bosses more challenging, you could have just reduced the extra damage they take from critical hits, rather than nullifying whole builds altogether.

The Bottom Line

I don’t mind some measure of farming, but when grinding is a part of the core gameplay experience, something’s wrong. It’s understandable that you want players to spend a lot of time in the game, but there are surely better ways to accomplish this. A design policy that enforces grinding only depreciates the game, making it more ordinary and easily comparable to lesser MMORPGs (which are best left unmentioned). It detracts from the very things that make Guild Wars 2 truly unique and attractive. Business-wise, this “strategy” (if it can be called that) is the exact opposite of a competitive advantage (and I’m a senior business consultant, by the way). As a customer, I don’t feel inclined to spend additional money on Guild Wars 2, even though I own well over 200 League of Legends skins.

Part 2

Minor nuisance – Long-standing unfixed bugs: Speaking of patches, what about that Orrian Sapling that spawns inside a prop half of the time in Cursed Shore? Or the broken Harpy Queen in Harathi Hinterlands (this one seems to have been fixed, but it sure took a long time!) Or Taidha Covington’s looping death scene? Or the Megadestroyer pre-quest that bugs when people stand at the NPCs’ spawn point? There are other bugs, but those are the ones that come to mind more readily. Once again, it begs the question: where are your priorities?

The almost-mandatory crafting system: In all honesty, I despise the crafting system. It’s tedious, slow and wasteful, not to mention that the interface is confusing and looks like it has been specifically designed to make you waste time scrolling up and down repeatedly (it doesn’t even have an auto-assembly system for intermediary materials). Leveling up crafts feels excruciatingly slow and forces you to squander resources on useless items until you finally reach a high enough level to make what you actually want. I would like to stay the hell away from this and just send materials to my buddy for him to craft the items for me, but guess what? Ascended gear is not tradable. Thus, the only recourse left is grinding. Even if I did enjoy crafting, I would have to spend ungodly amounts of time leveling up multiple crafts and farming up the materials anyway, so in the end, it all goes back to farming.

A tangent – Odd economic consequences of the crafting system: As I’ve just said, there is a strong pressure for people to be crafters. And, since all you have to do to become one is talk to an NPC, everyone and their mother is a crafter. Rather than being a profession your character can specialize and work on, crafting disciplines end up becoming a mandatory hindrance to your adventuring career. You could be planning and preparing for that dungeon with your guild, but instead everyone is trying get the huge amounts of hard to find materials it turns out they’ll need (many of them for intermediary items that will never actually see any use). Because of this, the demand for crafting materials is normally higher than the demand for finished items. In terms of actual finances, this means you often end up spending more money to craft an item than you would if you bought it on the trading company… talk about a messed up economy.

Traits now require unlocking: There were positive changes in the trait system with the April 2014 feature pack, but requiring new characters to do “quests” to unlock traits was definitely not one of them. Personally, I neglected to pre-create my remaining characters before the feature pack, so I’ve been hit pretty bad by this change. Contrary to what was intended, this feels like a chore and a waste of time. Even if you decide to buy the traits, you’ll have to farm up the gold and many, many skill points, so it goes back to farming and wasting time yet again. I have no words to express just how much of a bother this is – it simply takes away the fun of a new character. Suffice to say I’ve stopped leveling up my new characters, and I will never pick them up again. Evidently, I’ll never spend money on a character slot if things stay like this.

Another tangent – Suggestions for the trait system: The idea of requiring “quests” to unlock traits is not a bad one, but I would restrict them to the grandmaster traits, since those quests are interesting (read: end-game; actually challenging; don’t feel like a chore). This would be much closer to what capturing an elite skill felt like in GW 1. I would make the adept tier unlocked at level 20, the master tier unlocked at level 40 and the grandmaster tier unlockable from level 60 onwards. I believe this would offer players a nice window to experiment with traits and start working towards getting the grandmaster traits.

Low levels overly extended: Let’s face it, the game truly starts at level 80. However, it takes relatively long to get there, and this interlude feels basically like a limbo, a long wait until you can properly start playing that character. Even if there are low-level dungeons, people will wait until level 80 to do them. I don’t know if the new trait system was supposed to give you ‘something to do’ during that wait, but the fact is it doesn’t add any fun to your low-level experience – on the contrary, makes it harder. Much of this would be solved if leveling-up was faster and most mid-level areas were rescaled and redesigned to expand the end-game experience. The game needs less mid-level areas and more max-level areas. Challenge, not chores, is what makes a game fun to play.

The following post was written by me and a friend. It is presented “as is”, and I’m not asking anyone to agree with us. In fact, if you are not going to read the whole thing, please don’t even bother answering. Our perceptions may be skewed at points, but they stem from our own gaming experience with Guild Wars 2, particularly as GW veterans.

Disclaimer: This is not a petition, it’s customer feedback.
Without further ado…

An Appeal for Less Time-wasting, More Relevant Content and Clearer Design Policies

Part 1

I don’t know whether other players share this perception, but Guild Wars 2 often makes me feel alienated by design policies that indirectly enforce grinding or otherwise pressure me to waste time on activities I’m not interested in. I only have a couple of hours per day for this game, so I would like to invest them on activities that are fun and fulfilling – but that also feel rewarding. Below, I will comment in detail about some of the issues that bother me the most about Guild Wars 2:

Stats dependent on item rarity: I know it’s unfair to compare GW 2 to GW 1, since they’re different games, but I had never expected 2 to be so farm-oriented – it stands in stark contrast with the first installment of the series! I feel like the root of the problem is that item rarity is associated with actual combat stats: this strongly compels players to go after equipment with the highest stats available. The result is an endless pursuit of grinding, which in turns pumps dangerously high amounts of money into the economy – which the design team has to manage by creating infamous money sinks and other frustrating changes to “slow things down”. Is it too late to revert this vicious cycle? Possibly, but things can surely be made better one step at a time.

Focus on the economy: Currently, many aspects of the game feel like money/time sinks. The tier system introduced in the April 2014 feature pack is a good example: you don’t have to spend gold to respec traits anymore, but now you have to spend it to learn them! (Unless you have enough patience to complete the incredibly long list of “quests” instead.) Another example: Fractals is a dungeon specifically designed for farming, yet it comes with a sink in the form of agony resistance infusions. This goes to show just how much the design is being influenced by ‘economic issues’, often at the expense of fun. Personally, I feel dragged into a different game called “Grind Wars”. In GW 1, I could choose not to be an active part of the economy and still have top-tier equipment (stat-wise), which enabled me to participate in anything I wanted. Sadly, in GW 2 this option doesn’t seem to exist. I find this hard to understand, considering the large amount of awesome content present in Guild Wars 2.

Transparency issues: There are patches very often, but to access the patch notes, one needs to login at the forums – I wonder how many players do that (I confess I only found that out after a nasty change caught me by surprise). Why not give more visibility to the changes you make? You have a news screen at the game loader, for Christ’s sake. It’s important to explain the rationale behind changes; this way, even if players don’t agree with you, they’ll at least understand where you’re coming from. For example, the official explanation given in the patch notes for dismantling the Queenslade farm train seemed like just a vague “front” and not at all related to the real reasons behind this decision. If you’re nerfing a drop rate or a farm route, explain that openly! Otherwise, you earn mistrust from players who, by not being let into the mindset and objective behind changes, can’t help but feel betrayed (especially when it comes to economics). Lack of a public and transparent design policy is a dangerous thing.

There is one thing that’s made me mad beyond all reason: now when I create a new character I’ll have to do random stuff across the map to unlock my traits. This is incredibly annoying and time-consuming. And if I decide to actually buy all the traits, I’ll need to spend WEEKS farming up the gold and skill points!

Honestly, I will NEVER buy a character slot if the game stays like this. My play time is extremely limited as it is, so if this game requires me to spend hours doing things I’m not interested in, sorry, I’ll just grow tired and stop eventually.

Please stop introducing subtle “grinding” into Guild Wars 2, it’s ruining everything! If I wanted to spend my time FARMING, I would have chosen another MMORPG, thank you.

My suggestion: automatically unlock all Adept, Major and the two original Grandmaster traits. This way, players will have a decent pool to make builds and entertain themselves. For the extra Grandmaster traits, you can keep the quests (such as “Defeat the Risen High Priest of Grenth”), because they are actually challenging and interesting end-game content.

Hint: This is the first time I’m getting on the forums, and I’ve accessed them just to say how dissatisfied I am.