Guild Wars 2

Alright, fair enough.

So are more people interested?

Unfortunately due to the amount of work that goes into a drawing like this, I can’t just offer everyone free sketches, but maybe a couple of people can post their character screenshots and I can take a stab at it in order to give more samples.

No guaranteed time frame of when they’ll be done though, hopefully soon, as I do have other projects on hand at the moment.

Yea it’s http://frekittenofu.deviantart.com

This is the first piece of this kind that I’ve done though, so you won’t find others like it there. Hopefully if there are enough people who like this, I will be motivated to do more.

Edit: Lol are you kidding me? The automatic censor prevents me from correctly typing out my DA page link because it contains the letters S, H, and T in succession…

Anyways, replace kitten with S, H, and T to get to my page. Sorry for the inconvenience. That is just ridiculous. Is there a way to turn that censor off?

Here’s a drawing I did for a friend of mine who was kind enough to let me reference her picture. It is a GW2 inspired portrait, if you will, taking my friend’s likeness and transforming her into a Sylvari of my own design.

If anyone is interested in this kind of stuff, please let me know I am thinking about possibly accepting commissions, if there is a strong demand. I do other types of drawings as well, it doesn’t have to be a portrait.

Morrigan.2809:

I don’t know how active Crystal Desert is in WvWvW but sometime servers who are very focused on PvP have a low pop out in the world even though the server is stated as High pop.
I’m on Gunnar’s Hold and there are lots of people everywhere, I’ve also seen many new players the last month or so.
Maybe you just need to look into how players on different servers spend their time playing, not just the server numbers.
The players are there but you might not know it always.

Hmm, that’s an interesting thought. Crystal Desert does also happen to be one of the WvW map/team names, so maybe some psychology plays into that (ie. being fans of a specific team). Though like I said, there didn’t seem to be too many players in WvW playing when I tried it. Thanks for the tip though.

Rustypipes.6238:

Many players like to get to max level and find out that it’s not like other MMOs, there are no raids and loot doesn’t rain from the sky drenching them in the best gear in a week, this is a big turn off for a lot people who expected GW2 to be WoW2.

The devoted GW1 fans also are not happy with the game because it’s not GW1 with better graphics.

These are actually really good points. I don’t want to delve too deeply into this as it is a topic for another thread, but I too feel like AN watered down the GW experience in order to try and cater more to the general MMO audience that is more used to the WoW type structure. But in doing so, they didn’t go all the way, and like you said, it doesn’t quite fulfill either side’s desires.

Levels certainly didn’t matter much in GW1 and the game felt much less rigid in terms of acquiring skills. Here there are 80 levels which almost feels like a chore despite the great story (I’m still worried I will get burnt out on it after 1 playthrough). At the same time yes, the loot seems to be lackluster. This is not helped by the fact that GW characters in general always felt pathetically weak compared to what is in other MMOs (ie. in CoH 1 person could take on 8 regular mobs easily, in GW1 it took 8 (1 player and 7 npc helpers) to take out 1 mob in a timely manner).

So yes, I can see why players would want to flock to the most populated areas and basically powerlevel through the game, which is a shame considering story is such a strong point for this franchise.

I think it would help a lot if they simply increased the number of mobs and made them a lot easier to kill. It would make players feel more powerful and less likely to want to skip content for the sake of leveling at a reasonable pace.

Mystic Beaver.4795:

Really unnecessary to have such a massive, massive wall of text.

I play on Crystal Desert too and there’s loads of people everywhere, always people for events in every zone, lots of people in WvW. Maybe you’re just logging on at too bizarre times ?

Maybe, but as I’ve alluded to in my OP, back a few years ago, there would have been no such thing as “too bizarre times”. There were always plenty of people on at all hours of the day. Certainly, a supposedly massively popular game like GW2 would have had no excuse to be close to empty on any map at any time.

Given, GW2 does try to provide a unique starting experience for each separate race, and perhaps that creates some room for bias. But even so, as far as I can tell, AN has done an equally good job for each storyline, and I’m sure their QA assures that as well, so it still seems strange for this to happen.

What is the reason for this??

Is it because the maps are just so big that the players are spread thin?

Is it because the MMO genre is now but a shadow of its former self, so much so that even the hottest MMOs on the market are like ghost towns?

Is the economy just so bad that barely anyone has the interest to play MMOs like the way people used to (ie. living in the games)?

Is everyone ignoring the quests and just trying to jam pack into Lion’s Arch? (I did notice as I was passing through that area that it was the only place requiring a queue)(And seriously, I understand why games form central hubs, but instance-based GW1 kinda forced this. Here it would be pretty sad if people are still holing up in one place with such a vast open world to explore…)

I recently read an article too about the disproportionate distribution of races in GW2 and how the vast majority of players are choosing humans over all the others. Indeed, when I saw the graph, the human numbers roughly doubled that of each of the races I chose, while Norn are slightly more popular but still much less so than humans are. Could that be why?

Is the population cap on each server purposely set low so as to decrease lag, and that inadvertently creates the illusion of high population as a result, when I may in fact be playing on a low pop server?

Are the server populations somehow misrepresented and I’m actually on a low pop server?

Did the majority of players already get bored of this game and move on? Are people’s attention span for MMOs that short these days?

…

I really want to know, because GW2 being a giant empty space only a few months after launch doesn’t seem normal at all…

Hello All,

I’d like to start off by saying I’m fairly new to the game, having purchased it less than a week ago. I was in and out of GW1 for a number of years and really like the whole atmosphere and world that AN has created for their franchise.

So naturally when GW2 came out, and after reading that it is regarded as possibly the best MMO of 2012 as well as supporting a huge player base, I of course had to check it out.

Well here I am and… I don’t know what it is, but the place seems kinda empty :/

…

Now let me explain why I think that is by delving a bit into my MMO history.

I started out playing the recently shut down City of Heroes many years ago. That game was released roughly around the time when WoW was, so it had pretty stiff competition from the start. Comic books and superheroes were always a niche market too so the game never could draw as many players as a game like WoW could. Looking back now, CoH could be described as a mid-sized MMO in its heyday.

Nevertheless, in those early days, the place was jumping with activity 24/7. I used to play that game day in day out, and I could always find plenty of people to PUG or just talk with even at 2-4am in the morning, and that was before they added all the clubs/arenas/pvp zones.

…

Over the years, I understand the MMO market has gotten quite oversaturated, so a similar number of gamers interested in the genre would have been spread thin over various titles. A lot of subscription MMOs also either went F2P or out of business as a result of the above, the bad economy, or people getting tired of the genre in general.

Indeed, today not a single successful subscription-based MMO still exists besides WoW and maybe EVE. And most F2P games tend to hold a small group of diehards while most players leave as quickly as they join. So you could say the MMO genre has lost much of its former luster.

…

Still, when a game like GW2 came along, I had higher expectations. Knowing the wonderful lore, the incredibly immersive world, and the meticulously attention the AN team pays to polish and balance the game, I thought there would be a lot of people here, if for no other reason than based on GW1’s good reputation.

Having played for about a week, the game itself certainly doesn’t disappoint. So much to do, a massive world, great graphics, high production value in storytelling and voice acting, a new take on the traditional MMO quest formula, and huge objective-based world vs world pvp.

The only thing missing seems to be the actual players…

…

So far all of my toons are on the Crystal Desert server, which seemed like one of the most populated. I specifically refreshed the server list multiple times upon initial character creation just to see which ones would pop up at the top the most, and CD was one of these. I wanted to make sure when I came in that I could interact with as many players as possible, since I had been out of the MMO loop for a while and missed the social interaction.

I get into the game, create a sylvari, an asura, and 2 charrs… my main being lvl 21 by now, and every low level map I’ve been in thus far, I run into maybe a handful of players spread sparsely all over the place in maybe the course of 1-2 hours of play time, whereas in GW1 nearly every semi-large town was always full of people.

I also went into WvW. Albeit it was 4 in the morning, I remember back in GW1 GvG games would be going on all the time for spectatorship, and the pvp islands were always packed, but here there was barely a soul. I would run vast distances without meeting a single enemy player (and yes I know they show up as generic names), which is nothing like what I saw in the beta videos of GW2 on youtube.

…That is REALLY low pop, not just for a game that just recently came out, and sports nearly all (supposedly) full servers, and which is touted as one of, if not THE best MMO ever made… that is low even for a typical MMO entering mid life.

…

Continued…