The game did not have enough horizontal progression, acquiring skill, skins, titles, abilities, perks, conveniences, to keep people interested long term.
Why not? Well part of the problem is the very limited way they are handling classes. The classes are very streamlined and offer the players little flexibiity. This lack of flexibility really limits the options for horizontal progression. I had every worthwhile skill a month after launch.
Therefore, they sat down a month after release and said ‘Oops Wtf now?’ and plopped in this Ascended gear to keep people busy. Why? Because it is easy and cheap, not because it is good gameplay or fits with their Manifesto.
I would agree with this point.
The game at launch really didn’t have enough horizontal progression to offset the near complete lack of vertical.
I was looking forward to a game with no vertical.
To be honest, if I want to play an MMO with vertical, I’ll play an MMO that knows how to do it (IE, not a game from Arena Net). I did that for years in WoW.
Part of the problem with the launch was that much of the horizontal progression was just plain bugged and didn’t work (DE’s, dungeon bosses, etc). And so much of that bugged launch content is still in the exact same state as it was 3 months ago.
How many people still can’t complete their personal story because the event/Arah just doesn’t work? The Balthazar event is always in progress when I’m in Straits, but even now, every single time I see it in progress (double digits), it’s bugged.
Add in that so much of the horizontal at launch was just grind, grind, grind, and then RNG Mystic Forge chucking, and while there are so many zones that people won’t see along their way to 80 – because of the sheer amount of mats/karma/gold needed for some of this horizontal – those zones are, basically, worthless for someone going for something that needs loads of karma, gold or T6 mats. The content is already there, but many people view it as simply not worth doing because of how little it helps for some of the more grindy grinds in this game.
While I haven’t tried sPvP, WvW really needs some love – but the engine itself seems to be the limiter with culling. Since launch, there are 2 noticeable changes made to WvW – elimination of the Orbs and removal of karma from escorts. That’s it. There’s loads of things that could be done to make WvW better, but none of them are happening (and all the dev posts promise things “in the works” and “soon”.
I thought the Halloween event was good (barring not being able to see my character in the Clock Tower – I spent maybe 30 minutes total trying and just didn’t find blindly jumping fun), and there were even 2 PvP mini-games added. But they’re gone. They were there for a limited time, and I would love to play them now, but I can’t.
Throw in Lost Shores (what part of that is/was NOT bugged?), and it seems like the team is incredibly understaffed for what they are trying to do, and there seems to be a real lack of direction as to where things are going.
Like I said above – if I wanted to play a game with vertical, I’d play a game that does it well. The Fractals do NOT do it well. The encounters themselves are interesting, but every system around them is buggy, ill-thought out, tried and abandoned years ago by other MMOs, and just plain grindy.
While I haven’t played any “Korean grindfests”, I’ve played quite a few Western MMOs, and this is, by far, the grindiest MMO I’ve ever played, with a huge does of RNG on top of it. I don’t quite get how Mr. Whiteside can even say they ATTEMPT to avoid grinds, as this game is simply full of them.
