Let me take a second to distill the message of the original post, as it was a little to glib and unfocused:
If you are playing an aspect of the game for a “reward”, then this is not the game for you.
Sure, the various aspects of the game provide rewards, such as levels, items, and money; however, these rewards are ancillary to the actual game itself, which is instead focused on the EXPERIENCE of the game.
More or less meaning that the word “experience” itself (which is VERY subjective) now isn’t so much? We’re all catering to how people tell us we “should” play the game? Doesn’t sound much like a theme park, now does it? Everyone experiences a game differently, and will thusly want to play it differently. Telling people that those of them who want to feel rewarded for the amount of time they put into the game are playing the wrong game is simply inane.
This actual game you speak of is a number of different things put together, amongst those being rewards: Rewarded with dailies, monthlies, pvp ranks, titles, drops, etc. This game does reward people for every little thing they do; We even get rewarded with b-styled voice acting when we achieve something aswell as light particles here and there, achievement points for every little thing we do. Everything to rub us the right way. Claiming that the game isn’t for those who want to feel rewarded doesn’t make sense.
Here’s the problem, and I quote from another good sir hitting the nail on the head:
Open-world, theme parked games rewards you proportionally for the amount of effort you put into it. You spend more time, work harder, the game gives you what you legitimately earn.
Guild Wars 2 lacks this. In between anti-bot farming code (which isn’t perfect) comes the dungeon nerfs to the rewards. Making a dungeon hard is fine, but the rewards doesn’t reflect on the effort you put into it.
The anti-farming code doesn’t stop bots from farming events. Bots have infinite stamina. They never grow tired, they never need to eat, sleep or handle any other thing in real life. They exist solely to hit the same mob over and over again 24/7. They don’t care if they are getting 1% of drops anyway, they’ll just keep trucking on.
Human beings simply cannot compete with this, the time we spend on running DE is real, we spend real effort, real time, into doing events and dungeons.
However, the harder we work, the less we are rewarded.
Bots however, cannot do dungeons, so why the rewards for dungeons are reduced and a 30 minute timer cap placed on them makes no sense to me.
“But you don’t need to get that gear because normal gear gives you the same stats!”
That is a comment I hear often. Guild Wars is a game without a carrot on a stick, much like Minecraft. That’s why people complain there’s no endgame, because the game doesn’t provide them with that direction.
So what do people do in games where they’ve (somewhat) finished? People will make goals for themselves to give themselves something to do, it lengthens their game experience. People in Skyrim mod their games, some people start a new building project in Minecraft, some people start in harder game mode, or some people try to drive that motorcycle to see how high it can go off a ramp in GTA. People create goals for themselves in games all the time, and there is nothing wrong with that.
However, Guild Wars offers these goals, but they are from two extremes with no intermediates.
It is either regular gear and stuff that you can just get from levelling up, or extreme time consuming frustrating unrealistic time sinks.
There needs to be an intermediate spread of things to do that isn’t crazy easy or crazy hard (gear, vanity items, goals) that can be reached in intervals. What is wrong with having something of medium difficulty and others slowly scaling up to being hard, really hard and then to legendary hard?
Once a player realizes he can finish one goal, he will try for a harder one and so fourth challenging himself to do better.
I think Anet has the wrong idea of making things too expensive and scarce because they think that making people work longer for them will increase the lifespan of the game. It likely won’t, because there are human limits to patience, attention span, and interest.
The game needs to sprinkle a bit of reward for a player’s effort to encourage him forwards, to know that all his effort isn’t completely for nothing, instead of punishing people for putting honest effort into something.
It doesn’t come from boredom, it comes from too many restrictions on what I want to do in game, and restricting a theme parked game where you’re “freely” supposed to be able to do things doesn’t make sense."