Guild Wars 2

No, you don’t LOVE this game. If you did you wouldn’t be doing your very best to turn it into every MMO out there.

Stop being so overly dramatic. I’ve seen devs get cut off mid-way by the publisher, being forced to release early and have their entire company shut down along with the servers supporting the game. You’re “emotionally fatigued” because you had one convention to go to? Consider how monumentally lazy every update of GW2 has become. You turned to grinding, because it’s the cheapest, most non-innovative method of churning out “content”.

I’ll believe the developers of GW2 love their game when I see dynamic events that matter, zerging in WvW fixed, world bosses made epic and so on. All I see is the next carrot-on-a-stick. That’s not passion, Sharp. You want to see developer passion, go see CD Project Red. You just turned your game into a generic MMO, in 2 years you’ll go Free-to-Play and then what? Will you still be preaching your love for GW2?

Also, negativity getting you down? People used to provide structured, extensive criticism. And then they got tired and started whining. Why? Because you never bothered to reply to a single post. You hide behind pathetic interviews and blog posts that refer to some version of GW2 none of us have ever played. If you want players to take you seriously, come out and say “yeah, this is fundamentally broken, we heard you so we’ll restructure our priorities and have an update for you guys. ETA 3 weeks.”

So spare me the drama. This game has been going downhill since the start of the year and Ascended Gear is the latest proof you have no desire to pursue innovation. Not because it’s hard to achieve or because it’s essential – because it’s a fracking gear grind, the same thing you said GW2 would never have. Now you have a gear-treadmill in a game whose strength was never to make people grind. You abandoned the strong points of GW2 (dynamic events, changing world, world-threatening antagonists, diversity in builds) and went for the tried-and-tested “Do X 300 times to get a new dress” or “collect Y 500 to get +1 health”.

I pity the designers of GW2. So much stunning, genius art, made redundant by gameplay that just doesn’t work in an MMO. Something your team refuses to admit to this day.

It’s always been a problem. It won’t go away. Wanna know why? Because it’s the only profitable activity in the game. If Arena.NET doesn’t make challenging, hardcore content with actual good rewards in the end, people will continue to do this. And it’s so mind-numbing easy.

It’s the developer’s fault zerg farming exists. Players do what earns them the biggest reward the fastest, it’s been like that forEVER. Going blindly against gamers’ mentality without a replacement system was stupid and the outcome was predictable.

Fixing the zerg should immediately be followed up by hard content that discourages it (PBAoE, tons of AoE that instantly wipes everyone standing in the circle). So long as Arena.NET continue their cult zeal to appease the casual masses who literally cannot be bothered to play the game and just leave their character afk on auto-attack, none of this will be changed.

Oh, sure, champion farming will get nerfed… and then people will move on to the next profitable area. This cycle will continue until:

1) Major design decisions are made and released.
2) An actual competitor comes and steals most of the playerbase.

And rightfully so.

Waiting for you to elaborate on how zergs are “epic”.

People need commanders to help them out in PvE? You just clump up and spam 1-5 like a pianist. Reckon there should be Login commanders to complement the PvE ones.

@Galtrix you can’t expect much from these kitten forums.

#Sergoros It’s impossible for me to get roflstomped in a duel because I play (used to play) Thief. The game mechanics are broken, that’s why companies usually do extensive tests on the core systems before shipping the game.

I’m trying to picture people who find challenge here playing through Dark Souls… A+ “Let’s play” material.

Btw people who are unhappy with Guild Wars 2 just stop playing and don’t bother with the forums. Most MMO players move between games and since GW2 is designed to be played in sessions, more often than not people just don’t get invested in the game enough to care about these threads. Yes, there are good critiques here who want a better experience, but they just get butchered by the Whiteknight Brotherhood.

#Charak I tried your advice and it was insufficiently painful. I, myself, prefer the tried-and-true wall between LS bits.

You needed proof for that? AP in this game are basically Paragon levels in Diablo. Numerical value that represents a colossal time-sink, not in any way related to skill level.

No, players don’t want to farm. I mean the sane part of the community who wishes to enjoy their time in GW2, not take it like a drug every day. They (myself included) want challenging content that places an emphasis on the very things they preached as “essential” all those years ago.

Farming is by far the laziest end-game “content” a developer can create. You do minimal amount of work and put an extreme TIME-GATE mechanic to extend that as much as possible. That’s right, I said time-gating – farming isn’t “work”, you’re not a hero or a better player for doing the same thing 5000 times. Are farmers to blame? Well, when all Arena.NET does with their glorified micro-updates is provide more incentives for people to indulge in the bane of MMO gaming, it’s hard to accuse the community in particular.

That’s not what GW2 should have been about. But it’s what GW2 is.

@kokiman Yeah dude, the other dungeons in this game are the epitome of difficulty in MMOs.

Did I just catch you having fun?

Why should I watch a GW2 tournament? The game is broken and boring to watch. When I feel like watching competitive gaming I tune in to SC2’s streamed tournaments or the Dota 2 International. GW2 is just a pathetic joke in terms of its pro scene (doesn’t exist).

This reminds me of the people who think the Onion News is real. Can’t facepalm hard enough.

Abyssmal Shadow.2785:

Empressium.5482:

NerfWars2, nuff said

Meanwhile, League of Nerfs..

This is the main problem with League of Legends, has been since mid-Season 2. Nerfing is the easy cop-out for the balance team, buffing things to match is the difficult part. Nerfing sacrifices the fun factor to maintain the game’s integrity. Though I’ve no idea why it’s done here, honestly – Guild Wars 2 isn’t even pretending to be competitive due to horrendous balancing. If Arena.NET buff all classes for PvE to Warrior level and, logically, make all content harder to match, that might push the combat into more engaging, strategic choices.

I love how every single medium armor in this game is a trenchcoat. Golly, I can’t get enough of ‘em! It’s the small things that count, man.

I can see it now.

Manager: “How do you want a competitive scene when the game is broken?”
Arena-NET: “But, but… you’re meant to have fun! If you don’t want the combat to be broken, just play with the other fun skills!”
Manager: “…”

Like, seriously, people are saying that balance is achieved because you’re not constrained to a single skill-set or class? What, you need to be tied to the chair and play Zerker warrior? People play it because it’s broken, the mentality isn’t gonna change when you sugar coat it, it’s gonna change when you FIX THE BROKEN COMBAT MECHANICS.

Simple- you go back to the drawing board and introduce support into the game. Simply scrapping the trinity without a new system in place is like taking the wheels off the AI in a racer and saying “we fixed rubberbanding”.

Guild Wars 2’s combat is shallow because you don’t make team-oriented strategy. Fine, you have “builds”, but you’re not building towards the success of your team – you just want to make sure that you don’t die and that you deal damage.

It ain’t gonna work by just nerfing numbers, the problem is deep. And for the people who are “using all their abilities tactically” – I press 3 buttons and I achieve the same result.

Greetings, gem store addicts,

Experience the Black Void Chest in light of our one-year anniversary! Each shard of our broken universe opened has a small chance of giving you a super-elite and massively skill-based Void skin for any of your weapons! Beware, though – opening this chest can delete any of your characters at random or, if you’re a daredevil type – IP ban you forever!

Celebrate with us as we roll out the 900th reskin of Lion’s Arch and give you a reward chest just for clicking on the .exe file! We’ll also be erecting statues of Trahearne all across Tyria so you never forget the hero of your personal story!

@Justdeifyme Do you… even know… what synergy means?! Initiating, CC-ing, peeling for the DPS-er, two skills that benefit each other and so on? Are we back on the trinity train? Do you know how many people want to see 2 teams of 5 whacking each other without purpose on the professional scene? Without class counter-picking, team comps and actual theorycrafting? ZERO?!

These discussions, man, they make me sad on a sunny afternoon.

@Esplen Apologies, I must not have been paying attention to the game. I didn’t realize there was support/damage/control in a game where bosses are CC-immune. Must have been doing something wrong in 40+ Fractals : – )

I wish I knew the intricacies of GW2’s combat as well as you. I mean I’ve farmed Fractals for 4 months but if a random troll is telling me there’s actual support in this game then heck, how can I argue.

@Justdeifyme Well obviously if random people on the Internet are telling you you’re a pedophile, it must be true, right? You deserve every bit of hateful remarks I can make just because you managed to twist my words into sheer stupidity.

No trinity doesn’t work in this game because there’s no support, everything is DPS which means that the higher the damage of a class, the more important that class is to PvE. Which, in turn, makes other classes obsolete.

No trinity doesn’t work in sPvP because there’s no synergy between classes. No synergy = no teamwork = no competitive play.

Resurrecting doesn’t work because the game doesn’t offer enough punishing mechanics to warrant Downed State. Therefore you either limit the amount of people actively able to resurrect a person at any given time to one, or you drastically reduce the amount of health a person has while in Downed State. Dying in GW2 results in you being transformed into a static turret.

If I wanted a WoW clone I’d have written “I want a WoW clone”. I want the mechanics above FIXED. I don’t care that you follow the whiteknight clan where you’re somehow entitled to rephrase every bit of criticism to “this game has no gear grind and trinity it sucks”.

@Justdeifyme, oh golly, another person telling me I want a WoW clone. You people are like the plague. Did I SAY I WANT THOSE THINGS BACK?! I said the systems GW2 has are unfinished and don’t work – which is a FACT because I’ve played GW2 for 10 months and you have to be the stupidest person on the planet to claim that any of the things I’ve mentioned above are well-executed.

If you people spent half the time you do telling others they should move to other games to actually propose healthy changes, these forums wouldn’t be such a massive trollfest.

I’ve said it before- new MMOs will borrow GW2’s ideas and polish them and they will be far more successful. From an innovative standpoint Arena.NET did a fantastic job, but they never improved upon their systems (no trinity, rezzing, underwhelming loot, zerging, world bosses etc) and as a result they still suck. Hopefully we see good competition in the future like EQ: Next so Arena.NET can actually do some major updates.

Going back to older MMOs after playing GW2 is a no-no. Going forward with new titles – more than likely for most players, unless serious work is done here. Here’s hoping your thread doesn’t get closed because some moderator didn’t bother to read past the title.

I’m glad people are spending so much money. It means Arena.NET can fund an actual good game.

GW2’s combat is super intense, the way the bosses are giant bullet-sponges with zero mechanics I mean… man, future of MMOs.

Only the most hardcore players can do all the daily achievements every day. Forget the E-sport scene, this is where true skill shines.

Exactly zero. Matches the commitment of the devs toward this title.

So from an epic dragon-slaying adventure we’ve reached grinding achievements to play dress-up dolls. You know, this game would make a killer Facebook app.

Ferguson.2157:

Insignya.8625:

In fact, the only part of GW2 that warrants skillful play is being a good WvW commander.

I would add that the “Forum” mini-game warrants skillful play as well.

Sadly true =D

People are trying to take Vayne seriously now? lmao

I am genuinely impressed…

that some people think legendaries in this game are an achievement. Also, calling grinding “work” is like calling in-game chat “hanging out”. It’s only mildly pathetic because of how hilarious it is.

In fact, the only part of GW2 that warrants skillful play is being a good WvW commander.

Yeah btw the “social side” of any game is defined by community content created outside that game’s social pages. So advertising your own game is not “social”, it’s pathetic to even deem it as such.

Hunzo.4509:

On the whole it’s amazingly balanced, yes there are issues that need fixed such as melee classes not being able to have the same kind of survivability in boss fights as ranged classes.

But on the whole yes the game is balanced imo.

What was the last balanced game you played? Minecraft?

Guild Wars 2 is balanced. No one’s forcing you to pick one class over another. In fact, picking a class is entirely optional. Also, if you don’t like the balance, you should quit – there are plenty of other games out there.

Am I doing it right?

Right, let’s call it quits, alright gentlemen? These forums are completely and 100% moronic. I don’t write threads to get in conflicts, I write them to help the people making the game.

Since no developer wants to even acknowledge the existence of criticism here, there’s no point in continuing. It’s just catering to forum warriors and I’m sure you folk have better things to do.

@pricer It’s hilarious when devs do reply and it’s just blatant trolling. If they are listening, they’re not showing it in any shape or form. Get with the times, Arena.NET, and look at how far ahead other devs are in terms of communicating with players. How the f are we supposed to discuss a blog post? On Facebook?

@DeathSyke Indeed, Guild Missions should have been expanded upon. And there are things like NPC sneak detection in the game, there was a Heart that needed you to do that. So they can pull off an infiltration guild mission, it’s just a lack of inspiration and effort. Warrior missions would be freaking cool but, as of now, the closest we have are “guild challenges”, which are only a challenge if your keyboard gets disconnected.

I think Wildstar will put a broader emphasis on that with the multiple character paths (Warrior, Explorer, Scientist, Settler) they have going. Devs are really passionate about that and it looks like they’re working pretty h@rd on (stupidest censoring ever) unique missions for each path.

@AntiGw heck man, that’s my two cents on the subject. If I were a gaming developer I’d ask you to change your name, but that’s unimportant.

DR would be a step in the right direction if GW2 wasn’t this grindy. As it is it’s just an annoying restriction. I would draw a comparison with Microsoft’s Xbone – they tried to force the digital market on us and failed, because it just screws over the consumer and doesn’t provide benefits because we’re not ready to go digital yet. Same with GW2, although on a much smaller scale – MMOs are still way too grindy, even GW2 has ludacris amounts of grind, despite it trying to innovate. As such, you can’t force DR to restrict bots when the consumer is largely affected by this decision. Well, you can, obviously Arena.NET have done that. I don’t think the MMO market is there yet in terms of innovation to pose these restrictions. Maybe in another two-three years we’ll see DR as something common and unobstructive.

@AntiGw yes? I did post a special paragraph in the thread you didn’t read. Farming respawning mobs is basically the current PvE in a nutshell. It should go away but GW2 isn’t doing a good job at it.

Sidenote, and this is nothing personal, shouldn’t you be banned for your name? I mean I sometimes forget these forums have the worst moderators ever, but still, it seems reasonable to ban someone who’s name is basically anti – the developer’s product.

@Mirta I tried swapping characters, will see if relogging works. Thanks!

@AntiGw People don’t want to stand in one place waiting for neutrals to spawn, because monsters tend to be equally rewarding in their respective “tier” of level and mats they give. DR doesn’t hurt the campers, it hurts the legitimate farmer who wants to get something done in GW2.

For example, I needed 100 Charged Lodestones and since there are 2 areas in the game where they drop, one of which is an instance, I chose to hunt Sparks. Now after roughly an hour of farming I would hit DR and I’d have to call it quits. It’s a contradicting mechanic which wouldn’t be a problem if the reward system didn’t suck this badly.

@Skugga thanks man, I really do appreciate it. The whole reason I started this thread is to show Arena.NET that online communities aren’t built the way they’re going about it. There’s a bunch of suggestions that people wrote additionally, I myself wrote a list in the comments, here’s hoping you share your opinion there as well.

Guild Wars 2 was a great concept, but the game itself is so severely lacking. If they were doing only these big patches every 3 months or so and the game was in its current state I’d be more understanding, I could say “well, they obviously don’t have the resources to support it”. But they’re pushing these pointless updates when they haven’t even made a suitable platform to support a lasting community.

This will be offtopic, but thanks for sticking to the topic. And even though these forums have the most biased moderators, I’m still hopeful someone out there from Arena.NET cares about these points enough.

Reds themselves can start a thread asking people what they like or don’t like in the game, have a Q&A Session or collect poll results. Lots of games have a system where they collect community feedback, like Planetside 2’s Road Map. And at this point it’s kinda necessary – Guild Wars 2’s following a path many don’t find worth it to follow anymore and a blog post won’t hold their interest for long because, again, it’s nothing specific.

In 2013 devs are expected to seep through community feedback and find what’s best. For that they create their own systems or borrow somebody else’s. It’s another major part of future-proofing a game, you can’t not have an established method of taking the good criticism out of the bad.

I’m fine with smart use of RNG, like what you see with the Fractal skins. Things I find dreadful are the chests and coffers, as well as the precursors. The latter just adds to the overall feel of pointlessness to playing Guild Wars 2 for a long time. If you can whoop out a Dusk from the Forge you’re essentially 3 months of grinding ahead. It adds to a painful discrepancy between committed players and people who won the GW2 lottery. And, you know, it’s another reason why hardcore folk just aren’t welcomed here. This doesn’t mean I want to grind nor that I find it to be an endgame, it’s just the only “progressive” thing the game offers me to do past level 80, so precursors break even that notion of character development.

Hah, I remember breaking an enchanted weapon in TERA. Man, I got genuinely scared, it was so sudden and frustrating. And yeah, I don’t play that many MMOs in general so I had no idea that possibility existed.

@Erasculio, it’s incredibly easy to fix the odds on accounts. They’re not gonna go and say “yeah we can blacklist whenever we want”. RNG is an algorithm, it can be modified for players and why shouldn’t it? If someone’s paying for gold with real money and loses it all in the Forge, he’s gonna buy more most likely. Of course, none of that is proven, but none of that is disproved either. When people are asking you straight questions and you’re kitten ing around copy-pasting stuff from the manifesto, then it’s only logical to assume you’re being dishonest.

@Safer Saviour, the Living Story was supposed to change the world. It didn’t. It was meant to bring an “expansion’s worth of content”. It didn’t. It was also meant to bring content both temporary and permanent. It didn’t. The vague responses from Arena.NET don’t just concern the Living Story and I’ve written about them in an old thread, “How 10 months changed my perspective”.

I’m dismissive of people who spend their entire life in this forum without bringing a single actual suggestion.

@Safer Saviour, ever watched a League patch preview? Let me know when you do. What Colin is doing is 100% pure marketing, he’s not going into specifics, he’s just saying “oh yeah we’ll do that some day”. I don’t expect you to understand me the way I don’t expect Vayne and Morrigan to not continue to quote me and spurn out even more pointless arguing that’s light years away from the topic. But hey, that’s how forum warriors work. Please, show me your online superiority, I’m lolled you still haven’t discussed a single suggestion from my original list.

Listen ,this thread has become pointless. You wanna get back on topic, do so. At this point it’s just a bunch of people quoting me endlessly. I gave you a list of suggestions but yeah, why bother reading those when you can see something opinionated of mine and write an essay about it.

They never fixed the RNG issue, it’s still there. It’s just marketed more cleverly. Do we know the percentage chance of getting a skin? Do we know if accounts aren’t blacklisted for RNG? Unless they make a thread about it, explaining everything people have been asking for months about RNG, I have no reason to believe they’re not just screwing us over in a more creative way.

When you lose touch with the community, you become just another sellout in the industry. That’s just it, twist the truth however you want, I’ve seen devs take an absurd amount of criticism and reinforce people’s respect, because they actually stood up for their game. But you’re not doing that, Arena.NET – you can’t even go in here and say “you’re wrong, we’ll have this and this, we haven’t forgotten the hardcore” or defend your game and tell me where I’m wrong.

Wanna know why I said Colin is not a gamer? Because developers who actually play their game talk in a different way – they answer the exact questions people want to ask and they’re not afraid to stand up if they think this is right. You? “OH, Guild Wars 2 can be that, it can be this, it may have an expansion, we could continue the living story, we might do something else…” A gamer dev, even if he angers the community, at least tells it what his plans are.

You can’t do that, so you let me and other people deal with pointless arguments, resorting to whining and complaining that should never have been the point of this thread. You know how this works – if you stay silent people will forget, they’ll stop caring about the forums because they’re pointless and you can continue with your vague promises and soulless marketing.

Guild Wars 2, to me, is not a bad game. It’s a disappointment.