Guild Wars 2

A long time ago, there was an MMO that advertised itself out there to be “the” casual player mmo. This mmo promised it would create content that would be designed for relaxing and open social gameplay, the ability to play with friends without having to, the ability to do dungeon runs that werent frustrating or tedious, a massive world vs world vs world pvp mode that encouraged thousands to play. Huge map wide raids were also a big deal in these casual event systems designed to help casual gamers play with other casual gamers.

It also introduced a level based pvp system entirley seperate from its main game with an entirely class-balance based focus on that pvp system.

That game also had a decent roleplaying community on at least 2 major servers prior to the introduction of mega-servers and a number of other new additions to the game.

It also promised that absoleutley no content in the game would be a tedious chore.

It lied.

GW2, What ever you promised to be, you need to keep it, screw this “1%” minority that are into e-sports, and raiding 24/7 this isnt WoW just abbandon that entirley and focus on the people that “do” care about the game, and “do” care about it surviving longer than 3 months.

GW2 was the first MMO SINCE World of Warcraft I could activly play for more than just a month, I felt a certain satisfaction in exploring the world, doing random questsa t my own pace and leisure, having the options to see Tyria at my own adventuring pace.

Now, I feel like the game wants me to rush into content, get my ascended mats, aquire legendaries, 5000 acheivement points minimum and alot more content thats just locked behind farming for content so that an kitten group of stowaways from other MMO’s can have their moment to shine.

Can we please, PLEASE go back to what MADE GW2 special in the first place.

Going forward, GW2 needs to abbandon this “challenging group content” kitten and “e-sport pvp ladder” system and just focus on what MADE GW2 special.

Its a game, people can play at their own leisure for fun, with nothing overly complicated about that at all.

Season 2 did this ALOT better than HoT did.

Going into Season 3 and future expansions, I would seriously hope A-net goes BACK to what made the games CORE gameplay special.

I want a game that isnt just another WoW clone, dont become another wow clone, A-net.

it’s MORE of a grind.

“Hi we’re Anet and we believe that our game should have minimal or no grind so that everyone can enjoy it!

We believe that only tiny, marginal improvements on stats for some armor/weapons will mean that nobody will be barred from any gameplay. So yeah sure, go ahead and grind out ascended and legendary stuff, but if you can’t afford the time to do that – don’t worry! Nobody will bar you from dungeons/raids/PvE/guilds/team roaming just because you have slightly lower armor stats than them!"

“Also, you can’t enjoy the Elite Spec you basically bought HoT for because we’ve locked that behind a load of HP grind too! Oh, and you’ll have to do it aaaalll over again for each of the 8 other Elite Specs. Enjoy!”

Doesn’t matter how small the difference is, to MMO players better gear is better gear. And if you don’t have the best gear, you’re not gonna be included. Because Anet created such a huge grind gap between exotic and ascended stuff, the casuals are paying the price. I can’t comment on official stats, but I’d imagine there’s a not-insignificant number of casual players who are entirely put off particularly after the implementation of HoT, myself included. I guess this is just a non-casual-friendly game anymore and I should find something else. Fallout 4 seems pretty good.

GW1 is the most solo friendly MMO I’ve ever played due to the henchmen-heroes, you can even run through some of the the elite missions after you finish.

In GW2 it was not the same, but most of the open world is still soloable, most the meta are quite easy with enough ppl. The dungeons don’t even provide you better gear, just different skins. Even the Ascended sets only provide slightly higher stats and they don’t just drop in elite dungeons. Overall, GW2 is a very casual friendly game as well. So the whole player base is mostly formed of casual players. Of course when HoT came out, they don’t like a lot of it. Sure most of the open world is still soloable, but you need to be much more careful, even normal mobs could kill you in secs if not careful, a lot of players don’t want to explore the world like that. Right now HoT is new, but after a while, people will move into new content, it would be a problem for the rest to get the HP/meta done. I don’t get why so many players say “It’s a MMO group up”

Before WOW, most of the MMO are 90%+ groups content, which is why they were all niche game. WOW made 50-60% of the open world soloable and became a huge success. Now even WOW has past its prime because people got tired of its group content, people demand quicker, easier games without a settled timer. I don’t think HoT is going to the right direction.

Chances are they will probably add agony into raids like they do with fractals. Also, maybe they will add something to ascended gear that we don’t know of yet.

Wait until the expansion drops to look over the changes then decide.

Nike.2631:

Astralporing.1957:

Maybe because people would rather like that content to be about skill. Yes, i know why raiders would prefer it that way – it lets them pretend to be skilled, when the real difficulty lies in a completely different category.
Grind is not challenge. It’s just boring.

And here I thought the genuinely skillful would relish the challenge of something that tests them to the utmost rather than being trivialized by having a higher tier of gear than it’s designed for.

We’ve already seen content scaled for exotic gear in a post-ascended world is not a challenge. It’s boring.

I want a fight that takes BOTH skill and preparation.

The ideal solution would be to scale down ascended gear to exotic/scale up exotic to ascended.

Ascended armor is simply too prohibitively expensive for it to be reasonable to expect people to experiment with different sets of it. It completely removes the element of playing around with your build to see how to approach things.

Customisation is fun, progression is not, and ascended gear ruins the former.

Preparation is only enjoyable when you have to think about it, i.e. tailoring your builds for the encounter based on your understanding of the mechanics involved. Just grinding objectively higher stat gear doesn’t do that. There’s no trade off to make to it, the trait system is interesting because in order to take one trait, you have to forego another in that spot, with ascended gear, you don’t end up with more of one stat at the expense of another, you just get more of it.

Nike.2631:

And here I thought the genuinely skillful would relish the challenge of something that tests them to the utmost rather than being trivialized by having a higher tier of gear than it’s designed for.

Sure. But i doubt they’d consider actually getting that gear an important part of said challenge. Because it really isn’t.

Nike.2631:

We’ve already seen content scaled for exotic gear in a post-ascended world is not a challenge. It’s boring.

Well, then there exist an obvious solution to both problems – make ascended easily obtainable.

Nike.2631:

I want a fight that takes BOTH skill and preparation.

Gearing up is not preparation. It’s just a grind gate.

That’s why in content that’s about skill (sPvP) all gear is made easily accessible to everyone.

This post is ridiculous, comparing challenging group content to JPs and not thinking “dealing lots of damage means reducing defensive stats cannot mean more challenge” is just weird…

Challenge has zero to do with stats. An enemy that has 1000 HP and deals 50 damage per hit is no more challenging than one that has 100HP and deals 5 damage per hit, so long as you can just slap on armor that mitigates ten times as much damage and weapons that deal ten times as much. Just upping stats does nothing to make a scenario more challenging. Challenge comes from tactics, figuring out how to avoid their attacks and how to bypass their defenses.

Really the best way for them to balance a “challenging encounter” in GW2 would be to design it so that all damage was based purely on attack coefficient (ie the base damage it does regardless of statting), so that someone in white armor would be dealing exactly as much damage as someone in Ascended, and it all comes down to player skill.

I haven’t bought HoT yet because it’s not out yet and I’m not interested in beta testing.

ArenaNet: I Just want to say I really don’t like Masteries. They provide core play mechanics to the maps we encounter right away making the first thing a player does when they come into HoT is to grind for masterys. In principle this goes against the philosophy behind GW2. Perhaps at the map entry point where players come in in the release version they will not feel like grind, but where we are coming into the first map in BWE#3 the need for gliding tier #1 gliding is a requirement right away to enjoy the map because the map was designed for gliding.

You’re free to disagree, the bottom line is as a long time player of this I’m not having fun. As a game developer I would want to know this. Having studied game design I am very forgiving when it comes to design, play mechanic balancing. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Masteries garbage, it works but it brings Gw2 a lot closer to traditional MMOs. It adds grind, removes fun and again just goes against what the original team behind GW2 had opened it would be and that’s very sad.

Based on what’s been seen and played so far I believe wholeheartedly GW2 HoT will be at least as bugged at launch as the core game was in 2012 if not more. I guess that means NCSoft is cracking the whip and forcing your team to ship the game before it’s really ready. I do hope this assessment is incorrect.

DistantStatic.6098:

MashMash.1645:

It’s also 3 weeks till launch, and a lot is broken. Combine that with the rush job on druids, and it’s looking sketchy. Maybe it’ll be amazing and everything will be fine. /sarcasm

This is why you shouldn’t pre-order

Exactly. Preordering is basically telling everone that it is ok to charge for beta testing(which was free all the time) and that people are stupid enough to buy your stuff despite lack of knowlegde about content and! Information what you need for said content. The first thing still kind of surprised me, the second fact was only a sad confirmation of what I already knew from other electronical devices like mobiles..

Nobody is asking to know everything about every detail but a general sketch is not asked for too much if you ask me. And no “Soon” “When it is ready” “We´re so excited!” are not release dates, not even blurry ones, but simply a candy coated way for saying that what they had was neither sufficient nor attractive enough to not be hanged at the next tree.

PopeUrban.2578:

If I remeber correctly, the fact that shortly after launch that you and all of us had several top tier sets for every conceivable situation was why they added ascended in the first place though, right?

Wrong. They added it, because people were asking for more content, and Anet at that time was unable to deliver. Gear grind (yes, they fully intended going hamster wheel with gear then, which is clear if you look at their posts from that time) was just a cheap substitute for introducing new zones, events, boss fights and dungeons. It was also a kneejerk panic reaction to the content locust leaving the game, that was most likely done without much of a forethought (because at the time they made it game was still fresh, and they didn’t have any meaningful data they could base it on yet).

I’ve already bought the expansion.

I’m posting because I am having a lot of difficulty convincing friends to do the same.

As a friend said just last evening, “I played Dark Age of Camelot all the way to ToA (Trials of Atlantis). You know what I liked about it? Level 50 remained the maximum level from release to the very present day. That’s 14 years of good solid gameplay. Each expansion was about content. It was about exploring vast worlds as large or ever larger than the original game. Player Crafted armor was how you got your armor, from Legendary Crafters and not Legendary Armor only found in an instance. You’re not selling me that this new content can be anything good. All you’re telling me is Guild Wars 2 is swinging into World of Warcraft territory with armor ceilings locking players out of content and content we’ll not be able to play because it was only made for those players who have it own their schedule to play this game. The master levels are just more levels tacked onto an already excessively high level cap. I want to be able to explore the world, camp a few creatures like Knights used to be in Darkness Falls. I want to walk out into a forest full of Ironwood trees not realizing they are aggressive mobs.”

He went on like this for some time. He wasn’t pleased with the new player experience because it lead to his wife coming to hate the game just as she was getting into it. I think the bottom line is that, for most people the “you’re locked out of content until…” model for making games is just dead. Everyone’s lived through it if you’ve played an MMO and it’s really just an excuse to keep someone playing. Ironically it seems to have the opposite effect. I can’t count how many times girl friends won’t join an MMO at all simply because of the hours and hours and hours they’d have to dump into the leveling process before they reach any sort of content.

I think what players are looking for now is more exploration, more Zelda style content, more vistas and exploration and generally more abilities that sync with using their “brain thing” instead of "press a button, any button, and eventually ‘win’ will happen.

If all of this seems bias and doesn’t really match up with what Guild Wars 2 is I wholly agree, but MMOs have always been abusive of players’ time. They’re designers are usually willing to blow off a huge portion of their subscribers to favor some rare few they’ve christened as the fair haired child. I think lately, with the economy so bad in real life, people really can’t tolerate wasting their time. Either something delivers on the content they are into or they’re just not even going to spare the time to be convinced they’ve not got the whole picture.

Kormeg.2469:

Well if you consider story quests to be gating, then would you think the same about the entire leveling process? Even before the NPE?

On the character mechanics and map accessibility department I considered GW2 acceptable in the start, even if it could’ve been slightly better. I don’t like the generic MMORPG experience with unlock quests or level requirements for game mechanics, GW2 had none of the first and half-decently minimal amount of the second. Once in reply to speculation of the trait or maybe NPE details being there from the start I made a post something like: I would’ve known to never love this game.
The gating (term I learned recently, I just called them restrictions before) is so jarring when things were taken away. Overall, current direction is not what I thought this game would ever be.

Last bit which reminds me: Oh does HoT ever look like a bundle of tacked on mechanics. Ow my sense of consistency.

This all would belong to another thread and I fear I have not much interest being the game direction is what it is. I really just wanted to tell anet, in case they even remotely care, that I don’t want to ever give them any money again. How would they know otherwise.

If you say no then why do you want a portal key so much
that’s what closed beta is work for free to find the bugs and glitches and any other errors
for the developers to help them out it’s not a play HOT early for fun ! like every one seem to think it is . i hope they get kicked out of beta for not /bugging stuff

And on that note i will prob DELETE the portal if i got it since i don’t like working for free
and can wait for the expansion

I came to this game based on what they stated prior to coming out with the game that equipment and gear would be easily attainable. You can say now that yes it is quite easy to get if you grind for countless ours for the mats to make them. I would have been fine if they add accended gear but through all means, especially Karma since that was supposed to be the big currency.
I have not played this game in a couple of months or so. Made a couple of accended weapons and stopped. I got tired of having to go out and just grind mats during the time I could play.
Is the gear needed, no it is not, however, I like to have my characters in the best gear. That is just the way I am. This game strayed away from what they said it would be. To those that like VP and think it is needed. Why did you get this game to begin with? You know from the start they would not have VP but bought it anyways. Makes no sense to me.

Subdue.5479:

Honestly, A.Net is going to take fire no matter what they do. They have a small but very vocal minority – you guys – complaining about vertical progression, and then they have a massive exodus of players leaving the game because they’ve got nothing left to accomplish after 3 weeks of playing.

I think they handled the situation very well. They released a tier of items to work towards for those who want to have something to strive for which does not give a boost large enough to obsolete the more accessible exotic gear.

All in all, good job A.Net.

Actually, I thought it was impressive how badly they messed up a situation that should have been very easy. It should have been very obvious to them before they released the game that legendaries were not enough, but they spent all their time making temporary minigames instead of enriching the world with quests for new skills, weapons, skins, guild upgrades and challenges. Then they panicked and took the easiest way out by releasing ugly armors with stat boost and place it firmly into grind territory, nullifying every principle they used to stand for. Yes, good job Anet, it was impressive how badly you managed what should have been a very simple formula for success.

Once again you guys are getting caught up in the minutia and semantics and narrow-focused specifics. Big picture: they promoted the game as being X (and in my opinion, they delivered what they promoted). But then they reversed course and changed the game into whatever the opposite of X is, which is something they’d specifically and explicitly said Guild Wars 2 wouldn’t be.

Thank you for posting this. I agree with this. I would prefer there was no vertical progression in the game. I don’t think that it makes this a better game.

Even if the game doesn’t technically require people to grind, many will feel that they have to, and will be forced to play content they don’t enjoy.

Its easy to understand why vertical progression is bad…

People who really like this game, enjoy doing “content” aven if there is not much of it.

For example i d love to be free to play fotm, WWW or just to run a pug casual arah 4 etc..

But i can t…..i need gold for ascended armor -.- so i m forced to do daily for laurels and farm dungeons in speedrun parties…..

Then farm world bosses for dragonite…..

I need to grind to prepare to have fun….and the worst thing is that i need to grind to do the same exact stuff i used to do if i want to mantain my status quo.

I didn t gain anything by the introduction of vertical progression i just lost a lot of fun.

I think introducing ascended armour was a totally pointless exercise and a waste of the devs time.

They would have been much better introducing Legendary armour instead…same stats as exotic but a awesome skin, a slot for everything (infusions, rune etc…) and each legendary piece changeable to whatever stats you wanted outside of combat.

Everyone would have wanted legendary armour, very few people want ascended armour…

The bulk of the complaining about ascended has less to do with the actual stat increase (which does matter if you’re into WvW or min/maxing) but to do with the fact that Anet spend 5 years pimping their game as being one without gear progression or grind for gear.

I’m too lazy to look for the quote, but in essence, it was that everyone, including casuals would have the BiS gear at level 80. Further gear progression would be purely cosmetic.

Ascended is a blatant “kitten you” to every person who bought the game with that ideal in mind.

Raf.1078:

Kevan.8912:

Raf.1078:

If you aren’t having fun, go play or do something else.

every time the same words.

my opinion: no. for now, it’s more disappointment for recent changes than fun. so yes…no gw2 on my ssd until a miracle occurs.

Apparently the game not residing on your hard drive doesn’t keep you from the forums though, eh?

Why should it?

People that are not playing at the moment or have removed it from their hard drive are still customers they still have active accounts.

They may even have an interest in the game even if it’s just hoping things will improve.

I see that OP made this post fast and under influence of feelings. Will comment some.

“I’m getting annoyed by people who say they want instant armor, instant ascendeds, instant legendaries, instant gold, instant attention for their little worlds, in their little minds where they’ll seemingly never will be happy”

I’m getting annoyed with such generalization. Ppl doesn’t want anything instant, they want time/reward ratio to be acceptable. IMO it’s awesome for exotics as BiS stat gear and for legendary as status skin. I was happy. But now game is moving grind direction and I have concerns about it. Why my opinion is worse that yours ?

“A RPG game is not a grind, but you’ll have to work for it. "
Absolutely agree, see my first comment.

“I have played computer games for about 30 years now.”
Pretty much same. But I don’t think that opinion of ppl who play less is irrelevant.

“Nowadays games, including Guild Wars, can deliver a 3D simulated environment, on the fly, with 100’s, 10.000’s and even 1.000.000’s of people playing it. People don’t seem to care about the programming, the infrastruture and the effort which has to come together”
As a software developer I’d say that most processes are already working and optimized. You are not inventing every time you build new product. It’s still a complex technical problem but it’s not a god level solution. Gameplay design and QoL is more important IMO.

“just because they paid 50 euro’s/dollars and therefore they expect they are (the) boss.
I will tell you you are NOT! Even though I spend quite some money on this game I’m happy. Happy I got hundreds of people working their kitten off to make me able to play a luxury computer game. I’m happy people thought of it and build it. …”
Well. What can I say. It’s always good to appreciate dev’s work. I was also buying gems to support them (not anymore though until they’ll fix current grind issues at least at some extent). If you paid $50 for product that is not as it was advertised than you are not appreciating your own time/money. If you cannot respect yourself I doubt you can respect others. Nobody is trying to be a boss but everybody wants to play game they paid for and raising concerns if this has tendency to change.

“Just for all the instant people. Please just go and add some water and become people. Understand you are playing a RPG and you’ll never be first, cause there is always somebody who’s more fanatic and more dedicated to paying for things then you’ll be, in the 30 minutes it took you to read thispost or write your post someone else advanced a little furter ahead of you.”
Nobody wants to be first (with exclusions of course). Ppl want some QoL in game that is getting reduced. From where did you get this “being first” approach ? And btw please a little bit more respect to other ppl as you do for ANET devs.

“I’ll stay, because I like Guild Wars 2 -period-
To the whole crew of Guild Wars 2:
Thank you for giving me a nice game with so many interesting details. Thank you for the effort you put in to make this work. Thank you for making my life a bit bigger.
Thank you -period-”
Agree almost on everything here. I log in less often now but I’ll return when you’ll make latest changes more balanced. Please work with us on feedback and make this game even better. Don’t just go easy grind way. But in general your game is great.

“And maybe, just maybe in those 10 years of chopping wood and mining iron and crafting which lie ahead:
I’ll eventually hope to get my other legendaries and all needed ascended, legendary or godly items for my 9 characters…. If that is what I want…. As long as I’ll be enjoying it.”
I’m happy for you man. Just don’t forget that there is real life outside and you should enjoy it too. Wish you all the best.

Okay, this threads at 4 pages now within an hour, the longer they let this thread go on with out an official response debunking this shows the true credibility of Anet.

Aedelric.1287:

Yes Guild Wars 2 is a lot of fun, it has some fantastic moments.

Trail blazing across Southsun and setting up outposts.

Super Adventure Box world 1.

Travelling up to Zephyr Sanctum for the first time.

First Wintersday & Halloween.

Guild Wars has some exceptional and memorable moments just from the living story alone and judging from that we will likely have many more to come.

But I guess your definition of fun is different to mine Kaleban. When you say fun you talk about loot drops and class balance, if that is all that is fun to you then you might as well be playing a spreadsheet.

Class balance is necessary for well done competitive play, whether WvW or PvP, and so is inherent to the “fun factor” that makes players feel like they were victorious over an enemy, rather than just roflstomping an Ele with a Warrior because of a balance system that is extremely out of whack.

Loot in an MMO is also part of the fun factor, but how its handled is extremely important. The thrill of beating a big boss through strategy and tactics, and seeing that rare drop that you’ve been questing for is all sorts more epic and involving than dungeon grinding and “stacking” to exploit mob AI, after which you purchase your “epic lewts” with yet another inexplicable currency.

The point is, an MMO that was billed as dynamic and diverse with changing gameplay cannot have said gameplay (and fun factor) defined by “moments.” The first time you went up Zephyr Sanctum, awesome right? How about after your 1000th run of Sanctum Sprint? Or wow, can you believe the tower in Kessex Hills, how cool right? And after how many runs through the same end mini dungeon at the top without getting any of the tri-color key parts does it become a joke?

MMOs need to have fun and engaging gameplay ALL the time, which is why many have various avenues of PvP that cater to all sorts of builds. Capture and Hold plays to a few professions’ strengths, but not to most, so that format is dominated by those builds. WvW favors AoE and zerg tactics, which is why builds never run minions and Rangers are especially at a disadvantage.

So no, I don’t want to play a spreadsheet, that’s the point. But due to ANet’s increasing focus on grinding treadmills (Ascended and the potential future release of Legendary armors and trinkets, the repetitive title and achievement grinding, dailies and monthlies, etc.) they’re forcing the playerbase to also focus on these aspects, creating a game environment that is more like a 9 to 5 job rather than a fun diversion.

My whole deal is I really like the GW lore, the great art design, and even the look and feel of my beloved Elementalist. Problem is that its getting to the point where that is not enough to keep my interest anymore, and adding stuff to the gem shop or yet another 2 week LS release with Scarlet just isn’t cutting it. I hope ANet gets back to injecting fun into their games, and take a page from GW1, where everyone was competitive at level 20 with collector gear in PvE, but grinded for aesthetics. Ascended items were/are a huge mistake, and really detract from what the focus of GW2 should have been. Instead of spending resources on creating the Ascended category, ANet should have been adding in more dynamic events and adjusting rewards for areas not frequently traveled, which would give players something to do for fun, rather than just grind treadmill for the next tier of power.

imsoenthused.1634:

“I don’t have any complaints, so anybody else’s complaints are false or have no relevance, and you all are bad people/spoiled children for voicing them.”

^I made a TLDR for you OP

You sir, deserve a plus 1 for that.. and a kiss x

imsoenthused.1634:

“I don’t have any complaints, so anybody else’s complaints are false or have no relevance, and you all are bad people/spoiled children for voicing them.”

^I made a TLDR for you OP

Thanks, save me quite the read.

Lord Kuru.3685:

GW2’s like real life where you have a job (grinding) to support your actual interests (whatever you do with what you buy from grinding)?

Imagine a game in which we just did stuff because we thought it was fun, and got rewarded for whatever that might be in cool and interesting ways. It would be like having a job doing what you love, instead of work.

But that’s ridiculous, right? Anyway, no time to hang out here at the water cooler, I have to get back to grinding for ascended armor…