Guild Wars 2

Vayne.8563:

I don’t like what WoW did to the MMO industry. It’s very success took the genre in a direction I don’t like for years, because everyone copied it. All I had to choose from WoW and a bunch of other WOWs.

You, as a GW2 supporter, don’t like that WoW made MMOs more accessible? I’m somewhat confused here. Because that’s what it did to the industry. It pretty much copied EverQuest and tweaked it here and there but its largest contribution to the MMO scene back then was that it was far more casual than any of its competitors.

Vayne.8563:

You can pretend everyone likes WoW

I literally never said that.

Vayne.8563:

but that wouldn’t explain the pages on the net dedicated to WoW hate

GW2 has pages of hate dedicated to it too. Your point is what exactly?

I get it. You hate WoW. You believe it to be some sort of curse that is the sole reason for other games of the genre to not succeed. I’m not that big of a fan of it either, not since WOTLK ended, but I certainly won’t blame it when other games I was hopeful about (GW2, Wildstar, ArchAge, ESO) fail to deliver and fall short of their own promises and marketing hype.

Vayne, I have to ask…

Did WoW shoot your dog or something?

All throughout the thread you’ve been desperately trying to prove that it’s a bad game and in the process made statements that were hilariously untrue. Like how big of an influence the cash shop has or how it only retains the player numbers it does because of advertising. You seem to know nothing about the game.

Let me tell you, a lot of WoW players heard about GW2. A significant amount have played it even. The mmo-champion.com forum, the go-to site for WoW related news and discussions, has an entire section dedicated to this game.

If GW2 was the gaming heaven you make it out to be, trust me, only the most staunch Blizzard supporters would stay with WoW. But no matter how much folk parrot that the entire game is end-game in GW2, it still won’t make the lack of content any better. If in WoW the entire leveling process consisted of questing in Kalimdor and then the end-game would be repeating those quests, not many would pay the subscription price for more than a couple months.

Which is what happened with GW2. It launched with great hype, a lot of people bought it but then once it became obvious that you’ll be repeating the same (albeit wonderful) content ad nauseum both while you level and after you leveled with minimal rewards to boot, the players started dropping off.

That’s why the grind is so much more obvious and painful here. The only permanent zones added were Southsun Cove and Dry Top. Other than those, we’ve been killing the exact same dredges, giants, risens, sons of svanir, flame legion charrs and what not in the exact same zones for the past three years. With all of them having a rather similar and largely worthless loot table.

If this is how no grind looks like then I’d like to ask Arenanet to give us some grind, please.

Ayrilana.1396:

My level 3 has had 3 choices all of which were doable. I bought the account a little over a week ago so that’s about 8 straight days.

So I should file a bug report for getting Harathi Highlands at level 30?

/edit

Something also came to mind. You don’t unlock the asura gates until something like 18 with this new NPE nonsense. So can’t exactly travel to other low level areas unless you strip naked and drag yourself across high level zones with multiple deaths. Are you supposed to get, let’s say, Caledon Forest events at level ten as a charr?

/edit /edit

The second example I haven’t experienced myself but a friend of mine did. Asked them just now to make sure I remembered correctly. We started together, both as charrs, but I leveled somewhat quicker and when I suggested that we look at the dailies and see what we can do she did indeed have a task in the Sylvari area. Her character was around ten. Most likely thirteen. I apologize but neither of us can recall the exact number.

If that’s not a bug, it should be looked at. As for my example, if getting Harathi Highlands at level 30 isn’t intended, I’ll definitely submit a bug report next time something like that comes up.

Assumed it was normal, given how trait unlocks function the same nonsensical way. As in directing you towards exploring areas way above the level where you get access to the trait slot. Or sending you off to fights champions that you can’t possibly solo or even duo at that point.

I’m going off-topic here but good grief… the NPE is bad.

Ayrilana.1396:

The daily is based on the highest level character on their account. New players will not get anything for high level maps until they themselves are high level on a character.

That is either false or the algorithm is bugged. I purchased a brand new account around Christmas, deciding that I want to give the game another chance with a completely fresh start. My first and so far only character on this account has, multiple times, received daily objectives in zones that are above its level.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

Loiterer.4235:

Killthehealersffs.8940:

/Log in
/push ’’O’’
/go ’’Others’’ and the ’’Minis’’
/count 182

/go in ‘’Gem Store ’’ section
/count 10

Bored to look in the Wiki about limited pets from the Achivement-2week stories or the Limited edition Gem store sale .

“Too bored to look. Will just throw out random data.”

That is a great way to win a debate.

Hey !
I tried !
(But still in the Ah version there are 182 … did i calculate wrong ?)
Atleast i dont have to pay 15 euro per months (to access the servers) + the real money in the Store :P
But rather farm some dungeons if i need to , and not drop a single penny to the company (uneployed) :P

I’m not entirely sure but the AH listing might not include items that were/are bind on pick-up because you wouldn’t be able to list them anyway.

Your reasoning of grinding gold is sound but don’t forget that for that to happen, Arenanet has to rope in others to pay your share. Which was always my main issue with games that don’t have a subscription. Paying 15 dollars or 13 euros a month and getting access to 99% of the content comes out far cheaper than paying the same amount for a single cosmetic armour set.

In essence, the F2P and B2P model mainly appeals to those who can’t pay and those who can pay an obscure amount. The average user will either end up grinding too much or overspending to acquire the same amount of content that they get from a subscription game.

The gaming market shows that it’s viable model but to say that WoW depends on its cash shop as an argument for GW2’s own cash shop is such a bizarre statement that I have to question whether Vayne was simply trolling.

Killthehealersffs.8940:

/Log in
/push ’’O’’
/go ’’Others’’ and the ’’Minis’’
/count 182

/go in ‘’Gem Store ’’ section
/count 10

Bored to look in the Wiki about limited pets from the Achivement-2week stories or the Limited edition Gem store sale .

“Too bored to look. Will just throw out random data.”

That is a great way to win a debate.

Gem Shop – 224

Set 1 Pack – 54
Set 2 Pack – 46
Set 3 Pack – 49
Black Lion Chest – 5
Southsun Crate – 2
Consortium Chest – 3
Other – 65

Promotions – 7

Collector’s Edition – 1
Hall of Monuments – 4
PvP / Giveaway – 2
Birthday Gift – 1

Game – 50 (actually 38)

Mystic Forge – 17
Laurels – 8
Boss Loot – 3
Guild Mission – 3
Events – 16
Achievements – 3

Keep in mind that for the Mystic Forge ones to work, you need to melt pets that DO come from the gem shop with the exception of the Winterday toys (5) so in theory the number is 50, in practice it’s 38.

Vayne.8563:

I think WoW depends more heavily on the cash shop than you think

…what?

There are 431 mounts if we don’t count the retired and thus unobtainable ones. 9 of those come from the cash shop. 3 from promotions. 5 from the recruit-a-friend program. 17 from the trading card game which has been discontinued a while ago.

That means that if you don’t wish to pay, you can earn 397 mounts. 402 mounts if the recruit-a-friend program is available in your country.

There are 692 mini pets if we don’t count the retired and thus unobtainable ones. 15 of those comes from the cash shop. 35 from promotions. 4 from the recruit-a-friend program. 15 from the trading card game.

That means that if you don’t wish to pay, have never attended any Blizzard events and have never participated in any promotion, you can collect 638 pets. 642 if the recruit-a-friend program is available in your country.

So how many mini pets come from the gem store as opposed to the game in GW2?

/edit – forgot about some pets

Gehenna.3625:

I think a person can be more forgiving to flaws in a game when the game itself offers what you need from it. Even if they fixed the ranger issues, whatever they all may be, I think you might find that it just clears the path to the next annoyance you haven’t dealt with. But that’s just my idea, I don’t know how you feel about that yourself.

That is true. In fact, I just came after a rather long break. A year and a couple of months. Maybe even a year and a half. Haven’t been counting. While I have achieved great many things, at the end there I was with multiple level 80 characters and not much to do with them.

The ranger was my main initially so the lack of fixes narrowed down its viability and my participation in the different kinds of content even further.

Gehenna.3625:

The Wammo became the laughing stock at some point. The dual class system of GW1 was a rich feeding ground for imbalance but at least classes were about something and Anet did do a lot there to try to balance it. Even to the point of bringing in PvE only skills and making PvP and PvE versions of the same skill.

I applaud them as well for that and continue to make subtle jabs at Blizzard on the WoW forum as the balance cycle seems to mainly shift around the problem of the devs being determined to juggle the same set of skills in PvP and PvE.

As I mentioned, they’re not the epitome of class balance but it has to be said that I haven’t seen something as bad the GW2 ranger since pre-Zul’Gurub days when the survival hunter’s top tier skill was a DoT that did less damage than another DoT that they got at lower levels.

Lacerate / 2004 – 2005 / never forget

Arenanet did a great job by breaking up the more problematic skills into PvE and PvP versions but then I don’t know whappened. The fact that ranger pets still can’t reliably attack moving targets after three years + beta is… mindblowing.

Vayne.8563:

Ranger works fine for a whole lot of people. I know people who love their rangers and play them all the time. They run dungeons with them, do open world events with them, even PvP and WvW with them.

So maybe assuming the profession is unplayable is a gross exaggeration.

I used to love my ranger but then as I started spending more and more time on other characters as a consequence of leveling alts with friends, I realized that to love the ranger I had to make a lot of compromises. Something that I don’t need to do on other classes and at this point the only classes I haven’t yet played are the warrior and the necromancer.

It’s an amazing class IF you avoid dungeons, avoid fractals, trait either into the beastmaster line to have somewhat viable pets or into nature magic to act as a buff bot, don’t use their signature weapon outside of PvP, accept that you’ll spend more time in melee range than not, accept that even beastmaster traited pets will spend more time being dead than not, resign to the fact that several achievements are either uncompletable or made extremely hard because the pets can’t be stowed permanently and don’t bother with jumping puzzles that have enemies in them as the pets will magically port to those then engage them at the most inopportune times thus constantly keeping you in combat or suprise putting you in combat mid-jump.

I can do dungeons but my class is the least desired next to engineers so unless I get some friends together who don’t mind being kitten with a ranger in the team, I won’t be running a lot of them.

My class’ core mechanic is utterly unviable unless I pick specific traits. At least 30% of my DPS is tied to an NPC companion with laggy controls, buggy AI and the inability to stay alive for more than three seconds in an AoE. Which is very unfortunate because this game has more AoE than Twilight vampires have glitter on them. My pet can not be stowed permanently.

I could go on but I’m sure you get what I’m trying to say. The essence of playing a ranger is learning to work around an inordinate amount of bugs or design flaws. Whatever you wish to categorize them as. That’s not fine.

/edit

nGumball.1283:

In many games, there are classes that aren’t played at all. Do you know why? because they are not viable in PvE or PvP and that includes big titles like WoW.

Name one class that isn’t played at all in WoW. I’m waiting.

Blizzard isn’t the epitome of class balance but they’re doing a far better job since WOTLK than Arenanet did in this game or its prequel. (Wammo, anyone?)

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Darkness.9732:

Endgame is quitting this game for me. They haven t fixed ranger after 2 years and half.
No future guys no future

Other games haven’t fixed stuff in over 10 years, and those games still have a future.

There’s a difference between not fixing some minor bug and not fixing an entire class.

Sylv.5324:

You say, ‘work for validation’, but when you’re a kitten , just being able to wake up every morning, sit up, or hold a controller for a half hour is work. You are asking those who are suffering to prioritise what you, a healthy person, feel validates you.

Because I believe that one should always strive for more regardless of their current predicament, that must mean I’m healthy and know nothing about the difficulties an ill and/or disabled person has to face. Hmm.

I have made an error of judgement and as such I apologize for commenting on this thread. Please feel free to disregard my previous two posts. I wish you all the best.

Vayne.8563:

You don’t necessarily say that life sucks and escape into a video game. If the video game gives you relief from pain, of course you’re going to do it. If you find something else that gives you relief from pain you might do that instead…or you might not.

But being judgmental and that’s what this is, doesn’t help anyone. The way Chicken came across was judgmental and crass.

Maybe communications isn’t his/her strong point, which does happen. But telling people they shouldn’t react to someone who offends them is relatively pointless.

Offense is a two-way street. One party needs to state something that could be interpreted as offensive and the other party has to interpret it that way then get offended. If someone doesn’t think that what chicken said applies to them then why would they get offended?

Ultimately, it comes down to the game being an option but ideally not the only option. It’s wonderful that the OP and other commenters have found enjoyment in GW2 and I hope that they can find enjoyment in other things as well. Tyria, while no doubt beautiful, can never be a substitute for Earth and friends gained within the boundaries of internet anonymity aren’t quite the same as friends who you can reach out to in real life. No maliciousness intended.

As a sidenote, anyone quoting this please spare me the very predictable “you don’t know until you walk in their shoes” comment. I don’t believe my medical history is relevant in this discussion but be assured that it’s long with no cure for any of it. I speak from experience when I say that one should never settle for a virtual reality but use it as a spring board and, as chicken had put it, keep leveling up in real life as well.

/edit

The poster above me is a great example of what I’m trying to say.

Thank you, Aethgar!

Aethgar.1784:

Since we’re sharing… I used to live in another game when I was younger and unemployed. And I won’t regret the great times I had there.
But today, now, I’m a 34 yr old student about to defend her PhD early summer. I have a fourteen month old son who’s home with me about half the week (thank everything for daycare the other half or I’d get nothing done ever!)

munkiman.3068:

Vayne.8563:

Well-founded or not, it’s an opinion. I have full ascended items on three characters and I’ll never have to grind on those characters again. Not for gear.

I only take issue with this, when it comes to gear in the game, in general. If stat or content changes drastically enough, you might want to re-gear a toon or two. This is where i fall on the entire gear grind deal. I think they’d do well to get the system closer to gear having a base stat (or just a skin, mostly) and by swapping out the insignia you could change the stats. That’s pretty much the main reason i don’t bother all that much with ascended, it’s just too crazy if i want to change stats.

This is my biggest issue as well. In the past I contemplated getting ascended for at least my main but then I realized that I have three sets of gear just for that character alone, based on what kind of activity I want to participate in. That doesn’t even count the times I had to throw out an entire set and get something else due to gear changes Anet did like nerfing critical damage or introducing new stat combinations that turned out to be better for the role I crafted the previous set for.

Considering the time and money that goes into obtaining a full set of ascended gear, it should allow you to swap its stats just like a legendary does. Perhaps tie that ability to a small gold and/or material sink.

Currently, getting ascended is simply not worth it even though Arenanet intended it to be the traditional end-game goal that allegedly so many people were wishing for. It costs too much, locks you into one stat combination and is only marginally better than exotic gear.

/edit – typo

The hate directed at chickenooble makes me think that a lot of people here suffer from a severe case of entitlement more than anything else. He (excuse me if you’re a she, chicken) didn’t call anyone lazy or said that you lot shouldn’t play video games but proposed that perhaps you could do something other than play video games every now and then so you don’t pour the entirety of your remaining life into a virtual reality. Preposterous, I know.

It doesn’t have to be work, much less paid work. Anything will do. Throwing in the towel and saying that real life sucks so much that you might as well just escape into Tyria is doing yourself a disservice. You’re a human. You were born as a member of a species that conquered this planet and then some. We rose to the peak of the food chain by being clever and not by being strong. Physical limitations shouldn’t mean an end of a life, much less an end of ambitions. Especially not in this age.

Do you already pursue goals unrelated to gaming? Then congratulations, chickenooble’s comment does not pertain to you and as such you have no reason to be outraged and type out your entire medical history.

I know that gaming is a wonderful escapism but escapism should never be the be-all and end-all of one’s own life.

The grind in this game is both optional and mandatory. Why? Because you CAN choose not to aim for anything that requires grinding but that means you’re left with WvWvW, EotM, Conquest and jumping puzzles. That’s it. Everything else from cosmetics and high-end gear to crafting and events require a lot of grinding. Excessive amounts in many cases. Grinding that, by the way, you get punished for through the diminishing returns system.

It’s optional but unless you love 3D platforming or PvP, the game has very little content to offer that’s not locked behind grinding.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Loiterer.4235:

Calling players emotionally unstable teenagers for their opinion and telling them that for what their word is worth, they might as well pack up and go back to that other game? Not the best idea.

Rewritten that part. Having studied psychology, I believe this is an important aspect worth mentioning in the context, but I tried to make it more neutral now.

Thank you!

It looks much more professional now. Yes, it’s subjective to a degree but since humans are subjective I don’t think it would be fair to demand a completely objective list. While I know that some players fit the description you rewrote, generalising leaves a bad taste in your audience’s mouth and alienates them very quickly.

Keep on keeping on!

Tao.5096:

Don’t be a hypocrite, really.

Tao.5096:

I find it obviously being a hypocrite, whenever someone does point random 3* “good” parts of something, and make 10+ negative ones.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

The writing for the LS is subpar which bothers me because the lore content in the base game is amazing. We got an immersive world and personal questline with memorable characters then came the living story that introduced an NPC team so cliche I’m suprised there isn’t yet a Hollywood movie in production about them.

The social outcast? Check.
Homosexual couple? Check.
Inspirational disability? Check.
Single parent household? Check.
Interracial(species) relationship? Check.
Ragtag band winning against all odds? Check.

It’s like they went on tvtropes.com and picked out every major trope that could be crammed into this ordeal.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Because obviously, the game died because of absence of local equivalents of mounts, dueling and GvG, and not because of global issues with poor management, buggy coding, stale boring grindy gameplay, outdated graphics and so on…

But as you can see, according to financial reports, GW2 is going quite well for a 2 year old B2P game.

We have no idea how GW2 is doing. We do know how many accounts there are but it hasn’t been published how many of those are still active. It certainly does better than the game I mentioned but that’s partly due to its payment model. People are willing to be more patient when they’re not forced to pay monthly for what they perceive as a poor product.

Not saying GW2 is a poor product, mind you. I find it better now than how it was when I left, thanks to additions like skin collection, account bound currencies and permanent LS.

But no, that other game hasn’t only died due to poor management, bugs and stale gameplay. We could even say that after two years of no substantial changes, GW2’s gameplay boils down to a stale berserker geared dodge parade. Most MMOs suffer from those issues (lack of innovations seems to have become a staple of the genre, in fact) and yet they chug along well enough, retaining a decent population and making a nice profit for years to come. None ever reaches WoW levels but rarely due they fall from grace as hard as this one did.

I’ve been there from the start. Saw countless potential players getting chased away because not just the rabid defenders but the developers themselves seemed to hold the view “If you don’t like something, maybe you should go back to that other game.” and so people did. It was a ghost town by the third month.

This game has a suprisingly good community. Let’s not ruin that with “if you think this is a good idea, you’re unsuccessful in your life and are trying to compensate for it in the game” kind of nonsense. Take out such personal jabs from your posts and then we’ll have a nice overview, even if it’s a subjective one.

Anyandrell.6238:

and whip (new weapon) for ranged

Simon Belmont in Guild Wars?

I like it.

I run around with a hammer guardian and hum songs about John Henry.

I remember a community lashing out at anyone who dared suggest that they would like to see some features that worked in other games or didn’t quite agree with all of the developers’ decisions. Those people not only defended the game from every criticism but openly scorned other products of the same genre. Told others to go back where they came from as the game has no need of ungrateful whingers.

What did their valiant fight amounted to?

Their beloved game had to go through a server merge four months after launch, the world became a ghost town, employees were fired left and right, important figureheads left, development halted down to a snail’s pace and now the whole project is shaping up to be a bigger failure than SWTORtanic.

Calling players emotionally unstable teenagers for their opinion and telling them that for what their word is worth, they might as well pack up and go back to that other game? Not the best idea.

Sir Pounce A Lot

Whoever snatched that from me, I salute them for being a fellow Anders fan.

Joined the game with a friend and both of us fell in love with the charr. A thief and a guardian, respectively. I do believe we make a lovely team.

Sometimes I post on the WoW forums and then inevitably bear witness to the failure that their whole MVP (Most Valuable Player) schtick is.

People who are just as clueless, biased and intellectually stunted as their fellow commenters parade around with green coloured text either attempting and not succeeding to be humorous or going on the defensive and telling others off for suggesting that Blizzard might have made a mistake. The latter is interpreted by the company as being neutral. Of course.

There are always those who do those without any prompting but at least a healthy community can disregard them. As soon as they are given official endorsement, they feel validated and unfortunately on some level that does mean their drivel is validated whether those in power intended such an outcome or not.

If there’s one thing no forum and generally speaking no self-respecting company or organisation needs are clueless schnitzels eager for a position of illusory power.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Are you new to the game? Are you someone with experience in traditional MMO’s? If so, it’s possible that you may be approaching the game as you would another MMO, in which defense is largely passive (i.e., your armor and dice rolls for things like block and dodge).

GW2 defense is largely active. In addition to the active dodges that all characters have, Guardians have blocks, reflection, blinds, protection, etc. that all have to be activated at the right time.

I did play once but quit a long time ago and only now have come back so the system isn’t entirely new to me. Also experienced both the WoW and the Wildstar kind of combat but at the end of the day it never mattered much as due to certain physical limitations I’m a clicker and a keyboard turner.

I’ll always be behind the curve.

That being said, I didn’t mean to complain but merely tried and seemingly failed to illustrate with a bit of sarcasm that there’s no fair measure of difficulty as it’s a very subjective matter.

What the OP judges to be insultingly easy, some will find too difficult or a proper challenge thus the complaint “game is for kids” is not only extrapolated but also somewhat redundant.

I started a lil’ charr guardian. Got her to level fifteen. After six deaths and a dozen or so downed states which almost ended in death. How do I activate this secret faceroll mode the OP mentions?

I don’t mind the lack of mounts with the existence of portal points but I could see them being implemented as a cosmetic only item, not granting the player anything other than looking snazzy.