Guild Wars 2

I believe I’m running into this system just through normal gameplay and, if it exists and is implemented the way it seems to be, I just don’t understand it. It’s a great idea to make a game without the grind of a traditional MMO. That was one of the things that got me to try GW2. Except I’m not even at max level and this game is full of grinding. I finish a zone and I’m literally 5 levels below the next one so I have to grind events over and over. Or I have to go grind out crafting materials. Once I’m done leveling, what activities are going to generate any income for the repair and travel gold sinks? More farming, I guess. There won’t be daily quests or whatever, I’ll just have to run circuit of events.

It’s great that there is something going on behind the scenes to catch botters, but this anti-farming system in a game which requires farming is just punishing players. I’ve seen the same bots automating the same events over several days, despite me reporting them. They are probably still doing it now if I go back and look for them. Since people don’t actively play them it doesn’t matter that they have been doing the same event for 24 hours straight. The system isn’t getting rid of the bots or the grind, it is just pausing the bots briefly while punishing real players for playing the game the way it was designed – grind out gold/mats/karma.

There needs to be a better way to find people to group with. I’m skipping most of the dungeon content because the dungeons are located in zones outside the level range of their intended audience. I took the time to do the first level 40 dungeon because I wanted to see it – it was a pain getting it organized. You’ve got a choice between either sitting in a zone too low for you asking in /map chat for people or going back to a city and asking in /map chat. Either way, I’m just sitting there spamming and not playing. This is the same problem TOR had when it started, forcing people to choose between sitting in the fleet or ignoring dungeons while leveling. Also, the spam detection is pretty unforgiving here. I asked 3 times over 5 minutes and I got locked out of map chat for over 15 minutes.

Personally, I always liked the old WoW group tool where you could list yourself and what dungeons you wanted to run. You could look up the people who wanted to group for various things and whisper them to form a group. The only reason WoW moved past that to automatic group matching was the bottleneck of finding tanks/healers which doesn’t apply here.

I’ve been enjoying the game so far playing mostly solo PvE content and the personal story. Here’s the thing, though. I’m outpacing the content by several levels and it only gets worse as I continue. When I say ‘outpace’ I mean that I’m level 40 and the next zone, quest hub, or personal story quest is 5+ levels too high for me and this is with me doing 100% completion of every zone I go through. I end up having to farm group events over and over in a zone I’ve already completed before I can move on to what I really want to be doing. To make it over the last hump I had to spend nearly all of my gold on crafting materials for crafting experience gains.

I want to move on in the story/game. I don’t want to farm this stuff and, to top it off, there seems to be some anti-farming system under the hood to discourage this anyways even though it’s required to some degree. Am I missing something about leveling?