Guild Wars 2

This sucks, but I guess I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on it. Something has clearly gone wrong with post-HoT, because the raid team is the only one that has actually managed to ship content. We’ve gotten little in the way of iterative improvements either. WvW is still a mess, PvP is still a power-creeped CC-fest, fractals are swampy to the core, etc. If you’ve decided that legendaries are the thing that need to get the axe in order to actually get stuff done on the game, fine.

But the community’s patience is really wearing thin here. There need to be visible payoffs soon. And the Black Lion skins + gliders are sending the wrong message here.

Two major things I want to touch on:

(1) WvW getting shafted. I don’t understand why this has to be an issue every time something new comes out. A higher tier of gear, a new stat combination, whatever it may be – PvE players get it 10x faster. Then a dev posts about wanting to add an acquisition method to WvW and a tolerable alternative shows up a few months later. It’s just painful that this process has to happen every time. Why can’t I get ascended armor pieces for 800 badges + 5g or something? Vertical progression that heavily shafts part of the playerbase is not fun. Even if I was a big fan of vertical progression (I’m kinda lukewarm on it), it should be available to every part of the community, not “Oh, go do this thing you don’t enjoy to keep up.”

(2) I really want to know if Ascended is the end of the road. It’s going to take me several more months to get my two mains in fully ascended gear. I’m not super happy about that, but I’ll grit my teeth and get it done. If it provides a lot of other players something to do and progress towards, maybe that’s the lesser evil. But it can’t be a new tier or armor every year or two. I’m not going to sink farther and farther behind as ANet adds Respendent gear in 2014, Exalted gear in 2015, etc. I’m okay taking my time to slowly be one tier behind (exotic vs ascended) but it gets unacceptable to me if more tiers get added beyond that.

Speaking as someone who has played a WvW D/D Ele since release, but finally abandoned ship and rerolled as a Guardian last month — these changes look very well intended but poorly executed.

Please keep in mind that by the stats alone the Ele is the squishiest class in the game, combining both the lowest HP and worst armor type. We rely heavily on things like Vigor, Protection, Regeneration, water attunement swaps, Cleansing Wave on dodges, etc to not get flattened. So while I’m very interested in the idea of making Ele builds more flexible, right now the reality is that our access to those tools is getting nerfed.

I don’t see how I would be supposed to put out reasonable DPS while not getting splattered whenever someone looks at me. Being in melee range with Ele stats is terrifying and these changes make it harder without making it more rewarding. If these changes shipped today, I wouldn’t even consider going back to maining my Ele.

Alright, I waited for the blog post and read it carefully. It’s stated in no uncertain terms that this is just the beginning of gear progression.

Sorry, ArenaNet, but this simply isn’t what I signed up for. I strongly dislike the standard MMO model and I purchased GW2 because it did things differently. If you get more business introducing a gear treadmill, so be it, but I won’t be a part of it. I’m truly disappointed.

axiology.5807:

I will gladly receive that pm of yours.

I don’t find this uproar unreasonable at all. This is a deeply fundamental issue at the core of the game design.

Granted, information at this moment is scarce, and we may have misunderstood the whole thing, but I think it is good that people are so passionate about the original (hopefully still current) game philosophy. This means that GW2 did something very right in the MMO world that catered to how a lot of people wanted to play.

If it turns out that it was all a storm in a teacup, that’s great. The developers will have gained an idea of how we feel about this issue.

Agreed. I hope it’s just a miscommunication, but either way it’s a least a good opportunity to let ANet know how strongly I feel about no treadmill progression.

Also, I strongly dislike dungeons — I did a few AC and TA runs to get the exotic stats I needed. Definitely didn’t enjoy it, but it was bearable because I thought that once it was done, I would never need to do it again and could just WvW on my finished gear. The thought of having the better gear available only in a dungeon makes me want to cry.

ANet, if you introduce a gear treadmill, I am done. Since we don’t have the full story on this gear yet I will give you the benefit of the doubt until everything is known. But I do want to be very clear that I have no interest in my gear becoming outdated, it’s simply not the game model that I paid for.

Jacobin.8509:

Good post. I would say a major difference between MOBAs and GW2 is that LoL and the like were not initially sold to people as an esport. They started small and grew.

Another interesting thing to note is that competitive LoL gameplay was (at least was a year ago when I payed any attention to it, not sure about now) not very active or interesting, compared to other games. Not trying to start a huge fight with LoL fans, but the reality is that the gameplay was very static and passive in the majority of matches. The competitive LoL scene did well and was popular despite that because the casual players liked the game itself. The community had a blast watching people being very skilled at something they themselves enjoyed playing.

In essence, the casual community bought Riot a lot of time to improve their game. Tons of people liked LoL, which translated to tons of people liked competitive LoL enough to give it a chance. If it had been pushed at people as the pinnacle of competitive gaming it would have failed, because it wasn’t. Having people care is much more important than anything else. Gameplay can always be fixed, as long as the community has some patience and faith.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

I guess my point is this: wouldn’t it be better to fix your core gameplay for all users rather than push a feature that no one except maybe 5 or so dedicated teams would use? That’s the way it was done in gw1 and in dota and it worked pretty well (both set up solid gameplay before adding esport features).

This is correct.

I’ve been a competitive DotA player for a very long time and there are some things that I would like to point out. DotA’s competitive scene started off very obscure and the game itself had a huge skill barrier to entry. It wasn’t easy to pick up, and had no real support. In some ways it’s a miracle the game took off, but I can see a lot of people looking to it as inspiration that any other game with “properly” built PvP can eventually do the same.

The reality is that GW2 is a VERY different scenario. When DotA started out as a competitive game in 2005 or so, it was a unique game. The people that played it were already very devoted because the game had no rivals. If it didn’t succeed, the entire genre that all those players loved would die — they had a lot of motivation to make it work. GW2 does not have that luxury of devotion. If you don’t like PvP in GW2, you can simply hop to any number of other MMOs on the market.

ArenaNet needs to act fast because this isn’t the sort of thing that the community is going to faithfully wait around for. Delaying to make PvP more fun and inviting for the average gamer will kill PvP for the serious gamers. You need the foundation of the low and midskill players for it to work.

Acerac.6428:

But Blackgate is only staying competitive due to constant cheating. HoD was legit.

Oh please. There are tons of us playing perfectly legitimately and holding our own. I was on BG BL when the orb got hacked and NOBODY in chat was happy about it. We all wanted to win it back properly.

Besides, it’s hard to see the other T1 servers as paragons of amazing gameplay when JQ throws up two trebs at Foghaven and then a minute later loses them to my squad of 4 people.