I think even prior to the Nexon takeover of ANet’s internal logistics, back in the betas, there were enough bad decisions to indicate GW2 was never going to turn out as a true sequel to the first game.
Even if NCSoft hadn’t made its deal with the devil, we’d still be looking at a game with not even half of the depth of the first game. GW2 is basically just a monthly theme park ride now, and I think even if left entirely to their own devices, ANet still would have done almost the same exact thing on their own. Just minus the ridiculously blatant RNG chest events and without any ascended armor, at all.
I’d just take your good memories with GW for what they were. No company will ever have the marketing hype or financing ANet did to change MMOs as a genre. I think GW2 was basically the last chance the gaming market had to move things forward, and that’s gone now. GW1 will always be the little known high point.
I tried to, when I got depressed over how GW2 turned out. Some old existing GW players that had been loving the game for years wanted to see it evolve into something better, so we could continue playing. But as has been said, the two aren’t related. In that sense, GW never got a real sequel.
The mechanics, which were either ahead of their time or common for 2001 (when the game started development) are of course too hard for new players to get used to, going backwards. For those of us that played the original game for thousands of hours, starting a new character in pre-searing Ascalon can be pretty fun, but ultimately more depressing than rewarding. Especially during Eye of the North, the game also started to look and feel more and more like it was breaking its own world building with ridiculous events and items meant to try to keep players interested, plus game balance took a huge nose dive.
I wouldn’t really recommend it. GW1 in its prime was an amazing game, though. I hate MMOs, and GW1 was a fantastic alternative.
Most of the problem is that there’s very little utility in GW2. Everything is just DPS. So when someone does more DPS than you do, there’s no longer any point to using your own way of dealing DPS. Same with builds. Why use one build over another when they’re all just roads to DPS? Just use the one that deals the most.
Skills and overall design just needs to be less obsessed with numbers. Skills need to actively DO things, and those things need to matter far more than the amount of damage they’re dealing.
Only 18% agreed on releasing a working ladder? Imo having a way to see who is the best team/player in the game and seeing what kind skill players have to work for is the base of any competitive game. I mean, imagine watching the olympics or something. Would it be as fun to participate in or even watch if the teams weren’t competing for a “best in the world” spot, but doing it just for funsies? I know the game should be fun, but competition IS fun. At least it’s top three.
A working ladder and ranking system would be the #1 priority in a game that’s actually balanced and fun. The core gameplay in GW2 is so unbalanced and offensive to design that adding such a system would be like putting sprinkles on a kitten
In my experience in any game, players usually don’t want to make major changes to the game, even if the game is dying. As most players have no concept of how to design, and lack the imagination necessary, trying to visualize a whole design concept set apart from what they are used to is impossible for them.
Much of the problem with GW2’s combat is its heavy reliance on numbers, rather than mechanics. Making a build is similar to trying to perfect an Excel document. You aren’t concerned about how a skill will lead into another skill, or the timing on a disrupt or your ability to physically move around the battlefield. You’re concerned with how many stacks of a condition you can create, and how quickly. You’re concerned about how long you can upkeep a single status effect. You’re concerned about maximizing the amount of damage a single skill can produce by pouring more and more numbers into specific stats. Even the traits don’t actively do anything; most simply address numbers and how to improve those numbers. That’s GW2’s main problem.
A redesign of GW2 would have to involve first getting rid of traits almost entirely, as quite honestly, they’re mostly worthless, from a design point a view. Having a very small amount that dramatically change how your character “feels” would be a good idea. Death From Above probably remains my favorite example, as it’s very obvious, visceral, but serves a minor purpose and doesn’t benefit any invisible numbers other than falling damage. Traits should help define the personality of your character, not exist to buff damage, reduce damage or reduce cooldown times.
Secondly, almost all of the armor and runes in the game would need a complete overhaul. Even the most dramatic contrast in numbers between a tank’s armor and a damage dealer’s armor would have number variations so small that the difference would be almost nonexistent. No accessories. Only a single slot for an upgrade to the armor, and the armor itself always has the same base stats for that profession, with no possibility whatsoever of changing anything about it. Any customization is relegated to the single, solitary customization slot per armor piece. No exceptions. Weapons also receive a single upgrade slot. One. No other. These changes are also mostly mechanical. Vampiric mods. Passive slow on hit mods. Healing reduction mods. Etc. No +damage, +critical, or any other kind of damage or mitigation modifying mods of any kind. Those belong on armor, and only armor.
The core of your build are skills. You have an elite slot and a healing slot that are dedicated to those two functions. Your healing slot also always doubles as a resurrection utility slot. There is no reviving mechanic outside of this skill for your character. Weapons have no intrinsic skills, but primary skills are relegated to weapons, meaning certain skills only work with certain weapons. Which you choose and where they are on your skillbar are completely up to you. The number of skills available is tripled, or even quadrupled. What makes you a tank, a damage dealer, or so on is determined primarily by your skills. Your elite is especially important in creating your build, as elite skills have very potent and important, distinctive characteristics that alter how you play. Most have very short cooldowns and can behave as primary attacks. Others have longer cooldowns, but always under a minute, increasing with potency as their cooldowns go up. You can move any skill to any part of your bar. No exceptions. Skills auto-reflect damage values or cooldown values as you alter your stats, dynamically. If your attributes go up for any reason, the tooltip changes. Skills themselves are your primary means of performing on the battlefield. Combat overall is a little slower than in GW2, but more methodical. There are caps on how much armor, attack speed, etc that you can have, all with obvious caps depicted in your stat screens.
Overall, GW2 should be a better version of GW1, but without the tremendous bulk the first game had, and with much better mechanical features. GW2 as it is, is too number happy, too fast for the sake of trying to be fast, and lacking in basic customization features for builds while overcompensating by giving too many completely unnecessary variations on armor building.
Fewer numbers, more meaning.
I have not played since Nov 13th (quit immediately after the Ascended announcements), but thought I’d briefly put a couple thoughts down:
One, the only reason I’d come back is sPvP. PvE is a mess of RNG and grind, which is precisely what I avoid in MMOs.
Secondly, I have no faith in PvP team. Their time seems to be spent elsewhere, and the changes that are completely necessary would have to overlap with PvE, so I get the impression that even if they wanted to make the adjustments, they can’t due to internal politics.
Third, I’ll say the problem with sPvP is inherent in the combat system itself. Builds are almost always about the numbers behind your character, and not what your character is physically doing. Almost all of the statuses in the game are simply damage or damage reduction buffs and debuffs. In addition, almost all of the armor customization options orbit damage mechanics in some way. Briefly compare this to GW1, where everything was related to increasing your attribute points above the native maximum of 12, at the cost of losing health to do so. In GW2, there is no consequence to piling more and more of one thing onto yourself, which makes it incredibly difficult to balance the game. Far too much of the combat’s design is about the “economics” of your build.
Fourth, builds are all designed by the ANet teams. GW1 comparison: most successful builds were invented by players from the large selection of skills, and ANet was forced to address them. By consequence, most builds in GW2, having been designed by ANet, are terrible. Many traits, skills and especially elites are worthless, or not optimal. Due to the damage-centric design of the game, this also means that most builds are competing with one another over their primary purpose: damage or mitigating. As such, when one is better than the other, due to the fact that they have no true utility to balance the two, one will always win out over the other.
I’m of the opinion that 1) the game is broken in its very design and cannot be fixed without completely redesigning the whole combat system and that 2) no major changes or balancing will ever happen because the focus is so heavily on the PvE team and its product.
I will also say that when Jonathan, or whoever, talks about adding new features like custom tournaments, or so on, I do not care at all. I am looking for actual changes to the game, not new features for a game I do not enjoy playing. I don’t know if internal politics are really keeping these changes from happening, or if it’s a consequence of incompetence, or a combination of the two. Quite frankly, I don’t care. It’s not my job to care about the quality of Guild Wars 2, but as an old GW1 player, I would have preferred to see a much higher quality game than what was released. I, along with many others, will never return unless a dramatic and complete overhaul of the game, the design team and the internal process of production is obvious, complete and advertised in tandem with a massive overhaul to the game’s very core. Speaking directly to anyone involved in PvP development, I think we both know what needs to be done in order to make GW2’s PvP the success it once falsely claimed to desire. I also think we both know that will never happen, for a variety of reasons. As a professional, I would be quite ashamed of what is currently on the market, as well as the future plans to polish what is not worth polishing.
If you can make the necessary changes, good luck to you. If you produce a product worth using, I’ll use it. If you don’t believe such changes are necessary, I can only tell you that you’re being incredibly foolish, and that no effort on your part will ever make your product a success.
To say that “we know” GW2 alienated most of the GW1 playerbase is based on speculation. I played GW1 for years and am very happy with GW2
To be fair, you’re only getting half the story. The players who did not like GW2 obviously won’t be posting on the forums anymore. They’re gone. The only people left are people who either love the game or still tolerate it. And people like me that haven’t played since November and come back ever so often out of morbid curiosity.
I don’t doubt loot has not gotten worse. But I also suspect that what ANet believes is acceptable is far below what players consider acceptable. Setting to it ANet’s perception of “way too high” would probably be something akin to “only slightly bad” to most players. Who’s right on the matter is another topic entirely. But the answer is the player.
Whether or not GW1 was an MMO, I’d rather play whatever it was than whatever MMOs are. If both were suspended over lava and I could only save one, I’d cut the rope on MMOs myself. They need to die.
In my experience in GW1, which was a very block-heavy game, as a Warrior, a single attack that negated blocks was almost completely worthless, unless it was a disruption, or otherwise had some important utility that made a single circumvention of damage negation important, in some way. You could run a series of these kinds of attacks, as they were peppered throughout the various lines (Sword was actually good for this, as it had several), but ultimately that was a pressure DPS build that lacked appropriate damage. Rather, your main concern wasn’t having a move that went through a block, but outthinking your opponent and recognizing HOW they blocked, and then tricking them into using up that skill, followed by a spike. Hammer did this fairly well, as combined with KDs, the only way to deny that damage 1v1 was through stances, which you could trick people into using up. It worked fairly well. Single-hit anti-block skills weren’t very good, as they didn’t really do anything. Yay, you hit a blocking target for about 80 damage. Now what? Oh, he’s still blocking? Welp.
In GW2, obviously the combat is way more spammy, less cognitive and overall messier. Blocking isn’t really a major concern anymore, and certainly not in comparison to GW1, where denial played a very big factor in matches. The flip side is that a single hit attack that goes through a block may see more use, but be far more unpredictable, as to when you would want to use it.
I do think Warriors got a bunch of “ignores block” additions to their skills lately, along with other classes, but I haven’t even launched the game since the Ascendent announcement, so I couldn’t tell you what they are.
There really shouldn’t be any points associated with scores, at all. I’m a big fan of entering as a team and winning as a team. A report of things like damage dealt, received, skill use and so on should accompany this, but only in the sense of reporting information, never quantifying worth.
It’s a deeply rooted problem. There’s a lot of reasons for it.
The PvP itself is lacking. Poor balancing, lack of build diversity and viability, several broken, overpowered mechanics, the single game mode… The fact that professions lack roles, yet obviously one profession performs a function much better than others means it’s very hard for players to enter into games with a role in mind.
Entry into PvP in general is a problem. Where is PvP? Many players don’t know, starting out, as it’s not something you see during normal gameplay. Assuming you’re in the Mists, how do you start? There’s no “enter battle” button, just a NPC many will miss. Many will also never know there are multiple modes of PvP, and especially have no clue that more organized play exists. While obviously a surprising notion to people who are aware of PvP, the mechanics of how PvP integrates with the rest of the game (or rather, how it seals itself off completely) ensures many players never even try PvP at all.
Also, in terms of PvP being isolated, as you have all your progress effectively removed when you PvP (aside from dyes, which don’t even work in matches), there’s no incentives to participate. If you invest hours into PvE and are told to start over in PvP, you get a floating sense of separation from your own character, who now feels like a completely different person from that one you’ve been developing. Consequently, this detachment discourages people from bothering at all.
Not even touching on the combat mechanics of the game itself, how PvP integrates with the rest of the game is what kills it, before it even leaves the gate. The fact that PvP in GW2 is NOT newbie friendly at all only serves to continue to drive people away from it. And that stems mainly from the lack of established roles combined with poor class balance and an unwillingness on the part of the PvP team to actually address major mechanical concerns with the game.
GW2 PvP had potential, but is simply too segregated and ignored to be worth playing. It certainly will never be an e-sport, and probably will just die out completely (aside from a casual base anyway) within a few months. It can be fixed, and it can be fixed quickly, but given ANet’s prior behavior and choice pattern, I doubt it’ll ever happen.
[Edit]
I actually detest Ascended items in their totality and will never play the game again until they are removed. That part wasn’t sarcasm or anything.
[Edited by CC: Quote removed. Users were provoked the examples.]
(edited by Moderator)
“Fixing and improving existing content throughout the game, and better tying it into the overall sense of player progression within Guild Wars 2.”
Sounds like they’re going to make gear grinding even worse, somehow. “Progression” seems to be their new code word for “NCSoft is now dominating our professional careers; please, help us.”
Which makes this funny: “Adding new Guild content and Guild progression features.” plus “Adding brand new content to World vs. World as well as adding new reward progression.” If they were just adding in new items, they’d just say “adding new item rewards.”
Remember, kids. ANet progress is bad progress. It’s actually taking steps backwards. Not forwards.
It’s an issue with the class.
If you nerf the ability down to reasonable levels, the whole point of it is lost.
Therefore, the issue is with the design of the build. Stealth classes in MMOs should never be burst damage classes, especially when they have a stealth mechanic that cannot be removed by any skills nor damage.
The Thief, itself, is broken in design, in these kinds of builds. I’d find it funny if they turned Heartseeker into a root that lasts four seconds, like Hundred Blades.
I quit after the Ascendent mess. PvE is dead to me. Adding Random Arenas would bring me back. Actually reworking all the worthless traits and secondary skills across all the professions would restore a small fraction of my faith in humanity.
I think people jumped to the conclusion only two people were working on PvP because it certainly feels like it. Updates, changes and rebalances have been very, VERY slow, if not nonexistant. Every player has things they feel like need to be examined with their professions, and when the patch notes are released and almost none of them have been addressed in any way, it’s very frustrating.
A very large portion of the skills in the game, currently, aren’t viable in the meta, which isn’t really changing. Understandably, you may think that changing just a single skill can have long-reaching affects across all classes, due to how players have to adjust their builds to either counter something or due to no longer having to be so concerned about a certain build. But many skills or traits are simply not part of the meta, at all, and it makes many of wonder what exactly you’re spending all of your time on. If it takes weeks to get a single skill to function correctly, just move on to something else. Surely you can do something like… make Discipline’s passive bonus to Warriors not be worthless, in a day. There’s no excuse for things like that, or similar, taking this long. They should have been done and out of the door in a month after release, yet here we are, still waiting for them to even be noticed.
So, that’s why.
How about a game mode where if you kill someone they actually stay dead unless someone resurrects them? Some sort of… match… of… deaths? Maybe involving teams.
Hrm.
“Other” field. Use it. Abuse it.
I basically used it as a way of communicating that I’ve stopped playing. I suggest you liberally use the “Other” field, as it’s obvious they don’t want to hear about the Ascendent gear unless you force them to.
You’re asking which is a better tank? You’re kidding, right? Guardian.
Actually, almost all classes mitigate damage better than a Warrior can. That’s why Warriors are given so much more health – because they have such a hard time avoiding being hit. Most of the other classes can create builds that either can take hits for quite a long time through protection, blocks and so on, or they can simply mitigate by warping around through clone use, stealth or what have you.
As the innate armor values between the three ALs isn’t that big of a difference, most tanking ability in GW2 is associated very closely to skill utility. As Warriors lack that, in comparison, they’re the worst “tanking” (damage mitigation/avoidance) class. The only thing keeping them alive usually is the high health, which obviously most other professions can burn through in a couple of seconds. Hence why they’re favorite targets in mist PvP modes – they’re pretty easy to kill, if you focus fire them, as they can’t do a thing about it other than hope their extra 10,000 health (about two or three extra seconds of life against some classes) saves them. It won’t.
So, uh… yeah. Guardian.
People who prepaid can’t get refunds due to the 6 month time period. Hence why they offered prepaids at all so early. So you couldn’t get your money back.
Well, I was eager for a Guild Wars #2, as I spent years of my life in that game, and hate MMOs. I went back to GW1 for a while to play Pre-searing, and actually enjoyed myself a lot. But with almost 3,500 hours in GW1, I’ve more than experienced it, and it’s mainly just depressing at this point.
I’ve looked into other games, including MMOs, but it’s not the kind of experience I’ve been waiting to have, and the other MMOs have the same problems GW2/NCSoft is intentionally developing.
So, I don’t know.
ANet has always focused too much on having a single character, without considering people may want to 100% outfit their alts, too. It was a minor problem in GW1, especially with title grinds, since many just don’t count towards one another.
The game is kind of divided now into two groups: casuals and locusts. Casuals likely are still trying to get a single character to level 80. So who cares about them? They’ll never even think about trying to get Ascendent armor, much less be concerned about grinding it.
Locusts will just keep eating new tier advancements and then threatening to leave once they’re done, until ANet adds another color to the dumbace rainbow. Then they’ll just do it again. Casuals won’t really hit a wall until a year or so from now.
“Some” skill in Droknar runs? Maybe when they first started it. Man, it got nightmarish once they started piling enemies in there with tons of enchant removals and speed debuffs/CCs.
One thing I really missed from GW1 that I completely forgot about before I went back to play it is that when you were attacked by monsters, it didn’t slow you down at all. Unlike GW2, where if anything touches you your character suddenly decides they just can’t concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other anymore.
Farming in GW1 was… fun. GW2, it’s just competing with people over tags. In GW1 you actually had to know what you were doing. If you carefully pulled one mob at a time, sure, it was never a problem. But if you were trying to farm efficiently, you had to intentionally aggro tons of enemies and try to fight them all off at the same time. That was incredibly satisfying. Riposte-ing griffons was hilarious. 55ing was considered cheating up until everyone realized how difficult it could be, especially when a single packet drop combined with getting too aggressive could mean losing your skill chain.
Good game. GW2? Too easy, too accessible, too simplified.
Kind of late to the party. Most of the people who would participate in your thread left a week or two ago.
I haven’t logged in since the Ascended announcement. I started replaying GW1 until someone mentioned they saw me “logged in” to GW2 when I was actually playing GW1.
TSW is a fun horizontal skill growth game. In many ways it reminds me of GW1 in that one expands one skills to build a deck to develop synergies. The game is about skill build development.
The one thing that is problematic for me in TSW is the milieu is a bit too dark for my tastes.
Ack, I can never win it seems with MMO selection.
You may want to mention what TSW stands for.
The fact that GW1 used instances for exploration has no correlation to any arguments about core game mechanics. Saying it’s not a MMO, so it doesn’t count, is a non-argument used by people who are desperately trying to come up with any possible way to deflect a completely valid argument that completely tears their own beliefs to shreds, and then buries them.
It would be like someone pointing out “all these cars have terrible gas mileage,” and someone mentioning, “But this truck has great gas mileage. Why can’t they imitate this?” And the bad gas mileage supporter replying, “Yeah, but that’s a truck!” It doesn’t matter at all. Both run on the same thing. It’s just a deflection, to avoid addressing a valid point, because you know you’re completely wrong, and you don’t want to own up to it.
Honestly, there are none. The reason GW2 had so much hype behind it is because it was going to be different, and change the genre for the better, forever. GW1 was the beginning, although obviously it played second fiddle to WoW for years. GW2 finally had the financing behind it that it needed to transition GW1 into being a direct competitor, and possibly dominating the genre itself. We all know how that turned out. Bad developers took over the franchise, money and big interests got more involved, and locusts became very vocal, all encouraging the ruination of the entire franchise is only three months time.
GW1 is basically it. It may go down as being the only MMO style game within the space of about twenty or thirty years that ever did it right, more or less. We may see some within the next ten years, especially now that GW2 has embarrassed itself to the entire industry, and shown everyone what to do and not to do. Unfortunately, I think some may take this as notice that it can’t be done, considering how big of a budget and how much support the game had to be the next coming. If GW2 can’t do it, after all, who can? Probably no one.
I’ve always hated MMOs. The only one I’ve ever enjoyed for more than a couple of months is GW1. That will probably stay true, for the rest of my life. Honestly the closest games I can think of are all single player games, as those don’t need anywhere near the budget, and as such, aren’t so obsessed with money.
There are a lot of games that have open hub world mechanics, where you start a new game, and you can then choose from many different levels. One does not lead to the other, and you can complete them in any order. Mega Man is a good example, although that one obviously leads to a final showdown. This is horizontal progression. You aren’t necessarily getting more and more powerful. You’re simply becoming more well-rounded.
Coincidentally this is also how it worked in GW1. If you had enough skills for one good build, that’s all you needed. But the more you played, the more skills you obtained, meaning you could respond to more situations, play in more varied ways, and have new experiences, as you played. Gear never factored into any of it.
If you think about it, the idea of getting a higher number actually competing with such a satisfying thing as horizontal progression is incredibly stupid. There’s no possible way it can compare. Horizontal progression absolutely CRUSHES vertical progression. The problem is, horizontal progression is very difficult to achieve. Vertical progression is lazy and easy, and can be addicting if you intentionally make the levels too difficult, since humans are goal-oriented creatures. This is why MMOs use them, and why stupid people don’t know any better.
GW2 made the mistake of discarding every single one of the components that gave GW1 its progression elements, but still thought they could achieve the same things. I imagine most of this was due to Isiah Cartwright becoming the lead designer, as he was just the skill balancer in GW1. His experiences there, I imagine, made him resent such a complex system. As he isn’t really that great of a designer to begin with (certainly his work on GW1 left much to be desired), he unintentionally sabotaged a very complex system by reducing its complexity to the point that there was no longer any depth to the system, at all. As a result, combat, builds, and so on are now centered almost entirely around numbers, rather than utility. It’s probably the worst mistake ANet ever made.
The thing is, the elements people are comparing from the two games aren’t things that are necessary to make a MMO.
“GW1 didn’t have gear grind.”
“But GW1 wasn’t a MMO!”
Well… it was. But that aside, just because you’re making a MMO doesn’t mean you need gear grind. So that’s a stupid counter argument. It’s not even an argument; it’s just a deflection. So keep that in mind the next time you start blubbering about it. The only core necessity of a MMO is to enable a very large amount of people to do something together, online, at the same time, together. That’s it. Everything after that is optional.
hell no the servers are full
This.
As we all have to keep explaining to you people, the server lists population based on people registered to the server itself. It doesn’t matter if they even play the game any more.
Rampage is a joke. Get it last. I don’t know much about Charrzooka. I think it used to be better? Got me. I stopped playing, so my Charr is sitting perpetually on level whatever. Rampage is most assuredly 100% worthless in every way, though. Possibly the worst elite in the game.
Armor still matters a great deal, even if you are upleveled or downleveled. The only solution to this in game design is to make leveling and gearing an afterthought to other gameplay elements. GW2 obviously failed in this regard, and will be remembered as such.
According to a recent German interview, they weren’t closing the door on the idea entirely. Hence the exaggerated “will not be adding a new tier of gear every 3 months” comment that Thirsty posted. They didn’t want to say verbatim, “No, it will never happen,” because they don’t want to have yet even more problems.
So the answer is, “Maybe.” Even they don’t know, but anyone who definitely says no is just being a fanboy. Anyone who definitely says yes is just being a doomsday prophet. Considering they did this knowing it would be a very unpopular move (as stated in the same German interview), I imagine it’s leaning more towards, yes, there being more gear tiers added, eventually.
Just to throw it out for contrast: Guild Wars 1 had only a single tier of gear, and it was based on your level. Level 20? Get level 20 armor. The end. The only problematic aspect of outfitting yourself was the odd out kind of rune that had no balance to it other than rarity, which was in this case, Superior Vigor and Superior Absorption. Absorption was eventually rendered worthless, but vigor remained a problem since there was no downside to using one. That’s the only gearing problem I can ever remember anyone having in that game. Once you hit level 20, you were put right next to an armor vendor who sold you max level gear for next to nothing, because the developers wanted you at your best, since the point of the game was never your equipment.
Marketing, I imagine. GW1 was kind of a budget title with a small focus, so it could afford to try to be niche. That paid off, as people who hated MMOs loved GW1, as it circumvented all the genre problems.
GW2’s development took such a large amount of time and money I imagine they felt like they couldn’t make it back without casting a very large net. Hence the way the game was designed for the betas and launch, which most GW1 players will recognize as big steps backwards. I guess their logic now is that they brought in as many GW1 players as they ever will, and it’s time to screw the pooch and just bank on WoW players.
It’d be nice if the max level cap was 20, just long enough to teach you the mechanics of the game. And you spent most of the game as max level, just exploring, gathering new abilities, capturing elites and so on. That sounds familiar, though.
I’m also of the opinion most of this is the result of money. No developer is this stupid. Although ANet does have a history of taking problems with simple solutions and “fixing” them in stupid ways.
There’s nothing to be done, though. NCSoft is crashing and burning, and dragging GW2 with it, which is only making the problem even worse. I imagine GW2 will go F2P sometime next year.
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or if you mean they’ll drop the box fee and give the game away.
I know people refer to GW2 as being a F2P, but that’s mainly because a lot of people have gotten so used to the idea of subscriptions they’re amazed at the idea of paying for something, having it, and actually owning it.
I mean they’ll drop the first time fee and start pouring things into the cash shop. Maybe not things to circumvent grind (no idea, as that will be a marketing and sales decision down the line), but just a lot more items. So, actual F2P. Not the idiotic F2P some people think one time purchases are.
I’m also of the opinion most of this is the result of money. No developer is this stupid. Although ANet does have a history of taking problems with simple solutions and “fixing” them in stupid ways.
There’s nothing to be done, though. NCSoft is crashing and burning, and dragging GW2 with it, which is only making the problem even worse. I imagine GW2 will go F2P sometime next year.
I think one aspect that didn’t help is that earlier, around launch, when the subject of endgame content came up, there a big debate between people who thought players needed a sense of progression throughout the game (which is true) and people who… well, weren’t even at level 80.
The problem was that someone in ANet’s rafters took this to mean gear grind, rather than what players were asking for, which was lateral progression and access to more features that would allow them to keep moving forward, but in different ways other than equipment.
A colossal blunder on the part ANet’s development leads. If you look at the failures of other MMOs, it’s not just “they remade WoW.” Rather, the problems were more complex. You don’t simplify the core of your game, only its initial features of accessibility. Stupifying your game is death. You also don’t burn bridges with your existing, marketed player base. This means when you have 8,000 people spitting fire on the forums, that 8,000 (since most players never post) represents a very BIG portion of your playerbase. You also don’t ignore primary concerns for the same reason. Adding features seems like something that will make you more money, but especially in a modern age of networked players, displeasing large portions of your players is far more harmful. So introducing systems and then never fixing them, for the sake of releasing more and more broken content is also death. ANet unfortunately is committing most of these sins today.
It’s a marketing decision on ANet’s part. It’s already been made clear how unpopular (or at least neutral) the change has been. There’s nothing more the fans can do. I imagine ANet believes the changes are small enough that it won’t matter as much as in your example.
I don’t think it’ll kill GW2 like it killed SWO, although with the way ANet is behaving, it would serve them right to have this game die in a gutter, the same way. The gaming industry I thought had learned its lesson after so many MMOs crashed and burned, but apparently ANet coasted too long on GW1 without realizing how they coasted. They need a spanking to be put in their place, is all.
I fully expect some sort of public apology in the future, or for the game to buckle and go free to play in a few months. Maybe a little over a year. It’ll take a while. GW2 could probably support itself as a F2P using the old trash MMO model they’re moving to. They wouldn’t be able to support the staff they have now.
Decisions like this are usually made by one or two people in charge of everyone else, who are actively ruining the company. The rest of the staff can’t do anything about it, and can’t say anything about it. I guess feel bad for the people in the ANet offices who have to watch their game burn and fall just because there’s someone or some people in the head offices who have no idea what they’re doing. There’s probably some heavy internal politics going on in there right now. People who are a cancer to not only this game but the ANet work environment need to be removed as quickly as possible. The only way to do that is an appeal to people at the very top, who either are the problem, part of the problem or are too friendly or involved to fire the people who need to be ejected. The most power we have is to influence people who own stock in their company. The more of a fuss we make, the more obvious it becomes how displeased the source of their money is. That means they’re unhappy, which means stocks bottoming out. That can translate into change. Just keep complaining. And try to put the enablers and locusts in their place. Other than that, just sit back and watch the ship sail. It may burn. It may not. But I won’t be on it!
(edited by Plague.5329)
Zero. I only regret I could not invite negative people.
Well, it’s not dying, and it’s not going to die. It’s certainly hemorrhaging players, though. Which is to be expected when you start with so many initial sales. I don’t think it’s growing from that initial number like they had hoped, though.
All MMOs go through this phase of everyone trying out the game, then a mass of players realizing it wasn’t what they wanted, or realizing that if they have reached a point where they are grinding for better gear, they’ll just return to WoW, since it’s the same exact thing except they’re not starting from scratch there.
While I don’t think GW2 will die, I do think its population will level out at a level much lower than what ANet had anticipated. I chalk up much of this to some very poor decision decisions, not only from the Ascendant update, but from the initial launch. Many aspects of the game that were supposed to work simply didn’t. Examples?
Dynamic Events being very important, world-changing events that made you feel connected with the world? Definitely did not work. They happen far too often, and even if they didn’t, their subject matter is rarely important, and their effects can’t rarely be seen on a large scale, other than a couple vanishing models and NPCs moving from one area to another.
Focusing on content rather than gear. I needn’t specify much here. Even at release, grinding was still very much a reality. The game felt very MMO-like in that regard. It was certainly no GW1. With exotics being locked to dungeon runs, with those runs being so unprofitable and loot in general being so pathetic (and still is, even post-patch), this created an atmosphere of futility that still exists. The game is consequently also not very alt-friendly, especially since leveling can take such a very long amount of time if you aren’t crafting or going to WvW. The game feels like it knows it has no content to offer, and is simply trying to chain you down to keep you from realizing it. The Ascendant patch is just a few more chains for locust players, to try to stem the bleeding.
The build and skill system with the Tera-esque (but worse) combat was meant to create a system in which all builds were potentially viable, offering nearly infinite diversity. Very contrary to this, GW2 now has one of the worst build systems of any MMO, offering very limited skill choices (as many either do not work or are simply inferior to others) and a dull and straight-forward traiting system. Much of this stems from the developers playing it too safe in regards to balancing, and trying to avoid a situation where players could create systems they did not anticipate. Unfortunately this did just that, resulting in a system in which players can’t work around bad skills by using their creativity to utilize several different kinds of skills together, in unusual ways. This makes the meta very stagnant, combat very dull after hours of using the same kind of moves, and creates tension between build choices when components to these pre-planned ANet brand builds simply aren’t up to par.
But you get the idea. GW2 is only dying in the sense that it’s not going to be the WoW killer we wanted, which is 100% the fault of the developers. It will continue to make them money, but the population will eventually lower to a point they aren’t happy with. I think the kind of game they made is also bad for long term branding of the game world and franchise, as they are operating a business model off players who don’t care about the mechanics, only the addictive MMO progression elements. I doubt there will be a Guild Wars 3, but GW2 will survive for quite a long time, even if it eventually has to go true F2P a few years from now.
I actually was sitting around thinking about this. They obviously made GW2 to cater to WoW players, or standard MMO players, in general. The entire concept behind the first game is just plain gone. PvP focus, the skill system, the method of balancing, everything. There’s nothing similar about the two games at all other than the setting. GW2 probably should have been called something like “Guild Wars: Whatever,” as it’s definitely not the second game in the series.
I’d be interested in seeing some sort of PvP-only side game built using this engine, and preferably handled by different people, as I have no faith in whoever is in charge of this batch. Most preferably, I’d like to see a different company entirely make a very similar game, as ANet was already kind of crazy in the GW1 days, got nuts near the end, and is obviously now completely mad.
I’m sorry, but GW2 wasn’t made to cater to WoW players. If it was I’d be happy. Just to be clear, WoW >>>>>>>>>> GW2 and they cannot be compared. Having said that, I like GW1 as well. GW2 falls short when compared to both games and has no similarities with either. GW2 is just bad, that is all, don’t compare it with WoW no longer, please.
To me it feels like they tried to take the middle ground in way too many places. In a standard MMO, sure, there’s grind but the payout for that grind is very satisfying. In GW1, no real grind, other than titles or some nonsense like that. In GW2, you have grind, and it does take quite a while, but the payout is a joke.
That also has an effect on things like loot, the economy, and so on. Drops in other MMOs can be very satisfying, and in GW2, nothing of worth ever drops, even when “the rate has been increased.” And even if it does, it’s just junk you’ll sell on the TP for someone to try to salvage into ectos.
Similarly, they obviously tried to touch on the more low key MMOs or MOBA crowd with the ridiculously simplistic primary skill system and trait system. As combat isn’t catered to that sort of build system, it just ends up being very dull, over time, with no room to expand or adjust.
PvP is very similar. Obviously PvP has been an afterthought to PvE, the economy and especially microtransactions fueled by constant world events. That estranges all the PvP players, a good portion of GW1 players laterally, and eventually the locust-style players in PvE once they keep running out of content that isn’t satisfying their loot craze anyway.
GW2 I feel like tried too hard to make everyone happy, and just ended up frustrating everyone, whether in big ways or small ways. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t understand your market and try to cast too big of a net. When it can’t support what it brings in, it eventually breaks. I think GW2 will be remembered as a severely hyped game that ultimately failed to achieve most of its primary goals due to an obsession with trying too hard to avoid having its own identity.
I actually was sitting around thinking about this. They obviously made GW2 to cater to WoW players, or standard MMO players, in general. The entire concept behind the first game is just plain gone. PvP focus, the skill system, the method of balancing, everything. There’s nothing similar about the two games at all other than the setting. GW2 probably should have been called something like “Guild Wars: Whatever,” as it’s definitely not the second game in the series.
I’d be interested in seeing some sort of PvP-only side game built using this engine, and preferably handled by different people, as I have no faith in whoever is in charge of this batch. Most preferably, I’d like to see a different company entirely make a very similar game, as ANet was already kind of crazy in the GW1 days, got nuts near the end, and is obviously now completely mad.
All the professions desperately need major overhauls in many areas. Warriors are no exception. Getting a worthless buff like 10% damage to the longbow’s autoattack doesn’t mean all the HB Warriors you always see suddenly got any stronger. It always gets on my nerves when people just see a single blurb that’s not relevant whatsoever to any element of the meta and scream about how the whole class is being buffed or nerfed.
How many stance Warriors do you see running around? How about signet Warriors that aren’t that stupid precision build? How viable is a banner build? I’d bring up physical moves but people would just focus on all the HB Warriors running BR. Shoot, how viable is combining various build types rather than just stacking one kind of move? Fact of the matter is, there’s a high precision, high damage glass cannon HB Warrior, and then there’s everything else. Shouts as your alternate PvE/sPvP build, and it was laterally nerfed along with everyone else’s healing builds.
Obviously many professions have it worse. But complaining about one over the other at this point is just stupid. They’re all in a very bad place right now, with only about one to three viable builds across the whole professions. Concepts that were supposed to lend themselves to making any build viable obviously did not work at all. Many builds lack any sense of distinctiveness, or are outright flawed in their very design. I honestly don’t think you’ll ever see the richness of GW1 style building in this game. Really, I don’t think you’ll ever see even a fraction of it, because the core design is bad, and judging from the lack of progress so far, ANet has no intention of ever making even basic changes, much less dramatic ones.
I’d already sworn off PvE due to the manifest being burned and being given the finger by ANet because the WoW players bring in more money. I was waiting around to see if my Warrior at least would finally be worth playing in PvP, so I could at least wait out the storm in there.
No major changes to the core problems of PvP itself, and an even bigger middle finger to Warrior players who have been yearning for a rebalance to worthless secondary skills since the betas. I think I’m beyond being disappointed in ANet, and to the point that I’m just curious as to how delusional and disrespectful they can really be. Really? Improved dual shot damage by 10%? The skill that never even hits targets to begin with? The worst PvP weapon, and that’s it? Seriously, it’s just funny now how inept these people are.
Depends. PvE? Warrior. PvP? Thief. If you try to play Thief in PvE you will probably have some problems. If you try to play Warrior in PvP, hope you like being kitten