Guild Wars 2

Gaming or anything else is an addiction if and only if it it interferes with other aspects of your life, regardless of how little or how much you do it. One person could play for two hours a day but skip work to do so on a regular basis; that person could be considered addicted. Another person could play for 10 hours a day but never miss work or ignore their other commitments to do it. That person would not be an addict.

But all that is largely irrelevant to GW2 given the little amount of time it takes to reach 80. If you are used to WOW or old Everquest then 80 in a couple of days sounds absurd, but here it is possible in a few hours if you are efficient. Of course, you will miss out on a lot of content, even for people who aren’t focused on exploration and achievements, to do so by tradeskills and farming high level events, but even doing it “normally” it still takes very little time compared to other games. It took me 20-30 hours of actual playtime to hit 80 without abusing anything, reading any powerleveling guides, or having advance (beta) knowledge of tradeskills or anything else, doing a little bit of everything.

I wouldn’t think it’s an exploit unless there’s something in a specific dungeon that enables it to be skipped or otherwise complete it faster than normal. You can make 3 gold per hour just farming mobs outside if you know where to look.

DusK.3849:

Dedish.7923:

sense of gear progression

If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re playing the wrong game. And given we knew that there would be no gear progression a very long time before release, why did you buy it expecting there to be gear progression?

I’ll admit it; I’m a fanboy. But for the craziest of reasons: The game’s actually good. That doesn’t give you an excuse to write off objectivity. If you walked into this game thinking there would be gear progression, despite ANet saying countless times that there wouldn’t be, then you have nobody to blame but yourself for buying a game you decided to not look into.

Be an informed consumer next time.

So everyone who likes what you like is fine, and everyone who doesn’t should leave. Great logic. Maybe if you spent less time trolling every single thread about the endgame, they wouldn’t keep getting closed.

Character development is a core aspect of RPGs. It doesn’t have to be a gear treadmill, but if it’s absent entirely, the game simply won’t retain a lot of players and not enough will be around to buy expansions. Just as some people aren’t interested in gear treadmills, some people aren’t interested in achievement treadmills, collection treadmills, or mapping treadmills. It would make sense to include SOMETHING for progression-oriented people, else most of them won’t be around to buy the next expansion—and GW2 needs to retain a significantly higher percent of its customer base in terms of buying expanions to be profitable.

Also, the dungeon section of the main GW2 website states quite contrary to random blogs that came out just prior to its release that dungeons will reward epic gear, and doesn’t give any indication of “aesthetics only”.

DusK.3849:

They touched on a power plateau at max level around the time they had the ele reveal. Countless blogs and discussions in the years after that. You mean to tell me that somehow, when you “read everything on their site plus a couple reviews and beta videos”, you somehow missed all of that?

Here’s a link to a blog post by Colin touching on how a gear treadmill will not be in the game.

Colin Johanson

Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.

Here’s Colin Johanson and Eric Flannum in a video a few weeks before release talking about endgame.

So basically, yes, ArenaNet has said gear progression past max level will not be in the game. So if you bought this game expecting a gear treadmill, you might as well go out and buy Battlefield 3 expecting it to be Quake-esque arena shooter since you insist on being an uninformed consumer.

Correct. I did not read two random blogs released just prior to the game before buying it. I read what was on the main website, specifically the dungeons section which is very much in contrast to “aesthetics only,” and did a couple hours of research otherwise, most of it before June 19th, which would make coming across that information rather unlikely. Calling anyone that didn’t hunt down every last blog about the game uninformed consumers is ridiculous, and judging by your other posts in this thread you are either a rabid fanboy or a bad troll anyway, so kindly take it elsewhere. Neither I nor the OP nor many of the people concerned about the lack of endgame are saying GW2 is a bad game, but we would rather not see it be the next Warhammer, which is what it will be without some form of post-80 character progression. That actually does include things outside of the “gear treadmill”. AA/skill points that only work in certain areas so as to keep pvp balanced, heroic bonuses that only apply to heroic dungeons, there are numerous possibilities that could be implemented with minimal effort and without disrupting the other aspects of the game.

The fanboyism here is lollable. The OP made a lot of legitimate criticisms/complaints; I don’t agree with all of them but he was not obnoxious about it, yet virtually all of the responders who disagreed with him couldn’t do so without flaming.

Now for my Opinion, which is ever so important and should be adhered to strictly to the exclusion of everyone else’s:

Personally, I liked the leveling up more than most games. the quest hearts and dynamic events, both in terms of being less repetitive and not absolutely necessary to level up, are better than most other games.

I don’t have a problem with there not being a “holy trinity”, and for that matter, most classes have weapons and trait specializations that allow them to be tanks and healers, so organizing who is specced for what with your group is still an important part of dungeon running.

My only problem with WVW currently is that the bonuses are reset daily and the hacks/exploits people are using to take keeps, and those will presumably be fixed with time and the bonus extended. It would be nice if a fraction of it carried over to the next cycle, so it wouldn’t go completely to waste, or something to that effect, though.

The problem with the “endgame” is simply that there is no character progression, and character progression is a core aspect to RPGs. Without it, we might as well just have an FPS and cut out the leveling altogether. The fact that your character will be stronger after you X event IS much of the appeal of most RPGs. Of course it is bad if said X event is boring and you have to do it over and over numerous times, but without that progression, many players will not stay. I don’t have anything against people who like racking up achievements, exploration, or aesthetic gear, but I don’t really care about those things, and yet according to half the people here, that makes me “brainwashed” to enjoy meaningless numbers going up. The same could be said about meaningless achievements, or that the same massive grind is required to get the aesthetics here as is the gear grind elsewhere, but arguing as to which is better or more important is futile; some people enjoy character progression, some people enjoy achievements and aesthetics, it’s a matter of opinion. The problem is that if character progression is completely absent once you have a set or two of lv80 exotic gear, then the crowd that likes character progression is going to quit and probably not purchase the future expansions, and the game will lose a large chunk of its population. The argument that adding tiered gear would force people to get it is also not true; most games have separate PvE and PvP gearsets or rules such that hardcore PvE raiders do not have an advantage in PvP, so that said gear would only help in PvE situations. No one is forcing me to go to every single waypoint in the game; no one is forcing you to go into progression-type events or do said gear grinds for gear which will have limited to no impact outside of said events anyway.

As for “this was what Anet said their game would be so don’t complain”, I read everything on their site plus a couple reviews and beta videos and didn’t see anything about stat caps or lack of character progression. Even the Sept. 13 dev post doesn’t expressly say they will be absent from the game. I didn’t play GW1 and don’t read every single blog or scrap of information on the internet beforehand, nor is it reasonable to expect that people do many hours of research before purchasing a game. That said, I do not feel “cheated”; the game was/is fun, I am simply disappointed. I would also presume that Anet would probably like to retain both types of players when it comes time to release an expansion, and alienating half of them is not the way to go about doing that.

I’ve already disabled that and turned all graphics settings off or to the lowest they can go. It doesn’t stop it from happening. Is there a way to keep it from actually crashing at 1.5g in the first place?

I’ve heard some complaints about GW2 crashing as soon as it reaches 1.5gb RAM usage on windows XP 32-bit systems, and seem to be having this problem myself. The only solutions I could find were to enable the 3GB switch and lower graphics settings, but I have done both and it still crashes for me the instant it reaches the 1.5gb mark, most noticably in cities and WVW, but usually no matter what after a couple hours. Is there any other fix for this?

I am currently using Windows XP SP3, have 4GB RAM, an NVidia GTS 450 card, and an Intel quad core Q66 2.4gz. I have no problem running other programs that consume over 1.5gb RAM.

Thanks