Guild Wars 2

If you’re looking at skills as a means of character progression, then I have to commend you for it. A wider choice of skills breeds build variety and trying out new ways to play is far more enjoyable than grinding for higher numbers (tiers of gear).

I hope you consider revamping or at least tweaking your weapon skill system somewhere down the line.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

As Colin mentions in this post and this post, based upon community feedback, we are adjusting our strategy to include a larger mix of permanent updates in the future.

Those are good news, thank you.

Every MMORPG out there tries to make me login on a constant basis. Usually they do so through some form of recurring event that rewards you with a kind of currency you can turn in for things you want in the game.

GW2 does this with regular streams of content….as well as the more traditional means.

While I appreciate the constant updates with new things to do, as someone who likes to take long breaks and come back when he feels like it, all this stuff you release that you then take away is making me not want to login at all. I feel further and further apart from the rest of the community and from the game each time I miss something, and I don’t want to play out of a sense of obligation. Why can’t I enjoy your awesome content when I feel like it?

Please, consider keeping the things you implement in this game on a more permanent measure. You should still get a decent influx of active players with each new update anyway.

Vayne.8563:

Sorry OP, those quests have been put in the back burner, and they’re not being actively worked on. Sucks if you ask me.

I’d like to see some really long and involved quest lines in this game. I’m not wanting the traditional questing model, mind you, but one of the biggest flaws in Guild Wars 2 to me is the immediacy of everything.

Even in the personal story, everything feels separate instead of one continuous story. They did better on this in Guild Wars 1.

I’d much rather see precusor quests in the game than RNG.

That’s a shame. I’m at 94% world completion right now and I really wanted to try and go for a Legendary.

I’ll just come back if/when they announce the precursor quests. No biggie. Game has no sub.

Are we ever going to get quests to obtain the legendary precursors or is this just a rumor from months back?

I haven’t been playing the game and today I considered logging in to finish my map completion as a step towards the legendary, but I won’t bother unless there’s hope for me on the horizon. In their current form, I am simply too lazy to acquire a legendary. Yes, you can go ahead and make fun of me all you want. I will not spend the hundreds of hours required farming nonstop. I understand that only a small percentage of GW2’s population is expected to own legendaries, and if I’m not one of them, that’s cool. I just wanna know if I should quit now, because I doubt I’ll ever have the precursor and the trading post prices are scandalous.

Where are the patch notes?

Vayne.8563:

Space Cow.2431:

Vayne.8563:

How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.

…

The developers themselves post in their own forums on a semi-regular basis, often discussing player feedback. These changes make it into the game. They have a PTR where they encourage players to play and post their two cents about what’s being done right and what could be improved before the final version of the patch rolls out. And they love to brag that they listen to what their playerbase is saying, even if they are slowpokes in reality.

And, again, are we really arguing this? It’s common sense. If the community responds negatively to a feature en masse, it becomes something the developers have to deal with in order to retain active players.

Common. Sense.

Common sense is uncommon. Of COURSE devs are going to brag they listen to their fans. Why wouldn’t they? The problem is, you still don’t know how much stuff would have been done anyway. So of a company says, we listen to our fans because their fans said something they had in mind, why would they say otherwise.

Common sense includes not believing everything a company says. I don’t believe everything Anet says. Companies use spin. You should check out a television program called The Gruen Transfer and the sequel series Gruen Planet. It’s all about how companies use spin and PR to make themselves look awesome. They’re all businesses. They’re all out to sell copies of their game. They’re going to try to present themselves in the best light possible.

Note, Anet is a small company and pretty bad at this. lol

I don’t believe most of what Blizzard says either >_>

But I still find it completely ludicrous that anyone would think NOT discussing problems or what a percentage of the customers perceive as problems is a positive thing.

Anyway we are getting way offtopic here. It’s worth reiterating that I really like this game, and I only want to see it get better.

Vayne.8563:

How do you know what changes were planned, or what they wanted to do before people complained.

…

The developers themselves post in their own forums on a semi-regular basis, often discussing player feedback. These changes make it into the game. They have a PTR where they encourage players to play and post their two cents about what’s being done right and what could be improved before the final version of the patch rolls out. And they love to brag that they listen to what their playerbase is saying, even if they are slowpokes in reality.

And, again, are we really arguing this? It’s common sense. If the community responds negatively to a feature en masse, it becomes something the developers have to deal with in order to retain active players.

Common. Sense.

HiddenNick.7206:

This is exactly what I meant. You have access to all skills but you can’t pick skills from more then 2 professions at once. So your first decision is to choose 2 out of 10 pools/professions and that restricts you to about 250 skills. I’m not saying this isn’t huge amount of possibilities. Just saying how it really is in Gw1.

Jesus Christ…

Read the preamble, and then read what I wrote, and tell me where I failed to specify skill choice restriction.

Space Cow.2431:

The following is an analysis of what each player has access to in ONE character as far as creating a skill build goes.

-7 of 1026 normal skills (roughly 125 per profession, everyone has 2 professions, second profession can be changed. 81 skills are common across all professions).

I think that you wrote exactly the same thing as I did but with different words…

And I think you lack reading comprehension.

GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).

False. They can change those 5 skills by changing weapon sets.

Read what you just quoted. If you still don’t get it, read it again until you do.

Also you constantly forget that you can choose 2 weapon sets at the same time.

You’re right, I did forget that, my bad.

It should really read 2 of 5 sets of weapon skills (on average).

I will change the opening post accordingly.

I can’t understand why your saying silly things like that…

Stopped reading here and won’t bother with your posts anymore. If you resort to ad hominem you lose all credibility.

Vayne.8563:

Aside from that, saying if no one complained things wouldn’t change is unprovable, since there was never a time when no one complained. You’re assuming Anet is happy with the state of balance. I don’t think they are.

That’s ridiculous. I don’t need to prove it, it’s common sense. If nobody ever brought up an issue, the development team would focus on churning out content to retain players instead of wasting time and effort (and money) reworking mechanics.

So yes, talking about what is less than stellar is absolutely essential. Look at Blizzard’s Diablo 3. They move at a snail’s pace, but over the course of a year they have improved the game, and nearly every change was brought about by the rabid forum community.

Jemmi.6058:

I do like how you could customize your builds more in GW1.

However, I wanted to note that many of the skills in GW1 were repetitions.

For example Jamei’s Gaze and Heal Other:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jamei's_Gaze
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Heal_Other

And I wanted to point out that this only happened in the Factions expansion. It was pretty sad, I agree. While it was cool to have duplicate skills, it was blatant lazy design. But, again, thankfully it only happened in the first expansion and never again.

The game WILL change. Real change takes time. In a year, the stuff we’re complaining about now will not be valid

If nobody speaks up about it, then nothing will change.

Most MMOs at the 9 month mark are still babies.

Prophecies (The first GW1 campaign) did not have this issue upon release, and clamming up and never bringing up the shortcomings of an MMO is not how improvement happens.

If I didn’t care about the game I would not even bother posting. Clearly I like the game to some degree, but I’m disgruntled with where it falls short of expectations. I bring up these issues so that others may potentially echo my sentiment. And like I said, while I don’t expect a massive overhaul to the skill system, I have a glimmer of hope that Anet at least considers some changes in the right direction.

HiddenNick.7206:

You can choose 2 of 10 professions. And this choice restricts your other choices to 7 from about 200 skills and 1 from about 60 elite skills. I know that’s a lot of combinations but not so many as you stated.

Anyone can change their second profession, so everyone has access to every single skill. You may only draw from a combination of two professions at a time, so 125+125+60+81 for a single choice of two professions, or about 1300 for a single person across all possible choices.

All changes to your build are completely free.

HiddenNick.7206:

You also forgot to add that attribute distribution restricts number of skill pools to choose from. Like putting most of your attribute points into Sword Mastery restricts you to choose from sword pool.

It’s really the other way around. You pick the skills that will work and then assign attribute points to hit the thresholds of effectiveness that you need out of each skill. Your mileage may vary, and you should try to keep your spell schools to 2 or 3, which often leads you to look for skills that provide similar results in more convenient attributes.

GW2:
-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).

HiddenNick.7206:

It’s not like that at all…
Elementalist:

…is the big exception. I should know, since I play one. Can you guess why? It’s the least boring class in this game and it has the most skills.

And even the Elementalist suffers from 5-most-important-skills-are-always the same-syndrome, they just have more of them at a time…but they still can’t change them. The lack of build customization persists, it’s only the variety in their available loadout that is superior to the rest of the GW2 classes.

HiddenNick.7206:

That’s about right. You just forgot to mention that attributes are strictly tied to gear in opposite to gw1. But attributes still exists.

Attributes in GW1 have more in common with GW2’s traits than GW2’s attributes since they are a flexible part of build customization as opposed to something you try to stack the most of in gear.

Milennin.4825:

On first sight it looks pretty awesome, having that many skills to choose from. But then you realise how little skills are actually useful in general. A lot of skills are very situational

That is part of why GW1 skills were so awesome.

Suppose you have a skill that costs little mana and has a quick casting animation, causes weak to moderate damage and inflicts a strong condition on the target but also on yourself (poison/deep wound).

By itself, this would not be a very useful skill. But what if you have another skill that purges conditions on yourself and you gain life/mana for each? Or maybe you have a skill that grants you a buff that gives you condition immunity, and you found a way to keep up that buff indefinitely because it has a mechanic that refreshes its duration (lets say, for the sake of argument, that it reduces its own cooldown each time you crit). Combine these with a number of other skills that put conditions on you but also grant you advantages that are substantially better than they otherwise would if they were less situational, and you have yourself an interesting build.

That’s just one example. There were skills like that and builds made around such mechanics.

Look at the 55 hp monk.

The monk had a skill that reduced all incoming damage to no more than 10% of the player’s HP, and yet all of the monk’s life regenerating skills granted flat bonuses. The pool of HP to work with wandered the 450~500 health at max level, and regeneration skills were balanced around those values. If a player’s health then, happened to be lower, each point of health granted by regeneration skills was that much more valuable.

So there happened to exist items in the game that lowered the player’s health. Anything from Superior Runes to odd offhand items. Players realized that they could stack these to lower a player’s health to something as low as 55 hp. That means the most damage you could take from any one normal attack, was 5. If you regenerate upwards of 15 health per second, mobs will be hard pressed to kill you. And so with that in mind players devised variations of that idea with mechanisms to regain mana points so they could continue to recast all the spells necessary to keep this going and some form of AoE damage dealing that they could keep up indefinitely. This was as early as the first GW game, no expansions or anything. 55hp monks were farming trolls in ice caves for rare drops.

Sure by the end of the game’s lifetime everyone knew about it through PvX and other such websites, but think about how creative and ingenious the game allowed their players to be, and how rewarding it was to be able to completely change the way you play the game.

Experimenting and stumbling upon fun little combinations was the highlight of my day.

Vayne.8563:

Of course you guys agree. You accuse me of being a GW 2 fan boy. Well you’re GW 1 fan boys and you know, memory is not a perfect vessel.

I never called you or anyone else here a fanboy, there’s no need to go there.

And my memory is pretty fresh. I went back to GW1 a month before GW2 came out to finish my Hall of Monuments.

GW1:

-7 of 1026 normal skills (roughly 130 per profession, everyone has 2 professions, second profession can be changed. 81 skills are common across all professions).
-1 of 293 elite skills (you can choose to drop an elite for a normal skill instead)
-200 attribute points (to distribute across 1 primary attribute and 8 of 36 secondary attributes)

GW2:

-5 sets of 5 weapon skills with aquatic counterparts (on average).
-3 of 22 utility skills (2 racial)
-1 of 4 healing skills (1 racial)
-1 of 6 elite skills (3 racial)
-70 points (to distribute across 5 trait lines)
-7 traits (1 for each 10 spent in a single trait line)

GW2’s skill system is far too restrictive, and your weapon makes up 90% of your build and fully determines what you do in combat. The game becomes monotonous fast.

The pool of skills to choose from in GW2 is simply too small once you’ve committed to your race and profession at character creation. The biggest problem is the weapon skill system. Interesting in concept but lackluster in execution. Compare this to GW1 where you have the freedom to mix and match everything you want and crazy-yet-functional builds flourish in any environment.

The only thing GW2 does better than GW1 as far as the skill system goes is Traits. Traits are infinitely better than attribute points.

Just because some skills were OP doesn’t mean it wasn’t awesome to have thousands of skills to choose from.

It kept gameplay from being BORING. I’m BORED of GW2 because the weapon skills is what you use the most, and they are ALWAYS THE SAME.

aspirine.6852:

My first question would be did prophecies get you hooked or the full game with all the updates and expansions, for myself it was the latter.

I can answer that. I played GW1 since it came out and the game had all the good things right there since the beginning.

The big hook of GW1 was the profession and skill systems. Anyone who enjoyed the game will tell you that. Being able to experiment and mix-and-match as much as we were able to back then spawned hundreds of awesome builds with WIDELY different playstyles.

GW2 has a boring skill system, and instead of trying to overhaul it, Anet decided it was easier to add a gear treadmill.

Vayne.8563:

ShiningSquirrel.3751:

Zeppelin.6832:

Hence the problem with horizontal progression. Going after different “skins” is great, but you can only wear one set of armor at the time. Eventually you’re going to settle on what you like, and then what? There’s nothing else to do on a character.

Except play the game. That is what GW is supposed to be all about. You level, outfit your toon, then just play. It worked in GW1 for 7 years.
GW2 was created as a game with horizontal progression, it was advertised as a game with horizontal progression and it was sold as a game with horizontal progression.
Players coming in now and complaining that they don’t like horizontal progression really have nothing to complain about. The arguments that “the other games has this, the other game has that” are not valid and meaningless. This is not the other game.

It did work for Guild Wars 1 for 7 years…but Guild Wars never went mainstream. It had a core group of players who adored it, including me, but everyone I knew was off playing WoW.

Guild Wars 1 sold 7 million copies over 7 years or a million copies a year. WoW has ten million active subs at the moment. Sure it was successful, but the devs want to do something “big” and to do that they need numbers. Far more numbers that Guild Wars 1 provided them. For that matter, of the 7 million people, just about everyone I know had multiple accounts, because it was cheaper to do that than buy character slots. Between my wife and I we have five accounts. So it wasn’t necessariliy 7 million people who own the game.

Guild Wars 1 had a staff of 50 people. The staff making Guild Wars 2 is five times the size. That’s a huge difference. In order for Anet to make the game they envision they need more people to play it.

I was absolutely fine with the way things were in Guild Wars 1, and I wish more people could be fine with it too…but I strongly suspect that’s not the case.

We get that Anet decided the big business was in letting go of horizontal progression, but can you see how the people that bought the game because Anet promised something that they failed to deliver? And not in passing mind you – it was relentless advertising on their position to NOT fall into the same conventions of the gear treadmill.

The harsh reality is that Anet deemed their initial target audience insufficient, and in order to appeal to a broader audience, completely axed the core aspect that set their game apart from everyone else’s.

Can you understand why so many people are disgruntled with this situation? We were lied to.

MMOs are an investment of both time and money. They are a commitment.

That lie cost us 60 bucks and however much time we wasted in this game up to the point where it was made clear (after they finally stopped avoiding the question) that yes, new and stronger tiers of gear would continue to get released in the future.

>Advertise game’s primary aspect as lack of vertical progression
>Sell tons of copies during the first month
>Dissatisfied with number of active players
>Abandon the highly advertised direction they initially chose to take
>Players rage
>Anet covers their collective ears and pretends this isn’t a problem

I now quite simply don’t trust Anet and will not buy any possible expansions or future games. I also haven’t played the game for 6 months and sincerely doubt I will ever pick it up again.

dexored.8432:

I hope that Anet will find any useful feedback from this thread and apply it to the game later on. I don’t care if they put them all in an expansion…

Haha.

This has been discussed to death since the game came out. If Anet was remotely interested in what their customers have to say, something would have been done by now.

Heck, even a statement with a few promises would go a long way toward building up loyalty with their customers, but at this point they’ve burned so many bridges that I don’t think their word is taken seriously at all.

GW1 was a different MMO, so it attracted the people that were tired of the other MMOs.

GW2 promised to be a different MMO, and then chickened out.

Twaddlefish.6537:

Space Cow.2431:

Gear progression is the reason I have lost all interest in this game. I logged in today to see if anything has changed and immediately logged out.

I don’t understand why the people who want a gear treadmill can’t play one of the MANY other mmorpgs catering to your needs.

Instead we got this mess of a game that promised to be aimed at people who did not want to hunt for incremental gear upgrades every few months, then turned completely around claiming they didn’t lie to our faces when in fact they did.

1: Market game towards niche target audience
2: Alienate them in favor of the WoW-clone players
3: Fail to please those people
4: ???
5: Lack of profit.

I know it’s early, so I’ll assume this in the wrong thread because gear QQ has nothing to do with the title. Also, you point no.5, regardless of what I think of the rest of your points, is completely wrong. 3 million copies sold and a gem store that couldn’t do more business if it sold kittens.

I think they’re back on the right path with the SAB getting people out into the other capital cities, hopefully there’ll be permanent events like this soon to spread the player base out and get people away from world events.

I have no idea how this post ended up in this thread. I never clicked this thread at all :/

I replied to a thread that was about gear progression.

And I got infracted for it too.

My sincere apologies, but I’m still puzzled as to how this happened.

Thank you for the reply.

How long did it take you? Don’t worry about factoring in JUST farming hours, I want to know how long after you acquired the game did you manage to get your legendary.

-What was the hardest part of the grind?

-How much easier does it get once you get a hold of a precursor?

-Did you have to flip the TP or was regular farming sufficient?

-How many hours a day did you play overall, both for fun and to work towards it?

-Was it worth it?

I had completely given up on the idea of getting a Legendary, but I saw someone with Sunrise the other day and I nearly burst into tears. I will most likely wait until ANet introduces a better way of acquiring a precursor but I’d like to hear any kind of feedback on the journey from people who have been through all of it.

I will continue to agree with this.

Is your burning hatred towards competitors so fierce that you’re completely against mounts? They’re fun, practical, and would make ANet tons of money as a cash-shop item.

Self-explanatory.

It would be nice to level my alts while contributing to my overall karma on my main.

It would be nice not having to deposit and withdraw gold from the bank all the time.

Nibiru.1423:

Same as saying, the game is too hard so it must change because I’m too lazy to work for my stuff. I want everything in 3 months, stuff everyone else if they get bored because the game is too easy.

I would agree with you if this game wasn’t sold on the promise that it wouldn’t be like this.

Nibiru.1423:

“archaeology” in WoW was seriously more boring than anything iv done in GW2

Oh, I quite agree there.

Weindrasi.3805:

I can make roughly 1 to 1.5 gold pieces for every 6-20 minute CoF run I do.

Alright I guess I’ll tackle this one.

The best I have managed to do was 1g/hour running CoF, which is not bad but I stopped immediately because it bored me tremendously. It made me not want to play the game.

Ever since I quit WoW I promised myself I would not play a game unless the activity itself is entertaining to me.

I remember exactly how I decided I was done with WoW. It was 2 am and I was doing “archaeology”, which essentially means I was flying around stopping by digsites to click a button and hope something rare drops, which most of the time it wouldn’t.

I stopped and said, out loud, “what the kitten am I doing?”.

Again, no disrespect meant towards anyone who finds joy in this kind of thing, but I have long since left that behind. I think the general IDEA of Guild Wars 2 in which they standardize rewards across the board is a good one, because it discourages farming, I just think that rewards should scale better depending on the level of difficulty and a ratio of time/effort involved. Maybe this is a matter of the game being young. Maybe six months from now or even a year a lot of these kinks will have been ironed out, but some alarm bells went off in my mind after coming back to see that the situation has not improved, but worsened instead.

And to address some comments about exotics being easy to acquire, here’s my stance on it:

I don’t actually think they’re hard to get. I don’t think I can even truly criticize ANet for their choices here, but it’s really a matter of what you consider the norm.

If you were happy with GW1’s method, exotics here seem way too time consuming. Understand that this is the point of view of someone who approaches this game very casually, which is probably why they enjoyed the first Guild Wars.

If you are used to almost every other MMORPG, then exotics here are certainly very very easy to get.

So if anything, ANet chose a middle-ground that most of us are comfortable with in that regard.

Disclaimer:

This is one of “those” threads that everyone got out of their system months ago when the GW1 community left en masse and everyone else carried on unscathed.

You may want to skip it.

…

Playing this game is like climbing the steepest mountain imaginable.

I jumped ship when ascended gear was announced, but like a true junkie I came back recently because friends of mine started playing.

Little did I know things have only gotten worse.

Making money is virtually impossible unless you’re willing to:

1) Manipulate the TP

2) Spend an unhealthy amount of time farming for pathetic yields

I refuse to seriously consider option 1 because it’s neither fun nor productive to fight against people who have fortunes ready to invest every day made in the earlier days of this game when gems were cheap and plinx was unnerfed.

And I have better things to do than option 2.

My beef with this is that the game was sold to me on the promise (a pitch Anet plastered all over the place, mind you) that it was everything BUT option 2. Oh no, grinding is for other games. Not us. No sir.

Except it is. It truly, truly is.

This post is long enough as it is so I’ll skip over all the disappointment on how much this deviates from the first title, for better or worse. Nobody here is arguing with the sheer amount of content provided at a kitten good price, either. I don’t think I am owed a refund. I simply do not understand Anet’s aversion to making this game accessible to the average joe they were so eager to appeal to during prelaunch.

Everyone who plays this will reach a point in the game where they will feel like picking a goal and working towards it, but they will quickly realize that all roads to anything worth having will ask a hefty sum of gold. Said gold is impossible to farm at a reasonable rate. Heck, inflation rises faster than you can make a few pennies. I’m sure people with a firmer grasp on economy can pinpoint the exact reasons, but the reality of the situation should be clear to most: everything you do gives you meager rewards. Everything.

I guess my point is this:

Arena Net, or whomever is responsible for decisions on what direction this game is taking, is so afraid that people will stop playing their game that they’re artificially prolonging activities and grinds past the point where they are fun.

I can only speak for myself, I suppose, but at the same time I imagine anyone who’s bothered to think just how much time lies ahead of them before embarking on whatever journey they happen to choose, might also be discouraged earlier than you would like.

TL;DR:

-Event rewards should scale better (if you take 20 mins to kill a dragon with a bunch of other people, why do you get virtually the same net profit as you would doing some random 5 min event out in the world that you can solo?)

-Map travel needs to cost less (the game already has so many money sinks, and if you don’t farm you just barely break even)

-Legendaries should be difficult to acquire as a result of challenge, not how long it takes to gather materials (and perhaps creating quests giving them some flavor wouldn’t hurt)

To the surely many people who will vehemently disagree with me:

I’m glad you’re having fun with the game, no hard feelings whatsoever. The best among you will try to help me out and give me tips on how to get slightly less meager results, and believe me while the thought is most certainly appreciated I’m more concerned by the overall economic infrastructure than finding ways to work around it. The worst among you will tell me to L2P or dismiss my critique because they hold a different point of view. I’m a fairly passionate person so I will make an effort not to engage in an exchange I know will drag on forever without a chance at a consensus. Which is to say, if I ignore you, don’t take offense. I’m sure you raised a perfectly good point, I’m just keeping my combative nature in check.

…

Well, I’m glad I got that off my chest and if this gets exposure before sinking into page 2 I’ll call it a success.

The loot sucks.

‘Kay? ’Kay. I don’t think spending 4s to map travel then spending the next twenty minutes killing a dragon only to break even on the port cost and maybe a few pennies more. Very, very rarely, you get a yellow you can sell for 23s, and exotics, well, I’ve never gotten one off of Jormag myself.

So the loot sucks, and that’s out of the way.

378 karma though, really?

I’m going to go ahead and say that I don’t know of any special ways of farming karma beyond doing WvW. I did not know about Plinx until way after it got nerfed, and I suspect even if I found some similarly exploitative method of acquiring karma it would follow suit. Plus, I do not think it’s ultimately fun to just chase whichever obscure method of getting ahead is currently the most viable.

So is the disparity between WvW and regular events intended? And if so, is there a reason why event rewards all seem to give you the same (rather pathetic) rewards regardless of time and effort invested in them?

Right now, it takes 252k karma to buy a set of gear. At a rate of 378 karma per event, that’s 666~ dragon runs. I say dragon runs because everyone does them, so it’s the most likely event to get a full group out of, but even if you supplement these runs by walking around looking for other lesser events, that’s still going to be at the very least

six hundred and sixty six

events.

I’ve realized this is a prevalent issue throughout Guild Wars 2. The game is worth buying because there is a lot of content, but unfortunately the tiresome nature of the grind (as a result of really, really terrible rewards overall) drains the motivation for playing it.

I’ve picked up and abandoned this game on and off since launch. I pick it back up when my friends discover it for the first time and lose interest when I see myself making virtually no progress towards getting any kind of interesting item. I can’t make money and I can’t make karma. Everything I do feels like picking up trash and selling it for chump change.

Have you considered the possibility that in your zeal to create very long grinds to keep people in your game you might be driving them away instead?

Well done, OP, well done.

Yup. Logged in just to see if they’d put that on sale.

Not surprised they didn’t, though. The gem store is awful.

I’m not playing the game at the moment, this isn’t some sort of entitlement thread. I’m just pointing something out because I noticed people were talking about all zones being dead, which of course contrasts with the early stages of the game in which everyone was leveling and helping each other out in events.

These group events are a good thing. They are optional and easy to join or leave without causing dreadful harm to a group because there are so many people around you.

You fixed Plinx. That’s a good thing. No, seriously, it is. But for example, introducing Fractals just shifted the problem from one end to another.

There should be greater rewards for hanging around leveling zones.

Dynamic events like outdoors bosses should pop up more often and yield greater rewards so that maxed level characters feel like it’s worth their time to roam around looking for them. If the net profit of sitting in town repeating LFG over and over again is similar to that of someone who takes the time to go around the world scavenging for group events, then people will most likely do what’s more engaging and less mind-numbing.

It will engage your players in social interaction again and make the journey towards gearing up more entertaining. And it will breathe new life into the leveling zones for newcomers, preventing them from abandoning the game early on through fear of sinking their time into another ghost town MMO.

I know this used to be your design philosophy, and despite other decisions you’ve made recently that I strongly, strongly disapprove of, I doubt that things on this front have changed. Remember people respond much better to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement. Equalize rewards by making it more appealing to go explore. Enough to truly get people out of LA and into the world. If you your changes are marginal nothing will change because each of these events is too dependent on multiple people attempting to accomplish one goal. You have to make it good enough for everyone to be interested in it.

This could easily apply to every other aspect of the game, from crafting and even to pvp. I know this is what you intended to do in the first place. So don’t give up.

I feel like doing a thread on this.

Tolmos.8395:

And maybe we need more.

Precisely. Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t make it go away.

Keeping it to one thread would only serve a purpose if ANet used it for answering questions or at least acknowleded that they are looking at what we’re saying. By not letting go of this issue in the face of their silent treatment we’re protesting against these changes.

The forums are a slice of the playerbase. The entire community here is a vocal minority, regardless of the opinion they hold. Neither side of these arguments has any basis when they claim whether or not they are representative of the larger spectrum because the sample size is not big enough.

But here’s the thing: while the quantity of forum-goers may be dwarfed by the rest, they still range in the thousands. This is an important fact that does not get nearly enough attention. Regardless of percentile value, that’s still thousands of dissatisfied customers.

When a company conveys the idea that they do not care about this segment, by action or inaction, what does that say about them? And what do you think it will do for player retention?

You do not want to throw away the internet credit you had. You built this up with your marketing campaign and fans rallied to you in support of the underdog that promised wonders.

We can accept failure, but not betrayal. Be straight with us. Communicate with your players.

Roven Leafsong.8917:

I’m curious why this is any more relevant to the game post-patch as it is to the game pre-patch.

Many elements that would qualify for what is represented in the video were present since launch, but because there was a very real ceiling to it, it made the game into something people were more content wrapping their heads (and time) around.

Recent events make it seem like that ceiling is crumbling down on us and the lack of any real clarification exacerbates the panic response.

That’s all.

Kojiden.8405:

I don’t really like Extra Credit. The series is an opinion box. A vlog. But the entire structure of the video is him acting like a teacher and telling you how wrong you are and how right he is. It makes him sound condescending; like he has some amazing insight into the world that nobody else has.

You don’t have to agree with everything they say (I happened to cringe at the episodes about gamers being social pariahs and how basement dwellers are ruining it for everyone else) or how they convey their message to their viewers, but I personally would find it fairly ignorant of someone to dismiss what are extremely valid, well thought out and well explained traits of today’s gaming industry. No offense intended.

I am not saying Guild Wars 2 is the only game guilty of this. It isn’t, not by a long shot. I just wanted to share something with the rest of you to address a question that is asked of the segment who is generally disgruntled with the game as of recent events.

It’s interesting, you should check it out. Pretty much everything from Extra Credits is great food for thought if you are passionate about games.

ArenaNet is being judged by the standards they built up for themselves.

You’re telling people to stop voicing reasonable concerns with a game that has blatantly gone against everything that was promised, a game that marketed itself on principles it has utterly disregarded.

Explain to me what good would it do for people to shut up and take it as if the problem had gone away? And how is any of that indicative of growing up?

I am thoroughly disgusted by this kind of attitude from consumers with far too much time and money on their hands not to care about the state of the industry. Problems need to be reported so that they may be fixed, and underhanded business tactics need to be exposed so that future gaming companies think twice before they screw over their playerbase.

Speaking as someone who is generally disgruntled with the current state of the game, I just wanted to tell you I appreciate this level of communication and I hope you engage in it more often in the future.

Do you really think not having this section would stop people from voicing their concerns? They would just spread it all over the place.

You know I checked the reddit thread and you already covered this, so let me contribute with my two cents on other issues instead:

Question #3:

As a customer from your previous game, I am comfortable paying for expansions that come on a yearly basis and I expect most of the content to come from that. I don’t know how much ANet or NC Soft has to compromise in order to give us frequent, free content patches, but personally I would rather wait longer and pay for content updates if they are extensive and worthwhile (i.e. expansion packs).

Also, if there is at all room for suggestions on what kind of content we want:

New skills.
New weapons.
New classes.
New dungeons.
New areas.
New cosmetic grinds.
New story. Especially PERSONAL story.

Question #1:

Is ascended gear the final tier, forever? Yes or no. Straight answer, please.

Question #2:

Will you keep infusions strictly as a means to combat a specific mechanic, or will you start adding stat bonuses?

I stopped playing. I gave up on MMORPGs a long time ago, Guild Wars was the exception. Now ANet is taking a steaming dump on their customers and I decided I’d stay out of this until good news crops up.

I login once a day to see if there’s any news, but I don’t expect anything really.

If you need a European server, whisper or self invite then LEAVE THE PARTY

EU server all alone, first stage of quest. Whisper me/self invite/join.

NEED PEOPLE.

Invite yourself to my party (EU), we are halfway through the event and need more people.

Bella Risa.7413, I’m trying to join you but it keeps saying your party is full

Can you try inviting me please.