Guild Wars 2

Raging Bull.5048:

1) People “think” GW2 is dying because it is.

2) Well said and very true. The sad fact is you’ll get infracted for that post of yours. But we all know the truth, even with posts being deleted and people being banned from the forums.

Define “dying”. People have been proselytizing on forums about “dying” MMOs since WoW launched, and with maybe 1-2 exceptions out of 100 games they’re all still very much alive. It’s become de rigeur to proclaim a game is teetering on the brink of instant death the very second it fails to implement a favored feature, or a server is closed, or a friend leaves the game. I’d like to say it’s because people actually have the impression that the game is sinking, but I think the far more likely reason is that regular forum attendees contain an unusually large sub-demographic of hyperbolic children.

The game, of course, doesn’t have anywhere near the population it had at launch, but that was to be expected. It’s been the case for every single MMO to launch over the last 8 years. It’s even the case for WoW, now…WoW has a surge for expansions, and then a rapid bleed-off. Everyone assumes it is because the games are crap, and the form their assumption takes is based on their particular confirmation bias. Are you a hardcore progression hound? You will proclaim the game is for “kiddies” and lacks an “end game” where you can grind your head against stats for 17 hours a day. Are you a hardcore hatin’ casual who views stats as the devil’s playground? You will proclaim the game is a ghastly WoW clone, and is shuddering in the depths because no one wants to play anything similar to a breakaway, genre-defining hit.

In reality, games struggle to hold on to large player bases because the genre has stagnated, and it is overly populated with FTP games with low to no barrier to entry. Exhausted the content? Why stick around? There’s a dozen other games with fresh content waiting to be tried. This isn’t 2004 and the competition isn’t several aging MMOs with archaic, punitive mechanics. This is 2012, and even the niches have niches. Games are going to drop 50-70% of their players inside of 3 months. It’s inevitable.

What would be nice is if the players would wake up and smell that the MMO world has changed, and stop screeching “fanboy!” and “hater” at one another on the forums, and issuing jeremiads about power creep and end game and easy mode and just accept the fact that the more games crowd into this space, the harder it’s going to become for them to hold onto a large base. Maybe then they’ll stop acting like a bunch of chicken littles every time something they don’t like happens.

Probably not, though. Edited by moderator: post edited as it was breaking the Code of Conduct for disrespectful language

Focksbot.6798:

Well, don’t go into a law court, or you might be overcome with shock. ;-)

Yes, motivation is objective. Objective does not mean ‘outside the player’; it means something that holds true no matter the perspective you bring to it.

“Is this activity boring?” is a subjective question.

“Why is this person doing this activity?” is an objective question. You don’t send some people to jail for murder and others for manslaughter on the basis of subjective viewpoints.

The individual decided why they did something. You can objectively state what a motivation was. You cannot objectively state what someone’s motivation will be based on what an activity is. You can’t take a particular quest and say “All people who complete this quest will do so for reason X”. That’s absurd.

Focksbot.6798:

Jestunhi’s got it. Motivation is an objective quality, not subjective. It’s not about what the player thinks about what he’s doing; it’s what’s making him do it. Is he motivated by the sense of satisfaction or accomplishment he feels from carrying out a task, or is it the twinkle of loot at the end of the road?

I add in the ‘primarily’ because you can be motivated somewhat by both, of course, and many games offer types of rewards so that players will have an added incentive over the top of enjoyment. But if the primary motivation is the loot, then they’re grinding.

I’m a little startled and alarmed that you view motivation as an objective quality that lies outside the player.

Like, so startled and alarmed that I think we’ve really gone as far as it’s possible to go with this conversation, because I have no idea how on earth anyone could come to that conclusion rationally.

Jestunhi.7429:

At no point did he mention the players opinion on what he was doing.

Is the player performing a particular activity repeatedly primarily in order to attain a reward other than personal satisfaction? If yes, it’s a grind.

I agree with this definition. It’s about repeatedly taking the same actions (crafting the same items, repeating the same DE chains, killing the same mobs, etc) because that;s what’s required to progress.

Uh…

You don’t think the reason and motivation that someone does something is unique to that player’s psychology? You think it’s given to us by the game, do you?

Focksbot.6798:

I don’t think it’s a threshold. I think it’s an objective binary. Is the player performing a particular activity repeatedly primarily in order to attain a reward other than personal satisfaction? If yes, it’s a grind.

You’re using the term as an element of human psychology. Josh thinks X is grindy, because Josh finds it boring. It’s basically just a synonym for things Josh doesn’t like, which isn’t terribly useful to anyone but Josh.

If we’re going to reach out and apply it as a label to a game…this game is GRINDY…this game is a TREADMILL…then we need some kind of objective standard. Otherwise we’re just communicating preferences, rather than actually establishing what kind of mechanics are in play.

Focksbot.6798:

I would assume you’re talking about carrying out some activity you don’t particularly enjoy or engage with just to get some reward or bonus that you’re seeking. You’re seriously telling me there’s a definition other than that?

What is the threshold beyond which something can be reasonably defined as “grindy”? Is the term completely subjective? Because completely subjective terms are not particularly useful in dialogue with other human beings, for fairly obvious reasons.

Really though, we are starting to derail the thread discussing “grinding” when what we should be defining is “treadmill”.

I would say that GW2 was something of an evolutionary step forward in terms of removing “grind” or punitive play mechanics from the MMO, but it’s just an evolution. I don’t think they’re slipping into old mechanics so much as they never fully outgrew them to begin with. You open a clown college, you should not be overly surprised when aspiring clowns show up.

Focksbot.6798:

Wrong way round. Grinding means doing things just for the reward. Repeating simply tasks and challenges just to farm materials, or doing a dungeon or boss just for the chest at the end.

It’s called grinding because, psychologically, you’re not getting anything out of the activity itself. The idea of a game is almost predicated on the idea that you’re completing unnecessary tasks simply for the enjoyment of completing unnecessary tasks. Other than the sense of a job well done, what reward do you get for beating your opponent in chess? Or completing Super Mario Brothers?

The ‘grind’ of MMORPGs is why people joke about gaming becoming like a second job. We’re no longer playing for the challenge or the satisfaction of doing something well; we’ve instead been persuaded to attach the same extrinsic value to virtual objects as we do to material property.

Just wait until unscrupulous governments start working this out.

I’m not really sure where you’re getting “wrong way around” from. What do you think I characterize “grinding” as? Back in the day, “grinding” was sitting on a hill killing Tumps for 24 hours to knock off one bubble of one level of experience, and we were happy to do it. These days people run into a field, do a single event, and come to the forums to moan about the terrible grind. The word has lost all meaning. If I said “grind” to you in casual conversation about an MMO, unless you and I were close you would have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

We apparently have an entire generation of players in this genre who are playing despite the fact they hate every aspect of the game except the part where their numbers go up. I find it utterly baffling.

Crater.1625:

A gear treadmill is not a ‘treadmill’ because you have to keep doing it. Every ‘new’ maximum that is added to the game is definitionally a treadmill:

Actually the working definition of “treadmill” is that you keep running in place, perpetually. I understand that this application of the term is metaphorical, but I think there’s a reasonable limit to how far we can extend the term before it becomes meaningless. Following your definition, we already had a treadmill the second the game introduced a level 2.

Crater.1625:

That is what characterizes a treadmill: Being in position A, then having new equipment introduced that functionally moves you backwards to position B, and requires that you gear up and grind again, just to get back to position A. Repetition of that process makes it worse, but the fundamental issue is a conceptual one, not whether it’s ‘only’ an 8% difference, and not whether you ‘only’ have to do it once every 6, 9, or 12 months instead of every 3, and frankly, even if you only had to do it once, ever, it would still remain the same fundamental problem.

This is the same colloquial abuse of a term that occurred with grinding, to the point that “grinding” now means “doing things”, and the only thing that isn’t a “grind” is receiving a reward. I’m going to need more than one more tier of gear before I’m prepared to say GW2 is now a remorseless gear treadmill and the manifesto is completely out the window. This business with a single new tier of gear being added is caused for a raised eyebrow and an expression of concern, not a huge fit and accusations of betrayal. Come back when they’ve stapled on another 3-4 and then we can talk about fair application of the term “treadmill”.

Crater.1625:

But the addition of a gear treadmill overshadows all of that. It doesn’t matter how good the new content is, or how much there is of it. It’s a fundamental philosophical shift in the game’s ethos, and every part of the game (save sPvP/tPvP) now has to be viewed in this new light. It’s the difference between a game that I think is great, and a game that I have absolutely zero interest in or curiosity about. I would rather have the game that I think is great.

I have argued very ardently against the implementation of a gear treadmill or perpetual progression system in GW2. So I can understand your apprehension. But I think it’s more than a little jumping the gun to say this is a “gear treadmill”. Yes, they have added a new tier of gear, and yes I can see why some view that as ominous, but we already had tiered gear. In order to have a legitimate treadmill we need continual additional tiers.

I think it’s good people are holding Arena Net’s feet to the fire on the question of progression because I wouldn’t like to see them reversing direction in terms of their original stated goals for this game. But I don’t think outraged hyperbole is helping when it comes to the dialogue around this issue. There is a lot of slippery sloping going on in these forums right now, some by people who seem otherwise quite educated and eloquent. I see a lot of rhetoric flying around about “trust” and “broken promises”. It doesn’t say a lot about the degree of trust people had when this is their reaction to a single tier. It actually demonstrates an utter absence of trust.

All ya’ll need to take a deep breath.

Adding special stats that exist for the sole reason of gating content is a stupid idea. And yes, I am familiar with the “lololol this doesn’t affect me at all, it only gates one dungeon, it happened in GW1, etc” responses to this. Those change nothing. It is still a stupid idea.

Roctod.7290:

This is a really really really bad attitude to take. Sorry, but, uh, yeah, everything should be able to be completed by 100% of the playerbase. If you cater to a small crowd of blowhards who insist everything must be difficult and can only be achieved through hours of grinding, a huge majority of players become disillusioned with the game.

If they don’t find the game fun, they stop playing. When they stop playing, they aren’t supporting the game through expansion purchases or gem store goods. And what should be more relaxed and fun than a simple holiday event?

I mean, I haven’t tried Reaper Rumble yet (couldn’t get into it for some reason), but Lunatic Inquisition is pretty much one of the most fun things I’ve done in this game.

Normally I favor the “casual” argument in video game, because I hate gamer elitism with every fiber of my being. Not only is it obnoxious to listen to, but it makes the community look like idiots. Who brags about games? Idiots do.

But your paragraph 2 is appalling. Am I to understand that if these hypothetical casual gamers come across a single jumping puzzle in a holiday event that lasts a week and change that is too difficult, or too fussy, or too glitchy for them to fully enjoy, that they will UP AND QUIT THE GAME? And not buy any expansions, or return at any juncture? Because of this one puzzle? That, if the forums are any indication, plenty of people actually like?

I guess I probably don’t need to tell you what I think about that.

Why not 24 minute matches? Really shake things up!

Shorter matches is not the solution to over-tuned snowball mechanics.

Selo

It was exactly like this in SWToR aswell. Most people that didnt have blindfolds on realizes quite quickittenhe faults of the game, while the fanboys posted stuff like you did to redicule the worried ones.

It didnt go to well for that game.

My guild has gone from 80 players to 16 logging in each day since launch. Most of them give the reason to the game beeing boring an repetative to levelup in, and there not beeing any endgame.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_correlation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Technically I’m just ridiculing terrible posts by people who aren’t thinking things through and are launching into panicked hyperbole. There’s really not that fine a distinction between “I think this post is stupid” and “I think the game is 100% awesome and completely free of defects”. It’s possible I can detect that distinction because I’m not a binary thinker. Assuming you are a human being, and not…say…a self-aware on-off switch, you really shouldn’t be slumping into binary thinking either.

It’s pretty lazy.

Warheart.8143:

Swtor sold 2 million copies the first month as well then it flopped and went from 100 servers to 11… If the mass DR’s, Farm DR’s stay this game will flop just as fast.

MMO FORUM POST MAD LIBS!

“If ___________ doesn’t change _____________ ASAP then it will flop, just like ______________ me and my _______________ all agree on this issue, and I bet that ______________ players share our sentiments.”

Eveningstar.6940:

What are you basing these numbers on? Are you just making them up, or is there some evidence behind it?

EVE online had about 357,000 active subscribers by 2010, and it’s still going relatively strong despite being as old as WoW. Meanwhile, Warhammer Online peaked at 800,000 and dropped to an average of 150,000 within the space of a year. Age of Conan peaked at 700,000 and dropped to under 100,000. Rift peaked at 600,000 and within a year, lost half that.

Meanwhile, City of Heroes began with less than 50,000 subscibers and lasted from 2004 to 2012 on an average of a mere 150,000 subscribers. CoH alone helped spur a spike of comic book themed MMOs, including Champions Online (still going) and DCUO (not as lucky).

WoW, on the other hand, peaked at 12M subscibers between 2009 and late 2010, and has been in steady decline, hitting just over 10M in Q1 2012. That’s a loss of subscribers that more than doubles the peak of other, smaller MMOs that have lasted years on a smaller subscriber base.

The other big hitters? Lineage and Lineage 2 and 2-3 million, Runescape at 4 million in 2009, and ToR which peaked at just under 2 million.

Oh, and the MMOs with the highest peak concurrent users? Fantasy Westward East, Zheng Tu Online, Yulgang, Wen Dao, Shaiya, World of Legend…and World of Warcraft. All of those have peak concurrent users between 400k and 2.5 million.

TLDR: Your “500k users or above for a successful game” makes absolutely no sense. Very few games actually peak at and maintain 500k+ users and succeed. Plenty of games peak higher than 500k and crash. Plenty other games never get above 500k, but last for years and years, and influence lots of games around them.

Fantastic post, it’s nice to see someone actually has their numbers straight for once. The headaches I’ve had debating the LOL@FAILMMOS posts over the years because they didn’t instantly soar to 10 million subscribers…

Notably, those numbers for WoW are pretty questionable as well. Roughly 2/3rds of WoW’s player base is in Asia, and the way those “subscriptions” are counted is a little different. WoW’s western audience would’ve peaked at around 4 million subs, and is probably closer to 2 million subs these days, if that (and lord only knows, a good number of those are probably lapsed or inactive) . TOR, as one example, was not released in Asia at all. Neither was WAR, if I remember correctly. GW2 won’t be released there for a year. Aion and Lineage both pulled in the vast majority of their subs through Asia as well, if I remember correctly. To do a realistic 1:1 comparison you really do need to put regional audiences up against one another, not one game’s global subs against one game’s NA/EUR subs.

So while WoW was most definitely an anomalous breakaway hit and a genre-defining game, that ludicrous 10-12 million subscribers figure has always been pure fantasy, and a lot of “failed” MMOs with “small” subscriber bases of <500,000 have actually been fairly robust hits.

For my own part, I have no interest in seeing GW2 wedded to an infinite progression treadmill. I want to be able to put the game down for a month, and come back and not find that all my gear is now hopelessly obsolete. I want to be able to fight a guy in PvP and know he beat me because he was better than me, not because he spent 5000 hours on his rump to get the Sword of Now I Am Better Than You Because Of Math. I want to be able to play a game that does not shove some of its best content behind transparent and punitive gating mechanisms specifically DESIGNED to soak up your time and keep you busy while they prepare content. I have to admit, I never thought I’d see the day where people embraced the busywork and turned their noses up at the actual game, but here we are, I guess.

Do I think the game needs more content? Of course it does. Do I think the content we have now is working properly/working to its full potential? No it most certainly is not. There is a LOT of room for improvement. But you can’t “improve” the game by slapping in infinite progression without fundamentally BREAKING it, and turning into something it was never advertised as. There are other games for that. Many, many other games for that. You can go check out their forums, and hear people screaming there about how obnoxious progression is. Because it was always the wont of the MMO fan to complain about everything they are given.

rook.4625:

I think we can agree most of the audience that spend the majority of their time in-game and not on the forums are ages 16-18, and that’s being generous. I even think it’s fair to say they make up most of the players in-game.

No, we can’t agree on that. A few years back the average gamer was 35. If that suddenly plummeted to 16-18 in the intervening months, I’d be incredibly surprised.

CONS

1. The dark side to Pro #1, you never actually accomplish anything. You just chase a constantly moving target for years. Now, hypothetically you’re enjoying yourself along the way, but if the game play is enjoyable, the game play should be enjoyable whether your numbers are going up or not. If you’re spending years of your life enjoying yourself, that’s something I can get 100% behind. If you’re spending years of your life “working hard” or “grinding” towards completely intangible accomplishments that have no actual value and will swiftly be rendered irrelevant even in the virtual world with a new content patch, you have the very definition of “wasted time”. Now, I HATE people leveling that charge at hobbyists, because you love what you love, right? It’s not anyone’s business to tell you that you’re wasting your time. But time and time again it is made apparent to me that these people are not actually having any fun playing. They persistently refer to what they’re doing as “work”, then moan and wail and gnash their teeth if they’re forced to repeat a process or lose any of their imaginary “progress”, and they give every indication of being people who believe they are undertaking hard labor for a concrete reward. Maybe that reward is “feeling powerful” (again, illusory). I suspect, however, that the reward is feeling better than the other guy. Feeling like you have a leg up on them somehow. That you’re better, faster, more committed (to a game). In that respect, it might serve as an esteem crutch for people, which…I’m also not sure is something I’m eager to endorse. This brings us to…

2. The one thing you may actually accomplish is getting more powerful than other players. The world constantly scales to keep up with you, so instead of killing level 5 bears you’re killing level 50 UMBER bears or something, and if you’re really lucky they have a slightly different skin (progress!). But you’re now 10 times better than that poor dipstick who is stuck at level 5, killing regular bears, like a schnook. This transfers into a number of behaviors, including garden variety elitism (on forums and in-game), or getting a numerical advantage that allows them to dominate in PvP (thus destroying any hope of fair, skill based competition). This eventually results in the gentrification/stratification of your population, with the barrier of entry to fair competition getting higher and higher as your progression pyramid gets taller and taller.

3. If your interest is fair competition…say you’re competing directly in PvP, or indirectly in PvE for party spots, etc…you’re forced to keep pace with the most ardent players, because they set the pace for development. You end up with raids that 0-3% of the population ever sees, and people working the game like a 2nd job, playing long past the point that it is fun or rewarding for them because they need to “keep up”. Now this is a human psychology problem and not necessarily a game design problem, but I think if you’ll ask around, anyone who has played an MMO for any meaningful length of time has experienced this phenomenon. It’s part of the reason why so many people, upon eventually quitting, tend to turn on their old games with almost vitriolic disgust. The games become COMPULSIVE, rather than FUN.

(con’t)

rook.4625:

Seriously though, where does your disdain for gear progression come from?

It’s less a question of disdain for gear progression (although there is certainly an element of that, now that I’ve spend over a decade exposed to it, and I’ve become quite familiar with the problems it presents) as it is a question of disdain for the attitude that an MMO must have gear progression. We’ve just got done with 8+ years of what has generally been accepted to be utter stagnation in the genre, to the point where Arena Net was able to drive sales of their game simply by promising something different from the status quo, and suddenly we have an angry minority insisting that stagnation was really the way to go all along. We’re less than 2 months in, and they want to throttle ANY form of innovation in its infancy. But fine, let’s talk about “progression”. Let’s talk about what it does, both good and bad, to your game.

PROS

1. It gives you a perpetual goal that you will never reach. Human beings are biologically hard-wired to strive, and we don’t do well with “being happy with what we have”. By constantly jerking the reward away from a player as soon as they reach it, you keep them feeling engaged, and you create the illusion that something tangible is being worked towards. This is very compelling.

2. It serves as a capable stand-in for actual content. Creating zones, monsters, dungeons, encounters, etc. takes a lot of developer time and resources. Creating one raid, slapping a lockout timer on it, pushing the drop rates down incredibly low, and tuning your next raid so that gear from the first raid is necessary to complete it introduces a HUGE drag chute on the achievement focused segment of your population. If the raid is released buggy and badly tuned, all the better. That’s a few weeks of them kept busy and not chirping for more expensive content.

(con’t)

lacrimstein.5603:

Don’t resort to personal attacks just for the sake of saying something. If you don’t have a solid argument against my point, don’t post a reply.

I’ve not seen anyone address the reality that progression in MMOs is fundamentally illusory, because as you level, you are given new, equal leveled foes to fight. You get gear and progress so you can move into a new area, get gear, and progress. You’re not really progressing “towards” anything except more progression, which is where the term treadmill comes in…it gives you the illusion of movement when you are actually standing still.

The idea in GW2 was that they were going to give you the content without gating it behind progression. Now you don’t have to raid for 50 hours to get the gear to fight a dragon, you just fight a dragon. And some people are saying “Fighting dragons is BORING, I want my numbers to go up”. And that’s fine, you know. If they don’t like the game play, they don’t like the game play. What I don’t understand is the part where they claim they would like it MORE if they had to raid for 50 hours first.

lagrangeify.5641:

Some great posts by Spectacular Yak, who displays a grasp of logic and an erudite turn of phrase that far exceeds what most of the opposition can muster. Not that he’s opposed to anyone – he talks sense and logic from the head, others appear to be channeling raw emotion from their bowels.

I swear to GOD this isn’t me on an alternate account.

Soulbound Soldier.6148:

It clearly is a weapon that requires your leg to operate

Like a leg cannon?

That’s awesome. I want one of those. Maybe you fire them by pivoting your hips.

Ventari.8257:

…and leg weapons?

What the hell is a leg weapon?

Is it like a spike you put on your boot?

Velvet.4678:

If levels 1 through 80 are very enjoyable…

Because you are chewing through unique content.

Velvet.4678:

…why shouldn’t 80 be?

Because you have exhausted unique content.

Velvet.4678:

The idea of getting away from WoW-like content is great and one that I support, but it is not a reason to simply ignore level 80 content.

Well let’s not use “WoW-like” because that could mean many things, and because Blizzard did not pioneer gated progression or treadmills.

THINGS THAT COULD/SHOULD BE IMPROVED ON FOR LEVEL CAPPED CHARACTERS

- Scaling needs to work better, opening up the world beyond Orr, because Orr is frankly not very well implemented.
- On that note, Orr could use a re-working.
- Some form of housing/guild housing and trophy accrual/display could go in, as a further form of collectible/cosmetic reward.
- More titles/ranks, particularly in PvP.
- More skins for everything, potentially some tied to the titles/ranks.
- More zones…the game could use another zone in the 15-40 range, and another couple of zones in the 70-80 range.
- Dynamic Event reworking/expanding on the concept, particularly in high level zones. Not so self contained. An out of control Rift in Rift could consume a zone, the same should be happening here. DE’s simply do not reach their failure states enough, and the consequences for failure states are too contained.
- More things to spend skill points/gold/karma on (new skills, new recipes, new skins, new minis, town clothes, whatever).
- A refinement of the WvWvW rule set to maximize competitive balance/keep the underdog alive longer, and possibly a re-working of realm wide rewards for WvWvW success to make success a little more visceral.
- A Darkness Falls equivalent

Unfortunately, while I expect to see most if not all of that at one point or another, I don’t expect to see any of it soon, because so much of the content we already have is buggy as hell, and there is still a TON of balancing work to be done.

Kwami.4356:

There weren’t any battlegrounds in WoW, but there was world PvP. This included raids on the capital cities of the opposing faction. There were also duels. GW2 lacks both of these things, though it does have four WvW maps (kind of) and a handful of battlegrounds. So, GW2 probably wins on PvP. Though, it’s hard to call zerg vs. zerg "PvP’. :P

You’re right that WoW was probably the most meaningfully content rich game on release in MMO history (although it felt small, at the time, in comparison to Everquest). Open world PvP, though? You mean the Tarren Mill/Southshore shuffle? Please. Let’s not insult everyone’s intelligence by claiming WoW had any functionally integrated PvP at launch, because it didn’t.

Handwaving WvWvW, which is probably the best large scale PvP implementation in any game since DAoC, as “zerg vs zerg” makes you seem a little over-eager to slam GW2. Criticism rings a lot truer when it’s fair and objective. When I see people jumping out of their skin to blast every single element of a game…even its strengths…I don’t think “rational objective criticism”. I think “confirmation bias” and “Hate Dumb”.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HateDumb

Kwami.4356:

Of course, there would be backlash if WoW launched today in 2004 form. We’ve had 8 years of progress in the genre.

We’ve had 8 years of stagnation in the genre. There has been very little meaningful progress during that time. Do you want to talk about game launches? Which super successful launches have built on WoW’s success? Age of Conan? Warhammer Online? The Old Republic? Rift? The Secret World?

Show me the 8 years of “progress” in terms of launching games in a feature and content rich state, because I’m not seeing it. MMOs are almost universally launched in a half-finished, content light state. GW2 is actually above average, in this regard, although their inability to get the content they have WORKING is a genuine problem.

DyZ.2854:

Don’t think you have enough time to listen to that long list.

Bull.

Gating content through repetition does not mean you have more content.

WoW and EQ. Those were the only games that had more content than GW2 on release. And it’s debatable in EQ’s case, as the “content” on display was a largely static world with virtually no quests, no events, no PvP, or many (most) of the modern conveniences and features that MMO players have come to anticipate and expect. If EQ was launched in todays market with that feature set, it would be blasted.

Hell, WoW couldn’t really launch today with that feature set. A PvE focused (PvE only, at launch) game with only one raid, a raid with completely bland and static encounter mechanics? I can almost hear the howling from the content locusts now. In fact, I can hear it really clearly, because I heard it then, too. And let’s never mind the loot lag and constant server issues. My god, they’d be pilloried.

lacrimstein.5603:

Alright, since you insist on treating GW2 on single-player terms:

It’s world is not nearly as immersive as Skyrim’s.
It’s action-oriented combat system is not nearly as thrilling as God of War or Battlefield 3.
It’s story is pathetic at best, and can’t be compared to, say, Mass Effect.

The trump card of MMO’s is that they are the only genre that provide a huge, persistent world where thousands of players can interact. Because of that, supporting server population is crucial. MMO’s need to offer content that keeps people playing for months. If it doesn’t, the world becomes a ghost town, and the game loses appeal.

Skyrim’s combat and crafting are vastly inferior.
God of War and Battlefield 3 don’t have nearly the feature depth.
Mass Effect’s world is microscopically tiny by way of comparison, and the game is completely linear, and oh GOD that ending.
This apple is disgusting, it’s not nearly as citrusy as this orange!

I’m actually of the mind that there is a long discussion to be had about ways to improve on GW2’s current state, most particularly for players who have capped their level, plateaued their gear, or finished their explorations. Because I think there ARE things you can do to improve things for those players, without necessarily vomiting up endless content, or shackling the game to an archaic and punitive infinite progression treadmill.

However, these broken comparisons (not to mention this chicken little routine you’re affecting) doesn’t fill me with confidence that you’re actually willing to have that conversation. I’ve had too many years of listening to too many talking heads on too many forums insisting that GAME X is totally DOOMED if it doesn’t implement FEATURE Y. Over a decade of near ceaseless jeremiads and bloviating from self-proclaimed experts on the genre, because they’re in this guild, or they raided that boss, or they played for so many hours consecutively they stuck to the chair in a puddle of their own filth.

Just be constructive, man. If you can think of a way to improve things that doesn’t involve gear that lets you hunt for more gear that lets you hunt for more gear that lets you hunt for more gear that lets you hunt for more gear, let’s hear it. We’re all ears. This “booga booga, the game is dying” routine is old. So…old. There are a lot of reasons that no game ever has managed to capture even a notable fragment of WoW’s player base, but none of those reasons are “the developers did not give into Chad’s demands on the forums that one time”.

Selo.1250:

Many of them are the same thing, just using different words. And many of us dislike playing alts, we want to progress with out mains.

Don’t use the “many of us” argument. It’s appeal to popularity, and you cannot even establish what “many” means in order to demonstrate the popularity part of that equation. If your argument is sound, it doesn’t matter if you’re the only one making it, or if two million people are making it. You will find that “many” people can be found that believe almost anything.

Selo.1250:

Its like it has 50% less things to do at endgame then any other mmo, and most of it are meaningless to do becouse other then looks, you cant use it for anything.

50% less things to do, eh? Can you make a list of things to do that do not involve perpetual incremental progression that ALL other MMOs have, and GW2 does not?

merlinr.6581:

Complete your personal story
Unlock all available skills for your profession / race
Raise your crafting disciplines to skill level 400
Earn enough karma/gold/badges/tokens to purchase an exotic armor/weapon set
Play through all dungeons in story/explorable mode
Explore all areas in the game (100% World Completion)
Create a new character to experience a different profession / race
Participate in structured PvP
Participate in World versus World
Find and complete all 31 jumping puzzles

*Collect a set of armor from each dungeon in the game
*Craft a Legendary

Condensed into a sensible list without the absurd duplication/fluff items. It’s still reasonable for a launch MMO, although some of that content (story, dungeons) needs a lot of work, and some of it…like world completion…is a flat out headache with the game as buggy as it is.

(*) for stuff that presently requires a punitive grind.

Dsmac

So you want me to bust out wiki links as well? Maybe link a straw man article? Good for you, you have a bachelors in psychology as well as I. Are my points invalid, because I feel that many players are so devoted to this game that they haven’t provided a good counter argument? That most counter points are silly excuses for a endgame. Many players that play MMORPGs for continuous progression. How many posts are there about this mentality is seen as broken, like the way we enjoy games is wrong? People arn’t posting here, because they want GW2 to fail. They are posting here, because they want something more and for the game to succeed.

Yes to someone who is actually biased you owned my argument, destroyed all my credibility, made all my points invalid. However in reality many posts about wanting an endgame and how there are numerous excuses for an “endgame” are still valid. What GW2 now has for a endgame is truley the end of a game.

O yea 95% of statistics are made up on the spot, your post is full of irony.

Feeling defensive?

1. You can’t make the “the way we enjoy games is wrong” boo-hooery complaint, while at the same time slamming “fanboys” for their “devotion”. Either you acknowledge that different people like different things, or you do not. Where things start to break down is when you start demanding that things you don’t like be changed to suit your preferences. If I don’t like a game, I don’t play the game. I don’t demand the game change core mechanics to suit my whims.

2. All games, even MMOs, reach a point of content exhaustion. You can either stop playing the game at that point, or ride a treadmill that gives you the illusion of progress. As I said previously in the thread, I have no problem with people wanting to chase a carrot they never catch. I don’t necessarily UNDERSTAND it, but I have no problem with it. I do have a problem with them demanding that every game feature carrots they cannot catch, and if it doesn’t have them they start making outraged demands on internet forums.

3. An educated adult using the term “fanboy” is fairly precious. Like “hater”, “fanboy” is just a way to poison the well and hand wave any criticism of a position. They disagree with me? Oh, they must be fanboys. I’m actually fairly irritated with the game at the moment and have a list of complaints a mile long, but because I disagree with the cult of Infinite Progression and Watching Numbers Go Up As a Stand In For Gameplay I must necessarily be a “fanboy” blinded by my devotion to the game. So if you want to bust out wiki articles, by all means, fill your boots. While you’re at it, find me one that explains why all forms of entertainment need to have progression attached to them in order to be worth anyone’s time.

Dsmac

…fanboys…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_polarization

There’s your fanboys. The fun thing about confirmation bias is that it is not limited to people liking things, it applies equally to hating them. 95% of the time anyone using the term “Fanboy” un-ironically is just as neck deep in bias as the people they’re decrying, they’re just oblivious to it.

It’s the forum equivalent of two opposing groups shouting “NO U” at one another. Gripping stuff, really.

TIL forum moderators are also programmers.

Velvet.4678:

Good input spectacularyak. I sense an undercurrent of anger in all of your posts that is unnecessary, however. Different people like different things. While you say the system was awful, people like me will disagree with you.

I’m saying it’s awful for PvP. While you might enjoy it, it does not change the fact that as a competitive exercise it’s absolutely horrible. One of the most essential elements of any competitive experience is the concept of the level playing field. Once you abandon that, you don’t have anything resembling actual competition any more. You have…uh…how to put this. A particular form of “self abuse”. In video game form.

And what you’re detecting isn’t anger, it’s irritation/astonishment at the concept that every bloody game needs to be shackled to this anachronistic “infinite progression” nightmare or it’s not a real game. That playing a video game for 200-400 hours isn’t any kind of reward, I need a reward for playing the video game! In the form of a new SWORD. A sword that will let me play the video game for another 200-400 hours, while hitting slightly harder. I’m sure you can understand why having this debate over and over and over and over and over and over and over might eventually cause a sense of incremental pressure to build behind ones eyes.

Revenant.2691:

The selling point of MMOs is infinite replayability.

This was NEVER the selling point of ANY MMO. This is the absurd expectation a certain demographic has come to have of them, though, mistaking infinite repetition for infinite “playability”.

And no, this is not a condemnation of the genre, which I like just fine. It’s not even a condemnation of treadmill progression games, because they have their niche and I think they fill it well. Some people want to be the greyhound, forever chasing the mechanical rabbit but never catching it, and that’s alright.

It’s a condemnation of the bankrupt logic that anything will ever offer you infinite entertainment, especially for $60 up front, or even $15 a month. The very idea of it is absolutely absurd, and I cannot believe otherwise rational adults can even float the idea out there without breaking down into guffaws.

The selling point of MMOs is playing your game, whatever it might be…FPS, RTS, RPG…with hundreds of other people playing alongside you, either cooperating or competing. That’s it. That’s the selling point. Does player interaction create a level of dynamic experience that does not exist in a single player game? Certainly. But no one ever said it was always positive, or that even that stays interesting forever. You’ll get bored of ANYTHING eventually.

No one wants to play games any more. They want to foment addictions, and then react with petulant outrage when it doesn’t happen. Only 400 hours for $60? Rubbish! What am I supposed to do with my time now? READ?

Velvet.4678:

Allow me to clarify: I enjoyed battleground PvP in WoW. The feeling of gaining new items and becoming more powerful was what kept me in it. Had it not been for the PvP gear progression, I suspect I would not have played WoW for as long as I did.

I will not deny that I liked it when I, as someone who spent more time on PvP and therefore outgeared my competition, was able to defeat other players who did not put the time in. The ultimate purpose in a video game (as I see it) is to enter a world where things that are impossible in real life, are possible. One of those things being having the ability to become stronger than the competition to experience a feeling of power. Standing out through skill is something that requires a tremendous time commitment and coordination with other players. I simply do not want to invest that time.

Regardless of the reasons, PvP in GW2 does not make me want to do it. The feelings I associate with GW2 PvPare not thrill and exhilaration of advancement but boredom of repetition (not saying WoW PvP was not repetitive).

Everything you’ve just described is why WoW’s PvP was fundamentally AWFUL, in a way that can’t ever be repaired. You simply cannot have any kind of competitive sport or contest in which one party accumulates a crushing advantage simply by indulging their innate appetite for and/or ability to endure tedium. Your automatic wins by virtue of having numerically superior equipment are even less compelling than a participation trophy. Do you enjoy playing single player games with the cheat codes on? The experience is functionally identical.

I enjoyed WoW a lot, and there are many great things to admire about that game, but a PvP system lashed to a progression treadmill is broken.

Zsymon

…you’ll never be able to actually kill anything with it though…

That must come as tremendous comfort to the dozens of people I kill daily with it.

Moonpuncher.7250:

I want to thank everyone for participation in this thread. You have temporarily inspired me to pursue a set of armor (since it sounds like that’s a universally agreed-upon fun-thing-to-do in Guild Wars).

I’m looking at dungeon sets now, but the pics are pretty low res. Does anyone have a good link to see what dungeon, crafted, cultural, and other armor looks like? Also, is there any gear set that’s not dungeon, crafted, or cultural? (Not talking PvP, i want it to be something I can show off in the world).

Thanks again for all the help. We’ll see if this keeps my interests!

Try this.

http://www.guildwars2junkies.com/2012/08/22/pvp-armor-preview-locker-room-screenshots/

Ragnar Dragonfyre.1806:

Remember when MMORPG’s were about the adventure, forging new friendships, inadvertently making new enemies and escaping into a virtual world that doesn’t have all the trappings of real world consumerism?

I miss the days when I could simply go to the blacksmith in Britain and purchase several sets of the “best” gear from another player and never once had to worry about gear (except if/when I ran out of money). It’s a shame that most MMO players these days just don’t know any better because the MMO’s they grew up on conditioned them into gear grinding zombies.

Yes and no.

I remember buying the best gear from a vendor in UO and never having anything remotely resembling a gear grind.

I also remember going to the bank and seeing 25 guys named Raistlin and 3 guys named Satan, and having all but a handful of those guys try to kill and teabag me the second I left town.

MMO’s have always been deeply flawed constructions. If they’re not fundamentally broken in one respect, they’re broken in another.

Moonpuncher.7250:

Yakface

Yakface? Sir, I protest!

Moonpuncher.7250:

I just want better stuff to work towards. Dungeon gear is “different” but not “better” than crafted gear. That’s kind of my problem with it.

As soon as you get that, though, you’ve broken something fundamental to GW2’s design. If I want to PvP or PvE I can do it on a level playing field that was relatively easy to attain. Not instantaneous…but not an overwhelming task. Very importantly, if I’m buying this game new 3 months from now, the length of that journey is the same. It’s not now 5 times longer, because I’m late to the party. The more you tier your progression, the higher your barrier to entry is. Vertical progression should NEVER outlast your content, or require heavy repetition of content to finalize.

Moonpuncher.7250:

I get that this sounds crazy if you’ve never played an MMO before. But if you’ve played any MMO at length, some part of you understands this. I don’t play many single player games. I feel like they take too long to learn, too long to figure out if I’m going to like them or not. MMOs are comfortable for me because its a world I can “live” in for a few hours a day. I like to have the one game I enjoy playing all the time. Yes, that sounds crazy to some people, but not to people who spent the time in WoW, or EQ/AC/etc. A robust and persistent world where there’s ALWAYS something to do appeals to me greatly. For years, it was the best $15/month I could buy!

I’ve played almost every MMO since UO, and it sounds crazy. I understand what you’re saying, and I might’ve said the same thing myself at one time, but it wouldn’t have made what I was saying any less insane. What did you enjoy about those games? Because if you boil it down to “progression”…and we’ve discussed how the progression in those games was functionally illusory…then you’re saying that everything else is secondary. Killing monsters, exploring worlds, all of it completely secondary to “I went from 10 HP to 15 HP”, so now I can fight the 15 HP monsters instead of the 10 HP monsters". Hur-friggin-rah.

Moonpuncher.7250:

It wouldn’t hold up in court. These are logical fallacies and it’s not meant to prove my point. The thing with common logical fallacies is that they show the argument cannot rest on those principles alone. But these things can still be persuasive.

It doesn’t hold up on an internet forum, either. They’re not persuasive BECAUSE they’re transparently fallacious. Just because this is not a formal debate does not mean we should abandon logic or rationality at the door and just start making stuff up as suits our whims.

Moonpuncher.7250:

Rather, it was simply to show that I’m being flamed for liking Grind Type A, when people are actively engaging in Grind Type B. I doubt anyone bought a full set of Dungeon X armor and thought “Oh, I was just having fun running that dungeon 30 times. The gear was just a side bonus!”

Do understand that I do not endorse flaming you, and that I am not one of the people suggesting a grind of any flavor is a delightful undertaking. I don’t grind for the cosmetic armor because 1. I actually like the look of my easily acquired non-grind armor, and 2. OMG why would anyone ever do that? But then, I like a “low-fantasy” look.

Moonpuncher.7250:

We can get some amazing particle-infused weapon after a year of farming, or we can swing around a variety of level 80 exotic swords that look like something I looted from a Risen corpse.

Something in between, please!

There are some pretty neat skins you can get from Mystic Forge recipes. My GF’s greatsword came out of there, and it’s got lightning coursing up the middle of two long blades. It looks as “epic” as 99% of the epic gear in other MMOs.

Moonpuncher.7250:

…the power they have is often a result of how hard they’ve worked.

Twitch #1. This is a video game. At no point do I ever want to see anyone sane or rational equating their recreational video game time to “hard work”. If it is “hard work” then something is very, very wrong with the game, or the way you are playing it.

Twitch #2. Unfortunately, effort or skill often mean next to nothing when it comes to acquiring loot. Many games, even my much beloved EQ, had relatively low skill caps. It was all a question of a massive investment in TIME. Time spent repeating content, time spent waiting, time spent killing time, in order to make your +2 sword a +5 sword, so you could kill rats +5 instead of rats +2. It is a flawed model.

Moonpuncher.7250:

And this game, to an extent, agrees with me. Like I said, we can keep pretending that ArenaNet wants everyone to have the same capability all the time, but they still want you to go through 80 levels and at least farm up a good 100 hours of gold/karma/tokens/whatever to buy the gear. They just shortened the “time sink”.

There’s nothing wrong with the concept of vertical progression, the problem is vertical progression that never truly ends, or vertical progression that requires an investment of thousands of hours to complete. This is meant to be a hobby, not a lifestyle replacement.

Moonpuncher.7250:

I want to WvW and sPVP, but those things won’t keep me logged in hours a day.

Why does the game have to keep you logged in for hours a day, ostensibly forever!? Do you think there is a game in existence that can do that without having you indulge in absolutely spectacular amounts of repetition? I can tell you right now there isn’t. If you have stopped having fun, stop playing. If I get tired of a book, I put down the book. If I get tired of a show, I turn off the telly. If I get tired of anything, I move on to something else. But when it comes to MMOs, we are meant to understand that we should NEVER get tired? We should play for 500, 1000, 10000, 15000 hours, cheerfully killing goblins, completely transfixed because our hitpoints keep creeping up, and now I’m critting slightly more? This argument is COMPLETELY MAD.

Moonpuncher.7250:

But for every person condemning me for liking powerful gear, there’s 10 more logging in and running the same boring dungeon (trust me they’re bored of it by now) to afford their armor set.

You’re a smarter guy than this. #1, appeal to popularity. #2, you have not in any meaningful way even established popularity, you’ve just speculated a randomkittenpull statistic based on your confirmation bias. None of it is a foundation for an argument.

Moonpuncher.7250:

Give me more neat thing i can work towards please!

Take. A. Break. Go play X-Com.

Moonpuncher.7250:

You took away my stat grind, and left me what?.

Well, you were left with a game that by your own admission was great fun for the 150-200 hours it reasonably takes to exhaust the content. At that point, you either alt, or repeat the content if you REALLY enjoy it, or do the PvP if that’s your thing, or put the game down and go do something else while new content is prepared.

Take two games. MMO A, and MMO B.

Both MMO A and MMO B have ~ 200 hours worth of content. That content includes quests, dungeons, meaningful encounters without repetition, etc.

MMO A allows you to experience all of it without any noticeable timesinks. You do it all on one pass. 200 hours. Done.

MMO B puts length timesinks into the game. To do dungeon 2, you must first repeat dungeon one 10-15 times, and so on. You play for over one thousand hours.

Your argument is that by taking away those timesinks, they have robbed you of something essential. Putting aside for a moment the only reason those timesinks ever existed the way they did in the first place was to drag chute players and keep them paying a sub fee while new content was developed, can you come up with a cogent argument as to why a timesink of that magnitude is a crucial element?

BEST

1. Exploration/World Design
2. WvWvW
3. Early power plateau
4. Absolutely minimal forced grouping
5. Highly mobile combat

WORST

1. Extremely buggy, even by genre standards
2. Level scaling not really working as advertised
3. Dynamic Events lack ambition/complexity
4. Dungeons are underwhelming
5. More (non power related) goals needed for level-capped players

Moonpuncher

I really enjoy this conversation. But I don’t think I’ve called anyone a fool. Generally, I find the more name-calling you have to show, the less credibility your argument has. If you replace “fool” with good quality persuasion you might get somewhere. Dumdumpants.

Quoting this instead of something else because quote is, as usual, broken.

And yeah, lay off Moonpuncher. He’s being pretty reasonable and sparking a fair discussion.

There’s a problem with perpetual progression in MMOs, and the problem is that it is for all intents and purposes illusory. As you level up, so too do your opponents. Your level of power relative to the world you’re inhabiting is essentially static. In early stages, you might progress from killing rats to killing dragons, but eventually the game will blow its “fantasy hierarchy” wad and you’ll be back to killing rats again. Only HIGH LEVEL rats. With a mystic sword.

There comes a point in every MMO gamer’s career, when they’re swapping out the pants they spent 500 hours of raiding to acquire for a pair of green pants dropped off a random zone mob in the new expansion, that they begin to wonder what it was all for. The veil is temporarily lifted, and the reality that you’ve basically been running in place becomes apparent. Some people really enjoy the act of running, so they shrug and carry on. Others fly into a rage of disillusionment and crash the forums, talking about skinner boxes and operant conditioning and wondering how on earth they managed to stay so duped for so long.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with people who play just to see numbers go up incrementally over a period of many years, but I cannot claim that I find it particularly compelling myself at this point. What I desire from a game developer is their content. Their enemies, their dungeons, their story. If I log in to a new MMO to find that a significant portion of that content has been gated behind excruciating time sinks, I will look angrily in their direction, and my mouth will form a firm, hard line.

Moonpuncher.7250:

1) Advertised as X doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to wantY. It might mean I should have known not to expect it, but I can still want it.

And you’re going to continue to be told by people you’ll need to find it somewhere else. If I buy a puzzle game expecting an arcade brawler, what is my best course of action?

1. Recognize my mistake, and buy an arcade brawler.
2. Try to learn to enjoy a puzzle game based on its own merits.
3. Storm the forums and demand it be changed to an arcade brawler, and screw people who like puzzles.

Moonpuncher.7250:

2) Show me the true vanity items for an asura ele. Most of the cloth in this game looks the same, which means my only real options for weapons or gear is to spend HUNDREDS of gold. A game is going to need smaller rewards that take place more often to keep people’s interest. To stretch this out, would you really play this game for an entire year to get an item, with no rewards in between? Doubtful.

The game needs more “reward” tiers in the form of cosmetic items or “fluff” that can allow them to feel a sense of setting and meeting goals without those goals directly translating into endless vertical statistical progression on their avatar. This is “content”. You could attempt to make the argument that GW2 launched content light, and I would laugh at you, because it didn’t. But there will never be a game made that you cannot exhaust the content in with heavy play time, unless that content is specifically gated behind lengthy time-sinks and treadmills.

Moonpuncher.7250:

3) It’s a grind either way kiddos. So if you’re hating me for grinding stats, you should point the same dirty finger at grinding vanity.

It’s an optional grind. I can see all the content in the game, and experience PvP on a completely level field, without having to sink hundreds if not thousands of hours into a perpetual gear chase. I’m quite certain you can understand the value in that. The current grind on cosmetic items is, frankly, absurd, and I’m not sure why they chose to do it that way, but there it is. I’d like to see them add a LOT more, and some of them easier to reach. But that, again, is content. And new content must needs be delayed while they get the content they already have actually working.

Omega.5682:

MMO players like being able to become more powerful than other players based on the time and energy they put into the game.

Omega.5682:

MMO players like being able to highlight their individual skill in competitive contest

One of those things is completely incompatible with the other.

People like A, because they specifically do NOT like competitive contests. They like contests in which they have an advantage.

Moonpuncher.7250:

Give me something to do in between now and then so I don’t lose focus

.

Yes. More carrots to chase are good things.

Moonpuncher.7250:

Give me a way to slowly become more powerful please.

No. Ever escalating power is a bad thing, and completely anathema to the game’s current design.

rook.4625:

Yea, like basketball? That’s a game right? But I’ll be d*mned if there are kids that wear ankle weights to increase their vertical so they can jump higher and play more athletically.

What about tennis? My dad has a ball hitting machine so he can improve his game, so he can play better against his friends. Is that a sin? He wants no cookies, he feels rewarded in his effort that he applied to this recreation you speak of.

Wait, no, I get it. This is a computer game, right? Nothing physical, all fun, except you see all the competitive sports leagues now, and why were these things even created? It should just be fun, really, right? But I guess it’s just that competitive nature that makes the game just that more rewarding.

No, I do not want this game to just to appeal to the hardcore stance, you have misjudged me. I simply believe this game has the platform to appeal to the masses.

Well, a couple of things about this…

No one is stopping you from “getting better at the game”, which includes making faster decisions, thinking more tactically, understanding the mechanics better, having better reflexes, etc, etc. That is the correct analogy for people training at a sport.

I expect when you complain about “reward” you’re talking about numerical progression. That does not sit well with a sports analogy. Numerical progression in sports would be, say, a team winning a game, so they get to play with an extra man in the next game, so they can win easier.

If you have a competitive nature, you should want a flat field of competition, so that your personal skill determines the outcome, not your “rewards”.

rook.4625:

Na, I think what they want is a sense of a reward.

I remember a time when recreation was considered a reward in and of itself.

Now, people want cookies for eating cookies.

Sheen

Oh i’m sorry were people done with EQ/UO/AC1 within 3 days having done all of the major things there were to do in the game?

UO? Using today’s knowledge base and experience? Easily. EASILY. 24 hours, maybe, if that.

EQ? You know as well as I do that hitting level cap in a reasonable span of time wasn’t possible due to hell levels. Is this discussion about leveling speed now? Because you were talking about content. And by the modern standard of “content”, EQ didn’t have ANY. All it had was mob killing. Sit on a hill, kill some mobs. Level. Sit on a new hill, kill new mobs, level. I loved the game. I talk to THIS DAY about essential elements of the experience that have been lost in the translation from EQ to the more modern MMOs. But honestly, if I had to play EQ today? With sense direction, and XP loss, and hell levels, and the camping? I’d bin it almost immediately. The genre has moved on.

Sheen

I enjoy the fact that you tried to throw your weight around like you were some experienced MMO player, but you are talking to someone who is your senior….

You don’t act like anyone’s “senior”. I’ve honestly not met or interacted with any adults outside of their very early twenties who express themselves the way you have, and I CERTAINLY haven’t met any adults who use their lengthy experience in MMOs as some kind of podium to stand on. I’ve played a lot ofkittenvideo games in my life, but I never actually thought it was something to go around boasting about. And I don’t use it as a platform from which to abuse the No True Scotsman fallacy, either. So…

Sheen

The content in games like EQ = giving you places and zones to go to in a persistent world tied in to every other player on the server (no overflows here boys) with monsters of varying levels and difficulties that might allow you to solo them, or bring a huge raid to take them down.

I’m not sure where this “tied in to every other player” stuff is coming from, it’s a strangely poetic way of saying “you got to do a camp check 5 seconds after entering a zone”. Of all the things to feel nostalgic for in older MMO gaming, that’s a pretty curious one.

Sheen

I am sorry that WoW has brainwashed you into thinking in a way where you try to downplay how much content EQ had… but as someone who was in a top progression guild in EQ, as well as playing on Rallos Zek… I can safely say your revisionist history crap is skewed in a way to downplay the old mmos and glorify gw2.

Not at all. EQ was my favorite MMO of all time. Then UO. Then, possibly, WoW. I like a lot about GW2. Specifically I like it right now, in large part BECAUSE it’s not aping what have become increasingly stagnant conventions. I find it really weird that someone who played EQ way back in the day would actually come to a forum and waffle about content depth with a straight face though, because maybe 1 in 100 people would call what passed for content depth in the late 90’s acceptable by today’s standards.

Sheen.8196:

That’s odd because there are people with 100% map completion, story completely finished, nice looking gears, who are completely bored with the game. Which is harsh, because the old mmorpgs used to give you months of content at launch.

Again with this crap. Let’s try and keep in mind what that content WAS.

UO? Completely broken ecology. For the first few weeks you could barely even get a creature to SPAWN, let alone actually get a hit in before combat starved players swarmed it. There were no quests, no story, it was all sandbox, and all the toys were broken.

EQ? If you put the near constant rollbacks and server outages off to one side, what’s your content? Huge world? Check. Lots of mobs? Check. And that…was…it. Quests? Nope. Story? Nope. Events? Nope. Your content was killing mobs. And killing mobs. And killing more mobs. You can do that here, too, by the way. Yay, content!

DAoC? Hardly any functional system for RvR at launch, massive balance issues. PvE was completely halfkitten virtually no questing or story to speak of, completely unfinished and unitemized dungeons, no real rhyme or reason to anything, and no real way to get from 40-50 without one of the most absurd grinds imaginable (literally queuing to sit in the same spot for 10-20 hours at a time, farming the same spawn).

CoH? Randomized missions in a very limited set of instances against a very limited set of foes, using the same tactics over and over for every group. From level 40-50 there was so little content you had to run circuits in the sewers killing Hydras for hours on end. The “end game” was a terribly silly looking raid on an energy blob that was hilariously untuned.

AO was broken. AoC was broken. WAR was broken.

We’re really left with WoW…and I mean, it sounds silly to think of WoW as an “old MMO”, but if you’re 16-19 years old I can see why you’d feel that way. WoW, with its loot lag, with its awful Molten Core, the endless cycling through UBRS to kit out in “tier 0”, broken class balance, non-existent PvP unless you were a masochist and enjoyed doing the Southshore shuffle and/or dueling.

And hey! I liked ALL those games. Well, maybe not AoC, but ALL THE REST OF THEM. I loved some of them. EQ might be my favorite game of all time. But you? You are talking a bunch of rubbish when you suggest they were all bursting at the seams with “content”. Standard, revisionist history crap. And I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts if any of those games were released today you’d be one of the talking heads sneering at how bad they were and predicting their imminent doom, because that’s how you roll.

TLDR – Forum mushrooms show no perspective on history of genre, as usual.

Morgash.3165:

Sure in massive wvw zergs you can plink away with a longbow. Your not gong to bring people down though. I used to be a 100% longbow user. Just experance has shown me that its not nearlly as effective as a short bow. Granted you have to be built for the short bow, con-damage is a huge part of the build. It cost me a pretty penny to regear for short bow but it has been worth it.

This is the part I don’t understand. My feeling on the Shortbow has also been that it is a condition damage weapon, primarily, so to use it to full effect, you need to be stacking condition damage…which scales linearly, and can be cleansed. Do you not have to sacrifice one of crit, power or crit damage in order to stack that condition damage? How, upon doing that, are you still doing comparable physical damage to someone running a more conventional Berserker setup?

This is why I want to see actual math. I want to see what builds are being used for results, and where the damage is coming from. I want to see the cooldown and channel times on attacks. I want to know what kind of difference armor makes (because I most certainly DO kill people in WvWvW) . I want to see more FACTS and NUMBERS, and less anecdotal experiences.

TemperHoof.6438:

One of the biggest problems right now within Guild Wars 2 is that new players will now find just about every 15 minute event camped by a small army of bots.

I may be level 80, but I do run a lot of alts, who range in level from 10 to 30. In roughly 200 hours played, I’ve yet to see more than 1-2 players who I even suspected of botting, let alone could easily confirm. This, along with your assertion that “rare” items are spiraling up to 100g in price (when it fact it is only specific items needed for legendaries, actual “rares” are available for a handful of silvers), smack of hyperbolic and lazy journalism. I don’t deny the existence of bots…some of those screenshots and videos are pretty conclusive. And I fully applaud an article meant to light a fire under Arena Net and make sure the problem is dealt with as swiftly and harshly as possible. I just don’t think the best way to accomplish that is with alarmist claims and questionable, nebulous data.

There’s a lot of “many” and “lots of” and other vague, undefined terms in your piece. If you have data on bots, share the data. If all you have is anecdotal evidence in the form of youtube videos and screenshots, then change the language to support that. Video games in general are already frequently the subject of yellow journalism without yet another frothing jeremiad adding to the noise.

A call to arms on bots? Fantastic. Information about a gold sellers economy? Good stuff. You just need to tighten it up. By any real journalistic standard, this is an unacceptable piece.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

By your logic:

If I choose to do a DE more then once because it has a nice reward I am exploiting….

If I choose to farm any mob anywhere and it respawns then I am exploiting…

What exactly am I allowed to do that wouldn’t be exploiting?

What about the people who let the Grenth event fail so they can retake the temple? are they “exploiting” because they didn’t try hard enough?

Careful on that slope, man.

It looks slippery.