Guild Wars 2

Hm, all right, as i start writing this post, my intention is not to take a side in this discussion at the moment, but rather to show the situation from a different point of view. So please follow me as i take a step back, and look at this last page along with the bigger picture.

First of all:
Fixing bugs should be a high priority duty for every active game developer who is making an online game. There is no real argument here. Bugs ruin the gameplay, the feeling, and the PR of any game and online service. Of course other things can have this effect too, but by definition bugs are allways unintented, while other aspecs of the game can simply be a matter of taste and preferences. So i think the right way to put it actually is not to put bugs on the top of a list, because it should be a list of its own.

Second point: becoming the no.1 MMORPG.
This is where things will get long in my explanation so please bear with me.
Once again, lets get something clear: “beating WoW to the throne” will definitely not happen by making a game thats every bit better than WoW, and turning all its players to GW2. This is obviously quite impossible. WoW didnt beat other MMORPGs this way either. I know that nobody brought this up in their arguments, but this had to be made clear in order to continue.
What happened in my opinion that caused WoWs succes, among many other things, was a generation change in the mmorpg genre. I will be a bit lazy here, and put every mmorpg before WoW to generation 1, even tho thats not totaly accurate, and say that WoW became the first game of generation 2, and became so important, that it pretty much defined the whole generation. Everyone of us have noticed how there are at least 20-30 “wow clones” out there, so i’m not going to go into that now.

When WoW came out, there were more polished games out there, for example i think both Lineage 2 and RO was better at this front, but i might be wrong. For my point, it doesnt really matter. You see WoW didnt become no.1 because it was better in any aspect than its competition to strictly say it, but because it brought some new concepts to the mainstream mmorgp world (concepts, mind you, not features). For example, the idea of being able to reach max lvl within a week starting from scratch was completly new. Up to that mmorpgs were allways trying to avoind having a reachable lvl cap because they were afraid that people would lose their interest. They all had either so high limits that in cases literally only years of grinding would get you to the cap, or they had some kind of reset system, either wiping the server periodicaly or giving the player the option for a New Game+ to start over with bonuses.

So, in my opinion, concepts are the defining points of generation. With that in mind lets take a look back to GW3 and its aims, once again, as i see it, since i’m not a member of ANet, so obviously i dont have inside informations.

GW2 is trying to be among the first games of generation 3, and you can see many others are rushing out to be in this group too. Learning from the mistakes of generation 2 they are not trying to target WoW players anymore, but rather bring in certain innovations taken from other popular games.
Why do you think GW2 has only 5 weapon skills and 5 slot skills? I’m quite sure all of you played games where you had more skill bars than 5, not to mention skills.. And why do you think the system was created with microtransactions built in, as the primary money source of ANet over time? Because those are among the defining concepts of new games. And this is where i admit that i’m an LoL player as well, but as you see, i can quickly clear myself off against the argument of bias:
Did you hear about some of the new upcoming mmorpgs? Like D&D online and Elder Scrolls online? As far as their trailers and informations went so far, they both want to be Free to play with microtransactions and both are planning to have an “action based combat” with few actual active skills, and since unlike D&D, Elder Scrolls can go even that far, they dont want to have “classes for tank, dps and heal” either. Sounds familiar, right?

So for those who wonder what this wall of text has to do with this topic:

Kaaboose brought up an interesting list of things he thinks should be changed/fixed to help GW2, and nearly everyone here missed the point that most likely these are not the features that ANet are planning to use to beat other current games. I also think that most of the arguments in this last page become manageable if you look at them from my point of view: if you take this list a bit more lightly, as discussion for the sake of discussion, it still remains important, but maybe the chance of finding an actual agreement on some aspects might be easier.

Kaaboose.3897:

So after listing to solutions proposed in a contructive manner I’ve renouced that idea, An inspect funtion would be a terrible idea.
So what other solutions have been put forawrd? Let’s go over them.

Solution 1:
I’m personally not a huge fan of displaying certain stats, especially for the purpose of party finding. It as a quite similar effect to the inspect function with the added note saying “watch out for this stat”, or otherwise why would it be there? This so far can be viewed as either a good thing or a bad thing, for my point, it doesnt matter. The problem is that it encourages people to look for things they perceive bad. This again can be a good thing when its done with deep understanding and based on facts and informations, on the other hand i think basically anyone with online experience knows that people who just think without ideas to back them up have the power to ruin plans like this.

Solution 2.
This again will most likely create an interesting situation. If a party, a whole party can have a united MF boost, then it might come to the point of “we need that 100% MF or we are not doing an optimal course”. It might not be as much os a complication as it is in other games since in GW2 we rarely do the instances for the random loot itself, but it definitely might have long running side effects.

Solution 3.
I find this one to be the most interesting, and promising out of the 4 listed. Something similar to the ascended gear’s AR+stat system with lower resource need could turn MF into a kind of “endgame” stat where your best armor would definitely have it, and it might help you with achieving contents added later or farm for resources for legendaries. So in my opinion it wouldn’t "Remove the “Work harder for better loot” idea behind MF." but change it into a whole different concept. So in the end the drawback comes to AN where they have to make serious considerations before even begining to implement this, and then work a lot to actually do it.

Solution 4.
Since my main character is a Ranger, i usually do have 1 skill slot that for most bosses i could switch up for an MF skill, but as far as i know, its hardly the case for most classes. Seems to me that most classes have quite a tight fit with the skill slots, and most of the time are already sacrificing something that could help them or the team (well, rangers also have good stuff for their team, just less vital). So in the end the cons add up here to the most.
With added difficulty to manage your character, to manage the party, and requiring a nearly whole system balance overhaul on the side of AN, i dont see this one even plausible for consideration.

As a side note, without the intention of derailing the topic, i’d suggest everyone to be a bit more specific when you mention “unbalancing the economy”, because this term is quite vague in this form.
For example, only within a week the the dragon chest changes decreased the price of rare items from 32-37 silver to 18-20 silver, and as a result, the price of Ecto from 35-40 silver to roughly 25 silver. Did this unbalance the economy? No, it just created a new balance point.
Unbalancing only occures when some result of a change cannot be kept up in the long run. And considering that it can have disastrous results in MMORPGs, please be a bit more specific if you have something particular in mind,, or just be careful with the term. Thank you.