Guild Wars 2

This week was sad to say the least. For a few day after reset I did my best to keep high hopes for a JQ rally since you’ve got to cheer on your home team, but they soon caved in to my usual realist expectations as the competition was cranked up on Tuesday.

JQ just feel apart when BG turned the pressure cooker on and I finally got a good feel for what this server is really like. I haven’t seen a single queue since Tuesday. After the NA schools let out, LA /map chat always had at least one “troll” from BG/SoR reminding us of our crippling inability to play tactically while 20-30 JQers with their heads in the sand began blowing the trumpets of “oh you’re just a mad, kitten troll”. The funny (because it’s sad) part was that all I saw were 20-30 “mad, kitten” JQers projecting their upset on to the troll.

TS was the worst of all though. Players whom I once thought were level headed adults ended up being something far less when the veneer chipped away. The insight I gained in to the attitudes of many of JQs commanders was astounding. For days I haven’t been able to log in to the TS server without hearing commanders yelling at people for voicing their opinions, in fighting with each other over tactics (which was funny since the one with the better strategy was called a “troll” and players were actively encouraged to not follow him), and patting themselves on the back for gaining 10 points while we lost 30 points worth of objectives.

At one point I got to witness a player tell one of our commanders where some remaining enemy forces were stationed, but due to a language barrier he couldn’t give exact terms, but his description of “below” would have been enough for my 4 year old niece to understand she needed to look down. The commander kept asking him to clarify and finally the guy got exasperated and said “JUST LOOK DOWN” very shortly. The commander then told him he needed to “go to anger management” and to not get so mad because he [the commander] “was being nice”. I had to quit TS and the game all together to keep the cruelty festering in my gut from spewing out. I rejoined the game and TS a few hours later having finished some housework that needed to be done and immediately I walked in to this same commander yelling at another player for “second guessing him.” I couldn’t help it. My finger hit my ALT button and I gave it my best, most nasally Melvin voice and told him “you need to go to anger management”… and he lost it. He started yelling at me about “respecting” him and all the “hard work” he was putting in the server. “See you’re yelling at me. You need anger management.” At that point, I got up and went to the kitchen to check on the enchiladas I was cooking and get some water. From the living room I heard, “IF YOU’RE GOING TO TALK TO ME YOU BETTER HAVE A DEEPER VOICE, YOU LITTLE kitten. WHY DON’T YOU GO HAVE SEX WITH A WOMAN BEFORE TRYING TO TALK TO ME.” My wife heard it too and I could hear her kitten literally fall off from laughing so hard while I was doing a spittake. It was comedy gold.

But seriously, what was once an enjoyable (well, the only enjoyable) aspect of the game has been reduced to playground slapfights as I’ve had to come to realize that JQ was in fact carried by it’s best guilds and in reality, this place is mostly populated by a bunch of spoiled-rotten brats.

Open fire, kiddos. I couldn’t care less.

Yeah.

Watch the recording on youtube later.

Straegen.2938:

jesterscript.7493:

Every time I spend the 30 minutes necessary to kill one of these super “skilled” thieves in WvW they always come back with 8 – 20 other people as back up.

Basically doing their “job”. Many thieves build to harass and tie up players keeping them distracted. If one thief keeps a half dozen players running around chasing their shadow, that is helping the server overall and generally does require skill.

You keep telling yourself that while my buddy and I keep running around killing your dolyaks and taking your camps – strangling your supplies – while our zerg takes your towers and keeps that just can’t seem to get upgraded or repaired. That silence is your siege not having the supply to get built and that depression is the >1 number next to your Tier.

Every time I spend the 30 minutes necessary to kill one of these super “skilled” thieves in WvW they always come back with 8 – 20 other people as back up.

I always just assume that once they finally get killed, they have to get up, dry off all the tears, change their diaper, have a baby bottle, then hit their Pukitteno-Talk button and scream in the most Melvin voice possible “I GOT KILLED NEAR X, HURRY I NEED BACK UP HURRY”.

Zen.8497

Typical I-just-discovered-social-skills-and-kittenized-western-Buddhism drivel

No, I’m totally clueless like everyone who hasn’t managed to make it past the 18-25 age range.

I’m staying alive longer than ever after the Elixir S “nerf”.

Haven’t had this much fun in WvW since I got the game.

I took my engi to EB with the guild last night and after the server’s bad commanders went to bed we hit SM, but the arrow carts forced us to retreat and treb the walls from a safe distance like anyone with a little bit of brainpower would do. From there we spent about an hour and a half figuring out where we could build catas to take down the inner gate without ACs busting them. After the inner gate went down, we spent another 2 hours locked in combat with the defenders until we finally broke down most of their ACs and took the keep lord. Unfortunately, they got a couple more ACs up which caused all the zerg puggies to run away crying leaving me, my guild leader, and two guildies with the remainder of the defenders and after some intense ground-holding we finally got killed and the defenders revived their lord.

No, we didn’t take SM after almost 5 hours of fighting, but I’ll be kitten if that isn’t the most fun I’ve had PvPing since before Blizzard ruined Alterac Valley by turning it in to a quick zerg rush (72 hour AVs were a beautiful thing).

More maps, rotating map cycle…

Oh and I’d love a super-low graphics option that turns everyone in to team colored cubes so that I can get more than 2 fps when the zerg collide since I’m playing on a craptop.

And honestly, I’d love to see more of a challenge from the NPC. That invulnerable for 3 minutes buff just feels… lazy.

Vayne.8563:

Funny, I’ve had the same experience. I’ve leveled dozens of characters in many games over the years, and this is the first time I’ve ever really enjoyed the process all the way through…on all six of my characters.

The leveling process is simply a matter of personal taste. A lot of people really like it (and a lot don’t).

Is it? Really?

I was in your boat for a few months, OP. I was extremely excited for the game when it was first announced hundreds of years ago, but when it Duke Nukem Forever’d on me, I lost all interest. Then a good friend of mine bought me a copy last Christmas and I hit the grind like it was nobody’s business.

I reached 80 and was just stunned by how unbelievably… bored I was. After how fun the journey had been, the level cap was more of the same except it had no goal. Dungeons were okay with the guild I was in, but when my guildies weren’t on I couldn’t do any. WvW was alright (no, I’m kidding – it’s the best part of the game), but following the zerg and getting picked off when I fell behind got old. and the thought of more MMO “competitive” PvP made me do a spittake.

I rolled a couple of alts and quickly lost interest so in mid-January I went off to pursue other interests, coming back to read patch notes for any glimmer of hope. Ten a few days ago I was perusing the class forum on my phone while ignoring my mother-in-law and wife complaining away about everything and in the midst of all the “my class is underpowered” crying I found a video of the premiere cookiecutter spec for my class stomping kids in WvW.

I had foolishly been trying to “play the way I WANT to play” like I was your average selfish-12-year-old-mentality gamer (seriously, my wife’s 4 year old cousin is less of a spoiled brat than most gamers I have the misfortune of coming across these days) and resisted the cookiecutter since years of WoW had taken their toll.

Honestly, if it wasn’t so pointless, I’d kick myself for waiting so long. Even though I’m no where near the gear level of the guy in the video, I’m still having a great time while kicking puppies and contributing to my team in WvW. Within an hour of respeccing, the leader of a dedicated WvW guild was so impressed with me that he shot me an invite and now I’ve got a great team to strategically roll with. To top it all off, the damage and survivability are now allowing me to collect honor badges like crazy so the gear won’t be too far off.

So… I recommend taking a break and then giving in to the “darkside” when you come back. Find yourself a dedicated Guild and run with it.

I leveled dozens of characters to level cap in dozens of MMOs over the years, but in this game, I got one character to 80 and just couldn’t do it again. The difficulty:reward for PVE leveling in this game is literally as close to zero without touching as it can get.

Maybe I’ll dust off an alt and finish leveling them in WvW – the only fun part of this game – eventually, but that’s a long time coming so I’m glad I don’t have to pay a monthly fee.

Calae.1738:

I agree that stealth doesn’t provide skill based game play. However; keep in mind the audience that you’re trying to convey this discussion to. They generally don’t like to think.

Why think when you can just spam buttons on your keyboard for easy kills?

kerona.3465:

If it’s red => dead.

“But only if it poses no threat to me.”

I start out with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Hyblot9Co

And then load up a death metal station in Spotify.

Victory or death!

I leveled an engineer to 80 only to learn that I had just leveled an engineer to 80.

I rolled Charr because I look, sound, ankittenreated like one IRL so they’re the easiest for me to relate.

Males look like beef-cake superheroes – like if you made a Huge gender in CoH/CoV and moved the sliders all the way up. It’s comical more than anything.

Norn women just aren’t stacked like they should be. All their models should be some variation on Eir – their rail thin models are just awful.

I ended up switching my client audio to French because of how embarrassingly bad all the voice acting is.