Guild Wars 2

Well GW2 is a great game, when played in small groups. There is definitely strategy in the combat, and in every single fight actually, but it’s hard to figure it out when there are 50 people in the area. The most fun I had in this game was in some of the most basic events, such as escorting a merchant and his bull, except with 3 to 7 people, which made every single action count, allowed for creative skill combos, intelligent use of crowd control skills, and actual coordination.

Zerging is like playing Chess with a shotgun, it’s easy, you barely have to aim and press the trigger, and the enemies drop like flies.

The main problems are overpopulation, and decreasing the amount of players per shard isn’t a solution, and people playing just for the sake of playing and not actually caring about what happens and simply rushing to the event to kill everything, which we cannot solve either. This will only be solved as the players spread out over the entire game world as more content gets released, hoping that new content released won’t always just be “better”, but also different, so that people don’t always end up in the same areas.

After having spent the last few days crafting a lot, I agree that there is a problem with this. Crafting doesn’t seem useful enough to me.

It’s like every time I collect materials to craft something, I get roughly the exact same item from a drop, karma merchant, or reward, and enough money to be able to buy it on the trading post. And selling the few materials I can found gets me enough money to update my entire gear by buying them on the trading post.
There’s also a problem between the level of the areas where materials are found, and the level of the items that can be crafted with these, because no matter how I did it, I always ended up making items of lower level than I am. Kinda the same problem as dungeon tokens, because of the time it takes to collect them, the armor and weapons you can get are already worthless.

I know crafting is only an alternative. Well, it’s a terrible one. Crafting more and more seems to me to be a huge time and money sink. Either the items created aren’t useful enough, the materials are too hard to find, or exploration and quests are too rewarding, but there’s something wrong with it.

I myself think that crafting is too hard, but not challenging enough. It’s all about being lucky, because whether you spend 10 minutes or an hour finding materials, especially trophy ones, is all about luck. I’d rather see a part of it quest-based, like having to hunt down a specific creature or hidden treasure, to get a unique crafting material that can’t be found anywhere else, and make sure this isn’t easy so that just anyone can’t do it, and increase the value of items crafted with these. That would create an interesting balance with the materials you gather as you play, and an alternative to the trophy items.

As I see it, the only benefit of crafting is to make the items you want, with the stats you want. No matter how wide the choice of items can be on the TP, you won’t always find what you want. With crafting, you can get what you want.

Other than that, it is a time and money sink. As you progress through the first half of the game, the best craft is hunter/miner/harvester/woodcutter, selling what you get on the TP, and buying what you need. Once you reach level 40, crafting starts to get really useful. My advice would be to stockpile money until you reach level 40, and from then level your crafting with the money you kept. By discovering recipes, it is incredibly fast.