Guild Wars 2

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

male human faces that don’t look like this:

http://i.imgur.com/zQ7t34C.jpg

lol, it’s funny because it’s true.

Also: Can I have a check box at creation that auto-cuts off all the butt-skirts, butler coat-tails, and trenchcoat-hangings from all the armor I wear?

So you think not being stagnant means including what every other MMO has in them already? Interesting, tell me more.

Esplen.3940:

Geikamir.6329:

Esplen.3940:

Geikamir.6329:

The game doesn’t NEED anything technically. I’m just claiming that it’s not fair nor fun. Both things of which I should be required to make a good game.

Also, it’s not about working harder. Chance has nothing to do with working harder.

If there was an NPC with a set precursor price your point would be valid.

1. Name a game where the best gear cannot be grinded for as the only method to get it is fun. Now, if you can do that, tell me why you aren’t playing that game.

1. Chance has everything to do with working harder. If you have a 1/10 chance of getting something, are you going to give up after failing once?

1. There is an NPC. He sells Precursors for 10,000g. Why waste your gold when you can buy it on the Trading Post.

1- Any non-MMO. MMO’s do it incorrectly. Which was one of the main selling points of GW2. Fixing the mistakes of the past.

2- Chance has nothing to do with working harder. If you get rewarded the first try and I don’t get it after 10, did you or I work harder?

3- There is not an NPC that sells precursors.

1. Any? I seem to recall Skyrim having a terrible conversion rate. Also, this IS an MMO… therefore it’s comparable to other… MMO’s.
2. Neither of us worked harder, however are you going to stop because I did? That’s where working harder to achieve it comes it. If you give up, that’s your call, however you’re not supposed to give up until you achieve what you want or are done.
3. There is.

1- If you want a normal MMO, there are hundreds. This was supposed to be the refuge and it was marketing as such.

2- If one person gets a reward far faster than someone else for the same effort, one worked harder than the other. By denying this, it’s proving that you are just being argumentative.

3- There is not.

Judging by how hard they have been trying to bend over backwards to get money from the ex-WoW crowd, I would assume mounts will be one of the main features of an upcoming expansion pack.

Zaxares.5419:

I never post my wealth statistics because I always have a suspicion that these threads are created as a means of identifying targets for hacking.

Are you implying you have lots of wealth? You’ve just been targeted by someone now, lol. Cover blown!

marnick.4305:

GW2 is like a good girlfriend who gives you space when you need it. WoW is like the bad ex who’s always keeping tabs on where you are. Just like good girlfriends are hard to find, GW2 is a rare gem in the MMO market. For all its flaws, it’s the best MMO on the market, just like the small imperfection that makes a girl interesting.

Unless you are trying to get ascended gear. Then she checks up on you every single day.

Also, that good girlfriend makes you roll a couple die to see if you get a good night kiss. Get 6-6 or get no kiss.

Greibach.5341:

Here’s my problem with the bolded statement. Before ascended items became part of this game, all of those things that you mentioned were cosmetic and/or on the same scale of power. All the different ways of getting gear all gave you the same quality of gear (exotic). The skin was different, yes. Walking around in full Arah dungeon armor was earned, and was respected. Having that little star next to your name for world completion was neat, and respected. If you didn’t want to do those things, you could still be on the same level as them when it came to statistics.

When ascended gear entered the game, we saw a shift in methods of gear attainment. Ascended gear is flat out statistically superior to exotic gear. When fractals came out, it was no longer a question of being able to play the game the way you wanted to play and still be on a level playing field, it was “Play fractals, or be worse statistically”. This was a massive departure from the pre-ascended tone, message, and motto. Before, you could earn something cool by doing something hard. It was cool, but it wasn’t better. You could earn other cool things by doing other tasks. Again, they did not improve you, they merely let you show off the work you had done.

When laurels came out, there was finally a new way to get ascended items. Except that it didn’t cover back slots. So really, you still have to do fractals to get an ascended back slot. When guild missions came, so too did yet another set of ascended items that were unique from there (and laurels). For those of us in small guilds, the message was basically “Nope! Better join a big guild and leech off them to earn these.”

Laurels are an inadequate solution to providing alternative methods of gear. They are heavily gated on IRL time. In order to get one character geared using Laurels you have to spend ~5 months of getting every single daily and monthly achievement. By the time you’ve done that, I’d wager that ascended armor and/or weapons will start entering the game. For someone that has played over a thousand hours, if you don’t like Fractals or are in a small guild, you will never be able to gear multiple characters in ascended gear unless other methods of attaining them are introduced. Again, pre-ascended there were a multitude of ways that you could invest time to make your character unique, cool, and maximally geared. It’s not a matter of not wanting to put in the time, it’s a matter of not wanting or being able to do one specific kind of content and not having any realistic alternatives.

So to wrap it up, my problem is largely with ascended items. There need to be more ways of acquiring them than whatever specific new content you come out with any given month + laurels. There has been a paradigm shift with regard to how players are awarded for their time, and in my opinion, it is for the worse. I don’t care if I can’t turn into a guild banner because I am not in a large guild, I care that I am gated from getting earrings for two months per character.

Maybe there is something in the works. Maybe there is some grand plan that I don’t know about or is taking longer than expected. All I know is that as it stands, I’m giving up on gearing my characters despite playing them for hundreds of hours because I don’t want to be funneled into one specific kind of content in order to earn the most powerful rewards. I respect that you’re coming on here to talk to us about this, and I respect that you are trying to find a solution that benefits everyone. I think this goes a long way towards helping, but I feel that this entire Guild Mission drama has really highlighted how problematic many players feel Ascended items are and where they might be going. I hope I haven’t been overly aggressive or offensive here, I’m just trying to express my frustrations in a clear and cogent fashion.

As always, I completely agree with you.

This post, like countless others, won’t be addressed. Because it actually touches on real issues. Items that the players actually care about by the majority. Things that we were led to believe pre-launch and have slowly had to learn to let die because that’s not the GW2 we knew and loved.

It’s sad really. Each month that goes by it seems to get worse instead of better. I honestly feel like just grabbing the developers by the shoulders and shaking them. “What are you doing to your game, man!?”

Esplen.3940:

Geikamir.6329:

It’s an unfair and frustrating punishment for those players that did nothing wrong but be unlucky.

Simply not being lucky does not make oneself unlucky.

Think about it. Also, stop trying to rush it. If you want to rush it, take the trading post route and stop complaining. Sure, it MIGHT be getting manipulated by a few people, but you know what? If you had the money and the knowhow, you probably would too, especially if people would be willing to buy [into] it.

Heck, I’d do it if I knew I was making a profit simply because I know people are [grudging yet] willing to buy these items.

The majority of the community complains about getting Legendary [precursors]. Why? Because it does not conform to their lazy ways. If you stop being lazy and stop thinking about it as something you can get *NOW*, life becomes so much easier.

It’s a goal. Think of it as such.

Another goal, as an example to how you should think of goals, is 100% Achievements. Do you expect to have that done in a month of playing? Do you expect to be able to do that on one character?

If we’re arguing about things that can’t be done in an easy manner, let me complain about 100% Achievements. Why can’t I complete all the achievements on my one character? Why do I have to re-roll for race so I can complete my achievements? Why do I have to pick a different Order to complete my achievements? Why do I have to re-roll for profession so I can complete my achievements (weapon slayer)?

Hmm? Hmmm? Hmmmmmmmm?

Lazy has 100% NOTHING to do with this argument.

Imagine you worked a job and at the end of every week instead of having a wage you rolled a die and whatever it landed on you were paid. Now imagine that your friend rolls 10,000 multiple times in a row, but for the past 6 months you’ve only rolled a 10. And you both do the exact same work.

It’s not fun, fair, or work. People that are unlucky are not lazy.

Nothing can lack like the first Flame and Frost update.

But I personally think it will be cool if they have some big cool stuff planned.

Like others have said: mounts make no sense at all in this game. I really hope they aren’t added. It just becomes an eye sore because they take up so much screen space.

darkace.8925:

Guild Wars 2 is a vast improvement over Guild Wars. Why? It fixes so many things Guild Wars did wrong; such as stagnant gear progression and a lack of end-game.

Revolution.6301:

You can’t call Gw2 an improvment over the original Guild Wars

Too late…I just did.

You seem like you’d be a perfect candidate for insert any MMO ever made. You’d really enjoy it!

It’s soulbound. Anything green (masterwork) or higher becomes bound to your character when you equip it. You get a message ahead of time warning you.

Conncept.7638:

daimasei.4091:

lol with those fanboys. If you don’t like something you PAY for, you have the right to express your opinion. If the owner disagree, then the owner is free to return the expended money.

Making a complaint about a product you paid for and didn’t like is perfectly fine. Hanging around that products place of business and/or existing customers for seven months and whining about it is pitiably obsessive.

Like it enough to play, but upset enough to post.

How is that hard to understand?

Vayne.8563:

Erick Alastor.3917:

Saying that he’s saying something “completly wrong” means that you are sure that he IS wrong when he state the devs lied, but as you have already highlighted no one know what they were thinking when they made the manifesto.
So you’re using an hyperbole too, aren’t you?
He may be right or he may be wrong, we will never know, all we know is that we bought the game because of that manifesto and we were expecting something “a bit” different xD
(And it WAS different, then november came…)

Anyhow, we are off-topic so let’s just stop here >.> we’re both right and wrong the truth lies somewhere in between.

He’s completely wrong to make a statement of fact from something he doesn’t know. That’s not hyperbole it’s fact. It’s an unwarranted assumption. I’m not exaagerating what he’s saying. He’s calling someone a liar and it simply can’t be proved. And since a manifesto is only a statement of intent, there’s no reason to believe it’s a lie at all.

Also hyperbole is an exaageration in order to make something sound worse than it is. Calling someone completely wrong by saying something unprovable as fact is in no way hyperbole.

The person you quoted didn’t say they lied.

The thing about lying, is that you can keep lying to cover up your lies since no one ‘knows what you were thinking’. Maybe they had intentions to do something one way but do it another.

In that case, actions speak louder than words.

As a company, and not as a person, misleading your customers is poor service. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are/were. It matters what you say and what you do. And they said one thing and did something else.

Copestetic.5174:

Geikamir.6329:

zeromius.1604:

Geikamir.6329:

Wolfheart.1938:

Geikamir.6329:

The line that keeps being used is “We hear what the community is asking for”. That actually makes matters worse because they hear us but they just don’t actually care what we think.

And impartial observer would’ve noted that revamping the loot pinatas we call world bosses was something many players asked for, me included. Didn’t a recent thread about making the open world harder get upvoted?

People have been asking for things like player housing, new races/skills, gvg, better armor choices, more WvW updates, polymock, precursor crafting/scavenger hunt, new legendaries, guild halls, and other things far more than just making Tequatl behave slightly differently.

Some of these things are already in the game. Others aren’t as feasible right now and resources are probably better spent elsewhere.

• New races will require their own personal story additions.
• GvG will really just be sPvP but between players from different guilds.
• There will be new skills added to the game.
• I’m not sure what you mean by better armor choices but there are new runes, lots of new skins, and Ascended armor coming up.
• There’s been a number of WvW updates. They’re also bringing new features in and bringing the orbs back somehow.
• Precursor crafting will likely appear in some future update after everyone’s crafted their Ascended weapons.
• Playing housing/guild halls seems like a good idea but it could end up being really gimmicky. How often do you think people would actually visit their own houses or guild halls?

Yes these things require resources, all things do. By you saying the resources are better spent elsewhere you are doing exactly what they are. These things are constantly being asked for, but always ignored or postponed for indefinite or excessive amounts of time.

All the things you have tried to answer with “it’s coming, maybe, sometime in the future” which is all we’ve heard for a year.

Then it’s coming, eventually. What else do you want? Them to release content at the whims of people who request it? People seem to forget that this isn’t their game, it’s ANets. I’m pretty sure ANet has a schedule of content with when it’s suppose to go live. Why isn’t it out “NAO?!?!!?!”, because they’re working on other things they think is important or has more support.

They produce the game, FOR US. They don’t make the game for themselves to just gawk at. If they aren’t listening to their target audience, they are doing it wrong.

Vayne.8563:

I do hate other MMOs and I do think this MMO is MUCh better than others. Why? Because of the lack of kill stealing and node stealing, for one thing. The quest system in most MMOs, which I can’t stand. The level process which does require you to do a lot of bullkitten before having fun. I had fun from a very low level in Guild Wars 1. There are very few MMOs that give you events like the Shadow Behemoth in a starting zone.

YOU claim the main thing is the 20 level cap. I don’t think that’s a main thing. It was never a main thing for me. What was the main thing for me was that I could play the game and enjoy it and not think about leveling at all, unlike most MMOs. And guess what? I play Guild Wars 2 exactly the same way. I don’t think about level at all. That’s a choice, not something that Anet betrayed anyone on. Not like you get to max level and suddenly you can raid and PvP.

We don’t want player to grind in Guild Wars 2. This is perhaps the most disingenuous part of your entire post. A single line taken out of context, used to prove a totally fallacious point. Take the entire paragraph, read it and then tell me that line explains the paragraph. Colin is talking about combat grind, or grinding to level. Killing stuff to level. He’s talking about changing the way that people view combat. He’s NOT talking about grinding for gear, and no one with even the most basic grasp of the English language could construe that he was, if you take the entire post into account.

We do not want to build the same MMO everyone else is building. And they haven’t…for numerous reasons. It’s very different from many MMOs, so different many people try it and can’t figure out what to do. The breadcrumb trail found in almost every MMO is not there, the standard quests are largely gone and people are lost. If it was the same as every MMO people wouldn’t be lost.

This is simply an opinion stated as fact, but you know, I watched the same manifesto you did and have a completely different opinion. And your argument would be a lot more sympathetic if you didn’t take one major part of your diatribe out of context. It makes me question everything about all your other claims.

First, I didn’t take anything out of context. He said that, I quoted that, I replied to that. In parenthesis did I put words in his mouth? No.

About GW1: So you can name just ONE thing he could have been talking about that just you liked and you think that constitutes saying “We take everything you love about GW1 and put it in a persistent world”? And implying that doesn’t even take max gear at level 20 is definitely trying to twist the truth to fit your argument. GW1’s only remarkable things in PvE were very specifically connected to how fast you got to the stat plateau. Period.

They started off building a different MMO that everyone else was building and then progressively (starting in about November) have when through the same process. What do other MMO’s have that “people that hate MMO’s” would not enjoy? One of the main ones is gear grind. And that’s exactly what ascended gear is. Another one is questing. And that’s exactly what hearts are.

Here are some quotes that are not talking about combat at all but specifically about loot. There is nothing skewed or taken out of context. These are the full quotes. These quotes are what we were led to believe. This is how they marketed the game to us. If they didn’t want us to believe something different from their “intentions” they should have worded it completely differently. As it’s written here, it’s says one thing and they did something else entirely with ascended gear.

“Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success/

“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet

OZtheWiZARD.2401:

Geikamir.6329:

OZtheWiZARD.2401:

You guys forget about one thing. Without RNG Legendary wouldn’t be unique anymore. Everyone playing game long enough would run with one and people had one after playing the game for 2 months. Not even that, majority of the people that complains got their gifts ready and they are only missing precursor.
Sorry but Legendary weapons wouldn’t be what they’re now when half of the GW2 population would run with one. And it’s not like it’s impossible to even get one with the system implemented. You only need to try.

“Everyone playing [the] game long enough would run with one…”

So you’re telling me you support a system that no matter how long or hard someone strives to succeed something they may never attain it?

Having lottery level RNG does not make something prestigious. It makes the major end game item a cheapened experience where some are unfairly rewarded for their effort (or lack their of) and others are punished for not being lucky enough.

Once again I am not saying is good or bad. I am saying RNG is a part of a genre. Can you name MMO without RNG? The whole point of a unique item is its uniqueness and that means not everyone can have it/ obtain it. And that is not even true with Legendary. I have played in many MMOs and in some of them you have really had item that were literally impossible to get (Aion for example).
Now if everyone around was running with Legendary would they still maintain its “value”? Would that be still desired by players?

I’ll quote Arena Net again: “And if you hate MMO’s you should REALLY try GW2…”

Comparing this game to the bad habits of it’s predecessors is flawed from the start. Instead of just saying how others have had done things worse helps no one. Let’s just address the issue at hand in this game.

And to your last point: RNG does not make something prestigious. If it involved actual skill and/or challenge on an equal level for all those involved I would have no problem with the system. The problem is fairness and fun. And lotteries are neither of those things (except for the VERY small percentage of winners).

There is nothing wrong with small scale RNG (like crit chance) because the level of reward and rarity are both very minor. The median level intended is reached very often and easily. It’s when extremes are used that some people, no matter how much they try and work towards their goal, can seemingly never obtain their goal (speaking in general terms here). And others can be rewarded instantly with potentially no work, effort, or maybe even care involved.