Guild Wars 2

Tyger.5932:

The game, and all of it’s contents (I’d like to believe) were designed to be fun, which by extension should have included WvW. The time I spent actually aiding our server was not, in the least fun (for me). You can be the elitist and say that people do WvW just to do it, and that’s fine. My whole point was not “Q.Q don’t wvw cause the rewards suck.” My point is, We were given a Meta-achievement to complete in WvW, which I am to believe was meant to a extension of fun, and a means to gain potentially good loot from this. Seven weeks. Seven kitten weeks, during which I obtained maybe 5g, and a handful of mat’s. During that Seven weeks, I rarely did more than WvW (which as I previously stated, was not in the least bit fun). I had hoped that me aiding my server, and jumping in to help where I could would have been rewarded with fun/loot. I can’t even begin to explain how, had I not spent the time in WvW to better my server, I could have made countless more gold, and had a metric-kitten-ton more fun.

Lessened learned. Don’t beat your head into your monitor doing something that isn’t fun for you and expect to be lavished in gifts. I’ve skipped a bunch of living story events that had rewards I would have liked but it just wasn’t worth it to me to do what wasn’t fun to get them. I refuse to make my game time unpleasant in hope that I’ll get some digital reward. I also hate WvW. The reward could have been guaranteed 2000 gold I still would have passed on the event. If I’m not having fun it isn’t worth my time.

Well for people that WvW for you know, the reward of, wait for it… wait for it.. FUN, it was just an added bonus. Seriously, you subjected yourself to something you admit you despise doing. Why? The point of a game is to play for fun. I don’t know about you but there isn’t a reward in this game, precursor or whatever, that would entice me to spend hours doing something I don’t enjoy.

stof.9341:

jheryn.8390:

I appreciate your views. And I totally get what you are saying, but I didn’t say the situation was unhealthy, I said that not accepting change was unhealthy.

Why would it be healthy to accept changes for the worse? Of course it’s a matter of opinion in the end. Still …

I actually think it would stof. If something changes and you don’t accept it, that is called denial. That isn’t healthy! LOL

Of course, there is nothing wrong with doing what you can to reverse or change what has been changed for the worse. We don’t have to like change, but we do have to accept that it happens. What we do with it after that is up to us.

I have a better solution to farming, don’t by materials from the TP, if you need materials go out and spend the time acquiring all necessary mats you need to do whatever it is, that way the farmers can’t make money off the mats they farm, you’ll have the satisfaction of acquiring your own materials thus making the game a more rewarding experience….no changes to the monetary system needed.

I don’t think anyone in good conscience can argue that there wasn’t more build freedom in Guild Wars 1 than in Guild Wars 2, and in some ways that’s a good thing…and in some ways it was a bad thing.

There were two problems that arose from the amount of freedom we had.

The first was the balancing issues, particularly around insanely overpower builds. There’s nothing like a permasin or an imbagon paragon in Guild Wars 2. There’s no 600 monk builds, or crazy spirit spammer builds. That’s a good thing, not a bad one.

The second problem is that a lot of people who tried Guild Wars 1 found it too hard to make builds, and they weren’t aware of websites like PvX wiki. So they simply left the game, because they couldn’t handle it.

The sweet spot of any game should be easy to learn, hard to master. I think Guild Wars 2 got the easily to learn down pat (at least when it comes to builds), but the hard to master still needs some work.

I think Anet overcompensated in Guild Wars 2, because it was so impossible for the to control Guild Wars 1. I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing back the other ways a bit.

Gene Archer.8560:

Vayne.8563:

So the question remains, why are people being rewarded for easy content?

Is there a reason they shouldn’t be?

I think the concept most people talk about is risk vs reward. If the most rewarding thing in the game is easiest, that’s what people will gravitate too. I don’t particularly think that’s good for a game.

Rewards should be for accomplishing something, not running around doing something that is so simple it can’t fail…particularly if doing it that way cuts off normal play for other people attempting to just enjoy the game without a zerg coming and taking down a champion in two seconds.

I try to think of it from the point of view of someone who buys the game and starts off a human charcter and runs into Queensdale. And they see a champion…but they can’t get enough hits on it to get any credit because the zerg mowed it down. People are calling out stuff in map chat and instead of playing the game the way Anet originally intended, someone in map chat tells them about zerg farming. So now, this person who has no real chance to experience the game is running around with a zerg. They could, in theory, completely level to 80 without leaving Queensdale.

They’ll never get better at the game that way. Never learn their profession. Never be prepared for anything that happens later…then they’ll come to the forums and complain the game is too hard.

The idea in most games is that the reward you get should be directly proportional to the time/risk factor. If it’s not, the game is out of balance, and will eventually suffer for it.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Wow, Vanguard, Everquest2, SWG, Lotro, AoC, etc etc. What supposed “mmos” were you playing?

Actually, Never mind. You are correct, Etch A Sketch had only 2 knobs.

WoW didn’t have a LFG tool until the first expansion “The Burning Crusade”. Before that all it had was a global LFG channel most people had turned off because it was mostly a source of spam and the meeting stones automatically assigning you to random groups which was mostly useless because it didn’t take into account the need of a tank/healer/DPS trinity. It also didn’t have appearance slots until recently (I think with the cataclism release, I know it didn’t have them or any alternative when I left around WotLK expansion) which, IIRC works similarly to the way transmutation crystals work in GW2, you apply the skin of one item to the stats of another. I also don’t remember it having much in the form of particle controls, but might be wrong, didn’t fiddle much with the settings back then.

AoC at release didn’t have apearance slots (they were there when it went F2P, though, no idea when it was added), and the graphical and performance settings were famous for being abysmal at release, with most of them doing nothing. The selectable particle details was added about a couple of months after release (IIRC) because of the complains of the siege system (a big selling point) being completely unplayable because the game slowed to a crawl with more than 15 or 20 people on screen, and at least when I left (about 4 or 5 months after release) it was still not working properly. I also remember the guild interface not being too good, but it did have “last logged on” which is something sorely lacking on GW2.

Won’t comment on the others since I never played them, though, but a quick comment on other recent MMOs:

SW:TOR didn’t have a LFG tool when it launched either, and didn’t get one until about 6 months after release.

TSW didn’t have LFG either or even an auction house at release (and the guild management window was almost as basic as GW2), user made mods covered for them (like the LFG website here), but weren’t added properly into the game for a few months after release.

TERA did have a LFG tool on the NA release… which was over a year after its original asian release, which didn’t have one until the NA release added it.

I’m glad that Anet attempts to enforce good form in-game and on the forums through moderation as it emulates good social skills within the community even when not all members possess them. A game company is free to set a standard for speech within a private community and then enforce it. That is exactly what they have done.

Jae.5138:

LHound.8964:

Jae.5138:

Every post from Jonathan and other devs almost seem like a cry of frustration to me.

Indeed, and Cry of Frustration gives stacks of confusion, which seems the status you are in! /jk

Now really, what basis do you rely your conclusions that the company is experiencing sustainabily instead of growth? With Gigantic gaming companies behind ANet, shaping the business model, do you honestly believe that the actual business model is bad?

“What growth rate they want for Gw2?” This is the real question and the one nor you nor me have the answer to. For you it seems slow and dull, for them it may be perfect this way.

/cheers

If it seems perfect this way then clearly there’s something wrong with the company considering the amount of complaints on the forum about how the game’s hardly changed at all in the past year.

When one grows accustomed to receiving things one looses vision on what they have received.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

“Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!”

“Hm. Let me specify, lest I be accused of whining. I meant all the EXTRA hours I poured in was wasted. I just put in too much stuff. I’m not crying here. I’m learning a lesson.”

This is absolutely awful! I feel terribly for him. No one should be made to feel this way when they pour their heart and soul into something. And people wonder why we’ve stopped getting feedback of any kind on here. The forum community is simply toxic! Honestly, I wouldn’t blame anet if they simply pulled the plug on the game and told us all to gfy.

People blame Anet for not being transparent and being open with the community.

Well, what’s the benefit of that when the community responds to innocent and neutral comments with snide and rude remarks? What’s the benefit when any type of positive, hopeful remark is not met with excitement, but suspicion, hesitation and sometimes indifference.

I’m very surprised a guy like Colin just seems like he’s made of unicorns and lollipops. The guy is impervious to criticism and hard to troll (as many people here attempt to), and I respect him for it. But other folks aren’t as much and you can almost see the cracks in their attempts at maintaining a professional and neutral face. It doesn’t surprise me how some Anet devs have not even bothered posting on the forums (like Whiteside), probably because they know just how bad it is here.

“Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!”

“Hm. Let me specify, lest I be accused of whining. I meant all the EXTRA hours I poured in was wasted. I just put in too much stuff. I’m not crying here. I’m learning a lesson.”

This is absolutely awful! I feel terribly for him. No one should be made to feel this way when they pour their heart and soul into something. And people wonder why we’ve stopped getting feedback of any kind on here. The forum community is simply toxic! Honestly, I wouldn’t blame anet if they simply pulled the plug on the game and told us all to gfy.

Notice how Josh Foreman doesn’t post anymore since the sab w2 release? I remember reading how he said that he was very eager to work on W2 and very excited to come in early and do work, or stay late and continue to work.

You have to have pretty high work ethic, dedication and excitement for your work to have that kind of mentality.

And what did he get for it? Non-constructive criticism that SAB is just terrible. AND the playerbase gives him attitude and overreacts as if Foreman was offending them. It must be very unforgiving to be a designer in the game industry, be very open to it and still be able to be positive. I kind of hate how gamers, especially MMO players, have some sort of entitlement and gamer’s rights, so much that they kitten on the same very people that provided them with entertainment that was well worth their time and money.

And now we have a designer who probably doesn’t feel as motivated and probably won’t pull in the extra time to make content that is epic. Granted, Anet themselves discourage crazy hours (as he said), but it is disheartening when a dev loses that type of motivation because of these forums which are full of negative nancies they don’t provide anything close to constructive criticism.

Foreman:

Smaller team, actually. And the length was my own desire to get as many ideas as I could in there. I spent several months pulling 16 hour days and a couple weeks where I did a couple 36 hour stretches, went home, slept and came back and did it again. No one else wanted me to do that. In fact those sort of crazy hours are discouraged at ArenaNet. I did that because I freeking love what I do and wanted this release to be the best thing ever. Turns out I pushed too hard to get those new mechanics in there and I’m being told here over and over that all that work was wasted and it’s making people miserable. I’ve learned my lesson. Won’t happen again! And for that, my family thanks you!

later on:
Hm. Let me specify, lest I be accused of whining. I meant all the EXTRA hours I poured in was wasted. I just put in too much stuff. I’m not crying here. I’m learning a lesson.

I’d buy food.
Decades of gaming have lead me to the conclusion that my gaming will suffer considerably once I’m dead through starvation. The only sensible countermeasure against starvation I have found is eating. Eating requires food. Food makes for a 150% richer and happier gameplay experience.

“How to tell people are bored or burnt out… Forum traffic goes up. My posts first 6 months 1-2 total. My posts this weeks 210”
1) Ascribing your own personal feelings and motivations onto others
2) Creating a “safety net” for your irrational conclusions, where any result could be seen as evidence in favor of your hypothesis (“Forums are dead” = people not happy with the game; “Forums are crowded” = people not happy with the game)

“a game developer makes a significant misstep and people pour out of the game and into the forums”
- Making up wide-sweeping generalizations about the game’s overall population based on personal experiences and unverified suspicions

“A lot of people did indeed leave in November. It’s a fact.”
- Dressing up personal assumptions as “fact”

“The thing is, the people who got the game after the fractals launched, with the ascended gear, never knew the game without it. They didn’t know enough to be kitten off, so they had less reason to leave.”
- Claiming to know the personal motivations and playing habits of strangers

Basically, we have a lot of made-up guesses and hunches, based on personal anecdotes and unverified suspicions. Then you’re using assuming those premises are true, and drawing conclusions based on them. WORST DETECTIVES EVER.

Stop standing around then. Go do something else. For the folks that cry they have no time and “needed” the Maw on a fast timer, you could do a speed dungeon run in less time, get better loot and more money.

There are also sites to help you /lfg (ie like the timers for the dragons). The Maw was bugged in the sense that you got dragon rewards on a non-dragon timer. It was fixed, get used to it.

I just wanted to provide some clarity on the “fastest-selling of all time” issue. Also, I’ll thank killcannon for providing some contextual data to compare.

First, what does “fastest growing” mean? There are a variety of ways to measure it. Some would say that “sales within the first week” are all that should be considered. For our purposes, we can eschew a static timeframe that excludes data after a certain date in favor of “most copies sold in the shortest amount of time,” which we can compare fairly using reported sales numbers after a certain timeframe since release. That is, we can see both how many copies were sold by different games in the same period, as well as how long it took different games to reach the same sales threshold (if ever).

Two things we definitely have to acknowledge when making this metric determination are:

1) “…in the West”
and
2) Unless you count MMO expansions as individual games

clay.7849:

Then why is it when I google “fastest selling MMO” I keep getting SWTOR returns? You would think if what you said was true it would be bigger news.

This is problematic. You should never base any premise whatsoever on what you find as the top result for searching for a keyphrase on Google. For one thing, the phrase itself might be inadequate to obtain the results you’re looking for. For another, Google does not sort results by what is the most recent or the most accurate, but by which links have the highest PageRank.

News articles about SWTOR are rated highly by this algorithm. When SWTOR became the fastest-selling MMO of all time (which, in 2011, it did), it shattered the previous recordholder handily (in becoming the fastest-selling MMO, it also eclipsed the total sales of the previously fastest-selling games by a fair margin). This was a big deal!

However, it retained this record for less than a year, when it was overtaken by GW2. This is simply the fact of the scenario, not some kind of subjective assessment of what occurred. As to why it isn’t “bigger news,” I suppose it’s a fair question, but mainly one for the marketing department at ArenaNet. It might be a wise thing to base a campaign around during a free weekend/sale event.

Yes they sold 3 million fast, but they are not the fastest selling MMO of all time, that honor goes to SWTOR according to every other source I can find.

This is simply incorrect. And since you chose to say “according to every source,” I unfortunately have to question how much time you even spent looking.

SWTOR reached 2 million copies sold in four weeks, an incredibly impressive feat, especially considering the records it broke to reach that milestone. However, Guild Wars 2 accomplished this feat in just over two weeks. – and this timeframe also included a brief period when digital sales of the game were halted. It then went on to sell roughly another million in the remainder of 2012 which is significant because SWTOR simply never reached this figure at all. As of February 2012, EA was still sticking with an ‘over 2 million’ sales estimate, where the “active subscriber” pool was thought to have stabilized at 1.7 million.

Thus by either practical metric we might use based on this data- either “most sold within two weeks” or “shortest time to reach 3 million”- Guild Wars 2 wins handily and without much threat, at present, in the “fastest-growing MMO of all time” category (again, once you account for only the Western market, as well as not counting WoW’s expansions as individual games). In contrast, World of Warcraft, which was itself the fastest-selling PC game (not just MMO) at the time of its release, took roughly 8 months to reach 2 million subscribers and essentially, no other games are even a part of this discussion. EVE Online, notable for having consistent post-launch growth (like WoW, GW2 and no other MMOs at all ever in the West), has barely 500,000 subscribers total, and only crossed that line in 2013.

Regardless of how you feel about GW2 as a game, I hope we can all acknowledge these factual aspects of the MMO marketplace. Thanks for reading!

Neural.1824:

Calae.1738:

Arenanet will always nerf ways to make gold. The reason why is because they want you to buy gems. If I was working at arenanet I would design things for people to buy in the gem store. You’d think this would be common sense but; apparently for them it’s not.

Arenanet is obsessed with the gem store to an degree that is killing the game. Many things like self-style hair kits and other cosmetic items would sell a lot more frequently if they’d halve the price, but they obviously have some kitten for brains statistician who has never once touched a game like this applying real world purchasing habits of people to a virtual environment.

I’m beginning to think that their business plan is to “grab all you can, then shut down”, just like NCSoft did with City of Heroes when they made it f2p.

That’s a pretty harsh attitude to take, especially when you can buy everything in the gem shop without spending a single dime of real money. Plenty of people buy things from the gem shop. Apparently they are happy with the costs and are getting the revenue they want.

Also GW2 is B2P, not F2P. Cash shop is an additional revenue source on top of the box sales. In a F2P game it is the only source of income, meaning a much greater emphasis.

Neural.1824:

There’s no difference between GW2 and a F2P beyond the initial fee, and if everyone in the game was using gold to buy gems, Arenanets financial model would fail. As has been said before, they will nerf anything that becomes a significant gold income source for players. In the end, it’s no different from a subscription game, because on the financial back end, they are trying to push people to pay a given amount of real money per month (probably about $15 I would guess).
I consider it a realistic attitude. Arenanet released the game before it was ready, which is very likely due to executives promising profits far sooner than coders/artists could physically deliver. The result is a partially finished F2P game that has an upfront cost.

It’s an attitude held by a lot of narrowminded, entitled players.

Instead of being grateful that there’s an alternate method to acquire cash shop items via an exchange of in game currency, they choose to complain how this exchange isn’t good enough for them.

Can’t really feel any sympathy for such attitudes.

cesmode.4257:

This was my feeling up until november 15. Again, for a lot of people like myself, just human nature to want to stay on top of things. And I was. I had my exotic set and was content with just enjoying the game and exploring. But now, my pieces are not top dog and in order to stay on top, I have to do things I dont want to do. There is nothing psychotic about this, many people on this forum and in game feel the same way. You are 100% correct, it is how you approach the game.

You say that it’s just human nature… But as far as I know I’m human and I never feel these urges… I just really don’t get this. Why do content you don’t want to do for a reward you don’t really want or need? Some days I do the daily, some days I don’t get around to doing that last bit. Sure, it delays me acquiring ascended gear if I don’t do it, but…. why would I care? I let my main priority (world completion, messing in WvWvW, doing stuff with friends, whatever…) control my play choices. I simply don’t get why anyone else has a problem with this.

So you see a rotten fruit in a tree, and asks for changes in the tree so it’s fruits don’t rot anymore?

I think it’s much easier to just trash away the rotten fruits.

Also, there’s plenty of good fruits around, why are you worrying about the rotten ones?

Sorry, I had to go to work.

Anyhow whoever is curious about this, the answer is..

No, you will not lose your progress.

After I delete every character and transferred, My Laurel, Gem, and my Account Medal including sPvP Rank remained the same.

If you don’t mind making another 80 from a scratch and gather all the mats and all the Karma you need, this might be an option for you.

Cheers.

People who pull out dictionary definitions to make points always make me laugh. Because people say to people in Australia all the time, “you’re a legend” when it’s clear they’re not a legend.

In the strict dictionary definition a mob is a group of people, not one creature. Maybe it just takes a legendary effort to get the kitten thing. lol