Just some simple feedback to Anet; not looking to trollbait or debate folks who reply here. And FWIW, I’m a “fanboy” and think GW2 has been truly one of the best MMOs since the genre began. I’ve been playing them for that long and have played or beta-tested most of them. And I have 5 level 80 chars here in GW2 with three of them fully-tricked out in exotics or better. And I have participated heavily in all end game content, especially WvW. (Well, I never bothered with SPvP; not my thing.)
GW2 had the potential to keep me, my spouse, my longtime casual “family and friends” guild of 9 years, and my longer-time -very large and successful- hardcore PvP guild of 13 years still actively playing even now, past the 5-6 month mark where most of us have finally hit the saturation point. Even in the face of all the new 2013 MMOs that are about to come out (I’m beta testing no less than 3 different ones this weekend.)
But your endgame content frankly fails on three very simple accounts:
1. Your dungeon content has no “middle ground” difficulty level for less skilled players. Some of you will flame this post and say that the dungeon content is “too easy” even now, but I’ve got 20 people from my longtime casual guild who will beg to differ. A guild that did fine even on the middle tier of The Secret World (“elite” difficulty) and in other games struggled -greatly- with the overall difficulty of all GW2 dungeon content. Fractals were a bit better (easier) in the lower sub-10 difficulty levels, but the time investment to finish all three + jade maw to get any substantial reward is too heavy to accomodate the realities of gameplay windows for casual gamers. I’ll say it plainly and frankly: I know he means well, but Robert Hrouda should not be influencing or guiding your dungeon design in any way, because he does not understand the needs or capability of the typical “casual” gamer. Every one of my 20-member casual guild universally hates the standard dungeon design here: the stupid, senseless way they’re made difficult (and too much so), and the terrible “all or nothing” reward design. I’ve never heard good things from my large PvP guild either. Not -one- compliment for the dungeon design here out of the nearly 500 people I know who have played this game. Robert: Are you listening? Do better next time.
2. Money is too tight and the economy is too expensive. I’ve invested more than 1000 total hours in the game and have 5 level 80 characters. I’ve -never- had more than 20 gold in reserve at any one time. I have no hope whatsoever of ever attaining a legendary weapon for any one character. The costs are just way too far out of reach. Outfitting a single character in full exo gear is just stupid expensive and I’ve always resorted to grinding slowly for yellows, breaking them down with BL Salvage kits for ectos, and regularly scouring Orr and FG for ori and ancient wood. It’s slow and time consuming. Ultimately, it has made it -impossible- for me to experiment with different builds and gearing combinations. I’ve had to make a decision every time: will this character be focused on WvW or on dungeons? I couldn’t try the same class in both environments because I couldn’t acquire the two sets of gear necessary to do so.
3. Your “guild challenge” content completely excludes small casual guilds from the process. The unlock costs are incredibly and urealistically high for a smaller casual guild. After 6 months of spending our influence on very little (overall), we couldn’t even afford the very first unlock when you rolled that content out. That was the final nail in the coffin for my small guild. We didn’t enjoy your dungeon content as a group activity, and we were holding on only to see if the “guild challenge” content would keep us engaged. Nope: you left us out in the cold.
Anyway, I’m trying to keep this feedback relatively short. At this point you’ve lost my entire casual guild and my hardcore PvP guild. There are a few of us who still log in a few times a week to mess around and check whether the Daily that day will be fast and easy, but that’s about it. Most of us are already looking for the next game. I suppose you could say “hey, keeping you around for 5-6 months is pretty good for an MMO these days”. And that would be totally true. GW2 is a really strong game. The real point of this post is that if your end-game design were more casual-friendly in the three aspects listed above, you would have kept us engaged for much longer than that.
(edited by shaktiboi.5194)
