Guild Wars 2

That’s the sign of a poorly designed event.

A well-designed event should cater to the people who play for fun, the people who play for a challenge, and the people who play for loot. It sounds like this one isn’t properly designed for distributing loot, so it’s running into problems.

The solution is to adjust the event so that it provides adequate rewards in all stages, so that people don’t want to lose that territory to the centaurs or what-have-you.

It use to be really easy to sell Guild Wars 2 to my friends but …it’s so difficult now.

Everything sounds amazing, but when they start asking about “end gear/content” and I have to explain them it takes a minimum of 12 weeks for 2 accessories, a dedicated 20+ days of dailies and 1 monthly completion for a necklace and 20+ dailies from Fractals (unless you’re lucky with RNG) for 2 rings.

They look at me like “Are you serious?” – It’s a complete turn off and I can’t even defend you, Anet.

The most powerful/credible advertisement is word of mouth. Consider what kind of “words” are coming from our mouths recently.

What I’m saying is, please reconsider how your “gear treadmill” is earned. We understand “exotic’s were too easy to get” but please, this is not the right direction. If Ascended will be apart of Guild Wars 2 forever, add more fun ways to earn them that doesn’t involve a Daily. Maybe that means actually adding challenging content.

TLDR ; Dailies/Weeklies are not a quality way to earn end game gear and it’s NOT quality content. If someone asked me what Guild Wars 2 end game was, I’d tell them Dailies (Dragons, Fractals, Dungeons, Daily daily, Monthly, Guild Missions, etc).

Please go back to the drawing board, Anet.
I love your game but I’m concerned with the direction you’re taking.

Usual MMORPG developer thinking:
“Let’s make this character bound so that our players can have fun developing many characters through this system.”

Actual player thinking:
“I’m bored of this class. I think I’ll level up something new. Wait. It’s going to take me 6 months now to get to where my main is and while I’m doing this my main is going to fall behind. That’s not fun and I’m tired of my main. I quit.”

Every.
Game.
Ever.

The community asked for this improvement to drops and ecto gain every day since launch, loudly, often offensively. Anet listened and responded. I sort of know what you mean, but I’d much prefer the way it now is. It’s a little unfair to the devs to start complaining too much about the very things they changed because the community asked them to.

Disclaimer: What follows is entirely my opinion. So please, mods, do not bother changing the title. Everyone here knows that I’m only giving my own opinion. No one is going to be “confused”.

Now then….

I was asked recently by an avid defender of this game’s new policies a very simple question: what exactly in this new patch made me so angry? Naturally, I had a nice big list of things prepared and I could have riddled them all off, but as I thought about it some more, I realized that my problem with this patch, and indeed with most of the patches, all really boil down to one thing, one core flaw that defines all of the problems I’ve experienced with this game….trust.

Namely, the fact that I can no longer trust that the developers of GW2 have our best interests at heart. And as a loyal fan of the franchise since GW1, that actually hurts an awful lot to admit, because up until recently, ArenaNet was probably one of the only developers out there that I felt I could trust completely.

But I’ve felt this way ever since the game’s beta, when I saw major issues plaguing the game and the devs completely ignoring those reports, pushing forward with a release of a game that we all knew wasn’t ready yet. And it’s only gotten worse from there. You’ve no doubt seen a thousand rants about November, and other such things, so I’ll try to spare you as much of that as possible. Really, it’s not specific events for me….it’s the general trend of it all. GW2 is still a great game, one that I spend much of my free time playing. But my play habits have changed considerably, and not (in my opinion) for the better.

This game no longer feels like a game that “takes everything I love about GW1”, nor a game that encourages me to “play the way I want to”.

I’ll try to explain my stance, using more recent updates as examples.

1) A lot of people have praised the new dailies as “easier to complete”, but not only is this grossly untrue in many cases, it’s missing the point to begin with. The original dailies were the best model not because they were “easy” or “hard”, but because they were built entirely around the mantra of “play the way you want to”. Kills, kill variety, gathering, events. Things you could do nearly anywhere in the game. You could do them on your Lvl 1 or your Lvl 80, in any map zone you wanted. That provided a massive amount of variety that the new options are utterly devoid of. Kills in specific regions? Dungeon runs? Keg Brawl? These aren’t options that let you “play the way you want to”, they’re options that imply that maybe you’re not playing the game the way the devs want you to.

2) One of my favorite features of GW1 was the concept of horizontal progression. I had come from a lot of MMOs that focused around getting the biggest numbers, then chasing the next set of big numbers, and eventually that grind became too much for me, leading to me falling behind and quitting. GW2, I fear, is on its way towards that same fate. The devs have admitted that they like vertical progression and will continue with it moving forward….which, for someone like me who was disillusioned with other MMOs, that’s a deathblow to the game that “takes everything I love about GW2”, because it’s not taking one of my favorite elements from GW1: the fact that I never felt obligated to gear grind. I could leave, come back, and still be a competitor. Skill always felt more important than stats. Whether you consider Ascended to be a grind or not is personal preference, but the fact remains that it won’t be the end of their progression plans. They’ve said as much. And that bothers me, knowing that I could leave now, come back in two years, and be significantly behind other players in terms of performance, even if I was the better player.

3) The devs have a tendency of giving out no information, or worse, wrong and conflicting information. We’ve been told that the precursor system was actively being worked on, and then Colin comes along to tell us that it’s not even likely to happen until April (at the earliest). Colin comes along and talks about how they’re working on new rewards systems that could yield precursors (getting people’s hopes up that the laurel system would have some manner of obtaining them) and then backtracks on it within days. We’re told that the devs are working on condition damage, and yet not working on it. That culling will be fixed, and then a patch comes out and makes it worse. That AoE will be nerfed across the board, and yet on a case-by-case basis. I don’t feel as though I can trust the developers themselves any more, because they don’t say the same things, and some of the claims they do make are later revealed to be outright false or misleading.

The GW2 dev team seem to have a fixation with dailies now – and this is a trend that I find somewhat disturbing, especially for a game that was touted as “above all that”

I invite you all to watch the GW2 dev manifesto, in case you’re interested in a good laugh:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35BPhT-KI1E

We were promised something different – and yet here is A-net, encouraging people grind away for dumb rewards. Did the same dev team that made this manifesto ALSO make the game? ‘cause it’s like GW2 is suffering from massive bipolar disorder.

I’ll say it one more time: “Dailies” are not gameplay. There is no difference between having a quest NPC tell you to “kill 10 centaurs” and have a daily objective of “10 underwater kills” – THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE.

I don’t care that there are dailies. I get that a lot of people are into that… but the focus of GW2 (As stated in the manifesto) was something bigger, and deeper… So far I haven’t seen that. C’mon A-net – you can do better than this. This isn’t why a majority of us are playing GW2, or got into the series in the first place.