Guild Wars 2

cesmode.4257:

Are those official arenanet dev tweets? Didnt seem that way…seemed like a few players getting excited for nothing.

I now cringe when an arenanet dev gets excited for features because it normally means something earthshattering in the game, and not in a good way.

They love to fuel the hype train that eventually never leaves the train station.

No, they are tweets from different websites which are known to get early views and information about coming content.

Specifically TenTonHammer and GuildWars2Hub in this case.

You can’t really blame ArenaNet for what other people are hyping up now, can you?

Looks like they’ll be dragon out the secret for awhile yet.

I have expected something big coming for some while because I put the dots together
we have had a year of LS arc that we know is coming to an end- we know after that we have a features patch…
I am very interested to see what the LS does next

We also know that the LS teams are a fraction of the resources of the company- so- I must wonder…

I expect very big things- add the CDI and I am really excited

To run with the bizarre analogy in the OP, I still feel like Norm when I log in. Maybe you just need a new bar… the one I’m in keeps adding new items to the menu, new beer to the tap and the patrons are as raucous and fun loving as ever.

Agreed. As of right now GW2 is unchallenged in the mmo market ( IMO )

I too have played those mmo’s you’ve mentioned and more. Since playing GW2 i have uninstalled them all.

Khisanth.2948:

Is “more Scarlet” no longer a valid response?

Personally not really expecting much. Hopes were high pre launch/beta and look where we are now. Not saying the game is terrible but there are some big let downs in various areas.

Care to give an example of the “big let downs in various areas”. I honestly cannot find any. Minor issues there are, sure, but they’re minor at best, with things like balance being #1 (but what MMO doesn’t have balance issues?).

morrolan.9608:

The idea of S2 of WvW is enough to send most WvW players screaming to the other game given how badly the first season worked out.

I found the WvW Season #1 to rejuvenate WvW on my server and others. Queue time became huge because thousands wanted into the maps to participate (whether or not it can be argued that many were “achievement hunters”). In some people’s perspective it was ‘bad’, but most of those complaints either boil down to not being able to get into the map (something that Edge of the Mists should fix in the next season), or issues with GvG players (something that the revamped BG JP fixed, hopefully). Team play and tactical movements became an enjoyable norm to replace the keep-flipping that happened prior to the season.

Latinkuro.9420:

Conclusion

A lot of people say Guild Wars 2 lacks this and that and whatever.
But I say to you, all those other games are missing a hell of a lot more
that we as GW2 players take for granted everyday.
I believe we have been spoiled so much by all the nice good features of GW2 that now we expect an even higher level of quality and polish

I have to agree that GW2 fixed a lot of things I really hated about MMOs.

(Edited to remove my impressions of Wildstar)

It made me appreciate a few things about GW2

The quest where a new character gets initiated into the world of Tyria is 1) fairly short and 2) action packed. You get to kill some boss-like enemies right off the bat – I love the robot in the Asura intro.

There is no quest log with objectives in different locations or quest givers to keep track of – you just wander around and get XP for pretty much anything you do – hearts, events, killing creatures, harvesting, exploring. You don’t have to finish the hearts if you want to go do something else – your progress will be there when you get back to it, and they don’t unlock other quests.

Teaming is so easy. You don’t have to worry about who gets the loot, or the harvesting node, or the kill credit. It just works.

You have lots of choices of where to go adventuring regardless of your level. All the capital cities are two portals away. No zepplins. No hair raising runs through higher level areas.

Deposit all collectibles(!) Mail available without having to be at a mailbox. I could go on an on but I’ll spare you

I do have some things I don’t like about GW2, but I have some faith that they will eventually get fixed or improved. I’ve seen so many changes over the past year that seem directly related to the feedback on the forums that I’m confident if enough folks are bugged by something, it will get reworked somehow.

I have always been impressed with ANet’s attention to infrastructure. The hot patching is really an achievement in my opinion – it’s hard to imagine going back to a game with a regularly scheduled maintenance day. I imagine that their architecture was designed to be robust and handle all sorts of stresses.

The company I work for actually pays two different third parties to be on-call in the event of DDOS attacks and they filter the traffic to keep us up although at maybe a lower capacity than usual. We’re in financial services though, so the stakes are a bit higher if we’re inaccessible.

Latinkuro.9420:

I purposely didn’t log in to Guild Wars 2 for a week for 2 reasons:

- 1 to prevent burn out.
- 2 to see how I would view the game after a week of playing other mmo’s.

The result is well read on:

- In that week I played aion, STO, Rift, Neverwinter, Tera, Eden Eternal, Vindictus, Aura kingdom and so on you get the picture.

What I found is that:
- They all have awkward camera’s that are not smooth, at all !
- character responsiveness is awful.
- reaction times are awful.
- Boring combat.
- quality of life is none existent, when compared to GW.
- messy, badly coded interfaces, and ugly as hell.
- GCD, this didn’t use to bother me at all now I can’t stand it.
- need target to cast anything, annoying much.
- No global Trading post, yeah I missed it.
- art style, I’m gonna censor myself here.

Conclusion

A lot of people say Guild Wars 2 lacks this and that and whatever.
But I say to you, all those other games are missing a hell of a lot more
that we as GW2 players take for granted everyday.
I believe we have been spoiled so much by all the nice good features of GW2 that now we expect an even higher level of quality and polish

The fact of the matter is give credit where credit is due

Guild Wars 2 is an amazing game with many small things in it we take for granted and because they seem so small you might not give it a second thought and think all games out there have those features, when the reality is, I have yet to see any other game that has as much polish, attention to detail and quality of life features as GW2 has, not even wow comes close to this level of refinement, yes I dropped the elephant in the room !

Many consider wow the pinnacle of polish, well I’m here to tell you that is no longer true and hasn’t been since the day GW2 launched.

I’m not saying GW2 is perfect, cough RNG cough Time gating !
but when put into perspective against all the crap that is swirling the ether,
GW2 is a 24k diamond in the rough

I also took break periods. Once I renewed my sub to WoW for a month, and once renewed sub for SWTOR. Both of which were horrible experiences and I missed GW2 rigth away.

The only thing I did like, is I reinstalled mass Effect 3 since it had a bunch of DLCs released since I played it, so I got them, and finished it one more time going through all the DLCs which were on sale back around Labor Day.

It is definitely worth taking a break, because it does bring to light the strong points of GW2 again.

Just got a Early 2013 Macbook pro /r
-core i7 2.4Ghz
-8GB 1600MHz Ram
-Nvidia GT 650m
-Samsung SSD

Playing on medium is so beautiful So many colors that I never got to see on low settings

Upgraded from a 2012 HP Envy 15
-Core i5
-6GB 1333MHz Ram
-Radeon 7750
-SSHD

Curae captured my feelings exactly. While I’ve felt a little more tedium lately, that’s due to most of my guild vanishing for the holidays so the RP’s been scarce. But my attempt to go to my old game of 7 years failed inside an hour right after GW2 launched. I’m hardly a twitch reflex gamer and yet the action level in combat here and the clean UI keep me engrossed and feeling effective.

I’ll be trying out TESO, mostly because I have a good friend working on it and I will always support his projects. Also I did like Skyrim until a game killing bug stuck me in a town. I just hope I can handle the game mechanics after GW2 tailor made itself to everything I like.

Finally a thread that is worth it to read… +1

Arnath.2319:

Dodge.

I went back to WoW for a few days when they were offering free play time and the one thing i missed more then anything was dodging, that and moving while casting.

Also the graphics in GW2 are superior to any other mmo.

yeah, because of all the people that play it and all the people that recommend others to play it I actually did give it a go some time ago in 2007 or 2008.

I could not believe my eyes !
Back than I was a console player for the most part so I said to myself,
if that is what 12 million people were playing I considered them all morons at that moment.
that is the sorriest most pathetic excuse for a game I had ever seen in my life.
even compared to consoles games of that era the combat was stale and boring as hell.

Now I’m strictly a PC mmorpg player, all my consoles are gone !
I have never played any other game as long as I have played GW2 in my life.
not even FF which is a long time favorite of mine from my console days.

2500 hours and counting.

deathklock.4961:

Rift has bad camera angles and a bad interface? At least it has a highly adjustable interface, what can you do with gw2, oh thats right nothing, i hate neverwinter because you feel pressured to buy zen, but saying that games art work and combat system is inferior is a joke, its ok 2014 is here, this place will be a ghost town buy summer, gw2 had 0 real competition last year, this year will be different.

I dont dislike this game, but acting like its the best thing since sliced bread is pretty stupid.

- I also thought Rift had good camera, until I played GW2 and it showed me a real smooth camera.

- Rift interface is nice and all but all the add ons and all the crap on the screen makes it a play the interface not the game itself thing, plus combat is boring as hell.

- GW2 doesn’t need add ons or any of that crap, it’s a play the game not the interface feeling which I love.

- I didn’t say much about art, you are putting words there that do not belong, artistic taste is different for everyone but if neverwinter is your idea of good art style I say No comment

- no competition last year, hmm that might be true still doesn’t take away from the fact it is a great game dispite it’s issues.

- empty by summer, hahahahah I guess everybody can dream

- if you have not noticed, the single most telling thing about gw2 success is how now all upcoming companies are trying to copy some parts of it to integrate into their own creations instead of trying to continue to copy wow.

- Acting like it’s the best thing since sliced bread is also something you thought of by yourself mate.
no where does it say that at all and I did say it has it’s issues but….
even with it’s issues it’s a hell of a lot better than all the crap out there on the ether.

hmmm

- traditional RAIDS = fail
- extreme support for addons = fail ( certain add ons become a must, to the point you cannot play w/o them)
- P2P = fail. ( in this day and age, yes it is fail)

And with fail I mean it will stay a niche game at best, mainly for the hardcore crowd which is like 10% of the mmorpg community.

- For the particle effects issue, there is actually something that does wonders atm.
SweetFX, has reduced my particle effects problem to the point I can actually see the Boss telegraphs and all, and I’m a melee warrior so.

The living story started bad but it’s getting better and better. It has different tastes and some complain if they don’t like the type, poor Anet. I hope they keep doing this. I had rly much fun with living the story since Bazaar.

I used to play another mmo, during the beta weekends I would drop whatever I was doing in that game and go play gw2.
I told my friends there that I would still play this game alongside of gw2.

Once gw2 was released I played only this for 2 weeks, then figured I should still play the other game too.

It started with taking a solid minute to figure out why my skills stopped working. – I was out of mana.

I couldn’t find my heal skill, got confused when I died right away instead of being able to rally and forgot I had such a thing as a flying mount to get out of sticky situations.

I couldn’t dodge or attack and move at the same time – resulting in getting into a fight with a healer in an instance because I kept running around the boss…

After logging in 2 more times while trying to enjoy the game I just gave up and dropped my account info to a friend asked her to divide the stuff I have between friends – I never logged in there again.

I have tried different mmo’s since, just for the hell of it or when I needed a break. But it never got me as much as this game.
Not having to target, being able to dodge and rally, not having to worry about carrieng over 9000 potions around. Being able to choose how my gear looks through transmutation, no endless grinding just to keep up with the rest…

There are many, many more reasons why I love this game – too many to list them all.
There are obviously parts that ‘could’ be better, but that’s something that’s true for everything. But I have faith in that the core of this game will always be good… No Pay to Win, no waiting forever for a healer, many different viable builds and many different things to do ingame

While many things have changed between then and now people continue to point at the use of grind, which hasn’t, because they don;t know what the word means.

Grinding is forced (reread that last word) repetition of menial tasks in order to advance in the game. At no time in GW2 are you in anyway forced into repetitive menial tasks in order to progress in the game.

Farming events to make gold to get an expensive skin or Legendary is absolutely not forced since there are a million different ways to make gold.

Farming a dungeon to get tokens to buy exotic armor/weapons is also not a grind as there are a plethora of ways to get them.

Perhaps the closest thing to a grind is dailies since they are required to get some ascended pieces, but that really has the change from pure horizontal to some vertical progression to blame. Also they have worked hard to redesign it so that it takes minimal going out of your way to accomplish on most days.

If you had ever played a Korean MMO where you run out of quests at level 6 and are forced to spend an hour killing mobs between levels 5-7 (which there is only 1 mob of each level) in order to get to level 7, then you would know where the term grind came from.

Show me where the endless gear grind is in this game and I’ll consider considering that they may have shifted from the ideas presented in the manifesto. Yes, ascended gear itself can be a bit grindy (read: Time consuming) to get. However there is no endless treadmill of tossing away old gear for newer, more powerful gear which is exactly what the manifesto was referring to.

There is no treadmill, as promised. The fact that they’ve stuck to the manifesto in that regards is commendable.

Sorry the kittens (actually typed that hehe) are making you and others scramble on New Year’s Stephane.

Happy New Year ArenaNet! You’re all legendaries.

I hope those guys are put in jail, shutting down gaming servers ain’t cool, especially being as it’s a new year and we’re trying to have fun and escape reality.

Each new tier of gear in WoW was a monumental increase in stats. It was necessary. And to attain it you had to run raids. Endlessly. And they took forever to get together if you weren’t part of an organized raid guild.

GW2 has released exactly 1 new tier of gear since launch over a year ago: Ascended. They released trinkets first, then weapons, then armor separately, but all still just 1 new tier. I have no problems with the trinket acquisition. However, Ascended weapons and armor requiring expensive and time consuming crafting is ridiculous.

People are upset at the single new tier since it’s contrary to the original GW2 manifesto. But it’s still nothing like WoW.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

However as far as I can tell GW2 has a much longer, less rewarding and more frequent gear grind then WoW ever had.

And with that statement you lost any credibility to make any point you might have wanted to make. GW2 gear being more “grind-ier” than WoW is just laughable.

Many people complain about the game not being alt friendly. Those stones are in fact very alt friendly — I shove them in my bank and never worry about spending them on looks for new alts. I love how easy they are to get.

They’re only useless if you have only 80s who will only wear level 80 stuff.