Guild Wars 2

Agree, “We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds" did not happen at all in 2013, unless by “regularly” they meant “once a year”. They threw out most of the core principles of the manifesto too so i’m not surprised.

Committing to a roadmap of development and not sticking to it is never a good idea.

1) Ascended gear. It was a terrible idea last November, and it’s still a terrible idea now. It took the thing most GW1 veterans loved most about Guild Wars – horizontal progression – and destroyed it in the second content update. By aiming to please everyone, ANet lost support from their most loyal fanbase.

2) Elite skills. In GW1, elite skills were playstyle-defining staples that made your build your own. In GW2, they’re next to worthless. Aside from a very small set of them (like time warp), most are gimmicky garbage on obscenely long cooldowns that seem to say “look what the engine can do” rather than open up new playstyles or complement existing ones.

3) Defiant. I understand why it was implemented – to prevent large groups from making bosses trivially easy with multiple CC’s, but what it actually does is remove any sort of control role from major encounters, turning them into nothing but DPS and the occasional support class.

4) RNG, RNG everywhere. Especially those kitten ed Black Lion chests. A cheaper, more underhanded system to gimmick players out of their money while giving them nothing of value in return has never been invented.

5) The world is dying. And no, it’s not because of the dragons. If anything, the dragons are encroaching on Tyria to try to stop it from dying. What I mean is that, one year later, we have one new map, one new dungeon path, and Fractals – which isn’t even really part of Tyria. The “living story” doesn’t help. It moves at a glacial pace and abandons the already rich and established Guild Wars lore in favor of creating a new “threat” to Tyria that doesn’t even seem that dangerous. Look, I’m not saying we don’t care about Scarlet, I’m saying that we’re supposedly living in a world where titanic elder dragons threaten our very existence from all sides, an ancient and mysterious race lurks on an island just to the north, an undead warlord runs amok in the ruins of what was once a prosperous nation, and an entire city of bird men sits tantalizingly on the edge of our explorable area with its gates closed. We care about Scarlet, we just care about other things in Tyria a lot more, and we’re left wondering why the development team doesn’t seem to understand this.

My two cents.

And they say forums are full of trolls and whiners. I see more salient and well-written criticism in this thread than I’ve heard coming from some professional game designers.

My own list would be way bigger than five items, so I’ll just mention one item that I can put into words…

1. Lack of design documentation. What’s that? It’s a an ordinary text sheet presenting a grand plan for the entire game that you’re making, taking into account ALL game systems and features before they’re developed. This is needed for many obvious and not so much reasons – but… But.

In case of Guild Wars 2, it would mainly be needed to avoid having one part of the game completely contradict another.

• “Let’s focus on cosmetic progression.” Then, instead of progression, only allow switching out gear looks for cash once and once only.

• “Let’s allow players to easily switch out their builds with skills and traits.” And lock them down to a very specific and costly set of armor.

• “Let’s have a huge open world with lots of attention to detail.” Then let’s make sure most players populate only 1/100th of that world and have no reason to do otherwise.

These are all contradictions in design. Makes the game feel schizophrenic or, worse, lying straight to the player’s face.

(I’ve written and read some design documents, by the way – it’s not an easy task, and it’s barely ever done right in any industry. It’s really friggin’ important.)

1. DR/Grind/Time Gates/RNG: I get that other games have RNG in them, but here it is extremely bad. It goes beyond traditional RNG. Top that off with DR slapping you down and being stuck behind time gates with massive grinds to obtain anything, and it is just not worth the effort for anything. Like I always say, for a company that prides itself on not making grindy games, they sure do make grindy games.

2. Gem Store: What was supposed to be an innocent place for you to buy cosmetics and convenience items, ended up becoming a gamble fest. Gamble for weapon skin, gamble for dyes, gamble for minis, gamble for weapon tickets/scraps, etc. They just seem to care about conning money out of the player base by making them gamble for everything, instead of caring about player satisfaction. And the fact that the only armor sets and weapons we are actually getting, are in the Gem Store only. Cause god forbid we earn them through in game effort.

3. Ascended Gear: Even Anet admits this was a mistake. They straight up said, by level 80 we should have the best gear in the game. Yet the best gear in the game is behind a large grind and time gated. Introducing Ascended gear was the first step backwards on everything they stated GW2 would be. It was a panic move. They saw players leaving the game (which happens to every single MMO in it’s first few months), yet instead of learning from experience, they panicked and changed the direction of the game just like that to appease a small crowd that already quit.

4. Legendary Weapons: There is absolutely nothing Legendary about these weapons. It is an insult to even call them that. The word is right there in the title. Legend. You don’t do some epic storyline to get them, they don’t have some epic story behind them either. There is no Legend to these weapons whatsoever. They are flashy skins that require a ton of grinding, farming, RNG gambling, and tons of money. And they can be sold on the Trading Post. So please tell me what exactly is Legendary about that? Absolutely nothing.

5. Lack of QA: Let’s face it. There is a severe lack of quality assurance going on here. Anet doesn’t listen to their players, and straight up ignores them on the big issues. Take the recipe reset for example. So many players discovered all the recipes, yet Anet reset all the recipes all those players worked for. They lost gold, time, and materials spent for all that just so Anet didn’t have to make new recipes for us to level off. When the players voiced their concerns, Anet ignored them all and reset them any ways. Then the whole MF fiasco that made a ton of regular MF gear soul bound, instead of account bound like was stated by Anet themselves. They ignored everyone and then even changed the wording on all their statements to say account bound instead of soul bound. They lied to everyone and then tried to cover it up by claiming they never said that. Now here we are again with Fractals being reset. A ton of people are in an uproar about losing all their Fractal levels they worked hard for. And what is Anet doing? Ignoring everyone yet again. They don’t care what we have to say. They are going to do it whether we want them to or not.

And then there is all these content updates that are littered with bugs. Heck, even bugs since release are still here and being ignored. We get content patches every two weeks and every single time it comes out, it breaks a bunch of stuff and causes crashes. Then we get update after update to try and fix them, just to release a new content patch two weeks later that breaks even more stuff. It’s an endless cycle of bugs that keeps piling up cause they don’t fix everything before the next content update.

These are the reasons I quit GW2. There is also the Living Story to add there, with it’s nothing but achievement grind and filler content for a mini or back item, but I’ll leave it at those five (apologizes for the long post).

1) A near-complete lack of the features that made GW1 unique. Skill capturing? Gone. Story missions? Gone. Fast leveling? Gone. Fast and convenient build experimentation? Gone. Mobs using player skills? Gone.

2) Dull encounter design that promotes DPS over everything else.

3) The slow attack speed of mobs.

4) Dull utility skills.

5) The gem shop. At first, I liked it, but the way it’s been handled is pretty bad. Selling digital lottery boxes is a bit disgusting.

1) Too much rewarding of time played > skill
2) Lack of incentive to de-concentrate player volume and spread it across the game world
3) Execution of the new trinity. It’s current incarnation promotes a DPS-fest style of play.
4) Combat mechanics promote zergfests/stacking, instead of well executed positioning
5a) Lack of emphasis on Storytelling/Lore
5b) Too much focus on grabbing money from customers without providing adequate value in return.

1) Glacial balancing pace.

2) Bait and switch from token rewards system to RNG commercialized system of reward acquisition. You need to play the economy to gain the prestige rewards, not the game.

3) No regard whatsoever for build variety/state of PvE. Warriors, guardians, and zerker gear in general has reigned supreme for more than a year and they’ve done nothing.

4) Pointlessness of multiple races/lore. They give you many races, yet by the end the story and approaches is the same for all of them. Orders don’t matter.

5) No real content updates. 1+ year later and high end PvE content is largely the same.

I’m going to answer in terms of process rather than in terms of detail design decisions.

1. Investment decisions, and design decisions, are made in an inward focused way rather than with clear focus on the customer.

2. There is not a clear segmentation of the customer base, based in data, against which investment and design decisions are measured before they are made.

3. There is not a clear prioritization of the segments of the customer base, with a clear decision to delight players in this segment, try to retain players in that segment, and acknowledging that players in this other segment will attrit as the result of the decisions needed to delight the first group.

4. There is not a clear understanding of the unstated expectations (this is a reference to the Kano model from marketing textbooks) of the various customer segments. This results in entirely predictable customer reactions which could have been anticipated at the time investment or design decisions are made, but seem to come as a complete surprise to ArenaNet when the features are rolled out.

5. Prior to GW2 release, ArenaNet appeared to clearly communicate about GW2 and acted transparent. My perception is that post release, not only did the initial positioning become “no longer operative”, but also the transparency ceased. I believe retaining the traditional MMO player segment depends heavily on continued trust in the developer, and that the lack of transparency erodes that trust.

Looking at the lists above, many of the items involve tradeoffs between the needs/wants/expectations different segments of players. Perhaps the real problem is that each decision is made in a vaccum, so the overall decisions are not self consistent, so GW2 delights no one.

I don’t think there’d be many (any?) people who played GW1 who don’t feel that a number of design mistakes were made in GW2.

My list:

• Downed state in PVP zones. Adds nothing to the game but detracts a lot. It’s annoying, disrupts the flow of combat, introduces imbalance and farcical rally situations.
• Fixed weapon skills. Far too restrictive for me, pigeonholes weapons into roles & can causes whole weapons to be ruined because of just 1 bad skill.
• No resource system. Has caused GW2 combat to be all about spamming skills/dodges.
• Removal of skill capturing (signet of capture). One of the best & debatably most game-defining features of the first game, I cannot fathom the logic of why it was elided from GW2.
• Addition of ascended gear after release. Massive PR blunder. Pushed the game into a grind corner it has yet to escape from.

Funny story: on the day when Xbox One PR team announced it’d probably only run its games in 720p resolution rather the common today 1080p, some people jumped to its defense by saying that the two-times lower resolution actually looks better than the higher one.

That’s basically the people who defend grind in Guild Wars 2.

“Ordinary MMOs … You have fun tasks that you occasionally get to do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff … We don’t want that in Guild Wars 2.”

I know this statement will get me in trouble but at this point its fine if it does…..

I dont think Guildwars 2 as a game has a direction. I think they have so many teams working in so many directions they have no clue whats really going on. I think one manger says A another manger says B and a third manger says C. Then its up to the players and the company to decide what to trust and what not to trust.

Its like the LFG tool they added one official communication said selling spots in it was a ban able offence (I think it was twitter). Then someone else came out and said it was completely ok to sell spots as long as you don’t exploit the dungeon in anyway(I believe this was said on Reddit). Half the time one side of the company does not know what the other side of the company is doing.

Why not just divide the stream:
1 Narrator
A group of GOOD players

Because seriously, almost every player would agree that the group is really, really bad.
And I don’t mean bad like “bad setup”, no, bad like they can’t play their class/the game in general

Sure they want to show the new content is somewhat hard at 39, but if I wouldn’t know the game as good as I do, I’d think 39 is impossible for pug-groups
(even 70+ was far away from impossible or as hard as it looked in the stream -for one who doesn’t know better)

They need to choose between one of two things – 1) Play easy content casually or 2) showcase difficult content with competent players. Watching them fail a level 39 fractal over and over because the dev was playing without a weapon swap or using any of his utilities besides heal, was simply painful. As was said above, if its too distracting to play and livestream, but they want to show the harder mistlock levels, just have the devs commentate.

It was fun to watch them not be able to complete the Temple runs due to the game bugs making it impossible.
Classic.

I kinda agree, but for a different reason.

They should’ve limited the max level to 40, giving 2 attribute points from level 5 onward.
This would mean at least half the designed world could be at max level, so our characters wouldn’t be downscaled (which doesn’t always properly work either) in 80% of the entire world. It would certainly make a lot more of the game feel like ‘endgame’, when you’re at max strength, it sure did in GW1.

I’d love an AP reset.

The tears of those that grinded dull content they didn’t enjoy would be delicious.

Snoctopus.7084:

I usually stay away from forum posting unless it’s big related, but this has to be said.

The proposed changes to fractal level and infusions are completely unfair, and show a lack of appreciation and understanding for what players have had to deal with in fractals.

Anyone with a personal level of 49 or higher has had to endure some of the buggiest, most poorly tuned content on the game. Be it the invincible immune harpies on uncategorized, the 15 minute clown car on dredge, or the flat out hard grawl shaman, we persevered and advanced, playing over and over, month after month, to farm skins and make our agony sets and raise our personal level to 49.

Our personal level should not be rolled back to 30, and we should not lose agony resistance. These are statistics and achievements that we, as players, have EARNED, in spite of the abysmal rewards provided by fractals.

New content should not come from undoing the achievements of players and making them redo something for no legitimate reason. I have never in my ten years of playing mmorpgs seen something as disgraceful as a “content patch” specifically designed to punish the high skill players such as this.

We (Fractal Players) were normally quiet on the forums as most of the time we were forgotten by Anet completely. With no updates and nothing to look forward, we kept pushing our limits and playing with our alts to get them as high as our main…

Then ray of light came through with election that a new fractal level will be made. We couldn’t be any happier, when all others couldn’t care any less about it.

When it finally was announced what really is gonna happen, we not only been forgotten again. We been deemed outcasts and a laughing stock for PvE and WvW players across the board.

That’s what I feel like right now. A laughing stock. Having 3 characters level their way up to level 49 each and started working on my 4th one not that long ago. It was all waste of time and effort.

Now all these people that couldn’t care less when fractals were the way they were, since they either barely played them or had no intention of wasting their time and effort on leveling alts are now being rewarded and are practically laughing at us. All while refusing us any kind of compensation.

You win again Anet. You got majority on your side with this. There’s an example what small hardcore player base that actually cared about the content you’ve made, while others laughed at it, really mean to you. Why not reset us all to level 1? I really don’t see any difference in any of it anymore, nor do I feel the urge, need nor fun in getting my level up anymore, since it can be taken away from us at any moment again in the future…

I feel like I wasted all that time to get to 49 for nothing. Yes, it was challenging to do FotM 48 with people who knew how to use the dodge button, and yes I think I did get better drops and a better chance at fractal skins. The old system of grinding levels per character was tedious, but it did mean that someone who got to FotM 48 on their warrior couldn’t just relog on their alt and die over and over again, bringing the team down.

I suffered through absolutely crap loot, breaking 3 sets of armour because we have to keep wiping at cliffside to get the hammer that’s stuck in mid-air, that clown car I don’t even want to talk about, and OMG it seems like no one can do Shaman at 48 without at least 2 guardians in the party.

I don’t mind doing FotM with a wider range of players other than the limited playerbase that’s gotten to level 49+. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these FotM 30+ players are better than the ones at 49+. But I am incredibly annoyed that I’m getting punished for suffering through those 31~49 levels by having my progress reset. Some of us don’t give a crap about the leaderboards! We just want to play the same thing we’ve worked hard to be able to play without having to re-unlock the levels that we’ve already unlocked. WTF?

Because nobody cares?

You have free “content” every 2 weeks.

Destroyer Staff and the Dragon Bone Staff from Guild Wars 1.

I think the best part about having BG/JQ tie is It would most likely end with SoR/TC in a tie for 2nd thus giving SOS or mag 3rd… Letting both BG/JQ get first place prizes, SoR/TC second place prIzes and mag or SOS 3rd… Everyone wins and more servers get rewarded.

If JQ wins this week there’s no way that BG would get beaten out and take 3rd on the last week over SoR. So that being said and staying with JQ winning this week that would mean BG/JQ tie for first.(which isn’t a bad thing tbh, above reasons)

BUT, the biggest kicker here… Is does SoR want to try to knock JQ out of 2nd by teaming up with TC during week 6 and then with BG week 7 giving BG 1st, SoR 2nd and a tie with JQ/TC for 3rd… That would be interesting to see pan out. I think if BG wins this week that that’s a real possibility.

My questions and concerns:

1.) The hard cap of FotM 50 is going to be reached by hardcore PvE’ers in about a week, even with the reset to 30. Why did you decide to cap FotM at 50?

2.) What is going to happen to the people who upgraded backpieces, rings and infusions? A lot of materials (ie, ectos, T6 materials, relics, mist essence) were put into those upgrades. I know we don’t have the full picture on exactly how the AR changes are coming, but it seems a lot of these things will be destroyed.

3.) YOU SHOULD NOT RESET LEGITIMATE PROGRESSION IN A GAME. Ever. Period.

• If the content is challenging, if the mechanics are too difficult, people will go in at lower levels until they are confident enough to move forward.

• Arbitrarily resetting people to 30 simply to initiate a “leaderboard” is possibly the worst idea I’ve yet seen by the developers. The only people interested in such boards are the high-end PvE community — coincidentally the people you are hurting the most out of this update — and they already know who has the levels and skill to do high level fractals.

• To the people who think that the reset is okay: please don’t. Have sympathy for your fellow players. If you WvW or PvP, this is most comparable there — would you not fight to keep the progression you made there, especially if your rank was going to be cut in half or more? To the more casual PvE’ers — just imagine all of your characters being sent back to level 1 with no gear and being told that it was “okay”. You’d be upset as well. As Bright and Arietta have stated, there was lot of time, effort and gold spent among people who progressed to 50 – 80 level FotM.

4.) Thaumanova Reactor / Molten Furnace / Aetherblade Fractal — forgive me if I seem jaded but. . .are these just the same LS dungeons you’ve already released. . .made into a fractal level? The boss encounters described in your release sound like the same exact boss fights. They were BAD in the LS releases. They WILL NOT BE BETTER in a fractal unless you have done serious reworking of the mechanics in those fights.

• In particular I am worried about the Mai Trin boss fight. You’ve mentioned those stupid cannons where you ran in a circle for way too long until they got bored and came back down so you can actually do something about killing them. That fight in LS was not challenging. It was boring. It was tedious. Everyone I know was immensely relieved to have their achievements done so they didn’t have to ever do it again.

I appreciate that fractals updates are happening, but I have serious concerns about it’s implementation.

This is a very dangerous road to walk down for anet as a company. Personally I will have to sit down and determine if I even wanna continue to play there game.

I understand it’s just fractal’s getting reset. At the same time you have to remember this came out of the blue and from what I am reading and seeing for no real reason.

This to me seems like one of the design teams had a “brilliant” idea and decided to run with it.

What happen’s when they have another “brilliant” idea and it involves resetting hard work in pve or wvw?

How would the WvW community react if their progression was reset? How would the pvp community feel if theirs was?

you can argue with me saying that they are not equivalent, but in the end everyone determines their what progression they find important, from mini collectors to tpvp pros to elite pve guilds. Nobody wants their progression reset, regardless of what their progression is. The failure of many people to empathize with that is truly baffling to me.

A great many people highly valued the accomplishment of hitting fractal 80. even if you did it during the Search and Rescue days, or as recently as last week doing odd numbers, you still killed a boat load of insanely tough dredge. Still dodged a lot of deadly fire arrows. Still beat an brutally challenging Mossman fight dozens of times. It is no small feat, not only of skill but also endurance.

I seriously hope anet considered the blood, sweat and tears many people put into their fractal progression before they made this decision. I hope that the objections we have raised cause them to reconsider some aspects of the change, though I suspect it won’t.

No, if it was based on player input it would have filled quite significantly during the first few days, slowed down and by the second week stopped moving altogether.