Guild Wars 2

Thinly veiled brag post.

JK Arrow.7102:

I’m not complaining about more ascended gear making content easier, although it will. I’m complaining about added vertical progression that we were led to believe wouldn’t be a part of this revolutionary ground breaking innovative MMO.

This is one of many of the problems. I, for one, wouldn’t have bought the game had I known a treadmill was in the works.
Yes, it is a grind treadmill. Just because some self-proclaimed MMO experts here that have played a few other MMO’s with a worse treadmill than here, doesn’t mean just because this one is less that it doesn’t exist. That argument is invalid. I’ve played a much worse gear treadmill myself, this one is less intense, but thats where its heading.
So what if they spread it over months between releases? It still invalidates all the gear you have worked on and customized for the last few months. Whatever the power hop is from exotic to ascended, regardless of percentage, it still invalidates your ‘best’ gear down to second rate. Call it ‘not that bad’ or ‘not making exotic irrelevant’ or whatever you want or regardless of how anyone wants to sugarcoat it, your exotic gear is now transitional gear.
Add on top of that the time gating of 2 weeks per piece (goodbye gearing alts), and the game becomes a job. You must login everyday to get mats/money and craft this new gear if you want to get it even remotely timely, especially if your character uses multiple weapon sets (and really, who doesnt?). Currently, the most timely fashion of getting money to buy these mats is via repetitive zerg champ farming, which by the definition of grind being a mindless task repeated over and over, is a grindfest.

So now you have a gearspiral guised under slow release rate, with the best option to farm for being a grinding zergfest and an obligatory reason to have to login everyday or fall behind, with the addition of no new content or reason for this gear other than be a gearspiral.
Sounds about as innovative as any other run-of-the-mill MMO that’s had a treadmill in the last 10 years.
While I’m sure some people will call me or anyone else against this as a crybaby, overreacting, or just whining……..call it what it is. Its expressing disappointment in seeing this MMO, that was touted as innovative and going to change the standards, take the tired path of just about every other MMO out there. We were ready for something new.

Its not rocket science. Lets ignore the problems this causes for WvW.

In PvE. Its a tale spun in EVERY mmo to date except maybe Eve.

World is built for x stats on gear.
people make max level and say they are bored.
The introduce gear/items that increase that stat.
People get to max stats again and say they are bored.
They increase the item stats again. This time making it take longer/harder to get.
People reach max stats and are now farming the original content. The world is trivial.
They increase the difficulty of the world.
New player comes in and faces empty starter areas and a weakened character strength compared to the first groups going through the content.

This is the cycle we were hoping Anet would stop with GW2. This is the main problem with treadmill MMOs and was one of the big reasons people preorders in RECORD numbers… to try and get away for the normal treadmill/cycle.

THAT is why we are upset… sorry you wanted another WoW clone… the rest of us wanted ONE… ONE freaken mmo without this cycle and Anet broke it for quick cash.

• Various:
  Is it only me or is almost every aspect of new content worse than it was? Even the cutscenes are so basic it’s unbelievable. Quests are short, not demanding, not giving any choice, force players to do them as quickly as possible because they will be gone in one or two weeks. I’d gladly do them with new characters I am making now but I cannot…
  Events and quest require of us just fighting. What’s the learning curve? One try, imo.

Closing note:
SAB took the RIGHT DIRECTION! At least from what we have read so far.
We may play with party or play solo. We will be able to fight tougher battles for unique equipment. And there will be no RNG. We will be able to choose what we want.
THIS is what it means to being REWARDED. Not being lucky. We will know our progress.
Why other teams try so hard to create content that is hurting the game, the opinions of the game. Yes, people play but without much enthusiasm. It shows. Even without talking to players I can see that they just bash these mobs because Renown Heart requires it.
They just bash with #1, #2, maybe also #3. There’s no sense in using other skills.

THERE ARE SO MANY THING THAT WENT WRONG! Too many! And what’s on the horizon? Are they changes incoming? I don’t think so. Additions, yes. Exactly as it was from the very beginning when the game started to become worse.
And one thing we can be sure of. There are dedicated teams that will deliver new content every two weeks.
Have we heard of other teams? We know that they exist. But shouldn’t LW teams add their experience in developing systems that should REPAIR AND HEAL this game?
And the last thing – fix the friggin’ TARGETING! I am losing all hope for this game if one most important thing is working like kitten .
Start fixing this game from most IMPORTANT AND VITAL aspects!

• Rewards:
  Imo one of the biggest mistakes of this game. No one now is willing to do anything if not properly awarded. Shouldn’t the main purpose of this game is giving people joy of playing their characters? Where is the joy of spamming all the ablilities randomly at big groups of monsters, then pressing F key a lot and opening tens of Boxes hoping to be favored by RNG. And even if you get cool Exotic, where’s fun in it? Can you say – I’ve earned it? No! Just – I was lucky, good for me. It’s as distant from the winning great item by fighting for it as North Pole to South Pole.
  The feeling of participating in the world was brought to almost zero. We have story which completely cuts from the world. We have new events that negate old ones.
  We have exotics that are fresh and people want them and forgot about existing ones. Why? Because they have them anyway (dungeons being too easy and awarding too many tokens is one of the problem here). If they don’t have old exotics it’s because of good ol’ RNG… sigh.

What went wrong?
You give people best looking items with best stats for just being in the right place in the right moment. It accustomes people for receiving best rewards without putting any effort.
There are topics saying that some events are too hard. As I’ve seen, events that are too hard are just killing dozens of players in half a second without a chance to dodge. That is your desired difficulty level?
There should never be topics saying that solo event is too hard. Even in personal story (exception – if it was not intended – as too many mobs spawn and cc you to death or just give no chance to defeat because of sheer numbers).
Just modify reward system. Make it worthwhile. What’s just another exotic in a sea of of others? It has become obsolete. And not fun.
Customization ended. Development of characters ended. Interesting quests ended. Story ended. Dungeons ended (I have all I wanted). Fractals ended (no point in doing, I’ve beaten every one too many times).
Even classic gathering of materials ended, because from new boxes I can ecquire tens time more materials than from normal gathering.
World bosses ended – they are not interesting and I’ve beaten them too many times. They don’t give anything worthwhile. But the most important thing is that they are boring. It’s no fighting, it’s spamming #1 while standing in one spot.

• Living World:
  First of all, I understand that Developer teams need to get better in this but imo all this was rushed prematurely, game suffered a hard blows through this year. Dull story, presented very poorly, changes to world were minimal and had no impact on gameplay. Maps were not alive again. It was just a mass of players getting from one point to another ignoring any original event that was going there because new ones are just many, many times more rewarding (and this is the promoted way of playing – getting new loot. With repeating over and over the same events with a large group where indentity and personal skill are shadowed by a need for doing most AOE dmg.).

My objection is that there is too much emphasis on this LW thing. What’s it exactly? Any other game gets new things to do with patches.
How is the world living? Please clarify (it’s a serious question).
And additional question – how is this different from other MMOs? We don’t need to be in a party to get loot, that’s imo the only difference.

A lot of topics were created where people presented ideas on how to make GW2 to stand up. And not by going back to what GW was.

What went wrong?
Realisation of a good concept. After a year GW2 gained seasonal events that promote farming as much as possible before the event stops.
Please answer – who adds temporary stuff to a product that has many critical flaws on every front? So much time wasted on showing players what you meant by LW.
Ok, we tried new events, maybe even received new skin. But then we come back to normal content which is lacking of freshness and… yes, being alive. It’s rusted, beaten do death, old, repeating over and over without purpose. Maybe someone will be merciful and do one or two (to level up a new character).
The game clearly want’s to bring lvl 80 players to low level areas. But why do you throw there masses of powerful mobs and make it impossible for fresh characters to make normal events there. Not to mention that due to massive number of effects and players, FPS drop and lag kicks in.

cesmode.4257:

-Ascended gear is meant for fractals. You need Agony Resist to withstand the lazy mechanic the devs throw at us in fractals. Dont need ascended anywhere else in game. Funny, because fractals are quite abandoned right now. Same maps since November. I rarely see anyone looking for a fractal group anymore. Everyone is off doing invasions or some other dumb LS achievement.

I was just pondering this. Seems to me ascended gear should have been ‘fractal gear’ for use exclusively in fractals, kinda like how PVP gear is for use in PVP.

They could have given the fractal fans (fractalists? fractalers? fractoids?) a basic set of ascended/fractal gear and allowed them to earn new (better looking/more agony resistant) gear as they progressed, while leaving us poor plain old open world PVE guys out of it.

If T6 mats are going to be used to upgrade to T7, to be used to craft from level 400-500, to create unique exotics, to craft gifts for legendary items, to craft ascended backpacks, to craft ascended gear once you get crafting up to 400-500 there needs to be more ways to get them.

Using laurels for mats has been nerfed. 3 for 1 day and it’s randomized isn’t worth it, especially if laurels are going to be needed for buying other recipes, crafting.

The MF clover recipe doesn’t guarantee you’ll get 1 or 10 T6 mats let alone the T6 mats you need. It’s too randomized. You could get unlucky and never get the mats you technically need.

Zone clearing for mats is crap because only 3 zones are level 80 and only 2 of them have explorer achievements (Southsun doesn’t have map clear achievement). Frostgorge, Malchors, and Straits are level 76-80 meaning you get T5 not T6 mats. Not to mention all of this can only be done once per character.

There is no karma way of getting T6 mats (Orrian jewelry gives lodstones not regular T6 mats like claws, fangs, etc). The only way is basically to farm gold and buy on the TP and with prices skyrocketing because of the upcoming patch this is only going to get worse making T6 mats the new legendary/precursor money sink.

With MF going account bound farming specific creatures is going to be worse than it already was until you can up your account MF to a high enough level.

Bags are just as random as MF and less likely to actually drop T6 mats.

Also, I know this point has already been brought up, but what’s the point of doing world events when every chest you open is likely greens and blues (yes the new patch will make greens and blues somewhat worth wild) BUT if gobs are only a random chance with rares more rares need to drop. Spending 45 minutes fighting jormag only to be guaranteed 1 rare because you get a crap chest roll (which MF doesn’t help with) is not by any means an incentive. Champs give better drops now than world bosses. That is not right.

I suggest that level 80+ creatures no longer have any chance of dropping T5 mats. If level 70-79 already drop level T5 then let their be a tier of monsters that can only drop T6 mats. Also maybe there should be a small % that gobs can drop from salvaging rares and masterwork items if they are level 80 as well.

There has to be something implemented and soon if not when the patch hits otherwise it’s going to turn into pay to play where anyone who buys gems to transmute to gold or buys farmers gold is going to have the best gear and best stuff unless you have no life and farm regularly every single day for mats. Farming/Grinding is exactly what ANET promised GW2 wouldn’t be and yet this patch and the new items look like nothing but a grind, just like Legendary items already are.

They look really nice. I guess when you put all that time and effort into something it should at the very least look good. The only issue I think is with the colors changing to match the stats you have on the weapon. It’s pretty much an involuntary gear check. While I personally don’t care, I could imagine quite a lot of people freaking out about how Ascended weapons will give certain people a way to discriminate others based on their gear/build.

Vayne, the answer, of course, is to develop the game according to it’s DNA, not based upon each wave of reaction to any given element introduced. Just as people don’t fare well in life as people pleasers, neither do companies. If the DNA is right, the people will come. Customer feedback is very helpful and should be sought and considered, but it should not drive the evolution of the game.

I actually think that a lot of the bad elements that have been introduced since launch are due to the short-term thinking that accompanies receiving feedback with wringing hands. Oh no, they’re not all happy! Focus on the DNA (manifesto-level ideas). Listen to and evaluate all feedback. Take it for what it’s worth. (This is where reality testing comes in and it helps to have the experience of years of development.) Make corrections in course where necessary. If they deviate from the DNA, explain why they are being made honestly. Everything will be OK if your vision of the game is sound and I think the original vision was sound. I’d love to be a developer at a company with a compelling vision that was principled in evolving its product.

I’ve said before that I think a-net is working too much on LS for their own good. That the system at first might be the best way to keep people in the game as you constantly make them work toward new tasks, but that on the long term it would burn players as the pace of LS and achievements are starting to feel more like tasklists with an end date than a game. When we finish working hard in the real world, we don’t want to work more in our free time.

There was a time many months ago (too many now) where the pace was about right. You could dedicate some time to it, and the tasklist wasn’t so big (Halloween was the way to go, or the F&F that was divided in 3 full months instead of having all arcs in the same one, which also gave a sense of world progression instead of a rushing story).

But right now the pace is too fast, we have things to do and hard work in real life and when we play we want to relax, not to be in tension to finish our task list.

Worst part is that now with the 2 weeks content updates, they make the harder part of each story last less than the easier one (4 weeks for jubilee, 2 weeks for scarlet, 4 weeks for dragon bash, 2 weeks for aetherblade dungeon and its hard achievements, etc…).

But I’m starting this thread to share the story of a very good player on my guild. More specifically, a guy that already has 10K achievement points, so you can’t say he is a bad players, a newbie, someone that tried the game but wasn’t much into it or anything else. He is a great player and it’s great to have him in all kinds of content.

A couple of days ago, I received some mail from him with very valuable stuff for me and what looked like a goodbye text.

I asked him about that and he told me he would still connect for our guild weekend missions and things like that, but that LS had finally burned him, that he was expecting the game to go in a very different direction and that he works too much time a day and he simply didn’t want to keep doing tasklists. He was disappointed with the direction the LS is taking throwing so much content our way and expecting us to finish it like we didn’t have works and projects to do too. We’re talking about a player that didn’t mind to dedicate a lot of time to the game before all this happened, so much that he had 10K achievement points because he was having fun with the game.

And while I’m trying to convince him to stay, I can’t say I don’t share at least part of his thoughs. Even I have though about it, about just ignoring LS because it is burning me. In my case I’m a GW1 God Walking Among Mere Mortals that finished all elite areas and all hard mode quests like the HM titans or winds of change. I am a completionist and I’ve proven before that I can excell at it (GWAMM isn’t exactly an easy task), and with all that, I’m starting to feel the need to rest from this game too.

“Rest” from this game. That’s a big problem. A game should be what you do to rest from work, not more work that you need to rest from.

Continue in next post.

We really apreciate all that hard work you’re putting into the Living Story, it is a compliment to say that you’re working TOO MUCH indeed, but the thing is, you’re doing it to a point where you’re burning your players, including some great ones like my guildmate that I’m starting to miss in the game. I won’t label myself as great, but I can speak from the perspective of a GWAMM, which means I got experience at completing hard achievements, and you’re putting too many tasklists in the game and it feels really wrong. Not to mention that you’re also puting hard content on short time frames (hard + temporal is a bad thing, hard is great, temporal is fine, both are super bad, imagine needing to complete Mallyx in a month).

You know what I really loved about GW1? That because it didn’t have monthly fees, I could stop playing for 2 months as I didn’t have to amortize it, and then return to it when I felt I wanted to. Of course you would have to work a bit after returning to keep up with other players, but you could do it and you could set the bar where you wanted because you wasn’t limited by constant tasklists. But now all this LS thing is giving a sense of missing the game experience if you don’t play a lot every month.

As I said, that is a good thing from a business perspective, but please, take into consideration that you might be “killing all your cows” for a big feast now, but you’re not considering to separate some of them to breed and have more cows in the future.

The system is already burning players, including many of the good ones that are the ones keeping the community going like this guildmate I told you (there are many other players that will play for a while, follow the trend, then jump to a different game, but you’re losing guys that were really dedicated to the game and loved it).

Please, strongly consider slowing down the pace, I’m not saying “no more LS”, it’s how you wanted to do things and it’s good to see our impact over the world, but I would like to return to the pace of events and achievements of Halloween and Flame and Frost. We have work to do and we want to enjoy the game because we LOVE Tyria.

Don’t eat your cows so fast, if you take care of them you will have more and bigger cows in the future

PS: About the “cows” stuff… english isn’t my first language so I’m not sure what kind of refrains you have, but I think the idea is clear :P

There’s no such thing as vertical progression. It’s an illusion.

Every time your damage goes up by +1 the monster’s health goes up by +1. In the end all you have is redundant numbers cluttering the screen.

Now that’s brilliant game design right there. Unfortunately it’s what the players want. Big pointless numbers.

Secure trading will never happen. The TP is in game for a very important reason.

Sleuth.7964:

Morrigan.2809:

so you still have made no comment on Liadri mini?
Did you play in the gauntlet at all?
and now you want ascended armour?
So you do want better stats after all

I haven’t been viewing this thread at the moment and I don’t know what the mini is and I did play gauntlet it was easy some of the stuff was a little tedious though the wind lady was not designed very well to me

And yes I want better stats but that’s just me I understand that they are adding ascended armor to the game which should be earned by raid style content IMO that’s very difficult then having some more grindy way for casuals

They are adding ascended armor so i don’t exactly know why your asking me that question in the first place.

Completing every achievement in the Gauntlet is hard content in my opinion. Casuals can do this though. Casuals ain’t bad gamers, they merely have less time.

Completing the entire Gauntlet 50 times for a piece of armor is hardcore content.

The second is bad content imho, especially if said armor has more stats.

Sps.7862:

Well, it’s arguable. There are more events in Queensdale, although there is Fire Elemental in Metrica. On Jade Quarry, whenever I go to Metrica, there’s always people there.

I guess it’s a matter of server.

I’m on TC and there are always many more people in Queensdale. Metrica and the other starter maps are not barren by any means but you are more likely to run into larger groups of players in Queensdale and /map is more active. From my experience Caledon Forest is the most barren. I hate that place and most of my characters are Sylvari.

Holy kitten, DANCE MOVES??

My god, I’m so sick of the forums.

Nuka Cola.8520:

and you want me to be positive when the only content anet been adding for months is aimed at people that play 2h per week? How exactly you want to be positive about nerfs and their crappy LS thingy as their main focus the only new content provided every patch? If you seriously enjoy their juicy nerfs/dat LS or tell yourself ‘its great content’ then good for you, enjoy. I’m looking for something more complicated than break pinatas and talk to 15 pcs for a 15 points achievement, sorry to disappoint.

Actually, I don’t “want” you to do anything. I simply find it curious that you’re insulting players who choose to buy something in the cash shop, which you apparently feel is a waste of money… but instead of spending your TIME playing a different game you enjoy, you waste it making 46 pages worth of posts – complaining – for the last 10 months.

It just seems a bit… strange to me.

I mean, I don’t know about you, but $5 for a mini represents about 10 minutes of my TIME in the real world… how much TIME have you spent making hundreds of QQ’ing posts about a game you’ve been unhappy with for nearly a year?

I have seen the complete opposite. My friends who where “hardcore” finished all content available in a few weeks, and left never to return. I consider myself a “casual” player, and I am still here, still playing with my main and still have story and content to do. I am the one who spends money in the gem store, not my “hardcore” friends.