Guild Wars 2

I agree with you 100%, OP. When I purchased this game (April 2012, I think), I tried to bring some friends to here, explained them that GW2 wan’t “another MMO”. One of them told me: “It will be, as every kittening MMO. You’ll see it”.

Nowadays, I can only agree with him. The original concept has been corrupted and the manifesto is a big laugh. The ones I’d trusted (devs) were lying, so I finally left the game 2 weeks ago. I read this forums once or twice a week, with the hope that vertical progression is fixed (account bound ascended items or something like that), but only that. I’m playing other games, market is plenty of new games everyday.

tl;dr: I’ve logged in order to vote you four times, a former player since Sept 13th

I’m of two minds when it comes to the topic of Ascended weapons and armor.

On one hand, I don’t feel its essential in any way. It’s there if you want it. Everything is still perfectly playable with exotics.

On the other hand, it needs to stop with Ascended. I really, REALLY do not want a gear treadmill in this game. What I do want is what they told us about the dungeons to begin with: Hard PvE with awesome skins as a reward.

I want to look cool, not have better stats. I want very challenging content at level 80, not slightly-harder content to get a better item to make the next bit of content slightly less hard.

So I don’t think Ascended items are that bad, but if they go any further with it I’ll be genuinely disappointed.

I have read the whole post (all 4 parts) and I couldn’t express my sympathy for you more! Your writing mirrors my mind on where Anet went wrong and why it is wrong. Thank you.

PS: we do care

I read the following 2 posts, and I spit my drink all over my desk because I could not stop laughing. These are 2 sad testaments to the state of the game maker.
I do play solo or in my small tight 5 man guild. so it is just amusing.

read here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Some-ANET-interfered-with-our-GvG/page/16#post2931042
and then read here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/broken-link-exit-survey/first#post2931059

hope you put your drink down beforehand.

Edit: My mouse and keyboard are like brand new after a good cleaning, Thanks Anet!

Sorry that this “name and shames”. I tried to edit but I’m woefully bad at doing so. Anyways, here is some screenshot of an ANET employee kind of being a jerk to us who were GvGing. Hopefully I don’t get infracted, but I imagine it’s coming.

Enjoy,
http://imgur.com/a/mhYp4

For anyone who calls “taken out of context”, I have a full 45 minute video to give you the entire backdrop of the situation.

This is the best post I’ve ever read on this forum. ProxyDamage, I really hope ANet grabs that achievement and takes notes. I, for one, thank you for taking the time to write this message, I wholeheartedly second everything you said. I too feel my enthusiasm with GW2 diminishing and I would like for them to address the issues the games has. I was on the verge of quitting, I uninstalled the game for the first time since I bought it just a few days ago and then reinstalled it because… well, I realised I don’t want to quit GW2, I want it fixed. And by this time I don’t even want ANet to fix everything, I would settle for only part of the problems solved.

There’s always this talk about “core gamers” and I believed these were the people drawn by the ideas expressed in the Manifesto. Now, considering the amount of MMOs on the market – and more to come – there probably won’t be a “WoW killer”, where millions upon millions of people fill the coffers of a single company. A lot of people will always be drawn to what’s new. Right now that’s FF14, in a couple of months that will be Wildstar and the next year it will be TESO. So I guess if those people leave then, in the long run, you’re left with the “core audience”. Thus I wonder, if the core audience is those people that responded to the manifesto, then why not please them?

I wonder if this is where the problem lies actually and ANet needs more people to buy the game because the existing players can go by not further contributing to the company’s earnings? Of course, there can’t be a single reason for the shift in ANet’s mentality (at least that’s how I perceive it) but I, for one, can’t figure out a clear answer. And truth be told, I shouldn’t. It’s not my business to mind the inner workings of the company, my job is to play and pay for the product that has been advertised in the manifesto.

Vayne.8563:

TooBz.3065:

Vayne.8563:

MrRuin.9740:

Vayne.8563:

See I don’t think so. I think it’s still on a moderate progression path…and they intend to stay that way..that is the gear progression is going to be relatively minor stat-wise compared to other games. You won’t need the gear to run dungeons.

That’s my prediction anyway.

Really? Its still the same thing though. If they add another gear after Ascended, say, with another ‘minor’ stat boost of 10%, then another tier after that…..its still vertical and will still divide players as the stat difference from exotic to whatever the current tier may be gets larger and larger. Just because they’re doing it in smaller increments doesn’t mean it’s not there or gets to be called something else.
Its like your power company throwing a power rate increases at you – suddenly hike the bill by $200 in one shot or by increasing the bill by $10 over time so they can claim its better than the other company who does it in one shot.

Unless the older stuff becomes so easy to get that everyone has it…which is doable.

Everyone sees vertical progression and they think full on gear treadmill…cause that’s how everyone else has done it.

If you guys can’t see the difference between this and other MMOs, I’m not really sure what else I can say about it.

This is what I originally thought ANet was going to do. Let grinders get the gear early and then open up more paths for the rest of us. But this isn’t what they’ve done.

Instead, they’ve used Ascended gear as a carrot to get people to do stuff they don’t otherwise want to do. You can see all ascended gear since rings as an effort to spread people throughout the world (when they obviously don’t want to).

First dailies were suppose to spread people around the world, but people just completed them other ways or hung out in the appropriate 1-15 zones for a quick fix. The mid level zones were desolate. Now with the ore and wood requirements you have to go into the mid level zones (or someone does).

I don’t think this is going to change. If anything armor will reinforce this.

I’m not sure what you think isn’t changing. They’re doing exactly what I thought they’d do.

First they come out with ascended rings and stuff that only fractal runners could get. Then they made them so you could get them with dailies and such. Anyone who cared about that stuff, should have had it by now, surely. Rings and amulets are pretty easy to get.

Which brings us now to weapons. Sure they’re hard to get. They’re like rings when they first came out. It’s like some people spent a couple of grand on a VCR and a few years later everyone could afford them.

So Anet comes out with these weapons and makes them hard to get. Only the people who REALLY want them really care. But eventually, if they do come out with something else, they’ll make these much easier to get. It’s always going to be the older tier that’s easier to get.

The only trick is to make it so you can always do the content with the older tier (which you can).

As long as that remains, I think they’re handling it okay.

To be sure, I’d personally prefer a game with only cosmetic progression, but that ship has sailed. To be precise it sailed last November.

I have enough ascended rings at the moment for my next three or four 80s. I get earrings from doing guild missions. This stuff really isn’t that hard to get.

But the weapons are. As long as I don’t need them…I don’t care…and why should I? So I can have a BIS weapon? So I can save two minutes or a 12 minute dungeon run?

It’s very much like people who have to buy the absolutely top of the line computer. They pay a lot more and six months later it’s 30% cheaper.

I can wait the six months.

Guess you don’t play WvW much, or if you do you simply hide in the zerg. It won’t be long that if you want to stay alive outside of a large group you will need that better gear. Players in other threads have done the math … the difference is pretty significant.

Very well said ProxyDamage.

Your journey has parallels to all of my current group of gamer friends that bought this game together and I agree with pretty much everything that you said.

We are not logging in nearly as often as we used to. The no subscription fee helps with that a lot. Sometimes I wonder what will be the breaking point of our commitment to this game.

Mr ProxyDamage, sir. I enjoy reading through all that. Really. It kind of sums up my own sentiments. I’m not one who is fond of the whole MMORPG thing anyways. I always equate MMOs = grind. The only other MMO I ever played aside this was EVE and I left that because RL imposed economical restraints that made monthly subscriptions a burden. Otherwise I’d have stayed there.

But I digress. I too came to GW2 with a couple of other friends with the… hope, that this was different. It certainly was, at the beginning. I liked that BiS gear was easily attainable. I liked getting that out of the way so quickly so I can focus on other fun things. But things changed. OH well…

but really, nice read. Thanks for taking time to write it

Serelisk.6573:

Vayne.8563:

Nice opinion piece…which is pretty much just that. A very long opinion piece, but you blow it at the end.

You say this could be avoided,. but you don’t really know that. It’s pure conjecture. I’m not sure you’d said anything here that hasn’t been said in countless threads.

It’s just his opinion? Is it somehow worth less than any other post? I was pretty sure he made it clear this was his opinion, what with the heavily personalized introduction.

Your post comes across as solely attempting to devalue the worth of the OP.

@OP, thanks for the achievement; 20 pts closer to my new shiny helmet! But seriously, great post. As Vayne so eloquently pointed out, a lot of people echo this opinion but it’s nice to see someone who’s clearly passionate about how they feel and felt for the game over its lifetime elaborate on that in a post such as yours.

But that’s what the bots do, they devalue people’s opinions on how the game should be (based on what we were told prelaunch when Anet didn’t cut itself off from it’s players and actually worked with us).

OP I completely agree with you. If they wanted to add fractals they should have done it from the start, if they wanted to have ascended they should have kept the points the same but added something essential for running fractals/dungeons. But they didn’t do either of those things.

The open world has been made worse. The only time anyone shows up in a zone outside of Queensdale or SFen is due to a daily requirement or the single zone invasions. The problems this game has aren’t going to be solved overnight but they actually do have to try to start on them and what would show us they were serious about making the game better would be two things. Changing the stats on ascended to be no better than exotic, and removing DR. Those two things right there would be a show of solidarity to their playerbase in moving forward.

Skyline.3480:

ProxyDamage.9826:

Don’t look at this as an “I quit!” post. I didn’t, not yet. I’m hanging around (with rapidly fading enthusiasm, I admit) to see what happens for now.

You are wasting your time son. This game will never be what you or I wanted it to be.
They made a choice long ago to follow this path and there’s no coming back from it.

I can predict one thing with certainty though, call me crazy if you must. The game will not die. It will become more and more similar to conventional MMOs. More vertical progression will be added, new levels and gear tiers. New grindy elements and features will be added, to the point the game will be unrecognizable.
Yes, it will loose many players in the process but in the end it will remain a popular game. A game I won’t be playing.

As it becomes more similar to conventional MMO’s it puts itself into more and more danger of being obsoleted by the newest and shiniest conventional MMO that comes out.

Anet was formed by Ex-Blizzard Employees. It’s perhaps time for some Anet people to split away and form their own company.

ProxyDamage.9826:

Don’t look at this as an “I quit!” post. I didn’t, not yet. I’m hanging around (with rapidly fading enthusiasm, I admit) to see what happens for now.

You are wasting your time son. This game will never be what you or I wanted it to be.
They made a choice long ago to follow this path and there’s no coming back from it.

I can predict one thing with certainty though, call me crazy if you must. The game will not die. It will become more and more similar to conventional MMOs. More vertical progression will be added, new levels and gear tiers. New grindy elements and features will be added, to the point the game will be unrecognizable.
Yes, it will loose many players in the process but in the end it will remain a popular game. A game I won’t be playing.

+1 OP.

I’ve posted something similar to this a number of times, in a more condensed form.
Now we’ll wait for it to get locked by a mod for some stupid reason.

Mathias.9657:

This thread will be ignored by ANet.

Like everything else. Nothing’s new.

Cactus.2710:

Vayne.8563:

Cactus.2710:

Vayne.8563:

… been said in countless threads.

LOL. Do you even read the stuff you post? If what he said has been stated previously in “countless threads”, maybe … just maybe … it goes beyond pure conjecture and maybe … just maybe … a lot of it could indeed have been avoided if ANet had just taken all that ’countless" feedback seriously.

Countless threads? You can’t count them? Are you sure?

More than a thousand threads? I’m sure you can count up to a thousand. It doesn’t even take that long.

Anet has metrics. Threads are very nice, but you know…they’re just that…threads. And people in those negative threads sometimes disagree with the threads.

And MMORPG forums are usually cesspools of complaint no matter how well a game is doing.

How many complaints are troll threads too, because I’ve seen a few of those (though I agree this one is not).

Complaints on forums are nothing to get excited about. They sure as hell don’t guarantee a majority opinion.

Uhh … you’re the one who used the word “countless”. I was simply parroting you. How could that possibly have escaped you??

I lol’d at this pretty hard.

Thanks, Proxy. Your thread was a good read. Your journey parallels mine to some point. Wherever you end up, I wish you well.

Vayne.8563:

Cactus.2710:

Vayne.8563:

Nice opinion piece…which is pretty much just that. A very long opinion piece, but you blow it at the end.

You say this could be avoided,. but you don’t really know that. It’s pure conjecture. I’m not sure you’d said anything here that hasn’t been said in countless threads.

LOL. Do you even read the stuff you post? If what he said has been stated previously in “countless threads”, maybe … just maybe … it goes beyond pure conjecture and maybe … just maybe … a lot of it could indeed have been avoided if ANet had just taken all that ’countless" feedback seriously.

Countless threads? You can’t count them? Are you sure?

More than a thousand threads? I’m sure you can count up to a thousand. It doesn’t even take that long.

Anet has metrics. Threads are very nice, but you know…they’re just that…threads. And people in those negative threads sometimes disagree with the threads.

And MMORPG forums are usually cesspools of complaint no matter how well a game is doing.

How many complaints are troll threads too, because I’ve seen a few of those (though I agree this one is not).

Complaints on forums are nothing to get excited about. They sure as hell don’t guarantee a majority opinion.

Uhh … you’re the one who used the word “countless”. I was simply parroting you. How could that possibly have escaped you??

To ProxyDamage:

I can’t agree with you more. The main reason I got GW2 was because I’m also a GW veteran. I was looking forward to GW but with an Open world. Instead I got skill restrictions on weapons, Zergs, Zergs, and more Zergs, No GvG or Hero’s Ascent, A class mechanic that is total BS(ranger here too), oh and did I mention the Zergs.

To go along with all this now we have the gear-creap as I lilke to call it. You don’t have to get an Ascended weapon to do all the stuff in GW2 but it sure helps. It’s just the start of the gear treadmill. Just wait till they release an expansion and raise the level cap and this all starts over again.

Anet did it right with GW, 20 was cap and when they added Greens, they were just different skins that were harder to get to drop. Hell to this day the #1 armor in GW is still Obsidian and it was in at the start. When they released Factions they kept the level cap at 20 and even made it easier to reach, think it took me 8 hrs with my Assassin. They realized that that was too quick and lengthened it with the release of Nightfall. And never did they release weapons or armor that was any better than what was tops in Prophecies.

If Anet goes the way of the treadmill then I guess I may as well go back to SWToR since it’s a universe I’ve loved since 1976.

Spot on. This pretty much sums up how I feel about this game as well. I think the problem may be people like us who despise vertical progression and barriers to entry are a minority…

We’re like the lab rats that got away, liberated and free, we can’t be put back into those cages no more. Most of the ‘lab rats’ in the mmo scene though long for their hamster wheel and regimented dosages of ‘fun’.

You could even make a allusion to Moses’s Jews wandering the desert, searching for a home. We are few in number, with a unique point of view, or faith even…always looking for our holy land. GW2 was suppose to be that holy land, OUR holy land…and it feels JUST like our holy land has been invaded and corrupted by the Romans. So now I guess, following this to its logical conclusion, we need a Messiah to liberate us and lead us to gaming salvation. One can only pray… ;p

Vayne.8563:

Nice opinion piece…which is pretty much just that. A very long opinion piece, but you blow it at the end.

You say this could be avoided,. but you don’t really know that. It’s pure conjecture. I’m not sure you’d said anything here that hasn’t been said in countless threads.

LOL. Do you even read the stuff you post? If what he said has been stated previously in “countless threads”, maybe … just maybe … it goes beyond pure conjecture and maybe … just maybe … a lot of it could indeed have been avoided if ANet had just taken all that ’countless" feedback seriously.

Vayne.8563:

Nice opinion piece…which is pretty much just that. A very long opinion piece, but you blow it at the end.

You say this could be avoided,. but you don’t really know that. It’s pure conjecture. I’m not sure you’d said anything here that hasn’t been said in countless threads.

It’s just his opinion? Is it somehow worth less than any other post? I was pretty sure he made it clear this was his opinion, what with the heavily personalized introduction.

Your post comes across as solely attempting to devalue the worth of the OP.

@OP, thanks for the achievement; 20 pts closer to my new shiny helmet! But seriously, great post. As Vayne so eloquently pointed out, a lot of people echo this opinion but it’s nice to see someone who’s clearly passionate about how they feel and felt for the game over its lifetime elaborate on that in a post such as yours.

Waldir.2571:

There us a million threats about this, people want it and they said no, that’s the answer you’ll get from any player in here.

I won’t believe their ‘no’ as an answer unless… I dunno, it’s written in some kind of a manifesto or something. Then you’d know for sure they’ll keep their honest word.

This argument is not misleading in the slightest.

If I have food on my guardian that gives 20 boon duration, I’m not getting 200 stats and 20 boon duration. I’m getting 20 points into the virtue tree worth of boon duration. These are two very distinctly different things.

Also there is nothing permanent about food. At all.

That being said I believe that some food is completely imbalanced compared to other food and that some food is too good in general, such as the -40% condition duration food as well as few other egregious offenders.

Dear OP,

I zoned into Lion’s Arch today just in time to hear you spew out a curse-filled tirade about spending laurels on materials, and how at level 53 you only had enough materials saved up to make OOOOOOONE level 15 inscription (blue, not green). I watched people try and help you. I watched people (like myself) try and get you to calm down enough to offer a coherent explanation of what you needed help with, so we could try and help you.

Instead, you chose to continue to swear at us, to insult us, to for some bizarre reason drag RL politics into the mix though nobody else breathed a word of it, and to say how terrible the server is. There were a lot of people who would have been willing to give you help and advice if you’d just taken a minute to breathe and say what exactly you were looking for.

Even now having made this post, you STILL haven’t said what it is you’re looking for or want, other than a vague ‘T2 mats’. Which ones? Where have you been looking? What are you killing for them? What does the cash shop have, at all, to do with the state of low-level materials in the open world? When I took my first character through the game, I completed every map as I went along, trying to stay in a difficulty around my current level as I went. I don’t remember running into problems finding materials that way until I ran into T4 and T6 crafting tiers, and even then that was pretty easily solved by deciding what I wanted (scales, blood, totems, whatever), looking up what sort of thing dropped those (either the mobs themselves or white-quality loot bags from a level range), and ruthlessly slaughtering a metric ton of them.

If you change your mind at some point and would actually like help figuring out where to go and what to kill for the specific things you’re looking for instead of just knee-jerk screaming about how terrible the server is, feel free to shoot me a private message and I’ll see what I can do.

I don’t know if this is some kind of elaborate in-joke or something that is making fun of the things people complain about (especially with your bizarre derail about the cash shop at the end), but on the off chance that you’re serious…

You’ll want to find out the specific zones that have the individual materials you’re looking for and seek them out specifically. If you post what those are I can even help you eliminate that dangerous and time-consuming step as well.

We almost didn’t finish Shadow Behemoth earlier. Only 13:40 or so left on the clock. WHEW.

Already exists. The overflow queue system prioritizes home server occupants over guests. If they’re already on the map, why should they be removed?

I’m making this its own topic here in the vain hope that a dev will read it and something will click.

Body Shot is complained about often, but is not and has never been the actual problem with P/P, and adding a 1 second root to it will accomplish nothing.

The actual problem with P/P is that its primary damage skill is the Initiative-sucking Unload when it should be the free Vital Shot. This causes a problem with resource management where all of the ‘specialty’ skills are perpetually pitted against the main damage skill in a competition that the latter will always win.

In short, it’s the only set in the entire game that forces you to sacrifice most of your DPS to get any utility or mobility and sacrifice all of your utility and most of your mobility to maintain decent DPS. That is and always has been what’s wrong with P/P.

Please buff or rework Vital Shot to be good with P/P and redesign Unload into something a little more utilitarian/specialized (like a cone AoE) so that you aren’t forced to rely on it for basic DPS. Short of making #2, #4, and #5 blatantly overpowered that’s the only thing that will actually fix P/P.

GOSU.9574:

I, like many others, not only have no problem choosing where to use our Initiative, but I prefer Unload as it is. While not the same burst as d/d, Unload delivers a nice burst of ranged dps.

No offense, but you clearly don’t understand what I’m saying.