Guild Wars 2

The Problem with Gw2 is… it asks so little of it’s players before level 80, and dungeions, that players feel NO need to learn anything other than….1…1…1…1..w..w..w…dodge….dodge.

Players need to be presented with Mobs that will Pound their skull in for that strategy IN the open world, by level 15 latest. By then they have full weapons Unlocked, and a few utility skills to use.

As long as people can faceroll Open world mobs… they will feel no reason to learn.

Water flows downstream and takes the path of least resistance. Most players are the same. If they do Not need to learn how to use combos…. they won’t.

The dev needs to make then NEED to learn more than auto-attack 1. The issue seems to be this would chase away the UNDEVOTED casuals.

I’m not laying the blame on the devs. I’m replying to those that are asking the devs to make content that only zergs or whatever min/max flavor of the month can defeat to force players to “learn 2 play”. What the devs are doing is the correct course, by making the game more accessible to all types of build and not picking build winners.

I’m sorry that wasn’t clear.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I learned more about playing the game in persistent world during the first two BWE (when mobs hit harder) than I’ve learned since. Let’s not forget, however, that persistent world can still be dangerous, and that dungeons — if you don’t already know them — can be quite punishing. It’s easy to say, “The game is too easy!” when you’ve already learned how to play it.

That said, what does existing game-play teach players in GW2?

Dungeon PuG Meta Play

• All coordination and team play must take place at short range.
• Dungeon mobs other than those “required” are to be skipped because they aren’t worth the time to fight them.
• 50-75% of utility skills are useless.
• There are good weapons and bad weapons, then there are really bad weapons.

Dungeon Non-Meta Play

• Keep moving and hope the mobs aggro on the other guy.
• If you go down, expect to die unless your downed state has an escape skill.
• Doing things the same way (after a wipe) and expecting different results can work.
• What’s that white circle under me? I’d better dodge!

Persistent World Meta Events

• Timer = Difficulty.
• I’m glad I don’t get seizures or migraines.
• Someone will revive me.
• Don’t revive others while they’re in AoE.

Harder Persistent World Meta Events

• Success = getting into an instance with people who know the event.
• Getting in the right instance = difficulty.
• I’m glad I don’t get seizures or migraines.

Soloing in Persistent World

• Most builds work fine.
• The game expects me to be able to fight multiple mobs at the same time.
• There is little rhyme or reason to mob design. Some hit like trucks, others like origami.
• Why bother to change my utilities or weapons?

I believe both that increased difficulty can be a better teacher and that GW2 could do a better job of providing information about the game. This issue is not a dichotomy.

I totally agree about the fuster cluck of special effects on screen. It’s like GW2 wants to be Final Fantasy, and even FFXIV allows the user to tone down or remove the special effects for better clarity.

Also, I don’t enjoy leveling now, the lack of trait points gained per level made it feel rather lacking.

Nice read. I’ll highlight the issue of conveyance, and even more specifically, particle blur. ANet set out to design a game with the intent that players would watch the action onscreen rather than their UI. They then made what’s happening on screen massively unappealing to actually look at. That’s in addition to the fog-of-war effect that the particle blur produces. Massive design gaff, but not the only one.

I think that the best way they could do a death penalty is something akin to what was in GW1. While ultimately from a lore perspective the meaning of death has not been the same ever since Grenth took over from Dhuum (He was pro permadeath btw) it wouldn’t be to hard to imagine the same system here. Grenth “Punished” players by taking a chunk of their stats 1-60% (at 15% per death) but never more than 60%. This was cleared if you used certain items, zones into a city or outpost, or killed a boss (denoted by special aura glows). The same could easily apply here with vets, elites, champs and legendary mobs taking a chunk of the death penalty away at a time or, for simplicity sake, it wares off over time.

The only problem is from a lore standpoint the Gods are missing…so “Grenth in unable to punish you at the moment. Please leave your name and number after the tone, Thank you.”

While this would ultimately mean that experimentation would be more difficult in certain instances it also makes the game a bit more anti-zerg. If you actually have to think about the enemies moves and how to avoid getting hit rather than just face tank everything it leads to a more worth wile experience in my opinion. It would definitely be interesting trying to do that against the countless dungeon bosses which most “meta” players want to melee into the corner of a room and call that skill…

Mirta.5029:

1. Same was in Victorian Era. More people are educated right now then they were back then. Education is becoming more and more important as time goes by. Only very small percentage of people were anywhere near intelligent.
2. Countries by their literacy rate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
I have no idea where you took that 25% from.
3. http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090201021247AAistKW
you’re calling people smart, event though most of them did not even have more than the basic understanding of science.

I was avoiding the wiki, since anyone can edit.
http://www.dosomething.org/tipsandtools/11-facts-about-literacy-america
http://www.proliteracy.org/
http://www.literacypartners.org/literacy-in-america

Just a few I’ve browsed.

Just because someone has formal education doesn’t make them intelligent. Just because they don’t doesn’t make them stupid. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for less formal education by any means; however, there have been many a successful businessman that dropped out and went their own way. Conversely, there are plenty of high school and college graduates that couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag if you held their hand….

You you think that in a world where it was okay to discriminate against black people and women there was more kindness, forgiveness, respect and tolerance?

The colorism was in and of itself its own issue. It’s still its own issue. However, looking beyond that yes, society was extremely different. Again, discounting the colorism issue, yes people had more respect for each other, were polite to one another, etc. Hell, we had more of this 15 years ago even, but as time progresses we lose more and more of it. Children are no longer taught to respect their adults, hell adults don’t even respect other adults anymore. We can completely forget about any type of responsibility or sportsmanship anymore it seems. Perhaps people are still just turning their cheek, ignoring it and waiting for it to ‘go away,’ but issues rarely solve themselves. It can be seen in our online interactions, in our every day real life interactions. But, sort of got off the topic of intelligence here.

Players are babied and hand held enough.
The problem is bad players are not punished. If someone lays dead at a boss or event for more than 15 secs, they should lose all credit for it.
If they are afk or hiding and not actually damaging the boss, their contribution should go down and get far less rewards.
They don’t need to be handheld anymore, they need to be accountable for lack of caring or effort.

I don’t think I necessarily miss the trinity, but instead I miss a more relaxed gamer environment. The “go go go” mentality started creeping up in WoW PUGs years ago and it has only gotten worse across the entire gamer community. I’m not interested in speed runs or meta builds. It’s like I’m back in the Diablo 2 days.

Guess I’m just getting old. Maybe if I was still in my 20s I’d be trying to go as fast as I could too. Women reading this will probably snicker.

Wow, lots of hostility in this thread against commanders. Where does that come from?

Frankly, I lead by example. Players decide for themselves if they want to rally behind me or not. I provide information in map chat for players that do not know what to do, and simply give general instructions. Such as “Everyone to the portal”, or “repair the barricades”, or “fight this Warden with ranged attacks”. I don’t blame anyone personally for failing a platform, or for ignoring my ‘commands’, if you can call them that. Generally I consider it my job as a commander, to keep my army motivated (even in the face of impending defeat), and to instruct players that are new to the battle. That’s about it.

And even then there are players that are sometimes openly hostile for some reason. You’d think players would be slightly thankful for a couple of commanders putting in some effort, and trying to organize players, and aim for a victory.

Particle blur first and foremost. It’s a shame that a AAA game out in 2012 didn’t have the effects turn-off or turn-down option that earlier games had.

dislike: forum privileges still active even though players don’t play anymore

like: the game

Couldn’t really hurt to focus more on balancing the ranger and let the players create the guides. We already play the game better than the dev team; our guides are probably going to be on-par.

Ugh….and it’s because of people like the OP that we got ascended.

“Well, I rushed through everything, forgot to smell the roses so to speak, now I’m bored. Give me another external motivator – ie carrot- because I don’t know how to entertain myself” is exactly what this amounts to.

We do not need more stat climbing. NO MORE!

We do need:
better boss mechanics,
more emphasis on playing something other than pure dps,
additional skills and interesting ways to find/unlock them (hi ho, hi ho, if off skill hunting we go!),
better pet AI (cmon boys, you had it in GW1 for ranger pets! minions and spirits, not so much, but still, we know you can do it),
and so on…

Chaba.5410:

Notice that most of the suggestions are to not use Barrage or any other high-hit-number channeling skill. That’s a problem with the game design, not the player.

It’s not a problem with game design. Retaliation is working as intended. If you don’t want to nuke yourself, then attack slower, don’t attack at all, or strip boons. I like retaliation and it’s function. I don’t want to see it changed. I personally don’t run a build that gives me retaliation, but I also never felt like I lost a fight because someone had retaliation up. If I ever died and the person that beat me just happened to have retaliation up during the fight, it just means the same thing if the player didn’t have retaliation up; I was outplayed. Retaliation adds more depth to combat and I appreciate that level of complexity.

Void.4205:

This is entirely off point of the topic who cares how many players the game has, it has no end game content after a year, and still feels like its in beta.

every time when I hear this point I just want to ask what do people perceive as end game content
PvP, WvW – here
dungeons – here
What do you do in other MMOs after you have done everything? Grind for gear? What about when you get that gear?

if arenanet sits on round table with us, not only they won’t have time to release anything new, but they will probably give up with games and humanity.
also, us is not 12 people like king arthur knights, we are a lot and we “hate” each other, and we hate people that want things we hate.
how can you possibly think it’s something doable?

do telephone company in your country talks to all their customer when they decide to change taxes or something and people just go to other companies? i bet they don’t, because it’s pointless

edit: this is not a restaurant in a city with base customer that you know by their face and you know what they like. this is a company world wide dealing with enraged children with nothing to do all day (i’m being one of those children at 35 yo)

wow, the amount of whine here is too kitten high!

the karka queen is the best world boss event Anet ever made.

and punishing zerkers mentality is good, they should introduce more different boss encounters.

I think many of us can agree that Tybalt is one of the most well written characters in this game.

Not overly serious, but serious when he must be so. Natural, spontaneous dialogue with a nice attention to detail (from the writers). No perfect personality, with a healthy amount of strong points and weak points. And a proper character arch that takes them all into account. When everything’s over, I felt like he was my buddy, something that no other character made me feel yet.

My main problem with most of the characters in this game is that, although there’s a lot of effort by the writers to follow certain archetypes and to appeal to several audiences, they are not given by the writers the proper attention to further flesh them out of those templates.

Going back to Tybalt Leftpaw, he is everything the starting human NPC characters wanted to be, at once, and even more. The light, humorous dialogue of Lord Farren, humble and spontaneous like commoner Petra, with weaknesses and problematic pasts like Quinn. More attention to detail than all of them, and most of all, truly a buddy, like all of them tried to be but failed at, because the other three did not have enough personal interaction with the player’s avatar, nor even enough depth to stretch that interaction without making it repetitive, and were discarded by the plot the moment they were not needed.

When I had that key option about Quinn, I kinda couldn’t care at all. But how I would love to have such a choice for my charr buddy!

serpentu.4591:

Pietoro.2014:

The best voice actor in the game (so far that I’ve heard) is whoever did Tybalt Leftpaw. Seriously, I loved him! Not just because of his dialogue but because the actor really sold the character.

This game needs more apples.

We need a Tybalt mini, too.

The best voice actor in the game (so far that I’ve heard) is whoever did Tybalt Leftpaw. Seriously, I loved him! Not just because of his dialogue but because the actor really sold the character.

Oh god yes, everything said in this thread – yes.
I’m sorry but the personal story writing feels so overly grandiose that the characters become cardboard cutouts, one-dimensional and cartoonish.

a ‘valiant hero’ is just that, a valiant hero, he has no personality and no defining characteristics other than being that same valiant hero, is just one example.

While it seems like a lot of fantasy games nowadays overdo the “serious and dark” narrative, i’d like some of that in GW, less cartoonish good vs evil, and more grey area, more seriousness and moral ambiguity.

As a sidenote, a relatable anti-hero would also be good.

I’m not ranger player, got no love or hate for ranger profession but.. kitten Anet, why nerf something I can actually dodge and avoid rather than that invisible bullkitten that hit me from 9k dmg from 1200 range ( phantasm mesmer) or professions with on demand 1200 teleport/stun break ( s/d thief)?…once again a good call -_-

Bank and bag slots are precisely the sort of things a shop should have. I have very little issues with the shop, i think it is very good and certainly isnt pay to win at all, nor have i ever felt pressurised to buy anything.

Having said that, rng boxes should never be in the shop. Exclusive skins i have no issue, but not as a chance item.

Im also in two minds about buying gold. I can see the pros and cons of it, i just cant quite settle on whether it is a good or bad thing to have.

I dont think it is out to trick us though or see how it is doing this. People should take responsibility for their own purchases after all

Sovta.4719:

Kichwas.7152:

If there were dead servers they might do something, however if you look on the realm status for choosing a server, they are all at heavily impacted. We don’t even have medium servers, let alone light or dead ones.

Perhaps OP is playing out of sync with their server’s peak time, or simply lacks good social connections.

For 100000000000000 time, servers show amount of accounts not people playing, if they showed people playing it wouldn’t be more then maybe 2-3 Very High servers, and that for 6-7 days after patch.

And yet somehow despite being full most hours of the day people still manage to transfer onto tarnished coast by timing it to the right hour…

Those ratings mean pretty much the opposite of what you think they do.

Vote with your wallet.

Because builds don’t equal skill. And in PVe, even if my build isn’t a “standard” build, it works quite well for me.

In Guild Wars 1, people used to ask me to ping my build, after which they wouldn’t accept me in their groups. So I’d go solo the content with heroes, come back and wave at them, trying to build their group.

A lot more people out there think they have a clue than actually have one.