Guild Wars 2

lorazcyk.8927:

Tell me about this:
When you go out for a movie, don’t you like to enjoy it with a friend? Isn’t it better with friends than alone in a sea of strangers?
If you go play basketball, do you think it’s better to play with familiar people, or alone or strangers? It’s so much more kitten kitten kitten AWESOME to play with each other, tease each other, cheer with each other, win or lose with each other.

Yeah, I go with someone I already know. I don’t show up alone and then pester folks around me, and then loudly complain that nobody wants to be my friend and that I’m so terribly lonely. I have one IRL friend who plays this game. We group up together sometimes. Teasing and cheering is meaningless to me if the people behind the words aren’t people whose minds and thought processes I am familiar with and understand.

If you hate people that much, you can play solo games? This is a mmo.

That whole argument comes across to me as particularly absurd when we’re talking about a game that is giving me exactly what I need and is not giving you what you need. I’ve previously explained why it’s more interesting to participate in a world full of characters played by real people instead of computer-controlled NPCs. Everyone in a zone is grouped by default so we fight, heal, rez, and complete puzzles together. That level of interaction is perfect for me and I don’t want anything deeper with all the strangers out there. I do play solo games, but I also play this.

In this game it’s just a bunch of stangers pressing 1 2 3 1 2 3 like sleepy office workers who don’t give a kitten about each other just doing the bare minimum at their job because it’s enough to get the paycheck.

See, the problem you apparently have is with this game. So telling me to go play something else makes no sense, and it wouldn’t solve your problem anyway.

Katz.5143:

I see this complaint in every game. I always wonder, there are so many people that talk about wanting a group, why aren’t they grouping with each other? I’ve never determined what the barrier is that prevents them from grouping with each other.

I just automatically assume that people who want forced grouping are sad specimens who are entirely incapable of making friends unless they have a captive audience. Seeing them demand this mechanic only makes me even more resistant to it because I’d rather give up video games than be stuck with them.

When I see someone say “I’m lonely playing this game” I imagine that person becoming codependent and stalkerish with anyone who gives them the time of day. Right to the block list they go. I’m sure that’s not always true, but I wouldn’t want to chance it.

Dumb people? Ie, people who play massively multi player games to solo aren’t that bright. There are tons of single player games out there.

Apparently it’s too difficult for people to grasp that there’s a gradient here. It’s not a black and white thing of either you’re [social] or [solo], and that if you’re not forming parties, joining guilds, chatting, and making friends with other people, then you’re [solo] and should be playing console games instead.

I play with other people all the time in this game. They’re more interesting in their in-game actions than computer NPCs, and make the world more vibrant. But grouping and talking and getting to know each other is a completely separate issue, and you don’t get to hijack the definition of “multiplayer” to make it mean specifically that.

I like playing with people out in the world. Like combat and rezzing, and seeing how they approach a situation. In WvW I’m pretty noobish so I look for instructions and strategies in chat, and then try them out.

But I don’t share most people’s interests or sense of humor. I’ve never even stuck with a guild in other games because even guild chat with the supposedly “like-minded” people was just inane garbage and people who thought they were much more clever and cute than they were. Not as trolling and racist as general chat, but still pretty pathetic on the whole. People are nice until you have to listen to them idly prattle on about inconsequential personal crap and popular media pabulum. Then they’re just exasperating and an enormous detriment to fun.

Btw, the whole never-having-to-group thing (unless you want to finish your personal story lololol) in this game? That is the single thing that has made me quit all other MMOs without looking back.

Completing my personal story is something I’d like to do. But it is not enough to make me group up and do a dungeon.

I play this game as opposed to other MMOs because its social aspect is completely different (everyone can take part in the same content without grouping up or communicating and it’s not a zero-sum game.) I have no interest in dungeons. So personal story will remain unfinished for all of my characters.

The uncommitted, non-verbal (other than “thanks for the rez”) interaction with others that this game provides is something I enjoy. Anything more involved than that and, man, I can just think of a hundred things I find more compelling that I could do instead. The only use the chat window is to me is to get instructions during WvW.

I love the mechanics of underwater combat, and I just generally enjoy swimming and exploring underwater areas. I just think some classes need some balancing between their underwater and on-land effectiveness.

Jalliah.7862:

In this game I do find a lot of unspoken communication happening. People help me and in turn I help them all of the time. People seem to go out of there way to rez and jump in and help save my butt. It’s cool and not something I’m used to happening in other MMOs. Today I spent a whole DE chain with someone. It was just the two of us and without saying a word to each other we found a good groove with our respective classes and worked as a team. It was fun. At the end of it, we said goodbye and see yah around. Even though we didn’t talk it felt quite social in a weird way, the social just happened through the actual playing.

I’m enjoying how the design of the game allows for this type of thing to happen as I’m not always up for standing around and chatting about doing things rather then just doing them.

I’ve had these sorts of experiences too, and I find it preferable to any other sort of social gaming by a long measure.

CeCaKonVeu.5734:

"
In all MMOs, u know what stands for M.M. on mmo ? Massively Multiplayer, hence gathering many players on same server to play together duh ^^

Massively multiplayer doesn’t necessarily mean grouped. It means lots of players, leaving the specific context of the many players’ involvement with each other up to the design of the specific game. In this game I play with other players every day. I do not talk to them or group up with them. The only time I group is when my one IRL friend who plays GW2 is online.

Like OP said, modern / most recent MMOs mostly target egoists/centric people because nowadays everyone brag about useless kitten on FB so they feel important. And same mentality invaded mmos, they want it all, they want it now, without effort or they wont have anything to brag about.

There is absolutely nothing I could do in a video game that exists on this planet that I would consider to be worth bragging about or showing off. It’s all pretend. It’s fun, but it’s not real and certainly doesn’t give me the impression that I’m awesome or that I’ve done anything of substance. A major in-game accomplishment will give me the warm-and-fuzzies for about 10 minutes before it fades, and I’m under no delusion that anyone else would give a crap for even 10 seconds.

My main is a necromancer, so my effectiveness underwater is hilariously pitiful. Another thing that adds to underwater difficulty is that the area in which enemies can spawn around you is larger because they can appear above and below you in addition to around the front, back, and sides. And it always seems that respawn rates are greater underwater too, although this could just be my imagination.

But if there’s an underwater boss fight I’m there, even if I die 15 times. Had a fun time with the blood witch the other day when there were about 10 people besides myself fighting her. We got slowly whittled her health down about half way before everyone died and gave up. I foolishly went back two more times thinking there would be someone else there but instead I just ran up some repair costs for no reason.

I don’t want to talk to people. I like playing in a completely uncommitted way with others. That’s why I don’t play MMOs where you’re forced to group up to complete content, and why I do play GW2.

If I had to form groups with strangers and talk to them my response wouldn’t be to knuckle down and do it. I would just log off, delete the game, and forget about its existence. I like people, which is why I like a persistent world like this with folks running around. I just don’t share most people’s concerns, interests, or sense of humor, so I have no interest in talking to them.

If someone does talk to me though I will be polite and respond, all the while leaning away at a 45 degree angle and trying to come up with a diplomatic thing to say to end the conversation that isn’t “Blow it out your kitten!”

“Yes rollback sucks, but its not like they went, “hey, dev A, im going to call our IT department and tell them to roll back everyone for 1 hour”, “Sure dev B, lets do it and have some fun!”

Guys… stuff happens, deal with it, if they had to rollback its to fix something that simply happened…. sigh at ppl….."

Again, this doesn’t appear to be an intentional rollback, but an error caused by the login server being down. That’s a problem because it can happen again, and you get no warning that it’s down in-game, so you don’t know you’re wasting time. And AGAIN, it’s not a pure loss of progress. Basically, anything good that you gained (loot, xp, currency, map completion) is lost, but anything bad (chest or node counts as opened and is unavailable, gear damage from dying) remains. On top of that there’s trading post stuff that possibly happened too from some things I’m seeing.

A one-time screwup sucks but, well, stuff happens. The problem here is the potential for it to happen again. Because it does not appear to have been intentional, but rather an error that caused certain kinds of progress not to be saved actively while playing.

The problem I have with all of this is that nobody from ANet will even talk about it. Apparently if the login server goes down while you’re playing, you won’t be kicked. You can still play and earn currency, gear, crafting mats, xp, etc. But if the login server is still down when you log out or go to a different area, you will lose everything you did.

However, chests you opened are still empty even though you didn’t get to keep what you took from them, resource nodes (and the big bunches of veggies reset every 23 hours) are still harvested, and your gear is still damaged from any deaths during the missing time period. So it’s not as easy as just going back and doing it all over again for some of this stuff. I only lost half an hour so I tried to go back and redo everything, but was locked out of some stuff.

This could apparently happen at any time. So ANet needs to acknowledge the problem and commit to fixing it.

The fact that ANet don’t even have the common decency to address this (other than a “our bad, sucks to be you” post on Twitter) is terrifying. One of the things that has impressed me most with this gaming experience is the fact that the devs are much more involved with the community than Bioware’s are, but now it’s becoming the same crickets and distance.

They need to realize that this isn’t just a problem because of what happened last night. It’s a problem going forward because now we know that we can lose progress if the login server goes down while we’re playing, yet there’s no mechanism to warn us. That’s bad. That’s really, really bad and needs to be addressed extremely quickly, and a dev needs to at least say, “Hey, it’s our fault and we know it blows, and even though we can’t fix what happened, we are working on preventing it in the future.”

That’s a much bigger issue to me than the loss of progress last night.

Garrix, it wasn’t an intended rollback. It was a screwup caused my the login server being down, so the game wasn’t saving progress. It wasn’t stuff that happened 5 minutes before, it was progress from up to an hour before. It’s a big deal and a result of poor design.

I particularly love how the good things are not saved but crappy ones like equipment damage and whether or not you harvested a node or opened a chest are.

Yeah, lost progress/ items/ currency is close to the worst thing possible in an MMO. Lost characters would really be the only thing that can beat it. It’s not okay that it can happen, it’s not okay that it did happen. And a “Oops, our bad” sort of response is just insulting. And naturally that pathetic response was on Twitter, not on the forums, because it’s easier to handle this in a more passive aggressive way than to deal with it directly. That’s very Bioware of you, ANet. Don’t be Bioware.

Sounds like a pretty big design flaw, doesn’t it?

I can deal with a lot of bugs and stuff, and I love the game and generally have few complaints. But this is not okay.

The rollback is absolutely brutal. A lot of work just went down the tubes.