Guild Wars 2

That’s fine. You don’t need to play every day.

I agree that Precursors are ridiculous. The odds of dropping one is so low you shouldn’t even try.

At some point they’ve said they’re introducing new ways to get the precursors so you just need to wait for that really.

I do find it strange that you’ve done everything else in the game in such a short time though… Can I ask how many kills you have in WvW and what rank you are in PvP?

There is no trade window by design.

If there was a trade window, here is what EVERY SINGLE chat window would look like, map, guild, say, everything:

WTS Dusk – 400G
WTB Charged Lodestones 1G ea.
WTS Peach tarts 20s each
~~~ BUYING ~~~ 1000x MITHRIL ORE ~~~ 10c ~~~
WTS Dusk – 400G
WTB Charged Lodestones 1G ea.
WTS Peach tarts 20s each

FOREVER

Not having a trade window was the smartest move they ever made.

Guardian with Greatsword – best Melee in the game.

Most people agree that Guardians are OP. Take advantage now before they get nerfed.

AmagicalFishy.6935:

Soon, there will be no such thing as a super-rare item because everyone would have whined their way to the top.

Good. This is a western MMO, not a Korean Grind-Fest.

We don’t want or need “super-rare items”, whatever those are.

Did you get the most powerful and rare stuff in Final Fantasy 7? Yeah. So did everyone else that played that game.

Did it make it feel any less cool and awesome? No. No it did not.

Ubung.7423:

I also dont want everything the same as wow, i really like most elements of GW 2. If they added raiding and tuned up the dugeon bosses id be a happy player. No need to go all passive aggressive and tell me where to go.

I don’t see why you want WoW-style raids in GW2. They aren’t fun, the only reason people do them in WoW is because of the gear treadmill, not because they’re enjoyable.

Dungeon bosses I do agree with you, they are too weak and predictable to offer any kind of meaningful challenge. I don’t see that making them bigger and throwing more people at them “fixes” that though.

The AI in this game is pretty much non-existant. A boss simply follows its programmed attack pattern, and mobs simply move towards you and attack, nothing more complex than that, ever. There is no challenge in beating AI opponents in this game whatsoever. I don’t see that changing if they made Raid bosses.

This is why WvW is the best part of the game IMO, all your enemies are human-controlled and unpredictable.

For me, WvW is endgame. You can in theory start playing WvW at level 1, but if you don’t have a full set of level 80 exotics you’re going to struggle to get kills.

Nothing beats the thrill of storming Stonemist with an organised group, fighting back the enemy hoarde and killing the keep lord. It took us over 3 hours this afternoon to take down Stonemist, a fact I only realised when I looked at the clock, becuase it felt like 15 minutes

Literally the most fun I’ve had in a video game ever.

You want your “raids”, well here they are. Except instead of a tedious boss with predictable attacks, the enemy is the other team. I find beating another person on the field of battle far more exciting than beating an AI.

PvE feels like training for the main event, WvW.

Legendaries should be useless. They absolutely do not need to be anything other than expensive status symbols. If you’re looking for a game with a continual gear treadmill type of progression, please look elsewhere.

The point of them is that they look cool, not that they make you stronger. They hinted at making them stronger when Ascended weapons come out, but hopefully the huge backlash against Ascended has let them rethink that idea… We shall see.

As for WvW, They’ve acknowledged that it is pretty much a Beta test framework in it’s current form, and they’ll be adding to it as the years go on. I agree that Commander is probably the area that needs the most work.

I’m pretty bored of WvW now as well, but you can still have fun running around in a tight group of 20 with a couple of Mesmers and full voice comms.

There’s a big WvW update coming in Feb, so I’d wait for that if I were you.

I don’t agree with your points 2 or 3 for new players tbh, There’s no farming at all required to progress, you can get a full set of Exotics very easily with no farming at all.

Buying gold and items makes no difference, there is no concept of “winning” in guild wars 2, so there can be no Pay to Win.

Winning in PvP cannot be bought, nor can it in WvW, so I’m not sure how you can make the connection between spending money and being more powerful in the game, it’s simply not designed that way.

There isn’t supposed to be a zerg of players everywhere you go.

There was during launch because, well, it was launch.

To expect that volume of players in the starter areas now that launch is well and truly over is a little silly.

I’ve levelled 2 characters from 1-20 recently on Aurora Glade and never ran into any empty areas at all..

There were 3-4 other people with me for my starter instance, 10-15 people in the level 1-15 area, and plenty in the 15-25 area.

Of course some servers are going to be more empty than others, and some servers are going to be dead at 3am, but busy and thriving at 6pm. That’s just life I’m afraid.

You can always swap to a busier server or one with a population from a different time zone if it’s a problem for you.

Meh, solving a problem that doesn’t really exist tbqh.

sinisterpink.7912:

Yeah sorry but I am comfortable with the rarity and the price of pre-cursors.
Legendaries should be… well… Legendary – such that they are extremely difficult to obtain (in terms of time/resources, not through skill).

There’s nothing Legendary about sitting at home playing a video game for 1000 hours straight. It just means you’re unemployed and have no life.

If you buy one for gold, then you are an idiot with more money than sense. Even at Chinese gold seller prices a twilight costs $3000. If you waste that much money on pixels in a video game you are a loser.

I propose a name change from “Legendary” to “Loser” weapons.

Imagine if they were made easier to get: within a few weeks you may find yourself in a CoE party with 4 players ALL wielding TWILIGHT, swooshing their black trail animations around all over the place. Or in Cursed Shore: half of the people camping Penitent Camp shooting flowers and colorful splashes everywhere with their bows.

This happens right now. Those farming spots are frequented by exactly these losers waving their loser weapons around. After Xmas is over, go to Orr and play count the Legendaries.

vvp.8512:

No. There is no such thing as “skill-based” in an mmo. If it required group coordination then the forums would be flooded by people complaining that they don’t want to group with other people.

If it tested individual skill than the complaints would be about how “this is too hard” and “i’m the best player in the game but I can’t do this!” or some such nonsense.

But people will complain about anything in forums. The trick is being able to listen to, then disregard those complaints.

I would say that doing certain dungeon paths requires co-ordination and skill (if you don’t use the cheats and shortcuts), and therefore some skill-based rewards do already exist in this MMO. The amount of skill that you need is fairly low, sure, but it’s a start.

The clock tower jumping puzzle was a good skill challenge, although you’re right there was a good deal of QQ’ing from people who weren’t able to do it, and a somewhat sickening APOLOGY from the guy that made the puzzle? X_X

How times have changed, in the past if you made a difficult game you would be proud and boast about how hard it was to beat. These days you have to come online and say sorry for entertaining your players…

There’s the PvP paid tourneys, which also require a good deal of skill, and badges of jumping from WvW, which simply require a friendly mesmer ;P.

I think if they stick to their guns more, rewarding skill not luck and learn to ignore the type of person that posts on MMO forums they could make the game truly great.

It seems that they care too much about what people write on the forums though. That’s how we got the abomination of Fractals and Ascended gear…

I think the OP makes some valid points, but I also think some people are so conditioned to grinding in an MMO they will never stop, no matter how difficult the game makes it, they will find a way.

Even the designers of Guild Wars 2 themselves don’t seem to understand the “no-grind” philosophy.

If they did, Legendaries would not be the ridiculous grind that they are, and nor would Ascended.

Gabi.5264:

they will still leech a lot of $$$ as they have loads of fanboys and there’s no other new mmo out there at the moment.

We do have hope on the Horizon. Elder Scrolls MMO is coming out in 2013. This will force them to raise their game to keep selling gems.

And if they don’t, we can just go to Elder Scrolls instead. Win-win

There seems to be some long-term DR active in the game. If you log out for long enough to trigger it, or there is a server reset, you go into “loot god mode” and drop all kinds of awseome stuff.

After that, the more you play, the worse your loot gets.

They want to reward us for not playing. Let’s oblige.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Malediktus.9250:

spy kits and portal guns need to be removed from the game, also skipping stuff needs to be harder or be punished more, eg high amount of cripple, pull and immobilize

Or they could design content that players don’t want to skip, how bout that.

It’s not players that are the problem, it’s the content locusts / grinders. These people never “play” video games, they simply “connect” to them and begin aquiring loot.

The concept of “fun” to these people is completely alien, they exist for one reason only, to maximise personal profit, get the best items, and wave their gigantic e-peen around.

They will always seek out the cheat, the shortcut or the glitch, as anything that shortens the amount of time before they get the loot is a good thing, no matter how much fun the content they’re skipping is.

Anet doesn’t help the situation to be honest, they require you to repeat things so much that even casual players who do enjoy fun start to look for shortcuts. I want a legendary, I need to grind the game for around 500 hours to get one. Not play it, grind it. Meaning reapeating the same content 50-100 times to get the mats that I need.

If I can shorten that to 250 hours or 25-50 times by cheating, exploiting or glitching, then I more than likely will.

Geewoody.2017:

I really can’t understand why having an incredibly rare item in the game is a bad thing. Does every single thing have to be obtainable by ordinary means? Why can’t we have items that actually seem special? Legendaries are even starting to lose their charm.

It’s a bad thing because the only way to reliably get one is to spend a ridiculous amount of money at the cash shop. It’s encouraging people with an addictive personality who REALLY want to feel special to spend more than they can afford. It’s praying on the weak and taking them for all they have.

Why do you need to seem special in a video game? Is this feeling of specialness worth weak people wasting all their money on and getting into debt?

Is this what playing a video game should be about, your worth and status in the game linked to how much money you spent?

Euler.3259:

Everything in this game is so incomprehensibly out of reach I don’t even want to try. Sure the journey of a 1000 miles starts with a single step. But why is it a 1000 miles before I get anything?

Even better than that, the journey governed by RNG is both long and short at the same time. It may be 1000 miles, it may be 1. You have no idea how much longer you are going to be on the path for.

Eirik.9145:

RNG stuff is a lot of that profit which is why you see it tied to every event they have.

I think its short-term profit at the expense of long term player loyalty. We won’t put up with RNG rewards forever.

Zero Angel.9715:

RNG-ception.

Oh and they fixed the problems with RNG with the fractals. If you dont get a ring, you now get a special token. If you collect enough tokens you can use it to buy a ring of your choice.

Indeed. I guess maybe they tried playing Fractals themselves and realised that doing dailies and getting nothing was no fun.

The fractals ring token shows they are slowly turning away from this idea of RNG and luck being the main way to get what you want. I hope this starts to extend out to other areas of the game as well. I’d love to see a way to get a Precursor other than throwing rares into the forge and crossing your fingers, or a 0.00001% drop chance in the world. Both are particularly extreme abuses of RNG to make something very rare.

Lets be optimistic, and say that Wintersday rewards must have been planned and developed before this re-thinking about tokens and collecting being preferable to pure RNG rolls and a lot of hope.

Socram.6587:

You could invest a small portion of the time that you need to rant on the forums to take a look at the “socks and hats.. Again, RNG style.”… never wondered what these are for?

You can turn them in for more giant presents to have another crack at the RNG.

Oh hi, we heard you liked RNG so we put RNG in your RNG so you can gamble while you gamble.

I don’t play fractals, but I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be in a 5-man party doing your daily lvl 10 to try and get a ring, and everyone else in your party gets one but you don’t. They all move up to level 20 and you go back crying to LA.

Where’s the fun in that? If there’s a reward for doing something, either everyone should get it or nobody should.

When you did the clock tower jumping puzzle, you got a pair of exotic boots. No RNG, no BS, just a straight-up reward for doing something difficult. A good reward at that.

Everyone loved that. Do that. Don’t do RNG rewards. We hate those.

No.

You seem to be mistaking “rewards and achievements” with randomly being assigned high value and low value items based on a Random Number Generator.

If person A runs the JP faster than anyone else, completes it on their very first run through without falling off they get a tiny chance at a good reward at the chest at the end.

If person B runs the JP 200 times, falls off every time and eventually hobbles through and opens the chest on their 201st time, they get that exact same chance at a good reward.

With RNG, what you get is a totally random distribution of reward. Person B is just as likely to get the awesome loot as person A.

That, surely, is the “Trophy-for-participation” mechanic at work?

The point isn’t that you need to open 2000 chests to get a specific mini, it’s that SOME people will have to, whereas OTHERS will get what they want on the first try.

It’s not fair on those people to have to spend $1000 on gems to get a mini that someone else got by spending $1.50 is it?

If they put the minis on for the gem store for $500 there would be outrage. This way, they still charge $500 on average, but since some people get them for $1.50 they can avoid being called extortionists.

Yeah, it’s my fault for wanting something interesting or rewarding out of the event, right?

I should just shut up and farm Orr & Fractals for gold like everyone else, and buy myself my own presents from the TP.

Syphirr.3512:

My friend bought 4, he got the permanent hair kit from the first one.

…Then again, this is the same guy whose first ever drop was an abyss dye from a river drake in Queensdale.

I shouldn’t feel like it, but it’s stuff like this that makes me want to quit.

This is what makes RNG so demoralising and depressing. There will always be someone who gets the awesome reward for free, whereas most people will need to cheese-grater their faces off to get it. I doubt your friend feels proud or satisfied with getting these items for doing nothing.

This sort of mechnic works GREAT in Korea, where their culture is all about feeling superior than each other based on how lucky they are, or throwing $$$ at mystery boxes to cheat their way into winning.

It is absolutely out of place in a Western RPG, where we want to show off stuff that we EARNED, not that we win from RNG.

Zero Angel.9715:

… So stiff up a lip and get it done.

Stiff up a lip!

I love it

You just made my day.

I was struggling with this one until I turned off Core Parking in Windows and my FPS really improved quite dramatically.

Now I can mountain-goat my way through the whole thing without letting go of “W”.

Many MMO players struggle with the concept of only doing things once. It’s a sad mentality that’s been drilled into them by WoW and WoW-clones.

Minipets I’m fine with. I’ll get a couple that I want from doing the Tixx dungeons.

I’m more talking about stuff like the weapon skins and the choir bell and stuff.

It’s great that they put cool stuff in the game, but if we want it we’re seemingly expected to drop lots of gold on TP, or grind grind grind until we beat the odds on the RNG, without ever knowing what those odds actually are.

I don’t actually care if I get a bell or not. I just want them to stop this cynical stuff that takes advantage of players with an addictive personality. There’s no sub fee, stop making us grind as if there was one.

Why do I have to win some kind of insane lottery to get any kind of reward in this game? What happened to being rewarded for skill?

Every update you put out seems to rely more and more heavily on random chance.

So I can get a weapon skin if I open a gift, right? But a random one. I can’t choose which I want or anything like that? Oh well, at least I get a skin for opening the gift? Oh. No. It’s random chance and nobody knows what the actual % chance of getting a skin is.

I can get a Choir Bell reward if I open… 10000, 20000 gifts? Or I might get lucky and get it on my 1st try.

I can collect snowflakes from opening gifts to craft stuff… but only randomly.

I can collect socks and hats.. Again, RNG style.

I can buy the Xmas box from the gem store, but again I can’t choose what I get, it’s just whatever the RNG gods decide to give me.

I can complete the Xmas Jumping puzzle to get a reward that might give me something cool, but only a random chance, most of the time I’ll get crap.

You don’t even tell us what the chances are of getting what we want. Imagine entering a lottery where you could not work out what the odds of winning were. Or a Roulette table where you don’t see how many numbers are on the wheel until you put down your money, then they draw back the curtain and the wheel has 100’000 numbers on it… I don’t think it would be legal.

If I do all 5 Tixx dungeons I can get enough mats to make 2 Xmas Dolls. Which is cool, and how rewards should happen. There is not enough of this, and far too much RNG going on right now.

[Moderator note: thread title edited for clarity. Please refrain from using inflammatory thread titles. No infractions have been issued at this time.]

jazzllanna.1278:

I have always gotten a common blue as well. I find it odd that coriander is so rare though, you would think the truffle would be the high end ingredient since it is a higher level to get it.

They really screwed up all the cooking ingredients when they ripped out 90% of the karma food you could buy from karma and heart vendors. After the fallout from “The Butter Incident”, I guess nobody at Anet wants to touch it.

They’ve yet to go back and look at it again and fix cooking item rarity, so cooking is still really a mess.

Stuff that should be common and reasonably easy to get hold of like Coriander seeds are stupid expensive, wheras stuff you’d expect to be rare like Saffron and Lotus root are some of the most abundant ingredients in the game…

“We are working on a a way for you to make the exact color of dye you want using the Mystic Forge. You will need to get a specific crafting material for each color but you will get the exact color you want.
We really don’t want dyes to be a Gem Store only feature, we understand that some people would be willing to pay more to get exact dyes or all the dyes but we want to keep some aspects of the dyes system in the game.”

Crystin Cox – 13th June 2012

I guess they’re still working on those Mystic Forge recpies huh? Or maybe that was a flat-out lie to shut us up.

I’m actually relieved there’s no way to grind out a specific colour. Given how much grinding is required for a single Ascended backpeice, I can only imagine at the mats you’d need to craft Abyss dye…

4x Twilight in mystic forge = Abyss?

Crystin Cox had this to say on 13th June 2012:

“We are working on a a way for you to make the exact color of dye you want using the Mystic Forge. You will need to get a specific crafting material for each color but you will get the exact color you want.

We really don’t want dyes to be a Gem Store only feature, we understand that some people would be willing to pay more to get exact dyes or all the dyes but we want to keep some aspects of the dyes system in the game."

Still working on that Mystic Forge recipe there huh Crystin? Would love to see what mats I need to collect for Abyss. If I need 250 ectos and 9000 T6 mats for an ascended backpeice, I probably have to grind an entire mountain down to dust to collect those.

Maybe 4x Twilight in the Mystic Forge = Abyss?

Meh, early adopters take the risk. No refunds.

UnderdogSMO.9428:

tkalamba.2541:

marnick.4305:

For those who missed the AMA, Mike O’Brien and Chris Whiteside keep mentioning a “shallow power increase”.

Yes or no, is this a good idea?

As far as I’m concerned: no. Bad idea. Keep this power increase bs out of the game.

Also hypothetical level increases were mentioned. Give your opinion.

For me, also a big no. If I stop for a year and come back, I don’t want to find an outdated character.

A shallow power increase is nothing really to worry about.

You finding an outdated character is going to be inevitable anyways. There was never any avoiding it. They said back in 2011 that they would increase the level cap, and again during the AMA they said it. The intention was always there, and they have said it during development. It was a fact that was ignored or glossed over. An increased level cap will mean that your character will inevitably be outdated.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/19873-level-cap-increase-in-expansions/

the thing about GW2 level though is it will NEVER get any harder to level than it already is as the level curve is FLAT

I have a friend who just started playing only about 2 weeks ago, yesterday he was say “man i just hit level 40… I ONLY PLAY FOR LIKE at most 2 hours a day! Thats awesome!!!”

as long as you do your leveling in area’s built for your level it will always take a short time

Uhuh. And how long did it take for you to get full level 80 exotics? When you are level 90 you will need to get them all again, and it will take longer. Unless you want to keep playing in your 80 gear…

It’s a traditional MMO trick, make the levels easy to get, make the best gear difficult to get. So you think “ooh, I’m level 80, I’d better go get level 80 exotic armour otherwise I’m a noob!”

Roquen.4523:

It was mentioned numerous times during the recent AMA on Reddit that Anet would have preferred to roll out these items from the launch of the game.

Beware of believing this rhetoric.

It’s very easy for them to say “we wanted to do this all along!”, now that they’ve introduced it 3 months after the game launched.

It may be true, they may have indeed intended to have a gear grind in the game from the very start but lacked the resources and time to get it in. Would the game have attracted the interest of the MMO community and gaming press in general if it had the gear grind from the start? Would so many old GW1 fans have pre-ordered it? I doubt it.

Only one of two things can be the case here:

1: This is a lie, a well-phrased lie intended to deflect some of the fierce criticism the team is getting. They never intended to include a gear treadmill from the start, and in fact the main selling point was horizontal progression. The team may have had a vague idea that they could add more vertical progression in future if enough players demanded it, but it was not part of the original vision of the game.

2: This is the truth. They knew all all along that they would be introducing gear grind at a later stage, and chose to withold this information from us, the people buying their game on pre-order. It is not mentioned anywhere in the manifesto, anywhere in the development blog posts, (which do go into significant detail around Rare and Exotic gear) or any of the interviews that the team gave. If this was indeed the plan all along, they have been extremely good at hiding it.

I don’t believe that 2 is true, I have faith in Anet as a whole, I just can’t see them being so devious as to pull this as a bait-and-switch kind of deal.

I just think they’ve gotten carried away with the whole thing. The game has been far more successful than they had ever dared hope, and now they’re panicking about some of the big numbers.

I imagine that they’ve “lost” over a million players since launch, and that most of those players are citing “no PvE endgame” as the reason they’re quitting. This new gear tier is a measure to stop players who are into “Vertical Progression” from going back to WoW.

A message to Anet:

It won’t work, it can’t work, it has been tried dozens of times before and has always failed. These content locusts will eventually burn themselves out on WoW and find something better to do with their time. That might be GW2, it might not. We don’t care, and nor should you.

The number of people that want to grind for bigger numbers is getting smaller every single day. There are so many more people in the world that just want a decent video game. Pre-November, Guild Wars 2 was exactly that, you just didn’t give them enough time to let them find it.

It doesn’t MATTER if people buy your game, enjoy it, then quit. It DOESN’T. They will be back when you add more content, and they will buy gems. LOTS of gems.

Don’t try to catch the falling knife.

Roo Stercogburn.9671:

Its too early to assess the long term impact of ascended gear. I do get the feeling ArenaNet have gone back on their word and we are being drip fed the never-ending upgrade ladder.

In most MMOs I like some of both PvE and RvR/WvW. That said, GW2 PvE endgame is pretty crap. Other than the Fractals instance I’ve been extremely unimpressed with ArenaNet’s PvE endgame. So to PvE-focused friends I advise them to stay away from this gobbler. One decent 5-man instance in an MMO does not an end-game make.

On the other hand, WvW is very good and I would still recommend people to play at this time if they like large scale PvP. I can’t comment on sPvP as I don’t play that.

I don’t think it is too early to assess. I think Chris Whiteside’s statements in the AMA were pretty clear once you strip away the corporate double speak:

“Ascended is (probably) the last gear tier, however, we will continue to gradually increase the stats on all tiers of gear on a shallow power curve forever, not just Ascended.”

Pretty much gear treadmill confirmed, the only things we don’t know is the steepness and speed, which he seemed to agree were out of whack. If it’s a VERY shallow and VERY quick treadmill, we might be able to get an ascended piece in a few hours (rather than 60-70 hours as it is currently).

If they change it so that 1 Ascended is as easy to get as 2 Exotics, then I doubt many people will mind too much, as we’ll be back at the top of the treadmill in a couple of days, each time they creep up the stats.

However, if this is their idea of keeping us playing constantly, to give us a new piece of gear or a new infusion every couple of months that takes a couple of months (for normal people) to get, then their game will die, and it will deserve to die.

There was never supposed to be any endgame. The whole game is Endgame. This should not be a surprise. Once you play Skyrim, or GTA4, or Half Life 2, or Assassin’s Creed 3 all the way to the end, you don’t complain there’s nothing to do now that you’ve finished it, you turn it off and do soemthing else. GW2 PvE is like that, and in fact any worthwhile content, whether it’s a game or a movie or a TV series or whatever is like that. It stops.

WvW and sPvP were where we were supposed to find the long-lasting content. Endless battle in an open arena? Yes please! Honing our skills in close-quarters combat on a truly level playing field? Sign me up!

When I look at GW2 I see it as something like COD4. In both games, the PvE campaign is decent, cinematic and very entertaining. However it is easy, short and shallow. You play though it once, have a great time and then you go into PvP, which is where the majority of players spend most of their time, and where the real depth of gameplay is to be found.

Hundreds of thousands of people are still playing COD4 today, 5 years after it came out. I’m sure very few of them are moaning that playing through the PvE campaign over and over is boring.

They are definitely biased towards Greatsword… But that’s because they’re… Great.

Seriously though, all the other weapons look lame compared to GS.

Twilight, Sunrise AND Eternity.

Come on now.

Yeah… Join a guild, play with other people. You might think that the game does not change playing with more people but it does.

Try a difficult 5-man with 4 other people all connected on mumble / teamspeak. It’s a blast.

Honestly though, the game does not owe you any more entertainment than you’ve already had out of it.

If you can’t abide playing with people who aren’t your wife (and it sounds like she actually might be the one spoiling it for you), wait for the next free expansion (there’s one in two weeks), do all the content in that, then log out and wait for the next one.

Kana.6793:

Aaah, I see. That sucks, but if you enjoy the rest of the game you should probably find a new guild.

Indeed it does, and indeed I will.

I am already invested, I’ve already bought the game, done the boring grind in Orr to get my Exotics, got 400 hours under my belt and about $50 worth of gems. They’ve got me, hook, line and sinker. Shame on me for not waiting a few months to see if it was too good to be true.

The gear grind only affects Fractals for now. The game is still worth playing, even though it’s a lot less fun now than it was in October.

I want to get my money’s worth, so I am still in, for now.

I certainly won’t be telling my friends to buy it, and I won’t be spending another penny on gems or expansions.

Gnatoay.7581:

nach how would you know if your friend liked grinding or not?

I lost my relationship with my brother because he was addicted to EVE and could not socialise outside of the game. My best friend lost his girlfriend to her WoW guild. I’ve been there myself, my relationship with my own girlfriend almost broke down because I was logged in every waking hour that I was not at work, and she felt like the game was more important to me than she was. The terrifying thing is, on some level, she was right. Luckily I snapped out of it before it went too far. I’m sure we’ve all got stories like this.

This is not a joke. This addictive, pervasive, reprehensible mechanic, offered in the name of “entertainment”, is vile and dangerous. Anyone stuck in the grind mindset, I would try to help. If they would not accept my help, I would stop being friends with them.

If my friend liked grinding I would do all that I could to show him that grinding was a pointless waste of time, ruins lives and is to be avoided at all costs. I would certainly not feed his addiction by showing him more grindy games.

I hope some of you now understand why people feel so strongly about this, even though it is “just a game”.

I don’t think GW2 is exactly WoW again, just that they are introducing the one thing about WoW that made my friends and I want to stop playing it.

continual, never-ending, limitless “progression” in the form of your attacks hitting for 1012 damage instead of 1004 damage. Hold on to your hats guys, next month we’re releasing a new item that lets you do 1018 damage!

I love the trappings of MMOs, I love talking in guild chat, going out and doing stuff together, that feeling of teamwork and camaraderie that you only really get in an MMO, but I never wanted that type of regressive and redundant “progression” mechanic, and the reason I went and bought GW2 rather than any of the dozens of other MMOs out there is because it DIDNT have it.

Now that it’s been added, most of my guild has quit. Of those that are left, all they want to do is run Fractals over and over and over. All they talk about is Ascended gear and what DPS they now have. The fun, for me, is lost.

It sounds as if you’re still locked into the Gear Grind mentality. I hope you break out of it one day.

I and all of my freinds have played MMOs. Whether they were EVE, WoW, Runescape, SWOTR or some other game.

All of us, myself included, have stopped playing our MMOs because we were sick and tired of “Vertical Progression”. We were sick of chasing that carrot, and watching meaningless numbers slowly grow bigger and bigger. It took us a few years, and for some of us it took us a few MMOs, but we’re over that style of game, we never want to play a gear grind ever again.

We’re not unusual or unique. Most players I talk to share this mindset. Sometimes it’s painful, uncomfortable or difficult for people to admit they wasted some the best years of their life chasing a sword that increased their damage output by 0.5%, but in the end everyone feels cheated and hateful towards their old MMOs.

I hope you don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Gear Grind is addictive, demoralising and can lead to some really complex and frigtening emotions and behaviours. It can break up relationships, and in some cases even lead to real-life violence. It’s a despicable plague upon gaming, and brings the whole industry into disrepute.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1162078-Gamer-dies-playing-D3

http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/03/31/legend-of-mir-3-gamer-killed-after-selling-virtual-sword/

http://uk.kotaku.com/5925667/man-stabbed-in-the-chest-after-world-of-warcraft-argument

You might think these incidents are far-fetched or unique, but they are the ultimate product of Gear Grind mentality, and are frighteningly common.

This is why there was such a wave of excitement when Arenanet released their “Manifesto” to the press. Would this FINALLY be the MMO that broke the mould? That did away with “Grinding”? It certainly appeared to be the case.

And it was. The beta weekends confirmed everything in the Manifesto, casual-friendly difficulty, stuff for hardcore people to do, and an easy-to-attain stat cap.

It was, for want of a better word, perfect. Sales went through the roof. The internet was abuzz, Youtube was flooded with videos of players having an awesome time, free from the tyranny of gear grind. The game was SO POPULAR that Arenanet actually had to close down sales on their own website for a while to be able to cope with demand. The success of the game was absolutely unprecedented.

For months now, I have been convincing and persuading my friends to buy Guild Wars 2. The game is so much more fun with friends, and I wanted them to see that MMOs had changed, it was no longer a competition to see who could play the longest, grind out the most mats, thoerycraft the highest numbers, it was about having FUN and being competitive on a level playing field.

“Come to Tyria, it’s different!” I said.

“You only need to get to 80 and buy 1 set of gear, then you’re set!” I said.

“World Vs World is AWESOME fun, and you don’t need to grind to play it!” I said.

I’ve given out free trial keys, I’ve pimped the game in the forums, I’ve asked people I don’t even like to try it on Facebook.

I had followed every blog post, read every interview, watched every video, I thought I knew what Guild Wars 2 was about. I thought I saw a pioneering young game company bringing something amazing to the world, which had the chance to actually do the unthinkable and topple WoW from it’s throne.

In October, my world was shaken. I saw a simple picture posted by someone I’d never heard of before called Lindsey. It seemed to show a new item available in Guild Wars 2, a simple ring with some magic find stats.

WHAT? WHAT WAS THIS. The game I loved, the game I treasured, the game I logged over 300 hours playing and enjoying every minute of was introducing a new tier of items, with slightly, EVERY SO SLIGHTLY higher numbers on it than what I already had.

And I was supposed to be “excited” by this?

Well yes I was excited. I was so kitten excited I immediately called my friend who was going to relent to my incessant pestering for him to buy the game and told him not to.

“Don’t bother, they’ve started to introduce new gear with higher stats, it’s World of Warcraft all over again. Stay away from it man.”

So would I recommend Guild Wars 2 to a friend? Well before October I not only would but did. I reccomended it to everyone I possibly could and practically begged them to buy it and come play with me.

Now, I would feel like a drug pusher, getting them hooked on their first little taste of Vertical Progression crack.

No, I won’t be recommending it to anyone in future. They might get stabbed, or starve to death at their computer screen.

Shame on you all.

Mackdose.6504:

Avatar.1923:

the stat progression, as mild as it is, is in opposition to their original intent.

But that’s flat out incorrect. Mike O’Brien is on record stating that (mild) vertical progression has always been on the road map.

I wish he would have shared that little nugget of information more openly and freely with us, the people that bought his game on faith when it wasn’t even out, just to get access to the Beta.

I see no mention of it in the Manifesto, or any of the press releases written before October 2012.

Ditton.3149:

GW1 did not stay on par with WoW financially…not even close. WoW made billions, Anet could have left NCsoft if they made Billions.

Sure, but that ship has sailed. Dozens of companies have tried to make a WoW-clone and failed, because WoW got there first. The skinner box tactic only really works on someone once. There will never be another WoW.

WoW made it’s money by selling an addictive, expensive, unethical product. They give you a free sample to taste, then jack the price up sky high.

You could make billions selling crack too.

Raine.1394:

You will only be able to congratulate them on getting rid of bots when 3rd party sites no longer exist because they no longer have gold to sell. So, it’s a bit premature to congratulate them as the sites are still bustling and there will be no positive impact on the economy though anything they have done to date.

Sorry , but even if botting, hacking and cheating was 100% impossible these sites would still exist.

Their main way of getting gold would be actually buying it from players, not earning it themselves.

They buy gold at $5 for 10G and sell it at $10 for 10G. If you just dropped a legendary precursor, you could sell it on the trade post, then sell the gold to the gold sellers for $150.

This actually brought a tear to my eye.

I wish that all the devs see this.

Some of these carebears are really pathetic.

Nooo! Not WvW! There might be someone there that might actually be able to fight me! I only want ridiculously easy to fight AI enemies who have the intelligence of a brick!

Sorry, power creep has ruined this game. There is no going back now, they’ve made their bed, they must now lie in it with all the other WoW clones that have tried this and failed over the years.

If they didn’t want people getting refunds after buying the game, they shouldn’t have pulled the biggest bait-and-switch in gaming since Fable 2 / Fable 3.

We just take a couple of theifs and use perma stealth, everyone mines it fine and the champ ignores us.