Guild Wars 2

I vote Yay.

He’s pretty much the only memorable and likeable character in the entire of player’s Trahearne Story.

I mean, Trahearne Story.

I mean… Story.

There wasn’t enough time.

Notice that your backpiece already has a checkbox to hide/display it – like gloves and helments – even though most backpieces have no in-game model.

GuildWarsPlayer.5608:

Same here. I wanted to play an mmo where you could simply roam around and run into stuff to participate in, which is what GW2 claimed to be.

Sigh. Yeah…

It’s not like they can’t still make it this way. Just put a little more effort into adjusting the dynamic levelling, then homogenize the rewards across all open-world maps. Or something.

Vayne.8563:

OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

But a lot of people just use it to mean people who get fixated on doing something over and over again….compulsively.

Yep.

Achievements are the most typical example of gaming-related OCD. It’s a list of tasks with rewards attached, so you’re compelled to follow it through. So people focus all their attention there as if they HAVE to do it, even to the detriment of their own enjoyment.

(This can also be amazingly cruel to people with actual OCD.)

digiowl.9620:

Define crosshair.

Exact center of your screen. Usually marked with a dot in most action games.

digiowl.9620:

Currently the game prioritize the mob nearest the center of screen…

Prioritizes, but does not follow exactly. That’s why you often end up targeting things you didn’t mean to when there’s more than two targets on-screen.

With mouse cursor targeting you might make a mistake and pick the wrong target, but you can also always select the right one.

Not so much with tab-targetting. It always tries to assist you in selecting what it thinks is the “right” target, rather than the one you’re actually looking at.

digiowl.9620:

I tested this months ago, and the behavior was consistent.

I used to rely on it too. But you often end up in a situation where you can straight up NOT select the target in the center on your view because the targeting doesn’t want you to.

Also, tracking the faint glow of the highlight is really annoying.

Phy.2913:

Yes, because mouse look will totally give you the ability to target 1 of 2 people standing on the same spot

That it won’t. Nothing will.

Phy.2913:

or target the much smaller enemy behind the large melee enemy in your face.

That will work just fine.

Phy.2913:

Think about how annoying your idea would be in the cramped confines of the tower.

I think you somehow managed not to know what mouselook even is, or you wouldn’t be saying any of the above.

How. Why.

digiowl.9620:

Yep, this is the exact behavior of the current system.

It isn’t though.

Right now it highlights the auto-selected target, whichever one it decides that’d be, rather than the one that’s actually in your crosshairs. You don’t get the same results when you use the mouse cursor.

ezd.6359:

If you use your skills with mouse, it is not a problem for you, you have no character control, so you dont lose anything…

Exactly.

Standing still is almost never an option in this game, so pausing even for a second to manually select your target can easily spell your death.

Phy.2913:

You can do that now, why would your idea be any better.

Because this way you don’t have to drop everything and stay still to select your target while the mobs wail on you.

Also it’s better, faster and more precise. It’s called “mouselook”. It’s the hottest innovation of 1996.

Mostly I have no idea what you’re saying there.

ezd.6359:

Manual selecting only works for same people who always spam skills in /map chat. Guess why?

What?..

Phy.2913:

Because if there’s an enemy in front of you, but you want to target a smaller enemy 20ft behind them, that target system wont be able to do it.

But if you can see the enemy, you’d be able to target them by hovering over them. That’s the whole point.

That’s actually the exact type of problem that would go away if you use manual targeting instead of automatic.

Dynamic level scaling doesn’t work, the rewards for doing open-world content are abysmal, and there’s rarely anything interesting to do anyway.

So instead people just follow their OCD and do whichever content is the most profitable.

Personally, these three were my main draws to this game. For once, to see an MMO which actually feels like a wide-open, living world. At least it was more alive back on release.

Phy.2913:

Draco.2806:

Phy.2913:

And your suggestions are…?

Target highlighting.

When your crosshair (center of the screen) falls on a mob, it glows a faint color to let you know you will target THIS exact enemy when you hit Tab.

That would be just as wonky as the current system.

What kind of sense does that even make?

Why is there always someone on this forum opposing any sort of obvious improvements to the game? Like that crowd that opposed the LFG tool or Autoloot?

It’s just – What.

Phy.2913:

And your suggestions are…?

Target highlighting.

When your crosshair (center of the screen) falls on a mob, it glows a faint color to let you know you will target THIS exact enemy when you hit Tab.

Locuz.2651:

What do you mean? Thats its annoying to use?

Nah, I mean it can’t fix what isn’t there.

Shading is always a very complex issue. You can’t just pull a couple “brightness” or “contrast” sliders to make your game look good, but that’s all you’re stuck with in post-processing (which is what SweetFX does). You need to take the right approach to the entire scene first, which isn’t something a bit of contrast will fix later on.

That’s why Celestial and Abyss are the costliest dyes on the market, too. All colors other than black and white often blend into indiscernible mush.

Locuz.2651:

You tried using Sweetfx yet?

Yep, doesn’t really fix the problem though. You can straight up the contrast and saturation, but that’ll just be a strain on the nerves.

Shame for a game with such colourful concept art to end up looking so murky.

Sure, why not.

Images retouched a bit. The lack of proper shading in this game is disappointing, colours are almost always drained to blight. Bah, I say.

The fun thing about inflation is that you can’t solve the problem by taking away the money you’ve given. It’s like digging down without a ladder to climb back out.

Ultimately, few people being extremely rich – in an environment where money supply is endless – hurts no one. Raising prices on basic goods, however, hurts everyone.

thewamba.5203:

if you’re gonna kitten that much about the game….stop playing?

They already have.

If you’re perfectly satisfied with everything, you can share the company of a couple dozen others farming the latest champ train. Have fun.

I don’t see the problem.

If people are petty enough to be upset about someone upsetting their farming pattern, squashing their plans becomes its own reward.

On the other hand, if they ask nicely, do consider giving in a bit, right?

Saviourslave.6715:

They give players a goal to achieve, and thus reward them with the skin they prefer and the player respect they desire. If you take rarity away, and just give everyone every weapon, people would run out of goals very quickly…

Quite right. But that’s only true if you base your rewards on finite content (i.e. armors and weapons still have to be made by someone). It’s the fallacy that plunges most MMOs to lock down their rewards behind a +10 Concrete Wall of Mindless Grind.

One way to solve this, as I mentioned, is to lock desirable content behind extremely challenging content (which is hard to do in itself), but even then, a very good number of players will eventually rise to the challenge. Still, it’s an improvement over grinding.

I don’t think bragging rights and rare items are a worthy goal in any way. These are illusory goals – although you want to reach them, there’s no satisfaction once you have them. Ultimately it’s a form of betrayal, and no player appreciates it.

But players do need a goal to work towards. What’s important to remember is that goal doesn’t have to be loot. What can it be instead? Well, everything else in the game, really. You just need to think outside of the MMO box a bit when you start designing your game.

Zero Day.2594:

We can trade you our medium, male, leather skirts if you want.

I swear every single type of leg armor in this game is a skirt.

Achievements are designed to be a psychologically compelling factor, so that’s exactly what they do.

I would say the use of achievements in any form is unethical in game design.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Everything is perfect the way it is.

White-knighting in a nutshell.

Everyone else may refer here for a detailed explanation of what’s not quite perfect with the RNG.

OP, the answer to that has historically been introduction of Crafting, but that has its own pitfalls. Usually the right answer involves not having extremely rare drop-rates in the first place, as in regulating extreme rarity of content by locking it behind behind extremely challenging one.

Personally, I would not seek to create extremely rare items in the first place. I see no value in producing something the only value of which comes from its rarity.

xephire.8324:

Still a pretty boring quest with no story.

Point. Writing is also an important aspect of a “quest” (unless it’s a breather “quest”). There are also things like setting, pacing, notability, distinction, reward… Not an easy task overall.

Delryn.7235:

Even “boring” activities can be fun when you introduce new ways of going about things.

Someone talked about watering plants earlier. That’s a perfect example of a “breather” quest: boring and repetitive by itself, but nonetheless important to make sure the player’s perspective doesn’t change to accept all-out all-combat all-epic “quests” as being normal, and therefore boring.

In fact, this kind of “quest”, when set against its proper backdrop, can be one of the most impacting and memorable.

Relentliss.2170:

It appeals to no group in particular.

Also known in the industry as “conflicting design”. Usually that happens when multiple people work on the same task without over-reaching supervision (either in form of person or an idea).

And, uh, yeah. That’s a pretty big problem. Shame, considering one of the big promises of GW2 was to have both kinds of content for both kinds of players, and everything in between.

Mechanically, a well-designed “quest” (as in MMO “quest”) is one which uses existing gameplay in a way that’s not often experienced elsewhere.

For example, “kill ten rats” is a terrible quest from that point of view, whereas “dodge attacks of ten rats so you can lure them into a trap you’ve set beforehand” is quite decent.

Morrigan.2809:

Saying Ascended gear sucks or the living story is kitten can still be seen as negative feed back, limited as it might be
Saying everything is kitten bhwuha-ha- ha-ha bunch of suckers,y u still playing, is not

A succinct summary of what’s trolling and what’s not, actually.

Delryn.7235:

People are not stupid as many game companies like to think they are.

Many developers tend to believe otherwise because their playtesters often end up behaving like abject… not very smart, shall we say, and fail even the obvious tasks in a horrible fashion.

Half-Life 2 EP2 commentary

“We’ve added a small maze-like element to this cave by adding two branching paths in the player’s way. One of our playtesters then proceeded to turn right at this junction for half an hour. This was a strong argument for removing it from the game.

But that’s a fallacy. Failing at a certain task is perfectly acceptable in a non-linear world. In fact, it’s beneficent to the experience, because it dents the aura of invulnerability and 100% success the player accumulates otherwise.

+1 to the rest of your post, by the way.

Yes, you’re definitely confusing “trolling” with saying the game sucks. Banning people for posting negative feedback on official forums would easily be death sentence to ANet’s reputation. Not to mention absurd.

Otherwise,y these forums have some of the strictest and effective mods I’ve ever seen. So much as being “impolite” often warrants your post being deleted entirely. Actually a very appropriate policy considering what we’re dealing with here.

Saying the game rocks/sucks is perfectly appropriate feedback. Maybe not very detailed, sure, but it’s still someone’s opinion.

Galen Grey.4709:

Hey dont cheat, I didnt say Achievements you did, I mentioned JP, Mini games, vistas etc..

Actually we were talking about truly inconsequential stuff like vistas, points of interest, easter eggs, odd NPCs, doing random tasks for APs… hence why I likened it all to being little more than achievements.

More important than that is the issue of extremely repetitive content. You can have a thousand cookie-cutter “events” in the game, but it contributes no more than a single one would. Once you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a thousand times.

Mini-games are one of the best types of content, by the way.

Galen Grey.4709:

It isnt the other way round I assure everything is designed in a way that it can be acheived casually.

Intended, maybe. The implementation doesn’t work out in practice.

Galen Grey.4709:

The problem is it is also designed to take a long time to get and people cant accept that so they turn it into a hardcore grind fest to get it done much quicker.

So the game was designed to be even more grindy than it is now… That’s just great…

Galen Grey.4709:

Are we sure we’re even talking about the same game now? I mean you can accuse gw2 of many things but bland, generic and lacking attention to detail as well as immersion is surely not one of them!

Honestly it’s the main of them. If there was one word to describe GW2, it would be “……”

Galen Grey.4709:

I mean seriously take queensdale for example.

Ordinary green plains.

Actually one of the more vivid zones in the game, considering most other are brownish-green plains. We even have a giant kitten ext to Divinity’s Reach, which is an actual landmark. Those are pretty rare in GW2.

Bandits are ordinary trash mobs. Their presence exists, but it’s not felt, and it leaves no marks and no impression on the player. In fact it’s a huge immersion breaker because – seriously – people just don’t friggin’ work that way. Had bandits been a giant brainwashed cult to throw their lives away for the sake of committing acts of terrorism or a small band of ostracized and desperate misfits (for example), it’d at least be a start in being somewhat memorable.

It’s just so amazingly droll and unimaginative, and it’s not much in terms of detail when all details are the same. Yet again, WoW does all that and much, much more, much better.

Galen Grey.4709:

Even trivial things like whiny sound a wheel does while turning, its randomized and changed

Haha. Yes, and yet a swing of your sword or a shot of your bow always sounds the same…

Sound design 101: pitch and sample variation for oft-used actions unless implementing gameplay-relevant clues.

Galen Grey.4709:

Its exploration, you’re meant to enjoy finding it first and foremost

To enjoy exploration, you need a world you’re motivated to know more about. If the world is bland and boring and you have no attachment to it and it looks all the same everywhere you go, exploration is a non-starter.

Galen Grey.4709:

Saul was one of my favorite characters in Gw1 especially after playing his story in the mission bonus pack so you can imagine how rewarding is to find out an unmarked tomb actually belongs to him.

Exactly. This is good motivation coupled with good reward for your effort.

GW2 has a severe lack of these moments.

Delryn.7235:

We don’t need waypoints to be littered all around the map, just a very small amount in each map to help someone out is all we need … The waypoints remove the beautiful atmosphere the game has as well as horribly breaking immersion. Instead what we get with waypoints are long loading screens.

Bingo.

Ease of access to different locations is an important utility. But it comes at a steep cost of making a lot of the game completely irrelevant.

Vayne.8563:

Actually the true reward for hearts is exactly that…the shop they open.

Yeah, and they suck. Bad.

A reward that’s objectively worse than any other is no reward at all.

Galen Grey.4709:

It is still content, content you dont like but content none the less.

Achievements are as much content as moldy pizza is a delicacy.

Galen Grey.4709:

Like I said and like others told you some people enjoy that content more then the content you think is real content.

Actually they were talking about jumping puzzles; I didn’t say they weren’t content, I said they sucked. So these are “content” alright. Chasing a bunch of points on the map, however, isn’t.

Galen Grey.4709:

Ohh No I assure you plenty of people love the Clocktower..

Alright, I see.

Nevertheless, it was horrible.

Galen Grey.4709:

Well no game is for everyone, Gw2 is more aimed at casual play then it is at hardcore play and if thats not something you enjoy it will be problematic no doubt.

I think I wrote a lengthy post two pages ago to the effect that it’s the other way around; that playing “casually”, albeit the game makes a lot of effort to enable it, is a major PITA and is really only done against the game itself.

Galen Grey.4709:

I hope so, exploration is cool.But anyway how does gw2 not do at least what you’re saying WoW does?

Its world is bland, generic, lacks attention to detail, consistency, immersion or balance.

WoW may have terrible writing or poor design choices, but it’s a fun place to be. Consequently, it’s a fun place to explore – to explore you need to be interested in what you may find and, equally importantly, you need something to find.

You can say it’s up to taste, and that’s true. The same is true of every bad book and terrible movie – but their quality is still a measured value.

Oh and, the tomb example is actually pretty good. I didn’t find it that entertaining myself when I’ve been there, lacks attachment or progression, but it’s a start. Off the top of my head, I don’t remember a single such encounter that was memorable to me. WoW technically doesn’t have anything like it (for what I know), yet I don’t have the fingers to recount the fun little discoveries I’ve run into during my short trial.

I think ANet have missed a lecture on marketing somewhere.

Most people will not make a purchase if they’re informed it may be insecure.

And gem shop items seem extremely insecure to anyone who can figure out that they can only be used once, and that’s it. You get one chance. If you screw up, or if you decide otherwise, your purchase is gone. Even if someone ends up liking their their brand new set of 600-gem armor forever and ever, knowing that it can never be replaced will still be a strong deterrent.

Delryn.7235:

On another somewhat related note to the points of interests and vistas; waypoints.

Yep, there’s the difference between waypoints and mounts: one immerses you further in the game’s world, the other takes you out of it.

Another difference is that scaling the terrain on a mount may be – gasp – kind of fun and challenging. Can’t have that.

On the other hand, lack of waypoints at all easily leads people to abandon exploring and stay put in the general area where they know the loot may lie, since getting back to it on short notice will be impossible. Not to mention getting where you want to be on short notice can be extremely important sometimes. So it’s a bit of a dilemma.

Delryn.7235:

I think vistas were a completely bad idea. Vistas are a chore and nothing more, when I started playing back on release the one thing I’d always ignore was vistas. I couldn’t see the point to getting them because after the first two or three vistas I was done, it was boring.

I used to often go out of my way to get to Vistas if I saw their icon on the map. There’s some value of amusement in scaling a bunch of rocks to get to a previously unknown and relatively unreachable place. It’s neat.

But their implementation is horrible. Off the top of my head, two major problems:

a)They’re mandatory for world and map completion. Making something mandatory is the best way to make it suck. It’s the same way school kills any interest you might have had in art or science.

b)They’re just bad. Same problem as with jumping puzzles: it’s not done well. Platforming is an art Nintendo have been perfecting for years before they’ve even invented it. Throwing together a bunch of platforms makes a game the same way a bunch of stale dough makes a croissant.

In fact there are Vistas better than Vistas in this game, you might have spotted them from time to time: those out-of-the-way gardens of strawberries or other plantlife. They’re completely optional, you know they’re possible to get to, and they give a token unique reward for reaching them (and you know exactly what that reward is).

Please stop.

Seriously.

Per character.

Banks slots are much more frugal. I think they cost 600 gems or so, and offer tons more space.

Young Somalia.1706:

And? A stack of ecto will give you up to 27-30k points, of which ~70% of your investment is recouped by selling off the dust.

Assuming ecto costs 30 S, and a stack costs 75 G (30% = ~22 G), it’ll cost you 2,200 G to get the last 100% worth of MF if the progression were linear, not counting the previous 200%.

If you have that kind of money to throw around, good for you, but… please… do not make any suggestions on these forums that devs may see, even by accident. For the good of all of us.

Young Somalia.1706:

Like I said, it only matters if you’re casual.

(Jesus kittening Christ, what the hell.)

Young Somalia.1706:

Even at the peak (30k luck to level), that’s still only a stack of ecto salvages…

It takes THREE MILLION points of luck to get to 260% MF. Four million to 300%.

Redenaz.8631:

The chart made me laugh. It also made me a little sad, but, hey, it’s about what I expected.

To think MF gear worth 100% would cost ten times less than you have to spend now, too. :/

My guess is, you should stop somewhere just below 80% mark before it becomes an absurd waste of time.

goldenwing.8473:

(snip)

It was the best questing in an MMO I have ever done.

That was beautiful.

I want that.

Don’t worry about it. More likely than not, your projections are wrong.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/e/ec/TotalLuckReq.png

Knighthonor.4061:

It would be cool if Trahearne Story was more ,,,well,,, idk,,,TRAHEARNE perhaps?

Fixed.

Galen Grey.4709:

exploration, jumping puzzles and vistas might be inconsequential nonsense to you, its definitely not content that doesnt exist. Like I said, if you decided to skip content you’re entirely free to do so but if you’re accusing Anet of not creating not much content because you skipped most of it then you’re not being honest.

But it’s not content. It’s fluff. I’ve seen achievements that are more worthy of being called “content” than that.

“Content” is going on an epic quest to slay a bunch of baddies, listening to the story that unfolds, and receiving a reward. Placing a marker slightly out of the way on a featureless grey mountain and giving ten “achievement points” for reaching it isn’t “content”.

There’s plenty enough “achievements” in this game. But it’s no substitute for fun or things to do.

Galen Grey.4709:

Down leveling works and all content can be done when down leveled just fine

Not even. You’re still severely overpowered (or underpowered on lower levels) for content to be even remotely fair, and rewards are deliberate unfair from the get-go. If scaling worked properly, you’d be fighting in a 20 level zone as if it were an 80 level zone – same amount of challenge, same amount of reward. But it’s not true.

Down-leveling “sort of” works. It feigns being useful. It’s not.

Galen Grey.4709:

If people didnt care about jumping puzzle SAB wouldnt be the huge success it is since the whole mini game is one giant jumping puzzle. The clock tower was another fan favorite and received lots of praise on the forum.

I don’t know where were you for clock tower release, everyone and every thread I’ve ever seen hated it (as did I).

It’s a fallacy to assume people do content because they enjoy it. Do you think anyone enjoys grind? No. People do it because it’s rewarding. Because they think those rewards will one day allow them to play the game the way they want, to enjoy it the way they want.

People do this kind of content because there’s an achievement point or a reward attached. It’s silly motivation… but it’s all there is.

Because there’s just not enough fun content in this game to do.

Galen Grey.4709:

So what you’re saying is what? that you enjoy nothing Gw2 has to offer?

Not really. I enjoyed some of my time with it. You can have a bit of fun here.

It’s just not the kind of fun that warrants spending a hundred hours on. The “stuff to do” end way too quick, and what’s left is often little more than unrewarding slog.

That’s the real problem, I think. Shortly after release, people didn’t hesitate to point it out either.

Galen Grey.4709:

Because if once you reached max level like you said you went back to try and enjoy the rest of the open world and you couldnt even stick a whole hour it also means you didnt enjoy the previous 80 hours or so it took to get to max level.

No. It’s just that almost everything was already done by that point. Like in an ordinary single-player RPG.

Sure not “everything” everything, but once you’ve freed one or two tiny villages from centaurs – and by “freed” I mean "stand in place for five minutes killing everything that comes near – you’re not terribly motivated to do it another two hundred times.

It can be neat in places. Some fun, even. It can be enjoyable.

But it’s incredibly underwhelming, nevermind that a game that asks you to come back to it should offer more than any ordinary RPG – and GW2 only barely does that, too.

Galen Grey.4709:

Also I beg to differ. WoW most certainly doesnt do open world exploration and playing better.

And yet I’ve had more fun exploring it.

WoW actually has interesting locations to look at, interesting things to find on your own. The lands are different, the locations are imaginative. You can go out your way in a desert and find an oasis, you can scale an uneventful cliff and find a dark mob-infested passage that leads to a secret complex staffed by a big baddie. You can swim out of your way and run into half-buried ruins infested by you don’t even know what.

WoW doesn’t do dynamic leveling or hidden zones and such to support exploration, but it offers actual incentive to do so: it offers an interesting place to be in, and interesting places to see.

WoW runs out of stuff to see eventually, I bet (never paid for a subscription), but in doing so it puts GW2 to shame. Once you’ve seen one featureless Moa-infested green plains, you’ve seen them all. And there’s not even that many.

Delryn.7235:

we need epic and challenging quests in the game which make you want to explore the world.

Good work.

You’ve successfully avoided the typical mental traps and fallacies that side-track people into announcing very minute things as being “the problem with the game” and went right to the heart of it.

Maybe there’s a career in game design for you.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I would live Terraria to be an actual MMO, as in, you can’t just basically copy-paste worlds and ‘spawn’ items.

Oh yeah. Maybe if modding tools ever see the light of day, someone might actually enable a proper “persistent” mode for it. I bet “Large” maps can support a couple hundred players with breathing room if nothing else.

Terraria is my perfect MMO.

I honestly expected GW2 to be like it: go out, explore, acquire loot, kill things or not kill things, do what game wants you to do or don’t… that’d be great…

Galen Grey.4709:

Pitiful amount of content? Are you kidding? 1100 hours now and i still havent seen all the game has to offer.

You’re not the metric by which it’s judged.

Galen Grey.4709:

30 days of playing whatever you choose to play isnt a grind its at worst a long wait.

Partially because you’re actively ignoring grind’s very existence… “A long wait”, yeah, right. Not “grind”, just “wait”.

Galen Grey.4709:

7 full zones I didnt even start yet much less seen every dynamic event, found every jumping puzzle, found every hidden secret, did every skill challenge, found my way to every vista, checked out the story of every NPC, etc….

If you’re going to count inconsequential nonsense like this, then Pokemon Red has just as much “content”.

What’s on display in GW2 would be appropriate in a single-player RPG, not an MMO.

Galen Grey.4709:

There is plenty of level agnostic content thanks to downleveling.

…Which doesn’t work.

Now, if it actually did, that’d be another story.

Galen Grey.4709:

which other MMOs had JPs? None

Well thank god for that. They’re horrible.

I mean, come on, you’re really reaching here. I understand you want to point out how much content there is, and there’s certainly plenty – just not plenty enough to sink hundreds of hours into, not nearly enough to support an MMO. In fact that’s why most post-Everquest MMOs resort to horrible grind: in the end, there’s not enough content and in GW2, there’s even less than you’d expect.

Sure if you want to be obsessive-compulsive and hunt down every achievement you can waste lots of time – but that’s absurd. It’s not fun.

Galen Grey.4709:

Arenanet delivered on all that it promise a beautiful open world with tons of things to do where you didnt need to worry about gear all you had to do is go out and enjoy.

From where I stand, they delivered two green and two grey featureless plains each with a whole four kinds of randomly-spawning quests. And you do need to worry about gear on those – because when you’ve outgrown them, you have to make a choice between leaving them behind forever, or making ends meet with abysmal income and next to no rewards.

Galen Grey.4709:

The content is there and was there since day 1. You just ignored it because there was bigger profit to be done else where.

Oh, I did? I didn’t know that.

Because I’ve earned a grand total of 5 gold in the first few months of playtime since I didn’t spend a minute’s worth of farming champions in Orr, looking up locations of rich nodes, speedrunning dungeons, or whatever the hell. Being done with the story, I went back to zones I found least featureless and tried to have fun – and that lasted a grand total of an hour before the “content” got so tiringly repetitive and unrewarding I just couldn’t stomach it. I suppose if 150 days worth of daily quests is “no grind at all” to you, you may have different tolerance to repetition, but mine only goes so far.

I bought into the promise that GW2 would allow me to simply run around its vast open plains, running into fun events every once in a while, and enjoying the feel of adventure and exploration, and so I played that way.

And it sucked. Because the game doesn’t support this kind of gameplay on any level. Hell, WoW is better at all of them. THAT game.

And now with “Living Story” focusing on all the different facets of OCD, clearly the developers don’t share my vision for the game. But all that would be forgiven if I could just run around the featureless green plains helping occasional newbies slaughter Moas without wanting to gouge out my eyes because the game runs at 18 FPS for some reason.

Is it fun? No, it isn’t fun.

That all is definitely ArenaNet’s fault.

If players are running a champ train twelve hours a day, it’s ArenaNet’s fault. If they’re farming Orr, ArenaNet’s fault. Players go where the game tells them to go, that’s simply the nature of any game. If having fun in the game requires playing against the game, that is definitely ArenaNet’s fault.

Galen Grey.4709:

What happened is players were greedy…

What happened is that the game ended up having a pitiful amount of content for an MMO, most of it repetitive and not fun, with most rewarding kind being locked to absurd by-the-numbers grind in one-two high-level zones (one of which is terrible).

People never asked to be subjected to this barren wasteland like a stuck record. They asked for it to be improved, because there was room for improvement. But ANet seemingly didn’t listen. Since the end-game wasn’t enjoyable enough, many people who leveled out to 80 simply up and left.

Why you’re blaming players for ANet’s own failings to deliver on its own promise of level-agnostic content, horizontal progression, and hordes of content is beyond me.

Galen Grey.4709:

5 laurels, 20 laurels, 35 laurels or even 50 laurels is still something you earn by just playing the game.

This kind of logic as well.

30 days worth of quests for one of five trinkets? Even WoW would blush at this kind of nonsensical grind.

Optimist, pessimist, realist. Looks like we’ve got all bases covered on this topic. Good work.

DarcShriek.5829:

I can’t for the life of me, figure out why you’re still here?

Did no one ever teach you not to stalk people?

Jski.6180:

What about a WereChar!?

Too awesome. Not happening.