We know the RNG boxes sell A LOT, though. And that the main reason to buy them are the skins. If ArenaNet allows people to trade the skins, it will reward lucky people (who play the RNG gamble, get a skin and sell it for a fortune), and grinders who farmed a lot of gold and can make fortunes flipping the skins. All the while giving less money to ArenaNet.
IMO, it would have been better to just sell the skins in the Gem Store and keep them untradeable. Less RNG, more honest to players, ArenaNet still gets money and grinders can buy gems with gold anyway. Everyone wins.
Sorry but I disagree. I think Guild Wars 2 is very much in the spirit of the manifesto.
That is a massive surprise.
The only thing that has changed is that Anet learned that a huge percentage of players won’t play for just cosmetics.
Or that ArenaNet has failed to cater to the players who would play just for cosmetics. The original Guild Wars is proof that those players exist and were enough to buy more than six million copies of the Guild Wars chapters.
if you are so sure the game is not what you were expecting (and in most case it was all about your personal expectations), what is it that you want? should be easy to know!
A game about having fun, not about rewards.
an mmo is meant to last in time, is not meant to have a release every year, is meant to keep player playing. so if the reward system was similar to a single player game, once you finished that’s it. you have nothing else to do.
So you think MMORPGs need grind in order to give players something to do?
I honestly don’t see the point of giving stealth to Hunter’s Shot. IMO, it would be perfect for the shortbow after the range nerf, but the longbow is meant to be used at very long range, where it’s easier to avoid ranged attacks, and it already has a counter against melee attacks in Point Blank Shot.
Per the latest update notes:
New weapon skins purchased with a Black Lion Claim Ticket are now tradable until used.
Now lucky people may get rich (imagine the price of the Jade Weapons…), but people will have a lot less reasons to buy the RNG boxes from the in-game store.
Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
:(
Couldn’t have said it better. This was a little cool tool to have vertical mobility and to take a single big attack at the cost of Life Force. A pity it’s gone now.
The nerf to staff is another big hit. I hate the small Marks, but using 20 in Death Magic…
Because ArenaNet somehow feels the need to cater to players of classic MMOs, in which being unable to respec or having to pay for it is one more time sink that has been glorified into something (in this case, in “giving a sense of permanence”).
Changing traits wherever would likely be a bad idea – we would see dungeon exploiters demanding people to change builds in the middle of dungeons to make farming in the next area faster – but build diversity is something ArenaNet should encourage, not limit as they currently do. Having pre-made builds easily available anywhere in the open world and for free would likely increase the game’s longevity.
One more issue with this is the way gear decides build. In the original Guild Wars, gear did little to impact your build, and maxed gear was very easy to get so just having different headpieces with different runes was very simple, and it gave access to all of a profession’s builds.
In GW2… If you change all of your traits from Power to Precision, for example, but all your gear is still Power based, you will continue to have more Power than Precision. Changing only traits is not enough to completely change builds.
The idea of allowing Legendary items to have changeable stats is great – it’s a pity that the Stones which change armor appearance are one of the best selling items in the Gem Store, because that means a similar system won’t ever be implemented for all other gear in the game.
The problem is it turns out people are impatient and greedy. If you put a goal in front of them no matter how many times you tell them this is a long term goal that should take a year+ to achieve they’re going to try finish it by yesterday. Is that the game’s fault? I dont think so, there is nothing the game itself can do about that, the only way to ensure people dont farm / grind etc.. is to give them nothing to work towards and then you’ll fail because people will complain there is no reason to play your game.
You are proving my point by making a long post all about rewards.
Let’s add some perspective here: why did people play Final Fantasy VI? To get rewards? No, that didn’t mean anything in the game (and there wasn’t even that big a reward there). Why did people play Planescape: Torment? Rewards? No, there isn’t any reward there. Half Life? Same thing.
People play those games because they are fun.
“Those are all single player games, so you can’t compare!” – read my previous post. The idea that MMORPGs don’t have to be good games is exactly why they are so niche, and so similar to each other.
If Guild Wars 2 had no reward – if it were like recent single player RPGs, with skins and maxed items very easily available – how many people from the current community would be playing it? IMO, next to none. Try to guess why it is, then, that those games sell more than Guild Wars.
I should also explain that guardian hasn’t used either sword or mace for a very long time. She currently uses hammer or greatsword for melee weapons. So I have no preference per say between 1-h sword or mace. I am sure I could make both work.
Neither Moot nor Bolt.
I have a Guardian, too. Greatsword and hammer play VERY differently from main hand sword. Hammer is a bit similar to mace, but it feels like you would want the Moot because it would be easier, not because you really want it.
I would suggest trying to play with a main hand sword, and, unless you REALLY have lots of fun, sell Zap and wait. ArenaNet will make Champions drop Lodestones, which will make them cheaper; and players will be able to craft precursors, which will make them cheaper as well. Since you already have the Gifts of Fortune and of Mastery, you would then be able to get whatever Legendary you want, including the greatswords or the hammer,
Its weird…why doesn’t GW2 sell a lot more? Is it really just down to the power of advertising?
Because the game failed at one of its stated goals.
If you take a look at MMORPGs, you will notice a few things:
One of ArenaNet’s goals, as seen in their Manifesto, was to make a MMO for those who don’t like MMOs – in other words, make a game for people who want to have fun as opposed to giant time sinks disguised as content.
They failed. The Guild Wars 2 community is made by farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters in their ninth MMORPG. Pay attention to how much criticism is asking for more rewards, as opposed to more fun content. This means the audience of GW2 is still the same audience of all other MMOs, with the same sale spike at around 2 million players and the same massive loss of players a few months later, “coincidently” when ArenaNet introduced Ascended gear and Fractals of the Mist.
Ultimately, I think those looking for fun, great games with great stories and meaningful experiences have given up on MMORPGs. This is why GW2 isn’t selling more.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
The previous fight against the Elder Dragons, when the old races stood against them.
When the gods brought manking to Tyria.
The end of the Guild Wars (after all…).
Shouldn’t heavy classes have less damage than light ones? Just because they do have more defense in general? Gonnae blunt here, mesmers are only really picked in dungeon groups for portal, feedback, and timewarp. Warriors still hit higher than them and take less damage.
It was the same thing in the original Guild Wars; I wrote a topic about it, but even in the context of a setup closer to the holy trinity of “tank/DPS/healer” as GW1, warriors still had the highest sustained DPS in the game. In that game, it was because warriors were the profession who took the most skill to play properly.
- Run full berserker
- Learn how to dodge
- ???
- Profit
This doesn’t always work, of course – there are many situations in which dodge is not enough.
CoF1 is not one of those situations, so people don’t see any point in defensive gear these days.
The issue isn’t as much with the players, though, but with the poor design implemented by ArenaNet. By making dodging so proheminent, ArenaNet has made a large part of support irrelevant (all the interesting kinds of active support that help the entire party to withstand damage), and has created a mentality that leads to a lot of elitism.
Uh where??? All the dungeon content in this game is absurdly easy and can be completed with just the traits + weapon/utility skill available. Learnto use your evade skills properly!
Outside dungeons, whenever you face a lot of enemies with imobilize (which prevents dodging) who can apply it in a shorter cooldown than your condition removal skills.
So sad.
This is not sad – this is as it should be. Orr is terrible – we fight the same enemies over and over and over again, with environmental effects that are just annoying instead of being interesting, in a landscape that looks the same everywhere, and with next to no interesting dynamic event around. It should be left to rot with next to no player in sight so ArenaNet understands how badly designed the area is.
Same with Southsun. There is a bit more variety there, but almost always you will fight either the karka (of which all are the same), or the same Wind Rider enemy, or the same lizard enemy; and all of those have at least one annoying trait. The dynamic events are very poor and don’t tell a story other than “a lot of frenzied animals are attacking this place”. It’s one more place that deserves to be left to rot with no player around.
Heh, even the Zephyr Sanctum is more interesting than those areas. It has next to no enemies or dynamic events, but still the zone manages to tell a story and add a lot of lore to the world, not to mention the huge exploration angle there.
It’s really more about the journey then what class people want to perpetually farm on.
Actually, unless your definition of farming is “playing hard content or playing normal content with human beings as opposed to NPCs”, nothing in my previous post was about farming.
Again, often the “unique snowflakes” would simply not understand how weak their builds were when playing through easy content with heroes that made an eighth human player irrelevant. This doesn’t mean many builds weren’t very poor in PvE due to lack of balance, rather that large parts of the game were so easy that anything could play through them.
Balance is an over used and hyped up term in MMOs. The entire game doesn’t need to be perfect math equal symmetry across all classes in all situations.
Imbalance is as bad in PvE as in PvP.
Look at the original Guild Wars:
1. Paragons were added to the game, were (rather obviously) overpowered since they were a profession with very strong defense that could provide the entire party with passive defensive effects, and were then nerfed into next to nothing. ArenaNet tried to fix them in PvE… By giving them access to two overpowered skills. Which means, other than the builds using specifically “There’s Nothing to Fear!” and “Save Yourselves!” (which for the records is a warrior skill), all Paragon builds are subpar. Can you still use those other builds to play through the game? Sure, you could just play it with seven characters instead of a full party. But you would still be subpar in your party.
2. Dervishes were introduced in the game as a very powerful profession, later nerfed to the point that they had little usefulness in PvP or in Hard Mode, and as such the profession was completely overhauled later on. Again, this overhaul was not only due to PvP, but also due to how the Dervish lacked an useful role in PvE content.
3. Ritualists were the kings of nerfs. They had multiple skill changes that basically removed any unique role the profession had, and due to never receiving the overhaul they needed, they were given in PvE a single overpowered skill so they would be accepted in parties, Signet of Spirits. The lack of balance made all other builds not only weaker, but also underpowered, PvE wise.
4. Speaking about giving an underpowered profession an overpowered skill so it would be accepted in parties, Shadow Form. Do I have to say anything else?
The “unique snowflakes” who liked the original Guild Wars either only played easy content, ignoring Hard Mode and the hardest dungeons, or were carried by the rest of their team. Due to the lack of balance, many professions had very few viable builds in PvE, despite the game having more than one thousand skills.
Or they could add a boon duration modifier, or a condition duration modifier, and so on. I doubt they will increase the other stats.
Bad traits:
• Instinctual Bond (minor Range trait) – When you are downed, your pet gains quickness for 5 seconds. 50 second cooldown.
…Why? Traits that change what happens after a character is downed have little utility – it’s very unlikely that the small boost those traits give are what will make the difference between rallying or not. This one is IMO the worst of them all – I guess the idea is that the pet under quickness would have an easier time killing an enemy, but with the nerf to quickness and the nerf to pet damage, the damage increase given by this trait is completely negligible. The long recharge doesn’t help, either.
• Inner Fire (Major Guardian trait) – When you are set on fire, you gain fury.
This one is extremely situational. Other than jumping into lava, players do not really control when they will be set on fire or not. This has no impact in how a Guardian plays, has no synergy with anything, and does not reward skill.
• Reanimator (minor Necromancer trait) – Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe. 30 second cooldown.
This one is somewhat comprehensive, in that all Necromancers kill something once in a while. It does have some synergy with the trait that increases toughness per controlled minions. Unfortunatelly, it’s so annoying that it’s not worth either of those aspects. The Jagged Horror is borderline useless – it dies with a couple hits, it dies in a couple seconds even without being hit, and it does little damage. The minion can cause aggro issues in crowded areas. While having this trait, a Necromancer will keep repeating the minion dialogues (which is rather annoying). And, since this is a level 5 minor trait, unless you give up on the Death Magic trait line, you have no option but to keep this trait equipped all the time.
What are your own examples of good traits and bad traits?
Knowing that ArenaNet is about to introduce new traits, I think it’s worth pointing which traits are good and which traits are bad. I would like to hear input from the community on traits about all professions; in order to begin the discussion, I’ll give some examples of my own. IMO, the best traits are those which have strong synergies with others in similar lines, which changes how a profession plays, which are comprehensive, and which reward skill.
Good traits:
1. Justice combination for Guardians:
• Justice is Blind – When activating Virtue of Justice, nearby foes are blinded.
• Renewed Justice – Virtue of Justice is renewed when you kill a foe.
• Blind Exposure – Applying blind also applies 3 stacks of vulnerability (10 seconds).
• Inspired Virtue – Virtues now also apply the following boons: Justice applies might
Why I like this combination:
• It has a strong synergy between those traits. Together, whenever a Guardian uses the Justice virtue, he will burn the target, blind and inflict vulnerability to all nearby foes, and apply Might to himself and all nearby allies. Justice renews itself whenever the Guardian kills someone, allowing those effects to be used often.
• It changes gameplay: Justice goes from being merely a tool to allow burning once in a while to being a strong source of utility that is powered by killing foes.
• It’s comprehensive, in the meaning that ALL Guardians ALWAYS have access to the Virtues.
• It rewards skill a little bit – it’s a bit spammy, but blind is something best used before specific attacks, not spammed blindly.
2. Attunement combination for Elementalists:
• Sunspot – Inflict damage at your location when you attune to fire.
• Electric Discharge – Strike your target with a bolt of lightning when attuning to air.
• Earthen Blast – Damage foes and cripple them for 3 seconds when attuning to earth.
• Healing Ripple – Heal nearby allies when attuning to water.
• Cleansing Wave – Remove a condition from you and your allies when attuning to water.
• Arcane Fury – Grant yourself fury for 2 seconds on attunement.
• Elemental Attunement – When attuning to an element, you and all nearby allies gain:
o Fire: might
o Water: regeneration
o Air: swiftness
o Earth: protection
Why I like this combination:
• There is some synergy between those traits, as they all empower the change between attunements.
• It greatly changes gameplay: not only the attunements themselves become entirely new skills, but it favors a playstyle in which a player is constantly switching between the four elements.
• It’s comprehensive: ALL elementalists ALWAYS have access to the attunements.
• It rewards skilled play: the effects are useful, but they become incredibly powerful when used at the right time, and can be wasted since an attunement goes into a considerable recharge after it’s used.
3. Piercing Arrows for Rangers:
• Piercing Arrows – All arrow attacks pierce targets.
This is my favourite single trait. It massively changes a ranger’s gameplay as bows go from being single target weapons to doing full damage to all targets you can hit; it rewards skill by making how much damage you do a direct function of how well you can manipulate yours and the enemies’ positioning; and it’s somewhat comprehensive, since it works for almost all bow attacks (everything but Barrage) and rangers often use bows.
These cursed monthly updates that invariably always end up adding new content and then taking too much of it away afterwards make me feel like I need to hop in every month to make sure I do not miss out on something cool.
That is exactly the point.
How do you expect ArenaNet to keep people playing the game? They could try to release content in a single batch, but players always devour content faster than developers can make them, so it would only have a very temporary effect. They could do what every other MMORPG do and add massive grind to the game, but one of the main appeals behind the Guild Wars franchise has been the little grind it’s supposed to have.
What is the better option, then? To release temporary content in small updates. This keeps people interested, keeps people playing even if for a single day after a release, and keeps the game fresh.
The fact you feel like you should play the game often or miss cool stuff is exactly the goal behind the two weeks updates. IMO, it’s better than having you feel like you need to play the game often or you will be left behind in the gear treadmilll (which is what other MMOs do).
Yeah this is going to look awesome, right? Trinket aura(s), backpack aura, weapon aura. People will look like champions that get attacked by 50 people.
I’m not that concerned, since we don’t really have THAT many people with multiple legendaries :-P But it could be rather silly if there’s no limit to how many effects appear at once.
but knowing that trinkets don’t have visuals..
Yet.
The Wind Catcher was likely a test to try an accessory giving an aura. I would expect similar, only stronger, effects from Legendary trinkets – like the flaming aura from the Predator.
Please add a way to just craft for a skin as that is what most people are wanting anyways. Making us jump thru more hoops to get stats on something we just want the skin to is silly.
Never going to happen. Transmutation Stones are one of the best selling items in the Gem Store. Your suggestion would make them redundant for a large number of items. And, for the records, I doubt the developers actually read anything in the crafting subforum.
It’s still a problem and it still needs to be fixed.
Do you still think that’s an issue in Orr? After they nerfed it so enemies would have less CC, I don’t think the area has been too bad. I still avoid the Putrifiers as much as possible due to immobilize (and underwater it’s even worse, with their 10 seconds long Sink effect), and the Risen Spider's pull is annoying, but since they are less common it doesn’t feel too bad.
Orr is horrible, I hate playing there and I wish ArenaNet would rework the entire maps, but I don’t think excess of CC is Orr’s main issue right now. It was, before the nerf.
Who’s idea was it to put perm cripple on us?
i cannot remove it unless i equ pvp skills or log out.
I think it’s a sign of how weak PvE design has been when you see a PvE player claiming condition removal skills are “pvp skills”. I wonder if he thinks boons, combos and all mechanics other than spamming Hundred Blades with a berzeker warrior are “pvp only” too – that’s what a lot of the current PvE would make a player think.
It’s basically a way to exploit the game. If you have a lot of gold, you can buy a lot of a given item and sell it for a higher price, creating an artificial increase in price. The more gold you have, the more gold you can make through this process, at the cost of making the game a bit worse for everyone else (since you are artificially making it harder for people to get what they want).
If it’s a rare enough item, you can even buy all of it in the market and set a monopoly, selling at a considerable higher price than you bought. This doesn’t work with items that have a huge turnover like Globs of Ectoplasm, but for truly rare items – like precursors – it can be a gold mine.
And you can prove this happens because precursor prices have been extremely stable since january. Oh wait … that actually disproves the theory.
Uh… You do realize we can see the price fluctuations, right? So saying something that is not true like that is kinda pointless. Dusk, for example, has had multiple spikes in price since January, with its price having increased more than 100 gold during the last 30 days. This is not “extremely stable”.
You don’t create an artificial price increase. Doing so will just lead to hundred of undercuts and you’ll happily see your item sitting in your selling list every time you open TP.
There are no “hundred” of given precursors. It’s not possible to have a monopoly of common items like ectoplasm, but for extremely rare items like precursors, well… Using the same example above, right now there are 11 Dusks available in the TP. Those do not have such a high rotativity that someone with enough gold would be unable to get them and offer the same items for a higher price.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
1. Guardian: 291 hours, 406 deaths
2. Elementalist: 144 hours, 202 deaths
3. Ranger: 257 hours, 795 deaths (WvW character)
4. Necromancer: 99 hours, 155 deaths
There are 5 players in a Fractal.
There are 5 Gods opposing Abaddon.
~waits for it to sink in~
I was originally going to write something like that. ArenaNet could:
I don’t think it would work, though. While I really like the mechanic of playing as something else, having a new and unique skill bar, whenever that mechanic is introduced a lot of players complain (see the fight against Canach). Maybe – maybe - it could work in a dungeon dedicated exclusively to this, since players would know from the beginning what they would be getting into, but by placing it in the Fractals it would be a random option among many, which would likely lead to a lot of groans from the community.
It also has the issue of who the bosses would be. No Margonite champion would be a match to the combined power of the Five Gods. The only option that would make some sense would be to have Abaddon as the Fractal boss, with players fighting him multiple times, just like Subject Alpha in CoE; but even that would feel somewhat repetitive, instead of being something fun.
Lastly, and IMO far most important: it would banalise the gods. Grenth is the God of Death who reigns over Ice and the Underworld; his powers are sovereignty over those aspects of reality, not to do 10.000 damage in a area and fear the foes within it. By reducing the gods’ powers to mere skill numbers, even if very high numbers, we would be banalising their roles as almost mythical beings.
I would rather fight as soldiers under the gods, killing Margonites (I’m dying to see what Margonites would look like under the GW2 engine, they were beautiful in GW1 already), and watching as the colossal gods fight each other in the background. IMO, this would properly represent the gods as the beings they are.
Especially in case of elites. With only 3 elites per profession, achieving balance is not possible, since build diversity is reduced to nothingness. Engineers de facto only have 1 elite. Other professions might as well have none
IMO, this is more a sign that those elites need to be reworked so they would effectively be new skills (keeping just the same name) than that we would need more elites. If ArenaNet adds 5 more elite skills, those 2 engineer ones will continue to be useless; if ArenaNet reworks them into something useful, it would be as if the profession got two new skills, without in fact add more skills to the game, and while improving balance instead of removing it.
This is the path I would like ArenaNet to follow. Take all nearly useless skills and traits, and rework them into different functionalities so they become useful. We would end with more variety than we have today with the same number of skills, and players would have new toys to play with.
So I guess the question is what are these items in the first paragraph referring to? the time-restricted crafting materials or the ascended items we’re creating with them?
An interview here explains that:
Those will plug back into the second half of the new crafting materials, sort of like Tier 7 or Tier 8 depending on how you look at it. This other half is a combination of lower tier materials all combined together to make a new material and they’re time limited so you can only make X amount of them per day on each character that you own. They’re tradable, so if you want to take your character up to max crafting and every day keep making more and more of these materials, it gives an economy to the high level crafters and keeps a value by limit the number that can be made each day
The original Guild Wars was released with 6 professions, each with more or less 75 skills, in a total of more or less 450. The game was akittens peak, PvP wise and balance-wise, a bit before the release of Factions, the second chapter; that was when the best Korean guilds like War Machine and The Evil Empire gave shows of skill in the World Championship tournament in Taipei, for example. A couple years later, the game had 10 professions and more than one thousand skills, way more than ArenaNet could even hope to balance. The PvP community basically died, and PvE was filled with professions that were designed in groups only when using a single specific gimmick.
Now, in Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has announced they are going to add more skills and traits. I can’t help but wonder if the game is really ready for that. Looking at guardians, mesmers, elementalists and necromancers, they appear to be somewhat balanced (despite how there are still many relatively useless skills and traits among those professions). Everything else… Just no. If ArenaNet has not even balanced what we have currently, what hope do they have of being able to deal with even more skills and traits?
I realize a lot of players want more skills. I also realize that, often, what players want is not what is best for a game.
I hope elementalists don’t get any new weapon – that would introduce too many new skills to the game in a very short time (20 skills or more for a greatsword), and ArenaNet cannot balance even what is currently there.
I wouldn’t mind if elementalists got a new Conjure skill, though. That would add more variety through a somewhat more controlled option.
What I’d like to see: all characters, upon reaching xx level (40? 60? 80? dunno…), can complete a quest to get a permanent 25% speed boost added to their run speed. No signets, no weapon usage, no sigils required. That would be fair.
This basically invalidates Swiftness as a component of the game.
Make it only work in PVE. Solved.
This has to be one of the worst ideas in this forum.
Combat in GW2 has been balanced around the current combat speed. Changing movement speed would require a massive rebalance in the entire game for little gain, so of course it’s a very bad idea.
“Make it only work in PvE” – duh, combat in PvE has also been balanced with the current movement speed in mind. Swiftness and the signets only work within the system because they have a price, so a given character is losing something in exchange for moving faster. But removing this kind of limit from the game in PvE would require a massive change to a large number of mobs.
What is this thing called “play the TP”? Seriously, what’s that even means?
It’s basically a way to exploit the game. If you have a lot of gold, you can buy a lot of a given item and sell it for a higher price, creating an artificial increase in price. The more gold you have, the more gold you can make through this process, at the cost of making the game a bit worse for everyone else (since you are artificially making it harder for people to get what they want).
If it’s a rare enough item, you can even buy all of it in the market and set a monopoly, selling at a considerable higher price than you bought. This doesn’t work with items that have a huge turnover like Globs of Ectoplasm, but for truly rare items – like precursors – it can be a gold mine.
- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this
That’s a great thing. Considering how “dedicated players” is usually how people talk about grinders, limiting the grinders’ ability of receiving more rewards than other players by doing mindless, easy content for 18+ hours per day is a very good idea.
Regarding your point about alts being somewhat punished due to the “1 per day per account” limit, I agree. While I’m sure people would abuse the system if it could be used by level 1 characters, it wouldn’t hurt if the Quartz node in the personal instance was availble daily for each level 80 character in a given account. I doubt this would happen, though.
Seems like a bit of a slap in the face to require the same amount of effort (more if you consider the recipe drops are from RNG boxes) to make these as the new Ascended craftables
Hah!
You are assuming the Ascended craftable will require only as much gating and effort than the current Celestial gear. Wait and see – it will be much, much worse. The current Celestial exotic gear will look like something very easy to get when you see Ascended recipes.
I don’t play the game that much, maybe a couple hours per day. I usually log in, see where are the dailies pointing me to (“Ascalon Killer”, “Maguuma Veteran Killer”, and so on), pick whatever character I feel like playing, and go to some part of the map I haven’t been to in some time, to see what cool events I can find there. That, or I do a bit of WvW.
In five years, people will be talking about GW2-killers the way WoW-killers were the trend yesterday. Every new MMO will try to mimic the GW2 success formula, no trinity, shared pve drops and nodes, down-scaling, no gear grind. Even WoW will to do this to an extent to keep their subscriptions up, probably their next expansion is going to be part GW2-clone..
I STRONGLY disagree.
Is Guild Wars 2 a success? Let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that it is.
Is Guild Wars 2 the record-shattering, mind blowing, money-printing finantial success that WoW is? No.
Hence, no GW2 clones.
I think you are overestimating MMO developers. They are not making WoW clones because they want to make great games, revolutionize gaming, or anything; no, they look at WoW, see 11 million suckers who could give them free money, and so want a slice of WoW’s pie. Heh, MMO developers aren’t even smart enough to realize the great majority of MMOs has failed (they think it happened to everyone else but it won’t happen to them), or to see something as obvious as the migration pattern of MMO players (something ArenaNet also didn’t realize, for the records).
You are also overestimating MMORPG players. A lot of people want a copy of their first online world (which for most people was WoW), whether they realize it or not. Together with the high influx of WoW clones, this has turned the MMORPG audience into a small group of people – those who want everything seen in WoW, and who believes that all the faults seen in WoW are intrinsic to the MMORPG genre. Just see how many people here claim that it’s impossible to make a MMO without grind, gear progression, and so on.
So no, I don’t think GW2 will change a thing in the grand scheme of MMORPGs. People will continue trying to make WoW clones foolishly thinking they will have 12 million players, and players will continue to ask for WoW clones foolishly thinking MMORPGs cannot be anything else.
If (when) Evon wins, we would get the “Fall of Abaddon” Fractal. We have already been told it will be about his first defeat, centuries before the first GW. Now, to show that conflict in a Fractal would be hard. How do you people like ArenaNet to do it?
Here’s an idea to begin the discussion:
We play as the human soldiers fighting the Margonite armies, while above us the towering figures of the gods fight Abaddon, covering nearly the entire sky. We would circle around the Temple of Abaddon, destroying fragments of the Bloodstones that the Margonites are using to empower their god, until all fragments are destroyed (the fights could be spiced up by having environmental effects linked to each of the four schools of magic at the corresponding Bloodstone fragment). Then, we see from below as Balthazar hits the weakened Abaddon and makes he fall all the way to the Realm of Torment.
I think the best answer to this topic’s title is Marjory with Lady Kasmeer.
But I really like the small argument between the human who’s researching Ettins and his little and furious Asura friend. Love that event chain.
Funny how so many people (myself included, for the records) play an online game but prefer to play solo.
You would have a point if the personal storyline weren’t so bad – shallow, with choices that have no lasting impact, NPCs who leave every ten levels (and the only one who stays, Salad Boy, is insufferable), and very little lore.
It has potential to be much more, sure. But so does the Living Story.
2 things Gw2 did extremely well: combat overall and the 0 gear treadmill (ascended is still not needed except for fractal, exotics are enough for everything.)
I suggest reading the OP’s posting history – he’s not complaining that there is gear treadmill at the end of the game, rather that there is no gear treadmill since the beginning of the game. Many of his posts mention WoW, too, for the records.
Basically another topic asking for the Holy Trinity of DPS/tank/healer.
Stop reading this and go vote Evon instead.
I doubt Evon’s interest in the past isn’t entirely…religious.
I see the trend of charrs picking random things as their gods still continues: first the Titans, then for a very short time the Destroyers, and now Evon worships… Gold!!!
Still voting for him, though.
As I see it, the players that hate these NPCs will not ever be satisfied, regardless. They want what is impossible to really give in an MMO and still keep it an MMO. They want a single-player storyline.
Isn’t that what the personal storyline was meant to be?
I think it can be done. Instanced content could be used to deliver this kind of content, together with some creative use of open areas (an alternate version of the Cursed Shores, available only to those who have finished the personal storyline, so people could choose in which version of the map they want to play in, for example).
ArenaNet has the right tools. IMO, they simply lack the proper storytelling.
Does anyone else see the irony in a Charr, of all races, offering research about the Human gods?
#willvoteEvonregardless
Options:
Be in an entire army of humans vs margonites at the feet of 6 dragon-sized gods beating the hell out of each other & turning an entire sea into the desolation?
[img]http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/6/67/Gods_of_Tyria_Avatars.png[/img]or
Watch a building explode.
yeah.. not much of a choice.
That.
I think Kiel will win. I don’t expect even half of players to actually go to the website and read about the “Fall of Abbadon” fractal, or to understand how the reduced waypoint cost is only temporary. And I agree with the OP, in that humans are favoured over non human characters, plus Kiel is likely seen as a “girl”, and charrs were mentioned as the least popular race in the game.
Still, I’ll vote for Evon, and I know it’s not going to be simply a matter of “one player = one vote”. Maybe, just maybe, Evon could actually have a chance.
This is actually a big, recurring issue with ArenaNet.
In Prophecies, our characters ran around like mindless chicken, taking orders first from Rurik (who was our characters’ mentor when they were young and inexperienced) until his death, and later we began following person after person without really making any decision. We eventually learned that just following people blindly led us to joining the bad guys for a while, and we still kept just following people.
In Factions, we spend a long part of the game following Master Togo, who was our characters’ mentor when they were young and inexperienced, until his death. Sounds familiar? We also spent most of the game following Mhenlo around, to the point that people complained it felt like he was the true hero of the game (again, sounds familiar?).
In Nightfall, Kormir was our characters’ mentor when they were young and inexperienced, so I was rather sure she would die, but to my surprise she actually didn’t. And while our characters eventually became the leader of the Sunspears, and we actually did not follow THAT many people around, at the end of the game we were just doing what Kormir told us to do.
In GW2, our character is always taking orders. Be it from the racial mentor, later the order mentor, and later Traheanne, our characters never take the initiative.
In other words, ArenaNet is incapable of telling a story in which our characters are actually the ones directing the action. Our characters don’t plan, don’t make strategies, don’t even lead – they react, follow orders, and do as they are told.
I think one of the reasons for this is how our characters would need a personality to actually be that relevant to the story – and some MMORPG players think their characters are themselves, so they would be angry to see our characters having a personality different from their own.
To which I reply with a laugh. The guy who was posting here complaining about how female characters were played by male guys (because he was trying to find a girlfriend while playing the game) forgot what kind of game he was playing – a role playing game. The “role” there isn’t “tank/DPS/healer”, it means playing as something that is not you.
I wish we could have at least one part of the Living Story in which our characters aren’t asked to go find a NPC, and then told exactly how to proceed in order to deal with a given issue. I would love if our characters said “Ah, your idea is nice and all, but I have a plan of my own”, and we, players, were then led to execute our characters’ plan.
Basically it meant if you faced the toughest, bad kitten in the game, max level, etc.. You had a very good chance of getting the lowest level of loot from the drops.
Loot scalling was a system in which someone killing enemies in an area by himself would receive less drops than the sum of all drops a full party of 8 players would receive by killing the same enemies in the same area.
The loot system in GW2 actually worked against people playing together – the less people in a group, the more loot a single individual would receive, which has led to multiple solo farming builds. Loot scalling was a way to reinforce playing in groups.
Some people never understood the system, despite how it’s far from being the most complex thing in the world. I’m not surprised that some couldn’t see how it was much more than a nerf in the drops of solo farmers.
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