In any RPG/MMO styled game, there is a random/RNG/luck based loot system. Has been for a long time, and will continue.
MMORPGs have been mediocre for a very long time, with two of the main reasons being the grind, and players’ willingness to accept said grind.
And as far as people not being able to conceive a MMORPG without grind… I’m not going to repeat myself.
I’m talking about this http://pastebin.com/2rrFg9pS
Other topics about the same subject have been deleted (or “Moved to trashcan”). Expect the same to happen to yours. Apparently ArenaNet doesn’t want people to check that link.
You can’t just say that anybodys way to play isn’t worth a reward, because it’s not the way you like
I can say that farming isn’t worth a reward, not because I don’t like it, but because farming is bad for the game and it’s bad for the players.
In any MMO time spent needs to be rewarded because players are content and if nobody logs in then you ll end up with an empty MMO
That’s a lie told by MMO developers to justify releasing mediocre, grind-based Skinner box and calling them “games”.
Really? Where is your statistical evidence?
In the game. You don’t know what most players do. ArenaNet, in other hand, does. And what kind of content have they been releasing? Content to be grinded (Fractals of the Mists) and content to be farmed (the Southsun event, that was basically a few repetitive events that people could farm over and over with a 200% Magic Find buff).
The reason why ArenaNet can make content that is little more than badly disguised grind is because they, having the data on what most players do most of the time, know that most of the community is a bunch of grinders.
Normally rewards are based on time and / or skill. And I am not just talking about people and work (education (skill) and time) but the whole word. A tiger is hungry so he spends time hunting a deer. If he is skilled it will take him less time or he can catch more in the same time but still he gets rewarded for time and skills.
Wrong. A Chinese factory worker who works 12 hours per day 6 days a week is a lot like the so-called “dedicated” players, doing something simple and mindless over and over. Our factory worker does not get paid more than Steve Jobs did, though, despite how he worked less hours per week.
In real life, skill is rewarded significantly more than time spent. Grind is rewarded in MMOs to cater to the lowest denominators.
I know how the scavenger hunt is going to work. It will be more or less like:
“We are proud to announce the new scavenger hunt for precursors, introducing fun and creative ways to get those weapons! Players will have to go across all of Tyria to find the requirements for a super secret Mystic Forge recipe!”
The Mystic Forge recipe itself will be:
1. A Corrupted weapon. The weapon type will define which precursor will be earned (the shortbow gives the precursor for The Dreamer, for example). The greatsword recipe will have a 33% chance of giving Dust, 33% chance of giving Dawn and a 33% chance of giving a Wooden Sword (masterwork).
2. The Gift of Farming. This one has four components:
3. The Gift of Grinding. This one also has four components:
(Each elemental gift requires 4 dungeon Archgifts. Those are acquired by combining four stacks of 250 dungeon tokens of each dungeon. The Gift of Fire, for example, requires 1.000 tokens from Citadel of Flame, 1.000 tokens from Crucible of Eternity, 1.000 tokens from Sorrow’s Embrace and 1.000 tokens from The Ruined City of Arah.)
4. A Gift of Mastery (same as the one required for a Legendary).
I can’t wait.
I’m greatly amazed at how we get one topic per week about this.
So is there a term for people that post on the other end of the spectrum? For example saying something like, “Such and such update is terrible and Anet doesn’t care about the players. This game is going down the toilet and everyone I know is quitting. Anet is just greedy. /endpost”
Haters.
And you are right, both are a mirror of each other that just drag the community to the mud.
Why paying for changing traits is GOOD.
Gold sink.
Irrelevant.
The waypoint fee? That’s a good time sink. We want players to walk around and explore the world, so they see dynamic events they may have missed when they first moved through an area.
The fee for changing traits? That’s a bad time sink. It’s something ArenaNet should encourage players to do, not charge them for.
Assuming all time sinks are good is rather naive. Some are bad, others are good. The fee for changing traits… Is bad.
Can you blame them from trying to stop the endless complaints and players leaving in droves? Can you blame them for giving us what we asked for?
Yes.
Of course, in fact. It was obvious that a lot of players would leave the game a few months after release. That’s what has happened to every other MMORPG released recently, and it’s what will happen with the next MMORPGs as well. You can even see how it’s more or less the same numbers – if you look at how many players Age of Conan had right after release and how many players it lost, you will notice the similarities with how many players The Old Republic had at release and how many players they lost.
There is a locust cloud of MMORPG players who are eternally seeking a MMORPG that manages to be a better WoW than WoW, and thus keep jumping from MMO to MMO looking for something they will never find. Those are the players seeking all the “classic” MMOs features (raids, gear progression, the holy trinity, and so on). Those are the great majority of the one million players who jump to a big MMO as soon as it’s released and leave soon after.
In other words, those were the players who were going to leave Guild Wars 2 anyway, regardless of what ArenaNet did. ArenaNet should have known better than to panic when they saw players leaving the game, and they should have known better than to cater to those players.
Do you know who ArenaNet should have catared to? They know, they have stated it themselves in the Manifesto. “If you like MMOs, you should check Guild Wars 2; if you don’t like MMOs, you REALLY should check Guild Wars 2”. This should have been their target audience – everyone looking for a good RPG that they could play once in a while with their friends, but who was not so easily deceived by the tasteless time sinks found in classic MMOs.
ArenaNet failed to accomplish that. Just read this forum – the Guild Wars 2 community is not made by people who didn’t like MMOs, it’s made by the same grind-addicted and loot-focused players found in any other MMORPG. Those players will leave as soon as the next big thing is released.
So can I blame ArenaNet for listening to the wrong side of the community? Yes. They should have know better.
People thought they wanted Guild Wars 2 without grind and progression. They thought they were okay about “the whole game is endgame.” But once they actually got in, got to play, and were faced with the reality of what a MMO without gear grind and progression and traditional endgame actually was….just look around. People still complain about endgame, still ask for raids, practically demanded progression (only to complain once they got it), and started grinding and farming to the point that loot drops throughout virtually the entire freaking game have been nerfed, re-nerfed, and nerfed a few more times. And that’s in spite of the fact that there isn’t really anything to grind for.
There is a lot to grind for. But the flaw in your entire argument is that you are assuming it has been the same players complaining about the lack of raids and about the excess of grind. I doubt very much that anyone who has been following GW2 since the original announcement of GW:EN and who kept up to date with the news about the game would now be asking for more grind. It’s the other side of the community – the MMO locusts I mentioned above – who has been complaining about the “lack” of endgame. It’s also the side of the community ArenaNet decided to listen to.
Changing traits is 2 silver at level 80. Are you really that pressed for cash?
It’s a detriment for something ArenaNet should encourage players to do. Having players changing traits once in a while is good for the players and it’s good for ArenaNet. Now that they are trying to rebalance traits to give all professions multiple viable builds, it’s the perfect time to make the process of changing traits something more streamlined and something more attractive to players.
One of the main aspects behind the longevity of the original Guild Wars was the ability to keep changing builds. Soon after release, when we got rid of refund points, players were given a huge flexibility in how to play the game, and this helped immensily in keeping the game fresh – someone who got tired of playing as a Curses-based necromancer, for example, could easily change to a Minion Master and enjoy a very different playstyle.
Guild Wars 2 lacks this. The game already has far less skills than the original Guild Wars (which is not a bad thing – GW1 had way more skills than ArenaNet could balance), and we cannot change build so easily. Together with a community made predominantly by MMORPG players who are used to using a single rotation over and over while they farm play the game, this leads to stagnation – and stagnation leads to boredom, which leads to less players in the game.
Being able to completely change builds would help to deal with this stagnation. Someone who got tired of the same playstyle when playing as a Death Shroud based necromancer could, for example, switch to a Minion Master build using completely different trais and have a different experience. Those changes help to keep the game fresh for longer, thus keeping people playing the game for longer.
“But I like to keep my character the same through the entire game”, or “I think my character would lose its identity if I kept changing builds” – the option would be there to simply not reset one’s trait, of course. But the option to change traits around could help GW2 as much as the removal of refund points helped the original Guild Wars, which was a lot.
So time spent playing a game shouldn’t be rewarded according to you. What should we be rewarded for doing?
Skill. Playing the game well. If you read some old ArenaNet interviews, you will see how they liked to say “skill > time spent”.
MMORPGs reward time spent because they want to keep addicts – those who play longer (and thus pay monthly fees longer). The inability to even consider a different scenario is one of the reasons why MMORPG players make such a bad community.
…Is how much of it is made by people who want to keep something as bad as RNG in place.
The worst RNG in the game is the one that rewards luck (something which doesn’t really deserve a reward) and has been set in place so people keep buying RNG boxes in order to try to find items. It’s a mediocre design, based on the idea that players are foolish enough to waste their money on RNG boxes.
At the same time, the great majority of the community (and thus the great majority of the complainers) are grinders, farmers and so on.
And guess what? Farming rewards time spent (something which doesn’t really deserve a reward) and has been set in place so people keep grinding in order to try to find better items. It’s a mediocre design, based on the idea that players are foolish enough to waste their time on grind.
I wonder if we will soon have players addicted to RNG, just like we have players addicted to farming, claiming it’s a good thing. One design is as bad as the other, and both have been set in place to milk money from players, not to make good games.
What I imagine is the people that complain incessantly about the game are the ones that have played several hundred hours and
…And the moment you take all complaints about something and lump them in the same sack, you basically become a fanboy claiming the game is perfect.
No game is perfect. A lot of criticism thrown against Guild Wars 2 is incredibly bad and is the kind of thing ArenaNet should not listen (or have listened…) to, true. At the same time, we have some fanboys who disagree with every single criticism against the game, even when it’s constructive.
Ironically, both haters and fanboys fall for the same trap – not knowing what is constructive criticism and what isn’t. Both are not helpful for the game, and only make the game worse while ruining the community.
Storytelling>characters
Especially when the characters have all the same personality and same dialog and there are thousands of them trying to lie to themselfs each of them are the hero of the story.
Being the hero of a story does not work in MMOs :P
It does; the limitation is bad design in the other MMOs, not an issue inherent to the genre.
In fact, good storytelling more often than not requires the players to be the hero in the story. We need characters to move a story along, and, due to the nature of games, our characters are usually the active party in the world. In the current event, for example, we are the ones looking around the world trying to find the suspects – and that’s how it had to be, considering how our characters would not just stand still in Lion’s Arch waiting for someone to actually do something for us. In this context, having NPCs who we do everything for yet who are the center of the story creates the same issues we got with Traheanne.
but the predominant style of 2 talking marionettes used in the personal story really didn’t work for me.
I agree. I understand using that style in the open world, but in the personal instances it doesn’t make any sense. Compare the usual cutscenes to what we had seen in the original Guild Wars, like:
Those are rendered using in-game models, yet they are far better than the talking bodies we got in GW2. Even the few action cinematics here and there in the story are not well developed like that.
Here is how it is done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAlf0-THkCU
The guy who talks the most in that video and who was cinematics lead has left ArenaNet… They don’t do cinematic like that anymore. Even in the core game, they are very rarely used.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
Nope, those cinematics are bad.
For the records, this is a good example of how the opinions of players are more often than not misleading. It’s very easy to see the new cinematic system and think “ooooh, shiny!” and go gushing all over it.
There is a huge, critical flaw in them, though: they do not work with our characters. They require premade images showing premade characters, and cannot be adapted as they are to work with variable characters (aka, the PC characters).
So if you people want ArenaNet to keep using them… This means making stories about the NPCs, not about our characters. As if watching Traheanne’s rise to glory wasn’t enough, do you really want to see more stories in which our characters are only footnotes?
This kind of cinematic isn’t even that new to the game – the opening cinematic immediately after character creation uses a much smoother combination of concept art and in-game graphics, in a way that actually can show our characters as a part of the story. Too bad that ArenaNet can’t do much more of that, given how many of the artists involved have left the company.
Through that time, I learned that WvW was just a zerg fest, running from door to door. Extremely boring.
Your character is a thief, right? Just find some more thieves, or a thief and a mesmer, and go gank people moving around the map in WvW.
When I first started I would get up at 10:00am MST and log-in by 10:30am MST and play as I do now, only difference between then and now is I was able to do it for a lot longer and/or more often, logging off between 4:30am MST and 5:00am MST.
See the difference in time played.
I only play 1 character(Sylvari Ranger) 3,199 hours 50 minutes over past 9 months
If the farming nerfs have stopped you from farming 16 hours per day, you should thank ArenaNet. Do you have a job, go to school or something like that?
Well it seems someone would like a game completely catered to themselves? Well I wish you the best of luck on convincing a developer to do so.
There already are. Planescape: Torment, the Mass Effect series, the Witcher series, and so on and so on. You know, all those games in which the goal is to have fun and enjoy the experience, instead of doing something mindless (like standing with a mob so big that you barely get hit in the Penitent event) and that isn’t even enjoyable just for the sake of a reward.
All those games are single player games, though. MMORPGs could be more like them… And less a haven for farmers. It appears the farmers won’t let them become everything they could be, though.
I have exotics becouse my effort. And my fingers aren’t bleeding.
Doing the same mindless task over and over, repeating something you don’t even enjoy, and that a bot could do better than a human being, isn’t exactly what I would call an “effort”. It’s eerily similar to making a donkey walk by placing a carrot in front of its face. But of course, that’s just a donkey – a mindless animal who doesn’t know better. A human being would never lower himself to that level… Would he?
An unnecessary stab at people who do not share your vision of an RPG, perhaps?
Nope. A criticism on how players are responsible for some of the worst flaws in GW2.
I’m not going go to into how a farmer basically states that he’s no better than a Skinner rat. It wouldn’t bother me that much if it were just a matter of someone renouncing his humanity like that. It isn’t, though.
What farmers (and grinders, addicts and exploiters) have taught MMO developers is that there is no point in making a game fun. Fun is subjective – trying to make a given piece of content to be “fun” will, 100% of the time, result in something that some will like, and others will not. Making fun content is hard, too.
But do you know what is very easy do build? Grind. Just throw something players can kill over and over, give a shiny reward for it, and players will jump there. No need to actually work to make it interesting, farmers don’t care.
As a result, what updates do we get in Guild Wars 2? Improved storytelling? Better cinematics, like what we had seen in the original Guild Wars by the time of the BMP? Challenging content?
No, of course not. There is no point in any of that. Making repetitive, mindless content and throwing 200% Magic Find is enough to make farmers play until their fingers bleed. Who cares about good content? Grinders certainly do not.
MMORPGs won’t ever be great games, because the current community of MMORPG players don’t want great games – they want to revel in cesspools of grind.
I really wonder why people think an MMO needs to be as badly made as WoW.
Because to most people, when you say “MMO”, they hear “WoW”. It was not the first, but it was the most popular, so it was the first MMO for a lot of players. And as a game focused on keeping people addicted (and thus paying monthly fees), it was a huge success.
So huge, in fact, that it has created a big mass of players who want nothing else other than WoW clones to give them one more fix. That’s what MMORPG players are. That’s why MMORPGs are such bad games – because their players don’t care, they are not annoyed with the “kill 10 rats” quests as long as they get a shiny reward for their +1.
In the end, the biggest reason why WoW is a bad game is due to how it taught developers that making a fun game is not a good idea. Fun is subjective, so not everyone will enjoy a given piece of content. But addiction… Well, we know that at least 12 million people were willing to pay monthly in order to pay content they were addicted to. And it’s far easier to make addictive content (aka, grind) than to make fun content.
OP, I completely agree with you. It would be hard, but it would be doable to make the world react to what you do (you went to a cave and killed all the zombies in there? The wild animals that used to kill it will return, giving you different enemies to kill. Those have been killed, too? Carrion animals will appear to eat the dead flesh. Carrion animals killed? Zombies followed them and now fill the cave once more). This is an issue mostly in closed spaces like caves, since they often require you to leave from the same place where you entered, and so you will see again the same enemies you have killed. Doing a fix specifically for those caves would be hard, but doable.
The issue, OP, is that people like you and me are a minority. The great majority of MMORPG players don’t care. Give them something mindless to farm, and they will be happy, no matter what kind of respawning enemies have.
2) “Play The Way You Want” means “Wanting to be awarded items the way you want to be awarded.”
Here’s where I open the can of worms. I believe the core of MMOs’ designs is the need to provide VISUAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS in the form of ITEMS to the players. GW2 is no exception. What makes this a volatile topic is that not everyone wants to do the same thing as others would do it. There will be different opinions and methods of how people will go about acquiring things in game. But when taking this definition, it all comes down to this : People want stuff. Period.
It’s really sad to see people who cannot see beyond the lie that is saying “All MMOs need to be based around grind”. I have replied to that here, so I won’t repeat myself… But it’s sad.
Curious to hear how other players are reacting to these changes.
I’m happy, since it appears that those nerfs bothered the farmers. It’s always good to see people who believe they deserve a reward for doing mindless content that could be done by a bot being forced to watch how their so-called “effort” and “dedication” is, in the end, completely worthless.
My only concern is that it’s not enough. ArenaNet really should change the game in order to apply a Final Solution to farmers. Until then, those nerfs are the best we are going to get.
Orr is the worst part of the game, and unless it’s completeçy reworked (and that is never going to happen), it deserves to be left to rot with no player in sight. I would rather have a lot of players in Queensdale than in Orr.
If you want to argue about or discuss the game…argue about and discuss the game. Don’t bring up a 2 year old manifesto that came out before the game launched that is nothing more than a statement of intent anyway.
(…)
It’s like when you argue with your wife and she brings up stuff you did two years ago that have nothing to do with the current situation. It doesn’t make her right, whether she’s right to be angry or not.
So you think a statement of intent about GW2 has nothing to do with GW2? I see.
The respawn rate is acceptable. If you are in a rush to get somewhere….. Use a waypoint for god sakes
Sure. That doesn’t work in Orr, though. Almost all waypoints there are contested, and moving around the area to reach the waypoints and free them is such a pain that almost no one bothers.
Regarding the parts of the game that are fun, I agree with you. Regarding Orr… No.
Point 1. Look up manifesto. It’s a statement of intent, not a guarantee of delivery.
Irrelevant, tbh. Saying it’s a lie or not is more a discussion about semantics than a discussion about the game.
We know Guild Wars 2 was a work in progress (and is a work in progress). Dyes were originally account-wide and now are character wide; engineers originally had an Absorb skill that was later given to mesmers; ArenaNet claimed they didn’t want players to grind, and now the game has a lot of grind. Are any of those lies? Meh, not really, but what we call them doesn’t matter. I’m more concerned about why did those changes happen, and the impact they had in the game, than in discussing how to call them.
I have a strong feeling that ArenaNet had a conflicting view of the game; some aspects appear to have been made to avoid grind, others have been made to embrace grind. It has increased from what we were originally told the game would have (one armor or weapon piece per dungeon run, dyes account locked, maxed gear being easy to get), and I don’t like that direction, nor do I believe it’s healthy for the game. If the team really is ambivalent in this aspect, I would like them to know that at least one person – me – wishes them to go on the direction to reduce grind, not increase it. That’s pretty much all I can do to improve the game.
First, since I’m reading it in the wiki instead of watching the video, I am in fact reading it. That’s your first mistake
Nope, it’s your mistake. You are reading second-hand information, while assuming that everyone is doing the same thing you are. For everyone you are telling to “learn to read”, you can be talking to someone who’s actually listening to the source instead of being happy to read someone’s interpretation of it. In fact, you are losing by reading text – you are missing tone, cadence, body language, and all other things we, who have seen the video, know more about than you. For the records, an editor should know how text is lacking in those aspects when compared to video.
Ergo, your opinion is flawed. You lack the knowledge we have because you do not know what we are talking about, you only have second hand and incomplete information.
I’m taking the entire piece and reading it you guys are basically trying to take a sentence out of a paragraph. It doesn’t work.
It’s actually not a sentence out of a paragraph considering it’s not text…
Now, that said, he used the words “THIS” boring grind. It’s specifying the grind to get to the fun stuff.
Yep, grind to get to the fun stuff. It’s only your rose collored glasses that make you believe he’s talking about required grind, or gear grind or level grind. “Fun stuff” means anything in the game that people enjoy, from a fun dungeon to a fun area to explore to a fun type of PvP to a fun item. Any kind of grind in the game is bad, which is fitting since then Colin says “we don’t want players to grind”, not “we don’t want required grind”.
He finishes with the words, ’We want to change the way people view COMBAT".
Exactly. Combat is not seen as boring only when grinding for gear or for levels, it’s also seen as boring in grind for items or gold (aka farming). It’s no surprise that ArenaNet would claim they don’t want players to grind and then say thet want to change how people view combat. What doesn’t make sense is to assume that changing only level grind would change how people view combat.
I’m getting to this stage with the forums. Very little substance, same old stuff going round and round.
And if you stay quiet and let everyone with a different opinion speak, ArenaNet will only listen to those with a different opinion and the game will be changed, from your point of view, for the worse.
ArenaNet has always had trouble with player feedback. They listen to what players want way more than they should. The overwhelming majority of players are not game designers, nor willing to stop and think on the long term about what the implications of what they want now. Hence why listening to them is more often than not a bad idea.
In GW1, for example, the second chapter, Factions, was almost completely designed based on what players had asked for. The GW1 forums were filled with people asking for instances in which they could party with a lot of players, more than the usual 7, to do something big like killing a dragon. Factions had exactly this – a mission in which 14 players got together to kill a dragon. People hated it.
The GW1 forums were filled with people asking for a rogue-like profession – a dual wielding, low armor and high damage stealth using profession. ArenaNet introduced the Assassins, who were the source of many of Guild Wars’ biggest issues in the following years.
A lot of people asked ArenaNet to release skills for each profession in each new chapter. Originally, ArenaNet had planned to only release skills for the 6 core professions, but since the players asked otherwise, they decided to release new skills for everyone in each chapter. This was an incredibly, incredibly stupid idea: by Chapter 5, ArenaNet would have to release skills for 14 professions, adding to the massive number of skills in GW1 that they would never possibly be able to balance.
In Guild Wars 2, people want to grind. Truth be said, I have the feeling that’s what the majority wants in game too, not only in the forum. But it’s easy to understand why all content released by ArenaNet has been so grind-focused: Fractals of the Mists and the quest to grind Agony, Southsun that was little more than big farming grounds with 200% Magic Find, and now the “farm holographic enemies” festival.
If you don’t want the game to become little more than a grind cesspool, you should speak now. Even if it means swiming in another cesspool.
It’s so sad to see what happens when people try to explain to an editor how to read English. The idea of a paragraph is to group ideas together.
Of course, your entire line of reasoning is wrong. I would like to begin, though, with the irony in having to point to the mighty editor, expert on reading English, and fond of telling others to learn how to read, that what we are discussing is a video. All the times you have been saying “read” in this discussion, you are 100%, factually wrong. Your notion of a “paragraph” is also wrong – since it was not text, the idea that those lines are part of the same paragraph is your interpretation of them, not a fact.
Now, let’s see what Colin has said, right?
In most games, you go out, and you have really fun tasks, occasionally, that you get to do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff. ‘I swung a sword. I swung a sword again. Hey! I swung it again.’ That’s great. We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that. No one finds it fun. We want to change the way that people view combat.
Now, he defines grind as everything that is not fun in the game. In fact, if “grind” were defined as “doing repetitive tasks over and over to reach the level cap”, Colin would not have needed to say “boring grind to get to the fun stuff” – otherwise it would be implied, by the use of the word “grind”, that it was in reference to reaching the fun stuff. Do notice how he has not said the word “required” anywhere, for the records.
So what does Colin mean? That they don’t want players to do repetitive, annoying tasks like grinding, farming, etc. Not that they don’t want required grind – nowhere in there Colin mentions the word “required”. Not that they don’t want people to level grind or gear grind – nowhere there does Colin use the words “level” or “gear”.
The irony here is to see ArenaNet fans trying to twist his words, when they were in fact one of the most admirable things in the entire Manifesto. I believe this is the perfect example of how people wearing rose colored glasses are bad for a game – even someone who really likes Guild Wars 2 should be able to realize how they have strayed from the original views expressed in the Manifesto, and ask ArenaNet to go back to it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company had to change due to internal conflicts about those ideas, and players asking the game to move in the direction of the Manifesto would actually help ArenaNet, not hinder them.
In other words, it’s sad that some people are against any kind of criticism, even constructive criticism, to the point of twisting so completely something we all have heard.
Maybe I expect too much. But looking back at the vision showed in the manifesto, and then thinking about the game as it stands now, i cant help asking what happened? Where did the drive and ambition go? How have we descended from aspiring to challenge the elder dragons, to now being effectively mercenaries committing genocide over a beach resort?
Easy: because MMO players want mediocrity, so that’s all ArenaNet has been giving us. Ever since the game was released, the loudest and most common criticism here has not been about holes in the story, about how dynamic events could have been better, and so on; no, it has been about grinding. Players of classic MMOs are addicted to grind, and that’s all they want. ArenaNet originally intended to cater to those who do not like other MMOs, but they failed to do so, and therefore the GW2 community is made by grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters who couldn’t care less about “elder dragons” and etc.
Take a look at the Southsun event, it’s the perfect example. Horrible storytelling, mediocre events… But with 200% Magic Find, chest-giving events happening in multiple places of the island with a short cooldown, and a boss that has zero interesting mechanics, but that gives players two (I’m sure ArenaNet wants players to read that as “OMG, TWO!!!!111!!”) rare items.
I doubt any MMO will be better than this. The current community of MMORPG players won’t let it be so.
You mean most people have terrible reading comprehension skills. I agree. Most people hear what they want to hear and read what they want to read.
Case in point, someone hearing Colin saying “We don’t want players to grind” and making up all kinds of excuses as to why no, it doesn’t mean that ArenaNet does not want players to grind. Denial must be a great thing.
There are two issues here:
1) In one hand, we have the full Berzeker gear warriors with 5 signets who don’t want to stop attacking in order to dodge and who obviously are not going to change their utility skills. Those players are annoyed with any kind of crowd control since it stops them from winning by auto attacking, and so they would like such things to be gone from the game.
2) In other hand, a few areas do have too much crowd control. I have never had any issue with the holograms, but Orr has always been incredibly annoying in this aspect. The issue with Orr is that it has been so badly designed, and it’s so utterly unpleasant to play there, that often people just want to move from one point in the map to the other as fast as possible; all the crowd control in Orr, which even after the nerf is still a lot, only increases the annoyance when moving through those maps.
ArenaNet should completely revamp Orr (it’s not like they don’t have lore-based reasons to do so anyway). Just get a different team from the one who did the Southsun revamp, considering how that part of the map is now even worse than it was before.
However, PvP has not exactly lit up the universe, and some percentage of the hobbyists want something from PvE that the game is no giving them. Based on current evidence, that percentage is not large enough to garner ANet’s attention.
ArenaNet does not have the numbers for that kind of reasoning.
They know what players are doing in game. They know what players talk about in the forum and in the other parts of the community. But they have no way of knowing what most players think, or what would keep most players playing.
Someone could say, “a lot of people want challenging content”. Yet, there is no evidence of that. There is next to none challenging content in the game (assuming ArenaNet knows the difference between “challenging” and “annoying”), so ArenaNet doesn’t really know if challening content would be played by a lot of players or not.
What ArenaNet does know, though, is that the most popular activity in the game is farming (…wonderful community we have here). Hence updates basically focused on farming – Fractals of the Mists and gear grind, Southsun with 200% Magic Find, trying to keep people playing through Southsun after the event by adding one world boss with rare chests.
As long as the “farming updates” work – as in, a lot of people keep farming in them – ArenaNet has no reason to do anything else with the game. It’s very similar to the RNG boxes – people may complain, but as long as players buy a lot of them, ArenaNet has no reason to try to think of alternative and less safe ways of making money.
So no, I wouldn’t expect to see challenging content any time soon, just like I don’t expect to see good storytelling or interesting dynamic events any time soon – ArenaNet has no reason to work on those things when just making more ways for people to farm is easier, faster and safer.
(Truth be told, usually when a MMO player asks for “challenging content” he is just asking for more grind anyway, so this may not be bad news for everyone reading this topic.)
I don’t get how you expect an mmo to run without decent group content
GW2 has a lot (and for the records, it’s “a lot”, not “allot”) of content you can do with a group.
It, thankfully, has little content that demands you to play with a group.
This is how the game should be. You can play almost everything with other people, if you want to and if you have people who want to play with you. Unlike in other MMOs, though, if you don’t have people who want to play with you, you are not going to be able to force them to play with you due to some weak mechanic.
I’m not surprised that, in a system in which players only have to get together with those they want to be together, some players are left alone and thus complaining about a lack of group content. It does amaze me how those “lonely” players don’t understand exactly whose fault it is that no one plays with them.
The OP here is to utterly and deeply flawed that it almost feels like a joke.
The current state of crowd control (CC) such as stun and knockback is pitiful in PvE because of the unshakable and defiant mechanics.
Nope.
That’s a ridiculous claim. Enemies with Defiant and Unshakable are the exception, not the rule. If control were useful everywhere else in the game but not in the champions and dungeon bosses, it would be useful in the significant great majority of GW2. That’s not what happens, though.
From my understanding this was done to stop players from continually locking enemies with CC skills, trivializing the fight, but they went so far in trying to prevent this that they severely limited the effectiveness of CC.
Nope, again.
One of the old GW2 videos, before the game was released, showed a boss fight in which there was no limit on control skills. The boss spent the entire fight stun locked. Some measure to prevent that was necessary, and Defiant isn’t that bad.
The way ANet defines roles we have damage, support, and control.
Damage and support have nothing holding them back. You can take down a champion in under 30 seconds with enough damage (see CoF speed runs) and can permanently maintain boons and projectile blocks with support.
This is extremely myope. Condition damage is as limited as crowd control – try stacking more than 25 of any condition and see if that increases damage. Many kinds of support are equally limited – giving ten Regeneration buffs to an ally won’t increase the healing per second.
Even raw damage has been somewhat limited by giving the bosses a huge health bar. The result is the same as Defiant – an artificial way to make something less useful than it would have been otherwise.
In other words, all the OP does is pointing at what appears to be the obvious issue, using flawed arguments to reach a conclusion in which no better alternative is given.
This is as naive and as pointless as saying that the Gem Store is bad and that ArenaNet should just give everything for free to everyone, forever. Often, the most obvious issue and the most obvious solution are not the right ones.
Defiant is not the issue with control. The true issue is that there isn’t anything worth interrupting.
A lot of people complain that dungeons do not require team work, or communication, or good timing. Well, imagine if a boss had a skill that players HAD to interrupt. Imagine that boss has Defiant. What would happen?
Players would need team work. People would have to work together to use control effects and leave the boss open for the real interrupt at the right time. Players would need to communicate, so everyone knows who is doing the real interrupt, in order to avoid wasting control effects. Players would need good timing, to get the interrupt at the right time.
This is the real issue. Enemy fights are just a matter of DPS because there is no use for anything else: no enemy has a skill really worth interrupting, no enemy has to be crippled or immobilized, no enemy needs to be launched away. Support has pretty much the same issue – some bosses do moderate damage, but more often than not this is not damage that needs to be deflected, it can just be dodged or healed through.
Saying “OMG, Defiant sucks l0l0l0l0lzz!11” is easy. Seeing the true problem and how ArenaNet could fix it is not. Instead of having boring fights with enemies that have one million health points and who have very few interesting attacks, most of which can simply be dodged or just taken and healed through, ArenaNet should focus on twisting these mechanics around. An enemy who has little health but who does so much damage that players cannot use raw DPS to kill it before it kills them; an enemy with damage dealing skills that cannot be dodged; an enemy that must be prevented from reaching a given point in the map; an enemy that takes no damage, but that players must kill by throwing off a ledge; those mechanics are what ArenaNet needs to change, not Defiant.
Your ageist attempts to slander me aside, purchasing things just because they’re expensive is very much something adults do too. It’s certainly a thing MMO players do.
Just because they are old doesn’t mean they are adults. Likewise, just because someone looks like a person doesn’t mean it’s a human being; after all…
They’re the ultimate carrot on a stick for those who want a carrot to chase.
…Human beings use carrots to trick donkeys into doing what they want to be done, while being smarter than that themselves.
Does Legendary weapons have some prestige? A donkey may think a Legendary means it’s the king of donkeys, but that’s still very inferior to being a human being.
Now, MMOs do not cater to humans, rather to donkeys who are kept stuck eternally seeking one more carrot and thus eternally paying a monthly fee. Guild Wars 2 was in theory going to be a MMORPG for human beings, but it still cannot completely escape some primitive elements in its design. The donkeys may only want more carrots, sure, but people are not so easy to please…
ArenaNet mentioned that they would probably give professions access to existing weapons sooner than add new weapons to the game. I would expect necromancers to use swords, engineers to use hammers, and so on…
Well… assuming these aren’t trapped behind another asinine RNG gate anyway…
Asinine, Gem Store based RNG gate incoming, of course. The previews said the weapons were actually common, but I doubt they will appear more often than the esclerite skins (and we know how much of a success those were).
I started playing GW2 because I thought the whole point of this game was not to force the player to grind like so many other MMOs do.
That was assuming the game would be bought by people who did not want to grind.
That’s not what happened. The GW2 community is made by the players of those “many other MMOs” who want to grind, farm and exploit. ArenaNet is just giving its players what they are asking for.
I don’t care if you want to fish in GW2, I do. And so do a lot of other players.
Irrelevant. Claiming you (think you) and an imaginary “lot of other players” would like a feature is meaningless; you could say the same for every other bad suggestion here.
The argument about fishing being a good time sink is equally irrelevant; there are thousands of ways to add more time sinks to the game other than fishing (and most of them suck, too).
That some people actually want fishing shows how fooled they have been by MMO developers, who love deceiving players into thinking that mindless, grind-based time sinks are a good thing. This model was designed for pay to play games (in which it basically equals free money for the developers…), but MMO players ate the lie so completely that they ask for it even in buy to play games.
If everyone had Bifrosts, they wouldn’t be very cool at all.
Wrong.
There are some players who need the approval of others to be happy. This need for external validation is usually seen in teenagers (who often feel they are only going to feel good about themselves if others see them in a nice light), but most people grow away from that.
Then, there are those who become happy based on their own opinions, which is something more commonly seen in an adult. Someone like this would enjoy the Bifrost because it has a nice skin; if all players in the game had a Bifrost, each one would still have the exact same skin as it does today, so they would be as “cool” as they are right now.
Pretty things are supposed to be hard to get in MMOs. That’s how they get their prestige.
Two flaws in those arguments:
1. Things are not hard to get. There isn’t anything that is truly a rewards for skill. Legendaries, for example, are merely a reward for time spent (or real money spent buying gold). This is part of the design seen in pay to play MMOs: the developers couldn’t care less if players are skilled (so there is no point in rewarding skill), rather they want people to keep playing and paying monthly fees (so the idea is to reward time spent).
2. Due to the above – what prestige?
People have fooled themselves into believing that all MMOs need grind, and that said grind is a good thing. Unfortunatelly, so many players believe in it that all MMO developers are told to turn their games into nothing but grind simulators.
Let me explain something to you. People don’t have to be rewarded for doing events, doing dungeons, exploring the game, etc. However, when you want people to KEEP playing your game with the EXACT same events, dungeons, exploration, you have to put in an INCENTIVE for them to repeat things they’ve already done. Sure, it’s fun for the first time or first few times you do something. But it becomes monotonous, repetitive, boring. There needs to be a reason that players should be repeating content that they’ve already experienced.
Nope.
All of that is a rationalization to the idea of “I’m giving up on playing fun content, and instead am lowering myself to being a rat inside a Skinner box”. The moment you stop playing through content because it’s fun and begin playing through content you think is “monotonous, repetitive, boring” just to get a shiny reward, you are no better than a donkey chasing a carrot in front of its face. We already have too many MMOs like that, it’s about time we get one for human beings instead.
ArenaNet does not need to keep people playing Guild Wars 2 every day of every week for the rest of their lives. No one here is paying a monthly fee. It would be extremely simple to design a game focusing on giving a fun core experience, keeping players coming back once in a while by releasing periodical pieces of new content (like the monthly updates ArenaNet has been doing). The myth that a MMO needs grind to survive is a lie spread by players who need grind to survive.
The thing the game needs the most is a better community. One made not by farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters who have jumped in this game to play it like every other game in the long list of MMORPGs they have been hopping in and out. Rather, one made by people who don’t like other MMOs due to realizing how they are glorified Skinner boxes, and who want fun content made for human beings, not carrots for donkeys.
im changing it too Dungeons will really really cool skins that you can only get from running the dungeon.
That’s what dungeons have today.
Had I gotten a Molten Weapon ticket, I would have been stuck with something I did not want. Couldn’t give it to a guild member, couldn’t trade it, couldn’t sell it. WHY?!
So players can’t farm and buy those items with in-game gold, rather they would have to pay for them through the RNG with real life money in the in-game store.
The situation you describe above is exactly why the weapon tickets are account bound. If you want the greatsword, buy 100 tickets and get the shield, you could sell the skin at the TP and use the gold to buy the greatsword skin from someone who did the same thing. With account bound tickets, you are not going to be able to do this – your options are going to be either giving up, or buying more tickets in order to try again and again until you happen to find the skin you want. And “buying more tickets” is what ArenaNet wants you to do.
And then it all went downhill. As if I’d missed something critical, everyone started to do what I most loathe in games – exploits. Not botting, hacking, or whatever – massive moments of “well, just another MMO….”. People stacking at the feet of a dragon, people shouting for Warriors in map chat, people pulling the boss into one corner, doing the same exact thing in every Fractal because of dumb AI (I’m not blaming the developer, these things happen in every game, but they’re usually addressed quicker) In short, it broke the immersion that I was playing something truly unique. In a moment’s notice, it was all about the grind, the whole thing had become a job, as any other MMO tends to do.
This isn’t going to change. The reason why everyone began doing the above is because that’s what MMO players want. It didn’t matter that ArenaNet was trying to make a MMORPG different from all the others, less focused on grind and more focused on having fun – not only the game design itself was ambivalent, but the community itself has been, from the beginning, dominated by farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters. The kind that jumps from MMO to MMO devouring content like a locust cloud, and who wants nothing more than to do exactly what you described above.
Since release, that’s the kind of content we have been given by ArenaNet. Fractals to be grinded, Ascension gear to give a gear treadmill feeling to the game, Dragon events giving one rare per day so they can reliably be farmed, Southsun event made by a very poor story but with 200% Magic Find so people would flock there, and so on.
That’s how ArenaNet has been designing the game because that’s what the GW2 community wants. Interesting dynamic events? Good storytelling? Better personal storyline mission designs? Who cares? Not MMO players. People like you and me, who would like to play a Guild Wars version of Skyrim, may care about that kind of thing; we may even have been the main target audience around release. But not anymore – the game failed to bring a large amount of players who were not MMO players, and all those want is a pretty Skinner box.
No MMO will ever be different than what you described. The MMO community won’t let it be.
All the (Kitten)s are at CoF P1 Speed.
And in Fractals, and farming in Orr (but in the later you never have to talk to them, so it doesn’t make any difference).
Do notice how the more feline inclined players are the ones who concentrate on farming areas. See how farming is good for the game?
More skills. In GW1, each profession had like, 200+ skills or so. Some were better than others, obviously, but you still had an incredible amount of customization.
GW1 had too many skills. ArenaNet couldn’t come even close to balancing them all, which is why they just kept most skills underpowered, with a few being the really useful ones.
Worst, ArenaNet was adding too many skills. Each chapter had two new professions and a lot of skills for each old profession; making new chapters with less than that would allow players to complain that they would be paying the same for less content than previous chapters. But the true result was that ArenaNet had to kept adding more and more skills with each chapter, and we had already reached a point in which they didn’t know what to do.
This had less impact in most of PvE since it was so easy that almost any build worked. In PvP or in group PvE, though, it was clear that only a few builds were desirable. We even had some professions so broken that they needed major overhauls; some got it (dervish and elementalist, for example), some got part of it (ritualist), and some never got the overhaul they need and never will (paragon).
The idea in GW2 was that we would have less skills, but more balanced and thus more viable skills. Instead of GW1’s 1000 skills with 200 being really viable, in GW2 we would have 500 skill with all 500 of them being viable.
The real reason why adding more skills is a bad idea, though, is that the above has not worked. ArenaNet cannot properly balance even the skills currently available in the game. I’m really amazed that some people don’t see how adding even more skills would be utterly bad – it would be a sign that ArenaNet has given up on even trying to keep the game balanced.
Eric Flannum was the Lead Designer of Guild Wars 2, and during development he was one of the most talkative developers behind the game.
After release… He has disappeared. His linkedin profile still lists him as working at ArenaNet, now as a Game Director, but we haven’t heard anything about him in quite some time.
Has anyone heard something recently about him?
I agree with the OP.
There are multiple things ArenaNet could have rewarded the players for. They decided, however, to follow other MMOs and reward just time spent, instead of skill.
In pay to play MMORPGs, take makes sense. Those games are catering to the lowest denominator – they don’t want only the skilled players to be rewarded, they want everyone to have access to every reward… As long as they play long enough, which equals to as long as they keep paying those monthly fees for a very long time.
This is the aspect that has defined pay to play MMOs – the need to have mindless and rewarding time sinks to keep people hooked. Be it raids, mounts, gear-based PvP and etc, that’s the point of a pay to play MMORPG. The issue is that free to play and buy to play MMOs are following the same design, although it doesn’t make much sense in the absense of a pay to play scheme. It’s almost skeuomorphism.
…what achievements are their in game that can’t simply be grinded out?
Dungeon Master: you have to do each dungeon exactly once, instead of doing a single dungeon one hundred times.
World completition: you have to do each area once, instead of doing the same thing over and over.
Let’s create something that allow to unbind item.
No, bad idea, ruins the purpose of items being bound. Plus it’s a suggestion, so it should be in the suggestion forum.
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