Guild Wars 2

Iruwen.3164:

We already gain XP after level 80, there’s just no real use for it.

There is. That’s a weak argument, considering it’s wrong.

Bright.9160:

And why do you think there is such a small PvP scene? Because all the serious PvP’ers took off long ago

All serious PvPers had taken off long ago from GW1 as well. ArenaNet hasn’t exactly fixed all reasons why they left, so I doubt they would be willing to come back so easily.

The OP actually doesn’t mention the real issues behind GvG.

One, it would be one more PvP mode in the game, which would dilute the little PvP community this game has even more. I’m not sure the additional players who would be willing to do GvG would be enough to compensate for the loss of players from sPvP. We would risk changing from a single mode with few players to two PvP modes with very few players.

Two, ArenaNet kept struggling in GW1 to make a Guild versus Guild system that wasn’t just a matter of killing NPCs. The high number of changes to the “Victory or Death” mechanic in GW1 shows how ArenaNet didn’t really know a way to implement a polished GvG experience.

Three, with the ability to be in multiple guilds at the same time, it would be hard to prevent players from abusing whatever reward system ArenaNet implemented by creating fake guilds to be repeteadly defeated by the true guild, thus giving it free wins.

Vol.5241:

IKR? Shame on players who want to play more than others

Shame on players who believe they are entitled to more in-game rewards merely for playing more than others, despite being less skilled.

Uruz Six.6594:

Was Southsun a preview of things to come? For example, Magic / Gold Find NPCs spread across Tyria?

Yes. Not in having Magic Find NPCs across Tyria, but rather in making people play through new content not by having it to be fun or interesting, but rather by making it something easy to farm.

This is the price we, common players, pay for farmers. ArenaNet has learned that they don’t need to make a good, deep and interesting game – they can just keep adding Magic Find and farmers will keep farming.

I have often read people here saying, “Between farming and playing through the boring dungeons/dynamic events/storyline missions/etc, I would rather farm!”.

That is making the PvE part of the game even worse.

Let’s use the recent Southsun event as an example. ArenaNet could have use it to test a new, deeper and more branching system of dynamic events. They could have used it to implement longer, more complex and thus more interesting personal storyline missions. They could have use it to improve their in-game cinematics engine, and maybe even try to implement a way to add those “concept art cinematics” to the game more often.

The thing is, why would ArenaNet do any of that? If the goal was to fill Southsun with a lot of players, this was achieved by adding some easy to farm, simplistic and repetitive events (the instigator events, which were basically the same thing in two different points of the isle), together with high mob density and a 200% bonus to Magic Find.

ArenaNet has, then, no reason to actually bother implementing good PvE content in the game. It’s far easier to add farming grounds, since people flock to those anyway even if the content sidelining them is bad.

If players saw the bad storytelling, the boring dungeons, the hollow events and simply said “No, I won’t play this game until ArenaNet improves it”, then the developers would be forced to either sink or improve their game. When players say, “We will ignore all that bad content and just farm, then”, they are telling ArenaNet that players are happy by just being given somewhere to farm, and that actually making good content is not necessary.

In part, it is the players’ fault that PvE isn’t improving. As long as players accept bad but easy to farm PvE, the game won’t get any better.

the uprising.6317:

No they said the game was for everyone.

Not really.

Remember the Manifesto? “If you like MMOs, you will like Guild Wars 2. If you don’t like MMOs, you will really like Guild Wars 2”. With a bit of reading comprehension, it’s quite clear that ArenaNet’s target audience wasn’t the mass of MMO locusts who keep jumping from MMO to MMO looking for the next WoW clone, rather those players who are not deceived by the usual tricks employed by the current MMORPGs and who see them as the time sink Skinner boxes that they, in fact, are.

the uprising.6317:

I wish they told me the game wasn’t meant for the majority of ppl who actually LIKE MMO’s and were interested in a B2P one, before buying it…

See above. They did.

the uprising.6317:

Atm GW2 is not rewarding in terms of time put into the game or the amount skill/effort you put into it, just so the casual player can have his day in the sun and achieve just as much as people more dedicated to the game

Nope. What the game is telling you is that being “dedicated” – aka grinding mindlessly through easy and repetitive content for 10 hours per day every day for months, which is what people call “hardcore” these days – does not deserve a reward.

And it’s right.

That’s how real life works, too. 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.

Face it – the difference is that other MMOs are trying to cater to those who are willing to spend time (which means, who are willing to pay monthly fees for longer), and so call those players the “hardcore”, “dedicated” and so on. On a game like GW2, in which there is no monthly fees, players who waste a lot of time with mindless and easy content are just people who waste a lot of time, nothing more.

The Ignore feature was officially removed from this forum in February, after not working for months before that. Where is it?

This forum software is already extremely lackluster as it is. From the main forum subpages, we can’t see how many pages each topic has, we can’t pick which page we want to read first, we can’t see the last date of posting in any topic.

In a 1920×1200 resolution, most of my screen when reading this forum is a near blinding and empty white, and there are no alternatives to that skin. Text formatting is extremelly poor (although, truth be said, if players had the option I’m sure they would use font size 48 in all their text).

And now even something as commonplace as the Ignore feature has been left broken for more than six months? This is ArenaNet shooting its own feet. With an ignore feature in place, we would have less conflicts and as such less need for moderation.

the uprising.6317:

Really what’s WRONG with progression in a freaking PVE GAME. Let them hit boars and giraffe’s as hard as they want WHO CARES?

Everyone looking for a good PvE game.

Again, progression grind is not part of a good game. It’s part of an addiction. I’m sure most MMORPG players don’t even remember it, but in old RPGs the level cap was not something players were meant to achieve, just part of a levelling system made as an addendum to the game, not as its core. The goal of Final Fantasy 6 was not to reach the level cap (and it was actually pointless to do so), rather to experiment the story.

“But that’s a single player game, all MMOs are focused on level grind!” – that’s because all MMOs are mediocre games trying to be addictions, in order to keep players eternally paying a monthly fee. They won’t become actual games, much less good games, as long as all they try to be is huge grinds. And MMORPGs won’t ever become good games if MMO players continue to accept mediocre farming as their favourite addiction.

So the answer to the question “WHO CARES?” is, “everyone who’s trying to find a good massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, instead of the sick jokes that Skinner rats love so much”.

the uprising.6317:

So GW2 lets people play their way, unless that way is how most people play mmo’s?

Exactly. I would phrase it a bit differently, though – it’s “unless that way is how the Skinner hats like to press their levers”.

Dawdler.8521:

Awesome! A bloodstone shard, 250/250 ori crafting material and 20,000 crystaline dusts sounds good?

Too little, actually. Bloodstone Shard wouldn’t stop anyone, 500 pieces of orichalcum have easily found sources, and Crystalline Dust is found in multiple areas.

No, I would expect ArenaNet to make the recipe for precursors to be as frustrating as the current Mystic Toilet is. Something like 500 Charged Lodestone (together with a nerf to their drop rates from Orr boxes and from Fractals) together with 250 Pristine Fractal Relics, 100 laurels and something obtuse like 1000 dungeon tokens, with different dungeons for different precursors.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s all the “scavenger hunt” becomes, in fact: insane grind to get something that is just a component in the massive Legendary grind.

Kylindra.1794:

I realize that armor skins are probably an order of magnitude more work than weapon skins, but…..are we going to see some new options? Like, ever? Please?

Expansion content.

pricer.5091:

And once you have achieved Level 80 and done every fractal, every dungeon, every map, every DE and every world boss many many times, there really is no point in playing, unless you count logging on for the two hours it takes to complete any of the so called content patches they’ve been releasing.

So after playing 100+ hours of content, you don’t see the point of playing more beyond the monthly content ArenaNet keeps adding to the game?

And you think that’s a bad thing because…?

Actually, don’t answer. I’ll answer for you:

pricer.5091:

In fact I played games back in the 80’s that were more addictive than this one.

Guild Wars 2 is a game. It’s not trying to be an addiction. That’s what all the other MMOs are (they’re also mediocre games). The fact GW2 isn’t addictive isn’t a flaw – it’s one of the best design decisions in the game. Besides…

pricer.5091:

Honestly, I’m smoking a cigarette and drinking a Whisky.

…Don’t you already have too many vices, anyway?

What is implied when someone says “I want raids” is “I want one more WoW clone, with content made to a small minority of players who want to join a 40 people instance with tanks and DPS and healers, in which the goal is to defeat a boss to roll under a 0,001% chance that someone in our group will get the piece of loot we are all looking for; we want to get that loot as fast as possible, but of course this kind of content needs to be gated so it’s only available once per week”.

Mada.5319:

Darkever.9732:

Farming is not fun

Who are you to say what people find fun? What you may find boring, others may not.

People often lie to themselves. Want to see an example?

Mada.5319:

What about the rest of us who only got 20 minutes spare time and wanna just relax while killing things? Am I not allowed to achieve anything in that short time I have available?

If you really had fun farming, you wouldn’t need a reward for doing so – you would be happy with the experience itself, and not need to be given loot to feel like you have “achieved” anything.

Those who defend farming are so disconnected from their own speech that they don’t even see the glaring flaws in their own arguments. Saying “I have fun farming but only if I’m rewarded for it” is the same as saying “I’m going to the movies to see something I really like, but I will only be happy if someone gives me money at the exit!”. Both statements are false.

Faerun.3091:

Or make them fun to play. Most of those bosses are pretty static.

This is what I would like to see as well. Killing the Shatterer is incredibly boring – if you stay still and auto-attack, you will likely kill it. Jormag is probably the best dragon champion, and even it is lacking in many aspects.

KorbanDallas.7389:

Looking at it like that, any and all games require some form of grind. If I’m playing a shooting game, I have to grind my way through enemies with guns. Or maybe I’m playing a text adventure, and I have to grind my way through all that dialogue.

I disagree with you. In a shooting game, the goal is to shoot enemies – if you don’t think that is fun, you would simply not play the game. In the text adventure, the goal is to read the dialogue – if you don’t think it’s fun, you would not play the game.

Same thing with eating an apple pie. If you like apple pie, you would be happy eating one; if you don’t like apple pie, you would not eat it, period.

MMOs don’t work that way. For many players, the MMO is about getting rewards through content that is not fun. See the popularity of the old “kill ten rats” quests – I doubt someone would say the goal of a game was to kill a given number of all enemies in the map. But people did exactly that in order to get the reward for it.

It’s like someone being told, “I know you hate apple pie, but if you eat 100 of them, I will pay you one hundred dolars”.

Thanks to MMORPGs, and to the players who accept them, the focus of many games are switching from the experience (I eat pie because I like apple pie) to the reward (I hate apple pie, but I will eat it because I will get paid for doing so). It’s absurd that people are willing to accept this, especially for something as irrelevant as rewards in a game, but that’s what people want, and so that’s what MMO developers are offering them.

TheUndefined.1720:

But what many players are totally not realizing is the fact that exploits are making you a bad player in the long run.

I don’t think most people care.

Think about it. MMO players are those guys who made “kill ten rats” quests so popular. They are not concerned about being skilled. They are not concerned about having fun. They want to farm and grind (and exploit, since it’s almost the same thing).

That’s the main issue. ArenaNet could make a dungeon that were fun, but unless people could farm it, they wouldn’t play there. At the same time, ArenaNet can make a dungeon that is not fun, but if it has a big enough reward people will farm it 24 hours per day.

This is the crux of the issue. A farmer wants to play through a dungeon as fast as possible because he doesn’t want to play through that dungeon – he wants the reward he gets for it, the dungeon itself is just a required step to be rid of as soon as possible. Hence all the elitism, all the profession discrimination (demanding warriors in berseker gear only happens because no one is trying to have fun in those dungeons, just get done with them as soon as possible), the demands for a /inspect feature, and so on. Exploiters are just one small step ahead on the same scale – they also don’t have fun, they also want to go through those dungeons as quick as possible, and they also are doing everything they can, even if it’s detrimental to the game, to get the reward they want. If farmers abuse other players, exploiters abuse the game, but in the end it’s almost the same thing.

So no, your claims about exploiting making people worse players are not going to be heard. Farmers and exploiters don’t care about skill, or fun, or anything like that. All they care about is the reward; and the only way to prevent them from farming/exploiting is to nerf the farming, or nerf the reward itself.

Vol.5241:

Erasculio.2914:

Vol.5241:

Sooo what I’m understanding is that people who like to be wealthy and gain as much gold as possible (for the sake of experience) are pretty bad players and should be banned?

Do you think the players who exploited the snowflake issue deserved to be banned? They were people who liked to be wealthy and wished to gain as much gold as possible, and I’m not so sure they were unskilled players.

And if you think they deserved to have been banned, why? Because they hurt the economy of the game? But didn’t they increase the supply of ectos, thus lowering those prices, pretty much like farmers increase the supply of rare items in the game and (supposedly) decrease their prices?

So just cause they increase the supply of items by playing a lot more than a casual player means they should be banned?.

I was asking you questions, not making a statement. I would still like to see your replies about the snowflake incident.

Vol.5241:

Sooo what I’m understanding is that people who like to be wealthy and gain as much gold as possible (for the sake of experience) are pretty bad players and should be banned?

Do you think the players who exploited the snowflake issue deserved to be banned? They were people who liked to be wealthy and wished to gain as much gold as possible, and I’m not so sure they were unskilled players.

And if you think they deserved to have been banned, why? Because they hurt the economy of the game? But didn’t they increase the supply of ectos, thus lowering those prices, pretty much like farmers increase the supply of rare items in the game and (supposedly) decrease their prices?

This is a bad idea. People would focus too much on DPS and ignore everything else.

“But the meter would show everything, not only DPS” – even assuming meters could display everything, that would be useless. Just as today people want only to see offensive stats and ignore defensive stats, people would ignore everything else and focus only on DPS. Someone showing that he healed a lot of team members but did little DPS would be kicked as quickly as someone today wearing Healing Power gear.

“But today people are already elitist with profession and stats!” – and that’s an issue ArenaNet should fix, not a problem to increase even more. The OP is also assuming that a DPS meter would make people ignore profession and gear, focusing instead on DPS; but I don’t believe in that. People will find a specific profession + armor + build combination that has higher DPS than everything else, and accept only that combination, nothing else. We would see even less diversity, not more. Even if ArenaNet were to nerf that specific combination, people would jump to the second highest DPS one, and so on; ArenaNet would never be able to reach a state of balance in which multiple professions with multiple stats and multiple builds have the exact same DPS.

Vol.5241:

Well, who am I to argue against someone who thinks farmers (or grinders according to you) are on the same level as exploiters.

They are. In both cases, you have someone who is doing something not for the sake of the experience, but for the sake of the result. The farmer who doesn’t like CoF but is running it over and over to get gold for ectos is very similar to the guy who exploited the snowflake salvaging to get more ectos: both are not enjoying what they are doing, both want to get done with it as soon as possible, and both are in it only for the result. It’s even questionable if the impact from the extra ectos added to the game by those exploiters was that much worse than the elitism introduced in the game by the CoF farmers who, not enjoying the dungeon and thus wishing to clear it as fast as possible, only accept Berzeker warriors in their teams.

Vol.5241:

Farming =/ grinding

That is the kind of petty, meaningless semantic argument I expect when someone has no real counter to an argument. Farming is the same as grinding, with the exact same negative connotation as in someone wasting time doing a mindless and easy activity (that a bot could do better than a human being) for the sake of a shiny reward in the end. Much like a donkey chasing a carrot in front of its face, and definitely not any smarter.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Sorry, 100% map exploration and lots of other time spent in this game, and farming is actually more enjoyable than the vapid PvE content currently on offer in this game.

And that is your fault. Farmers don’t help the economy – it’s not a matter only of supply and demand, but also a matter of concentrating wealth in the hands of a minority, together will all the impact from people who don’t really want to play the game, just exploit the game.

But the worst aspect of farmers is how they are responsible for making MMOs mediocre. ArenaNet wants people to play the game; if no one played it because PvE is bad, ArenaNet would have to either improve the game or sink. But in reality they don’t have to – they know they don’t need to actually bother making good content because there is a horde of players willing to mindlessly farm through bad content just to get a shiny reward in the end, and thus ArenaNet knows that having only “vapid PvE content” is fine as long as they slap it with 200% Magic Find.

cesmode.4257:

To Arenanet: I WANT to farm. Why can’t I do this? This is how I want to play the game. Isn’t that what you have been preaching? “Play how you want to play”?

Actually, if you watch the Manifesto to see what ArenaNet was preaching, you would have heard they saying “We don’t want players to grind”. Not “we don’t want to force players to grind”, but rather “We don’t want players to grind”. They have stated with all letters that they don’t want you to grind, and still you claim you want to?

The issue isn’t that ArenaNet nerfs farming. It’s that they don’t nerf farming enough. Farmers and grinders are the ones responsible for how mediocre MMORPGs are – they tell developers that they don’t want fun and deep content, rather they want to be Skinner rats mindlessly pressing their tiny levers for shiny rewards. ArenaNet has made many bad design decisions, but the original idea was that this game was going to be something for human beings, not for rats. Each nerf on farming pushes some of the mice away, but doing things like the entire Southsun event (horrible storytelling, but 200% magic find and quick spawning events with unlimited reward chests) is like adding a big piece of rotten cheese in the game: the rats love it, but it’s still putrid.

ArenaNet should cull all the farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters. This not only would improve significantly improve the community, but also allow the studio to focus on building good content, instead of Farming 101.

What annoys me more than the skins is how limited the weapons and armors are. You cannot sell them, you cannot salvage them, you cannot throw them into the Mystic Forge, and they are Soulbound, not even Account bound.

In other words, they are mostly useless, from a mechanics point of view.

We call them The Shatterer, The Claw of Jormag and Tequatl the Sunless, which players periodically gather to mindless bash hoping those big fat piñatas will give them a precursor.

A “Dragon Bash” event would have been the perfect opportunity to improve those dynamic events and actually make them something interesting, that could be failed. People would likely continue to mindlessly farm them (since that’s all some players want to do), but at least it would cater to those players who want to have fun, too.

KorbanDallas.7389:

It’s like everyone who argues that the game is only farming with anti-farming tactics refuse to see that it isn’t all about farming. If you want me to elaborate at all, feel free to ask and I’ll do my best.

The game is not only about farming. But it’s too much about farming.

All rewards in the game require some sort of grind. Want a full dungeon armor set? Be ready to do that dungeon 23 times. Despite how someone who can do a given path twice can do the same thing 5 more times without anything more than time.

“But I like to mix and match” – nice for you, but the dungeon armor pieces have clearly been made to be used together, with those mixing and matching being the exception.

Want cultural armor? Go grind your eyes away farming gold. Want to craft your own exotic gear? Good luck grinding globs of ectoplasm (which is the worst grind in the game). Want to craft Legendary items? You’re in for the grind of your life.

Grind is bad. Doing content that is not fun just to get a shining reward in the end is not something a human being would do, it’s what a donkey with a carrot in front of its head would do. It’s not only mindless, but it’s also something that a bot can do better than a human being. It simply does not deserve a reward, much less to the main source of rewards in a game.

MMO developers love grind, since they believe it will allow them to get rich by making shallow, mediocre games. But players should have be better than that (and unfortunately they aren’t). And ArenaNet claimed they were better than that, but it appears the GW2 community has convinced them to change their ways.

Vol.5241:

That’s why I tell people it’s foolish to hate on ‘grinding’ or ‘farming’

I it’s foolish to defend “grinding” or “farming”. It’s basically saying that it’s better to do content that isn’t fun in exchange for a meaningless reward than doing nothing. Or, in other words, it’s proving that not all human beings are humans, rather they are big rats happily living in Skinner boxes.

The idea that you need to be playing a game every day of every week for every month for the rest of your life is a lie told by pay-to-play MMORPG developers, who need players to do that in order to get rich. Unfortunatelly, the success of WoW taught developers that yes, there are enough addicts in the world to fall for that. The result is the often heard mentality of “a MMO cannot exist without grind”, which must sound like a dream come true to MMO developers.

Meanwhile, single player games need solid content, to keep players interested enough so they are willing to buy a sequel, and to keep themselves relevant over time by releasing additional content on the long run. That MMORPG players cannot understand how MMOs should follow this exact same model – which, incidentally, is what GW2 is trying to do – shows how MMOs are doomed to be always mediocre games, since that’s what their players want.

Vayne.8563:

I’m not sure why people don’t understand that once a rare drop ceases to be rare, it’s not worth as much and as a result, you don’t get as much for it.

Because that’s the kind of reasoning a farmer would use (being concerned about the value of an item, and not what that item is), or someone who needs external validation would use.

I’m going to get Sunrise for one of my characters, eventually (in about 10 years). That’s because I like the skin of that sword. If everyone suddenly woke up tomorrow and found a chest giving them a Sunrise… Would that make the sword any less valuable to me? No, I want it because I like the skin, and the skin won’t become any uglier if everyone in the game has it, nor would it be any prettier if I were the only person in the game who had it.

That is because I don’t need external validation. I don’t have the delusion that having an item that requires a lot of grind in a computer game, no matter how ugly that item is, is a source of “status”. I don’t care about what other people think that much.

Do you know people who, in GW1, kept a character wearing FoW armor with Chaos Gloves (because that was one of the most expensive armor combinations in the game) despite not even liking that look? That’s the kind of person who needs external validation, and who wants every drop in the game to be as rare as possible (ideally after that person got it). For this kind of player, the best we can feel is pity.

stale.9785:

(I’m not alone in this – probably 8 in every 10 suggestions in the ranger forums are asking to simply to make the pet optional – Anet has said this won’t happen, so I’d settle for making the pet inconsequential if you’re not speccing for it.)

This is, of course, a very bad idea. You are basically saying “I would like to make pets optional, but since ArenaNet won’t do that I would like them to make them so irrelevant that you can ignore them if you want to, effectively being a kitten way to make them optional”.

That’s just poor design. Either make pets optional, or do not make them optional. Trying to find an in-between just to save face is rather silly.

Half of what a ranger does should be based on the pet. The issue is that the pet is right now not worth the effort – there is no fluid way to control it. If there were and using the pet were more active than it is today, the ranger would be a great, pet-focused profession.

Countess Aire.9410:

The mission to save the captive villagers from the Krait. I removed all the Kriat on the platform. Before I could even find a key to release one prisoner the Krait had all repopulated. I can understand making the game interesting, but when a simple free the prisoners turns into a constant fight.

I’m not sure you understand how dynamic events work. The one you are talking about, “Free villagers from Krait’s Larder”, is about freeing the prisioners while holding the Krait back. It is meant to be “a constant fight”, much like the other dynamic events; it’s not like killing enemies just standing there in the world, which spawn much slower.

Ryuujin.8236:

it includes a whole row of minor dedicated to interruption that NOBODY uses

Diversion, the profession skill 3, is an interrupt, which means all mesmers have access to interrupts whenever they have some illusion around. It’s not something “NOBODY uses”. Even if you think the interrupt effect itself is weak (and it isn’t), it’s better to have traits improving things that are just good than traits making overpowered things even more overpowered.

This is a bad idea.

Not all traits need to be changed. Many of them are quite fine as they are. Even some of those considered “bad” by most players, such as flat 10% increases, do have their places among traits.

Changing ALL traits feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the way some traits are bad. This won’t lead to a fix – making so many big changes will take a very long time, and ArenaNet will need even longer to balance everything after those changes have been first implemented.

Instead of changing everything, they should focus on changing the really bad and the bad traits, leaving everything else as it is today.

Chamolin.4530:

Those of us who put in the work are not well recognized

You don’t really deserve any recognition. Making a Legendary is not hard. Time consuming, sure, but not hard – if not by the (fastest) aspects of a Legendary that actually require completing the map, doing something in WvW and doing a few dungeons, it’s easy to see that a bot could get a Legendary – it’s perfectly capable of farming mindlessly for a very long time, which is the biggest requirement for a Legendary.

ArenaNet claimed they didn’t want players to grind in the Manifesto, but in the end they have taken the main rewards of the game and made them a prize for grinding. This is one more example of how the MMO mentality – that MMOs are bad games designed as just farming grounds for those addicted to that lifestyle – hurts GW2.

Full Berseker gear is all you need to get your warrior into any dungeon group.

PissedOffRyno.5381:

I understand this is a late-game class, and that it’s highly dependent on the abilities of the player, rather than it’s class abilities.

It’s the ganking profession, seen in every MMO nowadays. My suggestion is to join WvW and gank people there until you are level 80, then go back to PvE with stats high enough to play through all content with more or less any build. Level scalling still doesn’t make a fully geared level 80 character that much weaker in low level areas.

stayBlind.7849:

The ‘completely unapproachable’ difficulty is what kept me from getting bored with the game during the first month that I played it.

The poster you are quoting wrote it poorly, but the issue is that Guild Wars 1 has simply too many skills. ArenaNet itself cannot balance them. In fact, they have had to overhaul some professions, make sweeping changes in one more, and leave one profession broken now that they have stopped balance changes.

In order to keep PvP more or less balanced, ArenaNet just kept a high number of skills underpowered, so they would get out of the way when balancing the game. The result is that a game with 1000 skills had actually 250 viable skills which everyone used all the time.

The idea behind GW2 is that we would have less skills, but all of them would be viable, so we would have less than the 1000 skills in GW1 but more than the 250 viable skills there.

That idea unfortunatelly failed. ArenaNet cannot keep up to balance the game properly even with less skills. Which is just proof of how having more skills than we currently do would actually be worse, as the game would be even less balanced than it is right now.

Elbows.8461:

Elite skills suffer from a different set of problems. The majority of them do not synergize with or enhance your “goal” in what you do. 4 professions have 2 out of 3 elite skills that change your skill bar entirely. Elite skills that add utility in this way are definately cool, but this is way, way overdone. Most of the time it feels as though you’ve built your character for some specific purpose plotting out your stats/gear/skill combos, and then your biggest baddest move has very little to do with it. It almost feels like getting inside of a vehicle in WoW. PS: Why no elite skill capping/more elite skills? Exploring the world and pushing progression to snag that next elite skill to play around with was super ultra mega fun.

You are playing Guild Wars 2 expecting it to be Guild Wars 1.

In GW1, elite skills were usually the core of a build. The rest of the build would be built around the elite, if not directly linked to it at least taking it in consideration. In GW2, this has been changed so the weapon skills are the core of a build. It’s as expected, then, that the elite skills would become significantly less important, and lose most of their synergism with the rest of the skill bar.

In the context of GW2, this isn’t a bad thing. Elite skills have become more like unique resources to be used sporadically and less the powerful, almost always available skills they were in GW1, so it’s only to be expected that they would be seem as less important in the game.

HugoCosta.6735:

Meglobob.8620:

Elbegast.6970:

Heroes/Henchmen/Mercenaries

This^

If you will do dungeons, so it’s ok

That’s what I would like to see as well. Keep them out of the open world, since other people are not really needed there, but they are a must to make dungeons playable.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Gizmo.9178:

After 12 pages I think the question has been answered in every possible way…

Actually it was answered every possible way about 2 months and 9 pages ago

But the topic never dies:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Inspect-1/first#post1357523
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/GW2-Armory-or-inspect
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Inspect-Characters
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Inspect
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Please-Add-An-Option-To-Inspect-Other-Players/381589
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Inspect-Gear-Option-REQUIRED/1294689
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Armor-Inspecting/49067

et cetera et cetera and so on

I see a funny pattern that those advocating an inspect feature since they are forced to play with others are the kind of person I don’t want to play with. Why don’t all of them join the same guild and keep updated listing of all gear each other is using, based on periodically checking in-game? Would remove their “need” to play with other, common players and instead allow themselves to play with similarly-minded people. For as much good as that would do.

Aeonblade.8709:

Also, getting something for farming hundreds of thousands of karma reliably instead of a .9% chance would be nice too.

You deserve as much for farming “hundreds of thousands of karma” as a Skinner’s rat deverses for reliably pressing its cute little lever one hundred times. When you do something that requires skill instead of mindless farming, please let us know.

Mirta.5029:

And why is that a bad thing? They will have more money than him, yeah, but at least the casual will be able to afford his waypoint/ repair costs.

And nothing else. Meanwhile, farmers swin in Legendaries. Without those people, all prices would be flatter so more people would afford all items in the game, creating a more equal market.

pricer.5091:

No sorry, you are wrong. I play enough hours and have continuously played enough hours to NOT be basing on this speculation. The loot I am receiving is definitely, categorically a lot worse and has continued to decline with every patch since November. FACT

Wrong. Rather obviously wrong, for the records. That’s easy to learn, by the way. Do you know why? Because…

Bloodstealer.5978:

One could ask .. do you have proof that they weren’t nerfed?… No, ooh that’s good we cleared that up then I guess….

…I simply have a brain. If ectos had been nerfed as often as those players accused ArenaNet of lying to them, there would be no ectos in the game anymore as the drop rate would have been nerfed to near zero.

Is that what you see happening in the game? No? You’re welcome for having that cleared up.

Geotherma.2395:

Are you going to copy and paste this in every single thread?

In every single topic in which farmers get on their soapbox to complain about an imaginary nerf to the drop rates. It’s not my fault that we get weekly topics like that, all claiming that loot has been nerfed in the last few days.

Mirta.5029:

let’s assume that less hardcore players don’t run CoF infinite times for money. Let’s say they decided to do an event in Orr, got a heavy moldy bag, opened it and found T6 blood. Without open world farmers the prices would stabilize at about 60 silver. With open world farmers the price is brought down to 20 silver or bellow.

Cute. Would (maybe) be true if economy were that simple. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Do you remember that casual player you have mentioned? He’s not dealing only with supply and demand. He’s also dealing with trading post exploiters who artificially inflate prices by placing a lot of low buy and high sell orders, so those 20 silvers would have increased to 40. He has to deal with farmers who concentrate gold in their hands and thus can afford to buy more expensive items, thus increasing prices due to the minority while keeping items out of the hands of the majority; those 40 silvers increase to 60.

“Oh look, a casual who gets that item can sell it for 60 silver, like everyone else!”. True. He will get one or two of those. Meanwhile, farmers will get one hundred, and so will be able to dominate the economy.

Farmers, grinders, addicts and exploiters are bad for other players. They artificially inflate prices beyond what extra supply they add to the game. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the precursor market – one casual could maybe find one in an year and become rich, sure, but all other casuals won’t get any and won’t afford any, while farmers and TP exploiters are buying and selling multiples of them among themselves.

anzenketh.3759:

Looking at volume of sales I do not see a decrease in sales of Tier 6 mats.

I wish we could see how many Tier 6 mats the OP here is trying to sell. I would guess quite a lot, to go to all the trouble of trying to pretend their drop rate has been nerfed.

katniss.6735:

So I’m trying to do some things solo to get some enjoyment out of the game

At the same time…

katniss.6735:

Grinding/ farming is not fun

Ergo, you are lying. Either you are specifically trying to not have fun, or you are saying that grinding/farming is fun. Otherwise you would not be talking about how you keep farming again and again.

“But…But…I want to farm because I want to get gold to buy stuff, and farming is the only way to do that” – that’s an excuse. If that were really the issue, you wouldn’t be complaining about now ArenaNet nerfed farming, you would be asking ArenaNet to add fun ways to get gold.

I like this topic. It shows everything that is wrong with the GW2 community (and there is A LOT wrong with it, clearly).

Buttercup.5871:

Mind sharing on what your conclusion is based? Because as far as I can remember, the loot nerf that players had reported for months, and which was initially denied by Anet’s staff for months, was eventually confirmed to by Anet to be true. It was caused by a “bug” which ignored people’s contribution to a mob kill to be registered. As a result, they didn’t get any loot.

Nope. You remember it wrong. The bug which made people get less drops when killing enemies with a lot of health, such as champions, had been in the game since release. All that whining about a “nerf” to the drop rate was just that, empty whining.

Just like this.

And this.

And here, too.

And that other time.

And of course here.

If all those topics were true, there would be no ectos in the game anymore.

Ergo, I have proof that this community usually whines over non existing nerfs to drop rates. Do you have proof that loot has EVER been stealth nerfed? No? Such a pity.

LordByron.8369:

Frankly would be the third if not fourth “accidental” nerf discovered by players….

Nope. It would be the tenth time players stand on their soap box to complain about a nerf that doesn’t exist, due to lack of knowledge about statistics. This community loves lying through their teeth about drop rates. Most do it out of sheer ignorance, a few do it to artificially increase the price of items they are selling in the TP.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I don’t know what to say, exactly, except we aren’t ALL doing the ‘gimme gimme loot as fast as possible’ thing. =)

And you will soon become irrelevant, since ArenaNet is making content to cater to the (farming, grind-addict) majority, so the minority actually trying to have fun will soon find itself ignored by the developers.

MeGaZlo.9516:

No need to be a psychologist to know that most people in most MMOs are looking for one thing – profit.

In other words, MMO players are grinders. Your entire reasoning crumbles under your own argument – increasing the karma of all events wouldn’t make people do all events, it would lead people to farm the most profitable event over and over. The farm mob at Orr would only move to the area with the highest karma per time, and still leave the rest of the world empty.

If you assume players are just Skinner’s rats looking for the biggest lever to press, increasing most levers won’t do a thing – they will just seek which lever is the biggest and keeping pressing it, to the detriment of everything else.