So what’s the problem?
You are being too naive.
MMOs became popular during the “pay to play” times. Then, it was in a developer’s best interest to build (with as little effort as possible) content that kept people playing (and thus paying monthly fees) for as long as possible. The solution? Grind.
Now, the catch is that it took MMO developers some time to get that people would actually accept grind. There’s an old interview from Blizzard developers in which they mention how they were surprised by how people played WoW: Blizzard had built a fun way to achieve something, but most players actually reached that goal by farming instead of by having fun.
MMO players themselves told game developers they don’t care about having fun – they want to grind. This is perfect for the MMO developers. They want as many people as possible to play as long as possible, and as such the reward system built into MMOs has been made to cater to the lowest denominator: it doesn’t reward skill (since not everyone is skilled), nor inteligence (since not everyone is inteligent), but rather time – and by telling players “No matter how weak, ugly or incompetent you are, if you give enough of your time you will get all rewards here”, MMO developers got people to waste months of their lives grinding through content even those players don’t think is fun, all the while paying monthly fees.
WoW followed this model. As WoW was most people’s first MMO (and everyone who says otherwise is just very bad at math), this kind of design soon became synonym with “MMORPG”.
Today, when you say a game is a MMORPG, the unspoken assumption is that it’s basically a grind-filled, farming-based time sink. And that’s what millions of players want. If a MMORPG were released following a different model, those players would complain and whine that it was not a true MMORPG.
This is why you get so many comments in this forum stating things such as:
“All MMOs have grind, that’s part of the genre.”
“You need to have farming in a MMO, otherwise it won’t be a true MMORPG.”
And so on. The most intellectually challenged among them will even say “What does it matter to you if there is farming in the game? Just don’t do it if you don’t want to”. Which is a pretty way of ignoring what goes into developing a game. Just take a look at Guild Wars 2: we slowly went from dungeons with a story mode to dungeons meant to be farmed over and over with no story at all (Fractals of the Mist), and from having a personal storyline to an island filled with repetitive events and incredibly bad storytelling, but with 200% magic find. All those additions to the game have been huge successes, and do you know why?
Because that’s what MMO players want. Grind, farming, and so on. Like addicts seeking one more fix, that’s the main concern here. Good storytelling, interesting dynamic events, challenging content? Who cares? Content that can easily be farmed is enough. And if that’s what players want, if they are so easily pleased, why would ArenaNet actually try to build fun and interesting content, only to have it going to waste as people just try to find where to farm?
MMORPGs are grinding and farming games, that’s all the current MMO players want them to be, and as such there is no reason for a MMO developer to add great stories or great gameplay or anything else to those games. Don’t expect the storyline to become any better in Guild Wars 2, or to see any successful MMO doing a better job at telling a story – that’s not what the target audience cares about.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
I sincerely doubt that most farmers spend all their time farming simply because they like running in circles killing the same mobs in endless repetition.
I disagree with you. I believe farmers spend their time farming because they enjoy getting those rewards. MMOs have been built on the foundation that the only requirement for getting rewards is time, not skill or intelligence or knowledge; that’s a relic from the pay to play games in which the goal was to keep people playing longer, but that’s what MMO players got used to. As a result, what those players seek are mindless, easy and repetitive activities that will give them their “fix” (be it a +1 to some random stats – which they call “progression” – or some kind of unique item or just more in-game money), without worrying if the process of earning said “fix” is fun or not.
Skinner’s rat, human edition.
It works. It sells. In fact, it sells millions, as WoW has shown us. Developers have been trying to get a slice of the WoW pie for years now. More disturbingly, those players who think being a Skinner’s rat actually equals playing a game have associated this kind of lifestyle to MMOs. That’s what they expect when a new MMO is released, that is what they demand from a MMO developer, and that’s what they ultimately want, to the detriment of everything else.
Thus, that’s what MMOs are. Players who want something else don’t even bother to try MMOs anymore, and the few who do soon find themselves swimming in a sea of rats. Unfortunatelly for game developers, there aren’t enough people in the world willing to accept this kind of “game” in order to keep multiple MMOs afloat, hence the failure of MMO after MMO – is there anything still pay to play other than WoW? Even Rift is going free to play.
There is no salvation for MMORPGs because the MMORPG players are the core of the issue right now. Until the genre dies and its style of “play” is gone, so it can have a rebirth, I doubt very much we will see any MMO being and keeping itself as more than “Grinding 101”.
Not even a week in and im 90% certain iv wasted money on this game.
All those aspects of the game have been widely known for a very long time now. Anyone who actually read something about the game before purchasing it would have learned those things. For someone who buys a game based on name alone, well, you know the saying, “a fool and his money…”.
@Erasculio: obviously they are smart enough to notice, that this time there are a lot more players with relevant sample sizes
Looks like a lot of players who lack knowledge about statistics. Little surprise given previous discussions about similar subjects. I expect the exact same thing to happen: ArenaNet to state (correctly) that nothing has changed (which they have already done), and then later pay lip service so people stop complaining.
/philosophical soap box to try to better humanity through the internet….maybe a lost cause.
MMOs are not good games. They are not meant to be good games, most of the time. GW2 was trying to be one, but the issue is now out of a developer’s hands – those who are left playing MMOs are those who don’t want a good game, rather those who want a grind.
This is obvious in Southsun. Good storytelling, interesting dynamic events, a deep change to the world? No, 200% Magic Find and some unique looking items if you do some achievements, plus the good old RNG boxes. That’s what ArenaNet gave its community because that’s what the GW2 community wanted – you can easily see how the most played aspects of the game are those that this community grinds and farms. Fractals, CoF path 1, farming events in Orr, farming the dragon events? That’s where you will see the highest concentration of players.
A sane developer give its players what they want. The GW2 community has made very clear that they want loot and grind, not a good game.
Yes, I’m sure ArenaNet has nerfed the rate of ecto salvaging.
Just like this time.
And this time.
And here, too.
And that other time.
And of course here.
People should read this. I’m going to be incredibly disappointed with ArenaNet if they are actually bothering to check if the drop rate of ectos has been bugged in the last patch or not. The company itself, at least, should be smarter than that.
There’s really no way to have an open world design with permanent changes after a dynamic event. Every event would be one-time and technically never come back regardless of success or failure. So the 4 players that completed the event would be the only people to ever see the event unfold.
There isn’t any need to have permanent changes, just changes. A perfect example: in the Charr starting area, there’s an event in which ghosts attack a Charr camp. Once the event is lost, the camp is completely destroyed – it’s not like some areas in which the buildings stay there and the NPCs stay dead, the camp is completely gone. It stays so for a while, with other events happening in the area, until a considerably later time when the Charr send some scouts to rebuild the camp. If this event suceeds, it then continues with the Charr using the recently built camp to stage attacks deeper on Charr territory, triggering other events. And this isn’t even a meta event.
The differences between this and most Southsun events are huge:
Southsun goes against what even ArenaNet acknowledged as being good event design. The events in Southsun are perfect for farming – they happen in very short intervals, they have the same scenarios with no change in the world, and they are very simple. It’s not surprising to see the free 200% boost to Magic Find there.
I guess I’m just sad that, instead of exploring the full potential of dynamic events, ArenaNet went against their own vision and built “Farming 101”. I guess this is the kind of content the GW2 community wants, though.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
Dynamic Events are arguably one of Guild Wars 2’s best and most promising aspects. They are of variable degrees of quality, sure, but ArenaNet made some statements in which they seemed to understand the most common flaws of DEs; for example, Colin mentioned how the Dragon events cannot really fail, how they don’t really change the world, and how ArenaNet would eventually deal with those issues.
It is, then, mind boogling to see how Southsun is now filled with events with exactly those same issues. The instigator events cannot be failed, for example. The “protect the victim from an angry mob” event can fail, but nothing happens if it does (nothing happens if it succeeds either, for the records). All current events in Southsun are like that: they are meaningless, both because they have absolutely no impact on the world, and because they repeat over and over within the spaw of a few minutes.
An event that doesn’t change anything if it succeeds, cannot fail, and has a cycle of 3 minutes is not really a dynamic event – it’s just a farm. Considering how the GW2 community has a lot of farmers, addicts and grinders, I’m sure a lot of players must be happy with this kind of design. It’s a huge waste of one of Guild Wars 2’s best concepts, though.
I’m just going to link to this post, and leave it there as to why I’m happy that the OP is disappointed.
Except that the reason you can ignore them is not because they are useless, but because you can complete them by just enjoying the game.
By doing dynamic events, based on what Vayne and some others have said. In other words, dynamic events are (some times) great, yes. Hearts, meanwhile, are meaningless – the fact they can be ignored and just done automatically while people are doing some other kind of content (when that’s possible) is a great way to show how weak hearts are. The fact some posters here have adamantly used this argument to defend hearts is also a great way to show how bad they are – even those trying to defend them cannot use any better point than “they don’t get in the way”.
Hearts should have been some kind of content that people activelly do because they enjoy doing them (regardless of any reward), or they should just have been removed from the game.
You can achieve most hearts by doing dynamic events near them (except for 2-3 out of 301 hearts) that’s also a fact.
Wrong. A quick look at the lists of hearts shows it’s more than “2-3”. Your “fact” is a joke.
More humorously, you don’t even understand the argument you are trying to defend. Vayne claimed my criticism of hearts was too harsh because he never has sto stop to do them – he just plays the nearby dynamic events, and that fills the hearts. In other words, he just ignores them. If the best thing you can say about an aspect of the game is that you can ignore it, it deserves to be harshly criticized.
while accusing everybody who disagrees with your “infallible” arguments
My arguments are infallible since no one here has managed to refute them. The great majority has not even tried.
This topic has 3 main discussions:
1. “Your review is your opinion”. Which is a pleonasm.
2. “Hearts can be ignored since doing dynamic events fills them”. That’s not true, as I have already proved taking examples from the game. Even if it were, though, that’s a weak argument, as described above (since when is ignoring an aspect of the game a sign that it has been well developed?).
3. “You are trolling”. Ad hominem may be the most common logical fallacy on the internet, but it’s still the weakest one.
The review, that some people are complaining is too long, is long because it has points about most aspects of the game. I am still waiting to see a decent, logical counter-argument to the points there. So far, Vayne has tried to counter one line (and has been proved to be wrong), and a single other person has tried to counter with some random nonsense, and that’s it. All other replies are basically one of the 3 variations above, not really adding anything to the discussion.
And the inability to have a decent discussion here is – guess what? – a good way to show people how the community here is lacking.
and “again showing how such a great community it is” you’re just telling ArenaNet what they’ve done wrong?
Yes.
The community is dominated by grinders and exploiters because ArenaNet introduced multiple systems in the game catering to those players, instead of following their stated goal of trying to cater to the opposite group (those who do not usually like MMOs). It’s laughable to think that the design of a game does not influence what kind of community it will have. ArenaNet has some ways to deal with this issue, such as changing the design or at least making the game require less reliance on other players (so someone could just ignore the bad community).
Never have I see a book or game review just use the word fail.
Wrong. Pick an example of a game review using the word fail:
https://www.google.com.br/search?q=review+ign+"the+game+fails"
Do you see a pattern here? You claimed I said dynamic events do not count for hearts, and you were wrong. You claimed all hearts could be achieved by playing around them instead of actively doing them, and you were wrong. You claimed game reviews don’t use the word “fail”, and you were wrong.
Let me teach you a few things: a review is someone’s opinion. You can trust a review based either on knowing the reviewer and sharing the same tastes (which is only known after following a reviewer for quite some time), or based on the arguments used in the review. Saying “this game has bad graphics because it has too much pink and I hate pink” is as much an opinion as saying “this game has bad graphics because it is filled with clipping, and is using an outdated engine that renders obsolete textures”, but the latter has better arguments in which to stand.
My review is filled with arguments about why I have my opinions about the game. You cannot counter those arguments, or you would have tried to so. Instead, all you have left is to attack the format, using the good old “it’s just your opinion” as if it had any weight.
And that… Well, that’s a failure. As long as you cannot remove the blocks supporting my conclusion, you won’t be able to show why it would be wrong.
(This is not directed to any person in particular)
You know, I wish people who don’t like the game just… leave.
No dramatics, no complaining, just close the door and walk out.
These kinds of threads discourages new players from trying the game (and in the end, hurting the game itself) and what delayed me from trying it out myself for several months. I suggest mods to start locking/deleting these kinds of threads since it isn’t productive, useful and just bring about useless arguments/debate.
If you ask anyone who has any kind of criticism to leave, you will end only with those who think the game is perfect. And those actually hurt the game – they are delusional (no game is perfect), and by not telling the developers how to improve, they prevent the game from ever reaching its true potential.
There is a huge difference between constructive criticism and whining. Unfortunately, fanboys cannot see this difference, and as such try to silence anyone who thinks differently.
You’re trying to tell Anet about things:
a) most people don’t really care about
b) most people disagree with you about
I’m rather curious as to how you know what “most people” think.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
Hearts get done as I run through areas.
That’s rose colored glasses. You speak as if you could do all events just by playing normally in the areas around them, and that is factually wrong. For example, the heart about trading objects with a group of friendly Ettins: you can play normally in that area as much as you want, but unless you stop to “DO the heart”, you will never actually get it done.
Even the line about grind is a matter of opinion.
Do you understand what a review is?
Or, to make it short, can you think of any good review in which the reviewer does not state his/her opinion? In fact, can you point any good review that is not based around the reviewer’s opinions?
It’s a pretty unrealistic expectation that people are going to read four pages of text on a game that has already been released
Back in 2007, I wrote a long list of suggestions for GW2, considerably longer than this review. At the time, the community actually discussed the content, instead of wasting time discussing lenght. This is one more example of how the GW2 community is inferior to the GW1 community.
I’m not really sure the point of writing a review anyway (…) But I was disappointed when you characterized the Guild Wars community in such a negative way.
The conclusion to your own line of thought is the answer to your question. This review is not for the community; why would I bother writing something for it? The purpose of this review is to tell ArenaNet what they have done wrong. Replying to the community’s rants serves the purpose of keeping this in a place where it’s more likely ArenaNet will see it.
Let’s take one quick before I have to get back to the real world. In his review the OP claims that nearby events don’t help you fill in hearts. This is news to me since the vast majority of my hearts are completed by nearby events.
?
When played the way they were meant to be played – someone begins to fill a heart and then an event begins nearby, with event completition also filling the heart – they are actually doable.
You haven’t paid that much attention, have you?
Just admit you’re wrong and just follow the crowd who are mad because Legendary crafting is too hard for them
“For them”? Do you have a Legendary?
Nope, but unlike everyone I realise getting Legendary is hard and is supposed to be hard, very hard.
It’s not hard.
It’s simply time consuming.
That’s what grind is about in pay to play games. The developers are not interested in having skilled players – they don’t get anything out of that. They do get paid if people play longer, since that means more time paying monthly fees. The result is exactly the kind of thing seen in Legendary weapons: the so-called “hard” part are things a bot could do. They don’t require skill. They simply require time. Which can easily be seen in how some very bad players got more than one Legendary after playing ten hours per day every day for 5 months.
This makes perfect sense for a pay to play game. Guild Wars 2, however, is not a pay to play game. Ergo, having such a focus on grind doesn’t make sense.
Of course, for an amateur review, you’d expect this. It would have been much better if you saved the wall of text and just jumped to your conclusion though, since everything you say is suspect if you start with bias.
It was actually the opposite. I had writen a first draft with a more positive conclusion, but after going into details about the flaws of every system in the game, I realized how the game wasn’t as interesting as I was claiming it was.
I would accept your statement about some sort of bias if you could point where the arguments leading to my conclusion are wrong.
I actually disliked starting a character in nightfall because it required you to farm levels at the beginning. Grinding Sunspear and Lightbringer rank was pretty tormenting, lol.
I have seen similar complaints about the Kurzick and Luxon faction points in Factions. For those who have forgotten, you need 10.000 faction points in either of those two sides in order to advance through the storyline.
“OMG teh grindy!11!!”, someone could say. And that’s false. What ArenaNet has used in both those games (as well as in a few things in GW:EN) is giving players the option of which quests to do. While other MMOs would give players a list of quests and tell them to do all of them before advancing to the next area, the points system used by ArenaNet allowed players to pick which quests they wanted to do in order to advance.
Now, keep in mind I’m not saying GW1 was perfect, far from it. Prophecies had an horrible story, Factions’ one was only slightly less bad, and all the Guild Wars 1 games had a lot of flaws.
Unfortunately, Guild Wars 2 has even more flaws. Even the things ArenaNet should have learned after GW1 were thrown away. And the decision to cater to grinders, addicts and exploiters has obviously been something ArenaNet deliberately decided to do, to the detriment of other, real, players.
Just admit you’re wrong and just follow the crowd who are mad because Legendary crafting is too hard for them
“For them”? Do you have a Legendary?
It’s stupid and unnecessary.
I agree. ArenaNet apparently thinks otherwise, though, considering how they have filled the game with features for grinders.
The OP even implied he/she didn’t like MMOs.
I don’t. MMOs have been built to be more similar to addictions than to games. From a business point of view, that’s perfect: grind is a kind of content that is easy to make, that is very time consuming, and that some players are willing to devour in as large quantities as possible. Unfortunatelly, it’s also very poor content, as far as quality goes.
GW1 avoided the traps of other MMOs by actually trying to be a fun game, as opposed to relying purely on grind (until GW:EN, at least). Guild Wars 2 tries a bit, but all of its smaller systems are filled with grind, and some of the major ones suffer the same issue. When the grind is seen for what it is – a way to disguise content that is not fun – the fact it’s so prevalent in GW2 is actually very telling.
Most fun I had in Guild Wars 1 was missions.
Same here.
The issue is that not only storytelling somehow got worse (the personal story has worse writing than Nightfall), but also the community got a lot worse. Missions in Nightfall did not really give loot, but people did them anyway. Dungeons, which could have worked like missions (and could have been large open areas instead of mostly being small closed spaces), are only done in GW2 by people who are farming.
This is my biggest issue with the game. Adding fun content that requires other people will mostly mean it will be left alone by the community as a whole. Adding fun content that gives “phat loot” will gather farmers who want to exploit it, not play to have fun. Adding boring content that gives “phat loot” is the easiest way to make people play through content, but also the laziest.
I wish we had something like the GW1 henchmen for the instanced content. In GW1 henchmen helped when there weren’t people around, but GW2 needs henchmen for when there aren’t anyone other than farmers and exploiters around.
Why some people order Chicken & Noodle soup, and then get angry because it had Chicken pieces instead of Broccoli/Cheddar boggles the mind. :P
I really wanted to like GW2, though. After waiting all those years for it… It’s sad to see that the game is a failure for me.
(edited by Erasculio.2914)
Anet should totally have elected OP as lead game designer
Maybe for QA, since they obviously need more people doing that. Your comment is kinda ironic, though, considering how long it has been since we last heard of GW2’s original lead designer, Eric Flannum. He has been replaced by GW1’s skill balancer… Do you truly think that’s a good sign?
That doesn’t prove anything… There are people who are moving from zone to zone, world boss to world boss, there are people who are doing events for their dailies
I’m terribly amused that your rose-colored reply describing how the game wouldn’t be filled by grinders is by using as example those grinding world bosses or grinding dailies.
To be honest, no one has any evidence that the majority of GW2’s community is comprised of those players he seems to dislike. I am not that type of “hardcore”, pseudo-elite player either, but there are tons of players that play for fun, even if the “hardcore” seem to be so vocal.
Go in game and watch. Take a look at how many players are farming dynamic events in Cursed Shores; compare that to how many players are just playing in any other map in the game. Try to find a group for story mode in a dungeon that is not farmed, and compare that to finding a group for CoF path 1. See how many players do the Dragon events, and then tell me how many players you see just exploring the world.
All those examples make it clear that grinders are in very higher numbers than real players. This has a very clear impact on ArenaNet – Ascended gear is just a huge grind, Fractals are basically a huge grind, the loudest complaint in the forum a while ago was about the lack of drops, etc, etc.
MMORPGs have been designed to cater to grinders (and that is actually a fact, not just my opinion, unlike most other things I have said here). The original Guild Wars had less of a focus on grind, at least until GW:EN. GW2 is catering to grinders, and as such it has a community of addicts, who care more about their next “fix” than about having fun. Like I said above, it’s a pity that ArenaNet made a game in which it’s so easy to play with other people, and then filled it with people you don’t want to play with.
Do you mean Guild wars 2 failed for you ( that you think it sucks ) or you really mean Guild Wars 2 Has FAILED
For me, of course.
A tip from me to you: Long does not mean better, it just means long. Nobody wants to go to a game review site and read all that.
And here’s a tip from me to you: Short does not mean better, it just means short. Saying “people are too lazy to read” is not the same as proving that a given piece of text needs to be more concise.
Now seriously, my eyes hurt only while scrolling. You should do a resume or something.
Last post in the review, the Conclusion (just two paragraphs :-P).
A pattern of bad updates? Based on what?
Karka update. Guild missions update in which guild missions were bugged and did not work properly. Update that introduced the exploit in AC that took ArenaNet one month to fix; update that actually made the Scavengers in AC worse than they were. Lackluster story added through Flame & Frost. Ascended tier… Fractals with a gate mechanic based on gear, and so on.
You say it is riddled with bugs. No mmo is bug free
That’s just a bad excuse. MMORPGs are usually mediocre games. It’s irrelevant if GW2 is sligthly less mediocre or not; what matters is if Guild Wars 2 is a good game or not. And the amount of bugs in this game, plus how slow ArenaNet is in fixing them, is not something you see in good games.
Yeah, well, that’s just like, your opinion man.
I’m happy someone has learned today what the word “review” means!
I would ask for counter arguments, but I’m sure you haven’t read anything else other than that paragraph, so…
Conclusion
Guild Wars 2 failed. By ArenaNet’s own definition of success, “Is it fun?”, the answer often is “no, it’s not”. Good for them that the community of grinders that fill this (and all other) MMO are not really interested in fun.
My advice is: play through the tutorial, and then go explore the world. Do all the interesting dynamic events you find, admire the beautifully crafted world, listen to all the ambient dialogues, dig through all the lore you can find; do that from the starting areas all the way to right before you enter Orr. Ignore hearts, the personal story, dungeons, and definitely ignore the “lesser” aspects of the game (trading, crafting, item acquisition, etc). Once you have explored everything other than Orr, leave the game and never look back.
Other issues
One of Guild Wars 2’s main issues is its community. The Manifesto claimed the game was for those who don’t like MMOs, but it failed to captivate those players. As a result, its community, both in game and in the official forum, is dominated by the MMO player stereotype: grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters who are more interested in having something worth grinding than in having fun. This is the player who played ten hours per day every day for four months after release, and believes this kind of behavior makes him the ideal player that ArenaNet should cater to. This is the kind of person who scorns at anything innovative in the game and is asking for a return of the “holy trinity”, so he can grind rare gear in 50-people raids and then go sell his items to buy mounts. This is the guy who claims that all MMORPGs are grindy, and if you want something different you are playing the wrong genre.
Those are the Guild Wars 2 players. Like addicts seeking their fix, they want grind, not fun. They complain that the game doesn’t give them enough loot, not that they want more interesting content. They gather in activities that allow them to farm, while leaving the rest of the world empty. It’s a pity that ArenaNet has focused so much on making a game in which it’s so easy to play with other people, only to have it filled with people you don’t want to play with.
Is ArenaNet catering to those players? Yes, although by now not doing so would be suicide. The result is that the updates to the game after release have only made it worse. ArenaNet has added a new tier of gear, which is mostly a way to add more gear grind; they have added Fractals of the Mists, a dungeon system in which the same levels keep repeating over and over under an increased difficulty and with a gear-based lock mechanic. Even the smaller updates have been poor – remember those Scavenger enemies I mentioned above as good enemy design? The ones that had a lot of interesting counters? They have recently been reworked as enemies who dig tunnels in the ground, causing an area of effect knock down when they rise (no counter to stop them from digging, they are invulnerable when inside the ground), and given a passive effect that makes them evade attacks after being hit (no counter for this as well); their damage has also been reduced. In other words, they have become more of the “low damage but takes very long to kill” kind of enemy which already fills dungeons. I’m sure all the players who never understood GW2’s combat system must be happy with this change.
In this, ArenaNet is following a pattern of having bad updates; once in a while changes that make the game worse, such as the example described above, but often updates simply filled with bugs. The amount of bugs in Guild Wars 2 is staggering – upon release the game was filled with them, and many (especially broken profession traits) were still left six months after release. Worse, new updates often introduce as many bugs as they fix, and ArenaNet’s slow pace in making updates means it could be a month or more until a new bug is fixed. An update created a bug in which players could do an exploit to easily kill a few dungeon bosses, for example; since the entire GW2 community learned about this bug and decided to exploit it (again showing how such a great community it is), this basically meant I was left one month without playing in that dungeon, while waiting for a fix. Another fun experience was when the update lauded for introducing guild missions was actually bugged so many of those missions could not be done. ArenaNet desperately needs better testers and a better QA system.
Story-wise, updates have been poor as well. ArenaNet is trying to introduce the concept of a “Living World” by giving lackluster story content to a community that doesn’t really care about anything other than loot, so as expected the result isn’t pretty. It’s saddening to see how the end of the first chapter of the “Living World”, much like the end of the game itself, is a dungeon that requires you to party with four other players. Good luck trying to enjoy story content with grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters!
(And, for the records, the official forum is rather bad, too. It’s not a matter of moderation, rather of bad design. Like the game, it was incredibly bugged and it took months for ArenaNet to fix most of the major issues. There is almost zero in-game integration, despite how we have to use the same account for the forum and the game. There are a lot of unused areas, like the empty space below a user’s name. The Ignore List is STILL not working. Text formatting is very poor. And so on. The lack of an official forum on Guild Wars 1 was actually better than having this forum.)
Legendary items deserve to be considered a minor system as well. Created as the ultimate in-game reward, they symbolize everything bad in the game. Not all Legendary items were ready on release: not only some were missing animations that would be implemented later, but others were simply bugged, and even now, more than six months after release, some are still extremely lackluster. While originally meant to be only aesthetic rewards, Legendary items became more when we were told they would be updated to always match the highest item tier in the game – and considering how ArenaNet has added the Ascended tier after release, hinting that more may come at a later time, this gives Legendary items quite the advantage over everything else in the game. Lastly, and more importantly, Legendary items are just a big grind. They have some interesting aspects – requiring map completition is nice, for example – but in the end they are merely a reward for time spent, filled with RNG (there’s a component that requires using Ectoplasm – the RNG within a RNG, as described above – for a chance to get Mystic Clovers; this is three layers of RNG stacking on each other). This tells players that the most deserving activity in the game is grinding, since that’s the only way to get the biggest reward in the game; and so, it’s little surprise to see players who spent 10 hours per day, each day for 5 months, having more than one Legendary right now despite a huge lack of skill. The concept of “skill > time” has never been mocked so blatantly in the Guild Wars games.
And, speaking about grind, we have the Mystic Forge, which allows players to throw four items and get something else in return. Often, this is just a way to add grind for different skins, by using specific recipes that always give the same result (usually requiring very time consuming components, such as Ectoplasm or lodestones). In some cases, it’s one more example of GW2’s obsession with RNG, by randomly giving rare skins in exchange for high end items. This is the kind of concept that would make more sense in a loot-based game like Diablo 3; in GW2, it’s more often than not a source of frustration that has been nicknamed “the Mystic Toilet” by players.
The last minor system in the game is the Gem Store. After the success of the in-game store of the original Guild Wars, it’s no surprise that ArenaNet would add something along those lines to the sequel. It’s mind boggling, then, how they decided to make something so different from what had worked before. In the original Guild Wars, some of the best selling items were costumes: they could be worn everywhere, they fit the lore of the game, they gave every profession new armor styles, they were account bound, they could be made as many times as desired, and they were relatively easy to design because costumes did not work as armor: there were just a headpiece and a body piece, so the artists did not have to worry about the gloves of a costume clipping with the chest of a given armor piece. This kind of design has been completely removed in Guild Wars 2 and replaced by town clothes, which:
• Cannot be worn in combat
• Are often “funny” items that don’t make sense in the context of the game (boxing gloves? Aviator caps?)
• Are character bound, not account bound
• Can only be made once per purchase
• Work as armor, in the aspect that they are multiple pieces, so a costume’s gloves could clip with a chest armor piece
In other words, they are almost the opposite of costumes. Everything else in the Gem Store goes downhill from there. While there are not blatant “pay to win” items, the other things available are basically what someone could find in cheap free to play MMOs: armor boost consumables, experience consumables, lottery chests that have a very small chance of actually giving something interesting, and so on. Not to mention the entire can of worms that is selling gold in exchange for real money. There’s a great example of how the Gem Store has actually made the game worse: originally, dyes were going to be account bound. Later, in a blog entry from a former Nexxom employee and currently member of GW2’s commerce team, players were told that dyes would actually be character based and sold, as random packs, in the Gem Store. It’s even funny to see how transparent that money-making scheme is (and how it’s even more RNG).
Conclusion: all minor systems in Guild Wars 2 are bad. ALL of them. While a few of the major systems may be innovative and somewhat promising, the minor systems are a bunch of grind filled with RNG and more RNG, catering to grinders and addicts instead of to players who want to have fun.
And lastly, there’s PvP. I’m not going to discuss structured PvP, since I have never played it. World versus World, in other hand… The mechanics behind WvW are mostly fine, but there’s a single aspect that prevents me from playing it again. Someone roaming alone will certainly find a small group and be defeated. People in a small group can achieve a few things, but unless they are just a diversion split from a big group, anything they accomplish will be undone within minutes. Those in a guild can try to coordinate, but their efforts will be in vain unless the world they are in cares about WvW. In the end, the truth is that a single player is mostly irrelevant in World versus World. If you are not in a big WvW focused guild within a world that actually cares about this game mode, you won’t really accomplish anything, no matter what you do.
Minor systems
Then, we have the game’s smaller systems. Crafting, unlike other games, does not rely on gathering skills, and the crafted items do not “proc” into things with better stats (which would effectively make only the “proc” items to be desirable, and leave most of crafted items as failures). The system works by allowing players to craft weapons, armors and jewels with specific stats combinations, and in the case of armors with unique skins as well. Unfortunately, crafting is filled with flaws. Some are relatively minor: not all stats combinations are available through crafting, and weapon skins are mostly the generic models seen everywhere. Other flaws are huge: with the addition of a new gear tier, Ascended items, crafters are not capable anymore of crafting the best items in the game. More importantly, crafting at all levels is limited by the amount of fine crafting materials a character has; those are so hard to find in sufficient numbers that many crafting guides tell players to give up crafting for their main characters, and instead craft only for lower level alts. I actually managed to level crafting as I played due to having multiple characters, but even then I have hit a wall: crafting exotic items, at the top of each crafting discipline, requires Globs of Ectoplasm. Those are the worst RNG in the game, as they are available only through the Trading Post or by salvaging rare and exotic high level items, which has a random chance of producing a few ectos. In other words, it’s actually RNG within RNG: there is a low chance that a player will get a rare or an exotic item as a drop, and those may result in ectos when salvaged (or not). Considering how salvaging exotic items for a chance to get some of the components required to craft exotic items isn’t exactly very smart, high level crafting is an exercise in frustration,
The Trading Post is another minor system in the game. In theory, it has been very well designed: it’s fully global, there are no auctions, players can see all prices being offered and asked for each item, and there is a fee when selling so the TP works as a gold sink. Unfortunately, in practice the Trading Post is a mess. ArenaNet has implemented a Diminishing Returns system against grinders, so the more someone farms, the less loot that player gets. This is great – it difficults the lives of grinders and helps preventing them from making quick fortunes, which would artificially increase prices for normal players. The issue is that the Trading Post has no similar restrictions, and so the most efficient way to make gold in the game is to “flip” items – buy at the lowest price and sell at the highest. This has a vast myriad of issues: the more money a player has, the more he can make, thus creating massive gaps between players; for items rare enough, this allows players to have a monopoly and thus increase prices sky high; and it basically makes money making a matter of artificially inflating prices for everyone else. It speaks wonders about how bad the GW2 community is that so many players don’t see anything wrong in manipulating the market this way, despite how deleterious it is for everyone else.
Dungeons do (or did, in some cases – more on this later) highlight one of the best aspects of the game: the combat system is great.
Guild Wars 1 had many issues, but one of the biggest was how the game had too many skills, and was introducing too many new ones too quickly; the result was a massive mess, as it was clear that ArenaNet would never be able to balance so many skills and skills combinations. Another smaller issue was how it was very easy for players to kitten themselves – a warrior player could easily make a horrible build by relying on elementalist skills, without investing a single point in that profession’s attributes. Guild Wars 2 elegantly solves this issue by assigning specific skills to specific weapons, and having significant less skills than GW1; as a result, it’s easier to balance skills, and it’s harder for a player to make a completely useless build.
Meanwhile, classic MMOs always rely on a trinity system, with a tank, a healer and some DPS. Guild Wars 1 often avoided tanks, since the game does not have “taunt” abilities that control who the enemy monsters will attack; it does have healers, though, which would often cause some issues (from groups having to spend a long time spamming “GLF one more monk!” to profession elitism). Classic MMOs also often have “fear” mechanics that basically remove an enemy from a fight, by applying long lasting effects that prevent the enemy from attacking. Guild Wars 2 avoids both those systems: there is no real “healer” in the game, as every character is mostly responsible for its own health; there is no real “tank” in the game, since there are still no “taunt” abilities and a character cannot just stand there being healed by others; and the effects that disable enemies have a very short duration, acting more like interrupts from Guild Wars 1 than the classic “fear” from other MMOs. Together, those features are great, but there’s one caveat: the community is really bad.
I’ll go into more details later, but the community of GW2 players is deeply flawed, in that it’s filled with people who wish they were playing a classic MMO instead of GW2. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the complaints about this game’s combat system. Imagine someone who cannot understand a game that is not a clone of traditional MMORPGs – such person would see combat as a division between tanks, healers and DPS. Since GW2 does not have traditional tanks or healers, then, this player would claim, everyone is DPS, and so the combat system would be weak due to being simplistic and lacking roles.
Those assumptions are, of course, extremely flawed; however, the very high number of players who cannot understand (and, to the honest, do not want) anything different from traditional MMOs makes such complaints very common. There are many ways to refute them, but my favourite is by using one example. One dungeon had Scavenger enemies who would charge an attack and then knock down a character, quickly dealing a lot of damage and very likely killing it. Someone who does not understand how the game works and who believes it’s all a matter of DPS would say the only counters are to kill the enemy quickly or dodge the attack. In reality, the options were:
1. Interrupt the charging animation. Any kind of crowd control works for this.
2. If the character cannot interrupt the attack, use some kind of defensive skill to prevent the attack from hitting. Aegis for Guardians, Mist Form for Elementalists, and so on.
3. If the attack cannot be defended against, use some source of Stability to prevent the knock down and thus avoid the killing attacks.
4. If the character cannot prevent the knock down and is actually thrown on the ground, use any kind of stun breaker to leave the knocked down state and just walk away from the killing attacks.
5. If a character cannot do any of that… Just ask for help. Party members can do all of the above, plus interrupt the killing attacks themselves.
The combat system in Guild Wars 2 is one of the best aspects of the game. Too bad so many players wished it were a copy of all other MMOs.
It’s also too bad that combat fails spectacularly underwater. On the surface, when an enemy moves too far from its spawning location, it will regenerate all its health and move back; but this happens very occasionally. When underwater, due to having three axis, this behavior happens all the time. All the mobility in the surface combat has to be ignored underwater, as it’s likely that using it would make a monster reset; skills that move the enemies are best ignored, too, since they can trigger this behavior. The result is a very frustrating system that makes any underwater fight against an enemy with a lot of health something to be ignored.
One more issue is how bad the dialogue is. More often than not, the dialogue is very badly written and very badly delivered, which is puzzling considering how much better the ambient dialogue in the open world is. To make matters even worse, it’s clear that ArenaNet has cut costs regarding voice acting. Considering how there are 10 race/gender combinations, each with its own voice, most things our characters say would need to be recorded at least 10 times, each with a different voice actor, which would likely become very expensive very quickly. This has been solved by making NPCs deliver most of the dialogue in the game, including major speeches that should have been delivered by the protagonists. The result is a common feeling among players that they are actually watching a NPC’s story, while our characters do all the grunt work for someone else.
Bad dialogues plague one more of the game’s major features: dungeons. The story mode of dungeons, which tells the story of Destiny’s Edge, have by far the worst dialogue in the game; all the NPC “heroes” are written as children, which is oddly fitting with how they were also poorly written in the second Guild Wars book. This is Guild Wars 2’s storytelling at its worst… Which makes it slightly less bothersome that it’s so hard to find groups for dungeons anyway. The game does not have any party-searching feature, so those looking for a group are left spamming map chat in Lion’s Arch, something not only annoying but also ineffective, considering how the anti-spam system in the game soon blocks those advertising. One third party site is being used as the unofficial group making tool for Guild Wars 2, which is a nice sign of how flawed the game is in this aspect. Regardless, there are significantly less groups being made for story mode than for explorable mode.
Is this because explorable mode is fun or tells a good story? Nope. It’s because explorable mode is farming mode. The little stories told in explorable mode have better dialogue than story mode, but presentation is still awful. Most of them are told through cutscenes, in which two characters appear talking to each other over a static background made of concept art. While many players have complained about this kind of storytelling tool, I think it’s the best possible option for scenes in the open world, where seeing half dozen player characters talking to the same NPC during an important dialogue would be immersion-breaking. What is puzzling is how ArenaNet decided to rely on the same trick in smaller contexts, such as the personal storyline and the dungeons. Both have very few in-game cutscenes, all of very low quality, which is puzzling considering how well developed cutscenes were by the end of the original Guild Wars 1 – the cutscene showing the fight between Turai Ossa and Palawa Joko in the Bonus Mission Pack was miles better than anything in Guild Wars 2 (and for the records, speaking about wasted potential, it’s a pity the cinematics made with animated concept art are so uncommon in the game; they are one of the most beautiful and unique aspects of Guild Wars 2).
If the stories told in explorable mode are not that engrossing, do they have engaging gameplay? More often than not, no. Dungeons often have few interesting mechanics, and most rely on the same artifice over and over: a few enemies (or one boss) who don’ do that much damage, but who have a lot of health so they take a long time to put down. There are a few variations here and there, but that’s all most dungeons boil to, in the end. They would likely be ignored if not by how they are used as farming tools.
Linked to dynamic events and hearts, exploration deserves to be considered a major system by itself. This is one of the best aspects of Guild Wars 2: exploration has an in-game reward, and a considerable one, sure, but the experience of exploring the world of Tyria is the true prize here. Beautiful and detailed landscapes, rendered in the amazing painterly style used by ArenaNet (which assures the graphics will age well), together with an amazing soundtrack, are by themselves reason enough to explore every corner of (almost) every map. Adding everything else to find in the maps, such as vistas and skill points and dynamic events and amazing pieces of in-game dialogue, allows exploration to be truly a joy…
…Most of the time. Following a pattern seen in Guild Wars 1, in which the “elite areas” of the game were filled with bugs (The Deep, Urgoz’s Warren) or ugly and badly designed (The Domain of Anguish), the high level areas in Guild Wars 2 compare very poorly with the rest of the game. Orr is extremely unappealing: the maps themselves are ugly, they have the same enemies repeated over and over with basically a single enemy type filling three huge maps, the environmental effects are more nuisances than interesting additions to the game, and there is little of interest in those maps. Which is a pity, considering how the great cities of Orr could have been so much more – a repository of beauty and lore from an age past, showing the last remnants of the time when the gods still walked on the world. Instead, it’s mostly dominated by grinders and farmers. Which is somehow a better fate than that of Southsun Cove, a high level area added in the November update: no one ever goes there since there is absolutely nothing interesting to see or do on that map.
One other worrisome aspect of the game is how Jeremy Soule, the artist responsible for the entire GW1 soundtrack, has left Guild Wars 2 after composing songs for the main game. So far, the replacements have been doing a good job, as seen on the holiday events last year, but it remains to be seen who will fill that hole when it’s time for an expansion. At least the departure of Soule means players won’t have to deal with DirectSong anymore, one of the worst music sites I have ever dealt with (I strongly recommend never buying anything there, they have horrible support and their products are filled with issues).
But exploration in most of Guild Wars 2 is great, and I would be amiss to not give credit where it’s due: the in-world dialogue is wonderful. Heard when random people in the world are just chatting with each other, or before and after events, the common dialogue in the world has been very well written, and most voice actors actually manage to do a good work delivering it. This is one of our best windows into the world of Tyria, and it’s my favourite prize for exploring in the game.
It’s surprising, then, and almost incomprehensible, that the personal storyline is so bad. One of the main systems in the game, it’s based on interesting concepts: it’s ruled by player choice, beginning with character creation and the personal biography, going all the way to providing branching story steps depending on how a player wants to deal with a given issue. It follows a chapter structure, with each ten levels being a story chapter (although this is never stated explicitly in the game), and covering the character’s journey from being a local hero to helping save the world. Its missions offer some variety, with one being about participating in a party, another about searching for an undead pirate, one other being a noble’s trial, and so on.
The result, however, is less than satisfying. The fact there are multiple options on how to reach a point in the story has the side effect of making the chapters follow a somewhat modular design – the chapter about joining an order is the same whether your character is a commoner who has just fought his people or a noble who has just saved her Queen. As a result, almost all NPC characters are forgotten from one chapter to the next – that relative you saved in the beginning of your story will never appear or even be mentioned again, the Durmand Priory character who you interacted through 10 levels’ worth of the personal story will be gone, and so on. Needless to say, this not only hurts character development – almost no NPC has enough time to be developed – but it also impacts the choices we make: if most of the time they don’t matter, what’s the point? Ironically, the game has a system in place to counter this – a personal instance that would reflect your character’s unique storyline – but it is woefully inefficient, changing little, if at all, as we play through the game.
(Also here in case this is deleted.)
Guild Wars 2 is a big game. It took me all those months to have enough experience with the game in order to properly judge it. And here is my judgment.
Major systems
One of the game’s main features are dynamic events. In a traditional MMO, players would be expected to reach a quest hub, collect “kill 10 rats” quests for each kind of nearby enemy, then kill everything in sight before proceeding to the next quest hub. Guild Wars 2 changes this overly-simplistic design by introducing dynamic events, made to allow easy group play while changing the world. And when those events work, they are indeed great. For example, there’s an event chain in a middle level area based on an Ettin research site, populated by a human and an Asura. The human is collecting Ettin pelts, and after receiving them he makes an Ettin disguise for the rather grumpy Asura and sends her towards the giants’ camp; there, the Ettin chief claims the Asura is cute and wants to take her as his bride. After freeing the NPC and escorting her back to the research site, players watch as she builds an Ettin-killing golem to get revenge on her fellow human researcher; but the golem runs out of control, forcing players to shut it down. It’s a little side story with beginning, middle and end, although players are free to join at any step within the event. Some other events are great by changing the world: in the Sylvari starting area, there is a village of hostile Hylek that become friendly once an event is finished, opening an entire new outpost, with merchants and other services.
Unfortunately, many events are not that interesting, having no real context and making no change in the world. There’s an event in the Norn starter area that consists of “kill nameless and random NPC X”, without any story or impact on the world; and to make things worse, this event appears to be in a 2 minutes timer, so it basically keeps repeating over and over and over. Orr is especially guilty of this: while the high level areas do have meta-events that change the world a little bit and have a context in the game’s lore, most events there are both meaningless and futile, making players just escort NPC X from Y to Z, or defeat enemy A, without any real impact in the world.
Despite those issues, the idea behind dynamic events is great. Content available to everyone, allowing players to play together without the need of rigid party structures, changing how the world works and dynamically telling a story. The current execution is far from perfect, but the potential there is huge.
Significantly less interesting are the hearts. Made so players unfamiliar with the game have somewhere to go, and to keep those players in place until a dynamic event nearby begins (so hopefully said players understand that the events themselves are the meat of the game), hearts are basically little grinds. They require us to do some menial tasks over and over, with boredom being softened only by the little lore they provide and by the diversity of tasks available (so instead of “collect 10 mushrooms”, it’s “collect some mushrooms or kill some of those enemies or water these plants”). When played the way they were meant to be played – someone begins to fill a heart and then an event begins nearby, with event completition also filling the heart – they are actually doable. When the opposite happens – doing nearby events do nothing for the heart – they are just a maddening and pointless grind, much like quest hubs in traditional MMOs (and it speaks a lot about the GW2 community that some people there actually prefer the hearts to the dynamic events).
That’s a bad idea. It has also been discussed in half a dozen topics by now.
Fact remains; It’s impossible to make a non farming game. Period.
So Mass Effect is a farming game now? Super Mario Brothers is a farming game? The Longest Journey is a farming game, too?
First rule is: Rewards need to be compelling, it’s what keeps players playing.
When designing content, this should take priority, above all else. In gaming, the loot is what you seek, not the journey.
False. Grinders need rewards, since rewards is what keep grinders playing. Normal players, those who like to play to have fun, value the journey more than the shiny reward in the end.
This is also what is best for the game. What do you think is better – a human player, or a donkey which would run whenever just to get a carrot dangling in front of its face?
Yesterday I got 3 level 80 rare in 30 min from a starter area with level 80 char. Today I’m getting low level white loot from the same zone. Anyone know the new loot mechanics. Do only dynamic events loot scales to char level?
This is exactly the kind of statistically relevant, well-conducted research on drop rates that makes me completely ignore the complaints about how the loot system would be “bugged”.
What the kitten went trough the dev teams brains, when they implemented better gear that you cant get for a certain time period.
They listened to the forum. This forum has a vocal minority of grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters who do not understand the concept of playing a game in order to have fun, and who need something to give them their grindy fix. ArenaNet should have ignored them and listened to their real playerbase, but the fact they were (and are) very vocal together with the typical loss of players seen a few weeks after a new MMO has been released made ArenaNet panic.
So, my suggestion to you is: keep posting in this forum how much against this kind of thing you are. I was hoping ArenaNet would understand how obnoxious the most vocal part of the forum community is and don’t listen to most people here, but it appears they are willing to listen to the vocal minority to the detriment of the game – which, to be honest, they also did in GW1.
The crafting booster gives you crafting experience, not levelling experience. It would help you to need to craft less items to reach 400, not to get more levelling experience when crafting to reach 400.
The Ignore List is still not working.
It has been a very long time for this feature to be implemented. The original implementation was bad, sure (the post would be covered by a message saying “This user has been blocked”, but it would still take as much screen space as if it the post were visible), but it was better than having nothing as we currently do.
We can officially confirm this as an X-files level conspiracy at this point.
This is a rather offensive ad hominem in my opinion.
This is why I asked if he was confirming that there was an issue and they are trying to find the problem, or if he was saying we made the issue up and they are checking just to confirm.
And as a good example to my point above: Colin’s statement came after saying " We’ve completed verifying every update from the november release", which means, the “X-File conspiracy” is the idea that drops have been nerfed since the November release.
Does this mean that there isn’t an issue with drops? Colin answers that in the following paragraph: “We’re in the midst of evaluating every loot table in the game and running massive random roll evaluations table by table” to see if there’s an issue with drops from launch.
Would it really be worth having a developer stop working on the game to answer a question he has already answered? No. This is why they could not – and should not – reply to every request for communication from players in the forum.
The devs should be confident enough to be honest in their communications with players
Players, on average, are not that smart. There is a good reason why the average player is not a game designer – people usually don’t have the training to understand how to design a game. Any gaming community is also extremelly prone to take any developer statement and turn it around, finding many ways to misunderstand it.
Developers have more important things to do than saying the same thing over and over (so everyone understands it) to a very small part of the player community (forums are almost the definition of vocal minority). Like, working to improve the game.
If developers could say the uncensored truth, I think the reply to most people in this topic would be, “You want a loot-based game, but that’s not what GW2 is. This isn’t Diablo, it’s trying to be something closer to Planescape: Torment”.
We get on average one topic per week asking if the drop rate of ectos has been nerfed. Those posters usually employ as “evidence” the fact that in the previous week they got a lot o ectos, but n the current week they didn’t.
I think that’s enough evidence that players are not capable of judging if there’s something wrong with their loot or not. In the end, this topic is somewhat useless – players simply cannot objectiveky know iftheir drops are working as intendedor not.
as right now the abilities (especially weapon abilities) are best if you spam then whenever available
That’s not true.
Example: a ranger with a shortbow.
Weapon skill 1: does more damage when you are behind a target. Only staying in front of your enemy spamming it isn’t its best.
Weapon skill 2: fires 5 arrows that poison targets. The second to best use of this skill is when it can hit multiple enemies, or hit an enemy multiple times, which isn’t achieved by simply spamming it. The real best use of this skill is to hamper an enemy’s healing, by using it right before the enemy is going to heal itself, due to the way poison works.
Weapon skill 3: is a dodge. Spamming it is the same as spamming dodge.
Weapon skill 4: cripples target. Spamming it on a ranged enemy is more often than not useless. The skill is used best when kitting a foe, not when it’s spammed.
Weapon skill 5: it’s an interrupt. Again, spamming this one only avoids its strong effect.
I have the feeling not too many people really understand GW2’s combat system.
Should these points be in areas that are accessible rather than in Keeps which require your team to actually capture them
Nope.
The idea is exactly that people who want map completition will help their world to capture those things. Otherwise, someone doing map completition would be simply getting in the way of those playing WvW.
Implying that GW2, favoring a more casual type of gamer, was basically designed with the intention of it being played less than other “gear-treadmill, grinding” MMORPGs.
That’s true. Pay to play MMOs want to keep people playing, and thus paying, all the time. Hence the “stick dangling in front of a carrot” model that tries to addict people to MMOs. Unfortunately, said model results in mediocre games, which is what classic MMOs are (the idea there is playing to grind, not playing to have fun, so it makes sense).
GW2 is following a different model. Those who want the grindy, carrot-based MMOs have many other options out there. It’s about time someone made a MMO for a different kind of player.
All my characters should just avoid combat from now on, since it is so unrewarding.
See, this is why grind is bad for a game. A grinder is willing to play through anything as long as it gives a reward. A normal player would play because a game is fun. As long as the combat were fun, a normal player would play; if the combat were not fun, the player would ask combat to be changed so it’s fun. A grinder, in other hand, doesn’t care about fun: he will play through content that he does not think is fun, and his suggestion to fix it is not to actually improve content, rather to give it some kind of reward to be grinded.
This is why classic MMOs are such mediocre games – because they have been made for grinders, and grinders don’t care if content is fun or not, rather if they have stuff to grind for or not.
One does not have to be a grinder to like shinies.
One does have to be a grinder to play through content one does not actually enjoy just to get shinies.
And, if the content is something one enjoys, why wouldn’t one play it even in the abscence of shinies?
Of course. I’m not a grinder – which means, I’m better than a donkey running in order to reach a carrot dangling in front of its face. I’m playing GW2 for the same reason I play any othe game: because it’s fun. Not because of some meaningless rewards.
The issue with this forum (and with the MMO genre as a whole) is that it tends to be filled with grinders. Those do not make a solid playerbase, though.
Not affiliated with ArenaNet or NCSOFT. No support is provided.
All assets, page layout, visual style belong to ArenaNet and are used solely to replicate the original design and preserve the original look and feel.
Contact /u/e-scrape-artist on reddit if you encounter a bug.