Guild Wars 2

You have secret contact from the inside who told you why Crystin Cox was hired for? Maybe you should show us your proof that it’s her job to break the game?

It’s no secret that she’s working as a Monetization Producer.

Also why don’t you tell me what are these items that are absolutely required from the Gem store to play the game. Because frankly, I cannot think of a single item on Gem store that will help me achieve anything in game.

Really? I understand defending the game in order to gain self-reassurance, but this is too much.

Why do you require me to name examples you already know about? The mere fact that you can trade gems for gold helps you achieve something in game. Then, there are the Black Lion Salvage Kits (which have a chance of getting rare materials which is twice as much as the one of the best Salvage Kit available in-game), boosters, Mystic Forge Stones, Revive Orb, Transmutation Stones etc. All these items help you achieve something in-game, otherwise people wouldn’t be buying them. Not to mention the Black Lion Chests and the chance for the permanent “convenience” items.

Sure, none of them are required to log in and play, but they sure as hell make the experience a lot more enjoyable. It’s obvious there are a lot of things designed to guide you into the cash shop. Take for example, the Trading Post: why can you post items from anywhere but not pick up items or gold you received? The former is as much logic breaking as the latter, so what was the problem? They had to sell items in the gem store. Same is the case with depositing items in your bank.

Now, these are not game breaking, but they lead into other issues: imagine if waypoints had no cost, like in the first game. Nobody would have bought the Bank Access Express and Black Lion Trader Express items. Thus, they had to make waypoints cost a lot. And the list goes on.

Saying the game is not designed to make you use the shop is pure ignorance. Whether you are willing to cope with that or not is entirely subjective.

AcidicVision.5498:

The dye time-line…

- Dyes were going to be account bound. And people were happy.

- Mystery dye plant food was a fun cheap item in the cash-shop.

- Arenanet hired Crystin Cox to work on the cash-shop. Crystin Cox formally of Nexon a company known for pay to win games and micro transactions that knickle and dime the players.

- Fans predict her taking things we have and changing it encourage cash-shop buys.

- Crystin Cox announced that dyes would be character bound and retracted all previous statements made by Perry and anyone else who said they would be otherwise.

- Cheap mystic dye plant food disappears from cash-shop, it is replaced by the more expensive dye packs.

- Fan predictions come true.

- People were unhappy and demanded changes.

- Anet said no.

There you go, now you’re all caught up.

Crystin Cox’s job is basically about breaking systems in the game in order to encourage gem purchase. By breaking those systems, it’s a certainty you’ll affect the level of enjoyment of a certain part of the people who already spent 60 dollars/55 euro on the game. Nobody is against making money, but making money in such an unscrupulous way is simply disgusting (and when I say unscrupulous, I’m not referring only to dyes, but to most of the items in the cash shop). I really don’t know how these people can live with themselves.

FYI Arenanet NEVER said there would be no grind, what they said is there would be no grind that was necessary to progress, which i still see holds true

“We don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2” -Colin Johanson, MMO Manifesto

I agree. The points you’ve made in your post are the reasons I simply can’t drive myself to play the game anymore. It’s the same grind, the same repetitiveness we’ve seen in WoW, Rift, SWTOR, all of it veiled under tons of marketing efforts. This isn’t Guild Wars 2; this is WoW 2, with some quality of life improvements, a different setting and systems designed to coerce you to buy gems.

“…takes everything you love about Guild Wars 1 and puts into a persistent world… ". Yeah, right.

1. Yes
2. No
3. No
4. No
5. No

I didn’t delete the post, a moderator did. Lol.

P.S: I thought adding “lol” to the end of my post would make me feel cooler. It didn’t. Worth a shot though.

Probably a bug. I think logging out and back in will port you outside the instance.

A funny and sadly true post.

wacko.7543:

kids have short attention spams… they need new things every 5 minutes, or their heads will explode

How exactly is it that you know that most people who bought the game can be placed into the age category which you define as “kids”? How is it that you know it’s not adult players leaving the game? Is everyone defending the game privy to some sort of secret statistics that the rest of us are not?

GenericBox.1923:

Rift declined fast? Again, using Xfire, it declined by just under half after a 3 months – About 45% decline in 3 months. Like I said, games will always decline after 3 months.

SWTOR and now GW2 have declined quicker is not a mimic of this standard – GW2 has declined by 75% in 1 month, SWTOR was probably something similiar.

Those statistics aren’t representative… because… because those using X-fire are more prone to leaving Guild Wars 2 after the first month. Oh wait…

evasionmoon.1345:

Why you people LIE is beyond me i go to alot of zones as 80 becouse finally game i can END from lvl1 to 80 (this seems majority still not graps lol) and plenty of players at events.

When you cheat and exploit fast to 80 and then say there is nothing to do you are the ones who destroying the whole mmorpgs business. Nomatter what a company try making, you pathetic whiners keep crying its realy sad how you guys have plagued the mmo’s scene over past 7 years:(

Are you guys talking about other game?

Woah, woah, punctuation. Also, how can you be so stupid as to believe that just because someone hit 80 faster than you they’re cheating and exploiting?

There are always people complaining just for the sake of complaining, that much is not being questioned. However, the real plague of the genre are people like yourself. You’re the kind of person that, just because you can’t do something fast enough or don’t have enough time to do it, believes that others shouldn’t be allowed to do it either. That’s why you have no problem with the DR system. In fact, your problem is with the people asking for its removal, because that way, people that invested more time in the game would actually be rewarded proportionally to their effort.

You’re the plague, because, in your selfishness, you’d rather have everyone not be rewarded, just because you wouldn’t be able to put in the time to achieve that reward. You fail to acknowledge the fact that just because someone has more gold than you, because they worked for it, doesn’t mean they have an advantage.

DusK.3849:

I guess I’ll never know, seeing as it’s a sub-fee MMO and I refuse to play any sub-fee MMO on principle. But that doesn’t change the fact that people are severely underestimating what it takes to fix some issues in this game. There is no auto-fix-it button, despite what many seem to believe.

I, for one, never said there’s an auto-fix for bugs and I never complained about them not managing to. But adding DR systems which further impede upon our gameplay, while still being unable to fix bugs, really makes them look bad.

Soulwatcher.2604:

I never said its going to sell more then WOW. What I did say something is obviously wrong if the game goes from sell out to poor sales in 5 weeks. If the game was still selling well all zones would still be packed and Anet would still be making new servers!

Not at all. It means that the people that were going to buy the game already did so. Additional box sales will probably be determined by how happy people are with the game and what the general opinion about it will turn to be.

If somebody asked me whether they should buy Guild Wars 2, I’d tell them not to. Why? Because of the DR systems. Such systems belong in Asian F2Ps, not in an western MMO which is supposed to be the next big step in the genre.

DusK.3849:

But as a software engineering major, I can make some pretty educated guesses.

And Rift is still as much dynamic as Guild Wars 2, even if it has traditional quests.

Soulwatcher.2604:

WOW peaked at 15 million players, coming on here saying that they didn’t keep making new servers well after its release is kind of silly isn’t it?

12 million.

Soulwatcher.2604:

Did you play at release? All servers were full and had hideous server queue’s servers were filling as fast as they could make them. I don’t see that happening here!

If you were expecting Guild Wars 2 to be as successful as WoW at release, you’ve been fooling yourself all along. As has been pointed out, the reason WoW enjoyed so much success so early on was because of the Warcraft franchise, all of which broke the last game’s record of the best selling game ever.

Sure, there’s been a population drop and I’ve been directly affected by it, since my guild has died off, but the game clearly isn’t dead.

DusK.3849:

A lot of people aren’t going to understand how this could be possible. But it really is.

Since you haven’t worked on either game, you have no way of knowing. Rift is a dynamic MMO as well, so it’s definitely a grade more difficult to code than your average static WoW clone.

Tharjax.9068:

You presume to much, if a server is full and only half of those accounts are playing then the population rating goes down, the player activity is monitored.

And if, say, a number of people equivalent to that half transfer to the server making it full again and the half that wasn’t active starts playing again, what then? That server will have a population 50% larger than it’s maximum capacity.

For the thousandth time, server capacity indicates the number of accounts bound to that server, not the number of people online. It’s early morning in Europe and still there are 5 full servers; that’s because they’ve reached the maximum number of accounts which can be bound to them, not because there are a lot of people playing at this hour. There’s no queuing system like in WoW. It’s not like if you’re on a server that is high and then it becomes full that you’ll have to sit in a queue; other people simply won’t be able to transfer to it anymore.

Revenant.2691:

I love how half of you are blatantly ignoring the fact that server populations in the login screen have nothing to do with how many people are online. That’s the number of accounts currently registered to that server. A server could have 1 person online and still be listed as full. Since there’s no subscription, anyone who’s ever logged in is going to be contributing to one of those server pops forever, as it stands currently, even if they haven’t logged in for a month.

Ignorance is bliss. Either that or those who are saying the game is as lively as ever are selectively choosing arguments that support their points (not that there are many), while ignoring does that don’t. Besides, the mere fact that you can’t transfer to servers that are full and just sit in a queue waiting to get in, because the server capacity system doesn’t work like in WoW should suggest that. And they’re saying we’re stuck in the WoW ways.

@muthax Server capacity is based on the number of accounts on the server, not on the number of people playing on that server at a given time. When a server is full, you can’t choose that server anymore. It’s not like you can choose the server, then you have to wait in some queue like in WoW.

UndeadRufus.6832:

As for all the other complaints you decided to shoehorn in there, you’re welcome to have your opinions. I think there are already umpteen threads about those issues. Guild Wars 2 isn’t built around collecting bundles of pixels with labels on them. You can strive for that end-goal if you so choose, but the driving philosophy of the game is centered on an overarching experience, not gear treadmills, dangling carrots or what have you.

No, Guild Wars 2 is about playing your way. If I want to farm hundreds upon hundreds of gold I should be able to do so in a manner which doesn’t make me feel like I’m wasting my time.

Finalchrono.5023:

Gauradan.8361:

My friends have quit.

Well, sorry they can’t find some redeeming qualities in the game. There’s still plenty of people playing, why not gain some new friends? :P I’ll play with you.

Hmm, maybe i’m just a glass half full kind of guy.

I’m still playing the game, despite all these issues, because I’ve been waiting for it for 4 years. The game is awesome, that much is not questioned. I still get the occasional moment that makes me smile, like the quaggan humming in Caledon Forest.

The problem is this heap of bad decisions from ArenaNet is killing it. Every patch breaks more and more of the game, instead of fixing issues. The Arah opening event has been bugged on my server ever since the last patch and nobody’s done anything about it.

However, adding systems that work against the player, while also being unable to fix those bugs (for which I’m not blaming them, because I understand fixing bugs can be a pain) really does make them look bad. When those systems are bugged (like the dungeon DR system) it’s even worse.

Yes, it’s B2P and you can come back and check on it later, but how many people will actually return, even if they manage to get their act together? First impressions are always the strongest. If word gets around that Guild Wars 2 is a mess, it’s going to be hard to change that mentality.

Finalchrono.5023:

Maybe it’s because i’m not constantly comparing one game to another or looking for problems and just trying to relax, hang out with some friends in a game, and maybe kick some butt here and there.

My friends have quit.

@ lagrangeify When those people resort to insults and pulling baseless facts and statistics from their arses in order to prove their points, then they’re simply defending the game for the sake of defending it, which in turn makes them exactly what the word describes, which is fanboys.

muthax.4720:

btw YOU are in no place to dictate what other players want to play either. Especially when these are the vast majority. Stop dreaming kid

Everyone defending the game is bringing this argument up as a fact. How do you know that from the 2 million people that bought the game, the vast majority is enjoying it? Just because there aren’t half a million complaints on the forum doesn’t mean the vast majority of those who purchased are enjoying the game.

Here’s a REAL fact: out of the 17 people in my small guild, there are 4 or 5 that are still logging in, even on weekend days and most of them aren’t even representing the guild anymore. Right now, there’s only 1 person online besides myself. So, there you go the vast majority of my guild isn’t enjoying the game and they simply stopped logging in, without coming to the forums. Of course, this may be not relevant to the game’s population as a whole, but there have been other people reporting even larger amounts of people quitting.

Also, we’re not claiming that the game is dying, but that ArenaNet is killing it with their bad decisions.

Apos.5184:

Ye, this is what the blind believers of every other dead-by-now MMO said.

If I leave, who will you buy materials/items from?
If I leave, who will you sell materials/items to?
If I leave, who will you stumble upon and do an event?
If I leave, who will join your guild so that it expands?
If I leave, who will you play with on WvW?
If I leave, who will play against on Wvw?

Replace I with the playerbase that is unhappy and you get the picture. Either you like it or not, in order to play an MMO, you need to have a big playerbase.

In order to have a big playerbase you have to have a variety of rewards that will satisfy multiple types of players.

See where this is going?

Oh,and by the way, the players who farm a bit more do not ruin the economy. If you say that, then you have no clue over what does.

Some farm in order to craft their own gear quickly.
Some farm to pile up gold.
Some farm because they enjoy leveling through crafting.

Do you know that I sell absolutely everything I can on the TP, even though it might be just a few copper above the vendor price and I’m practically losing a couple copper due to the listing price? Does that ruin the economy? I’d earn the same amount of money pretty much,but no, I prefer that someone else gets to use that material/item instead, even if it means that I have to take a trip to the TP office to get the income.

Does that ruin the economy as well? Obviously it should, since everything I sell is things I farmed for.

You are in no place to dictate what fun is to another player. This is an MMO. An MMO that doesn’t offer a variety of potential reward routes, but instead punishes the player by the illusion of personal gain is not on a good track.

And why do I say illusion? I’ve already established that. Losing 20% of a huge playerbase is still more money earned than losing 10% of a medium one. But hey, who’s counting, right?

Couldn’t have said it better myself.
To those defending ArenaNet, do you know why WoW is the giant that it is today? Not because it addicts people to its gear treadmill like most people here claim, but because it caters to every category of players.

I knew a guy who had over 1 million gold; he didn’t raid or anything, but I guess he had the best gear that you could buy at the Auction House. He probably liked seeing gold pile up and spent his time farming. But guess what? As opposed to this game, he could do it.

Also, while playing WoW myself, there were times when I simply didn’t want to do max level stuff. At such times, I could go do low-level dungeons, just for fun (because the rewards weren’t worth it). I also liked soloing certain raid bosses (because I was playing a Death Knight). Can I do that here? Nope, because even if I’m level 80 I’ll still get knocked into the dust and I’ll still need other people to come with me. That was casual play; just for the fun of it and it made you feel as if you’d grown stronger in your journey. Moreover, as of the last patch in Cataclysm, you can even see raid content while not putting too much effort into getting gear, due to the new LFR tool.

DusK.3849:

Alright, let’s go into some hypotheticals. Let’s say the DR system was removed entirely, and some sort of bonus system like the one I described earlier was put in its place. Now farmers are getting nowhere near as much experience, gold, karma, and items compared to players who are moving about and varying their activities, but are still getting what they got before the DR system went into place.

How long do you think it would be before the Gen Disc boards are flooded with self-entitled farmers going on about how the increased benefits from varied content are “unfair to people trying to farm”?

Because make no mistake, it would happen. See the whole issue isn’t with this DR system isn’t about punishing “the entire player base,” because it doesn’t. I remain unaffected. Many, or dare I say, possibly most players remain unaffected. The only people affected are time-rich players who insist that their low-risk/low-effort activities should be met with high reward. And those affected by the bugs in the system right now, but we’re not talking about them.

These people, even under the circumstances given in my first paragraph, would be back here on the forums, demanding higher rewards for their farming to match those who aren’t. I guarantee it, because that’s how people who want handouts work.

I never had any problem with the karma DR on events, because I never was one to farm the same events over and over again. Sure, I only stayed in Curse Shore, but I ran across the zone instead of just sitting on one camp waiting for events. My problem is with the loot DR. Loot is already scarcer than in most MMOs, having it diminish over time is even worse.

You know what’s worse about Guild Wars 2 than those other games that people are mentioning? Those games died out because they were lacking fundamentally in design, whereas Guild Wars 2 is just digging its own grave with a couple of stupid mechanics despite being a great game overall. That’s why people are complaining: because it would be a shame for this game to kill itself in such an idiotic manner. I left SWTOR without complaining because I knew the game was just another gear grind and I just couldn’t cope with that anymore, especially after seeing the promise in this game.

However, I came here just to find that getting gold is the hardest from all the MMOs I’ve played and that’s because of 2 issues: the anti-farm code and bots. The code stops me from getting crafting materials to sell and the bots stop me from selling even those few materials that I get at decent prices, because of the huge amount of mats they’re dumping into the market.

You said there are 30k “whiners”. My friend and my brother, both of whom I started playing the game with, have quit. The small guild my friend, brother and I were in is all but dead, with the 4-5 people out of 17 that are still logging in representing other guilds. None of them came to the forums as far as I’m aware. They just stopped logging in. Thus, not everyone who has quit the game came to the forums to complain.

But you know what? You keep seeing everything in pink and saying the game is doing fine. However, do please tell me how fun the game will be when only you and your entourage are left playing.

DusK.3849:

Probably shrug their shoulders and watch a disappointed minority make hardly any dent in the overall player population when they leave.

You’re throwing that argument around as if it were a fact. Are you privy to some secret statistics from inside ArenaNet?

Apos.5184:

+1 to Ronin.

Seriously, most of the playerbase complaining are players who have been playing MMOs for years and years. From as low kitten years,to as high as 10+, saying that we are just a bunch of whiny kids is ludicrous.

All of us have seen these things happen before. We don’t complain,we just point towards the conclusion that the past attempts to something like this has shown. Punishing the player is a cheap way of making sure that you won’t lose income, sure, but then you will get punished back by the player itself.

+1 from me as well. A game developer can never get away with telling players: “play the game the way we want you to” and for an MMO developer it’s even worse. The MMO market is already crowded with games, while definitely not having as many players as other genres. ArenaNet said they aimed to attract even non-MMO players. How are they going to do that when there are limitations in the game that don’t exist in single players? Not getting any loot after half an hour in Orr would be similar to being kicked from Witcher 2 after 2 hours with the message: “You’ve seen enough of Geralt’s story today. Come back tomorrow.”

Oh ArenaNet’s deciding that I should only have 30 minutes long play sessions? Well, how about if I and other like-minded players decide that we should have 0 minutes long play sessions? What will they do then?

DusK.3849:

Dungeons, eh, I say just reward one token per chain clear, 2 if it’s your first chain clear for the day, and drop all the exotic armor prices down to 2 tokens per. Partial clear? Tough luck, try again. No first boss farming, people feel rewarded at the end of an explorable run because they get a nice shiny new piece of armor every time, and they’re still motivated to do multiple chains.

Funny you should say that, because that’s exactly how ArenaNet said it would be in the first place. As it is right now you still have to do roughly 20 runs to get a full set and that’s while hoping that the DR system doesn’t bug for you or the event for the dungeon that you need doesn’t bug. In my case, I want to get the Arah armor, but tough luck, the event’s been bugged since the last patch, so I can’t get in.

@Kincaidia If you’re talking about the fact that the OP was infracted, you’ll probably get infracted for your post too. Of course, I’ll be getting infracted for this one too.

Chantry of Secrets?

I agree. People say WoW is grindy, then when we say there are grinds in Guild Wars 2 as well, people say they’re optional. Somebody please call Blizzard and tell them that by simply stating that the grinds in their game are optional (which is true: nobody forces you to do tier over tier of content; there’s a huge world filled with quests, ripe for exploration) they’ll make WoW into a next-gen MMO.

Revenant.2691:

What really ticks me of is that I’ve already got almost a full set of Exotic armor on, an Exotic weapon, enough food to last me for days, 3 crafting skills at 400, and no desire to get a Legendary at this time with the economy so broken, so pretty much all I farm for is WvWvW. Spent about 6g upgrading towers and keeps the other night which took me a couple of hours to farm fast-travelling between Cursed Shore and Frostgorge. Spend another couple of hours slowly but steadily taking our borderlands back and getting them fortified for peak hours, then two enemy zergs pop in and roll us all the way back to the Garrison within half an hour. Now, I got plenty of Karma from running around fighting supply camp wars and re-capping the keeps and whatnot, but it seems that if I want to play WvWvW, which most players consider the endgame, and do well for my server, I have to spend hours every day farming gold to have enough to buy us the upgrades we need to hold on. That wouldn’t be so bad, but it feels like the game is fighting me every step of the way, like it doesn’t want me to have fun. The anti-grinding mechanic is actually making me have to grind more, just to participate in the things I consider fun.

Oh, and furthermore, the loot cap needs to be removed entirely from WvWvW maps. I can understand the logic behind having it in PvE zones, flawed as that logic is, but to have the cap kick in and nerf my badge drops from killing other players in PvP is nothing short of moronic. I can confirm this. Was manning a cannon, defending the bay keep during a long, protracted siege. Was getting about 1 badge drop per 4-5 kills at the beginning. Around the end? Over 30 kills with zero badges.

This has disgusted me so much that I haven’t been able to bring myself to log in since Tuesday. It’s not that I don’t love this game and have fun playing it. It’s one of the best MMOs I’ve played since GW1… or at least for the first 30 minutes I try to do something before the system steps in and tells me I’m having too much fun. It’s like Gandalf’s standing on a bridge in front of me shouting “YOU SHALL NOT PLAY!” Truth is, if they don’t fix this, I probably won’t.

This is what some people mindlessly defend as innovation in the genre. Your points, while true, will probably not be taken into consideration by ArenaNet. The best that could happen now is that this thread won’t be invaded by the “fun” people who are so eager to jump at the throats of those who bring up valid concerns about the game.

Newsin.1945:

What annoys me is when they say “there will be no grinding” and then put in a mechanic that requires it like crafting. really?

For that post, you’ll be swarmed by an army of rabid fanboys telling you how the grind is optional, without them taking into consideration the fact that besides grinding there’s nothing else to do at level 80 after you’ve done 100% map completion.

I agree with the OP, but there have been many threads like yours and they’ve all been ignored. I wanted to give ArenaNet the benefit of the doubt, but it’s been a month already and despite the controversy around this mechanic it’s still there. What else could you believe besides the fact that they mean to keep the players poor? You can’t possibly still believe it’s working against bots, because if it did, there wouldn’t be as many gold sellers as there are.

Fayel.7589:

No… they are fixing exploits as fast as possible so the economy doesn’t get messed up, it’s simple really, and makes sense. They’re gone get around to the bugs, don’t worry. The game just came out, give it a break.

If they really cared about the economy, they would have banned the huge amounts of bots. That’s what’s ruining the economy, not the fact that people are finding ways around their stupid mechanics. Besides, the economy is already messed up anyway. The lowest tier fine crafting materials cost 4 times less than they did the past week. Nice try, though.

@DusK He says as he goes back to games made by developers that charge him $15 a month while lying to him about how that money pays for the development of new content and the upkeep of servers.
You know, you’ve posted a good three pages worth about this “soulless company.” In largely mangled grammar, I might add. You ever think that might have been time better spent?

Yes, why would you pay 15$ a month and get a complete game when you can play Guild Wars 2 that only offers part of the game for free, the rest being accessible by active usage of the store? There are two such systems I can think of: the transmutation stone system (because we know how hard it is to get fine stones in-game and how much it depends on luck) and the minipet system. WoW has transmogrification which works pretty much the same way, but costs in-game gold, while also having lots of pets obtainable in-game. So, yes, I’d rather pay 15$ and get a complete game, rather than not pay at all and get only a part of it. Being able to trade gold for gems doesn’t nullify these concerns. I shouldn’t have to access the store in a 2012 MMO in order to be able to change the way my character looks. Even LOTRO and Age of Conan, which are F2Ps , give wardrobe slots for free.

Add to those issues the fact that the endgame is a grind, the fact that the gold sinks are absurdly high and nobody ever wants to do dungeons and you get just another MMO who thought that it could beat WoW at its own game and failed.

Detahmaio.2014:

Seems like they want you to grind the way they want you to. If you find a way to make it easier on yourself fan-boys and a-net slap exploit next to it and patch it ASAP while professions like the necro have 100’s of bugs not patched up.

Because there’s no profit to fixing bugs. There’s profit in fixing these “exploits” because the poorer people are, the more easily they’ll buy gems to trade for gold.

People on these forums claim that we shouldn’t ask for the grind to be removed because it’s optional and we can get the rewards by simply playing the game. They say ArenaNet doesn’t need you to play constantly. No, they don’t. They use an even more insidious method of milking their players: they don’t addict them to grinds, they make them feel bitter about the fact that, even though there are grinds, they’re impossible to complete. This way, they’ll get one of the two responses: some people will either buy gems and trade them for gold or buy boosters in order to make the grind go more smoothly, while others simply leave. Either way is fine to them, because they already have your money from the box price. Thus, they’d rather have 5 people quitting the game for one that spends money in the gem store.

I can’t keep playing the game just because it’s Guild Wars 2. I can’t keep playing the game just because of what it promised to be 2 years ago. The game has serious issues at the moment and the fact that ArenaNet cares more about keeping the population poor than about fixing bugs makes me want to play even less. Every patch breaks more and more of the game. The last patch just broke the Arah event on my server. Now, you can’t even get into the dungeon anymore. The only things that seem to be working properly are the mechanics put in place to prevent “exploiting”.

JazzyJay.1367:

I do understand how you feel about the cost. In my opinion the cost has the perfect weight. It isn’t so cheap that it is like, “Yeah whatever”, and it isn’t so expensive that I think, “Not a chance I will ever use that.” I weigh my travel expense before I go knowing I will have to work that cost off.

I won’t complain if they lower it, I promise you that.

There are enough goldsinks as it is. Repair costs (especially as expensive as they are right now) and travel costs really weren’t needed. The biggest gold sink is the trading post fee, which removes 15% of the gold on every transaction.

“..takes everything you love about Guild Wars 1..”
People loved free travel in Guild Wars 1. People loved not having to repair armor in Guild Wars 1. So again, how did they take everything we loved about Guild Wars 1 and put it into Guild Wars 2?

It feels more like they took what we hated about WoW, multiplied it by 10, then added it here. Both the armor repair costs and the travel costs in WoW were trivial, not to mention that you had mounts if you really didn’t want to pay.

JazzyJay.1367:

Gauradan.8361:

Well then, if they can’t come up with anything besides grinding to keep players busy, they’ll be remembered as another MMO that wanted to wrestle the giant that is WoW and got knocked into the dust. They say they want you to explore the world and have fun. If you did just that, without any farming at all, you’d be broke because of the waypoint travel costs. Reducing the waypoint travel costs or even removing them altogether would be the first step towards removing grinds.

So you remembered nothing about the game except the grind at 80? That is the only thing that comes to mind? Wow (no not WoW, but wow). How did you get to 80 if you couldn’t afford waypoint travel? I have had no trouble at all with waypoint costs. I walk a lot of the time and gather mats and such on the way. I get a couple drops decent drops from monsters and I have no trouble paying for waypoints.

“will be remembered”=/=“I will remember”. Of course I could afford waypoint travel; leveling is easily the most profitable avenue of gold. I can afford waypoint travel even now, but that’s because I farm gold. And even when I had 30 gold (before buying the first piece of T3 Cultural), I would still get annoyed by the fact that I had to pay 3 silver to get to Orr from LA.

Wait, so just because NcSoft paid for some reviews the game instantly becomes GOTY? There are games with higher user score than Guild Wars 2. Besides, why would you even listen to most critics? Look at Mass Effect 3’s critic score versus user score. We all know how much of a disappointment that game was.

Even SWTOR has 85 critic score, despite being such a flop. Are you telling me all those reviews were honest and not paid for by EA?

JazzyJay.1367:

There are so many complaints about grind at level 80. Then there are people that say there is nothing to do at 80. What way do you want it? If they just give you EVERYTHING at 80, there will be absolutely nothing to do. If they make is real quick, why bother at all? If it takes a long time it is suddenly considered a grind. Because ArenaNet said they were trying to avoid the grind, people jump all over them. How can you make anything last a long time in an MMO without some sort of grind? It isn’t possible. Devs cannot write code as fast as people can conquer it. Would you have preferred to wait another 10 years for this game? Waited until ArenaNet exhausted its resources and went out of business with the game unreleased because too much time went into content?

Freaking Ridiculous.

Well then, if they can’t come up with anything besides grinding to keep players busy, they’ll be remembered as another MMO that wanted to wrestle the giant that is WoW and got knocked into the dust. They say they want you to explore the world and have fun. If you did just that, without any farming at all, you’d be broke because of the waypoint travel costs. Reducing the waypoint travel costs or even removing them altogether would be the first step towards removing grinds.

Lance Coolee.9480:

And don’t try to combat this with the generic “well anyone can grind if they want to, just stand in one place and kill the same thing until ur fingers bleed. how do you expect anet to keep players from doing that”.

The designers PURPOSEFULLY emplaced rewards with no path to obtain them aside from grinding. This was very likely done (my belief) so that there was something for players to do when they hit level 80. This feels like a major cop-out and there are much better solutions to that problem.

I’ve got some 7000 achievement points in WoW. I’ve got over 100 mounts. Most of that was achieved by grinding, some of it while having fun. So, I’m asking myself: is it worth taking up another MMO in which I’m supposed to be doing the same thing all over again? Definitely not. If I wanted to grind, I’d go back to WoW, where I’ve already done some of it. That’s why no MMO, Guild Wars 2 included, has beaten WoW so far.

That’s why most players who pick up new MMOs simply return to WoW after hitting level cap: because they realize it’s the same thing with a different setting and better graphics. Why would they reinvest time in a game that does the same things as WoW when they could just as easily play WoW, in which they have already invested time?

Leveling in Guild Wars 2 was fun. Level 80 is simply WoW-like grind, but with a stat plateau to it. If any developer thinks they can beat WoW at their own game, just because they’re saying their game is designed for fun or that the grind is optional, they’re wrong.

The grinding for 100 mounts was optional in WoW too. So are many others. Yet people still see WoW as a huge grindfest. Why was ArenaNet pointing fingers at other MMOs saying those who ran them wanted us to grind? Isn’t it the same here? If you don’t grind, what else is there to do? You can say: “just have fun and you’ll reach whatever goal you’re after”. That’s wrong; you won’t reach that goal. Repair costs and travel costs will see to that.

For the record, I haven’t been subscribed to WoW since January and I’m not trying to praise the game in anyway. I just can’t for the life of me understand why people see WoW as grindy, when grinds have the same “optionality” there as they do here.

@Mackdose Where am I getting that information? Why, the manifesto itself, of course?

“We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that. No one finds it fun.”

When they say they don’t want players to grind, it means there aren’t supposed to be any grinds. If there are, there will be people who are doing it and as such, they will have gone against their philosophy in the manifesto. It’s simple logic, really.

Moreover, like someone else already said, they put in huge grinds in the game and then tried to make sure you couldn’t them do. They increased the cost of the Tier 3 Cultural armor tenfold since beta. All the while, we can’t even sell the crafting materials that we get as drops at decent prices, because there are bots farming tons of them and then selling them at ridiculously low prices.

Is this the game that you were promised? A game where, if you just ran around the world, having fun, you wouldn’t be able to withstand the cost of waypoint traveling? A game that is played by more bots, than people?

nerva.7940:

dungeons are amazing.

I just love this kind of posts. No arguments, no previous build-up, nothing to indicate that it’s a personal opinion. Alright, you’ve convinced me. Dungeons are amazing.

Swagman.9013:

If I can do it anyone can do it. There’s no trick to it

Let me rephrase then: The next trick is to get other 4 people that did it and are willing to do dungeons.

Swagman.9013:

So guild wars 1 had 0 grind completely fun replayable content with enough rewards to keep players going for years, all within 1 month of release.

Well I don’t get why you would ever play any other game ever again.

I never played at release, so I couldn’t tell you that. However, the game had something to it that set it apart. In Guild Wars 2 that’s not the case; we’ve got stupid gold sinks, we’ve got armor grinds; we’ve seen this before, we’ve been here before. Why would we start anew?

Note: I have never been one of those hardcore players doing the toughest things in the game. If I had been, the game could have probably held my attention even more.

Lance Coolee.9480:

So wait, if we can’t achieve infinitely varying content, the only other viable solution is to implement incredibly redundant content? Oh that must’ve been the innovation they were talking about.

So there’s no middle ground here, like say, giving players the immediate opportunity to buy a dungeon skin after completing the story line, then setting them up with an epic quest path (that involves them entering / completing each of the explorable modes) that allows them to take their story armor and craft a cooler looking exotic set? Heck! why not sprinkle in some ties to the open world and you’ve got yourself some variety!

That’s just a drop of a dime suggestion, but don’t tell me that the creative team responsible for composing such a beautiful looking world just completely brainfarted on the PvE content at 80.

I’m sorry, are you referring to Guild Wars 1 in your post? Because, as far as I’m concerned, that game was able to hold my attention for some 8 months as an everyday activity and then, even if I took breaks, I’d still come back for a couple of weeks and play it some more. I hardly doubt this will be the case with Guild Wars 2, unless they change some parts of the game drastically (starting with dungeons).