Guild Wars 2

I think this is a difficult issue for game makers. If you implement marriage as an option you can’t win. Either it’s for heterosexual couples only and you get criticism or you allow same gender marriage as well and you get a lot of crap from the other side.

My personal view is that same gender marriage should be allowed if you allow for marriages. I believe that people should be able to choose that for themselves.

Whether Anet wants to make a political statement or not is another matter though. Cause let’s be honest…if you implement marriage as a game developer, you will make a political statement either way.

What I would like is that when I press G the opening screen is the roster so I can see who’s online with which character first of all.

Soulwatcher.2604:

Gehenna.3625:

Is this a troll?

I am never super rich in any game but I do ok. Currently my main has about 15g and I haven’t really tried to farm much at all.

It seems to me that Anet made more money sinks that appealed to you then any MMO you played since 1999. That sounds like a positive achievement.

I don’t want to sound rude but 15 gold is nothing I have made way more then that and I still do not feel wealthy or rich.

Don’t worry, I’m not offended. I’ve taken my time to get to level 50 and got my exotic stuff together and have 15g. That isn’t wealthy but if you have had lots more cash and don’t feel rich, well, I dunno what your problem is. You are rich apparently but don’t feel it. You now admit that you are actually or were rich at some point. So it is easy for you to get rich.

So what are you getting at then? Do you really prefer having tons of gold and nothing to spend it on? I suppose it’s that way in many games but I see it as a positive thing that you still have lots you can spend it on.

Most people I know who play an elementalist have a hard time with it. Simply because an elementalist is very fragile. It requires you to move more. I’d say it gets better at higher levels but even though it requires more movement the elementalist doesn’t get weapon swapping. Also you need to invest in traits to make elements better and you can’t go full out in all 4 of course.
So I find the lack of weapon swapping a bit of a shame but it is cheaper.

Mesmer is just a very unique class. Don’t really see something like it in other games. It can be tricky to play right though. Personally, my main is a mesmer, I find it interesting and especially in dungeons and pvp you move a lot, no matter which class really. Still, mesmer would not by definition be the easiest class to figure out when you’re new to GW.

Is this a troll?

I am never super rich in any game but I do ok. Currently my main has about 15g and I haven’t really tried to farm much at all.

It seems to me that Anet made more money sinks that appealed to you then any MMO you played since 1999. That sounds like a positive achievement.

Drake.7952:

Story

Pros- I have to say, the story, voice acting, characters, etc are really good……
Cons – …… till level 50. When Trahearne took over and I realised I won’t lead the pact with Destiny’s edge, I really lost interest in the story… I’m sure many people agree.
7/10.

I disagree with the voice acting. It’s generaly childish and pedantic. It’s sort of goodie goodie (Lawful Good for D&D fans) and doesn’t allow for character development. Nowadays I skip all convo’s, even new ones. I can’t stand them really.

I do agree with the con. Trahearne is annoying and you really lose the “this is my story” into “I was also there”.

I prefer the local stuff (DE’s and tasks) much more because they don’t annoy me. I suppose I only still do story line stuff for certain rewards but even there I might give up on it totally.

So I give story a 4/10, but luckily there’s many things I do like in the game and from that perspective it’s good that the main story line is a small part of the content.

@Gohlar …but what if GW2 isn’t a gym but a cafe where you can have a laugh, a couple of beers and fun with some friends. And in that bar you can throw darts, shoot some pool etc etc.

It’s all about perception. What you might want to consider is that when you create a MMO you want to actually get a return on investment. This means that you need to aim for a larger audience. Per definition you cannot then focus this game towards a small part of this audience.

You represent a part of the audience but not the majority of players. If they make the game more challenging, Anet will lose a lot of players accordingly. Less income therefore. They make their cash off the initial box sale and basically fluff, convenience items in the gemstore….look at the gemstore and tell me whether you think it’s geared towards more casual or hardcore players. I think you might agree that it’s more about casuals. Hardcore players don’t need costumes and mini pets.

So a lot of the continuous sales come via the casual community. Making the game harder just chases those people away.

I’ve seen this in many MMOs but not to be funny but if you want hardcore, go play lineage or something. Here in the west the MMOs are more casual or they have a very small population. And well, small populations are not good for big projects that cost a lot of money to make.

It’s like going to McDonald’s and wondering why they don’t sell Beef Wellington. If you want the hardcore stuff and lots of challenge, a big game won’t offer that to you, because there’s not enough players that like that to make it worth investing many millions into.

AlexanderFaust.4518:

While I don’t agree with the tone of your post ~ I can’t argue with some of your points. ~ People that like GW2 seem to have forgotten what “fun” is really about (IE: Challenge) ~ not having everything handed to you.

You simply fail to understand that fun is not a fixed concept but something that is different to different people.

You say challenge and not getting everything handed to you is fun. This is not an exact statement, because what is a challenge to you? And at which point do you feel like they’re handing things out to you?

There simple is not a single reply to those questions.

Karma gear and legendary’s are not handed out as it is. But GW1 wasn’t about what you want.

The OP is right that this game is largely misunderstood. You apparently don’t get that the definition of fun is different for different people.

Selo.1250:

95% of the armors in GW2 is quite plain and boring looking.

If theres naything the Asians are good at doing, its armorlooks, Aion had awesome armorlooks.

Aion sucked in many ways but yeh they did have some cool armours. Mind you, GW2 copied a fair number of things from Aion but not the design.

It is kind of odd because they had better looking armour in GW1.

Some people here say that exotic gear looks better and they should wait till they get that but I agree that most exotic gear looks pretty horrendous too. I’m still hoping for content updates with more armour

I dunno, I don’t stack any MF but it is kinda lame that after more than 300 hours played I haven’t actually had a single exotic drop.

Not a game breaker for me, don’t get me wrong, I have full exotic gear but yeh it does seem to me that MF is really a bad mechanic that we could’ve done without. It would seem like extrem bad luck to not have had a single exotic drop after so much time, but oh well.

I think that it’s just fine. I mean, I don’t see much sense in celebrating Halloween two weeks after the date itself.

Yep, dungeons and selling mats work for me.

PvP and PvE are very different beasts. I don’t complain about the monthly being cross game, especially since we do have daily quests that gives rewards for PvE content.

On the other hand, I don’t seen an issue with having more than one monthly reward either. It would be ok to have a specific PvP monthly and a PvE monthy as well as a PvX monthly. The rewards should suit the players for that area of the game.

I think I can understand that Anet wants to encourage people to do both but zerg pvp isn’t for everyone and I think at the moment pvp needs help as it is. I for one miss the 4 vs 4 random arena’s from GW1 and a 1 vs 1 dueling arena wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

Yeah, I like the downscaling in that respect because it allows me to play elsewhere and still get something out of it.

I am sure it’s less efficient blah blah but I can go to low level areas and still get 250 karma for each event even if it’s a level 3 event.

Anything is better than Orr at this stage. I think from a story point of view it makes sense, I will say that. But once you’ve gone through it and finished your story…which I might not even do on alts because it’s a really disappointing ending, the place is to be avoided.

I don’t go to Orr anymore with my level 80 ….done with it, don’t need it. Part of it I think is that the Orr zones as it is are too big. Orr in that style could’ve been one third of the total area. Now it’s just a massive annoying zone with too much distance between the temples.

Try support instead of the general forum. It sucks when that happens but general chat is not the place for this.

I think criticism is a good thing for continuous improvement.

Sadly, a lot of people with complaints resort to flaming and shouting and general unresolved anger management issues. That’s the stuff I can do without.

I like the game but it also has some things I feel can be improved. No need to start name calling towards Anet, but I’ve made a couple of suggestions and made some comments.

Oh well…people are people I guess

I play pve mostly so pvp doesn’t mean so much to me, but for damage I prefer sword and torch. Defensively I tend to go with mace and shield but not completely happy with that.

Since it’s also a part of their anti-botting approach, it goes without saying really that they won’t give us any details of how exactly it works

@Gabi….. 33 minutes and counting. Thread’s still here.

Personally I don’t mind criticism with regards to the game. I have some myself.

I do get a bit tired though of all these people who think threads get closed simply because they disagree with Anet. I’ve seen quite a few threads being closed and I agreed with all of em. It was just people spamming the same topics over and over, flaming (which goes well beyond critisizing) or derailed threads.

This guy is just giving his opinion. Therefore the thread is still there.

So, you’re complaining that this patch apparently made your class the worst rdps class….but it would be ok if another class was the worst rdps class?

I ask that because obviously someone has to be the worst at something. So which class did you have in mind, should be the worst rdps of the ranged classes?

Oh and what exactly is a ranged class because, well, rangers can also do melee and have pets and all that? Would be nice if you could clarify what you meant there exactly?

I think that if MF didn’t exist in this game it wouldn’t be an issue. It doesn’t add anything positive by its existence but it does create issues.

PvE and PvP are totally different. Anet had lots of problems with this in GW1 until they finally split it with alternate versions of skills and pve-only skills.

Perhaps they thought they could do better now by dumbing down pve encounters and taking out dual classes.

Personally I don’t think it’s working and it will get worse over time. PvP will get more competitive and the need for skill balancing there will increase. At the same time the pve encounters will have to become more interesting. Not necessarily harder but more interesting than dodge, ress, heal and auto attack.

I think over time it will require that the skill bar and traits actually have an impact on your build in pve. At the moment that impact is relatively small. People might lose interest in combat in pve and get bored with it.

Considering that PvE and PvP have different requirements it is inevitable to me that the skill bars will become more and more of an issue over time. Right now a lot of people in pve might not mind but at some point they’ve done the vista’s and skill challenges and can’t be arsed to do them anymore. The combat system is just rather a bit boring in pve when it comes to boss fights or even veteran mobs and up.

So yeah, I think the split will come as skill balancing continues.

Anet has more people to consider outside the people who complain on the forum.

I will not blame Anet for people’s inability to deal with issues as an adult.

Making it personal and shouting at people is childish behaviour. If you are so upset about this that you cannot control your language then it’s your own failing.

Again Anet need to consider more than just one group of players. What I get sick of (not literally duh), is people coming here thinking they are the majority of players completely exaggerating their first world problems.

Public health issue? Get real. That is so far beyond ridiculous as a statement, that anything else you said cannot be taken seriously.

If a game company can make you this angry, then you have personal issues. If you think it’s personal, then you are overstating your own importance in this. Reality check please.

Now I don’t say there isn’t an issue that needs to be addressed but this childish display of emotion is probably the worst way to make your case.

Devildoc.6721:

@Jeshtuni: No, the damage shown in the screenshot is the total damage for all the hits in the combo.

I think in the end they need to split skills for PVE and PVP. Warriors are OP in PVE, but claim to be underpowered in PVP. Mesmers are underpowered for PVE, and OP for PVP, thieves in that same boat.

I would disagree that mesmers are underpowered for PvE. I am sure I don’t have the highest DPS but when I am in dungeons I am generally the person with the least actual deaths. Between illusions, chaos armor and a couple of other handy skills I use, I have a great survivability and rather constant DPS.

So I think it depends on how you look at it. It does require a lot of moving and proper timing to make it work, so in that sense perhaps the mesmer is not as good in pve for a lot of players.

What annoys me most is that some mobs or bosses in dungeons just have 10 million hit points.

There is no real challenge except not falling asleep. In TA for example you have a set of two wardens just before the end boss. One has a nasty knock down combo, so he is the primary target, but the other warden is easy to manage….it just takes 5 minutes to kill him because he’s incredible tough and/or has tons of hp.

This is just plain boring. The one shotting is annoying too but I fear that for the sake of ease of balancing skills they decided to make pve encounters rather simplistic so that pvp balancing has little effect on pve.

What I mean is that the pve difficulty is entirely dependent on how well you dodge and how quickly you ress team mates. Your actual skill bar only needs your auto attack and heal skill. The rest is just fluff that you could use but don’t really need.

With regards to difficulty in pve this means that boss difficulty is not about your skill bar but about your ability to dodge in time and kite around. Your traits and skills just determine the duration of the fight but not the outcome in any way. At least that’s how it feels to me.

It’s not utterly horrible.

You can get exotic gear quite easily, but yes getting skins for each set can cost a bit more. It gives you stuff to do as it is.

My mesmer uses phantasms because they come with the weapon choice. Not because I actually want those skills (I prefer clones). So I am forced to take such skills and now they get nerfed.

Thank you for reminding me of the annoying lack of flexibility in the skill bar and the obvious factor that these balances are all about pvp.

PvE encounters have been purposefully dumbed down to big hp and toughness mobs/bosses with one shot kills abilities. This nerf will not really affect pve because in pve you are only really required to use dodge, ress your team mates and use auto attack. The rest of the skills you can click at your leisure….they are basically inconsequential.

So yeh this nerf doesn’t shock me as much as it reminds me of the limitations for builds and pve especially.

In general I fear that from their experience with GW1 they are erring on the safe side. It seems that all skill balancing, including the elite skill particularly is to ensure balance in PvP. I don’t really want to bring in a PvP vs PvE discussion but it does seem that they’ve balanced around PvP and then dumbed down the PvE encounters to match the skills.

Elite skills got the worst of that and cause them to feel inconsequential in PvE. I am sure that if elites got buffed, they would wreak havoc in PvP. And there we are again.

PvE skills anyone?

They took out dual classes because it was too difficult to balance. I don’t think it really helped. Elites are pre-nerfed to keep balance in PvP, but in PvE we are stuck with boss fights where all you need is your self heal and an auto attack, the rest is fluff it seems….

Well, but that is part of my point. How would it wreck balance if “normal skills” are equipped.

If what you say is true, then it means normal skills are more powerful than the elite skills and all this talk about elite skills that can change the tide of battle are a bunch of nonesense.

Either elite skills need to become elite skills or they need to allow normal skills in that slot. At this moment it’s a lesser skill and the elite skill slot forces you to use only these failed elite skills.

Balance is all good and well, but if it’s balance > fun or balance > sense then I believe we lose a general balance somewhere else.

The elite skills don’t empower you but make you less powerful than when you would be allowed to slot a normal skill according to what you say here. If that were true, I find that highly disappointing.

I am not sure how the OP gets 4s repair bills for one death. I have full exotic gear and I pay about 1.5 silver per death.

I do agree that the waypoint costs are out of proportion. You can argue all day about the exact amount but I just like to do a little comparison:

Death: repair cost for exotic magic armour 1.5 silver
Waypoint travel to the nearest waypoint 1.5 silver
Waypoint travel from LA to Orr 2.5-3.5 silver
Travelling from Orr to LA via PvP tab free

My question is then: Does this make sense to anyone? It doesn’t really to me. Cash represents a value. Why does traveling one way have a value and the other way does not?

Also leveling causes waypoint costs to go up. This really makes no sense to me. I was in the human starter area yesterday and someone asked for help with a cave troll. From what I could tell there were only 2 people there and teleporting there cost 1.6 silver. With not many people there I considered that it was possible I could die. Sure, I am level 80 but with scaling down, I could die if I end up fighting a champion. They can kill me in a shot or two anyway and if the other guys are down as well then I have to pay another 1.5 silver and perhaps more. And what sort of loot can I expect from a low level event boss/champion/whatever?

So instead of rushing in there and helping out. I was sitting there trying to decide whether helping these players would cost too much.

If anything, that’s what’s mostly wrong with all of this.

And no, I didn’t go there in the end. It didn’t seem worth the risk to me. I only have about 3-4 gold and need to save money for other things. It’s a reality that’s there and it doesn’t encourage players to help each other out in my view.

Right, so at level 30 you unlock your final skill slot: the elite slot.

So, you think, finally I can equip those powerful elite skills….but they’re not powerful, have a cd that’s way too long or simply don’t fit into my build.

End conclusion: I have other skills that I would prefer to use instead of these so-called elites. So tell me Anet, how about allowing “normal skills” in the elite slot…or is that too powerful?

I would agree. Either the elite skills is too situational or it’s not really impressive. My main is a Mesmer and I guess it’s time warp that I use all the time. The rest is trash in comparison.

However, with the cd being 3.5 minutes I can only use it once a fight and with the current amount of hp/toughness on bosses it barely makes a dent.

In another thread I mentioned that most boss fights are just about that hp/toughness that just takes a long time to kill. This subject ties into that. The elites generally don’t have much of an effect.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that I wish I could equip non-elites in that skill slot because it would work much better for me that way. Many more skills that I have are simply more useful than the actual elites themselves.

The guardian can’t really use any elites underwater, so I don’t. It’s just an empty skill slot. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really matter either.

You do the math on that…

Well, I played GW1 quite a bit (over 6k hours) and I must say that what I miss from that in GW2 is the real ability to create actual builds. This was because you could redo your skill bar and attributes, even save builds so you quickly change between them. Redoing traits isn’t so flexible…you do need to go to a trainer and pay a small amount, so there is less flexibility.
The weapon sets are prepared by Anet. I do not agree with their choices in many cases. My level 21 necromancer for example uses 2 daggers but in essence I use a grasp skill on 6 to pull an enemy in and spam auto attack (skill 1). That’s the quickest and best way to kill. I might occasionally cast a heal or a well but usually there’s no need.

Then there’s a lot of bosses or champions that are best done with auto attack. It’s just a matter of their toughness and hp. I would prefer bosses were a little less on that side and a bit more of a dynamic fight. In any case, it doesn’t help in making things interesting.

No, what it looks like to me is that the skills are mainly fine tuned around pvp and pve is set up in a way that it doesn’t really matter which skills you bring as long as you have your auto attack, a heal and condition removal. The rest is really inconsequential in my view. You can use them for flavor or make kiting easier but you could do without them.

And this makes combat a bit one-dimensional in pve. It seems that Anet wanted to get rid of all the tricky skill balancing from GW1 and as such focused around pvp and dumbed down pve encounters to simple dps vs health/toughness encounters.

The real skills you need in group content is ressing and dodging.

Now, I don’t want to sound too negative here but I really do feel limited by the weapon choices. A lot of times I don’t like the skill choices because I usually am stuck with at least 1 or 2 skills on the weapon side that don’t fit in my build and I do get a bit tired of mobs or bosses where the only challenge is not getting RSI before their hp are finally gone.

It does take a bit of the fun out of it from time to time.

On the other hand he does have a point…if one server is that much in control, you’d think the others need a boost.

Razamis.1062:

Gehenna.3625:

I assume you are talking about the kung fu panda expansion. For a game that had over 10 million active players about a year ago, 2.7 milllion isn’t perhaps what you would hope for.

Actually thats the way expansions work for any game, not all the original player base purchase the expansion immediately because everyone plays at different pace, which means that some people are still not done with the previous expansions content and are not in any rush to get the new one. 30% of the player base bought MoP and it hasnt even been released in China yet (where millions more will likely purchase it), no, those numbers are just fine.

Expansions do sell less than the original but the 10 million I was talking about were the active accounts and not how many copies the original sold. Still, I am sure blizzard will be happy enough and if they sell a couple more millions in asia they won’t mind either. But the number of active accounts has dropped dramatically in the last year or so from what I’ve read so that still stands.

I think wow had the unique situation where they brought out something that was new to the general public and appealed. They were not the first MMO but definitely the one with the right timing. No one else can claim that advantage. Let’s be honest, no one else has the advantage of not really having a real competitor in the genre. That time is over and since that time not a single MMO has been able to reproduce what wow did.

Since then MMOs that were released either didn’t sell many copies to begin with or didn’t deliver what they promised and saw their populations cut in half within months of release. Some were salvaged by adding f2p but even there the numbers are not that high.

SWTOR was the last big one to try and they got over 2 million sales but then forget to fix the game and add more variety in content. They went from 200 servers to a handful in 9 months.

So yeh I am encouraged that GW2 sold over 2 million copies and hope that they are still selling copies because SWTOR sales plummeted within a month of release. I don’t know of any game next to wow, here in the west, that actually has had a stable base of a lot of players for a long time and we will see soon enough if GW2 can break that trend. Forget being a ‘wow-killer’ , let’s start with attracting a lot of players and maintaining a good player base. That would be an achievement by itself.

Oh, in case you wonder what I call a good player base it would be at least 500k, preferably ove 1 million active players. I think that’s what you need to be able to grow afterwards.

There was a monk in GW1….personally I really loved the Ritualist, even before SoS

I assume you are talking about the kung fu panda expansion. For a game that had over 10 million active players about a year ago, 2.7 milllion isn’t perhaps what you would hope for.

GW2 is a game with a much more humble amount of followers from GW1, a new game in many senses. How many MMOs can sell over 2 million copies nowadays? SWTOR did but destroyed itself shortly after, sales stagnated very quickly and unfortunately it went downhill from there.

One could argue that GW2 is more fun as a game and without a sub has a much better chance. Time will tell but I think all in all GW2 has done well and I do hope it will grow from there.

Looria.8019:

Gehenna.3625:

Yeh the cities are amazing places but there’s no reason to go there. It also makes little sense to create more than one hub, because people wanna go where they can talk to the most people. LA has everything except cultural armour vendors but since not everybody likes those and when you do it doesn’t take long to buy them, why spend any time there at all?

Still, they are beautifully crafted so I wouldn’t want them to be taken away. But also why would you want to separate people by forcing them to spread out to other cities?

Admittedly, a Winter’s Day celebration as we know from GW1 would probably be nicer in Hoelbrak…

Easy fix, make a chat thats connected through all cities. You will be able to be in any city and still see whats going on in all of them.

Yeah I actually think that would be a great idea.

Agenda.7935:

One thing that could add some “end-game” could be a places in lvl80 zones that only has veterans and champions, a good place for everyone to farm their t6 crafting mats and it might even offer some challenge. Also this would mean that current DR/anti-farm thingy needs to be reworked or removed so peoples could actually spend some time in there.

And imo farming spots are usually great places for social activity as there are alot of peoples doing same things as you are.

Seems like a good idea to me. It doesn’t get in the way of the solo player and allows an extra activity. DR all depends on how they set it up but in the end they have just stated that farming is a good thing in their vision so why not add a good place(s) to farm.

penatbater.4710:

I felt like HE was the main character, and I was just an overglorified assistant. :|

Unfortunately, I completely agree with you on that. At the end it certainly wasn’t “my story” anymore.

Yeh the cities are amazing places but there’s no reason to go there. It also makes little sense to create more than one hub, because people wanna go where they can talk to the most people. LA has everything except cultural armour vendors but since not everybody likes those and when you do it doesn’t take long to buy them, why spend any time there at all?

Still, they are beautifully crafted so I wouldn’t want them to be taken away. But also why would you want to separate people by forcing them to spread out to other cities?

Admittedly, a Winter’s Day celebration as we know from GW1 would probably be nicer in Hoelbrak…

Thanks for posting that Amon. It clears up a lot from what they were actually intending with this….in fact I think it clears up some misconceptions on both sides of the argument, myself included of course

Cerise.9045:

karma has no gold value, it can’t be sold, it can’t be traded in any way, it has no connection to the economy in any way

The mystic forge says you’re wrong. You also can buy salvaging kits for mats with them to sell for gold for example. That also increases their gold totals per day.

You’re just not thinking creatively enough….the gold sellers/botters on the other hand are.

I leveled my mesmer to 80 and completed the last 5 quests or so after I turned level 80

With newer characters I often am late in doing the personal stories. So I asked myself why, since I normally like story lines.

Well, for me I’ve stumbled on what I see as Anet’s weak point. The main story line in GW1 was initially told mostly in missions. I think that worked really well. Later additions were mostly text explanations. So GW1 was pretty good for me, specifically Prophecies.

In GW2 we have more cut scenes of npc’s and my character talking to each other. I do see this as an improvement over the text in chat we got in GW1 but after having played games like SWTOR and other Bioware games, the story telling is rather a bit cheesy, even childish and clunky at best. Also because of playing Bioware games I miss being able to make choices in conversations. In essence the attitude of your character is now dictated to you and that’s a problem if you envisioned your character differently.

The only good thing about the story line to me is the difficulty of the quests. They can be challenging and because there aren’t too many challenging ones it’s just nice from time to time to have.

All in all, I haven’t felt connected to my characters much and the story even less. Half the time I don’t even remember why I am doing a certain personal quests because I totally lost the background behind it.

Then the last few quests were just tedious and dragged on and the final confrontation with Zhaitan was only epic in the sense that it was an epic disappointment. Not going to go into details but it took too long to get to the end fight, it made no sense to me what was happening except in the beginning and the endfight itself didn’t feel like my character was a hero in any shape or form.

The beginning says “this is my story” and the end was “we did it all together but we couldn’t have done it without you”. Doesn’t feel the same to me.

So, it doesn’t keep me from enjoying the rest of the game but it certainly isn’t a strong point for me in this game. A shame I guess because I do love a good story.

What saves the game in that respect is that Anet have created a rich world and history. It’s just the actual story telling side that, for me at least, they aren’t very good at.

The fun about forum discussions like this is that nobody actually has real numbers but quite a few people act like they do.

The OP wants more things to do at max level. That by itself is a fair comment.

At the same time what is enough and to whom?

I would expect that when a number of players reach level 80 in less than a week, are not into playing alts and are willing to grind one area and the same event chain for weeks to get specific rewards but are not willing to repeat lower level events and are done with dungeon running because they also grinded those silly within the first month, that indeed the game will be boring by now.

But this is a relatively small group of players if we can believe the comment that most people aren’t even level 80 yet then it follows automatically that most people aren’t bored at level 80.

The second point is that the group of people that leveled to level 80 that quickly are generally (not all but mostly) the kind of people that are into efficient game and gear progression.

Then every MMO release has that group of people who rush to the end, rage over lack of content and quit.

So think about this. MMO makers know this group exists and know that most of them will quit. So why cater to them more? This group of people is relatively small and most of them will leave anyways. It’s a curve.

It’s development cost vs retention. If you can spend 100 milion (random number) on creating content and retain 85% of the players or spend 150 million on creating content and retain 90% of the players, then from a business point of view, you have to ask yourself if spending 50% more to retain 5% more players is worth it.

In my view it’s not.

Also with that there is the obvious element that Anet have advertised and spoken about GW2 in interviews for years now, explaining this game wasn’t about gear progression.

So then I have to ask the OP. If Anet used pretty much every opportunity to let people know this and you know that you like gear progression….why on earth would you buy this game?

And if you’ve played new MMOs before, how can you not know that you will go through the same thing again if you are the type of person who rushes through content.

Please just learn a MMO will never be able to satiate such rushing needs simply because the cost is to high in comparison to what the company gains from it.

I of course used made up numbers as I don’t know the real numbers but understanding the concept of cost vs return, especially that costs increase exponentially as the target goes up, can save you a lot of stress in you life.

Bottom line is that if you are the type of person who burns through content like there’s no tomorrow, you probably aren’t the target audience in GW2.

Think about it.

Stratzvyda.3921:

Jon why are you flat out lying to us? DR in it’s current state cannot possibly affect botters and not affect farmers, let me explain why. Regardless of the strictness of when the DR triggers, the main issue is why the DR triggers not when. The karma DR triggers when a large number of events are done in a short period of time. A farmer will always be able to complete more events faster than a bot. It is impossible for a trigger of this type to affect bots and not legitimate players. Additionally a farmer will be more effective in combat than a bot and will therefore kill more enemies and get more items having the loot DR trigger faster than it would for a bot. Again this entire type of trigger is incapable of punishing a bot more than a player. You need safeguards yes, but they should be a net partway down the building not a shotgun at the door to the roof.

A bot farms the best spots because the gold sellers need a steady supply to meet their demands.

If for example they need to make 100g a day to meet the demand, putting in DR will make this impossible with their same set up. They then need to find alternative ways of making that 100g a day. This could mean by finding other farming spots or by using more accounts.

In any case it does affect bots. Saying that it doesn’t affect them is just a silly statement. However, it doesn’t mean that DR solves the botting issue. It means they need to adapt or use more accounts making them more visible and easier to trace. DR cannot be seen as the only measure in the fight against botting. It’s just a small part of it and it forces botters to do things differently which Anet can then measure.

They cannot just swing the ban hammer at any suspicion either. The other side of this is that they might ban people by mistake and that would also be a bad thing.

DR is only one part of a bigger approach. The reason why it is such a big topic lies in 2 areas. First of all it affects players as well. Secondly it affects players who aren’t the target audience and are playing the game in a way that it wasn’t made for (this second part is of course my opinion based on the advertisements, interviews from Anet and experiencing the game myself as a player).

The reason I put that second reason in is because it is also my belief that DR isn’t just about bots. To me it was also a clear measure, just like changes in dungeons against speed clearing that Anet does want to stick to their vision for this game.

I have seen the reduction in Karma gain once myself and it was day that I was doing the grenth chain a few times cause people kept failing the chain because of the shade thing.

I was like oh well and after it failed again I left to do something else anyways caus I get bored with doing the same event 5 times in a row as it is…reward or no reward.

But even though DR by itself doesn’t fix the bot problem, it does have an effect on them.

The group of people that rushed to level 80 in the first week are I suppose by definition mostly people who are disappointed by now because of lack of content and trying to turn this game into a grindfest even though it’s not that type of game.

You see this best in the comments about legendary weapons. You don’t need this type of weapon to do any of the content in the game and from my point of view it’s the kind of thing that you can work towards over time. When I say time I mean months, not a couple of weeks.

The comment here that the cost of legendary weapons requires that people grind a lot in Orr is therefore an incorrect conclusion. People are used to grind for stuff in other games, because you need the gear to be able to participate in certain activities but I see that if after a few months I happen to have a lot of spare karma or skill points or what not that I might work towards it as a long term goal.

It’s pure impatience and skinner style training of gamers in other games that creates the need to grind for legendary weapons. A person with a bit of sense (in my opinion) can conclude that this is a long term goal that you can work towards over the next 3-6 months or so….if you want to. Again, you don’t need to.

So yes it is very possible that at least part of the current level 80 community are a bit frustrated and convinced themselves they have to grind and are upset at DR therefore because they only understand gear progression as fun. That is their personal problem, not mine. Sure, there is nothing wrong with liking gear progression, but then why play a game that isn’t gear centric but more about cosmetics? That makes no sense.

If you have the bad luck to be on a server where you have a lot of issues with the level 80 community I guess these people are the majority there. But then it is Orr….a lot of other level 80s spend more time in dungeons like TA and CoF and doing lower level content cause it’s fun and gives variation, rather than feeling I must grind Orr or else I have no endgame content left.

It really is a matter of perception and I suppose it’s sad when you are in a place with a lot of people like that.

OP, I see your points but there are a couple of items I’d like to comment on as I don’t agree.

You say you need to grind Orr to get exotic gear. This is a common misunderstanding. I have full exotic gear and didn’t spend much time in Orr at all. Dungeons and the TP are much better sources for exotic gear. It’s much less grind in Dungeons and the TP prices start around 2g each which is not that hard to make going all over the place. Also selling mats that you gather can quickly make you money. I decided I wasn’t going to do crafting and sold all the mats I had gathered so far. I made over 10g and trust me, I was not a meticulous gatherer, I skipped lots of nodes on the way to level 80. Also dungeons (and yes I mean explorable mostly) make good money. A decent group clears dungeons in less than 1.5 hours and you don’t have to have a lot of repair costs, again with a decent group. It nets good silver and some drops here and there that will net you something decent on the tp.

Also you don’t need to go to Orr for level 80 drops. You get those drops from all chests. For example in dungeons when I open a boss chest or in events that end with a chest the drops are level 76+

All in all I became level 80 a couple of weeks ago and it took me less than 10 days to get full exotic gear and I only was in Orr a few times since I had over 30k karma saved up from leveling and getting it to 42k for one piece of karma gear was easy enough to get then. So I have one piece from karma, 2 from a dungeon and the rest from the TP at 2-2.5g a piece which I easily made with dungeon runs (1 or 2 a day max) and selling mats.

I do feel that with a new approach as GW2 has made, there would’ve been a point to explaining more to the player base about how things work. It would’ve allowed more people to not just go to the grind as usual but be more aware of their options.

@Revenant. I didn’t compare the number of skins but the designs as such. For me GW1 had more designs I liked than GW2. This may change over time but at this stage that’s where it’s at for me.

My GW1 warrior (female) had 5 elite sets that I thought were awesome looking, like the Kurzick and Gladiator ones. I haven’t seen a single one in GW2 that I like as much as any of those. Not a single one.

I know it’s also a matter of taste but for me it’s made me stop leveling my guardian because I don’t have any real cool armour to look forward to. I hope more will be added later but specifically heavy armour either looks bland, funky or over the top (you those ones with flames coming out of em). It doesn’t have a good sense of style with it.

Light armour definitely has much more going for it.

yeah one thing I find in GW2 is that the design of armours isn’t nearly as good as it was in GW1. Light armour does have a few nice ones but for heavy I haven’t seen anything I really liked. So far my HoM skins for heavy armour are still the best I’ve seen.