Guild Wars 2

I still think in-game VoIP is the best long-term comms solution for ArenaNet, with proximity and global channels a la ARMA 2 /3.
But that’s a discussion for another day.

Yeah, I’m not keen on unlocking options based on WxP. All commanders should have all options available at all times.
WxP focusses on time played rather than inherent ability; while I know ArenaNet have adopted more time-based progression systems in PvE, I don’t think they have a place in any form of PvP. But I’m not a massive fan of WxP unlocked power benefits anyway.

I know that as an MMO developer, some of the things you feel you have to factor into game design are hooks that keep people playing and paying. But add too many of these things and you risk alienating your user base.

When the WxP progression system was initially introduced, it actively discouraged me from playing more than one character in WvW. And as an altaholic, I play for the variety switching professions offers. In the end, as more abilities were added further up the progression system, it contributed to my overall feeling of apathy towards GW2 as a whole and was a factor in me stopping playing completely.

Of course, you may use the fact that I don’t play any more as an excuse to dismiss my thoughts and suggestions, but I would hope you’d be wise enough to understand that what has put me off may very well put other players off.

If you introduce too much power progression into a competitive online game, you discourage newcomers as the barrier to entry over time grows higher.
Who wants to spend massive amounts of time playing at a sub-par level and getting continually stomped in order to just catch up and be on a level playing field?

I’ve got a few ideas, although I’m not sure if they’ve been mentioned before in the thread.

1: Use a player’s active guild symbol for their commander tag. Just the symbol, not the colour scheme. Have this tag affected by the colour schemes many others have suggested (first commander with guild symbol blue, second green, etc.).

2: Squads need dramatic re-thinking. I’m tempted to say do away with them completely, but squad-level text communication has its uses.
A player shouldn’t need to type or click anything to join a squad; they should simply be able to start following the commander they desire to.
To that end, maybe a commander’s squad level text commands should only be visible to those in their proximity. That is, whenever the commander or any player types anything using the squad channel, instead of it being based on everyone being in the same party, it should broadcast to all those within 200 metres or so. Where multiple commanders are in the same area, have player level squad text appear as white text and the commander’s text be the same colour as their tag.

3 : A commander’s mini-map order waypoints should be the same colour as their tag. Being able to see all commanders’ mini-map order waypoints at all times and being able to quickly differentiate between them would massively help tactical play. Only being able to see your particular squad commander’s order waypoints slows the flow of information.

4: Order waypoints should be visible as light column beacons in the world too instead of just being visible on the mini-map.

5: Order waypoints should be able to be placed on moving targets such as dolyaks or players, both friend and enemy. If placed on enemies, have the order waypoint disappear if the commander who placed it loses sight of the target.

6: Commanders should be able to draw on the map and have it visible to all players. In addition, their map drawings should be the same colour as their tag. I know ArenaNet are keen to limit universal visibility of map drawings in an effort to censor potential abuse, but such censorship completely stifles the potential of the map drawing system. To that end, players should be able to report abuse by right-clicking the offending drawing.

I’d like to see some Middle Eastern influenced armour, along the same lines as Saracen or Bedouin styles.

If they got rid of stats on gear, people could take armour between the two modes with no confusion or hassle.

The achievement rat race is primarily what drove me away from the game. Other things contributed, but this was the major factor.
And they’ll never get rid of it, which means all new content will to some extent be designed around achievements, which means I won’t be coming back any time soon.

stof.9341:

This is I’d say the biggest mistake in GW2 PvE. Gear should not have been role defining. The armor should have been just base armor, weapon base damage and trinkets shouldn’t exist. Traits, utilities and weapon type should have been the trait defining tools given to the players. Once that is done, the player dps and sustainability would be much less variable, allowing ANet to much better tune the PvE encounter difficulty to the point players will feel forced to make use of some really dedicated control and support roles.

I made a thread in the Suggestions forum making exactly the same argument for removing stats from gear, but got shouted down by people who think that this is the only way MMOs can work.
And that’s one of the biggest problems the game faces. It’s a victim of the vox populi.
Most people have no imagination and like things to remain constant. These people can’t understand the elegance behind such a system because all they’ve ever known are systems like the current one.

IndigoSundown.5419:

The community did embrace horizontal progression. The “nothing to do” posts didn’t start until after people got their “looks,” which didn’t take that long. ANet grossly underestimated the amount of skins needed to fuel a cosmetic endgame. Also, transmute stones encourage the adoption of a single “look” for a character. A wardrobe feature would have encouraged people to pursue multiple sets of cosmetics.

I’m happy to give them credit for innovations like the elimination of ninja-ing nodes, the elimination of kill-stealing, and marvelous things like “Deposit all collectibles.” However, the “cosmetic endgame” was not their finest hour.

I think this is one of the best summaries of what went wrong with this game.
They forgot where the strengths of the game are and instead ended up trying to solve a problem with the wrong tools.
I’ll use DCUO as an example. Before that became all about gear grind and score, I was more than happy tooling around the world picking up clues and completing race challenges. The reason being, this unlocked more cosmetic items that I could then access at any time and make a really unique looking character.
There’s your progression right there.

Actually, thinking further on the structure of the personal story, that picture also highlights a particular development practise.
They have quite obviously front-loaded the personal story, assuming that most players will never see the end.
It’s very common to do this in the game industry, and whilst it’s not a practise I condone, from a business perspective I can understand it.
Why bother wasting resources on content most players will never see?

You can see this throughout the game, with starter areas frequently being more engaging than mid to late game areas.

PVStar.3658:

The race specific stories are fun, after that it’s pretty terrible. I have 3 80s and I’ve only finished on one.

This.

The pact story is good played once up until Claw Island, but even then, the pact stories are nowhere near as engaging as the race specific ones.

That infamous picture of the story tree also highlights that as it progresses, the choices offered the player narrow down at every branch until everyone is funnelled into the same resolution.

I understand from a narrative point of view why this was easier to develop, but I can’t help but wonder how much more engaged we would have been if the story structure was inverted, so that everyone started off the same way but gradually diverged as the story progressed.

It would have meant a different story for every alt, and would have felt a lot more personal, as fewer players would have experienced the same story as yours.

But hindsight is twenty-twenty as they say.

Well let’s hope ArenaNet learn the lesson that being lazy and copy/pasting just leaves a bad taste in the mouth of their customers.
And I know they don’t like people calling them lazy, but this really was.

While I loved how heroes & henchies added an almost RTS element to GW1, I will also state that I thought they were the death of multiplayer in that game.
Oftentimes, hero monks were easier to get than human ones and performed more reliably too. The same was mostly true of interrupters, necros and ritualists.

Be careful what you wish for.

To be honest, I’m not even sure there’s a specific need for this whole CDI thing.
I just think ArenaNet need to participate more in the Suggestions forum. After all, that’s all these threads are. It’s just harder to pick out individual ideas when they’re all bunched up in one ginormothread.

Also, some recognition of adopted suggestions would help the community feel they aren’t being ignored. Several of my suggestions have been adopted almost word-for-word, yet ArenaNet haven’t even responded in the associated threads.

Examples:
Swappable stats on Legendaries
Achievement Tracking
Daily/Monthly Achievement List Choice

Yeah, mechanics needs seriously looking at.
One of my favourite ways to play before I stopped was as a PvE hammer warrior. My build was fun and reactive, but relied heavily on the ability to control the fight, something we were lead to believe before release as being one of the pillars of the new trinity.

Unfortunately, ArenaNet couldn’t find an effective way of balancing this, so they slapped an immunity to control on all significant enemies. So while it’s a fun way to play against mobs up to veteran level, it becomes completely ineffective on champions or tougher.
That means that while I enjoyed my way of playing, it was ineffectual against a huge amount of content.

Straight out of the gate, they’ve crippled one of their pillars and reduced options for build diversity.
I endured it for as long as I could hoping they would re-examine the implementation of control, but it’s clear to me now that fixing the actual game is way down their list of priorities.

Riffing on lolnotacat’s post, there’s also one clear problem that acts as a barrier to socialisation.
No in-game voice comms.
Yes, you can tell people to download Teamspeak, Skype or Mumble, but straight away, you’re preventing users from easily communicating.
If someone joins your party/guild/zerg, unless they’re already familiar with the ins and outs of all possible third-party VOIP applications, someone’s going to have to spend a lot of time typing instructions on how to download, install and set them up.

This is a huge barrier to effective team-play and socialisation.

To be honest, I think it should be a requirement for modern MMOs to include VOIP as standard. Not including it just impedes the user base’s ability to communicate effectively. It slows down the game at all levels.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’m not sure what you are getting at OP?

The equivalent to the AH in this game is the TP… which is the only thing that keeps inflation under control, and actually causes Anet to lose money since when tied in with the gold->gem conversion people don’t need to ever spend money on the game.

Are you suggesting they somehow remove the TP? That would utterly and totally destroy this game overnight.

I suppose they could increase profits by getting rid of the TP and forcing you to buy every item in the game directly from the cash shop with real money… is that what you are suggesting?

The fact that your post reads more like a dry article from the Financial Times regarding economics rather than a game should tip you off as to the meaning of my post.
GW2 is obsessed with currencies, value and rewards, to the detriment of actual gameplay.

From a Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview regarding the upcoming Diablo 3 expansion:

Playing auction houses can be fun – that whole sort of market-cornering aspect can be a cool kind of minigame – but it took away from the core fantasy of what our game is. It’s about killing monsters.

I can’t help but feel that ArenaNet could learn a lot from that kind of thinking.
This is a huge change to Diablo 3. It’s tied in to real-world money changing hands, and Blizzard have been receiving a percentage of every trade made. They are losing a source of revenue by doing this, but they realised that in the long run it was hurting the game rather than helping it.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Who is running TA Aetherpath anymore. It is not efficient. It is not profitable.

This right here is a prime example of why I stopped “playing” this game.
GW2 twists the minds of players and makes them believe gold and rewards are more important than fun.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Another food for thought: Back when we invaded Southsun, we did a lot of “one time” events with the story content. Folks complained that one time wasn’t fair because they would miss it, so we extended the “story” style content so you now have 2-4 weeks to experience it.

No Colin, it wasn’t so much that they missed the event itself.
It was that the reward for that event was potentially huge and they were missing out on that.

It was compounded by the event itself being around for an incredibly short period of time, yet it was riddled with bugs and connection issues. This meant that even if you were online at the time, you may not have been able to connect to the event, and if you did, it was a miserable experience because of the bugs.

If the reward had been inconsequential, people wouldn’t have felt they were missing out on much.
As it stood, because so many precursors were dished out during that event, every player who missed it felt like they’d missed out on one. Note, not a “Chance” at one. Even though it was completely random whether you’d actually get one or not, if people were prevented from experiencing that event, they believed that they would have received a precursor for certain if they’d only been able to play.

THAT’S where all the bad blood surrounding that event comes from.
Simple greed.
And that’s the game’s fault. If it really were more about content than the reward, I’m sure feedback in general would be a lot more positive.

The argument “It’s an MMO, that’s how they work, deal with it” is one of the laziest arguments around. It’s a simple fear of change.
And rather than just saying it’s game-breaking, explain HOW it’s game-breaking. I bet you can’t come up with a single, sound reason beyond making a lot of grind irrelevant (which I’m having a hard time seeing as a bad thing).

And your note about being able to make the gold quickly and that you’re “casual with your gold making”?
Yeah, pull the other one.
If you really were casual, you’d rarely have over ten gold to play with, and that would take a week or more to accumulate.
Newsflash: If you can make enough gold to allow you to re-gear quickly, you’re not casual.

MMO players. Can’t stand ‘em. No imagination. Can’t think outside their genre.

I think you made a crucial typo; +20 hours in GW1?
Yeah, not that impressive ;P

You know that ArenaNet toyed with the idea of getting rid of levels completely during the development of GW2, right?
They just weren’t brave enough to follow through.
So now Everquest Next is going to steal that ball and run with it.

Ethics.4519:

Turtle Dragon.9241:

Ethics.4519:

I’m confused. The moderator deleted the original post, but not the thread, leaving a quoted version of the original post?

Also, at turtle, I’m assuming you meant you buy gems to turn into gold to buy a legendary off the TP.

1$=4g. Depending on what legendary you want, I think most are going for 2000g-ish. So you’re looking at spending $500 for a legendary. Which I think getting $500 is harder than getting an ascended weapon, but that’s just my opinion.

There are certain people who have received their Legendaries through the mail as a “gift”. Nobody mentioned $500 for a Legendary or Gems>Gold, although that might be an option which is “as effective”. At least it is true that it would also take 5 minutes. There is a rumor that said people who received their Legendary by mail earned it by making a “donation” themselves to a certain cause whose sponsor is rumored to be in China. Of course, this is just a rumor.

I am not allowed to mention other player by names, but I know at least 1 person who received their Legendary as a “gift” by mail.

That’s still along the lines of buying with real money. On top of that, it’s obviously against the TOS so shouldn’t even hold place in this conversation

Nah, it just proves that ArenaNet’s Cash-to-Gems-to-Gold ratio can’t compete with the prices offered by gold farmers.
To be honest, I thought one of the main reasons they introduced the ability to effectively buy gold with cash was to stamp out gold farmers.
Turns out that ArenaNet are too stubborn and proud to get into undermining the gold farmers by making gold cheap to buy through official channels.
Another symptom of what happens when your focus is more about the in-game economy rather than the game itself.

Here’s another massive thing that is a factor; you can see it by how many people complain about the lack of stuff to do at top level.
No matter which way you cut it, level-scaling isn’t aggressive enough and content designed for any level lower than 70 is ridiculously easy for a fully geared level 80.

Compare this to Guild Wars Prophecies, where upon reaching top level, there was still a massive amount of the game you hadn’t played. Something like a third of the map was designed around maximum level players. This ratio only got better with Factions and Nightfall, where approximately 80% of those campaigns was designed with top level characters in mind.

On release, Guild Wars 2 had exactly ONE map designed specifically for level 80 players. Percentage-wise, that’s about 3% of the game designed specifically for level 80 players.

The problem’s also compounded by ArenaNet’s decision to chase the MMO demographic that prefers large amounts of character levels. I know it’s easy enough to reach 80 (hell, I craft-levelled a significant number of my toons after the initial 3; that takes about half a day from 1 to 80), but having such a large level range dictates that levelling be spread out across more zones. If you’re much more than 5 levels below the stated level range for a map, you’re fodder. So levelling unfortunately spreads to occupy the majority of the map leaving little room for actual top-level content.

This is why a lot of people get to 80 and complain that there’s little or nothing to do. It’s no wonder they get bored and leave when such a small percentage of the game is targeted at them.

Oh, and another thing, and this has affected anyone who has ever played with a non-standard build:
When ArenaNet change traits or skills without warning, your build is no longer viable and you HAVE to spend a lot of money and time re-gearing.

I understand that this would be a major change, but my point is, this is a far better, fairer, more balanced system, and the benefits would outweigh the negatives.
In addition, it would be an incredibly brave move for an MMO developer and really would set the game apart, where at the moment it’s beginning to taste like every other crappy WoW clone out there.

And to re-iterate, this would bring the system more in line with the original Guild Wars system. That also required tweaking over time, and the introduction of insignias and inscriptions was a massive sea change to that system, as big as this.
And it only improved the game.

Dalent, did you miss the part where I said I’m making these suggestions in the hope they’re implemented so that I might actually enjoy playing again?

I’ve put thousands of hours into GW2, and even more thousands into GW1.
I’ve put a pretty horrific amount of hours into other MMOs too, and what I have realised through my experience playing these games is that a focus on gear that affects stats is never satisfying.
It dictates that a progression system is pretty much mandatory.
It’s confusing and muddled as the stat bonuses are always fixed, resulting in infexibility.
There are almost ALWAYS stat combinations missing, and in the case of GW2, there’s a ridiculous amount missing or incomplete.
While YOU may use only one set of armour, that’s not to say everyone else does.

Let me explain about gear acquisition, build flexibility and balance:
If gear dictates build and is expensive to get, it discourages build experimentation and encourages cookie cutter builds.
People are too scared to invest in the gear they need to be completely flexible, so the metagame rapidly focuses on one particular build. As this build becomes prevalent, developers only see game feedback from players using this build, which in turn reinforces it.
Players eventually get bored of playing the same way over and over again and eventually stop playing as there’s no build diversity left.
Sound familiar?

If build flexibility is not restricted by expensive gear, people are more willing to experiment with builds.
Bugs or flaws are found faster.
Competitive play becomes more unpredictable and thus more exciting.
And developers receive feedback that allows them to balance for more than just one build, resulting in more satisfying and varied gameplay.

Variety is the spice of life.

Me, I got fed up with the constant achievement grind and the obsession of the community with getting appropriate “rewards”.
Seriously, GW2 achievements are WAY worse than GW1 titles were, and those eventually drove me away from that game. Repeating the same crap thousands upon thousands of times in order to attain some virtual frippery isn’t gaming. It’s abuse.
And the really sad thing is seeing how many gullible lackwits get suckered in to believing they’re awesome because they’ve possessed the required deficiency of imagination in order to do this monotonous tripe.

I hate the fact that the entire game is balanced to a large degree around maintaining the “economy”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If one of your main concerns as a developer is economic balance, you haven’t succeeded in making a game.

Time-gating and gear progression. Don’t even get me started.

The two week Living World/Story/Scarlet Crazy Happy Show achievement train just ground my ability to care into dust.
HERE’S FIVE MINUTES OF CONTENT WE’VE MANAGED TO STRETCH INTO OCCUPYING YOUR EVERY WAKING HOUR!
FEEL PRIVILEGED AND KNEEL BEFORE ZOD ARENANET!

And a crystal clear realisation:
All the fan boys kept telling me that the content I wasn’t enjoying was optional.
That’s when I realised they were right and that the entire game was optional.
So I opted out.

I hang around here because I have the vain hope that maybe ArenaNet will suddenly realise they’ve completely screwed the pooch and do a one-eighty.
But stepping back a pace has allowed me to observe that while they are indeed busy working on GW2, it’s very chaotic. There’s no proper organisation, no solid goal. They’re just flailing around and aiming for the easy targets instead of the difficult ones.
They’re releasing this new “content” at a rate unprecedented in MMO history, yet long running bugs are going unpatched. Entire gear tiers and acquisition methods prior to Ascended are going ignored and unfinished. Lore is being forgotten.
It’s all, quite frankly, going to the hot place in a hand-basket.

Can we do something about monster variety in late game zones?
This strikes me as the perfect use of the “Living World”.
There’s just too many Risen in the game, and let’s be frank here, other games do zombies better, because that’s all Risen are: zombies.

Maybe look at bringing back some of the GW1 bestiary, such as Aloes, Scarabs, dinosaurs, Mursaat, etc.

Keep runes and sigils the same. That’s the way it worked in GW1.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of work, but in the end, you’d have a much cleaner, easier to understand system that promotes experimentation and is easier to balance.

The other thing this would do that people might see as being bad until they’d considered it?
It would completely invalidate trinkets.
But trinkets are currently just a bad patch for a bad system. While each trinket has its own unique icon, they do not appear on your character model.
I would argue that anything you equip should be visible on your character.

Yes, this idea as a whole would require a lot of work to implement, but in the end would be better for players and developers alike. As it stands at the moment, you may want to experiment with certain builds but can’t as certain stat combinations don’t exist on gear.
If players assigned stats purely through traits, they wouldn’t have to worry about getting gear stats to match.

Things that would need re-working to accommodate this change:
Elimination of Trinkets and deletion of a crafting profession (Jeweller)

All crafts would have to be changed.

Crafting materials would have to be rethought, as rare materials would no longer have a role. Make rare materials affect the appearance of equipment instead of its stats. Of course, this means that they’d have to put some work into making more varieties of armour.

Of course, I’m not playing any more, so I’m just making suggestions that make sense to me as an ex-player and that would draw me back in to playing.
The existing gear system is one bad thing they’ve taken from other MMOs, where before they had a nice, elegant system in the first game.
The whole “Golden Y-Fronts of Cleanliness +10” thing has never made sense to me.

There’s a lot of people complaining how Berzerker gear is the only way to roll in PvE, that it’s Pvt for WvW and that builds based on Condition Damage get short shrift all round.

I propose that all stats are removed from gear apart from armour rating for armour and damage for weapons.

Then make traits solely responsible for controlling stat levels above base level.

Problem solved.
You no longer have to have umpteen different sets of gear.
Builds become more flexible, allowing more experimentation, as a trait refund only costs a couple of silver.

I’m not seeing the bad here.

And this is why tying stats to gear in GW2 was a huge mistake.
They should have stuck with the GW1 arrangement. Stats should be controlled purely by trait point allocation.

spoj.9672:

Mungrul.9358:

spoj.9672:

Im forced to do open world events to get dragonite. I sure as hell dont enjoy them. But if I want to finish ascended gear on all my alts Im gonna have to.

And why are you grinding out Ascended gear?
To make content you already don’t enjoy even easier?

So I can have BiS for speed clears and fractals. Why do you think? I dont open world, its dull. Doesnt mean I dislike all pve.

And why are you continuously repeating speed clears and fractals?
I’m willing to bet it’s not for enjoyment, but rather to aid in the grind for more shiny stuff.

spoj.9672:

Im forced to do open world events to get dragonite. I sure as hell dont enjoy them. But if I want to finish ascended gear on all my alts Im gonna have to.

And why are you grinding out Ascended gear?
To make content you already don’t enjoy even easier?

Kinda makes my point for me: The only reason people are playing this game is for the rewards.
Remove the rewards and your content had better be pretty kitten ed good.

I stopped playing GW2 for various reasons, but one of the major factors was how the Living Story and new content in general has become innately tied to achievement chasing and rewards.

I’ve come to realise that rewards and achievements are a bad thing for games in general.
It’s lowest common denominator stuff and makes people forget why they started playing in the first place. It all becomes about how much gold or achievement points players receive for repeating activities instead of actually enjoying the content itself.

I’ll use another game as an example.
I’m guessing a lot of ArenaNet developers have played The Last of Us.
I for one found it a breath of fresh air to have trophy and social intrusions completely removed from the game. This was a conscious decision by Naughty Dog. They didn’t want Joel and Ellie’s story ruined by continual pop ups. And it worked spectacularly well.
Free from trophy concerns or whether my friends were online or not, I was free to enjoy the game.

When a big developer like Naughty Dog backs away from achievement culture in such a dramatic fashion, I think it’s worth paying attention.

One of the things that would bring me back to GW2 would be the removal of the achievement hamster wheel and untangling it from so many gameplay elements. At the moment it’s the driving mechanic behind all new content. It’s like ArenaNet believe people won’t play their game unless there’s a reward for it.

Well I stopped playing BECAUSE of all the “rewards”.

If you play Guild Wars 2 at the moment, you’re unconsciously deciding to join the race to get the shiniest stuff or the most achievement points. This causes stress with the 2 week release cycle, and it makes people anxious when they miss out on something because they didn’t have time to dedicate to playing.
People turn around and say that all this content is optional and that you don’t have to play it, and guess what?
They’re right.
You don’t.

It’s just that if you don’t play content dedicated to rewarding you either with shinies or achievements, you don’t play Guild Wars 2.

Like me.

This entire game is optional.

I know you’ve probably built your development around integrating achievements and rewards in to new content ArenaNet, but seriously, take a step back and consider the potential for burnout.

It’s very simple:
If a waypoint is remaining contested for long periods of time, it’s because the content you need to complete to win that waypoint back is so tedious, people can’t be bothered to play it.

I can’t check my achievement panel, because as I’ve said many times over, I stopped playing this drek over a month ago now.
And once people start arguing semantics such as you arguing the meaning of the word “story” or eisberg the meaning of the word “by”, you know there’s no point listening to a thing they’re saying. It’s obvious to any sane observer that such people are desperately searching for the tiniest detail that will help justify their position.

Vayne, I know you love the game, but I have to take issue with you describing any part of the Living or Personal stories as being “Excellent”.

Gaming narratives aren’t widely known for their excellence, and the ones in GW2 fall way behind the curve as far as I’m concerned, all being incredibly predictable and mostly consisting of comic book style villains that have to be stopped otherwise something bad will happen to THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Compare Guild Wars 2 to say Spec Ops: The Line, The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, the Marathon Trilogy, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts, Deus Ex, etc. and you’ll find even the best examples of story in GW2 will be found wanting.

Guild Wars 2’s writing is tripe when held up against such exemplars.

Don’t get me wrong, their situational detailing and world-building are pretty darned good, but their narrative design is what you’d expect of a high-school student.

Incoming rant from a disgruntled ex-player:

That OP is pretty good, but I still think that MMO players as a whole have become far too obsessed with the concept of rewards, and developers have been pandering to them to the detriment of what should really matter: game-play.

I stopped playing GW2 just before SAB2.
I’d gotten fed up of running the same content multiple times in order to get some achievement points / useless shiny reward.
I’d been offended by the introduction of time-gated content that relied on the player performing lots of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks on a daily basis in order to increase their power level.

And here’s the core of the problem, and I don’t think it’s something a developer like ArenaNet is capable of addressing:
I and many others play games for the exploration, the discovery of something new and the challenge. What would really keep me playing GW2 instead of all the fluff that is constantly released would be constant, large, permanent updates. New areas on a monthly basis (and remember, an experienced player can map 2 whole maps in an evening). New dragons, not just revamps of existing ones; we’ve seen Zhaitan, where the Hell is the Jormag content?
To me, it feels like they’ve lost control of their own story and are floundering with a lack of focus.

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I first completed the game I thought that I understood what I could expect to see in the future. The Crystal Desert would get opened at some point and we would see a Zhaitan-sized personal story update concerning Kralkatorrik.
Similarly, we could expect to see other updates for Jormag and the Northern Shiverpeaks as well as the other Elder Dragons.

Instead, we get the bitty Living Story where quality lurches from decidedly average to outright awful.

We get drip fed endless FedEx quests that require insane amounts of repetition in order to claim some pointless bauble.

We get a new tier of equipment that requires you log in every day in order to work towards it, and if you don’t, you’ll be playing at a lower power than those who have continued to log in every day. You also have to do particular activities in order to get the things needed to gain this equipment. You can’t just play “Your Way” any more.

Want an Ascended backpiece? Yeah, you HAVE to do Fractals.
Ascended Trinkets? Make sure you’re logging in every day and MAYBE in a month you’ll have done enough daily and monthly tasks to afford ONE.
Ascended Weapons? Log in every day, kill your set amount of champions then stop because the materials can only be crafted at a set rate, again ensuring you have to do the same boring drek day-in, day-out.

This isn’t a game.
It’s a job.

And insanely, for a company seemingly obsessed with their own gemstore, you can’t even buy your way back in if you’ve stepped off of the progression train.

It’s now 14 months since release, and while they’ve busied themselves distracting the audience with meaningless glitter, there are still massive holes in the Exotic gear tiers and acquisition. You still can’t get a breather with a rarity higher than Masterwork.
You can’t acquire all stat combinations through all means; you can’t craft Soldiers, you can’t get Knight’s from Temple vendors, etcetera, etcetera.

What I’m saying is, they didn’t even finish the base game before getting carried away making fluff.

For me, they need to take a long, hard look at gear and how it’s acquired if they want to encourage build diversity.
Top tier gear should be easily attainable. I mean a full-set-in-one-day attainable.
ALL gear should have the Legendary swappable stats feature. You shouldn’t have to fill up your bags and storage with armour for every occasion.
Similarly, runes and sigils should also be swappable, requiring unlock by acquisition ONE TIME ONLY.
If you make gear hard to acquire, people take the easiest route. This is why everyone goes for Berserker’s. It’s too expensive to experiment, and Berserker’s is tried and tested.

The ONLY things players should look towards attaining as a goal are cosmetic changes. In addition, those cosmetic changes should also have a drop-down menu to select them. Once you unlocked a particular look, you should be able to change it whenever you want.
These cosmetics shouldn’t require massive amounts of repetitive tasks to acquire. Instead, they should be the rewards for completing good multi-part quest-lines, like the mini black moa chick in Guild Wars 1.

But this won’t happen, as it’s too hard to make this content instead of endless “Kill X amount of Y” quests.

And also, the entrenched, typical MMO community would object to such a radical overhaul. You see according to them, if someone hasn’t worked for the opportunity to play the game, they don’t deserve it.

Such a disgustingly twisted group of people.

A lot of my suggestions have made their way into this game, but that hasn’t managed to keep me playing.

It feels a bit silly to say it now, but I think ArenaNet have spent too much time taking community ideas on board, so much so that the game has lost focus and is becoming more the product of the community than of the ArenaNet team.
It’s now all about “rewards”, achievements and repeating content over and over again.

I think the most poisonous concept of those is that of rewards.
Great, innovative gameplay has been sidelined in favour of releasing quick, slap-dash content with a shiny reward at the end.
The game itself should be the reward, not some vacuous, virtual bauble.
But withdrawing “rewards” from the game now is impossible, as people are addicted to the steady drip-feed of shinies.

Just take a look around the forums and you’ll see that the player-base obsess on the in-game economy and availability of prestige items in the game instead of the gameplay itself.
And ArenaNet has organically grown to accommodate this obsession; after all, when it comes to developing with the idea of making money (or evolution in general), the path of least resistance is the easiest to follow. If you can keep the attach rate “high” by releasing regular low quality content, you will. It’s easier and less dangerous, as it appeals to a broader user base. And let’s face it, when you have a couple million customers, you’re no longer interested in appealing to a niche demographic that appreciates slower, quality content over more regular, shallow, snack-sized content.

And I must admit, I’m not innocent here; a lot of my suggestions were made innocently thinking that it would improve quality, when in reality they’ve ended up turning this game into a chore. And it’s impossible to see that without a few months of testing prior to releasing it.

For example, one of my suggestions was that of allowing players to pick 5 dailies from a list.
What I should have been petitioning for was the complete removal of daily check-lists, as now the whole game is circling the plughole of time-gated content.
But instead, my initial suggestion helped lay the foundation for acceptance of time-gated content by making it more palatable.
Months after ArenaNet implemented this idea, it’s one of the primary things that has driven me away from the game.

Hoisted by my own petard.

So in closing ArenaNet, I’ll make one more suggestion.
Stop listening to the community.
You guys have got degrees in game design.
We haven’t.

One the traditional MMO community didn’t play.

Galen Grey.4709:

okey fair enough no issue with what you said so far. so my next question is what kind of reward would you consider meaningful?

That’s the thing I’ve realised. I don’t play games for the “reward”. I think it’s really twisted that this is what the community has been taught to focus on. Hell, it’s the same in every MMO out there.

I play games for the experience and the challenge.

When I play Dwarf Fortress, it’s not for the reward. It’s for the stories created by the complex interactions of deep simulation. It’s for the challenge of making a fortress that becomes almost self-sufficient. It’s for the ridiculous structures I can dream up and implement.

When I play GTA, it’s for the sheer fun of tooling around in an open world and thinking of crazy stuff to do. It’s winning races and completing challenges. The rewards are meaningless.

When I play Demon’s / Dark Souls, again, it’s for the challenge and the sheer atmosphere; for a story deftly told through subtle hints.

Guild Wars 2 has become a cheap race for the next digital shiny, false rewards doled out for completing monotonous tasks.
It’s like operant conditioning.
Push the button, get a treat.

There is no depth there any more, and it can barely be called a game.

No achievement points, so I’m falling behind in rewards for each tier; no time-gated materials, so it’ll take me longer to get ascended weapons; no laurels, so again my ability to equip my alts with ascended is impacted; no living story participation, so I won’t get the rewards for that, yada, yada, yada.

And I know what you’re going to say in response to that:
“But all of those rewards are optional and don’t make a difference to how you play.”

Aside from that being arguable in regards Ascended, I am in agreement with you, and there’s the crux.

Those rewards ARE optional, and I’ve realised I don’t need them. They’re INCREDIBLY shallow. In addition, what remains isn’t good enough to keep me playing, as all recent “content” has been designed around “rewarding” the player’s ability to grind rather than actually being fun to play. There’s nothing to explore any more, and that’s my primary draw for these big games.

I feel I’ve seen everything, and the stuff they’ve been releasing recently hasn’t scratched my exploration itch, so there’s nothing beyond shinies retaining my attention.

All that’s left is a hollow grind for achievement points and ascended gear.

I gave up playing GW2 almost 4 weeks ago now. I realised ArenaNet were using underhanded tactics to keep me addicted and “playing”/paying, when in reality I was just repeating flavourless stuff every day in order to keep up with the Joneses.
It was becoming stressful making sure I was doing my dailies/living story so that I could keep up with everyone else, to get the “rewards” that seemed so necessary to my account.

So I just stopped. That’s what I tend to do when I realise something is adversely affecting my health, be it mental, physical or financial.

And now I feel much better.
The irony is, the longer I don’t play, the further “behind” I fall, the less inclined I am to log back in. The prospect of having to spend ridiculous amounts of time working in order to “catch-up” actively discourages me from logging in.

GW2 is no longer a game. It’s a rat race, yet somehow the rats end up paying for the “rewards” offered from “winning” that race, be that in time or money.

I would come back if I felt ArenaNet were going to change for the better, but they’re too invested in this bad cycle of achievements and events now to step away. They’ve got too many customers addicted to this stuff now, and if they removed it, they’d incur the wrath of thousands of disgruntled achievement/progression junkies.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

I think that is why ANet needs to kep us all playing. If we clue in that were not really doing anything, we will find something more productive to do.

This is EXACTLY what has happened to me, and I’m a lot happier without GW2 in my life.

I’ve now successfully weened myself off of GW2, and my life is better for it.
I’m playing other games, going out more, watching more movies and reading more books.

The longer I don’t play GW2, the more I realise I’m falling behind and the harder I’ll have to work to catch up if I decide to play again. This feeling amplifies the longer I don’t play.

Congratulations ANet.
You’ve made a game that gets less desirable to play the longer I haven’t played it.
That’s so stupid it’s punched through the other end and come out genius.

anzenketh.3759:

Exactly my point on asking for the quote I did not expect anyone to find it. I figured everyone got that idea due to chinese whispers(telephone) and that one livestream.

I think what really was said was Ascended should have gone in at the start. Not We had Ascended planned from the start. I have half the mind to look for that interview myself and put it on the wiki for quick reference along with linking Matt Visuals interview on the wiki.

I’ve managed to dig up the Reddit Chris Whiteside AMA where I remembered the information from. Click here.

The actual quote is as follows:

Question from toychristopher:
Was ascended gear actually conceptualized before launch? The blog post that introduced it made it sound like something that you guys came up with just recently.

Response:
Hi Toy,

It was not specifically designed before launch. However the concept of progression rewards with a shallow curve bridging other rewards was. Hope that makes sense.

Chris

So while not specifically Ascended, they are saying there that they had planned vertical progression prior to release.

I’ve stopped playing because I felt like a rat in a maze.

Unless I was dedicating my life to this game, I would fall behind.
The introduction of even MORE time-gated content in the form of ascended crafting has made me resent the game even more.
Unless I’m logging in EVERY DAY, I’ll fall behind everyone else on attaining the materials necessary for ascended crafting.

So I finally realised that ArenaNet has become nothing more than a pusher that is treating its customers like junkies, and I just stopped.

The first step in addressing a problem is realising you have one.

Of course, because I’m now falling behind everyone else, it cements the idea that I’ll never return. Time-gated content puts those with more important things to do, like living a life, at a disadvantage.

Another thing I’ll outline here so that it’s written down somewhere:
This stuff wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do it once.
But as they’re working to a punishing 2 week release cycle, instead of making quality content that takes some time to complete and doesn’t repeat, they have to instead release lots of insignificant activities that last all of 5 minutes and then force the players to repeat them lots of times in order to get the rewards.

Of course, that this stuff is much easier and cheaper to develop is just a bonus. It’s mostly just numbers rather than actual content; some achievement points here, a stat increase there.

It’s all just fluff, and I’ve had enough.

I’ve successfully cut the cancer that is Guild Wars 2 out of my life, and I would encourage others to do the same. All of a sudden your life will get lighter and you’ll realise there are more important things to worry about than your achievement score.

I purposefully stopped playing before SAB2 was released.
The reason?
SAB 1 was probably my favourite release. It was playful, fun and not reliant on the gem store. It was actual content. And I knew that I would probably enjoy SAB 2 just as much. Josh is after all about the only developer I’ve got any time for any more (apart from the tireless and incredible Gaile). So as a test to my resolve, I decided to deprive myself of something good.
And I succeeded.

milo.6942:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ArenaNet-Reviews-E255820.htm

Most of the other veterans have left the company and many are still leaving.

Wow, that page is one of the most revealing and depressing things I’ve read about this game, and explains a lot.
Thanks for the link.
Makes me realise that it isn’t really going to get any better.
I’ve gotten down to just doing my daily this week. I may experiment with not even doing that this weekend. Then I can finally walk away from this game.
I got to this stage with MMOs once before and took a long hiatus. This may just be the final nail in the coffin.
I’m fed up of being exploited as a player.