Yes and no. People who play more SHOULD have the advantage. It’s silly to think any other way. But getting good gear so everyone can do content is also nice. But MAX stat gear easily obtainable for everyone? No. Maybe a 5% or 10% difference for gear that actually takes time to get.
Why should people with no lives outside of the game have an advantage over people who do ?
The fact is that even without a gear difference someone who plays 4 hours a day is most likely going to be much better than someone who plays 1 hour a day.
Most likely, yes. Guaranteed, no.
But even if it was guaranteed, why should their advantage be made any greater ?
Why should someone who has been playing chess for years get to start with more queens on the board when their opponent has never played before ?
Players need things to aim for and some players like those things to be stats and I can guarantee you that far more people will aim for the armor with an extra +5 stats and keep playing than the number of people who will leave simply because of the items presence.
But how many of those people that want the +5 stats will stay in GW2 over another game that does it better ?
The people who leave because of too much grind are much more likely to stay in the long term because there is no alternative game for them.
Which customers are more valuable in the long term ?
MMO’s aren’t made for casuals in mind, by design, not even this one. Nothing new here why are ppl surprised?
Because of these bits of pre-release advertising promising that GW2 would be different:
“Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.”
-Mike Obrien, President of Arenanet
Fun impacts loot collection. The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best. The rarest items have unique looks to help your character feel that sense of accomplishment, but it’s not required to play the game. We don’t need to make mandatory gear treadmills, we make all of it optional, so those who find it fun to chase this prestigious gear can do so, but those who don’t are just as powerful and get to have fun too.”
– Colin Johanson
Finally, since combat is such a core part of the gameplay of any MMO, we’ve put a lot of emphasis into rethinking combat. So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral.
-Mike O’Brien
OH no! Don’t go there… now we will have this endless debate about GW1 vs GW2, mmo vs corpg. Omg, how could you do this! GAH!
As I see it GW1 wasn’t an MMO. However lots of players treated it as one, to the point where when someone asked for MMO recommendations, GW1 was given as an answer and nobody complained. So it was still a competitor to MMOs and attracted MMO players.
Thus the comparison is valid.
@Merthax.5172: grind for items always come with greater challenges and you still can change your build or use strategy to take down that challenge.
If you’re after greater challanges, why do you like higher stat gear ?
All it does is reduce the difficulty of all content.
nope. the game should be challenging.
How does high stats on your character make the game any more challenging ?
GW1 had no trouble making harder challenges, even though the gear stayed the same.
Arenanet already stated that they run events when they have the highest player concurency.