I actually quite liked that the rewards were both consistent and small. It means that people aren’t going to try and farm it because it’s inefficient in comparison to other methods of gaining ToT bags and the non-competitive rewards (in the sense that you don’t get more for better performance) mean that people aren’t going to tantrum over losing or try to match-fix. The end result is a group of people who play because they actually enjoy it.
It was nice seeing the micro-community develop in skill and sophistication with the game. The hiding spots that used to be secure would sudden have enemies doing sweeps over them and fearing the likely stealth hiding spots. Villagers who used to try and stealth six feet in front of you in the middle of an open passageway would instead dart for branching pathways and you’d have to gamble on whether they’d stealthed around a corner or just bolted down a random path. It wasn’t just fascinating watching the quick increase of player skill but you could also see elements of a shifting meta-game. Courtiers start hunting corners to try and suppress villager bonuses and get easy kills in the early game? Villagers start hiding in the centre of the map to avoid the outlying patrols. The courtiers then respond by doing more sweeps of the centre but it has the effect of leaving their presence on the edges of the map weaker. It was magnificent. I would have played this game even if there were no rewards. I’m going to miss it so much.
Godspeed, dear friend, I’ll miss you terribly when you’re gone.
This looked so much smaller in the preview window.
To anyone who read all of that and made it down here: I love you. We can marry and move somewhere the centaurs will never find us.
PvP
World v World could desperately use a tutorial area. WvW has massive queues because many, many people in it at any given time. The problem is that many of them aren’t very good. And I don’t mean that in a snobby, nose in the air kind of way, but more that I suspect that they don’t really get what they’re meant to be doing or make basic mistakes that they ought not to. Mistakes like a failure to recognise that boiling oil is hot and that maybe you shouldn’t stand beneath it. Or that fortification gates are strong and that the liberal application of siege weaponry would be useful. Or that perhaps your five man group is not quite strong enough to capture Stonemist. I don’t think that a tutorial area would solve all of these problems but it would help alleviate some of them by helping to give players a greater understanding of how WvW works.
WvW also has other issues that really shouldn’t be there but end up causing queue problems. Issues like people farming drop mats off the high level mobs in WvW. Those mobs don’t really add much of anything to the gameplay in WvW apart from occasionally being a nuisance, most players just run past them. But the way they attract farmers mean that people who would like to pvp often get stuck in long queues. My favourite moment in regards to this was having a guildee relate the story of being yelled at by farmers for not doing an adequate job of protecting them from enemy players. Because apparently protecting mat farmers in WvW is a crucial gameplay element.
I don’t have much to say about spvp mostly because I haven’t tried spvp yet. It looks interesting and I want to try it but I also don’t want to be that guy on a team of 5 who has absolutely no idea what’s going on. Have you ever seen a dog give you a look that basically communicates, “I’m confused and I love you?” That’s pretty much how I feel about spvp. I miss the old Zaishen areas where I could putter around to learn map and gameplay knowledge without being a drag on a team who just want to play. Short of something like a GW2 version of the Zaishen Challenge being implemented I’ll likely end up watching Youtube videos of spvp matches to try and figure out what I’m meant to be doing.
Conclusion
There are probably a few more things I intended to cover but can’t think of at the moment, which is fine as this note is ridiculously long already. To conclude, I’m enjoying Guild Wars 2. There have been bugs and balance issues that have caused me quite a high degree of frustration, but the game is three weeks past its release date, what can you expect? If they’re still here two or three months down the road then I’d make more of a fuss about them, but there’s still a significant honeymood period at the moment where you just trust that it will be addressed and get better. What concerns me more than the bugs are the policy and design decisions we’ve seen lately in regards to things like dungeons. I think that Anet would, at this moment, be best served by going back to the mission statement they released for GW2 prior to its launch and asking themselves if they’re still adhering to the principles they outlined as their goals for the game.
Underwater Combat
Guild Wars 2 does some of the best underwater combat I’ve seen in an MMO. The environments are beautiful, I enjoy it, it blows its competitor’s systems out of the water and it still feels incomplete and tacked on. It’s good, but it could be much better. One of the defining aspects of GW2 underwater combat is that it focuses on what you can’t do rather than what you can. There are a host of utility skills that you cannot use underwater. There is exactly one utility skill that you can only use underwater or has increased/different functionality underwater. That skill is Whirlpool, and that is because until a few patches ago Elementalists didn’t have an elite skill that they could use underwater. Players can’t even craft their own replacement rebreathers as they level. Nor can they buy them from the generic armour vendors basically everywhere. You have to find specific karma vendors who sell them and buy them there. Underwater combat in GW2 is head and shoulders above what you’ll find anywhere else, but as a standalone system it has a solid foundation that requires more work.
Balance issues
Repop rates in generally feel too fast. There have been countless time where I’ve encountered a cluster of mobs and by the time I’ve finished killing the last one, they’ve started to respawn again. This is especially pronounced in Orr. I had one encounter in Orr where I killed a mob, had it repop right on top of me, killed it again, started walking away and got hit in the back by the mob I had just re-killed. Although, to be honest, many problems are especially pronounced in Orr. Everything from mob density, repop rates, damage output and mob speed don’t feel right. To avoid going into huge detail about Orr, I’ll leave you with two images, which I’m assured are worth two thousand words, and then move on.
Welcome to Orr!
Learn to love your AoE snare. You’ll miss it dearly when it’s gone.
The issue isn’t solely with Orr though, I’ve had personal story instances where I was the recommended level for the story and then got the absolute tar beaten out of me. My favourite was a level 11 Norn story quest that had 6-8 ice imps spawning around the NPCs talking and then having attacks that chilled you and AoE attacks that hit for over 300 damage a pop, or as you like to call it at level 11: A quarter of your health with life runes. It was so lopsided and unexpected that it moved from frustrating into hilariously bizarre. There are many personal story and dungeon event that just feel like they were never play tested. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they were. Which just makes the feeling that they weren’t so much worse. I have no doubt that these will be tweaked and balanced as time goes on but they’re frustrating when you run into them.
Crafting
By and large, crafting is working well. I like the discovery system, the experience gains from crafting and that crafted equipment is actually worth wearing. The only real issue I have with crafting is that you never seem to have enough drop mats to keep your crafting skill on par with your level without going out of your way to grind. The scarcity was noticeable originally but it’s especially pronounced now that cooking mats drop from loot bags. I have mountains of chocolate and butter that I don’t have any use for yet in place of mats I did. I appreciate that the changes were made to add a diversity and, honestly, flat out roadblock to the ease of leveling cooking, but that change has further weakened an area that could have done with strengthening.
Upkeep Costs
Namely: repairs and waypoints. Repair costs feel slightly too high. It’s not high enough that I’d make a serious fuss about them, but they can get quite expensive. Especially if you’re doing dangerous content. High level waypoint costs are exorbitant. Just, ridiculously so. Waypoints do not straddle that thin line between cost and usefulness. I try as hard as I can to avoid using waypoints on my level 80 as they are too expensive to be worthwhile. As an example, I had a guildee mention that the Shatterer had gone up and that we should come and play. The waypoint cost there from where I was, was just under five silver. The low level blue items I got from the boss chest did not cover travel expenses, let alone the expense to get back to where I was originally. In a game built around the concept of co-operation and playing with your friends and guildees, waypoint costs act as an impediment to doing so. There are times when it feels like there are so many goldsinks in this economy that it’s more goldsink than economy. Personally, I would flat-out halve high level waypoint costs and call it reasonable, but at this point any reduction in waypoint costs would be welcome.
Dungeons
Right now, the hardest part of any dungeon for me is finding a group to run it. Even in a guild that is sitting at full capacity, it can be difficult to find a group to run dungeons. The recent changes made by Anet in regards to dungeons exacerbate this problem rather than alleviate it. Here’s the biggest problem: To do explorable dungeons you need to do story mode dungeons, to do story mode dungeons you need to get five people together who meet the requirements and, if it’s a pug, hope like hell that they don’t bail in the middle of getting their butt kicked multiple times.
But can’t the people who have already done story mode help new people get through dungeons with their experience and thus increase the pool of people capable of doing explorable dungeons? They could, but they won’t because there’s no end reward for doing so. Not even a second hat with the exact same skin as every other dungeon that is novel the first time and then completely irrelevant afterwards. They have learned nothing from the far superior hat simulator, Team Fortress 2. The ideal situation would be to not only give players an end reward for re-doing story missions but to give them a bonus reward if they have first timers in their group. This would act as an incentive and increase the pool of players willing to do story dungeons which would then flow on to an increased pool of players available for explorable dungeons. Anet have taken the exact opposite course of action and diminished what meagre rewards existed for players re-doing story missions because people were speed running Caudecus’s Manor Story. The problem wasn’t how high the rewards for CM Story was, the problem was that the most difficult fight in CM Story is the one the player has with controlling their camera angle. Yet instead of addressing the core problem of dungeon difficulty, Anet reduced replayed story mode rewards across the board and exacerbated an existing problem.
The importance of this problem can be overstated because the final point in a player’s personal story is the level 80 dungeon. It was supremely frustrating trying to find a group to do that dungeon with. On one side you had the people who had already done it and had no desire to do it again, and I can’t blame them. The dungeon is long, is somewhat dangerous and has no real rewards to balance both the upkeep from repairs and the investment of time when they could be doing something else more enjoyable and profitable. Then on the other side of the aisle you had all the people who didn’t meet the requirements for the dungeon. Either their level wasn’t high enough or they hadn’t progressed far enough through their personal story for them to want to do it. You have to somehow find enough players from the slim pool of people who are both ready for the dungeon and who haven’t done it yet. And then, once you have them, you hope the dungeon is open or that the group events you need to do to open it are both, A) running at the given moment you want to do the dungeon and B) not bugged. This is a problem right now, short term, but look beyond that to the long term and ask yourself, what happens two years down the road when a new player gets to the end of their personal story and needs to do the dungeon? Who do they group with? What incentive does anyone have to come back and do that dungeon with them? Anet seriously need to work not on creating and entrenching a system of two distinct pools of players with regards to story and explorable mode dungeons but on conflating the two to encourage player co-operation and alleviate systematic bottlenecks.
For the headstarters it’s been about three weeks since launch and this seems like as good a milestone as any to start giving feedback on your experience or how you feel things are shaping up now that we’ve got a solid degree of play time under our belts. The purpose of this thread is going to be about your experience and how you feel about the game more than suggestions, per se. That being said, when I give my feedback I’ll most likely include what I see as a solution to a problem on the basis that the difference between criticism and constructive criticism is not going, “This is bad” but rather, “This isn’t working, this is why and this is what I think you could do to improve it.” With that out of the way, let’s give some feedback. Be warned, it’s going to be a long post.
Hearts and Dynamic Events
I enjoy these quite a lot. They’re probably one of the stronger aspects of Guild Wars 2. By an large, they’re done well enough that there’s very little to critique here. Hearts do have a problem where they feel a little bit samey after a while. Especially if you’re solely taking the route of killing mobs for heart affection but with the alternate methods available for completing hearts if you keep choosing the same method of completion every single time the responsibility for feeling bored lies more on the shoulders of the person choosing to do than on the developers. Some of the heart events can also be quite tedious, especially the ones that involve either a transformation form or a replacement weapon. We’ve all had that moment in a game where you need to use a specific weapon to kill an enemy or transform into something and it’s just completely lackluster in comparison to what you could be doing otherwise. It’s not to say that these mechanics are bad in themselves, they just require tight balance to be fun and often it isn’t there.
Another tedium issue found with hearts is hearts that take far too long to complete. Fort Salma in Kessex Hills is a perfect example of this. It goes by in a flash if you have centaurs sieging the settlement and you have centaurs to kill and buildings to repair. If you don’t have that, your way to complete the heart is to put out a finite amount of fires, scrabble around for badges on a finite number of Seraph and pick up a finite amount of unexploded ordnance that will promptly explode and dump you on your butt. The focus on the finite nature of these items is that it means that often you need to sit around waiting for Unexploded Shell #361 to repop so you can get blown up by it again and gain a sliver of heart affection. Very grindy, not much fun.
Dynamic events are magnificent, especially dynamic event chains. There’s just something neat about trooping around with an NPC over half the map while you help set up something pretty cool. The greatest strength of dynamic events is the way they scale to the players present so that whether you’re alone or in a group you can participate and enjoy the content. It’s a mechanic that’s implemented so well that I am completely baffled by the next point of feedback. Namely:
Group Events
The strength of dynamic events is how reactive and enabling they are. Group events are the exact opposite. The issue with group events is that more often than not you cannot complete them alone. And for a feature titled “Group Event” kinda the point, I know. The problem though, is that it’s not entirely common to have other people in the exact same place that you are at the exact same time. Group event bosses have a habit of just sitting around, doing nothing for hours at a time because while countless players have streamed past the boss, they’ve streamed past it one at a time over the course of hours. As an anecdotal example, I was in Ashford and ran into the Flame Shaman. I tried to take him down by myself, failed and fled before I died. I then continued adventuring through Ashford, logged off, made food, did chores, logged back on, continued playing and then received a gold participation reward for the Flame Shaman event. Four hours after I fled out of that cave, enough people were in the right place at the right time to take the boss down. By itself this isn’t great but I wouldn’t classify it as terribly bad. There’s nothing too bad about a boss not dying like clockwork. What is a problem is that they’re often placed such that they get in the way of a player trying to do things. Group event bosses with large patrols have a way of sneaking up on players, or more irritating, group event bosses placed on top of points of interest or skill points so that they bar map completion until they’re gone. This aspect of boss placement shifts the group event boss not dying for four hours from “not great, not bad” into “needs to be looked at and addressed.”