Guild Wars 2

Harbard.5738:

Zenith.6403:

TwoBit.5903:

I keep hearing in the latest interviews constant mentioning of the word “reward” and very little about making the game more fun. This reminded me of an Extra Credits video I posted back discussing the nature of extrinsic and intrinsic gameplay, and the focus on rewards leads me to believe that intrinsic gameplay is taking a backseat to making players feel good about grinding. However, I also believe that the intrinsic vs extrinsic debate presents somewhat of a false dilemma when it comes to rewards and progression in RPGs.

Anet’s goals are to keep people playing the game and buy stuff from cash shop. It’s a real problem when you see that your playerbase is moving away from, say, WvW games and forum posts complaining that there’s “no point to play it”. Very cost-effective solution is to add some small progression without breaking balance, like having +% damage vs. NPCs or being able to carry a couple of supplies more. This makes it so that players have extrinsic rewards for playing WvW and solves the problem of players leaving.

That’s precisely my point. In the MMO world, where the devs have the “+stat or +% safety net” to fall back to, they don’t need to actually work to make WvW relevant, more engaging in its own merits, because there are always enough suckers that will grind the +%, the +gold… it’s so easy, so “cost-effective”, you don’t even have to make a game.

I don’t disagree with this notion, since it is effective to a degree. However I think this tactic is only effective when used in games that succeed on their own merits.

It certainly wasn’t effective enough to keep a several large communities, who were critical to the success of certain servers in WvW, from leaving the game or effective in making them come back to it. This relates back to my previous statement, if the game’s no good then people will eventually leave no matter what shinies you throw at them. And I believe there’s a another factor to it as well. Players have become more experienced. This is true in larger communities which tend to have people with more experience in their roster. I think these types of players going to be able sniff out carrot dangling tactics and know to avoid games that offer little more than shallow incentives. With the power of networking, it’s easy for them to find alternatives to play. I’m not going to list any names, looking up the web pages of former GW2 communities shows that these communities have already moved their consciousness away from GW2 and towards upcoming titles like Wildstar and ESO.

Deamhan.9538:

This threat certainly brings out a point in gaming. One that I think identifies what went wrong from rpg’s 20 years ago to the mmorpg’s today.

Both character and gear progression was a means to an end. Somewhere along the way, this changed and now character and gear progression is that end. The means is simply doing whatever is necessary to get that next gear item, skill, char lvl, etc.

That’s not to say that those old games simply gave you what you needed to move on. You still had to perform some task first.

Perform task->Get the advancement needed->Carry on towards your goal->repeat

Games now don’t have that last step. Or rather the advancement is the goal.

Perform task->Get the advancement->repeat

Games have become shallow. Is it lack of imagination of the developer’s part? Is it because gaming companies or too corporatized and simply want to put out products that rake in cakitten the lowest cost possible?

So what is the difference between those old rpgs and mmorpgs? Well, one is that the former is single player and the latter is multiplayer. What happens when you reach that goal in the rpg? Simple, you’re done the game.

With mmo’s the point is the game doesn’t end. Now expansions are suppose to be what gives you that next goal and keep the full cycle going. The problem is that this is not what ANet is doing with living story. The living story is simply new tasks designed to reward you new gear with the gear being the goal.

It’s simply more and more of….

Perform task->Get advancement->repeat.

The worst part? That the gear is just skins. It’s not even advancement. As for the tasks? Well, they are the same things with a new look.

So it’s no wonder that people are complaining about grind.

They need to bring out content that has a desirable goal. Content that requires advancement. Content that puts advancement back to being the means to an end rather than being that end.

Oddly enough a sandbox can do this. Look at EVE. Sure, advancing your character could be a goal but typically the player had their own goals and advancement may or may not have been needed.

Whether it was to form your own mega corp, bring down a mega corp, become an infamous pirate, or be the richest person in game, advancing your character was simply a means to such an end. It’s what made that game far less grindy than any other mmo out there.

Which is why game companies should be setting out their own particular goal and that goal is to see who can build the better sandbox.

I belive gear should be an ends as well, as it’s an important part of character expression. Just like how the skill system in GW1 was a form of expression. There are obviously superior builds but there was still room for imagination and personalization.

This brings to mind how power can be both gained and reduced in EVE. It’s sort of a treadmill gathering assets to buy ships in order to repeat gather more assets and so forth, but if you’re not careful or attentive you can lose assets to piracy so it’s not a completely mindless grind. PvP in EVE is competition based on equity and at the same time equity is reduced by actions encouraged through competition. It’s a fascinating dynamic that creates a highly sustainable model.

I’m hoping this kind of sustainability is something EQ Next and Wildstar are able to achieve. I haven’t read too much about EQN (although I’m excited about its premises), but Wildstar’s guild system and the competition it brings seems like a fun and interesting equity sink, at least with a cursory look at how the system works.

Gehenna.3625:

TwoBit.5903:

I wanted to keep it brief. I was also keen to avoid the mental gymnasitics that generally cause people type of pages of nonsense as reasoning-the kind I see in your post.

@Gehenna
I get that feeling as well. I’m not entirely sure why they gave those greens for completing LS quests when my current gear made the rewards so obsolete.

I think the tier system functions as a double-edged sword. The increases are significant but not enough to make make combat different in a meaningful way. You kill stuff with yellows or you can kill slightly faster with oranges. Whoopeee.

The newly announced skills piqued my interest because they could potentially add meaningful decisions and gameplay variations, but then I remembered how difficult it would be to add variation to this mushy mess of a combat system.

Mind you, lame story rewards is not unique to guild wars. For some reason MMOs tend to make leveling something that takes quite a while and is supposed to be epic and all that but the rewards are anything but. It seems to be some game developer logic that story lines should not be rewarded, thereby teaching people that the story line actually isn’t that important. It’s a matter of putting money where your mouth is really or do as I say, not as I do. Anet have followed suit in that.

That’s a silly trend, if true. It’s built on a shallow understanding of storytelling and it relies on the audiences ability to follow the developer’s obscure logic without proper conveyance of said logic. I really wish more developers would follow the loot concepts in Zelda. Often times the loot added characterization to NPCs and depth to the story, and it was all really easy to follow. For example of this would be the Iron Boots in Twilight Princess as it added character depth and humor to the mayor of your hometown.

However, there are a significant amount of people who want it, but not even for the stats. Just as a sense of completion or achievement. Too bad all it takes to get said gear is log in once a day for a while, again devaluating the meaning of top tier gear. Aside from being too easy and just time gated it’s also a very one sided approach…just do dailies, that’s it. That devaluates the rest of the game.

Problem I have is that gear only changes the speed at which things are done, and not actually engage players to make interesting or meaningful gameplay decisions. The gear and skill system in GW1 somehow managed to this beautifully, despite the horrendous balance issues. But then again games are never balanced in terms of power of efficacy, and that’s okay because they should focus on challenge and meaningful decisions instead.

What worries me about new skills is that to make them interesting, they will likely be more powerful. That means everybody will go for earning the new skills and the existing content will be even easier to do. Why do I think the new skills will be more powerful? Because if not, people will be disappointed and go: whatever.

Wanna get people excited? Give them more freedom within the existing skill bar set up.

That’s one of my concerns as well. It’ll be blatant power creep disguised as a horizontal skill system. Why? Because I can’t see them adding much meaningful variation in combat without redoing the entire system, so it’s easier to add in skill Y that does the same thing as skill X, but always does more damage.

Zenith.6403:

TwoBit.5903:

I keep hearing in the latest interviews constant mentioning of the word “reward” and very little about making the game more fun. This reminded me of an Extra Credits video I posted back discussing the nature of extrinsic and intrinsic gameplay, and the focus on rewards leads me to believe that intrinsic gameplay is taking a backseat to making players feel good about grinding. However, I also believe that the intrinsic vs extrinsic debate presents somewhat of a false dilemma when it comes to rewards and progression in RPGs.

- I think the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards is academic. There are tons of games loaded with all sorts of extrinsic reward systems that don’t interest me. Farmville is one of those games, have you played it? I tried it and played for a couple of days but got bored because the game lacks depth. That game didn’t reward me or satisfy any need I have.

Anet’s goals are to keep people playing the game and buy stuff from cash shop. It’s a real problem when you see that your playerbase is moving away from, say, WvW games and forum posts complaining that there’s “no point to play it”. Very cost-effective solution is to add some small progression without breaking balance, like having +% damage vs. NPCs or being able to carry a couple of supplies more. This makes it so that players have extrinsic rewards for playing WvW and solves the problem of players leaving.

There are players that feel their intrinsic reward mechanism doesn’t match what is being offered by the game (have you actually listened to what every single NPC has to say? There’s a ton of content) and leave the game because of it. I think this is natural.

The npc dialogue and interfacing is so poorly done in this game that people are are unlikely to read or enjoy them.

And plastering shallow, extrinsic reward only solves issues with in the short run. This is why WoW has so many gear tiers that consititue and egregious treadmill. For those like me, it was actually so repulsive that I stopped playing WvW. The fact that certain other upcoming MMOs seem to offer deeper reward systems/progression that work in tandem with world PvP make me believe that I wasn’t missing much.

A good reward system in which gameplay can built around can actually last for the lifespan of a game. Star Wars Galaxy and its procedural loot generation come to mind as it adds an infinite amount variety and incentive, and the incentive is enough to drive certain forms of gameplay.

I think many of you are also focusing too much on the binary intrinsic/extrinsic relationship of gameplay, which I made a point of getting away from as it presents a false dilemma in RPGs. But that’s understandable as the current rewards system in GW2 can really only be seen one way.

Harbard.5738:

TwoBit.5903:

Harbard.5738:

Welcome to MMOland? People were crying “gimme shinies” for months, so they decided they wanted the easiest-to-please and lamest player-base, people who play reward systems and not games. Can’t say I can blame people calling the shots at anet, sadly, it’s just way too easy. You don’t need a meaty game, all you have to do is roll out the +stat crap and rewarded “achievements” and those people shut up and keep paying. Wouldn’t that corrupt your lofty game designer ideals? lol

If this is all part of MMOland, well then MMOland kind of sucks.

Well, pretty much sums up my point. Not saying I don’t agree with you, but face it, man. That’s MMOland. Or am I missing some awesome game out there? Feel free to PM me the name.

On the bright side, GW2 took a mini step ahead, and we now get to play it every now and then in between real games, without subscriptions, when/if Anet releases something that’s not a stupid clunky minigame, while we continue on our Ever lasting Quest for the Next MMO-Which-Might-Not-Pretty-Much-Repeat-The-Same-Crap-And-Eventually-Suck.

I’ve already planned my Next adventure This game (or rather the forum) is tiding me over until then.

Love Extra Credits, but you have the reward thing wrong in this genre. They are not giving up on intrinsic rewards, they are simply addressing the perceived lack of extrinsic rewards, something absolutely necessary and to be desired in an MMO/RPG.

The concept of intrinsic rewards is important, just not important as an either/or. It’s both/and in or near the genre.

“In this genre” Well this genre stinks and emphasizes extrinsic time wasting.

Harbard.5738:

Welcome to MMOland? People were crying “gimme shinies” for months, so they decided they wanted the easiest-to-please and lamest player-base, people who play reward systems and not games. Can’t say I can blame people calling the shots at anet, sadly, it’s just way too easy. You don’t need a meaty game, all you have to do is roll out the +stat crap and rewarded “achievements” and those people shut up and keep paying. Wouldn’t that corrupt your lofty game designer ideals? lol

Pandering to superificial wants is the worst way to design games IMO. As a gamer, what I’ve seen that often separates a good game and a bad one is nuance of design (including gameplay mechanics, storytelling, graphics), and that’s something you can’t expect to achieve by listening to metrics. And I think blindly pandering to the beat metrics is a trap in itself, because I believe that if an MMO continues to continue down a path of poor design decisions, people will sooner or later realize it and move onto a better alternative. This will happen no matter what kind or what quantity of shinies you throw at the player. This is has happened even to giants like Blizzard. If this is all part of MMOland, well then MMOland kind of sucks.

IndigoSundown.5419:

stof.9341:

kRiza krimos.1637:

Yea because in gw2 you have to keep moving or you are dead. But sure it must be better to stand below monsters armpit than to move and fight, you can smell excitment!

Actually, you have to move always against that BAM too, it’s just that you keep that precise position because the mob punch can hardly be avoided due to the speed at which they launch. You have to move around to avoid all the other attacks which are a little more telegraphed.

You are constantly moving to avoid the big attacks and try to get back in position to avoid the autoattack before it happens.

I don’t remember Tera all that well anymore, but I seem to remember BAM’s not turning that quickly. Feel free to correct me if I’m misremembering.

They don’t turn as the players kite (or at least not very quickly), but they do turn towards the player with the highest aggro when winding up attacks. Furthermore, players are locked into a semi-fixed animation when attacking so as to prevent them from kiting mindlessly. The BAMs don’t really need to turn large angles at all, or at least not that often.

Esplen.3940:

Your words have potential, but they don’t really have any depth. They’re just all these words that make sense and are scattered on the ground like dice, trying to form a point.

I came into this thread, expecting a wall of text. What I got was a tripwire of text.

Regardless, they probably threw around the word reward a lot because they’re talking about their new reward system (makes sense, right?) I think you’re not giving Arenanet enough credit. Think about every player that plays this game. Arenanet has to cater to every individual; the grinder, the casual, the super casual, the super grinder, the achievement finder, the completionist, and more. And if they displease ANY of them, they get a stick shoved up their…

With that in mind, they have implemented a great system, it’s just abused (as anything and everything get, in any video game) in a way that it wasn’t meant to be. Because of that, they’re redoing the system to a method that will prevent it from getting abused (as hard). This new system will allow players to do that RNG skin grind they’ve always wanted (and yes, I am saying that they’ve always wanted this, I’ve seen so many complaints and suggestions, both ingame and out of game, asking for RNG on bosses for unique skins) That’s what’s happening. Arenanet is changing based on what the populace wants/needs.

The redundancy of content to get gear is not a problem. Why? Because you’re:
A: Working for pretty gear which you don’t need to do (you can easily play while looking ugly, there’s nothing stopping you).
B: YOU’RE working for that gear. Nobody is stopping you. Nobody is forcing you.
C: How would you propose new gear be attained WITHOUT reusing content? WITHOUT forcing players to do a task, or two, or three? How would you propose players get rewarded in a method not done with carrots (players love carrots)?

Think about it. Sure, you can add rewards tied to objectives done only once. Kinda like the Aetherblade Jumping Puzzle. Oh, that went well. But wait, there’s also the Achievement Points, you’re not forcing players to follow a carrot, you’re rewarding players who play how they want. Oh, that went well. But wait, there’s also the Fortune Scraps, which can be obtained while playing the game how you want to play the game (as long as it involves some sort of looting). Oh, that went well.

Want me to continue?

I wanted to keep it brief. I was also keen to avoid the mental gymnasitics that generally cause people type of pages of nonsense as reasoning-the kind I see in your post.

@Gehenna
I get that feeling as well. I’m not entirely sure why they gave those greens for completing LS quests when my current gear made the rewards so obsolete.

I think the tier system functions as a double-edged sword. The increases are significant but not enough to make make combat different in a meaningful way. You kill stuff with yellows or you can kill slightly faster with oranges. Whoopeee.

The newly announced skills piqued my interest because they could potentially add meaningful decisions and gameplay variations, but then I remembered how difficult it would be to add variation to this mushy mess of a combat system.

I keep hearing in the latest interviews constant mentioning of the word “reward” and very little about making the game more fun. This reminded me of an Extra Credits video I posted back discussing the nature of extrinsic and intrinsic gameplay, and the focus on rewards leads me to believe that intrinsic gameplay is taking a backseat to making players feel good about grinding. However, I also believe that the intrinsic vs extrinsic debate presents somewhat of a false dilemma when it comes to rewards and progression in RPGs.

Rewards should in and of themselves be a part of the gameplay experience, as both the means and the ends. In most RPGs, getting rewarded with higher stat gear and new skills for beating enemies was intrinsically fun because it was part of the problem solving and resource management that’s a very core of the genre. You get gear/skills so you can beat the next baddies. I think Zelda does this beautifully (if a bit redundantly) by introducing weapons as the players go through the game. GW1 does this quite well with the deck-building elements of the skill system.

The problem with GW2’s rewards system and gear progression is that it lets players be (slightly) more effective or look prettier in content they’ve already completed/problems they’ve already solved, and the effectiveness is only in dps. They don’t influence gameplay on a level that engages players to solve problems or play in different and interesting ways. They’re nothing more than carrots.

What worries me is that, as previously mentioned, the latest articles and teasers indicate a fetishism with rewards over gameplay. There’s a fine line between rewarding players to engage them to do more and rewarding them to encourage them to repeat the mundane, and I believed they crossed the line with the transition from guildwars 1 to guildwars 2. The wording of the article and general attitude towards content design (evident by their lacing everything with achievement points) leads me to believe that they did so without knowing where they were to begin with or how good it was for the playerbase in their previous game.

I’ll trade Lingering Elements for Renewing Stamina any day of the week.

Kurakura.7281:

Gehenna.3625:

etiolate.9185:

If confusion still hit hard the OP would have to learn to play.

Just saying.

I think the point is that you don’t have to l2p in this game (except perhaps in sPvP for the few who do that).

There is some complexity that you could use to your benefit….but you don’t need to. The game is purposefully dumbed down (as I see it) to accomodate the masses of casuals.

In PvE you can muck about, be an idiot and still win. In WvW you can zerg around with the rest. Bottom line you can be a total idiot and still be a hero, which is the exact opposite of l2p.

I think that’s why I don’t feel that this game is heroic because it’s all too simplistic. The fact that you can defeat a lot of enemies with auto attack and sit back is a testament to how shallow the game’s combat system is.

Now, you can make it spectacular by dodging and using all your skills…but you don’t need to…

The learn to play aspect is something that is really nice in a lot of action type games from first person shooters to action rpg’s… Every time you play you know you are getting better as you can do things you weren’t able to do before with the same gear. Even if there is no new content, getting better at the game is a goal too. The learning curve for PvE in GW2 is ridiculously low. It doesn’t even take 1 hour to learn how to play for most of PvE w/o any real difficulties.

I think it’s a problem with the design of the very core mechanics of the game and how they with one another. This game encourages dodging but only by pressing an invincibility toggle, which isn’t really dodging at all. You can move to dodge, but enemy attacks don’t synch to their animations so it’s not entirely sensible to move to dodge. Ranged attacks auto-track the player, making them rely on an invincibility toggle. The game wants to make movement matter but its simply can’t. To top it all off, the very telegraphing of attacks is done so poorly that you’re better off just not giving a kitten about dodging and are better off instead spamming dps, and cycling your reflect and heal skills off cooldown without really paying attention to enemy attacks and you do this for nearly every single encounter.

Masteries are a form of power creep, and they have been since their inception in WvW. In terms of equity, Wexp/levels is equity that only increases with time because there are no proper sinks for it (mastery skills are not sinks because they, and the power they grant, only increase with time). Once players max the existing masteries out and ANet runs out of ideas for unique skills, we can probably expect tier 2 masteries and then eventually super tier X masteries and so forth dolled out to keep player interest. This is why I quit as soon as the system was announced.

Making the system account bound would alleviate the grind and that would be wonderful for the player. However, it would go against the purpose of the system, which is to make the player grind even more.

Duke Blackrose.4981:

Gauradan.8361:

maddoctor.2738:

I laugh as well, a buggy mess like all Bethesda games is coming and somehow people think it will offer any kind of challenge for Guild Wars 2? Yeah right.

Except the game isn’t being developed by Bethesda. Don’t let facts get in the way of your ignorance, though.

ZeniMax is a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media – associated with Bethesda. You should really get your facts straight before fact checking someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZeniMax_Media

It’s the same thing as it being developed by Bethesda. It’s still likely to fail because of incompetent developing – this time WITHOUT the ability to mod everything and do the developers’ jobs for them – and more and more potential players have lost interest in the title with each passing information leak.

The ONLY thing that will lend the title immediate popularity is its TES IP – and that won’t stop it from potentially meeting the same fate as SWTOR.

Depends on the people creating the content. The Dawnguard expansion for Skyrim was clearly created by Bethesda, but difference in dungeon design, scenario design and the shoddy writing (I was writing fanfics of the same caliber in middle school) leads me to believe that it was done by a less experienced team than the one that created most of Skyrim. Dragonborn, the expansions came after Dawnguard, was clearly written by people with more experience. The writing and content design is the very reason why people are leery at ESO.

As for the bugs and coding, TES games have always prioritized content over quality control since they’re single player games that are can be modded/fixed by fans. Since ESO is an MMO, however, it’d be foolish of them to not increase the their QA to meet the demands of an MMO. Furthermore it’s possible that they’re outsourcing much of the coding for the game.

VOLKON.1290:

darkace.8925:

I wouldn’t call it shallow. Homogenized? Sure. But not shallow.

I was thinking more pasteurized. All the crap has been removed leaving only the good stuff.

Anymore pasteurizing and there would be nothing left, given how homogenous the existing skills and combat design are.

I think a good measure of depth could be derived from the of the tools players are given, how the game challenges them, and the overall variety created from the interplay of the previous two. There’s variety of in GW2, but it’s aesthetic. The same combo with a D/D Ele is as effective on a skritt as any other enemy. Furthermore, skill design isn’t very meaningful as the developers are opting to to design around damage numbers and conditions/boons rather than the actual frames of execution, hitboxes, and such, following a shallow concept of “action” gameplay. “Casters can move hurrderr so it’s better!”.

This results less nuanced gameplay. Efficacy of numbers always overwhelms skill. This is a huge problem in all game modes. In PvE as it creates a clear delineation of which class is better than which. In PvP, the inability of the combat system to scale to the player’s ability to execute skills creates a game with a laughably low skill cap which can only be balanced around hard counters.

MMOs have been ruined by the themepark mentality (wow wannabes) and oversimplification long before Guild Wars 2. GW2 just makes the themepark more accessible, but it still has all the warts of the all games in the genre and has created a few of its own. That said, it’s not as bad as most other MMOs.

Evolution is a popular scientific term that’s misappropriated in order to give credence to nonsense. Frankly speaking it’s a buzzword. The actual mechanisms of evolution are completely blind and mindless (understanding, however isn’t), so not exactly a suitable term for a field in which innovation must be coupled with large degree of insight and knowledge.

If by “evolution” we’re talking about smart design and innovations, then ANet and their living story fail in that regard as well. The changes since launch seem to revolve around the backtracking of “innovations,” most likely because these “innovations” were built upon faulty premises. Even basic things like narrative structure fall short due in no small part to ANets “innovations.”The fact that people complain that there’s barely any lore to the recent updates while in fact there is a decent amount should be signal to this fire. Using the main website to dump important setting information instead of delivering it sensibly in-game is not innovative.

Those are all important pillars of an RPG, but for an MMO there needs to be another one as well: social dynamism. The game’s focus on accessibility waters down player interaction. The trading post, for instance, removes the sense of identity intrinsic to trading between players or groups of players. Player ends up selling and buying from an interface rather than human. Another example of this is the crafting system which, because of its accessibility, functions as a progression mechanic rather than a form social glue as it does in other games.

Also, you used “suggestion.” A moderator will soon be here to move this thread into the bowels of the suggestion forums, never to see the light of day. Because semantics, that’s why.

Vayne.8563:

TwoBit.5903:

The question is, if it’s so inconsequential why have ascended gear at all? Given the general arguments of those defending the game, GW2 can surely compel players to play on its own merits rather than coercing them with vertical progression, can’t it?

I’ll tell you why.

Because the illusion of something can be greater than a think itself.

There are people who don’t like this game and won’t play it, because it doesn’t have a full on gear grind. To them, cosmetics aren’t worth their time at all.

By the same token, there are people who absolutely want NO vertical progression at all. Not even a hint of it (in spite of the fact that vertical progression existed in the game at launch).

But the people who’ll leave over extremes is still a relatively small percentage of the population.

By creating a compromise, those that are just uncomfortable with vertical progression or those who thought it would be nice to have some grind are both still playing the game….maybe not quite as happy as they would have been, but the game has now had the time to get going.

It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if Anet now didn’t release ascended armor or weapons. They may, but they’ll be very careful about how they do it.

The main point is this though. Before they released the fractals and ascended stuff a lot of people finished the game, didn’t go for cosmetic skins and they were done. They left. Anet saw what was happening, had to make a fast decision and they did so. They made the fractals. They released it fast, they screwed up how the gear was released, but they made that compromise.

And since then the game, from my point of view, has more or less remained strong. Some people see it as a bargain with the devil, but it really hasn’t hurt or affected the game that much.

That’s why it’s not more than it is, but it’s also why they couldn’t not do it.

You’re stating it as though the illusion is necessary. If the MMO genre is to evolve as you constant bring up, then I think that design mentality has to go. It’s baggage, and one that’s derived from false interpretations. The “illusion” you speak of is actually a quality of item scaling games of yore, where items have procedural randomization of stats. The illusion of there always being something better was due to the fact that getting fully optimized stats was impractical due the random nature of loot. It’s a powerful system, but it’s intricacies are taken for granted in GW2’s treadmill. In GW2 it’s a straight up “do this x times for max gear until the devs decide to give higher stat gear” or in other words the WoW model that GW2 was supposed to get away from, or implied to anyway.

Your statement about the game remaining strong is a rather dubious. You’re stating conjecture as fact without data to back your statements. The language is vague, almost as vague as, dare I say, this game’s manifesto. How much is “strong” anyway? Who else but the speaker is able set the criteria for it, especially when there are no facts?

If it’s for college, I suggest buying a laptop with a sturdy case. Alienware and Asus are good brands in that regard, albeit a pricey.

I suggest you stay away from the ideapad and Acer. Their casing and cooling systems are often bad, which means that they can become more prone to overheating (when pushed to their limit with games like GW2) as they age.

Make sure to read reviews (published reviews if possible) before you make your purchase for any laptop.

There’s one question that no one brings up when ascended gear is mentioned and I think it’s an important one to ask. If the stat gains are so inconsequential why have ascended gear at all? Given the general arguments of those defending the game, GW2 can surely compel players to play on its own merits rather than coercing them with vertical progression, can’t it?

I wasn’t really surprised by ANet going against their word. Right off the bat they designed the game with their vision pigeonhold by the concept of grind, so instead of making a fun and engaging loot system they focused on the speed and increment at which loot is delivered.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

TwoBit.5903:

Skills are too dps-centric, and by that I mean that design is too focused towards numerical values rather than the factors of their execution. It’s thoroughly designed with the mentality of MMO combat. It tries to be actiony by removing self rooting and making it so that new skills don’t phase out old ones, but all it ends up doing is removing the fat that made MMO combat interesting.

Games like Vindictus of DFO do action combat correctly because a skills in those games are balanced through the nuances of their execution- the hitboxes, windups, frames and so forth. Consequently those games tend to have even fewer overall skills, and little to no phasing of older ones.

And yet games like Tera and Vindictus who have ‘true action combat’ feel really really horrible (to me). GW2’s combat is exactly how it needs to be to avoid animation locks, which I love it for. If there is one thing I cant stand as a caster it is being forced to stand still to cast all of my skills, GW2 treats stationary skills properly by using them sparingly.

That’s personal opinion. “Feel” and “depth” are two different things, and guildwars2 tends to sacrifice the the latter for the former. PvP is almost illegible because of the speed of attacks and the fact that you can cancel all attacks into another. Personally I find kiting and spamming autoattacks tiresome, especially since the lack of restriction and lack of tightly tuned animations reduces the overall depth of execution and challenge of the game.

Skills are too dps-centric, and by that I mean that design is too focused towards numerical values rather than the factors of their execution. It’s thoroughly designed with the mentality of MMO combat. It tries to be actiony by removing self rooting and making it so that new skills don’t phase out old ones, but all it ends up doing is removing the fat that made MMO combat interesting.

Games like Vindictus of DFO do action combat correctly because a skills in those games are balanced through the nuances of their execution- the hitboxes, windups, frames and so forth. There’s depth of execution of each skills and, consequently, the games I mentioned have even fewer overall skills, and little to no phasing of older ones.

goldenwing.8473:

I, too, am an old RPG player for close to a decade and a half. I’ve helped alpha and beta a fair amount of games, and sat in on a lot of internal discussions over the years, and would like to think as a retired software developer (Fortune 20 company), that I’ve contributed. I’m a big proponent of the genre evolving and have left countless posts and discussions (both publically and internally to devs) over the years advocating such, including on this board.

The problem here isn’t that the game is evolving more in the direction of an MMO or an RPG, but rather devolving in the direction of Nintendo-style play. The best examples of “old-school RPGs” that I can think of are the gold standards set by the Infinity Engine (BGII: SoA) and subsequent Forgotten Realms games like NWN. Tremendous quantities of these games focused on exploration and problem-solving. The Forsaken Halls open mini-dungeon is a great example of the classic “Dark-room” problem-solving style play that was the hallmark of these games. In BGII, there were plenty of puzzle rooms where you only even began fighting mobs if you did something horribly wrong. These games were deeply immersive with well-written characters, including those that the player interacted with in the environment. The choices that the player made, including in seemingly inconsequential dialogues impacted the game world at a time when MMOs were in their infancy.

This sort of creative problem-solving, whether it’s finding the right lever or finding the right NPC to talk to in a crowded city in order to uncover a secret plot, being kidnapped and disguised as a Drow and hauled through the underdark, etcetera, are the hallmark of old school RPG. They were immersive and required thinking.

What many members of the GW2 community are concerned about is not the relative return to old school RPG encounters and immersion compared to recent MMOs. What we are deeply concerned about is that much of the new jump-puzzle related content has nothing to do with either MMOs or RPGs. MMOs are vast, persistent worlds populated by players and NPCs alike where a community of players blends with the game world to create an experience that goes beyond what’s possible in a campaign-driven single player game. RPGs are role-playing games where you the player can slide into an immersive world and feel like you are making a difference in that world.

Jump puzzles are a return to old Nintendo-style, single-player hopping from one rock to another to get the chest at the end

Most old-school RPGs did not even have a mechanic that allowed characters to jump. The old Infinity Engine games certainly didn’t. Short-range screen blackouts and cutscene-style teleports were required to even move characters across a chasm. Instead, the player was asked to think: strategically, tactically, creatively, to problem-solve their way through situations that sometimes had heavy combat, and sometimes just presented a challenge for an explorer to get through. But the point was that they didn’t take twitchy reflexes, and they were never in isolation from the game world.

Evolutionarily speaking, many players, myself included, have expressed their concern that jump puzzles are not evolving the MMORPG genre but are grafting in a kind of gameplay that harms both the MMO and RPG aspects of the game. That’s not evolving role-playing or community-building content, it’s replacing both of them with single-player twitch-reflex movement games that don’t appeal to me or many other players. I don’t personally have a problem with people who love jump puzzles. What I and many other players are frustrated by is that this niche style of content is not only potentially crowding out content that is both MMO and RPG, it is increasingly being forced on everyone (having it linked to rewards/achievements.) This does not even address the issue of whether technically the engine can properly support this style gameplay for all players, latencies, and machines.

Great post, totally agree on all points. I especially agree with how, in the games of old, narratives were often delivered through critical thinking challenges.

The proper narrative design seems to take a backseat in most games these days and it’s obviously escaped the content designers of the living story. Given the tight release schedule of the LS and the fragmentation of ANet’s content design teams, I don’t see them making any strides in releasing meaningful and deep narratives. Story writing is hard and often bottlenecks development if its given priority. That’s what I hear, anyway. However, if JPs and the occasional dungeon are things that are within their capabilities ANet should at the very least try fix the engine and camera. >.< “Do it right or don’t do it at all.”

LumAnth.5124:

It all started when….

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

Cue Halloween:
Now that Zhaitan was dead, the “Commander” was ready to have fun in Halloween.Halloween (re) introduced players to the Mad King Thorn. This ended with the destruction of the Lion’s Arch fountain.

Cue Lost Shores
The death of Zhaitan allowed the discovery of an unknown and dangerous island, now known as Southsun Cove. As Consortium begin to irritate the Karka, they retaliate. A lot of people don’t know this (because they ignored the Lost Shores update), but Lionguard Ellen Kiel was introduced at this update. She instructed you to solve the scavenger hunt, on the lore and story of the Karka. As the Karka become more irrate, they begin attacking Tyrian coasts, including Caledon Forest, and even the Wizard’s Tower town.

The Karka were pushed back and out of Lion’s Arch, and Southsun Cove was made available. This involved exploration of the new island, and thus lead players to what is known as the “Karka Hive.” This is where players defeated and killed the Ancient Karka.

Cue Wintersday:
With this finally slowing down, I guess the player character took a break for the Wintersday festival. (I will skip this) I think this was also when the Lion’s Arch fountain was finally restored, through player donations of Lionguard Lyns.

Cue F&F Series:
After a good time in Wintersday, settlers and refugees have been “kicked” from their homes. Players were assigned to assist the refugees on their way.

Soon after, portals and assaults of the now known “Molten Alliance” begin attacking Norn and Charr lands. Player characters help Rox and Braham through missions.

The F&F series melds with the Super Adventure Box, because the box was meant for children refugees to be entertained.

Finally, after a couple pushes and shoves to the Molten Alliance, we attack their base known as the “Molten Facility.” The Molten Alliance is broken, yet refugees still need places to go to.

Cue Secret of Southsun/Last Stand:
The Consortium decides to take advantage of some of the refugees and offers them a contract on the Island. Refugees are infuriated with said contract, as harsh conditions and rampaging monsters infest Southsun.

It is revealed that Canach, a sylvari who worked with the Consortium in the Lost Shores, used aggravating agents to make local fauna incredibly aggressive. We are also reintroduced to Lionguard Ellen Kiel. We stop Canach with the help of Kiel and an upcoming festival finally eases tension between the refugees and the Consortium.

Cue The Dragon Bash/Sky Pirates of Tyria:
With the festival, citizens of Lion’s Arch (including said refugees prior to the DB, specifically those from F&F and Southsun) have a great time. This gives players a little lore of the Canthan party known as the “Dragon Festival”

A new kind of technology is introduced. It is known as holograms. These holograms proved very intriguing and useful.

The Effigy ceremony finally signaled the near end of the Dragon Bash. During one of the ceremonies, a new type of Pirates known as the Aetherblades attack. Some of the council members of LA are seriously injured. With the help of Marjory, we track down the suspect, Mai Trin. Finally, we help Ellen Kiel in the Aetherblade retreat.

And now we’re here! The Bazaar of the Four Winds! Woohooo!!
Introduction of the Zephyr Sanctum and the Bazaar attract curious minds of Tyria and they visit the Marketplace.

Foreshadows of the sky pirates, the Aetherblades, seem to be attacking the Zephyr Sanctum.

And that is how this story is very deep and is very connected

P.S. Yes I typed ALL that out, but to be fair, I’m also waiting to flip my TP items

Connected (barely at that) but by no means deep.

Getefix.9150:

would you prefer a totally silent city? if anything, id love to hear more diverse chatter like maybe someone buying apples from some one handed charr merchant in lions arch or people discussing living story events, that’d be cool

I’d rather have better written dialogue, not one-off puns or impersonal slogans that are repeated ad nauseum. If that’s not possible, then I’d prefer silence.

I like that they’re going for more realism in this update story, but the writing and presentation lacks the nuance and detail that makes realism engaging and interesting.

I don’t dislike the idea of jumping puzzles, but if they want to implement more of them I think they should first address the engine. Otherwise, their content will be like Mario but not designed as well and not nearly as fun to play.

Harbard.5738:

I’m not so sure about all the superlative crappy, but it’s definitely like watching Michael Jordan doing some ice skating.

To me it’s not so bad when it’s only simple jumping puzzles, mixed with actual content, like open world Jps, jumping pads in PvP or dungeons. That fine. It starts to suck when the GAME starts becoming this. A whole update devoted to jumping and jumping skills. and.. what slow pace “racing”? Seriously?

They should just stop forcing the boundaries of the game and make an MMO.

Another concern:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Too-much-focus-on-Mini-games/first#post2386363

I’m more concerned that they had to give players an entirely new and specific skillset to enjoy the new content. I think this speaks volumes of the inflexibility of the combat system in regards to PvE design, and how well combat design meshes with terrain design.

The engine and camera keep JPs from being a sensible experience.

Well, the writing is already on the level of a Saturday morning cartoon show…

Celestial really has no place in any meta. PvE design favors direct damage. Conditions get overwritten, and if you party with a condition necro or engineer, all those condition damage stats are pointless since both professions are better at stacking bleeds and have better variety in their condition damage. sPvP and WvW favors burst mitigation and sustain, so Clerics and PVT. You can better support team members with clerics, and if you’re a solo roamer, PVT offers the same damage as Celestial, has more burst mitigation and is relatively easy to get.

Ranger because ANet couldn’t design good AI if their life depended on it.

xiv.7136:

The problem with celestial is simple.

Low power.

Basically. Given the scaling of power, crit and crit damage, zerker gear will almost always outdo celestial. Since healing and the damage mitigation through toughness scale together, you’re also losing far more survivability than the difference in numbers would lead you to believe, even more if you’re a class that runs with high protection uptime.

It might be worth it if you replaced gloves, shoulders and shoes with celestial since they already have relatively low stat values in the first place, but only because zerker and celestial gear give the same amount of crit damage.

If you, for whatever bizarre reason, want to run a condition build, you’re better off using carrion so that you can deal decently high direct and condition damage.

Hermes.7014:

Why? Weapons with particle effects are usually the most popular.

Personal preference. I have nothing against particles general, but they’re way overdone in GW2. There’s no particle effects slider, so if there are many players wearing gear with particle effects there’s nothing to mitigate the lag and clutter induced by them.

MightyMicah.7451:

TwoBit.5903:

Justdeifyme.9387:

TwoBit.5903:

When the game is bad, you blame the player. Everyone else is doing it!

Sorry to rip you out of your little dreamland but there are people on this earth who aren’t like you, lets say about 7 billion (yeah there are this many other humans on this earth! You probably didn’t even notice from looking in the mirror all the time). And out of the playerbase there are enough players who love the game, I bet those are even more than half the playerbase.

I don’t dislike the game, there are issues but it’s not that bad. What’s bad is the rhetoric where the player is at fault for the game’s failings. What’s even worse is players who like this game are blaming other players in order to shield the company and their game from useful criticisms as well as their own egos.. It’s disgusting and self-indulgent behavior.

Disgusting self-indulgent behavior? Bahahaha!

We’re not the ones complaining about the best mmo to ever be released. Learn to appreciate what you have. Learn the virtue called “patience.” Anet is working on this game and pushing it in a great direction. If you can’t see that then you shouldn’t play video games because you’re blind.

Best mmo to ever be created? That’s questionable. It’s all a matter of opinion, and I see far too often that people on these forums unable to debate without attacking one another simply because they can’t see past their own biases and opinions. I can just as easily say that you’re blind and my argument will have just as much merit, by which I mean none because personal attacks are not conducive to constructive debate. Furthermore if the game is so great, it would help to describe why, giving others insight and not simply repeat the “the game” to stroke your own bias of it That’s just self-indulgent posting.

More particles. Eugh. No thank you.

I said “when” it’s bad. Grammar is cool.

Justdeifyme.9387:

TwoBit.5903:

When the game is bad, you blame the player. Everyone else is doing it!

Sorry to rip you out of your little dreamland but there are people on this earth who aren’t like you, lets say about 7 billion (yeah there are this many other humans on this earth! You probably didn’t even notice from looking in the mirror all the time). And out of the playerbase there are enough players who love the game, I bet those are even more than half the playerbase.

I don’t dislike the game, there are issues but it’s not that bad. What’s bad is the rhetoric where the player is at fault for the game’s failings. What’s even worse is players who like this game are blaming other players in order to shield the company and their game from useful criticisms as well as their own egos.. It’s disgusting and self-indulgent behavior.

When the game is bad, you blame the player. Everyone else is doing it!

The game’s achievements feel more like rewards for tasks than achievements. Getting a perfect score on a difficult physics test? Now that’s an achievement. GW2’s achievments, which consist of running around 250 generic mobs and pressing f, is more along the lines of getting an obligatory gold star for finishing your homework in first grade.

I keep hearing the devs say “we intent” or “we want.” Mechanically speaking what they wanted and achieved hasn’t always been conducive to a good game.

Maybe when they integrate a better music playing system for instruments, like a mml or midi reader. Right now they’re only useful for griefing because the interface for them is incredibly inuntuitive for playing actual music.

I would say no because of clipping issues, but since even games like DCUO have clipping issues with capes and still have capes… why not? Just make it so that the capes don’t clip with the outfits they’d be sensible with. Then again that’d just limit them humanoid warriors lol.

Because the game’s camera wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I don’t think GW2’s engine supports that type of physics.

kostbabis.8791:

^ they also have ride the lightning with 20 sec cooldown :P

Their RTL doesn’t glitch and get caught in terrain, either :P

Engineers are currently better at being the Jack of All trades than the Ele. They also have higher health and armor. Something to meditate on, Izzy.

lordkrall.7241:

Nick.6972:

GW2 is more of a WoW Clone than GW1 Clone.
The irony.

Oh?
Please tell us all these things they have “copied” from WoW.

He didn’t say “copied” but there are certainly many things influenced by WoW. High level cap, gear tiers that influence player stats, isolated and regimented PvP, Quest structure (albeit worst and disguised as hearts), WvW being Alterac Valley but bigger, and even the player camera perspective. There’s also the glaring fact that many decision that went into GW2 had to deal with fixing problems intrinsic to themeparks WoW, or in other words doing themeparks but better. The game wasn’t made to be its own thing like GW1 but something tried to fix or “revolutionize” issues of of a genre. Ironically enough, it limited the vision of the game, making it very WoW-like. It also made many aspects of the game feel rather derivative (gear tiers and treadmill). On the actual development-side of things, a good number of developers contracted to work on GW2 were former WoW devs, go figure.

What I would want GW2’s raids to look like:

What it will probably look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=8CmZ5O_XjKs#t=521s

Edit: Timestamps not working for some reason. Scroll to 2:03 and 8:39 for the first and second vid respectively.