I kick people if htey haven’t shown up for like 7 months. But I send them an in game mail to explain and tell them they can always join again if they want by seeing me a mail or an in game message.
They haven’t gone into it yet, but it’s not something we’ve seen already. Whether you call this an expansion or not is largely irrelevant. It will change the way the game is played, in much the way an expansion would. The real test will be how many hours of play people get out of it.
I’ve played lots of MMO expansions in the past, some of which looked great on paper, but after a couple of months there was nothing.
How about we wait to see details before actually judging something.
I’m not sure if this is true for this beta or not, but I know for other short betas, they made things easier so people wouldn’t keep dying over and over, particularly while playing a new profession. Again I don’t know if that’s the case here, but it’s worth mentioning.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that simpler = bigger audience. While being overly complex can hurt a game, too much simplicity can hurt a game also.
I’m in favor of some of the changes (getting rid of traits that will never be viable is probably a good thing), but I’m less fond of others (I think the WvW auto-update went too far). And I think there are other things that could really stand to be simplified (there are frankly, too many gear sets / combinations, but that seems to be going the other way).
Sure, if you only have one option, you’re right, that’s too much simplicity. There are still plenty of people out there who find this game complex and don’t get stuff. As I said earlier it’s always a balance. The trick is to make it hard and easy. Easy to get into, hard to master. Anet needs to make some changes on both fronts still.
GW1 : Alot of choice,, alot of fun,, pretty balanced game
GW2 : Not much choice,, meta game,, totally unbalancedAlthough,, people say with less skills you have more balance… Well.. from what i have seen… GW2 is the most unbalanced game i’ve ever seen. Not even joking.
EDIT: It’s not the amount of skills that make gw2 so unbalanced. It’s more because there are no roles in gw2. Everyone does the same thing,, only different. But only 1 does it the best (with a few exceptions in certain situations)
Did you ever actually play GW1?
Even years after release the game was far from balanced.
GW2 is MUCH more balanced in comparison.There were very little actual choices in GW1. Either you played the going meta-build or you basically didn’t play. No one would take anyone that didn’t play meta. Simple as that.
You just needed to be in the right guild if you wanted to play outside the meta. Anyone who only played meta then are the people who just zerg now in my opinion. There were many ways to play GW1. Most didn’t because most builds weren’t optimal fast and easy to execute. Just like zerging and zerker really.
The difference is, virtually all the content can be finished by five of a single profession. So if you run a dungeon with five necros or five rangers, you can do it. I’m not sure the same can be said for the first game. Surely not for stuff like DOA.
Guild Wars 1 never made the impression Guild Wars 2 has. Anet wanted to capture a larger percentage of the player base, and you can’t do that with the skill system if Guild Wars 1. It was too complex for the masses.
Well, it doesn’t hurt GW2 is around in a time when WoW has been out for a while and there’s very little in the way of MMOs which stuck around for competition. Last time that happened, it was when WoW came out around when EQ had been around for a while . . .
Also, GW1 was really a niche game. It was really good in that niche, but it always felt like a more robust D2 experience.
. . . without the character building issues.
Actually, there were a lot of things that made Guild Wars 2 as popular as it originally was. Part of it was that everyone had been singing the same tune for so long, some players were tired of it. I know, let’s how WoW with Dynamic Events (Rift), let’s have WoW in space (SWToR). Its’ all just the same thing over and over again.
Anet did something different at a time when different was the right thing to do. But that doesn’t really change my point at all.
My point is, and you’ve sort of reiterated it, Guild Wars 1 was niche and it would have stayed niche had the skill format been repeated. It’s like D&D.
When D&D came out, it was just a couple of pamphlets with some basic info about how to create your own game and world. The more and more people who played it, the more you had to redesign it for the lowest common denominator.
I mean by percentage, if you make something for the top 25% of intelligence and skill, you’ll end up with a maximum sell through of 25%. You might lose some of that 25% if you dumb it down, but in the end you’ll probably get more.
The real trick is, and this is hard to do, is to make something simple enough so everyone can play it, but hard enough/complex enough where the higher end can still keep improving.
Guild Wars 2 falls short on the high end…but probably not by as much as many think.
Each increased level requires more and more mastery points.
No one knows until they cover difficult group content, but I suspect it won’t be traditional raids, at the very least.
Keep in mind you can always completely change trait set ups any time out of combat.
We’ve always been limited to three trait lines.
It honestly does my head in the fact that Anet could make a skill system like gw1 then make the sequel and completely dismiss what made them so popular in the first place???? Anet wake up because your stuffing it up. In gw1 there was hundreds of skills each unique and the slightest change in armour could take you from being invincible in Hard Mode to being slaughtered in seconds!!!
That is why you have loyal long term supporters Arenanet! Why the hell do you make a system 1/4 of as impressive as you already had? Fire the the simpleton that hard the idea to simplify, people already have games they can play if they want basic combat. The new system has only 1 build worth running for each class, Zerk Wars 2.
It does my head in that people who think that system was the best thing since sliced bread can’t acknowledge that there were people who didn’t like it as much or even at all, and stopped playing because of it.
It had good points and bad points. The bad points were if you weren’t going to put real thought into it, you weren’t going to be able to play the game properly. If you think most people are going to put real thought into their builds, I’m not sure what to tell you.
Guild Wars 1 never made the impression Guild Wars 2 has. Anet wanted to capture a larger percentage of the player base, and you can’t do that with the skill system if Guild Wars 1. It was too complex for the masses.
You shouldn’t have to download it at all. I didn’t during the first beta.
I do wish they would come out and announce a few new dungeons for HoT, but I really don’t want them to do anything like raise the level cap or add mounts.
Also, you use too many hashtags and probably need to rethink what a “white knight” is.
There’s just one hashtag! :0
We needed another thread complaining about the perceived size of HoT and the lack of updates until HoT releases?
Those aren’t perceived, those are reality.
I was looking at your signature, too. Which has two more hashtags.
And he/she isn’t talking about you perceiving what the updates for FF are going to be, he’s talking about you thinking HoT won’t have a lot of content. =P
I replied about HoT. Is the xpac going to be 80% open world?
Then maybe I missed a HoT announcement? Can you link me to where they announced the size of the expansion and the breakdown of what and how much of what it will include? Because if you’re saying it’s a reality not a perception, but you don’t have a real source to base that on, then it’s still just perception/assumption.
Colin clearly stated, during HoT very first presentation, that what they were showing is what HoT’s about to avoid people from guessing that more stuff would be released. So yeah, that presentation covered EVERYTHING HoT will have.
But it doesn’t cover everything HoT will have in detail. Take the comment, challenging group content.
From my point of view only one thing actually determines the amount of content in an expansion…how long you play it. Everything else is crap.
And we won’t know how long people will play it for, until…I don’t know…we’ve played it.
So many things are misleading on paper. But people never learn.
I’ll give you that, but still they aren’t releasing anything to the live game…
True and they don’t charge a monthly fee like the game we’re comparing it too. That’s not free content.
I do wish they would come out and announce a few new dungeons for HoT, but I really don’t want them to do anything like raise the level cap or add mounts.
Also, you use too many hashtags and probably need to rethink what a “white knight” is.
There’s just one hashtag! :0
We needed another thread complaining about the perceived size of HoT and the lack of updates until HoT releases?
Those aren’t perceived, those are reality.
I was looking at your signature, too. Which has two more hashtags.
And he/she isn’t talking about you perceiving what the updates for FF are going to be, he’s talking about you thinking HoT won’t have a lot of content. =P
I replied about HoT. Is the xpac going to be 80% open world?
Then maybe I missed a HoT announcement? Can you link me to where they announced the size of the expansion and the breakdown of what and how much of what it will include? Because if you’re saying it’s a reality not a perception, but you don’t have a real source to base that on, then it’s still just perception/assumption.
Colin clearly stated, during HoT very first presentation, that what they were showing is what HoT’s about to avoid people from guessing that more stuff would be released. So yeah, that presentation covered EVERYTHING HoT will have.
But it doesn’t cover everything HoT will have in detail. Take the comment, challenging group content.
From my point of view only one thing actually determines the amount of content in an expansion…how long you play it. Everything else is crap.
And we won’t know how long people will play it for, until…I don’t know…we’ve played it.
So many things are misleading on paper. But people never learn.
I’ve said this before, but I think farmers get a bad rap because of a small, vocal segment of their population that attacks people for “ruining their farms”. I don’t believe most farmers do this. In fact, I have people in my guild who farm and they’re quite nice and helpful and friendly. I can’t imagine them attacking people in map chat who do an event out of order or who somehow screw up something.
I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum. I’ve had arguments in map chats when I’ve unwittingly done something that’s annoyed a farmer and I’ve benefited from lower prices on some things because people were farming them, particularly because I don’t enjoy farming myself.
If I enjoyed farming I could get stuff a lot faster in game, but I don’t, so I just play a lot and get what I want when I can finally afford it….or sometimes not, because there are things I’ll never be able to afford.
It’s hard for me to answer the survey, because I don’t farm, but I do farm incidentally. I do most of my farming while doing other stuff that’s more important than the farming, so I’m not sure how to answer the question.
I’m running through a zone and I notice trees which might give me a foxfire cluster. If I’m not too rushed, I chop them down. I’m not out there TO get foxfire clusters, but I wouldn’t turn away from one if it were handed to me.
The only time I’ll farm is if the guild has some event that is like a farm, like a chest run in SW. Not even sure that’s farming, in the traditional sense.
GW1 : Alot of choice,, alot of fun,, pretty balanced game
GW2 : Not much choice,, meta game,, totally unbalancedAlthough,, people say with less skills you have more balance… Well.. from what i have seen… GW2 is the most unbalanced game i’ve ever seen. Not even joking.
EDIT: It’s not the amount of skills that make gw2 so unbalanced. It’s more because there are no roles in gw2. Everyone does the same thing,, only different. But only 1 does it the best (with a few exceptions in certain situations)
Did you ever actually play GW1?
Even years after release the game was far from balanced.
GW2 is MUCH more balanced in comparison.There were very little actual choices in GW1. Either you played the going meta-build or you basically didn’t play. No one would take anyone that didn’t play meta. Simple as that.
He is right though…. Gw2 enforces the metas even more than gw1 did, and with such little build diversity you are almost forced to run the same cookie cutter “cheese builds” as everyone else if you want to do well…
If you don’t, you will be at a disadvantage.
…also idk what you mean by gw1 not being balanced.
The game was balanced quite regularly for pvp, and thanks to the Hall of Heroes, everyone was able to see what was meta and copy it until nerfs happened.
…if you are talking about pve on the other hand…. gw2 still has it worse than gw1 did….. but its not as bad as it is in pvp.
There are still classes that get no love in PVE, and from a developer’s standpoint I wouldn’t let that sit the way it has for as long as it has..
Except for the fact that Guild Wars 1 really did require better builds to clear content. You can use less efficient builds and still clear content if you have decent technique in this game. That’s the difference.
that’s only because we can swap our weapons not our skills.
Basically giving us half a build at a time.
We are forced to have a heal skill on our bar.
…and you have like 4 elites to choose from.
Everything is viable simply because you have no freedom to really customize anything.
GW1 had options.
of course there were optimal builds to run…. but at the same time, you could change your party comp to have whatever you wanted…. as long as you had the elements of the holy trinity (something absent in gw2).
Just because people found out what the best builds were for PvE doesn’t mean that they were the only ones you could use.
I think you are mistaking the need to fill the roles of the trinity in a teamcomp with imbalance.
Actually in Guild Wars 1 you couldn’t change anything whenever you wanted. If you wanted to change your build you had to go back to an outpost and start over. If you were going through a huge area in hard mode to get to a hard mode dungeon, you had to have a build to handle both the area and the dungeon.
It wasn’t called build wars for nothing.
Thanks…. I played gw1 since launch, i know how it works.
I was not saying you could literally change what you wanted wherever you wanted…. but you could literally change your build to whatever you wanted and as long as you had your roles filled (dps support or tank) you were fine.
Right as long as you had your roles filled, so less freedom, in the guise of more freedom. Put it another way.
It’s much easier for me to find a casual group for a dungeon here taking a build I enjoy and find fun than it was to find a casual group for DOA or the Underworld. I can’t tell you about how many times I wanted to run one of those things without having to have the build of the week.
Here they tell you we want you in zerker armor. There they wanted to tell you every single skill and rune you needed to have. I never felt as free there to play as I want as I do here.
And you know, I get the whole you’re in a group, you have to play this way thing. Some groups, however, aren’t as interested in tell you what to do, or even in being efficient. There was a lot more of that in Guild Wars 1.
Though I have five lengendary weapons (and I’m sitting on two precursors) and plenty of other in game crap, what I’m really proud of is the guild. Not all the same faces from when we formed more than 3 years ago, but many of us are still here and we’ve grown substantially.
I think keeping a guild together for that long is probably harder than anything else I’ve done in the game.
GW1 : Alot of choice,, alot of fun,, pretty balanced game
GW2 : Not much choice,, meta game,, totally unbalancedAlthough,, people say with less skills you have more balance… Well.. from what i have seen… GW2 is the most unbalanced game i’ve ever seen. Not even joking.
EDIT: It’s not the amount of skills that make gw2 so unbalanced. It’s more because there are no roles in gw2. Everyone does the same thing,, only different. But only 1 does it the best (with a few exceptions in certain situations)
Did you ever actually play GW1?
Even years after release the game was far from balanced.
GW2 is MUCH more balanced in comparison.There were very little actual choices in GW1. Either you played the going meta-build or you basically didn’t play. No one would take anyone that didn’t play meta. Simple as that.
He is right though…. Gw2 enforces the metas even more than gw1 did, and with such little build diversity you are almost forced to run the same cookie cutter “cheese builds” as everyone else if you want to do well…
If you don’t, you will be at a disadvantage.
…also idk what you mean by gw1 not being balanced.
The game was balanced quite regularly for pvp, and thanks to the Hall of Heroes, everyone was able to see what was meta and copy it until nerfs happened.
…if you are talking about pve on the other hand…. gw2 still has it worse than gw1 did….. but its not as bad as it is in pvp.
There are still classes that get no love in PVE, and from a developer’s standpoint I wouldn’t let that sit the way it has for as long as it has..
Except for the fact that Guild Wars 1 really did require better builds to clear content. You can use less efficient builds and still clear content if you have decent technique in this game. That’s the difference.
that’s only because we can swap our weapons not our skills.
Basically giving us half a build at a time.
We are forced to have a heal skill on our bar.
…and you have like 4 elites to choose from.
Everything is viable simply because you have no freedom to really customize anything.
GW1 had options.
of course there were optimal builds to run…. but at the same time, you could change your party comp to have whatever you wanted…. as long as you had the elements of the holy trinity (something absent in gw2).
Just because people found out what the best builds were for PvE doesn’t mean that they were the only ones you could use.
I think you are mistaking the need to fill the roles of the trinity in a teamcomp with imbalance.
Actually in Guild Wars 1 you couldn’t change anything whenever you wanted. If you wanted to change your build you had to go back to an outpost and start over. If you were going through a huge area in hard mode to get to a hard mode dungeon, you had to have a build to handle both the area and the dungeon.
It wasn’t called build wars for nothing.
GW1 : Alot of choice,, alot of fun,, pretty balanced game
GW2 : Not much choice,, meta game,, totally unbalancedAlthough,, people say with less skills you have more balance… Well.. from what i have seen… GW2 is the most unbalanced game i’ve ever seen. Not even joking.
EDIT: It’s not the amount of skills that make gw2 so unbalanced. It’s more because there are no roles in gw2. Everyone does the same thing,, only different. But only 1 does it the best (with a few exceptions in certain situations)
Did you ever actually play GW1?
Even years after release the game was far from balanced.
GW2 is MUCH more balanced in comparison.There were very little actual choices in GW1. Either you played the going meta-build or you basically didn’t play. No one would take anyone that didn’t play meta. Simple as that.
He is right though…. Gw2 enforces the metas even more than gw1 did, and with such little build diversity you are almost forced to run the same cookie cutter “cheese builds” as everyone else if you want to do well…
If you don’t, you will be at a disadvantage.
…also idk what you mean by gw1 not being balanced.
The game was balanced quite regularly for pvp, and thanks to the Hall of Heroes, everyone was able to see what was meta and copy it until nerfs happened.
…if you are talking about pve on the other hand…. gw2 still has it worse than gw1 did….. but its not as bad as it is in pvp.
There are still classes that get no love in PVE, and from a developer’s standpoint I wouldn’t let that sit the way it has for as long as it has..
Except for the fact that Guild Wars 1 really did require better builds to clear content. You can use less efficient builds and still clear content if you have decent technique in this game. That’s the difference.
WvW, dungeons, and dynamic events were supposed to be “endgame”, then it morphed into the living world/story, then into a seasonal tv show, then season 2 achievements became the new endgame “dungeon” content, and WvW also became a PvE environment with EotM.
What in the world made you believe that dungeons, WvW and SPvP were “supposed to be” end game. Not only did Anet not say this before launch, they never even implied it.
From the very beginning, Anet talked about a living breathing world. They said, straight out, the game centered on dynmaic events. They spoke about story. They even said there’s no end game, or the end game begins at level 1.
I would love to see you post some evidence of what was supposed to be end game. Cause from my point of view, the Living Story is far more in in line with what Anet was talking about all along as long term goals than anything you listed.
I never meant officially, but that’s what endgame usually is in an MMO. It consists of dungeons/raids and pvp. It was/is the de-facto content style in almost all mainstream MMOs, including GW2. I’ll admit that it was a poor choice of words on my part, and i shouldn’t have said, “supposed to be”.
Devs, including those in other games, can spin it all they want, and claim endgame starts at lvl 1, or that there isn’t an endgame, but that’s just marketing. The fact is, there always will be some form of endgame, in a progression based leveling game, whether it’s horizontal or vertical.
As i’ve said, "If i could sum up GW2’s purpose, it would be an open-world environment based on events. ".. which agrees with your statement: " Cause from my point of view, the Living Story is far more in in line with what Anet was talking about all along as long term goals". This might have been what Anet expected as endgame, but it’s not what some players want or expect out of “endgame”, hence why this topic keeps constantly appearing over the years. Endgame for them is dungeons and pvp, like it is in other mmos.
No, it’s not just marketing and if you believe that you are absolutely playing the wrong game. It doesnt’ matter what every MMO does because there are things this MMO does differently. You came here with the idea there would be an end game.
Do you see Anet focused on bringing out new dungeons? I don’t. Do you see the dungeon community feeling they’re being focused on? I don’t. And that was my absolute problem with other games. I play an MMO to be in a world with LOTS of other players, not 20 people in an instance. And those games were focused around instance. Anet said we’re going to do something different and they DID do something different and you’re saying that’s just marketing? It’s not just marketing. It’s the goal of the company.
Anet didn’t lie when they said they wanted to make a living breathing world. That’s what season 1 of the personal story was supposed to be. A world that actually progressed. Where if an event happened you were either there or you missed it. Sort of like, I don’t know, a Living Breathing World. This is what Anet has been trying to do ALL along.
That didn’t work out because a lot of people couldn’t be there all the time and felt they were missing stuff. Fair enough. But don’t go and say that no end game, or no traditional end game is just marketing. It’s only marketing to people who LIKED those other MMOs and many people didn’t. Many people walked away from those MMOs because they didn’t want to be funneled into instanced or PvP.
This game was made for players who wanted a living breathing world. An open world experience. That’s why that’s what Anet is focusing on. And to those of us who don’t love instances, and I suspect that’s a much bigger percentage of the playerbase than you think it is, this game has meaningful content.
This is some strange usage of the word fair I’d obviously not heard before.
The OP’s argument is that a minority of the playerbase (not just WvW players, but WvW players who don’t PvE, which is probably less than one would think) are disadvantaged. So his proposal is that a vast majority of people (people who PvE and PvE and WvW) should be inconvenienced for his perceived fairness.
I don’t really mind if there’s a way to get points in WvW, but since these points are capped, you’d have to pick one way or another. And that’s part of the problem.
However, what’s really happening here is that a guy goes into a restaurant, and he’s a vegetarian. He complains he’s at a disadvantage because he can’t eat everything.
That may be true, but the restaurant isn’t going to take away everyone’s meat, just to be fair.
Speaking of habits, having been part of the Edge of the Mists beta, it was just like this in the early stages. The betas were 2 hour periods, a couple of times a day.
I’m not sure that anything has changed with regards to the focus of the game, but perhaps your expectations were unreasonable too.
There’s no way any company can make enough content to keep you playing forever. So in order to keep people around for new content, you end up having to work toward goals, whatever those goals are.
For some they’re items, for others achievements. Some people play to get better skins, some play to complete collections.
But the bottom line is, you’re going to have to do something repetitively in an MMO, no matter what MMO you play.
WvW, dungeons, and dynamic events were supposed to be “endgame”, then it morphed into the living world/story, then into a seasonal tv show, then season 2 achievements became the new endgame “dungeon” content, and WvW also became a PvE environment with EotM.
What in the world made you believe that dungeons, WvW and SPvP were “supposed to be” end game. Not only did Anet not say this before launch, they never even implied it.
From the very beginning, Anet talked about a living breathing world. They said, straight out, the game centered on dynmaic events. They spoke about story. They even said there’s no end game, or the end game begins at level 1.
I would love to see you post some evidence of what was supposed to be end game. Cause from my point of view, the Living Story is far more in in line with what Anet was talking about all along as long term goals than anything you listed.
Is there any game where content (pve content specifically) is not considered by anyone to be a “grind”?
And no i’m seriously asking.
It depends on what you mean. GW2 has very grindy open world content.
Take SW for example, there are only 5 events on the whole map. Defend forts, escort supply, kill vets, beat bosses, beat VW. The whole map is those 5 events. Completing them once is not enough to earn you anything, in fact you need to complete those same events 40-50 times to finish the achievements and get the zone skins.
I don’t know of ANY MMO that requires 40-50 completions of the same content to get all the rewards. WoW for example you get all the zone rewards by doing each quest in a zone once. No grind there, you do it, you’re done. WoW dungeons generally take 5-10 completions to get all possible rewards, but you generally don’t need them all. WoW raids take 10-12 completions to get your endgame gear which is probably the “grindiest” part of it. Compare that to GW2 where it takes ~150 dungeons runs to get all the gear from a single dungeon.
So for Open world I would not consider WoW PvE to be a grind, and I would consider their dungeons to not be a grind either. I would consider raids to be a slight grind, but SIGNIFICANTLY less than what it takes in GW2.
There are five events on the map? LMAO
So in other maps are there events other than defend, escort, kill, collect? Because those are the types of quests. What makes a quest isn’t the type of quest. What makes a quest , or event, is the specifics of the event. Saying there’s a boss fight, is wrong. There are seven boss fights and a maze you’re ignoring. In addition to that there’s the bandit boss, there’s reclaiming the skritt area, there’s a giant jumping puzzle, biggest in the game. There are chest runs (which aren’t boss fights), for people who like to farm as well.
You’re definitely trivializing the zone. While the defense events all seem very similar, they’re not really. In one fort it makes sense to man the arrow carts that spawn on the top, but other forts don’t have that. On one fort it’s much harder to light a fire to call down an air strike.
But saying there are only a few types of events, that’s not only true for every zone, it’s true for every game. All the quests in all the games fall into a few types.
That’s why no matter what race you start with in a game like WoW it feels sort of the same. Kill wolves and get wolf flanks or kill undead and get undead parts or gather flowers or gather gems. Those are the types of quests you can get in games.
Guild Wars 2 is no different. What makes the Silverwastes different is the way those quests are put together and make a cohesive unit, instead of a bunch of individual chests. It’s not just each quest that has a purpose, but the zone as a whole. It is telling a story.
If people would stop acting like kids, maybe they’d stop being treated that way.
To be honest I think a fair number of GW2 player are in fact kids. I think you meant to say unreasonable or irrational.
No I meant to say what I said, because I was responding to someone who suggested Anet stop treating them like kids. I used their words.
If a lot of the player base are kids, then they should be treated like kids, obviously. lol
One of the best features of this game is that it’s not too late to come back, pretty much ever. It’s how the game was designed.
Welcome to Tyria and the forums. A bit more positivity here is exactly what we need.
Anet was, at one point, somewhat more up front with us. At some point they decided to tell us less. I’m guessing that’s a reaction to the unreasonable over-reaction of a small but vocal percentage of the fan base.
Which was not a very sound decision in my opinion.
“A very small, absolutely tiny really, portion of our player base cannot control their reactions to our efforts to communicate with and engage with the community as a whole….so we are going to cut everyone off.”
Poor customer service in my opinion.
I agree it wasn’t a good decision from my point of view. That doesn’t mean it’s not a decision with a motive. Anet made the decision as a business decision. There’s no way to tell if their decision is good or bad, from a business point of view. That is to say, there’s no way of knowing if long term they would make more or less money doing it their way. The only real way to judge if it was a successful measure.
So far the game is doing okay, so I have to say that Anet must be doing something right. We have no way of knowing if it would be doing better or worse if they did it differently.
In GW, I never had the sense that my choices were on rails the way I often do in GW2. I never felt that ANet was holding my hand and dictating that if I want to do X, then the only real option is Y. I don’t know how anyone can argue that. The goal was to limit options to make balance easier. Is anyone surprised that if the goal was to limit options, then the result is limited options?
Sure, GW2 has some complexity — what it lacks is depth, by design.
If I want to change my build… GW: enter town/outpost; change stats if needed; change headpiece if needed; change weapons if needed; slot desired skills (later, slot template). In GW2; buy/craft new gear; ensure I have storage space for multiple sets to the tune of anywhere from 1-18 bag slots per desired stat allocation; leave combat; change 1-18 pieces of gear if needed; change 1-4 weapons if needed; change traits if needed; change utility/Elite skills if needed.
In Guild Wars 1, I always felt I was on rails when it came to starting a game and going anywhere. I didn’t feel like I was on rails with my build. Different rails I suppose.
The idea that you couldn’t even jump over a log and continue on your way never ceased to bother me.
The depth of GW1 skill mechanics and how one could exploit those deep mechanics through secondary profession choice really opened my eyes to a whole new level of MMO game mechanics, a level that GW2 has still failed to reach.
I think they never even attempted to reach for it, so not sure if one could say they’ve failed to reach it. I think they actually tried to go in the opposite direction.
Very much this. Guild Wars 1 was a nightmare to balance and it was too confusing for too many players. So Anet made an intentional decision to make it easier for people to have builds. That’s what attaching skills to weapons is all about.
Anet is choosing five skills for you every time you change a weapon. That means at very least, no matter what anyone does, they have five working skills that sort of work together.
This wasn’t necessarily the case in Guild Wars 1.
Anet succeeded in what they were trying to do, to a point anyway. They didn’t fail because they did what they set out to do.
The funny bit is, if people analzyed what you said, what I said, what anyone said with the same degree of scrutiny that Anet gets, none of us would be safe.
We put too much on each word, each syllable. It’s so people at Anet can’t talk, can’t say anything. They should walk around saying what? We’re not going to show you a profession this week so we can show you something mediocre?
I think people need to embrace reality a bit.
It’s important to note that the reason why people put such an outrageous emphasis on any and every little thing a dev says is because we have been conditioned to do so from being completely in the dark in terms of the game’s development. Anet does not tells us ANYTHING until it’s practically done and finalized. This leads to ridiculously long periods of time where we simply don’t know what is being developed or changed.
Thus, we latch onto any word that may indicate what is in store because that is all we have to go on. If Anet was more open with their development process and communicated more with the community people wouldn’t be so preemptive in every little thing that is said.
Yes, people may react if they are looking forward to a feature and it doesn’t turn out the way it was originally advertised. But the outlash is, again, caused by a lack of communication.
There are a few channels on youtube that are owned by indie devs, and every few weeks they update their channel explaining the new changes into the games they make. Some of these changes drastically alter the game and planned mechanics, and there have been some disappointments to come from them. However, I’ve never seen any negative criticisms or outlashes from the comments when there are, and I attribute that largely to the amount of communication that community receives from the devs.
I know it’s Anet’s policy to not talk about things until they are finalized. I just think it’s a horrible policy that makes things worse rather than not.
So what you’re saying is, to paraphrase, because Anet isn’t giving us information, people are right to analyze every syllable, blow it out of proportion and then blame Anet for saying stuff.
The problem is, the more people do this, the less likely Anet is to say stuff, and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.
If we are mature enough to not play the blame game (which is counter productive anyway) and to relax a bit and just take things in stride, take a reasonable approach instead of breaking out pitchforks immediately, we might in fact not be in the situation we’re in. It’s the chicken and the egg thing.
Anet was, at one point, somewhat more up front with us. At some point they decided to tell us less. I’m guessing that’s a reaction to the unreasonable over-reaction of a small but vocal percentage of the fan base.
yes, cuz the name has everything to do with GvG ….
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Guild_WarsYeah… I’m pretty sure it actually does.
People always try to cite that, but do you really believe that the backstory is what inspired the name (and the game mode?)
I’m pretty sure the lore was created to serve as a cute tie-in to the PvP content they wanted to build their game around.As for GW2 though, the name stuck simply because its an existing series and calling it ’Tomorrow’s Tyria’ wouldn’t catch peoples’ eyes.
The problem here is that people are living in the past. The original game was DESIGNED the way you say, but it adapted afterwards when Anet realized that PvE was as popular and perhaps more popular than PvP.
They may have initially started as mainly a PvP game, but a few years after launch, long before Guild Wars 2 ever launched, Guild Wars 1 shifted to a primarily PvE game. The last two titles they released weren’t about PvP. Almost all the achievements are PvE achievements.
So the game Guild Wars wouldn’t have applied by your standards even during the reign of the first game. The second game, naturally, took off where the first game has left off. Even to the tune where Anet said directly that they advertised the PvE aspect of the game a full year before they started talking about PvP so that they could break the illusion (paraphrasing that) that the game was a PvP-centric game.
They kept the name because that’s what you do. You don’t get name recognition at a cost and then abandon it, even if you do change focus.
I played Guild Wars 1 for well over five years predominantly as a PvE game. Never once was I involved in a GvG match.
From my point of view, if you try to play this game as a single player it’s not nearly as good as playing with friends or a guild. Not just for dungeons or WvW, for everything.
It’s just more fun with people goofing off and having a good time. This is probably true of most MMOs.
What makes this one more fun for me is that there are so many places you can go to goof off and have a good time.
In most MMOs, the early zones are nothing at all. There’s no reason to ever go back to them. The creatures don’t even attack you.
Here you have jumping puzzles, you have minigames, you have all sorts of stuff. Even just doing some of the events would could lead randomly to something valuable, like the event chain that leads to the Eye of Zhaitan in Straits of Devastation. By myself it would be boring but we did it today with a couple of guildies and had a lot of fun…and no, we didn’t get the best drops.
Guild Wars 2 wasn’t supposed to be about leveling. The game is about just playing the game. What difference does it really make how fast you level?
Okay one person said one thing on one podcast and everyone is thinking great things are afoot.
I don’t get this at all. People wonder why Anet says nothing ever about anything. This is why.
I think the fact that there’s so little new in game that this could blow up to be such a big deal is the real problem. These newsposts have kinda replaced actual ingame content. It’s been at least 2-3 months since anything of significance was added to the game. (I know that because that’s how long I’ve been playing :P)
You’re right, of course. There’s not a lot of new content. And in most games, that would actually be normal. Four, five months without new stuff isn’t all that unusual for most MMOs.
But then we know they’re focusing on the end game for an expansion right now, and that’s often when droughts hit in most games.
-Closed Beta Testing on May 26
-Ready Up: WvW Automatic Upgrades and Dragonhunter PvP demo
-Guild Wars 2 – The Rebuilding of Lion’s Arch
-Overwolf Guild Wars 2 App Challenge!
-Upgrading World vs. World Upgrades Blog
-The third Guild Wars 2 Tournament of LegendsWe all can’t like the same things, and trust I would have preferred to see the Ranger specialization preview over this list, but I’m still glad I got to see all this stuff anyhow.
Cool is still relative. What’s cool to one person isn’t cool to another. And it’s still just one person saying something cool is coming.
The funny bit is, if people analzyed what you said, what I said, what anyone said with the same degree of scrutiny that Anet gets, none of us would be safe.
We put too much on each word, each syllable. It’s so people at Anet can’t talk, can’t say anything. They should walk around saying what? We’re not going to show you a profession this week so we can show you something mediocre?
I think people need to embrace reality a bit.
I think people have a right to be angry about this. The whole participating in a beta thing has no detail. People don’t all know to expect limited times. Many people would have expected more.
But then you make the drop rate low and you have people farming for it for days on end, without any detail and it’s a recipe for disaster. What people were farming for should have been made more clear from the outset.
I didn’t farm for it, in fact, I was on vacation for most of that period and hardly had a chance to play at all, but I could see where people would be angered by this.
Okay one person said one thing on one podcast and everyone is thinking great things are afoot.
I don’t get this at all. People wonder why Anet says nothing ever about anything. This is why.
It’s not a stress test, it’s a beta test. Presumably that means they’re testing everything, including stuff like skills that don’t do what they say they’re supposed to do, visual glitches, none of which have anything to do with server crashes.
Also it’s entirely likely that a lot of the bugs we’re seeing are actually due to behind the scenes updates preparing for the changes coming.
My hype is for new stuff for the guild to do together, as a guild.
Given the complete lack of news about Guild Halls in HoT, I wouldn’t be surprised if they drop it from the expansion for launch, with plans for it to be added in “later”.
LMAO. The complete lack of info. You clearly weren’t paying attention during the first launch.
We got info when they were ready to give the info, not before. There will be guild hall info as they get closer to launch. Some with info about the difficult content.
Anet doesn’t give out all the information at once because they space it out.
I don’t even see the point in rebuilding L.A now that we will get Guild Halls
That’s where the majority of players will be at now unless they make no TP in or normal bank in GH to force ppl into Citys or this games Citys will looks like ghost towns to new players and the WvW changes will make ppl come back to WvW for maybe a month 2 at MAX no change to achievements 1 more time and money waster at lest give WvW it’s own track rewards like spvp there is no excuse for that imo
Aside from lore and story reasons you mean, which matter to at least some of us. Not to mention the number of people who don’t want to be part of a guild. Or people who just like to socialize.
We had Guild Halls in Guild Wars 1 also, but there were always people who enjoyed hanging out in Lion’s Arch. How about for festivals?
Happy 1000 days everyone!
And that is what it boils down to… a significant cadre of GW1 veterans who really would have been content with their old game rebooted with new graphics, and remain very upset that Arena.net changed the whole game entirely.
Yep. Of course, some of us GW 1 vets, even the ones who enjoyed the game, were ready for something new. I mean from following the game I knew it would be completely different.
There are a lot of things I like about this game that Guild Wars 1 didn’t have. The TP, jumping puzzles, not being pathed (I hated that).
I prefer dynamic events to static quests too.
And of course there were things the first game had that I liked but aren’t here.
At the end of the day, though, I knew the game would be very different long before it was launched.
So the people that busted their kitten to get those can flock to the forums to complain? Because that’s exactly what would happen.
It might be a bug, I’d report it. The wiki doesn’t say they’re unlisted.
With the last delay of the elite reveal I have revised my expected launch date from early/mid summer to (late? O_o ) fall .
AND YES we HAD an an announcement, search for “Heart of Thorns” on the youtube.
Honestly had I known that the whole expansion complex is that far away from release that even a beta seems to be months away, I wouldn´t have bothered coming back right now.
Okay I give up. If you came back too early, what’s to stop you from continuing your break?