I hope Living Story will be replayed. Several of us in my guild didn’t get “A rallying flame”. That’s a complete waste of, what, 3 months!
How is not getting A Rallying Flame a complete waste of three months? Is it the achievement point you’re talking about or the experience itself? Because as an experience, it was clicking on a fire. You didn’t miss much.
Yep, it’s a great community. Much better than the community of any other MMO I’ve played.
I get the impression the qualifier is that you used a Black Lion kit during the bug. As I did not do so, I have not (as of last night) received a kit, which is fine as the bug did not affect me.
I agree with this. I didn’t use a black lion kit during the bug (only a mystic salvage kit) and I didn’t receive anything.
I played Guild Wars 1 and I have a completely different list of what I expect from the Guild Wars franchise. For one thing, though the game started PvP heavy, it ended up being PVe heavy. That is to say the PvP community kept shrinking and the PVe community kept growing…one of the reasons Anet started putting less time/energy and updates into PvP by comparison to PvE. In fact Nightfall and Eye of the North, the last two products released didn’t do much for PvP at all. They were both PvE games.
In my five years of playing Guild Wars 1, I never GvGs. I did do a few forms of PvP (random arenas, Jade Quarry, Alliance Battles) but no GvG. Guild Halls to me, at least as they were done in Guild Wars 1, were pretty much a waste. A convience place to go and sell a few things, but little more.
So yeah, not sure I agree with your list of what to expect from the Guild Wars franchise.
Vayne
Snip
Let me put it another way. The manifesto video was many paragraphs long. The line everyone seems to quote (one of the two lines anyway), is a small part of something much larger.
We knew most of the differences before the game launched. What a dynamic event was and wasn’t was explained in great detail. The way weapons worked was explained in great detail. I don’t think too many people who followed the game didn’t know about skills being bound to the weapon.
Anet did a pretty good job of telling people pretty much what would be in the game. There were exceptions. Some things changed, but the bulk of what Anet said is still there in this game.
And people seem not to realize this.
Snip
For instance, I never knew Ranger pets would be permanent…not after the beta’s nor after leveling to Orr lol. It just never occurred to me and I never stowed the pet because it was novel and new and I wanted to try it out. There’s no info for this stuff unless you look it up online or buy the manual, which takes time away from the game or money away from your wallet.
by the way, since when do manuals not come freely with games??I knew about the skills being binded to weaps, and I wasn’t very happy about it. But I was willing to give it a shot because I trusted ANet to do it well. I would say they did an average job of it.
Did you know that attribute points were originally adjustable? Right up to before the first beta you could manually adjust those to a certain degree but they nixed it in an effort to keep any trinity-esque builds out of the game.
And the story, goodness the story!, I think we all thought this would be a strong point with ANet. It didn’t exactly turn out that way at all though.
I will say there were not many big things unexpected…but rather a ton of little things here and there and everywhere that individually don’t seem like much, but taken as a whole it’s different. It’s hard to define really, and I’m doing a lousy job of it, but there’s something that’s just really off about what I thought this game would be like. :/
I knew the pets would be permanent long before I bought the game. It’s the ranger’s profession mechanic. Without it, you’re kitten. There were many people who asked for a non pet option for ranger. It would be like asking for an elementalist option that doesn’t swap attunments. It can only kitten you.
And yes, I know how traits were originally. Do you know why they were changed, because Anet was very clear about the reasons for the change, and they were kitten good reasons. The way it used to be, everyone would always put 10 points in every trait line to get the most powerful trait they could in each trait line, meaning 80-90% of the playerbase has the exact same builds, with no variety. They changed it for two reasons. One to make people have to choose between one thing and another, and two, to give a sense of progression, which is quite missing from the game after level 30. Before, you could get any major trait as soon as you could get them. Now you have to wait till level 60. That sort of progression is important in an MMO and I think the choice to go this direction is better (particularly in the light of so many people putting 10 in each attribute to get the best major trait in each line).
And the story…well, the story in Guild Wars 1 wasn’t all that. I don’t know why people think the story was so great. Take Prophecies. People complained about Rurik. They hated him. A lot of people were happy he died. Anyone with half a brain new the white mantle was evil…why didn’t we? Are our characters that stupid? I knew Vizier Khilbron was a mistake too, why didn’t my character.
Do you think people didn’t complain as much about Komir as they did about Trahearne? Another NPC stealing our thunder. I can go through each story for each game and show you how bad those stories really were. It wasn’t exactly high literature.
And then, a good portion of the missions in Prophecies and Nightfall were strictly filler and were very bad, particularly in the design of some of the bonuses. I can give you examples if you really want.
But even with that, the story probably WAS better in Guild Wars 1. Why? Because the entire game was instanced, and it’s easy to tell a story in instances than the open world.
However, the world in Guild Wars 2 is far more alive than the world in Guild Wars 1. The conversations in places are much better than anything in Prophecies. A living world, to me, is far more important than a stagnant story I’m only really going to experience once.
Find yourself a nice guild community and don’t worry about the idiots. My main is a ranger and I do fine.
If you play a lot of WvW, you’ll have more deaths than someone who doesn’t. If you do a lot of dungeons, you’ll have more deaths than someone who doesn’t.
I know a guy who died like a dozen times…but all he does is hang out in LA and chat.
Don’t let the naysayers get you down.
Rift may have changed. It’s been a very long time since I played it. But I did have contact with someone who was very turned off by the expansion because of the inordinate amount of grind necessary to get himself raid ready.
He was a big Rift fan until Storm Legion came out, after which he didn’t have quite as much time and his guild leveled without him. They were raiding without him and the amount of time it would have taken him to catch up to them was prohibitive.
So it sounds like a typical gear-grind MMO.
I haven’t played Rift in quite some time, either. That said, looking at the design decisions TW made, it seemed like the planning process was: "Let’s copy everything about WoW, combat mechanics, huge numbers of skills, dual factions, global cooldowns, raid progression, daily quests, etc. OK, now we need some innovation. Let’s put in rifts and invasions, and we’ll let players have multiple sub-classes.
Until the discussion above about planarite came up, I’d forgotten about it. It’s kind of eerie how much its eventual uselessness resembles Karma in GW2.
Oh, it looks like you were right about mounts in GW2.
What about mounts in Guild Wars 2? Did I miss something?
Fill out a support ticket, you should get an exchange for it. Other people have.
Edit: But you’re absolutely right. There should be a warning in game.
Vayne
Very good point, but I think there’s some middle ground that was expected here. It is a giant sales pitch, but good sales pitch’s are laced with truth if they want to seem believable. And ANet historically enjoyed a relatively healthy relationship with the player base. There was a certain amount of trust there. Not like friendship trust by any means, but it was there in some form.
For one thing, they probably meant “you all” and not one person in particular. But more importantly, what did they mean by saying “everything you liked”? Were there things in GW1 that a majority of players could agree were good things, or even great things? Were there things that most players thought were unacceptable? Or maybe this is all about developer preference and it’s what they thought were good things or what we liked.
Surely there is a general consensus about some broad qualities of Guild Wars 1 that can be seen as things that “people liked.”
Let me put it another way. The manifesto video was many paragraphs long. The line everyone seems to quote (one of the two lines anyway), is a small part of something much larger.
We knew most of the differences before the game launched. What a dynamic event was and wasn’t was explained in great detail. The way weapons worked was explained in great detail. I don’t think too many people who followed the game didn’t know about skills being bound to the weapon.
Anet did a pretty good job of telling people pretty much what would be in the game. There were exceptions. Some things changed, but the bulk of what Anet said is still there in this game.
And people seem not to realize this.
Ya how dare they fix that exploited event! Grab the pitchforks and torches!
You obviously do not know the whole story. They did more than just fix the event. They decreased the loot rate and made it so one type of mob doesn’t drop anything at all. So even if you wanted to do the event the “right” way…you are going to get a lot less loot.
And then they opened up an island, added farmable events, added a buff that gives you 200% magic find in its place.
kitten them!
Guild Missions are garbage an the worst thing added to the game to date. They are only doable with large guilds that have 50+players on at that time who all have 80’s an a large part of the world map done. Its the death of small guilds the end of ‘fun with guild members’. My guild of 120 players have given up on them, we only have 10-20 on at one time an half of those dont have a 80. Hell we lost 10-20 members when we failed the guild bounty mission for the second time.
We do Guild missions routinely with FAR less than 50 players online. We’ve done them with less than 15 players online. Today we didn’t have a huge number of people for the mission, less than 15 turned up, so we did a Tier 3 trek…finished it successfully with 20 seconds left on the timer.
It was quite a rush (no pun intended).
Anyone who thinks they need 50 people online to do guild missions is not paying attention.
I think it takes at least some skill to get the Arah dungeon stuff. Not to say that you have to be superman, but Arah is no walk in the park.
They didn’t used to be this way actually when they first released them they were actually quite filled with T6 mats. Now you’re basically screwed. 1-6 1-10 will drop something but nothing of value and definitely not the most rare of items that need the most fixing in the game like dusts or lodestones or any of the items one might actually need for anything.
I keep seeing these pesky RNG posts in response to the OP.
This really doesn’t happen like this in any other game. In WoW for example they had real stealing. ( I know I spent hours doing it on my Rogue) and they had epics you could get from boxes you stole from the enemies. I had two of those jokers in about a month’s time which were selling pretty well. That doesn’t happen in this game. The RNG here is weird lopsided and definitely not Random in the least for some players.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that they have a different definition of RNG here. In other games they use it to prevent inflation. In this game they use it to prevent you from accomplishing anything, having fun, farming or playing how you want. There is a fine line, and I don’t think Anet is even in sight of it yet.
Atually, I don’t think Anet is using RNG to prevent you from having fun or accomplishing anything. I think you and people like you are looking for a type of fun that this game isn’t really designed for, and you’re blaming the game for not matching your personal criteria. No game will be for all people. If you try to make a game for all people, it will naturally fail. This game is already too divided, and as a result, it has less focus than it should.
Unfortunately, the words play your own way are simply taken completely out of context, considering how many times Anet explained it long before the game went on sale. This is what they said (and I’m paraphrasing here).
In most games, the way to get the best gear was to do dungeons, then raid. In Guild Wars 2, they want people to be able to play different ways to get that gear. So in SPvP, well you don’t have to PvE at all to play that. And in WvW, you can get the best armor and weapons without actually doing PvE. And in PvE you can do dungeons, or events to get karma, or buy exotics off the auction house, or craft them.
This is what they meant (and said they meant) by play it your way. It didn’t mean that anything you could conceivably want to do you’ll be able to, because that makes no sense. If you want to stand in Lion’s Arch and do nothing and have everything handed to you…well that’s playing your way so they should allow it, right?
There was no reason to have 4 paragraphs to say “I don’t agree with you.”
We already know you love this game no matter what they do. I don’t want any handouts, I just want to be able to kill things in a game designed around killing things and not be punished for it. Also, getting something for farming hundreds of thousands of karma reliably instead of a .9% chance would be nice too.
YOU were the one who used the line play your way (which many people quote, but continue to misuse).
I was just pointing it out.
I think it takes skill to get the Dungeon Master title. Maybe not as much skill as you’d like. In Guild Wars 1, I can’t think of many items you could get that required skill. Maybe the skins from the Historic mission pack when it was first released.
I don’t know I got a boatload of vicious fangs and powerful bloods today. I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. In fact, vicious fangs aren’t all that rare, look at their price on the marketplace.
Because when Anet bans a botter they move to the next stolen/hacked account and bot again. It doesn’t help or do anything except encourage hackers to steal more accounts.
Did you really need to make another thread about this issue, when there are so many others floating around?
The cool thing about the green items in GW, for me, was collecting them. I got a lot of mileage out of ‘going for the green’. I never sold them and didn’t always use them, and sometimes gave them away, but I had a lot of fun getting them.
You could also collect the named exotics in Guild Wars 2 the same way. There are a bunch of them. I got one this week.
The only difference is, I don’t have to stand in one place and kill one boss over and over to try to get his green. I can go anywhere and that exotic might drop.
Yeah, some random drop somewhere – meh. That’s not fun for me. Especially considering my luck with drops. The nearest thing I know of to getting a green item from a boss in GW2 would be Final Rest dropping from the Shadow Behemoth. I’ve long since given up on that dropping for me, though, and I won’t buy it off the trading post. So… meh.
So it takes longer to get the stuff, which makes it more valuable to me. Soloing a boss so I get a green and that’s easy to get that everyone has? Meh. I’d rather have something like Final Rest than that. I don’t mind that it takes longer to get stuff, as long as I’m getting it wherever I’m playing. I much prefer that.
Again, Please dont compare yourself and other people. If you prefer getting valuables in more difficult, time-taking way, since you say that it become more valuable to you, then go on. some of us here consider it stupid as sometimes, even if the price of the exotic is 1-2 gold (which is not cheap), we cant really sell it if the stat is bad. Salvage? no guarantee that you will get ectos that will cover the price of the exo. Please please pleaseeee…. Dont tell us what to do. we’re not baby anymore. we can decide what we want to do ourself.
I’ll compare myself to anyone I like, thanks. Try not to tell me what to do. It won’t change what I do.
If everyone got valuables easier, the valuables would be worthless (reference 90% of the greens in Guild Wars 1). Most of them you just merched, because they were worthless. If you prefer worthless greens to valuable exotics (and even many of them are no longer worth much), then that’s your own issue.
I’m not sure why people don’t understand that once a rare drop ceases to be rare, it’s not worth as much and as a result, you don’t get as much for it.
yeah we don’t understand. Problems?
Nope, I have no problems with you not understanding. I’m perfectly okay with it.
They didn’t used to be this way actually when they first released them they were actually quite filled with T6 mats. Now you’re basically screwed. 1-6 1-10 will drop something but nothing of value and definitely not the most rare of items that need the most fixing in the game like dusts or lodestones or any of the items one might actually need for anything.
I keep seeing these pesky RNG posts in response to the OP.
This really doesn’t happen like this in any other game. In WoW for example they had real stealing. ( I know I spent hours doing it on my Rogue) and they had epics you could get from boxes you stole from the enemies. I had two of those jokers in about a month’s time which were selling pretty well. That doesn’t happen in this game. The RNG here is weird lopsided and definitely not Random in the least for some players.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that they have a different definition of RNG here. In other games they use it to prevent inflation. In this game they use it to prevent you from accomplishing anything, having fun, farming or playing how you want. There is a fine line, and I don’t think Anet is even in sight of it yet.
Atually, I don’t think Anet is using RNG to prevent you from having fun or accomplishing anything. I think you and people like you are looking for a type of fun that this game isn’t really designed for, and you’re blaming the game for not matching your personal criteria. No game will be for all people. If you try to make a game for all people, it will naturally fail. This game is already too divided, and as a result, it has less focus than it should.
Unfortunately, the words play your own way are simply taken completely out of context, considering how many times Anet explained it long before the game went on sale. This is what they said (and I’m paraphrasing here).
In most games, the way to get the best gear was to do dungeons, then raid. In Guild Wars 2, they want people to be able to play different ways to get that gear. So in SPvP, well you don’t have to PvE at all to play that. And in WvW, you can get the best armor and weapons without actually doing PvE. And in PvE you can do dungeons, or events to get karma, or buy exotics off the auction house, or craft them.
This is what they meant (and said they meant) by play it your way. It didn’t mean that anything you could conceivably want to do you’ll be able to, because that makes no sense. If you want to stand in Lion’s Arch and do nothing and have everything handed to you…well that’s playing your way so they should allow it, right?
The cool thing about the green items in GW, for me, was collecting them. I got a lot of mileage out of ‘going for the green’. I never sold them and didn’t always use them, and sometimes gave them away, but I had a lot of fun getting them.
You could also collect the named exotics in Guild Wars 2 the same way. There are a bunch of them. I got one this week.
The only difference is, I don’t have to stand in one place and kill one boss over and over to try to get his green. I can go anywhere and that exotic might drop.
Yeah, some random drop somewhere – meh. That’s not fun for me. Especially considering my luck with drops. The nearest thing I know of to getting a green item from a boss in GW2 would be Final Rest dropping from the Shadow Behemoth. I’ve long since given up on that dropping for me, though, and I won’t buy it off the trading post. So… meh.
So it takes longer to get the stuff, which makes it more valuable to me. Soloing a boss so I get a green and that’s easy to get that everyone has? Meh. I’d rather have something like Final Rest than that. I don’t mind that it takes longer to get stuff, as long as I’m getting it wherever I’m playing. I much prefer that.
Again, Please dont compare yourself and other people. If you prefer getting valuables in more difficult, time-taking way, since you say that it become more valuable to you, then go on. some of us here consider it stupid as sometimes, even if the price of the exotic is 1-2 gold (which is not cheap), we cant really sell it if the stat is bad. Salvage? no guarantee that you will get ectos that will cover the price of the exo. Please please pleaseeee…. Dont tell us what to do. we’re not baby anymore. we can decide what we want to do ourself.
I’ll compare myself to anyone I like, thanks. Try not to tell me what to do. It won’t change what I do.
If everyone got valuables easier, the valuables would be worthless (reference 90% of the greens in Guild Wars 1). Most of them you just merched, because they were worthless. If you prefer worthless greens to valuable exotics (and even many of them are no longer worth much), then that’s your own issue.
I’m not sure why people don’t understand that once a rare drop ceases to be rare, it’s not worth as much and as a result, you don’t get as much for it.
To Op,
As a Reminder; without “whiners complaining and flaming”, there wouldn’t be any Change> Achievement>Freedom.
As the saying goes, “One Who Remain In Silence Gain Nothing”
“One Who Take Action Gain Momentum”
Actually, there’s a big difference between whiners and complainers and critiquers. I could do without the whining. I don’t mind posts that point out things that can be fixed. But when a lot of the whiners make stuff up, or complain about stuff because they just don’t get the idea behind the game, it’s not really helpful.
The cool thing about the green items in GW, for me, was collecting them. I got a lot of mileage out of ‘going for the green’. I never sold them and didn’t always use them, and sometimes gave them away, but I had a lot of fun getting them.
You could also collect the named exotics in Guild Wars 2 the same way. There are a bunch of them. I got one this week.
The only difference is, I don’t have to stand in one place and kill one boss over and over to try to get his green. I can go anywhere and that exotic might drop.
Yeah, some random drop somewhere – meh. That’s not fun for me. Especially considering my luck with drops. The nearest thing I know of to getting a green item from a boss in GW2 would be Final Rest dropping from the Shadow Behemoth. I’ve long since given up on that dropping for me, though, and I won’t buy it off the trading post. So… meh.
So it takes longer to get the stuff, which makes it more valuable to me. Soloing a boss so I get a green and that’s easy to get that everyone has? Meh. I’d rather have something like Final Rest than that. I don’t mind that it takes longer to get stuff, as long as I’m getting it wherever I’m playing. I much prefer that.
- I felt more rewarding in GW even as Anet hated me back the in rewarding my efford.
guildies gave me greens because after 20 runs i still had not got even 1. But even then I got the feeling i did something. Even though GW1 gave me more joy i since the GW2-Beta’s i could no longer play it.- GW1 was a very story driven game, this is all gone due to the open world and personal story is 3rd rank by now.
This is not GW1. It was never intended to be. Why do you insist it must be the same experience?
GW2 plays in the same world / lore and they did claim you would have everything you liked from GW1.
Anyone who seriously analyzes that statement HAS to know that it’s nothing more than marketing and the kind of thing every company says. Let’s be logical for a moment.
Everything YOU love about Guild Wars 1. Does Anet know you? Have they polled you? How about if you love something from Guild Wars 1 that I hate, or I hate something from Guild Wars 1 that you loved? What if I really really loved a specific bug in the game? Should that bug be in this game too? What if I really loved Prince Rurik? Should he make a return?
I really really really hated Spamadan…standing around and selling my stuff. Some people loved it. Should Guild Wars 2 not have a marketplace then?
People need to have some common sense when viewing marketing from ANY company.
With this statement they give their intent, their intent was to make a game that has features from GW1. Except for the lore, it really is a different game, none of the GW1 features are there. So yes, it is a completely different game. But you can’t claim they didnt suggest that the game will have GW1 features, they even call it the same. Jaws 2 is still about a shark and not about a crocodile.
There are plenty of things from this game that came from Guild Wars 1. The mesmer still has the same obnoxious feel. The play style, to me, feels very similar. The fact that in Guild Wars 1 protection was stronger than healing and neither game requires a tank. The fact that in both Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2, you have equally obnoxious NPCs who let you do the work and then end up the main heroes of the story (bet you didn’t miss that).
The whole feel of the game, and the way I play the game is actually the same. Even the loot tables are similar to the way they were set up in Guild Wars 1, though people don’t want to believe it. DR existed in both games.
What’s missing first and foremost is the skill system including dual professions, all of which we knew wouldn’t be in the game at launch long before the game started selling.
Edit: Even story mode and explorable mode dungeons were in Guild Wars 1, if you look at Oola’s Lab and the Bloodstone Caves.
(edited by Vayne.8563)
The cool thing about the green items in GW, for me, was collecting them. I got a lot of mileage out of ‘going for the green’. I never sold them and didn’t always use them, and sometimes gave them away, but I had a lot of fun getting them.
You could also collect the named exotics in Guild Wars 2 the same way. There are a bunch of them. I got one this week.
The only difference is, I don’t have to stand in one place and kill one boss over and over to try to get his green. I can go anywhere and that exotic might drop.
- I felt more rewarding in GW even as Anet hated me back the in rewarding my efford.
guildies gave me greens because after 20 runs i still had not got even 1. But even then I got the feeling i did something. Even though GW1 gave me more joy i since the GW2-Beta’s i could no longer play it.- GW1 was a very story driven game, this is all gone due to the open world and personal story is 3rd rank by now.
This is not GW1. It was never intended to be. Why do you insist it must be the same experience?
GW2 plays in the same world / lore and they did claim you would have everything you liked from GW1.
Anyone who seriously analyzes that statement HAS to know that it’s nothing more than marketing and the kind of thing every company says. Let’s be logical for a moment.
Everything YOU love about Guild Wars 1. Does Anet know you? Have they polled you? How about if you love something from Guild Wars 1 that I hate, or I hate something from Guild Wars 1 that you loved? What if I really really loved a specific bug in the game? Should that bug be in this game too? What if I really loved Prince Rurik? Should he make a return?
I really really really hated Spamadan…standing around and selling my stuff. Some people loved it. Should Guild Wars 2 not have a marketplace then?
People need to have some common sense when viewing marketing from ANY company.
The funny bit is, when I played Guild Wars 1, the loot was, for the most part, equally unrewarding. I mean you’d do a dungeon and you’d get these yellow drops (which we called gold drops) and they’d be worthless. You could get some coin by selling them as unidentified golds for people who were working on their wisdom title, but basically, they were worthless.
It would get to the point after a while where nothing that dropped really meant anything unless it was a black or white dye….or an ecto if you were in the underworld. Or a lock pick.
Guild Wars 1 wasn’t really a loot based game, and neither is Guild Wars 2.
Yeah, the greens in GW1 was the main rare in that game.. Golds were mainly for the treasure finding achievement and there were a few that had the same base stats as some greens. I remember getting a green drop from a Nightfall area that was nothing but crap. It wasn’t even worth keeping.
Even end game greens for completing the scenarios were pretty much meh. But you know, I didn’t play the game for the rewards. If I did, there’s no way I could have played for five years. And I play Guild Wars 2 much the same as I did Guild Wars 1.
Due to the nature of the questions, the responses you get will be completely meaningless. It’s because you don’t have enough options to make this survey have meaning.
For example, you ask how I feel about RNG. I don’t mind RNG is drops in the game, but I do mind RNG in the cash shop. I’ve yet to see any MMORPG that doesn’t have RNG drops anyway.
This sort of leading type poll accomplishes nothing in my opinion.
Rift, when I played it, which was when it started, had one path of progression and that was through raids. You had an epic quest chain that led through every single dungeon and culminated in a raid. It was the only epic quest chain in the game.
-snip-
So again, raids were the focus of the game….but I wasn’t a raider.
ok this sounds horrible, I downloaded Rift just a few hours ago but after reading this… meh. I really love Anets decision not to implement Raids, GW2 still has difficult carrot-content in form of fractals but I guess the hardcore people burned already through it like they do in every Raid-centric game. You can’t win as a developer since it takes much more time to create a dungeon than to burn through it.
the way I would like to see raid-like activities implemented in GW2:
- a raid of any size (a guild or even a single player with people around – no guild required!!) can spawn one of the worldbosses whenever the standard-spawn is over
- the area around get’s locked so no one can enter or leave – if you die you’ll have to wait until somebody picks you up or the whole group wipes and the battle is lost
- the encounter is much harder than on casual mode and rewards are encounter-specific skins
So in a way it works like guild missions, but no guild is required. Every player around can participate if he is in that area at the moment the guild spawns the battle. If a guild want’s to be alone, they have to spawn the dragon when no one else is around (or simply don’t rezz the others – kind of cruel though).
I don’t have a good solution that people don’t farm this all day long. Perhaps a player can only participate in such a battle twice a day. The system knows if you were there that day and the boss becomes invulnerable to that person.
Rift may have changed. It’s been a very long time since I played it. But I did have contact with someone who was very turned off by the expansion because of the inordinate amount of grind necessary to get himself raid ready.
He was a big Rift fan until Storm Legion came out, after which he didn’t have quite as much time and his guild leveled without him. They were raiding without him and the amount of time it would have taken him to catch up to them was prohibitive.
So it sounds like a typical gear-grind MMO.
which is still more than $0
Indeed, but then again the space needed to have custom servers probably cost a bit more than $0 as well.
…which obviously made it the players’ problem.
It’s not the players problem. Anet added something to the game, for which they’re charging. No one has to buy it. Everyone can PvP for free. Anyone can join tournaments for free.
You want a private arena that no one else can enter…yeah that you pay for.
Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.
Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.
I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.
They’re not constructive. They help no one.
If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.
You mean to tell us that nobody at anet picked up on this and that the first time they heard of this alleged ‘bug’ was when someone posted on the forums about it?
The same forums where thousands of threads go unnoticed…Ok, no, you’re probably correct.
I mean, obviously they don’t have the brai…, erm, manpower to keep such an important part of their fragile in-game economy incheck. Everyone is too busy making sure that nothing can be farmed (read: exploited) to care.
So yeah. Agreed. Not a conspiracy.
Just pure and utter incompetence, once again.
:-)
You obviously know a lot about programming on a large project that changes constantly. There’s no way I could possibly contest what you’ve said (other than pointing out that I’ve yet to find ANY MMO or any large program that doesn’t have similar issues).
It’s so easy to look at other people working and say they don’t do it well. It’s quite a different matter when you’re the one trying to do it.
Awesome. Them devs sure are speedy.
This made me laugh out loud. lol
…but having seen what Rift did with raids…they were pretty much the way to advance.
can you elaborate please?
Rift, when I played it, which was when it started, had one path of progression and that was through raids. You had an epic quest chain that led through every single dungeon and culminated in a raid. It was the only epic quest chain in the game.
The only way to get better gear was to do dungeons, to get the gear you needed to do raids. That was what you had to do. Otherwise, you could hang around at level 50 (the max level at launch) do the same daily quests every single day, and the monthly event which was more dailies for a new monthly currency. You could collect shinies which were just a collection thing, sort of a mini-game.
But the problem was the rewards for doing rifts back then (read events) was planarite. Everyone I knew had hit their planarite cap. There was nothing left to buy. So people stopped doing Rifts and more importantly the zone wide events which disrupted zones several times a night. Without people doing them, at least on my server, they couldn’t be beaten at all but there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t like Guild Wars 2 with dynamic events. Your quests were Rifts. It’s almost the situation with karma, except that I haven’t hit the karma cap and there’s still stuff I can spend Karma on. Not so with planarite at that time.
If you didn’t want to PvP (another problem with the game since a person starting had NO CHANCE against someone tier 6 and they were all lumped in together) you had nothing to do but dungeons, and when you outgeared them, they become meaningless. There was no scaling. So the only thing left was raids. That was it. You raided, or you went home.
Yeah, you could repeat the daily every day for an hour but really there was nothing left.
In Guild Wars 2, as much as people complain about no end game and dungeons, at least the dungeons scale. That wasn’t true in Rift. Going back to an early easier dungeon (when I played) was pretty much pointless. I could solo all of the early ones, because nothing in them could hurt me at all. It was sorta silly.
So yeah, raid or go home.
Just as I was leaving, they introduced single and two person instances. The problem is, back then anyway, they didn’t scale, so that I was OP for them with my gear. There was no point to doing them. Sure, once or twice to see them and you’re done.
So again, raids were the focus of the game….but I wasn’t a raider.
See, this I agree with. Maybe not raids, but hard core content should be in the game…and for the most part it’s not. But I think it should be geared towards smaller groups, not bigger ones. Times are a changing. Those who play MMOs are getting older and older and thus tend to have less time to have a raiding schedule.
It was great when the bulk of players were quite young and had less real life responsiblities, but raiding, the way its’ laid out in most games, is almost like a second job. I really think you’d have trouble finding people long term to sign on for stuff like that.
Define “Small”? I would personally suggest a 10 or 12 man styled dungeon, It’s what we had in Guildwars 1 and its the model that worked for that game.
But that game had healers. That’s what makes this different.
Unless Anet finds ways to make it so the entire exercise isnt’ just a bit DPS party, those instances will be completely meaningless. That means you can probably add MORE challenge with less people. It’s much harder to balance the DPS needed in an elite instance, so everyone will just end up being zerker warriors and we can go home. Not a party I’m likely to attend.
You should check out guild puzzles. Those types of mechanics, with some bosses thrown in, and kept to a 10-12 person style dungeon (i.e. “raid”) on a weekly timer would provide for some very cool encounters.
We’re working on unlocking them now.
Considering how easily those rooms can be made public and how many people probably will make them public, I fail to see the problem.
Probably someone reported you for it…which is different than just randomly banning the name. You get enough reports, and it eventually flags you. Generally speaking, unreported names are generally not banned.
See, this I agree with. Maybe not raids, but hard core content should be in the game…and for the most part it’s not. But I think it should be geared towards smaller groups, not bigger ones. Times are a changing. Those who play MMOs are getting older and older and thus tend to have less time to have a raiding schedule.
It was great when the bulk of players were quite young and had less real life responsiblities, but raiding, the way its’ laid out in most games, is almost like a second job. I really think you’d have trouble finding people long term to sign on for stuff like that.
Define “Small”? I would personally suggest a 10 or 12 man styled dungeon, It’s what we had in Guildwars 1 and its the model that worked for that game.
But that game had healers. That’s what makes this different.
Unless Anet finds ways to make it so the entire exercise isnt’ just a bit DPS party, those instances will be completely meaningless. That means you can probably add MORE challenge with less people. It’s much harder to balance the DPS needed in an elite instance, so everyone will just end up being zerker warriors and we can go home. Not a party I’m likely to attend.
Im sure all those white knights are looking a little foolish right now.
Those who called it a conspiracy with no actual evidence are the ones that should feel foolish. A bug was reported, a bug was fixed. That’s it.
I’m one of the white knights who supports fixing the game…but I don’t support mass hysteria, hyperbole or outright lies.
They’re not constructive. They help no one.
If you think that every time a bug appears it has to be some sort of conspiracy, then I’m not the one being unreasonable.
We can go in circles all day on this, but the only truth here is; our opinions and experiences in the game do not make them fact.
We can’t simply take these and translate them across the board to all players and ArenaNet’s handlings as the reason they occurred. My experience, along with many of my friends, has been far different than what you have described as your own, and what you also feel the community feels. Nonetheless, it doesn’t in-turn mean that my experience is how everyone played or didnt play GW2 nor why ArenaNet made the decisions they made. Unless you have some kind of actual factual information (numbers showing drop in players, their opinions captured and summed into sortable reasons, etc), then you’re just speaking in generalities. Personally, I have full ascended gear, but my own motivation has been for the shinies (it’s why I have a legendary too). Also, it’s not like the currently available ascended gear (trinkets) or a portion of it, couldn’t be made available through these means too. It’s simply another way to “play the game as you see fit”. It’s not required for anyone to participate in, and it satisfies the PvE’ers looking for an actual challenge that occurs amongst your friends and/or like-minded guildies. I just don’t see how guild missions, which occur in open-world, could ever be scaled or made challenging. Hard content in open-world would only lead to the one’s who care to get it done being angry and upset at the one’s “leaching” their efforts. I just don’t see how it can be designed to humor all skill levels and interest.
You can go in circles all day. The stuff I said about why Anet did what they did was pulled from stuff Anet themselves have said. I’m not making stuff up. I’m notoriously bad at looking up quotes, but I’m pretty good at getting the gist of what people are saying inside Anet at different points.
There was a lot said in November about this, good luck finding it all now, but this isn’t made up stuff. And Anet had no reason to break their word to their fans unless they really felt they had to.
People who are raiders tend to want better gear. Not all of them, but enough of them. Over the years, there have been tons of polls about who raids and who doesn’t raid, and it’s always surprised me how small a percentage of the gaming population actually raids (just as it would likely surprise you what percentage of the WoW population insists on soloing).
Again, I’m not against the current state of the game. I play it, my guild and friends play it, and the first time we go through it gets crushed; we say that was cool, and it gets forgotten about. There’s no sense of actually needing to learn encounters because they are not scaled for casual and hardcore players. 99% of this content can literally be done on a 1/2 arsed first-attempt. That needs to be addressed. Maybe raids isn’t the best solution for all (because of it’s negative representation in the past), but there needs to be progression and wipes; I don’t understand why this is such a “skill-based” marketed game while providing facerolling content.
Regarding your thoughts and generalities as fact; whatever floats your boat. Clearly I cannot sweigh you to stop speaking in generalities, but if your gut tells you it’s truth, it must be!
See, this I agree with. Maybe not raids, but hard core content should be in the game…and for the most part it’s not. But I think it should be geared towards smaller groups, not bigger ones. Times are a changing. Those who play MMOs are getting older and older and thus tend to have less time to have a raiding schedule.
It was great when the bulk of players were quite young and had less real life responsiblities, but raiding, the way its’ laid out in most games, is almost like a second job. I really think you’d have trouble finding people long term to sign on for stuff like that.
You got VIP for free? Or you bought it when it was sold? Red herring is a red herring. I was a VIP to, a privilege for which I paid $15 dollars a month. Sure if I pay $15 a month I can save my points to get the expansion free with the points I didn’t spend on other stuff. But that’s not free. That’s not even CLOSE to free.
In the short time I played Lotro, I paid double the money I put into Guild Wars 2, for a whole lot less.
I got my accounts on release when they offered lifetime for a flat one time fee. I realize that option is no longer available but I do not have to pay a 15$ per month fee, still get my TPs each and every month, and have gotten my full enjoyment out of the game for my initial investment. Everything that came after that, including Mines of Moria, Riders of the Rohan and this years expansion Helms Deep, I got (or will get) with my points. So three expansions, plus the original game all for my initial investment was well worth it for me. If I want something from the store I do not have to buy “chances” to get something, I buy the item outright with earned points and no rl money.
So although I enjoy both games, GW2’s rng business model is rapidly lowering my enjoyment for this game.
So if you weren’t there at the time and/or didn’t take advantage at that time of the lifetime subscribers model, everything you’ve said is pretty much invalid. That would be most people, btw.
Saying this game isn’t like that, because I took advantage of a limited time offer years ago is probably just a little bit disingenuous.
Other people either pay a monthly fee, grind like mad, or pay for content. That game is NOT free to play…even for you, since you paid for a lifetime subscription to it.
What profession are you playing, because that can make a huge difference too. I found that with my engineer I did quite well, and with my ranger too. There are professions that are harder to solo with though. And a lot depends on your play style.
And warriors specced for high damage output is definitely easy mode, but not all professions share that advantage.
We can go in circles all day on this, but the only truth here is; our opinions and experiences in the game do not make them fact.
We can’t simply take these and translate them across the board to all players and ArenaNet’s handlings as the reason they occurred. My experience, along with many of my friends, has been far different than what you have described as your own, and what you also feel the community feels. Nonetheless, it doesn’t in-turn mean that my experience is how everyone played or didnt play GW2 nor why ArenaNet made the decisions they made. Unless you have some kind of actual factual information (numbers showing drop in players, their opinions captured and summed into sortable reasons, etc), then you’re just speaking in generalities. Personally, I have full ascended gear, but my own motivation has been for the shinies (it’s why I have a legendary too). Also, it’s not like the currently available ascended gear (trinkets) or a portion of it, couldn’t be made available through these means too. It’s simply another way to “play the game as you see fit”. It’s not required for anyone to participate in, and it satisfies the PvE’ers looking for an actual challenge that occurs amongst your friends and/or like-minded guildies. I just don’t see how guild missions, which occur in open-world, could ever be scaled or made challenging. Hard content in open-world would only lead to the one’s who care to get it done being angry and upset at the one’s “leaching” their efforts. I just don’t see how it can be designed to humor all skill levels and interest.
You can go in circles all day. The stuff I said about why Anet did what they did was pulled from stuff Anet themselves have said. I’m not making stuff up. I’m notoriously bad at looking up quotes, but I’m pretty good at getting the gist of what people are saying inside Anet at different points.
There was a lot said in November about this, good luck finding it all now, but this isn’t made up stuff. And Anet had no reason to break their word to their fans unless they really felt they had to.
People who are raiders tend to want better gear. Not all of them, but enough of them. Over the years, there have been tons of polls about who raids and who doesn’t raid, and it’s always surprised me how small a percentage of the gaming population actually raids (just as it would likely surprise you what percentage of the WoW population insists on soloing).
GW2 makes me think about being the drifting hero. When I read books or watch shows about a travelling hero writing wrongs and then leaving I think of this game.
I also see it as my way of finally getting over this shy period of play, but I enjoy running around too much to consider joining guilds.
Why not join a guild that enjoys running around too much? lol
I still don’t believe people will raid (in bulk) if they don’t get more power out of it. Not that it couldn’t have been this way, but since most people have been trained by other games, they EXPECT more power out of raiding.
Some people, undoubtedly, will raid even for just cosmetic gear, but can you get groups of 20 to do that regularly? I’m thinking not.
This is why Anet ended up introducing ascended gear. Too many people weren’t going to work for cosmetics only. Anet was forced to compromise to keep some people in the game.
It’s a crappy truth, but it doesn’t make it false.
What? Your opinion does not make something truth, no matter how much you believe it.
Anet started this game with the idea that there could be no vertical progression at all. The people would work for skins and nothing else. They said in a couple of interviews that there would be no vertical progression.
And people were leaving the game. So Anet kitten ed off much of its loyal fan base by introducing ascended gear into the fractals, which was vertical progression. A lot of people who loved and supported this game walked away then. There was a significant drop in population at that time.
So why did Anet, knowing this would happen (indeed they said they knew there would be backlash) feel the need to add stats to the new tier of gear? Because people were NOT willing to work at content just for skins. Some were, but not enough. Once they had the stats they wanted, a lot of people were done and stopped playing. The fractals brought some of those people back.
If most people had been willing to work for just cosmetic gear, do you really think Anet would have had to make that change? A change that kitten ed off some of its biggest supporters?
Except EVERYONE isn’t complaining. Some people are complaining. I’ve also seen people say they’re getting the same results as they did before the patch. Saying everyone is complaining when everyone is not is called exaageration and doesn’t win arguments.
I’m sorry, the market doesn’t lie.
Sell listings for nearly every T6 mat are down since 4 days ago and prices are rising to match the lack of supply. Whether or not a few people experience ‘similar’ results the world market shows a depression in supply.
Also you latch on to one broad generalization instead of actually addressing the issue itself. Lol.
I think you’re saying two very smart things here.
First: The market doesn’t lie.
Second: The sell listing for nearly every T6 is down.This to me indicates that this “crisis” is manufactered, rather than real. It’s true that the sell listings for some T6 materials have gone down considerably over the past days (e.g. dust, bones, claws). Others, however, have stayed untouched (e.g. blood, fangs, scales). If there truly was some error in code, why does it only affect some of the materials?
this whole situation seems rigged to me. But let’s just wait if ANet finds something.
Blood, fangs and scales all drop in Southsun Cove, where most people are farming now due to the event. Bones, dust and claws dropped more in Orr, where people have largely stopped farming.
I’m not sure what the mystery here is.
Except EVERYONE isn’t complaining. Some people are complaining. I’ve also seen people say they’re getting the same results as they did before the patch. Saying everyone is complaining when everyone is not is called exaageration and doesn’t win arguments.
I’m sorry, the market doesn’t lie.
Sell listings for nearly every T6 mat are down since 4 days ago and prices are rising to match the lack of supply. Whether or not a few people experience ‘similar’ results the world market shows a depression in supply.
Also you latch on to one broad generalization instead of actually addressing the issue itself. Lol.
I’m addressing people saying stuff that may or may not be true…or in some cases is demonstrably untrue. In that EVERYONE is saying something, when everyone isn’t.
Now once people start saying stuff, true or not, that can affect the market. So the problem could as easily be manufactured by people basically lying, rather than changes in the game.
One example is that people are spending more time on Southsun cove and less time in Orr and different things drop on those zones. No one knows when the Southsun Cove magic find buff goes away what will happen to prices.
Seems to me you WANT to believe a conspiracy theory so you’re finding evidence to support what you’ve already made up your mind to believe.
Because programming errors/mistakes never occur, right? Conspiracy theorists at their best, where every mistake is 100% intentional if it hurts the players. What about the unintended dye drop rate boost a few months back? Oh wait, you’d see that as unintentional because it helped you.
Let’s leave the speculation/conspiracies behind while we wait for John to get back to us please.
Fat chance. How can you explain everyone complaining that loot has been broadly nerfed? Databases store information on generally in tables on what can drop what and how often. It’s never ever an “error” to CHANGE numbers. To remove something completely I can believe as feasible, but to change something in a broad spectrum is hard to swallow.
There are what, eight T6 materials? For each one to receive a reduction in appearance would mean multiple database tables were altered. If there are 50 mobs and they have even only 10 group loot tables that means 10 different database tables were altered. That’s going to cause a lot of raised eyebrows.
John Smith’s posts are damage control. Any instability in the T6 market — especially dust — will cause a kneejerk reaction. People will spend CASH on gems because it is the path of least resistance to get dust right now. I guarantee you it is not an accident.
Except EVERYONE isn’t complaining. Some people are complaining. I’ve also seen people say they’re getting the same results as they did before the patch. Saying everyone is complaining when everyone is not is called exaageration and doesn’t win arguments.
Im going to read the rest of your post, but I wanted to say that I agree with the OP. We are sheep being herded from event to event. To say that guild wars 2 is not a gear grinding game, is to say the sky isn’t blue. To say that the game is not evolving to be focused around gear, loot, and reward is to say that water is not wet. Lets be realistic and not naive, it is the direction of the game. Everything has a reward for your time and WE DEMAND IT. Why do anything that doesn’t reward, like reading the stories and dialogue.
I agree, I played Skyrim for the exploration, the story, the scenery. It is what I thought THIS mmo would be all about! I hardly cared about my gear. Sure, I kept up with it, but gear was the last kitten thing on my mind. It was all about being enthralled in the environment(story,audio,graphics,gameplay,purpose,landscape,etc). Shift to GW2, and we do things for a purpose. We grind dragons for chests for rares or precursors. We farm events for T6 mats.
I played the Mass Effect games, and loved every moment of it(still play multiplayer in ME3). The game was 90% driven by story and 10% gear. You cared what weapons you unlocked and but in the end, it was more about your skill and the choices you made. Again, a direction I thought/hoped GW2 would take.Ive said this in MANY threads. GW2 is no unique snowflake. It is not about exploration, or the experience. Its just given you different ways, or at least the same methods masked different, to obtain BiS gear when compared to traditional cames such as WoW or Rift.
And I fully agree on a legendary story line for the legendaries. I would rather grind out some rediculously difficult and long story for months than farm 600 gold for my precursor. The fact is, it is easier to left precursor prices inflate than it is to create content/story for a legendary.
Actually in this game, you CHOOSE how you play. I don’t get herded to events. Maybe once a day for a few minutes, I’ll do an event. The rest of the time, I do what I want and I enjoy myself.
I’m not sure why that’s so hard for you. The gear has always been here. The farming has always been here. You choose to participate or you play the game you want.
I mean I’ve seen farmers complain left and right this game is not for them. Now I’m seeing an explorer complaining this game isn’t for him. You can’t both be right. lol
You and those like you are not most people, unfortunately. In game, take a look around at the level 80s. The majority are either sitting in Lion’s arch butt-scratching, playing the lobby game(waiting for queues and groups to form), or waiting for meta events to pop, OR they are at these meta events. Reality is, you see way, way, way, way more level 80 characters at these meta events and standing around in LA doing nothing but swinging their legendaries around than you see a level 80 in a mid level zone or low level zone just for the heck of it.
If I take my level 80s to other zones, its to complete dailys or map completion. We ARE being herded from purpose to purpose..whether it is a meta event or daily completion. It IS the way of the world and it DOES comprise the majority of max level characters.
Lucky for you, you are one of the rare few that are max level and go out into the game in any zone and have “fun”…enjoy the game. I envy you. But Id say 9/10 people are not like you.
The problem is, we don’t really know how most people play the game. I’d almost wager most people don’t even know what a meta event is. The people you see at meta events are people that are obvious. You’re there and they’re there.
What if you had an equal number of people, same number that shows up to meta events, but they’re scattered all over the world. Some are in WvW (queues and zergs are still there), some are in SPvP (less than there once was, but I still find people when I go to play) and a whole bunch are just scattered among the 25 zones of the world. If you add up everyone at meta events, how do you really know there aren’t more people in other places. Fractals, dungeons, Southsun Cove, of course.
A lot of people do follow the meta event chains, but that doesn’t mean they’re the majority. They’re just easy to see because they’re out in the open.
Im going to read the rest of your post, but I wanted to say that I agree with the OP. We are sheep being herded from event to event. To say that guild wars 2 is not a gear grinding game, is to say the sky isn’t blue. To say that the game is not evolving to be focused around gear, loot, and reward is to say that water is not wet. Lets be realistic and not naive, it is the direction of the game. Everything has a reward for your time and WE DEMAND IT. Why do anything that doesn’t reward, like reading the stories and dialogue.
I agree, I played Skyrim for the exploration, the story, the scenery. It is what I thought THIS mmo would be all about! I hardly cared about my gear. Sure, I kept up with it, but gear was the last kitten thing on my mind. It was all about being enthralled in the environment(story,audio,graphics,gameplay,purpose,landscape,etc). Shift to GW2, and we do things for a purpose. We grind dragons for chests for rares or precursors. We farm events for T6 mats.
I played the Mass Effect games, and loved every moment of it(still play multiplayer in ME3). The game was 90% driven by story and 10% gear. You cared what weapons you unlocked and but in the end, it was more about your skill and the choices you made. Again, a direction I thought/hoped GW2 would take.Ive said this in MANY threads. GW2 is no unique snowflake. It is not about exploration, or the experience. Its just given you different ways, or at least the same methods masked different, to obtain BiS gear when compared to traditional cames such as WoW or Rift.
And I fully agree on a legendary story line for the legendaries. I would rather grind out some rediculously difficult and long story for months than farm 600 gold for my precursor. The fact is, it is easier to left precursor prices inflate than it is to create content/story for a legendary.
Actually in this game, you CHOOSE how you play. I don’t get herded to events. Maybe once a day for a few minutes, I’ll do an event. The rest of the time, I do what I want and I enjoy myself.
I’m not sure why that’s so hard for you. The gear has always been here. The farming has always been here. You choose to participate or you play the game you want.
I mean I’ve seen farmers complain left and right this game is not for them. Now I’m seeing an explorer complaining this game isn’t for him. You can’t both be right. lol
Why not? The game lost it’s focus by trying to be all things to all gamers. It’s trying to be an end game, farming, loot centered, story driven, pve focused, pvp focused, journey centric, dungeon heavy, dungeon lite, rpg. It doesn’t know what it is anymore.
Why do you see this as a bad thing?
Im going to read the rest of your post, but I wanted to say that I agree with the OP. We are sheep being herded from event to event. To say that guild wars 2 is not a gear grinding game, is to say the sky isn’t blue. To say that the game is not evolving to be focused around gear, loot, and reward is to say that water is not wet. Lets be realistic and not naive, it is the direction of the game. Everything has a reward for your time and WE DEMAND IT. Why do anything that doesn’t reward, like reading the stories and dialogue.
I agree, I played Skyrim for the exploration, the story, the scenery. It is what I thought THIS mmo would be all about! I hardly cared about my gear. Sure, I kept up with it, but gear was the last kitten thing on my mind. It was all about being enthralled in the environment(story,audio,graphics,gameplay,purpose,landscape,etc). Shift to GW2, and we do things for a purpose. We grind dragons for chests for rares or precursors. We farm events for T6 mats.
I played the Mass Effect games, and loved every moment of it(still play multiplayer in ME3). The game was 90% driven by story and 10% gear. You cared what weapons you unlocked and but in the end, it was more about your skill and the choices you made. Again, a direction I thought/hoped GW2 would take.Ive said this in MANY threads. GW2 is no unique snowflake. It is not about exploration, or the experience. Its just given you different ways, or at least the same methods masked different, to obtain BiS gear when compared to traditional cames such as WoW or Rift.
And I fully agree on a legendary story line for the legendaries. I would rather grind out some rediculously difficult and long story for months than farm 600 gold for my precursor. The fact is, it is easier to left precursor prices inflate than it is to create content/story for a legendary.
Actually in this game, you CHOOSE how you play. I don’t get herded to events. Maybe once a day for a few minutes, I’ll do an event. The rest of the time, I do what I want and I enjoy myself.
I’m not sure why that’s so hard for you. The gear has always been here. The farming has always been here. You choose to participate or you play the game you want.
I mean I’ve seen farmers complain left and right this game is not for them. Now I’m seeing an explorer complaining this game isn’t for him. You can’t both be right. lol
The only problems I can see have to do with choices and changes made during the personal story. It’s not a big deal but…
In my Sylvari story I saved someone. She moved into my home instance. Now you change races, all that stuff is gone. The stuff and choice you made during your story (and there were some) aren’t there anymore.
To me it’s like having a character born at 30 years old, without even knowing their past. What would you see when you click on your personal story book?