Guild Wars 2

What this forum REALLY needs is something like the +1 button next to posts, that shows a picture of a tinfoil hat, so we can rate some of these posts more accurately.

I think Anet dropped the ball here too. Yes, there was a climax and an ending in the two scenes that were in the chapter before the bonfire….so what was actually the purpose of the bonfire. If the bonfire was lit in the last part, after the two scenes no one would have had a word to say.

All that happens here is that you can talk to the people you brought the lost items too and they say different things now. Tell you about their updated plans now that the alliance was defeated. But in reality, this was just badly done.

You don’t need a whole upgrade just for that.

Except with the exception of WvW, the people in big guilds had no content at all. None. The party size is five. You can’t run around with forty people doing most events, because most events don’t scale that high.

These guild quests were added because big guilds were left out of everything else. It’s so easy to join a guild that allows people in for public guild missions and still be in your own guild 99% of the time.

Hell my guild will allow people to run with us, without otherwise contributing to the guild at all.

It’s easy enough to do. People who choose not to…well that’s their own look out.

tigirius.9014:

I’d have to say the most disliked on is speedy kits, not because of what it does, but because it pretty much is the most necessary trait in the engineer line I don’t think I’ve seen a build that doesn’t use it.

All we need is a well placed gadget that gives us the same 25% run speed and we’d be set to actually spec into something other then that for a change. We might even be able to increase our dps a bit.

I don’t use it. lol

Dante.1508:

CoRtex.2157:

Yes. GW2 is way more anti-social compared to GW1. Why? Because in GW2 u don’t need teamwork. Everyone is DPS. Healers aren’t there, you just need to dodge. So with this huge lack of roles you are pretty unimportant as a player. Also because it’s all DPS, you don’t need coördination, so no communication. In GW1 however you had many many roles, each player was really important and they had a certain task in the group, they have to work together as a group else they will fail. That’s it. In GW1 you have: Tank, heal, protecter, Nuker, CC’er, Hexer, Spiker, Runners, interrupters and many more. GW went from a super innovative game to a simplistic system where teamwork has no place.

Agree with this view, also the Addition of a gear treadmill only made the community worse, all the elitist attitudes and player base division are helped along by Ascended and Legendary stupidity, honestly none of that was needed and it made the community so much worse…

I also agree with most the Op said i’m not sure why Vayne’s GW1 experience was so bitter but i never had half the issues he had in GW1 for what 4 years, and its was on a whole a much superior game all round if you had no issues with instanced game play.. most other issues were small compared to GW2.

No matter how many times you use the word treadmill, it doesn’t make what is in this game a treadmill. It’s not. Play WoW for a few years and you’ll see what a treadmill is.

Had a great buff if you did it when it came out. They took the buff out, because they’re leaving the fires up for longer now.

Anet has pretty much said all along they had no plans for GvG. They do plan to add Guild Halls however. It’s on the list. I would expect it in the first paid expansion rather than a monthly update though.

CoRtex.2157:

Vayne.8563:

CoRtex.2157:

Behellagh.1468:

Here’s something that may give away who I was in another MMO since it’s posted there as well. The sales numbers of every MMO NCSoft reported on over the last 6+ years in chart form. If you want to gauge success or failure, just compare our sales numbers to the rest of the games NCSoft is willing to report on. Note that once GW2 came out, the GW sales got shoved into “Others”. Now compare GW2’s income to the original that you all are heaping praise on as better.

Sorry players vote with money and even this quarter shows that GW2 beat GW handily in their best quarter of sales.

The only thing i see is lineage doing better than GW2… GW2 had the most players ever at launch, if GW2 really was a great game, they would have had 2 times more than lineage 1 on the chart right now. Why didn’t they? They over hyped the game & they lied in videos. (ex. Hey i swong a sword, hey swong a sword again, We don’t want that in our game) Guesse how GW2 combat is… U can’t deny the fact that 80% of all players since launch left. But this isn’t what the topic is about, it’s about how anet is paying the servers. And for that we need to know the costs. Until then it doesn’t matter how much they make. But i’m sure anet makes enough money to pay the servers.

Oh look, again with the made up numbers. I can deny something you can’t prove quite easily. Just stop making up numbers. Because you don’t know the numbers. In fact, in a non-sub game, people leave and come back all the time.

You can’t compare lineage, which is a subscription game to Guild Wars 2 which is a buy once cash shop game. Even games with small player bases that have subscriptions make a lot of money. So only someone completely disingenuous would try to compare them. One is a theme park game one is a sandbox game. There’s nothing to compare here.

You would be suprised how much money people spend in a store of a good game. My friends in league of legends, almost all spent way more money than they would’ve if the game had a subscription fee. And this is the same for GW2 for many people. But league of legends is free + no-sub-fee. I’m pretty sure they make more money than any other game in the world knowing that they have 32+ million ACTIVE players. It’s not about subscription fees, it’s about how good your game is. That’s where profit comes from.

I really don’t understand how ANYONE can compare League of Legends to an MMORPG. How much monthly content do they have to come up with to keep people playing? Again, you have to compare MMOs to MMOs.

For example, how long did it take LoL to be developed and how many developers worked on it. It was a tiny project by comparison. A much smaller footprint.

Comparing a moba to an MMORPG with a giant explorable world is like comparing a car to a jet.

League of Legends had 20 million players at one point. Guild Wars 2 has had probably less than 4 million sales all up. If you’re right in saying that 80% of the playerbase have left the game, how many people does that leave?

You can’t compare games of different types to each other to make a point, because it doesn’t make the point you’re trying to make.

@tigirius

Funny, I was an alpha and a beta tester for Rift and many of the fans felt that the game went in the wrong direction starting from beta 4. In the early betas, if creatures took a town, that town stayed taken…it made the player base fight back. But too many people complained, so they made it so that a Rift invasion vanished after an hour, even if no one touched it. This, to me, was the first major Rift betrayal.

Rift’s first big world event was far worse than Guild Wars 2’s karka event for the majority of players. So much so that the company had to make an apology for it.

Rift had a single epic quest line that took you through every dungeon and culminated in a raid, because dungeons and raids were the focus of the game. That ALONE made the game unplayable for many of us (and leaves me wondering why people think dungeons are the focus of this game).

Rift had a few very nice ideas, some of which Anet would have done well to copy, but for an immersion player, who wants to be immersed in the world, it really was terribad. The most fun thing in the game for some people was collecting sparklies when no one would participate in Rifts or zone events on their server.

Rift did some things right, no question, but I paid for a year sub and left the game completely after four months. In other words, I could have gone back and played for free at any time, but the game wasn’t good enough to warrant it.

Admittedly it did catch a lot of WoW players, who wanted WoW in a new skin (they didn’t call it WoW 2.0 on the forums for nothing). But in the end, it was just another trinity game focused on the raid crowd. I wont’ even begin to talk about the appalling PvP.

CoRtex.2157:

Behellagh.1468:

Here’s something that may give away who I was in another MMO since it’s posted there as well. The sales numbers of every MMO NCSoft reported on over the last 6+ years in chart form. If you want to gauge success or failure, just compare our sales numbers to the rest of the games NCSoft is willing to report on. Note that once GW2 came out, the GW sales got shoved into “Others”. Now compare GW2’s income to the original that you all are heaping praise on as better.

Sorry players vote with money and even this quarter shows that GW2 beat GW handily in their best quarter of sales.

The only thing i see is lineage doing better than GW2… GW2 had the most players ever at launch, if GW2 really was a great game, they would have had 2 times more than lineage 1 on the chart right now. Why didn’t they? They over hyped the game & they lied in videos. (ex. Hey i swong a sword, hey swong a sword again, We don’t want that in our game) Guesse how GW2 combat is… U can’t deny the fact that 80% of all players since launch left. But this isn’t what the topic is about, it’s about how anet is paying the servers. And for that we need to know the costs. Until then it doesn’t matter how much they make. But i’m sure anet makes enough money to pay the servers.

Oh look, again with the made up numbers. I can deny something you can’t prove quite easily. Just stop making up numbers. Because you don’t know the numbers. In fact, in a non-sub game, people leave and come back all the time.

You can’t compare lineage, which is a subscription game to Guild Wars 2 which is a buy once cash shop game. Even games with small player bases that have subscriptions make a lot of money. So only someone completely disingenuous would try to compare them. One is a theme park game one is a sandbox game. There’s nothing to compare here.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

if the forums are a good indicator there are many who feel more a sense of lack than reward from the current tuning of the loot system in the game. I don’t find this to be true as I have been reading the forums for months and for the most part it is mostly the same people complaining every time.

I agree many do feel this. Many felt this in Guild Wars 1 too. It got to the point in Guild Wars 1 where the only things that really excited you were black or white dye drops, and the very occassional super rare you got from the end of a dungeon. Or an ecto or obsidian shard you could only get on those respective instances.

Open world drops in Guild Wars 1, even if you bought keys to open in world chests were terrible. The only reason people like rare drops was that you can sell them unidentified, for people working on their wisdom title. But the drops themselves? Dreadful.

Any game that pretty much has a hard gear cap is going to suffer from this sort of thing. All you can do is hope for rare mats or unidentified dyes, because you’re not going to get the rarest weapon skins very often from random mobs, or even chests.

In spite of the fact that they supposedly know nothing about MMOs, they called Neverwinter and the cash shop pretty accurately. That game was doomed the moment it was made by PW. I wouldn’t go near it. I’ve already given that company too much money. People complain about Guild Wars 2’s cash shop should be forced to play a Turbine game or a PW game for a few years before commenting. There is no comparison.

As for the rest of it, what game on that list should be Guild Wars 2. Maybe Eve, because it is exactly what its audience wants….but it won’t have mass appeal and you couldn’t expect a niche game to win the best game if most people won’t consider it.

That leaves what? Neverwinter with its cash shop, SWToR with it’s “free to play” coughs, TSW (which is probably the best theme park game for at least telling stories, but the combat does leave much to be desired) and Guild Wars 2.

Guild Wars 2 has certainly disappointed PvPers from Guild Wars 1…that much is clear. But I’m not a PvPer, I’m a PvE’er and though I like Guild Wars 1 quite a lot, I prefer Guild Wars 2, for many reasons.

You can say MMORPG doesn’t know anything about MMOs, but you’d be wrong. They simply approach MMOs from a different point of view than a player does…in the same way movie reviewers approach movies differently than someone just watching a movie for entertainment.

As for WoW, WoW got up to 10 million subscribers from 9.1 on the release of MoP and it’s now down to 8.3 million. I’m not sure that MoP is doing as well as they hoped. Once they year subs expire, I expect to see a much more significant drop.

The problem is, Guild Wars 1 was instanced and Guild Wars 2 is open world. So the more interested stuff has to be in dungeons. You can’t have mixed mobs respawning in the open world, no matter what players want, because far more players will be annoyed by it than players who want it.

Take a look at the krait. Anet made the krait harder and afterwards people complained. Look at AC. Anet made the dungeon harder and people stopped running it.

In an instanced game, you could make stuff hard, because first of all, no one was ever alone. You had henchmen with you and later heroes. And so you always fought in a group against groups.

You can’t really give everyone five or six henchmen in the open world, because if you do, you could end up with 12 guys together and you have an army of sixty. It wouldn’t work. You can’t have different professions healing each other in the open world, because one guy might not be able to do much against that, and how is that fair to him. Maybe someone plays at 3 am and there’s no one around. You were never alone in Guild Wars 1.

Guild Wars 1, in the later years, was far easier than Guild Wars 2 is now. It was complete yawn mode. People don’t remember, but things usually appeared in the same place. You pretty much knew exactly there this group was going to be and pretty much knew exactly how to tackle it.

Sure there were challenging runs in Guild Wars 1 (like the Droks run). Except it’s not challenging at all with a full party once you know it and have the right build. It’s only fun/challenging with a smaller party. You’ve changed the rules of the game.

So do the same thing here. Test yourself. Take off half your armor and then try the Cursed Shore. Try to solo a veteran karka. Try to run the Grawl tunnel in Frostgorge.

The last many years of Guild Wars 1, the game was so easy as to be unplayable. Those who fondly remember the Droks run, or the hydras in the crystal desert, are remembering a point in time.

Very often there are harder creatures and groups in dungeons in this game…but people don’t want to run the hard paths. They’d much rather repeat CoF path 1.

munkiman.3068:

Northern Shiverpeaks I rarely have any of that issue. Maybe you should join a guild too, preferably a helpful and friendly one.

Nooooooo! Don’t tell him to join a guild. He’ll yell at you…really. lol

tigirius.9014:

I’m the same way man but in other areas of the game.

If only I had known, __________ ,I would have never wasted my money:

1. that they would have suddenly decided that dungeons were their new focus instead of open world permanent DEs and permanent metas every month, and then try to make up for it with lousy temporary content
2. that instead of learning from every mmo that’s tried this and failed, they still used DR on loot and that’s only affected open world drops severely ( there’s some moderate stuff in dungeon but being cut off 99.999998% is not a good thing in open world after explaining that we would have any gameplay choice we want lead to the same rewards)
3. that there will come a day when agony is expected in the new dungeon content despite re-assurances that they wouldn’t cut off content via a gear treadmill.
4. that the only way they will ever fix all of the bugs and design flaws is to actually start work on an expansion with no official launch date
5. that they’d only have two people (it’s gotta be) working on class balance in PVE, neither of which actually like playing an engineer (including most everyone at their company) as the main so it’s testing is very lacking
6. that they’d never use the standards of successful unbiased testing every other AAA mmo out there has used successfully for years, a PTR
7. that they’d cause class imbalance by not separating the behaviors between PVP PVE WVW in skills since day 1 instead of when it’s almost a year old and thus too late
8. that they’d only have 85% of all new cosmetics available for RL money in the shop instead of in the game available from play not designed to require a very large guild that’s constantly online and grouped

If people go back and actually look at the videos with their interviews, they’d see what I’m talking about.

I’m mystified. How have they decided that dungeons are their new focus?

Aeonblade.8709:

Mirta.5029:

Aeonblade.8709:

Pretty much every major MMO on the market has SOME element of GW2 already in it. They didn’t do anything groundbreaking with this game really other than a non clunky dodge system, and possibly hearts. Everything else was borrowed from previous MMO’s. I could list examples if you want but it may have to wait until I get home from work.

I will be patiently waiting for your examples then.

DEs – Rifts zone events were much more enthralling and encompassing for me. A couple of waves of mobs from a DE is nothing to compare to an army invading from the elemental planes. They did these before GW2 ever came out. Warhammer did them before even Rift did.

WvW – Obvious, but DAoC, Shadowbane, etc.

Fractals/Dungeons – Once again, a staple of nearly every MMO since the beginning.

Personal Story – Yea, EQ and DAoC had these too, and they were better, and gave you unique items rather than some blue or green item.

sPvP – Thanks WoW for making any non siege PvP into an arena based nightmare.

Hearts – Really not groundbreaking, all they did was skip the part where you click accept at an NPC. But I’ll give them that this was a new feature for every MMO I have played personally.

Dodge System – Done by many other games before GW2, but I will say the GW2 system feels much more fluid than others. (TERA just off the top of my head, but it was so clunky!)

Weapon Skills based of Weapon Type – Yep, DAoC did this too, and not only that, you got 25 different skills to choose from. So nothing new here for GW2.

That pretty much wraps it up I think, apologies if I forgot anything anyone else considers a feature, this was a rather quick list at work as I said.

Rifts DEs, even their zone wide events are NOT what you have in Guild Wars 2. Do you know why Rift failed as a game for me.

Because they left in the traditional questing to level. People ignored Rifts and later zone events because the rewards for them were neglible. And people were kitten off because they couldn’t turn in quests to a quest guy because their zone was taken over and there weren’t enough people on their server to take it back, so they’d have to wait an hour for the zone to despawn.

I agree that when people did them they were exciting, but they were repeated every hour or so all night long, completely disrupting the entire zone. The problem is Rift did everything in half measure. They kept all the old stuff like traditional questing, raidiing and all that. Guild Wars 2 is the first game that went the whole way. Heart quests have multiple ways to fill them (something you couldn’t do in anything in Rift). Dynamic events chain, something that didn’t happen in Rift either. Some of them tell stories. They have have different conditions which can change the follow up event, none of which happened in Rift.

Please don’t try compare what this game offers with dynamic events compared to what Rift had. Sure some of the events are extremely repetitive, but some of the big event chains are far beyond anything Rift did with dynamic events.

Taerik.3405:

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Hard mode in the open world won’t ever exist in this game. It divides the playerbase too much. But in dungeons it’s certainly possible.

Cspence.6921:

Well after owning this game for about a month I can say to you Vayne I have not made one friend, and it’s not because I’m not trying.

Nor am I trying too hard to a point in which it is creepy.

It’s just nobody is interested

If I wanted to join a Chat Room (I.E. a guild) and make friends, I would.

I want to make them in the world, as I play.

Apparently what your all getting at is, this game just doesn’t work like that and thats a rare occurrence.

That’s sad information. But theres not a thing I can do about it.

Good talking to you all. I’m done with the thread.

People who complain about stuff and don’t want to solve it because they’re too attached to how they did it in the past will often end up dissatisfied. It’s no skin off my nose.

Sorry to disagree here, but TSW didn’t really remove levels in any meaningful way. TSW just SAID they removed levels.

You still got experience points for doing things and when you got enough experience points you could unlock a skill. Having higher skills in a certain category meant you had to have the lower skills first, so you got experience which unlocked skills when you had enough of it.

By the time you had enough experience, you had enough skills unlocked to unlock the next tier of skills. TSW did a lot of things right, but I personally felt lied to about them not having levels. Because skills required experience points, and because you had to unlock them in order, you had levels in everything but the appearance of the number on your character page.

Cspence.6921:

Vayne.8563:

Cspence.6921:

I dont want to go to a voice chat server….

If I wanted to talk to people like that I would go to a real life area and talk to real life people face to face…

I play online games to speak online and have fun with others online doing online things.

I really hope this type of thing doesn’t become a trend in MMOs because quite frankly its a bit ridiculous to me.

But it’s just my opinion.

How is doing things with people in a guild different than doing things with people you met in the world? That’s what I don’t get.

Not everyone that uses guild chat necessarily uses mumble. People do chat in guild and they group to do stuff.

So I’m not getting your point, I guess.

The thing is nobody does anything with you just because you join a guild.

You join a guild and unless you plan to WvW or do a idk..Fractal I guess there called in this game? Few will stop what their doing in a guild just to come do something with you.

Its different when you meet someone..whose goal is to conquer that 1 secluded event where you beat the Lava Bug Thingy in the south-eastern portion of Kessex Hills..and you both somehow succeed and continue questing and doing events together.

A friendship forms, you guys do all sorts of things together…etc.

That’s what I’m talking about.

That happens in every guild I’ve been in. People form friendships. We do stuff together. We stop doing what we’re doing to help each other out. I’ve made more friends in guilds in games than out of guilds. So I guess my experience is different from yours.

But being in a guild gives me another advantage. When I join a guild I look for a guild with players who share my play style. I’m not a run run run kind of guy. I don’t want to play with those guys. I’m a guy who likes to take my time, have fun. I’m not competitive. I’m not worried about whether it takes 20 minutes to beat a dungeon or 40.

So I guess for me, meeting a stranger and playing with them becomes a gamble. Being in a guild of like minded people allows me to make friends with people who already have the common ground of knowing that the guild stood for when they joined.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, but it was still stealing. A lot of times there’s context. There’s also social context. Everything you said is based on your upbringing in your society. No the things you said are always wrong aren’t always wrong. Right and wrong are social constructs. As situations change, right and wrong changes. But this isn’t about philosophy anyway.

Ethics is philosophy. Our fundamental philosophical differences are what prevent us from having any meaningful conversation about RNG boxes. It’s what leads these forums to devolve into shouting matches, where whoever can restate their position with the most force wins the argument; when that doesn’t work, people turn to darker methods. This is what happens when all that’s left are opinions rather than objective standards. MacIntyre wins again.

Or we could just go around and round like this: It’s your opinion that right and wrong are social constructs. Lots of people disagree with you. Your opinion doesn’t make it so. (See how easy that is.)

What I find most interesting is that you are arguing there are times when it is completely acceptable for a company to oppress the poor (or in the case of AreanNet, the mathematically ignorant) in order to make a profit.

It’s not completely okay for Anet to oppress the poor. Nor is Anet responsible for educating the masses. We’ve designed a culture where, at this point in time, no MMO can exist without either A) charging a monthly fee having some kind of cash shop that takes in a lot of money

There are two ways to do that with a cash shop. One way is to make it pay to win the other way is to do stuff like the RNG boxes. I sure don’t know any game that doesn’t do either. Unless they sell content, like Lotro does. You can’t do this area and this area, because you haven’t bought them. Which means calling the game free to play becomes a misnomer. Well it’s free to play part of it, but we have this roped off pay only area here.

So it’s not free to play. Well yes it is..you can play all you want right in this zone.

Is that morally okay? Why call a game free to play if you have to buy character classes that are popular or more powerful? To me that’s worse than what Guild Wars 2 is doing.

The only option besides not charging a fee or not having a cash shop that makes money is to not make an MMO at all.

MMOs, for better or worse, are big business these days. I didn’t ask for this setup. I don’t like this setup, but it’s the setup that exists. So Anet has choices, but all the choices it has has to fall somewhere into this setup.

That’s the realism of the matter as I see it. Anet isn’t forcing anyone to buy boxes. If people are stupid enough to buy them, or choose to support the company that way, I can live with it.

Mind you, I’m not happy living with it, but I’d rather see this than P2W or having to buy each section of the game as it comes out.

Wolfheart.1938:

I do miss them, but I understand why they aren’t there in the open world. However I really don’t get why the enemies inside dungeons aren’t like that. More often than not, “trash” mobs in dungeons are just packs of the same mob, or mobs that don’t work together at all…

There are plenty of examples in dungeons of packs of trash mobs that work together. People may not notice, but it doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Take CM for instance. You’ve got the rifle guys who do far more damage to you if you move, but you’ve got the saboteurs who drop red circles all over the place. If you move out of the red circles, you get more damage from the riflemen. In addition, one of the guys, I think it’s the thug, buffs and heals allies, so you want to take him out first.

Dredge have units that work together too. Things were more clearly defined in Guild Wars 1 because you generally knew who was a monk and who was a rit. Things are a bit more amorphous here, but that stuff exists.

In this case, everyone does it is literally true. It’s not that they should or shouldn’t. It’s that our entire society, fueled by advertising and self-interest is like that. It’s not just video games it’s everything.

There’s a great TV show in Australia called The Gruen Transfer, where advertising companies are on a panel talking about how they get people to buy different products. It talks about spin and how companies operate.

Imagine a company that came along and said, “we have this game, it’s pretty good and we sorta like it but it could be a lot better.” I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t sell as well and because these games require a mega investment, no one is going to do that. It’s not really reasonable to expect them to. In this case, the onus is on us to be smart about what we buy and how we view hype.

The only thing I’d also say is about Zhaitan. Most people think in terms of boss fights. And in terms of boss fights, Zhaitan was lame.

But I don’t think that way because I’m a reader more than a gamer. I didn’t see the Zhaitan fight as disappointing, because to me, the Zhaitan fight started when we got to Fort Trinity. It was all part of the same battle.

We weren’t fighting a mega strong creature by the time we got him, because we partially blinded him and starved him and broke his ability to create more undead, which was his particular strength. By the time we reached Zhaitan he was a lot less powerful.

And the laser that we used to finally defeat him was a special anti-dragon laser created by Professor Gor just to fight the power of the elder dragons (though only some personal stories will have revealed the sections about Gor).

So to me, I didn’t see it as an individual battle. The entire battle with Zhaitan, to me, was a war that took weeks.

QueenHysteria.1084:

Vayne.8563:

Interesting review. I think Guild Wars 2’s best years are ahead of it. Right now, what you see is a backbone of what was to come later. Remember in earlier Guild Wars 1, there was a whole lot less to do. There were no heroes at all. There were less challenging content. All these things take time to develop.

In fact, Guild Wars 1 isn’t one game….it’s 3 games and an expansion. In order to compare Guild Wars 2 to that you’d have to wait at least a couple of years.

So don’t be so fast to write the game off quite yet. There’ll be a lot of changes in the years to come.

It’s a very different game indeed. I see the potential for it becomming even better. It’s just lost a lot of what I enjoyed about GW1 and replaced it with something new. I’m open to new ideas but I just don’t really enjoy some of the changes, and what I mean by changes are the lack of character customizations with the skill options, the lack of a challenge when fighting and no real fear of death or failure. It feels too simplistic for me.

Do you find a lack of challenge when fighting when doing explorable mode dungeons too, or fractals? I’m curious.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

There’s no such thing as objective greed, only subjective greed. I see company X as greedy, and someone else doesn’t. That’s never going to change.

Only a certain set of scholars, like Michael Ruse, would agree. Here’s how everyone else in the world sees it:

It’s always, categorically wrong to use certain methods of obtaining money. Oppressing the poor to obtain wealth is always wrong. Lining your pockets through fraud and deceit is always wrong. Employing character assassins to eliminate corporate competition and create a monopoly is always wrong.

Less serious: preying on the emotions of participants in gambling scenarios where: (1) the expected value is less than one, and (2) the participants do not fully understand that their investment is not going to see a good return, is always wrong. In ArenaNet’s case, this is additionally problematic in that this monetization policy does not engender long-term loyalty, a core element of any successful MMORPG.

I think the difference FOR ME is that if someone needs money to run something and they can only get it with certain practices, it’s less greedy than a company who doesn’t need something and does something I don’t like in spite of that.

On your schema, need is also subjective.

Whatever they do, it seems, to me, more justified than if a rich person did the same thing.

Just a matter of perspective I guess.

I’d buy that if you would post that way. Instead, you said that Blizzard’s actions were the “very definition” of greedy. That’s invoking categories as if they were objective and normative.

If everything moral reduces to subjective opinion, then it doesn’t matter what any company does to make a buck. That’s scary. It also means no meaningful conversations can be had on this subject.

Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, but it was still stealing. A lot of times there’s context. There’s also social context. Everything you said is based on your upbringing in your society. No the things you said are always wrong aren’t always wrong. Right and wrong are social constructs. As situations change, right and wrong changes. But this isn’t about philosophy anyway.

Anet isn’t robbing people. They’re creating a situation where they can make money. Because we don’t know how much money they need to run the game, we can’t tell if they’re being greedy or not. If they’re doing it to pay employees so they can create more content, it’s not greedy in my opinion.

WoW, on the other hand, I find immensely greedy because they charge a monthly fee for a game that probably could exist quite well without one, and on top of that they elect to charge people for cool stuff they can’t get in game. That seems greedy TO ME.

What Anet is doing, if they don’t need to do it to support the game, I’d consider greedy. If they have, as some people claim, a shrinking population, then it’s sorta less greedy because they have employees to pay. I don’t know one way or another.

So I can’t judge. But I can judge WoW, because I know with the money they make they can run the game without charging people extra for cool stuff. It’s a decision I find to be completely greedy.

It gives them an unfair advantage over every single MMO out. You want to know why this genre has stagnated for so many years. WoW’s success is the answer. It’s certainly not a monopoly but with the money they have, how many companies can make a game with enough content to even TRY to stand against them.

As far as I’m concerned the popularity of WoW is why the MMO space is so screwed up.

Cspence.6921:

I dont want to go to a voice chat server….

If I wanted to talk to people like that I would go to a real life area and talk to real life people face to face…

I play online games to speak online and have fun with others online doing online things.

I really hope this type of thing doesn’t become a trend in MMOs because quite frankly its a bit ridiculous to me.

But it’s just my opinion.

How is doing things with people in a guild different than doing things with people you met in the world? That’s what I don’t get.

Not everyone that uses guild chat necessarily uses mumble. People do chat in guild and they group to do stuff.

So I’m not getting your point, I guess.

Great post! Nice to take a break from arguing. lol

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Okay, one last time, since I still don’t think you understand the arguments on the table:

Vayne.8563:

Yes, RNG is categorically different, but I am in fact, reacting to what you said.

Not in a meaningful way. For example:

Without knowing how much money Anet needs to run the game and create new content, we can’t know if RNG is greedy or not.

I’ve already stated my position this on, as have others. If RNG is essentially or almost always greedy, it matters not whether this is necessary for Guild Wars 2 to stay afloat. The ends do not justify the means.

But it’s a question we should have some answer to before we start judging what is and isn’t greedy.

So you admit that calling Blizzard “very greedy” was wrong and a judgment you can’t make from your epistemological position?

There’s no such thing as objective greed, only subjective greed. I see company X as greedy, and someone else doesn’t. That’s never going to change.

I think the difference FOR ME is that if someone needs money to run something and they can only get it with certain practices, it’s less greedy than a company who doesn’t need something and does something I don’t like in spite of that.

Like banks getting interest rate cuts and not passing on the full cuts to consumers with loans, even though they have record profits. That’s greedy. Greedy often depends on a situation.

You almost never hear of starving people trying to eek out a buck being greedy, because they’re starving people and they’re trying to eek out a buck. Whatever they do, it seems, to me, more justified than if a rich person did the same thing.

Just a matter of perspective I guess.

What about a check something like every four hours of game time, just to see if a person has gotten a rare in that time, and increase their chances if they haven’t until they get one?

Just thinking aloud here, but it might be hard to code too.

I think there’s another difference between Guild Wars 2 and other MMOs (that I’ve played anyway).

For a lot of people this game is more active and dynamic. I had no trouble chatting in WoW or Guild Wars 1. I didn’t have to move while I cast skills. Now that I’m moving all the time, I find it hard to type and do events and stuff.

Which is why I can talk to my guild via voice, but I can’t play and type at the same time.

skullmount.1758:

Vayne.8563:

skullmount.1758:

I just wish they would put the weapon ticket in the gem store as a guaranteed item. If they still want to leave the rng cash boxes in, run them both at the same time. It can’t possibly hurt anything to run both at the same time.

I’m not sure this is true. Mind you, I hope they do this, but if you can get a guaranteed ticket for a price, why would anyone buy the RNG box with only a chance of getting a ticket? I think this would make less money for the company over all.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that making money should be the only consideration.

Because there’s always gonna be gamblers. I figure they’ll still buy the kitten rng boxes, just for the hope that they get more than the one they’d get by buying the ticket outright. For example the new consortium chest. You get 10 for 1200 gems, which means 10 chances to get up to 10 of the weapon tickets, where as if they also offered the ticket for a flat 600 (like previous weapon skins). I’m sure there would still be people buying the 10 chests just for the hopes that they get more than 2 (well two in this case since you could get 2 tickets for the same price) of the tickets.

Maybe. And maybe Anet will take a month or two break from this because of the comments on the forum (but I doubt it). I mean if tons of people are buying this stuff and those complaining are truly in the minority…I’m not sure what I feel about that.

I think I wish people would wise up sometimes and not support this kind of practice. But it’s up hill and against the wind for us, I fear.

Wolfheart.1938:

You said that, not me! :P

Unfortunately I think we’ll just have to deal with it, as long as it gets them more money than outright selling the weapons at a fixed price.

I think we’ll see a mix of stuff going forward, but that some of the best stuff will end up in RNG boxes. I mean just last month there was a mace, a shield, a shortbow and a quiver. I bought the bow and quiver (I didn’t like the mace or shield). So it’s not like they’ve never put a weapon skin in the shop. I’m sure over time there’ll be more.

Which won’t stop them from doing the RNG stuff also, unfortunately.

skullmount.1758:

I just wish they would put the weapon ticket in the gem store as a guaranteed item. If they still want to leave the rng cash boxes in, run them both at the same time. It can’t possibly hurt anything to run both at the same time.

I’m not sure this is true. Mind you, I hope they do this, but if you can get a guaranteed ticket for a price, why would anyone buy the RNG box with only a chance of getting a ticket? I think this would make less money for the company over all.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that making money should be the only consideration.

Wolfheart.1938:

Nobody likes RNG weapon skins, nobody. Not even Vayne. Seriously…not. even. Vayne.

LMAO! This is true. Not even, Vayne…and he’s a fan boy!

killcannon.2576:

Huh?
Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. But I will address that what I said would apply to the Prophecies campaign. New players who started Prophecies after the later campaign was released would have had a substantially changed experience to anyone who would have played it from release. I assume Prophecies never came back to the population level of pre-launch Factions? I hear most GW1 vets tell people not to even bother playing it because of that. Now, if instead of releasing a brand new continent in Cantha, but had instead integrated an entire new campaign in Prophecies itself, the entire player base would have been revitalized for both new and veteran players and that split would never have happened.

Here’s the flaw in your thought process:
WoW, Rift, LotR have completely different foci for their game. It’s all about the end, the journey doesn’t matter. Most of their content is at the end of the game- dungeons, raids, mounts, gear treadmill. Where’s the population at? At the end where the content is. Where are the rewards? At the end where the content is. Where’s the focus? At the endgame.

What’s GW2’s focus? The journey, there is no end game content per se- except Orr- and Living Story in Southsun. And those two areas are now just being used to farm. Straits and Malchors are both considerably more empty than Cursed Shores. Almost all of GW2’s content lies in the journey, but where is the population? Not there. They are doing what the devs have decided to make endgame, while ignoring where their content actually lies. The majority of players are farming world events for chests concentrating in very small areas of a zone, or farming a very small area in Orr for drops, or farming the least time consuming dungeon.

This is what Anet has gotten wrong, and what Vet players can’t or won’t see. The game’s content focus is on journey, but the reward focus is on end game. The reward needs to go where the content focus is, just like those other games you mentioned.

I’m not sure you realize just how many people play Lotro who don’t care about or never get to end game. Lotro more than other games sure, but most games have a very health not-end game population.

It’s true that a lot of people on forums will talk about end game, because the people that solo those games and never party or don’t do anything more than casual dungeons aren’t usually forum goers, but I think you’d be shocked about the number of people who play other MMOs who couldn’t give a toss about end game.

Even Guild Wars 1 was like that. Plenty of people in Guild Wars 1 never even attempted DOA, the Deep or Urgoz’s warren. And while I beat them all at one time or another, they weren’t particularly a major part of my game either.

If you delete all your characters you can change servers for free.

In general, in most MMOs I’ve been to, open world chat is most active on RP servers, even if you don’t care about RPing.

Cspence.6921:

None of this is what I’m referring too..

None of you honestly have played another MMO where its actually hard to NOT make friends?

Just people to quest with, talk to, run around with. Not generic friends in guilds who only care about your existence for the sole purpose of being carried through content or being given things.

And Vayne if I’ve only been to level 25 theres no logic in me having enough gold, however much it may be, to transfer in that fashion, I personally have never owned even 1 gold before.

This is a drag ..

Which doesn’t mean you can’t join a guild on another server, and make friends, guest over and play for free. The only thing that’s a drag, in my opinion, is you locked into an old way of thinking.

In some ways, being in a guild in a game like this, particularly for socializing is a must. Being in the right guild anyway.

First of all you can transfer with gold if you have enough of it. You don’t need to transfer with money. Secondly you can even play PVe content with a guild on another server, without transferring at all. I have people in my guild who aren’t on my server..but they still guest over for free to play with us.

I soloed for more in Guild Wars 1 than I do in Guild Wars 2. No heroes does wonders for my desire to group.

As for the mixed mobs, yeah, I know where you’re coming from and I know why it can’t be done in an open world game.

Of course, theres plenty of mob density in certain dynamic events.

Henge.3907:

Vayne.8563:

Henge.3907:

I too am getting bored. I’ve beaten the story, made 6 alts, got them to 80 and geared out. Don’t feel like joining a big guild to do their mandatory 100% rep requirement. My brother just got into the game so I enjoy playing with him, but by myself I’m just bored. I log in, chat with guildies, log out. I fear they’ll just keep doing temp content, so if I leave for a while and come back, nothing will be new.

Why do you think big guilds automatically have 100% rep requirement?

Because all the large guilds on my server ask to rep 100% of the time? And the reasoning is because there isn’t a “last logged on/ repped” feature for guild management. Thus its rep or expulsion.

That’s pretty sad. THere are several large guilds on my server that don’t require repping. And plenty of medium sized guilds too. My guild has a hundred members, and we don’t require repping. I think it goes against the nature of the game.

Try looking for a larger medium sized guild instead of a mega-giant.

Guilds are the answer. I spent 90% of the time in this game speaking to my guild. Sometimes I’m tabbed out of game and still speaking to my guild. Half the time I don’t look at map chat.

Find a guild, join it, be social. It’s easy with the right guild.

killcannon.2576:

Vayne.8563:

killcannon.2576:

Zero.6082:

I guess that’s how the game works now. Pop in to check to see if its worth time or not. That sucks XD.

It works for some people. Some log in everyday for daily, then log back out. Some do a once around of the World Events plus the daily. Some spend their time farming pent/shelt in Orr. There’s all kinds of players, and different ways to play the game.

Most of the content for veteran players has been done and redone and redone some more and just isn’t as engaging for them anymore. Even the most optimistic players speak of losing veteran people in their guilds.

This is 100% true….I mean about losing veteran players in their guilds. It happened to me all during my five year run with Guild Wars 1 also. It’s because of the nature of the game.

It happened to me in Rift, in Lotro, and in my sons in their WoW guild. People leave MMOs all the time. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.

This sentence about veterans leaving is true of every single MMO I’ve ever played. Some people, however, will use it as evidence of something wrong with the game. It’s a correlation I don’t think anyone can draw.

Every MMO has people who finish all the content, get bored and move onto other things. At least until the next expansion comes out, sometimes for longer.

All games have “churn” or player turn over, it only becomes a problem when the vets who are leaving are not being replaced as fast as you lose them.

I think when most of the vets who are still around ask themselves what it was like when they first leveled through the game, and what a new player today will experience when they level through it, they will come up with different answers- especially depending on where you chose your home to be. Now if you want close to that same experience, you have to jump through some hoops, be that guesting, joining a “leveling” guild (if you can find one), or just not experiencing the entire game the way it was meant to be played. There’s an experience that people who have been around since launch or near to it that some new players will just never get.

I don’t buy it. I mean did you play Guild Wars 1?

The game changed all the time and vets had to answer the same questions throughout all the years of that game. When Factions was introduced it was a game changer. More people moved to Factions than stayed in Prophecies, but some people really didn’t like Factions at all and stayed in Prophecies. It split the community. When heroes were introduced, do you remember the uproar? People were furious. It was the end if the game, and for some people it was. More and more people had trouble finding live groups for missions and didn’t want to use heroes. For every person who hated it, someone else loved it.

Do you think this is different in any other MMO? Look at WoW forums, Rift forums, Lotro forums, anything like that over a long period of time. Every change to the game is the end of the world. Every single one. Doesn’t matter what it is. And people get frustrated and leave and others replace them.

MMOs don’t need 8.3 million people to be successful and run for years. A million people even is more than most MMOs need to run for years. An MMO can run very nicely on half a million people and do quite well.

Experiences in MMOs change. WoW vets will all tell you how the game changed and why they left. So is WoW unsuccessful?

Henge.3907:

I too am getting bored. I’ve beaten the story, made 6 alts, got them to 80 and geared out. Don’t feel like joining a big guild to do their mandatory 100% rep requirement. My brother just got into the game so I enjoy playing with him, but by myself I’m just bored. I log in, chat with guildies, log out. I fear they’ll just keep doing temp content, so if I leave for a while and come back, nothing will be new.

Why do you think big guilds automatically have 100% rep requirement?

killcannon.2576:

Zero.6082:

I guess that’s how the game works now. Pop in to check to see if its worth time or not. That sucks XD.

It works for some people. Some log in everyday for daily, then log back out. Some do a once around of the World Events plus the daily. Some spend their time farming pent/shelt in Orr. There’s all kinds of players, and different ways to play the game.

Most of the content for veteran players has been done and redone and redone some more and just isn’t as engaging for them anymore. Even the most optimistic players speak of losing veteran people in their guilds.

This is 100% true….I mean about losing veteran players in their guilds. It happened to me all during my five year run with Guild Wars 1 also. It’s because of the nature of the game.

It happened to me in Rift, in Lotro, and in my sons in their WoW guild. People leave MMOs all the time. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.

This sentence about veterans leaving is true of every single MMO I’ve ever played. Some people, however, will use it as evidence of something wrong with the game. It’s a correlation I don’t think anyone can draw.

Every MMO has people who finish all the content, get bored and move onto other things. At least until the next expansion comes out, sometimes for longer.

IVIUIEI.9631:

Vayne is the forum master…. i swear i see him on almost every post.

I ignore lots of threads. I probably post in less than 1/3rd of them. But in ones I do post in I post a lot. lol

Zero.6082:

I guess that’s how the game works now. Pop in to check to see if its worth time or not. That sucks XD.

No that’s not how the game works now. That’s how the game works now for you. Plenty of people have played this game every day since launch. Theyr’e not bored, you are.

If I played Prophecies from launch, I’d have been bored 9 months in. Guild Wars 1 had 25 missions originally, about half of which were really good and half of which were complete filler. Everything in the Maguuma Jungle was a complete waste of time. You could skip more than half the game by making the Droks run and a lot of people did (not me though).

There wasn’t any hard mode at launch. There were a couple of elite areas. There were no heroes at launch either. Most of what made Guild Wars 1 great for a lot of people came way after the first year had past.

There is no developer in the planet that can create a game that’s fun for 9 months of hard playing if people consume content quickly.

Now it happens you don’t like the new content. That’s fine. It doesn’t mean the new content isn’t good. You being bored is a symptom of you playing a game that doesn’t interest you. So go play a game that does.

Wanderer.3248:

Did fireheart rise the other day for map completion, and that zone was really really empty. I think I only saw one other person in the time it took me to complete the whole map. Orr can be pretty empty sometimes too. People seem to prefer the pretty zones.

Fireheart Rise is often empty because that zone is a pain in the kitten. I happen to like the zone, but yes, that’s one zone I don’t see tons of people in. Still do see people on my server, but not as often as in say Sparkfly Fen or Mount Maelstrom.

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563:

Guns and Giblets.9308:

Vayne.8563

So you’re saying a company that ALREADY makes millions and millions of dollars each and every month, should go out and sell mounts and minis for $25 bucks as well. And that’s somehow okay?

What’s wrong with that? You more than anyone should know that MMOs are a business first. There’s nothing inherently wrong with selling more products, especially if those products serve a good business model that increases the quality of current and future products.

The issue is RNG. If someone objects to RNG boxes, then they will object to it in WoW. You’re not going to win this issue by so obviously shifting the goal posts with illogical comparisons.

What’s wrong with is the same thing as skins. They put the coolest most awesome mounts in the cash shop, and make it mega hard to get mounts in game, so that people who are already paying a monthly fee will want those cool awesome new mounts.

That’s not RNG. These are categorically different. You’re not following the argument.

The thing is, they’re already making so much they could put them ALL in game. It’s not like they’re making so much new content every month. It’s pure greed.

You’re repeating yourself and not interacting with what I said.

If it makes good business sense and provides a good product or service people are willing to pay for, then Blizzard has every incentive to do it. It’s like paying for art. That is nothing like paying for a small chance to get something.

Whether it is “greedy” depends on how the extra revenue is being used. You’re not in a position to know that.

So yeah, can you say, categorically, that Anet could compete without having this RNG? Because as much as I dislike the RNG, I’m not sure that I can make that statement.

That’s a non-sequitur. The ends do not justify the means.

Blizzard, on the other hand, can EASILY have put those mounts in game for people, instead of putting them up just for cash.

It’s the very definition of greedy.

Not on any meaningful definition of the term.

Yes, RNG is categorically different, but I am in fact, reacting to what you said. Without knowing how much money Anet needs to run the game and create new content, we can’t know if RNG is greedy or not.

Unless you know for sure 100% that having stuff in the shop that isn’t RNG nets them enough money to keep going.

Blizzard…they have enough money to keep going many times over…but they want more money. Anet wants money too, but it is greed if that money is what they need to run the game. You don’t have an answer to that. Neither do I.

But it’s a question we should have some answer to before we start judging what is and isn’t greedy.

Interesting review. I think Guild Wars 2’s best years are ahead of it. Right now, what you see is a backbone of what was to come later. Remember in earlier Guild Wars 1, there was a whole lot less to do. There were no heroes at all. There were less challenging content. All these things take time to develop.

In fact, Guild Wars 1 isn’t one game….it’s 3 games and an expansion. In order to compare Guild Wars 2 to that you’d have to wait at least a couple of years.

So don’t be so fast to write the game off quite yet. There’ll be a lot of changes in the years to come.